Mehalah (Gothic Classic). Baring-Gould Sabine

an evening towards the close of September, a man stood in this farmhouse by the hearth, on which burnt a piece of wreckwood, opposite an old woman, who crouched shivering with ague in a chair on the other side. He was a strongly built man of about thirty-five, wearing fisherman's boots, a brown coat and a red plush waistcoat. His hair was black, raked over his brow. His cheekbones were high; his eyes dark, eager, intelligent, but fierce in expression. His nose was aquiline, and would have given a certain nobility to his countenance, had not his huge jaws and heavy chin contributed an animal cast to his face.

      He leaned on his duck-gun, and glared from under his pent-house brows and thatch of black hair over the head of the old woman at a girl who stood behind, leaning on the back of her mother's chair, and who returned his stare with a look of defiance from her brown eyes.

      The girl might have been taken for a sailor boy, as she leaned over the chairback, but for the profusion of her black hair. She wore a blue knitted guernsey covering body and arms, and across the breast, woven in red wool, was the name of the vessel, 'Gloriana.' The guernsey had been knitted for one of the crew of a ship of this name, but had come into the girl's possession. On her head she wore the scarlet woven cap of a boatman.

      The one-pane window at the side of the fireplace faced the west, and the evening sun lit her brown gipsy face, burnt in her large eyes, and made coppery lights in her dark hair.

      The old woman was shivering with the ague, and shook the chair on which her daughter leaned; a cold sweat ran off her brow, and every now and then she raised a white faltering hand to wipe the drops away that hung on her eyebrows like rain on thatching.

      'I did not catch the chill here,' she said. 'I ketched it more than thirty years ago when I was on Mersea Isle, and it has stuck in my marrow ever since. But there is no ague on the Ray. This is the healthiest place in the world, Mehalah has never caught the ague on it. I do not wish ever to leave it, and to lay my bones elsewhere.'

      'Then you will have to pay your rent punctually,' said the man in a dry tone, not looking at her, but at her daughter.

      'Please the Lord so we shall, as we ever have done,' answered the woman; 'but when the chill comes on me——'

      'Oh, curse the chill,' interrupted the man; 'who cares for that except perhaps Glory yonder, who has to work for both of you. Is it so, Glory?'

      The girl thus addressed did not answer, but folded her arms on the chairback, and leaned her chin upon them. She seemed at that moment like a wary cat watching a threatening dog, and ready at a moment to show her claws and show desperate battle, not out of malice, but in self-defence.

      'Why, but for you sitting there, sweating and jabbering, Glory would not be bound to this lone islet, but would go out and see the world, and taste life. She grows here like a mushroom, she does not live. Is it not so, Glory?'

      The girl's face was no longer lit by the declining sun, which had glided further north-west, but the flames of the driftwood flickered in her large eyes that met those of the man, and the cap was still illumined by the evening glow, a scarlet blaze against the indigo gloom.

      'Have you lost your tongue, Glory?' asked the man, impatiently striking the bricks with the butt end of his gun.

      'Why do you not speak, Mehalah?' said the mother, turning her wan wet face aside, to catch a glimpse of her daughter.

      'I've answered him fifty times,' said the girl.

      'No,' protested the old woman feebly, 'you have not spoken a word to Master Rebow.'

      'By God, she is right,' broke in the man. 'The little devil has a tongue in each eye, and she has been telling me with each a thousand times that she hates me. Eh, Glory?'

      The girl rose erect, set her teeth, and turned her face aside, and looked out at the little window on the decaying light.

      Rebow laughed aloud.

      'She hated me before, and now she hates me worse, because I have become her landlord. I have bought the Ray for eight hundred pounds. The Ray is mine, I tell you. Mistress Sharland, you will henceforth have to pay me the rent, to me and to none other. I am your landlord, and Michaelmas is next week.'

      'The rent shall be paid, Elijah!' said the widow.

'The Ray is mine,' pursued Rebow, swelling with pride. 'I have bought it with my own money—eight hundred pounds. I could stubb up the trees if I would. I could cart muck into the well and choke it if I would. I could pull down the stables and break them up for firewood if I chose. All here is mine, the Ray, the marshes, and the saltings,1 the creeks, the fleets, the farm. That is mine,' said he, striking the wall with his gun, 'and that is mine,' dashing the butt end against the hearth; 'and you are mine, and Glory is mine.'

      'That never,' said the girl stepping forward, and confronting him with dauntless eye and firm lips and folded arms.

      'Eh! Gloriana! have I roused you?' exclaimed Elijah Rebow, with a flash of exultation in his fierce eyes. 'I said that the house and the marshes, and the saltings are mine, I have bought them. And your mother and you are mine.'

      'Never,' repeated the girl.

      'But I say yes.'

      'We are your tenants, Elijah,' observed the widow nervously interposing. 'Do not let Mehalah anger you. She has been reared here in solitude, and she does not know the ways of men. She means nothing by her manner.'

      'I do,' said the girl, 'and he knows it.'

      'She is a headlong child,' pursued the old woman, 'and when she fares to say or do a thing, there is no staying tongue or hand. Do not mind her, master.'

      The man paid no heed to the woman's words, but fixed his attention on the girl. Neither spoke. It was as though a war of wills was proclaimed and begun. He sought to beat down her defences with the force of his resolve flung at her from his dark eyes, and she parried it dauntlessly with her pride.

      'By God!' he said at last, 'I have never seen anywhere else a girl of your sort. There is none elsewhere. I like you.'

      'I knew it,' said the mother with feeble triumph in her palsied voice. 'She is a right good girl at heart, true as steel, and as tough in fibre.'

      'I have bought the house and the pasture, and the marshes and the saltings,' said Elijah sulkily, 'and all that thereon is. You are mine, Glory! You cannot escape me. Give me your hand.'

      She remained motionless, with folded arms. He laid his heavy palm on her shoulder.

      'Give me your hand, and mine is light; I will help you. Let me lay it on you and it will crush you. Escape it you cannot. This way or that. My hand will clasp or crush.'

      She did not stir.

      'The wild fowl that fly here are mine, the fish that swim in the fleets are mine,' he went on; 'I can shoot and net them.'

      'So can I, and so can anyone,' said the girl haughtily.

      'Let them try it on,' said Elijah; 'I am not one to be trifled with, as the world well knows. I will bear no poaching here. I have bought the Ray, and the fish are mine, and the fowl are mine, and you are mine also. Let him touch who dares.'

      'The wild fowl are free for any man to shoot, the fish are free for any man to net,' said the girl scornfully.

      'That is not my doctrine,' answered Elijah. 'What is on my soil and in my waters is mine, I may do with them what I will, and so also all that lives on my estate is mine.' Returning with doggedness to his point, 'As you live in my house and on my land, you are mine.'

      'Mother,' said the girl, 'give him notice, and quit the Ray.'

      'I could not do it, Mehalah, I could not do it,' answered the woman. 'I've lived all my life on the marshes, and I cannot quit them. But this is a healthy spot, and not like the marshes of Dairy House where once we were, and where I ketched the chill.'

      'You cannot go till you have paid me the rent,' said Rebow.

      'That,' answered