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 he never gave a thought:
"time enough for that," he had decided, "when Steens became his, as some
day it must;" for the estate ever since the first Stephen acquired it in
the Wars of the Roses and gave it his name ('Steens' being but 'Stephen's'
contracted) had been a freehold patrimony descending regularly from father
to son or next heir. All in good time Roger Stephen would marry and
install his wife in the manor-house. But the shop in Coinagehall Street
was no place for a woman. She would be a nuisance, sweeping the place out
and upsetting him and Malachi; an expense, too, and Roger--always a
penurious man--incurred no expense until obliged.

But on a day, about two