"He'll suffer for it, both here and hereafter," said the parson.
"Wherever he dies, whether on land or on water, he will become a creature of that element instead of going to his rest," said the parson, with an angry light in his eyes.
"Doan't believe it!" said the man: "an' thee doan't nayther."
The parson marched off, disdaining to reply.
The infant grew into a bright little lad, but there was always a certain oddity about him, and he saw and understood more than he ought.
One day he was out fishing with a companion, in a tiny punt they had borrowed for the purpose, when he leaned overboard too far and fell into the sea.
His little companion was so paralysed with terror that he could do nothing but set up a shrill screaming, clinging to the boat with both his hands.
Silas rose once--and twice--with wildly-pleading eyes: his mouth full of water: his hair plastered against his head: then sank; and a third time emerged just above the surface; so close to the boat that his companion, leaning over, could see him sinking down slowly into the crystalline depths, with his hands stretched up and the hair on his head tapering to a point like the flame of a candle.
But Silas sank down; and ever down: lower and lower beneath the translucent waters, the vast flood deepening its tint above him, till at last he was hopelessly buried out of sight.
When John Penberthy heard the terrible news he took the blow as a man might take a sentence of death--in grim silence, and with a sullen despair which nothing might henceforth banish or relieve. The roof-tree of his hopes was broken irretrievably, and he gazed down blankly at the ruin around his feet.
About three days after Silas was drowned, John was one afternoon out fishing for bait, and happened to be keeping rather close to the cliff-line, when he perceived a little seal emerge from a zawn[M] and come swimming, as with a settled purpose, towards the boat.
There was something so melancholy and so pathetically human in the soft, liquid eyes of the animal, that John felt his heart touched unaccountably.
Forgetting the line, which he was just about to draw in, he sat staring at the seal with a fixed intensity, as if he were looking in the familiar eyes of some one with whom he had a world of memories to interchange.