Front matter (continued 6)

He was a sick man now, and no mistake. His very internals tormented him, as though he were a storm-tossed, drifting ship, and he saw land and the girl receding from him hopelessly on the horizon. How to reach her? How to get back to her? How still to save himself?

Alas, during these moments of wounded love and pride, for the Other One!

CHAPTER XXV

In one swift headlong descent of crime Pam had suddenly arrived at the awful pitch of robbing Her Majesty's mail.

She had vague terrorised notions of the penal code and the shameful penalty of her crime, but her horror for what the world would inflict upon her, to ease its conscience of the various offences it commits itself, was exceeded by the horror with which self regarded self. And she had horror, too, of the unutterable horror that would prevail in this house, so still and peaceful at present, supposing her crime were brought home to her and exposed. She saw the awe-struck face of the postmaster, sitting with his mouth open and empty of words under the incredible calamity of her shame; she saw Emma Morland looking at her, part in anger, part in unbelief, part in compassion; she saw James Maskill obstinately refusing to meet her eye, and pretending to whistle in shocked abstraction; she saw her one act extended and dramatised to its very close at Sproutgreen Court-house, as clearly as though her soul were a theater, luridly lighted, and she were sitting in the pit ... a horrified, helpless, untearful spectator of her own downfall.

All suddenly the course of the drama was disturbed. There was a sound of doors downstairs; voices mixed in question and answer. She held her breath and listened. Her heart gave a great bump and seemed to stop altogether. So vivid was her conception of her crime that her mind accepted these noises as indisputable notification of its detection. All the world was astir about the stolen letter. The policeman was there; the machinery of the law was in motion. They were come to take her. They would all be waiting for her below. She saw them in a blinding group, with the stragglers beyond, about the Post Office door; children flattening their noses and sticking their tongues grotesquely against the panes for a sight inside; licking their fingers and drawing slimy tracks over the glass. And then she heard her name uttered—that hateful name that was become now as a second word for sin. The sound of it sent a shudder through her to the soles of her lemon-colored shoes.

"Pam...." It was Emma Morland's voice that called her. "Pam! Are ye there?"

Instinctively she clutched the tell-tale letter in her hand and scrambled off the bed. Her first thought was for the little dressing-table. She pulled up the looking-glass (ah, that was no liar); rubbed her cheeks with her hands to try and soften their haggardness; smoothed her hair rapidly; shook out her skirts, and passed on trembling legs to the door. Her name met her a second time as she opened it, from a few steps further up the stairs, and more urgently uttered.

"Pam! ... Are ye there?"

Her mouth was dry; her lips felt cracked like crust; her tongue a piece of red flannel, but her voice might have been less unsteady—as it might also have been louder—when she answered.

"I 'm here," she said, and with an effort to divert suspicion and appear unconcerned; "... do you want me, Emma?"

A guilty person would never ask: "... do you want me?" A guilty person would know too well, and not dare to risk the question. Don't you understand? Cunning, you see, was coming to her help—now that she was enlisted in the devil's own army. When the crime is once committed, when we have taken the infernal shilling and the devil is sure of us, he does not stint his soldiers with the armament of craft.

"Did n't ye 'ear me callin' of ye?" Miss Morland inquired, with some sharpness of reproof at having been kept at the occupation.

"... I can't have done," said Pam. "... Have you been calling long?"

"Ah 've been callin' loud enough, onny road," Miss Morland protested. "What 's gotten ye upstairs?"

Pam's fingers tightened their hold of the letter in her pocket.

"... I 've been..."—she cast a beseeching look around the room for inspiration; the devil furnished her at once—"washing myself."

"Goodness wi' ye! En't ye washed yersen once this mornin'?"

"I 've been ... having another. It 's so hot outside."

"Ye mud be a mucky un bi t' way ye stan' i' need o' soap an' watter. Ye do nowt else, a think. Come down wi' ye noo an' set dinner things, will ye? It 's about time."

Only that! Not detection; not discovery and shame. Only to lay the dinner things. And she had been paying for that moment with all the horror and heart-burning and trembling of knees for the real shame itself. What prodigality of terror! What an outrageous price to pay, for a mere worthless alarm!

Now it seemed to her her body was turned to glass. Every thought within her she felt must be visible through its transparent covering, as though she had been but a shop-window for the display of her delinquencies. Down at the bottom of her pocket, smothered beneath her handkerchief, and her hand most frequently over that, lay the object of her crime. She dared not turn her back for long lest they should see it through her clothing. If it had been buried under the red flags of the kitchen their eyes would have been drawn to it and found it. They had lynx eyes, of a sudden, all of them. They pricked her through and through with strange test-glances, as though they were trying the flesh of a pigeon with a fork. When she put her hand to her pocket to reassure herself, at some horrid suspicion, that the letter was still there ... their eyes taxed the action and charged her at once, seeming to say: "Ah! ... what 's that? Did something crinkle?"

Even the handkerchief, in which she had placed her trust to hold down and choke the evidence of her guilt, narrowly missed betraying her outright into the hands of her enemies. It was after dinner. They were all rising from the table, and for some reason, Pam could not say why—unless it was that she felt some concentrated look upon her from behind and wished to perform a trifling act of unconcern to divert suspicion—but all at once she found herself with the handkerchief in her hand, and heard, at the very moment that her own fear shot like a dart through her breast, the keen voice of Emma:

"See-ye; what's that ye 've dropped o' floor? A letter bi t' looks on it."

In a flash Pam spun round upon the white square upon the red tiles. The schoolmaster had already perceived it, and come forward to relieve her of the necessity for stooping; his hand was outstretched when she turned, but she almost flung herself in front of him and snatched the letter from under his fingers. It was a dreadful display of distrust and suspicion. Her breath came and went, between shame for her act and terror for the alternative, while she stood before him, thrusting the letter into the pocket at the back of her, with a face like a flaming scarlet poppy, and a breast rising and falling, as though he had been seeking to wrest the missive from her. As for Emma Morland, accustomed as she was growing to novel demonstrations of the girl's character, this present act so eclipsed all previous records, and ran so counter to everything that experience had ever taught her of Pam, that she gasped in audible amazement. The schoolmaster, on his side, awkwardly placed—as one whose undesired services seem to savor of meddlesomeness—flushed up to the high roots of his hair, and then slowly, very, very slowly, commenced to whiten all over till his face, his lips, his neck even seemed turned, like Lot's wife, into salt.

If Pam had but allowed him to return the letter, it is quite probable that he might have had the good feeling to raise it from the floor and hand it to her with his eyes upon hers, as a guarantee of good faith. On the other hand, it was equally probable that he might not. In any case, the risk would have been truly a heavy one to run. But now, though Pam had saved herself from open detection, it was only at the cost of a suspicion that henceforth would keep its wide eye upon her every action. Love is a terrible detective; it has no conscience; knows no more than a criminal to discern between right and wrong. Everything that it does it does for love. The things done are nothing. The thing done for is all. Back into Pam's pocket went the accursed germ of crime and misery which she must hug so closely—though she would have given her unhappy soul to be rid of it.

But there was no safety in her pocket now; all her confidence in a personal possession fled from her. Her hand seemed sewn into her dress, by its anxiety to keep assured of the letter's safety. For everything that she did with her right hand she did half a dozen with her left.

And even that tried to betray her.

"What 'a ye done at yersen?" Miss Morland asked her tartly, when she saw her collecting the glasses lamely off the table with the left hand, and the other one missing. "... 'A ye cutten yer finger?"

"No...."

Pain jerked it quickly into use and showed desperate activity with it. Also, she cast a fearful look over her elbow, lest she should see the condemnatory square of white lying on the floor at the back of her, blinking maliciously at her discomposure. The letter seemed, in her imagination, suddenly instinct with the diabolical desire to work her ruin. She could no longer trust it about her. Up to her room she betook herself at the first favorable opportunity—which was the first that Emma's back happened to be turned. In the low, long drawer of the wardrobe, deep beneath confidential articles of personal attirement, she buried it in the furthermost corner, as far as arm could reach. Then she squeezed the drawer to again noiselessly, and standing back, applied her gaze in terrible assiduity to see whether the wardrobe showed any outward and visible signs of having been tampered with for improper purposes. There was nothing suspicious that she could discover. The knobs spun wickedly, and winked at her in devilish confraternity:

"Aha, not a word. Trust us. We know; we know!"

The afternoon drew on with a humming and a droning, and a buzzing and a whirring, and a tick-tacking and a hammering, all mixed up sleepily together in thick sunlight, like the flies in Fussitter's golden syrup. The postmaster slept on his little bench in the shoemakery, with his head back against the wall, and his mouth open like the letter-box outside, and Ginger Gatheredge's left boot between his knees, sole upward, and a hammer in one hand and the other thrown out empty—with the sort of mute, supplicating gesture towards the inexorable that one associates with rent-day. Mrs. Morland had slipped out to Mrs. Fussitter's, and would be back in a minute—without committing herself to say which. Emma was in the trying-on room, with her mouth all pinned up; there must have been, at one moment, a dozen tucks in at least. The schoolmaster was in the second kitchen. Pam was in the first. She knew where he was; her ears were alert to every sound in the house, but she did not know that he was keeping guard over her with a terrible check of concentration and listening apprehension. She was frightened he might be going to seek a conversation with her, but she need have no fear of this had she only known. He was as frightened of such a meeting—for different reasons—as she. Suspicion was consuming him again in silence, like the old former flame of his love. He dared not trust himself to words; he could only listen. Only desired to listen and keep always near her. He trusted her no more than if she 'd been a declared pickpocket. Love without any foundation of faith is a terrible thing, and his love was a terrible thing. He had loved her before as he would have loved an angel; his own unworthiness alone had made him fear for the getting of her. Now he loved her no less—deeper, indeed—but it was the love for a beautiful and treacherous syren. His love was as unworthy as he believed hers to be. He knew not to what extent she would practise her deadly deceptions, and in holding himself prepared for any, his mind outstepped them all. He opened a book—it was a volume of Batty's hymns—and laid it on the table to be ready as an excuse, should any be needed. And there he sat, with the flat of his face strained towards the kitchen beyond, where he heard the girl astir.

For a while, so far as Pam was concerned, in her solitary occupancy of the kitchen, she was free from actual alarms. Only her mind troubled her; asking her how she was going to repair this great wrong that she had done—for she had no wilful intention of retaining the letter. All her mind was concentrated upon the hazy means of its safe delivery. All her fears were lest shame of discovery should fall upon her before she could make redress. And these fears were not groundless. The task of redress seemed more difficult as she looked at it. In the first place, the letter bore the date of its Hunmouth stamping conspicuously on its face. Had the Ullbrig office had the stamping of its own letters, how easy it would have been to re-stamp over the old postmark. But coming and going, all the letters were stamped in Hunmouth. Oh, why had n't Government trusted them with the stamping of their own? So much better it would have been—so much better. Yet since there was no possibility of altering the tell-tale postmark, what was to be done? If she took the letter as it was ... he might remark the date, remember having come upon her when she was reading something, remember having seen her put something hurriedly into her pocket, remember her confusion when he asked whether there was any letter for him ... piece it all together and learn that she 'd robbed him.

And till he got this letter ... he would stay at Cliff Wrangham.

And there might be other things in it besides.

Money, for instance. Notes that She wanted him to put into the bank for her. That made Pam feel very ill. Notes—bank-notes! Those would mean transportation ... or something, for life, would n't they? The kitchen felt of a sudden so small and hot and cell-like that she could bear it no longer. She slipped out feverishly into the garden. There, among the potatoes and cabbages she made a turn or two, but it was such an unusual thing for her to do, and she was so afraid lest its strangeness might set other eyes to industry concerning her altered state, that the fear that had driven her out drove her in again. Back she came from under the burning sun into the stewpot of a kitchen. And there, all at once, she heard a horrible sound from overhead that stunned her intelligence like a cruel box on the ears. The next moment she was racing up the little twisted staircase with the horrid stealth and the concentrated purpose of a tigress. To her bedroom she fled on swift, noiseless feet; crouched by the door for a moment to make sure, and prepare her spring, and pounced in terrible silence upon the curved figure of the postmaster's daughter, on her knees by the fatal drawer of the wardrobe.

CHAPTER XXVI

"What are you doing there?" she panted breathlessly.

"Lawks, lass." The figure of Miss Morland sprang upward like a startled Jack-in-the-box and caught at the open drawer to prevent an overbalancement on to her back. "What a start ye gied me, comin' in on a body like that. Y' ought to 'ad more sense. Ah thought ye wor far enough."

"You have ... no right here," Pam said, desperately trying to justify her entrance. "This is my room. You have no right in my room. What are you doing in that drawer? You ought to have ... asked my permission."

For a moment Miss Morland's face was a kaleidoscope of conflicting emotions. Her mind apparently was in such rapid progress that her words could n't descend, like passengers at the door of a railway carriage, until the train had sufficiently slowed up.

"Oh, mah wod!" she ejaculated, rising to her feet at length in rare display of dudgeon, and wiping the unworthy lint of Pam's carpet off her knees as though it were contamination. "Things is come tiv a pretty state when ah 've to ask ye whether ye 've ganned an' putten mah red petticawt i' your drawer by mistake. Mah wod, they 'ave an' all. Ye mud think a body wanted to rob ye. What 's come tiv ye?"

Even now, with that fatal drawer thrown open, and the signs of rummaging visible about the surface, Pam dared not retreat from her standpoint. (Oh, my Heaven! it was n't her standpoint at all. She had n't made it. Had n't wished it. Up till now Emma had had the run of this room unchallenged. But Pam was but a poor, unresisting tool in the hands of her terror.) She dared not give Emma permission to continue the search. She dared not say she was sorry. She dared not abate one jot or tittle of her loathsome simulated indignation. She could n't breathe until that drawer was safely shut.

"If you had asked me..." she began.

"Ah don't want to ask ye nowt," Miss Morland said contemptuously. "Ye tell me nowt bud lies."

Pam's lip quivered with fear and reproach. How much did Emma suspect? How much did she know? How much had she seen?

"You have no right ... to say that, I think, Emma," she protested.

It was less a protest than a tremulous feeler, to sound the depths of Emma's knowledge. But she quaked for results.

"No, ah en't," Miss Morland acquiesced, with the terrible force of agreement that means so much dissent. "Ah s'd think ye was just comin' upstairs to get yersen washed again, when ye dropped o' me."

"I will look for the petticoat ... if you wish," Pam offered humbly. "But I don't think it 's here. Which one did you say it was, Emma?"

"Ah did n't say it was onny un," Miss Morland declared, repudiating the olive branch. "Ah don't want ye to look for owt. Ah 'll do wi'oot petticawt sin' ah 'm not fit to be trusted. Ay, an' ye need n't trust me. Ah don't trust you. Ah know very well ye 're agate o' seummut ye 'd for shame to be fun' [found] out in. Where 's waiter ye washed i' this mornin' before dinner? An' 'oo's been liggin' [lying] o' t' bed? Cat, ah s'd think. Folks is n't blind if ye think they are.... Noo, get yersen washed agen. Ah 'm about tired o' ye."

At which Miss Morland slammed to the drawer peremptorily with her knee, and flounced past Pam in a fine show of injured pride and indignation. And Pam never questioned the justice of her wrath. Emma was right to be angry. Pam had treated her shamefully, shamefully, shamefully. Oh, never did she think in the hours of her happiness that she would ever have come to treat Emma like this. To suspect her; to approach upon her by stealth; to use harsh words to her; to offend her so needlessly and so cruelly.

All the same, as soon as the feet of the postmaster's daughter had departed downstairs, telling the tale of their indignation loudly to every step on the way and banging it into the door at the bottom, the girl dropped on her knees, opened the drawer anew, and commenced to examine the depth and nature of Emma's exploration. Heart, soul, and body, suspicion now was eating her up piecemeal. With the lapse of her own trust she trusted nobody. Carefully she turned up the articles one by one, to see how far signs of recent disturbance extended. Thank goodness, they were mainly at the top. She sent her wriggling right arm to that furthermost corner at the bottom of the drawer, and the letter was there; there (relief and reawakened misery) flat as she had laid it.

But this incident had shaken Pam's nerve. Her faith in the room was shattered, and in agony of spirit she cast her eyes about on all sides of her to decide where now she could best deposit this horrid possession. Thoughts of sewing it into a little flannel band and wearing it across her breast occurred to her. But all sorts of dreadful things might happen. She might fall; she might faint; some sudden accident might overtake her; she might drop down dead even, or dying; willing hands might tear open her dress-body and exhume this frightful secret from its shallow grave. To such an extent did she foresee disaster of this sort, that the mere wearing of the letter seemed a courting of it. It was like shaking her fist in the face of Providence.

And then of a sudden she bethought herself. In the front parlor downstairs was a little inlaid brass and mother-of-pearl writing-desk that Father Mostyn had given her. Once she had made regular use of it for such small writing as she had, but now never. It had become elevated from an article of use to an article of household adornment; one of those penates—ornamental fetiches, with which all rustic parlors abound. To open it almost was an act of profanity, except for Pam. Pam had one or two little treasures of a personal nature that she was guarding zealously, and the household law could be stretched a point to allow her a sight of these possessions from time to time, so long as she did not abuse the privilege. True, there was no key—but then, respect of sacred tradition was as good as any key. Nobody had ever looked into the desk but Pam since its sanctification. Why should they look now? Down to the front parlor she worked her way, disguising the directness of her journey with the cunningest side errands, doublings and confusings of her tracks.

It was but the work of a moment to open the desk, but quick as she was about it the door of the second kitchen, that led out into the passage, opened in the meanwhile, and she heard the schoolmaster emerge. There was no time to dwell upon the details of the letter's concealment. Between the two leaves of the desk she thrust it, pushed the desk back into its place, reinstated the china shepherdess on its polished top, and picking up the crystal letter-weight, with the vivid picture of Southport in colors beneath its great magnifying eye, engrossed herself in the examination of this—her scarlet neck and burning ears turned resolutely towards the doorway.

For some moments, standing silent, a statue of guilt surprised, with her heart turning somersaults inside her and her voice miles away had it been called upon—she almost believed that the schoolmaster had entered the parlor. It seemed she was conscious of his presence advancing behind her; could feel his eyes boring through and through her like live coal. So tense was her feeling, and so imperative the summons of that unseen gaze, that in sheer self-defence she was constrained to lay down the letter-weight and turn round quaveringly to meet her accuser.

But there was none to meet. The room was empty of any but herself. For all she knew, the whole circumstance—from the opening of the kitchen door to the schoolmaster's entrance—was a mere fabrication of her tortured nerves. And now she would have liked to bring forth the desk anew and do her hiding over again more thoroughly, but she dared not, lest she might be disturbed in real fact. Minutes she waited there, with her hand on her bosom, listening for the selection of a moment that should seem propitious. "Now," she kept urging herself; and "now," "now," "now!"

But whenever she extended an arm some warning voice within her cried: "Wait ... what was that?" At times it was but the creaking of her own corset; the straining of her leather belt; the rustle of her dress. But it always arrested her short of her intention; it always seemed that the house woke into movement the minute she sought to revise her work.

And last of all, when she had wasted enough favorable moments for the doing of her work twenty times over, she grew frightened that this continued propitiousness of circumstance was too good—like summer weather—to last. Every moment now must see its break-up and dissolution; every moment added to her risk. And in this she was right. Of a sudden the sewing-machine stopped with a premonitory abruptness, and she heard its owner astir. With a haunting sense of dejection and misery for what she had failed to accomplish, Pam whipped from the room back to the little clean kitchen.

And the moment after that, her chances for this time present were ruthlessly snatched away from her. The postmaster awoke to find his neck and his left arm and both his legs asleep, and something wrong with his swallowing apparatus, and became very busy all at once on his little bench. Mrs. Morland came bustling back from Fussitter's and said, "Good gracious! yon clock 's nivver right." Not that she doubted for a moment that it was, but as a kind of reproof to Time for having slipped away from her this afternoon, and got home so much in advance of her.

And Emma Morland emerged from her trying-on room, and came into the little clean kitchen, apparently searching for something, and resolutely keeping her gaze clear of Pam. Pam knew at once what she wanted. It was not anything that eye could see or hands could lay hold of; not pins or petticoats or needles or darning thread. It was counsel and advice, locked up so securely in Pam's own delinquent body, and because of her conduct this afternoon, the girl for very shame and contrition dared not offer to give it. She besought Emma's eye with a pathetic, supplicating look to be asked some favor, however slight, by which she might hope to work back her slow way into Emma's good graces, but that eye knew its business to a hair's-breadth, and went doggedly about it without stumbling into the least collision.

Last of all:

"Do you ... want me, Emma?" Pam asked, in an almost inaudible voice of sorrow and repentance.

"Eh?" said Emma sharply, turning as though she had not rightly heard, and could not imagine what possible subject should lead Pam to address her. "Did ye say owt?"

"Do you want me, Emma?" Pam begged again humbly.

She would have liked to throw herself at Emma's feet and pluck the hem of Emma's skirt, and cling there till Emma poured upon her the benedictory grace of forgiveness.

"What sewd ah want ye for?" Emma asked incomprehendingly. "Naw; ah can do wi'oot ye, thanks."

No; she could do without her, thanks. She who had been so glad to have Pam's help and assistance in the past; who had never done a stitch on her own account without discussing it first with Pam, and whom Pam had always loved to help, could do without Pam now. Pam was no longer necessary to her; was no longer worthy to render assistance. No longer, for very shame, would she be able to enter Emma's little trying-on room, and know the happiness of helping; no longer be able to enter Emma's own heart and talk with her as to a sister.

It was all ended. The lights of life were dropping out one by one like the lights of Hunmouth when you drive away from it along the roadway by night. Into the great darkness of shame she was journeying; it seemed all the old landmarks were being left behind her. In a strange land she would soon find herself. She was on its borders now—but a twist of the road, and her old life would be for ever lost to her.

And then suddenly a vivid flash of resolution shot out and pierced her darkness with golden purpose, like a shaft of sunlight into the dense heart of a thicket. Why should she go on suffering like this? Why should she go on bearing her shameful burden of secrecy and silence round all these tortuous paths and byways of indecision? If she had an aching tooth, would she tramp through the wet and the wind in ceaseless rounds, of which the dentist was the fixed centre? This very night she would take the letter up to the Cliff and leave it at Dixon's. Let him think of her as he would. It was better to bear honorable open pain than ignominious secret torture. The simplicity of the resolve came upon her like a revelation. To think she could have been beating about the threshold of this decision so long without the courage to enter. But that is always the way. When the pain of the tooth first takes us we submit to its suffering. It is only when it has broken our spirit that we are driven on weak legs to the fatal brass plate, and bemoan the many hours of wasted anguish that might have been saved had we made use of the true light when it first illuminated us.

Alas! Pam was not at the dentist's yet, and there was still more suffering for her in that aching molar of crime.

CHAPTER XXVII

Soon all was abustle at the Post Office in preparation for the departing mail. The kettle commenced to throb upon the red embers of the little kitchen fire, and pushing out a blithe volume of steam through its pursed lips, appeared to be whistling light-heartedly at the immediate prospect of the cup that cheers. From the second kitchen came the melodious clink of the cups and saucers and tea-spoons; gladsome tea-table music, heard at four o'clock on a hot summer's day, with its queer cracked thirds and minor intervals and faulty diatonics. James Maskill rattled up to the Post Office door again, over the great round cobbles, and tying the reins up into a loop, stimulated hot and dusty letter-bringers to frantic final efforts with fierce cries that he was on the point of departure.

"Noo then, ye need n't gie ower runnin' if ah 'm to tek it."

"Ah s'd sit down, if I was you, an' watch me gan."

"Ay, theer, ye 'll 'ave to mek use o' yer legs."

"Noo, ah 'm just away an' all, so ye know."

Whereupon, at Pam's invitation, he retired to partake of a cup of smoking tea on the Post Office counter—that reappeared immediately upon his forehead in the form of globules—and doubling up plum-bread and butter by laying it flat on his great outstretched palm and closing his hand upon it, slipped it down his mouth cornerwise, as easily as posting a letter. Every now and then he gave his tea-cup a vigorous stir to shake up the sugar in it, and darting to the door of the Post Office, scanned the street up and down for distant letter-bearers on its horizon.

"Noo then," he cried out at Ding Jackson, lurking onward from afar. "'Ow much longer div ye think ah s'll wait for ye?"

"Ah don't know, an' ah don't care," Dingwall Jackson responded irreverently.

"Don't ye?" shouted the postman, with sudden ire.

"Naw," Ding Jackson shouted back at him, going better. "Ah 've no letters."

"Ay, bud ye 'll know if ah get 'old on ye," James Maskill cried threateningly, shaking a doubled fist like a great red brick at him, and as heavy. "An' ye 'll care too. Ye dommed saucy young divvle."

"Gie ower sweerin'," cried Ding Jackson, as loudly as he could. He almost twisted his interior in the effort to publish the postman's offence throughout Ullbrig. "Feythur, James Maskill 's sweerin' at me."

"Ay, ye sewd try an' curb your tongue, Jaames," the postmaster counselled him as he scowled back to his teacup. "It's a 'asty member wi' all on us, an' stan's i' need o' bridlin'."

"Ah 'll bridle 'im," said James morosely, stirring up the sugar again, this time like the dregs of discord. "... When ah get 'im. An' ah know very well where ah can leet of 'im" [alight on him].

At other times this wicked conduct of James's would have grieved and disappointed Pam, particularly in the face of his recent struggles and improvements, but to-day she felt no right to be grieved. Indeed, this sin seemed so inconsiderable by the side of her own that she envied the postman his comparative state of sinlessness. To call somebody a "devil" (which Ding Jackson undoubtedly was, at any time that you used the appellation to him; morning, noon, or night), what was that? But to steal something from somebody who 'd been your best friend. To be a thief. She knew by her sorrows what that was. And James Maskill had been reproved and shamed and corrected for the one, while she, for the other—that could have sent her to prison and shamed her before Ullbrig for ever—she was here, acting the saintly hypocrite.

Oh, no! Whatever James Maskill did now she could never reprove him. The very worst that his temper could do would always be above that level to which, through her sheer sinful tendency, she had sunk. James would never steal. James would never be a thief. From that hour forth she looked up to James Maskill with a new-born reverence and respect, as to one whose life was pure and hallowed.

"Thank ye," said the hallowed one, thrusting the cup and saucer and plate through the kitchen door, and holding them there until he should feel himself relieved of them.

"You 're very welcome, James," Pam answered him, in the softest voice that was left to her. Even her voice, it seemed, was becoming hard and sinful and metallic in these days, to match her soul. "Will you have any more?"

"No, ah s'll 'a my tea when ah get back," the hallowed one responded; and in a lower tone, according to custom: "Is there owt 'at ah can do for ye o' my way?"

Dear, faithful, honest, good-hearted fellow! How he loved her, Pam told herself bitterly. How he trusted her, vile character that she was. How his goodness ought to stimulate and strengthen her own, and draw her back, if so might be, to the old paths she had trodden once.

"No, thank you, James," she said after a pause—in which James only imagined she was trying to think of something.

"Not to-night?" said the hallowed one.

"Not to-night ... thank you," Pam told him.

If a kiss would have been any good to him ... and he 'd asked for it, he would have got it then. Poor James! Lost a kiss because he never dreamed of thinking it would be there, or asking on the off chance.

"Ah 'm still ... tryin' my best," he assured Pam, round the door-post. "Ah 'm not same man ah was, bud that d ... Dingwall, ah mean, gets better o' me yet. Ah know ah s'll not be right while ah 've fetched 'im a bat across 'is lugs. Nor 'e won't, saucy young ... sod. Bud ah 've not gidden up tryin'."

He had not given up trying. And she—was she trying?

Oh, James, James, James! After many days you are bringing back her soul's bread to her. Pray that she feed upon it and be strong. She needs it.

"Good-neet," said James.

"Good-night, James," said Pam.

The postman raised his voice.

"Good-neet, Emma."

"Good-neet, Jaames Maskill," Emma responded.

"Good-neet, Missis Morland."

"Good-neet, Jim lad."

"Good-neet, agen," James said to the postmaster.

"Neet, James. Ye 'll 'ev another nice jonney," the postmaster told him.

"Ay, neet 's about best part o' day, noo," James responded.

He took up the bag, and lingering, cast one extra "Good-neet" over his shoulder towards the door-post once more, in his second and softer voice. It did n't seem for anybody in particular, but more as though he had it to spare, and might as well leave it at the Post Office as anywhere. Pam's voice, however, registered acceptance of it from within, with the grateful inflection for a very welcome gift.

"Ay, good-neet," said the postman, giving her another forthwith; and after hesitating on the impulse of a third, hardened his mouth, swung the bag off the counter by its narrow neck, lunged out into the lurid sunlight, pulled the cart down to meet him, sprang into his place, said "Gee" and "Kt," and was round the brewer's corner in a twinkling, leaving golden clouds behind him.

And as soon as tea was over and the things were cleared, and the house commenced to slip into its peaceful evening mood, she set her plans in motion for the carrying out of her resolve. Viewing the recent discredit into which her washing had fallen with Miss Morland, it required all her nerve to brace herself for a visit of this nature to the bright bedroom overlooking the garden; but stealing a moment when Emma was absent, she did it, changed her light dress for a darker of navy blue, and descended, prepared to receive all Emma's scorn now that it could no longer deter her from her intention. But Emma was nowhere visible when she reached ground-floor again; her accumulated reserves of meekness and charity had been vainly stored. And now her first object was to secure the letter. She reconnoitred the rooms once more, with the end that she might possess herself of it, and hold it in readiness for the first suitable moment that might offer her a chance of departure without being seen. Such departure would not be yet, of course. It would not be till the dusk was well fallen, and the moon on the rise. Until that time there was always the fear of coming into collision with the Spawer about Dixon's farmstead. Above all, she must avoid that. And meanwhile, the letter must be in her keeping against all chance that the one moment most favorable to departure in all other respects should be the least favorable for the procurement of the letter itself.

To her consternation and dismay, she found that the parlor, though she had imagined it to be unoccupied when she listened outside the door, was held in the hands of the schoolmaster. He was seated, reading deeply at the round table, with his elbows on the edge and his hands over his ears, when she wavered upon the threshold. This first frustration cast a terrible shadow over her. She did not know where to go to keep vigil. If she dallied too openly about the house, there was ever the dread that it might involve her awkwardly with one member or other, and rob her of her chance a second time, just at the very moment that the schoolmaster should leave the coast clear. Apparently he had not heard her push the half-open door and stop dead upon the outer mat, for he had never raised his head. Dejected and anxious, she stole back to the little kitchen and twisted her knuckles by the window, watching the slowly deepening sky—so reflective of her own sinking gloom. From here the postmaster's approaching steps drove her into the second kitchen. From the second kitchen the sound of Emma Morland, humming a hymn-tune severely through her tightened lips, and advancing by the passage door, drove her back again, and—as Emma still pushed her advance—up the corkscrew staircase for the second time this night.

"Where 's Pam?" Miss Morland inquired acutely of the postmaster, when she entered—not that she was in active pursuit or need of her, but that the girl's absences now were always a source of suspicious inquiry and speculation.

"En't ye seed 'er?" the postmaster asked innocently. "She 's nobbut just this moment come oot o' kitchen an' ganned upstairs."

"Ay, to wash 'ersen, ah' s'd think," Miss Morland reflected shrewdly to herself. "Ah 'd gie seummut to know what lass 's after."

At that moment, if it could have been revealed to her, the lass was after listening at the top of the staircase with a twisted ear to their solicitudes concerning her whereabouts. Once upon a time, she told herself while she did it, she would never have listened to anything that anybody said, whether she had been the subject of it or not. But now, listening seemed part of her natural defence; she listened with no interest in the thing heard, except only as a means for her own intelligence and safety. At the first sound of words her suspicious ear was up like a cat's at the chattering of birds.

From her place at the head of the twisted stairs she was driven into her bedroom once more by Mrs. Morland. Then, when calm had been restored to the recently ruffled atmosphere of the post house, and it was possible to probe by ear to the uttermost corners of it, she slipped out a cautious head, chose her moment, and stole down by the Sunday staircase. Very gently she pressed upon the parlor door with her cushioned fingers ... very gently ... gently, gently, just so that she ... gently ... gently ... could catch a glimpse.

Ah!

The treacherous door had cracked, all at once, like a walnut-shell under her boot-heel. She was halfway up the stairs again in a trice; holding her palpitating heart and listening terribly over the bannisters for the sounds that should proclaim discovery of her attempt. But none came. Baffled, goaded with desire, half-crying with fear of her enterprise's failure, and yet unable to cry because she lacked the tears to cry with, being only able to pull painful faces; desperate to achieve her purpose and terrified with her own desperation, she was up and down the staircase after this a dozen times; back into her bedroom, listening at the head of the corkscrew stairs; holding her ear to every point of the compass. But never dared she essay entrance of the parlor. That door, just ajar on its hinges, held her more effectually at bay than had it been bolted with great bolts and locked and barred. Dusky night descended, the time was getting ripe for her purpose ... and still she lacked the letter.

Then the greater terror out-terrorised the lesser. Fear of what the consequences might be should she not achieve her purpose to-night drove her downstairs for the last time, and into the parlor. With an air of reckless innocence that pretends it has nothing to be afraid or ashamed of, she pulled the door wide and strode into the room. In the simulation of guiltlessness her bearing for the moment was almost defiant, as though she were braced for going into some hated presence. And indeed, for all the assuring silence of the parlor, she advanced with the full expectation of seeing the schoolmaster's figure looming forth from the table, with his hands to his ears and his back to her, as he had been on her first arrival. But no black shadow interposed itself between her and the window; the chair was empty; the room was void. Gone all this while.... And she in her terror had been letting the precious moments slip through her fingers like water. Her heart, in spite of the misery of her lost opportunities, gave a great bound of exultation when it found the way of its purpose clear.

She sprang across the room and laid hold of the desk. The pleasure of feeling it in her possession again after all her dividing anguish; this union of purpose with opportunity; this path unto righteousness—were more glorious than untold riches. Tremulously she deposed the china shepherdess, and opening the desk thrust in her feverish fingers.

And then, all of a sudden, her heart seemed to stand still. A great sinking, swaying sickness seized her.

The letter was not there.

CHAPTER XXVIII

The letter was not there.

Like a wild animal bereft of its young, when the first shock of discovery had had its way with her, she set herself with both hands to rummage the contents of the desk, as though sheer frenzy of desperation alone could restore to her that which was lost. Scarcely even did she regard the objects that her delving brought to the surface, but dug and tore at them all with a blind, consuming energy that revealed the unreasoning horror of her mind; turning and returning and overturning; now above, now below; selecting each thing seemingly with the prefixed idea to reject.

It was not there. The letter that all her life and honor hung upon, that she had thought to place there with her own hands, was not there. It was gone. There did not remain a trace of it. On the floor, upon her hand and knees, she sought distractedly, stroking the carpet with passionate solicitude to deliver her the letter that was not hers—as though it were a great, rough-coated beast that she was coaxing.

And there, on her hands and knees, the schoolmaster came upon her. Through the thick walls of her engrossment she never heard him; care she had thrown to the winds.

Still groping and coaxing, and peering over the floor in the fast gathering dusk, she saw for the first time the shadow that watched her. It said no word at the moment of her rising. Slowly and tremblingly she rose upward, like a faint exhalation, a phantom. Had she continued her vaporous ascent through the ceiling, and through the bedroom ceiling above that, and through the red-tiled roof, and forth into the great eternity of dissolution and nothingness, it would scarcely have been out of keeping with the strange slow spirituality of her rising. All the passionate heat of her search cooled before that presence; her body, that had been so assiduous in its enterprise, froze suddenly to ice; the very life seemed to have been smitten out of her, and her rising but the last muscular relaxation of a body from which the soul had fled.

"Are you ... looking for something?" the shadow asked her, after a terrible moment's silence, when the girl's guilty heart seemed trying to cry aloud and betray her.

It was the old schoolmaster's voice that uttered the question; the tight, hoarse whisper that seemed to strangle his throat in the utterance like a drawn cord. And it was the old schoolmaster's figure that waited upon her answer; the remorseless, condemnatory figure with its hands to its collar, that always, whatever she did, threw her in the wrong. All their intervening relations seemed cut out and done away with. They were back again, splicing their lives at the point where these had broken off on that memorable night in the kitchen. He was above her once more, on the great high judgment seat, and she ... down here—a poor, frail, inconsequential sinner—struggled and wrestled in the bondage of silence before him.

"I?" She spoke in an unsteady voice, all blown to pieces with short breaths, as though she had been running fast and far. "No, no! Only something that I ... that I ... I thought I 'd dropped. Nothing at all ... thank you. It does n't matter."

She wanted to pass him quickly on the strength of that denial—a lie on the face of itself—and get away somewhere, to her bedroom again, before he could question her further; but he stood there without moving, as he had stood in the moonlight, and she dared not advance. She had the fear within her that he might yield her no place.

"You ... will not find it on the floor," he told her.

"I don't ... know what you mean," she found strength to say—but only just.

"The letter," he answered. "You are looking for a letter."

In dead silence, like an executioner's axe, the charge fell, and seemed to sever her anguished head of evasion at one sharp blow from its trembling trunk. She had no power for struggling now; her life of tortured anticipation and mental activity was at an end. It was only a poor, soulless, quivering girl's body that the schoolmaster had in front of him. He might bend and bruise it as he listed; it should show him no resistance.

"It was a letter you were looking for," he taxed her again, his voice gaining severity, it seemed, from her admissive silence, as though he meant forcing her to confess with her lips what she had hoped to let her silence say for her.

"... Have you ... got it?" she inquired, in a dry, empty whisper.

Had she spoken the words with a hollow reed under her lips the tone would have been no more empty.

"It is safe," he said.

And something in the malicious utterance, something significant of exultation for a victory unfairly come by, revealed to the girl in a flash, when, and by what abominable means, it had come into the man's possession.

"You took it," she cried at him, flinging the accusation into his face as though it were a glove from the hand of outraged honor. "You stole it out of my desk!" With all the rapid process of moral despoliation that had been at work upon her during these latter days, and with all the resultant complaisance for crime, the old indignation rose up strong in her against the idea of a mean, petty theft like this. It seemed she might never have sinned or known sin herself, so clear and righteous was her moral eye become of a sudden. "You thief!" she threw at the man. "Coward and thief!"

He made no attempt to resent or defend himself against these puny javelins of her anger. Possession of the letter was so impregnable a position that he could afford to let her expend her ammunition fruitlessly against the walls of his silence.

"And if I did take it?" he asked her merely, in tones of gathering assurance.

"It was not yours to take," she panted at him. "It does not belong to you. Give it me back. You have no right to it."

"It belongs to neither of us," he said, yet without anger. With such a power as this letter in his pocket gave him, he had no need of anger. And of justification he sought none. "My right is as much as yours ... and I am prepared to stand by it. Call me a thief if you like; mere names won't hurt me ... your own harsh treatment has hardened me too much for that. We are both of us thieves."

"... I was going to take it back to-night..." the girl protested, part in asseveration of her innocence, part in supplication that he should restore her the letter.

"Perhaps you were," he said, with a callous indifference to her intentions that boded ill for his own. Apparently he was little concerned with the girl's atonement or questions of restitution. "But I have something ... to say to you first. We cannot talk here. Put on your hat ... we will go outside."

His assumption of authority and dominion roused the last red cinders of the girl's independence. Now that her back was to the wall and further retreat was impossible, the energy, hitherto dribbling away in futile skirmishes, accumulated itself in frontal activity. She was shamed—bitterly, horribly shamed—but even shame has its pride.

"Give me the letter..." she said doggedly, and held out her hand.

"Put on your hat..." he told her. "We will talk about that outside."

"I will not go with you. Give me the letter first. If you give me the letter I will go."

"You shall have the letter back ... in good time. Not now. If you speak so loudly they will hear us. Put on your hat."

"I will not put on my hat."

"... I think you will."

"When will you give me back the letter?"

"When ... we have come to an understanding."

The word "understanding" tolled out across the dreary wastes of her consciousness like a death-bell.

"... Will you give it me to-night?"

"We can discuss that."

"Give it me now ... and I will go with you."

"No; I cannot give it you now. You have had your way ... in other things. I must have mine, for once, in this. Put on your hat."

She would have gone on her knees to anyone else in the world that should have obtained this dominion over her, but before this man, no. To beg of him, her shame was ashamed. Knowing what he had been wanting of her all these months—what he was wanting of her now—she dared not plead for a single concession; dared not put herself under the yoke of one small favor. Doubly she was at a disadvantage before him. All her wiles of womanhood; all her tears; all her soft persuasions; her clasping of hands; her dove-like wooing with the voice ... all that dear pedlar's basket of feminine graces to win the hearts and minds of man must be left undisplayed. To this man, of all men on earth, she must not plead.

"If I will not put on my hat?" she said.

She dared not bind herself in direct negation to the refusal, but she suggested the act—drawing pride for it indirectly—with the twofold intention of expressing a contemplated resolve she was far from feeling, and of arriving at some knowledge of the degree to which the man was prepared to push his ill-gotten power.

"But you will," he said.

There was something so black about the insinuation—as though he himself were anxious to save her the sight of what might be in store for her if she persisted—that she dared hazard no second contingency. They remained for a second or two in silence, and the slow melting of her obstinacy into consent was as palpable during these moments as the melting away of a fragment of ice on a fishmonger's slab. No other word passed between them then. Very quietly the schoolmaster opened the door and stood by the wall while the girl slid by him, cowed and trembling.

The postmaster, sitting on the high Governmental stool in the Post Office, with his back to the window and his newspaper held up above his head to catch the last red reflection from the darkening sky, staring upward at the crowded firmament of print through his great glasses as though he were star-gazing, heard the front door close, and looking over the ribbed glass screen into the roadway, saw Pam and the schoolmaster pass together in the direction of the brewer's corner.

"Emma," said he, putting his head in at Miss Morland's door next moment; and more urgently still, not discerning her there at first in the dusk: "Emma lass, are ye theer?"

"Ay, ah seed 'em," said the severe voice of his daughter. "Div ye want lamp noo?"

CHAPTER XXIX

That same night the Ullbrig chimes were as clear to hear at Cliff Wrangham as though they 'd rung in Dixon's stackgarth, and Dixon shook his head.

"Yon 's a bad sound," said he dubiously. "Ah 'm jealous we s'll be gettin' some rain before morn."

And while all Ullbrig slept (save two), and all Cliff Wrangham (save one), a great, black, umbrella-shaped cloud pushed up its head into the sky above where the sun had sunk, like a mammoth mushroom. Soon there were no stars left behind Ullbrig church for the tower to show against; half the sky was black as ink and the mushroom still growing. Out of the advancing darkness came wafts of cool, wet wind that shook the sleeping, windows and casements gently, as though to awaken them to preparation, and bid them: "Be ready—we are coming." And almost while their breath was whispering the warning, the first rain drop spat sideways against the Spawer's window, and after that the second and a third and a fourth. And thenceforward, through the hours till daybreak—that never broke at all—the silence seethed with the steadfast downpouring of rain.

All over the country-side this night there would be white faces peering out through the streaming wet windows, for your farmer is a light sleeper where his crops are at stake; and men's low, calamitous voices heard discussing the swift change in their prospects; and stocking-feet stirring muffled about boarded floors; and bedsteads creaking as occupants sit up in them, and roll out with sudden-roused anxiety or throw themselves flat again in the despondency that knows too well to need any ocular confirmation of its fears; and the sounds of masters, calling urgently upon men by name in the great attic above, to inquire whether this, that, or the other had been safely done last night before turning in.

For three days the rain fell, almost without intermission. At times, for variation, great big-bellied clouds of white mist rolled over the land from the sea, and hid it, and rolled away again. They heard the booming of the minute-gun from Farnborough, and the hoot of passing steamers. More than once, during these three days, the Spawer extended his excursions—with fitful energy of action—right beyond the confines of Dixon's farm, and showed a set face of purpose towards Ullbrig. But it was all mere moonshine. The thought of his advent in Ullbrig village, with his streaming mackintosh and soaking cap and be-muddied boots, deterred him from his folly in time. And whenever he turned back it was always with a certain consolatory pious pain of renunciation, as though he had just got the better of a great temptation, and had gained a victory instead of losing one.

CHAPTER XXX

Early on the morning of the fourth day, which was a Saturday, Barclay was sighted in his spring cart, driving down to Ullbrig to catch Tankard's 'bus; the farm lad sat by his side to hold up the great gig umbrella, with cylindrical slashes in its cover, through which a cow could have jumped, and two or three of its complete ribs showing. Dixon, standing at the pump in his white waterproof and leggings, his corn-sack headgear, and his six-penny telescope, as though he 'd been a skipper, and Barclay's cart (with miniature waves of water curling off at its wheels) an apparently friendly craft, hailed him as the farm lad consigned to his master the care of the umbrella, and clambered down to throw open the lane gate.

"Noo then."

"Noo then," said Barclay in turn, showing his face, and waving the reins at him with the right hand.

"Ye 're not cuttin' owt to-day, it seems?" Dixon inquired jocularly.

"Nay, ah 'm waitin' while it ripens a bit. Ah thought ye 'd 'a been agate leadin' yours by noo."

"Ay," said Dixon, "... 'appen we may if rain dizz n't lift. We mud as well 'ave it damp as dry, ah think. 'Ow diz it suit ye noo, this tee-tawtal weather?"

"Nay, it dizz n't fall t' be no wuss nor it is. That 's 'ow it suits me," Barclay responded. "It 's no use stayin' i' 'oose, watchin' crops waste. Ah 'm away to Oommuth."

"To buy a bit o' band, ah 's think?" Dixon hazarded, with an internal twinkle.

"Ay, a bit o' band 'll not come amiss i' 'arvest time."

"Don't loss it o' yer way back, onny road," Dixon charged him. "Shall ye come wi' Tankard?"

"Ay," said Barclay oracularly. "Gen ah don't come later, ah shall."

... And drove away in the sloppy channel of the lane, with the clash of the gate behind him for farewell.

The farm lad, returning after a while in sole charge of the cart, with the umbrella totally inverted over him, using one of its rents as a window, held further parley with Dixon at close quarters by the same gate—that Dixon opened for him to save a dismount—concerning his master's departure, and the world in general. The conversation brightened Dixon's face as it proceeded, and sent him back to the house with a sparkle in his eye, as though he 'd been asked to pronounce judgment on a glass of XXX, and could say "Proper stuff this!" with all his heart.

"Noo, ah 've gotten to larn seummut ti morn, onny road," he announced to the household assembled in the big kitchen, from whose window the stack of faces had been interestedly observant of this second conversation. And in response to the very general inquiry: "What 'a ye larnt, then?" answered with another: "What div ye think?"

"What sewd we think, an' all?" Miss Bates demanded rebelliously. "Folks like me 'as no time to think."

"Nay, they 'd do better if they did," Dixon assented, with his imperturbable geniality.

"Ay, or they 'd do less, 'appen," Miss Bates snapped at him.

"Ah don't know i' what way," Dixon decided amiably. "Noo, div ye gie it up? Ah bet ye weean't guess, onny on ye."

"Sun 's shinin' i' Oolbrig, 'appen," Arny suggested.

"Feythur Mostyn 's gannin' to slart [daub] a sup o' paint ower t' front of 'is 'oose," Jeff said.

"Nay, ye 'll none on ye get gain [near] 'and it," Dixon said, not desiring, however, to give them too much rope, lest they might. "It 's a weddin'."

"Ay, an' ah know 'oo's it is!" Miss Bates cried, emerging suddenly at the open door of her rebellious silence, to demonstrate the superiority of her intelligence, and shaking it at him as though it were a broom. "It 's Pam's, an' she 's gannin' to marry schoolmester."

"Ay, that 's right enough," Dixon said, with the perceptible reluctance of admission that would have wished the news—or Miss Bates' guess—to have been otherwise, particularly in view of her triumphant: "Ah knowed very well."

"'Oo telt ye she was, though?" Jeff demanded of his father, with Thomasine unbelief.

"Barclay lad, just noo."

"An' where did 'e get it fro'?"

"Nay, 'e 'd gotten it off too well for me to ask 'im owt o' that. 'E telt me it wor ower village 'at schoolmester 'ad asked Pam to 'ave 'im, an' she 'd ta'en 'im. Ah 'm not sure schoolmester 'issen 'ad n't telt a goodish few."

"Ay, 'e 'll want to tell 'em an' all," Miss Bates agreed gustily. "'E 's been after 'er long enough. Mah wod! Ah 'd 'a seed 'er somewhere before ah 'd 'a looked at 'er twice, all time she 's been snuffin' 'er nose at me. They want giein' marriage, both on 'em. Ah sewd 'a 'ad to be asked a good few times before ah 'd tek up wi' a man same as yon—old enough to be my feythur, very nigh."

"Ay, it teks all sorts to mek a wuld," Dixon pronounced drily. "We s'll see what sort on a man teks up wi' you, 'appen."

"'Appen," said Miss Bates, with great reservoirs of meaning wisdom dammed up behind the accent of that word. And then, not finding quite sufficient satisfaction in this inflectional superiority, could not resist the temptation to cry out: "Bud 'e 'll 'ave to be different fro' be yon sort of a man, onny road."

"When 's weddin'?" Arny asked.

"Nay, ah can't tell ye owt more, wi'oot mekkin' it up," Dixon said. "Pick what there is for yersens. Ah lay, ye 'll manage to fin' seummut fresh in it." And looking towards the mid-parlor door: "'As 'e come doon yet?" he inquired.

"Ay, a goodish bit sin'," Miss Bates said. "Bud ah thought it was women 'at did all gossipin'!" she declaimed angrily, seeing the blessed standard of intelligence-bearer thus being wrenched from her grasp and carried into the Spawer's breakfast-table by another. And raising her voice more loudly as the figure of Dixon disappeared from the kitchen on its coveted errand: "Ay, ye can talk aboot women talkin', mah wod! Ye can an' all. Bud what aboot a man's tongue 'at must needs gan off as soon as it 's gotten to know seummut, an' tell it to ivverybody? Ah 'd for shame to show mysen so throng wi' other people's news!" And thus commencing to whip up the top of indignation within her, till it hummed loudly and threateningly, found an effective lodgment for her hand all of a sudden on the side of Lewis's cheek. "Put yer mucky fingers gain-'and that bacon, if ye dare!"

So the Spawer was not the only one to whom the news of Pam's engagement came as a blow, only he lacked Lewis's privilege of crying for it.

CHAPTER XXXI

Sunday morning opened out scowlingly, with an angry watery look that saw no pleasure in anything. There was no rain, but there were great black clouds heaped up in the sky, every one containing a thunderstorm, if not a couple. Such clouds they were as you can make for yourselves by dipping a thumb in ink and smearing circularly over paper. Between the superimposed piles of them at times, as they rifted, the cold grey light poured down upon the level landscape below like pailfuls of water. The chill drops still spangled everywhere from the recent rain. Every bird that flew out of the hedges scattered diamonds in its passage. The grass was bowed down beneath its watery burden, drop upon drop was strung on the bended blades. The trailing porch of flowering tea hung weightily over the door, ready to discharge its accumulated wetness down any neck that passed under. On all the window-sills were long, tremulous watery rows of jewels. The whitewashed walls of the house were soaked and mottled; everywhere about the path and laneways were great pools of gathered water, shivering under the breath that blew over them now and again, in apprehension of more.

A very day, indeed, for hot coffee, odorous ham, and smoking mushrooms—as all these ministrants to the stomach's comfort on the Spawer's breakfast-table there are—but the Spawer only looks at them in staring disregard.

This last blow about Pam has struck him so suddenly and so forcefully that he can only keep feeling himself over, and wonder what bones are broken, and how many. His pride, he knows, has suffered a nasty shock. All along he has been reckoning upon the girl as though she were an actual possession, to be left or taken at his own sweet will; a fixed star in the firmament. And lo! now he finds she is very much of a planet, with a path of her own, that has swum into his ken and swum out again, leaving the astronomer stuck in the mud with his telescope to his eye, a pitiable object of miscalculation.

And by turns he is incredulous and despairing, and hopeful and indignant and irate. She is not going to be married. It is a lie. There is no truth in it. She is going to be married. The shadow-man, the moonlight, the parting, her avoidance of him—all point to the truth of it.

Pam was marrying a pair of bell-bottomed trousers and a shabby morning coat. Horrible! horrible!

Oh, the sting was bitter! The disappointment supreme. Even his love for the girl was so steeped in the sense of humiliation and of grief that she should have fallen to such extent below the standard of his measurement, that at times almost he failed to tell whether he really loved her any longer, or was possessed only of pity.

He could n't believe it. On his soul, he could n't believe it. He knew it was true, but he could n't believe it. On Sunday morning, wet or fine, he must go to Ullbrig and learn the truth. Father Mostyn would be sure to know and tell him.

And meanwhile he had to garb himself with the extra scrupulousness of attire for covering his torn pride. Now that he was humbled he must be very proud. He must show no tell-tale flinchings. He must laugh with the lazy, half-contemptuous humor, as though this little rustic world ... Morbleu! ... this little pasture of bucolic clods ... this fallow field of earthen intelligences ... you understand? ... this pitiable place called Ullbrig, meant no more to him in serious reality than Jarge Yenery's straw hat. If this thing were so, as he knew and dared not believe ... it should be buried in his bosom and heaped under a thousand simulations of indifference. Neither the girl nor any in Ullbrig should have the gratification of knowing that he had ever acted to her as other than the friend.

CHAPTER XXXII

It lacked yet some minutes to service time when the Spawer passed up the path to church. In the porch old Obadiah Beestman, with a bell-rope in one hand and a bell-rope in the other, and his right foot slung in the noose of a third, was still ringing his dismal ding, dang, dong, as the Spawer entered. Obadiah is also clerk and sexton too, and is shrewdly suspected by his Reverence of Nonconformist proclivities into the bargain.

He nodded solemn greeting to the Spawer as the Spawer arrived—the ringing of the bells being to Obadiah as much a part of the morning's devotion as the Prayers and Litany—if not more—and told him, "Onny on 'em to left 'and." By which he meant that the Spawer was at liberty to occupy any pew that caught his fancy, without fear of trespassing upon rights or being disturbed. Not a soul, so far, was in church. The Spawer picked his favorite pew, with its faded green cushion and family of hassocks—the grand patriarch standing a foot and a half high, and sloped for the knees to rest on without unnecessary bending; with others of various shapes and sizes, down to the baby sawdust-stuffed buffet, no bigger than a bath bun. Once upon a time, some God-fearing household of the Established Faith had come here week by week to worship, and brought these hassocks to kneel upon, and this cushion for ease in sitting, and had died or gone away, while the tokens of their devotions were lapsed into possession of the church. In his old right-hand corner, with his shoulders fitted into the angle of the high pew-back and side, he sat and turned over the books within reach; hymns, ancient and modern, commencing at page twenty; prayer-books, decorated with rude designs of the human body, with poems against theft, and so much inscribed with names of ownership that the nine points of law and possession were merged in them quite; some small, some large; all clammy and smelling of the vault. Up and down the woodwork of the pew, and the hymn-books, and the green cushions, were the glistening tracks of lethargic but progress-making snails. All over the damp walls of the church they ran too, like luminous hieroglyphics of death and decay; and over the mural tablet in marble to the memory of Francis Shuttlewell Drayman, one time vicar, who served God in this church faithfully for forty-nine years, and was given rest as a reward for his labors on February 19, 1799. Also Hannah, wife of the above, who departed this life in search of her beloved husband, August 5, 1804.

As the Spawer sits and ponders over these things, trying to assimilate them by a sort of spontaneous process with his own state—and find one common key which shall fit all the varied wards of the locks of life—the worshippers begin to assemble. Mrs. Hesketh, holding her youngest by the hand and piloting it (whether a boy or a girl does not exactly make itself apparent to a superficial observation) up the aisle in front of her, at the manifest peril of falling over it, and trying by jerks of the arm to shake its stare off the Spawer, which, however, requires a stronger arm. They disappear into a pew somewhere under the lectern, where much sibilant whispering begins to issue immediately upon their incarceration, as though they were cooking something; and every second the big forehead of the infant, surmounted by its sailor hat, shows itself as far as the eyebrows over the pew back and goes down suddenly, as though its supports had been sundered. Old Mary Bateman shivers up the aisle too, on the far third-class side, with her brown charity shawl drawn tightly over her shoulders and clasped into the pit of her stomach by invisible hands wrapped up in it, as though she were cold and hungry, and the pinched, alms-house look of humility about the lips of her bowed face befitting a pauper. Being entirely dependent for everything in life upon the mercy of God, and having a very proper value and appreciation of it—which is too infrequently the case with people able to earn their own living—she has long since discarded pride as an unmeaning and useless appanage, and walks humbly before the Lord and her fellow-beings (if they will kindly pardon the liberty of her calling them such) as the devoutest Christian might desire. At Sacrament she will wait until the last lip has left the cup, and only presume to approach the table when sought out and summoned there by the priestly forefinger. And after death she will go underground in a nice deal coffin, as being cheaper and more perishable, so that she may the sooner mix her dust with the soil and make room for somebody else when the time requires. After her comes Mrs. Makewell, who deems it advisable to show herself occasionally beneath the priestly eye, as a reminder that she is still able to go out charing ("God be praised, your Rivrence") at eighteenpence a day, with her beer; also as a midwife when requested; and will give his Reverence judicious samples of her bronchitis during pauses in the service, knowing that his Reverence hears every cough and scrape and clearing, and bestows port wine upon the worthy. While she is trying to fasten herself into her pew there are sounds of a massive sneck being lifted somewhere round the chancel where the vestry is, and the scuffle of loose boots that are too big for the control of the feet that don't fit them echoing over a flagged floor. This, the Spawer knows by experience, is the choir. He even sees them peering round from the far end of the choir stalls and pushing each other out into the chancel, and hears the strident hiss of much whispering, which at closer quarters would resolve itself into:

"See-ye! Old Moother Bateman! old Moother Bateman!" with an unpublishable effusion upon the subject of this unfortunate from the pen (or the lips, as he would n't know what to do with a pen if he had it) of the Ullbrig bard. "Gie ower shovin', ye young divvle." "Look at Spawer fro' Dixon's, like a stuffed monkey in a menagerie." "Let 's chuck a pay [pea] at 'im."

The sound of the massive latch resounding acutely through the empty building a second time puts a death-like stop to the chancel activity, and an august step heard passing over the flagstones in lonely majesty of silence announces beyond all doubt that his Reverence has arrived. At the same moment the Spawer, with a strange, nervous fluttering about his heart—as though he were about to face some great audience in his musical capacity—hears the whispering echo of light footsteps going up the winding stairs of stone from the door in the porch to the organ loft. If he had been a gargoyle, or a sculptured effigy of Peter, his ears would have heard that tread, and known the maker of it. Every step of the way he followed her progress. Now she had two more left, and then the loft door. The two were taken, and the loft door creaked on its hinges. She was in the church and behind him. By an instinct as unerring as that which guides a homing bird he felt, with a painful throbbing of the throat, the fact of his recognition. He knew, almost as well as if he had been looking at the scene from some high point of vantage—higher even than the girl's—that she was gazing down upon him from the organ loft. And with this consciousness was poured into him from a vial more bitter the knowledge of her sudden start; the constrained tightening of her lips; the light suddenly extinguished in her eye at sight of him; all her being standing still like a human apostrophe and saying:

"He here!"

Yes; he was here. Miserable wretch that he was; he was here.

Into his shoulders he drew his neck; wedged his head down firmly, and sat without moving in the corner of his pew. On other Sundays he would have looked round at her and smiled his greeting upward. But not now. He dared not risk any such greeting now, lest he should look to find the girl's face turning from him. Without any shadow of doubt, their alienation was complete. He who had been regarded as a friend at the first was come to be regarded as a persecutor now. Even his presence there this morning was a persecution to the girl; a menace to her. She could trust him no longer. She suspected his intentions of dishonor, and was striving to hold at arm's length a man who hung about the skirts of her encouragement. He renewed his suspended breathing with a measure of relief when he heard the sliding rattle of the manual doors, and knew that her eyes were removed from him at last.

And then he knew that another figure had gone up to the organ loft with the girl, and was contemplating him from on high; a silent, spectral figure, whose flesh seemed constituted of pale moonlight; and whose garb was the shadow of night.

CHAPTER XXXIII

"Ha! this is beautiful of you," his Reverence said, coming up to the Spawer after the service and enfolding his hand in that warm, balmy, beneficent softness of palm. "To come three miles on a morning like this for the sake of worshipping in the true Faith. Beautiful! beautiful! quite an example to our Ullbrig laggards, it 'll be talked of. Ullbrig has only three yards to come ... and it does n't come those, as you see. When Ullbrig comes, look for the Millennium or port wine—generally port wine. There 's no mistaking the symptoms. Mrs. So-and-So's liver 's no better. Put on your best black dress and go to church this morning, Janie; a bottle of his reverence's port would do her good. Take care and sit where he can see you and sing as loud as you can. Show him how capitally you can find all your places, and don't stare about you when he 's preaching. That 's our Ullbrig way. Go to church to get something out of it if you can. 'His reverence gets paid for preaching; we ought to get something for going. That 's only fair.' See what his reverence the vicar 's to put up with in a place like this. Ex nihilo nihil fit. That 's our motto; which, being rendered according to Ullbrig theologians, means: Nothing done without good value given for it in return. If Nonconformity had n't its tea-urns and its bath buns it would n't hold sway over Ullbrig another twenty-four hours. Plenty of hot tea and big bath buns, with plenty of flies and currants in 'em; that 's the way to subjugate the heathen bucolic beast. Music's no good—any more than the Church. We 're dogs with bad names to start with, both of us. Musicians are unscrupulous, dissipated vagabonds, such as you, that live by their wits, as everybody knows. Vicars of the Established Church are children of Satan and prophets of Baal. We 're both in the same boat. And," said he, picking up the dismembered mortar-board from its place by the water-bottle, "this morning we shall have to swim for it. You can't go back to Cliff Wrangham in the teeth of a storm like this that 's brewing."

"It 's awfully good of you..." the Spawer began. "But really, I counted the risks when I came. I 'm ready to take my chance."

"Ha! not a bit of it! not a bit of it!" his Reverence objected, lifting up his forefinger. "You shall take your chance with me. It 'll be a dry chance, if frugal. We don't get so many faithful here that we can afford to treat them with indifference. Come along with you. We 'll lock up and make a bolt for it. I daresay we can find something in the larder to serve us in lieu of lunch if the storm sets in. And judging by the sound of it"—a prolonged peal of thunder spread itself out above them and shook the hollow fabric of the church to its uttermost corner—"it 's going to be a stayer."

Together they made the round of the building, closing up all the swing windows against the deluge that must inevitably come, and giving the lock of the exterior vestry door two turns as the clerk had admonished them, set the thick fibre mat close against the lower chink to oppose any intrusive swill of water, and did what they thought best in such cases as those where a diamond pane lacked in the leaded windows; removing the hassocks from below, and spreading a mouldy cushion or two to absorb the bulk of what wetness came through.

They had only just completed the last of their preparations when a vivid streak of lightning flashed in the yellow, murky air like a knife-blade, and seemed to rip up the great baggy canopy of water suspended above them at one slice. A roar of enraged thunder followed the deadly thrust, and the rain fell whizzing to earth next moment like arrows.

His Reverence gathered up his cassock in both hands as far as the knees, and screwing up his mouth and aiming a way for himself with one eye through the thick downpour to the Vicarage gate—but a dozen paces or so from the porch—made a game dash for cover.

"Ha! capital! capital!" his Reverence was saying at the other side of the close, bruised, blistered, and by this time rain-soaked door, wiping the drops off his chin and nose-end, and running the handkerchief round the inner rim of his Roman collar. "That 's one of the beauties of living by your own porch. The elements have n't any terrors for you," and stamping his feet upon the flags to shake out the legs of his trousers, where he had rucked them over his shoes, he led the way into the sanctum sanctorum, so full for the Spawer with memories of by-gone happiness.

A dual sense of gladness and sadness possessed him as he walked forward. Here he was very close to, and here he was very far from, the spirit of Pam. Out of every tile he trod on some brooding remembrance of the girl rose up as though his foot had dislodged it; wound about him like the sorrowing smoke from a funeral pyre and dissolved. In every corner of the room they entered, the spirit of the girl seemed to linger. All about the room were the visible tokens of the girl's presence—tokens so acute that to each of them his mind's eye supplied the absent figure of the girl as she had been at the actual moment of its accomplishment. Here she was stooping to straighten the antimacassar of a chair; here she was smoothing a cushion; here she was adjusting the objects on his Reverence's writing-table.

And because the Spawer's heart was full of the girl, they did not touch upon Pam first of all. Instead, they talked of the storm, of the thunder, of the crops.

And all the while his Reverence was making excursions to various corners of the storm-darkened room; opened the cupboard door and plunged his hands with a rattle into a hidden knife basket; tried the blades on his thumb, and sprang them critically against his palm for selection; jingled amid silver forks, and counted them to his requirements, large and small; brought forth glasses, tumblers and wine glasses, and liqueur; then casters and bottled condiments; plates and napery, and laying them on the far end of the big dining-table, cleared that space near the window for their ultimate disposal.

"Let 's see ... one, two ... did I bring the forks? To be sure. What am I thinking of? Capital! capital! I 've been so long in other people's clover, you see, that I 'm forgetting how to graze on my own meagre grassland. That 's better—and the salt. Well! and what 's the concerto been doing all this time? Made headway, has it?"

He picked open a folded table-cloth by its two corners, and shook it out of its stiff, snowy creasing.

The Spawer told him that he was afraid ... it had n't been doing much. To tell the truth (that candid truth at which the Spawer was becoming such an adept), the weather had corrupted him. First of all it had been too fine ... and then it had been too wet. This rain had unsettled him. It had washed out all his inspiration. He 'd only felt inclined to stick his fingers in his pockets and shiver over fires. The keys were too cold and damp. There was no warmth about them.

His Reverence gathered the cloth, and spread it over the table. "Indeed? I suppose you 've not seen much of Pamela ... since I left?" he asked casually.

The Spawer's heart hit him under the chin.

"Pam?" he replied, as though for the moment nothing had been further than this girl from his thoughts. "Very little. Let 's see. One ... no, twice, I believe. Yes; twice to speak to since you 've been away."

"Ha!" said his Reverence, and smoothed the cloth scrupulously down all its creases and over the corners of the table.

What did that oracular "Ha!" mean? Did it mean that his Reverence knew the whole history of those two times—or suspected it? ... or knew nothing; suspected nothing? There are moments when an ambiguous monosyllable is more potent than the wisest of words—and this was one of them. The Spawer waited a little space, while his Reverence passed his smooth palm backwards and forwards over the snowy surface, in the hopes that he might add something to that unexplanatory "Ha!" But his Reverence said nothing. He might have been waiting too.

"I 've heard, though..." the Spawer began, feeling the discomfort of that monosyllable like a drop of cold water down his neck, and stopped there suggestively.

"Ha!" His Reverence passed a concluding hand over the table-cloth, and straightened himself with puckered mouth and portentous brows. "... Unfortunately true. Unfortunately true. Yes."

"Unfortunately" true! The Vicar, then, was his ally.

"... At first," he said, professing suddenly that the destiny of two drops, trickling slowly towards each other on the window-pane, was of more moment to him than the matter of the girl, "... at first ... I hardly believed it. I suppose, though ... you say there 's no mistake."

His Reverence shook his head, and passed over to the cupboard again.

"A very great mistake," he said, stooping on one knee and speaking into the cavernous recesses of the shelves; and after a moment: "A very great mistake," he said. "I 'm not surprised at your incredulity. Of course, being ignorant of circumstances, you 've nothing but your judgment to guide you—and plainly judgment would lead you to pronounce against such a form of proceeding. Yes!" He raised himself from the floor with the twisted face for a rheumatic twinge in his knee, and returned once more to his table preparations. "I must admit that the girl has disappointed me. Of course ... ever since the beginning—as Ullbrig will tell you if you care to pay it the compliment of asking (which I don't suppose you will)—this has been a contingency to reckon with. But I 'd hoped. You see ... it 's different. Things latterly had looked so favorable. I thought the musical experiment was likely to succeed. Ha! and the French too. Yes, yes; the French too. It seemed to have stimulated the girl to aspirations altogether beyond Ullbrig. I thought we 'd trained her palate to require daintier food in every respect than Ullbrig could give her. And then ... all at once ... to be beaten on the post. Of course—" he drew attention to what followed with a quiet gesture, as though it were really quite obvious enough without the superfluous emphasis of pointing out—"... it would be quite possible for me to forbid the thing—veto it completely and put a stop to it once for all. But then..." he screwed up his mouth for a moment's reconsideration of what such an act would effect, "for the present I have n't quite found my justification for this extreme measure."

"He is ... a schoolmaster?" the Spawer hazarded.

"Exactly; our Ullbrig schoolmaster. A worthy enough man, no doubt, in his own particular way—but it is n't the way I had in my mind for Pam. I believe he excels somewhat in free-hand and rule of three. These are his specialties. His father—if my memory serves me right—" here the Vicar appeared to interrogate his memory through fringed lashes, "... was a—ha!-small greengrocer and mixed provision dealer—Knaresbro' way, I believe. Of course, under ordinary circumstances, I should have had no alternative but to nip the whole affair in the bud; pack Pam away, if need be, and arrange meanwhile for the fellow to be transplanted in some peculiarly far and foreign soil. But as it is ... that seems an unnecessary setting of the mills to grind without grist. If we stop this marriage..." His eye roamed over the table, where knives and forks and spoons and plates and glasses commenced to array themselves with a semblance of order beneath his fingers. The Spawer's eye shifted, as a meeting seemed imminent. "... Perhaps, when I 'm dead and gone, she may contract a worse. Situated as she is, without friends or society, we can't hope to place her in life as by right and reason she should be placed. Perhaps, if one could only finance the girl, and secure fashionable influence for her, and float her upon the social sea, she might repay the investment cent for cent. But on the other hand ... there 's always a fear. Knowing nothing of the temptations of society life, she might fall to the first barrel like a lame pigeon. Besides, the girl shows no hankerings after the flesh-pots. There 's not a pinch of mundane salt in her nature. So why apply it with one's own fingers, and spoil her in the seasoning? Ha! why indeed? Therefore, as things stand, she must be sacrificed. This man wants her and she wants him—more strongly than even I 'd supposed—and when all 's said and done, we might only make worse of it if we tried to twist human nature to our own preconcerted theories. At least, the fellow has no positive vices—they are mostly negative. He is steady, sober, respectable; a hard worker, likely—so far as one can foresee—to provide the girl with a certain home for life. For an indefinite period they may remain at Ullbrig, where—except for those inevitable little disturbances which we may expect under conditions of matrimony—her existence will be but slightly changed. Of course, she will have to relinquish her postal duties, but her parochial work will suffer no modification.

"Ha! now for the larder. Let 's see what there is to pick. Do you feel anything in the lobster way? Here 's a pie that Pam 's cooked and stuffed into the larder for me—knowing I should be back too late to lay in stock for Sunday. Dear girl. Why in the world could n't she think as beautifully for herself as she does for others? And here 's his reverence's brown loaf, and some beet, and some herring olives. Come, come! We shan't do so badly."

"You only got back last night?" the Spawer inquired.

"Last night only," his Reverence rejoined, dispersing his various acquisitions about the table. "Came along with Friend Tankard from Hunmouth. Poor Friend Tankard! I think he gets slower and slower. Some day, mark my words, he 'll set out from Hunmouth, and never reach Ullbrig at all. That 'll be the end of him. However, he did just manage to pull us through this time, and for the rest of the evening I was interviewing our errant sister. But she stood firm. I tried to shake her on all points; had her in tears even. Yes, poor girl, had her in tears. She rained copiously, but it only seemed to water the roots of her resolve. She used the tears of my making to beg to me with. Ha! Let 's see ... to be sure! The beer. You 're a beer man, at least, are n't you?—even though you stop short of whiskey. Capital! capital! I 'm going to offer you a little specialty of my own. It 's a local beer—not Ullbriggian, by the way—but from the district, and you 'll say you never tasted its equal. Foams like champagne and bites like a nettle. Mild withal."

He disappeared from sight on this new errand, and returned, after a remote sound of clinking, with half a dozen bottles of his specialty, three by the neck in each hand.

"Here we are! If the light were n't so bad, I 'd ask you to examine the color. But that 's no use. We 'll let that go, and judge by the taste alone.... And so—" By a skilful intonation he cleared his voice of the beer, and skipped back to the old topic where they had been before. "... In the end we allowed the matter to stand, and deferred judgment."

"And they will be married..." the Spawer began.

He was thankful beyond measure that the Vicar picked him up without delay, for his voice went suddenly as husky as bran.