“I don’t think that is what keeps me awake; but sometimes the house shakes so that I do feel a little nervous. I don’t know how it is. I never felt afraid of anything natural before.”
“What our Lord said about not being afraid of anything that could only hurt the body applies here, and in all the terrors of the night. Think about him, dear.”
“I do try, papa. Don’t you stop; you will get cold. It is a dreadful storm, is it not? Suppose there should be people drowning out there now!”
“There may be, my love. People are dying almost every other moment, I suppose, on the face of the earth. Drowning is only an easy way of dying. Mind, they are all in God’s hands.”
“Yes, papa. I will turn round and shut my eyes, and fancy that his hand is over them, making them dark with his care.”
“And it will not be fancy, my darling, if you do. You remember those odd but no less devout lines of George Herbert? Just after he says, so beautifully, ‘And now with darkness closest weary eyes,’ he adds:
Thus in thy ebony box
Thou dost enclose us, till the day
Put our amendment in our way,
And give new wheels to our disordered clocks.”
“He is very fond of boxes, by the way. So go to sleep, dear. You are a good clock of God’s making; but you want new wheels, according to our beloved brother George Herbert. Therefore sleep. Good-night.”
This was tiresome talk—was it—in the middle of the night, reader? Well, but my child did not think so, I know.
Dark, dank, weeping, the morning dawned. All dreary was the earth and sky. The wind was still hunting the clouds across the heavens. It lulled a little while we sat at breakfast, but soon the storm was up again, and the wind raved. I went out. The wind caught me as if with invisible human hands, and shook me. I fought with it, and made my way into the village. The streets were deserted. I peeped up the inn-yard as I passed: not a man or horse was to be seen. The little shops looked as if nobody had crossed their thresholds for a week. Not a door was open. One child came out of the baker’s with a big loaf in her apron. The wind threatened to blow the hair off her head, if not herself first into the canal. I took her by the hand and led her, or rather, let her lead me home, while I kept her from being carried away by the wind. Having landed her safely inside her mother’s door, I went on, climbed the heights above the village, and looked abroad over the Atlantic. What a waste of aimless tossing to and fro! Gray mist above, full of falling rain; gray, wrathful waters underneath, foaming and bursting as billow broke upon billow. The tide was ebbing now, but almost every other wave swept the breakwater. They burst on the rocks at the end of it, and rushed in shattered spouts and clouds of spray far into the air over their heads. “Will the time ever come,” I thought, “when man shall be able to store up even this force for his own ends? Who can tell?” The solitary form of a man stood at some distance gazing, as I was gazing, out on the ocean. I walked towards him, thinking with myself who it could be that loved Nature so well that he did not shrink from her even in her most uncompanionable moods. I suspected, and soon found I was right; it was Percivale.