A week later, at nine o'clock, Elder Penno was retiring to rest in his
bedroom, which overlooked his boat-building yard, when a clattering noise
broke on the night without, and so startled him that he all but dropped
his watch in the act of winding it.
The noise suggested an avalanche of falling boxes. The Elder blew out his
candle, lit a bull's-eye lantern which he kept handy by his bed, and,
throwing up the window, challenged loudly--"Who's there?"
For the moment the ray of the bull's-eye revealed no one. He turned it
upon the corner of the yard where, as a rule, stood a pile of empty
packing-cases from the shop, 'empties' waiting to be sorted out and
returned, old butter-barrels condemned to be knocked to pieces for
kindling-wood. Yes: the sound had come from there, for the pile had
toppled over and lay in a long moraine across the entrance gate.
"Must ha' been built up top-heavy," said the Elder to himself: and with
that, running his lantern-ray along the yard wall, he caught sight of a
small bare leg and a few inches of striped skirt for an instant before
they slid into darkness across the coping. He recognised them.
"This beats Old Harry!" muttered the Elder. "Bringin' up the child to be
a gaol-bird now--and on my premises! As if Sam Tregenza hadn' done me
injury enough without that!"
For two years the Elder had been unable to think of Sam Tregenza or to
hear his name mentioned, but a mixture of rage and indignation boiled up
within him. To be sure, the old man was ruined, had fallen on evil days,
subsisted now with the help of half a crown a week parish relief.
But he had behaved disgracefully, and his fall was a signal vindication of
God's justice. How else could one account for it? The man had been a
wise fisherman, as knowledgable as any in Ardevora. He had been bred to
the fishing, and had followed it all his life, but always--until his
sixtieth year--as a paid hand, with no more than a paid hand's share of
the earnings. For this his wife had been to blame--an unthrifty woman,
always out at heel and in debt to the shop; but with her death he started
on a new tack, began to hoard, and within five years owned a boat of his
own--the _Pass By_ lugger--bought with his own money, save for a borrowed
seventy-five pounds. He worked her with his one son Seth, a widow-man of
forty, and Seth's son, young Eli, aged fifteen, Liz's father and brother.
The boat paid well from the first, and the Tregenzas--the three
generations--took a monstrous pride in her.
It was Elder Penno who had advanced the borrowed seventy-five pounds, of
course taking security in the boat and upon an undertaking that Tregenza
kept her insured. But on the morrow of the black day when she foundered,
drowning Seth and Eli, and leaving only the old man to be picked up by a
chance drifter running for harbour, it was discovered that the Tregenzas
had missed by two months the date of renewing her premium of insurance.
The boat was gone, and with it the Elder's seventy-five pounds.
To think of recovering it upon Tregenza's sticks of furniture was idle.
The Elder threatened it, but the whole lot would not have fetched twenty
pounds, and there were other creditors for small amounts. The old man,
too, was picked up half crazy. He had been clinging to a fish-box for
five and twenty minutes in the icy-cold water; but whether his craziness
came of physical exhaustion or the shock of losing boat, son, and
grandchild all in a few minutes, no one could tell. He never set foot on
board a boat again, but sank straight into pauperism and dotage.
The Elder, for his part, considered such an end no more than the due of
one who had played him so inexcusable a trick over the insurance.
From the first he had suspected this weakening of Tregenza's intellect to
be something less than genuine--a calculated infirmity, to excite public
compassion and escape the blame his dishonest negligence so thoroughly
deserved.
As he closed the window that night and picked up his watch to resume the
winding of it, the Elder felt satisfied that there were depths in
Tregenza's craziness which needed sounding. He would pay him a visit
to-morrow. He had not exchanged a word with him for two years.
Indeed, the old scoundrel seldom or never showed his face in the street.
At eleven o'clock next morning he rapped at the door of Tregenza's hovel,
which lay some way up the hill above the harbour, in a nexus of mean
alleys and at the back of a tenement known as Ugnot's. His knock appeared
to silence a hammering in the rear of the cottage. By and by the door
opened--but a very little way--and through the chink old Tregenza peered
out at him--gaunt, shaggy, grey of hair and of face, his beard and his
very eyebrows powdered with sawdust.
"Kindly welcome," said Tregenza, blinking against the light.
"You won't say that when I've done wi' you," said the Elder to himself.