A Maid of the Silver Sea by John Oxenham
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John Oxenham >> A Maid of the Silver Sea
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18 A MAID OF THE SILVER SEA
by
JOHN OXENHAM
With Frontispiece in Colour by Harold Copping
Hodder and Stoughton Warwick Square, London, E.C.
TO
MY FRIEND
EDWARD BAKER
OF LA CHAUMIERE, SARK
ON WHOSE MOST HOSPITABLE AND SUPREMELY
COMFORTABLE VERANDAH, LOOKING OUT
TO THE FAIR COAST OF FRANCE, THIS
STORY WAS PARTLY WRITTEN, I
INSCRIBE THE SAME IN REMEMBRANCE
OF MANY
DELIGHTFUL DAYS
TOGETHER
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
HOW TWO LAY IN A CLEFT
CHAPTER II
HOW NANCE CAME TO BE HERSELF
CHAPTER III
HOW THE NEW MINE CAPTAIN CAME
CHAPTER IV
HOW GARD MADE NEW ACQUAINTANCES
CHAPTER V
HOW NANCE SHONE THROUGH HER MODEST VEILING
CHAPTER VI
HOW GRANNIE SCHEMED SCHEMES
CHAPTER VII
HOW GARD FOUGHT GALES AND TOM
CHAPTER VIII
HOW TOM WANTED TO BUT DIDN'T DARE
CHAPTER IX
HOW OLD TOM FOUND THE SILVER HEART
CHAPTER X
HOW YOUNG TOM FOUND HIS MATCH
CHAPTER XI
HOW GARD DREW NEARER TO HIS HEART'S DESIRE
CHAPTER XII
HOW NANCE CAME UP THE MAIN SHAFT WITHOUT GOING DOWN IT
CHAPTER XIII
HOW GARD REFUSED AN OFFER AND MADE AN ENEMY
CHAPTER XIV
HOW THEY WENT THROUGH THE DARKNESS OF THE NARROW WAY
CHAPTER XV
HOW TWO FELL OUT
CHAPTER XVI
HOW ONE FELL OVER
CHAPTER XVII
HOW TOM WENT TO SCHOOL FOR THE LAST TIME
CHAPTER XVIII
HOW PETER'S DIPLOMACY CAME TO NOUGHT
CHAPTER XIX
HOW THE SARK MEN FELT ABOUT IT
CHAPTER XX
HOW SARK CRAVED BLOOD FOR BLOOD
CHAPTER XXI
HOW LOVE TOOK LOVE TO SANCTUARY
CHAPTER XXII
HOW THE STARS SANG OF HOPE
CHAPTER XXIII
HOW NANCE SENT FOOD AND HOPE TO HIM
CHAPTER XXIV
HOW HE SAW STRANGE SIGHTS
CHAPTER XXV
HOW HE LIVED THROUGH THE GREAT STORM
CHAPTER XXVI
HOW HE HELD THE ROCK
CHAPTER XXVII
HOW ONE CAME TO HIM LIKE AN ANGEL FROM HEAVEN
CHAPTER XXVIII
HOW THE OTHERS CAME TO MAKE AN END
CHAPTER XXIX
HOW HE CAME INTO AN UNKNOWN PLACE
CHAPTER XXX
HOW NANCE WATCHED FROM AFAR
CHAPTER XXXI
HOW TWO WENT IN AND THREE CAME OUT
CHAPTER XXXII
HOW JULIE MEDITATED EVIL
CHAPTER XXXIII
HOW HOPE CAME ONCE AGAIN
CHAPTER XXXIV
HOW JULIE'S SCHEMES FELL FLAT
CHAPTER XXXV
HOW AN ANGEL CAME BRINGING THE TRUTH
CHAPTER XXXVI
HOW HE CAME HOME FROM L'ETAT
CHAPTER XXXVII
HOW THEY LAID TRAPS FOR THE DEVIL
CHAPTER XXXVIII
HOW THEY LAID THE DEVIL BY THE HEELS
CHAPTER XXXIX
HOW THEY THANKED GOD FOR HIS MERCIES
CHAPTER I
HOW TWO LAY IN A CLEFT
A girl and a boy lay in a cubby-hole in the north side of the cliff
overlooking Port Gorey, and watched the goings-on down below.
The sun was tending towards Guernsey and the gulf was filled witn golden
light. A small brig, unkempt and dirty, was nosing towards the rough
wooden landing-stage clamped to the opposite rocks, as though doubtful
of the advisability of attempting its closer acquaintance.
"Mon Gyu, Bern, how I wish they were all at the bottom of the sea!" said
the girl vehemently.
"Whe--e--e--w!" whistled the boy, and then with a twinkle in his
eye,--"Who's got a new parasol now?"
"Everybody!--but it's not that. It's the bustle--and the dirt--and the
noise--and oh--everything! You can't remember what it was like before
these wretched mines came--no dust, no noise, no bustle, no dirty men,
no silly women, no nothing as it is now. Just Sark as it used to be. And
now--! Mon Gyu, yes I wish the sea would break in through their nasty
tunnels and wash them all away--pumps and engines and houses--everything!"
And up on the hillside at the head of the gulf the great pumping-engine
clacked monotonously "Never! Never! Never!"
"You've got it bad to-day, Nan," said the boy.
"I've always got it bad. It makes me sick. It has changed everything and
everybody--everybody except mother and you," she added quickly.
"Get--get--get! Why we hardly used to know what money was, and now no
one thinks of anything but getting all they can. It is sickening."
"S--s--s--s--t!" signalled the boy suddenly, at the sound of steps and
voices on the cliff outside and close at hand.
"Tom," muttered the boy.
"And Peter Mauger," murmured the girl, and they both shrank lower into
their hiding-place.
It was a tiny natural chamber in the sharp slope of the hill. Ages ago
the massive granite boulders of the headland, loosened and undercut by
the ceaseless assaults of wind and weather and the deadly quiet fingers
of the frost, had come rolling down the slope till they settled afresh
on new foundations, forming holes and crannies and little angular
chambers where the splintered shoulders met. In time, the soil silted
down and covered their asperities, and--like a good colonist--carrying
in itself the means of increase, it presently brought forth and
blossomed, and the erstwhile shattered rocks were royally robed in
russet and purple, and green and gold.
Among these fantastic little chambers Nance had played as a child, and
had found refuge in them from the persecutions of her big half-brother,
Tom Hamon. Tom was six when she was born--fourteen accordingly when she
was at the teasable age of eight, and unusually tempting as a victim by
reason of her passionate resentment of his unwelcome attentions.
She hated Tom, and Tom had always resented her and her mother's
intrusion into the family, and Bernel's, when he came, four years after
Nance.
What his father wanted to marry again for, Tom never could make out. His
lack of training and limited powers of expression did not indeed permit
him any distinct reasoning on the matter, but the feeling was there--a
dull resentment which found its only vent and satisfaction in stolid
rudeness to his stepmother and the persecution of Nance and Bernel
whenever occasion offered.
The household was not therefore on too happy a footing.
It consisted, at the time when our story opens, of--Old Mrs.
Hamon--Grannie--half of whose life had been lived in the nineteenth
century and half in the eighteenth. She had seen all the wild doings of
the privateering and free-trading days, and recalled as a comparatively
recent event the raiding of the Island by the men of Herm, though that
happened forty years before.
She was for the most part a very reserved and silent old lady, but her
tongue could bite like a whip when the need arose.
She occupied her own dower-rooms in the house, and rarely went outside
them. All day long she sat in her great arm-chair by the window in her
sitting-room, with the door wide open, so that she could see all that
went on in the house and outside it; and in the sombre depths of her
great black silk sun-bonnet--long since turned by age and weather to
dusky green--her watchful eyes had in them something of the inscrutable
and menacing.
Her wants were very few, and as her income from her one-third of the
farm had far exceeded her expenses for more than twenty years, she was
reputed as rich in material matters as she undoubtedly was in
common-sense and worldly wisdom. Even young Tom was sulkily silent
before her on the rare occasions when they came into contact.
Next in the family came the nominal head of it, "Old Tom" Hamon, to
distinguish him from young Tom, his son; a rough, not ill-natured man,
until the money-getting fever seized him, since which time his
home-folks had found in him changes that did not make for their comfort.
The discovery of silver in Sark, the opening of the mines, and the
coming of the English miners--with all the very problematical benefits
of a vastly increased currency of money, and the sudden introduction of
new ideas and standards of life and living into a community which had
hitherto been contented with the order of things known to its
forefathers--these things had told upon many, but on none more than old
Tom Hamon.
Suspicious at first of the meaning and doings of these strangers, he
very soon found them advantageous. He got excellent prices for his farm
produce, and when his horses and carts were not otherwise engaged he
could always turn them to account hauling for the mines.
As the silver-fever grew in him he became closer in his dealings both
abroad and at home. With every pound he could scrimp and save he bought
shares in the mines and believed in them absolutely. And he went on
scrimping and saving and buying shares so as to have as large a stake in
the silver future as possible.
He got no return as yet from his investment, indeed. But that would
come all right in time, and the more shares he could get hold of the
larger the ultimate return would be. And so he stinted himself and his
family, and mortgaged his future, in hopes of wealth which he would not
have known how to enjoy if he had succeeded in getting it.
So possessed was he with the desire for gain that when young Tom came
home from sea he left the farming to him, and took to the mining
himself, and worked harder than he had ever worked in his life before.
He was a sturdy, middle-sized man, with a grizzled bullet head and
rounded beard, of a dogged and pertinacious disposition, but capable,
when stirred out of his usual phlegm, of fiery outbursts which overbore
all argument and opposition. His wife died when his boy Tom was three,
and after two years of lonely discomfort he married Nancy Poidestre of
Petit Dixcart, whose people looked upon it as something of a
_mesalliance_ that she should marry out of her own country into Little
Sark.
Nancy was eminently good-looking and a notable housewife, and she went
into Tom Hamon's house of La Closerie with every hope and intention of
making him happy.
But, from the very first, little Tom set his face against her.
It would be hard to say why. Nancy racked her brain for reasons, and
could find none, and was miserable over it.
His father thrashed him for his rudeness and insolence, which only made
matters worse.
His own mother had given way to him in everything, and spoiled him
completely. After her death his father out of pity for his forlorn
estate, had equally given way to him, and only realised, too late, when
he tried to bring him to with a round turn, how thoroughly out of hand
he had got.
When little Tom found, as one consequence of the new mother's arrival,
that his father thrashed instead of humouring him, he put it all down to
the new-comer's account, and set himself to her discomfiture in every
way his barbarous little wits could devise.
He never forgot one awful week he passed in his grandmother's care--a
week that terminated in the arrival of still another new-comer, who, in
course of time, developed into little Nance. It is not impossible that
the remembrance of that black week tended to colour his after-treatment
of his little half-sister. In spite of her winsomeness he hated her
always, and did his very best to make life a burden to her.
When, on that memorable occasion, he was hastily flung by his father
into his grandmother's room, as the result of some wickedness which had
sorely upset his stepmother, and the door was, most unusually, closed
behind him, his first natural impulse was to escape as quickly as
possible.
But he became aware of something unusual and discomforting in the
atmosphere, and when his grandmother said sternly, "Sit down!" and he
turned on her to offer his own opinion on the matter, he found the keen
dark eyes gazing out at him from under the shadowy penthouse of the
great black sun-bonnet, with so intent and compelling a stare that his
mouth closed without saying a word. He climbed up on to a chair and
twisted his feet round the legs by way of anchorage.
Then he sat up and stared back at Grannie, and as an exhibition of
nonchalance and high spirit, put out his tongue at her.
Grannie only looked at him.
And, bit by bit, the tongue withdrew, and only the gaping mouth was
left, and above it a pair of frightened green eyes, transmitting to the
perverse little soul within new impressions and vague terrors.
Before long his left arm went up over his face to shut out the sight of
Grannie's dreadful staring eyes, and when, after a sufficient interval,
he ventured a peep at her and found her eyes still fixed on him, he
howled, "Take it off! Take it off!" and slipped his anchors and slid to
the floor, hunching his back at this tormentor who could beat him on his
own ground.
For that week he gave no trouble to any one. But after it he never went
near Grannie's room, and for years he never spoke to her. When he passed
her open door, or in front of her window, he hunched his shoulder
protectively and averted his eyes.
Resenting control in any shape or form, Tom naturally objected to
school.
His stepmother would have had him go--for his own sake as well as hers.
But his father took a not unusual Sark view of the matter.
"What's the odds?" said he. "He'll have the farm. Book-learning will be
no use to him," and in spite of Nancy's protests--which Tom regarded as
simply the natural outcrop of her ill-will towards him--the boy grew up
untaught and uncontrolled, and knowing none but the worst of all
masters--himself.
On occasion, when the tale of provocation reached its limit, his father
thrashed him, until there came a day when Tom upset the usual course of
proceedings by snatching the stick out of his father's hands, and would
have belaboured him in turn if he had not been promptly knocked down.
After that his father judged it best for all concerned that he should
flight his troublesome wings outside for a while. So he sent him off in
a trading-ship, in the somewhat forlorn hope that a knowledge of the
world would knock some of the devil out of him--a hope which, like many
another, fell short of accomplishment.
The world knocks a good deal out of a man, but it also knocks a good
deal in. Tom came back from his voyaging knowing a good many things that
he had not known when he started--a little English among others--and
most of the others things which had been more profitably left unlearnt.
CHAPTER II
HOW NANCE CAME TO BE HERSELF
And little Nance?
The most persistent memories of Nance's childhood were her fear and
hatred of Tom, and her passionate love for her mother,--and Bernel when
he came.
"My own," she called these two, and regarded even her father as somewhat
outside that special pale; esteemed Grannie as an Olympian, benevolently
inclined, but dwelling on a remote and loftier plane; and feared and
detested Tom as an open enemy.
And she had reasons.
She was a high-strung child, too strong and healthy to be actually
nervous, but with every faculty always at its fullest--not only in
active working order but always actively at work--an admirable subject
therefore for the malevolence of an enemy whose constant proximity
offered him endless opportunity.
Much of his boyish persecution never reached the ears of the higher
powers. Nance very soon came to accept Tom's rough treatment as natural
from a big fellow of fourteen to a small girl of eight, and she bore it
stoically and hated him the harder.
Her mother taught her carefully to say her prayers, which included
petitions for the welfare of Grannie and father and brother Tom, and for
a time, with the perfunctoriness of childhood, which attaches more
weight to the act than to the meaning of it, she allowed that to pass
with a stickle and a slur. But very soon brother Tom was ruthlessly
dropped out of the ritual, and neither threats nor persuasion could
induce her to re-establish him.
Later on, and in private, she added to her acknowledged petitions an
appendix, unmistakably brief and to the point--"And, O God, please kill
brother Tom!"--and lived in hope.
She was an unusually pretty child, though her prettiness developed
afterwards--as childish prettiness does not always--into something finer
and more lasting.
She had, as a child, large dark blue eyes, which wore as a rule a look
of watchful anxiety--put there by brother Tom. To the end of her life
she carried the mark of a cut over her right eyebrow, which came within
an ace of losing her the sight of that eye. It was brother Tom did that.
She had an abundance of flowing brown hair, by which Tom delighted to
lift her clear off the ground, under threat of additional boxed ears if
she opened her mouth. The wide, firm little mouth always remained
closed, but the blue eyes burned fiercely, and the outraged little
heart, thumping furiously at its impotence, did its best to salve its
wounds with ceaseless repetition of its own private addition to the
prescribed form of morning and evening prayer.
Once, even Tom's dull wit caught something of meaning in the blaze of
the blue eyes.
"What are you saying, you little devil?" he growled, and released her so
suddenly that she fell on her knees in the mud.
And she put her hands together, as she was in the habit of doing, and
prayed, "O God, please kill brother Tom!"
"Little devil!" said brother Tom, with a startled red face, and made a
dash at her; but she had foreseen that and was gone like a flash.
One might have expected her childish comeliness to exercise something of
a mollifying effect on his brutality. On the contrary, it seemed but to
increase it. She was so sweet; he was so coarse. She was so small and
fragile; he was so big and strong. Her prettiness might work on others.
He would let her see and feel that he was not the kind to be fooled by
such things.
He had the elemental heartlessness of the savage, which recognises no
sufferings but its own, and refuses to be affected even by them.
When Nance's kitten, presented to her by their neighbour, Mrs. Helier
Baker, solved much speculation as to its sex by becoming a mother, Tom
gladly undertook the task of drowning the superfluous offspring. He got
so much amusement out of it that, for weeks, Nance's horrified inner
vision saw little blind heads, half-drowned and mewing piteously,
striving with feeble pink claws to climb out of the death-tub and being
ruthlessly set swimming again till they sank.
She hurled herself at Tom as he gloated over his enjoyment, and would
have asked nothing better than to treat him as he was treating the
kittens--righteous retribution in her case, not enjoyment!--but he was
too strong for her. He simply kicked out behind, and before she could
get up had thrust one of his half-drowned victims into the neck of her
frock, and the clammy-dead feel of it and its pitiful screaming set her
shuddering for months whenever she thought of it.
But now and again her tormentor overpassed the bounds and got his
reward--to Nance's immediate satisfaction but subsequent increased
tribulation. For whenever he got a thrashing on her account he never
failed to pay her out in the smaller change of persecution which never
came to light.
On a pitch-dark, starless night, the high-hedged--and in places
deep-sunk--lanes of Little Sark are as black as the inside of an ebony
ruler.
When the moon bathes sea and land in a flood of shimmering silver, or on
a clear night of stars--and the stars in Sark, you must know, shine
infinitely larger and closer and brighter than in most other places--the
darkness below is lifted somewhat by reason of the majestic width and
height of the glittering dome above. But when moon and stars alike are
wanting, then the darkness of a Sark lane is a thing to be felt, and--if
you should happen to be a little girl of eight, with a large imagination
and sharp ears that have picked up fearsome stories of witches and
ghosts and evil spirits--to be mortally feared.
Tom had a wholesome dread of such things himself. But the fear of
fourteen, in a great strong body and no heavenly spark of imagination,
is not to be compared with the fear of eight and a mind that could
quiver like a harp even at its own imaginings. And, to compass his ends,
he would blunt his already dull feelings and turn the darkness to his
account.
When he knew Nance was out on such a night--on some errand, or in at a
neighbour's--to crouch in the hedge and leap silently out upon her was
huge delight; and it was well worth braving the grim possibilities of
the hedges in order to extort from her the anger in the bleat of terror
which, as a rule, was all that her paralysed heart permitted, as she
turned and fled.
Almost more amusing--as considerably extending the enjoyment--was it to
follow her quietly on such occasions, yet not so quietly but that she
was perfectly aware of footsteps behind, which stopped when she stopped
and went on again when she went on, and so kept her nerves on the quiver
the whole time.
Creeping fearfully along in the blackness, with eyes and ears on the
strain, and both little shoulders humped against the expected apparition
of Tom--or worse, she would become aware of the footsteps behind her.
Then she would stop suddenly to make sure, and stand listening
painfully, and hear nothing but the low hoarse growl of the sea that
rarely ceases, day or night, among the rocks of Little Sark.
Then she would take a tentative step or two and stop again, and then
dash on. And always there behind her were the footsteps that followed in
the dark.
Then she would fumble with her foot for a stone and stoop hastily--for
you are at a disadvantage with ghosts and with Toms when you stoop--and
pick it up and hurl it promiscuously in the direction of the footsteps,
and quaver, in a voice that belied its message, "Go away, Tom Hamon! I
can see you,"--which was a little white fib born of the black urgency of
the situation;--"and I'm not the least bit afraid,"--which was most
decidedly another.
And so the journey would progress fitfully and in spasms, and leave
nightmare recollections for the disturbance of one's sleep.
But there were variations in the procedure at times.
As when, on one occasion, Nance's undiscriminating projectile elicited
from the darkness a plaintive "Moo!" which came, she knew, from her
favourite calf Jeanetton, who had broken her tether in the field and
sought companionship in the road, and had followed her doubtfully,
stopping whenever she stopped, and so received the punishment intended
for another.
Nance kissed the bruise on Jeanetton's ample forehead next day very many
times, and explained the whole matter to her at considerable length, and
Jeanetton accepted it all very placidly and bore no ill-will.
Another time, when Nance had taken a very specially compounded cake over
to her old friend, Mrs. Baker, as a present from her mother, and had
been kept much longer than she wished--for the old lady's enjoyment of
her pretty ways and entertaining prattle--she set out for home in fear
and trembling.
It was one of the pitch-black nights, and she went along on tiptoes,
hugging the empty plate to her breast, and glancing fearfully over first
one shoulder, then the other, then over both and back and front all at
once.
She was almost home, and very grateful for it, when the dreaded black
figure leaped silently out at her from its crouching place, and she tore
down the lane to the house, Tom's hoarse guffaws chasing her mockingly.
The open door cleft a solid yellow wedge in the darkness. She was almost
into it, when her foot caught, and she flung head foremost into the
light with a scream, and lay there with the blood pouring down her face
from the broken plate.
A finger's-breadth lower and she would have gone through life one-eyed,
which would have been a grievous loss to humanity at large, for sweeter
windows to a large sweet soul never shone than those out of which
little Nance Hamon's looked.
Most houses may be judged by their windows, but these material windows
are not always true gauge of what is within. They may be decked to
deceive, but the clear windows of the soul admit of no disguise. That
little life tenant is always looking out and showing himself in his true
colours--whether he knows it or not.
Nance's terrified scream took old Tom out at a bound. He had heard the
quick rush of her feet and Tom's mocking laughter in the distance. He
carried Nance in to her mother, snatched up a stick, and went after the
culprit who had promptly disappeared.
It was two days before Tom sneaked in again and took his thrashing
dourly. Little Nance had shut her lips tight when her father questioned
her, and refused to say a word. But he was satisfied as to where the
blame lay and administered justice with a heavy hand.
Bernel--as soon as he grew to persecutable age--provided Tom with
another victim. But time was on the victims' side, and when Nance got to
be twelve--Bernel being then eight and Tom eighteen--their combined
energies and furies of revolt against his oppressions put matters more
on a level.
Many a pitched battle they had, and sometimes almost won. But, win or
lose, the fact that they had no longer to suffer without lifting a hand
was great gain to them, and the very fact that they had to go about
together for mutual protection knitted still stronger the ties that
bound them one to the other.
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