A Singer from the Sea

by Amelia E. Barr

“So the boat was built. Aw, they wouldn’t be hoult; And every trennel and every boult The best of stuff. Aw, didn’ considher The ‘spense nor nothin’––not a fig! And three lugs at her––that was the rig–– And raked a bit, three reg’lar scutchers, And carried her canvas like a ducherss. Chut! the trim is in the boat. Ballast away! but the trim’s in the float–– In the very make of her! That’s the trimming!” ––T. E. Brown.

Money in the bank is all the comfort to the material life that a good conscience is to the moral life. Joan was restored to her best self by the confidence her child had given her, and John entering his cottage in the midst of a happy discussion between Denas, Tris, and his wife, felt as if the weight of twenty years suddenly dropped away from him. He thought it was Tris who brought the sunshine, and he rejoiced in it, and induced the young man to tell them about the yacht’s trip and the old cities on the Mediterranean which he had visited.

Everyone sees strange places with their own 315 mental and spiritual sight, and Tris had seen Genoa and Venice and Rome and Corinth from the standpoint of a Cornish Methodist fisherman. But apart from this partiality he had made sensible observations of the strange ways of building and living, and had come to the conviction that Cornish people held the great secret of a happy life. As for the Mediterranean itself, Tris considered it “a jade of a sea, nohow worth the praise it got.”

“You may read the Cornish seas like a book, John,” he said, “but this Mediterranean be this way––you have to watch it every minute. Turn your back on it for a bite or a sup, and it will get the better of you some way, and, most likely of all, with one of its dirty white squalls. Then I tell you, John, it is all hands to reef! Quick! and if a single breadth of canvas be showing, it is a rip and a roar and the death of the yacht and of every man in her.”

“And what of the yacht herself, Tris? Be she good-tempered and good-mannered?”

“She do behave herself beautiful. The seas may fly over her cross-trees, but if you make her trig she comes to her bearings like a shot to its mark; shakes herself as if she was ready for a race, and then away she do go––just like a sea-gull for a fish.”

So they talked the evening away, and Denas listened and watched the handsome yachtsman, kindling and laughing to the tales he told. And when he went away she felt, as others did, the sudden fall in the mental temperature and the chill and silence that follow any unnatural excitement. But Denas, 316 as well as John and Joan, were too simple for such considerations. They only felt the change, and were sure that it was Tris who brought the sunshine, and so, when he went, took it away with him.

But after this night there was a different atmosphere in John Penelles’ cottage. John’s unhappiness had been mainly caused by the sight of his wife’s anxiety and sorrow; and if Joan was her old self, John was not the man to let the loss of his boat and his position make him miserable. For in this little cottage the wife held the same mighty power that the wife holds in all finer homes––the power to either make her husband weak and sorrowful or to strengthen his heart for anything. When Joan smiled, then John could not only enjoy the present, but he could also bravely face the future. For when a man can trust in his wife, then he can hope in his God and all things are possible to him.

Denas also caught the trick of hoping and of being happy. She opened her school with thirty scholars and found out her vocation. No one could doubt the voice which had called her to this work; she went to it as naturally as a bird goes to build its nest. She loved the children and they loved her. At the end of the first week she found herself compelled to make her number forty. The sweet authority pleased her. The children’s affection won her. Her natural power to impart what knowledge she had gave her the sense of a benefaction. Such loving allegiance! Such bigoted little adherents! Such blind disciples as Denas had! In a couple of weeks she was the idol of every 317 child in St. Penfer by the Sea, and as mothers see through their children, she was equally popular with the children of larger growth.

One very singular incident of this popularity was the fact that every child, without special intent, without the slightest thought of offence, called their beloved teacher Denas Penelles. For a time she corrected the mistake, but the name Tresham was strange and unfamiliar. They looked at her with wide-open eyes and then went back to the old word. Denas perceived that they heard her called Penelles in their homes, and that it was useless to take offence where none was intended. Yet the inferred wrong to her dead husband wounded her and rekindled in her heart the fire of old affection.