There was to be no rain, after all; the clouds rolled
off to the horizon again, making the great purple
rampart and long purple isles of that wondrous land
which reveals itself to us when the sun goes down,—the
land that the evening star watches over. Maggie
was to sleep all night on the poop; it was better
than going below; and she was covered with the warmest
wrappings the ship could furnish. It was still
early, when the fatigues of the day brought on a drowsy
longing for perfect rest, and she laid down her head,
looking at the faint, dying flush in the west, where
the one golden lamp was getting brighter and brighter.
Then she looked up at Stephen, who was still seated
by her, hanging over her as he leaned his arm against
the vessel’s side. Behind all the delicious
visions of these last hours, which had flowed over
her like a soft stream, and made her entirely passive,
there was the dim consciousness that the condition
was a transient one, and that the morrow must bring
back the old life of struggle; that there were thoughts
which would presently avenge themselves for this oblivion.
But now nothing was distinct to her; she was being
lulled to sleep with that soft stream still flowing
over her, with those delicious visions melting and
fading like the wondrous aerial land of the west.
Chapter XIV
Waking
When Maggie was gone to sleep, Stephen, weary too
with his unaccustomed amount of rowing, and with the
intense inward life of the last twelve hours, but
too restless to sleep, walked and lounged about the
deck with his cigar far on into midnight, not seeing
the dark water, hardly conscious there were stars,
living only in the near and distant future. At
last fatigue conquered restlessness, and he rolled
himself up in a piece of tarpaulin on the deck near
Maggie’s feet.
She had fallen asleep before nine, and had been sleeping
for six hours before the faintest hint of a midsummer
daybreak was discernible. She awoke from that
vivid dreaming which makes the margin of our deeper
rest. She was in a boat on the wide water with
Stephen, and in the gathering darkness something like
a star appeared, that grew and grew till they saw
it was the Virgin seated in St. Ogg’s boat, and
it came nearer and nearer, till they saw the Virgin
was Lucy and the boatman was Philip,—no,
not Philip, but her brother, who rowed past without
looking at her; and she rose to stretch out her arms
and call to him, and their own boat turned over with
the movement, and they began to sink, till with one
spasm of dread she seemed to awake, and find she was
a child again in the parlor at evening twilight, and
Tom was not really angry. From the soothed sense
of that false waking she passed to the real waking,—to
the plash of water against the vessel, and the sound
of a footstep on the deck, and the awful starlit sky.
There was a moment of utter bewilderment before her
mind could get disentangled from the confused web
