Chapter XXVII

About four days before Christmas the storm returned, and the cloudy damp, the sullen fog, the biting frost, the lowering skies, and the desultory falls of snow gave place to a renewed rage of wind. The north-eastern gale smote with undiminished force the whole of the promontory of St. Nite’s Head, and on the day when the watch of the lighthouse should have been relieved it was inaccessible through the severe fury of the lashing waters; the waves were sweeping, high and dreadful, over all the half-hidden rocks on the Leopard Ridge. This dangerous channel was one sweep of whirling foam and tossing, gloomy spray, through which it was sometimes impossible to behold the shape of the lighthouse.

Oliver Sellar had come down to the shore in the expectation of seeing Lucius brought off. Both old Joshua, who had recovered during his three weeks’ rest, and a young man, were ready to take the place of Lord Vanden in the lighthouse, though Mathews was still an invalid. But, as Oliver was told, as soon as he appeared on the stormy shore, it was, of course, fools’ talk to think of any boat putting out in weather such as this. It might be many days before they were able to reach the lighthouse.

The oldest among them prophesied weeks of continuous storm.

“He’ll be safe enough,” they said among themselves. “The lighthouse be stout. There’s provisions a-plenty there, and fresh water and coal and oil; it’s all very well equipped--the young lord thought of that himself. He’ll do well enough. It’s dreary for him though, at Christmastime, and his father waiting.”

Oliver said nothing. He remained for two days in the little inn among the cluster of wretched cottages on those precipitous rocks. He spoke to no man, but daily watched the storm on the lighthouse.

“He’s haunted,” said some; “he’s mad,” said others. But no one pitied him, though his face was now hollowed as if the heavy bones had worn away the flesh, and his hair, which had been so deep a black, save on the temples, was now frosted with white, as if ashes had been sprinkled on his head.

There could no longer be any hope for the Countess Fanny; and people, whispering among themselves--from Dr. Drayton and Mr. Spragge and their women down to the fishers and the farmers and their women--wondered if Mr. Sellar had written to her relatives abroad; what he had done about her fortune; and if he would have the funeral service soon read for her in the church, and a cenotaph put up in the churchyard or the chancel. If he showed no sign of doing this by the New Year, Mr. Spragge meant to speak to him. He no longer came to church; nor had the vicar again visited Sellar’s Mead. Ambrosia came twice a day on Sundays in her carriage and pair, decorous, self-contained, with smooth brows and set lips; what she was enduring no one knew, for she never spoke. And the servants at Sellar’s Mead were as discreet as herself.

Only the Italian maid, wailing for a priest, had come up to the village once to see, in despair, Mr. Spragge--heretic though he might be--and to cry out: “No wonder my poor mistress destroyed herself, for that man is mad; mad, I tell you; and it is not fit that we should live with him!”

The vicar had hushed her; what was she--a foreigner, an hysterical fool? No notice must be taken of what she said. He had sent her away rebuked and silenced; yet in his heart there would lurk a horrid suspicion that she had only spoken the truth. So many people were beginning to whisper fearfully, one to another, that Oliver Sellar was mad. He seemed to delight in the storm, to welcome the return of those fierce gales which had been blowing when she disappeared--gales the same as these, fierce and blustering from the north-east, smiting the coast like a clap of giant hands on the bare rocks, buffet after buffet, till even the iron-like land seemed to ring with the force of the blows; wind that sent packs of clouds hurrying like hunted creatures about the sky; but there were always other packs behind them, and others and others; so that, however fast the wind blew, the clouds came faster, and the sky was never clear of them. Solid as the greenstone cliffs were, with an impenetrable solidity, yet they seemed to shudder before the savage onslaught of the tempest, and the water round the black jags of dangerous rocks was beaten and swirled and tortured into towering columns of flying spray. Showers of stone were hurled inland, and smote the roofs and walls of the tiny cottages, nestled away as these were in a cove, and some distance from the sea.

Oliver Sellar, standing on the shore watching the guiding light, his arms folded on his breast and his greatcoat flapping round him, was drenched with spray and soaked with gusts of rain, and beaten almost into insensibility by these buffetings of the wind; but never did he give up his vigil; in all weathers he was there, up and down, now on the cliffs, now on the shore, now a little farther inland, now on another point, farther out to sea--places where it seemed he could not keep his foothold, where he could not wear his hat, but must go bare-headed or muffle his head in his scarf--now climbing out on the rocks as far as he possibly could, amidst the slimy seaweed and the swirling eddies of foam, now moving round on the rugged coast to another point, where perhaps he might have a better vantage ground, here and there, now immovable for hours, now restless and hurrying to and fro, but always with his eyes in the one direction, fixed on the one object--the lighthouse.

The fisher-folk respected him now as they had not respected him in his prosperity and sanity. He was possessed, they said; he was haunted; the demons had got him; the water-wraiths and the ghosts claimed him for their own. His soul was no longer in his own possession. In their gloomy and superstitious minds they argued that one might be a little merciful to a man who was damned; and plainly Oliver Sellar was damned--a lost soul, if ever there was one, who seemed to stand on the chasm of hell, and to bend his head down and listen to the horrible groans and sighs that rose from the smoky depths.…

“He killed her, and he knows it,” they whispered to themselves. “She loved the young lord, and he loved her. He tried to make her go back and do her duty, and that was the end of it; she drowned herself sooner than wed that man yonder.” So near the truth of it did these rude people get.

At night Oliver Sellar would come to the “Drum and Trumpet,” and sit in the dirty little parlour staring into the fire--and drink, steadily drink. Sometimes he would sit there all night, as had become his custom in his own home, keeping the fire alight, never moving save to pile on fresh coal and wood. Sometimes he would go to the small bedroom allotted to him and sleep--or endeavour to sleep. But always, with the late dawn, the bitter chill, the stormy winter dawn, he was abroad again, huddled into his greatcoat, muffled round the throat and head, and his hands thrust into his pockets--a massive, dark, portentous figure--out on to the beach, staring at the lighthouse, where the red revolving light would be still visible.

Often he was there at the exact moment that it went out, the moment when Lucius must be mounting the small stairs, going up to the lantern-room, turning it out, checking the clockwork that moved the revolving reflector. Even in the evenings, when he had abandoned his search or his vigil on the shore, he would sit at the window always and watch the beacon rising out at sea; and sometimes those who served him, or crossed the parlour, would hear him counting to himself in a low mutter: “_One--two--flash_; _one--two--flash_”--following the movement of the light. A fine light, that worked well! Seventeen miles out to sea it could be seen, they declared proudly; and this year there had been no wreck.

“They’ll spend Christmas there,” remarked the fisher-folk; and indeed, on Christmas Eve, it was apparent that there was no hope of Lucius and the boy getting off for many days yet. Even when the wind subsided--and at present there seemed no sign that it would subside immediately--there would be for several days a heavy swell of the waters, always rough here with the undercurrents, forcing its way between those hidden reefs and pitted rocks.

One night when, despite the wind, the darkness seemed thick, as if the tremendous foam and spray could not escape, but must densify the air, they heard the alarm-bell or fog-syren, sounding from the slender, dark shaft of the lighthouse tower. Accurately and precisely this bell rang,--ten seconds of ringing, thirty seconds of silence, steadily, exactly as it had rung when Lucius and the engineers had tested it in the autumn.

“The young lord does very well,” smiled the fishers with approval to each other; “he knows his business, and is good at the work; but he’ll be lonely out there, with nothing but that boy--yon poor waif from Falmouth.”

The rough man who kept the inn could not avoid saying that evening to Oliver Sellar:

“Won’t you, sir, be returning home for Christmas? ’Twill be dreary for your sister, alone there!”

Oliver deigned no response, but he gave the man a look which forbade any further questions, and effectually checked the expression of any curiosity; whatever men might venture to whisper or mutter behind his back, to his face they preserved a blank impassivity.

On Christmas day, most of the inhabitants of the little colony made their way inland to the church, and Oliver remained at the “Drum and Trumpet.” Ambrosia was at church, and, seeing the fisher-folk from the promontory there, she asked about her brother in a cool and indifferent tone; and they, embarrassed and awkward, told her what they could: that Mr. Sellar remained at the “Drum and Trumpet,” and watched the lighthouse.

Ambrosia smiled, and gave them a gift of money for their wives and children, and passed into the church with her head high, and sat in the old Earl’s pew, folding her hands in her lap, and listening to the sermon with as much fortitude as if the storm had not been beating on the granite walls of the church; as if the memorials of the dead were not hanging around her on the cold stone; as if the pavings beneath her feet did not cover coffins; and as if all love and hope were not withered in her heart. That proud, cold face, in the shadow of the black bonnet, set off by the dark shawl and pelisse, made the old clergyman falter in his sermon. It was difficult to speak of peace and goodwill with that tormented and courageous countenance before him.

She was alone at Sellar’s Mead; she had refused his invitation, and that of the Earl, to spend Christmas with them. “Any moment,” she had said, “Oliver may return, and it would not be good for him to find the house empty.”

The old Earl looked puzzled also. It was impossible to sit beside Ambrosia and not feel something of the essence of her tragedy. He had been greatly disturbed by this new behaviour on the part of Oliver--this journey down to the promontory and this vigil, watching the lighthouse. He eagerly wished that the storm would abate, the waters be quieted, and Lucius able to come ashore. He had begun to miss Lucius very keenly. Never, since he left college, had the boy been so long away. And he feared the consequences of so prolonged a watch on one of such delicate habits and nervous constitution.

Lucius was skilful and brave, cool and prudent; but the strain would be very long. And he had no companion. In his impulsive rashness he had taken no one with him but a half-witted boy, a waif from Falmouth.

The fisher-folk from the Point took ale and cakes at the vicarage, and then tramped back their six miles to their desolate homes, which they only reached when the day was already darkening down. They found that the ocean was swelling with an even more tremendous commotion. The furious waves were heaving high, even over the summit of the jagged teeth of the Leopard’s Rock. In their lashing fury they seemed to toss themselves into the low and flying clouds; and, as they curled back from the land, they seemed to reveal a frightful abyss, even the capacious bed of the ocean itself, a doomful cavern, an opening gulf. Vain and impotent seemed any human intervention before such a storm; like a miracle appeared the beamy light of the lighthouse, showing through this tempest, across these bursting seas.

“Aye,” muttered old Joshua, “the young lord should never have done it; I should have gone again. That’s no place for a delicate gentleman, a night like this! What though he does know something of the engineering? But is it not said of the Lord, ‘He holdeth the winds in His fist, and the waters in the hollows of His hands?’ Unto Him let us commend him!”

A dark, shuddering group, they stood on the shore, fascinated by the spectacle of the gale, and absorbed in staring at the light which penetrated it. They were all roused by a sharp, fierce exclamation from Oliver Sellar, who for days had not spoken to any of them, nor, indeed, opened his lips save to mutter to himself.

“What’s yonder?” he exclaimed. And they all looked where his heavy hand pointed across the boiling waters. A fiery bolt, dreadfully vivid, had darted across the sky; it was just visible through the spume and smoke of the water, and the tattered fragments of dark cloud.

“A rocket!” exclaimed two of the fishermen together. “A ship in distress!” added another grimly. “But who could put a boat out a night like this? It would be dashed to pieces before it was launched.”

“Who is sending the rocket off?” demanded Oliver Sellar.

And the fishers each returned a different answer; some said it was from the lighthouse, and that the young lord had seen a ship and was sending the rocket as an extra warning of rocks, in case the lamp was obscured in the blizzard; and others said that it was the ship itself sending the rocket off.

Even while they thus disputed another came, rending the grey with that long flash of scarlet. This stream of radiance showed its lambent blaze for but a second, and then was eclipsed; but it was followed, almost immediately, by yet another. Then again there was the universal greyness becoming every instant deeper; and soon a pitchy black in which not even the shape of the lighthouse could be distinguished, but only--and that now and then--the flashing, revolving beacon on its summit.

Again the glancing flame; and it seemed to those straining ears of the watchers that they could hear the crackle and whizz of that human explosion amid all the powerful turmoil of the gale.

“What do they say in the Book?” muttered old Joshua sullenly. “‘The heaven shall pass away with a great noise.’ It is like that to-night; never have I beheld such a tempest.”

“We can do nothing,” said another.

“But,” cried a third, “we may keep a watch, at least, in case someone or somewhat be dashed ashore--if, indeed, it be a wreck; and like enough it be!”

“Who could be dashed ashore alive on such a night as this?” asked Oliver Sellar, with a malignant look. “If any ship breaks on the Leopard’s Rock to-night, it is death to all aboard her. This shore,” he added, with an atrocious smile, “is like an antechamber to the tomb; and standing here one may feel that one peers into the very sockets of the eyes of Death.”

Cowering under the shade and shelter of the cliffs, where the jutting outlines of these afforded some protection from the gale, the hardiest of the fisherfolk watched through the dark for the recurrence of the rocket, but saw nothing more. Blind, blank, and furious was the night; nothing was visible in that inky blackness but the lantern on the lighthouse. Men recalled fearfully how their grandfathers had told them how, on just such a night as this, the warships had gone down and the dead soldiers been cast up on the beach the next morning; how, on such a night as this, the old first lighthouse had been itself swept away, and in the morning there had been no trace of it, nor was there again ever any trace. And all of them thought of the young man and the boy, shut up there on this dismal and tempestuous Christmas day.

They could do nothing, and one by one returned to their homes to talk over the terror of the storm and speculate on the meaning of those rockets, flashing like ominous meteors through the hideous gloom and darkness and noise of the night.

Oliver Sellar remained the last of all, crouching and cowering under the ledge of rock; for indeed it was almost impossible for him, strong and heavy as he was, to keep his feet in the open. There he stayed, staring out at that distant light: “_One--two--flash_; _one--two--flash_”--steady, steady through the dark!

Then he, too, left his shelter and his vigil, and, staggering across the wet stones, made his way with pain and with difficulty to the little cove where the houses lay, and so to the dreary parlour of the “Drum and Trumpet,” where he ordered the window to be unshuttered and took up his place to stare out again at the wild night and the beacon on the lighthouse.

When his supper was brought in, he asked in a peremptory tone:

“Was that a wreck?”

“Aye, sir, I should say so; but who can tell on such a night as this? Maybe we’ll know in the morning.”

“Morning,” muttered Oliver Sellar, with a shudder; “is not the morning even more detestable than the night, since it begins, instead of ending another day?”

After these words of desperate extravagance he fell again into his black and malignant silence, drinking continuously and staring out to sea at the beacon on the lighthouse.