"Promise me..." she said, "you will not ... let go of me ... when the
time comes."
"I promise you," the man answered, very huskily.
"May I call you ... Maurice ... before we die?" she asked, and her voice
faltered at this.
"Please..." he begged her; and she said "Maurice" a time or two.
"Hold me ... Maurice," she said. "I may ... turn coward ... at the end
... but hold me. Don't let me go. I want to die with you."
"I will hold you," he answered, and their arms tightened.
And again the sea thundered, and this time something swirled about their
feet. Then they asked forgiveness of each other for inasmuch as they
had offended, and received the sacrament of each other's pardon.
And there being nothing else to do, they stood and waited for death.
*CHAPTER XLII*
On this same eventful evening, the absent Barclay o' Far Wrangham
returned to himself by slow stages from nowhere in particular, at some
vague, indeterminate point between Hunmouth, Sproutgreen, and Ullbrig,
having missed Tankard's 'bus by a small matter of two days and one
night.
Out of five golden sovereigns that had gone forth with him, he retained
a halfpenny, which, wedged tight in the corner of his trouser's pocket,
kept troubling him like a conscience at times. On his head was a
brimless hat that some friendly cattle-drover had exchanged with him on
Saturday. A tramp had picked up his overcoat and was walking the high
road to London in it; but Barclay o' Far Wrangham still retained the new
waggon-rope that had been one of his early purchases in Hunmouth market
on his arrival; and with this over his shoulder he lurched onward. He
possessed not the faintest idea of destination, but his legs shambled
along with him instinctively, like horses that knew their road. They
took him safely across fields, and over stiles, and along hedges, and
down narrow pathways between standing corn, and through gates--that he
hung over affectionately and went through all the most conscientious
formulae of shutting, and still left open behind him. Somewhere short
of Sproutgreen he perceived a figure coming distantly down the road in
his direction. At a hundred yards away or more he made elaborate
preparations for its greeting; wiped his mouth; let down the waggon-rope
to the ground, trailing it loosely by an end; took his hat off and
reversed it; rubbed the cobwebs from his eyes, and held out an arm like
a sign-post in attitude of friendly surprise. There had been a word in
his mouth, too, for welcome; only it slipped him at the last moment, but
he made an amicable bellowing instead.
"Bo-o-o-o-oh!" he cried, exploding loosely, like a good-natured cannon,
whose recoil sent him staggering backwards over his legs till it seemed
he meant retiring all the way to Hunmouth. By a gigantic effort,
however, he resisted the backward impetus when it had sent him off the
roadway into the shaggy side-grass, and fell forward on his hands.
"A-a-a-a-ay!" he shouted genially. He was brimming over with foamy
friendship for this dear, familiar stranger. "Noo wi' ye!" and stood up
on all fours at the greeting, like a well-intentioned dog, whose muzzle
was the battered cleft in his hat-brim.
Thus adjured, the pedestrian drew up with some severity on his aloof
side of the road, and gave Barclay to understand, with a grudging "Noo"
of inquiry, that he had nothing whatever to hope from him on this side
the Jordan. As he had chanced to stop in a line with the dead-centre of
Barclay's hat, Barclay could not immediately discern him, and was filled
indeed with suspicions of treachery.
"Wheer are ye?" he inquired, after a few moments of futile activity,
making valiant efforts to keep his eyelids lifted.
"Ah 'm 'ere i' front o' ye," his unknown friend replied, with small show
of favor, regarding this picture of human debasement with scorn.
"Are ye?" Barclay inquired, somewhat foggily, and pushed himself with
much effort on to his haunches. "Which way div ah want to be?" he asked.
"Wheer did ye come fro'?" the figure demanded sternly.
"Eh?" said Barclay.
"Wheer div ye come fro'? 'Oo are ye? What 's yer name?"
"Barclay o' Far Wrangham," said Barclay unsteadily, going forward on his
hands again.
"Ah 've 'eard tell on ye," the figure remarked. "Gan yer ways wi' ye.
Yon 's yer road. Come, be movin'."
For some moments Barclay rocked silently on his all fours, as though
thinking deeply.
"Which way div ah want to be?" he commenced again, after awhile, and
there being no immediate response, embraced the opportunity for a little
slumber.
Having slumbered pleasantly for a space on his hands and knees without
interruption, his head swaying in circles close to the grass as though
he were browsing, he awoke of a sudden, under consciousness that he had
received no response to this question, and working the muzzle of his hat
diligently in all directions about him, found to his surprise that he
was alone.
The discovery troubled him, first of all, so that he muttered darkly in
his throat like distant thunder. Then the brewing turned to sparkles,
and he laughed deliciously on the grass, rolling over on to his back,
and sprawling with limbs in air as though he were a celestial baby,
brought up from the bottle of pure bliss. Lastly, his mind darkened to
anger, and he rose to all fours, roaring defiance after his departed
enemy. It took him some time to find his hat after this, which had
rolled away from him during his Elysian laughter, but his knee trod on
it at last, and the moments expended in its discovery were doubled in
his efforts to apply it to his head.
A dozen times he clapped it down, sideways forward, and the same number
it rolled off him, and had to be resought.
Last of all: "Nay, ah weean't be pestered wi' ye!" he cried indignantly.
"Gen ye can't be'ave yersen proper, an' stay where ye 're put, ye 'll 'a
to gan."
And "gan" it did, sure enough, into the hedge bottom.
"Lig [lie] there, ye ill-mannered brute!" he shouted after it, and
filled with righteous wrath, picked up the waggon-rope and staggered to
his feet for departure.
"Come up wi' ye, ye lazy divvles!" he cried at his legs, that, through
their long inactivity, betrayed a certain tendency to let him down.
"Div ye 'ear? 'Od up [Hold up]. Dom yer eyes ... if ye weean't do
better ah 'll walk o' my knees an' shame ye."
"Gum! it 's tonnin cold," he decided, after some progress.
"Ah nivver knowed it ton so cold of a neet this time o' year," he added,
a while later.
And a short way further up the road:
"Gum ... bud ah feel it i' my yed [head] strangelins!" he declared, and
putting up an inquisitive hand to learn the cause of it, was blankly
amazed to discover himself hatless.
"Well! of all ... bud that 's a caution!" he said, and stopped as dead
as his legs would let him. "Well ... it 's no use seekin' after spilt
milk. Noo ah s'll 'a to mek best on it."
The best of it he made forthwith; and to compensate for this frigidity
of head he put such warmth of pace into his advancement that at
times--with his head a body's length in front of his feet, and his feet
churning in the rear like twin-screws--his progress was considerable. To
have stopped under a road's length would have been to fall as flat as a
pancake. Nothing short of the most gradual arrest could preserve his
equilibrium, and as the easiest solution of the problem was not to stop
at all, he forged ahead till the wind whistled on either side of his
ears. And this constant freshness, combined with the exposed state of
his head, so sobered and revivified him that, by the time he was passing
through familiar Ullbrig, he already knew what houses were which, and
who lived in them; the day of the week; how long he had been absent; and
was commencing, in common with the history of all these nocturnal or
matutinal returns, to see the evil of drink, and speak openly of wine as
a mocker.
Moodily pursuing this well-trodden path of his conversion, he slammed
his way through the gates, one after another, and passed Dixon's
sleeping farm-stead with a covetous eye upon its moonlit windows.
"Ay, you 've not slipped fi' pun [five pounds] doon yer belly this
'arvest-time, Jan Dixon," he reflected, as he turned his back to the
scrambling white house, so calm and self-contemplative in the moonlight,
and cut across towards the cliff. All his loquaciousness leaked out of
him now, in sight of the goal which he had been three days aiming at and
missed up to the present, and he tramped along with the impersonal
passivity of a cow being driven to market; untroubled as to fate, and
almost thoughtless. The sea shook the cliff, as he walked, with seismic
shivers, and boomed noisily in his ears; but he 'd known it off and on
now for forty years, and minded it--particularly at such moments as
this--as little as the buzzing of his own eight-day clock. Of a sudden,
however, the sea-surge bore up a sound to him--a small, shrill,
penetrating sound, that pierced his passivity to its vital marrow, and
caused him to throw up his head, with a gaping mouth to all quarters of
the compass about him, for the sound's location. He was sufficiently
sober by this time to realise how very drunk he had been, and in the
desolating flatness of life's Sahara--lacking any pleasant green oases
of illusion--that he was laboriously traversing now, he knew the sound
to have been produced by real, living, human lips; for his own brain was
far too stagnant to create fancies. Therefore he eased the wain-rope to
the ground, and holding up his open mouth to the sky, as though it were
an ear-trumpet, he listened for a repetition of this discordant note in
Nature.
And again it came: small, faint, embosomed in the roaring surge, but
cutting as a diamond.
This time he had no doubt. It came from over the cliff, and had the
despairing ring of death and danger in it, that not even returning
prodigals like Barclay can by any means mistake, though they 'd gone
away with twenty pounds in their pockets instead of five. And bellowing
response at the top of his lungs, he ran to the cliff edge.
"A-a-a-a-ay! 'Ello! Noo wi' ye! What 's amiss?" he cried, and
dropping on hands and knees, thrust his head recklessly over the brink
of it.
And again the cry rang out from almost straight below him--shriller and
more terribly charged this time with the agony of animated hope.
"Lord Almighty!" said Barclay; "it 's a lass."
*CHAPTER XLIII*
To this day the tale of that eventful midnight is told in Ullbrig. How
Barclay, returning from Hunmouth market, where he had sold three beasts
and a score of sheep, and drunk the money, heard Pam's last despairing
cries for assistance, beaten out of her by the sea itself. How he ran
to the edge of the cliff, and looked over, and saw the two drenched
figures sticking to the side of it like wet flies against a pudding
basin. How, even while he watched them, the sea boiled up again as
though it were milk, and rose bubbling above where they were, and made
him shut his eyes with a groan for what he might not see when the milk
subsided. How, praise God, they were still there when the water sank
down. How he untackled his waggon-rope, shouting courage to them all the
while, and made a loop to one end, and hitched the other to the adjacent
stile-post, and cast the slip-knot down the cliff. And how, for an age,
while he swore at them from above, the girl would not come up before the
man; and the man would not come up before the girl. And how, owing to
considerations which he did not then know or understand, namely, that
the man was powerless to give any help to his own ascent, and the girl
feared their rescuer might be unable to haul him unaided--the girl
slipped the noose under her shoulders, and struggled and clambered up
the cliff-side while Barclay pulled upon her. And how, almost before
she was on the top, she had detached the securing loop and thrown it
down to the man. And how he had just had time to slip it over his neck
and under his shoulders before the next sea came, cursing and swearing
because of the loss of them, and seethed up three parts of the cliff, so
that the foam of it slashed their faces. And how they felt the rope
first slacken and then go dead heavy in their hands, and knew the man
was off his feet, and would have been swept away but for their hold upon
him. And how they tugged together, the two of them, and how, at certain
intervals of progression, the girl had wound the slack rope round the
post, against all possible danger of slip or relapse. And how, in the
end, the man's face showed above the cliff-brink, and how they had
toiled him over; and how the girl had thrown herself beside him, and
taken him into her arms, and wiped his streaming face, and called upon
him by name, with a hundred solicitations and endearments, and kissed
him.
Till, in Barclay's own words: "Ah think theer 's one ower monny on us,"
he told them.
And the tale, continuing, recounted how these two, Barclay and the girl,
made a seat with their hands, and bore the man back to Dixon's between
them; and how the man, wringing wet though he was, kept falling asleep
on the shoulders of one or other of them, and telling Barclay he was the
boy for mushrooms, and he 'd eat them now she 'd given him up. And how
they got him home at last, and how Barclay took double handfuls of earth
and flung them up at Dixon's window, and how Dixon put his head out
first of all, and cried:
"Naay, Barcl'y, man! Naay, naay! Next farm. Ye want to tek more care
i' countin' when ye come 'ome this time o' daay."
And would n't believe Barclay's reasons for bringing him down, till Pam
joined her voice with his, when he said: "Well! Ah don't know!"--and
the whole household stood on its legs that same moment.
And then a mighty fire was roused up in the kitchen, out of the grate's
still hot embers, at Miss Bates' blowing, and the blinds were pulled
down carefully by Mrs. Dixon, and all extraneous elements--men, and so
forth--were unceremoniously banished, and Pam, shivering, crimson-eared,
bright-eyed, and hectic--but wildly joyous--let them skin her of her
sodden habiliments as though she had been a drowned rabbit, and was
rubbed dry with coarse kitchen towels till her white, starved body
glowed like a sunset over snow. And Jeff, having been despatched at
Pam's instigation to the cliff, and having run all the way there and all
the way back, thumped lustily against the outer panels of the kitchen
door, and Pam's parcel--looking, oh, so frail and pitiable and
shamefaced in its new surroundings--was drawn in by Mrs. Dixon, and its
contents bestowed, as the circumstances demanded, upon Pam's own body.
And Pam seemed so genuinely overcome with their kindness that all
questions of a controversial nature were by one consent avoided; and not
a word asked--beyond mere details of the rescue--as to the strange
juxtaposition of Pam and her bundle, and Mr. Maurice Ethelbert Wynne,
along the cliff at this time of morning. To such degree, indeed, did
Pam's own tearful, lip-quivering emotion of gratitude play upon her two
ministrants, that they discharged their self-sought duties in a
reflected emotion scarcely less profound than the original; giving the
girl tear for tear, and quiver for quiver.
And when they had rubbed and towelled her, they dressed her in the same
loving, lavish way, and vied with each other in finding articles from
their own wardrobe which might fit the girl; and when they had finished
with her, they looked upon her completed presentment as proudly as
though they 'd actually made her.
And while Pam was being in this way taken to pieces and readjusted and
put together again, Barclay and Dixon did the same by the Spawer,
upstairs in his own bedroom; and laid him between the blankets with a
hot-water bottle at his feet, that was fetched from the kitchen; and
Arny harnessed Punch to the spring-cart and drove off for Father Mostyn
and the Doctor--not that Father Mostyn's presence seemed called for on
any urgent or spiritual grounds, but that Pam knew what a slight he
would think had been administered upon his vicarial office, were he to
be left one moment uninformed of such an occurrence as this.
And until the arrival of the Doctor, Pam's courage and good hope had
never once deserted her. He for whom she would have died gladly twice
over was saved from death; but now there were other vague things to
fear. And as soon as she heard the ominous rattle of the spring-cart's
return, that well-known clear-cut voice of the ecclesiast, and the
sharp, Scotch, businesslike tones of the Doctor--as direct and straight
to their purpose as a macadamised road ... she quailed, and her
fortitude left her. It seemed as though the whole atmosphere were
charged at once with electrical dangers at lightning-point.
She sat with her face plunged in her hands, by the side of the roaring
kitchen fire, not daring to rise, or move, or go out to meet these awful
newcomers, lest her movement might precipitate the danger. All her
hearing was drawn out from her like wire, insupportably fine, to the
doors of that dread bed-chamber. Sounds near at hand, the roaring of
the fire, the fall of cinders, the subdued babel of downstairs voices,
had no existence for her. Her hearing, as though it had been a
telescope, was aimed above them to some distant star, and missed these
terrestrial obstacles by miles and miles--but every sound from the far
landing, every whisper, every turning of the handle, every creak of the
bedroom floor-boarding, was magnified a hundredfold. To support such
auricular sensitiveness it felt she needed the strength of a hundred
bodies, instead of that poor tortured one.
But at last, lifting her face from her hands with the blanched cheek of
high tension for the very worst, she heard the tread of general exodus;
the resonant "Ha!" of Father Mostyn, and the Doctor's little
sharp-tongued, Scotch-terrier voice, giving out its reassurance to the
applicants at the staircase foot.
"Na doot he 's had a narra squeak, an' ah 'm no goin' to say he 's oot
o' the wood yet," she heard him tell them. "His back will have had a
nasty twist, an' there 's some concussion, but there 's naethin' broken,
and no dislocation. Na, na, he 's no sae bad. Shock 's the worrst o'
't. Dinna mek yerselves onhappy, he 'll mend verra nicely. Oh, he 'll
mend fine!"
And going on beneath the Doctor's voice like an organ pipe, to support
and sustain and enrich it with ecclesiastical authority, was the voice
of his Reverence.
"Ha! No doubt about it. Concussion. That 's the mischief. But
nothing broken. No fractures or dislocation. No injury to the clavicle,
or more important still, to the dorsal vertebra. It's purely a case of
shock. Keep him well wrapped up in blankets, get some hot brandy and
water for him, and see that the bottle is n't allowed to grow cold. Ha!
that's the way. Beautiful! beautiful! We 'll soon bring him round
again."
And the tale, as it is told, goes on to tell how in Dixon's kitchen that
morning--for day was breaking now--Pam made long confession of something
to his Reverence the Vicar. Nobody in Ullbrig knows for sure what that
confession was, except the Doctor, who did not share the Dixons'
delicacy in withdrawing, but sat in Dixon's chair on the other side of
the fire, with his steaming toddy glass--compounded out of the sleeping
man's decanter--and stirred the fire with the poker when it needed it,
and was heard quite plainly to level his voice on such direct
interrogation as:
"But ye hae not explained ... so-and-so."
Or, "He may thank his guid stairs ye were there to hear-r-r! But hoo
cam ye by the cliff at midnight?"
But as Pam would have told him freely anything about her body if illness
had required it, and as she could trust him like Father Mostyn's second
self, it would have been cruelly, distrustfully invidious to divide her
carnal and spiritual confidences on this occasion with so fine a line;
and since the Doctor felt no compunction in their acceptance, Pam felt
quite tranquil in their bestowal. To these two men she told the history
of her past few days, shielding everybody save herself; how she had come
to love the Spawer, and how he had told her of his departure; and how
she had wept on her bed; and how she had feared facing him that morning,
lest she might weep betrayal of herself, and of a love she had no right
to let him see, or trouble him with; and how, while she was trying to
gain time for her terror, he came on her before she was aware; and how
she had plunged the letter into her pocket; and how she had taken it
back with her, not daring to deliver it after that ... and how ... and
how...
Here, in her desire to screen the guilty partner of her trouble, her
nervous narrative seemed all plucked to pieces. Her words, indeed, were
less for the purpose of telling than for the purpose of stopping their
own lips from asking.
"... And so ... he said he wanted me ... and he said he loved me.... I
know he loved me, because he 'd told me so before. Only then.... And
after that...."
But the Doctor, comfortably ensconced in Dixon's fireside chair, with
its red chintz cushion in the small of his back, and half a steaming
tumblerful of toddy inside him, was in no mood to be put off with such
ambiguous verbal impressionism.
"Stop, stop, stop!" said he, holding up an arrestive toddy-tumbler at
her. "I haena got the sense o' that. What d' ye say happened to the
letter?"
"Oh ... I cannot ... I cannot," Pam said, the tendons of her narrative
relaxing suddenly as though never could they be brought to bear her over
this part of the history. But in the end, with point-blank questions
from the Doctor, and gentle leading-words from the Vicar, Pam passed
over that rocking bridge of all that had happened--only, every admission
made against the man's interest was coupled with a pleader for his great
love of her. And she imparted to them, with a face glorified, how that,
when nothing seemed sure but death, the Spawer had told her his other
attachment was broken. and had confessed his love of her all the time,
and she had poured out her love of him ... and ... and they knew the
rest.
"Ay, it 's a very quairr complaint, this love!" the Doctor reflected,
pulling out his pipe, "... an' harrd to diagnose. Ye never can tell.
Ye never can tell. But losh! ah thocht ye were clean gyte when ah
hairrd ye were goin' ta marry yon fellow!"
But Father Mostyn was n't astonished in the least; waltzed gravely on
his feet with a superior, restrained tightness about the corners of his
mouth, and a far-away sparkle in his keen grey eyes, as of one to whom
revelation is no new thing.
"Beautiful! beautiful!" he mused, when Pam had finished, and was looking
with a timid, sub-radiant eagerness from one to the other. "There 'll
be a scandal, of course. That 's the proper penalty for not having
confided your trouble into the care of Holy Church." Here the Doctor
made a savage thrust with the poker through the gratebars, and stirred
and stirred up the red coals till they glowed to incandescence. "But
better late than never. Leave it to me. Leave it to me, dear child.
Our spiritual Mother never yet turned away from any supplicant that
sought her with true faith and humility. We 'll do our best for you.
Of course, the business is not so bad as it would be if it had been
unexpected. But fortunately, we 've been prepared for it. No mistaking
the symptoms."
And the tale, as Ullbrig will tell it to you to this day, goes on to
relate how Pam would not return to the Post Office, but took up her post
as nurse by the Spawer's bedside, and could hardly endure to let a bite
pass her lips thereafter, for her care of him, till he made the mend.
And that same morning, news traveled to Ullbrig that the schoolmaster
had been found, roaming and raving like a madman, in the neighborhood of
Prestnorth--where a married cousin of his was living--and was in bed now
at her house, with brain fever. Not likely to get better, the rumor
said, but therein it proved false, for a fortnight later he resigned the
mastership of Ullbrig School, and wrote, at the same time, to Miss
Morland, requesting that his effects might be despatched to him by
carrier as soon as she could conveniently find leisure to undertake the
commission. Another letter accompanied it, addressed to Pam in his
clear Board School script. In proclamation it was a penitential
acknowledgment of his sins; in effect it was a cacophonous outburst of
reproach, love, despair, and recriminations. She sorrowed for the man
and his hard lot--for if he had loved her so torturingly it was no fault
of his own, but he had taught her to fear him, and sympathy can never
truly subsist in the same bosom where fear is.
There were those in Ullbrig at first, as Father Mostyn had predicted,
who, with their sharp tongues, whittled the affair to a fine point of
scandal; those who considered the schoolmaster an ill-used man, and Pam
a conscienceless hussy who had jilted him under circumstances that would
not too well bear the stress of investigation; those who whispered; and
those who nodded their chins with compressed lips of meaning. But they
had the melancholy dissatisfaction of fearing, each one in his own
heart, that these things might not after all be true. Before such a man
as Barclay it would never have been politic to repeat this primitive
creed at any time. A champion of Pam's from the beginning--when he
cried reproof upon them for their uncharitableness towards the child--he
was doubly her champion now; strode up and down over the district like a
mighty sower, spreading seed of her heroism broadcast from both his
hands. And so it came to be that the real history of the girl burst its
early grain of scandal, as though it had been sprouting wheat, and sent
up its produce into the clear blue heaven of truth. To-day, when
Ullbrig tells you of that Monday midnight, it only gathers breath of
proud inflation to breathe how one of its daughters--by name Pam--went
down the cliff for the man she loved, and how Barclay saved them both.
*CHAPTER XLIV*
But for Pam and the Spawer, the true tale of their history only began
after the terrible events that give Pam her place among the heroines of
the district. They used its remembrance as a steel on which to sharpen
the blades of their present bliss, but it was not an inherent part of
their story. That commenced when the horror of this was over; when the
Spawer woke up finally, with a lasting wakefulness, on his bed, and saw
Pam, and smiled.
Ah! What a beautiful opening chapter that was--full of a golden
tremulousness on the girl's side, as of timid sunlight peeping through
the curtains of a May morning when a great day is in the balance. For
there had crept into the girl's heart while she watched him a strange
little dark bird, that fluttered ... and was still, and fluttered again
... and again was still, gathering its strength and grew, and was
fledged and flew up--almost into the clear skies of her reason, though
not quite--and sang plaintive melodies to her; among others, that the
man she thought of as Maurice had made love to her in his madness; that
he was not free; that he had never loved her; that she was only tending
him back to consciousness for the cruel happiness of finding that his
consciousness on the intellectual side meant unconsciousness on the
emotional; that he would remember nothing of his delirious words, and
that his love had been but the outcome of bodily weakness. Last of all,
she grew to dread his waking for the news it might tell her. When he
stirred ... she closed her eyes momentarily, with swift apprehension of
the worst. When he lay a long while still, she prayed he might wake
promptly and put her out of her misery.
For it was become a long misery of suspense. All her happiness was laid
aside like fine raiment; she dared not look at it or think of it; her
heart made ready to wear mourning. And oh, the anguish of that moment,
when at last--while her swift blood turned suddenly turbid in her veins,
and the very breath in her lungs curdled thick to suffocation--he came
out of his sleep, and his eyes opened incomprehendingly upon her ... and
she, drawn back in apprehension, with her hands clasped up to her lip
... met his gaze, and knew not how to respond to it.
And then that glorious burst of certainty when recognition woke in him
wanly and illuminated him like pale glad sunlight, and he struggled to
free his arms of their coverings, and held them out to her ... and she
had gone into them like a dove descending ... and put her own red, moist
lips to his dry ones ... and kissed his lingering soul back to life and
happiness.
Ah! To have lived that one brief moment, as Pam lived it, was to have
lived a lifetime abundantly. Now indeed that she knew he loved her for
certain, and had had the true sign and seal of it, she was ready to die
forthwith, if need were. It was enough to have held his love once in
her own soul's keeping, as a child treasures the moment's confidence of
some precious breakable vase. Pam was not greedy. She would have been
quite content with no more.
But Heaven was kinder to this dear terrestrial angel than that, and
filled every moment of her days henceforth with gladnesses as great, and
greater. At times she wanted to get right away from everywhere and
everybody; Heaven seemed to keep her plate replenished with celestial
meats quicker than her soul could consume them. She wanted to dally with
the taste of them, and extract their last nutritive juices of virtue.
But she ... well, she was only human, after all, and said grace, and ate
what was set before her.
In a way, Pam's prayer was almost of gratitude and rejoicing that her
love had been given to her in this hour of his weakness. While he lay
there, helpless upon his bed, following her mutely with his eyes, the
fact of his belonging to her seemed set forth and glorified to an extent
almost apocalyptic. In image he was a little child, dependent upon her
breasts for subsistence. Every moment furnished her with opportunities
for feeding him with the living love that flowed in her own body. Oh,
truly, truly, he seemed hers when she nourished him thus back to life
with her ceaseless attentions; with caresses; with sudden
fondlings--such as only his helplessness could have made possible; with
a thousand ministrations thoughtful and divine. Her thoughts were
always of him; her every movement showed him plainly as the motive
power. All the love of him that had been gathering in the stillness of
her soul flowed out towards him now in a great psychic stream--as warm
and broad as a beam of sunlight. From her fingers when they touched
him; from her lips when they rested on him; from her attitude when she
turned towards him--flowed this constant current of love, love, love.
Like a very planet was the life of Maurice Ethelbert Wynne in these
days--a luminous orb swimming in pure ether of love. The love of a
true, good woman is great and wonderful, but the love of this girl was
so great and so wonderful that in the strong tide of it the Spawer lay
half incredulous on his bed and blinked. It was no love of laughter; no
love of jingling words; no love of triflings or pretty affectations. It
was a strong, tense, electric current of unselfish feminine devotion
that set the very atmosphere a-quiver. When she came near him he could
almost hear it humming aeolian music, as though he had laid his flat
cheek to a telegraph post.
And in a way, too, he was glad to be thus helpless on his back, for the
glory of being cradled in such a love, and learning his love all over
again, like an infant its alphabet, from the lips and looks and actions;
the dear, large-hearted ABC Primer of Pam. Her very love of him,
issuing towards him from every pore of her body, fertilised the girl's
own beauty, like the sap in the lush hedgerows at spring. Her soft,
velvet eyes, that had been dark enough and deep enough before, darkened
and deepened for the accommodation of this love till they were beyond
all plumb of mortal gaze. Her lips, that had been red enough and
tender, colored now to a deeper, clearer carmine, with little pools of
love visible lurking in the corners of them; love that stirred and
eddied when she spoke, and settled down again into their ruby hollows
when the lips reposed. Her lashes, that had been black enough, and long
enough, and thick enough, lengthened almost under sight of the man; grew
black as ebony and so thick that when she looked upon him from above,
they lay in unbroken flatness upon her cheek. And her freckles
too--those dear little golden minstrels on the bridge of her nose and
brow--grew more purely golden, till at times almost they gleamed like
minute bright insets of the precious metal itself, and sang love like a
cluster of caged linnets. At whiles, when the Spawer looked at her,
such a proud and tearful tenderness floated into him that had he been
another woman, sure he must have wept. Her confidence in him; her
self-sacrifice; her unceasing devotion; her countless
ministrations--frightened him for what his own conduct must be ever to
repay them.
"Little woman..." he was moved to tell her, during that first day of his
convalescence, "... do you know ... I think I don't ever want to get out
of bed or on my legs again."
Pam was plainly alarmed, for it seemed to her he had suddenly caught the
desire of death which comes at times to those whose days are numbered.
But he made haste to reassure her.
"I just feel..." he explained to her, "... as though I could wish to lie
here, like this, for ever and ever and ever, with you by me to look at
and make me happy. Kiss me again, Pam, will you? It does me good."
Then Pam stooped over him, as she was always doing, and slipped her
linked fingers under his neck, and looked into his face first, and
kissed him (praying for him the while, though he did not know that), and
buried her face by his, and lifted it to look at him once more, and
kissed him again. For who was there now to lay a forbidding hand
between their lips? Who should stop her now from telling him she loved
him, loved him, loved him?
*CHAPTER XLV*
And rapidly the Spawer drew back, from its intricate shadowy by-paths,
to the great broad highway of Life.
How it would have fared with him but for that revitalising power of
love, if there had been no Pam to cling to and sustain him, no man can
positively say. The lonely Maurice Ethelbert Wynne of our latter
chapters, void of hope or happiness or aim, might have turned up his
hands and sunk under the deep sea without a struggle. But Pam was hands
and eyes, and feet and lips, and thinker for them both.
Emma Morland brought the letters round in these early days, but Pam
opened them, at the Spawer's express bidding, and read them to him aloud
in her musical fluty voice--the voice that had won her a place in his
heart before even he had set eyes upon her. And as she read, the
Spawer, sitting in the big chair by the open sunlit window, with
cushions under him of Pam's placing, would explain to her the various
allusions; let her into his life; throw open all its gateways to the
girl. In the inmost shelter of his soul he felt as though he needed the
comfort of Pam's companionship.
"Nixey" stood for So-and-So, he would explain to her; and "Jack" was the
brother of So-and-So--the fellow that did this and that and the other
that he 'd told her about, did n't she remember?
And did n't Pam remember? Oh, my Heaven! Pam remembered. Not a word
he ever said to her that she forgot.
Then, if there were any letters to answer, Pam would seat herself at the
table, with his writing-case thrown open, and dip deft fingers here, for
envelopes; and deft fingers there, for paper; and draw forth the pen,
and wield it as though armed for the fray; and would spear the ink-pot
with it, and wait upon his words with a persuasive "Yes, dear?"
And the Spawer would make prodigious pretensions of thinking, and not a
word come to him sometimes, because of the girl's face. His mind held
up its thought as an obstinate cow does milk, and never a drop could he
squeeze from it. All he could think of was Pam.
"Oh, bother the letters!" he would tell her. "They stop my thinking
about you. Why must I pawn my attention to a horrid old business screed
when I want never to take it from you?"
"Don't you?" says Pam gladly, and melts over him with her smile,
wrapping him up in such a heavenly mantle of indulgence and love and
devotion that he almost feels himself among the saints.
And oh! the joyousness of that return to the outer life, when Pam led
the Spawer out at last, she carrying a cushion and a little net-bag of
literary food (a French reader and the like); and they betook themselves
to the harvest-field, and sat down under the blue sky in the stubble,
with their backs against the golden stocks, and watched the elevated
figure of Arny riding over the sea of waving corn, like another Neptune,
turning off the wheat from the tip with rhythmic sweeps of his trident;
his eyes steadfast upon the tumbling crest of corn beside him; and they
contemplated the busy shirt-sleeves of the band-makers, pulling out
their two thin wisps of straw from the recumbent "shawves," splicing
them dexterously, and twisting them--across their chests and under their
arm-pits, till their arms flap like the wings of a crowing rooster--into
a stout-stranded band, that they lay out in the stubble alongside the
flat heaps of fallen grain; and they watched the harvestmen following,
who rake up the loose corn into a round bundle against the flat of their
leg, walk with it, so clipped, to the ready-made band, depose it there,
stoop, gather the two ends of the band in their strong hands, squeeze
the sheaf in with the knee, bind it, make a securing tuck with the
straw, and taking up the trim-waisted shock by its plaited girdle, cast
it aside out of the path of the reaper on its next round.
And then, when "lowance" time was proclaimed, this stock where Maurice
and his Pamela were seated would be made the headquarters of the repast.
Here would come the welcome brown basket, and the carpet bag with its
bottlenecks protruding; the blue mugs and the tin pannikins; the cheese
and the bread; the pasties and the sweet cakes; the tea and the beer.
And here would come Dixon's genial voice, greeting them from afar:
"Noo then, Mr. Wynne! 'Ow div ye fin' yersen ti morn? Very
comfortable, bi t' looks of ye. Ye 're in good 'ands, it seems."
And when the Spawer grows equal to it, it becomes a daily obligation for
them to wander across the intervening stubble and pasture to Barclay's
farm--where the sails of his reaper can be seen churning the blue sky
above the hedge level, like the paddle of a steamer--just to give
Barclay's stocks a turn, and show themselves not forgetful of their
deliverer. The time comes, of course, when they must cease thanking him
with their lips, but Pam's mere gaze upon him is a gratitude, and
Barclay would have missed it, if she failed him one day, as he would
miss his pipe or his "lowance."
"Ah," said he, on a certain occasion, looking over with a manifest nice
eye of critical observation, and finding no fault, "If ah 'd 'ad a lass
like you to tek me at start, ah mud 'a been a better man, an' a richer."
"But there are others," Pam told him encouragingly, "... besides me."
"Ay," Barclay cut in, with a grim humor. "There is. Ower monny, lass.
Bud they 'd 'ave to be good uns after ah 've 'ad you to sample. Ah
would n't tek onny rubbish noo, an' it 'd 'ave to be rubbishin' stuff
'at 'd tek me. Ah 'm ower well known 'ereabouts. 'Appen ah mud get
chance wi' next farm if ah change."
But the seed of resolution germinated in Pam's breast, and some days
later, getting Barclay to herself, it pushed its pure blades through the
warm soil all suddenly.
"... Oh, Mr. Barclay," she begged him, going close under his broad
chest, and showing the peeping hands of petition. "You won't be angry
with me ... please?"
"Nay, that ah weean't," Barclay protested staunchly. "Oot wi' it! What
'ave ah been doin' noo?"
"I want to ask you something," Pam continued, a little more softly, and
a little more rapidly. "... Something very particular. I want you to
promise something."
"Ay," said Barclay assentively. "Ah can promise ye, lass. Ah can
promise onnybody, so far as that gans. But it's keepin' of it 'at's not
i' mah line."
"If you promise _me_ ... you 'll keep it," Pam insinuated very softly,
but with an almost irresistible forcefulness.
"Ah 'm none so sure," Barclay reflected. "Ah know what ye want to ask
me."
"What?" said Pam.
"Ye want to ask me to gie it up."
"Yes," said Pam, after a pause, "I do."
"Ah 've tried ... lots o' times," Barclay admitted.
"But not for _me_!" Pam urged. "Not for the sake of anybody. Oh, Mr.
Barclay ... you don't know how unhappy I 've been at times about you, of
late ... to think that you 've saved my life--and his life--and put this
happiness in our way ... and all the time you 're not taking any care of
your own life ... at all."
"Why, lass," Barclay told her, but visibly troubled about the eyes by
her solicitude. "Ah 'm sorry ye 've let me be a trouble to ye. Ah 've
been nowt bud trouble to missen an' ivverybody. But where would ye be?
... an 'im too, if ah 'd kep' pledge sin' last time ah signed 'er? Eh?"
"I know; I know," Pam admitted. "I 've thought of that, too."
"Ay," Barclay took up, pleased with her admission. "It's a caution when
ye come to think on it. If ah 'ad n't been mekkin' a swill-tub o'
missen, an' walked back when ah did--it 'd 'a been good-by to ye, an'
long live teetawtallers. It just seems as though Lord 'ad called me to
Oommuth for t' puppos--though ah did n't know it at time. An' 'ow am ah
to know, if 'E calls o' me ageenn, same road ... 'at 'E 'as n't seummut
else 'E 's wantin' doin'? Eh noo?"
"Perhaps..." Pam suggested pleadingly, "... perhaps it was n't God that
called you, Mr. Barclay ... but it was God that sent you back. Don't
you think it might be that?"
"Noo, ah sewd n't wonder," Barclay decided, with obvious admiration for
the girl's ingenuity. "But it 'll be a rum un for me to know which way
'E wants me to gan ... or which end 'E 's at."
"... And you 'll promise me, won't you?" Pam besought him, and took hold
of his watch-chain. "You 'll promise me to fight your very best ... for
my sake."
"Ay," said Barclay, after a pause. "Ah can bud try."
"You 'll try hard, though?" Pam adjured him--finding too much fatalism
in the tone of his promise for her satisfaction.
"No.... when ah say ah 'll try, ah mean ah 'll try!" Barclay reassured
her. "Ah s'll try my very best for t' sake of 'oo asked me."
And Father Mostyn and the Doctor are constant attendants upon the
Spawer's recovery too, and stay for meals whenever they want them; and
tell him when the whiskey flask is running low.
And it comes to be decided that their marriage shall not take place for
a year. And meanwhile the Spawer is going to stay where he is; and Pam
is to push on with her music, and her French, and with her English, and
fill her dear little head with the intellectual fare for which it has
always hungered. And she is to do no more letter-carrying. Father
Mostyn has inhibited her from that with an _ex cathedra_ usage of the
great signet. To remain at the Post Office in an official capacity in
face of present circumstances would be an act of rebellion towards the
Church, and exceedingly offensive to Jehovah. As the girl's spiritual
and corporeal guardian, he charges himself with her care until she can
be decently and respectably married. And they will go, all three of
them, to Hunmouth at times, by Tankard's 'bus (oh, bliss! oh, heavenly
rapture!) for purposes of shopping ... and the sheer pleasure of it.
And the Spawer talks seriously of coming back to Ullbrig after the
honeymoon, and fitting up a little place for their own two selves, where
they can be near Father Mostyn, and all their old friends; and where he
can work earnestly, and without distractions; and where they can escape
all the jealousies and soul-corrupting ambitions of towns and places
where they "live."
"Oh, little woman!" he tells Pam, "I can't bear to think of your giving
up your own dear self, and letting your soul be shaped to the
conventional pattern of the world. I want you to be what you are--and
for what I love you. You shall see all the big places, of course, dear.
We 'll save up our coppers and manage that somehow. But let 's see 'em
from the outside. Let 's go and look at them through glass windows, as
though they were so many great shops, and come back to our own humble
happy life, and break bread and be thankful. The world for us, dear, is
just our two selves. We 're two little human hemispheres that go to
make our one globe, and if we 're only happy in ourselves ... why, let
the other planets go hang! Because you love me I just feel I don't care
how many people hate me. They can hate their heads off. They can cry
'pish' to my music. They can turn aside their faces when I go by, as
though I were a pestilence. What I do I want to do now for you. I feel
I would rather write a little song that pleases you, love, than compose
a Beethoven symphony for the world to bow to. And why? Because,
dearest, I know that the world is as ready to kick me as to bestow one
ha'porth of its kindness ... but You! All the pleasure I can give to
you ... is just an investment, which you can pay back to me in love at a
thousand per cent."
"Is n't it funny?" says Pam, though without showing the least
appreciation of the avowed humor, "... what love is. I 've thought the
same as you, too, but not put so beautifully. I just want us to try and
be like what we are now, in our hearts, as long as we live. At times
(do you?) I like to think of you as belonging to me ... as though you
were every bit mine. And at other times ... I feel frightened of having
you. The responsibility seems somehow too great. And then I just think
of myself as belonging to you. And all I want ... is to creep into your
heart, dear, and for you to shelter me. Oh, Maurice! To think. Six
months ago ... three months ago ... I had no thought of you, or you of
me! And we might never have met each other; never have loved each
other! Is n't it dreadful?"
"What the eye does n't see, darling!" Maurice tells her, "... the heart
does n't grieve. What we never know we never miss. But now we 're
going to make up for what might have been, are n't we?"
Pam says yes, they are. "And oh," she says, "if you had n't found me
you might have found somebody else, Morrie dear, do you think it
possible that I may be standing in the way of somebody you don't know at
all ... that you might love better?"
"Very likely you are, dear!" Maurice says, acting Job's comforter. "But
anyway, I 'm ready to risk you, and take my chance of what may be for
what is."
And this time Pam is ready to risk it too, and does not tell the Spawer,
as once she told Ginger:
"There must be no chance in love!"
*CHAPTER XLVI*
One bright morning in late September, when the sky dreamed as blue as
June, and the sun shone August, a stranger passed through into the
churchyard by the lich gate, and his Reverence the Vicar, having
received telepathic intimation of his presence, along one or other of
the invisible slender filaments that connect the Vicarage with the
churchyard, emerged shortly from his retreat, like a fine full-bodied
spider, and captured his prize by the side wicket, with a "Ha!" of
agreeable greeting.
"A stranger within our gates!" he observed, in courteous surprise,
rocking to and fro upon his legs in the pathway, and balancing the ebony
staff across both palms, as though he were weighing theological
propositions. He encompassed the sky with a comprehensive circle of
ferrule, and thrusting up a rapt nose to appreciation of its beneficent
blue, "You bring glorious weather!" he said.
The stranger acknowledged with marked politeness that the weather was as
his Reverence had been pleased to state. He was an elderly man, soberly
habited in black, and a compression of mouth that seemed to betoken one
whose office exacted of him either deference or discretion, or perhaps
both.
"A pilgrim to the old heathen centre of Ullbrig?" his Reverence
inquired. "... An antiquarian at all? A connoisseur of tablets? or a
rubber of brasses?--in which case we 've nothing to show you."
The stranger said he was not exactly any of these things.
"Ha! ... an epitaph hunter, perhaps?" his Reverence substituted
agreeably, as though desirous of setting him at ease.
Nor scarcely an epitaph hunter ... in the precise sense of the word, the
stranger disclaimed. He scanned Father Mostyn sideways with a
deferential regard of inquiry. "The Vicar, I presume?" he said.
His Reverence acknowledged the appellation by inclining leniently
towards it.
"I thought ... I could not be mistaken," the stranger told him. "As a
matter of fact ... I had intended taking the liberty of troubling you
with a call, after giving a glance round the gravestones here. It is
possible, if you would be so kind, that you might be of considerable
assistance to ... to me in a matter of some importance."
Father Mostyn wagged the divining rod sagely over his palms.
"A question of the register? Births? Deaths? Marriages? A pedigree in
the issue, perhaps?"
"To a certain extent, sir, you are quite correct." The stranger
compressed his mouth for a moment. "I may as well be explicit on the
point. Indeed, there is no reason, sir, why any particular secrecy
should be maintained. I am here to pursue investigations on behalf of
Messrs. Smettering, Keelman & Drabwell, solicitors, of Lincoln's Inn,
who are acting according to instructions received from a client of some
importance. Our object is merely to trace and establish connection with
a member of our client's family--considerably to this member's
advantage, I may assure you."
His Reverence looked speculatively over the stick as though the last few
sentences had escaped his precise observation, and he were trying now to
reclaim the import of them.
"... A military family at all?" he inquired.
The stranger eyed him with respectful surprise and dubiety for a moment.
"... An old family of importance," he admitted slowly. "I should say it
might be called a military family." Then he stopped. "Perhaps..." said
he, and looked at his Reverence.
"Ha!" said his Reverence blandly. "And the present client? An army
man, is he?"
"The son of one, I believe, sir."
"To be sure. Precisely. The son of one. Beautiful! beautiful! One or
two fat benefices in the family, do you know?"
"I rather fancy ... there is one attached to the estate. There may be
more, for anything to my knowledge." The stranger followed the lead
with the resignation of one who plays void of trumps. "If you know
anything..." he hazarded.
His Reverence stroked a gorgeous nose of wisdom.
"No mistaking the symptoms. Not a bit of it. Your client seeks
recovery of a daughter?"
The stranger demonstrated as much surprise as his discretion and his
respectfulness would let him.
"You can inform us ... where she is?"
"Certainly! certainly! We have been expecting you. I thought you would
n't be long in reaching us now. To-morrow ... or Thursday, I thought."
His Reverence cast a fine finger of effect towards the white headstone,
rising from the grass, beneath the east window. "She is there."
"Dead?" said the stranger.
"Your client is just a little matter of thirteen years too late."
"Her married name was Searle?" said the stranger, as though offering the
fact for the priest's verification.
"To be sure. On the gravestone. On the gravestone. 'Sacred to the
memory of Mary Pamela Searle.' And her father's name, of course,
was..."
"... Paunceforth, since you know it, sir, ... of Briskham Park,
Hampshire."
"He will be getting an old man," said his Reverence.
"Seventy-four ... or five," the stranger responded, "... and very
feeble. He has had one seizure already, and is anxious to make amends,
before he dies, for an act of early severity. At one stage of the
proceedings there was a child involved. A daughter. Is she still
living? If you can give me any information likely to lead to her
recovery, I may tell you that expense will be no object at all. No
stone is to be left unturned, by our client's instructions, to trace
matters to their final step. And I may add that ... as this is now the
last surviving branch of our client's family ... and he is a gentleman
of considerable wealth..."
"Exactly," said his Reverence. "I think it will not be difficult to
conclude matters to your client's entire satisfaction. His
granddaughter has been, and still is, under my safe care.... Just come
along with me as far as the Vicarage. There are a few things there in
my possession. ... Beautiful! beautiful! Quite an Indian summer we 're
having."
And that same day, before dinner, the news is racing all over Ullbrig
that Pam's grandfather had sought for her and found her; and that she is
to be a real lady at last, and ride horses, and drive carriages, and
order servants of her own, and live in a great big house in a great big
park, where deer are grazing and peacocks stalk the terraces, and will
never come back to Ullbrig any more, but give them all the go-by now,
and set her nose up higher than ever; and the Spawer is only marrying
her for her money.
Steggison says to himself with a Satanic joy:
"Noo all s'll get a chance at post-bag. She promised me ah sewd 'ave
fost try at it if owt 'appened 'er. Mah wod! Bud ah 'll gie 'em James
Maskell an' all. They 'll 'a t' run when ah call of 'em--ne'er mind if
they weean't!"
And James Maskill stands forlornly with his back propped against the
post-house bricks, and a heel hitched up to the wall beneath him, and
his hands in his pockets, and his mouth screwed to a spiritless whistle
that can't produce the ghost of a sound; staring at nothing, and
thinking of nothing; and feeling nothing--for life in front of him is
nothing now, and he would n't have the heart to fetch Dingwall Jackson
his promised bat across the lug, even if you caught him and held his
head up for the purpose.
And Emma Morland is bursting with pride, and weeping with the misery of
losing Pam--for this fashionable interment of Pam in the classic vaults
of High Society fills her with a more terrible sense of their severance
than a little green grave in Ullbrig churchyard.
And the postmaster makes an impressive chief mourner, standing by the
counter with set face and lowered eyes as though it were a coffin, and
telling his daughter, when she comes hither to embarrass him with her
demonstrations of grief:
"It 's all for t' best, lass no doot. We s'll larn to get ower it i'
time."
And Mrs. Morland, her mingled gladness and sorrow commingling to
reminiscence, tells, through fond tears, how Pam did this, and Pam did
that; and how she 'd always thought of others before herself; and what a
strange sad house it would be without her--and wept herself into
perspirations, and wiped her tears and her steaming forehead with large
double sweeps of her apron. And Ginger went off his food again--for
though she 'd never been his, at each new name with which hers was
coupled, he felt once more as though he 'd just lost her.
And Pam went dancing up to Cliff Wrangham that day, hugging his
Reverence's arm--as sad as any of them, and so joyful that it seemed not
earth she trod on, but the big round prismatic blown bubble of a dream,
shivering warningly, all ready to puff into nothing and let her down
into nowhere. And when they came to Dixon's, Pam went into the little
parlor, and looked at the Spawer, and said, "Oh, Morrie!" in a doleful
voice of preparation. For, to tell the truth, though she was come here
intended to play a little comedy on him, with a triumphant _denouement_,
her own conviction in things actual (including, for the time, their own
happiness) had been so surprisingly shaken that, despite her errand's
being presumably of gladness, she looked, as she looked at him, for all
the world as though she had seen a ghost.
"Good gracious, darling!" said the Spawer, in concern, when he saw her.
"Whatever 's been happening now?"
"Oh, Maurice!" said Pam again, trying hard to win back assurance that he
and she were not two mere unsubstantial figments of somebody else's
dream, but flesh and blood, and dear and bend to each other. "I 've
something to tell you, dear--I mean, to ask you, dear. Do you love me?"
"Do I love you?" repeats the Spawer, with a look of incredulous
surprise, and a tinge, in his tones, of severity. "What a remarkable
question to ask a man--and at such short notice! Really, Miss Searle
... I must confess you surprise me."
"Oh, but do you, do you?" begs Pam.
"Well, it 's dreadfully, horribly sudden," says Maurice. "And you put me
quite in a flutter. But since you 're rather an attractive girl ...
well, yes, I do."
"Oh, but suppose ... suppose..." says Pam, going on....
"Yes, little riddle-me-ree?"
"Suppose ... suppose I was n't what you 've always thought me. Suppose
it were found that ... I was n't a lady at all. Suppose I was somebody
altogether different from what Father Mostyn said I was."
Sundry speculative shadows rise up in the Spawer's mind, but he is not
dismayed, and feels no flinching.
"Well?" says he encouragingly. "And suppose you were?"
"Would it make no difference?" Pam asks tremulously, it must be
confessed, for oh ... if now it should!
"Darling," says the Spawer firmly, "not the least little bit."
Pam wants then and there to clasp his avowal and proclaim her mission.
Her soul has scarcely strength for further dissimulation, but for the
full crop of joy that she hopes to reap in the end, she keeps her hand
to the plough.
"Would you want to marry me ... just the same?" she asks.
"More!" says Maurice Ethelbert. "A hundred times more."
"Why more?" Pam inquires vaguely; her curiosity suddenly fanned to seek
the reason of this strange great increase in his affection for her.
"Because," the Spawer tells her, "the less you are to the world, dear,
the more you must be to me. The less claim the world can make upon you,
the more I feel I 've got you all to myself."
"You would still marry me, under any conditions?" persists Pam.
"Under any and all."
"And you won't let me go?"
"I won't let you go."
"Whatever people say?"
"Whatever people say."
"You 'll hold me as tight ... as you held me when we thought we were
going to die ... that night."
"Tighter, darling, tighter."
"Even if..."
"If what?"
"... I should turn out ... just a bit of a lady, after all, dear?"
The Spawer is going to answer, but he stops suddenly, lifts up the
girl's face, and looks straight into her eyes.
"Pam!" says he.