A Maid of the Silver Sea.

by John Oxenham.

CHAPTER I

HOW TWO LAY IN A CLEFT

A girl and a boy lay in a cubby-hole in the north side of the cliff overlooking Port Gorey, and watched the goings-on down below.

The sun was tending towards Guernsey and the gulf was filled witn golden light. A small brig, unkempt and dirty, was nosing towards the rough wooden landing-stage clamped to the opposite rocks, as though doubtful of the advisability of attempting its closer acquaintance.

"Mon Gyu, Bern, how I wish they were all at the bottom of the sea!" said the girl vehemently.

"Whe--e--e--w!" whistled the boy, and then with a twinkle in his eye,--"Who's got a new parasol now?"

"Everybody!--but it's not that. It's the bustle--and the dirt--and the noise--and oh--everything! You can't remember what it was like before these wretched mines came--no dust, no noise, no bustle, no dirty men, no silly women, no nothing as it is now. Just Sark as it used to be. And now--! Mon Gyu, yes I wish the sea would break in through their nasty tunnels and wash them all away--pumps and engines and houses--everything!"

And up on the hillside at the head of the gulf the great pumping-engine clacked monotonously "Never! Never! Never!"

"You've got it bad to-day, Nan," said the boy.

"I've always got it bad. It makes me sick. It has changed everything and everybody--everybody except mother and you," she added quickly.

"Get--get--get! Why we hardly used to know what money was, and now no one thinks of anything but getting all they can. It is sickening."

"S--s--s--s--t!" signalled the boy suddenly, at the sound of steps and voices on the cliff outside and close at hand.

"Tom," muttered the boy.

"And Peter Mauger," murmured the girl, and they both shrank lower into their hiding-place.

It was a tiny natural chamber in the sharp slope of the hill. Ages ago the ma.s.sive granite boulders of the headland, loosened and undercut by the ceaseless a.s.saults of wind and weather and the deadly quiet fingers of the frost, had come rolling down the slope till they settled afresh on new foundations, forming holes and crannies and little angular chambers where the splintered shoulders met. In time, the soil silted down and covered their asperities, and--like a good colonist--carrying in itself the means of increase, it presently brought forth and blossomed, and the erstwhile shattered rocks were royally robed in russet and purple, and green and gold.

Among these fantastic little chambers Nance had played as a child, and had found refuge in them from the persecutions of her big half-brother, Tom Hamon. Tom was six when she was born--fourteen accordingly when she was at the teasable age of eight, and unusually tempting as a victim by reason of her pa.s.sionate resentment of his unwelcome attentions.

She hated Tom, and Tom had always resented her and her mother's intrusion into the family, and Bernel's, when he came, four years after Nance.

What his father wanted to marry again for, Tom never could make out. His lack of training and limited powers of expression did not indeed permit him any distinct reasoning on the matter, but the feeling was there--a dull resentment which found its only vent and satisfaction in stolid rudeness to his stepmother and the persecution of Nance and Bernel whenever occasion offered.

The household was not therefore on too happy a footing.

It consisted, at the time when our story opens, of--Old Mrs.

Hamon--Grannie--half of whose life had been lived in the nineteenth century and half in the eighteenth. She had seen all the wild doings of the privateering and free-trading days, and recalled as a comparatively recent event the raiding of the Island by the men of Herm, though that happened forty years before.

She was for the most part a very reserved and silent old lady, but her tongue could bite like a whip when the need arose.

She occupied her own dower-rooms in the house, and rarely went outside them. All day long she sat in her great arm-chair by the window in her sitting-room, with the door wide open, so that she could see all that went on in the house and outside it; and in the sombre depths of her great black silk sun-bonnet--long since turned by age and weather to dusky green--her watchful eyes had in them something of the inscrutable and menacing.

Her wants were very few, and as her income from her one-third of the farm had far exceeded her expenses for more than twenty years, she was reputed as rich in material matters as she undoubtedly was in common-sense and worldly wisdom. Even young Tom was sulkily silent before her on the rare occasions when they came into contact.

Next in the family came the nominal head of it, "Old Tom" Hamon, to distinguish him from young Tom, his son; a rough, not ill-natured man, until the money-getting fever seized him, since which time his home-folks had found in him changes that did not make for their comfort.

The discovery of silver in Sark, the opening of the mines, and the coming of the English miners--with all the very problematical benefits of a vastly increased currency of money, and the sudden introduction of new ideas and standards of life and living into a community which had hitherto been contented with the order of things known to its forefathers--these things had told upon many, but on none more than old Tom Hamon.

Suspicious at first of the meaning and doings of these strangers, he very soon found them advantageous. He got excellent prices for his farm produce, and when his horses and carts were not otherwise engaged he could always turn them to account hauling for the mines.

As the silver-fever grew in him he became closer in his dealings both abroad and at home. With every pound he could scrimp and save he bought shares in the mines and believed in them absolutely. And he went on scrimping and saving and buying shares so as to have as large a stake in the silver future as possible.

He got no return as yet from his investment, indeed. But that would come all right in time, and the more shares he could get hold of the larger the ultimate return would be. And so he stinted himself and his family, and mortgaged his future, in hopes of wealth which he would not have known how to enjoy if he had succeeded in getting it.

So possessed was he with the desire for gain that when young Tom came home from sea he left the farming to him, and took to the mining himself, and worked harder than he had ever worked in his life before.

He was a st.u.r.dy, middle-sized man, with a grizzled bullet head and rounded beard, of a dogged and pertinacious disposition, but capable, when stirred out of his usual phlegm, of fiery outbursts which overbore all argument and opposition. His wife died when his boy Tom was three, and after two years of lonely discomfort he married Nancy Poidestre of Pet.i.t Dixcart, whose people looked upon it as something of a _mesalliance_ that she should marry out of her own country into Little Sark.

Nancy was eminently good-looking and a notable housewife, and she went into Tom Hamon's house of La Closerie with every hope and intention of making him happy.

But, from the very first, little Tom set his face against her.

It would be hard to say why. Nancy racked her brain for reasons, and could find none, and was miserable over it.

His father thrashed him for his rudeness and insolence, which only made matters worse.

His own mother had given way to him in everything, and spoiled him completely. After her death his father out of pity for his forlorn estate, had equally given way to him, and only realised, too late, when he tried to bring him to with a round turn, how thoroughly out of hand he had got.

When little Tom found, as one consequence of the new mother's arrival, that his father thrashed instead of humouring him, he put it all down to the new-comer's account, and set himself to her discomfiture in every way his barbarous little wits could devise.

He never forgot one awful week he pa.s.sed in his grandmother's care--a week that terminated in the arrival of still another new-comer, who, in course of time, developed into little Nance. It is not impossible that the remembrance of that black week tended to colour his after-treatment of his little half-sister. In spite of her winsomeness he hated her always, and did his very best to make life a burden to her.

When, on that memorable occasion, he was hastily flung by his father into his grandmother's room, as the result of some wickedness which had sorely upset his stepmother, and the door was, most unusually, closed behind him, his first natural impulse was to escape as quickly as possible.

But he became aware of something unusual and discomforting in the atmosphere, and when his grandmother said sternly, "Sit down!" and he turned on her to offer his own opinion on the matter, he found the keen dark eyes gazing out at him from under the shadowy penthouse of the great black sun-bonnet, with so intent and compelling a stare that his mouth closed without saying a word. He climbed up on to a chair and twisted his feet round the legs by way of anchorage.

Then he sat up and stared back at Grannie, and as an exhibition of nonchalance and high spirit, put out his tongue at her.

Grannie only looked at him.

And, bit by bit, the tongue withdrew, and only the gaping mouth was left, and above it a pair of frightened green eyes, transmitting to the perverse little soul within new impressions and vague terrors.

Before long his left arm went up over his face to shut out the sight of Grannie's dreadful staring eyes, and when, after a sufficient interval, he ventured a peep at her and found her eyes still fixed on him, he howled, "Take it off! Take it off!" and slipped his anchors and slid to the floor, hunching his back at this tormentor who could beat him on his own ground.

For that week he gave no trouble to any one. But after it he never went near Grannie's room, and for years he never spoke to her. When he pa.s.sed her open door, or in front of her window, he hunched his shoulder protectively and averted his eyes.

Resenting control in any shape or form, Tom naturally objected to school.

His stepmother would have had him go--for his own sake as well as hers.

But his father took a not unusual Sark view of the matter.