Chapter 43

It was a fresh, breezy, August afternoon. In the open sea, far out, east of the Skerries, we were scudding along blithely, with a flock of seagulls flying wantonly in our wake. The low hills of the Orkneys rose like a faint haze on the horizon to westward. Light waves, touched with green, curled over into snowy spray about our sides as our boat bent over and plunged buoyantly through them. Blue was the far-stretching sea, and bluer still the summer sky.

Away to the eastward, whither our bowsprit pointed, a white-sailed clipper grew larger as we approached her. The Danish ensign flew at her mizzen; the familiar signal for a pilot streamed from her fore peak. My heart beat quicker, telling me who was aboard this fair vessel as nearer and nearer we drew. Now we could distinguish the tiny figures moving about her yards, as one by one her studding sails were taken in.

Sitting in the stern sheets of my own pilot boat, I watched and watched for some sign on the ship's quarterdeck. At last a white object appeared over the rail, waving with regular motion. I took out my handkerchief and unfurled it in reply, still with faster beating heart.

"Lower away, my lads!" I cried, putting the helm to starboard.

"Ay, ay, sir," responded Willie Hercus, who had left the Clasper and was now our mate. Then down fell our sails, flapping loud in the breeze, and out went our long sweeping oars.

We crept in under the vessel's counter; a rope was thrown to us, and in a few moments I was on her quarterdeck, standing all trembling and nervous before a tall beautiful woman, whose deep-blue eyes and fair, breeze-blown hair were all that I could see--everything else was lost to me.

"Halcro!" she exclaimed, holding out her two sunburnt hands in greeting.

"Thora!" I murmured, taking her hands in mine.

"You have expected me, then?" she said, as I drew her gently to the rail to let the sailors pass.

We stood there, looking into each other's face, in which the four years that had passed since our last meeting had left their maturing touch.

"I have been expecting you these two months past," I said, looking wistfully over the sea. "There has never come a ship from Denmark but I have boarded her, hoping to see you."

"Well, you see me at last, and am I altered?"

"You are only more beautiful, Thora, more womanly. And so you are coming back to Pomona to visit us again?"

"No, not to visit you, Halcro. I am homeward bound this time. I am never going to leave old Orkney again. My schooling is over, and there is no one left in Copenhagen now to keep me there. I am going to settle down in some cottage near our dear sea cliffs, where I can see the ships passing from my garden seat and dream my life away in pleasant solitude."

"In solitude!" I stammered; then shyly asked:

"Did you not get my last letter, Thora?"

"What! the one in which you told me of Jessie's marriage to Captain Gordon, and that the dominie had retired from his school, and that you were promoted to captain, and had called your new boat the Thora? Yes, certainly, I got it."

"But there was something else I said in it, Thora--something more important to me than these things you speak of. Did you not read that part?"

Thora looked meekly down at the white planks of the deck, her cheeks growing rosy and her breath coming quick. Then turning her eyes aft towards the steering wheel, she said, crossing the deck:

"Captain Ericson, do you not think you should be attending to the piloting of this ship?"

"No," I said, following her across to the lee side, where the great mizzen sail shielded us from the view of others on board. "No; my mate, Willie Hercus, is looking after that. I am off duty today. I am here not as pilot; I have come out to welcome you home."

Then, after a long silence, during which we both looked overboard upon the dancing waves, where the porpoises rolled in play, and the gulls dipped lightly on balanced wings, I said:

"Thora, you did not answer all my letter when you wrote. You were not offended, were you, by what I said?"

"I know what you mean, Halcro," she said, resting her hand upon the rail and turning her eyes full upon me, "I was not offended, or I should not now be here. I did not answer you in writing. I have come to answer you in person."

She put her hand in mine, and added the one word:

"Yes."

And that was the answer that Thora spoke on that summer day, long ago, as we stood together on the ship that brought her over from the home of her fathers to the land in the northern seas that was more truly her own. And the ship sailed on, over the blue waters and through breezy sounds and among verdant isles; into sunlit fiords, where the sea birds flew; on, under the dark weatherbeaten cliffs and lofty rocks, where the cormorant sat perched on high. And at last, as the dusk of the evening gathered and the light of the sunset silvered the waters, down went the chain with rattling noise, and we came to an anchor in the peaceful haven of Stromness.

THE END.

Notes.

i According to the standard of value in 1843, the ingot of silver, weighing six ounces, would be worth 1 pound, 13s., 0d.

ii Peerie = little.