Beggars on Horseback

by F. Tennyson Jesse

And next day the rescued man was sitting by the hearth, somewhat stiff from bruises, but otherwise with his wiry frame none the worse. His looks had strikingly improved, for now that the soft beard, which had never known a razor, was dry, it peaked forward a little, whereas when wet it had clung to his too narrow jaw and revealed a lax line of chin.

His story was soon told—the brig on which he was mate had been returning from France when a squall overtook her, and she became a total wreck. He had clung to the floating spar for several hours before losing consciousness, when the tangled ratlines had borne him up and the tide had swept him into the shoreward current which set round the headland.

"And the first thing I knew," he ended, "was your face, mistress, bending over me in your cave. . . ."

Keast shot a glance at his daughter. They had exchanged looks before, at the man's mention of France, and now Bendigo flung a few veiled phrases, with here and there a cant term common to smugglers, at his guest, who understood him perfectly, and himself became entirely frank. His name, he said, was Robin Start, and that there was mixed blood in him he admitted. A more gracious race showed itself in his quick turns of wrist and eye, his ease of phrase, in his ready gallantry towards Thomasin. Yes, said Robin Start, his mother was a Frenchwoman, and had taught him her tongue—a fact he found useful in his dealings on the other side of the Channel.

A bargain is an intricate and subtle thing in Cornwall, a thing of innuendoes and reservations, and the one Bendigo Keast struck with the stranger was not without subtleties on both sides. Robin Start had quite understood all he had seen in the cave, and had made a mental note of the way out, which gave him a hold over Bendigo. On the other hand, Robin, who suffered paroxysms of craving for safety in the intervals of delighting in danger, knew it was safer to come in with Bendigo and make something for himself smuggling than it would be for him to think of escaping from that muscular father and daughter if he declined. As for Keast, it was true that since his nephew Dan had been knocked on the head by a swing of the boom, he needed some one to take the lad's place. A bottle of smuggled rum sealed the bargain, and then, for the first time in her life, Thomasin was talked to as a woman. To her father a partner; a mere fellow-man to the dark, silent Daniel who now lay in the lap of the tides; shunned by the envious villagers, and looked at askance by the Government men, Thomasin had never known of the sphere which began to be revealed to her that evening. For one thing, she was plain, though in certain lights or effects of wind she looked fine enough in a high-boned, rock-hewn way. She was what is called in that part of the world a "red-headed Dane," and her broad, strongly modelled face was thickly powdered with freckles. Though she was only twenty-two, hundreds of nights of exposure to wind and wet had roughened her skin, but at the opening of her bodice, where a hint of collar-bones showed like a bar beneath the firm flesh, her skin was privet-white. The slim, brown-haired Robin with his quick eyes was a contrast in looks and manners to anyone she had ever met, and mingled with her awe and wonder of him was the fierce sense of possession that had entered into her when she passed her hands over and over him in the cave. Also she felt maternal towards him because, though he must have been nigh upon thirty, he was one of those men who have a quality of appeal.

It was a stormy autumn that year, and little was possible in the way of business; but for Thomasin, who up till now had lived so whole-heartedly for her partnership with her father, it became that time of which at least the mirage appears to every one once in life. For her happiness she and Robin repainted her other love, the Merrymaid, together; giving her a new black coat and a white ribbon, and changing the green of her upright stem to blue. The Merrymaid was constantly adopting little disguises of the sort, running sometimes under barked sails, sometimes under white, and alternating between a jib and a gaff-topsail with a square head. Then in the long winter evenings the Keasts and Robin would sit by the fire, Bendigo pulling at his clay pipe, and Thomasin knitting a perpetual grey stocking—surely as innocent and law-abiding an interior as could have been found!—while Robin told them tales of all he had seen and done. Bendigo now and then gave a grunt that might have been of dissent, interest, or merely of incipient sleep, but Thomasin sat enthralled by the soft tones that to her mind could have lured a bird from the egg. Robin told of the thick yellow sea towards the north of China, so distinct from the blue sea around that it looked more like a vast shoal of sand, stretching for mile upon mile. He told, too, of the reddish dust, fine as mist, which once fell for days over his ship when he was far out at sea; it fell until the decks seemed like a dry soft beach, and lungs and eyes and at last their very souls seemed filled with it. His captain said it was blown along the upper air all the way from the Mongolian plains, but he himself thought it came from Japan, that country of volcanoes. Thomasin's ideas of volcanoes were derived from a broadside she had once seen which represented Vesuvius apparently on fire from the base, but she felt sure the mysterious sand was of the devil, and must come from somewhere hot.

So Robin talked and Thomasin listened, and with the coming of spring new portents woke in her blood and stirred the air. Robin began to slip his hand up her arm when he stood beside her in the shadow of the wind-buttresses, and when they went down to the caves he would make opportunities to press against her in the passages. The sheer animal magnetism of the girl allured him, and he found her crude and hitherto fierce aloofness going to his head. Though frequently now he felt a sudden passion of distaste for the physical strength of this father and daughter sweep over him, yet would come another passion, waked by the wonder of it that still lay in Thomasin's eyes—and he would think of what a pleasure was at his hand in Thomasin's potentialities for passion and the freshness of her. . . .

She herself was reluctant yet, for all her hot blood and untrained nature, partly because of the ingrained suspicion of soft things her upbringing had engendered, partly because of the eternal instinct which prompts withdrawal for the purpose of luring on. But in her heart she knew—she knew when the spring was on the cliffs, and he and she lay on the thymy grass watching for the fish-shoals; when around Robin's turf-pillowed head the rose-specked, flesh-hued cups of the sea-milkwort stood up brimming with the jewelled air as with a divine nectar; when among the cushions of silvery lichen and grey-green moss the scented gorse flung a riot of yellow, and the mating birds answered each other on a note like secret laughter. Then Thomasin would sometimes close her eyes for the happiness she dared not yet acknowledge; yet those days of soft joy and beauty were as nothing to the night of hard work and danger that finally brought her surging blood to acknowledge him as lord—that night when all the dominant male in him was of necessity stung to the surface by danger.

They were running a cargo of thirty barrels over from France—he, she, and her father. The Merrymaid, which was sloop-rigged and of about twenty tons burden, was quite enough for the three to handle, laden as she was with the corded tubs slung together with the stones already attached; for it was proposed to sink the cargo and then run on to harbour openly, a thing frequently done when the Preventive men were known to be on the watch. Robin was suffering from one of his nerve-revulsions; he dared show no sign of it, but as he sat in the bows, keeping a look-out through the darkness, he told himself that if this trip were brought off in safety it would be the last as far as he was concerned. He could stand the portentous figure of Bendigo looming at him through the little cottage no more, and he knew what to do. . . . As for Thomasin, he would not lose her—a woman surely sticks by her man. And if not, she would never harm him; and there were other women in the world—for the appeal Thomasin had for him was of sex, and not of personality.

Thomasin sat with her arm along the tiller, keeping the Merrymaid on a nor'-nor'-west course so as to make the Lizard light. They were running under their foresail and close-reefed mainsail only, for the south-west wind for which they had waited was swelling to storm-fury. The Merrymaid lay right over, the water scolding past her dipping gunwale and the clots of spindrift that whirled over the side gleaming like snowflakes in the darkness, which was of that intense quality which becomes vibrant to long staring. Robin, straining his eyes, was only aware of the danger when they were almost on it, but his voice shrieked out on the instant to Thomasin: "Hard-a-port!" and again, in a desperate hurry of sound, "Hard-a-port!"