“We’ll hope you will not. But do
as I bid you, girl. I shall be passing back
along the beach in two days’ time, and will call
for it.”
She resisted no longer.
“I will take it,” she said. “By
that time I may have thought of words to thank your
Honour.”
She curtsied again.
“Manasseh!” Captain Vyell pointed to the
door. The negro opened it and stood aside majestically
as she passed out and was gone.
Let moralists perpend. Ruth Josselin had knocked
at that door after a sharp struggle between conscience
and crying want. The poverty known to Ruth was
of the extreme kind that gnaws the entrails with hunger.
It had furthermore starved her childhood of religion,
and her sole code of honour came to her by instinct.
Yet she had knocked at the door with no thought but
that the Collector’s guinea had come to her hand
by mistake, and no expectancy but that the Collector
would thank her and take it back. She was shy,
moreover. It had cost courage.
“Honesty is the best policy.” True
enough, no doubt. Yet, when all is said, but
for some radical instinct of honesty, untaught, brave
to conquer a more than selfish need, Ruth had never
brought back her guinea. And, yet again, from
that action all the rest of this story flows.
When we have told it, let the moralists decide.
PARENTHETICAL—OF THE FAMILY OF VYELL.
Captain Oliver Vyell, as we have seen, set store upon
pedigree: and here, as well in compliment to
him as to make our story clearer, we will interrupt
it with a brief account of his family and descent.
The tomb of Sir Thomas Vyell, second Baronet, at whose
house of Carwithiel in Cornwall our Collector spent
some years of his boyhood, may yet be seen in the
church of that parish, in the family transept.
It bears the coat of the Vyells (gules, a fesse raguly
argent) with no less than twenty-four quarterings:
for an Odo of the name had fought on the winning side
at Hastings, and his descendants, settling in the West,
had held estates there and been people of importance
ever since.
The Wars of the Roses, to be sure, had left them under
a cloud, shorn of the most of their wealth and a great
part of their lands. Yet they kept themselves
afloat (if this riot of metaphor may be pardoned) and
their heads moderately high, until Sir William, the
first Baronet, by developing certain tin mines on
his estate and working them by new processes, set
up the family fortunes once more.
His son, Sir Thomas, steadily bettered them.
A contemporary narrative describes him as “chief
of a very good Cornish family, with a very good estate.
His marrying a grand-daughter of the Lord Protector
(Oliver) first recommended him to King William, who
at the Revolution made him Commissioner of the Excise
and some years after Governor of the Post Office.
. . . The Queen, by reason of his great capacity
and honesty, hath continued him in the office of Postmaster.
He is a gentleman of a sweet, easy, affable disposition—a
handsome man, of middle stature, towards forty years
old.” This was written in 1713. Sir
Thomas died in 1726, of the smallpox, having issue
(by his one wife, who survived him but a few years)
seven sons and three daughters.
