I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales Part 5

"I was thinkin' the same. Well, come along; for tho' I don't like the cut o' your jib, you'm a terrible handsome chap, and as clean-built as ever I see. Now then, one arm round my neck and t'other on the line, but don't bear too hard on it, for I doubt 'tis weakish. Bless the Lord, the tide's running."

So they began their journey. Zeb had taken barely a dozen strokes when the other groaned and began to hang more heavily on his neck. But he fought on, though very soon the struggle became a blind and horrible nightmare to him. The arm seemed to creep round his throat and strangle him, and the blackness of a great night came down over his eyes.

Still he struck out, and, oddly enough, found himself calling to his comrade to hold tight.

When Sim Udy and Elias Sweetland dashed in from the sh.o.r.e and swam to the rescue, they found the pair clinging to the line, and at a standstill. And when the four were helped through the breakers to firm earth, Zeb tottered two steps forward and dropped in a swoon, burying his face in the sand.

"He's not as strong as I," muttered the stranger, staring at Parson Babbage in a dazed, uncertain fashion, and uttering the words as if they had no connection with his thoughts. "I'm afraid--sir--I've broken--his heart."

And with that he, too, fainted, into the Parson's arms.

"Better carry the both up to Sheba," said Farmer Tresidder.

Ruby lay still abed when Mary Jane, who had been moving about the kitchen, sleepy-eyed, getting ready the breakfast, dashed up-stairs with the news that two dead men had been taken off the wreck and were even now being brought into the yard.

"You coa.r.s.e girl," she exclaimed, "to frighten me with such horrors!"

"Oh, very well," answered Mary Jane, who was in a rebellious mood, "then I'm goin' down to peep; for there's a kind o'

what-I-can't-tell-'ee about dead men that's very enticin', tho' it do make you feel all-overish."

By and by she came back panting, to find Ruby already dressed.

"Aw, Miss Ruby, dreadful news I ha' to tell, tho' joyous in a way.

Would 'ee mind catchin' hold o' the bed-post to give yoursel' fort.i.tude?

Now let me cast about how to break it softly. First, then, you must know he's not dead at all--"

"Who is not?"

"Your allotted husband, miss--Mister Zeb."

"Why, who in the world said he was?"

"But they took en up for dead, miss--for he'd a-swum out to the wreck, an' then he'd a-swum back with a man 'pon his back--an' touchin' sh.o.r.e, he fell downward in a swound, marvellous like to death for all to behold. So they brought en up here, 'long wi' the chap he'd a-saved, an' dressed en i' the spare room blankets, an' gave en clane sperrits to drink, an' lo! he came to; an' in a minnit, lo! agen he went off; an'--"

Ruby, by this time, was half-way down the stairs. Running to the kitchen door she flung it open, calling "Zeb! Zeb!"

But Young Zeb had fainted for the third time, and while others of the group merely lifted their heads at her entrance, the old crowder strode towards her with some amount of sternness on his face.

"Kape off my son!" he shouted. "Kape off my son Zebedee, and go up-stairs agen to your prayers; for this be all your work, in a way--you gay good-for-nuthin'!"

"Indeed, Mr. Minards," retorted Ruby, firing up under this extravagant charge and bridling, "pray remember whose roof you're under, with your low language."

"Begad," interposed a strange voice, "but that's the spirit for me, and the mouth to utter it!"

Ruby, turning, met a pair of luminous eyes gazing on her with bold admiration. The eyes were set in a cadaverous, but handsome, face; and the face belonged to the stranger, who had recovered of his swoon, and was now stretched on the settle beside the fire.

"I don't know who you may be, sir, but--"

"You are kind enough to excuse my rising to introduce myself.

My name is Zebedee Minards."

CHAPTER IV.

YOUNG ZEB FETCHES A CHEST OF DRAWERS.

The parish of Ruan Lanihale is bounded on the west by Porthlooe, a fishing town of fifteen hundred inhabitants or less, that blocks the seaward exit of a narrow coombe. A little stream tumbles down this coombe towards the "Hauen," divides the folk into parishioners of Lanihale and Landaviddy, and receives impartially the fish offal of both. There is a good deal of this offal, especially during pilchard time, and the towns-folk live on their first storeys, using the lower floors as fish cellars, or "pallaces." But even while the nose most abhors, the eye is delighted by jumbled houses, crazy stairways leading to green doors, a group of children dabbling in the mud at low tide, a congregation of white gulls, a line of fishing boats below the quay where the men lounge and whistle and the barked nets hang to dry, and, beyond all, the shorn outline of two cliffs with a wedge of sea and sky between.

Mr. Zebedee Minards the elder dwelt on the eastern or Lanihale side of the stream, and a good way back from the Hauen, beside the road that winds inland up the coombe. Twenty yards of garden divided his cottage door from the road, and prevented the inmates from breaking their necks as they stepped over its threshold. Even as it was, Old Zeb had acquired a habit of singing out "Ware heads!" to the wayfarers whenever he chanced to drop a rotund object on his estate; and if any small article were missing indoors, would descend at once to the highway with the cheerful a.s.surance, based on repeated success, of finding it somewhere below.

Over and above its recurrent crop of potatoes and flatpoll cabbages, this precipitous garden depended for permanent interest on a collection of marine curiosities, all eloquent of disaster to shipping. To begin with, a colossal and highly varnished Cherokee, once the figure-head of a West Indiaman, stood sentry by the gate and hung forward over the road, to the discomfiture of unwarned and absent-minded bagmen. The path to the door was guarded by a low fence of split-bamboo baskets that had once contained sugar from Batavia; a coffee bag from the wreck of a Dutch barque served for door-mat; a rum-cask with a history caught rain-water from the eaves; and a lapdog's paG.o.da--a dainty affair, striped in scarlet and yellow, the jetsom of some pa.s.senger ship--had been deftly adapted by Old Zeb, and stood in line with three straw bee-skips under the eastern wall.

The next day but one after Christmas dawned deliciously in Porthlooe, bright with virginal sunshine, and made tender by the breath of the Gulf Stream. Uncle Issy, pa.s.sing up the road at nine o'clock, halted by the Cherokee to pa.s.s a word with its proprietor, who presented the very antipodes of a bird's-eye view, as he knocked about the crumbling clods with his visgy at the top of the slope.

"Mornin', Old Zeb; how be 'ee, this dellicate day?"

"Brave, thankee, Uncle."

"An' how's Coden Rachel?"

"She's charmin', thankee."

"Comely weather, comely weather; the gulls be comin' back down the coombe, I see."

"I be jealous about its lastin'; for 'tis over-rathe for the time o'

year. Terrible topsy-turvy the seasons begin to run, in my old age.

Here's May in Janewarry; an' 'gainst May, comes th' east wind breakin'

the ships o' Tarshish."

"Now, what an instructive chap you be to conva.r.s.e with, I do declare!

Darned if I didn' stand here two minnits, gazin' up at the seat o' your small-clothes, tryin' to think 'pon what I wanted to say; for I'd a notion that I wanted to speak, cruel bad, but cudn' lay hand on't.

So at last I takes heart an' says 'Mornin', I says, beginnin' i' that very common way an' hopin' 'twould come. An' round you whips wi'

'ships o' Tarshish' pon your tongue; an' henceforth 'tis all Q's an'

A's, like a cattykism."

"Well, now you say so, I _did_ notice, when I turned round, that you was lookin' no better than a fool, so to speak. But what's the notion?"

"'Tis a question I've a-been daggin' to ax'ee ever since it woke me up in the night to spekilate thereon. For I felt it very curious there shud he three Zebedee Minardses i' this parish a-drawin' separate breath at the same time."

"Iss, 'tis an out-o'-the-way fact."

"A stirrin' age, when such things befall! If you'd a-told me, a week agone, that I should live to see the like, I'd ha' called 'ee a liar; an' yet here I be a-talkin' away, an' there you be a-listening an' here be the old world a-spinnin' us round as in bygone times--"

"Iss, iss--but what's the question?"

"--All the same when that furriner chap looks up in Tresidder's kitchen an' says 'My name is Zebedee Minards,' you might ha' blown me down wi' a puff; an' says I to mysel', wakin' up last night an' thinkin'--'I'll ax a question of Old Zeb when I sees en, blest if I don't.'"