IV At Portsannet
The news had spread in Portsannet, and many of the decent fisherfolk had joined the common sort at the head of the street. They murmured, but it was little of their business, after all. Had any of their own kin been seized, they might have resisted; as it was, Portsannet was well rid of a rogue or two; and as for the Pillers, they, too, were in a sort vagrants. True, when a red-haired, slipshod, unkempt wench appeared, holding a dead retriever bitch in her arms, they wondered, and some called her a hussy; but others, looking again, cried that it was a shame. But a dead dog was not a deal to make a trouble about, and what they would be gladdest to see was the stern of the longboat that was fastened down by the jetty.
And why did Jessie, with her lover pinioned and about to be reft from her, take his case less passionately than that of the cold and heavy animal? She could not have told you. Maybe her mind could comprehend only the small evil; or, as men in moments of stress will occupy themselves with foolish, trivial things, an instinct bade her hold the unbearable thought away from her. Likely enough it was this last; for, suddenly seeing Willie’s haggard eyes on her, she cried, faintly: “Dinna look at me now, or ’twill be th’ last! Turn thy face away! And ye—some o’ ye—show me where th’ bailiff lives——”
A woman took her own shawl and set it over her shoulders. “Dinna shame us, lassie,” she said; and “Ay, ay—where d’ye say he lives?” Jessie replied.
“Best tak’ her to our spare cham’er, Ellen,” a man’s voice said; but Jessie called again for the bailiff: he was a harmless man, wi’ a pleasant word for folk; his oaks and pines were but half cut; nay, they had not started with the pines....
“I’ll tak’ ye to th’ bailiff, dearie. Come, then,” said the woman who had given her the shawl; and suddenly Jessie began to tremble. Without glancing once at Willie, she crossed to the narrow entry of a passage, laid down the dog’s body, and then turned to the woman. “Come, make haste,” she said. She passed the lieutenant without seeming to see him. The two women turned into a dark lane that was deep rutted with carts, as if it led to a farm. By and by Jessie began to run.
Through a bare orchard a candle shone in the bailiff’s window. They found him in his comfortable kitchen smoking his strong tobacco. The two pieces of wood he had brought from the Ladyshaws lay on the table before him, and with the point of his penknife he was counting the rings of the tree’s growth. “A hundred and ninety-six—a hundred and ninety-seven—a hundred and ninety-eight,” he said, counting aloud; and when he got to the two hundredth ring he stuck the point of his penknife into the wood and looked up mildly and enquiringly.
Jessie’s railing was past now; she thought no more of Nellie.
“They’re taking th’ men—th’ press—that’s cutting the trees; they’re taking ’em down th’ street now,” she announced shortly; “go stop ’em.”
“Men?” the bailiff enquired, quite unruffled: “Oh, ay, the Pillers. I remember ye were with ’em. Dear, dear, now; that’s awk’ard. Two more days o’ this weather and the leaves’ll be breaking out everywhere. We shall lose the price o’ the bark—wi’out we could prosecute for it—no—now that’s vexing.... Ye’d see this piece of oak this morning? Of course. I’ve counted two hundred; think o’ that! Two hundred year sin’ them letters were cut, and more to count yet.”
“But they’re taking ’em—Willie and Jerry,” Jessie murmured, dazed. “Like enow ye wouldn’t know Willie’s name—it were him cut them pieces for ye.... Oh, man!” she cried suddenly, “he’s my lover—chance ye’re wed yoursel’——”
“Eh?” said the bailiff; “No.”
“Oh, think, wi’ your talk o’ two hundred year—happen lovers cut them marks, same as ye’ve cut a lass’s name on a tree!”
“Them that I heard tell of was King’s marks,” the bailiff mused, “but ay, happen this would be some lad——”
Jessie dropped face foremost on the table, and the fisherwoman spoke sharply.
“Come out o’ your moon-trances, Matthew Hudson!” she cried; “think what can be done. They’ll up anchor in a couple of hours wi’ th’ turn o’ th’ tide.—Wad th’ Warden stop ’em?”
Jessie moaned softly on the table, and the bailiff deliberated.
“Ay—no—there’s no knowing; the Warden might.”
“Then put th’ horse i’ the trap, ye daft fool, and tak’ us ower!” the woman cried, losing her temper.
And as the bailiff set his pieces of wood aside with a sigh, he murmured, “Me wed? No——”
In ten minutes the trap was ready, and the bailiff started the horse at a walk down the rutted lane.
“Give me them reins, ye fat oaf!” Ellen exclaimed. “D’ye think to-morrow’ll do for this?”
She shook up the horse, and the trap rocked and jolted. She made a cut with the whip as they reached the street; but Jessie, her face buried in the shawl, saw nothing of the throng a couple of score yards away.
“He trots better nor he gallops,” the bailiff suggested mildly, as they turned into another miry lane.
Soon Ellen passed the reins to the bailiff and set her arm about Jessie’s swaying, jolting body. She turned back a corner of the shawl to say in her ear, “’Twill be all right yet, dearie! Come, be easy, now.”
Before them, where the road wound round the headland, spread the impenetrable blackness of the sea. A sharp turn showed lights half a mile ahead, a little way up the hill; and as they drew nearer the bailiff remarked, as if the fact were not without interest, “He’s up, for a wonder; I’d have laid a crown he’d gone to bed.”
He pulled up at a wooden gate that had neither lodge nor avenue. One end of the large house a little way up the hill was brightly lighted.
“Lean on my shoulder, lassie,” Ellen said. “And you, Matthew, just step as if ye knew what ye’d come about.”
They passed up the treeless drive, and at a dark side door the bailiff rang a bell. A servant appeared with a candle, the bailiff said a few words, and they were shown into a small office with a desk and ledgers and tin boxes. The servant left the candle on the desk, and they waited.
In five minutes a heavily-built, grave-looking, elderly man appeared in the doorway. He looked first at one, then at another of the three, and, finally, he turned to the bailiff.
“What’s the meaning of this, Hudson?” he demanded.
The bailiff glanced at Ellen and murmured, “Ay, ’tis late—past eleven—half-past eleven, I should say——”
“I’ll tell ye th’ meaning of it, sir,” Ellen said, abruptly. “They’ll be off afore Matthew’s done looking for his wits i’ th’ candle-flame.” She told him how eight or nine unoffending landsmen, going quietly about their trade, had been seized for service on the gun-deck of the third-rater that lay off Portsannet Head.
“Well?” said the Warden; and Matthew removed his eyes from the flame of the candle.
“Ay,” he said. “It’s them that’s pilling up at Ladyshaws, and the question is, sir, in two days the sap’ll be set and ye’ll lose the price o’ the bark. Wi’ them off and away, an action would never lie. The best ye could do would be to seize the odd day’s pilling.”
“I know this woman; who’s the other?”
“Nay, I’m sure I can’t tell ye,” the bailiff replied; and then, at a touch from Ellen, Jessie let the shawl slip from her head, and looked at the grave face of the Warden. She did not speak. Quietly, as quietly as if she had been at her own bedside, she sank to her knees and folded her hands. She closed her eyes, and the Warden looked on her with knitted brows for a moment, and then began to walk up and down the small apartment.
“I think I see,” he said, by and by, stopping before Jessie, and taking her hand and raising her. “I passed Edward my word,” he continued, half to himself, “on condition our own people were unmolested. That I can’t withdraw, not even on the plea that these are in my own employ. But I’ll do what I can. Follow me.”
He led the way along a dark passage, and at the end of it drew a curtain aside. A soft glow of light spread about them. “Go in that door,” the Warden said, pushing Jessie gently forward; and Jessie found herself in a dining-room where half a dozen candles in silver sticks stood over their own still images in a polished table. “There’s the Commander himself,” said the Warden.
A white-haired gentleman, in a rich uniform of blue, white, and gold, sat at one corner of the shining-table. A decanter of wine stood at his elbow, the breaking of the soft light through which dyed the white ruffle at his wrist with ruby red. He was looking at a watch that he held in his hand, and Jessie knew not what beauty it was in his face that seemed to steal like a comforting balsam over her heart. The Warden crossed and spoke in a low voice to him, and presently he looked up from his watch. At a sign from him Jessie stood forward, and Ellen and the bailiff fell back.
“What is your name?” he asked her, in a very gentle voice; and when she had told him, “Where do you live?” he asked again. She told him that, too; and then he began to ask her many questions. What brought her so far from her home? Of what sort were her friends? What her daily life?—She answered all very tremblingly; she felt that there could be no passion in this man’s presence; and by and by he knew all about Willie and Jerry and Fat Maggie and the fatal journey that had given her her first sight of the sea.
“Come nearer, my maid.—And so you have but now seen the sea and a ship?”
“Ay, sir, to my sorrow.”
“So?” answered the stately gentleman. “Ah, women, women, never one of you yet but dreaded the sea!—Tell me, Henry: is it that they know the sea is more powerful than they? Do they know the dream that we, we others, dream—the discontent that lies in all achievement, the urge?... And not the youth only; the old man, too, is drawn from the chimney-corner, as I am drawn—as I must go even now with the turn of the tide.—Well, I had my choice, and twice or thrice I have warmed my hands at a fire that glows on no husband’s hearth. Perhaps I shall do so once more, and so die content. For marrying some, but we others are for the sea, the dream, the unrest....” He mused, and Jessie wondered if the face of a saint could be more beautiful than that on which her eyes were fixed.
“Well, that is my destiny, not another’s,” he resumed by and by.—“My child, have they told you why the acorn is set in the ground, and tended and fostered till it becomes a tree, and then dies, as we all die, to a nobler service?”
Jessie did not reply, not rightly understanding him; and the white-haired commander, putting his fingers into the pocket of his waistcoat, drew out two acorns. He considered them as they lay in the palm of his hand.
“Heart o’ the oak, that holds it all for us, for us others—the rest we scorned in our youth, the boundless sea, the endeavour that must be its own reward, the pleasantness of life foregone.... It may be that we chose ignorantly, blindly; perhaps we have doubted since, doubted but it had been better to choose the shelter of the rafters and the woman at our side and the little ones... no matter. Twice or thrice, and once more under God’s pleasure.... Girl, I come ashore but thrice in ten years, and there are hardly ten of years now remaining to me. For thirty years I have carried acorns in my pocket, and have planted them when opportunity came, and have seen tall oaks of my own planting. And your woodsmen come in the season and cut them down, and they are bolted together to be the houses of some of us—our hearths, homes, lodging, we others who have chosen it so.... Think of it when you see your lover set his hand to the axe, and when you feel his arms about you in the darkness, too.... You, too, have your choice; go—nay, stay.—You shall see the last of me, Henry: the gig is waiting now.—Plant me these last acorns, girl; heart o’ the oak, heart o’ the oak....”
The tide rustled and talked as it receded swiftly down the river channel, and here and there one of the stakes that marked out the waterway could be distinguished dimly in the darkness. The craft in the harbour began to heel over as the water left them. The tide washed and slapped against hulls and pebbles and wooden groynes and stone angles; and at the top of the breakwater half a dozen lanterns showed a group of dark figures that looked seaward.
The riding-lights of the ship had changed position; and between the ship and the harbour mouth the grunt of oars on rowlocks could be heard. A light appeared at the bow of a boat and shone on the water that broke at its foot. The groups shuffled to one side of the breakwater as the creaking of the oars drew nearer, and they could see the effort of the rowers as the current became rapid and confined. The boat laboured up past the stone entrance, and a man ran along the breakwater, leaped down to the crunching pebbles, and cast a rope. The pebbles grated harshly as the group followed him and pressed down to the boats. A man sprang from the ship’s boat to a rocking dinghy, and thence to another and another; and the boats tossed and knocked, and the water lapped loudly. The man sprang down to the beach, and Jessie Wheeler ran to him with a low cry. Another followed him, but, except that Jennie Holmes cried once “Father!” nobody spoke. In a few minutes all were landed, and the boat was thrust off immediately. Mechanically the group moved towards the breakwater again; they stood there as the boat dropped down the harbour and went out on the whispering tide.
Suddenly Jennie Holmes broke into hysterical sobs, and Willie Ramsey caught Jessie in his arms as she reeled against a wooden butt.
A woman touched his arm.
“Are ye him?... Ay, she’s overwrought. Ye’d best carry her to my house while morning. Happen a two-three neighbours’ll put the rest o’ ye up. What say ye, folk?”
—And the Pillers turned their backs to the sea, filed off the breakwater, and followed the men and women of Portsannet.