Four miles south of Steens, and a trifle over, lies the market town of
Helston (or 'Helleston' as men wrote it in 1734, and ought to write it
still); on the road to nowhere and somnolent then as now, but then as now
waking up once a year, on the 8th of May, to celebrate the Feast of Flora
and welcome back the summer. She is brought in at daybreak with green
boughs and singing, and at noon the citizens dance through the streets in
her honour, the Mayor himself leading off as the town band strikes up its
immemorial quickstep, the staid burgesses following with their partners.
At first they walk or amble two and two, like animals coming out of Noah's
ark; then, at a change in the tune, each man swings round to the lady
behind him, 'turns' her, regains his partner, 'turns' her too, and the
walk is resumed. And so, alternately walking and twirling, the procession
sways down the steep main street and in and out of the houses left open
for it--along the passage from front door to court or garden, out at the
back door, in at the back door of the next open house, and through to the
street again--the beadles preceding with wreathed wands, the band with
decorated drum, the couples 'turning' duly at the break in the tune,
though it catch them in the narrowest entrance or half-way down a flight
of steps.
On the 8th of May, 1734, at the foot of Coinage-hall Street, hard by the
Bowling Green, a pewterer's shop stood open, like its neighbours, to admit
the Flora. But the master of the shop and his assistant--he kept no
apprentice--sat working as usual at their boards, perhaps the only two men
in Helleston who disregarded the public holiday. But everyone knew Roger
Stephen to be a soured man, and what old Malachi Hancock did was of no
account.
Malachi sat at his bench in the rear of the shop turning the rim of a
pewter plate, and Roger Stephen in the front, for the sake of better
light, peering into the bowels of a watch which had been brought to him to
be cleaned--a rare job, and one which in his sullen way he enjoyed.
From youth up he had been badly used. His father, Humphrey Stephen, owned
Steens, and was a man of substance; a yeoman with money and land enough to
make him an esquire whenever he chose. In those days it was the custom in
Cornish families of the better class to send the eldest son to college
(usually to Oxford), and thence, unless the care of his estates claimed
him at home, into one of the liberal professions. Sometimes the second son
would follow him to college and proceed to Holy Orders, but oftener he had
to content himself as apprentice to an apothecary or an attorney.
The third son would, like Roger Stephen, be bound to a pewterer or
watchmaker, the fourth to a mercer, and so on in a descending scale.
But Roger, though the only child of a rich man, had been denied his
natural ambition, and thrust as a boy into the third class. His mother
had died young, and from the hour of her death (which the young man set
down to harsh usage) he and his father had detested each other's sight.
In truth, old Humphrey Stephen was a violent tyrant and habitually drunk
after two o'clock. Roger, self-repressed as a rule and sullen, found him
merely abhorrent. During his mother's lifetime, and because she could not
do without him, he had slept at Steens and walked to and from his shop in
Helleston; but on the day after the funeral he packed and left home,
taking with him old Malachi, a family retainer whom Humphrey had long ago
lamed for life by flinging a crowbar at him in a fit of passion.
So for twelve years he had lodged and taught Malachi his trade in the
dirty, low-browed shop, over which a pewter basin hung for sign and
clashed against the tilt whenever a sea-breeze blew. Malachi did his
marketing: Roger himself rarely stepped across his threshold, and had
never been known to gossip. To marriage he never gave a thought:
"time enough for that," he had decided, "when Steens became his, as some
day it must;" for the estate ever since the first Stephen acquired it in
the Wars of the Roses and gave it his name ('Steens' being but 'Stephen's'
contracted) had been a freehold patrimony descending regularly from father
to son or next heir. All in good time Roger Stephen would marry and
install his wife in the manor-house. But the shop in Coinagehall Street
was no place for a woman. She would be a nuisance, sweeping the place out
and upsetting him and Malachi; an expense, too, and Roger--always a
penurious man--incurred no expense until obliged.
But on a day, about two years before this 8th of May, 1734, word had come
down from Steens that his father wished to speak with him.
"Not dying, is he?" Roger asked the messenger in Cornish. Half his
customers spoke the old language, and it came readier to his tongue.
The messenger chuckled. "Dying? He'll live to be a hundred!
Eh, it's not dying he's after," and the man winked. He was near upon
bursting with news--or gossip--of his own.
"That's enough," said Roger. "Go back and tell him that if he's well and
wants to talk, he knows where to find me." And he turned back to his work.
Next day old Humphrey Stephen rode down into Helleston in a towering rage,
reined up before his son's shop, and dismounted.
"You're a pretty dutiful kind of son," he snarled. "But I've a word that
concerns you belike. I'm going to marry again."
"Ah?" said Roger, drawing in his breath and eyeing the old man up and down
in a way that disconcerted him. "Who's the poor soul?"
"She lives over to Porthleven," answered his father, "and her name is Mary
Nankivell. She's--well, in fact she's a fisherman's daughter; but I've
lived long enough to despise differences of that kind."
"I wasn't asking _your_ age," said Roger meditatively.
"What's the woman's?"
"She'll be twenty next birthday." The old man was sixty-five.
"Well, what's your opinion?" he asked testily, for he knew he was doing a
wrong thing, and craved an excuse to work himself into a rage.
"On which?" asked Roger, "--you, or the woman?"
"On the marriage." Old Humphrey stood glowering under his eyebrows,
and tapped his boot impatiently with the butt of his riding-whip.
"I reckoned it might concern you, that's all."
"I can't see that it does." There was that in Roger's slow look which his
father found maddening.
"Oh, can't you?" he sneered.
"No, for the life of me," answered Roger. "'Tis wickedness of course, but
I've no call to interfere. Take and marry the miserable fool, if you're
so minded."
Humphrey Stephen had more to say, but gulped it down and mounted his horse
with a devilish grin.
Roger Stephen went back to his work-bench.