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Lying Prophets: A Novel

by Eden Phillpotts · English · Gutenberg #7968 · 701,044 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Lying Prophets: A Novel

Author: Eden Phillpotts


        
Release date: April 1, 2005 [eBook #7968]
                Most recently updated: February 21, 2015

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7968

Credits: Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Tiffany Vergon, Eric Casteleijn and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LYING PROPHETS: A NOVEL ***




Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Tiffany Vergon, Eric
Casteleijn and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.











LYING PROPHETS

_A NOVEL_

BY EDEN PHILLPOTTS

_Author of "Down Dartmoor Way," "Some Everyday Folks" "The End of a
Life," etc._

_"'Tis like this: your man did take plain Nature for God, an' he did talk
fulishness 'bout finding Him in the scent o' flowers, the hum o' bees an'
sichlike. Mayhap Nature's a gude working God for a selfish man but she ed'n
wan for a maid, as you knaws by now. Then your faither--his God do sit
everlastingly alongside hell-mouth, an' do laugh an' girn to see all the
world a walkin' in, same as the beasts walked in the Ark. Theer's another
picksher of a God for 'e; but mark this, gal, they be lying prophets--lying
prophets both!"--Book II., Chapter XI._






BOOK ONE

_ART_




CHAPTER ONE

NEWLYN


Away beyond the village stands a white cottage with the sea lapping at low
cliffs beneath it. Plum and apple orchards slope upward behind this
building, and already, upon the former trees, there trembles a snowy gauze
where blossom buds are breaking. Higher yet, dark plowed fields, with
hedges whereon grow straight elms, cover the undulations of a great hill
even to its windy crest, and below, at the water line, lies Newlyn--a
village of gray stone and blue, with slate roofs now shining silver-bright
under morning sunlight and easterly wind. Smoke softens every outline;
red-brick walls and tanned sails bring warmth and color through the blue
vapor of many chimneys; a sun-flash glitters at this point and that,
denoting here a conservatory, there a studio. Enter this hive and you shall
find a network of narrow stone streets; a flutter of flannel underwear, or
blue stockings, and tawny garments drying upon lines; little windows, some
with rows of oranges and ginger-beer bottles in them; little shops; little
doors, at which cluster little children and many cats, the latter mostly
tortoise-shell and white. Infants watch their elders playing marbles in the
roadway, and the cats stretch lazy bodies on the mats, made of old
fishing-net, which lie at every cottage door. Newlyn stands on slight
elevations above the sea level, and at one point the road bends downward,
breaks and fringes the tide, leading among broken iron, rusty anchors, and
dismantled fishing-boats, past an ancient buoy whose sides now serve the
purposes of advertisement and tell of prayer-meetings, cheap tea, and so
forth. Hard by, the mighty blocks of the old breakwater stand, their fabric
dating from the reign of James I., and taking the place of one still older.
But the old breakwater is no more than a rialto for ancient gossips now;
and far beyond it new piers stretch encircling arms of granite round a new
harbor, southward of which the lighthouse stands and winks his sleepless
golden eye from dusk to dawn. Within this harbor, when the fishing fleet is
at home, lie jungles of stout masts, row upon row, with here and there a
sail, carrying on the color of the plowed fields above the village, and
elsewhere, scraps of flaming bunting flashing like flowers in a reed bed.
Behind the masts, along the barbican, the cottages stand close and thick,
then clamber and straggle up the acclivities behind, decreasing in their
numbers as they ascend. Smoke trails inland on the wind--black as a thin
crepe veil, from the funnel of a coal "tramp" about to leave the harbor,
blue from the dry wood burning on a hundred cottage hearths. A smell of
fish--where great split pollocks hang drying in the sun--of tar and tan and
twine--where nets and cordage lie spread upon low walls and open
spaces--gives to Newlyn an odor all its own; but aloft, above the village
air, spring is dancing, sweet-scented, light-footed in the hedgerows,
through the woods and on the wild moors which stretch inland away. There
the gold of the gorse flames in many a sudden sheet and splash over the
wastes whereon last year's ling-bloom, all sere and gray, makes a
sad-colored world. But the season's change is coming fast. Celandines
twinkle everywhere, and primroses, more tardy and more coy, already open
wondering eyes. The sea lies smooth with a surface just wind-kissed and
strewed with a glory of sun-stars. Away to the east, at a point from which
brown hills, dotted with white dwellings, tend in long undulations to the
cliffs of the Lizard, under fair clouds all banked and sunny white against
the blue, rises St. Michael's Mount, with a man's little castle capping
Nature's gaunt escarpments and rugged walls. Between Marazion and Newlyn
stretches Mount's Bay; while a mile or two of flat sea-front, over which,
like a string of pearls, roll steam clouds, from a train, bring us to
Penzance. Then--noting centers of industry where freezing works rise and
smelting of ore occupies many men (for Newlyn labors at the two extremes of
fire and ice)--we are back in the fishing village again and upon the
winding road which leads therefrom, first to Penlee Point and the
blue-stone quarry, anon to the little hamlet of Mousehole beyond.

Beside this road lay our white cottage, with the sunshine lighting up a
piece of new golden thatch let into the old gray, and the plum-trees behind
it bursting into new-born foam of flowers. Just outside it, above the low
cliff, stood two men looking down into the water, seen dark green below
through a tangle of brier and blackthorn and emerald foliage of budding
elder. The sea served base uses here, for the dust and dirt of many a
cottage was daily cast into the lap of the great scavenger who carried all
away. The low cliffs were indeed spattered with filth, and the coltsfoot,
already opening yellow blossoms below, found itself rudely saluted with
cinders and potato-peelings, fishes' entrails, and suchlike unlovely
matter.

The men were watching a white fleet of bird boats paddling on the sea,
hurrying this way and that, struggling--with many a plunge and flutter and
plaintive cry--for the food a retreating tide was bearing from the shore.

"'White spirits and gray,' I call them," said the younger of the two
spectators. "The gulls fascinate me always. They are beautiful to see and
hear and paint. Swimming there, and wheeling between the seas in rough
weather, or hanging almost motionless in midair with their heads turning
first this way, then that, and their breasts pressed against the
wind--why, they are perfect always, the little winged gods of the sea."

"Gods kissing carrion," sneered the other. "Beautiful enough, no doubt, but
their music holds no charm for me. Nothing is quite beautiful which has for
its cause something ugly. Those echoing cries down there are the expression
of a greedy struggle, no more. I hate your Newlyn gulls. They are ruined,
like a thousand other wild things, by civilization. I see them scouring the
fields and hopping after the plowman like upland crows. A Cornish seabird
should fight its battle with the sea and find its home in the heart of the
dizzy cliffs, sharing them with the samphire. But your 'white spirits and
gray' behave like gutter-fed ducks."

The first speaker laughed and both strolled upon their way. They were
artists, but while Edmund Murdoch dwelt at Newlyn and lived by his
profession, the older man, John Barron, was merely on a visit to the place.
He had come down for change and with no particular intention to work.
Barron was wealthy and wasted rare talents. He did not paint much, and the
few who knew his pictures deplored the fact that no temporal inducement
called upon him to handle his brush oftener. A few excused him on the plea
of his health, which was at all times indifferent, but he never excused
himself. It needed something far from the beaten track to inspire him, and
inspiration was rare. But let a subject once grip him and the artist's life
centered and fastened upon it until his work was done. He sacrificed
everything at such a time; he slaved; labor was to him as a debauch to the
drunkard, and he wearied body and mind and counted his health nothing while
the frenzy held him. Then, his picture finished, at the cost of the man's
whole store of nervous energy and skill, he would probably paint no more
for many months. His subject was always some transcript from nature,
wrought out with almost brutal vigor and disregard of everything but truth.
His looks belied his work curiously. A small, slight man he was, with
sloping shoulders and the consumptive build. But the breadth of his head
above the ears showed brain, and his gray eyes spoke a strength of purpose
upon which a hard, finely-modeled mouth set the seal. Once he had painted
in the West Indies: a picture of two negresses bathing at Tobago. Behind
them hung low tangles of cactus, melo-cactus and white-blossomed orchid;
while on the tawny rocks glimmered snowy cotton splashed with a crimson
turban; but the marvel of the work lay in the figures and the refraction of
their brown limbs seen through crystal-clear water. The picture brought
reputation to a man who cared nothing for it; and Barron's "Bathing
Negresses" are only quoted here because they illustrate his method of work.
He had painted from the sea in a boat moored fore and aft; he had kept the
two women shivering and whining in the water for two hours at a time. They
could not indeed refuse the gold he offered for their services, but one
never lived to enjoy the money, for her prolonged ablutions in the cause of
art killed her a week after her work was done.

John Barren was a lonely sybarite with a real love for Nature and
absolutely primitive instincts with regard to his fellow-creatures. The
Land's End had disappointed him; he had found Nature neither grand nor
terrific there, but sleepy and tame as a cat after a full meal. Nor did he
derive any pleasure from the society of his craft at Newlyn. He hated the
clatter of art jargon, he flouted all schools, and pointed out what nobody
doubts now: that the artists of the Cornish village in reality represented
nothing but a community of fellow-workers, all actuated indeed by love of
art, but each developing his own bent without thought for his neighbor's
theory. Barron indeed made some enemies before he had been in the place a
week, and the greater lights liked him none the better for vehemently
disclaiming the honor when they told him he was one of themselves. "The
shape of a brush does not make men paint alike," he said, "else we were all
equal and should only differ in color. Some of you can no more paint with a
square brush than you can with a knife. Some of you could not paint though
your palettes were set with Nature's own sunset colors. And others of you,
if you had a rabbit's scut at the end of a hop-pole and the gray mud from a
rain puddle, would produce work worth considering. You are a community of
painters--some clever, some hopeless--but you are not a school, and you may
thank God for it."

John Barron was rough tonic, but the fearless little man generally found an
audience at the end of the day in this studio or that. The truth of much
that he said appealed to the lofty-minded and serious; his dry cynicism,
savage dislike of civilization, and frank affection for Nature, attracted
others. He hit hard, but he never resented rough knocks in return, and no
man had seen him out of temper with anything but mysticism and the art bred
therefrom. Upon the whole, however, his materialism annoyed more than his
wit amused.

Upon the evening which followed his insult to the Newlyn gulls, Barron,
with Edmund Murdoch and some other men, was talking in the studio of one
Brady, known to fame as the "Wrecker," from his love for the artistic
representation of maritime disaster. Barron liked this man, for he was
outspoken and held vigorous views, but the two quarreled freely.

"Fate was a fool when she chucked her presents into the lap of a lazy
beggar like you," said Brady, addressing the visitor. "And thrice a fool,"
he added, "to assort her gifts so ill."

"Fate is a knave, a mad thing playing at cat's cradle with the threads of
our wretched little lives," answered John Barron, "she is a coward--a
bully. She hits the hungry below the belt; she heaps gold into the lap of
the old man, but not till he has already dug his own grave to come at it;
she gives health to those who must needs waste all their splendid strength
on work; and wealth to worthless beings like myself who are always ailing
and who never spend a pound with wisdom. Make no dark cryptic mystery of
Fate when you paint her. She looks to me like a mischievous monkey poking
sticks into an ant-hill."

"She's a woman," said Murdoch.

"She's three," corrected Brady; "what can you expect from three women
rolled into one?"

"Away with her! Waste no incense at her shrine. She'll cut the thread no
sooner because you turn your back on her. Fling overboard your
mythologies, dead and alive, and kneel to Nature. A budding spike of wild
hyacinth is worth all the gods put together. Go hand in hand with Nature, I
say. Ask nothing from her; walk humbly; be well content if she lets you but
turn the corner of one page none else have read. That's how I live. My life
is not a prayer exactly--"

"I should say not," interrupted Brady.

"But a hymn of praise--a purely impersonal existence, lived all alone, like
a man at a prison window. This carcass, with its shaky machinery and
defective breathing apparatus, is the prison. I look out of the window till
the walls crumble away--"

"And then?" asked one Paul Tarrant, a painter who prided himself on being a
Christian as well.

"Then, the spark which I call myself, goes back to Nature, as the cloud
gives the raindrop back to the sea from whence the sun drew it."

"A lie, man!" answered the other hotly.

"Perhaps. It matters nothing. God--if there be a God--will not blame me for
making a mistake. Meantime I live like the rook and the thrush. They never
pray, they praise, they sing 'grace before meat' and after it, as Nature
taught them."

"A simple child of Nature--beautiful spectacle," said Brady. "But I'm sorry
all the same," he continued, "that you've found nothing in Cornwall to keep
you here and make you do some work. You talk an awful deal of rot, but we
want to see you paint. Isn't there anything or anybody worthy of you here?"

"As a matter of face, I've found a girl," said Barron.

There was a clamor of excitement at this news, above which Brady's bull
voice roared approval.

"Proud girl, proud parents, proud Newlyn!" he bellowed.

"The mood ripens too," continued Barren quietly. "'Sacrifice all the world
to mood' is my motto. So I shall stop and paint."

A moment later derisive laughter greeted Barron's decision, for Murdoch, in
answer to a hail of questions, announced the subject of his friend's
inspiration.

"We strolled round this morning and saw Joan Tregenza in an iron hoop with
a pail of water slung at either hand."

"So your picture begins and ends where it is, Barron, my friend; in your
imagination. Did it strike you when you first saw that vision of loveliness
in dirty drab that she was hardly the girl to have gone unpainted till
now?" asked Brady.

"The possibility of previous pictures is hardly likely to weigh with me.
Why, I would paint a drowned sailor if the subject attracted me, and that
though you have done it," answered the other, nodding toward a big canvas
in the corner, where Brady's picture for the year approached completion.

"My dear chap, we all worship Joan--at a distance. She is not to be
painted. Tears and prayers are useless. She has a flinty father--a
fisherman, who looks upon painting as a snare of the devil and sees every
artist already wriggling on the trident in his mind's eye. Joan has also a
lover, who would rather behold her dead than on canvas."

"In fact these Methodist folk take us to be what you really are," said
Brady bluntly. "Old Tregenza tars us every one with the same brush. We are
lost sinners all."

"Well, why trouble him? A fisherman would have his business on the sea.
Candidly, I must paint her. The wish grows upon me."

"Even money you don't get as much as a sketch," said Murdoch.

"Have any of you tried approaching her directly, instead of her relations?"

"She's as shy as a hawk, man."

"That makes me the more hopeful. You fellows, with your Tam o' Shanters and
aggressive neckties and knickerbockers and calves, would frighten the
devil. I'm shy myself. If she's natural, then we shall possibly understand
each other."

"I'll bet you ten to one in pounds you won't have your wish," said Brady.

"No, shan't bet. You're all so certain. Probably I shall find myself beaten
like the rest of you. But it's worth trying. She's a pretty thing."

"How will you paint her if you get the chance?"

"Don't know yet. I should like to paint her in a wolf-skin with a thread of
wolf's teeth round her neck and a celt-headed spear in her hand."

"Art will be a loser by the pending repulse," declared Brady. "And now, as
my whisky-bottle's empty and my lamp going out, you chaps can follow its
example whenever you please."

So the men scattered into a starry night, and went, each his way, through
the streets of the sleeping village.




CHAPTER TWO

IN A HALO OF GOLD


Edmund Murdoch's studio stood high on Newlyn hill, and Barron had taken
comfortable rooms in a little lodging-house close beside it. The men often
enjoyed breakfast in each other's company, but on the following morning,
when Murdoch strolled over to see his friend, he found that his rooms were
empty.

Barron, in fact, was already nearly a mile from Newlyn, and, at the moment
when the younger artist sought him, he stood upon a footpath which ran
through plowed fields to the village of Paul. In the bottom of his mind ran
a current of thought occupied with the problem of Joan Tregenza, but,
superficially, he was concerned with the spring world in which he walked.
He stood where Nature, like Artemis, appeared as a mother of many breasts.
Brown and solemn in their undulations, they rose about and around him to
the sky-line, where the land cut sharply against a pale blue heaven from
which tinkled the music of larks. He watched a bird wind upward in a spiral
to its song throne; he noted the young wheat brushing the earth with a veil
of green; he dawdled where elms stood, their high tops thick with blossom;
and he delayed for full fifteen minutes to see the felling of one giant
tree. A wedge-shaped cut had been made upon the side where the great elm
was to fall, and, upon the other side, two men were sawing through the
trunk. There was no sound but the steady hiss of steel teeth gnawing inch
by inch to the wine-red heart of the tree. Sunshine glimmered on its leafy
crown, and as yet distant branch and bough knew nothing of the midgets and
Death below.

Barron took pleasure in seeing the great god Change at work, but he mourned
in that a masterpiece, on which Nature had bestowed half a century and more
of love, must now vanish.

"A pity," he said, while the executioners rested a few moments from their
labors, "a pity to cut down such a noble tree."

One woodman laughed, and the other--an old rustic, brown and bent--made
answer:

"I sez 'dang the tree!' Us doan't take no joy in thrawin' en, mister. I be
bedoled wi' pain, an' this 'ere sawin's just food for rheumatiz. My back's
that bad. But Squire must 'ave money, an' theer's five hundred pounds'
value o' ellum comin' down 'fore us done wi' it."

The saw won its way; and between each spell of labor, the ancient man held
his back and grumbled.

"Er's Billy Jago," confided the second laborer to Barron, when his
companion had turned aside to get some steel wedges and a sledge-hammer.
"Er's well-knawn in these paarts--a reg'lar cure. Er used tu work up Drift
wi' Mister Chirgwin."

Billy added two wedges to those already hammered into the saw-cut, then,
with the sledge, he drove them home and finished his task. The sorrowful
strokes rang hollow and mournful over the land, sadder to Barron's ear than
fall of earth-clod on coffin-lid. And, upon the sound, a responsive shiver
and uneasy tremor ran through trunk and bough to topmost twig of the elm--a
sudden sense, as it seemed, of awful evil and ruin undreamed of, but now
imminent. Then the monster staggered and the midget struck his last blow
and removed himself and his rheumatism. Whereupon began that magnificent
descent. Slowly, with infinitely solemn sweep, the elm's vast height swung
away from its place, described a wide aerial arc, and so, with the jolting
crash and rattle of close thunder, roared headlong to the earth, casting up
a cloud of dust, plowing the grass with splintered limbs, then lying very
still. From glorious tree to battered log it sank. No man ever saw more
instant wreck and ruin fall lightning-like on a fair thing. The mass was
crushed flat and shapeless by its own vast weight, and the larger boughs,
which did not touch the earth, were snapped short off by the concussion of
their fall.

Billy Jago held his back and whined while Barron spoke, as much to himself
as the woodman.

"Dear God!" he said, "to think that this glory of the hedge-row--this
kingdom of song birds--should come to the making of pauper coffins and
lodging-house furniture!"

"Squire must have money; an' folks must have coffins," said Billy. "You can
sleep your last sleep so sound in ellum as you can in oak, for that
matter."

Feeling the truth of the assertion, Barron admitted it, then turned his
back on the fallen king and pursued his way with thoughts reverting to the
proposed picture. There was nothing to alarm Joan Tregenza about him; which
seemed well, as he meant to approach the girl herself at the first
opportunity, and not her parents. Barron did not carry "artist" stamped
upon him. He was plainly attired in a thick tweed suit and wore a cap of
the same material. The man appeared insignificantly small. He was
clean-shaved and looked younger than his five-and-thirty years seen a short
distance off, but older when you stood beside him. He strolled now onward
toward the sea, and his cheeks took some color from the fine air. He walked
with a stick and carried a pair of field-glasses in a case slung over his
shoulder. The field-glasses had become a habit with him, but he rarely used
them, for his small slate-colored eyes were keen.

Once and again John Barron turned to look at St. Michael's Mount, seen afar
across the bay. The magic of morning made it beautiful and the great pile
towered grandly through a sunny haze. No detail disturbed the eye under
this effect of light, and the mount stood vast, dim, golden, magnified and
glorified into a fairy palace of romance built by immortal things in a
night. Seen thus, it even challenged the beholder's admiration, of which he
was at all times sparing. Until that hour, he had found nothing but
laughter for this same mount, likening the spectacle of it, with its castle
and cottages, now to a senile monarch with moth-eaten ermine about his toes
and a lop-sided crown on his head, now to a monstrous sea-snail creeping
shoreward.

Barron, having walked down the hill to Mouse-hole, breasted slowly the
steep acclivity which leads therefrom toward the west. Presently he turned,
where a plateau of grass sloped above the cliffs into a little theater of
banks ablaze with gorse. And here his thoughts and the image they were
concerned with perished before reality. Framed in a halo of golden furze,
her hands making a little penthouse above her brow, and in her blue eyes
the mingled hue of sea and sky, stood a girl looking out at the horizon.
The bud of a wondrous fair woman she was, and Barron saw her slim yet
vigorous figure accentuated under its drab-brown draperies by a kindly
breeze. He noted the sweet, childish freshness of her face, her plump arms
filling the sleeves of rusty black, and her feet in shoes too big for them.
Her hair was hidden under a linen sun-bonnet, but one lock had escaped, and
he noted that it was the color of wheat ripe for the reaping. He regretted
it had not been darker, but observed that it chimed well enough with the
flaming flowers behind it. And then he frankly praised Nature in his heart
for sending her servant such a splendid harmony in gold and brown. There
stood his picture in front of him. He gazed a brief second only, and then
his quick mind worked to find what human interest had brought Joan Tregenza
to this place and turned her eyes to the sea. It might be that herein
existed the possibility of the introduction he desired. He felt that
victory probably depended on the events of the next two or three minutes.
He owed a supreme effort of skill and tact to Fate, which had thus
befriended him, and he rose to the occasion.

The girl looked up as he came suddenly upon her, but his eyes were already
away and fixed upon the horizon before she turned. Observing that he was
not regarding her, she put up her hands again and continued to scan the
remote sea-line where a thin trail of dark smoke told of a steamer, itself
apparently invisible. Barron took his glasses from their case, and seeing
that the girl made no movement of departure, acted deliberately, and
presently began to watch a fleet of brown sails and black hulls putting
forth from the little harbor below. Then, without looking at her or taking
his eyes from the glasses, he spoke.

"Would you kindly tell me what those small vessels are below there just
setting out to sea?" he asked.

The girl started, looked round, and, realizing that he had addressed her,
made answer:

"They'm Mouzle [Footnote: _Mouzle_--Mousehole.] luggers, sir."

"Luggers, are they? Thank you. And where are they sailing to? Do you know?"

"Away down-long, south'ard o' the Scillies mostly, arter mackerl. Theer's a
power o' mackerl bein' catched just now--thousands an' thousands--but some
o' they booats be laskin'--that's just fishin' off shore."

"Ah, a busy time for the fishermen."

"Iss, 'tis."

"Thank you. Good-morning."

"Good-marnin', sir."

He started as though to continue his walk along the cliffs beyond the
plateau and the gorse; then he stopped suddenly, actuated, as it seemed, by
a chance thought, and turned back to the girl. She was looking out to sea
again.

"By the way," he said, unconcernedly, and with no suggestion that anything
in particular was responsible for his politeness. "I see you are on the
lookout there for something. You may have my glass a moment, if you like,
before I go on. They bring the ships very close."

The girl flushed with shy pleasure and seemed a little uncertain what to
answer. Barron, meanwhile, showed no trace of a smile, but looked bored if
anything, and, with a serious face, handed her the glass, then walked a
little way off. He was grave and courteous, but made no attempt at
friendship. He had noticed when Joan smiled that her teeth were fine, and
that her full face, though sweet enough, was a shade too plump.

"Thank 'e kindly, sir," she said, taking the glass. "You see theer's a gert
ship passin' down Channel, an'--an' my Joe's aboard 'er, an' they'm bound
for furrin' paarts, an' I promised as I'd come to this here horny-winky
[Footnote: _Horny-winky_--Lonely. Fit place for horny-winks.] plaace to get
a last sight o' the vessel if I could." He made no answer, and, after a
pause, she spoke again.

"I caan't see naught, but that's my fault, p'raps, not bein' used to sich
things."

"Let me try and find the ship," he said, taking the glass, which he had put
out of focus purposely. Then, while scanning the horizon where he had noted
the smoke-trail, he spoke, his head turned from her.

"Who's Joe, if I may ask? Your brother, I daresay?"

"No, sir; Joe'm my sweetheart."

"There's a big three-masted ship being taken down the Channel by a small
steamer."

"Ah! then I reckon that's the 'Anna,' 'cause Joe said 'twas tolerable
certain they'd be in tow of a tug."

"You can see the smoke on the edge of the sea. Look below it."

He handed the glasses to her again and heard a little laugh of delight
break from her lips. The surprise of the suddenly-magnified spectacle,
visible only as a shadow to the naked eye, brought laughter; and Barron,
now that the girl's attention was occupied, had leisure to look at her. She
was more than a pretty cottage maid, and possessed some distinction and
charm. There was a delicacy about her too--a sweet turn of lip, a purity of
skin, a set of limb--which gave the lie to her rough speech. She was all
Saxon to look at, with nothing of the Celt about her excepting her name and
the old Cornish words upon her lips. Those he rejoiced in, for they showed
that she still remained a free thing, primitive, innocent of School Boards,
or like frost-biting influences.

Barron took mental notes. Joan Tregenza was a careless young woman, it
seemed. Her dress had a button or two missing in front, and a safety-pin
had taken their place. Her drab skirt was frayed a little and patched in
one corner with a square of another material. But the colors were well
enough, from the artist's point of view. He noted also that the girl's
stockings were darned and badly needed further attention, for above her
right shoe-heel a white scrap of Joan was visible. Her hands were a little
large, but well shaped; her pose was free and fine, though the
field-glasses spoiled the picture and the sun-bonnet hid the contour of her
head.

"So you walked out from Mouzle to see the last of Joe's ship?" he asked,
quite seriously and with no light note in his voice.

"From Newlyn. I ed'n a Mouzle maid," she answered.

"Is the 'Anna' coming home again soon?"

"No, sir. Her's bound for the Gulf of Californy, round t'other side the
world, Joe sez. He reckons to be back agin' come winter."

"That's a long time."

"Iss, 'tis."

But there was no sentiment about the answer. Joan gazed without a shadow of
emotion at the vanishing ship, and alluded to the duration of her
sweetheart's absence in a voice that never trembled. Then she gave the
glass back to Barron with many thanks, and evidently wanted to be gone, but
stopped awkwardly, not quite knowing how to depart.

Meanwhile, showing no further cognizance of her, Barron took the glasses
himself and looked at the distant ship.

"A splendid vessel," he said. "I expect you have a picture of her, haven't
you?"

"No," she answered, "but I've got a lil ship Joe cut out o' wood an'
painted butivul. Awnly that's another vessel what Joe sailed in afore."

"I'll tell you what I'll do," he said, "because you were good enough to
explain all about the fishing-boats. I'll make a tiny picture of the 'Anna'
and paint it and give it to you."

But the girl took fright instantly.

"You'm a artist, then?" she said, with alarm in her face and voice.

He shook his head.

"No, no. Do I look like an artist? I'm only a stranger down here for a day
or two. I paint things sometimes for my own amusement, that's all."

"Pickshers?"

"They are not worth calling pictures. Just scraps of the sea and trees and
cliffs and sky, to while away the time and remind me of beautiful things
after I have left them."

"You ban't a artist ezacally, then?"

"Certainly not. Don't you like artists?"

"Faither don't. He'm a fisherman an' caan't abear many things as happens in
the world. An' not artists. Genlemen have arsked him to let 'em take my
picksher, 'cause they've painted a good few maidens to Newlyn; an' some of
'em wanted to paint faither as well; but he up an' sez 'No!' short.
Paintin's vanity 'cordin' to faither, same as they flags an' cannels an'
moosic to Newlyn church is vanity. Most purty things is vanity, faither
reckons."

"I'm sure he's a wise man. And I think he's right, especially about the
candles and flags in church. And now I must go on my walk. Let me see,
shall I bring you the little picture of Joe's ship here? I often walk out
this way."

He assumed she would take the picture, and now she feared to object.
Moreover, such a sketch would be precious in her eyes.

"Maybe 'tis troublin' of 'e, sir?"

"I've promised you. I always keep my word. I shall be here to-morrow about
mid-afternoon, because it is lonely and quiet and beautiful. I'm going to
try and paint the gorse, all blazing so brightly against the sky."

"Them prickly fuzz-bushes?"

"Yes; because they are very beautiful."

"But they'm everywheres. You might so well paint the bannel [Footnote:
_Bannel_--Broom.] or the yether on the moors, mightn't 'e?"

"They are beautiful, too. Remember, I shall have Joe's ship for you
to-morrow."

He nodded without smiling, and turned away until a point of the gorse had
hidden her from sight. Then he sat down, loaded his pipe, and reflected.

"'Joe's ship,'" he said to himself, "a happy title enough."

And meantime the girl had looked after him with wonder and some amusement
in her eyes, had rubbed her chin reflectively--a habit caught from her
father--and had then scampered off smiling to herself.

"What a funny gent," she thought, "never laughs nor nothin'. An' I judged
he was a artist! But wonnerful kind, an' wonnerful queer, wi' it, sure
'nough."




CHAPTER THREE

THE TREGENZAS


Joan Tregenza lived in a white cottage already mentioned: that standing
just beyond Newlyn upon a road above the sea. The cot was larger than it
appeared from the road and extended backward into an orchard of plum and
apple-trees. The kitchen which opened into this garden was stone-paved,
cool, comfortable, sweet at all times with the scent of wood smoke, and
frequently not innocent of varied fishy odors. But Newlyn folk suck in a
smell of fish with their mothers' milk. 'Tis part of the atmosphere of
home.

When Joan returned from her visit to Gorse Point, she found a hard-faced
woman, thin of figure, with untidy hair, wrinkled brow and sharp features,
engaged about a pile of washing in the garden at the kitchen-door. Mrs.
Tregenza heard the girl arrive, and spoke without lifting her little gray
eyes from the clothes. Her voice was hard and high and discontented, like
that of one who has long bawled into a deaf man's ear and is weary of it.

"Drabbit you! Wheer you bin? Allus trapsing out when you'm wanted; allus
caddlin' round doin' nothin' when you ban't. I s'pose you think breakfus'
can be kep' on the table till dinner, washing-day or no?"

"I don't want no breakfus', then. I tuke some bread an' drippin' long with
me. Wheer's Tom to?"

"Gone to schule this half-hour. 'Tis nine o'clock an' past. Wheer you bin,
I sez? 'Tain't much in your way to rise afore me of a marnin'."

"Out through Mouzle to Gorse P'int to see Joe's ship pass by; an' I seen en
butivul."

"Thank the Lard he's gone. Now, I s'pose, theer'll be a bit peace in the
house, an' you'll bide home an' work. My fingers is to the bone day an'
night."

"He'll be gone a year purty nigh."

"Well, the harder you works, the quicker the time'll pass by. Theer's
nuthin' to grizzle at. Sea-farin' fellers must be away most times. But he'm
a good, straight man, an' you'm tokened to en, an' that's enough. Bide
cheerful an' get the water for washin'. If they things of faither's bant
dry come to-morrer, he'll knaw the reason why."

Joan accepted Mrs. Tregenza's comfort philosophically, though her
sweetheart's departure had not really caused her any emotion. She visited
the larder, drank a cup of milk, and then, fetching an iron hoop and
buckets, went to a sunken barrel outside the cottage door, into which, from
a pipe through the road-bank, tumbled a silver thread of spring water.

Of the Tregenza household a word must needs be spoken. Joan's own mother
had died twelve years ago, and the anxious-natured woman who took her place
proved herself a good step-parent enough. Despite a disposition prone to
worry and to dwell upon the small tribulations of life, Thomasin Tregenza
was not unhappy, for her husband enjoyed prosperity and a reputation for
godliness unequaled in Newlyn. A great, weather-worn, gray, hairy man was
he, with a big head and a furrowed cliff of a forehead that looked as
though it had been carved by its Creator from Cornish granite. Tregenza
indeed might have stood for a typical Cornish fisher--or a Breton. Like
enough, indeed, he had old Armorican blood in his veins, for many hundreds
of Britons betook themselves to ancient Brittany when the Saxon invasion
swept the West, and many afterward returned, with foreign wives, to the
homes of their fathers. Michael Tregenza had found religion, of a sort
fiery and unlovely enough, but his convictions were definite, with
iron-hard limitations, and he looked coldly and without pity on a damned
world, himself saved. Gray Michael had no sympathy with sin and less with
sinners. He found the devil in most unexpected quarters and was always
dragging him out of surprising hiding-places and exhibiting him
triumphantly, as a boy might show a bird's egg or butterfly. His devil
dwelt at penny readings, at fairs and festivals, in the brushes of the
artists, in a walk on a Sunday afternoon undertaken without a definite
object, sometimes in a primrose given by a boy to a girl. Of all these
bitter, self-righteous, censorious little sects which raise each its own
ladder to the Throne of Grace at Newlyn, the Luke Gospelers was the most
bitter, most self-righteous, most censorious. And of all those burning
lights which reflected the primitive savagery of the Pentateuch from that
fold, Gray Michael's beacon flamed the fiercest and most bloody red. There
was not a Gospeler, including the pastor of the flock, but feared the
austere fisherman while admiring him.

Concerning his creed, at the risk of wearying you, it must be permitted to
speak here; for only by grasping its leading features and its vast
unlikeness to the parent tree can a just estimate of Michael Tregenza be
arrived at. Luke Gospeldom had mighty little to do with the Gospel of Luke.
The sect numbered one hundred and thirty-four just persons, at war with
principalities and powers. They were saturated with the spirit of Israel in
the Wilderness, of Esau, when every man's hand was against him. At their
chapel one heard much of Jehovah, the jealous God, of the burning lakes and
the damnation reserved for mankind, as a whole. Every Luke Gospeler was a
Jehovah in his own right. They walked hand in hand with God; they realized
the dismay and indignation Newlyn must occasion in His breast; they
sympathized heartily with the Everlasting and would have called down fire
from Heaven themselves if they could. Many openly wondered that He delayed
so long, for, from a Luke Gospeler's point of view, the place with its
dozen other chapels--each held in error by the rest, and all at deadly war
among themselves--its most vile ritualistic church of St. Peter, its
public-houses, scandals, and strifes, was riper for destruction than Sodom.
However, the hundred and thirty-four served to stave off celestial
brimstone, as it seemed.

It is pitiable, in the face of the majestic work of John Wesley in
Cornwall, to see the shattered ruins of it which remain. When the Wesleys
achieved their notable revival and swept off the dust of a dead Anglicanism
which covered religious Cornwall like a pall in the days of the Georges,
the old Celtic spirit, though these heroes found it hard enough to
rekindle, burst from its banked-up furnaces at last and blazed abroad once
more. That spirit had been bred by the saint bishops of Brito-Celtic days,
and Wesley's ultimate success was a grand repetition of history, as extant
records of the ancient use of the Church in Cornwall prove. Its principle
was that he who filled a bishop's office should, before all things, conduct
and develop missionary enterprise; and the moral and physical courage of
the Brito-Celtic bishops, having long slumbered, awoke again in John
Wesley. He built on the old foundations, he gave to the laymen a power at
that time blindly denied them by the Church--the power which Irish and
Welsh and Breton missionary saints of old had vested in them.
Wesley--himself a giant--made wise use of the strong where he found them,
and if a man--tinker or tinner, fisher or jowster--could preach and grip an
audience, that man might do so. Thus had the founders of the new creed
developed it; thus does the Church to-day; but when John Wesley filled his
empty belly with blackberries at St. Hilary, in 1743; when he thundered
what he deemed eternal truth through Cornwall, year after year for half a
century; when he faced a thousand perils by sea and land and spent his
arduous days "in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fasting often,
in cold and nakedness"; when, in fine, this stupendous man achieved the
foundations of Methodism, the harvest was overripe, at any rate, in
Cornwall. No Nonconformist was he, though few enough of his followers
to-day remember that, if they ever knew it. He worked for his church; he
was a link between it and his party; his last prayer was for church and
king--a fact which might have greatly shocked the Luke Gospelers had such
come to their ears. For John Wesley was their only saint, and they honestly
believed that they alone of all Methodist communities were following in his
footsteps. Poor souls! they lived as far from what Wesley taught as it is
easily possible to conceive. As for Gray Michael, he was under the
impression that he and his sect worthily held aloft the true light which
Wesley brought in person to Newlyn, and he talked with authority upon the
subject of his master and his master's doings. But he knew little about the
founder of Methodism in reality, and still less about the history of the
Methodist movement. Had he learned that John Wesley himself was once
accused of Popish practices; had he known that not until some years after
the great preacher's death did his party, in conference assembled, separate
itself from the Church of England, he had doubtless been much amazed.
Though saturated with religious feeling, the man was wholly ignorant of
religious history in so far as it affected his own country. To him all
saints not mentioned in Scripture were an abomination and invention of
Rome. Had he been informed that the venerable missionary saints of his
mother land were in no case Romish, another vast surprise must have awaited
him.

Let it not for an instant be supposed that the Luke Gospelers represented
right Methodism. But they fairly exemplified a sorry side of it; those
little offshoots of which dozens have separated from the parent tree; and
they exhibited most abundantly in themselves that canker-worm of Pharisaism
which gnaws at the root of all Nonconformity. This offense, combined with
such intolerance and profound ignorance as was to be found amid the Luke
Gospelers, produced a community merely sad or comic to consider according
to the point of view.

An instance of Michael Tregenza's attitude to the Church will illustrate
better than analysis the lines of thought on which he served his Creator.

Once, when she was thirteen, Joan had gone to an evening service at St.
Peter's, because a friend had dared her to do so. Her father was at sea and
she believed the delinquency could by no possibility reach his ears. But a
Luke Gospeler heard the dread tidings and Michael Tregenza was quickly
informed of his daughter's lapse. He accused Joan quietly enough, and she
confessed.

"Then you'm a damned maiden," he said, "'cause you sinned open-eyed."

He thought the matter over for a week, and finally an idea occurred to him.

"'Tis wi'in the power o' God to reach even you back," he declared to Joan,
"an' He's put in my mind that chastenin' might do it. A sore body's saved
many sowls 'fore now."

Whereupon he took his daughter into the little parlor, shut the door, and
then flogged her as he would have flogged a boy--only using his hard hand
instead of a stick. "Get thee behind her, Satan! Get thee behind her,
Satan! Get thee behind her, Satan!" he groaned with every blow, while Joan
grit her teeth and bore it as long as she could, then screamed and fainted.
That was how the truth about heaven and hell came to her. She had never
felt physical pain before, and eternal torment was merely an idea. From
that day, however, she was frightened and listened to her father gladly and
wept tears of thankfulness when, a month after her flogging, he explained
that he had wrestled with the Lord for her soul and how it had been borne
in upon him that she was saved alive. She had reached the age of seventeen
now, and felt quite confident upon the subject of eternity as became a
right Luke Gospeler. Unlike other women of the sect, however, and despite
extreme ignorance on all subjects, the girl had a seed of humor in her
nature only waiting circumstances to ripen. She felt pity, too, for the
great damned world, and though religion turned life sad-colored, her own
simple, healthy, animal nature and high spirits brought ample share of
sunshine and delight. She was, in fact, her mother's child rather than her
father's. His ancestors before him had fought the devil and lived honest
lives under a cloud of fear; Michael's own brother had gone religious mad,
when still a young man, and died in a lunatic asylum; indeed the awful
difficulty of saving his soul had been in the blood of every true Tregenza
for generations. But Joan's mother came of different stock. The Chirgwins
were upland people. They dwelt at Drift and elsewhere, went to the nearest
church, held simple views, and were content with orthodox religion. Mr.
Tregenza said of them that they always wanted and expected God to do more
than His share. But he married Joan Chirgwin, nevertheless; and now he saw
her again, fair, trustful, light-hearted, in his daughter. The girl indeed
had more of her mother in her than Gray Michael liked. She was
superstitious, not after the manner of the Tregenzas, but in a direction
that must have brought her father's loudest thunders upon her head if the
matter had come to his ears. She loved the old stories of the saints and
spirits, she gloried secretly in the splendid wealth of folklore and
tradition her mother's people and those like them possessed at command. Her
dead parent had whispered and sung these matters into Joan's baby ears
until her father stopped it. She remembered how black he looked when she
lisped about the piskeys; and though to-day she half believed in demon and
fairy, goblin and giant, and quite believed in the saints and their
miracles, she kept this side of her intelligence close locked when at home,
and only nodded very gravely when her father roared against the blighting
credulity of men's minds and the follies for which fishers and miners, and
indeed the bulk of the human family in Cornwall, must some day burn.

People outside the fold said that the Luke Gospelers killed Tregenza's
first wife. She, of course, accepted her husband's convictions, but it had
never been in her tender heart to catch the true Luke Gospel spirit. She
was too full of the milk of human kindness, too prone to forgive and
forget, too tolerant and ready to see good in all men. The fiery sustenance
of the new tenets withered her away like a scorched flower, and she died
five years after her child was born. For a space of two years the widower
remained one; then he married again, being at that time a hale man of
forty, the owner of his own fishing-boat, and at once the strongest
personality and handsomest person in Newlyn. Thomasin Strick, his second
wife, was already a Luke Gospeler and needed no conversion. People laughed
in secret at their wooing, and likened it to the rubbing of granite rocks
or a miner's pick striking fire from tin ore. A boy presently came to them;
and now he was ten and his mother forty. She passed rightly for a careful,
money-loving soul, and a good wife, with the wit to be also a good Luke
Gospeler. But her tongue was harder than her heart. Father and mother alike
thought the wide world of their boy, though the child was brought up under
an iron rod. Joan, too, loved her half-brother, Tom, very dearly, and took
a pride only second to her stepmother's in the lad's progress and
achievements. More than once, though only Joan and he knew it, she had
saved his skin from punishment, and she worshiped him with a frank
admiration which was bound to win Mrs. Tregenza's regard. Joan quite
understood the careful and troubled matron, never attached undue importance
to her sharp words, and was usually at her elbow with an ear for all
grievances and even a sympathetic word if the same seemed called for. Mrs.
Tregenza had to grumble to live, and Joan was the safety-valve, for when
her husband came off the sea he would have none of it.

Life moved uniformly for these people, being varied only by the seasons of
the year and the different harvests from the sea which each brought with
it. Pollock, mackerel, pilchards, herrings--all had their appointed time,
and the years rolled on, marked by events connected with the secular
business of life on one hand and that greater matter of eternity upon the
other. Thus mighty catches of fish held the memory with mighty catches of
men. One year the take of mackerel had been beyond all previous
recollection; on another occasion three entire families had joined the Luke
Gospelers, and so promised to increase the scanty numbers of the chosen.
There were black memories, too, and black years, casting gloomy shadows.
Widows and orphans knew what it was to watch for brown sails that came into
the harbor's sheltering arms no more; and spiritual death had overtaken
more than one Luke Gospeler. Such turned their backs upon the light and
exchanged Truth for the benighted parody of religion displayed by Bible
Christians, by Plymouth Brethren or by the Church of England.

Six months before the day on which she saw his ship through Barron's
glasses, Joan had been formally affianced to Joe Noy, with her father's
permission and approval. The circumstances of the event demand a word, for
Joe had already been engaged once before: to Mary Chirgwin, a young woman
who was first cousin to Joan and a good deal older. She was an orphan and
dwelt at Drift with Thomas Chirgwin, her uncle. The sailor had thereby
brightened an unutterably lonely life and brought earthly joy to one who
had never known it. Then Gray Michael got hold of the lad, who was
naturally of a solid and religious temperament, and up to that time of the
order of the Rechabites. As a result, Joe Noy joined the Luke Gospelers and
called upon his sweetheart to do likewise. But she recollected her aunt,
Joan's mother, and being made of stern stuff, stuck to the Church of
England as she knew it, counting salvation a greater thing than even a home
of her own. The struggle was sharp between them; neither would give way;
their engagement was therefore broken, and the girl's solitary golden
glimpse of happiness in this world shattered. She found it hard to forgive
the Tregenzas, and when, six months afterward, the sleepy farm life at
Drift was startled by news of Joan's love affair, Mary, in the first flush
of her reawakened agony, spoke bitterly enough; and even that most
mild-mannered of men, her uncle, said that Michael Tregenza had done an
ugly act.

But the fisherman was at no time concerned with Mary or with Joan. The
opportunity to get a soul into the fold had offered and been accepted. Any
matter of earthly love-making counted little beside this. When Joe broke
with Mary, his mentor declared the action inevitable, as the girl would not
alter her opinions, and when, presently, young Noy fell in love with Joan,
her father saw no objection, for the sailor was honest, already a stanch
Luke Gospeler and a clean liver.

Perhaps at that moment there was hardly another eligible youth in Newlyn
from Tregenza's point of view. He held Joan a girl to be put under stern
marital rule as soon as possible, and Joe promised to make a godly husband
with a strong will, while his convictions and view of life were altogether
satisfactory, being modeled on Michael's own. The arrangement suited Joan.
She believed she loved Joe very dearly, and she looked forward with
satisfaction to marrying him in about a year's time, when he should have
won a ship-master's certificate. But she viewed his departure without
suffering and would not have willingly foregone her remaining year of
freedom. She respected Joe very much and knew he would make a good partner
and give her a position above the everyday wives of Newlyn; moreover, he
was a fine figure of a man. But he lacked mental breadth, and that fact
sometimes tickled her dormant sense of humor. He copied her father so
exactly, and she, who lived with the real thunder, never could show
sufficient gravity or conviction in the presence of the youthful and
narrow-minded Noy's second-hand echoes. Mary Chirgwin was naturally a
thousand times more religious-minded than Joan, and sometimes Joe wished
the sober mind of his first love could be transported to the beautiful body
of his second; but he kept this notion to himself, studied to please his
future father-in-law, which he succeeded in doing handsomely, and contented
himself, in so far as his lady was concerned, by reflecting that the
necessary control over her somewhat light mind would be his in due season.

To return from this tedious but necessary glimpse at the position and
belief of these people to Joan and the washing, it is to be noted that she
quickly made up for lost time, and, without further mentioning the
incidents of her morning's excursion, began to work. She pulled up her
sleeves, dragged her dress about her waist, then started to cleanse the
thick flannels her father wore at sea, his long-tailed shirts and woolen
stockings. The Tregenzas were well-to-do folk, and did not need to use the
open spaces of the village for drying of clothes. Joan presently set up a
line among the plum-trees, and dawdled over the hanging out of wet
garments, for it was now noon, sunny, mild, and fresh, with a cool salt
breeze off the sea. The winter repose of the bee-butts had been broken at
last, and the insects were busy with the plum-blossom and among the little
green flowerets on the gooseberry bushes. Beyond, sun-streaked and bright,
extended apple-trees with whitewashed stems and a twinkle of crimson on
their boughs, where buds grew ripe for the blowing.

Joan yawned and blinked up at the sun to see if it was dinner time. Then
she watched a kitten hunting the bees in the gooseberry bushes. Presently
the little creature knocked one to the ground and began to pat it and
pounce upon it. Then the bee, using Nature's weapon to preserve precious
life, stung the kitten; and the kitten hopped into the air much amazed. It
shook its paw, licked it, shook it again. Joan laughed, and two pigs at the
bottom of the garden heard her and grunted and squealed as they thrust
expectant noses through the palings of their sty. They connected the laugh
with their dinner, but Joan's thoughts were all upon her own.

A few minutes later Thomasin Tregenza called her, and, as they sat down,
Tom arrived from school. He was a brown-faced, dark-eyed, black-haired
youngster, good-looking enough, but not at that moment.

"Aw! Jimmery! fightin' agin," said his mother, viewing two swollen lips, a
bulged ear, and an eye half closed.

"I've downed Matthew Bent, Joan! Ten fair rounds, then he gived up."

"Fight, fight, fight--'tis all you think of," said his parent, while Joan
poured congratulations on the conqueror.

"'Tweer bound to come arter the football, when he played foul, an' I tawld
en so. Now, we'm friends."

"Be he bruised same as you?"

"A sight worse; he's a braave picksher, I tell 'e! I doubt he won't come to
schule this arternoon. That'll shaw. I be gwaine, if I got to crawl theer."

"An' him a year older than what you be!" said Joan.

"Iss, Mat's 'leben year old. I'll have some vinegar an' brown paper to this
here eye, mother."

"Ait your mayte, ait your mayte fust," she answered. "Plague 'pon your
fightin'!"

"But that Bent bwoy's bin at en for months; an' a year older too," said
Joan.

"Iss, the bwoy's got no more'n what 'e desarved. For that matter, they
Bents be all puffed up, though they'm so poor as rats, an' wi'out 'nough
religion to save the sawl of a new-born babe 'mongst the lot of 'em."

Tom, with his mouth full of fish and potato pie, told the story of his
victory, and the women made a big, hearty meal and listened.

"He cockled up to me, an' us beginned fightin' right away, an' in the third
round I scat en on the mouth an' knocked wan 'is teeth out. An' in the
fifth round he dropped me a whister-cuff 'pon the eye as made me blink
proper."

"Us doan't want to knaw no more 'bout it," declared his mother after dinner
was over. "You've laced en an' that's enough. You knaw what faither'll say.
You did ought to fight no battle but the Lard's. Now clap this here over
your eye for a bit, then be off with 'e."

Tom marched away to school earlier than usual that afternoon, while the
women went to the door and watched him trudge off, both mightily proud of
his performance and his battered brown face.

"He be a reg'lar lil apty-cock, [Footnote: _Apty-cock_--Brave, plucky
youngster.] sure 'nough!" said Joan.

Mrs. Tregenza answered with a nod and looked along the road after her son.
There was a softer expression in her eyes as she watched him. Besides, she
had eaten well and was comfortable. Now she picked her teeth with a pin,
and snuffed the sea air, and gave a passing neighbor "good-afternoon" with
greater warmth of manner than usual. Presently her mood changed; she
noisily rated herself and her stepdaughter for standing idling; then both
went back to their work.



 CHAPTER FOUR

BARRON BEGINS TO LEARN THE GORSE


Between four and five o'clock in the morning of the following day the
master of the white cottage came home. His wife expected him and was
getting breakfast when Michael tramped in--a very tall, square-built man,
clad to the eye in tanned oilskin overalls, sou'wester, and jackboots. The
fisherman returned to his family in high good temper; for the sea had
yielded silvery thousands to his drift-nets, and the catch had already been
sold in the harbor for a handsome figure. The brown sails of Tregenza's
lugger flapped in the bay among a crowd of others, and every man was in a
hurry to be off again at the earliest opportunity. Already the first boats
home were putting to sea once more, making a wide tack across the mouth of
the bay until nearly abreast of St. Michael's Mount, then tearing away like
race horses with foam flying as they sailed before the eastern wind for the
Scilly Islands and the mackerel.

Michael kissed his wife and Joan also, as she came to the kitchen
sleepy-eyed in the soft light to welcome him. Then, while Mrs. Tregenza was
busied with breakfast and the girl cleaned some fish, he went to his own
small room off the kitchen and changed his clothes--all silvery,
scale-spotted and blood-smeared--for the clean garments which were spread
and waiting. First the man indulged in luxuries. He poured out a large tub
of fresh water and washed himself; he even cleaned his nails and
teeth--hyberbolic refinements that made the baser sort laugh at him behind
his back.

At the meal which followed his toilet Tregenza talked to his wife and
daughter upon various subjects. He spoke slowly and from the lungs with the
deep echoing voice of one used to vocal exercise in the open air.

"I seed the 'Anna' yesterday, Joan," he said, "a proud ship, full-rigged
wi' butivul lines. Her passed wi'in three mile of us or less off the
islands."

Joan did not hint at her visit to Gorse Point of the previous day, but her
stepmother mentioned it, and her father felt called upon to reprimand his
daughter, though not very seriously.

"'Twas a empty, vain thing to do," he said.

"I promised Joe, faither."

"Why, then you was right to go, though a fulish thing to promise en.
Wheer's Tom to?"

Tom came down a minute later. The swelling of his lips was lessened, but
his ear had not returned to a normal size and his eye was black.

"Fighting again?" Michael began, looking up from his saucer and fixing his
eyes on his son.

"Please, faither, I--"

"Doan't say naught. You'm so fond of it that I judges you'd best begin
fightin' the battle o' life right on end. 'Tain't no use keepin' you to
schule no more. 'Tis time you comed aboard."

Tom crowed with satisfaction, and Mrs. Tregenza sighed and stopped eating.
This event had been hanging over her head for many a long day now; but she
had put the thing away, and secretly hoped that after all Tregenza would
change his mind and apprentice the boy to a shore trade. However, Tom had
made his choice, and his father meant him to abide by it. No other life
appealed to the boy; heredity marked him for the sea, and he longed for the
hard business to begin.

"I'll larn you something besides fisticuffs, my beauty. 'Tis all
well-a-fine, this batterin' an' bruisin', but it awnly breeds the savage in
'e, same as raw meat do in a dog. No more fightin' 'cept wi' dirty weather
an' high seas an' contrary winds, an' the world, the flaish an' the devil.
I went to sea as a lugger-bwoy when I was eight year old, an' ain't bin off
the water more'n a month to wance ever since. This day two week you come
along wi' me. That'll give mother full time to see 'bout your kit."

Joan wept, Thomasin Tregenza whined, and Tom danced a break-down and rolled
away to see some fisher-boy friends in the harbor before school began. Then
Michael, calling his daughter to him, walked with her among his plum-trees,
talked of God with some quotations, and looked at his pigs. Presently he
busied himself and made ready for sea in a little outhouse where paint and
ship's chandlery were stored; and finally, the hour then being half past
seven, he returned to his labors. Joan walked with him to the harbor and
listened while he talked of the goodness of God to the Luke Gospelers at
sea; how the mackerel had been delivered to them in thousands, and how the
Bible Christians and Primitive Methodists had fared by no means so happily.
The tide was high, and Gray Michael's skiff waited for him at the pierhead
beside the lighthouse. He soon climbed down into it, and the little boat,
rowed by two strong pairs of hands, danced away to the fleet. Already the
luggers were stretching off in a long line across the bay; and among them
appeared a number of visitors: Lowestoft yawls come down to the West after
the early mackerel. They were big, stout vessels, and many had steam-power
aboard. Joan watched her father's lugger start and saw it overhaul not a
few smaller ships before she turned from the busy harbor homeward. That
morning she designed to work with a will, for the afternoon was to be spent
on Gorse Point if all went well, and she already looked forward somewhat
curiously to her next meeting with the singular man who had lent her his
field-glass.

Mrs. Tregenza was in sorry, snappy case all day. The blow had fallen, and
within a fort-night Tom would go to sea. This dismal fact depressed her not
a little, and she snuffled over her ironing, and her voice grated worse
than usual upon the ear.

"He's such a hot-headed twoad of a bwoy. I knaw he'll never get on 'pon the
water. I doubt us'll hear he's bin knocked overboard or some sich thing
some day; an' them two brothers, they Pritchards, as allus sails 'long wi'
Tregenza, they'm that comical-tempered every one knaws. Oh, my God, why
couldn' he let the bwoy larn a land trade--carpenterin' or sich like?"

"But, you see, faither's a rich man, an' some time Tom'll fill his shoes.
Faither do awn his bwoat an' the nets tu, which is more'n most Newlyn men
does."

"Iss, I should think 'twas," said Mrs. Tregenza, forgetting her present
sorrow in the memory of such splendid circumstances. "Theer ban't wan
feller as awns all like what faither do. The Lard helps His chosen, not but
what Tregenza allus helped hisself an' set the example to Newlyn from his
boyhood."

Mrs. Tregenza always licked her lips when she talked about money or
religion, and she did so now.

Among Cornish drifters Gray Michael's position was undoubtedly unique, for
under the rules of the Cornish fishery he enjoyed exceptional advantages
owing to his personal possession both of boat and nets. The owner of a
drift-boat takes one-eighth part of the gross proceeds of a catch, and the
remaining seven-eighths are divided into two equal parts of which one part
is subdivided among the crew of the boat, while the other goes to the owner
or owners of the nets used on board. The number of nets to a boat is about
fifty as a rule, and a man to possess his own boat and outfit must be
unusually well-to-do.

But it was partly for this reason that Mrs. Tregenza refused to be
comforted. She grudged every farthing spent on anything, and much disliked
the notion of tramping to Penzance to expend the greater part of a
five-pound note on Tom's sea outfit. In a better cause she would not have
thought it ill to expend money upon him. His position pointed to something
higher than a fisherman's life. He might have aspired to a shop in the
future together with a measure of worldly prosperity and importance not to
be expected for any mere seafarer. But Tom had settled the matter by
deciding for himself, and his father had approved the ambition, so there
the matter ended, save for grumbling and sighing. Joan, too, felt sore
enough at heart when she heard that the long-dreaded event lay but a
fortnight in the future. But she knew her father, and felt sure that the
certainty of Tom's going to sea at the appointed time would now only be
defeated by death or the Judgment Day. So she did not worry or fret.
Nothing served to soothe her stepmother, however, and the girl was glad to
slip off after dinner, leaving Thomasin with her troubles.

Joan made brisk way through Mousehole and in less than an hour stood out
among the furzes in the little lonely theater above the cliffs. For a
moment she saw nothing of John Barron, then she found him sitting on a
camp-stool before a light easel which looked all legs with a mere little
square patch of a picture perched upon them. Joan walked to within a few
yards of the artist and waited for him to speak. But eye, hand, brain were
all working together on the sketch before him, and if he saw the visitor at
all, which was doubtful, he took no notice of her. Joan came a little
closer, and still John Barron ignored her presence. Then she grew
uncomfortable, and, feeling she must break the silence, spoke.

"I be come, sir, 'cordin' to what you said."

He added a touch and looked up with no recognition in his eyes. His
forehead frowned with doubt apparently, then he seemed to remember. "Ah,
the young woman who told me about the luggers." Suddenly he smiled at her,
the first time she had seen him do so.

"You never mentioned your name, I think?"

"Joan Tregenza, sir."

"I promised you a little picture of that big ship, didn't I?"

"You was that kind, sir."

"Well, I haven't forgotten it. I finished the picture this morning and I
think you may like it, but I had to leave it until to-morrow, because the
paints take so long to dry."

"I'm sure I thank you kindly, sir."

"No need. To-morrow it will be quite ready for you, with a frame and all
complete. You see I've begun to try and paint the gorse." He invited her by
a gesture to view his work. She came closer, and as she bent he glanced up
at her with his face for a moment close to hers. Then she drew back
quickly, blushing.

"'Tis butivul--just like them fuzzes."

He had been working for two hours before she came, painting a small patch
of the gorse. Old gnarled stems wound upward crookedly, and beneath them
lay a dead carpet of gorse needles with a blade or two of grass shooting
through. From the roots and bases of the main stems sprouted many a shoot
of young gorse, their prickles tender as the claws of a new-born kitten,
their shape, color, and foliage of thorns quite different to the mature
plant above. There, in the main masses of the shrub, mossy brown buds in
clumps foretold future splendor. But already much gold had burst the sheath
and was ablaze, scenting the pure air, murmured over by many bees.

"You could a'most pick thicky theer flowers," declared Joan of the picture.

"Perhaps presently, when they are painted as I hope to paint them. This is
only a rough bit of work to occupy my hand and eye while I am learning the
gorse. Men who paint seriously have to learn trees and blossoms just as
they have to learn faces. And we are never satisfied. When I have painted
this gorse, with its thorns and buds, I shall sigh for more truth. I cannot
paint the soul of each little yellow flower that opens to the sun; I cannot
paint the sunny smell that is sweet in our nostrils now. God's gorse scents
the air; mine will only smell of fat oil. What shall I do?"

"I dunnaw."

"No more does anybody. It can't be helped. But I must try my best and make
it real--each spike, as I see it--the dead gray ones on the ground and the
live green ones on the tree, and the baby ones and the old gray-pointed
ones, which have seen their best days and will presently die and fall--I
must paint them all, Joan."

She laughed.

"Don't laugh," he said, very seriously. "Only an artist would laugh at me,
not you who love Nature. There lives a great painter, Joan, who paints
pictures that nobody else in the wide world can paint. He is growing old,
but he is not too old to take trouble still. Once, when he was a young man,
he drew a lemon-tree far away in Italy. It was only a little lemon-tree,
but the artist rose morning after morning and drew it leaf by leaf, twig by
twig, until every leaf and bud and lemon and bough had appeared. It was not
labored and false; it was grand because it was true: a joy forever; work
Old Masters had loved; full of distinction and power and patience almost
Oriental. A thing, Joan Tregenza, worth a wilderness of 'harmonies' and
'impressions,' 'nocturnes' and 'notes,' smudges and audacities. But I
suppose that is all gibberish to you?"

"Iss, so it be," she admitted.

"Learn to love everything that is beautiful, my good child. But I think you
do, unconsciously perhaps."

"I don't take much 'count of things."
 "Yes, unconsciously. You have a cowslip there stuck in your frock, though
where you got it from I can't imagine. The flower is a month too early."

"Iss, 'tis, I found en in a lew, sunshiny plaace. Us have got a frame for
growin' things under glass, an' it had bin put down 'pon top this cowslip
an' drawed 'en up."

"Will you give it to me?"

She did so, and he smelled it.

"D'you know that the green of the cowslip is the most beautiful green in
all Nature, Joan? Here, I have a flower, too; we will exchange if you
like."

He took a scrap of blackthorn bloom from his coat and held it out to her,
but she shrank backward and he learned something.

"Please not that--truly 'tis the dreadfulest wicked flower. Doan't 'e arsk
I to take en."

"Unlucky?"

"Iss fay! Him or her as first brings blackthorn in the house dies afore it
blows again. Truth--solemn--us all knaws it down in these paarts. 'Tis a
bewitched thing--a wicked plant, an' you can see it grawin' all
humpetty-backed an' bent an' crooked. Wance, when a man killed hisself,
they did use to bury en wheer roads met an' put a blackthorn stake through
en; an' it all us grawed arter; an' that's the worstest sort o' all."

"Dear, dear, I'm glad you told me, Joan; I will not wear it, nor shall
you," he said, and flung it down and stamped on it very seriously.

The girl was gratified.

"I judge you'm a furriner, else you'd knawn 'bout the wickedness o'
blackthorn."

"I am. Thank you very much. But for you I should have gone home wearing it.
That puts me in your debt, Joan."

"'Tain't nothin', awnly there's a many coorious Carnish things like that.
An' coorious customs what some doan't hold with an' some does."

She sat down near the cliff edge with her back to him, and he smiled to
himself to find how quickly his mild manners and reserve had put the girl
at her ease. She looked perfect that afternoon and he yearned to begin
painting her; but his scheme of action demanded time for its perfect
fulfillment and ultimate success. He let the little timorous chatterbox
talk. Her voice was soft and musical as the cooing of a wood-dove, and the
sweet full notes chimed in striking contrast to her uncouth speech. But
Joan's diction gave pleasure to the listener. It had freedom and wildness,
and was almost wholly innocent of any petrifying educational influences.

Joan, for her part, felt at ease. The man was so polite and so humble. He
thanked her for her information so gratefully. Moreover, he evidently cared
so little about her or her looks. She felt perfectly safe, for it was easy
to see that he thought more of the gorse than anything.

"My faither's agin such things an' sayin's," she babbled on, "but I dunnaw.
They seems truth to me, an' to many as is wiser than what I be. My mother
b'lieved in 'em, an' Joe did, till faither turned en away from 'em. But
when us plighted troth, I made en jine hands wi' me under a livin' spring
o' water, though he said 'twas heathenish. Awnly, somehow, I knawed 'twas a
proper thing to do."

"I should like to hear more about these old customs some day," he said, as
though Joan and he were to meet often in the future, "and I should be
obliged to you for telling me about them, because I always delight in such
matters."

She was quicker of mind than he thought, and rose, taking his last remark
as a hint that he wished to be alone.

"Don't go, Joan, unless you must. I'm a very lonely man, and it is a great
pleasure to me to hear you talk. Look here."

She approached him, and he showed her a pencil sketch now perched on the
easel--a drawing considerably larger than that upon which he had been
working when she arrived.

"This is a rough idea of my picture. It is going to be much larger though,
and I have sent all the way to London for a canvas on which to paint it."

'"Twill be a gert big picksher then?"

"So big that I think I must try and get something into it besides the
gorse. I want something or other in the middle, just for a change. What
could I paint there?"

"I dunnaw."

"No more do I. I wonder how that little white pony tethered yonder would
do?"

Joan laughed.

"You'd never get the likes o' him to bide still for 'e."

"No, I'm afraid not; and I doubt if I'm clever enough to paint him either.
You see, I'm only a beginner--not like these clever artists who can draw
anything. Well, I must think: to-morrow is Sunday. I shall begin my big
picture on Monday if the weather keeps kind. I shall paint here, in the
open air. And I will bring your ship, too, if you care to take the trouble
to come for it."

"Yes, an' thank 'e, sir."

"Not at all. I owe you thanks. Just think if I had gone home with that
horrid blackthorn."

He turned to his work as though she were no longer present and the girl
prepared to depart.

"I'll bid you good-arternoon now, sir," she said timidly.

He looked up with surprise.

"Haven't you gone, Joan? I thought you had started. Good-by until Monday.
Remember, if it is cold or rainy I shall not be here."

The girl trotted off; and when she had gone Barren drew her from memory in
the center of his sketch. The golden glories of the gorse were destined to
be no more than a frame for something fairer.




CHAPTER FIVE

COLD COMFORT


John Barron made other preparations for his picture besides those detailed
to Joan Tregenza. He designed a large canvas and proposed to paint it in
the open air according to his custom. His health had improved, and the
sustained splendor of the spring weather flattered hopes that, his model
once won, the work he proposed would grow into an accomplished fact. There
was no cottage where he might house his picture and materials within half a
mile of Gorse Point, but a granite cow-byre rose considerably nearer, at a
corner of an upland field. Wind-worn and lichen-stained it stood, situated
not more than two hundred yards from the spot on which Barron's picture was
to be painted. A pathway to outlying farms cut the fields hard by the byre,
and about it lay implements of husbandry--a chain harrow and a rusty plow.
Black, tar-pitched double doors gave entrance to the shed, and light
entered from a solitary window now roughly nailed up from the outside with
boards. A padlock fastened the door, but, by wrenching down the covering of
the window, Barron got sight of the interior. A smell of vermin and decay
rose from the inner darkness; then, as his eyes focused the gloom, he noted
a dry, spacious chamber likely enough to answer his purpose. Brown litter
of last year's fern filled one corner, and in it was marked a lair as of
some medium-sized beast; elsewhere a few sacks with spades and picks and a
small pile of potatoes appeared: the roots were all sprouting feebly from
white eyes, as though they knew spring held the world, though neither
sunshine warmed them nor soft earth aided their struggle for life. Here the
man might well keep his canvas and other matters. Assuming that temporary
possession of the shed was possible, his property would certainly be safe
enough there; for artists are respected in and about Newlyn, and their
needs considered when possible. A farm, known as Middle Hemyll, showed gray
chimneys above the fields, half a mile distant, and, after finding the
shed, Barron proceeded thither to learn its ownership. The master of Middle
Hemyll speedily enlightened him, and the visitor learned that not only did
he speak to the possessor of the cow-byre, but that Farmer Ford was a keen
supporter of art, and would be happy to rent his outhouse for a moderate
consideration.

"The land ban't under pasture now, an' the plaace ed'n much used just this
minute, so you'm welcome if you mind to. My auld goat did live theer wance,
but er's dead this long time. Maybe you seed the carcass of en, outside?
I'll have the byre cleared come to-morrer; an' if so be you wants winders
in the roof, same as other paintin' gents, you'll have to put 'em theer wi'
your awn money."

Barron explained that he only needed the shed as a storehouse for his
picture and tools.

"Just so, just so. Then you'll find a bwoy wi' the key theer to-morrer, an'
all vitty; an' you can pay in advancement or arter, as you please to. Us'll
say half-a-crown a week, if that'll soot 'e."

The listener produced half-a-sovereign, much to Farmer Ford's
gratification, and asked that a lad or man might be found to return with
him there and then to the shed.

"I am anxious to see the place and have it in order before I go back to
Newlyn," he explained. "I will pay you extra for the necessary labor, and
it should not take above an hour."

"No more 'twill, an' I'll come 'long with 'e myself this minute," answered
the other.

Getting a key to the padlock, and a big birch broom, he returned with
Barron, and soon had the doors of the disused byre thrown open to the air.

"I shut en up when the auld goat went dead. Theer a used to lie in the
corner, but now he'm outside, an' I doubt the piskeys, what they talks
'bout, be mighty savage wi' me for not buryin' the beast, 'cause all
fairies is 'dicted to goats, they do say, an' mighty fond o' the milk of
'em."

Farmer Ford soon cleared the place of potatoes, sacks, and tools. Then,
taking his broom, he made a clean sweep of dust and dirt.

"Theer's a many more rats here than I knawed seemin'ly," he said, as he
examined a sink in the stones of the floor, used for draining the stalls;
"they come up here for sartain, an' runs out 'long the heydge to the
mangel-wurzel mound, I lay."

Without, evidences of the vermin were clear enough. Long hardened tracks,
patted down by many paws, ran this way and that; and the main rat
thoroughfare extended, as the farmer foretold, to a great mound where,
stowed snugly in straw under earth, lay packed the remains of a
mangel-wurzel crop. At one end the store had been opened and drawn upon for
winter use; but a goodly pile of the great tawny globes still remained,
small lemon-colored leaves sprouting from them. Farmer Ford, however,
viewed the treasure without satisfaction.

"Us killed a power o' sheep wi' they blarsted roots last winter," he said.
"You'd never think now as the frost could touch 'em, but it did though,
awin' to the wicked long winter. It got to 'em, sure 'nough, an' theer was
frost in 'em when us gived 'em to the sheep, an' it rotted theer innards,
poor twoads, an' they died, more'n a score."

Barron listened thoughtfully to these details, then pointed to an ugly
sight beyond the wurzel mound.

"I should like that removed," he said.

It was the dead goat, withered to a mummy almost, with horns and hide
intact, and a rat-way bored through the body of the beast under a tunnel of
its ribs.

"Jimmery! to see what them varmints have done to 'en! But I'll bury what's
left right on en; an' I'll stop the sink in the house, then you'll be free
of 'em."

These things the farmer did, and presently departed, promising to revisit
the spot ere long with some dogs and a ferret or two. So Barron was left
master of the place. He found it dry, weather-proof and well suited to his
requirements in every respect. The concerns which he had ordered from
London would be with him by Saturday night if all went well, and he decided
that they should be conveyed to the byre at an early hour on Monday
morning.

The next day was Sunday, and half a dozen men, with Barron and Murdoch
among them, strolled into Brady's great whitewashed studio to see and
criticise his academy picture which was finished. Everybody declared that
the artist had excelled himself in "The End of the Voyage." It represented
a sweep of the rocky coast by the Lizard, a wide gray sand, left naked by
the tide, with the fringe of a heavy sea churning on it, and sea-fowl
strutting here and there. In the foreground, half buried under tangles of
brown weed torn from the rocks by past storms, lay a dead sailor, and a big
herring-gull, with its head on one side and a world of inquiry in its
yellow eyes, was looking at him. Tremendous vigor marked the work, and only
a Brady could have come safely through the difficulties which had been
surmounted in its creation. Everybody sang praises, and Barron nodded warm
approval, but said nothing until challenged.

"Now, find the faults, then tell me what's good," said the gigantic
painter. He stood there, burly, hearty, physically splendid--the man of all
others in that throng who might have been pointed to as the creator of the
solemn gray picture before them.

"Leave fault-finding to Fleet Street," said Barron; "let the press people
tell you where you are wrong. I am no critic and I know what a mountain of
hard work went to this."

"That's all right, old man; never mind the work--or me. Be impartial."

"Why should I? To be impartial, as this world wags, is to be friendless."

"Good Lord! d'you think I mind mauling? There's something wrong or you
wouldn't be so deucedly evasive. Out with it!"

"Well, your sailor's not dead."

Brady roared with laughter.

"Man! the poor devil's been in the water a week!"

"Not he. 'Tis a mistake in nine painted corpses out of ten. If you want to
paint a drowned man, wait till you've seen one close. That sailor in the
seaweed's asleep. Sleep is graceful, remember; death by drowning is
generally ugly--stiff, stark, hideous, eyeless, fish-gnawed a week after
the event. But what does it matter? You've painted a great picture. That
sea, with the circular swirl, as each wave goes back into the belly of the
next, is well done; and those lumps of spume fluttering above
watermark--that was finely noted. Easy to write down in print, but
difficult as the fiend to paint. And the picture is full of wind too. Your
troubles are amply repaid and I congratulate you. A man who could paint
that will go as far as he likes."

The simple Brady forgot the powder in swallowing the jam. Barron had
touched those things in his work which were precious to him. His impulsive
nature took fire, and there was almost a quiver of emotion in his big voice
as he answered:

"Damn it, you're a brick! I'd sooner hear you praise those lumps of
sea-spume, racing over the sand there, than see my picture on the line."

But sentiment was strange to John Barron's impersonal nature, and he froze.

"Another fault exists which probably nobody will tell you but me. Your
seaweed's great, and you knew it by heart before you painted it--that I'll
swear to, but your sleeper there would never lie in the line of it as you
have him. Reflect: the sea must float the light weed after it could move
him no more. He should be stogged in the sand nearer the sea."

Brady, however, contested this criticism, and so the talk wore on until the
men separated. But the Irishman called on Barron after midday dinner and
together they strolled through Newlyn toward the neighboring village.
Chance brought them face to face with two persons more vital to the
narrative than themselves, and, pausing to chronicle the event of the
meeting, we may leave the artists and follow those whom they encountered.

Gray Michael kept ashore on Sundays, and today, having come off the sea at
dawn, was not again putting forth until next morning. He had attended
meeting with his wife, his daughter and his son; he had dined also, and was
now walking over to Mousehole that he might bring some religious comfort to
a sorely stricken Luke Gospeler--a young sheep but lately won to the fold
and who now lay at the point of death. Joan accompanied him, and upon the
way they met John Barron and his companion. The girl blushed hotly and then
chilled with a great disappointment, for Barron's eyes were on the sea; he
was talking as he passed by, and he apparently saw neither her nor her
Sunday gown; which circumstance was a sorrow to Joan. But in reality Barron
missed nothing. He had shivered at her green dress and poor finery long
before she reached him. Her garb ruffled his senses and left him wounded.

"There goes your beauty," laughed Brady; "how would you like to paint her
in that frock with those sinful blue flowers in her hat?"

"Nature must weep to see the bizarre carnival these people enjoy on the
Seventh Day," answered the other. "Their duns and drabs, their russets and
tawny tones of red and orange, are of their environment, the proper skins
for their bodies; but to think of that girl brightening the eyes of a
hundred louts by virtue of those fine feathers! Dream of her in the Stone
Age, clad in a petticoat torn from a wolf, with her straw-colored hair to
her waist and a necklace of shells or wild beasts' teeth between her
breasts! And the man--her father, I suppose--what a picture his cursed
broadcloth and soft black hat make of him--like the head of a patriarch
stuck on a tailor's dummy."

Meanwhile, ignorant of these startling criticisms, Mr. Tregenza and his
daughter pursued their road, and presently stopped before a cottage in one
of the cobble-paved alley-ways of Mousehole. A worn old woman opened the
door and courtesied to Gray Michael. He wished her good-afternoon, then
entered the cottage, first bidding Joan return in an hour. She had friends
near at hand, and hurried off, glad to escape the sight of sickness and the
prayers she knew that her father would presently deliver.

"How be en?" inquired the fisherman, and the widowed mother of the patient
answered:

"Better, I do pray. Er was in the doldrums issterday an' bad by night also,
a dwaling an' moaning gashly, but, the Lard be praised, he'm better in mind
by now, an' I do think 'tis more along of Bible-readin' than all the
doctor's traade [Footnote: _Traade_--Physic.] he've took. I read to en
'bout that theer bwoy, the awnly son o' his mother, an' her a
widder-wumman, an' how as the Lard brought en round arter he'd gone dead."

Gray Michael sniffed and made no comment.

"I'll see en an' put up a prayer or so," he said.

"An' the Lard'll reward it, Mr. Tregenza."

Young Albert Vallack greeted the visitor with even greater reverence than
his mother had done. He and the old woman were Falmouth folks and had
drifted Westerly upon the father's death, until chance anchored them in
Newlyn. Now the lad--a dissolute youth enough, until sudden illness had
frightened him to religion--was dying of consumption, and dying fast,
though as yet he knew it not.

"'Tis handsome in you, a comin' to see the likes o' me," said the patient,
flushing with satisfaction. "You'm like the stickler at a wras'lin' match,
Mister Tregenza, sir; you sees fair play betwixt God an' man."

"So you'm better, Albert, your mother sez."

"Iss, a bit. Theer's more kick an' sprawl [Footnote: _Kick an'
sprawl_--Strength, vitality.] in me than theer 'ave bin; an' I feels
more hopeful like 'bout the future."

Self-righteousness in a new-fledged Luke Gospeler, who had been of the fold
but three months and whose previous record was extremely unsatisfactory,
irritated Gray Michael not a little.

"Bwoy!" he said loudly, "doan't 'e be deceived that way. 'Gird 'e wi'
sackcloth, lament and howl; for the fierce anger o' the Lard is _not_
turned back from us.' Three months o' righteousness is a purty bad set off
'gainst twenty years o' sin, an' it doan't become 'e to feel hopeful, I
'sure ye."

The sick man's color paled, and a certain note as of triumph in his voice
died out of it. His mother had left them, feeling that her presence might
hinder conversation and lessen the comfort which Mr. Tregenza had brought.

"I did ought to be chap-fall'n, I s'pose."

"Iss, you did, my son, nobody more'n you. Maybe you'll live; maybe you'll
die; but keep humble. I doan't wish to deceive 'e. Us ain't had time to
make no certainty 'bout things. You'm in the Lard's hand, an' it becomes 'e
to sing small, an' remember what your life's bin."

The other grew uneasy and his voice faltered while he still fought for a
happy eternity.

"I'd felt like 'twas all right arter what mother read."

"Not so. God's a just God 'fore everything. Theer ed'n no favorin' wi' Him.
I hopes you'll live this many a day, Vallack; an' then, when your hour
comes, you'll have piled up a tidy record an' can go wi' a certainty
faacin' you. Seems you'm better, an' us at chapel's prayed hot an' strong
to the Throne that you might be left to work out your salvation now your
foot's 'pon the right road."

"But if I dies, mister?"

"'The prayer of the righteous man availeth much,'" answered Gray Michael
evasively. "I be come," he added, "to read the Scriptures to 'e."

"You all prayed for me, sir?"

"Iss, every man, but theer was no mincin' matters, Albert. Us was arskin'
for a miserable sinner, a lost sheep awnly just strayed back, an' we put it
plain as that was so."

"'Tweer mighty kind o' the Luke Gosp'lers, sir."

"'Twas their dooty. Now I be gwaine to read the Book."

"I feels that uneasy now," whined the sufferer, in a voice where fear spoke
instead of hope, "but I s'pose 'tis a sign o' graace I should be?"

"Iss, 'tis. I've comed to tell 'e the truth, for 'tis ill as a man should
be blind to facts on what may be his last bed 'bove the airth. Listen to
this, my son, an' if theer's anything you doan't onderstand, arsk me an'
I'll thraw light 'pon it."

He read, with loud, slow voice, the fifty-fifth chapter of Isaiah, and that
glorious clarion of great promise gave Michael the lie and drowned his own
religious opinions as thunder drowns the croaking of marsh frogs; but he
knew it not. The brighter burned his own shining light, the blacker the
shadows it threw upon the future of all sinners.

As Tregenza finished and put down his Bible, the other spoke and quoted
eagerly:

"'Incline your ear an' come unto Me; fear, an' your sawl shall live!' Theer
do seem a hope in that if it ed'n awver-bold me thinkin' so?" he asked.

"That's like them Church o' Englanders, a tearin' wan text away from
t'others an' readin' it accordin' as they pleases. I'll expound it all to
wance, as a God-fearin' man did ought to treat the Scriptures."

Gray Michael's exposition illustrated nothing beyond his own narrow
intellectual limitations. His cold cloud of words obscured the prophet's
sunshine, and the light went out of the dying man's eyes, leaving only
alarm. He trembled on the brink of the horrid truth; he heard it thinly
veiled in the other's stern utterance, saw it looking from his hard blue
eyes. After the sermon, silence followed, broken by Vallack, who coughed
once and again, then raised himself and braced his heart to the tremendous
question that demanded answering.

"I wants your awn feelin' like, mister. I must have it. I caan't sleep no
more wi'out knawin' the best or worst. You be the justest man ever I seed
or heard tell on out the Scriptures. An' I wants 'e to gimme your opinion
like. S'pose you was the Judge an' I comed afore 'e an' the Books was theer
and you'd read 'em an' had to conclude 'pon 'em--?"

The fisherman reflected. Vallack's proposition did not strike him as
particularly grotesque. He felt it was a natural question, and he only
regretted that it had been put, because, though he had driven more than one
young man to righteousness along the path of terror, in this present case
the truth came too late save to add another horror to death. He believed in
all sincerity that as surely as the young man before him presently died, so
surely would he be damned, but he saw no particular object in stating the
fact. Such intelligence might tell upon Vallack's physical condition--a
thing of all others to be avoided, for Gray Michael held that the
sufferer's only chance of a happy eternity was increased and lengthened
opportunity in time.

"It ed'n for me to sit in the Judgment Seat, Albert. 'Vengeance is mine,
sayeth the Lard.' You must allus hold in mind that theer's mighty few saved
alive, best o' times. Many be called, but few chosen. Men go down to the
graave every second o' the day an' night, but if you could see the sawls a
streamin' away, thicker'n a cloud of starlings, you'd find a mass, black as
a storm, went down long, an' awnly just a summer cloud like o' the blessed
riz up. Hell's bigger'n Heaven; an' er's need to be, for Heaven's like to
be a lonely plaace, when all's said. I won't speak no more 'bout that
subjec'. 'Tis good fashion weather for 'e just now, an us'll hope as you
ban't gwaine to die for many a day."

"Say it out, mister, say it out. I knaws what you means. You reckons if I
gaws I'm lost."

"My poor sawl, justice is justice; an' the Lard's all for justice an' no
less. Theer's no favorin' wi' Him, Albert."

"But mightn't He favor the whole bilin' of us--good'n bad--cause He made
us?"

"Surely not. Wheer's the justice o' that? If He done that, how'd the godly
get their fair dues--eh? Be the righteous man to share God's Heaven wi'
publicans an' sinners? That ed'n justice anyhow. Don't fret, lad; tears
won't mend bad years. Bide quiet an' listen to me whiles I pray for 'e."

The man in the bed had grown very white, his eyes burned wildly out of a
shrunken face, and he gripped the sheets and shivered in pure physical
terror.

"I caan't die, I caan't die, not yet," he groaned, "pray to the Lard to
keep me from dyin' yet a while, mister. Arsk en to give me just a lil time,
'cause I'm that sorry for my scarlet sins."

Thereupon Michael knelt, clasped his hands so close that the bent
finger-joints grew white, raised his massive head upward and prayed with
his eyes closed. The intercession for life ended, he rose up, shook Vallack
by the hand, and so departed.

"Allus, when you've got the chance, bear the balm o' Gilead to a sinner's
couch," he said to his daughter as they walked home. "'Tis the duty of man
an' maid to spread the truth an' bring peace to the troubled, an' strength
to the weak-hearted, an' rise up them that fall."

A week later Mr. Tregenza heard how Albert Vallack had burst a blood-vessel
and died, fighting horribly with awful invisible terrors.

"Another sawl gone down into the Pit," he said. "I reckon fewer an' fewer
be chosen every year as the world do grow older an' riper for the last
fires."




CHAPTER SIX

FAIRY STORIES


Joan found her sketch waiting for her the next day when she reached Gorse
Point about eleven o'clock; and she also discovered John Barron with a
large canvas before him. He had constructed his picture and already made
many drawings for it. Now he knew exactly what he wanted, and he designed
to paint Joan standing looking out at a distant sea which would be far
behind the spectator of the picture. When she arrived, on a fine morning
and mild, Barron rose from his camp-stool, lifted up a little canvas which
stood framed at his side and presented it to her. The sketch in oils of the
"Anna" was cleverer than Joan could possibly know, but she took no small
delight in it and in the setting of rough deal brightly gilded.

"Sure 'tis truly good of 'e, sir!"

"You are more than welcome. Only let me say one word, Joan. Keep your
picture hidden away until Joe comes back from sea and marries you. From
what you tell me, your father might not like you to have this trifle, and I
should be very sorry to annoy him."

"I waddun' gwaine to show en," she confessed. "I shall store the picksher
away as you sez."

"You are wise. Now look here, doesn't this promise to be a big affair? The
gorse will be nearly as large as life, and I've been wondering ever so long
what I shall put in the middle; and whatever do you think I've thought of?"

"I dunnaw. That white pony us saw, p'raps?"

"No; something much prettier. How would it do, d'you think, if _you_
stood here in front of the gorse, just to fill up the middle piece of the
picture?"

"Oh, no, no! My faither--"

"You misunderstand, Joan. I don't want a picture of _you_, you know;
I'm going to paint the gorse. But if you just stood here, you'd make a sort
of contrast with your brown frock. Not a portrait at all, only just a
figure to help the color. Besides, you mustn't think I'm an artist, I
shouldn't go selling the picture or hanging it up for everybody to stare at
it. I'm certain your father wouldn't mind, and I'll tell him all about it
afterward, if you like."

She hesitated and reflected with trouble in her eyes, while Barron quietly
took the picture he had brought her and wrapped it up in a piece of paper.
His object was to remind her without appearing to do so of her obligation
to him, and Joan was clever enough to take the hint, though not clever
enough to see that it was an intentional one.

"Would it be a long job, sir?" she asked at length.

"Yes, it would; because I'm a slow painter and rather stupid. But I should
think it very, very kind of you. I'm not strong, you know, and I daresay
this is the last picture I shall ever paint."

"You ed'n strong, sir?"

"Not at all."

She was silent, and a great sympathy rose in her girl's heart, for frail
health always made her sad.

"You don't judge 'tis wrong then for a maiden to be painted in a picksher?"

"Certainly not, Joan. I should never suggest such a thing to you if I
thought it was in the least wrong. I _know_ it isn't wrong."

"I seed you issterday," she said, changing the subject suddenly, "but you
dedn see me, did 'e?"

"Yes, I did, and your father. He is a grand-looking man. By the way, Joan,
I think I never told you my name. I'm called John; that's short and simple,
isn't it?"

"Mister Jan," she said.

"No, not 'mister'--just 'Jan,'" he answered, adopting her pronunciation. "I
don't call you 'Miss' Joan."

She looked at once uncomfortable and pleased.

"We must be friends," the man continued calmly, "now you have promised to
let me put you here among the gorse bushes."

"Sure, I dunnaw 'bout the picksher, Mister Jan."

"Well, you would be doing me a great service. I want to paint you very much
and I think you will be kind."

He looked into her eyes with a steady, inquiring glance, and Joan
experienced a new emotion. Joe had never looked like that; nor yet her
father. She felt a will stronger than her own was busy with her
inclinations. Volition remained free, and yet she doubted whether under any
circumstances could she refuse his petition. As it happened, however, she
already liked the man. He was so respectful and polite. Moreover, she felt
sad to hear that he suffered in health. He would not ask her to do wrong
and she felt certain that she might trust him. A trembling wish and a
longing to comply with his request already mastered her mind.

"You'm sure--gospel truth--theer ed'n no harm in it?"

"Trust me."

In five minutes he had posed her as he wished and was drawing, while every
word he spoke put Joan more at her ease. The spice of adventure and secrecy
fired her and she felt the spirit of romance in her blood, though she knew
no name for it. Here was a secret delight knocking at the gray threshold of
every-day life--an adventure which might last for many days.

Barron, to touch the woman in her if he could, harped upon her gown and the
color of it, on her shoes and sun-bonnet--on everything but herself.
Presently he reaped his reward.

"Ban't you gwaine to paint my faace as well, Mister Jan."

"Yes, if I can. But your eyes are blue, and blue eyes are hard to paint
well. Yours are so very blue, Joan. Didn't Joe ever tell you that?"

"No--that's all fulishness."

"Nothing that's true is foolish. Now I'm going to make some little sketches
of you, so as to get each fold and shadow in your dress right."

Barron drew rapidly, and Joan--ever ready to talk to a willing listener
when her confidence was won--prattled on, turning the conversation as usual
to the matters she loved. Upon her favorite subjects she dared not open her
mouth at home, and even her lover refused to listen to the legends of the
land, but they were part of the girl's life notwithstanding, drawn into her
blood from her mother, a thousand times more real and precious than even
the promised heaven of Luke Gospeldom, not to be wholly smothered at any
time. Occasionally, indeed, uneasy fears that discussion of such concerns
was absolutely sinful kept her dumb for a week, then the religious wave
swept on, and Cornish folk-lore, with its splendor and romance, again
filled her heart and bubbled from her lips. Her little stories pleased
Barron mightily. Excitement heightened Joan's beauty. Her absolute
innocence at the age of seventeen struck him as remarkable. It seemed
curious that a child born in a cottage, where realities and facts are apt
to roughly front boy and girl alike, should know so little. She was a
beautiful, primitive creature, with strange store of fairy fable in her
mind; a treasury which brought color and joy into life. So she prattled,
and the man painted.

Pure artistic interest filled Barron's brain at this season; not a shadow
of passion made his pencil shaky or his eye dim; he began to learn the girl
with as little emotion as he had learned the gorse. He asked her to
unfasten the top button of her dress that he might see the lines of her
plump throat, and she complied without hesitation or ceasing from her
chatter. He noted where the tan on her neck faded to white under her dress,
and occupied himself with all the artistic problems she unconsciously
spread before him; while she merely talked, garnered in his questions and
comments on all she said, and found delight in the apparent interest and
entertainment her conversation afforded him.

"I seed a maggotty-pie [Footnote: _Maggotty-pie_--Magpie.] comin'
along this marnin'," she said. "Wan's bad an' a sign o' sorrer; but if you
spits twice over your left shoulder it doan't matter so much. But I be
better off than many maidens, 'cause I be saint-protected like."

"That's interesting, Joan."

"Faither'd be mad if I let on 'bout it to him, so I doesn't. He doan't
b'lieve much in dead saints, though Carnwall's full of 'em. Have 'e heard
tell 'bout Saint Madern?"

"Ah, the saint of the well?"

"Iss, an' the brook as runs by the Madern chapel."

"I sketched the little ruin of the baptistery some time ago."

"'Twas tho't a deal of wance, an' the holy water theer was reckoned better
for childern than any doctor's traade as ever was. My mother weer a Madern
cheel; an' 'er ordained I should be as well, an' when faither was to sea,
as fell out just 'pon the right day, mother took me up theer. That was my
awn mother as is dead. More folks b'lieved in the spring then than what do
now, 'cause that was sebenteen year agone. An' from bein' a puny cheel I
grawed a bonny wan arter dipping. But some liked the crick-stone better for
lil baabies than even the Madern brook."

"Mên-an-tol that stone is called?"

"So 'tis, awnly us knaws it as the crick-stone. Theer's a big hole in en,
an' if a cheel was passed through nine times runnin', gwaine 'gainst the
way of the sun every time, it made en as strong as a lion. An' 'tis good
for grawn people tu, awnly folks is afeared to try now 'cause t'others
laugh at en. But I reckon the Madern brook's holy water still. An' theer's
wonnerful things said 'bout the crick-stones an' long stones tu. A many of
'em stands round 'bout these paarts."

"D'you know Mên Scryfa--the stone with the writing on it? That's a famous
long stone, up beyond Lanyon Farmhouse."

"I've seed en, 'pon the heath. 'Tis butivul an' solemn an' still, all aloan
out theer in a croft to itself. I trapsed up-long wan day an' got beside of
en an' ate a pasty wi' Joe. But Joe chid me, an' said 'tweer a heathenish
thing sticked theer by the Phoenicians, as comed for tin in Solomon's
times."

"Don't you believe that, Joan. Mên Scryfa marks the memory of a good
Briton--one who knew King Arthur, very likely. I love the old stones too.
You are right to love them. They are landmarks in time, books from which we
may read something of a far, fascinating past."

"Iss, but I ded'n tell 'e all 'bout the Madern waters. The best day for 'em
be the fust Sunday in May; an' come that, the mothers did use to gaw up to
the chapel--dozens of 'em--wi' poor lil baabies. They dipped 'em naked in
the brook, an' 'twas just a miracle for rashes and braggety legs and sich
like. An', arterward, the mothers made offerin's to the saint. 'Twas awnly
the thot like, but folks reckoned the saint 'ud take the will for the act,
'cause poor people couldn' give a saint nothin' worth namin'."

Barren had heard of the votive offerings left by the faithful in past days
at St. Madron's shrine, but felt somewhat surprised to find the practice
dated back to a time so recent as Joan's infancy. He let her talk on, for
the subject was evidently dear to the girl.

"And what did the mothers give the saint?"

"Why, rags mostly. Just a rag tored off a petticoat, or some sich thing.
They hanged 'em up around about on the thorn bushes to shaw as they'd a
done more for the good saint if they'd had the power. An' theer's another
marvelous thing as washin' in thicky waters done: it kep' the fairies
off--the bad fairies, I mean. 'Cause theer'm gude an' bad piskeys, same as
gude an' bad men folks."

"You believe in fairies, Joan?"

She looked at him shyly, but he had apparently asked for information and
was not in the least amused.

"I dunnaw. P'raps. Iss, I do, then! Many wiser'n me do b'lieve in 'em. You
arsk the tinners--them as works deep. They knaws; they've 'eard the
knackers an' gathorns many a time, an' some's seen 'em. But the mine
fairies be mostly wicked lil humpetty-backed twoads as'll do harm if they
can; an' the buccas is onkind to fishermen most times; an' 'tis said they
used to bide in the shape of a cat by day. But theer be land fairies as is
mighty good-hearted if a body behaves seemly."

"I believe in the fairies too," said Barren gravely, "but I've never seen
one."

"Do 'e now, Mister Jan! Then I'm sure theer is sich things. I ne'er seed
wan neither; but I'd love to. Some maids has vanished away an' dwelt 'mong
'em for many days an' then comed home. Theer's Robin o' the Carn as had a
maiden to work for en. You may have heard the tale?"

"No, never."

"'Tis a fine tale; an' the gal had a braave time 'mongst the lil people
till she disobeyed 'em an' found herself back 'mongst men folk agin. But in
coorse some of them--the piskeys, I mean--works for men folk themselves. My
gran'mother Chirgwin, when she was very auld, seed 'em a threshin' corn in
a barn up Drift. They was tiny fellers wi' beards an' red faaces, an' they
handled the flails cruel clever. Then, arter a bit, they done the threshin'
an' was kickin' the short straw out the grain, which riz a gert dust; an'
the piskeys all beginned sneezin'. An' my gran'mother, as was peepin'
through the door unbeknown to 'em, forgot you must never speak to a piskey,
an' sez, 'God bless 'e, hi men!' 'cause that's what us allus sez if a body
sneezes. Then they all took fright an' vanished away in the twinkle of a
eye. Which must be true, 'cause my awn gran'mother tawld it. But they ded'n
leave the farm, though nobody seed 'em again, for arter that 'tis said as
the cows gived a wonnerful shower o' milk, better'n ever was knawn before.
An' I 'sure 'e I'd dearly like to be maiden to good piskeys if they'd let
me work for 'em."

"Ah, I'm certain you would suit them well, Joan; and they would be lucky to
get you, I think; but I hope they won't go and carry you off until I've
done with you, at any rate."

She laughed, and he bid her put down her hand from her eyes and rest. He
had brought some oranges for her, but judged the friendship had gone far
enough, and first decided not to produce them. Half an hour later, however,
when the sitting was ended, he changed his mind.

"Can you come to-morrow, Joan? I am entirely in your hands, remember, and
must consider your convenience always. In fact, I am your servant and shall
wait your pleasure at all times."

Joan felt proud and rather important.

"I'll come at 'leben o'clock to-morrow, but I doubt I caan't be here next
day, Mister Jan."

"Thank you very much. To-morrow at eleven will do splendidly. By the way, I
have an orange here--two, in fact. I thought we might be thirsty. Will you
take one to eat going home?"

He held out the fruit and she took it.

"My! What a butivul orange!"

"Good-by until to-morrow, Joan; and thank you for your great kindness to a
very friendless man. You'll never be sorry for it, I'm sure."

He bowed gravely and took off his cap, then turned to his easel; and she
blushed with a lively pleasure. She had seen gentlemen take off their hats
to ladies, but no man had ever paid her that respect until then, and it
seemed good to her. She marched off with her picture and her orange, but
did not eat the fruit until out of sight of Gorse Point.

The man painting there already began to fill a space in Joan's thoughts. He
knew so much and yet was glad to learn from her. He never laughed or talked
lightly. He put her in mind of her father for that reason, but then his
heart was soft, and he loved Nature and beautiful things, and believed in
fairies and spoke no ill of anybody. Joan speculated as to how these
meetings could be kept a secret and came to the conclusion it would not be
difficult to hide them. Then, reaching home, she hid her picture behind the
pig-sty until opportunity offered for taking it indoors to her own bedroom
unobserved.

As for John Barren, he felt kindly enough toward his model. He could hold
himself with an iron hand when he pleased, and proposed that the growing
friendship should ripen into a fine work of art and no more. But what might
go to the making of the picture could not be foretold. He would certainly
allow nothing to check inspiration or stand between him and the very best
he had power to achieve. No sacrifice could be too great for Art, and
Barron, who was now awake and alive for an achievement, would, according to
his rule, count nothing hard, nothing impossible that might add a grain of
value to the work. His own skill and Joan's beauty were brought in contact
and he meant to do everything a man might do to make the result immortal.
But the human instruments necessary to such work counted for nothing, and
their personal prosperity and welfare would weigh no more with him than the
future of the brushes which he might use, after he had done with them.




CHAPTER SEVEN

UNCLE CHIRGWIN


Joan's first announcement upon the following morning was a regret that the
sitting must be short.

"We'm mighty busy, come wan thing an' another," she said. "Mother's gwaine
to Penzance wi' my brother to buy his seafarin' kit; and Uncle Chirgwin, as
keeps a farm up Drift, be comin' to dinner, which he ain't done this long
time; an' faither may by chance be home tu, so like as not, for the first
bwoats be tackin' back from the islands a'ready."

"You shall stop just as short a time as you choose, Joan. It was very good
of you to come at all under these circumstances," declared the artist.

"Us be fine an' busy when uncle comes down-long, an' partickler this time,
'cause theer've bin a differ'nce of 'pinion 'bout--'bout a matter betwixt
him and faither, but now he's wrote through the post to say as he'm comin',
so 'tis all right, I s'pose, an' us'll have to give en a good dinner
anyways."

"Of course you must," admitted Barren, working steadily the while.

"He'm a dear sawl, an' I likes en better'n anybody in the world, I think,
'cept faither. But he's easier to please than faither, an' so humble as a
beggar-man. An' I wants to make some cakes for en against tea-time, 'cause
when he comes, he bides till candle-lighting or later."

Presently the artist bid her rest for a short while, and her thoughts
reverted to him and the picture.

"I hope as you'm feelin' strong an' no worser, Mister Jan," she said
timidly.

He was puzzled for a moment, then recollected that he had mentioned his
health to her.

"Thank you very much for asking, Joan. It was good and thoughtful. I am no
worse--rather better if anything, now I come to think about it. Your
Cornish air is kind to me, and when the sun shines I am happy."

"How be the picksher farin'?"

"I get on well, I think."

"'Tis cruel clever of 'e, Mister Jan. An' you'll paint me wi' the fuzz all
around?"

"That is what I hope to do; a harmony in brown and gold."

"You'll get my likeness tu, I s'pose, same as the photograph man done it
last winter to Penzance? Me an' Joe was took side by side, an' folks
reckoned 'twas the moral of us, specially when the gen'leman painted Joe's
hair black an' mine yeller for another shillin' cost."

"It must have been very excellent."

"Iss, 'twas for sartain."

"What did Mr. Tregenza say of it?"

"Well, faither, he'm contrary to sich things, as I tawld 'e, Mister Jan.
Faither said Joe'd better by a deal keep his money in his purse; but he let
me have the picksher, an' 'tis nailed up in a lil frame, what Joe made, at
home in the parlor."

She stopped a moment and sighed, then spoke again.

"Faither's a wonnerful God-fearin' man, sure 'nough."

"Is he a God-loving man too, Joan?"

"I dunnaw. That ed'n 'sackly the same, I s'pose?"

"As different as fear and love. I'm not an atom frightened of God
myself--no more than I am of you."

"Lard! Mister Jan."

"Why should I be? You are not frightened of the air you breathe--yet that
is part of God; you are not frightened of the gold gorse or the blue
sky--yet they are part of God too. God made you--you are part of God--a
deliberate manifestation of Him. What's the use of being frightened? You
and I can only know God by the shapes He takes--by the bluebells and the
ferns and the larks in the sky, and the rabbits and wild things."

His effort to inspire the girl with Nature-worship, though crudely cast in
a fashion most likely to attract her, yet failed just then, and failed
ludicrously. Her mind comprehended barely enough to accept his idea in a
sense suggested by her acquaintance with fable, and when he instanced a
rabbit as an earthly manifestation of the Everlasting, she felt she could
cap the example from her own store of knowledge.

"I reckon I sees what you'm meanin', Mister Jan. Theer's things us calls
witch-hares in these paarts up-long. The higher-quarter people have seed
'em 'fore now; nothin' but siller bullets will kill 'em. They goes
loppettin' about down lawnly lanes on moonlight nights, an' they draws
folks arter 'em. But if you could kill wan of 'em 'tis said as they'd turn
into witches theer an' then. So you means that God A'-mighty' takes shaapes
sometimes same as they witches do, doan't 'e?"

"Not quite that, Joan. What I want you to know is that the great Being you
call God is nearer to you here, on Gorse Point, than in the Luke Gospelers'
meeting-house, and He takes greater delight in a bird's song than in all
your father's prayers and sermons put together. That is because the great
Being taught the bird to sing Himself, but He never taught your father to
pray."

"I dunnaw 'sackly what you means, Mister Jan, but I judges you ban't so
religious like as what faither is."

"Religion came from God to man, Joan, because man wanted it and couldn't
get on comfortably without it; but theology--if you know what that
means--man invented for himself. Religion is the light; theology is the
candlestick. Never quarrel with any man's candlestick as long as you can
see his light burning bravely. Mr. Tregenza thinks all men are mistaken but
the Luke Gospelers--so you told me. But if that is the case, what becomes
of all your good Cornish saints? They were not Luke Gospelers--at least I
don't think they were."

Joan frowned over this tremendous problem, then dismissed it for the
pleasanter and simpler theme John Barron's last remark suggested.

"Them saints was righteous men anyhow, an' they worked miracles tu, so it
ban't no gude sayin' they wasn't godly in their ways, the whole boilin' of
'em. Theer's St. Piran, St. Michael, St. Austell, St. Blazey, St. Buryan,
St. Ives, St. Sennen, St. Levan, an' a many more, I could call home if I
was to think. Did 'e ever hear tell 'bout St. Neot, Mister Jan?"

"'No, Joan; I'm afraid I don't know much about him."

"Not 'bout they feesh?"

"Tell me, while you rest a minute or two."

"'Tis a holy story, an' true as any Bible tale, I should guess. St. Neot
had a well, an' wan day he seed three feesh a swimmin' in it an' he was
'mazed to knaw how they comed theer. So a angel flew down an' tawld en
that they was put theer for his eatin', but he must never draw out more'n
wan at a time. Then he'd all us find three when he comed again. An' so he
did; but wance he failed sick an' his servant had to look arter his vittles
meantime. He was a man by the name of Barius, an' he judged as maybe a
change of eatin' might do the saint good. So he goes an' takes two o' them
feesh 'stead o' wan as the angel said. An' he b'iled wan feesh, an' fried
t'other, an' took 'em to St. Neot; an' when he seed what his man been
'bout, he was flustered, I tell 'e. Then the saint up and done a marvelous
straange thing, for he flinged them feesh back in the well, just as they
was, and began praayin' to the Lard to forgive his man. An' the feesh
comed alive ag'in and swimmed around, though Barius had cleaned 'em, I
s'pose, an' took the guts out of 'em an' everything. Then the chap just
catched wan feesh proper, an' St. Neot ate en, an' grawed well by sundown.
So he was a saint anyways."

"You can't have a miracle without a saint, of course, Joan?"

"Or else the Lard. But I'll hold in mind what you sez 'bout Him bein' hid
in flowers an' birds an' sich like, 'cause that's a butivul thing to knaw."

"And in the stars and the sun and the moon, Joan; and in the winds and
clouds. See how I've got on to-day. I don't think I ever did so much work
in an hour before."

She looked and blushed to note her brown frock and shoes.

"You've done a deal more to them fuzzes than what you have to me,
seemin'ly," she said.

"That's because the gorse is always here and you are not. I work at the
gorse morning after morning, when the sun is up, until my fingers ache.
You'll see great changes in the picture of yourself soon though."

But she was not satisfied, of course misunderstanding the unfinished work.

"You mustn't say anything yet, you know, Joan," added the artist, seeing
her pouting lips.

"But--but you've drawed me as flat as a cheeld, an' I be round as a wummon,
ban't I?" she said, holding out her hands that he might see her slight
figure. Her blue eyes were clouded, for she deemed that he had put an
insult upon her budding womanhood. Barren showed no sign of his enjoyment,
but explained as clearly as possible that she was looking at a thing wholly
unfinished, indeed scarce begun.

"You might as well grumble with me for not painting your fingers or your
face, Joan. I told you I was a slow artist; only be patient; I'm going to
do all fitting honor to every scrap of you, if only you will let me."

"Warmer words had come to his lips, but he did not suffer them to pass.
Then the girl's beautiful face broke into a smile again.

"I be nigher eighteen than sebenteen, you knaw, Mister Jan. But, coorse, I
hadn't no bizness to talk like that to 'e, 'cause what do I knaw 'bout sich
things?"

"You shan't see the picture again till it is finished, Joan. It was my
fault for showing it to you like that, and you had every right to protest.
Now you must go, for it's long past twelve o'clock."

"I'm afeared I caan't come to-morrer."

"As you please. I shall be here every day, ready and only too glad to see
you."

"An'--an' you ban't cross wi' me for speakin' so rude, Mister Jan?"

"Cross, Joan? No, I'm never cross with anybody but myself. I couldn't be
cross with my kind little friend if I tried to be."

He shook hands; it was the first occasion that he had done so, and she
blushed. His hand was cold and thin, and she heard one of the bones in it
give a little crack as he held her palm within his own for the briefest
space of time. Then, as usual, the moment after he had said "good-by," he
appeared to become absolutely unconscious of her presence, and returned to
his picture.

Joan's mind dwelt much upon the artist after she had departed, and every
train of reflection came back to the last words Barron spoke that morning.
He had called her his kind little friend. It was very wonderful, Joan
thought, and a statement not to be explained at all. Her stepmother's voice
cut these pleasant memories sharply, and she returned home to find that
Uncle Chirgwin had already arrived--a fact his old gray horse, tethered in
the orchard, and his two-wheeled market cart, drawn up in the side-lane,
testified to before Mrs. Tregenza announced it.

"Out again, of coorse, just because you knawed I was to be drove off my
blessed legs to-day. I'll tell your faither of 'e, so I will. Gals like you
did ought to be chained 'longside theer work till 'tis done."

Uncle Chirgwin sat by the fireside with a placid if bored expression on his
round face. His hands were folded on his stomach; his short legs were stuck
out before him; his head was quite bald, his color high, his gray eyes
weak, though they had some laughter hidden in them. His double chin was
shaved, but a very white bristle of stubbly whisker surrounded it and
ascended to where all that remained of his hair stuck, like two patches of
cotton wool, above his ears. The old man wore a suit of gray tweed and
blinked benignly through a pair of spectacles. He had already heard enough
of Mrs. Tregenza's troubles to last some time, and turned with pleasure to
Joan as she entered. So hearty indeed was the greeting and a kiss which
accompanied it that his niece felt the displeasure which her uncle had
recorded by post upon the occasion of her engagement to Mary Chirgwin's
former sweetheart existed no more.

"My ivers! a braave, bowerly maid you'm grawin', sure 'nough! Joan'll be a
wummon 'fore us can look round, mother."

"Iss--an' a fine an' lazy wummon tu. I wish you could make her work like
what Mary does up Drift."

"Well, I dunnaw. You see there's all sorts of girls, same as plants an'
'osses an' cetera. Some's for work, some's for shaw. You 'specks a flower
to be purty, but you doan't blame a 'tater plant 'cause 'e ed'n particular
butivul. Same wi' 'osses, an' wi' gals. Joan's like that chinee plate 'pon
the bracket, wi' the pickshers o' Saltash Burdge 'pon en, an' gold writin'
under; an' Mary's like that pie-dish, what you put in the ubben a while
back. Wan's for shaw, t'other's for use--eh?"

"Gwan! you'm jokin', Uncle Thomas!" said Joan.

"An' a poor joke tu, so 'tis. You'd turn any gal's 'ead wi' your stuff,
Chirgwin. Wheer's the gude of a fuzz-pole o' yeller hair an' a pair o' blue
eyes stuck 'pon top of a idle, good-for-nothin' body? Maidens caan't live
by looks in these paarts, an' they'll find theerselves in trouble mighty
quick if they tries to."

Uncle Chirgwin instantly admitted that Mrs. Tregenza had the better of the
argument. He was a simple man with a soft heart and no brains worth naming.
Most people laughed at him and loved him. As sure as he went to Penzance on
market-day, he was cordially greeted and made much of, and robbed. People
suspected that his shrewd, black-eyed niece stood between him and absolute
misfortune. She never let him go to market without her if she could help
it; for, on those infrequent occasions when he jogged to town with his gray
horse and cart alone, he always went with a great trust of the world in his
heart and endeavored to conduct the sale of farm produce in the spirit of
Christianity, which was magnificent but not business. Mr. Chirgwin's simple
theories had kept him a poor man; yet the discovery, often repeated, that
his knowledge of human nature was bad, never imbittered him, and he mildly
persisted in his pernicious system of trusting everybody until he found he
could not; unlike his neighbors who trusted nobody until they found that
they could. The farmer had blazed with indignation when Joe Noy flung over
Mary Chirgwin because she would not become a Luke Gospeler. But the matter
was now blown over, for the jilted girl, though the secret bitterness of
her sorrow still bred much gall in her bosom, never paraded it or showed a
shadow of it in her dark face. Uncle Thomas greatly admired Mary and even
feared her; but he loved Joan, for she was like her dead mother outwardly
and like himself in character: a right Chirgwin, loving sunshine and
happiness, herself sunshiny and happy.

"'Pears I've comed the wrong day, Joan," he said presently, when Mrs.
Tregenza's back was turned, "but now I be here, you must do with me as you
can."

"Mother's gwaine to town wi' Tom bimebye; then me an' you'll have a talk,
uncle, wi'out nothin' to let us. You'm lookin' braave, me auld dear."

He liked a compliment, and anticipated pleasure from a quiet afternoon with
his niece. She bustled about, as usual, to make up for lost time; and
presently, when the cloth was laid, walked to the cottage door to see if
her father's lugger was at its moorings or in sight. Meantime Mrs.
Tregenza, having brought forth dinner from the oven, called at the back
door to her son in a voice harsh and shrill beyond customary measure, as
became her exceptional tribulations.

"Come in, will 'e, an' ait your food, bwoy. Theer ed'n no call to kick out
they boots agin' the pig's 'ouse because I be gwaine to buy new wans for 'e
presently."

Fired by a word which she had heard from John Barron, that flowers became
the house as well as the garden, Joan plucked an early sprig of pink ribe
and the first buds of wall-flower before returning to the kitchen. These
she put in a jug of water and planted boldly upon the dinner-table as Mrs.
Tregenza brought out a pie.

"Butivul, sure 'nough," said Mr. Chirgwin, drawing in his chair. His eye
was on the pie-dish, but Joan thought he referred to her bouquet.

"Lard! what'll 'e do next? Take they things off the table to wance, Joan."

"But Uncle Thomas sez they'm butivul," she pleaded.

"They be pleasant," admitted Mr. Chirgwin, "but bloody-warriors [Footnote:
_Bloody-warrior_--Wall-flower.] be out o' plaace 'pon the
dinner-table. I was 'ludin' to this here. You do brown a 'tater to rights,
mother."

Mrs. Tregenza's shepherd's pies had a reputation, and anybody eating of one
without favorable comment was judged to have made a hole in his manners.
Now she helped the steaming delicacy and sighed as she sat down before her
own ample share.

"Lard knaws how I done it to-day. 'Tis just a enstance how some things
comes nachrul to some people. You wants a light hand wi' herbs an' to knaw
your ubben. Get the brandy, Joan. Uncle allus likes the edge off drinkin'
water."

The Tregenzas were teetotalers, but a bottle of brandy for medicinal
purposes occupied the corner of a certain cupboard.

"You puts it right, mother. 'Tis just the sharpness I takes off. I can't
drink no beer nowadays, though fond o' it, 'cause 'tis belly-vengeance
stuff arter you gets past a certain time o' life. But I'd as soon have
tea."

"That's bad to drink 'long wi' vlaish," said Mrs. Tregenza. "Tea turns
mayte leather-hard an' plagues the stomach cruel, as I knaws to my cost."

They ate in silence a while, then, having expressed and twice repeated a
wish that Mary could be taught to make shepherd's pies after the rare
fashion of his hostess, Mr. Chirgwin turned to Tom.

"So you'm off for a sailor bwoy, my lad?"

"Iss, uncle, an' mother gwaine to spend fi' puns o' money on my kit."

"By Golles! be she now? I lay you'll be smart an' vitty!"

"That he will!" said Joan, but Mrs. Tregenza shook her head.

"I did sadly want en to be a landsman an' 'prenticed to some good body in
bizness. It's runnin' 'gainst dreams as I had 'fore the bwoy was born, an'
the voice I heard speakin' by night arter I were churched by the Luke
Gosp'lers. But you knaw Michael. What's dreams to him, nor yet voices?"

"The worst paart 'bout 'em, if I may say it, is that they'm so uncommon
well acquainted like wi' theer awn virtues. I mean the Gosp'lers an' all
chapel-members likewise. It blunts my pleasure in a good man to find he
knaws how good he is. Same as wan doan't like to see a purty gal tossin'
her head tu high."

"You caan't say no sich thing o' Michael, I'm sure," remonstrated Mrs.
Tregenza instantly; "he'm that modest wi' his righteousness as can be. I've
knawn en say open in prayer, 'fore the whole chapel, as he's no better'n a
crawlin' worm. An' if he's a worm, what's common folks like you an' me?
Awnly Michael doan't seem to take 'count in voices an' dreams, but I knaws
they'm sent a purpose an' not for nort."

Mr. Chirgwin admitted his own ridiculous religious insignificance as
contrasted with Gray Michael. Indeed the comparison, so little in his
favor, amused him extremely. He sipped his brandy and water and enjoyed a
treacle-pudding which followed the pie. Then, when Joan was clearing up and
Mrs. Tregenza had departed to prepare for her visit to Penzance, Uncle
Thomas began to puff out his cheeks, and blow, and frown, and look uneasily
to the right and left--actions invariably performed when he contemplated
certain monetary achievements of which he was only too fond. The sight of
Mary's eyes upon him had often killed such indiscretions in the bud, but
she was not present just then, so, with further furtive glances, he brought
out his purse, opened it, and found a half-sovereign which reposed alone in
the splendor of a separate compartment. Uncle Chirgwin then beckoned to
Tom, who had gone into the garden till his mother should be ready to start.

"Good speed to 'e, bwoy," he said, "an' may the Lard watch over 'e by land
an' sea. Take you this lil piece o' money to buy what you've a mind to; an'
knaw you've got a auld man's blessin' 'long wi' it."

"Mother," said Tom, a minute later, "uncle have gived me a bit o' gawld!"

She took the coin from him and her eyes rested on it lovingly while the
outlines of her face grew softer and she moistened her lips.

"First gawld's ever I had," commented Tom.

"You'm 'mazin' generous wi' your moneys, uncle, an' I thank 'e hearty for
the bwoy. Mighty good of 'e--so much money to wance," said Thomasin,
showing more gratification than she knew.

"I wants en to be thrifty," answered the old man, very wisely. "You knaws
how hard it is to teach young people the worth o' money."

"Ay, an' some auld wans! Blest if I doan't think you'd give your head away
if 'e could. But I'll take this here half-suvrin' for Tom. 'Tis a nest-egg
as he shall add to as he may."

Tom did not foresee this arrangement, and had something to say as he
tramped off with his mother to town; but though he could do more with her
and get more out of her than anybody else in the world, money was a subject
concerning which Mrs. Tregenza always had her way. She understood it and
loved it and allowed no interference from anybody, Michael alone excepted.
But he cared not much for money and was well content to let his wife hold
the purse; yet when he did occasionally demand an account, it was always
forthcoming to the uttermost farthing, and he fully believed what other
people told him that Thomasin could make a sixpenny-piece go further than
any other woman in Newlyn.

Mother and son presently departed; while Mr. Chirgwin took off his coat,
lighted his pipe, and walked with Joan round about the orchard. He foretold
great things for the plums, now in full flower; he poked the pigs with his
stick and spoke encouragingly of their future also. Then he discussed
Joan's prospects and gladdened her heart by telling her the past must be
let alone and need never be reverted to again.

"Mary's gettin' over it tu," he said, "least-ways I think she is. Her knaws
wheer to look for comfort, bless her. Us must all keep friendly for life's
not long enough to do 'nough good in, I allus says, let alone the doin' o'
bad."

Then he discussed Joe Noy, and Joan was startled to find, when she came to
think seriously upon the subject, that though but a week and three days had
passed since she bid her lover "good-by," yet the picture of him in her
mind already grew a trifle dim, and the prospect of his absence for a year
held not the least sorrow in it for her.

Presently, after looking to his horse, Uncle Thomas hinted at forty winks,
if the same would be quite convenient, and Joan, settling him with some
approach to comfort upon a little horsehair sofa in the parlor, turned her
attention to the making of saffron cakes for tea.




CHAPTER EIGHT

THE MAKING OF PROGRESS


John Barron held strong theories about the importance of the mental
condition when work was in hand. Once fairly engaged upon a picture, he
painted very fast, labored without cessation, and separated himself as far
as might be from every outside influence. No new interests were suffered to
intrude upon his mind; no distractions of any sort, intellectual or
otherwise, were permitted to occupy even those leisure intervals which of
necessity lay between the periods of his work. On the present occasion he
merely fed and slept and dwelt solitary, shunning society of every sort and
spending as little time in Newlyn as possible. Fortunately for his
achievement the weather continued wonderfully fine and each successive day
brought like conditions of sunshine and color, light and air. This
circumstance enabled him to proceed rapidly, and another fact also
contributed to progress; the temperature kept high and the cow-byre,
wherein Barren stored his implements and growing picture, proved so
well-built and so snug withal that on more than one occasion he spent the
entire night there. Sweet brown bracken filled a manger, and of this he
pulled down sufficient quantities to make, with railway rugs, an ample bed.
The outdoor life appeared to suit his health well; some color had come to
his pale cheeks; he felt considerably stronger in body and mentally
invigorated by the strain of work now upon him.

But though he turned his back on his fellow-men they sought him out, and
rumors at length grew to a certainty that Barron was busy painting
somewhere on the cliffs beyond Mousehole. Everybody supposed he had
abandoned his ambition to get a portrait of Joan Tregenza; but one man was
in his confidence: Edmund Murdoch. The young artist had been useful to
Barron. On many occasions he tramped out from Newlyn with additions to the
scanty larder kept at the cow-byre. He would bring hard-boiled eggs,
sandwiches, bottles of soda-water and whisky; and once he arrived at six
o'clock in the morning with a pony cart in which was a little oil stove.
Barron had confided in Murdoch, but begged he would let it be known that he
courted no society for the present. As the work grew he spent more and more
time upon it. He explained to his friend quite seriously that he was
painting the gorse, but that Joan Tregenza had consented to fill a part of
the picture--a statement which amused the younger artist not a little.

"But the gorse is extraordinary, I'll admit. You must have worked without
ceasing. She will be exquisite. Where shall you get the blue for her eyes?"

"Out of the sky and the sea."

"Does the girl inspire you herself, John? I swear something has. This is
going to be great."

"It's going to be true, that's all. No, Joan is a dear child, but her
body's no more than a perfect casket to a commonplace little soul. She
talks a great deal and I like nothing better than to listen; for although
what she says is naught, yet her manner of saying it does not lack charm.
Her voice is wonderfully sweet--it comes from her throat like a
wood-pigeon's, and education has not ruined her diction."

"She's as shy as any wood-pigeon, too--we all know that; and you've done a
clever thing to tame her."

"God forbid that I should tame her. We met and grew friendly as wild things
both. She is a child of Nature, her mind is as pure as the sea. Moreover,
Joan walks saint-guided. Folklore and local twaddle does not appeal
overmuch to me, as you know, yet the stories drop prettily from her lips
and I find pleasure in listening."

Murdoch whistled.

"By Jove! I never heard you so enthusiastic, so positive, so personally
alive and awake and interested. Don't fall in love with the girl before you
know it."

To this warning Barron made a curious reply.

"Everything depends on my picture. You know my rule of life; to sacrifice
all things to mood. I shall do so here. The best I can do must be done
whatever the cost."

A shadow almost sinister lay behind the utterance, yet young Murdoch could
not fathom it. Barren spoke in his usual slow, unaffected tones, and
painted all the time; for the conversation took place on Gorse Point.

"Not sure if I quite understand you, old man," said Murdoch.

"It doesn't matter in the least if you don't, my dear fellow."

His words were hardly civil, but the tone in which Barren spoke robbed the
utterance of any offense.

"All you need do," he continued, "is to keep silent in the interests of art
and of Joan. I don't want her precious visits to me to get back to her
father's ears or they will cease, and I don't wish to do her a bad turn in
her home, for I owe her a great debt of gratitude. If men ask what I'm
doing, lie to them and beg them not to disturb me, for the sake of Art.
What a glint the east wind gives to color! Yet this is hardly to be called
an east wind, so soft and balmy does it keep."

"Well, you seem to be the better for your work, at any rate. You're getting
absolutely fat. If Newlyn brings you health as well as fame, I hope you'll
retract some of the many hard things you have said about it."

"It has brought me an interest, and for that at any rate I am grateful.
Good-by. I shall probably come down to-night, despite the fact that you
have replenished my stores so handsomely."

Murdoch started homeward and met Joan Tregenza upon the way. She had given
Barron one further sitting after Uncle Chirgwin's call at Newlyn, but since
the last occasion, and for a period of two days, chance prevented the girl
from paying him another visit. Now she arrived, however, as early as
half-past ten, and Murdoch, while he passed her on the hill from Mousehole,
envied his friend the morning's work before him.

Joan was very hot and very apologetic upon her arrival.

"I began to fear you had forgotten me," the artist said, but she was loud
in protestations to the contrary.

"No, no, Mister Jan. I've fretted 'bout not comin' up like anything; ay,
an' I've cried of a night 'cause I thot you'd be reckoning I waddun comin'
no more. But 'tweern't my doin' no ways."

"You hadn't forgotten me?"

"Indeed an' I hadn't. An' I'd be sorrerful if I thot you thot so."

She walked to the old position before the gorse and fell naturally into it,
speaking the while.

"Tis this way: mother's been bad wi' faace ache arter my brother Tom went
to sea wi' faither. An' mother grizzled an' worrited herself reg'lar ill
an' stopped in bed two days an' kep on whinin' 'bout what I was to do if
she died; cause she s'posed she was gwained to. But so soon as Tom comed
off his first trip, mother cheered wonnerful, an' riz up to see to en, an'
hear tell 'bout how he fared on the water."

"Your head a wee bit higher, Joan. Well, I'm thankful to see you again. I
was getting very, very lonely, I promise you. And the more I thought about
the picture the more unhappy I became. There's such a lot to do and only
such a clumsy hand to do it. The better I know you, Joan, the harder become
the problems you set me. How am I going to get your soul looking out of
your eyes, d'you think? How am I to make those who may see my picture some
day--years after you and I are both dead and gone, Joan--fall in love with
you?"

"La! I dunnaw, Mister Jan."

"Nor do I. How shall I make the picture so true that generations unborn
will delight in the portrait and deem it great and fine?"

"I dunnaw."

"And yet you deserve it, Joan, for I don't think God ever made anything
prettier."

She blushed and looked softly at him, but took no alarm; for though such a
compliment had never before been paid her, yet, as Barron spoke the words,
slowly, critically, without enthusiasm or any expression of pleasure on his
face, they had little power to alarm. He merely stated what he seemed to
regard as a fact. There was almost a suggestion of irritation in his
utterance, as though his model's rare beauty only increased his own
artistic difficulties; and, perhaps fearing from her smile that she found
undue pleasure in his statement, he added to it:

"I don't say that to natter you, Joan. I hate compliments and never pay
them. I told you, remember, that your wrists were a thought too big."

"You needn't be sayin' it over an' over, Mister Jan," she answered, her
smile changing to a pout.

"But you wouldn't like me any more if I stopped telling you the truth. We
have agreed to love what is true and to worship Mother Nature because she
always speaks the truth."

The girl made no answer, and he went on working for a few moments, then
spoke again.

"I'm selfish, Joan, and think more of my picture than I do of my little
model. Put down your arm and take a good rest. I tried holding my hand over
my eyes yesterday to see how long I could do so without wearying myself. I
found that three minutes was quite enough, but I have often kept you posed
for five."

"It hurted my arm 'tween the shoulder an' elbow a lil bit at first, but
I've grawed used to it now."

"How ever shall I repay you, kind Joan, for all your trouble and your long
walks and pretty stories?"

"I doan't need no pay. If 'twas a matter o' payin', 'twould be a wrong
thing to do, I reckon. Theer's auld Bascombe up Paul--him wi' curls o' long
hair an' gawld rings in's ears. Gents pays en to take his likeness; an'
theer's gals make money so, more'n wan; but faither says 'tis a heathenish
way of livin' an' not honest. An'--an' I'd never let nobody paint me else
but you, Mister Jan, 'cause you'm different."

"Well, you make me a proud man, Joan. I'm afraid I must be a poor
substitute for Joe."

He noticed she had never mentioned her sweetheart since their early
interviews, and wanted to ascertain of what nature was Joan's affection for
the sailor. He did not yet dream how faint a thing poor Joe had shrunk to
be in Joan's mind, or how the present episode in her life was dwarfing and
dominating all others, present and past.

Nor did the girl's answer to his remark enlighten him.

"In coorse you an' Joe's differ'nt as can be. You knaws everything
seemin'ly an' be a gen'le-man; Joe's only a seafarin' man, an' 'e doan't
knaw much 'cept what he's larned from faither. But Joe used to say a sight
more'n what you do, for all that."

"I like to hear you talk, Joan; perhaps Joe liked to hear himself talk.
Most men do. But, you see, the things you have told me are pleasant to me
and they were not to Joe, because he didn't believe in them. Don't look at
me, Joan; look right away to the edge of the sea."

"You'm surprised like as I talks to ye, Mister Jan. Doan't ladies talk so
free as what I do?"

"Other women talk, but they are very seldom in earnest like you are, Joan.
They don't believe half they say, they pretend and make believe; they've
got to do so, poor things, because the world they live in is all built up
on ancient foundations of great festering lies. The lies are carefully
coated over and disinfected as much as possible and quite hidden out of
sight, but everybody knows they are there--everybody knows the quaking
foundations they tread upon. Civilization means universal civility, I
suppose, Joan; and to be civil to everybody argues a great power of telling
lies. People call it tact. But I don't like polite society myself, because
my nose is sensitive and I smell the stinking basis through all the pretty
paint. You and I, Joan, belong to Nature. She is not always civil, but you
can trust her; she is seldom polite, but she never says what is not true."

"You talk as though 'e ded'n much like ladies an' gen'lemen, same as you
be."

"I don't, and I'm not what you understand by 'a gentleman,' Joan. Gentlemen
and ladies let me go among them and mix with them, because I happen to have
a great deal of money--thousands and thousands of pounds. That opens the
door to their drawing-rooms, if I wanted to open it, but I don't. I've seen
them and gone about among them, and I'm sick of them. If a man wishes to
know what polite society is let him go into it as a very wealthy bachelor.
I'm not 'a gentleman,' you know, Joan, fortunately."

"Surely, Mister Jan!"

"No more than you're a lady. But I can try to be gentle and manly, which is
better. You and I come from the same class, Joan; from the people. The only
difference is that my father happened to make a huge fortune in London.
Guess what he sold?"

"I dunnaw."

"Fish--just plaice and flounders and herrings and so forth. He sold them by
tens of thousands. Your father sells them too. But what d'you think was the
difference? Why, your father is an honest man; mine wasn't. The fishermen
sold their fish, after they had had the trouble and danger of catching
them, to my father; and then my father sold them again to the public; and
the fishermen got too little and the public paid too much, and so--I'm a
very rich man to-day--the son of a thief."

"Mister Jan!"

"Nobody ever called him a thief but me. He was a great star in this same
polite society I speak of. He fed hundreds of fat people on the money that
ought to have gone into the fishermen's pockets; and he died after eating
too much salmon and cucumber at his own table. Poetic justice, you know.
There are stained glass windows up to his memory in two churches and tons
of good white marble were wasted when they made his grave. But he was a
thief, just as surely as your father is an honest man; so you have the
advantage of me, Joan. I really doubt if I'm respectable enough for you to
know and trust."

"I'd trust 'e with anything, Mister Jan, 'cause you'm plain-spoken an'
true."

"Don't be too sure--the son of a thief may have wrong ideas and lax
principles. Many things not to be bought can easily be stolen."

Again he struck a sinister note, but this time on an ear wholly unable to
appreciate or suspect it. Joan was occupied with Barron's startling scraps
of biography, and, as usual, when he began talking in a way she could not
understand, turned to her own thoughts. This sudden alteration of his
position she took literally. It struck her in a happy light.

"If you'm not a gen'leman then you wouldn' look down 'pon me, would 'e?"

"God forbid! I look up to you, Joan."

She was silent, trying to master this remarkable assertion. The artist
stood no longer upon that lofty pedestal where she had placed him; but the
change of attitude seemed to bring him a little closer, and Joan forgot the
fall in contemplating the nearer approach.

"That's why I asked you not to call me 'Mister Jan,"' Barron added after a
pause. "We are, you see, only different because I'm a man and you're a
woman. Money merely makes a difference to outside things, like houses and
clothes. But you've got possessions which no money can bring to me: a happy
home and a lover coming back to you from the sea. Think what it must be to
have nobody in the world to care whether you live or die. Why, I haven't a
relation near enough to be even interested in all my money--there's
loneliness for you!"

Joan felt full of a great pity, but could not tell how to express it. Even
her dull brains were not slow enough to credit his frank assertion that he
and she were equals; but she accepted the statement in some degree, and
now, with her mind wandering in his lonely existence, wondered if she might
presume to express sympathy for him and proclaim herself his friend. She
hesitated, for such friendship as hers, though it came hot from her little
heart, seemed a ludicrous thing to offer this man. Every day of intercourse
with him filled her more with wonder and with admiration; every day he
occupied a wider place in her thoughts; and at that moment his utterances
and his declaration of a want in life made him more human than ever to her,
more easily to be comprehended, more within the reach of her understanding.
And that was not a circumstance calculated to lessen her regard for him by
any means. Until that day he had appeared a being far apart, whose
interests and main threads of life belonged to another sphere; now he had
deliberately come into her world and declared it his own.

The silence became painful to Joan, but she could not pluck up courage
enough to tell the artist that she at least was a friend. Finally she
spoke, feeling that he waited for her to do so, and her words led to the
point, for she found, in his answer to them, that he took her goodwill for
granted.

"Ain't you got no uncles nor nothin' o' that even, Mister Jan?"

He laughed and shook his head.

"Not one, Joan--not anybody in all the world to think twice about me but
you."

Her heart beat hard and her breath quickened, but she did not speak. Then
Barron, putting down his brushes and beginning to load a pipe, that his
next remark might not seem too serious, proceeded:

"I call you 'friend,' Joan, because I know you are one. And I want you to
think of me sometimes when I am gone, will you?"

He went on filling his pipe, and then, looking suddenly into her eyes, saw
there a light that was strange--a light that he would have given his soul
to put into paint--a light that Joe's name never had kindled and never
could. Joan wiped her hand across her mouth uneasily; then she twisted her
hands behind her back, like a schoolgirl standing in class, and made answer
with her eyes on the ground.

"Iss, I will, then, Mister Jan; an' maybe I couldn't help it if I would."

He lighted his pipe carefully before answering.

"Then I shall be happy, Joan."

But while she grew rose-red at the boldness of her sudden announcement, he
took care neither to look at her nor to let her know that he had realized
the earnestness with which she spoke. And when, ten minutes later, she had
departed, he mused speculatively on the course of their conversation,
asking himself what whim had led him to pretend to so much human feeling
and to lament his loneliness. This condition of his life he loved above all
others. No man, woman or child had the right to interfere with his selfish,
impersonal existence, and he gloried in the fact. But to the scraps of his
life's history, which he had spread before Joan in their absolute truth, he
had added this fiction of friendless loneliness, and it had worked a
wonder. He saw that he was growing to be much to her, and the problem lying
in his path rose again, as it had for a moment when Murdoch warned him in
jest against falling in love with Joan Tregenza. Dim suspicions crossed his
mind with greater frequency, and being now a mere remorseless savage,
hunting to its completion a fine picture, he made no effort to shut their
shadows from his calculation. Everything which bore even indirectly upon
his work received its share of attention; to mood must all sacrifices be
made; and now a new mood began to dawn in him. He knew it, he accepted it.
He had not sought it, but the thing was there, and Nature had sent it to
him. To shun it and fly from it meant a lie to his art; to open his arms to
it promised the destruction of a human unit. Barron was not the man to
hesitate between two such courses. If any action could heighten his
inspiration, add a glimmer of glory to his picture, or get a shadow more
soul into the painted blue eyes of the subject, he held such action
justified. For the present his mind was chaos on the subject, and he left
the future to work itself out as chance might determine.

His painting was all he concerned himself with, and should Nature
ultimately indicate that greater perfection might be achieved through
worship and even sacrifice at her shrine, neither worship nor sacrifice
would be withheld.




CHAPTER NINE
 A WEDDING


Joan Tregenza went home in a dream that day. She did not know where to
begin thinking. "Mister Jan" had told her so many astounding things; and
her own heart, too, had made bold utterances--concerning matters which she
had crushed out of sight with some shame and many secret blushes until now.
But, seen in the light of John Barron's revelations, this emotion which she
had thrust so resolutely to the back of her mind could remain there no
more. It arose strong, rampant and ridiculous; only from her point of view
no humor distinguished it. This man, then, was like herself, made of the
same flesh and blood, sprung from the people. That fact, though possessing
absolutely no significance whatever in reality, struck Joan with great
force. Her highly primitive instincts stretched a wide gulf between the
thing called "gentleman" and other men; which was the result of training
from parents of the old-fashioned sort, whose world lay outside and behind
the modern spirit; who had reached the highest development of their
intelligence and formed their opinions before the passing of the Education
Act. Gray Michael naturally held the great ones of the earth as objects of
pity from an eternal standpoint, but birth weighed with him, and, in
temporal concerns, he treated his superiors with all respect and civility
when rare chance brought him into contact with them. He viewed uneasily the
last outcome of progress and the vastly increased facilities for
instruction of the juvenile population. The age was sufficiently godless,
in his judgment; and he had found that a Board School education was the
first nail in the coffin of every young man's faith.

Joan, therefore, allowing nothing for the value of riches, of education, of
intellect, was content to accept Barron's own cynical statement in a spirit
widely different from the speaker's. He had sneered at himself, just as he
had sneered at his own dead father. But Joan missed all the bitterness of
his speech. To her he was simply a wondrously honest man who loved truth
for itself, who could never utter anything not true, who held it no offense
to speak truth even of the dead. Gentle or simple, he seemed infinitely
superior to all men whom she had met with. And yet this beautiful nature
walked through the world quite alone. He had asked her to remember him when
he was gone; he had said that she was his friend. And he cared little for
women--there was perhaps no other woman in the world he had called a
friend. Then the girl's heart fluttered at the presumption of her silly,
soaring thoughts, and she glanced nervously to the right and to the left of
the lonely road, as though fearful that some hidden eavesdropper might peep
into her open mind. The magic spell was upon her. This little, pale, clever
man, so quiet, so strange, so unlike anything else within her seventeen
years of experience, had wrought Nature's vital miracle, and Joan, who,
until then, believed herself in love with her sailor sweetheart, now stood
aghast before the truth, stood bewildered between the tame and bloodless
fantasy of her affection for Joe Noy and this wild, live reality. She
looked far back into a past already dim and remembered that she had told
Joe many times how she loved him with all her heart. But the words were
spoken before she knew that she possessed a heart at all. Yet Joe then
formed no inconsiderable figure in life. She had looked forward to marriage
with him as a comfortable and sufficient background for present existence;
she had viewed Joe as a handsome, solid figure--a man well thought of, one
who would give her a home with bigger rooms and better furniture in it than
most fishermen's daughters might reasonably hope for. But this new blinding
light was more than the memory of Joe could face uninjured. He shriveled
and shrank in it. Like St. Michael's Mount, seen afar, through curtains of
rain, Joe had once bulked large, towering, even grand, but under noonday
sun the great mass dwindles as a whole though every detail becomes more
apparent; and so with poor Joe Noy. Removed to a distance of a thousand
miles though he was, Joan had never known him better, never realized the
height, breadth, depth of him so acutely as now she did. The former
ignorance in such a case had been bliss indeed, for whereunto her present
acquired wisdom might point even she dared not consider. Any other girl
must have remained sufficiently alive to the enormous disparity every way
between herself and the artist; and Joan grasped the difference, but from
the wrong point of view. The man's delicacy of discernment, his wisdom, his
love of the things which she loved, his fine feeling, his humility--all
combined in Joan's judgment to place him far above herself, though she had
not words to name the qualities; but whereas another lowly woman, reaching
this point, must, if she possessed any mother-wit or knowledge of the
world, have awakened to the danger and grown guarded, Joan, claiming little
wit to speak of, and being an empty vessel so far as knowledge of the world
was concerned, saw no danger and allowed her thoughts to run away with her
in a wholly insane direction. This she did for two reasons: because she
felt absolutely safe, and because she suspected that Nature, who was
"Mister Jan's" God, had now come to be her God also. The man was very wise,
and he hated everything which lacked truth: therefore he would always do
what was right, and he would not be less true to her than he was to the
world. Truth was his guiding star, and he had always found Nature true.
Therefore, why should not Joan find it true? Nature was talking to her now
and teaching her rapidly. She must be content to wait and learn. The two
men, Noy and Barren, fairly represented the opposite views of life each
entertained, and Joan felt the new music wake a thousand sleeping echoes in
her heart while the old grew more harsh and unlovely as she considered it.
Joe had so many opinions and so little information; "Mister Jan" knew
everything and asserted nothing save what Nature had taught him. Joe was so
self-righteous and overbearing, so like her father, so convinced that Luke
Gospeldom was the only gate to glory; "Mister Jan" had said there was more
of the Everlasting God in a bluebell than in the whole of the Old
Testament; he had declared that the smell of the gorse and the sunshine on
the deep sea were better things than the incense and banners at St.
Peter's; he had asserted that the purring of kittens was sweeter to the
Father of all than the thunder of a mighty organ played in the noblest
cathedral ever made with hands. All these foolish and inconsequent
comparisons, uttered thoughtlessly by Barron's lips while his mind was on
his picture, seemed very fine to Joan; and the finer because she did not
understand them. Again, Joe rarely listened to her; this man always did,
and he liked to hear her talk: he had declared as much.

Her brains almost hurt Joan on her way back to the white cottage that
morning. They seemed so loaded; they lifted her up high above the
working-day world and made her feel many years older. Such reflections and
ideas came to grown women doubtless, she thought. A great unrest arose from
the shadows of these varied speculations--a great unrest and disquiet--a
feeling of coming change, like the note in the air when the swallows meet
together in autumn, like the whisper of the leaves on the high tops of the
forest before rain. Her heart was very full. She walked more slowly as the
thoughts weighed heavier; she went back to her home round-eyed and solemn,
wondering at many things, at the extension of the horizon of life, at the
mental picture of Joe standing clearly out of the mists, viewed from a
woman's standpoint.

That day much serving awaited her; but, at every turn and pause in the
small affairs of her duty, Joan's mind swooped back like a hawk to the
easel on Gorse Point; and when it did, her cheeks flushed and she turned to
bend over sink or pig's trough to hide the new fire that burned in her
heart and lighted her eyes.

Mrs. Tregenza, who had suffered from neuralgia and profound depression of
spirit upon Tom's departure to the sea, but who comforted herself even in
her darkest hour by reflection that no lugger boy ever joined the fishing
fleet with such an equipment of new clothes as her son, was somewhat better
and more cheerful now that the lad had made his first trip and survived it.
Moreover, Tom would be home again that night in all probability, and, since
Michael was last ashore, the butcher from Paul had called and offered three
shillings and sixpence more for the next pig to be killed than ever a
Tregenza pig had fetched until that day. Life therefore held some
prosperity in it, even for Thomasin.

After their dinner both women, the elder with a shawl muffled about her
face, went down the road to Newlyn to see a sight. They stopped at George
Trevennick's little house. It had a garden in front of it with a short
flagstaff erected thereon, and all looked neat, trim and ship-shape as
became the home of a retired Royal Navy man. A wedding was afoot, and Mr.
Trevennick, who never lost an opportunity to display his rare store of
bunting, had plentifully shaken out bright reds and yellows, blues and
greens. The little flags fluttered in four streamers from the head of the
flagstaff, and their colors looked harsh and crude until associated with
the human interests they marked.

Already many children gazed with awe from the road, while a favored few,
including the Tregenzas, stood in Mr. Trevennick's garden, which was raised
above the causeway. Great good-humor prevailed, together with some
questionable jesting, and Joan heard the merriment with a sense of
discomfort. They would talk like this when Joe came back to marry her; but
the great day of a maid's life had lost its greatness for her now. The
rough, good-natured fun grated on her nerves as it had never grated before;
because, though she only guessed at the sly jokes of her elders, something
told her that "Mister Jan" would have found no pleasure in such merriment.
Mrs. Tregenza talked, Mr. Trevennick smoked, and Sally Trevennick, the old
sailor's daughter, entertained the party and had a word for all. She was
not young, and not well-favored, and unduly plump, but a sweet-hearted
woman nevertheless, with a great love for the little children. This indeed
presently appeared, for while the party waited there happened a tragedy in
the street which brought extreme sorrow to a pair of very small people.
They had a big crabshell full of dirt off the road which they drew after
them by a string, and in which they took no small pride and pleasure; but a
young sailor, coming hastily round a corner, trampled upon the shell,
smashed it, and passed laughing on. The infants, overwhelmed by this sudden
disaster to their most cherished earthly possession, crushed to the earth
by this blotting out of the sunshine of the day, lifted up their voices and
wept before the shattered ruins. One, the biggest, dropped the useless
string and put his face against the wall, that his extreme grief might be
hidden; but the smaller hesitated not to make his sorrows widely known. He
bawled, then took a deep breath and bawled again. As the full extent of his
loss was borne in upon him, he absolutely danced with access of frenzied
grief; and everybody laughed but fat Sally Trevennick. Her black eyes grew
clouded, and she went down into the road to bring comfort to the sufferers.

"Never mind, then; never mind, you bwoys; us'll get 'e another braave
shell, so us will. Theer, theer, give over an' come 'long wi' me an' see
the flags. Theer's many bigger auld crabshells wheer that comed from, I
lay. Your faither'll get 'e another."

She took a hand of each babe and brought them into the garden, from which
they could look down upon their fellows. Such exaltation naturally soothed
their sufferings, and amid many gasps and gurgles they found a return to
peace in the close contemplation of Mr. Trevennick's flagstaff and the
discussion of a big saffron pasty.

Presently the bridegroom and his young brother passed on the way to church.
Both looked the reverse of happy; both wore their Sunday broadcloth, and
both swung along as fast as their legs would carry them. They were red hot
and going five miles an hour; but, though Mousehole men, everybody in
Newlyn knew them, and they were forced to run the gauntlet of much chaff.

"Time was when they did use to thrash a new-married couple to bed," said
Mr. Trevennick. "'Twas an amoosin' carcumstance an' I've 'elped at many,
but them good auld doin's is dyin' out fast."

Mrs. Tregenza was discussing the bridegroom's family.

"He be a poor Billy-be-damned sort o' feller, I've allus heard, an' awnly a
common tinner, though his faither were a grass cap'n at Levant Mine."

"But he's a steady chap," said Sally; "an' them in his awn station sez he's
reg'lar at church-goin' an' well thot 'pon by everybody. 'Tedn' all young
pairs as parson'll ax out, I can tell 'e. He wants to knaw a bit 'fore
'e'll marry bwoys an' gals; but theer weren't no trouble 'bout Mark
Taskes."

"Sure I'm glad to hear it, Sally, 'cause if he caan't do everything,
everything won't be done. They Penns be a pauper lot--him a fish-jouster as
ain't so much as his awn donkey an' cart, an' lame tu. Not that 'twas his
awn fault, I s'pose, but they do say a lame chap's never caught in a good
trick notwithstandin'."

"Here comes the weddeners!" said Joan, "but 'tedn' a very braave shaw," she
added. "They'm all a-foot, I do b'lieve."

"Aw, my dear sawl! look at that now!" cried Mrs. Tregenza. "Walkin',
ackshally walkin'. Well--well!"

The little bride advanced between her father and mother, while relations
and friends marched two and two behind. A vision it was of age and youth,
of bright spring flowers, of spotless cotton and black broadcloth. A matron
or two marched in flaming colors; a few fishermen wore their blue jerseys
under their reefer jackets; the smaller children were led by hand; and the
whole party numbered twelve all told. Mr. Penn looked up at the flags as he
limped along, and a great delight broke out upon his face; the bride's
mother beamed with satisfaction at a compliment not by any means expected,
for the Penns were a humble folk; and the bride blushed and stole a nervous
peep at the display. Mr. Penn touched his hat to the party in the garden,
and Mr. Trevennick, feeling the eye of the multitude upon him, loudly
wished the wedding party well as it passed by.

"Good speed to 'e an' to the maid, Bill Penn. May she live 'appy an' be a
credit to all parties consarned."

"Thank 'e, thank 'e, kindly, Mr. Trevennick. An' us takes it mighty
favorable to see your butivul flags a hangin' out--mighty favorable, I
'sure 'e."

So the party tramped on and ugly Sally looked after them with dim eyes; but
Mrs. Tregenza's thin voice dried them.

"A bad come-along o't for a gal to walk 'pon sich a day. They did ought to
a got her a lift to her weddin', come what might."

"Maybe 'tis all wan to them poor dears. A coach an' four 'orses wouldn'
make that cheel no better pleased. God bless her, did 'e look 'ow she
flickered up when she seed faither's flags a flyin'?"

"Theer's a right way an' a wrong o' doin' weddin's, Sarah, an' 'tedn' a
question whether a gal's better pleased or no. It's all wan to a dead
corpse whether 'tis took to the yard in a black hearse wi' plumes, same as
what us shall be, or whether 'tis borne 'pon wan o' them four 'anded
stretchers used for carryin' fishin' nets, same as poor Albert Vallack was
a while back--but wan way's proper an' t'other 'edn'."

"They'm savin' the money for the feed. Theer's gwaine to be a deal o' clome
liftin' at Perm's cottage bimebye," said another of the party.

"No honeymoon neither, so I hear tell," added Mrs. Tregenza.

"But Taskes have bought flam-new furniture for his parlor, they sez,"
declared the former speaker.

"Of coorse. Still no honeymoon 'tall! Who ever heard tell of sich a thing
nowadays? I wonder they ban't 'shamed."

"Less shame, Mrs. Tregenza, than trapsing off to Truro or somewheers an'
wastin' their time an' spendin' money they'll be wanting back agin 'fore
Christmas," retorted Sally, with some warmth.

But Mrs. Tregenza only shook her head and sighed.

"You speaks as a onmarried wummon, Sarah; but if you comed to be a bride
you'd sing dif-fer'nt. No honeymoon's wrong, an' your faither'll tell the
same."

Mr. Trevennick admitted that no honeymoon was bad. He went further and
declared the omission of such an institution to be unprincipled. He even
said that had he known of this serious defect in the ceremonies he should
certainly have abstained from lending the brightness of his bunting to
them. Then he went to eye the flags from different points of view, while
Sally, in a minority of one, turned to Joan.

"And what do you say?" she asked. "You'm 'mazin' quiet an' tongue-tied for
you. I s'pose you'm thinkin' of the time when Joe Noy comes home. I lay
you'll have a honeymoon anyways."

"Iss, that you may depend 'pon," said Mrs. Tregenza.

And Joan, who had in truth been thinking of her sweetheart's return, grew
red, whereat they all laughed. But she felt secretly superior to every one
of them, for the shrinking process began to extend beyond Joe now. A
fortnight before, she had been much gratified by allusions to the future
and felt herself an important individual enough. Then, she must have shared
her stepmother's pity at the poverty of the pageant which had just passed
by. But now the world had changed. Matrimony with Joe Noy was not a subject
which brought present delight to her, but the little bride who had just
gone to her wedding filled Joan's thoughts. What was in that girl's heart,
she greatly wondered. Did Milly Penn feel for long-legged Mark Taskes what
Joan felt for "Mister Jan"? Was it possible that any other woman had ever
experienced similar mysterious splendors of mind? She could not tell, but
it seemed unlikely to her; it appeared improbable that an ordinary man had
power to inspire another heart with such golden magic as glorified her own.

Presently she departed with her stepmother, whereupon Sally Trevennick
relieved her pent-up feelings.

"Thank the Lard that chitter-faaced wummon edn' gwaine to the weddin' any
ways! Us knaws she's a dear good sawl 'nough; but what wi' her sour voice,
an' her sour way o' talkin', an' her sour 'pinions, she'm enough to set a
rat-trap's teeth on edge."




CHAPTER TEN

MOONLIGHT


That evening Thomasin had another spasm of face-ache and went to bed soon
after drinking tea. Michael was due at home about ten o'clock or earlier,
and Joan--having set out supper, made all ready, and ascertained that her
stepmother had gone to sleep--walked out to the pierhead, there to wait for
Mr. Tregenza and Tom. Under moonlight, the returning luggers crept
homeward, like inky silhouettes on a background of dull silver. Every
moment added to the forest of masts anchored at the moorings outside the
harbor; every minute another rowing-boat shot between the granite piers,
slid silently into the darkness under shore, leaving moonlit rings widening
out behind at each dip of the oars. Joan sat down under the lighthouse and
waited in the stillness for her father's boat. Yellow flashes, like
fireflies, twinkled along through Newlyn, and above them the moon brought
out square patches of silver-bright roof seen through a blue night. Now and
then a bell rang in the harbor, and lights leaped here and there, mingling
red snakes and streamers of fire with the white moonbeams where they lay on
still water. Then Joan knew the fish were being sold by auction, and she
grew anxious for her father's return, fearing prices might have fallen
before he arrived. Great periods of silence lay between the ringings of the
bell, and at such times only faint laughter floated out from shore, or
blocks chipped and rattled as a sail came down or a concertina squeaked
fitfully where it was played on a Norwegian iceboat at the harbor quay. The
tide ran high, and Joan watched the lights reflected in the harbor and
wondered why the gold of them contrasted so ill with the silver from the
moon.

Presently two men came along to the pierhead. They smoked, looked at the
sea, and did not notice her where she sat in shadow. One, the larger, wore
knickerbockers, talked loudly, and looked a giant in the vague light; the
other was muffled up in a big ulster, and Joan would not have recognized
Barron had he not spoken. But he answered his friend, and then the girl's
heart leaped to hear that quiet, unimpassioned voice. He spoke of matters
which she did not understand, of pictures and light and all manner of
puzzles set by Nature for the solution of art; but though for the most part
his remarks conveyed no meaning to her, yet he closed a sentence with words
that made her happy, and warmed her heart and left a precious memory behind
them.

"Moonlight is a problem only less difficult than sunshine," he said to his
friend. "Where are you going to get that?" and he pointed to the sea.

"It's been jolly well done all the same."

"Never. It is not to be done. You can suggest by a trick, but God defend us
from tricks and sleight-of-hand in connection with the solemn business of
painting pictures. Let us be true or nothing."

They walked away together, and Joan pondered over the last words. Truth
seemed an eternal, abiding passion with John Barron, and the contemplation
of this idea gave her considerable pleasure. She did not know that a man
may be at once true to his art and a liar to his fellows.

Presently her father returned with Tom, and the three walked home together.
Gray Michael appeared quietly satisfied that his son was shaping well and
showing courage and nerve. But he silenced the lad quickly enough when Tom
began to talk with some gasconade concerning greet deeds done westward of
the Scilly Islands.

"'Let another man praise thee an' not thine awn mouth,' my bwoy," said Mr.
Tregenza. "It ban't the wave as makes most splash what gaws highest up the
beach, mind. You get Joan to teach 'e how to peel 'taties, 'cause 'tis a
job you made a tidy bawk of, not to mention no other. Keep your weather-eye
liftin' an' your tongue still. Then you'll do. An' mind--the bwoat's clean
as a smelt by five o'clock to-morrow marnin', an' no later."

Tom, dashed by these base details, answered seaman fashion:

"Ay, ay, faither."

Then they all tramped home, and the boy enjoyed the glories of a late
supper, though he was half asleep before he had finished it.




CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE KISS


By half-past five o'clock, Mr. Tregenza's black lugger was off again in a
gray dawn all tangled with gold on the eastern horizon.

His mother had given Tom an early breakfast at half-past four, and the
youngster, agape and dim-eyed at first, speedily brightened up, for he had
a willing listener, in the candle-light and poured a tale of moving
incidents into Thomasin's proud but uneasy mind.

"Them Pritchards sez as they'll make a busker [Footnote: _Busker_--A
rare good fisherman.] of me, 'cause it blawed a bit issterday marnin', but
'twas all wan to me; an' you abbun no call to fret yourself, nohow, mother,
'cause faither's 'lowed to be the best sailor in the fleet an' theer ban't
a better foul-weather boat sails from Newlyn than ourn."

He chattered on, larding his discourse with new words picked up aboard, and
presently rolled off to get things shipshape just as his father came down
to breakfast.

When the men had gone, little remained to be done that day, and, by
half-past seven, about which hour Mrs. Tregenza went into the village that
she might whine with a widow who had two boys in the fleet, Joan found
herself free until the afternoon. She determined therefore to reach Gorse
Point before the artist should arrive there, and set off accordingly.

Early though she was, she had but a short time to wait, for Barron appeared
with his big canvas by nine o'clock. She thought he showed more pleasure
than usual at the sight of her. Certainly he shook hands and congratulated
her upon such early hours.

"This is an unexpected pleasure, Joan. You must have been up betimes
indeed."

"Iss fay, us took breakfus' by five, an' faither sailed 'fore half-past.
'Tis busy times for fishin' folk when the mackerl begins shoalin'."

"I'm glad I came back to my den in the fields yonder and didn't stop in
Newlyn last night. You must see my little cow-byre some day or other, Joan.
I've made it wonderfully snug. Farmer Ford is good enough to let me take
possession of it for the present; and I've got food and drink stowed away,
and a beautiful bed of sweet, withered bracken. I sleep well there, and the
dawn comes in and wakens me."

"You ban't feared o' piskeys nor nothin' in a lawnsome plaace like thicky
byre?"

"No, no--the rats are rather intrusive, though."

"But they'm piskeys or spriggans so like's not! You see, the lil people
takes all manner o' shaapes, Mister Jan; an' they chaanges 'em tu, but
every time they chaanges they've got to alter into somethin' smaller than
what they was before. An' so, in coorse of time, they do say they comes
down into muryans an' such like insects."

"Piskeys or no piskeys, I've caught several in a trap and killed them."

"They'm gashly things, rats, an' I shouldn't think as no good piskeys would
turn into varmints like them."

"More should I. But something better than rats came to see me last night,
Joan. Guess who it was."

"I dunnaw."

"Why, you came!"

"Me, Mister Jan! You must a bin dreamin'!"

"Yes, of course I was; but such a lovely dream, Joan! You see, men who
paint pictures and love what is beautiful and dream about beautiful things
and beautiful people see all sorts of visions sometimes. I have pictures in
my head a thousand times more splendid than any I shall ever put upon
canvas, because mere paint-brushes cannot do much, even when they are in
the cleverest hands; but a man's brain is not bound down by material,
mechanical matters. My brain made a picture of you last night--a picture
that came and looked at me on my fern bed--a picture so real, so alive that
I could see it move and hear it laugh. You think that wonderful. It isn't
really, because my brain has done nothing but think of you now for nearly
six weeks. My eye studies you and stamps you upon my brain; then, when
night comes, and no man works, and the world is dark and silent, my brain
sets off on its own account and raises up a magic vision just to show me
what you really are--how different to this poor daub here."

"Lard, Mister Jan! I never heard tell of sich a coorious thing as that."

"And the pretty dream-Joan can talk almost as well as you can! Why, last
night, while I was half awake and half asleep, she put her hand upon my
shoulder and said kind things, but I dared not move or kiss her hand at
first for fear she would vanish if I did."

Joan laughed.

"That is a funny story, sure 'nough," she said. "I 'specs 'twas awnly
another fairy body, arter all."

"No, it wasn't. She had your voice and your spirit in her; and that picture
which my brain painted for me was so much better than the thing my hand has
painted that, in the morning, I was almost tempted to destroy this
altogether. But I didn't."

"An' what did this here misty sort o' maid say to 'e?"

"Strange things, strange things. Things I would give a great deal to hear
you say. It seemed that you had come, Joan, it seemed that you had
purposely come from your little cottage on the cliff through the darkness
before dawn. Why? To share my loneliness, to brighten my poor shadowy life.
Dreams are funny things, are they not? What d'you think you said?"

"Sure I dunnaw."

"Why, you said that you were not going to leave me any more; that you
believed in me and that you had come to me because it was bad for a man to
live all alone in the world. You said that you felt alone too--without me.
And it made me feel happy to hear you say that, though I knew, all the
time, that it was not the real beautiful Joan who spoke to me."

Thereupon the girl asked a question which seemed to argue some sharpening
of intelligence within her.

"An' when I spoke that, what did you say, Mister Jan?"

"I didn't say anything at all. I just took that sweet Joan-of-dreams into
my arms and kissed her."

He was looking listlessly out over the sea as he spoke, and Joan felt
thankful his eyes were turned away from her, for this wonderful dream
incident made her grow hot all over. He seemed to divine by her silence
that his answer to her question had not added to her happiness.

"I shouldn't have told you that, Joan, only you asked me. You see, in
dreams, we are real in some senses, though unreal in others. In dreams the
savage part of us comes to the top and Nature can whisper to us. She
chooses night to do so and often speaks to men in visions, because by day
the voice of the world is in their ears and they have no attention for any
other. It was strange, too, that I should fancy such a thing--should
imagine I was kissing you--because I never kissed a woman in my life."

But from her point of view this falsehood was not so alluring as he meant
to make it sound.

"'Twould be wrong to kiss any maiden, I reckon, onless you was tokened to
her or she were your awn sister."

"But, as we look at life, we're all brothers and sisters, Joan--with Nature
for our mother. We agreed about that long ago."

He turned to his easel, and she went and stood where her feet had already
made a brown mark on the grass.

"I seen you last night, but you dedn' see me," she said, changing the
conversation with abruptness.

"Yes, I did," he answered, "sitting under the shadow of the lighthouse,
waiting for Mr. Tregenza, I expect."

"An' you never took no note o' me!"

He flung down his brushes, turned away from the picture before he had
touched it, and went and lay near the edge of the cliff.

"Come here, Joan, and I will tell you why I didn't notice you, though I
longed to do so. Come and sit down by me and I'll explain why I seemed so
rude."

She came slowly and sat down some distance from him, putting her elbows on
her knees and looking away to sea.

"'Tweern't kind," she said, "but when you'm with other folks, I s'pose
you'm ashamed o' me 'spite what you tawld me 'bout yourself."

"You mustn't say that, Joan, or you'll make me unhappy. Ashamed of you! Is
it likely I'm ashamed of the only friend I've got in the world? No, I'm
frightened of losing you; I'm selfish; I couldn't make you known to any
other man because I should be afraid you'd like him better than me, and
then I should have no friend at all. So I wouldn't speak and reveal my
treasure to anybody else. I'm very fond of my friend, and very proud of
her, and as greedy as a miser over his gold."

Joan took a long breath before this tremendous assertion. He had told her
in so many words that he was fond of her; and he had mentioned it most
casually as a point long since decided. Here was the question which she had
asked herself so often answered once for all. Her heart leaped at tidings
of great joy, and as she looked up into his face the man saw infinite
wonder and delight in her own. Mind was adding beauty to flesh, and he,
fast losing the artist's instinct before another, thought she had never
looked so lovely as then.

"Oh, Mister Jan, you'm fond o' me!"

"Why, didn't you know it, Joan? Did it want my words to tell you so? Hadn't
you guessed it?"

He rose slowly and approached his picture.

"Oh, how I wish this was a little more like my dream and like reality! I
need inspiration, Joan; I have reached a point beyond which I cannot go. My
colors are dead; my soul is dead. Something must happen to me or I shall
never finish this."

"Ban't you so well as you was?"

"No, Joan, I'm not. A thing has come between me and my happiness, between
me and my picture. I know not what to call it. Nature has sent it."

"Then 'tis right an' proper, I s'pose?"

"I suppose so, but it stops work. It makes my hand shake and my heart throb
fast and my brains grow hot."

"Can't 'e take no physic for't?"

"Why, yes, but I hesitate."

He turned to her and went close to her.

"Let me look at you, Joan--close--very close--so close that I can feel your
breath. It was so easy to learn the furze; it is so hard to learn you."

"Sure I've comed out butivul in the picksher."

"Not yet, not yet."

He put his hands on her shoulders and looked into her eyes until she grew
nervous and brushed her hand across her cheek. Then, without a second's
warning, he bent down and kissed her on the mouth.

"Mister Jan! How could 'e! 'Tis wrong--wrong of 'e! I'd never a thot--"

She started from him, wild, alarmed, blushing hotly; and he shook his head
at her dismay and answered very calmly, very seriously:

"It was not wrong, Joan, or I should not have done it. You heard me ask to
whom I should pray for inspiration, and Nature told me I must seek it from
you. And I have."

"You shouldn't never a done it. I trusted 'e so!"

"But I had to do it. Nature said 'Kiss her, and you will find what you
want.' Do you understand that? I have touched you and I am awake and alive
again; I have touched you, Joan, and I am not hopeless and sad, but happy.
Nature thought of me, Joan, when she made you and brought you into the
world; and she thought of sweet Joan when she fashioned Jan. Believe
it--you must believe it."

"You did ought to a arsked me."

"Listen. Nature let you live quiet in the country--for me, Joan. She let me
live all lonely in the world--for you. Only for you. Can't you understand?"

"You did ought to a arsked me. Kissing be wrong 'tween us. You knaws it,
Mr. Jan."

"It is right and proper and fair and beautiful," he said quietly. "My heart
sang when I kissed you, Joan, and so did yours. D'you know why? Because we
are two halves of a whole. Because the sunshine of your life would go out
without me; because my life, which never had any sunshine in it until now,
has been full of sunshine since I knew Joan."

"I dunnaw. 'Twadden a proper thing to do, seein' how I trusted 'e."

"We are children of Nature, Joan. I always do what she tells me. I can't
help it. I have obeyed her all my life. She tells me to love you, Joan, and
I do. I'm very sorry. I thought she had told you to love me, but I suppose
I was wrong. Never mind this once. Forgive me, Joan. I'll even fight Nature
rather than make you angry with me. Let me finish my picture and go away.
Come. I've no business to waste your precious time, though you have been so
kind and generous with it. Only I was tired and hopeless and you came like
a drink of wine to me, Joan; and I drank too much, I suppose."

He picked up his brushes, spoke in a sad minor key, and seemed crushed and
weary. The flash died from his face and he looked older again. Joan, the
mistress of the situation, found it wholly bitter. She was bewildered, for
affairs had proceeded with such rapidity. He had declared frankly that he
loved her, and yet had stopped there. To her ideas it was impossible that a
man should say as much as that to a woman and no more. Love invariably
meant ultimate union for life, Joan thought. She could not understand any
other end to it. The man talked about Nature as a little child talks of its
mother. He had deemed himself entirely in the right; yet something--not
Nature, she supposed--had told her that he was wrong. But who was she to
judge him? Who was she to say where his conduct erred? He loved truth. It
was not a lie to kiss a girl. He promised nothing. How could he promise
anything or propose anything? Was she not another man's sweetheart? That
doubtless had been the reason why he had said no more than that he loved
her. To love her could be no sin. Nature had told him to; and God knew how
she loved him now.

But she could not make it up with him. A cold curtain seemed to have fallen
between them. The old reserve which had only melted after many meetings,
was upon him again. He stood, as it seemed, on the former pedestal. A
strange, surging sensation filled her head--a sense of helpless fighting
against a flood of unhappy affairs. All the new glory of life was suddenly
tarnished through her own act, and she felt that things could never be the
same again.

She thought and thought. Then John Barron saw Joan's blue eyes begin to
wink ominously, the corners of her bonny mouth drag down and something
bright twinkle over her cheek. He took no notice, and when he looked up
again, she had moved away and was sitting on the grass crying bitterly with
her hands over her face. The sun was bright, a lark sang overhead; from
adjacent inland fields came the jolt and clank of a plow with a man's voice
calling to his horses at the turns. The artist put down his palette and
walked over to Joan.

"My dear, my dear," he said, "d'you know what's making you so unhappy?"

She sobbed on and did not answer.

"I can tell you, I think. You don't quite know whether to believe me or
not, Joan. That is very natural. Why should you believe me? And yet if you
knew--"

She sat up, swallowed some of her tears, and smudged her face with her
knuckles. He took a clean handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to
her. It was cool and pleasant, and she went on crying a while, but tears
which were comforting and different to the first stinging drops bred from a
sudden, forlorn survey of life. He talked on, and his voice soothed her. He
kept his distance, and presently, as her ruffled spirit grew calmer, his
remarks assumed a brighter note.

"Has my poor little Lady of the Gorse forgiven me at last? She won't punish
me any more, I know, and it is a very terrible punishment to see tears in
her eyes."

Then she found her tongue again and words to answer him, together with
fluttering sighs that told the tears were ended.

"I dunnaw why for I cried, Mr. Jan, but I seemed 'mazed like. I'm a stupid
fule of a maid, I reckon, an' I s'pose 'tis auld-fashioned notions as I've
got 'bout what be right an' wrong. But, coorse, you knaws better'n what I
can; an' you'd do me no hurt 'cause you loves me--you've said it;
an'--an'--I love 'e tu, Mister Jan, I 'sure 'e--better'n anything in all
the world."

"Why, that's good, sweet news, Joan; and Nature told me the truth after
all! We're bound to love one another. She made us for that very reason!"

He knew that her mind was full of the tangles of life and that she wanted
him to solve some of the riddles just then uppermost in her own existence.
He felt that Joe was in her thoughts, and he easily divined her unuttered
question as to why Nature had sent Joe before she had sent him. But, though
answers and explanations of her troubles were not likely to be difficult,
he had no wish to make them or to pursue the subject just then. Indeed, he
bid Joan depart an hour before she need have done so. Her face was spoiled
for that sitting, and matters had progressed up to the threshold of the
barrier. Before that could be broken down, she must be made to feel that
she was necessary to the happiness of his life; as he already felt that she
was necessary to the completion of his picture. She loved him very dearly,
and he, though love was not possible to his nature, could feel the
substitute. He had fairly stepped out of his impersonal shell into reality.
Presently he would return to his shell again. For a moment a model had
grown more to him than a picture; and he told himself that he must obey
Nature in order adequately to serve Art.

He picked up the handkerchief he had lent Joan, looked at the dampness of
the tear-stains, and then spread it in the sun to dry.




CHAPTER TWELVE

JOAN WALKS HOME


While John Barren determined that a space of time extending over some days
should now separate him from Joan, she, for her part, had scarce left Gorse
Point after the conversation just chronicled when there came a great
longing in her heart to return thither. As she walked home she viewed
wearily the hours which lay between her and the following morning when she
might go back to him and see his face again. Time promised to drag for the
next day and night. Already she framed in her mind the things her mouth
should say to-morrow; and that almost before she was beyond sight of the
man's easel. Her fears had vanished with her tears. The future was entirely
in his hand now, for she had accepted his teaching, endeavored to look at
life with his eyes, made his God her own, so far as she had wit to gather
what his God was. She accepted the situation with trust, and felt
responsibility shifted on to "Mister Jan's" shoulders with infinite relief.
He was very wise and knew everything and loved the truth. It is desirable
to harp and harp upon this ever-recurring thought: the artist's grand love
for truth; because all channels of Joan's mind flowed into this lake. His
sincerity begat absolute trust. And, as John Barren and his words and
thoughts filled the foreground of life for her, so, correspondingly, did
the affairs of her home, with all the circumstances of existence in the old
environment, peak and dwindle toward shadowy insignificance. Her father
lost his majestic proportions; the Luke Gospelers became mere objects for
compassion; the petty, temporal interests and concerns of the passing hour
appeared mere worthless affairs for the occupation and waste of time.
"Mister Jan" loved her, and she loved him, and what else mattered? Past
hours of unrest and wakefulness were forgotten; her tears washed the dead
anxieties clean away; and the kiss which had caused them, though it
scorched her lip when it fell there, was now set as a seal and a crowning
glory to her life. He never kissed any other woman. That pledge of this
rare man's affection had been won by the magic of love, and Joan welcomed
Nature gladly and called it God with a warm heart and thankful soul; for
Nature had brought about this miracle. Her former religion worked no
wonders; it had only conveyed terror to her and a comprehensive knowledge
of hell. "Mister Jan" smiled at hell and she could laugh at her old fears.
How was it possible to hesitate between two such creeds? She did not do so,
and, with final acceptation of the new, and secret rejection of the old,
came a great peace to Joan's heart with the whisper of many voices telling
her that she had done rightly.

So the storm gave place to periods of delicious calm and content only
clouded by a longing to be back with the artist again. He loved her; the
voice of his love was the song of the spring weather, and the thrush echoed
it and the early flowers wrote it on the hedgerows. God was everywhere to
her open eyes. Everything that was beautiful, everything that was good,
seemed to have been created for her delight during that homeward walk. She
was mightily lifted up. Nature seemed so strong, so kind, such a guardian
angel for a maiden. And the birds sang out that "Mister Jan" was Nature's
priest and could do no wrong; and that to obey Nature was the highest good.

From which reflection rose a hazy happiness--dim, beautiful and indefinable
as the twinkling gold upon the sea under the throne of the sun. Joan dwelt
on the memory of the day which was now over for her, and on the thought of
morning hours which to-morrow would bring. But she looked no further; and
backward she did not gaze at all. No thought of Joe Noy dimmed her mental
delight; no shadowy cloud darkened the horizon then. All was bright, all
perfect. Her mind seemed to be breaking its little case, as the butterfly
bursts the chrysalis. Her life till then had been mere grub existence; now
she could fly and had seen the sun drawing the scent from flowers. Great
ideas filled her soul; new emotions awoke; she was like a baby trying to
utter the thing he has no word for; her vocabulary broke down under the
strain, and as she walked she gave thanks to Nature in a mere wordless
song, like the lark, because she could not put her acknowledgment into
language. But the great Mother, to whom Life is all in all, the living
individual nothing, looked on at a world wakening from sleep and viewed the
loves of the flowers and the loves of the birds and beasts and fishes with
concern as keen as the love in the blue eyes of Joan upon her homeward way.

Busy indeed at this vernal season was the mysterious Nurse of God's little
world. Her hands rested not from her labors. She worked strange wonders on
the waste, by magic of a million breaking buds, by burying of the dead, by
wafting of subtle pollen-life from blossom to blossom. And in cliffs above
the green waters the nests of her wild-fowl were already lined with wool
and feather; neither were her samphires forgotten in their dizzy
habitations; and salt spray sprinkled her uncurling sea ferns in caves and
crannies where they grew. She laughed at the porpoises rolling their fat
sides into sunshine; she brought the sea-otter where it should find fish
for its young; she led giant congers to drowned men; she patted the sleek
head of the sad-eyed seal. Elsewhere she showed the father-hawk a leveret
crouching in his form; she took young rabbits to the

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