CHAPTER I.

THE

SECRET IN THE HILL

BY

BERNARD CAPES

LONDON

SMITH, ELDER & CO.,

15, WATERLOO PLACE

1903

(_all rights reserved_)

[DEDICATION.]

To

MISS PRECISION

AND

“YOUR AFFECNUT LITTLE FRIEND”

_THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED_

WITH DEFERENCE

BY

ITS AUTHOR AND THEIRS

CONTENTS.

PART I

I. I first see Joshua Pilbrow

II. A Great Loss and a Queer Equivalent

III. Uncle Jenico

IV. My First View of the Hill

V. The Story Of The Earthquake

VI. Mrs. Puddephatt and Fancy-Maria

VII. Mr. Sant

VIII. Treasure-Hunting

IX. Harry Harrier

X. Friends at Last

XI. Mischief of Sorts

PART II

I. The Badger

II. The Great Storm

III. Open Sesame

IV. The Secret in the Hill

V. A Reappearance

VI. An Odd Compact

VII. “Facilis Descensus Averni”

VIII. The Feast of Lanterns

IX. The Weary Sands

X. The Darkest Hour

XI. Joshua Speaks

XII. Rescue

XIII. Rampick Speaks

XIV. What the Letter said

XV. Out of the Depths

Conclusion

THE SECRET IN THE HILL.

PART I.

CHAPTER I.

I FIRST SEE JOSHUA PILBROW.

When I was a very little boy my mother died. I was too young to feel

her loss long, though I missed her badly at first; but the

compensation was that it brought my father nearer to me. He was a

barrister, a prodigal love of a man, dear bless him! And he felt his

bereavement so cruelly that for a time he seemed incapable of rallying

from the blow. But presently he plucked up heart, and went, for my

sake, to his business again.

He was more liked than lucky, I believe. I had evidence enough, at

least of the former; for after my mother’s death, not bearing that we

should be parted, he carried me with him on the last circuit he was

ever to go. Those were the days when Bench and Bar dined well, and sat

up late telling tales. Sometimes my father would slip me into his

pocket, so to speak, and from its shelter--when, to be candid, I had

been much better in bed--I heard fine stories related by the gentlemen

who put off gravity with the horsehair they wore all day. They were a

merry and irresponsible lot, rather like a strolling company of

actors; and, indeed, it was no less their business to play many parts.

There were types among them which I came to associate with certain

qualities: such as the lean vivacious ones, who ate and drank

hungrily, and presently grew incoherent and quarrelsome; such as the

rosy bald-headed ones, who always seemed to make most laughter; such

as the large, heavy-browed ones, who sulked when they were bettered in

argument. But my friend amongst them all, next to my father, was Mr.

Quayle, Q.C.

I fancied I had discovered, after much consideration, why he was

called Q.C. He was a little man, quite bald and round all over his

head and face except for a tuft of hair on his chin, and there was the

Q; and he wore a pouter-pigeon ruff under his chin like this, Q/C, and

there was the Q.C. I may have been wrong; but anyhow I had precedent

to justify me, for many of these jolly souls bore such characteristic

nicknames. There was Plain John, for instance, who had so christened

himself for ever during a dispute about the uses or abuses of multiple

titles. “Plain John” had been enough for him, he had said. Again,

there was Blind Fogle, so called from his favourite cross-examination

phrase. “I don’t quite see.” They were all boys together when off

duty, chaffing and horse-playing, and my father was the merriest and

most irrepressible of the crew.

There was one treat, however, of which he was persistent in baulking

me. Pray him as I might, he would never let me see or hear him in his

character of Counsel. The Court where he would be working by day was

forbidden ground to me, and for that very reason I longed, like

Bluebeard’s wife, to peep into it. This was not right, even in

thought, for I knew his wishes. But worse is to be confessed. I once

took an opportunity, which ought never to have been given me, to

disobey him; and dreadful were the consequences, as you shall hear.

We were travelling on what is called the Home Circuit, and one day we

came to Ipswich, a town to mark itself red in the annals of my young

life. On the second morning after our arrival I was playing at horses

with George, my father’s man, when Mr. Quayle looked in at our hotel,

and, dismissing George, took and sat me upon his knee.

“Dad gone to Court?” said he.

“Yes,” I answered; “just.”

He grunted, and rubbed his bald head, with a look half comical, half

aggravated. His eyes were rather blinky and red, and he seemed

confused in manner and at a loss for words.

“Dicky,” he said, suddenly, “did you live very well, very rich-like,

when mamma was alive?”

“Yes,” I answered; “’cept when mamma said we must retrench, and cried;

and by’m-by papa laughed, and threw the rice pudding into the fire,

and took us to dine at a palace.”

“And that was--very long before--hey?”

“It was a very little while before mamma went away for good,” I

murmured, and hung my head, inclined to whimper.

Mr. Quayle twitched at me compunctious.

“O, come!” he said, “we must all bear our losses like men. They teach

us the best in the world to stand square on our own toeses. There!

Shall I tell you a story--hey?”

I brightened at once. He knew some good ones. “Yes, please,” I said.

“O, lud!” he exclaimed, rubbing his nose with his eye-glasses. “I am

committed! Judex damnatur. Dicky, I sat up late last night, devouring

briefs, and they’ve given me an indigestion. Never sit up late, Dicky,

_or you’ll have to pay for it_!”

He said the last words with an odd emphasis, giving me a little shake.

“Is that the beginning of the story?” I asked, with reserve.

“O, the story!” he said. “H’m! ha! Dear take my fuddled caput! Well,

here goes:

“There were once two old twin brothers, booksellers, name of Pilbrow,

who kept shop together in a town, as it might be Ipswich. Now books,

young gentleman, should engender an atmosphere of reason and sympathy,

inasmuch as we talk of the Republic of letters, which signifies a sort

of a family tie between A, B, and C. But these fellows, though twins,

were so far from being united that they were always quarrelling. If

Joshua bought a book of a stranger, Abel would say he had given more

than its worth, and sell it at his own valuation; and if Abel attended

a sale, there was Joshua to bid against him. Naturally, under these

conditions, the business didn’t flourish. The brothers got poorer and

poorer, and the more they lost the worse they snapped and snarled,

till they took to threatening one another in public with dear knows

what reprisals. Well, one day, at an auction, after bidding each

against t’other thremenjus for a packet of old manuscripts and book

rubbish--which Abel ended by getting, by-the-by--they fastened

together like tom-cats, and had to be separated. The people laughed

and applauded; but the end was more serious than was expected. Abel

disappeared from the business, and a few days later the shop took

fire, and was burned to the ground.

“So far, so plain; and now, Mr. Dickycumbob, d’ye know what’s meant by

Insurance?”

“No, sir?”

“Well, look here. If I want to provide against my house, and the goods

in it, being lost to me by fire, I go to a gentleman, with a gold

watch-chain like a little ship’s cable to recommend him, and says

I:--‘If I give you so much pocket-money a year, will you undertake to

build up my house again for me in case it happens to be burned down?’

And the gentleman smiles, and says ‘Certainly.’ Then I say, ‘If I

double your pocket-money will you undertake to give me a thousand

pounds for the value of the goods in that house supposing they are

burned too?’ And the gentleman says, ‘Certainly; in case their value

really _is_ a thousand pounds at the time.’ So I go away, and

presently, strange to say, my house _is_ actually burned to the

ground. Then I ask the gentleman to fulfil his promise; but he says,

‘Not at all. The house I will rebuild as before, and for the goods I

will pay you; but not a thousand pounds, because I am given to believe

that they were worth nothing like that sum at the time of the fire?’

Now, what am I to do? Well, I will tell you what this Joshua did. He

insisted upon having the whole thousand pounds, and the gentleman

answered by saying that he believed Joshua had purposely set fire to

his own house in order to secure a thousand pounds for a lot of old

rubbish in it that wasn’t worth twopence ha’penny. D’yunderstand?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Very well, then, and listen to this. If the gentleman spoke true,

Joshua had fallen _in Scyllam cupiens vitare Charybdim_, which means

that he had jumped out of the frying-pan into the fire, or, in other

words had, in trying to catch the Insurance gentleman, been nabbed

himself by the law. For arson is arson, and fraud fraud, and the

gentleman with the watch-chain isn’t to be caught with a pinch of salt

on his tail. But that was not the worst. Human bones had been found

among the _débris_ of the building, and ugly rumours got about that

these bones were Abel’s bones--the bones of an unhappy victim of

Joshua’s murderous hate. The man had disappeared, the brothers’ deadly

quarrel was recalled; it was whispered that the fire might owe itself

to a double motive--that, in short, Joshua had designed, at one blow,

to secure the thousand pounds and destroy the evidences of a great

crime. Joshua, sir, was arrested and put upon his trial for murder and

arson.”

I was listening with all my eyes and ears.

“Who defended him?” I whispered, gulping; for I knew something of the

legal terms.

The answer took me like a smack.

“Your father, sir.”

“O!” I exclaimed, thrilling. And then, after a pause, with a pride of

loyalty: “He got him off, didn’t he?”

Mr. Quayle put me down, and yawned dyspeptically.

“What!” he said. “If any man can, papa will. I ask your pardon, Master

Dicky, I really do, for palming off fact instead of fiction on you.

But my poor brain wasn’t equal. The case is actually _sub

judice_--being tried at this moment. Yesterday began it, and to-day

will end. If you whisper to me to-night, I’ll whisper back the

result.”

The delay seemed insupportable. He had read and worked me up to the

last chapter of the story, and now proposed to leave me agonising for

the end. It was the first time I had ever been brought so close to the

living romance of the law, and my blood was on fire with the

excitement of it.

“O, I wish----” I began.

The barrister looked down at me oddly, and shook his head.

“Ah, you little rogue!” he chuckled.

I felt too guilty to speak. He knew all that was in my mind. Suddenly

he took my hand.

“Come along, then,” he said, “and let’s have a peep. Papa needn’t

know.”

He shouldn’t have tempted me, nor should I have succumbed. A murder

romance was no book for a child, though my father figured in it as a

Paladin championing the wronged and oppressed.

I hung back a moment, but the creature cooed and whistled to me. “Come

and see Joshua,” he said, “with his back to the wall, and papa in

front daring ’em all to come on.”

The picture was irresistible. I let myself be persuaded and run out,

tingling all over.

It was a dingy November morning. The old town seemed dull and uneasy,

and a tallow-faced clock on a church dawdled behind time, as if it had

stopped to let something unpleasant go by. That might have been a

posse of melancholy javelin-men, who, with a ludicrous little

strutting creature at their head--a sort of pocket drum-major, in

sword and cocked hat and with a long staff in his hand--went splashing

past at the moment. The court-house, what with the fog and drip, met

us like the mouth of a sewer, and I was half-inclined to cry off so

disenchanting an adventure, when my companion tossed me up in his arms

and carried me within. Through halls and passages, smelling of cold,

trodden mud, we were passed with deference, and suddenly were swung

and shut into a room where there were lights and a great foggy hush.

I saw before me the scarlet judge. I knew him well enough, but never

awful like this--a shrunk ferret with piercing eyes looking out of a

gray nest. I saw the wigs of the counsel; but their bobtails seemed

cocked with an unfamiliar viciousness. I saw the faces of the Jury,

set up in two rows like ghostly ninepins; and then I saw another, a

face by itself, a face like a little shrewd wicked gurgoyle, that hung

yellow and alone out of the mist of the court. And that face, I knew,

was the face of Joshua.

The terrible silence ticked itself away, and there suddenly was my

father standing up before them all, and talking in a quick impassioned

voice. My skin went cold and hot. If I reaped little of the dear

tones, I understood enough to know that he spoke impetuously for the

prisoner, heaping scorn upon the prosecution. Never, he said, in all

his experience had he known calumny visit a soul so spotless as the

one it was now his privilege to defend. The process would be laughably

easy, it was true, and he would only dwell upon what must be to the

jury a foregone conclusion--the accused’s innocence, that was to

say--with the object to crush with its own vicious fallacies a

_pro_secution which, indeed, he could not help remarking bore more the

appearance of a _per_secution.

Mr. Quayle at this point laughed a little under his breath and

whispered, “Bravo!” in my ear, as he eased his burden by resting my

feet on the back of a bench. As for me, I was burning and shooting all

over with pride, as my eyes went from my father to the poor little

ugly prisoner in the dock, and back again.

The accused, went on my father (in substance. I can only give the

briefest abstract of his speech), would not deny that there had been

differences between him and his brother. Indeed, it would be useless

to, in the face of some recent notorious evidence to the contrary. But

did not all history teach us the folly of jumping, on the strength of

an unguarded word, to fatal conclusions? Had not one of our own

monarchs (surnamed Fitz-Empress, as he need not remind the jury)

suffered a lifelong regret from the false interpretation put upon a

rash utterance of his? “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”

he had cried, in an unthinking moment. “You shall pay for this!” had

been Joshua Pilbrow’s threat to his brother, under a like aggravation,

in the sale-room. “Gentlemen,” said my father, “how deadly the seeming

import, how laughable the explanation in either case. King Henry cried

only distractedly for some one to persuade his importunate Chancellor

to leave him alone. Joshua Pilbrow meant no more than to insist that

his brother should ‘stand the whole racket’ of a purchase of which he

himself had disapproved. Hence, gentlemen, these tears!”

There was a little stir in court, and my companion chuckled

delightedly in my ear again.

My father then proceeded triumphantly to give the true facts of the

case. The packet of books had, it appeared when opened, revealed one

item of unexpected value, in the profits from which Joshua, as

partner, insisted upon sharing. To this, however, Abel, quoting his

own words against him, demurred. It was his--Abel’s purchase, Abel

contended, to do with as he chose. The dispute ran so high as to

threaten litigation; when all of a sudden one night Abel was found to

have taken himself off with the cherished volume. Joshua, at first

unable to credit such perfidy, bided his time, expecting his brother

to return. But when, at last, his suspicion of bereavement settled

into a conviction, he grew like one demented. He could not believe in

the reality of his loss; but, candle in hand, went hunting high and

low amongst the litter with which the premises were choked, hoping

somewhere to alight, in some forgotten corner where cupidity had

concealed it, on the coveted prize. Alas! it never rains but it pours.

He not only failed to trace the treasure, but, in his distracted hunt

for it, must accidentally have fired the stock, which, smouldering for

awhile, burst out presently into flame, and committed all to ruin.

* * * * * *

Such was the outline of the story, and, for all that I understood of

it, I could have clapped my father to the echo, with the tears gulping

in my throat, for his noble vindication of a wronged man. There were

other points he made, such as that Joshua had himself escaped with the

utmost difficulty from the burning building (and did that look like

arson?); such as that he had instructed his lawyers, after committal,

to advertise strenuously, though vainly, for his brother’s whereabouts

(and did that look like murder?); such as that the bones found amongst

the ruins were the bones of anatomical specimens, in which the firm

was well known to have dealt. I need not insist on them, because the

end was what I knew it must be if men were not base and abominable

enough to close their ears wilfully to those ringing accents of truth.

The prosecution, poor thing! answered, and the judge summed up; and

still Mr. Quayle, quite absorbed in the case, did not offer to take me

away. I had my eyes on my father all the time. He had sunk back, as if

exhausted, after his speech, and sat in a corner of the bench, his

hand over his face. The jury gave their verdict without leaving their

places. I heard the demand and the answer. The cry, “Not Guilty,” rang

like a pæan in my ears; and still I kept my eyes on my father.

The prisoner, freed from the dock, had left the court, when suddenly

some people stirred, and a whisper went round. A barrister bent over

the resting figure, and arose hurriedly. In a moment there was a

springing up of heads everywhere, so that the dear form was blotted

from my sight. Mr. Quayle, looking over my shoulder, caught a word,

and gave a quick little gasp.

“Dicky,” he said, catching at me, “come out at once! We must get away

before--before----” and he left the sentence unfinished as he hurried

me into the street.

CHAPTER II.

A GREAT LOSS AND A QUEER EQUIVALENT.

I looked in Mr. Quayle’s face; but I asked him no question. The mud

we trod seemed colder, the houses we passed more frowning than before;

but I asked no question. I could not form one in my mind; only

suddenly and somehow I felt frightened, as if in dreams before a great

solitude. Then in a moment I was sobbing fast and thickly.

Ah, what is the use to skate round the memory! Let it clutch me for a

moment, and be faced and dismissed. My father, my dear, ardent, noble

father was dead--struck down in an instant--shaken out of life by the

poignant utterances of his own spirit. While the flower of his fervour

was blossoming and bearing fruit, the roots thereof were dead

already--smitten in their place in his heart. That, its work done, had

ceased beating. Sometimes afterwards in my desolation I recalled the

church clock, with its poised motionless hands, and thought what a

melancholy omen it had been.

Mr. Quayle was kindness itself to me in my utter terror and

loneliness. He took upon himself, provisionally, the whole conduct of

my affairs. One morning he came in, and drew me to him.

“Dicky--Dicky-bird, me jewl!” he said. “I’ve found the fine cuckoo

that’s to come and father the poor little orphaned nestling.”

I must observe that he had his own theories about this same “harbinger

of spring,” which, according to him, was the “bird that looked after

another bird’s young.” I remembered the occasion on which he had so

defined it, and the laughter which had greeted him; and his

alternative, “Well, then, ’tis the bird that doesn’t lay its own eggs,

and that’s all one!” But the first definition, it appeared, was the

one he kept faith in.

“D’you remember Mr. Paxton?” he said.

“Uncle Jenico?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Uncle Jenico Paxton, mamma’s own only brother. Poor papa, my

dear--always a wonder and an honour to his profession--has left, it

seems, a will, in which he bequeathes everything to Uncle Jenico in

trust for his little boy, Master Dicky Bowen. And Uncle Jenico has

been found, and is coming to take charge of little Dicky Bowen.”

Was I glad or sorry? I was too stunned, I think, to care one way or

the other. Any one would do to stop the empty place which none could

ever fill, and neither my sympathies nor my dislikes were active in

the case of Uncle Jenico. I had seen him only once or twice, when he

had come to spend a night or so with us in town. My memory was of a

stout, hoarse old man in spectacles, rather lame, with a little nose

and twinkling eyes. He had seemed always busy, always in a hurry. He

bore an important, mysterious reputation with us as a great inventive

genius, who carried a despatch-box with him choked with invaluable

patents, and always left something behind--a toothbrush or an

umbrella--when he left. Let it be Uncle Jenico as well as another.

While we were talking there was a flurry at the door of the room, and

a man, overcoming some resistance outside, forced his way in. I gave a

little cry, and stood staring. It was the acquitted prisoner, Joshua

Pilbrow. George appeared just behind him, flushed and truculent.

“He would do it, sir,” said the servant, “for all I warned him away.”

Mr. Quayle had put me from him and arisen. There was a bad look on his

face; but he motioned to George to go, and we were left alone.

The intruder stood shrugging his disordered clothes into place, and

looking the while with a sort of black stealth at the barrister. His

face held and haunted me. It was bleak and sallow, and grey in the

hollows, with fixed dark eyes--the face, I thought, of a malignant,

though injured, creature. But it did not so affect Mr. Quayle, it was

evident.

“The verdict was ‘Not guilty,’ sir,” said the man, quite suddenly and

vehemently.

Mr. Quayle gave an unpleasant laugh.

“Or else you wouldn’t be intrudin’ here,” he said shortly.

“I came to thank my benefactor,” said the man. “I had heard nothing

till this moment of the tragic sequel.”

“Well,” said the barrister, in the same cynical tone, “you have come

too late. The price of your acquittal is this little orphaned life.”

He put his arm about my shoulders. The stranger looked hard at me.

“His son?” he muttered.

“There are some verdicts,” said Mr. Quayle, “bought too dear.”

In a moment the man turned upon him in a sort of fierce concentrated

bitterness.

“With the inconsistency of your evil profession,” he cried, “you

discount your own conclusions. The law guarantees and grudges me my

innocence. A curse upon it, I say! Did he there sacrifice his life for

me? He sacrificed it for truth, sir, and it’s that which you, as a

lawyer, can’t forgive.”

“You will observe,” said Mr. Quayle, icily, “that I have not

questioned the truth.”

“Not directly,” answered the visitor. “I know, I know. You damn by

innuendo; it’s your trade.”

The little lawyer laughed again.

“You malign our benevolence,” he said. “The law, by its artless

verdict, has entitled you to sue on the insurance question. Think, Mr.

Pilbrow; it actually offers itself to witness to your right to the

thousand pounds.”

“And I shall force it to,” cried the other; “and would to heaven I

could make it bleed another thousand for the wrong it has done me. It

would, if equity were justice.”

“Equity _is_ justice,” said Mr. Quayle. “Good morning.”

The man did not move for a moment, but stood looking gloomily at me.

Now, I cannot define what was working in my little soul. The pinched,

shorn face was not lovely, the eyes in it were not good; yet there was

something there of loss and hopelessness that touched me cruelly. And

was not my father lying in the next room in solemn witness to its

innocence? Suddenly, before Mr. Quayle could stay me, I had run to the

visitor and plucked at his coat.

“You did not do it,” I cried. “My father said so!”

He gave a little gasp, and fluttered his hand across his eyes,

sweeping in a wonderful way the evil out of them.

“Ah!” he said, “if your father, young gentleman, would whisper to you

where Abel lies hidden! He knows now.”

He stepped back, with a strange, wintry smile on his lips, stopped,

seemed about to speak, waved his hand to me, and was gone.

“Dicky, Dicky,” cried Mr. Quayle, “you’re the son of your father; but,

dear me, not so good a lawyer!”

CHAPTER III.

UNCLE JENICO.

That same evening Uncle Jenico arrived. I was just put to bed at the

time, but he came and stood by me a little before I went to sleep and

dreamt of him. He was not the least grown from his place in my

memory--only, to my wonder, a little more shabby-looking than I seemed

to recollect. The round gold spectacles were there, and the big beaver

hat, and the blue frock coat, and the nankeen trousers, and the

limp--all but the first and last a trifle the worse for wear. His

smile, however, was as cherubic, his despatch-box as glossy, his

walking-stick as stout as ever; and he nodded at me like a benevolent

Mandarin.

“Only we two left, my boy,” he said. “Poor papa, dear papa! He’s

learnt by now the secret of perpetual motion.”

It was an odd introduction. I cried a little, and, moved by his

kindness, clung to him.

“There!” he said, soothing me. “That’s all right. We are going to be

famous friends, _we_ are. _We’ll_ invent things; _we’ll_ set the

Thames on fire, _we_ will.”

Whether from exhaustion or from the dreamy contemplation of this

amazing feat to be performed by us, I fell asleep in his arms, lulled

for the first time out of my grief, and did not awake till bright

morning. The fog was gone; the birds were singing to us to carry my

father to his rest under the blue sky.

By-and-by we set out, Uncle Jenico very grave, in black, with a long

weeper round his hat. Mr. Quayle, and one or two more, who had

lingered a day behind the Assizes to do honour to the dead, came with

us; and others, including the judge, sent flowers. It was a simple,

pathetic service, in a green corner of the churchyard. I felt more

than understood its beauty, and when once I caught a glimpse of Uncle

Jenico busily and stealthily writing something with a pencil on the

inside lining of his hat, I accepted the fact naturally as a detail of

the ceremony.

But it was on the way home in the carriage that he disillusioned me by

removing his hat, and showing me a little drawing of a gravestone he

had made therein.

“Just an idea that occurred to me,” he said, “to perpetuate the memory

of poor papa. We want to do something better than keep it _green_, you

see. The weather and the lichen pay us all _that_ compliment. So I

suggest having the inscription very small, on a stone something the

shape of a dining-room clock, and over it a magnifying glass boss,

like one of those paperweights, you know, that have a little view at

the back. The tooth of Time could never touch that. What do you think

now?”

I thought it a very pleasant and kind idea, and told him so, at which

he was obviously pleased. But it was never carried out, no more than

many another he developed; and in the end--but that was long

afterwards--a simple headstone, of my own design, commemorated my

beloved father’s virtues.

The few mourners returned with us to the hotel, where, in a private

room, we had cake and sherry wine. Afterwards Mr. Quayle, when all but

he were gone, asked the favour of a final word with Uncle Jenico.

He appeared to find it a word difficult of utterance, walking up and

down, and puffing, and getting a little red in the face, while Uncle

Jenico sat beaming in a chair, his legs crossed and finger-tips

bridged.

At length Mr. Quayle stopped before him.

“Mr. Paxton,” said he, “when time’s short formalities are best

eschewed, eh?”

Uncle Jenico nodded.

“Surely,” said he. “I ask nothing less.”

“Then,” said Mr. Quayle, stuttering a little, “you are prepared to

accept our friend’s trust, _for all it’s worth_?”

Uncle Jenico nodded again, though I thought his countenance fell a

trifle over the emphatic qualification. However, he recovered in an

instant, and rubbed his hands together gleefully.

“Capital, sir,” he said; “a little capital. That’s all Richard and I

need to make our fortunes.”

He spoke as if we had been long partners, but hampered by insufficient

means.

“Ah!” said Mr. Quayle, decisively; “but that’s just the point.”

“Just the point,” echoed Uncle Jenico, still nodding, but weakly, and

with a dew of perspiration on his forehead.

“Just the point,” repeated Mr. Quayle. “I stood close to our friend. I

know something of his affairs--and habits. He was--d’ye understand

French, Mr. Paxton?”

“Yes, certainly,” answered my uncle, proudly.

“Well, listen to this, then: ‘Il a été un joueur invétéré celui

là; c’est possible qu’il a mangé son blé en herbe.’”

He drew back, to let his words take effect.

“God bless me!” said Uncle Jenico, weakly. “You have reason to know?”

“My dear sir,” replied Mr. Quayle, “I know how some of us occupy our

time on circuit when we’d be better abed. I know a punter when I see

one. I may be right; I may be wrong; and for your sake I hope I’m

wrong. But the point is this: A good deal of our friend’s paper has

come my way; and I want to know if, supposing I take it to market with

bad results to the estate, you are going to swear off your trust?”

Then Uncle Jenico did an heroic thing; how heroic I could not realise

at the time, though even then I think a shadow of the truth was

penetrating my bewilderment. He got to his feet, looking like an

angel.

“Mr. Quayle,” he said, “you’ve spoken plainly, and I don’t conceal

your words are a disappointment. But if they are also a prophecy, rest

assured, sir, that Richard and I stand or fall together. We are the

surviving partners of an honourable firm, and there is that in there,

sir” (he pointed to his inseparable despatch-box), “to uphold our

credit with the world.”

Mr. Quayle seized his hand, with an immense expression of relief on

his face.

“You’re a good soul,” he said. “Without that assurance I should have

felt like robbing the orphan. I hope it may turn out better than we

suppose.”

“I hope so, too,” said Uncle Jenico, rather disconsolately.

CHAPTER IV.

MY FIRST VIEW OF THE HILL.

It turned out not so badly, yet pretty badly. Uncle Jenico took

cheap lodgings for us in the town, and for two or three months was

busy flitting between Ipswich and London winding up my father’s

estate. At the end, when the value of every lot, stick, and warrant

had been realised, and the creditors satisfied, a sum representing

perhaps £150 a year was secured to us, and with this, and the

despatch-box, we committed ourselves to the future.

It appeared that my Uncle Jenico’s inventions had always been more

creditable than profitable to him, and this for the reason that

unattainable capital was necessary to their working. Given a few

hundreds, he was confident that he could make thousands out of any one

of them. It was hard, for the lack of a little fuel, so to speak, to

have so much power spoiling on one’s hands. I would have had him, when

once I understood, invest our own capital in some of them; but, though

I could see he loved me for the suggestion, he had the better strength

of affection to keep loyal to his trust, which he administered

scrupulously according to the law. Afterwards, when I came to know him

better, I could not but be thankful that he had shown this superior

genius for honesty; for his faith in his own concerns was so complete,

and at the same time so naïve, that he might otherwise have lacked

nothing but the guilt to be a defaulter.

As to the patents themselves, they represented a hundred phases of

craft, every one of which delighted and convinced me by its

originality. There was a design amongst them for an automatic

dairy-maid, a machine which, by exhausting the air in a number of

flexible tubes, could milk twenty cows at once. There was a design for

making little pearls large, by inserting them like setons in the

shells of living oysters. There was a plan for a ship to be driven by

a portable windmill, which set a turbine spinning under the stern.

Uncle Jenico’s contrivances were mostly on an heroic scale, and

covered every form of enterprise--from the pill which was to eliminate

dyspepsia from the land, to a scheme for liquidating the National Debt

by pawning all England for a term of years to an International Trust.

At the same time, there was no human need too mean for his

consideration. He was for ever striving to economise labour for the

betterment of his poorer fellow-creatures. His inventiveness was a

great charity, which did not even begin at home. His patents, from

being designed to improve any condition but his own, suffered the

neglect of a world to which selfishness is the first principle of

business competence. His “Napina,” a liquid composition from which old

clothes, after having been dipped therein, re-emerged as new, could

find no market. His “Labour-of-Love Spit,” which was turned by a

rocking-chair moving a treadle, like that on a knife-grinder’s

machine, so that the cook could roast her joint in great comfort while

dozing over her paper, could make no headway against the more

impersonal clock-work affair. And so it was with most of his designs,

but a few of which had been actually tested before being condemned on

insufficient evidence. What more ridiculous, for instance, than to

denounce his “Burglar’s Trap” on the score that one single idiot of a

householder had blundered into his own snare and been kept there while

the robbers were rifling his premises? What more scandalous than to

convict his Fire-Derrick--a noble invention, like a crane dangling a

little cabin, for saving life at conflagrations--because the first

time it was tested the box would not descend, but kept the insurance

gentlemen swinging in the air for an hour or two; or his Infallible

Lifebelt, which turned upside-down in the water for the single reason

that they tried it on a revenue officer who had lost his legs in an

explosion? No practical innovation was surely ever started without a

stumble. But Uncle Jenico had no luck. He sunk all his capital in his

own patents without convincing a soul, or--and this is the notable

thing--losing his temper. That one only of his possessions remained to

him, fresh and sound as when, as a little boy, he had invented a

flying top, which broke his grandmother’s windows. No neglect had

impaired it, nor adversity ruffled for more than a moment. If he had

patented it and nothing else, he could have made his fortune, I am

certain.

Still, when we came to be comrades--or partners, as he loved to call

us--his restless brain was busy as ever with ideas. Nothing was too

large or small for him to touch. He showed me, on an early occasion,

how his hat--not the black one he had worn at the funeral, but the big

beaver article that came over his eyes--explained its own proportions

in a number of little cupboards or compartments in the lining, which

were designed to carry one’s soap, toothbrush, razor, etc., when on a

short visit. He had the most delightful affection for his own

ingenuities, and the worldliest axioms for explaining the secret of

their success. On the afternoon when Mr. Quayle, after the kindest of

partings with me, had left us, and while he was yet on the stairs,

Uncle Jenico had bent to me and whispered: “Make it a business

principle, my boy, never to confess to insolvency. You heard the way I

assured the gentleman? Well, Richard, we may have in our despatch-box

there all Ophir lying fallow for the lack of a little cash to work it;

but we mustn’t tell our commercial friends so--no, no. We must let

them believe it is their privilege to back us. Necessity is a bad

recommendation.”

It may be. But I was not a commercial gent; and Uncle Jenico had all

my faith, and should have had all my capital if it had rested with me

to dispose of it as I liked.

During the time my uncle was engaged in London, George, good man,

remained at Ipswich to look after me, though we were forced

reluctantly to dismiss him as soon as things were settled. It was

impossible, however, on a hundred and fifty pounds a year to keep a

man-servant; and so presently he went, and with him my last connection

with the old life. Not more of the past than the clothes I stood in

now remained to me. It was as if I had been shipwrecked and adopted by

a stranger. But the final severance seemed a relief to Uncle Jenico,

who, when it was accomplished, drew a long breath, and adjusted his

glasses and looked at me rosily.

“Now, Richard,” he said, “with nobody any longer to admonish us, comes

the question of our home, and where to make it. Have you any choice?”

Dear me; what did I know of the world’s dwelling-places? I answered

that I left it all to him.

“Very well,” he said, with a happy sigh; “then I have an original

plan. Suppose we make it nowhere?”

He paused to note how the surprise struck home.

“You mean----” I began, hesitating.

“I mean,” said he, “supposing we have no fixed abode, but go from

place to place as it suits us?”

What boy would not have jumped at the suggestion? I was in ecstasies.

“You see,” said Uncle Jenico, “moving about, I get ideas; and in ideas

lies our future prosperity. Let’s look at the map.”

It was a lovely proposal. To enter, in actual being, the mysterious

regions of pictures-on-the-wall; to breathe the real atmosphere, so

long felt in romance, of tinted lithographs and coloured prints; to

find roads and commons and phantom distances, wistful, unattainable

dreams hitherto, made suddenly accessible to me--it was thrilling, it

was rapturous. My uncle humoured the thought so completely as to leave

to me the fanciful choice of our first resting-place.

“Only don’t let it be too far,” he said. “Just at present we must go

moderate, and until I can realise on the sale of a little patent,

which I am on the point of parting with for an inadequate though

considerable sum.”

I spent a delightful hour in poring over the county map. It was

patched with verdant places--big farms and gentlemen’s estates--and

reminded me somehow of those French green-frilled sugarplums which

crunch liqueur and are shaped like little vegetables. One could feel

the cosy shelter of the woods, marked in groves of things that looked

like tiny cabbages, and gaze down in imagination from the hills

meandering like furry caterpillars with a miniature windmill here and

there to turn them from their course. The yellow roads were rich in

suggestion of tootling coaches, and milestones, and inns revealing

themselves round corners, with troughs in front and sign-boards, and

perhaps a great elm shadowed with caves of leafiness at unattainable

heights. But the red spit of railway which came up from the bottom of

the picture as far as Colchester, and was thence extended, in a dotted

line only, to Ipswich, gave me a thrill of memory half sad and half

beautiful. For it was by that wonderful crimson track that my father

and I had travelled our last road together as far as the old Essex

town, where, since it ended there for the time being, we had taken

coach for Suffolk.

“Made up your mind?” asked Uncle Jenico, by-and-by, with a chuckle.

I flushed and wriggled, and came out with it.

“Can’t we--mayn’t we go to the sea? I’ve never been there yet; and

we’re so close; and papa promised.”

“The sea?” he echoed. “Why, to be sure. I’ve long had an idea that

seaweed might be used for water-proofing. It’s an inspiration,

Richard. We’ll beat Mr. Macintosh on his own ground. But whereabouts

to the sea, now?”

I could not suggest a direction, however; so he borrowed for me a

local guide-book, which dealt with places of interest round the coast,

and left me to study it while he went out for a walk to get ideas.

I had no great education; but I could read glibly enough for my eight

years. When Uncle Jenico returned in an hour or two, our choice, so

far as I was concerned, was made. I brought the book, and, laying it

before him, pointed to a certain description.

“Dunberry,” he read, skipping, so as to take the gist of it--“the

Sitomagus of the Roman occupation, and later the Dunmoc of East

Anglia. Population, 694. (H’m, h’m!) Disfranchised by the Reform Act

of ’32. (H’m!) Formerly a place of importance, owning a seaport,

fortifications, seven churches and an abbey. In the twelfth century

the sand, silting up, destroyed its harbour and admitted the

encroachments of the sea, from which date its prosperity was gradually

withdrawn. (H’m, h’m!) Since, century by century, made the devouring

sport of the ocean, until, at the present date, but a few crumbling

ruins, toppling towards their final extinction in the waves below,

remain the sole sad relics of an ancient glory which once proudly

dominated the element under which it was doomed later to lie

’whelmed.”

Uncle Jenico stopped reading, and looked up at me a little puzzled.

“There’s better to come,” I murmured, blushing.

He nodded, and went on--

“A hill, called the Abbot’s Mitre, as much from its associations,

perhaps, as from its peculiar conformation, overlooks the modern

village, and is crowned on its seaward edge by the remains of the

ancient foundation from which it takes its name. Some business is done

in the catching and curing of sprats and herrings. There is an annual

fair. Morant states that after violent storms, when the shingle-drifts

are overturned, bushels of coins, Roman and other, and many of

considerable value, may be picked up for the seeking.”

Uncle Jenico’s face came slowly round to stare into mine. His hair

seemed risen; his jaw was a little dropped.

“Richard!” he whispered, “our fortune is made.”

“Yes,” I thrilled back, delighted. “That’s why I chose it. I thought

you’d be pleased.”

He looked out the direction eagerly on the map. It was distant, by

road, some twenty-five miles north-east by north from Ipswich; by sea,

perhaps ten miles further. But the weather was fine, and

water-transport more suited to our finances. So two days later we had

started for Dunberry, in one of the little coasting ketches that ply

between Harwich and Yarmouth carrying farm produce and such chance

passengers as prefer paying cheap for a risk too dear for security.

It was lovely April weather, and a light wind blowing up the shores

from the south-east bowled us gaily on our way. I never so much as

thought of sickness, and if I had, Uncle Jenico, looking in his large

Panama hat like a benevolent planter, would have shamed me, with his

rubicund serenity, back to confidence again. Our sole property, for

all contingencies, was contained in the despatch-box and a single

carpet bag; and with no more sense of responsibility than these

engendered, we were committing ourselves to a future of ravishing

possibilities.

Throughout the pleasant journey we hugged the coast, never being more

than a mile or two distant from it, so that its features, wild or

civilized, were always plain to us. It showed ever harsher and more

desolate the farther we ran north, and the tearing and hollowing

effect of waves upon its sandy cliffs more evident. All the way it was

fretted, near and far, with towers--a land of churches. They stood

grey in the gaps of hills; brown and gaunt on solitary headlands.

Sometimes they were dismantled; and once, on a deserted shore, we saw

a belfry and part of a ruined chancel footing the tide itself. It was

backed by a great heaped billow of sand, which--so our skipper told

us--had stood between it and the sea till storms flung it all over and

behind, leaving the walls it had protected exposed to destruction.

As evening came on I must confess my early jubilation waned somewhat.

The thin, harsh air, the melancholy cry of the birds, the eternal

desolation of the coast, chilled me with a creeping terror of our

remoteness from all that friendly warmth and comfort we had rashly

deserted. Not a light greeted us from the shore but such as shone

ghastly in the lifeless wastes of foam. The last coast town, miles

behind, seemed to have passed us beyond the final bounds of

civilization. So that it was with something like a whimper of joy that

I welcomed the sudden picture of a hill notched oddly far ahead

against the darkening sky. I ran hurriedly to Uncle Jenico.

“Uncle!” I cried. “Uncle, look! The Abbot’s Mitre!”

The skipper heard me, and answered.

“Aye,” said he, “it’s the Mitre, sure enow,” and spat over the

taffrail.

There was something queer in his tone. He rolled his quid in his

cheek.

“And like enow, by all they say,” he added, looking at Uncle Jenico,

“to figure agen for godliness.”

“Eh?” said my uncle; “I beg your pardon?”

“Granted,” answered the skipper shortly; and that was all.

There was an uneasy atmosphere of enigma here. But we were abroad

after adventure, when all was said, and had no cause to complain.

I stood holding my uncle’s hand, while we ran our last knot for home

in the twilight. As we neared the hill its peculiar shape was

gradually lost, and instead, looking up from below, we saw the cap of

a broken tower showing over its swell. Then hill and ruin dropped

behind us, a shadowy bulk, and of a sudden we were come opposite a

sandy cleft cutting up into the cliff, and below on the shingle a

ghostly group of boats and shore-loafers, though still no light or

sign of houses.

We brought to, the sails flapping, and the skipper sent a long

melancholy boom sounding over the water from a horn. It awoke a stir

on the beach, and presently we saw a boat put off, and come curtseying

towards us. It was soon alongside, revealing three men, of whom the

one who sat steering was a little remarkable. He was immensely tall

and slouching, with a lank bristled jaw, a swarthy skin, and, in

spectral contrast, eye-places of such an odd sick pallor as to give

him the appearance, at least in this gloaming, of wearing huge

spectacles. However, he was the authoritative one of the three, and

welcomed us civilly enough for early visitors to Dunberry, hoping we

should favour the place.

“None so well as thee, Jole, since thy convarsion,” bellowed the

skipper, as we pushed off.

There followed a chuckle of laughter from the ketch, and I noticed

even that the two men pulling us creased their cheeks. Their

companion, unmoving, clipped out something like an oath, which he

gruffly and hastily coughed over.

“The Lord in His wrath visit not the scoffer,” he said aloud, “nor

waft him blindfold this night upon the Weary Sands!”

In a few minutes we slid up the beach on the comb of a breaker, and

half a dozen arms were stretched to help us out. One seized the

carpet-bag, another--our tall coxswain’s itself--the despatch-box; and

thereby, by that lank arm, hangs this tale. For my uncle, who was

jealous of nothing in the world but his box, in scrambling to resecure

it from its ravisher, slipped on the wet thwarts, and, falling with

his head against a corner of the article itself, rolled out bleeding

and half-stunned upon the sand.

I was terribly frightened, and for a moment general consternation

reigned. But my uncle was not long in recovering himself, though to

such a dazed condition that a strong arm was needed in addition to his

stick to help him towards the village. We started, a toilful

procession, up the sandy gully (Dunberry Gap its name), I carrying the

precious case, and presently, reaching the top, saw the village going

in a long gentle sweep below us, the scoop of the land covering it

seawards, which was the reason we had seen no lights.

It had been Uncle Jenico’s intention to look for reasonable lodgings;

but this being from his injury impracticable, we let ourselves be

conducted to the Flask Inn, the most important in the place, where we

were no sooner arrived than he consented to be put to bed, with me in

a little closet giving off his room. It was near dark by the time we

were settled, and feeling forlorn and bewildered I was glad enough,

after a hasty supper, to tuck my troubles between the sheets and

forget everything in sleep. But how little I guessed, as I did so,

that Uncle Jenico had, in falling, taken possession, like William the

Conqueror, of this new land of our adoption.

CHAPTER V.

THE STORY OF THE EARTHQUAKE.

Providence, I cannot but believe, had all this time humoured us

along a seeming “Road of Casualty,” which was, in truth, the direct

path to its own wonderful ends. We talk of luck and accident and

coincidence. They are, I am certain, but the veils with which It

blinds us to Its inexorable conclusions. My chance selection of our

destination, my uncle’s mishap--what were these but second and third

acts in the strange drama which had begun in the law courts of

Ipswich, where my father had given his life for a truth, which was to

be here, thirty miles away, proven and consummated. The _dénouement_

was distant yet, to be sure, for Providence, having all eternity to

plot in, works deliberately. Nevertheless, It never loses sight, I

think, of what we call the Unities of Art.

I awoke from a dreamless sleep, a restored and avid little giant. It

was bright morning. A clock on the stairs cleared its throat and sang

out six times. The house was still, save for a shuffling of drowsy

maids at their dusting below. I lay quiet, conscious of the most

unfamiliar atmosphere all about me--of whitewashed walls; of a smell

between wood-smoke and seaweed and the faint sourness of beer; of cold

boarded floors gritty with sand; of utter remoteness from the noise of

traffic habitual to a young denizen of towns. This little gap of time

had lifted me clean out of my accustomed conditions, and dumped me in

an outpost of civilization, amongst uncouth allies, friendlies in

name, but as foreign as foes to my experience.

I got up soon very softly, and washed and dressed and went out. I had

to pass, on my way, through my uncle’s room; and it relieved me to see

him slumbering peacefully on his pillow, though the white bandage

across his forehead gave me a momentary shock.

I emerged upon a landing, on a wall of which, papered with varnished

marble, hung a smoke-stained print of a hunt, with a case of stuffed

water-birds on a table beneath. No one accosted me as I descended the

little creaking flight of stairs. I passed out by the unlatched

private door of the tavern, and found myself at the sea-end of the

village street. It was a glowing morning. Not a soul appeared abroad,

and I turned to the path by which we had come the night before,

thrilling to possess the sea.

The ground went gently up by the way of a track that soon lost itself

in the thin grass of the cliffs. Not till I reached the verge did I

pause to reconnoitre, and then at once all was displayed about me. I

drew one deep delighted breath, and turned as my foremost duty to

examine the way I had come. The village, yawning from its chimneys

little early draughts of smoke, ran straight from the sea, perhaps for

a quarter of a mile, under the shelter of a low, long hill on which a

few sheep were folded. Beyond this hill, southwards, and divided from

it by a deepish gorge, whose end I could see like a cut trough in the

cliff edge, bulged another, the Abbot’s, the contour which gave it its

name but roughly distinguishable at these closer quarters. The ruins

we had passed overnight crowned this second slope near its marge; and

inland both hills dropped into pastures, whence the ground rose again

towards a rampart of thick woods which screened all Dunberry from the

world beyond.

It looked so endearing, such a happy valley of peace, one would

scarcely have credited the picture with a single evil significance;

yet--but I am not going to anticipate. Tingling with pleasure, I faced

round to the sea.

It was withdrawn a distance away, creaming at the ebb. All beyond was

a sheet of golden lustre fading into the bright mists of dawn. Right

under the rising sun, like a bar beneath a crest, stretched the line

of the Weary Sands, a perilous bank situate some five miles from

shore; and between bank and coast rode a solitary little two-masted

lugger, with shrouds of gossamer and hull of purple velvet, it seemed,

in the soft glow. Even while I looked, this shook out sails like

beetles’ wings, and, drawing away, revealed a tiny boat speeding

shorewards. I bent and peered over. Ten fathoms beneath me the gully

we had climbed in the dark discharged itself, a river of sand, upon

the beach; and tumbled at its mouth, as it might be _débris_, lay a

dozen pot-bellied fishing boats. Right and left the cliffs rose and

dropped in fantastic conformations, until they sank either way into

the horizon. It was a wonderful scene to the little town-bred boy.

Presently I looked for the rowing-boat again, and saw it close in

shore. In a minute it grated on the shingle, and there heaved himself

out of it the tall fisherman who had escorted us last night. I was

sure of him, and he also, it appeared, of me; for after staring up

some time, shading his eyes with his hand, he turned, as if convinced,

to haul his craft into safety. I watched him awhile, and was then once

more absorbed in the little vessel drawing seawards, when I started to

hear his voice suddenly address me close by. He must have come up the

gully as soft-footed as a cat.

His eyes were less like a marmoset’s by daylight; but they were still

a strange feature in his gaunt forbidding face. I felt friendly

towards every one; yet somehow this man’s expression chilled me, as he

stood smiling down ingratiatory without another word.

“Is that your little ship out there?” I asked, for lack of anything

better.

“Lor’ bless ’ee, no, sir,” he answered, heartily, but in a sort of

breathless way. “What makes ’ee think so?”

“Weren’t you coming from it?”

“Me!” He protested, with a panting chuckle. “Jole Rampick own that

_there_ little tender beauty! I’d skipped out _fur_ my morning dip,

sir--_if_ you must know. A wonderful bracing water this--_if_ folks

would only credit it.”

His unshorn dusky face was not, I could not help thinking, the best

testimony to its cleansing properties. But I kept my wisdom to myself,

and turned to go back to the inn. Mr. Rampick volunteered his company,

and on the way some instructive information.

“Aye,” he panted huskily; “man and boy _fur_ nigh on fifty year have I

known this here Abbot’s Dunberry, but never--_till_ three months

ago--the healing vartues of its brine.”

“Who told you of them?” I asked.

“The Lord,” he answered, showing the under-whites of his eyes a

moment. “The Lord, sir, _through_ his minister the parson--that’s Mr.

Sant. Benighted we were--_and_ ignorant--till the light was vouchsafed

us; and parson he revealed the Bethesda lying _at_ our very doors.”

“What’s Bethesda?” I had, I am sorry to say, to ask.

“A blessed watering-place,” he said--“I’m humbly surprised, sir; like

as parson calc’lates _to_ make of this here, if the Almighty will

condescend to convart our former wickedness _to_ our profit.”

“Were you wicked?”

“Bad, bad!” He answered, setting his lips, and shaking his head. “A

nest of smugglers _and_ forswearers, till He set His hand on us.”

“Mr. Rampick! How?”

“It tuk the form of an ’arthquake,” he said, with a little cough.

I jumped, and ejaculated: “O! Where?”

“Yonder, in the Mitre,” he said, waving his hand towards the hidden

bluff. “It’ll be fower months ago, won’t it, _as_ they run their last

contraband to ground _in_ the belly of that there hill. A cave, _it_

was supposed, sir; but few knew for sarten, and none will ever know

now till the day _when_ the Lord ‘shall judge the secrets of men.’

There was a way in, _as_ believed, known only to the few; and one

night, _as_ believed, them few entered by it, each man with his brace

o’ runlets--_and they never come out agen_!”

I gasped and knotted my fingers together. It did not occur to my

innocence to question the source of his knowledge, or conjecture.

“Why?” I whispered.

“Why?” he echoed in a sort of asthmatic fury. “Why, sir, because it

was a full cargo, and their iniquity according; and so the Lord He

spoke, _and_ the hill it closed upon ’em. In the dark, when we was all

abed, there come a roaring wind _from_ underground what turned our

hearts to water; and in the morning when we gathered to look, there

was the hill twisted _like_ a dead face out of knowledge, and the

Abbey--two-thirds of what was left--scrattled abroad.”

I could only stare up at him, breathing quick in face of this

wonderful romance. It had, I knew, been a year strangely prolific in

earth-shocks.

“Yes, sir,” he said soberly; “_if_ all what’s believed is Gospel true,

there at this moment lays those poor sinners, bedded like flints in

chalk--_and_ the hill fair reeking with Nantes brandy.”

He groaned hoarsely.

“Hallerloojer! It was a sign _and_ a warning. The shock of it carried

off th’ old vicar, and in a week or two arter Mr. Sant he come _to_

take his place. He found us a sober’d people, Hallerloojer! and soil

meet _fur_ the Lord’s planting. You be the fust fruits, sir; and we

favourably hope _as_ when you go away you’ll recommend us.”

Perhaps I vaguely understood by this something of the nature of our

welcome. Given an isolated fishing village skipped by tourists because

of its remoteness; given the sudden withdrawal from that village of

its natural advantages for an illicit trade; given a clerical

enthusiast, introduced at the right moment, to point out to a

depressed population it’s locality’s potentialities as a

watering-place, and to show the way for them to win an honest

prosperity out of the ruins of evil; given, to top all, a dressing of

local superstition, and the position was clear. Such deduction, no

doubt, was for the adult rather than the child; but though I could not

draw it at the time, it was there to _be_ drawn, I am sure.

As we talked we had reached the inn, and my companion, touching his

cap, passed on. But he came back before I had time to enter, and

addressed me breathlessly, as if on an after-thought.

“Begging _your_ pardon, sir--but you makes me laugh, you reely

does--about that there lugger belonging to poor Jole Rampick.” And he

went off chuckling, and looking, with his little head and slouching

shoulders and stilts of legs, like the hind-quarters of a pantomime

elephant.

I found my uncle sitting up in preparation to breakfast in bed. He was

very genial and happy; but, so it seemed to me, extraordinarily vague.

I told him about my adventure and the story of the earthquake, which

he seemed somehow unable to dissociate from his own accident.

“I knew it, Richard,” he said; “but it was taking rather a mean

advantage of a lame man, eh? There’s no security against it but

balloons--that I’ve often thought. You see, when the ground itself

gives underneath you, where are you to go? If one could only pump

oxygen into one’s own head, you know. I’ll think about it in the

course of the morning. I don’t fancy I shall get up just at present.

That despatch-box, now--it was a drastic way of impressing its claims

upon me, eh? Well, well!”

He laughed, rather wildly I thought.

“Uncle,” I said, “you’ve never told me--how did you get lame?”

“How did I get lame?” he murmured, pressing the bandage on his

forehead. “Why, to be sure, it was a parachute, Richard--a really

capital thing I invented. But the wires got involved--the merest

accident--and I came to the ground.”

He was interrupted by two young ladies, daughters of the inn, who came

themselves--out of curiosity, I think--to serve us breakfast. They

were over-dressed, all but for their trodden slippers, with large bows

of hair on their heads, and they giggled a good deal and answered

questions pertly.

“Well, my dears,” said Uncle Jenico, “how about the earthquake?”

They stared at him, and then at one another, and burst out laughing.

“O, there now!” said one; “earthquake yourself, old gentleman! Go

along with you!” And they ran out, and we heard them tittering all

down the stairs.

Uncle Jenico got clearer after his meal, though he was still

disinclined to move. I sat with him all the morning, while he showed

and explained to me more of the contents of his box; and about midday

a visitor, the Reverend Mr. Sant, was announced. I stood up expectant,

and saw a thin, dark young man, in clerical dress, enter the room at a

stride. He had the colourless face, large-boned nose, and burning eyes

of a zealot, and not an ounce of superfluous flesh anywhere about him.

Much athletic temperance had trimmed him down to frame and muscle, but

had not parched the sources of a very sweet smile, which was the only

emotional weakness he retained. He came up to the bed, took my uncle’s

hand, and introduced himself in a word.

“Permit me,” he said; “I heard of your accident. I know a trifle of

surgery, and our apothecary visits us but twice in the month. May I

look?”

He examined the hurt, and, saying he would send a salve for it,

settled down to talk.

Now, I could not follow the persuasive process; but all I know is that

within a quarter of an hour he had learned all my uncle’s and my

history, and the reason for our coming to Dunberry, and that, having

once mastered the details, he very ingeniously set himself to

appropriating them to the schemes of Providence.

“It is clear,” he said, “that you, free-lances of Destiny, were

inspired to select this, out of all the world, for your operations.

_We_ looked for visitors to report for us upon the attractions of the

place; _you_ for a quiet and healthful spot in which to develop your

schemes.”

“Very true,” said Uncle Jenico. “I’ve long had an idea for extracting

gold from sea-water.”

“You see?” cried Mr. Sant, greatly pleased. “It’s a clear

interposition of Providence. This coast is, I am sure, peculiarly

adapted, from the accessibility of its waters, to gold-seeking.”

I could not restrain my excitement.

“Please,” I said, “did-d-d the smugglers hide it there?”

Mr. Sant glanced at me sharply.

“Who told you about smugglers?” he demanded.

“Mr. Rampick,” I whispered, hanging my head.

“Ah!” he exclaimed, and turned to my uncle. “Old Joel Rampick, was it?

One of the most cherished of my converts, sir; a deeply religious man

at bottom, though circumstances long obscured the light in him. Old

Rampick, now! And talked about smuggling, did he? He’ll have drawn the

moral of it from his own experience, _I_ don’t doubt. Dunberry,

there’s no use concealing, has been a long thorn in the side of the

Revenue, though happily the earthquake has changed all that.”

“Ah, to be sure!” said my uncle; “the earthquake.”

“It was without question a Divine visitation,” said Mr. Sant,

resolutely.

“Do you think so?” said my uncle, his face falling. “My purpose in

coming here was really most harmless, sir.”

Mr. Sant looked puzzled; then went on, with a dry smack of his lips:

“I am afraid that my predecessor lacked a little the apostolic

fervour. He was old, and liked his ease, good man. Perhaps long

association with the place had blunted his prejudices. I must not play

the Pharisee to him, however. No doubt so circumstanced I should have

failed no less to sow the seed. Heaven sent me at a fruitful moment:

to Heaven be the credit and the glory! This little boy now--nephew

Dicky? He knows his catechism?”

“Ah!” said Uncle Jenico, with a cunning look; “does he?”

“Chit-chit!” protested the clergyman. “I hope not altogether ignorant

of it?”

He was decently shocked, and won an easy promise from my uncle that I

should come up to him for an hour’s instruction every day. Then he

rose to go.

“You’ll excuse me,” he said, bending his brows, “but I trust you are

satisfied with your quarters?”

“Well, yes,” answered my uncle, hesitating; “but--an inn, you see.

It’s a little more than we can--than we ought to--eh?”

Mr. Sant brightened immediately. We came to know afterwards that he

strongly disapproved of these flashy Miss Flemings, and had once

expressed in public some surprise that they had not been impounded as

skittish animals not under proper control.

“There’s the widow Puddephatt, ripe and ready for visitors,” he said,

“and perfectly reasonable, I am sure. May I give you her address? It’s

No. 3, the Playstow.”

My uncle thanked him warmly; and, smitten with a sudden idea, caught

at his coat as he was leaving.

“O, by the way!” he said, “these coins to be picked up on the beach,

now. There are enough left to make it profitable, I suppose?”

Mr. Sant stared at him.

“The coins, Roman and other,” persisted Uncle Jenico, anxiously

scanning the clergyman’s face; “the antiques, which Morant tells us

litter the beach like shells after storms?”

Mr. Sant shook his head.

“I have heard nothing of them during _my_ time,” he said; “but I

should hardly think smuggling would have got such a hold here if it

were the Tom Tiddler’s ground your friend supposes it to be.”

Directly he was gone, Uncle Jenico turned to me, rubbing his hands,

with a most roguish smile puckering his mouth.

“Richard,” he said, “we are in plenty of time. The obtuseness of the

rustic is a thing astonishing beyond words! Here, with all Pactolus at

his feet, he needs a stranger to come and show him his opportunities.

But, mum, boy, mum! We’ll keep this little matter to ourselves.”

CHAPTER VI.

MRS. PUDDEPHATT AND FANCY-MARIA.

The following day my uncle was near himself again, and we left the

Flask inn and took lodging with the widow Puddephatt. The Playstow was

a little green, about half-way down the village, where the villagers

reared their may-pole on May-day, and built their fires on Midsummer’s

Eve, and caroused in September on the harvest-largesse won from

passers-by. Round about, in a little _square_, were cottages, detached

and exclusive, the _élite_ of Dunberry; and to one side was the

church--but now in process of completion--in whose porch the daring

would seat themselves on St. Mark’s eve to see, at midnight, the

wraiths of the year’s pre-doomed come and knock at the door. Mr. Sant

had, however, limited that custom, as well as some others less

reputable; and the fact that he was able to do so spoke volumes for

his persuasiveness. At the present time the villagers, under his

stimulus, were transferring, stone by stone, to the long unfinished

fabric and its adjoining school-house, the less sacred parts of the

ruined foundation on the hill.

Mrs. Puddephatt, though Dunberry-born, was a comparative acquisition

to the village, to which she had been summoned, and to her natural

succession in No. 3, the Playstow, through the death of an only sister

without encumbrances. She had, in fact, gone very young, a great many

years ago, into service in London, and had never set foot again in her

native place until this inheritance, now two years old, had called

her. She brought with her an ironic atmosphere of the great world, and

a disdainful tolerance towards the little, in which her lot was now to

vegetate. She had, in her high experience, “’tweenied,” “obliged,”

scullery-maided, kitchen-maided, house-maided, parlour-maided, and

old-maided; and she had somehow emerged from this five-fold chrysalis

of virginity the widow Puddephatt--no one knew by what warrant, other

than that of a sort of waspish charity-girl cap, with a knuckle-bone

frill round her face. But then her knowledge of men was so matrimonial

that it was admitted nothing but a husband could have inspired it. Her

dictums, in respect to this mystic experience, were _merum sal_ to the

wives of Dunberry.

“Look in the pot for your new gownd,” and “The way to a man’s purse is

through his mouth,” may be bracketed for utterances cryptic to the

“general,” but not to _their_ delighted understandings.

“A hopen ’and comes empty ’ome.”

“A man shuts his sweet’art’s mouth with a kiss, but his wife’s heyes.”

“Be careful of a Saturday morning to mend the ’ole in your man’s

pocket.”

“When your ’usband talks of his hage, be sure he means yours.”

Such and the like shrewd axioms served the widow Puddephatt at least

as well as marriage lines; and, if more were needed, her mastery of

the exact science of nagging and of the conquering resource of

hysterics supplied it. Sometimes, it was whispered, she was to be seen

in her front garden viciously dusting a man’s coat with a stick; and

on this moral implication alone, late tavern roysterers, lurching home

after closing-time past the little wicket where she was often to be

seen watching spectral and ironic, had been known to slink by, meanly

conscious of deserting, and surrendering into her gloating hands a

purely imaginary Puddephatt, their late boon companion.

This tremendous lady undertook the care of us with infinite

condescension, and, hearing that we were Londoners bred, gathered us

at once under the protection of her maternal and metropolitan wing.

“Lork, Fancy-Maria!” she would say, with an air of amused tolerance

towards the little Suffolk rawbones who “generalled” for her; “we

don’t breathe on the knives and polish ’em in our haprons in

_London_!” Or, “That won’t do, Fancy-Maria! We know better in London

than to dust the ’ot plates with our helbers.”

With this shibboleth of sarcastic comparison, she had won, not only

Fancy-Maria, but all feminine Dunberry to a perspiring emulation of

her gentility, so that in the course of her two years the social code

had grown quite elevated, and it was no longer fashionable to dine in

one’s shirt-sleeves.

Fancy-Maria was her adoring, but unable lieutenant. She tried hard,

and breathed _very_ hard; yet her fervour led to frequent disaster. It

was the management of trays that tested her most severely. If she rose

with one from the depths, she invariably struck it against the lintel

of the parlour door, and shot everything from it into the hall. If she

descended with one from the heights, she tripped at the corner where

the stairs turned, and tobogganed down on it the rest of the way,

preceded by an avalanche of cups and dishes. She always did her best

to keep the contents steady with her thumbs; but her thumbs, though

large, were not universal, and were generally occupied in holding

secure the bread and butter, for choice, on one side, and the fried

fish on the other. Some people make a point of leaving a little piece

on each dish “for manners.” We always cut out and left Fancy-Maria’s

thumb-marks for that mysterious retainer of our childhood.

It was not long before Uncle Jenico questioned Mrs. Puddephatt about

the earthquake. She turned up her nose at the first mention of it, and

tittered the shrillest sarcasm.

“Lork, sir!” she said, “you’ve never abin took hin by that stuff!

_And_ you a Londoner!”

“Stuff, is it?” said Uncle Jenico, genially. “And why, now?”

She cocked her head and folded her arms across her chest, like a

tricksy saint in an old woodcut.

“I wouldn’t a’ believed it of you,” she said; “no, not if you’d gone

and took me by the ears and battered my ’ed on the table.”

“But, my good woman,” began my uncle, “Mr. Sant----”

“Bless ’im for a hinnercent suckling-dove o’cooing among the

sarpints!” she interrupted, with a tight little laugh.

We looked at her quite bewildered, and Uncle Jenico was evidently at a

loss for an answer.

“What ’e wants, that ’e believes,” said Mrs. Puddephatt, nodding her

head many times. “But _he_ ain’t a Londoner, and _hi ham_!”

The advantage, one would have thought, lay with the untainted

clergyman.

“_Herthquake_, indeed!” exclaimed Mrs. Puddephatt, with withering

contempt. “And grace took hout of it? No, sir; not more than what

Elijah looked to find in his’n, and was deceived in the Almighty. A

fine show convert we’ve got in our Mr. Rampick, haven’t we? Ho, yes!

Tee-hee! And I ’opes as he makes it pay, sinst the loss of his

liveli’ood by the _herthquake_.”

The amount of scorn she got each time into the word was simply

blasting.

“He lost----” began my uncle, surprised.

“Ah! what would he lose, now?” interrupted the lady, acridly humorous.

“That’s just _hit_, sir. Talked of the wicked smugglers to Master

Bowen here, didn’t he? Well, supposin’ he were hisself the most

howtdacious of the lot? I don’t say he was, you know. I wouldn’t so

commit myself. I merely states as a curious fact that this Rampick, as

was formerly as warm and dangerous a man as the best in the place, is,

sinst the _herthquake_, become a loafer, without any visible means of

substance. Ho, yes! A pretty convert, I _don’t_ think!”

“You believe him to be at heart a smuggler still?” said my uncle.

“Now, now, Mrs. Puddephatt!”

“Sir,” she answered, with dignity, “I thank you for the himplication;

but whatever my apperient greenness, I wasn’t born yesterday. We may

have our faults in London, but to be Suffolk paunches isn’t among

them. Once a smuggler, sir, is halways a smuggler.”

“Indeed?” said Uncle Jenico, much abashed.

“Yes, sir,” said Mrs. Puddephatt; “just as to be born a gipsy is to

laugh at the rates. A ’ottentot, sir, isn’t ashamed of his own

nekkedness, nor a smuggler of his smugness. Reform, hindeed!”

“Well, well,” said Uncle Jenico. “But what makes you suppose it

_wasn’t_ an earthquake?”

The landlady laughed sarcastic.

“In London, sir,” she said, “_herthquakes_--as is p’raps beknownst to

you--sends out sulfurious perfumes, and not the heffluvium of brandy.”

“Good heavens!” exclaimed my uncle. “But what----?”

“I reveal nothing, Mr. Paxton,” she interrupted him, “but what my nose

tells me. You may smell it yet, sir, begging your pardon, about the

Mitre.”

“But----”

“I’ve ’eard tell, sir, of ile wells, but never of brandy. I may be

wrong; and halso I may be wrong in doubting that gunpowder forms of

itself in the ’oller places of the herth,” and with these enigmatic

words she left us.

But it must be said that, for all her withering gentility, she made us

an excellent landlady, as we had full opportunity of proving. For--I

may as well out with it at once--we had come to Dunberry to stay.

CHAPTER VII.

MR. SANT.

I think, perhaps, Uncle Jenico foresaw it no more than I. Without

doubt, at first, he would have laughed to scorn the idea of sinking

all his eager interests in this little Suffolk fishing village, whose

communications with any town of even fifth-rate importance, such as

Yokestone, were by seven miles at least of villainous roads. Our

settlement was gradual; our departure postponed, in the beginning,

week by week, probably like that of the man who went to Venice for a

fortnight and stayed for thirty years. The initiatory step towards our

continued residence was certainly my uncle’s acceptance of Mr. Sant’s

offer to instruct me. That was, as the French say, _le premier pas qui

coûte_. Afterwards, the offer--being extended, with infinite

consideration for our means, to one for my general tuition by the

clergyman--grew to confirm our attachment to the place, until it came

to be tacitly understood that Dunberry was to see me through my

education.

But there was another reason. Uncle Jenico seemed never _quite_ to

recover from the stun inflicted upon him at his landing. His

affection, his geniality, his inventiveness were no whit impaired; yet

somehow the last, one could have thought, had relapsed from the

practical upon the theoretic. He was a trifle less restless; a trifle

more inert. He appeared to bask in a sort of luminous placidity, and

more and more his concern in his patents diminished. I do not mean by

this to imply that his schemes for our enrichment were all forgotten.

On the contrary, they concentrated to an intensity as pathetic as it

was single in its object. I know at this date that Uncle Jenico was a

lovable failure. I recognize, moreover, as I hardly recognized then,

that a wistful realization of this fact--minus its qualifying

adjective--was beginning to dawn upon him, and that he was inclining

to consider his “lame and impotent conclusions” a right judgment upon

him for his self-seeking. God bless him, I say! He thought to atone

for this, his egotism, dear charitable soul, by devoting all his

remaining energies to the task of making the fortune of the little

trust committed to his care. He wrought, in fact, that he might die

content, leaving me rich; and, in the furtherance of this object, his

schemes were not, as I say, forgotten, but transferred. They were

consolidated, in short, into one, which in the end was to become an

obsession. But of that I will treat in its place.

As soon as we were settled, I began at once to go to Mr. Sant’s for my

daily lesson, the scope of which imperceptibly enlarged itself from

Catechism to the Classics. The rectory stood inland beyond the

Playstow, in a rather lonely position under the drop of the hill. It

was a dark, mossy old building, shrouded in trees, and a by-road went

past its gates up to the woods beyond, in the depths of whose shadows

lay the Court Manor-house and its bed-ridden old squire.

Mr. Sant was a bachelor, a tough militant Churchman and Church

reformer. He taught me the uses of my fists as well as of the

Decalogue. No doubt it was this constitution of his which made such

way with the villagers, for Englishmen respect piety the better for

its being knocked into them. I took my share of his excellent

influence, and I trust it helped to make a man of me. You shall hear

by-and-by about the first practical use to which I put it.

He had the motto from Cicero framed and hung over the mantelpiece in

his study. I will quote it to you, because it speaks the man more

perfectly than I can do. _Quidquid agas, agere pro viribus_! Whatever

you do, to do with your whole strength--that was it. It was a maxim

very apt to one whose own strength, both of will and body, was of

tempered steel.

One among his many characteristic innovations was “The Feast of

Lanterns,” as he called it. A lecture, to combine instruction with

amusement, would be called for delivery in the church after dark.

Whosoever listed might, on a single condition, attend this. He would

find set up, spectrally discernible in the chancel, which, like the

rest of the building, would be unlighted, a screen of white linen, on

which had been roughly sketched in crayon, by the courageous lecturer

himself, a number of objects--to become, in their turn,

subjects--which might range, say, from a leg of mutton to the dome of

St. Paul’s. The condition of attendance was simply that each comer

should bring his or her own lantern, with the natural consequence that

the greater the company the brighter the illumination. Now, with the

first arrival began hymns, and were so continued until sufficient

lights were congregated to reveal the drawings on the screen, a right

identification of any one of which, by any member of the audience, at

the close of any verse, put a period to the singing and started a

disquisition on the object named. It must be said that the

identification was not always accurate, in which case the singing was

continued. For religious and artistic fervour are not necessarily

associated, and the splendid daring which Mr. Sant put into his work

sometimes obscured its intentions, as when his bellows, designed to

introduce a dissertation on pulmonics, were taken for a ham. But the

vigour and resourcefulness of the lecturer neither allowed an

_impasse_, nor, while he was always quite ready to join in the

laughter over his own artistic shortcomings, permitted criticism to

degenerate into fooling. He did not object to laughter; on the

contrary (I am afraid it will scandalize some people), he credited the

Almighty with an almighty sense of humour, only he insisted upon its

being tempered to the sacredness of the place in which it was evoked.

And, for the rest, he had a fund of bright and ready information at

his constant disposal.

Such is an example of his methods, and, if any pious reactionaries

object, I can only say that in the result it was educational; that it

won tavern-loafers to at least one wholesome evening in the week;

that, in short, it attained such popularity, that any dissipated

seceder attempting to sneak out of the church, and thereby obscure the

light by so much as the loss of a taper, would be roughly grabbed back

by his fellows, and forced, willy-nilly, to hear the lecture out.

Mr. Sant, to sum him up, was a zealot without being a bigot, and a

devoted servant to his Master without prejudice to human nature. He

was also a capable boxer. I came to love as much as to respect him.

CHAPTER VIII.

TREASURE-HUNTING.

For a fortnight succeeding our arrival the weather remained calm and

bright, so that Uncle Jenico and I were able to explore the locality

with great comfort and satisfaction. The coast, which we followed up

both north and south for miles, was extremely desolate and unvisited,

though bearing at intervals all along it the traces of former

settlements. It would seem to have been quite thickly populated once,

during a period which dated probably from the incursions, first, of

the Roman legions, and, after, of those salt sea-wolves who preferred

squatting round the fringes of their conquered island--with the open

door of the sea beside them, and its smell in their briny nostrils--to

penetrating into the traps of the close-shut valleys. Later,

Christianity had come to fret these windy, foam-whipped settlements

with pinnacles, and monastic walls, and stone fanes with jewelled

windows and airy bell-towers, so that church might peal to church all

down this long front line of the position it had won. But corruption

creeping in with prosperity, and lawlessness with the tides, God had

withdrawn His countenance from the temples that abused His service,

and had permitted the ocean to break in their defences and one by one

devour them. The priest who had evaded his vows had ages ago tucked up

his cassock and fled; the parson who succeeded him, and to the

reversion of his benefices, could not so hoodwink Heaven by taking his

tithes of smuggled tobacco and brandy, as to stay for one season the

hunger of the gluttonous waters. Year by year, century by century, the

storms had fed on these devoted sand-built coasts, and were still

feeding when we came to know them. Towns and once-flourishing colonies

had disappeared as utterly as if they had never existed. Not only

they, but the very soil on which they had been planted, paved the

floor of the ocean for miles out. There were legends of foundered

bells rung by unseen mermen at incredible distances from shore. There

were stories of treasure chests and sculptured marbles revealed to

storm-belated fishermen in the deep troughs of monstrous,

bottom-scouring waves. So far away as the Weary Sands themselves, it

was said, traces of the ancient Dunberry could be spelt out, in calm

seasons, by those who gazed intently enough and long enough into the

green, deep waters. It was a fable, probably, in a land of fables; yet

it served to emphasize the wreck of time, and will show upon what a

haunted border-land of ghosts we had come to make our home. The modern

village itself was old. How ancient, then, those grey ruins on the

cliff, which had survived to see the last of the glory, of which they

had once been a part, claimed by the deep, and their own hoary

traditions engulfed into the pettier traditions of a little clan!

These same ruins consisted of the great tower of the abbey, with a

mass of tumbled and complicated masonry at its foot; of the line of

the nave, picked out in an avenue of shattered arches which ran

seawards until stopped by the upward and outward sweep of the cliff;

and, finally, of a maze of huge fragments, mostly on the inland side,

which marked the sites of monastic buildings, lazar house, boundary

walls, and so forth. Elsewhere were traces of aisles, cloisters and

supernumerary offices uncountable, the whole buttressed with ivy. But

the most significant ruin of all, to my thinking, was one which stood

under the cliff, and for three-fourths of its depth apart from it.

This was no other than the abbey well, which generations of storms had

gnawed out of its deep bed in the ground without being able to crunch

and devour the sturdy relic itself. There it stood, a Titan of the

vanished race, sprouting stubborn from the littered sand below,

cemented, as it seemed, by the very drift which was yearly flung upon

it to destroy. Exposed and isolated, choked with parching rubbish as

it was, how thrilling was the thought of the monks who had once drunk

from it; of the waters it had drained from the hill; of the hill

itself with its one-time springs lying under the salt sea! It was the

very gaunt dead monument to the desolation of this land, and as such,

it seemed, would endure when all else was vanished. The storms which

took the rest stone by stone, could do no more than stone by stone

reveal this; the earthquake, which at a blow had rent the massive

tower and tumbled half the remaining walls, had left this unshaken. It

was a wonderful and impressive relic.

The first time I had entered among the ruins was by myself. I climbed

the slope early on the morning before breakfast, and stood in the

midst of them, thrilled and awestricken. A little grassy valley

divided me from the hill which concealed the village, of which not so

much as a roof was visible from where I stood. I seemed entirely cut

off and alone, a pigmy in the stupendous shadows of these “ruined

choirs.” The ground swept in a steepish curve to the cliff edge, and

again, inland, in one slightly shallower. These were the “Old and New

Testaments” of the Mitre; and in the “Valley of Knowledge” that lay

between, was built the abbey, its monastery, chapter-house, refectory

and other buildings taking and topping the western slope, which, on

its further side, went shelving down to the _Cemeterium Fratrum_, and

the confines of the old grounds.

I poked about among the shattered stones with a feeling between fear

and curiosity. I could tell by the fresh edges of the rents, and the

way in which little avalanches of mortar were constantly falling with

a whispering sound, that much of the devastation was recent. The tower

had been breached by the earthquake all down its seaward front,

opening a monstrous gap from which a cataract of stones had thundered,

and piled themselves in foam, as it were, at the foot. In one place,

near the cliff slope, a mighty plinth had been heaved on to its side,

and I saw the mould on the under surface of it yet grooved with the

tracks of slugs and beetles. It had sunk, with the mass of masonry

cemented to it, two-thirds of its breadth into the earth, and all

about the ground was strangely wryed, and distorted, and cracked, and

bubbled up into mounds, as if here the underheaval had made itself

peculiarly felt. I was gazing on it half-fascinated, when, happening

to raise my eyes, I started to see other regarding me fixedly from a

face which seemed to have sprouted from the earth.

I gave a little cry and uttered Mr. Rampick’s name. At the word, the

man himself rose to his height, from the position in which it appeared

he had been crouching, and ascended the last steps of a cliff pathway,

of the existence of which I had not known. He came up to me, rubbing

the back of his bony hand across his mouth.

“Come to see _fur_ yourself, sir?” he said, in his breathless, fawning

way.

“Yes,” I answered. “It was here, wasn’t it?”

He stamped with his great foot.

“Here, or hereabouts,” he said, “they lays under--_as_ supposed--each

with his brace o’ runlets.”

It was a fearful but thrilling thought.

“Why don’t they dig for them?” I whispered.

He gazed at me a moment, breathing hard. His eyes seemed blacker, the

rims round them more livid than I had yet noticed.

“What!” he cried, so hoarsely that his voice cracked. “Displace these

here sacred ruins _fur_ the likes of they! The Lord, sir--begging

_your_ pardon--set His own trap for them _in_ His own way; and it

been’t fur us to rise His dead. _May_ I make so bold to axe _if_ your

uncle knows you’re out?”

I felt the insolence of the question, but was too young to resent it.

“No!” I exclaimed, surprised.

“Ah!” he said. “I lay he won’t be best pleased, sir, _with_ humility.

This here hill, sir, _if_ all what’s said is Gospel true--is risky

ground to walk fur them as knows it not, nor its toppling stones, sir,

_nor_ its hidden abscesses. I’d go home, sir, _if_ I was you, with

favour, sir.”

I was offended, but a little frightened also. Blushing scarlet, I

turned away, without a word, and ran down the slope homewards.

I told Uncle Jenico of my adventure and encounter. To my further

surprise he commended Mr. Rampick’s warning.

“What should I do, if anything happened to you, Richard, when I was

not by?” he pleaded.

There was a note of emotion in his voice which touched me, and I

promised I would never seek the Mitre again out of his company. I

meant it when I said it; but, alas! the venturesomeness of youth led

me later on, I am ashamed to confess, to disregard my promise.

That was not till long after, however; and in the meanwhile the

weather remaining fine, as I have said, we had plenty of opportunity

for exploring the district. Not a day was allowed to pass, moreover,

without our investigating at least once in the twelve hours, a section

of the coast. Uncle Jenico would prod all the way, with his thick

stick, into the moraine of shingle which ran along the shore above the

high tide mark. At these times he would be very absent-minded,

answering my questions at random, and I knew that he had Morant and

his golden bushels in his thoughts. He never found anything, however,

and each evening would look up at the sky and predict stormy weather

with a sham deprecation of the inconvenience it would be to us.

But at last the weather really did break, and dark evening settled in,

with a high wind and rising sea. It blew a gale all night and

throughout the following day, and Uncle Jenico bemoaned our detention

in the house with a gratified face.

It was not until the second morning that it had cleared sufficiently

to enable us to go out, which we did immediately after breakfast. The

sun was blinking waterily, and the surf pounding yellow as we came

down to the beach; but the wind had fallen and the rain ceased, which

was enough for us.

Uncle Jenico, with his blue coat fastened tightly across his chest,

was looking extraordinarily swollen, I thought, until the reason was

explained to me. We had not gone far, when--first glancing all about

him with an air of twinkling mystery--he cautiously unbuttoned, and

revealed, neatly folded upon his chest, a little bushel sack such as

they use for potatoes.

“Hush!” he whispered, though not a soul was in sight; “the difficulty

will be to avoid observation when we bring it back full. I dare say

they’re honest here, Richard; but it’s a wrong business principle to

presume upon a sentiment. We must dine and sup out--I’ve brought some

sandwiches with me, and Mr. Sant will excuse you for once--and return

with our booty after dark.”

“Do you expect to fill _that_, Uncle?” I said, aghast for all my

infancy.

“Well,” he answered, laughing joyously but privately, “I hope not

_quite_, or it would puzzle us to carry it. But, in common wisdom we

must make the best we can of this rare opportunity.”

He hung the sack over his arm, and we started off. The storm had

certainly overturned the shingle, and scattered much of it abroad in a

tangle of seaweed and dead dog-fish. For hours we hunted on, groping

sedulously among the litter; and at last, late in the afternoon, we

found a penny. At least, _I_ was convinced it was one, being

intimately acquainted, like most boys, with the coin. But Uncle Jenico

would not hear of it. He was shaking with excitement as he examined

it. It was so rubbed by the action of the waves as to exhibit nothing

but a near-obliterated bust, which I was sure was that of our late

lamented King. My uncle, however, pointed out to me distinct traces,

though I could not see them, of a Latin inscription, and was jubilant

over the find. It did not make much impression on the sack, it is

true; but he was careful to point out to me that the value of a

nugget, such as it would take two men to carry, might all be contained

in a diamond which one could slip into one’s waistcoat pocket. It was

not so much quantity we needed, he said, as quality; and he was quite

satisfied, entirely so, with the result of our day’s exploration.

I was glad of this, at least, being dog-tired long before the

sun-setting, as it justified us in going home to supper. But my faith

in Morant, I am afraid, was already sadly shaken.

CHAPTER IX.

HARRY HARRIER.

It was that obnoxious penny, I believe, which was responsible for my

uncle’s continued pursuit of his new Lobby, until the hobby itself

became an obsession. If we had come home that first day empty-handed,

I have little doubt but that his baulked imagination would have found

itself some other and more practical outlet. As it was, the discovery

was held by him to justify every proverb which values itself upon

small beginnings. He was so little cast down by its meagreness, that

there was no limit to the golden dreams of which he made it the basis.

Most crazes, I fancy, are so built upon a pennyworth of fact.

He did not take out the sack again, but replaced it by a sponge-bag,

and the bag, later, by a stout leathern purse. Finally, he decided

that his trouser-pockets would serve all our needs, with the

additional advantage that our hands would be freer thereby, and the

risk of comment on our proceedings avoided. It may have been, for it

had certainly little to feed upon. During those early weeks, beyond

some scraps of old iron, we found nothing.

At first, it must be said, Uncle Jenico was not so entirely possessed

by his infatuation, but he found time to experiment in other

directions. For days he made our lodgings almost uninhabitable by

boiling and decomposing seaweed, until Mrs. Puddephatt complained that

her reputation was suffering by the incessant “hodour of ’ot putrid

fish” which emanated from her premises.

The patent, upon which he had expected to realize, turned out, after

all, a disappointment, and had never, it appeared, been regarded as

other than a joke by the man who, he had supposed, had been going to

buy it. He was a little disconsolate at first, but soon brightened up

when he thought of the potential riches lying under the shingle.

“_We’ll_ laugh at ’em all by-and-by, Richard,” he said. “What a joke

it’ll be when we’ve got our own capital to work upon, and these

ninnies find out the good things they’ve missed. But we won’t be

relentless, my boy, and disinherit the honest labourer because of the

shortsightedness of his employer. Work for the good of mankind,

remember, and you work for your own.”

Fine weather, at this time, made him thoughtful and restless. It was

only when the wind blew and the waves rose that he cheered up and

became excited like a seagull. Then he would laugh aloud, and button

up his coat and, telling me to follow him when my lesson was over,

limp off to the beach, and there untiringly weave his ropes of sand,

growing more and more absorbed in his task the faster it melted

beneath his hands. The coins were there, he was convinced; and it only

needed patience and luck (and he plumed himself upon his being rather

a spoilt child of the latter) to hit upon the deposits.

In the meanwhile I was going to my daily lesson, and getting absorbed

in my own way. Mr. Sant was a delectable tutor, inspiring and

invigorating, and by-and-by, unconsciously to me, my hour extended

itself to two, and sometimes more. So months passed, and then a year,

and I was nine.

One morning I was on my way to the rectory when I made a notable

acquaintance. I had to pass, on my setting out, the new school, which

was now in full activity, and battling its first successful steps in

the moral and intellectual reformation of infant Dunberry. The

children were generally trooping to the bell-call as I started, and I

have no doubt that the sense of superiority my consciousness of

private tuition gave me made itself apparent to some of them in my air

and demeanour.

A little beyond the Playstow the road to the rectory, and to the Court

on the hill, ran up obliquely through the village side, passing very

soon into privacy and loneliness. I had almost reached the rectory

palings when I saw a boy start out, at sight of me, from the shadow of

them and come swiftly on, as if to accost me while yet short of

shelter. He was about my own age or a little older, and had a round,

freckled face, with dark red hair curled as tight as astrakhan, and a

very fat little pug-nose. He was dressed in a brown velveteen jacket

and strong corduroy breeches and leathern gaiters, and he looked what,

in fact, he was, a miniature gamekeeper. I knew him well enough by

sight, having passed him for the last two or three weeks near the

school-house, and always, I verily believe, with an odd little tremor

of foreboding in my inside. He had proved, on inquiry, to be the only

child of Harrier, the squire’s gamekeeper, from whom, and that only on

his master’s initiative, a scowling consent to his son’s attending the

new school had been wrung by Mr. Sant. But the boy came, though near

as rebellious as his father, and had even, until this morning, arrived

punctual.

Now he advanced, swaggering and whistling, with his hands in his

breeches’ pockets, and a fine air of abstraction. I tried to dodge

him, but for all that, in spite of his pretended preoccupation, he

brought his shoulder smack against mine with a force that knocked me

sprawling, and, from the mere pain of it, drove the angry tears to my

eyes.

He wheeled round at once, as I gathered myself up, with a mock apology

so impudent that I longed to hit him, but was deterred by the front he

showed me. He stood square, balancing on his heels, as tight-knit a

young mischief as health and muscle could produce.

“Mighty!” he said, with a pretence of being scared. “What I done, Lor?

Blest if I ain’t knocked into the dirt the young gen’leman what treats

we for sich!”

Then my uneasy consciousness understood the nature of this

retaliation.

“You did it on purpose,” I said sullenly, trying not to whimper as I

dusted myself.

“_Me_!” he cried, in beautiful astonishment. “Why, howsomever can you

charge it to me, master, walking with your nose in the air?”

“It’s you that has your nose in the air,” I retaliated malevolently.

He flushed through his tan, and squared up to me.

“Say that agen!” he hissed, lifting his lip like a weasel.

“Once is enough,” I answered.

He danced about me, making play in the air with his fists.

“Is it!” he gasped, spasmodic. “O yus, o’ course!--I’ll larn you--you

dursen’t--foonk!--private poople--yah!--take your lickun, then!”

Something must have stirred in the garden at the moment, for he

suddenly flounced round and off, his mouth drawn down contemptuous,

and his chin stuck out. But I had not done with him by any means.

Mr. Sant received me that morning, I thought, oddly, and made no

allusion to my battered appearance. Neither did I, at which, perhaps,

he cleared a little.

The next morning Harry Harrier--for such was the young sportsman’s

name--met me as before. I gave him the path, though with anger in my

heart; and he openly jeered at me as he went by. The following day it

was the same, and for many days after. He would have risked, I

believe, ten times the punishment he deserved, and got, for being

late, rather than baulk himself of this recurrent treat. Presently he

altered his tactics in such a way as to eat his cake and have it, so

to speak. He did not pass me one day at the usual hour, and I confess

I breathed relief, for all my own inefficiency was gall to me. Mr.

Sant’s manner, as was usual now, was chilling almost to repulsion. I

was very unhappy. I had grown to brood on my grievance until it almost

choked me. Dunberry was becoming to me a miserable Siberia, and I

longed to be out of it, and hinted as much to my uncle. But, to my

dejection, he would not understand--could not, perhaps, as pride had

always prevented me from revealing my difficulty to him or to any of

my real friends. Moreover, the picking-up of some trumpery oddments on

the beach had by now established him unshakably in his craze, which

had been further confirmed by the action of certain unscrupulous

Dunberryites in palming off on him some faked-up coins, which I could

have sworn had never been minted out of my own generation.

The relief I enjoyed on this particular morning was, however,

delusive. The cunning little gamekeeper had got himself credited with

punctuality, only that he might descend upon me on his return journey

as I left the rectory. Nor was this the worst; for he came reinforced

by half a dozen schoolfellows, the dirty little parasites of his

corduroy lordship. I found them awaiting me at a quiet turn of the

road, and, before I knew it, was being hustled and insulted. I pushed

my way through, however, with a lump swelling in my throat, and was

trying to stifle the inclination to run, when a cry from Harrier

brought me to the roundabout with a scarlet face.

“Cowardy-cowardy-custard! Dursen’t peach to old Crazy, what broke his

leg a-kicking of yer!”

I rushed back and faced him.

“He broke his leg falling from a parryshoot. He isn’t crazy. I’m not

such a coward as you!” I blazed out in a breath. I was bristling and

tingling all over. The worm had turned at last.

Harry Harrier, whistling softly, took his hands from his pockets.

“Yus?” he said. “Anythink else?”

“You’re a liar!” I answered, boiling; “you’re a coward and liar!”

I was down and up again in a moment, and rushing blindly at him with a

cut lip and bloody mouth. He kept quite cool, and met me over and over

again with stunning blows. I didn’t care. I hardly felt them in my

rage; my long pent-up feelings had burst their bonds and I was quite

beside myself. In the midst I was caught in the leash of a sinewy hand

and torn away. For some moments I fought and screamed in my madness;

then suddenly desisted, gasping and trembling all over. Red seemed to

clear from my eyes, and I saw. The parasites were fled; Harry Harrier

stood opposite me, hanging his head and his twitching hands; and in

possession of us both was Mr. Sant.

A little silence followed; then suddenly the clergyman released me and

stepped aside.

“You’re a strong boy, Harrier,” he said, quietly. “You’ve had the

advantage of some training, too. This was hardly brave.”

“He called me a coward, sir,” muttered the boy.

“You’ve got to prove he was wrong, then.”

Harrier twitched his shoulders, and gave a defiant upward look.

“What!” said Mr. Sant. “Do you call it proving it to attack him six to

one?”

“I takes no count of that raff, sir,” said the boy. “’Twas him and me

fought.”

“But you used them to provoke him--not content with insulting him

yourself day by day as he came to his lesson. Yes; I know.”

I looked up amazed, and then down again. Certain tell-tale rustlings

that had reached my ears occasionally from the back of the rectory

palings occurred to me, so that I hung my head with shame.

“Well, your reverence,” said the boy, rather insolently, “pay me, and

get it over. I takes my capers with my mutton.”

“I shall pay you, sir,” said Mr. Sant, with, I could have thought, the

ghost of a grin, “as one gentleman pays another. You think, perhaps,

that Master Bowen here has told of your bullying him. He has not

breathed a word about it to anybody. Now that, I think, shows him to

be the better man of the two.”

The surprise, the gratification were so great, I could have cried out

to him like a silly girl.

The young gamekeeper grinned, incredulous and sarcastic.

“You think not?” said Mr. Sant. “Well, I’ll tell you what I’m going to

do--I’m going to back _my_ man to whop you by-and-by.”

The boy looked up at him, breathless now.

“You’ve all the advantage at present, you know,” went on the

clergyman. “You’ve got constitution, muscle, and a little of the

science--not so much as you think, but still a little. Now Master

Bowen isn’t your equal in any of these, as I suspect you knew, or you

wouldn’t have attacked him.”

“I would!” said the boy, furiously.

“Well,” said Mr. Sant, smiling, “I’ll take your word for it, because I

believe, after all, it’s an honest word. But the point is this. Muscle

and constitution are slow growers, and while my man was training to

improve his, you could be improving yours. Science, on the other hand,

can be taught, and I mean to teach him science until I consider he’s

your equal and better. When that comes about you shall fight again,

and I’ll umpire. Do you agree?”

“_Don’t_ I!” said the boy.

“Very well. Only I must have an understanding. You must leave him

unmolested in the mean time.”

“I’ll do it!” cried the lad. “I’ll do more. I’ll fight any one as

putts a finger on un.”

“The right spirit, that,” said Mr. Sant, with an approving face.

“We’ll agree to decide it, then--in a month’s time, say? I’d keep it

to myself if I were you. Good morning!”

The boy pulled his forelock, hesitated, mumbled with a blush and grin,

“You’re a gen’leman, sir,” and casting a saucy, triumphant glance at

me, retreated. Simultaneously, Mr. Sant took me by the shoulder, and,

hurrying me back to the rectory study, procured cold water and a

sponge, and shut himself in with me.

I felt half stupefied between the blows I had received and the

prospect of others yet to come, in the matter of which, it appeared, I

was to be allowed no choice. But there I was wrong. Mr. Sant, as he

sponged with great consideration my swollen places, took up the tale

at once.

“Now, Richard,” he said, “this is going to be, I think, the first

great test of your life. You can refuse it if you like, without any

loss of honour. You were bullied by a stronger boy, and you endured

your ill-treatment without telling tales. That was to be a gentleman.

You suffered insult--a little too long, perhaps--and only resented it

when directed against some one whom you very rightly love and respect.

Well, that was again to be a gentleman.”

I flushed crimson with pleasure, and he mopped hard away, talking all

the time.

“You heard the engagement I made for you? Well, I tell you, you can

decline quite honourably to stand by it. If you do, don’t think I

shall blame you. On the contrary, I will see that an effective end is

put to this tyranny. You have proved yourself, and that is enough.

Now, if you would like me to state the facts to your uncle, I will do

so at once.”

“Yes, please,” I stuttered through the sponge.

“Very well,” he answered, but dryly, I thought. “I could have trained

you, perhaps, to stand up to this young bruiser; but without doubt you

choose the Christian part. I will speak to Mr. Paxton.”

“Please, sir,” I said, “I don’t think he’d understand why I’ve _got_

to fight, unless you told him.”

His hand quite bumped my poor nose with the start he gave.

“You want it to come off, then, Richard? This is a little shocking,

I’m afraid; but perhaps I can’t altogether blame you. He’s a young

Samson, mind.”

“You said, sir, that science----” I began, but he plugged my mouth

hastily, and gave me no opportunity to speak more till he had cleaned

my wounds to his satisfaction. Then he put me up between his knees

and, while dabbing my face spasmodically with a towel, recited to me

the fable of the brass and the earthenware pots.

“The brass pot, you see, was the gentleman,” he said. “He illustrated

the Christian science of self-defence. He didn’t invite an encounter;

but, when it was forced upon him, his art got the better of the

coarser clay.”

He stretched out my arms and pinched their muscles.

“Well enough,” he said; “but that little Antaeus owes his to his

mother earth. He could lick you with one hand, Dicky--easy, he could.

Aren’t you afraid?”

“Yes, I am,” I said, honestly.

He nodded approvingly.

“Real courage, Dicky, doesn’t mean not being afraid. We must all be

afraid sometimes, when we are called upon to fight men or animals who

are much stronger and fiercer than we are. But when we know that wrong

or unjust things are being done to us by people who do these things

just _because_ they are stronger, then, if we fight them in spite of

our being afraid, that is the _real_ courage. On the other hand, it

isn’t brave to force people to fight who we know are much weaker than

we are. But when God has given us good health and strong arms, it is

noble to use them to help people who are weaker than we are, and to

punish the bullies who would take advantage of their weakness. That’s

what it is makes a true gentleman--not riches, nor titles, nor having

a tutor instead of a public teacher. The little boy who is just, and

very truthful, and who never does anything that he would be ashamed of

good people knowing, is on the way to be a gentleman, whether he lives

in a palace or a cottage. But if, added to these, he trains all his

faculties to oblige other people to repay him the truth and justice

and honour which he gives them, then he is a complete gentleman

already.”

He broke off to feel me all up and down.

“There’s good material here,” he said; “very good. We’ll use it to

counterbalance brute strength. That’s the fine moral of boxing, little

man--to see that the weak don’t go to the wall. Now, shall I confess a

secret? I love Harry Harrier pretty equal with you, sir. He’s got the

makings of a gentleman--my sort--in him; only no amount of persuasion

from me will educate him like a scientific licking from one less than

his own size. You don’t see that, perhaps; but, all the same, I look

to you to knock him into my fold for me. You are the Church’s

champion, Richard, and you shall gain me a new convert, or I’ll never

put faith in the gloves again. Now come along with me home.”

Uncle Jenico received us with surprise, and some consternation over my

appearance; nor did the recital of the affray much reassure him. Still

more was he confounded by the rector’s frank avowal of his object in

approaching him.

“He is a mere child, sir,” said my uncle.

“‘The childhood shows the man,’” quoted the other.

“To be sure. But, as he isn’t going to be a prize-fighter----”

“Every true Christian, sir, is a prize-fighter. He champions the right

in order to win heaven.”

“Well, where was the right here?”

“I regret to have to confess, sir, in an insulting expression about

you, which he very properly resented.”

“_Me_!” cried my uncle, amazed. Then suddenly he stumped across to

where I stood, and patted my shoulder rather tremulously. “Well,

well,” he said; “no doubt I’m a funny old fellow. So you stood up for

old Uncle Jenico, Dicky?”

His voice shook a little. I wriggled and flushed up crimson.

“It was a lie!” I cried, choking; “and I’m going to fight him and lick

him for it.”

Mr. Sant struck in.

“Broughton rules, sir, I pledge my word.”

“Eh?” said my uncle. “Who’s Broughton, and what does he rule?”

“I mean,” said Mr. Sant, “this little affair shall be conducted

strictly according to the regulations of Broughton, the famous boxer.”

“O!” exclaimed Uncle Jenico, palpably misled by the last word, and

proportionately relieved. “O, to be sure! ‘Mufflers,’ you call ’em, I

think?”

“Yes, yes!” said Mr. Sant, hastily. “A contest of science, sir; no

vulgar hammering;” and he repeated, with warm conviction, his little

dissertation on the true moral courage.

“If Richard, sir, don’t assert himself at the outset,” he ended with,

“I won’t answer for his life here remaining endurable.”

Perhaps this prospect of our moral banishment clinched the matter with

Uncle Jenico, whose attachment to the place was becoming quite morbid.

He stipulated only that the umpire should stop the fight the moment it

might appear I was getting the worst of it. More or less satisfied on

this point, he rubbed his hands, and rallied me on being the young

gamecock I was.

“I’ve given some thought, myself, to a new boxing-glove,” he

confessed; “one with a little gong inside to record the hits, you

know.”

Mr. Sant lost no time in taking me in hand. He fashioned me a little

pair of gloves out of some old ones of his own, and gave me half an

hour’s exercise with them every day after lessons. I am not going to

record the process. The result was the important thing.

During all this interval, with the single exception of the morning

following that of my encounter with Harry Harrier, I was left in peace

by the village boys. On that morning, however, I again found myself in

the midst of a little mob of them, who, emboldened by yesterday’s

sport, were come to waylay me after school hours. I was not yet so

proficient as to regard the situation with equanimity; when, behold!

my enemy resolved it for me. He appeared suddenly in the midst, his

knees and elbows in a lively state of agitation. One or two fell away,

protesting, their hands caressing their injured parts.

“Where be a coomen, ’ar-ree!” expostulated one boy, holding his palm

to his ear.

“Mighty!” exclaimed the young ruffler; “bain’t the road free to none

but yourself, Jarge? Here be a yoong gen’lman waiting to pass, now.”

They took it as aimed at me, and hedged in again. He clawed two by the

napes of their necks, and cracking their heads comfortably together,

flung both aside. His intentions were quite unmistakable, and his

strength a thing to regard. I was painfully conscious of it as I went

through the sullen lane the others, discomfited, made for me; but I

plucked up courage, as I passed, to express my gratitude.

“Thank you, Harry!” I said.

He was after me in a moment.

“It’s not a’going to make no differ’,” he whispered fiercely. “You

onderstand that?”

“It shan’t, anyhow, till after the fight,” I answered back in his ear,

and nodded and ran on.

At last the great day came. Mr. Sant, in order that my uncle might be

saved anxiety, and me the necessity of deception, had given me no

warning until the very moment was on me. He had manœuvred to hold me

a little longer than usual over my lessons; and suddenly returned to

me after a short absence from the room.

“Dick,” he said, “Harrier’s waiting for you in the garden.”

My heart gave a twist, and for a moment pulled the blood out of my

cheeks. Then I saw Mr. Sant looking at me, and was suddenly glowing

all over, as if after a cold douche.

“For the right, Dicky!” he said. “To win your spurs in Christendom!

Remember what I’ve taught you, and keep your head.”

It was all very well to say so, with that part of me like a bladder

full of hot air. But I followed him stoutly, trusting to the occasion

to inspire me with all the science which, for the moment, had clean

deserted me.

There was a little plat of lawn at the back, very snug and private

behind some trees; and here we found my adversary waiting, in charge

of Jacob, the gardener, a grizzled, comfortable old fellow in complete

Christian subjection to his master. Jacob was to second Harry, and Mr.

Sant me. The old fellow grinned and ducked as we appeared. There were

no other witnesses.

“Now,” said Mr. Sant, “when I say ‘Go!’ go; when I call ‘Time!’ stop.”

He fell back with the words, and we stood facing one another. I was

utterly bemused, at that instant, as to the processes by which I had

reached this situation. I could only grasp the one fact that I was put

up to batter, if I could (which seemed ridiculous), this confident,

taut little figure in the shirt and corduroy smalls and gaiters, who

held out, as if for my inspection, two bare brown arms, made all of

bone and whipcord; and that I must proceed to _try_ to do this,

without any present quarrel--but rather the reverse--to stimulate me.

It was so different to the circumstances of that other mad contest. I

could have laughed; I----

“Go!” said Mr. Sant.

Something cracked on my forehead, and I fell.

“Time!” cried Mr. Sant.

He pulled me to my feet.

“Get your wits, Dicky,” he said.

I had got them. The bladder seemed to have burst, and let out all the

hot air. I was quite cool, now, and pretty savage over this treatment.

“All right, sir,” I said; and I think he understood. He kept me

simmering, however, for the regulation three minutes.

I came up to time now, Broughton’s commendable pupil. The first round

had been, what we call in cricket, a trial ball. This that followed

was the game--muscle and a little science against science and a little

muscle. The brass pot, I am happy to say, prevailed, and sent the

earthenware spinning with a crack on its stubborn little nose. Jacob

mopped the vanquished, who could hardly be kept still to endure it. As

for me, I was cockahoop, crowing inside and out. My second laughed,

and let me go on, warning me only that the battle wasn’t won.

It was not, indeed. Our bloods were up, and the next round was a hot

test of our qualities. It was give and take, and take and give; until,

lunging under a loose defence, Harry hit me in the wind, and, while I

was gasping and staggering, levelled me to the ground with a blow on

my mouth. He was mad by now, and was rushing to pummel me, prostrate

as I was, when Jacob, with a howl, clutched him and bore him

struggling away.

“Law, ye little warmint!” cried the old man.

“No more of that, Harrier!” said Mr. Sant, from where he was kneeling,

nursing and reviving me; “or I take my man away. To hit one that’s

down, sir! That’s neither Christian nor professional.”

Then he whispered in my ear, “Three minutes, Dicky! Can you do it?

else I’m bound in honour to throw up the sponge.”

There was an agitation in his voice which he tried vainly to control.

I made a desperate effort, and rose as he began to count. I felt a

little sick and wild; but the lesson of over-confidence had gone home.

This time I played warily, tiring out my adversary. At last the moment

came. He struck out furiously, missed, and, as he recovered his guard,

I hit him with all my strength between the eyes. He staggered, gave a

little cry, and, quite blinded for the moment, began to grope

aimlessly with his fists.

“Noo, sir!” howled old Jacob, excited (I am afraid he was an

unsympathetic second); “noo, sir’s your time. Walk in and finish en!”

“I won’t,” I cried. “It isn’t fair. He can’t see.”

Trying to mark me by my voice, the boy let out a furious blow, and, as

his fist whizzed near me, I caught and clutched it in my own.

“Harry!” I said hurriedly, “let’s be friends!”

He tore his hand away, stood with his face quivering a moment, then

all of a sudden fell upon his knees, and, putting his arm across his

eyes, began to sob as if his heart were broken.

A silence and embarrassment fell upon us all. Then Mr. Sant walked

over to the boy and addressed some words to him. He turned a deaf ear,

repulsing him.

“You have fought like a man,” said the clergyman. “Come, take your

beating like one.”

The lad started and looked up. He could see again now, but

glimmeringly.

“Be the three minnuts past?” he said.

“I’m afraid so,” said the other.

The boy got to his feet, sniffing, and, without uttering a word, began

rolling down and buttoning his shirt sleeves.

“There’s a good hot dinner waiting for you inside,” said Mr. Sant.

“Come now, and do the man’s part by it and by us!”

Still he would not speak; but shook his head sullenly, and, fetching

his coat and cap, walked off.

“Humoursome, humoursome!” said old Jacob. “Let en go for a warmint.”

“No,” said Mr. Sant, rather wistfully. “He’s got the stuff in him.

We’ll have him on our side yet, Richard.”

CHAPTER X.

FRIENDS AT LAST.

When I had been washed, and my cuts and bruises salved, Mr. Sant

took me in to dinner, having already sent a message to my uncle that I

should be late. I was horribly stiff, with blubber lips, and knobs and

swellings everywhere; yet I would not for the world have missed one

pang which my jaws suffered in eating. For was not each twinge an

earnest to me that I was redeemed in my own eyes? The penance was as

gratifying as, I think, a Catholic’s must be after confession and

absolution given.

Before we were well finished Uncle Jenico came in, a little flurried

and apologetic over his intrusion. He had guessed pretty well the

reason of my detention, and his anxiety would not let him rest. His

hands trembled as he adjusted his spectacles to look at me, and

removed and wiped them, and put them on again for a second scrutiny.

“So you have conquered?” he said, “My poor boy; my poor, dear boy! Why

I had no idea boxing punished so. You should not have minded what they

said about me, Richard--a tough old rascal, and ready to take it all

in the day’s luck.”

“I don’t think Richard will agree with you, sir,” said Mr. Sant. “He

has won his spurs, and a convert, I hope. He has fought like a

gentleman and a Christian--by George, sir, it was poor Broughton and

the Norwich butcher over again--and you, I am sure, are as proud of

him as I am.”

“Eh?” said my uncle, half laughing and half crying; and then falling

suddenly grave. “If it’s to inculcate respect--the stitch in time, you

know--certainly. But I can’t help wondering, if this is the victor,

what is the state of the vanquished?”

“A state of grace, I hope,” said the clergyman, smiling. “But it’s a

very proper reflection, sir, and one which, I am sure, Richard will

take to heart.”

The reminder, nevertheless, was not out of place. It is well at the

feast of triumph to remember who pays the cost. I had been

self-glorifying a little overmuch; and here, of a sudden, was the

picture before me of my beaten enemy slinking away to hide his

battered face, at the very moment that I was crowing to everybody to

come and look at mine. Uncle Jenico was the true gentleman among us

all; and it was he who had been insulted.

I soon mended of my knocks, and the very next day was ruffling it to

my lessons with a new self-confidence that made nothing of possessing

the world. Dunberry was no longer a Siberia to me, but a conquered

country full of breezy possibilities. I should have welcomed the

prospect of an attack; but no one interfered with me. On the contrary,

awed and covert glances greeted me on my way past the school. I

dropped a book. An obsequious little courtier scurried to pick it up

for me. The news of the fight had got abroad, it was evident, and

Harry was no longer the cock of the walk. From this moment, with other

than the youth of Dunberry, I am afraid, my position was secured.

I hope I took no base advantage of the knowledge; yet I won’t say but

I might have if Mr. Sant had not been at my back to prevent it.

“Don’t forget you fought for a principle,” he would remind me. “It’s

no manner of Christian use to turn out a bully that you may usurp his

place.”

To prove to me that boxing was not the whole duty of a gentleman, and

to school me from presuming on any idea of indulgence because of my

victory, he rather put the screw on in my education, and for a time

was something of a martinet on questions of study and discipline. I

was hurt, and a little bit rebellious at first; but soon, having a

fair reason of my own, came to recognize his consistency.

During this time, and for some weeks after the fight, I saw next to

nothing of Harry Harrier. He kept out of my way, sulking and grieving,

though he attended school--with phenomenal punctuality, too, I

believe--regularly. His father, I heard from old Jacob, had been very

savage over his beating, and had dressed him well for it. I was

furious when I was told, and wanted Mr. Sant to complain to the

Squire; but, before he could do so, something happened which made any

complaint futile. A new steward, a Draco of a man, was appointed to

the Court, and one day, shortly after his arrival, lo and behold!

there was the gamekeeper handcuffed, and being carried off to Ipswich

gaol in a tax-cart by the officers of the law. It had been discovered

that for years he had been in collusion with a gang of poachers, and

in the end he had been watched, and caught _in flagranti delicto_. His

wife followed him to the county town, and devoted most of her savings,

poor woman, to his defence, but without avail. He was convicted and

transported, and I may as well say at once that that was the end of

him so far as his family was concerned, for he never turned up again.

While the trial was pending, Harry--it is not, under all the

circumstances, to be wondered at--gave the schoolhouse a wide berth;

but, after his father had been sentenced and their home broken up, to

the surprise of every one he put in an appearance there again, coming

dogged and punctual to a task which must have grown nothing less than

a perpetual ordeal to him. We did not, in truth, know the strength of

will of the desperate humbled little spirit--not any of us, that is to

say, but Mr. Sant. _He_ had gauged it, I am sure; and, having set his

heart on the boy’s reclamation, was watching with an anxious interest

the development of the odd little drama which he had helped to

engineer. He visited, of course, in virtue of his office, the

gamekeeper’s unhappy wife, who had been forced to betake herself to a

mean little tenement in the village, where she eked out the small

means remaining to her by washing for the rectory; and though, as yet,

the son would hardly notice or be civil to him, the mother did not

fail to acquaint him, with many fond tears, of her poor, wild little

fellow’s real love and resolution, and of the courage which was

determining him to train himself to take the place of the breadwinner

they had lost. All of which, I knew, made Mr. Sant the more eager to

have the lad recognize him for a friend; only pride stood in the way.

For, the truth is, poor Harry’s prestige was gone down to zero. Always

owing in some part to the local reputation of his father for a bully

and rowdy, the removal of that gentleman had finished what my victory

had begun. And now it was the case of the sick lion. The cowardly

little jackals who had formerly cringed to him, egged on by their more

cowardly elders taunted him with his disgrace. If he retaliated, they

overwhelmed him with numbers, or ran, squealing injured righteousness,

to appeal against him to their parents. His heart, swelling in his

plucky little breast, must often have had a business of it not to let

loose the tears; but he had an indomitable soul, and only time and

tact could find the way into it.

One day Mr. Sant and I, when walking together, came unnoticed upon the

rear of such a scene. The victim moved on in front, his head hanging a

little, though he would not force his pace an inch to accommodate his

tormentors, who followed behind, at a safe distance, hooting and

jeering at him.

“OO stole the pawtridges! When did ’ee last ’ear from the ’ulks! Why

don’t ’ee git your mawther to wash your dirty linen, ’ar-ree?” and

such-like insults they bawled.

I burned with indignation, and was running to retaliate on my enemy by

helping him as he had once helped me, when Mr. Sant seized me with a

determined hand, and bent to whisper in my ear--

“He will hate you, if you do. Leave him to fight his own battles.”

As he spoke the little wretches let fly a shower of small missiles,

and a stone struck the boy smartly on the neck. He leapt about at

once, and came rushing back with clenched fists and a blazing face.

The mob dispersed before his onset; but he cut off one panic-stricken

unit of it, and smote the lubberly coward with a thorny crash into the

hedge. His eyes looked red, his breast was heaving stormily; he would

have done some evil, I think, had not Mr. Sant run and put himself

between. Then he backed away, without a word; but his cheeks were

quite white now, and the wings of his nostrils going like a little

winded horse’s.

Consternation held the scattered enemy. They stood each where he had

been halted by the unexpected vision of their rector and me. The

assaulted one, sitting on spikes, stuffed his face into his elbow and

boo-hoo’d from stentorian lungs. Mr. Sant smiled with rather an ugly

look.

“Blubber away, Derrick,” he said. “You’ve been well served for a dirty

act.” Then he scowled abroad. “Are you English boys, to kick a downed

one! Not one of you, cowards, but if he passed this Harrier alone

would hug his fists in his pockets! It is no shame of his, but yours.

To bait him ten to one--O! what fine courageous fellows! But I’ll have

no more of it; d’ye hear? I’ll have no more of it!”

He stamped, in a little access of passion, and again turned sharply on

the fallen.

“Get up!” he said.

His tone was so peremptory that the boy rose, snuffling and wiping his

eyes with his cuff.

“It was you threw the stone,” said Mr. Sant. “I saw you. Very well,

then, it’s got to be one of two things: fight, or put your tail

between your legs and run. Quick now! Which is it to be?”

Derrick did not move, but raised his wail to a pitch so artificially

dismal that I had to laugh.

“Ah!” exclaimed Mr. Sant, still very grim for his part, and snapped

himself round. “He means fight, Harrier.”

If he did, the battle he contemplated was a Battle of the Spurs.

Clapping his hand to the thorns in him, and too frightened now to

remember to cry, he took to his heels and, turning a corner, was out

of sight in a moment. His answer to the resolution claimed for him was

so ludicrous that even his little abettors were set off chuckling.

I was looking across at Harry, and saw his face, too, relax and

lighten. Drawn by its expression, I walked up to him, with my hand

held out.

“Why won’t you, Harry?” I said.

He stared at me, but made no response.

“We knew you could look after yourself,” I went on, “and--and I wasn’t

going to interfere; at least--I mean--why won’t you let us stand up

for one another, Harry?” I ended, with a burst and a blush.

His face, too, was very red again, and I could see his lips were

trembling. Pride and gratitude were fighting within him for mastery;

but the former--still too hot with recent suffering to

surrender--remained the more stubborn of the two. While my hand was

yet held out, he turned his back on me, on us all, and walked off

erect.

I was bitterly hurt and chagrined. I felt that I had done the handsome

thing by a boor, and had been meetly rebuffed for my condescension. I

came back to Mr. Sant, swelling with indignation. He understood at a

glance.

“Give him time, Dick,” he said quietly; “give him time.”

“He shall have all the time he likes, sir,” I said, “before _I_ meddle

with him again.”

He did not answer, which was perhaps wise; and we continued our walk.

But thenceforth my heart was darkened to my unchivalrous foe, and when

we passed in the street I ignored him.

My studied indifference had not, however, the effect of making him

avoid me. On the contrary, he seemed rather to resume his earlier

practice, going out of his way to get in mine, and strutting by

whistling to show his unconsciousness of my neighbourhood. Yet all the

time, I knew, he was never more in need of a friend. Mr. Sant’s

protest, followed by a public rebuke in the school, had put an end to

the active bullying; but, to compensate themselves for this

deprivation, his companions had, by tacit agreement, sent poor Harry

to perpetual Coventry. He was disclaimed and excluded from all games

and conversation; isolated in the midst of the others’ merriment. What

this meant to the bright fallen little spirit only Lucifer himself,

perhaps, could say; and only Lucifer himself, perhaps, so endure with

unlowered crest while the iron ate into his soul. But, in justice to

myself, I could make no further overtures where my every advance was

wilfully misunderstood.

So the year went its course without any reconciliation between us; and

early in November fell a hard frost, with snow that seemed disposed to

stop. Awaking one morning, we saw the whole land locked in white under

a stiff leaden canopy, as if sea and sky had changed places. The

desolation of this remote coast winter-bound it is impossible to

describe. We seemed as cut off from the world as Esquimaux; and Uncle

Jenico, who had never conceived such a situation, stood aghast before

the prospect of a beach ankle-deep in snow. So we found it. The golden

sand was all replaced by dazzling silver, into which the surf, so

spotless in summer, thrust tongues of a bilious yellow. The sea, from

being sportive with weak stomachs, looked sick unto death itself; and

the wind in one’s teeth was like a file sharpening a saw. And all this

lifelessness cemented itself day by day, until it seemed that we could

never emerge again from the depths of winter into which we had fallen.

One afternoon I was loitering very dismal, and quite alone as I

thought, near the foot of Dunberry Gap, when a snowball took me full

on the back of the head and knocked my cap off. I was stooping to pick

it up, when another came splosh in my face, blinding, and half

suffocating me. I staggered to my feet, gasping, only to find myself

the butt of a couple of snow forts, between whose fires I had

unconsciously strayed. A row of little heads was sprung up on either

side, and I was being well pounded before I could collect my wits.

I must premise that at this time my empire was much fallen from its

former greatness. Never having confirmed it by a second achievement,

it had gradually lost the best of its credit, and, though I was still

respected by the unit, there was a psychologic point in the

association of units beyond which my reputation was coming to be held

cheap. I was learning, in fact, the universal truth that to rest on

one’s laurels is to resume them, in case of emergency, in a lamentably

squashed condition.

Now, with half the breath knocked out of my body and my arm protecting

my face, I tried to struggle out of the line of fire, only to find the

opposing forces basely combining to pelt me into helplessness. I made

some show of retaliating; but what was one against twenty? In the

midst, I looked up the Gap, my one way of retreat, and there, standing

halfway down, watching the fray, was Harry Harrier. I was smarting all

over, with rills of melted snow running down my neck, and still the

bombardment took me without mercy.

“Harry!” I cried. “Come and help me!”

The appeal did at a stroke what months of propitiation would have

missed. It put him right with himself once more. Like a young deer he

came leaping down, stooping and gathering ammunition as he approached.

The shower ceased on the instant; the craven enemy retreated pell-mell

to its double lines of shelter.

“Are you ready, sir?” said Harry, excitedly. “Git your wind and coom

on. We’ll drive en out of one o’ them places, and take cover there

ourselves.”

He was eagerly gathering and piling the snow as he spoke. In a minute

I was myself again, and burning for reprisals. Each of us well armed,

we charged upon the left-hand position, which seemed the more

accessible of the two, and carried it by storm against a faint show of

resistance. The garrison shot out and fled, encountering a volley from

the opposing force, while we peppered it in the rear. Our victory was

complete. As we sank back, breathed but glowing, I looked Harry

silently in the face and held out my hand for the last time. He took

it in his own, hanging his silly head; but the nip he gave it felt

like a winch’s.

“That’s all right, then,” said I. “It’s pax between us, ain’t it, you

old fool?”

He nodded. A long silence fell between us, and I began to whistle.

Suddenly he looked up shyly, but his eyes were quick with curiosity.

“I say,” he said, “what’s a parryshoot?”

The problem had evidently haunted him ever since I had told him that

my uncle had fallen from one.

“Well, what do you think?” says I.

“I dunno,” he answered carelessly. “Thought, maybe, ’twas one o’ them

things that shoots the malt refuge out of brewhouses.”

I sniggered with laughter. Fancy Uncle Jenico having been shot out of

a brewery!

“It’s an umbrella,” I said; “a thing that you jump into the air with

off a cliff, and come down without hurting yourself.”

“Mighty!” he cried, all excitement. “Is it reelly? Let’s make one--and

try it first on that Derrick,” he added, with commendable foresight.

My heart crowed at the idea. We discussed it for many minutes. In the

midst we heard a sound of distant jeering, and cautiously raised our

heads above the snow rampart. The whole body of our enemies was in

full retreat, and already nearing the top of the Gap. We were left

alone, sole inseparable masters of the field. It was the happiest omen

of what was to be.

CHAPTER XI.

MISCHIEF OF SORTS.

I came in all glowing to Mr. Sant, who greeted my good news with a

sigh of such relief that one could have thought a nightmare had rolled

off his chest.

“We have him,” he said gleefully. “You did very well, Dick; better

than I could have told you. And now--h’m!”

He fell into a fit of abstraction, the fruits of which did not appear

till the following day. Then, as I was leaving him after lessons, he

detained me a moment.

“Are you going to meet him?” he asked.

“Yes, if he will,” I answered.

“Then,” he said, “tell him that if he likes, and can obtain his

mother’s consent, he can come here with you for the future instead of

going to school.”

I could only breathe a great round “O!” of rapture.

“Yes,” said Mr. Sant, between relish and severity; “I cannot have so

promising a spirit warped by a sense of injustice. He has grit--I must

put my foot down--he--yes, tell him I will undertake his education, if

he is willing.”

I ran off, big with the delight of my mission; and, sure enough, met

Harry loitering near the Playstow by the way I should come, though he

would not let me suppose it was intentional. His freckled face flushed

as he spied me, and he grinned. There was already observable towards

him an attitude of increased respect on the part of some of his

schoolfellows who played near.

“Mighty!” he exclaimed, as I accosted him, “Who’d ever a-thought o’

meeting _you_ here!”

“Harry!” I whispered, too eager to get him away to feel any

embarrassment. “Come with me. I’ve got something to tell you.”

He came, looking both pleased and curious, but still with a certain

half-defiant swagger.

“Tell away,” he said; “I’m listening;” and he began to whistle.

“Mr. Sant,” I said, “wants you to chuck up the old school and come and

be his pupil with me, if you and your mother’s willing.”

He was fairly hipped. He stopped whistling, and rubbed his round nose

till it shone; then suddenly halted, in a quiet place, and stared at

me.

“Was it you axed him that?” he said.

“No, indeed.”

“Honour bright?”

“Of course. Why should I lie, you old stoopid?”

He tried to whistle again, and broke down. I didn’t know the depths of

the little soul, nor what it had endured.

“I dunno,” he said, hesitating, and with a curious husky sound in his

voice, “as--if it had been--I could a-brought myself to it. Now----”

He held out his hand quickly, and his eyes were shining.

“Ef you’ll let me be your friend, master, I’ll swear to be yours--till

death do me part--and so help me God!”

We shook hands firmly on it. “Only,” I said, “I’m Dick to you, you

know, just as you are Harry to me.”

“I’ll get used to it in time,” he answered; and so the compact was

made, and I am sure we had none of us reason to regret it.

He was a pretty untamed colt at first, with a little of the savage

lingering about him. But he was wonderfully sensitive and intelligent,

and soon got, under Mr. Sant’s vigorous and manful tuition, not only

to cultivate the graces of a scholar and the muscles of an athlete,

but to understand those right principles of a gentleman, which are to

temper natural combativeness with consideration for others. In this

respect, no doubt, his misfortunes had helped to shape him; but I am

not going to moralise over the result, which I dare say not one boy in

a thousand, coming from such a stock, would have effected. Harry

seemed to have inherited all the hardihood, with none of the

brutality, of his father; and, for the rest, we became inseparable

chums, who, so combined, were a match for any puling forces the

village could bring against us.

Mischief? Of course, we were always in it. One of our first escapades

was to make a parachute out of Uncle Jenico’s big sun umbrella, and,

having beguiled Derrick to the cliff edge by the Gap, tie his wrists

to the handle and push him over. We might have killed him; only we

didn’t. He fell into a snow-drift, with no more hurt than to rasp his

nose on the broken ice. But he smashed the umbrella, for which Mr.

Sant made us pay with extra lines.

We scoured the coast together, and were for ever, forgetting my

embargo, prowling about the Mitre, dislodging bits of the ruin and

imperilling our precious necks. On such occasions Rampick was always

our self-elected policeman, watching us and warning us away. Singly, I

think, we had an awe of this great sinister hulk of a creature,

though, together, we flouted him a good deal, resenting his

interference. But he was a pet of Mr. Sant’s, which made any open

affront from us difficult.

Harry, by virtue of his training, knew a heap about animals. I am

afraid we snared, in our time, more than one of the Squire’s rabbits,

fixing loops of copper wire in the runs under the hedgerows. The

“kill” went to Mrs. Harrier, whose poverty I used for salve to my

conscience, and whose rather weak fondness accepted the tribute with

some nervous deprecation. But it was not long before our mighty

reverence for Mr. Sant, both as a gentleman and a sportsman, cured us

of this temporary obliquity. A poacher gives no “law” to the game he

kills; a gentleman does; we gave no “law”; _ergo_ we were poachers,

_ergo_ we were not gentlemen. The revelation came upon us one day when

our tutor was illustrating some forgotten parable. “The man of

honour,” said he, “the God’s gentleman, don’t bet on a certainty, or

run his fox with a line tied to his tail, or kill a disarmed enemy, or

shoot his pheasant sitting. He sports for the glory of the battle, the

test between skill and skill.”

Harry and I looked at one another, and then down. After lessons he

addressed me rather resentfully--

“It’s all very well for you, as was brought up to it.”

“What do you mean?” I answered; “that you ain’t going to take the

hint?”

“If ever I snare another,” he said, growling, “may I be shot myself

and nailed to a barn door!”

“Well, then,” I said, “for all my being brought up to it, as you call

it, you’re the better gentleman, because I was still in two minds

about giving it up, it was such fun.”

“You’ll have to,” he said. He was grown more loyal even than I to Mr.

Sant.

“O! shall I?” I retorted. “Who’s going to make me?”

We were both bristling for a moment. Then Harry chuckled.

“Guess you won’t catch a-many without me to help you, anyhow,” he

said; which was so disgustingly true that I had to laugh in my turn.

Before this moral reformation occurred, however, we made some

thrilling captures. One day it was a hare, which Harry caught in the

most wonderful way with his hands alone. We were crossing an open

space between two copses, when he suddenly threw down his hat in the

snow, bidding me at the same time to take no notice, but walk on with

him as if unconcerned. There were tufts of gorse and withered bracken

projecting all over the clearing. We advanced briskly a short

distance, then quickly wheeled and came back, making a crooked line

for the hat. As we neared it, Harry, as swift as thought, swerved

aside to a patch of red dead fern and bramble, and, plunging down his

hand, brought up what looked like a mat of leaves and snow. But it was

a hare, which in that unerring swoop he had clutched behind the poll;

and before the startled creature could shriek or struggle, he had

seized its hind legs in his other hand, stretched its body, and

cracked its neck upon his knee. I could not have imagined such

quickness of eye and action. It could only be done, he told me, in

cold weather, when the frost gets in the animals’ brains and makes

them stupid. They are sort of fascinated by the hat thrown down,

watching for it to move; and when the steps return, finding

themselves, as it were, between two fires, they can think of nothing

but to crouch close. I have seen Harry bring out rats from a rick in

the same way. It was just a question of unwincing nerve; but I never

had the courage to try it myself. They say that if one has the

resolution to hold one’s hand unmoved to a snapping dog, the beast’s

teeth will close on it without inflicting an injury. It may be true;

only the first time I put it to the test will be in boxing-gloves.

A more legitimate poaching of ours--but that was later, in the

spring--was on the preserves of a beautiful unfamiliar sea-bird, which

came nesting upon our coasts, driven there by storms probably. We were

on the Mitre one day, when we saw it fly out from the top of the

Abbot’s well, and swoop down upon the shore, where, no one being by,

it gorged itself on a heap of dead dog-fish. We immediately fell flat

on the cliff edge to watch for its return. The broken top of the well

was perhaps thirty feet below us, but the ground sloping obtusely from

where we lay, prevented us from seeing far into it. Presently the bird

came back and settled on the rim, so that we could mark it plainly. It

was gull-shaped, but unlike any of the species we

knew--white-waistcoated, yellow-beaked, and a tender ash colour on the

wings--a St. Kilda’s petrel, in fact, we came to learn, which had

likely been driven down from the Orkneys. It hopped into the well and

disappeared.

“Mighty!” said Harry. “It’s got its nest there, I do believe.”

By-and-by the mother bird showed herself, and the fact was virtually

settled. Then there was nothing for it but to climb the well and see.

Harry accomplished it somehow, when the village was at dinner and the

beach deserted. He got up, claw and toe (the well inclined a little

outwards from the land), and availing himself of every hole and

projection reached the top and sprawled over the edge, so that I could

see nothing but his legs waving in the air. The birds shot out, and

wheeled screaming about him. I heard him utter a cry; and then he

emerged and descended with a very blank face, coming down the last

yard or two with a run. His hands were barked and bloody, and the

right one smeared with an orange slime.

“There was one egg,” he said, “white and a whopper; but it just broke

to pieces when I clawed it.”

It was a pity we had not left it alone, for, as it turned out, the

bird was a rarity on our coasts, and, laying as it does only a single

egg, would not likely outstay so cruel a welcome. Which, indeed,

proved to be the case; and the only reward we got for our venture was

the knowledge that the well was choked with sand to near its top, a

discovery which dissipated for ever some long-cherished dreams of ours

as to the ineffable secrets it would reveal if once surmounted and

looked down into.

During all this time, I am afraid, I neglected Uncle Jenico a good

deal. He was so sweet and kind, he made no complaint, but only

rejoiced that I had found a companion more suited than he to my years.

“He’s a fine boy, Richard,” he would say; “a fine promising boy. And

if he reconciles you to staying here----”

“Do _you_ want to leave Dunberry, uncle?”

Then he would look at me wistfully.

“I, my dear? No, no; I am content, if you are. We are doing

wonderfully well. It’s a place of really extraordinary possibilities.

Do you know, Richard, I shouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be

our promised land, after all. The extent of coast to be explored makes

it a little tiring sometimes, but that’s a trifle. We can’t expect to

find all Tom Tiddler’s ground in an acre or so, can we?”

That should have been a jog to my conscience; but youth, I fear, is

selfish. A dull day’s hunt with Uncle Jenico through the shingle had

come to show very blank by contrast with the exciting adventures

contrived by Harry and me. So I kept my deaf side to the calls of

duty, and Uncle Jenico pursued his hobby alone.

During the continuance of the frost he had, however, to divert his

imagination into other channels, as the beach was impracticable; and

really, I think, the distraction did him no harm. Being confined much

to the house, he turned his thoughts to an old invention of his for

cleaning chimneys, with which he had competed ages ago for a prize

offered by a syndicate of anti-climbing-boy philanthropists. I am

sure, if simplicity and economy counted for anything, Uncle Jenico

ought easily to have come out first; but it was the usual story of

showiness being preferred to plain utility. The contrivance was

homeliness itself; just a huge compressible ball of wool, attached

through its centre to the middle of a cord of indefinite length; and

the only objection to it--which was, after all, an extremely idle

one--was that it required two operators, one to stand on the roof, and

the other on the hearth below. But, once they were in a position, the

task was a pastime rather than a labour. The top-sawyer, so to speak,

lowered one end of the cord, weighted, down the flue; his companion

seized it, and between them they worked the ball up and down till

every particle of soot was dislodged. Could anything be more obvious?

And yet the committee rejected it! Well, all I can say is that Harry

and I proved its efficacy beyond a doubt; though, of course, Mrs.

Puddephatt, while she benefited by it, was sarcastic about an

invention which had failed to recommend itself to the particularity of

London.

“It _may_ be all right,” she would say; “and so may the himage of a

piece of fat pork pulled up and down one’s throat with a string,

which, I am told, is hemployed at sea to encourage ’eaving. At the

same time, sir, I may venture to remark, that there are remedies known

to Londoners to be worse than their diseases.”

Uncle Jenico, in the first instance, secretly inveigled Fancy-Maria

into helping him in his experiment. The parlour fire was extinguished,

and the worthy girl despatched to the roof through a trap-door, where

she performed her share of the task with such inflexible tenacity that

when my uncle tugged at his end of the cord, which she had dutifully

lowered, he pulled her head into the chimney, and would have ended by

drawing her bodily down, I believe, if her gasps and chokings reaching

him below had not warned him in time. Then he slackened his hold, and

commended her excess of loyalty and instructed her further; but in the

end she descended from the roof an absolute negress, and for days

afterwards shed soot from her boots and sneezed it from her hair in

little clouds that flavoured everything.

Subsequently, Harry and I were taken into his confidence and made his

operators, much to our gratification. Climbing-boys, indeed! It was

become a luxury to be a sweep, thanks to Uncle Jenico; and the world

called him a crank! Every one but himself might profit by his

inventions. Certainly Harry and I did. We polished every flue in Mrs.

Puddephatt’s house as clean as a whistle, and, until we tired of the

sport, whatever other chimneys in the village the housewives would lay

open to us. And it was only when we took to angling with the great

sooty ball over parapets for unsuspecting faces pausing below, that

Mr. Sant, giving ear to furious complaints, stepped in with his

authority, and put an end to the game.

So, on us, black and joyous and inseparable, I will let down the

act-drop of our little stage, to raise it on a later development of

the drama I set out to record.

END OF PART I.

PART II.

CHAPTER I.

THE BADGER.

It is with an odd sense of nervousness, and almost of oppression,

that I open upon the second act of my story. In the first, the

schoolboy, with his “shining morning face” and serene

irresponsibility, had it all his own way. Now--an interval of five

years having been supposed, as the play-bills say, to elapse--the

“shining morning face” shows a little sobered, a little greyer in the

dawn of manhood, like a young moon in the dawn of day. We have not

eschewed adventure, Harry and I; only the spirit of it in us is

beginning to be tempered with a sense of moral obligations. We are

indulgent to the flippancies of youth but in so far as they do not

venture to presume upon our patronage. Only when alone together do we

relax our vigilance in the matter of what is due to ourselves and our

extremely incipient moustaches.

Harry, in short, takes up the tale at sixteen, and I at a few months

younger. The interval had served to shape us, I do believe, after a

manly enough model. We might have been “oppidans”--to put an extreme

case--at Eton, and had our characters stiffened, like cream, by

whipping, and have coursed hares, and drunk small-beer at the

Christopher, and enjoyed all the other social and educational

advantages which, according to the evidence put before the late

Commission, [_Reported in 1864._] are peculiar to this seminary of the

gods, and not found in its Provost such a leader, counsellor and noble

confidant as little remote Dunberry was able to furnish us with in the

person of Mr. Sant. And this I say in no Pharisaic spirit of

self-satisfaction, but simply as a testimony to the qualities of this

prince among tutors, whom we loved and respected with the best reason

in the world.

Not much had figured to us, perhaps, during these five years except

the shapes of romance with which strong young souls can always people

a desert. We had put on mind and muscle. We could run, swim, fight,

eat anything that was set before us, and want more. Our excursions

were further afield; our walks more extended along the road to

Parnassus. We were very fine fellows, no doubt, in our own opinions;

and our voices were beginning to growl handsomely.

Harry had, for his part, developed into a shapely, fearless young

figure, with a good manner of speech and a great attachment to my

uncle. He had, moreover, developed a decided bent towards mechanics,

and went now on two days in the week to a technical school in

Yokestone, making the journey to and from on foot, and sleeping each

night with a cousin of his mother’s, who owned a small foundry there,

and who, since the boy’s proof of himself, had taken a practical

interest in his welfare. The periodic partings were without savour to

us, had it not been that to them the periodic reunions supplied the

salt. But no doubt they were helpful in giving us opportunity for a

more individually independent growth; and certainly during them “Coke

upon Littleton” (for Mr. Sant was training me with an eye to the Law)

secured my less divided attention.

As to Dunberry itself and its familiar figures, there was little

change to be noted. On the one side there was the ripening of the

young fruit towards maturity; on the other, a little whiter growth of

lichen on the decaying branches. Uncle Jenico must count among the

latter; though surely no tree past fruiting ever retained more

unimpaired the sweetness of its sap. He had collected during this

period enough antiquities to furnish out an old rag, bone, and iron

shop; and, indeed, I am afraid the bulk of his stock was not suited to

a much more exclusive repository. There was little which, provided it

was gathered from the beach and had once been a part of something

living or manufactured, he would not give a place in it. His

veneration for rust was the most artless thing. An object had only to

be corroded with it, to figure in his eyes for an assured antique. In

this way he amassed great quantities of bolts, links, sheet-iron

fragments, and other rarities, to most of which he assigned a use and

period, which, I am convinced, had never been theirs. There was, for

instance, a breastplate of the Renaissance era, which I do believe had

never been anything but a dish-cover of our own. There was an iron

skull-cap, or morion, of Edward the First’s time, which I will swear

was nothing but a saucepan without its handle; the handle itself,

indeed, being found near the same spot a few days later, and

catalogued for the head of a boar spear. Part of a whale’s under jaw,

much decayed, figured for the prow of a Viking ship; and divers teeth,

mostly, I think, horses’, for the grinders of prehistoric monsters.

There were some bronze coins certainly--none too many--whose value was

conjectural, and whose legends were largely undecipherable. Uncle

Jenico would never submit these, the cream of his collection, to

expert criticism. He hugged them as a miser hugs his gold, but with a

diviner intent. I alone was permitted to gloat with him over the

hoard.

“There’s your jointure, Dicky,” he would say. “Look at it accumulating

for you, without an effort of its own, at compound interest. There’s

no trustee like a collector who knows his business. You may turn over

current money to increase it; but the more you leave that alone the

better you’ll realize on it some day. The antiquity market is always a

rising one. Every year adds its interest to it. We won’t touch the

principal yet--not till you come of age. Then we’ll put it up, my

boy--then we’ll put it up; and you shall eat your dinners, and follow

in your dear father’s footsteps, and have chambers in Fountain Court

itself.”

Did he have a real faith in this picture? He had a faith in having a

faith in it, anyhow. Yet sometimes I could not help thinking he shrunk

from that same test of criticism; from the conceivable discovery that

he had wasted all these years of his life on a fond chimera. I am glad

that in the end the test was never forced; that circumstances came to

lay for ever the necessity of it, and in a way than which none other

could have delighted him better. For I believe a realization of the

truth would have broken his kind, unselfish heart.

He had not during this time altogether eschewed his former habits and

enthusiasms. Periodic inventions of purely local inspiration marked

it. He designed a respirator to be lined with porous shavings of

driftwood, so that the asthmatic merchant might inhale ozone in the

thickest fogs of Lombard Street. He planned a boat to be steered from

the front by means of a rudder which was merely a jointed elongation

of the prow, or false beak hinging to the neck, like a fish’s head and

gills: a splendid conception, seeing how the steersman would be also

the look-out, and the crew aft suffer no more responsibility than

passengers in a train.

Other happy notions of his were “the luminous angler,” a hook rubbed

with phosphorus for night fishing; a scheme for pickling sandhoppers;

and an uncapsizable boat, the buoyant principle whereof was an armour

of light iron pipings, each tube of which was to be divided into a

number of little water-tight compartments.

None of these was ever, to my knowledge, put to the actual test, so

pledged is our conservatism to run in a circle. The old stern-steerer

was good enough for our fathers, and were we to be more exacting than

they, who stand to us for all holy prescription? No inspired inventor

ever yet profited by his inspiration; nor did his descendants find

that inspiration marketable until it was mellowed to a tradition. For

which reason Uncle Jenico had to be content, like the magnanimous soul

he was, with planting for the generations to come.

He never dreamt now, more than I, of leaving the village in which

circumstance had laid us to take root. Aliens at first, we were become

of the soil, and bound to it by many ties of interest and affection.

As to the place itself, Mr. Sant’s hopes of seasonable visitors, of

whom we had been welcomed for the pioneers, were doomed to

non-fulfilment. Whether it was its isolation, its shocking

primitiveness in those days of antimacassars and the social

proprieties, or perhaps its rather forbidding reputation for

inhospitality, which kept strangers away, I do not know; but in any

case they came rarely, and then only as birds of passage. I think it,

at least, quite likely that the third consideration was most

operative. Dunberry, before the days of Mr. Sant, had borne, it must

be confessed, a sinister notoriety--a name for determined and

organized smuggling. Visitors then were neither desired nor welcomed,

the whole native population, or at least with few exceptions, forming

a lawless confederacy for the disposal of contraband. But after the

earthquake (or what was generally cited for such, and by many, I am

persuaded, who knew better, though it made no difference in the

moral), things should have been otherwise, when the new rector, using

its opportunity to reclaim his wayward flock to godliness, sought to

compensate by legitimate trade for the lost wages of sin. But it is

easier to cure the itch than to convince others of your patient’s

recovered cleanness. And so Dunberry reformed had still to suffer the

penalty of Dunberry unregenerate. Visitors came not to it, and it was

in the position of having dropped the carnal substance for the moral

shadow. And what made it worse was that the Excise, unpersuaded of its

reclamation, chose this very penitential time to dump down a

coastguard station on the cliffs a mile south, and so knocked on the

head for ever any possibility of its relapse into the old prosperous

condition.

The blow fell in the second year of our stay; and from it dated, I

think, the final demoralisation of the ancient order, of which Rampick

might be considered the prominent expression. This man deteriorated

thenceforth year by year, recognizing, I suppose, the practical

uselessness of his hypocrisy. His gradual self-revelation was a real

grief to Mr. Sant, whose worldly common sense was not always proof

against his missionary zeal. He had the pain to see this cherished

convert of his sink into an idle, drunken loafer, with a heart

poisoned with a shapeless black resentment against all whom he chose

to consider were in any way responsible for his ruin; amongst whom he

included, for some unaccountable reason, my uncle and me, and in only

less degree, the dear clergyman himself. But bankruptcy knows no

reason.

At the date at which I reopen my story, Joel Rampick was a shambling,

degraded, evil-looking man, half crazed between drink and his sense of

injury; full of suppressed snarlings and mutterings; still, as of old,

the watchful spirit of the ruins on the hill; still, as of old,

policing Harry and me, though secretly rabid now in his impotency to

control or terrify us; still, as of old, nevertheless, a hypocrite in

form, while he carried his heart on his tattered sleeve. And so, as a

main factor to be in the development of the strange drama, to the dark

accomplishment of which in this year of our opening manhood I have

been reluctantly leading, I reintroduce, and for the moment leave him.

* * * * * *

It was a wild, wet November, a season full of tempest and the promise

of it, when guns would boom beyond the fatal sandbanks, and sudden

rockets tear the sky; when the wives would gather a rich harvest of

driftwood, coming down in the morning to a prospect of frenzied

waters, and black spots of wreckage swooping in them like swallows

blown about a storm. Near the end of the month the winds quieted, and

one afternoon fell dead calm, so that Harry and I were moved to stroll

out after dark to stretch our long unexercised limbs. It was so

peaceful after the turmoil, that to enlarge our sense of

convalescence, we took the way of the lonely valley, and climbed the

Abbot’s Mitre. The moon was in its last quarter, and stooping towards

its rest in the earth like a bent and wearied old soul; an idle drift

or two of cloud pursued it, trying the effect of a star here and there

on its gauze, as it loitered; and not a sound broke the stillness but

the whispering chuckle of the small surf on the shingle below.

We sat down on a block of stone in the midst of the huge and silent

congress of ruin. Here were ghostly corridors, which the sea still

mocked with an echo of monkish footsteps; pitch-black corners, where

the faint rustle of mortar falling might have been the muttering

whisper of the confessional; drifts of broken arches,

colossal-shouldered, heaven-supporting in their time, now bowed under

the weight of their hanging-gardens of ivy; shattered windows that

were without a purpose, like open gates set up in a desert. Dim and

tragic in the moonlight, they stood around us, a spectral deputation

of giants, making its unearthly appeal for some human redress or

sympathy. They seemed to hem us in, to throng closer and closer. An

odd nightmare mood possessed me. I shivered, and stamped on the

ground.

“Harry,” I said, with a nervous giggle; “supposing these smuggler

chaps down here ever _walk_!”

With my very words he started, and nipped my arm like a vice.

“Look!” he whispered thickly, and pointed.

Out from the blackness of the overturned plinth hard by slipped a grey

shadow, a thing that might have been a dog, but was not.

“O!” I shuddered, falling against my friend. “Let’s get away--Harry!

at the back here.”

The sound of my voice, little though it was, appeared to startle the

creature. It turned, paused as if regarding us, seemed to be coming

our way, and vanished again into the glooms from which it had emerged.

I had had a dreadful moment; and so it was with a sense of outrage

that I heard Harry laugh out as he sprang to his feet.

“O!” he cried, skipping and sniggering before me; “to see it come so

pat, and hear his tone change. Wasn’t it beautiful? And him not to

know a bogey from a badger! O, Master Dicky, really!”

“A badger!” I echoed awfully. Then recovered myself and added with a

rather agitated laugh; “Well, don’t pretend you weren’t startled

yourself at first.”

“I?” he exclaimed. “Why, you old donkey, I brought you up here on

purpose, on the chance of seeing it.”

“Bosh!” I snapped.

“Very well,” he said. “I’ll show you its tracks in the mud to-morrow,

if you don’t believe me. I guessed it was somewhere in the hill, and

now I know.”

“Did you?” I said resentfully. “Then I’d rather you played the fool

with me by day.”

“Played!” said he; “what have I played? ’Twas you began with your

ghosts and things. Besides, any fool knows that badgers only _walk_ at

night.”

He sniggered again; then, seeing that I was hurt, took my arm in his,

and patted me down.

“It’s really rather a start, though,” said he--“I mean the thing being

here at all; because they live in woods, you know. But I’ll tell you

what I make of it; that it was driven down by those burnings” (it had

been a very hot summer, with two fires, destroying some acres, up in

the Court woods) “to get near the water. Anyhow, I spotted its tracks

in the soft ground here some days ago, and made up my mind to run it

to earth. We’ll come up to-morrow and have a look by daylight.”

We did as he proposed, and found, amongst the bramble and other

vegetable and miscellaneous litter which choked the neighbourhood of

the great tumbled mass of masonry, indubitable signs of a passage

leading to the creature’s earth.

“Don’t say anything about it,” said Harry, desisting, excited, from

his examination; “and we’ll just have a try to dig it out some day.

Wonder if it could tell us anything about the earthquake?”

He was staring at me, and I at him.

“Harry,” I whispered, thrilling all through; “supposing there’s a way

down after all!”

“Don’t _you_--believe it, sir,” said Rampick’s breathless voice.

The man had, after his customary fashion, come softly upon us from

some hidden coign of espial. His hands were slouched in his pockets,

and he mumbled a little black clay pipe, shaped like a death’s head,

between his teeth.

“I wouldn’t think--_if_ I were you,” he went on, “_fur_ to pry into

the Lord’s secrets. Let the grave keep its own--_per_vided I may be so

bold.”

“I wish _you_ wouldn’t pry into our secrets, Mr. Rampick,” said Harry,

loftily. “It’s got to be rather a nuisance this, you know.”

The ex-smuggler snatched his pipe from his lips, and seemed for an

instant as if he were about to dash it to the ground in a fury. But he

recovered himself, and pretended only to be shaking out the ashes

before he returned the cutty to his mouth.

“Secrets?” said he. “Why, you makes me laugh to talk of having secrets

here!”

He broke off, restless in a shaking way to get his pipe to draw; then

turned suddenly upon me.

“_You’re_ a gen’leman, sir,” he said, “and should know better--nor to

meddle _in_ things what don’t concarn you. The Lord has putt His seal

on this here hill: _you_ let it alone--_if_ I may make free to be His

mouthpiece, like Ezekiel what was told to warn the evil doers that

they come not to grief--_and_ die.”

I laughed.

“O, you flatter yourself, Mr. Rampick!” I said. “You aren’t a bit like

Ezekiel.”

He stood regarding me, half perplexed, half malignant, for a minute;

then settled himself down on a stone and smoked away, silent, his eyes

staring and full of a vicious resolution.

“Come on, Dick,” said Harry, seeing it obvious that the man meant to

outstay us, and took my arm and walked me off.

“But we’ll have the badger, nevertheless,” he said, when we were out

of hearing, “and in spite of that sot. Can’t make him out, can you?

Should have thought he’d have welcomed the chance of recovering some

of his old brandy tubs.”