Cornwall (England : County) -- Fiction; Short stories, English
'For months then I heard no more of Grace Pascoe's lover: nor (though
he now came every Sunday to church) did I ever see looks pass between
the Vicarage pew (where she sat) and the Vellancoose pew (where he).
But at the end of the year she came to me and told me she had given
her word to a young farmer of Goldsithney, John Magor by name. In a
worldly way this was a far better match for her than to take a
nameless and landless man. Nor knew I anything against John Magor
beyond some stray wildness natural to youth. He came of clean blood.
He was handsome, almost as the other; tall, broad of chest, a
prizewinner at wrestling-matches; and of an age when a good wife is
usually a man's salvation.
'I called their banns, and in due time married them. On the
wedding-day, after the ceremony, I returned from church to find the
young man Luke awaiting me by my house-door; who very civilly desired
me to walk over to Vellancoose with him, which I did. There, taking
me aside to an unused linhay, he showed me the sculpture, telling me
(who could not conceal my admiration) that he had meant it for John
and Grace Magor (as she now was) for a wedding-gift, but that the
young woman had cried out against it as immodest and, besides,
unlucky. On the first count I could understand her rejecting such a
gift; for the folk of these parts know nothing of statuary and count
all nakedness immodest. Indeed, I wondered that the bridegroom had
not taken Luke's freedom in ill part, and I said so: to which he
answered, smiling, that no man ever quarrelled with him or could
quarrel. "And now, sir," he went on, "my apprenticeship is up, and I
am going on a long journey. Since you find my group pleasing I would
beg you to accept it, or--if you had liefer--to keep it for me until
I come again, as some day I shall." "I do not wonder," said I, "at
your wish to leave Lezardew Parish for the world where, as I augur,
great fortune awaits you." He smiled again at this and said that,
touching his future, he had neither any hope nor any fear: and again
he pressed me to accept the statuary. For a time I demurred, and in
the end made it a condition that he altered the faces somewhat,
concealing the likeness to John and Grace Magor: and to this he
consented. "Yet," said he, "it will be the truer likeness when the
time comes."
'He was gone on the morrow by daybreak, and late that afternoon the
farmer brought me the statuary in his hay-wagon. I had it set in the
garden by the great filberd-tree, and there it has stood for near
five-and-twenty years. (I ought to say that he had kept his promise
of altering the faces, and thereby to my thinking had defaced their
beauty: but beneath this defacement I still traced their first
likeness.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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