I

When we East Anglians be set to do a thing, we be set firm. We come at what we want by slow thinking, but when we know what we want we hold fast by it—being born stubborn, and also being born staunch. It is the same with our hating and with our loving: we fire slowly, but when at last the fire is kindled it burns so strongly in the very hearts of us—with a white glow, hotter than any flame—that there is no putting it out again short of putting out our lives.

Men and women alike, we are born that way; and we fishermen of the Suffolk and Norfolk coast likewise are bred that way: seeing that from the time we go afloat as youngsters until the time that we are drowned, or are grown so old and rusty that there is no more strength for sea-fighting left in us, our lives for the most part are spent in fighting the North Sea. That is a fight that needs stubbornness to carry it through to a finish. Also, it needs knowledge of the ocean's tricks and turns—because the North Sea can do what we East Anglians can't do: it can smile at you and lie. A man must have a deal of training before he can tell by the feel of it in his own insides that close over beyond a still sea and a sun-bright sky a storm is cooking up that will kill him if it can. And even when he feels the coming of it—if he be well to seaward, or if he be tempted by the fish being plenty and by the bareness of his own pockets to hold on in the face of it—he must have more in his head than any coast pilot has if he is to win home to Yarmouth Harbour or to Lowestoft Roads.

For God in his cruelty has set more traps to kill seafarers off this easterly outjut of England, I do believe, than He has set anywhere else in all the world: there being from Covehithe Ness northward to the Winterton Overfalls nothing but a maze of deadly shoals—all cut up by channels in which there is no sea-room—that fairly makes you queazy to think about when you are coming shoreward in a northeast gale. And as if that were not enough to make sure of man-food for the fishes, the currents that swirl and play among these shoals are up to some fresh wickedness with every hour of the tide-run and with every half shift of wind. Whether you make in for Yarmouth by Hemesby Hole to the north, or by the Hewett Channel to the south, or split the difference by running through Caister Road, it is all one: twisting about the Overfalls and the Middle Cross Sand and the South Scroby, there the currents are. What they will be doing with you, or how they will be doing it, you can't even make a good guess at; all that you can know for certain being that they will be doing their worst by you at the half tide.

At least, though, the Lowestoft men and the Yarmouth men have a good harbour when once they fetch it; and by that much are better off than we Southwold men, who have no harbour at all. With anything of a sea running there is no making a landing under Southwold Cliff—though it is safe enough when once your boat is beached and hauled up there; and so, if the storm gets ahead of us, there is nothing left but to run for Lowestoft: and a nice time we often have of it, with an on-shore gale blowing, working up into the Covehithe Channel under the tail of the Barnard Bank! As for beating up to seaward of the Barnard and running in through Pakefield Gat, anybody can try for it who has a mind to—and who has a boat that can eat the very heart out of the wind. Sometimes you do fetch it. But what happens to you most times is best known to the Newcome Shoal. When you have cleared the Barnard—if so be you do clear it—the Newcome lies close under your lee for all the rest of the run. What it has done for us fishermen you can see when the spring tides bare it and show black scraps of old boats wrecked there, and sometimes a gleam of sand-whitened bones.

For a good many years we had another chance, though a poor one, and that was to make a longish leg off shore and then run in before the wind and cross the Barnard into Covehithe Channel through what we called the Wreck Gat—a cut in the bank that the currents made striking against a wrecked ship buried there. The Wreck Gat is gone now—closed by the same storm that nearly closed my life for me—and you will not find it marked nowadays on the charts. Its going was a good riddance. At the best it was a desperate bad place to get through; and at its worst it was about the same as a sea pitfall: and that nobody knows better than I do, seeing that I was the last man to get through it alive. But when you happened to be to windward of it, if it served at all, it served better than running down a half mile farther and trying to round the tail of the bank.

Very many craft beside our own fisher-boats find their death-harbour on our East Anglian sands. Our coast, as it has a right to be, is the dread of every sailor man who sails the narrow seas. Great ships, storm-swept on our sands, are sucked down into the depths of them, or are hammered to pieces on the top of them, as light-heartedly as though they were no more than cock-boats. And the supply of ships to be wrecked there is unending—since the half of the trade of the world, they say, sails past our shores. From every land they come: and many and many a one of them comes but never goes. Down on them bangs the northeast wind with a roar and a rattle—and presently our sands have hold of them with a grip that is to keep them fast there till the last day! Sometimes the dead men who were living sailors aboard those ships come ashore to us, though they are more like to find graves in the sands that murdered them or to be swept out to sea; sometimes, by a twist of chance that you may call a miracle, the sea has a fancy for casting one or two of them ashore alive. Dazed and half mad creatures those live ones are, usually: their wits all jangled and shaken by the great horror that has been upon them while they tossed among the waves.

And so, as you may see, we men of the Suffolk and Norfolk coast need the stiff backbone that we have as our birthright for the sea-fighting that is our life-work; and it is not to be wondered at that our life of sea-fighting makes us still more set and stubborn in our ways.

II

My little Tess came to me, a sea upcast, after one of our great northeast gales. I myself found her: lying where the waves had landed her on the shingle, and where they had left her with the fall of the tide.

I was but a bit of a lad myself, then, going on to be eight years old. Storms had no fright in them for me in those days. What I most was thinking about when one was blowing—while my poor mother, if my father was out in his boat, would be looking wild-eyed seaward, or in the bed-room praying for him on her knees—was what I'd be picking up on the shingle when the gale was over and the sea gone down. Later on, when I came to know that at the gale's end I might be lying myself on the shingle, along with the other wreckage, I got to looking at storms in a different way.

That blow that brought my Tess to me had no fears in it for my poor mother, seeing that it came in the night time and my father safe at home. The noise of my father getting up wakened me; and in a sleepy way I watched him from my little bed, when he had the lamp lighted, hurrying his clothes on that he might go down to where his boat was hauled up on the shingle and heave her with the capstan still higher above the on-run of the waves. And as I lay there, very drowsy, watching my father drag his big boots on and hearing the roar of the wind and feeling the shaking that it was giving to our house-walls, there came suddenly the sharp loud bang of a gun.

My father stopped as he heard it—with one leg in the air and his hands gripping the boot-straps, I can see him now. "That's from close by!" he said. "God help them—they must be ashore on the Barnard Bank!" Then he jammed his other boot on, jumped into his sou'wester, and was gone on a run. My mother ran to the door—I know now, having myself helped to get men ashore from wrecked ships at my life's peril, what her fear was—and called after him into the darkness: "Don't thou go to putting thy life in danger, George May!" What she said did no good. The wind swallowed her words before they got to him. For a minute or two she stood in the doorway, all blown about; then, putting her weight on it, she got the door shut and came back into the bed-room and knelt by the bedside praying for him. I still was very drowsy. Presently I went off to sleep again, thinking—God forgive me for it!—that if a ship had stranded on the Barnard I'd find some pretty pickings when morning came and the storm was over and I could get down to the shore.

And that was my first thought when I wakened, and found the sun shining and the wind blowing no more than a gentle breeze. My father was home again, and safe and sound. There had been no chance for a rescue, he said—the ship being deep down in the sands, and all her people swept out of her, by the time that daylight came. And so I bolted my breakfast, and the very minute that I had it inside of me I was off down the cliff-path and along the beach northward to find what I could find. All the other Southwold boys were hurrying that way too; but our house being up at the north end of the village gave me the start of all of them but John Heath, who lived close by us, and he came down the cliff-path at my heels.

The Barnard Bank lies off shore from Covehithe Ness, and under the Ness our pickings would be most like to be. At the best they would be but little things—buckets and baskets and brooms and odd oars, and such like—the coast guard men seeing to it that we got no more; but things, all the same, that any boy would jump for: and so away John and I ran together, and we kept together until we were under the Ness—and could see the broken stern-post of the wreck, all that was left to see of her, sticking up from the Barnard going bare with the falling tide. There I passed him—he giving a shout and stopping to pick up a basket that I missed seeing because on my side weed covered it—and so was leading him as we rounded the Ness by a dozen yards. And then it was I who gave a shout—and made a dash for a big white bundle that was lying in a nook of the shingle just above the lap of the waves.

John saw the bundle almost as soon as I did, and raced me for it. But I did see it first, and I touched it first, and so it fairly was mine. A white sheet was the outside of it; and at one corner, under the sheet, a bit of a blanket showed. I would have none of John's help as I unwrapped it. He stood beside me, though, and said as I opened it that even if I had touched it first we had seen it together—which wasn't so—and that we must go share and share. I did not answer him, being full of wonder what I was like to come to when I had the bundle undone. In a good deal of a hurry I got the sheet loose, it was knotted at the corners, and then the blanket, and then still another blanket that was under the first one: and when that inner wrapping was opened there was lying—a little live baby! It looked up into my face with its big black eyes, and it blinked them for a minute—having been all shut up in the dark and the sunlight bothering it—and then it smiled at me as if I'd just waked it up not from the very edge of death in the sea but from a comfortable nap in its cradle on land!

John Heath burst out laughing. "You can have my share of it, George," said he; "we've got babies enough of our own at home." And with that he ran away and began to look again for brooms and buckets along the shore.

But I loved my little Tess from that first sight of her, and I was glad that John had said that I might have his share in her; though of course, because I first saw her and first touched her, he had no real share in her at all. So I wrapped her up again as well as I could in her blankets—leaving the wet sheet lying there—and set off for home along the shore, carrying her in my arms. Tired enough I got before I had lugged my load that long way, and up the cliff, and so to our house door. In the doorway my mother was standing, and I put the bundle in her arms. "Lord save us!" said my mother. "What's the boy got here?"

"Mother," said I, "it's a little beautiful live baby—and I found it, and it's mine!"

III

That was the way that my Tess came to me: and I know now how good my father and my mother were in letting me keep her for my own—they with only what my father could make by his fishing to live on, and the wolf never very far away from the door. But the look of those black eyes of hers and the smile in them won my mother's love to her, just as it had won mine; and my mother told me, too, long years afterward, that her heart was hungry for the girl baby that God had not given her—and she said that Tess seemed to be her very own baby from the minute that she took her close to her breast from my tired little arms.

As to where Tess came from—from what port in all the wide world the ship sailed that brought her to us—we had no way of knowing. Nothing but Tess in her bundle came ashore from the wreck; and what was left of the ship burrowed down into the sands so fast and so far that there was to be seen of her only a broken bit of her stern-post at the storm's ending. Even after the set of the currents against her sunken hull, on the next spring tide, had cut through the Barnard Bank and so made the Wreck Gat, no part of her but her broken stern-post ever showed. Tess herself, though, told us what her own name was, and so gave us a notion as to what land she belonged to; but we should have been none the wiser for her telling it—she talking in words that were the same as Greek to us—if the Vicar had not lent us a hand.

My finding the baby made a stir in the whole village, and everybody had to have a look at her. In the afternoon along came the Vicar too—smiling through his gold spectacles, as he always did, and swinging his black cane. By that time, having had all the milk she could hold, and a good nap, and more milk again, Tess was as bright as a new sixpence: just as though she had not passed that morning nearer to death than ever she was like to pass again and live. She was lying snug in my mother's arms before the fire, and in her own fashion was talking away at a great rate—and my mother's heart quite breaking because her pretty chatter was all in heathen words that nobody could get at the meaning of. But the Vicar, being very learned, understood her in a minute. "Why, it's Spanish," said he. "It's Spanish as sure as you're born! She's calling you 'madrecita,' Mrs. May—which is the same as 'motherkin,' you know. But I can't make even a guess at the rest of it. Everything ends in 'ita'—real baby-talk."

"Do kindly ask her, sir, what her blessed little name is," said my mother. "It'll bring her a deal closer to us to know her name."

"I'll try her in Latin," said the Vicar—"that's the best that I can manage—and it'll be hit or miss if she understands." And then he bent over the little tot—she being then a bit over two years old, my mother thought—and asked her what her name was in Latin words.

For a minute there was a puzzled look in the big black eyes of her and her brow puckered. And then she smiled all over her pretty face and answered, as clear as you please: "Tesita." That a baby no bigger than that understood Latin always has seemed to me most like a miracle of anything that ever I have known!

My mother looked bothered and chap-fallen. "It's not a real name at all," she said, and sighed over it.

"It's a very good name indeed, Mrs. May," said the Vicar; "only she's giving you her baby way of saying it. Her name is Theresa. 'Tesita' is the same as our 'Tess' would be, you know."

"Theresa! Tess!" cried my mother, brightening up all in a minute. "Why, that was my own dear mother's name! Her having that name seems to make her in real truth mine, sir!" And she hugged the baby close to the heart of her, and all in the same breath cried over it and laughed over it—thinking, I suppose, of her mother dead and buried, and thankful for the daughter that she so longed for that had come to her upcast by the sea.

More than what her name was, as is not to be wondered at, Tess never told us; and the only thing in the world that gave us any knowledge of her—and that no more than that her people were like to be gentlefolk—was a gold chain about her neck, under her little night gown, with a locket fast to it on which were some letters in such a jumble that even the Vicar could not make head nor tail of them, though he tried hard.

IV

Whatever part of the world Tess came from, it was plain enough by the look of her—and more and more plain as she grew up into a tall and lanky girl, and then into a tall slim woman—that Suffolk was a long way off from the land where she was born.

Our Suffolk folk, for the most part, are shortish and thickset and fair and blue eyed. We men—being whipped about by the wind and weather, and the sea-salt tanned into us—lose our fairness early and go a bun-brown; but our women—having no salt spray in their faces, and only their just allowance of sunshine—have their blue eyes matched with the red and white cheeks that they were born with; and their hair, though sometimes it goes darkish, usually is a bright chestnut or a bright brown. Also, our women are steady-going and sensible; though I must say that now and then they are a bit hard to get along with: being given to doing their thinking slowly, and to being mighty fast set in their own notions when once they have made their minds up—the same as we men. As for Tess—with her black eyes and her black hair, and her face all a cream white with not a touch of red in it—she was like none of them; and she could think more out-of-the-way things and be more sorts of a girl in five minutes than any Suffolk lass that ever I came across could think or be in a whole year!

Tess was unlike our girls in another matter: she had a mighty hot spit-fire temper of her own. Our girls, the same as our men, are easy-going and anger slowly; but when they do anger they are glowing hot to their very finger-tips, and a long while it takes them to cool off. But Tess would blaze up all in a minute—and as often as not with no real reason for it—and be for a while such an out-and-out little fury that she would send everything scudding before her; and then would pull up suddenly in the thick of it, and seem to forget all about it, and like enough laugh at the people around her looking scared! Somehow, though, it was seldom that she let me have a turn of her tantrums; and when she did they'd be over in no time, and she'd have her arms around me and be begging me to kiss her and to tell her that I didn't mind. I suppose that she was that way with me because for my part—having from the very first so loved her that quarreling with her was clean impossible—I used just to stand and stare at her in her passions; and like enough be showing by the look in my eyes the puzzled sorrow that I was feeling in my inside. As to answering her anger with my anger, it never once crossed my mind.

With John Heath things went differently. He would go ugly when she flew out at him—and would keep his anger by him after hers long was over and done with, and would show it by putting some hurt upon her in a dirty way. A good many thrashings I gave John Heath, at one time or another, for that sort of thing; and the greatest piece of unreasonableness that Tess ever put on me, which is saying much for it, was on that score: she being then ten years old, or thereabouts, and John and I well turned of sixteen.

Some trick that he played on her—I don't know what it was—set her in a rage against him, and he made her worse by laughing at her, and she ended by throwing sand in his eyes. Then his anger got up, and he caught her—being twice the size of her—and boxed her ears. I came along just then, and I can see the look of her now. She was not crying, as any ordinary child would have been—John having meant to hurt her, and hit hard. She was standing straight in front of him with her little hands gripped into fists as if she meant to fight him, that cream white face of hers gone a real dead white, a perfect blaze of passion in her big black eyes. In another second or so she'd have been flying at him if I'd given her the chance. But I didn't—I sailed right in and myself gave him what he needed; and when I had finished with him I had so well blackened the two eyes of him that he forgot about the sand. But after it all was over, so far from being obliged to me, what did Tess do but fall to crying because I'd hurt him, and to saying that he'd only given her what she deserved! For a week and more she would not speak to me, and all that time she was trotting about sorrowfully at John's heels. It seemed as though all of a sudden she had got to loving him because he had played the man and the master to her; and I'm sure that his love for her had its beginning then too.

John's folks and my folks, as I have said, lived up at the north end of the village, a bit apart, and that made us three keep most together while we were little; but Tess never had much to do with the other children, even when she got big enough to be with them at school. They did not get along with her, being puzzled by her whims and fancies and set against her by her spit-fire ways. And she did not get along with them because she was quick about everything and all of them were slow. When she began to grow up, though, matters changed a good deal. The boys—she being like nobody else in the village—picked her out to make love to, and that set the girls by the ears. Tess liked the love-making a deal more than I liked her to like it; and she didn't mind what the girls said to her because her wits were nimbler than their wits and she always could give them better than they could send.

So things went while the years went till Tess was turned of seventeen, and was shot up into a tall slim woman in all ways so beautiful as to be, I do believe, the most beautiful woman that God ever made. And then it was that Grace Gryce, damn her for it, found a whip that served to lash her; and so cruel a whip that she was near to lashing the life out of her with it at a single blow.

V

According to our Suffolk notions, Grace Gryce was a beauty: being strongly set up and full built and well rounded, with cheeks as red as strawberries, and blue eyes that for any good looking man had a smile in them, and over all a head of bright-brown hair. Had Tess been out of the way she'd have had things all as she wanted them, not another girl in the village for looks coming near her; and so it was only human nature, I suppose, that she hated Tess for crossing her—making her always go second, and a bad second, with the men.

It was about John Heath, though, that the heart of the matter was. All the village knew that Grace fancied him, and that he half fancied her—and would have fancied her altogether had Tess been out of the way. Making up his mind between them—John always was a thick thinker—did not seem to come easy to him. The whims and the ways of Tess—that made a dozen different sorts of girl of her in five minutes—seemed to set him off from her a-most as much as they set him on: being a sort of puzzle, I'm free to say, that other men beside John couldn't well understand. With Grace it was different. She might blow hot or she might blow cold with him; or she might show her temper—she had a-plenty of it—and give him the rough side of her tongue: but what she meant and what she wanted always was plain and clear. To be sure, this is only my guess why he hung in the wind between them. Maybe he set too little store on Tess's love because it came to him too easily; maybe he thought that by seeming to love her lightly he best could hold her fast.

Hold her fast he did, and that is certain. In spite of all her whimsies, he had her love; and it was his, as I have said, from the time when he man-mastered her by boxing the little ears of her—she being only ten years old. Always after that, even when she was at her sauciest and her airiest, he had only to speak short and sharp to her and she'd come to heel to him like a dog. Sometimes, seeing her taking orders from him that way was close to setting me wild: I having my whole heart fixed on her, and ready to give the very hands of me to have from her the half of what she gave him. Not but what she loved me too, in her own fashion, and dearly. She showed that by the way that she used to come to me in all her little hurts and troubles; and the sweetness and the comfortingness of her to me and to my mother always, but most when my poor father was drowned, was beyond any words that I have to put it in. But my pain was that the love which she had for me was of the same sort that she had for my mother—and I was not wanting from her love of that kind. And so it cut to the quick of me—I who would have kissed her shoe-soles—to see her so ready always to be meek and humble at a word from John. There were times, and a good many of them—seeing her so dog-faithful to him, and he almost as careless of her as if she had been no more than a dog to him—that I saw red as I looked at him, and got burning hot in the insides of me, and was as close to murdering him as I well could be and he still go on alive.

Like enough Grace Gryce—being of the same stock that I was, and made much as I was—had the same feeling for Tess that I had for John; and Grace, being a woman, had nothing to stop her from murdering Tess in a woman's way. She would have done it sooner had her wits been quicker. Time and again they had had their word-fights together, and Tess always getting the better of her because Grace's wits, like the rest of her, were heavy and slow.

It was down by the boats, under the Gun Hill, that they fought the round out in which Grace drew blood at last. A lot of the girls were together there and Tess, for a wonder, happened to be with them. They all were saying to her what hard things they could think of; and she, in her quick way, was hitting back at them and scoring off them all. Poor sort of stuff it was that they were giving her: calling her "Miss Fine-Airs" and "Miss Maypole," and scorning the black eyes and the pale face of her, and girding at her the best they could because in no way was she like themselves.

"It's a pity I'm so many kinds of ugliness!" says Tess in her saucy way, and making it worse by laughing. "It's a true pity that I'm not pretty, like all the rest of you, and so am left lonely. If only I'd some of your good looks, you see, I might have, as the rest of you have, a lot of men at my heels."

That was a shot that hit all of them, but it hit Grace the hardest and she answered it. "It's better," said she, "to go your whole life without a man at your heels than it is to spend your whole life dog-tagging at the heels of a man."

The girls laughed at that, knowing well what Grace was driving at. But Tess was ready with her answer and whipped back with it: "Well, it's better to tag at a man's heels and he pleased with it than it is to want to tag there and he not letting you—liking a may-pole, maybe, better than a butter-tub, and caring more, maybe, for grace by nature than for Grace by name."

That turned the joke—only it was no joke—on Grace again; and as the girls had not much more liking for her than they had for Tess, seeing that she spoiled what few man-chances Tess left them, they laughed at her as hard as they could laugh.

Grace's slow anger had been getting hotter and hotter in her. That shot of Tess's, and the girls all laughing at her, brought it to a boil.

"Who be'st thou, to open thy ugly mouth to me?" she jerked out, with a squeak in her voice and her blue eyes blazing. "Who be'st thou, anyway? Who knows the father or the mother of thee? Who knows what foul folk in what foul land bore thee? Dog-tag thou may'st, but—mark my words—naught will come of it: because thou'rt not fit for John Heath or for any other honest man to have dealings with—thou rotten upcast of the sea!"

Tess was holding her head high and was scornful-looking when this speech began; but the ending of it, so Mary Benacre told my mother, seemed like a knife in her heart. Her face went a sort of a pasty white, so Mary said; and she seemed to choke, somehow, and put her hand up to her throat in a fluttering kind of way as if her throat hurt her. And then she sort of staggered, and made a grab at the boat she was standing by and leaned against it—looking, so Mary said, as if she was like to die.

"Mayhap now thou'lt keep quiet a bit," Grace said, with her hands on her fat hips and her elbows out; and with that, and a flounce at her, turned away. The other girls, all except Mary, went along with Grace; but not talking, and most of them scared-looking: feeling, like enough, as men would feel standing by at the end of a knife-fight, when one man is down with a cut that has done for him and there is a smell of blood in the air.

Mary staid behind—she was a good sort, was Mary Benacre—and went to Tess and tried to comfort her. Tess didn't answer her, but just looked at her with a pitiful sort of stare out of her black eyes that Mary said was like the look of some poor dumb thing that had no other way of telling how bad its hurt was. And then, rousing herself up, Tess pushed Mary away from her and started for home on a run. Mary did not follow her, but later on she came and told my mother just what had happened and gave her Grace Gryce's words.

It was well that Mary came, that way, and told a clear story about it all. What Tess told—when she came flying into the house and caught my mother around the neck and put her poor head on my mother's breast and went off into a passion of crying there—was such a muddle that my mother knew only that Grace Gryce had said something to her that was wickedly cruel. Tess cried and cried, as if she'd cry the very life out of her; and kept sobbing out that she was a sea upcast, and a nobody's daughter, and that the sea would have done better by her had it drowned her, and that she hoped she'd die soon and be forgotten—until she drove my mother almost wild.

And so it went for a long while with her, my mother petting her and crying over her, until at last—the feel, I suppose, of my mother's warm love for her getting into her poor hurt heart and comforting her—she began to quiet down. Then my mother got her to bed—she was as weak as water—and made a pot of bone-set tea for her; and pretty soon after she'd drunk a cup or two of it she dropped off to sleep. She still was sleeping when Mary Benacre came and told the whole story; and so stirred up my mother's anger—and she was a very gentle-natured woman, my mother was—that it was all she could do, she said afterwards, not to go straight off to Grace Gryce and give her a beating with her own hands.

VI

When Tess came to breakfast the next morning it gave me a real turn to look at her. Somehow, at a single jump, she seemed to have changed from a girl to a woman—and to an old woman at that. Suddenly she had got to be all withered like, and the airs that she used to give herself and all the pretty ways of her were gone. She just moped in a chair in a corner—she who'd never been quiet for five minutes together, any more than a bird—with a far-away look in her beautiful eyes, and the glint of tears in them. Sorrow had got into the very bones of her. "Dost think I really am come of such foul folk that I'm not fit for honest company?" she asked my mother—and if she asked that question once that morning she asked it a dozen times.

In a way, of course, she had known what she was all her life long. "My sea-baby" was my mother's pet name for her at the first; and by that pet-name, when most tender with her, my mother called her till the last. How she had come to us, how I had found her where the waves had left her and had carried her home in my little tired arms, she had been told over and over again. Sometimes she used to make up stories about herself in her light-fancied way: telling us that she was a great lady of Spain, and that some fine morning the great Spanish lord her father would come to Southwold by some chance or other, and would know her by the chain and the locket, and would take her home with him and marry her to a duke—or to a prince, even—in her own land. We'd see that she'd be pretending to herself while she told them to us that these stories were true, and I think that she did half believe in them. But it was not real believing that she had in them; it was the sort of believing that you have in things in dreams. Her love was given to my mother and to my father—and to me, too, though not in the way that I wanted it—and we were the true kinsfolk of her heart. On our side, we all so loved her, and made her feel so truly that she was our very own, that the thought of her being a nobody's child never had a chance to get into her mind. And her own fancies about herself—always that her own dream people were great people in the dream land where they lived—kept her from seeing the other chance of the matter: that they as well might be mean people, who would put shame on her should ever she come to know who they were. Into her head that cruel thought never got until Grace Gryce put it there; and put there with it the crueller thought that her being a nobody's child was what made John stand off from her, he thinking her not fit to be his wife.

Tess was fearing, maybe, that even if John had not had that feeling about her he was like to have it after Grace had set him in the way of it. And maybe she was thinking, too, that if she had been hurt for the sake of him, and so deserved loving pity from him, it was Grace who for the sake of him had done the hurting—and that it was Grace who had won. Our girls are best pleased with the lover who fights to a finish some other man in love with them and well thrashes him. Tess may have fancied that John would take it that way; and so end by settling that Grace, having the most fire and fight in her, was the most to his mind. But what really came of it all with John, as far as I can make out, was that his getting them fairly set the one against the other cleared his thick wits up and brought him to a choice.

And so, being in every way sorrowful, Tess was like a dead girl that day; and my heart was just breaking for her. When dinner time came she roused up a bit and helped my mother, as she always did—though my mother wanted her to keep resting—and tried in a pitiful sort of way to talk a little and to pretend that she was not in bitter pain; but those pretty feet of hers, so light always, dragged after her in her walking, and she was all wizened-looking, and there were black marks under her beautiful sorrowing eyes. My mother helped to make talk with her, though my mother was wiping her own tears away when she got the chance; but as for me, I was tongue-tied by the hurt and the anger in me and could not say a word. What I was thinking was, how glad I'd be to wring Grace Gryce's neck for her if only she was a man!

After dinner I went out to a bench in front of our house, but a bit away from it, and sat there trying to comfort myself with a pipe—and not finding much even in a pipe to comfort me—until the sun, all yellow, began to drop down toward the Gun Hill into a bad looking yellow sky. All the while I had the tail of my eye bearing on our door, and at last I saw Tess come out of it. She took a quick look at the back of me, sitting quiet there; and then, I not turning toward her, off she walked along the edge of the cliff to the northward. At first I didn't know what to do—thinking that if she wanted to be alone I ought to leave her to her loneliness—and I sat on and smoked another pipe before I could make up my mind. But the longer I sat there the stronger my drawing was to go to her. What was hurting her most, as I well enough knew, was the thought of having neither kith nor kin for herself, along with the dread that even if she found her people they might only be a shame to her—and that was a hurt that having a husband would cure for her, seeing that she would get a new and a good rating in the world when she got her husband's name. And so, at last, I started after her to tell her all that was in the heart of me; and thinking more, and this is the truth, of what I could do to comfort her by taking the sting out of Grace Gryce's words than of how in that same way I could win my own happiness.

I walked on so far—across the dip in the land where the old river was, and up on the cliffs again—that I began to think she had turned about inland and so had gone that way home. But at last I came up with her, on the very top of Covehithe Ness.

She was sitting at the cliff-edge, bent forward a little with her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands; and as I came close to her I saw that she was crying in that quiet sort of way that people cry in when they have touched despair. I walked so softly on the grass that she did not hear my footsteps; but she was not put out when she looked up and saw me standing over her—by which I think, and am the happier for thinking it, that she had not gone there of set purpose to meet with John.

"Sit thee down here, George. I'm glad thou'rt come," she said, and she reached me her hand.

When I was on the grass beside her—she still keeping her hand in mine, as if the touch of something that loved her was a comfort to her—she had nothing to say for a bit, but just leaned her head against my shoulder and cried softly there.

The tide was out and a long stretch of the Barnard Bank lay bared below us, with here and there the black bones of some dead ship lying buried in them sticking up from the sands. Slicing deep in the bank was the Wreck Gat, with the last of the ebb running out through it from the Covehithe Channel and the undercut sides of it falling down into the water and melting away. At the edge of it was the sunken ship that had made it: the ship that had brought Tess to us from her birth-land beyond the seas. As I have said, no more of the wreck showed than her broken stern-post: a bit of black timber, all jagged with twisted iron bolts and weed-grown and barnacled, upstanding at one side of the channel from the water and not high out of it even at low tide. When the tide was in, and any sort of a sea was running, you stood a good chance of finding just where it was by having your boat stove on it: for then it did not show at all, except now and then in the hollow of the waves.

Tess was looking down on it, her head still resting on my shoulder, and after a while she said: "If only we could dig that ship up, George, we might find what would tell that I'm not come of foul folk, after all"—and then she began to cry again in the same silent sort of way. I couldn't get an answer for her—what she said hurt me so, and she crying on my shoulder, and I feeling the beating of her heart.

"It was good of thee, George," she went on again, presently, "to save the baby life of me; but it's a true truth thou'dst have done me more of a kindness hadst thou just thrown me back into the sea. I'd be glad to be there now, George. Down there under the water it would make no difference what sort of folk I come of. And I'd be resting there as I can't rest here—for down there my pain would be gone."

My throat was so choked up that I had hard work to get my words out of it, and when they did come they sounded queer. "Tess! Tess!" I said. "Thou'lt kill me dead talking that way. As if the like of thee could come of foul folk! A lord duke would be the least to be fit father to thee—and proud of thee he well might be! But what does it matter, Tess, what thy folk were who owned thee at the beginning? They gave thee to the sea's keeping—and the sea gave thee to me. By right of finding, thou'rt mine. It was I who found thee, down on the shingle there, and from the first minute that ever I laid eyes on thee I loved thee—and the only change in me has been that always I've loved thee more and more. Whether thy people were foul folk or fair folk is all one to me. It's thyself that I'm loving—and with every bit of the love that is in my heart. Let me make thee the wife of me, Tess—and then thou'lt have no need to fret about who thy forbears were for thou'lt have no more to do with them, being made a part of me and mine."

I talked at such a rate, when I did get set a-going, that my own words ran away with me; and I got the feeling that they ran away with Tess too. But when I had ended, and she lifted up her head from my shoulder and looked straight into the eyes of me, I knew by what her eyes had in them—before ever she said a word back to me—that what I wanted most in the whole world for myself I could not have.

It seemed to me an hour before she spoke, she all the time looking straight into my eyes and her own eyes full of tears. At last she did speak. "George," said she, "if I could be wife to thee, as thou'dst have me be, I'd go down on my knees and thank God! But it can't be, George. It can't be! I've set my heart."

There was no doubting what she said. In the sound of her voice there was something that seemed as much as her words to settle the matter for good and all. Whenever I am at a funeral and hear the reading of the burial service it brings back to me the sound of her voice that day. Only there is a promise of hope in the burial service—and that there was not for me in Tess's words.

"It's John that's between us?" I asked.

"Yes," she said, speaking slow, "it's John." She was quiet for a minute and then went on again, still speaking slow: "I don't understand it myself, George. Thou'rt a better-hearted man than he is, and I truly think I love him less than I do thee. But—but I love him in another way."

"Damn him!" said I.

That got out before I could stop it, but when it had got out I wasn't sorry. It told what I felt then—and it tells what I feel now. John's taking her from me was stealing, and nothing less. We were together when I found her, he and I; but I first saw her and I first touched her—and he gave me his share in her, though he had no real share in her, when he knew what my finding was. And so his taking her from me was stealing: and that is God's truth!

Tess said nothing back to me. She only looked at me sorrowful for a minute, and then looked down again at the bit of wreck on the sands. By the sigh she gave I knew pretty well what was in her mind.

I'd had my answer, and that was the end of it. "I'll be going now, Tess," I said; and I got up and she got up with me. I was not feeling steady on my legs, and like enough I had a queer look on me. As for Tess, she was near as white as a dead woman, though some of her whiteness may have come from the yellow sunshine on her out of the western sky. Up there on top of the Ness we still had the sun with us, though he was almost gone among the foul weather yellow clouds.

"Thou'lt try to forgive me, George," she said, speaking low, and her mouth sort of twitching.

"I love thee, Tess," I said; "and where there's love there can be no talk of forgiveness. But John has the hate of me, and I tell thee fairly I'll hurt him if I can!"

With that I left her—there on Covehithe Ness, over the very spot where the sea brought her to me—and went walking back along the cliff-edge: and not seeing anything clearly because I was thinking about John, and what I'd like to do to him, and there was a sort of red blur before my eyes.

After a while I turned and looked back. My eyes had cleared a bit, but what I saw made them red again. Tess was not alone on the Ness. John was with her. The two stood out strong in the last of the yellow sunshine against a cloud-bank on the far edge of the sky. I suppose that Tess being hurt that way for him brought John to his bearings—making him love her the more for sorrow's sake, and for anger's sake making him ready to throw Grace Gryce over. Like enough he had been watching for his chance to get to her, waiting till I was gone. Anyway, there he was—and I knew what he was saying to her as well as if I'd heard the words. It is no wonder that the blood got into my eyes again as I started back along the path. But I did not go far. Somehow I managed to pull myself together and turn again. What I had to settle with John Heath could be settled best when he and I were alone.

VII

When Tess came home to supper that night she was all changed again: her looks gay once more, and her step light, and a sort of flutter about her lips—as if she was wanting to smile and was trying not to—and a soft look in her eyes that I never had seen there, but knew the meaning of and found the worst of all.

I couldn't eat my supper; and got up presently and went out leaving it—my mother looking after me wondering—and walked up and down on the cliff-edge in the darkness with my heart all in a blaze of hate for John. For a good while I had been looking for what I knew was in the way of coming to me; but it was different, and worse, and hurt more than I had counted on, when at last it came. Out there in the darkness I staid until the night was well on—not wanting for a while to hear the sound of Tess's voice nor to lay eyes on her. Not until I was sure, by the lights being out in the house, that she'd gone to bed, did I go in again. My mother was waiting waking for me. She came to me in the dark and put her arms around me and kissed me; by which I knew that Tess had been telling her—and knew, too, she always having looked to the wedding of us, that her heart was sore along with mine. But I could not bear even her soft touch on the hurt that I had. I just kissed her back again and broke away from her and went to bed. And in the very early morning, not having slept much, I slipped out of the house before either she or Tess was stirring and down to my boat and so away to sea.

What I was after was to get some quiet time to myself that would steady me before I had things out with John. I was not clear in my mind how I meant to settle with him. I did know, though, that I meant to have some sort of a fair fight with him that would end in my killing him or in him killing me—and I knew that to tackle him with my head all in a buzz would be to throw too many chances his way. And so I got away in my boat, at the day-dawn, to the sea's quietness: where I could clear my head of the buzzing that was in it and put some sort of shape to my plans.

Had I been in my sober senses that morning I never should have gone away seaward at all. Backing up the promise of the yellow sunset of the night before, pink clouds were showing in the eastern sky as I started; and as I sailed on in loneliness—standing straight out from the land on a soft leading wind from the south-west westerly—the pink turned to a pale red and then to a deep red, and at last the sun came up out of the water a great ball of fire. The look of the sea, too, all in an oily bubble, and the set of the ground-swell, told me plain enough—even without the sunrise fairly shouting it in the ears of me—that a change of wind was coming before mid-day, and that pretty soon after the wind shifted it would be blowing a gale.

I will say this, though: If I'd missed seeing the red sunrise—and all the more if I'd been full of happiness and my wits gone a wool-gathering—I might have thought from the look and the feel of the water, and from the set of the high clouds, that the wind would not blow to hurt anything for a good twelve hours. That much I'll say by way of excuse for John. Like enough he slept late that morning—through lying awake the night before thinking what he'd be likely to think—and so missed seeing the sun's warning. When he did get away in his boat it was well past eight o'clock; and there was no man on the beach when he started, so they told me, to counsel him. And, all being said, even a good sailor—and that John was—starting off as he was to buy a wedding-ring might not look as sharp as he ought to look at the sea and at the sky.

As to my own sailing seaward—I seeing the storm-signals and knowing the meaning of them—I have no more to say than that I was hot for a fight with anything that morning, and didn't care much what I had it with or how it came. Anybody who knows how to sail a boat, and to sail one well, knows what joy there is in getting the better of foul winds and rough seas for the mere fun of the thing; but there is still more joy in a tussle of that sort when you are in a towering rage. Then you are ready to push the fight farther by taking more and bigger death-chances: since a man in bitter anger—at least in such bitter anger as I was in then—does not care much whether he pulls through safely or gets drowned. And so I went on my course seaward, on that soft wind blowing more and more lazily, until the coast line was lost in the water behind me: knowing well enough, and glad to have it that way, that the wind would lull and lull until it failed me, and that then I would get a blow out of the northeast that would give me all the fight I wanted, and perhaps a bit to spare!

But because I meant my fight to be a good one, and meant to win it, I got myself ready for it. When the wind did fail—the sun was put out by that time, and from high up in the northeast the scud was flying over me—I took in and snugged away everything but my mainsail, and put a double reef in that with the reef-points knotted to hold. Then I waited, drifting south a little—the flood having made half an hour before, and the set of the ebb taking me that way.

I did not have to wait long. Out of the mist, banked thick to the north-eastward, came the moaning that a strong wind makes when it's rushing down on you; then from under the mist swept out a dark riffle that broke the oily bubble of the water and put life into it; and then the wind got to me with a bang. There was more of it than I had counted on having at the first, showing that the gale behind it was a strong one and coming down fast; but I had the nose of my boat pointed up to meet it, and with no more than a bit of a rattle I got away close-hauled. There was no going back to Southwold, of course. What I was heading for was the Pakefield Gat into the Stanford Channel, and so to the harbour at Lowestoft; and I pretty well knew from the first that no matter how close I bit into the wind—and my boat was a weatherly one—I had my work cut out for me if I meant to keep from going to leeward of the Pakefield Gat in the gale that was coming on.

Go to leeward I did, and badly. When I raised the coast again, and a lift of the mist gave me my bearings, I saw that Kessingland tower was my landfall. As to working up from there to the Pakefield Gat—the edge of the gale by that time being fairly on me—I knew that it was clean impossible. I still had two chances left—one being to cross the Barnard by the Wreck Gat, and the other to round into Covehithe Channel across the tail of the bank. To the first of these the wind would help me; but I knew that even with the wind's help it would be ticklish work trying to squeeze through that narrow place at the half ebb—when the strong outset of the current would be meeting the inpour of the storm-driven sea. It would be better, so I settled after a minute's thinking, to pass that chance and take the other—which would be a fairly sure one, though a close one too. And so I wore around—with a bad wallow in the trough of the sea that set everything to shaking for a minute—and got on my new course pretty well on the wind.

Just as I was making ready for wearing, and so had my hands full, I glimpsed the sail of a boat in the mist up to windward; and when I was come about she was abeam to leeward, showing her high weather side to me, not twenty yards away. Then I saw that it was John Heath's boat, and that John was standing up alone in her at the helm. Why the fool had not staid safe in Lowestoft harbour, God only knows. But it's only fair to him, again, to say that he must have got away from Lowestoft a good while before the wind shifted; and like enough he would have worked down to Southwold, and got his boat safe beached there before trouble came, if the calm had not caught him sooner than it did me—he being all the time close under the land.

VIII

Some of my rage had gone out of me in my fight to windward in the gale's teeth; but when I saw John close by me there it all came back to me. For half a minute the thought was in my head to run him down and sink him—and I had the wind of him and could have done it. Even in my rage, though, I could not play a coward trick like that on him; and before I could make any other plan up he set me in the way of one himself.

"I'm making for the Wreck Gat," he sung out. "Give me a lead in, George—'tis better known to thee than to me."

Had I stopped to think about it, his asking me to lead him in would have been a puzzle to me, he being just as good a sailor as I was and just as well knowing every twist of the sea and the sands. But I didn't stop to think about the queerness of what he wanted—why he was for making things double safe by my leading him is clear enough to me now—because my wits were at work at something else.

While the words were coming out of his mouth—it all was in my head like a flash—I saw my way to settling with him, and to settling fair. He was crazy to want to try for it through the Wreck Gat on the half tide, with the run of the ebb meeting the onset of the breakers and a whole gale blowing. But his being crazy that way was his look out, not mine. I'd give him the lead in that he wanted—asking him to take nothing that I didn't take first myself, and giving him a better chance than I had because I'd be setting the course for him and he'd have only to follow on. That either of us would pull through would be as it might be. As to my own chance, such as it was, I was ready for it: knowing that I would be no worse off dead with him than I was living with him—and a long sight better off if I put him in the way of the drowning that would finish him, and yet myself won through alive.

That was what got into my head like a flash while he was hailing me, and mighty pleased I was with it. "Follow on," I sung out. "I'll give thee a lead." And to myself I was saying: "Yes, a lead to hell!"

"All right," he sung out back to me—and let his boat fall off a bit that I might draw ahead of him. As he dropped astern, and the uptilt of his weather rail no longer hid the inside of his boat from me, I saw that there was a biggish bunch of something covered with a tarpaulin' in the stern sheets close by his feet. But I gave no thought to it: all my thought being fixed on what was ahead of me and him in the next half hour. I was glad that we had to wait a little. Every minute of waiting meant more wind, and so a bigger fight in the Wreck Gat between the out-running current and the in-running sea. I had a feeling in my bones that I would pull through and that he wouldn't, and I was keen to see the smash of him as his boat took the sands. After that smash came, the rest of his life could be counted in minutes and seconds—as he floundered and drowned in that wild tumble of sand-thickened waves. So I'd have done with him and be quit of him; and would have a good show—if I didn't drown along with him—for winning Tess for my own. If I did drown with him, or if—not being drowned—Tess would have none of me, there still would be this much to the good: I'd have served him out for crossing me in my deep heart-wish, and I'd have made certain that he and she never could come together in this world alive.

All that I was thinking as I stood on ahead of him, bucketing through the waves that every minute were heavier with the churned up sand. And I also was thinking, and I remember laughing as the thought came to me, that there was a sort of rightness in the way things were working out with us—seeing that the ship that had brought me my Tess, and the sea that had given her to me, together were making the death-trap for the man who had stolen away from me her love.

The wind was well up to a gale as we drove on together, me leading him by a half dozen boats' lengths, and from all along to leeward of us came to us through the mist a sort of a groaning roar as the breakers went banging and grinding on the Barnard Bank. Nothing but having the wind and the sea both with us, when we stood in for the gat, saved us from foundering; and yet that same also put us in peril of it, because we had a wide open chance of being pooped by the great following waves which came hanging over and dragging at our sterns.

The mist thinned as we got closer in shoreward, showing me the sand-heavy surf waiting for its chance to scour the life out of us; but also showing me Covehithe Ness, and Covehithe church tower off to the left of it, and so giving me the points that I wanted to steer by. As for the look of the Wreck Gat, when we opened it, the waves blustered over it so big, and were all in such a whirl and a fury with the current meeting them, that only a crazy man—as I have said—ever would have tried for it. Just about crazy I then was, and the look of it suited me. In that sea the narrow channel was so lashed by the breakers running off from the sands to windward of it that there was no sign of a cleft anywhere. No matter how we steered, getting through it would be just hit or miss with us—and with all my heart and soul I hoped that it would be hit for me and miss for John.

To make in, I had to bear up a little; and getting the wind by even that little abeam gave my boat a send to leeward that was near to doing for me. I was glad of it, though; because I knew that John would get that same send in the wake of me—and with more chance of its finishing him, his boat being a deal less weatherly than mine. And so—as I grazed the sands, and after the graze went on safe again—my heart was light with the thought that I'd got the better of him at last.

There was no looking back, though, to see what had gone with him. All my eyes were needed for my steering. Everywhere about me the sand-heavy water was hugely rising in a great roar and tumble; and as for the sands under it, and there the worst danger was, it was just good luck or bad luck about striking them—and that was all that you could say. Twice I felt a jar under me as the boat went deep in the sea-trough; but I did not strike hard enough to hurt me, and I lifted again so quick that I did not broach-to. And then, when I thought that I was fairly through, and had safe water right ahead of me, there came a bang on the boat's side—as the sea-trough took me down again—that near stove me: and right at the side of me, so close that I could have touched it as I lay for a second there in the deep wave-hollow, was the stern-post of Tess's sand-bedded ship rising black out of the scum and foam. One foot farther to leeward and the jagged iron of it would have had me past praying for. But it did no harm to me—and as the water covered it again I shot on beyond it into what seemed to me, after the sea I'd hammered through, almost a mill-pond on the lee side of the bank.

Then I could use my eyes to look behind me: and what I saw will stay fixed in them till the copper pennies cover them and I see with them no more.

In spite of his send to leeward at the start, John had come through after me without taking the ground; but he had gone farther to leeward than I had, and so was set—when smooth water lay close ahead of him—fairly in death's way. As I looked back I saw only the bow of his boat, with the scrap of sail above it, riding on the top of an oncoming wave. Then the boat tilted forward, and came tearing down the wave-front at a slant toward me, and I saw the whole length of her: and what burned my eyes out was seeing Tess there, standing brave and steady, the two hands of her gripping fast the mast.

It was not much more than a second that I had to look at her. With a sharp sound of wood splintering, that I heard above the noise that the sea was making, the boat struck fair and full on that iron set timber—and then the wave that had sent her there was playing with the scattered bits of her, and the sand-heavy breakers were tumbling about the bodies of the two that she had borne.

If the sea meant to give me back my dead Tess again, I knew where I should find her—and there I did find her. On the shingle under Covehithe Ness she was lying: come to me there at the last, as she came to me there at the first, a sea upcast. That last time she was all mine. There was no John left living to steal her away from me. And if she was not mine as I wanted her, at least she never was his at all. In that far I had my will and way over him, and for that much I am glad.

And so, she being all my own, home along the beach for the second time I carried her. It was a wonder to me, as she lay in my arms, how light she was—and she so tall!

THE END