Читать книгу Tregarthen's Wife - Fred M. White - Страница 7

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MARY positively refused to go any further for the present. She was tired and happy and lazy, for it had been one of those Days of Rare Delight that come to us all at times, days that we frame in golden memories and varnish with sweet recollections. She had been up early; she had seen the sun gild the latticed windows and the quaint twisted chimney-stacks of the Sanctuary; she had seen the brown shadows chased from the cloisters and the children playing on the green. These latter treated her with a superb scorn, a shy scorn that was yet perfectly self-possessed. Mary had seen Courts, had even backed breathlessly from Royalty itself, but she had seen no self-possession like unto this.

It was the same with all of them; men, women, and children alike. They answered her with straight and fearless eyes and a consciousness of complete social equality that still irritated this petted Democrat a little. They were poor folk, they were dreadfully ignorant and conceited (twin sisters, these), but they were certainly refined and there was no trace of vulgarity about them. It seemed almost impossible to believe that these broad-chested, straight-limbed men who carried themselves like princes should be unable to read. Assuredly Tregarthen had a deal to answer for.

Mary had seen the cottages, small and clean and yet eloquent with poverty; she had conversed with men and women and had looked into their eyes. And in all the eyes was the shadow of the tragedy, the haunting fear of hunger. Even the children had it.

Now, according to the tenets of all the smug philosophers, these people should have been utterly and entirely happy. They had no rent or taxes to pay, every householder was technically owner of his lands and hereditaments. A tithe of his earnings went to Tregarthen, who handled all the money, and the rest belonged to the tiller of the soil. There were no public-houses, no newspapers, and no post-office. There was a lovely island and a climate as perfect as any God has vouchsafed to the British Isles. Obviously, then, it was the duty of these people to be happy. They should have run races, garlanded themselves with flowers, and danced to the sackbut and hautboy.

But they did none of these things, albeit they were a hardy and well-nourished race. They had no sports, no conversation beyond the eternal sea and the prospects of narcissus and daffodil, they seldom laughed or smiled because the phantom of starvation was always before them. Mary thought of it angrily. Tregarthen could stop this by the raising of his hand. He should stop it, and she would compel him to do so. In the first place she would try argument, logic, and all the rest of it, and if that failed the great coup should be sprung. If Tregarthen only knew!

It seemed to Mary that she had seen everything. She had seen the harvest of the flowers going forward, she had seen the mile-long endless cable by which the baskets of blooms were transferred to the mainland at such time as the Atlantic ground-swell came reeling across the bay. She had seen Tregarthen's partially ruined castle on the headland where the lord of the island kept his solitary state. Time was when Tregarthen Castle had been a fortress of note, a ruin spoken of in legends and woven into fireside tales. As yet Mary had not explored its gloomy grandeur; that, she hoped, was to come. For the present she was interested in the human document with the aid of Miriam and Ruth who had been impressed into the service. Ruth had harvested her flowers before the sun was on them.

Mary was seated on the crest of the Valley of Contrasts. The spot had no official name of the kind, but it was even as Mary had described it. In front the tossed, wind-blown sandhills trended to the beach-dunes ruffled and quilled with weeds and carpeted with sea-pinks. Wild and desolate was this side with the chain of rocks, below this the firm reaches of sand stretched, and then the sea, blue as sapphire, and curling in from the Atlantic in huge long-crested waves, which broke thundering on the sands or carried up to the ramparts of the mainland, and dashed to pieces there like mile upon mile of exquisite billowy lace. The stagnant air trembled with the thunder of the breaking rollers, across the track of the sun a diaphanous haze of spray hung. Here you had all the spectacle of a great storm at sea with never a breath of wind to ruffle the head of a budding daffodil. And all this within five hours of London, so please you.

That is what lay on one side; the great crinkled face and the mighty voice of the Atlantic, the sweetest air under heaven, and just at the back of the sand dunes, where Mary was sitting, the edge of a valley which is a perfect paradise of flowers and waving foliage. It was like sitting on the edge of two climates. Practically speaking, it was a mere matter of shelter from the winds. One side of a tree might be blown sand and sea-pinks, the other a smiling oasis. Mary broke out enthusiastically.

"I should like to stay here always," she said.

Ruth laughed. There was something hopeless in the sound, a something suggestive of dark, screaming nights and the breaking up of boats in it.

"You wouldn't," she said. "I have seen Paradise turned into a howling desert by the frosty breath of one night. How redly the sun goes down! Did you ever see anything so magnificent as the crimson flush of that big sea?"

Mary was moved by it, and said so. Again Ruth laughed.

"It looks like frost," she replied. "Maybe the wind may shift a point or two south and carry it away. Frost is our nightmare at this time of the year. If it comes, not a flower yonder will be worth gathering in the morning. You see, we are too close to the mainland—if we were ten miles out to sea we should be better off. If the frost comes we are ruined. We shall have to struggle on as best we can till spring comes again. It happened two years ago. . . . God grant you may never see such a sight as that. And the pilchards had failed, so there was little to expect from the villagers over to Trevose. Many of the children died, even strong men perished. And the pity of it is that it could have been so easily averted."

"Who by?" Miriam asked sharply.

"By Tregarthen. Tregarthen is a good man, he loves his people heart and soul, but in some things he is no more than a madman. He is king here, and we are his subjects. And we would do anything for him. But he will do nothing for us because it is a crime for women to work, and he fears the greed of gold that business would bring. Can you do nothing for us?"

Ruth's eyes were gleaming, her hands were outstretched passionately. She walked up and down the spit of sand with the sinuous grace of a tiger. In all the fair picture was nothing fairer than this.

"I can do a great deal for you, Ruth," Mary said. "I am rich, for one thing; and there are other means at my disposal. But if there are others in the island who feel as you do——"

"There are none, except perhaps my dear Naomi, and she is old and fearsome. I am the only snake in the paradise—I and Gervase Tretire. And I feel all these things because I have read and studied, and I understand."

"Oh, oh! So you have read and studied?" said Miriam. "Where?"

"It is a secret. You must not tell anybody. My Naomi taught me to read. Then the Rector of St. Minver over to Trevose took an interest in me and he lent me books. Mr. Guy is a scholar and a gentleman, and he has a fine library. I have read nearly all his books. I know Shakespeare, and Milton, and Addison, and Steele, and Tennyson, and Shelley. And I know Kant, and Adam Smith, and Mill also. If these people here knew what I know and feel, they would burn me for a witch likely. And yet it is all for them; for their sakes I could make Tregarthen blossom like a rose. You may say that it does so now; but not always, not always. You are not laughing at me?"

She paused, with a sudden suspicion in her splendid eyes. Mary was touched, and even the loose lines of Miriam's mouth were quivering.

"I am very far from laughing at you, dear Ruth," Mary said gently. "I am going to try and do something for Tregarthen, and you shall be my ally. Yet it would be a thousand pities to see anything like trade or commerce here. Come, I see you have thought out a way to physical salvation."

Ruth sat down, and her eyes ceased to dilate.

"I have prayed for something like this," she murmured. The dying saffron of the day was on her face and glorified it. "You are rich, and you have told me you have Tregarthen blood in your veins. Don't leave us here to starve again. Fight Tregarthen; bring him to his senses. Make him understand that woman has a mission in life that is not all crystallized in the bearing and care of children."

"That is not original, Ruth," Miriam said demurely.

"I fancy it is Spencer," Ruth admitted. "But you know what I mean. The men here could grow the flowers and catch the fish, but we want something to fall back upon when the flowers fail and the pilchards are shy. We want summer, and spring, and autumn visitors; in fact, visitors all the year round. Rector Guy up to St. Minver came here to die of consumption three years ago. You will see for yourself what a testimonial to our air he is when he comes over to conduct service on Sunday afternoons. But what we want is some other staple industry."

Mary smiled. She couldn't help it. It seemed so strange to hear this glorious untamed daughter of the sea and sand discoursing learnedly of staple industries, and supply and demand, and the like. But Ruth saw nothing of this.

"Give us that and I will ask for nothing more," she said. "For the rest we are the model of a Christian commonwealth. We have no rents or taxes, we give a tithe to Tregarthen. The bad years he suffers, the good years he benefits. All we want is something we can work at all the year round."

Mary nodded thoughtfully. She looked from the climbing spume thundering on the cliffs away behind to the valley where the harvest of the flowers was going on. She felt the salt breath of the sea on her face. High overhead the gulls were calling. The boats of Trevose were drifting with the tide in the harbour.

"It must be something ideal," she said. "Something refined and dreamy. A Chicago man would recommend pigs. Fancy pigs in Tregarthen!"

"Don't," Miriam said. "Don't, Mary."

"Very well, I won't. It all comes of having a father who never talked anything but dollars, except when he varied his discourse with shares. Certainly we don't want any dollars or shares here. Painting or carving—perhaps children's toys. There is a good deal of latent poetry in Dutch dolls if you properly appreciate the subject. Then there is spinning; Tregarthen tweed, for instance, with the smell of the thyme in it. I could get Worth to make me a few gowns. What do you say to Tregarthen homespuns?"

Ruth looked up eagerly. The poor child had a wide and promiscuous education, but she was not of the world, and she had not learnt to laugh at things. The tragedy of the empty cupboard is a long way removed from persiflage that often covers an aching heart.

"Where are you going to get your sheep?" asked Miriam the practical. "I have a far better suggestion than that. Lace-making is the occupation for Tregarthen. Ruth, is the art lost in the island?"

Ruth looked up with scared eyes.

"Who told you about that?" she whispered.

"It is all in the diary I told you about this morning," Mary explained. "The art has been lost in Spain, but it was known here some century or two ago. Ruth, don't tell me the art is lost here also."

Ruth looked around her, fearful lest the birds of the air had carried the story. She bent to her companion eagerly.

"The art is alive," she said. "Tregarthen found it out four years ago, and all the pillows and bobbins were destroyed except mine. It was Naomi who gave me the lace of her own making, and I took it to Exeter and sold it for twelve pounds. That money kept Tregarthen for six weeks. But Tregarthen was furious, and Naomi destroyed almost everything. I didn't—I couldn't do it. Give us that industry, and Tregarthen knows sorrow and hunger no more."

"And you can do it?" Mary asked.

"I can do it," Ruth replied proudly; "but Naomi can do it better. And it's lovely. Shall I show you some of it to-night?"

"Vive la revolution!" Mary cried. "You shall, my dear, you shall."

And so the red flag of rebellion was raised.