A Singer from the Sea

by Amelia E. Barr

“But it is my duty now, Roland. I will begin to-morrow.”

So the next day Denasia went to the agencies, and Roland promised to take care of baby. A two weeks of exhausting waiting and seeking, of delayed hope and destroyed hope, followed; and Denasia was forced to admit that she had made no impression on the managerial mind. No one had heard of her singing and dancing, and those who condescended to listen were not enthusiastic.

“You see,” said one of the kindest of these caterers for the public’s pleasure––“you see, New Yorkers have no ideas about fisher men and women. If their fish is fresh, that is all that troubles them. If they think about the men who catch it, they very likely think of them as living comfortably in flats with all the modern improvements. A good topical song, a spirited dance––they are the things that fetch.”

In different forms this was the general verdict, and every day she found it harder and harder to return home and meet Roland’s eager face as she opened the door. Pretty soon the anxiety became tinctured with complaint and unreasonable ill-temper, and with all the domestic miseries which accompany resentful poverty.

The poor little baby in Roland’s opinion was to blame for every disappointment. Its arrival had belated Denasia’s application, or if he wanted to be particularly irritating, he accused Denasia of being in such a hurry to return to her child that she did not attend to her most necessary duties. So instead 238 of being a loving tie between them, the poor wailing little morsel of humanity separated very love, while Roland’s complaints of it soon really produced in his heart the impatient dislike which at first he only pretended.

He grumbled when left in charge of the cradle. As soon as Denasia was out of sight he frequently deserted his duty, and the disputes that followed hardened his heart continually against the cause of them. And when it came to naming the child, he averred that it was a matter of no importance to him, only he would not have it called Roland. “There had been,” he said, “one too many of the Treshams called Roland. The name was unlucky; and besides, the child did not resemble his family. It looked just like the St. Penfer fisher children.”

Denasia coloured furiously, but she answered with the moderation of accepted punishment, “Very well, then! I will call him ‘John’ after my father. I hope he may be as good a man.”

Matters went on in this unhappy fashion until the end of October––nay, they continually grew worse, for poverty deepened and hope lessened. Denasia had lost the freshness of her beauty, and she was too simple and ignorant to make art replace nature. Indeed, it is doubtful whether any persuasion could have made her imitate the “painted Jezebel” who had always been one of the most pointed examples of her religious education. In her first experience of public life her radiant health and colouring shamed all meaner aids and had been amply sufficient for the brightest lights and the longest hours. 239 But that fierce ordeal of acclimating under conditions of constant travel and hard work had drained even the magnificent vitality that had been her heritage from generations of seamen, and typhoid and unhappy maternity had robbed her of much of her almost defiant youth, with its indomitable spirit and invincible hope.

She had become by the close of October pale, fragile-looking, and woefully depressed. Roland no longer found her always smiling and hoping, and he called the change bad temper when he ought to have called it hunger. Not indeed hunger in its baldest form for mere bread, but hunger just as killing––hunger for the nourishing delicate food and proper tonics that were just as necessary as bread; hunger for hope, for work, and, above all, hunger for affection.

For Roland had begun privately––yea, and sometimes openly––to call himself a fool. And the devil, who never chooses a wrong hour, sent him at this time an important letter from Elizabeth. In it she told him that Mr. Burrell had died suddenly from apoplexy, and that she had resolved to sell Burrell Court and make her residence in London and Lucerne. She deplored his absence, and said how much she had needed some one of her own family in the removal from Cornwall and in the settlement of her husband’s estate; and she sent her brother a much smaller sum of money than she had ever sent before.