Read Ebook: Pat the Lighthouse Boy by Everett Green Evelyn

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 484 lines and 45645 words, and 10 pages

Illustrator: W. T. Smedley

AN IDYL OF THE EAST SIDE

In the matter of raising canary-birds--at once strong of body and of note, tamed to associate with humanity on rarely friendly terms, and taught to sing with a sweetness nothing short of heavenly--Andreas Stoffel was second to none. And this was not by any means surprising, for he had been born close by the small old town of Andreasberg: which stands barely within the verge of the Black Forest, on the southern declivity of the Harz--and which, while famous for its mines, is renowned above all other cities for the excellence of the bird songsters which there and thereabouts are raised.

They had sung him awake many and many a bright summer morning; and one of his tenderest memories of the time when he was a very little boy--and was put to bed, as little boys should be, at sundown--was of their faint, irregular, sleepy-headed chirpings and twitterings as they settled themselves to slumber on their perches for the night.

And when the time came that Andreas, grown to man's estate, being one-and-twenty years old, but not to man's strength, for he was small of stature and frail, was left lonely in the world--the good father killed by a rock-fall in the mines, and the dear mother thereafter pining away from earth, and so to the heaven that gave her husband back to her--it was his house-mates the birds who did their best to cheer him with their songs. And presently, as it seemed to him, these songs began to tell of new happiness in a new home far away across the mountains and beyond the sea--in that distant America where already his father's brother dwelt, and whereof he had heard wonderful stories of splendors and of riches incalculable all his life long. Indeed, the adventurous uncle had prospered amazingly in the twenty years of his American exile: rising, in due course, from the position of a young man of most promiscuous all work in a delicatessen shop in New York to the position of owner of the business, shop and all.

To go to a land where such things as this were possible seemed to Andreas most wise; and to be near his uncle, and the aunt and cousins whom he had never seen, his sole remaining kin, held out to him a pleasant promise of cheer and comfort in his loneliness.

But, in very truth, the sweet burden of the song of his birds was not born of thoughts of mere commonplace family affection and commonplace worldly wealth. Far more precious than these was the motive of the music that Andreas listened to and understood, and yet scarcely would acknowledge, even to himself; for in America it was that Christine now had her home--and that which set his heartstrings a-thrilling, as he listened to the song of his birds, was the deep, pure melody of love.

They had been children together, he and Christine, their homes side by side on the flanks of the Andreasberg; and when, three years before, she had gone with her father and her mother on the long journey westward, the heart of Andreas Stoffel had gone with her, and only his body was left behind among the mountains of the Harz. And Christine had dulled to him a little the keen edge of the sorrow of their parting by admitting that she left her own heart in the place of the heart that she bore away.

Thus it fell out that even in the time of his long journey his birds still sang to him; and his fellow-travellers by land and sea regarded curiously this slim, pale youth, who shyly kept apart from human converse and communed with his companions the birds. And so lovingly well did Andreas care for his little feathered friends that not one died throughout the whole long passage; and as the ship came up the beautiful bay of New York on a sunny May morning, while Andreas stood on the deck with his cages about him, very blithely and sweetly did the birds sing their hopeful song of greeting to the New World.

But it was a false song of hope, after all. Hearts were fickle thirty years ago, even as hearts are fickle to-day; and the first news that Andreas heard when he was come to his uncle's home was that Christine had been a twelvemonth married--in very complete forgetfulness of all her fine words about the heart left behind her, and of all her fine promises that she would be true!

That there be such things as broken hearts is an open question. Yet when this news came suddenly to Andreas a keen agony of pain went through his heart as though it were really breaking; and with his hands pressed tightly against his breast, and with a face as pale as death itself, he fell to the floor. He would have died then very willingly; and it was very unwillingly--the fierce pain leaving him as suddenly as it had come--that he returned to life. Whatever may be said for or against the probability of broken hearts, there can be no question as to the verity of broken lives. That day, assuredly, the life of Andreas Stoffel was broken, and it never wholly mended again. For a while even the song of his birds lost all its sweetness, and seemed to him but a discordant sound.

Yet even a broken life, until it be snuffed out entirely, must battle in the world for standing-room. Luckily for Andreas, there was no need for him to question how his own particular battle should be made. The shape in which his little store of worldly wealth was cast obviously determined the lines on which he should seek maintenance. It was plain that by the rearing and the selling of canary-birds he must gain support until the time should come when he might find release from this earth, where love so soon grows false and cold.

The rich uncle, who was a kind-hearted man, gave his help in the matter of finding a shop wherein the canary-bird business might be advantageously carried on, and gave also the benefit of his commercial wisdom and knowledge of American ways. And so, with no great difficulty, Andreas was soon established in a snug little place of his own on the East Side; where the friendly German speech sounded almost constantly in his ears, and where the friendly German customs obtained almost as completely as in his own dear German home. But, after all, the change was a dismal one. As his unaccustomed nose was assailed by the rank oil-vapors blown across from Hunter's Point he longed regretfully for the fresh, aromatic air that the south winds swept up and over his old home from the pines of the Schwarz-wald; and the contrast was a sorry one between a home on the slopes of the Harz Mountains and a home in Avenue B.

Yet had these been his only sorrows, and had he borne them--as he had hoped to bear them--with Christine, his lot would have been anything but hard. It was the deep heart-wound that he had suffered that made his life for many a year a very dreary one; too dreary for him to find much pleasure even in the singing of his birds. Now and again he met Christine. At their first meeting--in his uncle's fine parlor over the fine delicatessen shop, one Sunday afternoon--she was, as she well might be, confused in her speech and very shamefaced in her ways. Her husband was with her, quite a prosperous person, so Andreas was told, who had built up a great business in the pork and sausage line. He was a loud-voiced, merry man; and he aired his wit freely, though evidently with no intent to be unkind, upon the lover out of whose lucklessness his own luck had come. Even as pretty a girl as Christine could not have more than one husband at a time, said this big Conrad, with great good-humor; and so, since they could not both marry her, Andreas would do well to stop crying over spilled milk. They all would be very good friends, he added, and Andreas would be godfather to the first child. He put out his big hand as he made this proffer of friendship; and although Andreas could not refuse to clasp it, there was not, in truth, any great store of friendliness for Christine's loud-voiced husband in his heart. So soon as this was possible, he was glad to get away from the merry Sunday afternoon gathering in his uncle's fine parlor to the more sympathetic society of his birds. Yet there did not seem to him much music in the singing of his birds that day.

Christine was vastly proud of her big, rosy-faced, noisy husband, whose sausage-making greatly prospered, and to whom the American dollars rolled in bravely. But even in these days of her good-luck she sometimes found herself thinking--when Conrad's rough love-making was still further roughened, and his noisiness greatly increased, by too free draughts of heady German beer--of the gentler ways and constant tenderness of her earlier lover, whose love, with her own promise to be true to it, she had so lightly cast aside. Thoughts of this sort, it is true, did not often trouble her, but now and then they gave her a little heart-pang; and the pang would be intensified, sometimes, as the thought also would come to her that perhaps it was because she had broken her plighted troth that her many prayers to become a mother remained unanswered.

As time went on, Christine's sorrows came to be of a more instant sort. Her too jolly husband's fondness for heady beer grew upon him, and with its increase came a decrease in the success that until then had been attendent upon his sausage-making. His business fell away from him by degrees into soberer and steadier hands, which had the effect of making him take to stronger drinks than beer in order that he might the more effectually forget his troubles. He lost his merriness, and somewhat of his loudness, and became sullen; and the wolf always was shrewdly near the door. Thus, in a very bad way indeed, things went on for half a dozen years; then the big Conrad, what with drink and worry, fell ill--so ill, that for a long while he lay close to the open jaws of Death.

No one ever knew--though several people quite accurately guessed--why the wolf did not fairly get into the house during that dismal time. It is certain that when Conrad arose from his bed at last, a thin remnant of his former bigness, there were few high-priced birds left in Andreas Stoffel's little shop, where there had been a score or more when his sickness began. And, possibly, it was something more than a mere coincidence that nearly all of the few which remained were sold about the time that Conrad started again, in a very humble way, his business of sausage-making.

But if Andreas did thus sacrifice his birds for Christine's good, he did not grudge the sacrifice; for upon the big Conrad poverty and sickness had exercised a chastening and most wholesome influence. He got up out of his bed a changed man; and the change, morally at least, was greatly for the better. Physically the result was less salutary; indeed, he never quite recovered from his sharp attack; and three or four years later, just as his business was getting into good shape again, he sickened suddenly, and then promptly paid to nature the debt that all men owe, and that his partial return to health had but a little time delayed.

But Christine was not left desolate in the world, for in the last year of her husband's life the strong yearnid to wake up to see the circle of flashing light which it cast around upon the dark heaving mass of waters. The child was fascinated by the thought of the great lamp's lonely vigil over the wide empty sea long before he was able to understand what it was that it was doing.

The first step in the child's convalescence which seemed to mark the era of "getting better," was when he was able to be dressed and to go into the other room for his meals. The base of the lighthouse was divided into several queer-shaped rooms. There was the sleeping-room, in which the child had hitherto spent all his time; and opening from that was the kitchen or living room, in which he was used to hear his mother bustling about as he lay in bed. There were also, as he presently found out, other smaller and darker chambers. One of these was appropriated to the use of the keeper's assistant, whilst others contained the stores for the lamp and its caretakers, of which mention has been made before. It was quite a surprise to Pat to learn that he and his parents were not the only occupants of the lighthouse. He had never heard any strange voice from the inner room all the time he had been lying in bed, and so he was very much astonished the first day he sat up to supper, to see a heavy-looking dark-browed man come slouching in, and taking his seat without a word of explanation or apology. The child looked wonderingly at his mother.

"That is Jim," she said; "Jim helps daddy with the lamp. They take it in turns to watch. Jim, this is our little boy, Pat--him as has been so ill, you know. I have told you about him often."

Pat looked across the table and nodded, but Jim said nothing, and scarcely appeared to hear himself addressed. He took his food in perfect silence, and as soon as he had finished he got up and went out, and they heard him going heavily up the winding staircase towards the lantern house.

"Can't he talk?" asked Pat wonderingly. "Is he dumb, do you think?" Eileen smiled, and shook her head at the question.

"Nay, he can speak. He has a tongue, but he is wonderful loth to use it. I suppose it is the life here as has made him so quiet. Surly Jim is what folks call him. He has been with several keepers, but none has had a good word for him, save that he does his work well and can be trusted with the lamp. He won't be keeper, though they did offer him the place. But he stays on year after year when nobody else will. He does all his work well, and is very clean and neat; but he scarce opens his lips, save in the way of business, from one year's end to the other."

This seemed so very strange to Pat that he sat for some time turning it over in his mind. He thought when he had time he would try and get Surly Jim to talk to him; but at present there were many other things to think of, and the child's head was crowded with new ideas and questions.

What a fascinating place the lighthouse was! As he grew stronger, he began to explore it from end to end, and found new wonders every hour of the day.

There was the little door leading out to the rocks on which the place was built, and the flight of slippery steps which led down to the tiny creek where the boat lay moored. There were chains for hauling up the boat in rough weather on to a ledge, where it would not be likely to be swept away, save perhaps in the very worst weather; and at low tide there was a wonderful mass of rock uncovered by the sea, where he could wander about and pick up untold treasures, such as he had never seen or dreamed of before. And his mother was not afraid to let him wander about here. She had grown up herself on the wild coast, and had no fear of the slippery rocks and the plashing waves. Pat was only instructed to take off shoes and stockings before trying to scramble about them, and very soon he grew so sure-footed and fearless that neither parent was afraid for him. Moreover, he was growing brown and healthy-looking, and stronger than he had ever been in his life before; and though he might not be very robust for some time to come, he was gaining every day, and they were glad and thankful to see it.

Oh, that wide, wild, beautiful sea! How Pat came to love it! It was at once a friend and playmate and a deep unspeakable mystery. He was never tired of watching its wild play over the rocks, or of sitting listening to its deep strange voice, as it laughed or shouted in its wild wonderful strength. He would sit with his face towards the west as the sun was going down, and watch whilst the great blazing ball dipped lower and lower, till it sank, sank, sank, right into the sea itself. And then as the sea opened its mouth and swallowed it up, it seemed all dyed crimson and gold, as though it had caught some of the colour from the prisoner it had taken.

The child would watch with awe this daily mystery, and when he found that every morning the sun came up again out of the sea, but in quite a different place, he was awed and perplexed past the power of speech. It never occurred to him to ask questions even of his mother about this daily wonder; but he watched it with unfailing interest, and seemed to drink in new thoughts every time it happened. He was more and more sure that his new home was very like heaven--not so beautiful as the real heaven, because Jesus would be there to make the light of it: but like it in some things--in its peace and beauty and wonderful calm. Pat had been so near to the gates of death that his mind naturally turned to thoughts like this. He was still not strong enough to play more than a few hours every day, and the rest of his time would be spent sitting on the rocks or at the window watching the sea, and thinking about it, until his face took a new expression, as though some of the sunshine and the clearness of the blue sea had got into them and had taken up an abode there.

Very often he would carry out his little Testament to his favourite nooks in the rocks, and find some of the places where he loved to read. He was particularly fond of the chapter about the "sea of glass mingled with fire," because he was so sure it must be just like his own sea at sunset time; and there were other places he was fond of too, because they always set him thinking and dreaming, and chimed in with all his new ideas. He did not talk much about his thoughts; when he went in to his mother he would chatter to her of his play and of the live things he had seen in the pools. To his father he would ask questions about the lamp, and how it kept awake all the night through--whether it never went to sleep by accident; for to him that lamp was like a living creature. He had only seen it once, because the climb up the spiral stairs turned him queer and giddy, and his parents had bidden him wait till he was stronger before he tried again. But that one visit had been enough to excite him strangely, and he always thought with awe of the great revolving light going round and round the whole night through. He was never tired of hearing about it and asking questions; but of his own strange thoughts, when he was all alone with the sea and the sunshine, he said nothing. That was his own secret--perhaps because he lacked words in which to express himself. And the new, strange, beautiful life began for little Pat upon the isolated reef which supported Lone Rock Lighthouse.

One night, contrary to his usual habit, Pat could not sleep. He had been to sleep for some hours during the early part of the night, but now he was wide awake, and he did not feel like going to sleep any more. He sat up in bed, and looked round him in the moonlight. There were his father and mother, both sleeping calmly and quietly. If father was in bed, Jim must be up in the lighthouse, watching to see the big lamp did not "go to sleep by accident," as the child phrased it in his own mind. He was suddenly taken with a vivid curiosity to go to that lighted chamber himself. He had only been there by day as yet. He wondered what it would look like at night; and almost before he knew what he was doing, he had slipped out of bed, and was putting on his clothes. He did not want to disturb his father, who would by-and-by have to get up and take his own watch in the tower, as the child called it in his thoughts, so he moved softly about, and presently found himself creeping up the dim staircase that was lighted at intervals by small lamps placed in niches in the wall.

It made him rather breathless to mount so many stairs, but curiosity and a love of adventure led him on, and presently he found himself within the wonderful chamber he had visited before, only that now the great bright lamp with its myriad wicks and wonderful reflectors was alight, and slowly moving round and round, so that at one time it showed a red eye to those out at sea in great ships, at another a green, and again a pure white light, as white as crystal.

The child stood gazing at the wonderful mechanism without speaking a word. He was trying to see how it moved, and by what power the great reflectors moved round and round. Of course he could not understand, and he quickly came to the conclusion that the thing was some great living monster, and that it had to be watched all the night through lest it went to sleep, or refused to do its part properly. He wondered, with a thrill of nervous terror, whether it would resent his intrusion into its special domain. Standing as he did in the full glare of the light, he could not hope to escape observation, and he looked about him as if for a hiding-place in case of attack.

And then his eye fell upon the figure of the solitary watcher--a bent bowed figure, in a slouching and indifferent attitude, now quite familiar to the child, although he and the individual who owned that rough exterior had never as yet exchanged a single word.

Pat was not a shy child as a rule, but he had always stood in awe of "Surly Jim." He could eat better and chatter more freely when the man was not present at table. He shrank a little into himself always when Jim entered the living room. It was not often that he did this, save when called to meals, for when not on duty, he was either sleeping in his own room, or sitting in the boat smoking a short black pipe, and Pat had never attempted to approach him at these times. Now he was nearer to him than he had ever been, except at table, and yet the man appeared to take no manner of notice of his approach. He sat with his elbows on his knees, and his head in his hands, and did not seem to look up at the child's cautious approach. Pat felt certain he had been seen, but this indifference seemed a little uncanny. He drew near step by step, and at last laid one small cold hand on the knee of the assistant.

"Is it alive?" he asked softly, divided in his awe of the wonderful mechanism and its grim watcher. The man slowly lifted his head, and stared at the child without attempting to speak. Pat hesitated a moment, and then climbed upon the bench upon which Jim was seated, and slipped his small thin hand within the horny palm of the man. He felt that he must have hold of something human up here in this strange place of light and movement. He was trembling, and yet he was not exactly afraid.

His hand was suffered to remain where he had placed it. Jim glanced furtively down at the small fingers in his hard hand, and perhaps something of an unwonted nature stole into his heart, for, to the astonishment of the child, he suddenly spoke.

"What did you want to know, little master?"

Now Pat thought it was very grand to be addressed as "little master," and his opinion of Jim began quickly to change. He could not be as cross as he tried to make out. The child took courage, and went on with his questions, in the order in which they came into his mind.

"Is it alive?" he asked, with his eyes upon the slowly moving reflectors, as they solemnly revolved round and round the centre light.

"Seems like as if she was," answered the man; "her takes a deal of food, and a deal of cleaning, and a deal of watching. Her be as full of moods as wimmim folk mostly be. She can't get along without a deal of notice, no more than they can!"

Pat fixed his wondering eyes on the speaker's face. He was almost as much fascinated in Jim's slow and deliberate speech as in the subject in hand. It was almost as though the mouth of the dumb had been unstopped, as though it was only in this strange place, and in the witching hour of night, that the man's tongue was unloosed. He spoke very slowly, as though it was not easy for him to find words in which to clothe his thoughts.

"I've been a-keeping of her this five years or more," said Jim, after a long pause, in which Pat began to wonder whether he would ever speak again or not; "afore that I was in prison. They let me come out to look after her. It was so hard to get anybody to stop."

Pat felt a thrill of awe run through him. He had heard of people going to prison of course, and had known many lads and men who had passed through the ordeal of going there for a time; but that seemed different from Jim's case. He wondered whether this strange gruff man had ever been a murderer, or had done some very dreadful deed. If so, was it safe to be sitting up here with him in the night, all alone? Might he not perhaps think it would be a good opportunity for throwing him down the staircase, or out over the gallery into the sea? For a moment the child felt a queer sensation of fear come over him, and then it all passed away as fast as it came, for Jim still held him by the hand, and his clasp upon his fingers felt kind and friendly. He looked up into the sullen, weather-beaten face above him with his confiding smile, and asked--

"What had they put you in prison for? Had you done anything bad?"

"No," answered Jim, after the inevitable pause, "I hadn't. It were another man; but they wouldn't believe it. He gave evidence against me, and they took his word, not mine. Folks said it were proved against I, and so I was sent to prison. But I hadn't done it--I don't care what they say."

"No, and I don't care, either!" cried Pat, with hot partisanship; "I know you didn't do it! It was they who were wicked and bad to send you to prison! But they had to let you out again, you see!"

He spoke the last words with an air as of triumph, edging up towards Jim in a confidential way as he did so. The man was knitting his heavy brows, and looking as though he was not sure whether all this were not a strange dream.

Pat spoke in the simplest good faith, whilst Jim passed his hand across his eyes, and then looked down at the small figure beside him, rather as though he were not sure that it was not all a dream after all. Pat was not altogether sure of this either. It was certainly very queer to be up in the middle of the night just under the great lamp, sitting hand in hand with Jim and talking about being friends. He looked up into the rough face above him and smiled as he said--

"It seems almost like it, little master," answered the man; "but we'll go out into the gallery, and get a breath of fresh air. That's the best thing to wake one up if one is getting be-fogged."

Pat was delighted at this notion. He knew that there was an outside gallery running all round the glass house where the lamp lived. He had seen it from the boat when his father had rowed him out a little way in the evenings; but he had never been out on it before, and to go there at night for the first time seemed a very wonderful thing to do. He would see how the sea looked from up there in the moonlight; and perhaps Jim would be able to tell him how the sun managed to swim round from one side to the other before morning, and why it always came up in just the same place every day, and went down in the same place every night. Jim must know a lot of things, living so much up there, he thought.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet