The Project Gutenberg EBook of There is Sorrow On The Sea, by Gilbert Parker

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Title: There is Sorrow On The Sea

Author: Gilbert Parker

Last Updated: March 14, 2009
Release Date: October 18, 2006 [EBook #6255]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THERE IS SORROW ON THE SEA ***

Produced by David Widger

"THERE IS SORROW ON THE SEA"

By Gilbert Parker

I

"YORK FACTORY, HUDSON'S BAY,
"23rd September, 1747.

"MY DEAR COUSIN FANNY,--It was a year last April Fool's Day, I left you
on the sands there at Mablethorpe, no more than a stone's throw from the
Book-in-Hand Inn, swearing that you should never see me or hear from me
again. You remember how we saw the coast-guards flash their lights here
and there, as they searched the sands for me? how one came bundling down
the bank, calling, 'Who goes there?' You remember that when I said, 'A
friend,' he stumbled, and his light fell to the sands and went out,
and in the darkness you and I stole away: you to your home, with a
whispering, 'God-bless-you, Cousin Dick,' over your shoulder, and I with
a bit of a laugh that, maybe, cut to the heart, and that split in a sob
in my own throat--though you didn't hear that.

"'Twas a bad night's work that, Cousin Fanny, and maybe I wish it
undone, and maybe I don't; but a devil gets into the heart of a man when
he has to fly from the lass he loves, while the friends of his youth go
hunting him with muskets, and he has to steal out of the backdoor of his
own country and shelter himself, like a cold sparrow, up in the eaves of
the world.

"Ay, lass, that's how I left the fens of Lincolnshire a year last April
Fool's Day. There wasn't a dyke from, Lincoln town to Mablethorpe that
I hadn't crossed with a running jump; and there wasn't a break in the
shore, or a sink-hole in the sand, or a clump of rushes, or a samphire
bed, from Skegness to Theddlethorpe, that I didn't know like every line
of your face. And when I was a slip of a lad-ay, and later too--how you
and I used to snuggle into little nooks of the sand-hills, maybe
just beneath the coast-guard's hut, and watch th