THE BIG WAVE
Instead of staying the few weeks upon which they had planned at Snug Harbor Beach, Judith Graham and her husband’s mother remained on for nearly two months. Neither spoke to the other of the secret hope which chained them to the place, but each morning their eyes swept the beach with eager expectancy and each evening they said, “Perhaps, to-morrow.”
Judith often sat for hours on the low slab of rock where her husband had made the sketch of Gerald. Whenever he saw her thus, Gerald would invariably leave his play for a few minutes and lean against her knee, just as he had leaned against Gilbert’s. Sometimes neither of them spoke and sometimes Judith would ask—without removing her eyes from the distant horizon—“Do you think he’ll come back?” to which Gerald’s unvarying response was, “Sure.”
The moments when she was thus alone with him soon became to Judith the part of the day that counted. It seemed to her that while she sat with one arm round the boy, leaning her tired head against the warmth of his small body, the wounds which life had given her were being silently healed. No matter which way her path might lie, existence was no longer the dreary thing that it had been when she came to Snug Harbor Beach. Was it possible that Love had, indeed, walked over the sea of sorrow, to that desolate waste of waters where her bark drifted, and was saying, even to her, “It is I, be not afraid”?
At the end of the seventh week a northeast storm of unusual violence swept the coast and Judith was compelled to remain indoors for several days. She sat much near the window, sometimes reading, with deep interest, a small, leather-covered book which Mother Graham had recently purchased, and sometimes gazing out at the storm-lashed ocean. She thought how One had risen from sleep and said to such a sea, “Peace, be still.” That the Christ could speak those words to-day with the same authority—was speaking them, now, to her storm-racked consciousness—daily became a more assured and glorious fact.
When she again saw the strip of sandy beach, which had grown so dear because of its association with her own little son and with Gerald, the only trace of the recent storm was a heavy, sullen swell—called by sailors “the old sea”—which lifted and broke upon the shore, rushing in with tremendous force. Although the tide was out, Judith could not on this morning seek her usual seat, so far-reaching were the waves. She stood for some minutes on a path which wound through a maze of sweet fern and berry bushes, watching Gerald who, because of three days’ enforced absence from the sand, was bent on building a wonderful pyramid.
“The tide’s turned,” an old sailor said, in passing, “she’s coming in and she’ll be pretty high.”
Judith, who liked these simple fisherfolk, turned aside to talk with him for a few minutes.
“Such a storm as we have had these last few days is unusual at this time of year, is it not?” she asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he drawled, easily. “When it’s bin thick o’ fog outside, as it has for a week past, it takes a considerable breeze o’ wind to clear it away.”