“What’s the use?” I answered. “I’ve something just as good over here.”
She joined me, and as she did so I noted, a sour grin on Mr. Pike’s face.
The eastern heavens were equally spectacular. That quarter of the sky was sheer and delicate shell of blue, the upper portions of which faded, changed, through every harmony, into a pale, yet warm, rose, all trembling, palpitating, with misty blue tinting into pink. The reflection of this coloured sky-shell upon the water made of the sea a glimmering watered silk, all changeable, blue, Nile-green, and salmon-pink. It was silky, silken, a wonderful silk that veneered and flossed the softly moving, wavy water.
And the pale moon looked like a wet pearl gleaming through the tinted mist of the sky-shell.
In the southern quadrant of the sky we discovered an entirely different sunset—what would be accounted a very excellent orange-and-red sunset anywhere, with grey clouds hanging low and lighted and tinted on all their under edges.
“Huh!” Mr. Pike muttered gruffly, while we were exclaiming over our fresh discovery. “Look at the sunset I got here to the north. It ain’t doing so badly now, I leave it to you.”
And it wasn’t. The northern quadrant was a great fen of colour and cloud, that spread ribs of feathery pink, fleece-frilled, from the horizon to the zenith. It was all amazing. Four sunsets at the one time in the sky! Each quadrant glowed, and burned, and pulsed with a sunset distinctly its own.
And as the colours dulled in the slow twilight, the moon, still misty, wept tears of brilliant, heavy silver into the dim lilac sea. And then came the hush of darkness and the night, and we came to ourselves, out of reverie, sated with beauty, leaning toward each other as we leaned upon the rail side by side.
* * * * *
I never grow tired of watching Captain West. In a way he bears a sort of resemblance to several of Washington’s portraits. He is six feet of aristocratic thinness, and has a very definite, leisurely and stately grace of movement. His thinness is almost ascetic. In appearance and manner he is the perfect old-type New England gentleman.