Seadrift. A novel

Chapter I

' ' Care lives with all ; no rules, no precepts save The wise from woe, no fortitude the brave : Grief is to man as certain as the grave.' Crabbe. It was a small sad-looking village, imbedded in the chain of cliffs on the north coast of Cornwall. Sometimes, in a bright summer sun, it wore a grim smile, as the granite glittered in the morning light ; but at the period of which I write the sky was leaden in colour, and the broad desert of heaving waters was only relieved from the monotony of its gray tint by the white lines of foam which streaked them as the waves crested towards the shore. It was autumn, and the crimson and yellow foliage was half quivering yet upon semi denuded branches, half swept from their ragged arms, and huddled in sodden heaps round the cot- VOL. I. B SEADRIFT. tages studded within the bay.

A painter would have seized with pleasure on these lingering en signs of autumn, as the only bit of warm colour ing in a sombre picture. Seadrift had seen better days. She had a church far up inland, and a doctor, and had not a lawyer. Churches are creatures of centuries, therefore the presence of that which reared its old gray tower amongst the Cornish wilds was no guarantee for the importance of Seadrift. The presence of the doctor was equally illusory, and might be ascribed to the fact that he had a delicate t_> chest, and had been told by the faculty, that if he wished to live a few years longer, he had better try to do so on the coast of Cornwall. So his wife had persuaded him to strive to prolong life, and obtain a livelihood at the same time, by leaving Camberwell for Cornwall. There was in Seadrift a general shop ; aiid a carpenter, who was also a ship-builder in a small way, having plenty of em ployment, if not in building, in repairing boats.

The clergyman lived near the church, and three miles from the coast ; so the doctor was the only person with pretensions to education near the sea. What added to the gray aspect of the village was the fact, that the houses were mostly built of SEADRIFT. granite and roofed with slate. A slight trellis work of laths ran up outside these dwellings, and, covered by clematis and Virginian creeper, made a charming mixture of scarlet leaves and soft downy seeds, opposed in tint to the cold gray stone, as did the waving tendrils, swaying foliage, and deli cate crooked buds of the plants contrast with the solidity of the rugged stones against which they were placed.- Half the population of Seadrift lived on one side of the bay, and half on the other. There was a steep shelving beach of sand and pebbles between them, and as the sea seemed to have hard work to get up so many flights of pebbly stairs, 'the mighty monster' appeared generally to be tired when he had reached a certain height, and had gone grumbling and muttering back again.

Notwithstanding this, the ancestors of Seadrift had not always found Neptune so moderate in his incursions ; and choosing probably to be on the safe side, and possess a material guarantee, they had made a stone causeway, of considerable solidity and strength, which, extending from one end of the bay to the other, seemed a formidable sea-wall to defy ocean to any farther encroachment. On one side Dr. Mereside, the apothecary, re- SEADRIFT. presented the gentility of Seadrift ; and he was declared by the neighbourhood to be a real gen tleman ; but this cause of pride to West Seadrift was more than balanced by the grandeur of Mrs. Bolitho at East Seadrift — a lady with a turban and a bird-of-paradise plume, who kept a hotel, or what would have been one, had travellers ever come there, and a boarding-house for ladies and gentlemen, whom the known salubrity of Seadrift might attract, but did not, to the north coast of Cornwall.

Luckily Mrs. Bolitho had means of subsistence independent of her hotel and boarding house. She advertised, however, every now and then in the spring, summer, and autumn months, representing that Seadrift was an earthly paradise, possessing everything that could cheer the spirits and restore the vital tone of the invalid ; and that for perfect comfort, combined with cheapness, no hotel in any other part of the coast could equal that kept by Mrs. Bolitho ; that invalids desirous of profiting by the advantages thus offered would find the first medical skill that England could pro duce in the person of Dr. Mereside, general prac titioner; this addendum having been inserted at the suggestion of Mrs. Mereside, who had been most charmingly subservient to the queen of East SEADRD7T. 5 Seadrift, till she had induced Mrs. Bolitho to per mit this addition to the usual advertisement.

This had been accomplished without the knowledge of the medical practitioner, who would rather have gone for ever without patients who could pay than have submitted to a means of notoriety so unpro fessional. Luckily the innocent gentleman was spared, by his wife's reticence and his own indifference to the weekly paper, the blush which would have turned his cheek to a colour more extended than the circular pink spot on the left side, which told of latent mischief within. Formerly valuable mines of copper in the neighbourhood of Seadrift had given it importance. Small vessels could then come within an easy dis tance of the shore, from the shelving nature of the beach, and then transported the ore to London. The mines, however, were worked out, or supposed to be so, and Seadrift lost its popularity and its population.

Before the causeway had been built, the water flowing from the neighbouring hills had formed an outlet into the sea. Much of it had, however, been directed into other channels con nected with the mines. When no longer required for man's assistance, the channels became choked, and the water oozed naturally back to the lowest SEADRIFT. p-round, which was the middle of the village of Seadrift, where it formed first a marsh, then a good-sized pond, then a lake. Round this the houses and huts of Seadrift, with their gardens, abutted, and were reflected with their gray tints and autumn flowers ; but sometimes the troubled waters, like sulky folks, declined to make any re flections at all. The shortest way of crossing from the east to the west, or vice versa, was once the causeway ; the way round the lake was long, and made longer by a circle of houses on its borders.

The waters had encroached on the land till the buildings had been erected on the higher ground to escape from its inroads. Much speculation had been raised at one time on the propriety of digging an outlet through the solid sea-wall, and allowing the lake to escape ; but, to say nothing of the risk that the ocean would take advantage of the opportunity and return to reinforce the lake, the good wives rebelled furiously at the prospect of losing the supply of fresh water close at hand ; and, after all, no one much cared what became of Seadrift. Men did not begin to think about it till they grew up, and then considered that it would last their time forty being the average age of the Seadrifters. It SEADRIFT. 7 might sink into decay slowly, or be washed away suddenly ; and a ' Dear me !' from the readers of the Plymouth Chronicle would have been all the moan made.

The population were composed chiefly of fisher men — a stern, hard, solemn race. A hundred years since, they would have been riotous and de moralised ; but Wesley had preached to their fore fathers, and instilled holy aspirations into their descendants. His impassioned eloquence had had its exceeding great reward in the effects it pro duced on those remote districts. Death came also frequently to remind these men of the necessity for a godly life ; not death in the sheltered cottage, with the tender tears and holy prayers of living creatures, but death en countered oil the desolate horizon of ever-cease less surges. Beaten by winds, drenched by rain and foam, the exhausted men frequently sank with their frail vessels, leaving no clue to their fate save the broken oar or shred of sail washed up on the beach of Seadrift, where it told to the widow or orphan what had been the doom of the bread-winners.

The women had an expression of patient ex pectation of misfortune, with a stern determination SEADRIFT. to bear it, whatever might be its weight. Thus everybody seemed possessed by a feeling of ex pectation in Seadrift, but in a different way. The fishermen and their families expected and were prepared for misfortune — which came. The doctor expected good fortune in patients — and they did not come, at least not remunerative ones. Mrs. Bolitho expected inmates to her hotel and boarding-house — in vain. There was a white house of some pretensions, which stood with its front to the ocean, and its side to the sea-wall, where lived a woman and her daughter in whom expectation had almost died away, from want of reasonable nourishment to keep it alive. They were very poor, and only inhabited so good a house because, in the decayed prosperity of Seadrift, no one would rent it of the owner, who resided in it.

Mrs. Clemens had been in easy circumstances during the lifetime of her husband, the captain and owner of a small sailing-vessel ; but a night of storms had sunk the gallant little bark, and in it had perished the father and his two sons, leaving a widow and an orphan girl penniless. For some years Captain Clemens had insured his life scrupulously ; but sailors are pro verbially careless, and a time came when he let SEADRIFT. the day of payment slip by, and the insurance lapsed. The chief part of the furniture of the neat cottage owned by Mrs. Clemens — if that can be called a cottage which was built of granite and roofed with slate — had been sold to defray the small debts owing when Captain Clemens had perished. The chief of these was one for Martha's schooling; for the parents had both been possessed by a laudable ambition that their daughter should have a superior education.

Fathers and mothers pay such sums willingly, with an exaggerated idea of the advantages which are to result from the sacrifice. The amount of any knowledge worth having thus acquired is generally nil, though the habits of application are of some importance, but scarcely worth the sacrifice entailed on the parents to procure them by such means, as a little deter mination on the part of the mother will produce a better sample home-made. Mrs. Clemens did not find Martha could hem, seam, stitch, or backstitch a bit better when she returned than when she went to school. True, she brought back a large square of white -cotton velvet on which bloomed splendid flowers, which had been industriously rubbecl-in by aid of tin-patterns of SEADRIFT. different punctures ; but as this marvellous work of art only reached home after the death of Captain Clemens, it had never been mounted, and was both a pride and a pain to Mrs. Clemens, who kept it carefully covered with silver-paper till she should become rich enough to have it made into an ottoman — a circumstance not likely to occur.

The poor woman had sold all that she could, and more than she could conveniently spare ; but Hope, which stuck in the lid of Pandora's box, had kept a small niche for herself in the home of the widow Clemens. This small niche in habited by Hope was 'the best bedroom.' By this the widow had a vague idea that she should retrieve her fallen fortunes. Some traveller might come to search for pic turesque scenery, some geologist for specimens from the mines, or some speculator in the pilch ard fisheries. Who ever it might be, he would fall in love with Martha, and make her a rich woman; and then she, Mrs. Clemens, should die happy. It would seem likely that death would arrive sooner than any such good fortune. Mrs. Clemens felt the dimness of age in her eyes and in the relaxed tympanum of her ears.

She received answers short and sharp from her daughter when SEADRIFT. 11 inaudible responses made to her questions urged Martha to repeat them. Ten years had passed since that terrible storm which had brought death to the bread-winners and poverty to the household. Martha had been at that period seventeen — a slender genteel-looking girl, whose chief beauty lay in her golden hair, which rippled naturally over her well-shaped head, and was twisted in a rich Grecian braid at the back. She had at that time a pretty delicate colour in her cheeks, which had faded during the ten years of confinement and privation. When her mother could no longer see, even by the aid of her glasses, the line made by the thread drawn out in the shirt-collar, and had become disgracefully inaccurate in turning corners in stitching, Martha had been obliged to carry the load laid down by her mother's failing powers, and to support them both by her needlework.

How glad she would have been for a little ' change of work,' which, as the proverb says, is as good as rest ! But in this small village of Seadrift, or Seadrift Church Town, as the folks called it, the women kept to themselves all soft easy sewing, such as flannel -petticoats and waistcoats, habit shirts and cambric handkerchiefs, and gave Mar- SEADRIFT. tha Clemens the stiff' silk and the stout calico on which to exercise her fingers and sacrifice her needles. Gentlemen's shirts were made with an elabor ation of feminine skill, which might have been considered as an effort of love if performed by a devoted wife to adorn her idol, but became op pressive when a needlewoman was required to throw in the additional ornament without extra pay, like the ad libitum sheep supplied by the painter to the Vicar of Wakefield's picture.

No one but Mrs. Clemens and her daughter knew how very poor they were, nor how pinch ingly they lived. They had no servant ; for when ftlrs. Clemens's eyes were incapable of guiding her needle through the intricacy of cross threads, she abandoned that task to Martha, and took all the house-work on herself. So there was no one to tell to the baker's wife why it was that so little bread was eaten in the house, nor to the butcher that no meat was consumed from month's end to month's end bv the mother or daughter. Martha worked swiftly and well, and had a pretty taste in making up a gown, and a correct eye as to its fitting properly; so that the butcher's and baker's wives, and their maid-servants, when- SEADRIFT. 13 ever they had a new dress, took it to Martha to be fabricated. Her charges were so unreasonably reasonable, that she and her mother lived the greatest part of the year on potatoes only, with out even the luxury of the salt pilchard which would have given them flavour.

When Mrs. Clemens had exhausted every possible necessity for cleaning the house, she was condemned to inactivity, and she was accustomed to sit in a corner of the room, in which was a window commanding the sea-wall, or causeway, and the other the broad expanse of ocean. She yearned for some interest or amusement beyond Avatching a little cutting of a rose-tree given her by the doctor's wife. She looked at it daily ; and had rejoiced when, by the aid of her spectacles, she had seen the first irregularity in the green stem, pushing itself into a tender - tinted bud of future leaves. ' O, Martha, only see! it has taken root after all.' Martha did not look up. She was making the last button-hole in a servant's gown, and hated to be interrupted. Hope deferred makes some hearts not only sick but sullen.

Mrs. Clemens, repulsed, sank into silence. Pre sently she began again : SEADRIFT. ' Martha, there is something coming along the causeway — something bright and gay-looking.' ' Is there ?' said Martha, in a voice of perfect indifference, and without any interrogation in the tone. ' You say you can't see, so I do not know how you can tell.' ' My dear, old folks can see at a distance when they cannot see things close. You will find that out when you are as old as I am.' ' I hope I may not live till then,' muttered the daughter ; of which her mother, not catching the meaning, challenged the repetition of the sentence by a querulous ' Eh?' Martha replied impatiently, 'Nothing, mother;' the most irritating response to a deaf person. ' Well, Martha, but there is some one on the causeway, and I really believe 'tis Mrs. Bolitho.

Bless me, I never saw any one dress as she does.' Mrs. Bolitho was sailing along on the top of the causeway, in a purple-silk dress, with a shawl of striped orange silk, and bonnet trimmed with scarlet geraniums ; an extraordinarily glowing figure, considering the cold gray tints of sea and sky which constituted her surroundings. There is always some breeze from the sea, and it em barrassed Mrs. Bolitho considerably, sometimes SEADRIFT. 15 forcing her dress against her person so, that she could scarcely move her feet; sometimes puffing up the skirt like an inverted umbrella, which she tried in vain to put down with her little fubsy fingers ; or whirling her shawl into her face, as if trying to stop her breathing. ' Well, I never !' said Mrs. Clemens. ' What a woman she is! And O, Martha, I really do believe she is coming here !' And the widow turned pale, and Martha flushed, and cast her eyes round to see if the room were tidy.

There were some ends of gingham, which Mrs. Clemens did not see, but which Martha picked up and stuffed into a drawer, just as the Queen of the East, as Dr. Mereside called Mrs. Bolitho, opened the gate of Mrs. Clemens's small garden, and walked up to the door. Mrs. Bolitho had not before visited the wi dow Clemens. Why should she 1 Her dresses were made by the best dressmaker at Plymouth ; but she had some sewing-work to be done, and she had intended, in giving the order, to come down on the solitary pair in all the dignity of wealth and fine clothes. The wind, however, had taken her at a disadvantage, and she was conscious how ridiculous a figure it had made of her, as she SEADRIFT. came along the causeway ; whilst she suspected that, from the position of the windows, her embar rassment had been visible, and thought that she had probably afforded amusement, when she should have inspired awe.

She had been obliged, too, to drag her bonnet down in a manner most untender towards its delicacy, and had a conviction that it was sitting awry, besides a suspicion that the false front had drooped more over one eyebrow than the other. Mrs. Clemens had opened the door to her, and curtsying, ushered her into the sitting-room. ' Drat the folks — I mean, mum, drat the wind ; it makes one feel so uncomfortable. 'Tis true, as the saying is, that in a Cornish wind it takes two men to hold one man's hair on his head.' She looked over the chimney-piece, and saw the marks where a glass had been. ' Perhaps,' said Martha, ' mother, Mrs. Bolitho would like to walk up-stairs.' 'A good thought, Miss Clemens,' said the lady. — 'Mum, be so good as to show me the way.' Mrs. Clemens preceded her guest up-stairs to the room which the old woman could show with out any wound to her pride.

There was the hand- SEADRIFT. 17 9 some mahogany bedstead, with the clean white dimity curtains ; curtains also to the windows, carefully pinned up ; and a clean cover over the carpet, which had scarcely ever seen the light. ' If you will permit me, mum,' said Mrs. Cle mens, passing her to open the shutters ; and then she went out and shut the door, hearing an un mistakably angry tone in Martha's voice, calling ' Mother !' at the foot of the stairs. ' Mother,' con tinued Martha ; and coaxing Mrs. Clemens down, she dragged her into the sitting-room again. ' My dear,' said the mother, ' women are so curious, I really must go up again. You see, if she opens the chest of drawers, she will see all those stockings that I have not mended, and,' with a sigh, ' they are so coarse, and so full of holes.' Martha flushed ; she did not like the stockings to be seen either. ' And there's a flannel petticoat all cut through at the hem.

She will turn all my things over. I should not care if she came on the velvet you painted.' ' I daresay, mother, she has only looked at her self in the glass. Hush, here she comes,' added Martha, making a sign of silence to Mrs. Clemens, as the heavy footsteps of Mrs. Bolitho were heard, VOL. I. C SEADRIFT. making the stairs creak under her weight. She sailed into the room, reassured as to her appearance, and quite ready to assert her consequence and overwhelm the two women by her condescension. ' Take a seat, ma'am,' suggested Mrs. Clemens. Mrs. Bolitho sat down with her back to the light, and cast an insolent circular glance round the poor furniture of the room. Mrs. Clemens quivered and flushed under it. Mrs. Bolitho was a captain's wife, Mrs. Clemens a captain's widow. There was no difference of social rank except that made by wealth.

At length Mrs. Bolitho's eyes rested on Martha, as did those of Mrs. Clemens. ' You have no family, I believe, mum,' said the mother, with a tone of triumph. ' No, I've not,' said the captain's wife fiercely, ' and I pities them as has.' ' Sour grapes, some might say,' murmured the discomfited mother. ' However,' said Mrs. Bolitho, ' 'tis about her I am come,' indicating Martha by a nod. ' You see, Captain Bolitho sails in a fortnight's time and he wants a dozen new shirts. My time ' con tinued the lady loftily, ' is too much occupied to think of undertaking the work myself, and if they SEADRIFT. are bought ready-made they go to pieces directly ; so I have brought the calico, and fine Irish for the collars, wristbands, and fronts, and I must have them this day fortnight.' 'I do not think I could do it in the time, ma'am,' said Martha. ' Working from morning till night I can only do one shirt in the day, and a dozen in a fortnight is just that, cutting out the Sundays.

What will you pay me?' continued the joung woman sturdily, whilst Mrs. Clemens looked uncomfortable. ' I did think of one-and-ninepence each,' said the captain's wife tentatively. ' Can't be done for that money,' said Martha bluntly. ' They are cut out,' said Mrs. Bolitho. ' Umph !' said the girl ; ' not much help in that.' 'Well,' said the lady, 'we will say two shillings each, though one pound four shillings is a deal to pay for work when there's the calico, and linen, and buttons, and thread, to be paid for besides.' ' Do you wish the bosom to be stitched with a heart, ma'am?' ' Certainly.' SEADRIFT. 'Will the gentleman notice if the gussets in the shirts have not three rows of stitching ?' ' Bless you, no ! Men are such fools ! So long as 'tis clean, he don't care whether 'tis Irish or holland.' ' And about the stitching, ma'am ?' suggested Martha. 'You say he won't notice it.' ' The washerwomen will,' returned the lady, in a voice so solemn that it forbade farther dis cussion. 'Now, young woman,' continued Mrs. Bolitho, ' do you promise that I shall have those shirts this clay fortnight?' ' If I am alive and well, you shall have them some time between twelve o'clock in the day and twelve o'clock at night this day fortnight.

But you cannot have them before; and the days are so short now,' said the girl, with a sigh, thinking how much the twenty -four shillings must be broken into for candles. ' Very well ; I depend on you,' said the lady ; and a fat finger, of which the tip had burst the kid, pointed impressively at Martha. Mrs. Clemens had kept silence during the discussion as to the price of labour, but now she attended Mrs. Bolitho to the door. 'Are you going back the same way, mum? SEADRIFT. The wind won't take your clothes so unpleasant on the beach.' ' That's true,' said Mrs. Bolitho ; ' but the salt amongst the pebbles takes the colour out of one's boots so.' And pulling up her dress, she revealed a gorgeous pair of purple boots clasping the over hanging plumpness of the leg. ' 'Tis neap-tide, so I think the pebbles is dry,' said Mrs. Clemens. ' I s'pose I know that, being a captain's wife,' retorted the richer woman. 'However, I'll take the causeway, for 'tis rough walking along them nasty sloping pebbles, that you sink into before you know where you are.' As she left the little garden, she looked inland to the spot where gleamed beneath its glory of autumn foliage the neat white house of Dr. Mere side. ' Do you see much of them people ?' said Mrs. Bolitho. ' O, they are very kind,' said Mrs. Clemens ; ' and Mrs. Mereside gave me such a valuable cut ting of a rose,' said she, snatching it up, and pre senting the small green stem with the single bud on it — holding it up with the delight of a child SEADRIFT. showing its rattle to a bigger baby, whom the possession of a horse and cart makes indifferent to anything less valuable. 'Umph!' said Mrs. Bolitho; 'my garden is full of them.' ' Not of this kind,' replied the other pertinaciously.

But Mrs. Bolitho had moved away, and did not, or would not, hear the vehement assertion. Martha was glad that there were only the buttons to be sewed on the servant's dress, and then she should be free to begin the shirts. A few minutes after she had consented to exe cute the order, Mrs. Mereside came on a similar errand. 'My dear,' said that lady, patronising but good-natured, 'Airs. Treleaven has asked me to a grand dinner-part}- next week, and I have not a low dress to wear. You must run me. up this book-muslin and a petticoat to wear with it.' Martha shook her head ' You won't ?' said Mrs. Mereside. ' I cannot, ma'am.' ' I'll pay you well, and 'tis such light work !' ' I am very sorry, but I have promised to do some shirts for Mrs. Bolitho.' SEADRDJT. 23 ' O, if 'tis for the Queen of the East,' said the doctor's wife, ' of course I cannot expect you to break your word.' Martha did not explain that it was her regard for her word, and not her regard for Mrs. Bolitho, which made her resist the temptation. ' Well, I shall take the dress to Mary Moore, near the church.

The doctor has a patient there, and he can drop me whilst I give the order. She will not disoblige me, I am sure;' and the lady walked away in a huff. Mrs. Clemens looked ready to cry. ' If I had but my eyes, Martha, I could have clone the shirts, and your nimble fingers the mus lin dress.' ' Well, but you have not your eyes, mother ; so 'tis useless crying over spilt milk.' ' I am so sorry to have vexed Mrs. Mereside. She always speaks so civil to me,' the mother maundered on. ' It can't be helped, mother ; pray say no more about it.' So Mrs. Clemens went upstairs to inspect the spare room, and try to find whether Mrs. Bolitho had meddled with aught in the chest of drawers. ' She has ! She has indeed, Martha !' SEADRIFT. ' 'Twas very unmannerly.' ' Why did you make me come down ?' ' Because it would have been very unmannerly for you to stay whilst she took off her bonnet, cap, and wig, when she don't want any one to know that she wears one.' 'Why not?

Why should she wear a wig? I don't ; and I know she is only younger by five months than I am. And here is the stocking at the top which I know was at the bottom. I put it there because 'twas the worst ; so I kept it to the last. And she never went to the drawer where the velvet was at all ! And she as much as said the cutting wasn't worth a halfpenny !' These grievances admitted of no consolation ; so Martha went on with the quick incessant movement of her fingers in seaming the body of one of the shirts she had undertaken to make. Mary Moore made the muslin dress satisfac torily, and thereby established a claim to the manufacture of all future dresses for Mrs. Mere side ; and Martha had her good principles for such satisfaction as they might afford her. SEADRIFT. 25