A Singer from the Sea Part 31

Only those who have experienced the sensation can tell how strange and sad is the feeling with which the soul turns away from a destiny accomplished. When Denas had deposited her money in the Clydesdale Bank and made the few purchases she thought proper and prudent, she felt that one room of the house of life was barred for ever against her return to it.

For a few years her experiences had been strangely interwoven with those of the Treshams. To what purpose? Why had they been so? As far as this existence was concerned, it seemed a relationship that might well have been omitted. But who can tell what circ.u.mstances went before it or what were to follow? For all human beings leave behind them as they go through life a train of events which are due either to impulses originating in a previous existence or are the seeds of events which are to be perfected in a future one; what we sow, that we shall surely reap.

Leaving London, such thoughts of something final, at least as far as this probation was concerned, greatly depressed Denas. "Never more, never more," was the monotonous refrain that sprang from her soul to her lips. But it is a wise provision of the Merciful One that the past, in a healthy mind, very soon loses its charm, and the things that are present take the first place.

"I cannot bring anything back. I do not think I would bring anything back if I could. I have been very unhappy and restless in the past.

Every pleasure I had was t.i.thed by sorrow. Roland loved me, but I brought him only disappointment. I loved Roland, and yet all my efforts to make him happy were failures. Roland has been taken from me. Our child has been taken away from me. Elizabeth I have put away--death could not sever us more effectually. I am going back to my own people and my own life, and I pray G.o.d to give me a contented heart in it."

These were the colour of her reflections as the train bore her swiftly to the fortune of her future years. She had no enthusiasm about them.

She thought she knew all the possibilities they kept. She looked for no extraordinary thing, for no special favour to brighten their uniform occupations and simple pleasures. She had taken the first train she could, without considering the time of its arrival in St.

Penfer. She told herself that there would be a certain amount of gossip about her return, and that it could not be avoided by either a public or private arrival. Still, she was glad when the sun set and the shadows of the night were stretched out--glad that the moon was too young to give much light, and that it was quite nine o'clock when the St. Penfer station was reached.

A few people were on the platform, but none of them were thinking of Mrs. Tresham, and the woman so simply dressed and veiled in black made no impression on anyone. She left her trunk in the baggage-room and went by the familiar road down the cliff-breast. It had been raining, of course, and the ground was heavy and wet; but the sky was clear, and the half-moon made a half-twilight among the bare branches and shed a faint bar of light across the ocean.

At the last reach she stood still a moment and looked at the cl.u.s.tered cottages and the boats swaying softly on the incoming tide. A great peace was over the place. The very houses seemed to be resting. There was fire or candle light in every glimmering square of their windows; but not a man, or a woman, or a child in sight. As she drew near to her father's cottage, she saw that it was very brightly lighted; and then she remembered that it was Friday night, and that very likely the weekly religious meeting was being held there. That would account for the diffused quiet of the whole village.

The thought made her pause. She had no desire to turn her home-coming into a scene. So she walked softly to the back of the little house and entered the curing shed. There was only a slight door--a door very seldom tightly closed--between this shed and the cottage room. She knew all its arrangements. It was called a curing shed, but in reality it had long been appropriated to domestic purposes. Joan kept her milk and provisions in it, and used it as a kind of kitchen. Every shelf and stool, almost every plate and basin, had its place there, and Denas knew them. She went to the milk pitcher and drank a deep draught; and then she took a little three-legged stool, and placing it gently by the door, sat down to listen and to wait.

Her father was talking in that soft, chanting tone used by the fishers of St. Penfer, and the drawling intonations, with the occasional rise of the voice at the end of a sentence, came to the ears of Denas with the pleasant familiarity of an old song.

As he ceased speaking some woman began to sing "The Ninety-and-Nine,"

and so singing they rose and pa.s.sed out of the cottage and to their own homes. One by one the echoes of their voices ceased, until, at the last verse, only John and Joan were singing. As they finished, Denas looked into the room. Joan was lifting the big Bible covered with green baize. Between this cover and the binding all the letters Denas had sent them were kept, and the fond mother was touching and straightening them. John, with his pipe in one hand, was lifting the other to the shelf above his head for his tobacco-jar. The last words of the hymn were still on their lips.

Denas opened the door and stood just within the room, looking at them.

Both fixed their eyes upon her. They thought they saw a spirit. They were speechless.

"Father! Mother! It is Denas!"

She came forward quickly as she spoke. Joan uttered one piercing cry.

John let his pipe fall to pieces on the hearthstone and drew his child within his arms. "It be Denas! It be Denas! her own dear self," he said, and he sat down and took her to his breast, and the poor girl snuggled her head into his big beard, and he kissed away her tears and soothed her as he had done when she was only a baby.

And then poor Joan was on the rug at their feet. She was taking the wet stockings and shoes off of her daughter's feet; she was drying them gently with her ap.r.o.n, fondling and kissing them as she had been used to do when her little Denas came in from the boats or the school wet-footed. And Denas was stooping to her mother and kissing the happy tears off her face, and the conversation was only in those single words that are too sweet to mix with other words; until Joan, with that womanly instinct that never fails in such extremities, began to bring into the excited tone those tender material cares that make love possible and life-like.

"Oh, my darling," she cried, "your little feet be dripping wet, and you be hungry, I know, and we will have a cup of tea. And, Denas, there be such a pie in the cupboard. And a bowl of clotted cream, too.

It is just like the good G.o.d knew my girl was coming home. And I wonder who put it into my heart to have a mother's welcome for her?

And how be your husband, my dear?"

"He is dead, mother."

"G.o.d's peace on him!"

"And the little lad, Denas--my little grandson that be called John after me."

"He is dead, too, father."

Then they were speechless, and they kissed her again and mingled their tears with her tears, and John felt a sudden lonely place where he had put this poor little grandson whom he was never to see.

Then Denas began to drink her warm tea and to talk to her parents; but they said no words but kind words of the dead. They listened to the pitiful taking-away of the young man, and before the majesty of death they forgot their anger and their dislike, and left him hopefully to the mercy of the Merciful. For if John and Joan knew anything, they knew that none of us shall enter paradise except G.o.d cover us with His mercy.

And not one word of all her trouble did Denas t.i.tter. She spoke only of Roland's great love for her; of their trials endured together; of his resignation to death; of her own loneliness and suffering since his burial; and then, clasping her father's and mother's hands, she said:

"So I have come back to you. I have come back to my old life. I shall never act again. I shall sing no more in this world. That life is over. It was not a happy life. Without Roland it would be beyond my power to endure it."

"You be welcome here as the sunshine. Oh, my dear girl, you be light to my eyes and joy to my heart, and there is no trouble can hurt me much now."

Then Joan said: "'Twas this very morning I put clean linen on your bed, Denas. I swept the room, and then made the pie, and clotted the cream, and I never knew who I did it for. Oh, Denas, what a G.o.dsend you do be! John, my old dear, our life be turned to sunshine now."

And long after Denas had fallen asleep they sat by their fire and talked of their child's sorrow, and Joan got up frequently and took a candle and, shading it with her hand, went and looked to see if the girl was all right. When Denas was a babe in the cradle, Joan had been used to satisfy her motherly longing in the same way. Her widowed child was still her baby.

In the morning John went from cottage to cottage and told his friends to come and rejoice with him. For really to John "the dead was alive and the lost was found." And it was a great wonderment in the village; men nor women could talk of anything else but the return of Denas Tresham. Many were really glad to see her; and if some visited the poor, stricken woman thinking to add a homily to G.o.d's smiting, they were abashed by her evident suffering, by her pallor and her wasted form, and the sombre plainness of her black garments. For some days life was thus kept at a tension beyond its natural strain, and Joan and her daughter had no time to recover the every-day atmosphere. But no excitement outlasts the week's perchances and changes, and after the second Sunday all her acquaintances had seen Denas, and curiosity and interest were at their normal standard.

All her acquaintances but Tris Penrose. Denas wondered that he did not come to see her, and yet she had a shy dislike to make inquiries about him. For the love of Tris Penrose for Denas Penelles had been the village romance ever since they were children together, and she feared that a word from her about him might set the women to smiling and sympathising and to taking her affairs out of her own hands.

As the home-life settled to its usual colour and cares, Denas became conscious of a change in it. She saw that her father went very seldom to sea, that he was depressed and restless, and that her mother, in a great measure, echoed his moods. And she was obliged to confess that she was terribly weary. There was little housework to do, except what fell naturally to Joan's care, and interference with these duties appeared to annoy the methodical old woman. The knitting was far ahead, there were no nets to mend; and when Denas had made herself a couple of dresses, there seemed to be no work for her to do. And she was not specially fond of reading. Culture and study she could understand if their definite end was money; but for the simple love of information or pleasure books were not attractive to her.

So in a month she had come to a place in her experience when it was a consolation to think of that sixteen hundred pounds in London. She might yet find it necessary to her happiness; for without some change she could not much longer endure the idleness and monotony of her life. Fortunately the change came. One morning a woman visited the cottage, and the sole burden of her conversation was the lack of a school in St. Penfer by the Sea to which the fisher-children might go in the morning.

"Here be my six little uns," she cried, "and up the cliff they must hurry all, through any wind or weather, or learn nothing. And then they be that tired when they do get home again, they be no use at all about the bait-boxes or the boats. There be sixty school-going children in the village, and I do say there ought to be a school here for them."

And suddenly it came into the heart of Denas to open a school. Pay or no pay, she was sure she would enjoy the work, and that afternoon she went about it. An empty cottage was secured, a fisher-carpenter agreed to make the benches, and at an outlay of two or three pounds she provided all that was necessary. The affair made a great stir in the hamlet. She had more applications for admission than the cottage would hold, and she selected from these thirty of the youngest of the children.

For the first time in many months Denas was sensible of enthusiasm in her employment. But Joan did not apparently share her hopes or her pleasure. She was silent and depressed and answered Denas with a slight air of injury.

"They have agreed to pay a penny a week for each child," Denas said to her mother.

"Well, Denas, some will pay and some will never pay."

"To be sure. I know that, mother. But it does not much matter."

"Aw, then, it do matter, my girl--it do matter, a great deal." And Joan began to cry a little and to arrange her crockery with far more noise than was necessary.

"Dear mother, what is it? Are you in trouble of any kind?"

"Aw, then, Denas, I be troubled to think you never saw your father's trouble. He be sad and anxious enough, G.o.d knows. And no one to say 'here, John,' or 'there, John,' or give him a helping hand in any way."

"Sit down, mother, and tell me all. I have seen that father's ways are changed and that he seldom goes to the fishing. I hoped the reason was that he had no longer any need to go regularly."

"No need? Aw, my dear, he has no boat!"

"No boat! Mother, what do you mean to tell me?"

"I mean, child, that on the same night the steamer _Lorne_ was wrecked your father lost his boat and his nets, and barely got to land with his life--never would have done that but for Tris Penrose, who lost all, too--and both of them at the mercy of the waves when the life-boat reached them. Aw, my dear, a bad night. And bad times ever since for your father. Now and then he do get a night with Trenager, or Penlow, or Adam Oliver; but they be only making a job for him. And when pilchard time comes, 'tis to St. Ives he must go and hire himself out--at his age, too. It makes me ugly, Denas. My old dear hiring himself out after he have sailed his own boat ever since man he was.

And then to see you spending pounds and pounds on school-benches and books, and talking of it not mattering if you was paid or not paid; and me weighing every penny-piece, and your father counting the pipefuls in his tobacco-jar. Aw, 'tis cruel hard! Cruel! cruel!"

"Now, then, mother, dry your eyes--and there--let me kiss them dry.

Listen: Father shall have the finest fishing-boat that sails out of any Cornish port. Oh, mother, dear! Spend every penny you want to spend, and I will go to the church town this afternoon to buy father tobacco for a whole year."

"Let me cry! Let me cry for joy, Denas! Let me cry for joy! You have rolled a stone off my heart. Be you rich, dear?"