CHAPTER VIII

A GENTLEMAN IN HOMESPUN

"THERE'S some sort of meat you can't abide to sit down and look at," said Tryphena, with wind-like rushes up and down the long room at St. Piran's, "it's either clunk (swallow) it down at once or not at all. And when it's down you must leave it to your innerds to make the best job they can of it. Mrs. Wilmot's man seems to be like cold lickie-stewall right when once he's down, but bad in the swallowing."

Captain Penrice, leaning cosily against the doorpost, awaited her remarks. It was three days later, and though Dr. Borlace might be content to leave Wilmot to wait at Bossiney for the news which never came, her uncle was by no means disposed to allow her to continue brooding over a tragedy in a place which must bring it constantly before her mind. Nothing more had been heard of Archelaus's fate, nothing more would be, the captain was convinced. Wilmot must, therefore, return to Challacombe, and, being a man of his word, the captain himself had come to fetch her, and had called at St. Piran's to inquire on what part of the cliffs he had better search for her.

"You tell her I say so," concluded Tryphena.

"Some people would say you'd better not swallow that sort of stuff at all, for it puts too much strain on the inside," said Captain Penrice, with a twinkle.

"When you've naught else, you can't choose. How can her get a new husband? Just you tell me that.”

Captain Penrice being unable to do so, Tryphena proceeded―

"Here's her staying at Bossiney. Let her go back to 'en. That's what I say. There'd never be a pig ringed nor a cheeld born, if they that had the job to do sat down too long to think of the trouble they'd to go through.”

"It was the knowing woman, not the virtuous, that Solomon should have praised," said Captain Penrice, reflectively.

"I tell 'ee what it is," said Tryphena, now fairly champing the bit of self-expression, "you high-learnt folks walk along with your own fancies all staring 'ee in the face, so you can't see the very ground in front of 'ee, and when you look to the side for a blink, you can't see naught but the green spots your own eye makes. You tell her to go on with what's afore her, and to start going to once."

"She shall, she shall, back to Challacombe and the lickie-stew," said the captain, turning away in the direction indicated by Tryphena.

"There's them that keeps themselves bottled," fired Tryphena, as a parting shot; "but 'tisn't in me to see things going wrong for want of a word."

Captain Penrice was of the stature which makes one believe that the statement "there were giants in the land in those days" must have referred to the West Country. Six feet three in his stockinged feet he stood, with a square head thatched with close-clipt white hair. His hazel eyes flashed a ruddy gleam with a green tinge to it at times of excitement, like the flashes of the jungle-folks' eyes. Everything about him was massive, yet not immobile; rock-like, yet volcanic: an igneous rock in process of cooling. His hammered jaw and straight lip-line could curve and wave with laughter or tenderness.

Untaught, save in a hedge school, he yet had a close acquaintance with the Elizabethan dramatists, whom he often criticised in broad Devon. Pagan in instinct as he was, the wind of Methodism had blown on him in squalls,

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and brought with it fear of hell fire, conviction of damnation, and finally, in the articles of a strict creed, port, after seas of sin. Hard drinker, hard liver: he had been both. He had seen the world in many guises, on the tramp steamer, the smart yacht, the fishing trawler. Now, in his old age, he was a first-class builder of trawl-boats in a ship-building yard that had been in the hands of a Penrice for generations. The gift of speech came to him sometimes and taught a "local preaching" what a mighty rushing wind is like from a human frame. Best of all, nothing human ever shocked him, nothing vile, so it be humanly vile, ever alienated him: verbally professing a narrow creed, in practice he was like the sun that shines on just and unjust, which is but to name him gentleman, though in homespun.

It was drawing towards high noon when the captain at last found his niece curled up on a ledge that overhung the sea.

Here the two depths met, the blue vault of sky, golden with the sun-glow, and the blue disc of sea, swept into sheets of foam-tossed shimmer by the wind-gusts from the cliff. Feathery thistledown floated high up; shags, myrrhs, and gulls flitted across the vault of air; the black points, which meant land-birds, shook, quivered, and were lost in the blue; a white butterfly flitted across the plane of sunlight; the glow grew each moment more radiant, till the sense of colour was lost in a haze of white light.

Once more the sea-born goddess, as millions of times before, leapt forth to her union with the light-bringer. Lying there, between sea and sky, Wilmot felt weightless, levitated, without need of the earth's support, and dreamt over again the stories which man crooned to himself ages ago, so that he might make himself at home in the strange world of outside nature. The laughter of Aphrodite, the very syllables of whose name incarnate the loveliness of the sea-spaces, twinkled all round the imaginative little woman.

To enable man to escape from the sordidness of actual life to golden dreams: it is by this divine power that the mind atones for all the sufferings it inflicts on mortals. Wilmot, with penitence for folly behind her, and humdrum duty in front, revelled in fancies to-day. For the creed of all earth's loveliness sums itself up in the myth of the hyacinth of the sea and her lover, the gloomless God. And if the clumsy earth-mother, Demeter, the many-breasted, who bears the homeliest toil for beasts and men, be forgotten for a time, she asserts herself soon enough, after all.

Suddenly Wilmot found her uncle standing by her side. Recalled thus to actual life, she knew then, with a sudden pang, that the real place of awe is not the space of sea or land, but the inner world of the mind. Far less awful than the "not-man" of the material universe is the man within, and the baffled Prometheus, with his strange human power and weakness, expresses much more nearly the mystery of life than any myth of Apollo and Aphrodite.

Meanwhile, Captain Penrice was thinking of the awful question of human waste. Had he in his zeal given his little maid to the wrong man? Was she to join the meaningless lives of so many women? The thought jarred among his heartstrings, like a sudden consciousness of certain disaster. He had hoped to save her from the barren life of a useless woman, and he seemed to have blundered hopelessly. Yet Dr. Borlace was, for all his oddity, a good fellow; somehow, it is not a good fellow, but the good fellow, that matters in a woman's life.

"Well, little woman," he said, sitting down beside her and pushing back the dark hair over her forehead, "how goes it?"

"Sadly, Uncle Dickie, I'm afraid," she said, putting a sunburnt hand in his big, hairy one. She was always a little childish with this big man. "I'm a worry to everybody, and to myself most of all."

I want you to come back," he said slowly, beating her

hand up and down, "to be a worry to us down yonder to Challacombe-to Dr. Tony and me."

"Mother's been talking to you," she said; "I know it; it's no good you're saying she hasn't."

"She has. I don't deny it; and I think she's quite right. We want you, I want you, your husband wants you."

Wilmot shrugged her shoulders.

"It's true," said the old man, bending his grizzled eyebrows together in the effort to touch this wayward child somewhere in the quick, yet without hurting what was sore already. "Dr. Tony's got a hard job before him, and you can't choose but help or hinder him."

"Tony, a hard job?" she laughed incredulously. "I know he hates exertion, but, after all, that's nothing but his regular professional work, which other men take as it comes. He's broken fifteen babies' bottles since he's been at Challacombe, because he said they were dirty; but I don't know that he's done anything else different from the usual work of a medical man. You can't expect me to make a fuss over fifteen babies' bottles, though my husband did happen to break them."

Her heart was beating with a kind of rage at being put in the wrong by any one who was usually so entirely on her side as Captain Penrice.

"See here, ladybird," said the captain, "I didn't bring you up on men's books to have you turn out a little bit of a rag doll that hasn't sense enough to understand a good piece of useful work that'll stand wind and weather. You've been fed on meat, not cat-lap, and you ought to know that out in a man's world there's big things to be done or not donethat make a difference after the man that had it to do is dead and gone."

"I know. I like men that do things," said Wilmot. "You taught me to. Don't you remember taking me down