"You mark
my wurrds ef it dawn't cum truthy too,--there'll be terble loss uv
li-ife out there tu-night," and he waved his hand towards the blackening
sea, "an' us'll hev tu dig a fuu more graves, I reckin', cum marnin'!"
"The Lard hev murcy!" said Benjamin Blake, and the three resumed their
walk again.
Half an hour afterwards they were making their way along the one little
street of which Trewithen boasted to their homes; for a storm--the
roughest they had known for years--had burst overhead, and a man's life
is a frail thing in the teeth of a gale.
* * * * *
At the top of the cliff and beyond Trewithen churchyard by the length of
a field there stood a tiny cottage, in which lived Jacob Tresidder,
fisherman, and his daughter Bess.
"Daft Bess" the children called her as they played with her on the
sands, though she was a woman grown, and had hair that was streaked with
white.
She was sitting now by the dying fire in the little kitchen listening to
the storm without; the hands of the grandfather clock were nearing the
midnight hour, and Jacob Tresidder lay in a sound sleep upstairs hearing
nought. She was of the type of fisher-maid common to the depths of
Cornwall. The soft rich colouring of her skin reminded one more of the
sunny south, and her big brown eyes had always a glow in them.
To-night they were more luminous than ever as she sat by the fire
watching the sparks flicker and die, as if the dawn of some hidden
knowledge were being borne to them on the breath of the storm.
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