MEHALAH (continued 5)

'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.