So with Day, if an occasion might be great enough to call it forth.
"He always was a notional little man," the women said, on hearing this. The old bachelor was losing his wits. Such doctrine as he held made him out not one whit better off than Zinie Shadd, who averred that the heart of man was but a pendulum swaying in his bosom—though how it still moved when he stood on his head was more than even Zinie Shadd could fathom, to be sure.
"It's the voice of conscience he's thinking of, to my judgment," said one. "That girl is deafer than a haddock and dumb as the stone."
Untouched by gossip, the harbor master felt with pride that his jewel among women was safe, and that here, within four humble walls, he treasured up a being literally without guile, one who grew straight and white as a birch sapling. "Pavilioned in splendor" were the words descriptive of her which he had heard thunderously hymned in church. The hair heavy on her brow was of the red gold of October.
If they might be said to be shipmates sailing the same waters, they yet differed in the direction of their gaze. The harbor master fixed his eyes upon the harbor; but little Day turned hers oftenest upon the blue sea itself, whose mysterious inquietude he had turned from in dismay.
True, the harbor was not without its fascination for her. Leaning over the side of his dory, the sea girl would shiver with delight to descry those dismal forests over which they sailed, dark and dizzying masses full of wavering black holes, through which sometimes a blunt-nosed bronze fish sank like a bolt, and again where sting ray darted, and jellyfish palpitated with that wavering of fringe which produced the faintest of turmoil at the surface of the water.
This would be at the twilight hour when warm airs alternated with cold, like hopes with despairs. Sparbuoys of silver gray were duplicated in the water, wrinkled like a snout at the least ripple from the oars. Boats at anchor seemed twice their real size by reason of their dark shadows made one with them. One by one the yellow riding lights were hung, far in. They shone like new-minted coins; the harbor was itself a purse of black velvet, to which the harbor master held the strings. The quiet—the immortal quiet—operated to restore his soul. But at such times Day would put the tips of her fingers mysteriously to her incarnadined dumb lips and appear to hearken on the seaward side. If a willful light came sometimes in her eyes he did not see it.
But even on the seaward side there would not be heard, on such nights, the slightest sound to break the quiet, unless that of little fish jumping playfully in the violet light, and sending out great circles to shimmer toward the horizon.
So it drew on toward Day Rackby's eighteenth birthday.
One morning in October they set out from Meteor for the village. A cool wind surged through the sparkling brown oak leaves of the oaks at Hannan's Landing.