MEANWHILE the wreck still lay in shattered fragments on the beach, and
had brought discredit and disaster to at least one family in the village
before it disappeared in another and still heavier gale.
It was the best-looking young woman in the parish and the best-looking
young man whom I had united to-day in the holy bond of matrimony. And
now the wedding-dance was being held in a room twelve feet by twelve,
while the wedding-feast of light refreshments was spread in the
wash-house adjoining.
Ned Baker was a young fellow of the pale, refined type, looking younger
even than his years, and they numbered only twenty-four—a type rarely met
with in a country village, with clean and well-cut features, light wavy
hair, and the slim hand and tapering fingers that one assigns to a
musician, and associates not at all with the rough training of a village
carpenter. More fitted, you would say, to stand behind a London counter
and minister yards of drapery to some west-end beauty. Perhaps his
refinement may have been partially due to delicate health since boyhood;
nothing serious his friends would tell you, but just sufficient to unfit
him for out-door labour, and direct the tenor of his life to the
comparative ease of a carpenter’s workshop.
His wife in all probability, judging from her appearance, would rule the
roost. A woman of the strong, well-bosomed order, outcome oftener of the
village than the town, with the wild westerly breezes and salt sea air of
the Atlantic mantling in her cheek.
Truth to say, Ned was hardly a popular inmate of what was now his native
village. In appearance and refinement he was far above the tribe of
fishermen who inhabited the scattered hamlet, and won a precarious
livelihood from fishing and boating—sometimes, ’twas said, from the
jetson cast up by the sea beyond, when a wreck, such as still lay in
fragments not one hundred yards from their doors, would strew the shore
for miles and miles with drift of freight and timber.
It was natural, perhaps, that they should resent a superiority which
contrasted only too strongly with their own rough and rugged natures.
Besides, he was an alien—literally a drift from the sea—cast up and laid
for dead upon the sand some twenty years ago.
No one knew aught of him—he did not know anything of himself—though his
wavy sun-locks and bright blue eyes might have proclaimed him of the
north, the fragile incarnation of some Viking of the past. But all was
guess-work and mystery, for he was a little lad of three years old when
the sea laid him at their doors, after claiming for its own the ship and
everything, dead or living, that it had carried for its freight.
Kindly hands had welcomed him. An old fisherman and his wife, without
children or relations of their own, had loved and cherished the boy to
manhood. But they were dead and gone, and for years since he had lived
his life alone, till Arabella Bond, the beauty of the village, had been
won by the very grace and refinement which had made him alien and outcast
from the other villagers.
Indeed, with the single exception of the couple who had reared him,
Arabella had been his first and only friend. Three or four years older
than himself, she had, as a child, taken him under her special
protection, comforting him in all his troubles, and waging incessant war
with the lads of the village on his behalf. Her strong motherly
instincts, fired as time went on by a warm passion of love, had gone out
in pity to the youth who had been flung, alien and isolated, among a
world of strangers. And her devotion never wavered. Even now her
feeling towards him was rather that of the mother than the wife, and, but
for her, his prayer would have been that the sea might yet reclaim its
gift of life. Nameless and unknown, he was from the first an object of
suspicion to the villagers. Add to which, he had been cast up by the
sea, and the awe which clings round such a one, and the peril that it
foreshadows to his preservers, were for ever present in their minds.
With a race of men animated by their traditions King Arthur himself, if
he had been cast upon their shore, would never have gained their
confidence. And with Ned’s growth in years the feeling against him had
only become stronger and more accentuated. A high regard for
honour—honour in every word and deed—was the dominant characteristic of
his life, shown in nothing more conspicuously than in his scrupulous
honesty respecting all property recovered from the sea. Such views were
in hopeless antagonism to all the traditions of the neighbourhood, where
the villagers, whose ancestors may have smuggled a little in the days
gone by, held a rooted belief that the sea was their property, placed
where it was by a beneficent Providence to afford them a livelihood, and
sometimes, though not half so often as they wished, to present them with
an unearned increment in the shape of a wreck and the perquisites that
followed from it.
And, most unfortunately for Ned, no one held this faith with stronger
persistence than Arabella’s mother. To discover, if possible, the owner
of such property, or to report it to the recognised authorities would
have been judged by her a superlative act of folly, a wanton flying in
the face of Providence, which sent them such windfalls, as it did the
mackerel and the herrings—only with less regularity. It may be, I fancy,
that the northern nations, from whom Ned inherited his birthright, are as
punctilious in the practice of honour as southerners are in the
profession of it.
Anyhow, Ned and his folly were perpetual irritants to Arabella’s mother.
And matters were in no wise improved when he became a suitor for her
daughter’s hand. Even his personal appearance and his love-locks,
“clustering o’er his fair forehead like a girl’s,” came in for her abuse.
“A fine gen’elman you be,” she would say, “to teach us all our duties,
and make out as how we be thieves an’ liars. Why, you bain’t no better
nor a gal—an’ a poor ’un at that—wi’ all your long hair a-danglin’ about
your forehead, an’ no strength in ye to pull an oar or gi’ a hand to the
fishin’-tackle or the lobster-pots. Blest if I can tell what Arabella
sees in ye. But there—there’s no accountin’ for tastes. ’Twas sommat
liker to a man that would ha’ suited I, when I was lookin’ round me for a
husband.”
Then Arabella would heal the wound and say: “Never ’e mind, Ned. ’Tis
because ye be so much better than they that they hates ye so cruel. Wi’
yer fine language and looks that shames ’em all every time they meets ye,
no wonder they can’t stomach ye. Not but what you be learnin’ a lot of
our talk now along, and ye clips yer words fine, same a’ most as we does.
May be they’ll think the better of ye by and bye, when you gets a bit
liker to ’em. Not that I wishes it, my dear, never think it. ’Tisn’t I
that would have loved ye so fondly if ye hadn’t been better an’ cleverer
an’ handsomer than all the rest of ’m.”
But to-day all past animosities were forgotten, and the company who had
been called to the festivities could only bethink themselves of the
arrangements provided for their comfort.