Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/85

Rh just as she had dragged her anchors and drifted broadside on with the wind and tide; they could divine a single and broken mast remaining, raking the horizon, rising with the long roll of the ocean as it thundered in upon her, and settling down again, everywhere packs of black, clamoring waves leaping upon her and over her, each bearing away new fragments, and all shaken by great shocks of sea that feathered her with foam. They saw dark objects clinging to the rigging; they heard a cry that rose above the scream of the elements, that rode upon the incoming of the wind and chilled the blood with terror. And then there was nothing more to see, save a league of rushing froth and blackness, and here and there, it might be, the head of a swimmer battling for the beach.

Was he battling, this nearest one of all? or were the waves tossing him in on their shoulders, lightly and swiftly, and with the feet to shore? Why did that wall of emerald rear and pause, then slowly curl along its length into a crest of silver and shoot up the soft sand of Elisabetta's cove as sweetly as if urged only by the rising tide? When it crept whisperingly down again it had left a lifeless shape upon the beach, face upward to the night; and the people flocking round it, who had learned the lines of all his likenesses by heart, knew it for Sebastian.

They lifted the man, drowned and dead, and carried him gently to his mother's house, which he might enter once again, a guest for so short a time. Elisabetta never noted their coming. She did not see the lanterns nor hear the voices. She was entertaining that presence that comes to none but once; and when they paused, and Bessie, whom they had summoned, with her yellow locks clustered wetly round her blanched face, went in before, she found Elisabetta sitting no more alone, but gone to join her son.

You think the story a sad one? A death's head carried round the feast to admonish the revellers? That is because, rather than God's best blessing, you hold as a dark evil the boon of death; because you do not hail the hand that, out of a cloud, opens the door into a condition of which this life is but the shadow; because you believe in your eyes which shall one day be dust in their sockets, and do not feel and know that unsubstantial sphere to be a more real one than this dissolving planet; because the crude delights of this rudimentary being seem to you sweeter than all the hopes of eternity. You forget that now Elisabetta has her son, secure, inseparable, and heart to heart; that now the marred and miserable flesh has fallen away, and pure, and fresh, and free, expanding like a flower in full and fuller beauty under the delicate air of that new life, she leads on her child, through atmospheres of warmth, and love, and bliss, into the heart of that heaven where there is no more sea.