He lingered a moment looking at these passages, and then turned away.
"I will go upstairs," he said, "into the lantern, and make sure that everything is ready for the lighting at sunset. That's sudden about May Tolman," he began to reflect. "Why, I seem to see her going up and down these stairs the day she was here, so full of life."
He could hear her voice; he could see her black, glowing eyes, that had a peculiar fascination for Dave.
"Sorry," he said. "That's real sudden. Things do happen quick in this life sometimes."
Dave felt unusually sober that day. If he had told all his thoughts to any one, he would have confessed to a singular soberness of feeling for some time.
He had been shut up for several weeks with a man whose religion, without any pretence, any show, and any peculiarities, controlled his life, and came prominently to the surface in everything. Dave felt his sister's religious influence at home; but there were influences interfering with it and partly neutralizing it. Dave Fletcher's mother was too busy, she assured herself, to attend to religion; and Dave's father declared--also to himself--that he did not "feel the need of it." "I am as good as my neighbours; and I guess that will do," he said. He quoted in his thoughts Dave's lack of interest, saying, "There is Dave, good boy; and he takes his father's view of things."
But here at the lighthouse Dave declared that he was "cornered." Here was a simple, humble, unselfish life living in communion with his heavenly Father, bringing that presence down to that lonely tower in the sea, and filling it, and surrounding the boy who was the light-keeper's companion. No neutralizing associations here.
"It sets me to thinking," declared Dave, as he climbed the successive stairways to the lantern the afternoon of the keeper's absence. "And May Tolman's sickness--that is sudden. Nothing is certain. Well, we must just look after matters right around us. One can't give his thoughts to all these possibilities of accident. I'll just remember that I am a keeper of a lighthouse."
Keeper of a lighthouse! The moment he uttered this thought to himself there settled down upon his shoulders a new and serious weight of responsibility. He began to realize that for several hours he must carry the burden of a keeper's duties. He must look after the fog-signal, if a dusky veil of mist should suddenly be dropped from the sky and curtain off both the sea and the land. If there should be any accident upon the sea in the neighbourhood of the lighthouse, where the keeper might be expected to give any aid, Dave must render that help. When night came, or sunset rather, he must light the lamp in the lantern, and he must watch it, and see that for the sake of the many vessels upon the sea this light burned with steady lustre. Upon just a boy's shoulders how heavy a care seemed to be pressing down!
"I can stand it," he said, in pride and confidence. The very pressure of the responsibility aroused within him a corresponding measure of strength. However, it did not lessen the shadow of that sober thinking in which he often walked nowadays.