In Ardevora, a fishing-town on the Cornish coast not far from the Land's
End, lived a merchant whom everybody called 'Elder' Penno, or
'The Elder'--not because he had any right, or laid any claim, to that
title. His father and grandfather had worn it as office-bearers in a
local religious sect known as the Advent Saints; and it had survived the
extinction of that sect and passed on to William John Penno, an orthodox
Wesleyan, as a family sobriquet.
He was sixty-three years old, a widower, and childless.
His fellow-townsmen supposed him to be rich because he had so many irons
in the fire and employed, in one way and another, a great deal of labour.
He held a number of shares in coasting vessels, and passed as owner of
half a dozen--all of them too heavily in debt to pay dividends.
He managed (ostensibly as proprietor, but actually in dependence on the
local bank) a shipbuilding-yard to which the fishermen came for their
boats. He had an interest in the profit of most of these boats when they
were launched, as also in a salt-store, a coal-store, a company for the
curing of pilchards, and an agency for buying and packing of fish for the
London market. He kept a retail shop and sold almost everything the town
needed, from guernseys and hardware to tea, bacon, and tallow candles.
He advanced money, at varying rates of interest, on anything from a ship
to a frying-pan; and by this means had made himself accurately acquainted
with his neighbours' varying degrees of poverty. But he was not rich,
although generally reputed so: for Ardevora's population was not one out
of which any man could make his fortune, and of poor folk who borrow or
obtain goods on credit quite a large number do not seriously mean to pay--
a fact often overlooked, and always by the borrowers themselves.
Still, and despite an occasional difficulty in keeping so many balls in
the air at one time, Elder Penno was--as a widower, a childless man, and
in comparison with his neighbours--well-to-do. Also he filled many small
public offices--district councillor, harbour commissioner, member of the
School Board, and the like. They had come to him--he could not quite
tell how. He took pride in them and discharged them conscientiously.
He knew that envious tongues accused him of using them to feather his
nest, but he also knew that they accused him falsely. He was
thick-skinned, and they might go to the devil. In person he was stout of
habit, brusque of bearing, with a healthy, sanguine complexion, a double
chin, shrewd grey eyes, and cropped hair which stood up straight as the
bristles on a brush. He lived abstemiously, rose at six, went to bed at
nine, and might be found, during most of the intervening hours, hard at
work at his desk in the little office behind his shop. The office had a
round window, and the window overlooked the quay, the small harbour
(dry at low water), and the curve of a sandy bay beyond.
One morning Elder Penno looked up from his desk and saw, beyond the masts
of the fishing-boats lying aslant as the tide had left them, a small
figure--a speck, almost--on the sandy beach, about three furlongs away.
He was engaged at the moment in adding up a column of figures.
Having entered the total, he looked up again, laid down his pen, frowned
with annoyance, and picked up an old pair of field-glasses that stood
ready to hand on the sill of his desk beside the ink-well. He glanced at
the clock on his chimney-piece before throwing up the window-sash.
The hour was eleven--five minutes after eleven, to be exact; the month
April; the day sunny, with a humming northerly wind; the tide drawing far
out towards low-ebb, and the air so clear that the small figure standing
on the edge of the waves could not be mistaken.
As he threw up the sash Elder Penno caught sight of Tom Hancock, the
school attendance officer, lounging against a post on the quay below.
"You're the very man I want," said the Elder. "Isn't that Tregenza's
grandchild over yonder?"
"Looks like her," said the A.O., withdrawing a short clay pipe from his
mouth, and spitting.
"Then why isn't she at school at this hour?"
"'Tis a hopeless case, if you ask me." The A.O. announced this with a
fine air of resignation. His pay was 2s. 6d. a week, and he never erred
on the side of zeal.
"Better fit you was lookin' up such cases than idlin' here and wastin'
baccy. That's if you ask _me_," retorted the Elder.
"I've a-talked to the maid, an' I've a-talked to her gran'father, till I'm
tired," said Hancock, and spat again. "She'll be fourteen next May, an'
then we can wash our hands of her."
"A nice look-out it'd be if the eddication of England was left in your
hands," said the Elder truthfully, if obviously.
"You can't do nothin' with her." The A.O. was used to censure and wasted
no resentment on it. "Nothin'. I give 'ee leave to try."
The Elder stood for a moment watching the small figure across the sands.
Then, with a snort of outraged propriety, he closed the window, reached
down his hat from its peg, marched out of his office--through the shop--
and forth upon the sunny quay. A flight of stone stairs led down to the
bed of the harbour, now deserted by the tide; and across this, picking his
way among the boats and their moorings, he made for the beach where the
sea broke and glittered on the firm sand in long curves of white.
A tonic northerly breeze was blowing, just strongly enough to lift the
breakers in blue-green hollows against the sunshine and waft a delicate
film of spray about the figure of the child moving forlornly on the edge
of the foam. She was not playing or running races with the waves, but
walking soberly and anon halting to scan the beach ahead. Her legs were
bare to the knee, and she had hitched up her short skirt high about her
like a cockle-gatherer's. In the roar and murmur of the surf she did not
hear the Elder approaching, but faced around with a start as he called to
her.
"What are you doing here?" he asked.
For answer she held up a billet of wood, bleached and frayed with long
tossing on the seas, worthless except for firewood, and almost worthless
for that. The Elder frowned. "Look here," he said, "you ought to be in
school at this moment instead of minchin[1] idle after a few bits o'
stick, no good to anyone. A girl of your age, too! What's your name?"
"Please, sir, Liz," the child stammered, looking down.
"You're Sam Tregenza's grandchild, hey?"
"Please, sir."
"Then do you go home an' tell your grandfather, with my compliments, he
ought to know better than to allow it. It's robbin' the ratepayers,
that's what it is."
"Yes, sir," she murmured, glancing down dubiously at the piece of wood in
her hand.
"You don't understand me," said the Elder. "The ratepayers spend money on
a school here that the children of Ardevora mayn't grow up into little
dunces. Now, if the children go to school as they ought, the Government
up in London gives the ratepayers--me, for instance--some of their money
back: so much money for each child. If a child minches, the money isn'
paid. 'Tisn' the wood you pick up--that's neither here nor there--but the
money you're takin' out of folks' pockets. Didn' you know that?"
"No, sir."
"Your grandfather knows it, anyway--not," went on the Elder with sudden
anger in his voice, "that Sam Tregenza cares what folks he robs!"
He pulled himself up, slightly ashamed of this outburst. The child,
however, did not appear to resent it, but stood thoughtful, as if working
out the logic of his argument.
"It's the money," he insisted. "As for the wood, why you might come to my
yard and steal as much as you can carry, an' 'twouldn' amount to what you
rob by playin' truant like this; no, nor half of it. That's one thing for
you to consider; and here's another: There's a truant-school, up to
Plymouth; a sort of place that's half a school and half a prison, where
the magistrates send children that won't take warning. How would you like
it, if a policeman came, one of these days, and took you off to that kind
of punishment?"
He looked down on the child, and saw her under-lip working. She held back
her tears bravely, but was shaking from head to foot.
"There now!" said the Elder, in what for him was a soothing voice.
"There's no danger if you behave an' go to school like other children.
You just attend to that, an' we'll say no more about it."
He turned back to his office. On the quay he paused to tell Tom Hancock
that he reckoned the child would be more careful in future: he had given
her something to think over.