A Singer from the Sea - Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr (books for students to read .TXT) 📗

room, and then made the pie, and clotted the cream, and I never knew who I did it for. Oh, Denas, what a godsend you do be! John, my old dear, our life be turned to sunshine now."

And long after Denas had fallen asleep they sat by their fire and talked of their child's sorrow, and Joan got up frequently and took a candle and, shading it with her hand, went and looked to see if the girl was all right. When Denas was a babe in the cradle, Joan had been used to satisfy her motherly longing in the same way. Her widowed child was still her baby.

In the morning John went from cottage to cottage and told his friends to come and rejoice with him. For really to John "the dead was alive and the lost was found." And it was a great wonderment in the village; men nor women could talk of anything else but the return of Denas Tresham. Many were really glad to see her; and if some visited the poor, stricken woman thinking to add a homily to God's smiting, they were abashed by her evident suffering, by her pallor and her wasted form, and the sombre plainness of her black garments. For some days life was thus kept at a tension beyond its natural strain, and Joan and her daughter had no time to recover the every-day atmosphere. But no excitement outlasts the week's perchances and changes, and after the second Sunday all her acquaintances had seen Denas, and curiosity and interest were at their normal standard.

All her acquaintances but Tris Penrose. Denas wondered that he did not come to see her, and yet she had a shy dislike to make inquiries about him. For the love of Tris Penrose for Denas Penelles had been the village romance ever since they were children together, and she feared that a word from her about him might set the women to smiling and sympathising and to taking her affairs out of her own hands.

As the home-life settled to its usual colour and cares, Denas became conscious of a change in it. She saw that her father went very seldom to sea, that he was depressed and restless, and that her mother, in a great measure, echoed his moods. And she was obliged to confess that she was terribly weary. There was little housework to do, except what fell naturally to Joan's care, and interference with these duties appeared to annoy the methodical old woman. The knitting was far ahead, there were no nets to mend; and when Denas had made herself a couple of dresses, there seemed to be no work for her to do. And she was not specially fond of reading. Culture and study she could understand if their definite end was money; but for the simple love of information or pleasure books were not attractive to her.

So in a month she had come to a place in her experience when it was a consolation to think of that sixteen hundred pounds in London. She might yet find it necessary to her happiness; for without some change she could not much longer endure the idleness and monotony of her life. Fortunately the change came. One morning a woman visited the cottage, and the sole burden of her conversation was the lack of a school in St. Penfer by the Sea to which the fisher-children might go in the morning.

"Here be my six little uns," she cried, "and up the cliff they must hurry all, through any wind or weather, or learn nothing. And then they be that tired when they do get home again, they be no use at all about the bait-boxes or the boats. There be sixty school-going children in the village, and I do say there ought to be a school here for them."

And suddenly it came into the heart of Denas to open a school. Pay or no pay, she was sure she would enjoy the work, and that afternoon she went about it. An empty cottage was secured, a fisher-carpenter agreed to make the benches, and at an outlay of two or three pounds she provided all that was necessary. The affair made a great stir in the hamlet. She had more applications for admission than the cottage would hold, and she selected from these thirty of the youngest of the children.

For the first time in many months Denas was sensible of enthusiasm in her employment. But Joan did not apparently share her hopes or her pleasure. She was silent and depressed and answered Denas with a slight air of injury.

"They have agreed to pay a penny a week for each child," Denas said to her mother.

"Well, Denas, some will pay and some will never pay."

"To be sure. I know that, mother. But it does not much matter."

"Aw, then, it do matter, my girl--it do matter, a great deal." And Joan began to cry a little and to arrange her crockery with far more noise than was necessary.

"Dear mother, what is it? Are you in trouble of any kind?"

"Aw, then, Denas, I be troubled to think you never saw your father's trouble. He be sad and anxious enough, God knows. And no one to say 'here, John,' or 'there, John,' or give him a helping hand in any way."

"Sit down, mother, and tell me all. I have seen that father's ways are changed and that he seldom goes to the fishing. I hoped the reason was that he had no longer any need to go regularly."

"No need? Aw, my dear, he has no boat!"

"No boat! Mother, what do you mean to tell me?"

"I mean, child, that on the same night the steamer Lorne was wrecked your father lost his boat and his nets, and barely got to land with his life--never would have done that but for Tris Penrose, who lost all, too--and both of them at the mercy of the waves when the life-boat reached them. Aw, my dear, a bad night. And bad times ever since for your father. Now and then he do get a night with Trenager, or Penlow, or Adam Oliver; but they be only making a job for him. And when pilchard time comes, 'tis to St. Ives he must go and hire himself out--at his age, too. It makes me ugly, Denas. My old dear hiring himself out after he have sailed his own boat ever since man he was. And then to see you spending pounds and pounds on school-benches and books, and talking of it not mattering if you was paid or not paid; and me weighing every penny-piece, and your father counting the pipefuls in his tobacco-jar. Aw, 'tis cruel hard! Cruel! cruel!"

"Now, then, mother, dry your eyes--and there--let me kiss them dry. Listen: Father shall have the finest fishing-boat that sails out of any Cornish port. Oh, mother, dear! Spend every penny you want to spend, and I will go to the church town this afternoon to buy father tobacco for a whole year."

"Let me cry! Let me cry for joy, Denas! Let me cry for joy! You have rolled a stone off my heart. Be you rich, dear?"

"Not rich, mother, but I have sixteen hundred pounds at interest."

"Sixteen hundred silent pounds, and they might have been busy, happy, working pounds! Aw, Denas, what hours of black care the knowing of them might have saved us. But there, then--I had forgotten. The money be dance money and theatre money, and your father will not touch a penny of it. I do know he will not."

"Mother, when I stopped singing--when I left the theatre for ever I had not in my purse one half-penny. Roland gave me fifty dollars; that came from Elizabeth--that was all I had. When it was gone, Roland was employed by Mr. Lanhearne. I told you about him."

"Yes, dear. How then?"

"Roland's father left him pictures and silver plate and many valuable things belonging to the Treshams, and when Roland died they were mine. Elizabeth bought them from me. They were worth two thousand pounds; she gave me sixteen hundred pounds."

"Why didn't you tell father and me? 'Twas cruel thoughtless of you."

"No, no! I wanted to come back to you as I left you--just Denas--without anything but your love to ask favour from. If I had come swelling myself like a great lady, worth sixteen hundred pounds, how all the people would have hated me! What dreadful things they would have said! Father would have had his hands full and his heart full to make this one and that one keep the insult behind their lips. Oh, 'twould have been a broad defiance to evil of every kind. I did think, too, that father had some money in St. Merryn's Bank."

"To be sure. And so he did. But there--your aunt Helen's husband was drowned last winter, and nothing laid by to bury him, and father had it to do; and then there was a mortgage on the cottage, and that was to lift, or no roof to cover Helen and her children. So with this and that the one hundred pounds went away to forty pounds. That be for our own burying. There be twenty pounds of yours there."

"Mine is yours!" Then rising quickly, she struck her hands sharply together and cried out: "ONE and ALL! ONE and ALL!"[4]

And Joan answered her promptly, letting the towel fall from her grasp to imitate the sharp smiting of the hands as with beaming face she repeated the heart-stirring cry.

"ONE and ALL! ONE and ALL! Denas. Aw, my girl, there was a time when I said in my anger I was sorry I gave you suck. This day I be right glad of it! You be true blood! Cornish clean through, Denas!"

"Yes, I be true Cornish, mother, and the money I have is honest money. Father can take it without a doubt. But I will see Lawyer Tremaine, and he shall put the sum I got in the St. Penfer News, and tell what I got it for, and none can say I did wrong to take my widow right."

"I be so happy, Denas! I be so happy! My old dear will have his own boat! My old dear will have his own boat!"

"Now, mother, neither you nor I can buy a boat. Shall we tell father and let him choose for himself?"

Joan knew this was the most prudent plan, but that love of "surprise pleasures" which is a dominant passion in children and uneducated natures would not let Joan admit at once this solution of the difficulty. How could she forego the delight of all the private consultations; of the bringing home of the boat; of the wonder of the villagers; of John's happy amazement? She could not bear to contemplate the prosaic, commonplace method of sending John to buy his own boat when it was within the power of Denas and herself to be an unseen gracious providence to him. So after a moment's thought she said: "There be Tris Penrose. It will be busy all and happy all for him to be about such a job."

"I have not seen Tris since I came home. He is the only one who has not come to say welcome to me."

"Aw, then, 'twas only yesterday he got home himself. He has been away with Mr. Arundel on his yacht."

"You never told me."

"You never asked. I thought, then, you didn't want Tris to be named."

"But what for shouldn't I