In the afternoon, Mark Henry Garton, her mother’s brother, rode over from Danesacre. He was many years older than his sister, a man of fifty odd, with the face of a Flemish devil, and a habit of speech so full of the furies and fancies of his mind that few of his sentences reached an appointed end. He stuck his fingers into the pockets of his coat and strode up and down the dining-room while his sister rated him for cheating her over the sale of her shares. Mary, withdrawn into the farthest corner of the window-seat, listened attentively.
“Eh,” said Mark Henry, addressing his sister. “Eh, you beauty. Cheated you, did I? You roll of Spanish cloth, you. You’re devilish suspicious. Do you know I’ve robbed my own pocket to pay you out at a good price? And what shall I get from you when I’m cleaned out? Not a penny: women are always bad parters. Do you know what’s happening in London? I’ll be bound you don’t. You know nothing but shamelessness and junketing. You needn’t think you’re not the talk of Danesacre. You are. Why, there was a verse cut last night on the gates of my own house about you that would make you blush, if you could blush.”
“And what,” Charlotte asked sullenly, “have happenings in London to do with my money?” She pulled at the tassels of the curtain. The negligent curve of her tall body in its crimson silk drew her daughter’s eyes. Mary thought her mother the most beautiful of creatures.
“London is ruining me,” cried Mark Henry. He grasped the folds of an ample belly. “I’m living on my own fat. I’m crushed. I’m done for. Did you ever hear of the Navigation Code? Did you ever hear it was to be repealed? Did you ever hear that British bottoms were to be crowded off the seas by all the dirty scows that any frog-eating, tobacco-chewing scoundrel likes to send us? I’ll be bound you did not. Mark my words. In five years’ time there’ll not be a British-built ship afloat. Have I cheated you? Have I pauperised myself for your sake? Tell me that. Be a sensible girl now, and I’ll buy you something good next time I go to London. Something that’ll pawn for a couple of hundred when you need it, as you soon will do if you go on living in this menagerie. Why, the place smells like the monkey house at Brighton. I met a young gazebo in the hall just now who asked me for advice about some shares he was thinking of buying. ’Don’t touch ’em,’ I said. ’You go away and spend your bit of money on some nice little woman who’ll be good to you and as kind as kisses while the money lasts. You’ll make her happy and yourself happy, and that’s better than making some greasy-faced promoter happy, which is all you’ll do if you go trying to make money out of shares.’ If you can’t be clever be comfortable, that’s what I say.”
The man was half buffoon and half blackguard, and his sister knew that she was helpless in his hands, since Richard Hansyke could no more easily stoop to question his brother-in-law about money than make a penny himself. So she shrugged her fine shoulders and asked Mark Henry to stay to dinner.
He agreed to stay, and advancing on Mary picked her up in one hand, opened the lid of the window-seat with the other, and dropped her in. Then he shut the lid, leaving a crack to which he set his small twinkling eyes, while Mary shrieked with terror, and her mother ordered him to let the child out at once. Released, Mary took the opportunity of her mother’s caresses to ask if she might come down to the drawing-room after dinner.
“Children and little pigs go to bed at seven,” Mark Henry said, and chanted: “Little pigs lie with their tails curled up.”
“You can come if you like,” Charlotte said carelessly, and at ten o’clock Mary presented herself in the drawing-room. It was empty. She thereupon made her way to the dining-room, taking a circuitous route through the window and across the lawn, to escape Miss Flora, waiting mournfully on the stairs, ready to pounce on her charge when she crossed the hall. Miss Flora suffered agonies of fear for Mary’s soul in this house of wickedness, and prayed over the little girl for hours, kneeling stiffly by Mary’s side in the schoolroom. Mary was impressed by the prayers. She found it hard not to promise to keep out of the Devil’s way. That she did not promise was due partly to an obstinacy that rejected Miss Flora’s tears and partly to curiosity.
Entering by the dining-room window, she slipped unobserved into a corner of the room, avoiding the window-seats. Her father, supporting his thin, fastidious face on his hands, was talking to Mark Henry Garton. A decanter stood between them, and when it emptied, another appeared like a conjuring trick, while Mary was not looking. The other gentlemen at the table were also much occupied with decanters and bottles, but whereas her father’s face was pale, theirs were all in varying shades of crimson deepening to the colour of lustrous blue plums. There were gaps in the company at the table, and a few of the guests stood grouped round Mary’s mother, on the stone flags of the empty fireplace. Charlotte was in white, gleaming and sparkling, and leaning towards a tall gentleman with a fine, reddish beard. Mary studied his legs, frowning. They were not checked, though they were well-shaped and very long. Could this be the same gentleman? Mary had seen only legs in the morning’s war, but those at an intimate moment. She thought she would have known them again in their checks. It was puzzling. She sighed, and gave the problem up when a burst of song at the far end of the table distracted her from it.
The gentleman who was singing had a loud rich voice that gave Mary an inexplicable pleasure. Thrills ran up and down her small body, and she balanced herself on one foot, with her head thrown back in unconscious imitation of the singer.
“We’ll sport and be free with Moll, Betty and Dolly,
Have oysters and lobsters to cure melancholy:
Fish dinners will make a man spring like a flea,
Dame Venus, Love’s lady,
Was born of the sea.”
Mary forgot her caution and moved into the light, stamping her feet and shouting. A moment later, without knowing how, she found herself on her father’s knee. He dipped small pieces of bread in his glass and gave them to her. The drops of wine ran down his fingers and on to the shining damask. Absently he went on feeding her with sops, while Mary leaned back in his arms, conscious of a warmth that spread through her limbs, making her feel at once light and swollen. Her uncle’s face advanced and receded, like a comic fire-balloon. The voice of the singer rolled over her in waves of sound. “Will be damnably mouldly a hundred years hence,” he roared. Mary wept, and opened her mouth for another sop.
A long time after that she was conscious of her uncle’s face very close to hers. He seemed to be expostulating with her father, who stood up and laid Mary in Mark Henry’s arms, where she tried to struggle, but found herself unexpectedly lax. Then she was near her mother, to whom her father was speaking with such gravity and politeness that Mary was surprised to see her mother’s face turn scarlet. After that she was in the cool well of the stairs, still in her uncle’s arms, with her mother swaying in front, like a pillar of smoke, gleaming warmly in the candle-glow at the head of the stairs. Her mother was laughing, Miss Flora was sniffing urgently, and Mark Henry’s voice rumbled over all of them in an incomprehensible threnody of his own. She was alone with Miss Flora, whose sniff had become a continuous whistling like the sound of the wind in the granary, trying to tell the governess that her mother was Dame Venus, Love’s lady. Miss Flora would not listen. . . .
Much later that night—Mary always insisted that it was the same night, but it was probably the next—Mary roused to find her room filled with receding circles of light, in the centre of which stood her mother, wrapped in a dark coat. The light came from the candle in her mother’s hand. Seeing Mary awake, Charlotte Hansyke put the candle down and took the little girl in her arms.
“I’m going away,” she whispered, “but I’ll come back. You’ll be good, and mind the sanctified Miss Flora, and don’t forget me while I’m gone.”
Mary understood nothing except that misfortune had overtaken her.
“Don’t go. Why are you going?”
Charlotte Hansyke left hold of the child to fling her arms wide open.
“I’m dull,” she s
aid. “I’m dull. The tedious house. The useless, sneering man he is. I’m going to London, to friends. Listen, Mary, don’t cry, and I’ll come back for you. You shall sit in a box and hear the most divine music in the world. Mario, Mario in Meyerbeer. Oh, marvellous! The streets are lighted up at night as if the town were going to a dance. Think of it, Mary. That’s life. There’s nothing here.”
“Take me now.”
Charlotte stood up, disentangling her coat from the hands that clutched it. “You’re too little. I’ll come back for you.” Stooping again, she caught Mary into a warm smothering embrace against her breast, and laying her quickly down, went away. “Good-bye,” she called softly from the door. “Good-bye. I’ll come back. Good-bye.”
Mary lay silent in her bed, crushed by this stroke. . . .
In the morning she awoke to a heavy sense of desolation and remembered that her mother was gone. A faint hope that the thing was a dream sent her, half-dressed and trembling, to her mother’s door. The disorder there and the maid’s face as she bent over half-emptied drawers and boxes told her the truth before the girl spoke. Her mother had left her.
A week later, she accompanied Miss Flora to Danesacre and her uncle’s house, and life began again.
3
Mark Henry Garton’s house was built just above his own shipyard. A gate in the wall of his garden gave on to a path that led directly across a short grassy slope into the shipyard itself. All day long the sounds of the yard came up to the house, and from the rounded windows of the big sitting-room Mary could watch the progress of the boat on the stocks and the traffic of the upper harbour. The little town of Danesacre is built in a cleft of the cliffs, where the brown narrow Danesbeck, running down the valley from the moors, widens as it reaches the sea into a natural harbour with a muddy shelving floor. Garton’s Yard was on the east side of the town, in a basin of the upper harbour. Beyond it, up the valley, the hillside was wooded. Towards the sea, the narrow cobbled streets of cliff-fast houses stretched away from the Yard, and above them, a landmark for eight centuries of sailors, the church gripped the windy cliff-top. The stones outside its walls were grey and wrinkled like the sea itself and bore old names, and names of men who were lost at sea or, stricken in strange lands, saw with dying eyes the little town in the fold of the hills and the shore at home. Mary Hansyke was moor-bred, and yet to the end of her days it seemed to her that this was her home. Its little houses were thoughts that she had had, and its cobbled streets, steep steps and narrow ghauts were the tender gestures of a mother.
She came to Danesacre in February and the harbour was filled with the masts of sailing ships that had been laid up for the winter and were now preparing for sea. The graving-docks on both sides of the river were full, and when Mary Hansyke walked with Miss Flora along Harbour Street towards the new bridge that crossed to the west and fashionable side of the town, she passed under bowsprits and jib-booms stretching right across the street from vessels moored in the east-side docks. All day long from six o’clock to six o’clock work went on in the ships, and the Town Hall bell rang when it began and again when it left off. Sails were bent. Watertanks filled. Old cattle, driven in from the surrounding villages, were killed, salted, and stored away. Crowds of sailor lads in blue jerseys and billowing trousers, and fair-haired apprentices, who all winter had been living and studying in attics and kitchens of masters’ houses, thronged the streets, and from Garton’s Yard, as she listened, fragments of song came floating up to her enchanted ears, with the sound of calking hammers and the shouts of the lightermen loading ballast on to the ships going out light to their loading ports.
“Red-nosed men frequent the ale-’ouse
Oh, ho, yes,—oho.
Sandy-’aired men are always jealous
A hundred years ago.”
Mark Henry Garton had ten frigate-built vessels that traded to India and China. These were licensed India-men carrying guns to use against the pirates in the China seas, strong roomy boats, taking passengers as well as cargo. Their departure roused Mary to a pitch of excitement that excluded every other thought. She abandoned her studies, heard Miss Flora’s exhortations, threats and groans with indifference. The most truthful of children, she promised Mark Henry to work for two hours, and slipped away as soon as his back was turned. Perched on a shelving grassy ledge below the garden wall, she watched the men running round the capstan to bring up the anchor of a ship lying out in the harbour. The wind blew cold across the steely ripples of the water and brought with it the intoxicating music of men’s voices. She could not hear all the words, though she listened with her thin little body braced forward and her hands clasped in a rigor of attention.
“The ship went sailing out over the bar,
O Rio! O Rio! . . .
Turn away, love, away,
Away down the Rio. . . .
Then fare you well, my bonny young gel,
We’re bound for the Rio Grande.”
A single voice, like bells ringing on a sunny morning, came to her on the wind. She sat stiffly, a stolid little girl in a short jacket, with unbound hair. Only her eyes betrayed her. “Were you ever in Rio Grande?” Back came the swelling chorus. “Away you Rio.” Mary Hansyke from a worshipper became a child, and whooped with delight. Her ankle was grasped from below, and, looking down, she saw the grinning faces of her two boy cousins. She wrenched and kicked herself free, and rather than endure their jeers, ran back to the house, scarlet with mortification and disappointed rage.
The two young Lings were not, speaking by the table, her real cousins. They were the sons of John Ling, who was only the stepbrother of Charlotte and Mark Henry Garton. Their parents were dead, drowned at sea, and George and Rupert Ling, aged twelve and ten, lived with their half-uncle and were expected to succeed him at the Yard. Mark Henry had never married and had no other heir, though sporadic reproductions of his peculiar cast of face appeared in houses up and down Harbour Street. The Ling boys were at school, when they were not at home teasing Mary. She hated them. They were big clumsy lads, and Mary was small for her age, quick-tongued, light on her feet, but they neutralised these advantages by every form of ingenious torture they could without actual cruelty apply to her. They crept up silently and jumped out upon her. They untied her sash and her ribbons. George held her fast while Rupert brought his red freckled face close to hers, in a series of horrible grimaces. Mary loathed the nearness of his face, the smell of his hair thickened with bear’s grease, and the damp warmth of his breath on her cheek. They arranged the loose seat of her chair so that she fell through in humiliating postures.
Oddly, though together they were devils, apart they were human. Once Rupert, when George was for some crime confined to bed, took Mary fishing. He baited her hook for her and told her his secrets. He had a small peculiar stone he had found on the beach: he thought it might be a pearl. He was in love with the wife of Soal the baker. She had a broad round bosom that smelled of musk.
“How do you know that?” Mary asked curiously.
“Because she once let me feel it,” Rupert said solemnly. “She was wearing that glossy red bodice,” he added, “and I scratched my finger on one of the brooches. Look, that finger. Just there. There was a mark, but it went away in a day.”
When they returned home, they were both soaked to the skin and smelling overpoweringly of fish. Rupert escaped to the kitchen, but Mary, being waylaid by Miss Flora, was soundly thrashed after Miss Flora had offered up a prayer that the chastisement she was about to inflict on His child would be blessed by the Lord.
The following day George and Rupert shut a large dog in the cupboard where Mary kept her school books, but it was Miss Flora who opened the door and received the horrid impact of its released body on hers. She went into a series of fits and rigors, and emerging from them, had the boys banished for the duration of their holiday. They avenged themselves on Mary before they went by various torments of an ingenuity that surpassed any previous efforts, and brought Mary, for the first time
, to shamefaced tears. . . .
One day, before this exile relieved her, Mary was running away from the Lings and found herself in a large shed at the farthest end of the Yard. One end was open to the harbour and a flight of wooden steps led to an upper room. Climbing them, Mary discovered the sail loft. Mark Henry’s manager of the Yard was there, directing the workers in the preparing of sails for a new brig. Mary slipped her hand into his, and stood silently listening. The low raftered room smelt pleasantly of canvas and tar. Through its dirty window she could see the John Garton moving down the harbour. Mary knew her by heart. She had been built in 1841, the year of Mary’s own birth, of American rock-elm. The top sides were of greenheart and the beams of oak. The decks were of yellow pine. A glint of brass from her mast entered Mary’s eye like a splinter. She blinked and shut both eyes, opening them when she felt, by the change of light on her lids, that the John Garton was past the window and out of sight.
She fell to studying her uncle’s manager. John Sacheverell Mempes was a satisfactory figure. He wore his white top-hat, a foppish and youthful affectation, tilted over one eyebrow. His boots were long and pointed, and the hand to which Mary clung wore an immense ring, an onyx set in filigree gold, carved with a unicorn. He took Mary down into the Yard and talked to her with a polite and rather puzzled consideration. He hardly knew what to make of her innocent dignity, but the softness of her skin ravished him and so did her eyes, which had normally a depth of blueness that ordinary blue eyes achieve in anger or under a stormy sky.
The Lovely Ship Page 2