Two Sides of the Face | Page 2

to reflect upon these cellared piles of silver, and what they
indicate of Cornish life in those days: and bear in mind that they were
stacked in place a short ten years before Roger Stephen, a
mile-and-a-half away, first let fly his bullets at the Sheriff, on the
principle that an Englishman's house is his castle, and in firm
conviction--shared by all the countryside and in the bottom of his heart
by Sir John himself--that this particular castle was Roger Stephen's; not
perhaps by law, but assuredly by right.

II.
Four miles south of Steens, and a trifle over, lies the market town of
Helston (or 'Helleston' as men wrote it in 1734, and ought to write it
still); on the road to nowhere and somnolent then as now, but then as
now waking up once a year, on the 8th of May, to celebrate the Feast of
Flora and welcome back the summer. She is brought in at daybreak
with green boughs and singing, and at noon the citizens dance through
the streets in her honour, the Mayor himself leading off as the town
band strikes up its immemorial quickstep, the staid burgesses following
with their partners. At first they walk or amble two and two, like
animals coming out of Noah's ark; then, at a change in the tune, each
man swings round to the lady behind him, 'turns' her, regains his
partner, 'turns' her too, and the walk is resumed. And so, alternately
walking and twirling, the procession sways down the steep main street

and in and out of the houses left open for it--along the passage from
front door to court or garden, out at the back door, in at the back door
of the next open house, and through to the street again--the beadles
preceding with wreathed wands, the band with decorated drum, the
couples 'turning' duly at the break in the tune, though it catch them in
the narrowest entrance or half-way down a flight of steps.
On the 8th of May, 1734, at the foot of Coinage-hall Street, hard by the
Bowling Green, a pewterer's shop stood open, like its neighbours, to
admit the Flora. But the master of the shop and his assistant--he kept no
apprentice--sat working as usual at their boards, perhaps the only two
men in Helleston who disregarded the public holiday. But everyone
knew Roger Stephen to be a soured man, and what old Malachi
Hancock did was of no account.
Malachi sat at his bench in the rear of the shop turning the rim of a
pewter plate, and Roger Stephen in the front, for the sake of better light,
peering into the bowels of a watch which had been brought to him to be
cleaned--a rare job, and one which in his sullen way he enjoyed. From
youth up he had been badly used. His father, Humphrey Stephen,
owned Steens, and was a man of substance; a yeoman with money and
land enough to make him an esquire whenever he chose. In those days
it was the custom in Cornish families of the better class to send the
eldest son to college (usually to Oxford), and thence, unless the care of
his estates claimed him at home, into one of the liberal professions.
Sometimes the second son would follow him to college and proceed to
Holy Orders, but oftener he had to content himself as apprentice to an
apothecary or an attorney. The third son would, like Roger Stephen, be
bound to a pewterer or watchmaker, the fourth to a mercer, and so on in
a descending scale. But Roger, though the only child of a rich man, had
been denied his natural ambition, and thrust as a boy into the third class.
His mother had died young, and from the hour of her death (which the
young man set down to harsh usage) he and his father had detested each
other's sight. In truth, old Humphrey Stephen was a violent tyrant and
habitually drunk after two o'clock. Roger, self-repressed as a rule and
sullen, found him merely abhorrent. During his mother's lifetime, and
because she could not do without him, he had slept at Steens and

walked to and from his shop in Helleston; but on the day after the
funeral he packed and left home, taking with him old Malachi, a family
retainer whom Humphrey had long ago lamed for life by flinging a
crowbar at him in a fit of passion.
So for twelve years he had lodged and taught Malachi his trade in the
dirty, low-browed shop, over which a pewter basin hung for sign and
clashed against the tilt whenever a sea-breeze blew. Malachi did his
marketing: Roger himself rarely stepped across his threshold, and had
never been known to gossip. To marriage