Page:Rideout--Beached keels.djvu/167

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WILD JUSTICE
153

such things possible, and of himself, who seemed equally to blame; aching jealousy that his brother should have borne his mother's name of Lee. These thoughts he tried again and again to crush out as undutiful,—to drown even in bitter imaginings of the last days of his mother's life. But they appeared again and again, each time more powerful. Still more powerful, mingling with and mastering all his other emotions, was a newborn hatred of the sea, of all ships and sailors; a hatred as vast as the ocean itself, that lay beyond the village and the islands, under the evening star.

Somewhere round midnight, before he went to bed in one of the two rooms in the loft, he entered his mother's room, looked slowly about to see that everything was as it had been, then withdrew, and locking the door, hid the key behind the old spyglass on the kitchen shelf. Hereafter that room was to be a holy place.

The next morning his life began, alone; and alone it continued for five years, in house and village. He had already determined to