The village folk, who liked either dark hair or flaxen locks, had no admiration for Jessy's tawny tresses. But little Tim Rogers told her that she was beautiful, and looked like a queen. The girl and little boy had become fast friends, drawn together by their own isolation and by kindred tastes.
Tim loved the sea and the rocks and the deep clefts and chasms of the coast; and Jessy knew every crevice and cranny as well as the sea-gulls themselves. They spent hours together, unseen by others, exploring strange spots, telling tales and legends, and growing in friendship every day.
As Jessy heard her boy-friend's stories of the hardships of the lives of the King's excise officers, and had the other side of the question unfolded to her—the need for taxes to be levied, to keep up England's power and greatness, to preserve her coasts from foreign invaders, to enable her to be a power amongst other nations with greater territories—she began to understand that the smugglers were really defrauding the King of his rightful dues; and whatever might be said in favour of the landing of an occasional keg of spirits or bale of silk without paying duty, the regular nefarious traffic of such a vessel as the Black Prince could not be regarded as anything but a wrong done against the King and the nation.
It was the easier for Jessy to assimilate this new teaching because of her hatred towards Moffat, which was growing with every visit he paid. Her grandmother was now almost in her dotage, and was no real protection to the girl; and she sometimes almost feared that Moffat would carry her off to his vessel by force, so wild were his outbreaks of so-called love-making, and his gusts of rage when she repelled him, and would have none of his courtship.
Jessy's one weapon of defence was in the superstition of the man and his subordinates. They believed that the girl had inherited, or had acquired from her grandmother, some occult powers, and that she had the power to do them some injury by her fiery glance, or by word or spell. This knowledge had come accidentally to Jessy, from something she had overheard the men saying one to the other; but she had found that it was true, and that they really had some superstitious fear of her when she flung herself away from Moffat, and stood regarding them with her fiery glances of fear and desperation. Afterwards Jessy made some study of her part, and got her grandmother to teach her some spells and some curses; and although still in no small fear of Moffat's evident intention of making her his wife, she felt not quite so unprotected as before.
Soon, however, she was to find, as other women have found before her, that the surest way to turn a man's love to hate is to flout him, and refuse his courtship. When Jessy, driven one day to bay, flatly refused to marry Moffat, and added that she hated him worse than she hated any one but the devil himself, and didn't see as there was much to choose between them!—then the man's passion flamed forth, and the girl might have been killed, had not the old woman, suddenly aroused and alarmed, begun to curse so lustily that the seamen were filled with terror, and dragged their leader off with them, he shouting out all sorts of threats against Jessy, and vowing to be revenged upon her before he had done.
It seemed as though disappointed love had filled the man's heart with passions fiercer than their wont. It was but a few days later that Tim told the girl how his father had heard that the Black Prince was coming in soon with a contraband cargo, and that he was going to keep a very sharp look out for her.
"I wish your father would kill Moffat, and have done with him," cried Jessy, with sudden vehemence.
"Why, then, Jessy, you must be on our side?" cried Tim joyfully. "I never quite liked to ask you before; because, of course, all the folk you know are with the smugglers——"