In the Roar of the Sea. Baring-Gould Sabine
lifted the hand of his daughter, and looked at it with a faint smile. “It is very small, it is very weak, to fight for self alone, let alone yourself encumbered with Jamie.”
“I will do it, papa, do not fear.”
“Judith, I must talk very gravely with you, for the future is very dark to me; and I am unable with hand or brain to provide anything against the evil day. Numbness is on me, and I have been hampered on every side. For one thing, the living has been so poor, and my parishioners so difficult to deal with, that I have been able to lay by but a trifle. I believe I have not a relative in the world – none, at all events, near enough and known to me that I dare ask him to care for you – ”
“Papa, there is Aunt Dionysia.”
“Aunt Dionysia,” he repeated, with a hesitating voice. “Yes; but Aunt Dionysia is – is not herself capable of taking charge of you. She has nothing but what she earns, and then – Aunt Dionysia is – is – well – Aunt Dionysia. I don’t think you could be happy with her, even if, in the event of my departure, she were able to take care of you. Then – and that chiefly – she has chosen, against my express wishes – I may say, in defiance of me – to go as housekeeper into the service of the man, of all others, who has been a thorn in my side, a hinderer of God’s work, a – But I will say no more.”
“What! Cruel Coppinger?”
“Yes, Cruel Coppinger. I might have been the means of doing a little good in this place, God knows! I only think I might; but I have been thwarted, defied, insulted by that man. As I have striven to dig my buried church out of the overwhelming sands, so have I striven to lift the souls of my poor parishioners out of the dead engulfing sands of savagery, brutality, very heathenism of their mode of life, and I have been frustrated. The winds have blown the sands back with every gale over my work with spade, and that stormblast Coppinger has devastated every trace of good that I have done, or tried to do, in spiritual matters. The Lord reward him according to his works.”
Judith felt her father’s hand tremble in hers.
“Never mind Coppinger now,” she said, soothingly.
“I must mind him,” said the old man, with severe vehemence. “And – that my own sister should go, go – out of defiance, into his house and serve him! That was too much. I might well say, I have none to whom to look as your protector.” He paused awhile, and wiped his brow. His pale lips were quivering. “I do not mean to say,” said he, “that I acted with judgment, when first I came to S. Enodoc, when I spoke against smuggling. I did not understand it then. I thought with the thoughts of an inlander. Here – the sands sweep over the fields, and agriculture is in a measure impossible. The bays and creeks seem to invite – well – I leave it an open question. But with regard to wrecking – ” His voice, which had quavered in feebleness, according with the feebleness of his judgment relative to smuggling, now gained sonorousness. “Wrecking, deliberate wrecking, is quite another matter. I do not say that our people are not justified in gathering the harvest the sea casts up. There always must be, there will be wrecks on this terrible coast; but there has been – I know there has been, though I have not been able to prove it – deliberate provocation of wrecks, and that is the sin of Cain. Had I been able to prove – ”
“Never mind that now, dear papa. Neither I nor Jamie are, or will be, wreckers. Talk of something else. You over-excite yourself.”
Judith was accustomed to hear her father talk in an open manner to her. She had been his sole companion for several years, since his wife’s death, and she had become the confidante of his inmost thoughts, his vacillations, his discouragements, not of his hopes – for he had none, nor of his schemes – for he formed none.
“I do not think I have been of any use in this world,” said the old parson, relapsing into his tone of discouragement, the temporary flame of anger having died away. “My sowing has produced no harvest. I have brought light, help, strength to none. I have dug all day in the vineyard, and not a vine is the better for it; all cankered and fruitless.”
“Papa – and me! Have you done nothing for me!”
“You!”
He had not thought of his child.
“Papa! Do you think that I have gained naught from you? No strength, no resolution from seeing you toil on in your thankless work, without apparent results? If I have any energy and principle to carry me through I owe it to you.”
He was moved, and raised his trembling hand and laid it on her golden head.
He said no more, and was very still.
Presently she spoke. His hands weighed heavily on her head.
“Papa, you are listening to the roar of the sea?”
He made no reply.
“Papa, I felt a cold breath; and see, the sun has a film over it. Surely the sea is roaring louder!”
His hand slipped from her head and struck her shoulder – roughly, she thought. She turned, startled, and looked at him. His eyes were open, he was leaning back, almost fallen against the wall, and was deadly pale.
“Papa, you are listening to the roar?”
Then a thought struck her like a bullet in the heart.
“Papa! Papa! My papa! – speak – speak!”
She sprang from the bench – was before him. Her left guelder-rose had rolled, had bounded from her lap, and had fallen on the sand the old man had listlessly brought up from the church. His work, her play, were forever over.
CHAPTER II
A PASSAGE OF ARMS
The stillness preceding the storm had yielded. A gale had broken over the coast, raged against the cliffs of Pentyre, and battered the walls of the parsonage, without disturbing the old rector, whom no storm would trouble again, soon to be laid under the sands of his buried church-yard, his very mound to be heaped over in a few years, and obliterated by waves of additional encroaching sand. Judith had not slept all night. She – she, a mere child, had to consider and arrange everything consequent on the death of the master of the house. The servants – cook and house-maid – had been of little, if any, assistance to her. When Jane, the house-maid, had rushed into the kitchen with the tidings that the old parson was dead, cook, in her agitation, upset the kettle and scalded her foot. The gardener’s wife had come in on hearing the news, and had volunteered help. Judith had given her the closet-key to fetch from the stores something needed; and Jamie, finding access to the closet, had taken possession of a pot of raspberry jam, carried it to bed with him, and spilled it over the sheets, besides making himself ill. The house-maid, Jane, had forgotten in her distraction to shut the best bedroom casement, and the gale during the night had wrenched it from its hinges, flung it into the garden on the roof of the small conservatory, and smashed both. Moreover, the casement being open, the rain had driven into the room unchecked, had swamped the floor, run through and stained the drawing-room ceiling underneath, the drips had fallen on the mahogany table and blistered the veneer. A messenger was sent to Pentyre Glaze for Miss Dionysia Trevisa, and she would probably arrive in an hour or two.
Mr. Trevisa, as he had told Judith, was solitary, singularly so. He was of a good Cornish family, but it was one that had dwindled till it had ceased to have other representative than himself. Once well estated, at Crockadon, in S. Mellion, all the lands of the family had been lost; once with merchants in the family, all the fortunes of these merchants industriously gathered had been dissipated, and nothing had remained to the Reverend Peter Trevisa but his family name and family coat, a garb or, on a field gules. It really seemed as though the tinctures of the shield had been fixed in the crown of splendor that covered the head of Judith. But she did not derive this wealth of red-gold hair from her Cornish ancestors, but from a Scottish mother, a poor governess whom Mr. Peter Trevisa had married, thereby exciting the wrath of his only sister and relative, Miss Dionysia, who had hitherto kept house for him, and vexed his soul with her high-handed proceedings. It was owing to some insolent words used by her to Mrs. Trevisa that Peter had quarrelled with his sister at first. Then when his wife died, she had forced herself on him as housekeeper, but again