Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Tiffany Vergon, Eric
Casteleijn and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
LYING PROPHETS
_A NOVEL_
BY EDEN PHILLPOTTS
_Author of "Down Dartmoor Way," "Some Everyday Folks" "The End of a
Life," etc._
_"'Tis like this: your man did take plain Nature for God, an' he did talk
fulishness 'bout finding Him in the scent o' flowers, the hum o' bees an'
sichlike. Mayhap Nature's a gude working God for a selfish man but she ed'n
wan for a maid, as you knaws by now. Then your faither--his God do sit
everlastingly alongside hell-mouth, an' do laugh an' girn to see all the
world a walkin' in, same as the beasts walked in the Ark. Theer's another
picksher of a God for 'e; but mark this, gal, they be lying prophets--lying
prophets both!"--Book II., Chapter XI._
BOOK ONE
_ART_
CHAPTER ONE
NEWLYN
Away beyond the village stands a white cottage with the sea lapping at low
cliffs beneath it. Plum and apple orchards slope upward behind this
building, and already, upon the former trees, there trembles a snowy gauze
where blossom buds are breaking. Higher yet, dark plowed fields, with
hedges whereon grow straight elms, cover the undulations of a great hill
even to its windy crest, and below, at the water line, lies Newlyn--a
village of gray stone and blue, with slate roofs now shining silver-bright
under morning sunlight and easterly wind. Smoke softens every outline;
red-brick walls and tanned sails bring warmth and color through the blue
vapor of many chimneys; a sun-flash glitters at this point and that,
denoting here a conservatory, there a studio. Enter this hive and you shall
find a network of narrow stone streets; a flutter of flannel underwear, or
blue stockings, and tawny garments drying upon lines; little windows, some
with rows of oranges and ginger-beer bottles in them; little shops; little
doors, at which cluster little children and many cats, the latter mostly
tortoise-shell and white. Infants watch their elders playing marbles in the
roadway, and the cats stretch lazy bodies on the mats, made of old
fishing-net, which lie at every cottage door. Newlyn stands on slight
elevations above the sea level, and at one point the road bends downward,
breaks and fringes the tide, leading among broken iron, rusty anchors, and
dismantled fishing-boats, past an ancient buoy whose sides now serve the
purposes of advertisement and tell of prayer-meetings, cheap tea, and so
forth. Hard by, the mighty blocks of the old breakwater stand, their fabric
dating from the reign of James I., and taking the place of one still older.
But the old breakwater is no more than a rialto for ancient gossips now;
and far beyond it new piers stretch encircling arms of granite round a new
harbor, southward of which the lighthouse stands and winks his sleepless
golden eye from dusk to dawn. Within this harbor, when the fishing fleet is
at home, lie jungles of stout masts, row upon row, with here and there a
sail, carrying on the color of the plowed fields above the village, and
elsewhere, scraps of flaming bunting flashing like flowers in a reed bed.
Behind the masts, along the barbican, the cottages stand close and thick,
then clamber and straggle up the acclivities behind, decreasing in their
numbers as they ascend. Smoke trails inland on the wind--black as a thin
crepe veil, from the funnel of a coal "tramp" about to leave the harbor,
blue from the dry wood burning on a hundred cottage hearths. A smell of
fish--where great split pollocks hang drying in the sun--of tar and tan and
twine--where nets and cordage lie spread upon low walls and open
spaces--gives to Newlyn an odor all its own; but aloft, above the village
air, spring is dancing, sweet-scented, light-footed in the hedgerows,
through the woods and on the wild moors which stretch inland away. There
the gold of the gorse flames in many a sudden sheet and splash over the
wastes whereon last year's ling-bloom, all sere and gray, makes a
sad-colored world. But the season's change is coming fast. Celandines
twinkle everywhere, and primroses, more tardy and more coy, already open
wondering eyes. The sea lies smooth with a surface just wind-kissed and
strewed with a glory of sun-stars. Away to the east, at a point from which
brown hills, dotted with white dwellings, tend in long undulations to the
cliffs of the Lizard, under fair clouds all banked and sunny white against
the blue, rises St. Michael's Mount, with a man's little castle capping
Nature's gaunt escarpments and rugged walls. Between Marazion and Newlyn
stretches Mount's Bay; while a mile or two of flat sea-front, over which,
like a string of pearls, roll steam clouds, from a train, bring us to
Penzance. Then--noting centers of industry where freezing works rise and
smelting of ore occupies many men (for Newlyn labors at the two extremes of
fire and ice)--we are back in the fishing village again and upon the
winding road which leads therefrom, first to Penlee Point and the
blue-stone quarry, anon to the little hamlet of Mousehole beyond.
Beside this road lay our white cottage, with the sunshine lighting up a
piece of new golden thatch let into the old gray, and the plum-trees behind
it bursting into new-born foam of flowers. Just outside it, above the low
cliff, stood two men looking down into the water, seen dark green below
through a tangle of brier and blackthorn and emerald foliage of budding
elder. The sea served base uses here, for the dust and dirt of many a
cottage was daily cast into the lap of the great scavenger who carried all
away. The low cliffs were indeed spattered with filth, and the coltsfoot,
already opening yellow blossoms below, found itself rudely saluted with
cinders and potato-peelings, fishes' entrails, and suchlike unlovely
matter.
The men were watching a white fleet of bird boats paddling on the sea,
hurrying this way and that, struggling--with many a plunge and flutter and
plaintive cry--for the food a retreating tide was bearing from the shore.
"'White spirits and gray,' I call them," said the younger of the two
spectators. "The gulls fascinate me always. They are beautiful to see and
hear and paint. Swimming there, and wheeling between the seas in rough
weather, or hanging almost motionless in midair with their heads turning
first this way, then that, and their breasts pressed against the
wind--why, they are perfect always, the little winged gods of the sea."
"Gods kissing carrion," sneered the other. "Beautiful enough, no doubt, but
their music holds no charm for me. Nothing is quite beautiful which has for
its cause something ugly. Those echoing cries down there are the expression
of a greedy struggle, no more. I hate your Newlyn gulls. They are ruined,
like a thousand other wild things, by civilization. I see them scouring the
fields and hopping after the plowman like upland crows. A Cornish seabird
should fight its battle with the sea and find its home in the heart of the
dizzy cliffs, sharing them with the samphire. But your 'white spirits and
gray' behave like gutter-fed ducks."
The first speaker laughed and both strolled upon their way. They were
artists, but while Edmund Murdoch dwelt at Newlyn and lived by his
profession, the older man, John Barron, was merely on a visit to the place.
He had come down for change and with no particular intention to work.
Barron was wealthy and wasted rare talents. He did not paint much, and the
few who knew his pictures deplored the fact that no temporal inducement
called upon him to handle his brush oftener. A few excused him on the plea
of his health, which was at all times indifferent, but he never excused
himself. It needed something far from the beaten track to inspire him, and
inspiration was rare. But let a subject once grip him and the artist's life
centered and fastened upon it until his work was done. He sacrificed
everything at such a time; he slaved; labor was to him as a debauch to the
drunkard, and he wearied body and mind and counted his health nothing while
the frenzy held him. Then, his picture finished, at the cost of the man's
whole store of nervous energy and skill, he would probably paint no more
for many months. His subject was always some transcript from nature,
wrought out with almost brutal vigor and disregard of everything but truth.
His looks belied his work curiously. A small, slight man he was, with
sloping shoulders and the consumptive build. But the breadth of his head
above the ears showed brain, and his gray eyes spoke a strength of purpose
upon which a hard, finely-modeled mouth set the seal. Once he had painted
in the West Indies: a picture of two negresses bathing at Tobago. Behind
them hung low tangles of cactus, melo-cactus and white-blossomed orchid;
while on the tawny rocks glimmered snowy cotton splashed with a crimson
turban; but the marvel of the work lay in the figures and the refraction of
their brown limbs seen through crystal-clear water. The picture brought
reputation to a man who cared nothing for it; and Barron's "Bathing
Negresses" are only quoted here because they illustrate his method of work.
He had painted from the sea in a boat moored fore and aft; he had kept the
two women shivering and whining in the water for two hours at a time. They
could not indeed refuse the gold he offered for their services, but one
never lived to enjoy the money, for her prolonged ablutions in the cause of
art killed her a week after her work was done.
John Barren was a lonely sybarite with a real love for Nature and
absolutely primitive instincts with regard to his fellow-creatures. The
Land's End had disappointed him; he had found Nature neither grand nor
terrific there, but sleepy and tame as a cat after a full meal. Nor did he
derive any pleasure from the society of his craft at Newlyn. He hated the
clatter of art jargon, he flouted all schools, and pointed out what nobody
doubts now: that the artists of the Cornish village in reality represented
nothing but a community of fellow-workers, all actuated indeed by love of
art, but each developing his own bent without thought for his neighbor's
theory. Barron indeed made some enemies before he had been in the place a
week, and the greater lights liked him none the better for vehemently
disclaiming the honor when they told him he was one of themselves. "The
shape of a brush does not make men paint alike," he said, "else we were all
equal and should only differ in color. Some of you can no more paint with a
square brush than you can with a knife. Some of you could not paint though
your palettes were set with Nature's own sunset colors. And others of you,
if you had a rabbit's scut at the end of a hop-pole and the gray mud from a
rain puddle, would produce work worth considering. You are a community of
painters--some clever, some hopeless--but you are not a school, and you may
thank God for it."
John Barron was rough tonic, but the fearless little man generally found an
audience at the end of the day in this studio or that. The truth of much
that he said appealed to the lofty-minded and serious; his dry cynicism,
savage dislike of civilization, and frank affection for Nature, attracted
others. He hit hard, but he never resented rough knocks in return, and no
man had seen him out of temper with anything but mysticism and the art bred
therefrom. Upon the whole, however, his materialism annoyed more than his
wit amused.
Upon the evening which followed his insult to the Newlyn gulls, Barron,
with Edmund Murdoch and some other men, was talking in the studio of one
Brady, known to fame as the "Wrecker," from his love for the artistic
representation of maritime disaster. Barron liked this man, for he was
outspoken and held vigorous views, but the two quarreled freely.
"Fate was a fool when she chucked her presents into the lap of a lazy
beggar like you," said Brady, addressing the visitor. "And thrice a fool,"
he added, "to assort her gifts so ill."
"Fate is a knave, a mad thing playing at cat's cradle with the threads of
our wretched little lives," answered John Barron, "she is a coward--a
bully. She hits the hungry below the belt; she heaps gold into the lap of
the old man, but not till he has already dug his own grave to come at it;
she gives health to those who must needs waste all their splendid strength
on work; and wealth to worthless beings like myself who are always ailing
and who never spend a pound with wisdom. Make no dark cryptic mystery of
Fate when you paint her. She looks to me like a mischievous monkey poking
sticks into an ant-hill."
"She's a woman," said Murdoch.
"She's three," corrected Brady; "what can you expect from three women
rolled into one?"
"Away with her! Waste no incense at her shrine. She'll cut the thread no
sooner because you turn your back on her. Fling overboard your
mythologies, dead and alive, and kneel to Nature. A budding spike of wild
hyacinth is worth all the gods put together. Go hand in hand with Nature, I
say. Ask nothing from her; walk humbly; be well content if she lets you but
turn the corner of one page none else have read. That's how I live. My life
is not a prayer exactly--"
"I should say not," interrupted Brady.
"But a hymn of praise--a purely impersonal existence, lived all alone, like
a man at a prison window. This carcass, with its shaky machinery and
defective breathing apparatus, is the prison. I look out of the window till
the walls crumble away--"
"And then?" asked one Paul Tarrant, a painter who prided himself on being a
Christian as well.
"Then, the spark which I call myself, goes back to Nature, as the cloud
gives the raindrop back to the sea from whence the sun drew it."
"A lie, man!" answered the other hotly.
"Perhaps. It matters nothing. God--if there be a God--will not blame me for
making a mistake. Meantime I live like the rook and the thrush. They never
pray, they praise, they sing 'grace before meat' and after it, as Nature
taught them."
"A simple child of Nature--beautiful spectacle," said Brady. "But I'm sorry
all the same," he continued, "that you've found nothing in Cornwall to keep
you here and make you do some work. You talk an awful deal of rot, but we
want to see you paint. Isn't there anything or anybody worthy of you here?"
"As a matter of face, I've found a girl," said Barron.
There was a clamor of excitement at this news, above which Brady's bull
voice roared approval.
"Proud girl, proud parents, proud Newlyn!" he bellowed.
"The mood ripens too," continued Barren quietly. "'Sacrifice all the world
to mood' is my motto. So I shall stop and paint."
A moment later derisive laughter greeted Barron's decision, for Murdoch, in
answer to a hail of questions, announced the subject of his friend's
inspiration.
"We strolled round this morning and saw Joan Tregenza in an iron hoop with
a pail of water slung at either hand."
"So your picture begins and ends where it is, Barron, my friend; in your
imagination. Did it strike you when you first saw that vision of loveliness
in dirty drab that she was hardly the girl to have gone unpainted till
now?" asked Brady.
"The possibility of previous pictures is hardly likely to weigh with me.
Why, I would paint a drowned sailor if the subject attracted me, and that
though you have done it," answered the other, nodding toward a big canvas
in the corner, where Brady's picture for the year approached completion.
"My dear chap, we all worship Joan--at a distance. She is not to be
painted. Tears and prayers are useless. She has a flinty father--a
fisherman, who looks upon painting as a snare of the devil and sees every
artist already wriggling on the trident in his mind's eye. Joan has also a
lover, who would rather behold her dead than on canvas."
"In fact these Methodist folk take us to be what you really are," said
Brady bluntly. "Old Tregenza tars us every one with the same brush. We are
lost sinners all."
"Well, why trouble him? A fisherman would have his business on the sea.
Candidly, I must paint her. The wish grows upon me."
"Even money you don't get as much as a sketch," said Murdoch.
"Have any of you tried approaching her directly, instead of her relations?"
"She's as shy as a hawk, man."
"That makes me the more hopeful. You fellows, with your Tam o' Shanters and
aggressive neckties and knickerbockers and calves, would frighten the
devil. I'm shy myself. If she's natural, then we shall possibly understand
each other."
"I'll bet you ten to one in pounds you won't have your wish," said Brady.
"No, shan't bet. You're all so certain. Probably I shall find myself beaten
like the rest of you. But it's worth trying. She's a pretty thing."
"How will you paint her if you get the chance?"
"Don't know yet. I should like to paint her in a wolf-skin with a thread of
wolf's teeth round her neck and a celt-headed spear in her hand."
"Art will be a loser by the pending repulse," declared Brady. "And now, as
my whisky-bottle's empty and my lamp going out, you chaps can follow its
example whenever you please."
So the men scattered into a starry night, and went, each his way, through
the streets of the sleeping village.
CHAPTER TWO
IN A HALO OF GOLD
Edmund Murdoch's studio stood high on Newlyn hill, and Barron had taken
comfortable rooms in a little lodging-house close beside it. The men often
enjoyed breakfast in each other's company, but on the following morning,
when Murdoch strolled over to see his friend, he found that his rooms were
empty.
Barron, in fact, was already nearly a mile from Newlyn, and, at the moment
when the younger artist sought him, he stood upon a footpath which ran
through plowed fields to the village of Paul. In the bottom of his mind ran
a current of thought occupied with the problem of Joan Tregenza, but,
superficially, he was concerned with the spring world in which he walked.
He stood where Nature, like Artemis, appeared as a mother of many breasts.
Brown and solemn in their undulations, they rose about and around him to
the sky-line, where the land cut sharply against a pale blue heaven from
which tinkled the music of larks. He watched a bird wind upward in a spiral
to its song throne; he noted the young wheat brushing the earth with a veil
of green; he dawdled where elms stood, their high tops thick with blossom;
and he delayed for full fifteen minutes to see the felling of one giant
tree. A wedge-shaped cut had been made upon the side where the great elm
was to fall, and, upon the other side, two men were sawing through the
trunk. There was no sound but the steady hiss of steel teeth gnawing inch
by inch to the wine-red heart of the tree. Sunshine glimmered on its leafy
crown, and as yet distant branch and bough knew nothing of the midgets and
Death below.
Barron took pleasure in seeing the great god Change at work, but he mourned
in that a masterpiece, on which Nature had bestowed half a century and more
of love, must now vanish.
"A pity," he said, while the executioners rested a few moments from their
labors, "a pity to cut down such a noble tree."
One woodman laughed, and the other--an old rustic, brown and bent--made
answer:
"I sez 'dang the tree!' Us doan't take no joy in thrawin' en, mister. I be
bedoled wi' pain, an' this 'ere sawin's just food for rheumatiz. My back's
that bad. But Squire must 'ave money, an' theer's five hundred pounds'
value o' ellum comin' down 'fore us done wi' it."
The saw won its way; and between each spell of labor, the ancient man held
his back and grumbled.
"Er's Billy Jago," confided the second laborer to Barron, when his
companion had turned aside to get some steel wedges and a sledge-hammer.
"Er's well-knawn in these paarts--a reg'lar cure. Er used tu work up Drift
wi' Mister Chirgwin."
Billy added two wedges to those already hammered into the saw-cut, then,
with the sledge, he drove them home and finished his task. The sorrowful
strokes rang hollow and mournful over the land, sadder to Barron's ear than
fall of earth-clod on coffin-lid. And, upon the sound, a responsive shiver
and uneasy tremor ran through trunk and bough to topmost twig of the elm--a
sudden sense, as it seemed, of awful evil and ruin undreamed of, but now
imminent. Then the monster staggered and the midget struck his last blow
and removed himself and his rheumatism. Whereupon began that magnificent
descent. Slowly, with infinitely solemn sweep, the elm's vast height swung
away from its place, described a wide aerial arc, and so, with the jolting
crash and rattle of close thunder, roared headlong to the earth, casting up
a cloud of dust, plowing the grass with splintered limbs, then lying very
still. From glorious tree to battered log it sank. No man ever saw more
instant wreck and ruin fall lightning-like on a fair thing. The mass was
crushed flat and shapeless by its own vast weight, and the larger boughs,
which did not touch the earth, were snapped short off by the concussion of
their fall.
Billy Jago held his back and whined while Barron spoke, as much to himself
as the woodman.
"Dear God!" he said, "to think that this glory of the hedge-row--this
kingdom of song birds--should come to the making of pauper coffins and
lodging-house furniture!"
"Squire must have money; an' folks must have coffins," said Billy. "You can
sleep your last sleep so sound in ellum as you can in oak, for that
matter."
Feeling the truth of the assertion, Barron admitted it, then turned his
back on the fallen king and pursued his way with thoughts reverting to the
proposed picture. There was nothing to alarm Joan Tregenza about him; which
seemed well, as he meant to approach the girl herself at the first
opportunity, and not her parents. Barron did not carry "artist" stamped
upon him. He was plainly attired in a thick tweed suit and wore a cap of
the same material. The man appeared insignificantly small. He was
clean-shaved and looked younger than his five-and-thirty years seen a short
distance off, but older when you stood beside him. He strolled now onward
toward the sea, and his cheeks took some color from the fine air. He walked
with a stick and carried a pair of field-glasses in a case slung over his
shoulder. The field-glasses had become a habit with him, but he rarely used
them, for his small slate-colored eyes were keen.
Once and again John Barron turned to look at St. Michael's Mount, seen afar
across the bay. The magic of morning made it beautiful and the great pile
towered grandly through a sunny haze. No detail disturbed the eye under
this effect of light, and the mount stood vast, dim, golden, magnified and
glorified into a fairy palace of romance built by immortal things in a
night. Seen thus, it even challenged the beholder's admiration, of which he
was at all times sparing. Until that hour, he had found nothing but
laughter for this same mount, likening the spectacle of it, with its castle
and cottages, now to a senile monarch with moth-eaten ermine about his toes
and a lop-sided crown on his head, now to a monstrous sea-snail creeping
shoreward.
Barron, having walked down the hill to Mouse-hole, breasted slowly the
steep acclivity which leads therefrom toward the west. Presently he turned,
where a plateau of grass sloped above the cliffs into a little theater of
banks ablaze with gorse. And here his thoughts and the image they were
concerned with perished before reality. Framed in a halo of golden furze,
her hands making a little penthouse above her brow, and in her blue eyes
the mingled hue of sea and sky, stood a girl looking out at the horizon.
The bud of a wondrous fair woman she was, and Barron saw her slim yet
vigorous figure accentuated under its drab-brown draperies by a kindly
breeze. He noted the sweet, childish freshness of her face, her plump arms
filling the sleeves of rusty black, and her feet in shoes too big for them.
Her hair was hidden under a linen sun-bonnet, but one lock had escaped, and
he noted that it was the color of wheat ripe for the reaping. He regretted
it had not been darker, but observed that it chimed well enough with the
flaming flowers behind it. And then he frankly praised Nature in his heart
for sending her servant such a splendid harmony in gold and brown. There
stood his picture in front of him. He gazed a brief second only, and then
his quick mind worked to find what human interest had brought Joan Tregenza
to this place and turned her eyes to the sea. It might be that herein
existed the possibility of the introduction he desired. He felt that
victory probably depended on the events of the next two or three minutes.
He owed a supreme effort of skill and tact to Fate, which had thus
befriended him, and he rose to the occasion.
The girl looked up as he came suddenly upon her, but his eyes were already
away and fixed upon the horizon before she turned. Observing that he was
not regarding her, she put up her hands again and continued to scan the
remote sea-line where a thin trail of dark smoke told of a steamer, itself
apparently invisible. Barron took his glasses from their case, and seeing
that the girl made no movement of departure, acted deliberately, and
presently began to watch a fleet of brown sails and black hulls putting
forth from the little harbor below. Then, without looking at her or taking
his eyes from the glasses, he spoke.
"Would you kindly tell me what those small vessels are below there just
setting out to sea?" he asked.
The girl started, looked round, and, realizing that he had addressed her,
made answer:
"They'm Mouzle [Footnote: _Mouzle_--Mousehole.] luggers, sir."
"Luggers, are they? Thank you. And where are they sailing to? Do you know?"
"Away down-long, south'ard o' the Scillies mostly, arter mackerl. Theer's a
power o' mackerl bein' catched just now--thousands an' thousands--but some
o' they booats be laskin'--that's just fishin' off shore."
"Ah, a busy time for the fishermen."
"Iss, 'tis."
"Thank you. Good-morning."
"Good-marnin', sir."
He started as though to continue his walk along the cliffs beyond the
plateau and the gorse; then he stopped suddenly, actuated, as it seemed, by
a chance thought, and turned back to the girl. She was looking out to sea
again.
"By the way," he said, unconcernedly, and with no suggestion that anything
in particular was responsible for his politeness. "I see you are on the
lookout there for something. You may have my glass a moment, if you like,
before I go on. They bring the ships very close."
The girl flushed with shy pleasure and seemed a little uncertain what to
answer. Barron, meanwhile, showed no trace of a smile, but looked bored if
anything, and, with a serious face, handed her the glass, then walked a
little way off. He was grave and courteous, but made no attempt at
friendship. He had noticed when Joan smiled that her teeth were fine, and
that her full face, though sweet enough, was a shade too plump.
"Thank 'e kindly, sir," she said, taking the glass. "You see theer's a gert
ship passin' down Channel, an'--an' my Joe's aboard 'er, an' they'm bound
for furrin' paarts, an' I promised as I'd come to this here horny-winky
[Footnote: _Horny-winky_--Lonely. Fit place for horny-winks.] plaace to get
a last sight o' the vessel if I could." He made no answer, and, after a
pause, she spoke again.
"I caan't see naught, but that's my fault, p'raps, not bein' used to sich
things."
"Let me try and find the ship," he said, taking the glass, which he had put
out of focus purposely. Then, while scanning the horizon where he had noted
the smoke-trail, he spoke, his head turned from her.
"Who's Joe, if I may ask? Your brother, I daresay?"
"No, sir; Joe'm my sweetheart."
"There's a big three-masted ship being taken down the Channel by a small
steamer."
"Ah! then I reckon that's the 'Anna,' 'cause Joe said 'twas tolerable
certain they'd be in tow of a tug."
"You can see the smoke on the edge of the sea. Look below it."
He handed the glasses to her again and heard a little laugh of delight
break from her lips. The surprise of the suddenly-magnified spectacle,
visible only as a shadow to the naked eye, brought laughter; and Barron,
now that the girl's attention was occupied, had leisure to look at her. She
was more than a pretty cottage maid, and possessed some distinction and
charm. There was a delicacy about her too--a sweet turn of lip, a purity of
skin, a set of limb--which gave the lie to her rough speech. She was all
Saxon to look at, with nothing of the Celt about her excepting her name and
the old Cornish words upon her lips. Those he rejoiced in, for they showed
that she still remained a free thing, primitive, innocent of School Boards,
or like frost-biting influences.
Barron took mental notes. Joan Tregenza was a careless young woman, it
seemed. Her dress had a button or two missing in front, and a safety-pin
had taken their place. Her drab skirt was frayed a little and patched in
one corner with a square of another material. But the colors were well
enough, from the artist's point of view. He noted also that the girl's
stockings were darned and badly needed further attention, for above her
right shoe-heel a white scrap of Joan was visible. Her hands were a little
large, but well shaped; her pose was free and fine, though the
field-glasses spoiled the picture and the sun-bonnet hid the contour of her
head.
"So you walked out from Mouzle to see the last of Joe's ship?" he asked,
quite seriously and with no light note in his voice.
"From Newlyn. I ed'n a Mouzle maid," she answered.
"Is the 'Anna' coming home again soon?"
"No, sir. Her's bound for the Gulf of Californy, round t'other side the
world, Joe sez. He reckons to be back agin' come winter."
"That's a long time."
"Iss, 'tis."
But there was no sentiment about the answer. Joan gazed without a shadow of
emotion at the vanishing ship, and alluded to the duration of her
sweetheart's absence in a voice that never trembled. Then she gave the
glass back to Barron with many thanks, and evidently wanted to be gone, but
stopped awkwardly, not quite knowing how to depart.
Meanwhile, showing no further cognizance of her, Barron took the glasses
himself and looked at the distant ship.
"A splendid vessel," he said. "I expect you have a picture of her, haven't
you?"
"No," she answered, "but I've got a lil ship Joe cut out o' wood an'
painted butivul. Awnly that's another vessel what Joe sailed in afore."
"I'll tell you what I'll do," he said, "because you were good enough to
explain all about the fishing-boats. I'll make a tiny picture of the 'Anna'
and paint it and give it to you."
But the girl took fright instantly.
"You'm a artist, then?" she said, with alarm in her face and voice.
He shook his head.
"No, no. Do I look like an artist? I'm only a stranger down here for a day
or two. I paint things sometimes for my own amusement, that's all."
"Pickshers?"
"They are not worth calling pictures. Just scraps of the sea and trees and
cliffs and sky, to while away the time and remind me of beautiful things
after I have left them."
"You ban't a artist ezacally, then?"
"Certainly not. Don't you like artists?"
"Faither don't. He'm a fisherman an' caan't abear many things as happens in
the world. An' not artists. Genlemen have arsked him to let 'em take my
picksher, 'cause they've painted a good few maidens to Newlyn; an' some of
'em wanted to paint faither as well; but he up an' sez 'No!' short.
Paintin's vanity 'cordin' to faither, same as they flags an' cannels an'
moosic to Newlyn church is vanity. Most purty things is vanity, faither
reckons."
"I'm sure he's a wise man. And I think he's right, especially about the
candles and flags in church. And now I must go on my walk. Let me see,
shall I bring you the little picture of Joe's ship here? I often walk out
this way."
He assumed she would take the picture, and now she feared to object.
Moreover, such a sketch would be precious in her eyes.
"Maybe 'tis troublin' of 'e, sir?"
"I've promised you. I always keep my word. I shall be here to-morrow about
mid-afternoon, because it is lonely and quiet and beautiful. I'm going to
try and paint the gorse, all blazing so brightly against the sky."
"Them prickly fuzz-bushes?"
"Yes; because they are very beautiful."
"But they'm everywheres. You might so well paint the bannel [Footnote:
_Bannel_--Broom.] or the yether on the moors, mightn't 'e?"
"They are beautiful, too. Remember, I shall have Joe's ship for you
to-morrow."
He nodded without smiling, and turned away until a point of the gorse had
hidden her from sight. Then he sat down, loaded his pipe, and reflected.
"'Joe's ship,'" he said to himself, "a happy title enough."
And meantime the girl had looked after him with wonder and some amusement
in her eyes, had rubbed her chin reflectively--a habit caught from her
father--and had then scampered off smiling to herself.
"What a funny gent," she thought, "never laughs nor nothin'. An' I judged
he was a artist! But wonnerful kind, an' wonnerful queer, wi' it, sure
'nough."
CHAPTER THREE
THE TREGENZAS
Joan Tregenza lived in a white cottage already mentioned: that standing
just beyond Newlyn upon a road above the sea. The cot was larger than it
appeared from the road and extended backward into an orchard of plum and
apple-trees. The kitchen which opened into this garden was stone-paved,
cool, comfortable, sweet at all times with the scent of wood smoke, and
frequently not innocent of varied fishy odors. But Newlyn folk suck in a
smell of fish with their mothers' milk. 'Tis part of the atmosphere of
home.
When Joan returned from her visit to Gorse Point, she found a hard-faced
woman, thin of figure, with untidy hair, wrinkled brow and sharp features,
engaged about a pile of washing in the garden at the kitchen-door. Mrs.
Tregenza heard the girl arrive, and spoke without lifting her little gray
eyes from the clothes. Her voice was hard and high and discontented, like
that of one who has long bawled into a deaf man's ear and is weary of it.
"Drabbit you! Wheer you bin? Allus trapsing out when you'm wanted; allus
caddlin' round doin' nothin' when you ban't. I s'pose you think breakfus'
can be kep' on the table till dinner, washing-day or no?"
"I don't want no breakfus', then. I tuke some bread an' drippin' long with
me. Wheer's Tom to?"
"Gone to schule this half-hour. 'Tis nine o'clock an' past. Wheer you bin,
I sez? 'Tain't much in your way to rise afore me of a marnin'."
"Out through Mouzle to Gorse P'int to see Joe's ship pass by; an' I seen en
butivul."
"Thank the Lard he's gone. Now, I s'pose, theer'll be a bit peace in the
house, an' you'll bide home an' work. My fingers is to the bone day an'
night."
"He'll be gone a year purty nigh."
"Well, the harder you works, the quicker the time'll pass by. Theer's
nuthin' to grizzle at. Sea-farin' fellers must be away most times. But he'm
a good, straight man, an' you'm tokened to en, an' that's enough. Bide
cheerful an' get the water for washin'. If they things of faither's bant
dry come to-morrer, he'll knaw the reason why."
Joan accepted Mrs. Tregenza's comfort philosophically, though her
sweetheart's departure had not really caused her any emotion. She visited
the larder, drank a cup of milk, and then, fetching an iron hoop and
buckets, went to a sunken barrel outside the cottage door, into which, from
a pipe through the road-bank, tumbled a silver thread of spring water.
Of the Tregenza household a word must needs be spoken. Joan's own mother
had died twelve years ago, and the anxious-natured woman who took her place
proved herself a good step-parent enough. Despite a disposition prone to
worry and to dwell upon the small tribulations of life, Thomasin Tregenza
was not unhappy, for her husband enjoyed prosperity and a reputation for
godliness unequaled in Newlyn. A great, weather-worn, gray, hairy man was
he, with a big head and a furrowed cliff of a forehead that looked as
though it had been carved by its Creator from Cornish granite. Tregenza
indeed might have stood for a typical Cornish fisher--or a Breton. Like
enough, indeed, he had old Armorican blood in his veins, for many hundreds
of Britons betook themselves to ancient Brittany when the Saxon invasion
swept the West, and many afterward returned, with foreign wives, to the
homes of their fathers. Michael Tregenza had found religion, of a sort
fiery and unlovely enough, but his convictions were definite, with
iron-hard limitations, and he looked coldly and without pity on a damned
world, himself saved. Gray Michael had no sympathy with sin and less with
sinners. He found the devil in most unexpected quarters and was always
dragging him out of surprising hiding-places and exhibiting him
triumphantly, as a boy might show a bird's egg or butterfly. His devil
dwelt at penny readings, at fairs and festivals, in the brushes of the
artists, in a walk on a Sunday afternoon undertaken without a definite
object, sometimes in a primrose given by a boy to a girl. Of all these
bitter, self-righteous, censorious little sects which raise each its own
ladder to the Throne of Grace at Newlyn, the Luke Gospelers was the most
bitter, most self-righteous, most censorious. And of all those burning
lights which reflected the primitive savagery of the Pentateuch from that
fold, Gray Michael's beacon flamed the fiercest and most bloody red. There
was not a Gospeler, including the pastor of the flock, but feared the
austere fisherman while admiring him.
Concerning his creed, at the risk of wearying you, it must be permitted to
speak here; for only by grasping its leading features and its vast
unlikeness to the parent tree can a just estimate of Michael Tregenza be
arrived at. Luke Gospeldom had mighty little to do with the Gospel of Luke.
The sect numbered one hundred and thirty-four just persons, at war with
principalities and powers. They were saturated with the spirit of Israel in
the Wilderness, of Esau, when every man's hand was against him. At their
chapel one heard much of Jehovah, the jealous God, of the burning lakes and
the damnation reserved for mankind, as a whole. Every Luke Gospeler was a
Jehovah in his own right. They walked hand in hand with God; they realized
the dismay and indignation Newlyn must occasion in His breast; they
sympathized heartily with the Everlasting and would have called down fire
from Heaven themselves if they could. Many openly wondered that He delayed
so long, for, from a Luke Gospeler's point of view, the place with its
dozen other chapels--each held in error by the rest, and all at deadly war
among themselves--its most vile ritualistic church of St. Peter, its
public-houses, scandals, and strifes, was riper for destruction than Sodom.
However, the hundred and thirty-four served to stave off celestial
brimstone, as it seemed.
It is pitiable, in the face of the majestic work of John Wesley in
Cornwall, to see the shattered ruins of it which remain. When the Wesleys
achieved their notable revival and swept off the dust of a dead Anglicanism
which covered religious Cornwall like a pall in the days of the Georges,
the old Celtic spirit, though these heroes found it hard enough to
rekindle, burst from its banked-up furnaces at last and blazed abroad once
more. That spirit had been bred by the saint bishops of Brito-Celtic days,
and Wesley's ultimate success was a grand repetition of history, as extant
records of the ancient use of the Church in Cornwall prove. Its principle
was that he who filled a bishop's office should, before all things, conduct
and develop missionary enterprise; and the moral and physical courage of
the Brito-Celtic bishops, having long slumbered, awoke again in John
Wesley. He built on the old foundations, he gave to the laymen a power at
that time blindly denied them by the Church--the power which Irish and
Welsh and Breton missionary saints of old had vested in them.
Wesley--himself a giant--made wise use of the strong where he found them,
and if a man--tinker or tinner, fisher or jowster--could preach and grip an
audience, that man might do so. Thus had the founders of the new creed
developed it; thus does the Church to-day; but when John Wesley filled his
empty belly with blackberries at St. Hilary, in 1743; when he thundered
what he deemed eternal truth through Cornwall, year after year for half a
century; when he faced a thousand perils by sea and land and spent his
arduous days "in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fasting often,
in cold and nakedness"; when, in fine, this stupendous man achieved the
foundations of Methodism, the harvest was overripe, at any rate, in
Cornwall. No Nonconformist was he, though few enough of his followers
to-day remember that, if they ever knew it. He worked for his church; he
was a link between it and his party; his last prayer was for church and
king--a fact which might have greatly shocked the Luke Gospelers had such
come to their ears. For John Wesley was their only saint, and they honestly
believed that they alone of all Methodist communities were following in his
footsteps. Poor souls! they lived as far from what Wesley taught as it is
easily possible to conceive. As for Gray Michael, he was under the
impression that he and his sect worthily held aloft the true light which
Wesley brought in person to Newlyn, and he talked with authority upon the
subject of his master and his master's doings. But he knew little about the
founder of Methodism in reality, and still less about the history of the
Methodist movement. Had he learned that John Wesley himself was once
accused of Popish practices; had he known that not until some years after
the great preacher's death did his party, in conference assembled, separate
itself from the Church of England, he had doubtless been much amazed.
Though saturated with religious feeling, the man was wholly ignorant of
religious history in so far as it affected his own country. To him all
saints not mentioned in Scripture were an abomination and invention of
Rome. Had he been informed that the venerable missionary saints of his
mother land were in no case Romish, another vast surprise must have awaited
him.
Let it not for an instant be supposed that the Luke Gospelers represented
right Methodism. But they fairly exemplified a sorry side of it; those
little offshoots of which dozens have separated from the parent tree; and
they exhibited most abundantly in themselves that canker-worm of Pharisaism
which gnaws at the root of all Nonconformity. This offense, combined with
such intolerance and profound ignorance as was to be found amid the Luke
Gospelers, produced a community merely sad or comic to consider according
to the point of view.
An instance of Michael Tregenza's attitude to the Church will illustrate
better than analysis the lines of thought on which he served his Creator.
Once, when she was thirteen, Joan had gone to an evening service at St.
Peter's, because a friend had dared her to do so. Her father was at sea and
she believed the delinquency could by no possibility reach his ears. But a
Luke Gospeler heard the dread tidings and Michael Tregenza was quickly
informed of his daughter's lapse. He accused Joan quietly enough, and she
confessed.
"Then you'm a damned maiden," he said, "'cause you sinned open-eyed."
He thought the matter over for a week, and finally an idea occurred to him.
"'Tis wi'in the power o' God to reach even you back," he declared to Joan,
"an' He's put in my mind that chastenin' might do it. A sore body's saved
many sowls 'fore now."
Whereupon he took his daughter into the little parlor, shut the door, and
then flogged her as he would have flogged a boy--only using his hard hand
instead of a stick. "Get thee behind her, Satan! Get thee behind her,
Satan! Get thee behind her, Satan!" he groaned with every blow, while Joan
grit her teeth and bore it as long as she could, then screamed and fainted.
That was how the truth about heaven and hell came to her. She had never
felt physical pain before, and eternal torment was merely an idea. From
that day, however, she was frightened and listened to her father gladly and
wept tears of thankfulness when, a month after her flogging, he explained
that he had wrestled with the Lord for her soul and how it had been borne
in upon him that she was saved alive. She had reached the age of seventeen
now, and felt quite confident upon the subject of eternity as became a
right Luke Gospeler. Unlike other women of the sect, however, and despite
extreme ignorance on all subjects, the girl had a seed of humor in her
nature only waiting circumstances to ripen. She felt pity, too, for the
great damned world, and though religion turned life sad-colored, her own
simple, healthy, animal nature and high spirits brought ample share of
sunshine and delight. She was, in fact, her mother's child rather than her
father's. His ancestors before him had fought the devil and lived honest
lives under a cloud of fear; Michael's own brother had gone religious mad,
when still a young man, and died in a lunatic asylum; indeed the awful
difficulty of saving his soul had been in the blood of every true Tregenza
for generations. But Joan's mother came of different stock. The Chirgwins
were upland people. They dwelt at Drift and elsewhere, went to the nearest
church, held simple views, and were content with orthodox religion. Mr.
Tregenza said of them that they always wanted and expected God to do more
than His share. But he married Joan Chirgwin, nevertheless; and now he saw
her again, fair, trustful, light-hearted, in his daughter. The girl indeed
had more of her mother in her than Gray Michael liked. She was
superstitious, not after the manner of the Tregenzas, but in a direction
that must have brought her father's loudest thunders upon her head if the
matter had come to his ears. She loved the old stories of the saints and
spirits, she gloried secretly in the splendid wealth of folklore and
tradition her mother's people and those like them possessed at command. Her
dead parent had whispered and sung these matters into Joan's baby ears
until her father stopped it. She remembered how black he looked when she
lisped about the piskeys; and though to-day she half believed in demon and
fairy, goblin and giant, and quite believed in the saints and their
miracles, she kept this side of her intelligence close locked when at home,
and only nodded very gravely when her father roared against the blighting
credulity of men's minds and the follies for which fishers and miners, and
indeed the bulk of the human family in Cornwall, must some day burn.
People outside the fold said that the Luke Gospelers killed Tregenza's
first wife. She, of course, accepted her husband's convictions, but it had
never been in her tender heart to catch the true Luke Gospel spirit. She
was too full of the milk of human kindness, too prone to forgive and
forget, too tolerant and ready to see good in all men. The fiery sustenance
of the new tenets withered her away like a scorched flower, and she died
five years after her child was born. For a space of two years the widower
remained one; then he married again, being at that time a hale man of
forty, the owner of his own fishing-boat, and at once the strongest
personality and handsomest person in Newlyn. Thomasin Strick, his second
wife, was already a Luke Gospeler and needed no conversion. People laughed
in secret at their wooing, and likened it to the rubbing of granite rocks
or a miner's pick striking fire from tin ore. A boy presently came to them;
and now he was ten and his mother forty. She passed rightly for a careful,
money-loving soul, and a good wife, with the wit to be also a good Luke
Gospeler. But her tongue was harder than her heart. Father and mother alike
thought the wide world of their boy, though the child was brought up under
an iron rod. Joan, too, loved her half-brother, Tom, very dearly, and took
a pride only second to her stepmother's in the lad's progress and
achievements. More than once, though only Joan and he knew it, she had
saved his skin from punishment, and she worshiped him with a frank
admiration which was bound to win Mrs. Tregenza's regard. Joan quite
understood the careful and troubled matron, never attached undue importance
to her sharp words, and was usually at her elbow with an ear for all
grievances and even a sympathetic word if the same seemed called for. Mrs.
Tregenza had to grumble to live, and Joan was the safety-valve, for when
her husband came off the sea he would have none of it.