from two houses at Woodman’s Well two little parties on their way to the
parish church.
But this time no little coffin was carried to the graveyard; on the
contrary, two lusty little infants were being conveyed to the baptismal
font; and the parties issued respectively from the cottage of the
Leveridges and from that of the Weldons. And as both parties arrived at
the toll-gate, the woman who inhabited the toll-house issued forth, to
act as sponsor to both babes.
And as she walked along she said to old Mrs. Weldon, “Who ever would have
thought it, last time us two went this way?”
“Who ever would?” answered Mrs. Weldon; “but Jack might have gone far and
fared worse.”
“And then—Thomas Leveridge?”
“He’s taken to caring for home first, and politics come second only.”
“Well, well! The last time we were here together it was to a burying;
but it is true, that sayin’ of Scriptur’, ‘From Death we have passed to
Life.’”
CICELY CROWE
CICELY CROWE
I
Our house is a long one; it takes two minutes to walk from one end to the
other, consequently by the time one has gone from the principal staircase
at the east extremity to the kitchen at the west, one is older by two
minutes; whether one has grown in the time I am unable to say, never
having taken measures before starting and on arriving. It is satisfactory
that the staircase and not the dining-room occupies the extreme east,
otherwise we should always partake of cold meals.
But as if the main block of the house were not, in all conscience, long
enough, at some unknown period since its first construction a back
kitchen was added beyond the kitchen, farther west, and then, a little
room only reached by a stair farther west still. This little “prophet’s
chamber” was, however, one used within my recollection for the keeping
of the feathers of geese and fowls that had been plucked, where they
accumulated till sufficient for the composition of a feather bed, when
they were picked, cleaned, baked, and made up.
Before this final process I well remember, as a child of eight or nine,
scrambling into this little chamber, and then rolling and dancing among
the feathers, and making, as I believed, a snowstorm about me. The after
effects were not conducive to comfort; and I remember that the process of
scrubbing and cleansing me and my clothes after this snowstorm was both
irksome and lengthy. That experience was never repeated, not only because
of the cleansing process, but also because I was put across my father’s
knee, and the lesson not to play with feathers and raise snowstorms was
impressed on me with a square ruler, till my father got hot in the face,
and I—hot, elsewhere.
The same little stair that conducted to the feather room, also gave
admission to a low garret above the back kitchen.
This garret contained all kinds of imaginable and unimaginable lumber.
My dear father, who was an enthusiast for novelties, bought every
possible invention that conduced to the saving of time by cooks—patent
egg-boilers, lemon-squeezers, apple-parers, digesting pots, &c. These the
cooks “chucked” up into the lumber place with mighty disdain, and went
on in their old ways. Moreover, into it went all the pans that they had
left unscoured till rust had eaten through them, all the kettles that
began to leak, by letting them fall on the stone floor; a coffee roaster
that the then reigning cook refused to use, because it was less trouble
to employ ready-roasted coffee; a mortar, the bottom of which had been
knocked out, because she would pound almonds in it on her lap instead of
on the table; a tobacco canister in which bird’s-eye was kept for a lover
when he came on a visit. In fact, this garret was an emporium of objects
illustrative of kitchen wastefulness, and indicative of my father’s
good-nature.
No one ever visited this garret except the cook when “chucking away” some
of “master’s newfangled nonsense,” or when putting away some damaged
article out of reach of her mistress’s eye, consequently it was wholly
given over to rats, that raced about in it with a boldness only equalled
by that of cook when she looked straight into my mother’s eyes and said
there never had been, so long as she had been in the house, one of these
articles my mother missed, as the coffee-roaster, or the china mortar,
or the stewing pan, or the bronchitis kettle; or when my father sent
inquiries about such articles as the lemon-squeezer, or the apple-parer,
or the cream-whipper.
The rats got their pickings in this garret: they licked out the dirty
frying-pans in which was grease, they consumed the contents of the
pie-dishes that had been burnt in the oven with crust adhering to them,
and nibbled at the rabbit-skins that had been put away there to be sold
to the rag-and-bone man when he came round.
I knew of this garret, and loved it, loved it almost as dearly as did the
rats. My mother and father did not like my visiting it, as I came away
from it very dirty in hands and face, and with clothing often torn by
nails; and cook never would endure that I should visit it for reasons of
her own. Consequently, visits to it were surreptitious, and made at rare
intervals.
We had, when I was about thirteen, a maid of the name of Cicely Crowe;
she was an excellent servant, with a passionate love of neatness, did her
work well and conscientiously, but had not the most amiable disposition
or the most gracious manner. She was not a bad-tempered woman, never
violent, but, just as a diamond is said to be off colour if the least
lacking in absolute clearness, so may she be said to have been off
temper. She was very kind-hearted, but it seemed to go against her pride
to do a kind thing in a kind way. She never saw the good in anything,
only the faults. We all liked Cicely, but we all wished she would try to
be more pleasing. However, we have each our blurs in this world, one in
one way, one in another, and had Cicely’s mood been sunny, and her manner
sparkling, why she would have been snapped up at once, and half the young
men in the village would have been quarrelling as to who should have her.
It was just this uncertainty in her temper which deterred them, and kept
her in our service so many years.
She was a very pretty girl, was Cicely, with brown hair, so neat that
never was a hair out of place, and with large hazel eyes, and such a
complexion!—cream and strawberry were nothing to it, and the colour
palpitated under her transparent skin like the flush of the evening sun
on far-off delicate clouds.
The lads of the village said to each other, “What a lass that Cicely is,
but—” And our friends said to my mother, “What a very nice, respectable
servant girl you have in Cicely.” “Oh dear, yes,” answered my mother,
“she is everything that could be desired, but—” And her fellow-servants
all said, “We have nothing to say against Cicely, but—” And we children
remarked to each other, “Cicely is tremendously nice, but—” No one ever
got any further than “but—,” for no one could bring it over the lips to
say a word in depreciation of Cicely.
Now it fell out all on a summer’s day that cook had gone off for a
holiday, and the kitchen-maid had sickened with measles and been sent
home, and with great trepidation, and with a tremulous voice, and an
appeal in her eyes, my mother had asked Cicely if she _would_, under the
circumstances, boil the potatoes and the greens for the early dinner on
that Sunday. There was nothing to roast, nothing to stew; cook had made
cold pies and shapes, and so on, to last till her return.
Cicely replied ungraciously that everything was put on her, but she
supposed she must do it, and then turned her back on my mother and went
off to change her gown. As I have said, it was Sunday. I had a sore
throat, and so was not allowed to go to church, and was bidden remain at
home, not go outside the doors, and keep myself warm.
Now I had calculated on this, and had borrowed a rat-trap from the
gardener, and when Cicely was upstairs putting on such garments as she
deemed suitable for peeling potatoes and shelling peas, and cooking them,
I slipped up the stairs into the garret, hugging the trap, and holding a
piece of cheese-rind I had surreptitiously seized on and had roasted over
my candle. I was resolved on spending the time whilst my parents were
at church in catching a rat. There was a loose slate in the roof and I
tilted this up, peeped out, and watched my father and mother, brothers
and sisters, and the governess stalk away from the front door in their
Sunday suits, with prayer-books under their arms, and I saw my dear
mother pick off sundry bits of “fluff,” ends of thread, &c., which her
eye detected on the children’s clothes.
Then I heard a bustle of feet underneath, and some tongues, and I knew
that the domestics were also off to church by the back door. Thereupon I
set my trap, and sat down behind a barrel in the corner waiting to hear
the rats come out, and to watch them snuff at, then bite the bait, and,
snap—be caught.
Whilst I waited, and, waiting, learned my collect which had been set me
as a task, I heard Cicely come into the back kitchen, and with a sharp
motion pull the pan to her in which were the potatoes she had to peel.
Almost immediately after I heard the kitchen door open, and a male voice
exclaim, “Well, Cicely, so here you are?”
“I s’pose I be,” was her answer.
Now the floor of the loft was of boards, and in these boards were knots,
and the centre of some of these had fallen out. The back kitchen was not
ceiled. One of these peep-holes was close to me, so very gently I lay
down flat on the floor and applied my eye to the hole, and then saw that
a young man had entered named Will Swan.
I knew him well. He had a boat, and was a fisherman; an honest, cheerful
fellow, with whom I often went out on the sea. He was uncommonly civil,
and would insist on carrying the fish I caught, or fancied I had caught,
home for me.
Now only did it dawn on my infantile mind that his carrying the fish was
due not so much to a wish to oblige me, as to have an excuse for coming
into our kitchen to see Cicely Crowe.
“What’s brought you here?” asked Cicely.
“I wanted to see you and have a bit of a talk.”
“I’m busy,” was her curt answer.
“Ciss, I want a good-bye before I go.”
“Well, the door is open—Good-bye.”
He halted at the entrance, hesitated a while, and then said: “You will be
pleased to hear, Ciss, that the good-bye I asked for is one for ever.”
She dropped the potato she was peeling, but did not look at him; she took
up the potato again.
“I’m thinking of leaving—going to America.”
She did not answer for a while, but as he waited for an observation, she
said, “Indeed. Hope you’ll enjoy yourself there.”
“I am not going there to enjoy myself, but because—well, Ciss—I can’t
feel any joy here in the old country.”
“You seem merry enough.”
“I am not. I’ve always something in me, gnawing at my heart.”
“Swallowed a crab, I reckon, without having him b’iled first.”
“It’s not that, Ciss. You know well it is not that. If one can’t get now
what will make a fellow happy, it’s best to go, sez I.”
“You’ll get lots, lots over there,” said she, and pointed with the knife
towards the sea, America, the bed of the setting sun.
“I don’t want lots—only one.”
“May you find that one. I hope you will.”
“Do you?” with a flash of happiness.
“Yes—in America.”
He hung his head.
“I suppose,” said Will, “that I shall be forgotten when I am far away.”
“Those who go far away must reckon on that,” was her answer. “Psha!” she
had cut her finger. She quickly put a bit of potato rind over the wound
lest Will should observe it. But indeed, he was looking on the floor and
saw nothing.
“And, Ciss, you have nothing more to say to me?”
“Of course I have—Good-bye!”
He looked up, took a step nearer to her, gazed steadily into her face:
“Cicely, do you mean it—in this way to say good-bye to one you have
known all these years? It is not a light matter to cross the ocean and
go to the States. Who can tell what may happen there? Some find there
good luck, others, wretchedness and ruin. To go there and do well a chap
must take a good heart with him. I cannot do that. I shall bear but a
heartache with me, and have no hope whatever I do. Come, Ciss—what do you
say?”
“The parson don’t like any one coming in late for church. You’d best be
off—smart.”
He raised himself to his full height. The angry blood flew to his face
and darkened it, fire leaped from his eyes. I had never seen Will Swan
like that before.
“No—Ciss—no,” he said, and he spoke hoarsely; “I will not cross the
water. No, that would content you. Who can say—if things went contrary
here—you might be willing to come across to me there?”
“If——”
“Yes—who can say? But I will go where there is no passage across. I will
break down every bridge between us. This has been going on too long—from
one year to another—and I can bear it no further. I will get married to
some other wench, some one who will give a chap a good word; who, when
one leaves only for a day will say a good-bye, and her eyes will fill
with tears. She may never be to me all that you have been and are, but
she will be to me what it is not in your nature to be—kind and gracious.”
“Oh, that—that is it!” exclaimed Cicely. I could see, through my
peephole, how flames passed through her face and then that she became
deadly white. I could see how her bosom heaved, how her hands trembled as
she tried to continue with the potatoes, but was unable to do anything
because of her wounded finger.
Suddenly she took up the pan, thrust past Will, and threw the contents
into the pig-pail. “You have made me spoil all,” she said, and burst into
tears.
“Crying! What for?”
“That is it. You have already lost your heart to some other girl, and now
you come to say——”
“Yes, that I am going to the parson to have my banns called.”
“Who is it?” she asked, looking at him, her weeping arrested, and she as
one of stone.
“If I say it shall be you, what will you say?”
She tried to speak, could not, turned, put up her hand against the wall,
brushed it down once, twice, again, impatiently. She could not bring the
word out that she wished to say.
Will remained waiting. No answer came.
“Ciss,” he said, “it shall _not_ be you. Any other rather. No—you,
never!”
Then he turned and left the back kitchen.
She stood for a moment watching him as he departed. Then she leaned her
face in her wet hands and burst into convulsive weeping.
Snap. Wee! wee! wee! A rat was caught.
II
Will Swan did not go to America. What he did was to find an engagement
on a small boat that went to and from Bristol, bringing groceries,
earthenware, timber, ovens from Bridgewater, and which conveyed slates
from the Cornish quarries to that great mercantile city which goes on
building, building without ceasing. He was away sometimes for a week;
sometimes for a fortnight; now and then for over a month. America! He was
not going to expatriate himself for a woman’s sake, when there was plenty
of work to be found in his native land, or rather, on the seas that
washed it.
The Bristol Channel looks upon the map as though in it could be only calm
water, as in the estuary of the Thames. It is, however, not so. When the
wind blows from the west, how the great Atlantic billows roll in, and
with what fury do they recoil and strike the faces of their brother waves
also seeking an entrance! They tread one another down; they overleap one
another; they beat one another about, and leave a long line of foam down
the centre of the Channel, the dust and wreckage of ten thousand broken
waves.
And then, without. When Hartland Point has been turned, what a coast! The
iron-black frowning cliffs stand up sheer from deep sea, and seem to say,
“We look on all passers-by as foes; let none venture to approach us!”
And how the Atlantic billows heave there! It is no exaggeration to say
that they run mountains high. Woe to the vessel, great or small, that
enters or attempts to cross the great loop between Hartland and Trevose.
It is a mouth to champ up and suck the life out of every boat that falls
into it when the wind is inland.
Cicely heard that Will Swan had not gone to the States. She saw him
occasionally in church, but when there he never looked her way. He stood
up straight as a post, sang with lungs like the bellows of a blacksmith,
in his blue jersey, his face brown as a coffee-berry fresh roasted, but
his eye, blue as the summer sea, flashed and twinkled, but never on her.
She heard talk of him too. He was much at the Ship Inn; and Kate Varcoe,
the daughter of the host, was a “likely lass,” cheerful, fresh-faced,
with black dancing eyes. With Kate he chaffed and made merry. Cicely
listened every Sunday to hear the banns called, but no—called they were
not. Next, some one said that William had a sweetheart in Bristol.
Oh, in Bristol! Then why should not she show him that if he could be
false she would be so also. For a while she allowed herself to be walked
out by young Hannaway, a respectable youth, a carpenter by trade, who
made the coffins for all the neighbourhood, and undertook in black for
all the dead in that and the neighbouring parishes.
When next she encountered Will she was at the side of Hannaway. He was
talking with some chums, and a burst of laughter from them pealed out
after she had passed. Had he made some remark relative to her that had
caused this merriment? Her cheeks burned. She was angry. She hated him.
She was dull as a companion, and after three Sundays, as young Hannaway
“got no forrarder” with her, he gave her up and took to walking with Kate
Varcoe.
On the quay was a long bench, whereon the sailors and fishermen were
wont to sit and yarn. There Will, when at home, sat and yarned also—now
about ships, then about fish, about tobacco, and last about girls. He was
boastful, and laughed and said that he had only to hold up his little
finger and whistle, and half-a-dozen would perch on it. But this was so
strange in Will, so different from his wont, that an old pilot who had
known him from a child and now heard him, shook his head and said, “He’s
not got that Ciss out of his head yet, I’ll swear.”
Then the news came that Cicely was ill—very ill; “something on the
nerve,” so it was said, and others opined “her orgings were gone scatt.”
Will Swan asked no questions about her, but whistled “Black-eyed Susan”
with his hands in his pockets. It was obvious he cared nothing for her.
Then she began to mend. The disease, whatever it was, went “off the
nerve” again, or the “orgings” got patched up with powders or plaster.
Very white and weak, Cicely sat at her window and looked out. One day she
saw Will Swan coming along the way. “Is he about to ask after me?” she
thought. No, he went by. He did not turn in at the familiar—at one time
familiar—kitchen back entrance. He did not even look up at her window.
Now, at last, Cicely left our service. Her mother was dead, and some one
was needed at home to keep house for her father. She left us without a
word of regret. Indeed, she did not even say good-bye to my father and
mother. My dear mother, in her sweet, gentle way, reproached her for it
when they met.
“I thought, ma’am,” said Cicely, “if you’d wanted to say good-bye, you’d
ha’ come to the kitchen to say it to me. ’Twasn’t for me to intrude.”
“Oh! Cicely, after so many years!”—my mother’s eyes filled. She really
loved that girl, and from the depth of my heart I believe Cicely loved
her, but she was too perverse to show it.
“Now,” said Cicely to herself, “I’ll have no more nonsense.” By which she
meant that she would drive all thoughts of Will from her head. But this
is easier said and resolved on than accomplished. And you, we will say,
think that your thoughts, or fancies, are in your own power, that you can
trifle with them, and, when you like, put them aside. But when the day
comes that you _do_ wish thus to be rid of them, then you find yourself
entangled, chained in the passion, and you cannot break from it. So was
it with Cicely. She thought and worked for her old father more zealously
and lustily than she had for us, but only thought the more continuously
on, and suffered the keener for, young Will Swan.
Summer was over; autumn harvests were gathered in; Martinmas summer had
brooded over the land, enveloping all in a warm, lovely haze; and then,
suddenly came the change. Without warning an equinoctial gale burst on
the coast, the summer was over, the brightness past—winter had come with
gloom and sadness.
On the evening after it had been blowing great guns all day, the door was
thrown open, and one of the coastguard looked in.
“Jan Crowe!” called he to Cicely’s father, who had charge over the
lifeboat, “there’s the _Marianne_ wrecked.”
“The _Marianne_!”
Cicely uttered a cry. That was Will Swan’s vessel, or, rather, the vessel
in which Will Swan was. She ran down to the beach. The sea was almost
indistinguishable from the air, so lashed and shaken together was wave
with wind, so intermingled were foam and rain. The air was filled with
sound. The sands trembled with the beating of the surf on them. The whole
sky was brown and blurred with clouds sweeping along from the west,
inland, with screaming sea-birds peppered against the vapour, and salt
tears dripping out of it; now driving in rushes, then staying and drawing
up as a veil, and allowing the wind full play to riot and rend between
the clouds and the ocean.
All colour was gone out of land and sea and sky—gone as though melted
together into one medley of dull grey, never to be gathered together
into pure colour again. No outlines were clear. The bold points of land
that ran out into the sea were so be-hazed with spoondrift and rain that
they had changed their appearance, they had lost their consistency, they
seemed to waver and threaten to dissolve into the seething flood that
beat about them.
None but an experienced eye could distinguish the _Marianne_ in the haze
and tossing mass of sea.
Men and women, in fluttering garments, were on the beach, with their
hands to their eyes screening them, gazing seaward.
Cries rose for the boat to be launched. But in such a sea it was not
possible to do anything. The _Marianne_ was a wreck. No living being
was on her. The captain of the coast-guard put his glass to his eye and
looked steadily at the tossing—now seen, now obscured—patch that was once
the _Marianne_. In the gathering darkness little could be distinguished.
“They’ve left her,” he said. “There’s none aboard but a dog. Hark! you
can hear him bark.”
Those near held their breath.
“I can’t hear nothing,” said a seaman.
“You can if you look through my glass,” said the captain, “you can then
both see and hear the little dog yapping. He wouldn’t be yapping like
that unless he’d been left behind.”
“But where be they? There was Cap’n Thomas, and Simon Feathers, and Joe
Wilcock, and Bill Swan.”
“Aye,” said another, “and there’s Tony Graves; his mother be here in a
terrible take-on. ’Tis the first time the boy has been so far to sea.”
“Where be they?” asked the captain. “I can’t see anything of a boat.
They’ve took to it, sure as I’m here, and just as certain she’s capsized.”
“Then they’ll be washed ashore, dead or alive,” said one.
“Of course they will. ’Tain’t no use trying the lifeboat when you know
they’re not in the vessel. You don’t know where to look for ’em.”
So the shore was searched, and, first one, then another was recovered;
the boy Tony first, alive and not much the worse; then Joe Wilcock dead,
or so near death that there seemed no chance of recovering him. With the
barbarous ignorance then common, he was thrown across a barrel to let the
water run out of his lungs. He struggled, gasped, and was still.
Captain Thomas, a large stout man, holding to an oar, forged his way
ashore, but he was much bruised and cut by having been beaten against
sharp slate rocks like razors. He could not speak, but his eyes were
lively, black eyes under white bushy brows. After a quarter of an hour he
gasped out, “Where’s Tony? I stood my life to his mother I’d bring him
safe home.”
“Safe he is,” said some one near.
“Then that’s right,” said the captain. “Where’s the rest?”
They could tell him only of Joe Wilcock. Feathers and Swan had not been
washed ashore.
By this time it was night. Lanterns were flashing along the beach. Then
up from the water came some one; it was Cicely, drenched to the skin, her
hair streaming, but wet as seaweed. She was dragging in her arms a dark
mass.