The village of Freekirk Head was a changed place.
No longer of early mornings did the resounding pop! pop! of motor-dories ring back from the rocks and headland as the trawlers and hand-liners put to sea. No longer did the groups of weary fishermen gather on the store steps for an evening pipe and chat or the young bloods chuck horseshoes at the foot of the chapel hill.
It was a village of women. True, Squire Hardy, being too old to fish, had remained at home, and Bill Boughton, who was completing details for the immediate and profitable sale of the season’s catch, was behind the counter of his general store.
He dealt out supplies to the women and children, and wrote down against their fathers’ shares the amount of credit extended. But others, day after day, found nothing set against them, and this was due to the promise of help that Elsa Mallaby kept.
“It’s useless to charge supplies to those who have nothing now with the idea of getting it back from 172 their fishing profits,” she said. “What they earn will just about pay for it, and then there they are back where they started––with nothing. Better let me pay for everything until the men get back. Then they will have something definite ahead to go on.”
No one but Adelbert Bysshe, the rector, Bill Boughton, and Elsa Mallaby herself knew exactly how much she paid out weekly toward the maintenance of the village. But all knew it to be an enormous sum (as reckoned on the island), and daily the worship of Hard Luck Jim’s widow grew, until she occupied a place in Freekirk Head parallel to a patron saint of the Middle Ages.
But Elsa Mallaby was intensely human, and no one knew it better than herself, as, one late afternoon, she sat at her mahogany table, looking absently over the stubs in her check-book. She saw that she had disbursed a great deal of money––more, perhaps, than she would have under any other circumstances––but she frankly acknowledged that she did not mind that, if only she achieved the end toward which she was working.
For Elsa, more than any one on Grande Mignon, was a person of ways and means.
She was one of those women who seem to find nothing in self-communion. Hers was a nature destined for light and gaiety and happiness. To sit in 173 a splendid palace and mope over what had happened was among the last things she cared to contemplate.
Being of the pure Grande Mignon stock, she looked no farther for a husband than among the men of Freekirk Head, good, honest, able men, all of them. And her eye fell with favor upon Captain Code Schofield of the schooner Charming Lass, old schoolfellow, playmate, and lifelong friend.