On a grey day a girl was walking along a crescent of sand that curved at
the cliff's base. As she went the water welled up in the slanting
hollows left by her feet, and the fat, evil-looking leaves of the cliff
plants glistened with spray moisture; even the swollen fingers of the
marsh samphire, that all seemed to point at the girl as she passed, each
bore a tremulous drop at the tip. At the end of the little beach the
girl paused, and then turned to look out to sea, balancing herself on a
slab of wet shiny granite, where the cone-shaped shellfish clustered and
from which the long green weed floated out and in on the heave of the
tide. The girl held back the red hair that whipped about her forehead
and stared from under an arched palm.
"'Tes naught but a plaguey dolphin, d'believe," she muttered, yet still
stayed for one more glimpse of the dark thing that was bobbing up
through the curdling foam-pattern. A stinging scatter of spray blew into
her eyes, blinding her, and when she looked again the dark thing had
come nearer, and she saw it to be the body of a man caught in the
ratlines of some shrouds that the sea's action had lapped around the
mast they had once guarded. Were it not that his chin was hitched over
the ratlines, so that he was borne along with his face--a pale blot
among the paler blots of the foam--upturned, he would doubtless have
sunk, for he was not lashed to the mast in any way. A huge foam patch
had formed in the web made by the tangled shrouds, so that his head and
shoulders showed clearly against the creaming halo, on which his long
hair, dark with wet and released from its queue, lay streaked away from
his tilted face. The girl called to him twice in her strong, rough
voice; then, since even if he still lived he was past any consciousness
of doing so, she kept her energies for the saving of him. Wading in as
deep as she dared--not more than up to her hips, for even then the heave
and suction of the water threatened to knock her off her feet--she clung
on to a ridge of rock with one hand, and, leaning forward, made snatches
at the spar whenever it surged towards her. To her dismay she saw that
with every heave his legs must be catching against some rocks, for his
head began to sink away from the supporting ratlines, and when at last
she caught one end of the spar she only succeeded in drawing it away
from him. His head disappeared; for a moment the dark hole in the midst
of the foam-circle held, then broke, and was overrun as the whiteness
closed upon it. The next minute a surge of undercurrent brought him
knocking against her legs; she just managed to hold on with one hand
while with the other she plunged down at him. Her fingers met the cold
sleekness of his face, then caught in his tangled hair, and, drawing
herself up backwards against the rock-ledges, she pulled him with her,
step by step. A few moments more and she had staggered up the narrow
strip of beach with her burden dragging from her arms. Tumbling him
along the drier sand at the cliff's foot, she knelt beside him, and
with hands trembling from the strain that had been put upon the muscles,
she pulled apart the clinging shirt that was so sodden it seemed to peel
from off him. She felt at his heart, then laid her ear to the pale
glistening chest where the dark hair was matted to a point between the
breasts; she beat that pale chest with her hand, and at last saw the
faint red respond to the blows of her fingers. On that much of hope she
desisted, seemed to hesitate, then half-hauling him up by a hand beneath
each shoulder, she began dragging him towards where the cliff curved
outwards again to the sea. At a point some three or four feet from the
ground the cliff overhung so that it was possible to imagine creeping
beneath it at low tide, though a curtain of glossy spleen-wort hung down
so thickly it was difficult to tell. Going upon her knees, the girl
crawled backwards under the dripping dark green fringe, and pulled the
man in after her. Within, a tunnel, in which it was soon possible to
walk upright, led at a gradual incline up to what was apparently the
heart of the cliff, which here was honeycombed into those smugglers'
caves of the West of which even now all the secrets are not known. Up
this incline she got herself and him, and at last dragged him
triumphantly into the big cave where she and her father, Bendigo Keast,
stored the smuggled goods in which they traded so successfully. It was
very dark, but with accustomed hands she felt for the small iron box in
which the flint and tinder were kept; soon a tiny flame sprang to life,
and she passed it on to a wick that floated limply in a little cup of
stinking fish-oil on the floor. In the mere breath of light thus given
the rows of stacked barrels loomed dimly, the outermost curve of each
gleaming faintly, while between them the shadow lay banded.
Thomasin Keast ran some brandy from a little keg near into her palm and
tilted it between the man's teeth, then slopped the raw spirit over his
shirt, drenching it again. Then--not stripping him, for the modesty of a
Cornish woman, who thinks shame to show even her feet, prevented
that--she filled her hands with brandy and ran them in under his
clothes, rubbing tirelessly up and down till the flesh began to dry and
tingle. Around his reddened neck, where the soft young beard merged into
wet curls, she rubbed; over his shoulders, where the big pectoral
muscles came swelling past his armpits like a cape, then down the
serried ribs that she could knead the supple flesh around, past the
curve-in of the whole body beneath them, to the gracious slimness of the
flanks and the nervous indentation of the groins between the trunk and
the springing arches of the thighs. So Thomasin knelt in the gloom of
the cave, and all the time that his life was coming painfully and
reluctantly back to him under her strong, glowing hands, she felt as
though some presage of new life were flowing into herself. The old saw
has it that the saving of a drowning man brings ill-luck to his rescuer;
but Thomasin, as she watched grow in his features that intangible
something which makes the face human instead of a mere mask, scorned the
superstition; and still more she scorned it as her urgent hands felt the
rising beat of his pulses and arteries. For during that time his hidden
form became so known to her that his every curve and muscle, the very
feel of the strong-growing hair upon him softening into down as his skin
dried, all impressed themselves clearly on her memory for ever, and she
felt him hers--hers by right of discovery as well as right of salvage.
* * * * *
Thomasin Keast and her father lived in a little four-square cottage set
about half a mile from the headland--a half-mile of thorn and bracken,
of tumbled boulders and wedges of furze almost as solid. Here in the
spring the yellow-hammer and the linnet, the stonechat and the whinchat,
shrilled their first notes, and at dawn the greybird thrust a thirsty
beak into the dewy blackthorn blossoms; here the dun-coloured rabbits
darted in and out of their burrows with a gleam of white scuts. Here,
too, Keast and his daughter herded the moorland ponies that,
well-soaped, were loaded with the barrels of spirit and packets of lace
which had been brought from France at dark of the moon. The cottage was
of rough grey granite, with a roof crusted with yellow stonecrop that
looked as though it had been spilled molten over the slates. On either
side of the door a great wind-buttress, reaching to the eaves, swept out
like a sheltering wing.
This was the place to which Thomasin Keast brought her man on that
stormy evening. Dusk was already making the air deeply, softly blue, and
through it the whitewashed lintel gleamed out almost as clearly as the
phosphorescent fish nailed against the wall. Half-leading,
half-supporting him, Thomasin steered the stranger between the
buttresses and through the narrow doorway into the living-room. A peat
fire glowed on the hearth and against it the figure of a crouching man
showed dark. At the noise in the doorway he thrust an armful of furze on
to the fire, and the quick crackling flare that followed threw a
reflection like the flashing of summer lightning over the whitewashed
walls, sending the shadows scurrying into the corners and revealing the
man whose big hand, ridged with raised veins that ran up to the wrist,
was still upon the furze-stem.
Bendigo Keast was not long past his prime of strength and could still
have out-wrestled many a younger man. Through his jersey the working of
his enormous shoulders showed as plainly as those of a cat beneath her
close fur, and under his chin the reddish beard could not hide the knots
of his powerful throat. His eyes, blue and extraordinarily alert, were
half-hidden by the purpled lids, and the massive folds of his cheeks
that came down in a furrow on either side of his slightly incurved
mouth, looked hard as iron. Like most seamen when within doors, he was
in his stockings, and as he rose and his bulk swayed forward his feet
broadened a little and gripped at the uneven flagstones like those of a
great ape.
Thomasin spoke first.
"'Tes a man I found drownen', da," she said, and in her voice uneasiness
mingled with a readiness for defiance. "He'm most dead wi' salt water,
and cold. Us must get en to the bed to wance. Da . . ."
"Where did ee find en?" asked Bendigo Keast, without moving.
"To cove."
"Did a see aught?"
"How should a, and him nigh drowned?" evaded Thomasin; then, as the
stranger sank on to the settle and let his wet brown head fall limply
back against it, she went over to a crock of milk that stood in the
window-sill and poured some into a saucepan.
"Get en to the bed, da," she said more sharply. "I'll see to your
supper. He must have nawthen but milk for the night."
Bendigo came forward, and, swinging his long arms round the man, carried
him off up the stairs that led from the living-room into the first of
the two tiny bedrooms. He soon came down again.
"Tell me how tes a smells of brandy?" he demanded.
"I rubbed en down wi' et to put life into en." Thomasin spoke quietly,
but the sound of her stirring spoon grew less rhythmical.
"Then a did see?"
"Da, listen to me," said Thomasin, turning round. "S'pose a did see,
what then? He'm naught but a foreigner from up-country, and wouldn't
know to give we away. And--s'posen he'm minded to stay by us--well, you
d'knaw we'm needing another hand. We must find one somewhere, and
there's none o' the chaps to the church-town would come in wi' us,
because us have allus stood by oursel' and made our own profits. But now
Dan's dead, you d'knaw as well's I us must get another hand to help in
the _Merrymaid_. If you wern't so strong and I as good as a man, it
would ha' needed four of us to ha' run her."
"How can us knaw whether to trust en?" asked Bendigo suspiciously. "Tes
bad luck to save a man from the sea, they do say."
"Don't decide nawthen tell you've talked wi' en," advised Thomasin. "May
be the poor chap was too mazed to take notice o' what he saw. Us'll knaw
to-morrow."
And next day the rescued man was sitting by the hearth, somewhat stiff
from bruises, but otherwise with his wiry frame none the worse. His
looks had strikingly improved, for now that the soft beard, which had
never known a razor, was dry, it peaked forward a little, whereas when
wet it had clung to his too narrow jaw and revealed a lax line of chin.
His story was soon told--the brig on which he was mate had been
returning from France when a squall overtook her, and she became a total
wreck. He had clung to the floating spar for several hours before losing
consciousness, when the tangled ratlines had borne him up and the tide
had swept him into the shoreward current which set round the headland.
"And the first thing I knew," he ended, "was your face, mistress,
bending over me in your cave. . . ."
Keast shot a glance at his daughter. They had exchanged looks before, at
the man's mention of France, and now Bendigo flung a few veiled phrases,
with here and there a cant term common to smugglers, at his guest, who
understood him perfectly, and himself became entirely frank. His name,
he said, was Robin Start, and that there was mixed blood in him he
admitted. A more gracious race showed itself in his quick turns of wrist
and eye, his ease of phrase, in his ready gallantry towards Thomasin.
Yes, said Robin Start, his mother was a Frenchwoman, and had taught him
her tongue--a fact he found useful in his dealings on the other side of
the Channel.
A bargain is an intricate and subtle thing in Cornwall, a thing of
innuendoes and reservations, and the one Bendigo Keast struck with the
stranger was not without subtleties on both sides. Robin Start had quite
understood all he had seen in the cave, and had made a mental note of
the way out, which gave him a hold over Bendigo. On the other hand,
Robin, who suffered paroxysms of craving for safety in the intervals of
delighting in danger, knew it was safer to come in with Bendigo and make
something for himself smuggling than it would be for him to think of
escaping from that muscular father and daughter if he declined. As for
Keast, it was true that since his nephew Dan had been knocked on the
head by a swing of the boom, he needed some one to take the lad's place.
A bottle of smuggled rum sealed the bargain, and then, for the first
time in her life, Thomasin was talked to as a woman. To her father a
partner; a mere fellow-man to the dark, silent Daniel who now lay in the
lap of the tides; shunned by the envious villagers, and looked at
askance by the Government men, Thomasin had never known of the sphere
which began to be revealed to her that evening. For one thing, she was
plain, though in certain lights or effects of wind she looked fine
enough in a high-boned, rock-hewn way. She was what is called in that
part of the world a "red-headed Dane," and her broad, strongly modelled
face was thickly powdered with freckles. Though she was only twenty-two,
hundreds of nights of exposure to wind and wet had roughened her skin,
but at the opening of her bodice, where a hint of collar-bones showed
like a bar beneath the firm flesh, her skin was privet-white. The slim,
brown-haired Robin with his quick eyes was a contrast in looks and
manners to anyone she had ever met, and mingled with her awe and wonder
of him was the fierce sense of possession that had entered into her when
she passed her hands over and over him in the cave. Also she felt
maternal towards him because, though he must have been nigh upon
thirty, he was one of those men who have a quality of appeal.
It was a stormy autumn that year, and little was possible in the way of
business; but for Thomasin, who up till now had lived so whole-heartedly
for her partnership with her father, it became that time of which at
least the mirage appears to every one once in life. For her happiness
she and Robin repainted her other love, the _Merrymaid_, together;
giving her a new black coat and a white ribbon, and changing the green
of her upright stem to blue. The _Merrymaid_ was constantly adopting
little disguises of the sort, running sometimes under barked sails,
sometimes under white, and alternating between a jib and a gaff-topsail
with a square head. Then in the long winter evenings the Keasts and
Robin would sit by the fire, Bendigo pulling at his clay pipe, and
Thomasin knitting a perpetual grey stocking--surely as innocent and
law-abiding an interior as could have been found!--while Robin told them
tales of all he had seen and done. Bendigo now and then gave a grunt
that might have been of dissent, interest, or merely of incipient sleep,
but Thomasin sat enthralled by the soft tones that to her mind could
have lured a bird from the egg. Robin told of the thick yellow sea
towards the north of China, so distinct from the blue sea around that it
looked more like a vast shoal of sand, stretching for mile upon mile. He
told, too, of the reddish dust, fine as mist, which once fell for days
over his ship when he was far out at sea; it fell until the decks seemed
like a dry soft beach, and lungs and eyes and at last their very souls
seemed filled with it. His captain said it was blown along the upper
air all the way from the Mongolian plains, but he himself thought it
came from Japan, that country of volcanoes. Thomasin's ideas of
volcanoes were derived from a broadside she had once seen which
represented Vesuvius apparently on fire from the base, but she felt sure
the mysterious sand was of the devil, and must come from somewhere hot.
So Robin talked and Thomasin listened, and with the coming of spring new
portents woke in her blood and stirred the air. Robin began to slip his
hand up her arm when he stood beside her in the shadow of the
wind-buttresses, and when they went down to the caves he would make
opportunities to press against her in the passages. The sheer animal
magnetism of the girl allured him, and he found her crude and hitherto
fierce aloofness going to his head. Though frequently now he felt a
sudden passion of distaste for the physical strength of this father and
daughter sweep over him, yet would come another passion, waked by the
wonder of it that still lay in Thomasin's eyes--and he would think of
what a pleasure was at his hand in Thomasin's potentialities for passion
and the freshness of her. . . .
She herself was reluctant yet, for all her hot blood and untrained
nature, partly because of the ingrained suspicion of soft things her
upbringing had engendered, partly because of the eternal instinct which
prompts withdrawal for the purpose of luring on. But in her heart she
knew--she knew when the spring was on the cliffs, and he and she lay on
the thymy grass watching for the fish-shoals; when around Robin's
turf-pillowed head the rose-specked, flesh-hued cups of the sea-milkwort
stood up brimming with the jewelled air as with a divine nectar; when
among the cushions of silvery lichen and grey-green moss the scented
gorse flung a riot of yellow, and the mating birds answered each other
on a note like secret laughter. Then Thomasin would sometimes close her
eyes for the happiness she dared not yet acknowledge; yet those days of
soft joy and beauty were as nothing to the night of hard work and danger
that finally brought her surging blood to acknowledge him as lord--that
night when all the dominant male in him was of necessity stung to the
surface by danger.
They were running a cargo of thirty barrels over from France--he, she,
and her father. The _Merrymaid_, which was sloop-rigged and of about
twenty tons burden, was quite enough for the three to handle, laden as
she was with the corded tubs slung together with the stones already
attached; for it was proposed to sink the cargo and then run on to
harbour openly, a thing frequently done when the Preventive men were
known to be on the watch. Robin was suffering from one of his
nerve-revulsions; he dared show no sign of it, but as he sat in the
bows, keeping a look-out through the darkness, he told himself that if
this trip were brought off in safety it would be the last as far as he
was concerned. He could stand the portentous figure of Bendigo looming
at him through the little cottage no more, and he knew what to do. . . .
As for Thomasin, he would not lose her--a woman surely sticks by her
man. And if not, she would never harm him; and there were other women in
the world--for the appeal Thomasin had for him was of sex, and not of
personality.
Thomasin sat with her arm along the tiller, keeping the _Merrymaid_ on
a nor'-nor'-west course so as to make the Lizard light. They were
running under their foresail and close-reefed mainsail only, for the
south-west wind for which they had waited was swelling to storm-fury.
The _Merrymaid_ lay right over, the water scolding past her dipping
gunwale and the clots of spindrift that whirled over the side gleaming
like snowflakes in the darkness, which was of that intense quality which
becomes vibrant to long staring. Robin, straining his eyes, was only
aware of the danger when they were almost on it, but his voice shrieked
out on the instant to Thomasin: "Hard-a-port!" and again, in a desperate
hurry of sound, "Hard-a-port!"
Thomasin jambed the helm up as Bendigo, with the agility of long use to
sudden danger, eased off the sheets; and then Thomasin could see what
menaced them. A Preventive boat, like themselves with no light save the
wretched glimmer over the compass, had been lying to under her mizzen,
and already her men were making sail. Thomasin sat gripping the tiller
while the voices of her menfolk came to her ears.
"The topsail!" shouted Robin; but Bendigo's voice made answer: "Not till
us has to--it might rip mast off in this gale. Try the jib. . . ."
They set the jib and shook out the reefs in the mainsail, and the
_Merrymaid_ answered to it like a racehorse to the whip. She quivered
all her length, the tiller pushed like a sentient thing against
Thomasin's palm and they went reeling on.
For nearly an hour they ran before the wind, helped by the flood-tide,
and all the time the Preventive boat was slowly gaining on them, for she
was carrying a larger stretch of canvas. She was nearly upon them when
the sound of breaking surf told that they were nearing the Manacles, and
the tide was still fairly low. Suddenly Robin's voice came again, this
time with a thrill in it: "Now's our chance!" he called. "We'll hoist
the topsail and make a run for it inside of the Manacles."
He was at the mast as he spoke, and Thomasin heard the thin scream of
the unoiled sheave as the topsail halliards ran through it. The next
moment the mast creaked and bent; the almost useless jib slackened as
the other sails took all of the wind, and the _Merrymaid_ shook her nose
and plunged into the broken water that gleamed between the blackness of
the mainland and the Manacles.
"They'll never dare follow!" cried Bendigo; and even as he did so, the
Preventive boat, trusting to her superior speed to make good, began to
come round to the wind so as to pass the Manacles on the outer side. The
added strain proved too much, and her mast snapped with a report like a
gunshot--the one clean, sharp sound through all that flurry of rushing,
edgeless noise, and it told its own tale to the eager ears on the
_Merrymaid_. She, under the influence of the topsail, was burying her
bows at every plunge, and Thomasin knew, by the sudden cessation of the
tiller's tug, that the rudder had lifted clear of the racing water, only
to drive into it again with a blow that sent her reeling. Thomasin's
fight with the boat she loved began in real earnest. Yawing stubbornly,
the _Merrymaid_ pulled against the tiller so that the rough wood seemed
to burn into Thomasin's flesh, so hard had she to grip it to keep the
boat's head from going up into the wind.
With the breath failing in her throat, she had none left to cry for
help; she could only wrestle with the tiller, which, all the weight of
the yawing _Merrymaid_ against it, seemed about to crush her.
Then hands came over hers in the darkness, and even at that moment her
flesh knew Robin's.
"Tell me if I make a mistake; you know this hell-pool better than me,"
he called to her through the noise of the surf; and, with an easing of
the muscles so exquisite as to be almost a pain in itself, she felt him
absorb the weight of the boat into his grip. With the lifting of that
strain from her shoulders and arms came the realization of how
mercilessly his hands were grinding hers against the tiller, yet that
pain sent the first tremor of unadulterated passion through her that she
had ever felt, because it was the first time he had hurt her. There was
no need for her to call directions to him--he and she were so welded in
one at the tiller that the unconscious pull of her arm beneath his told
him, in his state of receptive tension, what to do more surely than any
words. That was their true mating--not what followed after--but there in
the stern of the reeling _Merrymaid_; for all that was least calculated
and finest in Robin had leapt to the need of it, and their consciousness
was fused as completely in the fight for life as the pain in their hands
was at the tiller.
They were through--through and safe, and five minutes more saw them
round the point and in the calmer water, where they slipped the cargo,
and soon after they had made the harbour under easy sail, innocent of
contraband from stem to stern.
All danger over, Thomasin felt oddly faint, and let her father go on
ahead across the moor while she hung heavily on Robin's arm, her numbed
hands slowly tingling back to life as they went. Arrived at the
cottage, a faint light, that went out even as they looked, told of
Bendigo's entry, and Robin set the lantern he carried on the flagstones
between the buttresses. Thomasin leant back against one of them, and the
dim light, flickering upwards, softened her marked bones and brightened
her eyes. Every defect of skin was hidden; it showed pale, and her mouth
velvet dark upon it. Robin's lips fastened on her throat below her ear
and stayed there till she stirred and gave a little cry, then his mouth
moved on and up till it found hers. The kiss deepened between them; his
head bent, hers upstretched. Time stayed still for one moment, during
which she wanted nothing further--she was not conscious of the ground
beneath her or the pain in her back-tilted neck, not even of his
supporting arms or the throbbing of him against her--all her being was
fused at the lips, and she felt as though hanging in space from his
mouth alone.
* * * * *
Robin Start waited till the cargo had been safely run and sold, and then
he went across the moor to the village and made a compact with the
Preventive men. The excitement of that night had had its usual way with
him, and he wished never to meet danger again as long as he lived. He
was suffering from a somewhat similar revulsion as regarded Thomasin,
though there he knew the old allure would raise its head again for him.
Bendigo's suspicious guard of him had relaxed, partly because the elder
man admitted that it was Robin's nerve which had planned the dash that
saved them, partly because he guessed how it was with his daughter, and
thought Robin safely theirs. . . . And Robin had at last done that which
had been in his mind ever since the beginning, and had sold the secret
of the caves to his Majesty's Government. Nervous of being overheard in
the village inn, Robin took the two head men with him over the moor to
the headland, safe in the knowledge that Bendigo was drinking heavily in
the cottage--the way in which he always rewarded himself for a
successful run. Robin showed the men the cunningly hidden entrances to
the passages, and then for a few minutes they all three stood making
their final arrangements. Robin found it wonderfully simple, the step
once taken. It was agreed that the officers of the law were to surround
the cottage that night after its inmates were abed, all save Robin, who
was to be sitting in the kitchen ready to open the door. No harm was to
be done to the girl--and, indeed, the Preventive men knew enough of
Cornish juries to know that Bendigo Keast himself would get an
acquittal; but his claws would be drawn, which was all they wanted.
Robin, unaware of this peculiarity of a Cornish jury, would have been
considerably alarmed had he known of it. Bendigo free to revenge himself
had not entered into the scheme of the man from up-country, where the
law was a less individual matter.
"At ten o'clock then, my man," were the last words of the Preventive
officer; but he added to his companion as they walked away: "The dirty
double-mouth!" and the distaste of the official for the necessary
informer was in his voice. "At ten o'clock," echoed Robin, and then was
aware of a quick rustling behind him--much the noise that a big adder
makes as it leaves its way through a dry tuft of grass. The sun was
already setting, and the glamorous light made vision uncertain, yet
Robin thought he saw a movement of the gorse more than the breeze
warranted. The bush in question was one of those which concealed an
opening to the caves, and Robin pulled it aside and peered into the
darkness. Silence and stillness rewarded him, and he swung his legs over
and descended a little way. All was quiet and empty in that passage; he
turned into another--that, too, was innocent of any presence save his.
He went through up that exit, and, still uneasy, stared across the moor.
If anyone--if by chance Thomasin had been in the passage, she could have
slipped out that way while he was entering by the other, and be out of
sight by now. . . . The sweat sprang on to Robin's brow. Then he took
counsel with himself. There was no reason why Thomasin should be at the
caves; nothing was doing there. It would be the most unlikely thing on
earth, because neither she nor her father ever ran the unnecessary risk
of going there between the cargoes. Robin knew this, and felt
reassured--how, after all, could he imagine that Thomasin, sick at the
reaction she felt in him, might have gone to re-gather force at the
place where she had first felt him hers? . . . He thought over what he had
said, and took still more heart when he remembered he had not let fall a
word that showed a light holding of Thomasin; and that, he told himself,
was the only thing a woman could not forgive. He felt it safe to count
on passion as against the habit of a mere business partnership, which
was all her relationship with her father had ever been. Dimly Robin was
aware that all her spiritual life had gone into that partnership, into
the feeling of her family against the world that had become an obsession
with her until he had brought another interest into her life; but Robin
Start would not have believed an angel from heaven who had told him that
the habit of years could be stronger with a woman than a new passion.
And, as regarded most women, Robin would probably have been right.
Besides, it was impossible that any one could have been there, and
Thomasin was his. . . . He gave himself a little shake and set off to the
cottage, and such was the force of his revulsion against a life of
dangers and the sinister suggestiveness of the Keasts' muscular
superiority, that he felt his heart lighter than it had been for months
past. He was even pleasurably, though subconsciously, aware of the
poignant beauty of the evening, and noted the rich shrilling of a thrush
from the alders by the stream. It was one of those evenings when, for a
few minutes, the light holds a peculiarly rosy quality that refracts
from each sharply angled surface of leaf or curved grass-blade; steeps
even the shadows with wine-colour, and imparts a reddish purple to every
woody shoot, from the trunks of trees to the stray twigs of thorn
piercing the turf. Wine-coloured showed the stems of the alders, the
lines of blackthorn hedges, the distant drifts of elms whose branches
were still only faintly misted with buds. Beneath Robin's feet the
yellow red-tipped blossoms of the bird's-foot trefoil borrowed of the
flushed radiance till they seemed as though burning up through the
ardent grass, and on the alders the catkins gleamed like still thin
flakes of fire. The whole world for a few magic moments was lapped in an
unharmful flame that had glow without heat, and through the gentle glory
of it Robin went home.
At ten o'clock that night, with no lanterns to betray them, half a dozen
Preventive men, followed by several of the leading men in the village,
who had got wind of the affair and were eager to see the self-sufficient
Keasts brought to book, all came up over the moor through the darkness.
No light showed in the cottage as they neared it, but that was merely
because the buttress, sweeping at right angles to the window, obscured
it from the approach. The buttress once rounded, the men saw the light
shining as Robin Start had promised. The officer motioned the others to
stay quiet, and then--he was a mere lad, and eager to be the first in
everything--he tiptoed to the window and peeped through.
Robin Start was sitting quietly in the armchair, a candle burning on the
stool beside him. There was nothing alarming in that, yet the next
moment the boy at the window stepped back with a great cry.
"He's got two mouths!" he shrieked. "He's got two mouths!"
* * * * *
Far out on the dark Channel father and daughter were drawing away in the
_Merrymaid_, the rising wind and some other urgent thing at their backs,
but the sense of justice done as their solace.
And in the cottage, his wrists tightly roped to the arms of the chair
and his silky beard shaved away, sat Robin Start. The footlight effect
of the candle eliminated all shadow under his sloping chin, making it
seem one with his throat, and that was cut from ear to ear. For the only
thing on which he had not calculated was that before such treachery as
his passion drops like a shot bird.
The candle flame flared up as the last of the tallow ran in a pool round
the yielding wick, and for one distorted moment the edges of the slit
throat flickered to the semblance of a smile. Then the flame reeled and
sank, and, spark by spark, the red of the glowing wick died into the
darkness.