THE APEX OF THE STORM
Bedtime came, and Miss Heppy led Lorna, with the little whale oil hand
lamp, up one flight of the spiral stairway and ushered her into the best
bedroom. It was the whitewashed cell facing the ocean.
The waves boomed with sullen roar upon the rocks, breaking, it seemed,
almost at the base of the lighthouse. Spray, as well as the sleet,
dashed against the single unshuttered window. It was sheeted with
white. But Miss Heppy drew the curtains close.
"You won't be afraid to sleep here alone, will you, child?" asked the
lightkeeper's sister. "Tobias and I are only just across the landing.
Though I guess Tobias will be up most o' the night watchin' the lamp,
and he'll likely put your young man in his bed."
"I wish you wouldn't!" sighed Lorna. "He's not my young man, whatever
else he may be. I here and now disown all part and parcel in Ralph
Endicott."
"I dunno what Miss Ida will say," the woman observed mournfully. "It'll
be a shock to her. Wal, try to sleep, deary, if the wintry winds do
blow. I guess 'twill clear, come morning. These late winter storms
never last."
She had shaken out a voluminous canton-flannel nightgown which she laid
over the foot of the bed. Now she pricked up the two round wicks of the
lamp with a pin, and after kissing the visitor left her to seek repose.
She heard a heavy step on the stair as she reached the foot of it, so
held the kitchen door open for her brother. Tobias had left Ralph to
watch the lamp while he came down on some small errand. Finding his
sister alone, the lightkeeper lingered.
"I give it as my opinion, Heppy," he said, slowly puffing on his clay
pipe, "that it was lucky we was born handsome instead o' rich."
"You speak for yourself, Tobias," rejoined his sister, with good-natured
irony. "My beauty never struck in, so's to be chronic, as ye might say.
And I could do right now with lots more money than we've got."
"You'd only put it in the Clinkerport Bank--you know you would,"
chuckled Tobias. "And the most useless dollar in the world--to the
owner I mean--is a dollar in the bank."
"You never did properly appreciate money."
"No, thanks be! Not according to your standard of appreciation, Heppy.
Money is only good for what you spend it for. A dollar in the bank that
airns ye three cents a year ain't even worth thinkin' of--let alone
talking about. You might just as well hide it under the hearthstone.
It would be less worry."
"We ain't got enough in the Clinkerport Bank to worry you none," scoffed
his sister.
"I dunno. Arad Thompson, the president of the bank _might_ run off with
the funds. Such things do happen."
"And he confined to a wheel chair for ten years now!" ejaculated Miss
Heppy. "I shall never worry over our little tad of money--save that it
is so little."
"I give it as my opinion that money don't seem to do folks all the good
in the world that it oughter. Look at these two young ones, now, Lorna
and Ralph. Their folks has got more wealth than enough. And yet Ralph
croaks as though he saw no chance at all ahead of him but trouble."
"I do allow," admitted Miss Heppy, "that Lorna thinks as little of
Ralph's money as she seems to of the boy himself. And he's a nice boy."
"And she's just the nicest gal that ever stepped in shoe-leather,"
rejoined the lightkeeper stoutly.
"They don't 'preciate each other," sighed Miss Heppy.
"Ain't it so? I give it as my opinion that if they was poor--re'l
poor--they would fall in love with each other quick enough."
"I dunno----"
"_I do,_" declared the confident lightkeeper. "It's a case o' money
being no good at all to them young ones. If Ralph had to dig clams or
clerk it in a bank for a living, and Lorny didn't have more'n two
caliker dresses a year and could not get any more--why! them two would
fall in love with each other so hard 'twould hurt. That's my opinion,
Heppy, and I give it for what it's worth."
He knocked the heeltap out of his pipe on the stove hearth. His sister
was not giving him her full attention. She raised her eyes from her
darning and listened to the storm.
The wind shrieked like a company of fiends around the tall tower. The
sleet and spray slapped viciously against the shutterless windows on the
exposed side of the structure. The woman shook her head.
"It's a terrible night, Tobias. Listen!"
From the ocean rose the voice of a blast seemingly worse than any that
had gone before. It was the apex of the storm. It drowned anything
further Tobias might have said.
The hurricane from the sea took the light tower in its arms and shook
it. The roar of it made the woman's face blanch.
As the sound poured away into the distance the two in the kitchen heard
a crash of glass--then a scream. Tobias dashed for the stairway door.
"The lamp!" he shouted.
"That ain't no lamp, Tobias," declared his sister.
When he opened the door a gale rushed in and sucked the flame out of the
top of the lamp chimney with a "plop!" The stairway seemed filled with
a whirling cyclone of wintry air.
Tobias heard the clatter of Ralph Endicott's boots on the iron treads
coming down from above. A door was banging madly on the second floor.
Lorna screamed again.
"The window of the best room's burst in, Tobias," shouted Miss Heppy.
"That poor child!"
The lightkeeper had seized his lantern, and now he started up the
stairway. But youth was quicker than vigorous old age. Ralph plunged
into the bedchamber, the door of which had been burst open by the blast
from the wrecked window.
The cowering figure of the girl at the foot of the bed, wrapped in Miss
Heppy's voluminous nightgown, was visible in the whirlwind of snow. She
sprang toward Ralph with a cry of relief, and the young man gathered her
into his arms as though she were a child.
"Oh, Ralph!"
"All right, Lorna! You're safe enough. Don't be frightened," soothed
Endicott.
For a long moment he sheltered her thus, bulwarking his own body between
her and the blast from the window. She cowered in his arms. Then:
"For love's sake!" gasped Miss Heppy at the head of the stairs.
The lantern in her brother's hand broadly illumined the two young
people. Tobias himself was enormously amused.
"Don't look as though you hated each other none to speak of," was his
tactless comment.
"Tobias!" shrieked Miss Heppy.
Lorna struggled out of Ralph's arms in a flame of rage.
"How dare you, Ralph Endicott?" she cried. "I thought you were at least
a gentleman. You go right away from here--now--this minute! I'll never
speak to you again!"
"Why, I--I----"
Ralph was too startled for the moment to be angry. The girl ran in her
bare feet to the comfort of Miss Heppy's ample person.
"Take me somewhere! Take me to your room, Miss Heppy. I never want to
see him again. How dared he?"
"Oh, sugar!" murmured the perfectly amazed lightkeeper.
But the fires of rage began to glow within Ralph Endicott's bosom now,
blown by the blast of Lorna's ingratitude. His face blazed.
"What do you mean?" he demanded. "I did not come here because I wanted
to. You yelled loud enough for help. I--I----"
"That will do!" exclaimed Lorna, her head up, as regal as any angry
little queen could be. "If you were a gentleman by nature you would
have refused to stay here in the first place, when you knew the light
was my only shelter."
"Well, of all the----"
"You can go on to Clinkerport. Telephone from the hotel to Aunt Ida and
tell her where I am and whose care I am in. If the story that you and I
remained here all night together is circulated about Harbor Bar, I'll
never forgive you, Ralph Endicott!"
"Great Scott!" shouted the young man, coming out into the hall and
closing the door of the bedroom. "You don't suppose for a moment _I_
want such a story circulated among our friends, do you? No fear!"
He started down the stairs, pulling his cap over his ears and buttoning
his automobile coat up to his throat.
"For love's sake!" again gasped the troubled spinster, who still held
the girl in her arms.
"Hold on! Hold on!" exclaimed Tobias. "'Tain't fit for to turn a dog
out into this storm."
"I don't care!" cried the hysterical girl wildly. "He never should have
let the car stall in that snowdrift. He should have gone on to
Clinkerport alone instead of making a nuisance of himself around here."
The lower door banged as punctuation to her speech.
Tobias started to descend the stair. His sister motioned him
commandingly toward the door of the best room.
"You find some way to stopper that window, Tobias," she said, "and then
go back to your lamp. You can't do no good interfering in this."
She led the sobbing girl into her own room and closed the door. The
lightkeeper shook his head.
"I give it as my opinion," he muttered, "that women folks is as hard to
understand as the Chinee language. And they begin their finicking
mighty airly."
Lorna sobbed herself into quietness in Miss Heppy's feather bed, cuddled
into the good spinster's embrace. The latter did not speak one word of
criticism. But as her passion ebbed, Lorna's conscience pricked her
sorely. She only appeared to fall asleep. In truth she remained very
wide awake listening to the bellowing of the gale.
Suppose something should happen to Ralph out in the storm? It was
hours, it seemed to her, before the wind calmed at all. She visualized
her friend staggering along the road toward Clinkerport, back of the
Clay Head cottages that were all empty at this time of year. Suppose he
was overcome by the storm, and fell there, and was drifted over by the
snow?
She lay and trembled at these thoughts; but she would not have admitted
for the world that she cared!
After all, Ralph had been her playmate for years. Why, she could not
remember when Ralph was not hanging upon the outskirts of the Nicholet
family. He was as omnipresent, as she had told him, as Aunt Ida. And
Miss Ida Nicholet had ever been Lorna's guardian.
The girl was the youngest of a goodly number of brothers and sisters;
but her mother, Mr. Nicholet's second wife, had died at Lorna's birth.
Miss Ida had come into the big house at Harbor Bar at that time and
assumed entire control--at least of Lorna.
The other girls and boys had grown up and flown the nest. Mr. Nicholet
was a busy man of studious habits who, if the housemaid had come into
his library, kissed him on his bald crown, and asked him for twenty
dollars, would have produced the money without question, said, "Yes, my
child," and considered that he had done his duty by his youngest
daughter.
Lorna had often passed him on the street and he had not known her.
But Mr. Nicholet subscribed to everything Miss Ida, his energetic
sister, said. If she declared it was the right thing for Lorna to marry
Ralph Endicott--that ended the matter as far as Mr. Nicholet was
concerned. Lorna knew it to be quite useless to appeal to him.
By and by it began to rain--torrentially. This, following the snow
which had drifted so heavily during the evening, somewhat relieved
Lorna's anxiety. The rain would flood the roads and make them
impassable, even if Ralph could repair his car; but no wanderer on foot
would be drifted over by rain.
She heard Tobias go down and up the spiral staircase more than once. He
even went out of the lighthouse on one occasion. That was soon after
Ralph had gone and while the storm was still high. But the lightkeeper
had quickly returned.
Dawn came at last, clutching at the window with wan fingers. The pale
light grew slowly. Lorna heard Tobias rattling the stove-hole covers as
he built the kitchen fire. Then the odor of coffee reached her
nostrils, and Miss Heppy awoke.