HOW GARD MADE NEW ACQUAINTANCES
Old Tom Hamon gave the new arrival warm greeting, and pointed out such
matters as might interest him as they climbed the steep road which led
up to the plateau and the houses.
“Assay Office, Mr. Gard.... Captain’s Office.... Forge.... Sark’s Hope
shaft.... Le Pelley shaft--ninety fathoms below sea-level.... Pump
shaft ... and yon to east’ard is Prince’s shaft.... We go round here
behind engine-house.... Yon’s my house ’mong the trees.”
“That’s a fine animal,” said Gard, stopping suddenly to look at a great
white horse, which stood nibbling the gorse on the edge of the cliff
right in the eye of the sun, as it drooped towards Guernsey in a
holocaust of purple and amber and crimson clouds. The glow of the
threatening sky threw the great white figure into unusual prominence.
“Yours, Mr. Hamon?” asked Gard--and the white horse flung up its head
and pealed out a trumpet-like neigh as though resenting the imputation.
“No,” said old Tom, staring at the white horse under his shading hand.
“Seigneur’s. What’s he doing down here? He’s generally kept up at
Eperquerie, and that’s the best place for him. He’s an awkward beast at
times. I must send and tell Mr. Le Pelley where he is.”
The little cluster of white, thatched houses stood close together for
company, but discreetly turned their faces away from one another so that
no man overlooked or interfered with his neighbour.
Gard found himself in a large room which occupied the whole middle
portion of the house and served as kitchen and common room for the
family.
The floor was of trodden earth--hard and dry as cement, with a strip of
boarding round the sides and in front of the fire-place. Heavy oaken
beams ran across the roof from which depended a great hanging rack
littered with all kinds of household odds and ends. Along the beams of
the roof on hooks hung two long guns. One end of the room was occupied
by a huge fire-place, in one corner of which stood a new iron cooking
range, and alongside it a heap of white ashes and some smouldering
sticks of gorse under a big black iron pot filled the room with the
fragrance of wood smoke. In the opposite side of the fire-place was an
iron door closing the great baking oven, and above it ran a wide
mantel-shelf on which stood china dogs and glass rolling-pins and a
couple of lamps.
A well-scrubbed white wooden table was set ready for supper. On a very
ancient-looking black oak stand--cupboard below and shelves above--was
ranged a vast assortment of crockery ware, and on the walls hung
potbellied metal jugs and cans which shone like silver.
Two doors led to the other rooms of the house, one of them wide open.
One corner of the room was occupied by a great wooden bin eight feet
square, filled with dried bracken. On the wide flat side, which looked
like a form, a woman and a girl were sitting when the two men entered.
Hamon introduced them briefly as his wife and daughter, and, comely
women as Gard had been accustomed to in his own country of Cornwall,
there was something about these two, and especially about the younger of
the two, which made him of a sudden more than satisfied with the
somewhat doubtful venture to which he had bound himself--set a sudden
homely warmth in his heart, and made him feel the richer for being
there--made him, in fact, glad that he had come.
And yet there was nothing in their reception of him that justified the
feeling.
They nodded, indeed, in answer to his bow, but neither their faces nor
their manner showed any special joy at his coming.
But that made no difference to him. They were there, and the mere sight
of the girl’s fine mobile face and large dark blue eyes was a thing to
be grateful for.
“You’ll be wanting your supper,” said Hamon.
“At your own time, please,” said the young man, looking towards Mrs.
Hamon. “I am really not very hungry”--though truth to tell he well might
have been, for the food on the brig had left much to be desired even to
one who had been a sailorman himself.
“It is our usual time,” said Mrs. Hamon, “and it is all ready. Will you
please to sit there.”
At the sound of the chairs a boy of fourteen came quietly in and slipped
into his seat.
His sister had gone off with a portion on a plate through the open door.
Gard was surprised to find himself hoping it was not her custom to take
her meals in private, and was relieved when she came back presently
without the plate and sat down by her brother.
“Ah, you, Bernel, as soon as you’ve done your supper run over and tell
Mr. Le Pelley that his white stallion is on our common, and he’d better
send for him.”
“I’ll ride him home,” said the boy exultingly.
“No you won’t, Bern,” said his sister quickly. “He’s not safe. You know
what an awkward beast he is at times, and you could never get him across
the Coupée.”
“Pooh! I’d ride him across any day.”
“Promise me you won’t,” she said, with a hand on his arm.
“Oh, well, if you say so,” he grumbled. “I could manage him all right
though.”
Just then the doorway darkened and two young men entered, and threw
their caps on the green bed, and sat down with an awkward nod of
greeting to the company in general.
“My son Tom,” said Mr. Hamon, and Tom jerked another awkward nod towards
the stranger. “And Peter Mauger”--Peter repeated the performance, more
shyly and awkwardly even than Tom, from a variety of reasons.
Tom was at home, and he had not even been invited--except by Tom. And
strangers always made him shy. And then there was Nance, with her great
eyes fixed on him, he knew, though he had not dared to look straight at
her.
And then the stranger had an air about him--it was hard to say of what,
but it made Peter Mauger and Tom conscious of personal uncouthness, and
of a desire to get up and go out and wash their hands and have a shave.
Gard, they knew, was the new captain of the mine, chosen by the
managers of the company for his experience with men, and he looked as if
he had been accustomed to order them about.
His eyes were dark and keen, his face full of energy. Being clean-shaven
his age was doubtful. He might be twenty-five or forty. Nance, in her
first quick comprehensive glance, had wondered which.
He stood close upon six feet and was broad-chested and
square-shouldered. A good figure of a man, clean and upstanding, and
with no nonsense about him. A capable-looking man in every respect, and
if his manner was quiet and retiring, there was that about him which
suggested the possibility of explosion if occasion arose.
Not that the Hamon family as a whole, or any member of it, would have
put the matter quite in that way to itself, or herself. But that,
vaguely, was the impression produced upon them--an impression of
uprightness, intelligence, and reserved strength--and the more strongly,
perhaps, because of late these characteristics had been somewhat
overshadowed in the Island by the greed of gain and love of display
engendered by the opening of the mines.
To old Tom Hamon his coming was wholly welcome. It foreshadowed a strong
and more energetic development of the mines and the speedier realization
of his most earnest desires.
To Mrs. Hamon it meant some extra household work, which she would gladly
undertake since it was her husband’s wish to have the stranger live with
them, though in his absorption by the mines she had no sympathy
whatever.
Nance looked upon him merely as a part of the mines, and therefore to
be detested along with the noisy engine-house, the pumps, the damp and
dirty miners, and all the rest of it--the coming of which had so
completely spoiled her much-loved Sark.
Tom disliked him because he made him feel small and boorish, and of a
commoner make. And feelings such as that inevitably try to disprove
themselves by noisy self-assertion.
Accordingly Tom--after various jocular remarks in patois to Peter, who
would have laughed at them had he dared, but, knowing Nance’s feelings
towards her brother was not sure how she would take it--loudly and
provocatively to Gard--
“Expect to make them mines pay, monsieur?”
“Well, I hope so. But it’s too soon to express an opinion till I’ve seen
them.”
“They put a lot of money in, and they get a lot of dirt out, but one
does not hear much of any silver.”
“Sometimes the deepest mines prove the best in the end.”
“And as long as there’s anybody to pay for it I suppose you go on
digging.”
“If I thought the mines had petered out--”
“Eh?” said Peter, and then coughed to hide his confusion when they all
looked at him.
“I should of course advise the owners to stop work and sink no more
money.”
“It’ll be a bad day for Sark when that happens,” said old Tom. “But it’s
not going to happen. The silver’s there all right. It only wants getting
out.”
“If it’s there we’ll certainly get it out,” said Gard, and although he
said it quietly enough, old Tom felt much better about things in
general.
“You’re the man for us,” he said heartily. “We’ll all be rich before we
die yet.”
“Depends when we die,” growled Tom--in which observation--obvious as it
was--there was undoubtedly much truth. And then, his little suggestion
of provocation having broken like ripples on Gard’s imperturbability, he
turned on Peter and tried to stir him up.
“You don’t get on any too fast with your making up to la garche, mon
gars,” he said in the patois again.
“Aw--Tom!” remonstrated Peter, very red in the face at this ruthless
laying bare of his approaches.
“Get ahead, man! Put your arm round her neck and give her a kiss. That’s
the way to fetch ’em.”
At which Nance jumped up with fiery face and sparks in her eyes and left
the room, and Gard, who understood no word of what had passed, yet
understood without possibility of doubt that Tom’s speech had been
mortally offensive to his sister, and set him down in his own mind as of
low esteem and boorish disposition.
As for Peter, to whom such advice was as useless as the act would have
been impossible at that stage of the proceedings, he was almost as much
upset as Nance herself. He got up with a shamefaced--
“Aw, Tom, boy, that was not good of you,” and made for his hat, while
Tom sat with a broad grin at the result of his delicate diplomacy, and
Gard’s great regret was that it was not possible for him to take the
hulking fellow by the neck and bundle him out of doors.
Old Tom made some sharp remark to his son, who replied in kind; Mrs.
Hamon sat quietly aloof, as she always did when Tom and his father got
to words, and Bernel made play with his supper, as though such matters
were of too common occurrence to call for any special attention on his
part.
Then Nance’s face framed in a black sun-bonnet gleamed in at the outer
door.
“Come along, Bern, and we’ll go and tell the Seigneur where his white
horse is,” and she disappeared, and Bernel, having polished off
everything within reach, got up and followed her.
“Will you please to take a look at the mines to-night?” asked old Tom of
his guest, anxious to interest him in the work as speedily as possible.
“We might take a bit of a walk, and you can tell me all you will about
things. But I don’t take hold till the first of the month, and I don’t
want to interfere until I have a right to. I suppose my baggage will be
coming up?”
“Ach, yes! Tom, you take the cart and bring Mr. Gard’s things up. They
are lying on the quay down there. Then we will go along, if you please!”
Old Tom marched him through the wonderful amber twilight to the summit
of the bluff behind the engine-house--whence Gard could just make out
his box and carpet-bag still lying on the quay below. And all the way
the old man was volubly explaining the many changes necessary, in his
opinion, to bring the business to a paying basis. All which information
Gard accepted for testing purposes, but gathered from the total the fact
that through ill health on the part of the departing captain, the ropes
all round had got slack and that the tightening of them would be a
matter of no little delicacy and difficulty.
Sark men, Mr. Hamon explained, were very free and independent, and hated
to be driven. They did piecework--so much per fathom, and were
constitutionally, he admitted, a bit more particular as to the so much
than as to the fathom. While the Cornish and Welsh men, receiving weekly
wages, had also grown slack and did far less work than they did at first
and than they might, could, and should do.
“But,” said old Tom frankly, scratching his head, “I don’t know’s I’d
like the job myself. Your men are quiet enough to look at, but they can
boil over when they’re put to it. And our men--well, they’re Sark, and
there’s more’n a bit of the devil in them.”
“I must get things round bit by bit,” said Gard quietly. “It never pays
to make a fuss and bustle men. Softly does it.”
“I’m thinking you can do it if any man can.”
“I’ll have a good try any way.”
“Whereabouts does the Seigneur live?” he asked presently, and
inconsequently as it seemed, but following out a train of thought of his
own which needed no guessing at.
“The Seigneur? Over there in Sark--across the Coupée.”
“What’s the Coupée?”
“The Coupée?--Mon Gyu!”--at such colossal ignorance--“Why, ...the
Coupée’s the Coupée.... Come along, then. Maybe you can get a look at it
before it’s too dark.”
They had got quite out of sound of the clanking engine, and were
travelling a well-made road, when their attention was drawn to a lively
struggle proceeding on the common between the road and the cliff.
Tom, setting out after the troubled Peter, had caught sight of the
Seigneur’s white horse and had forthwith decided to take him home.
Peter, agreeing that it was a piece of neighbourliness which the
Seigneur would appreciate, had turned back to give his assistance.
By some cajolery they had managed to slip a halter with a special length
of rope over the wary white head, and there for the moment matters hung.
For the white horse, with his forelegs firmly planted, dragged at one
end of the rope and the two men at the other, and the issue remained in
doubt.
The doubt, however, was suddenly solved by the white horse deciding on
more active measures. He swung his great head to one side, dragged the
men off their feet and started off at a gallop, they hanging on as best
they could.
Old Tom and Gard set off after them to see the end of the matter, and
suddenly, as the roadway dipped between high banks and became a hollow
way, the white beast gave a shrill squeal, flung up his heels, jerked
himself free, and vanished like a streak of light into the darkness of
the lofty bank in front.
“Mon Gyu!” cried old Tom, and sped up the bank to see the end.
But the white horse knew his way and had no fear. They were just in time
to hear the rattle of his hoofs, as he disappeared with a final shrill
defiance into the outer darkness on the further side of a mighty gulf,
while a stone dislodged by his flying feet went clattering down into
invisible depths.
“He’s done it,” panted old Tom, while Gard gazed with something like awe
at the narrow pathway, wavering across from side to side of the great
abyss, out of which rose the growl of the sea.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“Coupée. It’s a wonder he managed it. The path slipped in the winter
and it’s narrow in places.”
“And do people cross it in the dark?” asked Gard, thinking of the girl
and boy who had gone to see the Seigneur.
“Och yes! It is not bad when you’re used to it. Come and see!” and he
led the way back across the common to the road.
Gard walked cautiously behind him as he went across the crumbling white
pathway with the carelessness of custom, and, sailor as he had been, he
was not sorry when the other side was reached, and he could stand in the
security of the cutting and look back, and down into the gulf where the
white waves foamed and growled among the boulders three hundred feet
below.
“I’ve seen a many as did not care to cross that, first time they saw
it,” said old Tom with a chuckle.
“Well, I’m not surprised at that. It’s apt to make one’s head spin.”
“I brought captain of brig up here and he wouldn’t put a foot on it. Not
for five hundred pounds, he said.”
“It would have taken more than five hundred pounds to piece him together
if he’d tumbled down there.”
“That’s so.”
A young moon, and a clear sky still rarely light and lofty in the amber
after-glow, gave them a safe passage back.
When they reached the house among the trees, Gard bethought him of his
belongings.
“And my things from the quay?” he suggested.
“G’zammin! That boy has forgotten all about them, I’ll be bound. I’ll
take the cart down myself.”
“I’ll go with you.”
When they got back with the box and bag, which no one had touched since
they were dropped on to the platform four hours before, they found that
Nance and Bernel had got home and gone off to bed, having taken
advantage of being across in Sark to call on some of their friends
there.
Gard wondered how they would have fared if they had happened to be on
the Coupée when the white horse went thundering across.
He dreamed that night that he was cautiously treading an endless white
path that swung up and down in the darkness like a piece of ribbon in a
breeze. And a great white horse came plunging at him out of the
darkness, and just as he gave himself up for lost, a sweet firm face in
a black sun-bonnet appeared suddenly in front of him, and the white
horse squealed and leaped over them and disappeared, while the stones he
had displaced went rattling down into the depths below.