“You were telling me how you used to think of the sea—”
“When I was as young as you. I remember, sir. Well, that lasted a long time—lasted till my third boy fell asleep in the wide water; for it du call it falling asleep, don’t it, sir?”
“The Bible certainly does,” I answered.
“It’s the Bible I be meaning, of course,” she returned. “Well, after that, but I don’t know what began it, only I did begin to think about the sea as something that took away things and didn’t bring them no more. And somehow or other she never look so blue after that, and she give me the shivers. But now, sir, she always looks to me like one o’ the shining ones that come to fetch the pilgrims. You’ve heard tell of the Pilgrim’s Progress, I daresay, sir, among the poor people; for they du say it was written by a tinker, though there be a power o’ good things in it that I think the gentlefolk would like if they knowed it.”
“I do know the book—nearly as well as I know the Bible,” I answered; “and the shining ones are very beautiful in it. I am glad you can think of the sea that way.”
“It’s looking in at the window all day as I go about the house,” she answered, “and all night too when I’m asleep; and if I hadn’t learned to think of it that way, it would have driven me mad, I du believe. I was forced to think that way about it, or not think at all. And that wouldn’t be easy, with the sound of it in your ears the last thing at night and the first thing in the morning.”
“The truth of things is indeed the only refuge from the look of things,” I replied. “But now I want the key of the church, if you will trust me with it, for I have something to do there this morning; and the key of the tower as well, if you please.”
With her old smile, ripened only by age, she reached the ponderous keys from the nail where they hung, and gave them into my hand. I left her in the shadow of her dwelling, and stepped forth into the sunlight. The first thing I observed was the blacksmith waiting for me at the church door.
Now that I saw him in the full light of day, and now that he wore his morning face upon which the blackness of labour had not yet gathered, I could see more plainly how far he was from well. There was a flush on his thin cheek by which the less used exercise of walking revealed his inward weakness, and the light in his eyes had something of the far-country in them—“the light that never was on sea or shore.” But his speech was cheerful, for he had been walking in the light of this world, and that had done something to make the light within him shine a little more freely.
“How do you find yourself to-day?” I asked.