“Meekins!” he cried. “Where are you, Meekins?”
He turned his head and saw at once that Meekins was powerless. Five or six of the fishermen had gathered around him. There were at least thirty of them about, sinewy, powerful men. The only person who moved towards Mr. Fentolin’s carriage was Jacob, the coast guardsman.
“Mr. Fentolin, sir,” he said, “the lads have got your bully safe. It’s a year and more that Hannah Cox has been about the village with some story about two lights on a stormy night. It’s true what she says—that her man and boys lie drowned. There’s William Green, besides, and a nephew of my own—John Kallender. And Philip Green—he was saved. He swore by all that was holy that he steered straight for the light when his boat struck, and that as he swam for shore, five minutes later, he saw the light reappear in another place. It’s a strange story. What have you to say, sir, about that?”
He pointed straight to the wire-encircled globe which towered on its slender support above the boat-house. Mr. Fentolin looked at it and looked back at the coast guardsman. The brain of a Machiavelli could scarcely have invented a plausible reply.
“The light was never lit there,” he said. “It was simply to help me in some electrical experiments.”
Then, for the first time in their lives, those who were looking on saw Mr. Fentolin apart from his carriage. Without any haste but with amazing strength, Hannah Cox leaned over, and, with her arms around his middle, lifted him sheer up into the air. She carried him, clasped in her arms, a weird, struggling object, to the clumsy boat that lay always at the top of the beach. She dropped him into the bottom, took her seat, and unshipped the oars. For one moment the coast guardsman hesitated; then he obeyed her look. He gave the boat a push which sent it grinding down the pebbles into the sea. The woman began to work at the oars. Every now and then she looked over her shoulder at that thin line of white surf which they were all the time approaching.
“What are you doing, woman?” Mr. Fentolin demanded hoarsely. “Listen! It was an accident that your people were drowned. I’ll give you an annuity. I’ll make you rich for life—rich! Do you understand what that means?”
“Aye!” she answered, looking down upon him as he lay doubled up at the bottom of the boat. “I know what it means to be rich—better than you, maybe. Not to let the gold and silver pieces fall through your fingers, or to live in a great house and be waited upon by servants who desert you in the hour of need. That isn’t being rich. It’s rich to feel the touch of the one you love, to see the faces around of those you’ve given birth to, to move on through the days and nights towards the end, with them around; not to know the chill loneliness of an empty life. I am a poor woman, Mr. Fentolin, and it’s your hand that made me so, and not all the miracles that the Bible ever told of can make me rich again.”
“You are a fool!” he shrieked. “You can buy forgetfulness! The memory of everything passes.”
“I may be a fool,” she retorted grimly, “and you the wise man; but this day we’ll both know the truth.”