DEPARTURE OF THE SPAWER.

He was still pacing up and down the roadway, his eyes engrossed in some

systematic method of placing his toes, engaged on the task of convincing

himself that he had let no real possible opportunity slip during their

walk of acquainting the girl with the inevitable, when the atmosphere of

a sudden lighted up, as it were, and he saw the red poppies over the

gateway, stooping somewhat at the latch.

"What! So soon?" he asked; and again, by the apparently spontaneous

mental process, he threw off his heavy mantle of musing, and smiled as

though he had nothing to think of but happiness. "Come! You 've let me

off handsome."

Then he saw that Pam's lips looked a little troubled, and her eyes

sought his face with trepidation.

"It 's not that..." she said, watching his gaze like a compass. "... I

'm not done yet. But they ... they saw you were with me ... and ... and

won't you come in?"

"It 's awfully good of 'em, little woman," he said. "Just tell 'em so,

won't you? But really, I don't mind a bit. In fact, I 'd rather be out

here in the sun."

"I thought you would n't," Pam said, more to herself, as though his

reply constituted a refusal of something not uttered, but in her mind

only. And still she stood; and while she looked at the Spawer her eyes

filled with that sublime wistfulness of theirs that finds no translation

in words. "That 's not all," she said, after a pause. "I have n't told

you. They know ... who you are."

"Jove!" exclaimed the Spawer. "What a reputation I have in this part of

the globe. If only it were universal."

"It's my fault..." Pam confessed.

"There 's no fault about it, dear girl," he made haste to reassure her.

"On the contrary, it 's a jolly kind thought."

"But I 'm afraid ... I told them it was you when they asked if it was.

And they know how beautifully you play." Her eyes were absolutely

sealed down upon his now, so that not a flicker of their expression

could escape her. "... And ... and poor old Mr. Smethurst said there

were n't many that could play like you. And I told him, indeed there

were n't. And I was telling him how beautifully you did play ... and

all of a sudden he said he should just like to hear you play 'Sound the

loud timbrel' ... before he died. Did I think you would? And Mrs.

Smethurst was frightened, and said: 'Oh, John,' you must n't ask such

things of a gentleman like that. He does n't play to such as us.' And

he said, oh, so sadly: 'Nay, nay, I suppose I must n't. But I feel he

'd do it if only we dared ask him.' And I did n't know what to say ...

because, of course, I know it's a dreadful thing to ask you. But I made

a pretence of coming out to see whether you would come in and sit down."

The Spawer wrinkled his brows.

"It 's not so much the asking," he said, with a perplexed smile, "but it

's the doing, little woman. Have they a piano forte?"

"No, no." Pam sank deeper into her trouble. "It 's only a harmonium

... a very old one. I know it 's a dreadful thing to ask you to sit

down to a harmonium--and a hymn tune too. I 'd never, never have asked

you to do such a thing for myself--but for somebody else that 's never

going to get better again. Sometimes it does sick people you don't know

how much good to have their fancies gratified. I offered to try and

play it myself, but he told me: 'You can play it and welcome ... but it

won't be him.'"

"Little woman," said the Spawer, "no one knows better than you what an

act of martyrdom it is for a pianist to sit down to a harmonium and

humble himself to a hymn tune. But because it 's you that have asked

me, for your sake and through sheer pride--to show you how good I am--I

'll do it. It sounds good, but it's sheer, downright pride, remember.

Only pride could get through with it. Now; lead on, kindly light."

He took hold of her indulgently by the arm, and for a few paces walked

so with her. To the girl that touch was the crowning patent of his

nobility and goodness; to him it was so magnetically charged with the

dangerous communion of red, warm blood that he let go of it by slow,

imperceptible degrees, but with no less the feeling that he was

discarding a deadly temptation. The warmth of a woman's body is an

enervating atmosphere to the moral fibres of a man when that body is the

object of his renunciation, and his fibres are slackened to start with.

And the proud illumination about the girl's eyes as she went forward at

his instigation was like the high, bright blaze of a lighthouse for

holding him prisoner to its beacon against all the futile beating of his

wings.

Through the tarred gate and under the trailing flames of nasturtium Pam

led him into the cottage of the dying man. It was a kitchen living-room

they stepped into. All about the threshold and nasturtium porch was

enveloped in its own stifling atmosphere of hot leaves and baking--as

distinct from the corn-scented suffocation of the outer air. The

kitchen itself seemed congested with a close, oveny odor; the

accumulated smell of many meals and many bakings, never expelled, and

the peaty reek of a place where the fire burns day in, day out.

In a high-backed wooden chair by the warm side of the oven sat the dying

man, not so nearly dead as the Spawer had pictured him, perhaps, but

obviously stricken. He sat, an old withered figure, with the strange

inertness of body characteristic of the aged and the very sick, alive

seemingly no lower than his head, which moved slowly in the socket of a

grey plaid muffler, wrapped about his neck and tucked away beneath the

lapels of his dingy green-black coat. There was a red cotton cushion

propped under his shoulders. His legs, motionless as the padded legs of

a guy, and as convincing, looked strangely swollen and shapeless by

contrast with his white and wasted face. At their extremity a pair of

lifeless, thick ankles were squeezed into clumsy country slippers, whose

toes never once, during the course of the Spawer's visit, stirred away

from the red spot on the hearthrug where he had at first observed them.

The invalid's breathing was the labored wheezy usage of lungs that

bespoke asthma and bronchitis, and the hands that clasped the arms of

the wooden chair might have been carved in horn. A couple of crooked

sticks placed in the projecting angle of the range showed his extremity

in the matter of locomotion. To the Spawer, whose experience with the

dark obverse of life's bright medallion was restricted, and whose

acquaintance with death and death's methods was more by hearsay, as of

some notorious usurer, the picture was not a pleasant one. He had

rather been left out in the pure sunshine with his own tormenting

thoughts than be brought face to face with the actual draught that all

men mortal must drain. And yet, he told himself, this was the sort of

thing that Pam was almost daily sacrificing some portion of her young

life to; giving generously a share of her own freshness and

healthfulness and vitality to keep burning these wan and flickering

flames. Wonder of wonders, the magic chalice of a woman's heart, that

can pour forth its crystalline stream of love and comfort and

consolation, and yet not run dry.

An elderly woman, in a print dress, whose hands were nervously fidgeting

with the jet brooch at her throat, and who seemed employed in watching

the door with a smile not devoid of anxiety, curtseyed with painful

respectfulness at the Spawer's entrance, and dusting the surface of a

wooden chair, begged him to be seated. If he had lacked Pam's assurance

that his presence was coveted he might have almost reproached himself

for entering at some inopportune moment. A great air of formality

seemed to enter with his advent, and stiffen all about them--he felt it

himself--as though they were on the brink of some important ceremony

with whose procedure they were unacquainted, like Protestants at High

Mass. He took the chair, however, with the utmost friendliness and

thankfulness he could assume, and tried to sit down upon it with a

pleasant air of relief, as though it were a welcome accessory to his

comfort, and he were grateful. He was very anxious, for his pride's

sake, to do Pam credit.

"Ah!" he said, seeming to welcome the discovery of the fire as

something, in these chill times, to be glad for, and addressing himself

to the sick man, made pleasant allusion to it. "You keep a bit of a

blaze, I see," he said.

"Ye 'll 'a to speak up tiv 'im a bit, sir," the woman instructed him

deferentially. "'E weean't a 'eard ye. 'E 's gettin' that deaf it 's

past mekkin' 'im understand at times."

The man's head turned slowly in its grey woolen socket, as though he had

caught the fact of his being in question, but was out of the reach of

the inquiry, and seeking by the petition of his eye to be informed.

"'E 's speakin' about fire, gentleman is," the woman told him.

"What fire?" the sick man asked, in a frail, piping voice--a voice that

a three-days' chicken might almost have challenged.

He asked the question mechanically, with his eyes on the Spawer, but his

interest lay somewhere beyond the borderland of earthly things, as

though his mind, through much solitude of wandering, had strayed in

advance of his body towards the bourne of them both, and was recalled to

the flesh with increasing difficulty.

"Kitchen fire," his wife explained to him. "Fire i' grate yonder."

The man followed the line of her knotted, bony forefinger, and let his

eyes fall on the wasted red cinders, so symbolical of his own condition.

"Ay," he said, after a moment, when it had almost come to seem that the

connection between finger and fireplace was quite lost. "Fire 's a bit

o' company to me. We 've been good friends a goodish piece noo, but ah

s'll not need 'er so much longer, ah 'm thinkin'."

"Ye div n't know what ye 'll need," his wife admonished him, with the

sharpness of personal anxiety. But to the Spawer she added, catching at

her brooch: "Cough troubles 'im a deal o' nights noo. Doctor says 'e

misdoots 'e 'll see another winter thruff. 'E 'd seummut to do to get

thruff last."

The sick man knew, with the dumb instinct of a dog, that his case was

being discussed. He fastened his eyes on the Spawer's face to see

whether it would give him any clue to the words that were being uttered.

His wife's, by experience, he knew would tell him nothing; but a

stranger's might.

"Ah 'm about at far end," he piped, in his placid, piteous harmonic of a

voice, that issued between his lips with a sound like the blowing of a

cornstraw. "Ah 've been a sad, naughty slaverbags i' my time, bud ah 'm

done noo. It's 'arvest time wi' me, an' ah 'm bein' gathered in, ah

think. Doctor 's patched my bellows up a deal o' times, bud they

weean't stan' mendin' no more."

"Why weean't they? Ye 've breathed a deal free-er last few days," his

wife tried to instil into him. "It 's 'is 'eart as well," she told the

Spawer. "Doctor says it 's about worn out. Ay, poor man, poor man!

What a thing it is to sit an' watch 'im gan, ah-sure. An' 'im so active

as 'e was. Bud cryin' weean't alter it, for ah 've tried, an' it 's no

use. It 's Lord's will, an' we mun just be thankful 'at 'E 's spared

'im as long as 'E 'as, wi' me to look after 'im an' see 'e gans off

comfortable. There 's monny 'at is n't blessed so well as that."

The sick man fastened his eye on the Spawer again.

"Ye come fro' Dixon's?" he said inquiringly; and when the Spawer gave

him an illuminative "Yes"--"Ay," he said, through his thin lips. "It 's

long enough sin' ah seed 'im. Mebbe ye 'll do me the kindness to gie

'im mah respecks when ye get back. Monny 's the time 'im an' me 's met

i' Oommuth market an' driven wum [home] i' Tankard's 'bus together....

Ah 've been nowt bud trouble tiv 'er sin' day she wor fond enough to tek

me, an' she would n't 'a tekken me then, bud ah begged ower 'ard. An' ah

'm nowt bud trouble tiv 'er noo."

"Ay, an' ah 'd tek ye agen lad," the thin, worn woman told him, with an

assurance that was almost fierce. "Ne'er mind whether ye 're a bad un or

no. Ah 've nivver rued day ah tekt ye--though ye 'd gie'n me twice

trouble ye did. Ah mud 'ave looked far to fin' a better, an' then not

fun' [found] 'im. Let ye be as drunk as ye would, ye nivver gied me a

bad wod nor lifted 'and agen me."

"Nay, ah nivver lifted 'and agen ye," the man assented. "Ah 'ad n't

need. Bud that 's little to my credit. Ah trailed ye thruff

tribulation. What time ye was n't workin' to mek good what ah 'd wasted

ye was weepin' an' waitin' o' me. There 's scarcelins a Saturday neet,

at one time, ye set oot wi' a dry eye."

"Ay, bud ye nivver stayed away ower Sunday," his wife claimed, with

pride. "Ye was allus back an' to spare when Oolbrig bells got set o'

ringin'. An' it's not ivvery man's wife about this district 'at can say

same of 'er 'usband."

The sick man listened to her, and a pale, wintry smile flickered across

his face and over his frost-nipped lips. Years ago, perhaps, it had been

a smile as full of sunlight as the Spawer's own, and dear to the woman's

heart. Perhaps her soul had pined for that very smile, and drunk of its

remembrance, in the dark hours that clouded her life from time to time.

The sick man turned his eyes upon the Spawer, while yet the feeble ray

illuminated them.

"Ah did n't chose so badlins," he said, with a tinge of the dry humor

that sparkles mirthfully in the men of these parts like the crackling of

blazing twigs under a pot. "Nay, ah got best o' bargain when she

fastened 'ersen. Chosin' a wife 's same as chosin' a mare or owt else,

an' there 's a deal o' ways o' chosin' wrong. Don't tek notice o' way a

lass gans on tiv you, if ye want to pick a good un--for they 're all t'

same when they 're carryin' on wi' a man. Good uns an' bad uns acts

alike then. Div n't tek a woman 'll 'at fin's ower much fault wi' 'er

neighbors--syke a woman 'll fin' plenty wi' you when she 's gotten ye

fast. Ye want to 'ave a sharp eye when ye gan coortin'. There 's some

on 'em 'at gans coortin' by neet, 'at scarcelins knows look o' their

lass by day. That 's no way. Don't tek on wi' a lass because she

carries a 'ymn book. Onny lass can carry a 'ymn book. Tek one 'at 's

gotten all 'er 'ymns i' 'er 'eart. Don't trust yersen tiv a lass 'at

wastes all 'er time i' runnin' after ye. Think on it 's 'er feythur's

time she 's wastin', 'appen, an' when she 's gotten ye she 'll waste

yours. Ay, an' try an' pick a wench 'at dizz n't mind doin' what she

can to mek it a bit brighter for them 'at 's gannin' quick down shady

side o' life. 'Appen she 'll do t' same when it comes tiv your ton

[turn]."

All these things the Spawer promised to bear in mind when the time came,

with the despicable hypocrisy that assumed, as a cloak, the smiling

improbability of any such occurrence. Cad that he felt himself, he

dared not look at Pam, seated apart on a chair by the door leading into

a small scullery beyond. Like Peter he kept denying--by inference, at

least--the facts of a case that would so unpleasantly involve him. Like

Peter, each successive denial smote him to the heart; he wept in spirit

over his own spirit's weakness. And yet, as he asked himself very

naturally, even as he held his smile towards the old man, and studiously

away from the girl that fulfilled (either in actuality or in the guilty

similarity set up by his soul) every condition of the old fellow's

warning--was this the proper moment to declare to her what he had to

declare to her? Could he for the first time acquaint her with facts for

which she was all unprepared before strangers? No, no, no. Later on,

he swore it, he would fulfil his afternoon's mission. He was merely a

musician, he told himself, using destiny as his fiddle, tuning the

strings of circumstance to the tune needed of him. So, catching sight

of the little despicable harmonium for the hundredth time, with the

suddenly sparkling eye for a revelation, "What," said he, in accents of

surprised pleasure that even deceived Pam--(though he dared not have

thought it)--"a harmonium?"

The old woman whipped off its meagre tippet of oilcloth in a twinkling,

and displayed its poor double octave of discolored celluloid with a

toothless smile of proud possession.

"Mester bought it," she said. "He was allus fond of a bit o' music."

How was she to know, poor soul, the strickening effect that fatal use of

the diminutive had on the sensitive fibres of the Spawer's nature? Not

from his face, surely, for he smiled pure sunlight.

They dusted the keys for him, and a chair, and put up the fragile desk,

that subsided like a schooner before the blast, with its masts bending,

and the Spawer sat down and did his best.

Heavens, what a best!

The very tone of the instrument that cried out under his touch shook his

soul and almost frightened his fingers from the keys. So raucous it

was; so noisily sanctimonious; so redolent of blind musicians; of

street-corner meetings; so unblushingly bald; so callous; so

unsensitive; so ostentatious; so utterly awful. Every nerve, fibre, and

tissue of musical organization was offended; it was a crying offence

against every instinct of musical art. And all the while, as though the

soul itself were not being sufficiently punished by humiliation, the

body was being subjected to the physical indignity of working its legs

like a journeyman scissors-grinder.

Ye gods! the tragic absurdity of it all. To musical natures less

cultured, to senses less susceptible than the Spawer's, there would have

been the rising of throats and the wetness of tears during this scene,

for, truth to tell, it lacked none of the elements of moving pathos and

tragedy. The dying man; the care-worn woman; the girl with the

compassionate lips; the musician bending over his task of devotion; the

hymn tune evolved into harmony by his shaping fingers from the low

humming of the girl's lips:

"Sound the loud timbrel o'er Egypt's dark sea;

Jehovah hath triumphed, His people are free..."

the half-drawn blind--so soon to be drawn down to its full; the sun

beating on the window and on the red-tiled floor....

Not one witness in a thousand, drawn independently to consider the

scene, would have pierced to the heart of the pathos, and grasped

through the tearful confusion of their sympathies, that perhaps the most

beautiful focus-point of emotion was in the seated figure of the

musician, castigating his musical soul with biting thongs for the sake

of one girl and a dying man, and showing no sign.

And what recompense of moral gratification did he receive in return for

his act of artistic abnegation? Little enough, it must be confessed,

that the Spawer could discover. The old man looked older, he thought;

the old woman's prefatory smile of appreciative pride had been quenched

by the music, and her attitude when he turned round upon her was the

incomprehending silence of respect. All her face, so to speak, had

fallen to pieces like an over-shortened pie, with no concentration of

interest to hold up the crust of its expression. Perhaps the very

harmonies with which the Spawer had clad the naked melody of a hymn tune

had so baffled their decaying, primitive hearing that they had failed to

recognise it in its new garb. He had done better, possibly, to play the

melody out for them with one finger. Pam's face alone compensated him.

She, he knew--and was glad to know--was too much awakened to the scope

and magnitude of music to have derived anything approaching personal

pleasure from a crude performance such as this; but she had realised

what nausea it must have been to him, and in the light of a sacrifice

alone she had rejoiced in his achievement.

Well, however, the achievement was over, and they were ready to go any

time now. The old woman replaced the oilcloth over the harmonium with a

look of relief (or so the Spawer thought, but he thought wrong), and Pam

was just opening her lips to suggest departure when the old man piped

out in his faltering treble:

"Ay, bud ye 'll gie me a chapter before ye gan, lass, weean't ye?"

Pam turned a troubled eye part-way towards the Spawer, as though it were

accompanying a thought of hers on its own account; but she stopped it

before it reached him, and dropped submissive hands.

"Would you like me to?" she asked gently.

"Ay; ah s'd tek it kindly if ye would."

"You don't mind?" she asked the Spawer softly; and with his assent,

readily given, "I will," she said.

"Gie 'er the Book, lass," he ordered his wife; and the careworn woman

lifted it from beneath a pair of folded spectacles, and delivered it

reverently into the girl's receiving fingers.

"What shall I read you?" Pam asked, setting the book on her knees, and

turning over the pages, now backwards, now forwards.

"Ah 'll 'ave that bit o' John," he told her, "about mansions an'

such-like, if ye 've no objections."

"Is that the fourteenth chapter?" Pam suggested inquiringly. "Did n't

we have it last time?"

"Ay, an' we mud as lief 'ave it this," he decided placidly. "It 'll be

none the wuss of a time or two. Book 's not same as other things.

There 's allus seummut fresh in it for them 'at gans tiv it wi' a right

'eart. Ah s'd 'a done better if ah 'd ganned tiv it when ah 'ad use o'

legs Lord gid me. It 's ower late to larn me to walk straight i' this

wuld noo, but 'appen ah s'll be about ready to scrammle along to next,

when time comes."

"The fourteenth chapter of the Gospel according to St. John," Pam

announced, as signifying that she had found the place, and smoothing

down the page with her soft finger, lifted her voice and read:

"Let not your heart be troubled.... Ye believe in God, believe also in

me. In my Father's house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would

have told you. I go to prepare a place for you."

When Pam said: "If it were not so ... I would have told you," one felt

it must be so indeed. Such lips could never lie. And as the girl's

clear voice rose and filled that little kitchen--so compassionate, so

truthful, so natural--the full sublimity of the picture of a sudden

swelled up in the Spawer's soul and mounted to his throat. The

ingredient elements of the scene were unchanged, but now how exalted.

He saw, in a flash, as though his spiritual eyes had been opened, the

true pathos of the picture: the dying man, seated so motionless in his

chair, with his faded blue eyes gazing into Heaven through the blind;

the worn woman, the better portion of whose years and loving energy the

man was taking to the grave with him; the sweet, purifying sunlight

bathing the world outside; the girl with the lips of celestial

compassion, drawing old truths from the battered and thumb-marked Bible,

distilling them anew in pure liquid sound, and dropping them so

coolingly into the overheated kitchen of death. All these he

saw--acutely with his inward vision, dimly with his material--and

wondered, as he saw it, that the girl could proceed so courageously and

so unfalteringly on her consolatory path. He himself would have fared

along it badly, and knew it. But it was not the last time he was to

marvel at the girl's self-possession when circumstances demanded, and

perhaps this second time he would remember it even better.

"Ye 'll tek liberty to call agen, mebbe," the old man invited him as

they stood finally for departure, "... if ah 'm not mekkin' ower free to

ask ye; but it 's a lonely road when a man draws to yend of 'is days.

Busy folk can't reckon to be treubled wi' 'im--an' i' 'arvest an' all.

Ah wor no better mysen when ah 'ad my faculties. Ye 'll be stayin' wi'

Dixon a goodish while yet, mebbe?"

At the direct question the Spawer's resolution spun round and made as

though to turn tail. There was just a slight pause--quite inappreciable

to the others about him, but painfully magnified to himself--while he

struggled whether to ignore the opportunity or seize it like a man, and

sign irrevocably the bond of his departure.

"Perhaps..." he was quibbling with the reply even yet, while speaking,

not knowing whether to evade or to grapple with his chance. Then he

grappled suddenly, but always with that frank, pleasant smile of his

that showed no inkling of an inward perplexity. "... On the other

hand," he said, "... it 's possible I may be going any time now--any day

even." He sensed rather than saw the quick turn of the girl's eyes upon

him, and knew, too, in what kind of mild, protesting surprise she was

looking at him. She could not credit that he should first communicate

such an important piece of intelligence to strangers, without having

prepared her by a single word, and was wondering sorrowfully whether it

were not an excuse to evade any promise of visiting the old man again.

"It all depends," the Spawer explained, throwing his explanation over

the truth of the matter like a pleasant nebula, "... on a letter. I 'm

expecting to hear. One can't stay for ever, you know," he added

amiably, "even where one 's happy."

"Nay, nay," the old man acquiesced mournfully. "When a man comes to my

years 'e fin's that oot tiv 'is sorrer. Well, well; ah awpe [hope] when

ye think fit to change ye 'll change for t' better, young gen'leman, an'

ah thank ye for yer company an' yer kindness." He turned the faint

flicker of his long-ago smile upon Pam, like the sunlight stealing over

an autumn landscape.

"Pam 's not likely to change yet a bit," he said, with a sense of

comfort in the thought, as though the girl were a true staff to rest on

in time of trouble. Pam shook her head reassuringly. "Nay, Pam mun 't

change yet a bit," he admonished her. "She mun stop an' see t' old man

's time oot, ah think. 'E weean't keep 'er so long noo, but 'e 's a

selfish old chap; 'e dizz n't want to part wi' 'er no sooner nor need

be. She 's been as good tiv 'im as if she 'd been 'is own bairn. Ay,

an' better. There 's not monny bairns 'at 'ud 'a done as much--an' said

as little. Nay, nay; they 'd 'a telt 'im 'e was a treublesome old feller

long sin'. Good-by, lass; good-by--an' gie my respecks tiv 'is Rivrence

when 'e comes back."

His eye kindled momentarily as the girl laid light fingers on the horny

right hand and stooped and kissed him. But the light of this died out of

them as soon as he had done speaking, and the pressure of her clasp

relaxed. As they passed out of the kitchen his gaze followed them dimly

from afar, seeming to inquire who were these figures departing, and

whence came they and what their errand, and in what remote,

unintelligible degree their presence concerned himself.

*CHAPTER XVIII*

For a short space the Spawer and Pam walked along in silence, but

sharing the same thought, as though they made joint use of an umbrella.

The stillness of a great Sunday had fallen over them; like communicants

of the Blessed Sacrament of Charity, they walked away a little hushed,

each treasuring the remembrance of the other's goodness; each trying to

retain undissipated those elusive sky-colors of exaltation that at

length must melt and fade away, however carefully cherished, into the

dull grey of daily life.

And between here and the joining of the roads at Hesketh's corner the

Spawer was pledged to sign the document of departure. In two odd miles

of green-bordered laneway he was to waft all their charitable illusion

on one side with the rude hand of resolve, like the intrusive fumes of

rank tobacco, rather than the blessed clouds of incense, and make a

clear path for his shuffling feet to walk in.

He stole a look down the side of his nose at the girl by his elbow. If

her clear face had been a window, and he a contemptible urchin whose

purpose was a stone secreted in the palm of his hostile hand, he could

not have put it behind his back with greater shame or remorse when she

looked up at him.

"Hello!" he said, drawing up in their equable stride with a fine

pretence of awakening consciousness to the trend of their steps. "Where

on earth are we hurrying off to so fast?"

The girl drew up too, and sought his face inquiringly.

"Home ... are n't we?" she suggested, with a gentle stirring of surprise

at his need for the question.

"Are you so anxious to get rid of me?" he asked.

"I? Oh, no ... I was n't thinking about that."

"Let 's think about it now, then," he prompted agreeably. "Truth to

tell, little woman, you 've made me feel such a very good little boy--so

smug and pious--that I dread going back to the corrupt and naughty world

yet a bit. I feel I only want just a little time for my wings to grow.

So don't spoil an angel for a penn'orth of tar. Give me a chance to

become a cherub, that 's a dear girl. What do you say to a turn as far

as the cliff at Shippus? I 'm not sure that I shan't be able to fly by

the time we get there. Don't stand in the way of my flying, please."

Pam stood swinging the empty basket against her skirts, with a hungry

look towards Shippus and a lingering duty-pull towards Ullbrig.

Inwardly, ah! if he 'd only known how she was dying to accept this

invitation without demur.

"I don't know ... I should like," she admitted, and asked: "What time is

it, please?"

"Ah, what a girl for strict time it is, to be sure," the Spawer made

answer banteringly, pulling out his watch. "Always one, two, three,

four; one, two, three, four. But strict time 's not always music,

piccola mia, don't forget that. And music 's like life, no good at all

without a little 'tempo rubato.' Five o'clock, dear child--and there 's

a green fly on your chin." He stooped forward, put his lips towards it,

and puffed it lightly away. What a pretty chin it was, seen so near

too, and how almost like kissing it it had seemed--though not quite.

Ah, not quite. (What would she have said if he had, now?) "There," he

exclaimed, as the green fly floated out into space, "... excuse my

taking the liberty of blowing, but I was n't sure of my touch. I did

n't want to defile your chin with a murder, by accident. Well, what do

you say?"

"Five o'clock 's rather late," was what the girl said, but there was as

little backbone in the suggestion as in the body of a sawdust doll. "I

'm afraid ... tea."

"The very thing," the Spawer decided. "Let 's have tea at Shippus

together, and walk back like giants refreshed. Come; what do you say to

that? I say beautiful! beautiful! What do you say?"

Apparently the girl said "Oh!" and having said that, seemed able to say

no more.

"Very well, then," the Spawer declared, artfully taking the "Oh!" for

assent. "Come along and let 's tell 'em to put the kettle on, and be

sure to give us tea-leaves out of the canister."

He took possession of the basket again, that she released into his hands

as token of submission to his will.

"You won't ... lose the cover cloth, though, will you?" she besought

him, when he showed a tendency to swing it too freely.

"I 'll stuff it in my pocket," he promised her, suiting action to his

words. "And then I shall be sure to have it safe with me at Cliff

Wrangham when you want it."

Then slowly and happily they retraced their steps towards the sea.

Being a Tuesday, and harvest-time to boot--the sacred Sunday feeling of

silence covered Shippus too beneath its beneficent mantle. Moreover,

week-days are the only Sabbaths that this place ever knows. As soon as

the church bells of Ullbrig announce to the landlady of the Royal Arms

(which is four fifths of Shippus, as everybody knows) the hour of divine

service, she throws open the dingy business door, and listens for the

welcome rumble of the first brake load of travelers who have driven out

the thirteen odd miles from Hunmouth to be supplied with the drink that

would be denied them (by the devout act of a Protestant and religious

Government) at their own door. There is nothing at all royal about the

Royal Arms except the name. It is disclosed with the remaining few

cottages of Shippus at a quick turn of the road--an irregular,

dirty-washed building--presenting, apparently, nothing but back doors.

Indeed, there is no front entrance at all, that I know of. And the

Spawer approaches the Royal Arms and orders the Royal Arms to put the

kettle on and lay the table for two, with ham and eggs and anything else

they think likely to tempt an invalid. And the Royal Arms, which is the

austere-faced lady who looked sternly at them on their arrival through

the small-paned window of what might be the scullery, after suggesting

that he should accompany her to the hen-run and pick his fancy, promised

tea faithfully in twenty minutes. She could also promise it in fifteen,

if he liked, but not faithfully.

On a backless bench, close by the cliff edge, Pam and the Spawer sat

together in blessed community of spirit, and solaced their souls in the

blue sea before them. The sun, sinking behind their backs, cast their

two shadows far out on to the sands below, above the black silhouette of

the cliff. Right out to sea, on the straight, blue line of the horizon,

a ship stood up in snowy purity, like an iceberg. Over one corner of

the sky a smudge, as though a finger dipped in soot had drawn it across

the azure, broad at its base, thinned away to where it joined itself by

a fine thread to the funnel of a distant steamer. The chalk cliffs of

Farnborough rose up above the water in white marble, and the little

alabaster finger of the lighthouse showed clear, like a tiny belemnite.

And after they had spent their twenty minutes in contemplation of the

scene and wandered to and fro a little along the trampled margin of the

cliff, they retrace their steps and make their way into the tea-room of

the Royal Arms.

It is a long, low-ceilinged room, that promises little in the way of

table luxuries, and keeps its word. A great, bare table runs up the

centre of it on trestles, looking like a crocodile; scaly with the

involute rings of many glasses, and discolored with the spillings of

many liquids. At the far end, in a corner by the window, is an aged

piano--more aged than any the Spawer has ever come across, he thinks.

He gives an exclamation of amused greeting when his eyes first fall upon

it, and throwing up the lid, shakes hands with it most affably.

Probably it has never known respectability since the hour of its

birth--or at least since it went into the world from the factory. It

has been a pot-house creature--changing from pot-house to pot-house,

from vaults to cosy, from cosy to smoke-room, and from smoke-room to

private bar--until its landing here from Hunmouth three years ago. It

has the cracked, dissipated, nasal voice of a chucker-out, accustomed to

hurl vile-chorded epithets against a roomful of rowdy soakers, and knows

nothing of tune, never having heard any. But such as it is, it is a

distinct discovery and an acquisition to the present company.

"My good fellow," the Spawer tells it, "it is plain you know nothing of

my friends Brahms and Beethoven--to say nothing of Chopin. Later on I

must certainly introduce you. It would n't be fair to them to leave you

unacquainted when such a fine opportunity offers."

But for the present they take their places at the end of the crocodile

table, where a cloth has been spread, with a pewter tea-pot stand; a

glass bowl of some very azure and crystallised lumps of sugar; a dried

seed-cake, set out on a tri-colored tissue paper doyley; some treacly

marmalade; some butter; and a meagre miscellany of cheese-cakes. Ah,

how different from Pam's cooking and Pam's management, all these--and

yet, under the circumstances, quite enjoyable too, as a sort of

super-exalted jest. An under-sized girl in a full-sized apron, who

tilts the end of a big tray at such an angle upward, in front of her, to

sustain it at all, that she appears, on approach, to be walking on her

knees, ministers to their needs. She gives Pam an oppressed greeting,

for Pam knows her and she knows Pam, but her eye is mainly occupied with

the Spawer. She is visibly impressed with his importance, but the

impression, like all else about the Royal Arms, does not run to

superfluous courtesy. When he addresses a remark to her that she has

not heard, she tilts up her chin, sideways on, and screwing her lips to

inquiry says: "Eh?" or "M'm?" When he asks for a knife she demands:

"En't ye got one?" and when he removes his elbow to look, sees for

herself he has n't, and tells him, "Ah thought ah 'd setten two," as

though that explained everything. The Spawer thanks her liberally for

all she does for them, but never once can he succeed in forcing a "Thank

you" from her in return.

But it 's all very jolly and entertaining. Pam pours out the tea.

"Sugar and cream mine for me, dear girl," the Spawer bids her, "while I

tackle the ham."

"How many do you take?" Pam asks him.

"As many as you like to give me," the Spawer tells her. "I promise I

won't complain."

"I 'll give you one and a bit, then," Pam says. "Then you can come

again if you like."

"How good of you," says the Spawer.

And altogether they are very happy indeed. They eat part of their ham

and eggs with dreadful deadly Bengal metal forks, and cut them with

leaden-looking knives, bone-hafted, that are warranted "Real Sheffield

Steel," without compromising any particular maker by name.

And they urge each other to fresh helpings of the dried seed-cake, that

probably began its public career last Bank Holiday; and partake of the

fly-blown cheese-cakes, so great is their exaltation. At times too,

those necessary words are almost upon the Spawer's lips. The moment

seems propitious. Only let him swallow this mouthful, and he will tell

her ... he will say to her:

"Dear girl..."

Then the Dear Girl smiles, or the Dear Girl turns her head, or the Dear

Girl forestalls his words with words infinitely more desirable, or

catches his eye, and sends it back with as guilty a feeling as though he

were a top-story lodger trying to sneak down the staircase for a bucket

of coal, and intercepted with his nose at the door and the bucket in his

hand.

*CHAPTER XIX*

And meanwhile, as he removed himself more completely from the girl by

resolve, they came closer to each other in spirit. At the piano against

the window, looking out upon a poultry-run and the profile of three

meagre swing-boats, the Spawer sat down and made music, and the

music--even from this cracked, tin-plate, pot-house piano--seemed to sum

up all the goodness, all the charity, all the kindness, all the

happiness of the day; give it a pure and hallowed expression, as the

night's thanksgiving prayer gives blessed articulation to the hidden

processes of the soul. It was a mantle, this music that the Spawer

made, enfolded about them both. Their two lives, at this moment, were

silver streams of content, that met in melodious estuary, and flowed

henceforth with one broad current towards the infinite.

Ah! Dangerous state of exaltation this, when souls seem severed from

the body, and feel no clog of their fleshy burthens binding them to

sordid earth. When spirits are so emancipated from the material that a

breath can almost blow them; when life seems to have lost all root in

worldly soil, but is merely the blessed sweet odor, hovering above the

blossom of existence. While the Spawer played the sky deepened. It

seemed to descend like a beneficent angel from heaven and clasp the

swing-boats in a celestial embrace, so that they slumbered with the deep

peace that comes from above. Pallid harvest stars opened places for

themselves in the curtain of blue dusk and peeped down upon the scene.

Night threw down her lawny veil of mist, that wound the world dreamily

in its filmy folds and hid the realities of existence. The life of toil

and labor, the life of matter and the life of fact--these lives were no

more, they were merged in a delightful life of dreams. To think was to

do. Activity was merely a beautiful unfolding of the soul, delivered of

all gross physical exertion, like the expansion of a cloud or the dreamy

convolution of a puff of white steam. Pam and the Spawer were no longer

flesh and blood; they were the disembodied souls of themselves. They

were their own thoughts, disencumbered of the flesh, merged delightfully

into each other, and moving by volition amid a world of dreams.

Everything that lay about them was symbolised into sublime moral truths,

into doctrines of love and charity. All the world, all their doings,

were dreams.

They dreamed they left the piano and bought more tea-biscuits at six a

penny, and wandered forth (without any consciousness of legs) to redeem

their promise to the donkeys. After much wandering, they dreamed they

found them and fed them. Divine symbolism of love. And the girl dreamed

she kissed their noses and said many good-bys. Kissed the donkeys'

noses? Did she really kiss _their_ noses? Or were these kisses, cashed

upon the donkeys' noses, but the kisses of love and happiness drawn upon

the bank of universal love about them, and paid into the treasury of

their joint content? And she wound her soft dream arms about the

donkeys' necks. But in this nebulous state of bliss, where all thoughts,

all actions, all love, and all happiness seemed shared in common, and

indivisible, like the particles of gases that shift and move and change

their relative positions, but do not alter their substantial bulk, it

might have been that her dream arms wound about the Spawer's dream neck.

They dreamed their way to the cliff edge to take farewell of the sea,

that lay out with a silver-grey sheen upon its blue depth. On the same

seat they sat again, with their backs to the contracting shapelessness

of the Royal Arms and the west, whose dusky cheek the setting sun tinged

to crimson like the blush of a beautiful Creole. The penetrating eye of

Farnborough looked out at them from across the water, took stock of them

and closed itself once more. Anon it looked this way again, to see if

they were still there, and there they were. Many strange scenes of

love, in all love's aspects, has the far-seeing eye of Farnborough

witnessed in its day, by the side of the water along this coast. What

it does not know of these emotions--as well as of the comedies and

tragedies of death--is not worth knowing.

They dreamed, these two did, that they rose again and wandered a little

along the cliff line. They dreamed they saw a faint phosphorescent

pallor away over the water, and the Spawer dreamed he said:

"It is the moon. Let's see it rise."

So they dreamed themselves on to another seat, and sat together and

watched the moon push its red rim, like the edge of a new penny, above

the misty horizon. And they watched it turn to gilt as it rose and

threw aside its veil of mist, and mount up at last like a beautiful

goddess with a fair white body. They dreamed themselves back to the old

bench once more, at the head of the zigzag steps, cut in the face of the

cliff for descent to the beach.

"Let us sit down here a bit," the Spawer said; and they dreamed they

seated themselves.

The eye of Farnborough looked out searchingly for the bench, and found

it at last, with this twain on it, and said "Aha!" and winked itself out

again. In the growing light of the moon the girl's silvery face shone

forth from the shimmering mist like a planet. Was he going to tell her

here what he had to say? ...

Or was he going to wind his arms about her and kiss her, kiss her, kiss

her? Would she resent? or would she melt into his embrace like a drop

of water in strong wine? Ah, torture of temptation. St. Anthony scarce

suffered by comparison with this. The moon, the sea, the vastness of

the night, the stars, the winding mist, the exaltation--rising up like

fumes from their communion of this day--were all commingled in his soul,

making his emotions infinite. He was a poor weak mortal, suffering the

Olympian passion of a god. One moment his arms were almost about

her--though he never stirred. The next he was holding up his purpose

like a burning crucifix before his passion's eyes ... and all the while

the girl sat with her face to the moon, and he with his face sideways

upon hers.

Then the prolonged silence woke the girl to a sense of something

impending--that sense, so fine and subtle in her sex, that tells it, by

one quick touch, as of an antenna, what man must exercise all the

processes of his reason to discover.

"Shall we ... be going back?" she suggested, part rising, with a

tentative hand upon the seat, for she felt the silence as the dangerous

filaments of a web that was being woven about her for some sort of

captivity.

"Oh ... if you are tired of this..." he responded.

"I am not tired of it," she said.

"Let 's stay a little longer, then," he proposed. "Shall we?"

"If you like..." the girl said.

The submissive rustle of her sinking back sounded like a sigh. They

were very dreamy the two of them.

And again the temptation of St. Anthony commenced. What devils were

struggling for possession of him? Why was he delaying matters? Every

moment threw the girl more upon his hands. He had only to drop his

voice, to whisper, to put out his dream arms, to enfold her, to stifle

her lips under dream kisses.... And with what object this?

Ah!

Love is no analyst; does not profess to be; does not want to be. Pure

love and love unworthy are one and the same at the crisis. Whether the

flame is the flame of an evil incendiary or the spontaneous flame of

pure affinity ... it is all one when it burns. She was there; there by

his side. There to be taken ... or there to be left. Should he take

her? Should he leave her? And while he temporised thus with the

devils, before ceding the keys of his inner soul ... the girl was on her

feet again.

"Perhaps we ought to be going ... don't you think?"

Fool that he was. The moment was by again. This was no time for his

arm.

"Plainly ... you are in a hurry to be rid of me." His laugh was

infectiously frank and free. "Am I such poor company?"

"It 's growing late," the girl said, evading the dangerous quicksand of

his question. "I 'm afraid ... they 'll be wondering what's got me, at

home."

"Ah, is it such a naughty girl as that? Don't they trust her?"

"They don't know where I am. I did n't tell them."

"Do you always tell them?"

"Not always...."

"Good girl. She shall have a white mark for telling the truth."

"But ... this afternoon I did n't know ... that I was coming here. They

may be anxious."

"Suppose we walk as far as the other seat before going back. Would that

make them very, very anxious?"

"Perhaps we might walk as far as that ... if you wish."

And they walked--a whole legion of devils in attendance upon the man.

The searching eye, gazing keenly along the cliff from seat to seat,

found them once more at the second, and blinked knowingly. "The old,

old comedy," it told itself. But for all that, it was not quite the

old, old comedy of the true Shippus sort. The devils were practically

in possession of the dream-Spawer's soul, but the dream-Spawer was so

completely detached from the real Spawer's body that no physical

manifestation took place. The dream-Spawer, floating to and fro above

the small, pitiful, carnal presentment, like a balloon in oscillation,

wound dream arms about the girl, pressed dream kisses upon her lips,

felt her own dream arms wind celestially about his neck; suffocated all

remorse, all scruples, all purpose, all resolution, beneath kisses soft

and seductive as the roseate clouds of a July sunset ... but there was

no contact with the earthly Spawer. All this the vast dream-Spawer did,

but the small earthly Spawer beneath stood still and looked at the sea.

And a little later the searching eye from Farnborough, stealing a sly

glimpse at the second seat, said a sudden "Hello!" and gazed in

unconcealed, wide-open surprise. "H'm!" it reflected, in a tone of

considerable disappointment. "So they 've gone at last. Sorry I could

n't see the end of that business. Wonder where they are now."

But it had other little episodes to keep its eye upon--Merensea,

Farnborough, and even Spathorpe way--and could not afford to waste time

in useless regrets.

*CHAPTER XX*

The crisis was over, but the danger of relapse remained. The dream had

not been broken, it had merely been prolonged. Slowly or suddenly, the

awakening was bound to come. Every step of the homeward road that they

took was unwinding their dream like a skein of worsted. And now,

incredulous as it may seem, with the homeward end in view, the Spawer

recommenced to apply himself, by a kind of feverish rote, to the

preparation of the task that he had been so ready to cast down.

They passed the group of cottages where--ages and ages ago, one blazing

August afternoon--they had called to visit a dying man. He would be

dead now. The Spawer had troubled his last moments with a hymn-tune on

a cacophonous harmonium that emitted a discordant clamor like a flock of

geese in full prayer; and the girl had read him a chapter out of St.

Mark--or was it Matthew or Luke?--John perhaps. What a pious,

smug-faced fellow he had felt himself in those days. Almost fit for

heaven. And in these! He gazed, with the girl, at the little yellow

square of light as they passed, that showed where the scene had taken

place, and thought of Now and Then. All the air was saturated with

moonlight. It looked too thick to breathe. A great exhalation rose up

from the pores of the earth, tremulous as a mystic bridal-veil worn on

the brow of Nature. The hedges swooned away on either side of them.

The sky drooped dizzily. Sounds, filtered and languorous, percolated

through the supernatural stillness, with a strange distinctness and

purity. The cries of children at play, robbed of all earthly meaning

and wondrously tranquillised, as though uttered from the far-away abode

of the blest; the barking of dogs; the call of shepherds; the coughing

of sheep; the lowing of cattle; the unexpected cry of birds; the beating

of metal on some distant anvil, like the ringing of an angelus bell; the

slamming of remote gates--all spiritualised and purified, as though they

came from one world, and these two occupied another. There was a

melancholy and solitude about the earth that made them feel as though

they were among the shades; as though they were dead (very peacefully),

and the sun would never rise upon hard realities again; but as though,

from now henceforth through eternity, their souls might wander in misty

moonlight.

And still they walked, and still he had not told her. Still his soul was

divided in conflict between the desire to relapse himself to the dream

and the necessity to meet that promissory I.O.U. of honor which he had

given to himself. All the time he was practising overtures; trying

phrases in his mind by which he could approach the subject casually,

without allowing the girl to perceive the degraded tortuous trail over

which he had been crawling to it on his moral belly all this morning,

and all this afternoon, and all this evening. From the thick moonlight,

as they walked, other shades detached themselves of a sudden, as though

they had but that moment been fashioned out of the tremulous mist, met

them walking more slowly, and were absorbed into the mist again on the

Shippus side behind them, like ink-spots in blotting-paper. Silent

couples, walking wordless and sometimes apart, but wrapped in their own

amorous atmosphere, and always with that strange, lingering communion of

step, that concentration of purpose, as though a magnet were drawing

them forward in slumber. And already, here and there, through the

hedges and through branches of distant trees and in the moonlit sky,

were gleaming the dull yellow of blind-drawn casements and the

scintillating beams of naked lamps that betokened Ullbrig.

And still he had not told her.

A bat, fluttering blindly over the dusky hedgerow and steering itself

erratically on its course like an uncertain cyclist, flew almost into

the girl's face and wheeled off abruptly, so that she felt the waft of

its wing on her cheek and gave a little cry of surprise.

"What is the matter with you, dear girl?" The Spawer turned quickly at

the sound. "You have n't twisted your foot?"

"No, no." The girl held up a face of reassurance in the moonlight.

"It's nothing ... only a bat."

"And what did the naughty bat do to her to frighten her so?"

"It did n't frighten me really. I thought it was going to fly in my

face. It startled me at first ... that's all."

"It was a bad, wicked bat to fly in her face and startle her at first."

He took hold of her arm. At the touch of that round, warm, live member

all the blood in her body seemed to jump to issue with his, and combine,

as though one great pulsing artery fed them both. "Come along," he said

lightly, striving with his voice to palliate the tremulous danger of

their union. "I won't have this dear girl frightened. I will take care

of her."

She made no demur, either to his words or to his touch, but came along

by his side; so warm, so wonderfully alive, so spiritually silent.

"Will she trust him to take care of her?" he asked her softly. And

after a moment: "Will she?" for she had not answered a word. She said

"Yes" very faintly, with the faintness of happiness.

"It is a good girl," he said caressingly, "... and she shall be well

taken care of." He pressed confidence into that supple trunk of arm.

"But she must try and be as kind to me as she can ... now." He waited

to give her the opportunity of asking him, Why? but she did not. She

was in the ethereal state that takes everything for granted. "Because

... well ... because she did n't believe me this afternoon. She thought

I was only telling tarradiddles. Now did n't she? But it was n't

tarradiddles at all, at all. It was something far worse than

tarradiddles."

He felt the sudden thrill of awakening alarm run through her; but still

she said no word, asked no questions, left everything to him.

"What does the good little girl say?" he asked her--oh, so lightly!

With his hand on her arm, with the pain of parting quite merged in the

warm consolatory current of their common blood, penance seemed a light,

a meaningless thing. What was departure but a delightful occasion for

kisses and comfort ... till the dread moment came? The good little girl

trembled a little, he thought, but said nothing. "Does n't she say she

's sorry? Come, come. Surely she 's not such a heartless little girl as

not to say she 's sorry?"

This time the girl twisted a swift, startled face of inquiry towards his

own half-bantering smile.

"I thought..." she began, and stopped with the abruptness of fear.

"Yes, yes; I know you did," he laughed. "I told you so. You thought I

was just telling a great big fib, did n't you? ... because I did n't

want to bind myself to the ordeal of any more harmonium."

"You don't mean ... you 're going away?"

"Should you be very sorry?" he asked her.

She did not speak, but seemed, in the moonlight, to be looking at him as

though she were trying to absorb his meaning, to see if there were any

other sense below the surface of his words.

"Are you really ... going?" she asked him, after a while.

The intentness of her look and the wondrous depth of her great

eyes--stirred now to troubled speculation--sent his purpose reeling

aslant again.

"Ah!" He gave her arm a protesting squeeze. "She 's not going to give

her sorrow away until she 's quite sure there 's genuine necessity for

it. She 's a very wise and very cautious little woman. She wants good

security for any small advances of commiseration. If I did n't know for

certain that her name was what it is ... I should be inclined to think

they called her Rachel or Leah or Abigail or Zipporah--with something of

Benjamin or Isaacs or Ishmael about it. Never mind. I will trust her

with my gold watch, and she shall give me what she likes on it. Yes,

little Israelite ... it was the truth that this unfortunate Gentile

spoke this afternoon. He knows it was ... because he does n't speak it

so often but that he can tell the taste. He 's been loafing about

happily for a long time ... but the eternal policeman Destiny has given

him the office to move on, and it seems he 'll have to move. It 's no

use getting cross with the law. Is she sorry for him now, this little

Usurer?"

"But you 're not going away ... at once?" she asked him, in a startled

voice.

"My gracious! What an out-and-out extortioner she is," the Spawer

exclaimed, with an assumption of admiring tribute. "She won't advance

me a cent of sympathy until she knows the term of the loan. If I say I

'm going at once, she 'll give me a better price of pity than if the

advance is to drag on over an indefinite period of weeks." He made

pretence to throw his chin in the air and laugh with pleasure.

"Honestly, little Rebecca," he told her, looking down once more, "I

don't want to humbug a penny more out of you than you think you ought to

give. At present I can't say when I go ... whether I have to go

to-morrow, the day after, the day after that ... or next week even. It

all depends on a letter. I 'm a condemned man, under indefinite

reprieve." He paused for a moment, balancing whether he should say the

next thing on his mind. "As a matter of fact, little woman...." He

turned his face towards her with the engaging air of candor that

seemingly could not deny itself. "... It 's no use trying to stuff you.

You 're too sharp to take a dummy watch with the works out, or a gilt

sixpence. So ... as it 's not a bit of good trying to be anything else

... I 'll be frank with you. I 'll tell you a secret. It 's a big

one--all about myself. Do you think you can keep a secret?"

"I 'll try," said the girl, with her eyes fixed apprehensively on his

lips.

"Well, then..." he said. "I 'm in your hands. I 'm going to do a very

silly thing."

Did a tremor of apprehensive pain, like the very ghost of a shiver, run

up the arm that he held? or was it his own mind, that through a feeling

of sympathy sought to attribute its knowledge to hers?

"You 'll think me a frightful ass, no doubt, when I tell you what it is.

Can you guess?"

The girl seemed to concentrate her look upon him, but whether the true

answer had flashed across her mind, or whether the flash of divination

merely served to dazzle her and make her ignorance still darker, so that

she looked for enlightenment from him, he could not tell; but she said

"No," and gave up his riddle with a shake of the head.

"I wish you 'd guessed," he said. "It throws it all on to my shoulders.

Now I shall have to hoist the confession up like my own portmanteau, and

perhaps look a bigger ass than ever, with my knees all bent under it.

Anyhow, here goes--one, two, three ... I 'm going to be married.

"Well?" he inquired, after a pause. "Won't you say you 're sorry now?

It 's all my own silly fault, I know, and I deserved to be married for

being such a fool ... but still--can't you squeeze one little drop of

pity for me?"

"Are you really going to be married?" asked the girl. She spoke in a

very level and, it struck him, a very unemotional voice.

"Great goodness, little woman," he exclaimed, "what an unbelieving

Israelite you are! Do you think I do a wholesale and export trade in

tarradiddles? You did n't use to suspect me before, even when I told

you I was a great composer. Won't you believe me now, when I 'm willing

to confess myself an awful idiot? On my word and conscience, then ... I

'm going to be married."

"I hope ... you 'll be very, very happy," said the girl.

For her, he thought the words and the wish somewhat prosaic. At this

moment she lacked one of those beautiful little emotional touches with

which she could illuminate the simplest saying to poetry. Her voice,

soft though it was, and so full of sympathetic interest, yet struck him

with a painful feeling of matter-of-fact. He and his marriage seemed

suddenly stuck up in hard, unpoetic affirmation, like the tin

price-shield in a pork-pie. The subtlety of artistic suggestion was

altogether lacking, all the romance was gone. The thing he had wished

delicately hinting at, a mysterious romantic melody for _celli con

sordini_, to suit the orchestra of the evening and of their mood, was

become a commonplace tune for a drunken cornet to play outside a

public-house door on Saturday night. All at once he began to feel that

the coverlet of dreams was fast slipping away from him. The moonlight

was clearer: the hedges harder in outline. In spite of the hand that lay

on the girl's arm, as though to retain that part of the dream at any

rate, they were no longer spiritually united. There was an intangible,

invisible, impalpable something between them as keen as the sword of

flame at the Gate of the Garden of Eden. Like many another martyr before

him, in his crucial hour the roseate illusions that had fortified him to

his purpose were floating away from him now, and leaving him only his

actual senses to realise externals and apprise him of the horrible pangs

of suffering. Before, he had been temporising at the stake; trying the

rope to see how its bondage felt, without allowing the cruel loops to

cut into his flesh; posturing as martyr before the girl in mind

only--but now he had made the girl a participant of his purpose.

And the worst of it was that he must profess that the parting meant

nothing so very much to either of them. He must not insult the girl by

suggesting that his going affected only her--that she would deeply feel

the loss of him who felt her loss so little that he was leaving her for

another. And yet! And yet!

O Lord! And yet! All his present life was but a meaningless series of

disjunctive conjunctions; words of contingency and speculation; ifs,

buts, supposes, peradventures, perchances, and the like.

"I say ... you 're very silent, little woman," he remarked, after a

while. "Don't be hard on a fellow because he 's down on his luck. You

're not offended with me, are you?"

"Offended with you?" she said. "Oh, no, indeed. What should make me

offended ... with you?"

He made believe to laugh.

"Well, I don't know what should. Only ... perhaps because you 're

disappointed to find that I 'm just as much an ass as any other man.

Oh, music 's nothing to do with it, believe me. A man may play like an

angel on the piano--as I do--and yet play as giddy a goat as any on four

legs, in real life, as I 've done. But what 's done is done. I was

younger in those days, perhaps. All the same, I 'm not too old for a

little sympathy. Say something to me, won't you?"

"I hardly know what to say," said the girl. "I was trying to think."

"Say something to give me a little courage, then," he suggested;

"something to strengthen my knees a little. You don't know how

white-livered and weak-kneed it makes a man feel when the marriage noose

is round his neck, and he seems to hear the bell tolling, and sees the

chaplain getting out his little prayer-book, and knows his hour 's

approaching to be launched into eternity."

Even to himself he recognised how beautifully his words were serving the

purpose of concealing truth with truth. No girl on earth--certainly not

the girl by his side--could have probed his utterances, in that candid

voice of his, and said: "You are speaking the truth. You are going to

this wedding like a weak-kneed cur, and all the time you are trying to

cling to me for comfort and consolation--and yet trying not to demean

yourself in my eyes by letting me know it. I am the girl you love, and

you are trying to experience the pleasure of my love vicariously; by

proxy, as it were. If I were in the other one's place, and she were in

mine, not all the waters of the world would keep you apart from her."

No, no. His smiling, semi-serious words were like a rosewood veneer

over deal wood, and there was no penetrating them.

They were close on Hesketh's corner now. He had told her all, and he

had told her nothing. Words--hundreds, thousands, millions of words

were still wanting to make the parting as it should be.

And all at once he felt the power of the dream returning; the impulse to

take the girl in his arms; to kiss her; to tell her that he was but

jesting, and that he loved her above everything and everybody in the

world; pawn all his future, with its honor and duty, for the pleasure of

that one glorious avowal. How could he let her depart out of that empty

leave-taking without a word, a sign, when his heart was like a vast sea,

and she the spirit moving on its waters? Even as he thought of it his

fingers tightened possessively upon the girl's warm arm; his lips

dropped persuasively; the words seemed to rise to his mouth as easily as

bubbles to the surface of water, for the mere thinking.

"You have not said ... you are sorry I am going yet," he told her. "Are

you sorry?"

Did the girl tremble? Her face was turned away from him. Was she

laughing or was she crying?

"Are you sorry?" he asked her again pleadingly, conveying by inflection

what he wished her answer to be; his lips lower towards her still.

"Yes..."

He caught the word, but it was more like a shiver--as though all the

tissues of her body had conspired to give it tremulous birth, like the

whispering of a tree. Her head was still turned from him.

"Very sorry?" he pressed her. "Tell me. See; lift up your face..."

His own face sank lower, as low as the hat brim. "... You are not

crying?"

He released his hold of the girl's arm, slid his hand about her and drew

her to him by the waist. Into that warm socket she yielded

submissively, like a child into its cradle. She was his now; his in all

but the asking. They were still walking, but their walk was the ghostly

stepless progress of a mist moving across the meadows. The dream was

back again, and the gloriousness of it. He put out his left hand, with

the basket hanging from its wrist, and took the girl's soft warm chin to

pull it gently towards his lips.

"Pam..." he said.

Out of the yellow moonlight, or out of the denser substance of the

hedges, or out of the earth at their feet, was shaped suddenly the

motionless figure of a man. Whether he had been there from the first,

or had come there by approach, or had overtaken them, appeared not. As

though he were a black pestle in an alchemist's mortar, he seemed

deposed there, without movement or volition of his own. At sight of him

all the dream was precipitated in sediment of actuality, that fell down

to the ground in fine, imperceptible residue, like the shattered

particles of a bubble. The Spawer's arm slid to his side, and they

dropped apart several paces, guiltily.

"It is the schoolmaster," Pam said, awakening out of the sleep with a

voice of sudden terror, under her breath. "... I must be going."

The Spawer commenced to hum, and craning his neck up to the moon as

though he were aware of this orb for the first time, made pleasant

allusion in a clear, uncompromising voice to "A jolly fine night." The

man was on Pam's side of the road. As they reached him the girl

stopped.

"They have been looking for you," the man said.

"I am here," Pam answered, in her old clear voice.

The man did not move. He remained there motionless, seeming to take the

words as an intimation that she would accompany him. Pam held out her

hand for the basket that the Spawer was swinging with an assumption of

negligence and ease.

"Thank you," she said.

The dark figure of the man embarrassed all speech. The Spawer handed the

basket over into her hands without a word.

"And the serviette..." he said, drawing it from his pocket.

Pam received it from him and thanked him again.

Then there was a slight pause.

"Good-night!" she said.

"Good-night!"

They shook hands with a strange and ludicrous politeness.

Had they been naughty children, and this stranger the angry parent of

one of them, they could not have parted under a deeper cloud of ignominy

and disgrace.

*CHAPTER XXI*

The "Good-night" so soullessly inflected, that the girl gave to the

Spawer with her tepid fingers of politeness, was to her the leave-taking

of all her happiness. In joy she was an orphan. Her heart was choking

her as she surrendered herself to the sombre shadow in the roadway; the

black anchor that seemed to hold her fast now at the end of an iron

cable. If she could have died then, in her mingled agony and shame,

sorrow, mortification, and sickening despair, she would have wished it.

For a while no word was spoken. She and the gloomy figure of the man

walked towards Ullbrig together, very far apart, without looking at each

other, almost as though they were ignoring each other's presence. A

great silent wall of division rose up between them, a barrier of

disgrace, on the shady side of which walked Pam. Through all this

silence was going on a mighty struggle. The man, with throbbing neck

and veins of whipcord in his forehead, was desperately striving to find

his pretext to scale the barrier or break through and speak to the girl

on ground of common understanding, but a sense of shame for what he had

seen withheld him. Great waves of heat and cold swept him alternately.

That which he had witnessed chilled him with a horrible fear for the

terrors of that which he had not witnessed, and yet fired him to torrid

anguish. That embrace that had struck him sickly to stone in the

roadway ... was it the beginning, or was it the end? Had the girl been

playing him false all through? With the magnified doubts of his class

concerning the evil magnetism of musicians and the slackness of their

scruples, his heart was wrung with horrible apprehensions as to how far

the Spawer possessed this power, and how far he had used it. Was this

girl--whom he loved with a pure, blind, white-heat passion--was she,

while scorning his approaches, so deeply infatuated with the visitor

from the Cliff that she coveted rather to be the temporary toy of the

one than the honored wife of the other? The doubt stung him to the

quick. He wanted to speak, yet dared not for fear his words might

betray this thorny crown of his torture. Oh, what he would have given

to know the history of that walk from Shippus to Ullbrig; what would he

not have given to be able to wipe it out of all their lives and memories

as though it had never been.

"Let me ... carry your basket," he said awkwardly, after a while. He

tried to round his voice mentally before using it, to file down its

roughness of emotion; but it came out hoarse and unequal in spite of

him.

To the girl, troubled with her own personal misery and the gnawing

misery of speculation as to how much of her weakness he had witnessed,

and what he was thinking of her, and the acute irksomeness of his

presence at this crisis of her life, when she sought only solitude, the

mere relinquishing of the basket seemed like another surrender. She

clung to it in spirit, as though it were a straw on the black waters of

her foundering.

"It is nothing ... thank you," she told him. "I can carry it."

He felt the resistance to his offer, and the motive that urged it, and

the blood swept up about his head again. The girl, though she did not

look at him, saw the hands go up to his throat.

"You were ... not carrying it ... before," he hazarded.

"We are so near home." The girl hesitated, and there was a tremble in

her voice. "You may carry it, if you like," she said, and handed it to

him.

"Thank you."

He took it from her with an awkward scuffle of untutored politeness.

Even as he felt the pride of the possession he felt the shame and

degradation of it too--to walk by the side of her as the Spawer had

done; to carry her basket as the Spawer had done; to try and delude his

poor, anguished soul with these fragments of a banquet to which he had

been an uninvited spectator (a guest never), and make himself believe he

was in some sort enjoying her favor. Ah, poor fool! poor fool! By his

side walked the phantom figure of the Spawer, communing with the girl,

and his miserable guard of flesh and blood was powerless to prevent it,

or intercept the messages of remembrance passing between them. Ah, if

he could; if he could. All his life was bound up in the girl. He had

wrestled for her in body and soul. On his knees he had prayed for her,

begging God to give her to him, to incline her heart, to soften her, to

pour into her breast the grace to love him. He had got out of his bed

to pray for her in the sleepless night-time when she ... had been

dreaming-of this visitor, perhaps ... And now.

"Have you been fair to me?" he asked her suddenly, in a low drenched

voice. The words rushed up to his mouth on a tide of hot blood.

The girl had felt the imminence of the attack. She had been, in spirit

at least, a participant of the man's agony; had felt the blood rushing

up again and again with its impulsion of speech.

"What do you mean?" she asked faintly, and turned her head aside

momentarily, as though to the gust of a strong wind.

"Have you been fair to me?" he asked her again.

For very fear he dared not alter these words that he had once uttered

and was sure of, lest the alteration might involve him too much.

"I have not been unfair..." she said.

She put out the defence like an arm that almost recognises the justice

of the blow aimed, and makes no real effort to ward it.

"You have been very unfair," he said hoarsely. "You know you have been

very unfair. Even your voice betrays you." He was on the point of

calling upon his eyes for corroboration of her unfairness, but he

stopped himself with an effort that the girl heard and understood. "You

made me a promise," he said. "One night ... what did you promise?"

"It was n't a promise," the girl protested. "I never promised you

anything. I told you I dared not promise ... and I could n't promise

... and I did n't promise."

"It was a promise," he said again. "If it was n't a promise ... it was

your word, and I trusted your word. You said there was no bar to my

loving you. You told me ... and you know you told me, that I might go

on loving you, and try to win ... your esteem. All this time I have

been believing you and your word.... Are you going to tell me now that

I 've misjudged you?"

He spoke very rapidly and jerkily and hoarsely, as though he were

himself ashamed of this necessity to put his thoughts into words and

hear them.

"I only said it because ... it was because you pressed me so hard. You

would not take my answer. You looked so ill." The slow stream of tears

was trickling through the broken pauses of her speech. "It was you that

put the words into my mouth. You told me it would kill you if I said

there was no hope. How could I say there was no hope? I could n't; I

could n't. You forced me to say that you might go on loving me ... but

I told you it was n't a promise."

Her tears were running with her words now. She wept for herself and for

this man. The thing she had been dreading, it had come to pass. She

was an Ullbrig hypocrite, a deceiver, a faith-breaker, an actor and a

worker of lies.

Ah, miserable little sinner, whose only sin perhaps, had she known it,

was the sin of an overflowing, over-generous heart ... her day of

reckoning was upon her now, and her tears were bitter.

They walked along in silence for a step or two. Though the man by her

side was burning to burst forth in a fiery Etna of denunciation and

reproach, to subjugate her and gain dominion over her by the sheer

conflagration of righteous anger, he dared not, lest she might admit his

charges, confess herself a sinner, and own an unconquerable disregard of

him. To be allied to her by an indefinite hope, frail as a silkworm's

thread, was heavenly compared with the blank severance of despair. He

was a retainer upon her favor, and must keep his place. What authority

he held, to assume authority over her, came from her.

"You told me ... I might love you," he said, straining his voice to

breaking point in his fierce desire to hold it steady and keep its

control, "... that there was no other bar--no other bar. Have you been

making a mock of me all this time?"

"No, no." He knew the girl's two hands were together in their agony of

protestation, but they both spoke with their faces unturned, each

looking before them fixedly. "Believe anything of me ... but that," she

begged him. "I have never mocked you. I would never mock you."

He hesitated a moment, and then:

"Are you ... making a mock of yourself?" he asked her.

The question shook her first like a wind, and then stilled her suddenly.

"What do you mean?" she asked him.

"Are you making a mock of yourself?"

They were at the first of the houses now, in the little high street, and

there were figures moving about between them and the Post Office;

figures that might stop; figures that might speak; figures that might

peer into her tear-stained face when the light of some yellow window

shone on it.

"I cannot go on ... like this," she said, with a half-sob and a shiver.

"I 'm not fit to meet anybody. Let us turn back."

They turned back, facing the moon. The girl walked with her white,

troubled face set before her, glistening under its tears, like a second

moon. The man, stealing one covert look at it, saw that no resumption

of this subject was likely from her quarter. She was in the clairvoyant

state of trouble that would have led her to Shippus again, unchecked,

without a word.

"You say you have not made a mock of me," he took up again, in his

monotonous, tightened voice, "... but you are making a mock of somebody.

Who is it? Is it yourself?"

"Why am I making a mock of somebody?" the girl asked.

"Is it fair to yourself?" he said, and his voice grew tighter and

tighter, "... to be taking walks down the Shippus road ... at night ...

with a stranger? You know ... what sort of a reputation the Shippus

road has at night-time. You know what sort of company ... you are

likely to meet ... what sort of company you have met to-night." His

voice so constricted about his throat that it seemed like to strangle

him. "Is it fair to yourself ... putting me out of the question

altogether ... that you should give people ... give them the opportunity

of saying ... saying things about you?"

The girl had no answer but the faster flow of her tears. She knew well

enough that he had spoken no more than the truth. Judged from an

external standpoint, she looked no better than her misguided

sisters--farm wenches and hinds' lasses--that wandered to their shame by

the hedgerows under the shades of night. And for this, and all her

other delinquencies, and all her other sins, unhappinesses, and penances

of suffering ... she wept.

"I think too much of you ... ever to risk bringing you within reach of

people's slanders. I would rather cut my hand off ... than that I

should hear you spoken lightly of. To me ... your character is more

sacred than my own. I would guard it with my life if need be. But what

is it ... to others?" The reins of his passion slipped his grasp a

little; the girl's tearful endurance encouraged him to speak more

forcibly. "What do men of towns care for the character ... of a girl?

They come to-day and they go to-morrow. What does it matter to them

whether they leave shame ... and broken hearts behind? A girl's heart

is a plaything for them ... and when they have broken it ... they throw

it aside. There are plenty more hearts to be broken in the big cities."

Like all others of his untraveled kind, he had the wild, generic idea of

cities and of the large places of the earth as being seats of sinfulness

and iniquity. Wickedness filled them and saturated the dwellers

therein. Outside Ullbrig, and the little bit of Yorkshire contiguous

with which he was acquainted, the rest of the world (of which he had the

fleetingest personal knowledge) was Sodom and Gomorrah. All the men who

came from afar, and had the faint traces of fashion about their raiment,

were men of danger; ministers of the world, the flesh, and the devil.

Perhaps, in his own narrow track of ignorant bigotry, he was not so very

far from the truth after all; but it shocks one's cosmopolitan soul to

have to subscribe to such tenets. Not because of what they contain, but

because of the uncatholicity of the formula--a very stocks, indeed, for

the confinement of one's belief.

"What does it matter ... to him ... whether he makes you food for

people's tongues? All he cares about is his own pleasure and

gratification. The attentions ... of such a man ... are an insult in

themselves. He will know you down here, for his own purposes ... will

flatter you ... will walk with you; but would he know you in the towns?

Would he walk with you ... before his fine friends? No, he would not.

He is treating you as though you were a rose by the roadside, to be

plucked and cast away the moment he is tired of you. Your friends are

not his friends. You ought to see it ... and know it. You have no

right to be associating yourself ... with a man whose acquaintance ...

is so ambiguous. Does it matter to him that you are seen with him ...

along the Shippus lane by night? Does he care whether you are the talk

of every corner and gateway? Does he ask for you honorably ... as I do,

and seek to guard your reputation by every means in his power? No, no.

When your name has become a byword he will go back to his fine ladies

and forget all about you."

"It is not true. You are wrong," Pam struck in tearfully, catching at

the breast furthest away from him and pressing under it with her rounded

hand as though to hold up her weak and trembling body, "... wickedly

wrong. You have no right to say those things ... and I have no right to

listen to you. You think ... because ... because you saw us at

Hesketh's corner, and we were together.... But you are mistaken. He met

me ... as I was going to Mr. Smethurst's, quite by accident, and went

with me. And then ... we had tea ... at Shippus together, and music,

and stayed to watch the moon ... and came back. It was every bit my

fault. He does n't know anything about Shippus lane ... and I thought of

it, but I dared not tell him. How could I? He has been kinder to me

than anybody else in the world--except Father Mostyn. He is a

gentleman, and I know it as well as you ... and so does he. Is a

gentleman wicked because he 's a gentleman? All the things he has done

for me ... he has done without ever taking advantage of his kindness by

a single word. Other men have done things for me ... and asked me to

love them or marry them at once. He has never played with my heart as

you say, or tried to make love ... or make me unhappy. He is too proud

to do such things. You are wrong ... wickedly wrong. Because ... you

love me ... you think everybody loves me. He likes me ... but he does

n't love me. I wish he did. Oh, I wish he did! But I 'm not good

enough for him ... and I know it. There has never been any question of

his loving me. He is engaged to marry somebody else ... and he may

leave Ullbrig any day. When he told me he was going ... I was so

unhappy that I began to cry. I could n't help it. I did n't think he

would notice ... but he did ... and tried to comfort me. And then ...

then ... you were there and saw. And I love him," she said, almost

fiercely--certainly fiercely for Pam--"I love him. I love him, and I

tell you. Because he has been kind, and taught me things, and played to

me. I love him in the same way I love Father Mostyn. What if he would

n't walk with me before his friends? He has walked with me so kindly

here ... and made life so happy for me ... that it will be like death

without him. Oh, I wish I were dead now! I wish I were dead now that

he 's going!"

And turning aside by Lambton's gate, close on Hesketh's corner, she laid

her two arms upon the top rail, and lowering her forehead, poured forth

her wet sorrow into the loose folds of her handkerchief, with her back

upon the man. He stood, mortified and helpless, while the girl's figure

shook in the silent agony of wringing forth her tears. Even from her

grief he was shut out. He could not touch her, could not solace her,

could not draw near upon her. He was but a beggar, permitted by her

bounty to sit at the gate of her heart; a wretched, love-stricken leper,

whose confessions of homage were as unpleasant to her as the sight of

raw wounds. And now she had turned the tables upon his whining

reproaches. It was he that stood guilty, not the girl--and yet his guilt

was mingled with an exultant sense of triumph too, at the news she had

told him. The Spawer was going; this evil weaver of charms was under

order of departure. Till then he would hold his tongue; bear with the

surging of his love. When once this stumbling-block on the pathway to

the girl's heart was removed he could renew his approaches--fill the

void, even, that this stranger should leave in it.

"I was actuated ... only by desire for your happiness," he told Pam,

after he had suffered her to weep awhile without interruption. "What I

have said to you," he tugged at his collar, "has been said ... through

love and for love."

The girl raised her head, wiped her eyes with the damp ball of her

handkerchief, and put it away into her pocket.

"Let us go back," she said. And not another word passed between them

that night.

"'Ave ye brought 'er back wi' ye?" Emma Morland called, coming to the

passage end by the big clock, to inquire of the schoolmaster when they

entered by the front door, and catching sight of Pam: "Goodness, lass,

where 'ave ye been to all this time? We was beginnin' to think ye mud

'a gotten lost."

"I went to take Mr. Smethurst ... his wine," Pam said.

The schoolmaster passed through into the little kitchen.

"Ay, bud ah s'd think 'e 'll 'a drunken it all by this time," Emma

exclaimed, with not unkindly sarcasm. She had a reputation, even well

deserved, in the district of a tart tongue when occasion called for

it--which it frequently did--but to Pam her asperity was something in

the nature of a loving shield. She could say the hardest and flintiest

utterances to Pam, and yet convey the sense of kindness through them.

Her hand, indeed, was bony, but its grasp was tender. "An' 'ow did ye

find t' old gentleman? No better, ah s'd think."

"No."

"Nay, 'e 'll nivver be no better i' this wuld, ah doot. They gied ye yer

tea, it seems."

"No-o."

"What! En't ye 'ad it, then?"

"Yes, thank you, Emma."

"Where?"

"I had it at Shippus."

"At Shippus. Well, ah nivver! Did ye gan by yersen?"

"I met Mr. Wynne."

"An' 'as 'e been wi' ye all time?"

"Yes."

"'Ave ye onnly just come back?"

"... A little while ago."

Miss Morland's opinion was expressed by a pause.

"Come in an' get yer supper. It 's all sett'n ready."

"I don't want any supper ... thank you, Emma."

"Not want yer supper? What 's amiss wi' ye?"

"Nothing. At least ... I have a headache."

"Ye 'ad n't a headache when ye started."

"It 's the heat. It was very hot in the sun. Where 's uncle?"

"I' t' parlor."

"And aunt?"

"Ay."

"Say good-night to them both for me ... will you, Emma?"

"What ... are ye away to bed?"

"I think ... I shall be better there."

"That 's soon done wi' ye, onnyways."

Emma came closer and took a keen glance into the girl's eyes.

"Ye look to me as though ye 'd been cryin'," she said. "'Ave ye?"

Pam pretended not to hear the question. Moreover, she was quite

prepared to cry again at the slightest opportunity. Emma took her by

the arm.

"You 're all of a shake," she said, and held the girl under scrutiny.

"Pam lass," she said, and dropped her voice to a terrible whisper;

"there 's nowt ... nowt wrong wi' ye? Ye 've not been gettin' into

trouble?"

"Emma!"

Pam shook herself free of scrutiny with a burning face of repudiation.

"Thank goodness!" Emma said devoutly. "Bud it can 'appen soon enough to

onny on ye." Emma testified freely at all times to the frailty of her

sex, from which weakness, however, she dissociated herself, as a woman

possessed of the superior lamp of wisdom and common-sense kept always

burning. And indeed, it shone so conspicuously in her window that any

bridegroom of burglarious intentions would have been singularly intrepid

not to have been scared away by such a plain indication of this virgin's

alertness. "Onnyway," Miss Morland decided, "... seummut 's come tiv ye

beside a 'eadache. 'As 'e been sayin' owt tiv ye?"

"Who?"

"Either on 'em."

"How can you, Emma! ..."

"'Ave they?"

"No...."

"Ay ... bud ah 'm none so sure."

"Good-night, Emma."

"Good-night, lass."

But before the others in the parlor Emma spoke with happy unconcern:

"Come yer ways an' let 's 'ave supper," she said, with her head through

the door. "Pam weean't be wi' us; she 's ganned to bed. Ah telt 'er

she 'd better. Lass 's gotten a 'eadache, plain to see, wi' trampin'

about i' sun this afternoon-lookin' after other folks' comfort. Ah div

n't want 'er settin' to, to side things away when we 're done. She

would, for sure, if she set up. Ah 'd to say good-night to ye both for

'er, she telt me."

And that same evening, during a moment of the schoolmaster's absence,

the shoemaker delivered himself of a strange remark to his wife and

daughter. He was struggling with the big black Book at the time.

"'Ave ye noticed..." he inquired, in a confidential undertone, and

gazing at Emma and his wife over the thick silver rims of his

spectacles, "onnything about our Pam, latelins?"

Emma Morland looked up sharply.

"What sewd there be to notice?" she asked, as though the idea were

charged with the sublimated essence of the ridiculous.

"Div ye think ... there 's owt betwixt 'er an'..." he jerked his thumb

in the supposed direction of the absent one, "t' schoolmester?"

"Div ah think stuff and nonsense!" Emma Morland said.

"Ay, bud ah 'm tellin' ye," the postmaster insisted. "Noo, mark mah

wods. Ah 've watched 'em a goodish bit o' late, an' ah 've seed a

little o' seummut when they did n't think there was onnybody to see

owt."

"What 'ave ye seed wi' ye, then?" Miss Morland inquired sceptically, but

with a sharp eye.

"This much," the postmaster told her. "Ah 've seed 'em talkin' together

a dozen times when they did n't use to talk one. Ah 've knowed time

when they 'd set i' a room while clock ticked round almost, an' them

nivver say a wod--or they 'd gan their ways oot after a while, mebbe.

Watch an' see if they 'll set i' a room aif a minute noo wi'oot

speakin'? Ay, an' ah 've seed 'im kickin' 'is 'eels about passage end

for 'er, when 'e did n't think ah knowed owt about 'im, an' she 's come

down tiv 'im i' end. Ay, an' ah 've tekt notice on 'im when she 's

ganned out o' room. 'E 's all of a fidget to be up an' after 'er, an'

get a wod wi' 'er on 'er way back. Ay, an' 'e sets up for 'er when she

comes back fro' Vicarage. It 'll be a rum 'un if 'e wants 'er--an' ah

'm ready to lay 'e diz, onny time. Ah div n't know as all could wish

better for 'er, so far as my own inclination gans. 'E 'd mek 'er a good

'usband, an' 'ave a good roof to gie 'er, bud ah 'm jealous t' General

'ud 'ave to be considered. An' ah 've my doots whether 'e 's man to

think ower much about syke [such] as schoolmesters."

"T' old 'umbug," Miss Morland ejaculated--though whether in reference to

the schoolmaster or the General or his Reverence the Vicar, would be a

difficult point to decide.

But the subject, temporarily suspended by the entrance of the

schoolmaster himself, took deep root in the family imagination--deeper

root, still, indeed, in the well-nourished soil of Miss Morland's

common-sense, and testing the hypothesis by what she had seen of Pam's

conduct to-night, and finding it in accord, she prepared herself to wait

and watch events with an eye as keen as that of one of her own needles.

*CHAPTER XXII*

Up rose the sun in the morning as though nothing had happened, and

spinning over the red and thatched roofs of Ullbrig, took stock of the

harvest fields, the wheat in sheaf and stock, the oats outstanding;

measured the work to be done with a jocose eye as though he had said

"Aha!" and rubbed his hands in anticipation of a glad time.

Into Pam's bedroom he peeped--prudently, through a corner of the white

blind--and found the girl open-eyed upon her bed; thrown across it

transversely in abandonment of disorder, with her moistened handkerchief

clasped like a snow-ball in one hand. It had been a night of anguish

and unutterable torture. She had wept, she had prayed, she had

resolved, she had renounced, she had slept--at once the mere fact of

sleeping had awakened her--she had tossed from pillow to pillow, turned

them incessantly to find some coolness for her fevered cheek; she had

risen, and watched from her window the slow arrival of day; had seen the

firmament of stars sliding away in the west, like the giant glass of a

cucumber frame. The doings of the day before were a delirium. In her

dreams the schoolmaster, the dying man, the Spawer, Emma Morland, the

tea-room at Shippus, the donkeys, the moon--were all mixed up in a

horrid patchwork mantle of remembrance. The Spawer was going. There

would be no more music; no more French; no more walks and talks in the

morning; no more evenings at the Vicarage; no more evenings at Cliff

Wrangham. In the days when they had touched upon this final parting

with the light inconsequence for a thing far distant--as people speak of

death--she had entered into schemes for the continuance of all the

studies that he had inaugurated. She should go to Hunmouth for piano

lessons. She should have conversational French lessons _chez_ M.

Perron, whose brass plate and dirty windows she had seen often on her

visit to Hunmouth. Ah, but that was when the Spawer had been with her.

It had been bitter-sweet at times to dwell on future sadness, with the

warm hand of present happiness to take hold of, as a little child likes

to peer round the bogey-man's corner, holding tight to its mother's

fingers.

Now!

Ah, now! All was different. She wanted to die. Life was n't worth

living any longer. Now she knew for herself the feeling that the

schoolmaster had suffered and told her of: the dull undesire to live,

the carelessness of existence, the agonies of hopeless despair. She

knew it, but it made her pity him no more. The thought of him, sleeping

within a mere yard or two of her, through a couple of frail thicknesses

of bricks and mortar, filled her with horror and repugnance. All the

night through his cough had come to her at intervals, telling of that

one undesirable companion of her sleeplessness. She was being left to

him. Like a shadow now he would dog her steps. And with the

instinctive fear that he would finally overcome her, in spite of all,

that she would drift powerlessly to him, for lack of anchor to hold her

firm, or impulse to move, she shuddered tears into her pillow, and

clenched the coverlet with tightened fingers.

For there was only one man in the world for her, and he was going. She

loved him; she loved him; she loved him. She knew that she was not for

him or he for her; that he was above her on the ladder of life, treading

cruelly upon her fingers, as it were, without knowing it, and she too

proud to cry out; that this love of hers could never be consummated.

But she loved him for all that; drove the sharp knowledge of it into her

shrinking soul with the vindictive pleasure of a spur.

She knew now, now that he was going and it was ended, that she loved him

with all the love of which her soul was capable. Would he have had to

plead at her skirts ... as the schoolmaster had pleaded? No, no, no!

She knew it. She would have kept him waiting no longer at the door of

her heart than at the door of the Post Office itself. Had he just come

to her and looked at her, and said "Pam" ... oh, she would have known.

She would have known and gone into his open arms without shame, like a

bird to the nest. But she was not for him; never had been; never would

be. She had no anger against him because she was smitten. He was above

all anger. She had no silly impulses of passion to declare herself

deceived; no reproaches because he had never before pronounced himself a

man pledged. Her own heart had been so pure that it saw no impurity in

his. Even when he had put his arm about her and drawn her to him, and

uttered her name and looked at her ... there was nothing in that to cast

dishonor upon the other girl. It was only that he had detected her

suffering, had understood that she was weeping and unhappy at his

departure ... had put his arm about her to give her comfort, as though

she 'd been a little child. It was a beautiful act of tenderness and

compassion ... nothing more. Poor girl! poor girl! She was sick with

the misery of love, that, not knowing whence came this sudden sorrow,

multiplied causes without end; shames, ignominies, degradations. Even

the scene with Emma Morland, that would have slipped away from her like

water off the breast-feathers of a swan, had her heart been sound, was

branded now into her remembrance with the sear of red-hot iron. Emma's

look; her inquiries; the grasp of her hand; the drop of her voice; her

anxious whisper--somehow, wretched girl that she was, she seemed in some

fashion to have deserved them; to be guilty of some great unknown shame;

to be a lost sister, sinking like sediment through the clear waters of

life to its dregs, touching here and there as she descended. The day

was full of terrors for her; the morning meeting with Emma and with the

schoolmaster; the facing of her uncle and her aunt; their solicitude

about a headache that had never been. More Ullbrig hypocrisy to wade

through; more shame of lying and untruth.

From her bed she rose at length, a soulful picture of trouble; replaced

the fallen pillow and drew up the blind. An echo of its sound of cord

and creaking roller reached her faintly from elsewhere, with a muffled

cough, and telling her that her own activity was being duplicated by the

ever-vigilant shadow, struck pain across her mouth. The slide window was

already part open, but she flung it to its extreme width, and resting

her hands upon the white-painted sill, put out her head with red lips

parted, and tried to air her bosom of its close, suffocating atmosphere

of trouble that she had been breathing and rebreathing all through the

hours of this night. Down below, under a thin attenuated mist, lay the

little patchwork kitchen garden of potatoes and onions and peas and

kidney beans, and the dingy vegetable-narrow frame, like a crazy quilt.

And beyond that, away to her left, rolled out the fields in the face of

the sun to Cliff Wrangham ... where he was. From her place she could

distinguish the misty shadow, like a frost picture on a pane, that

proclaimed Dixon's. How often, in the days that were gone, had she

opened this casement and looked just so across the fields, and said to

herself: "Will there be any letters for him this morning? ... and shall

I see him?" But now she looked across and said: "I dare not see him.

God send there may be no letter this morning." All the world looked

strange to her. It seemed that her eyes, like the eyes of an infant,

were not yet trained to correct the images formed upon her retina.

Poor girl! poor girl! She had been so happy once. So very happy with

her six shillings a week, and no desires beyond the desire to be at

peace with her neighbors and return good for evil.

At last she lighted her little oil stove, that had once been the supreme

of her ambition throughout a month's saving, and set her can of

bath-water to boil. Every morning she made the complete ablution of her

body ... and in summer sometimes twice. In this respect, at least,

there was nothing of the Ullbrig hypocrite about her. As Father Mostyn

told the Spawer, and more than once, for Pam was a subject to his

liking:

"Ha! different class; different class altogether. No mistaking it. You

can trust her inside and out. Does n't dress herself first and then put

a polish on her face with a piece of soapy flannel, taking care to rub

the lather well in. Ha! that 's our Ullbrig way. Leave the neck for

Sunday, and rub the soap well in.

"But, thank heaven, that 's not Pam's way. Can't mistake it. Has the

instincts of the bath. Tubs herself like an officer of dragoons. No

mistaking the derivation of that. It does n't come from the people;

it's a pure blood inheritance; a military strain. She keeps her body as

clean as her mind. You could put her in a duchess's bed, and her grace

need n't be frightened of going in alongside of her. Ha! beautiful,

beautiful! the grace of cleanliness that is next to godliness. Her body

would almost get her into heaven."

And indeed, St. Peter is scarcely the man I take him for if he would

n't.

Leighton's Psyche unwound herself from long veils of diaphanous drapery

on the brink of a marble bath, and immersed herself in azure water

without soap--so far as the artist indicates in the picture. Pam's

setting was a big, round, sponge bath, scrupulously enamelled white by

her own hand; she did not stand pensive by its side, as though wondering

whether to-morrow or the day after would do as well; she unwound herself

from no sensuous mists of lawn; she held an active-service towel in her

hand, rough like a tiger's tongue, and in place of the diaphanous

draperies the steam from the hot water rolled and curled and licked

about her lovingly as she poured it into the bath, and tried it with

fingertips of no indecision--but she was Psyche for all that. Her body

was as sleek and supple as the picture Psyche; her flesh, where the sun

had not browned, was as white as alabaster and as sound as a young

apple; her limbs as shapely as any that Leighton's brush could have

given her. When she stood up, with her firm, round bosom thrown out,

and dipping the big Turkey sponge into the wash-basin of cold water,

pressed it to her with both hands as though she were hugging the desire

of her heart, while the water slid down her snowy torso, tinged with

warm glow of pink now, like marble, and ran, still clinging about her

limbs and body, to her feet; and dipped again, and again pressed, and

again and still again, till the water at her service was exhausted, she

was the best, most beautiful type of English girl; unforced in growth,

but developed gradually in pure air and pure thought; not one member of

her corporeal republic in advance of the other, or of herself; all of

them, indeed, reserved in their development rather than in advance of

it, but awaiting only the ripening. The beautiful picture of a girl on

the threshold of womanhood, and waiting in all chastity to be called,

without any indecorous rush to be in advance of the summons. Ah, girls,

girls, girls! Always anxious to be women. Do not struggle so

inordinately to be ripe for the market. Do you think man is such a poor

judge that he does not know the merits of green fruit, or so witless

that he does not know the dangers of the ripe? Keep your thoughts and

bodies green, like oranges for shipment, for indeed you are perishable

fruit.

The stimulus of the bath restored to some extent the freshness of the

girl's mind, and gave to her sorrow a cleanly, less bedraggled emotion.

From her eyes she swilled away all traces of the night's tears. Thank

Heaven, she renovated very easily; a porcelain girl could not have ceded

the dust of trouble more completely. She showed no redness about the

lashes; no swelling of the lids; no dark hollows above the cheek-bone.

Her flesh had not sickened in the least. A little press of the

fingertip on its plumpness, and lo! it sprang back alive and responsive,

like a cushion, with a little pink blush at the salutation; it did not

respond with doughy sluggishness. Her lips had lost none of their fire

of ruby; they had not consumed at all to grey ash; there was no dryness

to show how great the flame had been, no withering like the dried leaf

of a rose. Moist and elastic they looked as ever; the beautiful

downward pull about their corners--as though an invisible Cupid were

trying hard to bend this bow of his--might be more divinely accentuated,

but that would only be to an acute observer who, holding the secret of

the girl's sorrow as we do, searched keenly upon her face for the

outward signs of it. Her cheeks were still as smooth and creaseless as

ivory; her brow like a tablet on which nothing evil could ever be

written. The same old Pam she looked and seemed to everybody but

herself. Ah, if only one's mind would wash like one's body--what

blissful sinners we could be.

And with the strangely awakened desire for cleanliness, the feverish

thirst of a mind to counteract by outward purity its inward

contamination, the desire even to change all the old garments of

yesterday's turpitude, to invest herself in a new atmosphere, to give

herself a new mind and a new body and a new environment, if she might,

she drew on her legs black cotton-silk stockings of the sort she wore on

Sundays; buckled them with the best pretty blue silk garters of her own

making (Emma had a pair like these too), clad herself in linen of snowy

white, unfolded from her neat store in drawer and cupboard; and hid all

this dazzling envelopment under a pretty pale print frock that could

have stood up of its own cleanliness--cool and fresh and rigid as an

iceberg. And round her throat she clipped a snowy collar, and tied it

with a crimson bow of silk. To be cool and clean, and be conscious of

it. Let the mind burn, if it will, so long as the body does not

reproach us.

Thus she was clad at last, and came forth to face the day, diffusing

little wafts of cool print and white linen at every movement of her

body; little breaths, fresh and unperfumed, smelling of nothing but

young girlhood and cleanliness, that the nostril curled gratefully to

inhale and retain, as reviving to the spirit as puffs of breeze blown

into some burning valley from snow-clad mountains.

Slowly the early hours of the day wore on, and shaped themselves,

outwardly at least, to the semblance of all other days that had gone

before. Days in Ullbrig are as alike as pennies. This might have been

yesterday, or a day out of last week, or a day out of last year. Only

the change in oneself and one's outlook told of the relentless passage

of time. They sat at breakfast in the second kitchen, this strange

assortment of table company. The girl, like a star plucked from heaven,

cleansed with the dew, and exhaling the freshness of skies and dawn; the

postmaster, with his genial honest face of shrewd stupidity, brown as

snuff and wrinkled like morocco leather, who cut bread with his knife

and thumb and shoved it home with the haft, making a pouch of one cheek

while he talked out of a corner of the other; who stirred his cup with

the noise of a grindstone, and looped his thumb round his spoon while he

drank to prevent its slipping down his throat. Mrs. Morland, with her

relaxed face of maternal good-nature, like a well-buttered muffin, who

looked as though she lacked the energy for long-sustained anger, which,

in truth, she did. The vigilant Emma, sitting bolt-upright, as a sort

of human cruet, vinegary and peppery--whose acidulated conversation

almost lent the zest of pickles to the meal. And last of all the

schoolmaster, peering ruminatively--not to say furtively--into his plate

as though it were a book he pored over. When he masticated there were

muscles that worked in his temples and imparted an air of grave,

cerebral activity. His cough troubled him this morning, and his face

bore the haggard evidences of sleeplessness.

No word of allusion to last night's matter passed between these two, but

the constrained silence of each towards the other was like a finger laid

inexorably upon this page of their past. He was present when the

postmaster inquired of Pam about her headache, but recorded no

expression of sympathy. Perhaps Pam's crimson blush deterred him; but

he lingered, brushing his hat in the passage before departing for

school, and when Pam happened to make a journey into the front parlor he

interposed himself by the door against her return. Pam finding him

there, still brushing his hat as though he were an automatic

hat-brusher, stopped in the doorway coming out, and stood before him

without speaking--not angrily or resentfully or reproachfully--but

decidedly with the unhappiness of awakened remembrance upon her downcast

face and trembling lip.

"I only wanted..." he began, in a low voice, almost inaudible, "... to

tell you. Last night I--I said things to you ... that perhaps I ought

n't to have said. I can't remember now exactly what I did say, but I 'm

... I 'm very sorry I said anything."

Pam told him it did n't matter the least bit. He was n't, please, to

trouble.

"I did it for the best," he explained, "... at the time."

Pam said ... she was sure he did. He was n't, please, to think about

it. It appeared, however, the only thing he was capable of thinking

about. He seemed to have a difficulty in tearing himself away from it;

brushing his hat the while. It is fortunate school started when it did,

or he would have worn all the remaining nap off.

"Will you please try ... and forget what I said to you ... and forgive

me?"

Pam said ... she had forgotten already. A shade crossed over his face

to think that she should so soon have forgotten words that had been so

vital to him at the time, but the forgiveness that accompanied it

relieved the momentary disquietude.

"I hope..." he suggested--and in the pauses he brushed his hat

fiercely--"... that it will make ... no difference to us. I hope we

shall be ... as we ... as we were before."

Pam hoped so too, an invalid hope that walked slowly, and touched the

walls of silence for support as it went.

"Noo," said the postmaster triumphantly, in the clean little kitchen,

holding up a hand to enjoin attention, and jerking his thumb violently

in the direction of the parlor door, whence the brushing of the hat and

the low murmur of voices could plainly be heard. "What did ah tell ye?

There they are agen, whisperin' an' mummelin'. As soon as ivver 'e got

agate wi' 'is 'at i' passage Pam started to be after 'im."

"Sh! Be still wi' ye, then," said Miss Morland, going nearer to the

door. "Div ye want to mek 'em think we 're listenin' tiv 'em?"

But even while she spoke the sound of the hat-brush ceased, and the

subsequent shutting of the front door announced that the schoolmaster

had departed to his duties--having told Pam that after this morning

these duties would be at an end until harvest was over.

*CHAPTER XXIII*

Half an hour later the mail cart rattled up before the two-fold

Governmental door over the big round cobbles, and the fiery figure of

James Maskill, red and shining like a new-boiled lobster, fresh from his

sun-bath, invaded the Post Office, blowing the sweat off his mouth on to

the floor in a fierce "Bf-f-f!" with a shake of the head, and slammed

the letter-bag on to the counter in a strenuous but not aggressive

greeting.

"Noo," he said to the postmaster, mopping his face at him with a red

handkerchief, and "Noo," again to Pam, mopping the inside of his cap.

"Mah wod! Bud it 's gannin' to be warm to-day, before it's done."

"Will you have a drink, James?" Pam asked him.

At the sight of that ominous bag, so full of deadly inertness and

possibility, her heart had thumped her like a stone in a box. Yes or

no; yes or no; yes or no?

"What of?" James asked her straightway.