Then they had passed through the gate and were going rapidly down the narrow foot-path to the bottom of the hill. Hannah strained her eyes after them, and when at the turn of the road both brother and lover were lost to view, still she lingered at the spot pondering over Tom’s unwonted emotion. It was not like him. Never before had she seen him so singularly affected, and now that he was gone, it came back to her with redoubled intensity. The unusual sorrow that had almost choked him, the strange tone in his voice that he had tried vainly to conceal, the sudden wish that the Nereid was back even now, his repeated charges about their mother, all troubled her.
An uneasy feeling of dread oppressed her, she knew not why. The heavy perfume of the honeysuckle suddenly make her sick and faint. The tall and prickly cedar stood up straight and still, covered on one side with a fret-work of silver, on the other clothed with the very gloom of darkness, and somewhere from among its shadowy branches a dove, as if half wakened out of a dream, stirred, uttered its brooding note, then sank again to silence. Hannah had heard the same dove a hundred times before, she even knew that there were purple ripples on its neck, but this time she started violently and shivered. It seemed as if the summer night had suddenly grown cold and chilled her to the heart, and with hurried steps she ran back to the house.
The porch was deserted and strangely lonesome when she passed across. Even the crimson bloom, with its thousand crowns, looked black through the shade, as if it had withered in the hour, and she heard its leaves make a weird rustle, like a complaint, as she closed the door. The sense of desolation was so strong upon her that she could hardly keep from crying out in the solitude, but she went on swiftly to her mother’s room, and entered with noiseless feet. A great sigh of relief came to her lips when she saw the peaceful face upon the pillow, for Miriam, overcome by the reaction, already slept calmly as a child. Hannah sat down beside the bed. There was a smile upon her mother’s lips. How long she sat there, whether one hour, or two hours, she did not know, but when she got up all the tumult in her heart had subsided.
She kissed the sleeping face gently and went quietly up stairs to her own room. She threw the shutters open wide, and lo! out upon the sea with her wings spread, white as the plumage of a gull, the Nereid! Lonely, spirit-like, beyond the reach of voice, she stood upon the mighty desert of the ocean. Before her prow the waves held out their wreath of down, and above, solitary in the vast moonlit sky, hung the royal planet Jupiter. Steady, radiant, it burned like the magic Star in the East. Hannah, watching, saw the ship fade away in the far-off endless isles of silver mist. A great peace had come to her soul, and when she lay down to sleep there was no trouble on her face. Gone, the Nereid was gone, but still, even in her dreams, she knew that the star in the sky was shining.
Slowly the days came and went. Miriam, yet a little feebler, was bright and happy. Never, since that night when she said good-bye, had she murmured or uttered a word of complaint. Every thing at the cottage glided smoothly on; for Hannah attended to the house, and waited upon her mother with an untiring care, but even while she went about performing her different duties her eyes, unconsciously, would wander off to sea. Often in the afternoon, when the widow nodded in the great rocking chair by the window, she would slip away down to the beach, and sit there by the hour.
Those were pleasant days to Hannah. Then the sea, clear and calm, rounded out, a great circle of splendor, to the horizon; or on its surface the giant mists reared themselves, triumphant, in towering arches. Perhaps her thoughts went out beyond these mighty phantom aisles, seeking always the two loved ones across their portals, over the vast and solemn ocean. Sometimes when the sky was warm and the wind blew shoreward it seemed to bring faintly the scent of foreign flowers; for nearer now to her were those mystical lands where Summer, almighty Summer, sat upon an everlasting throne.
Hannah knew every vessel that sailed into port; and sometimes a boat, returning, had spoken the Nereid at sea, sometimes at long intervals a letter came. Then when for weeks, for months it might be, there was no word, no sign, the royal planet, moving in its eternal orbit, hung again in the sky, a star of promise. To Hannah, as she watched it night after night above the sea, it came as a messenger bearing glad tidings of great joy.
So the time waned. The peaceful days passed by and fierce storms broke with a savage roar upon the coast. The green upon the hill-sides faded out, and the freezing spray encrusted the cliff with ice where the wintry sea threw up its bitter brine—and sometimes, farther off upon the shelving beach, it threw up more than brine, or stiffened weed. Broken spars, dreary fragments of wrecks drifted in, told of the wild desolation out upon the hoarse wilderness of beaten waves.
But even those days too passed, and the Spring clothed the land again with emerald. More than a year had worn away since the Nereid had faded out of the horizon, and presently another Fall set in.
For five months no word had come from the absent wanderers. Still Miriam made not the least complaint. Even when the storms lashed the sea, until it sent up a roar that made the young girl shiver, the widow evinced no anxiety. Had she not promised that she would wait patiently? She talked very little, and generally sat quietly by the window from morning till evening. But Hannah, saying nothing, had grown heavy-hearted with the long silence.