After a minute or two, finding that he did not speak,
she too came to the window. He bent and kissed
her.
For he had seen, on the patch of sea beyond the haven,
a white frigate steal up Channel like a ghost.
She had passed out of his sight by this time, but
he was still thinking of one man that she bore.
Beside the Plymouth road, as it plunges down-hill
past Ruan Lanihale church towards Ruan Cove, and ten
paces beyond the lych-gate—where the graves
lie level with the coping, and the horseman can decipher
their inscriptions in passing, at the risk of a twisted
neck—the base of the churchyard wall is
pierced with a low archway, festooned with toad-flax
and fringed with the hart’s-tongue fern.
Within the archway bubbles a well, the water of which
was once used for all baptisms in the parish, for
no child sprinkled with it could ever be hanged with
hemp. But this belief is discredited now, and
the well neglected: and the events which led
to this are still a winter’s tale in the neighbourhood.
I set them down as they were told me, across the
blue glow of a wreck-wood fire, by Sam Tregear, the
parish bedman. Sam himself had borne an inconspicuous
share in them; and because of them Sam’s father
had carried a white face to his grave.
My father and mother (said Sam) married late in life,
for his trade was what mine is, and ’twasn’t
till her fortieth year that my mother could bring
herself to kiss a gravedigger. That accounts,
maybe, for my being born rickety and with other drawbacks
that only made father the fonder. Weather permitting,
he’d carry me off to churchyard, set me upon
a flat stone, with his coat folded under, and talk
to me while he delved. I can mind, now, the way
he’d settle lower and lower, till his head played
hidey-peep with me over the grave’s edge, and
at last he’d be clean swallowed up, but still
discoursing or calling up how he’d come upon
wonderful towns and kingdoms down underground, and
how all the kings and queens there, in dyed garments,
was offering him meat for his dinner every day of
the week if he’d only stop and hobbynob with
them— and all such gammut. He prettily
doted on me—the poor old ancient!
But there came a day—a dry afternoon in
the late wheat harvest—when we were up
in the churchyard together, and though father had his
tools beside him, not a tint did he work, but kept
travishing back and forth, one time shading his eyes
and gazing out to sea, and then looking far along
the Plymouth road for minutes at a time. Out
by Bradden Point there stood a little dandy-rigged
craft, tacking lazily to and fro, with her mains’le
all shiny-yellow in the sunset. Though I didn’t
know it then, she was the Preventive boat, and her
business was to watch the Hauen: for there had
been a brush between her and the Unity lugger,
a fortnight back, and a Preventive man shot through
