It was a
long band of common weed, that would in the sunlight have shone a
bright red. And at that very moment--right across the sparkling bar
the moon had laid over the sea--there passed, without any cloud to
cast it, a shadow. And my father's description of his love-tragedy
haunted me, I knew not why. And right across my life, dividing it in
twain like a burn-scar, came and lay for ever that strip of red
seaweed. Why did my father's description of his own love-tragedy
haunt me?
Before recalling the words that had fallen from my father in
Switzerland, I was a boy: in a few minutes afterwards, I was a man
with an awful knowledge of Destiny in my eyes--a man struggling with
calamity, and fainting in the grip of dread. My manhood, I say, dates
from the throwing up of that strip of seaweed. Winifred picked up the
weed and made a necklace of it, in the old childish way, knowing how
much it would please me.
'Isn't it a lovely colour?' she said, as it glistened in the
moonlight. 'Isn't it just as beautiful and just as precious as if it
were really made of the jewels it seems to rival?'
'It is as red as the reddest ruby,' I replied, putting out my hand
and grasping the slippery substance.
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