In Great Waters: Four Stories

by Thomas A. Janvier

When I was on the grass beside her—she still keeping her hand in mine, as if the touch of something that loved her was a comfort to her—she had nothing to say for a bit, but just leaned her head against my shoulder and cried softly there.

The tide was out and a long stretch of the Barnard Bank lay bared below us, with here and there the black bones of some dead ship lying buried in them sticking up from the sands. Slicing deep in the bank was the Wreck Gat, with the last of the ebb running out through it from the Covehithe Channel and the undercut sides of it falling down into the water and melting away. At the edge of it was the sunken ship that had made it: the ship that had brought Tess to us from her birth-land beyond the seas. As I have said, no more of the wreck showed than her broken stern-post: a bit of black timber, all jagged with twisted iron bolts and weed-grown and barnacled, upstanding at one side of the channel from the water and not high out of it even at low tide. When the tide was in, and any sort of a sea was running, you stood a good chance of finding just where it was by having your boat stove on it: for then it did not show at all, except now and then in the hollow of the waves.

Tess was looking down on it, her head still resting on my shoulder, and after a while she said: "If only we could dig that ship up, George, we might find what would tell that I'm not come of foul folk, after all"—and then she began to cry again in the same silent sort of way. I couldn't get an answer for her—what she said hurt me so, and she crying on my shoulder, and I feeling the beating of her heart.

"It was good of thee, George," she went on again, presently, "to save the baby life of me; but it's a true truth thou'dst have done me more of a kindness hadst thou just thrown me back into the sea. I'd be glad to be there now, George. Down there under the water it would make no difference what sort of folk I come of. And I'd be resting there as I can't rest here—for down there my pain would be gone."

My throat was so choked up that I had hard work to get my words out of it, and when they did come they sounded queer. "Tess! Tess!" I said. "Thou'lt kill me dead talking that way. As if the like of thee could come of foul folk! A lord duke would be the least to be fit father to thee—and proud of thee he well might be! But what does it matter, Tess, what thy folk were who owned thee at the beginning? They gave thee to the sea's keeping—and the sea gave thee to me. By right of finding, thou'rt mine. It was I who found thee, down on the shingle there, and from the first minute that ever I laid eyes on thee I loved thee—and the only change in me has been that always I've loved thee more and more. Whether thy people were foul folk or fair folk is all one to me. It's thyself that I'm loving—and with every bit of the love that is in my heart. Let me make thee the wife of me, Tess—and then thou'lt have no need to fret about who thy forbears were for thou'lt have no more to do with them, being made a part of me and mine."

I talked at such a rate, when I did get set a-going, that my own words ran away with me; and I got the feeling that they ran away with Tess too. But when I had ended, and she lifted up her head from my shoulder and looked straight into the eyes of me, I knew by what her eyes had in them—before ever she said a word back to me—that what I wanted most in the whole world for myself I could not have.

It seemed to me an hour before she spoke, she all the time looking straight into my eyes and her own eyes full of tears. At last she did speak. "George," said she, "if I could be wife to thee, as thou'dst have me be, I'd go down on my knees and thank God! But it can't be, George. It can't be! I've set my heart."

There was no doubting what she said. In the sound of her voice there was something that seemed as much as her words to settle the matter for good and all. Whenever I am at a funeral and hear the reading of the burial service it brings back to me the sound of her voice that day. Only there is a promise of hope in the burial service—and that there was not for me in Tess's words.

"It's John that's between us?" I asked.

"Yes," she said, speaking slow, "it's John." She was quiet for a minute and then went on again, still speaking slow: "I don't understand it myself, George. Thou'rt a better-hearted man than he is, and I truly think I love him less than I do thee. But—but I love him in another way."