Chapter XXV: How Beatrice Sat in the Dimpsy

[* Dimpsy = Twilight.]

The cold wind and showers of sleet which had visited Dartmoor were the results of a storm upon the Atlantic. There had been high seas upon North Cornwall, seas which tossed the biggest ships as though they had been cockle-shells, and broke up the small ones like a lion crunching a bone. From Cape Cornwall to Trebarwith Strand the coast had been strewn with the pathetic rubbish of wreckage. An empty bottle of Hollands and a baby’s coral were lying side by side in Porthmeer Cove quaint partners of tragedy. And at Porth Zennor a man was cast up by the sea.

It was Beatrice who discovered the body. She was out the morning after the storm, clad in oilskins, searching for curiosities to add to her museum--for the sea brought her treasures from China to Peru--and she perceived the white face bobbing beside the rocks. Like a cat the cruel sea had captured its victim and was now playing with it, patting it up to the land, and drawing it back before it could get too far. The girl scrambled down and secured the body and dragged it upon the rocks. The sight had no terror for her. She was not in the least afraid to touch it, although she had been once frightened out of her wits by the one-legged fisherman, and had been more repelled than she would own by the sight of Burrough’s disfigurement. That body was not mutilated; only bruised, and its poor hands were chafed terribly. The man was a French fisherman come to beg a little earth from England, and the right to stop there. He was a young man and married; for there was a ring upon his little finger, a worthless ring, but made precious by the dark hair worked around it.

After rescuing the body from the sea, Beatrice sat down and sobbed. Here was half-a-century of useful life wasted by a sudden passion of wind. The joy of life was strong within her. She loved every day of the year, sunshine or storm; her prayer was for long life--nothing else--sorrow, sickness, poverty, were more endurable than the thought of losing her beautiful body. With her, as with her Aunt, it was body first, the rest nowhere. So she cried for the poor Frenchman because he had lost his body. She would not have shed a tear for the widow. Why should she? The widow could go on enjoying the use of her body.

“Poor man,” said Beatrice softly. “I am sure you were nice and you worked hard for your wife. Perhaps you worked too hard, and didn’t think enough of yourself.” Then she frowned, and shook her head at the sea. “Why will you spoil my home?” said she. “These rocks were not put here for you to wreck ships upon. You have given us another funeral, and I hate you for it.” She lowered her voice. “It is not the fault of the sea, after all. It’s the wind, and I don’t know what’s to blame for that.”

She got up, shook the tears from her lashes, and the spray from her eyebrows, and hurried up the cliffs to make her discovery known.

The old gabled house, which was Beatrice’s own property and had been in her family for hard upon two centuries, was very near the sea. It was protected against the worst gales by a furze-covered hill which, report declared, was the original Tom Tiddler’s ground where the misguided mortal had stuffed his pockets with furze-blooms for gold. It stood in a slight hollow planted with great fuschias, hydrangeas, and escallonias. Beatrice had uprooted the rhododendrons, which were flourishing in great abundance when she came of age, because she considered they looked mournful in winter and in summer neither bird nor insect would dwell within them. In their place she had induced heather and bracken to grow, thus bringing the moorland characteristics to the very door of her home.

Beatrice was in a restless mood during those days which followed the storm. She felt that a great change threatened her life, the greatest change that can occur either to man or maid, and the thought of it unsettled her. It was necessary; that point she yielded. But it meant a breaking up of existing conditions, a certain amount of self-surrender, and probably a slight curtailment of her strange pleasures. She paid a flying visit to Sennen and came back thoughtful. She began letters and tore them up. She consulted her oracles, only to disregard the omens that they gave. She visited old wives at Porth Zennor and asked them their opinions upon various matters which interested her then. She tackled the fishermen and sought to hear what they thought of life and its environment. The answers she obtained were not encouraging. They threw her back after all upon her own feelings. The old wives seemed to be slightly cynical. They told her it was the duty of every maid to secure a man for herself and to keep him if she could. They assured her it was as well to extend the period of courtship, by which they meant no doubt the “walking out,” as much as possible, because that--and there the cynicism cropped up--was the best part of married life. It amused Beatrice to think that the joys of matrimony should be over before they had legally commenced; but that was the way of the world with a class which did not seek the ceremony until local sentiment and public morality demanded it. As for the fishermen they evaded the main issue and harped principally upon the habitation clause. They were afraid Beatrice might be leaving the country, so they assured her that anyone who had lived upon the Cornish coast could not settle or die in peace elsewhere. “You may travel over the world, east or west,” said one. “And when you’ve done it all, you’ll find there’s only Cornwall and you’ll come back.” Beatrice declared there was no danger of her departure. She could not live out of her native air; and she laughed her agreement with the fisherman, when he declared, with racial antipathies to the West Saxons, that England east of Exeter was a wilderness.

The body of the young Frenchman was lying in the church which stood upon a hill. Beatrice walked there towards evening. Her love for that wild rocky coast was fully developed then, and she doubted whether she could love any living creature as much as she loved her life and her home. She did not find it dull. Her day was fully occupied; she had friends in all directions; she knew everyone in the district, from the youngest child to the oldest greybeard. Her complete independence satisfied her. She knew she could do what she liked; that she could depart any day; and with that knowledge she was content.

“I’ll go and sit in the porch. I’ll make up my mind there,” said she.

First she raised herself on tiptoe beside a window, and looked inside the church. In the faint gloom she could just see the dim outline of the drowned fisherman, whose name and dwelling place were unknown, stretched upon the bier. Something was moving upon the uneven tiles beneath. Beatrice rubbed the glass with her finger, strained her eyes, and made out a mouse gliding smoothly to and fro. She shivered a little, because her stored up folk-lore suggested the tales where the human soul had been seen escaping in the form of a mouse. It seemed to her that the soul of the French fisherman was roving about the deserted church. The wind from the sea made the pane moist again. Beatrice stepped down and passed into the porch.

The church had been built of Cornish granite perhaps a thousand years before. Surrounding it were monuments of still greater antiquity, dating from the Age of Bronze, before the coming of the Celts when broad-headed savages occupied the neighbouring moorland before Romulus and Remus had been suckled. It was not surprising that romance should die slowly in such an old-world place. Not so very long ago a famous ghost-layer had there wrestled with the powers of darkness. In the field adjoining the churchyard he had subdued the unquiet spirit of a poor ruined girl. Beatrice knew the spot where the good man had marked his pentacle in the midst of a circle, and at the intersection of the five angles had set up his crutch of rowan. She accepted such stories as these, and never asked herself seriously whether she believed in them. She herself knew all the spells necessary to lay a ghost; and had there occurred within the church that “soft and rippling sound,” which denoted the approach of an unquiet spirit, she would have been up at once, taking her station south, on the true line of the meridian, and facing due north, as her witch instructress had taught her.

But the poor young Frenchman inside the church was peaceful. He made no soft and rippling sound. He was lying in the cobwebby gloom; and staring down upon him were monstrous mediæval frescoes and horrible faces in stone, more suggestive of an evil dream than religious symbolism. The mouse and the spiders and the dead man made no noise. Outside there was the wind. It was always windy there, and the murmur or the roaring of the sea came with it. As Beatrice sat in the porch dry leaves darted in strange fashion across the tiles, and scraps of heather and dried fronds of bracken scraped and tumbled about her little boots.

She was her normal self; quite warm and happy; and although slightly troubled in her mind she still refused to take things very seriously. It was her rule not to think unpleasantly, and thus she was able to sit in that gloomy porch, with the darkness coming up, and the memorials of departed Cornish folk around, and the wind drifting the wreckage of autumn up and down, without feeling the least qualm of dread. She looked at the roof of the porch and at the ancient church door, covered with half-rotten clamps, thinking and wondering. She thought about the man in the cottage by the gorge. She wondered if, about the time of the first primrose, she would pass that door and across that porch, in “faire white samite,” with a crown of spring blossoms, and a ring of gold upon the finger where, according to the Decretal, is a certain vein which reaches to the heart. Beatrice had seen the old book still kept in chains within the church, containing among offices and divers benedictions the pre-reformation order of matrimony. She had read the words with which many a maid then lying long forgotten in the surrounding acre had blushingly committed herself; she had written them in her prayer-book; she had them by heart; and she murmured them as she sat in the windy porch:--

“I Beatrice take the John to be my wedded housbonder, to have and to holde fro this day forwarde, for better for wors, for richere for poorer, in sykenesse and in hele, to be bonere and buxum in bedde and at the borde, tyll dethe us departe, if holy chyrche it woll ordeyne, and thereto I plight the my trouthe.”

“It rests with myself. My destiny is in my own hands,” said she.

There were sycamore leaves drifting past the porch. Beatrice had been watching them, and in an idle way counting them up to a dozen or so, then forgetting the exact number and starting afresh. Suddenly she drew out her watch. There was just light enough for her to see the hands upon the dial and the dry leaves passing outside.

“If twelve leaves, or more than twelve, pass completely across in two minutes I will marry in the spring.”

She sat on in silence, and the leaves drifted by one by one. The issue was never in doubt; for at the end of the first minute there came a wintry gust which sent more than a score of black-spotted leaves rustling past. Beatrice put away her watch with a little smile; but as she rose to depart a cross-current caught the big leaves that had gone by and whisked them back again.

“You can’t undo it,” said she, frowning and addressing the heedless wind. “You may blow the leaves wherever you like now, but you shan’t blow me back again. I have made up my mind; it’s fixed due east, and blow out your cheeks as you like it’s not going to point in any other direction. Blow into the church, if you must blow, and into the lungs of the poor French fisherman and give him his life again.”

Beatrice was in ill-humour with the windy brethren. One of them had raised the storm which had been the cause of bringing the body into her own particular cove; another had turned back the flight of her augural leaves. If she could have captured those two windy brothers she would have put them into the devil’s frying-pan at Cadgewith there to seethe and bubble till they burst.

Little Miss Pentreath was in bed, unpainted, unapparelled, unadorned; as dreary a sight as a dismantled theatre. She was suffering from an attack of bronchitis, which prostrated her every autumn, and that season had been more severe than usual. A bed had been made up for her downstairs amid the cheerful surroundings which prevailed on the ground floor, as she did not like to be ill in a bedroom. Beatrice sympathised with her. Had she been ill she would have gone out to lie on the heather; and that was precisely the remedy which she had prescribed for her Aunt.

“Darling, I’m so glad you’re back. I went to sleep and had a horrible dream, and woke with screams and shivers,” was Miss Pentreath’s greeting, as the girl came in. “Come and shake my pillows, and let me feel you, warm, glowing, healthy, lovely thing. Oh, that colour on your cheeks! I never could copy it, though I hunted through London and Paris. I never could make my cheeks like yours, could I, Trixy?”

“No, dear. They were rather Dutch-dolly. But it served you right. Going to England for what only Cornwall could give.”

“I hoped you would contradict me. You are so downright in your negatives,” sighed Miss Pentreath. “Whenever I asked you how I looked you always had a knock-me-down answer.”

“I’m going to knock-you-down again,” laughed Beatrice. “I’m going to tell you something which will either kill or cure. How will you have it--in two words, or a speech? All together, or broken gently? Gilded, or bitter? Plain, or varnished?”

“I won’t have it at all,” cried the invalid. “Don’t worry me just as I am getting better. I am much better this evening, Trixy. I am not going to listen to horrors, wrecked ships, drowned sailors, bogged moormen--let’s have tea and be snug, and see if we can’t find something nice to talk about.”

“I’m not going to spare you, Auntie. You have got to listen, and you may scream if you are moved so to do. You may also call me a toad, or compare me to any other of the reptilian creation which it may appear to you I particularly resemble.”

“Go on, you bully,” grumbled the little lady. “I’m entirely in your power. You will give me insomnia, and you won’t even be sorry.”

“Do you think, Auntie,” Beatrice went on, seating herself upon the bed and speaking rather quickly, “that if a man were very fond of me he could exist without me?”

“Why, of course he could. What a horribly conceited thing to say,” gasped Miss Pentreath. “I’ve been very fond of some men in my time, but I’m still alive, and I intend to remain so.”

“But if he were lonely and sad, and very fond of me?” Beatrice persisted.

“I always thought you were more likely to black a man’s eye than break his heart,” said Miss Pentreath, evading the question.

“Don’t be frivolous, else I’ll call you an old woman, which is the truth, though you don’t like to hear it.”

“You’re a toad, Beatrice. I don’t care--you are. A big bloated toad, clammy and horrible. Go away.”

“And you’re a very Methuselah of an old woman.”

“I can’t keep it up. I’m too weak,” laughed Miss Pentreath. “Anyhow, you always win in a slanging match.”

“I’ve broken off a nice big bit of the news,” the girl went on. “I’ve given you the broadest of hints. Now then, dear--what was your head given you for?”

“You are going to marry him?” gasped Miss Pentreath; and she rolled over in the bed and groaned.

“I’ve made up my mind at last. I am going to marry him,” said Beatrice.

“Where are you going to live?” asked the invalid, after a silent interval which Beatrice occupied by attending to the fire.

“Here nine months of the year. The other three on Dartmoor. Cheer up, Auntie. You shall keep house. I can’t.”

“You’re not going to desert me? You’re not going to turn me out?” cried Miss Pentreath. “Then I don’t care. You shall marry with my blessing, Trixy. You’re not a toad at all. You’re a darling, and if I could get out of bed I’d come and bite you.”

“I’ll draw near to be bitten,” said the girl.

After this ritual act had been accomplished Beatrice rang the bell and the maid brought in lamps and tea. Curtains were drawn, peat and wood in equal quantities were piled upon the fire, and it was all very snug. Miss Pentreath actually had a little natural colouring upon her cheeks. She sat up in bed, laughed over her tea, and was very happy now that she knew Beatrice was not intending to desert her. When the maid left them Miss Pentreath put a dozen questions in one breath, and with the next respiration signified her willingness to make up for the part of bridesmaid. This called down upon her the reproof,--

“You will wear a bonnet and black silk dress, trimmed with your best lace, and you’ll carry a huge prayer-book and look proper.”

“I won’t,” cried Miss Pentreath. “Take care, Beatrice, or you’ll revert to the reptilian state. I shall wear white _mousseline-de-soie_, with pink baby-ribbon and picture hat, satin shoes, lace stockings.”

“Shut up,” laughed Beatrice. “I don’t want to know what clothes you are going to wear or what complexion you intend to put on. You’re not my fairy godmother. You’re my aunt, and you’ve got to be my best-woman. I’m going to be married early in the spring,” she went on. “My marriage day will depend on the wild primroses. The Wednesday following the opening of the first primrose I shall give up my Cornish name.”

“What a whimsical creature it was,” murmured Miss Pentreath. “Really darling,” she added, “you have wrapped yourself up in witchcraft, stupid superstition, and pixy-tales until I believe you’ve forgotten you are living in a hard-hearted and practical age.”

“That doesn’t matter. We are out of the hard-hearted age here. Anyhow, I am contemplating a practical act,” said Beatrice.

“But, tell me, what you have been doing lately. What has made you alter your mind? You said you couldn’t bear to look at the poor dear man--”

“Neither could I. But he’s all right now, not quite as he was, of course, still good enough for me. I liked him very much from the beginning, and when I got to know him better I liked him much more. Then I was a good deal to blame for that horrible accident. I shall never find a man more devoted to me than he is. He’s clever, too, and I appreciate cleverness. He’s a writer, and I want to tell him all my experiences upon the moor, and my thoughts, and my little bits of folk stories; and he can write them out for me. We shall get on very well together. I shall be as free as I am now. I wouldn’t marry except on that condition. We shall work in the morning, he and I--putting down all the folk-lore in the West. In the afternoon we shall be upon the moor.”

“All this ‘we,’ this great ‘we,’” interrupted Miss Pentreath with piteous scorn. “What about me?”

“You shall stop at home and make the puddings, dear.”

“I quite perceive I am to play gooseberry-fool,” sighed the invalid. “Well, I must bear it. Custom has made it a something of easiness. Is Mr. Burrough here?” she asked. “Are you going to produce him suddenly?”

“And you most modestly abed! Well, he wouldn’t recognise you off the stage so to speak. I haven’t seen him since that evening when we gathered pixy-flowers in the copse, and you lighted the furze upon Brynamoor.”

“Then how do you know about his restoration?” cried Miss Pentreath, wonderingly.

“I sent my child. He has reported most favourably,” Beatrice explained, my child being her usual name for Poltesco. “He was immensely taken with poor Jack, and he has signified his entire approval of my choice.”

“Fantastic person!” murmured the invalid.

“Fantastic, am I?” laughed Beatrice, rolling her cat over upon the rug. “That’s nothing to what I’m going to do. I’m going to write to him this very night, post the letter to-morrow care of Bingie & Co., and perhaps it won’t be delivered till goodness knows when.”

“How fond you are of these stupid mysteries. Who is Bingie?” complained her aunt.

“The guardian of the bogs, my dear. The little person who rules the pools and wishing-wells. The letter may be delivered before winter sets in. If it isn’t I must write and explain; for when the wild weather comes the post-office will be closed, and won’t open for business until all the spring primroses have faded.”

“As for those primroses,” said a rebellious voice from the bed. “At the end of January I shall instruct the children to look out for the first flowers; and I shall offer sixpence for every one destroyed.”