Caius saw the woman clearly now, and how she received this attack. Shestood quite still at her full stature, ceasing to speak or togesticulate, folded her arms and looked at her husband. The look in herhard, dark face, the pose of her gaunt figure, said more clearly thanany passionate words, "Hold, if you value your life! you have gone toofar; you have heaped up punishment enough for yourself already." Thehusband understood this language, vaguely, it might be, but still heunderstood enough to make him draw back, still growling and menacingwith the whip. Caius was too young to understand what the womanexpressed; he only knew strength and weakness as physical things; hismind was surging with pity for the woman and revenge against the man;yet even he gathered the knowledge that for the time the quarrel wasover, that interference was now needless. He walked on, looking back ashe went to see the farmer go away to his stables and[Pg 8] the wife stalkpast him up toward the byre that was nearest the sea.
"If he must, he must," he said to his wife angrily, gloomily, for hisown opinion in the matter had changed little; but to Caius he gave hisconsent, and all the money he needed, and did not, except at first,express his disapproval, so that Caius took the less pains to argue thematter with him.
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They went down once more where they could see nothing but the surf andthe sand-hills. The boy had walked far on; they saw his coated andcowled figure swaying with the motion of his walk on the shining beachin front. The tide was at its lowest. What the fishermen had said of itwas true: with the wind beating it up it had gone down but a third ofits rightful distance; and now the strip that it had to traverse to befull again seemed alarmingly narrow, for a great part of their journeywas still to be made. The two men got up on the cart; the boy leaped upwhen they reached him, before O'Shea could bring it to full stop forhim, and on they went. Even the pony seemed to realize that there wasneed of haste.
Then the woman whom he was thus inwardly criticising rose and cameacross the room to meet him. Her perfect gravity, her dignity ofbearing, and her gracious greeting, impressed him in spite of himself.Pictures that one finds in history and fiction of lady abbesses rosebefore his mind; it was thus that he classified her. His opinion as tothe conscious romance of her life altered, for the woman before him wasvery real, and he knew in a moment that she had seen and suffered much.Her eyes were full of suffering and of solicitude; but it did not seemto him that the suffering and solicitude were in any way connected witha personal need, for there was also peace upon her face.
Caius was successful in this, that, in proportion to the number ofpeople who were taken ill, the death-rate was only one third of what ithad been before he came. He and his fellow-workers were successful alsoin a more radical way, for about the end of January it was suddenlyobserved among them that there were no new cases of illness. The ill andthe weak gradually recovered. In a few more weeks the Angels of Deathand Disease retired from the field, and the island was not depopulated.Whether another outbreak might or might not occur they could not tell;but knowing the thoroughness of the work which they had done, they wereready to hope that the victory was complete. Gradually their workceased, for there was no one in all the happy island who needed nursingor medical attendance. Caius found[Pg 168] then how wonderfully free the placewas from all those ailments which ordinarily beset humanity.
The warm March sun, and the March winds that agitated the open sea, weredoing their work. To-day there was water appearing in places upon theice where it joined the shore, and when Caius was out with a large bandof men upon the extreme edge of the solid ice, a large fragment brokeloose. There were some hundred seals upon this bit of ice, which werebeing butchered one by one in barbarous fashion, and so busy were themen with their work that they merely looked at the[Pg 194] widening passage ofgray water and continued to kill the beasts that they had hedged roundin a murderous ring. It was the duty of those on the shore to bringboats if they were needed. The fragment on which they were could notfloat far because the sea outside was full of loose ice, and, as ithappened, when the dusk fell the chasm of water between them and theshore was not too broad to be jumped easily, for the ice, having firstmoved seaward, now moved landward with the tide. 2ff7e9595c
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