Yet he stepped to the kitchen-door and listened keenly, when, after a long silence, he heard the door above open, and Charlotte lead her husband into the library.
"Mounchere knows what his wife's done for him at last," he muttered;—"and there goes in the baby," as a faint cry and a rush of skirts followed,—with an amused laugh, and his eyes dim.
But when he heard Lotty coming presently for him, he hurried in, to stretch himself on his bunk, and began to snore.
"It's kind in them to think of an old fellow like me; but they're best alone. They have had a rough pull of it together, and I think this is their first glimpse of land."
He could not wait long, however, but soon went bustling up, with the eager glow of all his childish Christmases in his simple old face and mind. They made ready for the day inland, he supposed; but they could do nothing like this,—glancing in, as he trotted up stairs, at the big fires he had built, and the bits of holly stuck around, and then out at the sweep of barren lee-coast and the desolate sea.
"And Lotty's surprise of the house, and that blessed baby! She's a devilish clever woman to contrive such a day for Mounchere, that's a fact!"
The library, when he reached it, seemed the very heart and core of all Christmas brightness. The very cold, and the hungry solitude of the restless sea on which the window opened widely, deepened the warmth within. The room slept in a still comfort: no fire was ever so clear, no air so calm, no baby so content to be alive as this which lay on its mother's breast while she walked to and fro. Her face was paler and humbler than he had ever seen it; her husband followed her unceasingly with his eyes,—a strange sense of almost loss in them Lufflin fancied, idly.
Jacobus was very silent and still; he did not seem so nervous with happiness as the Captain had fancied this opening of a new life would make him; but there was about him a rested and hushed look,—a depth of content which he did not believe any gain of the house or child could give. Lufflin was awed, he knew not why.
"It is as if they had found something which Death itself could not take away," he thought, after a space of wonder, as if they had talked to God Himself to-day.
The Professor wished him a happy Christmas, in his simple, hearty fashion, and then the two men sat talking of how they kept the day long ago: Lufflin telling of frolics on ship-board, but M. Jacobus going back constantly to the time when he was a boy with his mother.