'No,' said he bluntly; 'it is enough to believe in what is proper for our spiritual health. A dream never yet saved a soul.'
'Do you think so?' said I. 'Yet a man might get a hint in a vision, and in that way be preserved from doing a wrong.'
'What was your dream?' said Mr. Trembath, rounding upon my mother; 'for a dream you have had, and I see the recollection of it working in your face as you look at me.'
She repeated her dream to him.
'Tut! tut!' cried he; 'a little attack of indigestion. A small glass of your excellent cherry brandy would have corrected all these crudities of your slumbering imagination.'
Well, after an idle chat of ten minutes, which yet gave the worthy clergyman time enough to drink to us in a glass of that cherry brandy which he had recommended to my mother, he went away, and shortly afterwards I walked down to the pier to catch a sight of the ship. In all these hours there had been no change whatever in the aspect of the weather. The sky of dark cloud wore the same swollen, moist, and scowling appearance it had carried since the early morn, but the tufted thunder-coloured heaps of vapour had been smoothed out or absorbed by the gathering thickness which made the atmosphere so dark that, though it was scarcely three o'clock in the afternoon, you would have supposed the sun had set. The swell had increased; it was now rolling into the bay with weight and volume, and there was a small roaring noise in the surf already, and a deeper note yet in the sound of it where it boiled seawards past the points. A light air was blowing, but as yet the water was merely brushed by it into wrinkles which put a new dye into the colour of the ocean—a kind of inky green—I do not know how to convey it. Every glance of foam upon the Twins or Deadlow Rock was like a flash of white fire, so sombre was the surface upon which it played.
Hurricane Point shut out the view of the sea in the north-west, even from the pierhead, and the ship was not to be seen. There was a group of watermen on the look-out, one or two of them members of the lifeboat crew; and among these fellows was old Isaac Jordan, who, as I might easily guess, had drunk out my two shillings. He wore a yellow sou'-wester over his long iron-gray hair, and he lurched from one man to another, with his arm extended and his fingers clawing the air, arguing in the shrill voice of old age, thickened by the drams he had swallowed.
'I tell 'ee there's going to be a airthquake,' he was crying as I approached. 'I recollects the likes of this weather in eighteen hunnerd an' eighteen, and there was a quake at midnight that caused the folks at Faversham to git out of their beds and run into the street; 'twor felt at Whitstable, and turned the beer o' th' place sour. Stand by for a airthquake, I says. Here's Mr. Tregarthen, a scholard. The likes of me, as is old enough to be granddad to the oldest of ye all, may raison with a scholard and be satisfied to be put right if so be as he's wrong, when such scow-bankers as you a'n't to be condescended to outside the giving of the truth to ye. And so I says. Mr. Tregarthen——'
But I quietly put him aside.
'No more money for you, Isaac,' said I, 'so far as my purse is concerned, until you turn teetotaler. It is enough to make one blush for one's species to see so old a man——'