"They die as the old die," reflected Jethro Rackby, "gnarled, withered, still hanging on when they are all but sapless."
Despite the melancholy thought, his vision was gladdened by a magic clarity extending over all the heavens, and even to the source of the reviving winds. The sea was blown clear of ships. In the harbor a few still sat like seabirds drying plumage. Against the explosive whiteness of wind clouds, their sails looked like wrinkled parchment, or yellowing Egyptian cloth; the patches were mysterious hieroglyphs.
Day sat sleepily in the stern of the dory, her shoulders pinched back, her heavy braid overside and just failing the water, her eyes on the sway of cockles in the bottom of the boat.
Rackby puckered his face, when the square bell tower of the church, white as chalk, came into view, dazzling against the somber green upland. The red crown of a maple showed as if a great spoke of the rising sun had passed across that field and touched the tree to fire with its brilliant heat.
So he had stood—so he had been touched. His heart beat fast, and now he stood under the Preaching Tree again, and drew a whiff of warm hay, clover-spiced, as it went creaking past, a square-topped load, swishing and dropping fragrant tufts.—This odor haunted him, as if delights forgotten, only dreamed, or enjoyed in other lives, had drifted past him.—Then the vivid touch of Cad Sills's lips.
He glanced up, and at once his oars stumbled, and he nearly dropped them in his fright. For the fraction of a second he had, it seemed, surprised Cad Sills herself looking at him steadily out of those blue, half-shut lazy eyes of his scrupulously guarded foster child. The flesh cringed on his body. Was she lurking there still? Certainly he had felt again, in that flash, the kiss, the warm tumult of her body, the fingers dove-tailed across his eyes; and even seen the scented hay draw past him, toppling and quivering.
He stared more closely at the girl. She looked nothing like the wild mother. There was no hint of Cad Sills in that golden beauty unless, perhaps, in a certain charming bluntness of sculpturing at the very tip of her nose, a deft touch. Nevertheless, some invisible fury had beat him about the head with her wings there in the bright sunshine.
Disquieted, he resumed the oars. They had drifted close to the bank, and a shower of maple leaves, waxen red, all but fell into the boat.
"These die as the young die," thought the harbor master, sadly. "They delight to go, these adventurers, swooping down at a breath. They are not afraid of the mystery of mold."
His glance returned to the wandlike form of his daughter, whose eyes now opened upon his archly.