A Singer from the Sea

by Amelia E. Barr

“To be sure. Go your ways.”

Then Joan also rose, and went to the fireside, and drew the few coals together, and lit a lamp. For a moment she stood still, looking at the closed door between her and her child; then she lifted a large book from the window-sill, laid it on the small round table, opened it wide, and sat down before it. It was a homely, workaday-looking book, and she did not read a word of it, though her eyes were upon the page. But it was the Bible. And the Bible is like the sunshine, it comforts and cheers us only to sit down in its presence.

And very soon Joan lifted her hand and laid it across the open page. It was like taking the hand of a friend. God knows what strength, what virtue, there was in that movement! For she immediately covered her face with her other hand and tears began to fall, and anon mighty whispered words parted her lips––words that went from the mother’s 68 heart to the heart of God! How can such prayer ever fail?

In the morning John Penelles met his daughter, not with the petulant anger of a wounded woman, but with a graver and more reasonable reproof. “Denas, my dear,” he said, and he gently stroked her hair as he spoke, “Denas, you didn’t do right yesterday; did you now? But you do be sorry for it, I see; so let the trouble go. But no more of it! No more out in the dark, my girl, either for bride-making or for corpse-waking, and as for the man who kept you out, let him ask God to keep him from under my hand. That is all about it. Come and give father his tea, and then we will mend the nets together; and if Saturday be fair, Denas, we will go to St. Merryn and see your Aunt Agnes. ‘You don’t want to go?’ Aw, yes, my dear, you do want to go. You be vexed now; and not you that should be vexed at all, but your mother and I. There, then! No more of it!”

He spoke the last words as if he was at the end of his patience, and then turned sharply toward the broiled fish and hot tea which Joan was placing on the table. The face of Denas angered him, it was so indifferent and so wretched. He could have laughed away a little temper and excused it, for he was not an unjust nor even an unsympathetic man; and he realized his daughter’s youth and her natural craving for those things which youth considers desirable.

But the utter hopelessness of her attitude, her refusal to eat, her silence, her sighs, the unsuitableness 69 of the dress she wore to the humble duties of her station, her disinclination to talk of what troubled her, or indeed to talk at all––both John and Joan felt these things to be a wrong, deliberate and perpetual, against their love and their home and their daily happiness.

It was certainly a great and sudden change in the life of Denas. For the past eight weeks she had been in an atmosphere of excitement, tinctured with the subtle hopes and expectations of love. In it she had grown mentally far beyond the realization of her friends. She had observed, assimilated, and translated her new ideas through her own personality as far as her means permitted. If her mother and father had looked carefully at their daughter, they would have seen how much more effectively her hair was arranged; what piquancy of mode had been observed in the making of her new dresses; what careful pride had dictated the fashion and fit of her high-heeled shoes; what trouble was systematically taken to preserve her delicate skin and to restore the natural beauty of her hands––in short, they must have noticed that their child’s toilet and general appearance was being gradually but still rapidly removed from all fitness with her present surroundings.

And just after Elizabeth’s marriage came on the hardest and most distinctive part of the fisher’s year. All along the rocky coast the “huers” were standing watching for the shoals of pilchard, and the men were in the boats beneath, waiting for their signal to shoot the seines. Every fisher had now, in an 70 intense degree, the look which always distinguishes him––the look of a man accustomed to reflect and to be ready for emergencies. This year the shoals were so large that boat-loads were caught easily in fifty feet of water.

Then every wife in the hamlet had her hands full and busy from dawn till dark; and Joan went to the work with an exuberant alacrity and good nature. In former years Denas had felt all the enthusiasm of the great sea harvest. This year she could not endure its clamour and its labour. What had happened to her that the sight of the beautiful fish was offensive and the smell of its curing intolerable? She shut her eyes from the silvery heaps and would gladly have closed her ears against the jubilant mirth, the shouting and laughing and singing around her.

Her intense repugnance did really at last breed in her a low fever, which she almost gladly succumbed to. She thought it easier to lie in bed and suffer in solitude than to put her arms to her white elbows in fresh fish and bear the familiar jokes of the busy, merry workers in the curing-sheds. Denas was not really responsible for this change. It had grown into her nature, day by day and week by week, while she was unconscious of any transforming power. The little reluctances which had marked its first appearance had been of small note; her father and mother had only laughingly reproved them, telling her “not to nourish prideful notions.” She had not even been aware of nourishing anything wrong. Was it wrong? She lay tossing on her bed 71 in the small warm room, and argued the question out while fever burned in her veins and gave to all things abnormal and extravagant aspects.