Front matter (continued 8)

CHAPTER XL

Out of the dark womb of Eternity—and with all the penalties and discomforts incidental to birth—Maurice Ethelbert Wynne was born again.

With pangs, with anguishes, with flashes of light, and alternating darkness; with terrible struggles to lay hold of this elusive state called life, that seemed floating somewhere about and above him, if he only could secure it, he drew shuddering breath of consciousness at last upon his little six-foot couch, and saw, through tremulous eyelids that were yet powerless to open themselves, a multitude of round things shining.

They were so many, and their light so marvelously great, that he went off through pain into darkness forthwith, and abode there for a space. Thence, after awhile, he commenced to struggle inwardly again for the life he had once laid hold of, and groping, found it; and looked through his impotent lashes once more, and at once the multitude of round things shining fell in, and hurt him, and a second time he let life go quite quietly, and relapsed into his darkness. But the taste for life, once awakened, cannot be so inanimately surrendered. Cost what cost in pain, lips will keep returning periodically to the cup—each time with further strength of fortitude for pain—till in the end hands are strong to grasp and retain, and life, sipped at first, is gulped with eager mouthfuls. And so, slowly but surely, the Spawer returned again and again to his multitude of hurting things, and looked upon them diligently, and patiently learned their shape, and studied them, and knew them in the end for moons. Vague, shadowy remembrances of a former life, or premonitory forecasts of the life he was now about to live, floated—not in his mind, for he had as yet no concentrated point of consciousness that could be called a mind—but, dispersed and uncollected, all about the dark void of his being. Names that he did not know for names flitted hauntingly about him, like bats—names that, as though he were a mere baby, he had not the strength or the capacity to utter, but that he somehow recognised and knew. One name, in particular, came to him in his dusky sojourn, and abode with him; a blessed, dove-like messenger of a name, whose presence was peace. When it departed from him he was troubled, and sought for it, as a blind kitten seeks after the breast. When he found it again he was content with his darkness; quite content to lie and be conscious that he was alive.

Then, to names succeeded shapeless dreams; after-shadowings or forecastings, as the case might be, snatched by violence from Eternity, and bringing him pain. Shadowy figures in conflict he seemed to see; men running; men pursuing; men wrestling; men falling—not men, as men are, but men as his infant mind conceived them, dark and formless and blurred; men like trees walking, whose movements disturbed him painfully; men crying; men screaming. When they screamed, instinctively he sought the shelter of darkness once more, for he could not bear the sound of that scream. It frightened him from life. Yet after awhile, he would be back at the moons again, nibbling at them industriously with his intelligence, like a mouse at cheese. They were moons now, he knew quite well. He did not know them as such by name, but he understood the substance of the things seen, and thus feeding on them and deriving nourishment, his consciousness thrived. One by one it diffused itself through the darkened channels and subways of his being. It reached his ears, and he heard a great buzzing, and a roaring and a beating—as though all his brain were being churned within him. It reached his limbs, and his being strove to stir them, and after many trials succeeded insignificantly, whereupon, with his lips he groaned. Centuries thus, it seemed, he floated, a mere helpless log upon the tide of existence, clutching at things he could not hold, bumping against consciousness for moments at a time, and being drifted off again into the dark; in reality it was scarcely minutes. Then, of a sudden, something icy cold and wet fell with a rude slap over his face.

The shock roused him, and the coldness contracted spasmodically the relaxed tissues of his thinking. All his brain, diffused hitherto vastly throughout space, seemed to shrink up at that Arctic contact, like metal in a mould, and occupy the narrow limits of his head, throbbing painfully at the restriction imposed upon it. Thought, in this cramped environment, became agonisingly congested. His head was a sort of Black Hole of Calcutta, in which thought seethed for outlet. Where one idea before had attenuated itself throughout the centuries, now centuries of thinking were compressed insufferably within the space of one moment. Life, that had been unoccupied, teemed all at once with the fever of activity. A hundred incidents seemed in progress within him at one and the same instant. His lips were useless to him for speaking, but from somewhere in his throat came a voice that poured out from him unceasingly, as though it were a tap, accompanying with narrative the course of events. Still, though all the forces of life and thought were humming at high pressure inside him, was he powerless to burst the fetters of his body. Like an iron man he lay, with his one arm extended, and his one arm bent, and his chin thrown upward, and his legs stretching from him to their limp extremities—miles and miles and miles away. Over and over again in mind he got the victory over this unresponsive flesh, and rose with it, and looked about him at the encompassing multitude of moons; and over and over again his mind returned dejectedly to its recumbent habitation, and knew itself deluded. The desire for movement was become a nightmare. All his being wrought in motionless agony to wake up his dead limbs to life, as his soul had been wakened. The horror of this inactivity grew upon him and focussed itself to a great, loud, liberative cry that should cut his bonds like a knife and loose him from this awful lethargy. But though the cry was within him, all prepared, his lips could not utter it. He was lead-weighted; feet, hands, legs, eyelids—not a member to help him.

And then the cold wetness fell upon his face and forehead a second time, and with a terrible spasm of anguish he pushed his cry. All heaven seemed to ring with it in his tortured imagination; he could not have conceived that the bulk of his effort had been wasted mentally before it reached his lips, and that the residue of physical impulse would scarcely have sufficed to deflate a kitten's lungs. Just another cry or two like this, thought he, as he rested from the exertion of it, and he would burst forth from his bondage and be free.

And again, with titanic intention, and the merest inappreciable flattening of his diaphragm, he launched his pitiable mew.

And this time it suddenly seemed to him that he had awakened some external sympathy on his behalf; that other forces were being brought to bear upon him from without—how, or whence, or why, he knew not. Voices—or his mental equivalent for voices—seemed disturbing the atmosphere of his being; besieging him, trying to lay hold upon his voice and give him a ladder to outer life. The moons too, as he stared at them through his eyelashes, appeared moving about in agitated disorder this way and that above the high wall of blackness that fronted him. Then, something detached itself from the wall-top, and slid downward with a rattle. He was here! He was here! Did n't they see him? In went his stomach feebly again, and he ejected his agonised sigh. And while desperately he sought to aid the outer assistance, and proclaim his dire need—of a sudden his attitude changed. The moons swam backward overhead, the black wall rose above his sight. What his paralysed limbs had failed to accomplish of themselves, was being accomplished for them. Arms were under his neck, hands were beating his cheeks, voices were calling upon him.

And all at once, with a great spasm, his eyes rolled round into their right position—it seemed he had been gazing out of the backs of them this while—and the blindness fell away from him like the stone of a sepulchre; and his ears burst open; and the calling voice came clearly through into his understanding.

Oh, surely that was Pam's dear voice! None other in the world would have had sweet power to penetrate such a darkness as his. And his lips dissolved, that had seemed glued inseparably together, and let him move them over the girl's name.

"... Pam ..." he said.

CHAPTER XLI

Yes, it was Pam's own self that knelt beside him and sustained him, her arms wound supportingly about his helpless body, his head on her knee, and shed tears of warm thankfulness over his lifted face, and caressed him eagerly with her voice.

"I thought you were dead..." she said tremulously.

His response flickered elusively to and fro at the bottom of the Spawer's being, like sunlight deep down a well; but he merely watched it with curious philosophic content, as though quite sufficiently satisfied to know that it was there.

"Where am I?" he inquired listlessly, after a moment, and then, out of sheer gratitude to the girl, without waiting to be told, subsided into peaceful slumber upon her knee.

So long as she was there to hold him and nurse his head, what more could a man want? To sleep with Pam for pillow ... ye gods! But his period of blissful oblivion was short. The beating and the calling recommenced, and he was forced into opening his reluctant eyes.

"You must not..." he heard the girl beseech him. "Oh, indeed, you must not! Try to come to yourself. Are you hurt? Do you think you can stand?"

He heard the questions plainly enough—in his grave he would have heard questions that that voice put to him—but their import excited him little. What did anything matter, so long as Pam was with him? She would look to everything. Trust Pam. All he did was to dwell pleasantly upon the sound of her voice inside, and seek to slumber to it, as a child is soothed by singing. But though his soul longed for this peace, she would not grant it, but plied her questions anew with strange, inexplicable unrest. He had never known Pam so unrestful.

"Are you hurt? Do you think ... you can get up ... if I lift you? Shall I lift you? Will you let me lift you?"

He fished about listlessly for a moment or two in the depths of his well, and brought up the word "Eh," as being both easy to catch and to utter.

"Eh?" he said, without the slightest desire to be told for information's sake, and made as though once more to settle his head.

But she rubbed his cheeks vigorously with her hand, and roused him with her voice anew.

"Oh, please, please..." he heard her beg him, with tears. "Try to wake up now and answer me. Don't go back again. You must n't go back again. Do you think you can stand if I lift you? Do you?"

"Where am I?" he asked again, in the same apathetic voice.

He did n't care where he was. Wherever he was, Pam was with him. That was good enough for his taste. He merely wanted her to nurse him, and soothe him, and lull him. All speculation, all curiosity, had been knocked out of him by his fall. The heavens might have opened now, and the sight of angels descending would have caused him no wonder.

"You are down the cliff!" Pam told him, shouting the words in his ear, with the twofold object of reaching his remote understanding and rousing him by sheer strenuousness of voice. "You must have fallen. Don't you know what's happened? Can't you remember?"

He was down the cliff. He must have fallen. Did n't he know what had happened? Could n't he remember? Of a sudden—yes, of course he could remember. He was down the cliff. He must have fallen. The schoolmaster had pushed him. He 'd been fighting with the schoolmaster in a dream, and got pushed over. What did it matter—a dream? He 'd often got pushed over in dreams.

"Can't you remember?" came back to him, in echo of the girl's voice, and he told her: "Yes, he could remember." Furthermore, to prove his good intentions, he asked her with his eyes shut: "Where are the moons?"

"There 's only one," the girl shouted into his ear.

"That all?" he said, fishing hazily for the words as before.

"It 's up there—there in the sky." She let down his head a little, so that the moon might come into his line of vision. "There ... do you see it?"

He saw it and shut hie eyes, turning his head away from the light.

"All right," he said, and added a dreamy "Thank you."

Something boomed out behind him, and he saw the girl's hand go up defensively above his head. Next moment cold trickles were wriggling down his face. Some rested on his eyelashes and blurred the moonlight.

"What 's that?" he asked complacently.

"It's the sea..." the girl cried into his ear, and wiped the wet tenderly from his face and lashes with an end of sleeve drawn into her palm by her fingers. "The tide is coming up. We must not stay here any longer. We shall be drowned if we do."

"Oh!" he said. Drowned, would they? What was drowning to a man who had been dead? And then, quite irrelevantly—its irrelevancy even puzzled himself, in a placid kind of way—"are there any mushrooms?"

"Oh, yes, yes," the girl told him eagerly. "Lots and lots of them. But not down here; up at the top. We must get up to the top first."

"I 'm the boy for mushrooms," he said, and thought he smiled knowingly, but it was only his inside that smiled. The face of him never moved a muscle.

"See ... I am going to lift you!" the girl shouted. "Let me put my arm about you ... like that. Yes. And now like this. Now ... so. Do I hurt you?"

My Heaven! Did she hurt him? The groan that followed needed no conscious bidding to find the outlet of his lips. His immobile face was broken suddenly into seams of pain, like the cracking of a cast.

"Oh ... my poor darling! My poor darling!" the girl cried, lowering him a little, in an agony scarcely less than his own, and the tears started from her fast. "Have I hurt you? I did n't want to hurt you. But we can't stay here. However much it hurts we can't stay here. We must get you moved. I can't let you drown for the sake of a little pain. Come! try again. You 'll help me, won't you? Now. Is that better? Is that better? Am I hurting you now?"

And again she raised him. In a measure the first pain had paved the way for a second, and being prepared for it this time, by twisting his face he was enabled to bear the lifting; but it was agony. Such complete change of posture seemed to shake up all the dormant dregs of his discomfort, like the lees of a bottle. His body was become no more than a mere flagon, for the contents of mortal anguish. His heart beat as though it had been knocked loose by the fall. All the inside of his head had been dislodged, and bumped sickeningly against the walls of his skull. His ribs were hot gridirons. His back was on fire. But at least he stood unsteadily upright. Within the compass of the girl's arms—as once, on that first night of their meeting, she had been within his—he stood rocking helplessly to and fro; his knees trembling treacherously beneath him, only saved from sinking by the uplifting power of the girl's embrace. Suddenly it seemed to him, with a warning buzz in his ears, that the darkness was coming on again. A great weakness crept over him and enfolded him.

"Let me ... sit down..." he said faintly. He thought that by sitting he might elude the enveloping embrace of the darkness.

"No, no; not here. Not just here..." the girl implored him. "Not so near the edge. Try and walk. Please! ..."

And then the darkness closed upon him swiftly, as he stood in her arms, like a great engulfing fish.

But it disgorged him, almost at once. It seemed his own pain deterred it. And slowly, what time he suffered untold agonies of body, the girl half pushed, half carried him from the perilous edge of their narrow shelf, toward the cliff side; weeping to herself for the pain she knew she was inflicting; talking all the while to interpose her soft, tender voice between himself and the keen edge of his suffering. Did she hurt him now? That was better, was n't it? Oh, that was beautiful! Just another step like that. And now just one more. And now just one to finish. And now just a little one to bring him round here. And got him propped up in the end—though Heaven knows how—with his back against the ugly black slope of cliff, and his face towards the sea, that bit with raging white teeth against the miserable crust of their refuge, and roared and snarled mercilessly for their devourance.

And there, resting awhile, with the assistance of his own pain that had roused him, and the stern sight he saw, the girl assiduously coaxed and fretted, and rubbed his apathetic consciousness, like a cold hand, till it returned at last some vital warmth of understanding. As far as his loosened brain would allow, all the doings of this night came back to him, remotely remembered. Through clouds of intervening suffering he called back his quarrel with the schoolmaster; the words, even, that had been uttered; his horrid plunge over the cliff, and that sickening arrest at the bottom. And before these things had happened, came back to him his love for the girl, and his loss of her; his resolution and his irresolution; his night's packing, and the letters he had received. Even it occurred to him that the big lamp would be still burning—unless its oil were exhausted by now. It was all unreal and incomprehensible, but he remembered it and never doubted. This was no new life, but the old—to whose jagged splinters of breakage he was being so painfully spliced. What a wonder his breakage had n't been beyond all repair! How on earth had he come, neck downwards from that great height—a height it would have sickened him to contemplate jumping—and yet been spared? The mill of his mind ground slowly, by fits and starts, and not over-fine. All its mechanism seemed dislocated and rusty and out of order; in mid-thought it would be brought up suddenly with a horrid jolt that seemed like taking his head off. The noise of its working, too, was almost deafening.

"What are you doing here?" he asked vaguely, all at once, of the girl, who, with one arm about him, was seeing how far he might be trusted to keep his own balance against the cliff. It was a question that had been glimmering at the bottom of his well for some time past—only, so far, he had never been able to perceive clearly why she should not be here as well as anywhere else. But now the strangeness of her presence forced itself upon him.

"I was on the cliff..." she said, speaking in quick gasps, as the result of her exertion, "and heard you fall. At least ... I heard you cry out. You cried out ... did n't you? as you fell."

"Yes..." he admitted slowly, for the mills of thought were grinding again, and he knew whose cry had brought him succor. Murderous, cowardly cur! Friction of anger set up in his mind and heated him—who knows? ... perhaps for his own good. Anything, only to rouse him.

The girl shuddered at that cry's remembrance.

"... I heard you. I was by the boat ... and I knew something dreadful had happened ... and ran back, and looked over the cliff ... and saw you, and scrambled down to you. But we must n't waste time. Not a moment. If once the tide gets over here.... Do you think you can let me leave you ... for a minute? I must find a way up the cliff. So." She withdrew her hand from him, holding it outstretched, however, for a moment, with fingers close upon him, in case he might show any dangerous subsidence. But he did not. "Are you all right now? Do you think you can keep just like that?"

He assured her he was all right, and could keep just like that. He was by no means convinced in his own mind that such was the case, but he felt his acquiescence due to the girl, and gave it.

And she, with a final adjusting touch of finger, that was a caress all told, consigned him timidly to his own insecure care, and turned her energy upon the cliff.

Even as she looked up its black, forbidding side, smooth and sheer, and clayey with the recent rains—and remembered the desperate abandon of her descent—her heart forsook her. Calmly, first of all—trying to stimulate her bosom to courage by deliberateness of action—she sought of the cliff for some mode of ascent; desperately, after awhile, when none forthcame, flinging herself at the slimy earth, kicking with feet for a foothold—that slid down with her when she used it, as though she had been trying to scale butter; tearing with her hands at straggling tufts of grass, that pulled out by the wet roots, soft and sodden—struggling, scrambling, fighting.

And at last the fearful truth was borne in upon her—or perhaps, more accurately, the seal was put upon the truth that her bosom had secreted when she sacrificed herself over the cliff-edge for this man's saving—and with tears, not of terror, but of bitter defeat, she came back to him. Oh, the agony of that confession! Yet with death so close upon them, it was no moment to offer the cup of false hopes. However she tried to screen the knowledge from him, death would shortly tell him everything.

"It is no use..." she said, her tears streaming, her hands all muddied, that she wiped hopelessly on her skirts. "... I can find no way."

"Oh," he said, so apathetically, that for a moment she thought he had not understood. But it was only the mills that were grinding.

"It is all my fault," the girl burst out bitterly. "If I had run to the Dixons' at once ... they would have been here now ... and saved you. But I never thought. I was in such a hurry.... Oh, forgive me ... forgive me, please!"

And into her hands, for the man's sake, she sobbed as though her heart would have burst. It was so dreadful for him to be lost like this, when she had been so near to saving him. For herself it mattered nothing, who had so little to lose. And though she strove to extinguish the thought, there was a kind of proud, defiant exultation at being drowned in such company. Oh, God forgive her such wicked thinking! Her heart, so anguished during these latter days, could not, in its wildest moments, have wished a more companionable death than this.

After awhile, the mills of the man's mind, slowly moving, ground a little grist for his lips to get rid of.

"... Can you get up the cliff by yourself, if you leave me?"

He seemed to be talking to her out of the closed chamber of dreams. What he uttered reached her, indeed, but there was something between them yet, like a wall, that both were sensible of.

"But I would not ... I would not!" she cried impetuously.

"But could you?"

"No, no, no ... I could not!"

"Are you quite sure?"

"Quite. I could not. Indeed, I could not."

"Shall we both be drowned?" he inquired.

To the girl the question came with a callousness almost brutal. Moreover, it cut her to the quick to hear how this fall had blunted the keen edge of the man's susceptibilities. It was as though another being of an altogether inferior calibre were usurping his body. Oh, that for their last agonised moments together this terrible dull veil might be rent, and for dying happiness she might know him as she had known him in the past! And for this she maintained her weeping. But inside, the man was stoking up the furnace of his mills with desperate activity, to get work out of hand before this last. He, too, was filled with ripe grain of thought to be ground, and knew how bruised and blunted he was—and how little near he could place his thoughts to the thoughts of the girl.

"What were you doing ... on the cliff?" he asked laboriously.

All his within was striving to find a short cut to somewhere, but his mouth would not let him.

"... I was going away."

"Oh! Where to?"

"... Anywhere. To Hunmouth ... round by Garthston."

"Why were you going anywhere?"

"Because ... because ... did n't you get the letters? I left them on the piano."

"Oh, yes; the letters. I read them. But I did n't ... know them." "Know them" was n't what he wanted to say, and he struggled for a moment to find the requisite expression, but his mills were not equal to it. "I did n't ... know them," he repeated vaguely.

"Oh ... because ... because..."

And thereupon the girl plunged into the shameful deeps of her wickedness, and made confession. A hurried confession it was, for time pressed, but she cried it in its entirety into his ear—shielding nothing but the absent man ... and her love.

And the mills of the Spawer's mind thumped faster.

"I want ... to ask you something," he said slowly, "... before I die."

"Yes ... yes." The girl was at his lips in a moment, to catch their precious outpouring before death should stop her hearing for ever. "Ask me. I am here."

"I want to ask you..." he said. "You know why I was going back. The other letter was ... from Her. She asks me to set her free. If there had n't been ... been any other one in the case, and I 'd asked you ... to marry me ... would you have married me?"

And in an instant the girl's arms were about the man's neck, and her lips upon his lips, as though they would have sucked the poor remaining life out of his body into her own, and given it an abiding habitation.

"Oh ... my love, my love!" the girl wept, through the wet lips that clung to him. "What do I care about dying now? I would rather a thousand times die to learn that you had loved me ... than live and never know it."

And she poured her streams of warm tears over his face, and wrapped him about with her arms, and bound her body upon him. And in the fusion of that mighty love, the laboring mills of the man's mind burst free.

"Why did you come down to me?" he cried. "For God's sake get away while you have the chance. I 'm not worth saving now ... I'm only the fragments of a man.... But you!"

For all answer she bound him in tighter bondage of protection, as though she were trying to steep their souls so deep in the transport of love that they should not know death or its agony.

"If you leave me..." he urged upon her, "and get up the cliff ... there may still be time."

But she clung to him.

"For my sake, then!" he implored her. "You are my last hope of safety. For the love of me, try and do it. We must not die like this."

And for his sake, with her old desperate hopes falsely revived, she redoubled kisses of farewell upon his mouth and lips, and threw herself passionately against the relentless wet wall of their prison. Now this side, and now that. Now trying to kick out steps with her feet; now trying to tear them with her hands, she wrought at this frantic enterprise, and the man watched her, and knew it to be of no avail. And then, at his urging, she cried out—lifted her own white face to the sullen black face of the cliff, and cried—cried with words, and rent the air with inarticulate screams. But all was one. Like a thick blanket the cliff, so close upon her, muffled her mouth and I smothered the voice that issued from her.

"It 's no use ... no use," she said, and came back to the man.

And at the same moment the cruel, horrible sea, that had been boiling turbulently about the far brink of their ledge, with occasional casts of foam, thundered against the cliff, as though to the collected impulse of intent, and rushed up, roaring, and gained the summit of their slender refuge at last, and curled a scornful, devastating lip of water over it. They stood for a moment like marble, the two of them, at this clear message from the mouth of death; watching the water slide back after the retreating wave, and pour away at either side of their earthen shelf amid an appalling effervescence, and then the girl woke up again.

"It will not be long ... now," she said, very quietly.

Then she went to the man and laced her arms about him—

"Promise me..." she said, "you will not ... let go of me ... when the time comes."

"I promise you," the man answered, very huskily.

"May I call you ... Maurice ... before we die?" she asked, and her voice faltered at this.

"Please..." he begged her; and she said "Maurice" a time or two.

"Hold me ... Maurice," she said. "I may ... turn coward ... at the end ... but hold me. Don't let me go. I want to die with you."

"I will hold you," he answered, and their arms tightened.

And again the sea thundered, and this time something swirled about their feet. Then they asked forgiveness of each other for inasmuch as they had offended, and received the sacrament of each other's pardon.

And there being nothing else to do, they stood and waited for death.

CHAPTER XLII

On this same eventful evening, the absent Barclay o' Far Wrangham returned to himself by slow stages from nowhere in particular, at some vague, indeterminate point between Hunmouth, Sproutgreen, and Ullbrig, having missed Tankard's 'bus by a small matter of two days and one night.

Out of five golden sovereigns that had gone forth with him, he retained a halfpenny, which, wedged tight in the corner of his trouser's pocket, kept troubling him like a conscience at times. On his head was a brimless hat that some friendly cattle-drover had exchanged with him on Saturday. A tramp had picked up his overcoat and was walking the high road to London in it; but Barclay o' Far Wrangham still retained the new waggon-rope that had been one of his early purchases in Hunmouth market on his arrival; and with this over his shoulder he lurched onward. He possessed not the faintest idea of destination, but his legs shambled along with him instinctively, like horses that knew their road. They took him safely across fields, and over stiles, and along hedges, and down narrow pathways between standing corn, and through gates—that he hung over affectionately and went through all the most conscientious formulæ of shutting, and still left open behind him. Somewhere short of Sproutgreen he perceived a figure coming distantly down the road in his direction. At a hundred yards away or more he made elaborate preparations for its greeting; wiped his mouth; let down the waggon-rope to the ground, trailing it loosely by an end; took his hat off and reversed it; rubbed the cobwebs from his eyes, and held out an arm like a sign-post in attitude of friendly surprise. There had been a word in his mouth, too, for welcome; only it slipped him at the last moment, but he made an amicable bellowing instead.

"Bo-o-o-o-oh!" he cried, exploding loosely, like a good-natured cannon, whose recoil sent him staggering backwards over his legs till it seemed he meant retiring all the way to Hunmouth. By a gigantic effort, however, he resisted the backward impetus when it had sent him off the roadway into the shaggy side-grass, and fell forward on his hands. "A-a-a-a-ay!" he shouted genially. He was brimming over with foamy friendship for this dear, familiar stranger. "Noo wi' ye!" and stood up on all fours at the greeting, like a well-intentioned dog, whose muzzle was the battered cleft in his hat-brim.

Thus adjured, the pedestrian drew up with some severity on his aloof side of the road, and gave Barclay to understand, with a grudging "Noo" of inquiry, that he had nothing whatever to hope from him on this side the Jordan. As he had chanced to stop in a line with the dead-centre of Barclay's hat, Barclay could not immediately discern him, and was filled indeed with suspicions of treachery.

"Wheer are ye?" he inquired, after a few moments of futile activity, making valiant efforts to keep his eyelids lifted.

"Ah 'm 'ere i' front o' ye," his unknown friend replied, with small show of favor, regarding this picture of human debasement with scorn.

"Are ye?" Barclay inquired, somewhat foggily, and pushed himself with much effort on to his haunches. "Which way div ah want to be?" he asked.

"Wheer did ye come fro'?" the figure demanded sternly.

"Eh?" said Barclay.

"Wheer div ye come fro'? 'Oo are ye? What 's yer name?"

"Barclay o' Far Wrangham," said Barclay unsteadily, going forward on his hands again.

"Ah 've 'eard tell on ye," the figure remarked. "Gan yer ways wi' ye. Yon 's yer road. Come, be movin'."

For some moments Barclay rocked silently on his all fours, as though thinking deeply.

"Which way div ah want to be?" he commenced again, after awhile, and there being no immediate response, embraced the opportunity for a little slumber.

Having slumbered pleasantly for a space on his hands and knees without interruption, his head swaying in circles close to the grass as though he were browsing, he awoke of a sudden, under consciousness that he had received no response to this question, and working the muzzle of his hat diligently in all directions about him, found to his surprise that he was alone.

The discovery troubled him, first of all, so that he muttered darkly in his throat like distant thunder. Then the brewing turned to sparkles, and he laughed deliciously on the grass, rolling over on to his back, and sprawling with limbs in air as though he were a celestial baby, brought up from the bottle of pure bliss. Lastly, his mind darkened to anger, and he rose to all fours, roaring defiance after his departed enemy. It took him some time to find his hat after this, which had rolled away from him during his Elysian laughter, but his knee trod on it at last, and the moments expended in its discovery were doubled in his efforts to apply it to his head.

A dozen times he clapped it down, sideways forward, and the same number it rolled off him, and had to be resought.

Last of all: "Nay, ah weean't be pestered wi' ye!" he cried indignantly. "Gen ye can't be'ave yersen proper, an' stay where ye 're put, ye 'll 'a to gan."

And "gan" it did, sure enough, into the hedge bottom.

"Lig [lie] there, ye ill-mannered brute!" he shouted after it, and filled with righteous wrath, picked up the waggon-rope and staggered to his feet for departure.

"Come up wi' ye, ye lazy divvles!" he cried at his legs, that, through their long inactivity, betrayed a certain tendency to let him down. "Div ye 'ear? 'Od up [Hold up]. Dom yer eyes ... if ye weean't do better ah 'll walk o' my knees an' shame ye."

"Gum! it 's tonnin cold," he decided, after some progress.

"Ah nivver knowed it ton so cold of a neet this time o' year," he added, a while later.

And a short way further up the road:

"Gum ... bud ah feel it i' my yed [head] strangelins!" he declared, and putting up an inquisitive hand to learn the cause of it, was blankly amazed to discover himself hatless.

"Well! of all ... bud that 's a caution!" he said, and stopped as dead as his legs would let him. "Well ... it 's no use seekin' after spilt milk. Noo ah s'll 'a to mek best on it."

The best of it he made forthwith; and to compensate for this frigidity of head he put such warmth of pace into his advancement that at times—with his head a body's length in front of his feet, and his feet churning in the rear like twin-screws—his progress was considerable. To have stopped under a road's length would have been to fall as flat as a pancake. Nothing short of the most gradual arrest could preserve his equilibrium, and as the easiest solution of the problem was not to stop at all, he forged ahead till the wind whistled on either side of his ears. And this constant freshness, combined with the exposed state of his head, so sobered and revivified him that, by the time he was passing through familiar Ullbrig, he already knew what houses were which, and who lived in them; the day of the week; how long he had been absent; and was commencing, in common with the history of all these nocturnal or matutinal returns, to see the evil of drink, and speak openly of wine as a mocker.

Moodily pursuing this well-trodden path of his conversion, he slammed his way through the gates, one after another, and passed Dixon's sleeping farm-stead with a covetous eye upon its moonlit windows.

"Ay, you 've not slipped fi' pun [five pounds] doon yer belly this 'arvest-time, Jan Dixon," he reflected, as he turned his back to the scrambling white house, so calm and self-contemplative in the moonlight, and cut across towards the cliff. All his loquaciousness leaked out of him now, in sight of the goal which he had been three days aiming at and missed up to the present, and he tramped along with the impersonal passivity of a cow being driven to market; untroubled as to fate, and almost thoughtless. The sea shook the cliff, as he walked, with seismic shivers, and boomed noisily in his ears; but he 'd known it off and on now for forty years, and minded it—particularly at such moments as this—as little as the buzzing of his own eight-day clock. Of a sudden, however, the sea-surge bore up a sound to him—a small, shrill, penetrating sound, that pierced his passivity to its vital marrow, and caused him to throw up his head, with a gaping mouth to all quarters of the compass about him, for the sound's location. He was sufficiently sober by this time to realise how very drunk he had been, and in the desolating flatness of life's Sahara—lacking any pleasant green oases of illusion—that he was laboriously traversing now, he knew the sound to have been produced by real, living, human lips; for his own brain was far too stagnant to create fancies. Therefore he eased the wain-rope to the ground, and holding up his open mouth to the sky, as though it were an ear-trumpet, he listened for a repetition of this discordant note in Nature.

And again it came: small, faint, embosomed in the roaring surge, but cutting as a diamond.

This time he had no doubt. It came from over the cliff, and had the despairing ring of death and danger in it, that not even returning prodigals like Barclay can by any means mistake, though they 'd gone away with twenty pounds in their pockets instead of five. And bellowing response at the top of his lungs, he ran to the cliff edge.

"A-a-a-a-ay! 'Ello! Noo wi' ye! What 's amiss?" he cried, and dropping on hands and knees, thrust his head recklessly over the brink of it.

And again the cry rang out from almost straight below him—shriller and more terribly charged this time with the agony of animated hope.

"Lord Almighty!" said Barclay; "it 's a lass."

CHAPTER XLIII

To this day the tale of that eventful midnight is told in Ullbrig. How Barclay, returning from Hunmouth market, where he had sold three beasts and a score of sheep, and drunk the money, heard Pam's last despairing cries for assistance, beaten out of her by the sea itself. How he ran to the edge of the cliff, and looked over, and saw the two drenched figures sticking to the side of it like wet flies against a pudding basin. How, even while he watched them, the sea boiled up again as though it were milk, and rose bubbling above where they were, and made him shut his eyes with a groan for what he might not see when the milk subsided. How, praise God, they were still there when the water sank down. How he untackled his waggon-rope, shouting courage to them all the while, and made a loop to one end, and hitched the other to the adjacent stile-post, and cast the slip-knot down the cliff. And how, for an age, while he swore at them from above, the girl would not come up before the man; and the man would not come up before the girl. And how, owing to considerations which he did not then know or understand, namely, that the man was powerless to give any help to his own ascent, and the girl feared their rescuer might be unable to haul him unaided—the girl slipped the noose under her shoulders, and struggled and clambered up the cliff-side while Barclay pulled upon her. And how, almost before she was on the top, she had detached the securing loop and thrown it down to the man. And how he had just had time to slip it over his neck and under his shoulders before the next sea came, cursing and swearing because of the loss of them, and seethed up three parts of the cliff, so that the foam of it slashed their faces. And how they felt the rope first slacken and then go dead heavy in their hands, and knew the man was off his feet, and would have been swept away but for their hold upon him. And how they tugged together, the two of them, and how, at certain intervals of progression, the girl had wound the slack rope round the post, against all possible danger of slip or relapse. And how, in the end, the man's face showed above the cliff-brink, and how they had toiled him over; and how the girl had thrown herself beside him, and taken him into her arms, and wiped his streaming face, and called upon him by name, with a hundred solicitations and endearments, and kissed him.

Till, in Barclay's own words: "Ah think theer 's one ower monny on us," he told them.

And the tale, continuing, recounted how these two, Barclay and the girl, made a seat with their hands, and bore the man back to Dixon's between them; and how the man, wringing wet though he was, kept falling asleep on the shoulders of one or other of them, and telling Barclay he was the boy for mushrooms, and he 'd eat them now she 'd given him up. And how they got him home at last, and how Barclay took double handfuls of earth and flung them up at Dixon's window, and how Dixon put his head out first of all, and cried:

"Naay, Barcl'y, man! Naay, naay! Next farm. Ye want to tek more care i' countin' when ye come 'ome this time o' daay."

And would n't believe Barclay's reasons for bringing him down, till Pam joined her voice with his, when he said: "Well! Ah don't know!"—and the whole household stood on its legs that same moment.

And then a mighty fire was roused up in the kitchen, out of the grate's still hot embers, at Miss Bates' blowing, and the blinds were pulled down carefully by Mrs. Dixon, and all extraneous elements—men, and so forth—were unceremoniously banished, and Pam, shivering, crimson-eared, bright-eyed, and hectic—but wildly joyous—let them skin her of her sodden habiliments as though she had been a drowned rabbit, and was rubbed dry with coarse kitchen towels till her white, starved body glowed like a sunset over snow. And Jeff, having been despatched at Pam's instigation to the cliff, and having run all the way there and all the way back, thumped lustily against the outer panels of the kitchen door, and Pam's parcel—looking, oh, so frail and pitiable and shamefaced in its new surroundings—was drawn in by Mrs. Dixon, and its contents bestowed, as the circumstances demanded, upon Pam's own body. And Pam seemed so genuinely overcome with their kindness that all questions of a controversial nature were by one consent avoided; and not a word asked—beyond mere details of the rescue—as to the strange juxtaposition of Pam and her bundle, and Mr. Maurice Ethelbert Wynne, along the cliff at this time of morning. To such degree, indeed, did Pam's own tearful, lip-quivering emotion of gratitude play upon her two ministrants, that they discharged their self-sought duties in a reflected emotion scarcely less profound than the original; giving the girl tear for tear, and quiver for quiver.

And when they had rubbed and towelled her, they dressed her in the same loving, lavish way, and vied with each other in finding articles from their own wardrobe which might fit the girl; and when they had finished with her, they looked upon her completed presentment as proudly as though they 'd actually made her.

And while Pam was being in this way taken to pieces and readjusted and put together again, Barclay and Dixon did the same by the Spawer, upstairs in his own bedroom; and laid him between the blankets with a hot-water bottle at his feet, that was fetched from the kitchen; and Arny harnessed Punch to the spring-cart and drove off for Father Mostyn and the Doctor—not that Father Mostyn's presence seemed called for on any urgent or spiritual grounds, but that Pam knew what a slight he would think had been administered upon his vicarial office, were he to be left one moment uninformed of such an occurrence as this.

And until the arrival of the Doctor, Pam's courage and good hope had never once deserted her. He for whom she would have died gladly twice over was saved from death; but now there were other vague things to fear. And as soon as she heard the ominous rattle of the spring-cart's return, that well-known clear-cut voice of the ecclesiast, and the sharp, Scotch, businesslike tones of the Doctor—as direct and straight to their purpose as a macadamised road ... she quailed, and her fortitude left her. It seemed as though the whole atmosphere were charged at once with electrical dangers at lightning-point.

She sat with her face plunged in her hands, by the side of the roaring kitchen fire, not daring to rise, or move, or go out to meet these awful newcomers, lest her movement might precipitate the danger. All her hearing was drawn out from her like wire, insupportably fine, to the doors of that dread bed-chamber. Sounds near at hand, the roaring of the fire, the fall of cinders, the subdued babel of downstairs voices, had no existence for her. Her hearing, as though it had been a telescope, was aimed above them to some distant star, and missed these terrestrial obstacles by miles and miles—but every sound from the far landing, every whisper, every turning of the handle, every creak of the bedroom floor-boarding, was magnified a hundredfold. To support such auricular sensitiveness it felt she needed the strength of a hundred bodies, instead of that poor tortured one.

But at last, lifting her face from her hands with the blanched cheek of high tension for the very worst, she heard the tread of general exodus; the resonant "Ha!" of Father Mostyn, and the Doctor's little sharp-tongued, Scotch-terrier voice, giving out its reassurance to the applicants at the staircase foot.

"Na doot he 's had a narra squeak, an' ah 'm no goin' to say he 's oot o' the wood yet," she heard him tell them. "His back will have had a nasty twist, an' there 's some concussion, but there 's naethin' broken, and no dislocation. Na, na, he 's no sae bad. Shock 's the worrst o' 't. Dinna mek yerselves onhappy, he 'll mend verra nicely. Oh, he 'll mend fine!"

And going on beneath the Doctor's voice like an organ pipe, to support and sustain and enrich it with ecclesiastical authority, was the voice of his Reverence.

"Ha! No doubt about it. Concussion. That 's the mischief. But nothing broken. No fractures or dislocation. No injury to the clavicle, or more important still, to the dorsal vertebra. It's purely a case of shock. Keep him well wrapped up in blankets, get some hot brandy and water for him, and see that the bottle is n't allowed to grow cold. Ha! that's the way. Beautiful! beautiful! We 'll soon bring him round again."

And the tale, as it is told, goes on to tell how in Dixon's kitchen that morning—for day was breaking now—Pam made long confession of something to his Reverence the Vicar. Nobody in Ullbrig knows for sure what that confession was, except the Doctor, who did not share the Dixons' delicacy in withdrawing, but sat in Dixon's chair on the other side of the fire, with his steaming toddy glass—compounded out of the sleeping man's decanter—and stirred the fire with the poker when it needed it, and was heard quite plainly to level his voice on such direct interrogation as:

"But ye hae not explained ... so-and-so."

Or, "He may thank his guid stairs ye were there to hear-r-r! But hoo cam ye by the cliff at midnight?"

But as Pam would have told him freely anything about her body if illness had required it, and as she could trust him like Father Mostyn's second self, it would have been cruelly, distrustfully invidious to divide her carnal and spiritual confidences on this occasion with so fine a line; and since the Doctor felt no compunction in their acceptance, Pam felt quite tranquil in their bestowal. To these two men she told the history of her past few days, shielding everybody save herself; how she had come to love the Spawer, and how he had told her of his departure; and how she had wept on her bed; and how she had feared facing him that morning, lest she might weep betrayal of herself, and of a love she had no right to let him see, or trouble him with; and how, while she was trying to gain time for her terror, he came on her before she was aware; and how she had plunged the letter into her pocket; and how she had taken it back with her, not daring to deliver it after that ... and how ... and how...

Here, in her desire to screen the guilty partner of her trouble, her nervous narrative seemed all plucked to pieces. Her words, indeed, were less for the purpose of telling than for the purpose of stopping their own lips from asking.

"... And so ... he said he wanted me ... and he said he loved me.... I know he loved me, because he 'd told me so before. Only then.... And after that...."

But the Doctor, comfortably ensconced in Dixon's fireside chair, with its red chintz cushion in the small of his back, and half a steaming tumblerful of toddy inside him, was in no mood to be put off with such ambiguous verbal impressionism.

"Stop, stop, stop!" said he, holding up an arrestive toddy-tumbler at her. "I haena got the sense o' that. What d' ye say happened to the letter?"

"Oh ... I cannot ... I cannot," Pam said, the tendons of her narrative relaxing suddenly as though never could they be brought to bear her over this part of the history. But in the end, with point-blank questions from the Doctor, and gentle leading-words from the Vicar, Pam passed over that rocking bridge of all that had happened—only, every admission made against the man's interest was coupled with a pleader for his great love of her. And she imparted to them, with a face glorified, how that, when nothing seemed sure but death, the Spawer had told her his other attachment was broken. and had confessed his love of her all the time, and she had poured out her love of him ... and ... and they knew the rest.

"Ay, it 's a very quairr complaint, this love!" the Doctor reflected, pulling out his pipe, "... an' harrd to diagnose. Ye never can tell. Ye never can tell. But losh! ah thocht ye were clean gyte when ah hairrd ye were goin' ta marry yon fellow!"

But Father Mostyn was n't astonished in the least; waltzed gravely on his feet with a superior, restrained tightness about the corners of his mouth, and a far-away sparkle in his keen grey eyes, as of one to whom revelation is no new thing.

"Beautiful! beautiful!" he mused, when Pam had finished, and was looking with a timid, sub-radiant eagerness from one to the other. "There 'll be a scandal, of course. That 's the proper penalty for not having confided your trouble into the care of Holy Church." Here the Doctor made a savage thrust with the poker through the gratebars, and stirred and stirred up the red coals till they glowed to incandescence. "But better late than never. Leave it to me. Leave it to me, dear child. Our spiritual Mother never yet turned away from any supplicant that sought her with true faith and humility. We 'll do our best for you. Of course, the business is not so bad as it would be if it had been unexpected. But fortunately, we 've been prepared for it. No mistaking the symptoms."

And the tale, as Ullbrig will tell it to you to this day, goes on to relate how Pam would not return to the Post Office, but took up her post as nurse by the Spawer's bedside, and could hardly endure to let a bite pass her lips thereafter, for her care of him, till he made the mend.

And that same morning, news traveled to Ullbrig that the schoolmaster had been found, roaming and raving like a madman, in the neighborhood of Prestnorth—where a married cousin of his was living—and was in bed now at her house, with brain fever. Not likely to get better, the rumor said, but therein it proved false, for a fortnight later he resigned the mastership of Ullbrig School, and wrote, at the same time, to Miss Morland, requesting that his effects might be despatched to him by carrier as soon as she could conveniently find leisure to undertake the commission. Another letter accompanied it, addressed to Pam in his clear Board School script. In proclamation it was a penitential acknowledgment of his sins; in effect it was a cacophonous outburst of reproach, love, despair, and recriminations. She sorrowed for the man and his hard lot—for if he had loved her so torturingly it was no fault of his own, but he had taught her to fear him, and sympathy can never truly subsist in the same bosom where fear is.

There were those in Ullbrig at first, as Father Mostyn had predicted, who, with their sharp tongues, whittled the affair to a fine point of scandal; those who considered the schoolmaster an ill-used man, and Pam a conscienceless hussy who had jilted him under circumstances that would not too well bear the stress of investigation; those who whispered; and those who nodded their chins with compressed lips of meaning. But they had the melancholy dissatisfaction of fearing, each one in his own heart, that these things might not after all be true. Before such a man as Barclay it would never have been politic to repeat this primitive creed at any time. A champion of Pam's from the beginning—when he cried reproof upon them for their uncharitableness towards the child—he was doubly her champion now; strode up and down over the district like a mighty sower, spreading seed of her heroism broadcast from both his hands. And so it came to be that the real history of the girl burst its early grain of scandal, as though it had been sprouting wheat, and sent up its produce into the clear blue heaven of truth. To-day, when Ullbrig tells you of that Monday midnight, it only gathers breath of proud inflation to breathe how one of its daughters—by name Pam—went down the cliff for the man she loved, and how Barclay saved them both.

CHAPTER XLIV

But for Pam and the Spawer, the true tale of their history only began after the terrible events that give Pam her place among the heroines of the district. They used its remembrance as a steel on which to sharpen the blades of their present bliss, but it was not an inherent part of their story. That commenced when the horror of this was over; when the Spawer woke up finally, with a lasting wakefulness, on his bed, and saw Pam, and smiled.

Ah! What a beautiful opening chapter that was—full of a golden tremulousness on the girl's side, as of timid sunlight peeping through the curtains of a May morning when a great day is in the balance. For there had crept into the girl's heart while she watched him a strange little dark bird, that fluttered ... and was still, and fluttered again ... and again was still, gathering its strength and grew, and was fledged and flew up—almost into the clear skies of her reason, though not quite—and sang plaintive melodies to her; among others, that the man she thought of as Maurice had made love to her in his madness; that he was not free; that he had never loved her; that she was only tending him back to consciousness for the cruel happiness of finding that his consciousness on the intellectual side meant unconsciousness on the emotional; that he would remember nothing of his delirious words, and that his love had been but the outcome of bodily weakness. Last of all, she grew to dread his waking for the news it might tell her. When he stirred ... she closed her eyes momentarily, with swift apprehension of the worst. When he lay a long while still, she prayed he might wake promptly and put her out of her misery.

For it was become a long misery of suspense. All her happiness was laid aside like fine raiment; she dared not look at it or think of it; her heart made ready to wear mourning. And oh, the anguish of that moment, when at last—while her swift blood turned suddenly turbid in her veins, and the very breath in her lungs curdled thick to suffocation—he came out of his sleep, and his eyes opened incomprehendingly upon her ... and she, drawn back in apprehension, with her hands clasped up to her lip ... met his gaze, and knew not how to respond to it.

And then that glorious burst of certainty when recognition woke in him wanly and illuminated him like pale glad sunlight, and he struggled to free his arms of their coverings, and held them out to her ... and she had gone into them like a dove descending ... and put her own red, moist lips to his dry ones ... and kissed his lingering soul back to life and happiness.

Ah! To have lived that one brief moment, as Pam lived it, was to have lived a lifetime abundantly. Now indeed that she knew he loved her for certain, and had had the true sign and seal of it, she was ready to die forthwith, if need were. It was enough to have held his love once in her own soul's keeping, as a child treasures the moment's confidence of some precious breakable vase. Pam was not greedy. She would have been quite content with no more.

But Heaven was kinder to this dear terrestrial angel than that, and filled every moment of her days henceforth with gladnesses as great, and greater. At times she wanted to get right away from everywhere and everybody; Heaven seemed to keep her plate replenished with celestial meats quicker than her soul could consume them. She wanted to dally with the taste of them, and extract their last nutritive juices of virtue. But she ... well, she was only human, after all, and said grace, and ate what was set before her.

In a way, Pam's prayer was almost of gratitude and rejoicing that her love had been given to her in this hour of his weakness. While he lay there, helpless upon his bed, following her mutely with his eyes, the fact of his belonging to her seemed set forth and glorified to an extent almost apocalyptic. In image he was a little child, dependent upon her breasts for subsistence. Every moment furnished her with opportunities for feeding him with the living love that flowed in her own body. Oh, truly, truly, he seemed hers when she nourished him thus back to life with her ceaseless attentions; with caresses; with sudden fondlings—such as only his helplessness could have made possible; with a thousand ministrations thoughtful and divine. Her thoughts were always of him; her every movement showed him plainly as the motive power. All the love of him that had been gathering in the stillness of her soul flowed out towards him now in a great psychic stream—as warm and broad as a beam of sunlight. From her fingers when they touched him; from her lips when they rested on him; from her attitude when she turned towards him—flowed this constant current of love, love, love. Like a very planet was the life of Maurice Ethelbert Wynne in these days—a luminous orb swimming in pure ether of love. The love of a true, good woman is great and wonderful, but the love of this girl was so great and so wonderful that in the strong tide of it the Spawer lay half incredulous on his bed and blinked. It was no love of laughter; no love of jingling words; no love of triflings or pretty affectations. It was a strong, tense, electric current of unselfish feminine devotion that set the very atmosphere a-quiver. When she came near him he could almost hear it humming æolian music, as though he had laid his flat cheek to a telegraph post.

And in a way, too, he was glad to be thus helpless on his back, for the glory of being cradled in such a love, and learning his love all over again, like an infant its alphabet, from the lips and looks and actions; the dear, large-hearted ABC Primer of Pam. Her very love of him, issuing towards him from every pore of her body, fertilised the girl's own beauty, like the sap in the lush hedgerows at spring. Her soft, velvet eyes, that had been dark enough and deep enough before, darkened and deepened for the accommodation of this love till they were beyond all plumb of mortal gaze. Her lips, that had been red enough and tender, colored now to a deeper, clearer carmine, with little pools of love visible lurking in the corners of them; love that stirred and eddied when she spoke, and settled down again into their ruby hollows when the lips reposed. Her lashes, that had been black enough, and long enough, and thick enough, lengthened almost under sight of the man; grew black as ebony and so thick that when she looked upon him from above, they lay in unbroken flatness upon her cheek. And her freckles too—those dear little golden minstrels on the bridge of her nose and brow—grew more purely golden, till at times almost they gleamed like minute bright insets of the precious metal itself, and sang love like a cluster of caged linnets. At whiles, when the Spawer looked at her, such a proud and tearful tenderness floated into him that had he been another woman, sure he must have wept. Her confidence in him; her self-sacrifice; her unceasing devotion; her countless ministrations—frightened him for what his own conduct must be ever to repay them.

"Little woman..." he was moved to tell her, during that first day of his convalescence, "... do you know ... I think I don't ever want to get out of bed or on my legs again."

Pam was plainly alarmed, for it seemed to her he had suddenly caught the desire of death which comes at times to those whose days are numbered. But he made haste to reassure her.

"I just feel..." he explained to her, "... as though I could wish to lie here, like this, for ever and ever and ever, with you by me to look at and make me happy. Kiss me again, Pam, will you? It does me good."

Then Pam stooped over him, as she was always doing, and slipped her linked fingers under his neck, and looked into his face first, and kissed him (praying for him the while, though he did not know that), and buried her face by his, and lifted it to look at him once more, and kissed him again. For who was there now to lay a forbidding hand between their lips? Who should stop her now from telling him she loved him, loved him, loved him?

CHAPTER XLV

And rapidly the Spawer drew back, from its intricate shadowy by-paths, to the great broad highway of Life.

How it would have fared with him but for that revitalising power of love, if there had been no Pam to cling to and sustain him, no man can positively say. The lonely Maurice Ethelbert Wynne of our latter chapters, void of hope or happiness or aim, might have turned up his hands and sunk under the deep sea without a struggle. But Pam was hands and eyes, and feet and lips, and thinker for them both.

Emma Morland brought the letters round in these early days, but Pam opened them, at the Spawer's express bidding, and read them to him aloud in her musical fluty voice—the voice that had won her a place in his heart before even he had set eyes upon her. And as she read, the Spawer, sitting in the big chair by the open sunlit window, with cushions under him of Pam's placing, would explain to her the various allusions; let her into his life; throw open all its gateways to the girl. In the inmost shelter of his soul he felt as though he needed the comfort of Pam's companionship.

"Nixey" stood for So-and-So, he would explain to her; and "Jack" was the brother of So-and-So—the fellow that did this and that and the other that he 'd told her about, did n't she remember?

And did n't Pam remember? Oh, my Heaven! Pam remembered. Not a word he ever said to her that she forgot.

Then, if there were any letters to answer, Pam would seat herself at the table, with his writing-case thrown open, and dip deft fingers here, for envelopes; and deft fingers there, for paper; and draw forth the pen, and wield it as though armed for the fray; and would spear the ink-pot with it, and wait upon his words with a persuasive "Yes, dear?"

And the Spawer would make prodigious pretensions of thinking, and not a word come to him sometimes, because of the girl's face. His mind held up its thought as an obstinate cow does milk, and never a drop could he squeeze from it. All he could think of was Pam.

"Oh, bother the letters!" he would tell her. "They stop my thinking about you. Why must I pawn my attention to a horrid old business screed when I want never to take it from you?"

"Don't you?" says Pam gladly, and melts over him with her smile, wrapping him up in such a heavenly mantle of indulgence and love and devotion that he almost feels himself among the saints.

And oh! the joyousness of that return to the outer life, when Pam led the Spawer out at last, she carrying a cushion and a little net-bag of literary food (a French reader and the like); and they betook themselves to the harvest-field, and sat down under the blue sky in the stubble, with their backs against the golden stocks, and watched the elevated figure of Arny riding over the sea of waving corn, like another Neptune, turning off the wheat from the tip with rhythmic sweeps of his trident; his eyes steadfast upon the tumbling crest of corn beside him; and they contemplated the busy shirt-sleeves of the band-makers, pulling out their two thin wisps of straw from the recumbent "shawves," splicing them dexterously, and twisting them—across their chests and under their arm-pits, till their arms flap like the wings of a crowing rooster—into a stout-stranded band, that they lay out in the stubble alongside the flat heaps of fallen grain; and they watched the harvestmen following, who rake up the loose corn into a round bundle against the flat of their leg, walk with it, so clipped, to the ready-made band, depose it there, stoop, gather the two ends of the band in their strong hands, squeeze the sheaf in with the knee, bind it, make a securing tuck with the straw, and taking up the trim-waisted shock by its plaited girdle, cast it aside out of the path of the reaper on its next round.

And then, when "lowance" time was proclaimed, this stock where Maurice and his Pamela were seated would be made the headquarters of the repast. Here would come the welcome brown basket, and the carpet bag with its bottlenecks protruding; the blue mugs and the tin pannikins; the cheese and the bread; the pasties and the sweet cakes; the tea and the beer. And here would come Dixon's genial voice, greeting them from afar:

"Noo then, Mr. Wynne! 'Ow div ye fin' yersen ti morn? Very comfortable, bi t' looks of ye. Ye 're in good 'ands, it seems."

And when the Spawer grows equal to it, it becomes a daily obligation for them to wander across the intervening stubble and pasture to Barclay's farm—where the sails of his reaper can be seen churning the blue sky above the hedge level, like the paddle of a steamer—just to give Barclay's stocks a turn, and show themselves not forgetful of their deliverer. The time comes, of course, when they must cease thanking him with their lips, but Pam's mere gaze upon him is a gratitude, and Barclay would have missed it, if she failed him one day, as he would miss his pipe or his "lowance."

"Ah," said he, on a certain occasion, looking over with a manifest nice eye of critical observation, and finding no fault, "If ah 'd 'ad a lass like you to tek me at start, ah mud 'a been a better man, an' a richer."

"But there are others," Pam told him encouragingly, "... besides me."

"Ay," Barclay cut in, with a grim humor. "There is. Ower monny, lass. Bud they 'd 'ave to be good uns after ah 've 'ad you to sample. Ah would n't tek onny rubbish noo, an' it 'd 'ave to be rubbishin' stuff 'at 'd tek me. Ah 'm ower well known 'ereabouts. 'Appen ah mud get chance wi' next farm if ah change."

But the seed of resolution germinated in Pam's breast, and some days later, getting Barclay to herself, it pushed its pure blades through the warm soil all suddenly.

"... Oh, Mr. Barclay," she begged him, going close under his broad chest, and showing the peeping hands of petition. "You won't be angry with me ... please?"

"Nay, that ah weean't," Barclay protested staunchly. "Oot wi' it! What 'ave ah been doin' noo?"

"I want to ask you something," Pam continued, a little more softly, and a little more rapidly. "... Something very particular. I want you to promise something."

"Ay," said Barclay assentively. "Ah can promise ye, lass. Ah can promise onnybody, so far as that gans. But it's keepin' of it 'at's not i' mah line."

"If you promise me ... you 'll keep it," Pam insinuated very softly, but with an almost irresistible forcefulness.

"Ah 'm none so sure," Barclay reflected. "Ah know what ye want to ask me."

"What?" said Pam.

"Ye want to ask me to gie it up."

"Yes," said Pam, after a pause, "I do."

"Ah 've tried ... lots o' times," Barclay admitted.

"But not for me!" Pam urged. "Not for the sake of anybody. Oh, Mr. Barclay ... you don't know how unhappy I 've been at times about you, of late ... to think that you 've saved my life—and his life—and put this happiness in our way ... and all the time you 're not taking any care of your own life ... at all."

"Why, lass," Barclay told her, but visibly troubled about the eyes by her solicitude. "Ah 'm sorry ye 've let me be a trouble to ye. Ah 've been nowt bud trouble to missen an' ivverybody. But where would ye be? ... an 'im too, if ah 'd kep' pledge sin' last time ah signed 'er? Eh?"

"I know; I know," Pam admitted. "I 've thought of that, too."

"Ay," Barclay took up, pleased with her admission. "It's a caution when ye come to think on it. If ah 'ad n't been mekkin' a swill-tub o' missen, an' walked back when ah did—it 'd 'a been good-by to ye, an' long live teetawtallers. It just seems as though Lord 'ad called me to Oommuth for t' puppos—though ah did n't know it at time. An' 'ow am ah to know, if 'E calls o' me ageenn, same road ... 'at 'E 'as n't seummut else 'E 's wantin' doin'? Eh noo?"

"Perhaps..." Pam suggested pleadingly, "... perhaps it was n't God that called you, Mr. Barclay ... but it was God that sent you back. Don't you think it might be that?"

"Noo, ah sewd n't wonder," Barclay decided, with obvious admiration for the girl's ingenuity. "But it 'll be a rum un for me to know which way 'E wants me to gan ... or which end 'E 's at."

"... And you 'll promise me, won't you?" Pam besought him, and took hold of his watch-chain. "You 'll promise me to fight your very best ... for my sake."

"Ay," said Barclay, after a pause. "Ah can bud try."

"You 'll try hard, though?" Pam adjured him—finding too much fatalism in the tone of his promise for her satisfaction.

"No.... when ah say ah 'll try, ah mean ah 'll try!" Barclay reassured her. "Ah s'll try my very best for t' sake of 'oo asked me."

And Father Mostyn and the Doctor are constant attendants upon the Spawer's recovery too, and stay for meals whenever they want them; and tell him when the whiskey flask is running low.

And it comes to be decided that their marriage shall not take place for a year. And meanwhile the Spawer is going to stay where he is; and Pam is to push on with her music, and her French, and with her English, and fill her dear little head with the intellectual fare for which it has always hungered. And she is to do no more letter-carrying. Father Mostyn has inhibited her from that with an ex cathedra usage of the great signet. To remain at the Post Office in an official capacity in face of present circumstances would be an act of rebellion towards the Church, and exceedingly offensive to Jehovah. As the girl's spiritual and corporeal guardian, he charges himself with her care until she can be decently and respectably married. And they will go, all three of them, to Hunmouth at times, by Tankard's 'bus (oh, bliss! oh, heavenly rapture!) for purposes of shopping ... and the sheer pleasure of it.

And the Spawer talks seriously of coming back to Ullbrig after the honeymoon, and fitting up a little place for their own two selves, where they can be near Father Mostyn, and all their old friends; and where he can work earnestly, and without distractions; and where they can escape all the jealousies and soul-corrupting ambitions of towns and places where they "live."

"Oh, little woman!" he tells Pam, "I can't bear to think of your giving up your own dear self, and letting your soul be shaped to the conventional pattern of the world. I want you to be what you are—and for what I love you. You shall see all the big places, of course, dear. We 'll save up our coppers and manage that somehow. But let 's see 'em from the outside. Let 's go and look at them through glass windows, as though they were so many great shops, and come back to our own humble happy life, and break bread and be thankful. The world for us, dear, is just our two selves. We 're two little human hemispheres that go to make our one globe, and if we 're only happy in ourselves ... why, let the other planets go hang! Because you love me I just feel I don't care how many people hate me. They can hate their heads off. They can cry 'pish' to my music. They can turn aside their faces when I go by, as though I were a pestilence. What I do I want to do now for you. I feel I would rather write a little song that pleases you, love, than compose a Beethoven symphony for the world to bow to. And why? Because, dearest, I know that the world is as ready to kick me as to bestow one ha'porth of its kindness ... but You! All the pleasure I can give to you ... is just an investment, which you can pay back to me in love at a thousand per cent."

"Is n't it funny?" says Pam, though without showing the least appreciation of the avowed humor, "... what love is. I 've thought the same as you, too, but not put so beautifully. I just want us to try and be like what we are now, in our hearts, as long as we live. At times (do you?) I like to think of you as belonging to me ... as though you were every bit mine. And at other times ... I feel frightened of having you. The responsibility seems somehow too great. And then I just think of myself as belonging to you. And all I want ... is to creep into your heart, dear, and for you to shelter me. Oh, Maurice! To think. Six months ago ... three months ago ... I had no thought of you, or you of me! And we might never have met each other; never have loved each other! Is n't it dreadful?"

"What the eye does n't see, darling!" Maurice tells her, "... the heart does n't grieve. What we never know we never miss. But now we 're going to make up for what might have been, are n't we?"

Pam says yes, they are. "And oh," she says, "if you had n't found me you might have found somebody else, Morrie dear, do you think it possible that I may be standing in the way of somebody you don't know at all ... that you might love better?"

"Very likely you are, dear!" Maurice says, acting Job's comforter. "But anyway, I 'm ready to risk you, and take my chance of what may be for what is."

And this time Pam is ready to risk it too, and does not tell the Spawer, as once she told Ginger:

"There must be no chance in love!"

CHAPTER XLVI

One bright morning in late September, when the sky dreamed as blue as June, and the sun shone August, a stranger passed through into the churchyard by the lich gate, and his Reverence the Vicar, having received telepathic intimation of his presence, along one or other of the invisible slender filaments that connect the Vicarage with the churchyard, emerged shortly from his retreat, like a fine full-bodied spider, and captured his prize by the side wicket, with a "Ha!" of agreeable greeting.

"A stranger within our gates!" he observed, in courteous surprise, rocking to and fro upon his legs in the pathway, and balancing the ebony staff across both palms, as though he were weighing theological propositions. He encompassed the sky with a comprehensive circle of ferrule, and thrusting up a rapt nose to appreciation of its beneficent blue, "You bring glorious weather!" he said.

The stranger acknowledged with marked politeness that the weather was as his Reverence had been pleased to state. He was an elderly man, soberly habited in black, and a compression of mouth that seemed to betoken one whose office exacted of him either deference or discretion, or perhaps both.

"A pilgrim to the old heathen centre of Ullbrig?" his Reverence inquired. "... An antiquarian at all? A connoisseur of tablets? or a rubber of brasses?—in which case we 've nothing to show you."

The stranger said he was not exactly any of these things.

"Ha! ... an epitaph hunter, perhaps?" his Reverence substituted agreeably, as though desirous of setting him at ease.

Nor scarcely an epitaph hunter ... in the precise sense of the word, the stranger disclaimed. He scanned Father Mostyn sideways with a deferential regard of inquiry. "The Vicar, I presume?" he said.

His Reverence acknowledged the appellation by inclining leniently towards it.

"I thought ... I could not be mistaken," the stranger told him. "As a matter of fact ... I had intended taking the liberty of troubling you with a call, after giving a glance round the gravestones here. It is possible, if you would be so kind, that you might be of considerable assistance to ... to me in a matter of some importance."

Father Mostyn wagged the divining rod sagely over his palms.

"A question of the register? Births? Deaths? Marriages? A pedigree in the issue, perhaps?"

"To a certain extent, sir, you are quite correct." The stranger compressed his mouth for a moment. "I may as well be explicit on the point. Indeed, there is no reason, sir, why any particular secrecy should be maintained. I am here to pursue investigations on behalf of Messrs. Smettering, Keelman & Drabwell, solicitors, of Lincoln's Inn, who are acting according to instructions received from a client of some importance. Our object is merely to trace and establish connection with a member of our client's family—considerably to this member's advantage, I may assure you."

His Reverence looked speculatively over the stick as though the last few sentences had escaped his precise observation, and he were trying now to reclaim the import of them.

"... A military family at all?" he inquired.

The stranger eyed him with respectful surprise and dubiety for a moment.

"... An old family of importance," he admitted slowly. "I should say it might be called a military family." Then he stopped. "Perhaps..." said he, and looked at his Reverence.

"Ha!" said his Reverence blandly. "And the present client? An army man, is he?"

"The son of one, I believe, sir."

"To be sure. Precisely. The son of one. Beautiful! beautiful! One or two fat benefices in the family, do you know?"

"I rather fancy ... there is one attached to the estate. There may be more, for anything to my knowledge." The stranger followed the lead with the resignation of one who plays void of trumps. "If you know anything..." he hazarded.

His Reverence stroked a gorgeous nose of wisdom.

"No mistaking the symptoms. Not a bit of it. Your client seeks recovery of a daughter?"

The stranger demonstrated as much surprise as his discretion and his respectfulness would let him.

"You can inform us ... where she is?"

"Certainly! certainly! We have been expecting you. I thought you would n't be long in reaching us now. To-morrow ... or Thursday, I thought." His Reverence cast a fine finger of effect towards the white headstone, rising from the grass, beneath the east window. "She is there."

"Dead?" said the stranger.

"Your client is just a little matter of thirteen years too late."

"Her married name was Searle?" said the stranger, as though offering the fact for the priest's verification.

"To be sure. On the gravestone. On the gravestone. 'Sacred to the memory of Mary Pamela Searle.' And her father's name, of course, was..."

"... Paunceforth, since you know it, sir, ... of Briskham Park, Hampshire."

"He will be getting an old man," said his Reverence.

"Seventy-four ... or five," the stranger responded, "... and very feeble. He has had one seizure already, and is anxious to make amends, before he dies, for an act of early severity. At one stage of the proceedings there was a child involved. A daughter. Is she still living? If you can give me any information likely to lead to her recovery, I may tell you that expense will be no object at all. No stone is to be left unturned, by our client's instructions, to trace matters to their final step. And I may add that ... as this is now the last surviving branch of our client's family ... and he is a gentleman of considerable wealth..."

"Exactly," said his Reverence. "I think it will not be difficult to conclude matters to your client's entire satisfaction. His granddaughter has been, and still is, under my safe care.... Just come along with me as far as the Vicarage. There are a few things there in my possession. ... Beautiful! beautiful! Quite an Indian summer we 're having."

And that same day, before dinner, the news is racing all over Ullbrig that Pam's grandfather had sought for her and found her; and that she is to be a real lady at last, and ride horses, and drive carriages, and order servants of her own, and live in a great big house in a great big park, where deer are grazing and peacocks stalk the terraces, and will never come back to Ullbrig any more, but give them all the go-by now, and set her nose up higher than ever; and the Spawer is only marrying her for her money.

Steggison says to himself with a Satanic joy:

"Noo all s'll get a chance at post-bag. She promised me ah sewd 'ave fost try at it if owt 'appened 'er. Mah wod! Bud ah 'll gie 'em James Maskell an' all. They 'll 'a t' run when ah call of 'em—ne'er mind if they weean't!"

And James Maskill stands forlornly with his back propped against the post-house bricks, and a heel hitched up to the wall beneath him, and his hands in his pockets, and his mouth screwed to a spiritless whistle that can't produce the ghost of a sound; staring at nothing, and thinking of nothing; and feeling nothing—for life in front of him is nothing now, and he would n't have the heart to fetch Dingwall Jackson his promised bat across the lug, even if you caught him and held his head up for the purpose.

And Emma Morland is bursting with pride, and weeping with the misery of losing Pam—for this fashionable interment of Pam in the classic vaults of High Society fills her with a more terrible sense of their severance than a little green grave in Ullbrig churchyard.

And the postmaster makes an impressive chief mourner, standing by the counter with set face and lowered eyes as though it were a coffin, and telling his daughter, when she comes hither to embarrass him with her demonstrations of grief:

"It 's all for t' best, lass no doot. We s'll larn to get ower it i' time."

And Mrs. Morland, her mingled gladness and sorrow commingling to reminiscence, tells, through fond tears, how Pam did this, and Pam did that; and how she 'd always thought of others before herself; and what a strange sad house it would be without her—and wept herself into perspirations, and wiped her tears and her steaming forehead with large double sweeps of her apron. And Ginger went off his food again—for though she 'd never been his, at each new name with which hers was coupled, he felt once more as though he 'd just lost her.

And Pam went dancing up to Cliff Wrangham that day, hugging his Reverence's arm—as sad as any of them, and so joyful that it seemed not earth she trod on, but the big round prismatic blown bubble of a dream, shivering warningly, all ready to puff into nothing and let her down into nowhere. And when they came to Dixon's, Pam went into the little parlor, and looked at the Spawer, and said, "Oh, Morrie!" in a doleful voice of preparation. For, to tell the truth, though she was come here intended to play a little comedy on him, with a triumphant dénouement, her own conviction in things actual (including, for the time, their own happiness) had been so surprisingly shaken that, despite her errand's being presumably of gladness, she looked, as she looked at him, for all the world as though she had seen a ghost.

"Good gracious, darling!" said the Spawer, in concern, when he saw her. "Whatever 's been happening now?"

"Oh, Maurice!" said Pam again, trying hard to win back assurance that he and she were not two mere unsubstantial figments of somebody else's dream, but flesh and blood, and dear and bend to each other. "I 've something to tell you, dear—I mean, to ask you, dear. Do you love me?"

"Do I love you?" repeats the Spawer, with a look of incredulous surprise, and a tinge, in his tones, of severity. "What a remarkable question to ask a man—and at such short notice! Really, Miss Searle ... I must confess you surprise me."

"Oh, but do you, do you?" begs Pam.

"Well, it 's dreadfully, horribly sudden," says Maurice. "And you put me quite in a flutter. But since you 're rather an attractive girl ... well, yes, I do."

"Oh, but suppose ... suppose..." says Pam, going on....

"Yes, little riddle-me-ree?"

"Suppose ... suppose I was n't what you 've always thought me. Suppose it were found that ... I was n't a lady at all. Suppose I was somebody altogether different from what Father Mostyn said I was."

Sundry speculative shadows rise up in the Spawer's mind, but he is not dismayed, and feels no flinching.

"Well?" says he encouragingly. "And suppose you were?"

"Would it make no difference?" Pam asks tremulously, it must be confessed, for oh ... if now it should!

"Darling," says the Spawer firmly, "not the least little bit."

Pam wants then and there to clasp his avowal and proclaim her mission. Her soul has scarcely strength for further dissimulation, but for the full crop of joy that she hopes to reap in the end, she keeps her hand to the plough.

"Would you want to marry me ... just the same?" she asks.

"More!" says Maurice Ethelbert. "A hundred times more."

"Why more?" Pam inquires vaguely; her curiosity suddenly fanned to seek the reason of this strange great increase in his affection for her.

"Because," the Spawer tells her, "the less you are to the world, dear, the more you must be to me. The less claim the world can make upon you, the more I feel I 've got you all to myself."

"You would still marry me, under any conditions?" persists Pam.

"Under any and all."

"And you won't let me go?"

"I won't let you go."

"Whatever people say?"

"Whatever people say."

"You 'll hold me as tight ... as you held me when we thought we were going to die ... that night."

"Tighter, darling, tighter."

"Even if..."

"If what?"

"... I should turn out ... just a bit of a lady, after all, dear?"

The Spawer is going to answer, but he stops suddenly, lifts up the girl's face, and looks straight into her eyes.

"Pam!" says he.

THE END