“But they will not,” she thought angrily. “They want me to settle down and be content with Tris Penrose. I dare not tell them that Roland loves me. Roland dare not tell them either. I cannot say a word to them about my voice and the money it may make. Roland says any reasonable father and mother would be quite excited at the prospect and glad to go to London with me. But will my father and mother do so? Oh, no! In order to do myself justice I am obliged to run away. It is too bad! Any sensible person would feel sorry for me.”
With such specious reasoning she satisfied her conscience, and the afternoon wore away in gathering gloom and fierce scuds of rain. It was nearly dark at four o’clock, and she rose and brought a small round table to the hearth and began to put on it the tea-cups and the bread and butter. As she did so Joan entered the room. Her arms were full of clean clothing, but glancing at the table she threw them above her head, and regardless of the scattered garments cried out:
“Denas! Look to the loaf! Some poor ship be in distress! Pray God it be not your father’s.”
Then Denas with trembling hands lifted the loaf, which she had inadvertently laid down wrong side upward, and placed it, with a “God save the ship and all in her,” in the proper position. But Joan 129 was thoroughly unnerved by the ominous incident, and she sat down with her apron over her head, rocking herself slowly to her inaudible prayer; while Denas, with a resentful feeling she did not try to understand, gathered up the pieces of linen and flannel her mother had apparently forgotten.
Into this scene stepped a young man in the Burrell Court livery. He gave Denas a letter, but refused the offer of a cup of tea, because “the storm was hurrying landward, and he would be busy all to catch the cliff-top before it caught him.”
Joan took no notice of the interruption, and Denas felt her trouble over such a slight affair as a turned loaf to be almost a personal offence. In a short time she said: “Mother, your tea is waiting; and I have a letter from Mrs. Burrell, if you care anything about it.”
“Aw, my girl, I care little for Mrs. Burrell’s letters to-night. She be well and happy, no doubt; and my old dear is in the wind’s teeth and pulling hard against a frosty death.”
“Father knows the sky and the sea, and I think it is cruel hard of him to take such risks.”
“And where will the fishers be who do take no risks? Fish be plenty just before a storm, and the London market-boat waiting for the take; and why wouldn’t the men do their duty, danger or no danger?”
“I would rather die than be a fisher’s wife.”