“In all the terror and the tempest of these long hours,——for there’s been a fearful storm, though you haven’t felt it,” said mother,——“in all that, Mr. Gabriel can’t have slept. But at first it must have been that great dread appalled him, and he may have been beset with sorrow. He’d brought her to this. But at last, for he’s no coward, he has looked death in the face and not flinched; and the danger, and the grandeur there is in despair, have lifted his spirit to great heights,——heights found now in an hour, but which in a whole life long he never would have gained,——heights from which he has seen the light of God’s face and been transfigured in it,——heights where the soul dilates to a stature it can never lose. O Dan, there’s a moment, a moment when the dross strikes off, and the impurities, and the grain sets, and there comes out the great white diamond! For by grace are ye saved, through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God,——of Him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning. O, I will believe that Mr. Gabriel hadn’t any need to grope as we do, but that suddenly he saw the Heavenly Arm and clung to it, and the grasp closed round him, and death and hell can have no power over him now! Dan, poor boy, is it better to lie in the earth with the ore than to be forged in the furnace and beaten to a blade fit for the hands of archangels?”
And mother stopped, trembling like a leaf.
I’d been wiping and screwing the glass, and I’d waited a breath, for mother always talked so like a preacher; but when she’d finished, after a second or two Dan looked up, and said, as if he’d just come in,——
“Aunt Rhody, how come you out of bed?”
And then mother, she got upon the bed, and she took Dan’s head on her breast and fell to stroking his brows, laying her cool palms on his temples and on his eyelids, as once I’d have given my ears to do,——and I slipped out of the room.
O, I hated to go up those stairs, to mount that ladder, to open the scuttle! And once there, I waited and waited before I dared to look. The night had unnerved me. At length I fixed the glass. I swept the broad swollen stream, to the yellowing woods, and over the meadows, where a pale transient beam crept under and pried up the haycocks,——the smoke that began to curl from the chimneys and fall as soon,——the mists blowing off from Indian Hill, but brooding blue and dense down, the turnpike, and burying the red spark of the moon, that smothered like a half-dead coal in her ashes,——anywhere, anywhere but that spot! I don’t know why it was, but I couldn’t level the glass there,——my arm would fall, my eye haze. Finally I brought it round nearer and tried again. Everywhere, as far as your eye could reach, the sea was yeasty and white with froth, and great streaks of it were setting up the inky river, and against it there were the twin lighthouses quivering their little yellow rays as if to mock the dawn, and far out on the edge of day the great light at the Isles of Shoals blinked and blinked, crimson and gold, fainter and fainter, and lost at last. It was no use, I didn’t dare point it, my hand trembled so I could see nothing plain, when suddenly an engine went thundering over the bridge and startled me into stillness. The tube slung in my hold and steadied against the chimney, and there——What was it in the field? what ghastly picture?
The glass crashed from my hand, and I staggered shrieking down the ladder.
The sound wasn’t well through my lips, when the door slammed, and Dan had darted out of the house and to the shore. I after him. There was a knot sitting and standing round there in the gray, shivering, with their hands in their pockets and their pipes set in their teeth; but the gloom was on them as well, and the pipes went out between the puffs.
“Where’s Dennis’s boat?” Dan demanded, as he strode.
“The six-oar’s all the one not——”