Outwardly the place had some attractive features, it was kept so scrupulously clean. The walls were so white, the floor so neatly sanded, and the pewter pots glittered so cheerily on the polished oak-table which served for a bar, that a casual observer might reasonably have expected very comfortable and respectable accommodation from a scene which, though on an humble scale, promised so fair. Even the sleek, well-fed tabby-cat purred so peacefully on the door-sill that she seemed to invite the pedestrian to shelter and repose.
Martha Mason, the mistress of the house, was a bad woman, in the fullest sense of the word. Cunning, hard-hearted, and avaricious, without pity, and without remorse; a creature so hardened in the ways of sin, that conscience had long ceased to offer the least resistance to the perpetration of crime. Unfeminine in mind and person, you could scarcely persuade yourself that the coarse, harsh features, and bristling hair about the upper lip, belonged to a female, had not the untamed tongue, ever active in abuse and malice, asserted its claim to the weaker sex, and rated and scolded through the long day, as none but the tongue of a bad woman can rate and scold. An accident had deprived the hideous old crone of the use of one of her legs, which she dragged after her by the help of a crutch. But though she could not move quickly in consequence of her lameness, she was an excellent hand at quickening the motions of those who had the misfortune to be under her control.
Her son Robert, who went by the familiar appellation of "Bully Bob," was the counterpart of his mother. A lazy, drunken fellow, who might be seen from morning till night lounging, with his pipe in his mouth, on the well-worn settle at the door, humming some low ribald song to chase away the lagging hours, till the shades of evening roused him from his sluggish stupor to mingle with gamblers and thieves in their low debauch. The expression of this young man's face was so bad, and his manners and language so coarse and obscene, that he was an object of dislike and dread to his low associates, who regarded him as a fit subject for the gallows. In the eyes of his mother, Bob Mason was a very fine young man—a desirable mate for any farmer's daughter in the country.
The old Spanish proverb, "Poverty makes a man acquainted with strange bedfellows," was never more fully exemplified than in the case of these people and their next door neighbours.
Dorothy Grimshawe was the widow of a fisherman, whose boat foundered in the dreadful storm of the 10th of October, 1824. Like many others, who sailed from the little port high in health and hope, expecting to reap a fine harvest from the vast shoals of herrings which annually visit that coast, Daniel Grimshawe fell a prey to the spoiler, Death, that stern fisher of men.
The following morning, after the subsidence of the gale, the beach for miles was strewn with pieces of wreck, and the bodies of forty drowned men were cast ashore! Most of these proved to be natives of the town; and the bodies being carried to the town-hall, notice was sent to the wives of the absent fishermen to come and claim their dead.
This awful summons quickly collected a crowd to the spot. Many anxious women and children were there, and Dorothy Grimshawe and her little ones came with the rest.
"Thank the good God! my man is not there," said a poor woman, coming out with her apron to her face. "The Lord save us! 'tis a fearsome sight."
"He may be food for the crabs at the bottom of the sea," said a hoarse voice from the crowd; "you are not going to flatter yourself, Nancy, that you are better off than the rest."
"Oh, oh, oh!" shrieked the poor woman, thus deprived by envy of the anchor of hope to which she clung. "I trusted in the mercy of God; I could not look to the bottom of the salt deep."