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On Monday night there had been a thunderstorm; and he had slipped out, unobserved, into the roaring blackness of the moor, to lie bareheaded on the heather in a torrent of rain. Then had come Tuesday, soft and cool and silver-grey, with tender shadows over land and sea, after the turbulent glories of the lightning god. Surely there was never any world so beautiful, or any boy so happy, so splendidly alive.
But the divinest day was Wednesday. From the fire-opal of the sunrise to the cloudy amethyst of twilight, it was a day of jewels; a day of sapphire sea and diamond spray, of skylarks singing in far blue heights and sunbeams flaming on the yellow gorse; a day of peace on earth and goodwill — even — toward men. One could not hate uncle himself on such a day.
Jack was up with the dawn and on the beach before sunrise. It was low water, and he scrambled out on to the long, jagged reef which had caused so many wrecks that the precipice above it was called "Deadman's Cliff." When he was tired of slipping about on the tangle and cutting his feet with the sharp points of barnacles, he lay down beside a shallow rock pool and looked into the sunlit water. It was full of brilliant anemones, green and pink and orange, open wide and holding up hundreds of painted arms. In one corner was a fairy forest of zoophytes, with a sea-snail trying earnestly to force a passage through.
Suddenly, behind a little clump of seaweed, there was a flash of prismatic colour, and silken ripples passed over the surface of the pool. He lay still, watching. Presently a tiny fish, some two inches long, slipped out through the sea-weed and began to swim round and round the pool, glittering in pink and silver. He plunged his hand into the water with a swift, dexterous movement, and caught the fish.
He lifted the little creature and held it in the sunshine, watching the flashing colours pass and change along its sides as it plunged and struggled in his hand. Then suddenly he saw how beautiful it was, and put it gently back into the water, and let it dart away. One had no right to interfere with a thing whose body was made all of rainbows.
His hand was still lying in the water, and he glanced down at it carelessly. There were no rainbows on it; but it was beautiful; more beautiful even than the fish. He opened and shut it under the water; and watched the working of the muscles, and the strong, smooth curve of the wrist. Yes, it was beautiful, and it was a part of him.
That afternoon was again a half-holiday. Billy Greggs had suggested that they should go fishing, as Saturday's expedition had not come off; but Jack refused; he wanted to be quite alone, and clamber on the rocks and look down through deep fissures at the ebbing tide.
Starting off after early di
"Hullo, Moll!" he said cheerfully as he passed.
There was no answer, and he saw her shoulders shake a little; she was crying. He turned back.
"Why, what's wrong? Uncle been nagging again?"
She lifted up a tear-stained face.
"I'm to stop in... all the afternoon! And I did want to go and take Daisy to bathe: Dr. Jenkins ordered her sea-baths!"
Daisy, the broken-nosed doll lying on the grass beside her, was too far gone for any sea-baths to help, or, for that matter, to injure; but Molly could scarcely be expected to realise that.
"It's a jolly shame!" said Jack indignantly; he had been kept in so often himself that he could feel for her. "Poor old girl! What had you been doing?"
The question brought a burst of tears.
"I hadn't done anything! I wouldn't mind if I'd been naughty, but I hadn't! It's only because Mary A
"But you don't go out with Mary A
"Emma's away from home, and Janey Scott couldn't come. I can't help that! If I'd been naughty it would have been just the same. It's not fair."
Jack's forehead contracted; this was an echo of his own grievance. Either things should be arranged according to convenience, and there should be no rewards and punishments at all, or people should be punished only when they were to blame. Uncle, and, apparently, uncle's God, had a very elaborate system for dealing with offenders according to their deserts; but the practical result of it seemed always to be that, if you were unlucky, you were punished for your misfortunes. He glanced at the sunlit cliffs with a sigh; he had been counting so on a perfect holiday alone.
"Don't cry, old girl," he said. "Let's go and ask Aunt Sarah whether you may come with me."
Mr. Raymond, fortunately, was out; and Aunt Sarah, though a little surprised at so unusual a request from Jack, who was generally the most unsociable of boys, made no difficulties; so the two children went down the steep lane together, Jack a little sobered and trying not to feel disappointed, Molly trotting beside him, radiant with happiness.
In ten minutes he had forgotten all about his disappointment. More delightful even than the flashing water itself was Molly's joy in it. With amazement he discovered that this little creature, whom he had always looked down upon, possessed, at nine years old, a sense of beauty to which he, with all his superiority of a big boy, had only now awaked. She hugged herself with ecstasy at the sight of the green waves dashing up between wet rocks and flinging showers of bright spray into the sunlight. He took her to a favourite spot of his; a narrow rock platform on which one could kneel beside a hole in the granite, and look through into a cavern far below where the water foamed and thundered. As he knelt with his arm about her, holding her carefully so that she should not fall, he felt the little body quiver against his side, and drew her back from the edge of the hole.
"Don't be frightened! I won't let you fall."
Then he saw that it was not fear which made her tremble. Her eyes were big and shining as she looked up at him.
"Jack," she said, "do you think God lives down there?"
When the tide ebbed he took her down to the reef and showed her wonderful things. They fed anemones with scraps of dead limpets tied with strands of Molly's hair, which she tugged out in the recklessness of her excitement; and drew the bait up again, half-devoured, to see the anemone "turn sulky" and shrink into a shapeless lump of jelly. They undressed Daisy and bathed her solemnly, and dried her with grubby pocket-handkerchiefs, and plastered her broken nose with slimy sea-weed; oh, if the Gang had seen its captain playing with his sister's doll! They caught a shrimp, and mimicked his hideous face, and let him go again. At last they sat down side by side to eat their cherries, their naked feet in a rock pool.
Molly threw a cherry stone into the pool; and presently Jack heard her telling a story to herself as she leaned over looking down into the water; she had quite got over her shyness with him now.
"...So the cherry tree grew up in the sea, and was a sea cherry tree; and there were sea cherries all over it... And one day the shrimp came by and saw the sea cherries, and he thought: 'I must take some of those home for my baby shrimps'..."
"Molly," said Jack suddenly, "do you ever tell stories to Aunt Sarah? No, I don't mean fibs — of course everybody tells fibs; I mean stories about shrimps, and cherries, and things?"
She lookdd round, shocked at such a question.
"Why, no!"
Jack was quite abashed.
"Oh, wel," he said apologetically, "I couldn't know, you see. I thought, perhaps, as you are good, ahd she likes you..."
"It's the easiest way," she answered seriously, "if you're good, they let you alone."