On the doorsteps at home, Tony smoked his pipe.
“Ah, the beggar’s written at last,” he grumbled; then unfolding a single sheet, read it calmly, without comment. Miles, who had always vaguely connected this coming letter with “enemies made at sea,” was disappointed to see no more change in Florio’s dark face than in his later behavior.
Weeks passed without incident. Miles went daily to the village for mail which was never there, and of which the sailor declared no expectation. He returned down river always by the shore path—“to see how the weir gets along,” he told himself stubbornly. It got along slowly, from bad to worse. Sometimes he saw the magician, far out, ankle-deep in mud, hammering stakes, or weaving brush wattles into his foredoomed structure. Once the blue of a calico dress moved among the white birch pillars. Speech of his new neighbors, however, or nearer view, he did not get. No face lurked behind the window-pane. And at home the fir headland sundered them as effectually as the rim of a hemisphere.
One night, at his nine-o’clock visit to the upper light, he paused for a time in the lamp-room, his back to the glare, looking out into the dark. Something—perhaps the silence of the evening, the calm, so great that the other tower’s light pierced the water deeply, like an inverted point of exclamation—induced lonely and melancholy thoughts. As he stood thus, a sound rose through the open trap-door. Something stirred, thinly and dryly, on the stairs below.
At first like faintly tearing silk, or scuffing sand-paper, it mounted. Footsteps, thought Miles; yet such footsteps as he had never heard, uncertain, soft, and of a person neither shod nor barefoot.
They stopped. A harsh yet guarded call followed. If speech, it was no human tongue. Miles waited, in a profound silence. A voice called in strange sing-song; then nearer, chanting what sounded like a fragment of barbarous melody.
Portuguese and Italian sailors Miles had seen, on rare visits aboard some lumber schooner bound for Sicily or the Canary Islands. At Admiral’s Light, however, nothing could bring them ashore, still less up into the tower. And this sing-song gabble, as instinct told him, came from no Latin throat.
The dry, scuffing steps began once more. Suddenly, out of the darkness, claw-like fingers clutched the sides of the trap-door,—fingers of an impossible, horny yellow, ending in blue talons.
For one spasmodic instant, Miles, had he stood on open ground, might have bolted. Then as up from a pit, a reassuring black felt hat bobbed through the opening, and tilted back to disclose a human face. Eyes hard and bright as black glass peered from under lids curiously in-folded, of double thickness; the saffron cheeks were smooth as a babe’s; and indeed, in that strange face, as in a changeling’s, baby innocence conflicted with reptilian age and wisdom. Without alteration, without sound, it rested there for a moment, at the level of the floor, as though decapitated; then sank from sight.
Miles had stared in fascination. Waking to anger, part at his own fear, part at its cause, he shouted:—