Baring-Gould Sabine
In the Roar of the Sea
CHAPTER XXX
THROUGH THE TAMARISKS
For some time after Judith had given her consent, and had released Jamie from the hands of the Scantlebrays, she remained still and white. Uncle Zachie missed the music to which he had become used, and complained. She then seated herself at the piano, but was distraught, played badly, and the old bird-stuffer went away grumbling to his shop.
Jamie was happy, delighted not to be afflicted with lessons, and forgot past troubles in present pleasures. That the recovery of his liberty had been bought at a heavy price, he did not know, and would not have appreciated it had he been told the sacrifice Judith had been ready to make for his sake.
In the garden behind the cottage was an arbor, composed of half a boat set up, that is to say, an old boat sawn in half, and erected so that it served as a shelter to a seat, which was fixed into the earth on posts. From one side of this boat a trellis had been drawn, and covered with eschalonia, and a seat placed here as well, so that in this rude arbor it was possible for more than one to find accommodation. Here Judith and Jamie often sat; the back of the boat was set against the prevailing wind from the sea, and on this coast the air is unusually soft at the same time that it is bracing, enjoyable wherever a little shelter is provided against its violence. For violent it can be, and can buffet severely, yet its blows are those of a pillow.
Here Judith was sitting one afternoon, alone, lost in a dream, when Uncle Zachie came into the garden with his pipe in his mouth, to stretch his legs, after a few minutes’ work at stuffing a cormorant.
In her lap lay a stocking Judith was knitting for her brother, but she had made few stitches, and yet had been an hour in the summer-house. The garden of Mr. Menaida was hedged off from a neighbor’s grounds by a low wall of stone and clay and sand, in and out of which grew roughly strong tamarisks now in their full pale pink blossom. The eyes of Judith had been on these tamarisks, waving like plumes in the sea-air, when she was startled from her reverie by the voice of Uncle Zachie.
“Why, Miss Judith! What is the matter with you? Dull, eh? Ah – wait a bit, when Oliver comes home we shall have mirth. He is full of merriment. A bright boy and a good son; altogether a fellow to be proud of, though I say it. He will return at the fall.”
“I am glad to hear it, Mr. Menaida. You have not seen him for many years.”
“Not for ten.”
“It will be a veritable feast to you. Does he remain long in England?”
“I cannot say. If his employers find work for him at home, then at home he will tarry, but if they consider themselves best served by him at Oporto, then to Portugal must he return.”
“Will you honor me by taking a seat near me – under the trellis?” asked Judith. “It will indeed be a pleasure to me to have a talk with you; and I do need it very sore. My heart is so full that I feel I must spill some of it before a friend.”
“Then indeed I will hold out both hands to catch the sweetness.”
“Nay – it is bitter, not sweet, bitter as gall, and briny as the ocean.”
“Not possible; a little salt gives savor.”
She shook her head, took up the stocking, did a couple of stitches, and put it down again. The sea-breeze that tossed the pink bunches of tamarisk waved stray tresses of her red-gold hair, but somehow the brilliancy, the burnish, seemed gone from it. Her eyes were sunken, and there was a greenish tinge about the ivory white surrounding her mouth.
“I cannot work, dear Mr. Menaida; I am so sorry that I should have played badly that sonata last night. I knew it fretted you, but I could not help myself, my mind is so selfishly directed that I cannot attend to anything even of Beethoven’s in music, nor to stocking-knitting even for Jamie.”
“And what are the bitter – briny thoughts?”
Judith did not answer at once, she looked down into her lap, and Mr. Menaida, whose pipe was choked, went to the tamarisks and plucked a little piece, stripped off the flower and proceeded to clear the tube with it.
Presently, while Uncle Zachie’s eyes were engaged on the pipe, Judith looked up, and said hastily, “I am very young, Mr. Menaida.”
“A fault in process of rectification every day,” said he, blowing through the stem of his pipe. “I think it is clear now.”
“I mean – young to be married.”
“To be married! Zounds!” He turned his eyes on her in surprise, holding the tamarisk spill in one hand and the pipe in the other, poised in the air.
“You have not understood that I got Jamie off the other day only by taking full charge of him upon myself and relieving my aunt.”
“But – good gracious, you are not going to marry your brother.”
“My aunt would not transfer the guardianship to me unless I were qualified to undertake and exercise it properly, according to her ideas, and that could be only by my becoming engaged to be married to a man of substance.”
“Goodness help me! what a startlement! And who is the happy man to be? Not Scantlebray, senior, I trust, whose wife is dying.”
“No – Captain Coppinger.”
“Cruel Coppinger!” Uncle Zachie put down his pipe so suddenly on the bench by him that he broke it. “Cruel Coppinger! never!”
She said nothing to this, but rose and walked, with her head down, along the bank, and put her hands among the waving pink bunches of tamarisk bloom, sweeping the heads with her own delicate hand as she passed. Then she came back to the boat arbor and reseated herself.
“Dear me! Bless my heart! I could not have credited it,” gasped Mr. Menaida, “and I had such different plans in my head – but there, no more about them.”
“I had to make my election whether to take him and qualify to become Jamie’s guardian, or refrain, and then he would have been snatched away and imprisoned in that odious place again.”
“But, my dear Miss Judith – ” the old man was so agitated that he did not know what he was about; he put the stick of tamarisk into his mouth in place of his pipe, and took it out to speak, put down his hand, picked up the bowl of his pipe, and tapped the end of the tamarisk spill with that; “mercy save me! What a world we do live in. And I had been building for you a castle – not in Spain, but in a contiguous country – who’d have thought it? And Cruel Coppinger, too! Upon my soul I don’t want to say I am sorry for it, and I can’t find in my heart to say I’m glad.”
“I do not expect that you will be glad – not if you have any love for me.”
The old man turned round, his eyes were watering and his face twitching.
“I have, Heaven knows! I have – yes – I mean Miss Judith.”
“Mr. Menaida,” said the girl, “you have been so kind, so considerate, that I should like to call you what every one else does – when speaking of you to one another – not to your face – Uncle Zachie.”
He put out his hand, it was shaking, and caught hers. He put the ends of the fingers to his lips; but he kept his face averted, and the water that had formed in his eyes ran down his cheeks. He did not venture to speak. He had lost command over his voice.
“You see, uncle, I have no one of whom to ask counsel. I have only aunt, and she – somehow – I feel that I cannot go to her, and get from her the advice best suited to me. Now papa is dead I am entirely alone, and I have to decide on matters most affecting my own life, and that of Jamie. I do so crave for a friend who could give me an opinion – but I have no one, if you refuse.”
He pressed her hand.
“Not that now I can go back from my word. I have passed that to Aunt Dionysia, and draw back I may not; but somehow, as I sit and think, and think, and try to screw myself up to the resolution that must be reached of giving up my hand and my whole life into the power of – of that man, I cannot attain to it. I feel like one who is condemned to cast himself down a precipice and shrinks from it, cannot make up his mind to spring, but draws back after every run made to the edge. Tell me – uncle – tell me truly, what do you think about Captain Coppinger? What do you know about him? Is he a very wicked man?”
“You ask me what I think, and also what I know,” said Mr. Menaida, releasing her hand. “I know nothing, but I have my thoughts.”
“Then tell me what you think.”
“As I have said, I know nothing. I do not know whence he comes. Some say he is a Dane, some that he is an Irishman. I cannot tell, I know nothing, but I think his intonation is Irish, and I have heard that there is a family of that name in Ireland. But this is all guesswork. One thing I do know, he speaks French like a native. Then, as to his character, I believe him to be a man of ungovernable temper, who, when his blood is roused will stick at nothing. I think him a man of very few scruples. But he has done liberal things – he is open-handed, that all say. A hard liver, and with a rough tongue, and yet with some of the polish of a gentleman; a man with the passions of a devil, but not without in him some sparks of divine light. That is what I think him to be. And if you ask me further, whether I think him a man calculated to make you happy – I say decidedly that he is not.”
Rarely before in his life had Mr. Menaida spoken with such decision.
“He has been kind to me,” said Judith. “Very kind.”
“Because he is in love with you.”
“And gentle – ”
“Have you ever done aught to anger him!”
“Yes. I threw him down and broke his arm and collar-bone.”
“And won his heart by so doing.”
“Uncle Zachie, he is a smuggler.”
“Yes – there is no doubt about that.”
“Do you suppose if I were to entreat him that he would abandon smuggling? I have already had it in my heart to ask him this, but I could not bring the request over my lips.”
“I have no doubt if you asked him to throw up his smuggling that he would promise to do so. Whether he would keep his promise is another matter. Many a girl has made her lover swear to give up gambling, and on that understanding has married him; but I reckon none have been able to keep their husbands to the engagement. Gambling, smuggling, and poaching, my dear, are in the blood. A man brings the love of adventure, the love of running a risk, into the world with him. If I had been made by my wife to swear when I married never to touch a musical instrument, I might out of love for her have sworn, but I could not have kept my oath. And you – if you vowed to keep your fingers from needle and thread, and saw your gown in rags, or your husband’s linen frayed – would find an irresistible itch in the finger ends to mend and hem, and you would do it, in spite of your vows. So with a gambler, a poacher, and a smuggler, the instinct, the passion is in them and is irresistible. Don’t impose any promise on Captain Cruel, it will not influence him.”
“They tell me he is a wrecker.”
“What do you mean by a wrecker! We are all wreckers, after a storm, when a merchantman has gone to pieces on the rocks, and the shore is strewn with prizes. I have taken what I could, and I see no harm in it. When the sea throws treasures here and there, it is a sin not to take them up and use them and be thankful.”
“I do not mean that. I mean that he has been the means of luring ships to their destruction.”
“Of that I know nothing. Stories circulate whenever there is a wreck not in foul weather or with a wind on shore. But who can say whether they be true or false?”
“And about that man, Wyvill. Did he kill him?”
“There also I can say nothing, because I know nothing. All that can be said about the matter is that the Preventive man Wyvill was found at sea – or washed ashore without his head. A shark may have done it, and sharks have been found off our coast. I cannot tell. There is not a shadow of evidence that could justify an indictment. All that can be stated that makes against Coppinger is that the one is a smuggler, the other was a Preventive man, and that the latter was found dead and with his head off, an unusual circumstance, but not sufficient to show that he had been decapitated by any man, nor that the man who decapitated him was Coppinger.”
Then Mr. Menaida started up: “And – you sell yourself to this man for Jamie?”
“Yes, uncle, to make a man of Jamie.”
“On the chance, Judith, on the very doubtful chance of making a man of Jamie, you rush on the certainty of making a ruin of yourself. That man – that Coppinger to be trusted with you! A fair little vessel, richly laden, with silken sail, and cedar sides, comes skimmering over the sea, and – Heaven forgive me if I judge wrongly – but I think he is a wrecker, enticing, constraining you on to the reefs where you will break up, and all your treasures will – not fall to him – but sink; and all that will remain of you will be a battered and broken hull, and a draggled discolored sail. I cannot – I cannot endure the thought.”
“Yet it must be endured, faced and endured by me,” said Judith. “You are a cruel comforter, Uncle Zachie. I called you to encourage me, and you cast me down; to lighten my load, and you heap more on.”
“I can do no other,” gasped Mr. Menaida. Then he sprang back, with open mouth, aghast. He saw Cruel Coppinger on the other side of the hedge, he had put his hands to the tamarisk bushes, and thrust them apart and was looking through.
“Goldfish!” called Captain Coppinger, “Goldfish, come!”
Judith knew the voice and looked in the direction whence it came, and saw the large hands of Coppinger holding back the boughs of tamarisk, his dark face in the gap. She rose at once and stepped toward him.
“You are ill,” he said, fixing his sombre eyes on her.
“I am not ill in body. I have had much to harass my mind.”
“Yes, that Wadebridge business.”
“What has sprung out of it?”
“Shall I come to you, or will you to me! – through the tamarisks?”
“As you will, Captain Coppinger.”
“Come, then – up on to the hedge and jump – I will catch you in my arms. I have held you there ere this.”
“Yes, you have taken me up, now must I throw – ” She did not finish the sentence; she meant, must she voluntarily throw herself into his arms?
She caught hold of the bushes and raised herself to the top of the hedge.
“By Heaven!” said he. “The tamarisk flowers have more color in them than your face.”
She stood on the summit of the bank, the tamarisks rising to her knees, waving in the wind about her. Must she resign herself to that man of whom she knew so little, whom she feared so greatly? There was no help for it. She must. He held out his arms. She sprang, and he caught her.
“I have you now,” he said, with a laugh of triumph. “You have come to me, and I will never give you up.”
CHAPTER XXXI
AMONG THE SAND-HEAPS
Coppinger held her in his arms, shook her hair out that it streamed over his arm, and looked into her upturned face. “Indeed you are light, lighter than when I bore you in my arms before; and you are thin and white, and the eyes, how red. You have been crying. What! this spirit, strong as a steel spring, so subdued that it gives way to weeping!”
Judith’s eyes were closed against the strong light from the sky above, and against the sight of his face bent over hers, and the fire glint of his eyes, dark as a thundercloud and as charged with lightnings. And now there was a flashing of fire from them, of love and pride and admiration. The strong man trembled beneath his burden in the vehemence of his emotion. The boiling and paining of his heart within him, as he held the frail child in his arms, and knew she was to be his own, his own wholly, in a short space. It was for the moment to him as though all earth and sea and heaven were dissolved with nebulous chaos, and the only life – the only pulses in the universe – were in him and the little creature he held to his breast. He looked into her face, down on her as Vesuvius must have looked down on lovely, marble, white Pompeii, with its gilded roofs and incense-scented temples, and restrained itself, as long as restrain its molten heart it could, before it poured forth its fires and consumed the pearly city lying in its arms.
He looked at her closed eyelids with the long golden lashes resting on the dark sunken dip beneath, at the delicate mouth drawn as with pain, at the white temples in which slowly throbbed the blue veins, at the profusion of red-gold hair streaming over his arm and almost touching the ground.
She knew that his eyes – on fire – were on her, and she dared not meet them, for there would be a shrinking – from him, no responsive leap of flame from hers.
“Shall I carry you about like this!” he asked. “I could and I would, to the world’s end, and leap with you thence into the unfathomed abyss.”
Her head, leaning back on his arm, with the gold rain falling from it, exposed her long and delicate throat of exquisite purity of tint and beauty of modelling, and as it lay a little tuft of pink tamarisk blossom, brushed off in her lap into his arms, and then caught in the light edging of her dress, at the neck.
“And you come to me of your own will?” he said.
Then Judith slightly turned her head to avoid his eyes, and said, “I have come – it was unavoidable. Let me down, that we may speak together.”
He obeyed with reluctance. Then, standing before him, she bound up and fastened her hair.
“Look!” said he, and threw open his collar. A ribbon was tied about his throat. “Do you see this?” He loosed the band and held it to her. One delicate line of gold ran along the silk, fastened to it by threads at intervals. “Your own hair. The one left with me when you first heard me speak of my heart’s wish, and you disdained me and went your way. You left me that one hair, and that one hair I have kept wound round my neck ever since, and it has seemed to me that I might still have caught my goldfish, my saucy goldfish that swam away from my hook at first.”
Judith said calmly; “Let us walk together somewhere – to St. Enodoc, to my father’s grave, and there, over that sand-heap we will settle what must be settled.”
“I will go with you where you will. You are my Queen, I your subject – it is my place to obey.”
“The subject has sometimes risen and destroyed the Queen; it has been so in France.”
“Yes, when the subject has been too hardly treated, too down-trodden, not allowed to look on and adore the Queen.”
“And,” said Judith further, “let us walk in silence, allow me the little space between here and my father’s grave to collect my thoughts, bear with me for that short distance.”
“As you will. I am your slave, as I have told you, and you my mistress have but to command.”
“Yes, but the slave sometimes becomes the master, and then is all the more tyrannous because of his former servitude.”
So they walked together, yet apart, from Polzeath to St. Enodoc, neither speaking, and it might have been a mourner’s walk at a funeral. She held her head down, and did not raise her eyes from the ground, but he continued to gaze on her with a glow of triumph and exultation in his face.
They reached at length the deserted church, sunken in the sands; it had a hole broken in the wall under the eaves in the south, rudely barricaded, through which the sacred building might be entered for such functions as a marriage, or the first part of the funeral office that must be performed in a church.
The roof was of pale gray slate, much broken, folding over the rafters like the skins on the ribs of an old horse past work. The church-yard was covered with plain sand. Gravestones were in process of being buried like those whom they commemorated. Some peeped above the sand, with a fat cherub’s head peering above the surface. Others stood high on the land side, but were banked up by sand toward the sea. Here the church-yard surface was smooth, there it was tossed with undulations, according as the sand had been swept over portions tenanted by the poor who were uncommemorated with head-stones, or over those where the well-to-do lay with their titles and virtues registered above them.
There was as yet no monument erected over the grave of the Reverend Peter Trevisa, sometime rector of St. Enodoc. The mound had been turfed over and bound down with withes. The loving hands of his daughter had planted some of the old favorite flowers from the long walk at the rectory above where he lay, but they had not as yet taken to the soil, the sand ill agreed with them, and the season of the year when their translation had taken place dissatisfied them, and they looked forlorn, drooping, and doubted whether they would make the struggle to live.
Below the church lay the mouths of the Camel, blue between sand-hills, with the Doom Bar, a long and treacherous band of shifting sands in the midst.
On reaching the graveyard Judith signed to Captain Coppinger to seat himself on a flat tombstone on the south side of her father’s grave, and she herself leaned against the headstone that marked her mother’s tomb.
“I think we should come to a thorough understanding,” she said, with composure, “that you may not expect of me what I cannot give, and know the reason why I give you anything. You call me Goldfish. Why?”
“Because of your golden hair.”
“No – that was not what sprung the idea in your brain, it was something I said to you, that you and I stood to each other in the relation of bird of prey to fish, belonging to distinct modes of life and manner of thinking, and that we could never be to one another in any other relation than that, the falcon and his prey, the flame and its fuel, the wreckers and the wrecked.”
Coppinger started up and became red as blood.
“These are strange words,” he said.
“It is the same that I said before.”
“Then why have you given yourself to me?”
“I have resigned myself to you, as I cannot help myself any more than the fish can that is pounced on by the sea-bird, or the fuel that is enveloped by the flame, or the ship that is boarded by the wrecker.”
She looked at him steadily; he was quivering with excitement, anger, and disappointment.
“It is quite right that you should know what to expect, and make no more demands on me that I am capable of answering. You cannot ask of me that I should become like you, and I do not entertain the foolish thought that you could be brought to be like me – to see through my eyes, feel with my heart. My dead father lies between us now, and he will ever be between us – he a man of pure life, noble aspirations, a man of books, of high principle, fearing God and loving men. What he was he tried to make me. Imperfectly, faultily, I follow him, but though unable to be like him, I strive after what he showed me should be my ideal.”
“You are a child. You will be a woman, and new thoughts will come to you.”
“Will they be good and honorable and contented thoughts? Shall I find those in your house?”
Coppinger did not reply, his brows were drawn together and his face became dark.
“Why, then, have you promised to come to me?”
“Because of Jamie.”
He uttered an oath, and with his hands clenched the upper stone of the tomb.
“I have promised my aunt that I will accept you, if you will suffer my poor brother to live where I live, and suffer me to be his protector. He is helpless and must have someone to think and watch for him. My aunt would have sent him to Mr. Obadiah Scantlebray’s asylum, and that would have been fatal to him. To save him from that I said that I would be yours, on the condition that my home should be his home. I have passed my word to my aunt, and I will not go from it, but that does not mean that I have changed my belief that we are unfitted for each other, because we belong to different orders of being.”
“This is cold comfort.”
“It is cold as ice, but it is all that I have to give to you. I wish to put everything plainly before you now, that there may be no misapprehension later, and you may be asking of me what I cannot give, and be angry at not receiving what I never promised to surrender.”
“So! I am only accepted for the sake of that boy, Jamie.”
“It is painful for me to say what I do – as painful as it must be for you to hear it, but I cannot help myself. I wish to put all boldly and hardly before you before an irrevocable step is taken such as might make us both wretched. I take you for Jamie’s sake. Were his happiness, his well-being not in the scale, I would not take you. I would remain free.”
“That is plain enough,” exclaimed Coppinger, setting his teeth, and he broke off a piece of the tombstone on which he was half sitting.
“You will ask of me love, honor, and obedience. I will do my best to love you – like you I do now, for you have been kind and good to me, and I can never forget what you have done for me. But it is a long leap from liking to loving, still I will try my best, and if I fail it will not be for lack of effort. Honor is another matter. That lies in your own power to give. If you behave as a good and worthy man to your fellows, and justly toward me, of course I shall honor you. I must honor what is deserving of honor, and where I honor there I may come to love. I cannot love where I do not honor, so perhaps I may say that my heart is in your hands, and that if those hands are clean and righteous in their dealings it may become yours some time. As to obedience – that you shall command. That I will render to you frankly and fully in all things lawful.”
“You offer me an orange from which all the juice has been squeezed, a nut without a kernel.”
“I offer you all I have to offer. Is it worth your while having this?”
“Yes!” said he angrily, starting up, “I will have what I can and wring the rest out of you, when once you are mine.”
“You never will wring anything out of me. I give what I may, but nothing will I yield to force.”
He looked at her sullenly and said, “A child in years with an old head and a stony heart.”
“I have always lived with my father, and so have come to think like one that is old,” said Judith, “and now, alone in the world, I must think with ripened wits.”
“I do not want that precocious, wise soul, if that be the kernel. I will have the shell – the glorious shell. Keep your wisdom and righteousness and piety for yourself. I do not value them a rush. But your love I will have.”
“I have told you there is but one way by which that may be won. But indeed, Captain Coppinger, you have made a great mistake in thinking of me. I am not suited to you to make you happy and content; any more than you are suited to me. Look out for some girl more fit to be your mate.”
“Of what sort? Come, tell me!” said Coppinger scornfully.
“A fine, well-built girl, dark-haired, dark-eyed, with cheeks like apricots, lively in mood, with nimble tongue, good-natured, not bookish, not caring for brush or piano, but who can take a rough word and return it; who will not wince at an oath, and shrink away at coarse words flung about where she is. All these things you know very well must be encountered by your wife, in your house. Did you ever read ‘Hamlet,’ Captain Coppinger?”
He made no answer, he was plucking at the slab-cover of the tomb and grinding his heels into the sand.
“In ‘Hamlet,’ we read of a king poisoned by his queen, who dipped the juice of cursed hebenon into his ears, and it curdled all his blood. It is the same with the sort of language that is found in your house when your seamen are there. I cannot endure it, it curdles my heart – choose a girl who is indifferent.”
“You shall not be subjected to it,” said Coppinger, “and as to the girl you have sketched – I care not for her – such as you describe are to be found thick as whortle-berries on a moor. Do you not know that man seeks in marriage not his counterpart but his contrast? It is because you are in all things different from me that I love you.”
“Then will naught that I have said make you desist?”
“Naught.”
“I have told you that I take you only so as to be able to make a home for Jamie.”
“Yes.”
“And that I do not love you and hardly think I can ever.”
“Yes.”
“And still you will have me?”
“Yes.”
“And that by taking me you wreck my life – spoil my happiness.”
He raised his head, then dropped it again and said, “Yes.”
She remained silent, also looking on the ground. Presently she raised her head and said: “I gave you a chance, and you have cast it from you. I am sorry.”
“A chance? What chance?”
“The chance of taking a first step up the ladder in my esteem.”
“I do not understand you.”
“Therefore I am sorry.”
“What is your meaning?”
“Captain Coppinger,” said Judith, firmly, looking straight into his dark face and flickering eyes, “I am very, very sorry. When I told you that I accepted your offer only because I could not help myself, because I was a poor, feeble orphan, with a great responsibility laid on me, the charge of my unfortunate brother; that I only accepted you for his sake when I told you that I did not love you, that our characters, our feelings were so different that it would be misery to me to become your wife – that it would be the ruin of my life, then – had you been a man of generous soul, you would have said – I will not force myself upon you, but I will do one thing for you, assist you in protecting Jamie from the evil that menaces him. Had you said that I would have honored you, and as I said just now, where I honor, there I may love. But you could not think such a thought, no such generous feeling stirred you. You held me to my bond.”
“I hold you to your bond,” exclaimed Coppinger, in loud rage. “I hold you, indeed. Even though you can neither love nor honor me, you shall be mine. You likened me to a bird of prey that must have its prey or die, to a fire – and that must have its fuel – to a wrecker, and he must have his wreck, I care not. I will have you as mine, whether you love me or not.”
“So be it, then,” said Judith, sadly. “You had your opportunity and have put it from you. We understand each other. The slave is master – and a tyrant.”
