THE DELECTABLE DUCHY


BY Q

1906




SHORT STORY

To

ALFRED PARSONS




CONTENTS


PROLOGUE
THE SPINSTER'S MAYING
DAPHNIS
WHEN THE SAP ROSE
THE PAUPERS
CUCKOO VALLEY RAILWAY
THE CONSPIRACY ABOARD THE "MIDAS"
LEGENDS OF ST. PIRAN.
I St. Piran: the Millstone
II St. Piran: the Visitation
IN THE TRAIN.
I. Punch's Understudy
II. A Corrected Contempt
WOON GATE
FROM A COTTAGE IN GANTICK.
I. The Mourner's Horse
II. Silhouettes
THE DRAWN BLIND
A GOLDEN WEDDING
SCHOOL FRIENDS
PARENTS AND CHILDREN.
I. The Family Bible
II. Boanerges
TWO MONUMENTS
EGG-STEALING
SEVEN-AN'-SIX
THE REGENT'S WAGER
LOVE OF NAOMI
THE PRINCE OF ABYSSINIA'S POST-BAG.
I. An Interruption
II. The Great Fire on Freethy's Quay




PROLOGUE.


A week ago, my friend the Journalist wrote to remind me that once upon
a time I had offered him a bed in my cottage at Troy and promised to
show him the beauties of the place. He was about (he said) to give
himself a fortnight's holiday, and had some notion of using that time
to learn what Cornwall was like. He could spare but one day for Troy,
and hardly looked to exhaust its attractions; nevertheless, if my
promise held good.... By anticipation he spoke of my home as a "nook."
Its windows look down upon a harbour, wherein, day by day, vessels
of every nation and men of large experience are for ever going and
coming; and beyond the harbour, upon leagues of open sea, highway
of the vastest traffic in the world: whereas from his own far more
expensive house my friend sees only a dirty laurel-bush, a high green
fence, and the upper half of a suburban lamp post. Yet he is convinced
that I dwell in a nook.

I answered his letter, warmly repeating the invitation; and last week
he arrived. The change had bronzed his face, and from his talk I
learnt that he had already seen half the Duchy, in seven days. Yet he
had been unreasonably delayed in at least a dozen places, and used the
strongest language about 'bus and coach communication, local trains,
misleading sign-posts, and the like. Our scenery enraptured him--every
aspect of it. He had travelled up the Tamar to Launceston, crossed
the moors, climbing Roughtor and Brown Willy on his way, plunged down
towards Camelford, which he appeared to have reached by following two
valleys simultaneously, coached to Boscastle, walked to Tintagel,
climbed up to Uther's Castle, diverged inland to St. Nectan's Kieve,
driven on to Bedruthan Steps, Mawgan, the Vale of Lanherne, Newquay,
taken a train thence to Truro, a steamer from Truro to Falmouth,
crossed the ferry to St. Mawes, walked up the coast to Mevagissey,
driven from Mevagissey to St. Austell, and at St. Austell taken
another train for Troy. This brought half his holiday to a close: the
remaining half he meant to devote to the Mining District, St. Ives,
the Land's End, St. Michael's Mount, the Lizard, and perhaps the
Scilly Isles.

Then I began to feel that I lived in a nook, and to wonder how I could
spin out its attractions to cover a whole day: for I could not hear to
think of his departing with secret regret for his lavished time. In
a flash I saw the truth; that my love for this spot is built up of
numberless trivialities, of small memories all incommunicable, or
ridiculous when communicated; a scrap of local speech heard at this
corner, a pleasant native face remembered in that doorway, a battered
vessel dropping anchor--she went out in the spring with her crew
singing dolefully; and the grey-bearded man waiting in his boat
beneath her counter till the custom-house officers have made their
survey is the father of one among the crew, and is waiting to take
his son's hand again, after months of absence. Would this interest my
friend, if I pointed it out to him? Or, if I walk with him by the path
above the creek, what will he care to know that on this particular
bank the violets always bloom earliest--that one of a line of
yews that top the churchyard wall is remarkable because a pair of
missel-thrushes have chosen it to build in for three successive years?
The violets are gone. The empty nest has almost dissolved under the
late heavy rains, and the yew is so like its fellows that I myself
have no idea why the birds chose it. The longer I reflected the
more certain I felt that my friend could find all he wanted in the
guide-books.

None the less, I did my best: rowed him for a mile or two up the
river; took him out to sea, and along the coast for half a dozen
miles. The water was choppy, as it is under the slightest breeze from
the south-east; and the Journalist was sea-sick; but seemed to mind
this very little, and recovered sufficiently to ask my boatman two or
three hundred questions before we reached the harbour again. Then
we landed and explored the Church. This took us some time, owing to
several freaks in its construction, for which I blessed the memory
of its early-English builders. We went on to the Town Hall, the old
Stannary Prison (now in ruins), the dilapidated Block-houses, the
Battery. We traversed the town from end to end and studied the
barge-boards and punkin-ends of every old house. I had meanly ordered
that dinner should he ready half-an-hour earlier than usual, and, as
it was, the objects of interest just lasted out.

As we sat and smoked our cigarettes after dinner, the Journalist
said--

"If you don't mind, I'll he off in a few minutes and shut myself up in
your study. I won't he long turning out the copy; and after that I can
talk to you without feeling I've neglected my work. There's an early
post here, I suppose?"

"Man alive!" said I, "you don't mean to tell me that you're working,
this holiday?"

"Only a letter for the 'Daily ----' three times a week--a column and a
half, or so."

"The subject?"

"Oh, descriptive stuff about the places I've been visiting. I call it
'An Idler in Lyonesse.'"

"Why Lyonesse?"

"Why not?"

"Well, Lyonesse has lain at the bottom of the Atlantic, between Land's
End and Scilly, these eight hundred years. The chroniclers relate that
it was overwhelmed and lost in 1099, A.D. If your Constant Readers
care to ramble there, they're welcome, I'm sure."

"I had thought" said he, "it was just a poet's name for Cornwall.
Well, never mind, I'll go in presently and write up this place: it's
just as well to do it while one's impressions are still fresh."

He finished his coffee, lit a fresh cigarette, and strolled off to the
little library where I usually work. I stepped out upon the verandah
and looked down on the harbour at my feet, where already the vessels
were hanging out their lamps in the twilight. I had looked down thus,
and at this hour, a thousand times; and always the scene had something
new to reveal to me, and much more to withhold--small subtleties such
as a man finds in his wife, however ordinary she may appear to other
people. And here, in the next room, was a man who, in half-a-dozen
hours, felt able to describe Troy, to deck her out, at least, in
language that should captivate a million or so of breakfasting
Britons.

"My country," said I, "if you have given up, in these six hours, a
tithe of your heart to this man--if, in fact, his screed be not
arrant bosh--then will I hie me to London for good and all, and write
political leaders all the days of my life."

In an hour's time the Journalist came sauntering out to me, and
announced that his letter was written.

"Have you sealed it up?"

"Well, no. I thought you might give me an additional hint or two; and
maybe I might look it over again and add a few lines before turning
in."

"Do you mind my seeing it?"

"Not the least in the world, if you care to. I didn't think, though,
that it could possibly interest you, who know already every mortal
thing that is to be known about the place."

"You're mistaken. I may know all about this place when I die, but not
before. Let's hear what you have to say."

We went indoors, and he read it over to me.

It was a surprisingly brilliant piece of description; and accurate,
too. He had not called it "a little fishing-town," for instance, as so
many visitors have done in my hearing, though hardly a fishing-boat
puts out from the harbour. The guide-books call it a fishing-town, but
the Journalist was not misled, though he had gone to them for a number
of facts. I corrected a date and then sat silent. It amazed me that a
man who could see so much, should fail to perceive that what he had
seen was of no account in comparison with what he had not: or that,
if he did indeed perceive this, he could write such stuff with such
gusto. "To be capable of so much and content with so little," I
thought; and then broke off to wonder if, after all, he were not
right. To-morrow he would be on his way, crowding his mind with quick
and brilliant impressions, hurrying, living, telling his fellows a
thousand useful and pleasant things, while I pored about to discover
one or two for them.

"I thought," said the Journalist, swinging his gold pencil-case
between finger and thumb, "you might furnish me with just a hint or
so, to give the thing a local colour. Some little characteristic of
the natives, for instance. I noticed, this afternoon, when I was most
sea-sick, that your fellow took off his hat and pulled something out
of the lining. I was too ill to see what it was; but he dropped it
overboard the next minute and muttered something."

"Oh, you remarked that, did you?"

"Yes, and meant to ask him about it afterwards; but forgot, somehow."

"Do you remember where we were--what we were passing--when he did
this?"

"Not clearly. I was infernally ill just then. Why did he do it?"

I was silent.

"I suppose it had some meaning?" he went on.

"Yes, it had. And excuse me when I say that I'm hanged if either you
or your Constant Readers shall know what that meaning was. My dear
fellow, you belong to a strong race--a race that has beaten us and
taken toll of us, and now carves 'Smith' and 'Thompson' and such names
upon our fathers' tombs. But there are some things you have not laid
hands on yet; secrets that we all know somehow, but never utter, even
among ourselves, nor allude to. If I told you what Billy Tredegar did
to-day, and why he did it, I tell you frankly your article would
make some thousands of Constant Readers open wide eyes over their
breakfast-cups. But you won't know. Why, after all, should I say
anything to spoil Cornwall's prospects as a health-resort?"

My friend took this very quietly, merely observing that it was rather
late in the day to take sides against Hengist and Horsa. But he was
sorry, I could see, to lose his local colour. And as I looked down,
for the last time that night, upon Troy, this petition escaped me--

"O my country, if I keep your secrets, keep for me your heart!"




THE SPINSTER'S MAYING.

"_The fields breathe sweet, the daisies kiss our feet,
Young lovers meet, old wives a-sunning sit;
In every street these tunes our ears do greet--
Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-wee, to-witta-woo!
Spring, the sweet Spring_."


At two o'clock on May morning a fishing-boat, with a small row-boat in
tow, stole up the harbour between the lights of the vessels that lay
at anchor. She came on a soundless tide, with her sprit-mainsail
wide and drawing, and her foresail flapping idle; and although her
cuddy-top and gunwale glistened wet with a recent shower, the man who
steered her looked over his shoulder at the waning moon, and decided
that the dawn would be a fine one. A furlong below the Town Quay he
left the tiller and lowered sail: two furlongs above, he dropped
anchor: then, having made all ship-shape, he lit a pipe and pulled an
enormous watch from his fob. The vessels he had passed since entering
the harbour's mouth seemed one and all asleep. But a din of horns,
kettles, and tea-trays, and a wild tattoo of door-knockers, sounded
along the streets behind the stores and houses that lined the
water-side. Already the town-boys were ushering in the month of May.

The man waited until the half-hour chimed over the 'long-shore roofs
from the church-tower up the hill; set his watch with care; and sat
down to wait for the sun. Upon the wooded cliff that faces the town
the birds were waking; and by-and-bye, from the three small quays came
the sound of voices laughing, and then a boat or two stealing out of
the shadow, each crowded with boys and maids. Before the dawn grew red
above the cliff where the birds sang, a dozen boats had gone by him on
their way up the river, the chatter and broken laughter returning down
its dim reaches long after the rowers had passed out of sight.

For some moments longer he watched the broadening daylight, till the
sun, mounting above the cliff, blazed on the watch he had again pulled
out and now shut with a brisk snap. His round, shaven face, still
boyish in middle age, wore the shadow of a solemn responsibility. He
clambered out into the small boat astern, and, casting loose, pulled
towards a bright patch of colour in the grey shore wall: a blue
quay-door overhung with ivy. The upper windows of the cottage behind
it were draped with snowy muslin, and its walls, coated with recent
whitewash, shamed its neighbours to right and left.

As the boat dropped under this blue quay-door, its upper flap opened
softly, and a voice as softly said--

"Thank you kindly, John. And how d'ye do this May morning?"

"Charming," the man answered frankly. "Handsome weather 'tis, to be
sure."

He looked up and smiled at her, like a lover.

"I needn't to ask how _you_ be; for you'm looking sweet as blossom,"
he went on.

And yet the woman that smiled down on him was fifty years old at
least. Her hair, which usually lay in two flat bands, closely drawn
over the temples, had for this occasion been worked into waves
by curling-papers, and twisted in front of either ear, into that
particular ringlet locally called a kiss-me-quick. But it was streaked
with grey, and the pinched features wore the tint of pale ivory.

"D'ye think you can clamber down the ladder, Sarah? The tide's fairly
high."

"I'm afraid I'll be showing my ankles."

"I was hoping so. Wunnerful ankles you've a-got, Sarah, and a
wunnerful cage o' teeth. Such extremities 'd well beseem a king's
daughter, all glorious within!"

Sarah Blewitt pulled open the lower flap of the door and set her foot
on the ladder. She wore a white print gown beneath her cloak, and a
small bonnet of black straw decorated with sham cowslips. The cloak,
hitching for a moment on the ladder's side, revealed a beaded reticule
that hung from her waist, and clinked as she descended.

"I reckon there's scarce an inch of paint left on my front door," she
observed, as the man steadied her with an arm round her waist, and
settled her comfortably in the stern-sheets.

He unshipped his oars and began to pull.

"Ay. I heard 'em whackin' the door with a deal o' tow-row. They was
going it like billy-O when I came past the Town Quay. But one mustn'
complain, May-mornin's."

"I wasn' complaining," said the woman; "I was just remarking. How's
Maria?"

"She's nicely, thank you."

"And the children?"

"Brave."

"I've put up sixpennyworth of nicey in four packets--that's one
apiece--and I've written the name on each, for you to take home to
'em."

She fumbled in her reticule and produced the packets. The
peppermint-drops and brandy-balls were wrapped in clean white paper,
and the names written in a thin Italian hand. John thanked her and
stowed them in his trousers pockets.

"You'll give my love to Maria? I take it very kindly her letting you
come for me like this."

"Oh, as for that--" began John, and broke off; "I don't call to mind
that ever I saw a more handsome morning for the time o' year."

They had made this expedition together more than a score of times, and
always found the same difficulty in conversing. The boat moved easily
past the town, the jetties above it, and the vessels that lay off them
awaiting their cargoes; it turned the corner and glided by woods where
the larches were green, the sycamores dusted with bronze, the wild
cherry-trees white with blossom, and all voluble. Every little bird
seemed ready to burst his throat that morning with the deal he had to
say. But these two--the man especially--had nothing to say, yet ached
for words.

"Nance Treweek's married," the woman managed to tell him at last.

"I was thinking it likely, by the way she carried on last Maying."

"That wasn' the man. She've kept company with two since him, and
mated with a fourth man altogether--quite a different sort, in the
commercial traveller line."

"Did he wear a seal weskit?"

"Well, he might have; but not to my knowledge. What makes you ask?"

"Because I used to know a Johnny Fortnight that wore one in these
parts; and I thought it might be he, belike."

"Jim had a greater gift o' speech than you can make pretence to," said
the woman abruptly. "I often wonder that of two twin-brothers one
should be so glib and t'other so mum-chance."

"'Tis the Lord's ways," the man answered, resting on his oars. "Will
you be dabblin' your feet as usual, Sarah?"

"Why not?"

He turned the boat's nose to a small landing-place cut in the solid
rock, where a straight pathway dived between hazel-bushes and appeared
again twenty feet above, winding inland around the knap of a green
hill. Here he helped her to disembark, and waited with his back to
the shore. The spinster behind the hazel screen pulled off shoes and
stockings, and paddled about for a minute in the dewy grass that
fringed the meadow's lower slope. Then, drawing a saucer from her
reticule, she wrung some dew into it and bathed her face. Ten minutes
later she re-appeared on the river's bank.

"A happy May, John!"

"A happy May to _you_, Sarah!"

John stepped out beside her, and making his boat fast, followed her
up the narrow path and around the shoulder of the steep meadow. They
overed a stile, then a second, and were among pink slopes of orchards
in bloom. Ahead of them a church tower rose out of soft billows of
apple-blossom, and above the tower a lark was singing. A child
came along the footpath from the village with two garlands mounted
cross-wise on a pole and looped together with strings of painted
birds' eggs. John gave him a penny for his show.

"Here's luck to your lass!" said the wise child.

Sarah was pleased, and added a second penny from her reticule. The boy
spat on it for luck, slipped it into his breeches pocket, and went on
his way skipping.

They stood still and looked after him for some moments, out of pure
pleasure in his good humour; then descended among the orchards to the
village. Half-way up the street stood the inn, the Flowing Source,
with whitewashed front and fuchsia-trees that reached to the
first-floor windows; and before it a well enclosed with a round stone
wall, over which the toadflax spread in a tangle. Around the well,
in the sunshine, were set a dozen or more small tables, covered with
white cloths, and two score at least of young people eating bread and
cream and laughing. The landlady, a broad woman in a blue print gown,
and large apron, came forward.

"Why, Miss Sarah, I'd nigh 'pon given you up. Your table's been spread
this hour, an' at last I was forced to ask some o' the young folks if
you was dead or no."

"Why should I be dead more than another?"

"Well, well--in the midst o' life, we're told. 'Tisn' only the ripe
apples that the wind scatters. He that comes by your side to-day is
but twin-brother to him that came wi' you the first time I mind 'ee,
seemin' but yesterday. Eh, Miss Sarah, but I envied 'ee then, sittin'
wi' hand in hand, an' but one bite taken out o' your bread an' cream;
but I was just husband-high myself i' those days, an' couldn't make
the men believe it."

"Mary Ann Jacobs," Miss Sarah broke out, "if 'twas not for the quality
of your cream, I'd go a-mayin' elsewhere, for I can truly say I hate
your way of talkin' from the bottom of my soul."

"Sarah," said John, wiping his mouth as he finished his bread and
cream, "I'm a glum man, as you well know; an' why Providence drowned
poor Jim, when it might have taken his twin image that hadn' half his
mouth--speech, is past findin' out. But 'tis generally allowed that
the grip o' my hand is uncommon like what Jim's used to be; an' when I
gets home to-night, the first thing my old woman'll be sure to ask is
'Did 'ee give Sarah poor Jim's hand-clasp?'--an' what to say I shan't
know, unless you honours me so far."

"'Tis uncommon good of Maria," said the woman simply, and stole her
thin hand into his horny palm. She had done so, in answer to the same
speech, more than twenty times.

"Not at all," said John.

His fingers closed over hers, and rested so. All but a few of the
mayers had risen from the table, and were romping and chasing each
other back to the boats, for the majority were shop-girls and
apprentices, and must be back in time for business. But Miss Sarah was
in no hurry.

"Not yet," she entreated, as John's grasp began to relax. He tightened
it again and waited, while she leant back, breathing short, with
half-closed eyes.

At length she said he might release her.

"I'm sure 'tis uncommon kind of Maria," she repeated.

"I don't see where the kindness comes in. Maria can have as good any
day o' the year, an' don't appear to value it to that extent."

They walked back through the orchards in silence. At Miss Sarah's
quay-door they parted, and John hoisted sail for his home around the
corner of the coast.




DAPHNIS.

_Has olim exuvias mihi perfidus ille reliquit,
Pignora cara sui: quae nunc ego limine in ipso,
Terra, tibi mando; debent haec pignora Daphnin--
Ducite ab urbe domum, mea, carmina, ducite Daphnin_.


I knew the superstition lingered along the country-side: and I was
sworn to find it. But the labourers and their wives smoothed all
intelligence out of their faces as soon as I began to hint at it. Such
is the way of them. They were my good friends, but had no mind to help
me in this. Nobody who has not lived long with them can divine the
number of small incommunicable mysteries and racial secrets chambered
in their inner hearts and guarded by their hospitable faces. These
alone the Celt withholds from the Saxon, and when he dies they are
buried with him.

A chance word or two of my old nurse, by chance caught in some cranny
of a child's memory and recovered after many days, told me that the
charm was still practised by the woman-folk, or had been practised not
long before her death. So I began to hunt for it, and, almost as soon,
to believe the search hopeless. The new generation of girls, with
their smart frocks, in fashion not more than six months behind London,
their Board School notions, and their consuming ambition to "look
like a lady"--were these likely to cherish a local custom as rude and
primitive as the long-stone circles on the tors above? But they were
Cornish; and of that race it is unwise to judge rashly. For years I
had never a clue: and then, by Sheba Farm, in a forsaken angle of the
coast, surprised the secret.

Sheba Farm stands high above Ruan sands, over which its windows flame
at sunset. And I sat in the farm kitchen drinking cider and eating
potato-cake, while the farmer's wife, Mrs. Bolverson, obligingly
attended to my coat, which had just been soaked by a thunder-shower.
It was August, and already the sun beat out again, fierce and strong.
The bright drops that gemmed the tamarisk-bushes above the wall of the
town-place were already fading under its heat; and I heard the voices
of the harvesters up the lane, as they returned to the oat-field
whence the storm had routed them. A bright parallelogram stretched
from the window across the white kitchen-table, and reached the dim
hollow of the open fire-place. Mrs. Bolverson drew the towel-horse, on
which my coat was stretched, between it and the wood fire, which (as
she held) the sunshine would put out.

"It's uncommonly kind of you, Mrs. Bolverson," said I, as she turned
one sleeve of the coat towards the heat. "To be sure, if the women in
these parts would speak out, some of them have done more than that for
the men with an old coat."

She dropped the sleeve, faced round, and eyed me.

"What do you know of that?" she asked slowly, and as if her chest
tightened over the words. She was a woman of fifty and more, of fine
figure but a worn face. Her chief surviving beauty was a pile of light
golden hair, still lustrous as a girl's. But her blue eyes--though now
they narrowed on me suspiciously--must have looked out magnificently
in their day.

"I fancy," said I, meeting them frankly enough, "that what you know
and I don't on that matter would make a good deal."

She laughed harshly, almost savagely.

"You'd better ask Sarah Gedye, across the coombe. She buried a man's
clothes one time, and--it might be worth your while to ask her what
came o't."

If you can imagine a glint of moonlight running up the blade of
a rapier, you may know the chill flame of spite and despite that
flickered in her eyes then as she spoke.

"I take my oath," I muttered to myself, "I'll act on the invitation."

The woman stood straight upright, with her hands clasped behind her,
before the deal table. She gazed, under lowered brows, straight out of
window; and following that gaze, I saw across the coombe a mean
mud hut, with a wall around it, that looked on Sheba Farm with the
obtrusive humility of a poor relation.

"Does she--does Sarah Gedye--live down yonder?"

"What is that to you?" she enquired fiercely, and then was silent for
a moment, and added, with another short laugh--

"I reckon I'd like the question put to her: but I doubt you've got the
pluck."

"You shall see," said I; and taking my coat off the towel-horse, I
slipped it on.

She did not turn, did not even move her head, when I thanked her for
the shelter and walked out of the house.

I could feel those steel-blue eyes working like gimlets into my back
as I strode down the hill and passed the wooden plank that lay across
the stream at its foot. A climb of less than a minute brought me to
the green gate in the wall of Sarah Gedye's garden patch; and here I
took a look backwards and upwards at Sheba. The sun lay warm on its
white walls, and the whole building shone against the burnt hillside.
It was too far away for me to spy Mrs. Bolverson's blue print gown
within the kitchen window, but I knew that she stood there yet.

The sound of a footstep made me turn. A woman was coming round the
corner of the cottage, with a bundle of mint in her hand.

She looked at me, shook off a bee that had blundered against her
apron, and looked at me again--a brown woman, lean and strongly made,
with jet-black eyes set deep and glistening in an ugly face.

"You want to know your way?" she asked.

"No. I came to see you, if your name is Sarah Gedye."

"Sarah Ann Gedye is my name. What 'st want?"

I took a sudden resolution to tell the exact truth.

"Mrs. Gedye, the fact is I am curious about an old charm that was
practised in these parts, as I know, till recently. The charm is
this--When a woman guesses her lover to be faithless to her, she
buries a suit of his old clothes to fetch him back to her. Mrs.
Bolverson, up at Sheba yonder--"

The old woman had opened her mouth (as I know now) to curse me. But
as Mrs. Bolverson's name escaped me, she turned her back, and walked
straight to her door and into the kitchen. Her manner told me that I
was expected to follow.

But I was not prepared for the face she turned on me in the shadow of
the kitchen. It was grey as wood-ash, and the black eyes shrank into
it like hot specks of fire.

"She--_she_ set you on to ask me that?" She caught me by the coat and
hissed out: "Come back from the door--don't let her see." Then she
lifted up her fist, with the mint tightly clutched in it, and shook it
at the warm patch of Sheba buildings across the valley.

"May God burn her bones, as He has smitten her body barren!"

"What do you know of this?" she cried, turning upon me again.

"I know nothing. That I have offered you some insult is clear: but--"