At breakfast Joe Viney said:--
"I was lobsterin' this morning."
"It must have been the thud of your oars that we heard when we woke."
"Mos' likely,--I was down there at the end of the island, hauling in the
pots. It's goin' to be a greasy day. But there's wind comin'."
They could hear the long call of a steamer's whistle and the wail of the
fog-horn beyond the next island. The little white house was swathed in the
sea mist.
"Better take the steamer at the Neck, if you're going to the city," Mrs.
Viney suggested. "It'll be cold and damp sailing this morning."
"Never!" Margaret protested.
Mrs. Viney looked at Margaret pityingly. That a woman from the city should
care to come to this forlorn, lonesome spot, "when the summer folks had
gone," and sleep out of doors on fir boughs, and go off in a messy
sail-boat in a fog, when there was a clean, fast steamer that would take
her in an hour to the city--it was a mystery. As she packed some pieces of
soggy bread, a little meat, and still soggier cake into a box for their
luncheon she shook her head, protesting:--
"You'll spoil that hat o' yourn. It wasn't meant for sailin'."
"No, it wasn't; that's true!" She took off the flower-bedecked hat with its
filmy veiling. "Would you like it? I shall find a cap in the boat."
'Clearly,' thought Mrs. Viney, 'the woman is crazy;' but she accepted the
hat. Afterwards she said to her husband:--
"I can't make them two out. She ain't young, and she ain't exactly old, and
she ain't pretty,--well, she's got the best of the bargain, a little wisp
like her." For, womanlike, she admired Falkner in his sweater and flannels,
strong and male, with a dark coat of tan on his face.
Viney accompanied them to the boat, waddling across the field, his hands in
the armholes of his vest. He said little, but as he shoved them off in
their tender, he observed:--
"It's the sort of day you could get lost in mighty easy."
"Oh," Falkner called back cheerily, "I guess I know my way."
"Well, I guess you _do_!"
* * * * *
As Viney had said, the wind came through the fog, driving the boat in
unseen fashion, while the sail hung almost limp. There was a little eddy of
oily water at the stern; they were slipping, sliding through the fog-bank,
back to the earth.
"Back to life," Falkner hummed, "back; back, to the land, to the world!"
The fog clung in Margaret's hair, and dimmed her eyes. She bared her arms
to feel the cool touch of it on her skin. Clean things, like the sun
yesterday, the resinous firs, the salty fog,--clean elemental things,--how
she loved them!
"And suppose," Falkner suggested, "I should lose my way in this nest of
reefs and islands and we got shipwrecked or carried out to sea?"
"I should hear Ned calling through the fog." A simple answer, but withal
enough. Their hour, which they had set themselves, was past. And lying here
in the impalpable mist, slipping towards the hidden port, she was filled
with ineffable content....
"You are still radiant!" Falkner said wonderingly.
"It can't fade--never wholly! I cherish it." She drew her arms close about
her. "Sacred things never utterly die!"
They had found it, they had lived it, they knew--what the unspiritual and
carnal millions that clutter God's earth may never know--ecstasy, the
secret behind the stars, beyond the verge of the sea, in the great lunar
spaces of spirit.
* * * * *
On they glided through the thoroughfares, around island points, across
reaches of the sea, sweeping onward now with an audible gurgle in their
wake, the sails bellying forward; veering this way, falling off there, as
the impassive man touched the tiller, obeying an instinct, seeing into the
dark beyond. Now a bit of cliff loomed in the fog, again a shingled roof or
a cluster of firs, and the whistling buoy at the harbor's mouth began to
bellow sadly,--reminders all of the shell of that world towards which they
sailed. And at last the harbor, with its echoing bells and fog-whistles,
the protesting shrieks of its man-machines; suddenly the colossal hull of a
schooner at anchor. Then the ghostly outlines of the huddled shipping, the
city roofs, the steeples, the shriek of engines in the freight yards--they
touched the earth! It had ended. The noise of living reverberated in their
ears.
Margaret rose with a sigh, and looked back through the closing curtain of
fog to an island headland misty and vague.
"My heaven--oh, my heaven! our haven, my master!"
Like two newly wakened beings, stunned by the light and sound around them,
they stumbled over the wharf. A large sailing vessel was loading there for
its voyage,--a Portuguese ship bound for Demerara, so the black sailor said
whom Falkner questioned. With a last look at its tall masts they took their
way into the city and so to the station.
Here was the same crowd coming from the trains,--the little human motes
pushing hither and thither, hurrying from train to train, dashing,
dawdling, loitering. Were they the same motes as two days before? Were they
always the same,--marionettes wound to perform the clamorous motions of
life? Or were they men and women like themselves, with their own great
secrets in their hearts? Above all, the secret that transforms! Had these
others, too, gone into the great high places?
They walked to the bridge while they waited for the Bedmouth train. Far
down the harbor rose the tall masts of the Portuguese ship.
"Bound for Demerara," murmured Falkner, with a smile; "we might be sailing
for the Windward Islands?"
"No," Margaret smiled back; "we love too much for that,--you and I."