His warning came just in time, for, owing to the sudden shifting of the bear, a small stream of water poured in over the gunwale. Rouse and Prat moved quickly to the other side, and the barge righted itself. King Lud rolled over, growling angrily.
Then, as if to drown his voice, the thunder itself growled in a final fit of rage and retreated, with low mutterings, toward the setting sun. At last a ray of light shone faintly through a rift in the cloud and a long shaft of gold glanced obliquely to the earth, beside which the now distant gleam of forked and unsymmetric lightning seemed like a sign of chaos fading before the advance of order. The rain, which for a few moments had fallen in torrents, passed on, while only a shower of sunshot drops, falling like diadems from the woodland’s crown, echoed the harsh patter of a moment before.
“It is over,” said Marlowe, and, turning, he looked long at Eleanor, then went down into the stern and spoke to her. A momentary flash like the lightning shone in his eyes. “Thus would my love,” he declared, “consume its object.”
She returned his glance meditatively. “Nay, that is not love.”
“’Twould, indeed, be mine.” He gazed off to the western sky in deep abstraction, adding slowly: “Yet, ’tis not love I see before me; it is death. Alas! I like not the stealth of death as it creeps seemingly nearer and very near.” He paused, still looking away toward the sun, which in another moment sank behind the forest of the mainland. And Eleanor made no answer, but instinctively turned to glance at Gyll Croyden in the boat behind them. Then, realizing that Marlowe was following her gaze, she looked up at him again quickly. The spirit of premonition had suddenly left his eyes; the moment of transcendency had passed. He was smiling at Mistress Croyden.
But the little Virginia, peering up at Christopher from under her mother’s cloak, whispered, “Death,” and again, with a bright smile, slowly, questioningly, “Death?” as though striving to grasp the meaning of a new and pretty word.
The treble voice, however, was suddenly drowned by a loud cheer from many throats, the sound of which caused Virginia to look about like a white rabbit from its hole and to pout at the rude interruption of her childish reverie. But soon she darted out from the cloak and added her prattle to the prolonged huzzah, for her bright eyes told her that once more she could run about in chase of birds and quest of flowers.
The colonists had arrived at Croatan.