Without reasoning on the matter, Denas felt that absence would be a good thing. She was afraid of being driven by emotion or by circumstances into a mistaken position. And she had now an absorbing interest in her life. Her school was a delight. No consideration of money qualified her pleasure in her pupils. She was eager to teach all she knew. She was eager to learn, that she might teach more. As the weeks went by her school got a local fame; it was considered a great privilege to obtain a place in it.
Good fortune seemed to have come to St. Penfer by the Sea when Denas came back to it. Never had there been a more abundant sea-harvest than that summer. The Darling Denas brought luck to the whole fleet. She was a swift sailer, always first on the fishing-ground and always first in harbour again; and it was a great pleasure to Denas to watch her namesake leading out and leading home the brown-sailed bread-winners of the hamlet. When the time and the tide and the weather all served, Denas might now often be seen, with her mother and the rest of the fishermen’s wives, standing on the wind-blown pier watching the boats out in the evening.
There had been a time when she had positively declined the loving ceremony––when she had hated the thought of any community in such feelings––when the large brown faces of the wives and mothers and the sad patience of their attitude had seemed to 326 her only the visible signs of a poor and sorrowful life. And even yet, as she stood among them she was haunted by a rhyme she had read in some picture paper years ago––a rhyme that so pathetically glanced at love that dwelt between life and death that she never could see a group of fishermen’s wives on the pier watching the boats outside without saying it to herself:
| “They gazed on the boats from the pier, ah, me! Till their sails swelled in the wind, Till darkness dropped down over the sea And their eyes with tears were blind. Then home they turned, and they never spoke, These daughters and wives of the fisher-folk.” |
But years and experience had taught her the falsehood of extremes; she knew now that life has many intermediate colours between lamp-black and rose-pink, and that if the fisherman’s wife had hours of anxious watching, she had also many hours of such rapturous love as comes sparingly to others––love that is the portion of those who come back from the very grave with the shadow of death on their face.
In the autumn Tris returned for a few days, but he was so busy that he could not leave the yacht. She was being provisioned and put in order for the long Mediterranean winter voyage, and Tris was in constant demand. But John and Joan and Denas walked over to St. Clair to bid him good-bye. And never had Tris looked so handsome and so manly. His air of authority became him. In a fishing-boat men are equal, but on this lordly pleasure-boat it 327 was very different. Tris said to one man go and to another come, and they obeyed him with deference and alacrity. This masterful condition impressed Denas greatly. She thought of Tris with a respect which promised far more than mere admiration for his beauty or his picturesque dress.
After Tris was gone the winter came rapidly, but Denas did not dread it. Neither did John nor Joan. John looked upon his boat as a veritable godsend. What danger could come to him on a craft so blessed? All her takes were large and fortunate. The other boats thought it lucky to sail in her wake. On whatever side the Darling Denas cast her bait, they knew it was right to cast on that side also.
Joan was happy in her husband’s happiness; she was happy in her unstinted housekeeping; she was now particularly happy in Denas’ school. The little lads and lasses brought all their news, all their joys and sorrows to Denas; and when Denas went home every day, Joan, with her knitting in her hands, was waiting to give her a dainty meal and to chat with her over all she had heard and all she had done.
And Denas was happy. When she mentally contrasted this busy, loving winter with the sorrows of the previous one, with the hunger and cold and poverty, the anguish of death and the loneliness, she could not but be grateful for the little home-harbour which her storm-tossed heart had found again. If she had a regret, it was that she could not retain her hold upon her finished life. Every time she asked her heart after Roland, memory gave her 328 pictures in fainter and fainter and fainter colours. Roland was drifting farther and farther away.
She could no longer weep at his name. A gentle melancholy, a half-sacred remoteness invested the years in which he had been the light of her life. For