A Maid of the Silver Sea | Page 2

voices on the cliff outside and close at hand.
"Tom," muttered the boy.
"And Peter Mauger," murmured the girl, and they both shrank lower
into their hiding-place.
It was a tiny natural chamber in the sharp slope of the hill. Ages ago the
massive granite boulders of the headland, loosened and undercut by the
ceaseless assaults of wind and weather and the deadly quiet fingers of

the frost, had come rolling down the slope till they settled afresh on
new foundations, forming holes and crannies and little angular
chambers where the splintered shoulders met. In time, the soil silted
down and covered their asperities, and--like a good colonist--carrying
in itself the means of increase, it presently brought forth and blossomed,
and the erstwhile shattered rocks were royally robed in russet and
purple, and green and gold.
Among these fantastic little chambers Nance had played as a child, and
had found refuge in them from the persecutions of her big half-brother,
Tom Hamon. Tom was six when she was born--fourteen accordingly
when she was at the teasable age of eight, and unusually tempting as a
victim by reason of her passionate resentment of his unwelcome
attentions.
She hated Tom, and Tom had always resented her and her mother's
intrusion into the family, and Bernel's, when he came, four years after
Nance.
What his father wanted to marry again for, Tom never could make out.
His lack of training and limited powers of expression did not indeed
permit him any distinct reasoning on the matter, but the feeling was
there--a dull resentment which found its only vent and satisfaction in
stolid rudeness to his stepmother and the persecution of Nance and
Bernel whenever occasion offered.
The household was not therefore on too happy a footing.
It consisted, at the time when our story opens, of--Old Mrs.
Hamon--Grannie--half of whose life had been lived in the nineteenth
century and half in the eighteenth. She had seen all the wild doings of
the privateering and free-trading days, and recalled as a comparatively
recent event the raiding of the Island by the men of Herm, though that
happened forty years before.
She was for the most part a very reserved and silent old lady, but her
tongue could bite like a whip when the need arose.

She occupied her own dower-rooms in the house, and rarely went
outside them. All day long she sat in her great arm-chair by the window
in her sitting-room, with the door wide open, so that she could see all
that went on in the house and outside it; and in the sombre depths of
her great black silk sun-bonnet--long since turned by age and weather
to dusky green--her watchful eyes had in them something of the
inscrutable and menacing.
Her wants were very few, and as her income from her one-third of the
farm had far exceeded her expenses for more than twenty years, she
was reputed as rich in material matters as she undoubtedly was in
common-sense and worldly wisdom. Even young Tom was sulkily
silent before her on the rare occasions when they came into contact.
Next in the family came the nominal head of it, "Old Tom" Hamon, to
distinguish him from young Tom, his son; a rough, not ill-natured man,
until the money-getting fever seized him, since which time his
home-folks had found in him changes that did not make for their
comfort.
The discovery of silver in Sark, the opening of the mines, and the
coming of the English miners--with all the very problematical benefits
of a vastly increased currency of money, and the sudden introduction of
new ideas and standards of life and living into a community which had
hitherto been contented with the order of things known to its
forefathers--these things had told upon many, but on none more than
old Tom Hamon.
Suspicious at first of the meaning and doings of these strangers, he very
soon found them advantageous. He got excellent prices for his farm
produce, and when his horses and carts were not otherwise engaged he
could always turn them to account hauling for the mines.
As the silver-fever grew in him he became closer in his dealings both
abroad and at home. With every pound he could scrimp and save he
bought shares in the mines and believed in them absolutely. And he
went on scrimping and saving and buying shares so as to have as large
a stake in the silver future as possible.

He got no return as yet from his investment, indeed. But that would
come all right in time, and the more shares he could get hold of the
larger the ultimate return would be. And so he stinted himself and his
family, and mortgaged his future, in hopes of wealth which he would
not have known