The only answer was a shrug. Ruan is a small town that faces Troy across the diminutive harbor, or, perhaps, I should say that Troy looks down upon it at this slight distance. When a Trojan speaks of it he says, “Across the water,” with as much implied contempt as though he meant Botany Bay. There is no cogent reason for this, except that the poorer class at Ruan earns its livelihood by fishing. In the eyes of its neighbors the shadow of this lonely calling is cast upwards upon its wealthier inhabitants. Troy depends on commerce, and employs these wealthier men of Ruan to build ships for it. Further it will hardly condescend. In the days of which I write intermarriage between the towns was almost unheard-of, and even now it is rare. Yet they are connected by a penny ferry.
“Her father’s a shipbuilder,” urged Sue Tregraine’s supporter.
“He might so well keep crab-pots, for all the chance she’ll have.”
Now there was a Ruan girl standing just outside this group, and she heard what was said. Her name was Nance Trewartha, and her father was a fisherman, who did, in fact, keep crab-pots. Moreover, she was his only child, and helped him at his trade. She could handle a boat as well as a man, she knew every sea-mark up and down the coast for forty miles, she could cut up bait, and her hands were horny with handling ropes from her childhood. But on Sundays she wore gloves, and came across the ferry to chapel, and was as wise as any of her sex. She had known before coming out of her pew that the young minister had a well-shaped back to his head, and a gold ring on his little finger with somebody’s hair in the collet, under a crystal. She was dark, straight, and lissome of figure, with ripe lips and eyes as black as sloes, and she hoped that the hair in the minister’s ring was his mother’s. She was well aware of her social inferiority; but—the truth may be told—she chose to forget it that morning, and to wonder what this young man would be like as a husband. She had looked up into his face during sermon time, devouring his boyish features, noticing his refined accent, marking every gesture. Certainly, he was comely and desirable. As he walked down the hill by Deacon Snowden’s side, she was perfectly conscious of the longing in her heart, but prepared to put a stop to it, and go home to dinner as soon as he had turned the corner and passed out of sight. Then came that unhappy remark about the crab-pots. She bit her lip for a moment, turned, and walked slowly off towards the ferry, full of thought.
Three weeks later Reverend Samuel Bax received his call.
He arrived, to assume his duties, in the waning light of a soft January day. Bontigo’s van set him down, with a carpet-bag, bandbox, and chest of books, at the door of the lodgings which Deacon Snowden had taken for him. The house stood in the North Street, as it is called. It was a small, yellow-washed building, containing just half a dozen rooms, and of these the two set apart for the minister looked straight upon the harbor. Under his sitting-room window was a little garden, and at the end of the garden a low wall, with a stretch of water beyond it and a bark that lay at anchor but a stone’s throw away, as it seemed, its masts overtopping the misty hillside that closed the view. A green painted door was let into the garden wall—a door with two flaps, the upper of which stood open; and through this opening he caught another glimpse of gray water.
The landlady, who showed him into this room and at once began to explain that the furniture was better than it looked, was hardly prepared for the rapture with which he stared out of the window. His boyhood had been spent in a sooty Lancashire town, and to him the green garden, the quay door, the bark, and the stilly water seemed to fall little short of Paradise.
“I reckoned you’d like it,” she said. “An’, to be sure, ’tis a blessing you do.”
He turned his stare upon her for a moment. She was a benign-looking woman of about fifty, in a short-skirted gray gown and widow’s cap.