"Gurd," said his father sternly, the old stained hand still stroking his white face, "ye have strength and skill above the most--but look at yon! Put up your boat, lad; it's no use. Moreover, there are five men yonder on the masts--your boat, tested in an ordinar' sea, holds but five alone!"

"Will ye go out jest to give them another chance to wrack themselves, and ye put yerself by to drown?" said another, with a trembling, half-ferocious laugh. "Look to yer wife and child. Don't be a fool!"

"There 's not one o' ye," cried Gurdon, "but if ye had a boat fit 'u'd do all ye could, an' men sinkin' and a-wavin' ye like that--let me off!

There 's no other way----"

His voice broke. He looked at his wife and child, a look the woman understood for all eternity.

Vesty stood like marble; her shawl had escaped from her own throat, but was warm about the child that Gurdon had placed back on her breast.

As we waited, watching, transfixed, Fluke came running breathless from the woods where he had been as guide with the party of Notely's pleasure-seekers who had stayed behind that morning.

Captain Rafe ran to him, with the hand still stroking his pallid face: "That was Gurdon out there, making so near the sinking boat--he would go--only five----"

But Fluke heard never a word. He saw; his face flushed with a kind of mad joy; he tossed his hair back, and leaping into the waves, swam to his own frail little fishing-boat that was tossing at anchor.

His voice leaped back to us above the tumult of the wind: "Gurd and me'll come home together!"

There was a lull in the gale; the five were put off from the sinking craft in Gurdon's boat.

And the men were standing with ropes on the sh.o.r.e; but I only saw, as the tempest moaned, to swell again, one figure on a bending mast, between sea and sky, and one in a frail sh.e.l.l toiling toward him.

The tempest fell and smote. Then did nothing seem to me fated underneath those awful heavens, but grand and free; freest, mightiest of all that figure imprisoned between storm and cloud, overwhelmed, buried----triumphant, imperishable! Then did the dead that I had known come forth and walk upon the waves before me: and I beheld that they were not dead, but glorious and strong--that, rather, I was dead.

Then all seemed black about me. I would have clutched at somewhat, but I felt a cold hand grasp mine in appealing agony. They brought in with ropes through the breakers the five men who had neared the sh.o.r.e in the young sailor's new fishing-boat.

But the "Twin Brothers," the sublime figure on the mast, the toiling figure in the boat, had "gone home together!"

XVI

THE POPLAR LEAVES TREMBLE

It was Vesty's hand that had wrung mine. Captain Rafe, after he lost his sons, hardly spoke without drawing his own trembling hand along his piteous face.

"Notely fell from the mast and was stunted; they put him in the boat: else he wouldn't 'a' come and left my Gurd, I b'lieve." Tears rolled down his cheeks.

Vesty spoke to me so softly, as if her head were turned, or she were wandering in a dream. "When Gurdon had anything that anybody needed, and they asked him for it, he always gave it them. So they asked him for his life--and he gave that!"

Notely, on recovering consciousness, had been carried to his house at the Neck: by the next morning they had his mother with him; he was in a fever.

Would Vesty remember now the promise she had asked of Mrs. Garrison?

At all events, the sick man babbled deliriously of past days, had fallen from the rock once more, and would have Vesty to nurse him: "where," asking ever, "is Vesty?"

Mrs. Garrison herself went to her, pleading his pain and danger. Vesty came.

"h.e.l.lo! we're saved!--the Vesty!" cried Notely, whose fever had been plunging him in cold sea-waves, his voice a feeble echo of its old gay tone, as he put up his hand to her.

So ashy and sunken was his face, Vesty took him on her arm as she would her child; he fell asleep.

"Vesty stops the pain--no one lifts me like Vesty--sing, Vesty!" from pathetic lips and wandering blue eyes that would die if one recalled them to their sorrow.

"Only stay," said Mrs. Garrison. "His life hangs upon it. Surely you are not afraid to have your child with me?"

Her heart was full of tenderness for the girl. "I would die rather than anything should happen to your child, Vesty," she cried, with a sincere impulse.

Vesty lifted those Basin eyes.

"Oh, he is not old enough yet to understand my worldliness," said Mrs.

Garrison, with bitter lips.

For, from entrusting the child at first to her servants, while Vesty was in the sick-room, Mrs. Garrison had grown to have a jealous care for him herself. He had taken an occasion, and he had conquered her.

When she pleased him he dimpled and gave her, on appeal, an ostentatious kiss, composed wholly of noise and vanity. When she first displeased him he had tried conclusions with her by unhesitatingly administering a slap on the face.

Mrs. Garrison, the select and haughty, tingling from this direct Basin blow, watched the flame die out of the baby's eyes, in astonishment, not in anger. The blow felt good to her. Vesty treated her, though unconsciously, from such a height.

"My darling," she said sorrowfully, lifting the child in her arms, "would you hurt me, when I love you so?"

A bit of sugar sealed the reconciliation: while he devoured it little Gurdon leaned his head in tender remorse upon Mrs. Garrison's neck.

She had handsome eyes--for him, full only of love and longing--and he saw strange tears in them. He never treated her again to corporeal punishment; while she, on her part, indulged him fully.

The attachment was so marked between them that he would, when he was well and had dined, very cheerfully leave Vesty for her society, to Vesty's secret chagrin and Mrs. Garrison's beating heart of joy.

"Do you mean to say that you will take the child back again--back to that squalid home--yes, for such it is, Vesty--that you will deprive him of all that might be, and give him up to a fisherman's wretched life and dreary fate?"

"Will you make a better man of him in the world than his father was?"

said Vesty simply.

"You know that I worship Gurdon Rafe's memory," cried Mrs. Garrison, with adroit heat. "What do you think would please him best for his wife and child--misery and cold with an old man who could have a better home among his own kin, had he not to make the effort to support you--or happiness and warmth and love, and a great sphere of usefulness, happiness, and education for his child?"

"You see," said Vesty, on the plain Basin path, "in trying to get those things we might miss the only--the greatest--thing, that Gurdon had.

I'd rather my boy should learn to have that, and miss all the others."

"O my dear! you shall teach your child, you shall be always with him.

I have some things to remember and regret, Vesty. I promise you solemnly--and I do not break my word--I will not interfere. You shall teach and guide your child as you will."

Notely was awake and calling.

"Go to him," said Mrs. Garrison, excitement in her eyes; "he will explain to you, my child." There was a tenderness, a hope, a voluptuousness of sweet earthly things in her manner toward the poor girl now, which all her life Vesty had missed.

Heart and flesh were weary, and Notely, who had been the light of her life once, looked up at her with that weight of sorrow, so much darker and heavier than her own; so much heavier because it was dark.

"Help me to bear it!" he said.

She understood all; she laid her head beside him, sobbing.