“You remember the wreck—that wreck—the Samaritan? She came ashore beneath here; right beneath our feet; by no fault or carelessness. A light-house on a coast like this—a coast without a harbour—is a joke set in a death-trap, to make game of dying men.”
“But since the coast has no harbour—”
“I would build one. Look at this,” he pulled a pencil and paper from his pocket and rapidly sketched the outlines of the Bristol Channel. “What is that? A bag. Suppose a vessel taken in the mouth of it; a bag with death along the narrowing sides and death waiting at the end—no deep-water harbour—no chance anywhere. And the tides! You know the rhyme—”
“From Padstow Point to Lundy Light
Is a watery grave by day or night.”
“Yes, there’s Lundy”—he jotted down the position of the island— “Hit off the lee of Lundy, if you can, and drop hook, and pray God it holds!”
“But this harbour? What would it cost?”
“I dare say a million of money; perhaps more. But I work it out at less—at Porthquin, for instance, or Lundy itself, or even at St. Ives.”
“A million!” she laughed. “Now I see the boy I used to know—the boy of dreams.”
He turned on her gravely. She was exceedingly beautiful, standing there in her black habit, bareheaded in the glare of the lenses, standing with head thrown back, with eyes challenging the past, and a faint glow on either cheek. But he had no eyes for her beauty.
He opened his lips to speak. Yes, he could overwhelm her with statistics and figures, all worked out; of shipping and disasters to shipping; of wealth and senseless waste of wealth. He could bury her beneath evidence taken by Royal Commission and Parliamentary Committee, commissioners’ reports, testimony of shipowners and captains; calculated tables of tides, sets of currents, prevailing winds; results of surveys hydrographical; all the mass of facts he had been accumulating and brooding over for eighteen long months. But the weight of it closed his lips, and when he opened them again it was to say, “Yes, that is my dream.”