The terror of that lopped trunk, flat on its back, shocked his heart.
Childlike he felt in the dimness for the Parson's fingers, and was made glad by their grip.
"I think he's gone," whispered the Parson.
II
The old man's head, moon-white in the dusk, lay on a soldier's knapsack. An officer's short cloak, buttoned about his throat, was flung back from his body. The great hands, fingers so touching in their thick-jointed awkwardness, were folded on his bare and shaggy breast. His wounds were hidden, but tattooed upon his chest was something that Kit at first mistook for a cross. Then he saw it was an anchor.
And as he looked the anchor seemed to glow and grow. No longer a blue smudge on the skin, it was an anchor in the heart, shining through the flesh—the anchor on which this brave old battleship had ridden out the gale of life.
The old man lay calm as marble. The cheeks were hollowed, and the fringe of stiff white hair uplifted.
A more beautiful picture of an Englishman, faithful unto death, it was impossible to conceive.
Kit thought of Sir Geoffrey Blount, the old Crusader with chipped nose—mailed hands folded just so, casqued head tilted just so—asleep on the stone-slab in the lady-chapel at home.
But how far more beautiful than that broken-nosed old warrior was this
Crusader of the Sea!