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Updated: June 5, 2025
At the threshold she swayed for a moment in the power of the storm; then she was sucked out like a dried leaf and was no more seen. Overhead, all about the eaves of the house the great wind shrilled mockery and despairing mirth. The fire leapt toward the middle of the room and fell back so much white ash. Bessie Prawle plumped down to her knees, huddled, and prayed.
They went along the forest and up and down the fells together. The wind had dropped, the stars shone. And together they took up their life where they had dropped it, with one significant omission in its circumstance. Bessie Prawle had disappeared from Dryhope. She had followed him up the fell on the night of the storm, but she came not back. And they say that she never did.
'One Devon man, he says to me, 'don' lave anotherr. We werr six days where we shuld ha' been tu; when we got back to the ship a cruiser had got her for gun-runnin'." "And what has become of Captain Pearse?" Prawle answered, "Zurr, I belave 'e went to China, 'tis onsartin." "He's not dead?" Prawle looked at me with a kind of uneasy anger. "Yu cudden' kell 'en! 'Tis true, mun 'll die zome day.
The cutter was beautifully clean; built for a Brixham trawler, she still had her number DH 113 uneffaced. We dived into a sort of cabin, airy, but dark, fitted with two bunks and a small table, on which stood some bottles of stout; there were lockers, too, and pegs for clothes. Prawle, who showed us round, seemed very proud of a steam contrivance for hoisting sails.
Then suddenly screwing up his little blue eyes, he added: "Why, I remembers yu. Steered yu along o' the young lady in this yer very craft." It was Prawle, Zachary Pearse's henchman. "Yes," he went on, "that's the cutter." "And Captain Pearse?" He leant his back against the quay, and spat. "He was a pra-aper man; I never zane none like 'en." "Did you do any good out there?"
That was the family; and there was a girl, Bessie Prawle, daughter of a neighbour, very much in and out of the house, and held by common report to be betrothed to Andrew. She used to help the widow in domestic matters, see to the poultry, milk the cow, churn the butter, press the cheeses.
Old King came out booted and cloaked, his staff in his hand, battled to the door and was swept up the brae upon the gale. Miranda did not appear; so Mabilla, white and rigid, was alone in the whirling room. Creeping to her through the open door, holding to whatever solid thing she could come by, entered Bessie Prawle. In all that turmoil and chill terror she alone was hot.
The neighbours were too well disposed to the family to raise any doubts or objections; Bessie Prawle was sullen and quiet; only Miranda King seems to have been equal to the occasion. She, as if in complete possession of facts which satisfied every question, received the girl as an equal.
Speculation was rife and volubly expressed, especially by Bessie Prawle. Miranda King, however, was silent; but it was noticed that she kept her eyes fixed upon the woman behind her son, and that her lips moved as if she was muttering to herself. The facts were as the expectations. Andrew King brought forward a young, timid and unknown girl as his wife.
Out on the parched fell-side Bessie Prawle sat like a bird of omen and gloomed at the wrath to come. Toward dusk a wind came moaning down the valley, raising little spires of dust. It came now down, now up. Sometimes two currents met each other and made momentary riot. But farm-work has to get itself done through fair or foul.
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