He raced down into a steep gully, drummed across a little foot-bridge, took by scrambling assault the other bank, and on the crest, suddenly, as their black wall yawned to engulf him, entered a low grove of pines and cedars. The cold wet bristles bedewed his hands, as he skipped along, now scuffing loudly on a worn ledge, now over a stretch of wet touch-wood, the full, fern-bordered length of a vanished log, that made him advance silent as a ghost.
A ghost—he often thought of that, for now came the one mild excitement. Three times every night, his grandfather’s unofficial deputy, he tramped this triangular beat, downhill, along the shore between the two fixed lights, uphill again to the farmhouse. At first a lark, this tramp had in the last year become dull monotony; his score, penciled in the back of his beloved atlas, showed over a thousand tours, on which nothing ever happened; and yet now and then, as he neared the Admiral’s deck, he felt the childhood presentiment that just ahead something would appear. Usually a nameless emotion, faint and swiftly obliterated, it came now, in the early morning darkness, almost as the pristine thrill.
At the place which had helped to name the whole shore, his path widened into a clearing beside a low bluff. The lantern twirled its shadow-ribs across a floor of rotten wood,—old ship’s planking, the few solid remnants auger-bored. Here, beside a stout rail which now tottered over the dark gulf, Admiral Bissant, the boy’s great-uncle, had walked the quarter-deck in his dotage. Miles’s grandfather never mentioned the tradition; but old Fisherman Bull had often told how, dropping down river in the Mystic Tie, he had seen an aged figure pacing the verge above, in faced uniform and cocked hat. “Givin’ orders he was,” said the fisher, “to nobody—trompin’ an’ mumblin’ amongst the trees, bossin’ hemlocks fer men.” To prove the story there remained uniform, cocked hat, and sword as well, rescued by Uncle Christopher when the old Bissant house burned, and now hung in the “front hall” of their cottage. And these mouldering planks still outlined the landfast quarter-deck. A ghost there must be, Ella said. Of course that was her nonsense. Only a faint breeze of dawn sighed through the drooping needles.
“Nothing ever happens,” thought Miles. He dived into a dark billow of firs, brushed along with now and then a gossamer damp across his cheeks, and following the outward curve of the shore, emerged on a tiny promontory, down which a ragged wall of Norway pines sloped to the second lighthouse,—another stunted white obelisk tipped with radiance. Here again his inspection was needless; and soon he climbed the homeward field, where fast encroaching fir-trees squatted like a thinned regiment of dwarfs.
At the farmhouse door he blew out his lantern; and tiptoeing from the stair-head past his grandfather’s room, undressed in the dark, and was soon abed and asleep.
Full flood of autumn sunshine woke him; and from a late breakfast alone, he went, as usual, straight to the “library.” Before a snapping beech-wood fire, his grandfather, a tall, spare man, whose ruddy, clean-shaven face was marked with severe wrinkles, paced in uncertain fidgets, both hands clasping a Bible at his back.
“Get your Testament, sir,” he commanded querulously, without turning his hook-nosed profile. Ella, the “girl” who had served their family these thirty years, looked up and nodded furtive encouragement, then bent to as furtive a study of the long words. Sitting beside her, Miles could see the fat fingers, white and puckered from hot water, faltering across the narrow columns, balking beneath Urbane, Stachys, Tryphena and Tryphosa. When her turn came to read aloud, she omitted them one and all, glibly, but with the air of a nervous knitter dropping stitches. The old man, standing braced before the fire, affected not to notice. It was one of his few compromises. He read on sonorously, his head uplifted before the portrait of his brother, the Admiral, who stared down from the canvas with the same ruddy face and close white curls, the same beaked severity and intolerant poise.
Their devotions ended, Ella went bustling to her kitchen, and the head of the Bissant family turned to its youngest survivor.
“Good-morning, sir! Are you any better prepared to-day?” With eyes of a confused, smoky brightness, he surveyed his grandson, then searched the few old books on the shelves. “Hmm! Sallust—yes, just so. Come, begin—where’s the lesson, eh?—No, not there, either, take it all!—Hmm!—Ah, here ’tis, boy: Volturcius interrogatus de itinere—”
“Please, sir,” said Miles humbly, “we don’t—it’s Saturday, grandfather.”