A Singer from the Sea

by Amelia E. Barr

No wonder John Penelles hated him instinctively. John’s soul needed but a glimpse of the lovers sauntering down the narrow cliff-path to apprehend the beginning of sorrows. Instantaneous as the glimpse was, it explained to him the restless, angry, fearful feeling that had driven him from his own cottage to the place appointed by destiny for the revelation of his child’s danger and of his own admonition.

He was glad that he had obeyed the spiritual order; whatever power had warned him had done him service. It is true the fond assurances of Denas had somewhat pacified his suspicions, but he was not altogether satisfied. When Denas declared that Roland had not made love to her, John felt certain that the girl was in some measure deceiving him––perhaps deceiving herself; for he could not imagine her to be guilty of a deliberate lie. Alas! lying is the vital air of secret love, and a girl must needs lie who hides from her parents the object and the course of her affections. Still, when he thought of her arms around his neck, of her cheek against his cheek, of her assertion that “Denas loved no one better than her father and mother,” he felt it a kind of disloyalty to his child to altogether doubt her. 34 He believed that Denas believed in herself. Well, then, he must try and trust her as far and as long as it was possible.

And Joan trusted her daughter––she scouted the idea of Denas doing anything that was outside her mother’s approval. She told John that his fear was nothing but the natural conceit of men; they thought a woman could not be with one of their sex and not be ready to sacrifice her own life and the lives of all her kinsfolk for him. “It be such puddling folly to start with,” she said indignantly; “talking about Denas being false to her father and mother! ’Tis a doleful, dismal, ghastly bit of cowardice, John. Dreadful! aw, dreadful!”

Then John was silent, but he communed with his own heart. Joan had not seen Roland and Denas as he had seen them; no one had troubled Joan as he had been troubled. For something often gives to a loving heart a kind of prescience, when it may be used for wise and saving ends; and John Penelles divined the angry trend of Roland’s thoughts, though it was impossible for him to anticipate the special form that trend would take.

Roland had indeed been made furiously angry at the interference between himself and Denas. “I spoke pleasantly to the old fisher, and he was as rude as could be. Rude to me! Jove! I’ll teach him the value of good manners to his betters.”

He sat down on a lichen-covered rock, lit a cigar, and began to think. His personal dignity had been deeply wounded; his pride of petty caste trod upon. He, a banker’s son, had been snubbed by a common 35 fisherman! “He took Denas from me as if I was going to kill her, body and soul. He deserves all he suspected me of.” And as these and similar thoughts passed through Roland’s mind he was not at all handsome; his face looked dark and drawn and marked all over with the characters sin writes through long late hours of selfish revelry and riot.

But however his angry thoughts wandered, they always came back to the slight of himself personally––to the failure of Penelles to appreciate the honour he was doing him in wooing his daughter. And if the devil wishes to enter easily a man or a woman, he finds no door so wide and so easy of access as the door of wounded vanity and wounded self-esteem.

Roland’s first impulse was to make Denas pay her father’s debt. “I will never speak to her again. Common little fisher-girl! I will teach her that gentlemen are to be used like gentlemen. Why did she not speak up to her father? She stood there without a word and let him snub me. The idea!” These exclamations were, however, only the quick, unreasoning passion of the animal; when Roland had calmed himself with tobacco, he felt how primitive and foolish they were. His reflections were then of a different character; they began to flow steadily into a channel they had often wandered in, though hitherto without distinct purpose.

“After all, I like the girl. She has a kind of nixie, tantalising, bewitching charm that would drive a crowd mad. She has a fresh, sympathetic 36 voice, penetrating, too, as a clarion. Her folk-songs and her sea-songs go down to the bottom of a man’s heart and into every corner of it. Now, if I could get her to London and have her taught how to manage her voice and face and person, if I had her taught how to dance––Jove! there is a fortune in it! Dressed in a fancy fisher costume, singing the casting songs and the boat songs––the calls and takes she knows so well––why, she would make a gas-lit theatre seem like the great ocean, and men would see the white-sailed ships go marching by, and the fishing cobbles, and the wide nets full of gleaming fish, and––and, by Jove! they would go frantic with delight. They would be at her feet. She would be the idol of London. She would sing full pockets empty. I should have all my desires, and now I have so few of them. What a prospect! But I’ll reach it––I’ll reach it, and all the fishers in St. Penfer’s shall not hinder me!”

He thought his plans over again, and then it was dark and he rose up to return home; but as he shook himself into the proper fit of his clothes and settled his hat at the correct angle, he laughed vauntingly and said: