Front matter (continued 5)

And still they walked, and still he had not told her. Still his soul was divided in conflict between the desire to relapse himself to the dream and the necessity to meet that promissory I.O.U. of honor which he had given to himself. All the time he was practising overtures; trying phrases in his mind by which he could approach the subject casually, without allowing the girl to perceive the degraded tortuous trail over which he had been crawling to it on his moral belly all this morning, and all this afternoon, and all this evening. From the thick moonlight, as they walked, other shades detached themselves of a sudden, as though they had but that moment been fashioned out of the tremulous mist, met them walking more slowly, and were absorbed into the mist again on the Shippus side behind them, like ink-spots in blotting-paper. Silent couples, walking wordless and sometimes apart, but wrapped in their own amorous atmosphere, and always with that strange, lingering communion of step, that concentration of purpose, as though a magnet were drawing them forward in slumber. And already, here and there, through the hedges and through branches of distant trees and in the moonlit sky, were gleaming the dull yellow of blind-drawn casements and the scintillating beams of naked lamps that betokened Ullbrig.

And still he had not told her.

A bat, fluttering blindly over the dusky hedgerow and steering itself erratically on its course like an uncertain cyclist, flew almost into the girl's face and wheeled off abruptly, so that she felt the waft of its wing on her cheek and gave a little cry of surprise.

"What is the matter with you, dear girl?" The Spawer turned quickly at the sound. "You have n't twisted your foot?"

"No, no." The girl held up a face of reassurance in the moonlight. "It's nothing ... only a bat."

"And what did the naughty bat do to her to frighten her so?"

"It did n't frighten me really. I thought it was going to fly in my face. It startled me at first ... that's all."

"It was a bad, wicked bat to fly in her face and startle her at first." He took hold of her arm. At the touch of that round, warm, live member all the blood in her body seemed to jump to issue with his, and combine, as though one great pulsing artery fed them both. "Come along," he said lightly, striving with his voice to palliate the tremulous danger of their union. "I won't have this dear girl frightened. I will take care of her."

She made no demur, either to his words or to his touch, but came along by his side; so warm, so wonderfully alive, so spiritually silent.

"Will she trust him to take care of her?" he asked her softly. And after a moment: "Will she?" for she had not answered a word. She said "Yes" very faintly, with the faintness of happiness.

"It is a good girl," he said caressingly, "... and she shall be well taken care of." He pressed confidence into that supple trunk of arm. "But she must try and be as kind to me as she can ... now." He waited to give her the opportunity of asking him, Why? but she did not. She was in the ethereal state that takes everything for granted. "Because ... well ... because she did n't believe me this afternoon. She thought I was only telling tarradiddles. Now did n't she? But it was n't tarradiddles at all, at all. It was something far worse than tarradiddles."

He felt the sudden thrill of awakening alarm run through her; but still she said no word, asked no questions, left everything to him.

"What does the good little girl say?" he asked her—oh, so lightly! With his hand on her arm, with the pain of parting quite merged in the warm consolatory current of their common blood, penance seemed a light, a meaningless thing. What was departure but a delightful occasion for kisses and comfort ... till the dread moment came? The good little girl trembled a little, he thought, but said nothing. "Does n't she say she 's sorry? Come, come. Surely she 's not such a heartless little girl as not to say she 's sorry?"

This time the girl twisted a swift, startled face of inquiry towards his own half-bantering smile.

"I thought..." she began, and stopped with the abruptness of fear.

"Yes, yes; I know you did," he laughed. "I told you so. You thought I was just telling a great big fib, did n't you? ... because I did n't want to bind myself to the ordeal of any more harmonium."

"You don't mean ... you 're going away?"

"Should you be very sorry?" he asked her.

She did not speak, but seemed, in the moonlight, to be looking at him as though she were trying to absorb his meaning, to see if there were any other sense below the surface of his words.

"Are you really ... going?" she asked him, after a while.

The intentness of her look and the wondrous depth of her great eyes—stirred now to troubled speculation—sent his purpose reeling aslant again.

"Ah!" He gave her arm a protesting squeeze. "She 's not going to give her sorrow away until she 's quite sure there 's genuine necessity for it. She 's a very wise and very cautious little woman. She wants good security for any small advances of commiseration. If I did n't know for certain that her name was what it is ... I should be inclined to think they called her Rachel or Leah or Abigail or Zipporah—with something of Benjamin or Isaacs or Ishmael about it. Never mind. I will trust her with my gold watch, and she shall give me what she likes on it. Yes, little Israelite ... it was the truth that this unfortunate Gentile spoke this afternoon. He knows it was ... because he does n't speak it so often but that he can tell the taste. He 's been loafing about happily for a long time ... but the eternal policeman Destiny has given him the office to move on, and it seems he 'll have to move. It 's no use getting cross with the law. Is she sorry for him now, this little Usurer?"

"But you 're not going away ... at once?" she asked him, in a startled voice.

"My gracious! What an out-and-out extortioner she is," the Spawer exclaimed, with an assumption of admiring tribute. "She won't advance me a cent of sympathy until she knows the term of the loan. If I say I 'm going at once, she 'll give me a better price of pity than if the advance is to drag on over an indefinite period of weeks." He made pretence to throw his chin in the air and laugh with pleasure. "Honestly, little Rebecca," he told her, looking down once more, "I don't want to humbug a penny more out of you than you think you ought to give. At present I can't say when I go ... whether I have to go to-morrow, the day after, the day after that ... or next week even. It all depends on a letter. I 'm a condemned man, under indefinite reprieve." He paused for a moment, balancing whether he should say the next thing on his mind. "As a matter of fact, little woman...." He turned his face towards her with the engaging air of candor that seemingly could not deny itself. "... It 's no use trying to stuff you. You 're too sharp to take a dummy watch with the works out, or a gilt sixpence. So ... as it 's not a bit of good trying to be anything else ... I 'll be frank with you. I 'll tell you a secret. It 's a big one—all about myself. Do you think you can keep a secret?"

"I 'll try," said the girl, with her eyes fixed apprehensively on his lips.

"Well, then..." he said. "I 'm in your hands. I 'm going to do a very silly thing."

Did a tremor of apprehensive pain, like the very ghost of a shiver, run up the arm that he held? or was it his own mind, that through a feeling of sympathy sought to attribute its knowledge to hers?

"You 'll think me a frightful ass, no doubt, when I tell you what it is. Can you guess?"

The girl seemed to concentrate her look upon him, but whether the true answer had flashed across her mind, or whether the flash of divination merely served to dazzle her and make her ignorance still darker, so that she looked for enlightenment from him, he could not tell; but she said "No," and gave up his riddle with a shake of the head.

"I wish you 'd guessed," he said. "It throws it all on to my shoulders. Now I shall have to hoist the confession up like my own portmanteau, and perhaps look a bigger ass than ever, with my knees all bent under it. Anyhow, here goes—one, two, three ... I 'm going to be married.

"Well?" he inquired, after a pause. "Won't you say you 're sorry now? It 's all my own silly fault, I know, and I deserved to be married for being such a fool ... but still—can't you squeeze one little drop of pity for me?"

"Are you really going to be married?" asked the girl. She spoke in a very level and, it struck him, a very unemotional voice.

"Great goodness, little woman," he exclaimed, "what an unbelieving Israelite you are! Do you think I do a wholesale and export trade in tarradiddles? You did n't use to suspect me before, even when I told you I was a great composer. Won't you believe me now, when I 'm willing to confess myself an awful idiot? On my word and conscience, then ... I 'm going to be married."

"I hope ... you 'll be very, very happy," said the girl.

For her, he thought the words and the wish somewhat prosaic. At this moment she lacked one of those beautiful little emotional touches with which she could illuminate the simplest saying to poetry. Her voice, soft though it was, and so full of sympathetic interest, yet struck him with a painful feeling of matter-of-fact. He and his marriage seemed suddenly stuck up in hard, unpoetic affirmation, like the tin price-shield in a pork-pie. The subtlety of artistic suggestion was altogether lacking, all the romance was gone. The thing he had wished delicately hinting at, a mysterious romantic melody for celli con sordini, to suit the orchestra of the evening and of their mood, was become a commonplace tune for a drunken cornet to play outside a public-house door on Saturday night. All at once he began to feel that the coverlet of dreams was fast slipping away from him. The moonlight was clearer: the hedges harder in outline. In spite of the hand that lay on the girl's arm, as though to retain that part of the dream at any rate, they were no longer spiritually united. There was an intangible, invisible, impalpable something between them as keen as the sword of flame at the Gate of the Garden of Eden. Like many another martyr before him, in his crucial hour the roseate illusions that had fortified him to his purpose were floating away from him now, and leaving him only his actual senses to realise externals and apprise him of the horrible pangs of suffering. Before, he had been temporising at the stake; trying the rope to see how its bondage felt, without allowing the cruel loops to cut into his flesh; posturing as martyr before the girl in mind only—but now he had made the girl a participant of his purpose.

And the worst of it was that he must profess that the parting meant nothing so very much to either of them. He must not insult the girl by suggesting that his going affected only her—that she would deeply feel the loss of him who felt her loss so little that he was leaving her for another. And yet! And yet!

O Lord! And yet! All his present life was but a meaningless series of disjunctive conjunctions; words of contingency and speculation; ifs, buts, supposes, peradventures, perchances, and the like.

"I say ... you 're very silent, little woman," he remarked, after a while. "Don't be hard on a fellow because he 's down on his luck. You 're not offended with me, are you?"

"Offended with you?" she said. "Oh, no, indeed. What should make me offended ... with you?"

He made believe to laugh.

"Well, I don't know what should. Only ... perhaps because you 're disappointed to find that I 'm just as much an ass as any other man. Oh, music 's nothing to do with it, believe me. A man may play like an angel on the piano—as I do—and yet play as giddy a goat as any on four legs, in real life, as I 've done. But what 's done is done. I was younger in those days, perhaps. All the same, I 'm not too old for a little sympathy. Say something to me, won't you?"

"I hardly know what to say," said the girl. "I was trying to think."

"Say something to give me a little courage, then," he suggested; "something to strengthen my knees a little. You don't know how white-livered and weak-kneed it makes a man feel when the marriage noose is round his neck, and he seems to hear the bell tolling, and sees the chaplain getting out his little prayer-book, and knows his hour 's approaching to be launched into eternity."

Even to himself he recognised how beautifully his words were serving the purpose of concealing truth with truth. No girl on earth—certainly not the girl by his side—could have probed his utterances, in that candid voice of his, and said: "You are speaking the truth. You are going to this wedding like a weak-kneed cur, and all the time you are trying to cling to me for comfort and consolation—and yet trying not to demean yourself in my eyes by letting me know it. I am the girl you love, and you are trying to experience the pleasure of my love vicariously; by proxy, as it were. If I were in the other one's place, and she were in mine, not all the waters of the world would keep you apart from her."

No, no. His smiling, semi-serious words were like a rosewood veneer over deal wood, and there was no penetrating them.

They were close on Hesketh's corner now. He had told her all, and he had told her nothing. Words—hundreds, thousands, millions of words were still wanting to make the parting as it should be.

And all at once he felt the power of the dream returning; the impulse to take the girl in his arms; to kiss her; to tell her that he was but jesting, and that he loved her above everything and everybody in the world; pawn all his future, with its honor and duty, for the pleasure of that one glorious avowal. How could he let her depart out of that empty leave-taking without a word, a sign, when his heart was like a vast sea, and she the spirit moving on its waters? Even as he thought of it his fingers tightened possessively upon the girl's warm arm; his lips dropped persuasively; the words seemed to rise to his mouth as easily as bubbles to the surface of water, for the mere thinking.

"You have not said ... you are sorry I am going yet," he told her. "Are you sorry?"

Did the girl tremble? Her face was turned away from him. Was she laughing or was she crying?

"Are you sorry?" he asked her again pleadingly, conveying by inflection what he wished her answer to be; his lips lower towards her still.

"Yes..."

He caught the word, but it was more like a shiver—as though all the tissues of her body had conspired to give it tremulous birth, like the whispering of a tree. Her head was still turned from him.

"Very sorry?" he pressed her. "Tell me. See; lift up your face..." His own face sank lower, as low as the hat brim. "... You are not crying?"

He released his hold of the girl's arm, slid his hand about her and drew her to him by the waist. Into that warm socket she yielded submissively, like a child into its cradle. She was his now; his in all but the asking. They were still walking, but their walk was the ghostly stepless progress of a mist moving across the meadows. The dream was back again, and the gloriousness of it. He put out his left hand, with the basket hanging from its wrist, and took the girl's soft warm chin to pull it gently towards his lips.

"Pam..." he said.

Out of the yellow moonlight, or out of the denser substance of the hedges, or out of the earth at their feet, was shaped suddenly the motionless figure of a man. Whether he had been there from the first, or had come there by approach, or had overtaken them, appeared not. As though he were a black pestle in an alchemist's mortar, he seemed deposed there, without movement or volition of his own. At sight of him all the dream was precipitated in sediment of actuality, that fell down to the ground in fine, imperceptible residue, like the shattered particles of a bubble. The Spawer's arm slid to his side, and they dropped apart several paces, guiltily.

"It is the schoolmaster," Pam said, awakening out of the sleep with a voice of sudden terror, under her breath. "... I must be going."

The Spawer commenced to hum, and craning his neck up to the moon as though he were aware of this orb for the first time, made pleasant allusion in a clear, uncompromising voice to "A jolly fine night." The man was on Pam's side of the road. As they reached him the girl stopped.

"They have been looking for you," the man said.

"I am here," Pam answered, in her old clear voice.

The man did not move. He remained there motionless, seeming to take the words as an intimation that she would accompany him. Pam held out her hand for the basket that the Spawer was swinging with an assumption of negligence and ease.

"Thank you," she said.

The dark figure of the man embarrassed all speech. The Spawer handed the basket over into her hands without a word.

"And the serviette..." he said, drawing it from his pocket.

Pam received it from him and thanked him again.

Then there was a slight pause.

"Good-night!" she said.

"Good-night!"

They shook hands with a strange and ludicrous politeness.

Had they been naughty children, and this stranger the angry parent of one of them, they could not have parted under a deeper cloud of ignominy and disgrace.

CHAPTER XXI

The "Good-night" so soullessly inflected, that the girl gave to the Spawer with her tepid fingers of politeness, was to her the leave-taking of all her happiness. In joy she was an orphan. Her heart was choking her as she surrendered herself to the sombre shadow in the roadway; the black anchor that seemed to hold her fast now at the end of an iron cable. If she could have died then, in her mingled agony and shame, sorrow, mortification, and sickening despair, she would have wished it. For a while no word was spoken. She and the gloomy figure of the man walked towards Ullbrig together, very far apart, without looking at each other, almost as though they were ignoring each other's presence. A great silent wall of division rose up between them, a barrier of disgrace, on the shady side of which walked Pam. Through all this silence was going on a mighty struggle. The man, with throbbing neck and veins of whipcord in his forehead, was desperately striving to find his pretext to scale the barrier or break through and speak to the girl on ground of common understanding, but a sense of shame for what he had seen withheld him. Great waves of heat and cold swept him alternately. That which he had witnessed chilled him with a horrible fear for the terrors of that which he had not witnessed, and yet fired him to torrid anguish. That embrace that had struck him sickly to stone in the roadway ... was it the beginning, or was it the end? Had the girl been playing him false all through? With the magnified doubts of his class concerning the evil magnetism of musicians and the slackness of their scruples, his heart was wrung with horrible apprehensions as to how far the Spawer possessed this power, and how far he had used it. Was this girl—whom he loved with a pure, blind, white-heat passion—was she, while scorning his approaches, so deeply infatuated with the visitor from the Cliff that she coveted rather to be the temporary toy of the one than the honored wife of the other? The doubt stung him to the quick. He wanted to speak, yet dared not for fear his words might betray this thorny crown of his torture. Oh, what he would have given to know the history of that walk from Shippus to Ullbrig; what would he not have given to be able to wipe it out of all their lives and memories as though it had never been.

"Let me ... carry your basket," he said awkwardly, after a while. He tried to round his voice mentally before using it, to file down its roughness of emotion; but it came out hoarse and unequal in spite of him.

To the girl, troubled with her own personal misery and the gnawing misery of speculation as to how much of her weakness he had witnessed, and what he was thinking of her, and the acute irksomeness of his presence at this crisis of her life, when she sought only solitude, the mere relinquishing of the basket seemed like another surrender. She clung to it in spirit, as though it were a straw on the black waters of her foundering.

"It is nothing ... thank you," she told him. "I can carry it."

He felt the resistance to his offer, and the motive that urged it, and the blood swept up about his head again. The girl, though she did not look at him, saw the hands go up to his throat.

"You were ... not carrying it ... before," he hazarded.

"We are so near home." The girl hesitated, and there was a tremble in her voice. "You may carry it, if you like," she said, and handed it to him.

"Thank you."

He took it from her with an awkward scuffle of untutored politeness. Even as he felt the pride of the possession he felt the shame and degradation of it too—to walk by the side of her as the Spawer had done; to carry her basket as the Spawer had done; to try and delude his poor, anguished soul with these fragments of a banquet to which he had been an uninvited spectator (a guest never), and make himself believe he was in some sort enjoying her favor. Ah, poor fool! poor fool! By his side walked the phantom figure of the Spawer, communing with the girl, and his miserable guard of flesh and blood was powerless to prevent it, or intercept the messages of remembrance passing between them. Ah, if he could; if he could. All his life was bound up in the girl. He had wrestled for her in body and soul. On his knees he had prayed for her, begging God to give her to him, to incline her heart, to soften her, to pour into her breast the grace to love him. He had got out of his bed to pray for her in the sleepless night-time when she ... had been dreaming-of this visitor, perhaps ... And now.

"Have you been fair to me?" he asked her suddenly, in a low drenched voice. The words rushed up to his mouth on a tide of hot blood.

The girl had felt the imminence of the attack. She had been, in spirit at least, a participant of the man's agony; had felt the blood rushing up again and again with its impulsion of speech.

"What do you mean?" she asked faintly, and turned her head aside momentarily, as though to the gust of a strong wind.

"Have you been fair to me?" he asked her again.

For very fear he dared not alter these words that he had once uttered and was sure of, lest the alteration might involve him too much.

"I have not been unfair..." she said.

She put out the defence like an arm that almost recognises the justice of the blow aimed, and makes no real effort to ward it.

"You have been very unfair," he said hoarsely. "You know you have been very unfair. Even your voice betrays you." He was on the point of calling upon his eyes for corroboration of her unfairness, but he stopped himself with an effort that the girl heard and understood. "You made me a promise," he said. "One night ... what did you promise?"

"It was n't a promise," the girl protested. "I never promised you anything. I told you I dared not promise ... and I could n't promise ... and I did n't promise."

"It was a promise," he said again. "If it was n't a promise ... it was your word, and I trusted your word. You said there was no bar to my loving you. You told me ... and you know you told me, that I might go on loving you, and try to win ... your esteem. All this time I have been believing you and your word.... Are you going to tell me now that I 've misjudged you?"

He spoke very rapidly and jerkily and hoarsely, as though he were himself ashamed of this necessity to put his thoughts into words and hear them.

"I only said it because ... it was because you pressed me so hard. You would not take my answer. You looked so ill." The slow stream of tears was trickling through the broken pauses of her speech. "It was you that put the words into my mouth. You told me it would kill you if I said there was no hope. How could I say there was no hope? I could n't; I could n't. You forced me to say that you might go on loving me ... but I told you it was n't a promise."

Her tears were running with her words now. She wept for herself and for this man. The thing she had been dreading, it had come to pass. She was an Ullbrig hypocrite, a deceiver, a faith-breaker, an actor and a worker of lies.

Ah, miserable little sinner, whose only sin perhaps, had she known it, was the sin of an overflowing, over-generous heart ... her day of reckoning was upon her now, and her tears were bitter.

They walked along in silence for a step or two. Though the man by her side was burning to burst forth in a fiery Etna of denunciation and reproach, to subjugate her and gain dominion over her by the sheer conflagration of righteous anger, he dared not, lest she might admit his charges, confess herself a sinner, and own an unconquerable disregard of him. To be allied to her by an indefinite hope, frail as a silkworm's thread, was heavenly compared with the blank severance of despair. He was a retainer upon her favor, and must keep his place. What authority he held, to assume authority over her, came from her.

"You told me ... I might love you," he said, straining his voice to breaking point in his fierce desire to hold it steady and keep its control, "... that there was no other bar—no other bar. Have you been making a mock of me all this time?"

"No, no." He knew the girl's two hands were together in their agony of protestation, but they both spoke with their faces unturned, each looking before them fixedly. "Believe anything of me ... but that," she begged him. "I have never mocked you. I would never mock you."

He hesitated a moment, and then:

"Are you ... making a mock of yourself?" he asked her.

The question shook her first like a wind, and then stilled her suddenly.

"What do you mean?" she asked him.

"Are you making a mock of yourself?"

They were at the first of the houses now, in the little high street, and there were figures moving about between them and the Post Office; figures that might stop; figures that might speak; figures that might peer into her tear-stained face when the light of some yellow window shone on it.

"I cannot go on ... like this," she said, with a half-sob and a shiver. "I 'm not fit to meet anybody. Let us turn back."

They turned back, facing the moon. The girl walked with her white, troubled face set before her, glistening under its tears, like a second moon. The man, stealing one covert look at it, saw that no resumption of this subject was likely from her quarter. She was in the clairvoyant state of trouble that would have led her to Shippus again, unchecked, without a word.

"You say you have not made a mock of me," he took up again, in his monotonous, tightened voice, "... but you are making a mock of somebody. Who is it? Is it yourself?"

"Why am I making a mock of somebody?" the girl asked.

"Is it fair to yourself?" he said, and his voice grew tighter and tighter, "... to be taking walks down the Shippus road ... at night ... with a stranger? You know ... what sort of a reputation the Shippus road has at night-time. You know what sort of company ... you are likely to meet ... what sort of company you have met to-night." His voice so constricted about his throat that it seemed like to strangle him. "Is it fair to yourself ... putting me out of the question altogether ... that you should give people ... give them the opportunity of saying ... saying things about you?"

The girl had no answer but the faster flow of her tears. She knew well enough that he had spoken no more than the truth. Judged from an external standpoint, she looked no better than her misguided sisters—farm wenches and hinds' lasses—that wandered to their shame by the hedgerows under the shades of night. And for this, and all her other delinquencies, and all her other sins, unhappinesses, and penances of suffering ... she wept.

"I think too much of you ... ever to risk bringing you within reach of people's slanders. I would rather cut my hand off ... than that I should hear you spoken lightly of. To me ... your character is more sacred than my own. I would guard it with my life if need be. But what is it ... to others?" The reins of his passion slipped his grasp a little; the girl's tearful endurance encouraged him to speak more forcibly. "What do men of towns care for the character ... of a girl? They come to-day and they go to-morrow. What does it matter to them whether they leave shame ... and broken hearts behind? A girl's heart is a plaything for them ... and when they have broken it ... they throw it aside. There are plenty more hearts to be broken in the big cities."

Like all others of his untraveled kind, he had the wild, generic idea of cities and of the large places of the earth as being seats of sinfulness and iniquity. Wickedness filled them and saturated the dwellers therein. Outside Ullbrig, and the little bit of Yorkshire contiguous with which he was acquainted, the rest of the world (of which he had the fleetingest personal knowledge) was Sodom and Gomorrah. All the men who came from afar, and had the faint traces of fashion about their raiment, were men of danger; ministers of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Perhaps, in his own narrow track of ignorant bigotry, he was not so very far from the truth after all; but it shocks one's cosmopolitan soul to have to subscribe to such tenets. Not because of what they contain, but because of the uncatholicity of the formula—a very stocks, indeed, for the confinement of one's belief.

"What does it matter ... to him ... whether he makes you food for people's tongues? All he cares about is his own pleasure and gratification. The attentions ... of such a man ... are an insult in themselves. He will know you down here, for his own purposes ... will flatter you ... will walk with you; but would he know you in the towns? Would he walk with you ... before his fine friends? No, he would not. He is treating you as though you were a rose by the roadside, to be plucked and cast away the moment he is tired of you. Your friends are not his friends. You ought to see it ... and know it. You have no right to be associating yourself ... with a man whose acquaintance ... is so ambiguous. Does it matter to him that you are seen with him ... along the Shippus lane by night? Does he care whether you are the talk of every corner and gateway? Does he ask for you honorably ... as I do, and seek to guard your reputation by every means in his power? No, no. When your name has become a byword he will go back to his fine ladies and forget all about you."

"It is not true. You are wrong," Pam struck in tearfully, catching at the breast furthest away from him and pressing under it with her rounded hand as though to hold up her weak and trembling body, "... wickedly wrong. You have no right to say those things ... and I have no right to listen to you. You think ... because ... because you saw us at Hesketh's corner, and we were together.... But you are mistaken. He met me ... as I was going to Mr. Smethurst's, quite by accident, and went with me. And then ... we had tea ... at Shippus together, and music, and stayed to watch the moon ... and came back. It was every bit my fault. He does n't know anything about Shippus lane ... and I thought of it, but I dared not tell him. How could I? He has been kinder to me than anybody else in the world—except Father Mostyn. He is a gentleman, and I know it as well as you ... and so does he. Is a gentleman wicked because he 's a gentleman? All the things he has done for me ... he has done without ever taking advantage of his kindness by a single word. Other men have done things for me ... and asked me to love them or marry them at once. He has never played with my heart as you say, or tried to make love ... or make me unhappy. He is too proud to do such things. You are wrong ... wickedly wrong. Because ... you love me ... you think everybody loves me. He likes me ... but he does n't love me. I wish he did. Oh, I wish he did! But I 'm not good enough for him ... and I know it. There has never been any question of his loving me. He is engaged to marry somebody else ... and he may leave Ullbrig any day. When he told me he was going ... I was so unhappy that I began to cry. I could n't help it. I did n't think he would notice ... but he did ... and tried to comfort me. And then ... then ... you were there and saw. And I love him," she said, almost fiercely—certainly fiercely for Pam—"I love him. I love him, and I tell you. Because he has been kind, and taught me things, and played to me. I love him in the same way I love Father Mostyn. What if he would n't walk with me before his friends? He has walked with me so kindly here ... and made life so happy for me ... that it will be like death without him. Oh, I wish I were dead now! I wish I were dead now that he 's going!"

And turning aside by Lambton's gate, close on Hesketh's corner, she laid her two arms upon the top rail, and lowering her forehead, poured forth her wet sorrow into the loose folds of her handkerchief, with her back upon the man. He stood, mortified and helpless, while the girl's figure shook in the silent agony of wringing forth her tears. Even from her grief he was shut out. He could not touch her, could not solace her, could not draw near upon her. He was but a beggar, permitted by her bounty to sit at the gate of her heart; a wretched, love-stricken leper, whose confessions of homage were as unpleasant to her as the sight of raw wounds. And now she had turned the tables upon his whining reproaches. It was he that stood guilty, not the girl—and yet his guilt was mingled with an exultant sense of triumph too, at the news she had told him. The Spawer was going; this evil weaver of charms was under order of departure. Till then he would hold his tongue; bear with the surging of his love. When once this stumbling-block on the pathway to the girl's heart was removed he could renew his approaches—fill the void, even, that this stranger should leave in it.

"I was actuated ... only by desire for your happiness," he told Pam, after he had suffered her to weep awhile without interruption. "What I have said to you," he tugged at his collar, "has been said ... through love and for love."

The girl raised her head, wiped her eyes with the damp ball of her handkerchief, and put it away into her pocket.

"Let us go back," she said. And not another word passed between them that night.

"'Ave ye brought 'er back wi' ye?" Emma Morland called, coming to the passage end by the big clock, to inquire of the schoolmaster when they entered by the front door, and catching sight of Pam: "Goodness, lass, where 'ave ye been to all this time? We was beginnin' to think ye mud 'a gotten lost."

"I went to take Mr. Smethurst ... his wine," Pam said.

The schoolmaster passed through into the little kitchen.

"Ay, bud ah s'd think 'e 'll 'a drunken it all by this time," Emma exclaimed, with not unkindly sarcasm. She had a reputation, even well deserved, in the district of a tart tongue when occasion called for it—which it frequently did—but to Pam her asperity was something in the nature of a loving shield. She could say the hardest and flintiest utterances to Pam, and yet convey the sense of kindness through them. Her hand, indeed, was bony, but its grasp was tender. "An' 'ow did ye find t' old gentleman? No better, ah s'd think."

"No."

"Nay, 'e 'll nivver be no better i' this wuld, ah doot. They gied ye yer tea, it seems."

"No-o."

"What! En't ye 'ad it, then?"

"Yes, thank you, Emma."

"Where?"

"I had it at Shippus."

"At Shippus. Well, ah nivver! Did ye gan by yersen?"

"I met Mr. Wynne."

"An' 'as 'e been wi' ye all time?"

"Yes."

"'Ave ye onnly just come back?"

"... A little while ago."

Miss Morland's opinion was expressed by a pause.

"Come in an' get yer supper. It 's all sett'n ready."

"I don't want any supper ... thank you, Emma."

"Not want yer supper? What 's amiss wi' ye?"

"Nothing. At least ... I have a headache."

"Ye 'ad n't a headache when ye started."

"It 's the heat. It was very hot in the sun. Where 's uncle?"

"I' t' parlor."

"And aunt?"

"Ay."

"Say good-night to them both for me ... will you, Emma?"

"What ... are ye away to bed?"

"I think ... I shall be better there."

"That 's soon done wi' ye, onnyways."

Emma came closer and took a keen glance into the girl's eyes.

"Ye look to me as though ye 'd been cryin'," she said. "'Ave ye?"

Pam pretended not to hear the question. Moreover, she was quite prepared to cry again at the slightest opportunity. Emma took her by the arm.

"You 're all of a shake," she said, and held the girl under scrutiny. "Pam lass," she said, and dropped her voice to a terrible whisper; "there 's nowt ... nowt wrong wi' ye? Ye 've not been gettin' into trouble?"

"Emma!"

Pam shook herself free of scrutiny with a burning face of repudiation.

"Thank goodness!" Emma said devoutly. "Bud it can 'appen soon enough to onny on ye." Emma testified freely at all times to the frailty of her sex, from which weakness, however, she dissociated herself, as a woman possessed of the superior lamp of wisdom and common-sense kept always burning. And indeed, it shone so conspicuously in her window that any bridegroom of burglarious intentions would have been singularly intrepid not to have been scared away by such a plain indication of this virgin's alertness. "Onnyway," Miss Morland decided, "... seummut 's come tiv ye beside a 'eadache. 'As 'e been sayin' owt tiv ye?"

"Who?"

"Either on 'em."

"How can you, Emma! ..."

"'Ave they?"

"No...."

"Ay ... bud ah 'm none so sure."

"Good-night, Emma."

"Good-night, lass."

But before the others in the parlor Emma spoke with happy unconcern:

"Come yer ways an' let 's 'ave supper," she said, with her head through the door. "Pam weean't be wi' us; she 's ganned to bed. Ah telt 'er she 'd better. Lass 's gotten a 'eadache, plain to see, wi' trampin' about i' sun this afternoon-lookin' after other folks' comfort. Ah div n't want 'er settin' to, to side things away when we 're done. She would, for sure, if she set up. Ah 'd to say good-night to ye both for 'er, she telt me."

And that same evening, during a moment of the schoolmaster's absence, the shoemaker delivered himself of a strange remark to his wife and daughter. He was struggling with the big black Book at the time.

"'Ave ye noticed..." he inquired, in a confidential undertone, and gazing at Emma and his wife over the thick silver rims of his spectacles, "onnything about our Pam, latelins?"

Emma Morland looked up sharply.

"What sewd there be to notice?" she asked, as though the idea were charged with the sublimated essence of the ridiculous.

"Div ye think ... there 's owt betwixt 'er an'..." he jerked his thumb in the supposed direction of the absent one, "t' schoolmester?"

"Div ah think stuff and nonsense!" Emma Morland said.

"Ay, bud ah 'm tellin' ye," the postmaster insisted. "Noo, mark mah wods. Ah 've watched 'em a goodish bit o' late, an' ah 've seed a little o' seummut when they did n't think there was onnybody to see owt."

"What 'ave ye seed wi' ye, then?" Miss Morland inquired sceptically, but with a sharp eye.

"This much," the postmaster told her. "Ah 've seed 'em talkin' together a dozen times when they did n't use to talk one. Ah 've knowed time when they 'd set i' a room while clock ticked round almost, an' them nivver say a wod—or they 'd gan their ways oot after a while, mebbe. Watch an' see if they 'll set i' a room aif a minute noo wi'oot speakin'? Ay, an' ah 've seed 'im kickin' 'is 'eels about passage end for 'er, when 'e did n't think ah knowed owt about 'im, an' she 's come down tiv 'im i' end. Ay, an' ah 've tekt notice on 'im when she 's ganned out o' room. 'E 's all of a fidget to be up an' after 'er, an' get a wod wi' 'er on 'er way back. Ay, an' 'e sets up for 'er when she comes back fro' Vicarage. It 'll be a rum 'un if 'e wants 'er—an' ah 'm ready to lay 'e diz, onny time. Ah div n't know as all could wish better for 'er, so far as my own inclination gans. 'E 'd mek 'er a good 'usband, an' 'ave a good roof to gie 'er, bud ah 'm jealous t' General 'ud 'ave to be considered. An' ah 've my doots whether 'e 's man to think ower much about syke [such] as schoolmesters."

"T' old 'umbug," Miss Morland ejaculated—though whether in reference to the schoolmaster or the General or his Reverence the Vicar, would be a difficult point to decide.

But the subject, temporarily suspended by the entrance of the schoolmaster himself, took deep root in the family imagination—deeper root, still, indeed, in the well-nourished soil of Miss Morland's common-sense, and testing the hypothesis by what she had seen of Pam's conduct to-night, and finding it in accord, she prepared herself to wait and watch events with an eye as keen as that of one of her own needles.

CHAPTER XXII

Up rose the sun in the morning as though nothing had happened, and spinning over the red and thatched roofs of Ullbrig, took stock of the harvest fields, the wheat in sheaf and stock, the oats outstanding; measured the work to be done with a jocose eye as though he had said "Aha!" and rubbed his hands in anticipation of a glad time.

Into Pam's bedroom he peeped—prudently, through a corner of the white blind—and found the girl open-eyed upon her bed; thrown across it transversely in abandonment of disorder, with her moistened handkerchief clasped like a snow-ball in one hand. It had been a night of anguish and unutterable torture. She had wept, she had prayed, she had resolved, she had renounced, she had slept—at once the mere fact of sleeping had awakened her—she had tossed from pillow to pillow, turned them incessantly to find some coolness for her fevered cheek; she had risen, and watched from her window the slow arrival of day; had seen the firmament of stars sliding away in the west, like the giant glass of a cucumber frame. The doings of the day before were a delirium. In her dreams the schoolmaster, the dying man, the Spawer, Emma Morland, the tea-room at Shippus, the donkeys, the moon—were all mixed up in a horrid patchwork mantle of remembrance. The Spawer was going. There would be no more music; no more French; no more walks and talks in the morning; no more evenings at the Vicarage; no more evenings at Cliff Wrangham. In the days when they had touched upon this final parting with the light inconsequence for a thing far distant—as people speak of death—she had entered into schemes for the continuance of all the studies that he had inaugurated. She should go to Hunmouth for piano lessons. She should have conversational French lessons chez M. Perron, whose brass plate and dirty windows she had seen often on her visit to Hunmouth. Ah, but that was when the Spawer had been with her. It had been bitter-sweet at times to dwell on future sadness, with the warm hand of present happiness to take hold of, as a little child likes to peer round the bogey-man's corner, holding tight to its mother's fingers.

Now!

Ah, now! All was different. She wanted to die. Life was n't worth living any longer. Now she knew for herself the feeling that the schoolmaster had suffered and told her of: the dull undesire to live, the carelessness of existence, the agonies of hopeless despair. She knew it, but it made her pity him no more. The thought of him, sleeping within a mere yard or two of her, through a couple of frail thicknesses of bricks and mortar, filled her with horror and repugnance. All the night through his cough had come to her at intervals, telling of that one undesirable companion of her sleeplessness. She was being left to him. Like a shadow now he would dog her steps. And with the instinctive fear that he would finally overcome her, in spite of all, that she would drift powerlessly to him, for lack of anchor to hold her firm, or impulse to move, she shuddered tears into her pillow, and clenched the coverlet with tightened fingers.

For there was only one man in the world for her, and he was going. She loved him; she loved him; she loved him. She knew that she was not for him or he for her; that he was above her on the ladder of life, treading cruelly upon her fingers, as it were, without knowing it, and she too proud to cry out; that this love of hers could never be consummated. But she loved him for all that; drove the sharp knowledge of it into her shrinking soul with the vindictive pleasure of a spur.

She knew now, now that he was going and it was ended, that she loved him with all the love of which her soul was capable. Would he have had to plead at her skirts ... as the schoolmaster had pleaded? No, no, no! She knew it. She would have kept him waiting no longer at the door of her heart than at the door of the Post Office itself. Had he just come to her and looked at her, and said "Pam" ... oh, she would have known. She would have known and gone into his open arms without shame, like a bird to the nest. But she was not for him; never had been; never would be. She had no anger against him because she was smitten. He was above all anger. She had no silly impulses of passion to declare herself deceived; no reproaches because he had never before pronounced himself a man pledged. Her own heart had been so pure that it saw no impurity in his. Even when he had put his arm about her and drawn her to him, and uttered her name and looked at her ... there was nothing in that to cast dishonor upon the other girl. It was only that he had detected her suffering, had understood that she was weeping and unhappy at his departure ... had put his arm about her to give her comfort, as though she 'd been a little child. It was a beautiful act of tenderness and compassion ... nothing more. Poor girl! poor girl! She was sick with the misery of love, that, not knowing whence came this sudden sorrow, multiplied causes without end; shames, ignominies, degradations. Even the scene with Emma Morland, that would have slipped away from her like water off the breast-feathers of a swan, had her heart been sound, was branded now into her remembrance with the sear of red-hot iron. Emma's look; her inquiries; the grasp of her hand; the drop of her voice; her anxious whisper—somehow, wretched girl that she was, she seemed in some fashion to have deserved them; to be guilty of some great unknown shame; to be a lost sister, sinking like sediment through the clear waters of life to its dregs, touching here and there as she descended. The day was full of terrors for her; the morning meeting with Emma and with the schoolmaster; the facing of her uncle and her aunt; their solicitude about a headache that had never been. More Ullbrig hypocrisy to wade through; more shame of lying and untruth.

From her bed she rose at length, a soulful picture of trouble; replaced the fallen pillow and drew up the blind. An echo of its sound of cord and creaking roller reached her faintly from elsewhere, with a muffled cough, and telling her that her own activity was being duplicated by the ever-vigilant shadow, struck pain across her mouth. The slide window was already part open, but she flung it to its extreme width, and resting her hands upon the white-painted sill, put out her head with red lips parted, and tried to air her bosom of its close, suffocating atmosphere of trouble that she had been breathing and rebreathing all through the hours of this night. Down below, under a thin attenuated mist, lay the little patchwork kitchen garden of potatoes and onions and peas and kidney beans, and the dingy vegetable-narrow frame, like a crazy quilt. And beyond that, away to her left, rolled out the fields in the face of the sun to Cliff Wrangham ... where he was. From her place she could distinguish the misty shadow, like a frost picture on a pane, that proclaimed Dixon's. How often, in the days that were gone, had she opened this casement and looked just so across the fields, and said to herself: "Will there be any letters for him this morning? ... and shall I see him?" But now she looked across and said: "I dare not see him. God send there may be no letter this morning." All the world looked strange to her. It seemed that her eyes, like the eyes of an infant, were not yet trained to correct the images formed upon her retina.

Poor girl! poor girl! She had been so happy once. So very happy with her six shillings a week, and no desires beyond the desire to be at peace with her neighbors and return good for evil.

At last she lighted her little oil stove, that had once been the supreme of her ambition throughout a month's saving, and set her can of bath-water to boil. Every morning she made the complete ablution of her body ... and in summer sometimes twice. In this respect, at least, there was nothing of the Ullbrig hypocrite about her. As Father Mostyn told the Spawer, and more than once, for Pam was a subject to his liking:

"Ha! different class; different class altogether. No mistaking it. You can trust her inside and out. Does n't dress herself first and then put a polish on her face with a piece of soapy flannel, taking care to rub the lather well in. Ha! that 's our Ullbrig way. Leave the neck for Sunday, and rub the soap well in.

"But, thank heaven, that 's not Pam's way. Can't mistake it. Has the instincts of the bath. Tubs herself like an officer of dragoons. No mistaking the derivation of that. It does n't come from the people; it's a pure blood inheritance; a military strain. She keeps her body as clean as her mind. You could put her in a duchess's bed, and her grace need n't be frightened of going in alongside of her. Ha! beautiful, beautiful! the grace of cleanliness that is next to godliness. Her body would almost get her into heaven."

And indeed, St. Peter is scarcely the man I take him for if he would n't.

Leighton's Psyche unwound herself from long veils of diaphanous drapery on the brink of a marble bath, and immersed herself in azure water without soap—so far as the artist indicates in the picture. Pam's setting was a big, round, sponge bath, scrupulously enamelled white by her own hand; she did not stand pensive by its side, as though wondering whether to-morrow or the day after would do as well; she unwound herself from no sensuous mists of lawn; she held an active-service towel in her hand, rough like a tiger's tongue, and in place of the diaphanous draperies the steam from the hot water rolled and curled and licked about her lovingly as she poured it into the bath, and tried it with fingertips of no indecision—but she was Psyche for all that. Her body was as sleek and supple as the picture Psyche; her flesh, where the sun had not browned, was as white as alabaster and as sound as a young apple; her limbs as shapely as any that Leighton's brush could have given her. When she stood up, with her firm, round bosom thrown out, and dipping the big Turkey sponge into the wash-basin of cold water, pressed it to her with both hands as though she were hugging the desire of her heart, while the water slid down her snowy torso, tinged with warm glow of pink now, like marble, and ran, still clinging about her limbs and body, to her feet; and dipped again, and again pressed, and again and still again, till the water at her service was exhausted, she was the best, most beautiful type of English girl; unforced in growth, but developed gradually in pure air and pure thought; not one member of her corporeal republic in advance of the other, or of herself; all of them, indeed, reserved in their development rather than in advance of it, but awaiting only the ripening. The beautiful picture of a girl on the threshold of womanhood, and waiting in all chastity to be called, without any indecorous rush to be in advance of the summons. Ah, girls, girls, girls! Always anxious to be women. Do not struggle so inordinately to be ripe for the market. Do you think man is such a poor judge that he does not know the merits of green fruit, or so witless that he does not know the dangers of the ripe? Keep your thoughts and bodies green, like oranges for shipment, for indeed you are perishable fruit.

The stimulus of the bath restored to some extent the freshness of the girl's mind, and gave to her sorrow a cleanly, less bedraggled emotion. From her eyes she swilled away all traces of the night's tears. Thank Heaven, she renovated very easily; a porcelain girl could not have ceded the dust of trouble more completely. She showed no redness about the lashes; no swelling of the lids; no dark hollows above the cheek-bone. Her flesh had not sickened in the least. A little press of the fingertip on its plumpness, and lo! it sprang back alive and responsive, like a cushion, with a little pink blush at the salutation; it did not respond with doughy sluggishness. Her lips had lost none of their fire of ruby; they had not consumed at all to grey ash; there was no dryness to show how great the flame had been, no withering like the dried leaf of a rose. Moist and elastic they looked as ever; the beautiful downward pull about their corners—as though an invisible Cupid were trying hard to bend this bow of his—might be more divinely accentuated, but that would only be to an acute observer who, holding the secret of the girl's sorrow as we do, searched keenly upon her face for the outward signs of it. Her cheeks were still as smooth and creaseless as ivory; her brow like a tablet on which nothing evil could ever be written. The same old Pam she looked and seemed to everybody but herself. Ah, if only one's mind would wash like one's body—what blissful sinners we could be.

And with the strangely awakened desire for cleanliness, the feverish thirst of a mind to counteract by outward purity its inward contamination, the desire even to change all the old garments of yesterday's turpitude, to invest herself in a new atmosphere, to give herself a new mind and a new body and a new environment, if she might, she drew on her legs black cotton-silk stockings of the sort she wore on Sundays; buckled them with the best pretty blue silk garters of her own making (Emma had a pair like these too), clad herself in linen of snowy white, unfolded from her neat store in drawer and cupboard; and hid all this dazzling envelopment under a pretty pale print frock that could have stood up of its own cleanliness—cool and fresh and rigid as an iceberg. And round her throat she clipped a snowy collar, and tied it with a crimson bow of silk. To be cool and clean, and be conscious of it. Let the mind burn, if it will, so long as the body does not reproach us.

Thus she was clad at last, and came forth to face the day, diffusing little wafts of cool print and white linen at every movement of her body; little breaths, fresh and unperfumed, smelling of nothing but young girlhood and cleanliness, that the nostril curled gratefully to inhale and retain, as reviving to the spirit as puffs of breeze blown into some burning valley from snow-clad mountains.

Slowly the early hours of the day wore on, and shaped themselves, outwardly at least, to the semblance of all other days that had gone before. Days in Ullbrig are as alike as pennies. This might have been yesterday, or a day out of last week, or a day out of last year. Only the change in oneself and one's outlook told of the relentless passage of time. They sat at breakfast in the second kitchen, this strange assortment of table company. The girl, like a star plucked from heaven, cleansed with the dew, and exhaling the freshness of skies and dawn; the postmaster, with his genial honest face of shrewd stupidity, brown as snuff and wrinkled like morocco leather, who cut bread with his knife and thumb and shoved it home with the haft, making a pouch of one cheek while he talked out of a corner of the other; who stirred his cup with the noise of a grindstone, and looped his thumb round his spoon while he drank to prevent its slipping down his throat. Mrs. Morland, with her relaxed face of maternal good-nature, like a well-buttered muffin, who looked as though she lacked the energy for long-sustained anger, which, in truth, she did. The vigilant Emma, sitting bolt-upright, as a sort of human cruet, vinegary and peppery—whose acidulated conversation almost lent the zest of pickles to the meal. And last of all the schoolmaster, peering ruminatively—not to say furtively—into his plate as though it were a book he pored over. When he masticated there were muscles that worked in his temples and imparted an air of grave, cerebral activity. His cough troubled him this morning, and his face bore the haggard evidences of sleeplessness.

No word of allusion to last night's matter passed between these two, but the constrained silence of each towards the other was like a finger laid inexorably upon this page of their past. He was present when the postmaster inquired of Pam about her headache, but recorded no expression of sympathy. Perhaps Pam's crimson blush deterred him; but he lingered, brushing his hat in the passage before departing for school, and when Pam happened to make a journey into the front parlor he interposed himself by the door against her return. Pam finding him there, still brushing his hat as though he were an automatic hat-brusher, stopped in the doorway coming out, and stood before him without speaking—not angrily or resentfully or reproachfully—but decidedly with the unhappiness of awakened remembrance upon her downcast face and trembling lip.

"I only wanted..." he began, in a low voice, almost inaudible, "... to tell you. Last night I—I said things to you ... that perhaps I ought n't to have said. I can't remember now exactly what I did say, but I 'm ... I 'm very sorry I said anything."

Pam told him it did n't matter the least bit. He was n't, please, to trouble.

"I did it for the best," he explained, "... at the time."

Pam said ... she was sure he did. He was n't, please, to think about it. It appeared, however, the only thing he was capable of thinking about. He seemed to have a difficulty in tearing himself away from it; brushing his hat the while. It is fortunate school started when it did, or he would have worn all the remaining nap off.

"Will you please try ... and forget what I said to you ... and forgive me?"

Pam said ... she had forgotten already. A shade crossed over his face to think that she should so soon have forgotten words that had been so vital to him at the time, but the forgiveness that accompanied it relieved the momentary disquietude.

"I hope..." he suggested—and in the pauses he brushed his hat fiercely—"... that it will make ... no difference to us. I hope we shall be ... as we ... as we were before."

Pam hoped so too, an invalid hope that walked slowly, and touched the walls of silence for support as it went.

"Noo," said the postmaster triumphantly, in the clean little kitchen, holding up a hand to enjoin attention, and jerking his thumb violently in the direction of the parlor door, whence the brushing of the hat and the low murmur of voices could plainly be heard. "What did ah tell ye? There they are agen, whisperin' an' mummelin'. As soon as ivver 'e got agate wi' 'is 'at i' passage Pam started to be after 'im."

"Sh! Be still wi' ye, then," said Miss Morland, going nearer to the door. "Div ye want to mek 'em think we 're listenin' tiv 'em?"

But even while she spoke the sound of the hat-brush ceased, and the subsequent shutting of the front door announced that the schoolmaster had departed to his duties—having told Pam that after this morning these duties would be at an end until harvest was over.

CHAPTER XXIII

Half an hour later the mail cart rattled up before the two-fold Governmental door over the big round cobbles, and the fiery figure of James Maskill, red and shining like a new-boiled lobster, fresh from his sun-bath, invaded the Post Office, blowing the sweat off his mouth on to the floor in a fierce "Bf-f-f!" with a shake of the head, and slammed the letter-bag on to the counter in a strenuous but not aggressive greeting.

"Noo," he said to the postmaster, mopping his face at him with a red handkerchief, and "Noo," again to Pam, mopping the inside of his cap. "Mah wod! Bud it 's gannin' to be warm to-day, before it's done."

"Will you have a drink, James?" Pam asked him.

At the sight of that ominous bag, so full of deadly inertness and possibility, her heart had thumped her like a stone in a box. Yes or no; yes or no; yes or no?

"What of?" James asked her straightway.

"Of ... of ... what would you like?"

"Nay ... 'appen ah 'm best wi'oot," James decided, a great mantle of modesty falling over him at this suggestion of choice.

"Not if you want one, you 're not," Pam said.

Her fingers were burning, and her heart was dreading the opening of the bag. Was there? Was n't there? Was there? Was n't there? She put her hand to her side again. James only thought she slackened the grip of her belt.

"Ah could do wi' un," he admitted reluctantly, "so far as that gans."

"Milk ... would you like?" Pam suggested.

"Nay ... ah mun't mix 'em," he declared oracularly, and licked his parched lips with a smack of apprehension.

"Mix what?" Pam asked.

"Ah 've 'ad one ... o' t' road," he explained. "Bud 'appen yon barril 's thruff by noo. She wor drawin' a bit thick last time ye asked me."

"Ye 're best wi'oot, Jaames Maskill," came the voice of Emma Morland, from the interior of the Post Office, "... this time o' mornin'."

"Ay, ah think ah 'm, mebbe," said the postman, plunging hands into his pockets and screwing up his mouth for a broken-hearted whistle.

"Gie 'im a glass o' lemonade," said the voice again. "'E can 'ave that an' welcome."

"Will you have a glass of lemonade?" asked Pam.

"Ay, ah 'm willin', if it suits ye," the postman acknowledged.

A hand appeared at the inner door holding a lemonade bottle and a thick tumbler (the latter looking as though it had once held marmalade in Fussitter's window), and a second hand, when Pam had possessed herself of these, held forth a boxwood lemonade opener.

The postman drew forth the effervescing liquid thirstily into his profounds, with his red chin mounting up step by step as though it were going upstairs, and a great fizzling sound from within as if he were a red-hot man, and let the glass rest on inverted end upon his lips for a space, to make sure it had yielded its last drop, and set it down on the counter with a great breathed "Ah!" of appreciation, holding his mouth open while the sparkles needled his inside.

"Noo let 's away," he said, "... or we s'll be 'avin' old Tankard prawtestin' us to Goovinment agen."

He said this because Pam had already opened the bag and was sorting the letters with quick, nervous fingers. Those for James Maskill's district went to the right hand of her; those for her own to the left. Her heart began to beat furiously. Now the impulse seized her to spread out all these letters over the counter and to furrow with both hands among them for the letter she feared to find. She knew by an instinct so strong that she never for a moment questioned it, what characteristics the fatal letter would possess. In her mind's eye she saw, with such clearness that her actual eye could scarcely add aught to the confirmation, the thin foreign envelope, the green stamps, the familiar superscription. She went cold and she went hot. Her ears burned, and there were strange noises opening inside them like whistles and hummings, as though in protest to the insupportable outer silence, the imperturbable calm of the Post Office. But the postman was watching her, and the postmaster from his high deal stool. It seemed as though they were all three silently concentrated upon the appearance of that fatal missive. Her emotions hastened, delayed, evaded, shuffled, ceased; but before these two onlookers her fingers went on regularly as clockwork.

Right, left. Right, right, right.

Left, left.

Right....

Left....

James Maskill, watching her, thought she hesitated there for an almost inappreciable moment, as though she had detected her fingers in blundering, and expected to see her transfer the letter from her own pile to his. But she had not blundered. No, no; she had not blundered. The distribution of the envelopes went on again apace, as though she were dealing hands from Fate's pack. Left, right; left, right; left, left, left. She allotted the last letter, and pushed James Maskill's budget towards him across the counter with a heroic smile, enough to make his eyes water. It was the smile such as a dying martyr might bequeath to those she loved, and by whom she had been loved. All was death and the coldness of it underneath, but at times like these death, coming from within, drives out the soul from its earthly tenement, and as it lingers on the threshold of the flesh before departing, the flesh is glorified. Many smiles had Pam given the postman in his time ... but this one clung to him—so far as anything seemed to him—that she might almost love him. That smile accompanied James Maskill throughout his morning's round. Ullbrig, looking beneath its blinds and through its muslin curtains, and out of the cool, gauze-protected windows of its dairies at the toiling figure of the postman—hot, perspiring, and dusty—could have little imagined that he was the carnal receptacle of a smile; that he held Pam's last look enclosed in his secretive body as though it had been the precious pearl and he the rugged oyster. But so it was. He scarcely noticed the shining of the outer sun, to such extent did the internal brightness light him.

And meanwhile, while James Maskill fed his heart upon that one smile and thought what a treasury of bliss it would mean to possess the possessor of it, the possessor walked along, a miserable bankrupt of happiness. Scarcely another smile remained to her. She had given him that one, but it was about her very last. Under the broad brown strap of her letter-bag she strode, with her lips locked and her soul as far away from her eyes as though the body were a house in the hands of the bailiffs; the key elsewhere; the occupants dispersed. For all the sun beat upon the red poppies in her hat till the straw cracked again and planted burning kisses on her neck, she was almost cold, from her feet in their black cotton-silk stockings upward. Once or twice even, she could have shivered for a thought. And the burden of the bag! Strange that one letter should make such a difference.

All about her the harvest was in full swing; the reapers whirling from seen and unseen quarters like the chirruping of grasshoppers. The morning's mist was quite absorbed; the scene was as clear and detailed as one of those colored Swiss photographs, with a blue sky, showing perhaps here and there a little buoyant white cloud floating cool and motionless in it, like ice in wine. Towards Garthston way the moving sails of the self-binder beat the air above the hedges. Half a dozen fields distant a pair of red braces, crossed over a calico shirt, struck out clear and distinct as though the whole formed a banner. Now and again she heard "Helloes," and looking, saw remote figures hailing her through their trumpeted hands. When she raised her own hand in response they made semaphores with the twisted bands of straw or shook rakes in the blue air. It was not many harvest fields that would have liked Pam to pass along the road without noticing them. From their side of the picture they saw the scarlet poppies dancing lightheartedly on their errand, and took the friendly uplifting of the girl's arm for token of the smile they never doubted would be there. If they could but have seen the smile of their blissful imagination at close quarters—a mere strained drawing back of the lips—as significant of pain as of pleasure, it would have furnished them with ample material for their harvest-field converse.

Ah, yes. She was very sick and wretched and unhappy. All the natural spring was out of her step. She wanted to walk flat-footed, with both her hands hanging and her chin down; but by sheer resolve she held her head high, and broke the dull concussion of her step with that lissom responsiveness of toe which was now the vanished inheritance of her happiness. She did not want to meet him ... this morning. She did not feel equal to it. She prayed, as she walked, that she might have this one good favor bestowed upon her in her trouble: the blessed privilege of avoiding him. Without the culminating straw to her sorrow, the letter in her bag, she could have met him ... perhaps ... with some amount of courage and confidence. But now ... to have to be the bearer of what she bore ... and repeat all the history of her misery in this summarised form; to give him the letter ... be witness while he read it even; hear him tell her definitely that he must go ... that all was over! Oh, no, no, no! It was too much for her to sustain. And she did n't want to break down before him again. She did n't want to degrade herself in his sight. It was one thing to shed tears at a sudden intelligence ... but it was another to be always shedding them. If she showed tears again ... he would suspect her. Had he been another girl she could have wept her weep out upon his shoulder. That was admissible between girls. But because he was a man ... she could not weep. There were no friendships possible between men and women; it was love or nothing. She must just let her heart break—if only it would—in silence and solitude.

All in thinking upon her trouble, her step, accommodating itself spontaneously to the mental retardation of her progress, grew slower and slower. The nearer she came to Cliff Wrangham, the more time she needed to prepare herself. If possible she must try and slip round through the Dixon's paddock, cut across the stackgarth, and leave the letter with one of the twins—if only she could come upon them—without being seen. They would be sure to be somewhere about. Then she tested her stratagem by all sorts of contingencies. Suppose Miss Bates came upon her instead, and asked her to wait ... for any letters in return. Suppose ... he was out in the lane ... waiting anxiously for the very letter she so feared delivering. She might leave it at Stamway's, and ask Stamway's if they 'd let Arthur drop across the fields with it ... as she was in a hurry to get back. And she would give Arthur a penny.

And now her step was slowed almost to a standstill. George Middleway even could have run her down. All the activity was up above; there was none left for her legs. Already she was past the halfway house in the little elbow of road before you get first sight of Stamway's. It is a part enclosed; except from the immediate fields, which were untenanted, she could n't be seen here in the pursuit of wasting Government time. The next turn would bring her into sight again; she would be under the eyes of Stamway's; Dixon's would be able to follow her progress henceforward, all but a yard here or a yard there, to the paddock stile. Before she came into public view again ... she ought to think; she ought to make sure. And one cannot think, standing erect in the roadway like a scarecrow. It looks suspicious, even to the suspicious eye of self—that at these times suspects everything. Instinctively she drew into the shelter of a hospitable gateway. There, at least, she could profess for her own satisfaction that she had succumbed to the midday lassitude; was listening to the music of the reapers, with her arm over the rail and her foot on one of the lower bars.

Was the past a dream? ... or the present? Had the Spawer ever been? ... or was he ever going? Which was easier to realise? The joyousness of then or the misery of now? Should she wake up to discover that all her unhappiness was a nightmare, that there was no question of the Spawer's going, no dread of a letter? She dipped her hand, almost unconsciously, into the bag to see if, perchance, the whole affair was an unsubstantial fabric of fancy.

Ah, no! No fancy; no fancy. She had not wakened yet. There were the two letters at the bottom of the bag; the one for Stamway, the other ... it came out with her hand. She had not wilfully drawn it, but it seemed to cling to her fingers. Oh yes, how well she knew its motley of stamps and postmarks; how well the superscription in that familiar feminine hand. She held it before her eyes, and gazed at the writing as though she would have wrested the invisible scribe out of it; called up the astral body of the girl who, in these shapely lines, and all innocently and unknowingly, had dealt her happiness such an irreparable blow. Who was she? Where did she live? When, where, and how had he met her? Did she love music? Had he taught her? Had he taught her French? Was she beautiful? Ah, she was sure to be. And a lady. That would be a fashionable way of affixing the stamps. And young. Rich too, perhaps. She must be, for poor people could not afford to spend long holidays in foreign places like this. Assuredly the writer of these words did not tramp the country roads with a bag over her shoulder for six shillings a week.

Something white and moving grew into the corner of her unconscious eye as she gazed in absorption upon the fatal envelope—a cow or a horse or a sheep or a cloud, over the hedge line.

But no; it was not a cow. It was too erect for a cow; too tall for a sheep; too progressive for a cloud. There was a patch of color about it too, somewhere. Cows did not wear ribbons, or sheep or clouds.

It was a figure; the figure of a man; a man in white; a man in flannels—the Spawer.

All at once her dormant consciousness awoke with a start to his imminence, as though her eye had been giving no warning of his approach all this while. She turned round, and a great spreading sickness of guilt took hold of her. Her blood seemed rushing all ways, like an anthill in confusion. The hand with the letter dropped suddenly, as though it were a wounded wing. It was the right hand that held it now, and the bag was on her left side. Had he seen her? Could she pass it into the bag without notice. He was horribly near ... and looking at her. Her heart pitched downward like a foundering vessel into the trough of her fear.

Into the pocket at the back of her her guilty hand crept, trembling and craven, and lay there, in its thief's refuge, burning unbearably like the firebrand of her infamy.

CHAPTER XXIV

The hot sunlight about the Post Office was savory with the smell of Yorkshire pudding—you might have almost imagined that it was the house itself a-cooking—when Pam returned, beneath the sling of the empty letter-bag.

On other mornings she would take her way in through the two-fold Governmental door; announce her arrival in musical pleasantry to the postmaster in his little shoemakery; hang up the flabby letter-bag on its peg behind the counter; pop in upon Emma Morland, if she were at work in the trying-on room, to commend her diligence or express surprise at the amount of the work achieved, or ask in what way she could be of assistance; give a look into the little clean kitchen to feel the pulse of the oven, and proffer herself for some kind service to her aunt-by-courtesy, as red as boiled beetroot, and fitting her clothes as tightly as if she 'd been a bladder set before the hot grate. But this morning the girl made no parade of arrival. She drew nearer to the house by the shadow of its walls, and let herself meekly in through the spick-and-span household door—white painted, with fashionable brass knob and knocker—that gives entrance between the twelve-paned parlor window beyond the scraper and the smaller eight-paned window of Miss Morland's trying-on room, whose austere starched curtains (drawn in primly at the pit of the stomachs with pink sashes to reveal the polished oak cover of the sewing-machine, and sundry dress fabrics in course of construction, casually displayed) always proclaimed any particularly sacred rite of disrobement proceeding within its sanctuary by being discreetly pinned.

Whereat, though man's religious fibres might be stirred to their utmost, it was useless his stopping to spell out the familiar capitals of Emma's card with all the earnestness of the anxious (and short-sighted) inquirer after Truth.

Up to her bedroom she stole, a soft-toed figure, by the best Sunday staircase, with white holland over the carpet. If she were dead they would bring her down this staircase in her coffin. She wished she were dead. She was dead in all but the flesh—and in truth she looked but the phantom of her former self—but the ghost of the girl that had gone out this morning. All the color was struck out of her blanched cheeks as though a hand had smitten them white, and no blood returned to reproach the blow. Her eyes were fixed in front of her whichever way she walked; it seemed something horrible had been stamped upon them and set over them for seal. Her lips were hard and rigid; wax-work lips, artificially colored, upon a wax-work mouth. It looked as if such a mouth could never open in speech; it was a mold, a cast, struck off the face of grief. Slowly, but very surely, the old Pam was being squeezed out of her bodily habitation. As a house in the hands of new tenantry loses its old outward characteristics and takes on new features of blinds and curtains and window-palms, so this body of Pam's in the hands of its new possessor was beginning gradually to display evidences of the invisible occupant that, hidden behind its walls, wrung fingers and wept, and spent its moments in the torturing austerities of self-examination and penance.

... Once in her bedroom, the hardness fell off the girl's face as though it had been stucco; the hidden occupant came to her trembling lips, looked out of her eyes, gazed forth upon the outer world, as an escaped prisoner might, full of horror of his position, and dreading every moment the summons that should announce his discovery. But there were no tears this time. Tears are but the petty cash of woman's trouble account; the noisy silver and copper, which make a great jingle, are parted with and never missed. Pam's trouble was no longer in silver and copper, not in gold even. It was in silent bank-notes. All the tears in the world could not liquidate such a liability. One might as well attempt to compound with a handful of irate creditors out of the loose coin at the bottom of one's pocket. Besides, it was not sorrow now, it was horror. In trouble women weep; but in horror they stare with open eyes, for fear the thing dreaded may come upon them when they are unaware. So children, who rain tears at a dog by day, will lie abed silent at night, with their great, dry eyes fixed upon the darkness, and fear to cry or close them. Tears, scalding tears, were all about the hot lashes of the girl's eyes; but into her eyes themselves they did not enter. Like a thief she had stolen round her own door; like a thief she pressed it to, with a hand over its sneck, and shot the little catch under the lock; like a thief she listened—she, who had feared nothing before but herself and her own conscience; feared everything now.

The big grandfather's clock downstairs went "Br-r-r-r-r!" It was a way he had; he meant nothing by it; but it sent the girl's hand to her bosom this morning as though she had heard in the sound the announcement of her whereabouts to the world at large. Now she strained her ears for the sounds of feet, the calling of her own name, the approach of pursuers ... but there came none. Only down below were audible the muffled intermittent click click click of Emma's industrious machine; the tapping of the shoemaker's hammer; the sound of the little kitchen poker thrust energetically through the bars of the grate to rouse the sleepy fire to its duty by Mrs. Morland; the clash of saucepan lids and the jangle of a pail. Satisfied that her entrance had been unobserved, and that the clock's warning had been in vain, she unslung the post-bag from her shoulder and hung it over the foot of the bed; removed her hat of red poppies, and laid it on the chest of drawers.

What had she come for? For a moment even she herself seemed scarcely to know, standing by the bedside with dangling head as though she had been some wild driven creature fleeing for refuge, of which now, in possession, she knew not to make what use. Then as she stood, her right hand crept round to the back of her, found the entrance to her pocket, burrowed its way out of sight into its depths like a mole; delved there for a while, lay still, and came forth into the open, dragging its prize—something white and square and unsubstantial, that crackled resentfully under the holding. An envelope; a letter.

In the stillness of death the girl held this helpless prey of her fingers under gaze and stared at it. She did not read. It was no act of curiosity. It was the horror-struck stare of a face that had been seeking confirmation of its guilt and found it. She did not look at details of writing or of the address; she fastened her great eyes upon the thing in gross—the four inches by three of her everlasting turpitude. She had not given it to him. Into her pocket it had gone; in her pocket it had stayed. She had stolen it. She was a thief; a thief; a thief!

On her soft, clean bed she threw herself and lay face downwards, without a tear. In her grief, as in everything else that she did, she was beautiful. Her light dress of print gathered under her and wound about her body as she rolled, and outlined the supple firmness of her figure with something of gusto in the task. In abandonment there seemed no bones in it; it was supple as a salmon; as lissom as a wand cf green lancewood. Backward or forward, this way, that way, it looked as though you might have bent it and broken nothing—not even its heart. Her ankles, dear indices to a fascinating volume, so sleek and tight and flexible, lost nothing by their encasement in black cotton-silk; into the little soft leather Sunday shoes her feet fitted like a hand into a glove; press your thumb and finger anywhere and the leather would gently resist you. Poor little shoes, that had walked so happily in their time, how very still and lifeless they lay now, side by side on the white counterpane, with their soles still fresh and lemon-colored, turned pathetically towards the foot-rail. This burden at least is too heavy for you, little patient smugglers. And little arms that had swung so blithely; how resistless you are now. Many lovers have sought to be enfolded within them in their time, but you have repulsed them all. Now is come a lover whom you cannot repulse. They shall clasp him, unresisting, and he shall enter them. Shame is your lover. He has been in your waking dreams all this night past, seen dimly and distorted. Now you have him face to face. Lie still in his arms and be mute before the hot caress of his kisses. Your Gingers and your James Maskills, your doctors, your parsons, your schoolmasters, your Jevons, and your Steggisons have sought you in the flesh, but this lover has found you through the spirit. Now that the spirit is surrendered the flesh lies prone enough.

Poor beautiful flesh. Even Shame's kisses cannot corrupt the beauty of it. In this moment of its weakness and surrender, if the Spawer could but be witness of you, it is probable (only you do not know it) that your defeat would gain you the victory. For the weakness of a woman is her strength, and to see beauty so overthrown, by a lover less relenting than himself, rouses a man's best instincts of honor and protecting chivalry.

But the Spawer is three good miles away, and cannot enter damsels' bedrooms as the sun does. Perhaps, as human nature is constituted, it is well. If you cried on him he could not hear you, and with that label of your guilt between your fingers, though you knew he could hear you, you dared not cry.

Poor child! Poor child! So young, so beautiful, and so wicked! So dreadfully, horribly wicked!

To say that she thought would be to convey a wrong impression of her state. Thought, like her eyes, was wide open, but it did not think—any more than her eyes saw. It stared—stared fixedly, without blinking, at the consciousness of her great wickedness.

Dreadful images passed over the darkened curtain of life, like the pictures of a magic-lantern.

In Sproutgreen a poor girl had taken some clothes that did not belong to her. Only a bodice (very much worn), an old skirt, a vest or two (she was badly off for vests), and some stockings. She had not meant to take them, she said ... but all the same she had taken them, and they had sent her to prison.

That picture showed on Pam's screen too.

She had not meant to take it. No, no; but she had taken it. Why should n't she be sent to prison? Why should the one poor girl be made to suffer and she go free?

A man in Hunmouth had stolen a leg of mutton from a butcher's shop when the butcher's back was all but turned. If he 'd only waited a moment longer or set off a moment sooner all would have been well. But his wife was starving and he was in a hurry. He wanted the mutton ... it was noble of him to risk himself for a dying wife. But the law recognises no nobility in theft, and sent him to prison.

That picture showed on Pam's mind too.

She was n't starving; there was no excuse for her, even of pity. She had stolen something she did n't want. She was a thief, unworthy to receive the weight of honest people's eyes. Looks now, the lightest of them, smiles and glances, were all insufferable burdens deposited upon the bowed shoulders of her shame.

Poor girl! poor, unhappy girl! Wrong from first to last. Seeing the world upside down. Cast forth from the cool leafy oasis of hope into the burning desert of despair. If she could have taken but one peep into the man's heart the rain of blessed relief would have fallen in abundance; she would have kissed that dread letter for token of her forgiveness; would have risen, smiling in glory, like the sun through April clouds.

But she could not see. These two souls, surcharged with their vapors of unshed trouble, that only needed to come together to combine and pour forth all their misery in one great shower of gladness and rejoicing—these two souls lay asunder.

While the girl stared dumbly into the blackness of her pillow, the man gazed with the vacant stare of a harmless idiot over Dixon's first gate. If his state had been hopeless before, he told himself, it seemed doubly hopeless now.

To be sentimental by moonlight was one thing, but for a man ostensibly in the marriage-bespoke department to manoeuvre a wide-awake girl into the laneways of emotion was a very different thing indeed. All their yesterday's sentimentalism was so much trade discount knocked off their relations; he was at cost price now, and something under. The whole time of their interview this morning she was unmistakably trying to shake him off; had been inventing urgent reasons why she must be getting back; had n't a word to say for herself beyond transparent excuses to get away; could n't say what she was going to be doing this afternoon; could n't say what she was going to be doing to-night; could n't say whether she should see him to-morrow; could n't say, apparently, whether she 'd ever see him again; had almost torn herself away from him in the end. What was he to think? What was he to say? What was he to do?