Now, at the onset of this disaster had such a letter reached Polperro not a man in the place but, short of knowing it would cost his life, would have risked all else to go to London, and if Jerrem was to die give him courage by mustering round their comrade at the last. But the downpour of disaster had cowed these daring spirits, and the men who had not known what fear meant so long as success was secure now trembled and gave way under the superstitious certainty that Ill-luck was following them and Misfortune had marked them for her own. Their energies paralyzed, they succumbed to what they looked upon as Fate, and in most cases were seized without a struggle and led off to the nearest prisons without an effort on their own part toward resistance.
The money over which, from the small scope for spending it, they had seemed so lavish and reckless, when needed for lawyers and counsel and bribes went but a small way; and though they made a common purse of all their hoards, not a day passed without some house being stripped of the substance which adorned it, so that money might be got for the husband, the son, the brothers who had brought these treasures home. The women, on their knees, pressed on the farmers' wives their chintzes, their lace, their gaudy stock of jewelry, and when this market failed toiled along to Liskeard, Plymouth and Launceston, carrying their china, silver plate and bowls in the hope of finding somebody to buy them.
With a revenue cutter--often two--always in sight, landing parties of king's men, who, recalling ugly thoughts of the hated press-gang, roamed hither and thither, ready to seize any one who happened to show his face; with half the husbands, sons and brothers in Plymouth clink or Bodmin jail, and the rest skulking in farm-houses or lying hidden in the secret places; with plenty vanishing and poverty drawing nigh,--the past circumstances which had led to this desolation were swallowed up in the present misery it had entailed upon them; and though every one now knew the whole story as it stood--how that through Jerrem writing to Eve she had had it in her power to tell Reuben May, her former lover, who, led on by jealousy, had betrayed them to the revenue-men--so familiar had Reuben's good services to Jerrem become known that it was taken as only one more of his many friendly actions that he should write to Joan, urging her to come to London without delay, and promising to meet her and see that she was taken care of. If any among them thought that Joan would go probably to Eve's home, they made no mention of it, for Eve's name was by a tacit understanding banished from their mouths, and the memory of her lay as a seal to that dark sepulchre wherein, with bitter scorn and hate, Adam lay buried.