In the Roar of the Sea Part 47

So they walked together, yet apart, from Polzeath to St. Enodoc, neither speaking, and it might have been a mourner's walk at a funeral. She held her head down, and did not raise her eyes from the ground, but he continued to gaze on her with a glow of triumph and exultation in his face.

They reached at length the deserted church, sunken in the sands; it had a hole broken in the wall under the eaves in the south, rudely barricaded, through which the sacred building might be entered for such functions as a marriage, or the first part of the funeral office that must be performed in a church.

The roof was of pale gray slate, much broken, folding over the rafters like the skins on the ribs of an old horse past work. The church-yard was covered with plain sand. Gravestones were in process of being buried like those whom they commemorated. Some peeped above the sand, with a fat cherub's head peering above the surface. Others stood high on the land side, but were banked up by sand toward the sea. Here the church-yard surface was smooth, there it was tossed with undulations, according as the sand had been swept over portions tenanted by the poor who were uncommemorated with head-stones, or over those where the well-to-do lay with their t.i.tles and virtues registered above them.

There was as yet no monument erected over the grave of the Reverend Peter Trevisa, sometime rector of St. Enodoc. The mound had been turfed over and bound down with withes. The loving hands of his daughter had planted some of the old favorite flowers from the long walk at the rectory above where he lay, but they had not as yet taken to the soil, the sand ill agreed with them, and the season of the year when their translation had taken place dissatisfied them, and they looked forlorn, drooping, and doubted whether they would make the struggle to live.

Below the church lay the mouths of the Camel, blue between sand-hills, with the Doom Bar, a long and treacherous band of s.h.i.+fting sands in the midst.

On reaching the graveyard Judith signed to Captain Coppinger to seat himself on a flat tombstone on the south side of her father's grave, and she herself leaned against the headstone that marked her mother's tomb.

"I think we should come to a thorough understanding," she said, with composure, "that you may not expect of me what I cannot give, and know the reason why I give you anything. You call me Goldfish. Why?"

"Because of your golden hair."

"No--that was not what sprung the idea in your brain, it was something I said to you, that you and I stood to each other in the relation of bird of prey to fish, belonging to distinct modes of life and manner of thinking, and that we could never be to one another in any other relation than that, the falcon and his prey, the flame and its fuel, the wreckers and the wrecked."

Coppinger started up and became red as blood.

"These are strange words," he said.

"It is the same that I said before."

"Then why have you given yourself to me?"

"I have resigned myself to you, as I cannot help myself any more than the fish can that is pounced on by the sea-bird, or the fuel that is enveloped by the flame, or the s.h.i.+p that is boarded by the wrecker."

She looked at him steadily; he was quivering with excitement, anger, and disappointment.

"It is quite right that you should know what to expect, and make no more demands on me that I am capable of answering. You cannot ask of me that I should become like you, and I do not entertain the foolish thought that you could be brought to be like me--to see through my eyes, feel with my heart. My dead father lies between us now, and he will ever be between us--he a man of pure life, n.o.ble aspirations, a man of books, of high principle, fearing G.o.d and loving men. What he was he tried to make me. Imperfectly, faultily, I follow him, but though unable to be like him, I strive after what he showed me should be my ideal."

"You are a child. You will be a woman, and new thoughts will come to you."

"Will they be good and honorable and contented thoughts? Shall I find those in your house?"

Coppinger did not reply, his brows were drawn together and his face became dark.

"Why, then, have you promised to come to me?"

"Because of Jamie."

He uttered an oath, and with his hands clenched the upper stone of the tomb.

"I have promised my aunt that I will accept you, if you will suffer my poor brother to live where I live, and suffer me to be his protector.

He is helpless and must have someone to think and watch for him. My aunt would have sent him to Mr. Obadiah Scantlebray's asylum, and that would have been fatal to him. To save him from that I said that I would be yours, on the condition that my home should be his home. I have pa.s.sed my word to my aunt, and I will not go from it, but that does not mean that I have changed my belief that we are unfitted for each other, because we belong to different orders of being."

"This is cold comfort."

"It is cold as ice, but it is all that I have to give to you. I wish to put everything plainly before you now, that there may be no misapprehension later, and you may be asking of me what I cannot give, and be angry at not receiving what I never promised to surrender."

"So! I am only accepted for the sake of that boy, Jamie."

"It is painful for me to say what I do--as painful as it must be for you to hear it, but I cannot help myself. I wish to put all boldly and hardly before you before an irrevocable step is taken such as might make us both wretched. I take you for Jamie's sake. Were his happiness, his well-being not in the scale, I would not take you. I would remain free."

"That is plain enough," exclaimed Coppinger, setting his teeth, and he broke off a piece of the tombstone on which he was half sitting.

"You will ask of me love, honor, and obedience. I will do my best to love you--like you I do now, for you have been kind and good to me, and I can never forget what you have done for me. But it is a long leap from liking to loving, still I will try my best, and if I fail it will not be for lack of effort. Honor is another matter. That lies in your own power to give. If you behave as a good and worthy man to your fellows, and justly toward me, of course I shall honor you. I must honor what is deserving of honor, and where I honor there I may come to love. I cannot love where I do not honor, so perhaps I may say that my heart is in your hands, and that if those hands are clean and righteous in their dealings it may become yours some time. As to obedience--that you shall command. That I will render to you frankly and fully in all things lawful."

"You offer me an orange from which all the juice has been squeezed, a nut without a kernel."

"I offer you all I have to offer. Is it worth your while having this?"

"Yes!" said he angrily, starting up, "I will have what I can and wring the rest out of you, when once you are mine."

"You never will wring anything out of me. I give what I may, but nothing will I yield to force."

He looked at her sullenly and said, "A child in years with an old head and a stony heart."

"I have always lived with my father, and so have come to think like one that is old," said Judith, "and now, alone in the world, I must think with ripened wits."

"I do not want that precocious, wise soul, if that be the kernel. I will have the sh.e.l.l--the glorious sh.e.l.l. Keep your wisdom and righteousness and piety for yourself. I do not value them a rush. But your love I will have."

"I have told you there is but one way by which that may be won. But indeed, Captain Coppinger, you have made a great mistake in thinking of me. I am not suited to you to make you happy and content; any more than you are suited to me. Look out for some girl more fit to be your mate."

"Of what sort? Come, tell me!" said Coppinger scornfully.

"A fine, well-built girl, dark-haired, dark-eyed, with cheeks like apricots, lively in mood, with nimble tongue, good-natured, not bookish, not caring for brush or piano, but who can take a rough word and return it; who will not wince at an oath, and shrink away at coa.r.s.e words flung about where she is. All these things you know very well must be encountered by your wife, in your house. Did you ever read 'Hamlet,' Captain Coppinger?"

He made no answer, he was plucking at the slab-cover of the tomb and grinding his heels into the sand.

"In 'Hamlet,' we read of a king poisoned by his queen, who dipped the juice of cursed hebenon into his ears, and it curdled all his blood.

It is the same with the sort of language that is found in your house when your seamen are there. I cannot endure it, it curdles my heart--choose a girl who is indifferent."

"You shall not be subjected to it," said Coppinger, "and as to the girl you have sketched--I care not for her--such as you describe are to be found thick as whortle-berries on a moor. Do you not know that man seeks in marriage not his counterpart but his contrast? It is because you are in all things different from me that I love you."

"Then will naught that I have said make you desist?"

"Naught."

"I have told you that I take you only so as to be able to make a home for Jamie."

"Yes."

"And that I do not love you and hardly think I can ever."

"Yes."

"And still you will have me?"