"The very last, zur! They do say 'tis St. Johns. But, sure, zur, they
must be something beyond. What do it be?" After a silence, he
continued, speaking wistfully, "What's the last harbour in all the
whole world, zur? Doesn't you know?"
* * * * *
It had been a raw day--gray and gusty, with the wind breaking over the
island from a foggy sea: a sullen day. All day long there had been no
rest from the deep harsh growl of the breakers. We were at tea in Aunt
Amanda's cottage; the table was spread with dried caplin, bread and
butter, and tea, for Aunt Amanda, the Scotsman who was of the harbour,
and me. The harbour water was fretting under the windows as the swift
gusts whipped over it; and beyond the narrows, where the sea was
tumbling, the dusk was closing over the frothy waves. Out there a punt
was reeling in from the Mad Mull fishing grounds; its brown sail was
like a leaf driven by the wind. I saw the boat dart through the
narrows to the sheltered water, and I sighed in sympathy with the man
who was then furling his wet and fluttering sail, for I, too, had
experienced the relief of sweeping from that waste of grasping waves
to the sanctuary of the harbour.
"Do you think of the sea as a friend?" I asked Aunt Amanda.
She was a gray, stern woman, over whose face, however, a tender smile
was used to flitting, the light lingered last in her faded eyes--the
daughter, wife, and mother of punt fishermen. So she had dealt hand to
hand with the sea since that night, long ago, when, as a wee maid, she
first could reach the splitting-table by standing on a bucket. As a
child she had tripped up the path to Lookout Head, to watch her father
beat in from the grounds; as a maiden, she had courted when the
moonlight was falling upon the ripples of Lower Harbour, and the punt
was heaving to the spent swell of the open; as a woman she had kept
watch on the moods of the sea, which had possessed itself of her hours
of toil and leisure. In the end--may the day be long in coming--she
will be taken to the little graveyard under the Lookout in a skiff.
Now, at my suggestion, she dropped her eyes to her apron, which she
smoothed in an absent way. She seemed to search her life--all the
terror, toil, and glory of it--for the answer. She was not of a kind
to make light replies, and I knew that the word to come would be of
vast significance.
"It do seem to me," she said, turning her eyes to the darkening water,
"that the say is hungry for the lives o' men."
"Tut, woman!" cried the old Scotsman, his eyes all a-sparkle. "'Tis a
libel on the sea. Why wull ye speak such trash to a stranger? Have ye
never heard, sir, what the poet says?"
"Well," I began to stammer.
"Aye, man," said he, "they all babble about it. But have ye never
read,
"'O, who can tell, save he whose heart hath tried,
And danced in triumph o'er the waters wide,
The exulting sense, the pulse's maddening play,
That thrills the wanderer of that trackless way?'"
With that, the sentimental old fellow struck an attitude. His head
was thrown back; his eyes were flashing; his arm was rigid, and
pointing straight through the window to that patch of white, far off
in the gathering dark, where the sea lay raging. It ever took a poet
to carry that old Scotsman off his feet--to sweep him to some high,
cloudy place, where the things of life rearranged and decked
themselves out to please his fancy. I confess, too, that his
enthusiasm rekindled, for a moment, my third-reader interest in "a wet
sheet and a flowing sea" and "a wind that follows fast." We have all
loved well the sea of our fancy.
"Grand, woman!" he exclaimed, turning to Aunt Amanda, and still
a-tremble. "Splendid!"
Aunt Amanda fixed him with her gray eye. "I don't know," she said,
softly. "But I know that the say took me father from me when I was a
wee maid."
The Scotsman bent his head over his plate, lower and lower still. His
fervour departed, and his face, when he looked up, was full of
sympathy. Of a sudden my ears hearkened again to the growling
breakers, and to the wind, as it ran past, leaping from sea to
wilderness; and my spirit felt the coming of the dark.
[Footnote 4: A scolding.]
[Footnote 5: Some miles distant.]
[Footnote 6: Sealing.]