“Harry Barnett has broke his leg,” shouted the lighthouse keeper, “and he wants to know if Captain Mockett will give him a passage to Whitstable.”
The boat turned back to the brig, and after a brief and bellowed consultation, once more pulled towards the lighthouse.
“Skipper says yus,” roared the sailor, when he was within ear-shot, “and he says look alive, ’cause he don’t want to miss his tide.”
The injured man heaved a sigh of relief. “That’s good news,” said he, “though, how the blazes I’m going to get down the ladder is more than I can tell. What do you say, Jeffreys?”
“I say you’d better let me lower you with the tackle,” replied Jeffreys. “You can sit in the bight of a rope and I’ll give you a line to steady yourself with.”
“Ah, that’ll do, Tom,” said Barnett; “but, for the Lord’s sake, pay out the fall-rope gently.”
The arrangements were made so quickly that by the time the boat was fast alongside everything was in readiness, and a minute later the injured man, dangling like a gigantic spider from the end of the tackle, slowly descended, cursing volubly to the accompaniment of the creaking of the blocks. His chest and kit-bag followed, and, as soon as these were unhooked from the tackle, the boat pulled off to the brig, which was now slowly creeping stern-foremost past the lighthouse. The sick man was hoisted up the side, his chest handed up after him, and then the brig was put on her course due South across the Kentish Flats.
Jeffreys stood on the gallery watching the receding vessel and listening to the voices of her crew as they grew small and weak in the increasing distance. Now that his gruff companion was gone, a strange loneliness had fallen on the lighthouse. The last of the homeward-bound ships had long since passed up the Princes Channel and left the calm sea desolate and blank. The distant buoys, showing as tiny black dots on the glassy surface, and the spindly shapes of the beacons which stood up from invisible shoals, but emphasized the solitude of the empty sea, and the tolling of the bell buoy on the Shivering Sand, stealing faintly down the wind, sounded weird and mournful. The day’s work was already done. The lenses were polished, the lamps had been trimmed, and the little motor that worked the fog horn had been cleaned and oiled. There were several odd jobs, it is true, waiting to be done, as there always are in a lighthouse; but, just now, Jeffreys was not in a working humour. A new comrade was coming into his life to-day, a stranger with whom he was to be shut up alone, night and day, for a month on end, and whose temper and tastes and habits might mean for him pleasant companionship or jangling and discord without end. Who was this man Brown? What had he been? and what was he like? These were the questions that passed, naturally enough, through the lighthouse keeper’s mind and distracted him from his usual thoughts and occupations.
Presently a speck on the landward horizon caught his eye. He snatched up the telescope eagerly to inspect it. Yes, it was a boat; but not the coast-guard’s cutter, for which he was looking. Evidently a fisherman’s boat and with only one man in it. He laid down the telescope with a sigh of disappointment, and, filling his pipe, leaned on the rail with a dreamy eye bent on the faint grey line of the land.
Three long years had he spent in this dreary solitude, so repugnant to his active, restless nature: three blank, interminable years, with nothing to look back on but the endless succession of summer calms, stormy nights and the chilly fogs of winter, when the unseen steamers hooted from the void and the fog-horn bellowed its hoarse warning.