The Light at Cobbe's Point

Source written for Revision Library in a classic literary style (original, copyright-free).

It was the equinoctial gale of that year which first taught Verity Ashworth the true meaning of the word "storm", for she had lived the whole of her twelve years within sound of the sea, and had supposed, until that night, that she knew something of its temper. She stood upon the iron gallery that encircled the lantern of Cobbe's Point, her shawl drawn tight against a wind that seemed bent upon tearing the very stones from their mortar, and watched the sea below her labouring in the darkness like some vast and maddened creature that could not be still.

Her father, Mr Ashworth, had kept the light at Cobbe's Point for the better part of twenty years, and Verity herself had known no other home since her fifth year, when her mother had died of a fever one wet November and left the two of them, father and daughter, to keep house together upon their lonely rock. It was, she sometimes thought, a strange manner of childhood, set apart from the ordinary business of villages and schoolrooms; yet she would not, on the whole, have exchanged it for any other, being of a temperament not easily daunted by solitude, nor, as this night was shortly to prove, by very much else besides.

Below, in the lamp-room, her father laboured over the great light itself, trimming the wicks and polishing the reflectors with a care he gave to nothing else in this world, for, as it was his wont to remark, a neglected lamp was no less than a murderer, though a slow and a patient one. The wind, meanwhile, continued to rise, until it no longer howled but shrieked, a long, importunate cry that set Verity's teeth on edge and made the whole tower shudder upon its foundation of rock.

It was Verity's turn to keep the watch upon the gallery while her father saw to the lamp below, and it was thus that she was first to observe, far out upon the tumbling water, a light that was not the beam of her own lighthouse: a small, wavering point, now visible, now lost among the troughs of the waves, accompanied, some minutes later, by the dull report of a distress gun, scarcely to be distinguished from the general tumult of the gale. She called down the stair to her father in a voice she scarcely recognised as her own, and heard, in reply, only the single word "Wreck", uttered with a grim composure that frightened her more than any cry of alarm could have done.

There followed some hours of which Verity afterwards found she could remember only fragments: the lifeboat men labouring up the path from the cove with lanterns held high against the rain, in search of such succour as the keeper's cottage might afford; her father's low voice giving orders that were somehow both urgent and unhurried; and, presently, an importunate knocking upon the keeper's door below, which she ran down to answer before her father could forbid her.

She had expected, she could not afterwards have said quite what: a bearded giant of a man, perhaps, roaring with the sea still in his lungs. What she found, wrapped in a borrowed coat far too large for him and shivering upon the doorstep between two of the lifeboat men, was a boy of perhaps her own age, his face the colour of tallow, his eyes wide with a terror he was plainly too proud, or too exhausted, to give voice to. "Ship's boy off the Mercy Ann," said one of the men, setting him down gently in the nearest chair. "Rest of the crew we cannot speak to yet, miss, but this one came off the wreck alive, and that is more than we looked for an hour since."

Verity, without quite deciding to do so, found that she had already fetched the blanket from her own bed and was wrapping it about the boy's shoulders, and pressing into his cold hands a cup from which the steam rose thin and grey in the lamplight. He was, she could see, loath to speak of what he had witnessed, and she did not press him, but watched him instead with an expression she thought she understood very well, having worn something like it herself on the night her mother died: the look of a person who has been, for a little while, entirely alone in the world, and cannot yet quite believe that this is no longer so.

By the time the grey light of morning crept in at the small window, the wind had abated to no more than a stiff breeze, and the boy, whose name they had by then learned was Daniel, slept at last beside the dying fire, worn out with cold and grief and the sheer labour of having survived. "You did well tonight," her father said, pausing on the stair only long enough to say it, before returning to his lamp, for the light, he always said, would not tend itself; and Verity found that four such words, spoken so plainly, pleased her rather more than a great deal of embracing would have done. She climbed once more to the gallery, where the sea, though still restless, no longer wore the aspect of a beast but only of water, tired, like everything else that night, from its own violence. She was not, she told herself, a person given to imagining that she had done anything very remarkable; and yet she found, watching the light sweep its slow circle over the calming water, a small, steady satisfaction in the thought that when the importunate knock had come, she had not been afraid to answer it.