Then half the village would be gathered on the beach, with the men ready
to risk their lives for ours, and in no wise wishing for the ship to be
wrecked; yet anxious not to lose their chance of booty, if Providence
should rule that wrecked she must be. And I knew Ratsey would be there,
and Damen, Tewkesbury, and Laver, and like enough Parson Glennie, and
perhaps--and at that perhaps, my thoughts came back to where we were,
for I heard Elzevir speaking to me:
'Look,' he said, 'there's a light!'
'Twas but the faintest twinkle, or not even that; only something that
told there was a light behind drift and darkness. It grew clearer as we
looked at it, and again was lost in the mirk, and then Elzevir said,
'Maskew's Match!'
It was a long-forgotten name that came to me from so far off, down such
long alleys of the memory, that I had, as it were, to grope and grapple
with it to know what it should mean. Then it all came back, and I was a
boy again on the trawler, creeping shorewards in the light breeze of an
August night, and watching that friendly twinkle from the Manor woods
above the village. Had she not promised she would keep that lamp alight
to guide all sailors every night till I came back again; was she not
waiting still for me, was I not coming back to her now? But what a coming
back! No more a boy, not on an August night, but broken, branded convict
in the November gale! 'Twas well, indeed, there was between us that white
fringe of death, that she might never see what I had fallen to.
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