A MESSAGE FROM THE SEA
CHAPTER I--THE VILLAGE
"And a mighty sing'lar and pretty place it is, as ever I saw in all
the days of my life!" said Captain Jorgan, looking up at it.
Captain Jorgan had to look high to look at it, for the village was
built sheer up the face of a steep and lofty cliff. There was no
road in it, there was no wheeled vehicle in it, there was not a
level yard in it. From the sea-beach to the cliff-top two irregular
rows of white houses, placed opposite to one another, and twisting
here and there, and there and here, rose, like the sides of a long
succession of stages of crooked ladders, and you climbed up the
village or climbed down the village by the staves between, some six
feet wide or so, and made of sharp irregular stones. The old pack-
saddle, long laid aside in most parts of England as one of the
appendages of its infancy, flourished here intact. Strings of pack-
horses and pack-donkeys toiled slowly up the staves of the ladders,
bearing fish, and coal, and such other cargo as was unshipping at
the pier from the dancing fleet of village boats, and from two or
three little coasting traders. As the beasts of burden ascended
laden, or descended light, they got so lost at intervals in the
floating clouds of village smoke, that they seemed to dive down some
of the village chimneys, and come to the surface again far off, high
above others. No two houses in the village were alike, in chimney,
size, shape, door, window, gable, roof-tree, anything. The sides of
the ladders were musical with water, running clear and bright. The
staves were musical with the clattering feet of the pack-horses and
pack-donkeys, and the voices of the fishermen urging them up,
mingled with the voices of the fishermen's wives and their many
children. The pier was musical with the wash of the sea, the
creaking of capstans and windlasses, and the airy fluttering of
little vanes and sails. The rough, sea-bleached boulders of which
the pier was made, and the whiter boulders of the shore, were brown
with drying nets. The red-brown cliffs, richly wooded to their
extremest verge, had their softened and beautiful forms reflected in
the bluest water, under the clear North Devonshire sky of a November
day without a cloud. The village itself was so steeped in autumnal
foliage, from the houses lying on the pier to the topmost round of
the topmost ladder, that one might have fancied it was out a bird's-
nesting, and was (as indeed it was) a wonderful climber. And
mentioning birds, the place was not without some music from them
too; for the rook was very busy on the higher levels, and the gull
with his flapping wings was fishing in the bay, and the lusty little
robin was hopping among the great stone blocks and iron rings of the
breakwater, fearless in the faith of his ancestors, and the Children
in the Wood.
Thus it came to pass that Captain Jorgan, sitting balancing himself
on the pier-wall, struck his leg with his open hand, as some men do
when they are pleased--and as he always did when he was pleased--and
said, -
"A mighty sing'lar and pretty place it is, as ever I saw in all the
days of my life!"
Captain Jorgan had not been through the village, but had come down
to the pier by a winding side-road, to have a preliminary look at it
from the level of his own natural element. He had seen many things
and places, and had stowed them all away in a shrewd intellect and a
vigorous memory. He was an American born, was Captain Jorgan,--a
New-Englander,--but he was a citizen of the world, and a combination
of most of the best qualities of most of its best countries.
For Captain Jorgan to sit anywhere in his long-skirted blue coat and
blue trousers, without holding converse with everybody within
speaking distance, was a sheer impossibility. So the captain fell
to talking with the fishermen, and to asking them knowing questions
about the fishery, and the tides, and the currents, and the race of
water off that point yonder, and what you kept in your eye, and got
into a line with what else when you ran into the little harbour; and
other nautical profundities. Among the men who exchanged ideas with
the captain was a young fellow, who exactly hit his fancy,--a young
fisherman of two or three and twenty, in the rough sea-dress of his
craft, with a brown face, dark curling hair, and bright, modest eyes
under his Sou'wester hat, and with a frank, but simple and retiring
manner, which the captain found uncommonly taking. "I'd bet a
thousand dollars," said the captain to himself, "that your father
was an honest man!"
"Might you be married now?" asked the captain, when he had had some
talk with this new acquaintance.
"Not yet."
"Going to be?" said the captain.
"I hope so."
The captain's keen glance followed the slightest possible turn of
the dark eye, and the slightest possible tilt of the Sou'wester hat.
The captain then slapped both his legs, and said to himself, -
"Never knew such a good thing in all my life! There's his
sweetheart looking over the wall!"
There was a very pretty girl looking over the wall, from a little
platform of cottage, vine, and fuchsia; and she certainly dig not
look as if the presence of this young fisherman in the landscape
made it any the less sunny and hopeful for her.
Captain Jorgan, having doubled himself up to laugh with that hearty
good-nature which is quite exultant in the innocent happiness of
other people, had undoubted himself, and was going to start a new
subject, when there appeared coming down the lower ladders of
stones, a man whom he hailed as "Tom Pettifer, Ho!" Tom Pettifer,
Ho, responded with alacrity, and in speedy course descended on the
pier.
"Afraid of a sun-stroke in England in November, Tom, that you wear
your tropical hat, strongly paid outside and paper-lined inside,
here?" said the captain, eyeing it.
"It's as well to be on the safe side, sir," replied Tom.
"Safe side!" repeated the captain, laughing. "You'd guard against a
sun-stroke, with that old hat, in an Ice Pack. Wa'al! What have
you made out at the Post-office?"
"It is the Post-office, sir."
"What's the Post-office?" said the captain.
"The name, sir. The name keeps the Post-office."
"A coincidence!" said the captain. "A lucky bit! Show me where it
is. Good-bye, shipmates, for the present! I shall come and have
another look at you, afore I leave, this afternoon."
This was addressed to all there, but especially the young fisherman;
so all there acknowledged it, but especially the young fisherman.
"He's a sailor!" said one to another, as they looked after the
captain moving away. That he was; and so outspeaking was the sailor
in him, that although his dress had nothing nautical about it, with
the single exception of its colour, but was a suit of a shore-going
shape and form, too long in the sleeves and too short in the legs,
and too unaccommodating everywhere, terminating earthward in a pair
of Wellington boots, and surmounted by a tall, stiff hat, which no
mortal could have worn at sea in any wind under heaven;
nevertheless, a glimpse of his sagacious, weather-beaten face, or
his strong, brown hand, would have established the captain's
calling. Whereas Mr. Pettifer--a man of a certain plump neatness,
with a curly whisker, and elaborately nautical in a jacket, and
shoes, and all things correspondent--looked no more like a seaman,
beside Captain Jorgan, than he looked like a sea-serpent.
The two climbed high up the village,--which had the most arbitrary
turns and twists in it, so that the cobbler's house came dead across
the ladder, and to have held a reasonable course, you must have gone
through his house, and through him too, as he sat at his work
between two little windows,--with one eye microscopically on the
geological formation of that part of Devonshire, and the other
telescopically on the open sea,--the two climbed high up the
village, and stopped before a quaint little house, on which was
painted, "MRS. RAYBROCK, DRAPER;" and also "POST-OFFICE." Before
it, ran a rill of murmuring water, and access to it was gained by a
little plank-bridge.
"Here's the name," said Captain Jorgan, "sure enough. You can come
in if you like, Tom."
The captain opened the door, and passed into an odd little shop,
about six feet high, with a great variety of beams and bumps in the
ceiling, and, besides the principal window giving on the ladder of
stones, a purblind little window of a single pane of glass, peeping
out of an abutting corner at the sun-lighted ocean, and winking at
its brightness.
"How do you do, ma'am?" said the captain. "I am very glad to see
you. I have come a long way to see you."
"Have you, sir? Then I am sure I am very glad to see you, though I
don't know you from Adam."
Thus a comely elderly woman, short of stature, plump of form,
sparkling and dark of eye, who, perfectly clean and neat herself,
stood in the midst of her perfectly clean and neat arrangements, and
surveyed Captain Jorgan with smiling curiosity. "Ah! but you are a
sailor, sir," she added, almost immediately, and with a slight
movement of her hands, that was not very unlike wringing them; "then
you are heartily welcome."
"Thank'ee, ma'am," said the captain, "I don't know what it is, I am
sure; that brings out the salt in me, but everybody seems to see it
on the crown of my hat and the collar of my coat. Yes, ma'am, I am
in that way of life."
"And the other gentleman, too," said Mrs. Raybrock.
"Well now, ma'am," said the captain, glancing shrewdly at the other
gentleman, "you are that nigh right, that he goes to sea,--if that
makes him a sailor. This is my steward, ma'am, Tom Pettifer; he's
been a'most all trades you could name, in the course of his life,--
would have bought all your chairs and tables once, if you had wished
to sell 'em,--but now he's my steward. My name's Jorgan, and I'm a
ship-owner, and I sail my own and my partners' ships, and have done
so this five-and-twenty year. According to custom I am called
Captain Jorgan, but I am no more a captain, bless your heart, than
you are."
"Perhaps you'll come into my parlour, sir, and take a chair?" said
Mrs. Raybrock.
"Ex-actly what I was going to propose myself, ma'am. After you."
Thus replying, and enjoining Tom to give an eye to the shop, Captain
Jorgan followed Mrs. Raybrock into the little, low back-room,--
decorated with divers plants in pots, tea-trays, old china teapots,
and punch-bowls,--which was at once the private sitting-room of the
Raybrock family and the inner cabinet of the post-office of the
village of Steepways.
"Now, ma'am," said the captain, "it don't signify a cent to you
where I was born, except--" But here the shadow of some one
entering fell upon the captain's figure, and he broke off to double
himself up, slap both his legs, and ejaculate, "Never knew such a
thing in all my life! Here he is again! How are you?"
These words referred to the young fellow who had so taken Captain
Jorgan's fancy down at the pier. To make it all quite complete he
came in accompanied by the sweetheart whom the captain had detected
looking over the wall. A prettier sweetheart the sun could not have
shone upon that shining day. As she stood before the captain, with
her rosy lips just parted in surprise, her brown eyes a little wider
open than was usual from the same cause, and her breathing a little
quickened by the ascent (and possibly by some mysterious hurry and
flurry at the parlour door, in which the captain had observed her
face to be for a moment totally eclipsed by the Sou'wester hat), she
looked so charming, that the captain felt himself under a moral
obligation to slap both his legs again. She was very simply
dressed, with no other ornament than an autumnal flower in her
bosom. She wore neither hat nor bonnet, but merely a scarf or
kerchief, folded squarely back over the head, to keep the sun off,--
according to a fashion that may be sometimes seen in the more genial
parts of England as well as of Italy, and which is probably the
first fashion of head-dress that came into the world when grasses
and leaves went out.
"In my country," said the captain, rising to give her his chair, and
dexterously sliding it close to another chair on which the young
fisherman must necessarily establish himself,--"in my country we
should call Devonshire beauty first-rate!"
Whenever a frank manner is offensive, it is because it is strained
or feigned; for there may be quite as much intolerable affectation
in plainness as in mincing nicety. All that the captain said and
did was honestly according to his nature; and his nature was open
nature and good nature; therefore, when he paid this little
compliment, and expressed with a sparkle or two of his knowing eye,
"I see how it is, and nothing could be better," he had established a
delicate confidence on that subject with the family.
"I was saying to your worthy mother," said the captain to the young
man, after again introducing himself by name and occupation,--"I was
saying to your mother (and you're very like her) that it didn't
signify where I was born, except that I was raised on question-
asking ground, where the babies as soon as ever they come into the
world, inquire of their mothers, 'Neow, how old may you be, and
wa'at air you a goin' to name me?'--which is a fact." Here he
slapped his leg. "Such being the case, I may be excused for asking
you if your name's Alfred?"
"Yes, sir, my name is Alfred," returned the young man.
"I am not a conjurer," pursued the captain, "and don't think me so,
or I shall right soon undeceive you. Likewise don't think, if you
please, though I do come from that country of the babies, that I am
asking questions for question-asking's sake, for I am not. Somebody
belonging to you went to sea?"
"My elder brother, Hugh," returned the young man. He said it in an
altered and lower voice, and glanced at his mother, who raised her
hands hurriedly, and put them together across her black gown, and
looked eagerly at the visitor.
"No! For God's sake, don't think that!" said the captain, in a
solemn way; "I bring no good tidings of him."
There was a silence, and the mother turned her face to the fire and
put her hand between it and her eyes. The young fisherman slightly
motioned toward the window, and the captain, looking in that
direction, saw a young widow, sitting at a neighbouring window
across a little garden, engaged in needlework, with a young child
sleeping on her bosom. The silence continued until the captain
asked of Alfred, -
"How long is it since it happened?"
"He shipped for his last voyage better than three years ago."
"Ship struck upon some reef or rock, as I take it," said the
captain, "and all hands lost?"
"Yes."
"Wa'al!" said the captain, after a shorter silence, "Here I sit who
may come to the same end, like enough. He holds the seas in the
hollow of His hand. We must all strike somewhere and go down. Our
comfort, then, for ourselves and one another is to have done our
duty. I'd wager your brother did his!"
"He did!" answered the young fisherman. "If ever man strove
faithfully on all occasions to do his duty, my brother did. My
brother was not a quick man (anything but that), but he was a
faithful, true, and just man. We were the sons of only a small
tradesman in this county, sir; yet our father was as watchful of his
good name as if he had been a king."
"A precious sight more so, I hope--bearing in mind the general run
of that class of crittur," said the captain. "But I interrupt."
"My brother considered that our father left the good name to us, to
keep clear and true."
"Your brother considered right," said the captain; "and you couldn't
take care of a better legacy. But again I interrupt."
"No; for I have nothing more to say. We know that Hugh lived well
for the good name, and we feel certain that he died well for the
good name. And now it has come into my keeping. And that's all."
"Well spoken!" cried the captain. "Well spoken, young man!
Concerning the manner of your brother's death,"--by this time the
captain had released the hand he had shaken, and sat with his own
broad, brown hands spread out on his knees, and spoke aside,--
"concerning the manner of your brother's death, it may be that I
have some information to give you; though it may not be, for I am
far from sure. Can we have a little talk alone?"
The young man rose; but not before the captain's quick eye had
noticed that, on the pretty sweetheart's turning to the window to
greet the young widow with a nod and a wave of the hand, the young
widow had held up to her the needlework on which she was engaged,
with a patient and pleasant smile. So the captain said, being on
his legs, -
"What might she be making now?"
"What is Margaret making, Kitty?" asked the young fisherman,--with
one of his arms apparently mislaid somewhere.
As Kitty only blushed in reply, the captain doubled himself up as
far as he could, standing, and said, with a slap of his leg, -
"In my country we should call it wedding-clothes. Fact! We should,
I do assure you."
But it seemed to strike the captain in another light too; for his
laugh was not a long one, and he added, in quite a gentle tone, -
"And it's very pretty, my dear, to see her--poor young thing, with
her fatherless child upon her bosom--giving up her thoughts to your
home and your happiness. It's very pretty, my dear, and it's very
good. May your marriage be more prosperous than hers, and be a
comfort to her too. May the blessed sun see you all happy together,
in possession of the good name, long after I have done ploughing the
great salt field that is never sown!"
Kitty answered very earnestly, "O! Thank you, sir, with all my
heart!" And, in her loving little way, kissed her hand to him, and
possibly by implication to the young fisherman, too, as the latter
held the parlour-door open for the captain to pass out.
