Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/82

74 you for the whirling whiteness. Suddenly a rosy flash shot through all the driving atmosphere, illumined the snow flakes till they glistened like dancing sparks of fire, and spread a lane of glory across the waters of the bay, and far, fir out at sea. Elisabetta followed it with her glad eyes, and then she saw, or fancied that she saw—sight never could have reached so far—a sail on which the brightness smote—a white, white sail, a glittering peak of mast. She never questioned whether at such time a ship would be scudding under bare poles, riding out the gale in the face of the wind, or bearing down full-bosomed on her death; she never thought of canvas torn to ribbons by the teeth of the raging east, of any doomed apparition; it was enough for her that she had seen a sail; whose sail but the Falconer's? Her boy would be here, then, to-night—only to-night! she had known it all along. How he was to compass it, she never asked—that was Sebastian's business: he knew his own affairs. But as instantly as it came, the splendor of sunset was gone; and then the Christmas bells began to ring. They rang an hour; she listened to them with stretched ears; they were used to strike upon the tingling air so keen and vibrant that the kindling stars seemed to be the sparks their contact struck; but, listen as she might to-night, the wind carried all their tones the other way—there came only a muffled sound of funeral feet, a jangle, a breath of music suffocating in the snow; but by and by when it was time that they were done ringing out their heraldry of Christmas cheer to all the uproarious heavens, the deeper sound that had mingled with them still pealed on—a low boom of a bell, a single tone, full of foreboding and fate—so the great ship's bell of some mighty Indianman, fixed fast upon the breakers and' rolling with the onslaught of the serried waves, might have tolled and tolled the knell of all the souls on board.

Elisabetta would not have tea brought in; so Nora had only drawn the curtains and brightened the fire, and then together they had taken out a stocking from a nook of the closet, and had gone up stairs and hung it from the lofty bed-post in Sebastian's room; that it was Sebastian's, no need to say; in the toe, fine lawn handkerchiefs, a wrought cigar-case, watch-guards and invisibles, but, further up, the once-coveted turnover and bunch of Spanish grapes, and then a tiny toy violin, a long penny trumpet, a sugar dove, and a fluffy rabbit, a six-penny box of paints, and a little jointed doll reaching her arms over the top, like a preacher from the pulpit, haranguing on vanities; they laughed gleefully over their jest; they talked to each other about his waking in the night and his eye happening on its dim outline in the snow-lighted air, how he would reach forward, forgetfully and half bewilderedly, as if he had grown back to be a child again, and feel with one hand all down its length, and then relapse into sleep; and how by the