It was a dark, delicate, oval face, like a girl's, with finely cut features, and a complexion as fair as the petals of an apple blossom; but it was his great brown eyes and long eyelashes, black as night, that held the attention, together with a look of deep patient suffering, mingled with gentleness and love that lit all up, and filled even the heart of a rough old rat-catcher like me with a feeling of deep pity and an intense desire to protect and befriend a small creature who looked too fragile, too beautiful, and too good for this old work-a-day world of ours, and as if he were only tarrying for a short while before going to his eternal home, where his features will be beautified by perfect love, and will lose the look of suffering and pain.
The rector, taking off his "sou'-wester" as he entered, turned to the woman with a cheery voice, and said, "Well, Mary, how are you and the boy?—how are you, my man? I happened to be passing" (just as if it were quite a common thing for a parson to be out on the loose at one a.m. on a winter's night), "and I thought I would just call in to say that the men at the boats tell me that the bark of this gale is far worse than its bite, and that it is a fair, honest, rattling gale that such good sailors as your husband care nothing for, and that we may expect the boats in with the daylight, so you may keep the pots boiling. But why isn't that youngster snug in bed and asleep? Oh! he can't sleep when the wind howls, and Jack is away! Why, my boy, Jack will laugh at you when he comes home, and say he don't want such big, tired-looking eyes watching for him! Well, it will be morning soon, and, please God, Jack will be here, and will have popped you into bed himself before most of the world are up and about." At this Mary smiled; and the little boy, with a low laugh, said: "Jack knows Mary and I are waiting for him. Jack says he can often see us, and all we are doing, when he is out at sea in a raging storm, and the night is ever so dark; and he'd feel bad, Jack would, if I was not up to see him eat his supper; and besides, Mary could not sit here alone and listen to the wind and sea, and I am never tired and sleepy when waiting for Jack. Besides, Jack says he must tell someone all he has done and seen while he gets his supper, and Mary is too busy after the nets and things, so I sit here, and Jack tells me of such wonderful things: it is just lovely to hear him."
The rector would not sit down, and soon hurried me off to another cottage, much such another as the first; but instead of Mary and the boy, we found a great, tall, gaunt old woman, sitting up before the fire, waiting for her two grandsons, who were away in the same boat with Jack; but to the rector's cheery, hopeful words, the woman answered with a bitter, sharp, complaining tongue: "I don't want no stop-at-home idle chaps to tell me what a storm is. Danger! who says there's danger? Danger with a little puff of wind like this? Not but what both of those boys will be washed ashore one day as their grandfather and father were. It's in the blood, and trying for a lone woman. Drat the boys! I told them not to go off with Jack. I could see plain for days that it was coming on to blow; but oh, no! they know better than me, who have lived to lose their father in such a storm as this, and to see his boat with my own eyes go to pieces on the Point as she came in, and not a man saved, and me left with them boys to keep. God only knows how I did it, and now they are that masterful they won't pay no attention to me." And then, as a hurricane of wind dashed at the door and windows and sent the smoke from the wood fire far out into the room, the poor old thing started and turned to the night outside with a look of terror; and, as the storm rushed on, and then there was a lull, she threw her apron over her head and sobbed for fear and deep anxiety for her grandsons.
The rector comforted her with gentle words and praise of her pluck and nerves; and as he and I returned to the beach, he told me that the old woman had once been the prettiest girl for many miles round, that when her boys were far too young to help her the father had been drowned by the upsetting of his boat on the Point, and from that day she had worked and toiled, mending nets and selling fish in fair weather and foul, often weary and half-starved, but succeeding in the end to keep her old cottage over her head, and to bring her boys up respectably and turn them out two of the smartest fishermen along the coast.
As we left the cottage the first tender light of the morning was paling the eastern sky far out to sea, and hastening on to the Point, we could just make out a distant sail appearing now and then out of the departing darkness of the night, and before half an hour was over the rector declared it to be Jack's boat coming in fast before the wind. All the village was astir in a minute, old men and young women and children hurrying to the cove and making ready for the home-coming; and in a few minutes the boat, with Jack holding the helm and the old woman's boys sitting crouched low down, dashed past the Point, turned sharp into the cove, and down in a moment fell the sail and the anchor-chain rattled out of the bows. There was no cheering or noisy welcome or rejoicing, for such scenes were the daily incidents in the life of the village; but everyone lent a helping hand, and in a few minutes Jack and his men were on shore. The old grandmother was there, but took no notice of her grandsons, who marched off to the cottage laden with oars, etc., where the old woman had just preceded them to put out the breakfast.
The rector and I turned to go home, and as I passed the cottage where Jack lived I glanced in and saw him standing on the hearth, tall, massive, weather-beaten and rugged, with the lame boy high up in his arms looking hard in his face, and both man and child had such a happy contented smile on their faces that it did me good to see, and I think may have rejoiced even the angels above.
When parting from me at the inn door, the rector said that if I liked to step up to the rectory that evening after my supper he would find me a pipe of tobacco, and tell me all that was known of the history of the little boy who had awakened such an interest in me, for, he added, "it is a very curious story."
[CHAPTER X.]
At eight o'clock, having fed my dogs and ferrets and left my boy Jack chatting in the harness-room with the rector's old coachman, I found myself in a snug arm-chair, pipe in mouth, my feet on the fender, and the rector sitting opposite me in his study, he also enjoying an after-dinner pipe; and after a chat over the events of the day and of the storm of the previous night, the rector began the history of the poor lame boy at the cottage thus—