And then we wandered out through the gardens and the park down to the site of the monastery beyond, strolling in and out between the ruined walls and arches, while a nightingale, who night after night gave a concert to his mate at the same hour from the same tree, sang to us his own idea of love.
Not talking this time, either of us, as to the mysteries or pleasures of a world to come—too happy, I am afraid, with this one. And certainly dreaming nothing of a danger that was already drawing nearer and still nearer with the intent to wreck our happiness.
CHAPTER XIII
Meanwhile the wreck still lay in shattered fragments on the beach, and had brought discredit and disaster to at least one family in the village before it disappeared in another and still heavier gale.
It was the best-looking young woman in the parish and the best-looking young man whom I had united to-day in the holy bond of matrimony. And now the wedding-dance was being held in a room twelve feet by twelve, while the wedding-feast of light refreshments was spread in the wash-house adjoining.
Ned Baker was a young fellow of the pale, refined type, looking younger even than his years, and they numbered only twenty-four—a type rarely met with in a country village, with clean and well-cut features, light wavy hair, and the slim hand and tapering fingers that one assigns to a musician, and associates not at all with the rough training of a village carpenter. More fitted, you would say, to stand behind a London counter and minister yards of drapery to some west-end beauty. Perhaps his refinement may have been partially due to delicate health since boyhood; nothing serious his friends would tell you, but just sufficient to unfit him for out-door labour, and direct the tenor of his life to the comparative ease of a carpenter’s workshop.
His wife in all probability, judging from her appearance, would rule the roost. A woman of the strong, well-bosomed order, outcome oftener of the village than the town, with the wild westerly breezes and salt sea air of the Atlantic mantling in her cheek.
Truth to say, Ned was hardly a popular inmate of what was now his native village. In appearance and refinement he was far above the tribe of fishermen who inhabited the scattered hamlet, and won a precarious livelihood from fishing and boating—sometimes, ’twas said, from the jetson cast up by the sea beyond, when a wreck, such as still lay in fragments not one hundred yards from their doors, would strew the shore for miles and miles with drift of freight and timber.
It was natural, perhaps, that they should resent a superiority which contrasted only too strongly with their own rough and rugged natures. Besides, he was an alien—literally a drift from the sea—cast up and laid for dead upon the sand some twenty years ago.
No one knew aught of him—he did not know anything of himself—though his wavy sun-locks and bright blue eyes might have proclaimed him of the north, the fragile incarnation of some Viking of the past. But all was guess-work and mystery, for he was a little lad of three years old when the sea laid him at their doors, after claiming for its own the ship and everything, dead or living, that it had carried for its freight.