At the Black Rocks Part 19

As he glanced out of either of the two windows--the deep recessed windows in the kitchen--he saw a cold, angry sea broken up into little waves, each seeming to carry a white snow-flake of the size of the crest of the wave. The distant s.h.i.+ps, too, had a cold look, as if they also were snowflakes.

"A cool day," thought the light-keeper; "and the fire feels good."

While he was in the kitchen Dave was up in the watch-room, hunting in the little library for a history he meant to read, in accordance with a plan suggested by the keeper, "a little every day, and to keep at it."

Mr. Tolman had a book in his lap--"The best book in the world," he said to himself. It was his big-print Bible, and especially did he rejoice in that sense of protection, its promises give on days like this, when he heard the wind rus.h.i.+ng and storming at the window, suggestive of the wild tempests that might blow any hour.

Just this moment the keeper was not reading. He was thinking, and the Bible was the occasion of his meditation about Dave Fletcher.

"I don't see Dave reading his Bible much," he said to himself; "and I don't believe he cares very much about prayer--acts that way, at any rate. I should like to help him; but how?"

He called Dave before his mind, this brown-haired, blue-eyed boy, with his quiet manners and methods, but, as the keeper put it, "loaded with a lot of grit."

"Yes, I should like to help that boy," continued the keeper in his thoughts. "I would like to influence him to be a Christian; but how, I wonder? He is one of that kind of self-reliant chaps you feel that he had rather find out a thing himself than be told of it. He doesn't want me, I know, to tell him all the time about his duty, and yet--yet--I should like to influence him, and I wonder how?"

Of course, there was one's example first of all.

"Try to do what I can here," thought the keeper. "I might speak to him, though I don't want to run the thing into the ground. Well, I shall be guided."

The thought came to him, "Now there is a bit of a thing I can do which certainly won't do harm."

The thought was just to leave his Bible open on the kitchen table.

"Perhaps he may see a verse," thought the keeper, "and it will set him to thinking."

After that on the table would lie the keeper's Bible turned back to some impressive chapter. Dave would have been uneasy if in contact with some styles of religion, but such a kindly natured, sunny, generous, and tolerant soul as Toby Tolman he could not find disagreeable. Toby's religion was never obtrusive, never unpleasantly in the way of people; though always prominent, out in open sight, it was the prominence of the suns.h.i.+ne, of a bird's happy singing, of nature on a spring morning.

Dave felt it, but he was a silent lad over important subjects. He was different from his sister Annie. If her soul were stirred by any profound emotion, she must in some way give expression to it. Dave, though, would look very serious and continue silent. His mother, who knew him so well, said that Dave felt most when he said the least, and the hours of his greatest stillness were to her the surest signs of an intense activity within.

"Dave is fullest when he seems to be emptiest," Mrs. Fletcher would say.

Because now-a-days at the light he would often have long seasons of silence, was it any sign of mental occupation?

"I don't think I understand that boy yet," was Toby Tolman's thought.

"He is thinking about something, I know."

It was a day near the close of Dave's stay at the lighthouse that the keeper said in the morning,--"Beautiful day! Everything just as calm!

It seems as if it would stay so always, but it won't."

How the sea might rock and roar in twenty-four hours! The lighthouse was very peaceful. The morning's work was despatched promptly, and the tower was very quiet. With any rocking, roaring sea would come a change in the life of the tower. There would be hurrying feet, and the fog-signal would shriek out its sharp, piercing warning.

The flow of life in nature, though, out on the sea, up in the sky, was undisturbed all that day, and in the tower of the fog-signal the machinery stirred not, while the light breeze playing around the mouth of the fog-trumpets aroused no answering blast. It was peaceful on the sea and in the tower. And yet in the light-keeper's own bosom it seemed that afternoon as if an ocean tempest had been evoked and was suddenly raging. About three Dave, who chanced to be in the storeroom of the tower, heard a voice outside.

"There's some one down at the foot of the ladder," thought Dave. "I will see who it is."

He went to the door of the signal-tower and looked down.

"Ho! that you, Timothy? Coming back?" said Dave.

Down in a boat lightly resting on the smooth, gla.s.sy water was Toby Tolman's a.s.sistant, Timothy Waters. Dave knew that Timothy was coming back very soon, and he thought that Timothy might have concluded to antic.i.p.ate the date appointed for his return and resume work now.

"Not just yet," replied Timothy. "Get the cap'n soon as you can. I won't come up. Spry, please."

The keeper was quickly at the door.

"What's wanted, Timothy? Coming up, are you not?"

"Wish I could, cap'n, but I want to take you to town. Your--is--very--"

The sea heaved just then sufficiently to disturb the speaker's balance and also to interfere with his message. There he stood, trying to steady himself by the help of the mooring-rope and then looking up again.

"What? who?" asked the keeper.

"Why, your granddarter May, cap'n," replied Timothy. "She is very sick.

They don't know that she will live. She has been begging to see you, and if you could come a few hours I will get you back again all right afterwards."

"I will be with you right off." The keeper turned to Dave: "You heard that. It's ugly news. Now if I go, can't you light up and watch till half-past eight? I'll be back, sure. Don't worry. It will be a quiet night; no sign just yet of any change in the weather."

"Oh yes, Mr. Tolman; that is all right. You go. I would if I were you.

I will look after things. I can handle them."

"I think you can; and I shall be obleeged to you. My, my! this is sudden. Wasn't looking for May's sickness."

He was quickly in the boat with Timothy Waters; and then Dave watched the two men pulling stoutly on their oars and making quick progress landward. The boat turned the corner of a bluff projecting into the harbour and disappeared. Dave stepped back into the lighthouse, and sat down beside the kitchen stove. It was very peaceful there. The clock ticked as usual on the wall; and on the table, lying open, as if laid down a moment ago by the keeper, was his Bible. Dave glanced at the opened pages a moment. As his eyes slipped down the line of verses he noticed such a.s.surances as these:--

"He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.... Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night.... For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone."

He lingered a moment looking at these pa.s.sages, and then turned away.

"I will go upstairs," he said, "into the lantern, and make sure that everything is ready for the lighting at sunset. That's sudden about May Tolman," he began to reflect. "Why, I seem to see her going up and down these stairs the day she was here, so full of life."

He could hear her voice; he could see her black, glowing eyes, that had a peculiar fascination for Dave.

"Sorry," he said. "That's real sudden. Things do happen quick in this life sometimes."

Dave felt unusually sober that day. If he had told all his thoughts to any one, he would have confessed to a singular soberness of feeling for some time.

He had been shut up for several weeks with a man whose religion, without any pretence, any show, and any peculiarities, controlled his life, and came prominently to the surface in everything. Dave felt his sister's religious influence at home; but there were influences interfering with it and partly neutralizing it. Dave Fletcher's mother was too busy, she a.s.sured herself, to attend to religion; and Dave's father declared--also to himself--that he did not "feel the need of it." "I am as good as my neighbours; and I guess that will do," he said. He quoted in his thoughts Dave's lack of interest, saying, "There is Dave, good boy; and he takes his father's view of things."

But here at the lighthouse Dave declared that he was "cornered." Here was a simple, humble, unselfish life living in communion with his heavenly Father, bringing that presence down to that lonely tower in the sea, and filling it, and surrounding the boy who was the light-keeper's companion. No neutralizing a.s.sociations here.

"It sets me to thinking," declared Dave, as he climbed the successive stairways to the lantern the afternoon of the keeper's absence. "And May Tolman's sickness--that is sudden. Nothing is certain. Well, we must just look after matters right around us. One can't give his thoughts to all these possibilities of accident. I'll just remember that I am a keeper of a lighthouse."

Keeper of a lighthouse! The moment he uttered this thought to himself there settled down upon his shoulders a new and serious weight of responsibility. He began to realize that for several hours he must carry the burden of a keeper's duties. He must look after the fog-signal, if a dusky veil of mist should suddenly be dropped from the sky and curtain off both the sea and the land. If there should be any accident upon the sea in the neighbourhood of the lighthouse, where the keeper might be expected to give any aid, Dave must render that help. When night came, or sunset rather, he must light the lamp in the lantern, and he must watch it, and see that for the sake of the many vessels upon the sea this light burned with steady l.u.s.tre. Upon just a boy's shoulders how heavy a care seemed to be pressing down!

"I can stand it," he said, in pride and confidence. The very pressure of the responsibility aroused within him a corresponding measure of strength. However, it did not lessen the shadow of that sober thinking in which he often walked nowadays.

"I'll take that history I am reading," he said on his return from the lantern, "and get over a good number of pages to-day."

He read until supper-time, but somehow his thoughts did not seem to stay on his book. They were like birds on the telegraph wires along the railroad track--flying off and then alighting again, only to lift their wings and beat the air in another flight.