Page:Once a Week June to Dec 1863.pdf/678

668 “Arrested! Where? By whom?”

“In Lyme. The Mayor had information from a creature of his own, who has tracked the young man for weeks past. The people cry ‘shame!’ but there is no help now.”

“What will be the end of it,—tell me, my Lord, I conjure you!”

“The worst, I fear. There is no room for doubt,—no ground for mercy.”

“Is it possible!”

“How could it be otherwise? He was out with Monmouth. Go and comfort your sister.”

“Comfort her! Good Heaven, how? It will break her heart.”

“You shall have my prayers. Go, and do your duty to her.”

I first came to live in Falmouth, there stood a most broken-down, dilapidated house, the back windows of which overlooked the sea, and which was known by the name of the Fisherman’s Home. In that house, just fifty years ago, there lived two fishermen, who were partners—one pursuing his trade by day, the other fishing by night. Michael Tregillian owned the house, in which Nancolas (his partner) rented a room. Michael was an honest-hearted, even-tempered, good man, frank and open, steady and industrious. With the break of day he set out to fish, generally returning at dusk. For these reasons his opportunities for making friends were scarce, and his hours for relaxation few; and, besides the few old fishermen with whom (when his day’s work was at an end) he smoked his pipe and took his glass, he had neither friends nor acquaintances.

Paul Nancolas (Tregillian’s partner) was a stout, well-built man, who had seen some five-and-forty winters, and after having passed his earlier years in His Majesty’s Service, he had for some reason left the Navy to take to the trade he was then pursuing. He drank hard, smoked, and gambled; and between the little tavern where he drank and his stall in the market where he gossipped, he managed to waste his best hours, and to squander his own earnings as well as those of his hard-working partner. Gloomy and sullen, uncouth and brutal, caring not whom he pleased or offended, as ready for a fight as he was for a glass, Nancolas was sneered at, pitied, and despised.

Repulsed on all sides, and deserted even by those of his own habits, who could no longer endure his ferocity, the partnership that existed between himself and Tregillian must have speedily come to an end, but for a small inmate in Michael’s house who exercised a strange influence in reforming the habits and improving the nature of the brutalised, drunken fisherman. Tregillian had a wife, and one son—the latter a little fellow, who, when Nancolas entered into partnership, was about a twelvemonth old. The man was unwearied in his exertions at his trade, whilst the mother kept a small chandler’s shop and took in needlework. Hour by hour, and day by day, they laboured for the lad: many and many a night, when the little town has been apparently wrapt in darkness, has a small light twinkled through the crevices in the window-shutter, showing too plainly, to those who knew the people, the mother’s unceasing labour for her boy.

I have heard, and believe, that upon more occasions than I care to number, the fisherman and his wife have deprived themselves of the common necessaries of life, that their darling should in the future reap the benefit of their self-denying frugality.

I call to mind sometimes the labour of this couple, as I sit by my window in the sunset, mentally picturing and laying plans for the sunny morrow, which the first dark cloud may dash for ever aside.

This boy had a singular influence on Paul Nancolas; and he alone was the sole and unconscious instrument in working out that man’s partial reformation. The child was not afraid of his father’s rough partner: shy of others, the little fellow had always a laugh for him; he was willing to go to this bold, bad man, and in time Nancolas was, by slow consent, induced to take into his great, rough, weather-beaten arms, this baby-boy; and once, it is said, he was so far forgetful of his nature, as to press the little mouth with his gin-stained lips. By slow degrees, was the drunkard won from his dissolute course. The change was scarcely perceptible at first, but step by step he was weaned from his seat in The Jolly Sailor’s taproom to a corner at Tregillian’s fireside; and though years passed before people believed that Nancolas was a sober man, yet that day came at last, when his old companions laughed at him, and the neighbours pointed him out as a reformed reprobate. To carry out the impression he had made, and in testimony to those who were willing to think well of him, Paul Nancolas in all sincerity one morning pledged himself to taste no more liquor for the next twelve months—a promise that required some nerve to make; but Nancolas made it, and resolved the vow should be kept.

Twelve years had passed, and on each anniversary had Nancolas renewed his vow of temperance. The time that had served to erase the dark spots that stained the fisherman’s former life, had transformed the unconscious cause into a robust and handsome youth; whilst the passing fondness that had arisen in the fisherman’s breast for the child, had grown into a deep-rooted attachment for the boy. That boy (as Nancolas often said) had been the first that had ever cast a thought on him—almost the only soul who had given him a tender look. “God bless the boy!” He had won him unknowingly from the bad, and made him know what it was to hold up his head with the good and true; then snapping his fingers, either in defiance of his past state, or in exultation at his present, he would hug the fair-haired little fellow closer to his big, manly breast, and in his heavy sea-boots go crashing along the beach to his boat wherein to set sail for his evening trip. On these occasions (when the weather was fine and the sky clear) the boy was his companion for half the distance, returning in his father’s boat, which they usually met.

It was about half-past eight o’clock on a Friday evening in August, about thirty years ago, that