Front matter (continued 3)

"Ah knaw 'oo yon 'll be," went the whisper round behind him.

Once he was ill, drawing the breath into his lungs like great anchor chains dragged through hawse-holes, and Pam nursed him. Dressed the pillows under his head; laid her cool hand on his hot forehead; gave him his medicine; sat through the night with him, clasping courage and comfort and consolation into his burning fingers, wrote letters for him; read for him. "Noo we s'll be gettin' telt seummut before so long," said Ullbrig to itself. "A jug gans to pump adeal o' times, but some fond lass 'll brek it before she 's done,"—but the schoolmaster consumed in stillness like the flame of a candle. There were days when "Good morning, Yes, No, Please, Thank you, and Good-night" would have covered all that he said to Pam directly—and even then the veins in his forehead and the tightening muscles about his jaws reproved him straightway, as though he had already said too much. If, by any chance, Pam addressed him suddenly, the blood would mount up to his forehead and the outlines of his face would harden, like a metal cast in the setting, before he spoke, till it almost looked as though he were debating whether he should give her any reply. And the reply given, he would take the first opportunity of turning his back. Indeed, there were times when he barely waited for the opportunity, but clipped his sentence in the middle and threw an abrupt word over his shoulder to complete the sense of it, while Pam stood sorrowfully regarding the two familiar threadbare tail buttons and the shine about the back of the overworked morning coat, whose morning knew no noon, wondering if she 'd said anything to offend him. Once, when he had swung round more abruptly than usual, giving her the reply so grudgingly that it fell altogether short of her hearing, as though he had cast a copper to some wayside mendicant for peace's sake, Pam—who could never bear to leave anything in doubt that a word might settle—asked him softly if he were angry with her. The question fetched him suddenly round again, with the appearance of warding a blow.

"Angry with you?" he repeated. There was the hoarseness of suppressed emotion about his voice, and his lip trembled.

"You are angry with me now, though," said Pam mournfully, "for asking you."

And indeed, by the way he had turned upon her and spoken, he seemed like a man brought to the sudden flash-point of passion by some injudicious word.

"I am not angry with you," he said, in the same constrained, hoarse voice, and said no further, but put his shoulders between them again as though the subject were too unimportant to be discussed.

Then Pam made a discovery.

"He does not like me," she told herself, and without showing that she held his secret, she set herself in her own quiet, gentle fashion to verify the fact by observation. He was never a man of many words at any time, but she saw he was never a man of so few as when he was with her. He had words for the postmaster; he had words for the postmaster's wife; he had words for Emma; he had words—stray, detached, pedagogic schoolroom words, read up aloud from the chalkings on an invisible blackboard—for the villagers. But for Pam—Pam saw herself—he had only the constrained, hard words between his teeth like the enforced bit of a horse, that he champed fretfully in the desire to break away from her.

No. Pam knew what it was. He liked the postmaster because they could talk the papers over together, and predict terrible things about the country to each other; and he liked Emma because Emma was so straightforward and sensible and earnest looking—even if she was n't pretty, which perhaps, after all, she was n't—and never said silly things she did n't mean; and he liked Mrs. Morland because nobody could help liking her—she was so kind and motherly and sympathetic and talkative, and so full of allowances for other people. But Pam! ... Well, he did n't care about Pam because ... oh, because of heaps of things, perhaps. It was n't any use trying to put them all together. Because he thought she was a silly, empty-headed gad-about, who cared for nothing but showing herself around the countryside ... (but that was n't true a bit; he knew it was n't!) ... and being asked if she 'd have people....

Pam doubled up one little hand in anguish, and stared at an invisible something in front of her—that seemed to be a bogey by the startled look she gave it—with a bitten underlip twisting and struggling like a red live thing to be free; and a drawn grey cheek—till the great round tear-drops gathered in her eyes and fell hotly on her knuckles one by one.

But that was only for a moment.

Then Pam dashed the tears aside and shook her glorious head with new-found resolve. Pam would be brave; and strong; and steadfast; and still; and modest; and nobly feminine; and true. And would show him by her actions that he had done her a wrong in his heart.

Pam was still engaged upon the work of showing him when the Spawer took up his quarters at Cliff Wrangham.

CHAPTER X

On the morning following the Spawer's session at Father Mostyn's, before James Maskill had yet flung himself round the brewer's corner, his Reverence threw open the blistered Vicarage door and sallied forth genially to the Post Office in a pair of well-trodden morocco slippers, screwing up his lips to inaudible cheery music as he went, and holding in his left hand a round roll of grey stuff which, judging by wristbands of a similar texture that showed beyond the crinkled cassock sleeves, appeared to be a reverend flannel shirt. Jan Willim was chalking their price on a pair of virgin soles when he heard the insidious slip-slap of heelless leather take the cobbles like the lipping of an advancing tide, and he put his head hurriedly round the little clean kitchen door at the sound of it.

"Noo, 'ere 's 'is Rivrence," he announced, with the loud double-barrelled whisper intended to do duty as a shout on the one side and be inaudible on the other, "... an' it 'll be Pam 'e 's after.... Noo, Pam lass!"

"Ha! The very girl I wanted to see," his Reverence told her, as Pam slipped her frank face deftly behind the counter to receive him, like a beautiful honest marguerite, fresh plucked and button-holed, with a friendly upward "Yes-s-s?" prolonged through her ivory petals, pink-tipped, and' a peep of rosy tongue. "The very girl! How 's Government this morning, John?" he inquired obliquely of the deferential shadow brooding by the inner door, where the sound of straining shoe-leather bespoke the presence of somebody striving to keep silence on his toes.

"She 's very well, ah think, yer Rivrence, thank ye," responded the postmaster, stepping forward the necessary six inches to show himself respectfully before the Vicar in the act of speaking, and retiring when his words were ended.

"Busy, is she?" asked his Reverence affably, commencing to unroll the grey bundle of flannel on the counter with a leisurely ordering of his hands—Pam lending assistant touches here and there.

"Ay, she 's busy," said the postmaster, showing again in the door-frame, and wiping his fingers on his apron, lest their inactivity might seem like disrespectful indolence before the Vicar. "Bud it 'll be slack time wi' 'er an' all before long. Theer 's not so many stamps selt i' 'arvest by a deal, nor so many letters written. Folks is ower throng i' field."

"Ha! No doubt about it. The harvest field is a fine corrective for cacoethees scribendi," said his Reverence, disposing the shirt on the counter lengthwise, with limp, outstretched arms, for Pam's inspection, as though it were some subject on an operating table. "Buttons again, you see, Pam," he told her, pointing out where they lacked.

"My word, I see!" said Pam, running over the outlines of the article with a swift, critical eye. "And wristbands and collarbands as well. You want some new shirts badly. You 've only four now, with the one you 've got on—and that," she said, turning up his cassock sleeves to get a look at it, "is almost past mending. See how thin it is.... And will you have pearl buttons, then?" asked Pam, composing the shirt to seemly folds under soft, caressing fingers, and following every move of her hands with a fascinating agreement of head, "... or plain white?"

"Ha! Plain white ... by all means," said Father Mostyn. "Large plain white for his reverence the vicar—as large and as plain and as white as we can get 'em, that lie flat where they fall, and don't run all over the floor and try to find the crack in the skirting-board. Pearl buttons are for the young and flexible (incidentally too, for the profane), and not for aged parish priests, whose knees are stiffened with a life of kneeling.... Shirts and pearl buttons must n't let me forget, though," he admonished himself, drawing the solitary, backless cane-bottomed chair under him from below, and sitting to the counter with one hand drumming on its oilcloth and the other gripping a spindle, "what I really came about."

"No," said Pam, watching his lips.

"We had a visit from our friend of the Cliff End last night."

Pam's eyes were drawn for a moment to sundry faults in the folding of the shirt, and her fingers busied themselves with their correction.

"Yes," she said, looking up again. "But you did n't have any music? ... Did you?" she asked, with the sudden eagerness for a coveted opportunity gone by.

"All in good time—all in good time, dear child," Father Mostyn exhorted her indulgently. "Last night we made music with our mouths, but the next night we 're going to make a little with our fingers. Bach! Scarlatti! Beethoven! Mozart! Schumann! Palestrina! ... And then we shall have to have you with us."

"Me?" asked Pam, with swift, desirous incredulity.

"You," said Father Mostyn.

Pam plunged her face into her two hands straightway (which was a characteristic trick of hers at such times), as though the beauty of this thing were too great to behold. After a moment she let her fingers slide away into her lap of their own weight and threw back a brave head with the smile of tears about it, and the little double shake that remained over to her from the short while ago when her hair had fallen in sleek, black curtains on either side of her cheeks each time she stooped.

"Does he know I 'm to be there?" she inquired.

"To be sure he does, dear child."

"But it was your idea ... to ask me," said Pam.

"It was my vicarage," said Father Mostyn.

Pam made pot-hooks with her fingers.

"Yes..." she said, as though the word were only the beginning to a puzzled objection, but her breath went out in it in lingering, and she let it stand by itself as an assent. "What did he say?"

"When?"

"When you told him ... I was to be there? Perhaps he did n't say anything?"—with anxiety. "Did he?"

"And supposing he did n't?"

"Then perhaps it would mean he did n't want me. And perhaps it would n't ... but it might."

"Ha! Might it? Let 's make our mind easy, dear child. He said lots of things."

"About me?"

"Certainly. It was you we were discussing."

There was only one question possible to ask after this on the direct line, and Pam drew up short, confronting it with a sudden air of virtue.

"I don't want to know what they were," she said.

"There 's no earthly reason why you should n't," Father Mostyn told her suavely, "so far as that goes."

"Is n't there?" asked Pam; and then quickly: "... Of course, I did n't think there would be. Why should there?"

"Ha! Pam, Pam, Pam!" said his Reverence, raising his hand from the counter, and wagging a monitory loose forefinger at her. "All the doctrine of Church Catholic can't drive the first woman out of you quite, I fear. Curiosity in that little breast of yours is a blackbird in a linnet's cage, and may break away through the bars."

Pam looked up from her pot-hooks sideways and laughed the soft, musical confession of guilt.

"All that was said about you last night," his Reverence assured her, "had to do with your music...."

"But you never told him," said Pam, locking her knuckles with a sudden alarm against the impending disclosure, and straining them backwards over her knee.

"To be sure I did."

"Oh!" said Pain, and dipped her face into her basined fingers a second time. "... That 's dreadful. Now he 'll come to church."

Father Mostyn stroked a severe, judicial chin. "Is that so dreadful? ... to go to church? You would n't have him go to chapel?"

"No, no," said Pam. "Not if he did n't want. But he never went ... anywhere before. And now he 'll laugh."

"In church? ... I think not."

"When he gets outside."

"Why should he laugh when he gets outside?"

"Because.... Oh!" Pam twisted her fingers. "Because of me."

"And why, pray, because of you?"

"Oh ... because.... Not because you have n't taught me properly, because you have, and been clever and kind, and more painstaking than I deserved ... ever. But because ... what must my playing sound like to him, when he plays so beautifully?"

"Pride, dear child, pride!" Father Mostyn cautioned her with uplifted finger. "Let 's beware of our pride. The Ullbrig pride that can't bear the humiliation of being taught."

"I 'm sure I try," said Pam penitentially.

"Let's try harder, then," said his Reverence, with affable resolve. "Never let 's cease trying to try harder. The laughter you speak of is most assuredly a miasma; rising from the deadly quagmires of your own pride. If our playing merits the fate of being laughed at, why should we wish it to receive any better fate, or fear its receiving its just deserts. Is n't that a virulent form of Ullbrig hypocrisy?"

"I did n't mean it to be hypocrisy," said Pam sadly. "And I did n't think it swas till you showed me. Only ... somehow ... I can't help it. I seem to be growing more and more into a hypocrite every day."

"Ha!" said Father Mostyn, welcoming the admission, "... so long as we recognise the sin, and the nature and the degree and the locality of it ... and have strength to confess it, dear child, salvation is still within our clasp. It 's only in sinning without knowing it that the deadliness lies. And that 's what the Church Catholic is to protect us from.... Are you listening, John?"

"Ah catch seummut o' what 's bein' said, yer Rivrence," the postmaster acknowledged cautiously, manifesting a certain diffidence about showing himself to this appeal, "... bud ah 'm not listenin' if it 's owt 'at dizz n't consarn me."

"The Catholic Church," Father Mostyn instructed him solemnly, "concerns all men—even shoemakers—and you would be well advised to catch as much of what you hear her saying as you can. Truth may come to us some day by keeping our ears open to her, but be sure she won't come to us without."

"Ah expeck she weean't," said a depressed voice from the shoemakery. "Thank ye."

"You 're welcome, John. And now"—Father Mostyn turned to Pam in lighter vein—"enough of spiritual meats for our soul's digestion, dear child. Far from laughing at you, as your little momentary lapse from discipline permitted you to imagine, our Cliff End friend was most genuinely interested in your musical welfare; inquired diligently concerning your state of proficiency; whether—"

"Oh!" Pam had been torturing her ten fingers over her knee while the list proceeded. "Did n't you just tell him I knew nothing at all?" she begged pathetically.

"Patience, dear child, patience!" Father Mostyn adjured her, with episcopal calm. "I did better than that. I told him the truth. Ha! told him the truth. Told him you were willing at heart to learn, but headstrong, and apt to be careless. Explained where the grave shortcomings lay."

"... About the thumbs going under?" Pam prompted anxiously.

"Ha! ... and your fatal tendency to depart from the metronomic time as adjudicated by the old masters. Have no fear, dear daughter. I told him all your musical offences that I could remember at the moment. He knows the dreadful worst, and has most kindly promised to lend a helping hand and assist us to make better of it if the thing can be done."

Pam gulped, with her eyes fixed on Father Mostyn, as though she had been swallowing one of Fussitter's large-size three-a-penny humbugs.

"Does a helping hand ... mean lessons?" she asked, in a still, small voice, after the humbug had settled down.

"Not so fast; not so fast," Father Mostyn reproved her. "I feared what my words might induce. Let 's beware of the fatal trick of jumping at conclusions. It does not appear at present what a helping hand, in its strictest interpretation, may mean. You see ... we 've got to remember ... our friend is n't like the common ruck of 'em. No mere bread-and-cheese musician, dependent on the keyboard for his sustenance, but a dilettante ... a professional patron of the muse, so to speak, who is n't solely concerned with its sordid side of pounds, shillings, and pence. I told him he 'd have to let us feed him the next time he came to see us. Not dine him ... but feed him. And he seemed to cotton to the idea. So now, dear child, what are we going to do about it?"

"Oh!" Pam pressed a hand flat to each cheek and fastened a look of round-eyed, incredulous delight on Father Mostyn's face. "Is it to be a party?"

"Not altogether a party." Father Mostyn pursed up his lips dubiously over the word. "Let 's beware of confusions in our terms, dear girl. Not a party. Nothing set or fixed or formal. Not a dinner. No, no; not a dinner. A feed. That 's what it 's to be."

"Yes," said Pam, sticking close to the suggestion as though she were afraid of losing it, and nodding her head many times with an infinity of understanding. "I know. A feed. What sort of a feed?"

Father Mostyn's judicial eyebrow shot up like the empty end of a see-saw.

"That 's what we 've got to settle. I rather fancied.... You see—the weather 's so hot ... we must consider. My idea was ... I thought, perhaps ... we 'd have something rather cooling. Something, say, in the nature of a cold spread.... But anything you like, dear child," he allowed her. "Just think out for yourself—when I 've gone—the very best you can do for us, and we 'll subscribe to it in success or failure when the time comes. And now, let 's settle when the time 's to be. When can we manage it, think you?"

"To-night? ... were you thinking of?" said Pam.

"Ha!" Father Mostyn wagged his hands free of all part in the proposal. "I was thinking of nothing. But to-night 's a little too precipitate, dear child. To-morrow night, then, let us say, and I 'll ride up to the Cliff myself some time this morning, and take the invitation."

So it was arranged, and the post rattled up over the cobbles, and his Reverence departed, after a genial word with James Maskill.

"Ha! Here comes the joyful-hearted James," he said to the figure of the postman, that showed hot and angry through the doorway, gripping the neck of his red-sealed canvas bag as though it were a doomed Christmas turkey, and waiting sullenly sideways for his Reverence to pass by. "No need to ask how the joyful-hearted James is. Fit and smiling as ever. Not even the burden of other people's letters can disturb his equanimity. Splendid weather for you, James. Don't stand; don't stand. Come in, and let 's see what you 've got inside your lucky-bag this morning—anything for the Cliff End at all? Eh, Pam?"

Thereupon James brushed past the reverend cassock buttons with a grunt like a felled ox, that might have been apology or anathema, or neither, and brought down the post-bag on the counter like a muffled thud.

"No," said Pam, when she 'd taken it from him with a smiling nod of recognition and thanks, and run its contents deftly under her fingers. "There 's nothing for farther than Stamway's this morning."

"And nothing for his Reverence?"

Pam ran over the letters again before his Reverence's eyes, to show him that she was n't merely making use of the word "No" to save her a little trouble, and shook her head.

"Ha! Capital! capital!" said his Reverence, preparing to go. "At least, it means there 's nobody petitioning for new drain-pipes or a cow-shed roof by this post."

"Ay," pronounced the postman darkly after him, watching the retreating shoulders with an explosive face like a fog-signal. "Yon sod ought to 'ave 'is dommed neck screwed round an' all."

"Sh! James, James, James!" cried Pam, biting a lip of grieved reproof at him across the counter, and seeking to melt his hardness with a sorrowing eye. "How can you bear to say such wicked things?"

"Ah sewd run after 'im an' tell 'im o' me, if ah was you," James taunted her, free of any anxiety that the challenge might be accepted. "'E weean't 'a gotten so far."

"You know very well I would n't do it," said Pam.

"Ah know nowt about what ye 'd do," James denied obstinately, shaking admission away from him like raindrops gathered on the brim of his cap-shade. "Nor ah don't care."

"You know very well I would n't do that, anyhow," said Pam, with a trembling lip for the injustice. "And it 's wrong of you to say I would."

"Ah know ah 'm a bad 'un," said James. "Let's 'a my letters an' away."

"You 're not a bad one," Pam protested, with a more trembling lip than ever, "but you try to make people think you are. And some of them believe you."

"They can think what they like. Folks is allus ready to believe owt bad about a man," said the postman bitterly, "wi'oot 'im tryin'. Ah sewd 'ave seummut to do to mek 'em think t' other road, ah 'll a-wander, ne'er mind whether ah tried or no. Nobody 's gotten a good wod for me."

"I 've got a good word for you," said Pam.

There was silence over the postman's mouth for a moment, and in that moment his evil genius prevailed.

"Ye can keep it, then," he said ungraciously, swinging on his heel. "Ah nivver asked ye for it."

And the silence was not broken again after that. Pam went on sorting her letters steadily, but every now and then she turned her head to one side of the counter, and for each stamp on the envelope there were a couple—big, blurred, swollen, and rain-sodden, with a featureless resemblance to James Maskill about them—that danced before her eyes.

Only, later in the day, when there was no postmaster to prejudice matters with his presence, Pam heard James Maskill whistling the Doxology outside the door with his heel to the brickwork, and she slipped round and took him prisoner by his coat lapels.

"James..." she said softly, and the Doxology stopped on the sudden, as dead as the March in Saul. "You did n't ... mean it, did you?"

The postman dropped his eyelids to their thinnest width of obstinacy, and said nothing. Pam waited, looking persuasively at his great freckles (so unlike her own), and still holding him up against the brickwork, as though he were Barclay, in need of it on Saturday night.

"You did n't really ... think I would do such a thing.... Did you now, James?" she asked him, after a while, trying to gain entrance to his heart by a soft variation on the original theme.

"There 's some on 'em would," James muttered evasively through his lips, when it seemed that Pam meant going on looking at him for ever. "... Ay, in a minute they would."

"But not me," Pam pleaded.

"Ah did n't say you," James answered, after another pause. "Ah said ah did n't know."

"But you do know, don't you?" Pam urged him. "You know I would n't; don't you, James?"

The postman changed embarrassed heels against the brickwork.

"'Appen ah do," he said, with his eyes closing.

"Say you do," Pam begged. "Without any 'happen,' James."

There was an awful period of conflict once more, in which James showed a disposition to clamp both heels against the brickwork together, but this second time his good genius conquered.

"... Do," he said, with his eyes quite shut; and Pam let go the lapels.

"I knew you did," she said, but without any sting of exultation about the words—only pride for the man's own victory—and went back to her work again (which had reference to hard-boiled eggs and chickens) with a brightened faith in the latent goodness of humanity.

And when James was standing on the cobbles before the Post Office that night, loosing the knot in his reins prior to departure, Pam slipped out with a neat little parcel done up in butter paper, and put it into his hands.

"Ay, bud ye 're ower late," said the postman tersely, with no signs of the recent softening about him, and sought to press it back upon her. "Bag 's made up."

"But it is n't for the bag," said Pam, resisting the transfer. "It 's for you, James."

"What 's it for me for?" demanded the postman, with the old voice of ire.

"To eat," said Pam. "It 's a chicken pasty I made on purpose for you, with a savory egg and a sponge sandwich. The egg 's in two halves with the shell off, and it 's quite hard. You can eat it out of your fingers if you like. I thought they 'd be nice for your tea."

The postman exchanged the parcel from hand to hand for a while, as though he were weighing it, slipped it after deliberation under the seat, gathered the reins, gripped the footboard and splasher, pulled them down to meet him, treading heavily on the step, till the whole cart appeared to be standing on its side, and rocked up into place with a send-off that looked like shooting him over the saddler's chimney. For James Maskill to thank anybody for anything was an act of weakness so foreign to his nature that there were few in all the district who could accuse him of it; and from the present signs Pam did not gather she was to be among the number.

"Good-by, James," she said wistfully, stepping back from the wheel as he sat down—for James Maskill's starts were sudden and fearful events, not unattended with danger to the onlooker, "... and I hope you 'll like them."

"Kt, Kt!" was all James vouchsafed (and that not to Pam) out of a threatening corner of his mouth; but as the bay mare leaned forward to the traces, and Pam gave him up utterly for lost, he turned a quick, full face upon her. "Good-neet ... an' thank ye," he said. And in a smothered voice that seemed to issue from under the seat, turning back again: "Ah 'll try my best."

Then he set his teeth and brought the whip down hissing venomously, as though desirous to get clear of the sound of his own words and weakness. The bay mare sprang up into the sky like a winged Pegasus, taking James Maskill and the trap along with her, and before Pam's eye could catch on to them again, they were gone in a cloud round the brewer's corner.

CHAPTER XI

Then for two days there were six very busy girls in Ullbrig—busier, indeed, than any other six girls in the world, I think, and their name was Pam. They cooked things in the little clean kitchen that gave forth a savor like all the flesh-pots of Egypt; things that turned Jan Willim's nostrils sideways in his head through trying to smell them from the shoemakery at work with his head down, and elicited a constant sound of snuffling outside the Post Office as of pigs that prize their snouts under the stye door at feed time. They went abroad with baskets, whose white napkins Ullbrig's fingers itched to lift, and pushed open the blistered Vicarage door without knocking, and passed in. They were seen to pay calls at Mrs. Fussitter's, and then Ullbrig sent bonnetless emissaries after them, with their bare arms wrapped up in harden aprons, to inquire:

"Ye 've 'ad Pam wi' ye just noo, en't ye? ... Ay, ah thought y' 'ad. Ah thought ah seed 'er... Ah 's think she 'd nowt to say for 'ersen, 'ad she?"

You may judge, then, if Pam was busy.

But in the end the things that had to be done were done, and the appointed hour came to pass, and Pam slipped through the Vicarage door with the final basket, and did not emerge again, and the shutters were drawn in both windows.

("Ay ... see ye ... look there! ... If ah did n't think they would," said Mrs. Fussitter, when all hope had gone with the second. "They weean't let onnybody tek a bit o' interest i' them, ah-sure. Ah mud just as well 'a gotten on wi' my work nor waste time ower them 'at dizz n't thank ye.")

And lastly, the Spawer rode down from Dixon's when the dusk was falling, to enjoy the ripe fruits of all this preparation. They heard the sound of his bell, percolating the stillness from Hesketh's corner like a drop of cool musical rain, and Pam said: "Here he is," in a whisper, almost awestruck, and bit her nails between her white teeth with a sudden enlargement of eye, as though they 'd been lying in wait for a burglar all this time, and the burglar had come.

And for a moment her heart failed her. She did n't know what to do. For how was she there? Why was she there? By what right was she there? What folly or blind presumption had led her to be there? Why had she ever consented to be there?

Suppose it was all a mistake, after all, and he did n't really expect her. What would happen then? What should she do if his face dropped discernibly when she showed herself, and he became cold?

Oh, he would be terrible cold.

And what would he be thinking of if his thoughts made him look like that? Would he be thinking of the same things as the schoolmaster?

Oh, no, no, no! Would he?

Would he turn his back upon her, and talk over her to Father Mostyn as though she were a mere wooden palisade? What if she was a lady, as Father Mostyn found necessary to remind her at times when she did n't act like one? How was he to know that?

And even if he did know it, what did it matter? If the thing itself was wrong to start with, how was it bettered because a lady did it?

Besides ... she was n't a lady.

She knew very well she was n't. She was just the post-girl. And he 'd been most good to her in the past; had shaken hands with her and talked French for her (that she was trying hard to learn, with Father Mostyn's assistance, out of an eighteenth century grammar that his father's father had used), and promised to play to her whenever she wanted.

Oh, yes ... she knew; and was very grateful. But that was different now. Then (and he knew it, too) she had been trying to get out of his way. Now she was thrusting herself into it. She was taking advantage of his own kindness to claim friendship and equality out of it, like the impudent beggars that make your one favor the plea for asking a dozen. Friendliness was one thing; friendship was another.

Oh, what should she do? and how should she meet him?

It was a terrible moment.

And then Pam suddenly bethought herself, and dipped her face swiftly into the font of her two joined hands—as though for baptism by resolution—and prayed.

It was very silly of her, of course—though, for the matter of that, lots of people do the same thing when they are in trouble—particularly girls; and Pam was only a girl, we are to remember.

Perhaps she did n't exactly pray so much as think aloud in her thoughts, so that God might hear His name and listen to her if He would. Very quickly and earnestly, and without any stops at all, as though the words had been in her great heart to start with, and she 'd just turned it upside down. And no sooner had they turned out than she heard the Spawer's two feet strike the ground outside like a dotted crochet and a quaver in a duple bar as he jumped from his bicycle, and heard Father Mostyn throw open the front door and say "Ha!" and the Spawer give him back sunny greeting in his familiar voice of smiles (that she seemed to know almost as well as her own—if not better), and immediately her fear left her as though it had never been; and she knew he was expecting her and would be glad to see her, and had come more on her account than on his own, and would put out his hand as soon as ever he saw her, and smile friendship; and her appetite for this joyous double feast returned.

Then she threw up her head and shook it, and slipped out into the hall (she 'd been standing out of sight in the door-frame during her momentary disquietude), with her lips a little apart as though for the quickened breathing of eagerness that has been a-running, and her white teeth glistening between like the pure milk of human kindness, and her cheeks aflush with the transparent golden-pink of a ripening peach, and her head thrown back, and her chin tilted forward, and her two eyes gazing forth—each under an ineffable half-width of lid; and nobody a penny wiser about the prayer.

"Ha! Come in; come in," Father Mostyn was saying. "Take stock of our lamp. Ha! the glory makes you blink. That's better than the reprehensible Ullbrig habit of carrying lighted candles with us to see who 's at the front door, and setting our guests on fire while we shake hands; or inviting 'em into darkness and bidding 'em stand still and break nothing until we 've got the shutters up and can strike a match. Tell Archdeaconess Dixon when you get back that his reverence has a twenty-four candle-power lamp lavishing its glory in the hall—just for shaking hands and hanging your hat up by—it 'll do her good to know!" The Spawer, who had already been passing his recognitions to Pam over Father Mostyn's shoulder, leaned across the bicycle and shook hands with her to her heart's content in his own happy fashion—a fashion that had nothing of offensive familiarity about it, nor any chill of reserve, but was as sunny as you please and honestly affectionate. Had he pulled her ear or patted her cheek or kissed her, it would have seemed to come quite naturally to the occasion under the circumstances, without any suggestion of impropriety. But he did n't do any of these things—nor did he call her by any name—which Pam noticed. He simply shook the little brown handful of fingers that had been so busy on his behalf these two days, and smiled upon her.

"Pam, dear child," his Reverence was saying, "how 's the table getting on? Ready to sit down to, is she?"

Then he turned to the Spawer.

"You 've brought your appetite with you, Wynne?" he charged him, with solicitous interrogation.

"All there is of it," the Spawer affirmed pleasantly. "They advised me to up at the Cliff (if it 's not betraying confidences)." A rendering of the vernacular less literal, perhaps than elegant. "Noo, ye 'll get some marma-lade!" had been Miss Bates' reflection on the subject. "... So I 've been keeping it up to concert pitch all day."

"Come along, then," said Father Mostyn. "Let 's all go and take the table as we find it. No use waiting for formality's sake. We 'll manage to get a feed off it somehow."

And spreading out a benedictory semicircle of arm, whose left extremity was about Pam and whose right fell paternally on the Spawer's shoulder, he gathered them both before him like a hen coaxing her chickens, and so urged them invitingly to the feast.

Ah! but that was a feed to remember. The glorious, never-to-be-forgotten first of many of its kind. The same old room it was in which the Spawer had sat with Father Mostyn two nights ago, but you could never have known it without being told. There was no longer any need to walk like a prisoner in shackles, sliding one foot past the other for fear of treading on crockery, or balancing outstretched arms as you went against the dizzy inclination to sit down. All the things by the side of the wall and the skirting-board (including the cobwebs) were either gone or unrecognisably reduced; cunningly compressed into semblances of Chesterfields and ottomans and settees. And all about the room were traces of Pam's taste and explorative industry; everything that had a good side to show showed it, and even those that had n't had been coaxed by Pam's alluring fingers into looking as though they had.

You may guess if the Spawer tried politely to make believe he did n't notice any change in the room.

But the crowning glory of the place and of all Pam's achievements—it was the table. Four candles lighted it and a brass lamp, and they were every one lighted to start with. There was a chicken-pie in a Mother Hubbard frill, with its crust as brown as a hazel-nut, and just nicely large enough to feed half a dozen, which is a capital size for three; and a noble sirloin of beef, fringed with a hoary lock of horse-radish, and arching its back in lonely majesty on an oval arena of Spode; and there was a salad, heaped up high under the white and yellow chequer of sliced eggs, and a rosy tomato comb, in a glorious old oaken bowl as big as a kettle-drum, china-lined, bound with three broad hoops of silver and standing on three massive silver claws; and there were some savory eggs, deliciously embowered in their greenery of mustard and cress, and a tinned tongue, tissue-papered in white and red, and garnished with stars and discs and crescents as though it had never known what it was to sleep in darkness in an air-tight tin under Fussitter's counter; and some beetroot, brimming in a blood-red lake of vinegar; and whipped creams, and a trifle pudding, all set out on snowy white damask amid an arctic glitter of glass and silver and cutlery. Except the cheese, which was a Camembert, and went by itself on the grained side-cupboard, where all the tumblers and wine-glasses had been congregated before.

And they sat down to table.

Father Mostyn took his place at the head, in the ecclesiastical high-backed arm-chair of oak, facing the beef and the window, with the big buck-horn hafted carving-knife to his right hand and the carving fork to his left for insignia of office, each of them rearing its nose over a monstrous cut-glass rest, shaped like a four-pound dumbbell. Pam sat on his left. And the Spawer sat exactly in front of Pam on the other side of the table; whenever they raised their eyes they were looking at each other. While they were drawing their serviettes across their knees, Father Mostyn keeled abstractedly over the arm of his chair towards Pamela with his eyelids curiously lowered, as though he were trying to catch sight of a fly on his nose, and named her in a spirit of gentle musing:

"... Pam ... dear child?"

Then Pam threw up her chin fairly and squarely and fearlessly, after the manner of one who had nothing to be ashamed of, looking into the Spawer's eyes without flinching, first of all, and thence to the very gates of Heaven over his shoulder and crossed herself, and lifted her clear, bell-like voice in pronouncement, and said:

"In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost."

Whereupon Father Mostyn crossed himself too—with easy familiarity, as though he were sprinkling surplus snuff off his fingers; being a priest, and in the profession, so to speak—his neck stretched out the while like that of a Christmas Eve turkey, and his nose thrown up raptly over the beef; after which he let his serviette slip through his knees, and took hold of both arms of his chair, and flung himself recklessly out over them at right angles, first to one side of the table and then to the other, in bland survey, like Punch delivering his immortal gallows oration, and said:

"Pam, dear child.... What are you giving us?" as though Pam had not reiterated every dish to him half a dozen times that very night.

"... There are the herrings," she suggested, assuring herself by a sight of them, with a hopeful slant of inquiry for his Reverence's approval.

"Ha!" Father Mostyn cast up recognisant eyes to Heaven as though he had not understood this signal act of mercy to form one of the items of Pam's grace, and must needs now add a special acknowledgment. "Beautiful! beautiful! Pass them along, dear child. A plebeian fish at three a penny, but one of many virtues, whose sole faults lie in its price and name. Fortunately, those are faults not likely to affect the epigastrium. Wynne, my boy." He received the dish from Pam's fingers and transferred it magnificently over the roast beef to the Spawer's side of the table; a gesture that made rare caviare of it at once, "... let me persuade you. Herring olives prepared according to the recipe of my late maternal uncle, Rear-Admiral Sir Alexander Cornelius...."

And so they entered upon it, with little thin, crustless sandwiches of brown bread and butter (Pam's making) to accompany the olives, and the Spawer went twice without shame,—just as Pam had arranged he should,—and it acted beautifully. You would never have known she 'd risen from the table if you had n't been watching to see what became of them. And after that they turned their eyes towards the beef with one accord, and Father Mostyn uttered a dread "Ha!" and seized it between knife and fork like an executioner, and whipped it over and stuck the fork critically into the undercut, holding his nose very high, and knitted at the brows, and looking terribly down the sides of it through his lashes, and drew the knife (another awful moment for Pam) and melted in a rapturous smile as the blade sank easily, out of sight, and said:

"Beautiful! beautiful! ... Cuts like a bar of butter, dear child."

In such wise they embarked upon the beef stage, and laid siege to Pam's succulent salad, with its tender, juicy greens and its mellifluous cream sauce. Then the pie passed in turn, nobly supported by the savory eggs, and similarly succeeded all the other items of the feed—(a glorious procession)—the stewed plums, the custard, the trifle pudding, the port-wine jellies, the whipped creams, and the cheese, with the wherewithal to wash them down and cleanse the palate for its discriminating duties—St. Julia winking rosily in the tinted claret glasses by the sides of Father Mostyn and the Spawer; simple lemonade in a tumbler for Pam to put her lips to.

And all the while they talked. At least, the Spawer and Father Mostyn did. Pam said less with her lips, but her eyes were always present in the heart of the conversation—so frankly and sweetly and freely communicative, and with such beautiful brows of sympathetic understanding playing above them that one never felt any need of the spoken word. Indeed, one did n't even notice it was n't there. That was because she possessed the unconscious subtle faculty of extending her words through manner; of perfuming them, as it were, with her own sweet, ineffable identity, so that what had been a mere brief-spoken monosyllable, unmemorable of itself, became through her a complete sentence in physical expression, memorable for some beautiful phrase of neck or lips, or brows, or all of them together, perhaps, in one melodious gesture.

And after they 'd saturated themselves through and through with the talk of things musical till the girl's eyes were wonder-worlds, swimming gloriously aloft amid whole systems of consonant stars, and the priest was a-hum in every fibre of him with fragmentary bars and snatches of quotation under the gathering force of musical remembrance, like a kettle coming to the boil. After all this they passed in procession over the echoing flagstones into the far room, where was the little sprightly old-fashioned spinster of a Knoll piano, exhaling still a faint pungency of ammonia from its recent ablutions, with new candles in its sconces and an open copy of Rossini's Stabat Mater laid suggestively on its desk, and all its yellow ivories exposed in a four-octave smile of seduction.

And here Pam brought those familiar etceteras of hospitality with which the Spawer had already made acquaintance; and filled the pipe as unconcernedly and as skilfully as though she were a seasoned smoker; and sliced the three rounds of lemon for his Reverence's glass.

And they made music—glorious music—on the little short-compassed upright. They had the concerto, of course—what was written of it—which Pam, nursing intent clasped hands in her lap, with her head erect and her red lips folded and her eyes aglow, adjudged more beautiful the more she heard it. Oh, what a glorious thing it was to be a composer, and have one's head filled with beautiful music in place of other people's ordinary humdrum ideas! And Father Mostyn passed a rhapsodical hand over his shining scalp and said: "Ha! ... makes one long for a few hairs to stand on end in tribute to it. Such music as that seems somehow to be wasted on a bald head."

And they had the A-flat prelude again, that sealed Pam's eyes with the great round tears of remembrance. And the Black Study they had; and some of Bach's Englische Suiten; and bits of Beethoven, the Waldstein; and the III; and part of the "Emperor"; and snatches of Brahms—all just as they came into the Spawer's head, with little illuminative discourses to accompany them—a sort of running verbal analytic programme, as it were. And Father Mostyn gave them reminiscences of Mario and Grisi and Braham and the great Lablache, and sang "I am no better than my Fathers," from Elijah.

Not a bit better, really—if indeed as good.

And the Spawer furnished humorous illustrations of all the great players. De Pachmann, with the high, uplifted finger and exquisite smile; and the statuesque Paderewski, sitting stonily at the piano; and the oblivious Rubinstein; and the imperious Liszt; and the pedagogic Von Bülow; all of them as funny as could be, with real musicianly insight at the back of them; most felicitous examples of instructive comparative criticism.

And Pam had her first lesson this night, and was quite ready to begin the second when that was over; and there seemed not more happiness in Heaven.

CHAPTER XII

It was midnight when Pam breathed guarded good-by over her shoulder to Father Mostyn and the Spawer in the roadway, and let herself noiselessly out of their sight through the post-house door.

Up above, in the bedroom that lay over the passage, a rhythmic sonorous sound gave token that the postmaster, at least, was enjoying the abundant fruits of blessed repose. In darkness Pam tiptoed to the little clean kitchen, and cautiously lighting the candle that her own hands had left ready for her on the corner of the dresser, held it gently about her on all sides in final inspection, for the observance of any little neglected duties that might be the better for doing before she took her way to bed. To one side of the fireplace there was the little clothes-horse standing—more, by right, a pony—gaily caparisoned with clocked hose and plain; long stockings and short; grey woollens; unstarched collars; and sundry inspiriting pink and white frilled trappings, that should have given mettle to the sorriest nag alive. Through the internal brightness of remembered music Pam's practical mind went out instinctively to the stockings. She set down her candle, and ran them one by one like gloves over her left hand as far as the foot, working her fingers within the hidden-most recesses of toe and heel for any signs of the wanting stitch. Out of some dozen pairs it wanted in three that forthwith did not return to the little clothes-pony, but went over her left arm in token of unsoundness. With these dangling at her skirt she made quick, noiseless tracks over the kitchen floor to acquire the necessary paraphernalia of repair—for nobody ever recognised the superiority of time present over time past or future better than Pam, or, recognising it, put the recognition to more practical account—and slipping a purposeful finger through the ringed handle of the candlestick, prepared to fetch worsted from the kitchen parlor.

She took the knob in her hand and entered naturally enough, opening the door gently first of all, against any grease-sputtering displacement of air, and keeping watch on the candle's behavior as she brought it round from the shelter of her bosom and passed it in front of her across the threshold. Quite two steps forward she had taken with her eyes on the little yellow flame, before something strange about the feel of the room plucked peremptorily at her attention as though with live fingers, and brought her up on her heel, gazing in front of her, to an involuntary quick-drawn breath of surprise. On the wool mat, in the centre of the square table where they gathered at meals, stood the lamp, still burning dimly, and in the obscurity beyond the lamp, the blur as of a second globe, where a human head lay bowed in the supporting hollow of two pallid hands.

Head and hands of the schoolmaster, beyond a doubt. How well Pam knew them; the long nervous fingers, that always flew to his throat when he addressed her, as though to throttle back the lurking dog of his dislike; the high, bulging forehead, with the compressed temples and the pulse in their veins; the whiteness and brightness of the scalp where the hair should have been. Oh, how Pam had studied them times out of number, like some strange, unlearnable lesson, trying to get them into her head and realise what they meant, and why—but never, perhaps, with her soft eyelashes fringing a greater perplexity than when she looked over them to-night. Never before had Pam found him—or any other of the household—awaiting her arrival when she returned from a late sitting with Father Mostyn. Was he troubled? Was he ill?

It was but a momentary glimpse of him that she caught, with head and hands together; but in that one moment he seemed all these things. The next, while Pam was revolving in her mind whether she should speak his name or cough, or rattle her matches, or depart more softly than she had come—the attitude dissolved. The long spectral fingers slid downwards (so quickly that he might have been merely drawing them across his cheeks when Pam entered) and his body rose from the chair to a standing posture. He gave no look at Pam, though his averted head showed recognition of her presence.

For a second or so there was silence in the room, Pam gazing over her candle at the drawn white face—whiter and more drawn than usual, it seemed to her—with the guilty thought beating within her that once again she had brought herself before this man unwelcomely. Then, seeing that she was the intruder, and that he, risen to full height from the chair, showed no signs of addressing her, or even of actively ignoring her, but stood passive, as though she had summoned his attention and he was simply giving it, without prejudice to any explanation she might wish to make—begged his pardon (for Heaven knows what) in a voice of infinite apology and contrition.

"I hope I have n't disturbed you..." she said. He bit his lip over a strained short "No."

"I did n't mean to. I only came in for some worsted ... Emma used it last. A grey ball with three needles in it, the color of uncle's stockings. May I look for it? ... It 's by the Bible, I think."

Without a word he turned on his heel to the sideboard where the big everyday reading Bible lay, and commenced a silent search. Something about the desolate droop of his thin, threadbare shoulders and the weary aimlessness of his seeking, sent (as his rear prospect always seemed to send) a thrill of spontaneous pity through Pam's heart. Why she pitied him, or exactly what there was about the shiny obverse of him to stimulate the emotion, not for the life of her could she have told.

He was some considerable time with his coat-tails turned towards her, and seemed, by the laborious stooping of his shoulder, quagmired in his search, she suggested—with such gentleness of breathing as would not have rocked the flame of her candle—that perhaps ... if he would let her ... she might be able....

Immediately he spun round from the side cupboard as though she had struck him, with the needles flashing in his hand.

"Is this your worsted?" he said.

"Oh ... thank you so much!"

Her eyes corroborated the color in an instant, and she started forward with grateful extended hand to relieve him of the necessity for coming more than halfway across the kitchen to meet her.

He took the words, but his eyes refused to admit the look. "No thoroughfare" seemed eternally writ up over them. Pam gazed a second at the stern intimation, and then, cuddling her candle to her for departure, turned—softly, so that he might not construe one single grain of anger into her going—for the door. Halfway there she looked back irresolutely over a shoulder, hesitating whether to speak or not.

"Your lamp ... is getting low," at length she ventured. "I think, perhaps ... it may want a little more oil. Shall I refill it for you?" she inquired solicitously. "The smell may give you a headache."

For answer he stooped over the table on both hands and blew out the convulsed flame with two short breaths. A thin, acrid column of smoke from the red wick commenced to wend its way upward, like a soul in tedious migration.

"I am going to bed," he said,

Pam's quick ear caught the sudden collapse of utter weariness in his voice as he said it. Something in the sound of it smote her soul to pity, as though she had had a momentary sight of his shoulders.

"You were not ... sitting up ... for me?" she asked—begged would be a better word.

"Why should I sit up ... for you?" he asked her; and his two hands went up to his collar.

"I don't know ... why you should," she said, plucking her reply to pieces, petal by petal, in soft embarrassment, as though it had been a flower. All the working of his lips, it seemed to her, could not conceal the sardonic amusement her answer stirred in him. Red shame rushed up the slim column of the girl's neck and plunged for hiding in the roots of her hair. "... And of course ... you did n't," she hastened to add.

"Of course."

Whether he repeated her words in mere unconcerned assent, or pressed upon them with the hard knuckle of sarcasm, or was using them interrogatively, Pam could not make sure, nor dared she ask, though she delayed awhile with her eyes fixed for solution upon his face.

"I 'm glad you did n't," she said gently, and in silence led the way into the little clean kitchen. "You will want a fresh candle," she said, putting her own down once more on the dresser, and reaching the empty holder, that by household consent was allowed to pertain to his exclusive use.

Out of a drawer in the dresser she produced a piece of newspaper; tore off a strip; narrowed its width by folding; bound it neatly round the base of the candle; pressed the candle securely into its socket; lighted it from her own, and handed it—after its flame was sufficiently established—to the waiting man.

He took it awkwardly and tardily enough, rocking so long in silence on his feet before acceptance, with head thrown forward and chin bearing heavily over his collar, that for some moments Pam had doubts whether he was not fast asleep and about to fall prone across the outstretched candle and her. But roused at length, as it would seem, by her prolonged gaze of inquiry, he lifted his head and extended an uncertain hand—a hand so uncertain, indeed, that at the first attempt it went wide of the candlestick altogether. At the second, more through Pain's management than his, thumb and finger closed upon it and he turned to go. The look of his dazed eyes and the dry, white lips that rubbed impotently sideways upon each other to shape a soundless "Thank you," sent a great surging tide of solicitous alarm through Pam's bosom. She was after him in a moment.

"Mr. Frewin ... Mr. Frewin.... Are you ill?"

CHAPTER XIII

His foot was already on the first step when she urged her bated voice of inquiry after him. He stayed for a moment so, as though he lacked strength to ascend or purpose to speak, and then turned upon her very slowly.

"You ask that," he said, compressing his words through bloodless lips, hard and set. "Don't you know? Can't you see?"

The fixed, meaningful way he looked at her, as though his face were a written answer, and she could read it if she would, and the strange, underlying emphasis of his question, took Pam altogether by surprise. Did n't she know? Could n't she see? All the dread sicknesses under the sun seemed to swathe him and envelope him in their hideous mantles as she gazed ... a fearful kaleidoscopic counterpane of ailments. Which of all these had her blindness overlooked?

Did n't she know? Could n't she see?

"See what?" she begged, in the whispered hush of a voice that besought an answer it scarcely dared to hear. For, framed in the narrow dark inlet of the staircase, with the candle casting corpse-hollows over his eyes, and sinking his cheeks under shadow, and sharpening his nose, and hardening his nostrils—to the girl's disturbed imagination he seemed dead and coffined already. "Oh, tell me, please!—what I ought to see. Oh, I am so sorry! Is there anything you want? Is there anything I can get you?"

"You know what I want," he said, and Lazarus, wakened from the dead, might have spoken his first words in just such a voice.

"I know what you want?" repeated Pam, falling back a little dismayed before the directness of his charge, and the black inability of her mind to meet it.

"... You," he said.

"Me?" said Pam again, more vacantly still, taking the word from him, and trying it in turn, like a key, upon all those sayings that had gone before, to see which of their several senses it might fit and open. Then, all of a sudden she saw the door it opened, and the threshold it led over, and let the key fall, as it were, from her hands, and covered her face hotly with her ten small fingers. "Oh, no, no, no!" she panted. "You don't mean that."

She opened a place in her fingers to look at him through, in the silence that followed, like a fawn staring startled from out the high stalks of a thicket, and let both hands slip downward to her skirts with the limp fall of bewilderment. To think this was the secret of his disfavor; this the reason for all his anger, and all her self-interrogations. That he loved her.

He laid down his candle on the dresser beside her own, and ran the finger of his left hand looseningly round the inner rim of his collar, as though it had suddenly grown tight about him.

"Why not that?" he said, in a voice so low and natureless and hoarse that it might have issued from a man of straw, for all the tone it gave.

"Because ... oh ... because of everything," Pam told him, with troubled eyes and lips and fingers. "I never expected it. It 's all so sudden."

"Sudden," he said.

Pam moved her lips in mournful affirmation. It cut her to the quick to hurt him.

"I 'm afraid so," she said, laying the words soothingly over the raw in his soul. "... Terribly sudden."

"... When it 's been going on ... for two years. Ever since ... I came. You call that sudden?"

"So long as that?" said Pam, in open-eyed amaze. "Oh, I never knew it. Indeed I did n't. I had n't the faintest idea."

He passed his hand across his forehead with a look of pain.

"... And I thought I could n't keep it from you—even when I tried. I fancied you read me through and through, and understood what I wanted to ask of you—but could n't, till now. You looked as though you did. Did n't you? Don't play with me. Tell me. You must have known."

Pam shook a head of pitying negation.

"It was n't that I did n't try," she told him, "... for I tried my best. But I could n't. I never thought ... you cared one little bit about me. If I 'd thought you cared for me ... there are lots of unkind things I 'd never have done that I did do, without thinking. I, would n't have followed you into the room when you were alone, and looked at you, and tried to make you look at me, and spoken to you. Never. You 'll believe I would n't when I say so, won't you? All the time I was only trying to make friends with you—that I was already, though I did n't know it. And all the time you thought ... that I saw what was the matter with you, and knew why you would n't look at me, and what you meant when you turned your back. But I did n't. Indeed I did n't. Oh, how spiteful and cruel you must have thought me," she said, with the beautiful wetness of tears about her lashes. "And I did n't mean it for cruelty a bit. I meant it for kindness. It 's all been a mistake from the first."

"Is it a mistake ... now?" he asked.

"A mistake now?" said Pam, and looked at him for a moment; and then drew a breath, and looked at him again; and drew another breath, and still looked at him; while her lower lip broke loose and fluttered a little, like a hovering butterfly, and stopped, and fluttered a second time, and her lashes fell by an almost imperceptible shade—less a falling of the lashes, indeed, than a falling of something not definable—a thin, gauzy, darkening veil of trouble, it seemed to be, over the very look itself. "I hope not," she said; but her voice and her eyes and her lips belied the hope she spoke of. "We understand each other now ... don't we?"

"What do we understand?" he asked huskily.

"I thought you knew," Pam said, setting her gaze on him, in intrepid wonderment to think he should comprehend so badly, or so soon forget. "I 've just ... been telling you."

"I know nothing," he said, and then in a sudden husky outburst of avowal: "There is only one thing I want to know. I 've told you what it is. Have you nothing to say in return?"

The unavailing exertion of trying to raise his lead-heavy voice clear of a low whisper made him stop to cough—the hard, dry cough that weeks of patient nursing and nights of anxious solicitude had taught Pam to know so well.

"Nothing ... that I should like to say," Pam answered unsteadily. "Nothing that you would wish to hear me say. I thought ... I 'd said everything. Oh, please ... don't ask me to say any more. It might only make things worse."

He swallowed time upon time in slow succession.

"And this is the end of all my waiting?"

"If you 'll let it, please, it is," Pam begged him, very pleadingly for herself; very sorrowfully for him.

"I can't let it," he blurted after a while. "You don't know what you are asking of me. I can't give you up."

"But I 'm not yours to give," Pam protested, with an awed voice, at this unexpected assumption of possession.

"Whose are you?" he cried

"Nobody's, of course," Pam said, in meek submission, "except my own."

"You could be mine ... if you would," he told her, grappling with his throat again. "Just for the saying of a word you could. I 've waited for you for two years. Is one word too much to give ... for two years' waiting?"

"Ginger waited for me longer than that," Pam said, very simply. "And I said 'No' to Ginger."

"Who was Ginger, to want you?" he exclaimed. "You could never have married Ginger."

"I did n't," said Pam quietly. "But Ginger loved me."

"I love you," he said fiercely.

"Ginger loved me first," Pam maintained stoutly. "And others loved me before Ginger. If I 'd said to them what they wanted me to say to them and what you want me to say to you, there would never have been any question of your asking me."

"Why did n't you let me die ... when I had the chance?" he demanded bitterly. "But you were kind to me then. You took advantage of me. You were kind when I was ill and could n't help myself. Death stood as near to me as I stand to you ... but day and night you stood between us both and saved me."

"Oh, no, no!" Pam disclaimed hastily, in twofold fear and modesty, shrinking before the acceptance of such an obligation. "It was n't I that saved you. It was you yourself that got strong and better. I only sat by you and did what little I could; but it was nothing at all ... really."

"Nothing at all," he said, and clenched his fist in assurance. "It was everything. Why did I get stronger and better—but for you? Because you were by me, and because I wanted you ... and could n't bear to leave you. Look," he said, standing back from her suddenly, as though to give her full view of his statement, "do you know there were times ... times when I could have turned my face to the wall and died for the mere wishing?"

"But you would never have done that," Pam whispered, in hushed alarm.

"Why should n't I have done it?" he asked her, "... when death was so easy and living so hard? You alone stopped me from doing it. The thought of you and the sight of you, and the hope of you. Often and often I was looking at you ... when you thought I was asleep."

"Sometimes I saw you," said Pam.

"... And making up my mind whether to die ... or risk living ... for your sake. But I never could die ... because of you. And once, when you had been a long while gone ... I said to myself: 'How easy to slip off now ... before she comes back' ... and just as I was wondering whether there would be time ... you came in, and stooped over me and kissed me. How could I die after that? Once I made up my mind to kiss you back ... but my lips had n't strength. You saw them move, and asked me if I wanted a drink, and I said 'Yes'; but I did n't. And you cried over me, too."

"I was sorry for you," said Pam. "I wanted you to get better."

"Are n't you sorry for me now?" he asked. "... Now that my mind is ill ... as my body was then?"

The terrible earnestness of his love troubled her. Love before she had witnessed in plenty, but never love like this. It was as though she stood with clasped hands before some burning homestead that her own unintending fingers had fired, and saw the fierce wind fan the flames, and heard the cry for succor from within ... and could do nothing. Oh, it was horrible! For a while they looked at each other and said nothing, for each feared speaking; he, lest he might divert Pam's answer; Pam, because she had no answer to divert.

"Well?" he said at length. "Have you nothing to say to me?"

Pam only shook her head. What had she to say, and how could she say it when her own great heart was hammering away like a stone-mason in the place where her voice should have been.

"Not even a word?" he said, with a broken sob. "Won't you say ... you 'll try and care for me ... if I can make you? Is it too much to ask that?"

Pam put her hands to her face.

"Oh ... I don't know. What am I to say? What am I to do?"

"... Do nothing," he said bitterly.

"But I want to do something," Pam protested desperately—though her own shrinking conscience told her how little. "... And I don't say I won't try. But perhaps ... I could never learn. I don't know. How am I to know? And if I say I 'll try ... and can't in the end ... what a dreadful thing for us both.... Oh, are you quite sure there 's nothing short of love that will do?" she asked, with the lameness that can get no further, and wrenched her hands, and looked at him in helpless appeal.

"That means you won't try?" he said; and she could see his hand close tight upon the dresser.

"Oh, no, no, no ... I will try!" Pam cried, charging blindly down the open roadway of consent, for fault of any other way to turn. "... If you wish it, I 'll try. But oh, please, it is n't the least bit of a promise ... and you must n't ... must n't build on it. And you must n't try and force me to learn ... or be angry with me if I 'm slow ... or can't. Perhaps I can't. Oh, it may very well be that I can't ... for all my trying.

"... And even ... if I ever grew to care anything for you ... in the way you want—and I dare n't think or say. It all seems so sudden and unreal. It seems as though I were dreaming it. Last night—half an hour ago even—I never thought you wanted to speak to me or have anything to do with me at all, and now—you 're asking me to try and love you. And even if I grow to care for you in that way (and I don't know. Oh, you must n't think I 'm promising) I should n't want ... I mean it would have to be ... oh, for a long time. Years, perhaps. Longer than ever you cared to wait. I told ... somebody once, when they asked me—what you 've been asking me, that I never meant to get married. And if I did ... it would be like acting a story to them—as they said I was doing at the time. And I 've said 'No' to such lots of others too ... and now to say 'Yes' to anybody (and I 'm only saying half 'Yes'—only a quarter 'Yes'—to you) seems, somehow, like breaking faith. It seems mean ... and unfair. And anyway it could n't ... could n't possibly be yet. Could n't be for ever such a long time. Perhaps you 'd never want to wait so long as that."

"Wait?" He thrust out his hand desperately to shut this dangerous back-door of her concession. "With you at the end of my waiting ... I would wait till the Judgment Day."

The dreary, dogged patience of the man's passion chilled Pam. It rose up high in her mind like an awesome black monument of Patience, and cast its great shadow over the brightness of her life—on and on and on interminably, out of sight to the dull sun-setting of her clays. If she could have recalled her words then. If she could have had the strength, the moral strength, to throw him aside from her then and there—at never mind what momentary cost to their feelings. All her soul, she knew, was striving impotently to cast off the encumbrance of him—but the strength was lacking. Strength to be cruel; strength to be kind. Because she could not bring herself to deal the one smart blow that the moment required with her own hand ... she was throwing herself contemptibly upon the protection of the Future; making herself the Future's ward, and trusting, in some blind, unreasoning fashion, that her guardian would be responsible for her when the time came, and do for her what she had lacked the daring to do for herself, and free her without consequence (if so needed), and deal happiness all round with that lavish hand for which the Future is, and has been, and ever will be, so extolled.

Wild, fatal fantasy of Pam's—that she shared in common with every man, woman, and temporising child of this self-deluded, procrastinating world. For the Future is that dread witch that, appearing first under the guise of a sweet and amiable old lady, turns suddenly into the red-eyed, horrid old hag of to-day.

But alas! The compact was drawn and signed and sealed. What consequence that Pam imposed a hundred feverish reservations and supplications, and qualifications and amendments, and loopholes and contingencies upon her little old lady in the signing—and seemed to be granted them every one? Into this little old lady's house she signed herself for all that, and henceforth all her goings and comings, and sleepings and wakings were no longer her sweet own, as heretofore, but under the authority and subject to the control of the little sweet amiable old lady—who was only biding her good time (as you may be sure) to snap into the horrid, red-eyed hag we wot of, and fall upon Pam with the black venom of her malignant nature.

All through the remaining hours till dawn and daylight the cough of the schoolmaster rang out monotonously, dull and muffled, from beneath the bedclothes like a funeral bell, and Pam, the only other awake in that household to hear it, lay and listened to its tolling with great, wide eyes staring at the darkness of the ceiling, and at the darkness beyond the foot of the bed, and at the darkness where the door was, and sometimes passionately into the smothered darkness of her own pillow, and said to herself, with a wondering horror:

"When daybreak comes ... shall I wake?"

CHAPTER XIV

Green July, gliding smoothly on the noiseless axles of its diurnal wheels, gives way at last to golden August, and beneath the assiduous burning of the sun the cornfields begin to brown like the crust of a pasty under the brasing iron. It is the mystic eve of harvest, that consummation of the farmer's year, and all the countryside is palpitating with it. Everywhere the talk is of cutting, and men, on meeting, cast anxious eyes from each other's faces to the sky and ask:

"Will it 'owd [hold], think ye?"

And while this vast metamorphosis of color is creeping over the land, and the countryside seems beating like a breast towards the consummation of its great purpose, Pam and the piano and the Spawer and Father Mostyn grow daily into a bond of deeper sympathy, and the wondrous ripening process, so visible in externals, is going on no less surely within their own hearts. On the little cracked Vicarage piano Pam practises assiduously, and such is her zeal for the labor, and such her sense of loyal gratitude to the setter of it and her desire to fulfil his instructions that, by sheer force of love alone, she keeps pace with what he teaches and wins his admiring praise for her progress. Sometimes they gather at Father Mostyn's, cutting into chicken-pies one night and finishing them off another. Sometimes Father Mostyn and Pam walk up to Cliff Wrangham for the benefit of the better piano, and compare the Archdeaconess's cookery—without comment, and very kindly—and are set back by the Spawer, filled with music and affection.

A state of things which greatly indignates the orphan Mary Anne, who cries aloud to herself:

"Is there nawbody good enough for 'im at Cliff Wrangham bud 'e mun gan 'is ways an' fetch 'em fro' Oolbrig?"

And every morning, with the habit of second nature, the Spawer goes forth and sits on the lane gate about Pam's time, and feels a sense of emptiness somewhere—as though he 'd gone without his breakfast—when she does n't come. But when she does, and he sees her hat or her blue Tam-o'-Shanter sailing briskly along the hedgerow, his released expectancy curls up into smiles like stretched wire, and he strolls to meet her as though his face had never known doubt, and accompanies her henceforth to the end of her journey, so that the girl's brisk walk, divided now between the two of them, is a gentle amble scarcely quicker than Tankard's 'bus that daily rumbled through Ullbrig.

Their communion on these occasions, as at all times, is simple and sacred. The perspicacious reader who has been preparing for tender dialogues full of love and its understanding will have to suffer the penalty of his perspicacity, for the sweet trivialities of love are in no way touched upon. They talk of music; of struggles with "flesh" of technique; of composition; of the meaning of music—if it has any. They talk of French, and they talk French, of the recognised question and answer pattern, till Pam gains quite a vocabulary of sea-coast words, and could make herself understood intelligibly—and certainly prettily—to any Frenchman on any cliff you like to name. And they talk quite sincerely about the sea and the blueness of it; and bend down their heads for the better appreciation of this great round bubble of color; and draw each other's attention to clouds, to bees, to butterflies, and nameless insects fluttering by. At other times, the Spawer talks to her of his student life abroad and of his present-day ambitions; the sort of glory he covets and the sort of glory by which he sets no store. And the talk is of composers and schools of composers; and players and schools of players—thick as shoals of herrings—till Pam, who never forgets a precious word of what this deified mortal tells her, but can reproduce its exact use and inflection for her own hearing at any future time, is full to the red lips with critical discernments and differentiations, and could astonish any wandering, way-logged musician who might, for the sake of illustration, be presumed to find himself in the district, and open subject of his own business with this sweet girl stranger under her Government bag.

Sometimes, towards the end of an evening at Father Mostyn's, the Doctor drops in upon them casually, introducing himself with the invariable "Don't let me distairrb ye"—though it is known he comes for whist. Music appeals to him about as meaningfully as a German band to a stray dog; and being a Scotchman, he says so in the fewest words wherein this hard truth can be contained, nor ceases to manifest a lurking distrust of the piano until they are safely squared round the card-table, and the cards are being cut. In his own Scotch way he is as fond of Pam as can be, and on the strength of this tacit affection asks her bluntly to do whatever he may happen to be in need of at the time.

"Ye 'll hae to gie me another match, Pam," he says unconcernedly, as he deals, without looking at her. "A 'm no alicht yet."

And when she offers it to him, already lighted, he merely holds his pipe-bowl towards her from his mouth, as a matter of course, scooping up his cards and drawing vigorously, while Pam applies the flame, till combustion is effected, when he draws his mouth away.

"Clubs are trumps," says he.

Pam does n't mind his disregard of her in the least, for you see he does n't mean anything by it, being a Scotchman; but she would enjoy these games better if the exigencies of play did not always pit her against the Spawer, inasmuch as she and he, being the two weak members of the quartette, can never be partnered against such past masters as his Reverence and the Doctor. Eventually, since it proves itself the most equable division of the table, she comes to be the accepted partner of the latter, who does not hesitate to acquaint her, with cutting directness, of any discrepancy in her play.

"What the deil made ye lead trumps, Pam?" he demanded of her, in blank surprise, on one occasion. "Did ye no see me look at ye last time Father Mostyn led them?"

He is a typical hardy Scotsman, all sinew and gristle, and raw about the neck, and thinks little—if indeed at all—concerning dress. For the most part, you will see him bicycling about the roads in meagre knickerbockers that were trousers when he first came to Ullbrig, blue stockings, and heavy-soled boots, with the tags sticking off them like spurs. In other respects, he is a reader of profane literature and avowed sceptic. Between him and his Reverence the Vicar is a standing feud of opinion, which finds vent in many an argumentative battle royal. At the end of one of these tremendous conflicts, that would almost be hand-to-hand at times but for the pacific whiskey-bottle between them, the Doctor rises to his feet, buttons his coat-collar as a preliminary to departure, and cries vehemently:

"Hey, mon, but there 's na driving sense nor reason into ye. Hand over the whiskey, and I 'll be gone. Ye 're as stubborn as Balaam's donkey."

"Ha! with the same authority, dear brother," his Reverence answers blandly.

"And what authority will that be, pray?" asks the Doctor, bending the stiff neck of the whiskey-bottle towards his tumbler, as though it were his Reverence he had hold of.

"Divine authority, dear brother," says Father Mostyn. "Divine authority."

"Divine authority," says the Doctor. "... Wi' yer meeracles. Mon, hae ye ever hairrd a donkey speak?"

"Ha! frequently, frequently," murmurs his Reverence, focussing a distant point of space through his eyelashes, and waltzing softly, without animus, to and fro in his foot radius.

"Ah 'm no speakin' pairsonally, ye understand," the Doctor says, with a tinge of remonstrance for levity, "but it will hae been in the pulpit ye have hairrd it. Mon, hae ye never read Hume on the Meeracles? Are ye no conversant wi' your Gibbon? D' ye pretend to tell me ye are ignorant o' such men as Reenan and Strauss, and Bauerr and Darrwin, and Thomas Huxley?"

"Estimable people, no doubt, Friend Anderson," the Vicar tells him imperturbably. "... Estimable people."

"Ah doot ye 've read a wurrd of them," the Doctor pronounces bluntly.

"So much the better for me, dear brother. So much the better for me."

"Mon," says the Doctor, exasperated by this equanimous piety that all his own exasperation cannot exasperate. "... Ye 're a peetifu' creature, an' ah feel shame tae be drinkin' the whiskey o' such as you. Ye go inta chairrch and fill a lot o' puir eegnorant people wi' mair ignorance than they had without ye, teachin' them your fairy tales about apples and sairrpints, and women bein' made oot o' man's ribs (did one ever hearr the like!). Let's awa', an' mind dinna tek inta yer heid ta fall sick this week, or it 'll go harrd wi' ye if ah 'm called."

"Ha! We can die but once, Brother Anderson," the priest tells him cheerfully. "Even all the science and medical skill in the world can't kill us more than that."

And so the moments of these four pass, and the harvest hour approaches, inwardly and outwardly, until at last ... one day...

But in the meanwhile, for all this life of external happiness that Pam shared with others, she was serving her silent apprenticeship in the house of the little old lady. Even when he was furthest from her the schoolmaster clung close to her mind. Each time she laughed, each time she looked into the Spawer's face, each time she spoke with him she saw inside her—but as plainly as though she had been looking at him in the flesh—the dark figure of the schoolmaster regarding her in mute reproof, with hands to throat and beating temples. The brightest moments of her happiness, indeed, threw this shadow blackly across her mind like the gnomon of a dial when the sun shines clearest. Whenever she returned now from Father Mostyn's or the Spawer's, he was always there sitting up for her. Heaven knows why, for they had little enough to say to one another. He never pressed himself upon her, but by leaving himself to her good pity she felt the claim of him tenfold—lacking the power to withhold what, perhaps, on demand, she might have summoned courage to deny. Always he was dumbly set, like those canvas collecting sheets on Lifeboat Saturdays, for the smallest coppers of her kindness. If she had not looked into the larger kitchen before bed she knew he would never have revealed himself, but she had not the heart to ignore one as little courageous for the winning of her love as she was herself for its defence. At times the thought of what the future had in store for her troubled her so darkly that she knew not how best to shape her present moments. Therefore, in place of shaping, she merely whittled—for every cut this way, a cut that; for every chip off one side, a chip off the other; so that though the rough wood she worked on wore nearer down to her fingers, it assumed no shape. Through fear of having been too cruel one day she was constantly over-kind the next; and then, what she had lacked to charge in cruelty to him she charged extortionately to herself, paid the bills in silence, and said never another word. But though she could meet these little daily expenditures, there was a great bill slowly mounting, she knew, which should of a surety one day be presented to her. And who should pay that? Who should pay that?

While the music is at Father Mostyn's and the Spawer's she feels to a certain extent in harbor against the evil day. But what shall happen when this harbor is denied her, and for fault of its protection, she must sail out into the open, unprotected sea? What will betide her then? What is life coming to?

Alas! She is soon to know.

One day....

CHAPTER XV

One day the Spawer wakes up suddenly to consciousness, like Barclay in the hedge bottom, and discovers, as his friend Barclay has not infrequently discovered before him, that he is occupying a strange and uncomfortable position. It was on a Tuesday when he made the final effort and awoke definitely to an actual sense of his location, but he had been blinking at it unseeingly for some while before that. The previous morning Father Mostyn had taken leave of Ullbrig for his few days' annual pike fishing with the Rev. the Hon. Algernon Smythe Trepinway in Norfolk, and this sudden break in the continuity of existence had served as an alarum to the Spawer's long slumber. He woke reluctantly, but with purpose, took his morocco red bathing drawers, his towel and his stick, and without pausing to any appreciable length at the lane gate, plunged across the two fields towards the cliff.

It was a glorious, steadfast blue day. Not a cloud as big as the puff of my lady's powder-box showed itself in any corner of the sky. No breezes, even of the softest, filtered through the hot hedges, or cooled the parched tips of the burning grass blades. Without intermission the sun poured his golden largess down upon the earth from on high, so forcefully that wherever the sunlight rested, it was as though a great hot hand were imposing its weight. Yesterday the harvesting had set in with a vengeance, and now the whole air was a-quiver with the whir of busy blades, whose tireless activity seemed the very music made for slumber, and lulled all other moving things towards somnolent repose.

The beach lay out dazzling in its unbroken smoothness, like white satin, and deserted quite. Not another footstep than his own had been, or in all probability would be, there that day to tread destructive perforating tracks over its beautiful surface of sand. Up and down, for something like a dozen clear miles of coast, or so far as his eyes could show him, he seemed, like a second Robinson Crusoe, monarch of all he surveyed. The true spirit of the solitude of the lower Yorkshire coast is here. There is no elaboration to the picture; it is plain and lacking detail. Of foliage by the sea there is not a leaf, excepting mere divisional hedges. Fields in cultivation and out of it run to the very edge of the cliff—a sombre cliff of soft, dark earth, stained here and there to unprepossessing rusty red, with trickling chalybeate streams, and showing terrible toothmarks of the voracious sea, that feeds its way inland on this part of the coast at the rate of a yard a year. Looking over the brink of it you can discern as many as half a dozen paths, in various stages of subsidence, that less than that number of years ago led people along the cliff top as the path you stand on leads them now. In other places you may see huge slices of grass land, descending like great steps downwards to the shore in their progress towards ultimate devourance, while warning fissures across the existing pathway show where, perhaps this very winter, another step will be detached and added to the never-ending stairway of demolition.

In a sheltered inlet, where the sea has swept up a thick white carpet of bleached sand, the Spawer pitches his bathing camp this morning. On other occasions he has trod down here more gladsomely; the sea, murmuring its musical cadences upon a lonely beach, has not made music to him in vain. But for him to-day the sun is a little dim, the sea a little jaded. The inward content that stood interpreter between his soul and his outward worldly joyance is gone from him, and he stands somehow like a stranger in the presence of strange things. Here on the seashore, he has come to play a duet more full of emotion, and more crowded with difficulties than any he knows within the province of music, for it is a duet with his own soul.

In a sense, dimly and vaguely, he has comprehended for a day past, a couple of days past, at the most—Lord help him—a week, that this duet was inevitable. He has been, indeed, since these several days, two men. The second was better than the first, but not much. The second of them held the strings of the conscience bag (slackly, however) and rattled it ominously—though more as a warning, if the truth were told—to give the first his chance of escape. In the heart of the second (if heart it could be called) there lingered a sneaking sympathy with the delinquent first, as for a younger brother. And now, after a mutual game of hide-and-seek, when the one would not look while the other showed, and the other would not show while the other was looking, through a kind of desperate conviction that something must be done, they had sneaked their two ways down to the beach this morning, prepared (though only badly) to declare themselves to one another, and come to some understanding, though whether this understanding should be creditable or discreditable to both or to either was yet unsettled.

By what subtle, imperceptible paths has he outjourneyed the territory of that great happiness which seemed so lately his, to find himself all suddenly in this unpleasant no-man's land of the imagination? By subtle, imperceptible paths indeed. By the touch of hands; by the gazing of eyes; by the inflection of voice. Time was, in the early days it was, when he could look on Pam's fascinating sprinkling of freckles with an eye as purely interested, and as purely disinterested, as though they had been the specklings of a wild bird's egg. He had begun by making a friend of her. He had come ultimately to regard her as a sister, to whom he had acted in all good faith the strong, reliant, reliable, affectionate, unemotional elder brother—who could have kissed her, and thought no more of that kiss, nor prepared his lips for kisses to come. And now ... what was he going to make of her next? ... of himself? Who but a brother can act the brother? Who but a father—even though he doddle benevolently on his legs and have respectable white hairs—can be sure of acting the father to any daughter not his own? What are the sexes but phosphorus and sandpaper for the kindling of love's emotion? Already the phosphorus had not wanted signs of impending ignition. Just a very little more rubbing of this friendly intercourse—a day or two ... a week at most ... and the flame would burst out for them both to see. So here let him settle it. What was he going to do?