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.