"No, David—no!" he said—"She is what we call—yes, I think we call it—an old maid. This is not a kind term, perhaps, but it is a true one. She is, I believe, in her thirty-fifth year,—a settled and mature woman. No man would take her unless she had a little money—enough, let us say, to help him set up a farm. For if a man takes youth to his bosom, he does not always mind poverty,—but if he cannot have youth he always wants money. Always! There is no middle course. Now our good Miss Deane will never have any money. And, even if she had, we may take it—yes, I certainly think we may take it—that she would not care to buy a husband. No—no! Her marrying days are past."
"She is a beautiful woman!" said Helmsley, quietly.
"You think so? Well, well, David! We have got used to her in Weircombe,—she seems to be a part of the village. When one is familiar with a person, one often fails to perceive the beauty that is apparent to a stranger. I believe this to be so—I believe, in general, we may take it to be so."
And such was the impression that most of the Weircombe folks had about Mary—that she was just "a part of the village." During his slow ramblings about the little sequestered place, Helmsley talked to many of the cottagers, who all treated him with that good-humour and tolerance which they considered due to his age and feebleness. Young men gave him a ready hand if they saw him inclined to falter or to stumble over rough places in the stony street,—little children ran up to him with the flowers they had gathered on the hills, or the shells they had collected from the drift on the shore—women smiled at him from their open doors and windows—girls called to him the "Good morning!" or "Good-night!"—and by and by he was almost affectionately known as "Old David, who makes baskets up at Miss Deane's." One of his favourite haunts was the very end of the "coombe," which,—sharply cutting down to the shore,—seemed there to have split asunder with volcanic force, hurling itself apart to right and left in two great castellated rocks, which were piled up, fortress-like, to an altitude of about four hundred or more feet, and looked sheer down over the sea. When the tide was high the waves rushed swirlingly round the base of these natural towers, forming a deep blackish-purple pool in which the wash to and fro of pale rose and deep magenta seaweed, flecked with trails of pale grassy green, were like the colours of a stormy sunset reflected in a prism. The sounds made here by the inflowing and outgoing of the waves were curiously musical,—like the thudding of a great organ, with harp melodies floating above the stronger bass, while every now and then a sweet sonorous call, like that of a silver trumpet, swung from the cavernous depths into clear space and echoed high up in the air, dying lingeringly away across the hills. Near this split of the "coombe" stood the very last house at the bottom of the village, built of white stone and neatly thatched, with a garden running to the edge of the mountain stream, which at this point rattled its way down to the sea with that usual tendency to haste exhibited by everything in life and nature when coming to an end. A small square board nailed above the door bore the inscription legibly painted in plain black letters:—
ABEL TWITT,
Stone Mason,
N. B. Good Grave-Work Guaranteed.
The author of this device, and the owner of the dwelling, was a round, rosy-faced little man, with shrewd sparkling grey eyes, a pleasant smile, and a very sociable manner. He was the great "gossip" of the place; no old woman at a wash-tub or behind a tea-tray ever wagged her tongue more persistently over the concerns of he and she and you and they, than Abel Twitt. He had a leisurely way of talking,—a "slow and silly way" his wife called it,—but he managed to convey a good deal of information concerning everybody and everything, whether right or wrong, in a very few sentences. He was renowned in the village for his wonderful ability in the composition of epitaphs, and by some of his friends he was called "Weircombe's Pote Lorit." One of his most celebrated couplets was the following:—
"This Life while I lived it, was Painful and seldom Victorious,
I trust in the Lord that the next will be Pleasant and Glorious!"
Everybody said that no one but Abel Twitt could have thought of such grand words and good rhymes. Abel himself was not altogether without a certain gentle consciousness that in this particular effort he had done well. But he had no literary vanity.
"It comes nat'ral to me,"—he modestly declared—"It's a God's gift which I takes thankful without pride."
Helmsley had become very intimate with both Mr. and Mrs. Twitt. In his every-day ramble down to the ocean end of the "coombe" he often took a rest of ten minutes or a quarter of an hour at Twitt's house before climbing up the stony street again to Mary Deane's cottage, and Mrs. Twitt, in her turn, was a constant caller on Mary, to whom she brought all the news of the village, all the latest remedies for every sort of ailment, and all the oddest superstitions and omens which she could either remember or invent concerning every incident that had occurred to her or to her neighbours within the last twenty-four hours. There was no real morbidity of character in Mrs. Twitt; she only had that peculiar turn of mind which is found quite as frequently in the educated as in the ignorant, and which perceives a divine or a devilish meaning in almost every trifling occurrence of daily life. A pin on the ground which was not picked up at the very instant it was perceived, meant terrible ill-luck to Mrs. Twitt,—if a cat sneezed, it was a sign that there was going to be sickness in the village,—and she always carried in her pocket "a bit of coffin" to keep away the cramp. She also had a limitless faith in the power of cursing, and she believed most implicitly in the fiendish abilities of a certain person, (whether male or female, she did not explain) whose address she gave vaguely as, "out on the hills," and who, if requested, and paid for the trouble, would put a stick into the ground, muttering a mysterious malison on any man or woman you chose to name as an enemy, with the pronounced guarantee:—