Joan, the Curate

by Florence Warden

As the answering cheer came forth from the throats of Tregenna and his crew, a shout of hoarse, mocking laughter, mingled with oaths and foul threats, came in a volley from the smugglers’ craft; and the next moment, finding that the two opposing boats were gaining on her, she swung round and waited for them to come up with her.

Tregenna’s boat was now the nearer of the two. In the moonlight the lieutenant saw a face, coarse, evil, with eyes aflame, peering over the side of the smuggler’s craft from under one of the knitted caps the most of them wore: it was that of Ben the Blast. The next moment the rascal raised his right arm, and pointed a pistol at him.

The rest of the smugglers were all crouching, like Ben, round the sides of the boat. Suddenly there sprang up above their heads the slighter, more lithe figure, in open jacket and loose shirt-collar, which Tregenna had so much reason to remember. Even at that moment of excitement, the thought that this was a woman who stood exposed to his own fire and that of his men made Tregenna feel for a moment sick and faint. Before he had recovered from the effects of his recognition of Ann Price in the guise of “Jem Bax,” he saw her strike a violent blow at Ben’s right arm: and the upraised pistol dropped into the water.

Then there came a cry from the crew of the second cutter’s boat; in the last few moments they had gained on their comrades, and it was they who first came up with the smugglers.

Over Tregenna there had suddenly come a frightful sense of a new and sickening danger, that of killing a woman in open fight. Unsexed creature as she had seemed, when he had heard her cursing and uttering threats against him at the farmhouse, he could not but remember, at this fearful moment, how she had conversed with him in the garden at Hurst Court, with all the sweet tones and soft looks, the pleading words and winning ways, of a very woman.

The feeling was paralyzing; it went near to making a coward of him. Then, just as his boat was drawing in its turn alongside that of the smugglers, he saw one of his own men, from the other boat, in actual conflict with “Jem.”

He saw the gleam of knives; he saw the two boats rocking like cradles on the surface of the water. Then it was “Jem” who uttered a cry; the red blood gushed forth over the white shirt she wore, and the next moment she staggered, and fell, not back into her comrades’ boat but into that of the revenue-men.

At that moment Tregenna’s attention was recalled to his own situation by his receiving a blow on the breast from a weapon in the hands of one of the smugglers. The attack recalled him to himself, roused again the savage instinct which is the best for a man to feel at such a time, and nerved his arm to retaliation.

He saw no more of “Jem;” he was able, therefore, in the excitement of the fight, to forget her. And, although the smuggler’s boat presently succeeded in sheering off, after having inflicted some damage on their opponents, it was with more than one of their number hurt and disabled that they made off in the direction of the sloop.

Tregenna would have followed; but to the signals he made to his second boat to accompany him, the crew replied that they were unable to do so. He had, therefore, to be content with the damage he had undoubtedly inflicted upon the “free-traders,” and to return to the cutter, which he reached some minutes before the second boat did.