“After fifty years, my God! After fifty years!”
CHAPTER XVIII
THE LOOMING SHADOW
Old Captain Briggs, meanwhile, absorbed in the most cheerful speculations, was putting his best foot forward on the road to Hadlock’s Wharf. A vigorous foot it was, indeed, and right speedily it carried him. With pipe in full eruption, leaving a trail of blue smoke on the late afternoon air, and with boots creaking on the hard, white road, the captain strode along; while the Airedale trotted ahead as if he, too, understood that Master Hal was coming home.
He made his way out of the village and so struck into the road to Endicutt itself. “The mingled scents of field and ocean” perfumed the air, borne on a breeze that blent the odors of sea and weedy foreshore and salt marsh with those of garden and orchard, into a kind of airy nectar that seemed to infuse fresh life into the captain’s blood. His blue eyes sparkled almost as brightly as the harbor itself, where gaily painted lobster-pot buoys heaved on the swells, where dories labored and where gulls spiraled.
Briggs seemed to love the sea, that afternoon, almost as he had never loved it—the wonderful mystery of tireless, revivifying, all-engendering sea. Joy filled him that Hal, in whose life lived all the hopes of his race, should have inherited this love of the all-mother, Ocean.
Deeply the captain breathed, as he strode onward, and felt that life was being very good to him. For the most part, rough hillocks and tangled clumps of pine, hemlock and gleaming birch hid the bay from him; but now and again these gave way to sandy stretches, leaving the harbor broad-spread and sparkling to his gaze. And as the old man passed each such place, his eyes sought the incoming canvas of the Sylvia Fletcher, that seemed to him shining more white, uprearing itself with more stately power, than that of any other craft.
Now and then he hailed the boy as if Hal could hear him across all that watery distance. His hearty old voice lost itself in the ebbing, flowing murmur of the surf that creamed up along the pebbles, and dragged them down with a long, rattling slither. Everything seemed glad, to Captain Briggs—dories hauled up on the sand; blocks, ropes and drying sails; lobster-pots and fish-cars; buoys, rusty anchors half-buried—everything seemed to wear a festive air. For was not Hal, now homeward bound, now almost here?