Silver Shoal Light/Chapter 24
CHAPTER XXIV
STAR-SET AND SUNRISE
JOAN sat down before the beach-fire and gazed into its embers. The charm of the verses, which still ran through her mind, had not made her forget the Ailouros. She had lost it, a beautiful and precious thing. In miserable imagination she pictured its fate. She saw the poor frightened boat tossed rudderless in the open sea, harried and driven, wandering desolate through the outer night, a helpless mast swinging across the pitiless stars. She saw the broken hull tossed upon the rocks, battered, splintered, crushed by the Reef. She saw it floating bottom up far from land, with gulls wheeling and shrieking above it.
Joan wondered how she could face Jim, how she could bear to meet Elspeth's eyes. They would never trust her again, and she did not deserve to be trusted. She remembered Jim's half-joking words about "wrecking, marooning, or losing overboard" his only son, and her own laughing reply. She bowed her head in new shame. She had deliberately gone on beyond Trasket Rock, where they could have made a safe and easy landing before the squall struck. She had sailed on, with so much bravado, such blind confidence in her knowledge of handling a boat. Her confidence was gone.
She began to call up more agonizing pictures with which to torment herself. If the boom had struck Garth at the end of the jibe, instead of at the beginning when it had barely gathered way; if it had swept him overboard; if the boat had capsized, which might well have happened! She thought out at unnecessary length and detail what she could have done under all these circumstances, and grew more and more wretched. For faint consolation she remembered the treasure then, and the miraculous finding of the sword-hilt. And, perhaps because imagination was more or less concerned with this particular train of thought, Mr. Robert Sinclair came to mind. It was by no means the first time she had thought of him since her arrival at the lighthouse, and each time she did so she regretted more and more her rude, unpleasant answers to him. She wished now, with all her heart, that she had listened to what he had tried to tell her about the poor little newsboy. She wished, too, that he could know Garth.
"Though he couldn't love him more than I do," Joan reflected; "no one could."
Then, with quick humiliation, she remembered a time when Garth had tried to do something beyond his power and had fallen. Jim caught him as he fell, before Elspeth reached him, and in their faces had been a love so deep that Joan could hardly understand it, and had felt distant, awed, before it. Yet she had just said that no one could love him more than she!
She raised her head and looked out into the night. There was no sound but the rushing and dying of waves among the pebbles and the crack of falling embers. Overhead the stars marched and burned in voiceless splendor, and low on the horizon the Light held out its clear sea-candle, steadfast and calm and pale.
Joan turned away from the fire, and looked at Garth. The firelight reached him faintly, setting a glimmer on the hair about his forehead and flickering down the clean line of his cheek. The hilt of the broad-sword, gleaming dully green, lay almost within the grasp of his outflung hand. Behind him the ragged crest of Trasket Rock rose frowning against the stars.
Joan built the fire high, for the wind was cooler, and lay down beside Garth under the rug. She put her cheek close to his, and a few tears slipped from her eyes. For she had gone through some very unhappy hours, and then, too, she did love Garth even more than she realized. Strangely enough, the tears made her feel much happier, and she fell asleep with her face to the great open sky and Garth's arm flung across her.
In the uncharted hours of night, Joan woke and knew somehow that Garth was awake, too. She moved a very little, and the faintest of whispers breathed:
"Are you asleep?"
"No."
"Did you ever see so many stars? I never did," he said. "I wonder why everybody doesn't sleep out-of-doors all the time."
He cuddled very close to her.
"Do you know about stars?" he asked. "Tell me all their names and everything you know."
"I'm afraid I don't know many of them," she said. "There's Draco, the Dragon." They talked in low voices as they gazed straight up at the sky.
"I can see the Dipper, of course," said Garth, "and the Pole Star; and what's that awfully bright one over in the Milky Way?"
"Altair," said Joan. "There's Corona, do you see? Six stars in a circle, like a crown; and Auriga, there on the horizon?"
"What were the ones in Fogger's poem?" Garth asked. "You know, the one about the lighthouse."
"The one where the Light speaks? I can't remember much of it. Something about—
A vigil all night long.
With Cepheus, and Gemini,
And Aldebaran over me.
"Isn't it? You can't see them all together at this time of year. Gemini has set, and Aldebaran's a winter star, I think. But there's Cepheus, almost over us. And of course Dorado, in the other poem, we can never see up North at all."
A point of light suddenly detached itself from the black sky and shot between the other stars, leaving for an instant a wispy, nebulous trail.
"A shooting star!" whispered Garth. "I wonder where it went."
"It is rather queer, isn't it," said Joan dreamily, "to think that some of them are so far away that their light doesn't reach us for hundreds—of thousands—of years."
"What do you mean?" Garth asked.
"Some of them may have stopped being stars. We're seeing them the way they looked ages ago, because the light of them has only just reached us. They may not be there at all."
Her hushed voice lent the subject an added awe in the midnight silence.
"What do you mean?" Garth repeated.
"We don't know anything about the way they really look now. Some of them are so far away that it takes all that time for their light to travel to the earth."
"I don't like it," Garth said, clasping her; "it sounds too queer. But I didn't know that light went so slowly as that. I thought it went flash, so fast you didn't know it."
"Well," Joan said, "if I remember rightly, it goes one hundred and ninety thousand miles a second."
There was a silence, as immensity dawned dimly on Garth's mind. Then he said slowly:
"I'm trying to think. Do you mean that some of the stars are so far away that it takes light, going that fast, a hundred thousand years to get to us?"
"Yes," Joan whispered.
"Oh, don't!" he said. "It makes me feel all queer and empty. Let's look at our Light. That's like a nice, near star. I don't like things to be so far away as that."
They held each other's hands and looked drowsily at the far lamp that burned above the water.
"It's been there all the time," murmured Garth, "and Fogger and Mudder—are—there, and everybody—in the world—is—asleep, except—us."
The ancient stars blazed on; the sea, almost as ancient, fingered the beach ceaselesly, creeping and falling back, and creeping again. But now, according to Garth's notion, everybody in the world was asleep.
When Joan woke again, she could not think what had happened. For there was no ceiling above her, nothing but flat, empty gray, and her hand, as she put it out, touched rough, cold sand. Garth was sitting up beside her, the end of the rug over his knees.
"I've been wishing and wishing you'd wake up," he said, "because the sun's rising on the other side of the rock, and we can see it if we go on top."
They put on their shoes and flapped the sand out of their queerly wrinkled clothes.
"It was so funny, waking up this morning," Garth said, as Joan helped him up the rock. "I thought I'd dreamed all that about the stars and everything, until I saw where I was. Oh, look at the sun!"
It was rising straight from the sea, scattering banded clouds before it in great ranks of crimson and flame-color. A strip of clear, hard amber lay along the horizon, and overhead the lifeless gray melted to faint rosiness and pale, liquid blue.
"I always mean to wake up at home and see it," said Garth, "but I hardly ever do. It's much more fun living on the beach this way."
"What if it rained?" Joan asked.
"That wouldn't be very nice," Garth mused; "but we could build a hut. Only then it would be just like living in a house again. Oh, dear!"
They saw the lighthouse, down the coast, looking rather like a white sea-gull asleep on the water. The light had been extinguished.
"I dare say Fogger will come for us before breakfast," Garth said. "I wish he wouldn't, except that I want something to eat. It'll take him ages to row out. Go up to that mountain-peak yonder, Ben, and take a look about with the spy-glass."
The spy-glass was an imaginary one, but the mountain existed, a higher shelf of rock too steep and rough for Garth to attempt. Joan sprang to the top and swept the horizon beneath a shading hand.
"Three-masted schooner out to sea, sir," she reported, "bearing Noothe by East. And what would you make this yere vessel out?" She indicated a single sail flitting far off at the mouth of the bay.
Garth got to his feet and looked down the coast.
"I make her out the Ailouros," he said promptly.
Joan's face shadowed instantly.
"Don't," she said; "it can't be. The Ailouros is gone, goodness knows where. It's some one from Quimpaug."
"The fishermen have power-boats," Garth contested, "and no one else would be out so early. They're fresh-water lubbers at the hotel. Besides, I know the Ailouros just—just the way I know Fogger or anybody else."
Joan shook her head and would not be consoled nor convinced. They went back and lay on the dry sand, for dew still clung to the rough grass on the crest of Trasket Rock. They watched the shadows of the rocks spring out on the sand as the sun rose higher, the gulls that flashed screaming overhead—golden light on white wings,—the brightening green of distant fields as the mainland woke in the young daylight. They rummaged the picnic-basket finally and discovered two overlooked crackers, on which they pounced.
"Hardtack, sir, but better'n naught," Joan observed, munching her share. "If we be stranded here long, we'll be put to it; birds'-nesting and crab-catching for our fare, like enough."
Then after a time the Ailouros, unmistakable now, came swinging in beside the beach, and Jim hove to and hailed them. Joan ran down to the water's edge.
"Where, where did you find her?" she shouted. "Is she hurt?"
"Who? The Ailouros? Not in the least. Are you all right?" Jim called.
"Yes!" the castaways replied in chorus.
Joan slung the jug, basket, and shawl into the skiff, bundled Garth into the stern sheets, and pushed off for the sail-boat.
"Where was she?" Joan repeated eagerly, as Jim lifted his son aboard and held out a hand to her.
"Well," he said, "I went out on the gallery last evening at light-up time and took a look at Trasket with the glass. I saw the smoke of your fire and knew that you were there safe. Then my eyes happened to wander toward shore, and behold, the Ailouros nosing around Bird Rock. I went over in the dory and got her; she'd caught her anchor in a ledge and was neatly moored. I found everything most shipshape, boom lashed, rudder unshipped, halyards belayed—"
"Don't!" murmured Joan.
"So I saw at once what had happened. Stiff sea, not enough cable out, tide rising—" Joan nodded miserably. "So, naturally, she dragged and went off with herself. Elspeth and I consulted. As the food and the rug weren't in the boat, we assumed that you had them. The night was remarkably warm; we knew you'd be too sensible to try to row down; I couldn't leave the Light in any case; so we decided to let you stay. We thought you'd enjoy yourselves thoroughly."
"Do you think I enjoyed myself," said Joan, "knowing that I'd lost your boat?"
"I told her it was all right," Garth put in. "She's been worrying awfully."
"I did a great many careless things," said Joan rather wretchedly, and confessed to Jim the whole history of her ill-judged excursion. She did not dare to look at him and did not know what he was thinking.
"I admit," he said gravely, when she had finished, "that I shouldn't have felt very happy if I'd known you were out in that squall. I calculated that you'd have reached Trasket a good half hour before it came up. I'm sorry that you had such a stiff time, but, on the whole, I think that you must have managed rather well not to have had her over."
"I'll never sail again," said Joan.
"That's no way to feel," Jim said. "You'll not let the Ailouros have the best of it, will you? You'll sail her every day, and you'll take her home now." And he made her do it.
"Joan was dreadfully bothered," said Garth, as they sailed down, "but we did have a wonderful time. And I nearly forgot to show you the treasure."
"That's true," said his father. "Let's see the pirate gold."
"It's not gold," Garth said, digging the sword-hilt out of the picnic-basket, "but it's much interestinger."
"Upon—my—word!" cried Jim, entirely taken aback. He examined the sword eagerly and with much interest.
"It looks to me mightily like an Andrea Ferrara, but I'd like to clean it a bit before I'm sure."
"Do you mean The Sword of Ferrara?" cried Garth. "The one you sing about, Fogger?"
"One like it; he made a great many."
"It might be, of course," said Garth. "I never thought of that. Don't you know how it says about its 'rusting beside the salt sea's marge'? And that's zackly what it was doing."
"I don't think it's that very one, because that 'rusted in exiled hands,' you know. But it's quite a wonderful thing to find out on old Trasket. I'd no idea that the Spanish Main was really so close at hand!"
"We did have such fun," Garth said. "The fire was so nice in the dark, and before I went to sleep Joan said some poetry—that merman one, you know, and then some of yours."
"Mine!" said Jim, turning an astonished gaze upon Joan, who busied herself with the sheet.
"I hope you don't mind," she said. "I learned some of them. I like them."
"I'm highly honored," said Jim. "I didn't know that any one liked them very much, except this old person."
He put his arm around Garth and slid a hand through his son's wind-blown hair.
"Let's see where the boom caught you, Cap'n," he said.