“Well, I am disappointed. There is positively no one here, and the mystery of the island light is still unsolved.”
Her attendant did not answer. Thinking that he was still under the influence of fear, she said:
“Why, Pompey, we are as safe and as quiet here as I was when I lived here with Aunt Joe and Hugh.”
Still her follower did not speak, but rather lingered behind her, and she herself relapsed into silence, and fell into a reverie, until she arrived at the farthest extremity of the isle, opposite to that on which she had landed. This was the northwestern point of the island, and the same beach upon which she and the sole companion of her childhood, Hugh, used to pick maninosies. Here, as she walked about watching the starlit waves break gently on the beach, noting the numerous perforations, where the maninosies had buried themselves in the sand, the tide of memory rolled back, overwhelming the apprehension of the present. She saw herself, a tiny, sprite-like child, stealing out on starlight nights, and sitting on the pile of rocks, on this very spot, watching in fond faith for the swimming of the nereids, and mistaking the reflection of some purple cloud, high up in the heavens, for the royal robe of Amphytrite in the “deep, deep sea.” She saw herself again in the daytime, when the setting sun, like Macbeth’s blood-crimsoned hand, would
“The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red!”
she saw herself well shod and warmly clothed, and Hugh, the manly boy, barefooted, bareheaded, and coarsely clad, yet grandly handsome “as Hercules ere his first labor!” Hugh, with his noble look and noble nature; and she smiled to think of the high faith, and hope, and love that irradiated his fine countenance, as he confidently promised to make a fortune for her, his sister; to get wealth, rank, honor for her! And the tears rolled down Garnet’s cheeks, as she thought of the glorious boy, and thought how many, many years it had been since she had even inquired his residence or his destiny.
“He thought,” she said, speaking to herself in a low self-communing voice, “he thought to have made a fortune before me—to have conferred wealth, rank, honor upon me! The case might be reversed—it might! oh! I wish it could! There is only one way in which it could, and that is not impossible, though remote. This dream that I have enshrined within my heart—this ideal of goodness and greatness with which only I will unite—this I owe to Hugh. And oh! if he has fulfilled in his manhood the glorious promise of his boyhood, whatever his external fate may be, if he has fulfilled in himself the promise of matured goodness and greatness—then——”
“What then?” said a deep voice at her elbow.
She started slightly, and exclaimed: