"That's good," says he. "Ye're a wonderful shot, Dannie. I heared un
go t' smash. That's good; that's _very_ good!"
* * * * *
We sat, my uncle and I, for an hour after that, I fancy, without
managing an exchange: I would address him, but he would not hear,
being sunk most despondently in his great chair by the empty, black
grate, with his eyes fixed in woe-begone musing upon the toes of his
ailing timber; and he would from time to time insinuate an irrelevant
word concerning the fishing, and, with complaint, the bewildering rise
and fall of the price of fish, but the venture upon conversation was
too far removed from the feeling of the moment to engage a reply.
Presently, however, I commanded myself sufficiently to observe him
with an understanding detached from my own bitterness; and I perceived
that he sat hopeless and in fear, as in the days when I was seven,
with his head fallen upon his breast and his eyes grown tragical,
afraid, but now in raw kind and infinite measure, of the coming of
night upon the world he sailed by day. I heard nothing from my
tutor--no creak of the floor, no step, no periodical creaking of his
rocking-chair. He had not, then, thinks I, cast off his clothes; he
had not gone to reading for holy orders, as was, at intervals, his
custom--he had thrown himself on his bed. But I neither cared nor
wondered: I caught sight of my uncle's face again--half amazed, wholly
despondent, but yet with a little glint of incredulous delight
playing, in brief flashes, upon it--and I could think of nothing else,
not even of Judith, in her agony of mysterious shame upon the Whisper
Cove road, nor of her disquieting absence from the house, nor of the
rising wind, nor of the drear world I must courageously face when I
should awake from that night's sleep.