CHAPTER III.
ALONE.
The child remained motionless on the rock, with his eyes fixed--nocalling out, no appeal. Though this was unexpected by him, he spoke nota word. The same silence reigned in the vessel. No cry from the child tothe men--no farewell from the men to the child. There was on both sidesa mute acceptance of the widening distance between them. It was like aseparation of ghosts on the banks of the Styx. The child, as if nailedto the rock, which the high tide was beginning to bathe, watched thedeparting bark. It seemed as if he realized his position. What did herealize? Darkness.
A moment later the hooker gained the neck of the crook and entered it.Against the clear sky the masthead was visible, rising above the splitblocks between which the strait wound as between two walls. The truckwandered to the summit of the rocks, and appeared to run into them. Thenit was seen no more--all was over--the bark had gained the sea.
The child watched its disappearance--he was astounded but dreamy. Hisstupefaction was complicated by a sense of the dark reality ofexistence. It seemed as if there were experience in this dawning being.Did he, perchance, already exercise judgment? Experience coming tooearly constructs, sometimes, in the obscure depths of a child's mind,some dangerous balance--we know not what--in which the poor little soulweighs God.
Feeling himself innocent, he yielded. There was no complaint--theirreproachable does not reproach.
His rough expulsion drew from him no sign; he suffered a sort ofinternal stiffening. The child did not bow under this sudden blow offate, which seemed to put an end to his existence ere it had well begun;he received the thunderstroke standing.
It would have been evident to any one who could have seen hisastonishment unmixed with dejection, that in the group which abandonedhim there was nothing which loved him, nothing which he loved.
Brooding, he forgot the cold. Suddenly the wave wetted his feet--thetide was flowing; a gust passed through his hair--the north wind wasrising. He shivered. There came over him, from head to foot, the shudderof awakening.
He cast his eyes about him.
He was alone.
Up to this day there had never existed for him any other men than thosewho were now in the hooker. Those men had just stolen away.
Let us add what seems a strange thing to state. Those men, the onlyones he knew, were unknown to him.
He could not have said who they were. His childhood had been passedamong them, without his having the consciousness of being of them. Hewas in juxtaposition to them, nothing more.
He had just been--forgotten--by them.
He had no money about him, no shoes to his feet, scarcely a garment tohis body, not even a piece of bread in his pocket.
It was winter--it was night. It would be necessary to walk severalleagues before a human habitation could be reached.
He did not know where he was.
He knew nothing, unless it was that those who had come with him to thebrink of the sea had gone away without him.
He felt himself put outside the pale of life.
He felt that man failed him.
He was ten years old.
The child was in a desert, between depths where he saw the night risingand depths where he heard the waves murmur.
He stretched his little thin arms and yawned.
Then suddenly, as one who makes up his mind, bold, and throwing off hisnumbness--with the agility of a squirrel, or perhaps of an acrobat--heturned his back on the creek, and set himself to climb up the cliff. Heescaladed the path, left it, returned to it, quick and venturous. He washurrying landward, just as though he had a destination marked out;nevertheless he was going nowhere.
He hastened without an object--a fugitive before Fate.
To climb is the function of a man; to clamber is that of an animal--hedid both. As the slopes of Portland face southward, there was scarcelyany snow on the path; the intensity of cold had, however, frozen thatsnow into dust very troublesome to the walker. The child freed himselfof it. His man's jacket, which was too big for him, complicated matters,and got in his way. Now and then on an overhanging crag or in adeclivity he came upon a little ice, which caused him to slip down.Then, after hanging some moments over the precipice, he would catchhold of a dry branch or projecting stone. Once he came on a vein ofslate, which suddenly gave way under him, letting him down with it.Crumbling slate is treacherous. For some seconds the child slid like atile on a roof; he rolled to the extreme edge of the decline; a tuft ofgrass which he clutched at the right moment saved him. He was as mute insight of the abyss as he had been in sight of the men; he gatheredhimself up and re-ascended silently. The slope was steep; so he had totack in ascending. The precipice grew in the darkness; the vertical rockhad no ending. It receded before the child in the distance of itsheight. As the child ascended, so seemed the summit to ascend. While heclambered he looked up at the dark entablature placed like a barrierbetween heaven and him. At last he reached the top.
He jumped on the level ground, or rather landed, for he rose from theprecipice.
Scarcely was he on the cliff when he began to shiver. He felt in hisface that bite of the night, the north wind. The bitter north-wester wasblowing; he tightened his rough sailor's jacket about his chest.
It was a good coat, called in ship language a sou-'wester, because thatsort of stuff allows little of the south-westerly rain to penetrate.
The child, having gained the tableland, stopped, placed his feet firmlyon the frozen ground, and looked about him.
Behind him was the sea; in front the land; above, the sky--but a skywithout stars; an opaque mist masked the zenith.
On reaching the summit of the rocky wall he found himself turned towardsthe land, and looked at it attentively. It lay before him as far as thesky-line, flat, frozen, and covered with snow. Some tufts of heathershivered in the wind. No roads were visible--nothing, not even ashepherd's cot. Here and there pale spiral vortices might be seen, whichwere whirls of fine snow, snatched from the ground by the wind and blownaway. Successive undulations of ground, become suddenly misty, rolledthemselves into the horizon. The great dull plains were lost under thewhite fog. Deep silence. It spread like infinity, and was hush as thetomb.
The child turned again towards the sea.
The sea, like the land, was white--the one with snow, the other withfoam. There is nothing so melancholy as the light produced by thisdouble whiteness.
Certain lights of night are very clearly cut in their hardness; the seawas like steel, the cliff like ebony. From the height where the childwas the bay of Portland appeared almost like a geographical map, pale,in a semicircle of hills. There was something dreamlike in thatnocturnal landscape--a wan disc belted by a dark crescent. The moonsometimes has a similar appearance. From cape to cape, along the wholecoast, not a single spark indicating a hearth with a fire, not a lightedwindow, not an inhabited house, was to be seen. As in heaven, so onearth--no light. Not a lamp below, not a star above. Here and there camesudden risings in the great expanse of waters in the gulf, as the winddisarranged and wrinkled the vast sheet. The hooker was still visible inthe bay as she fled.
It was a black triangle gliding over the livid waters.
Far away the waste of waters stirred confusedly in the ominousclear-obscure of immensity. The _Matutina_ was making quick way. Sheseemed to grow smaller every minute. Nothing appears so rapid as theflight of a vessel melting into the distance of ocean.
Suddenly she lit the lantern at her prow. Probably the darkness fallinground her made those on board uneasy, and the pilot thought it necessaryto throw light on the waves. This luminous point, a spark seen fromafar, clung like a corpse light to the high and long black form. Youwould have said it was a shroud raised up and moving in the middle ofthe sea, under which some one wandered with a star in his hand.
A storm threatened in the air; the child took no account of it, but asailor would have trembled. It was that moment of preliminary anxietywhen it seems as though the elements are changing into persons
, and oneis about to witness the mysterious transfiguration of the wind into thewind-god. The sea becomes Ocean: its power reveals itself as Will: thatwhich one takes for a thing is a soul. It will become visible; hence theterror. The soul of man fears to be thus confronted with the soul ofnature.
Chaos was about to appear. The wind rolling back the fog, and making astage of the clouds behind, set the scene for that fearful drama of waveand winter which is called a Snowstorm. Vessels putting back hove insight. For some minutes past the roads had no longer been deserted.Every instant troubled barks hastening towards an anchorage appearedfrom behind the capes; some were doubling Portland Bill, the others St.Alban's Head. From afar ships were running in. It was a race for refuge.Southwards the darkness thickened, and clouds, full of night, borderedon the sea. The weight of the tempest hanging overhead made a drearylull on the waves. It certainly was no time to sail. Yet the hooker hadsailed.
She had made the south of the cape. She was already out of the gulf, andin the open sea. Suddenly there came a gust of wind. The _Matutina_,which was still clearly in sight, made all sail, as if resolved toprofit by the hurricane. It was the nor'-wester, a wind sullen andangry. Its weight was felt instantly. The hooker, caught broadside on,staggered, but recovering held her course to sea. This indicated aflight rather than a voyage, less fear of sea than of land, and greaterheed of pursuit from man than from wind.
The hooker, passing through every degree of diminution, sank into thehorizon. The little star which she carried into shadow paled. More andmore the hooker became amalgamated with the night, then disappeared.
This time for good and all.
At least the child seemed to understand it so: he ceased to look at thesea. His eyes turned back upon the plains, the wastes, the hills,towards the space where it might not be impossible to meet somethingliving.
Into this unknown he set out.