The presence of the steamship, a tiny dull spot on the glowing picture, peopled the void with life and banished poetry with the thinly sheeted ghosts of the fog. In a little more than an hour she would be abreast of the Gulf Rock Light. The watcher believed—was almost certain, in fact—that she was the Princess Royal, homeward bound from New York to Southampton. From her saloon deck those enthusiasts who had risen early enough to catch a first glimpse of the English coast were already scanning the trimly rugged outlines of the Scilly Isles, and searching with their glasses for the Land's End and the Lizard.
In a few hours they would be in Southampton; that afternoon in London—London, the Mecca of the world, from which, two years ago, he fled with a loathing akin to terror. The big ship out there, panting and straining as if she were beginning, not ending, her ocean race of three thousand miles, was carrying eager hundreds to the pleasures and follies of the great city. Yet he, the man smoking and silently staring at the growing bank of smoke,—a young man, too; handsome, erect, with the clean, smooth profile of the aristocrat,—had turned his back on it all, and sought, and found, peace here in the gaunt pillar on a lonely rock.
Strange, how differently men are constituted. And women! Bah! A hard look came into his eyes. His mouth set in a stern contempt. For a little while his face bore a steely expression which would have amazed the man within the lantern, now singing lustily as he worked.
But as the harp of David caused the evil spirit to depart from Saul, so did the music of the morning chase away the lurking devil of memory which sprang upon the lighthouse-keeper with the sight of the vessel.
He smiled again, a trifle bitterly perhaps. Behind him the singer roared genially:
"Soon we'll be in London Town,
Sing, my lads, yeo ho-o,
And see the King in his golden crown,
Sing, my lads, yeo ho."
The man on the platform seemed to be aroused from a painful reverie by the jingle so curiously à propos to his thoughts. He tapped his pipe on the iron railing, and was about to enter the lantern—and so to the region of sleep beneath—when suddenly his glance, trained to an acuteness not dreamed of by folk ashore, rested on some object seemingly distant a mile or less, and drifting slowly nearer with the tide.
At this hour a two-knot current swept to the east around and over the treacherous reef whose sunken fangs were marked by the lighthouse. In calm weather, such as prevailed just then, it was difficult enough to effect a landing at the base of the rock, but this same smiling water-race became an awful, raging, tearing fury when the waves were lashed into a storm.
He pocketed his pipe and stood with hands clenched on the rail, gazing intently at a white-painted ship's life-boat, with a broken mast and a sail trailing over the stern. Its color, with the sun shining on it, no less than the vaporous eddies fading down to the surface of the sea, had prevented him from seeing it earlier. Perhaps he would not have noticed it at all were it not for the flashing wings of several sea-birds which accompanied the craft in aërial escort.
Even yet a landsman would have stared insolently in that direction and declared that there was naught else in sight save the steamer, whose tall masts and two black funnels were now distinctly visible. But the lighthouse keeper knew he was not mistaken. Here was a boat adrift, forlorn, deserted. Its contour told him that it was no local craft straying adventurously from island or mainland. Its unexpected presence, wafted thus strangely from ocean wilds, the broken spar and tumbled canvas, betokened an accident, perchance a tragedy.