It was then that the dear old thing, with the best of intentions, made a mistake. She must needs refer—bless her!—to the length of time that had passed since ever Jim had seen the sea. Then, concerned at the sound of the blind man's "Ah, mother!" she misinterpreted her mistake, conceiving it to have been in the reference to sight. Poor old lady! How hurt she was when she found it out!
Jim was equally concerned on her account. He understood what her thought had been almost before she had begun to explain. "Oh no, no, no, mother!" he cried out, filling the little cottage with his big voice. "Never you think it was that! Where should we be if I couldn't bide to hear a word about my own bad luck? It don't make it neither more nor less, ye know! And it might just as easy have been anybody else." Jim's meaning was that the sum of human misery had been arranged, and this tribulation had to be borne by someone, to balance. If he had it, someone else escaped. "No, no," he continued; "that's not to be thought on, mother!"
But there had been a something, very distinct; and it was equally clear that Mrs. Fox would like to know what, without asking intrusively. Besides, Jim wanted to make that wrong guess a thing of the past. He would try to explain why he was so moved. "It's none so easy, mother, now and again, to say just what you have an inklin' to say. Not if the other party's to understand, mind you! But ... did ye never see the sea, mother?" No—Mrs. Fox had never seen the sea. But she had been in Worcestershire, to her uncle's, many was the time. Jim declined Worcestershire, but gently, not to seem scornful. "It might be a far-off sight," he said. "Not like seafaring folk see it, from sun-up to sun-up; just a fair offing all round ye, and the sky overhead." However, Worcestershire had only been referred to that the old lady might not seem quite untravelled. So Jim returned to his explanation. "It was just a queer feel I had," said he, "about the sound of it again, after such a many years."
Mrs. Fox's slip of the tongue had given her a fright, and she sat silent. A log tumbled on the great open hearth, and a shower of sparks went up the chimney to whirl away in the wind that was roaring down it about the cold white drift of the winter night. Jim sat and thought of his watches out upon the sea, and the same wind whistling through the shrouds, and his strong arm and keen eyesight in the days gone by. All gone—for ever! Nights by the galley-fire, or in some warm corner of a steamer's 'tween-decks, welcome in the spells of look-out duty, when the look-out was for icebergs in the Atlantic—the sort that wait till a ship is well alongside, and choose a clever moment to turn turtle and catch her in the nick. Nights in sailing traders—there are some left still—on a still sea in the tropics, with not a breath of wind below, and strange activity of meteors in an unresponsive universe of stars above. Nights of battle with the storm-fiend—of whirling spray-drench and decks swept by the torrent of the crested seas, all vanished in the past, with that little wicked reason in between that lay in ambush for Jim's eyes on the quay at Cape Town, in the bunghole of an oil-cask.
And then the broken sailor said to his heart: "Can we bear it, you and I?—we that have borne so much; we that must live perforce in dread of so much more still left to bear; we that may even have to say good-bye to the little voice that has been the stronger half of our strength till now? But this—oh, this!—to stand again in hearing of the sea; to know it as of old by the endless intermittent rush of the shoaling beach in its caress, by the music of the curling ridge of its wavelets, nearer, nearer to the shore; to breathe the scent of it in the landward wind—and then!... What then? Just to go mad in an aching void of darkness, and cry out in agony for but one glimmer of the daylight that has been once and shall never be again, just one momentary image of the living world that void can never know."
Presently Mrs. Fox rose, saying quietly, "It's the remindin' brings it back," and busied herself to get some toddy for her tenant. She condemned a lemon-scrap as too dry; her stimulated pity for poor Jim suggested a new one from "the shop," and she disappeared to get it. Jim sat on in the glimmering firelight he did not know from sunshine, thinking of the sea. He did not put his consolatory pipe down; it was something, if not much, against thoughts that ran close on the lines the story guessed for them, if not word for word. But it could not stop the tears that would come from the eyes that were good now for nothing else but to shed them.
[CHAPTER XLII]
HOW A NAUGHTY LITTLE GIRL CAME OUT IN THE COLD AND TALKED TO HER DADDY. AND HOW WINTER MADE HER WORSE. OF A TALK BETWEEN THE RECTOR AND MISS FOSSETT, AND A SUGGESTION SHE MADE TO HIM