The village of Polkerran lies snugly in a hollow between cliffs facing
the Atlantic, at the head of a little bay that forms a natural harbour.
The grey stone cottages rise from the sea-level in tiers, as in an
amphitheatre, huddled together, with the narrowest and most tortuous of
lanes between them. Through the midst a stream flows from the high
ground behind, in summer a mere brook, in winter a swollen torrent that
colours the sea far out with the soil it carries down. The bay is
shaped like a horseshoe; at low tide its mouth is closed by a reef
except at the northern end, where there is always a narrow fairway
between the reef and the sharp point of land known as the Beal.
Northward of this is another little inlet called Trevanion Bay, whence
the coast winds north-east, a line of rugged, precipitous, and
overhanging cliffs, unbroken until you come to St. Cuby's Cove, where
they reach a height of three hundred feet, and bulge out over the sea
like a penthouse roof.
One August evening, in the year 1804, a wide tubby boat lay in twelve
feet of water, just outside the line of breakers beneath the cliffs,
about a mile and a half from the village. The sun had been down some
two hours, but there was enough of twilight to show to any one out at
sea--the boat being invisible from the land--that it contained two lads,
one a tall, slight, but muscular youth of seventeen or thereabouts, the
other a thicker, sturdier boy, who looked older, but was, in fact, a
year or more younger than his companion.
"Well, Maister Dick," said the younger boy, "I reckon we'd better go
home-along; it do seem as if the water be too clear to-night."
"They're not on the feed, Sam, that's certain," replied Dick Trevanion.
"But I don't like going empty-handed. I'm thinking of supper."
"It do be queer, sure enough. 'Tis a hot night, and they mostly comes
in close when 'tis hot, and the biggest comes the closest. I 'spect
what us do want is a bit of a tumble, to stir up the bottom and muddy
the water."
Dick Trevanion had come out at sunset with his companion Sam Pollex to
fish for salmon bass, which at this time of year were usually plentiful
along the coast. For two hours they had had no luck. Every now and
then a ripple and spirt on the smooth surface showed that fish were
sporting beneath; but though they changed the bait, trying squid,
pilchard, spider-crab in turn; varied the length of line and the weight
of the lead; trailed the bait where they last saw the surface
disturbed--though they tried every device known to them to lure the
fish, they had not as yet been rewarded with a single bite. It was
exasperating. Dick knew that the larder at home was bare, and had set
his heart on carrying back two or three fish for supper and next
morning's breakfast.
"It will be high-water in half-an-hour," he said. "We'll wait till then,
and no longer."
Baiting his hook with cuttle-fish, he got Sam to row slowly up the shore
towards a spot where the sea broke gently over a yard or two of
half-submerged rocks. The air was very still; there was no sound save
the light rustle of the waves washing the foot of the cliff. As the sky
darkened and the last faint radiance vanished from the west, the stars
appeared and the shade beneath the cliff became deeper. Sam rowed up
and down for some minutes, Dick hauling in his line once or twice to see
that the hook was not fouled with sea-weed; but still there was no sign
of fish.
All at once, when he was on the point of giving up, he felt a slight tug
at the line, which began immediately to slip through his fingers.
"At last!" he whispered, jumping to his feet so hastily as to set the
boat rocking.
He held the line loosely until a dozen yards had run out, then tightened
his grasp with a jerk. Meanwhile Sam had thrown the anchor overboard.
"He's a whopper," said Dick, letting his line run again. "See; there he
goes!"
He pointed to a slight phosphorescent glow on the water about twenty
yards away. The line was running out fast. It was only a hundred yards
long, and he must check the rush of the fish, or he would lose line and
all. Grasping the twine with both hands, he exerted a steady strain, at
one moment being almost jerked out of the boat by the violent struggles
of the fish. He set his feet against the gunwale and pulled again.
With a suddenness that threw him backwards the tension relaxed.
"He's gone, Sam! He's torn away the hook," he cried.
"Scrounch un for a rebel!" said Sam indignantly. "Why couldn't he bide
quiet!"
Dick wound up his line rapidly, feeling no resistance until he had
recovered about thirty yards of it. Then once more it began to slip
away.
"He's not gone yet, Sam, after all. I'll have him, sure as I'm alive."
Steadily he worked the fish in. For a few moments he would draw in the
line without resistance; then there was a jerk; it swerved to right, to
left; and he could merely hold his own in the desperate struggle. But
gradually, fight as the fish might, it was drawn nearer and nearer to
the boat. At the broken water it spent its last energies; phosphorescent
flashes showed where it was dashing to and fro in the vain effort to
regain its liberty. Then, its strength exhausted, it suffered itself to
be dragged slowly towards the boat.
Sam was eagerly on the watch, bending over the gunwale to seize the fish
as soon as it came alongside. Suddenly he flung out his hands, only to
draw them back with a cry. He had pricked them against the fish's sharp
dorsal fin. Once more he stooped, and as Dick hauled hard on the line,
Sam got his arms beneath the fish, and with a mighty heave cast it into
the bottom, where it struggled for a moment and then lay still.
"A beauty, sure enough," said Sam.
"Worth waiting for," remarked Dick. "'Tis getting late, and Mother will
have given me up, so we'll go now. He's big enough to give us two meals
at least."
They bent down to disengage the hook and wind up the line. So intent
had they been on the capture of the bass that neither had noticed, until
that moment, a smack about three-quarters of a mile out at sea, sailing
rapidly across the bay towards St. Cuby's Cove. The moon was rising,
faintly illuminating the vessel, but casting a deep shadow on the water
immediately beneath the cliff, so that the boys were invisible from the
smack. Familiar as they were with all the small craft belonging to
Polkerran, they knew at the first glance, in spite of the dim light,
that the smack was a stranger.
"She's not Cornish," said Dick, taking a long look at her.
"Nor even English," added Sam. "Maybe a Frenchman from Rusco, though
'tis early for the running to begin."
"They won't run a cargo at the Cove, surely. The path up the cliff is
too steep, and Joe Penwarden's cottage too near. I think she's a
stranger that doesn't know the coast."
They watched the smack until she rounded the headland between them and
the Cove, and then began to row in the opposite direction. They had
just reached the end of the promontory bounding Trevanion Bay on the
north, and had swung round landward, when, their faces now being toward
the open sea, they saw something that caused them to pause in
mid-stroke. Perhaps a mile in the offing like a phantom barque in the
quivering radiance of the moonlight, lay a large three-masted vessel
with sails aback. Through the still air came the sound of creaking
tackle, and the boys, resting on their oars, saw a boat lowered, and
then another, which pulled off in the same direction as the smack.
"This be some jiggery, Maister Dick," said Sam. "Do 'ee think, now, it
be Boney come spying for a place to land?"
Those were the days when the imminence of a French invasion kept the
people of the southern counties in a constant state of alarm.
"Boney wouldn't come to this coast," replied Dick. "He wouldn't risk
his flat boats round the Lizard. No; he'll make some lonely quiet spot
on the south coast; Boney won't trouble us."
"Well, daze me if I can make head or tail o't," said Sam.
"Pull in a bit, so that we can see without being seen."
From the shadowed headland they watched in silence. The boats had
scarcely gone a third of a mile across the bay when a shrill whistle
cleft the air. They at once put about, returned to the larger vessel,
and were hoisted in, whereupon the ship made sail, and in the course of
ten or fifteen minutes disappeared into the darkness.
"There be queer things a-doing, I b'lieve," said Sam, while the vessel
was still in sight.
"Maybe," rejoined Dick, "but we don't know. Don't speak a word of it
till I give you leave, Sam. 'Tis a matter for Mr. Mildmay if any one."
"Zackly. I can keep a still tongue with any man; and now seems to I
we'd best go home-along."
He dipped the oars, and pulled, not towards the Beal, beyond which lay
the village, but towards the head of Trevanion Bay. It was now
high-water. Below the cliff only a narrow stretch of white sand was
visible. Within ten yards of this beach Sam shipped oars, and the boat
was carried along until its nose stuck in the sand. Both the boys then
sprang out, and dragged their craft up to the base of the cliff beyond
high-water mark.
"'Tis lucky tide be high," said Sam, wiping his brow with the back of
his hand, "for 'tis a hot night, and old boat be desp'rate heavy."
"True, she's both heavy and old," said Dick, as he secured her to a post
driven deep into the sand. "She's a good deal older than you or I, Sam."
"Ay, true, and Feyther have give her more knocks than he've give me.
You can see his marks on her, but you can't see 'em on me--hee! hee!"
Dick laughed. Many a time had the planks been repaired by old Reuben
Pollex, the signs of whose rough and ready handiwork were easily
discoverable.
Carrying his tackle, Dick ordered Sam to bring the bass, and led the way
along a steep path that zigzagged up the face of the cliff, being soon
hidden from the sea by knobs and corners of rock. It was a toilsome
climb; the cliff was two hundred feet high, but the windings made the
path three times as long. When they reached the top, Sam found it
necessary once more to wipe his brow; then followed his young master
across a stretch of coarse bent towards a large building, mistily lit by
the moonbeams, about a hundred yards distant.
The Towers, at one time a manor house of no little importance, was now
in the stage of decrepitude. It had been for centuries in the possession
of the Trevanions, who, in the time of King Charles I., had been a
family of great wealth and influence, owning estates, it was said, in
three counties. But the squire of that time had sold part of his
property to provide money for the King, whose cause he espoused with
unselfish loyalty, and from that time the family fortunes had gradually
declined, partly through the recklessness of certain of the owners,
partly through sheer ill-luck. For many years wealth had been drawn
from tin and copper mines beneath the surface, parts of whose apparatus,
in the shape of ruined sheds, scaffoldings, pipes, conduits, broken
chains, strewed the ground in desolate abandonment. In the early
manhood of the present squire, Dick's father, the lodes had shown signs
of exhaustion, and Mr. Trevanion, wishing to keep the mines going as
much for the sake of the miners as for his own interest, had spent large
sums on opening up new workings, which proved unprofitable. He had
mortgaged acre after acre in this fierce struggle with misfortune,
having more than his share of the doggedness of his race; but all his
efforts were fruitless; the mines were closed and the men dismissed; and
the Squire himself at last had no property unencumbered except the land
on which the Towers stood, and the barren cliff between the house and
the end of the promontory, almost worthless save for the little grazing
it afforded.
To this he had clung with grim tenacity. He was often hard put to it to
pay the interest on his mortgages as it became due; his little
household, consisting now only of himself, his wife and son, and the two
Pollexes, often had barely enough to eat; many a time he was tempted to
raise money on the little remnant of his property; but for long years,
as often as the temptation came, he had resisted it. Though he would not
admit the fact, even to himself, superstition had a good deal to do with
his determination. He scoffed at the country folks' belief in omens and
witches, and professed to think nothing of an old motto which had
attached to his family for near a hundred and fifty years. In the reign
of Charles II., when the Trevanions owned estates not only in Cornwall,
but the adjoining counties, the spendthrift whose extravagance had been
a partial cause of their ruin had, at some crisis in his affairs,
consulted a wise woman who lived alone in a little cottage on the moor.
He brought nothing from his interview with her but the couplet:
Trevanion, whate'er thy fortune be,
Hold fast the rock by the western sea.
Like his forefathers, Roger Trevanion derided the witch's counsel, but,
like them, too, he had "held fast" until, a year before the opening of
our story, he had been forced to relax his grip. Now every rood of the
land, to the uttermost extremity of the Beal, was in the hands of
mortgagees, and the dread of foreclosure weighed on the Squire like a
nightmare.
The Towers had been allowed to fall into decay. Only one wing was now
inhabited; the remainder was ruinous, and for the most part roofless.
In the south wing lived the Squire, now past fifty years of age, his
wife, a few years younger, and Dick, their only son. Their sole
attendants were Reuben Pollex, a widower, who had grown up from boyhood
with the Squire, and steadily refused to leave him, and his boy Sam.
These two did all the household work, grew vegetables, bred poultry and
pigs, the sale of which, together with the small sums obtained by
letting to neighbouring farmers the grazing rights of the cliff, was all
that kept the family from abject poverty. Dick himself was, to a large
extent, the family provider. With Sam's help he snared rabbits, shot
wild fowl, and fished along the coast. His bronzed skin and hard flesh
bespoke an active life in the open air, and as he went about in his
jersey, rough breeches, and long boots, he would scarcely have been
distinguishable from the fisher lads of the village but for a certain
springiness of gait and a look of refinement and thoughtfulness.
Dick and his companion hastened towards the south wing, where an
unusually bright light in one of the lower rooms proclaimed that the
Squire had company. While Sam took the fish, which turned out to be a
fine fourteen-pounder, into the kitchen, Dick changed his boots, washed
his hands, and entered the living-room. His father sat at the head of
the table, his mother at the foot; between them was a man of about the
Squire's age, dressed in a blue coat with brass buttons, with "seaman"
written on every inch of him. The table was covered with a spotless but
much-darned cloth; the only viands were a loaf of bread and half a
cheese. A large brown jug contained ale brewed in the family brew-house
by old Pollex.
"Why, Dick, how late you are!" said his mother. "We are just going to
begin supper."
"Better put it off for a few minutes, Mother. I've brought home a fine
bass. How d'ye do, Mr. Mildmay?"
"Ah, Dick, glad to see you, my boy! Good fishing to-night, eh?"
"One catch after two hours, sir," replied Dick. "The weather's too fine,
I suppose."
"Shall we wait, Mr. Mildmay?" asked his hostess.
"As you please, ma'am."
Mr. Mildmay, a naval lieutenant, now in command of a revenue cutter,
knew very well by the expression of the lady's face that the
postponement of the meal was welcome to her. He was an old friend of
the Squire's--a messmate indeed, for Mr. Trevanion had served for a few
years in the Navy; and his acquaintance with the penury of the household
had neither diminished his friendship nor damped the cordiality of the
Squire's welcome. In these days there were few visitors to the Towers,
and those who came knew what they had to expect in the way of
entertainment. Such as might have looked merely for the satisfaction of
the inner man had long since ceased to call. Mr. Mildmay could have
supped contentedly on bread and cheese. The meagreness of the fare
would have troubled Mrs. Trevanion the most, and the look upon her face
told Dick how welcome was his addition to it.
Dick went into the kitchen to see how Sam was getting on, and soon
returned with a portion of the fish broiled and garnished with herbs.
"As fine a bit of fish as I've tasted," said Mr. Mildmay, "and well
cooked, upon my word."
"I am glad you like it," said Mrs. Trevanion, giving Dick privately an
approving smile.
"You'll soon be hard at work, I suppose, sir," said Dick to the
lieutenant.
"Yes, no doubt I shall have a merry winter. But I wish the Commissioners
would make better arrangements on land. What can I do, with miles of
coast to keep an eye on? One riding-officer and a few old excisemen
here and there! I can't be everywhere."
"Why don't they, sir?" asked Dick.
"Because every man of muscle is snapped up by the press-gang or the
recruiters. Upon my word, I wish Boney would come, if he is coming.
When he has had his walloping there'll be a little time to attend to our
proper concerns. As it is, with this eternal war going on, the
free-traders play ducks and drakes with law and ordinances."
The Squire said nothing. His attitude to smuggling was one of
neutrality. His training in the Navy made him in general adverse to the
contraband trade; but there was a time, not very long since, when the
owners of the Towers were actively engaged in it, or at least accessory
to it, and the landowners along the coast regarded it with sympathy,
open or secret. Indeed, it is probable that the cask of brandy in Mr.
Trevanion's own cellar had never paid duty to the Crown, and old Reuben
Pollex, who loved his "dish of tay," would certainly not have been able
to enjoy it in that time of high prices unless he had known a little
back room in Polkerran where it was easy to slip in and out secretly,
and without the knowledge of the exciseman.
"The smugglers are getting bolder and bolder, confound 'em," Mr. Mildmay
went on. "With the land force so weak, what's the result? If I'm
called to a spot, ten to one by a trick, I must leave the rest of the
coast unguarded. As you know, the only man permanently in this
neighbourhood is old Penwarden, who is zealous enough, but not so active
as a younger man would be."
"No, poor man," said Mrs. Trevanion. "He has often said to me that he
fears the Government will replace him. He will cling to his duty as
long as he can for the sake of his old sister. You know he supports
her, in Truro, Mr. Mildmay."
"I know it, and I'm not the man to put him out of a job, though one of
these days a Commissioner of Customs will make his appearance, and then
I'll get a wigging."
All this while Dick had been considering whether he ought to tell the
lieutenant about the strange vessels he had seen. He knew that
smuggling was the only matter on which there was a certain constraint
between his father and Mr. Mildmay. It was tacitly understood between
them that the Squire would not round on the smugglers. On the other
hand, the revenue officer knew that anything he told the Squire would be
perfectly safe with him. He therefore discussed the subject quite
openly with his old messmate, though, like a wise general, he never
spoke about any plans that he had in view.
Dick made up his mind to say nothing. The lieutenant's cutter was lying
in the little harbour, and if he mentioned what he had seen, Mr. Mildmay
would certainly hurry away and sail in chase of the stranger. What the
Squire would not do, his son could not. But he had scarcely come to
this decision when matters took an unexpected turn.
"By the way, Squire," said the lieutenant, "I've just heard from
Plymouth that the _Aimable Vertu_--precious fine name for a rascally
privateer--is showing herself very active in the Channel. She made two
captures last week, and was sighted two days ago off Falmouth, where a
barque only just managed to escape her. She's said to be a vessel of
extraordinary speed. The Government would give a good deal to catch her
and hang her captain, that daredevil Frenchman, Delarousse; but it's
with privateers as it is with smugglers: we can't be everywhere at once,
and while we're fighting the French on the high seas, I suppose our home
waters must be left to the enemy."
This led to an exchange of reminiscences of privateer-hunting during the
American war, when both were young in the service. Meanwhile Dick felt
uncomfortable. What if the larger vessel he had lately seen was this
very privateer, the _Aimable Vertu_? In that case it was no question of
smuggling, but of piracy. He felt that he ought at least to mention the
matter, yet hesitated to speak without consulting his father. By-and-by
there came an opportunity of speaking to him privately. While Mr.
Mildmay was conversing with Mrs. Trevanion, Dick slipped to the Squire's
side and told him in a sentence or two what he had seen.
"Mildmay," cried the Squire, "hark to this. Dick tells me that an hour
or more ago he saw a strange three-master in the bay. She lowered a
couple of boats, but recalled 'em, and sailed away westward. D'ye think
she's the privateer?"
"Dash my bones, Dick," cried the lieutenant, starting up, "why on earth
didn't you speak before? Oh! I see--I see; I won't reproach you; but
I'll be as mad as a hatter if 'tis the rascal and she gets away. Good
night to you all; you'll excuse me, Mrs. Trevanion. Oh, you young dog!"
He shook his fist at Dick, and hurried from the room.