Miranda of the Balcony: A StoryMason, A. E. W. (Alfred Edward Woodley)
General
Miranda of the Balcony: A Story
Mason, A. E. W. (Alfred Edward Woodley)
Fiction
They climbed over the low rocks and walked along the crown of the
island towards the wreck. There was no tree or shrub upon the
barren soil, only here a stretch of sandy grass, there a patch of
mallows--mallows of a rusty green and whitened with salt of the sea.
In the midst of one such patch they came upon the body of a man. He
was dressed in a pilot coat, sea boots and thick stockings drawn over
his trousers to the hips, and he lay face downwards with his head
resting upon his arms in a natural posture of sleep.
Fournier stood still. The lighthouse-keeper walked forward and tapped
the sleeper upon the shoulder. But the sleeper did not wake. The
lighthouse man knelt down and gently turned the man over upon his
back; as he did so, or rather just before he did so, Fournier turned
sharply away with a shudder. When the sailor was lying upon his back,
the keeper of the lighthouse started with something of a shudder too.
For the sailor had no face.
The lighthouse man drew his handkerchief from his pocket and gently
covered the head. It seemed almost as if Fournier had been waiting,
had been watching, for this action. For he turned about immediately
and stood by the lighthouse-keeper's side. Above the lonely islet the
sea-birds circled and called; on the sea the mist was now no more than
a gauze, and through it the glow of the sun was faintly diffused.
"Strange that, isn't it?" said the lighthouse-keeper, in a hushed
voice. "The sea dashed him upon the rocks and drew him down again and
threw him up again until it got tired of the sport, and so tossed him
here to lie quietly face downwards amongst the mallows like a man
asleep."
Then he sat back upon his heels and measured the distance between the
mallows and the sea with some perplexity upon his forehead--and the
perplexity grew.
"It's a long way for the sea to have thrown him," he said, and as
Fournier shifted restlessly at his side, he looked up into his face.
"Good God, man, but you look white," he said.
"The sight is terrible," replied Fournier, as he wiped his forehead.
The lighthouse-keeper nodded assent.
"Yes, it's a terrible place, the sea about these western islands," he
said. "Did you ever hear tell that there are sunken cities all the way
between here and Land's End, the sunken cities of Lyonnesse? Terrible
sights those cities must see. I often think of the many ships which
have plunged down among their chimneys and roof-tops--perhaps here a
great Spanish galleon with its keel along the middle of a paved square
and its poop overhanging the gables, and the fishes swimming in and
out of the cabins through the broken windows; perhaps there a big
three-decker like Sir Cloudesley Shovel's, showing the muzzles of
her silent guns; or a little steam-tramp of our own times, its iron
sides brown with rust, and God knows what tragedy hidden in its tiny
engine-room. A terrible place--these islands of Scilly, dwelling
amongst the seas, as the old books say--dwelling amongst the seas."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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