On a lonely moor lying between Carn Kenidzhek[1] and Bosvavas Carn lived one Tom Trebisken and Joan his wife. They had been married up in the teens of years, and had no child, which was a disappointment to them both, especially to Joan, who suffered from rheumatism, which had crippled her feet.
A Cornish Tin-mine.
Tom had long given up all hope of having a child, but Joan still believed that one would come to them some day, and it cheered her dreary hours, as she sat helpless in her armchair, to think of the advent of the little one, who would gladden their life. Every six days in seven she spent absolutely alone, for Tom worked as surface-man all the year round at Ding Dong, a great tin-mine, or bal, at the other end of their moor, and had to leave for his work early in the morning, and did not return until late in the evening; so it was not surprising that she wanted a child, and that she sometimes cried in her heart: ‘Aw that I had a little maid of my own to do things for me an’ keep me company when my Tom is away all day at the bal!’
The part of the moor where the Trebiskens lived was three miles or more from Ding Dong, and two miles from their nearest neighbour. It was quite out of the beaten track, and a passer by their cottage was as rare as blackberries in December. They would not have lived there at all, but that the cottage was their own—or, rather, Joan’s. It had been left to her by will, with the condition that they should live in it themselves.
The cottage was not an ordinary one; its walls were built of small blocks of mica and porphyry—much of the porphyry being of that lovely deep-pink kind, with blotchings of black hornblende, all of which a long century or more of weather had polished to the smoothness of glass. Joan said the weather had nothing whatever to do with it, and that it was done by the dear Little People[2] who, she declared, lived in the carn near where the cottage stood. But whoever polished the walls—weather or fairies—the house was a pleasure to look at, particularly when the sun began to sink behind the moors and shone full upon its walls; for then all the richness of the porphyry’s rose, all the hornblende’s soft blackness, and all the mica’s brilliancy, were brought out of the stone, and intensified until a less imaginative person than Joan Trebisken would have believed it was built by enchantment. Even its commonplace roof of brown thatch, which overspread the small casement windows in shaggy raggedness, did not take from the burning wonder of the walls. Perhaps it was because a company of stone-crop had found a dwelling-place there, and that on the ridge of the roof stood out in red distinctness half a dozen Pysgy-pows[3]—curious little round-knobbed tiles placed there by Joan’s forebears for the Piskeys to dance on.
Joan, poor soul, seldom saw the outside splendour of their cottage, as she was powerless to move from her chair without help, and when her Tom came home, his face was the only thing she wanted to see, she said. Fortunately, however, her doors and windows opened on to the moor, and she could therefore command from where she sat a long stretch of moorland, which, though wild, was none the less beautiful at every season of the year, but especially in the springtime, when the yellow broom and golden gorse were in flower.
In spite of its loneliness, Joan loved the moor with all her Celtic nature, and spent most of her day looking out upon it until the days shortened and Nisdhu, the Black Month, which the Cornish of our time call November, drew near.
Nobody dreaded that dark month, with its damp clinging cold, its fogs and mists, which often veiled the whole landscape, including the great carns, more than Joan. She said she felt the chill of its breath before it showed its nose over the head of Carn Kenidzhek, and was careful to shut her door and hatch and her small casement-windows before October was half through. She was sorry to do this, and would not have done so but for the pain in her bones, which was always worse when November was on its way; for she shut out, she said, the music of the Small People’s voices.
Tom told her it wasn’t the voices of the Wee Folk she heard, but the trickling of a little stream making its way down by the carn on its way across the moor. But she declared she knew better, and had ears to distinguish between the tinkle of water and the sweet voices of the dear Little People, if he had not, and Tom, like a sensible man, let her hold to her belief.