She's All the World to Me

by Sir Hall Caine

"THERE IS SORROW ON THE SEA"

Two months passed away, and the mists from the sea were chased by the winds of winter. It was the twenty-third of December. In the two days that followed between that day and Christmas morning occurred the whole series of appalling events which it now remains to us to narrate.

Mona Cregeen and Danny Fayle, with Ruby between them, were walking along the shore from Orry's Head toward the south. The little one prattled and sang, shook out her hair in the wind, and flew down the sand; ran back and clasped a hand of each; and dragged Danny aside to look at this sea-weed, or pulled Mona along to look at that shell; tripped down to the water's edge until the big waves touched her boots, and then back once more with a half-frightened, half-affected laughter-loaded scream.

Mona was serious and even sad, and Danny wore a dejected look in his simple face which added a melancholy interest to its vacant expression. Since we saw him first in the house of Mylrea Balladhoo, Danny had passed through a bitter experience. There was no tangible sorrow, yet who shall measure the depth of his suffering?

When the new element of love first entered into Danny's life, he knew nothing of what it was. A glance out of woman's eyes had in an instant penetrated his nature. He was helpless and passive. He would stand for an hour neither thinking nor feeling, but with a look of sheer stupidity. If this was love, Danny knew it by no such name. But presently a ray of sunlight floated into the lad's poor, dense intelligence and everything around was bathed in a new, glad light. The vacant look died away from his face. He smiled and laughed. He ran here and there with a jovial willingness. Even Kisseck's sneers and curses, his threats and blows became all at once easier to bear. "Be aisy with me, Uncle Bill," he would say; "be aisy, uncle, and I'll do it smart and quick astonishin'." People marked the change. "It's none so daft the lad is at all, at all," they said sometimes. This was the second stage of Danny's passion—and presently came the third. Then arose a vague yearning not only to love but to be loved. The satisfied heart had not asked so much before, but now it needed this further sustenance. Curious and pathetic were the simple appeals made by Danny for the affection of the woman he loved. Sometimes he took up a huge fish to the cottage of the Cregeens, threw it on the floor, and vanished. Sometimes he talked to Mona of what great things he had done in his time—what fish he had caught, how fast he had rowed, and what weather he had faced. There was not a lad in Peel more modest than Danny, but his simple soul was struggling in this way with a desire to make itself seem worthy of Mona's love. The girl would listen in silence to the accounts of his daring deeds, and when she would look up with a glance of pity into his animated eyes, the eyes of Danny would be brave no more, but fall in confusion to his feet.

Then, bit by bit, it was borne in on Danny that his great, strong, simple love could never be returned; and this was the last stage of his affection. The idea of love had itself been hard to realize, but much harder to understand was the strange and solemn idea of unrequited passion. Twenty times had Mona tried in vain to convey this idea to his mind without doing violence to the tenderness of the lad's nature. But that which no artifice could achieve time itself accomplished. Danny began to stay away from the cottage on the "brew," and when, in pity for that unspeakable sorrow which Mona herself knew but too well, the girl asked him why he did not come up as often as before, he answered, "I'm thinking it's not me you're wanting up there." And Danny felt as if the words would choke him.

Then the whole world, which had seemed brighter, or at least less cruel, became bathed in gloom. The lad haunted the seashore. The moan of the long dead sea seemed to speak to him in a voice not indeed of cheer but of comforting grief. The white curves of the breakers had something in them that suited better with his mood than the sunlit ripples of a summer sea. The dapple-gray clouds that scudded across the leaden sky, the chill wind that scattered the salt spray and whistled along the gunwale of his boat, the mist, the scream of the sea-bird—all these spoke to his desolate heart in an inarticulate language that was answered by tears.

Poor Danny, a hurricane had uprooted the only idol of your soul, and for you the one flower of life, the flower of love, was torn up and withered forever!

Love? Yes, even the image of a happy love had at length stood up for one moment before his mind, even before his mind. That love itself might have been possible to him, yes, possible to such a one as he was, though laughed at—"rigged" as he called it—here, there, and everywhere—this was the blessed vision of one brief instant. He thought of how he might have clasped her hands by the bright sea, and looked lovingly into her eyes. But no, no, no; not for him had God sent the gracious love, and Danny turned in his dumb despair to the cold winter sea, shrinking from every human face.

"Is there not a storm coming?" said Mona to Danny, as she and Ruby overtook the boy on the shore that morning.