“What is the meaning of this?” Mr. Fentolin demanded, his voice shrill with anger. “Didn’t you hear what I said? This woman annoys me. Send her away.”
Not one of the fishermen answered a word or made the slightest movement to obey him. One of them, a grey-bearded veteran, drew the chair a little further down the planked way across the pebbles. Hannah Cox kept close to its side. They came to a standstill only a few yards from where the waves were breaking. She lifted her hand.
“Listen!” she cried. “Listen!”
Mr. Fentolin turned helplessly around. The little group of fishermen had closed in upon Sarson and Meekins. The woman’s hand was upon his shoulder; she pointed seaward to where a hissing line of white foam marked the spot where the topmost of the rocks were visible.
“You wondered why I have spent so much of my time out here,” she said quietly. “Now you will know. If you listen as I am listening, as I have listened for so many weary hours, so many weary years, you will hear them calling to me, David and John and Stephen. ‘The light!’ Do you hear what they are crying? ‘The light! Fentolin’s light!’ Look!”
She forced him to look once more at the top of the boat-house.
“They were right!” she proclaimed, her voice gaining in strength and intensity. “They were neither drunk nor reckless. They steered as straight as human hand could guide a tiller, for Fentolin’s light! And there they are, calling and calling at the bottom of the sea—my three boys and my man. Do you know for whom they call?”
Mr. Fentolin shrank back in his chair.
“Take this woman away!” he ordered the fishermen. “Do you hear? Take her away; she is mad!”
They looked towards him, but not one of them moved. Mr. Fentolin raised his whistle to his lips, and blew it.