Ezekiel's Sin: a Cornish romance

Front matter

By the Same Author Crown 8vo, cloth, 3s. 6d. each Inconsequent Lives Literary World. — "It is long since we read a story revealing power of so high an order. We have no hesitation in welcoming in Mr. Pearce a novelist of great promise." Eli's Daughter Spectator. — "A powerful, ably written, and eminently realistic story of Cornwall and the Cornish mines. Eli is one of the most remarkable characters in modern fiction. Mr. Pearce has com mand of a really admirable style ; he is capable of being impressive without being either too sensa tional or too vulgarly smart." London : William Heinemann popular Six Shilling morels Edward Bellamy Equality Hall Caine The Christian 'Ihe Manxman The Scapegoat The Bondman Richard Harding Davis Soldiers of Fortune Harold Frederic Illumination Sarah Grand The Beth Bo.>k The Heavenly Twins I DEAL A Our Manifold Nature M. Hamilton The Freedom of Henry Mkredyth McLeod of the Camerons A Self-Denying Ordinance Robert Hichens Flames The Folly of Eustace An Imaginative Man Henry James What Maisie Knew The Other House The Spoils of Povnton Embarrassments Terminations W. E. Norris Marietta's Marriage The Dancer in Yellow A Victim of Good Luck.

The Countess Radna Flora Annie Steel In the Permanent Way On the Face of the Waters The Potter's Thumb From the Five Rivers Robert Louis Stevenson St. Ives The Ehb Tide I. Zangwill The Master The King of Schnorrers Children of the Ghetto The Premier and the Painter LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN 21 Bedford Street, W.C. And all Booksellers and Bookstalls A Cornish Romance By T. H. Pearce Author of "Eli's Daughter," "Inconsequent Lives," etc. ' ' Here lies poor old John Hildebrod — Have mercy on his soul, Lord God ! As he would do, were he Lord God, And Thou wert poor John Hildebrod." London William Heinemann Ali rights reserved Contents CHAP- PAGE I. A TEMPTED MAN ...... 1 II. THE OLD LIFE AND THE NEW .... 8 III. A TEMPTED HOUSEHOLD ...... 16 IV. SHADOW'S ...... 25 V. AT THE EDGE OF FAIRYLAND 34 VI.

SECRETS ....... 47 VII. THE CRABBER AND HIS WORLD .... 54 VIII. A COUNTRY WOOING ...... 62 IX. SUNSHINE AND GOSSAMER • .... 60 X. LOVERS AND A LISTENER .... 71 XI. PREPARING FOR THE WEDDING .... 75 XII. SPRING 84 XIII. YESTERDAY AND TO-MORROW ..... 89 XIV. THE DAZZLE OF LOVE ...... 94 XV. THE WIND IN THE TREES ..... 98 XVI. WEDDED BLISS . . . . . . .106 XVII. ANTICIPATIONS AND MEMORIES .... HI XVIII. THE HEART OF A GIRL ...... H9 XIX. ILLUSION AND DISILLUSION ..... 121 XX. A LONELY MAN ....... 128 XXI. SIDELIGHTS ........ 134 CONTENTS VIII CHAP. PAQE XXII. THE CRABBER AND HIS SON-IN-LAW . . . 142 XXIII. IN THE ENCHANTED WOOD OF MEMORY . . 145 XXIV. DAUGHTER VerSUS WIFE . . . . ' 151 XXV. A MEETING ON THE MOOR ..... 158 XXVI. A MAN AND HIS BURDENS ..... 107 XXVII. EXHAUSTED AFFINITIES ..... 173 XXVIII.

Chapter 1

A TEMPTED MAN The tide bad just begun to ebb that morning when Ezekiel Trevaskis set off for his crab-pots, taking with him his pro visions for the remainder of the day — a jar of water, a potato pasty, and a hunk of saffron cake. When the ebb was at its lowest, and the tide was practically dead, he was already far out on the distant fishing-grounds, with a fair stock of bait — gurnards, bream, and a few pollack — gathered in the brine-soaked bottom of his boat. Since then, he had emptied and re-baited his various strings of pots — whicii were scattered along the coast from Treen Dinas to the Bucks — had conveyed his catch from these to his larger store-pot near Polurrian, and had again sailed out almost to the solitary lighthouse on the Wolf; meaning to end up the day by whiffing for mackerel, which just then were fairly plentiful round the coast.

The flow, however, had commenced while he was tacking off the Longships — the most dangerous reef in the Land's End race — and in a little while the vast tidal movement of the Atlantic had begun to make its effect felt from Scilly to Mount's Bay. With the flowing tide the wind freshened slightly, and the seagulls seemed to grow busier and more alert as the slow rise and brimming of the water affected their various haunts and resting-places, submerging reefs and beaches, climbing A slowly up the cliff-ledges, and generally passing, like a wave of change and unrest, over the main portion of their world. Innumerable things the tide swept in with it : shoals of mackerel, with the shark-like dog-fishes in their wake ; weed-tangles ; drifts of wreck-wood from the open ocean ; the corks of a fishing-net cut adrift by a passing steamer ; huge floating jelly-fish ; a dead body here and there : per haps, also, the secret weapon destined to wound to his un doing some lonely toiler drifting on the seas, one whose grey life hitherto had been beyond reproach, but whom to-night Fate meant to put grimly to the test.

Feeling the pulse of the tide now beating against him, Ezekiel instead of running towards the Wolf — whose lonely grey pillar was still a few miles distant from him — decided to turn back into the bay and follow the flow, whiffing as he went. He had practically enough bait for the next setting of his pots, having caught several large pollack between Pordenack and the Longships, and he decided that the mackerel which he might now catch, if any, he would take home for his supper, and for dinner on the morrow. A tall, lean man, six foot in his stockings, with a bony face and a big, beaked nose, and with a thick, heavy beard as grey as a badger, Ezekiel had a markedly individual appearance : and sitting here in his boat, on the blue field of the Atlantic, he had the air of being thoroughly at one with his surroundings.

The lower part of his face was painfully lean and sharp, the upper half, by contrast, seeming unnatu rally developed, and his eyes were of a faint, dreamy blue, while in his ungainly ears he wore thin gold rings. His clothes, however, were less individual than his face. He wore a brine - stiffened, brown - stained duck "jumper"; woollen trousers, once of a dark blue, but whose present hue was a rusty indigo which was complicated by countless smears of tar ; a stout sou'wester, that had once been yellow ; and a pair of well-oiled, long sea-boots. His little boat looked also rusty and weather-beaten, as if the sea had gnawed at its planks and soaked them with her brine, and the greyrain had lashed it, and the wind had buffeted it A TEMPTED MAN 3 pitilessly, much as the storms of life had buffeted its occupant.

The boat was patched (though that carefully) in a dozen different places, its ropes and sailing-gear were old and worn, it was markedly in want of a coat of paint, and it was as ill-furnished as it could be with reasonable regard to safety. Altogether it was very evident that, up to the present, Ezekiel had not made a success of his life. Whether or no it was now too late for him to do so, was a question that could be argued on, but could not be answered yet. About a week previously, a large steamer — homeward bound from Australia, and carrying a score, or more, wealthy passengers — had been wrecked on one of the reefs off Scilly, and within the last few days three or four of the dead bodies had drifted into Mount's Bay, borne almost abreast of Mouse hole by the inflowing tide. These had been taken to Pen zance by the fishermen who had fallen in with them, and there reported to the Custom House and handed over to the Receiver of Wreck : and one of the salvors who had earned a few shillings in this way was Ezekiel's neighbour, Isaac Roscorla, such another lean old crabber as himself.

As Ezekiel attended to his lines this afternoon, he was thinking more of Isaac Roscorla's good fortune than of the silver-glistening mackerel he occasionally hauled in. Life was so persistently niggardly in its gifts to him that a few shillings added to the week's income was something to make Ezekiel's mouth water merely to think of: and as he let his imagination dally with the idea, there crept into his eyes a look not unlike hunger ; a look of restless, furtive dissatisfac tion, with a dash in it of almost stealthy desire. The quiet loneliness of the sea was in itself a temptation : a temptation to brood over the immense duplicity of life — its cheating promises, its paltry performances ; the trials and disappointments that had to be endured, and the pleasures that were always persistently out of reach.

For the massy singleness and simplicity of the ocean — the absence of the confusing and multitudinous details which a land-scene often forces on the thoughts — has something of the cloisteral effect of a retreat ; and even an uneducated crabber, drifting lonely across the waters, occasionally finds himself succumbing to the spell. And Ezekiel, brooding sullenly over matters this afternoon, fell presently into such a moody bitterness of soul that, if he could have coined his life-blood into sovereigns, he would there and then have attempted the task. Not that he was thus greedy of money for himself. As far as he was personally concerned, he was reasonably content with his starved existence; not having imagination enough to desire anything better, or, at least, better on lines at once ampler and less grey.

He had been a crabber all his life — with intervals of employment on the larger fishing-boats when the crabbing season closed and the pilchard fishing began — and under his father's supervision he had learned how to bait a pot and how to disarm the crabs and lobsters taken from it, long before the down had begun to appear upon his face. Polurrian cove, with its half score cottages, had really been the world for him, as far as shore-life was concerned. When he was eight and twenty he had married Malva Polgrain, the daughter of an elderly crabber in the cove, and with this, and the birth of his five children by her, his experiences of life had practically been rounded off: the milestones along this route, and his adventures between them, summing up, so far, his knowledge of the world. No, he was not greedy of money for himself.

Neither did he hungrily desire it for his wife. Like himself, Malva had been tamed and subdued by life, and, if she ever had been rebellious, she had long forgotten the mood. It was solely for his children that Ezekiel's hunger was excited. Or, at least, for them in the first place and most directly : though certainly in the second place (so alloyed are human motives) it was to feed his jealous pride in them and his pleasure in their happiness. Of the five children born to him, only two were still alive. One, the first-born, had died in infancy. The third and fourth had been sons : and on these he had built his hopes. But the sea had lusted after them, and had strangled them in her hunger; and now one of them was sleeping quietly under the grass in Choone churchyard, and the other lay A TEMPTED MAN 5 God alone knew where !

God, and the old sea-mother, perhaps ? The second and fifth children were, however, still alive : and both (so Fate had willed it) were girls. Drusilla, the eldest, remained at home to assist her mother ; though already, at six and twenty, she was hungering for wider experiences and was noticeably beginning to be restless in the nest : while Morvenna,1 the youngest, a girl of seventeen, was half a monitor and half a school-teacher in the little granite school-house up in the valley, midway between Polurrian and Choone. It was for Morvenna and Drusilla (perhaps chiefly for Morvenna) that Ezekiel hungered after what seemed to be for him the unattainable : not wealth, in the vague and grander meaning of the term, but a sufficiency of ready cash to make a shilling of no importance, and half a sovereign . . . well, a sum that could be spared cheerfully.

The twelfth of May (now a fortnight distant) was ' feasten Sunday,' the ' great day ' of the parish : and at feasten-tide all the girls and youngsters, if possible, indulged in new clothes, or in new finery of some kind — even if it were only a necktie, or a new ribbon in a hat. Morvenna and Drusilla wanted to appear in new dresses, or, at the very least, in new spring hats : but, up to the present, Ezekiel, with the heartiest desire to humour them, had found himself unable to make a promise to that effect. Only this morning Morvenna had come pleading to him, coaxingly, to advance her half the amount of her quarter's salary : which she would be able to repay him at midsummer, as he was aware. But Ezekiel had been obliged to tell her, most reluctantly, that it was as impossible for him to advance her the desired twelve-and-sixpence as it was for Cam Bargis (one of the headlands of the cove) to lean across and shake hands with its opposite neighbour Cam Mellyn.

Morvenna had borne the refusal with reasonable self-control, but he could see, from her trembling lips, that she was deeply disappointed, and remembering how much a bit of finery meant 1 Morvenna = the sea-maiden. to a girl of her age, Ezekiel understood and sympathised with her disappointment. He felt that he would willingly have given a finger to have been able to meet her wishes and to have sent her off happy with a kiss and a 'yes I ' This request of hers was still playing on his mind as he sailed along past the grey front of Treen Dinas, with the great bell, swinging above the sinister Runnelstone,1 steadily tolling, tolling in his ears as the Atlantic surges swayed it to and fro. A few powerful herring-gulls occasionally winged their way past him, the light-skimming terns were wheeling about by scores, and now and then he saw the black head of a cormorant lifted above the water with a sudden alertness, accompanied by a momentary gleam of silver as the strong beak raised some writhing mackerel which an instant after vanished in the bird's capacious maw.

The boom of the sea against the granite coast-line, the lap and gurgle of the water around his boat, and the long, soft sighing of the wind across the waves, there were no other sounds to attract his attention, unless it were the shrill brief cry of a gull ; and Ezekiel, peering now into the glassy depths beneath him, and now gazing across the water to the distant cliffs and beaches, became gradually depressed into a mood so sombre that, if he had hauled up Satan at the end of one of his hooks, he would have been tempted to sell his soul to Him for the satisfaction of his desires. Presently, as he idly watched his lines, he noticed an ex ceptional strain upon them — as if something unusually heavy were tugging at the hooks. A sudden heat of excitement flickering through his veins, he immediately set about hauling in the lines : and then became aware — with a throb of superstitious terror — that a long dark object was approaching the boat, as if held by the hooks, or else clinging to them.

The answer to his secret craving for temptation had come to him in the guise in which he was best able to welcome it. 1 The Runnelstone is a huge mass of granite, partly submerged, thrust up through the open sea about a mile from the shore. A large bell-buoy is moored in its vicinity. A TEMPTED MAN 7 To welcome it, that is, supposing he should feel inclined . . . alone as he was (and he glanced over his shoulders with the nervous swiftness of fear) ... to treat it as a temptation, and not as anything worse. He knew well the loneliness and hostility of the sea, the menaces of her savage lust, her secret grudges and her inhospitableness, and the thought of these shook him with a deep disquiet, as he glanced down now at the prey which she had seized, and tried to steel his trembling nerves to defy her — - to defy her not for his fellow-men, but singly, and for himself.

For a minute or two, Ezekiel, with his eyes glittering strangely, peered over the edge of the boat into the water. As he did so, under the bronze of its wind-and-sun tan, his bearded face seemed to grow almost wan, as if with a strange, half-terrified sadness. And meanwhile there drew near to it, at the end of the lines, another pallid face, a face bearded like his own, but with eyes that stared persistently and yet were as blank as stones. Ezekiel, in return, stared down at the floating body : stared at it hard, and long, and wistfully. And as he stared at it, he perceived that a couple of hooks had caught the drowned man by the heavy belt around his waist. But the fastenings of the belt had broken, and it was gradually becoming detached, owing partly to the weight of the body and partly to the movement of the boat.

In a minute or two, unless he seized it from the boat, the body would slip from the belt and float away. Would the hooks hold the belt, or would that slip and sink ? He bent over the boat eagerly, his eyes shining with excitement, and began very slowly to draw in the lines. He was aware that, by doing so, he might possibly save the belt . . . but what of the body ? ... It was slipping even as he touched the lines. ... In his tragical isolation, Fate was tempting him to his undoing : holding out to him its hand of gold with an air of friendly secrecy. And Ezekiel, thinking of Morvenna (and of her almost solely), seemed to forget the hand of iron which was clenched behind its back.

Chapter II The Old Life And The New

Already in the depths of Polurrian cove1 the westering sun was hidden from sight, though any one ascending the glen to the ridge of downs out of which it was carved would have seen the sun still glaring across the granite hill tops that formed the backbone and main watershed of the peninsula. The sullen moan of the incoming tide was still audible all along the coast, and across the skerries and ledges, the reefs and haggard rocks, the long green rollers made a jabble of broken water which from the bleak sea front looked threatening enough. A solitary raven was sailing high above the clifftops, uttering at intervals its hoarse, barbaric cawk ! in which the very spirit of its loneliness seemed to be concentrated ; a few kittiwakes and terns were fishing between the headlands, and across the gorse-cushioned flank of Cam Mellyn, a kestrel wheeled and hovered restlessly.

Lower down the sedge-warblers chattered among the flags, and a score or more black-backed, twittering swallows skimmed rapidly to and fro across the rush-fringed shallows where the streamlet bubbled tinklingly as it travelled to the sea. On a shelf-like terrace, or outcrop of rock, not three hundred yards from the boulders of the beach, stood a row of weather-beaten granite cottages, the thatched roofs half as tall again as the walls, and the small, coarsely glazed windows — two to each cottage-front — leaving the impression that they were altogether too insignificant to light up the interiors to any appreciable extent, so that one imagined the latter as always weighted with shadow, and having the atmosphere of a cavern or a tomb. In spite of the gulls and the wheeling swallows, a de- 1 Polurrian = the home of the sea-birds, pressing air of mournfulness seemed to pervade the cove.

Through the thin and hungry soil the rock thrust nakedly, the slopes were strewn with enormous blocks of granite, and except in the sheltered head of the valley and along the banks of the bubbling streamlet, the vegetation was of the scantiest, and showed but little variety ; gorse, broom, heather, and grass being monotonously repeated in every direction. The effect produced by the scattered boulders, and by the wild and unsheltered aspect of the glen, was heightened by the hollow moan of the breakers and the restless, dreary sighing of the wind : heightened also by the huge mural headlands whose fronts were already being drenched with spray, and whose sinister rock-masses, so enormous in their bulk, made the tiny granite cottages, clustered together on the sea-front, look forlorn and almost pitiful in their insignificance.

All the chimneys of the little row were now beginning to smoke busily, and through the half-open windows and widely open doorways the crackling and the pungent aroma of burning furze stole out pleasantly on the evening air. The work of the day for the women was almost ended, and that the labours of the men-folk were also drawing to a close was evident from the domestic preparations in the cottages, and from the occasional presence of a clean aproned wife looking out from the doorway for the advent of her man. In the row, when the return of the men was expected, the women's eyes invariably sought the sea : for here, in Polurrian, the sea was the great protagonist : every one had to wrestle with it, if they wished to live at all, and along its highway every one came and went — went, now and then, unhappily, to return again no more.

Even the healthy faces of the women at the doors did little to dispel the pervading sombreness. The homes at their backs were so poor and rude, and the women were so evidently the serfs of their surroundings — held in thrall for life to the loud-clamouring sea, and the lean and hungry hills about them — that the idea of a monotonous gloom in their lives forced itself on the thoughts at every juncture. The crumbling lines of breakers — toppling over, rising, toppling over again incessantly— seemed the type of these lives, so isolated and so elemental, so apparently fruitless in their efforts, and so unrememberable in their effect. One after another, the half-dozen crabbers who dwelt in the cottages came creeping round the headlands from their crab-pots and fishing-grounds, and, anchoring their boats, came leisurely ashore.

By the time the twilight had begun stealthily to obscure the scene, all the men were indoors except Ezekiel Trevaskis, whose boat even now was not in sight. Again and again Malva went to the door, arching her hand above her spectacles to peer across the cove, but she saw only the anchored boats of her neighbours, the grey tumbling waters, and the steadily darkening sky. " Let's start tea without waitin' for'n, mother," said Dru silla, at last becoming impatient at the delay. " I'm as dry as a chirk,1 and as hungry as a hunter." "No, no; let's wait: I'm in no hurry," remarked Mor venna: "you know father doesn't like to have his tea alone." " Take thy tay, ef thee want it," said Malva to Drusilla. " Thee'rt like lazy Lurk — two stomachs to ayte an' none to work." And with that she went to the door again.

In the shadows at the back of the cottages the bats were already abroad, and occasionally one flew squeaking past her, while the low, murmurous rustling of the flags, blended with the roughened utterance of the streamlet, travelled faintly and confusedly to her ears at intervals as the wandering night-wind drifted through the glen. Louder than all was the clamour of the sea between the headlands, the pounding thud and hammering of the breakers, and their long, re treating growl as they clashed the boulders together, and rattled the drift of shingle that lay beween, and under these. The great loneliness and desolation of twilight was on 1 Cinder. the cove — a loneliness whose note of pathos is even deeper than that of the night— and on the heart of the crabber's wife there brooded heavily and drearily the sombre racial thoughts of the peasant, filling her with a deep, though inarticulate sadness.

The toilers of the sea are at the mercy of every shifting change, and their wives are an anxious race, whatever their sweethearts may chance to be. " Thy man not come in yet ? " shouted a neighbour, who could hear Malva's restless movements on the granite door step, the doors of all the cottages being open. " No, you ; bra' an' late to-night, esn'a ? I ben 'spectin' un in for the laast hour. Ded Isaac see un, as he was comin' up to cove, do'ee knaw ? " Mrs. Roscorla shouted in the question to her husband, who accordingly came to the door to reply. "Iss, you; seed un just afore sundown. He was a bra' way out : haaf way across the bay. He was whiffin' for mackerl, b'leeve, when I seed un." "Well, s'pose he waan't be much longer," said Malva. " 'Spect not. Anyhow, he's right 'nuff," said Isaac.

" Got in among a good school 1 of 'em, I 'spect. Thee'll ha' mackerl enough to-night to last'ee for a week. Unless, you, ' added Isaac ruminantly, " unless he've failed in weth a body from the Gannet, an' ben an' took un in to Penzaance this tide." " No such luck for my man," answered Malva. " He's more likely to lose than to find, es 'Zekiel." " Well, we never knaw wha's in the pot 2 'till we empty it. Hopin' waa'nt hurt nowan," said Isaac. And with that he went indoors to his tea. By this time, the blurred grey waste of waters, with its headlands and its stretch of starless sky, was chiefly dis tinguishable from the massed shadows of the valley through the white line of foam, where the breakers met the beach. But Morvenna, whose keen young eyes were questing to and 1 Shoal. 2 Here meaning tbe crab-pot. fro intently, presently cried out exultantly to her mother, "There he is !

Just coming round Cam Bargis ! " Malva studied the blurred scene from under the shadow of her hand. " Iss, there he es," she replied contentedly. " He's late, but he'll soon be in to moorings now." And she went indoors to complete her preparations. Meanwhile Morvenna ran lightly down the bank of shingle, and, standing at the frothing edge of the waves, waited there for her father, humming softly to herself. Owing to the headlands projecting on either hand, the chief anchorage of the boats (under the lee of Cam Bargis) was so veiled in shadows that it was impossible to distinguish anything in the cave-like blackness, and from the shore the boats there were now entirely invisible. But Ezekiel knew the sea-bottom of the cove — its ledges and shallows, its rocks and its patches of sand — with a more minute thoroughness than he knew the floor of his own kitchen, and he accordingly brought his boat to her accustomed moorings as easily as if it were broad day.

To Morvenna, standing at the edge of the waves, her father had become invisible, a mere portion of the blackness, as soon as he had rounded the headland and crept in to his anchorage. Knowing well, however, where he would be likely to moor, she presently launched her voice at him through the shadows. " Father ! I'm here waiting for you ! " she called to him across the water : the sounds ringing out as purely as the notes of a treble bell. Ezekiel, out at the mooring-grounds, could just catch the cry ; but, owing to the trampling waves, he was unable to distinguish the words. He recognised the voice as being that of his youngest daughter, and in the mere recognition of it — so many memories did it set vibrating — he realised, with a strange, sudden poignancy of emotion, the gulf between the man who had sailed out of the cove in the morning, and the man who came creeping back into it now.

He longed to see Morvenna ; yet felt half ashamed to face her. " Run home an' tell mawther I'm comin' ! " he shouted back to her. "I'll wait for you!" called out Morvenna; catching nothing ofhis message except the familiar word, "comin 1" And tossing back her short brown curls from her forehead, she stood staring across the dusky stretch of sea towards the just-distinguishable line of the horizon. As she stood there staring, a faint silvery glimmer began to show above the sea-line, and the huge earth, slowly re volving on its axis, presently revealed to her the wan-faced moon shining steadily in the far-off depths of space. The riband of shimmering light, unrolling slowly across the sea, finally reached the frothing edge of the waves, making the wet pebbles glisten like lumps of silver and the lips of the waves flush suddenly with life.

A minute or two afterwards, she heard the plash of oars, and Ezekiel, in his tiny punt, became visible in the moonlight : the boat and its occupant (indivisible from the shore) bobbing up and down on the water like a sea-duck. As he stepped out of the little punt and began to haul her up the beach, Morvenna ran up to him, chattering briskly, and, putting her hands on the gunwale, began to haul at the boat with him. But Ezekiel, ordinarily so placid and deliberate, was now confusedly restless and agitated. He had the air of one surprised, and trying awkwardly to conceal something : as though a crime, or the clue to it, lay hidden in the punt. Pushing Morvenna's hand away, he bade her hurry off home : he would follow her in a minute or two, as soon as the boat was up on the bank. And as Morvenna stood back in undisguised astonishment — his roughness, and the con straint of his tones, equally surprising her — he stooped down and began to lift out a crab-pot from the boat.