XIII

THE SPECTRE BRIDEGROOM

By WILLIAM HUNT

Long, long ago a farmer named Lenine lived in Boscean.  He had but one son, Frank Lenine, who was indulged into waywardness by both his parents.  In addition to the farm servants, there was one, a young girl, Nancy Trenoweth, who especially assisted Mrs Lenine in all the various duties of a small farmhouse.

Nancy Trenoweth was very pretty, and although perfectly uneducated, in the sense in which we now employ the term education, she possessed many native graces, and she had acquired much knowledge, really useful to one whose aspirations would probably never rise higher than to be mistress of a farm of a few acres.  Educated by parents who had certainly never seen the world beyond Penzance, her ideas of the world were limited to a few miles around the Land’s-End.  But although her book of nature was a small one, it had deeply impressed her mind with its influences.  The wild waste, the small but fertile valley, the rugged hills, with their crowns of cairns, the moors rich in the golden furze and the purple heath, the sea-beaten cliffs and the silver sands, were the pages she had studied, under the guidance of a mother who conceived, in the sublimity of her ignorance, that everything in nature was the home of some spirit form.  The soul of the girl was imbued with the deeply religious dye of her mother’s mind, whose religion was only a sense of an unknown world immediately beyond our own.  The elder Nancy Trenoweth exerted over the villagers around her considerable power.  They did not exactly fear her.  She was too free from evil for that; but they were conscious of a mental superiority, and yielded without complaining to her sway.

The result of this was, that the younger Nancy, although compelled to service, always exhibited some pride, from a feeling that her mother was a superior woman to any around her.

She never felt herself inferior to her master and mistress, yet she complained not of being in subjection to them.  There were so many interesting features in the character of this young servant girl that she became in many respects like a daughter to her mistress.  There was no broad line of division in those days, in even the manorial hall, between the lord and his domestics, and still less defined was the position of the employer and the employed in a small farmhouse.  Consequent on this condition of things, Frank Lenine and Nancy were thrown as much together as if they had been brother and sister.  Frank was rarely checked in anything by his over-fond parents, who were especially proud of their son, since he was regarded as the handsomest young man in the parish.  Frank conceived a very warm attachment for Nancy, and she was not a little proud of her lover.  Although it was evident to all the parish that Frank and Nancy were seriously devoted to each other, the young man’s parents were blind to it, and were taken by surprise when one day Frank asked his father and mother to consent to his marrying Nancy.