Presently Abraham asked, 'How came you to be there?'

'Master sent Jim out with me in the big boat after ducks, and he was in

the punt,' answered one of the men. 'He bade us lie by at the mouth of

the Rhyn, while he went on to drive the birds our way; there was a lot,

and we thought to pepper into a whole flight. He was not long away--not

above an hour--when we saw the Ray house afire, and heard him shouting

to us to come on, so we rowed as hard as hard, and by the time we landed

he had broke open the door, and got the old lady out. We helped as best

we might, and saved a deal of things.'

'They ain't worth much,' said Abraham. 'There's nothing in the house

worth five pound,--take the whole lot. The cow was the only thing would

pay for saving, and she was safe. I slept in the loft over her.'

'The life of your mistress was worth something, I hope, Abby.'

'Don't know that. Not to me, anyhow. She's not mistress; it is Mehalah

that orders, and does everything. I don't reckon an old woman's life is

worth a crown, not to nobody but herself, may be; but that is her

concern not mine. She was an ailing aguish body. Why!' exclaimed

Abraham banging his can of ale on the table, 'when you've saved an old

woman who is nought but a trouble to everybody as does with her, of what

wally is it? They might have paid you to let her alone, but not to lug

her out of the fire. Now, Mehalah, she was another sort. But you

didn't save her.'

'Where was she? She was not in the house.'

'How am I to know? I don't spy after her. Others may,' he gave a sly,

covert look at Elijah, 'I don't. But I reckon she was out on the

saltings watching for the sheep-stealers.'

'Have you had sheep-stealers on the Ray?'

'Aye, we have.'

'Did you watch for them at night?'

'I!' with a grunt. 'They were not my sheep. No, thank you. Let them

that wallys the sheep watch 'em. I do what I'm paid to do, and I don't

do more.'

Mehalah did not listen to the whole of this conversation. She had

satisfied herself that Abraham was there, and had heard how Rebow and

his men came to be on the spot when the fire broke out; she then closed

the door again, and returned to the window. She did not leave her

station till dawn, except to attend to the fire, to make it up from the

heap stacked by the side of the chimneypiece. When day began to break,

she seated herself on a stool by the bed, and laying her head on the

mattress fell asleep, and slept for an hour or two, uneasily, troubled

by dreams and the discomfort of her position.

When she awoke the house was quiet. She went downstairs, with

reluctance, and found no one stirring, but the fire made up and a kettle

boiling over it, the table spread with everything she could desire for

breakfast. Elijah, Abraham, and the other men were gone. There was a

canister with tea on the board. Mehalah made her mother some, and took

it up to her.

The old woman was awake, and drank the tea with eagerness.

'I don't think I can get out of bed to-day, Mehalah!' she said. 'I feel

my limbs all of an ache; the cold has got into the marrow of my bones,

and I feel as if the frost were splitting them, as at times it will

split pipes. I must lie abed till the thaw comes to them.'

'Can you eat anything?'

'I think I can.'

'Mother, how long are we going to remain here?'

'It is wery comfortable, I am sure.'

'But we cannot stay in this house.'

'Where else can we go?'

'I will get into service somewhere.'

'You cannot leave me. Where shall I go? I cannot leave my bed, and I

don't think the frost will get out of my bones for a week or more.'

'I can not, I will not, remain here.'

'Where can we go?'

Mehalah put both her hands to her brow. She could not answer this

question. Were she alone, she could get a situation in a farmhouse,

perhaps; but with a sick mother dependent on her, this was not possible.

No farmer would take them both in for the sake of her services.

'Where else can we go?' again asked Mrs. Sharland; then in a repining

voice, 'If Master Rebow houses us for a while, it is very good of him,

and we must be thankful, for we have no chance of shelter elsewhere.

Where is the money to pay for rebuilding the farmhouse? Do you think my

cousin, Charles Pettican----'

'No, no,' exclaimed Mehalah, 'not a word about him.'

'He spoke up and promised most handsomely,' said Mrs. Sharland.

'He can do nothing, mother, I will not ask him.'

'A man that has a gilded balcony to his house wouldn't miss a few pounds

for running up a wooden cottage.'

'I will not go to him again.'

'My dear child,' said Mrs. Sharland, 'I don't doubt he would take us in

on a visit for a while, when we are forced to leave Red Hall.'

'You think we shall not be obliged to remain here?'

'I don't see how we can. It is very good of Master Rebow to house us

for a bit, but I doubt we can't stick as fixtures. I only wish we

could. Anyhow stay here a bit we must. We have nowhere else to go to,

except to my cousin Charles.'

Mehalah knew what this alternative was worth. It was a relief to her to

hear her mother speak of their stay in Red Hall as only temporary. She

could not endure to contemplate the possibility of its being permanent.

She formed a hope that she would be able to find work somewhere, and

hire a small cottage; she was strong enough to do as much as a man.

During the day, everything that had been rescued from the fire on the

Ray was brought to Red Hall, even the cow, which was driven round by

land, a matter of eleven miles. The old clock arrived, and was set up

in the large room below, an old cypress chest or 'sprucehutch' as Mrs.

Sharland called it, covered with curious shallow carvings picked out

with burnt umber, representing a hawking party, that contained her best

clothes, and was a security against moth, was conveyed into her bedroom.

It weighed half a ton. The old Lowestoft dishes she valued were placed

in the rack in the hall along with the ware that belonged to Elijah.

The toad-jug, a white jug with a painted and glazed figure of a toad

squatting inside it in the neck, was also brought to Red Hall, so even

were two biscuit-china poodles with shaven posteriors and with manes and

tufted tails, that had stood on the chimneypiece at the Ray. The

warming-pan of brass with a stamped portrait of H.M. George I. on it was

likewise transported to Red Hall, and hung up in the little oak-panelled

parlour behind the entrance hall generally occupied by Rebow.

By degrees most of the property of Mrs. Sharland was brought to the

house, and the small oak parlour was furnished with it. Her arm-chair

of leather with high back was placed in the hall by the great fireplace

that bore the inscription, 'When I hold, I hold fast.' There were also

some things belonging specially to Glory that had been saved, and these

were put in the oak parlour. The satisfaction of Mrs. Sharland at

finding herself surrounded by her goods was extreme. She did not leave

her bed, but she insisted on her daughter bringing her up everything

that could be carried, that she might turn it about, and inspect it

minutely and rejoice over what was uninjured, and bewail what had

suffered. One of the poodles had lost an ear and part of its tail. The

old woman cried and grumbled and scolded about this injury, as though it

were on a level with the destruction of the house. She would see the

men Jim and Joe who had brought it from the Ray in the boat; she

catechised them minutely, she insisted on knowing which had brought the

dog out of the burning house, where it had been placed till removal, and

fretted, till they promised to examine the spot beneath the thorn tree

where the china brute had spent the night, and also the bottom of the

boat, for the missing tail tuft and ear tip.

'You know,' she said, 'if I boil them in milk with the dog, I can get

them to stick on.'

Among certain persons, the mind is destitute of perspective, and

consequently magnifies trifles and disregards great evils. Mrs.

Sharland had a mind thus constituted. She harped all day on the

battered biscuit-china dog, because it was placed on the mantelpiece of

her bedroom, and was under her eyes whenever she turned her head that

way. The farmhouse was almost forgotten in her distress about the tail;

her flaming home formed but a red background to the mutilated white

poodle.

Mehalah saw nothing of Elijah Rebow all day. He was several times in

the house; directly her foot sounded on the stairs, however, he

disappeared. But she saw and felt that he was considering her; his care

to recover all the little treasures and property on the Ray evinced

this; and in the house he provided everything she could need; he placed

meat on the table in the hall for her dinner, and had boiled potatoes

over the fire. They were set ready for her, she had only to take them

out. Her mother ate heartily, and was loud in expressions of

satisfaction at the comfort that surrounded them.

'I hope, Mehalah, we shan't have to leave this in a hurry.'

Glory did not answer.

Towards evening Abraham Dowsing arrived with the cow. The girl heard

the low, and ran down--she could not help it--and threw her arms round

the neck of the beast. There was a back stair leading to the kitchen

and yard, by which she could descend without entering the hall, and by

this means she avoided Elijah, who, she was aware, was there.

Elijah, however, came to the top of the steps after she had descended,

and looked into the yard where she was. Mehalah at once desisted from

lavishing her tenderness on the animal.

Abraham stood sulkily by.

'I've had a long bout,' he said.

'I dare say you have, Abraham,' she answered.

'I want something to eat and drink, I haven't bit nought since morning.

There's nothing but ashes on the Ray now, and they are red-hot. You

don't expect me to fill my belly on them.'

Mehalah put her hand to her mouth and checked her tongue, as she was

about to tell him to go indoors and get some supper. She had now

nothing to give the old man. She lived on the bounty of Rebow.

'I cannot go without my wittles,' persisted Abraham. 'Now I want to know

where my wittles are to come from. I paid fourpence at the Rose for

some bread and cheese, and you owes me that.'

'There is the money,' said Mehalah producing the coin.

'Ah! that is wery well. But where am I to get my wittles now? Am I

your servant or ain't I? If I am,--where's my wittles?'

'Come here, Abraham,' said Elijah, from the kitchen door. 'There is

bread and cold potatoes and meat here. You shall have your supper, and

you can sleep in the loft.'

'Look here, master,' pursued the sullen old man, 'I want to know further

where I'm to look for my wages.'

'To me,' said Rebow. 'I take you on.'

'Where am I to work?'

'Here, or on the Ray, looking after the sheep.'

'The sheep are not yours, they are hers,'--pointing to Mehalah with his

thumb.

'The Ray and Red Hall are one concern,' answered Rebow. 'You look to me

as your master, and to her as your mistress;' then he entered and

slammed the door.

Abraham shrugged his shoulders. He leered at Mehalah, who had put her

hands to her forehead.

'When are you going to church? Eh, mistress? I thought it was coming

to this. But I don't care so long as I gets my wittles and wage.'

Abraham went slowly into the cattlehouse with the cow. Mehalah remained

rooted to the spot, pressing her brow.

This was more than she could endure. She ran up the steps, she would

speak to Rebow while her heart was full. She dashed through the kitchen

and into the hall. He was not there. As she ran on, she tripped and

almost fell; and recovered herself with horror. She had almost

precipitated herself through the trap into the vault beneath. The door

was thrown back, her foot had caught this. Faugh! an odour rose from

the cellar as from the lair of a wild beast. She looked in, there was

the maniac racing up and down in the den fastened by his chain,

jabbering and uttering incoherent cries. He was almost naked, covered

with filthy rags, and his hair hung over his face so that she could

distinguish no features by the dim light that strayed down from the

trap, and from the horn lanthorn that Elijah had placed on the steps.

Rebow had a pitchfork, and he was tossing fresh straw to his brother,

and raking out the sodden and crushed litter of the wretched man.

Mehalah could not bear the sight; she withdrew. She needed a little

while by herself to consider what was best to be done, to think of what

had taken place. She opened the front door, and descended by the long

flight of steps over the arch. Then she saw that a shutter covered the

circular window that in summer lighted the den of the maniac. This was

now closed to shut out the cold of winter. There was a door. As she

looked, Rebow opened it from within, and appeared, raking out the litter

and the gnawed bones, the relics of his brother's repasts. He did not

notice her, or he pretended not to do so, and she shrank back. Her wish

to speak with him had gone from her. She was not equal to an interview

till she had been alone for a while, and had gathered up her strength.

An interview with him must be a contest. It was clear to her that he

was resolved that she should stay at Red Hall. She was equally

determined not to do so. But how to get away and remove her mother was

more than she could discover.

She left the house and the garden round it, and walked through the

meadow till she reached the sea-wall. She ascended that, and went along

it to the spot where the Red Hall marsh divided the Tollesbury Fleet

from the Virley and Salcott Creeks.

Then she threw herself beneath the windmill, the mill that pumped the

water out of the dykes, and worked day and night whenever there was wind

to move the sails. The mill was now at work. The wings rushed round,

and the pump painfully creaked, and after every stroke sent a dash of

water into the sea over the wall.

Mehalah hoped that here, away from her mother and Rebow, and the sights

and sounds of Red Hall, she might be able to think. But it was not so.

Her numbed head was unable to form any plans. She looked out at sea, it

was leaden grey, ruffled with angry waves, and the mews screamed and

dipped in them. The sky overhead was overcast. The Bradwell shore

looked grey and bleak and desolate; there was not a sail in the offing.

The fancy took her to sit and wait, and if she saw a ship pass to take

it as a good omen, a promise of escape from her present perplexity.

She sat and waited. The sea darkened to a more sullen tint. The mews

were no longer visible. Mersea with its trees and church tower

disappeared. Bradwell coast loomed black as pitch against the last

lingering light of day. Not a sail appeared.

Far away, out to sea, as the darkness deepened, gleamed a light. It

gleamed a moment, then grew dim and disappeared in the blackness. A

minute, and then it waxed, but waned again, and once more all was night.

So on, in wearisome iteration. What she saw was the revolving Swin

light fifteen miles from land, a floating Pharos. She thought of

Elijah's words, she thought of the horrible iterations in the barrow on

the hill, the embracing and fighting, embracing and fighting, loving and

hating, loving and hating, till one should conquer of the twin but rival

powers.

*CHAPTER XVII.*

*FACE TO FACE.*

Mehalah returned slowly to the house, her spirits oppressed with gloom.

It was night without and within, before her face, and in her soul. The

wind sighed and sobbed among the rushes and over the fen, in a

disconsolate, despairing manner, and the breath of God within--the

living soul--sighed and sobbed like His breath that blew over the wintry

marsh without. Not a star looked down from His heaven above, and none

looked up from His heaven below in the little confines of a human heart.

Mehalah could scarce see her way in the fen, among the dykes and drains;

she was as unable to find a path in the level of her life.

She reached Red Hall at last, and mounted the front stairs to the

principal door. She would see Elijah now. It were better to speak with

him and come to some understanding at once. It was intolerable to allow

the present position to remain unexplained, and the future undetermined.

She hesitated at the door. It was not without a struggle that she could

open it and go in and face the man whose hospitality she was receiving

and yet whom she abhorred. She knew that she was greatly indebted to

him. He had saved her mother's life, he had secured from destruction a

large amount of their property; yet she could not thank him. She

resented his intrusion into their affairs, when anyone else would have

been unobjectionable. She disliked him all the more because she knew

she was heavily in his debt; it galled her almost past endurance to feel

that she and her mother were then subsisting on his bounty.

'Come in, Glory!' shouted Elijah from within, as she halted at the door.

She entered. He was seated by the fire with his pipe in his hand; he

had heard her step on the stairs, and had paused in his smoking, and had

waited in a listening, expectant attitude.

He signed her to take a chair--her mother's chair--on the other side of

the hearth. She paid no attention to the sign, but stood in the middle

of the room, and unconsciously covered her eyes with her hands. Her

pulses quivered in her temples. Her heart grew cold, and a faintness

came over her.

'The light is not too strong to dazzle you,' said Elijah, 'put your

hands down, I want to see your face.'

She made an effort to retain them where they were, but could not; they

fell.

'Sit down.'

She shook her head.

'Sit down.'

'I want to speak with you, Elijah, for a moment. I must speak with you.'

Her heart palpitated, her breast heaved. She could only utter short

sentences.

'Sit down there!' he beckoned with the stalk of his pipe.

She still refused to obey. Her power was slipping from her. The

exhaustion after the excitement she had gone through had affected even

her stout will. She resolved to oppose him in this trifling matter, but

knew that her resolution was infirm. She clung desperately to what

remained to her of power.

'I will not listen to a word you say unless you sit down.'

He paused, and looked at her; then he said, 'Go to your mother!' and

continued his smoking, with face averted.

'Elijah, I know what you have done, and are doing now for my mother.'

He sprang from his seat, and strode up and down the room, turning and

glowering at her, sucking at his pipe, and making it red and angry like

his eyes in the firelight. He walked fast and noisily on the brick

floor, with his high shoulders up and his head down. She watched him

with painful apprehension; he reminded her of the mad brother pacing in

the vault below. She could not speak to him whilst he persisted in this

irritating, restless tramp. There was no help for it. She dropped into

her mother's leather chair.

'There!' said he, and he flung a ring with some keys attached to it,

into her lap. 'Take them. They are yours now. The keys of everything

in the house, except of----' he jerked his pipe towards the den beneath.

'I cannot take them,' she said, and let them slide off her lap upon the

floor.

'Pick them up!' he ordered.

'No,' she said firmly, 'I will not. Elijah, we must come to an

understanding with each other.'

'We already understand each other,' he said, pausing in his walk. 'We

always did. I can read your heart. I know everything that passes there,

just as if it was written in red letters on a page. I understand you,

and there's nobody else in the world that can. I was made to read you.

I heard a Baptist preacher say one day that God wrote a book, and then

He created mankind to read it. You are a book, and God made me to read

you. I can do it. That wants no scholarship, it comes by nature to me.

Others can't. They might puzzle and rack their heads, they'd make

nothing of you. But you are clear as light of day to me. You

understand me?'

'I do not.'

'You _will_ not. You set your obstinate, wicked mind against

understanding me. I heard a preacher once say--I went to chapel along

of my mother when I was a boy; I goes nowhere now but to the Ray after

you--What is God? It is that as makes a man, and keeps him alive, and

gives him hopes of happiness, or plunges him in hell. Every man has his

own God; for there is something different makes and mars each man. What

do I want but you, Glory? It is you that can make and keep me alive,

and you are my happiness or my hell.'

'But,' said he standing still again, and flourishing his hand and pipe,

'as I was saying, I heard a preacher say once, that God made every man

of a lump of clay and a drop of spittle, and that He made always two at

a time. He couldn't help it. He has two hands and ain't right and left

handed as we, but works with both, and then He casts about the men He

has made, anywhere. Hasn't He made all things double? Have not you two

hands and two feet and two eyes? Is there not a sun and a moon, are

there not two poles to the earth, and two sexes, and day and night, and

winter and summer? and--' he went up before Mehalah, and with a burst of

passion--'and you and me?' Then he recommenced his pacing, but slower,

and continued, 'Wherever those two are that God made with His two hands,

they must come together. It don't matter where they be, if one is in

Mersea, and t'other is in Asia, or Africa, or China, or America, or

London, it don't matter, soon or late, they must come together, and when

they come together then they are in heaven. Now if a man takes some

other left-handed figure--it was the left hand made woman--then it don't

matter, he can't go against his destiny. He has taken the wrong woman,

and he is not happy. He knows it all along, and he feels restless and

craving in his soul, and if he does not find the proper one in this

world when he goes out of it, he waits and wanders, till the proper one

dies and begins to hunt about for her right-hand man. That is what

makes ghosts to ramble. Ghosts are those that have married the wrong

ones, wandering and waiting, and seeking for their right mates. Do you

hear the piping and the crying at the windows of a winter night? That

is the ghosts looking in and sobbing because they are out in the cold

shivering till they meet their mates. But when they meet, then that is

heaven. There's a heaven for everyone, but that is only once for all

when the two doubles find each other, and if that be not in this life,

why it is after. And there is a hell too, but that isn't reserved for

all, and it does not last for ever and ever, but is only when one has

taken the wrong mate and has found it out.' He stopped. He had become

very earnest and excited by what he had said. He came again over

against Mehalah. 'Glory!' he continued, 'don't you see how the moon

goes after the sun and cannot come to him? She is his proper mate and

double, and the sun don't know, and won't have it, and so day and night,

and winter and summer, and waxing and waning goes on and on. But that

won't go on for ever. The sun will grow sad at heart, and wane for want

of the moon some day, and then there will be a great flare and blaze and

glory, and they will be in heaven. And now the two poles of the earth

are apart, and so long as they keep apart, the world rolls on in misery

and pain, and that is what makes earthquakes, and volcanoes, and great

plagues--the poles are apart which ought to be together. But they are

drawing gradually nearer each other. The seasons now are not what they

used to be, and that is it. The poles are not where they were, they are

straining to meet. And some day they will run into one, and that will

be the end. I've heard say that in the Bible it is spoken that there'll

be an end of this world. I could have known that without the Bible. The

poles must come together some day, and be one. Glory!' he went on, 'you

and I are each other's doubles, you was made with God's left hand, and I

with his right, at the same moment of time, and He cast you into the

Ray, and me to Red Hall. There was not much space between, only some

water and ooze and marsh, and we've been drawing and drawing nearer and

closer for ever so long, and now you are here, under my roof. You can't

help it. You cannot fight agin it. You was made for me and I for you,

and you'll have a life of hell unless you take me now. I must be yours.

You thought you'd resist and take George De Witt. It might have been.

Suppose you had, and I had died years before you. You would have heard

me crying at your window and beating at your door, and you would have

felt me drawing and drawing of you, whether you chose or not, taking the

heart away from your George, and bringing it to me. Then at last, you'd

have died, and then, then, you'd have been mine, and you would have

found our heaven after thirty, forty, fifty years of hell.'

The terrible earnestness of the man imposed on Mehalah. He spoke what

he believed. He gave utterance, in his rude fierce way, to what he

felt. She, untaught, full of dim gropings after something higher,

vaster, than the flat, narrow life she led, was startled.

'Heaven with you!' she cried, drawing back; 'never! never!'

'Heaven with me, and with none but me. You can't get another heaven but

in my arms, for you was made for me by God. I told you so, but you

would not believe it. Try, if you like, to find it elsewhere. God

didn't make you and George De Witt out of one lump. He couldn't have

done it--You, Glory! strong, great, noble, with a will of iron, and that

weak, helpless, vulgar lout, tied to his mother's apron. He couldn't

have done it. He made, like enough, Phoebe Musset and George De Witt

out of one piece, but you and me was moulded together at the same time,

out of the same clay, and the same breath is in our hearts, and the same

blood in our veins. You can't help it, it is so. You can not, you shall

not, escape me. Soon or late you must find your proper mate, soon or

late you must seek your double, soon or late find your heaven.'

He came now quietly and seated himself in his chair opposite Mehalah.

'What did you fare to say, Glory?' he asked. 'I interrupted you.'

'I must thank you first for what you have done for my mother.'

'I have done nothing for her,' said Elijah sharply.

'You drew her out of the burning house. You saved her goods from the

flames. You have sheltered her here.'

'I have done nothing for her,' said Elijah again. 'Whatever I have done,

I did for you. But for you she might have burned, and I would not have

put out a finger to help her. What care I for her? She is naught to

me. She wasn't destined for me; that was you. I saved her because she

was _your_ mother. I collected your things from the blazing house. I

have taken you in. I take her in only as I might take in your shoe, or

your cow, because it is yours. She is naught to me. I don't care if I

never saw or heard her again.'

He got up and went to the window, took a flask thence; then brought his

gun from a corner, and began to polish the brass fittings with rag,

having first put on the metal some of the vitriol from the bottle.

'Look at this,' he said, dropping some of the acid on the tarnished

brass. 'Look how it frets and boils till it has scummed away the filth,

and then the brass is bright as gold. That's like me. I'm fretted and

fume with your opposition, and I dare say it is as well I get a little.

But after a bit it will bring out the shining metal. You will see what

I am. You don't like me now, because I'm not shapely and handsome as

your George De Witt. But there is the gold metal underneath; he was but

gilt pinchbeck--George De Witt!' he repeated. 'That was a fancy of

yours, that he was your mate! You could not have loved him a week after

you'd known what he was. Marriage would have rubbed the plating off,

and you would have scorned and cast him aside.'

'Elijah!' said Mehalah, 'I cannot bear this. I loved once, and I shall

love for ever,--not you!--you--never,' with gathering emphasis, 'George,

only George, none but George.'

'More fool you,' said Rebow sulkily. 'Only I don't believe it. You say

so to aggravate me, but you don't think it.'

She did not care to pursue the subject. She had spoken out her heart,

and was satisfied.

'Well, what else had you to say? I didn't think you was one of the

bread and butter curtsey-my-dears and thanky, sirs! That is a new

feature in you, Glory! It is the first time I've had the taste of thanks

from you on my tongue.'

'You never gave me occasion before.'

'No more I did,' he answered. 'You are right there. And I don't care

for thanks now. I'd take them if I valued them, but I don't. I don't

care to have them from you. I don't expect thanks from my body when I

feed it, nor from my hands when I warm 'em at the fire; they belong to

me, and I give 'em their due. What I do for you I do for myself, for

the same reason. You belong to me.'

'I must speak,' said Mehalah. 'This is more than I can endure. You say

things of me, and to me, which I will not suffer. Do you mean to insult

me? Have I ever given you the smallest reason to encourage you to

assume this right?'

'No. But it must be. You can't always go against fate.'

'I do not believe in this fate, this destiny, of which you talk,' said

the girl gathering up her strength, as her indignation swelled within

her. 'You have no right over me whatever. I have been brought here

against my will, but at the same time I cannot do other than acknowledge

your hospitality. Had you not given us a shelter, I know not whither we

should have gone. I ask you to let us shelter here a little longer, but

only a little longer, till I have found some situation where I can work,

and support my mother. We must sell our little goods, our sheep and

cow, and with the proceeds----'

'With the proceeds you will have to pay the rent of the Ray to Lady

Day.'

'You cannot be so ungenerous,' gasped Mehalah, flashing wrathfully

against him. 'This undoes all your kindness in housing us. But if it

must be, so be it. We will sell all, and pay you every penny; yes, and

for our keep in this house, as long as we are forced to remain.'

'Not so fast, Glory,' said Elijah composedly. 'There are various things

to be considered first. You can't find a situation--no one would take

you in along of an old bedridden mother.'

'I can but try.'

'Aye, try; try by all means, and then come back to me. You have tried a

deal of tricks to escape me, but you can't do it. You tried by

borrowing money of George De Witt, you tried by going to that old

palsied shipbuilder, you tried at Parson Tyll's, you tried, I don't know

how at last, and you got the money; but yet you couldn't escape me. You

tried to get George De Witt as your husband, to keep you from me in

life, but it came to naught. He's gone out of the path that leads from

you to me. You may heap up what you will, but the earth will open, and

swallow all obstructions, and leave the way smooth and open. Did you

ever see the old place--they call it the Devil's Walls--by Payne's? No,

I dare say you don't know thereabouts. Well, I'll tell you how that

spot lies waste, and covered with brambles and nettles now. The old

lords D'Arcy thought to build a castle there. Then the Salcott creek

ran up so far, and they could row and sail right up to their gates, were

the mansion built. But it could not be. The masons built all day, and

at night the earth sucked the walls in. They worked there a whole year,

and they brought stones from Kent, and they poured in boulders, and they

laid bricks, but it was all of no good, the earth drank in everything

they put on it, as water. At last they gave it up, and they built

instead on the hill where stands Barn Hall. It will be the same with

you. You may build what you like, and where you like, it will go; it

cannot stand, it will be swallowed up; you can only build on me.'

'Elijah! I insist on your listening to me. I will not hear this.'

'You will not? I do not care, you must. My will will drink in yours.

But go on; say what you wish.'

'I am going to propose this. Pay me a wage, and I will work here. I

will attend to the house and the cows, and do anything you require of

me. You have no servant, and you need one. You shall let me be your

servant. I shall not be ashamed to be that, but I will not remain here

unless my place be determined and recognised.'

'You shall be the mistress.'

'I do not want, I do not choose to be anything else in this house but

your hired servant. Pay me a wage, and I will remain till I can find

some other situation; refuse, and, if I have to leave my mother, I will

go out of this house to-night.'

'If you leave your mother, I will throw her out.'

'I would fetch her away. I would carry her in my arms. I will not stay

here on any other terms.'

'I will humour you. You shall be paid. I will give you five shillings

a week. Is that enough?'

'More than enough, with my keep and that of my mother. I thank you now.

In future speak of me to the men as their fellow-servant, and not as you

did recently to Abraham as their mistress.'

'I shall speak to them as I like. Am I to be controlled by you?'

'Then I will leave. I will carry my mother to the inn at Salcott, and

rest there till I can find some other shelter.'

'Now look here, Glory,' said Elijah. He put his gun aside, and leaned

his elbows on his knees, and faced her. 'It is of no use your talking

of running away from me. You may run, but I can draw you back. I sit

here of a night brooding over my fire, I begin thinking of you. I

think, I think, and then a spirit takes me as it were, and fills me with

fierce will, to bring you here. I feel I have threads at every finger

and threads to my knees and to my feet, all fast to you, and if I stir,

I move you. I lift my finger, and you raise yours. I wave my hand up,

and you throw up yours. You don't know it. I do. I know that I have

but to rise up from my chair, and I lift you up wherever you may be, in

your bed, in your grave, and then, if I draw in with my will, I wind up

these threads, and you come, you come, from wheresoever you are, out of

your bed in your smock, out of your grave in your shroud; doors are

nothing, my will can burst them open; locks are naught, my will can

wrench them off; the screws in the coffin lid and five feet of earth are

nothing, I could draw you through all. I could draw you over the ooze,

and you would not be sucked in by it. I could draw you over the water,

and you would not wet your foot. I could draw you through the marsh and

you would not break a bullrush; look there--' he waved his arm towards

the door. 'That door would fly open, and there you would stand, like

one dreaming, with your eyes wide open as they are now, with your cheek

colourless as now, with your lips parted as now, helpless, unable to

stir a finger, or utter a sound, against my will, and you would rush

into my arms, and fall on my heart. I can do all that. I feel it. I

know it. I have sat here and wanted to do it, but I have not. I would

not have you come to me in that way, but come of your own free will.

You must come to me one way or other. Look here!' he raised his hand,

and involuntarily, unconsciously, she lifted hers.

'Pick up the keys.'

She stooped and took them up.

'One day,' he said, 'you refused to take a piece of money that fell,

when I bade you. Now you are more compliant. My will is gaining over

yours. Your will is stout and rebellious, but it must bend and give way

before mine. Go; I have done with you for the present.'

*CHAPTER XVIII.*

*IN A COBWEB.*

A month passed. Mrs. Sharland recovered, as far as recovery was

possible to one of her age and enfeebled constitution, much shaken by

the events of the night that saw the destruction of her home and the

abrasion of the ear and tail of her biscuit-china poodle. After

remaining in bed for more than a week, Mehalah almost by force obliged

her to get up and descend. When once she had taken this step and found

that her leather high-backed chair was before the fire in the hall, she

showed no further desire to spend her days upstairs. Her life resumed

the old course it had run at the Ray, but she sat more by the fire, and

did less in the house than formerly. She devolved most of the domestic

work on her daughter. That she had declined in strength of late was

obvious. Old people will go on from year to year without any visible

alteration, till some shock, or change in their surroundings takes

place, when they drop perceptibly a stage, and from that moment

declension becomes rapid.

Mrs. Sharland was unmistakably contented with her position at Red Hall.

She enjoyed comforts which were not hers at the Ray. She saw more

people, some gossip reached her ears. There was a village, Salcotty

within two miles, and the small talk of a village will overflow its

bounds, and dribble into every house in its neighbourhood. Every little

parish throws up its coarse crop of vulgar tittle-tattle, on which the

inhabitants feed, and which is exactly adapted to their mental

digestion. Human characters as well as skins are subject to parasitic

attacks, but human beings are the vermin which burrow their heads into,

and blow themselves out on the blood of moral life. There are certain

creatures which will lie shrivelled up on their backs, and endure flood

and frost and burning sun, without its killing them, with suspended

animation, till the animal on which they feed chances to come that way,

when they leap into activity and voracity at once. Mrs. Sharland had

been laid aside on the Ray, without neighbours, and therefore without

matter of interest and objects of attack. She was now within leaping,

lancing, and sucking distance of fresh life, and she rejoiced in renewed

vigour, not of body, but of mind, if mind that can be called which has

neither thought nor instinct, but only a certain gravitation which sets

the tongue in motion. The brain of the rustic is as unlike the brain of

the man of culture as the maggot is unlike the butterfly; the one is the

larva of the other. They feed, live, move in different spheres; one

chews cabbage, the other sips honey; one crawls on the earth, the other

flies above it; one is clumsy in all its motions, the other agile; one

is carnal, the other is spiritual. And yet--wondrous thought! the one

is the parent of the other.

Mehalah had a great deal to do, and that work of a sort she had not been

much engaged on at the Ray. No female hand had been employed at Red Hall

since the death of Elijah's mother, and everything was accordingly

falling out of repair and into disorder. She saw nothing of Rebow

except at meals, and not always then, for he was often away with beasts

at market, or at sales making purchases.

The rich marshes of Red Hall were unrivalled for the grazing of cattle,

and the rearing of young stock.

As Mehalah was well occupied, her mind was taken off from herself, and

she was for a while satisfied with her position. Rebow had not spoken

to her in the manner she so disliked, and she had small occasion to

speak with the men. Her mother, on the contrary, seized every occasion

to entangle them in talk, or to initiate a conversation with Rebow. He

maintained a surly deference towards her, and condescended at times to

answer her queries and allow himself to be drawn into talk by the old

woman. When that was the case, Mehalah found excuse to leave the room

and engage herself in the kitchen or among the cows.

Abraham Dowsing saw much less of her than formerly. The old man, with

all his sulky humour and selfish greed, had got a liking for the girl.

He was much at the Ray, but often about Red Hall, where he got his food.

If he went after the sheep for the day, Mehalah provided him with

'baggings,' provision during his absence.

Lambing time was at hand, when he would be away for some weeks,

returning only occasionally. Mehalah noticed that the shepherd

hesitated each time he received his food, as though he desired to speak

to her, but put off the occasion. At last, one day at the beginning of

February, when he was about to depart for the Ray, and would be absent

some days, he said to her in a low dissatisfied tone, 'I suppose, when I

come back after the lambing, you'll have been to church with him.'

'What do you mean?'

'What do I mean?' repeated Abraham, 'I mean what I say. I ain't one of

those that says one thing and means another. Nobody can accuse me of

that.'

'I do not understand you, Abraham.'

'There's none so dull as them that won't take,' he pursued.

'I don't hold, myself, that much good comes of going to church with a

man, except this, that you fasten him, and he can't cast you off when

he's tired of you.'

Mehalah flushed up.

'Abraham,' she said angrily, 'I will not allow you to speak thus to me.

I understand you now, and wish I did not.'

'Oh! you do take at last! That's well. I'd act on it if I was you. A

man, you see, don't make no odds of taking up with a girl, and then when

he's had a bit of her tongue and temper, he thinks he'd as lief be

without her, and pick up another. He'd ring a whole change on the

bells, he would, if it warn't for churches. That is my doctrine.

Churches was built, and parsons were made, for tying up of men, and the

girls are fools who let the men make up to them, and don't seize the

opportunity to tie them.'

'Abraham, enough of this.'

'It is no odds to me. I don't care so long as I has my wittles and my

wage. Only I'd rather see you mistress here than another. I'd get my

wittles more regular and better, because you know me and my likings, and

a new one wouldn't. That's all. Every man for himself, is my

doctrine.'

'I forbid this for once and all. I am servant on wage here just as you

are; I am that, and I shall never be anything else.'

'Oh, there you think different from most folks. You don't think

according to your interests; and mistress, let me tell you, you don't

talk as does the master.'

He went away mumbling something about it being no concern of his, and if

some people did not know how to eat their bread and butter when they had

it in their hands it was no odds to him.

Mehalah was hurt and incensed. She went to her mother.

'Mother,' she said, 'when will you be able to move? I shall look out for

a situation elsewhere.'

'What, my dear child! Move from here, where I am so comfortable! You

can not. Elijah won't hear of it. He told me so. He told me you was

to remain here, and I should spend the rest of my days here in quiet.

It is a very pleasant place, and more in the world than was the Ray. I

am better off here than I was there. Now we get everything for nothing,

we don't lay out a penny, and you get wage beside.'

'Mother, Abraham has been speaking to me. He has hinted, what I do not

like, that I ought to marry Elijah----'

'So you ought,' said the widow. 'Elijah, I am sure, is willing. It is

what he has been wishing and hoping for all along, but you have been so

stubborn and set against him. After all he has done for us you might

yield a bit.'

'I will never marry him.'

'Don't say that. You will do anything to secure a comfortable home for

me. It may not be long that I may have to trouble you,--I know you look

on me as a trouble, I know that but for me you would feel free, and go

away into the world. You think me a burden on you, because I can do

nothing: you are young and lusty. But I bore with you, Mehalah, when

you was young and feeble, and I laid by for you money that would have

been very acceptable to me, and bought me many little comforts that I

forbore, to save for you----' The old woman with low cunning had

discovered the thread to touch, to move her daughter.

'Say no more, say not another word, mother,' exclaimed Mehalah. 'You

know that I never, never will forsake you, that you are more to me a

thousand times than my own life. But there is one thing I never will do

for you. I never will marry Elijah.'

'I am afraid, Mehalah, that folks will talk.'

'I fear so too, but they have no occasion. I will show them that. I

will find a situation elsewhere.'

'You shall not, Mehalah!'

'I must, mother.'

She thought for some time what she should do, and then put on her

bonnet, and walked into Salcott. She had not been into the village

since her arrival at Red Hall.

Salcott is a small village of old cottages at the head of a creek that

opens out of the Blackwater. It has a church with a handsome tower

built of flints, but with no chancel. Within a bowshot, across the

creek, connected with it by a bridge, is Virley church, a small

hunchbacked edifice in the last stages of dilapidation, in a graveyard

unhedged, unwalled; the church is scrambled over by ivy, with lattice

windows bulged in by the violence of the gales, and a bellcot leaning on

one side like a drunkard. Near this decaying church is a gabled farm,

and this and a cottage form Virley village. The principal population

congregates at Salcott, across the wooden bridge, and consisted--a

hundred years ago--of labourers, and men more or less engaged in the

contraband trade. Every house had its shed and stable, where was a

donkey and cart, to be let on occasion to carry smuggled goods inland.

At the end of the village stands a low tavern, the Rising Sun, a mass of

gables; part of it, the tavern drinking-room, is only one storey high,

but the rest is a jumble of roofs and lean-to buildings, chimneys, and

ovens, a miracle of picturesqueness. Mehalah walked into the bar, and

found there the landlady alone.

'I have come here, mistress,' she said abruptly, 'in search of work. I

am strong and handy, and will do as much as a man. I will serve you

faithfully and well if you will engage me. I have an infirm mother who

must be lodged somewhere, so I ask for small wage.'

'Who are you? Where do you come from?' asked the landlady eyeing her

with surprise.

'My name is Mehalah Sharland. I lived on the Ray till the house was

burned down. Since then I have been at Red Hall.'

'Oh!' exclaimed the woman, her countenance falling. 'You are the young

woman, are you, that I heard tell of?'

'I am the young woman now in service there, but wanting to go and work

elsewhere.'

'I've heard tell of you,' said the landlady dryly.

'What have you heard of me?'

The woman looked knowingly at her, and smiled.

'Pray what does Master Rebow say to your leaving him? You and he have

fallen out, have you?' said the hostess knowingly. 'You'll come

together all the faster for it. There's nothing like a good breeze for

running a cargo in.'

'Can you give me work?'

'I dursn't do it.'

'Have you need of anyone now?'

'Well,' with a cough, 'if Master Rebow were agreeable, I might find such

a girl as you wery handy about the house. I've lost the last girl I

had; she's took with the small-pox. You could have her bed, and her

work, and her wage, and welcome. But unless the master gave his

consent,' she began to dust the table, 'I dursn't do it.'

'Is he your landlord?'

'No, he is not.'

'Then why need you doubt about taking me?'

'Because Rebow wouldn't allow of it.'

'He could not stop me. I am not engaged to him for any time.'

'I dursn't do it. How long have you been with Rebow?'

'A little more than a month.'

'You've never gone against him perhaps. If you had, you wouldn't ask me

the reason why I dursn't stand in his way.'

Mehalah considered. She had opposed Elijah from the very beginning.

'There's no one would dare to do it,' continued the landlady. 'If you

want to get from Master Rebow, you must go farther inland; but I doubt

if you'll escape him. However,' and she tossed her head, 'you only want

to make him fast. If a girl gives way at once, she's cheap.'

'You mistake me, you altogether mistake me,' said Mehalah indignantly.

'I will not remain in his house any longer; I must and I will go

elsewhere.'

'If Elijah Rebow was to take the purse out of my pocket, or the bed from

under me, if he was to take my daughter from my side, I dursn't say nay.

If you think to escape against the will of the master, you are

mistaken.'

'I shall.'

'Look here,' said the landlady; 'take my advice and go back and be mum.

I won't say another word with you, lest I get into trouble.' She turned

and left the bar.

Mehalah went out, more determined than ever to break away from Red Hall,

whether her mother desired it or not.

She crossed the creaking rude wooden bridge to Virley. The churchyard

and the farmyard seemed all one. The pigs were rooting at the graves.

A cow was lying in the porch. An old willow drooped over a stagnant

pool beneath the chancel window. Shed roof-tiles and willow leaves lay

mouldering together on the edge of the pond. The church of timber and

brick, put up anyhow on older stone foundations, had warped and cracked;

the windows leaned, fungus growths sprouted about the bases of the

timbers. Every rib showed in the roof as on the side of a horse led to

the knackers.

The farm was but little more prosperous in appearance than the church.

Patched windows and broken railings showed a state of decline. Mehalah

walked into the yard, where she saw a man carrying a pitchfork.

'Who is the master here?' she asked.

'I am.'

'Is there a mistress?'

'Yes. What have you to say to her?'

Mehalah told her story as she had told it to the landlady of the Rising

Sun. 'I will work for my keep and that of my mother, and work harder

than any man on your farm.'

'Where do you come from?'

'Red Hall.'

'Oh!' said the farmer, with a whistle, 'Rebow's girl, eh?'

'I am working for him now.'

'Working for him, come now that's fine.'

'I am working for him,' repeated Mehalah with clouding brow.

'And you want to come here. You think my missus would let you, do you?

Now tell me, what put you on to coming to me? Has Elijah picked a

quarrel with me, that he sends you here? Does he want occasion against

me? Do you think I want to run any risks with my barns and my cattle

and my life? No, thank you. I dursn't do it.'

'Tell me, where can I find work?'

'You must go out of the reach of Rebow's arm, if you find it.'

'You won't give me any?'

He shook his head. 'For my life, I dursn't do it.' He laughed and put

out his hand to chuck her under the chin, she struck his fingers up with

her fist. 'There ain't a better judge of beasts in all the marshes than

Rebow, nor in horse-flesh neither. You ain't a bad bit of meat neither.

I approve his taste.'

Mehalah wrenched the pitchfork out of his hand. Her eyes flamed. She

would have struck him; but was suddenly assailed from behind by the

farmer's wife.

'Now then, hussy, what are you up to?'

The girl could not answer; her anger choked the words in her throat.

'She's that wench of Rebow's, you know,' said the farmer. 'I guess it

is cat and dog in that house.'

'Get you gone,' shouted the woman, 'go out of my premises, hussy! I

don't want my place to be frequented by such as you. Get you gone at

once, or I will loose the mastiff.'

Mehalah retired with bowed head, and her arms folded on her bosom. She

halted on the bridge, and kicked fragments of frozen earth and gravel

into the water. A woman going by looked at her.

'Where is the parson?' asked Mehalah.

'Yonder, you go over the marsh by the hill with the windmill on it, and

you come to a road, you'll find a blacksmith's shop, and you must ask

there. He's the curate, there's no rector hereabouts. They keep away

because of the ague.'

Mehalah cross the fen indicated, passed beside the windmill and the

blacksmith's shop, and found the cottage occupied by the curate, a poor

man, married to a woman of a low class, with a family of fourteen

children, packed in the house wherever they could be stowed away. The

curate was a crushed man, his ideas stunned in his head by the uproar in

which he dwelt. His old scholarship remained to him in his brain like

fossils in the chalk, to be picked ont, dead morsels. There was nothing

living in the petrified white matter that filled his skull.

Mehalah knocked at the door. The parson opened it, and admitted her

into his kitchen. As soon as the wife heard a female voice, she rushed

out of the back kitchen with her arms covered with soap suds, and stood

in the door. A little-minded woman, she lived on her jealousy, and

would never allow her husband to speak with another woman if she could

help it.

'What do you want, my dear?' asked the curate.

'Ahem!' coughed the wife. 'Dear, indeed! Pray who are you, miss?'

Mehalah explained that she sought work, and hoped that the parson would

be able to recommend her.

'You don't, you don't----' faltered he.

'You don't suppose I'd take you on here,' said the parson's wife.

'You're too young by twenty years. I don't approve of young women; they

don't make good servants. I like a staid matronly person of forty to

fifty, that one can trust, and won't be gadding after boys or----' she

shook her suds at her husband. 'But I don't at present want any

servant. We are full.'

'We don't keep any,' said the pastor.

'Edward! don't demean us, we do keep servants--occasionally. You know

we do, Edward. Mrs. Cutts comes in to scour out and clean up of a

Saturday. You forget that. We pay her ninepence.'

'Who are you, my dear--I mean, young woman?' asked the curate.

'Yes, who are you?' said his better half. 'We must know more of you

before we can recommend you among our friends. Our friends are very

select, and keep quite a better sort of servants, they don't pick up

anybody, they take so to speak the cream, the very purest quality.'

Mehalah gave the required information. Mrs. Rabbit bridled and blew

bubbles. The Reverend Mr. Rabbit became depressed, yet made an effort

to be confidential. 'You'd better--you'd better marry him,' he hinted.

'It would be a satisfaction on all sides.'

'What is that? What did you say, Edward? No whisperings in my house,

if you please. My house is respectable, I hope, though it mayn't be a

lordly mansion. I do drive a conweyance,' she said, 'I hire the

blacksmith's donkey-cart when I go out to make my calls, and drop my

cards. So I leave you to infer if I'm not respectable. And

Miss--Miss--Miss--' with a giggle and a curtsey, 'when may I have the

felicity of calling on you at Red Hall, and of learning how respectable

that establishment has become? There's room for improvement,' she said,

tossing her nose.

At that moment a rush, a roar, an avalanche down the narrow stairs,

steep as a ladder. In a heap came the whole fourteen, the oldest

foremost, the youngest in the rear.

'We've got him, we're going to drown him.'

'What is it?' feebly enquired the father, putting his hands to his ears.

'We'll hold him to the fire and pop his little eyes.'

'No, they're too small.'

'Into the water-butt with him!'

A yell.

'He's bitten me. Drown him!'

'What is it?' shouted the mother.

'A bat. Tommy found him in the roof. We're going to put him in the

butt, and see if he can swim.'

The whole torrent swept and swirled round Mehalah, and carried her to

the front door.

The curate stole out after her.

'My good girl,' he whispered, 'botch it up. Marry. Most marriages

hereabouts are botches.'

'Edward!' shouted Mrs. Rabbit, 'come in, no sneaking outside after

lasses. Come back at once. Always wanting a last word with suspicious

characters.'

'Marry!' was the pastor's last word, as he was drawn back by two soapy

hands applied to his coat tails, and the door was slammed.

Mehalah walked away fast from the yelping throng of children congregated

about the water-butt, watching the struggles of the expiring bat. She

took the road before her, and saw that it led to Peldon, the leaning

tower of which stood on a hill that had formed the northern horizon from

the Ray. There was a nice farm by the roadside, and she went there, and

was met with excuses. The time was not one when a girl could be

engaged. There was no work to be done in the winter. The early spring

was coming on, she urged, and she would labour in the fields like a man.

Then the sick mother was mentioned as an insuperable objection. 'We

can't have any old weakly person here on the premises,' said the

farmer's wife. 'You see if she was to die, you've no money, and we

should be put to the expense of the burying; anyhow there'd be the

inconvenience of a corpse in the house.'

Mehalah went on; and now a hope dawned in her. Another two miles would

bring her to the Rose, the old inn that stood not far from the Strood.

There she was known, and there she was sure, if possible, she would be

accommodated and given work.

She walked forward with raised head, the dark cloud that had brooded on

her brow began to rise, the bands about her heart that had been

contracting gave way a little. There was the inn, an old-fashioned

house, with a vine scrambling over the red tile roof, and an ancient

standard sign before the door, on the green, bearing a rose, painted the

size of a gigantic turnip.

Mehalah walked into the bar. The merry landlord and his wife greeted

her with delight, with many shakes of the hands, and much condolence

over the disasters that had befallen her and her mother.

'Well, my dear,' said the landlady, confidentially, 'you're well out of

it, if you come here. To be sure we'll take you in, and I dare say

we'll find you work; bring your mother also. It ain't right for a

handsome wench like you to be living all along of a lone man in his

farm. Folks talk. They have talked, and said a deal of things. But

you come here. What day may we expect you?'

'I must bring my mother by water. The tide will not suit for a week.

It must be by day, my mother cannot come in the boat if there be much

rain; and we shall not be able to come--at least there will be a

difficulty in getting away--should Rebow be at home. Expect us some day

when the weather is favourable and there be an afternoon tide.'

'You will be sure to come?'

'Sure.'

*CHAPTER XIX.*

*DE PROFUNDIS.*

Mehalah's heart was lighter now than it had been for many a week. She

had secured her object. She could be out of the toils of Rebow, away

from his hateful presence.

She had worked hard and conscientiously at Red Hall, and felt that she

had to some extent cancelled the obligation he had laid on her. Her

proud spirit, lately crushed, began to arise; her head was lifted

instead of being bowed.

Rebow remarked the change in her, and was satisfied either that she had

reconciled herself to her position, or that she meditated something

which he did not understand.

Mrs. Sharland did not share in her daughter's exultation. She grumbled

and protested. She was very comfortable at Red Hall, she was sure

Elijah had been exceedingly kind to them. They had wanted nothing. The

house was much better than the old ramshackle Ray, and their position in

it superior to any they could aspire to at the Rose. This was a hint to

Mehalah, but the girl refused to take it. As for Elijah, what was there

to object to in him? He was well off, very well off, a prosperous man,

who spent nothing on himself, and turned over a great deal of money in

the year. He was not very young, but he was a man who had seen the

world and was in his prime of strength and intelligence. Mrs. Sharland

thought that they could not do better than settle at the Red Hall and

make it their home for life, and that Mehalah should put her foolish

fancies in her pocket and make the best of what offered.

But Mehalah's determination bore down all opposition.

St. Valentine's Day shone bright with a promise of spring. The grey

owls were beginning to build in the hayrick, the catkins were timidly

swelling on the nut bushes; in the ooze the glasswort shot up like

little spikes of vitriol-green glass. A soft air full of wooing swept

over the flats. The sun was hot.

The tide flowed at noon, and Elijah was absent.

Mehalah, deaf to her mother's remonstrances, removed some of their

needful articles to the boat, and at last led her mother, well wrapped

up, to the skiff.

When the girl had cast loose, and was rowing on the sparkling water, her

heart danced and twinkled with the wavelets; there was a return of

spring to her weary spirit, and the good and generous seeds in her

uncultivated soul swelled and promised to shoot. She was proud to think

that she had carried her point, that in spite of Rebow, she had

established her freedom, that her will had proved its power of

resistance. She even sang as she rowed, she,--whose song had been

hushed since the disappearance of George. She had not forgotten him,

and cast away her grief at his loss, but the recoil from the bondage and

moral depression of Red Hall filled her with transient exultation and

joyousness.

The row was long.

'O mother!' she said, as she passed under the Ray hill, 'I must indeed

run up and look at the place. I cannot go by.'

'Do as you will,' said Mrs. Sharland. 'I cannot control you. I don't

pretend to. My wishes and my feelings are nothing to you.'

Mehalah did not notice this peevish remark, she was accustomed to her

mother's fretfulness. She threw the little anchor on the gravel at the

'hard,' and jumped on shore. She ascended the hill and stood by the

scorched black patch which marked her old home. The house had burned to

the last stick, leaving two brick chimneys standing gauntly alone.

There was the old hearth at which she had so often crouched, bare, cold,

and open. A few bricks had been blown from the top of the chimney, but

otherwise it was intact.

As she stood looking sadly on the relics, Abraham Dowsing came up.

'What are you doing here?'

'I have come away from Red Hall, Abraham,' she said gaily, 'I do not

think I have been so happy for many a day.'

'When are you going back?'

'Never.'

'Who then is to prepare me my wittles?' he asked sullenly. 'I ain't

going to be put off with anything.'

'I do not know, Abraham.'

'But I must know. Now go back again, and don't do what's wrong and

foolish. You ought to be there, and mistress there too. Then all will

run smooth, and I'll get my wittles as I like them.'

'You need not speak of that, Abraham, I shall never return to Red Hall.

I have quitted it and I hope have seen the last of the hateful house and

its still more hateful master.'

'I wonder,' mused the shepherd, 'whether I could arrange with Rebow to

get my wittles from the Rose.'

'That is where I am going to.'

'Oh!' his face lightened, 'then I don't mind. Do what you think best.'

His face darkened again. 'But I doubt whether the master will keep me

on when you have left. I reckon he only takes me because of you; he

thinks you wouldn't like it, if I was to be turned adrift. No. You had

better go back to Red Hall. Make yourself as comfortable as you can.

That's my doctrine.'

Presently the old man asked, 'I say, does the master know you have

left?'

'No, Abraham.'

'Are you sure?'

'I never told him.'

'Did your mother know you had made up your mind to leave?'

'Yes, I told her so a week ago.'

'And you suppose she has kept her mouth shut? She couldn't do it.'

'If Elijah had suspected we were going to-day,' said Mehalah, 'I do not

think he would have left home; he would have endeavoured to prevent me.'

'Perhaps. But he's deep.'

'Good day, Abraham!' She waved him a farewell with a smile. She knew,

and made allowance for the humours of the old man. In a moment she was

again by her mother, at the oar, and speeding with the flowing tide up

the Rhyn to the 'hard' at its head belonging to the Rose Inn.

'Have you brought the toad-jug with you, Mehalah?'

'No, mother.'

'Nor the china dogs?'

'No, mother.'

'It is of no use, I will not live at the Rose. I will not get out of

the boat. I must have all my property about me.'

'I will fetch the other things away. When you are housed safely, then I

shall not care. I will go back and bring away all our goods.'

'You are so rough. I won't let anyone handle the china but myself.

Last time the poodles were moved, you know one lost a ear and a bit of

its tail. There is no one fit to touch such things but me. Those

rough-handed fellows, Jim and Joe, what do they know of the value of

those dogs? You will promise me, Mehalah, to be gentle with them. Put

them in the foot of a pair of stockings and wrap the legs round them,

and then perhaps they will travel. I wouldn't have them lose any more

of their precious persons,--no, not for worlds,--not for worlds.'

'I will take heed, mother.'

'And mind and stuff my old nightcap,--the dirty one, I mean--and my

bedsocks into the toad-jug, then it won't break. You'll promise me

that, won't you; if that were injured, I'd as soon die as see it.'

'I will use the utmost precaution with it.'

'Then there are the soup plates, of Lowestoft. I had them of my father,

and he had them of his grandmother; there's a dozen of them, and not a

chip or a crack. True beauties as ever you saw, I think you'd best put

them in the folds of some of my linen. Put them between the sheets,

wide apart, in the spruce hutch.'

'All right, mother; now hold hard, here we are.'

The boat grated on the bottom, and then it was drawn up by a firm hand.

Mehalah looked round and started.

Elijah and two other men were there. Elijah had stepped into the water,

and pulled the boat ashore.

'Here we are, Glory!' he said, 'waiting ready for you. The sheriff's

officer with his warrant, all ready. You haven't kept us waiting long.'

'What is that? What is that?' screamed Mrs. Sharland.

'Step out, Glory! step out, mistress!' said Elijah.

'What is the meaning of this?' asked Mehalah, a cloud suddenly darkening

her sky and quenching the joy of her heart.

'I've a warrant against you, madam,' said the man who stood by Rebow.

'Please to read it.' He held it out.

'What is this?' screamed Mrs. Sharland, rising in the boat and

staggering forwards. Mehalah helped her on shore.

'This is what it is,' answered Rebow. 'You and Glory there are my

tenants for the Ray. The farm is mine, with the marshes and the

saltings. I gave eight hundred pounds for it. You've burnt down my

premises, between you, you and Glory there. You've robbed me of a

hundred or two hundred pounds worth of property with your wilfulness or

carelessness. Now, I want to know, how is it you have not built up my

farmhouse again?'

'I can't do it. I haven't the money!' wailed Mrs. Sharland. 'I am

sure, Master Rebow, there was nothing but pure accident in the fire. I

never thought----'

'Pure accident!' scoffed Elijah. 'Do you call that pure accident,

soaking the whole chamber in spirits, with a fire burning on the hearth,

and dashing the cask staves here and there, on the fire and off it.'

Mehalah looked at him.

'Ah, ha! Glory! You think I don't know it. You think I didn't see you!

Why, I was at the window. I saw you do it. Tell me, mother, did not

Glory smash the keg I had just given you?'

'I believe she did, Elijah! I am very sorry. I did my best to stop

her, but she is a perverse, rebellious girl. You must forgive her, she

intended no harm.'

'If you saw me do it, why did you let the house catch fire?' asked

Mehalah, looking hard in Rebow's face.

'Could I help it?' he asked in reply. 'There you sat by the hearth, and

no harm came of it. At last you went out, and locked and double-locked

the door. I went down to my boat. I tell you, I was uneasy, and I

looked back, and I saw by the light in the room that the spirit had

caught. I ran back and tried to get in. The floor was flaming.'

'The floor was of brick,' said Mehalah.

'The door was fast locked. You know best why you locked it. It never

was fastened before that night. You screwed on the lock, then you went

out of the place yourself, leaving the room on fire, and fastened the

door that none might get in.'

'A lie!' exclaimed the girl.

'Is it a lie? I don't think it. I can't cipher out your doings any

other way. I tried to break open the door, but you had put too stout a

fastening on. Then I burst open the window, and when the wind got in,

it made the fire rage worse. So I ran and shouted to my men in the big

boat, and I got a balk and I stove the door in, and then it was too late

to do more than save your mother and her goods. As for you, you left

her and them to burn together; you wanted to be off and free of her. I

know you.'

'Oh, Master Rebow! I know I'm a burden to her, but she would not do

that!' put in Mrs. Sharland.

'Why did you watch me?' asked Mehalah, and then regretted that she had

put the question.

'You see,' said Elijah turning to the officer, 'she didn't think anyone

was near to give evidence against her.'

'Here I am,' said Mehalah, 'put me in prison, do with me what you will.

I am innocent of all intent to burn the farm.'

'I could hang you for it,' laughed Elijah. 'That pretty neck where the

red handkerchief hangs so jauntily would not look well with a hemp rope

round it. You'd dangle on the Ray, where the house stood. You'd have a

black cap then pulled over those dark eyes and brown skin, not a red

one, not a red one, Glory!' he rubbed his hands.

'I have no warrant against you,' said the bailiff to Mehalah. 'You

stand charged with nothing. The warrant is against your mother.'

'Against me? What will you do with me?' cried the old woman.

'You must go to prison if you cannot build the house up again, and

restore it as good as it was to the landlord. He can't be at a loss by

your neglect.'

'I cannot do it. I have not the money.'

'Then you must go to prison till you get it.'

Mrs. Sharland sank on the gravel. She wept and wrung her hands. This

was worse than the burning of the house, worse even than the lesion of

the ear and tail of the poodle.

'I won't go. I can't go!' she sobbed. 'I've the ague so bad. I suffer

from rheumatism in all my bones. Let me alone,' she pleaded, 'and I

promise I'll go to bed and never get out of it again.'

'You'll suffer in prison, I can promise you,' said Elijah exultingly.

'You'll have no bed to crawl into, unless you can pay for it; you'll

have no blankets to wrap round you in the cold frosty night, if you

can't pay for them; you'll have no fire to shiver by when there is ice

on the ponds, if you haven't money to pay for it. The frost in your

bones will make you shriek and jabber in prison.'

'I have no money. I gave the last to pay off Mrs. De Witt,' wailed the

wretched woman. 'But there are the sheep.'

'They go to pay your rent up to Lady Day, aye, and till Michaelmas. I

haven't had notice yet that you are about to quit. You can't give up

the farm without, and I will exact every penny of my rent.'

'Then I am at your mercy,' sobbed Mrs. Sharland. She turned to Mehalah

and pleaded, 'Haven't you a word to say, to save me?'

The girl was silent. What could she say?

'Come along, madam, it is of no use. The warrant is here, and come

along you must.'

'I will not go to prison. I will not. I shall die of cold and ague and

rheumatics there. My bones will burst like water-pipes, and I'll shiver

the teeth out of my jaws and the nails off my fingers and toes. I won't

go!' she screamed. 'You must carry me, I can't walk. I'm a dying old

woman.'

'Would you like to go back to Red Hall?' asked Elijah gravely.

'Oh! Master Rebow, if I might! I could shiver in comfort.'

'You and Glory! You and Glory!' He looked from one to the other. 'I

don't take back one without the other.'

'Take me back!' wailed Mrs. Sharland. 'I know you won't be so cruel as

to send me to prison. Let me go back to my armchair; Mehalah! promise

him everything.'

'I will promise him nothing,' she said gloomily. 'If ever I hated this

man, I hate him now.'

'Then she must go to prison,' growled Rebow. 'Now look you here, Glory!

I don't ask much. I only ask you to go back with your mother, and work

for me as you have worked hitherto. I do not say a word about anything

else. You thought to escape me. You cannot. I have told you all along

that it is impossible. As for the future, let the future determine. I

wish to let you take your own course. I will not say another word about

my wishes, till you come to me, of your own accord, and say that you

will be mine. There! I promise you that. I will not force you any

further; but I will not allow you to leave my house. There you must

remain till you come to me and bid me take you, till you come and give

yourself freely into my hands. Do you hear me, Glory?'

'Mehalah, save me,' pleaded Mrs. Sharland. 'Do what you can to save me

from prison. Did I not lay by for you when I was a widow and needy?

And will you refuse me this?'

'One thing or another,' said Rebow. 'Either your mother rots in prison,

with no escape possible till she goes out to her grave in a pauper's

shell, or you and she return at once to Red Hall, on the same conditions

as you have been there hitherto, on the conditions you proposed

yourself.'

Mehalah trembled.

'Let us go back,' said Mrs. Sharland. 'Help me into the boat. He

couldn't have spoken more fair. You see, Mehalah, the Ray house is a

great loss to him, and he gave eight hundred pounds for it.'

'And the marshes, and the saltings, and for you and Glory, and all

things,' put in Rebow.

Mehalah held out her arms. Her head swam; she stood as though balancing

herself on a high wall. Then she clasped her hands over her forehead,

and burst into a storm of tears.

'Jim!' said Elijah, 'get the old doll into the stern, and you row her

back to Red Hall. Take her under your arm and chuck her in anyhow.'

He looked at the convulsed girl with an ugly smile of triumph.

'Give me the warrant, bailiff!' He took the paper, held it under

Mehalah's eyes and tore it in pieces, and scattered them over the water.

'Shove off, Jim. Row the old bundle back quick. Glory and I are going

to drive home.'

Mehalah looked up, with a gasp as though stung.

'Yes, Glory! To-day is Valentine's Day. Valentine's Day it is. I have

my little gig here. It accommodates two beautifully. I am going to

take you up by my side, and drive you home, _home_, to your home and

mine, Glory, in it; and all along the road, here at the Rose where the

horse is standing, at Peldon, at Salcott and Virley,--all along the

road,--at the parson's, at the Rising Sun, at Farmer

Goppin's,--everywhere I'll let them see that I'm out a-junketing to-day

along with my Valentine.'

All power of resistance was gone from Mehalah. The landlady at the Rose

looked at her with pitying eyes, as she was helped up into the gig.

'I thought you was coming to us,' said the woman.

'You thought wrong,' answered Elijah with a boisterous laugh. 'Glory is

coming back to me. We've had a bit of a tiff, but have made it up.

Haven't we, Glory?'

The girl's head fell in shame on her bosom. She could not speak, but

the tears rolled out of her eyes and streaked the 'Gloriana' on her

breast.

He did not say a word to her as he drove home; but he stopped wherever

she had halted a few days before. At Peldon farm he drew up, and struck

at the door. He asked if there was a bullock there to be sold. The

woman came into the garden with him.

'Out a Valentining along with my lass,' he said, indicating Mehalah with

his whip over his shoulder.

He arrested his horse at the parson's cottage, and shouted till the door

opened, and Mr. Rabbit appeared, with Mrs. Rabbit behind his back,

peeping over his shoulder.

'I say,' roared Rebow, 'one of those cursed brats of yours has been on

my marshes plaguing my cows, and has run two of them lame. Let him try

it on again, let him put his foot on my ground, and I'll cut it off, and

send him limping home.'

He stopped at the Rising Sun and called for spirits, and offered some to

Mehalah. She turned aside her head in disgust; he drove up to Virley

Hall farm, and into the yard, and called forth Farmer Goppin and his

wife.

'I tell you,' he said, 'one of my cattle has been straying, I don't

suppose she has done damage; she got into this here yard, I'm told. You

turned her out. I'm a man of few words, but I thank ye. I am carrying

her home before she is pounded.'

And then he drove straight to Red Hall.

Mehalah descended, crushed, broken, no more herself, the bold haughty

girl of the Ray. She crept upstairs, took off her red cap and tore it

with her hands and teeth. Her liberty was for ever gone from her.

Her mother was in their common bedroom, the boat had returned before the

cart, for the way by water was the shortest, and tide had favoured. The

old woman babbled about her grievances, and rejoiced at Rebow's

magnanimity. She was busy replacing all the little articles that had

been carried away, and were now brought back.

Mehalah could not endure the thrumming of her talk, and she hid herself

in a corner of the little inner apartment, an empty room lighted by a

small triangular window. There she crouched in the corner, on the

ground, with her head on her knees and her hands in her hair behind.

She sat there motionless. The fountain of her tears was dried up. The

hectic flames burned in her cheeks, but all the rest of her face was

deadly in its pallor. She could not think, she could not feel. She had

experienced but one such another period of agony, that when the medal

was restored and she knew that George was lost to her. That moment was

sweet to this. That was one of pure pain, this of pain and humiliation,

of crushed pride, of honour trampled and dragged in the dirt. Her

self-respect had had its death-wound, and she sat and let her heart

bleed away. Once or twice she put her hand on the floor. She thought

that that must have been flooded with blood and tears, as if, when she

took her hand up, it must be steeped red. It was not so.

But the soul has its ichor as well as the heart, and when it is cut deep

into it also drains away, and is left empty, pulseless, pallid. Mrs.

Sharland came in and spoke to her daughter, but got no answer. Mehalah

looked up at her, but there was no expression in her eyes, she did not

hear, or if she heard, did not understand what was said to her. The old

woman went away muttering.

The evening fell, and Mehalah still sat crouched in her corner. The

golden triangle which had stood on the wall opposite her had moved to

her side, turned to silver, and now was but a nebulous patch on the

white plaster. With the death of the day some abatement came to

Mehalah's distress. She moved her cramped limbs. She rose to her

knees, and fixed her eyes on the sky that glimmered grey through the

triangular window. A star was hanging there. She saw it, and looked at

it long, it shone through her eyes and down into the dark abyss in her

soul. By little her ideas began to shape themselves; recollections of

the past formed over that despairing gulf; she could not think of the

present; she had not the power or the will to look into the future.

A year had passed since, on such an evening as this, looking on that

star, she had stood with George de Witt on the Ray beneath the thorn

trees, and he had gaily called her his Valentine, and given her in jest

a picture of the Goddess of Liberty as proclaimed in Paris, wearing the

bonnet rouge. She a goddess! She who was now so weak. Her power was

gone. Liberty! She had none. She was a slave.

She drew herself up on her knees, and strained her united fingers, with

the palms outward, towards that glittering star, and moaned, 'My

Valentine! My George, my George!'

Suddenly, as if in answer to that wail from her wounded heart, there

came a crash, and then loud, pealing, agonising, a cry from below out of

the depths, and yet in the air about--'Glory! Glory! Glory!'

*CHAPTER XX.*

*IN PROFUNDUM.*

The cry roused Mehalah, as a step into cold water is a shock bringing a

somnambulist instantly to full consciousness.

In a minute she was outside the house, looking for the person whose

appeal had struck her ear. She saw the wooden shutter that had closed

the window of the madman's den broken, hanging by one hinge. Two

bleached, ghostly hands were stretched through the bars, clutching and

opening.

At his door, above the steps, stood Elijah.

'Hah! Glory!' he said, 'has the crazed fool's shout brought you down?'

She was stepping towards the window. Rebow ran down before her.

'Go in!' he shouted to his brother. 'Curse you, you fool! breaking the

shutter and yelling out, scaring the whole house.' He had a whip, a

great carter's whip in his hand, and he smacked it. The hands

disappeared instantly.

'Bring me a hammer and nails,' ordered Rebow. 'You will find them in the

window of the hall.'

Mehalah obeyed. Rebow patched up the shutter temporarily. There were

iron bars to the window. The wooden cover had a small hole in it to

admit a little light. During the summer the shutter was removed. It

was used to exclude the winter cold.

'Why did he call me?' asked Mehalah.

'He did not.'

'I heard his cry. He called me thrice, Glory! Glory! Glory!'

'He was asking for his victuals,' said Rebow, with a laugh. 'Look you

here, Glory! I have been alone in this house so long, and have thought

of you, and brooded on you, and had none to speak to about you. At last

I took to teaching my brother your name. I wouldn't give him his food

till he said it. I taught him like a parrot. I made him speak your

name, as you make a dog sit up and beg for a bit of bread. I've been

about on the road all day, on account of your perversity and wilfulness,

and so forgot to give my brother his food. But I don't care. He had no

right to smash the shutter and yell out the way he has. I'll punish him

for it. I'll lay into him with the whip, so as he shall not forget.

He'll be quieter in future.'

'Do not,' said Mehalah. 'It is a shame; it is wicked to treat a poor

afflicted wretch thus.'

'Oh! you are turned advocate, are you? You take the side of a madman

against the sane. That is like a perverse creature such as you. What

has he done for you, that you should try to save his back?'

'No mercy is to be looked for at your hands,' said Mehalah sullenly.

'Look you here, Glory! the moon is full, and that always makes him

madder. I have to keep him short of food, and strap his shoulders, or

he would tear the walls down in his fury.'

'Let me attend to him,' asked Mehalah.

'You'd be afraid of him.'

'I should pity him,' said the girl. 'He and I are both wretched, both

your victims, both prisoners, wearing your chains.'

'You have no chains round you, Glory.'

'Have I not? I have, invisible, may be, but firmer, colder, more given

to rust into and rub the flesh than those carried by that poor captive.

I have tried to break away, but I cannot. You draw me back.'

'I told you I could. I have threads to every finger, and I can move you

as I will. I can bring you into my arms.'

'That--never,' said Mehalah gloomily and leisurely.

'You think not?'

'I am sure not. You may boast of your power over me. You have a power

over me, but that power has its limits. I submit now, but only for my

mother's sake. Were she not dependent wholly on me, were she dead, I

would defy you and be free, free as the gull yonder.'

Elijah put his hand inside his door, drew out his gun, and in a moment

the gull was seen to fall.

'She is not dead,' said Mehalah, with a gleam of triumph in her sad

face.

'No, but winged. The wretch will flutter along disabled. She will try

to rise, and each effort will give her mortal agony, and grind the

splintered bones together and make the blood bleed away. She will skim

a little while above the water, but at length will fall into the waves

and be washed ashore dead.'

'Yes,' said Mehalah; 'you will not kill, but wound--wound to the quick.'

'That is about it, Glory!'

'Let me repeat my request,' she said; 'allow me to attend to your

brother. I must have someone, some thing, to pity and minister to.'

'You can minister to me.'

'So I do.'

'And you can pity me.'

'Pity you!' with scorn.

'Aye. I am to be pitied, for here am I doing all I can to win the heart

of a perverse and stubborn girl, and I meet with nothing but contempt

and hate. I am to be pitied. I am a man; I love you, and am defied and

repulsed, and fled from as though I had the pestilence, and my house

were a plague hospital.'

'Will you let me attend to your brother?'

'No, I will not.'

The shutter was dashed off its hinges, flung out into the yard, and the

two ghastly hands were again seen strained through the bars. Again

there rang out in the gathering night the piteous cry, 'Glory! Glory!

Glory!'

'By God! you hound,' yelled Elijah, and he raised his whip to bring it

down in all its cutting force on the white wrists.

'I cannot bear it. I will not endure it!' cried Mehalah, and she

arrested the blow. She caught the stick and wrenched it out of the hand

of Rebow before he could recover from his surprise, and broke it over

her knee and flung it into the dyke that encircled the yard. There was,

however, no passion in her face, she acted deliberately, and her brown

cheek remained unflushed. 'I take his cry as an appeal to me, and I

will protect him from your brutality.'

'You are civil,' sneered Elijah. 'What are you in this house? A

servant, you say. Then you should speak and act as one. No, Glory! you

know you are not, and cannot be, a servant. You shall be its mistress.

I forgive you what you have done, for you are asserting your place and

authority. Only do not cry out and protest if in future I speak to the

workmen of you as the mistress.'

A hard expression settled on Mehalah's brow and eyes. She turned away.

'Are you going? Have you not a parting word, mistress?'

'Go!' she said, in a tone unlike that usual with her. 'I care for

nothing. I feel for no one. I am without a heart. Do what you will

with that brother of yours. I am indifferent to him and to his fate.

Everything in the world is all one to me now. If you had let me think

for the poor creature and feed him, and attend to him, I might have

become reconciled to being here; I could at least have comforted my soul

with the thought that I was ministering to the welfare of one unhappy

wretch and lightening his lot. But now,' she shrugged her shoulders.

'Now everything is all one to me. I can laugh,' she did so, harshly.

'There is nothing in the world that I care for now, except my mother,

and I do not know that I care very much for her now. I feel as if I had

no heart, or that mine were frozen in my bosom.'

'You do not care now for your mother!' exclaimed Rebow. 'Then leave her

here to my tender mercy, and go out into the world and seek your

fortune. Go on the tramp like your gipsy ancestry.'

'Leave my mother to your mercy!' echoed Mehalah. 'To the mercy of you,

who could cut your poor crazed brother over the fingers with a great

horsewhip! To you, who have stung and stabbed at my self-respect till

it is stupefied; who have treated me, whom you profess to love, as I

would not treat a marsh briar.[1] Never. Though my heart may be

stunned or dead, yet I have sufficient instinct to stand by and protect

her who brought me into the world and nursed me, when I was helpless.

As for you, I do not hate you any more than I love you. You are nothing

to me but a coarse, ill-conditioned dog. I will beat you off with a

hedge-stake if you approach me nearer than I choose. If you keep your

distance and keep to yourself, you will not occupy a corner of my

thoughts. I take my course, you take yours.' She walked moodily away

and regained her room.

[1] Horse-fly.

Mrs. Sharland began at once a string of queries. She wanted to know who

had cried out and alarmed them, what Mehalah had been saying to Rebow,

whether she had come to her senses at last, how long she was going to

sulk, and so on.

Mehalah answered her shortly and rudely; that the cry had come from the

madman, that he meant nothing by it, he had been taught to yell thus

when he wanted food, that he had been neglected by his brother and was

distressed; as for her mother's other questions, she passed them by

without remark, and brushing in front of the old woman, went into the

inner chamber.

'Mehalah!' called Mrs. Sharland. 'I will not have you glouting in there

any longer. Come out.'

The girl paid no attention to her. She leaned her head against the wall

and put her hands to her ears. Her mother's voice irritated her. She

wanted quiet.

'This is too much of a good thing,' said the old woman, going in after

her. 'Come away, Mehalah, you have your work to do, and it must be

done.'

'You are right,' answered the girl in a hard tone, 'I am a servant, and

I will do my work. I will go down at once.' She knitted her brows, and

set her teeth. Her complexion was dull and dead. Her hair was in

disorder, and fell about her shoulders. She twisted it up carelessly,

and tied it round her head with George's handkerchief.

When she returned, her mother was in bed, and half-asleep. Mehalah went

to the window, the window that looked towards the Ray, and drawing the

curtains behind her, remained there, her head sunk, but her eyes never

wavering from the point where her home had been when she was happy, her

heart free, and her self-respect unmangled. So passed hour after hour.

There was full moon, but the sky was covered with clouds white as curd,

scudding before a north-west wind. The moon was dulled but hardly

obscured every now and then, and next moment glared out in naked

brilliancy.

Everything in the house was hushed. Elijah had gone to bed. Mehalah

had heard his heavy tread on the stair, and the bang of his door as he

shut it; it had roused her, she turned her head, and her face grew

harder in the cold moonlight. Then she looked back towards the Ray.

Her mother was asleep. The starlings and sparrows who had worked their

way under the eaves, and were building nests between the ceiling and the

tiles, stirred uneasily; they were cold and hungry and could not sleep.

Anyone not knowing what stirred would have supposed that mice were

holding revel in the attics. There yonder on the marsh was something

very white, like paper, flapping and flashing in the moonlight. What

could it be? It moved a little way, then blew up and fell and flapped

again. Was it a sheet of paper? If so how came it not to be swept away

by the rushing wind. No, it was no sheet of paper. Mehalah's curiosity

was roused. She opened the window and looked out. At the same moment

it rose, fluttered nearer, eddied up, and fell again. A cloud drifted

over the moon and made the marsh grey, and in the shadow the restless

object was lost, the flash of white was blotted over. When the moon

gleamed out again, she saw it once more. It did not move. The wind

tore by, and shook the casement in her hand, but did not lift and blow

away that white object. Then there was a lull. The air was still for a

moment. At that moment the white object moved again, rose once more and

fluttered up, it was flying, it was nearing,--it fell on the roof of the

bakehouse under the window. Now Mehalah saw what this was. It was the

wounded gull, the bird Rebow had shot.

The miserable creature was struggling with a broken wing, and with

distilling blood, to escape to sea, to die, and drop into the dark,

tossing, foaming waves, to lose itself in infinity. It could not expire

on the land, it must seek its native element, the untamed, unconfined

sea; it could not give forth its soul on the trampled, reclaimed,

hedged-in earth.

Was it not so with Glory? Could her free soul rest where she now was?

Could it endure for ever this tyranny of confinement within impalpable

walls? She who had lived, free as a bird, to be blown here and there by

every impulse, when every impulse was fresh and pure as the unpolluted

breath of God that rushes over the ocean. Was she not wounded by the

same hand that had brought down the white mew? There she was

fluttering, rising a little, again falling, her heart dim with tears,

her life's vigour bleeding away, the white of her bosom smeared with

soil that adhered, as she draggled in the mire, into which he had cast

her. Whither was she tending? She turned her face out to sea--it lay

stretched before her ink-black. Red Hall and its marshes were to her a

prison, and freedom was beyond its sea-wall.

She was startled by a sound as of bricks falling. She listened without

curiosity. The sound recurred again, and was followed after a while by

a grating noise, and then a rattle as of iron thrown down. She heard

nothing further for a few minutes, and sank back into her dull dream,

and watching of the poor mew, that now beat its wings on the roof, and

then slid off and disappeared. Was it dead now? It did not matter.

Mehalah could not care greatly for a bird. But presently from out of

the shadow of the bakehouse floated a few white feathers. The gull was

still wending its way on, with unerring instinct, towards the rolling

sea. Just then Mehalah heard a thud, as though some heavy body had

fallen, accompanied by a short clank of metal. She would have paid it no

further attention had she not been roused by seeing the madman striding

and then jumping, with the chain wound round one arm. He looked up at

the moon, his matted hair was over his face, and Mehalah could not

distinguish the features. He ran across the yard, and then leaped the

dyke and went off at long bounds, like a kangaroo, over the pasture

towards the sea-wall.

Mehalah drew back. What should she do? Should she rouse Elijah, and

tell him that his brother had wrenched off the grating of his window and

worked his way out, and was now at large in the glare of moon on the

marshes, leaping and rejoicing in his freedom? No, she would not. Let

the poor creature taste of liberty, inhale the fresh, pure air, caper

and race about under no canopy but that of God's making. She would not

curtail his time of freedom by an hour. He would suffer severely for

his evasion on the morrow, when Elijah would call out his men, and they

would hunt the poor wretch down like a wild beast. She could see Rebow

stand over him with his great dog-whip, and strike him without mercy.

She rouse Rebow! She reconsign the maniac to his dark dungeon, with its

dank floor and stifling atmosphere! The gull was forgotten now; its

little strivings overlooked in anxiety for the mightier strivings of the

human sufferer. Yet all these three were bound together by a common

tie! Each was straining for the infinite, and for escape from thraldom;

one with a broken wing, one with a broken brain, one with a broken

heart. There was the wounded bird flapping and edging its way outwards

to the salt sea. There was the dazed brain driving the wretched man in

mad gambols along the wall to the open water. There was the bruised soul

of the miserable girl yearning for something, she knew not what, wide,

deep, eternal, unlimited, as the all-embracing ocean. In that the bird,

the man, the maid sought freedom, rest, recovery.

She could not go to bed and leave the poor maniac thus wandering

unwatched. She would go out and follow him, and see that no harm came

to him.

She took off her shoes, shut the window. Her mother was sleeping

soundly. She undid the door and descended the stairs. They creaked

beneath her steps, but Rebow, who had slept through the noise made by

his brother in effecting his escape, was not awakened by her footfall.

She unlocked the back door, closed it, and stole forth.

As she passed the bakehouse she lit on the wounded bird. In a spasm of

sympathy she bent and took it up. It made a frantic effort to escape,

and uttered its wild, harsh screams; but she folded her hands over the

wings and held the bird to her bosom and went on. The blood from the

broken bone and torn flesh wet her hand, and dried on it like glue. She

heeded it not, but walked forward. By the raw moonlight she saw the

madman on the wall. He had thrown down his chain. He heeded it not

now. There had been sufficient intelligence or cunning in his brain to

bid him deaden its clanking when making his escape from the house.

He sprang into the air and waved his arms; his wild hair blew about in

the wind, it looked like seaweed tangles. Then he sat down. Mehalah

did not venture on the wall, but crept along in the marsh. He had got a

stone, and was beating at his chain with it upon the stone casing of the

wall on the sea face. He worked at it patiently for an hour, and at

last broke one of the links. He waved the chain above his head with a

shout, and flung it behind him into the marsh. He ran on. Mehalah stole

after him. He never looked back, always forwards or upwards. Sometimes

he danced and shouted and sang snatches to the moon when it flared out

from behind a cloud. Once, when at a bend of the wall, his shadow was

cast before him, he cowered back from it, jabbering, and putting his

hands supplicatingly towards it; then he slipped down the bank, laughed,

and ran across the marsh, with his shadow behind him, and thought in his

bewildered brain that he had cunningly eluded and escaped the figure

that stood before him to stop him. He reached the mill that worked the

pump. He must have remembered it: it was mixed up somehow with the

confused recollections in his brain, for it did not seem to startle or

frighten him. He scarcely noticed it, but, uttering a howl, a wild,

triumphant shout, sprang upon a duck punt hauled up on the wall. It was

Elijah's punt, left there occasionally, quite as often as at the landing

near the house, a small, flat-bottomed boat, painted white, with a pair

of white, muffled oars in it.

In a moment, before Mehalah had considered what to do, or whether she

could do anything, he had run the punt down into the water, and had

seated himself in it, and taken the oars and struck out to sea, out

towards the open, towards the unbounded horizon.

He rowed a little way, not very far, and then stood up. He could not

apparently endure to face the land, the place of long confinement, he

must turn and look out to sea.

Mehalah stood on the sea-wall. The waves were lapping at her feet. The

tide had turned. It flowed at midnight, and midnight was just past.

She had forgotten the gull she bore, in her alarm for the man, she

opened her arms, and the bird fluttered down and fell into the water.

The moon was now swimming in a clear space of sky free of cloudfloes.

In that great light the man was distinctly visible, standing, waving his

arms in the white punt, drifting, not rapidly, but steadily outwards. In

that great light went out also, on the same cold, dark water, the dying

bird, that now stirred not a wing.

Mehalah watched motionless, with a yearning in her heart that she could

not understand, her arms extended towards that boundless expanse towards

which the man and the bird were being borne, and into which they were

fading. He was singing! Some old, childish lay of days that were

happy, before the shadow fell.

There stood Glory, looking, indistinctly longing, till her eyes were

filled with tears. She looked on through the watery vail, but saw

nothing. When she wiped it away she saw nothing. She watched till the

day broke, but she saw nothing more.

*CHAPTER XXI.*

*IN VAIN!*

Mrs. De Witt was not happy, taken all in all. There were moments indeed

of conviviality when she boasted that she was now what she had always

wanted to be, independent, and with none to care for but herself, 'none

of them bullet-headed, shark-bellied men to fuss and worrit about.' But

she laboured, like the moon, under the doom of passing through phases,

and one of these was dark and despondent. As she lay in her bunk of a

raw morning, and contemplated her toes in the grey light that fell

through the hatches, she was forced to admit that her financial position

was not established on a secure basis. It reposed on smelt, shrimps,

dabs and eels, a fluctuating, an uncertain foundation. She strode about

the island and the nearest villages on the mainland, with a basket on

her arm, containing a half-pint measure, and a load of shrimps, or swung

a stick in her hand from which depended slimy eels. She did a small

trade at the farm-houses, and reaped some small retail profits. The

farmers' wives were accustomed to see her in sunshine habited in scarlet

more or less mottled with crimson, in storm wearing a long grey military

great coat. In summer a flapping straw hat adorned her head; in winter

a fur cap with a great knob at the top, and fur lappets over her ears.

In compliment to her condition of mourner a big black bow was sewn to

the summit of the knob, and she looked like a knight helmeted, bearing

as crest a butterfly displayed, sable. It was seldom that she was

dismissed from a farmhouse without having disposed of a few shrimps, or

some little fish; for if she were not given custom regularly, she took

huff and would not call with her basket again, till an apology were

offered, and she was entreated to return.

The profits of the trade were not however considerable, and such as they

were underwent reduction on all her rounds. She consumed the major part

of them in her orbit at the 'Fountain,' the 'Fox,' the 'Leather Bottle'

or the 'Dog and Pheasant.' In the bar of each of these ancient taverns,

Mrs. De Witt was expected and greeted as cordially as at the

farm-kitchen. There she was wont to uncasque, and ruffle out her white

cap, and turn out her pockets to count her brass. There also this brass

underwent considerable diminution. The consumption of her profits

generally left Mrs. De Witt in a condition rather the worse than the

better. She was a sinking fund that sucked in her capital. However

cheery of face, and crisp of gathers, Mrs. De Witt may have started on

her mercantile round, the close saw her thick of speech, leery of eye,

festoony of walk, vague in her calculations, reckless of measurement

with her little pewter half-pint, and generally crumpled in cap and

garment. If she were still able to rattle a few coppers in her pocket

when she stumbled up the ladder, toppled down into the hold, and tumbled

into her bunk, she was happy. She was her own mistress, she had no

helpless, foolish man, husband or son, to consider, and before whom to

veil her indiscretions; she pulled up the ladder as soon as she was

home; and, as she said, sat up for no one but herself.

She had not quite reconciled her smoking to her conscience, when she had

a son to set a model of life to, before whom to posture as the ideal of

womanhood and maternity; then when his foot was heard on the ladder she

would slip her clay into the oven, and murmur something about a pinch

out of her snuff-box having fallen on the stove, or about her having

smoked her best gown as a preventive to moth. Now she smoked with

composure, and turned over in her mind the various possibilities that

lay before her. Should she bow to the hard necessity of leading about a

tame man again, or should she remain in her present condition of

absolute freedom? The five-and-twenty pounds had nearly disappeared,

and she was not certain that she could live in comfort on her gains by

the trade in shrimps and eels.

Mrs. De Witt was a moralist, and when nearly drunk religious. She was

not a church-goer, but she was fond of convivial piety. Over her cups

she had a great deal to say of her neighbours' moral shortcomings and of

her own religious emotions. When in a state of liquor she was always

satisfied that she was in a state of grace. In her sober hours she

thought of nothing save how to make both ends meet. She mused on her

future, and hovered in her choice, she feared that sooner or later she

must make her election, to take a man or to do without one. The eagle

can gaze on the sun without blinking, but Mrs. De Witt could not fix her

eye on matrimony without the water coming into it. That was a step she

would not take till driven to it by desperation. The _Pandora's_ bottom

was not all that could be wished, it was rotten. Mrs. De Witt saw that

the repair of the _Pandora_ was a matter she could not compass. When

she let in water, Mrs. De Witt would admit a husband. Whilst a plank

remained impervious to the tide, so would her breast to matrimonial

dreams.

The spring tides came, and with them seawater oozing in at the rotted

joints of the vessel. Mrs. De Witt was well aware of the presence of

bilgewater in the bottom. Bilgewater has the faculty of insisting on

cognisance being taken of its presence. Whenever she returned to the

_Pandora_, the odour affected her with horror, for it assured her that

her days of independence were numbered. But all at once a new light

sprang up in the old lady's mind, she saw a middle course open to her; a

way of maintaining a partial independence, on a certainty of

subsistence.

She had not returned the call made her by her nephew Elijah Rebow. Half

a year had elapsed, but that was no matter. Etiquette of high life does

not rule the grades to which the Rebows and De Witts belonged. Why

should not she keep house for her nephew? He was well off, and he was

little at home; his house was large, she would have free scope in it for

carrying on her own independent mode of life, and her keep would cost

her nothing. That house had been her home. In it she had been born and

nurtured. She had only left it to be incumbered with a husband and a

son. Now she was free from these burdens, what more reasonable than

that she should return? It was the natural asylum to which she must

flee in her necessity.

It was true indeed that Rebow had taken in Mrs. Sharland and Glory, but

what ties attached them to him equal to hers of flesh and blood. Was

she not his aunt?

Now that Mrs. De Witt saw that it was clearly in her interest to

disestablish the Sharlands and install herself in their place, she saw

also, with equal clearness, that morality and religion impelled her to

take this course. What was Elijah's connection with Glory? Was it not a

public scandal, the talk of the neighbourhood? As aunt of Rebow was she

not in duty bound to interfere, to act a John the Baptist in that

Herod's court, and condemn the intimacy as improper?

Mrs. De Witt pulled herself up, morally as well as physically, and in

habit also. That is, she was sitting on her military coat tails, and

with a gathering sense of her apostleship of purity she shook them out,

she drew in at the same time the strings of her apron and of her cap,

tightened and lifted her bustle, so that the red military tails cocked

in an audacious and defiant--if not in an apostolic and missionary

manner. She ran her fingers through the flutings of her frills, to make

them stand out and form a halo round her face, like the corolla of white

round the golden centre of the daisy. Then she drank off a noggin of

gin to give herself courage, and away she started, up the companion,

over the deck, and down the ladder, to row to Red Hall with her purpose

hot in her heart.

After the disappearance of the madman, Mehalah had returned to the house

and to her room. She said nothing next day of what she had seen.

Elijah and his men had searched the marshes and found no trace of the

man save the broken chain. That Rebow took back, and hung over his

chimney-piece. He enquired in Salcott and Virley, but no one there had

seen anything of the unfortunate creature. It was obvious that he had

not gone inland. He had run outward, and when it was found that the

punt was gone, the conclusion arrived at was that the madman had left

the marshes in it.

Elijah rowed to Mersea, and made enquiries without eliciting any

information. He went next to Bradwell on the south coast of the great

Black water estuary, there his punt had been found, washed ashore; but

no traces of the man were to be discovered. That he was drowned

admitted of no doubt. Rebow satisfied himself that this was the case,

and was content to be thus rid of an encumbrance. Mehalah's knowledge

of the matter was unsuspected, and she was therefore not questioned.

She did not feel any necessity for her to mention what she had seen. It

could be of no possible advantage to anybody.

Her life became monotonous, but the monotone was one of gloom. She had

lost every interest; she attended to her mother without heart; and

omitted those little acts of tenderness which had been customary with

her, or performed them, when her mother fretted at the omission, in a

cold, perfunctory manner. Mrs. Sharland had been accustomed to be

overruled by her daughter, but now Mehalah neither listened to nor

combated her recommendations. She rarely spoke, but went through the

routine of her work in a mechanical manner. Sometimes she spoke to her

mother in a hard, sharp tone the old woman was unused to, and resented;

but Mehalah ignored her resentment. She cared neither for her mother's

love nor for her displeasure.

When she met the men about the farm, if they addressed her, she repelled

them with rudeness, and if obliged to be present with them for some

time, did not speak.