It was night. The cabin, poor, but warm and cosy, was full of a half
twilight, through which the objects of the interior were but dimly
visible by the glimmer of the embers which flickered on the hearth
and reddened the dark rafters overhead. The fisherman's nets were
hanging on the wall. Some homely pots and pans twinkled on a rough
shelf in the corner. Beside a great bed with long, falling curtains, a
mattress was extended on a couple of old benches, on which five little
children were asleep like cherubs in a nest. By the bedside, with her
forehead pressed against the counterpane, knelt the children's mother.
She was alone. Outside the cabin the black ocean, dashed with stormy
foam-flakes, moaned and murmured, and her husband was at sea.
From his boyhood he had been a fisherman. His life, as one may say, had
been a daily fight with the great waters; for every day the children
must be fed, and every day, rain, wind, or tempest, out went his boat
to fish. And while, in his four-sailed boat, he plied his solitary
task at sea, his wife at home patched the old sails, mended the nets,
looked to the hooks, or watched the little fire where the fish-soup
was boiling. As soon as the five children were asleep, she fell upon
her knees and prayed to Heaven for her husband in his struggle with
the waves and darkness. And truly such a life as his was hard. The
likeliest place for fish was a mere speck among the breakers, not more
than twice as large as his own cabin--a spot obscure, capricious,
changing on the moving desert, and yet which had to be discovered in
the fog and tempest of a winter night, by sheer skill and knowledge of
the tides and winds. And there--while the gliding waves ran past like
emerald serpents, and the gulf of darkness rolled and tossed, and the
straining rigging groaned as if in terror--there, amidst the icy seas,
he thought of his own Jenny; and Jenny, in her cottage, thought of him
with tears.
She was thinking of him then and praying. The sea-gull's harsh and
mocking cry distressed her, and the roaring of the billows on the reef
alarmed her soul. But she was wrapped in thoughts--thoughts of their
poverty. Their little children went barefooted winter and summer.
Wheat-bread they never ate; only bread of barley. Heavens! the wind
roared like the bellows of a forge, and the sea-coast echoed like an
anvil. She wept and trembled. Poor wives whose husbands are at sea!
How terrible to say, "My dear ones--father, lover, brothers, sons--are
in the tempest." But Jenny was still more unhappy. Her husband was
alone--alone without assistance on this bitter night. Her children were
too little to assist him. Poor mother! Now she says, "I wish they were
grown up to help their father." Foolish dream! In years to come, when
they are with their father in the tempest, she will say with tears, "I
wish they were but children still."