He went off to change some money and Lister went to his cabin and began to pack his trunk. When he came up they had passed the Chicken Rock and a long bright beam touched the sea astern. In the East, water and sky faded to dusky blue, but presently a faint light began to blink as if it beckoned. The light got brighter and gradually drew abeam. The foaming wake glimmered lividly in the dark, the beat of screws seemed quicker, and Lister thought the ship was carried forward by a stream of tide.
Other lights began to blink. They stole out of the dark, got bright, and vanished, and Lister, leaning on the rails, felt they called him on. One knew them by their colors and measured flashes. They were beacons, burning on a well-ordered plan to guide the navigator, but he did not know the plan. In a sense, this was important, and he began to muse.
Now he would soon reach the Old Country, he felt he had made a momentous plunge. Adventure called, he knew Canada and wanted something fresh, but he wondered whether this was all. Perhaps the plunge had, so to speak, not been a thoughtless caprice. In a sense, things had led up to it and made it logical. For example, it might not have been for nothing he met the girl on the train and got hurt. His hurt had kept him at Winnipeg and stopping there had roused his discontent. Then he had met Vernon, who wanted him to know the English ship-owner. It was possible these things were like the flashes that leaped out of the dark. He would know where they pointed when the journey was over. Then Lister smiled and knocked out his pipe.
When he went on deck again some time afterwards the ship was steering for a gap between two rows of twinkling lights. They ran on, closing on each other, like electric lamps in a long street, and in front the sky shone with a dull red glow. It was the glimmer of a great port, they were entering the Mersey, and he went off to get up his luggage.
[PART II—THE RECKONING]
[CHAPTER I]
VERNON'S PLOT
Lister occupied the end of a slate-flag bench on the lawn at Carrock, Mrs. Cartwright's house in Rannerdale. Rannerdale slopes to a lake in the North Country, and the old house stands among trees and rocks in a sheltered hollow. The sun shone on its lichened front, where a creeper was going red; in the background birches with silver stems and leaves like showers of gold gleamed against somber firs. Across the lawn and winding road, the tranquil lake reflected bordering woods; and then long mountain slopes that faded from yellow and green to purple closed the view.
While Lister waited for the tea Mrs. Cartwright had given him to cool he felt the charm of house and dale was strong. Perhaps it owed something to the play of soft light and shade, for, as a rule, in Canada all was sharply cut. The English landscape had a strange elusive beauty that gripped one hard, and melted as the fleecy clouds rolled by. When the light came back color and line were as beautiful but not the same.
There was no grass in Canada like the sweep of smooth English turf, and Lister had not thought a house could give the sense of ancient calm one got at Carrock. Since his boyhood he had not known a home; his resting place had been a shack at a noisy construction camp, a room at a crowded cheap hotel, and a berth beside a steamer's rattling engines. Then the shining silver on the tea-table was something new; he marked its beauty of line, and the blue and gold and brown pattern on the delicate china he was almost afraid to touch. In fact, all at Carrock was marked by a strange refinement and quiet charm.