THE OWLS’ HOUSE

By CROSBIE GARSTIN

A. L. BURT COMPANY

Publishers New York

Published by arrangement with Frederick A. Stokes Company

Printed in U. S. A.

Copyright, 1923, by

Frederick A. Stokes Company

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

The Owls' House

CHAPTER I

It was late evening when John Penhale left the Helston lawyer’s office. A fine drizzle was blowing down Coinage Hall Street; thin beams of light pierced the chinks of house shutters and curtains, barred the blue dusk with misty orange rays, touched the street puddles with alchemic fingers, turning them to gold. A chaise clattered uphill, the horses’ steam hanging round them in a kind of lamp-lit nimbus, the post-boy’s head bent against the rain.

Outside an inn an old soldier with a wooden leg and very drunk stood wailing a street ballad, both eyes shut, impervious to the fact that his audience had long since left him. Penhale turned into “The Angel,” went on straight into the dining-room and sat down in the far corner with the right side of his face to the wall. He did so from habit. A trio of squireens in mud-bespattered riding coats sat near the door and made considerable noise. They had been hare hunting and were rosy with sharp air and hard riding. They greeted every appearance of the ripe serving maid with loud whoops and passed her from arm to arm. She protested and giggled. Opposite them a local shop-keeper was entertaining a creditor from Plymouth to the best bottle the town afforded. The company was made up by a very young ensign of Light Dragoons bound to Winchester to join his regiment for the first time, painfully self-conscious and aloof, in his new scarlet. Penhale beat on the table with his knife. The maid escaped from the festive sportsmen and brought him a plate of boiled beef and onions. As she was about to set the plate before him one of the hare hunters lost his balance and fell to the ground with a loud crash of his chair and a yell of delight from his companions.

The noise caused Penhale to turn his head. The girl emitted an “ach” of horror, dropped the plate on the table and recoiled as though some one had struck her. Penhale pulled the plate towards him, picked up his knife and fork and quietly began to eat. He was quite used to these displays. The girl backed away, staring in a sort of dreadful fascination. A squireen caught at her wrist calling her his “sweet slut,” but she wrenched herself free and ran out of the door.

She did not come near Penhale again; the tapster brought him the rest of his meal. Penhale went on eating, outwardly unmoved; he had been subject to these outbursts, off and on, for eighteen years.

Eighteen years previously myriads of birds had been driven south by the hard winter upcountry. One early morning, after a particularly bitter snap, a hind had run in to say that the pond on Polmenna Downs, above the farm, was covered with wild duck. Penhale took an old flintlock fowling piece of his father’s which had been hanging neglected over the fireplace for years, and made for Polmenna, loading as he went.

As the hind had said, the pool was covered with duck. Penhale crouched under cover of some willows, brought the five-foot gun to his shoulder, and blazed into the brown.

An hour later a fisherman setting rabbit snares in a hedge above the Luddra saw what he described as “a red man” fighting through the scrub and bramble that fringed the cliff. It was John Penhale; the gun had exploded, blowing half his face away. Penhale had no intention of throwing himself over the Luddra, he was blind with blood and pain. The fisherman led him home with difficulty, and then, being of a practical mind, returned to the pond to pick up the duck.

An old crone who had the reputation of being a “white witch” was summoned to Bosula and managed to stop the bleeding by means of incantations, cobwebs and dung—principally dung. The hind was sent on horseback to Penzance to fetch Doctor Spargo.

Doctor Spargo had been making a night of it with his friend the Collector of Customs and a stray ship captain who was peculiarly gifted in the brewing of rum toddies. The doctor was put to bed at dawn by his household staff, and when he was knocked up again at eleven he was not the best pleased. He bade his housekeeper tell the Bosula messenger that he was out—called out to a confinement in Morvah parish and was not expected back till evening—and turned over on his pillow.

The housekeeper returned, agitated, to say that the messenger refused to move. He knew the doctor was in, he said; the groom had told him so. Furthermore if Spargo did not come to his master’s assistance without further ado he would smash every bone in his body. Doctor Spargo rolled out of bed, and opening the window treated the messenger to samples from a vocabulary enriched by a decade of army life. The messenger listened to the tirade unmoved and, as Doctor Spargo cursed, it was borne in on him that he had seen this outrageous fellow before. Presently he remembered when; he had seen him at Gwithian Feast, a canvas jacket on, tossing parish stalwarts as a terrier tosses rats. The messenger was Bohenna, the wrestler. Doctor Spargo closed both the tirade and the window abruptly and bawled for his boots.

The pair rode westwards, the truculent hind cantering on the heels of the physician’s cob, laying into it with an ash plant whenever it showed symptoms of flagging. The cob tripped over a stone in Bucca’s Pass and shied at a goat near Trewoofe, on each occasion putting its master neatly over its head. By the time Spargo arrived at Bosula he was shaking worse than ever. He demanded more rum to steady his hand, but there was none. He pulled himself together as best he could and set to work, trembling and wheezing.

Spargo was a retired army surgeon; he had served his apprenticeship in the shambles of Oudenarde and Malplaquet among soldiers who had no option but to submit to his ministrations. His idea was to patch men up so that they might fight another day, but without regard to their appearance. He sewed the tatters of John Penhale’s face together securely but roughly, pocketed his fee and rode home, gasping, to his toddies.

John Penhale was of fine frame and hearty. In a week or two he was out and about; in a month he had resumed the full business of the farm, but his face was not a pleasant sight. The left side was merely marked with a silvery burn on the cheek bone, but the right might have been dragged by a harrow; it was ragged scars from brow to chin. The eye had gone and part of an ear, the broken jaw had set concave and his cheek had split into a long harelip, revealing a perpetual snarl of teeth underneath. He hid the eye socket with a black patch, but the lower part of his face he could not mask.

Three months after his accident he rode into Penzance market. If one woman squeaked at the sight of him so did a dozen, and children ran to their mothers blubbering that the devil had come for them. Even the men, though sympathetic, would not look him in the face, but stared at their boots while they talked and were plainly relieved when he moved away. John never went in again, unless driven by the direst necessity, and then hurried out the moment his affairs were transacted. For despite his bulk and stoic bearing he was supersensitive, and the horror his appearance awoke cut him to the raw. Thus at the age of twenty-three he became a bitter recluse, a prisoner within the bounds of his farm, Bosula, cared for by a widow and her idiot daughter, mixing only with his few hinds and odd farmers and fishermen that chance drove his way.

He had come to Helston on business, to hear the terms of his Aunt Selina’s will, and now that he had heard them he was eager to be quit of the place. The serving girl’s behavior had stung him like a whip lash and the brawling of the drunken squires jarred on his every nerve. He could have tossed the three of them out of the window if he liked, but he quailed at the thought of their possible mockery. They put their heads together and whispered, hiccoughing and sniggering. They were, as a fact, planning a descent on a certain lady in Pigs Street, but John Penhale was convinced that they were laughing at him. The baby ensign had a derisive curl in his lip, John was sure . . . he could feel the two shop-keepers’ eyes turned his way . . . it was unbearable.

Sneers, jeers, laughter . . . he hated them all, everybody. He would get out, go home to Bosula, to sanctuary. He had a sudden longing for Bosula, still and lonely among the folding hills . . . his own place. He drank off his ale, paid the score and went out to see what the weather was like.

The wind had chopped around easterly and the rain had stopped. The moon was up breasting through flying ridges of cloud like a naked white swimmer in the run of surf. Penhale found an ostler asleep on a pile of straw, roused him and told him to saddle his horse, mounted and rode westwards out of town.

He passed a lone pedestrian near Antron and a string of pack horses under Breage Church, but for the rest he had the road to himself. He ambled gently, considering the terms of his aunt’s will. She had left him her strong farm of Tregors, in the Kerrier Hundred, lock, stock and barrel, on the one condition that he married within twelve months. In default of his marrying it was to pass to her late husband’s cousin, Carveth Donnithorne, ship chandler of Falmouth.

John Penhale paid silent tribute to his aunt’s cleverness. She disliked the smug and infallible Donnithorne intensely, and in making him her next heir had passed over four nearer connections with whom she was on good terms. Her reasons for this curious conduct were that she was a Penhale by birth with intense family pride and John was the last of her line. A trivial dispute between John and Carveth over a coursing match she had fostered with all the cunning that was in her till the men’s dislike of each other amounted to plain hatred. She knew John would do anything in his power to keep Donnithorne out of the Tregors’ rents. She would drive him into matrimony, and then, with reasonable luck, the line would go on and Penhales rule at Bosula forever and ever.

John laughed grimly at the thought of his aunt—sly old devil! She had married and left home before he was born, and he had not seen her a score of times in his life, but she was a vivid memory. He could see her now riding into Bosula, a-pillion behind one of her farm hands, her cold blue eyes taking in every detail of the yard, and hear her first words of greeting to her brother after a year’s separation.

“Jan, thou mazed fool, the trash wants cutting back down to Long meadow, and there’s a cow coughing—bring her in to once and I’ll physick her.”

The cow came in at once; everybody obeyed Selina without question or delay both at Bosula and Tregors. Her husband, Jabez Donnithorne, was the merest cipher whose existence she barely acknowledged.

On one occasion Jabez, returning very drunk from Helston market, having neglected to buy the heifers he was sent after, Selina personally chastised him with a broom handle and bolted him in the pig-sty for the night, where he was overlaid by a sow and suffered many indignities. That cured Jabez.

Selina never stopped long at Bosula—three days at the most—but in that time she would have inspected the place from bound to bound, set everybody to rights, and dictated the policy of the farm for twelve months to come. As she had ruled her brother in boyhood she ruled him to the day of his death. She was fond of him, but only because he was head of the family. His wife she looked on merely as a machine for producing male Penhales. She would see to it that on her death Tregors fell to her family, and then, doubly endowed, the Penhales of Bosula would be squires and gentlefolk in the land.

When, after many years, John remained the only child, Selina bit back her disappointment and concentrated on the boy. She insisted on his being sent to Helston Grammar School, paid half the cost of his education, kept him in plentiful pocket money and saw that his clothes were of the best. He was a handsome, upstanding lad and did her credit. She was more than satisfied; he would go far, she told herself; make a great match. Then came John’s accident. Selina made no move until he was out and about again, and then rode over to assess the damage. She stalked suddenly into the kitchen one morning, surveyed the ruins of her nephew’s comely face, outwardly unmoved, and then stalked out again without a word of consolation or regret, barked instructions that her horse was to be baited and ready in two hours and turned up the hill.

Up the hill she strode, over Polmenna Downs and on to that haunt of her girlhood, the Luddra Head. Perched high on its stone brows, the west wind in her cloak and hair, she stared, rigid and unseeing, over the glitter of the Channel. She was back in the two hours, but her eyelids were red—for the last time in her life Selina had been crying.

She slept at the Angel at Helston that night, visited a certain disreputable attorney next morning and left his office with the Tregellas mortgage in her pocket.

Mr. Hugh Tregellas of Tregellas had four daughters and a mania for gambling. He did not fling his substance away on horse-racing, cock or man fights—indeed he lifted up his voice loudly against the immorality of these pursuits—he took shares in companies formed to extract gold from sea water, in expeditions to discover the kingdom of Prester John, and such like. Any rogue with an oiled tongue and a project sufficiently preposterous could win a hearing from the Squire. But though much money went out few ships came home, and the four Miss Tregellases sat in the parlor, their dowries dwindling to nothing, and waited for the suitors who did not come.

All this was well known to their neighbor, Selina Donnithorne. She knew that when the four Miss Tregellases were not in the parlor playing at ladies they were down on their knee bones scrubbing floors. She even had it on sound authority that the two youngest forked out the cow-byre every morning.

She called on the Squire one afternoon, going to Tregellas in state, dressed in her best, and driving in a cabriolet she had purchased dirt cheap from a broken-down roisterer at Bodmin Assizes. She saw Mr. Tregellas in his gunless gun-room and came to the point at once. She wanted his youngest daughter for John Penhale. Mr. Tregellas flushed with anger and opened his mouth to reply, but Selina gave him no opportunity. Her nephew was already a man of moderate means, she said, living on his own good farm in the Penwith Hundred, with an income of nearly one hundred pounds per annum into the bargain. When she died he would have Tregors also. He was well educated, a fine figure of a man and sound in wind and limb, if a trifle cut about one side of the face—one side only—but then, after all these wars, who was not?

Here Mr. Tregellas managed to interpose a spluttering refusal. Selina nodded amiably. She ventured to remind Mr. Tregellas that since Arethusina’s dowry had sunk off Cape St. Vincent with the Fowey privateer, God’s Providence, her chances of a distinguished marriage were negligible—also that she, Selina, was now mortgagee of Tregellas and the mortgage fell due at Michaelmas.

Mr. Tregellas was a gambler. As long as there was one chance left to him, no matter how long, the future was radiant. He laughed at Selina. He had large interests in a company for trading with the King of certain South Sea atolls, he said, the lagoons of which were paved with pearl. It had been estimated that this enterprise could not fail to enrich him at a rate of less than eleven hundred and fifty-three per centum. A ship bearing the first fruits was expected in Bristol almost any day now, was in fact overdue, but these nor’-easterly head winds . . . Mr. Tregellas saw Selina to the door, his good humor restored, promising her that long before Michaelmas he would not only be paying off the mortgage on Tregellas, but offering her a price for Tregors as well.

Selina rocked home in her cabriolet no whit perturbed by the Squire’s optimism. Nor’-easterly head winds, indeed! . . .

Three months from that date Mr. Tregellas returned the call. Selina was feeding ducks in the yard when he came. She emptied her apron, led the Squire into the kitchen and gave him a glass of cowslip wine—which he needed.

“Come to offer me a price for Tregors?” she asked.

The old gambler blinked his weak eyes pathetically, like a child blinking back tears, and buried his face in his hands. Selina did not twit him further. There was no need. She had him where she wanted him. She smiled to herself. So the pearl ship had gone the deep road of the Fowey privateer—and all the other ventures. She clicked her tongue, “Tchuc—tchuc!” and offered him another glass of wine.

“I’ll send for John Penhale to-morrow,” said she. “I’ll tell him that if he don’t take your maid he shan’t have Tregors. You tell your maid if she don’t take my John I’ll put you all out on the road come Michaelmas. Now get along wid ’ee.”

Arethusina came over to Tregors to pay Mrs. Donnithorne a week’s visit, and John was angled from his retreat by the bait of a roan colt he had long coveted and which his aunt suddenly expressed herself willing to sell.

The sun was down when he reached the farm; Selina met him in the yard, and leading him swiftly into the stables explained the lay of the land while he unsaddled his horse, but she did not tell him what pressure had been brought to bear on the youngest Miss Tregellas.

John was amazed and delighted. Mr. Hugh Tregellas’ daughter willing to marry him, a common farmer! Pretty too; he had seen her once, before his accident, sitting in the family pew in Cury church—plump, fluffy little thing with round blue eyes, like a kitten. This was incredible luck!

He was young then and hot-blooded, sick of the loneliness of Bosula and the haphazard ministrations of the two slatterns. He was for dashing into the house and starting his love-making there and then, but Selina held him, haggling like a fish wife over the price of the roan. When he at length got away from her it was thick dusk. It was dark in the kitchen, except for the feeble glow of the turf fire, Selina explaining that she had unaccountably run out of tallow dips—the boy should fetch some from Helston on the morrow.

Arethusina came downstairs dressed in her eldest sister’s bombazine dress, borrowed for the occasion. She was not embarrassed; she, like John, was eager for change, weary of the threadbare existence and unending struggle at home, of watching her sisters grow warped and bitter. She saw ahead, saw four gray old women, dried kernels rattling in the echoing shell of Tregellas House, never speaking, hating each other and all things, doddering on to the blank end, four gray nuns cloistered by granite pride. Anything were better than that. She would sob off to sleep swearing to take any chance rather than come to that, and here was a chance. John Penhale stood for life full and flowing in place of want and decay. He might only be a yeoman, but he would have two big farms and could keep her in comfort. She would have children, she hoped, silk dresses and a little lap dog. Some day she might even visit London.

She entered the kitchen in good heart and saw John standing before the fire, a vague but imposing silhouette. A fine figure of a man, she thought, and her heart lifted still higher. She dropped him a mischievous curtsey. He took her hand, laughing, a deep, pleasant laugh. They sat on the settle at the back of the kitchen and got on famously.

John had barely spoken to any sort of woman for a year, leave alone a pretty woman; he thought her wonderful. Arethusina had not seen a presentable man for double that period; all her stored coquetry bubbled out. John was only twenty-four, the girl but nineteen; they were like two starved children sitting down to a square meal.

The brass-studded grandfather clock tick-tocked, in its corner; the yellow house cat lay crouched on the hearth watching the furze kindling for mice; Selina nodded in her rocker before the fire, subconsciously keeping time with the beats of the clock. A whinny of treble laughter came from the settle, followed by John’s rumbling bass, then whisperings.

Selina beamed at her vis-à-vis, the yellow cat. She was elated at the success of her plans. It had been a good idea to let the girl get to know John before she could see him. The blow would be softened when morning came. In Selina’s experience obstacles that appeared insurmountable at night dwindled to nothing in the morning light; one came at them with a fresh heart. She was pleased with Arethusina. The girl was healthy, practical and ambitious—above all, ambitious. She might not be able to do much with John, marred as he was, but their children would get all the advantages of the mother’s birth, Selina was sure. The chariot of the Penhales would roll onwards, steered by small, strong hands.

She glanced triumphantly at the pair on the settle and curled her thin lips. Then she rose quietly and slipped off to bed. The yellow cat remained, waiting its prey. Arethusina and John did not notice Selina’s departure, they were engrossed in each other. The girl had the farmer at her finger ends and enjoyed the experience; she played on his senses as on a keyboard. He loomed above her on the settle, big, eager, boyish, with a passionate break in his laughter. She kept him guessing, yielded and retreated in turn, thrilled to feel how easily he responded to her flying moods. What simpletons men were!—and what fun!

John shifted nearer up the settle, his great hot hand closed timorously over hers; she snatched it free and drew herself up.

“La! sir, you forget yourself, I think. I will beg you to remember I am none of your farm wenches! I—I . . .” She shook with indignation.

John trembled; he had offended, lost her. . . . O fool! He tried to apologize and stuttered ridiculously. He had lost her! The prospect of facing a lifetime without this delectable creature, on whom he had not bestowed a moment’s thought three hours before, suddenly became intolerable. He bit his nails with rage at his impetuosity. So close beside him, yet gone forever! Had she gone already? Melted into air? . . . A dream after all? He glanced sideways. No, she was still there; he could see the dim pallor of her face and neck against the darkness, the folds of the bombazine dress billowing out over the edge of the settle like a great flower.

A faint sweet waft of perfume touched his nostrils. Something stirred beside him; he looked down. Her hand . . . her hand was creeping back up the settle towards him! He heard a sound and looked up again; she was crying! . . . Stay, was she crying? No, by the Lord in heaven she was not; she was laughing! In a flash he was on his feet, had crushed her in his arms, as though to grasp the dear dream before it could fade, and hold it to him forever. He showered kisses on her mouth, throat, forehead—anywhere. She did not resist, but turned her soft face up to his, laughing still. Tregors and Bosula were safe, safe for both of them and all time.

At that moment the yellow cat sprang, and in so doing toppled a clump of furze kindling over the embers. The dry bush caught and flared, roaring, up the chimney. The kitchen turned in a second from black to red, and John felt the youngest Miss Tregellas go suddenly rigid in his arms, her blue eyes stared at him big with horror, her full lips were drawn tight and colorless across her clenched teeth. He kissed her once more, but it was like kissing the dead.

Then she came to life, struggled frantically, battered at his mouth with both fists, giving little “Oh! Ohs!” like a trapped animal mad with pain. He let her go, amazed.

She fled across the kitchen, crashing against the table in her blind hurry, whipped round, stared at him again and then ran upstairs, panting and sobbing. He heard the bolt of her door click, and then noises as though she was piling furniture against it.

John turned about, still amazed, and jumped back startled. Who was that? . . . that ghoul’s mask lit by flickers of red flame, snarling across the room? Then he remembered it was himself of course, himself in the old round mirror. After his accident he had smashed every looking-glass at home and had forgotten what he looked like. . . . During the few hours of fool’s paradise he had forgotten about his face altogether . . . supposed the girl knew . . . had been told. The fatal furze bush burnt out, leaving him in merciful darkness.

John opened the door, stumbled across to the stable, saddled his horse and, riding hard, was at Bosula with dawn.

When the farm girl went to call Arethusina next morning she found the room empty and the bed had not been slept in. Selina sent to the Squire at once, but the youngest Miss Tregellas had not returned. They discovered her eventually in an old rab pit halfway between the two houses, her neck broken; she had fallen over the edge in the dark. It was supposed she was trying to find her way home.

CHAPTER II

Since that night, seventeen years before, John Penhale had done no love-making nor had he again visited Tregors. The Tregellas affair had broken his nerve, but it had not impaired that of his aunt in the slightest degree, and he was frightened of her, being assured that, did he give her a chance, she would try again.

And now the old lady was dead, and in dying had tried again. John pictured her casting her final noose sitting up, gaunt and tall, in her four-poster bed dictating her last will and testament to the Helston attorney, awed farm hands waiting to affix their marks, sunset staining the west window and the black bull roaring in the yard below. And it was a shrewd cast she had made; John could feel its toils tightening about him. He had always been given to understand that Tregors was as good as his, and now it was as good as Carveth Donnithorne’s—Carveth Donnithorne! John gritted his teeth at the thought of the suave and ever prospering ship chandler. Tregors had always been a strong farm, but in the last seventeen years Selina had increased the acreage by a third, by one hundred acres of sweet upland grazing lopped from the Tregellas estate. There were new buildings too, built of moor granite to stand forever, and the stock was without match locally. John’s yeoman heart yearned to it. Oh, the clever old woman! John pictured Carveth Donnithorne taking possession, Carveth Donnithorne with his condescending airs, patronizing wife and school of chubby little boys. Had not Carveth goods enough in this world but that he must have Tregors as well?

John swore he should not have Tregors as well, not if he could stop it. How could he stop it? He puzzled his wits, but returned inevitably to the one answer he was trying to evade, “Marry within twelve months! Marry within twelve months!” His aunt had made a sure throw, he admitted with grim admiration, the cunning old devil! It was all very well saying “marry,” but who would marry a man that even the rough fisher girls avoided and children hid from? He would have no more force or subterfuge. If any woman consented to marry him it must be in full knowledge of what she was doing and of her own free will. There should be no repetition of that night seventeen years before. He shuddered. “No, by the Lord, no more of that; rather let Tregors go to Carveth.”

In imagination he saw the Squire’s daughter as he was always seeing her in the dark nights when he was alone, stricken numb in his arms, glazed horror in her eyes—saw her running across the blind country, sobbing, panting, stumbling in furrows, torn by brambles, trying to get home, away from him—the Terror. He shut his eyes, as though to shut out the vision, and rode on past Germoe to Kenneggy Downs.

The moon was flying through clouds like a circus girl through hoops, the road was swept by winged shadows. Puddles seemed to brim with milk at one moment, ink the next. At one moment the surrounding country was visible, a-gleam as with hoar frost, and then was blotted out in darkness; it was a night of complete and startling transformations. The shadow of a bare oak leapt upon them suddenly, flinging unsubstantial arms at man and horse as though to grasp them, a phantom octopus. Penhale’s mare shied, nearly unseating him. He came out of his somber thoughts, kicked spurs into her and drove her on at a smart trot. She swung forward, trembling and uneasy, nostrils swelling, ears twitching, as though she sensed uncanny presences abroad. They reached the high ground above Perranuthnoe, waste, gorse-covered downs. To the south the great indent of Mount’s Bay gloomed and glittered under cloud and moonshine; westward Paul Hill rose like a wall, a galaxy of ships’ riding lights pricking the shadow at its base. The track began to drop downhill, the moors gave over to fields with high banks. An old pack horse track, choked with undergrowth, broke into the road from the seaward side. The mare cocked her ears towards it, snorted and checked. Penhale laid into her with his whip. She bounded forward and shied again, but with such violence this time that John came out of the saddle altogether. He saw a shadow rush across the road, heard something thwack on the mare’s rump as she swerved from under him, and he fell, not on the road as he expected, but on top of a man, bearing him to the ground. As John fell he knew exactly what he had to deal with—highwaymen! The mare’s swerve had saved him a stunning blow on the head. He grappled with the assailant as they went down and they rolled over and over on the ground feeling for strangle holds. John was no tyro at the game; he was muscled like a bull and had been taught many a trick by his hind Bohenna, the champion, but this thief was strong also and marvelously elusive. He buckled and twisted under the farmer’s weight, finally slipped out of his clutch altogether and leapt to his feet. John scrambled up just in time to kick the heavy oak cudgel from the man’s reach and close with him again. John cross-buttocked and back-heeled him repeatedly, but on each occasion the man miraculously regained his feet. John tried sheer strength, hugged the man to him, straining to break his back. The man bent and sprang as resilient as a willow wand. John hugged him closer, trying to crush his ribs. The man made his teeth meet in the farmer’s ear and slipped away again.

Once more John was just in time to stop him from picking up the club. He kicked it into the ditch and set to work with his knuckles. But he could not land a blow; wherever he planted his fists the fellow was not, eluding them by a fraction of an inch, by a lightning side-step or a shake of the head. The man went dancing backwards and sideways, hands down, bobbing his head, bending, swaying, bouncing as though made of rubber. He began to laugh. The laugh sent a shiver through John Penhale. The footpad thought he had him in his hands, and unless help came from somewhere the farmer knew such was the case; it was only a question of time and not much time. He was out of trim and cooked to a finish already, while the other was skipping like a dancing master, had breath to spare for laughter.

At that time of night nobody would be on the road, and help was not likely to drop from Heaven. He had only himself to look to. He thought over the manifold tricks he had seen in the wrestling ring, thought swiftly and desperately, hit out with his left and followed with an upward kick of his right foot—Devon style. His fist missed as he expected, but his boot caught the thief a tip under the knee cap as he side-stepped. The man doubled up, and John flung himself at him. The footpad butted him in the pit of the stomach with his head and skipped clear, shouting savagely in Romany, but limping, limping! John did not know the language, but it told him there was a companion to reckon with—a fresh man; the struggle was hopeless. Nevertheless he turned and ran for the club. He was not fast enough, not fast enough by half; three yards from the ditch the lamed thief was on him. John heard the quick hop-skip of feet behind him and dropped on one knee as the man sprang for his back. The footpad, not expecting the drop, went too high; he landed across John’s shoulders, one arm dropping across the farmer’s chest. In a flash John had him by the wrist and jerked upright, at the same time dragging down on the wrist; it was an adaptation of the Cornish master-throw, “the flying mare.” The man went over John’s shoulders like a rocket, made a wonderful effort to save himself by a back somersault, but the tug on his wrist was too much, and he crashed on his side in the road. John kicked him on the head till he lay still and, picking up the club, whirled to face the next comer. Nobody came on. John was perplexed. To whom had the fellow been shouting if not to a confederate?

Perhaps the cur had taken fright and was skulking in the gorse. Very well; he would drub him out. He was flushed with victory and had the club in his hands now. He was stepping towards the furze when he heard a slight scrunching sound to his left, and, turning, saw a dark figure squatting on the bank at the roadside. John stood still, breathing hard, his cudgel ready. The mysterious figure did not stir. John stepped nearer, brandishing his club. Still the figure made no move. John stepped nearer yet, and at that moment the moon broke clear of a mesh of clouds, flooding the road with ghostly light, and John, to his astonishment, saw that the confederate was a girl, a girl in a tattered cloak and tarnished tumbler finery, munching a turnip. Strolling acrobats! That explained the man’s uncanny agility.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded.

“Nothing, sir,” said the girl, chewing a lump of the root.

“I’ll have him hung and you transported for this,” John thundered.

“I did you no harm,” said the girl calmly.

That was true enough. John wondered why she had not come to the assistance of her man; tribe law was strong with these outcasts, he understood. He asked her.

The girl shrugged her shoulders. “He beat me yesterday. I wanted to see him beat. You done it. Good!”

She thrust a bare, well-molded arm in John’s face. It was bruised from elbow to shoulder. She spat at the unconscious tumbler.

“What is he to you?” John asked.

“Nothing,” she retorted. “Muck,” and took another wolfish bite at the turnip; she appeared ravenous.

John turned his back on her. He had no intention of proceeding with the matter, since to do so meant carrying a stunned footpad, twelve stone at least, a mile into Market Jew and later standing the publicity of the Assizes. He was not a little elated at the success of his “flying mare” and in a mood to be generous. After all he had lost nothing but a little skin; he would let the matter drop. He picked the man up and slung him off the road into the gorse of the pack track. Now for his horse. He walked past the munching girl in silence, halted, felt in his pocket, found a florin and jerked it to her.

“Here,” he said, “get yourself an honest meal.”

The florin fell in the ditch, the girl dropped off the bank onto it as he had seen a hawk drop on a field vole.

“Good God!” he muttered. “She must be starved,” and walked on.

He would knock up the inn in Market Jew and spend the remainder of the night there, he decided. He would look for his horse in the morning—but he expected it would trot home.

A hundred yards short of the St. Hilary turning he came upon the mare; she was standing quietly, a forefoot planted on a broken rein, holding herself nose to the ground. He freed her, knotted the rein and mounting clattered down the single street and out on the beach road on the other side. Since he had his horse he would push straight through after all; if he stopped he would have to concoct some story to account for his battered state, which would be difficult. He went at a walk, pondering over the events of the night. On his left hand the black mass of St. Michael’s Mount loomed out of the moon-silvered bay like some basking sea monster; before him lay Penzance with the spire of St. Mary’s rising above the masts of the coasters, spearing at the stars.

At Ponsandane River the mare picked up a stone. John jumped off, hooked it out and was preparing to remount when he noticed that she had got her head round and was staring back down the road, ears pricked. There was some one behind them. He waited a full minute, but could neither see nor hear anything, so went on again, through Penzance, over Newlyn Green and up the hill. The wind had died away. It was the still hour that outrides dawn; the east was already paling. In the farms about Paul, John could hear the cocks bugling to each other; hidden birds in the blackthorns gave sleepy twitters; a colt whinnied “good morning” from a near-by field and cantered along the hedge, shaking the dew from its mane. Everything was very quiet, very peaceful, yet John could not rid himself of the idea that he was being followed. He pulled up again and listened, but, hearing nothing, rode on, calling himself a fool.

He dropped down into Trevelloe Bottoms, gave the mare a drink in Lamorna stream and climbed Boleigh. A wall-eyed sheep dog came out of a cottage near the Pipers and flew, yelping, at the horse’s heels. He cursed it roundly and it retired whence it came, tail between its legs. As he turned the bend in the road he heard the cur break into a fresh frenzy of barking.

There was somebody behind him after all, somebody who went softly and stopped when he did. It was as he had suspicioned; the tumbler had come to and was trailing him home to get his revenge—to fire stacks or rip a cow, an old gypsy trick. John swung the mare into a cattle track, tied her to a blackthorn, pulled a heavy stone out of the mud and waited, crouched against the bank, hidden in the furze. He would settle this rogue once and for all. Every yeoman instinct aroused, he would have faced forty such in defense of his stock, his place.

Dawn was lifting her golden head over the long arm of the Lizard. A chain of little pink clouds floated above her like adoring cherubs. Morning mists drifted up from the switch-backed hills to the north, white as steam. Over St. Gwithian tower the moon hung, haggard and deathly pale, an old siren giving place to a rosy débutante. In the bushes birds twittered and cheeped, tuning their voices against the day. John Penhale waited, bent double, the heavy stone ready in his hands. The footpad was a long time coming. John wondered if he had taken the wrong turning—but that was improbable; the mare’s tracks were plain. Some one might have come out of the cottage and forced the fellow into hiding—or he might have sensed the ambush. John was just straightening his back to peer over the furze when he heard the soft thud of bare feet on the road, heard them hesitate and then turn towards him, following the hoof prints. He held his breath, judged the time and distance and sprang up, the stone poised in both hands above his head. He lowered it slowly and let it drop in the mud. It was the girl!

She looked at the stone, then at John and her mouth twitched with the flicker of a smile. John felt foolish and consequently angry. He stepped out of the bushes.

“Why are you following me?” he demanded.

She looked down at her bare feet, then up at him out of the corners of her deep dark eyes, but made no answer.

John grasped her by an arm and shook her. “Can’t you speak? Why are you following me?”

She did not reply, but winced slightly, and John saw that he was gripping one of the cruel bruises. He released her, instantly contrite.

“I did not mean to do that,” he said. Then, hardening again: “But, look you, I’ll have no more of this. I’ll have none of your kind round here, burning ricks. If I catch you near my farm I’ll hand you over to the law for . . . for what you are and you’ll be whipped. Do you hear me?”

The girl remained silent, leaning up against the bank, pouting, looking up at John under her long lashes. She was handsome in a sulky, outlandish way, he admitted. She had a short nose, high cheekbones and very dark eyes with odd lights in them; her bare head was covered with crisp black curls and she wore big brass earrings; a little guitar was tucked under one arm. The tattered cloak was drawn tight about her, showing the thin but graceful lines of her figure—a handsome trollop.

“If you won’t speak you won’t . . . but, remember, I have warned you,” said John, but with less heat, as he untied his horse and mounted. As he turned the corner he glanced furtively back and met the girl’s eyes full. He put spurs to the mare, flushing hotly.

A quarter of an hour later he reined up in his yard. He had been away rather less than twenty-four hours, but it seemed like as many days. It was good to be home. A twist of blue smoke at a chimney told him Martha was stirring and he would get breakfast soon. He heard the blatter of calves in their shed and the deep, answering moo of cows from the byre, the splash and babble of the stream. In the elms the rooks had already begun to quarrel—familiar voices.

He found Bohenna in the stable wisping a horse and singing his one song, “I seen a ram at Hereford Fair,” turned the mare over to him and sought the yard again.

It was good to be home . . . and yet, and yet . . . things moved briskly outside, one found adventures out in the world, adventures that set the blood racing. He was boyishly pleased with his tussle with the vagabond, had tricked him rather neatly, he thought; he must tell Bohenna about that. Then the girl. She had not winced at the sight of his face, not a quiver, had smiled at him even. He wondered if she were still standing in the cow track, the blue cloak drawn about her, squelching mud through her bare toes—or was she ranging the fields after more turnips—turnips! She was no better than an animal—but a handsome animal for all that, if somewhat thin. Oh, well, she had gone now; he had scared her off, would never see her again.

He turned to walk into the house and saw the girl again. She was leaning against the gate post, looking up at him under her lashes. He stood stock-still for a moment, amazed as at a vision, and then flung at her:

“You—you . . . didn’t you hear what I said?” She neither stirred nor spoke.

John halted. He felt his fury going from him like wind from a pricked bladder. In a second he would be no longer master of himself. In the glow of morning she was handsomer than ever; she was young, not more than twenty, there was a blue gloss on the black curls, the brass earrings glinted among them; her skin had a golden sunburnt tint and her eyes smoldered with curious lights.

“What do you want?” John stammered, suddenly husky.

The girl smiled up at him, a slow, full-lipped smile. “You won me . . . so I came,” she said.

John’s heart leapt with old pagan pride. To the victor the spoils!—aye, verily! He caught the girl by the shoulders and whirled her round so that his own face came full to the sunrise.

“Do you see this?” he cried. “Look well, look well!”

The girl stared at him steadily, without a tremor, without the flick of an eyelid, and then, bending, rubbed her forehead, cat-like, against his shoulder.

“Marry,” she purred, “I’ve seen worse than that where I came from.”

For answer John caught her up in his arms and marched, shouting with rough laughter, into the house, the tumbler girl clasped tight to his breast, her arms about his neck.

To the victor the spoils!

CHAPTER III

Bosula—“The Owls’ House”—lay in the Keigwin Valley, about six miles southwest of Penzance. The valley drained the peninsula’s bare backbone of tors, ran almost due south until within a mile and a half of the sea, formed a sharp angle, ran straight again and met the English Channel at Monks Cove. A stream threaded its entire length, its source a holy well on Bartinny Downs (the water of which, taken at the first of the moon, was reputed a cure for chest complaints). Towards the river’s source the valley was a shallow swamp, a wide bed of tussocks, flags, willow and thorn, the haunt of snipe and woodcock in season, but as it neared Bosula it grew narrower and deeper until it emptied into the sea, pinched to a sharp gorge between precipitous cliffs.

It was a surprising valley. You came from the west over the storm-swept, treeless table-land that drives into the Atlantic like a wedge and is beaten upon by three seas, came with clamorous salt gales buffeting you this way and that, pelting you with black showers of rain, came suddenly to the valley rim and dropped downhill into a different climate, a serene, warm place of trees with nothing to break the peace but the gentle chatter of the stream. When the wind set roundabouts of south it was not so quiet. The cove men had a saw—

“When the river calls the sea,

Fishing there will be;

When the sea calls the river,

’Ware foul weather.”

Bosula stood at the apex of the angle, guarded on all sides, but when the wind set southerly and strong the boom of the breakers on the Twelve Apostles reef came echoing up the valley in deep, tremendous organ peals. So clear did they sound that one would imagine the sea had broken inland and that inundation was imminent.

The founder of the family was a tin-streamer from Crowan, who, noting that the old men had got their claws into every inch of payable dirt in the parish, loaded his implements on a donkey and went westward looking for a stream of his own. In due course he and his ass meandered down Keigwin Valley and pitched camp in the elbow. On the fourth day Penhale the First, soil-stained and unkempt, approached the lord of the manor and proposed washing the stream on tribute. He held out no hopes, but was willing to give it a try, being out of work. The lord of the manor knew nothing of tin or tinners, regarded the tatterdemalion with casual contempt and let him draw up almost what terms he liked. In fifteen years Penhale had taken a small fortune out of the valley, bought surrounding land and built a house on the site of his original camp. From thenceforth the Penhales were farmers, and each in his turn added something, a field, a bit of moorland, a room to the house.

When John Penhale took possession the estate held three hundred acres of arable land, to say nothing of stretches of adjoining bog and heather, useful for grazing cattle. The buildings formed a square, with the yard in the center, the house on the north and the stream enclosing the whole on three sides, so that the place was serenaded with eternal music, the song of running water, tinkling among bowlders, purling over shallows, splashing over falls.

Penhale, the tinner, built a two-storied house of four rooms, but his successor had seven children, and an Elizabethan, attuning himself to a prolific age, thirteen. The first of these added a couple of rooms, the second four. Since building forwards encroached on the yard and building backwards would bring them into the stream they, perforce, extended sideways and westwards. In John Penhale’s time the house was five rooms long and one thick, with the front door stranded at the east end and the thatch coming down so low the upper windows had the appearance of old men’s eyes peering out under arched and shaggy brows. There was little distinctive about the house save the chimneys, which were inordinately high, and the doorway which was carved. Penhale the First, who knew something of smelting and had ideas about draught, had set the standard in chimney pots, but the Elizabethan was responsible for the doorway. He pulled a half-drowned sailor out of the cove one dawn, brought him home, fed and clothed him. The castaway, a foreigner of some sort, being unable to express gratitude in words, picked up a hammer and stone chisel and decorated his rescuer’s doorway—until then three plain slabs of granite. He carved the date on the lintel and a pattern of interwoven snakes on the uprights, culminating in two comic little heads, one on either side of the door, intended by the artist as portraits of his host and hostess, but which they, unflattered, and doubtless prompted by the pattern below, had passed down to posterity as Adam and Eve.

The first Penhale was a squat, burly man and built his habitation to fit himself, but the succeeding generations ran to height and were in constant danger of braining themselves against the ceilings. They could sit erect, but never rose without glancing aloft, and when they stood up their heads well-nigh disappeared among the deep beams. This had inculcated in them the habit of stooping instinctively on stepping through any door. A Dean of Gwithian used to swear that the Penhale family entered his spacious church bent double.

The first Penhale, being of small stature, made his few windows low down; the subsequent Penhales had to squat to see out of them. Not that the Penhales needed windows to look out of; they were an open-air breed who only came indoors to eat and sleep. The ugly, cramped old house served their needs well. They came home from the uplands or the bottoms at the fall of night, came in from plowing, shooting, hedging or driving cattle, came mud-plastered, lashed by the winter winds, saw Bosula lights twinkling between the sheltering trees, bowed their tall heads between Adam and Eve and, entering the warm kitchen, sat down to mighty meals of good beef and good vegetables, stretched their legs before the open hearth, grunting with full-fed content, and yawned off to bed and immediate sleep, lulled by the croon of the brook and the whisper of the wind in the treetops. Gales might skim roofs off down in the Cove, ships batter to matchwood on the Twelve Apostles, upland ricks be scattered over the parish, the Penhales of Bosula slept sound in the lap of the hills, snug behind three-foot walls.

In winter, looking down from the hills, you could barely see Bosula for trees, in summer not at all. They filled the valley from side to side and for half a mile above and below the house, oak, ash, elm and sycamore with an undergrowth of hazel and thorn. Near the house the stream, narrowed to a few feet, ran between banks of bowlders piled up by the first Penhale and his tinners. They had rooted up bowlders everywhere and left them lying anyhow, on their ends or sides, great uneven blocks of granite, now covered with an emerald velvet of moss or furred with gray and yellow lichen. Between these blocks the trees thrust, flourishing on their own leaf mold. The ashes and elms went straight up till they met the wind leaping from hill to hill and then stopped, nipped to an even height as a box-hedge is trimmed by shears; but the thorns and hazels started crooked and grew crooked all the way, their branches writhing and tangling into fantastic clumps and shapes to be overgrown and smothered in toils of ivy and honeysuckle.

In spring the tanglewood valley was a nursery of birds. Wrens, thrushes, chiffchaffs, greenfinches and chaffinches built their nests in scented thickets of hawthorn and may; blue and oxeye tits kept house in holes in the apple and oak trees. These added their songs to that of the brook. In spring the bridal woods about Bosula rippled and thrilled with liquid and debonair melody. But it was the owls that were the feature of the spot. Winter or summer they sat on their boughs and hooted to each other across the valley, waking the woods with startling and eerie screams. “To-whoo, wha-aa, who-hoo!” they would go, amber eyes burning, and then launch themselves heavily from their perches and beat, gray and ghostly, across the moon. “Whoo, wha-hoo!”

Young lovers straying up the valley were apt to clasp each other the tighter and whisper of men murdered and evil hauntings when they heard the owls, but the first Penhale in his day, camped with his ass in the crook of the stream, took their banshee salutes as a good omen. He lay on his back in the leaves listening to them and wondering at their number.

“Bos hula enweer ew’n teller na,” said he in Cornish, as he rolled over to sleep. “Truly this is the owls’ house.”

CHAPTER IV

When John Penhale carried the gypsy girl into Bosula, he thought she would be off again in a fortnight or a month at most. On the contrary she curled up as snug as a dormouse, apparently prepared to stay forever. At first she followed him wherever he went about the farm, but after a week she gave that up and remained at Bosula absorbed in the preparation of food.

The number of really satisfying meals the girl Teresa had had in her time could be counted on her fingers and toes, almost. Life had been maintained by a crust here and a bone there. She was only half gypsy; her mother had been an itinerant herbalist, her father a Basque bear-leader, and she was born at Blyth Fair. Her twenty-two years had been spent on the highways, singing and dancing from tavern to tavern, harried by the law on one side and hunger on the other. She had no love for the Open Road; her feet were sore from trudging it and she knew it led nowhere but to starvation; her mother had died in a ditch and her father had been hanged. For years she had been waiting a chance to get out of the dust, and when John came along, knocked out the tumbler and jerked her a florin she saw that possible chance.

A sober farmer who tossed silver so freely should be a bachelor, she argued, and a man who could fight like that must have a good deal of the lusty animal about him. She knew the type, and of all men they were the easiest to handle. She followed up the clew hot foot, and now here she was in a land of plenty. She had no intention of leaving in a fortnight, a month, or ever, if she could help it, no desire to exchange three meat meals daily, smoking hot, for turnips; or a soft bed for the lee of a haystack. She would sit on the floor after supper, basking at the roaring hearth, her back propped against John’s knees, and listen to the drip of the eaves, the sough of the treetops, the echoed organ crashes of the sea, snuggle closer to the farmer and laugh.

When he asked her why she did that she shrugged her shoulders. But she laughed to think of what she was escaping, laughed to think that the tumbler was out in it. But for that flung florin and the pricking of her thumbs she would have been out in it too, crouched under a hedge, maybe, soaked and shivering. Penhale need have had no fears she would leave him; on the contrary she was afraid he would tire of her, and strove by every means to bind him to her irrevocably. She practiced all her wiles on John, ran to him when he came in, fondled and kissed him, rubbed her head on his shoulder, swore he didn’t care for her, pretended to cry, any excuse to get taken in his arms; once there she had him in her power. The quarter strain of gitano came uppermost then, the blood of generations of ardent southern women, professional charmers all, raced in her veins and prompted her, showed her how and when. It was all instinctive and quite irresistible; the simple northern yeoman was a clod in her hands.

Martha had found Teresa some drugget clothes, rummaging in chests that lay, under the dust of twenty years, in the neglected west wing—oak chests and mahogany with curious iron clasps and hinges, the spoil of a score of foundered ships. Teresa had been close behind the woman when the selection was made and she had glimpsed many things that were not drugget. When she gave up following John abroad she took to spending most of her time, between meals, in the west wing, bolting the doors behind her so that Martha could not see what she was doing.

John was lurching home down the valley one autumn evening, when, as he neared Bosula, he heard singing and the tinkling of melodious wires. There was a small grove of ashes close ahead, encircling an open patch of ground supposed to be a fairy ring, in May a purple pool of bluebells, but then carpeted with russet and yellow leaves. He stepped nearer, peered round an oak bole and saw a sight which made him stagger and swear himself bewitched. There was a marvelous lady dancing in the circlet, and as she danced she sang, twanging an accompaniment on a little guitar.

“Then, Lovely Boy, bring hither

The Chaplet, e’er it wither,

Steep’d in the various Juices

The Cluster’d Vine produces;

The Cluster’d Vine produces.”

She was dressed in a straight-laced bodice stitched with silver and low cut, leaving her shoulders bare; flowing daffodil sleeves caught up at the elbows and a cream-colored skirt sprigged with blue flowers and propped out at the hips on monstrous farthingales. On her head she wore a lace fan-tail—but her feet were bare. She swept round and round in a circle, very slow and stately, swaying, turning, curtseying to the solemn audience of trees.

“So mix’t with sweet and sour,

Life’s not unlike the flower;

Its Sweets unpluck’d will languish,

And gather’d ’tis with anguish;

And gather’d ’tis with anguish.”

The glare of sunset shot through gaps in the wood in quivering golden shafts, fell on the smooth trunks of the ashes transforming them into pillars of gold. In this dazzle of gold the primrose lady danced, in and out of the beams, now glimmering, now in hazy and delicate shadow. A puff of wind shook a shower of pale leaves upon her, they drifted about her like confetti, her bare feet rustled among them, softly, softly.

“This, round my moisten’d Tresses,

The use of Life expresses:

Wine blunts the thorn of Sorrow,

Our Rose may fade to-morrow:

Our Rose—may—fade—to-morrow.”

The sun went down behind the hill; twilight, powder-blue, swept through the wood, quenching the symphony in yellows. The lady made a final fritter of strings, bowed to the biggest ash and faded among the trees, towards Bosula. John clung to his oak, stupefied. Despite his Grammar School education he half believed in the crone’s stories of Pixies and “the old men,” and if this was not a supernatural being what was it? A fine lady dancing in Bosula woods at sundown—and in the fairy circle too! If not a sprite where did she come from? There was not her match in the parish, or hundred even. He did not like it at all. He would go home by circling over the hill. He hesitated. That was a long detour, he was tired and his own orchard was not a furlong distant. His common sense returned. Damme! he would push straight home, he was big and strong enough whatever betide. He walked boldly through the woods, whistling away his fears, snapping twigs beneath his boots.

He came to a dense clump of hollies at the edge of the orchard and heard the tinkle-tinkle again, right in front of him. He froze solid and stared ahead. It was thick dusk among the bushes; he could see nothing. Tinkle-tinkle—from the right this time. He turned slowly, his flesh prickling. Nothing. A faint rustle of leaves behind his back and the tinkle of music once more. John began to sweat. He was pixie-led for certain—and only fifty yards from his own door. If one listened to this sort of thing one was presently charmed and lost forever, he had heard. He would make a dash for it. He burst desperately through the hollies and saw the primrose lady standing directly in front of him on the orchard fringe. He stopped. She curtsied low.

“Oh, Jan, Jan,” she laughed. “Jan, come here and kiss me.”

“Teresa!”

She pressed close against him and held up her full, tempting mouth. He kissed her over and over.

“Where did you get these—these clothes?” he asked.

“Out of the old chests,” said she. “You like me thus? . . . love me?”

For answer he hugged her to him and they went on into the kitchen linked arm in arm. Martha in her astonishment let the cauldron spill all over the floor and the idiot daughter threw a fit.

The drugget dress disappeared after that. Teresa rifled the chests and got some marvelous results. The chests held the hoardings of a century, samples of every fashion, washed in from wrecks on the Twelve Apostles, wardrobes of officers’ mistresses bound for the garrison at Tangier, of proud ladies that went down with Indiamen, packet ships, and vessels sailing for the Virginia Colony. Jackdaw pickings that generations of Penhale women had been too modest to wear and too feminine to part with. Gowns, under gowns, bodices, smocks and stomachers of silk, taffeta, sarsenet and satin of all hues and shapes, quilted, brocaded, embroidered, pleated, scalloped and slashed; cambric and holland ruffs, collars, bands, kerchiefs and lappets; scarves, trifles of lace pointed and godrooned; odd gloves of cordovan leather, heavily fringed; vamped single shoes, red heeled; ribbons; knots; spangled garters; feathers and fans.

The clothes were torn and faded in patches, eaten by moth, soiled and rusted by salt water, but Teresa cared little; they were treasure-trove to her, the starveling. She put them all on in turn (as the Penhale wives had done before her—but in secret) without regard to fit, appropriateness or period and with the delight of a child dressing up for a masquerade. She dressed herself differently every evening—even wearing articles with showy linings inside out—aiming only at a blaze of color and spending hours in the selection.

The management of the house she left entirely to Martha, which was wise enough, seeing she knew nothing of houses. John coming in of an evening never knew what was in store for him; it gave life an added savour. He approached Adam and Eve, his heart a-flutter—what would she be like this time?—opened the low door and stepped within. And there she would be, standing before the hearth waiting for him, mischievous and radiant, brass earrings winking, a knot of ribbons in her raven curls, dressed in scarlet, cream, purple or blue, cloth of gold or silver lace—all worn and torn if you came to examine closely, but, in the leaping firelight, gorgeous.

Sometimes she would spend the evening wooing him, sidling into his arms, rubbing with her cheek and purring in her cat fashion; and sometimes she would take her guitar and, sitting cross-legged before the hearth, sing the songs by which she had made her living. Pretty, innocent twitters for the most part, laments to cruel Chloes, Phyllises and Celias in which despairing Colins and Strephons sang of their broken hearts in tripping, tuneful measures; morris and country airs she gave also and patriotic staves—

“Tho’ the Spaniards invade

Our Int’rest and Trade

And often our Merchant-men plunder,

Give us but command

Their force to withstand,

We’ll soon make the slaves truckle under.”

Such stuff stirred John. As the lyrics lulled him, he would inflate his chest and tap his toe on the flags in time with the tune, very manful.

All this heady stuff intoxicated the recluse. He felt a spell on the place, could scarcely believe it was the same dark kitchen in which he had sat alone for seventeen years, listening to the stream, the rain and the wind. It was like living in a droll-teller’s story where charcoal burners fell asleep on enchanted barrows and woke in fairy-land or immortals put on mortal flesh and sojourned in the homes of men. Reared on superstition among a race that placed balls on their roofs and hung rags about holy wells to keep off witches, he almost smelt magic now. At times he wondered if this strange creature he had met on the high moors under the moon were what she held to be, if one day she would not get a summons back to her own people, the earth gape open for her and he would be alone again. There had been an authentic case in Zennor parish; his own grandmother had seen the forsaken husband. He would glance at Teresa half fearfully, see her squatting before the blaze, lozenges of white skin showing through the rips in her finery, strong fingers plucking the guitar strings, round throat swelling as she sang—

“I saw fair Clara walk alone;

The feathered snow came softly down . . .”

—and scout his suspicions. She was human enough—and even if she were not, sufficient for the day. . . .

As for the girl, with the unstinted feeding, she put on flesh and good looks. Her bones and angles disappeared, her figure took on bountiful curves, her mouth lost its defiant pout. She had more than even she wanted to eat, a warm bed, plenty of colorful kickshaws and a lover who fell prostrate before her easiest artifices. She was content—or very nearly so. One thing remained and that was to put this idyllic state of affairs on a permanent basis. That accomplished, her cup of happiness would brim, she told herself. How to do it? She fancied it was more than half done already and that, unless she read him wrong, she would presently have such a grip on the farmer he would never throw her off. By January she was sure of herself and laid her cards on the table.

According to her surmise John took her forthwith into St. Gwithian, a-pillion on the bay mare, and married her, and on the third of July a boy was born. It was a great day at Bosula; all the employees, including Martha, got blind drunk, while John spent a delightful afternoon laboriously scratching a letter to Carveth Donnithorne apprising him of the happy event.

Upstairs, undisturbed by the professional chatter of wise women, Teresa lay quietly sleeping, a fluffy small head in the crook of her arm, a tired smile on her lips—she was in out of the rain for good.

It is to be presumed that in the Donnithorne vault of Cury Church the dust of old Selina at length lay quiet—the Penhales would go on and on.

CHAPTER V

The first boy was born in 1754 and was followed in 1756 by another. They christened the eldest Ortho, a family name, and the second Eli.

When his younger son was three months old John died. He got wet, extricating a horse from a bog-hole, and took no heed, having been wet through a hundred times before. A chill seized him; he still took no notice. The chill developed into pneumonia, but he struggled on, saying nothing. Then Bohenna found him prostrate in the muck of the stable; he had been trying to yoke the oxen with the intention of going out to plow.

Bohenna carried him, protesting, up to bed. Only when he was dying would he admit he was ill. He was puzzled and angry. Why should he be sick now who had never felt a qualm before? What was a wetting, i’ faith! For forty odd winters he had seldom been dry. It was ridiculous! He tried to lift himself, exhorting the splendid, loyal body that had never yet failed him to have done with this folly and bear him outside to the sunshine and the day’s work. It did not respond; might have been so much lead. He fell back, betrayed, helpless, frightened, and went off into a delirium. The end was close. He came to his senses once again about ten o’clock at night and saw Teresa bending over him, the new son in her arms. She was crying and had a tender look in her tear-bright eyes he had never seen before. He tried to smile at her. Nothing to cry about. He’d be all right in the morning—after a night’s sleep—go plowing—everything came right in the morning. Towards midnight Martha, who was watching, set up a dreadful screech. It was all over. As if awaiting the signal came a hooting from the woods about the house, “Too-whee-wha-ho-oo-oo!”—the Bosula owls lamenting the passing of its master.

Fate, in cutting down John Penhale in his prime, did him no disservice. He went into oblivion knowing Teresa only as a thing of beauty, half magical, wholly adorable. He was spared the years of disillusionment which would have pained him sorely, for he was a sensitive man.

Teresa mourned for her husband with a passion which was natural to her and which was very highly considered in the neighborhood. At the funeral she flung herself on the coffin, and refused to be loosened from it for a quarter of an hour, moaning and tearing at the lid with her fingers. Venerable dames who had attended every local interment for half a century wagged their bonnets and admitted they had never seen a widow display a prettier spirit.

Teresa was quite genuine in her way. John had treated her with a gentleness and generosity she had not suspected was to be found on this earth, and now this kindly cornucopia had been snatched from her—and just when she had made so sure of him too! She blubbered in good earnest. But after the lawyer’s business was over she cheered up.

In the first flush of becoming a father, John had ridden into Penzance and made a will, but since Eli’s birth he had made no second; there was plenty of time, he thought, years and years of it. Consequently everything fell to Ortho when he came of age, and in the meanwhile Teresa was sole guardian. That meant she was mistress of Bosula and had the handling of the hundred and twenty pounds invested income, to say nothing of the Tregors rents, fifty pounds per annum. One hundred and seventy pounds a year to spend! The sum staggered her. She had hardly made that amount of money in her whole life. She sat up that night, long after the rest of the household had gone to bed, wrapped in delicious dreams of how she would spend that annual fortune. She soon began to learn. Martha hinted that, in a lady of her station, the wearing of black was considered proper as a tribute to the memory of the deceased, so, finding nothing dark in the chests, she mounted a horse behind Bohenna and jogged into town.

A raw farmer’s wife, clutching a bag of silver and demanding only to be dressed in black, is a gift to any shopman. The Penzance draper called up his seamstresses, took Teresa’s measure for a silk dress—nothing but silk would be fitting, he averred; the greater the cost the greater the tribute—added every somber accessory that he could think of, separated her from £13.6.4 of her hoard and bowed her out, promising to send the articles by carrier within three days. Teresa went through the ordeal like one in a trance, too awed to protest or speak even. On the way home she sought to console herself with the thought that her extravagance was on John’s, dear John’s behalf. Still thirteen pounds, six shillings and fourpence!—more than Bohenna’s wages for a year gone in a finger snap! Ruin stared her in the face.

The black dress, cap, flounced petticoat, stiff stays, stockings, apron, cloak of Spanish cloth and high-heeled shoes arrived to date and set the household agog. Teresa, its devastating price forgotten, peacocked round the house and yard all day, swelling with pride, the rustle of the silk atoning for the agony she was suffering from the stays and shoes. As the sensation died down she yearned for fresh conquests, so mounting the pillion afresh, made a tour through the parish, paying special attention to Gwithian Church-town and Monks Cove.

The tour was a triumph. Women rushed to their cottage doors and stared after her, goggling. At Pridden a party of hedgers left work and raced across a field to see her go by. Near Tregadgwith a farmer fell off his horse from sheer astonishment. She was the sole topic of the district for a week or more. John’s memory was duly honored.

In a month Teresa was tired of the black dress; her fancy did not run to black. The crisp and shining new silk had given her a distaste for the old silks, the soiled and tattered salvage of wrecks. She stuffed the motley rags back in the chests and slammed the lids on them. She had seen some breath-taking rolls of material in that shop in Penzance—orange, emerald, turquoise, coral and lilac. She shut her eyes and imagined herself in a flowing furbelowed dress of each of these colors in turn—or one combining a little of everything—oh, rapture!

She consulted Martha in the matter. Martha was shocked. It was unheard of. She must continue to wear black in public for a year at least. This intelligence depressed Teresa, but she was determined to be correct, as she had now a position to maintain, was next thing to a lady. Eleven months more to wait, heigh-ho!

Then, drawn by the magnet of the shops, she went into Penzance again. Penzance had become something more than a mere tin and pilchard port; visitors attracted by its mild climate came in by every packet; there was a good inn, “The Ship and Castle,” and in 1752 a coffee house had been opened and the road to Land’s End made possible for carriages. Many fine ladies were to be seen fanning themselves at windows in Chapel Street or strolling on the Green, and Teresa wanted to study their costumes with a view to her own.

She dismounted at the Market Cross, moved about among the booths and peeped furtively in at the shops. They were most attractive, displaying glorious things to wear and marvelous things to eat—tarts, cakes, Dutch biscuits, ginger-breads shaped like animals, oranges, plum and sugar candy. Sly old women wheedled her to buy, enlarging ecstatically on the excellence and cheapness of their wares. Teresa wavered and reflected that though she might not be able to buy a new dress for a year there was no law against her purchasing other things. The bag of silver burnt her fingers and she fell. She bought some gingerbread animals at four for a farthing, tasted them, thought them ambrosia and bought sixpennorth to take with her, also lollipops. She went home trembling at her extravagance, but when she came to count up what she had spent it seemed to have made no impression on the bag of silver. In six weeks she went in again, bought a basketful of edibles and replaced her brass earrings with large gold half-moons. When these were paid for the bag was badly drained. Teresa took fright and visited town no more for the year—but as a matter of fact she had spent less than twenty pounds in all. But she had got in the way of spending now.

The tin works in which John’s money was invested paid up at the end of the year (one hundred and twenty-six pounds, seventeen shillings and eight-pence on this occasion), and Tregors rent came in on the same day. It seemed to Teresa that the heavens had opened up and showered uncounted gold upon her.

She went into Penzance next morning as fast as the bay mare could carry her and ordered a dress bordered with real lace and combining all the hues of the rainbow. She was off. Never having had any money she had not the slightest idea of its value and was mulcted accordingly. In the third year of widowhood she spent the last penny of her income.

The farm she left to Bohenna, the house to Martha, the children to look after themselves, and rode in to Penzance market and all over the hundred, to parish feasts, races and hurling matches, a notable figure with her flaming dresses, raven hair and huge earrings, laying the odds, singing songs and standing drinks in ale houses like any squire.

When John died she was at her zenith. The early bloom of her race began to fade soon after, accelerated by gross living. She still ate enormously, as though the hunger of twenty-two lean years was not yet appeased. She was like an animal at table, seizing bones in her hands and tearing the meat off with her teeth, grunting the while like a famished dog, or stuffing the pastries she bought in Penzance into her mouth two at a time. She hastened from girlish to buxom, from buxom to stout. The bay mare began to feel the increasing weight on the pillion. Bohenna was left at home and Teresa rode alone, sitting sideways on a pad, or a-straddle when no one was looking. Yet she was still comely in a large way and had admirers aplenty. Sundry impecunious gentlemen, hoping to mend their fortunes, paid court to the lavish widow, but Teresa saw through their blandishments, and after getting all possible sport out of them sent them packing.

With the curate-in-charge of St. Gwithian it was the other way about. Teresa made the running. She went to church in the first place because it struck her as an opportunity to flaunt her superior finery in public and make other women feel sick. She went a second time to gaze at the parson. This gentleman was an anemic young man with fair hair, pale blue eyes, long hands and a face refined through partial starvation. (The absentee beneficiary allowed him eighteen pounds a year.) Obeying the law of opposites, the heavy dark gypsy woman was vaguely attracted by him at once and the attraction strengthened.

He was something quite new to her. Among the clumsy-limbed country folk he appeared so slim, so delicate, almost ethereal. Also, unable to read or write herself and surrounded by people as ignorant as she, his easy familiarity with books and the verbose phrasing of his sermons filled her with admiration. On Easter Sunday he delivered himself of a particularly flowery effort. Teresa understood not a word of it, but, nevertheless, thought it beautiful and wept audibly. She thought the preacher looked beautiful too, with his clear skin, veined temples and blue eyes. A shaft of sunlight pierced the south window and fell upon his fair head as though an expression of divine benediction. Teresa thought he looked like a saint. Perhaps he was a saint.

She rode home slowly, so wrapped in meditation that she was late for dinner, an unprecedented occurrence. She would marry that young man. If she were going to marry again it must be to some one she could handle, since the law would make him master of herself and her possessions. The curate would serve admirably; he would make a pretty pet and no more. He could keep her accounts too. She was always in a muddle with money. The method she had devised of keeping tally by means of notched sticks was most untrustworthy. And, incidentally, if he really were a saint her hereafter was assured. God could never condemn the wedded wife of a saint and clergyman to Hell; it wouldn’t be decent. She would marry that young man.

She began the assault next day by paying her overdue tithes and throwing in a duck as makeweight. Two days later she was up again with a gift of a goose, and on the following Sunday she presented the astonished clerk with eightpennorth of gingerbreads. Since eating was the occupation nearest to the widow’s heart she sought to touch the curate’s by showering food upon him. Something edible went to the Deanery at least twice a week, occasionally by a hind, but more often Teresa took it herself. A fortnight before Whitsuntide Teresa, in chasing an errant boar out of the yard, kicked too violently, snapped her leg and was laid up for three months. Temporarily unable to reduce the curate by her personal charms she determined to let her gifts speak for her, doubled the offerings, and eggs, fowls, butter, cheese and hams passed from the farm to the Deanery in a constant stream. Lying in bed with nothing to do, the invalid’s thoughts ran largely upon the clerk. She remembered him standing in the pulpit that Easter Sunday, uttering lovely, if unintelligible words, slim and delicate, the benedictory beam on his flaxen poll; the more she pictured him the more ethereally beautiful did he become. He would make a charming toy.

As soon as she could hobble about she put on her best dress (cherry satin), and, taking the bull by the horns, invited her intended to dinner. She would settle matters without further ado. The young man obeyed the summons with feelings divided between fear and determination; he knew perfectly well what he was in for. Nobody but an utter fool could have mistaken the meaning of the sighs and glances the big widow had thrown when visiting him before her accident. There was no finesse about Teresa. She wanted to marry him, and prudence told him to let her. Two farms and four hundred pounds a year—so rumor had it—the catch of the district and he only a poor clerk. He was sick of poverty—Teresa’s bounty had shown him what it was to live well—and he dreaded returning to the old way of things. Moreover he admired her, she was so bold, so luscious, so darkly handsome, possessed of every physical quality he lacked. But he was afraid of her for all that—if she ever got really angry with him, good Lord!

It took every ounce of determination he owned to drive his feet down the hill to Bosula; twice he stopped and turned to go back. He was a timid young man. His procrastination made him late for dinner. When he reached the farm, the meal had already been served. His hostess was hard at work; she would not have delayed five minutes for King George himself. She had a mutton bone in her hands when the curate entered. She did not notice him for the moment, so engrossed was she, but tore off the last shred of meat, scrunched the bone with her teeth and bit out the marrow. The curate reeled against the door post, emitting an involuntary groan. Teresa glanced up and stared at him, her black eyebrows meeting.

Who was this stranger wabbling about in her doorway, his watery eyes popping out of his podgy face, his fleshy knees knocking together, his dingy coat stretched tightly across his protruding stomach? A lost inn-keeper? A strayed tallow chandler? No, by his cloth he was a clerk. Slowly she recognized him. He was her curate, ecod! Her pretty toy! Her slim, transparent saint developed into this corpulent earthling! Fat, ye Gods! She hurled the bone at his head—which was unreasonable, seeing it was she had fattened him.

The metamorphosed curate turned and bolted out of the house, through the yard and back up the hill for home.

“My God,” he panted as he ran, “biting bones up with her teeth, with her teeth—my God, it might have been me!”

That was the end of that.

CHAPTER VI

In the meanwhile the Penhale brothers grew and grew. Martha took a sketchy charge of their infancy, but as soon as they could toddle they made use of their legs to gain the out o’ doors and freedom. At first Martha basted them generously when they came in for meals, but they soon put a stop to that by not showing up at the fixed feeding times, watching her movements from coigns of vantage in the yard and robbing the larder when her back was turned. Martha, thereupon, postponed the whippings till they came in to bed. Once more they defeated her by not coming in to bed; when trouble loomed they spent the night in the loft, curled up like puppies in the hay. Martha could not reach them there. She dared not trust herself on the crazy ladder and Bohenna would give her no assistance; he was hired to tend stock, he said, not children.

For all that the woman caught the little savages now and again, and when she did she dressed them faithfully with a birch of her own making. But she did not long maintain her physical advantage.

One afternoon when Ortho was eight and Eli six she caught them red-handed. The pair had been out all the morning, sailing cork boats and mudlarking in the marshes. They had had no dinner. Martha knew they would be homing wolfish hungry some time during the afternoon and that a raid was indicated. There were two big apple pasties on the hearth waiting the mistress’ supper and Martha was prepared to sell her life for them, since it was she that got the blame if anything ran short and she had suffered severely of late.

At about three o’clock she heard the old sheep dog lift up its voice in asthmatic excitement and then cease abruptly; it had recognized friends. The raiders were at hand. She hid behind the settle near the door. Presently she saw a dark patch slide across the east door-post—the shadow of Ortho’s head. The shadow slid on until she knew he was peering into the kitchen. Ortho entered the kitchen, stepping delicately, on bare, grimy toes. He paused and glanced round the room. His eye lit on the pasties and sparkled. He moved a chair carefully, so that his line of retreat might be clear, beckoned to the invisible Eli, and went straight for the mark. As his hands closed on the loot Martha broke cover. Ortho did not look frightened or even surprised; he did not drop the pasty. He grinned, dodged behind the table and shouted to his brother, who took station in the doorway.

Martha, squalling horrid threats, hobbled halfway round the table after Ortho, who skipped in the opposite direction and nearly escaped her. She just cut him off in time, but she could not save the pasty. He slung it under her arm to his confederate and dodged behind the table again. Eli was fat and short-legged. Martha could have caught him with ease, but she did not try, knowing that if she did Ortho would have the second pasty. As it was, Ortho was hopelessly cornered; he should suffer for both. Ortho was behind the table again and difficult to reach. She thought of the broom, but it was at the other side of the kitchen; did she turn to get it Ortho would slip away.

Eli reappeared in the doorway lumpish and stolid; he had hidden the booty and come back to see the fun. Martha considered, pushed the table against the wall and upturned it. Ortho sprang for the door, almost gained it, but not quite. Martha grasped him by the tail of his smock, drew him to her and laid on. But Ortho, instead of squirming and whimpering as was his wont, put up a fight. He fought like a little wild cat, wriggling and snarling, scratching with toes and finger nails. Martha had all she could do to hold him, but hold him she did, dragged him across the floor to the peg where hung her birch (a bunch of hazel twigs) and gave him a couple of vicious slashes across the seat of his pants. She was about to administer a third when an excruciating pain nipped her behind her bare left ankle. She yelled, dropped Ortho and the birch as if white-hot, and grabbed her leg. In the skin of the tendon was imprinted a semi-circle of red dents—Eli’s little sharp teeth marks. She limped round the kitchen for some minutes, vowing dreadful vengeance on the brothers, who, in the meanwhile, were sitting astride the yard gate munching the pasty.

The pair slept in the barn for a couple of nights, and then, judging the dame’s wrath to have passed, slipped in on the third. But Martha was waiting for Eli, birch in hand, determined to carry out her vengeance. It did not come off. She caught Eli, but Ortho flew to the rescue this time. The two little fiends hung on her like weasels, biting, clawing, squealing with fury, all but dragging the clothes off her. She appealed to Teresa for help, but the big woman would do nothing but laugh. It was as good as a bear-bait. Martha shook the brothers off somehow and lowered her flag for good. Next day Ortho burnt the birch with fitting ceremony, and for some years the brothers ran entirely wild.

If Martha failed to inspire any respect in the young Penhales they stood in certain awe of her daughter Wany on account of her connection with the supernatural. In the first place she was a changeling herself. In the second, Providence having denied her wits, had bequeathed her an odd sense. She was weather-wise; she felt heat, frost, rain or wind days in advance; her veins might have run with mercury. In the third place, and which was far more attractive to the boys, she knew the movements of all the “small people” in the valley—the cows told her.

The cows were Wany’s special province. She could not be trusted with any housework however simple, because she could not bring her mind to it for a minute. She had no control over her mind at all; it was forever wandering over the hills and far away in dark, enchanted places.

But cows she could manage, and every morning the cows told her what had passed in the half-world the night before.

There were two tribes of “small people” in the Keigwin Valley, Buccas and Pixies. In the Buccas there was no harm; they were poor foreigners, the souls of the first Jew miners, condemned for their malpractices to perpetual slavery underground. They inhabited a round knoll formed of rocks and rubble thrown up by the original Penhale and were seldom seen, even by the cows, for they had no leisure and their work lay out of sight in the earth’s dark, dripping tunnels. Once or twice the cows had glimpsed a swarthy, hook-nosed old face, caked in red ore and seamed with sweat, gazing wistfully through a crack in the rocks—but that was all. Sometimes, if, under Wany’s direction, you set your ear to the knoll and listened intently, you could hear a faint thump and scrape far underground—the Buccas’ picks at work. Bohenna declared these sounds emanated from badgers, but Bohenna was of the earth earthy, a clod of clods.

The Pixies lived by day among the tree roots at the north end of Bosula woods, a sprightly but vindictive people. At night they issued from a hollow oak stump, danced in their green ball rooms, paid visits to distant kinsfolk or made expeditions against offending mortals. The cows, lying out all night in the marshes, saw them going and coming. There were hundreds of them, the cows said; they wore green jerkins and red caps and rode rabbits, all but the king and queen, who were mounted on white hares. They blew on horns as they galloped, and the noise of them was like a flock of small birds singing. On moonless nights a cloud of fireflies sped above them to light the way. The cows heard them making their plans as they rode afield, laughing and boasting as they returned, and reported to Wany, who passed it on to the spellbound brothers.

But this did not exhaust the night life in the valley. According to Wany, other supernaturals haunted the neighborhood, specters, ghosts, men who had sold their souls to the devil, folk who had died with curses on them, or been murdered and could not rest. There was a demon huntsman who rode a great black stallion behind baying hellhounds; a woman who sat by Red Pool trying to wash the blood off her fingers; a baby who was heard crying but never seen. Even the gray druid stones she invested with periodic life. On such and such a night the tall Pipers stalked across the fields and played to the Merry Maidens who danced round thrice; the Men-an-Tol whistled; the Logan rocked; up on misty hills barrows opened and old Cornish giants stepped out and dined hugely, with the cromlechs for tables and the stars for tapers.

The stories had one virtue, namely that they brought the young Penhales home punctually at set of sun. The wild valley they roamed so fearlessly by day assumed a different aspect when the enchanted hours of night drew on; inanimate objects stirred and drew breath, rocks took on the look of old men’s faces, thorn bushes changed into witches, shadows harbored nameless, crouching things. The creak of a bough sent chills down their spines, the hoot of an owl made them jump, a patch of moonlight on a tree trunk sent them huddling together, thinking of the ghost lady; the bark of a fox and a cow crashing through undergrowth set their hearts thumping for fear of the demon huntsman. If caught by dusk they turned their coats inside out and religiously observed all the rites recommended by Wany as charms against evil spirits. If they were not brought up in the love of God they were at least taught to respect the devil.

With the exception of this spiritual concession the Penhale brothers knew no restraint; they ran as wild as stoats. They arose with the sun, stuffed odds and ends of food in their pockets and were seen no more while daylight lasted.

In spring there was plenty of bird’s-nesting to be done up the valley. Every other tree held a nest of some sort, if you only knew where to look, up in the forks of the ashes and elms, in hollow boles and rock crevices, cunningly hidden in dense ivy-clumps or snug behind barbed entanglements of thorn. Bohenna, a predatory naturalist, marked down special nests for them, taught them to set bird and rabbit snares and how to tickle trout.

In spring they hunted gulls’ eggs as well round the Luddra Head, swarming perpendicular cliffs with prehensile toes and fingers hooked into cracks, wriggling on their stomachs along dizzy foot-wide shelves, leaping black crevices with the assurance of chamois. It was an exciting pursuit with the sheer drop of two hundred feet or so below one, a sheer drop to jagged rock ledges over which the green rollers poured with the thunder of heavy artillery and then poured back, a boil of white water and seething foam. An exciting pursuit with the back draught of a southwesterly gale doing its utmost to scoop you off the cliffside, and gull mothers diving and shrieking in your face, a clamorous snowstorm, trying to shock you off your balance by the whir of their wings and the piercing suddenness of their cries.

The brothers spent most of the summer at Monks Cove playing with the fisher children, bathing and scrambling along the coast. The tide ebbing left many pools, big and little, among the rocks, clear basins enameled with white and pink sea lichen, studded with limpets, yellow snails, ruby and emerald anemones. Delicate fronds of colored weed grew in these salt-water gardens, tiny green crabs scuttered along the bottom, gravel-hued bull-cod darted from shadow to shadow. They spent tense if fruitless hours angling for the bull-cod with bent pins, limpet baited. In the largest pool they learnt to swim. When they were sure of themselves they took to the sea itself.

Their favorite spot was a narrow funnel between two low promontories, up which gulf the rollers raced to explode a white puff of spray through a blow-hole at the end. At the mouth of the funnel stood a rock they called “The Chimney,” the top standing eight feet above low water level. This made an ideal diving place. You stood on the “Chimney Pot,” looked down through glitters and glints of reflected sunshine, down through four fathoms of bottle-green water, down to where fantastic pennants of bronze and purple weed rippled and purled and smooth pale bowlders gleamed in the swaying light—banners and skulls of drowned armies. You dived, pierced cleanly through the green deeps, a white shooting star trailing silver bubbles. Down you went, down till your fingers touched the weed banners, curved and came up, saw the water changing from green to amber as you rose, burst into the blaze and glitter of sunlight with the hiss of a breaker in your ears, saw it curving over you, turned and went shoreward shouting, slung by giant arms, wallowing in milky foam, plumed with diamond spray. Then a quick dash sideways out of the sparkling turmoil into a quiet eddy and ashore at your leisure to bask on the rocks and watch the eternal surf beating on the Twelve Apostles and the rainbows glimmering in the haze of spindrift that hung above them.

Porpoises went by, skimming the surface with beautiful, lazy curves, solitary cormorants paddled past, popping under and reappearing fifty yards away, with suspicious lumps in the throat. Now and then a shoal of pilchards crawled along the coast, a purple stain in the blue, with a cloud of vociferous gannets hanging over it, diving like stones, rising and poising, glimmering in the sun like silver tinsel. Sometimes a brown seal cruised along, sleek, round-headed, big-eyed, like a negro baby.

There was the Channel traffic to watch as well, smacks, schooners, ketches and scows, all manner of rigs and craft; Tyne collier brigs, grimy as chimney-sweeps; smart Falmouth packets carrying mails to and from the world’s ends; an East Indiaman, maybe, nine months from the Hooghly, wallowing leisurely home, her quarters a-glitter of “gingerbread work,” her hold redolent with spices; and sometimes a great First-Rate with triple rows of gun-ports, an admiral’s flag flying and studding sails set, rolling a mighty bow-wave before her.

Early one summer morning they heard the boom of guns and round Black Carn came a big Breton lugger under a tremendous press of sail, leaping the short seas like a greyhound. On her weather quarter hung a King’s Cutter, gaff-topsail and ring-tail set, a tower of swollen canvas. A tongue of flame darted from the Breton’s counter, followed by a mushroom of smoke and a dull crash. A jet of white water leapt thirty feet in the air on the cutter’s starboard bow, then another astern of her and another and another. She seemed to have run among a school of spouting whales, but in reality it was the ricochets of a single round-shot. The cutter’s bow-chaser replied, and jets spouted all round the lugger. The King’s ship was trying to crowd the Breton ashore and looked in a fair way to do so. To the excited boys it appeared that the lugger must inevitably strike the Twelve Apostles did she hold her course. She held on, passed into the drag of the big seas as they gathered to hurl themselves on the reef. Every moment the watchers expected to see her caught and crashed to splinters on the jagged anvil. She rose on a roaring wave crest, hung poised above the reef for a breathless second and clawed by, shaking the water from her scuppers.

The Cove boys cheered the lugger as she raced by, waving strips of seaweed and dancing with joy. They were not so much for the French as against the Preventive; a revenue cutter was their hereditary foe, a spoke in the Wheel of Fortune.

“Up the Froggy,” they yelled. “Up Johnny Roscoff! Give him saltpeter soup Moosoo! Hurrah! Hooroo!”

The two ships foamed out of sight behind the next headland, the boom of their pieces sounding fainter and fainter.

Those were good days for the Penhale brothers, the days of early boyhood.

CHAPTER VII

Ortho and Wany were in Penzance looking for cows that had been taken by the Press gang, when they met the Pope of Rome wearing a plumed hat and Teresa’s second best dress. He had an iron walking stick in his hand with a negro head carved at the top and an ivory ferrule, and every time he tapped the road it rang under him.

“Hollow, you see,” said His Holiness. “Eaten away by miners and Buccas—scandalous! One more convulsion like the Lisbon earthquake of fifty-five and we shall all fall in. Everything is hollow, when you come to think of it—cups, kegs, cannon, ships, churches, crowns and heads—everything. We shall not only fall in but inside out. If you don’t believe me, listen.”

Whereupon he gathered his skirts and ran up Market Jew Street laying about him with the iron stick, hitting the ground, the houses and bystanders on the head, and everything he touched rumbled like a big or little gong, in proportion to its size. Finally he hit the Market House; it exploded and Ortho woke up.

There was a full gale blowing from the southwest and the noise of the sea was rolling up the valley in roaring waves. The Bosula trees creaked and strained. A shower of broken twigs hit the window and the wind thudded on the pane like a fist. Ortho turned over on his other side and was just burying his head under the pillow when he heard the explosion again. It was a different note from the boom of the breakers, sharper. He had heard something like that before—where? Then he remembered the Breton with the cutter in chase—guns! A chair fell over in his mother’s room. She was up. A door slammed below, boots thumped upstairs, Bohenna shouted something through his mother’s door and clumped down hurriedly. Ortho could not hear all he said, but he caught two essential words, “Wreck” and “Cove.” More noise on the stairs and again the house door slammed; his mother had gone. He shook Eli awake.

“There’s a ship ashore down to Cove,” he said; “banging off guns she was. Mother and Ned’s gone. Come on.”

Eli was not anxious to leave his bed; he was comfortable and sleepy. “We couldn’t do nothing,” he protested.

“Might see some foreigners drowned,” said Ortho optimistically. “She might be a pirate like was sunk in Newlyn last year, full of blacks and Turks.”

“They’d kill and eat us,” said Eli.

Ortho shook his head. “They’ll be drowned first—and if they ain’t Ned’ll wrastle ’em.”

In settlement of further argument he placed his foot in the small of his brother’s back and projected him onto the floor. They dressed in the dark, fumbled their way downstairs and set off down the valley. In the shelter of the Bosula woods they made good progress; it was comparatively calm there, though the treetops were a-toss and a rotten bough hurtled to earth a few feet behind them. Once round the elbow and clear of the timber, the gale bent them double; it rushed, shrieking, up the funnel of the hills, pushed them round and backwards. Walking against it was like wading against a strong current. The road was the merest track, not four feet at its widest, littered with rough bowlders, punctuated with deep holes. The brothers knew every twist and trick of the path, but in the dark one can blunder in one’s own bedroom; moreover the wind was distorting everything. They tripped and stumbled, were slashed across the face by flying whip-thongs of bramble, torn by lunging thorn boughs, pricked by dancing gorse-bushes. Things suddenly invested with malignant animation bobbed out of the dark, hit or scratched one and bobbed back again. The night was full of mad terror.

Halfway to the Cove, Ortho stubbed his toe for the third time, got a slap in the eye from a blackthorn and fell into a puddle. He wished he hadn’t come and proposed that they should return. But Eli wouldn’t hear of it. He wasn’t enjoying himself any more than his brother, but he was going through with it. He made no explanation, but waddled on. Ortho let him get well ahead and then called him back, but Eli did not reply. Ortho wavered. The thought of returning through those creaking woods all alone frightened him. He thought of all the Things-that-went-by-Night, of hell-hounds, horsemen and witches. The air was full of witches on broomsticks and demons on black stallions stampeding up the valley on a dreadful hunt. He could hear their blood-freezing halloos, the blare of horns, the baying of hounds. He wailed to Eli to stop, and trotted, shivering, after him.

The pair crawled into Monks Cove at last plastered with mud, their clothes torn to rags. A feeble pilchard-oil “chill” burnt in one or two windows, but the cottages were deserted. Spindrift, mingled with clots of foam, was driving over the roofs in sheets. The wind pressed like a hand on one’s mouth; it was scarcely possible to breathe facing it. Several times the boys were forced down on all fours to avoid being blown over backwards. The roar of the sea was deafening, appalling. Gleaming hills of surf hove out of the void in quick succession, toppled, smashed, flooded the beach with foam and ran back, sucking away the sands.

The small beach was thronged with people; all the Covers were there, men, women and children, also a few farm-folk, drawn by the guns. They sheltered behind bowlders, peered seawards, and shouted in each other’s ears.

“Spanisher, or else Portingal,” Ortho heard a man bellow.

“Jacky’s George seen she off Cribba at sundown. Burnt a tar barrel and fired signals southwest of Apostles—dragging by her lights. She’ll bring up presently and then part—no cables won’t stand this. The Minstrel’ll have her.”

“No, the Carracks, with this set,” growled a second. “Carracks for a hundred poun’. They’ll crack she like a nut.”

“Carracks, Minstrel or Shark’s Fin, she’m ours,” said the first. “Harken!”

Came a crash from the thick darkness seawards, followed a grinding noise and second crash. The watchers hung silent for a moment, as though awed, and then sprang up shouting.

“Struck!”

“Carracks have got her!”

“Please God a general cargo!”

“Shan’t be long now, my dears, pickin’s for one and all.”

Men tied ropes round their waists, gave the ends to their women-folk and crouched like runners awaiting the signal.

A dark object was tossed high on the crest of a breaker, dropped on the beach, dragged back and rolled up again.

Half a dozen men scampered towards it and dragged it in, a ship’s pinnace smashed to splinters. Part of a carved rail came ashore, a poop-ladder, a litter of spars and a man with no head.

These also were hauled above the surf line; the wreckers wanted a clear beach. Women set to work on the spars, slashing off tackle, quarreling over the possession of valuable ropes and block. A second batch of spars washed in with three more bodies tangled amongst them, battered out of shape. Then a mass of planking, timbers, barrel staves, some bedding and, miraculously, a live dog. Suddenly the surf went black with bobbing objects; the cargo was coming in—barrels.

A sea that will play bowls with half-ton rocks will toss wine casks airily. The breakers flung them on the beach; they trundled back down the slope and were spat up again. The men rushed at them, whooping; rushed right into the surf up to their waists, laid hold of a prize and clung on; were knocked over, sucked under, thrown up and finally dragged out by the women and ancients pulling like horses on the life-lines. A couple of tar barrels came ashore among the others. Teresa, who was much in evidence, immediately claimed them, and with the help of some old ladies piled the loose planking on the wreck of the pinnace, saturated the whole with tar and set it afire to light the good work. In a few minutes the gale had fanned up a royal blaze. That done, she knotted a salvaged halliard about Bohenna, and with Davy, the second farm hand, Teresa and the two boys holding on to the shore end, he went into the scramble with the rest.

Barrels were spewed up by every wave, the majority stove in, but many intact. The fisher-folk fastened on them like bulldogs, careless of risk. One man was stunned, another had his leg broken. An old widow, having nobody to work for her and maddened at the sight of all this treasure-trove going to others, suddenly threw sanity to the winds, dashed into the surf, butted a man aside and flung herself on a cask. The cask rolled out with the back-drag, the good dame with it. A breaker burst over them and they went out of sight in a boil of sand, gravel and foam. Bohenna plunged after them, was twice swept off his feet, turned head over heels and bumped along the bottom, choking, the sand stinging his face like small shot. He groped out blindly, grasped something solid and clung on. Teresa, feeling more than she could handle on her line, yelled for help. A dozen sprang to her assistance, and with a tug they got Bohenna out, Bohenna clinging to the old woman, she still clinging to her barrel. She lay on the sand, her arms about her prize, three parts drowned, spitting salt water at her savior.

He laughed. “All right, mother; shan’t snatch it from ’ee. ’Tis your plunder sure ’nough.” Took breath and plunged back into the surf. The flow of cargo stopped, beams still came in, a top mast, more shattered bodies, some lengths of cable, bedding, splinters of cabin paneling and a broken chest, valueless odds and ends. The wreckers set about disposing of the sound casks; men staggered off carrying them on rough stretchers, women and children rolled others up the beach, the coils of rope disappeared. Davy, it turned out, had brought three farm horses and left them tied up in a pilchard-press. These were led down to the beach now, loaded (two barrels a horse), and taken home by the men.

Teresa still had a cask in hand. Bohenna could hardly make a second journey before dawn. Moreover, it was leaking, so she stove the head in with a stone and invited everybody to help themselves. Some ran to the houses for cups and jugs, but others could not wait, took off their sodden shoes and baled out the contents greedily. It was overproof Oporto wine and went to their unaccustomed heads in no time. Teresa, imbibing in her wholesale fashion, was among the first to feel the effects. She began to sing. She sang “Prithee Jack, prithee Tom, pass the can around” and a selection of sottish ditties which had found favor in Portsmouth taverns, suiting her actions to the words. From singing she passed to dancing, uttering sharp “Ai-ees” and “Ah-has” and waving and thumping her detached shoe as though it were a tambourine. She infected the others. They sang the first thing that came into their heads and postured and staggered in an endeavor to imitate her, hoarse-throated men dripping with sea water, shrill young women, gnarled beldames dribbling at the mouth, loose-jointed striplings, cracked-voiced ancients contracted with rheumatism, squeaky boys and girls. Drink inspired them to strange cries, extravagant steps and gesticulations. They capered round the barrel, dipping as they passed, drank and capered again, each according to his or her own fashion. Teresa, the presiding genius, lolled over the cask, panting, shrieking with laughter, whooping her victims on to fresh excesses. They hopped and staggered round and round, chanting and shouting, swaying in the wind which swelled their smocks with grotesque protuberances, tore the women’s hair loose and set their blue cloaks flapping. Some tumbled and rose again, others lay where they fell. They danced in a mist of flying spindrift and sand with the black cliffs for background, the blazing wreckage for light, the fifes and drums of the gale for orchestra. It might have been a scene from an infernal ballet, a dance of witches and devils, fire-lit, clamorous, abandoned.

The eight drowned seamen, providers of this good cheer, lay in a row apart, their dog nosing miserably from one to the other, wondering why they were so indifferent when all this merriment was toward, and barking at any one who approached them.

When the Preventive men arrived with dawn they thought at first it was not a single ship that had foundered but a fleet, so thick was the beach with barrel staves and bodies, but even as they stared some corpses revived, sat up, rose unsteadily and made snake tracks for the cottages; they were merely the victims of Teresa’s bounty. Teresa herself was fast asleep behind a rock when the Preventive came, but she woke up as the sun rose in her eyes and spent a pleasant hour watching their fruitless hunt for liquor and offering helpful suggestions.

Hunger gnawing her, she whistled her two sons as if they had been dogs and made for home, tacking from side to side of the path like a ship beating to windward and cursing her Maker every time she stumbled. The frightened boys kept fifty yards in rear.

In return for Teresa’s insults the Preventives paid Bosula a visit later in the day. Teresa, refreshed by some hours’ sleep, followed the searchers round the steading, jeering at them while they prodded sticks into hay-stacks and patches of newly dug ground or rapped floors and walls for hollow places. She knew they would never find those kegs; they were half a mile away, sunk in a muddy pool further obscured by willows. Bohenna had walked the horses upstream and down so that there should be no telltale tracks. The Preventives were drawing a blank cover. It entertained Teresa to see them getting angrier and angrier. She was prodigal with jibes and personalities. The Riding Officer retired at dusk, informing the widow that it would give him great pleasure to tear her tongue out and fry it for breakfast. Teresa was highly amused. Her good humor recovered and that evening she broached a cask, hired a fiddler and gave a dance in the kitchen.

CHAPTER VIII

The Penhale brothers grew and grew, put off childish things and began to seek the company of men worshipfully and with emulation, as puppies imitate grown dogs. Ortho’s first hero was a fisherman whose real name was George Baragwanath, but who was invariably referred to as “Jacky’s George,” although his father, the possessive Jacky, was long dead and forgotten and had been nothing worth mentioning when alive.

Jacky’s George was a remarkable man. At the age of seventeen, while gathering driftwood below Pedn Boar, he had seen an intact ship’s pinnace floating in. The weather was moderate, but there was sufficient swell on to stave the boat did it strike the outer rocks—and it was a good boat. The only way to save it was to swim off, but Jacky’s George, like most fishermen, could not swim. He badly wanted that boat; it would make him independent of Jacky, whose methods were too slow to catch a cold, leave alone fish. Moreover, there was a girl involved. He stripped off his clothes, gathered the bundle of driftwood in his arms, flopped into the back wash of a roller and kicked out, frog-fashion, knowing full well that his chances of reaching the boat were slight and that if he did not reach it he would surely drown.

He reached the boat, however, scrambled up over the stern and found three men asleep on the bottom. His heart fell like lead. He had risked his life for nothing; he’d still have to go fishing with the timorous Jacky and the girl must wait.

“Here,” said he wearily to the nearest sleeper. “Here, rouse up; you’m close ashore . . . be scat in a minute.”

The sleeper did not stir. Jacky’s George kicked him none too gently. Still the man did not move. He then saw that he was dead; they were all dead. The boat was his after all! He got the oars out and brought the boat safely into Monks Cove. Quite a sensation it made—Jacky’s George, stark naked, pulling in out of the sea fog with a cargo of dead men. He married that girl forthwith, was a father at eighteen, a grandfather at thirty-five. In the interval he got nipped by the Press Gang in a Falmouth grog shop and sent round the world with Anson in the Centurion, rising to the rank of quarter-gunner. One of the two hundred survivors of that lucrative voyage, he was paid off with a goodly lump of prize money, and, returning to his native cove, opened an inn with a florid, cock-hatted portrait of his old commander for sign.

Jacky’s George, however, was not inclined to a life of bibulous ease ashore. He handed the inn over to his wife and went to sea again as gunner in a small Falmouth privateer mounting sixteen pieces. Off Ushant one February evening they were chased by a South Maloman of twice their weight of metal, which was overhauling them hand over fist when her foremast went by the board and up she went in the wind. Jacky’s George was responsible for the shot that disabled the Breton, but her parting broadside disabled Jacky’s George; he lost an arm.

He was reported to have called for rum, hot tar and an ax. These having been brought, he gulped the rum, chopped off the wreckage of his forearm, soused the spurting stump in tar and fainted. He recovered rapidly, fitted a boat-hook head to the stump and was at work again in no time, but the accident made a longshoreman of him; he went no more a-roving in letters of marque, but fished offshore with his swarm of sons, Ortho Penhale occasionally going with him.

Physically Jacky’s George was a sad disappointment. Of all the Covers he was the least like what he ought to have been, the last man you would have picked out as the desperado who had belted the globe, sacked towns and treasure ships, been master gunner of a privateer and killed several times his own weight in hand-to-hand combats. He was not above five feet three inches in height, a chubby, chirpy, red-headed cock-robin of a man who drank little, swore less, smiled perpetually and whistled wherever he went—even, it was said, at the graveside of his own father, in a moment of abstraction of course.

His wife, who ran the “Admiral Anson” (better known as the “Kiddlywink”), was a heavy dark woman, twice his size and very downright in her opinions. She would roar down a roomful of tipsy mariners with ease and gusto, but the least word of her smiling little husband she obeyed swiftly and in silence. It was the same with his children. There were nine of them—two daughters and seven sons—all red-headed and freckled like himself, a turbulent, independent tribe, paying no man respect—but their father.

Ortho could not fathom the nature of the little man’s power over them; he was so boyish himself, took such childish delight in their tales of mischief, seemed in all that boatload of boys the youngest and most carefree. Then one evening he had a glimpse of the cock-robin’s other side. They were just in from sea, were lurching up from the slip when they were greeted by ominous noises issuing from the Kiddlywink, the crash of woodwork, hoarse oaths, a thump and then growlings as of a giant dog worrying a bone. Jacky’s George broke into a run, and at the same moment his wife, terrified, appeared at the door and cried out, “Quick! Quick do ’ee! Murder!”

Jacky’s George dived past her into the house, Ortho, agog for any form of excitement, close behind him.

The table was lying over on its side, one bench was broken and the other tossed, end on, into a corner. On the wet floor, among chips of shattered mugs, two men struggled, locked together, a big man on top, a small man underneath. The former had the latter by the throat, rapidly throttling him. The victim’s eyeballs seemed on the point of bursting, his tongue was sticking out.

“Tinners!” wailed Mrs. Baragwanath. “Been drinkin’ all day—gert stinkin’ toads!”

Jacky’s George did not waste time in wordy remonstrance; he got the giant’s chin in the crook of his sound arm and tried to wrench it up. Useless; the maddened brute was too strong and too heavy. The man underneath gave a ghastly, clicking choke. In another second there would have been murder done in the “Admiral Anson” and a blight would fall on that prosperous establishment, killing trade. That would never do. Without hesitation its landlord settled the matter, drove his stump-hook into the giant’s face, gaffed him through the cheek as he would a fish.

“Come off!” said he.

The man came off.

“Come on!” He backed out, leading the man by the hook.

“Lift a hand or struggle and I’ll drag your face inside out,” said Jacky’s George. “This way, if you please.”

The man followed, bent double, murder in his eyes, hands twitching but at his sides.

At the end of the hamlet Jacky’s George halted. “You owe me your neck, mate, but I don’t s’pose you’ll thank me, tedd’n in human nature, you would,” said he, sadly, as though pained at the ingratitude of mortal man. “Go on up that there road till you’m out of this place an’ don’t you never come back.”

He freed the hook deftly and jumped clear. “Now crowd all canvas, do ’ee.”

The great tinner put a hand to his bleeding cheek, glared at the smiling cock-robin, clenched his fists and teeth and took a step forward—one only. A stone struck him in the chest, another missed his head by an inch. He ducked to avoid a third and was hit in the back and thigh, started to retreat at a walk, broke into a run and went cursing and stumbling up the track, his arms above his head to protect it from the rain of stones, Goliath pursued by seven red-headed little Davids, and all the Cove women standing on their doorsteps jeering.

“Two mugs an’ a bench seat,” Jacky’s George commented as he watched his sons speeding the parting guest. “Have to make t’other poor soul pay for ’em, I s’pose.” He turned back into the Kiddlywink whistling, “Strawberry leaves make maidens fair.”

Ortho enjoyed going to sea with the Baragwanath family; they put such zest into all they did, no slovenliness was permitted. Falls and cables were neatly coiled or looped over pins, sail was stowed properly, oars tossed man-o’-war fashion, everything went with a snap. Furthermore, they took chances. For them no humdrum harbor hugging; they went far and wide after the fish and sank their crab-pots under dangerous ledges no other boat would tackle. In anything like reasonable weather they dropped a tier or two seaward of the Twelve Apostles. Even on the calmest of days there was a heavy swell on to the south of the reef, especially with the tide making. It was shallow there and the Atlantic flood came rolling over the shoal in great shining hills. At one moment you were up in the air and could see the brown coast with its purple indentations for miles, the patchwork fields, scattered gray farmhouses, the smoke of furze fires and lazy clouds rolling along the high moors. At the next moment you were in the lap of a turquoise valley, shut out from everything by rushing cliffs of water. There were oars, sheets, halliards, back-ropes and lines to be pulled on, fighting fish to be hauled aboard, clubbed and gaffed. And always there was Jacky’s George whistling like a canary, pointing out the various rigs of passing vessels, spinning yarns of privateer days and of Anson’s wonderful voyage, of the taking of Paita City and the great plate ship Nuestra Señora de Covadonga. And there was the racing.

Very jealous of his craft’s reputation was Jacky’s George; a hint of defiance from another boat and he was after the challenger instanter, even though it took him out of his course. Many a good spin did Ortho get coming in from the Carn Base Wolf and other outer fishing grounds, backed against the weather-side with the Baragwanath boys, living ballast, while the gig, trembling from end to end, went leaping and swooping over the blue and white hillocks on the trail of an ambitious Penberth or Porgwarra man. Sheets and weather stays humming in the blast, taut and vibrant as guitar strings; sails rigid as though carved from wood, lee gunnel all but dipping under; dollops of spray bursting aboard over the weather bow—tense work, culminating in exultation as they crept up on the chase, drew to her quarter, came broad abeam and—with derisive cheers—passed her. Speed was a mania with the cock-robin; he was in perpetual danger of sailing the Game Cock under; on one occasion he very nearly did.

They were tearing, close-hauled, through the Runnelstone Passage, after an impudent Mouseholeman, when a cross sea suddenly rose out of nowhere and popped aboard over the low lee gunnel. In a second the boat was full of water; only her gunnels and thwarts were visible. It seemed to Ortho that he was standing up to his knees in the sea.

“Luff!” shouted Jacky’s George.

His eldest son jammed the helm hard down, but the boat wouldn’t answer. The way was off her; she lay as dead as a log.

“Leggo sheets!” shouted the father. “Aft all hands!”

Ortho tumbled aft with the Baragwanath boys and watched Jacky’s George in a stupor of fright. The little man could not be said to move; he flickered, grabbed up an oar, wrenched the boat’s head round, broke the crest of an oncoming wave by launching the oar blade at it and took the remainder in his back.

“Heave the ballast out an’ bale,” he yelled gleefully, sitting in the bows, forming a living bulwark against the waves. “Bale till your backs break, my jollies.”

They bailed like furies, baled with the first things to hand, line tubs, caps, boots, anything, in the meanwhile drifting rapidly towards the towering cliffs of Tol-pedn-Penwith. The crash of the breakers on the ledges struck terror through Ortho. They sounded like a host of ravenous great beasts roaring for their prey—him. If the boat did not settle under them they would be dashed to pieces on those rocks; death was inevitable one way or the other. He remembered the Portuguese seamen washed in from the Twelve Apostles without heads. He would be like that in a few minutes—no head—ugh!

Jacky’s George, jockeying the bows, improvising a weather cloth from a spare jib, was singing, “Hey, boys, up we go!” This levity in the jaws of destruction enraged Ortho. The prospect of imminent death might amuse Jacky’s George, who had eaten a rich slice of life, but Ortho had not and was terrified. He felt he was too young to die; it was unfair to snatch a mere boy like himself. Moreover, it was far too sudden; no warning at all. At one moment they were bowling along in the sunshine, laughing and happy, and at the next up to their waists in water, to all intents dead, cold, headless, eaten by crabs—ugh! He thought of Eli up the valley, flintlock in hand, dry, happy, safe for years and years of fun; thought of the Owls’ House bathed in the noon glow, the old dog asleep in the sun, pigeons strutting on the thatch, copper pans shining in the kitchen—thought of his home, symbol of all things comfortable and secure, and promised God that if he got out of the mess he would never set foot in a boat again.

The roar of the breakers grew louder and he felt cold and sick with fear, but nevertheless baled with the best, baled for dear life, realizing for the first time how inexpressibly precious life may be. Jacky’s George whistled, cracked jokes and sang “The Bold British Tar.” He made such a din as to drown the noise of the surf. The “British Tar” had brave words and a good rousing chorus. The boys joined in as they baled; presently Ortho found himself singing too.

Six lads toiling might and main can shift a quantity of water. The gig began to brisk in her movements, to ride easier. Fifty yards off the foam-draped Hella Rock Jacky’s George laid her to her course again—but the Mouseholeman was out of sight.

No Dundee harpooner, home from a five years’ cruise, had a more moving story of perils on the deep to tell than did Ortho that night. He staggered about the kitchen, affecting a sea roll, spat over his shoulder and told and retold the tale till his mother boxed his ears and drove him up to bed. Even then he kept Eli awake for two hours, baling that boat out over and over again; he had enjoyed every moment of it, he said. Nevertheless he did not go fishing for a month, but the Baragwanath family were dodging off St. Clements Isle before sun-up next day, waiting for that Mousehole boat to come out of port. When she did they led her down to the fishing grounds and then led her home again, a tow-rope trailing derisively over the Game Cock’s stern. They were an indomitable breed.

Ortho recovered from his experience off Tol-Pedn and, despite his promise to his Maker, went to sea occasionally, but that phase of his education was nearing its close. Winter and its gales were approaching, and even the fearless cock-robin seldom ventured out. When he did go he took only his four eldest boys, departed without ostentation, was gone a week or even two, and returned quietly in the dead of night.

“Scilly—to visit his sister,” was given by Mrs. Baragwanath as his destination and object, but it was noted that these demonstrations of brotherly affection invariably occurred when the “Admiral Anson’s” stock of liquor was getting low. The wise drew their own conclusions. Ortho pleaded to be taken on one of these mysterious trips, but Jacky’s George was adamant, so he had perforce to stop at home and follow the Game Cock in imagination across the wintry Channel to Guernsey and back again through the patrolling frigates, loaded to the bends with ankers of gin and brandy.

Cut off from Jacky’s George, he looked about for a fresh hero to worship and lit upon Pyramus Herne.

CHAPTER IX

Pyramus Herne was the head of a family of gypsy horse dealers that toured the south and west of England, appearing regularly in the Land’s End district on the heels of the New Year. They came not particularly to do business, but to feed their horses up for the spring fairs. The climate was mild, and Pyramus knew that to keep a beast warm is to go halfway towards fattening it.

He would arrive with a chain of broken-down skeletons, tied head to tail, file their teeth, blister and fire their game legs and turn them loose in the sheltered bottoms for a rest cure. At the end of three months, when the bloom was on their new coats, he would trim their feet, pull manes and tails, give an artistic touch here and there with the shears, paint out blemishes, make old teeth look like new and depart with a string of apparently gamesome youngsters frolicking in his tracks.

It was his practice to pitch his winter camp in a small coppice about two and a half miles north of Bosula. It was no man’s land, sheltered by a wall of rocks from the north and east, water was plentiful and the trees provided fuel. Moreover, it was secluded, a weighty consideration, for the gypsy dealt in other things besides horses, in the handling of which privacy was of the first import. In short he was a receiver of stolen goods and valuable articles of salvage. He gave a better price than the Jew junk dealers in Penzance because his travels opened a wider market and also he had a reputation of never “peaching,” of betraying a customer for reward—a reputation far from deserved, be it said, but he peached always in secret and with consummate discretion.

He did lucrative business in salvage in the west, but the traffic in stolen goods was slight because there were no big towns and no professional thieves. The few furtive people who crept by night into the little wood seeking the gypsy were mainly thieves by accident, victims of sudden overwhelming temptations. They seldom bargained with Pyramus, but agreed to the first price offered, thrust the stolen articles upon him as if red-hot and were gone, radiant with relief, frequently forgetting to take the money.

“I am like their Christ,” said Pyramus; “they come to me to be relieved of their sins.”

In England of those days gypsies were regarded with well-merited suspicion and hunted from pillar to post. Pyramus was the exception. He passed unmolested up and down his trade routes, for he was at particular pains to ingratiate himself with the two ruling classes—the law officers and the gentry—and, being a clever man, succeeded.

The former liked him because once “King” Herne joined a fair there would be no trouble with the Romanies, also he gave them reliable information from time to time. Captain Rudolph, the notorious Bath Road highwayman, owed his capture and subsequent hanging to Pyramus, as did also a score of lesser tobymen. Pyramus made no money out of footpads, so he threw them as a sop to Justice.

The gentry Pyramus fawned on with the oily cunning of his race. Every man has a joint in his harness, magistrates no less. Pyramus made these little weaknesses of the great his special study. One influential land owner collected snuff boxes, another firearms. Pyramus in his traffickings up and down the world kept his eyes skinned for snuff boxes and firearms, and, having exceptional opportunities, usually managed to bring something for each when he passed their way, an exquisite casket of tortoise-shell and paste, a pair of silver-mounted pistols with Toledo barrels. Some men had to be reached by other means.

Lord James Thynne was partial to coursing. Pyramus kept an eye lifted for greyhounds, bought a dog from the widow of a Somersetshire poacher (hung the day before) and Lord James won ten matches running with it; the Herne tribe were welcome to camp on his waste lands forever.

But his greatest triumph was with Mr. Hugo Lorimer, J. P., of Stane, in the county of Hampshire. Mr. Lorimer was death on gypsies, maintaining against all reason that they hailed from Palestine and were responsible for the Crucifixion. He harried them unmercifully. He was not otherwise a devout man; the persecution of the Romanies was his sole form of religious observance. Even the astute Pyramus could not melt him, charm he never so wisely.

This worried King Herne, the more so because Mr. Lorimer’s one passion was horses—his own line of business—and he could not reach him through it.

He could not win the truculent J. P. by selling him a good nag cheap because he bred his own and would tolerate no other breed. He could not even convey a good racing tip to the gentleman because he did not bet. The Justice was adamant; Pyramus baffled.

Then one day a change came in the situation. The pride of the stud, the crack stallion “Stane Emperor,” went down with fever and, despite all ministrations, passed rapidly from bad to worse. All hope was abandoned. Mr. Lorimer, infinitely more perturbed than if his entire family had been in a like condition, sat on an upturned bucket in the horse’s box and wept.

To him entered Pyramus, pushing past the grooms, fawning, obsequiously sympathetic, white with dust. He had heard the dire news at Downton and came instanter, spurring.

Might he humbly crave a peep at the noble sufferer? . . . Perhaps his poor skill might effect something. . . . Had been with horses all his life. . . . Had succeeded with many cases abandoned by others more learned. . . . It was his business and livelihood. . . . Would His Worship graciously permit? . . .

His Worship ungraciously grunted an affirmative. Gypsy horse coper full of tricks as a dog of fleas. . . . At all events could make the precious horse no worse. . . . Go ahead!

Pyramus bolted himself in with the animal, and in two hours it was standing up, lipping bran-mash from his hand, sweaty, shaking, but saved.

Mr. Hugo Lorimer was all gratitude, his one soft spot touched at last. Pyramus must name his own reward. Pyramus, both palms upraised in protest, would hear of no reward, honored to have been of any service to such a gentleman.

Departed bowing and smirking, the poison he had blown through a grating into the horse’s manger the night before in one pocket, the antidote in the other.

Henceforward the Herne family plied their trade undisturbed within the bounds of Mr. Lorimer’s magistracy to the exclusion of all other gypsies and throve mightily in consequence.

He had been at pains to commend himself to Teresa Penhale, but had only partly succeeded. She was the principal land owner in the valley where he wintered and it was necessary to keep on her right side.

The difficulty with Teresa was that, being of gypsy blood herself, she was proof against gypsy trickery and exceeding suspicious of her own kind. He tried to present her with a pair of barbaric gold earrings, by way of throwing bread upon the waters, but she asked him how much he wanted for them and he made the fatal mistake of saying “nothing.”

“Nothing to-day and my skin to-morrow?” she sneered. “Outside with you!”

Pyramus went on the other tack, pretended not to recognize her as a Romni, addressed her in English, treated her with extravagant deference and saw to it that his family did the same.

It worked. Teresa rather fancied herself as a “lady”—though she could never go to the trouble of behaving like one—and it pleased her to find somebody who treated her as such. It pleased her to have the great King Herne back his horse out of her road and remain, hat in hand, till she had passed by, to have his women drop curtsies and his bantlings bob. It worked—temporarily. Pyramus had touched her abundant conceit, lulled the Christian half of her with flattery, but he knew that the gypsy half was awake and on guard. The situation was too nicely balanced for comfort; he looked about for fresh weight to throw into his side of the scale.

One day he met Eli, wandering up the valley alone, flintlock in hand, on the outlook for woodcock.

Pyramus could be fascinating when he chose; it lubricated the wheels of commerce. He laid himself out to charm Eli, told him where he had seen a brace of cock and also some snipe, complimented him on his villainous old blunderbuss, was all gleaming teeth, geniality and oil. He could not have made a greater mistake. Eli was not used to charm and had instinctive distrust of the unfamiliar. He had been reared among boors who said their say in the fewest words and therefore distrusted a talker. Further, he was his father’s son, a Penhale of Bosula on his own soil, and this fellow was an Egyptian, a foreigner, and he had an instinctive distrust of foreigners. He growled something incoherent, scowled at the beaming Pyramus, shouldered his unwieldy cannon and marched off in the opposite direction.

Pyramus bit his fleshy lip; nothing to be done with that truculent bear cub—but what about the brother, the handsome dark boy? What about him—eh?

He looked out for Ortho, met him once or twice in company with other lads, made no overtures beyond a smile, but heeled his mare and set her caracoling showily.

He did not glance round, but he knew the boy’s eyes were following him. A couple of evenings after the last meeting he came home to learn that young Penhale had been hanging about the camp that afternoon.

The eldest Herne son, Lussha, had invited him in, but Ortho declined, saying he had come up to look at some badger diggings. Pyramus smiled into his curly beard; the badger holes had been untenanted for years. Ortho came up to carry out a further examination of the badger earths the very next day.

Pyramus saw him, high up among the rocks of the carn, his back to the diggings, gazing wistfully down on the camp, its tents, fires, and horses. He did not ask the boy in, but sent out a scout with orders to bring word when young Penhale went home.

The scout returned at about three o’clock. Ortho, he reported, had worked stealthily down from the carn top and had been lying in the bracken at the edge of the encampment for the last hour, imagining himself invisible. He had now gone off towards Bosula. Pyramus called for his mare to be saddled, brushed his breeches, put on his best coat, mounted and pursued. He came up with the boy a mile or so above the farm and brought his mount alongside caracoling and curveting. Ortho’s expressive eyes devoured her.

“Good day to you, young gentleman,” Pyramus called, showing his fine teeth. Ortho grinned in return.

“Wind gone back to the east; we shall have a spell of dry weather, I think,” said the gypsy, making the mare do a right pass, pivot on her hocks and pass to the left.

“Yeh,” said Ortho, his mouth wide with admiration.

King Herne and his steed were enough to take any boy’s fancy; they were dressed to that end. The gypsy had masses of inky hair, curled mustaches and an Assyrian beard, which frame of black served to enhance the brightness of his glance, the white brilliance of his smile. He was dressed in the coat he wore when calling on the gentry, dark blue frogged with silver lace, and buff spatter-dashes. He sat as though bolted to the saddle from the thighs down; the upper half of him, hinged at the hips, balanced gracefully to every motion of his mount, lithe as a panther for all his forty-eight years.

And the mare—she was his pride and delight, black like himself, three-quarter Arab, mettlesome, fine-boned, pointed of muzzle, arched of neck. Unlike her mates, she was assiduously groomed and kept rugged in winter so that her coat had not grown shaggy. Her long mane rippled like silken threads, her tail streamed behind her like a banner. The late sunshine twinked on the silver mountings of her bridle and rippled over her hide till she gleamed like satin. She bounded and pirouetted along beside Ortho, light on her feet as a ballerina, tossed her mane, pricked her crescent ears, showed the whites of her eyes, clicked the bit in her young teeth, a thing of steel and swansdown, passion and docility.

Ortho’s eyes devoured her. Pyramus noted it, laughed and patted the glossy neck.

“You like my little sweet—eh? She is of blood royal. Her sire was given to the Chevalier Lombez Muret by the Basha of Oran in exchange for three pieces of siege ordnance and a chiming clock. The dam of that sire sprang from the sacred mares of the Prophet Mahomet, the mares that though dying of thirst left the life-giving stream and galloped to the trumpet call. There is the blood of queens in her.”

“She is a queen herself,” said Ortho warmly.

Pyramus nodded. “Well said! I see you have an eye for a horse, young squire. You can ride, doubtless?”

“Yes—but only pack-horses.”

“So—only pack-horses, farm drudges—that is doleful traveling. See here, mount my ‘Rriena,’ and drink the wind.” He dropped the reins, vaulted off over the mare’s rump and held out his hand for Ortho’s knee.

“Me! I . . . I ride her?” The boy stuttered, astounded.

The gypsy smiled his dazzling, genial smile. “Surely—an you will. There is nothing to fear; she is playful only, the heart of a dove. Take hold of the reins . . . your knee . . . up you go!”

He hove the boy high and lowered him gently into the saddle.

“Stirrups too long? Put your feet in the leathers—so. An easy hand on her mouth, a touch will serve. Ready? Then away, my chicken.”

He let go the bridle and clapped his palms. The mare bounded into the air. Ortho, frightened, clutched the pommel, but she landed again light as a feather, never shifting him in the saddle. Smoothly she caracoled, switching her plumy tail, tossing her head, snatching playfully at the bit. There was no pitch, no jar, just an easy, airy rocking. Ortho let her gambol on for a hundred yards or so, and then, thinking he’d better turn, fingered his off rein. He no more than fingered the rein, but the mare responded as though she divined his thoughts, circled smoothly and rocked back towards Pyramus.

“Round again,” shouted the gypsy, “and give her rein; there’s a stretch of turf before you.”

Again the mare circled. Ortho tapped her with his heels. A tremble ran through her, an electric thrill; she sprang into a canter, from a canter to a gallop and swept down the turf all out. It was flight, no less, winged flight, skimming the earth. The turf streamed under them like a green river; bushes, trees, bowlders flickered backwards, blurred, reeling. The wind tore Ortho’s cap off, ran fingers through his hair, whipped tears to his eyes, blew jubilant bugles in his ears, drowning the drum of hoofs, filled his open mouth, sharp, intoxicating, the heady wine of speed. He was one with clouds, birds, arrows, all things free and flying. He wanted to sing and did so, a wordless, crazy caroling. They swept on, drunk with the glory of it. A barrier of thorn stood across the way, and Ortho came to his senses. They would be into it in a minute unless he stopped the mare. He braced himself for a pull—but there was no need; she felt him stiffen and sit back, sat back herself and came to a full stop within ten lengths. Ortho wiped the happy tears from his eyes, patted her shoulder, turned and went back at the same pace, speed-drunk again. They met the gypsy walking towards them, the dropped cap in hand. He called to the mare; she stopped beside him and rubbed her soft muzzle against his chest. He looked at the flushed, enraptured boy.

“She can gallop, my little ‘Rriena’?”

“Gallop! Why, yes. Gallop! I . . . I never knew . . . never saw . . . I . . .” Words failed Ortho.

Pyramus laughed. “No, there is not her match in the country. But, mark ye, she will not give her best to anybody. She felt the virtue in you, knew you for her master. You need experience, polish, but you are a horseman born, flat in the thigh, slim-waisted, with light, strong hands.” The gypsy’s voice pulsed with enthusiasm, his dark eyes glowed. “Tcha! I wish I had the schooling of you; I’d make you a wizard with horses!”

“Oh, I wish you would! Will you, will you?” cried Ortho.

Pyramus made a gesture with his expressive hands.

“I would willingly—I love a bold boy—but . . .”

“Yes?”

Pyramus shrugged his shoulders. “The lady, your mother, has no liking for me. She is right, doubtless; you are Christian, gentry, I but a poor Rom . . . still I mean no harm.”

“She shall never know, never,” said Ortho eagerly. “Oh, I would give anything if you would!”

Pyramus shook his head reprovingly. “You must honor your parents, Squire; it is so written . . . and yet I am loath to let your gifts lie fallow; a prince of jockeys I could make you.”

He bit his finger nails as though wrestling with temptation. “See here, get your mother’s leave and then come, come and a thousand welcomes. I have a chestnut pony, a red flame of a pony, that would carry you as my beauty carries me.”

He vaulted into the saddle, jumped the mare over a furze bush, whirled about, waved his hat and was gone up the valley, scattering clods. Ortho watched the flying pair until they were out of sight, and then turned homewards, his heart pounding, new avenues of delight opening before him.

Out of sight, Pyramus eased Rriena to a walk and, leaning forward, pulled her ears affectionately. “Did he roll all over you and tug your mouth, my sweetmeat?” he purred. “Well, never again. But we have him now. In a year or two he’ll be master here and I’ll graze fifty nags where I grazed twenty. We will fatten on that boy.”

Ortho reported at the gypsy camp shortly after sun-up next morning; he was wasting no time. Questioned, he swore he had Teresa’s leave, which was a lie, as Pyramus knew it to be. But he had covered himself; did trouble arise he could declare he understood the boy had got his mother’s permission.

Ortho did not expect to be discovered. Teresa was used to his being out day and night with either Bohenna or Jacky’s George and would not be curious. The gypsies had the head of the valley to themselves; nobody ever came that way except the cow-girl Wany, and she had no eyes for anything but the supernatural.

The riding lessons began straightway on Lussha’s red pony “Cherry.” The chestnut was by no means as perfect a mount as the black mare, but for all that a creditable performer, well-schooled, speedy and eager, a refreshing contrast to the stiff-jointed, iron-mouthed farm horses. Pyramus took pains with his pupil. Half of what he had said was true; the boy was shaped to fit a saddle and his hands were sensitive. There was a good deal of the artist in King Herne. It pleased him to handle promising material for its own sake, but above all he sought to infect the boy with horse-fever to his own material gain.

The gypsy camp saw Ortho early and late. He returned to Bosula only to sleep and fill his pockets with food. Food in wasteful plenty lay about everywhere in that slip-shod establishment; the door was never bolted. He would creep home through the orchard, silence the dogs with a word, take off his shoes in the kitchen, listen to Teresa’s hearty snores in the room above, drive the cats off the remains of supper, help himself and tiptoe up to bed. Nobody, except Eli, knew where he spent his days; nobody cared.

The gypsies attracted him for the same reason that they repelled his brother; they were something new, something he did not understand.

Ortho did not find anything very elusive about the males; they were much like other men, if quicker-witted and more suave. It was the women who intrigued and, at the same time, awed him. He had watched them at work with the cards, bent over the palm of a trembling servant girl or farm woman. What did they know? What didn’t they know? What virtue was in them that they should be the chosen mouthpieces of Destiny? He would furtively watch them about their domestic duties, stirring the black pots or nursing their half-naked brats, and wonder what secrets the Fates were even then whispering into their ringed ears, what enigmas were being made plain to those brooding eyes. He felt his soul laid bare to those omniscient eyes.

But it was solely his own imagination that troubled him. The women gave him no cause; they cast none but the gentlest glances at the dark boy. Sometimes of an evening they would sing, not the green English ballads and folk-songs that were their stock-in-trade, but epics of Romany heroes, threnodies and canzonets.

Pyramus was the principal soloist. He had a pliant, tuneful voice and accompanied himself on a Spanish guitar.

He would squat before the fire, the women in a row opposite him, toss a verse across to them, and they would toss back the refrain, rocking to the time as though strung on a single wire.

The scene stirred Ortho—the gloomy wood, the overhanging rocks, the gypsy king, guitar across his knees, trumpeting his wild songs of love and knavery; and the women and girls, in their filthy, colorful rags, seen through a film of wood smoke, swaying to and fro, to and fro, bright eyes and barbaric brass ornaments glinting in the firelight. On the outer circle children and men lay listening in the leaf mold, and beyond them invisible horses stamped and shifted at their pickets, an owl hooted, a dog barked.

The scene stirred Ortho. It was so strange, and yet somehow so familiar, he had a feeling that sometime, somewhere he had seen it all before; long ago and far away he had sat in a camp like this and heard women singing. He liked the boastful, stormy songs, “Invocation to Timour,” “The Master Thief,” “The Valiant Tailor,” but the dirges carried him off, one especially. It was very sweet and sad, it had only four verses and the women sang each refrain more softly than the one before, so that the last was hardly above a whisper and dwindled into silence like the wind dying away—“aië, aië; aië, aië.” Ortho did not understand what it was about, its name even, but when he heard it he lost himself, became some one else, some one else who understood perfectly crept inside his body, forced his tears, made him sway and feel queer. Then the gypsy women across the fire would glance at him and nudge each other quietly. “See,” they would whisper, “his Rom grandfather looking out of his eyes.”

CHAPTER X

One evening, in late February, there was mullet pie for supper which was so much to Teresa’s taste that she ate more than even her heroic digestive organs could cope with, rent the stilly night with lamentations and did not get up for breakfast. Towards nine o’clock, she felt better, at eleven was herself again and, remembering it was Paul Feast, dressed in her finery and rode off to see the sport.

She arrived to witness what appeared to be a fratricidal war between the seafaring stalwarts of the parish and the farm hands. A mob of boys and men surged about a field, battling claw and hoof for the possession of a cow-hide ball which occasionally lobbed into view, but more often lay buried under a pile of writhing bodies.

Teresa was very fond of these rough sports and journeyed far and wide to see them, but what held her interest most that afternoon was a party of gentry who had ridden from Penzance to watch the barbarians at play. Two ladies and three gentlemen there were, the elder woman riding pillion, the younger side-saddle. They were very exquisite and superior, watched the uncouth mob through quizzing glasses and made witty remarks after the manner of visitors at a menagerie commenting on near-human antics of the monkeys. The younger woman chattered incessantly; a thinly pretty creature, wearing a gold-braided cocked hat and long brown coat cut in the masculine mode.

“Eliza, Eliza, I beseech you look at that woman’s stomacher! . . . And that wench’s farthingale! Elizabethan, I declare; one would imagine oneself at a Vauxhall masquerade. Mr. Borlase, I felicitate you on your entertainment.” She waved her whip towards the mob. “Bear pits are tedious by comparison. I must pen my experiences for The Spectator—‘Elegantia inter Barbaros, or a Lady’s Adventures Among the Wild Cornish.’ Tell me, pray, when it is all over do they devour the dead? We must go before that takes place; I shall positively expire of fright—though my cousin Venables, who has voyaged the South Seas, tells me cannibals are, as a rule, an amiable and loving people, vastly preferable to Tories. Captain Angus, I have dropped my kerchief . . . you neglect me, sir! My God, Eliza, there’s a handsome boy! . . . Behind you. . . . The gypsy boy on the sorrel pony. What a pretty young rogue!”

The whole party turned their heads to look at the Romany Apollo. Teresa followed their example and beheld it was Ortho. Under the delusion that his mother was abed and, judging by the noise she made, at death’s door, he had ventured afield in company with four young Hernes. He wore no cap, his sleeve was ripped from shoulder to cuff and he was much splashed all down his back and legs. He did not see his mother; he was absorbed in the game. Teresa shut her teeth, and drew a long, deep breath through them.

The battle suddenly turned against the fishermen; the farm hands, uttering triumphant howls, began to force them rapidly backwards towards the Church Town. Ortho and his ragged companions wheeled their mounts and ambled downhill to see the finish. Teresa did not follow them. She found her horse, mounted and rode straight home.

“The gypsy boy on the sorrel pony—the gypsy boy!”

People were taking her Ortho, Ortho Penhale of Bosula and Tregors, for a vagabond Rom, were they?

She was furious, but admitted they had cause—dressed like a scarecrow and mixed up with a crowd of young horse thieves! Teresa swore so savagely that her horse started. Anyhow she would stop it at once, at once—she’d settle all this gypsy business—gypsy! Time after time she had vowed to send Ortho to school, but she was always hard up when it came to the point, and year after year slipped by. He must be somewhere about sixteen now—fifteen, sixteen or seventeen—she wasn’t sure, and it didn’t matter to a year or so, she could look it up in the parish registers if need be. He should go to Helston like his father and learn to be a gentleman—and, incidentally, learn to keep accounts. It would be invaluable to have some one who could handle figures; then the damned tradesmen wouldn’t swindle her and she’d have money again.

“The gypsy boy!” . . . The words stung her afresh. Had she risen out of the muck of vagrancy to have her son slip back into it? Never! She’d settle all that. Not for a moment did she doubt her ability to cope with Ortho. What must John in heaven be thinking of her stewardship? She wept with mingled anger and contrition. To-morrow she’d open a clean page. Ortho should go to school at once. Gypsy! She’d show them!

She was heavily in debt, but the money should be found somehow. All the way home she was planning ways and means.

Ortho returned late that night and went to bed unconscious that he had been found out. Next morning he was informed that he was to go with his mother to Penzance. This was good tidings. He liked going to town with Teresa. She bought all kinds of eatables and one saw life, ladies and gentlemen; a soldier or two sometimes; blue-water seamen drunk as lords and big wind-bound ships at anchor. He saddled the dun pony and jogged alongside her big roan, prattling cheerfully all the way.

She watched him, her interest aroused. He certainly was good looking, with his slim uprightness, eager expression, and quick, graceful movements. He had luminous dark eyes, a short nose, round chin and crisp black curls—like her own. He was like her in many ways, many ways. Good company too. He told her several amusing stories and laughed heartily at hers. A debonair, attractive boy, very different from his brother. She felt suddenly drawn towards him. He would make a good companion when he came back from school. His looks would stir up trouble in sundry dove-cotes later on, she thought, and promised herself much amusement, having no sympathy for doves.

It was not until they arrived in Penzance that she broke the news that he was going to school. Ortho was a trifle staggered at first, but, to her surprise, took it very calmly, making no objections. In the first place it was something new, and the prospect of mixing with a herd of other boys struck him as rather jolly; secondly, he was fancying himself enormously in the fine clothes with which Teresa was loading him; he had never had anything before but the roughest of home-spuns stitched together by Martha and speedily reduced to shreds. He put the best suit on there and then, and strutted Market Jew Street like a young peacock ogling its first hen.

They left Penzance in the early afternoon (spare kit stuffed in the saddle-bags). In the ordinary way Teresa would have gone straight to the “Angel” at Helston and ordered the best, but now, in keeping with her new vow of economy, she sought a free night’s lodging at Tregors—also she wanted to raise some of the rent in advance.

Ortho was entered at his father’s old school next day.

Teresa rode home pleasantly conscious of duty done, and Ortho plunged into the new world, convinced that he had only to smile and conquer. In which he erred. He was no longer a Penhale in his own parish, prospective squire of the Keigwin Valley, but an unsophisticated young animal thrust into a den of sophisticated young animals and therefore a heaven-sent butt for their superior humor. Rising seventeen, and set to learn his A, B, C in the lowest form among the babies! This gave the wits an admirable opening. That he could ride, sail a boat and shoot anything flying or running weighed as nothing against his ignorance of Latin declensions.

He sought to win some admiration, or even tolerance for himself by telling of his adventures with Pyramus and Jacky’s George, but it had the opposite effect. His tormentors (sons of prosperous land owners and tradesmen) declared that any one who associated with gypsies and fishermen must be of low caste himself and taunted him unmercifully. They would put their hands to their mouths and halloo after the manner of fish-hawkers. “Mackerel! Fresh mack-erel! . . . Say, Penhale, what’s the price of pilchards to-day?”

Or “Hello, Penhale, there’s one of your Pharaoh mates at the gate—with a monkey. Better go and have a clunk over old times.”

Baiting Penhale became a fashionable pastime. Following the example of their elders, the small boys took up the ragging. This was more than Ortho could stand. He knocked some heads together, whereby earning the reputation of a bully.

A bulky, freckled lad named Burnadick, propelled by friends and professing himself champion of the oppressed, challenged Ortho to fight.

Ortho had not the slightest desire to fight the reluctant champion, but the noncombatants (as is the way with noncombatants) gave him no option. They formed a ring round the pair and pulled the coats off them.

For a moment or two it looked as if Ortho would win. An opening punch took him under the nose and stung him to such a pitch of fury that he tumbled on top of the freckled one, whirling like a windmill, fairly smothering him. But the freckled one was an old warrior; he dodged and side-stepped and propped straight lefts to the head whenever he got a chance, well knowing that Ortho could not last the crazy pace.

Ortho could not, or any mortal man. In a couple of minutes he was puffing and grunting, swinging wildly, giving openings everywhere. The heart was clean out of him; he had not wanted to fight in the first place and the popular voice was against him. Everybody cheered Burnadick; not a single whoop for him. He ended tamely, dropped his fists and gave Burnadick best. The mob jeered and hooted and crowded round the victor, who shook them off and walked away, licking his raw knuckles. He had an idea of following Penhale and shaking hands with him . . . hardly knew what the fight had been about . . . wished the other fellows weren’t always arranging quarrels for him; they never gave his knuckles time to heal. He’d have a chat with Penhale one of these days . . . to-morrow perhaps. . .

His amiable intentions never bore fruit, for on the morrow his mother was taken ill, and he was summoned home and nobody else had any kindly feelings for Ortho. He wrestled with incomprehensible primers among tittering infants during school hours; out of school he slunk about, alone always, cold-shouldered everywhere. His sociable soul grew sick within him, he rebelled at the sparse feeding, hated the irritable, sarcastic ushers, the bewildering tasks, the boys, the confinement, everything. At night, in bed, he wept hot tears of misery.

A spell of premature spring weather touched the land. Incautious buds popped out in the Helston back gardens; the hedgerow gorse was gilt-edged; the warm scent of pushing greenery blew in from the hillsides. Armadas of shining cloud cruised down the blue. Ortho, laboriously spelling C, A, T, cat, R, A, T, rat, in a drowsy classroom, was troubled with dreams. He saw the Baragwanath family painting the Game Cock on the Cove slip, getting her summer suit out of store; saw the rainbows glimmering over the Twelve Apostles, the green and silver glitter of the Channel beyond; smelt sea-weed; heard the lisp of the tide. He dreamt of Pyramus Herne wandering northwards with Lussha, and the other boys behind bringing up the horses, wandering over hill and dale, new country out-reeling before him every day. He bowed over the desk and buried his face in the crook of his arm.

A fly explored the spreading ear of “Rusty Rufus,” the junior usher. He woke out of his drowse, one little pig eye at a time, and glanced stealthily round his class. Two young gentlemen were playing noughts and crosses, two more were flipping pellets at each other; a fifth was making chalk marks on the back of a sixth, who in turn was absorbed in cutting initials in the desk; a seventh appeared to be asleep. Rufus, having slumbered himself, passed over the first six and fell upon his imitator.

“Penhale, come here,” he rumbled and reached for his stick.

Ortho obeyed. The usher usually indulged in much labored sarcasm at the boy’s expense, but he was too lazy that afternoon.

“Hand,” he growled.

Ortho held out his hand. “Rufus” swung back the stick and measured the distance with a puckered eye. Ortho hated him; he was a loathly sight, lying back in his chair, shapeless legs straddled out before him, fat jowl bristling with the rusty stubble from which he got his name, protuberant waistcoat stained with beer and snuff—a hateful beast! An icy glitter of cruelty—a flicker as of lightning reflected on a stagnant pool—suddenly lit the indolent eyes of the junior usher and down came the cane whistling. But Ortho’s hand was not there to receive it. How it came about he never knew. He was frightened by the revealing blaze in Rufus’ eyes, but he did not mean to shirk the stick; his hand withdrew itself of its own accord, without orders from his brain—a muscular twitch. However it happened the results were fruitful. Rufus cut himself along the inside of his right leg with all his might. He dropped the stick, bounded out of his chair and hopped about the class, cursing horribly, yelping with pain. Ortho stood transfixed, horrified at what he had done. A small boy, his eyes round with admiration, hissed at him from behind his hand:

“Run, you fool—he’ll kill you!”

Ortho came to his senses and bolted for the door.

But Rufus was too quick for him. He bounded across the room, choking, spluttering, apoplectic, dirty fat hands clawing the air. He clawed Ortho by the hair and collar and dragged him to him. Ortho hit out blindly, panicked. He was too frightened to think; he thought Rufus was going to kill him and fought for his life with the desperation of a cornered rat. He shut his eyes and teeth, rammed Rufus in the only part of him he could reach, namely the stomach. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven—it was like hitting a jelly. At the fourth blow he felt the usher’s grip on him loosen. At the fifth he was free, the sixth sent the man to the floor, the seventh was wasted.

Rufus lay on the boards, clutching his stomach, making the most dreadful retching noises. The small boys leapt up on their desks cheering and exhorting Ortho to run. He ran. Out of the door, across the court, out of the gates, up the street and out into the country. Ran on and on without looking where he was going, on and on.

It was fully an hour later before it occurred to him that he was running north, but he did not change direction.

Teresa was informed of Ortho’s sensational departure two days later. The school authorities sent to Bosula, expecting to find the boy had returned home and were surprised that he had not. Where had he got to? Teresa had an idea that he was hiding somewhere in the district, and combed it thoroughly, but Ortho was not forthcoming. The gypsy camp was long deserted, and Jacky’s George had gone to visit his Scillonian sister by the somewhat circuitous route of Guernsey.

It occurred to her that he might be lying up in the valley, surreptitiously fed by Eli, and put Bohenna on to beat it out, but the old hind drew blank. She then determined that he was with the tinners around St. Just (a sanctuary for many a wanted Cornishman), and since there was no hope of extricating him from their underground labyrinths the only thing to do was to wait. He’d come home in time, she said, and promised the boy a warm reception when he did.

Then came a letter from Pyramus Herne—dictated to a public letter writer. Pyramus was at Ashburton buying Dartmoor ponies and Ortho was with him. Pyramus was profuse with regrets and disclaimed all responsibility. Ortho had caught up with him at Launceston, foot-sore, ragged, starving, terrified—but adamant. He, Pyramus, had chided him, begged him to return, even offered to lend him a horse to carry him back to Helston or Bosula, but Ortho absolutely refused to do either—declaring that rather than return he would kill himself. What was to be done? He could not turn a friendless and innocent boy adrift to starve or be maltreated by the beggars, snatch-purses and loose women who swarmed into the roads at that season of the year. What was he to do? He respectfully awaited Teresa’s instructions, assuring her that in the meanwhile Ortho should have the best his poor establishment afforded and remained her ladyship’s obedient and worshipful servant, etc.

Teresa took the letter to the St. Gwithian parish clerk to be read and bit her lip when she learnt the contents. The clerk asked her if she wanted a reply written, but she shook her head and went home. Ortho could not be brought back from Devon handcuffed and kept chained in his room. There was nothing to be done.

So her son had reverted to type. She did not think it would last long. The Hernes were prosperous for gypsies. Ortho would not go short of actual food and head cover, but there would be days of trudging against the wind and rain, soaked and trickling from head to heel, beds in wet grass; nights of thunder with horses breaking loose and tumbling over the tents; shuddering dawns chilling the very marrow; parched noons choked with dust; riots at fairs, cudgels going and stones flying; filth, blows, bestiality, hard work and hard weather, hand to mouth all the way. Ortho was no glutton for punishment; he would return to the warm Owls’ House ere long, curl up gratefully before the fire, cured of his wanderlust. All was for the best doubtless, Teresa considered, but she packed Eli off to school in his place; the zest for duty was still strong in her—and, furthermore, she must have somebody who could keep accounts.

CHAPTER XI

Eli went to school prepared for a bad time. Ortho had not run away for nothing; he was no bulldog for unprofitable endurance—lessons had been irksome, no doubt—but he should have been in his element among a horde of boys. He liked having plenty of his own kind about him and naturally dominated them. He had won over the surly Gwithian farm boys with ease; the turbulent Monks Cove fisher lads looked to him as chief, and even those wild hawks, the young Hernes, followed him unquestioning into all sorts of mischief. Yet Ortho had fled school as from torment.

If the brilliant and popular brother had come to grief how much more trouble was in store for him, the dullard? Eli set his jaw. Come what might, he would see it through; he would stick at school, willy-nilly, until he got what he wanted out of it, namely the three R’s. It had been suddenly borne in on Eli that education had its uses.

Chance had taken him to the neighboring farm of Roswarva, which bounded Polmenna moors on the west. There was a new farmer in possession, a widower by the name of Penaluna, come from the north of the Duchy with a thirteen-year daughter, an inarticulate child, leggy as a foal.

Eli, scrambling about the Luddra Head, had discovered an otter’s holt, and then and there lit a smoke fire to test if the tenant were at home or not. The otter was at home and came out with a rush. Eli attempted to tail it, but his foot slipped on the dry thrift and he sprawled on top of the beast, which bit him in three places. He managed to drop a stone on it as it slid away over the rocks, but he could hardly walk. Penaluna met him limping across a field dragging his victim by the tail, and took him to Roswarva to have his wounds tied up.

Eli had not been to Roswarva since the days of its previous owners, a beach-combing, shiftless crew, and he barely recognized the place. The kitchen was creamy with whitewash; the cupboards freshly painted; the table scrubbed spotless; the ranked pans gleamed like copper moons; all along the mantelshelf were china dogs with gilt collars and ladies and gentlemen on prancing horses, hawks perched a-wrist. In the corner was an oak grandfather clock with a bright brass face engraved with the signs of the zodiac and the cautionary words:

“I mark ye Hours but cannot stay their Race;

Nor Priest nor King may buy a moment’s Grace;

Prepare to meet thy Maker face to face.”

Sunlight poured into the white kitchen through the south window, setting everything a-shine and a-twinkle—a contrast to unkempt Bosula, redolent of cooking and stale food, buzzing with flies, incessantly invaded by pigs and poultry. Outside Roswarva all was in the same good shape; the erst-littered yard cleared up, the tumbledown sheds rebuilt and thatched. Eli limped home over trim hedges, fields cultivated up to the last inch and plentifully manured and came upon his own land—crumbling banks broken down by cattle and grown to three times their proper breadth with thorn and brambles; fields thick with weeds; windfalls lying where they had dropped; bracken encroaching from every point.

He had never before remarked anything amiss with Bosula, but, coming straight from Roswarva, the contrast struck him in the face. He thought about it for two days, and then marched over to Roswarva. He found Simeon Penaluna on the cliff-side rooting out slabs of granite with a crowbar and piling them into a wall. A vain pursuit, Eli thought, clearing a cliff only fit for donkeys and goats.

“What are you doing that for?” he asked.

“Potatoes,” said Simeon.

“Why here, when you got proper fields?”

“Open to sun all day, and sea’ll keep ’em warm at night. No frost. I’ll get taties here two weeks earlier than up-along.”

“How do you know?”

“Read it. Growers in Jersey has been doin’ it these years.”

Eli digested this information and leaned against the wall, watching Penaluna at work.

Eli liked the man’s air of patient power, also his economy of speech. He decided he was to be trusted. “You’re a good farmer, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” said Penaluna truthfully.

“What’s wrong with our place, Bosula?” Eli inquired.

“Under-manned,” said Penaluna. “Your father had two men besides himself and he worked like a bullock and was clever, I’ve heard tell. Now you’ve got but two, and not a head between ’em. Place is going back. Come three years the trash’ll strangle ’e in your beds.”

Eli took the warning calmly. “We’ll stop that,” he announced.

Penaluna subjected him to a hard scrutiny, spat on his palms, worked the crow-bar into a crevice and tried his weight on it.

“Hum! Maybe—but you’d best start soon.”

Eli nodded and considered again. “Are you clever?”

Penaluna swung his bar from left to right; the rock stirred in its bed.

“No—but I can read.”

Eli’s eyes opened. That was the second time reading had been mentioned. What had that school-mastering business to do with real work like farming?

“Went to free-school at Truro,” Simeon explained. “There’s clever ones that writes off books and I reads ’em. There’s smart notions in books—sometimes. I got six books on farming—six brains.”

“Um-m,” muttered Eli, the idea slowly taking hold.

In return for advice given, he helped the farmer pile walls until sunset and not another word was interchanged. When he got home it was to learn that Ortho was in Devon with Pyramus and that he was to go to school in his stead.

Eli’s feelings were mixed. If Ortho had had a bad time he would undoubtedly have worse, but on the other hand he would learn to read and could pick other people’s brains—like Penaluna. He rode to Helston with his mother, grimly silent all the way, steeling himself to bear the rods for Bosula’s sake. But Ortho, by the dramatic manner of his exit, had achieved popularity when it was no longer of any use to him. Eli stepped in at the right moment to receive the goodly heritage.

Was he not own brother to the hero who had tricked Rufus into slicing himself across the leg and followed up this triumph by pummeling seven bells out of the detested usher and flooring him in his own classroom? The story had lost nothing in the mouths of the spectators. A half-minute scramble between a sodden hulk of a man and a terrified boy had swollen into a Homeric contest as full of incident as the Seven Years’ War, lasting half an hour and ending in Rufus lying on the floor, spitting blood and imploring mercy. Eli entered the school surrounded by a warm nimbus of reflected glory and took Ortho’s place at the bottom of the lowest form.

That he was the criminal’s brother did not endear him to Rufus, who gave him the benefit of his acid tongue from early morn to dewy eve, but beyond abuse the usher did not go. Eli was not tall, but he was exceptionally sturdy and Rufus had not forgotten a certain affair. He was chary of these Penhales—little better than savages—reared among smugglers and moor-men—utterly undisciplined . . . no saying what they might do . . . murder one, even. He kept his stick for the disciplined smaller fry and pickled his tongue for Eli. Eli did not mind the sarcasm in the least. His mental hide was far too thick to feel the prick—and anyhow it was only talk.

One half-holiday bird’s-nesting in Penrose woods, he came upon the redoubtable Burnadick similarly engaged and they compared eggs. In the midst of the discussion a bailiff appeared on the scene and they had to run for it. The bailiff produced dogs and the pair were forced to make a wide detour via Praze and Lanner Vean. Returning by Helston Mill, they met with a party of town louts who, having no love for the “Grammar scholards,” threw stones. A brush ensued, Eli acquitting himself with credit. The upshot of all this was that they reached school seven minutes late for roll call and were rewarded with a thrashing. Drawn together by common pain and adventure, the two were henceforth inseparable, forming a combination which no boy or party of boys dared gainsay. With Rufus’ sting drawn and the great Burnadick his ally Eli found school life tolerable. He did not enjoy it; the food was insufficient, the restraint burdensome, but it was by no means as bad as he had expected. By constant repetition he was getting a parrot-like fluency with his tables and he seldom made a bad mistake in spelling—providing the word was not of more than one syllable.

At the Owls’ House in the meanwhile economy was still the rage. Teresa’s first step was to send the cattle off to market. In vain did Bohenna expostulate, pointing out that the stock had not yet come to condition and further there was no market. It was useless. Teresa would not listen to reason; into Penzance they went and were sold for a song. After them she pitched pigs, poultry, goats and the dun pony. Her second step was to discharge the second hind, Davy. Once more Bohenna protested. He could hardly keep the place going as it was, he said. The moor was creeping in to right and left, the barn thatch tumbling, the banks were down, the gates falling to pieces. He could not be expected to be in more than two places at once. Teresa replied with more sound than sense and a shouting match ensued, ending in Teresa screaming that she was mistress and that if Bohenna didn’t shut his mouth and obey orders she’d pack him after Davy.

But if Teresa bore hard on others she sacrificed herself as well. Not a single new dress did she order that year, and even went to the length of selling two brooches, her second best cloak and her third best pair of earrings. Parish feasts, races, bull-baitings and cock-fights she resolutely eschewed; an occasional stroll down the Cove and a pot of ale at the Kiddlywink was all the relaxation she allowed herself. By these self-denying ordinances she was able to foot Eli’s school bills and pay interest on her debts, but her temper frayed to rags. She railed at Martha morning, noon and night, threw plates at Wany and became so unbearable that Bohenna carried all his meals afield with him.

Eli came home for a few days’ holiday at midsummer, but spent most of his waking hours at Roswarva.

On his last evening he went ferreting with Bohenna. The banks were riddled with rabbit sets, but so overgrown were they it was almost impossible to work the fitchets. Their tiny bells tinkled here and there, thither and hither in the dense undergrowth, invisible and elusive as the clappers of derisive sprites. They gamboled about, rejoicing in their freedom, treating the quest of fur as a secondary matter. Bohenna pursued them through the thorns, shattering the holy hush of evening with blasphemies.

“This ought to be cut back, rooted out,” Eli observed.

The old hind took it as a personal criticism and turned on him, a bramble scratch reddening his cheek, voice shaking with long-suppressed resentment. “Rooted out, saith a’! Cut back! Who’s goin’ do et then? Me s’pose.”

He held out his knotted fists, a resigned ferret swinging in each.

“Look you—how many hands have I got? Two edden a? Two only. But your ma do think each o’ my fingers is a hand, I b’lieve. Youp! Comin’ through!”

A rabbit shot out of a burrow on the far side of the hedge, the great flintlock bellowed and it turned somersaults as neatly as a circus clown.

“There’ll be three of us here when I’ve done schooling next midsummer and Ortho comes home,” said Eli calmly, ramming down a fresh charge. “We’ll clear the trash and put the whole place in crop.”

Bohenna glanced up, surprised. “Oh, will us? An’ where’s cattle goin’?”

“Sell ’em off—all but what can feed themselves on the bottoms. Crops’ll fetch more to the acre than stock.”

“My dear soul! Harken to young Solomon! . . . Who’s been tellin’ you all this?”

“Couple of strong farmers I’ve talked with on half holidays near Helston—and Penaluna.”

Bohenna bristled. Wisdom in foreign worthies he might admit, but a neighbor . . . !

“What’s Simeon Penaluna been sayin’? Best keep his long nose on his own place; I’ll give it a brear wrench if I catch it sniffing over here! What’d he say?”

“Said he wondered you didn’t break your heart.”

“Humph!” Bohenna was mollified, pleased that some one appreciated his efforts; this Penaluna, at least, sniffed with discernment. He listened quietly while Eli recounted their neighbor’s suggestions.

They talked farming all the way home, and it was a revelation to him how much the boy had picked up. He had no idea Eli was at all interested in it, had imagined, from his being sent to school, that he was destined for a clerk or something bookish. He had looked forward to fighting a losing battle, for John’s sake and Bosula’s sake, single-handed, to the end. Saw himself, a silver ancient, dropping dead at the plow tail and the triumphant bracken pouring over him like a sea. But now the prospect had changed. Here was a true Penhale coming back to tend the land of his sires. With young blood at his back they would yet save the place. He knew Eli, once he set his face forward, would never look back; his brain was too small to hold more than one idea. He gloated over the boy’s promising shoulders, thick neck and sturdy legs. He would root out the big bowlders as his father had done, swing an ax or scythe from cock-crow to owl-light without flag, toss a sick calf across his shoulders and stride for miles, be at once the master and lover of his land, the right husbandman. But of Ortho, the black gypsy son, Bohenna was not so sure. Nevertheless hope dawned afresh and he went home to his crib among the rocks singing, “I seen a ram at Hereford Fair” for the first time in six months.

Eli was back again a few days before Christmas, and on Christmas Eve Ortho appeared. There was nothing of the chastened prodigal about him; he rode into the yard on a showy chestnut gelding (borrowed from Pyramus), ragged as a scarecrow, but shouting and singing. He slapped Bohenna on the back, hugged Eli affectionately, pinned his mother against the door post and kissed her on both cheeks and her nose, chucked old Martha under the chin and even tossed a genial word at the half-wit Wany.

With the exception of Eli, no one was particularly elated to see him back—they remembered him only as an unfailing fount of mischief—but from Ortho’s manner one would have concluded he was restoring the light of their lives. He did not give them time to close their front. They hardly knew he had arrived before he had embraced them all. The warmth of his greeting melted their restraint. Bohenna’s hairy face split athwart in a yellow-toothed grin, Martha broke into bird-like twitters, Wany blushed, and Teresa said weakly, “So you’re back.”

She had not forgiven him for his school escapade and had intended to make his return the occasion of a demonstration as to who ruled the roost at Bosula. But now she thought she’d postpone it. He had foiled her for the moment, kissed her . . . she couldn’t very well pitch into him immediately after that . . . not immediately. Besides, deep in her heart she felt a cold drop of doubt. A new Ortho had come back, very different from the callow, pliant child who had ridden babbling to Helston beside her ten months previously. Ortho had grown up. He was copper-colored with exposure, sported a downy haze on his upper lip and was full two inches taller. But the change was not so much physical as spiritual. His good looks were, if anything, emphasized, but he had hardened. Innocence was gone from his eyes; there was the faintest edge to his mirth. She had not wanted to be kissed, had struggled against it, but he had taken her by surprise, handled her with dispatch and assurance that could only come of practice—Master Ortho had not been idle on his travels. An idea occurred to her that she had been forestalled; it was Ortho who had made the demonstration. Their eyes met, crossed like bayonets and dropped. It was all over in the fraction of a second, but they had felt each other’s steel.

Teresa was not alarmed by the sudden development of her first-born. She was only forty-one, weighed fourteen stone, radiated rude health and feared no living thing. Since John’s death she had not seen a man she would have stood a word from; a great measure of her affection for her husband sprang from the knowledge that he could have beaten her. She apprised Ortho’s slim figure and mentally promised him a bellyful of trouble did he demand it, but for the moment she concluded to let bygones be—just for the moment.

Ortho flipped some crumbs playfully over Wany, assured Martha she had not aged a day, told Bohenna they’d have a great time after woodcock, threw his arm around Eli’s neck and led him out into the yard.

“See here what I’ve got for you, my old heart,” said he, fishing in his pocket. “Bought it in Portsmouth.”

He placed a little brass box in Eli’s hand. It had a picture of a seventy-four under full sail chased on the lid and the comfortable words, “Let jealous foes no hearts dismay, Vernon our hope is, God our stay.” Inside was coiled a flint steel and fuse. Eli was profoundly touched. Ortho’s toes were showing through one boot, his collar bones had chafed holes in his shirt and his coat was in ribbons. The late frost must have nipped him severely, yet he had not spent his few poor pence in getting himself patched up, but bought a present for him. As a matter of fact the little box had cost Ortho no small self-denial.

Eli stammered his thanks—which Ortho laughed aside—and the brothers went uphill towards Polmenna Down, arms about shoulders, talking, talking. Eli furnished news of Helston. Burnadick was sorry about that row he had had with Ortho—the other fellows pushed him on. He was a splendid fellow really, knew all about hare-hunting and long-dogs. Eli only wished he could have seen Ortho ironing Rufus out! It must have been a glorious set-to! Everybody was still talking about it. Rufus had never been the same since—quaking and shaking. Dirty big jellyfish!—always swilling in pot-houses and stalking serving-maids—the whole town had laughed over his discomfiture.

Ortho was surprised to learn of his posthumous popularity at Helston. Eli’s version of the affair hardly coincided with his recollection in a single particular. All he remembered was being horribly frightened and hitting out blindly with results that astonished him even more than his victim. Still, since legend had chosen to elevate him to the pinnacle of a St. George, suppressor of dragons, he saw no reason to disprove it.

They passed on to other subjects. How had Ortho got on with the Romanies? Oh, famously! Wonderful time—had enjoyed every moment of it. Eli would never believe the things he had seen. Mountains twice . . . three . . . four times as high as Chapel Carn Brea or Sancreed Beacon; rivers with ships sailing on them as at sea; great houses as big as Penzance in themselves; lords and ladies driving in six-horse carriages; regiments of soldiers drilling behind negro drummers, and fairs with millions of people collected and all the world’s marvels on view; Italian midgets no higher than your knee, Irish giants taller than chimneys, two-headed calves and six-legged lambs, contortionists who knotted their legs round their necks, conjurers who magicked glass balls out of country boys’ ears; dancing bears, trained wolves and an Araby camel that required but one drink a month. Prizefights he had seen also; tinker women battling for a purse in a ring like men, and fellows that carried live rats in their shirt bosoms and killed them with their teeth at a penny a time. And cities! . . . Such cities! Huge enough to cover St. Gwithian parish, with streets so packed and people so elegant you thought every day must be market day.

London? No-o, he had not been quite to London. But travelers told him that some of the places he had seen—Exeter, Salisbury, Plymouth, Winchester—were every bit as good—in some ways better. London, in the opinion of many, was overrated. Oh, by the way, in Salisbury he had seen the cream of the lot—two men hanged for sheep-stealing; they kicked and jerked in the most comical fashion. A wonderful time!

The recital had a conflicting effect on Eli. To him Ortho’s story was as breath-taking as that of some swart mariner returned from fabulous spice islands and steamy Indian seas—but at the same time he was perturbed. Was it likely that his brother, having seen the great world and all its wonders, would be content to settle down to the humdrum life at Bosula and dour struggle with the wilderness? Most improbable. Ortho would go adventuring again and he and Bohenna would have to face the problem alone. Bohenna was not getting any younger. His rosy hopes clouded over. He must try to get Ortho to see the danger. After all Bosula would come to Ortho some day; it was his affair. He began forthwith, pointed out the weedy state of the fields, the littered windfalls, the invasion of the moor. To his surprise Ortho was immediately interested—and indignant.

“What had that lazy lubber Bohenna been up to? . . . And Davy? By Gad, it was a shame! He’d let ’em know. . . .”

Eli explained that Davy had been turned off and Bohenna was doing his best. “In father’s time there were three of ’em here and it was all they could manage, working like bullocks,” said he, quoting Penaluna.

“Then why haven’t we three men now?”

“Mother says we’ve got no money to hire ’em.”

Ortho’s jaw dropped. “No money! We? . . . Good God! Where’s it all gone to?”

Eli didn’t know, but he did know that if some one didn’t get busy soon they’d have no farm left. “It’s been going back ever since father died,” he added.

Ortho strode up and down, black-browed, biting his lip. Then he suddenly laughed. “Hell’s bells,” he cried. “What are we fretting about? There are three of us still, ain’t there? . . . You, me ’n Ned. I warrant we’re a match for a passel of old brambles, heh? I warrant we are.”

Eli was amazed and delighted. Did Ortho really mean what he said?

“Then—then you’re not going gypsying again?” he asked.

Ortho spat. “My Lord, no—done with that. It’s a dog’s life, kicked from common to heath, living on hedge-hogs, sleeping under bushes, never dry—mind you, I enjoyed it all—but I’ve had all I want. No, boy”—once more he hugged his brother to him—“I’m going to stop home long o’ thee—us’ll make our old place the best in the Hundred—in the Duchy—and be big rosy yeomen full of good beef and cider. . . . Eh, look at that!”

The sun had dipped. Cirrus dappled the afterglow with drifts of smoldering, crimson feathers. It was as though monster golden eagles were battling in the upper air, dropping showers of lustrous, blood-stained plumes. Away to the north the switch-backed tors rolled against the sky, wine-dark against pale primrose. Mist brimmed the valleys; dusk, empurpled, shrouded the hills. The primrose faded, a star outrider blinked boldly in the east, then the green eve suddenly quivered with the glint of a million million spear-heads—night’s silver cohorts advancing. So still was it that the brothers on the hilltop could plainly hear the babble and cluck of the hidden stream below them; the thump of young rabbits romping in near-by fields and the bark of a dog at Boskennel being answered by another dog at Trevider. From Bosula yard came the creak and bang of a door, the clank of a pail—Bohenna’s voice singing:

“I seen a ram at Hereford Fair,

The biggest gert ram I did ever behold.”

Ortho laughed and took up the familiar song, sent his pleasant, tuneful voice ringing out over the darkling valley:

“His fleece were that heavy it stretched to the ground,

His hoofs and his horns they was shodden wi’ gold.”

Below them sounded a gruff crow of mirth from Bohenna and the second verse:

“His horns they was curlèd like to the thorn tree,

His fleece was as white as the blossom o’ thorn;

He stamped like a stallion an’ roared like a bull,

An’ the gert yeller eyes of en sparkled wi’ scorn.”

Among the bare trees a light winked, a friendly, beckoning wink—the kitchen window.

Ortho drew a deep breath and waved his hand. “Think I’d change this—this lew li’l’ place I was born in for a gypsy tilt, do ’ee? No, no, my dear! Not for all the King’s money and all the King’s gems! I’ve seen ’s much of the cold world as I do want—and more.” He linked his arm with Eli’s. “Come on; let’s be getting down-along.”

That night the brothers slept together in the same big bed as of old. Eli tumbled to sleep at once, but Ortho lay awake. Towards ten o’clock he heard what he had been listening for, the “Te-whoo-whee-wha-ha” of the brown owls calling to each other. He grunted contentedly, turned over and went to sleep.

CHAPTER XII

Christmas passed merrily at Bosula that year. Martha was an authority on “feasten” rites and delicacies, and Christmas was the culmination. Under her direction the brothers festooned the kitchen with ropes of holly and ivy, and hung the “kissing bush”—two barrel hoops swathed in evergreens—from the middle beam.

Supper was the principal event of the day, a prodigious spread; goose giblet pie, squab pie made of mutton, raisins and onions, and queer-shaped saffron cakes, the whole washed down with draughts of “eggy-hot,” an inspiring compound of eggs, hot beer, sugar and rum, poured from jug to jug till it frothed over.

The Bosula household sat down at one board and gorged themselves till they could barely breathe. Upon them in this state came the St. Gwithian choir, accompanied by the parish fiddler, “Jiggy” Dan, and a score or so of hangers on. They sang the sweet and simple old “curls” of the West Country, “I saw three ships come sailin’ in,” “Come and I will sing you,” “The first good joy that Mary had,” and

“Go the wayst out, Child Jesus,

Go the wayst out to play;

Down by God’s Holy Well

I see three pretty children

As ever tongue can tell.”

Part singing is a natural art in Cornwall. The Gwithian choir sang well, reverently and without strain. Teresa, full-fed after long moderation, was in melting mood. The carols made her feel pleasantly tearful and religious. She had not been to church since the unfortunate affair with the curate, but determined she would go the very next Sunday and make a rule of it.

She gave the choir leader a silver crown and ordered eggy-hot to be served round. The choir’s eyes glistened. Eggy-hot seldom came their way; usually they had to be content with cider.

Martha rounded up the company. The apple trees must be honored or they would withhold their fruit in the coming year. Everybody adjourned to the orchard, Martha carrying a jug of cider, Bohenna armed with the flintlock, loaded nearly as full as himself. Wany alone was absent; she was slipping up the valley to the great barrow to hear the Spriggans, the gnome-miners, sing their sad carols as was the custom of a Christmas night.

The Bosula host grouped, lantern-lit, round the king tree of the orchard; Martha dashed the jug against the trunk and pronounced her incantation:

“Health to thee, good apple tree!

Hatsful, packsful, great bushel-bags full!

Hurrah and fire off the gun.”

Everybody cheered. Bohenna steadied himself and pulled the trigger. There was a deafening roar, a yard-long tongue of flame spurted from the muzzle, Bohenna tumbled over backwards and Jiggy Dan, uttering an appalling shriek, fell on his face and lay still.

The scared spectators stooped over the fiddler.

“Dead is a?”

“Ess, dead sure ’nough—dead as last year, pore soul.”

Panegyrics on the deceased were delivered.

“A brilliant old drinker a was.”

“Ess, an’ a clean lively one to touch the strings.”

“Shan’t see his like no more.”

“His spotty sow coming to her time too—an’ a brearly loved roast sucking pig, the pretty old boy.”

Bohenna sat up in the grass and sniffed.

“There’s a brear strong smell o’ burning, seem me?”

The company turned on him reproachfully. “Thou’st shotten Jiggy Dan. Shot en dead an’ a-cold. Didst put slugs in gun by mistake, Ned?”

Bohenna scratched his head. “Couldn’t say rightly this time o’ night . . . maybe I did . . . but, look ’ee, there wasn’t no offense meant; ’twas done in good part, as you might say.” He sniffed again and stared at the corpse of his victim.

“Slugs or no seem me the poor angel’s more hot than cold. Lord love, he’s afire! . . . The wad’s catched in his coat!”

That such was the case became painfully apparent to the deceased at the same moment. He sprang to his feet and bounded round and round the group, uttering ghastly howls and belaboring himself behind in a fruitless endeavor to extinguish the smoldering cloth. The onlookers were helpless with laughter; they leaned against each other and sobbed. Teresa in particular shook so violently it hurt her.

Somebody suggested a bucket of water, between chokes, but nobody volunteered to fetch it; to do so would be to miss the fun.

“The stream,” hiccoughed Bohenna, holding his sides. “Sit ’ee down in stream, Dan, my old beauty, an’ quench thyself.”

A loud splash in the further darkness announced that the unhappy musician had taken his advice.

The apple trees fully secured for twelve months, the party returned to the kitchen, but the incident of Dan had dissipated the somewhat pious tone of the preceding events. Teresa, tears trickling down her cheeks, set going a fresh round of eggy-hot. Ortho pounced on Tamsin Eva, the prettiest girl in the room, carried her bodily under the kissing bush and saluted her again and again. Other men and boys followed suit. The girls fled round the kitchen in mock consternation, pursued by flushed swains, were captured and embraced, giggling and sighing. Jiggy Dan, sniffing hot liquor as a pointer sniffs game, limped, dripping, in from the stream, was given an old petticoat of Martha’s to cover his deficiencies, a pot of rum, propped up in a corner and told to fiddle for dear life. The men, headed by Ortho, cleared the kitchen of furniture, and then everybody danced old heel and toe country dances, skipped, bowed, sidled, passed up and down the middle and twirled around till the sweat shone like varnish on their scarlet faces.

The St. Gwithian choir flung themselves into it heart and soul. They were expected at Monks Cove to sing carols, were overdue by some hours, but they had forgotten all about that.

Teresa danced with the best, with grace and agility extraordinary in a woman of her bulk. She danced one partner off his feet and all but stunned another against the corner of the dresser, bringing most of the crockery crashing to earth. She then produced that relic of her vagabondage, the guitar, and joined forces with Jiggy Dan.

The fun became furious. The girls shook the tumbled hair from their eyes, laughed roguishly; the men whooped and thumped the floor with their heavy boots. Jiggy Dan, constantly primed with rum by the attentive Martha, scraped and sawed at his fiddle, beating time with his toe. Teresa plucked at the guitar till it droned and buzzed like a hive of melodious bees. Occasionally she sang ribald snatches. She was in high feather, the reaction from nine months’ abstinence. The kitchen, lit by a pile of dry furze blazing in the open hearth, grew hotter and hotter.

The dancers stepped and circled in a haze of dust, steaming like overdriven cattle. Eli alone was out of tune with his surroundings. The first effects of the drink had worn off, leaving him with a sour mouth and slightly dizzy. The warmer grew the others, the colder he became.

He scowled at the junketers from his priggish altitude and blundered bedward to find it already occupied by the St. Gwithian blacksmith, who, dark with the transferable stains of his toil, lay sprawled across it, boots where his head should have been. Eli rolled the unconscious artificer to the floor (an act which in no way disturbed that worthy’s slumbers) and turned in, sick and sulky.

With Ortho, on the other hand, things were never better. He had not drunk enough to cloud him and he was getting a lot of fun out of Tamsin Eva and her “shiner.” Tamsin, daughter of the parish clerk, was a bronze-haired, slender creature with a skin like cream and roses and a pretty, timid manner. Ortho, satiated with swarthy gypsy charmers, thought her lovely and insisted upon dancing with her for the evening. That her betrothed was present and violently jealous only added piquancy to the affair. The girl was not happy—Ortho frightened her—but she had not enough strength of mind to resist him. She shot appealing glances at her swain, but the boy was too slow in his movements and fuddled with unaccustomed rum. The sober and sprightly Ortho cut the girl out from under his nose time and time again. Teresa, extracting appalling discords from the guitar, noted this by-play with gratification; this tiger cub of hers promised good sport.

Towards one o’clock the supply of spirituous impulse having given out, the pace slackened down. Chastened husbands were led home by their wives. Single men tottered out of doors to get a breath of fresh air and did not return, were discovered at dawn peacefully slumbering under mangers, in hen roosts and out-of-the-way corners. Tamsin Eva’s betrothed was one of these. He was entering the house fired with the intention of wresting his lass from Ortho and taking her home when something hit him hard on the point of the jaw and all the lights went out. He woke up next morning far from clear as to whether he had blundered into the stone door post or somebody’s ready fist. At all events it was Ortho who took Tamsin home.

Teresa fell into a doze and had an uncomfortable dream. All the people she disliked came and made faces at her, people she had forgotten ages ago and who in all decency should have forgotten her. They flickered out of the mists, distorted but recognizable, clutched at her with hooked fingers, pressed closer and closer, leering malevolently. Teresa was dismayed. Not a friend anywhere! She lolled forward, moaning, “John! Oh, Jan!” Jiggy Dan’s elbow hit her cheek and she woke up to an otherwise empty kitchen filled with the reek of burnt pilchard oil, a dead hearth, and cold night air pouring in through the open door. She shuddered, rubbed her sleepy lids and staggered, yawning, to bed.

Jiggy Dan, propped up in the corner, fiddled on, eyes sealed, mind oblivious, arm sawing mechanically.

They found him in the morning on the yard muck heap, Martha’s petticoat over his head, fiddle clasped to his bosom, back to back with a snoring sow.

The Christmas festivities terminated on Twelfth Night with the visit of goose dancers from Monks Cove, the central figure of whom was a lad wearing the hide and horns of a bullock attended by other boys dressed in female attire. Horse-play and crude buffoonery was the feature rather than dancing, and Teresa got some more of her crockery smashed.

Next morning Eli went to Helston for his last term and Ortho took off his coat.

When Eli came home at midsummer he could hardly credit his eyes. Ortho had performed miracles. Very wisely he had not attempted to fight back the moor everywhere, but had concentrated, and the fields he had put in crop were done thoroughly, deep-plowed, well manured and evenly sown—Penaluna could not make a better show.

The brothers walked over the land on the evening of Eli’s return; everywhere the young crops stood up thick and healthy, pushing forwards to fruition. Ortho glowed with justifiable pride, talked farming eagerly. He and Ned had given the old place a hammering, he said. By the Holy they had! Mended the buildings, whitewashed the orchard trees, grubbed, plowed, packed ore-weed and sea-sand, harrowed and hoed from dawn-blink to star-wink, day in, day out—Sundays included. But they’d get it all back—oh, aye, and a hundredfold.

Eli had been in the right; agriculture was the thing—the good old soil! You put in a handful and picked up a bushel in a few months. Cattle—pah! One cow produced but one calf per annum and that was not marketable for three or four years. No—wheat, barley and oats forever!

Now Eli was home they could hold all they’d got and reclaim a field or so a year. In next to no time they’d have the whole place waving yellow from bound to bound. Ortho even had designs on the original moor, saw no reason why they should not do their own milling in time—they had ample water power. He glowed with enthusiasm. Eli’s cautious mind discounted much of these grandiose schemes, but his heart went out to Ortho; the mellowing fields before him had not been lightly won.

Ortho was as lean as a herring-bone, sweated down to bare muscle and sinew. His finger nails were broken off short, his hands scarred and calloused, his face was torn with brambles and leathern with exposure. He had fought a good fight and was burning for more. Oh, splendid brother!

Ned Bohenna was loud in Ortho’s praise. He was a marvel. He was quicker in the uptake than even John had been and no work was too hard for him. The old hind was most optimistic. They had seeded a fine area and crops were looking famous. Come three years at this pace the farm would be back where it was at John’s death, the pick of the parish.

For the rest, there was not much news. Martha had been having the cramps severely of late and Wany was getting whister than ever. Said she was betrothed to a Spriggan earl who lived in the big barrow. He had promised to marry her as soon as he could get his place enlarged—he, he!

There had been a sea battle fought with gaffs and oars off the Gazells between Jacky’s George and a couple of Porgwarra boats. Both sides accused each other of poaching lobster pots. Jacky’s George sank a Porgwarra boat by dropping a lump of ballast through her—and then rescued the crew. They had seen a lot of Pyramus Herne, altogether too much of Pyramus Herne. He had come down with a bigger mob of horses and donkeys than usual and grazed them all over the farm—after dark. Seeing the way he had befriended Ortho, they could not well say much to him, especially as they had grass to spare at present; but it could not go on like that.

Eli buckled to beside the others. They got the hay in, and, while waiting for the crops to ripen, pulled down a bank (throwing two small fields into one), rebuilt a couple more, cleaned out the orchard, hoed the potatoes and put a new roof on the stables. They were out of bed at five every morning and into it at eight of an evening, dead-beat, soiled with earth and sweat, stained with sun and wind. They worked like horses, ate like wolves and slept like sloths.

Ortho led everywhere. He was first afoot in the morning, last to bed at night. His quick mind discerned the easiest way through difficulties, but when hard labor was inevitable he sprang at it with a cheer. His voice rang like a bugle round Bosula, imperious yet merry. He was at once a captain and a comrade.

Under long days of sunshine and gentle drenches of rain the crops went on from strength to strength. It would be a bumper year.

Then came the deluge. Wany, her uncanny weather senses prickling, prophesied it two days in advance. Bohenna was uneasy, but Ortho, pointing to the serene sky, laughed at their fears. The next day the heat became oppressive, and he was not so sure. He woke at ten o’clock that night to a terrific clap of thunder, sat up in bed, and watched the little room flashing from black to white from the winks of lightning, his own shadow leaping gigantic across the illuminated wall; heard the rain come up the valley, roaring through the treetops like surf, break in a cataract over the Owls’ House and sweep on. “This’ll stamp us out . . . beat us flat,” he muttered, and lay wondering what he should do, if there was anything to do, and as he wondered merciful sleep came upon him, weary body dragging the spirit down with it into oblivion.

The rain continued with scarcely less violence for a week, held off for two days and came down again. August crept out blear-eyed and draggle-tailed.

The Penhales saved a few potatoes and about one-fifth of the cereals—not enough to provide them with daily bread; they would actually have to buy meal in the coming year. Bohenna, old child of the soil, took the calamity with utter calm; he was inured to these bitter caprices of Nature. Ortho shrugged his shoulders and laughed. It was nobody’s fault, he said; they had done all they could; Penaluna had fared no better. The only course was to whistle and go at it again; that sort of thing could hardly happen twice running. He whistled and went at it again, at once, breaking stone out of a field towards Polmenna, but Eli knew that for all his brave talk the heart was out of him. There was a lassitude in his movements; he was merely making a show of courage.

Gradually he slowed down. He began to visit the Kiddlywink of a night, and lay abed long after sunrise.

At the end of October a fresh bolt fell out of the blue. The Crowan tin works, in which the Penhale money was invested, suddenly closed down. It turned out that they had been running at a loss for the last eight months in the hope of striking a new lode, a debt of three hundred pounds had been incurred, the two other shareholders were without assets, so, under the old Cost Book system current in Cornish mining, Teresa was liable for the whole sum.

She was at first aghast, then furious; swore she’d have the law of the defaulters and hastened straightway into Penzance to set her lawyer at them. Fortunately her lawyer was honest; she had no case and he told her so. When she returned home she was confronted by her sons; they demanded to know how they stood. She turned sulky and refused details, but they managed to discover that there was not five pounds in the house, that there would be no more till the Tregors rent came in, and even then was pledged to money-lenders and shop-keepers—but as to the extent of her liabilities they could not find out. She damned them as a pair of ungrateful whelps and went to bed as black as thunder.

Ortho had a rough idea as to the houses Teresa patronized, so next day the brothers went to town, and after a door to door visitation discovered that she owed in the neighborhood of four hundred pounds! Four plus three made seven—seven hundred pounds! What was it to come from? The Penhales had no notion. By selling off all their stock they might possibly raise two hundred. Two hundred, what was that? A great deal less than half. Their mother would spend the rest of her life in a debtor’s prison! Oh, unutterable shame!

They doddered about Penzance, sunk in misery. Then it occurred to Ortho to consult the lawyer. These quill-driving devils were as cunning as dog foxes; what they couldn’t get round or over they’d wriggle through.

The lawyer put them at their ease at once. Mortgage Bosula or Tregors . . . nothing simpler. Both strong farms should produce the required sum—and more. He explained the system, joined his finger-tips and beamed at the pair over the top.

The brothers shifted on their chairs and pronounced for Tregors simultaneously. The lawyer nodded. Very well then. As soon as he got their mother’s sanction he would set to work. Ortho promised to settle his mother and the two left.

Ortho had no difficulty with Teresa. He successfully used the hollow threat of a debtor’s prison to her, for she had been in a lock-up several times during her roving youth and had no wish to return.

Besides she was sick of debt, of being pestered for money here, there and everywhere.

She gave her consent readily enough, and within a fortnight was called upon to sign.

Carveth Donnithorne, the ever-prospering ship chandler of Falmouth, was the mortgagee; nine hundred and fifty pounds was the sum he paid, and very good value it was.

Teresa settled the Crowan liabilities with the lawyer, and, parading round the town, squared all her other accounts in a single afternoon. She did it in style, swept into the premises of those who had pressed her, planked her money down, damned them for a pack of thieves and leeches, swore that was the end of her custom and stamped majestically out.

She finished up in a high state of elation. She had told a number of her enemies exactly what she thought of them, was free of debt and had a large sum of ready money in hand again—two hundred and fifty pounds in three canvas bags, the whole contained in a saddle wallet.

Opposite the market cross she met an old crony, a retired ship captain by the name of Jeremiah Gish, and told him in detail what she had said to the shop-keepers. The old gentleman listened with all his ears. He admired Teresa immensely. He admired her big buxom style, her strength, her fire, but most of all he revered her for her language. Never in forty years seafaring had he met with such a flow of vituperation as Teresa could loose when roused, such range, such spontaneity, such blistering invention. It drew him like music. He caught her affectionately by the arm, led her to a tavern, treated her to a pot of ale and begged her to repeat what she had said to the shop-keepers.

Teresa, nothing loth, obliged. The old tarpaulin listened rapt, nodded his bald head in approval, an expression on his face of one who hears the chiming of celestial spheres.

A brace of squires jingled in and hallooed to Teresa. Where had she been hiding all this time? The feasten sports had been nothing without her. She ought to have been at Ponsandane the week before. They had a black bull in a field tied to a ship’s anchor. The ring parted and the bull went loose in the crowd with two dogs hanging on him. Such a screeching and rushing you never did see! Old women running like two-year-olds and young women climbing like squirrels and showing leg. . . . Oh, mercy! The squire hid his face in his hands and gulped.

Teresa guffawed, took a pound out of one of the bags, strapped up the wallet again and sat on it. Then she called the pot boy and ordered a round of drinks. To blazes with economy for that one evening!

The company drank to her everlasting good health, to her matchless eyes and cherry lips. One squire kissed her; she boxed his ears—not too hard. He saluted the hand that smote him. His friend passed his arm round her waist—she let it linger.

Jerry Gish leaned forward and tapped her on the knee. “Tell ’em what you said to that draper, my blossom—ecod, yes, and to the Jew . . . tell ’em.”

Once more Teresa obliged. The company applauded. Very apt; that was the way to talk to the sniveling swine! But her throat must be dry as a brick. They banged their pots. “Hey, boy! Another round, damme!”

Other admirers drifted in and greeted Teresa with warmth. Where had she been all this time? They had missed her sorely. There was much rejoicing among the unjust over one sinner returned.

Teresa’s soul expanded as a sunflower to the sun. They were all old friends and she was glad to be with them again. Twice more for the benefit of newcomers did Captain Gish prevail on her to repeat what she had said to her creditors, and by general request she sang three songs. The pot boy ran his legs off that night.

Towards eleven p. m. she shook one snoring admirer from her shoulder, removed the hand of another from her lap, dropped an ironical curtsey to the prostrate gentlemen about her and, grasping the precious wallet, rocked unsteadily into the yard. She had to rouse an ostler to girth her horse up for her, and her first attempts at mounting met with disaster, but she got into the saddle at last, and once there nothing short of gunpowder could dislodge her. Her lids were like lead; drowsiness was crushing her. She kept more or less awake until Bucca’s Pass was behind, but after that she abandoned the struggle and sleep swallowed her whole.

She was aroused at Bosula gate by the barking of her own dogs, unstrapped the wallet, turned the roan into the stable as it stood, and staggered upstairs. Five minutes later she was shouting at the top of her lungs. She had been robbed; one of the hundred pound bags was missing!

The household ran to her call. When had she missed it? Who had she been with? Where had she dropped it? Teresa was not clear about anything. She might have dropped it anywhere between Penzance and home, or again she might have been robbed in the tavern or the streets. The point was that she had lost one hundred pounds and they had got to find it—now, at once! They were to take the road back, ransack the town, inform the magistrates. Out with them! Away!

Having delivered herself, she turned over and was immediately asleep.

Ortho went back to bed. He would go to Penzance if necessary, he said, but it was useless before dawn. Let the others look close at home first.

Wany and Martha took a lantern and prodded about in the yard, clucking like hens. Eli lit a second lantern and went to the stable. Perhaps his mother had dropped the bag dismounting. He found the roan horse standing in its stall, unsaddled it, felt in the remaining wallet, turned over the litter—nothing. As he came out he noticed that the second horse was soaking wet. Somebody had been riding hard, could only have just got in before Teresa. Ortho of course. He wondered what his brother was up to. After some girl probably . . . he had heard rumors.

Martha reported the yard bare, so he followed the hoof tracks up the lane some way—nothing.

Ortho was up at dawn, ready to go into town, but Teresa, whose recuperative powers were little short of marvelous, was up before him and went in herself. She found nothing on the road and got small consolation from the magistrates.

People who mixed their drinks and their company when in possession of large sums of ready money should not complain if they lost it. She ought to be thankful she had not been relieved of the lot. They would make inquiries, of course, but held out no hope. There was an officer with a string of recruits in town, an Irish privateer and two foreign ships in the port, to say nothing of the Guernsey smugglers—the place was seething with covetous and desperate characters. They wagged their wigs and doubted if she would ever see her money again.

She never did.

CHAPTER XIII

Some three weeks after Teresa’s loss Eli found his brother in the yard fitting a fork-head to a new haft.

“Saw William John Prowse up to Church-town,” said he. “He told me to tell you that you must take the two horses over to once because he’s got to go away.”

Ortho frowned. Under his breath he consigned William John Prowse to eternal discomfort. Then his face cleared.

“I’ve been buying a horse or two for Pyramus,” he remarked casually. “He’ll be down along next week.”

Eli gave him a curious glance. Ortho looked up and their eyes met.

“What’s the matter?”

“It was you stole that hundred pounds from mother, I suppose.”

Ortho started and then stared. “Me! My Lord, what next! Me steal that . . . well, I be damned! Think I’d turn toby and rob my own family, do you? Pick my right pocket to fill my left? God’s wrath, you’re a sweet brother!”

“I do think so, anyhow,” said Eli doggedly.

“How? Why?”

“ ’Cos King Herne can do his own buying and because on the night mother was robbed you were out.”

Ortho laughed again. “Smart as a gauger, aren’t you? Well, now I’ll tell you. William John let me have the horses on trust, and as for being out, I’m out most every night. I’d been to Churchtown. I’ve got a sweetheart there, if you must know. So now, young clever!”

Eli shrugged his shoulders and turned away.

“Don’t you believe me?” Ortho called.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“ ’Cos ’tis well known William John Prowse wouldn’t trust his father with a turnip, and that Polly mare hadn’t brought you two miles from Gwithian. She’d come three times that distance and hard. She was as wet as an eel; I felt her.”

Ortho bit his lip. “So ho, steady!” he called softly. “Come round here a minute.”

He led the way round the corner of the barn and Eli followed. Ortho leaned against the wall, all smiles again.

“See here, old son,” said he in a whisper, “you’re right. I did it. But I did it for you, for your sake, mind that.”

“Me!”

Ortho nodded. “Surely. Look you, in less than two years Tregors and this here place fall to me, don’t they?”

“Yes,” said Eli.

Ortho tapped him on the chest. “Well, the minute I get possession I’m going to give you Tregors, lock, stock and barrel. That’s the way father meant it, I take it—only he didn’t have time to put it in writing. But now Tregors is in the bag, and how are we going to get it out if mother will play chuck-guinea like she does?”

“So that’s why you stole the money?”

“That’s why—and, harkee, don’t shout ‘stole’ so loud. It ain’t stealing to take your own, is it?” Ortho whistled. “My Lord, I sweated, Eli! I thought some one would have it before I did. The whole of Penzance knew she’d been about town all day with a bag of money, squaring her debts and lashing it about. To finish up she was in a room at the ‘Star’ with a dozen of bucks, all of ’em three sheets in the wind and roaring. I seen them through a chink in the shutters and I tell you I sweated blood. But she’s cunning. When she sat down she sat on the wallet and stopped there. It would have taken a block and tackle to pull her off. I went into the ‘Star’ passage all muffled up about the face like as if I had jaw-ache. The pot boy came along with a round of drinks for the crowd inside. ‘Here, drop those a minute and fetch me a dash of brandy for God Almighty’s sake,’ says I, mumbling and talking like an up-countryman. ‘I’m torn to pieces with this tooth. Here’s a silver shilling and you can keep the change if you’re quick. Oh, whew! Ouch!’

“I tossed him the shilling—the last I’d got—and he dropped the pots there and then and dived after the brandy. I gave the pots a good dusting with a powder Pyramus uses on rogue horses to keep ’em quiet while he’s selling ’em. Then the boy came back. I drank the brandy and went outside again and kept watch through the shutters. It worked pretty quick; what with the mixed drinks they’d had and the powder, the whole crew was stretched snoring in a quarter hour. But not she. She’s as strong as a yoke of bulls. She yawned a bit, but when the others went down she got up and went after her horse, taking the wallet along. I watched her mount from behind the rain barrel in the yard and a pretty job she made of it. The ostler had to heave her up, and the first time she went clean over, up one side and down t’other. Second time she saved herself by clawing the ostler’s hair and near clawed his scalp off; he screeched like a slit pig.

“I watched that ostler as well, watched in case he might chance his fingers in the wallet, but he didn’t. She was still half awake and would have brained him if he’d tried it on. A couple of men—stranded seamen, I think—came out of an alley by the Abbey and dogged her as far as Lariggan, closing up all the time, but when they saw me behind they gave over and hid in under the river bank. She kept awake through Newlyn, nodding double. I knew she couldn’t last much longer—the wonder was she had lasted so long. On top of Paul Hill I closed up as near as I dared and then went round her, across country as hard as I could flog, by Chyoone and Rosvale.

“A dirty ride, boy; black as pitch and crossed with banks and soft bottoms. Polly fell down and threw me over her head twice . . . thought my neck was broke. We came out on the road again at Trevelloe. I tied Polly to a tree and walked back to meet ’em. They came along at a walk, the old horse bringing his cargo home like he’s done scores of times.

“I called his name softly and stepped out of the bushes. He stopped, quiet as a lamb. Mother never moved; she was dead gone, but glued to the saddle. She’s a wonder. I got the wallet open, put my hand in and had just grabbed hold of a bag when Prince whinnied; he’d winded his mate, Polly, down the road. You know how it is when a horse whinnies; he shakes all through. Hey, but it gave me a start! It was a still night and the old brute sounded like a squad of trumpets shouting ‘Ha!’ like they do in the Bible. ‘Ha, ha, ha, he, he, he!’

“I jumped back my own length and mother lolled over towards me and said soft-like, ‘Pass the can around.’ ”

“That’s part of a song she sings,” said Eli, “a drinking song.”

Ortho nodded. “I know, but it made me jump when she said it; she said it so soft-like. I thought the horse had shaken her awake, and I ran for dear life. Before I’d gone fifty yards I knew I was running for nothing, but I couldn’t go back. It was the first time I’d sto . . . I’d done anything like that and I was scared of Prince whinnying again. I ran down the road with the old horse coming along clop-clop behind me, jumped on Polly and galloped home without looking back. I wasn’t long in before her as it was.” He drew a deep breath. “But I kept the bag and I’ve got it buried where she won’t find it.” He smiled at his own cleverness.

“What are you going to do with the money?” Eli asked.

“Buy horses cheap and sell ’em dear. I learnt a trick or two when I was away with Pyramus and I’m going to use ’em. There’s nothing like it. I’ve seen him buy a nag for a pound and sell it for ten next week. I’m going to make Pyramus take my horses along with his. They’ll be bought as his, so that people won’t wonder where I got the money, and they’ll go up-country and be sold with his—see? I’ve got it all thought out.”

“But will Pyramus do it?”

Ortho clicked his even white teeth. “Aye, I reckon he will . . . if he wants to winter here again. How many two-pound horses can I buy for a hundred pounds?”

“Fifty.”

“And fifty sold at ten pounds each, how much is that?”

“Five hundred pounds.”

“How long will it take me to pay off the mortgage at that rate?”

“Two years . . . at that rate. But there’s the interest too, and . . .”

Ortho smote him on the back. “Oh, cheerily, old long-face, all’s well! The rent’ll pay the interest, as thou thyself sayest, and I’ll fetch in the money somehow. We’ll harvest a mighty crop next season and the horses’ll pay bags full. In two years’ time I’ll put my boot under that fat cheese-weevil Carveth and you shall ride into Tregors like a king. If only I could have got hold of that second hundred! You don’t know where mother hides her money, do you?”

“No.”

“No more do I . . . but I will. I’ll sit over her like a puss at a mouse hole. I’ll have some more of it yet.”

“Leave it alone,” said Eli; “she’s sure to find out and then there’ll be the devil to pay. Besides, whatever you say about it being our money it don’t seem right. Leave it be.”

Ortho threw an arm about his neck and laughed at him.

Pyramus Herne arrived on New Year’s Eve and was not best pleased when Ortho announced his project. He had no wish to be bothered with extra horses that brought no direct profit to himself, but he speedily recognized that he had a new host to deal with, that young Penhale had cut his wisdom teeth and that if he wanted the run of the Upper Keigwin Valley he’d have to pay for it. So he smiled his flashing smile and consented, on the understanding that he accepted no responsibility for any mishap and that Ortho found his own custom. The boy agreed to this and set about buying.

He picked up a horse here and there, but mainly he bought broken-down pack mules from the mines round St. Just. He bought wisely. His purchases were a ragged lot, yet never so ragged but that they could be patched up. When not out looking for mules he spent practically all his time in the gypsy camp, firing, blistering, trimming misshapen hoofs, shotting roarers, filing and bishoping teeth. The farm hardly saw him; Eli and Bohenna put the seed in.

Pyramus left with February, driving the biggest herd he had ever taken north. This, of course, included Ortho’s lot, but the boy had not got fifty beasts for his hundred pounds—he had got thirty-three only—but he was still certain of making his four hundred per cent, he told Eli; mules were in demand, being hardy, long-lived and frugal, and his string were in fine fettle. With a few finishing touches, their blemishes stained out, a touch of the clippers here and there, a pinch of ginger to give them life, some grooming and a sleek over with an oil rag, there would be no holding the public back from them. He would be home for harvest, his pockets dribbling gold.

He went one morning before dawn without telling Teresa he was going, jingled out of the yard, dressed in his best, astride one of Pyramus’ showiest colts. His tirade against gypsy life and his eulogy of the delights of home, delivered to Eli on his return from his first trip with Pyramus, had been perfectly honest. He had had a rough experience and was played out.

But he was tired no longer. He rode to join Pyramus, singing the Helston Flurry Song:

“Where are those Span-i-ards

That made so brave a boast—O?

They shall eat the gray goose feather

And we will eat the roast—O.”

Eli, leaning over the gate, listened to the gay voice dwindling away up the valley, and then turned with a sigh.

Dawn was breaking, the mists were rolling up, the hills loomed gigantic in the half-light, studded with granite escarpments, patchworked with clumps of gorse, thorn and bracken—his battlefield.

Ortho had gone again, gone singing to try his fortune in the great world among foreign multitudes. For him the dour grapple with the wilderness—and he was glad of it. He disliked foreigners, disliked taking chances. Here was something definite, something to lock his teeth in, something to be subdued by sheer dogged tenacity. He broke the news that Ortho had gone gypsying again that evening at supper.

Teresa exploded like a charge of gun-powder. She announced her intention of starting after her son at once, dragging him home and having Pyramus arrested for kidnapping. Then she ramped up and down the kitchen, cursing everybody present for not informing her of Ortho’s intentions. When they protested that they had been as ignorant as herself, she damned them for answering her back.

Eli, who came in for most of her abuse, slipped out and over the hill to Roswarva, had a long farming talk with Penaluna and borrowed a pamphlet on the prevention of wheat diseases.

The leggy girl Mary sat in a corner sewing by the light of a pilchard chill and saying never a word. Just before Eli left she brought him a mug of cider, but beyond drinking the stuff he hardly noticed the act and even forgot to thank her. He found Teresa sitting up for him. She had her notched sticks and the two remaining money bags on the table in front of her. She looked worried.

“Here,” she growled as her younger son entered. “Count this.” Eli counted. There was a round hundred pounds in the one bag and thirty-one pounds, ten shillings and fourpence in the other. He told her.

“There was fifty,” said she. “How much have I spent then?”

“Eighteen pounds, ten shillings and eightpence.” Eli made a demonstration on his fingers.

Teresa’s black eyebrows first rose and then crumpled together ominously.

“Eighteen!” she echoed, and began to tick off items on her own fingers, mumbling sotto voce. She paused at the ninth finger, racked her brains for forgotten expenditures and began the count over again.

Eli sat down before the hearth and pulled his boots off. He could feel his mother’s suspicious eyes on him. Twice she cleared her throat as if to speak, but thought better of it. He went to bed, leaving her still bent over the table twiddling her notched stick. Her eyes followed him up the stairs, perplexed, angry, with a hot gleam in them like a spark in coal.

So Ortho had found her hiding place after all and had robbed her so cleverly that she was not perfectly sure she had been robbed. Eli tumbled into bed wishing his brother were not quite so clever. He fell asleep and had a dream in which he saw Ortho hanging in chains which creaked as they swung in the night winds.

Scared by the loss of her money, Teresa had another attack of extravagant economy during which the Tregors lease fell in. She promptly put up the rent; the old tenant refused to carry on and a new one had to be found. An unknown hind from Budock Water, near Falmouth, accepted the terms.

Teresa congratulated herself on a bright stroke of business and all went on as before.

Eli and Bohenna worked out early and late; the weather could not have been bettered and the crops promised wonders. Eli, surveying the propitious fields, was relieved to think Ortho would be back for harvest, else he did not know how they would get it home.

No word had come from the wanderer. None was expected, but he was sure to be back for August; he had sworn to be. Ortho was back on the fourth of July.

Eli came in from work and, to his surprise, found him sitting in the kitchen relating the story of his adventures. He had a musical voice, a Gallic trick of gesticulation and no compunction whatever about laughing at his own jokes. His recital was most vivacious.

Even Teresa guffawed—in spite of herself. She had intended to haul Master Ortho over an exceedingly hot bed of coals when he returned, but for the moment she could not bring herself to it. He had started talking before she could, and his talk was extremely diverting; she did not want to interrupt it. Moreover, he looked handsomer than ever—tall, graceful, darkly sparkling. She was proud of him, her mother sense stirred. He was very like herself.

From hints dropped here and there she guessed he had met with not a few gallant episodes on his travels and determined to sit up after the others had gone to bed and get details out of him. They would make spicy hearing. Such a boy must be irresistible. The more women he had ruined the better she would be pleased, the greater the tribute to her offspring. She was a predatory animal herself and this was her own cub. As for the wigging, that could wait until they fell out about something else and she was worked up; fly at him in cold blood she could not, not for the moment.

Ortho jumped out of his chair when Eli entered and embraced him with great warmth, commented on his growth, thumped the boy’s deep chest, pinched his biceps and called to Bohenna to behold the coming champion.

“My Lord, but here’s a chicken that’ll claw the breast feathers out o’ thee before long, old fighting cock—thee or any other in Devon or Cornwall—eh, then?”

Bohenna grinned and wagged his grizzled poll.

“Stap me, little brother, I’d best keep a civil tongue before thee, seem me. Well, as I was saying—”

He sat down and continued his narrative.

Eli leaned against the settle, listening and looking at Ortho. He was evidently in the highest spirits, but he had not the appearance of a man with five hundred pounds in his possession. He wore the same suit of clothes in which he had departed and it was in an advanced state of dilapidation; the braid edging hung in strings, one elbow was barbarously patched with a square of sail-cloth and the other was out altogether. His high wool stockings were a mere network and his boots lamentable. However that was no criterion; gypsying was a rough life and it would be foolish to spoil good clothes on it. Ortho himself looked worn and thin; he had a nasty, livid cut running the length of his right cheek bone and the gesticulating palms were raw with open blisters, but his gay laugh rang through the kitchen, melodious, inspiring. He bore the air of success; all was well, doubtless.

Eli fell to making calculations. Ortho had five hundred pounds, Teresa still had a hundred; that made six. Ortho would require a hundred as capital for next year, and then, if he could repeat his success, they would be out of the trap. He felt a rush of affection for his brother, ragged and worn from his gallant battle with the world—and all for his sake. Tregors mattered comparatively little to Ortho, since he was giving it up and was fully provided for with Bosula. Ortho’s generosity overwhelmed him. There was nobody like Ortho.

The gentleman in question finished an anecdote with a clap of laughter, sprang to his feet, pinned his temporarily doting mother in her chair and kissed her, twitched Martha’s bonnet strings loose, punched Bohenna playfully in the chest, caught Eli by the arm and swung him into the yard.

“Come across to the stable, my old dear; I’ve got something to show you.”

“Horse?”

“Lord, no! I’ve got no horse. Walked from Padstow.”

“You!—walked!”

“Yes, heel and toe . . . two days. God, my feet are sore!”

“How did you come to get to Padstow?”

“Collier brig from Cardiff. Had to work my passage at that; my hands are like raw meat from hauling on those damned braces—look! Slept in a cow-shed at Illogan last night and milked the cows for breakfast. I’ll warrant the farmer wondered why they were dry this morning—ha, ha! Never mind, that’s all over. What do you think of this?”

He reached inside the stable door and brought out a new fowling piece.

“Bought this for you in Gloucester,” said he; “thought of you the minute I saw it. It’s pounds lighter than father’s old blunderbuss, and look here . . . this catch holds the priming and keeps it dry; pull the trigger, down comes the hammer, knocks the catch up and bang! See? Clever, ain’t it? Take hold.”

Eli took hold of the gun like a man in a dream. Beautiful weapon though it was, he did not even look at it.

“But why . . . why did you work your passage?” he asked.

“Because they wouldn’t carry me for nothing, wood-head.”

“Were you trying to save money?”

“Eh?—er—ye-es.”

“Have you done as well as you expected, Ortho?”

“N-o, not quite. I’ve had the most damnable luck, old boy.” He took Eli’s arm. “You never heard of such bad luck in your life—and none of it my fault. I sold a few mules at first at good prices, but the money went—a man must eat as he goes, you know—and then there was that gun; it cost a pretty penny. Then trouble began. I lost three beasts at Tewkesbury. They got scared in the night. One broke a shoulder and two went over a quarry. But at Hereford . . . Oh, my God!”

“What happened?”

“Glanders. They went like flies. Pyramus saw what it was right off, and we ran for it, south, selling horses to the first bid; that is, we tried to, but they were too sick and word went faster than we. The crowd got ugly, swore we’d infected the country and they’d hang us; they would have, too, if we’d waited. They very nearly had me, boy, very nearly.”

“Did they mark your face like that?”

“They did, with a lump of slate. And that isn’t all. I’ve got half a dozen more like it scattered about.” He laughed. “But no matter; they didn’t get me and I’m safe home again, thank God!”

“And the horses?”

“They killed every one of ’em to stop the infection.”

“Then you haven’t got any money?”

Ortho shook his head. “Not a penny.”

CHAPTER XIV

Misfortune did not daunt Ortho for long; the promising state of the home fields put fresh heart in him. He plunged at the work chanting a pæan in praise of agriculture, tore through obstacles and swept up his tasks with a speed and thoroughness which left Eli and Bohenna standing amazed.

The Penhale brothers harvested a record crop that season—but so did everybody else. The market was glutted and prices negligible. Except that their own staple needs were provided for, they were no better off than previously. Eli did not greatly care—he had done what he had set out to do, bring a good crop home—but Ortho fell into a state of profound gloom; it was money that he wanted.

It seemed to make little difference in agriculture whether you harvested a bumper yield or none at all. He had no capital to start in the second-hand horse trade again—even did he wish to—and he had no knowledge of any other business. He was on the desperate point of enlisting in the army on the chance of being sent abroad and gathering in a little loot, when opportunity rapped loudly on his door.

He had run down towards Tol-Pedn-Penwith with Jacky’s George one afternoon in late September. It was a fine afternoon, with a smooth sea, and all the coves between Merther Point and Carn Scathe were full of whitebait. They crowded close inshore in dense shoals, hiding from the mackerel. When the mackerel charged them they stampeded in panic, frittering the surface like wind-flaws. The gig’s crew attacked the attackers and did so well that they did not notice the passage of time.

Jacky’s George came to his senses as the sun slipped under, and clapped on all sail for home. He appeared in a hurry. By the time they were abreast of the Camper, the wind, which had been backing all the afternoon, was a dead-muzzler. Jacky’s George did what he was seldom known to do; he blasphemed, ported his helm and ran on a long leg out to sea. By ten o’clock they had leveled Boscawen Point, but the wind fell away altogether and they were becalmed three miles out in the Channel. Jacky’s George blasphemed again and ordered oars out. The gig was heavy and the tide against them. It took Ortho and three young Baragwanaths an hour and a half to open Monks Cove.

Ortho could not see the reason of it, of wrenching one’s arms out, when in an hour or two the tide would carry them in. However, he knew better than to question Jacky’s George’s orders. Even when Monks Cove was reached the little man did not go in, but pointed across for Black Carn. As they paddled under the lee of the cape there came a peculiar whistle from the gloom ahead, to which the bow-oar responded, and Ortho made out a boat riding to a kedge. They pulled alongside and made fast. It was the second Baragwanath gig, with the eldest son, Anson, and the remainder of the brothers aboard.

“Who’s that you got wid ’e?” came the hushed voice of Anson.

“Ortho Penhale,” his father replied. “Hadn’t time to put en ashore—becalmed way out. Has a showed up yet?”

“Naw, a’s late.”

“Ess. Wind’s felled away. All quiet in Cove?”

“Ess, sure. Every road’s watched and Ma’s got a furze stacked up to touch off if she gets warning.”

“All right . . . well, keep your eye peeled for his signal.”

Light suddenly broke on Ortho. There was a run on and he was in it—thrilling! He leaned towards Jacky’s George and whispered, “Who’s coming? Roscoff boat?”

Jacky’s George uttered two words which sent an electric quiver through him:

“King Nick.”

King Nick. Captain Nicholas Buzza, prince of Free Traders, the man who had made more runs than all the rest put together, who owned a fleet of armed smugglers and cheated the Revenue of thousands a year. Who had fooled the riding officers times out of number and beaten off the Militia. Who had put to sea after a big privateer sent to suppress him, fought a running fight from Godrevy to Trevose and sent her diving down the deep sea. The mercurial, dare-devil King Nick who was said to be unable to sleep comfortably unless there was a price on his head; who had raided Penzance by the light of the moon and recaptured a lost cargo; who had been surprised by the gaugers off Cawsand, chopped to bits with cutlasses, left for dead—and then swam ashore; who was reported to walk through Peter Port with all the Guernsey merchants bowing low before him, was called “Duc de Roscoff” in Brittany, and commanded more deference in Schiedam than its own Burgomaster. King Nick, the romantic idol of every West Country boy, coming to Monks Cove that very night, even then moving towards them through the dark. Ortho felt as if he were about to enter the presence of Almighty God.

“Is it a big run?” he whispered to Jacky’s George, trembling with excitement.

“Naw, main run was at Porthleven last night. This is but the leavings. A few trifles for the Kiddlywink to oblige me.”

“Is King Nick a friend of yours, then?” said Ortho, wide-eyed.

“Lord save you, yes! We was privateering together years ago.”

Ortho regarded the fisherman with added veneration.

“If a don’t come soon a’ll miss tide,” Anson hissed from the other boat.

“He’ll come, tide or no tide,” snapped his father. “Hold tongue, will ’e? Dost want whole world to hear?”

Anson subsided.

There was a faint mist clouding the sea, but overhead rode a splendor of stars, an illimitable glitter of silver dust. Nothing was to be heard but the occasional scrape of sea-boots as one cramped boy or other shifted position, the wail of a disturbed sea bird from the looming rookeries above them, the everlasting beat of surf on the Twelve Apostles a mile away to the southwest and the splash and sigh of some tired ninth wave heaving itself over the ledges below Black Carn.

An hour went by. Ashore a cock crowed, and a fisherman’s donkey, tethered high up the cliff-side, roared asthmatically in reply. The boats swung round as the tide slackened and made. The night freshened. Ripples lapped the bows. The land wind was blowing. Ortho lay face-down on the stroke thwart and yawned. Adventure—if adventure there was to be—was a long time coming. He was getting cold. The rhythmic lift and droop of the gig, the lisp and chuckle of the water voices had a hypnotic effect on him. He pillowed his cheek on his forearms and drowsed, dreamt he was swaying in gloomy space, disembodied, unsubstantial, a wraith dipping and soaring over a bottomless void. Clouds rolled by him big as continents. He saw the sun and moon below him no bigger than pins’ heads and world upon glittering world strewn across the dark like grains of sand. He could not have long lain thus, could not have fallen fully asleep, for Anson’s first low call set him wide awake.

“Sail ho!”

Both boats’ crews sat up as one man.

“Where away?”

“Sou’-east.”

Ortho’s eyes bored into the hollow murk seawards, but could distinguish nothing for the moment. Then, as he stared, it seemed to him that the dark smudge that was the corner of the Carn was expanding westwards. It stretched and stretched until, finally, a piece detached itself altogether and he knew it was a big cutter creeping close inshore under full sail. Never a wink of light did the stranger show.

“Hast lantern ready?” hissed Jacky’s George.

“Aye,” from Anson.

“Cast off there, hoist killick and stand by.”

“Aye, aye!”

The blur that was the cutter crept on, silent as a shadow, almost indistinguishable against the further dark, a black moth on black velvet. All eyes watched her. Suddenly a green light glowed amidships, stabbing the inky waters with an emerald dagger, glowed steadily, blinked out, glowed again and vanished. Ortho felt his heart bound into his throat.

“Now,” snapped Jacky’s George. “Show lantern . . . four times, remember.”

Anson stood up and did as he was bid.

The green lantern replied, the cutter rounded up in the wind and drifted towards them, tide-borne.

“Out oars and pull,” said Jacky’s George.

They swept within forty yards of the cutter.

“ ’Vast pulling,” came a voice from her bows.

“Back water, all!” Jacky’s George commanded.

“Is that George Baragwanath?” came the voice again, a high-pitched, kindly voice, marvelously clear.

“Aye, aye!”

“What’s the word then, my dear?”

“Hosannah!”

“What’s that there boat astern of ’e?”

“Mine—my second boat.”

“Well, tell him to keep off a cable’s length till I’ve seen to ’e,” the amiable voice continued. “If he closes ’fore I tell en I’ll blow him outer the water as God is my salvation. No offense meant, but we can’t take chances, you understand. Come ahead, you.”

The gig’s crew gave way and brought their craft alongside the smuggler.

“One at a time,” said the voice somewhere in the darkness above them, mild as a ringdove. “George, my dear soul, step up alone, will ’e, please?”

Jacky’s George went over the rail and out of sight.

Ortho heard the voice greet him affectionately and then attend to the helmsman.

“Back fore-sail, Zebedee; she’ll jam ’tween wind and tide. No call to anchor. We’ll have this little deck load off in ten minutes, please God, amen! There it is all before you, George—low Hollands proof, brandy, sugar, and a snatch of snuff. Tally it, will you, please. We’re late, I’m afraid. I was addressing a few earnest seekers after grace at Rosudgeon this afternoon and the word of the Lord came upon me and I spake overlong, I fear, trembling and sweating in my unworthiness—and then the wind fell very slight. I had to sweep her along till, by God’s infinite mercy, I picked up this shore draught. Whistle up your second boat and we’ll load ’em both sides to once. You haven’t been washed in the blood of the Lamb as yet, have you, George? Ah, that it might be vouchsafed this unworthy vessel to purge you with hyssop! I must have a quiet talk with you. Steady with them tubs, Harry; you’ll drop ’em through the gig.”

For the next quarter of an hour Ortho was busy stowing casks lowered by the cutter’s crew, but all the time the sweet voice went on. It seemed to be trying to persuade Jacky’s George into something he would not do. He could hear the pair tramping the deck above him side by side—one, two, three, four and roundabout, one, two, three, four and roundabout—the voice purling like a melodious brook; Jacky’s George’s gruff negatives, and the brook purling on again unruffled. Nobody else on the cutter uttered a sound; it might have been manned by a company of mutes.

Anson called from the port side that he was loaded. Jacky’s George broke off his conversation and crossed over.

“Pull in then. Soon’s you’ve got ’em stowed show a spark and I’ll follow.”

Anson’s gig disappeared shorewards, wallowing deep. Jacky’s George gripped a stay with his hook and swung over the rail into his own boat.

“I can’t do it, cap’n,” he called. “Good night and thank ’e kindly all the same. Cast off!”

They were away. It burst upon Ortho that he had not seen his hero—that he never would. In a minute the tall cutter would be fading away seawards as mysteriously as she had come and the great King Nick would be never anything to him but a voice. He could have cried out with disappointment.

“Push off,” said Jacky’s George.

Ortho leant on his oar and pushed and, as he did so, somebody sprang from the cutter’s rail, landed on the piled casks behind him as lightly as a cat, steadied himself with a hand on his shoulder and dropped into the stern-sheets beside the fisherman.

“Coming ashore wid ’e, George,” said the voice, “and by God’s grace I’ll persuade ’e yet.”

King Nick was in the boat!

“Mind what I bade ’e, Zebedee,” he hailed the cutter. “Take she round to once and I’ll be off to-morrow night by God’s providence and loving kindness.” The cutter swung slowly on her heel, drifted beam on to the lapping tide, felt her helm and was gone, blotted out, swallowed up, might never have been.

But King Nick was in the boat! Ortho could not see him—he was merely a smudged silhouette—but he was in the stern-sheets not a yard distant. Their calves were actually rubbing! Could such things be?

They paddled in and hung a couple of cables’ length off shore waiting Anson’s signal. The smuggler began his argument again, and this time Ortho heard all; he couldn’t help it.

“Think of the money in it, George. You’ve got a growing family. Think o’ your duty to them.”

“I reckon they won’t starve—why won’t the bay men do ’e?”

“ ’Cos there’s a new collector coming to Penzance and a regiment o’ dragoons, and you know what they rogues are—‘their mouth is full of cursing and bitterness, their feet are swift to shed blood’—nothing like they poor lambs the militia. Won’t be able to move a pack horse between Mousehole and Marazion wid they lawless scum about—God ha’ mercy on ’em and pardon ’em!”

“Who told ’e new collector and sojers is coming?”

“The old collector, Mr. Hawkesby. Took him a pin o’ crafty old Jamaica with my respects only last Tuesday and he showed me the letter signed and sealed. An honorable Christian gentleman is Mr. Hawkesby; many a holy discourse have I had with him. He wouldn’t deceive me. No, George, ‘Strangers are risen up against me and tyrants.’ . . . ‘Lo, the ungodly bend their bow.’ ”

“Umph! Well, why don’t ’e run it straight on north coast, handy to market?”

King Nick’s voice took on a slightly pained tone. “George, George, my dear life, ponder, will ’e? Consider where between St. Ives and Sennen can I run a cargo. And how many days a week in winter can I land at Sennen—eh? Not one. Not one in a month hardly. ‘He gathereth the waters of the sea together, as it was upon a heap.’ Psalm thirty-three. And it’s in winter that the notable hard drinking’s done, as thou well knowest. What else is the poor dear souls to do in the long bitter evenings? Think o’ they poor St. Just tinners down in the damp and dark all day. ’Tis the duty of any man professing Christian love and charity to assist they poor souls to get a drop of warm liquor cheap. What saith the Book? ‘Blessed is he that considereth the poor and needy.’ Think on that, George.” There were tears in the melodious brook.

Jacky’s George grunted. “Dunno as I’ve got any turrible love for tinners. The last pair o’ they mucky toads as comed here pretty nigh clawed my house down. Why not Porgwarra or Penberth?”

“ ’Cos there aren’t a man there I’d trust, George. I wouldn’t put my trust en nobody but you—‘The faithful are minished from among the sons o’ men.’ You run a bit for yourself; why can’t ’e run a bit more and make a fortune? What’s come over ’e, my old and bold? ’Fraid, are ’e, all to once? What for? You’ve got a snug landing and a straight track over the moors, wid never a soul to see ’e pass. Riders can’t rush ’e here in this little crack o’ the rocks; they’d break their stiff necks. ‘Let their way be dark and slippery and let the angel of the Lord persecute them: and we shall wash our footsteps in the blood of the ungodly.’ What makes ’e hold back, old shipmate?”

“Horses,” said Jacky’s George. “Lookee, Cap’n Nick, the money’s good and I do respect it as much as the next man. I aren’t ’fraid of riders nor anything else—save tumors—and if it were only a matter of landing, why, I’d land ’s much stuff as you’ve a mind to. But carry goods to St. Just for ’e, I won’t, for that means horses, and horses means farmers. I’m bred to the sea myself and I can’t abide farmers. I’ve tried it before and there’s always trouble. It do take a week walking round the earth collecting ’em, and then some do show up and some don’t, and where are we then? Why, where the cat was—in the tar-barrel. Paul farmers won’t mix wid Gwithian, and Sancreed can’t stomach neither. And, what is more, they do eat up all your profits—five shillings here, ten shillings there—and that ain’t the end of it. When you think you’ve done paying a farmer, slit me, you’ve only just begun. I won’t be plagued wid ’em, so that’s the finish.”

“Listen to me a minute,” King Nick purled on, quite undeterred. “I’ll tell ’e. . . .”

“T’eddn no manner of use, cap’n,” said Jacky’s George, standing up. “There’s the light showing. Way all! Bend to it!”

The gig shot shorewards for the slip.

The manner in which the Baragwanath family disposed of a run contained the elements of magic. It was a conjuring trick, no less—“now you see it, now you don’t.” At one moment the slip-head was chockablock with bales and barrels; at the next it was bare. They swooped purposefully out of nowhere, fell upon the goods and—hey, presto!—spirited themselves back into nowhere, leaving the slip wiped clean.

Including one son and two daughters-in-law, the tribe mustered fourteen in all, and in the handling of illicit merchandise the ladies were as gifted as the gentlemen. Ortho was laboriously trundling a cask up the slip when he encountered one of the Misses Baragwanath, who gave him a push and took the matter out of his hands. By the time he had recovered his balance she had gone and so had the cask. It was too dark to see which way she went. Not that he was interested; on the contrary, he wanted to think. He had a plan forming in his head, a money-making plan.

He strode up and down the bare strip by the boat capstan getting the details clear. It did not take him long, being simplicity itself. He hitched his belt and marched up the little hamlet hot with inspiration.

Subdued mysterious sounds came from the surrounding darkness, whispering thuds, shovel scrapings, sighs as of men heaving heavy weights. A shed suddenly exploded with the clamour of startled hens. In another a sow protested vocally against the disturbance of her bed. There was a big bank running beside the stream in front of “The Admiral Anson.” As Ortho passed by the great mass of earth and bowlders became articulate. A voice deep within its core said softly, “Shift en a bit further up, Zack; there’s three more to come.”

Ortho saw a thin chink of light between two of the bowlders, grinned and strode into the kitchen of the Kiddlywink. There was a chill burning on the table and a kettle humming on the hearth. Jacky’s George sat before the fire, stirring a mug of grog which he held between his knees. Opposite him sat a tall old man dressed in unrelieved black from neck to toe. A wreath of snowy hair circled his bald pate like a halo. A pair of tortoise-shell spectacles jockeyed the extreme tip of his nose, he regarded Jacky’s George over their rims with an expression benign but pained.

Jacky’s George looked up at Ortho’s entrance.

“Hallo, what is it?”

“Where’s King Nick? I want to see him.”

The tortoise-shell spectacles turned slowly in his direction.

“There is but one King, my son, omnipotent and all-merciful. One King—on High . . . but my name is certainly Nicholas.”

Ortho staggered. This the master-smuggler, the swashbuckling, devil-may-care hero of song and story! This rook-coated, bespectacled, white-headed old Canorum [Methodist] local preacher, King Nick! His senses reeled. It could never be, and yet he knew it was. It was the same voice, the voice that had blandly informed Anson he would blow him out of the water if he pulled another stroke. He felt for the door post and leaned against it goggling.

“Well?”

Ortho licked his lips.

“Well? I eddn no fiery dragon to eat ’e, boy. Say thy say.”

Ortho drew a long breath, hesitated and let it out with a rush.

“I can find the horses you’re wanting. I can find thirty horses a night any time after Twelfth Night, and land your goods in St. Just under four hours.”

King Nick screwed round in his chair, turning the other side of his face to the light, and Ortho saw, with a shock of revulsion, that the ear had been sheared off and his face furrowed across and across with two terrible scars—relics of the Cawsand affair. It was as though the old man was revealing the other side of him, spiritual as well as physical.

“Come nearer, lad. How do ’e knaw I want horses?”

“I heard you. I was pulling stroke in boat.”

“Son o’ yourn, George? He don’t favor ’e, seem me.”

“Naw. Young Squire Penhale from Bosula up-valley.”

“You knaw en?”

“Since he were weaned.”

“Ah, ha! Ah, ha!” The smuggler’s blue eyes rested on Ortho, benevolent yet probing. “And where can you find thirty horses, my son? ’Tis a brear passell.”

“Gypsy Herne rests on my land over winter; he has plenty.”

“An Egyptian! An idolater! A worshiper after false gods! Put not thy trust in such, boy—though I do hear many of the young ones is baptized and coming to the way of Light. Hum! Ha! . . . But how do ’e knaw he’ll do it!”

“ ’Cos he wants the money bad. He lost three parts of his stock in Wales this summer. I was with en.”

“Oh, wid en, were ’e? So you knawn en well. And horse leaders?”

“There’s seven Romanies and three of us up to farm.”

“You knaw the country, s’pose?”

“Day or night like my own yard.”

King Nick turned on Jacky’s George, a faint smile curling the corners of his mouth. “What do ’e say now, George? Can this young man find the horses, think you?”

“Ess, s’pose.”

“Do ’e trust en?”

A nod.

“Then what more ’ave ’e got to say, my dear?”

The fisherman scratched his beard, breathed heavily through his nostrils and said, “All right.”

King Nick rose to his feet, rubbing his hands together.

“ ‘Now let Jacob rejoice and Israel be glad.’ That’s settled. Welcome back to the fold, George, my old soul. ‘This is my brother that was dead but is alive again.’ Soon’s you give me word the Romany is agreeable I’ll slip ’e the cargoes, so shall the poor tinner be comforted at a reasonable price and the Lord be praised with cymbals—‘yea, with trumpets also and shawms.’ Gather in all the young men and maidens, George, that we may ask a blessing on our labors! Fetch ’em in to once, for I can feel the word of the Lord descending upon me!”

Dawn peering through the bottle-panes of Jacky’s George’s Kiddlywink saw the entire Baragwanath family packed shoulder to shoulder singing lustily, while before them, on a chair, stood a benevolent old gentleman in black beating time with one of John Wesley’s hymnals, white hair wreathing his head like a silver glory.

“Chant, my dear beauties!” he cried. “Oh, be cheerful! Be jubilant! Lift up your voices unto the Lord! ‘Awake up, my glory, Awake lute and harp!’ Now all together!”

“When passing through the watery deep

I ask in faith His promised aid;

The waves an awful distance keep

And shrink from my devoted head.”

CHAPTER XV

Pyramus came down earlier than usual that year. The tenth of December saw his smoke-grimed wigwams erected in the little wood, the cloaks and scarves of the Romany women making bright blots of color among the somber trees, bronze babies rolling among bronze leaves.

Ortho was right; the gypsy chief had been hard hit and was open to any scheme for recouping his fortunes. After considerable haggling he consented to a fee of six shillings per horse per run—leaders thrown in—which was a shilling more than Ortho had intended to give him and two shillings more than he would have taken if pressed. The cavalry had not arrived as yet, and Ortho did not think it politic to inform Pyramus they were expected; there were the makings in him of a good business man.

The first run was dated for the night of January the third, but the heavy ground swell was rolling in and the lugger lay off until the evening of the fifth. King Nick arrived on the morning of the third, stepped quietly into the kitchen of the “Admiral Anson” as the Baragwanath family were sitting down to breakfast, having walked by night from Germoe. The meal finished, he gave melodious thanks to Heaven, sent for Ortho, asked what arrangements had been made for the landing, condemned them root and branch and substituted an entirely fresh lot. That done, he rode off to St. Just to survey the proposed pack route, taking Ortho with him.

He was back again by eight o’clock at night and immediately held a prayer-meeting in the Kiddlywink, preaching on “Lo, he thirsteth even as a hart thirsteth after the water brooks”—a vindication of the gin traffic—and passing on to describe the pains of hell with such graphic detail that one Cove woman fainted and another had hysterics.

The run came off without a hitch two nights later. Ortho had his horses loaded up and away by nine o’clock. At one-thirty a crowd of enthusiastic diggers (all armed with clubs) were stripping his load and secreting it in an old mine working on the outskirts of St. Just. He was home in bed before dawn. Fifty-six casks of mixed gin, claret and brandy they carried that night, not to mention five hundredweight of tea.

On January 17th he carried forty-three casks, a bale of silk and a hundredweight of tea to Pendeen, dumping some odds and ends outside Gwithian as he passed by. And so it went on.

The consumption of cheap spirits among the miners was enormous. John Wesley, to whose credit can be placed almost the whole moral regeneration of the Cornish tinner, describes them as “those who feared not God nor regarded man,” accuses them of wrecking ships and murdering the survivors and of taking their pleasure in “hurling, at which limbs are often broken, fighting, drinking, and all other manner of wickedness.”

In winter their pastimes were restricted to fighting and drinking—principally drinking—in furtherance of which Ortho did a roaring trade. Between the beginning of January and the end of March he ran an average of five landings a month without any one so much as wagging a finger at him. The dragoons arrived at Christmas, but instead of a regiment two troops only appeared and they speedily declared a policy of “live and let live.” Their commanding officer, Captain Hambro, had not returned to his native land after years of hard campaigning to spend his nights galloping down blind byways at the behest of a civilian riding officer.

He had some regard for his horses’ legs and more for his own comfort. He preferred playing whist with the local gentry, who had fair daughters and who were the soul of hospitality. He temporized good-humoredly with the collector, danced quadrilles with the fair daughters at the “Ship and Castle,” and toasted their bright eyes in excellent port and claret, the knowledge that it had not paid a penny of duty in nowise detracting from its flavor. Occasionally—when he had no other appointment and the weather was passable—he mounted his stalwarts and made a spectacular drive—this as a sop to the collector. But he never came westwards; the going was too rough, and, besides, St. Just was but small potatoes compared with big mining districts to the east.

For every cask landed at Monks Cove, King Nick and his merry men landed twenty either at Prussia Cove, Porthleven, Hayle or Portreath—sometimes at all four places simultaneously. Whenever Capt. Hambro’s troopers climbed into their saddles and took the road to Long Rock, a simple but effective system of signals flashed ahead of them so that they found very little.

There was one nasty affair on Marazion Beach. Owing to a misunderstanding the cavalry came upon a swarm of tinners in process of making a landing. The tinners (who had broached a cask and were full of spirit in more senses than one) foolishly opened hostilities. The result was two troopers wounded, six miners killed—bearing out King Nick’s warning that the soldiers might easily be fooled, but they were by no means so easily frightened. The trade absorbed this lesson and there were no more regrettable incidents that season.

Ortho was satisfied with his winter’s work beyond all expectations. It was a common tenet among Free Traders of those days that one cargo saved would pay for two lost, and Ortho, so far from losing a single cargo, had only lost five tubs in all—three stove in transshipping and two when the mule carrying them fell into a pit. Everybody was satisfied. The district was flooded with cheap liquor. All the Covers in turn assisted in the boat-work and so picked up money in the off-season, when they needed it most. Pyramus, with his animals in constant employment, did so well that he delayed his northern trip for a month.

The only person (with the exception of His Majesty’s Collector of Customs) who was not entirely pleased was Eli. In defrauding the Revenue he had no scruples whatever, but it interfered with his farming. This smuggling was all very fine and remunerative, but it was a mere side line. Bosula was his lifework, his being. If he and Bohenna had to be up all night horse leading they could not be awake all day. The bracken was creeping in again. However, they were making money, heaps of it; there was no denying that.

With the instinctive dislike of a seaman for a landsman, and vice versa, neither Jacky’s George nor Pyramus would trust each other. The amphibious Ortho was the necessary link between them and, as such, paid out more or less what he thought fit—as has been the way with middlemen since the birthday of the world. He paid Jacky’s George one and six per cask for landing and Pyramus three shillings for packing (they went two to a horse), making a profit of ten shillings clear himself. Eli, the only person in the valley who could read, write or handle figures, kept the accounts and knew that at the end of March they were three hundred and forty pounds to the good. He asked Ortho where the money was.

“Hid up the valley,” said his brother. “Put away where the devil himself wouldn’t find it.”

“What are you hiding it like that for?” Eli asked.

“Mother,” said Ortho. “That last rip-roar she had must have nigh baled her bank dry and now she’s looking for more. I think she’ve got a notion who bubbled her last year and she’s aiming to get a bit of her own back. She knows I’ve got money and she’s spying on me all the time. I’d tell you where it is only I’m afeard you’d let it out without meaning to. I’m too sly for her—but you, you’re like a pane of glass.”

Wholesale smuggling finished with the advent of spring. The shortening nights did not provide sufficient cover for big enterprises; dragoons and preventive men had not the same objections to being out of their beds in summer as in winter, and, moreover, the demand for liquor had fallen to a minimum.

This was an immense relief to Eli, who now gave himself heart and soul to the farm, haling Bohenna with him; but two disastrous seasons had impaired Ortho’s vaunted enthusiasm for “the good old soil,” and he was absent most of the week, working up connections for next winter’s cargo-running—so he told Eli—but it was noticeable that his business appointments usually coincided with any sporting events held in the Hundred, and at hurling matches, bull-baitings, cock-fights and pony-races he became almost as familiar a figure as his mother had been, backing his fancy freely and with not infallible judgment. However, he paid his debts scrupulously and with good grace, and, though he drank but little himself, was most generous in providing, gratis, refreshment for others. He achieved strong local popularity, a priceless asset to a man who lives by flouting the law.

The money was not all misspent.

He developed in other ways, began to be particular about his person in imitation of the better-class squires, visited a Penzance tailor of fashion and was henceforth to be seen on public occasions in a wide-skirted suit of black broadcloth frogged with silver lace, high stockings to match and silver-buckled shoes, very handsome altogether.

He had his mother’s blue-black hair, curling, bull-like, all over his head, sparkling eyes and strong white teeth. When he was fifteen she had put small gold rings in his ears—to improve his sight, so she said. At twenty he was six feet tall, slim and springy, moving among the boorish crowds like a rapier among bludgeons. His laugh was ready and he had a princely way with his money. Women turned their eyes his way, sighing—and he was not insensible.

Rumors of his brother’s amorous affairs drifted home to Eli from time to time. He had cast off the parish clerk’s daughter, Tamsin Eva, and was after a farmer’s young widow in St. Levan. Now he had quarreled with the widow and was to be seen in Trewellard courting a mine captain’s daughter. Again he had put the miner’s daughter by, and St. Ives gossips were coupling his name with that of the wife of a local preacher and making a great hoity-toity about it—and so on. It was impossible to keep track of Ortho’s activities in the game of hearts.

He came home one morning limping from a slight gunshot wound in the thigh, and on another occasion brought his horse in nearly galloped to death, but he made no mention of how either of these things came about. Though his work on the farm was negligible, he spent a busy summer one way and another.

Pyramus was down by the eighth of November, and on the night of the fourteenth the ball was opened with a heavy run of goods, all of which were safely delivered. From then on till Christmas cargo after cargo was slipped through without mishap, but on St. Stephen’s day the weather broke up, the wind bustled round to the southeast and blew great guns, sending the big seas piling into Monks Cove in foaming hills. The Cove men drew their boats well up, took down snares and antique blunderbusses and staggered inland rabbiting.

Eli turned back to his farm-work with delight, but prosaic hard labor had no further attraction for Ortho. He put in a couple of days sawing up windfalls, a couple more ferreting with Bohenna, then he went up to Church-town and saw Tamsin Eva again.

It was at a dance in the long room of the “Lamb and Flag” tavern and she was looking her best, dressed in blue flounced out at the hips, with a close-fitting bodice. She was what is known in West Cornwall as a “red Dane,” masses of bright auburn hair she had and a soft white skin. Ortho, whose last three little affairs had been pronounced brunettes, turned to her with a refreshened eye, wondering what had made him leave her. She was dancing a square dance with her faithful swain, Tom Trevaskis, when Ortho entered, circling and curtseying happily to the music of four fiddles led by Jiggy Dan.

The mine captain’s daughter glowed as rosy as a pippin, too rosy; the preacher’s spouse was an olive lady, almost swarthy. Tamsin Eva’s slender neck might have been carved from milk-ivory and she was tinted like a camellia. Ortho’s dark eyes glittered. But it was her hair that fascinated him most. The room was lit by dips lashed to decorated barrel hoops suspended from the rafters, and as Tamsin in her billowy blue dress swept and sidled under these the candlelight played tricks with her burnished copper head, flicked red and amber lights over and into it, crowned her with living gold. The black Penhale felt his heart leap; she was most lovely! Why on earth had he ever dropped her? Why?

Deep down he knew; it was because, for all her physical attraction, she wearied him utterly, seemed numbed in his presence, had not a word to say. That Trewellard wench at least had a tongue in her head and the widow had spirit; he could still almost feel his cheek tingle where she had hit him. But that queenly crown of hair! He had an over-mastering desire to pull it down and bury his face in the shining golden torrent. He would too, ecod! Dull she might have been, but that was two years ago. She’d grown since then, and so had he, and learnt a thing or two; a score of women had been at pains to teach him. He hadn’t gone far with Tamsin previously—she’d been too damned soft—but he would now. He’d stir her up. Apparently shallow women were often deep as the sea, deep enough to drown one. He’d take the risk of drowning; he fed on risks. That the girl was formally betrothed to Trevaskis did not deter him in the slightest. There was no point in the game in which he could not out-maneuver the slovenly yokel.

He waited till the heated boy went to get himself a drink, and then shouldered through the press and claimed Tamsin for the next dance, claiming her smilingly, inevitably, as though she was his private property and there had not been a moment’s break between them. The girl’s eyes went blank with dismay, she tried to decline. He didn’t seem to hear, but took her hand. She hung back weakly. There was no weakness in Ortho’s grip; he led her out in spite of herself. She couldn’t resist him, she never had been able to resist him. Fortunately for her he had never demanded much. Poor Tamsin! Two years had not matured her mentally. She had no mind to mature; she was merely a pretty chattel, the property of the strongest claimant. Ortho was stronger than Trevaskis, so he got her.

When the boy returned she was dancing with the tall Free Trader; the golden head drooped, the life had gone out of her movements, but she was dancing with him. Trevaskis tried to get to her at every pause, but always Ortho’s back interposed. The farmer went outside and strode up and down the yard, glaring from time to time through the window; always Tamsin was dancing with Penhale. Trevaskis ground his teeth. Two years ago he had been jockeyed in the same way. Was this swart gypsy’s whelp, whose amorous philanderings were common talk, to have first call on his bright girl whenever he deigned to want her? Trevaskis swore he should not, but how to frustrate him he did not know. Plainly Tamsin was bewitched, was incapable of resistance; she had admitted as much, weeping. Thrash Ortho to a standstill he could not; he was not a brave man and he dared not risk a maul with the smuggler. Had Penhale been a “foreigner” he could have roused local feeling against him, but Penhale was no stranger; he was the squire of Bosula and, moreover, most popular, far more popular than he was himself. He had a wild idea of trying a shot over a bank in the dark—and abandoned it, shuddering. Supposing he missed! What would Penhale do to him? What wouldn’t he do to him? Trevaskis hadn’t courage enough even for that. He strode up and down, oblivious of the rain gusts, trying to discover a chink in the interloper’s armor.

As for Ortho, he went on dancing with Tamsin, and when it was over took her home; he buried his face in that golden torrent. He was up at Church-town the very next night and the next night and every night till the gale blew out.

Trevaskis, abandoning a hopeless struggle, followed in the footsteps of many unlucky lovers and drowned his woes in drink. It was at the Kiddlywink in Monks Cove that he did his drowning and not at the “Lamb and Flag,” but as his farm lay about halfway between the two there was nothing remarkable in that.

What did cause amusement among the Covers, however, was the extraordinary small amount of liquor it required to lay him under the bench and the volume of his snores when he was there.

CHAPTER XVI

1

The southeasterly gale blown out, Ortho’s business went forward with a rush. In the second week in January they landed a cargo a night to make up for lost time, and met with a minor accident—Jacky’s George breaking a leg in saving a gig from being stove. This handicapped them somewhat. Anson was a capable boatsman, but haphazard in organization, and Ortho found he had to oversee the landings as well as lead the pack-train. Despite his efforts there were hitches and bungles here and there; the cogs of the machinery did not mate as smoothly as they had under the cock-sparrow. Nevertheless they got the cargoes through somehow and there was not much to fear in the way of outside interruptions; the dragoons seemed to have settled to almost domestic felicity in Penzance and the revenue cutter had holed her garboard strake taking a short cut round the Manacles and was docked at Falmouth. Ortho got so confident that he actually brought his horses home in plain daylight.

Then on the fourteenth of February, when all seemed so secure, the roof fell in.

Mr. William Carmichael was the person who pulled the props away. Mr. William Carmichael, despite his name, was an Irishman, seventeen years of age, and, as a newly-joined cornet of dragoons, drawing eight shillings a day, occupied a position slightly less elevated than an earth-worm. However, he was very far from this opinion. Mr. Carmichael, being young and innocent, yearned to let blood, and he wasn’t in the least particular whose. Captain Hambro and his two somewhat elderly lieutenants, on the other hand, were experienced warriors, and consequently the most pacific of creatures. Nothing but a direct order from a superior would induce them to draw the sword except to poke the fire. Mr. Carmichael’s martial spirit was in a constant state of effervescence; he hungered and thirsted for gore—but without avail. Hambro positively refused to let him run out and chop anybody. The captain was a kindly man; his cornet’s agitation distressed him and he persuaded one of the dimpled Miss Jagos to initiate his subordinate in the gentler game of love (the boy would come into some sort of Kerry baronetcy when his sire finally bowed down to delirium tremens, and it was worth her while). But Mr. Carmichael was built of sterner stuff. He was proof against her woman’s wiles. Line of attack! At ’em! The lieutenants, Messrs. Pilkington and Jope, were also gentle souls, Pilkington was a devotee of chess, Jope of sea-fishing. Both sought to engage the fire-eater in their particular pastimes. It was useless; he disdained such trivialities. Death! Glory!

But Hambro, whose battle record was unimpeachable, knew that in civil police work, such as he was supposed to be doing, there is precious little transient glory to be picked up and much adhesive mud. He knew that with the whole population against him he stood small chance of laying the smugglers by the heels, and if he did the county families (who were as deeply implicated as any) would never rest until they had got him broken. He sat tight.

This did not suit the martial Carmichael at all. He fumed and fretted, did sword exercise in the privacy of his bedroom till his arm ached, and then gushed his heart out in letters to his mother, which had the sole effect of eliciting bottles of soothing syrup by return, the poor lady thinking his blood must be out of order.

But his time was to come.

On the eighth of February Pilkington was called away to Axminster to the bedside of his mother (at least that is what he called her) and Carmichael was given his troop to annoy. On the morning of the fourteenth Hambro left on three days’ leave to shoot partridges at Tehidy, Jope and Carmichael only remaining. Jope blundered in at five o’clock on the same afternoon sneezing fit to split himself. He had been off Low Lee after pollack and all he had succeeded in catching was a cold. He growled about the weather, which his boatman said was working up for a blow, drank a pint of hot rum bumbo and sneezed himself up to bed, giving strict orders that he was not to be roused on any account.

Carmichael was left all alone.

To him, at seven of the clock, came Mr. Richard Curral, riding officer, a conscientious but blighted man.

He asked for Hambro, Pilkington and Jope in turn, and groaned resignedly when he heard they were unavailable.

“Anything I can do for you?” Carmichael inquired.

Curral considered, tapping his rabbit teeth with his whip handle. Mr. Carmichael was terribly young, the merest babe.

“N-o. I don’t think so; thank you, sir. No, never mind. Pity they’re away, though . . . seems a chance,” he murmured, talking to himself. “Lot of stuff been run that way of late . . . ought to be stopped by rights . . . pity!” he sighed.

“What’s a pity? What are you talking about?” said Mr. Carmichael, his ears pricking. “Take that whip out of your mouth!”

Mr. Curral withdrew the whip; he was used to being hectored by military officers.

“Er—oh! . . . er, the Monks Cove men are going to make a run to-night.”

Mr. Carmichael sat upright. “Are they, b’God! How d’you know?”

“An informer has just come in. Gives no name, of course, but says he’s from Gwithian parish; looks like a farmer. Wants no reward.”

“Then what’s his motive?”

Mr. Curral shrugged his shoulders. “Some petty jealousy, I presume; it usually is among these people. I’ve known a man give his brother away because he got bested over some crab-pots. This fellow says he overheard them making their plans in the inn there—lay under the table pretending to be drunk. Says that tall Penhale is the ringleader; I’ve suspected as much for some time. Of course it may only be a false scent after all, but the informer seems genuine. What are you doing, sir?”

Mr. Carmichael had danced across the room, opened the door and was howling for his servant. His chance had come. Gore!

“Doing! . . . Why, going to turn a troop out and skewer the lot of ’em of course. What d’you think?” shouted that gentleman, returning. “I’d turn out the squadron, only half the nags are streaming with strangles. Toss me that map there. Now where is this Monks Cove?”

Mr. Curral’s eyes opened wide. He was not used to this keenness on the part of the military. One horse coughing slightly would have been sufficient excuse for Hambro to refuse to move—leave alone half a squadron sick with strangles. It promised to be a dirty night too. He had expected to meet with a diplomatic but nevertheless definite refusal. It was merely his three-cornered conscience that had driven him round to the billet at all—yet here was an officer so impatient to be off that he was attempting the impossible feat of pulling on his boots and buckling on his sword at the same time. Curral’s eyes opened wider and wider.

“Ahem!—er—do you mean . . . er . . . are you in earnest, sir?”

“Earnest!” The cornet snorted, his face radiant. “Damn my blood but I am in very proper earnest, Mr. What’syourname—as these dastardly scoundrels shall discover ere we’re many hours older. Earnest, b’gob!”

“But Mr. Jope, sir . . . hadn’t you better consult Mr. Jope? . . . He . . .”

“Mr. Jope be dam . . . Mr. Jope has given orders that he’s not to be disturbed on any account, on any account, sir. I am in command here at the moment, and if you will have the civility to show me where this plaguy Monks Cove hides itself instead of standing there sucking your whip you will greatly assist me in forming my plan of action.”

Curral bent over the map and pointed with his finger.

“Here you are, sir, the merest gully.”

“Then I shall charge down the gully,” said Carmichael with that quick grasp of a situation displayed by all great commanders. The riding officer coughed: “Then you’ll have to charge at a walk, sir, and in single file; there’s only a rough pack-track. Further, the track is picketed at the head; as soon as you pass a gun will be fired and when you reach the cove there won’t be a cat stirring.”

Carmichael, like all great commanders, had his alternative. “Then I shall charge ’em from the flank. Can I get up speed down this slope?”

Curral nodded. “Yes, sir. You can ride from top to bottom in a moment of time.”

“How d’you mean?”

“It is practically a precipice, sir.”

“Humph!—and this flank?”

“The same, sir.”

Carmichael scratched his ear and for the first time took thought. “Lookee,” he said presently. “If I stop the pack track here and there are precipices on either side how can they get their horses out? I’ve got ’em bottled.”

Curral shook his head. “I said practically precipices, sir. Precipices to go down, but not to come up. As you yourself have probably observed, sir, a horse can scramble up anything, but he is a fool going down. A horse falling uphill doesn’t fall far, but a horse falling down a slope like that rolls to the bottom. A horse . . .”

“Man,” snapped the cornet, “don’t talk to me about horses. My father keeps twenty. I know.”

Curral coughed. “I beg your pardon, sir. The informer tells me there are a dozen places on either side by which these fellows can get their beasts to the level. Remember it is their own valley; they’re at home there, while we are strangers and in the dark.”

“I wish you could get out of this habit of propounding the obvious,” said Carmichael. He dabbed his finger down on the map. “Look—supposing we wait for them out here across their line of march?”

“They’d scatter all over the moor, sir. We’d be lucky if we caught a couple on a thick night like this.”

Carmichael plumped down on a chair and savagely rubbed his curls.

“Well, Mr. Riding Officer, I presume that in the face of these insurmountable difficulties you propose to sit down and do nothing—as usual. Let these damned ruffians run their gin, flout the law, do exactly as they like. Now let me tell you I’m of a different kidney, I . . .”

“You will pardon me, sir,” said Curral quietly, “but I haven’t as yet been given the opportunity of proposing anything.”

“What’s your plan then?”

“How many men can you mount, sir?”

“Forty with luck. I’ll have to beat the taverns for ’em.”

“Very good, sir. Send a small detachment to stop the head of the track; not to be there before ten o’clock. The rest, under yourself, with me for guide, will ride to the top of the cliff which overhangs the village from the east and there leave the horses. The informer tells me there is a sheep-track leading down from there and they picket the top of it—an old man with a gun to fire if he hears anything. That picket will have to be silenced.”

“Who’s going to do that?” the cornet inquired.

“I’ve got a man of my own I think can do it. He was a great poacher before he got religion.”

“And then?”

“Then we’ll creep, single file, down the sheep-track, muster behind the pilchard sheds and rush the landing—the goods should be ashore by then. I trust that meets with your approval, sir?”

The cornet nodded, sobered. “It does—you seem to be something of a tactician, Mr. . . . er . . . Curral.”

“I served foreign with Lord Mark Kerr’s Regiment of Horse Guards, sir,” said the riding officer, picking up his whip.

Carmichael’s jaw dropped. “Horse Guards! . . . Abroad! . . . One of us! Dash my guts, man, why didn’t you say so before?”

“You didn’t ask me, sir,” said Curral and sucked his whip.

2

Uncle Billy Clemo sat behind a rock at the top of the sheep-path and wished to Heaven the signal would go up. A lantern run three times to the truck of the flag-pole was the signal that the horses were away and the pickets could come in. Then he would be rewarded with two shillings and a drop of hot toddy at the Kiddlywink—and so to bed.

He concentrated his thoughts on the hot toddy, imagined it tickling bewitchingly against his palate, wafting delicious fumes up his nostrils, gripping him by the throat, trickling, drop by drop, through his chilled system, warm and comforting, trickling down to his very toes. He would be happy then. He had been on duty since seven-thirty; it was now after ten and perishing cold. The wind had gone round suddenly to the northeast and was gaining violence every minute. Before dawn it would be blowing a full gale. Uncle Billy was profoundly thankful he was not a horse leader. While Penhale and Company were buffeting their way over the moors he would be in bed, praise God, full of toddy. In the meanwhile it was bitter cold. He shifted his position somewhat so as to get more under the lee of the rock and peered downwards to see how they were getting on. He could not see much. The valley was a pit of darkness. A few points of light marked the position of the hamlet, window lights only. The fisher-folk knew their own place as rats know their holes and made no unnecessary show of lanterns. A stranger would have imagined the hamlet slept; in reality it was humming like a hive.

A dim half-moon of foam marked the in-curve of the Cove; seaward was blank darkness again. Uncle Billy, knowing what to look for and where to look, made out a slightly darker blur against the outer murk—the lugger riding to moorings, main and mizzen set. She was plunging a goodish bit, even down there under shelter of the cliffs. Uncle Billy reckoned the boat’s crews must be earning their money pulling in against wind and ebb, and once more gave thanks he was not as other men.

The wind came whimpering over the high land, bending the gorse plumes before it, rattling the dead brambles, rustling the grass. Something stirred among the brambles, something living. He picked up his old Brown Bess. A whiff of scent crossed his nostrils, pungent, clinging. He put the Bess down again. Fox. He was bitter cold, especially as to the feet. He was a widower and his daughter-in-law kept him short in the matter of socks. He stood up—which was against orders—and stamped the turf till he got some warmth back in his toes, sat down again and thought about the hot toddy. The lugger was still there, lunging at her moorings. They were a plaguy time landing a few kegs! Jacky’s George would have finished long before—these boys! Whew! it was cold up there!

The gale’s voice was rising to a steady scream; it broke against Uncle Billy’s rock as though it had been a wave. Shreds of dead bracken and grass whirled overhead. The outer darkness, which was the sea, showed momentary winks of gray—breakers. When the wind lulled for a second, a deep melancholy bay, like that of some huge beast growling for meat, came rolling in from the southwest—the surf on the Twelve Apostles.

There were stirrings and snappings in the brambles. That plaguy fox again, thought Uncle Billy—or else rabbits. His fingers were numb now. He put the Bess down beside him, blew on his hands, thrust them well down in his pockets and snuggled back against the rock. The lugger would slip moorings soon whether she had unloaded or not, and then toddy, scalding his throat, trickling down to his . . .

Something heavy dropped on him from the top of the rock, knocking him sideways, away from the gun, pinning him to the ground; hands, big and strong as brass, took him round the throat, drove cruel thumbs into his jugular, strangling him.

“Got him, Joe,” said a voice. “Bring rope and gag quick!” He got no hot toddy that night.

3

“That the lot?” the lugger captain bellowed.

“Aye,” answered his mate.

“Cast off that shore boat then and let go forward soon’s she’m clear.”

“Aye, aye. Pull clear, you; look lively!”

The Gamecock’s crew jerked their oars into the pins and dragged the gig out of harm’s way.

The moorings buoy splashed overboard, the lugger, her mainsail backed, came round before the wind and was gone.

“Give way,” said Anson; “the wind’s getting up a fright.” He turned to Ortho. “You’ll have a trip to-night . . . rather you nor me.”

Ortho spat clear of the gunwale. “Have to go, I reckon; the stuff’s wanted, blast it! Has that boat ahead unloaded yet?”

“She haven’t signaled,” the bowman answered.

“No matter, pull in,” said Anson. “We haven’t no more than the leavings here; we can land this li’l’ lot ourselves. Give way, all.”

Four blades bit the water with a will, but the rowers had to bend their backs to wrench the gig in against the wind and tide. It was a quarter of an hour before they grounded her nose on the base of the slip.

“Drag her up a bit, boys,” said Anson. “Hell!—what’s that?”

From among the dark huddle of houses came a woman’s scream, two—three—and then pandemonium, shouts, oaths, crashes, horses stamping, the noise of people rushing and struggling, and, above all, a boy’s voice hysterically shouting, “Fire! Curse you! Fire!”

“Christ!” said Ortho. “The Riders! Hey, push her off! For God’s sake, push!”

The two bowmen, standing in the water, put their backs to the boat and hove; Ortho and Anson in the stern used their oars pole-wise.

“All together, he-ave!”

Slowly the gig began to make stern-way.

“Heave!”

The gig made another foot. Feet clattered on the slip-head and a voice cried, “Here’s a boat escaping! Halt or I fire!”

“Hea-ve!” Ortho yelled. The gig made another foot and was afloat. There was a spurt of fire from the slip and a bullet went droning overhead. The bowman turned and dodged for safety among the rocks.

“Back water, back!” Anson exhorted.

There were more shouts from the shore, the boy’s voice crowing shrill as a cockerel, a quick succession of flashes and more bullets went wailing by. The pair in the boat dragged at their oars, teeth locked, terrified.

Wind and tide swept them up, darkness engulfed them. In a couple of minutes the shots ceased and they knew they were invisible. They lay on their oars, panting.

“What now?” said Ortho. “Go after the lugger? We can’t go back.”

“Lugger’s miles away, going like a stag,” said Anson. “Best chance it across the bay to Porthleven.”

“Porthleven?”