"I will not, and you shall not!" he cried. "What you are about do to is ruin—for Lucy, for Jane, and for little Ellen. You cannot—you shall not put such a stain upon that child. You love her, you—"
"Yes—too well to let that woman touch her ag'in if I kin help it!" The fury of the merciless sea was in him now—the roar and pound of the surf in his voice. "She'll be a curse to the child all her days; she'll go back on her when she's a mind to just as she did on Archie. There ain't a dog that runs the streets that would 'a' done that. She didn't keer then, and she don't keer now, with him a-lyin' dead there. She ain't looked at him once nor shed a tear. It's too late. All hell can't stop me! Out of my way, I tell ye, doctor, or I'll hurt ye!"
With a wrench he swung back the doors and flung himself into the light.
"Come in, men! Isaac, Green—all of ye—and you over there! I got something to say, and I don't want ye to miss a word of it! You, too, Mr. Feilding, and that lady next ye—and everybody else that kin hear!
"That's my son, Barton Holt, lyin' there dead! The one I druv out o' here nigh twenty year ago. It warn't for playin' cards, but on account of a woman; and there she stands—Lucy Cobden! That dead boy beside him is their child—my own grandson, Archie! Out of respect to the best woman that ever lived, Miss Jane Cobden, I've kep' still. If anybody ain't satisfied all they got to do is to look over these letters. That's all!"
Lucy, with a wild, despairing look at Max, had sunk to the floor and lay cowering beneath the lifeboat, her face hidden in the folds of her cloak.
Jane had shrunk back behind one of the big folding doors and stood concealed from the gaze of the astonished crowd, many of whom were pressing into the entrance. Her head was on the doctor's shoulder, her fingers had tight hold of his sleeve. Doctor John's arms were about her frail figure, his lips close to her cheek.
"Don't, dear—don't," he said softly. "You have nothing to reproach yourself with. Your life has been one long sacrifice."
"Oh, but Archie, John! Think of my boy being gone! Oh, I loved him so, John!"
"You made a man of him, Jane. All he was he owed to you." He was holding her to him—comforting her as a father would a child.