Katharine Blythe

Chapter I

Katharine Blythe was the daughter of the Rev. Samuel Blythe, Yicar of Lanyon, a small parish in the most distant part of the Duchy of Cornwall. Bounded on the west and south by the seething waves of the Atlantic, that frothed at the base of its grey cliffs, on the north and east by a low range of granite-strewn, heathery hills, Lanyon parish was but a strip of land between the hills of Carn Wartha and the sea. Most of it was under some sort of cultivation, and produced little patches of wheat or barley, or grew small hard turnips VOL. i. l and coarse hay. The rest was left for pasture, and brought forth thistles and all manner of wild flowers. Towards the cliffs great tracts of Lan yon parish were still covered with short golden furze and deep purple heath, of the sort that, not so very long ago, was the flowery carpet of nearly all western Corn wall.

The hills that bounded the parish on the north were still in this wild and beautiful state, and glowed with gold and purple in the summer and autumn months, and lay brown and russet with the dead bracken all through the winter. There was not a tree in Lanyon save a twisted, gnarled old stump of elder, called in lingering Celtic phrase, a " scow," that grew in the churchyard. No trees could bear up against the force of the strong salt winds that swept across that bare upland country, and went moaning over the rocky hills. This absence of all taller vegetation was, however, amply atoned for by the exceeding beauty of the wild flowers and ferns that grew in all the boggy fields and unenclosed spaces. Great brakes of Osmunda Regalis, wildernesses of smaller ferns, with flowers of every hue, made a bit of bog a veritable garden of delight to look at, but not to venture into.

They were the only flower-gardens of the neigh bourhood, save one or two walled-in spaces, about twelve feet square, that to the un initiated traveller looked like pounds with the doorways blocked up. Inside these walls some few lovers of floriculture kept their hardy stocks and gilliflowers, pinks and sweet-williams, from being literally blown out of the earth. On a clear, fine day there is something very fresh and invigorating in this wild open country. Tbe little whitewashed cottages are dotted all about like pebbles thrown from a giant child's hand. It would be difficult to tell which were villages and which were not, but for the churches, which stand like hoary sentinels about the land. No place could have less order or design in its arrangement than a Cornish village, for therein every man doeth that wliich is right in his own eyes, and builds his house where and how he pleases.

The great desire of the average Cornish working man is to own his own house and the bit of land adjoining it; so the houses are scattered all over the country, with just a few of the older ones clinging about the bases of the grey churches, and forming the " churchtowns." Lanyon churchtown was just a cluster of these little cottages straggling off into the fields all around. There was no pre tence at a village street ; the road wound through the clustering cottages and passed close under the church tower. Facing the tower was a moderate-sized grey stone house, built in a square and plain fashion, and whose uncurtained windows seemed to stare in an unblinking, grim way upon the church. This was the doctor's house. The parsonage lay lower down the vil lage, and its side was towards the road.

It, too, was built of solid granite, now grown rough and seamed with the winter storms. A grass plot was in front of the house, divided from the road by a stone hedge. A kitchen-garden lay at the other side of the house, and at the back was a yard with fowl-houses and pigsties in it. The parsonage was bare and ugly. There was not a vestige of any grace or beauty about the place. The ornaments of the garden were a fringe of weeping tamarisk bushes that hung over the hedge, and a very disreputable ragged specimen of pam pas grass that grew in the middle of the grass plot, The gravel was of crushed quartz, and was white and glaring, and as if there were not enough rocks in the neighbourhood, a pile of loose stones, mostly of white quartz, were piled in front of the house under the middle window.

These had been placed there probably with reference to the construction of a rockery by some benighted individual, who had had dreams of introducing ferns among these dreadful specimens, and had then abandoned the project in disgust. This was Katharine's home. In it she had been born and bred, and had never passed a night of her life outside its walls. The waving, treeless country, the pinnacles of rock jutting out into the sea, the sway ing of the Atlantic rollers, the solitary beacon light, and the far-off, misty western islands had been, as it were, the unvarying framework of her life. At the time when this story opens, and Katharine was about seventeen, the family at the vicarage consisted of three persons. The Rev. Samuel Blythe had lost his wife more than ten years ago. She was a quiet, gentle woman, tall and fair.

She had come from Oxford, where her father was a pro fessor, to follow the fortunes of her young husband. She had been well and carefully educated, was an accomplished musician, and a good linguist. She had been brought up among intellectual people, and was clever, and indeed, for a woman in those days, learned. She bore the life at Lanyon well. She was never heard to murmur at her complete isolation, or at the utter absence of all that had nourished and delighted her spirit of old ; she was never heard to regret the learned society she had left, nor, what was still more to her, the music she had loved so dearly. At first, perhaps, she had been very happy with her husband, and then when she had seen that he was gradually slipping away from her and his old life, and becoming day by day more of a narrow-minded sportsman and farmer, she may have turned to her children for comfort; but she never complained.

She died when her eldest daughter was ten and her youngest six. No one knew exactly why she died ; she seemed to fade away, and no one, except her children, seemed to think very much about it. Mr. Blythe missed her a good deal at first. His easy, pleasant nature had leant on her for his comforts more than he suspected. All the parish considered him a very model and inconsolable widower. So he was in a sort of way. To the very end of his life he talked of his poor dear Kitty in a gentle, pitying tone, as if she really was greatly to be pitied for having gone away from him. By-and-by, however, his daughter attended to his comforts, and studied his little ways, and anticipated his modest desires much as her mother had done, and then Mr. Blythe regained his cheerfulness, and people said how wonderfully he bore up under his trials.

It was Anna, the eldest daughter, who thus supplied her mother's place to her father. She had been well instructed in the part before her mother's death. " Be sure," the dying woman had said to her daughter over and over again, " be sure you never let your father miss any of his little comforts or pleasures, Anna. He has not very many, and as he gets older you must find other things to do for him, and so make his life a happy one." Anna had promised, and fulfilled her promise — at first, being such a child, imper fectly, later on with trust and fidelity. At this time, when she was about twenty one, she was the very model of a good daughter, thoughtful, careful, patient, and obedient, Possibly, as she grew older and became more confirmed in her habits, she might become somewhat exacting and over careful respecting details, but at present she was the perfection of a daughter.

Of late years she had also played the harmonium in the church — a groaning, wheezing, rattling old machine that was always getting out of order, and emitting some horrible sound from its creaking depths at the most unexpected times. It was Anna's custom to practice on this in strument every Monday afternoon, from five to six o'clock, as a preparation for the Sunday's services. Katharine usually ac companied her on these occasions, to make suggestions respecting the hymns and chants to be used, and to drill two or three extremely unwilling little urchins who had been captured with great trouble for the occasion. One evening in late summer they came together out of the damp, earthy old church, that even in that glorious weather had seemed chill and close, and as Anna locked the door after her, she asked, " What are you looking at, Katharine ?

" The girl made no answer ; she was standing under the ruinous old granite porch, on the grey, storm-beaten lintels of which some faint traces of angel forms lingered in uncouth carving, half covered with lichen and the close moss of ages. She had a white dress on — a home-made, old-fashioned garment, with loose straight folds, and tight sleeves. The gold of the sunlight fell upon it and turned it into a robe of light. She was looking out to sea, where, like a thin strip of indented cloud upon the horizon, lay the isles of the west. So full of light was the sky, so full of dancing ripple was the sea, that they lay as if suspended between earth and heaven upon the outskirts of the world. " There is going to be a sunset," she said, when Anna had again spoken to her. " I shall go down on the cliffs and see it."

" Tea is ready," said Anna the practical, fastening the crazy old wooden gate of the porch with a rusty chain and an antiquated padlock ; " you had better come in, first." " Then I shall lose the best part of it ; no, I will have something when I come in." " I will fetch you a bit of cake to put in your pocket," said the elder sister. They were walking along the deep churchyard path towards the lych gate, deep with the dead of Lanyon for many years passed, that lay piled on either side under the coarse grass. Katharine nodded ; it did not occur to her to fetch the cake herself. At this stage of her life she lived in that sweet dream land air that only girls and youths can breathe. She was not more foolish than her kind in her dreams, perhaps not so foolish as some. To this dreamland, this visionary Utopia of young and unspoilt natures, it may be, the world owes most of its greatest and noblest things.

Men must have an ideal good before they seek to realize even its reflection upon earth. So Anna fetched the cake, and Katharine dreamed, kneeling upon the broken churchyard wall, that was low inside by reason of the number of the dead, though high enough from the road outside. To steady herself she leant against the gnarled old trunk of the scow tree, the branches of which writhed and undulated like so many snakes with crowns of tattered leaves upon their foreheads. As she so knelt, watching the sea turning into deeper blue, and the islands into purple, she was startled by a voice below her. " Good evening, Kitty ; are you doing penance ? " She looked down. A lad stood in the road below her, a fresh-faced, bright-eyed lad, with short curling hair and strong sinewy limbs. He was not very tall ; Cornish lads run to breadth rather than height, and this youth's chest would not have been out of proportion for a man of six feet in height.

There was a twinkle in his eyes as he looked up at her. " No," she said, " I am waiting for Anna. I am going down to the cliffs to see the sunset." He glanced towards the west. " Hum ! looks rather nasty for to-morrow. I am going down in the bay to lock at my crab pots directly. Will you come ? " " No ; I would rather sit on the cliffs." " Well, I will bring you a crab if I get one. Good-bye." " Good-bye," she said ; 'and the lad went whistling into the doctor's house. Anna brought the cake in a little basket for her sister. " Be sure you don't sit out too late, and catch cold," she said as she gave it to her, and Katharine took the cake and went by a path beside the doctor's house that led through some fields, and then on to the downs upon the cliffs.

Chapter II

When Anna came back the second time to the vicarage, she found a stranger with her father. He was a clergyman, a tall, melancholy-looking man, with black eyes, black hair, and a sallow complexion. He had no beard or moustache, and in these days a beardless parson generally gets him self up to look as much as possible like a Roman Catholic priest. This man did not look like one, for he wore a white tie. His chief characteristics were the black ness and restlessness of his eyes, and a certain nervous compression of his lips when not speaking, as if he felt that there were words behind them which the very least relaxation of the muscles would suffer to come forth. Indeed, there was an air of resolute suppression about the man altogether, and it might betoken great strength or great weakness, for from his face it was impossible to say wliich it was ; one thing only was certain, that he was a man terribly in earnest with his life and his surroundings.

He could hardly have found a greater contrast than Mr. Blythe. The latter was a short, rather small man, with a delicately moulded face, small regular features, and bright, very blue eyes. He must have been close upon sixty, but his eyes were as bright and clear and blue as a little child's, and were a complete contrast to the inscru table flat black eyes of the stranger, and his large, somewhat heavily-made features. Mr. Blythe had small hands and feet, and a quick fluttering action of his fingers, more like a woman's than a man's. The stranger had large bony hands which he vol. i. pressed together tightly whenever he spoke, and generally kept hidden as much as possible. His easy good-nature, and a little hesita ting manner that he had with him, which came of indolence and general satisfaction with the things about him, made Mr. Blythe introduce this gentleman in a slightly wandering remark to his daughter.

" Anna, my dear, this is a new neighbour; at least, will shortly be. Dear me, did you say you had come to St. Cadoc ? This is Mr. Warrall, my dear, and he would like some tea." Mr. Warrall bowed, and coloured, then advanced, and then apparently put sufficient constraint upon himself to stay where he was. He did not seem to know what to do with one of his hands until Anna took it, and then he seemed suddenly anxious to get it back again. He was clearly not much used to ladies' society. " I am glad to hear you have come to St. Cadoc," said Anna composedly, " but I am afraid you will find the parish in a dreadful state ! " " Indeed ! " he said eagerly, and then stopped himself, and afterwards proceeded with an effort, " in what way do you _ " mean r " I fear," said Anna, shaking her head gravely, while she took the tea out of the caddy by spooufuls, " I fear that poor old Mr. Hicks sadly neglected visiting among the cottages."

" He was very old," said the new ac quaintance with a jerk, after a few moments' silence. " Perhaps his faculties failed him." Anna thoughtfully shook her head again ; she knew of a stronger reason than age that prevented Mr. Hicks from visiting his flock, but she would not speak evil of the dead in that direct manner ; so she only said — " I fear there is scarcely a churchman in the parish — I mean any one with any real church feeling ; they all go to chapel in the evenings, even if a few of them have been to church in the morning." The visitor looked long and earnestly at her over his teacup. He seemed struck by the sedateness of her manner, and the interest she took in what she said. Anna very rarely made conversation ; hers was essentially an earnest, practical nature. " I hope," she said, " that you mean to have two services on Sundays."

" Certaiuly," he answered, roused from his steady gaze at her, and swallowing his tea, " by all means." " And there is the Sunday school," pur sued Anna, leaning her chin upon her hand, and in her turn looking at the stranger. " I do hope you will have one. The Bible-Christians have a flourishing one, and so have the Methodists ; and it is so dreadful that there is not even an effort of the sort among the church people." " I always," he said, looking down and plaiting the table-cloth with his fingers, " have had great faith in Sunday schools. They get hold of the young, and impress — yes, impress them while they are young and susceptible. Yes, I have great faith in Sunday schools." He spoke very clearly and distinctly, and Anna listened attentively to what he had to say. " I quite agree with you," she said, " but unfortunately, the great difficulty is to find suitable teachers.

There are no gentle people at all in this neighbourhood, and the sons and daughters of the farmers, be sides being mostly Wesleyan, are themselves very uneducated." Mr. Warrall listened with attention to her clear girlish voice, with its steady tone, and noted the serenity and gravity of her face, and the calm earnestness of her eyes. He locked his hands so fast together be tween his knees under the table, that the knuckles turned white with the strain. "I should consider myself very fortunate," he said slowly, " if I had a young lady like yourself in my parish, Miss Blythe." She smiled at the obvious compliment. " I do what I can," she said. "You are very fortunate," said the new friend, turning to Mr. Blythe, who had been buttering and eating his hot potatoe cake, and giving bits of it to a large tabby cat that sat on his knee, while he apparently paid no heed to the conversation — " in your daughter's being such a great, and I am sure, efficient help to you, Mr. Blythe."

" Eh ! " said Mr. Blythe, dropping a bit of his buttered cake on the cat's nose, who, resenting such a liberty, instantly jumped down— "eh, Anna ? Oh yes, of course ; she is a great help to me— a great help indeed. Do you fish at all, Warrall ? We have one or two very nice little streams in some of the valleys to the south." " No," said the other — " no," pausing, as if locking up some statement about himself. " No ; I do not fish." " Ah, that's a pity ! " said Mr. Blythe, complacently. He had repented of his remark about the stream the moment it was made. Trout were scarce even for one fisherman in that neighbourhood ; it would not do to increase the number of votaries. " Ah, Tib ; come here." But Tib would not come, so Anna got up and lifted her from the hearthrug on which she sat, and placed her on her father's knee, for which she received a " thank you, my dear."

Mr. Warrall turned to Anna as she resumed her seat at the head of the table. " You have mentioned," he said slowly, " that there are very few persons of quality in the neighbourhood ; do I understand you to refer to your own parish exclusively ? ' " No," she said, a little wondering at the expression he used to designate the class he referred to — " I mean in all this district to within a few miles of Penzance. Except the clergy, and Dr. Bosvargus, who lives close by, I know of no one above the rank of farmer in the neighbourhood." " Indeed,' he replied — " indeed," while a gleam of something like pleasure lit up his face for a moment, and was instantly sup pressed by the settling of the muscles about his mouth. He locked his hands so fiercely together after this, that had Anna seen them she would have feared the hard knuckles would have come through the strained skin.

" It is a lonely neighbourhood," she said, finding he made no further reply, "and but for there being so much to be done among the people, it might be a dull one ; but I, at least, have never found it that." She paused, and dropped her eyes, for Mr. Warrall's were fixed so intently upon her face that she felt a little embarrassed. " You visit a good deal ? " he asked after a long pause. She glanced a little anxiously at her father, who was complacently stroking his cat from the top of her head to the tip of her tail. " Papa is not very strong," she said ; " he cannot afford to keep a curate, so of course I do what I can to help him." Her anxiety that their visitor should not judge harshly of the indifferent, lazy man who took no part even in talk of parish matters, was so evident, that had Mr. WarraU been a man given to smiling, he would have done so within himself out of pity for the earnest young girl before him.

But a smile would have been the last thing Mr. Warrall would have thought of under the circumstances. He was by no means a dull man, and he divined pretty accurately the state of things in Lanyon Yicarage ; but he only looked graver, and when he next spoke it was with an obvious effort. " I shall be proud," he said slowly, " very proud, Miss Blythe, to have the benefit of your experience among the poor in this neighbourhood. It is," and he paused and wiped his brow — " it is a new one to me." This admission seemed wrung from him by a great effort. "You do not know this part of the world ? " He shook his head, then repeated the same words, as if fearful that if he used another form of expression some further revelation might be twisted out of it. " It is a new neighbourhood to me." " I shall be very glad to be of any use to you that I can be," said Anna, pleased at having her advice asked.

" The people about here are, so strangers say, very dif ferent from what they are in the rest of England. In some respects I hope they are ; in others, our people set a good example. There is very little drunkenness or idleness, and they are fairly clean and honest. Rough and outspoken to a degree, and I am sorry to say, very immoral. Papa, you can tell Mr. Warrall more about the characteristics of the people than I can, as you have lived in other places, and can compare them with others, whereas I," and she raised her clear eyes to their visitor's face, " have never been away from Lanyon." Again that curious, half-baffled expression of pleasure crossed his face ; but he set his mouth hard, and looked fixedly at the table cloth. "The people about here?" said Mr. Blythe; " oh yes, to be sure.

They are not a bad set in many ways, Warrall ; very obliging, and all that kind of thing. Oh, a very good sort, on the whole ! Have their faults ; I suppose we all have. Not quite so regular at church, perhaps, as they might be ; " and Mr. Blythe shook his head, and tried very hard to be profoundly interested in the fact ; but his facile mind readily dropped the subject, and he said, with a sudden air of interest about him, " By the way, Warrall, did you happen to bring out a paper from Penzance with you ? " The sudden change of subject took Mr. Warrall some time to deliberate upon. He turned it over in his mind, and then said, " No, no, I did not obtain a paper in Penzance." Mr. Blythe had been impatiently drum ming with his fingers on the table before his visitor had begun to speak ; he was getting decidedly bored by the slowness of his companion.

" Ah ! " he said impatiently, as Mr. Warrall concluded his laborious statement " ah ! when you have lived here some time, Warrall, you will understand how valuable a paper is in this place. It is looked upon here as a positive duty for every one who goes into Penzance to bring out a paper. We only get the Cornish papers here on the day of publication. Ah ! I wish it had occurred to you to bring out the Field with you." " The Field," said Mr. Warrall, musingly ■ — " the Field ! I am not acquainted with the paper. Does it relate to missionary enter prise ? "Eh! the Field? Bless me, Warrall, you don't mean to say you don't know that the Field is a— is a — well, a gardening, and poultry keeping, and a — well, a— a sporting paper ? " " Papa is interested in farming," said Anna, hastily, seeing the blank astonish ment on Mr. Warrall's face ; " we farm our own glebe."

"I think, my dear," said her father, laying down his teacup, which he had just finished with, " that I will go out and see if Naboth has littered the old sow down properly. You will excuse me, Warrall. I shall see you again when I come in ; " and, glad to escape from their ponderous visitor, Mr. Blythe left the room, humming the tune of " Bonnie Dundee." "We are not able to keep a hind," * Anna explained, fearful for her father's reputation in the eyes of their guest, " so papa is obliged to attend to the farm work himself." She blushed, and cast down her eyes ; for Mr. Warrall was again looking at her in that intense strained manner of his. " I understand," he said slowly; " I think I may safely say that I understand it all. Mr. Blythe is fortunate in being able to manage his glebe himself.

For my part," * (For the information of Mr. Arch and others) a farm-bailiff. and he passed his hand across his brow again, " I do not know anything about farming;" and he sat staring very hard at the floor between his feet. They had risen when Mr. Blythe had gone out, and had then seated themselves near the window, and Anna took up some plain work she had to do. "You have not told me," he said, going back to their former subject of conversation — " you have not yet told me, Miss Blythe, how you advise me to set to work in my parish. I wish you to understand " — and here he looked earnestly at a particular spot on the carpet and kept his eyes fixed upon it — " that the one and only object I have before me is the perfect discharge of my duties to God and man. My object in taking this parish was " — and here he pressed his hands very tightly together — " that I might faithfully discharge the duties im posed upon me by my profession.

I repeat, my sole object is the perfect discharge of my duty. It is with this object that I ask you to give me the benefit of your ex perience among these people, who are to me a new race— I repeat it, a new race." He raised his eyes and fixed them on her face at the conclusion of his speech. She returned his glance with her sincere grave eyes. " I am obliged to you for your confidence in me," she said quietly. " Anything that I can do I will very gladly do ; " and then she went on to speak to him about the peoj. le and their lives and habits, neither of them noticing that the red west had become a pale yellow, and that the harvest moon was shining in the sky.

Chapter III

Katharine, after she had passed through the fields at the back of the doctor's house, came to a broad piece of moorland that led down to the cliffs. It was covered with short furze, golden with blossom, and low growing heath, that was a mass of tiny purple flowers. With swift feet she fol lowed a little narrow sheep-track that led on to the furthest point of headland, and in about twenty minutes she was clamber ing round the rocks at the extreme edge of the cliff. It was a wild place enough. High masses of granite lay piled one above the other in wildest confusion. Great boulders, that looked like roughly hewn pillars, rose vol. i. up from the tossing, beating sea, and on these, piled high, and seemingly tossed recklessly hither and thither, were immense blocks of stone, some as big as a church, looking as if some giant hand had wantonly dropped them where they stood.