E-text prepared by Lionel Sear
SHINING FERRY.
by
ARTHUR THOMAS QUILLER-COUCH ("Q").
1910
This e-text was prepared from a reprint of a version published in 1905.
CONTENTS
BOOK I.
I. ROSEWARNE OF HALL.
II. FATHERS AND CHILDREN.
III. ROSEWARNE'S PILGRIMAGE.
IV. ROSEWARNE'S PENANCE.
V. THE CLOSE OF A STEWARDSHIP.
VI. THE RAFTERS.
VII. THE HEIRS OF HALL.
BOOK II.
VIII. HESTER ARRIVES.
IX. MR. SAMUEL'S POLICY.
X. NUNCEY.
XI. HESTER IS ACCEPTED.
XII. THE OPENING DAY.
XIII. TOM TREVARTHEN INTERVENES.
XIV. MR. SAM IS MAGNANIMOUS.
XV. MYRA IN DISGRACE.
BOOK III.
XVI. AUNT BUTSON CLOSES SCHOOL.
XVII. PETER BENNEY'S DISMISSAL.
XVIII. RIGHT OF FERRY.
XIX. THE INTERCEDERS.
XX. AN OUTBURST.
XXI. MR. BENNY GETS PROMOTION.
XXII. CLEM IS LOST TO MYRA.
XXIII. HESTER WRITES A LOVE LETTER.
XXIV. THE RESCUE.
XXV. BUT TOM CAN WRITE.
XXVI. MESSENGERS.
XXVII. HOME.
CHAPTER I.
ROSEWARNE OF HALL.
John Rosewarne sat in his counting-house at Hall, dictating a letter to
his confidential clerk. The letter ran--
"Dear Sir,--In answer to yours of the 6th inst., I beg to inform you
that in consequence of an arrangement with the Swedish firms, by
which barrel-staves will be trimmed and finished to three standard
lengths before shipment, we are enabled to offer an additional
discount of five per cent, for the coming season on orders of five
thousand staves and upwards. Such orders, however, should reach us
before the fishery begins, as we hold ourselves free to raise the
price at any time after 1st July. A consignment is expected from the
Baltic within the next fortnight."
The little clerk looked up. His glance inquired, "Is that all?"
"Wait a minute." His master seemed to be reflecting; then leaning back in
his chair and gripping its arms while he stared out of the bow-window
before him, he resumed his dictation--
"I hope to be in Plymouth on Wednesday next, and that you will hold
yourself ready for a call between two and three in the afternoon at
your office."
"I beg your pardon, sir," the clerk interposed, "but Mr. Samuel closes
early on Wednesdays.
"I know it. Go on, please--
"I have some matters to discuss alone with you, and they may take a
considerable time. Kindly let me know by return if the date
suggested is inconvenient."
"That will do." He held out his hand for the paper, and signed it,
"Yours truly, John Rosewarne," while the clerk addressed the envelope.
This concluded their day's work.
Rosewarne pulled out his watch, consulted it, and fell again to staring
out of the open window. A climbing Banksia rose overgrew the sill and ran
up the mullions, its clusters of nankeen buds stirred by the breeze and
nodding against the pale sunset sky. Beyond the garden lay a small
orchard fringed with elms; and below this the slope fell so steeply down
to the harbourthat the elm-tops concealed its shipping and all but the
chimney-smoke of a busy little town on its farther shore. High over this
smoke the rooks were trailing westward and homeward.
Rosewarne heard the clank of mallets in a shipbuilding yard below.
Then five o'clock struck from the church tower across the water, and the
mallets ceased; but far down by the harbour's mouth the crew of a
foreign-bound ship sang at the windlass--
Good-bye, fare-ye-well--Good-bye, fare-ye-well!
[In the original text a short length of musical score is shown]
The vessel belonged to him. He controlled most of the shipping and a good
half of the harbour's trade. As for the town at his feet, had you
examined his ledgers you might fancy its smoke ascending to him as
incense. He sat with his strong hand resting on the arms of his chair,
with the last gold of daylight touching his white hair and the lines of
his firm, clean-shaven face, and overlooked his local world and his
possessions. If they brought him happiness, he did not smile.
He aroused himself with a kind of shake of the shoulders, and stretched
out a hand to ring, as his custom was after the day's work, for a draught
of cider.
"Eh? Anything more?" he asked; for the little clerk, having gathered up
his papers, had advanced close to the corner of the writing-table, and
waited there with an air of apology.
"I beg your pardon, sir--the 28th of May. I had no opportunity this
morning, but if I may take the liberty."--
"My birthday, Benny? So it is; and, begad, I believe you're the only soul
to remember it. Stay a moment."--
He rang the bell, and ordered the maidservant to bring in a full jug of
cider and two glasses. At the signal, a small Italian greyhound, who had
been awaiting it, came forward fawning from her lair in the corner, and,
encouraged by a snap of the fingers, leapt up to her master's knee.
"May God send you many, sir, and His mercy follow you all your days!" said
little Mr. Benny, with sudden fervour. Relapsing at once into his
ordinary manner, he produced a scrap of paper and tendered it shyly.
"If you will think it appropriate," he explained.
"The usual compliment? Hand it over, man." Mr. Rosewarne took the paper
and read--
"Another year, another milestone past;
Dear sir, I hope it will not be the last:
But more I hope that, when the road is trod,
You find the Inn, and sit you down with God."
"Thank you, Benny. Your own composition?"
"I ventured to consult my brother, sir. The idea--if I may so call it--
was mine, however."
Mr. Rosewarne leant forward, and picking up a pen, docketed the paper with
the day of the month and the year. He then pulled out a drawer on the
left-hand side of his knee-hole table, selected a packet labelled
"Complimentary, P. B."--his clerk's initials--slipped the new verses under
the elastic band containing similar contributions of twenty years,
replaced the packet, and shut the drawer. The little greyhound, displaced
by these operations, sprang again to his knees, and he fell to fondling
her ears.
"I do not think there will be many more miles, Benny," said he, reaching
for the cider-jug. "But let us drink to the rest of the way."
"A great many, I hope, sir," remonstrated Mr. Benny. "And, sir--talking
about milestones--you will be pleased to hear that Mrs. Benny was confined
this morning. A fine boy."
"That must be the ninth at least."
"The eleventh, sir--six girls and five boys: besides three buried."
"Good Lord!"
"They bring their love with them, sir, as the saying is."
"And as the saying also is, Benny, it would be more to the purpose if they
brought their boots and shoes. Man, you must have a nerve, to trust
Providence as you do!"
"It's a struggle, sir, as you can guess; but except to your kindness in
employing me, I am beholden to no man. I say it humbly--the Lord has been
kind to me."
Rosewarne looked up for a moment and with a curious eagerness, as though
on the point of putting a question. He suppressed it, however.
"It seems to me," he said slowly, "in this question of many children or
few there's a natural conflict between the private man and the citizen;
yes, that's how I put it--a natural conflict. I don't believe in Malthus
or any talk about over-population. A nation can't breed too many sons.
Sons are her strength, and if she is to whip her rivals it will be by the
big battalions. Therefore, as I argue it out, a good citizen should beget
many children. But now turn to the private side of it. A man wants to do
the best for his own; and whatever his income, he can do better for two
children than for half a dozen. To be sure, he mayn't turn 'em out as he
intended."--
Here Rosewarne paused for a while unwittingly, as his eyes fell on the
packet of letters in Mr. Benny's hand. The uppermost--the business
letter which he had just signed--was addressed to his only son.
"--But all the same," he went on, "he has fitted them out and given them
a better chance in the struggle for life. The devil takes the hindmost
in this world, Benny. I'd like to lend you a book of Darwin's--the
biggest book of this century, and a new gospel for the next to think out.
The conclusion is that the spoils go to the strongest. You may help a man
for the use you can make of him, but in the end every man's your natural
enemy."
"A terrible gospel, sir! I shall have to get along with the old one,
which says, 'Bear ye one another's burdens.'"
"I won't lend you the book. 'Twouldn't be fair to a man of your age, with
eleven children. And after all, as I said, the new gospel has a place for
patriots. They breed the raw material by which a nation crushes all
rivals; then, when the fighting is over, along comes your man with money
and a trained wit, and collars the spoils."
Mr. Benny stood shuffling his weight from one foot to the other.
"Even if yours were the last word in this world, sir, there's another to
reckon with."
"And meanwhile you're on pins and needles to be off to your wife's
bedside. Very well, man--drink up your cider; and many thanks for your
good wishes!"
As Mr. Benny hurried towards the wicket-gate and the street leading down
to the ferry, he caught sight, across the hedge, of two children seated
together in a corner of the garden on the step of a summer arbour, and
paused to wave a hand to them.
They were a girl and a boy--the girl about eight years old and the boy a
year or so younger--and the pair were occupied in making a garland such as
children carry about on May-morning--two barrel-hoops fixed crosswise and
mounted on a pole. The girl had laid the pole across her lap, and was
binding the hoops with ferns and wild hyacinths, wallflowers, and garden
tulips, talking the while with the boy, who bent his head close by hers
and seemed to peer into the flowers. But in fact he was blind.
"You're late!" the girl called to Mr. Benny. At the sound of her voice,
the boy too waved a hand to him.
"It's your grandfather's birthday, and I've been drinking his health."
He beckoned them over to the hedge. "And it's another person's birthday,"
he announced mysteriously.
"Bless the man! you don't tell me you've gone and got another!" exclaimed
the girl.
Mr. Benny nodded, no whit abashed.
"Boy or girl?"
"Boy."
"What is he like?" asked the boy. His blindness came from some defect of
the optic nerve, and did not affect the beauty of his eyes, which were
curiously reflective (as though they looked inwards), and in colour a deep
violet-grey.
"I hadn't much time to take stock of him this morning," Mr. Benny
confessed; "but the doctor said he was a fine one." He nodded at the
garland. "Birthday present for your grandfather?" he asked.
"Grandfather doesn't bother himself about us," the girl answered.
"Besides, what would he do with it?"
"I know--I know. It's better be unmannerly than troublesome, as they say;
and you'd like to please him, but feel too shy to offer it. That's like
me. I had it on my tongue just now to ask him to stand godfather--the
child's birthday being the same as his own. 'Twas the honour of it I
wanted; but like as not (thought I) he'll set it down that I'm fishing for
something else, and when it didn't strike him to offer I felt I couldn't
mention it."
"_I'll_ ask him, if you like."
"Not on any account! No, please, you mustn't! Promise me."
"Very well."
"I oughtn't to have mentioned it, but,"--Mr. Benny rubbed the back of his
head. "You don't know how it is--no, of course you wouldn't; somehow,
when a child's born, I want to be talking all day."
"Like a hen. Well, run along home, and some day you shall ask us to tea
with it."
But Mr. Benny had reached the wicket. It slammed behind him, and he ran
down the street to the ferry at a round trot. He might have spared his
haste, for he had to cool his heels for a good ten minutes on the slipway,
and fill up the time in telling his news to half a dozen workmen gathered
there and awaiting the boat. Old Nicky Vro, the ferryman, had pulled the
same leisurable stroke for forty years now, and was not to be hurried.
The workmen were carpenters, all engaged upon the new schoolhouse above
the hill, and returning from their day's job. They discussed the building
as Nicky Vro tided them over. Its fittings, they agreed, were something
out of the common.
"'Tis the old man's whim," said one. "He's all for education now, and the
latest improvements. 'Capability'--that's his word."
"A poor lookout it'll be for Aunt Butson and her Infant School."
"He'll offer her the new place, maybe," it was suggested.
But all laughed at this. "What? with his notions? He's a darned sight
more likely to offer her Nicky's job, here!"
Nicky smiled complacently in his half-witted way. "That's a joke, too,"
said he. He knew himself to be necessary to the ferry.
He pulled on--still with the same digging stroke which he could not have
altered for a fortune--while his passengers discussed Rosewarne and
Rosewarne's ways.
"Tis a hungry gleaning where he've a-reaped," said the man who had spoken
of capability; "but I don't blame the old Greek--not I. 'Do or be done,
miss doing and be done for'--that's the world's motto nowadays; and if I
hadn't learnt it for myself, I've a son in America to write it home.
Here we be all in a heap, and the lucky one levers himself a-top."
Mr. Benny said good-night to them on the landing-slip, and broke into a
trot for home.
"'Tisn't true," he kept repeating to himself, almost fiercely for so mild
a little man. "'Tisn't true, whatever it sounds. There's another world;
and in this one--don't I _know_ it?--there's love, love, love!"
CHAPTER II.
FATHERS AND CHILDREN.
John Rosewarne fetched his hat and staff from the hall, and started on his
customary stroll around the farm-buildings, with the small greyhound
trotting daintily at his heels.
The lands of Hall march with those of a far larger estate, to which they
once belonged, and of which Hall itself had once been the chief seat.
The house--a grey stone building with two wings and a heavy porch midway
between them--dated from 1592, and had received its shape of a capital E
in compliment to Queen Elizabeth. King Charles himself had lodged in it
for a day during the Civil War, and while inspecting the guns on a
terraced walk above the harbour, had narrowly escaped a shot fired across
from the town where Essex's troops lay in force. The shot killed a poor
fisherman beside him, and His Majesty that afternoon gave thanks for his
own preservation in the private chapel of Hall. In those days, the porch
and all the main windows looked seaward upon this chapel across half an
acre of green-sward, but the Rosewarnes had since converted the lawn into
a farmyard and the shrine into a cow-byre. Above it ran a line of tall
elms screening a lane used by the farm-carts, and above this again a great
field of arable rounded itself against the sky.
From the top of Parc-an-hal--so the field was named--the eye travelled
over a goodly prospect: sea and harbour; wide stretches of cultivated land
intersected by sunken woodlands which marked the winding creeks of the
river; other woodlands yet more distant, embowering the great mansion of
Damelioc; the purple rise of a down capped by a monument commemorating
ancient battles. The scene held old and deeply written meanings for
Rosewarne, as he gazed over it in the descending twilight--meanings he had
spent his life to acquire, and other meanings born with him in his blood.
Once upon a time there lived a wicked nobleman. He owned Damelioc, and
had also for his pleasure the house and estate of Hall, whence his family
had moved to their lordlier mansion two generations before his birth.
Being exiled to the country from the Court of Queen Anne, he cast about
for some civilised way of passing the time, and one day, as he lounged at
church in his great pew, his eye fell on Rachel Rosewarne, a gipsy-looking
girl, sitting under the gallery. This Rachel's father was a fisherman,
tall of stature, who planted himself one night in the road as my lord
galloped homeward to Damelioc. The horse shied, and the rider was thrown.
Rosewarne picked him up, dusted his lace coat carefully, and led him aside
into this very field of Parc-an-hal. No one knows what talk they held
there, but on his lordship's dying, in 1712, of wounds received in a duel
in Hyde Park, Rachel Rosewarne produced a deed, which the widow's lawyers
did not contest, and entered Hall as its mistress, with her son Charles--
then five years old.
Rachel Rosewarne died in 1760 at the age of seventy-six, leaving a grim
reputation, which survived for another hundred years in the talk of the
countryside. While she lived, her grip on the estate never relaxed.
Her son grew up a mere hind upon the home-farm. When he reached
twenty-five, she saddled her grey horse, rode over to Looe, and returned
with a maid for him--one of the Mayows, a pale, submissive creature--whom
he duly married. She made the young couple no allowance, but kept them at
Hall as her pensioners. In the year 1747, Charles (by this time a man of
forty) had the temerity to get religion from the Rev. John Wesley.
The great preacher had assembled a crowd on the green by the cross-roads
beyond Parc-an-hal. Charles Rosewarne, who was stalling the cattle after
milking-time, heard the outcries, and strolled up the road to look.
Two hours later he returned, fell on his knees in the outer kitchen, and
began to wrestle for his soul, the farm-maids standing around and crying
with fright. But half to hour later his mother returned from Liskeard
market, strode into the kitchen in her riding-skirt, and took him by the
collar. "You base-born mongrel!" she called out. "You barn-straw whelp!
What has the Lord to do with one of your breed?" She dragged him to his
feet and laid her horse-whip over head and shoulders. Madam had more than
once used that whip upon an idling labourer in the fields.
She died, leaving the estate in good order and clear of debt. Charles
Rosewarne enjoyed his inheritance just eleven years, and, dying in 1771 of
_angina pectoris_, left two married daughters and a son, Nicholas, on whom
the estate was entailed, subject to a small annual charge for maintaining
his mother.
In this Nicholas all the family passions broke out afresh. He had been
the one living creature for whom Madam Rachel's flinty breast had nursed a
spark of love, and at fourteen he had rewarded her by trying to set fire
to her skirts as she dozed in her chair. At nineteen, in a fit of
drunkenness, he struck his father. He married a tap-room girl from
St. Austell, and beat her. She gave him two sons: the elder (named
Nicholas, after his father), a gentle boy, very bony in limb, after the
fashion of the Rosewarnes; the younger, Michael, an epileptic. His mother
had been turned out of doors one night in a north-westerly gale, and had
lain till morning in a cold pew of the disused chapel, whereby the child
came to birth prematurely. This happened in 1771, the year that Nicholas
took possession of the estate. He treated his old mother even worse,
being fierce with her because of the small annual charge. She grew blind
and demented toward the end, and was given a room in the west wing, over
the counting-house. Nicholas removed the door-handle on the inside, and
the wainscot there still showed a dull smear, rubbed by the poor
creature's shoulder as she trotted round and round; also marks upon the
door, where her fingers had grabbled for the missing handle. There were
dreadful legends of this Nicholas--one in particular of a dark foreigner
who had been landed, heavily ironed, from a passing ship, and had found
hospitality at Hall. The ship (so the story went) was a pirate, and the
man so monstrously wicked that even her crew could not endure him.
During his sojourn the cards and drink were going at Hall night and day,
and every night found Nicholas mad-drunk. He began to mortgage, and
whispers went abroad of worse ways of meeting his losses; of ships lured
upon the rocks, and half-drowned sailors knocked upon the head, or chopped
at with axes.
All this came to an end in the great thunderstorm of 1778, when the
harvesters, running for shelter to the kitchen, found Nicholas lying in
the middle of the floor with his mouth twisted and eyeballs staring.
They were lifting the body, when a cry from the women fetched them to the
windows, in time to catch a glimpse of the foreigner sneaking away under
cover of the low west wall. As he broke into a run the lightning flashed
upon the corners of a brass-bound box he carried under his arm. One or
two gave chase, but the rain met them on the outer threshold in a deluge,
and in the blind confusion of it he made off, nor was seen again.
Thus died Nicholas Rosewarne, and was followed to the grave by one mourner
only--his epileptic child, Michael. The heir, Nicholas II., had taken the
king's shilling to be quit of his home, and was out in Philadelphia,
fighting under Sir Henry Clinton. He returned in 1780 with a shattered
knee-pan and a young wife he had married abroad. She died within a year
of her arrival at Hall in giving birth to a son, who was christened
Martin.
The loss of her and the ruinous state of the family finances completely
broke the spirit of this younger Nicholas. He dismissed the servants and
worked in the fields and gardens about his fine house as a common market
gardener. On fair-days at Liskeard or St. Austell the ex-soldier,
prematurely aged, might have been seen in the market-place, standing as
nearly at 'Attention' as his knee-pan allowed beside a specimen apple
tree, which he held to his shoulder like a musket. Thus he kept sentry-go
against hard Fortune--a tall man with a patient face. Thanks to a natural
gift for gardening, and the rare fertility of the slopes below Hall, he
managed to pay interest on the mortgages and support the family at home--
his sad-browed mother, his brother Michael, and his son Martin. And he
lived to taste his reward, for his son Martin had a financial genius.
This genius awoke in Martin Rosewarne one Sunday, in his fifteenth year,
as he sat beside his father in the family pew and listened to a dull
sermon on the Parable of the Talents. He was a just child, and he could
not understand the crime of that servant who had hidden his talent in a
napkin. In fault he must be, for the Bible said so.
The boy spent that afternoon in an apple-loft of the deserted chapel, and
by evening he had hit on a discovery which, new in those days, now informs
the whole of commerce--that it is more profitable to trade on borrowed
capital than upon one's own.
He put it thus: "Let me, not knowing the meaning of a 'talent,' put it at
100 pounds. Now, if the good and faithful servant adventured five
talents, or 500 pounds, at ten per cent, he made 50 pounds a year.
But if the servant with one talent can borrow four others, he has the same
capital of 500 pounds. Suppose him to borrow at five per cent. and make
ten like the other, he pays 20 pounds profit in interest, and has thirty
per cent, left on the talent he started with."
"Father," said the boy that night at supper, "what ought the wicked
servant to have done with his talent?"
"Parson told you that plain enough, if you'd a-been listening."
"But what do _you_ think?"
"I don't need to think when the Bible tells me. 'Thou wicked and slothful
servant,' it says, 'thou oughtest to have put my money to the exchangers,
and then I should have received mine own with usury.'"
"That means he ought to have lent it?"
"Yes, sure."
"Well, now," said the boy, nodding, "_I_ think he ought to have borrowed."
Nicholas stared at his son gloomily. "Setting yourself up agen' the
Scriptures, hey? It's time you were a-bed."
"But, father."--
The ex-soldier seldom gave way to passion, but now he banged his fist down
on the table. "Go to bed!" he shouted. "Talk to _me_ of borrowing!
Don't my shoulders ache wi' the curse of it?"
Martin took his discovery off and nursed it. By and by another grew out
of it: If the wicked servant be making thirty per cent, against the
other's ten, he can afford for a time to abate some of his profit, lower
his prices, and, by underselling, drive the other out of the market.
He grew up a tall and taciturn lad, pondering his thoughts while he dug
and planted with his father in the kitchen-gardens. For this from the age
of eighteen he received a small wage, which he carefully put aside.
Then in 1800 his uncle Michael died, and left him a legacy of 50 pounds.
He invested it in the privateering trade, in which the harbour did a brisk
business just then. Three years later his father suffered a stroke of
paralysis--a slight one, but it confined him to his room for some weeks.
Meanwhile, Martin took charge.
"I've been looking into your accounts," he announced one day, as soon as
his father could bear talking to.
"Then you've been taking an infernal liberty."
"I see you've cleared off two of the mortgages--on the home estate here
and the Nanscawne property. You're making, one way and another, close on
500 pounds a year, half of which goes to paying up interest and reducing
the principal by degrees."
"That's about it."
"And to my knowledge three of your tenants are making from 200 to 400
pounds by growing corn, which you might grow yourself. Was ever such
folly? Look at the price corn is making."
"Look at the labour. How can I afford it?"
"By borrowing again on the uncumbered property."
"Your old lidden again? I take my oath I'll never raise a penny on Hall
so long as I live! With blood and sweat I've paid off that mortgage, and
I'll set my curse on you if you renew it when I'm gone."
"We'll try the other, then. Your father raised 1500 pounds on the
Nanscawne lands, and spent it on cards and ropery. We'll raise the same
money, and double it in three years. If we don't--well, I've made 500
pounds of my own, and I'll engage to hand you over every farthing of it."
"Well," his father gave in, "gain or loss, it will fall on you, and pretty
soon. I wasn't built for a long span; my father's sins have made life
bitter to me, and I thank God the end's near. But if you have 500 pounds
to spare, I can't see why you drive me afield to borrow."
"To teach you a lesson, perhaps. As soon as you're fit for it, we'll
drive over to Damelioc, and have a try with the new owner. He'll jump at
us. The two properties went together once, and when he hears our tale,
he'll say to himself, 'Oho! here's a chance to get 'em together again.'
He'll think, of course, that you are in difficulties. But mind you stand
out, and don't you pay more than five per cent."
Here it must be explained that the great Damelioc estates, after passing
through several hands, had come in 1801 to an Irishman, a Mr. Eustatius
Burke, who had made no small part of his fortune by voting for the Union.
Mr. Burke, as Martin rightly guessed, would have given something more than
the value of Hall to add it to Damelioc; and so, when Nicholas Rosewarne
drove over and petitioned for a loan of 1500 pounds, he lent with
alacrity. He knew enough of the situation to be thoroughly deceived.
After Nanscawne, he would reach his hand out upon Hall itself. He lent
the sum at five per cent, and dreamed of an early foreclosure.
Armed with ready money, the two Rosewarnes called in the leases of their
fields, hired labourers, sowed corn, harvested, and sold at war prices.
They bought land--still upon mortgage--on the other side of the harbour,
and at the close of the great year 1812 (when the price of wheat soared
far above 6 pounds a quarter) Nicholas Rosewarne died a moderately rich
man. By this time Martin had started a victualling yard in the town, a
shipbuilding yard, and an emporium near the Barbican, Plymouth, where he
purveyed ships' stores and slop-clothing for merchant seamen. He made
money, too, as agent for most of the smuggling companies along the coast,
although he embarked little of his own wealth in the business, and never
assisted in an actual run of the goods. He had ceased to borrow actively
now, for other people's money came to him unsought, to be used.
The Rosewarnes, as large employers of labour, paid away considerable sums
weekly in wages. But those were times of paper money. All coin was
scarce, and in some villages a piece of gold would not be seen in a
twelvemonth. Martin and his father paid for labour in part by orders on
their own shops; for the rest, and at first for convenience rather than
profit, they set up a bank and issued their own notes--those for one or
two pounds payable at their own house, and those for larger sums by their
London agent. At first these notes would be cashed at once. By and by
they began to pass as ordinary tender. Before long, people who possessed
a heap of this paper learnt that the Rosewarnes would give them interest
for it as well as for money, and bethought them that, if hoarded, it ran
the risk of robbery, besides being unproductive. Timidly and at long
intervals men came to Martin and asked him to take charge of their wealth.
He agreed, of course. 'Use the money of others' was still his motto.
So Rosewarne's became a deposit bank.
To the end Nicholas imperfectly understood these operations. By a clause
in his will he begged his son as a favour to pay off every penny of
mortgage money. On the morning after the funeral, Martin stuffed three
stout rolls of bank-notes into his pocket, and rode over to Damelioc.
Mr. Burke had for six years been Lord Killiow, in the peerage of Ireland,
and for two years a Privy Councillor. He received Martin affably.
He recognised that this yeoman-looking fellow had been too clever for him,
and bore no malice.
"I've a proposition to make to you, Rosewarne," said he, as he signed the
receipts. "You are a vastly clever man, and I judge you to be
trustworthy. For my part, I hate lawyers "--
"Amen!" put in Martin.
"And I thought of asking you to act as my steward at a salary. It won't
take up a great deal of your time," urged his lordship; for Martin had
walked to the long window, and stood there, gazing out over the park, with
his hands clasped beneath his coat-tails.
"As for that, I've time to spare," answered Martin. "Banking's the
easiest business in the world. When it's hard, it's wrong. But would you
give me a free hand?"
"I cannot bind my brother Patrick, if that's what you mean. When I'm in
the grave he must act according to his folly. If he chooses to dismiss
you."--
"I'll chance that. But you are asking a good deal of me. Your brother is
an incurable gambler. He owes something like 20,000 pounds at this
moment--money borrowed mainly on _post obits_."
"You are well posted."
"I have reason to be. Man--my lord, I mean--he will want money, and
what's to prevent me adding Damelioc to Hall, as you would have added Hall
to Damelioc?"
"There's the boy, Rosewarne. I can tie up the estate on the boy."
Martin Rosewarne smiled. "Your brother's is a good boy," he said.
"You can tie up the money with him. Or you may make me steward, and I'll
give you my word he shall not be ousted."
Eustatius, first Lord Killiow, died in 1822, and his brother, Patrick
Henry, succeeded to the title and estates. Martin Rosewarne retained his
stewardship. To be sure he made an obliging steward. He saw that the man
must go his own gait, and also that he was drinking himself to death.
So where a timid treasurer would have closed the purse-strings, he
unloosed them. He cut down timber, he raised mortgages as soon as asked--
all to hasten the end. Thus encouraged, the second Lord Killiow ran his
constitution to a standstill, and succumbed in 1832. The heir was at that
time an undergraduate at Christchurch, Oxford, and already the author of a
treatise of one hundred and fifty pages on _The Limits of the Human
Intelligence_. On leaving the University he put on a white hat and buff
waistcoat, and made violent speeches against the Reform Bill. Later, he
sobered down into a 'philosophic' Radical; became Commissioner of Works;
married an actress in London, Polly Wilkins by name; and died a year
later, in 1850, at Rome, of malarial fever, leaving no heir.
Lady Killiow--whom we shall meet--buried him decently, and returned to
spend the rest of her days in seclusion at Damelioc, committing all
business to her steward, John Rosewarne.
For Martin Rosewarne had taken to wife in 1814 a yeoman's daughter from
the Meneage district, west of Falmouth, and the issue of that marriage was
a daughter, who grew up to marry a ship's captain, against her parents'
wishes, and a son, John, whom his father had set himself to train in his
own ideas of business.
In intellect the boy inherited his father's strength, if something less
than his originality. But in temper, as well as in size of frame and
limb, he threatened at first to be a throw-back to Nicholas, his
great-grandfather of evil memory. All that his father could teach he
learnt aptly. But his passions were his own, and from fifteen to eighteen
a devil seemed to possess the lad. He had no sooner mastered the banking
business than he flatly refused to cross the bank's threshold. For two
years he dissipated all his early promise in hunting, horse-breaking,
wrestling at fairs, prize-fighting, drinking, gaming, sparking.
Then, on a day after a furious quarrel at home, he disappeared, and for
another three years his parents had never a word of him.
It was rumoured afterwards that he had enlisted, following his
grandfather's example, and had spent at least some part of these
wander-years as private in a West India regiment. At any rate, one fine
morning in 1838 he returned, bringing with him a wife and an infant son,
and it appeared that somehow he had exorcised, or at least chained, his
devil. He settled down quietly at Hall, where meanwhile business had been
prospering, and where now it put forth new vigour.
It was John who foresaw the decline in agriculture, and turned his
father's attention from wheat-growing to mining. He opened up the granite
and china-clay on the moorland beyond the town, and a railway line to
bring these and other minerals down to the coast. He built ships, and in
times of depression he bought them up, and made them pay good interest on
their low prices. He bought up the sean-boats for miles along the coast,
and took the pilchard-fishery into his hands. Regularly in the early
spring a fleet sailed for the Mediterranean with fish for the Spaniards
and Italians to eat during Lent. Larger ships--tall three-masters--took
emigrants to America, and returned with timber for his building-yards,
mines, and clay-works. The banking business had been sold by his father
not long before the great panic of 1825.
In this same year 1825 John lost his first wife. After a short interval
he sought and found a second--this time a lady of good family on the
shores of the Tamar. She bore him a daughter, Anne, who grew up to make
an unhappy match, and died untimely. The children at play in the garden
were hers. Her mother survived her five years.
As men count prosperity, John Rosewarne had lived prosperously. He had a
philosophy, too, to steel him against the blows of fate, and behind his
philosophy a great natural courage. Nevertheless, as he gazed across his
acres for the last time--knowing well that it might be the last--and
across them to Damelioc, the wider acres of his stewardship, his eyes for
one weak moment grew dim. He had reached the stile at the summit of
Parc-an-hal, and was leaning there, when he felt a cool, damp touch upon
his fingers. The little greyhound, puzzled at his standing there so long
motionless, had reached up on her hind legs, and was licking his hand
affectionately.
He frowned, pushed her off, and started to descend the hill. Night was
falling fast, with a heavy dew. The children had left their play and
crept to bed. They never sought him to say good-night.
He returned slowly, leaning on his staff, went to his room, lit the lamp,
and spent a couple of hours with his papers. This had become his nightly
habit of late.
On Wednesday he arose early, packed a hand-bag, crossed the ferry, and
took train for Plymouth.
CHAPTER III.
ROSEWARNE'S PILGRIMAGE.
From the railway station at Plymouth John Rosewarne walked straight to
Lockyer Street, to a house with a brass plate on the door, and on the
brass plate the name of a physician famous throughout the West of England.
The doctor had just come to the end of his morning consultations, and
received Rosewarne at once. The pair talked for five minutes on
indifferent matters, then of Paris, and the terrible doings of the
Commune--for this was the month of May 1871. At length Rosewarne stood
up.
"Best get it over," said he.
The doctor felt his pulse, took the stethoscope and listened, tapped and
sounded him, back and chest, then listened again.
"Worse?" asked Rosewarne.
"It is worse," answered the doctor gravely.
"I knew it. One or two in my family have died in the same way. The pains
are sharper of late, and more frequent."
"You keep that little phial handy?"
Rosewarne showed where it lay, close at hand in his watch-pocket.
"How long?" he asked.
"A few months, perhaps." The doctor seemed to hesitate.
"And you won't answer for _that_?"
"With care. It is folly for a man like you to be overworking."
Rosewarne laughed grimly. "You're right there, and I've often enough
asked myself why I do it. To what end, good Lord! But I'm taking no
care, all the same. Good-bye."
"Good-bye, my friend." The doctor did not remonstrate further.
He knew his man.
From Lockyer Street Rosewarne walked to his hotel, ordered a beef-steak
and a pint of champagne, and lunched leisurably. Lunch over, he lit a
cigar, and strolled in the direction of the Barbican. The streets were
full of holiday-keepers, and he counted a dozen brakes full of workers
pouring out of town to breathe the air of Dartmoor on this fine afternoon.
He himself was conscious of elation.
"I'll drink it regularly," he muttered to himself. "It's hard if a man
with maybe a month more to live cannot afford himself champagne."
The air in Southside Street differed from that of Dartmoor, being stuffy,
not to say malodorous. He rapped on the door of a dingy office, and it
was opened by his son, Mr. Samuel Rosewarne.
"How d'ye do, Sam?" he nodded, not offering to shake hands. "All alone?
That's right. I hope, by the way, I'm not depriving you of a holiday?"
"I seldom take a holiday," Mr. Sam answered.
The old man eyed him ironically. Mr. Sam wore a black suit, with some
show of dingy white shirt-front, relieved by a wisp of black cravat and
two onyx studs. His coat-cuffs were long and frayed, and his elastic-side
boots creaked as he led the way to the office.
In the office the old man came to business at once. "First of all," said
he, with a nod toward the safe, "I'd like a glance into your books."
"Certainly, sir," answered Mr. Sam, after a moment's hesitation.
He unlocked the safe. "Do you wish to take the books in order? You will
find it a long business."
"Man, I don't propose to audit your accounts. If you let me pick and
choose, half an hour will tell me all I want."
Well knowing that his son detested the smell of tobacco, he pulled out
another cigar and lit it. "You can open the window," said he, "if you
prefer the smell of your street. Is this the pass-book?"
For about three-quarters of an hour he ransacked the ledgers, tracking
casual entries from one to another apparently at random. His fingers
raced through the pages. Now and again he looked up to put a sharp
question; and paused, drumming on the table while Mr. Sam explained.
Once he said, "Bad debt? Not a bit; the man was right enough, if you had
made inquiries."
"I _did_ make inquiries."
"Ay, into his balance. So you pinched him at the wrong moment, and
pinched out ninepence in the pound. Why the devil couldn't you have
learnt something of the _man? He_ was all right. If you'd done that, you
might have recovered every penny, earned his gratitude, and done dashed
good business."
He shut the ledger with a slam. "Lock 'em up," he commanded, lighting a
fresh cigar, "and come up to the Hoe for a stroll. Where the deuce did
you pick up that hat?"
"Bankrupt stock."
"I thought so. Maybe you've invested in a full suit of mourning for _me_,
at the same time?"
"No, sir."
"Why not? The books are all right. You've no range. Still, within your
scope you're efficient. You'll get to your goal, such as it is. You wear
a hat that makes me ill, but in some way you and your hat will represent
the survival of the fittest. What's the boy like?"
"He ails at times, sir--being without a mother's care. I am having him
privately instructed. He has some youthful stirrings toward grace."
Old Rosewarne swung round at a standstill. "Grace?" he echoed, for the
moment supposing it the name of a girl. Then perceiving his mistake, he
broke out into a short laugh; but the laugh ended bitterly, and his face
twitched with pain.
"Look here, Sam; I'm going to leave you the money. Don't stare--and
don't, I beg, madden me with your thanks."--
"I'm sure, sir."--
"You'll get it because I can't help myself. There's your half-sister's
children at home; but of what use to me is a girl or a blind boy?
You are narrow--narrow as the grave: but I find that, like the grave, you
are inevitable; and, like the grave, you keep what you get. For the kind
of finance that was the true game of manhood to your grandfather and me,
you have no capacity whatever. No, I cannot explain. Finance? Why, you
haven't even a _sense_ of it. Yet in a way you are capable. You will
make the money yield interest, and will keep the race going. That is what
I look to--you will keep the race going. Now I want to speak about that
boy of yours. Do me the only favour I have ever asked you--send him to a
public school, and afterwards to college, and let him have his fling."
Sam thought his father must have gone mad. "What, sir! After all you
have said of such places! 'Dens of idleness,' 'sinks of iniquity'--I have
heard you scores of times!"
"I spoke as a fool. 'Twas my punishment, perhaps, to believe it; but,
Lord!"--he eyed his son up and down--"to think my punishment should take
this form!" He caught Sam's arm suddenly and wheeled him about in face of
a glass shop-front. "Man, look at yourself! Make the boy something
different from _that!_ Do what I'd have done for you if ever you had
given me a chance. Turn him loose among gentlemen; don't be afraid if he
idles and wastes money; let him riot out his youth if he will--he'll be
learning all the time, learning something you don't know how to teach, and
maybe when his purse is emptied he'll come back to you a gentleman.
I tell you there's no difference in the world like that between a
gentleman and a man who's not a gentleman. Money can't buy it; and, after
the start, money can't change or hide it. The thing is there, or it
isn't."
"Whatever the thing is," said Sam sullenly, "you are asking me to peril my
son's soul for it."
They had reached the Hoe by this time. John Rosewarne dropped upon a
bench and sat resting both hands on his staff and gazing over the
twinkling waters of the Sound.
"Anne married a gentleman," pursued Sam.
"Ay, and a rake. A-ah!" muttered the old man after a moment, drawing a
long breath, "if only that boy of hers weren't blind! But he doesn't
carry the name, while _you_."--He broke off with a savage laugh.
"What's that you said a moment ago?--something about immortal souls."
"I said there's a world beyond this, and,"--
"Is there? That's what I'm concerned to know just now. And_ you?_
What are you proposing to do when you get there?" He withdrew his eyes
from the bright seascape and let them travel slowly over his son. "_You!_
sitting there like a blot on God's sunshine! By what right should you
expect another world, who have cut such a figure in this one? I have
known love and lust, and drink and hard work and hard fighting; I have
been down in the depths, and again I have known moments to make a man
smack his hands together for joy to be alive and doing. But you?
What kind of man are you, you son of mine? What do you live for? Why did
you marry? And what did you and your poor woman find to talk about?"
Whatever bullying Sam suffered, he had his revenge in this--that he and no
other man could exasperate his father to weakness. He rubbed his thin
side whiskers now and muttered something about 'an acceptable sacrifice.'
The old man jabbed viciously at the gravel with his staff. "And your
religion?" he broke forth again. "What is it? In some secret way it
satisfies you--but how? I look into the Bible, and I find that the whole
of religion rests on a man's giving himself away to help others.
I don't believe in it myself; I believe in the exact contrary.
Still there the thing is, set out in black and white. It upsets law and
soldiering and nine-tenths of men's doings in trade: to me it's folly; but
so it stands, honest as daylight. When did _you_ help a man down on his
luck? or forgive your debtor? You'll get my money because you never did
aught of the kind. Yet somehow you're a Christian, and prate of your mean
life as an acceptable sacrifice. In my belief you're a Christian
precisely because Christianity--how you work it out I don't know--will
give you a sanction for any dirty trick that comes in your way. When good
feeling, or even common honour, denies you, there's always a text
somewhere to oil your conscience."
"I've one, sir, on which I can rely--'Be just, and fear not.'"
"I'll test it. You'll have my money; on which you hardly dared to count,
eh? Be honest."
"Only on so much of it as is entailed, sir."
For a while John Rosewarne sat silent, with his eyes on the horizon.
"That," said he at length, "is just what you could not count on."
He turned and looked Sam squarely in the face. "You were born out of
wedlock, my son."
Sam's hand gripped the iron arm of the bench. The muscles of his face
scarcely moved, but its sallow tint changed, under his father's eyes, to a
sickly drab.
"Ay," pursued the old man, "I am sorry for you at this moment; but you
mustn't look for apologies and repentance and that sort of thing.
The fact is, I never could feel about it in that way. I was young and
fairly wild, and it happened. One doesn't think of possible injury to
someone who doesn't yet exist. But that, I grant you, doesn't make it any
the less an injury. Now what have you to say?"
"The sins of the fathers."--
"--Are visited on the children: quite so. Afterwards we did our best, and
married. No one knows; no one has ever guessed; and the proof would be
hard to trace. In case of accident, I give you Port Royal for a clue."
Sam rose and stood for a moment staring gloomily down on the gravel.
"Why did you tell me, then?" he broke out. "What need was there to tell?"
His father winced, for the first time. "I see your point. Why didn't I,
you ask, having played the game so far, play it out? Why couldn't I take
my secret with me into the last darkness, and be judged for it--my own
sole sin and complete? Well, but there's the blind child. By law the
house and home estate would he his. I might have kept silence, to be
sure, and let him be robbed; but somehow I couldn't. I've a conscience
somewhere, I suppose."
"Have you?" Sam flamed out, with sudden spirit. "A nice sort of
conscience it must be! I call it cowardice, this dragging me in to help
you compensate the child. Conscience? If you had one, you wouldn't be
shifting the responsibility on to mine."
"You are mistaken," said his father calmly. "And by the way, I advise you
not to take that tone with me. It may all be very proper under the
circumstances; but there's the simple fact that I won't stand it.
You're mistaken," he repeated. "I mean to settle the compensation alone,
without consulting you; though, by George! if 'tweren't for pitying the
poor child, I'd like to leave it to you as a religious man, and watch you
developing your reasons for giving him nothing."
"And it was you," muttered Sam, with a kind of stony wonder, "who advised
me just now to let my son run wild!"
"I did, and I do." John Rosewarne stood up and gripped his staff.
"By the way, too," he said, "your mother was a good woman."
"I don't want to hear anything about it."
"I know; but I wanted to tell you. Good-bye."
He turned abruptly and went his way down the hill. As he went, his lips
moved. He was talking not to himself, but to an unseen companion--
"Mary! Mary!--that this should be the fruit of our sowing!"
CHAPTER IV.
ROSEWARNE'S PENANCE.
Beside the winding Avon above Warwick bridge there stretches a flat
meadow, along the brink of which on a summer evening you may often count a
score of anglers seated and watching their floats; decent citizens of
Warwick, with a sprinkling of redcoats from the garrison. They say that
two-thirds of the Trappist brotherhood are ex-soldiers; and perhaps if we
knew the reason we might also know why angling has a peculiar fascination
for the military.
Angling was but a pretext, however, with a young corporal of the 6th
Regiment, who sat a few yards away on John Rosewarne's right, and smoked
his pipe, and cast frequent furtive glances, now along the river path,
now back and across the meadow where another path led from the town.
Each of these glances ended in a resentful stare at his too-near
neighbour, who fished on unregarding.
"Is this a favourite corner of yours?" the corporal asked after a while,
with meaning.
"I have fished on this exact spot for thirty-five years," answered John
Rosewarne, not lifting his eyes from the float.
The corporal whistled. "Thirty-five years! It's queer, now, that I never
set eyes on you before--and I come here pretty often."
Rosewarne let a full minute go by before he answered again.
"There's nothing queer about it, Unless you've been stationed long in
Warwick."
"Best part of a year."
"Quite so: I fish in Avon once a year only."
"Belong to the town?"
"No; nor within two hundred miles of it."
"You must think better of the sport than I do, to come all that distance."
John Rosewarne lifted his eyes for the first time and turned them upon the
young man.
"_What_ sport?" he asked.
"Eh? Why, fishing, to be sure. What else?" stammered the corporal,
taken aback.
"Tut!" said the old man curtly. "Here she comes. Now, what are you going
to do?"
Without waiting for an answer, he bent his gaze on the float again, and
kept it fastened there, as a pretty shop-girl came strolling along the
river path. She had taken off her hat, of broad-brimmed straw with
artificial poppies and cornflowers, and swung it in her hand as she came.
Her eyes roamed the landscape carelessly, avoiding only that particular
spot where the corporal, as she approached, scrambled to his feet; then,
her start of surprise was admirable.
"Oh, it's _you!_ Good-evening."
"Good-evening, miss."
"Why, whoever--! It seems to me you spend most of your time fishing."
She paused, gathering in her skirt a little--and this obviously was the
cue for a gallant soldier. The corporal began, indeed, to wind up his
line, but with a foolish grin and a glance at Rosewarne's back.
"It keeps beautiful weather," he answered at length.
"_I_ call it sultry." She held out her hat with a little deprecating
laugh. "I took it off for the sake of fresh air," she explained. Then, as
he stood stock-still, a flush crept up her cheek to her pretty forehead.
"Well, good-evening; I won't interrupt you by talking," she said, and
began to move away.
Come to think of it, it _do_ look like thunder, "the corporal remarked to
Rosewarne, staring after her and then up at the sky.
"If you had eyes in your head, you'd have seen that without her telling
you. That cloud yonder has been rising against the wind for an hour.
Look you along the bank, how every man Jack is unjointing his rod and
making for home. Go, and leave me in peace!"
He did not turn his head even when the corporal, having packed together
his gear, wished him good-night and hurried after the print frock as it
vanished in the twilit shadows. One or two of the departing anglers
paused as they went by to promise him that a storm was imminent and the
fish had ceased feeding. He thanked them, yet sat on--solitary, in the
leaden dusk.
The scene he had just witnessed--how it called up the irremediable past,
with all the memories which had drawn him hither, summer after summer!
And yet how common it was and minutely unimportant! Nightly by the banks
of Avon couples had been courting--thousands in these thirty-five years--
each of them dreaming, poor fools, that their moment's passion held the
world in its hands. But the world teemed with rivers ten times lordlier
than Avon--rivers stretching out in an endless map, with bridges on which
lovers met and whispered, with banks down which they went with linked arms
into the shadows--
"Were I but young for thee, as I hae been,
We should hae been gallopin' doun in yon green,
And linkin' it owre the lily-white lea--
And wow gin I were but young for thee!"
He had been young, and had loved and wronged a woman, and bitterly
repented. He had married her, and marriage had killed neither love nor
remorse. The woman was dead long since: he had married again, but never
forgotten her nor ceased to repent. She, a pretty tradesman's daughter of
Warwick, had collected her savings and taken ship for the West Indies,
trusting to his word, facing a winter's passage in the sole hope that he
would right her. Until the day of embarking she had never seen the sea;
and the sea, after buffeting her to the verge of death, in the end
betrayed her. A gale delayed the ship, and in the height of it her child
was born. Rosewarne, a private soldier, went to his captain, as soon as
she was landed, made a clean breast of it, and married her. But it was
too late. She lived to return with him to England; but he knew well enough
when she died that her sufferings on the passage out, and the abiding
anguish of her shame, had killed her. A common tale! Men and women still
go the way of their instinct, by which the race survives. "All the rivers
run into the sea, and yet the sea is not full. The thing that hath been,
it is that which shall be, and that which is done is that which shall be
done."
A tale as common as sunset! Yet upon all rivers and upon every bridge and
willow-walk along their courses the indifferent sun shines for each pair
of fools with a difference, lighting their passion with a separate flame.
The woman was dead; and he--he that had been young--sat face to face with
death.
He leaned forward, oblivious of the clouded dusk, with his half-shut eyes
watching the grey gleam of the river; but his mind's eye saw the shadowy
mead behind him, and a girlish figure crossing it with feet that seemed to
faint, holding her back from doom, yet to be impelled against their will.
They drew nearer. He heard their step, and faced about with a start.
An actual woman stood there on the river path, most like in the dusk to
that other of thirty-five years ago; but whereas _she_ had worn a print
frock, this one was clad in total black.
"Mr. Rosewarne,"--she began; but her words came to a halt, checked by a
near flash of lightning and by what it revealed.
He was in the act of rising--had risen, in fact, on one knee--when a spasm
of pain took him, and his hand went up to his breast. For a moment he
knelt so, turning on her a face of anguish; then sank and dropped in a
heap at her feet.
Quick as thought she was down on her knees beside him, and, slipping an
arm beneath his head, drew it upon her lap. While with swift fingers she
loosened his collar and neckcloth, a peal of thunder rumbled out, and the
first large raindrops fell splashing on her hand. She recalled that last
gesture of his, and with sudden inspiration searched in his breast-pocket,
found and drew out a small phial, uncorked it, and forced the liquid
between his teeth before they clenched in a second spasm. Two or three
sharp flashes followed the first. In the glare of them her eyes searched
along the river-bank, if haply help might be near; but all the anglers had
departed. Rosewarne's face stared up at her, blue as a dead man's in the
dazzling light. At first it seemed to twitch with each opening of the
heavens; but this must have been a trick of eyesight, for his head lay
quiet against her arm as she raised him a little, shielding him against
the torrential rain which now hissed down, in ten seconds drenching her to
the skin, blotting out river and meadow in a sheet of grey. It forced her
to stoop her shoulders, and, so covering him, she put out a hand and laid
it over his heart. Yes, it beat, though feebly. Once more she picked up
the phial and gave him to drink, and in a little while he stirred feebly
and found his voice.
"Rain? Is it rain?" he muttered.
"Yes; but I can spread my skirt over you. It will keep off a little.
Are you better?"
"Better? Yes, better. Let me feel the rain--it does me good."
He lay silent for a minute or so. "I shall be right again in a few
minutes. Did you find the phial?"
"Yes."
"Good girl. It was touch and go." By and by he made a movement to sit
up. "Let us get home quickly. You can throw the rod into the river.
I shan't want it again."
But she stood up, and, groping for the rod, drew the float ashore, and
untackled it, still in the hissing rain. The storm, after a brief lull,
had redoubled its rage. The darkness opened and shut as with a rapidly
moving slide, the white battlements of Caesar's Tower gleaming and
vanishing above the castle elms, and reappearing while their fierce
candour yet blinded the eye. The thunder-peals, blending, wrapped Warwick
as with one roar of artillery. Rosewarne had risen, and stood panting.
He grasped her shoulder. "Come!" he commanded. The girl, dazzled by the
lightning, puzzled by his sudden renewal of strength, turned and peered at
him. He declined her arm. They walked back across the sodden meadow to
the town, over the roofs of which, as the storm passed away northward, the
lightning yet glimmered at intervals, turning the gaslights to a dirty
orange.
At the summit of the High Street, hard by the Leycester Hospital, they
came to the doorway of a small shuttered shop, over which by the light of
a street lamp one could read the legend, "J. Marvin, Secondhand
Bookseller." The girl opened the door with a latchkey. An oil lamp burned
in an office at the back of the shop--if that can be spoken of as a
separate room which was, in fact, entirely walled off with books laid flat
and rising in stacks from the floor. The place, in fact, suggested a cave
or den rather than a shop, with stalagmites of piled literature and a
subtle pervading odour of dust and decayed leather. The girl, after
shutting the bolts behind her, led the way cautiously, and, crossing a
passage at the rear of the shop, opened a door upon a far more cheerful
scene. Here, in a neat parlour hung with old prints and mezzotints and
water-colours, a hanging lamp shed its rays on a China bowl heaped with
Warwickshire roses, and on a white cloth and a table spread for supper.
"H'm!" grunted Rosewarne, glancing in through the doorway, while she lit a
candle for him at the foot of the stairs. "Your father and I used to sup
in the kitchen, with old Selina to wait on us."
"But since there is no longer any Selina! I had to pension her off, poor
old soul, and she is gone to the almshouse."
She handed him the light.
"Now, if you will go up to your room, I will fetch the hot water, and then
you must give me your change of clothes. They shall be warmed for a few
minutes at the kitchen fire, and you shall have them hot-and-hot."
"It seems to me that while all this is doing, you will stand an excellent
chance of rheumatic fever."
"Oh, I shall be all right," she announced cheerfully. "No--don't look at
me, please. I know very well that the dye has run out of these crapes,
and my face is beautifully streaked with black! Can you walk upstairs
alone? Very well. And if you feel another attack coming, you are to call
me at once."
She must have been expeditious; for when he came downstairs again he found
her awaiting him in the parlour, clad in a frock of duffel-grey, which,
with her damp, closely plaited hair, gave her a Quakerish look. Yet the
frock became her; the natural wave of her hair, defying moisture, showed
here and there rebelliously, and her cheeks glowed after a vigorous
towelling.
Rosewarne drew from under his coat a bottle of champagne, and set it on
the table, where the lamp's ray fell full on its gold foil. Her eyes
opened wide; for he had always visited this house in his oldest clothes
and passed for a poor man.
"Since you insist upon the parlour," said he, "I must try to live up to
it." He produced a knife from his pocket, with a pair of nippers, and
began to cut the wire. "Why are you wearing grey?" he demanded.
She flushed. "This is my school frock. I have only one suit of mourning
as yet."
"And you sent away Selina. You wanted money, I suppose?"
"No," she answered, after a moment, meeting his eyes frankly; "at least,
not in the way you mean. The doctor's bills were heavy, and for years
father had done business enough to keep the roof over him and no more.
So at first there was--well, a pinch. The books will sell, of course; two
honest men are already bidding for them--one at Birmingham and the other
at Bristol. But meanwhile I must pinch a little or run in debt.
I hate debt."
"And afterwards?" Rosewarne broke off sharply, with a glance around the
table. "But, excuse me, you have laid for one only."
"If it is your pleasure, Mr. Rosewarne."--
"Say that I claim it as an honour, Miss Hester," he answered, with a
mock-serious bow.
She laughed, and ran off to the pantry.
"And afterwards?" he resumed, as they seated themselves.
"Afterwards? Oh, I go back to the teaching. I like it, you know."
He brimmed her glass with champagne, then filled his own. "You saved my
life just now, Miss Hester; and life is good to look forward to, even when
a very little remains. I drink to your happiness."
"Thank you, sir."
"How old are you?"
"I shall be twenty-five in August."
"And how long have you been teaching?"
"Eight years."
"Ah! is it eight years since I came and missed you? I remember, the last
time we three supped together--you and your father and I--I remember
taking note of you, and telling myself, 'She will be married before I
return next year.' Why haven't you married?"
It was the essence of Hester Marvin's charm that she dealt straightly with
all people.
"It takes two to make even that quarrel," she answered frankly and gaily.
"Will you believe that nobody has ever asked me?"
"Make light of it if you will, but I bid you to beware. You were a
good-looking missie, and you have grown--yes, one can say it without
making you simper--into a more than good-looking woman. But the days slip
by, child, and your looks will slip away with them. You are wasting your
life in worrying over other folk's children. Those eyes of yours were
meant for children of your own. What's more, you are muddling the world's
work. Which do you teach now--boys or girls?"
"Girls for the most part; but I have a class of small boys."
"And what do you teach 'em--I mean, as the first and most important
thing?"
Hester knit her brows for a moment before answering. "Well, I suppose, to
be honourable to one another and gentle to their sisters."
"Just so. In other words, you relieve a mother of her proper duty. Who
but a mother ought to teach a boy those things, if he's ever to learn 'em?
That's what I call muddling the world's work. By the time a boy gets to
school he ought to be ripe for a harder lesson, and learn that life's a
fight in which brains and toil bring a man to the top. As for girls,
one-half of present-day teaching is time and money thrown away. Teach
'em to be wives and mothers--to sew and cook."--
"Does your supper displease you, Mr. Rosewarne?"
He set down knife and fork with a comical stare around the board.
"Eh? No--but did you really--?"
Their eyes met, and they both broke into a laugh.
"I should very much like to know," said Hester, resting her elbows on the
table and gazing at him over her folded hands, "if _you_ have treated life
as a fight in which men get the better of their neighbours."
He eyed her with sudden, sharp suspicion.
"You have at any rate a woman's curiosity," said he. "When you wrote to
me that your father was dead, but that I might have, for the last time, my
usual lodging here, had you any reason to suppose me a rich man?"
"I think," answered Hester slowly, after a pause, "that I must have spoken
so as to hurt you somehow. If so, I am sorry; but you must hear now just
why I wrote. I knew that, ever since I was born, and long before, you had
come once a year and lodged here for a night. I knew that you came because
my father was the parish clerk and let you spend the night in St Mary's
Church; and I know that, though he allowed it secretly, you did no harm
there, else he would never have allowed it. Now he is dead, and meanwhile
I keep the keys by the parson's wish until a new parish clerk is
appointed. And so I wrote, thinking to serve you for one year more as my
father had served you for many."
"I thank you, Miss Hester, and I beg your pardon. Yet there is a question
I need to ask, though you may very properly refuse to answer it.
Beyond my name and address and my yearly visits, what do you know of me?"
"Nothing at all."
"You must have wondered why I should do this strange thing, year by year?"
"To wonder is not to be inquisitive. Of course I have wondered; but I
supposed that you came to strengthen yourself in some purpose, or to keep
alive a memory--of someone dear to you, perhaps. Into what has brought
you to us year after year I have no wish at all to pry. But there is a
look on your face--and when children come to me with that look they are
unhappy with some secret, and want to be understood without having to tell
all particulars. A schoolmistress gets to know that look, and recognises
it sometimes in grown-up folk, even in quite old persons. Yes, and there
is another look on your face. You are not strong enough to go alone to
the church to-night, and you know it."
"I am going, I tell you."
He had pushed back his chair, and answered her, after a long pause, during
which he watched her removing the cloth.
"To-morrow you may have recovered; but to-night you are faint from that
attack. If you really must go, will you not let me go too, and take my
promise neither to look nor to listen?"
"Get me the key," he commanded, and walked obstinately to the door.
But there his strength betrayed him. He put out a hand against the jamb.
"I am no better than a child," he groaned, and turned weakly to her.
"Come if you will, girl. There is nothing to see, nothing to overhear."
She fetched cloak and bonnet and found the great keys. He and she stepped
out by a back entrance upon a lane leading to the church. The storm had
passed. Aloft, in a clear space of the sky, the moon rode and a few stars
shone down whitely, as if with freshly washed faces. Hester carried a
dark lantern under her cloak; but, within, the church was light enough for
Rosewarne to grope his way to his accustomed pew. Hester saw him take his
seat there, and choosing a pew at some distance, in the shadow of the
south aisle, dropped on her knees.
Nothing happened. The tall figure in the chancel sat motionless.
Rosewarne did not even pray--since he did not believe in God. But because
a woman, now long dead, had believed and had implored him to believe also,
that they two might one day meet in heaven, he consecrated this night to
her, sitting in the habitation of her faith, keeping his gaze upon that
spot in the darkness where on a bright Sunday morning a young soldier had
caught sight of her and met her eyes for the first time. Year after year
he had kept this vigil, concentrating his thought upon her and her faith;
but never for an instant had that faith come near to touching him, except
with a sentimental pity which he rejected, despising it; never had he come
near to piercing the well of that mysterious comfort and releasing its
waters. To him the dust of the great dead yonder in the Beauchamp
Chapel--dust of men and women who had died in faith--was dust merely,
arid, unbedewed by any promise of a life beyond. They had played their
parts, and great tombs and canopies covered their final nothingness.
This was the last time he would watch, and to-night he knew there was less
chance than ever of any miracle; for weariness weighed on him, and the
thought of coming annihilation held no terror, but only an invitation to
be at rest.
From the tower overhead the airy chimes floated over Warwick, beating out
a homely tune to mingle with homely dreams. He sat on, nor stirred.
The June dawn broke, with the twittering of birds in the churchyard.
He stood up and stretched himself, with a frown for the painted windows
with their unreal saints and martyrs. His footsteps as he walked down the
aisle did not arouse the girl, who slept in the corner of the pew, with
her loosened hair pencilling, as the dawn touched it, lines of red-gold
light upon the dark panels. Her face was pale, and sleep gave it a
childlike beauty. He understood, as he stooped and touched her shoulder,
why the apparition of her on the river-bank had so startled him.
"Come, child," he said; "the night is over."
CHAPTER V.
THE CLOSE OF A STEWARDSHIP.
A strange impatience haunted Rosewarne on his homeward journey; an almost
intolerable longing to arrive and get something over--he scarcely knew
what. When at length he stood on the ferry slipway, with but a furlong or
two of water between him and home, the very tranquillity of the scene
irritated him subtly--the slow strength of the evening tide, the few ships
idle at their moorings, the familiar hush of the town resting after its
day's business. He tapped his foot on the cobbles as though this fretful
action could quicken Uncle Nicky Vro, who came rowing across deliberately
as ever, working his boat down the farther shore and then allowing the
tide to slant it upstream to the landing-place.
"Eh? So 'tis you?" was Nicky's greeting. "Well, and I hope that you've
enjoyed your holiday--not that I know, for my part, what a holiday means."
"It's time you took one, then," Rosewarne answered.
The old man chuckled. "Pretty things would happen if I did! 'Took a day
off, one time, to marry my old woman, and another to bury her, and that's
all in five-and-forty year. Not a day's sickness in all that time, thank
the Lord!"
Rosewarne watched the old fellow's feeble digging stroke. "I preach
capability," he said to himself, "and this is the sort of thing I allow!"
His gaze travelled from the oar to the oarsman. "You're getting past your
work, all the same," he said aloud. "What does it feel like?"
"Eh?"
"To give up life little by little. Some men run till they drop--are still
running strong, maybe, when the grave opens at their feet, and in they go.
With you 'tis more like the crumbling of rotten timber; a little dribble
of sawdust day by day to show where the worms are boring. What does it
feel like?"
"I don't feel it at all," Nicky answered cheerfully. "Folks tell me from
time to time that I'm getting past. My own opinion is, they're in a
greater hurry to get to market than of yore. 'Competition '--that's a cry
sprung up since my young days: it used to be 'Religion,' and 'Nicholas
Vro, be you a saved man?' The ferry must ply, week-day or Sabbath: I put
it to you, What time have I got to be a saved man? The Lord is good, says
I. Now I'll tell you a fancy of mine about Him. One day He'll come down
to the slip calling 'Over!' and whiles I put Him across--scores of times
I've a-seen myself doing it, and 'tis always in the cool of the evening
after a spell of summer weather--He'll speak up like a gentleman, and ask,
'Nicholas Vro, how long have you been a-working this here boat?'
'Lord,' I'll answer, 'for maybe a matter of fifty year, calm or blow,
week-days and Sabbaths alike; and that's the reason your Honour has missed
me up to church, as you may have noticed.' 'You must be middlin' tired of
it,' He'll say: and I shall answer up, 'Lord, if you say so, I don't
contradict 'ee; but 'tis no bad billet for a man given to chat with his
naybours and talk over the latest news and be sociable, and warning to
leave don't come from me.' 'You'd best give me over they oars, all the
same,' He'll say; and with that I shall hand 'em over and be rowed across
to a better world."
Rosewarne was not listening. "Surely, man, the tide's slack enough by
this time!" he interrupted, his irritation again overcoming him.
"You needn't be fetching across sideways, like a crab."
Nicky Rested on his oars, and stared at him for a moment. As if Rosewarne
or any man alive could teach _him_ how to pull the ferry! He disdained to
argue.
"Talking about news," said he, resuming his stroke, "the _Virtuous Lady_
arrived yesterday, and began to unload this morning. You can see her
top-m'sts down yonder, over the town quay."
"Has Mrs. Purchase been ashore?" Mrs. Purchase was Rosewarne's only
sister, who had married a merchant skipper and sailed with him ever since
in the _Virtuous Lady_, in which she held a preponderance of the shares.
"Came ashore this very afternoon in a bonnet as large as St. Paul's, with
two-thirds of a great hummingbird a-top. She's balancing up the freight
accounts at this moment with Peter Benny. Indeed, master, you'll find a
plenty of folk have been inquiring for 'ee. There's the parson for one.
To my knowledge he've been down three times to ask when you'd be back, and
if you'd forgotten the School Managers' meeting, that's fixed for
to-morrow." Uncle Nicky brought his boat at length to shore.
"And there's Aun' Butson in terror that you'll be bringing in some
stranger to teach the children, and at her door half the day listening for
your footstep, to petition 'ee."
Somehow Rosewarne had promised himself that the restlessness would leave
him as soon as he reached his own side of the water. He stepped ashore
and began to walk up the slipway at a brisk pace; and then on a sudden his
brain harked backward to Uncle Nicky's talk, to which a minute before he
had listened so inattentively. In his hurry he had let an opportunity
pass. The old man had talked of death; had been on the point of saying
something important, perhaps--for all that concerned death and men's views
of death had become important now. He halted and turned irresolutely.
But the moment had gone by.
"Good-night!" he called back, and resumed his way up the village street.
Uncle Nicky, bending to replace a worn thole-pin with a new one, dropped
the pair with a clatter. In all his experience Rosewarne had never before
flung him a salutation.
"And a minute ago trying to tell me how to work the ferry!" the old man
muttered, staring after him. "The man must be ailing."
As a hunted deer puts the water between him and the hounds, Rosewarne had
hoped to shake off his worry at the ferry-crossing. But no; it dogged him
yet as he mounted the hill. Only, as a dreamer may suffer the horror of
nightmare, yet know all the while that it is a dream, he felt the
impatience and knew it for a vain thing. All his life he had been
hurrying desperately, and all his life the true moments had offered
themselves and been left ungrasped.
Before the doorway of a cottage halfway up the hill an old woman
waited to intercept him--Aunt Butson, the village schoolmistress.
She was a spinster well over sixty, and lodged with a widow woman, Sarah
Trevarthen, to whom the cottage belonged.
Rosewarne frowned at the sight of her. She wore her best cap and shawl,
and her cheeks were flushed. Behind her in the doorway sat a young
sailor, with a cage on the ground beside him and a parrot perched on his
forefinger close against his cheek. He glanced up with a shy, very
good-natured smile, touched his forelock to Rosewarne, and went on
whispering to the bird.
Aunt Butson stepped out into the roadway. "Good-evening, Mr. Rosewarne,
and glad to see you back and in health!" She dropped him a curtsey.
"If you've a minute to spare, sir."--
Confound the woman!--he had no minutes to spare. Still frowning, he
looked over her head at the young sailor, Sarah Trevarthen's boy Tom,
home from his Baltic voyage in the _Virtuous Lady_. Yes, it was Tom
Trevarthen, now a man grown. Rosewarne remembered him as a child in
frocks, tumbling about the roadway; as an urchin straddling a stick; as a
lad home (with this same parrot) from his first voyage. Who, in a world
moving at such a pace, could have a minute to spare?
Aunt Butson had plunged into her petition, and was voluble. It concerned
the new schools, of course. "She had taught reading, writing, and
ciphering for close on forty years. All the children in the village, and
nine-tenths of their parents for that matter, owed their education to her.
A little she could do, too, in navigation--as Mr. Rosewarne well knew:
enough to prepare a lad for schoolmaster Penrose across the water.
Mr. Penrose would rather teach two boys from her school than one from any
other parish. Surely--surely--the new Board wouldn't take the bread out
of an old woman's mouth and drive her to the workhouse? She didn't
believe, as some did, in this new-fangled education, and wouldn't pretend
to. Arithmetic up to practice-sums and good writing and spelling--
anything up to five syllables--were education enough to her mind for any
child that knew his station in life. The rest of it only bred Radicals.
Still, let her have a trial at least; let them decide to-morrow to give
her a chance; 'twould be no more than neighbourly. Her ways might be
old-fashioned; but she could learn. And with Mrs. Trevarthen to keep the
grand new schoolroom dusted--if they would give her the job--and look
after the fires and lighting."--
Rosewarne pretended to listen. The poor soul was inefficient, and he knew
it: beneath all her flow of speech ran an undercurrent of wrath against
the new learning and all its works. Poverty--sheer terror of a dwindling
cupboard and the workhouse to follow--drove her to plead with that which
she hated worse than the plague. He heard, and all the while his mind was
miles away from her petition; for some chance word or words let fall by
her had seemed for an instant to offer him a clue. Somewhere in the past
these words had made part of a phrase or sentence which, could he but find
it again, would resolve all this brooding trouble. He searched his
memory--in vain; the words drew together like dancers in a figure, and
then, on the edge of combining, fell apart and were lost.
Aloud he kept saying, "You mustn't count on it. Some provision will be
made for you, no doubt--in these days one must march with the times."
This was all the comfort she could win from him, and the poor old creature
gazed after him forlornly when at length he broke from her and went his
way up the hill.
He reached the entrance-gate. As it clashed behind him, two children at
play in the garden lifted their heads. The girl whispered to the boy,
and the pair stole away out of sight. From the porch the small greyhound
caught sight of him, and, bounding to him, fawned about his feet.
In the counting-house he found his sister closeted with Mr. Benny, and a
pile of bills on the table between. Mrs. Purchase rose and greeted him
with a little pecking kiss. She was a cheerful body, by some five or six
years his junior, with a handsome weather-tanned face, eyes wrinkled at
the corners like a seaman's, and two troubles in the world--the first
being that she had borne no children. She shared her husband's voyaging,
kept the ship's accounts, was known to all on board as "The Bos'un," and
when battened under hatches in foul weather spent her time in trimming the
most wonderful bonnets. Her coquetry stopped short at bonnets.
To-day indeed--the weather being warm--in lieu of bodice she had slipped
on a grey alpaca coat of her husband's.
"Good-evening, John!" She plunged at once into a narrative of the passage
home--how they had picked up a slant off Heligoland and carried it with
them well past the Wight; how on this side of Portland they had met with
slight and baffling head-winds, and for two days had done little more than
drift with the tides. The vessel was foul with weed, and must go into
dock. "You could graze a cow on her for a fortnight," Mrs. Purchase
declared. "Benny and I have just finished checking the bills.
You'd like to run through them?"
"Let be," said Rosewarne. "I'll cast an eye over them to-night maybe."
He stepped to the bell-rope and rang for his jug of cider.
Some touch of fatigue in the movement, some slight greyness in his face,
caught Mrs. Purchase's sisterly eye.
"It's my belief you're unwell, John."
"Weary, my dear Hannah--weary; that's all." He turned to the little
clerk. "That will do for to-night, Benny. You can leave all the papers
as they are, just putting these bills together in a heap. Is that the
correspondence? Very well; I'll deal with it."
"In all my life I never heard you own to feeling tired," persisted Mrs.
Purchase, as Mr. Benny closed the door behind him. "You may take my word
for it, you're unwell; been sleeping in some damp bed, belike."
Rosewarne moved to the window and gazed out across the garden.
Down by the yew-hedge, where a narrow path of turf wound in and out among
beds of tall Madonna lilies and Canterbury bells, the two children were
playing a solemn game of follow-my-leader, the blind boy close on his
sister's heels, she turning again and again to watch that he came to no
harm.
"I wonder if that boy could be trained and made fit for something?" mused
Rosewarne aloud.
"Eh? Is it Clem?" She had followed and stood now by his elbow.
"My dear man, he has the brains of the family! Leave Myra to teach him
for a while. See how she's teaching him now, although she doesn't know
it; and that goes on from morning to night."
"Where's the use of it? What's a blind man, at the best?"
"What God means him to be. If God means him to do better--ay, or to see
clearer--than other men, 'tisn't a pair of darkened eyes will prevent it."
"Woman's argument, Hannah. I take you on your own ground--God could cure
the child's eyes; but God doesn't, you see. On the contrary, God chose to
blind 'em. If I'd your religion, it would teach me that Clem's misfortune
was a punishment designed--the sins of the fathers."--
"Ay, you're a hard man, like your father and mine. Haven't I cause to
know it? Hadn't _she_ cause to know it--the mother of that pretty pair?"
"She made her bed."
"--And lies in it, poor soul. But I tell you, John, there's a worse
blindness than Clem's, and you and father have suffered from it.
I mean the blindness of thinking you know God's business so much better
than God that you take it out of His hands. 'Punishment,' you say, and
'sins of the fathers'? I'd have you beware how you visit the past on poor
Clem, or happen you may find some day that out of the sins of his fathers
you have chosen your own to lay on him."
Rosewarne turned on her with a harsh glance of suspicion. No, her eyes
were candid--she had spoken so by chance--she did not guess.
Had he been blind all his life? It was certain that now at the last his
eyes saw the world differently, and all things in it. Those children
yonder--a hundred times from this window he had watched them at play
without heeding. To-night they moved against the dark yew-hedge like
figures in a toy theatre, withdrawn within a shadowy world of their own,
celebrating a ritual in which he had no concern. The same instant
revealed their beauty and removed them beyond his reach. Did he wish to
make amends? He could not tell. He only knew it was too late. The world
was slipping away from him--these children with it--dissolving into the
shadow that climbed about him.
Next morning he saddled his horse and rode. His way led him past the new
school-buildings; and he reined up for a minute, while his eyes dwelt on
them with a certain pride. As chairman of the new School Board he had
chosen the architect, supervised the plans, and seen to it that the
contractor used none but the best material. The school would compare with
any in the Duchy, and should have a teacher worthy of it--one to open the
children's eyes and proclaim and inculcate the doctrine of progress.
John Rosewarne was a patriot in his unemotional way. He hated the drift
of the rural population into the towns, foreseeing that it sapped the
strength of England. He despised it too; his own experience telling him
that a countryman might amass wealth if he had brains and used them.
As for the brainless herd, they should be kept on the land at all cost, to
grow strong, breed strong children, and, when the inevitable hour came, be
used as fighters to defend England's wealth.
He rode on pondering, past uplands where the larks sang and the mowers
whetted their scythes; down between honeysuckle-hedges to a small village
glassing itself in the head waters of a creek, asleep, since all its grown
inhabitants had climbed the hill to toil in the hay-harvest, and silent
but for a few clucking fowls and a murmur of voices within the infants'
school; thence across a bridge, and up and along a winding valley to the
park gates at Damelioc. Beyond these the valley narrowed to a sylvan
gorge, and the speckless carriage-road mounted under forest trees
alongside a river tumbling in miniature cascades, swirling under mossy
footbridges, here and there artfully delayed to form a trout-pool, or as
artfully veiled by thickets of trailing wild roses and Traveller's Joy.
For a mile and more he rode upward under soft green shadows, then lifted
his eyes to wide daylight as the coombe opened suddenly upon a noble
home-park, smooth as a lawn, rising in waves among the folds of the hills
to a high plateau whence Damelioc House looked seaward--a house of wide
prospect and in aspect stately, classical in plan, magnificently filling
the eye with its bold straight lines and ample symmetries prolonged in
terraces and rows of statues interset with pointed yews.
The mistress of this palace gave him audience as usual in her
blue-and-white morning-room, from the ceiling of which, from the centre of
a painting, "The Nuptials of Venus and Vulcan," her own youthful face
smiled down, her husband having for a whim instructed the painter to
depict the goddess in her likeness. It smiled down now on a little
shrunken lady huddled deep in an easy-chair. Only her dark eyes kept some
of their old expressiveness, and her voice an echo of its old full tone.
She asked Rosewarne a polite question or two concerning his holiday, and
they fell at once to ordinary talk--of repairs, rents, game, and
live-stock generally, the hiring of a couple of under-keepers, the
likeliest tenant for a park-lodge which had fallen empty; of investments
too, and the money market, since Rosewarne was her man of business as well
as steward.
Lady Killiow trusted him absolutely; but only because she had long since
proved him. He on his part yielded her the deepest respect, both for her
sagacity in business and for the fine self-command with which she, an
actress of obscure birth, had put the stage behind her, assumed her rank,
and borne it through all these years with something more than adequacy.
John Rosewarne, like a true Briton, venerated rank, and had a Briton's
instinct for the behaviour proper to rank. About his mistress there could
be no question. She was a great lady to the last drop of her blood.
His devotion to her had a touch of high chivalry. It came of long
service; of pity for her early widowhood, for her childlessness, for the
fate ordaining that all these great possessions must be inherited by
strangers; but most of all it was coloured by a memory of which he had
never dared, and would never dare, to speak.
He had seen her on the stage. Once, in his wild days, and not long before
he enlisted, he had spent a week in Plymouth, where she was acting, the
one star in a touring company. Night after night she had laid a spell on
him; it was not Rosalind, not Imogen, not Mrs. Haller, not Lady Teazle,
that he watched from the pit; but one divine woman passing from avatar to
avatar. So, when the last night revealed her as Lady Macbeth, as little
could he condemn her of guilt as understand her remorse. He saw her
suffering because for so splendid a creature nothing less could be decreed
by the jealous gods. It tortured him; and when the officer announced her
death, for the moment he could believe no less. 'The queen, my lord, is
dead.' 'She should have died hereafter.' How well he remembered the
words and Macbeth's reply--those two strokes upon the heart, strokes of a
muffled bell following the outcry of women.
He was no reader of poetry. He had bought the book afterwards, and flung
it away; it tangled him in words, but showed him nothing of the woman he
sought.
Yet to-day, as he stood before Lady Killiow discussing the petty question
of a lease, the scene and words flashed upon him together, and he grasped
the clue for which his brain had been searching yesterday while he
listened to old Mrs. Butson. It was Lady Killiow who called the lease a
'petty' one, and that word unlocked his memory. "This petty pace--
"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time--
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death."
"I beg your pardon," said Lady Killiow, lifting her eyes to him in some
astonishment--for he had muttered a word or two--and meeting his fixed
stare. "You are not attending, I believe."
"Excuse me, my lady. It is true that I have not been well of late--and
that reminds me: in case of illness, my son will post down from Plymouth.
He holds himself ready at call. If I may say it, you will find him less
of a fool than he looks."
Lady Killiow put up her hands with a little laugh, half comfortable, half
wistful. "My good Mr. Rosewarne, I am a very old woman! In a short while
you may do as you like; but until I am gone, please understand that you
cannot possibly fall ill."
He bowed with a grave smile. Of his mistress's grateful affection he took
away these light words only: but they were enough.
He had thought by this visit to Damelioc to lay his demon of restlessness;
had supposed this monthly account of his stewardship, punctually rendered,
to be the business weighing on his mind. But no: as he passed out through
the park gates, the imp perched itself again behind his crupper, urging
him forward, tormenting him with the same vague sense of duty neglected
and clamorous.
Towards evening it grew so nearly intolerable that he had much ado to sit
patiently and preside at the School Board meeting, convened, as usual, in
the great parlour at Hall. All the Board was there: the Clerk, Mr. Benny,
and the six Managers; two Churchmen, three Dissenters, and himself--a
Gallio with a casting vote. He was used to reflecting cynically that
these opponents trusted him precisely because he cared less than a
tinker's curse for their creeds, and reconciled all religious differences
in a broad, impartial contempt. But to-night, as Parson Endicott
approached the crucial difficulty--the choice of a new teacher--with all
the wariness of a practised committee-man, laying his innocent parallels
and bringing up his guns under cover of a pleasant disavowal to which the
three Dissenters responded with "Hear, hear!" John Rosewarne listened not
at all, nor to the fence of debate that followed as Church and Dissent
grew heated and their friction struck out the familiar sparks--
'sectarian,' 'undoctrinal,' 'arrogance,' 'broad-mindedness.' At length
came the equally familiar pause, when the exhausted combatants turned by
consent and waited on their chairman. He sat tapping his fingers upon the
polished mahogany, watching the reflected candle-lights along its surface,
wondering when these fretful voices would cease, these warring atoms
release him to obey the summons of his soul--still incomprehensible, still
urgent.
Their sudden hush recalled him with a start. He had heard nothing of
their debate. Slowly he lifted his eyes and let them rest upon Mr. Benny,
who sat on his right, patiently waiting to take down the next entry for
the minutes.
"If you will trust me," he said, "I can find you a teacher--a woman--whom
you will all accept."
He had spoken without premeditation, and paused now, doubtful of the sound
of his own voice. The five Managers were looking at him with respectful
attention. Apparently, then, he was speaking sense; and he spoke on,
still wondering by what will (not his own) the words came.
"If you leave her and the children alone, I think her religion will not
trouble you. She is accustomed to boys, and teaches them to be honourable
to one another and gentle to their sisters."
He paused again and drummed with his fingers on the table. He heard the
voices break out again, and gathered that the majority assented.
Mechanically he put the resolution, declared it carried, and closed the
meeting; as mechanically he shook hands with all the Managers and wished
them good-night. "And on your way, Benny, you may tell the maids they may
go to bed. I'll blow out the candles myself."
When all had taken their leave he sat for a while, still staring at the
reflected lights along the board. Then he arose and passed into his
counting-house, where an oil lamp burned upon his writing-table.
He took pen and paper and wrote, addressed the letter, sealed it
carefully, and leaned back in his chair, studying the address.
"There is to-morrow," he muttered. "I can reconsider it before post-time
to-morrow."
But the restlessness had vanished and left in its stead a deep peace.
If Death waited for him in the next room, he felt that he could go quietly
now and take it by the hand. He remembered the candles still burning
there, and stood up with a slight shiver--a characteristic shake of his
broad shoulders. As he did so his eyes fell again upon the addressed
letter. He turned them slowly to the door--and there, between him and the
lights on the long table, a vision moved towards him--the figure of a girl
dressed all in black. His hand went up to the phial in his breast-pocket,
but paused half-way as he gazed into the face and met her eyes. . . .
CHAPTER VI.
THE RAFTERS.
Two children came stealing downstairs in the early dawn, carrying their
boots in their hands, whispering, lifting their faces as if listening for
some sound to come from the upper floors. But the whole house kept
silence.
Their plan was to escape by one of the windows on the ground floor.
Tiptoeing along the hall to the door of the great parlour, Myra
noiselessly lifted the latch (all the doors in the house had old-fashioned
latches) and peeped in. The candles on the long table had burned
themselves out, and the shuttered room lay in darkness save for one long
glint of light along the mahogany table-top. It came from the half-open
doorway in the far corner, beyond which, in the counting-house, a ghost of
a flame yet trembled in Rosewarne's lamp.
Myra caught at Clem's arm and drew him back into the hall. For the moment
terror overcame her--terror of something sinister within--of their
grandfather sitting there like Giant Pope in the story, waiting to catch
them. She hurried Clem along to the kitchen-passage, which opened out of
the hall at right angles to the front door and close beside it.
The front door had a fanlight through which fell one broken sunray,
filtered to a pale green by the honeysuckle of the porch; and reaching it,
she caught her breath in a new alarm. The bolts were drawn.
After a furtive glance behind her, she peered more closely, holding Clem
fast by the sleeve. Yes, certainly the bolts were drawn, and the key had
not been turned in the lock. Very cautiously she tried the heavy latch.
The door opened easily--though with a creak that fetched her heart into
her mouth.
But there was no going back. Whatever might be the explanation of the
unbolted door, they were free now, at large in the dewy morning with the
world at their feet. The brightness of it dazzled Myra. It broke on
Clem's ears with the dinning of innumerable birds.
They took hands and hurried down the gravel path. Did ever Madonna
lilies, did ever clove carnations smell as did these, lifting their heads
from their morning bath? Yet field challenged garden with the fragrance
of new-mown hay wafted down through the elms from Parc-an-hal, that great
meadow.
On the low wall by the garden-gate Myra found a seat for Clem, helped him
to lace his boots, and then did on her own.
"What's the time?" Clem demanded.
"I don't know, but he'll be coming soon. It can't be four o'clock yet, or
we should hear Jim Tregay knocking about the milk-pails."
The boy sat silent, nursing his knee, drinking in a thousand scents and
sounds. Myra watched the great humble-bees staggering from flower to
flower, blundering among their dew-filled cups. She drew down a lily-stem
gently, and guided her brother's hand so that it held one heady fellow
imprisoned, buzzing under his palm and tickling it. Clem laughed aloud.
"Listen!"
A lad came whistling Up the road from the village. It was Tom Trevarthen,
and the sunshine glinted on his silver earrings.
"Good-morning, missy! Good-morning, Master Clem! I'm good as my word,
you see; though be sure I never reckoned to find 'ee up and out at this
hour."
"Myra woke me," said Clem. "I believe she keeps a clock in her head."
"When I want to wake up at any particular hour, I just do it," Myra
announced calmly. "Have they begun the rafting?"
"Bless your life, they've been working all night. There's one raft
finished, and the other ought to be ready in a couple or three hours, to
save the tide across the bay."
"I don't hear them singing."
"'Tisn't allowed. The Bo--your Aunt Hannah, I mean--says she don't mind
what happens to sea, but she won't have her nights in harbour disturbed.
Old Billy Daddo hadn't laid hands on the first balk before he began to
pipe, 'O for a thousand tongues to sing,' starting on the very first hymn
in the collection like as if he meant to sing right through it. He hadn't
got to 'music in the sinner's ears' before the old woman pushed her face
overside by the starboard cathead, nightcap and all--in that time she must
ha' nipped out of her berth, up the companion, and along the length of the
deck--and says she, 'I ben't no sinner, William Daddo, but a staid woman
that likes her sleep and means to have it.' 'Why, missus,' says Billy,
'you'll surely lev' a man ask a blessing on his labours!' 'Ask quiet
then,' she says, 'or you'll get slops.' Since then they be all as mute as
mice."
Myra took Clem's hand, and the three hurried down the hill and through the
sleeping village to the ferry-slip, where Tom had a ship's boat ready.
In fifty strokes he brought her alongside the barque where the rafters--
twenty-five or thirty--were at work, busy as flies. The _Virtuous Lady_
had been towed up overnight from her first anchorage to a berth under Hall
gardens, and a hatch opened in her bows, through which the long balks of
timber were thrust by the stevedores at work in the hold and received by a
gang outside, who floated them off to be laid raftwise and lashed together
with chains. The sun, already working around to the south, gilded the
barque's top-gallant masts and yards, and flung a stream of gold along the
raft already finished and moored in midstream. But the great hull lay as
yet in the cool shadow of the hillside over which the larks sang.
Tom Trevarthen found the children a corner on the half-finished raft, out
of the way of the workmen, and a spare tarpaulin to keep their clothes
dry; and there they sat happily, the boy listening and Myra explaining,
until Mrs. Purchase, having slept her sleep and dressed herself (partly),
emerged on deck with a teapot to fill at the cook's galley, and, looking
over the bulwarks, caught sight of them.
"Hullo! You don't tell me that Susannah,"--this was the housekeeper at
Hall--"allows you abroad at this hour!"
Now the risk of Susannah's discovering their escape and pursuing was the
one bitter drop in the cup of these truants' happiness. Susannah--a
middle-aged, ill-favoured spinster, daughter of a yeoman-farmer, with
whose second wife she could not agree--scorned the sea and all sailors.
Once, as a girl, she had committed her ample person to a sailing boat,
and, thank God! that one lesson had been enough. Ships came and went
under the windows of Hall, but in the children's eyes they and their crews
belonged to an unknown world. Things real to them were the farm and farm
stock, harvests and harvest-homes, the waggoners' teams, byres, orchards,
garden, and cool dairy. Ships' captains arrived out of fairyland
sometimes, and crossed the straw-littered townplace to hold audience with
their grandfather; magic odours of hemp and pitch, magic chanty songs and
clanking of windlasses called to them up the hill; but until this morning
they had never dared to obey the call. Had Clem been as other boys--.
But, being blind, he trusted to Myra, and Myra was a girl.
"Come aboard and have a drink of something cordial!" continued Mrs.
Purchase, holding the teapot aloft. She walked forward and looked down on
the workers. "Now you may sing, boys, if't pleases 'ee."
"Thank'ee, ma'am," answered up Billy Daddo; "then lev' us make a start
with Wrestling Jacob, Part Two--"
'Lame as I am, I take the prey'--
"'Tis a pleasant old tune and never comes amiss, but for choice o' seasons
give me the dew o' the mornin'."
He pitched the note in high falsetto, and after a couple of bars five or
six near comrades joined in together--
"Speak to me now, for I am weak,
But confident in self-despair:
Speak to my heart, in blessings speak;
Be conquer'd by my instant prayer!
Speak, or thou never hence shall move,
And tell me if thy name is Love."
Billy Daddo's gang hailed from a parish, three miles up the coast, noted
for containing "but one man that couldn't preach, and that was the
parson." Their fellow-labourers--the crew of the barque and half-a-score
longshoremen belonging to the port--heard without thought of deriding.
Though themselves unconverted--for life in a town, especially in a seaport
town, makes men curious and critical rather than intense, and life in a
ship ruled by Mrs. Purchase did not encourage visionaries--they were
accustomed to the fervours of the redeemed.
"'Tis Love! 'tis Love! thou diedst for me:
I hear thy whisper in my heart--!"
"Brayvo! 'tis workin'! 'tis workin'! Give it tongue, brother Langman!"
cried Billy, as a stevedore within the hold broke forth into a stentorian
bass that made the ship rumble--
"The morning breaks, the shadows flee,
Pure universal Love thou art:
To me, to me thy bowels move,
Thy nature and thy name is Love!"
Meanwhile young Tom Trevarthen had brought the children under the vessel's
side, and was helping Clem up the ladder. Mrs. Purchase greeted them with
a kiss apiece, and carried them off to the cabin, where they found Mr.
Purchase eating bread and cream.
Skipper Purchase, a smart seaman in his day and a first-class navigator,
had for a year or two been gradually weakening in the head; a decline
which his wife noted, though she kept her anxiety to herself.
She foresaw with a pang the end of their voyaging, and watched him
narrowly, having made a compact with herself to interfere before he
imperilled the _Virtuous Lady_. Hitherto, however, his wits had
unfailingly cleared to meet an emergency. While she could count upon
this, she knew herself competent to rule the ship in all ordinary weather.
"Help yourselves to cream," said Mr. Purchase, after giving them
good-morning. "Clever men tell me there's more nourishment in a pound o'
cream than in an ox. Now that may seem marvellous in your eyes?"
He paused with a wavering, absent-minded smile. "'Tis the most nourishing
food in the animal, vegetable, or mineral kingdoms,--unless you count
parsnips."
"T'cht!" his wife put in briskly, banging down a couple of clean teacups
on the swing-table. "Children don't want a passel o' science in their
insides. Milk or weak tea, my dears?"
"I don't know," the skipper went on after another long pause, bringing his
Uncertain eyes to bear on Clem, "if you've ever taken note what
astonishing things folks used to eat in the Bible. There's locusts, and
wild honey, and unleavened bread--I made out a list of oddments one time.
Nebbycannezzar don't count, of course; but Ezekiel took down a whole book
in the shape of a roll."
Mrs. Purchase signed to Myra to pay no heed, and engaged Clem in a sort of
quick-firing catechism on the cabin fittings, their positions and uses.
The boy, who had been on board but once in his life before, stretched out
a hand and touched each article as she named it.
"The lamp, now?"
Clem reached up at once and laid his fingers on it, gently as a butterfly
alights on a flower.
"How does it swing?"
"On gimbals."
"Eh? and what may gimbals be?"
"There's a ring fastened here,"--the boy's fingers found it--"and swinging
to and fro; and inside the ring is a bar, holding the lamp so that it tips
to and fro crossways to the ring. You weight the bottom of the lamp, and
then it keeps plumb upright however the ship moves."
"Wunnerful memory you've got, to be sure--and your gran'father tells me
you can't even read!"
"But he knows his letters," Myra announced proudly; "and when the new
teacher comes he's to go to school with me. Susannah says so."
"How in the world did you teach'n his letters, child?"
"I cut them on the match-boarding inside the summer-house, and he traces
them out with his fingers. If you go up you can see for yourself--the
whole lot from A to Ampassy! He never makes a mistake--do you, Clem?
And I've begun to cut out 'Our Father,' but it's slow work."
"Did ever you hear tell!" Mrs. Purchase turned to her husband, who had
come out of his reverie and sat regarding Clem with something like lively
interest. He had, in fact, opened his mouth to utter a scriptural
quotation, but, checked on the verge of it, dropped back into pensiveness.
At this point Mrs. Purchase's practised ear told her that the stevedores
were ceasing work, and she bustled up the ladder to summon her crew to
swab decks. The old man, left alone with the children, leaned forward,
jerked a thumb after her, and said impressively, "I named her myself."
"Who? Aunt Hannah?" stammered Myra, taken aback.
"No, the ship. I named her after your aunt. 'Who can find a virtuous
woman?' says Solomon. 'I can,' says I; 'and, what's more, I done it: only
I changed the word to lady, as more becoming to one of her haveage.
Proverbs thirty-one, fourteen--turn it up when you get home, and you'll
find these words: 'She is like the merchant ships, she bringeth her food
from afar.'"
"Uncle," put in Myra breathlessly, "I want you to listen for a moment!
Clem and I have run away this morning, and by this time Susannah will have
found it out and be searching. If she sends down here, couldn't you hide
us--just for a little while? The--the fact is, we've set our hearts on
going with the rafts. There's no danger in this weather, and Tom
Trevarthen has promised to look after us. I don't dare to ask Aunt
Hannah; but if you could have a boat ready just when the rafts are
starting, and hide us somewhere till then."--
Mr. Purchase did not seem to hear, but rose and opened a small Dutch
corner-cupboard, inlaid with parrots and tulips, and darkly varnished.
From it he took a large Bible.
"I'll show you the text I was speaking of."
"But, uncle."--
"They'm washing-down already," said he, lifting his head to the sound of
rushing water on deck. "Your aunt will be back in a moment, and 'tis time
for prayers."
Sure enough, at that instant the feet and ankles of Mrs. Purchase appeared
on the ladder. "Tide's on the turn," she announced. "Keep your seats, my
dears; the Lord knows there's no room to kneel, and He makes allowance."
She set a small packed basket on the table, and turned to her husband.
"You'll have to pray short, too, if the children are going with the
rafts."
"Going?--Oh, Aunt Hannah!"
"Why, I'd a notion you _wanted_ to! To be sure, if I'm wrong, I'm wrong,
and 'tisn' the first time; but young Tom Trevarthen didn' seem to reckon
so. There, get your prayers over and cut along; I'll make it all right
with your grandfather and Susannah."
Ah, but it was bliss, and blissful to remember! The rafts dropped down
past the town quay, past the old lock-houses, past the ivied fort at the
harbour's mouth, and out to the open sea that twinkled for leagues under
the faint northerly breeze, dazzling Myra's eyes. Tom Trevarthen grinned
as he tugged at an enormous sweep with two other men, Methodists both, and
sang with them and with Billy Daddo, who steered with another sweep,
rigged aft upon a crutch--
"Praise ye the Lord! 'Tis good to raise
Your hearts and voices in His praise."--
"Now what should put it in my noddle to take up with that old hemn?" asked
Billy aloud, coming to a halt at the close of the first verse and
scratching his head. "'Tidn' one of my first fav'rites--nothing in it
about the Blood o' the Lamb--an' I can't call to mind havin' pitched it
for years. Well, never mind! The Lord hev done it with some purpose, you
may be sure."
"I call it a very pretty hymn," said Myra, for he seemed to be addressing
her. "And isn't it reason enough that you're glad to be alive?"
"But I bain't," Billy argued, shaking his head. "You wouldn' understand
it at your age, missy; but as a saved soul I counts the days. Long after
I was a man grown, the very sound of 'He comes, He comes! the Judge
severe,' or 'Terrible thought, shall I alone,' used to put me all of a
twitter. Now they be but weak meat, is you might say. 'Ah, lovely
appearance of death'--that's more in my line--
"Ah, lovely appearance of death!
What sight upon earth is so fair?
Not all the gay pageants that breathe
Can with a dead body compare."--
"Don't!" Myra put both hands up to her ears. "Oh, please don't, Mr.
Daddo! And I call it wicked to stand arguing when the Lord, as you say,
put a cheerfuller tune in your head."
"Well, here goes, then!" Billy resumed "Praise ye the Lord." At the
fifth verse his face began to kindle--
"What is the creature's skill or force?
The sprightly man, or warlike horse?
The piercing wit, the active limb,
Are all too mean delights to Him.
But saints are lovely in His sight,
He views His children with delight;
He sees their hope, he knows their fear,
And looks and loves His image there."
"Ay, now," he broke out, "to think I didn' remember that verse about
children when I started to sing! And 'twas of you, missy, and the young
master here the dear Lord was thinkin' all the time!"
He dropped his eyes and, leaning back against the handle of the sweep,
suddenly burst into prayer. "Suffer little children, O dear Jesus! suffer
little children. Have mercy on these two tender lambs, and so bring them,
blessed Lord, to Thy fold!"
As his fervour took hold of him he left the sweep to do its own steering,
and strode up and down the raft, picking his way from balk to balk,
skipping aside now and again as the water rose between them under his
weight and overflowed his shoes. To Myra, unaccustomed to be prayed for
aloud and by name, the whole performance was absurd and embarrassing.
She blushed hotly under the eyes of the other men, and glanced at Clem,
expecting him to be no less perturbed.
But Clem did not hear. The two children had taken off their boots, and he
sat with the water playing over his naked insteps and his eyes turned
southward to the horizon as if indeed he saw. With his blind gaze
fastened there he seemed to wait patiently until Billy's prayer exhausted
itself and Billy returned to the steering; and then his lips too began to
move, and he broke into a curious song.
It frightened Myra, who had never heard the like of it; for it had no
words, but was just a sing-song--a chant, low at first, then rising shrill
and clear and strong, and reaching out as though to challenge the waters
twinkling between raft and horizon. Through it there ran a note of high
courage touched with tremulous yearning--yearning to escape yonder and be
free.
She touched his hand. So well she loved and understood him, that even
this strange outbreak she could interpret, though it caught her at
unawares. For the moment he did not feel the touch; he was far away.
He had forgotten her--alas!--with his blindness. She belonged to his
weakness, not to his strength. For the while he dwelt in the vision of
his true manhood, which only his one infirmity forbade his inheriting; and
she had no place in it.
He came back to reality with a pitiful break and quaver of the voice, and
turned his eyes helplessly toward her. She answered his gaze timidly, as
though he could see her. She was searching his eyes for tears. But there
was no trace of tears in them. He took the food she handed him from Aunt
Purchase's basket; and, having eaten, laid his head in her lap and fell
asleep.
Slowly under the noonday heat and through the long afternoon the two rafts
moved across the bay, towing each its boat in which the rafters would
return in the cool of the evening.
But the children did not return in them; for on the quay, where the balks
were due, to be warped ashore unlashed and conveyed inland to the mines,
stood Jim Tregay waiting with their grandfather's blood-mare Actress
harnessed in a spring-cart. How came Jim here, at this distance from
home?
"Been waiting for you these two hours!" he called to the children.
"Jump into the boat there and come ashore. You'm wanted to home, and at
once!"
CHAPTER VII.
THE HEIRS OF HALL.
They landed and clambered into the spring-cart.
"Nothing wrong at home, I hope?" called Tom Trevarthen from the quay's
edge, as he pushed off to scull back to the raft.
"Oh, this is Susannah's nonsense, you may be sure!" called back Myra.
"I suppose she carried her tales to grandfather, and he packed you off
after us, Jim Tregay? Well, you needn't look so glum about it.
Aunt Hannah gave us leave, and told Tom to look after us, and we've had a
heavenly day, so Susannah may scold till she's tired."
"Hold the reins for a moment, Miss Myra, if you please."
Jim left the mare's head and walked down the quay, holding up his hand to
delay the young sailor, who slewed his boat round, and brought her
alongside again. The pair were whispering together. Myra heard a sharp
exclamation, and in a moment Tom Trevarthen was sculling away for dear
life. Jim ran back, jumped into the cart, and took the reins.
"But what is he shouting?" asked Myra, as the mare's hoofs struck and slid
on the cobbles and the cart seemed to spring forward beneath her.
She clutched her brother as they swayed past mooring-posts, barrels, coils
of rope, and with a wild lurch around the tollman's house at the
quay-head, breasted the steep village street. "What's he shouting?" she
demanded again.
Jim made no answer, but, letting the reins lie loose, flicked Actress
smartly with the whip. Even a child could tell that no horse ought to be
put at a hill in this fashion. Faces appeared at cottage doors--faces
Myra had never seen in her life--gazing with a look she could not
understand. All the faces, too, seemed to wear this look.
"What has happened?"
At the top of the hill, on a smoother road, the mare settled down to a
steady gallop. Jim Tregay turned himself half-about in his seat.
"From battle and murder and from sudden death--good Lord, deliver us!"
"Oh, Jim, be kind and tell us!"
"Your grandfather, missy--the old maister! They found 'en in the
counting-house this mornin' dead as a nail!"
Myra, with an arm about Clem and her disengaged hand gripping the light
rail of the cart, strove to fix her mind, to bring her brain to work upon
Jim's words. But they seemed to spin past her with the hedgerows and the
rushing wind in her ears. A terrible blow had fallen. Why could she not
feel it? Why did she sit idly wondering, when even a dumb creature like
Actress seemed to understand and put forth all her fleetness?
"Who sent you for us? Susannah?"
"Susannah's no better than a daft woman. Peter Benny sent me.
He took down the news to Mrs. Purchase, and she told him where you was
gone. He called out the horse-boat and packed me across the ferry
instanter."
Myra gazed along the ridge of the mare's back to her heaving shoulders.
"Clem!" she whispered.
"Yes," said the boy slowly, "I am trying to understand. Why are we going
so fast?"
So he too found it difficult. In truth their grandfather had stood
outside their lives, a stern, towering shadow from the touch of which
they crept away to nestle in each other's love. Because his presence
brooded indoors they had never felt happy of the house. Because he
seldom set foot in the garden they had made the garden their playground,
their real nursery; the garden, and on wet days the barn, the hay-lofts,
the apple-lofts, any Alsatia beyond the rules, where they could run free
and lift their voices. He had never been unkind, but merely neglectful,
unsmiling, coldly deterrent, unapproachable. They knew, of course,
that he was great, that grown men and women stood in awe of him.
When at length Jim Tregay reined up in the roadway above the ferry, they
found a vehicle at a stand there, with a rough-coated grey horse in a
lather of sweat; and peering over the wall from her perch in the
spring-cart, Myra spied Mr. Benny on the slipway below, in converse
with a tall, black-coated man who held by the hand a black-coated boy.
As a child, she naturally let her gaze rest longer on the boy than on the
man; but by and by, as she led Clem down the slipway, she found herself
staring at the two with almost equal distaste.
Little Mr. Benny ran up the slipway to meet the children. His eyes were
red, and it was with difficulty that he controlled his voice.
"My dears," he began, taking Myra by the hand and clasping it between his
palms, "my poor dears, a blow indeed! a terrible blow! Your uncle--dear
me, I believe you have never met! Let me present you to your uncle,
Mr. Samuel, and your cousin, Master Calvin Rosewarne. These are the
children, Mr. Samuel--Miss Myra and Master Clem--and, as I was saying, I
sent a trap to fetch them home with all speed."
The man in black shook hands with the children gloomily. Myra noted that
his whiskers were black and straggling, and that, though his upper lip was
long, it did not hide his prominent yellow teeth. As for the boy, he
shook hands as if Under protest, and fell at once to staring hard at Clem.
He had a pasty-white face, which looked the unhealthier for being
surmounted by a natty velveteen cap with a patent-leather up-and-down
peak, and he wore a black overcoat, like a minister's, knickerbockers,
grey woollen stockings, and spring-side boots, the tags of which he had
neglected to turn in.
"You sent for them?" asked Mr. Samuel sourly as he shook hands, turning a
fishy eye upon Mr. Benny. "Why did you send for them?"
"Eh?" stammered Mr. Benny. "Their poor grandfather, Mr. Samuel! I could
not have forgiven myself. It was, after telegraphing to you, my first
thought."
"I can't see with what object you sent for them," persisted Mr. Samuel,
and pulled at his ragged whiskers. "Were they--er--away on a visit?
staying with friends? If so, I should have thought they were much better
left till after the funeral."
He shifted his gaze from Mr. Benny and fixed it on Myra, who flushed
hotly. What right had this Mr. Samuel to be interfering and taking
charge?
"We were not staying with friends," she answered, "or paying any visit.
Clem and I have never slept away from home in our lives. We have been
across the bay with the rafts--that's all; and Aunt Hannah gave Us leave."
He ignored her display of temper. "You've been let run wild, you two, I
daresay," he replied, in a tone almost rallying. "I guess you have had
matters pretty much your own way."
Poor Myra! This was the first whole holiday she and Clem had ever taken.
But how could she tell him? She gulped down her tears--she was glad he
had turned away without perceiving them--clutched Clem's hand in silence,
and followed down to the boat, which Uncle Vro was bringing alongside.
As the party settled themselves in the sternsheets Master Calvin fixed his
pale, gooseberry-coloured eyes on hers.
"You needn't show temper," he said slowly, with the air of a young
ruminant animal.
"I'm not showing temper!" Myra retorted in a tone which certainly belied
her.
"Yes, you are; and you've told a fib, which only makes things worse."
He smiled complacently at having beaten her in argument, and Myra thought
she had never met such an insufferable boy in her life.
He transferred his unblinking stare to Clem, and for half a minute took
stock of him silently. "Is he blind," he asked aloud, "or only
pretending?"
Myra's face flamed now. A little more, and she had boxed his ears; but
she checked herself and, caressing the back of Clem's hand, answered with
grave irony, "He _was_ blind, up to a minute ago; but now, since seeing
you, he prefers to be pretending."
Master Calvin considered this for almost a minute. "That's rude," he
announced at length decisively.
But meanwhile other passengers in the boat had found time to get
themselves at loggerheads.
"Your servant, Master Samuel!" began old Nicky affably, as he fell to his
oars. "I hope I see 'ee well, though 'tis a sad wind that blows 'ee here.
Ay, there's a prophet gone this day from Israel!"
Mr. Samuel frowned. "Good-evening," he answered coldly, and added, with
an effort to be polite, "I seem to know your face, too."
"He-he!" Uncle Nicky leaned on his oars with a senile chuckle.
"Know my face, dost-a? Ought to, be sure, for I be the same Nicholas Vro
that ferried 'ee back and forth in the old days afore your father's
stomach soured against 'ee. Dostn't-a mind that evening I put 'ee across
with your trunks for the last time? 'Never take on, Master Sam,' said I--
for all the parish knew and talked of your differences--'give the old
man time, and you'll be coming home for the Christmas holidays as welcome
as flowers in May.' 'Not me,' says you; 'my father's is a house o' wrath,
and there's no place for me.' A mort o' tide-water have runned up an'
down since you spoke they words; but here be I, Nicholas Vro, takin' 'ee
back home as I promised. Many times I've a-pictered 'ee, hearing you was
grown prosperous and a married man and had took up with religion.
I won't say that years have bettered your appearance; 'tisn't their way.
But I'd ha' picked out your face in a crowd--or your cheeld's, for that
matter. He features you wonderful."
"I remember you now," said Mr. Sam. "You haven't grown any less talkative
in all these years." He turned to Mr. Benny. "Your telegram was sent off
at nine-forty-five. Was that as early as possible?"
"I can say 'yes' to that, Mr. Samuel. Of course I had to begin by
quieting the servants--they were scared out of their wits, and it took me
some time to coax them out of their alarm. Then, taking boat, I rowed
down to the post-office, stopping only at the barque yonder, to break the
news to Mrs. Purchase. She put on her bonnet at once and was rowed
ashore. 'Twas from her, too, I learned the whereabouts of Miss Myra and
Master Clem; for up at the house they could not be found, and this had
thrown Miss Susannah into worse hysterics--she could only imagine some new
disaster. At first I was minded to send a boat after them, but by this
time the rafts were a good two miles beyond the harbour, and Mrs. Purchase
said, 'No, they can do no good, poor dears; let them have their few hours'
pleasure.' From the barque I pulled straight to the post-office, and sent
off the telegram, and--dear me, yes--at the same time I posted a letter.
I had found it, ready stamped, lying on the floor by my poor master's
feet. It must have dropped from his hand; no doubt he had just finished
writing it when the end came."
"But why such a hurry to post it?"
"It was marked 'Private and Immediate.'"
"For whom?"
Mr. Benny hesitated. "You will excuse me, Mr. Samuel."--
"Confidential?"
"As a matter of fact, sir, when Mr. Rosewarne marked his letters so I made
it a rule never to read the address. But this one--coming upon it as I
did--I couldn't help."--
"You prefer to keep the address to yourself?"
"With your leave, sir."
Mr. Samuel eyed him sharply. "Quite right!" he said curtly, with a glance
at Uncle Vro; but the old man was not listening.
"Lord! and I mind his second marriage!" he muttered. "A proper lady she
was, from up Tamar-way. He brought her home across water, and that's
unlucky, they say; but he never minded luck. Firm as a nail he ever was,
and put me in mind of the nail in Isaiah: 'As a nail in a sure place I
will fasten him, and they shall hang upon him all the glory of his
father's house, the offspring and the issue, all vessels of small
quantity, from the vessels of cups even to all the vessels of flagons.'
But the offspring and the issue, my dears," he went on, addressing Clem
and Myra, "was but your poor mother. Well-a-well, weak or strong, we go
in our time!"
As they landed and climbed the hill, Mr. Sam spoke with Peter Benny aside.
"They may ask about that letter at the inquest. You have thought of the
inquest, of course?"
"If they do, I must answer them."
"So far as you know, there was nothing in it to cause strong emotion--
nothing to account--?"
"Dear me, no," answered Mr. Benny, staring at him in mild astonishment;
"so far as I know, nothing whatever."
After packing Susannah off to her room with a Bible and a smelling-bottle,
Mrs. Purchase had set herself to reduce the household to order.
"'Tisn't in nature to think of death," confessed Martha the dairy-girl,
"when you'm worrited from pillar to post by a woman in creaky boots."
Above and beside her creaky boots Aunt Hannah had a cheerful, incurable
habit of slamming every door she passed through. It came, she would
explain, of living on shipboard where cabin was divided from cabin either
by a simple curtain or by sliding panels. Be this is it may, she kept the
house of mourning re-echoing that day "like a labouring ship with a cargo
of tinware," to quote Martha again, whose speech derived many forcible
idioms from her father, the mate of a coaster.
Nevertheless--and although it appeared to induce a steady breeze through
the house, rising to a moderate gale when meals were toward--Aunt Hannah's
presence acted like a tonic on all. She presented to Mr. Sam a
weather-ruddied cheek, receiving his kiss on what, in so round a face as
hers, might pass for the point of the jaw. In saluting Master Calvin she
had perforce to take the offensive, and did so with equal aplomb.
After a rapid survey of some three seconds she picked off his velveteen
cap and kissed him accurately in the centre of the forehead.
"I meant to do it on the top of his head," she informed Myra later,
"but the ghastly child was smothered in bear's-grease. Lord knows that,
as 'twas, I very nearly slipped in my thumb and kissed _that_, as I've
heard tell that folks do in the witness-box."
Myra did not understand the allusion; but from the first she divined that
her aunt misliked Master Calvin and found that mislike consolatory.
"As for these two," the good lady announced, indicating brother and
sister, "I allow to myself they'll be best out of the way till the
funeral. I've been through the clothes-press, and put up their
night-clothes and a few odd items in a hand-bag. 'Siah will be here at
eight-thirty sharp, to take 'em aboard with him. For my part, I reckon to
sleep here to-night and look after things till that fool Susannah comes to
her senses. And as for you, Peter Benny, you'll stay supper, I hope, for
there's supper ready and waiting to be dished--a roast leg of lamb, with
green peas. It puts me in mind of Easter Day," she added inconsequently.
"You may remember, Sam, that your poor father always stickled for a roast
leg of lamb at Easter. He was a good Christian to that extent, I thank
the Lord!"
"And I thank _you_, ma'am," protested Mr. Benny, "but I couldn't touch a
morsel--indeed I couldn't, though you offer it so kindly."
"To my knowledge, you've not eaten enough to-day to keep a mouse alive.
Well, if you won't, you won't; but I've been through the garden, and
there's a dish of strawberries to take home to your wife."
Mrs. Purchase could not know--good soul--that in removing the two children
to shipboard, to spare them the ugly preparations for the funeral, she was
connecting their grandfather's death in their minds for ever with the most
delightful holiday in life. Yet so it was. Punctually at half-past eight
Mr. Purchase appeared and escorted them on board the _Virtuous Lady_; and
so, out-tired with their long day, drugged and drowsed by strong salt air
and sunshine and the swift homeward drive, they came at nightfall, and as
knights and princesses come in fairy tales, to the palace of enchantment.
As they drew close, its walls towered up terribly and overhung them,
lightless, forbidding; but far aloft the riding-lamp flamed like a star,
and Myra clapped her hands as she reached the deck and peered down
into a marvellous doll's-house fitted with couches, muslin blinds,
and brass-locked cupboards that twinkled in the lamplight.
There was a stateroom, too, with a half-drawn red curtain in place of a
door, and beyond the curtain a glimpse of two beds, one above the other,
with white sheets turned back and ready for the sleepers--at once like and
deliciously unlike the beds at home. The children, having unpacked their
bag and undressed, knelt down side by side as usual in their white
night-rails. But Myra could not pray, although she repeated the words
with Clem. Her eyes wandered among marvels. The lower bed (assigned to
Clem by reason of his blindness) was not only a bed but a chest of
drawers.
"Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,
Look upon a little child;
Pity my simplicity."--
Her fingers felt and tried the brass handles. Yes, a real chest of
drawers! And the washstand folded up in a box, and in place of a chair
was a rack with netting in which to lay their garments for the night!
"God bless dear Clem, and grandfather."--What was she saying?
Their grandfather was dead, and praying for dead people was wicked.
Susannah had once caught her praying for her mother, and had told her that
it was wicked, with a decisiveness that closed all argument. None the
less she had prayed for her mother since then--once or twice, perhaps half
a dozen times--though slily and in a terror of being punished tor it and
sent to hell. "And Susannah, and Martha, and Elizabeth Jane,"--this was
the housemaid--"and Peter Benny, and Jim Tregay, and all kind friends and
relations,"--including Uncle Sam and that odious boy of his? Well, they
might go down in the list; but she wouldn't pretend to like them.
"Ready, my dears?" asked Uncle Purchase from outside. "Sing out when
you're in bed, and I'll come and dowse the lights."
He did so, and stood for a moment hesitating, scarcely visible in the
faint radiance cast through the doorway by the lamp in his own cabin.
Maybe the proper thing would be to give them a kiss apiece? He could not
be sure, being a childless man. He ended by saying good-night so gruffly
that Myra fancied he must be in a bad temper.
"Clem!" she whispered, after lying still for a while, staring into
darkness. "Clem!"
But Clem was already sound asleep.
She sighed and turned on her pillow. She had wanted to discuss with him a
thought that vexed her. Did folks love one another when they grew up?
And, if so, how did they manage it, seeing that so few grownups had
anything lovable about them? Clem and she, of course, would go on loving
each other always; but that was different. When one grown-up person died,
were the others really sorry? No one seemed sorry for her grandfather--no
one--except, perhaps, Peter Benny. . . .
For two days the children lived an enchanted life, interrupted only by a
visit to Miss de Gruchy, the dressmaker across the water, and by a
miserable two hours in which they were supposed to entertain their Cousin
Calvin, who had been sent to play with them. The boy--he was about a year
older than Myra--greeted them with an air of high importance.
"I've seen the corp!" he announced in an ogreish whisper.
Myra had the sense to guess that if she gave any sign of horror he would
only show off the more and tease her. She met him, therefore, on his own
ground.
"Well, you needn't think _we_ want to, because we don't!"
"Oh, they'll show it to you before they screw it down. But I saw it
first!"
For the next forty-eight hours this awful possibility darkened her
delight. For it _was_ a possibility. Grown people did such monstrous
unaccountable things, there was no saying what they might not be up to
next. And here, for once, was an ordeal Clem could not share with her.
He was blind. Alone, if it must be, she must endure it.
She did not feel safe until the coffin had been actually packed in the
hearse and the long procession started. To her dismay, they had parted
her from Clem. He rode in the first coach beside Aunt Hannah and
_vis-a-vis_ with her Uncle Samuel and Cousin Calvin; she in the second
with Mr. Purchase, Peter Benny, and Mr. Tulse the lawyer, a large-headed,
pallid man, with a strong, clean-shaven face and an air of having attended
so many funerals that he paid this one no particular attention.
His careless gentility obviously impressed Mr. Purchase, who mopped his
forehead at half-minute intervals and as frequently remarked that the day
was hot even for the time of year. Mr. Benny was solicitous to know if
Mr. Tulse preferred the window up or down. Mr. Tulse preferred it down,
and took snuff in such profusion that by and by Myra could not distinguish
the floating particles from the dust which entered from the roadway,
stirred up by the feet of the crowd backing to let the carriages pass.
Myra had never seen, never dreamed of, such a crowd. It lined both sides
of the road almost to the church gate--and from Hall to the church was a
good mile and a half; lines of freemasons with their aprons, lines of
foresters in green sashes, lines of coastguards, of fishermen in blue
jerseys crossed with the black-and-white mourning ribbons of the local
Benevolent Club; here and there groups of staring children, some holding
tightly by their mothers' hands; here and there a belated gig, quartering
to give way or falling back to take up its place in the rear of the line.
The sun beat down on the roof of the coach drawing a powerful odour of
camphor from its cushions. For years after the scent of camphor recalled
all the moving pageant and the figure of Mr. Tulse seated in face of her
and abstractedly taking snuff. But at the time, and until they drew up at
the churchyard gate, she was wondering why the ships in the harbour had
dressed themselves in gay bunting. The flags were all half-masted, of
course; but she had not observed this, nor, if she had, would she have
known the meaning of it.
In the great family pew she found herself by Clem's side, listening to the
lesson, of which a few words and sentences somehow remained in her memory;
and again, as they trooped out, Clem's hand was in hers. But to the
ceremony she paid little attention. The grave had been dug hard by the
south-east corner of the churchyard, close by a hedge of thorn, on the
farther side of which the ground fell steeply to a narrow coombe.
The bright sun, sinking behind the battlements of the church tower,
flung their shadow so that a part cut across the parson's dazzling
surplice, while a part fell and continued the pattern on the hillside
across the valley. And while the parson recited high over the tower a
lark sang.
Someone asked her if she wished to look down on the coffin in its bed.
She shrank away, fearing for the moment that the trick of which she had
stood in dread for two days was to be played on her now at the last.
But the mysterious doings of her elders were not yet at an end, for no
sooner had they reached home again than she and Clem were hustled into the
parlour, to find Mr. Tulse seated at the head of the long table with a
paper in his hand, and Mr. Samuel in a chair by the empty fireplace with
Cousin Calvin beside him. Aunt Hannah disposed herself between the two
children with her back to a window, and Uncle Purchase, having closed the
door with extraordinary caution, dropped upon the edge of a chair and sat
as if ready to jump up at call and expel any intruder.
Mr. Tulse glanced around with that quiet, well-bred air of his which
seemed to take everything for granted. Having satisfied himself that all
were assembled, he cleared his throat and began to read. His manner and
intonation suggested family prayers; and Myra, not doubting that this must
be some kind of postscript to the burial service for the private
consolation of the family, let her mind wander. The word 'testament' in
the first sentence seemed to make this certain, and the sentence or two
that followed had a polysyllabic vagueness which by habit she connected
with the offices of religion. The strained look on Aunt Hannah's face
drew her attention away from Mr. Tulse and his recital. Her ear had been
caught, too, by a low whining sound in the next room. By and by she heard
him speak her own name--hers and Clem's together--and glanced around
nervously. She had a particular dislike of being prayed for by name.
It made her blush and gave her a curious sinking sensation in the pit of
the stomach. Her eyes, as it happened, came to rest on her Uncle
Samuel's, who withdrew his gaze at once and stared into the fireplace.
A moment later Mr. Tulse brought his reading to an end. There was a
pause, broken by someone's pushing hack a chair. She gazed around
inquiringly, thinking that this perhaps might be a signal for all to
kneel.
Her aunt had risen, and stood for a moment with twitching face,
challenging a look from Mr. Samuel, who continued to stare at the shavings
in the fireplace.
Whatever Mrs. Purchase had on her lips to say to him, she controlled
herself. But she turned upon Myra and Clem, and her eyes filled.
"My poor dears!" she said, stretching out both hands. "My poor, poor
dears!"
Myra thought it passing strange that, if she and Clem were to be pitied
for losing their grandfather, Aunt Hannah should have waited till now.
She paid, however, little heed to this, but ran past her aunt's
outstretched arms to the door of the counting-house. Within, on the rug
beside the empty chair, weak with voluntary starvation, lay stretched the
little greyhound, and whined for her master.
BOOK II.
CHAPTER VIII.
HESTER ARRIVES.
Hester Marvin stood on the windy platform gazing after the train.
Her limbs were cramped and stiff after the long night journey; the grey
morning hour discouraged her; and the landscape--a stretch of grey-green
marsh with a horizon-line of slate-roofed cottages terminated by a single
factory chimney--was not one to raise the spirits. Even the breeze
blowing across the marsh had an unfamiliar edge. She felt it, and
shivered.
She had been the only passenger to alight here from the train, which had
brought her almost all the way from the Midlands; and as it steamed off,
its smoke blown level along the carriage roofs, her gaze followed it
wistfully, almost forlornly, with a sense of lost companionship.
She knew this to be absurd, and yet she felt it.
Between the chimney and this ridge the train passed out of sight; but
still her gaze followed the long curve of the metals across the marsh.
They stretched away, and with them the country seemed to expand and
flatten itself, yielding to the sky an altogether disproportionate share
of the prospect--at any rate in eyes accustomed to the close elms and
crooked hedgerows of Warwickshire.
She withdrew her gaze at last, and glancing up the long platform spied her
solitary trunk, as absurdly forlorn as herself. A tall man--the
stationmaster--bent over it, examining the label, and she walked towards
him, glancing up as she passed the station clock.
"No use your looking at _him_," said the station-master, straightening
himself up in time to observe the glance. "He never kept time yet, and
don't mean to begin. Breaks my heart, he do."
"How far is it from here to Troy?"
"Three miles and a half, we reckon it; but you may call it four, counting
the hills."
"Oh, there are hills, are there?" said Hester, and looking around she
blushed; for indeed the country was hilly on three sides of her and flat
only in the direction whither she had been staring after the train.
The stationmaster did not observe her confusion. "Were you expecting
anyone to meet you, miss?" he asked.
"Yes, from Troy. A Mr. Benny--Mr. Peter Benny." She felt for the letter
in her pocket.
The stationmaster's smile broadened. "Peter Benny? To be sure--a
punctual man, too, but with a terrible long family. And when a man has a
long family, and leaves these little things to 'em--But someone will be
here, miss, sooner or later. And this will be your luggage?"
"Three miles and a half, you say?--or four at the most?" Hester stood
considering, while her eyes wandered across to a siding beyond the
up-platform, where three men stood in talk before a goods van.
Two of them were porters; the third--a young fellow in blue jersey, blue
cloth trousers, and a peaked cap--was apparently persuading them to open
the van, which they no sooner did than he leapt inside. Hester heard him
calling from within the van and the two porters laughing. "Four miles?"
She turned to the station-master again. "I can walk that easily.
You have a cloak-room, I suppose, where I can leave my trunk?"
"I'll take it home with me, miss, for safety: that is, if you're really
bent on walking." He jerked his thumb toward a cottage on the slope
behind. "No favour at all. I'm just going back to breakfast, and it
won't take me a minute to fetch out a barrow and run it home.
Whoever comes for your luggage will know where to call. You'd best give
me your handbag too."
"Thank you, but I can carry that easily."
"The Bennys always turn up sooner or later," he went on musingly.
"If they miss one train, they catch the next. Really, miss, there's no
occasion to walk. But if you must, and I may make so bold, why not step
over to my house and have a cup of tea before starting? The kettle's on
the boil, and my wife would make you welcome. We've a refreshment-room
here in the station," he added apologetically, "but it don't open till the
nine-twenty-seven."
Hester thanked him again, but would not accept the invitation. He fetched
the barrow for her trunk, and walked some little distance with her,
wheeling it. Where their ways parted he gave her the minutest directions,
and stood in the middle of the roadway to watch her safely past her first
turning.
The aspect of the land was strange to her yet, but the stationmaster's
kindness had made it less unhomely. The road ran under the base of a hill
to her left, between it and the marsh. It rose a little before reaching
the line of slate-roofed cottages; and as she mounted this rise the wind
met her more strongly, and with more of that tonic sharpness she had
shrunk from a while ago. It was shrewd, yet she felt that it was also
wholesome. Above the cottage roofs she now perceived many masts of
vessels clustered near the base of the tall chimney. She bent her head
against the breeze. When she raised it again after a short stiff climb,
she looked--and for the first time in her life--upon the open sea.
It stretched--another straight line--beyond the cottage roofs, in colour a
pale, unvaried grey-blue; and her first sensation was wonder at its bare
simplicity. She rested her bag upon the low hedge, and stood beside it at
gaze, her body bent forward to meet the wind.
For five minutes and more she stood there, so completely absorbed that the
sound of footsteps on the road drew near and passed her unheard.
A few paces beyond they came to a halt.
"Begging your pardon, miss, but that bag is heavy for you," said a voice.
She turned with a start, and, as she did so, was aware of a scent about
her, not strong, but deliciously clean and fragrant. It came from a tuft
of wild thyme on which her palm had been pressing while she leaned.
"Thank you, it is not heavy," she answered, in some confusion.
"I--I just rested it here while I looked out to sea."
She knew him at once for the blue-jerseyed young man she had seen in talk
with the porters; and apparently he had prevailed, for he stooped under
the weight of a great burden, in which Hester recognised a blackboard, an
easel, a coloured globe, and sundry articles of school furniture very
cleverly lashed together and slung across his shoulder by a stout cord.
He was smiling, and she smiled too, moved perhaps by the sight of these
familiar objects in a strange land.
"If you'm bound for Troy, you may so well let me carry it, miss.
There's a terrible steep hill to go up, and a pound or two's weight won't
make no difference to what I got here."
She had taken up her bag resolutely and was moving on. The young man--it
was most awkward--also moved on, and in step with her. She compressed
her lip, wondering how to hint that she did not desire his company.
A glance told her that he was entirely without guile, that he had made his
offer in mere good-nature. How might she dismiss him and yet avoid
hurting his feelings?
"They argued me down at the station," he went on. "Would have it the
traps couldn' possibly be in the van. But I wasn't going to have my walk
for nothing if I could help it. 'Give me leave to look,' said I; and I
was right, you see!"
He nodded his head as triumphantly as his burden allowed. It weighed him
down, and the stoop gave his eyes, when he smiled, an innocent roguish
slant. Hester noted that he wore rings in his brown ears, and somehow
these ornaments made him appear the more boyish.
"But what are you doing with a blackboard and easel?" she asked.
"They're for old Mother Butson. She lives with my mother and keeps
school. Tidy little outlay for her, all this parcel! but she must move
with the times, poor soul."
"Then hers is not a Board School?--since she is buying these things for
herself."
"Board School? Not a bit of it. You're right there, miss: we're the
Opposition." He laughed, showing two rows of white regular teeth.
"Are you a teacher too?"
She had no sooner asked the question than she knew it to be ridiculous.
A teacher, in blue jersey and earrings! He laughed, more merrily than
ever.
"Me, miss? My name's Trevarthen--Tom Trevarthen: and I'm a seaman;
ordinary till last voyage, but now A.B." He said this with pride: of what
it meant she had not the ghost of a notion. "A man don't need scholarship
in my way o' life; but, being on shore for a spell, you see, miss,
I'm helping the old gal to fight the School Board. 'Tis hard on her,
too."
"What is hard?" Hester asked, her professional interest aroused.
"Why, to have the bread taken out of her mouth at her time of life.
She sent in an application, but the Board wouldn't look at it.
Old Rosewarne, they say, had another teacher in his eye, and got her
appointed--some up-country body. Ne'er a man on the Board had the pluck
to say 'Bo' when _he_ opened his mouth."
"Rosewarne?" Hester came to a halt.
"That bag is too heavy for you, miss. Hand it over--do'ee now!"
"Are you talking of Mr. John Rosewarne?"
"Ay, Rosewarne of Hall--he did it. If you was a friend of his, miss, I
beg your pardon; but a raspin' old tyrant he was. Sing small, you might
be let off and call yourself lucky; stand up to 'en, and he'd have you
down and your face in the dust if it cost a fortune."
"Wait a moment, please!" Hester commanded, halting for breath. They had
reached a steep hill, and the tall hedgerows shut out the sea; but its far
roar sounded in her ears. She nodded toward the bundle on his shoulders.
"Are those things meant to fight the new schoolmistress?"
"That's of it. The old woman has pluck enough for a hunderd. But, as I
tell her, she may get the billet now, after all, since the old fellow's
gone, and Mr. Sam--they do say--favours the Dissenters."
"I don't understand. 'Gone'? Who is gone?"
"Why, old Rosewarne. Who else?"
"You are not telling me that Mr. Rosewarne is dead?"
"Beggin' your pardon, miss--but he's dead, and buried last Saturday.
There! I han't upset you, have I? I took it for certain that everyone
knew. And you seeming an acquaintance of his, and being, so to speak, in
black."--
"But I heard from him only last Thursday--less than a week ago!"
Hester's hand went to her pocket. To be sure she possessed, with
Rosewarne's letter, a second from a Mr. Peter Benny, acknowledging her
acceptance of the post, and promising that she should be met on her
arrival, on the day and hour suggested by her. But Mr. Benny's letter had
been cautiously worded, and said nothing of his master's death.
The young sailor had come to a halt with her, evidently puzzled, and for
the fourth time at least was holding out a hand to relieve her of her bag.
"No!" she said. "You must walk on, please; I am the new schoolmistress."
It took him aback, but not in the way she had expected. His face became
grave at once, but still wore its puzzled look, into which by degrees
there crept another look of pity.
"You can't know what you'm doing then, miss; I'm sure of that.
They haven't told you. She's a very old woman, and 'tis all the bread she
has."
He stared at her, seeking reassurance.
"You are certainly right, so far: I have tumbled, it seems, into
mysteries. But for aught I know, I _am_ the new schoolmistress, and we
are enemies, it seems. Now will you walk ahead, or shall I?"
Still he paused, considering her face.
"But if you knew what a shame it is!" he stammered. "And you look good,
too!"
With a movement of the hand she begged him to leave her and walk ahead.
But as she did so she caught sound of hoofs and wheels on the road above.
They drew apart to let the vehicle pass, she to one side of the road, the
young sailor to the other. A light spring-cart came lurching round the
corner; and its driver, glancing from one to the other, drew rein sharply,
dragging the rough-coated cob back with a slither on the splashboard, and
bringing him to a stand between them.
CHAPTER IX.
MR. SAMUEL'S POLICY.
Hester's letter accepting the teachership had put Mr. Sam in something of
a quandary. It came addressed, of course, to his father, and as his
father's heir and executor he had opened it.
"'Hester Marvin'?" He read the signature and pondered, pulling his ragged
whisker. "So that was the name on the letter you posted?" (No question
had been asked about it at the inquest.)
"That was the name, sir," said Mr. Benny.
"Who is she? How did my father come to select her?"
Mr. Benny had not a notion.
"By her tone, they must have been pretty well acquainted," continued Mr.
Sam, still pondering. "She signs herself 'Yours very truly,' and hopes he
has been feeling better since his return. You know absolutely nothing
about her?"
"Absolutely nothing, sir."
"I wish,"--Mr. Sam began, but checked himself. What he really wished was
that Mr. Benny had used less haste in posting the letter--had intercepted
it, in short. But he did not like to say this aloud. "I wish," he went
on, "I knew exactly what the old man wrote; how far it committed us,
I mean." And by 'us' again, he meant the Board of Managers, upon which he
had no doubt of being elected to replace his father.
"You may be sure, sir," answered Mr. Benny, "that he made her a definite
offer. My dear master was never one to make two bites of a cherry."
"Well, we must let her come, and find out, if we can, how far we're
committed. Better write at once and fix a date--say next Thursday.
You needn't say anything about my father's death. Just make it a formal
letter, and sign your own name; you may add 'Clerk of the School Board.'"
"Can I rightly do that, sir?" Mr. Benny hesitated.
"Why not? You _are_ the clerk, aren't you? As clerk, you answer her
simply in the way of business. There's no need to call a meeting of the
Board over such a trifle; though, if you wish, I'll explain it personally
to the Managers. We may have a dozen cases like this before we get into
working order--small odds and ends which require, nevertheless, to be
dealt with promptly. We must do what's best, and risk small
irregularities."
Mr. Benny, not quite convinced, fell to composing his letter.
Mr. Sam leaned back in his chair and mused, tapping his long teeth with a
paper-knife. He wondered what kind of a woman this Hester Marvin might
be, and of what religious 'persuasion.' In a week or two he would succeed
to his father's place on the Board. There would be no opposition, and it
seemed to him natural and right that there should be none. Was he not by
far the richest man in the parish? Samuel Rosewarne studied his Bible
devoutly; but he did not seek it for anything which might stand in the way
of his own will or his private advantage. When he came upon a text
condemning riches, for instance, or definitely bidding him to forgive a
debtor, he told himself that Christ was speaking figuratively, or was, at
any rate, not to be taken literally, and with that he passed on to
something more comfortable. He did not, of course, really believe this,
but he had to tell himself so; for otherwise he would have to alter his
whole way of life, or confess himself an irreligious man. But he was, on
the contrary, a highly religious man, and he had no disposition to alter
his life.
He hated the Church of England, too, because he perceived it to be full of
abuses; and he supposed that the best way to counteract these abuses was
to put a spoke in the Church's wheel wherever and whenever he could.
In this he but copied the adversary--Parson Endicott, for example--who
hated Dissent, perceiving that it rested on self-assertiveness,
encouraging unlearned men to be opinionative in error. Perceiving this,
Parson Endicott supposed himself to be combating error by snatching at
every advantage, great or small, which exalted the supremacy of his Church
and left Dissent the worse in any bargain. To neither of these men, both
confident in their 'cause,' did it occur for a moment to leave that cause
to the energy of its own truth.
The parson, however, was not likely to bring forward an opposition
candidate; for that would conflict with a second principle of conduct,
the principle of siding with the rich on all possible occasions.
By doing this in his small way he furthered at once the cause of stable
government--that is to say, the rule of the poor by the wealthy--and the
cause of his own Church, which (he fully believed) in these times depends
for existence upon mendicancy. Therefore Mr. Samuel would certainly be
elected; and counting on this, he felt sorry to have missed the chance of
giving the teachership, by his casting vote, to one of his own sect--some
broad-minded, undenominational person who would teach the little ones to
abhor all that savoured of popery. To be sure, this Hester Marvin might
be such a person. On the other hand, his father had been capable of
choosing some Jew, Turk, infidel, or heretic, or even papist. It remained
to discover, first, what kind of woman this Hester Marvin might be; and
next, whether or not the terms of her engagement amounted to a contract.
"By the way," said Mr. Sam, as Mr. Benny sat pursing his lips over the
letter, "you take in a lodger now and then, I believe?"
"Now and then," Mr. Benny assented, looking up and biting the end of his
quill. He did not understand the drift of the question. "Now and then,
sir," he repeated; "when my wife's health allows."
"Then add a line, telling her she shall be met at the station, and that
you will put her up."
"But, Mr. Samuel, I could scarcely bring myself to offer."--
"Tut, man; you don't ask her to pay. I'll see to that. Merely say that
you hope she will be your guest until she finds suitable lodgings."
"That is very kind of you, sir."
"Not at all." He reached out a hand for Mr. Benny's letter, read it
through, and nodded. "Yes, that will do; seal it up and let it go by next
post. My father had great confidence in you, Benny."
"He ever did me that great honour, sir."
"I hope we shall get on together equally well. I daresay we shall."
"It comforts me to hear you say so, sir. When a man gets up in years--
with a long family depending on him."--
"Of course, if this Miss Marvin should happen to give you further
particulars of my father's offer, so much the better," said Mr. Sam
negligently.
As the little man went down the hill toward the ferry he was pounced upon
by Mother Butson, who regularly now watched for him and waylaid him on his
way home.
"Hold hard, Peter Benny--it's no use your trying to slip by now!"
"I wasn't, Mrs. Butson; indeed, now, I wasn't!" he protested; though
indeed this waylaying had become a torment to him.
"Well, and what have they decided?" The poor old soul asked it fiercely,
yet trembled while waiting for his answer, almost hoping that he would
have none.
Mr. Benny longed to say that nothing was decided; but the letter in his
pocket seemed to be burning against his ribs. He was a truthful man.
"It don't lie with me, Mrs. Butson; I'm only the clerk, and take my
orders. But I must warn you not to be too hopeful. The person that Mr.
Rosewarne selected will come down and be interviewed. That's only right
and proper."
All the village knew by this time what had happened at the last Board
meeting.
"Coming, is she? Then 'tis true what I've heard, that the old varmint
went straight from the meetin' and wrote off to the woman, and that the
hand of God struck 'en dead in his chair. Say what you will,"--the cracked
voice shrilled up triumphantly--"'tis a judgment! What's the woman's
name?"
"That I'm not allowed to tell you. And look here, Mrs. Butson--you
mustn't use such talk of my poor dead master; indeed you mustn't."
He looked past her appealingly and at Mrs. Trevarthen, who had come to her
doorway to listen.
"I said what I chose to 'en while he was alive, and I'll say what I choose
now. You was always a poor span'el, Peter Benny; but John Rosewarne never
fo'ced _me_ to lick his boots. 'Poor dead master!'" she mimicked.
"Iss fay!--dead enough now, and poor, he that ground the poor!"
At once she began to fawn. "But Mr. Sam'll see justice done.
You'll speak a word for me to Mr. Sam? He's a professin' Christian, and
like as not when this woman shows herself she'll turn out to be some
red-hot atheist or Jesuit. To bring the like o' they here was just the
dirty trick that old heathen of yours would enjoy. Some blasphemy it must
ha' been, or the hand o' God'd never have struck 'en as it did."
"Folks are saying," put in Mrs. Trevarthen from the doorway, "that Sall
here ill-wished 'en. But she didn't. 'Twas his own sins compassed his
end. Look to your ways, Peter Benny! Your master was an unbeliever and
an oppressor, and now he's in hell-fire."
Mr. Benny put his hands to his ears and ran from these terrible women.
For the moment they had both believed what they said, and yet old
Rosewarne's belief or unbelief had nothing to do with their hatred.
They gloated because he had been removed in the act of doing that which
would certainly impoverish them. They, neither less nor more than Mr. Sam
and Parson Endicott, made identical the will of God with their own wants.
Peter Benny as he crossed the ferry would have been uneasier and unhappier
had he understood Mr. Sam's parting words. He had not understood them
because he had never laid a scheme against man, woman, or child in his
life. Still he was uneasy and unhappy enough: first, because it hurt him
that anyone should speak as these old women had spoken of his dead master;
next, because he really felt sorry for them, and was carrying a letter to
their hurt; again because, in spite of Mr. Sam's reassuring words, he
could not shake off a sense of having exceeded his duties by signing that
letter without consulting the Board; and lastly, because in his confusion
he had forgotten his wife's state of health, and must break to the poor
woman, just arisen from bed and nursing a three-weeks'-old baby, that he
had invited a lodger. Now that he came to think of it, there was not a
spare bedroom in the house!
CHAPTER X.
NUNCEY.
The driver of the spring-cart was a brown-skinned, bright-eyed,
and exceedingly pretty damsel of eighteen or twenty, in a pink print
frock with a large crimson rose pinned in its bodice, and a pink
sun-bonnet, under the pent of which her dark hair curtained her
temples in two ample rippling bands.
"Why, hullo!" She reined up. Hester and the young sailor had fallen
apart to let her pass, and from her perch she stared down from one
side of the road to the other with a puzzled, jolly smile.
"Mornin', Tom!"
"Mornin', Nuncey!"
"Sakes alive! What be carryin' there 'pon your back?"
"School furnitcher."
The girl's eyes wandered from the bundle to Hester, and grew wide
with surmise.
"You don't mean to tell me you're the new schoolmistress!"
"Yes, I'm Hester Marvin."
"And I pictered 'ee a frump! But, my dear soul," she asked with
sudden solemnity, "what makes 'ee do it?"
"Do what?"
"Why, teach school? I al'ays reckoned that a trade for old persons--
toteling poor bodies, 'most past any use except to worrit the
children."
"And so 'tis," put in the young sailor angrily.
"Han't been crossed in love, have 'ee? But there! what be I clackin'
about, when better fit I was askin' your pardon for bein' so late?
I'm sent to fetch you over to Troy. Ought to have been here more'n a
half-hour ago; but when you've five children to wash an' dress an' get
breakfast for an' see their boots is shined, and after that to catch the
hoss and put'n to cart--well, you'll have to forgive it. That's your
luggage Tom's carryin', I s'pose?--and a funny passel of traps school
teachers travel with, I will say. You must be clever, though; else
you couldn't have coaxed Tom Trevarthen to shoulder such a load.
He wouldn't lift his little finger for _me_." She shot this
unrighteous shaft with a mischievous side-glance, and laughed.
She had beautiful teeth, and laughing became her mightily.
"But that is not my luggage."
"Not your luggage! Then where--Hullo! have you two been quarrellin'?
Well, I never! You can't have lost much time about it."
"I left my trunk at the station," Hester went on, flushing yet redder
with annoyance.
"And this here belongs to Mother Butson," declared Tom Trevarthen,
red also. "I'm fetchin' it home for her."
"Then take and pitch it into the tail of the trap; and you, my dear,
hand up your bag and climb up alongside o' me. We'll drive back to
station, fetch your trunk, and be back in time to overtake Tom at the
top o' the hill and give him a lift home. There's plenty room for
three on the seat--that is, by squeezin' a bit."
"You're very kind, Nuncey," said Tom Trevarthen sullenly. "But I'll
not take a lift alongside o' _she_; and I'll not trouble you with my
load, neither."
"Please yourself, you foolish mortal, you. But--I declare! You
_must_ have had a tiff!"
"No tiff at all," corrected Tom, sturdily wrathful. "It's despise
her I do--comin' here and drivin' an old 'ooman to the workhouse!"
He turned on his heel and trudged away stubbornly up the hill.
Nuncey gazed back at him for a moment over her shoulder.
"Never saw Tom in such a tear in all my life," she commented
cheerfully. "Take 'en all the week round, you couldn't find a
better-natered boy. Well, jump up, my dear, and we'll fit and get
your trunk. He may be cured of his sulks by time we overtake 'en."
Undoubtedly Hester had excuses enough for feeling hurt and annoyed;
yet what mainly hurt and annoyed her (though she would not confess
it) was that this sailor and this girl had each taken her as one on
equal terms with themselves. She was a sensible girl, by far too
sensible to nurse on second thoughts a conceit that she was their
superior simply because she spoke better English. Yet habit had
taught her to expect some degree of deference from those who spoke
incorrectly; and we are all touchier upon our vaguely reasoned claims
than upon those of which we have perfect assurance.
"J'p, Pleasant!" Nuncey called to the grey horse, flicking him
lightly with the whip. The ill-balanced trap seesawed down the
slope, and soon was spinning along the cliff-road, across which the
wind blew with such force that Hester caught at her hat.
"Never mind a bit of breeze, my dear. And as for the touch of damp,
'tis nobbut the pride o' the mornin'. All for heat and pilchar's, as
the saying is: we shall have it broiling hot afore noon. Now I come
to think of it, 'tis high time we made our introductions. I'm Nuncey
Benny--that's short for Annunciation. This here hoss and trap belongs
to my mother. She's a regrater when in health; but there's a baby
come. That makes eleven of us. You'll find us a houseful."
"Your father was kind enough to offer me,"--began Hester.
"Iss," broke in Nuncey; "father's kind, whatever else he may be. As
for considerin' where to stow you, that never crossed his head. You
mustn't think, my dear, that you bain't welcome. Only--well, I may
so well get it over soon as late--you'll have to put up with a bed in
the room with me. Shall you mind?"
"Of course I shall not mind," said Hester, conquered at once.
"Well, that's uncommon nice of you; and I don't mind tellin' 'ee 'tis
the second load you've a-lifted off my mind. For, to start with, I
made sure you was goin' to be a frump."
"But why?"
Nuncey had no time to explain, for they were now arrived at the
stationmaster's cottage. The station-master himself welcomed them at
the door, wiping his mouth.
"You'll step in and have a dish of tea, the both of you. It'll take
off the edge of the mornin'."
Nuncey declined, after a glance at Hester, and at once fell to
discussing the weather with the station-master while he hoisted in
the trunk. Two of Hester's earliest discoveries in this strange land
were that everyone talked about the weather, and everyone addressed
everyone else as 'My dear.'
"Well, so long!" said the stationmaster. "Wind's going round wi' the
sun, I see, same as yesterday. We're in for a hot spell, you mark my
words."
"So long!" Nuncey shook the reins, and they started again. "Is that
how sleeves are wearin', up the country?" she asked, after two or
three glances at Hester's jacket.
"They are worn fuller than this, mostly," Hester answered gravely.
"But you mustn't take me for an authority."
"I can see so far into a brick wall as most. Don't tell me! You're
one to think twice about your clothes, for all you look so modest.
Boots like yours cost more than I can spend on mine in a month o'
Sundays; iss, and a trifle o' vanity thrown in. You've a very pretty
foot--an' I like your face--an' your way o' dressin', if you weren't
so sad-coloured. What's that for, makin' so bold?"
"It's for my father."
"There now, I'm sorry!--Always was a clumsy fool, and always will be.
I thought it might be for old Rosewarne, you bein' hand-in-glove with
him."
"But I scarcely knew him. It was only just now I heard the news."--
Hester broke off, colouring again with annoyance. What did these
people mean, that they persisted in taking for granted her complicity
in some mysterious plot?
By and by, at the top of the hill, they overtook the young sailor.
"Got over your sulks, Tom?" inquired Nuncey cheerfully. "If so,
climb up and be sociable--there's plenty room."
But Tom shook his head without answering, though he drew close to the
hedge to let the trap pass. It is difficult to look dignified with a
blackboard, an easel, and a coloured globe on one's back. The globe
absurdly reminded Hester of a picture of Atlas in one of her
schoolbooks, and she could not help a smile. A moment later she
would have given all her pocket-money to recall that smile, for he
had glanced up, glowering, and observed it.
Nuncey laughed outright.
"But all the same," she remarked meditatively as they drove on,
"I like the lad for't. 'Tisn' everyone would do so much for the sake
of an old 'ooman that never has a good word to fling at nobody, and
maybe spanked 'en blue when he was a tacker and went to school wi'
her. He's terrible simple; and decent, too, for a sailor. I reckon
there's a many think Mother Butson hardly used that wouldn't crack their
backs for her as he's a-doing."
"He spoke to me," said Hester, "quite as if I were doing a wickedness
in coming--as if, at least, I were selfish and unjust. And I never
heard of this Mother Butson till half an hour ago! Do _you_ think
I'm unjust?"
"Well," Nuncey answered judiciously, "if any person had asked me that
an hour ago, I'd have agreed with Tom. But 'tis different now I've
seen your face."
Nuncey and the stationmaster were wise weather prophets. Here on the
uplands the grey veil of morning fell apart, and dissolved so
suddenly that before Hester had time to wonder the miracle was
accomplished. A flood of sunshine broke over the ripening cornfields
to right and left; the song of larks rang forth almost with a shout;
beyond the golden ridges of the wheat the grey vapour faded as breath
off a mirror, and lo! a clear line divided the turquoise sky from a
sea of intensest iris-blue. As she watched the transformation her
heart gave a lift, and the past few hours fell from her like an evil
dream. The stuffy compartment, the blear-eyed lamp, the train's roar
and rattle, the forlorn arrival on the windy platform--all slipped away
into a remote past. She had passed the gates of fear and entered an
enchanted land.
As she looked abroad upon it she marvelled at a hundred differences
between it and her native Midlands. It was wilder--infinitely
wilder--than Warwickshire, and at the same time less unkempt; far
more savage in outline, yet in detail sober almost to tidiness. It
seemed to acknowledge the hand of some great unknown gardener; and
this gardener was, of course, the sea-breeze now filling her lungs
and bracing her strength. The shaven, landward-bending thorns and
hollies, the close-trimmed hedgerow, the clean-swept highroad, alike
proclaimed its tireless attentions. It favoured its own plants,
too--the tamarisk on the hedge, the fuchsia and myrtle in the cottage
garden. As the spring-cart nid-nodded down the hill towards Troy,
the grey roofs of the town broke upon Hester's sight beyond a cloud
of fuchsia blossoms in a garden at the angle of the road.
So steep was the hill, and so closely these roofs and chimneys
huddled against it, that Hester leaned back with a catch of the
breath that set Nuncey laughing. For the moment she verily supposed
herself on the edge of a precipice. She caught one glimpse of a blue
water and the masts of shipping, and clutched at the cart-rail as the
old grey began to slither at a businesslike jog-trot down a street so
narrow that, to make way for them, passers-by on foot ran hastily to
the nearest doorways, whence one and all nodded good-naturedly at
Nuncey. Of some houses the doors were reached by steep flights of
steps tunnelled through the solid rock; of others by wooden stairways
leading to balconies painted blue or green and adorned with
pot-plants--geraniums, fuchsias, lemon-verbenas--on ledges imminent over
Hester's head. The most of the passers-by were women carrying pails
of water, or country folks with baskets of market stuff. The whole
street seemed to be cleaning up and taking in provisions for the day,
and all amid a buzz of public gossip, one housewife pausing on her
balcony as she shook a duster, and leaning over to discuss market
prices with her neighbour chaffering below. The cross-fire of talk
died down as the dealers dispersed, snatching up their wares from
under the wheels of the spring-cart, while the women took long,
silent stock of Hester's appearance and dress. Behind her it broke
forth again, louder than ever.
At the foot of the hill they swung round a corner, and passing a
public-house and the rails of the parish church, threaded their way
round two more corners, and entered a street scarcely less narrow
than the other, but level. Here Nuncey drew up before an ope through
which Hester caught another glimpse of blue-green water. They had
arrived.
A grinning lad lifted out Hester's trunk and bore it down the ope to
a green-painted doorway, where a rosy-faced, extremely solemn child
stared out on the world over a green-painted board, fixed across with
the evident purpose of confining him to the house. Having despatched
this urchin to warn his mother that 'the furriner was come,' the lad
heaved his burden over the board, dumped it down inside with a bang,
and returned, still grinning amiably, to take charge of horse and
cart.
"If you want to know t'other from which in our family," said Nuncey,
"there's nothing like beginning early. This is Shake."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Father had him christened Shakespeare, but we call him Shake for
short. It sounds more natural, somehow. And this here is Robert
Burns," she went on, leading the way to the green-painted doorway
where the small urchin had resumed his survey of the world beyond
home. "That's another of father's inventions; but the poor cheeld
pulled down the kettle when he was eighteen months old and scalded
hisself all over, so he's gone by his full name ever since. Mother!"
Nuncey called aloud, stepping over the barrier. "Here's the new
school-teacher!"
A middle-aged, fair-haired woman, with a benign but puzzled smile,
appeared in the passage, holding a baby at the breast.
"You're kindly welcome, my dear; that is, if you'll excuse my hair
being in curl-papers. Dear me, now!" Mrs. Benny regarded Hester with
a look of honest perplexity. "And I was expectin' an older-lookin'
person altogether!"
Hester followed her into a kitchen which, though untidy and dim,
struck her as more than passably clean; and it crossed her mind at
once that its cleanliness must be due to Nuncey and its untidiness to
Mrs. Benny. The dimness was induced by a crowd of geraniums in the
window and a large bird-cage blocking out the light above them.
A second large bird-cage hung from a rafter in the middle of the
ceiling.
"And you've been travellin' all night? You must be pinin' for a dish
of tea."--
But here a voice screamed out close to Hester's ear--
"What's your name? What's your name? Oh, rock and roll me over,
what's your darned name?"
"Hester Marv--" she had begun to answer in a fright, when Nuncey
broke out laughing.
"Don't 'ee be afraid of 'en--'tis only the parrot;" and Hester
laughed too, recovering herself at sight of a grey and scarlet bird
eyeing her with angry inquisitiveness from the cage over Mrs. Benny's
head. Her gaze wandered apprehensively to the second cage by the
window.
"Oh, _he_ won't speak!" Nuncey assured her. "He's only a cat."
"A cat?"
"Iss. He ate the last parrot afore this one, and I reckon he died of
it. Father had 'en stuffed and put 'en in the cage instead. Just go
and look for yourself; he's as natural as life."
"I was thinkin' a ham rasher," suggested Mrs. Benny, with her kindly,
unsettled smile. "Nuncey, will you hold the baby, or shall I?"
"You give me the frying-pan," commanded Nuncey, turning up her
sleeves. "What's the matter with _you_, Robert Burns? And what's
become of your manners?" she demanded of the urchin who had followed
them in from the passage, and now stood gripping Hester's skirts and
gazing up at her, as she in turn gazed up at the absurd cat in the
parrot's cage.
"What great eyes she've got!" exclaimed Robert Burns in an
awe-stricken voice.
"'All the better to see you with,'" quoted Hester, laughing and
looking down on him.
"That's in _Red Riding Hood_. She knows about stories!" The child
clapped his hands.
"Well," put in Mrs. Benny, seating herself with a sigh as the ham rasher
began to frizzle, "you may say what you like about education, but mothers
ought to thank the Lord for it. Sometimes, as 'tis, I feel as if the
whole world was on my shoulders, and I can't be responsible for it any
longer; but what would happen if 'twasn't for the school bell at nine
o'clock there's no knowing. You'd like a wash, my dear?"
"I should indeed," answered Hester.
"Sometimes I loses count," went on Mrs. Benny, not pursuing her
invitation, but standing with a faraway gaze bent upon the geraniums
in the window; "but there's eleven of 'em, and three buried, and five
at school this moment. I began with two boys--two years between
each--and then came Nuncey. There's four years between her and
Shake, but after that you may allow two years to each again, quite
like Jacob's ladder."
"Lord bless 'ee, mother!" interrupted Nuncey, glancing up from the
frying-pan, "she don't want to be told I'm singular. She've found
out that already. Here's the kettle boilin'--fit and give her a cup
of tea, and take her upstairs. 'Tis near upon half-past nine
already, and at half-past ten father was to be here to fetch her
across to see Mr. Samuel--though, for my part, I hold 'twould be more
Christian to put her to bed and let her sleep the forenoon out."
When Hester descended to breakfast Mr. Benny had already arrived; and
he too could not help showing astonishment at her youthful
appearance.
"But twenty-five is not so young, after all," she maintained,
laughing. "I feel my years, I assure you. Why are you all in
conspiracy to add to them?"
"The late Mr. Rosewarne had given us no particulars," began Mr. Benny.
"He wrote at length to me about the school and his hopes for it."
"You knew him, then, Miss Marvin?"
"He was, in a fashion, a friend of my father's. He used to visit us
regularly once a year.--But let me show you his letter."
"Not on any account!" Mr. Benny put up a flurried hand. "It--it
wouldn't be right." He said it almost sharply. Hester, puzzled to
know what offence she had nearly committed, and in some degree hurt
by his tone, thrust the letter back in her pocket.
CHAPTER XI.
HESTER IS ACCEPTED.
"Well?" Mr. Sam lifted his eyes from his writing-table.
"Miss Marvin has arrived, sir, and is waiting in the morning-parlour,"
Mr. Benny announced.
"Let her wait a moment. I suppose she takes the line that we've
definitely engaged her?"
"I don't know, sir, that she takes what you might call a line; but there's
no doubt she believes herself engaged. She talks very frankly, and is
altogether a nice, pleasant-spoken young person."
"You didn't happen to find out what my father wrote to her?"
"Of her own accord she offered to show me his letter."
"Well, and what did it say?"
"I didn't read it, sir."
"You didn't read it?" Mr. Sam repeated in slow astonishment.
"No, sir. I felt it wasn't fair to her," said Mr. Benny.
His employer regarded him for a moment with sourly meditative eyes.
"You had best show her in at once," he commanded sharply.
He reseated himself, and did not rise when Hester entered, but slewed his
chair around, nodded gloomily in response to her slight bow, and, tapping
his knees with a paper-knife, treated her to a long, deliberate stare.
"Take a seat, please."
Hester obeyed with a quiet 'Thank you.'
"You have come, I believe, in answer to a letter of my father's?
Might I ask you what he said, exactly?"
Hester's hand went towards her pocket, but paused. She had taken an
instant aversion from this man.
"My father," he went on, noting her hesitation, "has since died suddenly,
as you know. His affairs are in some confusion, of course."
This was untrue, but Mr. Sam had no consciousness of telling a lie.
The phrase was commonly used of dead men's affairs. "In this matter of
your engagement, for instance, I am moving in the dark. I can find no
record of it among his papers."
"I answered him, sir; but my letter arrived, it seems, after his death.
Mr. Benny replied to it."
"Yes, to be sure, I saw your letter, but it did not tell me how far the
negotiations had gone."
"You are one of the Managers, sir?"
"Well, not precisely; but you will find that makes little difference.
I am to be placed on the Board as my father's successor."
"The offer was quite definite," said Hester calmly. "I would show you the
letter, but some parts of it are private."
"Now why in the world was she ready to show it to Benny?" he asked
himself. Aloud he said, "You were a friend, then, of my father's?
Is it for him, may I ask, that you wear mourning?"
"No, sir; for my own father. Mr. Rosewarne and he were friends--oh, for
many years. I asked about it once, when I was quite a girl, and why
Mr. Rosewarne came to visit us once every year as he did. My father told
me that it had begun in a quarrel, when they were young men; it may have
been when my father served in the army, in the barracks at Warwick.
I don't remember that he said so, yet somehow I have always had an idea
that the quarrel went back to that time; but he said that they had hated
one another, and made friends after a long time, and that your father had
the most to forgive, being in the wrong. I remember those words, because
they sounded so queer to me and I could not understand them. When I was
eighteen, I went out to get my living, and did not see Mr. Rosewarne for
many years until the other day, though he came regularly."
"The other day?" Mr. Sam stared at her blankly.
"On the 5th. Mr. Rosewarne always paid his visit on the 5th of June."
"I don't understand you in the least. A minute ago you told me that your
father was dead!"
"Yes; he died almost two months ago. But Mr. Rosewarne wrote and asked
leave to come, since it was for the last time."
"Your mother entertained him?"
Hester shook her head. "I have no mother. He came as my guest, and that
evening--for he never spent more than one night with us--we talked for a
long while. He knew, of course, that I was a schoolmistress; and he began
to mock at some things in which I believe very deeply. He did it to try
me, perhaps. I don't know whether he came meaning to try me, or seeing me
alone in the world, and making ready to leave the old home, he suddenly
took this notion into his head. At any rate, I did not guess for a
moment; and when he spoke scorn of girls' teaching, I answered him--too
hotly, I thought at the time; but it seems that he forgave me."
She rose. "I have told you all this, sir, because you say you are in the
dark. I am here because Mr. Rosewarne offered me the post. But you seem
disposed to deny this; and so in fairness I must consult a friend, if I
can find one, or a lawyer perhaps, before showing you the letter."
"Wait a moment, please." Hester's story had held a light as it were,
though but a faint one, to an unexplored passage in old Rosewarne's life;
and to Mr. Sam every unexplored corner in that life was now to be
suspected. "You jump to conclusions, Miss Marvin. I merely meant to say
that as my father's executor I have to use reasonable caution.
Might I inquire your age? Excuse me, I know that ladies--"
"I am twenty-five," she struck in sharply.
"Married, or unmarried?"
"Unmarried."
"You will excuse me for saying that I am surprised. A young person of
your attractiveness--"
"Have you any more questions, sir?"
"Eh?--ah, to be sure! Qualifications?"
Hester briefly enumerated these. He did not appear to be listening, but
sat eyeing her abstractedly, while he rattled the point of the paper-knife
between his Upper and lower teeth.
"Yes, yes--quite satisfactory. Religious views?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"Religious views?"
"If you really think that a necessary question, I was baptised and brought
up in the Church of England."
"Not a bigoted Churchwoman, I hope?"
"Not bigoted, I certainly hope," Hester answered demurely.
"I feel sure of it," said Mr. Sam, rising gallantly. "In the matter of
so-called apostolic succession, for instance--"
But here there came a tap at the door, and Elizabeth Jane, the housemaid,
announced that Parson Endicott had called. "Show him in," ordered Mr. Sam
promptly, and at the same time--having suddenly made up his mind--he flung
Hester an insufferably confidential glance, which seemed to say, "Never
mind _him_; you and I are in the same boat."
Parson Endicott suffered from shortness of sight and a high parsonic
manner. He paused on the threshold to wipe his eyeglasses, adjusted them
on his nose, and gazing around the room, cleared his throat as if about to
address a congregation.
"Good-day, parson." Mr. Sam saluted him amiably, still without rising.
"You've come in the nick of time. I have just been chatting with Miss
Marvin here--our new schoolmistress."
Hester divined that, for some reason, Mr. Samuel had decided to accept her
claim; and that for some reason equally occult he meant to give the
clergyman no choice but to accept it.
"Indeed?--er--yes, to be sure, I am pleased to make your acquaintance,
Miss Marvin," said Parson Endicott mellifluously, with a glance which
seemed to distinguish Hester kindly from the ordinary furniture of the
room. This was his habitual way of showing cordial goodwill to his social
inferiors, and the poor man had lived to the age of fifty-six without
guessing that they invariably saw through it. Having bestowed this glance
of kindness upon Hester, he turned to Mr. Sam with another, which plainly
asked how far (as one person of importance conferring with another) he
might take it that the creature before them was a satisfactory creature.
"You're in luck's way," said Mr. Sam, answering this look. "She's a
Churchwoman."
"My dear Mr. Rosewarne,"--Parson Endicott pressed the finger-tips of both
hands together, holding them in front of his stomach--"I am gratified--
deeply gratified; but you must not suppose for one moment--h'm--whatever
my faults, I take some credit to myself for broad-mindedness.
A Churchwoman, eh?"--he beamed on Hester--"and in other respects, I hope,
satisfactory?"
"Quite." Mr. Sam turned to Hester. "Would you mind running over your
qualifications again? To tell the truth, I've forgotten 'em."
Hester, with an acute sense of shame, again rehearsed the list.
"Quite so," said Parson Endicott, who had obviously not been listening.
He turned to Mr. Sam with inquiry in his eye. "I think, perhaps--if Miss
Marvin--"
"I daresay she won't mind stepping into the next room," said Mr. Sam,
turning his back on her, and calmly reseating himself. The parson glanced
at Hester with polite inquiry, and, as she bowed, stepped to open the door
for her. With head bent to hide the flush on her cheeks, she passed out
into the great parlour.
Now the great parlour overlooked the garden through three tall windows,
of which Susannah had drawn down the blinds half-way and opened the lower
sashes, so that the room seemed to Hester deliciously fresh and cool.
It was filled, too, with the fragrance of a jarful of peonies, set
accurately in the middle of the long bare table; and she stood for a
moment--her sight yet misty with indignant, wounded pride--staring at the
reflection of their crimson blooms in the polished mahogany.
These two men were intolerable: and yet they only translated into meaner
terms the opinion which everyone in this strange country seemed to have
formed of her. She thought of the young sailor, of Nuncey, of Mr. Benny.
All these were simple souls, and patently willing to believe the best of a
fellow-creature; yet each in a different way had treated her with
suspicion, as though she were here to seek her own interests, and with a
selfish disregard of others'. The young sailor had openly and hotly
accused her of it. Nuncey and her father, though kind, and even
delicately eager to make her welcome, as clearly held some disapproval in
reserve--were puzzled somehow to account for her. And she was guiltless.
She had come in response to a plain invitation, thinking only of good work
to be done. No; what she found intolerable was not these two men, but the
whole situation.
She turned with a start. Something had flown in through the open midmost
window, and fallen with a thud on the floor a few yards from her feet.
She stepped across and stooped to examine it. It was the upper half of a
tattered and somewhat grimy rag doll.
To account for this apparition we must cross the garden, to the
summer-house, where Myra and Clem had hidden themselves away from
the heat with a book, and, for the twentieth time perhaps, were lost in
the adventures of Jack the Tinker and the Giant Blunderbuss.
As a rule Myra would read a portion of the story, and the pair then fell
to acting it over together. In this way Clem had slain, in the course of
his young life, many scores of giants, wizards, dragons, and other enemies
of mankind, his sister the while keeping watch over his blindness, and
calling to him when and where to deliver the deadly stroke.
But to-day the heat disinclined them for these dramatic exertions, and
they sat quiet, even on reaching the point at which Jack the Tinker, his
friend Tom, the good-natured giant, and Tom's children, young Tom and
Jane, fare forth with slings for their famous hunting.
"'They soon knocked down as many kids, hares, and rabbits as they desired.
They caught some colts, placed the children on two of them and the game on
the others, and home they went.'"
Myra glanced up at Clem, for this was a passage which ever called to him
like a trumpet. But to-day Clem spread out both hands, protesting.
"'On their return, whilst waiting for supper, Jack wandered around the
castle, and was struck by seeing a window which he had not before
observed. Jack was resolved to discover the room to which this window
belonged; so he very carefully noticed its position and then threw his
hammer in through it, that he might be certain of the spot when he found
his tool inside the castle. The next day, after dinner.'"--
"Wait a moment, Clem dear!"
"Oh, but we _must!_" Clem had jumped to his feet.
"It's too dreadfully hot. Very well, then; but wait for the end.
"'The next day, after dinner, when Tom was having his snooze, Jack took
Tom's wife Jane with him, and they began a search for the hammer near the
spot where Jack supposed the window should be; but they saw no signs of
one in any part of the walls. They discovered, however, a strangely
fashioned worm-eaten oak hanging-press. They carefully examined this, but
found nothing. At last Jack, striking the back of it with his fist, was
convinced from the sound that the wall behind it was hollow. He and Jane
went steadily to work, and with some exertion they moved the press aside
and disclosed a stone door. They opened this, and there was Jack's hammer
lying amidst a pile of bones, evidently the relics of some of old
Blunderbuss's wives, whom he had imprisoned in the wall and left to perish
there!'"
Myra shut the book with a slam, and, groping beneath the seat of the
summer-house, found and handed to Clem the torso of an old rag doll,
which, because it might be thrown against a window without breaking the
glass, served as their wonted substitute for the Tinker's hammer.
"O-oh!" cried Myra, clutching at Clem and drawing him back from the sudden
apparition in the window; and so for a dozen seconds she and Hester stared
at one another.
"Good-morning!"
"Good-morning!" Myra hesitated a moment. "Though I don't know who you
are. Oh, but yes I do! You're the new teacher, and it's no use your
pretending."
"Am I pretending?" asked Hester.
"Yes; but I know what to do." The child nodded her head defiantly and
made an elaborate sign of the cross, first over Clem and then upon the
front of her own bodice. "That's against witches," she announced.
"Please don't take me for a witch!" It was absurd, but really Hester
began to wonder where these misunderstandings would end. The look, too,
on the boy's face puzzled her.
"I always wondered," said Myra, unmoved, "if the new teacher would turn
out a witch. Witches always start by making themselves into young and
beautiful ladies; that's their trick. Whoever heard of a teacher being a
young and beautiful lady?"
"Well," answered Hester, between a sigh and a smile, "a compliment's a
compliment, however it comes. I am the witch, then; and who may you be?--
Hansel and Grethel, I suppose? I don't think, though, that Hansel really
believes me a witch, by the way he's looking at me."
"He isn't looking at you at all. Come away, Clem!" She led the boy away
by the hand, which he gave to her obediently, but left him when half-way
across the turf and came swiftly back. "He wasn't looking at you.
He's blind."
"Ah, poor child! I am sorry--please tell me your name, and believe that I
am sorry."
"If you were sorry, you'd go away, and not come teaching here."
Myra delivered this Parthian shaft over her shoulder as she walked off.
At the same moment Hester heard a door open in the room behind her, and
Parson Endicott came forth from the counting-house.
"Ah--er--Miss Marvin "--He paused with a lift of his eyebrows at the sight
of the rag doll in Hester's hand. She, on her part, felt a sudden
hysterical desire to laugh wildly.
"It--it isn't mine!" she managed to say in a faint voice and with a catch
in her throat.
"I had not supposed so," Parson Endicott answered gravely. "I came to
tell you, Miss Marvin, that Mr. Samuel Rosewarne and I have agreed to
recognise your claim. By so doing we shall be piously observing his
father's wishes, and--er--I anticipate no opposition from my
fellow-members on the Board. The school--you have already paid it a
visit, perhaps? No? It will, I venture to think, exceed your
expectations. The school is furnished and ready. I suggest--if the other
Managers consent--that we open it formally on Tuesday next, with a short
religious service, consecrating, so to speak, your future labours.
Yours is a wonderful sphere of usefulness, Miss Marvin; and may I say what
pleasure it gives me to learn that you are a Churchwoman. A regular
communicant, I hope?"
Hester was silent. She disliked this man, and saw no reason to be hurried
into making any confession to him.
"It is a point upon which I am accustomed to lay great stress. In these
days, with schismatics on all hands to contend against, it behoves all
members of the true Church to show a bold and united front." He leaned
his head on one side and looked at her interrogatively. "Do you play the
harmonium?" he asked.
But at this point Mr. Sam thrust his head out through the counting-house
doorway, and the parson coughed discreetly, as much as to say that the
answer might wait.
"Well, Miss Marvin," said Mr. Sam jocosely, "we've fixed it up for you
between us!"
Hester thanked them both briefly, and wished them good-day.
"She dresses respectably," said the parson, when the two were left alone.
"I detect a certain earnestness in her, though I cannot say as yet how far
it is based on genuine religious principles."
"She is more comely than I expected," said Mr. Sam.
At the ferry Hester found Nuncey awaiting her with a boat-load of the
Benny children.
"I reckoned you'd be here just-about-now," Nuncey hailed her.
"Come'st along for a bathe wi' the children! I've a-brought a bathin'
suit for 'ee."
"But I can't swim," Hester answered in alarm, and added, as she stepped
into the boat, "Nuncey, don't laugh at me, but until to-day I had never
seen the sea in my life."
Nuncey looked her up and down quizzically. "And I've never seen Lunnon!
Never mind, my dear; 'tisn' too late to begin. There's none of this crew
knows how to swim but me and Tenny here," she pointed out a boy of eleven
or twelve. "We'll just row out to harbour's mouth; there's a cove where
we can put the littlest ones to paddle. And after that I'll larn 'ee how
to strike out and use your legs, if you've a mind to. It'll do 'ee good
to kick a bit, I'll wage, after a dose of Mister Sam. Well, and how did
you like 'en?"
"I didn't like him at all." Hester almost broke down. "Please, Nuncey, be
good to me! It--it seems as everyone was banded against me to-day,
to think badly of me."
"Be good to 'ee? Why, to be sure I will! Sit 'ee down and unlace your
boots, while me and Tenny pulls. Care killed the cat--'cos why?
He wouldn't wash it off in salt water."
They rowed down past the quays and out beyond the ancient fort at the
harbour's mouth. On the opposite shore a reef of rock ran out, and on the
ridge stood a white wooden cross, "put up," so Nuncey informed her,
"because Pontius Pilate landed here one time." Beyond this ridge they
found a shingly beach secluded from the town, warmed by the full rays of
the westering sun. There they undressed, one and all, and for half an
hour were completely happy. To be sure, Hester's happiness contained a
fair admixture of fright when Nuncey took her hand and led her out till
the water rose more than waist-high about her.
"Now trust to me; lean forward, and see if you can't lift your feet off
the ground," said Nuncey, slipping a hand under her breast. Hester tried
her hardest to be brave, and although no swimming was accomplished that
day, the trial ended in peals of laughter. She splashed ashore at length,
gleeful, refreshed in body and mind, and resolved to make herself as good
a swimmer as Nuncey, who swam like a duck.
CHAPTER XII.
THE OPENING DAY.
It often happens, when a number of persons meet together for some purpose
in itself unselfish, that there prevails in the assembly a spirit of its
own, recognisably good, surprising even the pettiest with a sudden glow in
their hearts, and a sudden revelation that the world is a cheerfuller
place than in their daily lives they take it for. This cheerful
congregational spirit I take to flow from a far deeper source than the
emotion, for example, which a great preacher commands in his audience.
It may be--indeed, usually is--accompanied by very poor oratory.
The occasion may be trivial as you please; that it be unselfish will
suffice to unlock the goodness within men, who, if often worse than they
believe, and usually than they make believe, are always better than they
know.
This spirit prevailed at the school opening, and because of it Hester felt
happy and confident during the little function, and ever afterwards
remembered it with pleasure. For the moment Church and Dissent seemed to
forget their meannesses and jealousies. The morning sun shone without;
the breeze played through the open windows with a thousand hedgerow
scents; the two score of children ranged by their desks, fresh-faced and
in their cleanest clothes, suggested thoughts innocent and deep as the
gospel story; and if Parson Endicott was long-winded, and Mr. Sam spoke
tunelessly and accompanied his performance on the bones, so to speak--that
is, by pulling at his knuckles till the joints cracked--consolation soon
followed. For third and last came the turn of the Inspector, who had
halted on his progress through the county to attend a ceremony of the kind
in which he took delight. He had lately been transferred from the Charity
Commission to this new work, and it fell to him at a time when the selfish
ambitions die down, and in their place, if a man's heart be sound, there
springs up a fatherly tenderness for the young, with a passionate desire
to help them. Hester could not guess that this grave and courteous
gentleman, grey-haired, clean shaven, scholarly in his accent, neat even
to primness in his dress, spoke with a vision before him of an England to
be made happy by making its children happy, that the roots of the few
simple thoughts he uttered were watered by ideal springs--
"I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land."
Simple as the thoughts were, and directly spoken, the children gazed at
him with set faces, not appearing to kindle with any understanding; and
yet, after the manner of children, they were secreting a seed here and
there, to germinate in their dark little minds later on, as in due time
Hester discovered. She herself, seated at the harmonium, felt a lift of
the heart and mist gathering over her sight at the close of his quiet
peroration, and a tear fell as she stretched out her hands over the
opening chords of the 'Old Hundredth.' All sang it with a will, and
Parson Endicott with an unction he usually reserved for 'The Church's One
Foundation.'
With a brief prayer and the benediction the ceremony ended, and while the
elders filed out the Inspector walked over for a few words with Hester.
"Ever since I learnt your name, Miss Marvin--excuse me, it is not a common
one--I have been wanting to ask you a question. I used to have an old
friend--Jeremy Marvin--who lived at Warwick, and found for me some scores
of old books in his time. I was wondering--"
"He was my father, sir."
"Indeed? Then, please, you must let me shake hands with his daughter.
Yes, yes,"--with a glance down at her black skirt--"I heard of his death,
and with a real sense of bereavement."
"I have addressed and posted many a parcel to you, sir, in the days before
I left home to earn my living."
"And you weren't going to tell me that? You left me to find out--yes,
yes; 'formidable Inspector,' and that sort of thing, eh? I'm not an ogre,
though. Now this little discovery has just put the finishing touch to a
delightful morning!"
Hester, encouraged by his smile, laughed merrily, and so did he; less at
the spoken words than because of the good gladness brimming their hearts.
"But tell me," he went on, becoming serious again, "if a child, out of
shyness, hid from you a small secret of that sort, you would be sorry--eh?
And you would rightly be sorry, because by missing that little of his
entire trust you had by so much fallen short of being a perfect teacher."
"And two of these children," thought Hester, with a glance at Clem and
Myra, "solemnly believe I am a witch!"
As the Inspector went down the hill towards the ferry, he overtook another
and older acquaintance in an old college friend. This was Sir George
Dinham of Troy, who had attended the ceremony uninvited, and greatly to
the awe of everyone assembled--the Inspector and Hester alone excepted.
Indeed, his presence had bidden fair at the start to upset the
proceedings; for Parson Endicott and Mr. Sam had both approached him hat
in hand, and begged him, not without servility, to preside. This proposal
he had declined with his habitual shy, melancholy smile, and shrunk away
to a back row of the audience. In his great house over Troy he lived a
recluse: a scholar, a childless man, the last of his race, rarely seen by
the townsfolk, of whom two-thirds at least were his tenants. He had heard
of the Inspector's coming, and some ray of remembered affection had
enticed him forth from his shell, to listen. Now, at the sound of the
Inspector's footstep on the road behind him, he turned and waited, leaning
on his stick. The two men had not met since a Commemoration Ball when
young Dinham led his friend proudly up to a beautiful girl, his bride that
was to be. She died a bare six weeks later; and from that day her lover
had buried himself with his woe.
"George!"
"How d'ye do, Jack? I had to turn out to listen, you see--_ecce quam
sempiterna vox juventutis!_ You have improved on your old debating style,
having, as I gather, found belief."
The Inspector flushed. "Ah, you gathered that?"
"Yes, I haven't lost the knack of understanding those I once understood.
Not that it needed anything of the sort. Man, you were admirably
straight--and gentle, too--you that used to be intolerant. You mustn't
think, though, that I'm convinced; I can't afford to be."
"You mean--?"
"I mean that, if you are right, I ought to be a sun worshipper, and sit
daily at dawn on top of my tower yonder, warming my hands against the glow
of children's faces, trooping to school. Whereas the little beggars run
wild and rob my orchards, and I don't remember at this moment my parish
schoolmaster's name."
The Inspector bethought him of the broken bridge in his friend's life--the
bridge by which men cross over from self into love of a new generation--
and was silent.
"But look here," Sir George went on, "the fun was your preaching the
doctrine in that temple. You didn't know the man who built it. He died a
week or two ago; a man of character, I tell you, and a big fellow, too, in
his way."
"I have heard of this Rosewarne. All I know of him is that he's to be
thanked for the best-fitted school, for its size, in all Cornwall.
I'm not talking of expense merely; he used thought, down to the details.
When you begin to study these things, you recognise thought, down to the
raising or lowering of a desk, or the screws in a cupboard. You don't get
your fittings right by giving _carte blanche_ to a wholesale firm."
"Of course you don't. But what, think you, had the man in view? I tell
you, Jack, you are a fossil beside him. You talk of making good citizens,
quite in the old Hellenic style. Oh yes, I recognised the incurable
Aristotle in your exhortation, though you _did_ address it to two score of
rustic British children. But, my dear fellow, you are a philosopher in a
barbarian's court, and your barbarian has been reading his Darwin.
Where you see a troop of little angels--"
"_Non Angeli sed Angli_," the Inspector put in, with a smile.
"Where you behold a vision, then, of little English citizens growing up to
serve the State, he saw a horde of little struggle-for-lifers climbing on
each other's backs; and these fellows--that son of his, and the parson--
will follow his line by instinct. They don't reason; but Darwin and the
rest have flung them on the scent of selfishness, and they have a rare
nose for self. Struggle-for-life or struggle-for-creed, the scent is the
same, and they're hot upon it."
"Think of these last fifty years of noble reform. Is England going back
upon herself--upon the spirit, for instance, that raised Italy, freed the
slave, and cared for the factory child?"
"To be sure she will. She has found a creed to vindicate the human brute,
and the next generation--mark my words--will be predatory. Within twenty
years we shall be told that it is inevitable the weak should suffer to
enrich the strong; we shall accept the assurance, and our poets will hymn
it passionately."
"If that day should ever come, we can still die fighting it. But I trust
to Knowledge to do her own work. You remember that sentence in the
_Laws_, 'Many a victory has been and will be suicidal to the victors, but
education is never suicidal'? Nor will you persuade me easily that the
new mistress up yonder,"--the Inspector nodded back at the school
building--"is going to train her children to be little beasts of prey."
"The girl with the Madonna face? No; you're right there. But the
Managers will find a short way with her; she'll go."
"She turns out to be the daughter of an old friend of mine, Marvin of
Warwick, the second-hand bookseller."
"Marvin? Jeremiah Marvin? Why, I must have received his catalogues by
the score."
"Jeremy," his friend corrected him. "He was christened Jeremiah, to be
sure, and told me once it was the handiest name on earth, and could be
made to express anything, 'from the lugubrious, sir, to the rollicking.
In my young days, sir,'--for he had been a soldier in his time--'I was
Corporal Jerry. Corporal Jerry Marvin! How's that for a name? Jeremiah
I hold in reserve against the blows of destiny or promotion to a better
world. But Jeremy, sir, as I think you'll allow, is the only wear for a
second-hand bookseller.' A whimsical fellow!"
"He is dead, then?"
"Yes, he died a few weeks since; and poorly-off, I'm afraid. He had a
habit of reading the books he vended. Look here, George,"--the Inspector
halted in the middle of the roadway--"I want you to do me a favour, or
rather, to promise one."
"What is it?"
"I want you to promise that, if these fellows get rid of Miss Marvin, you
will see that she suffers no harsh treatment from them. I can find her
another post, no doubt; but there may be an interval in which you can
help."
"Very well," Sir George answered, after a pause. "I can manage that.
But they'll eject her, you may bet."
CHAPTER XIII.
TOM TREVARTHEN INTERVENES.
When the company had departed Hester arranged her small troop at their
desks--boys and girls and 'infants'--and made them a speech. It was a
very short speech, asking for their affection, and somehow she found
herself addressing it to Myra, whose dark eyes rested on her with a stare
of unyielding suspicion. On hearing that the two children were to attend
the Board School, Aunt Purchase had broken out into vehement protest, the
exact purport of which Myra did not comprehend. But she gathered that a
wrong of some kind was being done to her and (this was more important) to
Clem, and she connected it with the loss of their liberty. Until this
moment she had known no schooling. Her grandmother in stray hours had
taught her the alphabet and some simple reading, and the rest of her
knowledge she had picked up for herself. She well remembered the last of
these stray hours. It fell on a midsummer evening, three years before,
when she and Clem--then a child of four--had spent a long day riding to
and fro in the hay waggons. Now Mrs. Rosewarne for the last few years of
her life, and indeed ever since Myra could remember, had been a cripple,
confined to the house or to her small garden, save only when she entered
an ancient covered vehicle (called 'the Car') and was jogged into Liskeard
to visit her dressmaker, or over to Damelioc to attend one of Lady
Killiow's famous rose fetes. It was the hour of sunset, then, and in the
shadow of the hedge old Pleasant, the waggon-horse, having Clem on his
back, stood tethered, released from his work, contentedly cropping the
rank grass between the clusters of meadow-sweet, and whisking his tail to
brush off the flies. The horse-flies had been pestilent all day, and
Myra was weaving a frontlet of green hazel twigs to slip under Pleasant's
headstall, when she happened to turn and caught sight of her grandmother
standing by the upper gate, leaning on her ivory-headed staff, and shading
her eyes against the level sun. No one ever knew how the old lady had
found strength to walk the distance from the house--for walked it she had.
It may have been that some sudden fright impelled her; some unreasoning
panic for the children's safety. Old Rosewarne, seated on horseback and
watching the rick-makers in the far corner, caught sight of her, cantered
across to the gate, dismounted there, and led her home on his arm; and the
children had followed. So far as Myra could remember, nothing came of
this apparition--nothing except that she found herself, a little later,
seated in her grandmother's dressing-room and reading aloud; and this must
have happened soon after they reached home, for while she read she heard
the fowls settling themselves to roost in the hen-house beneath the open
window. Three weeks later Mrs. Rosewarne was dead--had faded out like a
shadow; and since then the children had run wild, no one constraining them
to tasks.
She sat with eyes fixed sullenly on Hester, and fingers ready at any
moment to make the sign of the cross. To the other children she paid no
heed; they were merely so many victims entrapped, ready to be changed into
birds and put into cages, as in _Jorinda and Jorindel_. "Why was this
woman separating the girls from the boys? She should not take away Clem.
Let her try!" Hester had too much tact. Having marshalled the others,
she set a pen and copy-book before Myra, and bending over Clem, asked him
in the gentlest voice to sit and wait; she would come back to him in a
moment (she promised) and with a pretty game for him to play.
"Don't you listen to a single word she says," Myra whispered; but Clem had
already taken his seat.
Hester had sent for a book of letters in raised type for the blind boy.
Before setting him down to this, however, she wished to try the suppleness
and accuracy of his touch with some simple reed-plaiting.
The reeds lay within the cupboard across the room. She went to fetch
them, and at this moment the schoolroom door opened behind her.
She heard the lift of the latch, and turned with a smile. But the smile
faded almost at once as she recognised her visitor. It was Tom
Trevarthen, and he entered with a grin and a defiant, jaunty swagger which
did not at all become him.
In an instant she scented danger, and felt her cheeks paling; but she
lifted her head none the less, looking him straight in the eyes.
"I beg your pardon. Are you in search of someone?"
"Seems I'm too late for the speechifying," said the young sailor, avoiding
her gaze, and winking at two or three elder boys on the back benches.
"Well, never mind; must do a little speechifyin' of my own, I suppose.
By your leave, miss," he added, seating himself on the end of a form and
fanning himself with his seaman's cap, which he had duly doffed on
entering.
"I think," said Hester quietly, and prayed that he might not hear the
tremble in her voice, "I think you have come on purpose to annoy, and that
you do not like the business."
"It's this way, miss. I've no grudge at all against _you_, except to
wonder how such a gentle-spoken young lady can have the heart to come here
ruinin' an old 'ooman that never done you a ha'p'orth of harm in her
life." He was looking at her firmly now, with a rising colour in his tan
cheeks, and Hester's heart sank as she noted his growing confidence.
"But I've told 'ee that a'ready," he said, and turned to the boys again.
"What I wonder at more is _you_, Billy Sweet--an' _you_, Dave Polseath--
an' _you_, Rekkub Johns--that'll be growin' up for men in a year or two.
Seems to me there's some spirit gone out o' this here parish since I used
to be larrupped for minchin'. Seems to me a passel o' boys in my day
would have had summat to say afore they sat here quiet, helpin' to steal
the bread out of an old 'ooman's mouth, an' runnin' to heel for a
furriner."
The boys glanced at one another and grinned, then at the intruder, lastly
at Hester. Her look held them, and some habit of discipline learnt from
the old woman they were being invited to champion. One or two began
shuffling in their seats.
But it was Myra who led the rebellion. She stepped to Tom's side at once,
and cried she, pointing a finger at Hester, "She's a witch! Look at
her--she's a witch! I know now why Aunt Hannah called it a burning shame.
She's robbing Mother Butson, and she's a witch and ought to be burnt.
Come along, Clem!"
Hester, turning from the child between pain and disgust, intent only on
holding the bigger boys in check while she could, did not note that Clem
made no movement to obey his sister.
"Well done, Miss Myra!--though you needn't talk vindictive. There's no
need to harm _her_. Now look here, boys! Mother Butson gives you a
holiday, and sent me up with the message. What do 'ee say to it?"
"Stop!" Hester lifted a hand against the now certain mutiny. "Your name
is Trevarthen, I believe?"
"Tom Trevarthen, miss."
"Then, Tom Trevarthen, you are a poor coward. Now do your worst and go
your way. You have heard the truth."
"'Tidn' best a man said that to me," answered Tom, with a lowering brow.
"A man?" she replied, with a short laugh of contempt which in her own ears
sounded like a sob. "There were men here just now; but you waited till
they were gone!"
"No, miss; I did not, you'll excuse me. I only knew the school was to
open to-day. I came ashore half an hour ago, and walked up here across
the fields." He stood for a second or two meditatively twisting his round
cap between his hands. "We'll play fair, though," he said, and faced
round on the benches. "Sorry to disappoint 'ee, boys, but you must do
without your holiday, after all. This here is a man's job, as Miss Marvin
says, and 'tis for men to settle it. Only,"--he turned upon Hester again--
"you must name your man quick. My ship sails early in the week; let alone
that there's cruel wrong being done, and the sooner 'tis righted the
better."
Hester's hand went up to her throat. Was this extraordinary youth
actually proposing a wager of battle? His eyes rested on hers seriously;
his demeanour had become entirely courteous.
"Ah," she gasped, "but cannot you see that the mischief is done!
You behave shamefully, and now you talk childishly. You have made these
children disloyal, and what hold can I have on them except through their
loyalty? You have thrown me back at the start--I cannot bear to think how
far--and you talk as if some foolish violence could mend this for me!
Please--please go away! I have no patience to argue with you."
"Yes, go away!" broke in a shrill treble voice. It was Clem's. The child
had risen from his bench and stood up, gripping the desk in front and
trembling.
"Clem dear, you don't understand--" began Myra.
"Yes, I do understand!" For the first time in his life his will clashed
with hers. "Tom Trevarthen is wrong, and ought to go away."
"She's a nasty, deceitful witch!"
"She's not a witch!" The child's eyes turned towards Hester, as if
seeking to behold her and be assured. "You're not a witch, are you?" he
asked; and at the question Hester's tears, so long held back, brimmed
over.
Before she could answer him the door opened, and Mr. Sam stood in the
entry with Mrs. Purchase close behind his shoulder, in a sky-blue and
orange bonnet.
"Eh? Hullo! what's all this?" demanded Mr. Sam, staring around the
schoolroom; and Mrs. Purchase, bustling in and mopping her face, paused
too to stare.
For a moment no one spoke. Mr. Sam's eyes passed over Tom Trevarthen in
slow, indignant wonder, and rested on Hester's flushed cheeks and
tear-reddened lids.
"Why, whatever on earth is Tom Trevarthen doin' here?" cried Mrs.
Purchase.
"I've a-come here, ma'am," spoke up Tom, kindling, "to say a word against
a cruel shame; for shame it is, to take the food away from a poor old
'ooman's mouth!"
"Meanin' Mother Butson?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"An' your way to set things right is to come here and browbeat a poor girl
before the children till her eyes be pink as garden daisies! Go'st 'way
home, thou sorry fool! I'm ashamed of 'ee!"
"As for that, ma'am, I did wrong," Tom admitted sullenly, "and I beg her
pardon for't. But it don't alter the hurt to Mother Butson."
"You're mistaken, my friend," broke in Mr. Sam, in his rasping voice.
"To be sure you haven't closed Mother Butson's school for her, because
'tis closed already. Twopence a week is the lowest she could ever charge,
to earn a living, and I leave to judge how many sensible folks will be
paying twopence a week for her ignorance when they can get sound teaching
up here for a penny. But a worse thing you've done for her. She lodges
with your mother, I believe? Very well; you can go home and tell your
mother to get rid of her lodger. Eh, what are you staring at?"
The young man had fallen back, and stared from face to face, incredulous.
There was a bewildered horror in his eyes, and it cut Hester to the heart.
Her own eyes sank as he challenged them.
"No, Sam--no!" Mrs. Purchase interposed. "Don't 'ee go to punish the lad
that way. He've made a mistake; but he's a well-meanin' lad for all, and
I'll wage he'll tell you he's sorry."
"Well-meaning, is it, to come here bullying a young lady? Sorry, is he? I
promise he'll be sorrier before I've done. Answer me, sir. Did Mrs.
Butson know of your visit here to-day?"
"I told her I was coming," Tom answered dully.
"That settles it. Heaven is my witness," said Mr. Sam, with sudden
unction, "I was willing to let the old woman wind up her affairs in peace.
But mutiny I don't stand, nor molesting. You go home, sir, to your
mother, and tell her my words. I give her till Saturday--"
The words ended in a squeal as Tom, with a sharp intake of breath like a
sob, sprang and gripped him by the throat, bearing him back and
overturning Hester's desk with a crash. One or two of the girls began to
scream. The boys scrambled on top of their forms, craning, round-eyed
with excitement. The little ones stood up with white faces, shrinking
with terror, as Hester ran and placed herself between them and the
struggle.
"You cur! You miserable--dirty--cur!" panted Tom, shaking Mr. Sam to and
fro. "Leave me alone, missus!"--for Mrs. Purchase was attempting to
clutch him by the collar. "Leave me deal with him, I tell you!
Stand clear, there!"
With a sharp thrust he loosened his hold, and Mr. Sam went flying
backwards, missed his footing, and fell, his head striking the corner of a
form with a thud.
"Get up! Up on your legs, and have it out like a man!"
But Mr. Sam lay where he had fallen in a heap, with the blood oozing from
an ugly cut across the left temple.
"Get up?" vociferated Mrs. Purchase. "Lucky for you if he ever gets up!
You've gone nigh to killing 'en, mean it or no. Out of my sight, you
hot-headed young fool! Be off to the ship, pack up your kit, and run.
'Tis a jailin' matter, this; and now you've done for yourself as well as
your mother."
For a moment the young man stared at her, not seeming to comprehend.
"Eh, missus?" he muttered. "Be you agen' me too?"
Mrs. Purchase positively laughed, and a weird cackling sound it made in
Hester's ears as she bent to support one of the smaller girls, who had
fainted. "Agen' you? Take an' look around on your mornin's work!
You've struck down my brother's son, Tom Trevarthen--isn't that enough?
Go an' pack your kit; I'll have no jail-birds aboard my ship."
He turned and went. On the way his foot encountered Mr. Sam's tall silk
hat, and he kicked it viciously through the doorway before him.
"Tom!"
Until the call had been repeated twice behind him Tom Trevarthen did not
hear. When, after a stupid stare at his hands (as though there had been
blood on his knuckles), he turned to the voice, he saw Myra speeding
bareheaded to overtake him. She beckoned him to stop.
"What will you do, Tom?" she panted, as he waited for her to come up.
"Me, missy? Well, I hadn't given it a thought; but now you mention it, I
s'pose I'd better cut. 'Tis a police job, most like, as your aunt said.
But never you mind for me."
The name of the police sounded terribly in Myra's ears.
"The _Good Intent_ will be sailing to-night; I heard Peter Benny say so,"
she suggested; "and the _Mary Rowett_ to-morrow, if the weather holds."
Tom Trevarthen nodded. "That's so, missy. Old man Hancock of the
_Good Intent_ wants a hand, to my knowledge. I'll try 'en, or else walk
to Falmouth. Don't you fret for me," he repeated.
They had reached the gate of Hall, over which a gigantic chestnut spread
its branches. As Myra faced Tom Trevarthen a laugh sounded overhead; and,
looking up, she saw Master Calvin's legs and elastic-sided boots depending
from a green bough.
"Hullo, Myra!" Master Calvin called down. "How d'you get on up at the
Board School?"
"_He_ don't go to Board School," said Tom Trevarthen, jerking his thumb up
towards the bough. "In training to be a gentleman, _he_ is; not like
Master Clem. Well, good-bye, missy!"
Myra watched him down the road, and, as he disappeared at the bend, flung
a glance up at the chestnut tree.
"Come down," she commanded, in no loud voice, but firmly.
"Shan't."
"What are you doing up there?" She sniffed the air, her sense of smell
alive to a strange scent in it. "You nasty, horrid boy, you're smoking!"
"I'm not," answered Master Calvin untruthfully, concealing a pipe.
"I'm up here pretending to be Zacchaeus."
Myra without more ado pushed open the gate and went up the path to the
house. In less than two minutes she was back again.
"Come down."
"Shan't."
"Very well. I'm going to Zacchaeus you."
"What's that in your hand?"
"It's grandfather's powder-flask; and I've a box of matches, too."
CHAPTER XIV.
MR. SAM IS MAGNANIMOUS.
Hester's cupboard contained a small case of plasters, lint, ointments,
etc., for childish cuts and bruises. She despatched a couple of boys to
the playground pump to fetch water, and then glanced at Mrs. Purchase
interrogatively.
"Better send for a doctor, I suppose?" said Mrs. Purchase.
"I think, if we bathe the wound, we can tell better what's necessary.
Will _you_--?"
"I reckon the job's more in your line. You've the look o' one able to
nurse--yes, and you've the trick of it, I see," Mrs. Purchase went on, as
Hester knelt, lifted the sufferer's head, and motioned to the boys to set
down their basin of water beside her. "I'll clear the children out to the
playground and keep 'em quiet. Call, if you want anything; I'll be close
outside." The good lady shepherded them forth with brisk authority;
not for nothing had she commanded a ship these thirty years.
"But, Lord!" she muttered, "to think of me playing schoolmistress!
What'll I do, I wonder, if these varmints of boys break ship and run
home?"
She might have spared herself this anxiety. The children were all agog to
see the drama out. Would Mr. Samuel recover? And, if not, what would be
done to Tom Trevarthen? They discussed this in eager groups. If any of
them had an impulse to run downhill and cry the news through the village,
Mrs. Purchase's determined slamming and bolting of the playground gate
restrained it--that, and perhaps a thought that by running with the news
they would start the hue-and-cry after Tom.
Hester, having sponged away the blood, found that the cut on Mr. Sam's
temple was nothing to need a doctor, but could be set right by cleansing
and a few strips of plaster. Doubtless the fall had stunned him, and
doubtless he must be in some pain. Yet when at length he groaned and
opened his eyes she could not repress a suspicion (although she hated
herself for it) that in some degree he had been shamming.
"Do not move, please," she commanded gently, snipping at the plaster with
her scissors. "A couple of strips more, then a bandage, and you will soon
be feeling better."
His eyes rolled and fixed themselves on her. "A ministering angel," he
muttered. She caught the words, and turned her head aside with a flush of
annoyance.
"You have an ugly bruise," she told him sharply. "I am going to put a
cool compress on it. You had better close your eyes, or some of the water
will be trickling into them."
He closed them obediently, but asked, "He has gone?"
"Yes."
"Then _you_ are safe at least, thank God!"
Yes, he had taken his hurt in protecting her; and yet something in his
tone caused her to glance, and as if for protection, to the doorway.
"You are comely," he went on slowly, opening his eyes again, and again
rolling that embarrassing gaze upon her. "Your fingers, too, have the
gift of healing."
She could not tell him with what repugnance she brought them to touch him.
Having fastened the bandage firmly, she turned again to the doorway to
summon Mrs. Purchase, but checked herself.
"I want to ask you a favour," she began in a hesitating voice.
"You may ask it confidently."
"I want you to forgive--no, not forgive; that is the wrong word--to be
generous, and not to punish."
Mr. Samuel blinked. "Let him off?" he asked. "Why? What's your
motive?"
"I don't know that there's any motive." She met his eyes frankly enough,
but with a musing air as if considering a new suggestion. "No; it's just
a wish, no more. An hour ago it seemed to me that everyone was eager and
happy; that there would always be pleasure in looking back upon our
opening day." Her voice trembled a little. "Now this has happened, to
spoil all; and yet something may be saved if we bear no malice, but take
up the work again, and show that we waste no time or thought on
punishment, being determined only to win."
"You are asking a great deal of me," he answered. Nevertheless he had
instantly resolved to grant her wish, and for many reasons. "I suppose
you know the matter is serious enough for a warrant? Still, if I shall
oblige you by declining to prosecute--"
"But please don't put it in that way!" she interrupted.
"I really don't see how else to put it." He paused, as if requiring her
to suggest a better. "The point is, you want me to let the fellow off--
eh? Well then, I will."
"Thank you," said Hester, with a sigh.
Mr. Sam smiled. After being shaken like a rat, a man needs to retrieve
his self-respect, and he was retrieving his famously. He could see
himself in a magnanimous light: he had laid the girl under an obligation;
he had avoided public action which would, to be sure, have given him
revenge, but at much cost of dignity; and, for the rest, he had still
plenty of ways to get even with Master Tom Trevarthen.
Hester had a mind to tell him that he misconstrued her; that merely to
abstain from pursuing the lad with warrant or summons neither fulfilled
her request nor touched the kernel of it. But while she cast about for
words Mrs. Purchase thrust a cheerful head in at the doorway.
"Hullo, that's famous!" she exclaimed at sight of the bandaging.
"You're a clever woman, my dear; and now I'll ask you to bring your
cleverness outside here and take these children off my hands.
W'st, you little numskulls!"--she turned and addressed them--"keep quiet,
I say, with your mountains out of molehills! There's no one killed nor
hurt; only a foolish lad lost his temper, and he'll smart for it, and I
hope it'll be a warning to you." She poked her head in through the
doorway again. "Come along, Sam, and show yourself. And as for you, my
dear," she went on hurriedly, lowering her voice, "better get 'em back to
their work as if nought had happened. I'll bide a while with you till you
have 'em in hand again."
"Thank you," said Hester; "but that wouldn't help me in the long-run.
I must manage them alone."
"You mean that?"
"Yes; but I thank you none the less."
"And you're right. You're a plucky woman." She turned to Mr. Sam
briskly. "Well, take my arm and put on as light a face as you can.
Here's your hat--I've smoothed out the worst of the dents. Eh? Bain't
goin' to make a speech, surely!"
Mr. Sam, leaning slightly on his aunt's arm, pulled himself up on the
threshold and surveyed the children's wondering faces.
"Boys and girls," he said, "our opening day has been spoilt by a scene on
which I won't dwell, because I desire you not to dwell on it. If you
treat it lightly, as I intend to do, bearing no malice, we shall show the
world all the more clearly that we are in earnest about things which
really matter."
He cleared his throat and looked around with a challenging smile at
Hester, who watched him, wondering to hear her own words so cleverly
repeated.
"We wish," he proceeded, "to remember our opening day as a pleasant one.
Miss Marvin especially wishes to look back on it with pleasure; and I
think we all ought to help her. Now if I say no more about this foolish
young man--whom I could punish very severely--will you promise me to go
back to your books? To-day, as you know, is a half-holiday; but there
remains an hour for work before you disperse. I want your word that you
will employ it well, and honestly try to do all that Miss Marvin tells
you."
He paused again, and chose to take a slight murmur among the children for
their assent.
"I thank you. There is an old saying that he who conquers himself
performs a greater feat than he who takes a city. Some of us, Miss
Marvin, may hereafter associate the lesson with this our opening day."
He seemed to await some reply to this; but Hester could not speak, even to
thank him. Her spirit recoiled from him; she could not reconcile egoism
so inordinate with such cleverness in turning it to account. She watched
him with a certain fascination, as one watches some trained monster in a
show displaying its deformity for public applause. He shook hands with
her and made his exit, not without dignity, leaning on Mrs. Purchase's arm
and turning at the playground gate to wave farewell.
It is doubtful if the children understood his speech. But they were awed.
At the word of command they trooped into school, settled themselves at
their desks, and took up their interrupted lessons with a docility at
which Hester wondered, since for the moment she herself had lost all power
to interest or amuse them.
For her that was a dreadful hour. A couple of humble-bees zoomed against
the window pane, and the sound, with the ticking of the schoolroom clock,
took possession of her brain. Z-zoom! Tick-tack, tick-tack!
Would lesson-time never come to an end? She went about automatically
correcting sums, copies, exercises, because the sight of the pencilled
words or figures steadied her faculties, whereas she felt that if she
called the children up in class her wits would wander and all answers come
alike to her, right or wrong. Her will, too, had fallen into a strange
drowsiness. She wanted the window open, to get rid of the humble-bees;
a word to one of the elder boys and it would be done. Yet the minutes
passed and the word remained unspoken. So a sick man will lie and debate
with himself so small a thing as the lifting of a hand.
At length the clock hands pointed to five minutes to noon. She ordered
books to be shut and slates to be put away; and going to the harmonium,
gave out the hymn, "Lord, dismiss us with Thy blessing." The Managers had
agreed upon this hymn; the Nonconformist majority insisting, however, that
the concluding 'Amen' should be omitted. Omitted accordingly it was on
the slips of paper printed for school use.
"Lord, dismiss us with Thy blessing,
Thanks for mercies past receive;
Pardon all their faults confessing;
Time that's lost may all retrieve;
May Thy children
Ne'er again Thy Spirit grieve."
The children, released from the dull strain of watching the clock, sang
with spirit. Hester played on, inattentive to the words. At the end,
without considering what she did, she pressed down the chords of the
'Amen,' and the singers joined in, all unaware of transgressing.
In the silence that followed she suddenly remembered her instructions to
omit the word, and sat for a moment flushed and confused. But the deed
was done. The children stood shuffling their feet, awaiting the signal of
dismissal.
"You may go," she said. "We will do better to-morrow."
When their voices had died away down the road she closed the harmonium
softly, and fell to walking to and fro, musing, tidying up the schoolroom
by fits and starts. She wanted to sit down and have a good cry; but
always as the tears came near to flowing she fell to work afresh and
checked them. Not until the room looked neat again did she remember that
she was hungry. Nuncey had cooked a pasty for her, and she fetched it
from the cupboard, where it lay in a basket covered by a spotless white
cloth. As she did so, her eyes fell on a damp spot on the floor, where,
after bandaging Mr. Sam, she had carefully washed out the stain of his
blood.
She looked at her hands. They were clean; and yet having set down the
basket on the desk, and turned her stool so that she might not see the
spot on the floor, she continued to stare at them, and from them to the
white cloth. A while she stood thus, irresolute, still listening to the
bees zooming against the pane. Then with a sudden effort of will she
walked out and across the yard, to the pump in the far corner.
She was stooping to raise the pump handle, but straightened herself up
again at the sound--as it seemed to her--of a muffled sob.
She looked behind her and around. The playground was empty, the air
across its gravelled surface quivering under the noonday heat.
She listened.
Two long minutes passed before the sound was repeated; and this time she
knew it for the sob of a child. It came from behind an angle of the
building which hid a strip of the playground from view. She ran thither
at once, and as she turned the corner her eyes fell on little Clem.
She had missed him from his place when the children returned to the
schoolroom. His sister, she supposed, had taken him home.
He stood sentry now in the shade under the north wall of the building.
He stood there so resolutely that, for the instant, Hester could scarcely
believe the sobs had come from him. But he had heard her coming; and the
face he turned to her, though tearless, was woefully twisted and
twitching.
"My poor child!"
He stretched out both hands.
"Where is Myra? I want Myra, please!"
CHAPTER XV.
MYRA IN DISGRACE.
Myra was in her bedroom, under lock and key; and this is how it had
happened.
"What put it into your head to make that speech?" asked Mrs. Purchase, as
she and Mr. Sam wended their way back to Hall. In form the question was
addressed to her nephew; in tone, to herself.
Mr. Sam paused as if for breath, and plucking down a wisp of honeysuckle
from the hedgerow, sniffed at it to gain time.
"I don't like talking about such things," he answered; "but it came into
my head to do my Master's bidding: 'Bless them that curse you, do good to
them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you.'"
"Fiddlestick-end!" said Mrs. Purchase.
"I assure you--"
"If you don't mean to get upsides with Tom Trevarthen, I'm a Dutchman.
'Forgive your enemies' may be gospel teaching, but I never knew a
Rosewarne to practise it. You're a clever fellow, nephew Sam, and that
speech saved your face, as the Yankees say; but somehow I've a notion its
cleverness didn't end there. I saw the schoolmistress watching you--did
she put you up to it?"
"I don't mind telling you that she had interceded with me."
"I like the cut of that girl's jib," Mrs. Purchase announced after a
pause. "She's good-looking, and she has pluck. But I don't take back
what I said, that it's a wrong you're doing to Clem and Myra, putting them
to school with all the riff-raff of the parish."
"That's the kind of objection one learns to expect from a Radical," her
nephew answered drily.
"'Tis a queer thing, now," she mused, "that ever since I married 'Siah the
family will have me to be a Radical; and 'tis the queerer, because ne'er
one of 'ee knows what a Radical is or ought to be. S'pose I do hold that
all mankind and all womankind has equal rights under the Lord--that don't
mean they're all alike, do it? or that I can't tell a man from a woman, or
my lord from a scavenger? D'ee reckon that we'm all-fellows-to-football
aboard the _Virtuous Lady_, and the fo'c'sle hands mess aft?"
"They would if you were consistent," answered Mr. Sam, with positiveness.
She sighed impatiently. "There's times you make me long to wring your
stiff neck. But I'll take your own consistency, as you call it.
I don't notice you send that precious boy o' yourn to the Board School;
and yet if 'tis good enough for Clem and Myra, 'tis good enough for any
Rosewarne."
"Calvin has received a superior education. Yet I don't mind telling you
that, if I find Miss Marvin competent, I propose asking her to teach him
privately."
"O--oh!" Mrs. Purchase pursed up her lips and eyed him askance.
"Such a nice-looking girl, too!"
Mr. Sam flushed beneath his sallow skin. He was about to command her
angrily to mind her own business, when the air between the hedgerows, and
even the road beneath his feet, shook with a dull and distant detonation.
"Sakes alive!" cried Mrs. Purchase. "Don't tell me that's the
powder-ship, up the river!"
"It didn't come up from the river--it came from Hall!" He gripped her arm
with sudden excitement; then, as she began to protest, "Don't talk, woman,
but help me along! It came from Hall, I tell you!"
Master Calvin defied Myra bravely enough while she threatened, and even
while she piled a little heap of gunpowder under the sycamore and
ostentatiously sprinkled a train of it across the roadway. He supposed
that she intended only to frighten him.
Nor would any mischief have happened had he kept his perch. The heap of
gunpowder was too small to do serious damage--though he may well be
excused for misdoubting this. But when Myra struck a match and challenged
him for the last time, he called to her not to play the fool, and began to
scramble down for dear life. In truth, for two or three minutes he had
been feeling strangely giddy, and to make matters worse, was suddenly
conscious of a horrible burning pain in his side.
So intolerable was the pain, that he clutched at it with one hand; and
missing his hold with the other, slipped and hung dangling over the
powder, supported only by the bough under the crook of his armpit.
At that instant, while he struggled to recover his balance, Myra was
horrified to see smoke curling about his jacket; a fiery shred of tobacco
and jacket-lining dropped from his plucking fingers. She had flung away
her match and was running forward--the burning stuff fell so slowly, there
was almost time to catch it--when the ground at her feet leapt up with a
flame and a bang, and Master Calvin thudded down upon the explosion.
She ran to him. He was not dead, for at once he began screaming at the
pitch of his voice; but his features were black, his smallclothes torn,
and his legs writhed in a terrifying way. His screams sank to groans as
she beat out the smouldering fire in his jacket-lining; and for a while
she could get no other answer from him. By and by she lost patience, and
shook him by the shoulder.
"Oh, get Up for goodness' sake! I believe you're more frightened than
hurt; but if you're really hurt, sit up and tell me what's the matter."
"Let me alone," groaned Calvin. "I want to die."
"Fiddlesticks--'want to die'! Come along to the pump and wash yourself."
"You're a wicked girl! You tried to kill me!"
"I didn't. I wanted to frighten you, and--and I'm sorry; but you fired
the powder yourself with your nasty pipe, and you've burnt a hole in your
pocket. You'd best come along and get washed and changed before your
father catches you. It looks to me you've lost one of your eyebrows, but
the other one's so pale I daresay 'twon't be noticed. Or I might give you
a pair with a piece of burnt cork."
It was while she stood considering this that Mr. Sam and her aunt made
their appearance round the corner of the road.
"Whatever in the round world have you children been doin'?" panted Mrs.
Purchase, and wound up with a gasp at sight of Calvin's face.
"I believe I'm going to die!" The boy began to writhe again.
"What has happened?" his father demanded, with a shake in the voice,
stooping to lift him.
"She--she tried to kill me!" Calvin pointed at her with vindictive finger,
and at once clasped both hands over his stomach.
"I did not," retorted Myra.
"Ask her who brought the powder and laid a train right under me! Ask her
what she's doing with that box of matches!"
"Is that true?" Mr. Sam demanded again, straightening himself up and
fixing a terrible stare on Myra.
The girl's face hardened. "Yes, I brought the powder." She pointed to
the flask lying in the roadway.
"You dare to tell me that you did this deliberately?"
"I never did it at all."
"Yes, she did!" almost screamed the boy. "She put the powder here; she
owns up to it."
Myra shrugged her shoulders and turned away. "Very well; he's telling a
nasty fib, but you can believe him if you like."
"Stop a minute, miss." Mr. Sam strode across to her. "You don't get off
in that fashion, I promise you!"
She looked up at him sidewise, under lowered brows. "Are you going to
beat me?" she asked quietly.
The question took Mr. Sam aback. "You deserve a whipping if ever a girl
did," he answered, after a second or two. "First, it seems, you almost
succeed in killing your cousin, and then you tell a falsehood about it."
"I have told you the truth. I put the powder there. As for meaning to
kill him, that's nonsense, and he knows it. I didn't even mean to hurt
him, though he deserves it."
"Deserves it!" echoed Mr. Sam.
"Yes, for robbing Clem."
"Sam--Sam!" Mrs. Purchase thrust herself between them. "What's the
matter? Don't go for to hurt the child!"
"What--what does she mean, then?" He had stretched out a hand to grip
Myra by the shoulder, but fell back with a yellow face.
"Tom Trevarthen told me." Myra pointed from father to son. "He says
you're no better than a pair of robbers."
"Myra," said her aunt quietly, "go to your room at once. On your own
confession you have done wickedly, and must be punished."
"Very well, Aunt Hannah."
"I must attend to Calvin first; but I will come to you by and by.
Until then you are not to leave your room. Do you understand?"
"Yes, Aunt Hannah."
She turned and walked towards the house.
"And now," said Mrs. Purchase, after a glance at Mr. Sam's face,
"let's see what bones are broken."
She bent over Calvin, but looked up almost immediately, as Mr. Sam uttered
a sharp exclamation.
"What's this?" he asked, stooping to pick up a briar pipe.
Master Calvin blinked, and turned his head aside from Mrs. Purchase's
curious gaze.
"I think it belongs to Tom Trevarthen," he mumbled.
"How on the airth did Tom Trevarthen come to drop a pipe here, and walk
off 'ithout troubling to pick it up? If 'twas a hairpin, now," said Mrs.
Purchase, not very lucidly, "one could understand it."
"I--I'm going to be ill," wailed the wretched Calvin, with a spasmodic
heave of the shoulders.
"Well," his aunt commented grimly after a moment, "you told the truth that
time, anyway."
Having conveyed him to the house and put him, with Susannah's help, to
bed, Aunt Hannah went off to Myra's room, but descended after a few
minutes in search of Mr. Sam, whom she found pacing the garden walk.
"Well?" he asked.
"I've told her the punishment--bread and water, and to keep her room all
day. She says nothing against it, and I think she's sorry about the
powder; but I can get no sense into her until her mind's set at rest about
Clem."
"What about him?"
"Why, the poor child's left behind at the school."
"Is that all? Miss Marvin will bring him home, no doubt."
"So I told her. But it seems she don't trust Miss Marvin--hates her, in
fact."
"The child must be crazed."
"Couldn't you send Peter Benny?"
"Oh, certainly, if you wish it." Mr. Sam went indoors to the
counting-house, where Mr. Benny jumped up from his desk in alarm at sight
of the bandages.
"Mercy on us, sir--you have met with an accident?"
"A trifle. Are you busy just now?"
Mr. Benny blushed. "I might answer in your words sir--a trifle.
Indeed, I hope, sir, you will not think it a liberty; but the late Mr.
Rosewarne used very kindly to allow it when no business happened to be
doing."
His employer stared at him blankly.
"On birthdays and such occasions," pursued Mr. Benny. "And by the way,
sir, might I ask you to favour me with the date of your birthday?
Your dear father's was the 28th of May." Mr. Sam's stare lost its
blankness, and became one of sharp suspicion.
"What have you to do with my birthday, pray?"
"Nothing, sir--nothing, unless it pleases you. Some of our best and
greatest men, sir, as I am well aware--the late Duke of Wellington, for
instance--have had a distaste for poetry; not that my verses deserve any
such name."
"Oh!" said Mr. Sam, his brow clearing, "you were talking of verses?
I've no objection, so long as you don't ask me to read them." He paused,
as Mr. Benny's face lengthened dejectedly. "I mean no reflection on
yours, Benny."
"I thank you, sir."
"Shakespeare--and I am told you can't get better poetry than
Shakespeare's--doesn't please me at all. I tried him once, on a friend's
recommendation, and came on a passage which I don't hesitate to call
lascivious. I told my friend so, and advised him to be more careful in
the reading he recommended. He was a minister of the gospel, too.
I destroyed the book: one can't be too careful, with children about the
house."
"I assure you, sir--"
"I don't suggest for a moment that you would be guilty of any such
expressions as Shakespeare uses. We live in a different age.
Still, poetry, as such, gives me no pleasure. I believe very firmly,
Benny--as you may have gathered--in another world, and that we shall be
held strictly to account there for all we do or say in this one."
"Yes, sir."
"If you will wait a moment, I have a note to write. You will deliver it,
please, to Mrs. Trevarthen on your way home. But first I wish you to walk
up to the school and fetch Master Clem."
Mr. Benny, absorbed in poetical composition, had either failed to hear the
explosion at the gate, or had heard and paid no heed to it. He wondered
why Master Clem should need to be fetched from school.
"And Miss Myra?" he suggested.
"Miss Myra has been sent to her room in disgrace," said Mr. Sam.
Mr. Benny asked no further questions, but pocketed the letter which Mr.
Sam indited, and fetched his hat. As it happened, however, at the gate he
met Hester leading Clem by the hand; and receiving the child from her,
handed him over to Susannah.
"You are going home?" he asked, as he rejoined Hester at the gate.
They were already warm friends.
"I am on my way. And you?"
"We'll cross the ferry together, if you'll wait a moment while I deliver a
note at Mrs. Trevarthen's."
Mrs. Trevarthen was at her door. She took the note, and, before opening
it, looked at Hester curiously.
"You know what's inside of it, I reckon?" she said, turning to Mr. Benny.
"Not a word."
"My eyes are bad," said Mrs. Trevarthen, who, as a matter of fact, could
not read.
Mr. Benny knew this, and knew also that Mrs. Trevarthen as a rule employed
Aunt Butson to write her few letters and decipher the few that came to
her.
"The light's bad for the time of year," he said. "Shall I read it for
you, missus?"
"No; let _her_ read it," answered the old woman, holding out the letter to
Hester. Hester took it and read--
"Madam,--This is to inform you that the rent of my cottage, at present
occupied by you on a monthly tenancy at 9 pounds per annum, will from
the first of next month be raised to 15 pounds per annum; also that
the tenancy will not, after that date, carry with it a permission to
let lodgings.--Yours truly, S. ROSEWARNE."
In the silence that followed Mrs. Trevarthen fixed her bright beady eyes
steadily on Hester. "You've driven forth my son from me," she said at
length, "and you're driving forth my lodger, and there's nobbut the
almshouse left. Never a day's worry has my son Tom given to me, and never
a ha'p'orth o' harm have we done to you. A foreigner you are and a
stranger; the lad made me promise not to curse 'ee, and I won't. But get
out of my sight, and the Lord deliver us from temptation!--Amen."
Poor Mr. Benny, who had written half a dozen enthusiastic verses on the
opening of the new school, crushed them down in his pocket. He had been
so proud of them, too!
They ran--
"This morning the weather was wreathed in smiles.
And we, correspondingly gay,
Assembled together from several miles
To welcome our Opening Day."
"The children were plastic in body and mind.
Their faces and pinafores clean;
And persons scholastic, in accents refined.
With eloquence pointed the scene."
"Blest scene! as its features we fondly recall,
Come let us give thanks to the Lord!
The Parents, the Teacher, the Managers all,
Including the Clerk to the Board!"
BOOK III.