In the Roar of the Sea/Chapter 1
IN THE ROAR OF THE SEA.
CHAPTER I.
OVER AND DONE.
Sitting in the parsonage garden, in a white frock, with a pale green sash about her waist, leaning back against the red-brick wall, her glowing copper hair lit by the evening sun, was Judith Trevisa.
She was tossing guelder-roses into the air; some dozens were strewn about her feet on the gravel, but one remained of the many she had plucked and thrown and caught, and thrown and caught again for a sunny afternoon hour. As each greenish-white ball of flowers went up into the air it diffused a faint but pleasant fragrance.
"When I have done with you, my beauty, I have done altogether," said Judith.
"With what?"
Her father spoke. He had come up unperceived by the girl, burdened with a shovel in one hand and a bucket in the other, looking pale, weary, and worn.
"Papa, you nearly spoiled my game. Let me finish, and I will speak."
"Is it a very serious matter, Judith, and engrossing?"
"Engrossing, but not serious, Je m'amuse."
The old rector seated himself on the bench beside her, and he also leaned back against the red-brick, gold-and-gray-lichen-spotted wall, and looked into the distance before him, waiting till his daughter was ready to speak, not, perhaps, sorry to have a little rest first, for he was overtired. Had Judith not been absorbed in her ball-play with the guelder-rose bunch she would have noticed his haggard appearance, the green hue about his mouth, the sunken eyes, the beaded brow. But she was counting the rebounds of her ball, bent on sustaining her play as long as was possible to her.
She formed a charming picture, fresh and pure, and had the old man not been overtired, he would have thought so with a throb of parental pride.
She was a child in size, slender in build, delicate in bone, with face and hands of porcelain transparency and whiteness, with, moreover, that incomparable complexion only seen in the British Isles, and then only with red-gold hair.
Her bronze-leather shoes were the hue of some large flies that basked and frisked on the warm wall, only slightly disturbed by the girl's play, to return again and run and preen themselves again, and glitter jewel-like as studs on that sun-baked, lichen-enamelled wall. Her eyes, moreover, were lustrous as the backs of these flies, iridescent with the changing lights of the declining sun, and the changed direction of her glance following the dancing ball of guelder-rose. Her long fingers might have been of china, but that when raised so that the sun struck their backs they were turned to a translucent rose. There was no color in her cheek, only the faintest suffusion of pink on the temples below where the hair was rolled back in waves of luminous molten copper dashing against the brick wall.
"I have done my work," said the rector.
"And I my play," responded the girl, letting the ball drop into her lap and rock there from one knee to the other. "Papa, this fellow is the conqueror; I have made him dance thirty-five great leaps, and he has not yet fallen—wilfully. I let him go down and get breath just now. There lie all my dancers dead about me. They failed very speedily."
"You cannot be forever playing, Ju."
"That is why I play now, papa. When playtime is over I shall be in earnest indeed."
"Indeed?" the old man sighed.
Judith looked round, and was shocked to see how ill her father appeared to be.
"Are you very tired, darling papa?"
"Yes—overtired."
"Have you been at your usual task?"
"Yes, Ju—an unprofitable task."
"Oh, papa!"
"Yes, unprofitable. The next wind from the sea that blows—one will blow in an hour—and all my work is undone."
"But, my dear papa!" Judith stooped and looked into the bucket. "Why!—what has made you bring a load of sand up here? We want none in the garden. And such a distance too!—from the church. No wonder you are tired."
"Have I brought it?" he asked, without looking at the bucket.
"You have, indeed. That, if you please, is unprofitable work, not the digging of the church out of the sand-heaps that swallow it."
"My dear, I did not know that I had not emptied the pail outside the church-yard gate. I am very tired; perhaps that explains it."
"No doubt about it, papa. It was work quite as unprofitable but much more exhausting than my ball -play. Now, papa, while you have been digging your church out of the sand, which will blow over it again to-night, you say, I have been pitching and tossing guelder-roses. We have been both wasting time, one as much as the other."
"One as much as the other," repeated the old man. "Yes, dear, one as much as the other, and I have been doing it all my time here—morally, spiritually, as well as materially, digging the church out of the smothering sands, and all in vain—all profitless work. You are right, Ju."
"Papa," said Judith hastily, seeing his discouragement and knowing his tendency to depression, "papa, do you hear the sea how it roars? I have stood on the bench, more than once, to look out seaward, and find a reason for it; but there is none—all blue, blue as a larkspur; and not a cloud in the sky—all blue, blue there too. No wind either, and that is why I have done well with my ball-play. Do you hear the roar of the sea, papa.?" she repeated.
"Yes, Ju. There will be a storm shortly. The sea is thrown into great swells of rollers, a sure token that something is coming. Before night a gale will be on us."Then ensued silence. Judith with one finger trifled with the guelder-rose bunch in her lap musingly, not desirous to resume her play with it. Something in her father's manner was unusual, and made her uneasy.
"My dear!" he began, after a pause, "one must look out to sea—into the vast mysterious sea of the future—and prepare for what is coming from it. Just now the air is still, and we sit in this sweet, sunny garden, and lean our backs against the warm wall, and smell the fragrance of the flowers; but we hear the beating of the sea, and know that a mighty tempest, with clouds and darkness, is coming. So in other matters we must look out and be ready—count the time till it comes. My dear, when I am gone——"
"Papa!"
"We were looking out to sea and listening. That must come at some time—it may come sooner than you anticipate." He paused, heaved a sigh, and said, "Oh, Jamie! What are we to do about Jamie?"
"Papa, I will always take care of Jamie."
"But who will take care of you?"
"Of me? Oh, papa, surely I can take care of myself!"
He shook his head doubtfully.
"Papa, you know how strong I am in will—how firm I can be with Jamie."
"But all mankind are not Jamies. It is not for you I fear, as much as for you and him together. He is a trouble and a difficulty."
"Jamie is not so silly and troublesome as you think. All he needs is application. He cannot screw his mind down to his books—to any serious occupation. But that will come. I have heard say that the stupidest children make the sharpest men. Little by little it will come, but it will come certainly. I will set myself as my task to make Jamie apply his mind and become a useful man, and I shall succeed, papa." She caught her father's hand between hers, and slapped it joyously, confidently. "How cold your hand is, papa! and yet you look warm."
"You were always Jamie's champion," said her father, not noticing her remark relative to himself.
"He is my twin brother, so of course I am his champion. Who else would be that, were not I?"
"No—no one else. He is mischievous and troublesome—poor, poor fellow. You will always be to Jamie what you are now, Ju—his protector or champion? He is weak and foolish, and if he were to fall into bad hands—I shudder to think what might become of him."
"Rely on me, dearest father."
Then he lifted the hand of his daughter, and looked at it with a faint smile. "It is very small, it is very weak, to fight for self alone, let alone yourself encumbered with Jamie."
"I will do it, papa, do not fear."
"Judith, I must talk very gravely with you, for the future is very dark to me; and I am unable with hand or brain to provide anything against the evil day. Numbness is on me, and I have been hampered on every side. For one thing, the living has been so poor, and my parishioners so difficult to deal with, that I have been able to lay by but a trifle. I believe I have not a relative in the world—none, at all events, near enough and known to me that I dare ask him to care for you——"
"Papa, there is Aunt Dionysia."
"Aunt Dionysia," he repeated, with a hesitating voice. "Yes; but Aunt Dionysia is—is not herself capable of taking charge of you. She has nothing but what she earns, and then—Aunt Dionysia is—is—well—Aunt Dionysia. I don't think you could be happy with her, even if, in the event of my departure, she were able to take care of you. Then—and that chiefly—she has chosen, against my express wishes—I may say, in defiance of me—to go as housekeeper into the service of the man, of all others, who has been a thorn in my side, a hinderer of God's work, a— But I will say no more."
"What! Cruel Coppinger?"
"Yes, Cruel Coppinger. I might have been the means of doing a little good in this place, God knows! I only think I might; but I have been thwarted, defied, insulted by that man. As I have striven to dig my buried church out of the overwhelming sands, so have I striven to lift the souls of my poor parishioners out of the dead engulfing sands of savagery, brutality, very heathenism of their mode of life, and I have been frustrated. The winds have blown the sands back with every gale over my work with spade, and that stormblast Coppinger has devastated every trace of good that I have done, or tried to do, in spiritual matters. The Lord reward him according to his works." Judith felt her father's hand tremble in hers.
"Never mind Coppinger now," she said, soothingly.
"I must mind him," said the old man, with severe vehemence. "And—that my own sister should go, go—out of defiance, into his house and serve him! That was too much. I might well say, I have none to whom to look as your protector." He paused awhile, and wiped his brow. His pale lips were quivering. "I do not mean to say," said he, "that I acted with judgment, when first I came to S. Enodoc, when I spoke against smuggling. I did not understand it then. I thought with the thoughts of an inlander. Here—the sands sweep over the fields, and agriculture is in a measure impossible. The bays and creeks seem to invite—well—I leave it an open question. But with regard to wrecking—" His voice, which had quavered in feebleness, according with the feebleness of his judgment relative to smuggling, now gained sonorousness. "Wrecking, deliberate wrecking, is quite another matter. I do not say that our people are not justified in gathering the harvest the sea casts up. There always must be, there will be wrecks on this terrible coast; but there has been—I know there has been, though I have not been able to prove it—deliberate provocation of wrecks, and that is the sin of Cain. Had I been able to prove——"
"Never mind that now, dear papa. Neither I nor Jamie are, or will be, wreckers. Talk of something else. You over-excite yourself."
Judith was accustomed to hear her father talk in an open manner to her. She had been his sole companion for several years, since his wife's death, and she had become the confidante of his inmost thoughts, his vacillations, his discouragements, not of his hopes—for he had none, nor of his schemes—for he formed none.
"I do not think I have been of any use in this world," said the old parson, relapsing into his tone of discouragement, the temporary flame of anger having died away. "My sowing has produced no harvest. I have brought light, help, strength to none. I have dug all day in the vineyard, and not a vine is the better for it; all cankered and fruitless."
"Papa—and me! Have you done nothing for me?"
"You!"
He had not thought of his child.
"Papa! Do you think that I have gained naught from you? No strength, no resolution from seeing you toil on in your thankless work, without apparent results? If I have any energy and principle to carry me through I owe it to you."
He was moved, and raised his trembling hand and laid it on her golden head. He said no more, and was very still.
Presently she spoke. His hands weighed heavily on her head.
"Papa, you are listening to the roar of the sea?"
He made no reply.
"Papa, I felt a cold breath; and see, the sun has a film over it. Surely the sea is roaring louder!"
His hand slipped from her head and struck her shoulder—roughly, she thought. She turned, startled, and looked at him. His eyes were open, he was leaning back, almost fallen against the wall, and was deadly pale.
"Papa, you are listening to the roar?"
Then a thought struck her like a bullet in the heart.
"Papa! Papa! My papa!—speak—speak!"
She sprang from the bench—was before him. Her left guelder-rose had rolled, had bounded from her lap, and had fallen on the sand the old man had listlessly brought up from the church. His work, her play, were forever over.