‘Never mind’ he said, ‘perhaps we shall manage it in the summer. We will get your father to go out with us himself; and, in the meantime, who likes to come with me after the rabbits in Cliffstone Copse? Farmer Holt will thank Robin for killing a dozen or so, for he makes grievous complaints of them.’
Guy conducted the boys out of sight of the sea, and, to console them, gave them so much more use of the gun than usual, that it might be considered as a wonder that he escaped being shot. Yet it did not prevent a few sighs being spent on the boating.
‘Can’t you forget it?’ said Guy, smiling. ‘You have no loss, after all, for we are likely to have no boating weather this long time. Hark! don’t you hear the ground-swell?’
‘What’s that?’ said the boys, standing still to listen to the distant surge, like a continuous low moan, or roar, far, far away, though there was no wind, and the sea was calm.
‘It is the sound that comes before stormy weather,’ said Guy. ‘It is as if the sea was gathering up its forces for the tempest.’
‘But what?—how? Tell me what it really is,’ said Robin.
‘I suppose it is the wind on the sea before it has reached us,’ said Guy. ‘How solemn it is!’
Too solemn for the boys, who began all manner of antics and noises, by way of silencing the impression of awfulness. Guy laughed, and joined in their fun; but as soon as they were gone home, he stood in silence for a long time, listening to the sound, and recalling the mysterious dreams and fancies with which it was connected in his boyhood, and which he had never wished thus to drive away.
The storm he had predicted came on; and by the evening of the following day, sea and wind were thundering, in their might, against the foot of the crags. Guy looked from the window, the last thing at night, and saw the stars twinkling overhead, with that extreme brilliancy which is often seen in the intervals of fitful storms, and which suggested thoughts that sent him to sleep in a vague, soothing dream.
He was wakened by one tremendous continued roar of sea, wind, and thunder combined. Such was the darkness, that he could not see the form of the window, till a sheet of pale blue lightning brought it fully out for the moment. He sat up, and listened to the ‘glorious voice’ that followed it, thought what an awful night at sea, and remembered when he used to fancy it would be the height of felicity to have a shipwreck at Redclyffe, and shocked Mrs. Bernard by inhuman wishes that a ship would only come and be wrecked. How often had he watched, through sounds like these, for a minute gun! Nay, he had once actually called up poor Arnaud in the middle of the night for an imaginary signal. Redclyffe Bay was a very dangerous one; a fine place for a wreck, with its precipitous crags, its single safe landing-place, and the great Shag Stone, on the eastern side, with a whole progeny of nearly sunken rocks, dreaded in rough weather by the fishermen themselves; but it was out of the ordinary track of vessels, and there were only a few traditions of terrible wrecks long before his time.