I.

The house known as Vellan's Rents stands in the Chy-pons over the waterside, a stone's throw beyond the ferry and the archway where the toll-keeper used to live. You may know it by its exceeding dilapidation and by the clouds of steam that issue on the street from one of its windows. The sill of this window stands a bare foot above the causeway, and glancing down into the room as you pass, you will see the shoulders of a woman stooping over a wash-tub. When first I used to pass this window the woman was called Naomi Bricknell; later it was Sarah Ann Polgrain; and now it is (euphemistically) Pretty Alice. One goes and makes way for another, but the wash-tub is always there and the rheumatic fever; and while these remain they will never lack, as they have never lacked yet, for a woman to do battle for dear life between them.

But my story concerns the first of these only, Naomi Bricknell. She and her mother occupied two rooms in Vellan's Rents as far back as I can remember, and were twisted with the fever about once in every six months. For this they paid one shilling a week rent. If you lift the latch and push the front door open, you seem at first to be looking down a well; for a flight of thirty-two steps plunges straight from the threshold to the quay door and a square of green water there. And when the sun is on the water at the bottom of this funnel, the effect is pretty. But taking note of the cold wind that rushes up this stairway and into the steaming room where the wash-tub stands, you will understand how it comes that each new tenant takes over the rheumatic fever as one of the fixtures.

In a room to the right of the stairway, and facing Naomi's, lived a middle-aged man who was always known as Long Oliver. This man was a native of the port, and it was understood that he and Naomi had been well acquainted, years ago, before he started on his first voyage and some time before Naomi married. Tiring of the sea in time, he had found work on the jetties and rented this room for sixpence a week. In these days he and Naomi rarely spoke to each other beyond exchanging a "Good-morning" when they met on the stairway, nor did he show any friendliness beyond tapping at her mother's door and inquiring about her once a day whenever she happened to be down with the fever. I have made researches and find that the rest of the house was tenanted at that time by a working block-maker, with his wife and four children; a widow and her son just returned from sea with an injured spine; a young couple without children. But these do not come into the tale.

Now the history of Naomi was this. She was married at three-and-twenty to Abe Bricknell, a young sailor of the port, and as steady as a woman could wish. In the third year of their married life, and a week after obtaining his certificate, he sailed out of Troy as mate of a fruit-ship, a barque, that never came back, nor was sighted again after passing the Lizard lights.

Naomi—a tall up-standing woman with deep, gentle eyes, like a cow's, and a firm mouth that seldom spoke—took her affliction oddly. She neither wailed nor put on mourning. She looked upon it as a matter between herself and her Maker, and said:

"God has done this thing to me; therefore I have finished with Him. I am no man to go and revenge myself by breaking all the Commandments. But I am a woman and can suffer. Let Him do His worst: I defy Him."

So she never set foot inside church again, nor offered any worship. The week long she worked as a laundress, and sat through the Sundays with her arms folded, gloomily fighting her duel. When the fever wrenched her arms and lips as she stood by the wash-tub, she set her teeth and said, "I can stand it. I can match all this with contempt. He can kill, but that's not beating me."

Her mother, a large and pale-faced woman of sixty, with an apparently thoughtful contraction of the lips, in reality due to a habit of carrying pins in her mouth, watched Naomi anxiously during this period of her life. And Long Oliver watched her too, though secretly, with eyes screwed up after the fashion of men who have followed the sea.

One day he stopped her on the stairs and asked, abruptly:

"When be you thinkin' to marry again?"

"Never," she answered, straight and at once, halting with a hand on her hip and eyeing him.

"Dear me; but you will, I hope."

"Not to you, anyway."

"Laws me, no! I don't want 'ee; haven't wanted 'ee these ten years.
But I'd a reason for askin'."

"Then I'm sure I don't know what it can be."

"True—true. Look'ee here, my dear; 'tis ordained for you to marry agen."

"Aw? Who by?"

"Providence."

Naomi had treated Long Oliver badly in days gone by, but could still talk to him with more freedom than to other men. Still standing with a hand on her hip, she let fall a horrible sentence about the Almighty—all the more horrible in that it came deliberately, without emphasis, and from quiet lips.

"Woman!" cried a voice above them.

They turned, looked up, and saw the bent figure of a man framed in the street doorway. This was William Geake, who walked in from Gantick every Saturday to collect the sixpences and shillings of Vellan's Rents for its landlord, a well-to-do wine and spirit merchant at Tregarrick. As a man of indisputable probity and an unwearying walker, Geake was entrusted with many odd jobs of this kind in the country round, filling in with them such idle corners as his trade of carpenter and undertaker to Gantick village might leave in the six working days. On Sundays he put on a long black coat, and became a Rounder, or Methodist local-preacher, walking sometimes twenty miles there and back to terrify the inhabitants of outlying hamlets about their future state.

"Woman!" cried William Geake, "Down 'pon your knees an' pray God the roof don't fall on 'ee for your vile words."

"I reckon," retorted Naomi quietly, with a glance up at the worm-riddled rafters, "you'd do more good by speakin' to the landlord."

William Geake had a high brow and bright, nervous eyes, betokening enthusiasm; but he had also a long and square jaw that meant stubbornness. This jaw now began to protrude and his lips to straighten.

"Down 'pon your knees!" he repeated.

Naomi turned her eyes from him to Long Oliver, who leant against the staircase wall with his arms crossed and a veiled amusement in his face. With a slightly heightened colour, but no flutter of the voice, she repeated her blasphemy; and then, pulling a shilling from her worn purse, tendered it to Geake. This, of course, meant "Mind your own business"; but he waved her hand aside.

"Down 'pon your knees, woman!" he shouted thunderously. Then, as she showed no disposition to obey, he added, grimly, "Eh? but somebody shall intercede for thee afore thou'rt a minute older."

And pulling off his hat there and then, he knelt down on the doorstep, with the soles of his hob-nailed boots showing to the street.

"Get up, an' don't make yoursel' a may-game," said Naomi hurriedly, as one or two children stopped their play, and drew around to stare.

"Father in heaven," began William Geake, in a voice that fetched the women-folk, all up and down the Chy-pons, to their doors, "Thou, whose property is ever to have mercy, forgive this blaspheming woman! Suffer one who is Thy servant, though a grievous sinner, to intercede for her afore she commits the sin that cannot be forgiven; to pluck her as a brand from the burning—"

By this, the women and a loafing man or two had clustered round, and
Colliver's coal-cart had rattled up and come to a standstill. The
Chy-pons is the narrowest street in Troy, and Colliver's driver could
hardly pass now, except over William Geake's legs.

"Draw in your feet, brother Geake," he called out, "or else pray short."

One or two women giggled at this. But Geake did not seem to hear. For five good minutes he prayed vociferously, as was his custom in meeting-house; then rose, replaced his hat, dusted his knees, held out his hand for Naomi's shilling, and wrote her the customary voucher in his most business-like manner, and without another word. But there was a triumphant look in his eyes that dared Naomi to repeat her offence, and she very nearly wept as she felt that the words would not come. This and the shame of publicity drove her back into her room as Geake passed down the stairs to collect the other rents. A few women still hung about the doorway as he emerged, some twenty minutes later. But he marched down Chy-pons with head erect and eyes fixed straight ahead.