In the Roar of the Sea Part 46

"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 pa.s.sion 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 sh.o.r.e 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 sh.o.r.e. 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 ash.o.r.e 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 circ.u.mstance, 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 hara.s.s 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 x.x.xI.

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 s.p.a.ce. 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 s.p.a.ce 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."