"By the deep nine!" came the hoarse murmur of the leadsman.
It lay with him to stop the ship or not; a word, and she would come shivering to a standstill; a word, and the boatswain would pipe away his gig and the crew would be running to their places. His heart ached with the desire to land, but something, he knew not what, withheld the order on his lips. Let him remain silent, and the opportunity would pass away forever; it was passing now with every turn of the propeller. Had he not told her he would return? Had he not whispered it that night when they were torn apart? Did he not owe it to her to keep the promise of forty years, a promise given in the flush of youth and hope, and sealed with scalding tears?
His resolution was taken. He ordered Captain Stillwell to stop the ship and lower a boat.
"I am going to treat myself to a run ashore," he said by way of explanation.
The vessel slowly stopped. The covers were whipped off the gig. She was hoisted out and lowered, the crew dropping down the ladder into their places at the peep-peep-peep of the whistle.
"I leave the ship," said Sir John, not to convey a fact patently obvious, but in obedience to a naval formula.
He was landed at a little cove where in bygone days he had often whiled away an hour waiting in charge of Hadow's boat. It gave him a singular sensation to feel the keel grate against the shingle, and to find himself once more setting foot in Lihua. He drew a deep breath as he looked about and noticed how unchanged it all was. There were some new houses in new places, and grass on the sites of others that were endeared to him in recollection; but it was Lihua, after all, the Lihua of his boyhood, the Lihua of his dreams. For a while he strolled about at random, walking with the phantoms of the past, hearing their laughter, seeing their faces, recalling a thousand things he had forgotten.
It came over him with a start that the village was empty. Then he remembered it was Sunday, and they were all in church. Thank God, there was none to watch him; no prying, curious eyes to disturb his thoughts. But they would soon be out again, and it behooved him to make the best use of his solitude while he might. He struck inland, his heart beating with a curious expectancy; at every sound he held his breath, and he would turn quickly and look back with a haunting sense that Tehea was near him; that perhaps she was gazing at him through the trees. He approached his old home through overgrown plantations. It awed him to part the branches and to feel himself drawing nearer at every step to the only house he had ever called his own. As he heard the splashing waterfall he stopped, not daring for the moment to go on. When at last he did so, and mounted the little hill, he found no house at all; nothing but ferns and weeds, man-high. He moved about here and there, up to the armpits in verdure, in a sort of consternation at discovering it gone.
His foot struck against a boulder.
He had forgotten there were any rocks on the hill. He moved along, and his foot struck again. He pressed the weeds back and looked down. He saw a tomb of crumbling cement, green with age and buried out of sight under the tangle.