“Well, it’s all I’ve seen them drink,” Charlotte maintained.
“Dear! dear! That’s bad.” Then, as the cob reached the gate of the Grange and would have turned in, “Thank you,” he said. She pulled up and he got out. “I will see,” he said awkwardly. “But I — I shall do nothing in a hurry. Good day.”
His tone was stiff, and Charlotte as she drove on to the house believed that she had offended him, and she was sorry. “But I don’t care!” she said recklessly. Yet she looked as if she did care, and for once she did not confess her indiscretion to her mother.
She was right in one thing: in thinking that Peggy felt her isolation. She was young, and life at the Rectory had been full and, within bounds, gay. She had many friends, and among her fellows had been valued for her high spirits and admired for the very wilfulness that had landed her where she was. She had been popular, a leader; and now to be shunned and sent to Coventry by those who had courted her and followed her was not and could not be pleasant. The treatment was bracing, it bred in her a wholesome contempt for the world’s fickleness; but it hurt. Spending of necessity much time alone, she had moments of depression in which she saw herself reduced for the rest of her life to a lower level; and, being a woman with a woman’s social values, she suffered.
But in the main she reacted bravely, and nine days out of ten she was able to lift herself above these feelings. She loved and was loved, and in the range of her home, confined as it was, she found far less to jar on her taste or wound her refinement than might have been expected. The cottage was small, and its plenishing poor, but its windows looked on a glorious view, it stood apart without near neighbours to overlook or offend, and it was her own. Within she reigned, and care and neatness were the homage paid to her presence by those who shared its cabin-like proportions. Not an hour passed that she had not to recognize their thought for her, and their care of her; and if the woman who came for an hour or two each day to do the rougher work was heavy-handed, she had two men-servants to make good what was lacking.
So as a rule Peggy was happy, and many an evening, as the winter approached, and she sat by the fireside, she owned the world well lost, though they were but whitewashed walls that gave back the light of the humble lamp. With Charles leaning over a chart and sailing again some ancient voyage, with the old man busy at his bench, carving a hull, with her own hands full of some domestic task, or her eyes on one of their few books, she told herself that she envied no one — that she could say with truth, “A fig for their greatness!”
Yet she had her anxieties. With the insight of love she knew that Charles was not satisfied, and would never be satisfied while the burden of disgrace and failure weighed upon him. And of lifting that burden from his shoulders she saw no chance and no hope. It would always be a drawback to their happiness, and a cloud on their home. But it must be borne with and lightened.
Then in Beremouth that winter was a depressing one. The Peggy was out of commission, and some were the poorer for that, and Budgen was short of work and had reduced his small staff. The cheerful noise of the hammers rose less often from the Cove, there were many days when it was wholly silent, and Peggy looking down on the idle sheds feared that Charles might be the next to lose his employment, and the modest sum that it brought in. If that happened, and they were cast on the old Captain’s tiny pension and slender pay, Charles would be driven to seek work elsewhere — and would it be possible for him to take her with him? Not at first, she feared; and on winter nights when the wind flung itself against the face of the cliffs and howled in the chimney of the cottage, and she could not sleep, it was a fear that wrung her heart. She would be separated from him! Poverty, hardship, the narrowest straits, she could bear all as long as he was with her. But she knew that he was too proud to live on his father, even if her own pride had not scorned the thought.
That fear, however, she was sedulous to hide. Charles might sit, as he sat too often, absent and moody, betraying to watchful eyes the anxiety that he felt. But she must smile. Stooping to tasks below his station, humouring Budgen’s ill-temper, plodding at the rickety desk when all his tastes were for the open sea — if he could bear this, if he could lower himself to this, surely she could wear a cheerful face, since it was all that she could do to help him.
She told herself, indeed, and many times, that her burden was a light one. But it was not so light in the face of growing perplexity, and of the reports that were afloat in the town. Budgen, it began to be hinted, was in low water. He was in a bad way. It was even whispered on the quay that he was like to be sold up. He could not find the money for another cruise — so, for the most part, they explained his inaction. He owed here and he owed there; and if peace came — and there was talk of peace, the Plymouth paper was full of it — the Lively Peggy, built for speed and with little cargo-room, would not be worth the copper sheathing that covered her bottom! She lay idle and useless at her moorings, and all kinds of stories were abroad. And as the winter wore on, all the stories were disquieting.
CHAPTER XVI
OVER a district stretching from Saltash to Yealmpton Augusta Portnal’s handsome features, the charm of her smile, and the dignity with which she carried herself were household words. Allowed by mothers to be all that she should be, she was quoted as a pattern for daughters, and it was everywhere admitted that happy would be the man who was privileged to set her at the head of his dinner-table. Even in her home she was not ill-liked or ill-spoken of; the servants had nothing to say against her temper or her management. But with all this the girl lacked the vital spark. She awoke no flame, or the happy man had surely come forward before this; she kindled no enthusiasm, no kitchen-wench would have followed her into exile or served her without wages. She gave dignity to the Rectory, she presided over it with a cold brilliance, but warmth was not in her.
While Peggy had been there, to flit up and down the stairs, to fill the passages with laughter, and to whistle tunefully as any blackbird in the walled garden, no one had perceived the lack. But with Peggy gone and the place fallen silent, the household felt the void and in the household no one presently felt it more sensibly than the Rector. His dignity had no longer a foil, his gravity a set-off; and worse, his hours of ease had no longer a plaything to pet or chide. Justly offended as he was, and though he had no fault to find with his remaining daughter, he owned the blank. The stillness of the house weighed on him; it remained all that was decorous, all that was becoming, and yet he was not happy. He assured himself several times a day that it was his duty to ignore the daughter who had abandoned him, but he could not forget the daughter who had lived with him and who had been, though he had not known it, the sunshine of his home.
He was not so false to himself as to let this be seen. On the contrary he won fresh tributes by his behaviour under a painful trial. No one could have acted more becomingly, neither ignoring nor advertising his trouble, but doing his duty to society without stooping to apologies. From the railing in which smaller men might have indulged he refrained. To an intimate here and there he voiced his sorrow in a few well-chosen words; to the world he turned a face graver than usual. And that was all. He uttered no defence, sought no man’s support, but went his way cloaked in a self-respecting reticence.
His temper, however, was not as equable as it had been, and he took umbrage more readily. Against Budgen in particular he harboured the bitterest feelings. It was not only that the man continued, out of sheer perversity, to employ young Bligh and so to keep the Blighs in Beremouth; but — minor grievance as this was — he was keeping the Rector out of money, and Dr. Portnal, bereft in his home, thought more of money than before. He saw his capital in the privateer lying idle, he doubted if there would remain enough to make good his advances, and he began to hate the man whose brutish obstinacy stood in the way of increasing the one and realizing the other.
Pride for a time withheld him from making a final attack on Budgen. He feared that it would be futile. But when about mid-winter rumours of
peace began to take definite shape and the Funds to rise — an ominous sign from his point of view — he could no longer contain himself. He hoped that an argument that had failed before might be effectual now, and it was big with purpose, and with a stern face under his wide-brimmed hat, that he started one evening for the Cove. He would have it out with Budgen.
It was significant of his mood that he took the path that passed the Cottage. Since his daughter’s return he had not gone to the Cove that way; he had used, though it was half a mile longer, the road that wound about the rear of the headland. But to-day he rose above his weakness, and that he did so, ignoring the humiliating sight that he must encounter, was a proof of the strength of his purpose. Yet when a turn in the path disclosed the thatched roof, it hurt him so sorely to think that his daughter lived in conditions so low that he turned away his eyes as he went by, in fear lest he should see her face at the window or meet her at the gate; and though neither of these things happened, his pride suffered. He felt himself degraded and he added another stroke to the score that Budgen owed him.
He would have added a second had he found Bligh in the boat-builder’s company. But he was spared this. Budgen was alone, pottering about the shed, his hands idle and his face morose, an unhappy man as anyone with vision could see. But the Rector, if he had insight, had no pity; he hated idleness in the lower classes, and waste no less, and the sight of the man dawdling there while precious hours passed, put a sharper edge on his grievance.
He lost no time in broaching it. Acknowledging Budgen’s surly greeting by a curt nod, “Have you seen the Exeter paper?” he demanded.
To Budgen the visitor was a black dot darkening all the landscape and he made no pretence that he was welcome. “Not I!” he said, as contemptuously as he dared, and he wrung out a wet cloth as if the other had not been there. “I don’t trouble my head wi’ such things.”
“Well, if you had you would have seen something that touches you, Budgen. I advise you to get the paper and look at it. It is reported that an early peace is certain, and I have myself letters that promise it for the summer. It is only a question of months. Now, man, you have told me more than once how little the brig will be worth when that happens, yet you have let the summer and the autumn pass, and you’ve made no use and no profit of her. But it is not too late. There is still time to fit her out and to make a cruise that may bring me some return and save you — from a debtor’s prison.”
Budgen started. “Prison?” he ejaculated savagely, as he glared at his tormentor. Yet the other saw that he was shaken. He saw that cold as the day was, beads of sweat had sprung out on his brow and that his eyes were the eyes of a frightened man.
The Rector pushed his advantage. “Yes, a debtor’s prison!” he said firmly. “For I give you warning that I do not intend to wait for my money, Budgen. If you do not avail yourself of this last chance to save yourself, I shall seize the brig. I doubt if she will cover your debt to me, and if she does not I shall fall back on your interest in the Cove.”
“You cannot!” Budgen cried.
“You will find that I can,” the Rector said. “My lawyers will see to that.”
Budgen strove to maintain his truculent air and to brazen it out, but panic peeped through the pretence. “That’s just talk! Threats!” he said. But his mouth twitched.
“They are threats that I shall make good,” the Rector replied. And then in a milder tone, “Man,” he continued, “I am speaking in your own interest. I am giving you a last chance. You have been sleeping on the edge! Awake before you fall over. Fit out the brig, and make use — make use of the few weeks or the few months that you have. I will advance in reason, and one good prize, such as your folly and your men’s drunkenness wasted, may save you.”
“And fill your pocket,” the boat-builder muttered, with a poor attempt at a sneer. But though he acted indifference, he was a shaken man. As the Rector had said, he saw where he stood. He wiped his brow with a trembling hand, and his next words, though he tried to infuse contempt into them, marked his surrender. “And who’s to take her out?” he muttered.
“Why not Copestake? He was in fault last time, grievously, grievously in fault. Still—”
Budgen spat on the ground. “He’ll sail no more!” he said. “He’ve done with the sea. He’ve said it often, but he means it this time.”
“He may be persuaded.”
Budgen laughed sourly. “Not he! Nor it don’t lie with him, neither. He’ve wedded a wife, a body Portsmouth way, and she’d scratch your eyes out if you so much as said the word to him.”
“Well, he’s not the only seaman, man.”
“Maybe. But it ain’t every skipper the men will ship with! That’s certain.”
“Well, you know my mind now,” the Rector rejoined. “You have had your warning. “ He pointed his gold-headed cane at the Peggy floating high at her moorings. “It is a sin to let the brig rot idle there, a sin and a shame, man. And as my money is in her and I’ve no mind to be a loser by her, if she does not sail within a reasonable time, you may be sure that I shall take steps to secure myself. Even now I doubt if your share of her will cover my advances. But later she will not meet them by a large sum, and I’ll not wait to see her value reduced to nothing!”
“And yet you’ve the will to advance more,” Budgen said with a sneer.
“I have — on the chance of the venture. And to save you, if it be possible.”
Budgen gave way, though with an ill grace. “Well, I’ll think of it,” he said sullenly.
“Then lose no time. And cut down your expenses here. Waste no more money on that worthless rascal Fewster, whom I am told you are still supporting in his idleness.” It was on the tip of the Rector’s tongue to bring up the matter of Bligh’s employment also, but pride stood in the way; he saw that to do so, now that his motive was known, would be to lower himself intolerably, and he left the words unsaid.
“Well, I’ll consider it,” Budgen repeated, sulkily.
This was as much as the Rector looked for, and he said a parting word and closed the interview, returning to the town by the road.
He left behind him a frightened man. The boat-builder, hardly knowing what he did, wandered down to the water’s edge and, with his gaze bent seawards, lost himself in gloomy meditation. The Rector’s order, for an order it was, had angered him almost to madness, but it had opened his eyes. It had disclosed to him his true plight, the plight that hitherto in sheer churlishness he had refused to face. Now, roughly awakened, he saw ruin yawning at his feet, and he saw too and plainly that he had wasted the months and neglected the means that might have saved him. To stand with folded arms until the Peggy lost her value and his pitiless creditor came upon his other property — no policy could have been more insane or more hopeless. In that the Rector had been right and had advised him well — and yet how he hated the man! How he longed to thwart him! But to thwart him, he saw now, was to cut his own throat.
For many minutes he continued to stand where he was, gazing dully at the heaving waste that about the Point broke in cascades of snowy foam: and it may be doubted whether his rage or his fear had the upper hand. He heard the Lively Peggy knocked down for an old song, and he saw his creditor insisting on his pound of flesh. The Cove and all that went with it, his snug house and its arbour looking on the sea, his men’s white-washed cottages sprinkled up and down the bluff like snow-berries on a bush, his slips and shed and all that made him what he was — that was his and had been his father’s and his grandfather’s before him — he saw all pass from him at the fall of a remorseless hammer.
Ay, it was too true. His possession of the things, that stood to him for wife and child, was in desperate jeopardy. He was losing hold of them, with every day, with every hour that passed. That devil, who had just left him, was not going to wait for Joe’s death. No, lending a little for this and a little for that, he had got him, Budgen, in his grip, he had gained ever a larger and a larger interest in the brig, willing in hi
s subtlety and his cunning to go beyond her value. He had seen, he had planned to that end. He had perceived, beyond the Peggy, a richer prize and a sounder security, and presently, soon, he would press for the balance, and the Cove, so quiet, so remote, so precious and so long Budgen’s own would be drawn into the maw, the greedy maw — of that devil! Ay, and he would leave it to a new man and take for himself a monstrous fine!
Budgen saw it all, doing the Rector less than justice. He saw himself denuded, beggared, driven from the house that his grandfather had built, from the cottages his father had added, from the lofts and slips that he had repaired and loved: driven from the land that his forefathers had found naked and barren, a worthless foreshore, and that by their labour and thrift had become wealth-producing — had become the home that was his very life!
It was a bitter thought and a bleak prospect. It matched — and fitly matched the sullen waste of waters on which he gazed. But only Budgen, to whom the things about him were his all, could say how bitter or how bleak was that prospect, or how far the fear of losing his all might drive a desperate man.
CHAPTER XVII
IT has been said that to his neighbours the Rector appeared to be little changed. He carried his head as high or higher than before. But this was the outward show, for within the man was harassed to an extent that he alone could measure. He might avoid but he could not ignore the Cottage; it stretched its tentacles far, it lay in wait for him at every step. He could not leave his house, he could not walk a hundred yards with the certainty that he would not meet his daughter. At any turn, at every corner he might come upon her, dressed with a plainness that hurt his pride, yet for very shame he must stand and say a formal word to her, conscious that a score of curious eyes were on him and as many tongues itching to describe the meeting.
Nor was this all. If he entered a shop he might find his son-in-law at the counter — once he had done so and had turned and gone out in dudgeon with a mortifying sense of defeat. It had come indeed to this, that in the parish where he had once moved care-free as Jove, where his passage had bared all heads, he now shrank from showing himself, or walked ill at ease, baulking at every corner.
Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman Page 757
