THE BIRD IN
THE BOX

BY

MARY MEARS

Author of "The Breath of The Runners"

TORONTO
WILLIAM BRIGGS

All rights reserved, including that of translation
into foreign languages including the Scandinavian
Copyright, 1910, by
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
October, 1910

To
THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER
"NELLY WILDWOOD"
THIS BOOK IS DEVOTEDLY INSCRIBED

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

The soul of man at birth is immured in a prison. It is like a bird singing in a cage, heedless of the bars that confine it. But later the soul knows its bondage.

Panting with a desire for liberty, man tries in two ways to attain it, through his ability to labour, through his capacity to feel.

He has need of freedom, hence the poem, the ship, the engine, the thousand cunning and gigantic structures for annihilating space, for chaining the forces of nature.

He has need of freedom, hence the universal outpouring of his affections, the glory and the emancipation of his highest love.

June, 1910

CONTENTS

BOOK I

CHAPTER

I [The Long Journey and the Longer One]
II [The Waiting of Women]
III [The Sun]
IV [Amid Bleak Surroundings]
V [The Barnacle]
VI [The Figure-head Gains an Admirer]
VII [Concerning Alexander Emil St. Ives]
VIII [In the Cause of Science]
IX [The Old Fascination]
X [In Which a Kiss Is Given and Regretted]
XI [At the Old Burying Point]
XII [The Migratory Instinct]

BOOK II

I [The Street of Masts]
II [Emily Short—Toy-Maker]
III [Simon Hart to the Rescue]
IV [The Unexpected Happens]
V [Showing that Sacrifices Are not Always Appreciated]
VI [Despair and Desolation]
VII [Stop—Look—Listen]
VIII [A Woman's Caprice; A Father's Repentance; A Lover's Self-Conquest; A Girl's Pity]
IX [Rachel—Simon]
X [The Bird in the Box]

BOOK III

I [The House in Washington Square]
II [Continuation of the History of a Genius]
III [The Confession]
IV [How is it Possible to Stop Loving]
V [Love by the Sea]
VI [The Insistent Past]
VII [In Which John Smith Unburdens His Conscience]
VIII [The Place of the Statues]
IX [The Energy of Being]
X [In the Garden]
XI [Flames]
XII [Love Confronts Despair]
XIII [The Escape]

BOOK I

THE BIRD IN THE BOX

CHAPTER I
THE LONG JOURNEY AND THE LONGER ONE

The new vessel, gay with swelling scarves of bunting, ornamented from stem to stern with floating flags that kissed the breeze, rested easily on the stocks. The ways under her had been greased, the space before her in the river cleared. High on the prow her name Merida shone in gold letters. Every eye was upon her.

Grimy faces looked from shop windows. The windows of the bending-shed, the blackboard-shed, the pipe-cutting shop, the sheet-iron shop, the joiner-shop, the brass-foundry,—all were filled with countenances blackened by labour. Similar countenances peered from the masts of vessels still in the slips, and from the heights of the immense travelling cranes and floating derricks. These gigantic and uncouth machines seemed to await the launch with an eagerness of their own. Had not each, in its own way, helped to fashion her—this marvel of a new ship?

The contrivances for drilling, chipping, caulking, blowing rivet-heating fires seemed to hold their breath, so unwonted was their stillness at this hour; while the mammoth pontoon, whose duty was still to be performed,—that of transporting the eighty-ton boiler a distance of one hundred feet and depositing it, a living heart, within the vessel,—the pontoon seemed to be lost in speculation.

The stocks gave no sign. Amid all the excitement of the yard, these great mother-arms of wood awaited stoically the instant when they must release their burden. All the morning a swarm of workmen had been busy loosening their tenacious hold on the new vessel.

"She'll go out at the turn of the tide," remarked a reporter; "that chap over there with an eyeglass will give the signal. He's launched over a hundred vessels, and never a hitch."

The newspaper artist to whom these remarks were addressed, scarcely heeded them. He was busy with his sketch. But an old man, standing near, caught the words and shivered ecstatically.

"She's a Ward liner to be used in the fruit trade between New York and Havana," continued the reporter. "Look, there comes the launching party now," he cried. "The messenger boy has the flowers,—and that's the girl who's to do the christening! She's the granddaughter of the owner. Rather good looking, don't you think?"

The old man turned squarely about. His stick shook in his hand. Excitement gripped him by the throat. He smiled broadly. The girl, accompanied by a bevy of friends, came forward. She was a slight thing, dressed in grey, and had about her neck a white feather boa, which fluttered in the breeze. Escorted by a man wearing a high hat, who helped her over the obstructions, she approached the new vessel, lifting blue eyes to the imposing height. A platform, reached by a slant of stairway and bright with red, white and blue bunting, had been built against the boat's bow. The girl's slim fingers grasped the railing, and followed by the rest of the party, she lightly ascended the steps.

Immediately there was a commotion. A score or more workmen, like elves, swarmed beneath the immense swelling sides of the boat, and with rhythmical strokes of sledge hammers, drove in wedges and removed the long pieces of timber placed in a slanting position against the ship. Thus lifted, the Merida rested completely on the greased ways. Only one log now restrained the six hundred feet of her impatient length. Was it the mother's lingering hold?

Red below the water-line, black above, her new anchor turned to silver in the sunlight, the Merida was without blemish, save for the spots left when the shores were hauled down; and these spots workmen, carrying long-handled brushes, touched rapidly with paint. At last all was in readiness and the dull sound of a saw passing through wood could be heard. The silence grew so deep that the word given by the man wearing the eyeglass was heard by the spectators. He spoke quietly; the saw passed through the log. The girl with the fluttering boa was seen to raise her hand; there was a shattering of glass, and with one plunge, one impulse of superb motion, the new ship slid down the ways. Swiftly, smoothly, she glided forward and the laughing water seemed to rise to meet her.

Instantly from an hundred throats a shout went up. The boats watching from the river began to whistle, the locomotives on the surrounding railroads shrieked shrilly. The workmen threw their caps into the air and followed as fast as they could along the line of the deserted stocks. The girl in the white boa waved her handkerchief. But the boats on the river had their own way. Shrilly, loudly, continuously, they tooted; while those still in the slips,—double-turreted monitors and squat battleships,—without bells, without whistles, without cannon,—by the very eagerness with which they seemed to await their turn, added mystically to the commotion.

Free! This was the one thought expressed on every side. It was as if man, by the intensity of his craving to escape bonds, communicated this desire to the objects of his creation. The impulse of the launching had carried the new ship to the middle of the stream, and there, hailed by the enthusiasm of the shore and the river, she floated, half-turning as if looking back coquettishly at the land; while over her a flock of birds, little specks in air, circled in an abandonment of freedom.

Amid all the tumult only one figure had remained without stirring. The old man with the stick in his hand was a stranger; until that day he had never been seen in the place. Yet, at the moment of the launch, he alone reached the highest pitch of exultation of which the human spirit is capable.

No longer conscious of his body, he laughed while great tears rolled down his cheeks and lost themselves in his beard. Suddenly, however, he looked at the ways covered with tallow which lay in folds now,—wrinkled like the flesh of the very old,—at the stocks lifting empty arms to the sky; and a change came over him. The sparkles died in his eyes, the eyes themselves seemed to sink back in his head. He lifted his hand. Then, after a wavering second, the hand fell.

"Ships," he quavered, speaking half to himself, half, it would seem, to the deserted stocks, "ships is like sons. There's no use clutchin' 'em or hangin' on to 'em. It's their nature to go exploitin' over the world. All we can say is, the Lord bless 'em, the Lord reveal his mighty wonders to 'em. Amen."

After this quaint speech, his spirit, which was the eternal youth within him, revived. Chuckling to himself, old David Beckett started on his homeward journey to Pemoquod Point on the Maine coast, a day's and a night's travel, by water and rail. His pilgrimage to Philadelphia, from every point of view but his own, had proved unsuccessful.

Five months before, David's son, Thomas Beckett, had disappeared from the Point and had gone to Philadelphia to work in the shipyards. Beyond the bald statement of this fact, which he left scrawled on the back of an envelope, young Thomas had never written a word home, though once he had sent a draft for a small sum of money. His was an impatient, gloomy spirit, easily depressed and easily excited. Life, indeed, either blazed in him like a devouring flame, or died down to a flicker which left him frozen and taciturn, with never a word on his thick, handsome lips, and no feeling in his heart, save, apparently, that of a fierce caged thing. In this mood when at home he had been wont to go about for weeks, leaving the care of the lobster pots entirely to his father, while he nursed his insensate wrath. Then, suddenly, the light would come. He would set about his work with savage joy, and with painful eagerness would read every book that came to his hand, from the Bible to a ten cent translation of a French novel. He would sing, he would lay plans. It was in this mood that he had gone to Philadelphia. When, however, his father followed him, bearing urgent news concerning the young fellow's wife, Thomas had again disappeared. Two weeks before, so old David learned, he had shipped as a sailor on an out-going vessel he had helped to build. But the father understood.

"I tell ye, Zary," he proclaimed the following evening in Old Harbour, as he clambered into the cart of his friend Zarah Patch, blandly ignoring the question in the other's face, "Philadelphy's changed since the days when I used to work in the car shops at t'other end of the town. There wa'n't any sech vessels built then. Double-turreted monitors and iron-clad battleships and cruisers that blaze with lights at night jest like floating hotels, all gilt furniture and white paint. Times has changed. Why some of them ships, when they was finished, they told me, would have as many as four engines apiece a-beatin' inside of 'em, to say nothin' of cylinders and twin-screws; and the fightin' ships would jest bristle with breach-loading rifles and Gatling guns. Think of the commotion they'll make when they're once finished, all them ships!" he concluded gleefully. "Yet there they stood, each in its stocks, quiet as lambs, helpless as babes unborn."

As David uttered the last words, Zarah gave him a sidelong glance, though he made no comment other than the sharp flap he gave the reins on the mare's back. He was not given to speech. Zarah owned a bit of ground on which he raised vegetables which he delivered to the summer hotel. He also carried what travellers there were from Old Harbour dock to Pemoquod. To-night David, the lobsterman, was his one passenger.

It was about seven o'clock of an evening in late summer, and across that bleak, barren bit of land the sun was just setting. As they drove along, it sparkled on the window panes of the houses and lit up the cross on the Catholic church; beyond the village it seemed to confine itself to the rocks by the wayside. It turned them a dull soft gold. A strong salt breeze was blowing.

Bony with boulders, the land reached like an eager arm into the sea, as if it would obtain somewhat. But beyond the dories of the lobstermen clinging close in shore and visible as the road ascended to a slight eminence, nothing told of any garnering whatsoever. On every side were wastes of long brownish grass, low shrubs and clumps of pines, that stood up stark by the roadside. Beneath the dark shade of the trees mushrooms and little clumps of shell were embedded in moss.

Of farms, strictly speaking, there were none, though the houses that revealed themselves occasionally as the road dipped and turned, had each its poor attempt at a garden. It was frankly a land of bleak striving, bordering closely on want, of roistering storms and sweet, enveloping fogs.

As David Beckett talked he raised his voice to a piping treble. Ships and the building of ships, this was his theme. And exalted beyond time and reality, he gave himself up to it, so that at last even Zarah was influenced. Its poetry began to work in his slower brain and his lips relaxed into a smile.

As the sun neared the horizon, the wind increased, and in every direction the shrubs bent before it with a writhing movement; and as far as the eye could see, an agitation ran through the coarse grass. From the sea came the steady moaning of the surf. It was as if the earth emitted heavy sighs; but for these two ancient men the burdens that weigh upon human life had ceased to exist.

The house before which they presently stopped was a gaunt frame structure with scarcely a trace of whitewash remaining upon its clapboards. Cold and exposed it turned its front door away from the road with New England reserve. A lilac bush grew under one of the windows. With every breath of wind it sawed against the sill. As David possessed himself of his carpet-bag and turned in at the gate with a wave of the hand, the sun, which until that moment had shone full upon this window, disappeared. Shadows and the old man entered the house together.

Flushed like Ulysses returned from his adventures, old David deposited his grip-sack in the entry and then cautiously approached his daughter-in-law's room. She lay there in a great bed with four posts, and in her thin fingers, she held a leaf of the lilac bush—a leaf like a green heart.

The old man peered in at her, pursing up his lips. He thought that his story would "liven Laviny up," and he was enjoying the prospect of relating it, when she turned toward him. She half lifted herself on her elbow. Her face was ghastly, her eyes shining. She looked past him; then fixed her eyes wildly on his face. But he shook his head at her and began speaking with soft jocularity.

"No, I didn't bring him, I couldn't; let me tell you how it was;" and he advanced smiling into the room. "Day after day as Thomas seen that ship he was at work on, grow up taller in the stocks; as he fitted them pieces of red tin unto her sides,—for Thomas was what they call a 'fitter-up', Laviny,—he had his thoughts. And you an' me, knowin' him, we know pretty well what those thoughts were. The long and short of it was, he couldn't stand bein' tied by the leg no longer. He thought how she would glide through the water, that great ship, of the lands she'd visit, of—Laviny!" he cried sharply, as with a gasp, she fell back on the pillow.

"You hadn't ought to act so," he expostulated; "you know he wa'n't marked the way he was fer nothin' with that little spot on his left cheek under the eye. His mother marked him that way before ever he was born, and we often spoke of its bein' jest the shape of the continent of Africky; and it's to Africky—"

A hoarse rattle drowned his words. He peered more closely at her with his aged eyes. And at that moment a faint thin wail came up from the other side of the bed.

He seized her arm while his tears fell on her wrist, which never quivered under their hot touch. "Laviny!" he cried, "Oh, he hadn't ought to have done it! Don't leave me alone with it—the little one!" he shrieked. "Why didn't you tell me it was here? Oh, Laviny, Laviny girl!"

But Lavina Beckett paid no heed. She had embarked for a stranger port and over stormier seas than any her husband had dared. The sound of the old man's sobs brought a woman to the door. Her figure surged with fat. One of her teeth projected when her face was in repose. She hastily approached the bed, but even she was awed.

"Don't make sech a noise," she said finally. "It ain't no use. You can't call her back now. If you could've managed to bring him, it would've been different likely. But you didn't. You never did manage, I guess, to do anything you set out to."

But the old man paid no heed. He sat with his hands on his knees, his head dropped forward, inefficient, old, broken down by grief, and a thin low wail for the second time broke the silence.

CHAPTER II
THE WAITING OF WOMEN

Lavina Beckett lay in the front room of the old house, and people passing glanced askance at the closed blinds. Recent death inhabits a place more completely than life, and Lavina's personality seemed to lurk in the panels of the grey door, in the branches of the lilac bush, and even extended to the road.

All through the day neighbours came to offer condolences. Then, shrewd-faced, with the marks of child-bearing, hard work and a harsh climate in every line, these respectable wives of lobstermen took their way home in little groups. In the house they had borne themselves somewhat awkwardly, and once outside, their pity for the dead woman appeared tinged with resentment. Little was known about her at the Point.

It was after nightfall when a woman wearing a shawl over her head, knocked timidly at old David's door. A boy of six years clung to her skirts. When she was admitted, she slipped furtively into the room of death, and the boy, with difficulty restraining his tears, waited for her in the kitchen. He was afraid of the fat woman with her face bound round with a handkerchief, who was washing dishes at the sink. She made a great clatter. When she stepped to a cupboard, the candle threw an exaggerated portrait of her on the opposite wall. The ends of the cloth around her face stood up in two points, like horns; from between her flabby cheeks, projected a nose like a beak. A fork in her hand became, to his gaze, the size of a pitchfork. Once, when she passed near him, she held back her skirts, muttering under her breath; and he saw the same aversion in her eyes that he knew to be in his own, save that in her look there was a mingling of scorn and in his, a mingling of fright. It was a strange look to be directed toward a child, but it was one with which the boy was familiar. Presently his mother reappeared and they went out again. She walked very rapidly and now and then she wiped her eyes with a corner of her apron. The boy had to run to keep up with her. When they struck into a rugged path leading to the lighthouse, he paused and looked back.

Under the light of a full moon the Beckett house shone with a quite peculiar radiance. And yes, there it was! as they had said. It stood near the tumble-down cow-shed. The funeral was to take place in a village some miles distant, and an early start in the morning was necessary. The undertaker had gone, but the driver, with the hearse, would remain the night. He was eating his supper now, waited upon by the ugly woman. Meanwhile it stood out in the yard and the moonlight glinted on the four sable urns that decorated its corners, and sparkled on its glass sides and peeped between the black hangings without hindrance. The moon, indeed, to the child's thought, seemed to be as curious as he. Beads of perspiration started to his forehead, and, grasping his mother's skirt, he stumbled on at her side.

As the boy had pictured, in the Beckett kitchen the driver of the hearse was eating his supper, washing it down with a drink of whiskey. Then he disposed himself as best he could on two chairs, and fell asleep. Nora Gage finished the preserves the man had left on his plate, ate a quarter of a pie and went to bed in a room conveniently near the pantry. By eleven o'clock old David was alone.

He entered the front room, and very softly approached the coffin. The light from a candle wavered over the dead face. Leaning his elbow on the coffin lid and his chin in his hand, old David inspected the face. The first shock past, he wondered that he did not feel more poignant sorrow, but there was something almost impersonal in Lavina's expression. There were violet shadows under the eyes, and the lashes, as they rested on the cheek, were somewhat separated. The small mouth was closed rigidly, the cheeks showed hollows. Young as she was, her delicate feminine countenance already bore upon it the world-old legend—The waiting of women. The look did not belong to her individually—twenty years of life could not have branded it there. It was inherited from the first woman who had loved,—the first mother. It was the woman-look, and David recognized it. But he was almost seventy years old, and he sank into a chair and was soon nodding.

The candle spluttered, and the faint significance of the woman's days on earth for the last time blended confusedly with the silence, the night, the wind blowing in the moonlit sedge-grass. When we bury the body we cut off the last light of a jewel already dimmed by death.

In life Lavina had borne about her a faint suggestion of learning; it was said that on arriving at the Point she had brought with her a box of books. Some of the neighbours believed that she had been a schoolteacher; others that she had been reared by a relative who dealt in books, since the volumes she brought were all new. But Lavina never told them anything, and nothing was known about her, save that she came from a village thirty miles distant, which was on no railroad.

A gust of wind flickered the flame of the candle and a drop of tallow fell on the coffin.

Was it this supposed learning that had attracted Thomas Beckett, or the coiled braids of hair, or the nose, the nostrils of which used to expand slightly, as is the way with people who feel things keenly; or was it, perhaps, the sensitive hands, crossed now so patiently? In any case, whatever the attraction, it had ceased to hold Thomas after the third month; and once more in the grip of his black mood, he had been seen striding over the rocks, with the hair clinging to his forehead and his eye glowing as if from drink; and finally came the night when the old man and the young woman, both sleeping now so quietly, knew that they were deserted.

Again the draught from the window reduced the light of the candle to a mere blue tongue, and a shadow fell across the woman's face. It blotted out the lips which had been on the point of revealing their tender secret when the blow fell; it still further shrouded the eyes, which through the succeeding weary months gazing from the windows of the alien house, had noted the rags of mist that went floating by and vanished—like human hopes. It blotted out the hands, eloquent of agony, heavy with ungiven caresses. For an instant the shadows obliterated the whole slight frame that until recently had carried beneath its heart another life. Suddenly the candle flame brightened, and simultaneously a cry, small, sharp, almost impudent, broke the silence.

The old man started from his sleep. The cry was repeated. A smile so triumphant that it was sly, spread itself across his wrinkled visage. Seizing the candle which lit the room of death, he trotted into the room of the creature just born.

Outside, the hearse stood in the moonlight. And over yonder at the lighthouse a boy tossed restlessly on the bed beside his mother. In his imagination he still saw the hearse and it filled him with dull questioning. Lifting himself, he laid a hand on the shoulder of his drowsing parent.

'Why were they going to take the woman away?' he asked.

'Because—why because it was necessary.'

'Were they going to put her in the ground?

'Yes, that also was necessary.'

'But wasn't it dark under the ground, and wouldn't she be afraid?'

The mother sighed in her sleep.

The boy regarded her for an instant. Then propping his head on his hand, he fell to listening to the beat of the surf. Gradually his fears ceased, for each silver-lipped wave seemed to be speaking not alone to him, but to the dead woman.

"Rest, rest," they seemed to say, "rest, rest."

CHAPTER III
THE SUN

Old David Beckett, though he never spoke on the subject, was haunted by memories of a childhood passed amid scenes of refinement and wealth. He had a hazy impression that his father had been a gentleman of local distinction in a Canadian town. However, with his father's death had come a change in the fortunes of the family. Its members had drifted apart, and David himself, at the time scarcely more than a child, had gone to Philadelphia. Year after year he had worked in the car shops until the lead in the paint had affected his health. This break-down had occurred after his wife's death, in his fiftieth year. Reduced in strength he had come to the Point where one of the owners of the shops, in recognition of his long and faithful service, had given him a little house and a bit of land. This change David had welcomed, but it had engendered in his son Thomas a brooding discontent which had increased with the years.

Brought up in Philadelphia until his tenth year, Thomas Beckett had received a rudimentary training in the public schools, and this training, after coming to the Point, he had managed to eke out with haphazard reading. But the cheerless surroundings had fostered in him a tendency to indulge fits of melancholy. Without visible cause, he would become taciturn. When he was twenty-one his father urged him to marry and settle down, but domestic life had small attraction for Thomas, and it was a surprise to the old man when he finally acted on the suggestion. At the time of his marriage the young lobsterman was thirty years old, tall and broad shouldered, with bold intelligent eyes gazing out from beneath heavy brows, and a moustached lip that, as he spoke, lifted slightly, showing the tips of the white teeth. One raw day he had sailed away from the Point with a cargo of lobsters, and a fortnight later had returned with the meek and fragile Lavina.

During the short period of her wedded life the young wife had contributed to the house of the father and son an air of comfort. Geraniums had bloomed at the windows and the curtains of the front room had been kept white; all the beds had been covered with bright patch-work quilts and the dishes had been washed as soon as used and arranged in gleaming rows in the cupboard. But from the hour of Thomas's desertion, Lavina had relaxed her care of the house. Now, after her death, the change in it was complete. The curtains were dingy, the plants dead, fish-heads from the dog's dish littered the kitchen floor and flies buzzed about the rich messes Nora Gage was constantly preparing for her own consumption. The deterioration in the home suggested a picture by Hogarth.

David Beckett was bewildered. He would have preferred absolute solitude to the presence of Nora Gage, but the fat woman had established herself with the intention of remaining and he was too old and too ineffectual to know how to get rid of her. Often, from a distance, he would stare at the house with a look of indecision, then, with an oath, he would start on a rapid trot for the kitchen. But once in the presence of the woman, his courage forsook him. With one glance from her little crevice eyes, Nora dominated him.

However, she had one virtue. Though she ignored the appeal of hanging buttons and refused to patch his clothes, she fed him. For that matter, it was her custom to feed every living thing that came under her notice, the dog, the chickens, even flies. For the flies she had been known to scatter sugar grains, leaning heavily on a substantial elbow to watch the progress of the tiny meal. To old David's food she gave especial attention. His teeth suggested isolated stumps in a clearing; therefore she prepared soft foods for him, porridges and soups, and, while he ate, she was wont to watch him. Her jaws would move in sympathy and in profound contemplation she would even lick her lips.

On Sundays Nora rolled out of bed at an early hour, and, with her prayer book clasped in her pudgy fingers and her too plump bust visibly undulating, she proceeded by slow stages to Old Harbour, where she attended both early mass and vespers in the ancient Catholic church. This church was none too well thought of by the majority of the townspeople, who in the latter years had turned Protestant. Though placed solemnly in the very centre of the town, the edifice was entirely nautical in character, and many were the sympathetic quiverings of its bell when there was a storm off Pemoquod. It seemed to be sounding a requiem for its invisible congregation of sailormen of every port and clime. Perhaps it was the sight of an occasional sea-faring stranger with a bold look in his eyes that attracted Nora. Or perhaps it was the nearness of a certain little eating-house in a side street, owned by a friend, Katherine Fry.

The hours not occupied in divine worship, Nora was accustomed to spend with Katherine in a room curtained off from the public gaze. There, the one buttressed with unwholesome fat, the eyes playing in her countenance the part of little, gleaming, deep-driven nails, the other, lank as a skeleton, in a shawl the fringe of which suggested her own cookery, the friends were wont to regale themselves, Nora with rich cakes and pastry, Katherine with the quarters and dimes her customer unwillingly relinquished to her. Quarrels were frequent, for each had a spiteful understanding of the other's vice; but greed united them.

"I tell ye," old David would remark when of a Sunday he had undisputed possession of his lonely grey old house and with Zarah Patch could enjoy to the full the pleasures of a pipe before the kitchen ingle—a pleasure denied him during the week—"I tell ye, Zary, I thank the Lord Nora has religious inclinations! As for me," he would add, hanging his head with a sudden change of mood, "I'm old and filled with wickedness; the wickedness of the world has got to the very marrow of my bones. I ain't fit to bring up no child, Zary."

However, he did bring up the infant literally by hand. Puny, touching, defenceless, the tiny creature, surrounded from the moment of its birth with these oddly unfavourable conditions, asserted at once its independence. It screamed and squirmed every time Nora Gage took it up, so that the care of it devolved entirely upon the grandfather. But far from complaining, he was secretly flattered by this preference. "She feels the tie of blood," he would explain, "but don't you mind, Nora, she'll outgrow these little ways." The woman, however, laughed straight in his face. She was not particularly anxious that the baby should outgrow them.

The infant early became a tyrant. She was not a very pretty child. From beneath a high rounded forehead peered forth two eyes dark and restless. They had the furtive look seen in the eyes of some animals, save that the pupils had a way of expanding suddenly with inquiry. Even before she could speak, her crowing had a strong note of interrogation. "Eee?" she would pipe, raising imperceptible eyebrows, and the old man, as well as he could for chuckling, would answer in the same cryptic language. She had, moreover, a very amusing and energetic way of creeping.

When the times for her feeding arrived, she was always close beside the door; and there old David found her when, big silver watch in hand, he came hastening up from the dory. He carried the odour of the lobsters, and before he could do anything else he must wash his hands. Then the bottle must be scalded and rinsed and the milk warmed. All the wrinkles of his face drew together, such was the care with which he performed these operations; and eager-eyed, occasionally fretting if he were late or particularly slow, the infant watched him from her place on the floor. Presently he lifted her; then what a picture of peace!

With both hands she clutched the bottle and a soft gurgling, similar to the purring of a cat, filled the room. She laughed, and the look of rapturous content which filled her face was reflected in the countenance of the grandfather. They looked oddly, touchingly alike. Occasionally it was necessary for him to draw the bottle away in order that she might take breath, and at such times she either pursued it with her rosy, clinging mouth, or, being partially satisfied, turned to thrust her fingers between his lips or to pull his beard. Weary as he was from the labour that had occupied him since four in the morning, nothing could have prevailed upon him to relinquish these ministrations to his granddaughter.

When she was nine months old, he had her christened in the Catholic church before a figure of St. Anthony, which seemed to his anxious mind to be of a friendly mien. But it was with no idea of turning her over to the church. Her religion when she grew up should be a thing of her own choosing. Meanwhile he hearkened to the persuasions of Nora Gage, and the child was baptized Rachel Beckett in honour of his dead wife. After that event, however, the housekeeper lapsed into her former state of indifference; and, neglected on the one hand, and foolishly indulged on the other, the child's life flowed on until her fifth year. When she was five years old a change dawned for her. In the care of the boy from the lighthouse she went to the district school, where she was enrolled as a pupil.

Lizzie Goodenough never abbreviated her son's name. She called him boldly André Garins. But when he gave this name at school, the older boys put tongue in cheek. He was an exceedingly handsome lad, with a woodsy grace. Moreover, his ears were slightly pointed like a fawn's; nor did the likeness end there, for his eyes under the thick mat of hair had a wild and impenetrable look and his soft arched lips seemed formed for other speech than that of human beings. When addressed, he would either twist his fingers in a kind of wordless agony, or take fleetly to his heels. He was considered an "innocent" by the folk of the Point.

He led Rachel to the school, her tiny cold hand resting noncommittally in his, and left her stranded before the teacher's desk. But that brisk person frightened the child and she became as restless as a little trapped animal. She refused to learn her letters, she refused to learn to count; André Garins, stealthily on the watch, was ashamed of her. But one day she heard the teacher explaining a point in geography by means of a map on the wall and her eyes suddenly dilated. All at once those monotonous recitations, to which she was wont to shut her ears, those garbled descriptions of mountains, oceans, and climates, assumed a startling significance. In that map grimed by smoke and the breath of generations of children, in that square of painted canvas, with its spots of blue for the water, its spots of yellow and pink for the land, its black veins for rivers, and its fuzzy lines, like caterpillars, for the mountains, she beheld what was an actual vision of the actual world. And this brilliancy of the imagination, this power to touch with life and colour any fact that penetrated her brain at all, proved to be a special gift. But she was too young to understand the liberation that comes through books.

The schoolroom seemed to her the one point of stagnation in an active world. She longed to the point of tears for the sight of trees of which she was temporarily deprived, and for the smell of the outdoor air. The teacher finally in despair left her alone. With something disconcerting in her extraordinarily intelligent eyes, she gazed about her at the other pupils as if she dimly recognised herself as belonging to a distinct and lonely species. Perhaps some subtle power of reasoning underneath the dark hair which grew in a point on her forehead, revealed to her that their needs were not her needs. As instinctively as a plant, she selected from the atmosphere surrounding her what she most required for growth; and idleness offered opportunity for observations, shrewd, penetrating, constant.

Lizzie Goodenough's son was the one child admitted to her friendship. In winter she permitted him to drag her to and from school on his sled, and in summer she allowed him to string thimble-berries for her on a long grass, which could be smuggled under the desk out of sight of the teacher and eaten at odd moments, when one stood in such dire need of refreshment in the dry country of learning. But, strictly speaking, she had no companions.

For her grandfather a warm strong love beat in her little heart. Often she would clasp him about the neck with one thin arm, and with the other hand against his cheek, would gaze intently upon him until a simultaneous gleam of laughter shot into both their faces. Then she would nestle to him, quivering with a divine mirth which was the mask of diviner tears.

For Nora Gage, Rachel entertained a silent dislike that expressed itself in manoeuvres to keep out of her way. If Nora entered a room, Rachel, if possible, left it. If the housekeeper, in her flapping slippers, shuffled out into the yard and cast herself down on the seat beneath the apple tree, where Rachel was playing, the child immediately gathered up her pebbles and shells and gravely sought another place. She spoke no oftener to the housekeeper than was necessary, and when she did speak, a weight of scorn trembled in her voice as if some feeling were silently gathering power. Nora Gage looked upon her with her little eyes, which were shrewd and meditative, exactly as a pig's are shrewd and meditative, and was apparently indifferent. But it was inconceivable that she did not hate her.

A part of a battered wreck and a figure-head were, in the truest sense, Rachel's companions. Both were rooted fast where they had come ashore, but before they had reached that expanse of sand, the sea had had its way with them. They were by no means parts of the same craft, but torn, hurled, gnawed, they had been brought, by the rollicking mood of the ocean, past the fierce skirting of rocks outside and dashed there together on the shore of the bay, to become the playmates of a little child.

Timber by timber the wreck had been washed small, and sometimes after a storm streams of rusty water that resembled blood trickled from its various bolts. Rachel, climbing out upon the wreck, sometimes felt the shallow water sucking between its timbers urging it to put to sea again; and, conscious of the tremble of eagerness in the poor maimed thing, she would pat the beams in passionate sympathy, and lay her cheek to them. Often she tried to dislodge the great hulk by placing her shoulder against it, and once, when the sea sucked off a plank and the tide flung it on the shore several rods away, she spent the following morning in hauling the dissevered portion back to the wreck and trying to hammer it into position. There was in her a curious susceptibility to the pathos of things.

Here and there about the wreck vestiges of paint appeared, and a faint assemblage of letters formed the name Defender on what had been the prow. This paint Rachel brought to temporary brightness by rubbing it with a corner of her apron dipped in sea water. The sand that clogged the ribs of the wreck she removed daily with a shovel. In brief, no waning sovereign, already in the clutch of death could have been waited upon by a trusty handmaiden with more patience and love. In her day she had sailed many a stormy sea, that ship, and without doubt had made many a difficult port; but now in the days of her nothingness to be loved with a love passing that of sailor or captain (for in such affection there is ever something of the seaman's pride in the capabilities of his craft), to be loved, forsooth, with a deep feminine tenderness,—surely, if comfort were possible to those broken bolts and spars, the wreck was comforted. And, testifying to the gallantry inherent in every timber, all that remained of her responded to the thrill of the child's spirit. It was as if the wreck heard commands summoning her to deeds of spiritual daring. The stumps of her masts she lifted to the sky with an air of defiance, she resisted the encroachments of the sand; and in the upward sweep of her lines toward her broken bow, there was indomitable courage and pride invincible. Valour answered valour and the sun shone gently on the incongruous playmates, on the wreck whose earthly voyages were over, and on the child whose life's journey had scarcely begun.

For the figure-head, Rachel entertained a somewhat different sentiment. It was evidently a bit of German carving, and represented a robust goddess with face lifted to the sky. Full waves of hair blew back from the face; the chin was gone, the nose was gone, but in the gaze of the eyes was blank, unquestioning triumph. She was clad in swirling drapery and a breastplate of overlapping scales, and in the one arm that remained to her she carried a sceptre tipped with a diminutive crown. Rachel admired the way the figure-head stood proudly erect, even strained backwards, and sometimes grasping a stick, she paced the sands in grotesque imitation of the wooden woman. But more often she sat before her lost in silent contemplation. She saw her fastened to the prow of a vessel, "great-kneed, deep-breasted," with lips and eyes stung by the spray; she saw her bowing deep into the trough of a wave, her gaze as she sank still intrepidly lifted to heaven; and she saw her rise again, dripping, all gilded by the light of the sun. The exhilaration of life and hope were still in the figure-head, wrought into her with the carving, it would seem, and these qualities her later experience in the brine had heightened to a kind of glory, so that now, unmindful that she was stranded, she stared out at the dawns and the evenings and the far-away twinkling stars with the same undaunted look of conquest.

This look, branded upon the figure-head and smitten into her round staring pupils, had its effect upon the child. Often and often when there was a storm off Pemoquod and the green water ran fifty feet high with the spray twice as high, grinding and pounding over the rocks and even entering the bay, until its strong death-fingers reached her very feet, Rachel stared at the waters while a fierce exultation swelled her little heart.

Persistent in her childish desires, imperious when they were crossed, at all other times gentle and tractable, Rachel up to her ninth year comprehended no force superior to that of which she was conscious in herself. Her grandfather she could sway by a word, and there were ways she knew of compelling Nora Gage; as for André, he was a slave, to be ruled by kindness for the most part and blows when necessary, blows aimed straight at his wild dark face. In her domain she tolerated no insubordination. But one night the pettiness of this domain and its purely human limits were revealed to her.

When whiskey got the better of Captain Daniels at the lighthouse, and this happened occasionally, Lizzie Goodenough, with a strong arm, could draw the oil and tend the beacon. If truth were told, it was because he had recognised her possibilities for usefulness in this direction, that the captain, sixteen years before, had taken pity on the girl and her newly-born infant. At the time he was just recovering from what he termed "a bad spell," and Lizzie appealed to him as capable and sturdy; moreover, she was very handsome, with a frown set squarely between her brows and an ominous light in her glance. He had never married her. Now that her boy had grown large enough to go on watch at a pinch, the arrangement was even more advantageous.

On the night in question, Rachel, after much worrying of her grandfather and Lizzie, obtained their consent to go on watch with André. She mounted with him to the lantern.

The immense corrugated lenses flashed diamond tints of inconceivable brilliancy. There, in rims of living colour, in circles of crystal, that white gush of light that flooded the rocks below, was born. There was the glitter and clash of its nightly cradle. The tower creaked and the sea thundered like cannon, ghostly finger-tips tapped now and then on the glass; a night bird, allured by the radiance, beat out its brains on the costal.

Presently André descended to the whitewashed room just below the lantern and Rachel stumbled after him.

"The plunger won't need windin' again till morning," he told her; "we can rest now."

But Rachel, squeezing her hands together, sat bolt upright, given over to a mighty, new, inspiring sensation. She was intoxicated with a sense of the power of man. Finally she laughed aloud; then she glanced at André. But, forgetful of all responsibility, the lad sat with his head against the wall, while the breath passed peacefully between his lips. Instantly Rachel was on her feet. She trembled all over. How about the ships at sea now! He could just talk big about the lighthouse, but he couldn't keep it,—not he! Then on a sudden she craned toward him, and from the vital, virile, little face the gleam of anger disappeared, for on the lad's forehead, beneath his mat of hair, and on the chin where it jutted in below the mouth, she saw that look of helplessness with which a relentless Fate sometimes brands her children.

Actuated by an almost maternal impulse, Rachel divested herself of her bit of shawl and laid it over the shoulders of the sleeping boy. Then she resumed the watch, and with every hour ticked forth by the clock on the wall, her sense of responsibility increased till the flame in the lantern was duplicated by another flame alight in a little human heart.

It was toward daylight when she stepped out on the balcony which encircled the tower just below the lantern. But the world she looked out upon was no longer the world with which she was familiar. At that hour a mysterious, quiet influence was abroad. Far below to the northward she descried her grandfather's house, grey, closed, silent; and she saw the silver loop of the bay. Inland the pine trees were arranged in dark, meditative groups, and the rocks, no longer formidable, in that wan half-light appeared like cattle that had trooped down to the water to drink. Here and there, perched on the loftiest crags, were the sentinel crows. These, solitary, motionless, accentuated the universal air of waiting.

All at once she held her breath. Across the clear blue of the sky lay, like lines of smoke, two or three filmy clouds. From a light pink these were turning to rose. Gradually the stars, one by one, paled—went out. Then an abrupt happening. A curve of crimson appeared above the horizon; this widened until it resembled an eye; then a full glowing countenance swung clear of the ocean and rays sprang from it. The whole sky began to blush. The ocean, a moment before a dull grey, flushed, and tiny ripples covered its surface; ships, hitherto invisible, appeared on its gently agitated bosom. And this infusion of vitality reached inland, quivering to gold in the tree-tops, trembling to crimson in the coarse grass, invading with radiance the most secret recess of the tiniest shell on the sand. The whole shore was illumined with the lavender and gold of the dawn; and simultaneously, from every quarter, rose the crows with their raucous caw caw in greeting to the oncoming day.

Suddenly through the weary frame of the child surged tides of exultation; it was as if, after the dreary watch, the sun rose in her. She stretched out her arms, and, for an instant, the sun and the child stared at each other. Then its fierce glow overpowered her, its fiery shafts blinded her; and covering her eyes, she stumbled below, whimpering, conscious of a dull ache, a shame, a sullen fear which she could not comprehend. Something hitherto unconquered was vanquished in her heart, so that never afterwards did she move with quite the same feeling of supremacy.

CHAPTER IV
AMID BLEAK SURROUNDINGS

Pemoquod lighthouse is on a point projecting into the ocean. Standing in the lantern of the lighthouse and looking toward the east, one beholds the ocean with nothing between him and Europe except an inconsiderable island or two; looking toward the west, one beholds John's Bay. On the ocean side of the Point is a long line of broken cliffs ranged for a certain distance in tiers, like the seats in a vast amphitheatre. Then abruptly this formation ends and the cliffs tower up into separate crags,—monsters that forever contemplate the sea with rage. There between the water and the rocks is a constant contest. The rocks are like giant animals; the sinuous waves, leaping and roaring, like unearthly reptiles. Between the rock-beasts and the wave-reptiles is unabating feud. After each conflict the waves seem to hiss with fury, the rocks to drip with gore by reason of the masses of red seaweed with which they are covered over.

It is curious to rise from a seat in the amphitheatre where you have been lulled by the light touch of the wind and the soft lapping of the waves, to contemplate two or three rods beyond this scene of mighty wrath. It is more curious still to stroll through expanses of sedgegrass to the other side of the Point and behold the bay. A quiet little bay it seems, with its diversified edge of sandy beach and tumble of small rocks, with its lobstermen's sheds clinging to the shore and further inland the houses. From the bay only the blank walls of these houses can be seen, for the women, with reason, regard the sea as an enemy to be ignored during peaceful indoor hours, and hardly a window of the modest dwellings looks toward the water.

During the summer and part of the winter, the bay is sprinkled far and wide with the sails of fishing dories. Into this pocket of the sea, always conveniently open, nature brings food for man in the form of marine creatures,—lobsters, crabs, and a clutter of fish. The bay, with its air of mild domesticity, is man's domain; the sea outside, God's alone.

Never the less the region in winter is harsh and unfavoured. The wind pipes down the chimneys and clamours on the crags and fairly howls in giant witch-fashion on the ocean. The people go about their duties with shoulders shrugged up, with purple noses and freezing toes. In the houses, they can scarcely hear one another speak on the windiest days, and conversation is impossible anywhere near the Point; this life fosters in them a solitariness of the soul.

With motley garments, sometimes quilts and shawls, strapped and buckled around them, the few who pursue lobster-fishing as a vocation fuss around their pounds or, out on the bay, haul their pots and swear. Their oaths mingle with the gale and the dashing waters and even freeze in mid air to come to land later and form icicles. At least, this was Rachel's fancy, and when she saw the bits of ice at the window ledges, she reached forth an arm and plucking them, dissolved them in her soft warm mouth, as if she would dissolve at the same time her grandfather's probable wrath. This wrath, being so justified, however, had something righteous in it, which Rachel was not slow to admit. Certainly it was not right that a man's living should be so hard a thing to win, and what was there for it but to exorcise these demons of wind and tide with language harsh enough to fit the occasion?

David Beckett, despite his gentleness, was a prodigious oath maker; indeed, some of his oaths were so picturesque as to have come into general circulation, a fact which afforded Rachel not a little satisfaction. To be able to invent such oaths, she felt instinctively, required an imagination of no uncertain order.

In winter her cheeks grew ruddy from the wind, tears caused by the cold sometimes stood in her eyes and the skin on the backs of her hands cracked until the knuckles bled. But she was very hardy and healthy. She had a fondness for mingling the impressions of form and colour and scent which bespoke a very sensuous temperament.

The old man's delight in her was boundless. Whenever she approached him a wonderful tenderness illuminated his face; his blue eyes sparkled and a set of wrinkles, entirely new, shot out from their corners like rockets. On her part the child returned his feeling with a depth of affection, startling and almost tragic in one so young. She seemed to give the old man something of the vigour of childhood, while into her passed a little of the seriousness of age.

They were constant companions. Sometimes in order not to be separated from her, David took her out in the dory. There, while the boat rose and sank and rose again, and Zarah Patch's nephew phlegmatically set or hauled the pots, the old man sought to answer her numerous questions, suggested for the most part, by her chance study of the family Bible.

"Does God raise up the lobsters?" she asked one day, "the lobsters we kill."

The old man grinned. "No, I never heard that he did," he answered; "lobsters ain't much 'count save as they feed man, I guess," he added.

The child relapsed into a sulky silence. After that she began putting back into the sea half-dead fish that she found on the shore and patiently straightening out the legs of flies discovered in webs. "It's man alone that's saved," she thought with a pang.

CHAPTER V
THE BARNACLE

When she was ten years old Rachel left the country school, and when she was eighteen she graduated from the High School in Old Harbour. Her course of study in that institution had been protracted by reason of the frequent spells of bad weather which, for weeks together, had kept her a prisoner at the Point. These interruptions she had accepted philosophically, for she had preferred to gain knowledge in an unhampered fashion, to look about her, to ask questions, to read the books of her own choosing. She was an exceedingly headstrong creature and had anyone wished to manage her he would have experienced great difficulty. However, apparently, no one had such an unreasonable wish.

Her lean little face was charming. With its broad forehead and high cheek bones it suggested a type of the Renaissance. The expression in her eyes was candid and thoughtful. Her nose was straight, her upper lip short, her mouth full and handsome in line, though, in meaning, asleep. Activity of the mind gives character to the eye, activity of the emotions individuality to the lips, and Rachel Beckett had not lived emotionally. She was still chained heavily by her youth, for youth has its shackles as well as age.

It was about this time that André Garins approached her with an important proposition. He came leaping down the path from the lighthouse and found her seated in the lobsterman's door. In the kitchen Nora could be heard scolding. Occasionally the words were drowned in guttural sobs.

"It's her pork pie," Rachel explained. "I got to reading and the fat just bubbled up before I knew. Now I'm going to Old Harbour to get her another," she added in a louder voice, "Want to come along?"

André nodded. He had attained his full height without losing the slimness of adolescence. "There's something I want to talk to you about," he said shyly.

But he did not broach the subject at once; instead he said tentatively as the two breasted the high wind which was all alive with the tang of the sea, and in which the girl's garments rattled like the rigging of a ship, "It's good of you to get her another pork pie; why do you do it?"

"Because," Rachel answered with spirit, "people once in a while ought to have what they want—if it's only pork pie."

André regarded her beautiful face with dull curiosity. "Then you're not doing it because you're sorry for her?" he asked.

"No," she answered shortly; "principle."

But the abstract had no meaning for André; he always thought in straight lines and his thoughts were convertible into actions. Now he took up the matter which had brought him to her.

"Mother thinks you and I could set up shop together," he said. "She thinks I can paint what are called 'souvenirs'; you know I paint very well, and you could take charge of the candy and fruit. She thinks we might get quite a little trade from the hotel people all about here, if we opened a shop in that unused barn of Shattuck's."

The proposition appealed to Rachel mightily. Now that the schooldays were past she found herself much too frequently in the presence of Nora Gage and quarrels were constant. If the young girl had had her way she would have bundled the so-called housekeeper out of the door and have done the work herself, but old David was fastidious in the matter of her hands and cherished the idea of one day seeing her a "lady." André's plan seemed to offer scope for her energy, she hailed it joyfully. A week later the youthful shop keepers were established in their odd quarters.

The situation of the unused barn was magnificent. It stood on the top of a high turfy hill which overlooked both the ocean and the bay. On going around it a narrow path, almost hidden by the tall grass, was discovered, and this path led directly to that bit of the bay shore where were the figure-head and the wreck. The door of the barn commanded the road. There was something in the bleakness of the situation that took hold on the fancy. The barn had long been an object of popular interest. It was toned by the weather to the beautiful grey of a dove's wing. It leaned lightly to one side. Its two front windows were like empty eye-sockets. As one approached it, climbing around the crumbling foundation of what years before had been a house, he imagined it the retreat of birds of prey.

The only steeds housed here were the horses of the wind, in the pauses of the storms that swept the Point. The barn was supposed to be haunted. Therefore the scene that greeted the first curious visitors, struck pleasantly on their sight.

A bit of sail-cloth bearing the inscription: Souvenirs And Confectionery appeared over one window, and a little trail of smoke issued from the other. Just inside the door was Rachel. She stood behind an improvised counter of new boards on which was ranged a file of golden oranges. Oranges and girl, how they lit the gloom! When not engaged in waiting on a customer, and her duties in this direction were of the lightest, Rachel made a pretence of sewing, though oftener than not the sewing was abandoned for a book. The range of her reading at this time was remarkable. Like her father, she read everything that came her way with a kind of tragic eagerness. Frequently closing the book and leaning her elbows on the counter, she would gaze straight ahead, while the questioning look deepened in her eyes. In the background where a ray of light fell André painted the lighthouse in garish colours on the bosom of a heaven-tinted shell.

What a pair they were, to be sure! What a bouquet of innocence, youth and utterly worthless endeavour!

The enterprise brought in little, though during July and August people came from the Ocean View House and even from remoter hotels on outlying islands. At this André laughed in his heart, but after the novelty had worn off, Rachel was less pleased. The money that she earned bought her a new dress and hat; but it was not sufficient to lighten the burden on her grandfather's shoulders. Unable longer to bear the hardships of lobster-fishing, old David had sold his pots. Taking part of his scant savings he had bought four cows. He now peddled milk from one end of the Point to the other. Rachel sometimes looked at him with sudden fear, though their poverty she realized but vaguely, never having known anything different. She mended his clothes and lavished upon him every care. She opened her heart to him, and in spirit he dwelt there as in a wide, sunny room. But, though he knew her heart, neither he nor anyone else, knew what was passing in her mind. Sometimes with a vigorous motion she would clasp her hands behind her head while she stared through the doorway of the barn; then she would slip away, taking the winding path to the bay, and remain there for hours.

The groups of rocks on the bay shore differed from those fronting the ocean. They were more sad than threatening in form and were covered thickly with seaweed, like enormous heads with hair. In this hair sparkled iridescent drops left by the receding tide; these drops resembled jewels. The rocks, indeed, were decked like the heads of women, and by reason of the long tresses of seaweed that trailed from them and that undulated on the surface of the water, an uneasy restlessness seemed to pervade them.

Rachel would eye them gloomily: then, flinging herself down, she would observe the various forms of life in the little pools of water where floated crabs and jellyfish. In the prominent eyes of the crab she saw the desire for its prey. Looking upward, attracted by the sinister screech of gulls, she saw them fluttering about the nest of a sanderling which they pillaged of its eggs. Letting her glance fall again she studied the little bell-shaped barnacles, like tiny huts, which everywhere adhered to the rocks in settlements. As the water approached, one after another of the doors of these wee huts opened and a hand, vaporish, white as light, reached forth and gathered in the necessary provender. Everywhere, everything received what it needed to sustain life. She alone was starved.

With these thoughts surging in her brain, Rachel would make her way back to the barn. There, with cheeks puffed out, stooping over his work, she would find André. One day when she entered the barn he greeted her with a gleeful announcement: he had sold five little shells and one big one during her absence. She turned away. She had often watched the faces of the summer people: they bought the shells out of pity for André, or perhaps, because they admired his handsome face. As art, she suspected, the shells were nothing. Why could he not see?

"You have no ambition," she said surlily, "there are schools where one can learn to do this sort of thing, I suppose. You ought to want to get away and study."

Amazed, he looked up at her. "But the shells sell all right," he remarked. "I paint well enough for that."

She made no answer and sparks of some sort glowed in her eyes. She shook her head at him.

"You're just like a barnacle," she cried passionately, "it clings to a rock, it lives in a corner; everyday when the tide comes in, it opens its door and gathers in food. In the same way every morning you wait for the city people. You open your door, you reach out your hand—like this, and you take in the pennies. Bah! is that enough for you?"

"Well, isn't it?" he asked, and in his eyes, as he looked at her, dawned a certain yearning softness.

But she turned away. "Then stay on your rock," she flashed out; "I want more."

He came up to her and laid his hand on her arm.

"What do you want?" he asked.

She looked at him and seeing tears in his eyes, she turned away sullenly. "I don't know," she answered, "but I want life—more'n what the sea brings me."

Then suddenly she broke from him and darted into the twilight.

CHAPTER VI
THE FIGURE-HEAD GAINS AN ADMIRER

The field where old David put the cows to pasture lay a comparatively short distance from the house, in the direction of the bay. But Rachel, leading a large white cow by a rope, had elected to go round by "the barn."

"Come along, Betty," she cried, as she turned into the main road dragging the surprised animal after her.

A dense fog obscured every landmark. Looking backward, she could just discern the placid light of the cow's eyes below the sickle of its horns; looking downward, she could make out her own feet and the stalks of grass and flowers beside the road. Moisture clung to the grass in pendant beads, and there was a fugitive flash of colour here and there close to the ground. All else was sheeted in the white pall. Groups of firs looked like spectres, the bushes covered with fluffs of mist looked like phantoms; Rachel herself appeared like a ghost.

The sea hurled itself against the cliffs. Now and again when it suspended its roar, the moaning of the fog bell could be heard. In these intervals of comparative quiet the surging fury in the girl's heart gave way to waves of melancholy. She had quarrelled with Nora Gage that morning and the colour was still high in her cheeks. Presently she came to a pause, stamping on the ground; the next moment, however, she was moved to laughter. In a sty beside the road a group of pigs was nozzling in a trough. One sat up and looked at her with Nora's eyes.

Somewhat improved in humour, she went on up the road. When she came opposite the barn, she clambered around the ruined cellar foundation, and after tying the cow, entered the little shop. A fire had been lighted in the battered stove and sent forth a cheerful flicker. Early as it was, André was already at work; he was decorating a smooth egg-shaped stone from which he had first removed its wrapping of seaweed. He glanced up and a light leaped to his eyes. He looked at Rachel with smiling intentness as if to satisfy himself that she had not changed in any way over night. Finally he spoke:

"If you'd come a little sooner, Rachel, you'd have seen something."

She spread her fingers above the stove and turned her neck from side to side with a slow and graceful movement as the heat rushed into her face.

"What would I have seen?"

Jumping from his stool, André poured some coffee from a pot into a cup; then he offered the cup to her.

"You look cold," he said, gazing directly into her eyes; "are you cold?" And taking her shawl, he shook the moisture from it. There was always in his attitude toward her a kind of awe.

"What would I have seen?" she repeated without glancing at him.

"Why, a stranger was here. He'd been making a sketch of the figure-head; he showed it to me."

"I don't see what right he had to draw it without my permission," she murmured jealously. "Was it a good picture, André?"

The lad looked doubtful. "It was all little scratchy lines," he said.

Rachel brooded for some minutes over the stove; then she rose. "There won't be anyone here this morning," she announced, "so I sha'n't come back. I've got to take Betty to pasture. Buttercup—all the others—got hold of some sorrel; they're sick."

She went to the door. The fog was so thick that it looked like cotton. The wild roses that bloomed here and there made delicate pink patterns on this white. From the barn the sea no longer could be heard, the complaint of the fog bell could be caught only faintly. Overhead, through the mysterious whiteness, could just be discerned the pale disc of the sun. The girl made her way through the mist as through a tangible substance. She took the path to the beach and the cow followed her placidly, the tall wet grass striking against its sides and its udder swinging like a pendulum. Rachel slipped along the wet path and climbed stealthily to the top of the first rock.

There, sitting on the wreck near the figure-head, was the stranger; but he was not sketching. Instead, his head, from which the cap had fallen, was bent forward and he was carefully burying in the sand what appeared to be the scraps of a letter. When he had finished this operation a kind of humorous relief was manifest all over him. A passenger boat steamed down the bay; a line of smoke followed it. The vessel was invisible, but the smoke lay in the fog a trail of black. The young man turned his head to observe it, and at that instant Rachel started and the cow behind her made a movement.

He looked up.

Poised on the summit of the rock, with the horns of the cow up-curving about her feet, with the fog clinging to her dress of faded blue and undulating about her in clouds, she resembled a figure of the Virgin in a crescent moon.

The pupils of the stranger's eyes, which were of a living, magnetic black dashed with fiery sparks, dilated; and two perpendicular lines, which started from the root of his nose, deepened to grooves on his forehead. He got to his feet, his massive head with its hair thrown back upraised toward her. Touched all over with a subjugating power, a grace more penetrating than beauty, he stared, a sort of animal.

As for Rachel, something of his excitement was communicated to her. For another instant she paused, held there by the mere force of his gaze. Then she turned and descending from the rock, led the cow round into the open space. A close observer might have seen that she wavered slightly, like one who tastes of wine for the first time.

The spell, however, was broken for the stranger. Unconsciously, with his lightning glance, he saw that there was a scratch on the back of one of her hands, that their flesh was rough and that there were freckles across her nose. She was just a strong, healthy, handsome lass; and, with the fickleness of a child, he abruptly turned his attention elsewhere. With excessive care he moved a small box, to which a telephone was attached, to a position of greater safety.

Rachel watched him warily. Growing within her was an odd sense of defiance, and this feeling triumphed finally over her natural shyness.

"Did you sketch the figure-head?" she asked all in a breath. Then a wave of colour rose in her cheeks. She stood before him in a trance of noble embarrassment.

"Why yes, I did," he returned. He took a book from his pocket, opened it to a certain page and presented it to her. The book was filled, all but that page, with drawings of little instruments.

She slowly approached leading the cow. He turned to her his face, framed in its curling beard. "I'm a pretty poor excuse for an artist," he began.

"That figure-head belongs to me," she interrupted, handing the book back.

A second time he fixed his attention upon her and two tiny stars of laughter shot into his eyes. "Does it, indeed?" he remarked; there was almost a caress in the words.

"Yes, my grandfather saved it and set it up here," she affirmed. She breathed quickly and every moment her shyness and her anger deepened.

"It appears to be an interesting bit of carving." Stealing over this great giant as he frankly studied her was something of the air of a lazy lion. "I should say someone carved it who loved to carve," he added. Then, with an idea of giving her a chance to recover countenance, he considerately turned his gaze in the direction of the bay.

"What—what are you doing now?" she asked quickly; for her spirit was roused and it behooved her to recover dignity.

"Well, I hoped to be able to get some of those fishermen to take me out in a boat for a certain purpose, but they can't see my signal and the fog doesn't lift."

He seated himself on the wreck and began to touch up his drawing of the figure-head, then he fell to making a tentative sketch of the indistinct figures in the dories out on the water.

Had he made the slightest effort to detain her in conversation, Rachel certainly would have turned on her heel; as it was, drawn on by her curiosity, she moored the cow with a stone on the rope, and came nearer.

"All this is out of my line," he explained, "but I like to try my hand at it once in a way." And, indeed, he looked hugely pleased with his effort, as he held the paper at arm's length to study the effect.

Rachel watched him and now and then her eyes travelled to his face with the clear dispassionate gaze of a child. His cap lay on the sand at his feet and his dishevelled locks moved in the wind above a face that was simple and bold. His finger-tips were stained with acid, his clothing was a bit careless; a spray of Prince's Feather, freshly picked, trailed from the button-hole of his coat. About them was complete silence except for the plashing of the waves and an occasional muffled cry from the almost invisible lobstermen. The fog wrapped them round.

Presently he reached a point beyond which he was unable to carry his sketch, and, abandoning it, he began turning the pages of the book at first slowly, then with increased attention. At last he paused. His eyes narrowed and the perpendicular wrinkle on his forehead deepened. He read over some notes. He struck out a word here, inserted another there; then commenced to write rapidly on the margin of the page and for several minutes the scratching of his pencil continued. It was apparent that like a hunter he was running down his quarry, and leaping over many a ditch and rock in his excitement; it was apparent, too, that he had entered a world in which woman was unknown.

Finally, Rachel's interest expressed itself in an involuntary sigh, and he raised his head with a dawning consciousness of her presence. Tiny drops of moisture, like diamond dust, glittered in her hair. He studied them; then met the brightness of her oval-shaped eye.

In his turn embarrassed, he hitched his shoulders and laughed.

"I forgot that you were here," he said.

Until that moment she had not resented his indifference, but now, when he voiced it, she felt a hot sense of chagrin. He had, she considered, been pointedly lacking in courtesy. Moving away, she took up the rope of the cow.

He got to his feet. "By Jove, I don't see how it happened," he said simply.

It was the touch required. She halted and stood playing with the rope.

"I got to thinking of this," he continued, and he laid his hand on the box to which the telephone receiver was attached. "It's something I've been working out. I want to test it. It's a fine coast for the purpose. Plenty of submerged rocks, I should say," and he gazed about him.

She also swept the rolling leagues of misty emptiness, but with the glance of one who is familiar with them, then her eyes, wistful and unutterably intense, went to his. There was something about the life and mentality of this man that startled and stirred her, something in his appearance that seemed to speak of a nature unshackled, gigantic.

"I asked that boy at the old barn up the road where I could get hold of a boat and someone to row," he continued, "but he didn't tell me."

She turned from him. "I'll take you," she volunteered, "this afternoon."

At this the stranger showed a row of brilliant teeth. "Why that—that's fine," he said. Once more his manner was gentle, almost caressing.

To demonstrate his gratitude he tore from the book the sketch of the figure-head and presented it to her.

She took it without exhibiting any emotion. Then, leading the cow, she disappeared around a boulder. A moment later, however, she appeared on its summit, and the cow pushed up behind her so that his first miraculous impression was repeated.

"What time," she asked, "do you want to go?"

He moved his lips without speaking; a magical light had dawned on his world.

"Why, about three o'clock," he answered,—pausing between the words.

And the next moment she was no longer there. The fog had closed over the spot of the vision.

CHAPTER VII
CONCERNING ALEXANDER EMIL ST. IVES

In the make-up of this Alexander Emil St. Ives, who carried his name like a flaunting feather, his father played small part. During the life of the elder St. Ives, the family had lived on a farm in Rhode Island and the father, a dour, narrow man, had laid his commands upon the soil and had tilled it with his will as with an agricultural implement; in bad seasons often he had been the one farmer in the neighbourhood who harvested crops.

There were two sons. The elder boy, Edgar, resembled the father, though built on smaller, neater lines, with a face shaped like an egg. He had much of the father's obstinate force united to a faculty for grasping and retaining what seemed to him worth while. The younger son resembled the mother.

Mrs. St. Ives, timid, valiant creature, was incapable of not loving. For her first-born she entertained an affection purely maternal; for Emil, however, she harboured a feeling almost worshipful. The fact that she had borne him was to her a miracle ever new. He woke heaven in her heart and his love opened her soul as the sun's ray opens the flower. Neither husband nor elder son ever suspected the exquisite quality of her nature.

Edgar was a lad of fifteen when Emil was born. From the first he turned a cold face on the mite, and as time went on grew jealous of him up to the eyes. There was something august about Emil even in his ugly, defenceless childhood. He was of a singularly inquiring turn of mind and years afterward his mother delighted to relate how, when he was two years old, he had crawled a mile and a half from home, lured forward by the curiosity that later became his salient characteristic. His energies spent, he had rested on a flat rock. While his tiny body grew warm in the sun, his infant mind had lost itself in inarticulate reverie. If he could go on quite to the end of everything, even to that hazy, far-away point where blue met green, what should he find? It was this speculative tendency that gave his hair its wild aspect; that kindled in his eyes their roving, searching glance; that already, young as he was, made him look at life with an air of keen astonishment.

When he was eleven years old, his father died and the reins of management fell into Edgar's hands. That young man, being in no sense a typical farmer, immediately exchanged the farm, which the elder St. Ives had bequeathed him, for a large country store. By dint of shrewd management, he soon became a successful merchant. So rapidly did he rise that by the end of the second year, he had built himself a house and installed in it a shrewish wife who lost no time in presenting him with a swarm of children. He also placed in the house his mother, and the poor lady dwelt there under the lash of the wife's tongue, like a servant in constant fear of dismissal. In righteous mood, Edgar even went so far as to extend the protection of his roof to his young brother. In a tiny chamber over the kitchen the lad's first tentative inventions saw the light.

But between these two natures a gulf was fixed. If truth were told, they had not a trait in common. Edgar was provident and saving, Emil the reverse. Long ere he had obtained his majority, he had wheedled from his mother the little money she held in trust for him from his grudging and disapproving father. To be sure, the sum was very meagre and could not be stretched, by any calculation, to cover the technical training the lad coveted; therefore he had expended a part of it for scientific books and the rest had gone little by little into materials for his constant experimenting.

For the precious little inventions which cluttered Emil's chamber and sometimes found their unwelcome way into other parts of the house, Edgar had a withering contempt. He never missed an opportunity to have a fling at them and his scornful words entered the mother's heart like barbed arrows. However, in his nineteenth year Emil produced an apparatus for freshening sea water which it seemed must prove of inestimable value to all sea-faring folk. The mother in a flutter of excitement and even with tears, besought him to take his brother into his confidence. In fact this was necessary, if he wished to secure the use of an abandoned and much coveted granary for a shop. But the lad held back. The apparatus, despite its undoubted usefulness, seemed to him of trifling importance. The mother, however, foreseeing fortune ahead of him, urged the step and at length the boy consented. True to her prediction, after his first scornful inspection of the contrivance, Edgar admitted that it might have possibilities. Like most of the boy's experiments, this device was beyond his comprehension, but he could grasp the fact that sailors and fishermen, with the chance of shipwreck forever staring them in the face, might have use for it. He therefore offered to get it patented, then took steps to secure the patent—in his own name. As it chanced, the papers, bearing his signature but otherwise carefully copied from those which Emil had submitted for his inspection fell under the boy's eye.

The night following this discovery, a light appeared in the granary. Edgar, peering from his chamber window, perceived a demoniacal figure, smashing and demolishing everything the little shop contained. Even as he looked, it lifted a small instrument, which represented months of patient labour, and threw it with a crash to the floor. Instantly Edgar was out of the house. He scampered across the yard, his night gear fluttering in the light of the pale moon. Emil at that moment caught up the sea-water device and sent it crashing through the doorway. Being made largely of glass, the instrument shivered into a million minute fragments. Edgar and his wife and children, who had flocked to his side, covered their eyes. When they looked again, through the dust that still hung in the air, they beheld a bent figure, lit up by the gleam of the lantern, still moving in a whirl of rubbish.

Edgar in his scant raiment danced up and down.

"Thief!" he hissed.

For an instant the boy paused in his diabolical work:

"Thief!" He burst into terrifying laughter.

With one final wrench he brought down the work-bench and flung it across the pile; then kneeling, he applied a match to the mass. Crackling flames leaped upward. He got to his feet and stood with his figure silhouetted against the red glow. In that hour he had destroyed something more precious than his inventions, his books and all his little workmen's kit in which he had taken such pride. That which had gone down in flames hotter than those which raged around him, was the essential quality which is youth. Such searing emotions are the death of adolescence. He was visibly trembling. The hair was matted above the eyes which he lifted. Without a word he darted past them and disappeared into the night.

A quarter of a mile from the house he met his mother. She was waiting for him in the darkness. Quivering all over she took him in her long arms. But his anger had already subsided and he felt stealing over him a new and gratifying sense of release.

"Don't, Mother," he whispered hoarsely, "it was bound to come,—and you'll see—I'll soon send for you."

Her tears distressed him. For this cheated, baffled, frail and suffering mother who asked but one thing, that his ambition be gratified, Emil's feeling was fiercely paternal. It was the solitary oasis in a nature devoid of all other affections.

He caressed her with his hands, but presently he held them up before her. "With these," he whispered, "and with this," and he touched his forehead, "I'll do something. You'll see. The world needs me," he cried.

The world needed him! At that moment he felt that he could grasp the universe, instinct with unknown laws, and plunging his mind into it could drag forth some hitherto undiscovered force.

The world needed him! Poor, foolish, misguided, highly-gifted youth! Certainly he was more valuable to Society than its rickety children who would never grow up, its infirm old men, sick with alcoholism, its base and unworthy charges; yet for all these, he soon discovered, the great New York, glancing indifferently from her million windows, provided asylums; but for him, who had in his head that which should bring the world to his feet—for him nothing.

In turn he worked for a photographer, a printer, and an engraver, but as he failed to pay attention to his duties and urged upon his irate employers devices for improving the processes used in their work, he remained only a short time in each situation. By the third year, however, he drifted into a place that promised to be permanent.

The conservative lithographing establishment of Benjamin Just and Richard Lawless was in need of an apprentice. Being by this time much reduced in health and spirits, with all the fiery currents of his being at low ebb, Emil accepted this berth. For upwards of a year he worked with commendable sobriety; in fact, became no more than a pivot, a screw, a tiny whirling wheel in the life of the factory. But at the end of a twelvemonth his old fever broke out in aggravated form; the trivial bit of mechanism became a madman or a genius over night.

Waving some papers above his head, laughing naïvely and applauding himself, Emil approached the head draughtsman one day and exhibited a little model. But the draughtsman into whose hands all the choice work of the establishment fell, swore at him. 'The art of lithography,' he gave him to understand, 'was an old and honourable one; and as for cheapening the work, heaven knew, enough had been done in that line!' And he briefly consigned the young fool and his new-fangled process to hell.

Thereupon, Emil, nothing daunted, approached the two owners. Trembling all over with eagerness, he fixed them with his eyes in which a flame seemed to be leaping up and down.

"Just a thin flexible sheet, that is what I propose," he cried;—"a sheet which has all the qualities of the finest of your lithographic stones, but which is superior because cheaper and lighter and the possible supply unlimited. How's that? A sheet, which after one preparation for printing, will continue to yield clean proofs without dampening or resetting for a much longer time than the best of your lithographic stones," he continued.

"But how do you print from this precious sheet of yours?" inquired Mr. Lawless, a fat red man, who tried to look scornful and only succeeded in looking ridiculous. If truth were told, the partners, while appearing to have little faith in the scheme, felt in the pits of their stomachs an excited feeling similar to that produced by high swinging; indeed, their phlegmatic pulses beat to the same excited measure as the young inventor's.

"With a specially constructed cylinder press, that's now I'll print," answered Emil.

As a result of the conference, the owners, although professing scepticism, consented to give him a small room in which to perfect his invention and, in their generosity, even guaranteed to continue the payment of his former meagre salary.

From that day, Emil began to live a particular and intensely nervous life.

He was now one of a large army, consisting of press men, lithographers, zinc men, clerks, artists, stenographers, bookkeepers. The majority of these men did their work methodically and as a matter of duty. When they quitted the factory at night, they forgot the labour that had occupied them during the day. With Emil, however, it was otherwise.

In a tiny room, reeking with heat and dust and clamorous with the rumble of the presses, he worked, scarcely taking note of the passing of one day and the birth of another. Often he sought the factory at night. The general manager, a man with a forceful presence and a shrewd eye, scornfully shrugged his shoulders. He distrusted such enthusiasm; but the owners were more hopeful. At night they had a door left open for the erratic inventor.

Unconscious that he was observed, Emil hurried through the streets and bounded up the steps to his den. Then how he caressed his invention, how he stared straight before him with eyes that saw nothing, while his brain drew from the surrounding ether a crowd of images wonderful for their reality and vigour. Sometimes in these nights of limpid contemplation, he became as beautiful as an angel. At other times, inspiration was capricious and the particular idea that he sought must be pursued. At such times he would crack his fingers at the joints, wave backward and forward like a tree in a storm, rock like a ship on an angry sea. Somehow, he would wrest his idea from the vast Unknown. And when he had succeeded in fixing it, smiling peacefully, he would go to sleep like a child; go to sleep and dream of some far land where invention was not torture. Before his work-bench, exhausted, he was often discovered in the early dawn by Ding Dong when he came to sweep out.

Half-witted, deaf and dumb, with a face so hideous that caricature could not exaggerate it, Ding Dong had received his nick-name from some bookish artist or other. With a fat tongue useless in his wide mouth and ears like sails, though they served to convey no sound to his meagre brain, Ding Dong ate habitually of the food thrown away by saloons, drank the dregs left in whiskey glasses, and, with the agility of a little cat, accepted the stumps of cigarettes which the clerks good naturedly threw him.

Between him and Emil, existed a peculiar friendship, and many were the novel breakfast parties held in the little workroom at the hour when New York was just waking to life.

Ding Dong procured rolls and made coffee; then three partook of the meal, for there were always three, the inventor, Ding Dong and, to furnish the feminine element, Lulu, a tiny South American monkey. Pinched and sad Lulu seemingly was not devoid of coquetry, for she wrapped herself in a bit of bright flannel which she held together beneath her chin with one small black hand, while she peeped out from between the folds with her little mournful eyes.

Of all the prisoners in the great building, none was more miserable than this little monkey. A present to the wife of one of the partners, who detested her, she had been brought down to the factory where she led a truly miserable life. In order to be out of reach of the furnace man, who had once treated her cruelly, she ran up among the asbestos-covered pipes, and there remained, save when she suffered herself to be lured down by Ding Dong. It was as if these two touching creatures, the one so nearly bestial and the other so nearly human, strove to lessen each other's profound loneliness.

As Emil pulled at his long pipe, resting after his exertions of the night, something of his serenity stole over his companions and wrapped in the same mood of abstracted dreaminess, they watched the dawn together.

When the department overseer appeared, a shudder ran through the building. The presses rumbled and boys began to feed them with great sheets of paper. The band of pale, dispirited youths in the art department etched their designs. With dust, sweat, oaths, grinding muscles, shriek and thunder of machinery,—the day began. Hour after hour the passionate clamour increased to a poem, a hymn, a pæan to the God of Work.

At twelve o'clock the tension relaxed. Men from the different departments poured into the streets and sought the cafes and restaurants of the neighbourhood. A few, however, always remained in the building. For that hour they were no longer slaves. The head bookkeeper, an old man, stretched his legs, glad to get down from his high stool; one of the stenographers, with flying fingers resumed her work on a little red jacket for Lulu. Even Emil was affected by the sudden contagion of idleness that swept the building. Leaving the model of his press, he took time to stare from the windows at the roofs of New York. But despite his interest in his work these surroundings were beginning to tell upon him. One day in July, unable to bear the heat, he staggered out into the passage to get a drink from a pail of water that stood there. He was lifting the dripping dipper to his lips, when a pair of eyes met his with a sort of shock. When he stumbled back into the little den, Annie Lawless, springing up from a chair in her father's office, followed him.

"What's the matter?" she cried sharply, as he sank down with his head bowed on the work-bench. She started to summon someone, but a second glance at his pale face with tiny beads of perspiration around the nostrils, caused her to change her mind. She passed swiftly to the door and closed it. Then, detaching a jewelled smelling-bottle from her belt, she held it under his nose with her little shaking hand. When Emil came to himself, he saw bending over him a delicate face shaped like a pear, the cheeks white almost as his own. This face was furnished with soft open lips, like an infant's, and, by contradiction, with two blue eyes which, for the moment, looked into his with an almost maternal solicitude.

"Are you better?" The question was blended with the odour of violets, subtle and overpowering, with the gleam of diamonds, with the touch of a soft fabric, warm with life, beneath his cheek.

The next instant he sat up, flushing all over. And Annie Lawless blushed too.

"Yes, I'm all right, perfectly right," he muttered, and tried to laugh. "It's only this infernal heat," supporting his head in a strange fashion as if he feared it would drop off.

"Yes, it is awfully hot," Annie answered. "Is that the model for the cylinder press?" she asked presently. "I've heard Father speak of your inventions."

Emil, whose head was still giddy, had a childish wish that she would come near him again and put those hands, covered with rings, on his brow. He looked at her as she stood speaking. When she turned sidewise he noticed dreamily how small her waist was, he believed he could span it with his two hands; and her nose was slightly hooked, which combined with her quick movements, gave her somewhat of the appearance of a bird.

"I've heard Papa say that he thinks your press is going to be a big thing," she continued, "but I should think he ought to give you a better place to work in."

At these words Emil roused himself. He had not known before that Mr. Lawless believed in the press. "Why yes, if I had a decent place to work in—" he began.

"Papa ought to pay you more money," she said with conviction. "Why, he used to have a man who invented things and he gave him special rooms and a fine salary besides. Papa says a man with the inventive bee in his bonnet isn't fit to look after himself. But that man was," she concluded, "for he left Papa one day in the lurch and went to inventing things on his own account, and since then he has made a pile of money. You'll do that too if they aren't careful."

The upshot of the matter was that she began making plans for the relief of the stranger who, with his extraordinary air, seemed more interesting to her than anyone she had ever known.

"It may take a little time, but I'll manage it somehow," she told him as she left.

And she did manage it.

She saw Emil several times, arousing a perfect furor of gossip among the artists by the temerity of her visits. When she knew that her father and his partner were out of the building, she slipped in to see Emil, and, more than once as the summer advanced, she met him at an appointed place on his homeward walk.

Finally, acting on her advice, he sent in a written protest to his employers, stating that it was impossible for him to complete the work at his present salary and setting forth his desire for a more fully equipped workroom. In conclusion, he intimated that if his requests were not acceded to, in view of the services he had already rendered them, he should feel free to quit their employ.

The day following this step, Annie appeared with triumph written all over her face.

"It's all settled," she announced. "Mr. Just and the general manager were at our house last night. They talked about you and I listened at the library door. Papa made Mr. Wakefield admit that he'd been wrong in his estimate of you. And then Papa went on to say that he thought they might as well, first as last, offer to grub stake you. Do you know what that means?" she cried, laughing. "It means that they will pay all your expenses and give you rooms somewhere like that Mr. Pennyworth I told you about. He said already, by the different improvements you'd made on this and that machine, you'd saved the firm thousands of dollars. You didn't know that, I guess. He said you were too valuable a man to lose. And that's not all," she went on to cover her embarrassment, for Emil was staring at her, "you're to have a few weeks somewhere in the country if you want them, and I'm sure you need a vacation badly enough."

"How did you manage it?" he asked, speaking with difficulty.

"Oh, I just kept Papa thinking about you by the things I said. One day I said that the factory was horribly stuffy and I should think the artists, and you particularly, would just die. And then I asked him carelessly if he thought your press was going to be any good, and he said, 'Good!—well, if he can be got to finish it, that's all we want. The man's a genius!' And I laughed and told him he'd better look out or his genius would have sunstroke. I explained to him that you were probably so worn out that you couldn't finish it. I said a thing here and a thing there, mere nothings, but I made him uneasy, and then came your letter throwing up the whole scheme before it was completed. Oh I knew he'd do it, if it was managed all right!" she exclaimed gleefully. And then changing her tone: "Are you glad?" and she wrinkled her brow into anxious furrows beneath her light summer hat.

Emil took one of her little hands timidly. He turned a ring round and round on her tiny finger, staring at her, endeavouring to find words. Suddenly two arms were laid about his neck and all quivering in the storm of her own emotions, like a bird seeking shelter, she fluttered against his breast. Her hat had slipped to her shoulders. He felt that she was sobbing violently, and scarcely knowing what he did, he clasped her closely in his arms and muttering unintelligible words which he himself did not understand, he pressed his lips again and again to her small blond head.

But the plum that tumbles into our lap without the asking is seldom as fine as the fruit we climb for, strain for, spend hours in thirsting after. Three weeks—and this fierce agitation of the senses had subsided. It was an excitement, a fever, which at the time had been augmented by so many equivocal influences; by the noise of the presses which had seemed to keep time to his pulses, by the gleam of the girl's jewels, by the softness of her attire, by the fact, more than all else, that she was his chief's daughter.

A whiff of sea air and Emil looked back on the affair with utter weariness. Without a conscience, he was accustomed to follow simply the dictates of his own nature. The memory of the girl irked him, therefore with heavy sighs like a weary horse, he destroyed her letters. However, the phantom of love had passed very close, and it was not in vain that all the electric currents of his being had been set in motion. He was awake now to another world than that in which he had hitherto dwelt,—awake, with his great inquisitive eyes, attentive.

It was at this juncture that Rachel Beckett dawned on his horizon. When she came round the rock leading the cow, a novel sensation convulsed that strange uncultivated heart of his. A man's heart is a garden in which, before the coming of death, many flowers of emotion bloom; and the history of these flowers is the history of his life.

CHAPTER VIII
IN THE CAUSE OF SCIENCE

Since the night of Emil's departure, which had brought such terror to her heart, a divine serenity had fallen upon Mrs. St. Ives. His frequent letters, filled with the vitality of his genius and all radiant with love, were to her a second baptism of youth. Palpitating with enthusiasm, she carried them to her room where she read and reread them. Sometimes she wept over them, and for days after the receipt of one, she went about with an expression of utter peace. But when, for some reason, a letter failed to arrive, then in that house far removed from the scenes among which he dwelt, she would clasp her hands in silent agony, she would be given over to anxiety, glancing about her, more nervous than any bird; she would rebuke the teasing grandchildren and fiercely demand the letter which, she imagined, her daughter-in-law kept from her. Then became evident in her no longer the triumph of youth but the tragedy of age.

Without doing anything to deserve her special affection, both Edgar and his wife were jealous of her absorbing love for Emil. They ridiculed this worship. And no one except the singular object of her devotion comprehended the extent of her suffering. Vague and unsatisfactory as he was in all other relations, where she was concerned he was gifted with an insight that might have done credit to a woman. Full well he comprehended that she was living her life in his, and, for that reason, he strove to make it gorgeous for her. Poor devil of an inventor, with his toes all but through his boots and his head in the clouds! He would often brood over her situation with tears in his eyes. He cherished the hope of one day having her with him, and, in the event of her coming, planned like a lover, to greet her royally. But once plunged in his work, it must be confessed that for days together he incontinently forgot all about her. Then, perhaps, a feeble scrawl would arrive, announcing a headache or some trifling woman's worry, and contrition would be rampant in him. Rousing himself, he would write her one of his long, characteristic letters, fairly pouring out his life on the page.

As may be conjectured, his being sent to Old Harbour to rest and, incidentally, to add the finishing touches to the metal plate and cylinder press, was subject matter for a glowing epistle, which brought to the mother a wealth of happiness and sent her to bed night after night with touching prayers of gratitude on her lips. Once settled in the hotel at Old Harbour, however, Emil abandoned the work in hand and fell to making a depth indicator. How think of anything else with the sea out there waiting to be plumbed? In vain Annie Lawless hinted that her father was anxious to install the press and counselled haste, as has been related, Emil destroyed her letters and went feverishly forward with his self-appointed task.

On the afternoon of the day of his meeting with Rachel he was in fine feather. The presence of the girl and the prospect of testing his invention filled him with animation. At moments, as he tinkered at the boat's rim, he whistled so shrilly that the sea gulls paused in their wheeling to listen; and this complicated energy, this unusual virility, was as much a tribute to her who sat in the grey nest of boulders, as a testimony of interest in the work. And so she understood it.

With her slight figure relieved against the skyline, she waited for him to complete his preparations. Now and then her eyes travelled, with unerring directness, to the mound of sand where he had that morning buried the letter. What did those hard-packed grains of sand conceal? Instinctively she played with the question and its import sat deep in her eye. As if by a stroke of art, she had placed herself in direct line with the figure-head, so that no one glancing that way could fail to be struck by the dissimilarity between image and maid. Mobility and an ardent capacity for a rich and varied existence were written all over her; that something which is the potency of womanhood itself seemed to have awakened suddenly from the torpor of youth in that little heart and to have come abroad for the first time experimentally. There she sat, and whenever he turned his head, he was struck anew with her, so that he must needs look again and yet again.

She had covered her feet with her skirts and her hands were clasped decorously in her lap. Her brow had a male gravity, as distinguished from her chin which was softly-turned and exceeding feminine. Her hair was parted and trained in two shining unbroken portions and tucked away behind her ears, something as a curtain is looped back from a window. The sphinx-like mystery of Leonardo's La Gioconda was alive in her eyes.

Even while the girl, in her essential self, remained superlatively innocent and unconscious, there looked out from her little virgin countenance at Emil, gravely selecting him, the 'Genius of the Species.' Her glance proclaimed sex and intellectual detachment.

Presently Emil turned his face over his shoulder and beckoned to her; and his laugh was repeated by the water coursing up the beach and curling round the boat in white-lipped waves. The fog had disappeared and the sun was now shining joyously.

Rachel grasped the oars, rowing with long even strokes, and Emil sat in the bow. To one side of the boat and projecting into the water, he had attached a bell, which gave out when struck a special, sharp, short note; and on the other side of the boat he had placed a telephone receiver connected with a small box.

"And inside that box is another still smaller of metal," he told her, "and that contains the secret of the whole device. Did you ever hear of the microphone?"

She shook her head.

"Well, it's a tiny affair no larger than a pea, and will so magnify sound in connection with an electric current and a telephone receiver, such as I have here, that the footsteps of a fly on a sheet of paper sound about like the tramping of an army. It's so powerful," he continued, "that if I were to place it in the end of a tube and point the tube, say, toward that island out there, any noise going on—-a wagon rattling along the road or a child naming—I should be able to hear on this side, provided I had arranged the microphone so as to shut out all intervening noises. For instance, this microphone here is sensitive to no sound but that of the bell and the vibrations that I hope may be reflected back from the sea bottom. But we'll soon know whether it will work," he cried. "Row about twenty rods farther and then I'll tell you not only the depth of the water at that point, but the character of the bottom and whether it will be safe for our big liner to advance."

He was trembling all over and Rachel reflected his interest. She sent the boat forward a few strokes, then rested on the dripping oars. Nature, it seemed, was in her most approachable mood and at a hint of coaxing would reveal her secrets; yet the girl was conscious of something in the phenomena of the sea implacable and resistant to the efforts of man. Concealed promontories, hidden shoals, submerged headlands, treacherous peaks, drowned under the ceaseless rushing of waters—would the Voice come back bearing tale of all this?—or, if mud, weeds, fish, incrustations of shell—would the Voice proclaim safety, and the inventor know the very thickness of that rolling, beauteous mantle of mystery?

Nothing of the poetic significance of the test was lost on the girl, and she felt the hand of pity at her throat when she witnessed Emil's disappointment manifest all over him like a blight. Then she gloried when she saw him repeat the test.

Come what might, it was clear he had faith in himself.