high-backed arm-chair of oak, facing the beef and the window, with the
big buck-horn hafted carving-knife to his right hand and the carving
fork to his left for insignia of office, each of them rearing its nose
over a monstrous cut-glass rest, shaped like a four-pound dumbbell. Pam
sat on his left. And the Spawer sat exactly in front of Pam on the
other side of the table; whenever they raised their eyes they were
looking at each other. While they were drawing their serviettes across
their knees, Father Mostyn keeled abstractedly over the arm of his chair
towards Pamela with his eyelids curiously lowered, as though he were
trying to catch sight of a fly on his nose, and named her in a spirit of
gentle musing:
"... Pam ... dear child?"
Then Pam threw up her chin fairly and squarely and fearlessly, after the
manner of one who had nothing to be ashamed of, looking into the
Spawer's eyes without flinching, first of all, and thence to the very
gates of Heaven over his shoulder and crossed herself, and lifted her
clear, bell-like voice in pronouncement, and said:
"In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost."
Whereupon Father Mostyn crossed himself too--with easy familiarity, as
though he were sprinkling surplus snuff off his fingers; being a priest,
and in the profession, so to speak--his neck stretched out the while
like that of a Christmas Eve turkey, and his nose thrown up raptly over
the beef; after which he let his serviette slip through his knees, and
took hold of both arms of his chair, and flung himself recklessly out
over them at right angles, first to one side of the table and then to
the other, in bland survey, like Punch delivering his immortal gallows
oration, and said:
"Pam, dear child.... What are you giving us?" as though Pam had not
reiterated every dish to him half a dozen times that very night.
"... There are the herrings," she suggested, assuring herself by a sight
of them, with a hopeful slant of inquiry for his Reverence's approval.
"Ha!" Father Mostyn cast up recognisant eyes to Heaven as though he had
not understood this signal act of mercy to form one of the items of
Pam's grace, and must needs now add a special acknowledgment.
"Beautiful! beautiful! Pass them along, dear child. A plebeian fish at
three a penny, but one of many virtues, whose sole faults lie in its
price and name. Fortunately, those are faults not likely to affect the
epigastrium. Wynne, my boy." He received the dish from Pam's fingers
and transferred it magnificently over the roast beef to the Spawer's
side of the table; a gesture that made rare caviare of it at once, "...
let me persuade you. Herring olives prepared according to the recipe of
my late maternal uncle, Rear-Admiral Sir Alexander Cornelius...."
And so they entered upon it, with little thin, crustless sandwiches of
brown bread and butter (Pam's making) to accompany the olives, and the
Spawer went twice without shame,--just as Pam had arranged he
should,--and it acted beautifully. You would never have known she 'd
risen from the table if you had n't been watching to see what became of
them. And after that they turned their eyes towards the beef with one
accord, and Father Mostyn uttered a dread "Ha!" and seized it between
knife and fork like an executioner, and whipped it over and stuck the
fork critically into the undercut, holding his nose very high, and
knitted at the brows, and looking terribly down the sides of it through
his lashes, and drew the knife (another awful moment for Pam) and melted
in a rapturous smile as the blade sank easily, out of sight, and said:
"Beautiful! beautiful! ... Cuts like a bar of butter, dear child."
In such wise they embarked upon the beef stage, and laid siege to Pam's
succulent salad, with its tender, juicy greens and its mellifluous cream
sauce. Then the pie passed in turn, nobly supported by the savory eggs,
and similarly succeeded all the other items of the feed--(a glorious
procession)--the stewed plums, the custard, the trifle pudding, the
port-wine jellies, the whipped creams, and the cheese, with the
wherewithal to wash them down and cleanse the palate for its
discriminating duties--St. Julia winking rosily in the tinted claret
glasses by the sides of Father Mostyn and the Spawer; simple lemonade in
a tumbler for Pam to put her lips to.
And all the while they talked. At least, the Spawer and Father Mostyn
did. Pam said less with her lips, but her eyes were always present in
the heart of the conversation--so frankly and sweetly and freely
communicative, and with such beautiful brows of sympathetic
understanding playing above them that one never felt any need of the
spoken word. Indeed, one did n't even notice it was n't there. That
was because she possessed the unconscious subtle faculty of extending
her words through manner; of perfuming them, as it were, with her own
sweet, ineffable identity, so that what had been a mere brief-spoken
monosyllable, unmemorable of itself, became through her a complete
sentence in physical expression, memorable for some beautiful phrase of
neck or lips, or brows, or all of them together, perhaps, in one
melodious gesture.
And after they 'd saturated themselves through and through with the talk
of things musical till the girl's eyes were wonder-worlds, swimming
gloriously aloft amid whole systems of consonant stars, and the priest
was a-hum in every fibre of him with fragmentary bars and snatches of
quotation under the gathering force of musical remembrance, like a
kettle coming to the boil. After all this they passed in procession
over the echoing flagstones into the far room, where was the little
sprightly old-fashioned spinster of a Knoll piano, exhaling still a
faint pungency of ammonia from its recent ablutions, with new candles in
its sconces and an open copy of Rossini's Stabat Mater laid suggestively
on its desk, and all its yellow ivories exposed in a four-octave smile
of seduction.
And here Pam brought those familiar etceteras of hospitality with which
the Spawer had already made acquaintance; and filled the pipe as
unconcernedly and as skilfully as though she were a seasoned smoker; and
sliced the three rounds of lemon for his Reverence's glass.
And they made music--glorious music--on the little short-compassed
upright. They had the concerto, of course--what was written of
it--which Pam, nursing intent clasped hands in her lap, with her head
erect and her red lips folded and her eyes aglow, adjudged more
beautiful the more she heard it. Oh, what a glorious thing it was to be
a composer, and have one's head filled with beautiful music in place of
other people's ordinary humdrum ideas! And Father Mostyn passed a
rhapsodical hand over his shining scalp and said: "Ha! ... makes one
long for a few hairs to stand on end in tribute to it. Such music as
that seems somehow to be wasted on a bald head."
And they had the A-flat prelude again, that sealed Pam's eyes with the
great round tears of remembrance. And the Black Study they had; and some
of Bach's Englische Suiten; and bits of Beethoven, the Waldstein; and
the III; and part of the "Emperor"; and snatches of Brahms--all just as
they came into the Spawer's head, with little illuminative discourses to
accompany them--a sort of running verbal analytic programme, as it were.
And Father Mostyn gave them reminiscences of Mario and Grisi and Braham
and the great Lablache, and sang "I am no better than my Fathers," from
Elijah.
Not a bit better, really--if indeed as good.
And the Spawer furnished humorous illustrations of all the great
players. De Pachmann, with the high, uplifted finger and exquisite
smile; and the statuesque Paderewski, sitting stonily at the piano; and
the oblivious Rubinstein; and the imperious Liszt; and the pedagogic Von
Buelow; all of them as funny as could be, with real musicianly insight
at the back of them; most felicitous examples of instructive comparative
criticism.
And Pam had her first lesson this night, and was quite ready to begin
the second when that was over; and there seemed not more happiness in
Heaven.
*CHAPTER XII*
It was midnight when Pam breathed guarded good-by over her shoulder to
Father Mostyn and the Spawer in the roadway, and let herself noiselessly
out of their sight through the post-house door.
Up above, in the bedroom that lay over the passage, a rhythmic sonorous
sound gave token that the postmaster, at least, was enjoying the
abundant fruits of blessed repose. In darkness Pam tiptoed to the
little clean kitchen, and cautiously lighting the candle that her own
hands had left ready for her on the corner of the dresser, held it
gently about her on all sides in final inspection, for the observance of
any little neglected duties that might be the better for doing before
she took her way to bed. To one side of the fireplace there was the
little clothes-horse standing--more, by right, a pony--gaily caparisoned
with clocked hose and plain; long stockings and short; grey woollens;
unstarched collars; and sundry inspiriting pink and white frilled
trappings, that should have given mettle to the sorriest nag alive.
Through the internal brightness of remembered music Pam's practical mind
went out instinctively to the stockings. She set down her candle, and
ran them one by one like gloves over her left hand as far as the foot,
working her fingers within the hidden-most recesses of toe and heel for
any signs of the wanting stitch. Out of some dozen pairs it wanted in
three that forthwith did not return to the little clothes-pony, but went
over her left arm in token of unsoundness. With these dangling at her
skirt she made quick, noiseless tracks over the kitchen floor to acquire
the necessary paraphernalia of repair--for nobody ever recognised the
superiority of time present over time past or future better than Pam,
or, recognising it, put the recognition to more practical account--and
slipping a purposeful finger through the ringed handle of the
candlestick, prepared to fetch worsted from the kitchen parlor.
She took the knob in her hand and entered naturally enough, opening the
door gently first of all, against any grease-sputtering displacement of
air, and keeping watch on the candle's behavior as she brought it round
from the shelter of her bosom and passed it in front of her across the
threshold. Quite two steps forward she had taken with her eyes on the
little yellow flame, before something strange about the feel of the room
plucked peremptorily at her attention as though with live fingers, and
brought her up on her heel, gazing in front of her, to an involuntary
quick-drawn breath of surprise. On the wool mat, in the centre of the
square table where they gathered at meals, stood the lamp, still burning
dimly, and in the obscurity beyond the lamp, the blur as of a second
globe, where a human head lay bowed in the supporting hollow of two
pallid hands.
Head and hands of the schoolmaster, beyond a doubt. How well Pam knew
them; the long nervous fingers, that always flew to his throat when he
addressed her, as though to throttle back the lurking dog of his
dislike; the high, bulging forehead, with the compressed temples and the
pulse in their veins; the whiteness and brightness of the scalp where
the hair should have been. Oh, how Pam had studied them times out of
number, like some strange, unlearnable lesson, trying to get them into
her head and realise what they meant, and why--but never, perhaps, with
her soft eyelashes fringing a greater perplexity than when she looked
over them to-night. Never before had Pam found him--or any other of the
household--awaiting her arrival when she returned from a late sitting
with Father Mostyn. Was he troubled? Was he ill?
It was but a momentary glimpse of him that she caught, with head and
hands together; but in that one moment he seemed all these things. The
next, while Pam was revolving in her mind whether she should speak his
name or cough, or rattle her matches, or depart more softly than she had
come--the attitude dissolved. The long spectral fingers slid downwards
(so quickly that he might have been merely drawing them across his
cheeks when Pam entered) and his body rose from the chair to a standing
posture. He gave no look at Pam, though his averted head showed
recognition of her presence.
For a second or so there was silence in the room, Pam gazing over her
candle at the drawn white face--whiter and more drawn than usual, it
seemed to her--with the guilty thought beating within her that once
again she had brought herself before this man unwelcomely. Then, seeing
that she was the intruder, and that he, risen to full height from the
chair, showed no signs of addressing her, or even of actively ignoring
her, but stood passive, as though she had summoned his attention and he
was simply giving it, without prejudice to any explanation she might
wish to make--begged his pardon (for Heaven knows what) in a voice of
infinite apology and contrition.
"I hope I have n't disturbed you..." she said. He bit his lip over a
strained short "No."
"I did n't mean to. I only came in for some worsted ... Emma used it
last. A grey ball with three needles in it, the color of uncle's
stockings. May I look for it? ... It 's by the Bible, I think."
Without a word he turned on his heel to the sideboard where the big
everyday reading Bible lay, and commenced a silent search. Something
about the desolate droop of his thin, threadbare shoulders and the weary
aimlessness of his seeking, sent (as his rear prospect always seemed to
send) a thrill of spontaneous pity through Pam's heart. Why she pitied
him, or exactly what there was about the shiny obverse of him to
stimulate the emotion, not for the life of her could she have told.
He was some considerable time with his coat-tails turned towards her,
and seemed, by the laborious stooping of his shoulder, quagmired in his
search, she suggested--with such gentleness of breathing as would not
have rocked the flame of her candle--that perhaps ... if he would let
her ... she might be able....
Immediately he spun round from the side cupboard as though she had
struck him, with the needles flashing in his hand.
"Is this your worsted?" he said.
"Oh ... thank you so much!"
Her eyes corroborated the color in an instant, and she started forward
with grateful extended hand to relieve him of the necessity for coming
more than halfway across the kitchen to meet her.
He took the words, but his eyes refused to admit the look. "No
thoroughfare" seemed eternally writ up over them. Pam gazed a second at
the stern intimation, and then, cuddling her candle to her for
departure, turned--softly, so that he might not construe one single
grain of anger into her going--for the door. Halfway there she looked
back irresolutely over a shoulder, hesitating whether to speak or not.
"Your lamp ... is getting low," at length she ventured. "I think,
perhaps ... it may want a little more oil. Shall I refill it for you?"
she inquired solicitously. "The smell may give you a headache."
For answer he stooped over the table on both hands and blew out the
convulsed flame with two short breaths. A thin, acrid column of smoke
from the red wick commenced to wend its way upward, like a soul in
tedious migration.
"I am going to bed," he said,
Pam's quick ear caught the sudden collapse of utter weariness in his
voice as he said it. Something in the sound of it smote her soul to
pity, as though she had had a momentary sight of his shoulders.
"You were not ... sitting up ... for me?" she asked--begged would be a
better word.
"Why should I sit up ... for you?" he asked her; and his two hands went
up to his collar.
"I don't know ... why you should," she said, plucking her reply to
pieces, petal by petal, in soft embarrassment, as though it had been a
flower. All the working of his lips, it seemed to her, could not
conceal the sardonic amusement her answer stirred in him. Red shame
rushed up the slim column of the girl's neck and plunged for hiding in
the roots of her hair. "... And of course ... you did n't," she
hastened to add.
"Of course."
Whether he repeated her words in mere unconcerned assent, or pressed
upon them with the hard knuckle of sarcasm, or was using them
interrogatively, Pam could not make sure, nor dared she ask, though she
delayed awhile with her eyes fixed for solution upon his face.
"I 'm glad you did n't," she said gently, and in silence led the way
into the little clean kitchen. "You will want a fresh candle," she
said, putting her own down once more on the dresser, and reaching the
empty holder, that by household consent was allowed to pertain to his
exclusive use.
Out of a drawer in the dresser she produced a piece of newspaper; tore
off a strip; narrowed its width by folding; bound it neatly round the
base of the candle; pressed the candle securely into its socket; lighted
it from her own, and handed it--after its flame was sufficiently
established--to the waiting man.
He took it awkwardly and tardily enough, rocking so long in silence on
his feet before acceptance, with head thrown forward and chin bearing
heavily over his collar, that for some moments Pam had doubts whether he
was not fast asleep and about to fall prone across the outstretched
candle and her. But roused at length, as it would seem, by her
prolonged gaze of inquiry, he lifted his head and extended an uncertain
hand--a hand so uncertain, indeed, that at the first attempt it went
wide of the candlestick altogether. At the second, more through Pain's
management than his, thumb and finger closed upon it and he turned to
go. The look of his dazed eyes and the dry, white lips that rubbed
impotently sideways upon each other to shape a soundless "Thank you,"
sent a great surging tide of solicitous alarm through Pam's bosom. She
was after him in a moment.
"Mr. Frewin ... Mr. Frewin.... Are you ill?"
*CHAPTER XIII*
His foot was already on the first step when she urged her bated voice of
inquiry after him. He stayed for a moment so, as though he lacked
strength to ascend or purpose to speak, and then turned upon her very
slowly.
"You ask that," he said, compressing his words through bloodless lips,
hard and set. "Don't you know? Can't you see?"
The fixed, meaningful way he looked at her, as though his face were a
written answer, and she could read it if she would, and the strange,
underlying emphasis of his question, took Pam altogether by surprise.
Did n't she know? Could n't she see? All the dread sicknesses under
the sun seemed to swathe him and envelope him in their hideous mantles
as she gazed ... a fearful kaleidoscopic counterpane of ailments. Which
of all these had her blindness overlooked?
Did n't she know? Could n't she see?
"See what?" she begged, in the whispered hush of a voice that besought
an answer it scarcely dared to hear. For, framed in the narrow dark
inlet of the staircase, with the candle casting corpse-hollows over his
eyes, and sinking his cheeks under shadow, and sharpening his nose, and
hardening his nostrils--to the girl's disturbed imagination he seemed
dead and coffined already. "Oh, tell me, please!--what I ought to see.
Oh, I am so sorry! Is there anything you want? Is there anything I can
get you?"
"You know what I want," he said, and Lazarus, wakened from the dead,
might have spoken his first words in just such a voice.
"_I_ know what you want?" repeated Pam, falling back a little dismayed
before the directness of his charge, and the black inability of her mind
to meet it.
"... You," he said.
"Me?" said Pam again, more vacantly still, taking the word from him, and
trying it in turn, like a key, upon all those sayings that had gone
before, to see which of their several senses it might fit and open.
Then, all of a sudden she saw the door it opened, and the threshold it
led over, and let the key fall, as it were, from her hands, and covered
her face hotly with her ten small fingers. "Oh, no, no, no!" she panted.
"You don't mean that."
She opened a place in her fingers to look at him through, in the silence
that followed, like a fawn staring startled from out the high stalks of
a thicket, and let both hands slip downward to her skirts with the limp
fall of bewilderment. To think this was the secret of his disfavor;
this the reason for all his anger, and all her self-interrogations.
That he loved her.
He laid down his candle on the dresser beside her own, and ran the
finger of his left hand looseningly round the inner rim of his collar,
as though it had suddenly grown tight about him.
"Why not that?" he said, in a voice so low and natureless and hoarse
that it might have issued from a man of straw, for all the tone it gave.
"Because ... oh ... because of everything," Pam told him, with troubled
eyes and lips and fingers. "I never expected it. It 's all so sudden."
"Sudden," he said.
Pam moved her lips in mournful affirmation. It cut her to the quick to
hurt him.
"I 'm afraid so," she said, laying the words soothingly over the raw in
his soul. "... Terribly sudden."
"... When it 's been going on ... for two years. Ever since ... I came.
You call that sudden?"
"So long as that?" said Pam, in open-eyed amaze. "Oh, I never knew it.
Indeed I did n't. I had n't the faintest idea."
He passed his hand across his forehead with a look of pain.
"... And I thought I could n't keep it from you--even when I tried. I
fancied you read me through and through, and understood what I wanted to
ask of you--but could n't, till now. You looked as though you did. Did
n't you? Don't play with me. Tell me. You must have known."
Pam shook a head of pitying negation.
"It was n't that I did n't try," she told him, "... for I tried my best.
But I could n't. I never thought ... you cared one little bit about me.
If I 'd thought you cared for me ... there are lots of unkind things I
'd never have done that I did do, without thinking. I, would n't have
followed you into the room when you were alone, and looked at you, and
tried to make you look at me, and spoken to you. Never. You 'll
believe I would n't when I say so, won't you? All the time I was only
trying to make friends with you--that I was already, though I did n't
know it. And all the time you thought ... that I saw what was the
matter with you, and knew why you would n't look at me, and what you
meant when you turned your back. But I did n't. Indeed I did n't. Oh,
how spiteful and cruel you must have thought me," she said, with the
beautiful wetness of tears about her lashes. "And I did n't mean it for
cruelty a bit. I meant it for kindness. It 's all been a mistake from
the first."
"Is it a mistake ... now?" he asked.
"A mistake now?" said Pam, and looked at him for a moment; and then drew
a breath, and looked at him again; and drew another breath, and still
looked at him; while her lower lip broke loose and fluttered a little,
like a hovering butterfly, and stopped, and fluttered a second time, and
her lashes fell by an almost imperceptible shade--less a falling of the
lashes, indeed, than a falling of something not definable--a thin,
gauzy, darkening veil of trouble, it seemed to be, over the very look
itself. "I hope not," she said; but her voice and her eyes and her lips
belied the hope she spoke of. "We understand each other now ... don't
we?"
"What do we understand?" he asked huskily.
"I thought you knew," Pam said, setting her gaze on him, in intrepid
wonderment to think he should comprehend so badly, or so soon forget.
"I 've just ... been telling you."
"I know nothing," he said, and then in a sudden husky outburst of
avowal: "There is only one thing I want to know. I 've told you what it
is. Have you nothing to say in return?"
The unavailing exertion of trying to raise his lead-heavy voice clear of
a low whisper made him stop to cough--the hard, dry cough that weeks of
patient nursing and nights of anxious solicitude had taught Pam to know
so well.
"Nothing ... that I should like to say," Pam answered unsteadily.
"Nothing that you would wish to hear me say. I thought ... I 'd said
everything. Oh, please ... don't ask me to say any more. It might only
make things worse."
He swallowed time upon time in slow succession.
"And this is the end of all my waiting?"
"If you 'll let it, please, it is," Pam begged him, very pleadingly for
herself; very sorrowfully for him.
"I can't let it," he blurted after a while. "You don't know what you
are asking of me. I can't give you up."
"But I 'm not yours to give," Pam protested, with an awed voice, at this
unexpected assumption of possession.
"Whose are you?" he cried
"Nobody's, of course," Pam said, in meek submission, "except my own."
"You could be mine ... if you would," he told her, grappling with his
throat again. "Just for the saying of a word you could. I 've waited
for you for two years. Is one word too much to give ... for two years'
waiting?"
"Ginger waited for me longer than that," Pam said, very simply. "And I
said 'No' to Ginger."
"Who was Ginger, to want you?" he exclaimed. "You could never have
married Ginger."
"I did n't," said Pam quietly. "But Ginger loved me."
"I love you," he said fiercely.
"Ginger loved me first," Pam maintained stoutly. "And others loved me
before Ginger. If I 'd said to them what they wanted me to say to them
and what you want me to say to you, there would never have been any
question of your asking me."
"Why did n't you let me die ... when I had the chance?" he demanded
bitterly. "But you were kind to me then. You took advantage of me.
You were kind when I was ill and could n't help myself. Death stood as
near to me as I stand to you ... but day and night you stood between us
both and saved me."
"Oh, no, no!" Pam disclaimed hastily, in twofold fear and modesty,
shrinking before the acceptance of such an obligation. "It was n't I
that saved you. It was you yourself that got strong and better. I only
sat by you and did what little I could; but it was nothing at all ...
really."
"Nothing at all," he said, and clenched his fist in assurance. "It was
everything. Why did I get stronger and better--but for you? Because
you were by me, and because I wanted you ... and could n't bear to leave
you. Look," he said, standing back from her suddenly, as though to give
her full view of his statement, "do you know there were times ... times
when I could have turned my face to the wall and died for the mere
wishing?"
"But you would never have done that," Pam whispered, in hushed alarm.
"Why should n't I have done it?" he asked her, "... when death was so
easy and living so hard? You alone stopped me from doing it. The
thought of you and the sight of you, and the hope of you. Often and
often I was looking at you ... when you thought I was asleep."
"Sometimes I saw you," said Pam.
"... And making up my mind whether to die ... or risk living ... for
your sake. But I never could die ... because of you. And once, when
you had been a long while gone ... I said to myself: 'How easy to slip
off now ... before she comes back' ... and just as I was wondering
whether there would be time ... you came in, and stooped over me and
kissed me. How could I die after that? Once I made up my mind to kiss
you back ... but my lips had n't strength. You saw them move, and asked
me if I wanted a drink, and I said 'Yes'; but I did n't. And you cried
over me, too."
"I was sorry for you," said Pam. "I wanted you to get better."
"Are n't you sorry for me now?" he asked. "... Now that my mind is ill
... as my body was then?"
The terrible earnestness of his love troubled her. Love before she had
witnessed in plenty, but never love like this. It was as though she
stood with clasped hands before some burning homestead that her own
unintending fingers had fired, and saw the fierce wind fan the flames,
and heard the cry for succor from within ... and could do nothing. Oh,
it was horrible! For a while they looked at each other and said
nothing, for each feared speaking; he, lest he might divert Pam's
answer; Pam, because she had no answer to divert.
"Well?" he said at length. "Have you nothing to say to me?"
Pam only shook her head. What had she to say, and how could she say it
when her own great heart was hammering away like a stone-mason in the
place where her voice should have been.
"Not even a word?" he said, with a broken sob. "Won't you say ... you
'll try and care for me ... if I can make you? Is it too much to ask
that?"
Pam put her hands to her face.
"Oh ... I don't know. What am I to say? What am I to do?"
"... Do nothing," he said bitterly.
"But I want to do something," Pam protested desperately--though her own
shrinking conscience told her how little. "... And I don't say I won't
try. But perhaps ... I could never learn. I don't know. How am I to
know? And if I say I 'll try ... and can't in the end ... what a
dreadful thing for us both.... Oh, are you quite sure there 's nothing
short of love that will do?" she asked, with the lameness that can get
no further, and wrenched her hands, and looked at him in helpless
appeal.
"That means you won't try?" he said; and she could see his hand close
tight upon the dresser.
"Oh, no, no, no ... I will try!" Pam cried, charging blindly down the
open roadway of consent, for fault of any other way to turn. "... If
you wish it, I 'll try. But oh, please, it is n't the least bit of a
promise ... and you must n't ... must n't build on it. And you must n't
try and force me to learn ... or be angry with me if I 'm slow ... or
can't. Perhaps I can't. Oh, it may very well be that I can't ... for
all my trying.
"... And even ... if I ever grew to care anything for you ... in the way
you want--and I dare n't think or say. It all seems so sudden and
unreal. It seems as though I were dreaming it. Last night--half an
hour ago even--I never thought you wanted to speak to me or have
anything to do with me at all, and now--you 're asking me to try and
love you. And even if I grow to care for you in that way (and I don't
know. Oh, you must n't think I 'm promising) I should n't want ... I
mean it would have to be ... oh, for a long time. Years, perhaps.
Longer than ever you cared to wait. I told ... somebody once, when they
asked me--what you 've been asking me, that I never meant to get
married. And if I did ... it would be like acting a story to them--as
they said I was doing at the time. And I 've said 'No' to such lots of
others too ... and now to say 'Yes' to anybody (and I 'm only saying
half 'Yes'--only a quarter 'Yes'--to you) seems, somehow, like breaking
faith. It seems mean ... and unfair. And anyway it could n't ... could
n't possibly be yet. Could n't be for ever such a long time. Perhaps
you 'd never want to wait so long as that."
"Wait?" He thrust out his hand desperately to shut this dangerous
back-door of her concession. "With you at the end of my waiting ... I
would wait till the Judgment Day."
The dreary, dogged patience of the man's passion chilled Pam. It rose
up high in her mind like an awesome black monument of Patience, and cast
its great shadow over the brightness of her life--on and on and on
interminably, out of sight to the dull sun-setting of her clays. If she
could have recalled her words then. If she could have had the strength,
the moral strength, to throw him aside from her then and there--at never
mind what momentary cost to their feelings. All her soul, she knew, was
striving impotently to cast off the encumbrance of him--but the strength
was lacking. Strength to be cruel; strength to be kind. Because she
could not bring herself to deal the one smart blow that the moment
required with her own hand ... she was throwing herself contemptibly
upon the protection of the Future; making herself the Future's ward, and
trusting, in some blind, unreasoning fashion, that her guardian would be
responsible for her when the time came, and do for her what she had
lacked the daring to do for herself, and free her without consequence
(if so needed), and deal happiness all round with that lavish hand for
which the Future is, and has been, and ever will be, so extolled.
Wild, fatal fantasy of Pam's--that she shared in common with every man,
woman, and temporising child of this self-deluded, procrastinating
world. For the Future is that dread witch that, appearing first under
the guise of a sweet and amiable old lady, turns suddenly into the
red-eyed, horrid old hag of to-day.
But alas! The compact was drawn and signed and sealed. What
consequence that Pam imposed a hundred feverish reservations and
supplications, and qualifications and amendments, and loopholes and
contingencies upon her little old lady in the signing--and seemed to be
granted them every one? Into this little old lady's house she signed
herself for all that, and henceforth all her goings and comings, and
sleepings and wakings were no longer her sweet own, as heretofore, but
under the authority and subject to the control of the little sweet
amiable old lady--who was only biding her good time (as you may be sure)
to snap into the horrid, red-eyed hag we wot of, and fall upon Pam with
the black venom of her malignant nature.
All through the remaining hours till dawn and daylight the cough of the
schoolmaster rang out monotonously, dull and muffled, from beneath the
bedclothes like a funeral bell, and Pam, the only other awake in that
household to hear it, lay and listened to its tolling with great, wide
eyes staring at the darkness of the ceiling, and at the darkness beyond
the foot of the bed, and at the darkness where the door was, and
sometimes passionately into the smothered darkness of her own pillow,
and said to herself, with a wondering horror:
"When daybreak comes ... shall I wake?"
*CHAPTER XIV*
Green July, gliding smoothly on the noiseless axles of its diurnal
wheels, gives way at last to golden August, and beneath the assiduous
burning of the sun the cornfields begin to brown like the crust of a
pasty under the brasing iron. It is the mystic eve of harvest, that
consummation of the farmer's year, and all the countryside is
palpitating with it. Everywhere the talk is of cutting, and men, on
meeting, cast anxious eyes from each other's faces to the sky and ask:
"Will it 'owd [hold], think ye?"
And while this vast metamorphosis of color is creeping over the land,
and the countryside seems beating like a breast towards the consummation
of its great purpose, Pam and the piano and the Spawer and Father Mostyn
grow daily into a bond of deeper sympathy, and the wondrous ripening
process, so visible in externals, is going on no less surely within
their own hearts. On the little cracked Vicarage piano Pam practises
assiduously, and such is her zeal for the labor, and such her sense of
loyal gratitude to the setter of it and her desire to fulfil his
instructions that, by sheer force of love alone, she keeps pace with
what he teaches and wins his admiring praise for her progress.
Sometimes they gather at Father Mostyn's, cutting into chicken-pies one
night and finishing them off another. Sometimes Father Mostyn and Pam
walk up to Cliff Wrangham for the benefit of the better piano, and
compare the Archdeaconess's cookery--without comment, and very
kindly--and are set back by the Spawer, filled with music and affection.
A state of things which greatly indignates the orphan Mary Anne, who
cries aloud to herself:
"Is there nawbody good enough for 'im at Cliff Wrangham bud 'e mun gan
'is ways an' fetch 'em fro' Oolbrig?"
And every morning, with the habit of second nature, the Spawer goes
forth and sits on the lane gate about Pam's time, and feels a sense of
emptiness somewhere--as though he 'd gone without his breakfast--when
she does n't come. But when she does, and he sees her hat or her blue
Tam-o'-Shanter sailing briskly along the hedgerow, his released
expectancy curls up into smiles like stretched wire, and he strolls to
meet her as though his face had never known doubt, and accompanies her
henceforth to the end of her journey, so that the girl's brisk walk,
divided now between the two of them, is a gentle amble scarcely quicker
than Tankard's 'bus that daily rumbled through Ullbrig.
Their communion on these occasions, as at all times, is simple and
sacred. The perspicacious reader who has been preparing for tender
dialogues full of love and its understanding will have to suffer the
penalty of his perspicacity, for the sweet trivialities of love are in
no way touched upon. They talk of music; of struggles with "flesh" of
technique; of composition; of the meaning of music--if it has any. They
talk of French, and they talk French, of the recognised question and
answer pattern, till Pam gains quite a vocabulary of sea-coast words,
and could make herself understood intelligibly--and certainly
prettily--to any Frenchman on any cliff you like to name. And they talk
quite sincerely about the sea and the blueness of it; and bend down
their heads for the better appreciation of this great round bubble of
color; and draw each other's attention to clouds, to bees, to
butterflies, and nameless insects fluttering by. At other times, the
Spawer talks to her of his student life abroad and of his present-day
ambitions; the sort of glory he covets and the sort of glory by which he
sets no store. And the talk is of composers and schools of composers;
and players and schools of players--thick as shoals of herrings--till
Pam, who never forgets a precious word of what this deified mortal tells
her, but can reproduce its exact use and inflection for her own hearing
at any future time, is full to the red lips with critical discernments
and differentiations, and could astonish any wandering, way-logged
musician who might, for the sake of illustration, be presumed to find
himself in the district, and open subject of his own business with this
sweet girl stranger under her Government bag.
Sometimes, towards the end of an evening at Father Mostyn's, the Doctor
drops in upon them casually, introducing himself with the invariable
"Don't let me distairrb ye"--though it is known he comes for whist.
Music appeals to him about as meaningfully as a German band to a stray
dog; and being a Scotchman, he says so in the fewest words wherein this
hard truth can be contained, nor ceases to manifest a lurking distrust
of the piano until they are safely squared round the card-table, and the
cards are being cut. In his own Scotch way he is as fond of Pam as can
be, and on the strength of this tacit affection asks her bluntly to do
whatever he may happen to be in need of at the time.
"Ye 'll hae to gie me another match, Pam," he says unconcernedly, as he
deals, without looking at her. "A 'm no alicht yet."
And when she offers it to him, already lighted, he merely holds his
pipe-bowl towards her from his mouth, as a matter of course, scooping up
his cards and drawing vigorously, while Pam applies the flame, till
combustion is effected, when he draws his mouth away.
"Clubs are trumps," says he.
Pam does n't mind his disregard of her in the least, for you see he does
n't mean anything by it, being a Scotchman; but she would enjoy these
games better if the exigencies of play did not always pit her against
the Spawer, inasmuch as she and he, being the two weak members of the
quartette, can never be partnered against such past masters as his
Reverence and the Doctor. Eventually, since it proves itself the most
equable division of the table, she comes to be the accepted partner of
the latter, who does not hesitate to acquaint her, with cutting
directness, of any discrepancy in her play.
"What the deil made ye lead trumps, Pam?" he demanded of her, in blank
surprise, on one occasion. "Did ye no see me look at ye last time
Father Mostyn led them?"
He is a typical hardy Scotsman, all sinew and gristle, and raw about the
neck, and thinks little--if indeed at all--concerning dress. For the
most part, you will see him bicycling about the roads in meagre
knickerbockers that were trousers when he first came to Ullbrig, blue
stockings, and heavy-soled boots, with the tags sticking off them like
spurs. In other respects, he is a reader of profane literature and
avowed sceptic. Between him and his Reverence the Vicar is a standing
feud of opinion, which finds vent in many an argumentative battle royal.
At the end of one of these tremendous conflicts, that would almost be
hand-to-hand at times but for the pacific whiskey-bottle between them,
the Doctor rises to his feet, buttons his coat-collar as a preliminary
to departure, and cries vehemently:
"Hey, mon, but there 's na driving sense nor reason into ye. Hand over
the whiskey, and I 'll be gone. Ye 're as stubborn as Balaam's donkey."
"Ha! with the same authority, dear brother," his Reverence answers
blandly.
"And what authority will that be, pray?" asks the Doctor, bending the
stiff neck of the whiskey-bottle towards his tumbler, as though it were
his Reverence he had hold of.
"Divine authority, dear brother," says Father Mostyn. "Divine
authority."
"Divine authority," says the Doctor. "... Wi' yer meeracles. Mon, hae
ye ever hairrd a donkey speak?"
"Ha! frequently, frequently," murmurs his Reverence, focussing a distant
point of space through his eyelashes, and waltzing softly, without
animus, to and fro in his foot radius.
"Ah 'm no speakin' pairsonally, ye understand," the Doctor says, with a
tinge of remonstrance for levity, "but it will hae been in the pulpit ye
have hairrd it. Mon, hae ye never read Hume on the Meeracles? Are ye
no conversant wi' your Gibbon? D' ye pretend to tell me ye are ignorant
o' such men as Reenan and Strauss, and Bauerr and Darrwin, and Thomas
Huxley?"
"Estimable people, no doubt, Friend Anderson," the Vicar tells him
imperturbably. "... Estimable people."
"Ah doot ye 've read a wurrd of them," the Doctor pronounces bluntly.
"So much the better for me, dear brother. So much the better for me."
"Mon," says the Doctor, exasperated by this equanimous piety that all
his own exasperation cannot exasperate. "... Ye 're a peetifu' creature,
an' ah feel shame tae be drinkin' the whiskey o' such as you. Ye go
inta chairrch and fill a lot o' puir eegnorant people wi' mair ignorance
than they had without ye, teachin' them your fairy tales about apples
and sairrpints, and women bein' made oot o' man's ribs (did one ever
hearr the like!). Let's awa', an' mind dinna tek inta yer heid ta fall
sick this week, or it 'll go harrd wi' ye if ah 'm called."
"Ha! We can die but once, Brother Anderson," the priest tells him
cheerfully. "Even all the science and medical skill in the world can't
kill us more than that."
And so the moments of these four pass, and the harvest hour approaches,
inwardly and outwardly, until at last ... one day...
But in the meanwhile, for all this life of external happiness that Pam
shared with others, she was serving her silent apprenticeship in the
house of the little old lady. Even when he was furthest from her the
schoolmaster clung close to her mind. Each time she laughed, each time
she looked into the Spawer's face, each time she spoke with him she saw
inside her--but as plainly as though she had been looking at him in the
flesh--the dark figure of the schoolmaster regarding her in mute
reproof, with hands to throat and beating temples. The brightest
moments of her happiness, indeed, threw this shadow blackly across her
mind like the gnomon of a dial when the sun shines clearest. Whenever
she returned now from Father Mostyn's or the Spawer's, he was always
there sitting up for her. Heaven knows why, for they had little enough
to say to one another. He never pressed himself upon her, but by
leaving himself to her good pity she felt the claim of him
tenfold--lacking the power to withhold what, perhaps, on demand, she
might have summoned courage to deny. Always he was dumbly set, like
those canvas collecting sheets on Lifeboat Saturdays, for the smallest
coppers of her kindness. If she had not looked into the larger kitchen
before bed she knew he would never have revealed himself, but she had
not the heart to ignore one as little courageous for the winning of her
love as she was herself for its defence. At times the thought of what
the future had in store for her troubled her so darkly that she knew not
how best to shape her present moments. Therefore, in place of shaping,
she merely whittled--for every cut this way, a cut that; for every chip
off one side, a chip off the other; so that though the rough wood she
worked on wore nearer down to her fingers, it assumed no shape. Through
fear of having been too cruel one day she was constantly over-kind the
next; and then, what she had lacked to charge in cruelty to him she
charged extortionately to herself, paid the bills in silence, and said
never another word. But though she could meet these little daily
expenditures, there was a great bill slowly mounting, she knew, which
should of a surety one day be presented to her. And who should pay
that? Who should pay that?
While the music is at Father Mostyn's and the Spawer's she feels to a
certain extent in harbor against the evil day. But what shall happen
when this harbor is denied her, and for fault of its protection, she
must sail out into the open, unprotected sea? What will betide her
then? What is life coming to?
Alas! She is soon to know.
One day....
*CHAPTER XV*
One day the Spawer wakes up suddenly to consciousness, like Barclay in
the hedge bottom, and discovers, as his friend Barclay has not
infrequently discovered before him, that he is occupying a strange and
uncomfortable position. It was on a Tuesday when he made the final
effort and awoke definitely to an actual sense of his location, but he
had been blinking at it unseeingly for some while before that. The
previous morning Father Mostyn had taken leave of Ullbrig for his few
days' annual pike fishing with the Rev. the Hon. Algernon Smythe
Trepinway in Norfolk, and this sudden break in the continuity of
existence had served as an alarum to the Spawer's long slumber. He woke
reluctantly, but with purpose, took his morocco red bathing drawers, his
towel and his stick, and without pausing to any appreciable length at
the lane gate, plunged across the two fields towards the cliff.
It was a glorious, steadfast blue day. Not a cloud as big as the puff
of my lady's powder-box showed itself in any corner of the sky. No
breezes, even of the softest, filtered through the hot hedges, or cooled
the parched tips of the burning grass blades. Without intermission the
sun poured his golden largess down upon the earth from on high, so
forcefully that wherever the sunlight rested, it was as though a great
hot hand were imposing its weight. Yesterday the harvesting had set in
with a vengeance, and now the whole air was a-quiver with the whir of
busy blades, whose tireless activity seemed the very music made for
slumber, and lulled all other moving things towards somnolent repose.
The beach lay out dazzling in its unbroken smoothness, like white satin,
and deserted quite. Not another footstep than his own had been, or in
all probability would be, there that day to tread destructive
perforating tracks over its beautiful surface of sand. Up and down, for
something like a dozen clear miles of coast, or so far as his eyes could
show him, he seemed, like a second Robinson Crusoe, monarch of all he
surveyed. The true spirit of the solitude of the lower Yorkshire coast
is here. There is no elaboration to the picture; it is plain and
lacking detail. Of foliage by the sea there is not a leaf, excepting
mere divisional hedges. Fields in cultivation and out of it run to the
very edge of the cliff--a sombre cliff of soft, dark earth, stained here
and there to unprepossessing rusty red, with trickling chalybeate
streams, and showing terrible toothmarks of the voracious sea, that
feeds its way inland on this part of the coast at the rate of a yard a
year. Looking over the brink of it you can discern as many as half a
dozen paths, in various stages of subsidence, that less than that number
of years ago led people along the cliff top as the path you stand on
leads them now. In other places you may see huge slices of grass land,
descending like great steps downwards to the shore in their progress
towards ultimate devourance, while warning fissures across the existing
pathway show where, perhaps this very winter, another step will be
detached and added to the never-ending stairway of demolition.
In a sheltered inlet, where the sea has swept up a thick white carpet of
bleached sand, the Spawer pitches his bathing camp this morning. On
other occasions he has trod down here more gladsomely; the sea,
murmuring its musical cadences upon a lonely beach, has not made music
to him in vain. But for him to-day the sun is a little dim, the sea a
little jaded. The inward content that stood interpreter between his
soul and his outward worldly joyance is gone from him, and he stands
somehow like a stranger in the presence of strange things. Here on the
seashore, he has come to play a duet more full of emotion, and more
crowded with difficulties than any he knows within the province of
music, for it is a duet with his own soul.
In a sense, dimly and vaguely, he has comprehended for a day past, a
couple of days past, at the most--Lord help him--a week, that this duet
was inevitable. He has been, indeed, since these several days, two men.
The second was better than the first, but not much. The second of them
held the strings of the conscience bag (slackly, however) and rattled it
ominously--though more as a warning, if the truth were told--to give the
first his chance of escape. In the heart of the second (if heart it
could be called) there lingered a sneaking sympathy with the delinquent
first, as for a younger brother. And now, after a mutual game of
hide-and-seek, when the one would not look while the other showed, and
the other would not show while the other was looking, through a kind of
desperate conviction that something must be done, they had sneaked their
two ways down to the beach this morning, prepared (though only badly) to
declare themselves to one another, and come to some understanding,
though whether this understanding should be creditable or discreditable
to both or to either was yet unsettled.
By what subtle, imperceptible paths has he outjourneyed the territory of
that great happiness which seemed so lately his, to find himself all
suddenly in this unpleasant no-man's land of the imagination? By
subtle, imperceptible paths indeed. By the touch of hands; by the
gazing of eyes; by the inflection of voice. Time was, in the early days
it was, when he could look on Pam's fascinating sprinkling of freckles
with an eye as purely interested, and as purely disinterested, as though
they had been the specklings of a wild bird's egg. He had begun by
making a friend of her. He had come ultimately to regard her as a
sister, to whom he had acted in all good faith the strong, reliant,
reliable, affectionate, unemotional elder brother--who could have kissed
her, and thought no more of that kiss, nor prepared his lips for kisses
to come. And now ... what was he going to make of her next? ... of
himself? Who but a brother can act the brother? Who but a father--even
though he doddle benevolently on his legs and have respectable white
hairs--can be sure of acting the father to any daughter not his own?
What are the sexes but phosphorus and sandpaper for the kindling of
love's emotion? Already the phosphorus had not wanted signs of impending
ignition. Just a very little more rubbing of this friendly
intercourse--a day or two ... a week at most ... and the flame would
burst out for them both to see. So here let him settle it. What was he
going to do?
He did not know what he was going to do.... There were complications.
Complications of his own allowing, remember. Why had he not let it be
plainly understood--as soon as his relations with this girl grew--that
he was a man with a claim upon him?
Ah! If only he had.
Why had n't he? Had he shirked it? If he had shirked it, then he was
indeed guilty.
He did not think he had shirked it ... at least, with intention.
But the idea had come to him. Come to him more than once. Did he not
on one occasion at Hesketh's corner make the resolve to tell the girl
that he was going to be married?
Yes.
Then why did n't he?
Because he could think of no expression at the time to relieve the news
of a certain primitive brutality--a blunt statement quite out of accord
with the moment and the mood.
Thought must always be in some measure of accord with the moment and the
mood. You could not say, for instance: "Good morning. What a beautiful
day. I am going to be married."
But he had thought the same thought subsequently.
True.
Why had he not acted on it?
Partly for the same reason. And then again ... it seemed so easy in
thought and so difficult in effect. He was frightened he might bungle
it, and make it sound like an unpalatable caution to the girl. "Don't
set your aspirations upon me. I warn you. I am not for you." Faugh!
The idea--in this girl's case--was revolting.
Because, therefore, of a little unpleasantness on account, he had run up
a long score--prepared to declare himself bankrupt when occasion arose,
and involve the girl in his own insolvency. Was that it?
He had certainly avoided anything that might be odious to the girl ...
or painful to her feelings--but he had had no ideas of involving her.
God forbid!
And the other? The Absent One? What had been his feelings towards her?
Had he thought his conduct such as to merit her confidence in him?
He had not thought it undeserving of her confidence. Their relations
were of long standing. Before now he had kissed some mutual girl
friends in her presence. She had smiled.
Supposing he had kissed them in her absence ... and she had come
subsequently to hear of it? Would she have smiled? Of course he had
told her in his letters all about the post-girl--and their present
relations?
He had told her the postman was a girl.
Exactly. But what sort of a girl.
Was there more than one sort of a girl? A girl, it seemed to him, was a
girl all the world over. The definition was plain enough.
Had he said she was a pretty girl?
Why should he have said that?
Why should he have avoided it?
He had n't avoided it. It was only one of the things he had n't ...
specified. Why should he specify a "pretty girl" any more than he
should have specified an "ugly one"? Besides ... prettiness was all
abstract, and relative, and indefinable. When we called a thing pretty
we only meant that it excited that particular degree of emotion in our
own mind. Other people might decide upon it as ugly.
Exactly. Had he, by any chance, spoken of Cliff Wrangham as a
delightful corner of the world's end?
He believed he had.
And he had mentioned Father Mostyn?
Certainly. He had alluded to him.
In affectionate and laudatory terms?
He did n't know about affectionate and laudatory terms. Perhaps he had.
He had spoken of him as he bad found him. Father Mostyn had always been
kind. In writing he had no doubt alluded to that kindness.
More than once?
Doubtless more than once. Kindness was not such a common quality that
it would not bear a little repetition.
He had mentioned the Doctor.
Some of him. His stockings, he believed, and his strange happiness in
speaking the truth.
How often had he met the Doctor?
Perhaps half a dozen times.
And the post-girl?
Let him see....
Exactly. He could n't count the number. He had mentioned with some
small degree of detail a man who was but a cypher in his visit, and he
had overlooked altogether the figure which was its numerator, so to
speak.
Suppose he had put the case, as it stood, before a referee, chosen from
the Sons of the World. Suppose he 'd said, for instance: There was a
fellow once, engaged to a girl. The girl went with a maiden aunt by
marriage to Switzerland for the aunt's health. It was arranged that
while they were there the fellow was to go into obscurity by the
sea-coast and complete some great compositional work he had the vanity
to think he could achieve, and that, after the girl's return, either
towards the end of November or the early part of January, these two were
to be married. But during this obscurity the fellow came upon an
altogether unusual sample of a post-girl. She was supposed to be
derived from a family of importance; had all the inherited gifts of a
lady; the low, musically-balanced voice; the symmetrical, graceful
figure and carriage; beautiful teeth and a smile like dawn. Suppose
everything about the girl appealed to this fellow tremendously. Suppose
they became ... well, call it friends. Suppose he taught her music and
French, and met her as often as possible. Suppose all his moments were
occupied in thinking of her. Suppose the life he had left and the life
(presumably) he was going back to were receded so far away that he could
scarcely distinguish them, or his obligations to them. Suppose that the
girl was to all intents and purposes his little cosmos, out of which he
indited letters to the Other Girl--letters that made no mention of the
existing state of things. Suppose, now, he laid this case, just as it
stood, before any man of the world. What, did he imagine, would that
man of the world decide upon him? What would he think of him?
Another man of the world, perhaps.
Probably so. And suppose this other girl had been his sister, and he
had been some other man, and the circumstances were as they were, and
some enlightened friend had informed him of them. Well?
On the face of it, he might be tempted to step in and send the fellow to
the devil.
And in his own case?
In his own case? Summarising like that, without any partiality, but
condensed into a cold-blooded abstraction, he supposed he might seem
deserving of being sent to the devil, too--if he were not there already.
Every case looked black when it was formularised. The facts had
accumulated without his perceiving them. It was easy now to go and roll
them up like an increasing snowball of accusation against him, but at
the time they had seemed slight enough. When he had scribbled off the
letters it had been with a consciousness of the shuffle, but with the
inward resolve, clearly defined, to atone for it by a longer letter next
day, or some other day.
And he had done so?
Unfortunately, no. Fate, there again, had seemed against him. But the
intention had not been wanting--it was the flesh only that had been a
little weak.
In the light of present understanding, then, if by the mere wish he
could blot out not only the remembrance of this weakness but the
actuality of it, he would wish the wish?
No reply.
Eh? He would wish the wish at once--was n't that so?
Still no reply.
Perhaps he had n't quite understood. Put it another way. Suppose,
since the doings of these latter days were not entirely creditable to
him, when viewed dispassionately, was he prepared to wish that he had
never come to Cliff Wrangham?
He could n't honestly wish that. It was n't fair to Cliff Wrangham or
the Dixons. He 'd had a very happy time there and done good work.
Cliff Wrangham was n't to blame.
Since Cliff Wrangham was n't to blame, then, would he be prepared to
wish that he had never come across the post-girl?
He 'd have been bound to come across her.
Not if, for instance, she 'd been ill, and somebody else had brought the
letters.
He would n't wish anybody ill for the mere sake of saving his
conscience.
Supposing she had been away, then?
Away where?
Anywhere.
But she had n't been away, and so there was an end of it. He was n't
dealing with what might have been, but what was.
And what was?
He did n't know. He only knew that he would n't wish his worst enemy to
be on the rack as he 'd been on it all last night, and this morning. He
had n't slept a wink.
Why had n't he slept?
Because he could n't sleep.
But surely that was funny.
It was n't funny at all. It was hell.
How could that be? If he found now that he 'd been taking a wrong moral
turn, all he had to do was to turn back. His way was easy.
Was it?
It was ... if he were sorry he 'd gone wrong. Was he sorry that he 'd
gone wrong?
Of course he was sorry. The difficulty was he 'd gone such a deuce of a
long way wrong.
Ah! Longer, perhaps, than he 'd said.
Not longer than he 'd said, but quite long enough, without saying a
word. To turn all the way back, at this stage of the proceedings--with
explanation or without--was a desperately hard thing to do.
If duty compelled it, nevertheless?
Why should duty compel him to do anything so unpleasant?
But surely that was a strange way to speak of a duty which merely
implied his obligation to the Other Girl. Presumably, as things stood,
he loved her.
Presumably he did.
He had come to love her of his own free will? It was not a case where
he had been "rushed"? There was no solicitous mother or obliging sister
in the case?
None at all. Only he had had larger opportunity to cultivate her
acquaintance than in the general run of affairs. She was a distant
connection of his by a remote marriage, who, in view of her extreme
personal connection with the family, had generally ranked as a cousin.
In the days when he had had prospects from his uncle they were
constantly thrown together, and it was in those days that he engaged
himself. All the family looked with favor upon the match, and even
encouraged it. Then this wretched old uncle took it suddenly into his
head to be actively interested in the nephew's welfare. Wanted him to
throw music to the winds as being unworthy of his high prospects, and
went the length of telling him in a letter of six words or so to choose
between music and the mammon of unrighteousness. Fool, perhaps, that he
was, he chose for music. All his family rounded on him at once--or such
family as it was; thank God, there was n't much of it--and wrote abject
letters to the mammon, telling him how headstrong poor dear Maurice was,
and how darling uncle must please give him time, and not be too severe
upon his wicked indiscretion. Maurice, dear misguided boy, loved
darling uncle very dearly, and would be shocked one day when he came to
his senses, and saw how deeply he had grieved him.
And the Other Girl? Did she share the family reproaches?
On the contrary, she said he had acted nobly. He offered her her
freedom, of course, as soon as he relinquished the mammon, but she would
not accept it.
Had she said to him, for instance: "Dear Maurice, there have been times
when I have been troubled to know which of you I loved; you or your
uncle's money. And now that the horrid money 's gone, I think it 's
you."
Yes, she had said that.
Did he tell her that it was n't for beggars to be choosers, and that if
she cared to have a musical pauper she could have him, and there 'd be
nothing to pay but his bills?
He believed he had made some witty allusion to that effect.
What did he call pauperdom?
He called two or three hundred a year pauperdom. With the assistance of
a few pot-boiling songs under somebody else's name, including, to his
shame be it said, a percentage of semi-sacred effusions with angels
fluttering in the treble, and organ obligato, he generally managed to
supplement this. He also wrote a few elementary teaching pieces for a
certain educational firm, under the reassuring title of Ivan Fedor
Ivanowitch, which returned him a pittance. There was no demand for his
two symphonies or his orchestral suite or his first piano concerto in
_fa diese_. That 's why he was writing another. Altogether, taking one
thing with another, his income might be set down--except to the Inland
Revenue--at about three hundred and fifty pounds a year. A man could
n't be much poorer than that, and talk, Heaven help him, of marriage.
And the Other Girl? Had she expectations at all?
He hoped not, for her own peace of mind. She had this aunt by marriage.
Perhaps she might be able to call a couple of hundred pounds per annum
her own some day. But it would n't be much more.
And how long had she been engaged to him?
Oh, he could n't exactly say. Six or seven years. It had been an early
and a lingering engagement.
Taking his statements into admission, one thing seemed very clear. He
was under a strong moral obligation to the Other Girl.
He had never denied it.
Perhaps not, but his actions--judged superficially, of course--had shown
a large tendency to overlook this obligation. However, let the past
bury the past. He saw now the right way, and where he had strayed from
it. Henceforth, since his sole desire was to purge his spirit of its
temporary faithlessness, and gain grace to win back his claim to the
Other Girl's confidence, henceforth his path lay clear.
Where?
Where? Surely he had no necessity to ask that?
On the contrary, he did ask that.
But there could be no doubt in his mind. Any way that did not lead him
back into the old temptation was the right way.
If coming across the post-girl was temptation, there was no way in this
district that did lead the right way.
Then he must depart to where there was.
Leave Cliff Wrangham altogether?
Precisely.
Why should he leave Cliff Wrangham--that is, before the Other One
returned? Was he an infant that he must be packed off into the corner
in disgrace, because he could n't be trusted?
He had proved himself an infant by the mere fact that he was no longer
to be trusted. In other words, he had broken his trust.
He denied it. He 'd broken nothing.
When a nursemaid, who 's been warned, lets a child....
Oh, damn the nursemaid and the child, too! Serve it jolly right if she
did. He was n't a nursemaid.
Perhaps not. Perhaps he was just a low, common blackguard, after all.
Perhaps he was.
He had his bath, but the salt water was all unfriendly, and there was no
stimulus in its waves. It seemed to have deserted him at this hour of
dark temptation. In ceaseless tussle the two of him returned along the
sands and slowly back to Dixon's. Out of the drifting current of
reasonings two things at least seemed clear. The conscience-bearer was
dimly arguing for departure; the shuffling second self, that had been
actively dodging investigation all this while, was trying to invent
counter-arguments for delay.
The very life he was leading had become dear to him. He had lost slowly
the desire to regain touch with the big centres of artistic activity,
and seemed to be living somehow a purer life, in which he worked solely
(or at least, thought so) for Art's own sake. The ultimate success of
this concerto troubled him little. Before, he had been building much on
it, as the most promiseful fruit of his muse. Now, if it were scouted,
if he and all his labors were scouted, there was the blessed sense of
being able to return here for solace and shelter. The Dixons would be
sorry to lose him, he felt sure; glad to have him back. The Vicarage
door would open as soon as his figure came on to the vicarial territory
in front of the iron rails; the bland, beneficent hand of his Reverence
would receive him, like the lost lamb gathered into the fold. God bless
the Vicarage! His heart warmed, and his eye--a little emotionalised, it
might be, by the crisis he was passing through--moistened as he thought
upon that smallpox-blistered door, and the happiness that had been
behind it. And last of all ... there was Pam. What a soft and soothing
cataplasm she was for all the soul's inflammations; for all the chafing
irritation of spirit brought about by contact with a rough world. Her
breath was balm, and her voice like a soft south wind blowing through
the strings of a lute. All her freckles would cry aloud in welcome; her
lips would disclose the pure, milky greeting of those white teeth; her
hands--that he had, with amusement and exalted joy, watched struggling
in their dear, feminine tirelessness with the contrary humors of Father
Mostyn's keys--he knew what those hands would do when she heard of his
return. They would clasp themselves and go beneath her chin. He had
not noticed her for nothing. And then his mind went on to the
shortening of the days; to the harvest gathered; to the crisp September;
to the autumn, with its long, cosy evenings in the Vicar's room, and the
music; to the winter; to Christmas; to the meetings; to the happiness;
to the sea....
And by Christmas ... perhaps ... he would be married.
Married!
Married and far away. All these days would be but a remembrance.
Father Mostyn and Pamela something less, and something infinitely more,
than the figments of a dream. He would be building up a new life for
himself; a new habitation for his soul to live in, out of new interests,
out of new ambitions (if he had any), out of new environments.
Last of all, out of the mass of arguments and sub-arguments, questions
and cross-questions, considerations and counter-considerations, in one
of those sudden lucid heavenly flashes of righteousness with which the
soul's lightning has power to pierce, at irregular and unexpected
intervals, the cloud of doubt, he received the inspiration of resolve.
Departure, the Spawer decided, was the only thing to save him. The
necessity was cruel, no doubt--to the Ullbrig girl, perhaps, as well as
himself--but in the momentary lucidity of soul he had caught the glimpse
of this as his sole honorable path, and he elected now to pursue it. To
make the requisite retractions and yet stay on was out of the question.
He could not bring himself to exercise those despicable economies of
affection--palpable retrenchments even--in his friendship with the girl,
lacking which, to remain in Ullbrig was not to stand still but to
advance. No amount of mere passive rectitude could check the evolution
of facts and circumstances. The world did not stand still because one
chastened spirit resolved to hold back from the general march of
iniquity. There was nothing for it. He would go.
Then imagination, intoxicated with the virtuous bitter draught he had
drained, took wild flight into the future. He was going, truly, but not
for long. Pam and this wife of his that was to be should become as
sisters. He pictured Pam's coming to visit them. Long, glorious visits
they should be. And he and Beatrice should return to Cliff Wrangham.
They would make Cliff Wrangham their summer residence, their winter
residence, their life-long residence. Exaltation carried him to the
pitch of bigamy even. In his wild desire to squeeze the last drop of
happiness from these deadly sweet berries of fancy he was deaf to the
voice of reason. He scarcely perceived whether it was Pam or the absent
one that figured, in this glorified vision, as his wedded wife. At
times, for all the power he possessed to discriminate, it might have
been both. Or perhaps, with fine prophetic oversight of worldly
institutions, he visioned a sublime state of platonic bliss in which was
neither marrying nor giving in marriage. For extreme righteousness
knows nothing of reason, nor does it argue. Arguments are but the
beatings of its wings to gain impetus for flight, but the flight, once
attained, transcends all logic. The sublime picture of married felicity
that the Spawer created would have been the scandal of any decent,
respectably constituted community. Had there been a dozen Pams, indeed,
he would have included them all in this spiritual harem, and
yet--repugnant as this indiscriminate scheme of domestic association
might appear to the many--there was no taint of earthly impurity in his
conception of it.
Fortified with this blest vision of a paradise as reward for the pains
of present righteousness, he swallowed a hasty and a tasteless meal, and
set off without further thought or delay--lest the strength of resolve
might in any way leak from him before his purpose was accomplished--down
the Ullbrig road. For he knew that his composure was bearing a
tremendous burden on its back, and he feared, if he retarded too long,
it might break down, when ultimately he met the girl, into some
stammering, faulty, broken-backed, weak-kneed, incomplete accomplishment
of his mission. If possible, he wanted to drop across her as though by
pure accident. He did n't want her to detect any traces of labored
premeditation in what he had to tell. He held the manner of the
news-breaking roughly formulated in his mind, but he was anxious lest
she might discern, through any flaw in the outer agreement of his smiles
(just sufficiently tinged with regret, he told himself, to be in keeping
with the subject of departure, but no more), the horrible machinery,
driven by a thousand heart-power, clanking away inside him, and
manufacturing this leave-taking to pattern, like rolled steel.
He was so little sure of his capacity to execute his own purpose that,
through mere distrust of doing what he wanted to do, he was almost ready
to give the project up and declare himself beaten before the battle.
And all the while he walked onward he began to accumulate doubts
respecting the undertaking of such a delicate operation beneath the
searching light of day. He had one revelation of the girl's great eyes
fixed solemnly upon his lips, and watching him as he wallowed in his
embarrassment, and his soul flinched. For a moment he had desperate
thoughts of return. Then he sat, under the white flag of truce, on a
rail. Then he moved slowly onward again, with fixed eyes on Ullbrig,
praying he might miss the girl. And with this prayer almost moving his
lips, at Hesketh's corner he met her.
*CHAPTER XVI*
She wore a great hat of coarse Zulu straw, trimmed with white muslin and
scarlet poppies, and a pale cream muslin dress, beneath whose hem her
neat shoes and trim, black ankles showed themselves so demurely, like
sleek twin witches of seductive enchantment. In her left hand she
carried a snowy-topped basket emblematic of Faith, Hope and
Charity--particularly this last--while the thumb of her cotton-gloved
right hand was tucked, at the time of their recognition, into a green
crocodile leather belt. She was just passing the corner, indeed, as she
caught sight of the Spawer, and had to fall back on her heel to verify
the impression; then she stood waiting for him, swinging the basket in
front of her skirt with both hands, and showing the glad smile for a
welcome and unexpected meeting. All the gloomy necessities of the
encounter were packed up and stowed away at the back of the Spawer's
being with the first slight shock of realisation. Almost spontaneously
he discarded his reflections as though they had been impersonal and
bearing no reference to the girl before him, and advanced upon her with
the sunny face that seemed never to have known the clouds of
disquietude.
"How funny," said Pam simply, as he came near. "... I was just thinking
about you."
"I can see you were," he laughed.
"Can you?" asked Pam, smiling, but a shade incredulous.
"By your ears," he told her.
Pam put her fingers to them.
"It is the sun," she said, nipping a little crimson lobe between cool
white-cottoned fingers. "Yours burn too. Were you thinking about me?"
"Perhaps."
"Were you? What were you thinking?"
"Tell me first what you were thinking about me?"
"I was thinking whether I should see you if I looked up the Cliff
Wrangham road. But I never thought I should. And you?"
"I was thinking the same thing."
"Were you really? Did you want to see me ... about anything?"
It was the Spawer's opportunity to say what he had come to say, but like
a faint-hearted jumper, feeling he had not bite enough for his purpose,
he burked the hurdle.
"I don't know that I wanted to see you ... about anything," he answered,
covering up his momentary hesitation with a smile, "... but I was
perfectly agreeable to see you about nothing at all."
"Perhaps you 're coming to the post?" Pam hazarded.
"Nothing so reputable," said he. "Fact is, I 'm afraid I 've broken
loose to-day. I 'm on the laze."
"You lazy!" laughed Pam, in incredulous amazement.
"Oh, horribly lazy, dear girl," he said. "If you don't know that you
don't know me. It comes on at periods. I can't yet decide whether my
hard work is sheer activity of a guilty conscience, or my laziness is
the collapse of a conscience too highly taxed, but the one follows the
other as night follows day. I 've not done a stroke of work since
getting up. This morning I washed myself and bathed--you 'll say that's
a good work done. This afternoon I determined to stroll inland and see
if there was anybody disposed to take pity on my sad idleness. What a
pretty basket!"
Pam held it up for his inspection.
"May I lift the cover?"
Pam nodded and laughed, showing all her white, small teeth in assent.
"Bottles," said he, taking a peep under the snowy serviette. "We 're
well met. Which way are you going?"
"I 'm going to Shippus," said Pam, with a little wistful accent on the
"I 'm," expressive of solitude.
"The very thing," said the Spawer. "And we won't touch them till we get
there. Not a drop. Will you take me with you?"
"Will you go with me?" said Pam, a light of desire suddenly dawning in
her eyes at his half-bantering suggestion.
"If you 'll have me."
"I 'll have you. But perhaps you would n't care ... it's a sick call."
"I don't care what it is," said the Spawer, "so long as it 's nothing
catching. Tell me it 's not smallpox and I 'm with you."
"Oh, it is n't smallpox," Pam reassured him. "It 's only poor old Mr.
Smethurst."
"Come," said the Spawer, relieved, "that does n't sound so alarming. I
'll risk it. And are the bottles his or ours?"
"His," said Pam, as the Spawer disengaged her of them, and they
commenced to walk forward together. "Poor old gentleman. There 's a
lemon jelly and a bottle of port and a bottle of whiskey. Those are
from Father Mostyn--the very same that he drinks himself." Her eyes
kindled luminously at the mention. "Is n't it good of him? Nobody
knows but me what lots of things he gives away ... and what lots of
things he does for people. He 'd do anything for anybody. They don't
understand him in Ullbrig a bit. I did n't always, but I do now. They
talk about his house, and say it wants painting. And of course it does.
And they say he 's a Roman Catholic, and gets paid by the Pope for every
conversion he makes; but that 's not true. He 's nothing at all to do
with the Pope. And then they laugh at him because he goes down on his
knees in church, but as he said one day to Mr. Stevens (Sheppardman):
'You touch your hat to me because I 'm his reverence the vicar, but you
're too proud to bow to the Lord Jesus.' And it 's not a matter of what
he does in church. They ought n't to go by that--and they can't
truthfully, because they 're never there to see. It's what he does in
Ullbrig. If anybody 's ill, it 's always him they send for, and he
always goes, whether it 's by night or day. When they 're well he talks
about their hypocrisy and their sinfulness, and about their pride--you
've heard him, have n't you? But when they 're ill ... oh, you would
n't know him. He 's as gentle as a woman. He looks at their medicine,
and feels their pulse, and smooths their pillow; and oh, he talks so
beautifully. When little Annie Summers died of diphtheria he sat up all
the night after the operation, keeping her throat clear with a feather
(that was very dangerous, of course, and he might have died of it), and
when she was dead her father told him: 'I 've never given you a good
word all my days, Mr. Mostyn,' and Father Mostyn only shook his head and
told him: 'Well, well, John, give it me now.' And when poor old James
Marshall was dying they sent for Father Mostyn, of course, and James
told him he was a bit fearsome he had n't done the right thing in
spending so much of his time at chapel. And Father Mostyn said: 'Make
your mind easy, James, there are no churches or chapels up there.' Old
Mr. Smethurst used to go to chapel, too, when he was well enough to go
anywhere, but as Father Mostyn says, we can't help that. The wine will
do him as much good as if he had been to church. And it was a long time
ago. He 'll never go there any more."
"Is he so ill as that?" asked the Spawer.
"He 's dying," said Pam.
The little tremor of her lip, and the sudden moistness about her
eyes--though he had witnessed these wonderful manifestations of her
tender nature before on many an occasion--went to the Spawer's heart in
the present instance like an arrow. Pam's tears were in everybody's
service. Not idle tears, but tears that seemed the sacred seal of noble
self-sacrifice and devotion.
And to think he was so soon going to remove himself from the
soft-dropping springs of their sympathy.
"What a ministering angel you are," he said, looking at her lightly
enough, and yet--though Pam could not know that--with a kind of
tightness about the throat.
"I 'm afraid I 'm not an angel," the girl regretted. "Not a bit of one.
I wish I were."
"On the contrary," he said, "wish nothing of the kind."
"Why not?" she asked.
"Because Ullbrig would miss you so. Angels' visits are few and far
between, and when they come they don't bring bottles. Be what you are,"
he told her. "A lay angel."
"Don't you believe in real angels?" Pam asked him ingenuously. "Dr.
Anderson does n't."
The Spawer smiled.
"Kindness is the greatest angel in the world," he said, and looked at
her. "I believe in kindness."
"So do I," said Pam.
"And do you never, never get tired of doing kind actions?" he asked her
curiously. "... Surely you must."
Pam gave him a quick look and dropped her lip, as though a little
lead-weight of admission were upon it.
"Sometimes I do," she admitted, and turned her face away from him as
though the thought of her own offend-ing troubled her. "But somehow ...
kind acts always seem to pay for themselves, don't you think?"
"Do they?" he asked hazily.
"Why, yes," Pam said, after a moment, just a little shaken in her
confidence by his question. "The more you don't want to do a thing, the
more you 're glad when you 've gone and done it--a kind thing I mean."
The more you did n't want to do a thing the more you were glad when you
'd gone and done it. How did that apply to him?
"... Father Mostyn says you must beware of doing kindnesses for the mere
gratification of being thanked. He says that's a deadly sin--one of the
prides of charity. There are a lot more, but that 's the worst. What do
you think?"
"What do I think? Gracious!" laughed the Spawer, "I dare n't contradict
his Reverence. I think so too."
"But you! You 're quite different from me," the girl objected. "I
could n't be kind at all if it were n't for Father Mostyn. All my
kindnesses have been taught me by him." Such is the power of loyalty
and loving adherence, that transfers its own virtues to the object of
affection. "But you. I don't think you can help being kind. Some
people can't. You seem to do things from the heart somehow, as though
they came naturally to you; but me, I do all mine from the head, because
I 've been taught what things are kind and what things are cruel. And
often I make mistakes too." She was thinking of the schoolmaster. "But
you never do."
Did n't he? What were all his trumpery smiles and petty kindnesses, his
smooth words and minor generosities, but little errors of excess in a
grand sum of cruelty, that had brought the total to an amount he dared
scarcely contemplate, and were compelling him this day to cancel these
labyrinthine workings of arithmetic by a wholesale application of the
sponge?
"That," said he, looking leniently upon her, "is because your kindness,
little woman, won't let you find flaws in mine. But there are flaws in
it--great flaws."
"Where?" asked Pam, with the earnestness of a child.
"All over," said the Spawer.
"You have always been kind to me," said Pam.
"Don't let 's talk of that," he responded cheerfully,
affecting--double-dyed hypocrite that he knew himself to be--a sublime
disregard of such kindnesses as had been his, which but served to
illuminate his conduct in the girl's eyes with letters of celestial gold
paint.
"May n't I talk to you about it ... ever, please?" the girl asked him.
"Oh, if it 's a question of pleases," he said, with laughing concession,
"I would n't deny you for worlds. Talk away, dear child."
Did he realise how much store the girl set by these diminutive titles of
affectionate address? Did he know that each time he called her "Dear
child" and "Dear girl" and "Little woman" (mere friendly substitutes for
the Pam he never used) her heart leaped up in responsive gladness? Did
he know that each of these designations, so lightly uttered by him, was
a nail driven into the door against his departure, and that door the
girl's own heart? Surely and truly he never knew it, or even our hero,
Maurice Ethelbert Wynne, for all his blackguardism, would have shrunk
from the usage of them.
"Now I don't know what to say," Pam said.
"Why ever not?"
"Because you told me to talk away."
"How like a girl! Wants to do a thing until she 's bidden, and then ...
be hanged if she will. You contrary little feminine."
All the same, as soon as he adjured her not to mind, but to say no more
about it, she found plenty to say in a sudden gush respecting his past
kindness to her. He had been so good to her. She had told Father
Mostyn to be sure and tell him how grateful she felt to him for all his
goodness.... Had he? But she had been dying to tell him herself too.
And somehow, whenever she had begun, he had always turned her off so
kindly that she had never done any more than tell him that she wanted to
tell him, and never told him; but to-day, when he had spoken about _her_
kindness, she felt she must tell him about his. There had been no reason
why he should have been kind to her. He had done it all so beautifully
... that there seemed nothing in it, and at times she 'd almost believed
that there was nothing in it either, and that it was just happening so,
and no more. But when she 'd come to look into it she saw exactly how
much there was, and how it could have happened otherwise--oh, quite
otherwise--but for his great kindness in preventing it. Why had he been
so good to her? It was n't--as he 'd tried to make out--that there was
anything to gain, because she 'd nothing in the world to give him except
her thanks--and until to-day he 'd never even accepted those from her.
Father Mostyn had told her, as he 'd told her himself, that he did n't
give lessons to anybody else ... and that she was his only pupil. She
'd tried not to feel proud about that, because it was no merit of her
own, but simply his own goodness; but she could n't help it. Father
Mostyn said you might feel proud if your pride were pride of loyalty--as
pride in the Church, or in the goodness of another--and in that way she
'd felt proud. But it was difficult dealing with prides; they got the
better of you somehow. He 'd given her music because he said he knew
where to send for it, and could get it down quicker--being known to the
people--but that was just so that she need n't have to pay for it. And
he 'd made her a present of Erckmann-Chatrian's "L'ami Fritz" and "Le
Blocus," and a beautiful French Dictionary....
"Well," he asked her, "... where 's the goodness in that?"
"It was all of it goodness."
"Nothing of the sort, dear girl. It 's all pure selfish pride."
Oh, no, no, no! Pam could n't believe that.
Oh, but she must believe it. He 'd given her lessons solely for his own
pleasure--not hers--because teaching her had interested him, and it was
a sort of recreation. And he 'd taught her French for the same reason,
and for the pride of being looked up to as a great French authority.
And he 'd given her books and music so that she might say what a kind,
generous fellow he was,--oh, she must n't make any mistake about the
matter; it was precious little goodness she 'd have found about him.
Oh, he was a bad one at heart!
So, arguing agreeably on the subject of goodness specific and general,
they walked along the high-road lane that leads to Shippus.
Thus they came at last upon a group of two or three detached cottages
along the roadside, white-washed and blinding, with thatched roofs and
tarred palings, and a profusion of giant nasturtiums clambering over the
doors and licking at the window-sills with a great yellow-scarlet blaze,
as though the porches were on fire. Here Pam slowed up, and held out
her hand for the basket.
"Shall you be long?" the Spawer asked, giving it to her.
"Perhaps you won't care to wait?" she suggested wistfully, though
offering him his liberation.
"Trot along," said he, smiling back refusal of the proffered freedom.
"I 'll hang about outside for you. Only promise me you won't slip away
by the back."
He smiled and raised his hat to her with that delightful blending of
familiarity and homage which had won the girl's heart from the first.
There were points about his kindness which she could not touch upon,
even to him, and this was one. Other men might have made her position
unbearable, but he never. The raising of the hat itself meant nothing,
for she knew it was an instinctive recognition of her sex which
accomplished itself, in his case, even when the sex was adequately
disguised beneath harden aprons and masculine caps; but the action as he
performed it had none of the odious insinuating gallantry to which the
Saturday Hunmouth trippers had accustomed but never reconciled her.
With no man had she ever been so intimate as with this one; and yet no
man had ever so helped her to preserve her own modest self-respect.
Ah, Pam, Pam, Pam! Do you see that queer little hunched-up shadow,
carrying a shapeless lump of a basket, that keeps close by your side as
you cross the road and lay your finger upon the latch of the tarred
wooden wicket? It is the little old lady, as plain as plain can be. She
makes no noise; her footsteps merge in yours; but day by day, hour by
hour, moment by moment, she never leaves you. The time approaches when
she shall rise up in her hideous deformity and declare you a prisoner in
her dwelling. And you shall gaze upon the features of an altered world
through wet windows of running tears.
*CHAPTER XVII*
Outside the Spawer strolled gently to and fro along the white, staring
roadway, stopping always a little short of the cottages lest his
constant recurrence in face of the window might seem like an embargo
upon Pam's moments. To a casual observer he looked, in his light
flannels and straw hat--tilted a little over his nose for facing the
sun--the typical figure of a summer lounger, with no endeavor beyond
indolence, and no thought above keeping cool. But within, his brain was
busily clanking and clamoring, like an overpressed newspaper office;
editing, sub-editing, inserting, deleting, putting all his conduct into
orderly columns and making ruthless "pi" of it. One item of
intelligence alone remained stable amid the vast jumble of worthless,
inconsequential paragraphs: