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

Denas and Roland were both in her way. They were at the piano singing as complacently and deliberately as if the coming of her future husband was an event that could slip into and fit into any phase of ordinary life. It was a strange, wonderful thing to her, something so sacred and personal she could not bear to think of discussing it while Roland laughed and Denas sang. It was not an every-day event and she would not have it made one.

She knew her father would not interfere, and she knew one way in which to rid herself of Denas and Roland. Naturally she took it. A little after six she said: "I have a headache, Roland, and shall not walk to-night. Will you take Denas safely down the cliff?"

Roland was delighted, and Denas was no more afraid of the gay fellow than the moth is of the candle. She was pleasantly excited by the idea of a walk all alone with Roland. She wondered what he would say to her: if he would venture to give voice to the inarticulate love-making of the last two years--to all that he had looked when she sang to him--to all that he meant by the soft, prolonged pressure of her hand and by that one sweet stolen kiss which he had claimed for Christmas' sake.

They walked a little apart and very silently until they came into the glades of the cliff-breast. Then, suddenly, without word or warning, Roland took Denas in his arms and kissed her. "Denas! sweet Denas!" he cried, and the wrong was so quickly, so impulsively committed that for a moment Denas was passive under it. Then with flaming cheeks she freed herself from his embrace. "Mr. Tresham, you must go back," she said. "I can walk no further with you. Why were you so rude to me?"

"I am not rude, Denas, and I will not go back. After waiting two years for this opportunity, do you think I will give it up? And I will not let you call me Mr. Tresham. To you I am Roland. Say it here in my arms, dear, lovely Denas! Do not turn away from me. You cannot go back without telling Elizabeth, and I swear you shall not go forward until you forgive me. Come, Denas, sweet, forgive me!" He held her hands, he kissed her hands, and would not release the girl, who, as she listened to his rapid, eager pleading, became more and more disposed to tenderness. He was telling the story no one could better tell than Roland Tresham. His eyes, his lips, his smile, his caressing attitudes, all went with his eager words, his enthusiastic admiration, his passionate assertion of his long-hidden affection.

And everything was in his favour. The lovely spring eve, the mystical twilight, the mellow flutings of the blackbirds and the vesper thrushes piping nothing new or strange, only the sweet old tune of love, the lift of the hills, the soft trinkling of hidden brooks, the scent of violets at their feet and of the fresh leaves above them--all the magic of the young year and of young love made the delicious story Roland had been longing to tell and the innocent heart of Denas fearing and longing to hear very easy to interpret--very easy to understand.

Listening, and then refusing to listen; yielding a little, and then drawing back again, Denas nevertheless heard Roland's whole sweet confession. She was taught to believe that he had loved her from their first meeting; taught to believe and half-made to acknowledge that she had not been indifferent to him. She was under almost irresistible influences, and she did not think of others which might have counteracted them. Even Elizabeth's revelation to her of her own splendid matrimonial hopes was favourable to Roland's arguments; for if it was a thing for congratulating and rejoicing that Elizabeth should marry a man so much richer than herself, where was it wrong for Denas to love one supposed to be socially and financially her superior?

Before they were half-way to the shingle Roland felt that he had won. The conviction gave him a new kind of power--the power all women delight to acknowledge; the sweet dictation, the loving tyranny that claims every thought of the beloved. Roland told Denas she must not dare to remember anyone but him; he would feel it and know it if she did. She promised this readily. She must not tell Elizabeth. Elizabeth was unreasonable, she was even jealous of everything concerning her brother; she would have a hundred objections; she would influence his father unfavourably; she would do all she could to prevent their seeing each other, etc., etc. And where a man pleads, one woman is readily persuaded against another. But Denas was much harder to persuade where the article of secrecy touched her father and mother. Her conscience, uneasy for some time, told her positively at this point that deception was wicked and dangerous. Roland could not win from her a promise in this direction. But he was not afraid--he was sure he could trust to her love and her desire to please him.

One of the cruellest things about a wrong love is that it delights in tangles and hidden ways; that it teaches and practises deceit from its first inception; that its earliest efforts are toward destroying all older and more sacred attachments. Roland was not willing to take the hand of Denas in the face of the world and say: "This is my beloved wife." Yet for the secret pleasure of his secret love, he expected Denas to wrong father-love and mother-love and to deceive day by day the friend and the companion who had been so kind and so fairly loyal to her.

No wonder John Penelles hated him instinctively. John's soul needed but a glimpse of the lovers sauntering down the narrow cliff-path to apprehend the beginning of sorrows. Instantaneous as the glimpse was, it explained to him the restless, angry, fearful feeling that had driven him from his own cottage to the place appointed by destiny for the revelation of his child's danger and of his own admonition.

He was glad that he had obeyed the spiritual order; whatever power had warned him had done him service. It is true the fond assurances of Denas had somewhat pacified his suspicions, but he was not altogether satisfied. When Denas declared that Roland had not made love to her, John felt certain that the girl was in some measure deceiving him--perhaps deceiving herself; for he could not imagine her to be guilty of a deliberate lie. Alas! lying is the vital air of secret love, and a girl must needs lie who hides from her parents the object and the course of her affections. Still, when he thought of her arms around his neck, of her cheek against his cheek, of her assertion that "Denas loved no one better than her father and mother," he felt it a kind of disloyalty to his child to altogether doubt her. He believed that Denas believed in herself. Well, then, he must try and trust her as far and as long as it was possible.

And Joan trusted her daughter--she scouted the idea of Denas doing anything that was outside her mother's approval. She told John that his fear was nothing but the natural conceit of men; they thought a woman could not be with one of their sex and not be ready to sacrifice her own life and the lives of all her kinsfolk for him. "It be such puddling folly to start with," she said indignantly; "talking about Denas being false to her father and mother! 'Tis a doleful, dismal, ghastly bit of cowardice, John. Dreadful! aw, dreadful!"

Then John was silent, but he communed with his own heart. Joan had not seen Roland and Denas as he had seen them; no one had troubled Joan as he had been troubled. For something often gives to a loving heart a kind of prescience, when it may be used for wise and saving ends; and John Penelles divined the angry trend of Roland's thoughts, though it was impossible for him to anticipate the special form that trend would take.

Roland had indeed been made furiously angry at the interference between himself and Denas. "I spoke pleasantly to the old fisher, and he was as rude as could be. Rude to me! Jove! I'll teach him the value of good manners to his betters."

He sat down on a lichen-covered rock, lit a cigar, and began to think. His personal dignity had been deeply wounded; his pride of petty caste trod upon. He, a banker's son, had been snubbed by a common fisherman! "He took Denas from me as if I was going to kill her, body and soul. He deserves all he suspected me of." And as these and similar thoughts passed through Roland's mind he was not at all handsome; his face looked dark and drawn and marked all over with the characters sin writes through long late hours of selfish revelry and riot.

But however his angry thoughts wandered, they always came back to the slight of himself personally--to the failure of Penelles to appreciate the honour he was doing him in wooing his daughter. And if the devil wishes to enter easily a man or a woman, he finds no door so wide and so easy of access as the door of wounded vanity and wounded self-esteem.

Roland's first impulse was to make Denas pay her father's debt. "I will never speak to her again. Common little fisher-girl! I will teach her that gentlemen are to be used like gentlemen. Why did she not speak up to her father? She stood there without a word and let him snub me. The idea!" These exclamations were, however, only the quick, unreasoning passion of the animal; when Roland had calmed himself with tobacco, he felt how primitive and foolish they were. His reflections were then of a different character; they began to flow steadily into a channel they had often wandered in, though hitherto without distinct purpose.

"After all, I like the girl. She has a kind of nixie, tantalising, bewitching charm that would drive a crowd mad. She has a fresh, sympathetic voice, penetrating, too, as a clarion. Her folk-songs and her sea-songs go down to the bottom of a man's heart and into every corner of it. Now, if I could get her to London and have her taught how to manage her voice and face and person, if I had her taught how to dance--Jove! there is a fortune in it! Dressed in a fancy fisher costume, singing the casting songs and the boat songs--the calls and takes she knows so well--why, she would make a gas-lit theatre seem like the great ocean, and men would see the white-sailed ships go marching by, and the fishing cobbles, and the wide nets full of gleaming fish, and--and, by Jove! they would go frantic with delight. They would be at her feet. She would be the idol of London. She would sing full pockets empty. I should have all my desires, and now I have so few of them. What a prospect! But I'll reach it--I'll reach it, and all the fishers in St. Penfer's shall not hinder me!"

He thought his plans over again, and then it was dark and he rose up to return home; but as he shook himself into the proper fit of his clothes and settled his hat at the correct angle, he laughed vauntingly and said:

"I shall be even with you, John Penelles, before next Easter. I was not good enough for Denas, was I not? Well, she is going to work for me and for