"'Tes naught but a plaguey dolphin, d'believe," she muttered, yet still stayed for one more glimpse of the dark thing that was bobbing up through the curdling foam-pattern. A stinging scatter of spray blew into her eyes, blinding her, and when she looked again the dark thing had come nearer, and she saw it to be the body of a man caught in the ratlines of some shrouds that the sea's action had lapped around the mast they had once guarded. Were it not that his chin was hitched over the ratlines, so that he was borne along with his face—a pale blot among the paler blots of the foam—upturned, he would doubtless have sunk, for he was not lashed to the mast in any way. A huge foam patch had formed in the web made by the tangled shrouds, so that his head and shoulders showed clearly against the creaming halo, on which his long hair, dark with wet and released from its queue, lay streaked away from his tilted face. The girl called to him twice in her strong, rough voice; then, since even if he still lived he was past any consciousness of doing so, she kept her energies for the saving of him. Wading in as deep as she dared—not more than up to her hips, for even then the heave and suction of the water threatened to knock her off her feet—she clung on to a ridge of rock with one hand, and, leaning forward, made snatches at the spar whenever it surged towards her. To her dismay she saw that with every heave his legs must be catching against some rocks, for his head began to sink away from the supporting ratlines, and when at last she caught one end of the spar she only succeeded in drawing it away from him. His head disappeared; for a moment the dark hole in the midst of the foam-circle held, then broke, and was overrun as the whiteness closed upon it. The next minute a surge of undercurrent brought him knocking against her legs; she just managed to hold on with one hand while with the other she plunged down at him. Her fingers met the cold sleekness of his face, then caught in his tangled hair, and, drawing herself up backwards against the rock-ledges, she pulled him with her, step by step. A few moments more and she had staggered up the narrow strip of beach with her burden dragging from her arms. Tumbling him along the drier sand at the cliff's foot, she knelt beside him, and with hands trembling from the strain that had been put upon the muscles, she pulled apart the clinging shirt that was so sodden it seemed to peel from off him. She felt at his heart, then laid her ear to the pale glistening chest where the dark hair was matted to a point between the breasts; she beat that pale chest with her hand, and at last saw the faint red respond to the blows of her fingers. On that much of hope she desisted, seemed to hesitate, then half-hauling him up by a hand beneath each shoulder, she began dragging him towards where the cliff curved outwards again to the sea. At a point some three or four feet from the ground the cliff overhung so that it was possible to imagine creeping beneath it at low tide, though a curtain of glossy spleen-wort hung down so thickly it was difficult to tell. Going upon her knees, the girl crawled backwards under the dripping dark green fringe, and pulled the man in after her. Within, a tunnel, in which it was soon possible to walk upright, led at a gradual incline up to what was apparently the heart of the cliff, which here was honeycombed into those smugglers' caves of the West of which even now all the secrets are not known. Up this incline she got herself and him, and at last dragged him triumphantly into the big cave where she and her father, Bendigo Keast, stored the smuggled goods in which they traded so successfully. It was very dark, but with accustomed hands she felt for the small iron box in which the flint and tinder were kept; soon a tiny flame sprang to life, and she passed it on to a wick that floated limply in a little cup of stinking fish-oil on the floor. In the mere breath of light thus given the rows of stacked barrels loomed dimly, the outermost curve of each gleaming faintly, while between them the shadow lay banded.
Thomasin Keast ran some brandy from a little keg near into her palm and tilted it between the man's teeth, then slopped the raw spirit over his shirt, drenching it again. Then—not stripping him, for the modesty of a Cornish woman, who thinks shame to show even her feet, prevented that—she filled her hands with brandy and ran them in under his clothes, rubbing tirelessly up and down till the flesh began to dry and tingle. Around his reddened neck, where the soft young beard merged into wet curls, she rubbed; over his shoulders, where the big pectoral muscles came swelling past his armpits like a cape, then down the serried ribs that she could knead the supple flesh around, past the curve-in of the whole body beneath them, to the gracious slimness of the flanks and the nervous indentation of the groins between the trunk and the springing arches of the thighs. So Thomasin knelt in the gloom of the cave, and all the time that his life was coming painfully and reluctantly back to him under her strong, glowing hands, she felt as though some presage of new life were flowing into herself. The old saw has it that the saving of a drowning man brings ill-luck to his rescuer; but Thomasin, as she watched grow in his features that intangible something which makes the face human instead of a mere mask, scorned the superstition; and still more she scorned it as her urgent hands felt the rising beat of his pulses and arteries. For during that time his hidden form became so known to her that his every curve and muscle, the very feel of the strong-growing hair upon him softening into down as his skin dried, all impressed themselves clearly on her memory for ever, and she felt him hers—hers by right of discovery as well as right of salvage.
* * * * *
Thomasin Keast and her father lived in a little four-square cottage set about half a mile from the headland—a half-mile of thorn and bracken, of tumbled boulders and wedges of furze almost as solid. Here in the spring the yellow-hammer and the linnet, the stonechat and the whinchat, shrilled their first notes, and at dawn the greybird thrust a thirsty beak into the dewy blackthorn blossoms; here the dun-coloured rabbits darted in and out of their burrows with a gleam of white scuts. Here, too, Keast and his daughter herded the moorland ponies that, well-soaped, were loaded with the barrels of spirit and packets of lace which had been brought from France at dark of the moon. The cottage was of rough grey granite, with a roof crusted with yellow stonecrop that looked as though it had been spilled molten over the slates. On either side of the door a great wind-buttress, reaching to the eaves, swept out like a sheltering wing.
This was the place to which Thomasin Keast brought her man on that stormy evening. Dusk was already making the air deeply, softly blue, and through it the whitewashed lintel gleamed out almost as clearly as the phosphorescent fish nailed against the wall. Half-leading, half-supporting him, Thomasin steered the stranger between the buttresses and through the narrow doorway into the living-room. A peat fire glowed on the hearth and against it the figure of a crouching man showed dark. At the noise in the doorway he thrust an armful of furze on to the fire, and the quick crackling flare that followed threw a reflection like the flashing of summer lightning over the whitewashed walls, sending the shadows scurrying into the corners and revealing the man whose big hand, ridged with raised veins that ran up to the wrist, was still upon the furze-stem.
Bendigo Keast was not long past his prime of strength and could still have out-wrestled many a younger man. Through his jersey the working of his enormous shoulders showed as plainly as those of a cat beneath her close fur, and under his chin the reddish beard could not hide the knots of his powerful throat. His eyes, blue and extraordinarily alert, were half-hidden by the purpled lids, and the massive folds of his cheeks that came down in a furrow on either side of his slightly incurved mouth, looked hard as iron. Like most seamen when within doors, he was in his stockings, and as he rose and his bulk swayed forward his feet broadened a little and gripped at the uneven flagstones like those of a great ape.
Thomasin spoke first.
"'Tes a man I found drownen', da," she said, and in her voice uneasiness mingled with a readiness for defiance. "He'm most dead wi' salt water, and cold. Us must get en to the bed to wance. Da . . ."
"Where did ee find en?" asked Bendigo Keast, without moving.
"To cove."