Chapter 10: A Strange Night

IT was a sultry August night, and Bride felt no disposition for sleep. She had acquired during her mother’s long illness the habit of wakefulness during the earlier hours of the night, when she was frequently beside the sick-bed, ministering to the wants of the patient. Since death had robbed her of that office, she had fallen into the habit of spending the earlier hours of the night in meditation and prayer, together with a study of the Scriptures; and to-night, after her old nurse had brushed out her abundant hair, and arranged it for the night, and after she had exchanged her dress for a long straight wrapper which was both cooler and more comfortable, she dismissed the old servant with a few sweet words of thanks, and setting her windows wide open to the summer night, knelt down beside the one which looked out over the moonlit bay, and was soon lost to all outward impression by her absorption in her own prayerful meditations.

The hour of midnight had boomed from the clock-tower before she moved, and then she was aroused less by that sound than by a gradual consciousness that there was in the sky, to which her eyes were frequently raised, a glow that was not of the moon, but was more ruddy in tone, and seemed to absorb into itself the softer and whiter light. As she remarked this, her thoughts came back to earth again, and rising from her knees, she leaned out of the window, and then crossed the room hastily towards that other window looking away in the direction of Pentreath, and then at once she understood.

A tall column of fire arose from behind the belt of woodland which hid the distant town, a beautiful but awful pillar of fire, reaching up as it seemed to the very heavens, and swaying gently to and fro in the light summer breeze. For a few moments Bride stood gazing at it with eyes in which pain and wonderment were gathering, and then a stifled exclamation broke from her lips.

“God forgive them!—that is the work of incendiaries!”

She stood rigid and motionless a few moments longer, and then with rapid fingers she began unfastening her wrapper, and clothing herself in one of her dark walking dresses. Her heart was beating fast and furiously. Her face was very pale, for she was taking a resolution that cost her a great effort; but she seemed to see her duty clearly mapped out before her, and she came of a race that was not wont to shrink from the path of duty because the road was rough.

Few knew better than did Lady Bride Marchmont the temper of the rude fisher-folk of St. Bride’s Bay. From her childhood she had been wont to accompany her mother down to that cluster of cottages and hovels which formed the little community, and she had grown up with an intuitive understanding of the people, and their ways and methods of thought, which had been matured and deepened by her many talks with Abner. She knew full well that, although in the main kindly men individually, there was a vein of ferocity running through the fibre of their nature, which a certain class of events always awoke to active life. Thirty years back these men, or their fathers, were professionally wreckers, and it had needed long patience, and all the gentle influence of the Duchess and her helpers, to break them of this terrible sin. Of late years deliberate wrecking had to a very great extent died out, but there was still in the hearts of the fishermen an irradicable conviction that when “Providence” did send a vessel to pieces on their iron-bound coast, the cargo of that vessel became their lawful prey; and they were careless enough, in striving to outwit the authorities and secure the booty, of any loss of human life which might have been averted by prompt measures on their part. They made it rather a principle than otherwise to let the crew drown before their eyes without any attempt at rescue. When the crew were saved, they had a way of claiming the contents of the ship if any came ashore, and that was a notion altogether foreign to the ideas of the fishermen of St. Bride.

The same instinct of plunder awoke within them when any misfortune occurred in the neighbourhood; and wherever there was booty to be had for the taking, there were the hardy fisher-folk of the place likely to be found. Bride realised in a moment that if they saw the glow of this fire, and understood its meaning as she did, they would set off at once to join the band of marauders and incendiaries; and as every addition to such a band brings a fresh access of lawlessness and a growing sense of power, the very fact of the arrival of this reinforcement was likely enough to result in fresh outrage, and fresh scenes of destruction and horror.

Whilst standing rigid and silent, watching that terrible pillar of flame, Bride had turned the matter over in her mind, and resolved upon her own course of action. She knew the fishermen well, and knew their nature—at once soft and passionate, gentle and ferocious. Were she to alarm the household and get her father to send down a number of the servants to try and stop them by force from marching to join the riot, she knew that nothing but fighting and disaster would ensue. There was a long-standing and instinctive feud between the servants of the castle, many of whom were not natives of the place, and the rugged fisher-folk of the bay. The servants despised the fishermen, and the fishermen hated the servants. No good could possibly result from such a course of action. But Bride knew every man amongst them. She had gone fearlessly in and out of their houses since childhood. She had sailed in their boats on the bay, she had visited their wives in sickness, and had clothed their children with the work of her own hands. They loved her in their own rough way. She knew that well, and she was a power in their midst, as her mother had been before her. They might be stayed by her pleading words, when no attempt at force would do more than whet their desire after battle and plunder. If she went alone, she had a chance with them; if she stayed to get help, all would be lost.

Her resolution was taken in less time than it has taken to read these lines. Donning her plainest dress and cloak, and softly summoning from the anteroom a great hound, who was the invariable companion of her lonely walks, she opened another door into one of the turreted chambers of the castle, and found her way down a spiral staircase, lighted by broad squares of moonlight from unclosed windows, to a door at the base, the bolts of which she drew back easily—for this was her own ordinary mode of access to the gardens—and found herself out in the soft night-air with the moon overhead, and that glow in the sky behind her which told such a terrible tale of its own. There were two ways from the castle to the fishing-village lying out of sight beneath the shelter of the cliff. One was the long and roundabout way of the zigzag carriage-drive, leading through the grounds and out by the lodge upon the road, from which a bye-lane led down to the shore. The other was a far shorter, but a rough and in some seasons a perilous track—a narrow pathway formed by a jutting ledge of rock, extending by one of nature’s freaks from a little below the great terrace in front of the castle right round the angle of the bluff, and so to St. Bride’s Bay itself. A long, long flight of steps led down from the sea-terrace of Penarvon to the beach below, where the castle boats lay at anchor, or were housed within their commodious boat-house, according to weather and season; and from one spot as you descended these steps a sure-footed person could step upon the ledge of rock which formed the pathway round the headland. Bride was familiar from childhood with this path, and had traversed it too often and too freely to feel the smallest fear now. The moonlight was clear and intense. She knew every foot of the way, and even the hound who followed closely in her wake was too well used to the precarious ledge to express any uneasiness when his mistress led the way down to it.