At midnight there came the awful waking. Thomasin slept at last and slumbered dream-tossed in a shadow-world of fantastic troubles. Then a sound roused her—the sound of a voice speaking loudly, breaking off to laugh, and speaking again. The voice she knew, but the laugh she had never heard. She started up and listened. It was her husband who had wakened her.
"How do it go then? Lard! my memory be like a fishin' net, as holds the gert things an' lets the little 'uns creep through. 'Twas a braave song as faither singed, though maybe for God fearers it ban't a likely song."
Then the bed trembled and the man reared up violently and roared out an order in such words as he had never used till then.
"Port! Port your God-damned helm if you don't want 'em to sink us."
Thomasin, of whose presence her husband appeared unconscious, crept trembling from the bed. Then his voice changed and he whispered:
"Port, my son, 'cause of that 'pon the waters. Caan't 'e see—they bubbles a glimmerin' on the foam? That's the last life of my lil Tom; an' the foam-wreath's put theer by God's awn right hand. He'm saved, if 'twasn't that down at the bottom o' the sea a man be twenty fathom nearer hell than them as lies in graaves ashore. But let en wait for the last trump as'll rip the deep oceans. An' the feesh—damn 'em—if I thot they'd nose Tom, by God I'd catch every feesh as ever swum. But shall feesh be 'lowed to eat what's had a everlasting sawl in it? God forbid. He'm theer, I doubt, wi' seaweed round en an' sea-maids a cryin' awver his lil white faace an' keepin' the crabs away. Hell take crabs—they'd a ate Christ 'isself if so be He'd falled in the water. Pearls—pearls—pearls is on Tom, an' the sea creatures gives what they can, 'cause they knaw as he'd a grawed to be a man an' theer master. God bless 'em, they gives the best they can, 'cause they knawed how us loved en. 'The awnly son o' his mother.' Well, well, sleep's better'n medicine; but no sleepin' this weather if us wants to make home again. Steady! 'Tis freshenin' fast!"
He was busy about some matter and she heard him breathing in the darkness and stirring himself. Thomasin, her heart near standing still before this awful discovery, hesitated between stopping and flying from the room before he should discover her. But she felt no fear of the man himself, and bracing her nerves, struck a light. It showed Gray Michael sitting up and evidently under the impression he was at sea. He grasped the bed-head as a tiller and peered anxiously ahead.
"Theer's light shawin' forrard!" he cried. Then he laughed, and Thomasin saw his face was but the caricature of what it had been, with all the iron lines blotted out and a strange, feeble expression about eyes and mouth. He nodded his head, looked up at the ceiling from time to time, and presently began to sing.
It was the old rhyme he had been trying to recollect, and it now came, tossed uppermost in the mind-quake which had shattered his intellect, buried matters of moment, and flung to the surface long hidden events and words of his youth.
"'Bucca's a churnin' the waves of the sea,
Bucca's a darkenin' the sky wi' his frown,
His voice is the roll o' the thunder.
The lightnin' do shaw us the land on our lee,
An' do point to the plaace wheer our bodies shall drown
When the bwoat gaws down from under.'