“Here he paused in thought, his eyes fixed in a troubled way on my face, while the changes wrought by time and the sea seemed to disappear from his own, and I wondered that I ever could have been so blind as not to have known him at once: a triple sense of condemnation oppressed me; and the soft eyes and the sweet face came vividly up, until I actually shuddered to think, as the whole name, Ellen Symington Blount, was as plain as day; what terrible tale which linked her fate with his might be still lurking behind. I could well understand, too, his allusion to Lallah Rookh, which was her favorite poem, and how it was that he had no recollection of me, having never seen me but once, and that for a moment by starlight. Old Charley’s riddle was read, though it was hard to tell how he became master of it, and stifling my feelings as I best could, I awaited in silence for the captain to resume.
“His eyes dropped to the floor, where the rats were again creeping about unheeded: presently they scampered off, and I heard the hasty pit-pat of naked feet as one of the anchor-watch came aft to the binnacle, when the ship’s bell struck one. The stroke was instantly followed by a clang from the Arab frigate, and then by a sort of stir, which loomed up as it were on the sultry gloom of night, in the midst of which you seemed to hear the cries of the sentries on shore, calling from tower to tower, through the pestilential air; and when these died away, with the nearer echoes of the bells in the harbor, you heard again the sound of the man’s feet pattering along the deck, as if he, too, had paused to listen before rejoining his watch-mate, who perhaps, like myself, was spinning some old yarn.
“When all was still again, the silence seemed to press on my ears like the distant splurge of a tide, while the lamp drowsed and the rats crept to Catherton’s very feet, scuttling off, however, as soon as he stirred, breaking abruptly out of his reverie.
“ ‘I made a trading voyage round the globe, and returning to the village twenty-six months after I left it, was received like one from the dead. I was bent upon giving old Blount, the schoolmaster, a surprise—as much so, it seems to me now, as if I had run away from school for that sole end.
“ ‘Accordingly, I was out of the stage and bang into his garden, where he sat smoking his pipe, with his back toward the walk, before he had the least notion of what had turned up.
“ ‘Hillo! old ship! What cheer?’ said I, and round he swung to my hail, dropping his merschaum and staring at me in the summer-twilight, as I stood rigged out in a full suit of blue, swinging my cynet-hat, until I could stand it no longer, but just broke out into my old laugh, which brought his daughter tripping out from the back-porch, when, of course, the recognition took place. After the old man was over the heat of his surprise, and I took time to notice that Ellen had grown, in proportion, quite as much as myself, and how beautiful she was—and that she had been the first to divine that I had gone to sea—my heart beat quickly again with a feeling strange as sweet, and somehow I was not so much shocked as I might have been, when her father, taking off his spectacles and sobering his face, informed me that my uncle had died a year before. To be sure, I had never known a parent’s care, and Colonel Catherton, living as he did, almost alone with his books, was a man rather to be feared than loved by a child. Besides, I cannot remember ever to have had strong feelings for a human being before I became aware of my attachment to Ellen. I rather loved to lie behind some hill which shut out all but the sky from view, and dream of the sea—or to sit under the lee of the woods in a gale, with a book of voyages in my hand, intent upon scenes of battle and wreck, with the last year’s leaves under my feet, and the wild roar in my ears.
“ ‘It was in the whole stock, and, in fact, I have heard that my father and two of my uncles, at different times, had all been lost at sea. However, the colonel, who had been a great merchant in his time, had left some property—not so much though as was supposed from his style of living—and as I was his only heir, they persuaded me from taking another cruise until the estate was settled. This, of course, only left me leisure to fall all the deeper in love—the rock, Mr. Miller, on which, it seems, the gentlest as well as the roughest of us must split. Many were the consultations I had with old Blount, and strongly he urged me to settle at home as a professional man, never dreaming—old proser as he was—that the thing was too deeply grained in, ever to be coaxed out, even by Ellen’s eyes. The upshot of it was that I remained at home for two years longer, until the property was sold, doing nothing but reading nautical works and growing more and more enamored of Ellen. There was a soul in that girl’s voice like the sound of the surf as it breaks upon some enchanted shore, off which it might be, you lay waiting for day to dawn—a spell in her dark eyes more like the ideal dreams of old, than the influence of woman over man in these degenerate days. If ever mortal had fair excuse for anchoring his faith on the sandheads of—but, excuse me, Mr. Miller, they are all of a piece, as you may have discovered before this—some one says to be rated only by their different capacities for mischief.
‘Helen laid thousands on the shelf,
Dido only burned herself:
As Helen’s beauty was the rarer,