HOW NANCE SHONE THROUGH HER MODEST VEILING
As soon as the old captain’s time was up, Gard took up his work in the
mines with energetic hopefulness.
His hopefulness was unbounded. His energy he tempered with all the tact
and discretion his knowledge of men, and his experience in handling
them, had taught him.
His father had been lost at sea the year after his son was born. His
mother, a good and God-fearing woman, had strained every nerve to give
her boy an education. She died when Stephen was fourteen. He took to his
father’s calling and had followed it with a certain success for ten
years, by which time he had attained the position of first mate.
Then the owner of the Botallack Mine, in Cornwall, having come across
him in the way of business, and been struck by his intelligence and
aptitude, induced him by a lucrative appointment to try his luck on
land.
The managers of the Sark Mines, seeking a special man for somewhat
special circumstances, had applied to Botallack for assistance, and
Stephen Gard came to Sark as the representative of many hopes which, so
far, had been somewhat lacking in results.
But, as old Tom Hamon had predicted, he very soon found that he had laid
his hand to no easy plough.
The Sark men were characteristically difficult, and made the difficulty
greater by not understanding him--or declining to understand, which came
to the same thing--when he laid down his ideas and endeavoured to bring
them to his ways.
Some, without doubt, had no English, and their patois was quite beyond
him. Others could understand him an they would, but deliberately chose
not to--partly from a conservative objection to any change whatever, and
partly from an idea that he had been imported for the purpose of driving
them, and driving is the last thing a Sark man will submit to.
Old Tom Hamon, and a few others who had a financial interest in the
mines, assisted him all they could, in hopes of thereby assisting
themselves, but they were few.
As for the Cornishmen and Welshmen, the success or failure of the Sark
Mines mattered little to them. There was always mining going on
somewhere and competent men were always in demand. They were paid so
much a week, small output or large, and without a doubt the small output
entailed less labour than the large. They naturally regarded with no
great favour the man whose present aim in life it was to ensure the
largest output possible.
And so Gard found himself confronted by many difficulties, and,
moreover, and greatly to the troubling of his mind, found himself looked
upon as a dictator and an interloper by the men whom he had hoped to
benefit.
Concerning the mines themselves he was not called upon for an opinion.
The managers had satisfied themselves as to the presence of silver. If
his opinion had been asked it would have confirmed them. But all he had
to do was to follow the veins and win the ore in paying quantities, and
he found himself handicapped on every hand by the obstinacy of his men.
Outside business matters he was very well satisfied with his
surroundings.
In such spare time as he had, he wandered over the Island with eager,
open eyes, marvelling at its wonders and enjoying its natural beauties
with rare delight.
The great granite cliffs, with their deep indentations and stimulating
caves and crannies; the shimmering blue and green sea, with its long
slow heave which rushed in foam and tumult up the rock-pools and
gullies; the softer beauties of rounded down and flower-and fern-clad
slopes honeycombed with rabbit holes; the little sea-gardens teeming
with novel life; in all these he found his resource and a certain
consolation for his loneliness.
And in the Hamon household he found much to interest him and not a
little ground for speculation.
Old Mrs. Hamon--Grannie--had promptly ordered him in for inspection,
and, after prolonged and careful observation from the interior of the
black sun-bonnet, had been understood to approve him, since she said
nothing to the contrary.
It took him some time to arrive at the correct relationship between
young Tom and Nance and Bernel, for it seemed quite incredible that
fruit so diverse should spring from one parent stem.
For Tom was all that was rough and boorish--rude to Mrs. Hamon, coarse,
and at times overbearing to Nance and Bernel, to such an extent, indeed,
that more than once Gard had difficulty in remembering that he himself
was only a visitor on sufferance and not entitled to interfere in such
intimate family matters.
Tom was not slow to perceive this, and in consequence set himself
deliberately to provoke it by behaviour even more outrageous than usual.
Time and again Gard would have rejoiced to take him outside and express
his feelings to their fullest satisfaction.
With Mrs. Hamon and Bernel he was on the most friendly footing, his
undisguised sentiments in the matter of Tom commending him to them
decisively.
But with Nance he made no headway whatever.
It was an absolutely new sensation to him, and a satisfaction the
meaning of which he had not yet fully gauged, to be living under the
same roof with a girl such as this. He found himself listening for her
voice outside and the sound of her feet, and learned almost at once to
distinguish between the clatter of her wooden pattens and any one else’s
when she was busy in the yard or barns.
Even though she held him at coolest arm’s length, and repelled any
slightest attempt at abridgment of the distance, he still rejoiced in
the sight of her and found the world good because of her presence in it.
He did not understand her feeling about him in the least. He did not
know that she had had to give up her room for him--that she detested the
mines and everything tainted by them, and himself as head and forefront
of the offence--that she regarded him as an outsider and a foreigner and
therefore quite out of place in Sark. He only knew that he saw very
little of her and would have liked to see a great deal more.
The very reserve of her treatment of himself--one might even say her
passive endurance of him--served but to stimulate within him the wish to
overcome it. The attraction of indifference is a distinct force in life.
There was something so trim and neat and altogether captivating to him
in the slim energetic figure, in its short blue skirts and print jacket,
as it whisked to and fro, inside and out, on its multifarious duties,
and still more in the sweet, serious face, glimmering coyly in the
shadow of the great sun-bonnet and always moulded to a fine, but, as it
seemed to him, a somewhat unnatural gravity in his company.
And yet he was quite sure she could be very much otherwise when she
would. For he had heard her singing over her work, and laughing merrily
with Bernel; and her face, sweet as it was in its repression, seemed to
him more fitted for smiles and laughter and joyousness.
He saw, of course, that brother Tom was a constant source of annoyance
to them all, but especially to her, and his blood boiled impotently on
her account.
He carried with him--as a delightful memory of her, though not without
its cloud--the pretty picture she made when he came upon her one day in
the orchard, milking--for, strictly as the Sabbath may be observed, cows
must still be milked on a Sunday, not being endowed manna-like, with the
gift of miraculous double production on a Saturday.
Her head was pressed into her favourite beast’s side, and she was
crooning soothingly to it as the white jets ping-panged into the
frothing pail, and he stood for a moment watching her unseen.
Then the cow slowly turned her head towards him, considered him gravely
for a moment, decided he was unnecessary and whisked her tail
impatiently. Nance’s lullaby stopped, she looked round with a reproving
frown, and he went silently on his way.
It was another Sunday afternoon that, as he lay in the bracken on the
slope of a headland, he saw two slim figures racing down a bare slope on
the opposite side of a wide blue gulf, with joyous chatter, and
recognized Nance and Bernel.
They disappeared and he felt lonely. Then they came picking their way
round a black spur below, and stood for a minute or two looking down at
something beneath them. Which something he presently discovered must be
a pool of size among the rocks, for after a brief retiral, Nance behind
a boulder and Bernel into a black hollow, they came out again, she
lightly clad in fluttering white and Bernel in nothing at all, and with
a shout of delight dived out of sight into the pool below.
He could hear their shouts and laughter echoed back by the huge
overhanging rocks. He saw them climb out again and sit sunning
themselves on the grey ledge like a pair of sea-birds, and Nance’s
exiguous white garment no longer fluttered in the breeze.
Then in they went again, and again, and again, till, tiring of the
limits of the pool--huge as he afterwards found it to be--they crept
over the barnacled rocks to the sea, and flung themselves fearlessly in,
and came ploughing through it towards his headland. And he shrank still
lower among the bracken, for though he had watched the distant little
figure in white with a slight sense of sacrilege, and absolutely no
sense of impropriety but only of enjoyment, he would not for all he was
worth have had her know that he had watched at all, since he could
imagine how she would resent it.
Nevertheless, these unconscious revelations of her real self were to him
as jewels of price, and he treasured the memory of them accordingly.
He watched them swim back and disappear among the rocks, and presently
go merrily up the bare slope again; and he lay long in the bracken,
scarce daring to move, and when he did, he crept away warily, as one
guilty of a trespass.
And glad he was that he had done so, for he had proof of her feeling
that same night at supper.
Peter Mauger came sheepishly in again with Tom, and Tom, when he had
satisfied the edge of his hunger, must wax facetious in his brotherly
way.
“Peter and me was sitting among the rocks over against big pool
s’afternoon and we saw things”--with a grin.
“Aw, Tom!” deprecated Peter in red confusion.
“An’ Peter, he said he never seen anything so pretty in all his life
as--”
“Aw now, Tom, you’re a liar! I never said anything about it.”
“You thought it, or your face was liar too, my boy. Like a dog after a
rabbit it was.”
“It was just like you both to lie watching,” flamed Nance. “If you’d
both go and jump into the sea every day you’d be a great deal nicer than
you are; and if you’d stop there it would be a great deal nicer for us.”
“Aw--Nance!” from Peter, and a great guffaw from Tom, while Gard devoted
himself guiltily to his plate.
“You looked nice before you went in,” chuckled Tom, who never knew when
to stop, “but you looked a sight nicer when you came out and sat on
rocks with it all stuck to you--”
“You’re a--a--a disgusting thing, Tom Hamon, and you’re just as bad,
Peter Mauger!” and she looked as if she would have flown at them, but,
instead, jumped up and flung out of the room.
Gard’s innate honesty would not permit him to take up the cudgels this
time. Inwardly he felt himself involved in her condemnation, though none
but himself knew it.
But he had taken at times to glowering at Tom, when his rudeness passed
bounds, in a way which made that young man at once uncomfortable and
angry, and at times provoked him to clownish attempts at reprisal.
Mrs. Hamon bore with the black sheep quietly, since nothing else was
possible to her, though her annoyance and distress were visible enough.
Old Tom was completely obsessed with his visions of wealth ever just
beyond the point of his pick. He toiled long hours in the damp
darknesses below seas, with the sounds of crashing waves and rolling
boulders close above him, and at times threateningly audible through the
stratum of rocks between; and when he did appear at meals he was too
weary to trouble about anything beyond the immediate satisfaction of his
needs. Besides, young Tom had long since proved his strength equal to
his father’s, and remonstrance or rebuke would have produced no effect.
As to Bernel, he was only a boy as yet, but he was Nance’s boy and all
she would have wished him.
In time he would grow up and be a match for Tom, and meanwhile she would
see to it that he grew up as different from Tom in every respect as it
was possible for a boy to be.