Beggars on Horseback Part 14

As Sophia felt the anguish of the Person who had absorbed her, she realized it was the same as hers--the fear and pain of barrenness.

Whether she had known all along that it was the repeat, the echo, of a vision of Beata's that was on her, or whether she only knew it then, she could never have told. No actual child that might have been cried to the Beata consciousness, only natural longings apart from any one person, yet the anguish bit keenly, for with it went fear--the deadly fear lest barrenness should be deliberate sin against life. Powerless to help, Sophia saw the thought turn in the other's mind, and with that they both entered into the last phase of the vision. Here Sophia, who had not trained herself, like Beata, to prolonged sustaining of the will, flagged and began to fail. A brightness that was too strong for her, a sense as of great Shapes, a looming Presence, swept on to her, wrapped her round, overweighted her. She struggled to keep up with the Beata consciousness, for she knew if only she could succeed in that she would find the answer to her own sorrow and Beata's fear. The outer world had begun to come back, the towers of the town showed as through a mist, some growing more and more definite; some, those of Beata's day, wavering uncertainly. . . . She strained her flagging nerves, caught at her subsiding energies in one last effort. . . . A divine warmth suffused her breast; sky and air were filled with the gleam of a fiery Child that flashed towards her, filled her arms; and sank, not away, but into her very soul and, like quick stars, she saw the wounds on His hands and feet.

With that she knew, as Beata had known, that this was the reward of virginity, that each virgin could mother the Christ-child afresh. She knew that to those to whom the joy of making a living body with its corresponding soul is denied, creation is not stilled, that there need be no barrenness in a garden enclosed. For she saw that there is no sterility save that of the wilful mind.

With a shock the present reeled into its place; spiritual vision was past and physical vision lost keenness as her own blurred sight swam back to her; and, worn out, hardly conscious of her own life, but filled with peace, Sophia lay along the seat in the kindly dusk.

She was still to know month upon month of pain; sometimes acute as when she stayed out of doors all night and made sounds and hurt herself physically to distract her mind's distress; but mostly an ache that bore on her like a weight, sometimes invading dreams and always by her bedside when she awakened. She was to find that for the friendship she could have made so exquisite he had no gift; she was to feel the many hurts his lack of thoughtfulness inflicted; she was to bear the unhappiness of seeing him unworthy of all that might have been so good in him as he let himself drift into flirtations where not one of his finer senses was touched. She was to feel one sharpest hour of any, when the time came, which, if she had given herself would have seen his child in her arms. . . .

And through everything, through the dreadful London months of loneliness and the cruder physical hardships of extreme poverty; through her weary clear-eyed knowledge of him she was to come back perpetually to the refrain--that surprised herself after a few weeks of comparative calm when she hoped she was "getting over it"--of "How I love him." She had no high-flown theories of love; she knew he was not what is tritely called "the right man," he was more--he was the one she loved well enough to forgive for not being the "right one," and in those moments there was no evading the simple fact that she would have given all the rest of her life to have been his wife for one year and have borne him a child.

But, through and above and around all that, went the memory of Beata's vision which she too had seen. The vision itself was often dark and meaningless to her in the actuality of her love and pain, but of the knowledge that she had had it she was never bereft. Also, it was hers to create those pleasant fruits and chief spices of which the greatest love-song in the world tells as growing only in a garden enclosed.

THE MAN WITH TWO MOUTHS

On a grey day a girl was walking along a crescent of sand that curved at the cliff's base. As she went the water welled up in the slanting hollows left by her feet, and the fat, evil-looking leaves of the cliff plants glistened with spray moisture; even the swollen fingers of the marsh samphire, that all seemed to point at the girl as she pa.s.sed, each bore a tremulous drop at the tip. At the end of the little beach the girl paused, and then turned to look out to sea, balancing herself on a slab of wet shiny granite, where the cone-shaped sh.e.l.lfish cl.u.s.tered and from which the long green weed floated out and in on the heave of the tide. The girl held back the red hair that whipped about her forehead and stared from under an arched palm.

"'Tes naught but a plaguey dolphin, d'believe," she muttered, yet still stayed for one more glimpse of the dark thing that was bobbing up through the curdling foam-pattern. A stinging scatter of spray blew into her eyes, blinding her, and when she looked again the dark thing had come nearer, and she saw it to be the body of a man caught in the ratlines of some shrouds that the sea's action had lapped around the mast they had once guarded. Were it not that his chin was. .h.i.tched over the ratlines, so that he was borne along with his face--a pale blot among the paler blots of the foam--upturned, he would doubtless have sunk, for he was not lashed to the mast in any way. A huge foam patch had formed in the web made by the tangled shrouds, so that his head and shoulders showed clearly against the creaming halo, on which his long hair, dark with wet and released from its queue, lay streaked away from his tilted face. The girl called to him twice in her strong, rough voice; then, since even if he still lived he was past any consciousness of doing so, she kept her energies for the saving of him. Wading in as deep as she dared--not more than up to her hips, for even then the heave and suction of the water threatened to knock her off her feet--she clung on to a ridge of rock with one hand, and, leaning forward, made s.n.a.t.c.hes at the spar whenever it surged towards her. To her dismay she saw that with every heave his legs must be catching against some rocks, for his head began to sink away from the supporting ratlines, and when at last she caught one end of the spar she only succeeded in drawing it away from him. His head disappeared; for a moment the dark hole in the midst of the foam-circle held, then broke, and was overrun as the whiteness closed upon it. The next minute a surge of undercurrent brought him knocking against her legs; she just managed to hold on with one hand while with the other she plunged down at him. Her fingers met the cold sleekness of his face, then caught in his tangled hair, and, drawing herself up backwards against the rock-ledges, she pulled him with her, step by step. A few moments more and she had staggered up the narrow strip of beach with her burden dragging from her arms. Tumbling him along the drier sand at the cliff's foot, she knelt beside him, and with hands trembling from the strain that had been put upon the muscles, she pulled apart the clinging shirt that was so sodden it seemed to peel from off him. She felt at his heart, then laid her ear to the pale glistening chest where the dark hair was matted to a point between the b.r.e.a.s.t.s; she beat that pale chest with her hand, and at last saw the faint red respond to the blows of her fingers. On that much of hope she desisted, seemed to hesitate, then half-hauling him up by a hand beneath each shoulder, she began dragging him towards where the cliff curved outwards again to the sea. At a point some three or four feet from the ground the cliff overhung so that it was possible to imagine creeping beneath it at low tide, though a curtain of glossy spleen-wort hung down so thickly it was difficult to tell. Going upon her knees, the girl crawled backwards under the dripping dark green fringe, and pulled the man in after her. Within, a tunnel, in which it was soon possible to walk upright, led at a gradual incline up to what was apparently the heart of the cliff, which here was honeycombed into those smugglers'

caves of the West of which even now all the secrets are not known. Up this incline she got herself and him, and at last dragged him triumphantly into the big cave where she and her father, Bendigo Keast, stored the smuggled goods in which they traded so successfully. It was very dark, but with accustomed hands she felt for the small iron box in which the flint and tinder were kept; soon a tiny flame sprang to life, and she pa.s.sed it on to a wick that floated limply in a little cup of stinking fish-oil on the floor. In the mere breath of light thus given the rows of stacked barrels loomed dimly, the outermost curve of each gleaming faintly, while between them the shadow lay banded.

Thomasin Keast ran some brandy from a little keg near into her palm and tilted it between the man's teeth, then slopped the raw spirit over his shirt, drenching it again. Then--not stripping him, for the modesty of a Cornish woman, who thinks shame to show even her feet, prevented that--she filled her hands with brandy and ran them in under his clothes, rubbing tirelessly up and down till the flesh began to dry and tingle. Around his reddened neck, where the soft young beard merged into wet curls, she rubbed; over his shoulders, where the big pectoral muscles came swelling past his armpits like a cape, then down the serried ribs that she could knead the supple flesh around, past the curve-in of the whole body beneath them, to the gracious slimness of the flanks and the nervous indentation of the groins between the trunk and the springing arches of the thighs. So Thomasin knelt in the gloom of the cave, and all the time that his life was coming painfully and reluctantly back to him under her strong, glowing hands, she felt as though some presage of new life were flowing into herself. The old saw has it that the saving of a drowning man brings ill-luck to his rescuer; but Thomasin, as she watched grow in his features that intangible something which makes the face human instead of a mere mask, scorned the superst.i.tion; and still more she scorned it as her urgent hands felt the rising beat of his pulses and arteries. For during that time his hidden form became so known to her that his every curve and muscle, the very feel of the strong-growing hair upon him softening into down as his skin dried, all impressed themselves clearly on her memory for ever, and she felt him hers--hers by right of discovery as well as right of salvage.

Thomasin Keast and her father lived in a little four-square cottage set about half a mile from the headland--a half-mile of thorn and bracken, of tumbled boulders and wedges of furze almost as solid. Here in the spring the yellow-hammer and the linnet, the stonechat and the whinchat, shrilled their first notes, and at dawn the greybird thrust a thirsty beak into the dewy blackthorn blossoms; here the dun-coloured rabbits darted in and out of their burrows with a gleam of white scuts. Here, too, Keast and his daughter herded the moorland ponies that, well-soaped, were loaded with the barrels of spirit and packets of lace which had been brought from France at dark of the moon. The cottage was of rough grey granite, with a roof crusted with yellow stonecrop that looked as though it had been spilled molten over the slates. On either side of the door a great wind-b.u.t.tress, reaching to the eaves, swept out like a sheltering wing.

This was the place to which Thomasin Keast brought her man on that stormy evening. Dusk was already making the air deeply, softly blue, and through it the whitewashed lintel gleamed out almost as clearly as the phosph.o.r.escent fish nailed against the wall. Half-leading, half-supporting him, Thomasin steered the stranger between the b.u.t.tresses and through the narrow doorway into the living-room. A peat fire glowed on the hearth and against it the figure of a crouching man showed dark. At the noise in the doorway he thrust an armful of furze on to the fire, and the quick crackling flare that followed threw a reflection like the flashing of summer lightning over the whitewashed walls, sending the shadows scurrying into the corners and revealing the man whose big hand, ridged with raised veins that ran up to the wrist, was still upon the furze-stem.

Bendigo Keast was not long past his prime of strength and could still have out-wrestled many a younger man. Through his jersey the working of his enormous shoulders showed as plainly as those of a cat beneath her close fur, and under his chin the reddish beard could not hide the knots of his powerful throat. His eyes, blue and extraordinarily alert, were half-hidden by the purpled lids, and the ma.s.sive folds of his cheeks that came down in a furrow on either side of his slightly incurved mouth, looked hard as iron. Like most seamen when within doors, he was in his stockings, and as he rose and his bulk swayed forward his feet broadened a little and gripped at the uneven flagstones like those of a great ape.

Thomasin spoke first.

"'Tes a man I found drownen', da," she said, and in her voice uneasiness mingled with a readiness for defiance. "He'm most dead wi' salt water, and cold. Us must get en to the bed to wance. Da . . ."

"Where did ee find en?" asked Bendigo Keast, without moving.

"To cove."

"Did a see aught?"

"How should a, and him nigh drowned?" evaded Thomasin; then, as the stranger sank on to the settle and let his wet brown head fall limply back against it, she went over to a crock of milk that stood in the window-sill and poured some into a saucepan.

"Get en to the bed, da," she said more sharply. "I'll see to your supper. He must have nawthen but milk for the night."

Bendigo came forward, and, swinging his long arms round the man, carried him off up the stairs that led from the living-room into the first of the two tiny bedrooms. He soon came down again.

"Tell me how tes a smells of brandy?" he demanded.

"I rubbed en down wi' et to put life into en." Thomasin spoke quietly, but the sound of her stirring spoon grew less rhythmical.

"Then a did see?"

"Da, listen to me," said Thomasin, turning round. "S'pose a did see, what then? He'm naught but a foreigner from up-country, and wouldn't know to give we away. And--s'posen he'm minded to stay by us--well, you d'knaw we'm needing another hand. We must find one somewhere, and there's none o' the chaps to the church-town would come in wi' us, because us have allus stood by oursel' and made our own profits. But now Dan's dead, you d'knaw as well's I us must get another hand to help in the _Merrymaid_. If you wern't so strong and I as good as a man, it would ha' needed four of us to ha' run her."

"How can us knaw whether to trust en?" asked Bendigo suspiciously. "Tes bad luck to save a man from the sea, they do say."

"Don't decide nawthen tell you've talked wi' en," advised Thomasin. "May be the poor chap was too mazed to take notice o' what he saw. Us'll knaw to-morrow."

And next day the rescued man was sitting by the hearth, somewhat stiff from bruises, but otherwise with his wiry frame none the worse. His looks had strikingly improved, for now that the soft beard, which had never known a razor, was dry, it peaked forward a little, whereas when wet it had clung to his too narrow jaw and revealed a lax line of chin.

His story was soon told--the brig on which he was mate had been returning from France when a squall overtook her, and she became a total wreck. He had clung to the floating spar for several hours before losing consciousness, when the tangled ratlines had borne him up and the tide had swept him into the sh.o.r.eward current which set round the headland.

"And the first thing I knew," he ended, "was your face, mistress, bending over me in your cave. . . ."

Keast shot a glance at his daughter. They had exchanged looks before, at the man's mention of France, and now Bendigo flung a few veiled phrases, with here and there a cant term common to smugglers, at his guest, who understood him perfectly, and himself became entirely frank. His name, he said, was Robin Start, and that there was mixed blood in him he admitted. A more gracious race showed itself in his quick turns of wrist and eye, his ease of phrase, in his ready gallantry towards Thomasin.

Yes, said Robin Start, his mother was a Frenchwoman, and had taught him her tongue--a fact he found useful in his dealings on the other side of the Channel.

A bargain is an intricate and subtle thing in Cornwall, a thing of innuendoes and reservations, and the one Bendigo Keast struck with the stranger was not without subtleties on both sides. Robin Start had quite understood all he had seen in the cave, and had made a mental note of the way out, which gave him a hold over Bendigo. On the other hand, Robin, who suffered paroxysms of craving for safety in the intervals of delighting in danger, knew it was safer to come in with Bendigo and make something for himself smuggling than it would be for him to think of escaping from that muscular father and daughter if he declined. As for Keast, it was true that since his nephew Dan had been knocked on the head by a swing of the boom, he needed some one to take the lad's place.

A bottle of smuggled rum sealed the bargain, and then, for the first time in her life, Thomasin was talked to as a woman. To her father a partner; a mere fellow-man to the dark, silent Daniel who now lay in the lap of the tides; shunned by the envious villagers, and looked at askance by the Government men, Thomasin had never known of the sphere which began to be revealed to her that evening. For one thing, she was plain, though in certain lights or effects of wind she looked fine enough in a high-boned, rock-hewn way. She was what is called in that part of the world a "red-headed Dane," and her broad, strongly modelled face was thickly powdered with freckles. Though she was only twenty-two, hundreds of nights of exposure to wind and wet had roughened her skin, but at the opening of her bodice, where a hint of collar-bones showed like a bar beneath the firm flesh, her skin was privet-white. The slim, brown-haired Robin with his quick eyes was a contrast in looks and manners to anyone she had ever met, and mingled with her awe and wonder of him was the fierce sense of possession that had entered into her when she pa.s.sed her hands over and over him in the cave. Also she felt maternal towards him because, though he must have been nigh upon thirty, he was one of those men who have a quality of appeal.

It was a stormy autumn that year, and little was possible in the way of business; but for Thomasin, who up till now had lived so whole-heartedly for her partnership with her father, it became that time of which at least the mirage appears to every one once in life. For her happiness she and Robin repainted her other love, the _Merrymaid_, together; giving her a new black coat and a white ribbon, and changing the green of her upright stem to blue. The _Merrymaid_ was constantly adopting little disguises of the sort, running sometimes under barked sails, sometimes under white, and alternating between a jib and a gaff-topsail with a square head. Then in the long winter evenings the Keasts and Robin would sit by the fire, Bendigo pulling at his clay pipe, and Thomasin knitting a perpetual grey stocking--surely as innocent and law-abiding an interior as could have been found!--while Robin told them tales of all he had seen and done. Bendigo now and then gave a grunt that might have been of dissent, interest, or merely of incipient sleep, but Thomasin sat enthralled by the soft tones that to her mind could have lured a bird from the egg. Robin told of the thick yellow sea towards the north of China, so distinct from the blue sea around that it looked more like a vast shoal of sand, stretching for mile upon mile. He told, too, of the reddish dust, fine as mist, which once fell for days over his ship when he was far out at sea; it fell until the decks seemed like a dry soft beach, and lungs and eyes and at last their very souls seemed filled with it. His captain said it was blown along the upper air all the way from the Mongolian plains, but he himself thought it came from j.a.pan, that country of volcanoes. Thomasin's ideas of volcanoes were derived from a broadside she had once seen which represented Vesuvius apparently on fire from the base, but she felt sure the mysterious sand was of the devil, and must come from somewhere hot.

So Robin talked and Thomasin listened, and with the coming of spring new portents woke in her blood and stirred the air. Robin began to slip his hand up her arm when he stood beside her in the shadow of the wind-b.u.t.tresses, and when they went down to the caves he would make opportunities to press against her in the pa.s.sages. The sheer animal magnetism of the girl allured him, and he found her crude and hitherto fierce aloofness going to his head. Though frequently now he felt a sudden pa.s.sion of distaste for the physical strength of this father and daughter sweep over him, yet would come another pa.s.sion, waked by the wonder of it that still lay in Thomasin's eyes--and he would think of what a pleasure was at his hand in Thomasin's potentialities for pa.s.sion and the freshness of her. . . .

She herself was reluctant yet, for all her hot blood and untrained nature, partly because of the ingrained suspicion of soft things her upbringing had engendered, partly because of the eternal instinct which prompts withdrawal for the purpose of luring on. But in her heart she knew--she knew when the spring was on the cliffs, and he and she lay on the thymy gra.s.s watching for the fish-shoals; when around Robin's turf-pillowed head the rose-specked, flesh-hued cups of the sea-milkwort stood up br.i.m.m.i.n.g with the jewelled air as with a divine nectar; when among the cushions of silvery lichen and grey-green moss the scented gorse flung a riot of yellow, and the mating birds answered each other on a note like secret laughter. Then Thomasin would sometimes close her eyes for the happiness she dared not yet acknowledge; yet those days of soft joy and beauty were as nothing to the night of hard work and danger that finally brought her surging blood to acknowledge him as lord--that night when all the dominant male in him was of necessity stung to the surface by danger.

They were running a cargo of thirty barrels over from France--he, she, and her father. The _Merrymaid_, which was sloop-rigged and of about twenty tons burden, was quite enough for the three to handle, laden as she was with the corded tubs slung together with the stones already attached; for it was proposed to sink the cargo and then run on to harbour openly, a thing frequently done when the Preventive men were known to be on the watch. Robin was suffering from one of his nerve-revulsions; he dared show no sign of it, but as he sat in the bows, keeping a look-out through the darkness, he told himself that if this trip were brought off in safety it would be the last as far as he was concerned. He could stand the portentous figure of Bendigo looming at him through the little cottage no more, and he knew what to do. . . .

As for Thomasin, he would not lose her--a woman surely sticks by her man. And if not, she would never harm him; and there were other women in the world--for the appeal Thomasin had for him was of s.e.x, and not of personality.

Thomasin sat with her arm along the tiller, keeping the _Merrymaid_ on a nor'-nor'-west course so as to make the Lizard light. They were running under their foresail and close-reefed mainsail only, for the south-west wind for which they had waited was swelling to storm-fury.

The _Merrymaid_ lay right over, the water scolding past her dipping gunwale and the clots of spindrift that whirled over the side gleaming like snowflakes in the darkness, which was of that intense quality which becomes vibrant to long staring. Robin, straining his eyes, was only aware of the danger when they were almost on it, but his voice shrieked out on the instant to Thomasin: "Hard-a-port!" and again, in a desperate hurry of sound, "Hard-a-port!"

Thomasin jambed the helm up as Bendigo, with the agility of long use to sudden danger, eased off the sheets; and then Thomasin could see what menaced them. A Preventive boat, like themselves with no light save the wretched glimmer over the compa.s.s, had been lying to under her mizzen, and already her men were making sail. Thomasin sat gripping the tiller while the voices of her menfolk came to her ears.

"The topsail!" shouted Robin; but Bendigo's voice made answer: "Not till us has to--it might rip mast off in this gale. Try the jib. . . ."

They set the jib and shook out the reefs in the mainsail, and the _Merrymaid_ answered to it like a racehorse to the whip. She quivered all her length, the tiller pushed like a sentient thing against Thomasin's palm and they went reeling on.

For nearly an hour they ran before the wind, helped by the flood-tide, and all the time the Preventive boat was slowly gaining on them, for she was carrying a larger stretch of canvas. She was nearly upon them when the sound of breaking surf told that they were nearing the Manacles, and the tide was still fairly low. Suddenly Robin's voice came again, this time with a thrill in it: "Now's our chance!" he called. "We'll hoist the topsail and make a run for it inside of the Manacles."

He was at the mast as he spoke, and Thomasin heard the thin scream of the unoiled sheave as the topsail halliards ran through it. The next moment the mast creaked and bent; the almost useless jib slackened as the other sails took all of the wind, and the _Merrymaid_ shook her nose and plunged into the broken water that gleamed between the blackness of the mainland and the Manacles.

"They'll never dare follow!" cried Bendigo; and even as he did so, the Preventive boat, trusting to her superior speed to make good, began to come round to the wind so as to pa.s.s the Manacles on the outer side. The added strain proved too much, and her mast snapped with a report like a gunshot--the one clean, sharp sound through all that flurry of rushing, edgeless noise, and it told its own tale to the eager ears on the _Merrymaid_. She, under the influence of the topsail, was burying her bows at every plunge, and Thomasin knew, by the sudden cessation of the tiller's tug, that the rudder had lifted clear of the racing water, only to drive into it again with a blow that sent her reeling. Thomasin's fight with the boat she loved began in real earnest. Yawing stubbornly, the _Merrymaid_ pulled against the tiller so that the rough wood seemed to burn into Thomasin's flesh, so hard had she to grip it to keep the boat's head from going up into the wind.

With the breath failing in her throat, she had none left to cry for help; she could only wrestle with the tiller, which, all the weight of the yawing _Merrymaid_ against it, seemed about to crush her.