Upon leaving the post-office Burrough felt his journey had not been made in vain. “Those gossiping tongues will convey the message for me,” he said. “And as it is only because of my appearance that Beatrice has cut me off from her, there is still a chance she may consent to see me again. Now for the Land’s End, some lunch, and a soliloquy upon the rocks. Then for Penzance and a train home again.”
At the little hostelry above the sea, where the land narrows into a mass of rocks and sea-foam, Burrough obtained food and drink. Afterwards he roamed to the end of Penwith and saw its wonders, from the natural tunnel and the amazing sea-scape, to the Armed Knight and Dr. Johnson’s Head enveloped in a whimsical wig.
As he stood there alone Burrough felt that he ought to say many fine things. None, however, occurred to him. He felt much confused and somewhat drowsy. Nothing suggests the end of the world, and the end of all things, quite so distinctly as the fag end of Cornwall when the outline of Scilly is not apparent. All the headland is of granite, but shattered and splintered, and bristling like a crocodile’s jaws. There are plenty of black and grey lichens, and sometimes little sprigs of heather pushing hopefully from sheltered nooks; and there is always the roar of the sea, which never stops. It is not deep; would that it were for the sake of ships. A country with palaces and fair gardens, and one hundred and forty churches, lies just beneath the surface. It is the lost land of Lyonesse, submerged with all its cities and towers and its dreams of fair women; and yonder, in the vague cloud mists which never shift, is the island valley of Avillion where Arthur lies with his three queens, being healed of his grievous wound.
The sea and the wind were calm that day, but there was nevertheless a roaring as of imprisoned lions beneath the cliff. Each blackened rock rising out of the water had a ring of white foam at its base; and the waves went leaping up, embracing the crags, streaming back unwillingly in streaks as of molten silver; or like the white arms of a loving wife withdrawn reluctantly from her husband’s neck. The sea-mews soared screaming, and cormorants skimmed over the waves. It was peaceful there, but with all its quietness haunted by ghosts and tales of shipwreck. Here vessels had been cast away by those wasteful waters before the Romans came tin hunting; and bodies in thousands had been hurled landwards with the contemptuous, “Earth, take thine earth,” of the wind-tossed waves; from a stern bearded Phœnician to a beautiful pale girl in her frilled nightdress with a string of pearls about her neck.
It was the romantic thought of the lost land—for the actual end was certainly in Scilly once—which was the charm of the place to Burrough, who, with all his faults, and perhaps because of them, had a powerful imagination. He rested upon a sun-warmed slab of granite and looked out upon Lethowsow, the sea which flows across Lyonesse. As the sound of the roaring came up from below he imagined the land rising in all its glory out of the sea. There were castles embattled with huge archways and dark towers glistening in the sun. Warders paced the turrets, and the old Seneschal stood with keys beside the gate. Beyond was a garden of green arbours of red roses and white lilies; and there a noble dame was teaching her damsels to make silken work and cloth of gold; and there were long-haired knights playing bowls in the cool alleys. There were meats and wines prepared for them in a rich pavilion; and some were feasting, and some lying upon the grass amid the flowers, listening to the birds; and some whispering to mistresses, bright as blossoms on the whitethorn, a tale that was old even in that young world.
Then an old man came forth, and all forsook their tasks or pleasures to flock about him. He was clad in a deep yellow robe, his white beard swept his chest, a chaplet was upon his head, and his harp gleamed before him. He was the minstrel king, the schoolmaster and historian of the time, and he sang the history of his country and of the deeds of its heroes.
Outside the royal palace a herdsman had gathered a crowd to tell them of some notable adventure which had befallen him in the enchanted forest; and while he was speaking a lovely lady rode past, her robe gathered close that she might display her wondrous figure; a jewel in her hair worth a Saxon Kingdom; her white palfrey ambling proudly; her falcon upon her wrist, and two white greyhounds running at her side. She paused to listen to the herdsman’s story, not doubting it, because the world was enchanted then, and she had spoken with Lancelot, the maiden knight who had seen the Holy Grail covered with red samite, in that wonderful night when he had arrived “afore a castle on the backe side, which was rich and faire, and there was a posterne that opened toward the sea, and was open without any keeping, save two lions kept the entrie, and the moone shined cleare.”
A glorious land was that old Lyonesse of romance. Every story was sure to end happily there. It was a land where women were always beautiful, and good as beautiful, and the knights, however tried and persecuted, were saints, half poets and half priests. Nothing is left of that kingdom now, except love. The poetry and chivalry of that lost land have gone. Even the dreams of it, say hard-headed men, are dangerous. They are but flashes of lightning out of a cloud, beautiful always, rarely harmful. Every time a true-hearted man kisses a virtuous maid in pure love they enter together, though it may be only for a moment, the sweet lost land of Lyonesse.
Burrough stirred from his rocky seat. He thought he had heard a distant murmur of voices. Time was pressing and he had far to go that day. It was a ridiculous descent from the land of romance to the railway timetable; but it was necessary that he should catch the early evening train from Penzance. He moved a step forward, looked over the edge into the dip of the cliff, and saw, not stunted gorse, nor wind-blown heather, nor even ragged granite—but a boy and girl clasped together in the first frenzy of love.
And they had found Lyonesse. They did not discover Burrough. They clung together, breast to breast and mouth to mouth; and the only sound they made was a passionate sigh as they inhaled each other’s breath. Every romance was dry as dust compared to that. Their young faces were seaward. Their features were bathed in the warm red sunshine—to them it was sunrise, such as had never been before, such as would never come again.
To Burrough’s surprise and delight, another little note came in Beatrice’s quaint handwriting—each word was like a long-legged spider—the envelope postmarked Sennen, as before. Certainly the girl was not a complete letter-writer. Her fun, daintiness, and nonsense seemed to desert her directly she took a pen into her hand. It was a most precise note, telling him she had just spent a night lance-spearing in the sands, though she did not mention the name of the sands. Her aunt was not at all well, and was grumbling a great deal. She was having some photographs printed of herself in fisher-girl’s costume—long boots, oilskins, and jersey—and would send him one if he cared to have it. And she remained “his old pal, Bill.” It was a most unfeminine epistle, not even containing a postscript; but it convinced Burrough that he was remembered.
The omens for his success had been lately more favourable. The slight operation had been performed with considerable success, the false eye had been fitted, he had become accustomed to the new sensation which it caused and the new expression which it gave, and he was able to agree with the enthusiastic surgeon that the result was a triumph of surgical art. His appearance was altered very strikingly for the better now that the principal cause of disfigurement had been removed. He was no longer unpleasant to gaze upon. The false eye certainly changed his expression. It made him look alert and businesslike, and it also added a suggestion of cunning to his face which he did not like.
Acting on a friendly suggestion made to him privately at the camp, Burrough wrote to the War Office withdrawing his claim. He was assured that by so doing he would prevent much unpleasantness, on the one side of giving, and on the other of receiving, an unfavourable reply. It was pointed out that a great deal had been done for him, that he was in very much the same position then as before the accident, with health and powers of working practically unaffected, and that he was to blame for having exposed himself to danger, being a commoner perfectly well acquainted with the ranges used by the artillery and the times of firing, and not an ignorant visitor who had strayed upon that part of the moor by chance. So Burrough climbed down gracefully, and expressed himself well satisfied with the care and attention which had been bestowed upon him. The camp broke up, and the moor was abandoned to its winter solitude and dreariness. And the owner of the cottage by the gorge, conscious that he would have to rely upon his own efforts entirely, settled earnestly to work, his pipe his sole companion, now that poor Peter had passed away for ever.
At last he wrote to Beatrice, unable to bear the sense of separation any longer. Merely a few lines reminding her she had not sent him her address, begging her to do so, and promising he would not come down without her permission, and that he would be obedient in all things. He commenced the letter, “My dear Bill,” and concluded it, “Yours always, Jack”; and he enclosed it, carefully sealed, in an envelope addressed to the post-mistress of Sennen, and containing a polite request that she would give the enclosed to Poltesco, the fisherman, if she did not wish to add Beatrice’s address herself.
A few days later there came an answer in quite a different style—
“So you went to Sennen, and you made kind inquiries about me, and you moralised at the Land’s End, did you? I heard all about the poor old soldier who had lost his eye in the wars. But why did you? In the note I left for you with the Cobbledicks I charged you not to search diligently for me. I was afraid you might want to forget that my name is Bill, the fisherman of the hamlet of Blank, in the parish of Blank, in the kingdom of West Wales. You might have written every day and run to and fro. I judged you quite accurately. Well, now, as Bill, I should like to see you; but as Beatrice I ought not to. That is why I don’t give geographical particulars concerning my hut circle. Of course I shall see you again, and as two wild boys we’ll ramble in Blissland, and go swaling, and walk to Cranmere. We’ll do it all over again next summer. By that time we shall have become more settled in our minds. Apart altogether from the results of that horrid accident—though I do hear they have patched you up and made a first-rate job—I’m not the sort of fisherman to meet a girl on Monday, want her to say ‘Yes’ on Tuesday, and to wear a wedding-ring on Wednesday. You know what I mean. I’ll give you Poltesco’s address, and you may write to me through him once a month. Just ‘Dear Bill.’ You understand. No endearments and no diminutives. Do you want a successor to King Peter? If so, I’ll send you one in a basket. He’s a little prince, but not royal, and he laps milk like a cherub. He’s doing his little traedjawg—worse than gorse-prickles—on my knee as I write. I’m working hard on my native moor. I’m actually doing a little independent tin-streaming. You may write when you get this.
“Your old pal,
“Bill.“P.S.—I’m certain I am right in keeping you in the dark about my address. After a little you will think me a perfect toad.”
It was a red-letter day for Burrough. Beatrice was herself again. That was very different from the two precise notes he had already received. She could put her fun and nonsense upon paper after all, and the mere fact that she had done so on this occasion convinced him that his cause was not hopeless. His message had reached her and had done its work. Evidently she did consider it possible that she might bear with his false eye and scar now that the really unpleasant details had been removed. She was right not to commit herself. She was right to withhold her address. He knew how weak he was, and how his loneliness affected him. Had she given him her address he would have gone to her during one of his irresistible outbursts of feeling—such as that which had taken him to Sennen—in spite of all the promises he might make. She knew that too, and had taken the wiser course of keeping him from her until, as she had said, they should become more settled in their minds.
The literary business that engrossed Burrough for that day, and much of the ensuing night, was a letter of ten thousand words. He had never written at such length or so readily before. When about to write professionally he had to take himself by the shoulders, as it were, force himself into his chair, and condemn himself to be seated for a fixed period. No such tyrannical methods were required that day. He did not revise the lengthy screed, but packed it up in a long envelope and sent it off to the faithful Poltesco.
Soon he received the formal announcement—
“Dear Sir,—Your manuscript has reached us safely. We will write you our opinion regarding it as soon as possible.
“We are, yours faithfully,
“Bill & Co.“At the sign of the ‘Stormy Petrel,’ n’Importe Ou.”
No opinion came, and the days drifted on, making a week, a second, and a third, until Burrough grew restless and impatient. At length there came a break in the monotony.
It was the first day of winter—the weather of winter, if not yet the season. A thick haze was hanging upon the moor, blotting out tor and cleave, and there came continually a stinging shower of sleet, slanted by the wind into the faces of those who were unfortunate enough to be abroad. Mrs. Cobbledick’s meteorological statement, that it was “a full day with a tremenjus frisk,” was admirably descriptive of the prevailing conditions.
Burrough worked steadily through the morning. During the afternoon a knock came upon his door. He hurried to open it and discovered a shivering Frenchman, bearing a pole on which were slung long strings of onions. He was one of the Bretons who cross twice each year to Plymouth, and from that point wander through the west to hawk the produce of their fields. High Dartmoor was a savage place to that quaking man after his smiling Brittany.
Burrough invited him in, and gave him a stool beside the glowing peat. The onion-seller accepted gratefully, and his eyes shone when he heard himself addressed in his native tongue. As for Burrough, he was glad of any sort of companion just then. He would have welcomed an escaped convict. So he pressed the man to stay and talk for an hour or so in his lonely hut. He gave the Breton tobacco and tea. He bought the longest of his strings of onions. He talked of the wild moors and of smiling Brittany, and compared them unpatriotically. He made a great fire, as though he had determined to have the man broiled and garnished with his own onions. And the Breton cooked his toes, and thawed his cheeks, and worshipped the Englishman in a devout manner.
Burrough looked at the man’s thin face and sallow skin tanned by climate and sea air, his small restless eyes, thin lips, and slight wisp of black moustache. Here was a man who worked much harder than he and was not so well off. A newspaper column written off in a couple of hours was of more value than all those strings of onions. Was the man married? But yes, m’sieur. And children? Three, m’sieur. How did he manage? How in the name of the age of miracles did he manage? Ah, that was where Our Lady and the blessed saints came in. Burrough, neither more nor less sceptical than most scholars, smiled cynically.
Then the man rose. He had far to go. He had shelter to seek, and the “tremenjus frisk” was still beating outside. He was only an incident, and yet Burrough was sorry to lose him; and when he had departed after more worshipping the lonely man was half inclined to call him back. He wanted to find a solution of the social problem—how could a man maintain a home, wife, and three children by crossing the channel and selling a few strings of onions? And if it were possible what was the equivalent for the strings of onions which would enable the educated man of gentle birth to obtain such luxuries?
Burrough was unsettled. He had received a visitor. Such a thing had not happened since Beatrice’s departure. He had seen a fellow-creature; had spoken well-nigh forgotten French; had entertained a man at his fireside—a fact to be recorded and remembered.
The short day closed in, and Burrough longed intensely for the divine pleasures of matrimonial tea. He imagined the lamps lighted, himself on the hearthrug beside the glowing fire, “the curtains drawn and flickering gently,” Beatrice tea-making, while the “tremenjus frisk” was beating upon the windows and the water thundered down the gorge. And he thought again of the Breton out upon the wild moor with the strings of onions, and envied the man because he had solved the social problem and remained respectable.
Presently the showers of sleet ceased and there was a calm. The sky cleared a little, and a few stormy-looking stars peeped out between the wet clouds. Burrough had not been outside all day. He determined to go for a walk towards the village. He might see some more men and hear the human voice again. The visit of the onion-seller had been a dissipation, and he wanted more of it. He resolved to persevere in it for the rest of the evening.
It was dark and gloomy when he looked out, regular Dartmoor weather, and there were groups of ponies huddled for shelter under the side of the moor beside his cottage with their tails towards the wind. The baffling mist lent strange shapes to the ragged gorse, and the breezes were laden with vapour. The physical conditions of Dartmoor would not be endurable until the four gloomy months ahead had come and gone, and the sunshine of spring had converted the bleak and uncomfortable surroundings into a garden of ferns and flower.
Not a single specimen of the biped homo vulgaris was sighted by Burrough as he tramped towards the village, nor was there a genial vision of anyone in petticoats—something in dark serge, with a suspicion of red flannel underneath, and a suggestion of Beatrice about the ankles would have done his heart good. Even some moorman’s wife—called wickedly by Beatrice moorhens—would have cheered his lonely spirits, although there was practically nothing feminine about them, apart from anatomy and clothing. Men and women were as extinct as dodos and great auks so far as the rough moorland track was concerned. Even the village at a slight distance resembled a sort of disinterred Pompeii without light, sound, or motion.
The illusion was disturbed when Burrough came into the centre of things. He heard a scream suggestive rather of insanity, but nevertheless a human sound, and on that account not unwelcome. He saw a light through the mist, a sort of jack o’ lanthorn jerking from side to side, moving very gradually beside the high wall surrounding the Vicarage garden. He associated the scream with the presence of that light. Within the dark tumbledown vicarage the housekeeper was indulging in those revelries observed by all devout worshippers of Bacchus. The lantern bearer without the wall was old Yeoland. He had been driven out by the woman and did not dare to return. He would walk up and down, mumbling and trembling, until the bottle-imp inside had ceased to trouble the evening air with her exclamations. The screams were intermittent, and every time one came the lantern perceptibly wobbled. In the sycamores by the church a pair of owls were hooting in B flat. On the whole it was somewhat weird.
Burrough had some genuine sympathy for old Yeoland. He distrusted common report which declared that the Vicar was a moral, as well as an intellectual, failure; that he was not so much under the thumb of his riotous housekeeper as was supposed; that he was in short bound to her by a tie which for his own peace of mind and his reputation he did not dare to break. This was the sort of talk dear to Mrs. Cobbledick, and much indulged in even by those who were opposed to her in the matter of butter-making. Solitude had played havoc with old Yeoland. That, and the keen mountain air, had created in him the desire for tippling, and he had not drawn the line until it was too late. He was absolutely alone in the world. He had bought the living as a young man. It brought him in a miserable pittance, and he could not give it up, although unable to perform the duties connected with it. To do so would have meant exchanging the damp half-ruined thatched cottage which constituted the vicarage for the comparative comfort of the workhouse. During the summer evenings he basked at his gate, ogling the girls as they passed. The winter evenings he spent in his arm-chair, half asleep, or sobbing like a frightened child, afraid of the solitude, except on those occasions when he had to wander through mist and mud with his lantern, listening to the owls in the sycamores and the screaming in the house.
Burrough went up and greeted the old man. With his big stable lantern in one hand, a thick stick in the other, he shuffled along very slowly, rather like a toad dragging itself over a gravel path. He was delighted to see Burrough, although as a rule he avoided him, because solitude and the partial loss of his five wits had made him shrink from every man.
“Don’t talk about the weather,” mumbled old Yeoland directly he recognised Burrough.
“I won’t,” said the young man, “I wasn’t going to.”
“Don’t talk of noises,” the Vicar went on. “The owls are screaming all round, all over Dartmoor.”
“In your house and garden,” added Burrough.
“Never mind. They’ll stop presently. Make a joke. Go on! Say something to make me laugh.”
“I’m afraid I can’t joke to order. Why are you out so late?”
“To get the air,” said old Yeoland. “I come out all weathers—when it pours with rain. I get soaked through, wet to the skin—does me good, makes me young again. Were you at the university? Are you a scholar?”
“I took classical honours,” said Burrough.
“Well done,” said the Vicar, shuffling back as though the announcement frightened him. “Have you got a paper for me? Can’t you give me a funny paper with pictures?”
“I might have one at home,” Burrough answered, “but my cottage is a long way off upon the moor.”
“I’m coming to see you some day. Get the paper. Go on! Winter’s coming. I want something to make me laugh.”
“All right. I’ll go and get it.”
With that Burrough turned and left him. Old Y.’s conversation was not the sort of dissipation he had come out to find; and he felt a sudden desire to return and work. He knew that the old man would forget all about him and the “funny paper” in less than ten minutes. He hurried back over the wild moor, whistling loudly, and trying to imagine he was in sympathy with the lonely life of wind and vapour that had fallen to his lot.
Beside his cottage he was troubled with an uncomfortable sensation. He seemed to feel the near presence of a human being. He thought he had seen a figure swaying through the mist, and he made a few steps up the moor to satisfy himself that the motion was caused by a big gorse-bush troubled by the wind. The ponies stamped and squealed beside the door. Burrough stampeded them, then as he turned the handle he hesitated. Suppose he should find someone inside, some abortion, a creature of the moors, or a murderous convict escaped from Princetown. Even while he hesitated the gorse-bush in the mist shook again like a swaying human figure, and somehow he could not turn his back upon it. He smiled at his folly. The meeting with old Y. had unhinged him. Of course there could be no one there. The people of the village would be going to bed. Pixies were extinct—besides that figure of his imagination was no little person, but a giant, a Corineus. And as for convicts the only ones to escape rifle-shot had been accounted for by the bogs. No convict could make that dreaded “crossing” in winter without a guide.
The next minute Burrough was inside, searching for matches by the glow of peat upon the hearthstone. The lamp lighted, and its beams streaming across the moor from the uncurtained window—that window was called the lighthouse by the villagers—he felt easier in his mind, and wondered what had made him such a fool. Unable to work or read, or indeed to do anything but dream, he flung himself upon the lounge, watching the smoke drifting, listening to the ponies stamping outside. Only a wall of granite blocks separated him from the sheltering animals and the swaying gorse-bushes. When a shaggy pony bumped or scratched itself upon the rough wall he became aware of it; and he thought he could hear the prickles of the gorse scraping against the stones.
Then the onion-seller became an enemy. It was the visit of that Breton which had upset Burrough in the first instance, and his going away had left him hopelessly unsettled. Through his means Burrough was transported into smiling scenery. He left Dartmoor winds and vapours, to roam in warm valleys, amid white flowers, between blue hills covered with grape-vines. A face began to reveal itself and a figure clad in oilskins, a fisher-girl going down to the boats with a stable lantern in her hand and strings of onions upon her shoulder. It seemed to Burrough he was gazing out from his window and the scene was in Brittany, although surrounded by Cornish cliffs. And near him upon a boulder the fisher-girl was sitting, and he looked, and it was Beatrice with Breton onions, Cornish oil-skins, and old Y.’s stable lantern. Then Dartmoor vapours rolled down, the sunshine disappeared, the wind howled, the water roared for a moment in the gorge—and then he fancied himself walking with Beatrice hand in hand, just as he had walked with her a few months before along the Apron String, and into their fanciful little kingdom of Blissland by the river of ferns.
This picturesque dream was interrupted by what would have been prosaic enough in most places, but there was romantic, even terrifying, and causing in Burrough a reflex of feeling that swallowed up imagination and left him, not so much in amazement, as a state of terror. He was aroused by a knock upon the door.
At last he went to receive the ghostly visitor. He dragged the door open desperately, prepared to see the outline of a Brittany onion-seller, or a Devonshire pixy, or a Cornish giant. It appeared to be the latter. A tall upright figure stood there, and a pleasant musical voice apologised for troubling the gentleman, but would he direct him towards the nearest station. The mists had caught him upon the moor and he had lost his way.
In wild places every human habitation is an inn. During his wanderings Burrough had frequently received the invitation, “Do ye come in and pitch.” In English more classical he repeated the customary formula, and the stranger at once bent his head and entered.
“Good heaven! Another Frenchman.” Such was Burrough’s mental exclamation. First a Breton onion-seller, and now a Norman fisherman. Were the western moors overrun by the French peasantry? Had they conquered and seized West Wales as Beatrice fondly called her dear land, and was this white-haired Barbarossa quartered upon him as a punishment for his sins? Certainly the stranger’s face was Norman; but as assuredly his speech was Cornish. Burrough remembered that the types are similar. But a second visitor—that was the amazing incident—a second visitor that day!
A finer specimen of a man he had never seen. Tall, upright, and somewhat thin; his face would have been attractive anywhere, and have arrested the attention of anyone given to ethnological inquiry—it was weather beaten, sharp-lined, and wonderfully free from wrinkles, although the man must have been more than sixty; that fact was proclaimed by the crisp white hair. It was a beautiful face, a Sir Galahad type of face, and its smile was gentle, maternal rather than masculine, and even sweet if such an epithet could be applied to the smile of any man. He was in fisherman’s costume; long boots well above the knees, corded breeches, thick ribbed jersey half concealed by a rough jacket, and around his neck was a snowy muffler, and upon his head was an oilskin hat shaped exactly like the barber’s basin sported by the knight of La Mancha as the helmet of Mambrino.
“This is different from your Cornish weather,” said Burrough, when he had persuaded the man to be seated.
“It’s cold there too,” said the fisherman. “And windy, sir, beside the sea.”
“I know you are from Cornwall. Your speech betrays you. So does your face. I am wondering what brings you upon Dartmoor,” Burrough went on, while he stirred the peat and put on some sticks to make a blaze.
“Yes, sir, us Cornish folk don’t travel much. I’m up to see a friend to Chagford. Walking across the moor I lost my bearings.”
“You are perfectly right. You are making straight for the station,” said Burrough. “But if you crossed from Chagford you have done a wonderful thing. I couldn’t do it this time of year and I know the moor. I see by your boots you escaped the bogs. How did you manage it?”
“I came a bit round, sir,” explained the fisherman, with his singularly pleasant smile.
Burrough knew that the man was not telling him the truth. Making for the Cornish line from Chagford he would certainly pass that way, if he struck across the moor. That he had not done so was obvious by the state of his boots, which ought to have been plastered with bog-mud, but were perfectly clean. Several thoughts occurred to Burrough, all strange ones. He noticed whenever he looked up that the fisherman withdrew his gaze hurriedly. He noticed also the woollen wrapper round the man’s neck. That had not been made by his wife or daughter; and he would scarcely have bought anything so dainty. The last time he had seen such a wrapper was when Beatrice was walking in the rain; and the wrapper was lying upon her dark brown hair. He smiled to himself with a kind of triumph.
“I must be getting on, sir. Thank’ye kindly,” said the old man with simple dignity.
“Fill your pipe before you go,” said Burrough, handing over his tobacco jar. “What would you like to drink—a glass of beer?”
“Thank’ye kindly,” said the fisherman again, with the smile which seemed to convey a blessing with it.
Burrough brought the beer and the fisherman accepted it with a courteous gesture. The young man for reasons of his own made it his business to keep as much as possible away from the light. He tried to appear at his best before the old fisherman. He talked brightly and laughed continually, and did all else that was possible to make a favourable impression. The gentle old fellow laughed too, and was obviously well pleased at his reception, and quite satisfied with his host; but for all that he declared he must be getting on his way.
“You cannot get home to-night,” said Burrough.
“I’m going to Plymouth, sir. I have friends to Torpoint. Is it far to the station, sir?”
“I’ll show you the shortest way if you wait until I put on my boots.”
Burrough was soon back ready to start, but first he had a question for the old fisherman. He asked him what he thought of Chagford. The visitor replied he didn’t think much of the place, which was right and proper, as he was a Cornishman, and therefore possessed of hereditary hatred for everything that appertained unto Devonshire.
“But a very fine town,” argued Burrough. “Splendid buildings. Of course you saw the town-hall? Didn’t you admire that?”
“Yes, sir, a very fine building,” admitted the fisherman.
“And the big park with the pavilion and bandstand. You’ve nothing like that in Cornwall.”
“Yes, sir, a very fine park,” agreed the fisherman.
“And the theatre. As big as anything in Plymouth,” continued Burrough relentlessly.
“Yes, sir, a very fine theatre,” came the monotonous reply.
Burrough turned to lower the lamp, and the knightly old fisherman walked towards the door. The young man was greatly excited. So this visit was Beatrice’s answer to his long letter. And this man, who had probably never been out of Cornwall before; who professed to have walked over the moor from Chagford without getting mud on his boots; who knew so much about the moorland village as to agree when he heard it described as a town with parks, fine buildings, and theatres; who asked moreover to be directed to the station from whence he had only recently proceeded for the express purpose of subjecting Burrough to a close scrutiny—who was this man, if he were not Poltesco, the faithful fisherman of St. Sennen Church-Town?
[* Dimpsy = Twilight.]
The cold wind and showers of sleet which had visited Dartmoor were the results of a storm upon the Atlantic. There had been high seas upon North Cornwall, seas which tossed the biggest ships as though they had been cockle-shells, and broke up the small ones like a lion crunching a bone. From Cape Cornwall to Trebarwith Strand the coast had been strewn with the pathetic rubbish of wreckage. An empty bottle of Hollands and a baby’s coral were lying side by side in Porthmeer Cove quaint partners of tragedy. And at Porth Zennor a man was cast up by the sea.
It was Beatrice who discovered the body. She was out the morning after the storm, clad in oilskins, searching for curiosities to add to her museum—for the sea brought her treasures from China to Peru—and she perceived the white face bobbing beside the rocks. Like a cat the cruel sea had captured its victim and was now playing with it, patting it up to the land, and drawing it back before it could get too far. The girl scrambled down and secured the body and dragged it upon the rocks. The sight had no terror for her. She was not in the least afraid to touch it, although she had been once frightened out of her wits by the one-legged fisherman, and had been more repelled than she would own by the sight of Burrough’s disfigurement. That body was not mutilated; only bruised, and its poor hands were chafed terribly. The man was a French fisherman come to beg a little earth from England, and the right to stop there. He was a young man and married; for there was a ring upon his little finger, a worthless ring, but made precious by the dark hair worked around it.
After rescuing the body from the sea, Beatrice sat down and sobbed. Here was half-a-century of useful life wasted by a sudden passion of wind. The joy of life was strong within her. She loved every day of the year, sunshine or storm; her prayer was for long life—nothing else—sorrow, sickness, poverty, were more endurable than the thought of losing her beautiful body. With her, as with her Aunt, it was body first, the rest nowhere. So she cried for the poor Frenchman because he had lost his body. She would not have shed a tear for the widow. Why should she? The widow could go on enjoying the use of her body.
“Poor man,” said Beatrice softly. “I am sure you were nice and you worked hard for your wife. Perhaps you worked too hard, and didn’t think enough of yourself.” Then she frowned, and shook her head at the sea. “Why will you spoil my home?” said she. “These rocks were not put here for you to wreck ships upon. You have given us another funeral, and I hate you for it.” She lowered her voice. “It is not the fault of the sea, after all. It’s the wind, and I don’t know what’s to blame for that.”
She got up, shook the tears from her lashes, and the spray from her eyebrows, and hurried up the cliffs to make her discovery known.
The old gabled house, which was Beatrice’s own property and had been in her family for hard upon two centuries, was very near the sea. It was protected against the worst gales by a furze-covered hill which, report declared, was the original Tom Tiddler’s ground where the misguided mortal had stuffed his pockets with furze-blooms for gold. It stood in a slight hollow planted with great fuschias, hydrangeas, and escallonias. Beatrice had uprooted the rhododendrons, which were flourishing in great abundance when she came of age, because she considered they looked mournful in winter and in summer neither bird nor insect would dwell within them. In their place she had induced heather and bracken to grow, thus bringing the moorland characteristics to the very door of her home.
Beatrice was in a restless mood during those days which followed the storm. She felt that a great change threatened her life, the greatest change that can occur either to man or maid, and the thought of it unsettled her. It was necessary; that point she yielded. But it meant a breaking up of existing conditions, a certain amount of self-surrender, and probably a slight curtailment of her strange pleasures. She paid a flying visit to Sennen and came back thoughtful. She began letters and tore them up. She consulted her oracles, only to disregard the omens that they gave. She visited old wives at Porth Zennor and asked them their opinions upon various matters which interested her then. She tackled the fishermen and sought to hear what they thought of life and its environment. The answers she obtained were not encouraging. They threw her back after all upon her own feelings. The old wives seemed to be slightly cynical. They told her it was the duty of every maid to secure a man for herself and to keep him if she could. They assured her it was as well to extend the period of courtship, by which they meant no doubt the “walking out,” as much as possible, because that—and there the cynicism cropped up—was the best part of married life. It amused Beatrice to think that the joys of matrimony should be over before they had legally commenced; but that was the way of the world with a class which did not seek the ceremony until local sentiment and public morality demanded it. As for the fishermen they evaded the main issue and harped principally upon the habitation clause. They were afraid Beatrice might be leaving the country, so they assured her that anyone who had lived upon the Cornish coast could not settle or die in peace elsewhere. “You may travel over the world, east or west,” said one. “And when you’ve done it all, you’ll find there’s only Cornwall and you’ll come back.” Beatrice declared there was no danger of her departure. She could not live out of her native air; and she laughed her agreement with the fisherman, when he declared, with racial antipathies to the West Saxons, that England east of Exeter was a wilderness.
The body of the young Frenchman was lying in the church which stood upon a hill. Beatrice walked there towards evening. Her love for that wild rocky coast was fully developed then, and she doubted whether she could love any living creature as much as she loved her life and her home. She did not find it dull. Her day was fully occupied; she had friends in all directions; she knew everyone in the district, from the youngest child to the oldest greybeard. Her complete independence satisfied her. She knew she could do what she liked; that she could depart any day; and with that knowledge she was content.
“I’ll go and sit in the porch. I’ll make up my mind there,” said she.
First she raised herself on tiptoe beside a window, and looked inside the church. In the faint gloom she could just see the dim outline of the drowned fisherman, whose name and dwelling place were unknown, stretched upon the bier. Something was moving upon the uneven tiles beneath. Beatrice rubbed the glass with her finger, strained her eyes, and made out a mouse gliding smoothly to and fro. She shivered a little, because her stored up folk-lore suggested the tales where the human soul had been seen escaping in the form of a mouse. It seemed to her that the soul of the French fisherman was roving about the deserted church. The wind from the sea made the pane moist again. Beatrice stepped down and passed into the porch.
The church had been built of Cornish granite perhaps a thousand years before. Surrounding it were monuments of still greater antiquity, dating from the Age of Bronze, before the coming of the Celts when broad-headed savages occupied the neighbouring moorland before Romulus and Remus had been suckled. It was not surprising that romance should die slowly in such an old-world place. Not so very long ago a famous ghost-layer had there wrestled with the powers of darkness. In the field adjoining the churchyard he had subdued the unquiet spirit of a poor ruined girl. Beatrice knew the spot where the good man had marked his pentacle in the midst of a circle, and at the intersection of the five angles had set up his crutch of rowan. She accepted such stories as these, and never asked herself seriously whether she believed in them. She herself knew all the spells necessary to lay a ghost; and had there occurred within the church that “soft and rippling sound,” which denoted the approach of an unquiet spirit, she would have been up at once, taking her station south, on the true line of the meridian, and facing due north, as her witch instructress had taught her.
But the poor young Frenchman inside the church was peaceful. He made no soft and rippling sound. He was lying in the cobwebby gloom; and staring down upon him were monstrous mediæval frescoes and horrible faces in stone, more suggestive of an evil dream than religious symbolism. The mouse and the spiders and the dead man made no noise. Outside there was the wind. It was always windy there, and the murmur or the roaring of the sea came with it. As Beatrice sat in the porch dry leaves darted in strange fashion across the tiles, and scraps of heather and dried fronds of bracken scraped and tumbled about her little boots.
She was her normal self; quite warm and happy; and although slightly troubled in her mind she still refused to take things very seriously. It was her rule not to think unpleasantly, and thus she was able to sit in that gloomy porch, with the darkness coming up, and the memorials of departed Cornish folk around, and the wind drifting the wreckage of autumn up and down, without feeling the least qualm of dread. She looked at the roof of the porch and at the ancient church door, covered with half-rotten clamps, thinking and wondering. She thought about the man in the cottage by the gorge. She wondered if, about the time of the first primrose, she would pass that door and across that porch, in “faire white samite,” with a crown of spring blossoms, and a ring of gold upon the finger where, according to the Decretal, is a certain vein which reaches to the heart. Beatrice had seen the old book still kept in chains within the church, containing among offices and divers benedictions the pre-reformation order of matrimony. She had read the words with which many a maid then lying long forgotten in the surrounding acre had blushingly committed herself; she had written them in her prayer-book; she had them by heart; and she murmured them as she sat in the windy porch:—
“I Beatrice take the John to be my wedded housbonder, to have and to holde fro this day forwarde, for better for wors, for richere for poorer, in sykenesse and in hele, to be bonere and buxum in bedde and at the borde, tyll dethe us departe, if holy chyrche it woll ordeyne, and thereto I plight the my trouthe.”
“It rests with myself. My destiny is in my own hands,” said she.
There were sycamore leaves drifting past the porch. Beatrice had been watching them, and in an idle way counting them up to a dozen or so, then forgetting the exact number and starting afresh. Suddenly she drew out her watch. There was just light enough for her to see the hands upon the dial and the dry leaves passing outside.
“If twelve leaves, or more than twelve, pass completely across in two minutes I will marry in the spring.”
She sat on in silence, and the leaves drifted by one by one. The issue was never in doubt; for at the end of the first minute there came a wintry gust which sent more than a score of black-spotted leaves rustling past. Beatrice put away her watch with a little smile; but as she rose to depart a cross-current caught the big leaves that had gone by and whisked them back again.
“You can’t undo it,” said she, frowning and addressing the heedless wind. “You may blow the leaves wherever you like now, but you shan’t blow me back again. I have made up my mind; it’s fixed due east, and blow out your cheeks as you like it’s not going to point in any other direction. Blow into the church, if you must blow, and into the lungs of the poor French fisherman and give him his life again.”
Beatrice was in ill-humour with the windy brethren. One of them had raised the storm which had been the cause of bringing the body into her own particular cove; another had turned back the flight of her augural leaves. If she could have captured those two windy brothers she would have put them into the devil’s frying-pan at Cadgewith there to seethe and bubble till they burst.
Little Miss Pentreath was in bed, unpainted, unapparelled, unadorned; as dreary a sight as a dismantled theatre. She was suffering from an attack of bronchitis, which prostrated her every autumn, and that season had been more severe than usual. A bed had been made up for her downstairs amid the cheerful surroundings which prevailed on the ground floor, as she did not like to be ill in a bedroom. Beatrice sympathised with her. Had she been ill she would have gone out to lie on the heather; and that was precisely the remedy which she had prescribed for her Aunt.
“Darling, I’m so glad you’re back. I went to sleep and had a horrible dream, and woke with screams and shivers,” was Miss Pentreath’s greeting, as the girl came in. “Come and shake my pillows, and let me feel you, warm, glowing, healthy, lovely thing. Oh, that colour on your cheeks! I never could copy it, though I hunted through London and Paris. I never could make my cheeks like yours, could I, Trixy?”
“No, dear. They were rather Dutch-dolly. But it served you right. Going to England for what only Cornwall could give.”
“I hoped you would contradict me. You are so downright in your negatives,” sighed Miss Pentreath. “Whenever I asked you how I looked you always had a knock-me-down answer.”
“I’m going to knock-you-down again,” laughed Beatrice. “I’m going to tell you something which will either kill or cure. How will you have it—in two words, or a speech? All together, or broken gently? Gilded, or bitter? Plain, or varnished?”
“I won’t have it at all,” cried the invalid. “Don’t worry me just as I am getting better. I am much better this evening, Trixy. I am not going to listen to horrors, wrecked ships, drowned sailors, bogged moormen—let’s have tea and be snug, and see if we can’t find something nice to talk about.”
“I’m not going to spare you, Auntie. You have got to listen, and you may scream if you are moved so to do. You may also call me a toad, or compare me to any other of the reptilian creation which it may appear to you I particularly resemble.”
“Go on, you bully,” grumbled the little lady. “I’m entirely in your power. You will give me insomnia, and you won’t even be sorry.”
“Do you think, Auntie,” Beatrice went on, seating herself upon the bed and speaking rather quickly, “that if a man were very fond of me he could exist without me?”
“Why, of course he could. What a horribly conceited thing to say,” gasped Miss Pentreath. “I’ve been very fond of some men in my time, but I’m still alive, and I intend to remain so.”
“But if he were lonely and sad, and very fond of me?” Beatrice persisted.
“I always thought you were more likely to black a man’s eye than break his heart,” said Miss Pentreath, evading the question.
“Don’t be frivolous, else I’ll call you an old woman, which is the truth, though you don’t like to hear it.”
“You’re a toad, Beatrice. I don’t care—you are. A big bloated toad, clammy and horrible. Go away.”
“And you’re a very Methuselah of an old woman.”
“I can’t keep it up. I’m too weak,” laughed Miss Pentreath. “Anyhow, you always win in a slanging match.”
“I’ve broken off a nice big bit of the news,” the girl went on. “I’ve given you the broadest of hints. Now then, dear—what was your head given you for?”
“You are going to marry him?” gasped Miss Pentreath; and she rolled over in the bed and groaned.
“I’ve made up my mind at last. I am going to marry him,” said Beatrice.
“Where are you going to live?” asked the invalid, after a silent interval which Beatrice occupied by attending to the fire.
“Here nine months of the year. The other three on Dartmoor. Cheer up, Auntie. You shall keep house. I can’t.”
“You’re not going to desert me? You’re not going to turn me out?” cried Miss Pentreath. “Then I don’t care. You shall marry with my blessing, Trixy. You’re not a toad at all. You’re a darling, and if I could get out of bed I’d come and bite you.”
“I’ll draw near to be bitten,” said the girl.
After this ritual act had been accomplished Beatrice rang the bell and the maid brought in lamps and tea. Curtains were drawn, peat and wood in equal quantities were piled upon the fire, and it was all very snug. Miss Pentreath actually had a little natural colouring upon her cheeks. She sat up in bed, laughed over her tea, and was very happy now that she knew Beatrice was not intending to desert her. When the maid left them Miss Pentreath put a dozen questions in one breath, and with the next respiration signified her willingness to make up for the part of bridesmaid. This called down upon her the reproof,—
“You will wear a bonnet and black silk dress, trimmed with your best lace, and you’ll carry a huge prayer-book and look proper.”
“I won’t,” cried Miss Pentreath. “Take care, Beatrice, or you’ll revert to the reptilian state. I shall wear white mousseline-de-soie, with pink baby-ribbon and picture hat, satin shoes, lace stockings.”
“Shut up,” laughed Beatrice. “I don’t want to know what clothes you are going to wear or what complexion you intend to put on. You’re not my fairy godmother. You’re my aunt, and you’ve got to be my best-woman. I’m going to be married early in the spring,” she went on. “My marriage day will depend on the wild primroses. The Wednesday following the opening of the first primrose I shall give up my Cornish name.”
“What a whimsical creature it was,” murmured Miss Pentreath. “Really darling,” she added, “you have wrapped yourself up in witchcraft, stupid superstition, and pixy-tales until I believe you’ve forgotten you are living in a hard-hearted and practical age.”
“That doesn’t matter. We are out of the hard-hearted age here. Anyhow, I am contemplating a practical act,” said Beatrice.
“But, tell me, what you have been doing lately. What has made you alter your mind? You said you couldn’t bear to look at the poor dear man—”
“Neither could I. But he’s all right now, not quite as he was, of course, still good enough for me. I liked him very much from the beginning, and when I got to know him better I liked him much more. Then I was a good deal to blame for that horrible accident. I shall never find a man more devoted to me than he is. He’s clever, too, and I appreciate cleverness. He’s a writer, and I want to tell him all my experiences upon the moor, and my thoughts, and my little bits of folk stories; and he can write them out for me. We shall get on very well together. I shall be as free as I am now. I wouldn’t marry except on that condition. We shall work in the morning, he and I—putting down all the folk-lore in the West. In the afternoon we shall be upon the moor.”
“All this ‘we,’ this great ‘we,’ ” interrupted Miss Pentreath with piteous scorn. “What about me?”
“You shall stop at home and make the puddings, dear.”
“I quite perceive I am to play gooseberry-fool,” sighed the invalid. “Well, I must bear it. Custom has made it a something of easiness. Is Mr. Burrough here?” she asked. “Are you going to produce him suddenly?”
“And you most modestly abed! Well, he wouldn’t recognise you off the stage so to speak. I haven’t seen him since that evening when we gathered pixy-flowers in the copse, and you lighted the furze upon Brynamoor.”
“Then how do you know about his restoration?” cried Miss Pentreath, wonderingly.
“I sent my child. He has reported most favourably,” Beatrice explained, my child being her usual name for Poltesco. “He was immensely taken with poor Jack, and he has signified his entire approval of my choice.”
“Fantastic person!” murmured the invalid.
“Fantastic, am I?” laughed Beatrice, rolling her cat over upon the rug. “That’s nothing to what I’m going to do. I’m going to write to him this very night, post the letter to-morrow care of Bingie & Co., and perhaps it won’t be delivered till goodness knows when.”
“How fond you are of these stupid mysteries. Who is Bingie?” complained her aunt.
“The guardian of the bogs, my dear. The little person who rules the pools and wishing-wells. The letter may be delivered before winter sets in. If it isn’t I must write and explain; for when the wild weather comes the post-office will be closed, and won’t open for business until all the spring primroses have faded.”
“As for those primroses,” said a rebellious voice from the bed. “At the end of January I shall instruct the children to look out for the first flowers; and I shall offer sixpence for every one destroyed.”
Even on Dartmoor the hours after noon on Saturday may not be violated by work. It is a time of beer-drinking, debt-renewing, and ballad-singing; when the heads of families are gathered together into one place—the village inn; and the wives assemble in the market town to lay up provision for the coming week.
It was a Saturday in November, and the little village of Lew-upon-the-Moor appeared deserted. Ballads were being sung hoarsely and incoherently in Eastaway’s inn, where that worthy soul was rattling into the till the wages he had just paid out; but the long street was empty, except for geese and dogs and the inevitable plague of fowls. Not even the witless face of old Y. was to be seen looking over his gate. The last summer visitor had left a month ago, and the parlour in every cottage had been set in order and closed for six long months. The reign of the winds had commenced.
Looking down the village one might have observed a quaint object in the middle of the road. It was a three-legged milking-stool. It was also a symbol of independence and a defiance to the parish. If a cart had come that way the driver would have dismounted to remove the stool, so that his horse should not stumble over it, and would then have replaced it prudently rather than with reverence. Even the animals avoided that stool. Every living creature had learnt to respect the tongue of its owner. Mrs. Cobbledick had always milked her cows in the middle of the road, and she intended to persevere in that practice so long as she might live.
In due time Ann appeared with a milking-pail, which had an indifferent claim to newness and cleanliness, leading Artful Twoad, her favourite cow, by a piece of rope, twisted about the animal’s neck, and so rotten that a single tug would have snapped it. Having placed the cow precisely in the centre of the road, with many a “Do ye get up,” “Do ye get back,” and “Do ye bide still,” for it had never yet occurred to her that it would be easier to shift the stool than to place the cow beside it, she wiped her hands upon her apron, which by its appearance might have been used for cleansing the interior of a grate, and devoted herself to professional duties, calling out occasionally to Willum who was loafing beside the kitchen fire before going to loaf in the village inn.
Soon there came a mighty gust of wind which threatened to remove Mrs. Cobbledick, milking-stool, and Artful Twoad from the face of the moor. Both ladies objected, one of them by whisking her tail, and the other by screaming “Christmas!” her customary expletive, which had the merit of being not merely harmless but actually tinged with a suggestion of sanctity.
“Come out,” she called. “There be a frisky wind. Do ye good, old dear.”
After a little more admonition Willum appeared, hands in his pockets and apparently rooted there. He considered the time had come for him to exchange the fireside for the inn, that he might relieve his distressing malady by copious draughts of ale. Not that he expected any foaming gifts from Eastaway. A distinct coldness had sprung up between the stonebreaker and the house of Cobbledick, since Willum had acquired the tombstone by such unscrupulous methods. The scholar never entered the bar-room until he had first satisfied himself, either that Eastaway was absent or that several villagers were present with him. Possession being in that community the entire ten points of the law, Eastaway had come to regard the thirty shillings due to him for the stone as a bad debt; but he had not yet come to regard the mean old widow and her crafty son as brother and sister, although Griffey the preacher made a point of insisting that he should do so. As, however, Griffey regarded his brothers and sisters in practice very much as a man who is digging regards worms, the publican did not feel compelled to conform to his pulpit teachings.
“Don’t ye take her head. Her won’t hurt I,” cried the widow when Willum, under a sudden fit of energy, made as though he would hold the rotten rope, and thereby run the risk of straining himself. “You be getting thin, Willum. You be wasting cruel. You mun eat more butter.”
Willum raised objections. He explained that liquid foods were assimilated with greater ease and possessed far superior flesh-forming qualities. In his opinion the food most admirably adapted to his case was the exhilarating beverage prepared from farinaceous grain by a process of fermentation. “I mun drink more beer,” was his summing up of the matter; and that he might put this laudable design into immediate practice he extorted sixpence from the widow by means of a few churchyard coughs.
“It be getting rough on the moor,” said Ann, butting her grey head into Artful Twoad’s side to make that patient animal more mindful of its duties.
“Wannell were going after his bullocks, but he’s let ’em bide,” replied Willum. “Says ’tis as much as his life is worth to go up on Dartmoor wi’ the frisk blowing.”
“So ’tis. Don’t ye go up, Willum. You’d be pixy-led sure enough and get stugged. ’Tis the first year the Dart have took no one,” she went on, screwing her head round to contemplate the ruddy features of her son.
“Year ain’t over yet,” the scholar reminded her.
“Dart don’t take ’en in winter. Takes ’en in summer. One year a man, next year a maid. ’Tis how it used to be, but the old ways have changed. Took that lady last year, Dart did. Her went in after the little maid that Dart were taking, and Dart took she instead. Her warn’t a maid, ’cause her were married. Bide still, Artful. The old ways have changed. Cows don’t give milk like they used to when I was a maid.”
Seeing that Willum was anxious to join the ballad-singers and fatten upon malted liquors, the mischief-making dame changed her subject, that she might detain her son until the milking was finished, and hinted darkly that the note, which Beatrice had left in her charge for the owner of the cottage by the gorge, might be “discovered” and forwarded to the person who had the most right to it.
“I tore ’en up,” Willum replied, with a malicious grin. “Tore ’en up the day after I shot his old cat. He wouldn’t pay for ’en. Told I to go and work. Let ’en work hisself.”
“Told ye to work,” cried the widow shrilly. “The mucky twoad! Her called ’en ‘dear Jack,’ in the letter,” she went on, relapsing into pure scandal. “Called herself ‘Bill.’ What du it mean, Willum?”
“It ain’t for me to say,” replied the scholar mysteriously. “Her was bad, and he’m bad, sure enough. Her wouldn’t call herself by a man’s name if her warn’t bad.”
“You never caught ’em together,” muttered the strictly moral old woman sorrowfully.
“They got away from I,” her son explained. “I never could find ’em. They went too quick for I. Got into lew places on Dartmoor where I couldn’t find ’em.”
“They was ashamed to be seen,” commented Mrs. Cobbledick, as she rose from her stool. “Honest folk like we stops in the village. Us don’t go on Dartmoor to talk. I milks Artful in the middle of the road, ’cause I ain’t ashamed to be seen. I’m proud of it, Willum. Honest folk be always proud to be seen. They don’t hide themselves on Dartmoor. And when a maid calls herself Bill—well, I wouldn’t let she stop wi’ me if her didn’t pay us well.”
With these virtuous sentiments her son entirely agreed. As he moved away, to spend the evening in the vitiated atmosphere of the bar-room, he summed up the situation with the remark, “Her won’t marry ’en. Her be a lady, and he be only half a gentleman, though he reckons he’m a whole one; and he bain’t a scholar, though he reckons he be; and he’ve only one eye, though he reckons us don’t know it.”
“Her b’ain’t no lady,” cried Mrs. Cobbledick, harsh naturally upon her own sex. “Her be no better than an actress.” This was the unkindest thing the unkindly soul could think of. “Artful be more of a lady than she. Get over, Artful! Come back early, Willum,” she called after the slouching figure. “I’ll have a nice supper for ye, old dear.”
Five minutes later the village street was once more silent and deserted—given over to the geese and fowls—and the three-legged stool occupied the centre of the road until dusk.
That same afternoon Burrough was lying upon his bed. He was not well. He had a feverish headache, and his temperature was slightly above normal. For the last two days he had not been out; he was depressed by the wild and wintry weather, by the knowledge that he could do no work, by the overwhelming sense of his loneliness, and by the fact that he had heard nothing of Beatrice since the fisherman’s visit. Ill in body and worried in mind as he was, he began to wonder whether the experiences of that day had actually occurred. He had been dreaming a great deal lately owing to the disturbed condition of his brain; and sometimes he doubted whether he had been visited by the onion-seller in the first instance, and then by Poltesco, and whether he had walked out that evening and talked with old Y. under the Vicarage wall. His dreams had become a confused mixture of Breton valleys, Cornish cliffs and moors, pilchards and onions, old men with lanterns, screaming women and owls, and behind everything the vision of Beatrice, not quite as he had known her, but a graver, wiser Beatrice, sitting alone in fields of blue-flowered flax—that was the influence of the Breton—her hands clasped before her, and her distracting face always turned slightly away from him. He awoke with struggles, but the dream-picture accompanied his waking hours, until he found it no easy matter to sift the grain of fact from the chaff of imagination.
From his position upon the bed he could command the moorland track, which heaved in the form of an arc right in front of his window. He could see everything that passed; the big horned sheep, the bullocks, and shaggy ponies. He looked continually along that rough bend of narrow road, wishing it was summer, longing to see some familiar creature of his own species start suddenly into view. Nobody had come that way during the two days of his illness—which was mental rather than physical—except the postman bringing him daily newspapers, but no letters, no small envelope bearing the Sennen postmark. He felt sure that Poltesco’s report had been unfavourable. Three weeks had passed since the fisherman’s strange visit, and Beatrice had not spoken. It could only be because she did not like to tell him that his artificial eye would repel her, as the artificial leg of the old fisherman had repelled her years before.
It began to grow dusk. Burrough stretched himself back upon the bed and closed his eyes. No one would come along the moorland track that day. Presently he roused himself to take his temperature. It had gone up slightly.
He went on dreaming. Again the Breton became a prominent figure, almost an obsession. Burrough imagined him planting his onions, harvesting them, stringing them, crossing to Plymouth that he might hawk them in desolate places, and returning with a few shillings’ profit in his pocket to commence the trivial round again. He thought of the man’s wife and children, wondered how they managed to live, where their clothes came from, how often they had a meal; and he envied the simple faith which made the success of the onion crop dependent upon the good-will of their blessed saints. Then he opened his eyes, dreading to fall again into the troubling realm of dreamland. Darkness was coming rapidly across the moor; the track was almost obscured; but his imagination had become so heightened, and the thought of the onion-seller possessed his mind so completely, that he actually saw the Breton, swinging along towards the gorge, with the pole upon his shoulder, and a string of bronzed onions hanging at each end.
“This won’t do at all,” he muttered, turning aside with a shudder.
He looked again. The darkness seemed to have increased marvellously in those few seconds, and it was not at first easy to distinguish the dull grey track between the black gorse-bushes. The apparition had vanished. Then a pony dashed across, its mane and tail streaming wildly, and Burrough heard others in front of his cottage apparently stampeding. There was a moment of silence, and then came a gentle rap-rap upon the door.
Burrough sprang up, his head aching violently, but somehow not at all surprised. He was dressed, so he passed quickly downstairs, wrenched the door open, for the recent rains had caused the woodwork to swell, and was greeted at once with the shy smile and soft “good day” of the Breton, who was not an apparition at all, but the same man who had visited the cottage three weeks before, an hour or so before the coming of Poltesco, and had for some unaccountable reason remained an obsession ever since.
“You were kind to me the last time,” said the man in his own language. “So I have come back to tell you something you may like to know.”
“I am very glad to see you,” Burrough replied heartily. “I am very lonely, and I am not well. Come in and talk to me, and spend the night here if you like.”
“No, no,” said the Breton. “I must walk a long way to-night. I am going home.”
He lowered the pole from his shoulder, and pointed at the two remaining strings of bulbs. “Those are all I have left. I shall sell them as I go to Plymouth.”
“You will leave them here. I will buy them,” said Burrough.
“Thank you,” the Breton replied simply, and he gave a little sigh which was more eloquent than words. He could go back to his wife with money in his pockets, and tell her he had sold all his onions, and had moreover sold them well.
Burrough felt restored. He was tingling with expectation of good news as he brought the Frenchman to his fireside, and the headache left him as though by enchantment. Here was a second mysterious visit. Had the Breton gone through Cornwall in the course of his wanderings; met Beatrice there; told her the story of the lonely seigneur, who had shown him kindness in the tiny chateau upon Dartmoor; received a message for him from her, one of those cryptic messages in which Beatrice so delighted? Had he beneath that rough jersey, very much like the one Poltesco had worn, something from the Cornish princess for the unfortunate and unhappy King of Trevalyor? That fairy-tale, which was not all a fairy-tale, came back vividly to Burrough’s mind. How long ago it seemed! And how different their little kingdom by the river had been then!
“Tell me. Have you been in Cornwall?” he asked.
He was disappointed when the man smiled and shook his head. He had not been west of Plymouth. He had been in the mid-Devon villages, in the low, deeply-wooded swamp land, among the still almost primitive people of Zeal Monachorum and Bow, and the ancient hamlets along the northerly fringe of the moor. That morning he had been in Chagford, and had sold onions to the best known of the Dartmoor guides.
“Have you come from Chagford? Can you swear you come from there?” said Burrough excitedly, mindful of Poltesco’s deceitful story, of which this promised to be a repetition.
The Breton swore by the blessed saints, who had brought him a plentiful harvest of onions, and had enabled him to sell them at excellent profit, and had, moreover, taken his wife and children beneath their protection during his long absence, that he was speaking nothing but the truth. To satisfy Burrough he described the village, and when he had done so with complete accuracy, the young man expressed himself satisfied, and begged him to proceed.
“The guide is a good man. He, too, was kind to me,” said the Breton, puffing at the cigarette which his host had given him. “He told me he had been a great journey to a wild place, to the grande marais which he called Cranmere. He had done a service for a young lady.”
“Yes,” said Burrough, when the man paused. “Go on.”
“The young lady sent him a letter, and told him to take it to Cranmere. There is a box——”
“I understand all that,” the other interrupted. “I know all about the postal system of Cranmere. Give me names. Who sent the letter?”
“I do not know. The guide did not say. But the letter was for you.”
Burrough leaned forward. He placed a hand upon the Breton’s knee, and asked earnestly, “How do you know that?”
“Because the guide told me who that letter was for. He asked me if I had heard of you. I told him I had seen you——”
“How did you know my name?”
“That evening after I left you I went into the village, and I asked for your name. You had been very good to me. I came here cold and unhappy. I had tramped a long way and sold no onions. You brought me in. You gave me tea and tobacco, and let me sit by your fire. When I left you I was happy and warm. I sold my onions well. You had brought me good fortune. You were my patron. So I asked for your name that I might remember it in my prayers.”
Burrough was deeply touched. He took the Breton’s hand and shook it warmly, murmuring a few words of gratitude, not so much for the pious remembrance as for the information he had brought. He was grateful to discover that there were men eager to go out of their way to perform a kindly service in return for a very little kindness. He knew that not a single commoner would have made a dozen steps to bring him the information which this poor alien had brought gladly. He thanked the Breton again and again.