Two Sides of the Face.
by Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch.
STEPHEN OF STEENS.
A Tale of Wild Justice.
I.
Beside a high-road in the extreme West of England stands a house which you might pa.s.s many times without suspecting it of a dark history or, indeed, any history worth mention. The country itself, which here slopes westward from the Mining District to Mount"s Bay, has little beauty and--unless you happen to have studied it--little interest. It is bare, and it comes near to be savage without attaining to the romantic. It includes, to be sure, one or two spots of singular beauty; but they hide themselves and are not discoverable from the road, which rewards you only by its extravagant wealth of wild flowers, its clean sea-breeze, and perhaps a sunset flaming across the low levels and silhouetting the long shoulder of G.o.dolphin Hill between you and the Atlantic, five miles distant.
Noting, as you pa.s.sed, the size of the house, its evident marks of age, and the meanness of its more modern outbuildings, you would set it down for the residence of an old yeoman family fallen on evil days. And your second thought--if it suggested a second--might be that these old yeomen, not content with a lonely dwelling in a lonely angle of the land, had churlishly built themselves in and away from sight even of the infrequent traveller; for a high wall enclosing a courtlage in front screens all but the upper story with its slated roof, heavy chimneys and narrow upper windows; and these again are half hidden by the boughs of two ragged yew trees growing within the enclosure. Behind the house, on a rising slope, tilled fields have invaded a plantation of n.o.ble ash trees and cut it back to a thin and ugly quadrilateral. Ill-kept as they are, and already dilapidated, the modern farm-buildings wear a friendlier look than the old mansion, and by contrast a cheerful air, as of inferiors out-at-elbows, indeed, but unashamed, having no lost dignities to brood upon.
Yet it may happen that your driver--reading, as he thinks, some curiosity in your glance at Steens (for so the house is called), or politely anxious to beguile the way--pulls up his horse and with a jerk of his whip draws your attention to certain pock-marks in the courtlage wall. Or perhaps, finding you really curious but unable from your seat in the vehicle to distinguish them, he dismounts and traces them out for you with the b.u.t.t of his whip-handle. They are bullet-marks, he says, and there are plenty of others on the upper front of the house within--even grooves cut by bullets in the woodwork of the windows. Then follows a story which you will find some difficulty in swallowing. That in 1734, when Walpole was keeping England at peace--that almost at the moment when he boasted, "There are fifty thousand men slain this year in Europe, and not one Englishman,"--an unmilitary pewterer was here holding at bay the Sheriff, his posse and half a regiment of soldiers, slaying seven and wounding many; and that for eight months he defied the law and defended himself, until cannon had to be dragged over the roads from Pendennis Castle to quell him--such a tale may well seem incredible to you unless you can picture the isolation of Cornwall in days when this highway was a quag through which, perhaps twice a week, a train of pack-horses floundered.
The man who brought Roger Stephen to justice, though tardily and half against his sense of right, was Sir John Piers, of Nansclowan, hard by.
And when Sir John--"the little baronet," as he was called, a Parliamentman, and the one whom Walpole never could bribe--married pretty Mistress Catherine, the heiress of Sherrington across Tamar, his lady"s dowry was hauled down through the Duchy to Nansclowan in waggons--a wonder to behold--and stacked in Nansclowan cellars: ten thousand pounds, and every doit of it in half-crowns. Eighty thousand half-crowns!
Be pleased to reflect upon these cellared piles of silver, and what they indicate of Cornish life in those days: and bear in mind that they were stacked in place a short ten years before Roger Stephen, a mile-and-a-half away, first let fly his bullets at the Sheriff, on the principle that an Englishman"s house is his castle, and in firm conviction--shared by all the countryside and in the bottom of his heart by Sir John himself--that this particular castle was Roger Stephen"s; not perhaps by law, but a.s.suredly by right.
II.
Four miles south of Steens, and a trifle over, lies the market town of Helston (or "h.e.l.leston" as men wrote it in 1734, and ought to write it still); on the road to nowhere and somnolent then as now, but then as now waking up once a year, on the 8th of May, to celebrate the Feast of Flora and welcome back the summer. She is brought in at daybreak with green boughs and singing, and at noon the citizens dance through the streets in her honour, the Mayor himself leading off as the town band strikes up its immemorial quickstep, the staid burgesses following with their partners.
At first they walk or amble two and two, like animals coming out of Noah"s ark; then, at a change in the tune, each man swings round to the lady behind him, "turns" her, regains his partner, "turns" her too, and the walk is resumed. And so, alternately walking and twirling, the procession sways down the steep main street and in and out of the houses left open for it--along the pa.s.sage from front door to court or garden, out at the back door, in at the back door of the next open house, and through to the street again--the beadles preceding with wreathed wands, the band with decorated drum, the couples "turning" duly at the break in the tune, though it catch them in the narrowest entrance or half-way down a flight of steps.
On the 8th of May, 1734, at the foot of Coinage-hall Street, hard by the Bowling Green, a pewterer"s shop stood open, like its neighbours, to admit the Flora. But the master of the shop and his a.s.sistant--he kept no apprentice--sat working as usual at their boards, perhaps the only two men in h.e.l.leston who disregarded the public holiday. But everyone knew Roger Stephen to be a soured man, and what old Malachi Hanc.o.c.k did was of no account.
Malachi sat at his bench in the rear of the shop turning the rim of a pewter plate, and Roger Stephen in the front, for the sake of better light, peering into the bowels of a watch which had been brought to him to be cleaned--a rare job, and one which in his sullen way he enjoyed.
From youth up he had been badly used. His father, Humphrey Stephen, owned Steens, and was a man of substance; a yeoman with money and land enough to make him an esquire whenever he chose. In those days it was the custom in Cornish families of the better cla.s.s to send the eldest son to college (usually to Oxford), and thence, unless the care of his estates claimed him at home, into one of the liberal professions. Sometimes the second son would follow him to college and proceed to Holy Orders, but oftener he had to content himself as apprentice to an apothecary or an attorney.
The third son would, like Roger Stephen, be bound to a pewterer or watchmaker, the fourth to a mercer, and so on in a descending scale.
But Roger, though the only child of a rich man, had been denied his natural ambition, and thrust as a boy into the third cla.s.s. His mother had died young, and from the hour of her death (which the young man set down to harsh usage) he and his father had detested each other"s sight.
In truth, old Humphrey Stephen was a violent tyrant and habitually drunk after two o"clock. Roger, self-repressed as a rule and sullen, found him merely abhorrent. During his mother"s lifetime, and because she could not do without him, he had slept at Steens and walked to and from his shop in h.e.l.leston; but on the day after the funeral he packed and left home, taking with him old Malachi, a family retainer whom Humphrey had long ago lamed for life by flinging a crowbar at him in a fit of pa.s.sion.
So for twelve years he had lodged and taught Malachi his trade in the dirty, low-browed shop, over which a pewter basin hung for sign and clashed against the tilt whenever a sea-breeze blew. Malachi did his marketing: Roger himself rarely stepped across his threshold, and had never been known to gossip. To marriage he never gave a thought: "time enough for that," he had decided, "when Steens became his, as some day it must;" for the estate ever since the first Stephen acquired it in the Wars of the Roses and gave it his name ("Steens" being but "Stephen"s"
contracted) had been a freehold patrimony descending regularly from father to son or next heir. All in good time Roger Stephen would marry and install his wife in the manor-house. But the shop in Coinagehall Street was no place for a woman. She would be a nuisance, sweeping the place out and upsetting him and Malachi; an expense, too, and Roger--always a penurious man--incurred no expense until obliged.
But on a day, about two years before this 8th of May, 1734, word had come down from Steens that his father wished to speak with him.
"Not dying, is he?" Roger asked the messenger in Cornish. Half his customers spoke the old language, and it came readier to his tongue.
The messenger chuckled. "Dying? He"ll live to be a hundred!
Eh, it"s not dying he"s after," and the man winked. He was near upon bursting with news--or gossip--of his own.
"That"s enough," said Roger. "Go back and tell him that if he"s well and wants to talk, he knows where to find me." And he turned back to his work.
Next day old Humphrey Stephen rode down into h.e.l.leston in a towering rage, reined up before his son"s shop, and dismounted.
"You"re a pretty dutiful kind of son," he snarled. "But I"ve a word that concerns you belike. I"m going to marry again."
"Ah?" said Roger, drawing in his breath and eyeing the old man up and down in a way that disconcerted him. "Who"s the poor soul?"
"She lives over to Porthleven," answered his father, "and her name is Mary Nankivell. She"s--well, in fact she"s a fisherman"s daughter; but I"ve lived long enough to despise differences of that kind."
"I wasn"t asking _your_ age," said Roger meditatively.
"What"s the woman"s?"
"She"ll be twenty next birthday." The old man was sixty-five.
"Well, what"s your opinion?" he asked testily, for he knew he was doing a wrong thing, and craved an excuse to work himself into a rage.
"On which?" asked Roger, "--you, or the woman?"
"On the marriage." Old Humphrey stood glowering under his eyebrows, and tapped his boot impatiently with the b.u.t.t of his riding-whip.
"I reckoned it might concern you, that"s all."
"I can"t see that it does." There was that in Roger"s slow look which his father found maddening.
"Oh, can"t you?" he sneered.
"No, for the life of me," answered Roger. ""Tis wickedness of course, but I"ve no call to interfere. Take and marry the miserable fool, if you"re so minded."
Humphrey Stephen had more to say, but gulped it down and mounted his horse with a devilish grin.
Roger Stephen went back to his work-bench.
III.
"Pack of fools!" growled old Malachi as the thump-thump of the drum drew nearer. He rose and shifted his stool to a corner, for the way to the back premises lay through the shop. Roger looked forth into the sunny street, blinked, and, picking up a pair of pincers, returned to his watch.
The band came slowly down the street and halted outside--still in full blast; for between the Market House and the Bowling Green there must be no pause in the Flora-dance or its music. And presently the Mayor himself thrust his red face in at the shop-door.
"Good-mornin"!" he nodded, jigging away with his feet. "You"ll lev" us come through, I suppose?"
"Welcome," grunted Roger.
"And, darn"ee, take care o" my cabbages!" added Malachi. "You ruined half a score of "em last year with your May-games."
"Cab--" Here the inexorable tune forced His Worship to face about and twirl his partner. "Cabbages?" he resumed. "You dare to use such a word to me, you saucy rascal? Why, I"ve sent better men than you to prison for less!"
"I don"t doubt it," retorted Malachi. "But King George is above us, and holds even a Mayor responsible for what he treads on. Dance along out, that"s a dear man, and if you want to be frolicsome, keep to the paths."
"Of all the unpublicspirited houses I"ve danced into this day, this here"s the unpublicspiritedest!" exclaimed the Mayor. He had reached by this time the door at the back of the shop, and would have said more; but again the tune took him by the legs compelling him to twirl his partner, and, twirling her, he was swept out of sight.