CICELY CROWE

I

Our house is a long one; it takes two minutes to walk from one end to the other, consequently by the time one has gone from the principal staircase at the east extremity to the kitchen at the west, one is older by two minutes; whether one has grown in the time I am unable to say, never having taken measures before starting and on arriving. It is satisfactory that the staircase and not the dining-room occupies the extreme east, otherwise we should always partake of cold meals.

But as if the main block of the house were not, in all conscience, long enough, at some unknown period since its first construction a back kitchen was added beyond the kitchen, farther west, and then, a little room only reached by a stair farther west still. This little “prophet’s chamber” was, however, one used within my recollection for the keeping of the feathers of geese and fowls that had been plucked, where they accumulated till sufficient for the composition of a feather bed, when they were picked, cleaned, baked, and made up.

Before this final process I well remember, as a child of eight or nine, scrambling into this little chamber, and then rolling and dancing among the feathers, and making, as I believed, a snowstorm about me. The after effects were not conducive to comfort; and I remember that the process of scrubbing and cleansing me and my clothes after this snowstorm was both irksome and lengthy. That experience was never repeated, not only because of the cleansing process, but also because I was put across my father’s knee, and the lesson not to play with feathers and raise snowstorms was impressed on me with a square ruler, till my father got hot in the face, and I—hot, elsewhere.

The same little stair that conducted to the feather room, also gave admission to a low garret above the back kitchen.

This garret contained all kinds of imaginable and unimaginable lumber.

My dear father, who was an enthusiast for novelties, bought every possible invention that conduced to the saving of time by cooks—patent egg-boilers, lemon-squeezers, apple-parers, digesting pots, &c. These the cooks “chucked” up into the lumber place with mighty disdain, and went on in their old ways. Moreover, into it went all the pans that they had left unscoured till rust had eaten through them, all the kettles that began to leak, by letting them fall on the stone floor; a coffee roaster that the then reigning cook refused to use, because it was less trouble to employ ready-roasted coffee; a mortar, the bottom of which had been knocked out, because she would pound almonds in it on her lap instead of on the table; a tobacco canister in which bird’s-eye was kept for a lover when he came on a visit. In fact, this garret was an emporium of objects illustrative of kitchen wastefulness, and indicative of my father’s good-nature.

No one ever visited this garret except the cook when “chucking away” some of “master’s newfangled nonsense,” or when putting away some damaged article out of reach of her mistress’s eye, consequently it was wholly given over to rats, that raced about in it with a boldness only equalled by that of cook when she looked straight into my mother’s eyes and said there never had been, so long as she had been in the house, one of these articles my mother missed, as the coffee-roaster, or the china mortar, or the stewing pan, or the bronchitis kettle; or when my father sent inquiries about such articles as the lemon-squeezer, or the apple-parer, or the cream-whipper.

The rats got their pickings in this garret: they licked out the dirty frying-pans in which was grease, they consumed the contents of the pie-dishes that had been burnt in the oven with crust adhering to them, and nibbled at the rabbit-skins that had been put away there to be sold to the rag-and-bone man when he came round.

I knew of this garret, and loved it, loved it almost as dearly as did the rats. My mother and father did not like my visiting it, as I came away from it very dirty in hands and face, and with clothing often torn by nails; and cook never would endure that I should visit it for reasons of her own. Consequently, visits to it were surreptitious, and made at rare intervals.

We had, when I was about thirteen, a maid of the name of Cicely Crowe; she was an excellent servant, with a passionate love of neatness, did her work well and conscientiously, but had not the most amiable disposition or the most gracious manner. She was not a bad-tempered woman, never violent, but, just as a diamond is said to be off colour if the least lacking in absolute clearness, so may she be said to have been off temper. She was very kind-hearted, but it seemed to go against her pride to do a kind thing in a kind way. She never saw the good in anything, only the faults. We all liked Cicely, but we all wished she would try to be more pleasing. However, we have each our blurs in this world, one in one way, one in another, and had Cicely’s mood been sunny, and her manner sparkling, why she would have been snapped up at once, and half the young men in the village would have been quarrelling as to who should have her. It was just this uncertainty in her temper which deterred them, and kept her in our service so many years.

She was a very pretty girl, was Cicely, with brown hair, so neat that never was a hair out of place, and with large hazel eyes, and such a complexion!—cream and strawberry were nothing to it, and the colour palpitated under her transparent skin like the flush of the evening sun on far-off delicate clouds.

The lads of the village said to each other, “What a lass that Cicely is, but—” And our friends said to my mother, “What a very nice, respectable servant girl you have in Cicely.” “Oh dear, yes,” answered my mother, “she is everything that could be desired, but—” And her fellow-servants all said, “We have nothing to say against Cicely, but—” And we children remarked to each other, “Cicely is tremendously nice, but—” No one ever got any further than “but—,” for no one could bring it over the lips to say a word in depreciation of Cicely.

Now it fell out all on a summer’s day that cook had gone off for a holiday, and the kitchen-maid had sickened with measles and been sent home, and with great trepidation, and with a tremulous voice, and an appeal in her eyes, my mother had asked Cicely if she would, under the circumstances, boil the potatoes and the greens for the early dinner on that Sunday. There was nothing to roast, nothing to stew; cook had made cold pies and shapes, and so on, to last till her return.

Cicely replied ungraciously that everything was put on her, but she supposed she must do it, and then turned her back on my mother and went off to change her gown. As I have said, it was Sunday. I had a sore throat, and so was not allowed to go to church, and was bidden remain at home, not go outside the doors, and keep myself warm.

Now I had calculated on this, and had borrowed a rat-trap from the gardener, and when Cicely was upstairs putting on such garments as she deemed suitable for peeling potatoes and shelling peas, and cooking them, I slipped up the stairs into the garret, hugging the trap, and holding a piece of cheese-rind I had surreptitiously seized on and had roasted over my candle. I was resolved on spending the time whilst my parents were at church in catching a rat. There was a loose slate in the roof and I tilted this up, peeped out, and watched my father and mother, brothers and sisters, and the governess stalk away from the front door in their Sunday suits, with prayer-books under their arms, and I saw my dear mother pick off sundry bits of “fluff,” ends of thread, &c., which her eye detected on the children’s clothes.

Then I heard a bustle of feet underneath, and some tongues, and I knew that the domestics were also off to church by the back door. Thereupon I set my trap, and sat down behind a barrel in the corner waiting to hear the rats come out, and to watch them snuff at, then bite the bait, and, snap—be caught.

Whilst I waited, and, waiting, learned my collect which had been set me as a task, I heard Cicely come into the back kitchen, and with a sharp motion pull the pan to her in which were the potatoes she had to peel.

Almost immediately after I heard the kitchen door open, and a male voice exclaim, “Well, Cicely, so here you are?”

“I s’pose I be,” was her answer.

Now the floor of the loft was of boards, and in these boards were knots, and the centre of some of these had fallen out. The back kitchen was not ceiled. One of these peep-holes was close to me, so very gently I lay down flat on the floor and applied my eye to the hole, and then saw that a young man had entered named Will Swan.

I knew him well. He had a boat, and was a fisherman; an honest, cheerful fellow, with whom I often went out on the sea. He was uncommonly civil, and would insist on carrying the fish I caught, or fancied I had caught, home for me.

Now only did it dawn on my infantile mind that his carrying the fish was due not so much to a wish to oblige me, as to have an excuse for coming into our kitchen to see Cicely Crowe.

“What’s brought you here?” asked Cicely.

“I wanted to see you and have a bit of a talk.”

“I’m busy,” was her curt answer.

“Ciss, I want a good-bye before I go.”

“Well, the door is open—Good-bye.”

He halted at the entrance, hesitated a while, and then said: “You will be pleased to hear, Ciss, that the good-bye I asked for is one for ever.”

She dropped the potato she was peeling, but did not look at him; she took up the potato again.

“I’m thinking of leaving—going to America.”

She did not answer for a while, but as he waited for an observation, she said, “Indeed. Hope you’ll enjoy yourself there.”

“I am not going there to enjoy myself, but because—well, Ciss—I can’t feel any joy here in the old country.”

“You seem merry enough.”

“I am not. I’ve always something in me, gnawing at my heart.”

“Swallowed a crab, I reckon, without having him b’iled first.”

“It’s not that, Ciss. You know well it is not that. If one can’t get now what will make a fellow happy, it’s best to go, sez I.”

“You’ll get lots, lots over there,” said she, and pointed with the knife towards the sea, America, the bed of the setting sun.

“I don’t want lots—only one.”

“May you find that one. I hope you will.”

“Do you?” with a flash of happiness.

“Yes—in America.”

He hung his head.

“I suppose,” said Will, “that I shall be forgotten when I am far away.”

“Those who go far away must reckon on that,” was her answer. “Psha!” she had cut her finger. She quickly put a bit of potato rind over the wound lest Will should observe it. But indeed, he was looking on the floor and saw nothing.

“And, Ciss, you have nothing more to say to me?”

“Of course I have—Good-bye!”

He looked up, took a step nearer to her, gazed steadily into her face: “Cicely, do you mean it—in this way to say good-bye to one you have known all these years? It is not a light matter to cross the ocean and go to the States. Who can tell what may happen there? Some find there good luck, others, wretchedness and ruin. To go there and do well a chap must take a good heart with him. I cannot do that. I shall bear but a heartache with me, and have no hope whatever I do. Come, Ciss—what do you say?”

“The parson don’t like any one coming in late for church. You’d best be off—smart.”

He raised himself to his full height. The angry blood flew to his face and darkened it, fire leaped from his eyes. I had never seen Will Swan like that before.

“No—Ciss—no,” he said, and he spoke hoarsely; “I will not cross the water. No, that would content you. Who can say—if things went contrary here—you might be willing to come across to me there?”

“If——”

“Yes—who can say? But I will go where there is no passage across. I will break down every bridge between us. This has been going on too long—from one year to another—and I can bear it no further. I will get married to some other wench, some one who will give a chap a good word; who, when one leaves only for a day will say a good-bye, and her eyes will fill with tears. She may never be to me all that you have been and are, but she will be to me what it is not in your nature to be—kind and gracious.”

“Oh, that—that is it!” exclaimed Cicely. I could see, through my peephole, how flames passed through her face and then that she became deadly white. I could see how her bosom heaved, how her hands trembled as she tried to continue with the potatoes, but was unable to do anything because of her wounded finger.

Suddenly she took up the pan, thrust past Will, and threw the contents into the pig-pail. “You have made me spoil all,” she said, and burst into tears.

“Crying! What for?”

“That is it. You have already lost your heart to some other girl, and now you come to say——”

“Yes, that I am going to the parson to have my banns called.”

“Who is it?” she asked, looking at him, her weeping arrested, and she as one of stone.

“If I say it shall be you, what will you say?”

She tried to speak, could not, turned, put up her hand against the wall, brushed it down once, twice, again, impatiently. She could not bring the word out that she wished to say.

Will remained waiting. No answer came.

“Ciss,” he said, “it shall not be you. Any other rather. No—you, never!”

Then he turned and left the back kitchen.

She stood for a moment watching him as he departed. Then she leaned her face in her wet hands and burst into convulsive weeping.

Snap. Wee! wee! wee! A rat was caught.

II

Will Swan did not go to America. What he did was to find an engagement on a small boat that went to and from Bristol, bringing groceries, earthenware, timber, ovens from Bridgewater, and which conveyed slates from the Cornish quarries to that great mercantile city which goes on building, building without ceasing. He was away sometimes for a week; sometimes for a fortnight; now and then for over a month. America! He was not going to expatriate himself for a woman’s sake, when there was plenty of work to be found in his native land, or rather, on the seas that washed it.

The Bristol Channel looks upon the map as though in it could be only calm water, as in the estuary of the Thames. It is, however, not so. When the wind blows from the west, how the great Atlantic billows roll in, and with what fury do they recoil and strike the faces of their brother waves also seeking an entrance! They tread one another down; they overleap one another; they beat one another about, and leave a long line of foam down the centre of the Channel, the dust and wreckage of ten thousand broken waves.

And then, without. When Hartland Point has been turned, what a coast! The iron-black frowning cliffs stand up sheer from deep sea, and seem to say, “We look on all passers-by as foes; let none venture to approach us!”

And how the Atlantic billows heave there! It is no exaggeration to say that they run mountains high. Woe to the vessel, great or small, that enters or attempts to cross the great loop between Hartland and Trevose. It is a mouth to champ up and suck the life out of every boat that falls into it when the wind is inland.

Cicely heard that Will Swan had not gone to the States. She saw him occasionally in church, but when there he never looked her way. He stood up straight as a post, sang with lungs like the bellows of a blacksmith, in his blue jersey, his face brown as a coffee-berry fresh roasted, but his eye, blue as the summer sea, flashed and twinkled, but never on her.

She heard talk of him too. He was much at the Ship Inn; and Kate Varcoe, the daughter of the host, was a “likely lass,” cheerful, fresh-faced, with black dancing eyes. With Kate he chaffed and made merry. Cicely listened every Sunday to hear the banns called, but no—called they were not. Next, some one said that William had a sweetheart in Bristol.

Oh, in Bristol! Then why should not she show him that if he could be false she would be so also. For a while she allowed herself to be walked out by young Hannaway, a respectable youth, a carpenter by trade, who made the coffins for all the neighbourhood, and undertook in black for all the dead in that and the neighbouring parishes.

When next she encountered Will she was at the side of Hannaway. He was talking with some chums, and a burst of laughter from them pealed out after she had passed. Had he made some remark relative to her that had caused this merriment? Her cheeks burned. She was angry. She hated him. She was dull as a companion, and after three Sundays, as young Hannaway “got no forrarder” with her, he gave her up and took to walking with Kate Varcoe.

On the quay was a long bench, whereon the sailors and fishermen were wont to sit and yarn. There Will, when at home, sat and yarned also—now about ships, then about fish, about tobacco, and last about girls. He was boastful, and laughed and said that he had only to hold up his little finger and whistle, and half-a-dozen would perch on it. But this was so strange in Will, so different from his wont, that an old pilot who had known him from a child and now heard him, shook his head and said, “He’s not got that Ciss out of his head yet, I’ll swear.”

Then the news came that Cicely was ill—very ill; “something on the nerve,” so it was said, and others opined “her orgings were gone scatt.”

Will Swan asked no questions about her, but whistled “Black-eyed Susan” with his hands in his pockets. It was obvious he cared nothing for her.

Then she began to mend. The disease, whatever it was, went “off the nerve” again, or the “orgings” got patched up with powders or plaster. Very white and weak, Cicely sat at her window and looked out. One day she saw Will Swan coming along the way. “Is he about to ask after me?” she thought. No, he went by. He did not turn in at the familiar—at one time familiar—kitchen back entrance. He did not even look up at her window.

Now, at last, Cicely left our service. Her mother was dead, and some one was needed at home to keep house for her father. She left us without a word of regret. Indeed, she did not even say good-bye to my father and mother. My dear mother, in her sweet, gentle way, reproached her for it when they met.

“I thought, ma’am,” said Cicely, “if you’d wanted to say good-bye, you’d ha’ come to the kitchen to say it to me. ’Twasn’t for me to intrude.”

“Oh! Cicely, after so many years!”—my mother’s eyes filled. She really loved that girl, and from the depth of my heart I believe Cicely loved her, but she was too perverse to show it.

“Now,” said Cicely to herself, “I’ll have no more nonsense.” By which she meant that she would drive all thoughts of Will from her head. But this is easier said and resolved on than accomplished. And you, we will say, think that your thoughts, or fancies, are in your own power, that you can trifle with them, and, when you like, put them aside. But when the day comes that you do wish thus to be rid of them, then you find yourself entangled, chained in the passion, and you cannot break from it. So was it with Cicely. She thought and worked for her old father more zealously and lustily than she had for us, but only thought the more continuously on, and suffered the keener for, young Will Swan.

Summer was over; autumn harvests were gathered in; Martinmas summer had brooded over the land, enveloping all in a warm, lovely haze; and then, suddenly came the change. Without warning an equinoctial gale burst on the coast, the summer was over, the brightness past—winter had come with gloom and sadness.

On the evening after it had been blowing great guns all day, the door was thrown open, and one of the coastguard looked in.

“Jan Crowe!” called he to Cicely’s father, who had charge over the lifeboat, “there’s the Marianne wrecked.”

“The Marianne!”

Cicely uttered a cry. That was Will Swan’s vessel, or, rather, the vessel in which Will Swan was. She ran down to the beach. The sea was almost indistinguishable from the air, so lashed and shaken together was wave with wind, so intermingled were foam and rain. The air was filled with sound. The sands trembled with the beating of the surf on them. The whole sky was brown and blurred with clouds sweeping along from the west, inland, with screaming sea-birds peppered against the vapour, and salt tears dripping out of it; now driving in rushes, then staying and drawing up as a veil, and allowing the wind full play to riot and rend between the clouds and the ocean.

All colour was gone out of land and sea and sky—gone as though melted together into one medley of dull grey, never to be gathered together into pure colour again. No outlines were clear. The bold points of land that ran out into the sea were so be-hazed with spoondrift and rain that they had changed their appearance, they had lost their consistency, they seemed to waver and threaten to dissolve into the seething flood that beat about them.

None but an experienced eye could distinguish the Marianne in the haze and tossing mass of sea.

Men and women, in fluttering garments, were on the beach, with their hands to their eyes screening them, gazing seaward.

Cries rose for the boat to be launched. But in such a sea it was not possible to do anything. The Marianne was a wreck. No living being was on her. The captain of the coast-guard put his glass to his eye and looked steadily at the tossing—now seen, now obscured—patch that was once the Marianne. In the gathering darkness little could be distinguished.

“They’ve left her,” he said. “There’s none aboard but a dog. Hark! you can hear him bark.”

Those near held their breath.

“I can’t hear nothing,” said a seaman.

“You can if you look through my glass,” said the captain, “you can then both see and hear the little dog yapping. He wouldn’t be yapping like that unless he’d been left behind.”

“But where be they? There was Cap’n Thomas, and Simon Feathers, and Joe Wilcock, and Bill Swan.”

“Aye,” said another, “and there’s Tony Graves; his mother be here in a terrible take-on. ’Tis the first time the boy has been so far to sea.”

“Where be they?” asked the captain. “I can’t see anything of a boat. They’ve took to it, sure as I’m here, and just as certain she’s capsized.”

“Then they’ll be washed ashore, dead or alive,” said one.

“Of course they will. ’Tain’t no use trying the lifeboat when you know they’re not in the vessel. You don’t know where to look for ’em.”

So the shore was searched, and, first one, then another was recovered; the boy Tony first, alive and not much the worse; then Joe Wilcock dead, or so near death that there seemed no chance of recovering him. With the barbarous ignorance then common, he was thrown across a barrel to let the water run out of his lungs. He struggled, gasped, and was still.

Captain Thomas, a large stout man, holding to an oar, forged his way ashore, but he was much bruised and cut by having been beaten against sharp slate rocks like razors. He could not speak, but his eyes were lively, black eyes under white bushy brows. After a quarter of an hour he gasped out, “Where’s Tony? I stood my life to his mother I’d bring him safe home.”

“Safe he is,” said some one near.

“Then that’s right,” said the captain. “Where’s the rest?”

They could tell him only of Joe Wilcock. Feathers and Swan had not been washed ashore.

By this time it was night. Lanterns were flashing along the beach. Then up from the water came some one; it was Cicely, drenched to the skin, her hair streaming, but wet as seaweed. She was dragging in her arms a dark mass.

Some ran to her with lights. What she was heaving was Will Swan, conscious, for he looked at her, but speechlessly. The moment others drew nigh the girl released her load and disappeared.

The night became clearer. The wind shifted to the north, the clouds parted. Stars appeared in the patches of dark sky. The rain ceased, but the sea still thundered and gleamed white.

A knock at the cottage door of the old fellow who had charge of the lifeboat. He was out still, but Cicely opened and saw Will Swan before her with both hands extended.

She drew her hand back and looked coldly at him.

He was staggered, and said: “Well, Ciss!”

“Well,” she said, “what do you want here?”

Will stepped forward, and tried to put his arm round her to take a kiss. She thrust him from her impatiently.

For a moment he stood motionless, then he burst forth: “It was you—you who snatched me out of the water.”

“You are mistaken, it was Jacob Finch. I stood by. I would have done that for any one.”

Will became white as chalk; then almost in fury, as if he would have torn her, he cried: “Ciss! you be cruel to me and to yourself. I don’t care, say yes or no, fight or bite if you will, mine you shall be, or I will carry you in these arms and throw you and myself together over the cliff into the sea.”

He seized her in his strong arms, clasped her to his heart, and covered her face with kisses.

So, in a paroxysm of fury, was this courtship done.

And Cicely melted like wax against glowing iron. But only for a moment, and then said: “Well, if it must be, it must.”

Fifty years have passed since that day.

There is now an old seaman sits smoking his pipe on the bench, looking seaward, and he yarns with his mates, and is looked up to and listened to by the younger men. He has got strapping sons of his own. They are seamen as was their father. He has a daughter married, and the old chap is fond of taking one of his grandchildren out with him, to walk on the quay and sit on the old bench beside him or else on his knee.

That old man is Will Swan.

The Crowe, by holy matrimony, had become a Swan.

The pretty Cicely I remembered so long ago was now dead; and old Bill wore a black band round his blue jersey arm.

A day or two ago I was sitting by him on the bench.

He was silent for a long time, smoking and blowing clouds.

Presently he turned his face to me. I saw there was trouble in it.

“You knew my wife, sir?” he said.

“Indeed I did, since I was a little child.”

“I know you did.”

Then again silence.

Presently again his face turned, and he drew his pipe from his mouth and rested it on his knee.

“You’re a minister now, sir?”

“Yes; I am a parson.”

“Then p’r’aps you can tell me something.”

“I will tell you what I can.”

“You see, sir, Ciss was that won’erful sort of a woman. Though us was married for fifty years her never once in all that time would say as her loved me.”

Again a long pause; another smoke. Then a turn to me: “You are a parson?”

“Yes. What do you want?”

“Well, you can tell me. When I get into life everlasting, do you think Ciss will meet me at the gates o’ Paradise and say: ‘What are you doin’ here now? Don’t you go bothering of me, I don’t want you’?”

“All that is left behind,” said I, “all, all in the soil and dross of the grave. Above, the bright happy smile will break out, and the welcome, and the hands will be stretched out——”

“Thank you,” he said slowly. Great tears were in his eyes and rolling down his cheeks. “I hopes the same, but I doubts it. There must be a terrible, mirac’lous change for that to come about. But things may happen past ’uman understanding, and even onions turn to apples, and jerseys to pea-jackets. No offence, sir,” and he touched his forehead.