CHAPTER XVIII

THE IMMORTAL MOMENT

That which Lenine had hoped for some twelve years, which the Parson and

Vassie had first feared and then laughed at, which Ishmael himself had

hardly thought of, and then merely to dismiss with a smile, had come to

pass--so simply, with such a logical though quiet following of effect on

various causes, that it was no wonder Ishmael felt enmeshed in the web

of something it was not worth fighting to cut away. At first, on the

heels of the miller's rejoicing and Phoebe's clinging content, he had

been overwhelmed by a dense cloud of depression--a sense as of being

caught in something soft and too sweet that would not let him go and

into which he sunk the more deeply for his instinctive protest. Also the

sheer impossibility of the thing affected him with a dream-like belief

that it could not really have happened, or that at least something must

occur to dissolve it. Yet nothing did, not even the Parson's

frankly-expressed dismay.

Ishmael was very young, and in no sense a man of the world, and when he

thought of what lay behind that kiss he had given Phoebe he felt her

innocence had a right to demand of him that at least he should not

retract what she had built upon it. Also, Penwith being a very narrow

and intimate track of land, the scandal for her if he had withdrawn and

let the miller blaze his version abroad would have never been lived

down. A country which is a blind-alley has the advantage of immunity

from tramps, but it has the disadvantages also of a place which cannot

be a highway to other places. Talk, interest, all the thoughts and

emotions of life, of necessity beat back on themselves instead of

passing on and dying, or being swamped in the affairs of the great

world. Phoebe, as the miller knew, was already the subject of censure

among the stiffer matrons, whose sons were wont to hang round the mill

like bees, and in his expressions of approval to Ishmael was mingled a

subtle strain of warning, almost of menace. And to himself as the days

went by and Phoebe was always there for him to see and caress when he

felt inclined, her yielding sweetness ever ready for him to draw on, her

gentle stupidity hidden under her adoration, he admitted that he did not

altogether want to withdraw. After all, what did it matter? Phoebe had

many refinements of heart and temper which surely could be held to

outweigh her little ignorances, and now that, with the removal of

Blanche, the outer world was, he told himself, cut off from him, he

refused to see that to ally himself with the Lenines of the mill

mattered as much as the Parson, in his old-fashioned Toryism, seemed to

think. A woman takes her husband's position; and as to that, what, he

asked bitterly, was his position that any woman should want to share it?

Phoebe did want to; she had shown all her heart so plainly in that

cry--genuine in that she believed it herself; and Phoebe was kind and

perilously sweet.... The days went on, and Vassie's letter of argument

and protest was less determined than it would have been if she herself

had not been engrossed in her own affairs. And stronger even that the

dread of hurting Phoebe, of the terrible scenes that would of

necessity occur, than his own loneliness, was the enemy within himself

that every time he caressed Phoebe mounted to his brain and told him

it was, after all, well worth while.

It fell to the Parson's bitter lot to marry them in the early autumn of

that year. Archelaus had now been away a year, and he had neither come

back nor written, and not till several months later did he suddenly

reappear, after the habit of the born rover.

They were months of mingled wonder and dismay for Ishmael. He had

married a girl who had only one talent, but that was the oldest in the

world--she was a born lover. She, who in many ways was so startlingly

lacking in refinement, had a genius for the little lures, the ways with

hand and eye, of voice and gesture, that make of love an art. In the

ordinary intimacies of marriage, the blunting intimacies of daily life,

she had no discrimination; Ishmael, had he been inclined to idealise

her, would not have been spared the realisation that even as the grosser

male she looked unbeautiful at times, needed to send clothes to the

wash, and was warned every few weeks, by an unbecoming limpness in her

hair, that it was time for soap and water to combat natural greasiness.

She made no attempt to keep up the illusion which, even while it is

admitted to be such, yet achieves its object. She would have thought it

silly. But when it came to the rites of love she was inspired and could

not make a false move. A thousand little ways of her own, cat-like rubs

of her sleek head, turns of her limbs, inspirations of withheld kisses

and in the same breath approaches that held an eternally child-like

quality in their submission--there was no faint tone of the age-old

gamut to which she did not give its keenest value.

The month spent at the genteel resort of Torquay was to Ishmael a

fevered medley. His days were full of distaste--at her predilections for

the young clerks who eyed her on the sea-front, for cheap jewellery and

casual friends picked up at the hotel, at the bland superficiality of

her mind; and now and again this distaste was shot through with moments

of acute fears when he realised, startled to it by some blunt display of

the ugly things of life, that to this he must accustom himself for the

rest of his days; and that he would grow only too deadly accustomed, to

the stifling of other ideals, he foresaw. These were his days, yet he

felt remorseful at his own spirit of criticism, because she thought him

so god-like, and in many little womanly ways showed an unselfish

consideration that humbled him in his own eyes and exalted her. Of the

nights, even when there was no passion between them, she made such a

delight with her childish clinging, her soft nestling against him, that

he would hold his breath to listen to her quiet breathing and move a

little away as though in sleep, so as to feel her kitten-like,

half-unconscious wriggle into the curve of his arm again. It was sweet

at such times to feel such utter dependence upon him as the protective

male, and the best in him was stirred to response. The next morning she

might jar again from the hour of getting up in their ugly hotel room,

through the expedition with which they would try and beguile the day, to

the dinner, at which her conversation was always most noticeably

trifling; but he always, to her surprise, let her go to bed alone, and

came up much later to find the old magic upon her once more like dew.

It was late autumn when they went back to Cloom, and under John-James'

watchful care the harvest was all in; he awaited them at the station in

the smart new trap that had been a present from the miller, and Katie

Jacka, with a tight-lipped smile upon her face and a heart full of

contempt for a mistress whom privately she considered no better than

herself, was hovering between kitchen and passage when they drove up,

with a large bouquet of bought flowers swaddled in a stiff paper frill

ready as an offering. Boase came over after supper, and when Phoebe,

piqued by a conversation which she could not share and--what she

resented still more--by the efforts of the two men to include her in it,

had gone upstairs, then Ishmael and the Parson sat and smoked and

chatted, and for the first time all the past month lifted its

deadweight and life seemed more as it had been in the old days.

It was in the winter that Archelaus reappeared, and the first that Cloom

heard of it was a casual word dropped by Katie as she waited at table.

"So Cap'n Arch'las is back among us," she remarked cheerfully, after the

manner of Cornish servants, who see no harm in imparting items of gossip

as they hand a dish; "they do say he'm rare and changed, though 'zackly

how I don't knaw. Simme 'tes enough to make a man come home a nigger,

going so much to the lands where the folk are all black."

Ishmael was startled by the news, but, to hide the fact, began to joke

Katie on her ideas of the population of the American continent, when a

little sound from Phoebe caught his attention. She had gone very

white, and she tried to push her chair away from the table, making a

gesture as though she wanted to be free of its confining edge; but her

hands seemed too weak to accomplish the act, and she let them fall into

her lap. Ishmael sprang up and went round to her, sharply bidding the

staring Katie to bring cold water; in a moment or two Phoebe had

conquered her faintness and was smiling timidly at him. When he was

alone and out of doors he thought over the incident, but without

exaggerating it to himself. He had always guessed that Archelaus had at

one time been attracted by Phoebe; he supposed that her refusal of him

was at the back of the former's departure. Now that Archelaus had

returned it was not unnatural, considering her marriage and the bad blood

between himself and his brother, that she should feel nervous. He was

sorry for her, and wondered, not for the first time, whether it would not

be possible, now he himself was less green and prickly, and had settled

into a scheme of life that need not, ill-feeling apart, exclude

Archelaus, to become better friends or at least more tolerant of each

other. He suggested his idea to Phoebe, though characteristically he did

not refer to her attack of faintness. She looked at him in a scared way

and then murmured something about thinking it was best to wait till

Archelaus made the first advance, and to this Ishmael rather reluctantly

agreed.

They had not long to wait; the next evening saw Archelaus at Cloom. An

oddly-altered Archelaus, so much was soon plain. Even in appearance he

seemed changed; something of his golden beauty had tarnished at last,

and a faint grizzle showed here and there in his curly hair, while the

ruddy face had become weather-beaten. He talked a good deal--about his

adventures in California, his bad luck with the gold, and the beauty of

the Californian women, especially those with a Spanish strain. Of these

last he spoke so freely, notably of some camp-followers, that Ishmael

reminded him sharply of Phoebe's presence. Archelaus glanced from one

to the other, from Ishmael's irritated eyes to Phoebe's averted cheek,

with a slight smile, before answering.

"Ah! I forgot that Phoebe's not like that kind o' women a man gets

used to out there," he said slowly. "Besides, of course, she'm a lady

now...."

The apology was worse than the offence; but Ishmael swallowed his anger

for Phoebe's sake, though he was vexed with her too for staying there

to hang upon Archelaus's doubtful talk. Soon after, when Phoebe had

brewed hot milk-punch and it had been drunk by the two men, Archelaus

rose to go. He went out to see if his trap were ready, and Ishmael went

also. The boy had gone home for the night, and Ishmael lit a lantern and

went into the stable to fetch the horse. He supposed Archelaus was with

him, but found he had not followed so far; neither was he by the cart.

Ishmael put the horse in and brought it through into the courtyard, and

the same moment saw Archelaus appearing from the kitchen door.

"Just haven a bit of chat wi' Katie," said Archelaus. "She'm a rare one

for gossip, she is." Then, as he pretended to busy himself with

something at the horse's head, he spoke again.

"Ishmael," he began, "I knaw how it is wi' you. You think on when my

fancy was took by your lil' missus, and you don't knaw how I'm thinken

about things. Well, I'm a rough chap, but I'm honest, b'lieve, and I can

tell 'ee there's no wound in my heart, and the soreness there was

against 'ee has gone in the sun out in those lands.... Will 'ee shake

hands and let I be a friend to you and your missus as a brother should?"

He held out his hand as he spoke, and Ishmael found himself staring at

it in the uncertain light of the lamps. The next moment a flood of

self-reproach at his own hesitation swept over him; he put out his hand

and took his brother's. Archelaus gave such a vigorous wringing that

Ishmael could not keep back a little exclamation, and his fingers were

numb when they were released.

"Bit too strong, am I?" asked Archelaus with a friendly laugh. "My

muscles have got so tough I don't rightly knaw how hard I grip." He

swung himself up into the cart, and from that elevation looked down at

Ishmael with a nod of farewell.

Ishmael went into the house, where he found Phoebe still sitting in

the parlour, her hands folded on her lap, staring in front of her. She

gave a start when he spoke to her, and when he told her of his pact with

Archelaus chilled him by her scant enthusiasm. They went to bed, and as

they lay side by side in the darkness there was a constraint between

them there had not been even when they had quarrelled or his occasional

fits of irritation had made her rail at him.

As the weeks wore on they both seemed to become used to the occasional

but unwonted presence of Archelaus about the place, though Phoebe

always resented it oddly. Yet it was a friendly presence; he was ready

to help on the farm with advice and even with his strong muscles if need

be, and the world at large was much edified by the reconciliation.

"A gentle little wife like that is such a softening influence" was the

general verdict ... and Ishmael, irked by the strain between them to a

sudden passion of distaste for what he felt had been his weakness, had

instituted what was for those days a startling innovation--that of a

separate bedroom for himself. He guessed that Phoebe almost hated him

for it, yet he had come suddenly to that point when he sickened at

over-intimacy, when he realised that the passion in him had betrayed

him, so that he felt the only salvation for his mind lay in crushing it.

He had sold himself, but at least he could refrain from taking his

price. So he told himself and so he meant, yet when, as on a night when

Phoebe, shedding resentment for a wistful tenderness, had won him to a

triumph of passion once again, there was mingled with his sense of

having failed himself a certain relief in the acknowledgment that this

thing still held sweets for him....

With the spring the affairs on the farm took up Ishmael's interest more

and more, and he was able to find solace for the deadening knowledge of

his mistaken marriage in the things that lay so near his heart. He told

himself that it was here, in the soil, and the warm, gentle cattle and

the growing things, that his keenest as well as his truest joys were to

be found, not knowing that even while he thought it Phoebe held that

which was to thrill him as never yet anything in life had had power to

do.

She told him of it one night when he went up to bed late, thinking and

hoping she would be asleep. But she called out to him as he passed her

door. He went in and found her sitting up, looking like a child among

the big white pillows, her brown hair about her wide eyes. He was

struck by it and spoke to her gently, telling her to lie down and go to

sleep. Instead of obeying she held out her hands and drew him down

towards her.

"I want to whisper, Ishmael," she said, as she had been wont to say when

a little girl and she had had something of tremendous interest to

impart. He humoured her, and, putting his arm round her, gathered her

against him and said that he was listening. She kept a shy silence for a

second after that and then whispered. Ishmael caught the few words, and

at first they seemed to him to convey something incredible, though he

had often thought about this very thing, wondered if and when he should

hear of it. He was very gentle with her, but said little, only he stayed

by her till she had fallen asleep, and then he disengaged himself and,

going quietly out of the room, opened the front door and went out into

the garden.

It was the darkest hour of the night, only the stars shone brightly, and

not till he was upon the pale clouds of the drifted narcissi could he

tell they were there, not till their scent came up at him. The night was

very still as well as dark, but Ishmael noted neither circumstance. His

own soul held all of sound and colour and light for him, and he recked

of nothing external. This news, the simplest, oldest thing in the way of

news that there is, seemed to him never to have been told to anyone

before--never, at least, to have been so wonderful. All the beauties of

Cloom, of life, all the trouble his own short span had felt, all the

future held, seemed to fall into place and be made worth while. This was

what he had lived for without knowing it--not to make Cloom finer for

himself, not to save his own soul or carve out a life for himself, but

this--to make of himself this mysterious immortality. Always he had

waited for "something" to happen, always at moments of keenest pleasure

he had been conscious there was more he did not feel: depths unplumbed,

heights unscaled, some master-rapture that would explain all the others

and that he never came upon. Even beauty had had this sting for him; he

had always felt that, however lovely a thing were, there was something

more beautiful just round the corner, for ever slipping ahead, like a

star reflected in a rain-filled rut. Now for the first time he was aware

of a dizzying sensation as though for one moment the gleam had stayed

still, as if Beauty for a flash were not withdrawing herself, as though

time for one moment stood, and that moment was self-sufficient, free of

the perpetual something that was always just ahead--more, actually

capturing that something. The moment had the quality of immortality,

although it reeled and was caught up again in the inexorable march, but,

drunken with it, he stayed tingling in the cold dawn.

And if, mixed with that draught, there were this much of venom--that he

rejoiced at having at last so ousted Archelaus, in the fact that indeed

flesh of his flesh should inherit after him and Archelaus be outcast for

ever, at least in that first rapture he was unaware of it.

BOOK III

RIPENING

CHAPTER I

UNDER-CURRENTS

Spring waxed full, buds burst into flower, then petals dropped and the

hard green fruit began to swell, and the blades of the corn showed

perceptibly higher every week. Summer, warm and lazy, big with all her

ripening store, brooded upon the land, and Phoebe Ruan, guarding the

growing life she held, seemed, with all the care taken of her, to lose

vigour and gaiety. She seemed to wish to withdraw from everyone, from

Ishmael most of all, as though she only wished to sit and commune with

the secret soul of the child beneath her heart. She was almost beautiful

these days, touched by a gravity new to her, and with an added poise.

For the first time it was as though she found sufficient support in her

own company and did not need to be for ever following and leaning upon

other people. To look at, sitting so withdrawn, her eyes watching

something unseen of human gaze, she was perfect; even in intercourse she

would have been more nearly so than ever before had it not been for the

fits of irritability gave unwonted bitterness to her tongue. There were

days when nothing would please her, when she showed all her common

strain in the taunts she found to fling at Ishmael and the rest of her

little world. Only Archelaus was immune, and in his presence she

maintained a sullen silence, so marked that a third person with them

could, if he were sensitive, feel her ever-deepening resentment

emanating from her.

Archelaus himself was as though unaware of it, for he came to the house

with increasing frequency. About this time he began to walk out with a

Botallack girl, the daughter of a mine captain, and indeed asked

Ishmael's congratulations on the match. But, in his brotherly fashion,

he was always eager to do anything to help Phoebe, whether it were to

ride into Penzance and buy her anything she wished for, or to wait on

her at home, adjusting a hammock at exactly the right height and

carrying out cushions. Only Phoebe knew the taunt that underlay every

word, the subtle scheme for making her uncomfortable that he carried on

under cover of his solicitude. And she was not clever enough to combat

it; when he told her she had ruined his life by marrying Ishmael, she

was not brave enough to retort that he had had opportunity enough to

marry her and never breathed the wish; when she hinted as much, he

retorted that he had only been waiting to make more money so that she

could have a position worthy of her. He declared that all she had

married Ishmael for was to get the position that should by rights have

belonged to him, Archelaus. That there had been a month of terror when

she would, if he had not already left, have begged him to marry her she

never told him. That fear had been groundless and had passed, but she

never forgave it him.

Since his return she could not have told what swelled her resentment the

more--that he should dare to come back at all, or that his fascination

for her, the plainer to her since intimacy with another man had proved

so much less wonderful, should prick at her perpetually in spite of her

dislike of him. Ishmael she still regarded as a superior being whom she

admired, but the touch of Archelaus's casual hand had power over her

that was more intensified than stilled both by her resentment and her

distrust.

So the months went by, and the time drew nearer, and all seemed more

peaceful at Cloom than it had ever been. One day Phoebe happened to be

alone; Ishmael and John-James were in the fields, and Phoebe lay on a

plush sofa in the parlour. Ishmael had bought that sofa for her in

Penzance when she admired its glossy crimson curves. She had not been at

all grateful; she had merely told him that he bought it, as he did

everything else for which she expressed a wish, because he wanted to do

everything possible to ensure a healthy and happy child, and there was

enough of truth in her accusation to justify it. Now she lay upon the

sofa, staring at the mahogany arm that ran along one side of it and

wishing that she were dead or that Archelaus would go away and not

torment her with his taunts and his kisses--his whole presence that made

her feel so helpless. While she lay there thus thinking he came in,

walking straight into the hall as of right, whistling carelessly; and

she heard his stick, flung against the wall, go sliding and clattering

down upon the stone flags.

The next moment he was in the room and standing looking down at her with

a smile. She did not move, but lay looking back at him like a small bird

stricken motionless and staring beneath a hawk. Wanda, who was curled up

by her feet, growled softly. What strange twist it was in Archelaus,

what sardonic cruelty, inherited perhaps from the old Squire, that made

him take pleasure in tormenting the helpless Phoebe it would have been

hard to say. Though always latent in him, it may have been waked to

activity by the wound on his head which had left the scar. Some nice

balance may have been overset in his brain, though there was bitterness

enough in his sense of grudge to stimulate him to a perpetual nagging at

this vulnerable part of Ishmael. He had lately discovered a new way to

frighten her; in addition to his passionate urgings of what he called

his love, he vowed that he would not be able to bear his life much

longer, that in losing Cloom he had been sent out to wander the earth a

disappointed man, but in losing her he had lost all that had made his

life worth living. He threatened to kill himself, with so many

picturesque details and so much grim emphasis, that there were moments

when he could almost have deceived himself, let alone poor simple

Phoebe. His feeling for her had been of the most animal even at its

strongest, but he had to the full the primitive instinct for possession;

he had made her his woman, and, though he might have felt a mere blind

jealousy if she had married any other man, to find her taken by Ishmael,

the younger brother who had dispossessed him of all, awoke in him a

surge of anger stronger than any emotion he had ever known.

He stooped down and deliberately took a long kiss from her mouth,

hitting the back of his hand against Wanda's sensitive nose to stop her

growling. She whimpered and slunk off the sofa, and Archelaus helped her

departure with his boot. Phoebe was too taken up with his cruelty to

herself to reproach him on behalf of the dog.

"You ought to be ashamed, Archelaus!" she complained. "Oh, sometimes I

think you're the wickedest man in the world, that I do...!"

"Who's made me so, then? Who went and wed another man as soon as I'd

gone off to make a fortune for her, eh? Tell me that!"

"I don't believe it; if it had been that you'd have told me."

"How could I tell 'ee? Wouldn't you, wouldn't any woman, have bidden me

hold my tongue till I'd shown what I could do? Would your Da have looked

at I for a son?"

"Well, you can't be heart-broken, anyway, or you wouldn't be going to

marry Senath Pollard...."

He came and bent over her again, bringing his face very close to hers

and trying to hold her eyes with his look, as only a liar does.

"You knaw why I be walking out with Senath ... so as to be able to come

here and have no one thinkin' anything. You knaw that as well as my

tongue and heart can tell 'ee. Look at me ... don't 'ee knaw it,

Phoebe? Don't 'ee?"

She turned her head this way and that to avoid his insistence, but at

last she yielded as on that night long ago beside the stile and met look

and lips. "I don't believe it," she murmured in a choked whisper, her

mouth against his; "but I'm a sinful woman, and there's something in me

wishes I could...."

She had come thus far, she whose total lack of moral sense had not

suggested to her any reason why, having been the lover of one brother,

she should not be the wife of the other; but her stereotyped views,

missing the essentials, did revolt, though vainly, against his kisses

when she was a wife, even while she burned beneath them. She really was

very miserable. Suddenly he released her and leant back with a dark look

on his face, a look she knew and dreaded. She resorted to her little

wiles to make him shake it off.

"Archelaus!..." she breathed, sliding her hand across his eyes; "don't

look like that.... To please me!" She pulled his head towards her and

dropped light kisses on his lids to charm the expression out of his

eyes, but he remained impassive. She was in a condition when wiles leave

a certain kind of man very untouched, and hate for Ishmael, not any

charm left for him in her, urged his cunning love-making.

"I can't go on weth it," he declared; "it's no good, Phoebe. What does

life hold for I now? Last week I was down in the mine when there was a

fall of rock, and for a bit we thought we'd never get out, and I said to

myself what did it matter?... it'll only save I the trouble of doen it

for myself."

"Archelaus!..."

"I put the barrel of my gun against my head t'other day and pulled the

trigger, but it missed fire. And then I dedn't try again, because I

thought all of a sudden that I must see you once more, Phoebe, and

tell 'ee plain all about it--what you and that husband of yours have

driven a man to."

"Don't talk to me about Ishmael! At least he's a good man, so he is, and

we're neither of us fit to live along of him!"

"Good, is he? Yes; but is he the man for 'ee? Do 'ee ever feel your lil'

heart beating the quicker against his? If he'm a man, why don't 'ee tell

him everything and let him kick me out, eh?"

"You know I can't tell him--that I couldn't ever."

"He'll knaw when I'm dead, because I'll lave word to show all men how

one brother took everything in life from another.... He'll knaw then."

"I don't believe you; I don't believe anyone would be so wicked, even

you."

"Ah! there's things in life even you don't knaw anything about, though

you'm so wicked yourself," said Archelaus grimly; "but you too 'll knaw

a bit more by-and-bye. I won't be able to keep off it for long,

Phoebe. Maybe it'll take me suddenly when I'm here one day. You'll

hear my life-blood running away, lil' 'un, and think for a minute it's

water drippen' somewhere. Or perhaps I'll just take a rope and hang

myself, and you'll hear I choken'. I saw a man hung in Australy once for

stealen' another man's gold, and he took an awful time to die, he did.

You could hear the choken' of him loud as bellows...." Phoebe had

turned sickly pale, she screamed out, and thrust him away from her.

"Katie!" she called. Archelaus went to the door and shouted into the

kitchen. "Your missus is feelen' faint," he informed the maids. "I just

looked into the parlour and saw her lyen' all wisht like." Katie

bustled past with an odd look at him, and Phoebe was taken up to bed.

She was better again next day, but she feared after that to leave her

room, and in spite of Ishmael's protests stayed in bed, pleading that

she felt giddy whenever she stood up. Twice Archelaus came to the house

and had to be content with calling to her through the door, and each

time she replied she was not well enough to see him.

He began to fume that his hidden delight of torment, which in his

distorted mind was part of his scheme for revenge against Ishmael, was

being thwarted; and day by day as he brooded to himself, his thoughts

ever on the same theme, the end of all his anger and her fear began to

loom, as he had planned. It was chance that eventually played into his

hands, but the will and the cunning that made him ripe to catch at it

were his already.

CHAPTER II

THE PASSAGE

Phoebe lay in her big bed, her arms straight out upon the coverlet,

listless palms upwards, her eyes closed, and her dim thoughts--the

unformed blind thoughts of a resentful child--her only company. A week

earlier Ishmael had been called up to Devon to see his mother, who had

taken a turn for the worse: she had died a few hours after his arrival;

he had had to stay and see to the funeral, and was not due back till

that evening. John-James was in the fields and the maids were all in the

dairy, working hard to finish the butter for market. Phoebe did not

mind--for the first time in her life she preferred to be alone; she

found it more and more difficult to control herself in the presence of

others, to hide or account for the terror that possessed her. Only when

she thought of the little life that in another month she would have

brought into the world, that would be nestling against her, did she feel

a glow of comfort. Nothing disturbed her joy in that, which she had

perforce to pretend was the cause of her depression. As she lay now,

with the wrongs done to her and by her stirring in her slow bewildered

brain, she banished them by thoughts of that which was to be hers--that

solace so far sweeter than the little animals with which she had

hitherto filled her days. Poor Wanda, who from much petting had grown to

fawn on her almost as much as upon Ishmael, was neglected now, and did

not even stretch her woolly length beside the bed, but roamed, alone and

melancholy, in the passage, waiting for the well-known loved footstep of

her master.

Phoebe curved over in bed, and began to pretend to herself, as when a

small child she had been wont to do for the first hour in bed every

evening--planning small pleasures, triumphs over the other children she

knew--and as when a girl she had been used to lie and imagine thrilling

episodes with some dream lover. Now she pretended her baby had already

come and was lying beside her; she bunched a fold of bedclothes to make

her pretence the more real, and lay cuddling it, her eyes closed so that

the sense of sight should not dissipate her dreams. No man had any part

in her vision of the future with her baby; it was to be hers alone, and

she pictured a blissful period when she played with it, dressed and

undressed it, lived for it. Somehow she imagined that all her

difficulties would cease with its birth, and both the torment of

Archelaus and the presence of Ishmael, which now left her so unstirred

it wearied her, faded away. Although she told herself she hated men and

the harm they did, she hoped her child would be a boy, because she was

of the type of woman, even as Annie had been, that always wants a boy.

She kept her eyes shut and caressed the bundle she had made beside her,

and tried to forget her physical condition and her mental worry in the

joy she was forecasting.

"Phoebe ... lil' 'un ... I'm come," said a voice from the other side

of her bedroom door. Her lids flew up; a great spasm of terror shot

through her, making her sick and setting her heart pounding. She saw the

last warm glow of the evening in the square of sky, its light tingeing

the white bedroom with fire; she saw the bundle in the curve of her arm

was only a roll of sheet and blanket whose striped edge of pink and blue

somehow for an irrational moment engaged her attention, so vivid had her

dreaming been, so incongruous was this sudden recall. Then she turned

over in bed towards the door, panic in her breast, and her whole body

swept by the hot waves of fear. She had locked the door, as she always

did now, but the tones, soft as they were, had power to frighten her

even through the stout wood.

She lay silent, hoping he would think she was asleep, not making a

sound.

"I do want to see 'ee that bad," came the voice. She paid no heed, but

clenched her hands under the bedclothes; her heart had settled into an

even thunderous beating that to her ears almost deafened the voice that

provoked its action.

"I've come to say good-bye," went on the voice. "Won't 'ee just say

good-bye to I? I'm going to another world this time, not to Australy or

Californy. I can't stand life any longer, Phoebe; you'll just wish I a

good journey for the last? 'Tes a hard voyage, I fear."

Her self-control broke; she could no longer hold her tongue, a sick

belief in his words struggling with the conviction, born of her wish,

that he would never carry out his threat.

"Go away, Archelaus! I wish you'd go away and leave me in peace. I don't

believe you'll do no such wickedness; you're only trying to frighten me,

and it's wicked, with me so near my time and no one with me. Go away,

Archelaus!"

"You don't believe me ...? Just lie there in your soft bed and listen,

then," said Archelaus through the door. "You'll soon knaw whether I'm a

man to be believed or not. Good-bye, lil' Phoebe!"

She heard him go downstairs, caught the well-known creak of two of

them--one at the top, the other near the bottom, which always creaked;

she could gauge his descent by them. Then came the harder ring of his

boots upon the nags of the passage. Then for a while all was quiet,

while she lay with straining ears trying to ignore the sound of her own

heart that she might better hear any sounds below.

Upon her incredulous senses came a faint scrabbling noise, a scuffling

sound, clearly audible through the old worn boarding of the floor; it

was followed by the sharp clatter of an overturned chair. Then came to

her a noise so often described by him that for one moment it seemed she

had heard it before, as sometimes in a day after a vivid dream the

events dreamed of seem for an irrational recurring moment actually to

have happened. A noise of choking....

It went on and on, a sound no acting could have counterfeited--a wild

choking, a frenzy of protest made by compressed lungs and windpipe. The

choking went on and then grew fainter; at last it died away. Phoebe

lay soaked in sweat, her hands clutching the side of the bed, her rising

beats of pulses and heart confusing the sense of sound so much that she

hardly knew when the suggestive noise from below had really ceased.

It might have only been a few minutes she stayed there, it might have

been an hour or more, for all she could have told; but at last, driven

by her fear, she half-fell from the bed and found the door. She drew the

bolt with fingers that did not feel it, opened the door, and crept to

the head of the stairs. Not a sound came up to her. She put one bare

foot forward, drew it back, then impelled by something stronger than her

own will, she began the descent, holding on by the wall. She went down

the first flight, turned the corner--without looking up, for she felt

very giddy--and then went on down the stairs, still groping. At their

foot she took a step or two along the passage and suddenly felt the

shock of something solid and hairy against her face. She screamed out

and looked up and saw what it was that had made those ominous sounds,

that had choked out life swinging from a beam of the hall. Poor Wanda

hung dead, her head limply to one side, her tongue out, her furry paws,

that had pattered with so much energy and glee in her master's service,

dangling helplessly.

CHAPTER III

PHOEBE PAYS TOLL

When Ishmael returned a few hours later no one had thought to cut down

the body of Wanda. Everyone was too occupied with Phoebe, and those

people who had come in by the hall had merely thrust the dangling

obstruction aside and hurried on, with only a thought to it as the cause

of the trouble upstairs. Ishmael, finding his beloved dog hanging thus,

coming on it without a word of warning, felt a shock, a sense of

unbelievable outrage that made him for a moment or two think he must be

dreaming or out of his mind. He put out a hand and touched the pitiful

thing before conviction came upon him, and with a shout of rage and pain

he gathered Wanda in his arms, calling her name, hoping for a twitch of

life. Then he whipped out his knife and sawed through the cord and

lowered the body upon the floor, felt for the heart, turned up the

dropped eyelids, even shook the inanimate stiffening form of his pet. He

knew it was in vain--that never again would she jump trustingly upon

him, never again would she appear absurdly with one of his slippers in

her wide mouth that always seemed to smile at the joke, coming down the

drive to greet him; that never again would he have her for his untiring

companion on his walks or upon the plateau where he was wont to lie and

look into her wise eyes and talk to her without fear of contradiction,

receiving that full measure of admiration and belief that only a dog

gives. So much was his grief, but overpowering that simpler emotion was

a sick rage. The knowledge that rough, brutal hands must have carried

out this outrage, that in an agony of fear and astonishment she must

have yielded up her breath, struck at his heart. He got to his feet, and

carrying the body into the parlour, laid it down, then went through to

the kitchen. The dairymaid was standing over a kettle of water that was

heating on the fire; the other maid stood near her. They had evidently

been talking together earnestly when he burst in upon them; they had not

even heard his approach. Both girls seemed excited, charged with portent

beyond the ordinary. They stood staring at Ishmael, mouths open.

"What is the meaning of it?" he shouted at them. "How is it you are both

in here like this, and with--that left in the passage? Has everyone gone

mad? What has happened?"

"Oh, maister!" ejaculated one of them, "havn't 'ee heard?"

"Heard what? I come in and find my poor dog--" He broke off; he could

not bring himself to utter the words that would tell what he had come

upon.

"Missus got out of the bed and found someone had hung the dog, and her

was took all of a sudden, and the doctor is overstairs weth her now,"

the girl informed him; and through all her commiseration the ghoulish

delight of her kind in misfortune showed. "She'm mortal bad, they do

say," she added.

Ishmael stood still where he was. His mind had been subjected to too

violent an onslaught for this fresh news to break upon it with much

added weight. Dimly aware that the standard of these other people would

expect him hardly to notice the death of his dog when his wife was in

danger, he did not speak again of Wanda, but all his loyalty of

affection went out to the furry body lying helplessly in the deserted

parlour, as all his sense of horror had been absorbed by the finding of

it. After that everything seemed to him more or less dreamlike; an

impersonal pity and anxiety he felt and deeply, but it was as though he

stood and looked on at Phoebe from outside of himself as much as from

outside of her.

He was first stirred to active realisation by the expression of her

physical pain; when he heard her cries, rising and falling, piercing the

calm autumn night, he went into the garden and tried to stop his ears,

but the thin poignancy of those cries still rang in them. He went back

to the parlour, and picking up the body of poor Wanda, carried it out to

a spot of the garden where the sun fell the longest, and there, beneath

a rambler rose bush, began to dig her grave furiously. Suddenly it

struck him as rather awful that it should be a grave he was busy over at

such a moment, and he stopped. Then his deadly sense of proportion that

never would leave him alone for long told him how little it really

mattered, and he went on with his work. Wanda was covered by a smoothed

patch of earth--he wanted no mound to bring the memory of the pity of

her before him--by the time the flame in his lantern had flickered and

died, and the late moon was riding high in the sky. He put on his coat

and went again to the house.

Phoebe's ordeal was not over till broad day had appeared and the usual

sounds of farm-life had perforce begun again. With them there mingled a

fresh note--the cry of the new-born child, insistent, wailing,

plaintive; but the cries of its mother had ceased. She lay silent in her

exhaustion, amid the dim looming of the horror that had encompassed her,

and she showed no interest even in the desired babe that had been laid

in the curve of her arm as she had pictured him not twelve hours before.

The ordeal had been too much for Phoebe in her weak condition; she was

never to recover from the terror of that minute or hour when she had

lain and listened, as she thought, and as he had meant her to think, to

Archelaus hanging himself in the passage below. The child, though born

prematurely and for the first few weeks a sickly little creature enough,

gradually strengthened, but Phoebe's life flickered lower each hour.

She did not seem frightened at the approach of death, if she realised

it, which was doubtful. It was as though she had used up all of emotion

before and had no strength left to indulge in any now. That was how

Ishmael too had felt all those first hours after his homecoming; but

with a short spell of heavy, irresistible sleep the power to feel

returned to him, and he was even surprised at the depth to which he felt

a pang. He had not "loved" Phoebe in the sense in which that

much-abused word is generally used; he had felt for her a passion which

was in itself a reaction and an affection which had diminished and not

augmented in their life together. But intimacy and custom go far towards

producing that sense of knowledge of another human being which makes the

imagination translate what the other is suffering into terms of self,

and that is after all the method by which the most vivid human sympathy

is evoked. He felt he knew her so well--her aims and ideas, her likes

and little gusty hates, her sweetnesses and her pettiness--that he

suffered with her now more acutely than she for herself.

Also, as her life drew out, and that feeling of something focussing, of

many tangled threads all being drawn together, which the approach of

death gives, took hold of the watchers, all the external things which go

to make life fell away from him and the stark roots of it stood out.

This had been his mate, this fragile little thing lying there, her

listless eyes not meeting his, her limp fingers not responding to any

touch. She had been nearer to him physically than any other human being,

and that she had been further mentally was swamped in that thought in

the hour when she was dying of the nearness.... For he had the guilty

feeling of the man whose wife dies in childbirth, and though he told

himself that whatever passing brute had wantonly hung the harmless dog

had brought about this tragedy, that could not altogether absolve him.

His poor little Phoebe--he had always known her soft heart for

animals, but even he had not guessed that the tragedy of Wanda would

affect her so--she who had seen so many animals killed with much less

sickening than he himself.

As he sat by the bed there flashed on him an irrational memory of that

day in the field when the girls had found a wounded toad amidst the

oat-sheaves, and how he had come up to them as they clustered round it

in their pale gowns. It had been Blanche who had been most articulate in

her pity, and yet Blanche had not scrupled to hurt him when it suited

her. Phoebe, till these months of irritation and the dislike which had

seemed to spring in her, had never wilfully hurt anyone. He felt he knew

all of Phoebe there had been to know, and his heart softened over her

as she slipped away from any power of his to tell her so.

That flattened little form under the crumpled coverlet was Phoebe's,

was the same body with which she had given him so much delight. This was

the Phoebe who had hung about his neck in the valley and smothered his

words upon his lips with kisses--she who had taught him her own

knowledge of love, that instinctive knowledge of Aspasia and her

sisters; it was through her he had become a man. So he felt now looking

at her.

With dawn, the day after the child's birth, it became plain that she

could hold the frail thread of her life no longer. The nurse sat on one

side of the bed; the doctor had not yet come back after leaving to

attend another case. The child lay beside her, because the only time she

spoke or showed any interest that night she had asked for it. Now she

lay either asleep or already unconscious, her hair all pushed away from

her face, which had fallen into hollows. She looked far older than her

years--older than it would have been possible to imagine she ever could

look.

Ishmael sat very still, his mind as quiescent as his body; it was as

though it had been hypnotised by its steady concentration on her

approaching death as by the steady keeping of the eyes fixed on some one

glittering object. All around that one point thought had ceased;

impalpable walls shut off from consciousness everything else in the

scheme of things. The focussing in the quiet room sharpened, grew more

intense; the liquid light of dawn began to flood the air, and a bright

shaft shot across the hill as the sun swam up over the rim of the moor.

It fell across the bed, and Phoebe stirred and opened her eyes. Their

gaze rested blankly on Ishmael, wandered round the room, then fell to

the round head against her shoulder.

The shaft of sun lay upon the baby's reddish fair fluff of hair, and the

brightness of it seemed to arrest Phoebe's look, as it might have the

unreasoning gaze of a child. She put out one wavering hand and tried to

touch it; her direction was uncertain, and the hand fell again without

reaching more than the outskirts of the beam. Thinking she wished to

touch the child, the nurse guided her hand, and as Phoebe felt her

fingers fall about the curve of its head a faint look of content passed

across her face. Then she tried to make as though to lift her hand, but

it fell sideways. The nurse moved the baby nearer her, but it was not

that that Phoebe wanted; she kept trying to touch the gleam of sun

upon the white quilt. Ishmael felt a pang go through him as he

remembered the girl who had once before tried to pick the sun....

A few moments later the child, as though stirred by some prescience,

began to whimper and make little struggling movements--Phoebe had died

as simply as she had lived, and as secretively.

CHAPTER IV

THE DISCOVERING OF NICKY

There followed for Ishmael a time when the sordidness inseparable from a

death in a civilised country made of everything a hideousness, and he

was aware of a rising tide of irritability in himself that he found it

difficult to keep within the decorous bounds of the subdued aspect

required from a newly-made widower. Later, after the funeral was over

and life at the Manor had somewhat settled down again, with the

incongruous addition of a nurse, he began to feel that unkind touch of

the ludicrous which accompanies the position of a young man left with a

baby on his hands. He was ashamed of this feeling and tried to suppress

it, but it was there nevertheless. It ceased to twinge when Vassie came

down, her husband with her, to pay him a visit--partly because, he

guessed, it was to see that all was being done for the baby's welfare in

such a masculine house that she had come.

Vassie was resplendent, and if she did not love her husband ecstatically

she was intensely proud of him. She had become an enthusiastic Radical,

and talked of the rights of the people as to the manner bred. Ishmael

suppressed a smile, feeling himself completely the embodiment of

opposite views, and liked her husband in spite of it. He was just not

quite a gentleman--a little too vivid, too clever, too emphatic; but

that he would go far even the Parson believed. Ishmael was grateful to

the pair for coming, and never asked Vassie why she, who held such

socialistic views, had not come to stay when Phoebe was alive.

Afterwards he realised the chief debt he owed to Vassie was that she

first opened his eyes to the delightfulness of his child. One evening of

winter he happened to come in earlier than usual, at the sacred hour of

the bath, and Vassie promptly pounced on him and made him come up to the

room she had arranged according to her modern ideas--the modernity of

'69--as a nursery. A fire leapt in the grate from behind a thing like a

wire meat-safe that Ishmael had never seen before and that had never

been considered necessary to keep him or his brothers from a fiery

death. Before it was spread a creamy-hued blanket, on which stood an

oval bath from whose lip a cloud of steam wavered up, the incense of

this ritual. Vassie sat beside it, a towel over her knees, and sprawling

upon it, its bent legs kicking in the air, its tiny fists clutching at

everything and nothing with the instinctive grasp of life, lay the baby.

James Nicholas Ruan--so called after his uncle and the Parson--was a

little over three months old, just the age when a baby begins to be

attractive even to a male observer.

Ishmael watched him as Vassie skilfully dipped and dried him, turning

him about on her lap to dust the powder into the interstices of his tiny

person, and, far from resenting this as an indignity, he seemed to think

it all a huge joke. Yet the jollity of him, his sudden smiles and his

clutchings and wavings, all seemed addressed to himself alone--part of

some life he alone knew, some vision he alone could see. As he was

soaped and patted, and powdered and turned, there was always the air

about him of a being really supremely independent of everyone; although

his body seemed so helpless one got the impression that his soul was

thoroughly aloof, untouched. When he laughed at the efforts of the

grown-ups to please him it was a sublime condescension, that was all.

When something failed to please him he was recalled to the things of

this world and set up a loud wail, which filled Ishmael with anxiety,

though Vassie and the nurse remained unaccountably calm. The baby

evidently was of their opinion, because he left off wailing with the

suddenness with which he had begun, and finally was tucked into his

cradle and fell soundly asleep, one tiny hand flung palm upwards upon

the pillow by his head after the manner of babies from time immemorial.

Ishmael, though he had first held aloof and then been terrified when

Vassie insisted on his taking the fragile little body in his arms, had

yet felt a thrill go through him when he did so. It was not possible for

a man to have the feeling for the land that he had and not both crave

for a child and feel a deep-rooted emotion at its possession. Yet it was

more than that, he told himself, when he felt the warm little body

utterly dependent on him. He had taken him up before often enough, but

never in the intimacy of this evening, which held the quality of a

shrine.

He showed nothing of what he felt, but that evening, after Vassie and

her ever-talking husband had settled themselves in the parlour, he went

up again to the nursery and told the nurse she could go downstairs for a

little while. Then he crossed over to the cot and, drawing back the

curtain, looked down at the little morsel lying asleep in it. This was

his son, this small rosy thing, his son that would one day walk his land

beside him and would eventually take it over as his own. This was flesh

of his flesh as no wife could ever be, and soul of his soul as well.

As he looked the baby began to whimper and opened its eyes, of the milky

blue of a kitten's. Ishmael went on his knees beside the cot, and eager,

absurdly eager, to be able to cope with the situation successfully

himself, spoke as soothingly as he knew how. The baby's whimper became a

cry. His little hand beat the air. Ishmael struck his forefinger into

the tiny palm, and the little fingers curled round it with that amazing

tenacity of babies, who can clutch and suck before they can do anything

else--getting, always getting, from life, like all young things. The

baby hung firmly on to the finger and his cries died down; his mouth

twitched and puckered to an absurd smile. Ishmael felt an exquisite glow

suffuse his tired heart that had been so dry for months. He dared not

make a sound for fear he broke the spell of contentment that held the

baby and himself; he stayed with his finger enwrapped by those tiny

clinging fingers till long after the baby had fallen asleep again. Then

he crept from the room, and meeting the nurse his face assumed a blank

and casual expression. But his heart guarded the glow that had been lit,

which grew within him.

He began to work at Cloom as never before, because this time he was not

working for himself. As the baby grew and became more and more of a

delight and a companion--and a baby can be an excellent companion--he

felt within him a steady gleam that did not flicker with the mood of the

hour as so many gleams will. He told himself, as he settled into a

manner of life and thought of which the child was the inalienable

centre, that this was indeed the greatest thing in life. Before this,

desire paled and self died down; in the white light of this love all

others faded in smoke, except the love of heaven, of which it was a

part. By heaven he meant not only the future state of the soul, but the

earth on which he trod, and the only thing likely to become pernicious

during the years that followed was his obsession with the one idea and

his certainty that he had found the great secret.

Yet in spite of the passion which held him, and which he told himself

was the master passion, there at times, and more as the years went on,

would arise in him the old feeling--the feeling that something must

surely happen, that round the corner awaited events of which the mere

expectation made each day's awakening a glowing thing. Life was young

and insistent in his veins, and with the lifting dawns, the recurrent

springs, it began to sing anew--for him as apart from his child. Not yet

had he found any one thing to make the complete round, to give him

enough whereby to live without further questioning.

CHAPTER V

CENTRIPETAL MOVEMENT

While little Nicky was still too young to need troubling over in the

matter of schooling, Ishmael yet found himself for the first time

considering the subject, not so much as it would affect his child, but

as it bore upon the children of the countryside--children such as his

own brothers had been, as he might have been himself.... The Education

Act had not long been passed, for it was the spring of '72 when Ishmael

began to take an active part in its administration in the West. He was

still a young man, but the happenings and circumstances of his life had

made for thoughtfulness, and association with his firebrand

brother-in-law was turning that thought into more definite channels than

formerly. Ishmael was becoming less a philosophic dreamer, and he began

to feel within himself the stirring of desire to do things. Not that he

had ever been idle, but his own little corner of the world and the

definite work he had had to do in it had hitherto filled the practical

part of life for him. Now that Cloom was so far set upon the upward way

as to allow him more liberty, bigger though not dearer ideas began to

germinate within him.

The years his youth had seen were stirring enough; the excitements and

scandals of the Crimean War, the chief topic during the time just before

he went to St. Renny, had been followed, in his first year there, by the

tragedy of the Mutiny and the wild stories that had filled the land at

the time. Then, even in Cornwall, the question of the liberation of

slaves had been a burning one, and that, combined with the sad tales of

distress caused in the North and Midlands, had made the American war a

live matter. Ever since he had heard Russell and Gladstone fighting for

the doomed Reform Bill of '66--heard, above all, Bright's magic flow of

words--the political world had held a reality for him it never had

before. Ever since he too had been swept with the crowds to Hyde Park on

that memorable day when the people of England had shown their will so

plainly he had felt within him a rising sense of the necessity of

reforms. Not till he met his brother-in-law, Dan, had it really become

clear to him that there lay his own path.... Up till then, after the

fashion of the young who have not been directly incited either by

upbringing or an exceptional temperament to deeds bigger than

themselves, he had been very engrossed with the personal life of himself

and those he knew. Whenever he had projected beyond that--as he did in a

degree incomprehensible to his family--it had been into the intangible

regions of the spirit.

Now, with the first fine rapture of youth already faded, but its

enthusiasm left burning for scope, with his emotional capacities

exhausted for a long time to come and his mind sickened of the intimate

matters of life, now he was ripening every day for the more material but

impersonal energies involved in helping other people's minds and bodies.

As usual, any measure took far longer to sink in in Cornwall than

up-country, and the Education Bill might for long have remained an empty

sound as far as Penwith was concerned if it had not been for Boase,

Ishmael, and several others of the local gentry. The Nonconformists were

still bitter against it, and there were riots and much heartburning

among the poor. They resented having their children sent to school to

learn more than their parents instead of helping them by earning almost

as soon as their little legs could stagger. Indignation meetings were

held in the local chapels, and the Parson was once stoned from behind a

hedge. He, though by nature a Conservative, was too truly a wise as well

as a compassionate man not to see the crying need for reforms, and

though of necessity he deplored the creeping in of undenominationalism,

yet he knew his parish was too poor to support adequate Church schools,

and he was glad enough to see children in a way to receive some

education. He smiled at the idea of the Bible being "explained" without

a leaning to any particular creed, but he relied on his own Sunday

school to supply that want. Also perhaps even he was not averse to

supporting what had so violently the disapprobation of the

Nonconformists.... There was no particular force in the objections of

these latter in that district, as the Church school, the only one for

miles, would not be large or convenient enough to come under the State

aid of the Bill, so almost from the first it was a matter of building

one of the new Board schools, where the undenominational system abhorred

by Boase would be all that would hold sway.

Ishmael's first definite outward movement came about on an evening when

Boase came up to the Manor to see him and the Flynns, who were staying

with him at the time. Nicky was then three years old, and a daily

growing delight to Ishmael, but the Parson was not without a guileful

plot to wean him somewhat from that allegiance. He had begun to

consider--probably because Daniel Flynn, deeply as he disagreed from him

in many respects, had stirred him to the wider issues--that Ishmael must

be made to take a hand in other affairs than the ordering of his estate

and the upbringing of his son. He had watched with alarm the increasing

inwardness of the man he loved, to him always the boy he remembered--an

inwardness not towards egoism, for that Ishmael's distrust of

individualism, would always prevent, but towards a vague Quietism that

enwrapped him more and more. His son, deeply as he engrossed him,

rather increased this trend than otherwise, and Boase, casting about for

other influences, had irresistibly thought of Flynn.

Daniel Flynn was a living mass of contradictions. An Irishman and a

disciple of the O'Connell tradition, he was yet--though the word had not

then been coined--an Imperialist, for his Canadian sympathies were

strong, and he knew that not yet could the Colonies be entirely cut

loose from the Mother Country. A Liberal, he had been an ardent

supporter of the Dominion scheme evolved under the Tory Government of

Derby. He revered the memory of Durham, that large-ideaed,

generous-hearted, spectacular nobleman whose crime had been to hold by

the spirit rather than by the letter, and whom Dan declared to be the

father not only of Canada, but of the modern Colonial system. Though he

held the Crimean War to be an error of policy and the Chinese War of '57

to be an abomination, he never joined with those of Palmerston's

detractors who accused him of being too French in his sympathies. He

inveighed against all wars in the abstract, yet raged at the loyalty of

O'Connell, which, by stopping short at the use of rebellious force, had

alienated his adherents; and he himself had borne arms for Garibaldi. He

had been among the most passionate critics of the manner in which the

trial of the Manchester Fenians had been conducted and at the sentence

pronounced against them, but his Imperialist and O'Connellised self had

deprecated the action of the Fenians in the first place. He was a

Catholic by blood and an agnostic by temperament; the former made him

abhor blasphemy, and the latter definite boundaries. He was a follower

of Russell, that aristocrat of reform, and yet voted against his Reform

Bill, as many Liberals did, because it was half-hearted. He was an

Irish-Canadian and sat for a manufacturing town in the Midlands.

Daniel Flynn was a man whose brain was too finely balanced not to see

fairly, but whose sympathies were so passionately partisan they were for

ever swaying action to one side or other of the true point of equity. On

this evening the Parson found him in fine fettle for a talk, and if

necessary for a fight. He was sitting in the parlour with Vassie, but

his whole soul was with a letter he had had from Ireland telling of a

disastrous case where the new Irish Land Act, of which even Dan had

hoped great things, had failed more signally than usual.

"Listen to this," he burst forth almost as soon as Boase was seated,

"and tell me if that fool Government doesn't want hanging as high as

those poor Fenians! Here's a man in my own country, where the little

cabin is that saw me born, before ever me father took me to the new

country; and his landlord has told him he'll not give him a penny piece

for the shed and the new wall and the garden patch he's made out of the

bare earth with his own hands. And him going to America, and the money

the scoundrel ought to pay him for them would take his family across in

comfort, and his wife with child at the blessed moment!"

Boase held his head in comic bewilderment, and Dan laughed a little and

calmed down.

"And why can't he make the landlord pay, you'd ask? Because the spalpeen

had it in writing from him when the Bill was passed that if he put on a

new roof to keep the wet off a dying child he should never enforce the

terms of the Act against him.... Didn't I vote against the Act because

of the very clause allowing that? I knew the landlords and the devil's

tricks they'd be up to.... Saving your presence, Ishmael, old fellow,

landlords are the scum of the earth!"

"At least you can't accuse me of being an absentee landlord," said

Ishmael, smiling.

"No, indeed," chimed in Vassie almost indignantly. "If you knew all

he's done here, Dan, it's like a miracle. I don't believe wages or the

standard of living could be lower in Ireland than they were here when

Ishmael took the place in hand."

"I believe you," said Flynn. "It's myself thinks Ishmael has it in him

to be a grand reformer; that's why I can't bear to see him wasting

himself over morals and manure when he could be working away at the

bettering of the world."

Ishmael laughed, but the Parson took up the suggestion seriously.

"The world's a large order," he said, "but this particular corner of it,

perhaps.... There's several matters down here would be the better for

the gentry taking more interest in them. These new school boards, for

instance--"

"Ah, the children...!" cried Flynn, the light of the enthusiast

springing into his fine eyes. "They're what matter, when all's said and

done. If we get the children we get the world. Every generation has in

it the millennium, the seeds of Utopia."

"The phantom cities of Fata Morgana ..." said the Parson with a sigh.

"But we're all the better for sighting them, even so. What d'you think

of the suggestion, Ishmael?"

"What? I didn't know there'd been one made."

"That you should be on this new board," said the Parson boldly. "Lord

Luxullyan has had to retire through illness; he himself suggested you

should take his place."

Ishmael was stricken silent for a moment. The idea seemed to him a

little absurd, but Boase and Flynn, both of whom he respected, seemed

alight with enthusiasm. He thought it over as well as he could in a

short space. Perhaps there might be something in it after all. He

remembered his own youth, how, if it had not been for the especial

interest taken in him by the Parson, he, like his brothers, might have

had to be content with the bare elements of reading and writing imbibed

at the local dame school whenever Annie chose they should go. Tom had

been the only one to educate himself further by his own efforts; he

himself, he believed, would never have done as much as Tom. All around

him he saw the children of his tenants growing up in ignorance, too

ill-educated even to respond to his schemes for advancing them, for

their better health and conditions of labour. He knew there was

opposition to this new scheme, that the Parson had come in for a share

of obloquy, and that the parents themselves, in some cases were their

children's enemies. And lastly, in that swift flashing before him of

these thoughts, came the image of Nicky--of Nicky whose intelligence was

daily showing as a brighter thing, whose jolly little presence meant so

much of the future to him, on whom he was building his own life-work as

he had up till now conceived of it. How if it were his Nicky who was

destined never to learn, never to be pulled out of the slough of deadly

content, never to know any of the things that make life rich and the

horizon not only the material one proscribed by locality? The

countryside was full of little Nickies--not so finely dowered by nature,

doubtless thicker of skull and soul, but still little Nickies.... Better

co-workers with Nicky these could be made. For the first time he saw not

only Cloom and his own tenants, but the whole countryside that he knew

so well, growing finer, freer.

And it was all about a school board! An ordinary enough thing now, when

custom has staled it and the many faults in the system have become

visible; but, printing once invented, school boards could no more be

held back than the eventual express railway engine once Hero of

Alexandria had made his little experiments with a steam kettle. About

the benefit of either there may be two opinions, but none about their

inevitability.

At the time of the Forster Act the school board was a new and thrilling

thing, one more sign of the approaching day when reform should have made

a perfect world. Very famous and great people did not scorn to sit upon

it, and the whole movement was considered in the light of a benevolent

revolution. Ishmael, seeing with the eyes of his age and time, tingled

to the thought. It was the first occasion on which the cup of ambition

had been held before him, and to him it was momentous. He said little,

but did not try and dissuade the Parson when he declared he would take

the matter to the authorities, and he listened to Flynn for the rest of

that evening with less the sensation of the outsider, the mere onlooker,

than ever before.

Reform, reform, was Daniel's theme, especially the reform of the whole

voting system. He was a keen advocate of increased franchise and the

ballot, and here the Parson differed from him. The Parson, in his heart

of hearts, would have taken the vote away from most of the people he

knew; he would certainly not have enlarged its scope, and as to the

system of the secret ballot-box, he was too used to knowing what all his

parishioners did with their votes and to guiding their hands.... There

were steps he could not take with Flynn; but Ishmael, listening, began

to waver in his allegiance towards the Parson. His own nature would have

supported the idea of secret voting even if his progressive spirit, the

eager spirit of youth that can put all right, had not urged him to be on

the side of things new. Already he had once or twice found himself

failing to support the Parson's advocacy of Derby, and in debate upheld

Gladstone against Disraeli. This evening it dawned upon him that Boase

was not infallible, that times had moved past him.... The dear old

Parson, of course he would always feel just the same about him; but

after all he had stayed down here too long and was getting old ... he

could not be expected to know as much as younger men.

It was only towards the end of the evening that Ishmael's complacency

received a slight prick that made it waver. Dan had told of an Irishman

who, after winning a case against his landlord, had hidden behind a

hedge and shot him on the way home from the court.

"It was his heart was broken by all the trouble of it," said Flynn, "and

when the victory was his he didn't want it. If he'd lost his case he

wouldn't have done it. But it's a difficult thing to get into the head

of a jury, especially when it's a packed jury of black Protestants from

the North."

"We don't make nearly enough account, in our laws or our private lives,

of which of the two great divisions any deed falls into," said the

Parson.

"What divisions?" asked Flynn curiously.

"The divisions of what one may call the primary and secondary--I mean,

if a deed be born of itself, a pure creation, or whether it is the

result of a reaction. I have had more girls 'go wrong' after a religious

revival than at any other time. Pure reaction! I firmly believe reaction

is at the bottom of half the marriages and all the divorces of the

world."

"It's at the back of quite half the crime," assented Flynn, "and murder

should certainly be classified under that distinction."

"It's at the bottom of nearly all the decisive steps in a man's own

life," said Ishmael thoughtfully. He was thinking that his self-created

impulses seemed to have ceased with the death of his love for Blanche.

She and Cloom had both been passions born of their own inevitable

necessity. But his marriage came under the heading of "reaction" if ever

anything did. He wondered whether this new fire he felt beginning to

warm him did not partake of some quality of reaction also--reaction from

the dreams and undisciplined longings of adolescence which had served

him so badly. At the thought the glow died down, and greyness spread

over the vague budding schemes that had begun to swell life out.

"But one mustn't confuse the law of reactions with that of cause and

effect," the Parson went on, "which it is easy to do if you let yourself

think sloppily."

Dan pounced on the point eagerly. "No, indeed, or it's all reforms would

be only on the secondary plane, instead of which any reform worthy the

name is a pure impulse of creation. I don't believe any deed, public or

private, of the finest calibre can come under the head of the secondary

type."

"Perhaps not," said Boase, "but it's all the more important a

distinction. Both the foolish and the criminal deed are less blameworthy

if they are the result of some violent reaction, even if the fine deed

is the less unalloyed."

Thinking it over that night with his accustomed honesty, Ishmael came to

the conclusion that it was the law of cause and effect, and not the law

of reactions, which prompted his new stirrings, and he was as nearly

right as any man may be about his own motive power.

CHAPTER VI

THE NATION AND NICKY

The school board was only a beginning, and, though Ishmael never yielded

to Dan's persuasiveness to the extent of standing for Parliament, he

took an increasing share in local administration. Reform was in the air;

it was the great time of reforms, when men burned over what would now

seem commonplaces, so used are we become to the improvements these men

made.

When Gladstone dissolved Parliament in '74 and made his appeal to the

country to reinstate the Liberals, Ishmael boldly made up his mind as to

his own convictions and supported the Liberal candidate. But England was

sick of the Liberals, in spite of the reforms of the late Government.

The dread of Home Rule, the defeat of the Ministry over the unpopular

Irish Universities Bill, and the ill-feeling aroused by the payment of

the fine to the United States for the depredations of the

_Alabama_--which was to have marked the beginning of a new era when all

troubles would be settled by arbitration--these things had all, though

none had loomed as large in the popular imagination as the great

Tichborne case, contributed to the weariness felt where Mr. Gladstone

was concerned. Ishmael, unswayed by the childish temper of the nation,

based his convictions chiefly upon the condition of the lower classes,

which he had too good cause to know was entirely unsatisfactory. Not all

the old English squiredom of Mr. Disraeli--surely the most incongruous

figure of a squire that ever gave prizes to a cap-touching

tenantry--could persuade Ishmael that the labourer might live and rear a

family in decency on ten shillings a week. The labourer had just sprung

into prominence in the eyes of the world, but Ishmael had known him

intimately for years. The Ballot Act having been passed in '72, this

election held a charm, a secret excitement, new in political history;

but in West Penwith the people were so anxious to impress Ishmael with

the fact that they had voted the way he wished, or if it were the Parson

whose favour they coveted, to tell that gentleman that the Conservative

candidate had had the benefit of their votes, that much of the objective

of voting by ballot was lost. Except, as Ishmael observed, that they

were all quite likely to be lying anyway....

As all the world knows, Gladstone's party failed to get in, largely

owing to the influence of the publicans and brewers, who had been

alarmed at his attempts to regulate the liquor traffic, and Mr. Disraeli

came into power; the pendulum had swung once more. Daniel Flynn had paid

a flying visit to the West and made a few impassioned speeches in favour

of the Liberal candidate, and Ishmael had driven him about the country.

If Blanche Grey could have looked ahead she might have seen fit to stand

by her bargain after all. That Vassie and her Irish firebrand should sit

at dinner with Lord Luxullyan, that Ishmael should be called upon to

receive with the other county potentates a Royal princeling on a tour in

the West--who could have foretold these things? Certainly not Ishmael

himself; and though the Parson had had limitless ambitions for him, he

had never thought of them in actual terms.

Neither was Boase altogether happy about the path in life of his

spiritual son, although that path seemed to lead, in its unobtrusive

manner, upward. It was an age when materialism was to the fore, when the

old faiths had not yet seen their way to harmonise with the undeniable

facts of science, when morality itself was of a rather priggish and

material order. And Ishmael would in not so many years now be reaching

the most material time of life--middle age. At present he was very much

under the sway of two entirely different people--Daniel Flynn and little

Nicky.

When Nicky reached the age of eight years he was entrancing, very much

of a personage, and to Ishmael a delightful enigma. Nicky was so vivid,

so full of passing enthusiasm, so confident of himself, with none of the

diffidence that had burdened Ishmael's own youth. He was not a pretty

boy, but a splendidly healthy-looking one, with fair hair, not curly,

but rough, that defied all the blandishments of Macassar oil, and long

limbs, rather supple than sturdy, for ever growing out of his clothes.

He had the pretty coaxing ways of a young animal--Phoebe's ways, with

a bolder dash in them; and his brown eyes looked at one so frankly that

it was a long time before Ishmael could bring himself to understand that

this son of his was apparently without any feeling for the truth. It was

not so much that he lied as that he seemed incapable of discriminating

between the truth and a lie; whatever seemed the most pleasant thing to

say at the moment Nicky said, and hoped for the best. It was a problem,

but Boase was less worried by it than the young father.

"Children often seem to have a natural affinity for the false instead of

the true," he said, "and they grow out of it when they begin to see more

plainly. The great thing is not to frighten him so that he doesn't dare

admit it when he's lied."

Ishmael accepted the Parson's advice thankfully; besides having a

distaste for the idea of corporal punishment, he could hardly have borne

to hurt the eager, bright creature who always hung about him so

confidingly when in the mood, but who had no compunction in not going

near him for days, except to say good-morning and good-night, when in

one of his elusive fits.

Vassie, who had no children of her own, adored her little nephew, and

was very proud of him, so one way and another it was not remarkable that

Nicky was in a fair way to be spoilt. Already he was too much aware of

his own charm, of the fact that to these kind but rather stupid people,

whom it was so easy to deceive, he was wonderful. He seemed to be a

clean-natured boy, but what he did and did not know it would have been

hard to say, as, added to a certain secretiveness which in different

ways both Phoebe and Ishmael possessed, there was in him a strain of

elusiveness; you could not coerce him to a definiteness he did not wish

any more than you could catch a butterfly by stabbing at it in air with

a needle.

Ishmael would sometimes observe him quietly when the boy was unaware of

scrutiny, and always the mere sight of the round close-cropped head, the

delicious idle busyness of childhood, the air at once of import and

carelessness it holds, disarmed and captured him. It seemed to him to be

his own younger self he was watching, and the pathos of unconscious

youth, slipping, slipping, imperceptibly but swiftly, struck at his

heart. How little while ago it seemed since he had been like Nicky,

intent on profound plans, busy in a small but vivid sphere which

focussed in self, which swayed and expanded and grew incredibly bright

or dark beyond hope at such slight happenings! Looking back on his own

childhood, drawing on it for greater comprehension of his Nicky, he

never could connect it up with his present self, it always seemed to him

a different Ishmael that he saw, who had nothing to do with the one he

knew nowadays. He saw his own figure, small and alive, as he might have

looked at some quite other person into whose nature he had been gifted

with the power to see clearly, not as himself younger, less developed.

In the same way he regarded his early manhood, when he looked back upon

the ardent boy who had loved Blanche and staked all of intensity that

apparently he was capable of on that one personality. Phoebe too....

With memory of her he felt more alien still, unless he were looking at

Nicky; then he would have a queer sensation that he was seeing some

embodiment of what she had stood for to the passionate Ishmael who had

married her. Sometimes he wondered what it would have been like if she

had not died.... She would have lost her charm perhaps, become

coarser--or would that peculiar dewy softness of hers have survived the

encroachments of the years? Further apart they would inevitably have

grown; less and less of sympathy between them would have been

inevitable. So much his honesty had to admit. Passion, which he

flattered himself he had so mastered, almost as though it had been

shocked out of him on that terrible night of waiting for its fruit to

come and rend the mother's life away from her--would passion have lived?

He knew that as anything individual between her and him it could not

have, so that he would always have been meaning to deny its claims, and

would always have been falling into what would have become a mere custom

of the flesh impossible to break, only yielding, after years of it, to

boredom.

From that he had been saved, and he gave thanks without pretence, for

with the freedom of his body was enwrapped the freedom of his soul. Yet

he was still a young man when Nicky was nearing "double figures"--only

in the early thirties. To him the years that had passed since Nicky's

birth were so different in quality from all that had gone before that it

was small wonder they seemed to him another life and he himself another

person. Nicky had been the dominating human factor; the public life of

the times, as it affected his own corner in particular, the chief

interest which had kept him hard at work, too busy for the dreams of his

unsatisfied youth. He had altered, hardened, sharpened, become more of a

man of the world, thought himself contented, and in action and practical

affairs drowned mental speculation and emotion.

This was the Ishmael of the late 'seventies, a being altered indeed, but

not more so than the England of that period was from the England of the

'fifties and 'sixties. That she had grown, improved, set her house in

better order, it would have been futile to deny--the improvements were

of the visible kind, patent to all men. That Mr. Disraeli's new policy

of Imperialism was to be a great and splendid thing there were few men

among the Liberals wise enough to foresee, and Ishmael was not yet

amongst them. That he himself had grown, developed, become a useful

member of society, no one who knew him would have denied, but whether

his growth had been altogether towards the light was another question.

The old Parson was a wise and a patient man who had gone too far along

life's road to take any stage in it as necessarily final, and he watched

and bided the time perhaps more prayerfully, certainly more silently,

than of yore. Ishmael never failed in consideration, in affection, but

there had grown a barrier that was not entirely made of a difference in

politics. He knew it even if Ishmael, the child of his heart, seemed not

to care enough one way or the other to be aware of it.

One day, a sunlit blowy day of spring, when the cloud-shadows drew

swiftly over the dappled hills and the young corn was showing its first

fine flames of green, Ishmael received a letter. Long after it had come

he sat with it in his hand, reading and re-reading it. A tinge of

excitement, a heady something he had long not felt, because it was

purely personal, went through and through him as he read. The letter was

from Killigrew, from whom he had heard nothing for several years, and it

held news to awake all the old memories in a flood. The letter began by

asking for news of Ishmael, and went on with a brief dismissal of the

writer's own life during the past years. It had been the "usual

thing"--no small measure of success, friendships, women, play and work.

What mattered was that Killigrew had suddenly taken it into his head he

must come down again to Cloom. He was coming and at once. He gave a few

characteristic reasons.

"I have lost something and till yesterday I couldn't for the life of me

tell what," wrote Killigrew. "It's been a good time, and I've enjoyed

most of it, but suddenly it occurred to me that really I wasn't enjoying

it as much as I thought I was, as much as I used to. I lay on the lawn

of this confounded suburban villa whence I'm writing to you now--I'm

putting in a few days at my mother's--and I was doing nothing particular

but think over a lot of old times. And there came into my mind without

any warning--flashed into it rather--a saying of my old master's in

Paris. He was a wise old bird, the wisest I ever knew--somehow reminds

me of your old Padre, though you couldn't meet two men more different.

And what I remembered was this. 'The test of any picture, or indeed of

any of the arts, is whether or not it evokes ecstasy.' I don't know

whether it's the test of the arts, but I know it's the test of life. And

that is what I've lost. Ecstasy! One still feels it now and again, of

course, but how more and more rarely! Well, I lay on the lawn, with this

light flooding in on me, and suddenly I opened my eyes and what do you

think I saw? There was a flock of starlings in the sky, and I opened my

eyes full on 'em, so that I got 'em against the west, which was full of

sunset. They were flying in a dense mass between me and the glow. I

could see their beating wings in serried ranks of black V-shapes. And,

quite suddenly, at some bird-command communicated--heaven knows how--the

whole flock of them heeled over, presenting nothing but the narrow edge

of their wings, hair-fine, all but invisible. In that one flashing

moment the whole solid crowd of birds seemed to vanish, as though

swallowed up by a shutter of sky. I'd never seen it before, and I might

have gone through life without the luck to see it. I can tell you, it

made me tingle. I could have shouted aloud, but the sound of my own

voice would have spoilt it so. I got ecstasy all right that time, and I

realised with a pang of gratefulness that it's the impersonal things

that produce ecstasy. In personal contact you may get delirium, but

that's not the same thing. This, says I, is the sort of thing I'm after.

And so of course I thought of you and that wonderful place of yours and

that nice solid impersonality that always wrapped you round and made you

so restful. So I'm coming down. I won't stay with you; find me digs

somewhere--I'm better on my own."

Ishmael read so far, where the letter ended abruptly; there was,

however, a postscript:--"P.S.--Do you remember Judith Parminter? She

wants a holiday and is coming down with a friend. If Mrs. Penticost is

still in the land of the living you might fix up for them there."

Ishmael followed out all Killigrew's instructions, but that night he

took the letter over to Boase. It was as though the atmosphere of the

old days re-established by its arrival, the habit of the old days,

claimed him sub-consciously. The Parson read it, but did not comment

beyond the obvious remark that it would all be very pleasant. After

Ishmael had gone he sat and thought for a long while. What struck him

as noteworthy was that Killigrew should have been satiated with the

personal, which he had cultivated so assiduously, at the moment when, or

so it seemed to him, Ishmael, after a life spent for so long in the

impersonal, might be expected to react in exactly the opposite

direction. Ishmael, as he walked home, was only aware that the letter

had stirred him beyond the mere pleasurable expectation of once again

seeing his friend. That one word "ecstasy" had stung him to something

that had long been dormant--the desire to feel life again as something

wonderful, that did not only content but could intoxicate as well. He

was unaware of this revulsion, and was only vaguely surprised that a

queer discontent should mingle with his pleasure.

CHAPTER VII

PARADISE COTTAGE AGAIN

When the train came slowly into the station and clanked to rest with a

long, tired sigh of steam, Ishmael's first search was for Killigrew's

red beard and pale face. While his gaze roved up and down the line of

carriages a couple of women, one of whom seemed to know him, swam into

his range of vision and distracted his attention.

It was nearly ten years since he had seen Judith Parminter, and he

stared for a moment in bewilderment. Fashion had undergone in those

years one of its rare basic changes. Instead of the swelling curves

which had been wont to encompass women, so that they seemed to float

upon proud waves, skirts had become a species of swaddling clothes

caught back below the knees, whence a series of frills clung tightly

about the feet. Rows of flutings, tuckings and what-not, confounded

simplicity of line, but all the drapery was pulled in a backwards

direction and puffed to a sudden bulkiness behind, so that women looked

as though they were walking in the face of a perpetual wind. On their

heads they were wont to perch delicious little hats, poked forward, in

contradistinction to the trend of the draperies, slanting nosewards and

tilted up in the rear by plaited chignons.

Of the two women advancing towards Ishmael, the tall dark one, by far

the elder, wore under a black silk jacket a gown of soft red, the

terra-cotta then beginning to be in vogue amidst the artistic elect, but

it was smartly cut, whereas the peacock blue garment of her companion

showed a depressing sloppiness, which was not helped out by the

drooping rows of many-coloured beads which were slung round her throat

or the peacock feathers that trailed from her shovel hat of gauged silk.

This girl, Ishmael saw vaguely, had a pale chubby face like a child, but

the long, dark countenance of the other, lit by a smile of recognition,

was suddenly familiar to him. Only--Judy had become a woman, a thin,

rather sad-looking woman, with a melancholy that was not the old effect

of tragedy for which her monkey-look and the bistre shadows beneath her

eyes had been responsible without any deeper cause. The monkey-look was

there still, but Judy was almost beautiful in spite, or perhaps more

truly because, of it. Ishmael felt her lean, strong hand, ungloved, come

into his.

"I knew it was you!" exclaimed Judy in the husky voice he remembered.

"You've changed, but only along the lines one would have expected. Mr.

Killigrew can't come--not for a day or two. He told me to tell you he'd

try to get down by the end of the week. May I introduce you to Miss

Georgie Barlow?"

Another hand was thrust into his, with a sudden _gauche_ movement that

was not without a girlish charm. Ishmael found himself looking at the

pale chubby face, and the only thing he noticed in it was the mouth.

Georgie Barlow stayed in his mind as "the girl with the mouth," as she

frequently did to those who met her even once. She had a wonderful

mouth, and was wont to declare it to be her only feature. It was not

very red, but very tenderly curved, the lips short, flat in modelling

and almost as wide at the ends as the centre, which just saved them from

being a cupid's bow. The corners were deeply indented, tucked in like

those of a child. Not only the lips but the planes of the chin and

cheeks immediately around them were good, very tender in colour and

curves, with the faint blur of fine golden down to soften them still

more.

Such was Georgie Barlow--a short, rounded little creature, with a bare

neck that was not long but delicate, and surrounded by three "creases of

Venus" like that of a baby. Her rather small but frank blue eyes held a

boyish look that was intensified by the fact that her hair was cut short

after the new fashion in a certain set and brushed almost to her fair

eyebrows in a straight fringe in front, while on the nape of her neck it

curved in little drake's tails of soft brown. The blue beads riding up

her neck ruffled the tails like tiny feathers.

Both she in her "artistic" way and Judy in her quiet smartness were very

different from the women Ishmael had been seeing of late years--the

dowdy county ladies or Vassie in her splendid flamboyance. He felt oddly

shy with them; the ageing of Judy, so marked and somehow so

unexpected--she had seemed such a child only ten years ago--made him

feel she was as much of a stranger as her little companion, and there

was also about her some new quality he could not but feel, a something

aloof, a little hard, for all her gentleness of manner. He had never

envisaged her as growing into this self-possessed woman, whose most

noticeable quality, had it not been for her aloofness, would have been a

certain worldliness. He felt his dreams of the old time rudely upset.

Killigrew's erratic defection, the altered feeling of Judy, which made

him uncertain even whether to call her by her Christian name as of old

or not, the presence of this oddly-attired girl with the mouth, were all

so different from what he had been expecting. He told himself that when

Killigrew did arrive he also would probably be a different creature from

of old, not knowing that exactly what made Killigrew such a wearing

person to keep up with was that he never changed, only became more

himself.

Judith was not very illuminating on the subject when he questioned her,

merely answering him with an affirmative when he asked her whether she

had seen a good deal of Killigrew since the old days, and he was forced

to keep company with his curiosity till Killigrew should appear out of

the blue a few days hence.

Meanwhile, he drove the two ladies to Mrs. Penticost's, Judy saying that

as they had luggage she thought it would be simpler to go straight there

instead of stopping for supper at the Manor. The next day, however, both

were to meet Boase there for tea.

Meanwhile Ishmael had to relinquish them to the care of Mrs. Penticost

and go back to the Manor, feeling discontented and unable to settle to

anything, while at the same time he was not at all sure he was glad that

Killigrew had ever taken it into his head to come down and send his

harem, as Ishmael annoyedly termed it to himself, before him. Not so

Mrs. Penticost. She still called Judith her lamb, and after folding her

to her portly breast was not likely to feel any tremors when she held

her off to gaze at her.

"You'm gone through somethen' since I saw 'ee, my dear," she announced

candidly. "There's lines under your pretty eyes that dedn' belong to be

there. I shouldn' wonder if it wasn't the men as had putt en there.

Menfolk are like children--they'm a pack of worry, but the women can't

get along happy wethout en."

"Well, at least I haven't any children, Mother Penticost," said Judy,

laughing.

"Aren't married, are you, my dear? Mr. Ruan ded say 'Miss Parminter' to

I when he came about the rooms."

"No, I'm not married."

"And why's that?" demanded the direct Mrs. Penticost. "Not because they

haven't asked 'ee, I'll lay. Couldn't 'ee fancy none of en, my dear

sawl?"

"Not enough for that, apparently."

"I used to think you and that Killigrew weth his red head and his free

tongue would make a match of it, but I suppose it was not to be....

Never mind, my dear. We never goes to church weth the first one as takes

our fancy."

"Oh, I shall never marry!" declared Judith lightly. "By the way, I hear

Mr. Ruan has a beautiful boy, Mrs. Penticost."

"Aw, dear sawl, so he have. Best thing that flighty little faggot to the

mill ever ded was to make that babe. Children's a deal of trouble,

though, so they are. Some has boys and wants maids, and some has only

maids and provokes the Lard to send en boys, as though there weren't

enough men in the world. No pleasing some folks."

"They're a trouble that's well worth while, anyway. Children, I mean,"

said Judith.

"Ah! so some of us says as hasn't got en. We can all stand any joys that

come along, but we'd all like to have the choosen' of our troubles,"

replied Mrs. Penticost non-committally.

"I certainly think children must be the nicest troubles one can choose,"

remarked Judith.

"There's many a poor maid that's thought otherwise," responded Mrs.

Penticost.

"Oh, well, I didn't mean that way ... that's a trouble for the children

too when they grow up ... worse than for the mother. That's why it's

wicked to have them like that. I meant if one were married."

"It's not all honey then, my dear. Look at Jenny Trewen down to the

church-town. She'm never had naught but boys, and she sticks every

virtue on that maid she always wanted and that never came. 'Twould have

been just the same if it had been the other way on, if you see what I do

mane. 'Tes the babes as never are born that lie nearest to a mother's

heart...."

"What a terrible theory!" broke in Georgie, swinging her legs as she

sat perched upon the corner of the table. "And according to the same

theory, are the men one never meets the nicest, and the picture one

never paints the finest, and the kiss that never comes off the

sweetest?"

Mrs. Penticost turned and surveyed her with a kindly tolerance for her

impertinent youth.

"You'm spaken' truer than you do knaw," she told her. "And truer than

you'll knaw for many a day to come if you'm one of the lucky ones. Now I

suppose you'll be like you always were, Miss Judy, washing the life out

of 'ee weth hot water? The bath's gone up overstairs."