PART III THE SEA

CHAPTER ONE

§ 1

Sussex was as golden-brown as Sark, and from the downs came the same scent of hot thyme as came from the cliffs above Saignie. Otherwise there was nothing in the Ouse Valley to remind Daniel of the Norman isle. The twilight was full of mist, lying between the faintly curved ridges of the downs—there was no glamour save in the sky, where the west was the colour of a grape and the east was the colour of pale green leaves.

Daniel had economically taken the ’bus which ran several times a day between Lewes and Newhaven, leaving his luggage to follow by carrier the next morning. He felt tired after his journey, and a little sick—for under the oily blue calms of the surface heavy swells had moved and shuddered over the sea’s bed, and his change from boat to train at Southampton had only added to his discomfort, by depriving him of the fresh air. Now it was queer to smell the dust instead of the sea—the fine, white dust of the Newhaven road—and he had that curious, cradled feeling which he had so often known among the downs, watching their soft ridges lying above him against the sky.

He also had the same feeling as when he had come home after the war—the feeling of never having been away. The past two and a half years lay behind him like a dream, and the present hour seemed to close up with those tragic hours at the George, when he had just lost Belle, as the hour of waking closes with the hour of falling asleep. Indeed he was conscious of his loss of Belle as he had never been conscious during the last two years, and as he was not conscious of his loss of the girl who had really belonged to him—of Rose “la chère épouse de Daniel Le Couteur ... nous n’avons rien apporté dans ce monde, et il est evident que nous n’en pouvons rien emporter.” ... It seemed as if even his memory of her had stayed behind in Sark, and slept within sound of the sea under the white stone. No—it was not quite like that. There was something of her which he had brought away—one survival of that sea-blue interlude which was still with him now that he had returned to the main grey road of life. He looked down at Thomas Helier Sheather, asleep in his arms.

The baby was considerably less tired than his father. He had travelled comfortably, wrapped in his big white shawl, and he had not fared too ill by masculine attendance. Daniel had not miscalculated—a big tight-bodiced woman had taken charge of him on the Lorena, had given him his bottle after it had been warmed by the second-class stewardess, and attended to even more baffling wants, finally handing him over to a sister-woman, travelling in the coast-train, so that Daniel had not had actually the sole charge of him till Brighton. This had given him the happy illusion that babies are easily managed, and he looked down affectionately at Thomas Helier, cradled in his arms, and thought how good it would be to watch the little chap growing up, to see him beginning to look like his mother, perhaps ... notre Helier ... he squeezed him in a passion of goodwill....

They were set down at the sign-post where the Telscombe lane starts on its brief roaming. At first Daniel had a moment of qualm, when he thought that Len had failed to meet him and that he would have to trudge with Thomas Helier three miles across the down. But the next minute he saw his brother’s trap coming round a bend—old bay Meg between the shafts, so different from the sad-eyed mules that had been his beasts of draught and burden for two years.

“Hullo!” said Dan.

“Hullo!” said Len.

“Whew!” he added, at the nearer sight of Thomas Helier.

“I squeezed him by mistake, and he’s been sick,” said Dan. “I wish you’d brought Emmie along.”

“Never mind. Jump up, and we’ll be at Brakey Bottom in half an hour. How old is he?”

“Six months. He was born the eleventh of April, and his mother died the same night.”

Len nodded sadly.

“We’ve all seen a bit of trouble since we were together last.”

“How’s Mum?”

“Oh, she’s well enough. Pretty sick with dad, as all of us are. She’ll be pleased to have the child.”

Daniel wondered.

“I can’t help thinking,” continued Len, “that none of this would have happened if you hadn’t gone away. You kept things just within bounds while you was at home, but directly you’d gone, nothing would stop dad ruining the business—and I can’t see that you’ve done much for yourself by going. Haven’t made a fortune out there, have you?”

“No—but I couldn’t very well have stayed at home with my last young lady living only just across the road as another man’s wife.”

“We never know what we can do till we try,” said Len oracularly.

§ 2

At Brakey Bottom his welcome was very much what he had expected. His mother kissed him and reproached him for having gone away, Christopher—whose good looks had become more striking in the last two years—gave him some languid attention, Emmie swooped in cordial competence upon Thomas Helier, and the children were friendly and noisy, even after it was discovered that Uncle Daniel had not brought any sweets.

“You don’t seem to have brought anything at all except yourself and the kid,” said Len. “Where’s your luggage?”

“Following on to-morrow from Lewes.”

“How are you off for money?”

“I’ve got a shilling.”

“And how d’you propose to live on that?”

“I don’t propose to live on it—nor on you, neither, so don’t worry. To-morrow I’m going out to look for work.”

“And it’s precious hard to find.”

“I know that—but I’ll find it somehow. I’ll take anything that’s going.”

“Well, I hope you’ll consider us, and not disgrace yourself too thoroughly. I’m just beginning to pull the farm up in spite of everything, and I’d as soon my brother wasn’t a railway porter or a dustman.”

“I’d be thankful if I could get as good a job as either—it’s more like to be cleaning sewers in Newhaven, or driving around a laundry cart.”

“Well, I don’t see anything to laugh about—what’s happened to you? You’ve come back in a fine good humour—our affairs don’t seem to bother you much.”

“He’s fallen in love again, perhaps,” shrilled Kitty; “he’s fallen in love with someone he met on the boat.”

“No fear, mum. I haven’t been widowed six months.”

“Then maybe it’s your marriage that has changed you. You look different—more set up.”

“You’re lucky to have been out of all our troubles,” said Leonard; “we’ve had some fine times here without you, and not a word from father since he sailed.”

“Oh, your father,” groaned Kitty; “he take me away from my dear country and my dear family and then he leave me. Did your uncles send me any message, Daniel?”

Daniel gave what ought to have been the messages of Uncle Philip and Uncle Eugene but were not.

His mother sat by him while he had his supper—the others had finished theirs—and he told her about the Pêche à Agneau and his cousins and a little about Moie Fano and Rose. But she did not really listen much; her mind was full of her own trouble. She spoke of Tom Sheather as if he had deserted her six months after their marriage, instead of thirty years.

“Oh, you men are cruel and faithless to us poor women, who work for you.”

“No, mum, we ain’t,” said Christopher, who was sitting at the table beside his mother. He rubbed his head against her shoulder—but she pushed him away.

“You do not love me—you are courting.”

“What, Chris courting?—who is she?”

“She’s Mary Wright at Exceat, and soon I shan’t have even him left——” and her tears flowed.

“You will—you will,” cried young Christopher. “Maybe I shan’t marry her, and if I do, she’ll have to say you’ll live along of us.”

“That always leads to trouble—the wife is always jealous of her husband’s mother.”

“Well, I don’t know as I shall marry her. I haven’t asked her yet, and seeing the way most marriages turn out, maybe I never will. Why, your girl, Dan, that you used to be so struck on, Belle Shackford that was, reckon she leads poor Ernley Munk a proper life—reckon he wouldn’t be so sorry to have his single days again.”

“What! ain’t they happy?” asked Daniel, uneasy.

Kitty shrugged.

“As happy as most, maybe—but there’s few men wouldn’t like to see their single days again soon after marriage. They all go off and leave us sooner or later.”

“But there’s been no trouble—no quarrel—has there?”

“Not that I know of—but most like a lot that I don’t.”

Daniel could not be sure whether his mother was speaking from the bitterness of her own grievance, or whether she really had grounds for her suspicions. He decided to let the matter drop for the moment, but Chris pursued it rather mercilessly.

“I remember how gone you used to be on her, Dan. Three years ago you’d have wanted to punch my head if I’d told you that you’d soon be marrying another woman.”

“Yes—thank God it all come to nothing!” cried Kitty; “and it is somebody else’s son who marries a woman who is not a lady.”

“What are you talking about, mother?”

“Well, no one can say Belle Shackford was ever a lady. I know how a lady should behave; and other people know—that is why they did not let their rooms for this September at the Crown. She’s a big scrambling thing—and she let the visitors see her with her hair down.... I myself see her with her hair hanging on her cheeks like straw, and her dress all undone at the back, so as you could see right through to her stays.”

Daniel blinked—somehow his mother’s broken words had called up an almost agonizing picture of Belle.

“Thank God you did not marry her,” continued Kitty. “And thank God you did not marry a Carré or a Hamon. I have nothing against the Falles, and I should have been pleased to meet your poor wife if she had not been taken. But she has been taken, and I hope that some day you will marry again, for the sake of the child. Christopher shall take you to see his Mary Wright.”

Daniel could not help laughing.

“Christopher, may I marry your Mary Wright?”

“You know I did not mean that,” sulked Kitty.

“Come, ma,” broke in Em Sheather, who had begun to clear the table; “I reckon Daniel’s tired after his journey and wants to go to bed. I’ve had to put you in with the children, Danny—I know you don’t mind, and I haven’t got room for you anywheres else.”

§ 3

The next morning Daniel went over to Bullockdean. He wanted to see Mr. Marchbanks and to see Ernley, and perhaps Belle. He would go to the rectory first, but before he went to it he must pass between the two inns that stared at each other across the village street. There they were—the George and the Crown; the creak of their signs in the wind seemed a familiar music, but he knew that the hearts of both had changed.

The Crown had changed outwardly too. It had grown a new wing, of red brick like the rest of the house, with clematis and virginia creeper already beginning to hide its crude contrast with the mellow, time-worn bricks of the old dwelling. The George had not changed—it looked cracked and mean as ever, and peering through the taproom window, Dan saw the bar as it always had been, except for a strange young man in his shirt-sleeves, serving Messrs. Hobday and Hitch’s beer to a couple of silent farm-hands.

Young Sheather could not resist the temptation to walk in and spend fourpence on a glass of the old bad ale. The man behind the bar was inclined to be friendly. He was the new landlord, he told Daniel—the former landlord had got into a mess with the police and had gone away to sea. He himself came from Rottingdean, where he had been a gentleman’s servant. The old man had died and left him a bit of money, and he’d been tempted to take a little place like this, and his wife’s father had helped him. So here he was and he hoped he’d do well, though the place was a poor sort of place. He was evidently glad to have someone to talk to—having no doubt suffered from the local prejudice against “furriners,” and Dan, moved to sympathy by his own recent experiences, had another glass, which reduced his capital to fourpence.

He then went up the village to the rectory. Here were more changes, though perhaps they were less changes than intensifications. The house seemed more deeply sunk than usual into its orchard and garden—due, Daniel censoriously felt, to his successor’s defective pruning—its roof and its lawn had a shaggy, unkempt look, and the rector kept a pig, judging by the smell that floated round from the backyard. Daniel rang the bell disapprovingly.

After a time the door was opened by Mr. Marchbanks himself.

“What! Daniel!” he cried. “I didn’t know you were back yet. Come in.”

“I came back last night.”

“But you haven’t written to me for a year.”

“No more I have,” said Daniel sheepishly.

“Well, come in and have some dinner. I’m just getting it ready. Jess Harman has gone into Lewes for the day.”

The kitchen was pleasant with the smell of frying bacon. Daniel took the pan, while the rector laid the table; he also made some tea, and with that, and bread and cheese, they had a fine dinner, which Brakey Bottom would have despised.

“I wrote to you four or five days ago,” said the parson. “I expect you’d left before my letter arrived.”

“Reckon I had.”

Mr. Marchbanks was very shy; so he did not question Daniel as to the reason for his long silence—indeed, he had been long enough in Bullockdean to guess that the reason might be only one of penmanship, the difficulty of getting thoughts or even words to flow in channels of ink. Daniel, on his side, felt a little ashamed of himself. He might at least have sent Mr. Marchbanks a card at Christmas—there had been cards for sale at De Cartaret’s shop. These feelings made them both a little awkward with each other during the meal, but when it was over and they had taken out their pipes, they both grew more talkative. Daniel told his friend about Sark and the Le Couteurs and Rose and the cottage at Moie Fano, and why he had come back with Thomas Helier, and how he must now set about and look for work. The rector, in his turn, told him about the struggle he had had in church and parsonage since Daniel went away. Tommy Pilbeam, his immediate successor, had lapsed from house and altar after a few months, and since then there had been a difficult variety of doubtful youths, till at last, in self-defence, Mr. Marchbanks had become his own gardener and sacristan.

“That’s why the place looks so awful,” he said ruefully. “I can cope with the church, but the garden is beyond me. Jess Harman’s a splendid girl, but she’s got more than enough to do indoors—and I’d arranged to sell the pig when I heard you were expected home.”

“I dunno as I’ve got much home now. At least, it’s only Brakey Bottom, and I don’t see as I can look properly after the pig and you if I live over there.”

“No—that does make it rather difficult. I wish we could think of something. It would be simple enough if I wasn’t so stony, but I can’t afford to pay you more than ten bob a week—indeed, I don’t see how I can even manage that now that I’m paying twelve to Jess Harman—there she is, by the way,” as a flowered hat went past the window. “I wonder what’s brought her back so early?”

As he finished speaking the door opened, and Jess walked in, elegantly dressed in a saxe-blue coat and skirt and a picture hat trimmed with a wreath of silk roses, to which, either from neglect or pride, the price-ticket still adhered, to show the destination of three and elevenpence of the rector’s twelve shillings.

“I heard down at auntie’s that you’d come home, Daniel,” she said as she shook hands, “so I thought I’d run back and have a look at you.”

Evidently she saw no necessity to maintain the relations of employer and employed out of working hours; she sat down beside Daniel and fired off a round of Bullockdean news.

“Reckon we’re all glad to see you home,” she finished, “and uncommon glad to see you here. The place has been all mussed up by those louts of boys, and we’re looking to you to put us straight again.”

“But I don’t see how he’s to do it,” said Mr. Marchbanks—“he’s living over at Brakey Bottom.”

“Why can’t he live here? You’ve eleven empty rooms, as I scrub the floors of only. You could let him have one of those, or the lot if he likes.”

“But how about furniture?”

“Reckon we could manage that. It isn’t as if he’d need much—he’s not used to anything special. There’s a chair in here we don’t use, and a box ud do for a washstand—and a few hooks we’d want ... and maybe I could get hold of a bed somewhere.”

“But I’ve got a baby with me, you know,” said Dan deprecatingly.

“So you have!—that’ll be just sweet. I could do with a kid to mind. Look here”—she addressed her employer—“if you let him have a room, furnished, and his meals, and I look after the kid, then he can work the outside for us, and you needn’t pay him nothing. I don’t say it’s grand, but it’ll do while he looks around for something better. What about it, Daniel?”

“Reckon it ud suit me very well. But I dunno how Mr. Marchbanks feels about it.”

“Oh, I should be delighted. I wish I could offer you a proper job, but this ud be better than nothing.”

They discussed details, and at last everything was settled, since all three were eager that the plan should materialize. Daniel thought it a first-class plan, since it would spare him dependence on Len’s anxious charity during the search for work, which he felt would probably be a long one; and when he got work it meant that he would be able to afford quite a good sum every week for his mother, and wipe off the stigma he wore in her eyes. He was overcome by Jess’s resource and Mr. Marchbanks’s generosity, and felt obliged to embark on an explanation as to why he had not written to either of them for so long—an explanation which involved him in such embarrassments that in the middle of it Mr. Marchbanks felt urged to remember the pig’s dinner, and they both went out.

That afternoon Daniel cleaned the pigsty, and then, very necessarily, himself, and afterwards set off towards Brakey Bottom to make his final arrangements with Len, and spend his last night in the disturbing if beloved society of Len’s children. But on his way he would call at the Crown.

§ 4

When he came to the inn for the second time he saw that in the new wing was a properly equipped front door, with a bell and a letter-box, but somehow he shrank from approaching it, and turned to his old entrance through the bar, even though he knew it would be closed against him.

He knocked, and the door was opened by Maudie Harman.

“Hallo! Daniel!—this is good. I heard you’d been in the village, but I never thought you’d come around here. How are you?”

“Oh, I’m fine. How are you?”

“Fine, too. Reckon you’ll have seen Jess at the Rectory. She’s quite the lady now with her twelve bob a week.”

“I could see that. I’m to live at the Rectory, Maudie, till I find work. Reckon it’s a good idea, for there ain’t room for me at Brakey Bottom.”

“What sort of work are you looking for?”

“Any sort I can get. I’ve a kid to support now, you know.”

“Yes, I heard you’d got a kid—fancy you, Danny, with a kid!” and Maudie rocked with laughter. “What’s he like, Daniel?”

“Well, he ain’t like much just yet. Em says he takes after me.”

“Was his mother dark or fair?”

“She wasn’t neither——” he suddenly found that he did not want to talk to Maudie about Rose. “Who’s in just now?”

“They’re both in, and ull be unaccountable glad to see you. But you shouldn’t ought to have come in this way. There’s a front door now, and a servant to answer the bell—in a cap, too. I’m sorry you missed her.”

“I’m glad. Let me in this way, Maudie—it’s the way I always used to come.”

“Come on, then. But I’m going to show you the new smoking-room. You’ve got to see that. Reckon it ain’t to be beat outside Eastbourne.”

She ushered Daniel into a long, low room with French windows, cream walls, and saddle-bag armchairs. It was hung with sporting prints, and with his own eyes he saw the glories of Ernley’s electric light. Maudie switched it on to make the splendour complete.

“There now! See what the Crown has got to! I’m lucky to be still here—I feel the next thing ull be a barman in a white coat and cocktails. Now don’t you touch anything while I go and find the boss—your hands don’t look over-clean.”

A whimpering sound came from the room above.

“Babies,” said Maudie as she went out—“we have ’em, too. Everybody’s got ’em now, seemingly.”

She had not been gone a minute before steps sounded in the passage, and the next moment Ernley was in the room, gripping both Daniel’s hands in his own.

“Thank heaven you’re back. This is splendid, Dan. And you’ve not changed a bit—except that you look bigger, somehow. I wonder why?”

“I dunno—maybe it’s having been married.”

Ernley laughed thinly.

“Most men find it makes ’em smaller.... Well, anyhow, I’m glad you haven’t quarrelled with me, old chap—like Leonard.”

“Reckon I’d be sorry to do that.”

“I’m glad to hear you say it. I don’t really know why he was so mad with me, except that I honestly thought and said this wretched thing wouldn’t have happened if your father’s family had looked after him.”

“It might or it mightn’t,” said Dan sagely, sitting down with extreme care and consciousness of his dirty breeches on the edge of one of the leather armchairs.

“It’s easy enough to stop gambling, you know—and people getting drunk, too.... I believe there was a lot of that.”

“Always was.”

“But we never have it here—it’s a thing that can easily be stopped. You used to stop it yourself when you were at home. You should never have gone away—a silly idea that was going to stay with your mother’s people. They’re just a lot of savages. Didn’t you think ’em so?”

“Yes, I did, and they thought the same of me.”

“Well, I hope they haven’t turned you into one. You look different, somehow—cheekier ... and now I suppose you’re out of a job. What do you propose to do?”

“I was wondering if you’d take me on as barman.”

“The devil you did. But, joking apart, Daniel, it’s a rotten show, looking for work these days. I know many a good chap who’s been landed on his uppers. I’m damn lucky to have this place—though sometimes I feel I’d like to burn it down.”

“But you’re doing well, ain’t you?”

“We’re doing famously. Think—we’re let for Christmas already.... Hallo, Belle!”

“Hallo, Daniel,” said Belle.

Dan rose scramblingly out of the armchair as she came into the room.

§ 5

His first impression was that Belle had changed—she had a sleek, trimmed look about her, somehow, different from her old opulent blowziness. Her hair was all smooth and coiled—it must have been in a forgetful moment that Kitty Sheather had seen it hanging on her cheeks like straw—her dress had elegant lines and no immodest gapes, her ankles were silk and her feet shining. Dan had a supreme sensation of awkwardness, of being just a common boy, a common country boy in common clothes, with common, clumsy manners—as he scrambled out of the leather armchair, treading on his hat which he had laid beside him on the floor. His hand, clean with that painful scrubbed cleanness which is so much more damning than dirt, was in Belle’s—and then he knew that she wasn’t really sleek and trimmed—she only looked it. She had only brushed herself up a bit in his honour and in honour of the Crown, she was really just the old Belle, in spite of her changed life and looks, just as he, in spite of his, was just the old Daniel.

“I’m pleased to see you again, Belle,” he said, gripping her hand.

“And I to see you, I’m sure.”

She gave a nervous giggle, and he wondered how he ever could have thought her fine.

“I heard your babies crying a minute ago,” he said, friendly. “You’ve got a pair of ’em, I’m told.”

“Yes—Jill and Peter. You have one, too, haven’t you, Daniel?”

“Yes—Thomas Helier, named after his two grandfathers. I’ll show him to you, Belle, some day. You’ll let me see yourn, won’t you?”

Ernley laughed.

“They’re not much to look at—I think all children under twelve should be farmed out. It’s too humiliating to be reminded at every turn that the early stages of one’s life were so entirely animal.”

Daniel was shocked at such speech.

“Reckon I’d sooner have a kid about me than most things.”

“Don’t tell me you’re fond of yours.”

“Reckon I am—and you of yours, for all your talk.”

“I don’t deny that I shall be some day. But I’m not now. They’re too animal, without an animal’s cheapness and independence. Besides, they’re a nuisance in a house like this—scare people off—I’ll always say that it was because of them we didn’t let for October.”

“Oh, Ernley, you know they only cancelled it because the gentleman had doctor’s orders for the South of France.”

“That’s what they said—but I’ve a good idea they’d heard from the Rolands that our youngsters howl o’ nights.”

“I don’t see why the Rolands should complain—their rooms were right on the other side of the house.”

“But your precious Jill and Peter made enough noise to raise both sides of the house. I’m not complaining—there’s no use complaining of the inevitable—I’m merely pointing to facts, and it’s a fact that children in a hotel are bad business.”

“But you’re doing well, aren’t you, Ernley?” said Dan. “Seeing as you’re let for Christmas.”

“Yes, I’ve the whole place let for Christmas, which certainly isn’t bad.”

“How many can you hold?”

“Not more than a dozen—but I shall build on a bit more in the spring. We were full all the summer, though we’ve only a few here now.”

“Well, you’ve gone up while we’ve gone down, I reckon.”

“Yes, and I’m sorry for it—for your side of it, I mean. As for me—well, it’s nothing to shout about. I’ve turned a decent country pub into a decent country hotel—that’s all. It isn’t much when one comes to think of it. When I was crawling over the mud at Wipers I’d have been devilish upset if someone had told me that was all I’d do with my life—maybe I shouldn’t have been so anxious not to stop a bullet.”

Daniel thought Ernley’s attitude unthankful. After all, the problems of existence seemed wondrously settled for the landlord of the Crown. He looked round the comfortable room with the saddle-bag armchairs and the sporting prints on the walls—he looked at Ernley, and detected just the faint sketching of a curve under his waistcoat—and then at Belle, with her glowing face under her gleaming hair, and thought of her as Ernley’s wife, as Ernley’s rich and comfortable possession.... And there was he, without a home or money or a job or a wife ... some words were ringing in his ears: “And yet the dogs shall eat the crumbs....”

“A penny for your thoughts,” said Ernley jocosely.

“You’re welcome—I could do with it. I was only thinking I was a bit unlucky—that’s all.”

“Yes, you’ve had a pretty stiff time in some ways. But it ull change—you’re not the sort to keep down. I wish I could think of something for you, though. I’ve a plan in my head for buying the stream field and starting a few head of poultry and a couple of cows—‘Eggs and milk from the home farm,’ you know—but it won’t be for a great while yet. Can’t Len give you a bit of work, just for your board and keep?”

“No—he’s doing that for Christopher.”

“Well, he’ll house you till you’ve found something, I reckon.”

“I’m going to live along of Mr. Marchbanks.”

“The devil you are. Well, you must manage your own affairs.”

“What’s the matter with this?”

“Oh, nothing. I don’t care for Marchbanks, that’s all. Visitors don’t like his sort—they like a family at the rectory. Marchbanks doesn’t even live like a gentleman.”

“He can’t afford to.”

“Then he shouldn’t have taken the living—always bad for a place if the parson doesn’t live in proper style.”

“Well, I’d be in a bad way if it wasn’t for him, whatever his style. Len hasn’t got house-room for me, and I must go somewhere—I reckon Mr. Marchbanks ull keep me till I find work, in exchange for my doing a bit about the garden.”

He rose to go, feeling ruffled at Ernley’s criticism of his benefactor. Also it would be past tea-time at Brakey Bottom.... As he rose he met Belle’s eyes.

“Won’t you stay?” she said—“and have a cup of tea with us and see the children.”

But her eyes weren’t saying that. They were saying: “Please go—I can’t bear to see you, all poor and homeless as you are, while I have silk dresses and silk stockings. I’m very sorry for you, Danny, so please go.”

CHAPTER TWO

§ 1

The next morning Daniel moved his son and his other belongings over to Bullockdean, borrowing the Brakey Bottom trap. His family were obviously relieved to find that he was making some sort of a home for himself, though they, too, were inclined to be contemptuous of the poverty and celibacy of Bullockdean Parsonage. There was no denying that, as it happened, the whole thing was mighty convenient.... Em, of course, was miserable at having to part with Thomas Helier, and for some time continued to assert tearfully that she could have found room for the two of them somewhere—but Len mistrusted his brother’s presence for practical reasons. His temperament brooded over the troubles of the “out-of-work”; he foresaw Dan for long weeks unemployed—in winter too, when he could be of no use on the farm—and finally in desperation taking a job under the Sewage Department of the Newhaven Corporation.... It was better that his brother should go where he could at least make some appreciable return for his board and keep, and would not be driven into the hasty acceptance of menial offers.

As it happened, Dan’s life at the Parsonage involved much of what Len would have thought menial if he had known its details. He had started with the idea that he would look after the pig and garden, clean the boots and carry the coals, while Jess Harman worked indoors, with the scrubbing, dusting, cooking and the care of Thomas Helier. But after a week or two their positions altered. Dan had always been secretly fond of housework, and on an occasion when Jess was away again in Lewes, it was discovered that he was very much the better cook of the two. Not in vain had he cooked for his Rose at Moie Fano.... Also he had learned to make coffee in the same school, and for months Mr. Marchbanks had been drinking Jess’s tea as the lesser of two evils.... So after some friendly discussion the matter was resettled. Jess still had charge of Thomas Helier, except at nights, when she went home to her auntie’s, also of the cleaning and bed-making; but instead of cooking she took over the lighter part of Dan’s gardening job, pushed the lawnmower, and trimmed the borders, while he stood in the kitchen, with her sacking apron tied round his waist and his sleeves rolled above his elbows, spelling out slowly from the cookery book which guided his more ambitious efforts.

For as a cook Daniel was ambitious in a way that he had never been as a man. He could not very substantially gratify his ambition on a housekeeping allowance of two pounds a week, but his imagination soared above the hashes and milk-puddings that Jess considered a suitable diet for a country clergyman. He brooded much over the “Entrée” division of the cookery-book, he produced a curry and a hot-pot, he attempted, and after three attempts achieved, a rabbit pie.

“Daniel fancies himself, don’t he?” Jess would say, when in her capacity of parlourmaid she would set his latest production before her master.

On the whole the scheme worked well. Daniel liked living with Mr. Marchbanks, and liked working for him. Their friendship was a sound one, for it was accompanied by a certain shyness, which made each appreciate and respectfully leave standing the barriers between them. On one side was Eton and Oxford and a theological college—on the other was the son of the inn, the chucker-out of drunken men, the country boy working with his hands, never quite clean, his mind holding the confused dregs of a board-school education. They met on the common ground of their poverty, both living by contrivance from day to day, Dan bringing his friend the gift of his willing service, and in return sitting at his feet for the greater necessities of life, the good things he had forgotten while he was in Sark.

He was fond of Jess Harman, too, and they went through the day’s work as comrades. Soon all difference disappeared between the male and the female tasks, and Mr. Marchbanks never knew whether it was Dan or Jess who would feed the pig or make the beds or mow the lawn or take Thomas Helier out in his push-cart. Jess had produced the push-cart from some unknown source, also the furniture she had promised for their bedroom—a camp-bed, a crate, a packing-case or two, a few hooks, a jug and basin and a chair. He in his turn had covered everything with a “polished-oak” stain, so successfully that he had been encouraged to apply the treatment to the rest of the house—indeed, he became so enterprising in the way of stains that Mr. Marchbanks was forced into one of his rare acts of self-defence, and shut his study door against the advancing tide of decoration.

Dan found those first weeks of autumn very happy ones, in spite of his continued failure to hear of a job, and a certain feeling of sadness that his mother could so contentedly let him go and live five miles away, when perhaps her intervention would have kept him near her. But he had always tacitly accepted the fact of her preference for Christopher, and his moments of revolt were only occasional and queerly uncomplicated by jealousy—though sometimes he allowed himself the luxury of wondering what she would do when Christopher had married his Mary Wright.

As October wore on into November he became anxious on the score of his unemployment. It is true that he worked hard for his keep, but he was not actually saving the rector’s money, as he knew that he and the child together cost more than the few shillings Mr. Marchbanks would have paid Tommy Pilbeam or Freddie Pont for the outside work. Thomas Helier was a glutton for milk, and Dan knew that he himself ate a terrible lot—he couldn’t help it. He called at the Labour Exchange in Lewes two or three times a week, and regularly studied the advertisement columns in the East Sussex Herald and the Sussex Daily News; but it was a bad time to be out of work—winter was at hand, with stagnation on the farms, and everywhere money was short, economy rife, and labour profuse and rampant.

He soon gave up the hope of finding honourable work on a farm or at an inn, and in time his ambition sank even below the status of corporation employee, which Len had despised. He was not proud—he would stick at nothing—all the same he could not help wondering what his brothers and his mother, or even Jess and Mr. Marchbanks, would think when at last he found a job as conductor of a motor-bus plying between Newhaven and Uckfield.

§ 2

The first person he told about it was Belle. When he came back from the motor-bus company’s offices in Lewes Mr. Marchbanks was out, and Jess was sweeping in some distant part of the house, having left Thomas Helier asleep in his soap-box cradle. Daniel was an adventurous father, and unimpressed by the advantages of a sleeping child, he decided to take his son out for an airing in the push-cart. To be rudely awakened, to have your woolly cap crammed over your head by a well-meaning but male hand, and finally to be strapped sitting up into a push-cart intended for a child three times your age, are an accumulation of pains not to be suffered in silence, and Thomas Helier was not silent.

“What are you doing, Dan?” shouted Jess out of an upstairs window, as they went down the parsonage drive.

“Taking out the kid.”

“That’s plain enough—poor little mite! Why couldn’t you leave him alone? He was sleeping beautiful.”

“It ain’t healthy for him to be always indoors.”

“He ain’t always indoors. You are a meddler, Daniel.”

“Well, he’s my own child. I can do what I like with him.”

“Oh, hark to that now! There’s a Christian father! Poor little soul, his cap’s right over his face. Really, I’ll be thankful when you’ve got a job and won’t come interfering....”

Dan walked out of earshot, rather haughtily, and as soon as he saw he was out of eyeshot, too, he stopped and pulled the baby’s cap off his eyes, tickled his neck, and otherwise tried to propitiate him. But Thomas Helier still howled mightily, and at that moment Belle appeared.

“Hullo, Daniel!—and you’ve got the baby!”

She came and stooped over the push-cart. Dan wished she could have found his son in a more engaging mood, but he saw that her eyes were both eager and tender as she looked into the crimson, furious little face.

“Poor little soul! He isn’t comfortable. May I lift him out, Daniel?”

“Of course you may, Belle.”

“He isn’t old enough really to sit up in a push-cart. There, there, my beautiful—I’ve got you. Isn’t that better, my gem?”

The soft curve of her arm was under Thomas Helier’s backbone—his yelling died suddenly down.

“Is this the first time you’ve seen him?” asked Daniel.

“Oh, I’ve seen him about now and then, but this is the first time I’ve held him—there’s a sweet—there’s a lovely boy.”

“I never knew you was fond of children,” said Daniel idiotically.

“I don’t know that I ever thought about them much till I had them of my own. You like my Jill and Peter, don’t you?”

“Reckon I do, though I haven’t seen much of them, either.”

“You haven’t seen much of any of us. I expect you’ve been busy.”

“Yes—I’ve had a lot to do for Mr. Marchbanks, and I’ve been looking for work besides.”

“Haven’t you heard of anything yet?”

“I’ve just got a job this morning.”

“What sort of a job?”

“Oh, a grand job. I’m to be conductor on the Downs Omnibus Company’s ’bus between Newhaven and Uckfield. I shall wear a fine coat with brass buttons. You’ll be proud to know me.”

He laughed without malice. She was wearing a fur coat, and a velvet cap pulled low over the golden hanks of her hair. Beside her was a man who was glad to get thirty shillings a week as conductor of a country ’bus—a man who had loved her, whose arms had held her, before she wore fur and velvet.

“Well, I’m glad you’ve found something, though I wish it had been better. Will your hours be long?”

“Nine till seven—and I’ve got to get to and from Newhaven.”

“It sounds heavy—but I suppose you’ll have half a day off and your Sundays.”

“Yes, I’ll have that.”

“You must come and see us when you’re free. Ernley was saying only yesterday that he’s scarcely seen you since you came back to Bullockdean.”

“I’ve been cooking for them at the rectory, and doing a lot of work besides, as well as going in to the Labour Exchange three times a week. I’ve meant to come round a dunnamany times. Now I’ve got a job maybe I’ll be able to look in now and then after supper.”

“Come and have supper with us.”

“Reckon you’ll have too grand suppers for me these days.”

“Don’t talk nonsense, Daniel. We won’t have it with the visitors—not that we think you aren’t ‘grand’ enough, but we’d much rather be by ourselves.”

“Don’t you like the visitors?”

Belle shrugged, and laughed a little ruefully.

“I dunno—they scare me, somehow—at least our sort do. Such ladies and gentlemen!... ‘Do you know that your chambermaid doesn’t wipe out the basins when she empties them?’—I’d never heard of such a thing till I came here, though I never let on I hadn’t—not even to Ernley. Dan, I wasn’t meant to be a hotel-keeper’s wife.”

“It’s a difficult job, but you look very well on it, Belle.”

“Do I?” she asked, almost eagerly. “Do you think I’ve improved?”

“Yes—you’re more elegant, somehow. And I like your clothes—not but that I didn’t like the old ones.”

“Oh, they were rubbish, and I was always untidy. I’m often untidy still, but Ernley’s taught me a lot. He’s dreadfully particular about what I wear and what I look like.”

“Well, reckon he must be pleased, anyway.”

She seemed touched by his goodwill.

“Dan, you don’t—I mean, you’ve quite forgiven me for the way I treated you all that time ago?”

Perhaps she ought not to have said it till they had knit together more strands of their severed acquaintance, but she could not help it.

“It wasn’t forgiving I had to do, but forgetting,” he said slowly.

“But you’ve done that.”

“Yes, I’ve done it now—sure enough.”

There was a moment’s awkward silence. Then he said:

“Anyways I’m uncommon glad we’re friends again. It was terrible being shut of you and Ernley.... I must come around and see old Ernley as soon as ever I can.”

“Come and see him now. He’ll be in by tea-time, and till then we can sit in the nursery and watch the babies. I’d like to see how mine and yours get on together.”

The idea pleased Daniel, and they walked on towards the Crown, Belle still carrying the peaceful Thomas Helier. It was rather wonderful, Daniel thought, that, after all, she should carry his child in her arms.

§ 3

The nursery at the Crown was in the new wing, a beautiful room with a frieze of nursery rhymes, and a crawling-pen beside the fire. Dan’s eyes opened wide at the sight of it and at the sight of the nurse in uniform.

“Lord, but you are fine, Belle!—reckon this is a grand place for kids ... and look at their toys, too.”

He realized for the first time that Thomas Helier had no toys. He was rather young for any, it is true; nevertheless Dan experienced his first real pang of envy as he looked at the shelf on which sat a Teddy-bear, Pip and Squeak, and other more indefinite animals.

Belle sat down by the fire with Thomas Helier on her knee, and held up a woolly ball before him. He stretched out his hands, and kicked delightedly. It was wonderful how she managed him, thought Daniel—better than Jess, better certainly than his poor father. As he looked at her it seemed as if the lines of her face had changed, had grown softer, more maternal. From a wanton Belle had become a mother. Had her heart roved only till it had found this, its real desire?

Her own children were two fair, sturdy little creatures, one about two years old, the other the same age as Thomas Helier. They wore little silk smocks that made Dan painfully conscious of his son’s limitations as a well-dressed baby. It was a pity that he would kick in that ecstatic way and show what inevitably suggested comparisons. He tried to straighten his legs upon Belle’s lap, but Thomas Helier only kicked harder, while otherwise grossly testifying his delight in the situation.

“What a darling he is!—come and look at him, Jill. Look at the dear little baby.”

But the little Munks were as uninterested as small children usually are in each other. Their curiosity centred in Daniel.

“Tick-tick,” demanded Jill.

“Ain’t got none,” said Dan.

But Jill’s experience did not so far include man as apart from watch; once more she demanded:

“Tick-tick.”

“Don’t bother him, darling—he hasn’t got a tick-tick. But he’s got a dear little boy just Peter’s age. Come and look at him.”

“Ugh,” said Jill at the sight of Thomas Helier. Then she gripped Dan’s trouser-leg and repeated—“tick-tick.”

Both Dan and Belle laughed.

“Aren’t children funny!” said Belle. “I’m glad you’re laughing, Daniel. But don’t let her worry you—I’m afraid I don’t always realize what a nuisance she is. Ernley says these two annoy the visitors, and the trouble is I can’t see it, so don’t stop it.”

He noticed that she seemed unable to speak of Ernley without some sort of self-depreciation.

“Well, you can’t keep children in a house as if they was rabbits,” he remarked sagely—“they’re bound to spannel about a bit. Look at mine—he almost fills the rectory, as you might say. It’s lucky Mr. Marchbanks don’t mind, though sometimes he’ll yell o’nights as if it was blue murder. If Mr. Marchbanks don’t mind, I don’t see why Ernley should, seeing as he’s the father, which Mr. Marchbanks ain’t, though he’s got to put up with it all the same.”

“Oh, Ernley doesn’t mind for himself. It’s for the visitors. You’ve no idea what a difference it’s made, him having charge of this hotel. While his father was alive and ran it, he didn’t bother about it much, but now it’s all the world to him.... Hark! there he is, I believe,” as a motor-cycle was heard in the street. “We’ll go downstairs, if it is, Daniel, as he likes to find his tea ready.”

§ 4

The motor-cyclist proved to be Ernley, and he was delighted to see Daniel, and they all three had a comfortable, friendly tea together in the smoking-room of the Crown. They talked about Dan’s new work, which amused Ernley very much.

“I’ll come for a ride in your ’bus—we both will. But look here, my boy; directly I settle about that river land and start the farm, you’ll come to me. That’s settled.”

“I’d be glad to come, Ernley, but reckon I ain’t experienced enough—you’ll want someone more used to that kind of job. I’ve been a barman and a fisherman and I’ll have been a ’bus conductor, but I guess none of them ull show me how to look after chickens.”

“Nonsense—you’ve kept poultry at the George and a pig at the parsonage, to say nothing of having helped on your uncle’s farm in Sark. I shan’t run a big affair—only a few fowls and pigs, and a cow or two. But maybe it’ll all come to nothing—it depends on the price Lord Gage ull take. We haven’t got a terrible lot of capital at the Crown—all the money goes in improvements....” Dan was beginning to discover that the subject of the Crown was a bottomless well into which dropped most of Ernley’s conversations. This one went in deeper and deeper, till at last Dan began to have uneasy thoughts of Thomas Helier’s bedtime and Jess Harman’s wrath at its delay.

“Reckon I must be taking the kid back home. Thank you, Belle, for the cup of tea—glad to have seen you, Ernley.”

Ernley tried to keep him, but Belle, knowing the importance of a baby’s bed-time, herself fetched Thomas Helier and packed him as comfortably as might be into the push-cart. Then at the last moment she stooped and put beside him the woolly ball.

“Let him take it home. He loved playing with it so.”

For a moment Dan had no voice to thank her. Thomas Helier’s reproach among babies had been taken away—and taken away by Belle, with a gesture which made him realize how little of her he had really lost.

CHAPTER THREE

There was some vexation at Brakey Bottom when it was discovered that Dan had become the conductor of the Uckfield ’bus, but there was really very little to be done in the way of protest, beyond words, which were plentiful. Besides, he was earning thirty shillings a week, fifteen of which he paid his mother; therefore he had solved the financial problem of those days.

The work was arduous, but he liked it—it was so personal ... and it involved the active, physical service which had always appealed to an officious element in him. Dan liked helping old women with heavy baskets, children on their way from school, mothers with large families inclined to spread about the ’bus. He also liked throwing out drunken men who tried to travel without a ticket—it was like old times at the George—and “sassing back” the people who rode on his ’bus and then scolded him because it wasn’t the ’bus for Chailey or Seaford. There was nothing aloof or detached or inhuman about conducting a ’bus, especially when it was a ’bus which jogged and meandered through country lanes, linking up farms and small villages, taking its regular freight of farm stuff and farm-people, as well as the interest of strangers, or a tramp with a few halfpence to spare for a ride.

Daniel’s day went by rule, or he never could have done in it as much as he did. Every morning he was up at six, to feed the pig and attend to any household jobs that, in his opinion, could not wait till Jess Harman appeared at the more reasonable hour of eight. Then on most mornings he would represent the village of Bullockdean at its altar. As he lived at the parsonage, it seemed natural that this function should be his more often than Tommy Pilbeam’s or Freddie Pont’s or other youths whose punctuality was more uncertain. It was rather a strain on his already over-filled day, but Dan would have done much more for Mr. Marchbanks, who had housed and fed him when his own family were reluctant to do so, and still bore with Thomas Helier’s crying o’nights.... So there stood Mr. Marchbanks looking rather like a big green beetle, and there knelt Daniel trying how much of the Confession he could say in one breath, and there behind them lay the darkness and emptiness of Bullockdean Church. It was bitterly cold, as they could not afford to have the heating on week-days, but he soon grew warm in the hurry back to the parsonage, with perhaps a turn at Jess Harman’s broom, or a few minutes at the fire with a sluggish kettle. Half an hour for breakfast and washing up—half an hour for the tramp into Newhaven—when he had saved some money he would buy a bicycle—and at nine o’clock he was incredibly at the Downs Motor Company’s office in Bridge Road, ready to start out on their first ’bus.

It was as well that he was warm and glowing with all his haste, for the overcoat with the brass buttons was not of the thickest material, and it was cold work standing on the back step of a ’bus in winter-time. They would take a few farm labourers out of Newhaven, men employed on farms outside the town, who could not find cottages near their work. These would be set down all along the road between Newhaven and Southease, and others picked up and carried on to the farms; for it was the same all over the district, and the old-time labourer’s right to live on the ground he tilled was lost and the loss accepted.

The ’bus did not take the direct route from Lewes to Uckfield, but an eccentric road of its own, looping to include villages a mile or so away—Ringmer and the Broyle—then turning abruptly north to East Hoathly, and up to Framfield by Iron Peartree. They were, as a rule, pretty empty by then, for it was past ten o’clock, and the farm-men were all at their work and the children were all in school, and it was too early for more casual road traffic. Between Framfield and Uckfield they might pick up a few early shoppers, but they often ran empty into the town. For half an hour the ’bus stood outside the Maiden’s Head, while Dan and the motor-man smoked their fags—then she went out again by Bird-in-Eye, generally well loaded. As she ran back through Hoathly and Ringmer her load increased, and she would often enter Lewes quite full. On market day there would be tremendous packs and crushes, and Dan would pull the bell, shouting: “Full up, please,” guarding the entrance with a sturdy arm.

They made this journey twice a day, leaving Newhaven at nine and three. In a week or so Dan knew every scrap of the road by heart, every hill, every haystack. He depended on the passengers for any variety in his day, and they themselves seemed to follow a well-worn rule—farm-men out of Newhaven, old women shoppers into Uckfield, young women shoppers into Lewes in the morning, and cinema-goers in the evening. Now and then there would be small excitements—once they took a wedding-party from Lewes to Rushy Green, the bride very shy, the bridegroom ashamed, and the guests uproarious; another time a young woman felt ill in the ’bus, and held Dan’s hand for a mile ... and there were always parcels that were left behind, and children that were sick, or had lost the pennies they had been given for their fares ... so altogether he found the life exciting, and felt pleasurably thrilled and tired when eight o’clock saw him back at Bullockdean, hungry for supper after his dinner of bread and cheese.

He had the whole of Wednesday afternoon off to attend to the garden, and his Sundays were always free, and spent at Brakey Bottom. Here he would console his mother, who smarted much under Christopher’s courtship of his Mary Wright, which took him away to Exceat Bridge every Sunday. Dan knew that her displayed affection was intended rather as a rebuke to one son than as a reward to the other, nevertheless, he rejoiced in those new caresses of provocation, and would give her in return those which were not coiners’ money, but the currency of true love. Of other comfort he could give but little, for the situation was outside his understanding. He was wounded and puzzled by his mother’s selfishness in trying to thwart her son in the chief business of a man’s life, and his own experience made it hard for him to realize a love which could be given to a wife only at the expense of a mother. Still, his whole philosophy and tendency was to take what he could get and be thankful, and he was glad to feel a little boy again with his head on his mother’s shoulder, even though he knew that her arm drew him really close only when Christopher came and stood in the doorway, staring at them with shadowed eyes.

The spare moments of the day were spent with Len, pottering round the farm and lending a sympathetic ear to his grievances—or else Ivy and Leslie would be waiting for him with their “Snakes and Ladders,” still only partly superseded by a race-game with motor-cars. Meanwhile Emmie “went over” Thomas Helier, as she put it—sewed on buttons and let down tucks, and otherwise repaired the omissions of the week. She would have taken charge of him altogether, but Dan was very insistent that he had “got used” to him, and at the end of the day invariably packed him into the push-cart and trundled him home. What would Jess Harman say, he wondered, if he came back without him? or Mr. Marchbanks, with all his strict notions on the duties of parents to children, which was what he always preached about, him being a bachelor, instead of the old-fashioned duties of children to parents that the village was used to. Or, for that matter, what would he say himself if he broke his one link with “la chère épouse de Daniel Le Couteur,” asleep under the ilex trees?—that golden Rose with the laughing name, whose love had given him no pain or fear or sorrow, but had grown up in his heart like a rose, and, like a rose, in death was still sweet.

No, he would not part with Thomas Helier, even to the kind Emmie, who would care for him better than either Jess Harman or his own father. He would wheel him home down the ruts of the Telscombe lane—if Len were too busy to put the mare to and give them a lift as far as the high road—and then down the road, almost in the ditch to avoid the great cars that swept by, till the sign-post pointed them once more into the by-ways. Then at last they would trundle between the lights of the George and the Crown, spilled together in one pool in the midst of Bullockdean Street, and find the rectory dark, with Mr. Marchbanks and Jess Harman still in church. Shut out by his possession of Thomas Helier both from church and tavern, Dan would take him into the kitchen, to the red gleeds of the fire, and put him into his cradle, while he heated his milk, and thought with equal regret of the beer he might have drunk and the hymns he might have sung.

CHAPTER FOUR

§ 1

During the first weeks of his new work Dan had not much time to spare for calling at the Crown. He was generally so tired when he came in of an evening that he could think only of supper and bed. His Wednesday afternoons were full of long arrears of work in house and garden, and his Sundays were spent at Brakey Bottom. But shortly before Christmas, he unexpectedly met Ernley in Lewes High Street. It was a rainy night, and he had just come off the last ’bus, which had been run into Lewes for repairs, when he saw him turn the corner out of Station Road. Munk hailed him with gratifying eagerness.

“Hullo, old Daniel—it’s good to see you. Where are you going?”

“I’m just starting home.”

“Come in and have a bite of something with me, and I’ll run you back in the side-car. I’ve wanted a talk with you this age, but I never seem to see you anywhere.”

“I’ve been wonderful busy on the ’bus.”

“I bet you have—and you look as if it suited you. You’re a marvellous chap, Daniel.”

“In what way?”

“Oh, leading the life you do and keeping well and cheery with it all.”

“It ain’t a bad life.”

“It’s a shocking life, and I’m ashamed that you should have to lead it. But it doesn’t seem as if I’d ever get that farm going. The tenant won’t go out—you know old Bream’s had the brook lands since Burnt Oak was divided, and I can’t quite get round Lord Gage on the price.”

“Oh, I’m right enough—I don’t have much time to worry.”

“Well, come and feed, anyhow. We’ll go to the White Hart.”

A few minutes later they were sitting in the warmth of the coffee-room, the day’s rain steaming off Daniel’s clothes.

“I’m uncommonly glad to see you, Dan. D’you know—it’s so good having you back again, and finding that....” He stopped a little before he need, to take the bill of fare from the waitress.

They had chops and tomatoes, with porter, followed by treacle roll and coffee. Daniel was in high spirits—it was months since he had had such a meal on a week-day, and he was pleased to find that he and Ernley had slipped back so happily into the old relationship. Distrust and jealousy were gone, and Ernley was talking to him as in the old times, laying down the law on politics, racing, farming and innkeeping—chiefly the last.

Afterwards they had coffee, and Ernley had two brandies. These seemed to turn his conversation into more personal channels. He finished a sentence he had begun before dinner.

“It’s so good having you back again, and finding that we’ve got over all that muddle—you and me—about Belle, you know.”

“Yes, I’m glad of that.”

“When I heard you were coming back, I wasn’t sure how you’d have got over it. You’d been away two years and you’d married another girl, but somehow I’d an idea you might come back feeling pretty much the same—about me, I mean ... thinking I’d taken Belle from you and suchlike.”

“I never thought you’d taken her from me, Ernley—she’d left me before she went back to you.”

“But she left you because of me—she told me she did. It seems that I was troubling her more or less all the time. Queer, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s queer.”

Dan had a sudden memory, so acute as to be almost a vision, of himself facing Belle in the little parlour at Three Cups Corner, and for the first time since his return some of the misery of those days came back to him. He felt his love for Belle driving through his heart—not as an actual reality, but as a memory too much alive. He said no more, but sat in silence, smoking one of Ernley’s cigarettes.

Munk dropped the stump of his own into his coffee.

“Damn it all, Dan—now you’re at it I can talk to you. There’s no one else I can talk to, for I never was much of a chap for making friends. Now tell me—when you saw Belle and me together, what did you think of us?”

“I thought—I thought you were all right. Don’t tell me I was wrong.”

“You weren’t very sharp. But of course—oh, I suppose one tries to hide these things.”

“What things?”

“That one’s making one’s wife unhappy.”

“You ain’t never telling me that!”

His heart began to beat quickly with sickness and anger.

“Yes, I am. Did you think I’d stopped doing it just because I’d married her? No—I haven’t. I’ve gone on like I always did. But the queer thing is that though marriage hasn’t changed me, it’s changed her. She’s become something different. You know what Belle always used to be—the wild, roving kind, out for passion. I never thought she’d turn into the mother-kind of woman—children first, husband nowhere....”

“Come, Ernley—that isn’t true.”

“Maybe it isn’t. That’s just what’s wrong with me. I exaggerate everything. The truth is that Belle’s turned into a thoroughly good wife and mother, and I don’t appreciate it.”

“That wild kind often does—it’s what they’re out after all along, though maybe they don’t know it.”

“Then she ought to have married you.”

“What nonsense! She didn’t love me.”

“She’d have loved you if you’d married her. I know it’s my own fault that she didn’t, and it’s right I should be punished for it, but not right that she should be.”

“It seems to me you’re talking some unaccountable rubbish. Belle ud never have been happy along of me—I’m too quiet for her. But she’d be happy enough along of you if you weren’t always criticizing her and pulling out your feelings to look at ’em and make other people look at ’em when they don’t want to.”

“I’m sorry, Dan. I know you don’t want to, but you must. If you don’t, Belle will have to. It does me good to have things out, and it’s such ages since I had anyone to talk to—openly. I can’t talk to Belle. She thinks I’m unnatural, because I don’t care for spending all my spare time in the nursery.”

“You’ll never tell me you ain’t fond of those kids.”

“Oh, I am—I am. But I don’t want them always—hearing them when I don’t see them. I want my wife.”

“Well, reckon you’ve got her.”

“But not as I’d like to have her. I want my old Belle as she used to be.”

“No one ud be madder than you if you had.”

“I don’t mean looking and behaving as she used to. But I want my old fires lit.”

Dan shivered.

“I know it’s not her fault, but I feel they’d have gone on blazing if she hadn’t changed like this—run all to wifehood in a way I’d never have thought.... Perhaps I shouldn’t have minded so much if the change had been of another kind—if she’d turned sleeker and more sophisticated. D’you remember Pearl?”

Dan nodded grimly.

“Well, she was my ideal woman—outwardly. I shouldn’t have quarrelled with Belle if she’d taken to that sort of thing. But she’s as untidy as ever—only without the blaze, somehow. I can’t see love in this jog-trot way. You can—that’s why she’d better have married you.”

“Adone, do, with your talk of Belle marrying me! You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

“So I ought—and if she had married you I shouldn’t have been any happier. For the queer thing is that I love her.”

“I don’t see as it’s at all queer.”

“Not queer that I should be able to stand outside like this and curse and criticize—and yet feel that somehow, in spite of it all, I could never live without her?”

Dan put out his cigarette with an unsteady hand.

“Have another?”

“No, thanks.”

“You’re not mad with me, are you, Daniel? It’s not quite my fault. We’re all such insects when we try to live ... flies dancing over stagnant water—that’s love—a dance of flies.”

Daniel rose to his feet.

“Well, I must be going now.”

“I have made you angry, then?”

“Only a bit.”

“I tell you it’s not my fault—unless being what I am’s my fault, as I dare say it is. What you are doesn’t matter in love, but it matters in marriage. Women ask so much more of marriage than a man does. God knows what Belle wants. She hasn’t got it, anyway.”

Dan felt in the midst of Ernley’s speech as a man feels who sinks slowly into a swamp. With an effort he threw himself out of it.

“All she wants is for you to be kind and good to her, and speak kind, and care for her and the children, and understand all the trouble she has with them and the place. She doesn’t want much, but maybe more than you can spare from yourself.”

The colour rose in Ernley’s cheeks, and for a moment they faced each other in an angry silence. Then Munk spoke quite calmly:

“Don’t let’s quarrel, Dan. I couldn’t bear another separation. I’m sorry if I’ve upset you about Belle—I know I exaggerate things. If you’ll stay my friend, you’ll help us both a lot.”

The appeal found Dan’s vulnerable part. His wrath collapsed, and he felt a little ashamed of it.

“I’m sorry I spoke rough—but hearing you talk on and on like that——”

He said no more, and they went out together.

§ 2

Nevertheless he could not quite get rid of his anger. When Ernley had left him at Bullockdean parsonage, and he was alone with Thomas Helier in the little bedroom that Jess had garnished, he still felt shaken and affronted. He felt affronted, somehow, by Ernley’s confidence. Ernley had always been like that—taking too much for granted. Now he was taking for granted that Daniel had “got over” his affair with Belle. Dan had taken it for granted himself, for the matter of that, till an hour ago; but Ernley’s cool assumption of his indifference had somehow destroyed it. What right had Ernley to think he was made like that?—that he could forget all those beautiful moments that had come to him with Belle? Of course it was true that he had married another woman and been happy with her—but that was different. He had not been in love with Rose Falla when he married her—he had married her out of pity and repentance, and love had somehow afterwards been made of their common life. If Rose had still been alive he would not have thought of Belle, and never of those beautiful moments of passion. But Rose was dead, and with her his life in Sark was dead, and all the years and changes that separated him from his love for Belle.

He had got into bed because of the cold, but he could not sleep. He lay awake, staring at the ceiling and the pattern of leaves that moved there in the moonlight. The night was still—dreadfully still.... Thomas Helier lay quiet in his cradle, though for the first time in his life Dan would have welcomed any distraction he chose to provide. He did not like lying awake with his thoughts. He had no business to be thinking of Belle like this, for though Rose was dead Ernley was alive. Curse him!—not for being married to Belle—Daniel was still very far from that—but for being all unworthy of his marriage—of any marriage. Ernley didn’t know so much as the A B C of married life—he’d no idea how to behave as a husband. Dan thought of the cottage at Moie Fano and of the marriage that had begun without love, without common tastes, without even a common language, and yet had been a thing of pure and perfect happiness.... In marriage you had to be tender, to put yourself in her place, to realize that she was made different from you—though she was flesh of your flesh and bone of your bone.... And Ernley went about showing her his feelings—like a lot of tripe ... the simile rushed into his mind as an expression of the almost physical disgust which he felt at Ernley’s confidences. He never used to mind his confidences, amorous or otherwise, but now somehow he couldn’t stomach them.... Ernley was eaten up with himself, and that was why his marriage was unhappy. He had nothing else to make it so. Belle had got shut of her bad ways, as Daniel had always felt sure she would; she had given him two dear little children, and her one thought was to please him. And he went about grumbling for his “old fires.” Silly fool! Didn’t he know as much about love as Daniel whom he’d always looked upon as a child in such matters? “Old fires “—put them out! They only made the place hot and dangerous—they weren’t the sort of fire you could ever boil a kettle on.

A clock somewhere in the house struck two, and Dan was seized with the working-man’s terror of a sleepless night, knowing that at whatever hour he slept he must rise for toil as usual. It was a bad thing lying awake like this, and his reason for it was bad. If he was really beginning to feel about Belle like this again, he had better clear out. Of course it was natural that he should fret about two friends making each other unhappy—but this acuteness of trouble was wrong. Maybe he was over-tired ... well, he’d be tireder yet before he’d done with to-morrow.

§ 3

Indeed he went through the next day little more than half awake. The hum and rumble of the ’bus, the heavy rush of the wind as it tore after them down the roads and eddied round him on the back step, swept him into a drowsiness which was sometimes actual sleep. He slept standing on his platform for brief dangerous minutes. He had always been able to sleep on his legs, and he enjoyed these stolen naps, but he was aware of their criminality in a ’bus conductor. He slept past the turning to Clay Hill on the Halland road, with the result that an elderly clergyman who had been marketing in Lewes and seemed as tired as Daniel himself had to walk back half a mile to the sign-post, laden with bags from which were bursting loaves of bread, potatoes, cheese and other fare for Poverty Parsonage. After that he kept awake.

He was half asleep again when he walked up Bullockdean Street at the end of the day, and it was as in a dream that at the rectory gate he met Belle Shackford. She was certainly Belle Shackford, and not Belle Munk, for she came to him out of the moonlight looking exactly as in the old days—all her sleekness gone. Her hair was rough and towish under the moon, which was bright enough to show him also her careless tam-o’-shanter cap, and the piece of dyed cat-fur that lay at odds upon her shoulders. Thus he had seen Belle years ago on many a winter’s night, with her hair upon her cheeks and the gleam of sham pearls upon her neck, with transparent silk stockings and cracked patent leather shoes showing under the frayed hem of her coloured coat, and about her the strong cloying whiff of cheap scent, at once enticing and disgusting him.

“Hullo, Belle!” he greeted her, “where have you been?”

“Over to Batchelors’; Lucy’s been giving a party. She’s going to be married at last, you know, and her boy’s people have been over, and we’ve had a bit of a dance. I’m tired.”

“You don’t tell me you’ve walked back all by yourself?”

“Why not?—it isn’t far by the down, and the moon’s lovely. Ernley wanted to fetch me, but I knew he was busy, it being so near Christmas, and I’m always a bit nervous when he comes over to Batchelors’—he and my dad don’t hit it off.”

“That’s a pity.”

“It is. But Ernley doesn’t understand dad, and of course I own he’s troublesome, having an idea that I’ve married money, and so ought to support the old home. Twice he’s tried to borrow money off Ernley, and twice they’ve had a row about it.”

“Is your father in a bad way, then?”

“Oh, he’s sure bust sooner or later. Most farmers do these days. When Lucy gets married there’ll be one less for the work, and he can’t afford another man. I’m sorry about it all, which worries Ernley. He says, I oughtn’t to feel I belong there any more.”

“Well, I don’t see that you’ve got any call to worry about Batchelors’, after the way they’ve treated you.”

“Oh, they haven’t treated me badly. It’s always like that in a big, poor family. You’ve got to work hard and you have rows. I don’t say I was never to blame. But we’re all friendly enough now.”

She sighed, almost as if she regretted Batchelors’ with its toiling, quarrelling ways. Then she asked:

“How are you getting on, Dan?”

“Oh, well enough—it’s hard work, but healthy.”

“Do you get Christmas off?”

“Only the day.”

“Well, you must come and see us some evening when you’re free—what about supper? You promised us weeks ago that you’d come to supper.”

Daniel hesitated. He felt unwilling in part—in part too eager.

“Do come,” said Belle.

“Well, I’d like to——”

“Wednesday’s your afternoon off, isn’t it? Come next Wednesday.”

Daniel struggled in himself. He asked in himself: “Who’ll I meet?—Belle Shackford or Belle Munk?” But all he could say outwardly was:

“Thank you kindly. I’d like to come.”

CHAPTER FIVE

§ 1

Daniel knew he was a fool to go to supper at the Crown. If he was beginning to feel like this again about Belle he ought to keep away from her. There was no good telling himself that he was going to see Ernley—he had plenty of opportunities for seeing Ernley without his wife. No—he might as well be honest—he was going because he wanted to see Belle, and also—to be frank as well as honest—because it would be a treat to have supper at the Crown. He wondered what they would have to eat ... chops, sausages, cutlets ... a fowl, even.... And he would be able to sit and talk to Belle, to watch her mouth when she laughed, and the big column of her throat, and her hair that would be like spun sugar in the glow of the new electric light.... He was a fool to think of going, but, of course, he went.

When Wednesday came he devoted nearly an hour to his preparations. First he had a comprehensive wash at the sink, then he changed into his Sunday clothes, put on new-blacked boots, and sleeked his hair with some hair-cream specially bought in Lewes. It would never do to appear a shabby fellow. He was just setting out when he met Mr. Marchbanks, who surveyed him nervously.

“What time ull you be back?”

“Ten o’clock. Jess says she’ll stay till then.”

Mr. Marchbanks coughed.

“Dan—you feel—you feel quite settled in your mind about Mrs. Munk, don’t you? I mean, you’ve quite got over all that, or you wouldn’t——”

Dan suddenly found himself angry.

“Well, if I haven’t got over it all, seeing as I’ve been married and widowed and got a kid ... and I don’t see why you’ve any call to think such things of me.”

“I beg your pardon. I didn’t really think it. I merely wanted to put you on your guard. She is a very charming woman, and, of course, it isn’t easy to forget....”

“Ho, isn’t it!” cried Daniel as he walked out.

He felt highly indignant all the way down the drive. What right had Mr. Marchbanks to interfere? But then he’d always been like that with Belle—disapproving. It was the one thing he couldn’t get on with in Mr. Marchbanks—his ideas about women and love ... afraid of everything. You’d think he’d had some kind of upset himself and got scared.

But by the time Dan had reached the village he, too, was scared—so scared in fact that he went into the George and had a pint of Hobday and Hitch’s before he dared go into the Crown. The young man at the George now knew who he was, and they often exchanged confidences about the management of an inn. The George was a quiet place now, entertaining only a farm labourer or two, and paying its way even more uncertainly than in the days of Thomas Sheather. Certainly the ale was bad, but Dan obtained a slight comfort from it, though probably his reassurance was chiefly due to the few minutes spent in old beloved surroundings—the familiar, sawdusted floor, the low, beamed ceiling, blackened by the oil lamp that still hung from it, the familiar whisky advertisements on the walls, the beer-handles that he himself had worked to and fro behind the counter for so long.

He went out feeling comforted for the evening’s adventure. The Crown was brilliantly lit up—pouring the reflections of its electric light into the road and across it into the dim, lamp-lit windows of the George. Above it the blackness of its roof rose steeply into the dark sky, where a single star hung remote from the dazzle of Bullockdean Street. Dan looked at the star, and thought of another which he had seen in pictures, shining above an inn at Christmas-time. Three wise men had followed a star right across the world, and it had brought them to a common inn. They must have had a shock. It was curious how his thoughts of Belle seemed mixed with that story of another inn—he remembered how he had dreamed of her when he was in Sark, in the stable with her baby at Christmas-time. Perhaps his love for her was not the wicked thing Mr. Marchbanks thought it.

But there was no good standing mooning in the street. He went up to the door-bell and faced the parlourmaid, who brought him into the Munks’ private sitting-room, where they both waited. To-night Belle surprisingly wore black, and Dan was abashed not only by the return of her sleekness, but by the deepening of her beauty. The black made her skin like milk and her hair like honey—it gave her an air of pale delicacy which he had never seen her wear before. It was a delicacy of colour rather than of outline—in outline she was still the rich-moulded, splendid Belle whose bigness he had loved.

They spoke together rather awkwardly till dinner was ready—for it was certainly dinner and not supper to which he had been invited. It was served in the hotel dining-room, where the visitors already sat in high-class dispersal, and Dan’s eyes opened wide at the sight of the two waitresses in black and white uniforms who brought in the soup.

“Lord, Ernley, but you have come on!”

Ernley smiled complacently.

“Yes—we haven’t done so badly. As I used to say to poor dad—‘it pays to launch out a bit.’ We were quite full for Christmas, though we’re slacking again now.”

It struck Daniel that Ernley was looking extremely prosperous, in spite of his inward distress. There was certainly a curve under his waistcoat and his jaw was thicker. But his heart was lean withal—except when he talked about the hotel, he had all his old questing bitterness. He talked like Ernley in the trenches, though he looked very different from the Ernley of those days.

“Egad, you’re a lucky fellow, Dan. You look straight ahead of you and don’t worry about what’s at the side. If you had this pub now there’d be nothing else you’d want.”

“Reckon there would be a fat lot I’d want,” said Dan, who resented this description of himself.

“Well, I mean a wife and children with it, of course. You wouldn’t go wanting to look beyond the horizon. You’d be satisfied with the common business of life. I believe you’re satisfied now, even as you are.”

“I ain’t, but I haven’t got it in me to make a fuss about things like you.”

Ernley seemed pleased at this, and laughed. Dan was beginning once more to find him irritating, but he would not let his feelings betray him any further. Not only was he Ernley’s guest, eating his very good food, but he did not want to give any added distress to Belle by goading her husband. He watched Belle secretly while he ate, watched for any expression of her face or speech which should betray her feelings. Was Ernley really making her unhappy, as he thought he was, or was she merely accepting him with that motherly toleration which is so often the female response to male unreasonableness?

He could not tell, for she sat very nearly silent. Indeed, the conversation being little more than a monologue by Ernley, it would have been difficult for her to do otherwise. But he noticed that she did not smile—as she might have, pityingly or comprehendingly—though this again he should not have expected, for it had never been Belle’s way to smile at men except in allurement.

After supper—which though a little distressing on the human side had been most comforting in the matter of food and drink—they returned to the sitting-room, where Belle took out some sewing and Ernley went on talking. He talked about the French occupation of the Ruhr, laying down the law uncontradicted by Daniel, who had little interest in or understanding of post-war politics in their larger issues. The rise and fall of prices, the difficulties in the way of getting work, the gradual withdrawal of industrial and agricultural guarantees—that was how the hinder-parts of the Great War looked to Daniel and some millions like him. Matters of stability, economy and reparation were all by him vaguely classified as “talk”—and it seemed queer to him that the politicians should go right away to Paris for their talking when the unemployed were parading the streets of Lewes and Newhaven.

In the midst of Ernley’s talk a waitress came in and told him that he was wanted on the telephone. He threw his cigarette into the grate and went out, leaving Daniel and Belle to entertain each other on lower intellectual levels. No sooner had he shut the door behind him than Belle looked uneasy.

“I think I hear the children,” she said—and going to the door she opened it and listened. The house was silent, save for Ernley’s distant voice on the telephone. She came back into the room, but did not return to her old chair, sitting down instead on one nearer the door, which she had left open.

“I don’t hear any kids,” said Daniel.

“No.”

The monosyllable came blankly, and he suddenly realized that she was listening intently—listening to Ernley’s voice.

“The children are very quiet as a rule,” she continued. Then shut her mouth and listened again.

Dan had a sudden dreadful intuition that she doubted the innocence of Ernley’s telephone call. She was trying to overhear as much of it as she could. From where he sat he could hear nothing but a voice, but probably from her position by the door she could distinguish words. This suspicion so appalled him that, if Belle wanted his silence she could not have been better served. She had never been subtle in her methods, and he soon became convinced that she was listening, for beyond making a few random remarks about the children, she scarcely opened her mouth while Ernley was away.

After a time she evidently heard him put down the receiver, for she shut the door, and strolled back to the chair she had been sitting in when he went out. Dan sat rigid with embarrassment and misery, and had not succeeded even in forcing out a remark about the weather when Ernley came in.

“Well,” said Belle at once—“who was your call from?”

“Barker,” said Ernley, “he was ringing me up about that sherry.”

“But the shop’s closed.”

“He rang me up from his home.”

“Do you generally call him ‘kid’?”

Dan felt his skin go like a goose’s, not so much for Ernley possibly snared in a delinquency as for the manner of Belle’s snaring. He saw Munk’s face grow hard, though he answered quietly:

“I certainly don’t call him that.”

“But I heard you—you said ‘don’t be silly, kid,’ and then ‘good night, kid’ at the end.”

Belle had always been crude in her methods—Dan had been present at many a scene like this in the old days—but it was the first instance he had known since her marriage. Ernley turned crimson, and Dan blushed with him and for him.

“You must have good ears,” he said—“to hear so distinctly through two shut doors.”

“I need ’em in this house.”

“Well, I feel this is a matter more interesting to you than to Daniel, who probably doesn’t care how I address my wine-merchant. Did you ever go to Barker’s, Dan, when you were in business?”

“I dunno—we—we were a tied house, you know,” stammered poor Dan.

“For your wines, I mean of course.” Ernley seemed annoyed at his failure to assist in the diversion. “I suppose you stocked wines.”

“Yes, we stocked wines in a manner of speaking—sherry and port and such.”

Ernley discoursed on port and sherry as he had formerly discoursed on German reparations. But the rest of the evening was sheer agony to Daniel. He knew that Belle was only waiting for him to be gone before she re-opened her attack. Her parting lips and heavy brow were an earnest of the storm that would break when she had her husband to herself. She sat silent, huddled and lumpish, her eyes fixed sullenly on Ernley. Sometimes Dan almost felt sorry for Munk when he thought of what he would be put through in the next hour or so. But most often he was angry and not sorry. Ernley had almost certainly not been talking to his wine-merchant, and he richly deserved to be told off. Dan was outraged and disgusted at the idea of his slightest unfaithfulness to Belle. If he made her unhappy through being unsympathetic and tiresome, that was bad enough, but if he distressed her through any treacherous friendship with another woman, he was nothing but a swine.

Ten o’clock struck, and Daniel rose to his feet with muttered excuses. It wouldn’t do any good to stop on, so he’d better go and let them get it over. But as he went out he felt sorry and ashamed for them both.

§ 2

Once in the dark and empty street he pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead. Whew! that had been dreadful—that glimpse of married life.... Ernley a philanderer and Belle a shrew. He had suddenly been shown the dark side of both his friendship and his love. Ernley, that companion of so many years, had appeared before him as a gross and selfish man, unhappy and yet spoilt by prosperity, thinking of nobody but himself, and already, after barely three years of marriage, fallen into deceit. Belle, whom, ever since his return, he had seen as all maternal kindness, the wanton ripened and sweetened into the mother, he had seen to-night on the level of vulgar jealousy and suspicion, dragged by them below the decencies of common reticence ... exposing her husband before the man who had once loved her.

He had reached the parsonage gate, but felt too much shaken to go in at once and face the questions of Mr. Marchbanks and Jess Harman. They would want to know what sort of evening he had spent, and he wasn’t yet in a fit mood to tell them. He walked up the lane, which just beyond the parsonage shrivelled into a cart-track and led under some skew-blown thorn trees to the open down.

As he walked into the great spread loneliness of Heighton Hill, Dan’s heart was full of offence because the love-story of Belle Shackford and Ernley Munk had not yet been given its happy ending. He had lost her not to joy but to sorrow. He felt that she was unhappier with the man she had chosen than she would have been with the man who was not her choice. Ernley had not the power to make any woman happy—he was too self-centred, too restless, too exacting. Daniel remembered him as he had been in courtship—that courtship which had been one long series of quarrels and reconciliations. In marriage he was just the same—it had not changed him. But marriage had changed Belle—it had made her a wife, whereas Ernley was still only a lover.

He told himself that she was happy in her children. But he could have given her those ... and he would not have stood apart from them, contemptuous and fault-finding, as Ernley stood. Ernley would have preferred to be without them, he did not like this change in Belle—he did not really want a wife but a mistress. He wanted his old fires rekindled—damn him for a silly fool—and since Belle could not do so he was carrying the torch elsewhere.

Dan was always wretched when he hated. The emotion of hate caused him such acute pain that whenever it was roused in him his whole being seemed to concentrate on putting it down. Now he reminded himself of all Ernley had endured in the war, the experiences that had given him not only the pain of old wounds to harry him, but also had left his mind torn and gashed. Daniel knew how still in dreams Ernley grovelled in the craters of no-man’s land, cowering and sweating till the inevitable crash came which brought both the full horror of his dream and a terrified awakening. Ernley’s mind bore old wounds like his body, wounds both of mind and body which Daniel had been spared by his better luck and his duller constitution. You must judge him morally as you judged a cripple physically.... And Belle, too, had been very trying. It was maddening to be suspected ... even if you were guilty ... there had been something vulgar and womanish in her method of reproach.... But Daniel could not judge Belle, and thoughts of her often brought him back into all his rage at Ernley. It was Ernley’s fault that she had behaved in such a low fashion—she had been driven to it by his conduct, by her own desperate efforts to defend her marriage. She was in despair, poor Belle, and had been unable to keep up her disguises. Ernley was not worthy of her big, generous soul—he did not appreciate the graces it had acquired through marriage. Dan thought of her stooping over Thomas Helier with the woolly ball in her hand.

§ 3

It was not till eleven o’clock that he felt calm enough to go back to the parsonage. Jess Harman flung open the door in a state of high indignation.

“Well, so you’re back at last! What’ll my auntie think of me not coming home before this? I said I’d be back by ten.”

“You needn’t have waited.”

“I like that! With your poor little baby yelling his head off. A nice father you are—gallivanting half the night and leaving your poor little child at home.”

“Well, I couldn’t have taken him with me.”

“No—but you might have come back at a Christian hour. You really don’t deserve to have a baby.”

“Now, Jess, you’ve no call to talk like that.”

“Yes, I have. I never heard of such goings on—stopping at the Crown till all hours. It isn’t seemly that you should hang round Mrs. Ernley Munk.”

Dan flushed.

“So it’s taken you that way too, has it?”

“How d’you mean by ‘too’?”

“You’re getting like Mr. Marchbanks, seeing harm where there ain’t none.”

“Well, if there ain’t harm in leaving your poor child and sitting half the night with an old sweetheart....”

“I wasn’t sitting with her. I went for a walk.”

“That was kind of you, seeing as you knew I was waiting for you here.”

“Couldn’t Mr. Marchbanks have looked after baby?”

“Him! What’s he know about a human child? Go on, Daniel—you’ve behaved badly, and there’s no good making out you haven’t.”