A Singer from the Sea, Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr [best story books to read TXT] 📗

calling out: "Why, it is Tris Penrose at her wheel!" Then as she came closer a man shouted: "It be the Darling Denas. It must be John Penelles' boat. To be sure it be John's boat!" This opinion was reached by an instant conviction, and every face was turned to John.

"It be my boat, mates. Thank God and my little girl. It be my boat, thank God!"

And then Tris was at the slip, and the anchor down and all the men were as eager about the new craft as a group of horsemen could possibly be about the points of some famous winner. Tris had to tell every particular about her builder and her building, and as the fishers were talking excitedly of these things, Joan gave a general invitation to her friends, and they followed her to the cottage, and heard the St. Penfer News read, and had a plate of junket[5] and of clotted cream.

And they were really proud and glad of what they heard. Denas had made herself so beloved that no one had a grudging or, envious feeling. Everyone considered how she had come back to them as if she had been penniless; "and teaching our little ones too--with sixteen hundred pounds at her back! Wonderful! Wonderful!" said first one and then another of the women. Indeed, if Denas had thought out a plan to make herself honoured and popular, she could hardly have conceived of one more in unison with the simple souls she had to influence. They could not sleep for talking about it. Denas Penelles was a veritable romance to them.

"And fair she was and fair she be!" said Mary Oliver, a good woman, with not a pinch of pride in her make-up. "And if Tris Penrose win her and she win him, a proper wedding it will be--a wedding made by their guardian angel. I do think that." And the group of women present answered one and then another, "A proper wedding it will be, to be sure."

In the evening there was a great praise-meeting at John's cottage; for in St. Penfer all rejoicing and all sorrow ended in a religious meeting. And Denas and Tris sang out of the same hymn-book, and sat side by side as they listened to John's quaintly eloquent tribute to the God "who did always keep faith with His children." "I was like to lose sight of my God," he cried, "but my God never did lose sight of me. God's children be well off, He goes so neighbourly with them. He is their pilot and their home-bringer. I did weep to myself all last night; but just as His promise says, joy did come in the morning." And then John burst into song, and all his mates and neighbours with him.

And it is in such holy, exalted atmospheres that love reaches its sweetest, fairest strength and bloom. Tris had no need of words. Words would have blundered, and hampered, and darkened all he had to say. One look at Denas as they closed the book together--one look as he held her hand on the door-step, and she knew more than words could ever have said. She saw through his eyes to the bottom of his clear, honest soul, and she knew that he loved her as men love who find in one woman only the song of life, the master-key of all their being.

She expected Tris would come and see her the next day, but Ann Trewillow brought word that he had sailed with Mr. Arundel. Tris had been expecting the order, and the yacht had only been waiting for guests who had suddenly arrived. Denas was rather pleased. She was not yet ready to admit a new love. She felt that in either refusing or accepting Tris' affection she would be doing both herself and Tris an injustice. A love that does not spring into existence perfect needs cautious tending; too much sunshine, too much care, too constant watching will slay it. There must be time given for it to grow.

Without reasoning on the matter, Denas felt that absence would be a good thing. She was afraid of being driven by emotion or by circumstances into a mistaken position. And she had now an absorbing interest in her life. Her school was a delight. No consideration of money qualified her pleasure in her pupils. She was eager to teach all she knew. She was eager to learn, that she might teach more. As the weeks went by her school got a local fame; it was considered a great privilege to obtain a place in it.

Good fortune seemed to have come to St. Penfer by the Sea when Denas came back to it. Never had there been a more abundant sea-harvest than that summer. The Darling Denas brought luck to the whole fleet. She was a swift sailer, always first on the fishing-ground and always first in harbour again; and it was a great pleasure to Denas to watch her namesake leading out and leading home the brown-sailed bread-winners of the hamlet. When the time and the tide and the weather all served, Denas might now often be seen, with her mother and the rest of the fishermen's wives, standing on the wind-blown pier watching the boats out in the evening.

There had been a time when she had positively declined the loving ceremony--when she had hated the thought of any community in such feelings--when the large brown faces of the wives and mothers and the sad patience of their attitude had seemed to her only the visible signs of a poor and sorrowful life. And even yet, as she stood among them she was haunted by a rhyme she had read in some picture paper years ago--a rhyme that so pathetically glanced at love that dwelt between life and death that she never could see a group of fishermen's wives on the pier watching the boats outside without saying it to herself:


"They gazed on the boats from the pier, ah, me!
Till their sails swelled in the wind,
Till darkness dropped down over the sea
And their eyes with tears were blind.
Then home they turned, and they never spoke,
These daughters and wives of the fisher-folk."


But years and experience had taught her the falsehood of extremes; she knew now that life has many intermediate colours between lamp-black and rose-pink, and that if the fisherman's wife had hours of anxious watching, she had also many hours of such rapturous love as comes sparingly to others--love that is the portion of those who come back from the very grave with the shadow of death on their face.

In the autumn Tris returned for a few days, but he was so busy that he could not leave the yacht. She was being provisioned and put in order for the long Mediterranean winter voyage, and Tris was in constant demand. But John and Joan and Denas walked over to St. Clair to bid him good-bye. And never had Tris looked so handsome and so manly. His air of authority became him. In a fishing-boat men are equal, but on this lordly pleasure-boat it was very different. Tris said to one man go and to another come, and they obeyed him with deference and alacrity. This masterful condition impressed Denas greatly. She thought of Tris with a respect which promised far more than mere admiration for his beauty or his picturesque dress.

After Tris was gone the winter came rapidly, but Denas did not dread it. Neither did John nor Joan. John looked upon his boat as a veritable godsend. What danger could come to him on a craft so blessed? All her takes were large and fortunate. The other boats thought it lucky to sail in her wake. On whatever side the Darling Denas cast her bait, they knew it was right to cast on that side also.

Joan was happy in her husband's happiness; she was happy in her unstinted housekeeping; she was now particularly happy in Denas' school. The little lads and lasses brought all their news, all their joys and sorrows to Denas; and when Denas went home every day, Joan, with her knitting in her hands, was waiting to give her a dainty meal and to chat with her over all she had heard and all she had done.

And Denas was happy. When she mentally contrasted this busy, loving winter with the sorrows of the previous one, with the hunger and cold and poverty, the anguish of death and the loneliness, she could not but be grateful for the little home-harbour which her storm-tossed heart had found again. If she had a regret, it was that she could not retain her hold upon her finished life. Every time she asked her heart after Roland, memory gave her pictures in fainter and fainter and fainter colours. Roland was drifting farther and farther away.

She could no longer weep at his name. A gentle melancholy, a half-sacred remoteness invested the years in which he had been the light of her life. For


"When the lamp is shattered,
The light in the dust lies dead;
When the cloud is scattered,
The rainbow's glory is fled."


Mercifully, youth has this marvellous elasticity. And the children filled all the vacant places in her life. For as yet she did not think much nor at all decidedly about Tris. If Roland was slipping away from memory, Tris by no means filled her heart. Yet she was pleased when Ann Trewillow's little maid Gillian told her one morning:

"Master Arundel's yacht be come into harbour safe and sound, and Captain Tris, he be brave and hearty, and busy all to get ashore again. And my mother do say Mr. Arundel he be going to marry a fine lady, and great doings at the Abbey, no doubt. And mother do say, too, that Captain Tris will be marrying you. And I was a brave bit frightened at that news, and I up and answered mother: 'It bean't so. Miss Denas likes better teaching us boys and girls.' I said that, and wishing it so with all my heart."

And Denas, seeing that the boys and girls were looking anxiously at her for an assurance of this position, said positively:

"I am happier with you, children, than I could be with anyone else, and I do not intend to marry at all."

"Never? Say never!"

"Well, then--never."

Yet there was a faint longing in her heart for love all her own. A man can love what others love, but a woman wants something or someone to love that is all her own. And she was interested enough in Tris' return to dress with more than usual care that evening. She felt sure he would come, and she put on her best black gown and did not brush the ripples out of her front hair, but let the tiny tendrils soften the austere gravity of her face and make that slight shadow behind the ears which is so womanly and becoming.

About seven o'clock she heard his footsteps on the shingle and the gay whistle to which they timed themselves. Joan went to the door to welcome him. Denas stood up as he entered, and then, meeting his ardent gaze, trembled and flushed and sat down again. He sat down beside her. He told her how much already he had heard of her gracious work in the village. He said it was worth going to France and Italy and Greece, only to come back and