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Updated: May 11, 2025
His father and grandfather had worn it as office-bearers in a local religious sect known as the Advent Saints; and it had survived the extinction of that sect and passed on to William John Penno, an orthodox Wesleyan, as a family sobriquet. He was sixty-three years old, a widower, and childless.
Lizzie shook her head. She would have liked to call Mr. Penno the best man in the world; but luckily for it would have been an untruth she found herself unequal to it. Their apprehensions were vain. What though she could not, as Mr. Penno had foreseen, be extricated from the yard but at the expense of seven feet of wall and the butt-end of Ugnot's pigsty?
"Look here," said the Elder, and caught himself wondering at the sound of his own voice; "if 'tis wood you want, let her come and ask for it. I'm not sayin' but she can fetch away an armful now an' then in reason, you know." The longer Elder Penno thought it over, the more he confessed himself puzzled, not with Tregenza, but with his own conduct.
One morning Elder Penno looked up from his desk and saw, beyond the masts of the fishing-boats lying aslant as the tide had left them, a small figure a speck, almost on the sandy beach, about three furlongs away. He was engaged at the moment in adding up a column of figures.
The Cove had given up business, and Government let bygones be bygones, behaving very handsome for once. In Ardevora, a fishing-town on the Cornish coast not far from the Land's End, lived a merchant whom everybody called 'Elder' Penno, or 'The Elder' not because he had any right, or laid any claim, to that title.
Still, and despite an occasional difficulty in keeping so many balls in the air at one time, Elder Penno was as a widower, a childless man, and in comparison with his neighbours well-to-do. Also he filled many small public offices district councillor, harbour commissioner, member of the School Board, and the like. They had come to him he could not quite tell how.
As he threw up the sash Elder Penno caught sight of Tom Hancock, the school attendance officer, lounging against a post on the quay below. "You're the very man I want," said the Elder. "Isn't that Tregenza's grandchild over yonder?" "Looks like her," said the A.O., withdrawing a short clay pipe from his mouth, and spitting. "Then why isn't she at school at this hour?"
On the quay he paused to tell Tom Hancock that he reckoned the child would be more careful in future: he had given her something to think over. A week later, at nine o'clock, Elder Penno was retiring to rest in his bedroom, which overlooked his boat-building yard, when a clattering noise broke on the night without, and so startled him that he all but dropped his watch in the act of winding it.
Tregenza was mad, and madness would account for anything. But why should he, Elder Penno, be moved to take a sudden interest, unnecessary as it was inquisitive, in this mad old man, who had fooled him out of seventy-five pounds? Yet so it was. The Elder came again, two days later, and once again before the end of the week. By the end of the second week the visit had become a daily one.
He worked her with his one son Seth, a widow-man of forty, and Seth's son, young Eli, aged fifteen, Liz's father and brother. The boat paid well from the first, and the Tregenzas the three generations took a monstrous pride in her. It was Elder Penno who had advanced the borrowed seventy-five pounds, of course taking security in the boat and upon an undertaking that Tregenza kept her insured.
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