The Ship of Stars/Part 2

 

XV
TAFFY'S APPRENTICESHIP

They could manage the carpentering now. And Jacky Pascoe, who, in addition to his other trades, was something of a glazier, had taken the damaged east window in hand. For six months it had remained boarded up, darkening the chancel. Mr. Raymond removed the boards and fixed them up again on the outside, and the Bryanite worked behind them night after night. He could only be spied upon through two lancet windows at the west end of the church, and these they curtained.

But what continually bothered them was their ignorance of iron-work. Staples, rivets, hinges were for ever wanted. At length, one evening, toward the end of March, the Bryanite laid down his tools.

"Tell 'ee what 'tis, Parson. You must send the boy to someone that'll teach en smithy-work. There's no sense in this cold hammering."

"Wheelwright Hocken holds his shop and cottage from the Squire."

"Why not put the boy to Mendarva the Smith, over to Benny Beneath? He's a first-rate workman."

"That is more than six miles away."

"No matter for that. There's Joll's Farm close by; Farmer Joll would board and lodge en for nine shillings a week, and glad of the chance; and he could come home for Sundays."

Mr. Raymond, as soon as he reached home, sat down and wrote a letter to Mendarva the Smith and another to Farmer Joll. Within a week the bargains were struck, and it was settled that Taffy should go at once.

"I may be calling before long, to look you up," said the Bryanite, "but mind you do no more than nod when you see me."

Joll's Farm lay somewhere near Carwithiel, across the moor where Taffy had gone fishing with George and Honoria. On the Monday morning when he stepped through the white front gate, with his bag on his shoulder, and paused for a good look at the building, it seemed to him a very comfortable farmstead, and vastly superior to the tumble-down farms around Nannizabuloe. The flagged path, which led up to the front door between great bunches of purple honesty, was swept as clean as a dairy.

A dark-haired maid opened the door and led him to the great kitchen at the back. Hams wrapped in paper hung from the rafters, and strings of onions. The pans over the fire-place were bright as mirrors, and through the open window he heard the voices of children at play as well as the clacking of poultry in the town-place.

"I'll go and tell the mistress," said the maid; but she paused at the door. "I suppose you don't remember me, now?"

"No," said Taffy truthfully.

"My name's Lizzie Pezzack. You was with the young lady, that day, when she bought my doll. I mind you quite well. But I put my hair up last Easter, and that makes a difference."

"Why, you were only a child!"

"I was seventeen last week. And—I say, do you know the Bryanite, over to St. Ann's—Preacher Jacky Pascoe?"

He nodded, remembering the caution given him.

"I got salvation off him. Master and mis'-ess they've got salvation too; but they take it very quiet. They're very fond of one another; if you please one, you'll please 'em both. They let me walk over to prayer-meetin' once a week. But I don't go by Mendarva's shop— that's where you work—though 'tis the shortest way; because there's a woman buried in the road there, with a stake through her, and I'm a terrible coward for ghosts."

She paused as if expecting him to say something; but Taffy was staring at a "neck" of corn, elaborately plaited, which hung above the mantel-shelf. And just then Mrs. Joll entered the kitchen.

Taffy—without any reason—had expected to see a middle-aged housewife. But Mrs. Joll was hardly over thirty; a shapely woman, with a plain, pleasant face and auburn hair, the wealth of which she concealed by wearing it drawn straight back from the forehead and plaited in the severest coil behind. She shook hands.

"You'll like a drink of milk before I show you your room?"

Taffy was grateful for the milk. While he drank it, the voices of the children outside rose suddenly to shouts of laughter.

"That will be their father come home," said Mrs. Joll, and going to the side door called to him. "John, put the children down! Mr. Raymond's son is here."

Mr. Joll, who had been galloping round the farmyard with a small girl of three on his back, and a boy of six tugging at his coat-tails, pulled up, and wiped his good-natured face.

"Kindly welcome," said he, coming forward and shaking hands, while the two children stared at Taffy.

After a minute the boy said, "My name's Bob. Come and play horses, too."

Farmer Joll looked at Taffy with a shyness that was comic. "Shall we?"

"Mr. Raymond will be tired enough already," his wife suggested.

"Not a bit," declared Taffy; and hoisting Bob on his back, he set off furiously prancing after the farmer.

By dinner-time he and the family were fast friends, and after dinner the farmer took him off to be introduced to Mendarva the Smith.

Mendarva's forge stood on a triangle of turf beside the high-road, where a cart-track branched off to descend to Joll's Farm in the valley. And Mendarva was a dark giant of a man with a beard like those you see on the statues of Nineveh. On Sundays he parted his beard carefully and tied the ends with little bows of scarlet ribbon; but on week days it curled at will over his mighty chest. He had one assistant whom he called "the Dane"; a red-haired youth as tall as himself and straighter from the waist down. Mendarva's knees had come together with years of poising and swinging his great hammer.

"He's little, but he'll grow," said he, after eyeing Taffy up and down. "Dane, come fore and tell me if we'll make a workman of en."

The Dane stepped forward and passed his hands over the boy's shoulders and down his ribs. "He's slight, but he'll fill out. Good pair o' shoulders. Give's hold o' your hand, my son."

Taffy obeyed; not very well liking to be handled thus like a prize bullock.

"Hand like a lady's. Tidy wrist, though. He'll do, master."

So Taffy was passed, given a leathern apron, and set to his first task of keeping the forge-fire raked and the bellows going, while the hammers took up the music he was to listen to for a year to come.

This music kept the day merry; and beyond the window along the bright high-road there was usually something worth seeing— farm-carts, jowters' carts, the doctor and his gig, pedlars and Johnny-fortnights, the miller's waggons from the valley-bottom below Joll's Farm, and on Tuesdays and Fridays the market-van going and returning. Mendarva knew or speculated upon everybody, and with half the passers-by broke off work and gave the time of day, leaning on his hammer. But down at the farm all was strangely quiet, in spite of the children's voices; and at night the quietness positively kept him awake, listening to the pur-r of the pigeons in their cote against the house-wall, thinking of his grandmother awake at home and harkening to the tick-tack of her tall clock. Often when he awoke to the early summer daybreak and saw through his attic-window the grey shadows of the sheep still and long on the slope above the farmstead, his ear was wanting something, asking for something; for the murmur of the sea never reached this inland valley. And he would lie and long for the chirruping of the two children in the next room and the drawing of bolts and clatter of milk-pails below stairs.

He had plenty to eat, and that plenty simple and good, and clean linen to sleep between. The kitchen was his except on Saturday nights, when Mrs. Joll and Lizzie tubbed the children there, and then he would carry his books off to the best parlour or stroll around the farm with Mr. Joll and discuss the stock. There were no loose rails in Mr. Joll's gates, no farm implements lying out in the weather to rust. Mr. Joll worked early and late, and his shoulders had a tell-tale stoop—for he was a man in the prime of life, perhaps some five years older than his wife.

One Saturday evening he unburdened his heart to Taffy. It happened at the end of the hay-harvest, and the two were leaning over a gate discussing the yet unthatched rick.

"What I say is," declared the farmer quite in-consequently, "a man must be able to lay his troubles 'pon the Lord. I don't mean his work, but his troubles; and go home and shut the door and be happy with his wife and children. Now, I tell you that for months—iss, years—after Bob was born I kept plaguing myself in the fields, thinking that some harm might have happened to the child. Why, I used to make an excuse and creep home, and then if I see'd a blind pulled down you wouldn't think how my heart'd go thump; and I'd stand wi' my head on the door-hapse an' say, 'If so be the Lord have took'n, I must go and comfort Susan—not my will, but Thine, Lord— but, Lord, don't 'ee be cruel this time!' And then find the cheeld right as ninepence and the blind only pulled down to keep the sun off the carpet. After a while my wife guessed what was wrong—I used to make up such poor twiddling pretences. She said, 'Look here, the Lord and me'll see after Bob; and if you can't keep to your own work without poking your nose into ours, then I married for worse and not for better.' Then it came upon me that by leaving the Lord to look after my job I'd been treating Him like a farm labourer. It's the things you can't help he looks after—not the work."

A few evenings later there came a knock at the door, and Lizzie, who went to open it, returned with the Bryanite skipping behind her.

"Blessings be upon this here house!" he cried, cutting a sort of double shuffle on the threshold. He shook hands with the farmer and his wife, and nodded toward Taffy. "So you've got Parson Raymond's boy here!"

"Yes," said Mrs. Joll; and turned to Taffy. "He've come to pray a bit: perhaps you would rather be in the parlour?"

Taffy asked to be allowed to stay; and presently Mr. Pascoe had them all down on their knees. He began by invoking God's protection on the household; but his prayer soon ceased to be a prayer. It broke into ejaculations of praise—"Friends, I be too happy to ask for anything—Glory, glory! The blood! The precious blood! O deliverance! O streams of redemption running!" The farmer and his wife began to chime in—"Hallelujah!" "Glory!" and Lizzie Pezzack to sob. Taffy, kneeling before a kitchen chair, peeped between his palms, and saw her shoulders heaving.

The Bryanite sprang to his feet, overturning the settle with a crash. "Tid'n no use. I must skip! Who'll dance wi' me?"

He held out his hands to Mrs. Joll. She took them, and skipped once shamefacedly. Lizzie, with flaming cheeks, pushed her aside. "Leave me try, mis'ess; I shall die if I don't." She caught the preacher's hands, and the two leapt about the kitchen. "I can dance higher than mis'ess!" Farmer Joll looked on with a dazed face. "Hallelujah!" "Amen!" he said at intervals, quite mechanically. The pair stood under the bacon rack and began to whirl like dervishes—hands clasped, toes together, bodies leaning back and almost rigid. They whirled until Taffy's brain whirled with them.

With a louder sob Lizzie let go her hold and tottered back into a chair, laughing hysterically. The Bryanite leaned against the table, panting.

There was a long pause. Mrs. Joll took a napkin from the dresser and fell to fanning the girl's face, then to slapping it briskly. "Get up and lay the table," she commanded; "the preacher'll stay to supper."

"Thank 'ee, ma'am, I don't care if I do," said he; and ten minutes later they were all seated at supper and discussing the fall in wheat in the most matter-of-fact voices. Only their faces twitched now and again.

"I hear you had the preacher down to Joll's last night," said Mendarva the Smith. "What'st think of en?"

"I can't make him out," was Taffy's colourless but truthful answer.

"He's a bellows of a man. I do hear he's heating up th' old Squire Moyle's soul to knack an angel out of en. He'll find that a job and a half. You mark my words, there'll be Dover over in your parish one o' these days."

During work-hours Mendarva bestowed most of his talk on Taffy. The Dane seldom opened his lips except to join in the anvil chorus—

Here goes one—
⁠Sing, sing, Johnny!
Here goes two—
⁠Sing, Johnny, sing!
Whack'n till he's red,
Whack'n till he's dead,
⁠And whop! goes the widow with
⁠A brand new ring!

And when the boy took a hammer and joined in he fell silent. Taffy soon observed that a singular friendship knit these two men, who were both unmarried. Mendarva had been a famous wrestler in his day, and his great ambition now was to train the other to win the County belt. Often after work the pair would try a hitch together on the triangle of turf, with Taffy for stickler, Mendarva illustrating and explaining, the Dane nodding seriously whenever he understood, but never answering a word. Afterwards the boy recalled these bouts very vividly—the clear evening sky, the shoulders of the two big men shining against the level sun as they gripped and swayed, their long shadows on the grass under which (as he remembered) the poor self-murdered woman lay buried.

He thought of her at night, sometimes, as he worked alone at the forge; for Mendarva allowed him the keys and use of the smithy overtime, in consideration of a small payment for coal. And then he blew his fire and hammered, with a couple of candles on the bench and a Homer between them; and beat the long hexameters into his memory. The incongruity of it never struck him. He was going to be a great man, and somehow this was going to be the way. These scraps of iron—these tools of his forging—were to grow into the arms and shield of Achilles. In its own time would come the magic moment, the shield find its true circumference and swing to the balance of his arm, proof and complete.

en d etithei thotamoio mega stheuos okeanoio
antuga pad pumatev sakeos puka poietoi…

XVI
LIZZIE AND HONORIA

His apprenticeship lasted a year and six months, and all this while he lived with the Jolls, walking home every Sunday morning and returning every Sunday night, rain or shine. He carried his deftness of hand into his new trade, and it was Mendarva who begged and obtained an extension of the time agreed on, "Rather than lose the boy I'll tache en for love." So Taffy stayed on for another six months.

He was now in his seventeenth year—a boy no longer. One evening, as he blew up his smithy fire, the glow of it fell on the form of a woman standing just outside the window and watching him. He had no silly fears of ghosts: but the thought of the buried woman flashed across his mind and he dropped his pincers with a clatter.

"’Tis only me," said the woman. "You needn't to be afeard." And he saw it was the girl Lizzie.

She stepped inside the forge and seated herself on the Dane's anvil.

"I was walking back from prayer-meeting," she said. "’Tis nigher this way, but I don't ever dare to come. Might, I dessay, if I'd somebody to see me home."

"Ghosts?" asked Taffy, picking up the pincers and thrusting the bar back into the hot cinders.

"I dunno: I gets frightened o' the very shadows on the road sometimes. I suppose, now, you never walks out that way?"

"Which way?"

"Why, towards where your home is. That's the way I comes."

"No, I don't." Taffy blew at the cinders until they glowed again. "It's only on Sundays I go over there."

"That's a pity," said Lizzie candidly. "I'm kept in, Sunday evenings, to look after the children while farmer and mis'ess goes to Chapel. That's the agreement I came 'pon."

Taffy nodded.

"It would be nice now, wouldn't it——" She broke off, clasping her knees and staring at the blaze.

"What would be nice?"

Lizzie laughed confusedly. "Aw, you make me say't. I can't abear any of the young men up to the Chapel. If me and you——"

Taffy ceased blowing. The fire died down, and in the darkness he could hear her breathing hard.

"They're so rough," she went on, "and t'other night I met young Squire Vyell riding along the road, and he stopped me and wanted to kiss me."

"George Vyell? Surely he didn't?" Taffy blew up the fire again.

"Iss he did. I don't see why not, neither."

"Why he shouldn't kiss you?"

"Why he shouldn't want to."

Taffy frowned, carried the white hot bar to his anvil, and began to hammer. He despised girls, as a rule, and their ways. Decidedly Lizzie annoyed him; and yet as he worked he could not help glancing at her now and then, as she sat and watched him. By-and-by he saw that her eyes were full of tears.

"What's the matter?" he asked abruptly.

"I—I can't walk home alone. I'm afeard!"

He tossed his hammer aside, raked out the fire, and reached his coat off its peg. As he swung round in the darkness to put it on, he blundered against Lizzie or Lizzie blundered against him. She clutched at him nervously.

"Clumsy! can't you see the doorway?"

She passed out, and he followed and locked the door. As they crossed the turf to the high-road, she slipped her arm into his. "I feel safe, that way. Let it stay, co!" After a few paces, she added, "You're different from the others—that's why I like you."

"How?"

"I dunno; but you be diff'rent. You don't think about girls, for one thing."

Taffy did not answer. He felt angry, ashamed, uncomfortable. He did not turn once to look at her face, dimly visible by the light of the young moon—the hunter's moon—now sinking over the slope of the hill. Thick dust—too thick for the heavy dew to lay—covered the cart-track down to the farm, muffling their footsteps. Lizzie paused by the gate.

"Best go in separate," she said; paused again and whispered, "You may if you like."

"May do what?"

"What—what young Squire Vyell wanted."

They were face to face now. She held up her lips, and as she did so they parted in an amorous little laugh. The moonlight was on her face. Taffy bent swiftly and kissed her.

"Oh, you hurt!" With another little laugh she slipped up the garden path and into the house.

Ten minutes later Taffy followed, hating himself.

For the next fortnight he avoided her; and then, late one evening she came again. He was prepared for this, and had locked the door of the smithy and let down the shutter while, he worked. She tapped upon the outside of the shutter with her knuckles.

"Let me in!"

"Can't you leave me alone?" he answered pettishly. "I want to work, and you interrupt."

"I don't want no love-making—I don't indeed. I'll sit quiet as a mouse. But I'm afeard, out here."

"Nonsense!"

"I'm afeard o' the ghost. There's something comin'—let me in, co-o!"

Taffy unlocked the door and held it half opened while he listened.

"Yes, there's somebody coming, on horseback. Now, look here—it's no ghost, and I can't have you about here with people passing. I—I don't want you here at all; so make haste and slip away home, that's a good girl."

Lizzie glided like a shadow into the dark lane as the trample of hoofs drew close, and the rider pulled up beside the door.

"You're working late, I see. Is it too late to make a shoe for Aide-de-camp here?"

It was Honoria. She dismounted and stood at the doorway, holding her horse's bridle.

"No," said Taffy: "that is, if you don't mind the waiting."

With his leathern apron he wiped the Dane's anvil for a seat, while she hitched up Aide-de-camp and stepped into the glow of the forge-fire.

"The hounds took us three miles beyond Carwithiel: and there, just as they lost, Aide-de-camp cast his off-hind shoe. I didn't find it out at first, and now I've had to walk him all the way back. Are you alone here?"

"Yes."

"Who was that I saw leaving as I came up?"

"You saw someone?"

"Yes." She nodded, looking him straight in the face. "It looked like a woman. Who was she?"

"That was Lizzie Pezzack, the girl who sold you her doll, once. She's a servant down at the farm where I lodge."

Honoria said no more for the moment, but seated herself on the Dane's anvil, while Taffy chose a bar of iron and stepped out to examine Aide-de-camp's hoof. He returned and in silence began to blow up the fire.

"I dare say you were astonished to see me," she remarked at length.

"Yes."

"I'm still forbidden to speak to you. The last time I did it, grandfather beat me."

"The old brute!" Taffy nipped the hot iron savagely in his pincers.

"I wonder if he'll do it again. Somehow I don't think he will."

Taffy looked at her. She had drawn herself up, and was smiling. In her close-fitting habit she seemed very slight, yet tall, and a woman grown. He took the bar to the anvil and began to beat it flat. His teeth were shut, and with every blow he said to himself "Brute!"

"That's beautiful," Honoria went on. "I stopped Mendarva the other day, and he told me wonders about you. He says he tried you with a hard-boiled egg, and you swung the hammer and chipped the shell all round without bruising the white a bit. Is that true?"

Taffy nodded.

"And your learning—the Latin and Greek, I mean; do you still go on with it?"

He nodded again, towards a volume of Euripides that lay open on the workbench.

"And the stories you used to tell George and me; do you go on telling them to yourself?"

He was obliged to confess that he never did. She sat for a while watching the sparks as they flew. Then she said, "I should like to hear you tell one again. That one about Aslog and Orm, who ran away by night across the ice-fields and took a boat and came to an island with a house on it, and found a table spread and the fire lit, but no inhabitants anywhere—You remember? It began 'Once upon a time, not far from the city of Drontheim, there lived a rich man——'"

Taffy considered a moment and began "Once upon a time, not far from the city of Drontheim—" He paused, eyed the horse-shoe cooling between the pincers, and shook his head. It was no use. Apollo had been too long in service with Admetus, and the tale would not come.

"At any rate," Honoria persisted, "you can tell me something out of your books: something you have just been reading."

So he began to tell her the story of Ion, and managed well enough in describing the boy and how he ministered before the shrine at Delphi, sweeping the temple and scaring the birds away from the precincts: but when he came to the plot of the play and, looking up, caught Honoria's eyes, it suddenly occurred to him that all the rest of the story was a sensual one, and he could not tell it to her. He blushed, faltered, and finally broke down.

"But it was beautiful," said she, "so far as it went: and it's just what I wanted. I shall remember that boy Ion now, whenever I think of you helping your father in the church at home. If the rest of the story is not nice, I don't want to hear it."

How had she guessed? It was delicious, at any rate, to know that she thought of him; and Taffy felt how delicious it was, while he fitted and hammered the shoe on Aide-de-camp's hoof, she standing by with a candle in either hand, the flame scarcely quivering in the windless night.

When all was done, she raised a foot for him to give her a mount. "Good-night!" she called, shaking the reins. Half a minute later Taffy stood by the door of the forge, listening to the echoes of Aide-de-camp's canter, and the palm of his hand tingled where her foot had rested.

XVII
THE SQUIRE'S WEIRD

He took leave of Mendarva and the Jolls just before Christmas. The smith was unaffectedly sorry to lose him. "But," said he, "the Dane will be entered for the championship next summer, so I s'pose I must look forward to that."

Every one in the Joll household gave him a small present on his leaving. Lizzie's was a New Testament, with her name on the flyleaf, and under it, "Converted April 19, 187-." Taffy did not want the gift, but took it rather than hurt her feelings.

Farmer Joll said, "Well, wish 'ee well! Been pretty comfiable, I hope. Now you'm goin', I don't mind telling 'ee I didn't like your coming a bit. But now 'tis wunnerful to me you've been wi' us less than two year'; we've made such friends."

At home Taffy bought a small forge and set it up in the church at the west end of the north aisle. Mr. Raymond, under his direction, had been purchasing the necessary tools for some months past, and now the main expense was the cost of coal, which pinched them a little. But they managed to keep the fire alight, and the work went forward briskly. Save that he still forbade the parish to lend them the least help, the old Squire had ceased to interfere.

Mr. Raymond's hair was greyer, and Taffy might have observed—but did not—how readily towards the close of a day's laborious carpentry he would drop work and turn to Dindorf's Poetæ Scenici Græci', through which they were reading their way. On Sundays the congregation rarely numbered a dozen. It seemed that, as the end of the Vicar's task drew nearer, so the prospect of filling the church receded and became more shadowy. And if his was a queer plight, Jacky Pascoe's was queerer. The Bryanite continued to come by night and help, but at rarer intervals. He was discomforted in mind, as anyone could see, and at length he took Mr. Raymond aside and made confession.

"I must go away; that's what 'tis. My burden is too great for me to bear."

"Why," said Mr. Raymond, who had grown surprisingly tolerant during the last twelve months, "what cause have you, of all men, to feel dejected? You can set the folk here on fire like flax." He sighed.

"That's azactly the reason—I can set 'em afire with a breath, but I can't hold 'em under. I make 'em too strong for me—and I'm afeard. Parson, dear, it's the gospel truth; for two years I've a been strivin' agen myself, wrastlin' upon my knees, and all to hold this parish in." He mopped his face. "’Tis like fightin' with beasts at Ephesus," he said.

"Do you want to hold them in?"

"I do, and I don't. I've got to try, anyway. Sometimes I tell mysel' 'tis putting a hand to the plough and turning back; and then I reckon I'll go on. But when the time comes I can't. I'm afeard, I tell 'ee." He paused. "I've laid it before the Lord, but He don't seem to help. There's two voices inside o' me. 'Tis a terrible responsibility."

"But the people: what are you afraid of their doing?"

"I don't know. You don't know what a runaway hoss will do, but you're afeared all the same." He sank his voice. "There's wantonness, for one thing—six love-children born in the parish this year, and more coming. They do say that Vashti Clemow destroyed her child. And Old Man Johns—him they found dead on the rocks under the Island—he didn't go there by accident. 'Twas a calm day, too."

As often as not Taffy worked late and blew his forge-fire alone in the church, the tap of his hammer making hollow music in the desolate aisles. He was working thus one windy night in February, when the door rattled open and in walked a totally unexpected visitor—Sir Harry Vyell.

"Good evening! I was riding by and saw your light in the windows dancing up and down. I thought I would hitch up the mare and drop in for a chat. But go on with your work."

Taffy wondered what had brought him so far from his home at that time of night, but asked no questions. And Sir Harry placed a hassock on one of the belfry steps, and taking his seat, watched for a while in silence. He wore his long riding-boots and an overcoat with the collar turned up about a neckcloth less nattily folded than usual.

"I wish," he said at length, "that my boy George was clever like you. You were great friends once—you remember Plymouth, hey? But I dare say you've not seen much of each other lately."

Taffy shook his head.

"George is a bit wild. Oxford might have done something for him; made a man of him, I mean. But he wouldn't go. I believe in wild oats to a certain extent. I have told him from the first he must look after himself and decide for himself. That's my theory. It makes a youngster self-reliant. He goes and comes as he likes. If he comes home late from hunting I ask no questions; I don't wait dinner. Don't you agree with me?"

"I don't know," Taffy answered, wondering why he should be consulted.

"Self-reliance is what a man wants."

"Couldn't he have learnt that at school?"

Sir Harry fidgeted with the riding-crop in his hands. "Well, you see, he's an only son—I dare say it was selfish of me. You don't mind my talking about George?"

Taffy laughed. "I like it. But——"

Sir Harry laughed too, in an embarrassed way. "But you don't suppose I rode over from Carwithiel for that? Well, well! The fact is—one gets foolish as one grows old—George went out hunting this morning, and didn't turn up for dinner. I kept to my rule and dined alone. Nine o'clock came; half-past; no George. At ten Hoskins locked up as usual, and off I went to bed. But I couldn't sleep. After a while it struck me that he might be sleeping here over at Tredinnis; that is, if no accident had happened. No sleep for me until I made sure; so I jumped out, dressed, slipped down to the stables, saddled the mare and rode over. I left the mare by Tredinnis great gates and crept down to Moyle's stables like a housebreaker, looked in through the window, and sure enough there was George's grey in the loose box to the right. So George is sleeping there, and I'm easy in my mind. No doubt you think me an old fool?"

But Taffy was not thinking anything of the sort.

"I couldn't wish better than that. You understand?"

"Not quite."

"He lost his mother early. He wants a woman to look after him, and for him to think about. If he and Honoria would only make up a match.… And Carwithiel would be quite a different house."

Taffy hesitated, with a hand on the forge-bellows.

"I dare say it's news to you, what I'm telling. But it has been in my mind this long while. Why don't you blow up the fire? I bet Miss Honoria has thought of it too: girls are deep. She has a head on her shoulders. I'll warrant she sends half a dozen of my servants packing within a week. As it is, they rob me to a stair. I know it, and I haven't the pluck to interfere."

"What does the old Squire say?" Taffy managed to ask.

"It has never come to saying anything. But I believe he thinks of it, too, when he happens to think of anything but his soul. He'll be pleased; everyone will be pleased. The properties touch, you see."

"I see."

"To tell you the truth, he's failing fast. This religion of his is a symptom: all of his family have taken to it in the end. If he hadn't the constitution of a horse, he'd have been converted ten years before this. What puzzles me is, he's so quiet. You mark my words "—Sir Harry rose, buttoned his coat and shook his riding-crop prophetically—"he's brewing up for something. There'll be the devil of a flare-up before he has done."

It came with the Midsummer bonfires. At nine o'clock on St. John's Eve, Mr. Raymond read prayers in the church. It was his rule to celebrate thus the vigils of all saints in the English calendar and some few Cornish saints besides; and he regularly announced these services on the preceding Sundays: but no parishioner dreamed of attending them.

To-night, as usual, he and Taffy had prayed alone: and the lad was standing after service at the church door, with his surplice on his arm (for he always wore a surplice and read the lessons on these vigils), when the flame of the first bonfire shot up from the headland over Innis village.

Almost on the moment, a flame answered it from the point where the lighthouse stood; and, within ten minutes, the horizon of the towans was cressetted with these beacon-fires: surely (thought Taffy) with many more than usual. And he remembered that Jacky Pascoe had thrown out a hint of a great revival to be held on Baal-fire Night (as he called it).

The night was sultry and all but windless. For once the tormented sands had rest. The flame of the bonfires shone yellow— orange-yellow—and steady. He could see the dark figures of men and women, passing between him and the nearest, on the high wastrel in front of Tredinnis great gates. Their voices reached him in a confused murmur, broken now and then by a child's scream of delight. And yet a hush seemed to hang over sea and land: an expectant hush. For weeks the sky had not rained. Day after day, a dull indigo blue possessed it, deepening with night into duller purple, as if the whole heavens were gathering into one big thundercloud, which menaced but never broke. And in the hush of those nights a listener could almost fancy he heard, between whiles, the rabbits stirring uneasily in their burrows.

By-and-by the bonfire on the wastrel appeared to be giving out sparks of light which blazed independently; yet without decreasing its own volume of flame. The sparks came dancing, nearer and larger: the voices grew more distinct. The revellers had kindled torches and were advancing in procession to visit other bonfires. The torches, too, were supposed to bless the fields they passed across. Small blessing had they ever brought to the barren towans.

The procession rose and sank as it came over the uneven ridges like a fiery snake; topped the nearest ridge and came pouring down past the churchyard wall. At its head danced Lizzie Pezzack, shrieking like a creature possessed, her hair loose and streaming while she whirled her torch. Taffy knew these torches; bundles of canvas steeped in tar and fastened in the middle to a stout stick or piece of chain. Lizzie's was fastened to a chain; and as he watched her uplifted arm swinging the blazing mass he found time to wonder how she escaped setting her hair on fire. Other torch-bearers tossed their arms and shouted as they passed. The smoke was suffocating, and across the patch of quiet graveyard the heat smote on Taffy's face. But in the crowd he saw two figures clearly—Jacky Pascoe and Squire Moyle; and the Bryanite's face was agitated and white in the infernal glare. He had given an arm to the Squire, who was clearly the centre of the procession and tottered forward with jaws working and cavernous eyes.

"He's saved!" a voice shouted.

Others took up the cry. "Saved!" "The Squire's saved!" "Saved to-night—saved to glory!"

The Squire paused, still leaning on the Bryanite's arm. While the procession swayed around him, he gazed across the gate as a man who had lost his bearings. No glint of torchlight reached his cavernous eyes; but the sight of Mr. Raymond's surpliced figure standing behind Taff's shoulder in the full glare seemed to rouse him. He lifted a fist and shook it slowly.

"Com'st along, sir!" urged the Bryanite.

But the Squire stood irresolute, muttering to himself.

"Com'st along, sir!"

"Lev' me be, I tell 'ee!" He laid both hands on the gate and spoke across it to Mr. Raymond, his head nodding while his voice rose.

"D'ee hear what they say? I'm saved. I'm the Squire of this parish, and I'm goin' to Heaven. I make no account of you and your church. Old Satan's the fellow I'm after, and I'm going to have him out o' this parish to-night or my name's not Squire Moyle."

"That's of it, Squire!" "Hunt 'en!" "Out with 'en!"

He turned on the crowd.

"Hunt 'en? Iss fay I will! Come along, boys—back to Tredinnis! No, no"—this to the Bryanite—"we'll go back. I'll show 'ee sport— we'll hunt th' old Divvle by scent and view to-night. I'm Squire Moyle, ain't I? And I've a pack o' hounds, ha'n't I? Back, boys— back, I tell 'ee!"

Lizzie Pezzack swung her torch. "Back—back to Tredinnis!" The crowd took up the cry, "Back to Tredinnis!" The old man shook off the Bryanite's hand, and as the procession wheeled and re-formed itself confusedly, rushed to the head of it, waving his hat—

"Back!—Back to Tredinnis!"

"God help them!" said Mr. Raymond; and taking Taffy by the arm, drew him back into the church.

The shouting died away up the road. For three-quarters of an hour father and son worked in silence. The reddened sky shed its glow gently through the clear glass windows, suffusing the shadows beneath the arched roof. And in the silence the lad wondered what was happening up at Tredinnis.

Jim the Whip took oath afterward that it was no fault of his. He had suspected three of the hounds for a day or two—Chorister, White Boy, and Bellman—and had separated them from the pack. That very evening he had done the same with Rifler, who was chewing at the straw in a queer fashion and seemed quarrelsome. He had said nothing to the Squire, whose temper had been ugly for a week past. He had hoped it was a false alarm—had thought it better to wait, and so on.

The Squire went down to the kennels with a lantern, Jim shivering behind him. They had their horses saddled outside and ready, and the crowd was waiting along the drive and up by the great gates. The Squire saw at a glance that two couples were missing, and in two seconds had their names on his tongue. He was like a madman. He shouted to Jim to open the doors. "Better not, maister!" pleaded Jim. The old man cursed, smote him across the neck with the butt-end of his whip, and unlocked the doors himself. Jim, though half stunned, staggered forward to prevent him, and took another blow, which felled him. He dropped across the threshold of Chorister's kennel; the doors of all opened outwards, and the weight of his body kept this one shut. But he saw the other three hounds run out, saw the Squire turn with a ghastly face, drop the lantern, and run for it as White Boy snapped at his boot. Jim heard the crash of the lantern and the snap of teeth, and with that he fainted off in the darkness. He had cut his forehead against the bars of the big kennel, and when he came to himself one of the hounds was licking his face through the grating.

Men told for years after how the old Squire came galloping up the drive that night, hoof to belly, his chin almost on mare Nonsuch's neck, his face like a man's who hears hell cracking behind him, and of the three dusky hounds which followed (the tale said) with clapping jaws and eyes like coach-lamps.

Down in the quiet church Taffy heard the outcry, and, laying down his plane, looked up and saw that his father had heard it too. Mr. Raymond's mild eyes, shining through his spectacles, asked as plainly as words: "What was that?"

"Listen!"

For a minute—two minutes—they heard nothing more. Then out of the silence broke a rapid, muffled beat of hoofs, and Mr. Raymond clutched Taffy's arm as a yell—a cry not human, or if human, insane—ripped the night as you might rip linen, and fetched them to their feet. Taffy gained the porch first; and just at that moment a black shadow heaved itself on the churchyard wall and came hurling over with a thud——a clatter of dropping stones——then a groan.

Before they could grasp what was happening the old Squire had extricated himself from the fallen mare, and came staggering across the graves.

"Hide me!——"

He came with both arms outstretched, his face turned sideways. Behind him, from the far side of the wall, came sounds—horrible shuffling sounds—and in the dusk they saw the head of one of the hounds above the coping and his forepaws clinging as he strained to heave himself over.

"Off! Keep 'en off!"

They caught him by both hands, dragged him within, and slammed the door.

"Hide me! Hi——!"

The word ended with a thud as he pitched headlong on the slate pavement. Through the barred door the scream of the mare Nonesuch answered it.

XVIII
THE BARRIERS FALL

There were marks of teeth on his right boot, but no marks at all on his body. Fright—or fright following on that evening's frenzy—had killed him.

He was buried three days later, and Mr. Raymond read the service. No rain had fallen, and the blood of the three hounds still stained the gravel dividing the grave from the porch, where the crowd had shot them down.

For a while his death made small difference to the family at the Parsonage. They had fought his enmity and proved it not formidable for brave hearts. But they had scarcely realised their success, and wondered why his death did not affect them more.

About this time Taffy began to carry out a scheme which he and his father had often discussed, but hitherto had found no leisure for— the setting up of wooden crosses on the graves of the drowned sailormen. They had wished for slate, but good slate was expensive and hard to come by, and Taffy had no skill in stone-cutting. Since wood it must be, he resolved to put his best work into it. The names, etc., should be engraved, not painted merely. Some of the pew-fronts in the church had panels elaborately carved in flat and shallow relief—fine Jacobean designs, all of them. He took careful rubbings of their traceries, and set to work to copy them on the face of his crosses.

One afternoon, some three weeks after the Squire's funeral, he happened to return to the house for a tracing which he had forgotten, and found Honoria seated in the kitchen and talking with his father and mother. She was dressed in black, of course, and either this or the solemnity of her visit gave her quite a grown-up look. But, to be sure, she was mistress of Tredinnis now, and a child no longer.

Taffy guessed the meaning of her visit at once. And no doubt this act of formal reconciliation between Tredinnis House and the Parsonage had cost her some nervousness. As Taffy entered his parents stood up and seemed just as awkward as their visitor. "Another time, perhaps," he heard his father say. Honoria rose almost at once, and would not stay to drink tea, though Humility pressed her.

"I suppose," said Taffy next day, looking up from his Virgil, "I suppose Miss Honoria wants to make friends now and help on the restoration?"

Mr. Raymond, who was on his knees fastening a loose hinge in a pew-door, took a screw from between his lips.

"Yes, she proposed that."

"It must be splendid for you, dad!"

"I don't quite see," answered Mr. Raymond, with his head well inside the pew.

Taffy stood up, put his hands in his pockets, and took a turn up and down the aisle.

"Why," said he, coming to a halt, "it means that you have won. It's victory, dad, and I call it glorious!" His lip trembled. He wanted to put a hand on his father's shoulder; but his abominable shyness stood between.

"We won long ago, my boy." And Mr. Raymond wheeled round on his knees, pushed up his spectacles, and quoted the famous lines, very solemnly and slowly:

And not by eastern windows only,
⁠When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!
⁠But westward, look, the land is bright!

"I see," Taffy nodded. "And—I say, that's jolly. Who wrote it?"

"A man I used to see in the streets of Oxford and always turned to stare after: a man with big ugly shaped feet and the face of a god—a young tormented god. Those were days when young men's thoughts tormented them. Taffy," he asked abruptly, "should you like to go to Oxford?"

"Don't, father!" The boy bit his lip to keep back the tears. "Talk of something else—something cheerful. It has been a splendid fight, just splendid! And now it's over I'm almost sorry."

"What is over?"

"Well, I suppose—now that Honoria wants to help—we can hire workmen and have the whole job finished in a month, or two at farthest: and you——"

Mr. Raymond stood up, and leaning against a bench-end, examined the thread of the screw between his fingers.

"That is one way of looking at it, no doubt," he said slowly; "and I hope God will forgive me if I have put my own pride before His service. But a man desires to leave some completed work behind him— something to which people may point and say, 'he did it.' There was my book, now: for years I thought that was to be my work. But God thought otherwise and (to correct my pride, perhaps) chose this task instead. To set a small forsaken country church in order and make it worthy of His presence—that is not the mission I should have chosen. But so be it: I have accepted it. Only, to let others step in at the last and finish even this—I say He must forgive me, but I cannot."

"Your book—you can go back to it and finish it."

"I have burnt it."

"Dad!"

"I burned it. I had to. It was a temptation to me, and until I lifted it from the grate and the flakes crumbled in my hands the surrender was not complete."

Taffy felt a sudden gush of pity. And as he pitied suddenly he understood his father.

"It had to be complete?"

"Either the book or the surrender. My boy"—and in his voice there echoed the aspiration and the despair of the true scholar, who abhors imperfection and incompleteness in a world where nothing is either perfect or complete; "it is different with you. I borrowed you, so to say, for the time. Without you I must have failed; but this was never your work. For myself, I have learnt my lessons; but, please God, you shall be my Solomon and be granted a temple to build."

Taffy had lost his shyness now. He laid a hand on his father's sleeve.

"We will go on then."

"Yes, we will go on."

"And Jacky? Where has he been? I haven't seen him since the Squire died."

Mr. Raymond searched in his coat-pocket and handed over a crumpled letter. It ran:—

Dear friend,—this is to say that you will not see me no more. The dear Lord tells me that I have made a cauch of it. He don't say how, all He says is go and do better somewheres else.

"Seems to me a terrable thing to think Religion can be bad for any man. It have done me such powars of good. The late Moyle esq he was like a dirty pan all the milk turned sour no matter what. Dear friend I pored Praise into him and it come out Prayer and all for him self. But the dear Lord says I was to blame as much as Moyle esq so must do better next time but feel terrable timid.

"My respects to Masr Taffy. Dear friend I done my best I come like Nicodemus by night. Seeming to me when Christians fall out tis over what they pray for. When they praise God forget diff^nses and I cant think where the quaraling comes in and so no more at present from

"Yours resp^ffly

"J. Pascoe."

After supper that night, in the Parsonage kitchen Humility kept rising from her chair, and laying her needlework aside to re-arrange the pans and kettles on the hearth. This restlessness was so unusual that Taffy, seated in the ingle with a book on his knee, had half raised his head to twit her when he felt a hand laid softly on his hair, and looked up into his mother's eyes.

"Taffy, should you like to go to Oxford?"

"Don't, mother!"

"But you can." The tears in her eyes answered his at once. She turned to his father. "Tell him!"

"Yes, my boy, you can go," said Mr. Raymond; "that is, if you can win a scholarship. Your mother and I have been talking it over."

"But——" Taffy began, and could get no further.

"We have money enough—with care," said Mr. Raymond.

But the boy's eyes were on his mother. Her cheeks, usually so pale, were flushed; but she turned her face away and walked slowly back to her chair. "The lace-work," he heard her say: "I have been saving— from the beginning——"

"For this?" He followed and took her hand. With the other she covered her eyes; but nodded.

"O mother—mother!" He knelt and let his brow drop on her lap. She ceased to weep; her palms rested on his bowed head, but now and then her body shook. And but for the ticking of the tall clock there was silence in the room.

It was wonderful; and the wonder of it grew when they recovered themselves and fell to discussing their plans. In spite of his idolatry, Mr. Raymond could not help remembering certain slights which he, a poor miller's son, had undergone at Christ Church. He had chosen Magdalen, which Taffy knew to be the most beautiful of all the colleges; and the news that his name had been entered on the college books for years past gave him a delicious shock. It was now July. He would matriculate in the October term, and in January enter for a demyship. But (the marvels followed so fast on each other's heels) there would be an examination held in ten days' time—actually in ten days' time—a "certificate" examination, Mr. Raymond called it—which would excuse the boy not only the ordinary Matriculation test, but Responsions too. And, in short, Taffy was to pack his box and go.

"But the subjects?"

"You have been reading them and the prescribed books for four months past. And I have had sets of the old papers by me for a guide. Your mathematics are shaky—but I think you should do well enough."

It was now Humility's turn, and the discussion plunged among shirts and collars. Never had evening been so happy; and whether they talked of mathematics or of collars, Taffy could not help observing how from time to time his father's and mother's eyes would meet and say, as plainly as words, "We have done rightly." "Yes, we have done rightly."

And the wonder of it remained next morning, when he awoke to a changed world and took down his books with a new purpose. Already his box had been carried into old Mrs. Venning's room, and his mother and grandmother were busy, the one packing and repacking, the other making a new and important suggestion every minute.

He was to go up alone, and to lodge in Trinity College, where an old friend of Mr. Raymond's, a resident fellow just then abroad and spending his Long Vacation in the Tyrol, had placed his own room at the boy's service.

To see Oxford—to be lodging in college! He had to hug his mother in the midst of her packing.

"You will be going by the Great Western," she said. "You won't be seeing Honiton on your way."

When the great morning came, Mr. Raymond travelled with him in the van to Truro, to see him off. Humility went upstairs to her mother's room, and the two women prayed together—

"They also serve who only stand and wait."

XIX
OXFORD

Know you her secret none can utter?
⁠Hers of the Book, the tripled Crown?

"Eight o'clock, sir!"

Taffy heard the voice speaking above a noise which his dreams confused with the rattle of yesterday's journey. He was still in the train, rushing through the rich levels of Somersetshire. He saw the broad horizon, the cattle at pasture, the bridges and flagged pools flying past the window—and sat up rubbing his eyes. Blenkiron, the scout, stood between him and the morning sunshine emptying a can of water into the tub beside his bed.

Blenkiron wore a white waistcoat and a tie of orange and blue, the colours of the College Servants' Cricket Club. These were signs of the Long Vacation. For the rest his presence would have become an archdeacon; and he guided Taffy's choice of a breakfast with an air which suggested the hand of iron beneath the glove of velvet.

"And begging your pardon, sir, but will you be lunching in?"

Taffy would consult Mr. Blenkiron's convenience.

"The fact is, sir, we've arranged to play Teddy `All this afternoon at Cowley, and the drag starts at one-thirty sharp."

"Then I'll get my lunch out of college," said Taffy, wondering who Teddy Hall might be.

"I thank you, sir. I had, indeed, took the liberty of telling the manciple that you was not a gentleman to give more trouble than you could 'elp. Fried sole, pot of tea, toast, pot of blackberry jam, commons of bread——" Mr. Blenkiron disappeared.

Taffy sprang out of bed and ran to the open window in the next room. The gardens lay below him—smooth turf flanked with a border of gay flowers, flanked on the other side with yews, and beyond the yews with an avenue of limes, and beyond these with tall elms. A straight gravelled walk divided the turf. At the end of it two yews of magnificent spread guarded a great iron gate. Beyond these the chimneys and battlements of Wadham College stood grey against the pale eastern sky, and over them the larks were singing.

So this was Oxford; more beautiful than all his dreams! And since his examination would not begin until to-morrow, he had a whole long day to make acquaintance with her. Half a dozen times he, had to interrupt his dressing to run and gaze out of the window, skipping back when he heard Blenkiron's tread on the staircase. And at breakfast again he must jump up and examine the door. Yes, there was a second door outside—a heavy oak-just as his father had described. What stories had he heard about these oaks! He was handling this one almost idolatrously when Blenkiron appeared suddenly at the head of the stairs. Blenkiron was good enough to explain at some length how the door worked, while Taffy, who did not need his instruction in the least, blushed to the roots of his hair.

For, indeed, it was like first love, this adoration of Oxford; shamefast, shy of its own raptures; so shy, indeed, that when he put on his hat and walked out into the streets he could not pluck up courage to ask his way. Some of the colleges he recognised from his father's description; of one or two he discovered the names by peeping through their gateways and reading the notices pinned up by the porters' lodges, for it never occurred to him that he was free to step inside and ramble through the quadrangles. He wondered where the river lay, and where Magdalen, and where Christ Church. He passed along the Turl and down Brasenose Lane; and at the foot of it, beyond the great chestnut-tree leaning over Exeter wall, the vision of noble square, the dome of the Radcliffe, and St. Mary's spire caught his breath and held him gasping. His feet took him by the gate of Brasenose and across the High. On the farther pavement he halted, round-eyed, held at gaze by the beauty of the Virgin's porch, with the creeper drooping like a veil over its twisted pillars.

High up, white pigeons wheeled round the spire or fluttered from niche to niche, and a queer fancy took him that they were the souls of the carved saints up there, talking to one another above the city's traffic. At length he withdrew his eyes, and reading the name "Oriel Street" on an angle of the wall above him, passed down a narrow by-lane in search of further wonders.

The clocks were striking three when, after regaining the High and lunching at a pastrycook's, Taffy turned down into St. Aldates and recognised Tom Tower ahead of him. The great gates were closed. Through the open wicket he had a glimpse of green turf and an idle fountain; and while he peered in, a jolly-looking porter stepped out of the lodge for a breath of air and nodded in the friendliest manner.

"You can walk through if you want to. Were you looking for anyone?"

"No," said Taffy, and explained proudly, "My father used to be at Christ Church."

The porter seemed interested. "What name?" he asked.

"Raymond."

"That must have been before my time. I suppose you'll be wanting to see the Cathedral. That's the door—right opposite."

Taffy thanked him and walked across the great empty quadrangle. Within the Cathedral the organ was sounding and pausing, and from time to time a boy's voice broke in upon the music like a flute, the pure treble rising to the roof as though it were the very voice of the building, and every pillar sustained its petition, "Lord have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law!" Neither organist nor chorister was visible, and Taffy tiptoed along the aisles in dread of disturbing them. For the moment this voice adoring in the noble building expressed to him the completest, the most perfect thing in life. All his own boyish handiwork, remember, under his father's eye had been guided toward the worship of God.

"… And incline our hearts to keep this law." The music ceased. He heard the organist speaking, up in the loft; criticising, no doubt: and it reminded him somehow of the small sounds of home and his mother moving about her housework in the hush between breakfast and noon.

He stepped out into the sunlight again, and wandering through archway and cloister found himself at length beyond the college walls and at the junction of two avenues of elms, between the trunks of which shone the acres of a noble meadow, level and green. The avenues ran at a right angle, east and south; the one old, with trees of magnificent girth, the other new and interset with poplars.

Taffy stood irresolute. One of these avenues, he felt sure, must lead to the river; but which?

Two old gentlemen stepped out from the wicket of the Meadow Buildings, and passed him, talking together. The taller—a lean man, with a stoop—was clearly a clergyman. The other wore cap and gown, and Taffy remarked, as he went by, that his cap was of velvet; and also that he walked with his arms crossed just above the wrists, his right hand clutching his left cuff, and his left hand his right cuff, his elbows hugged close to his sides.

After a few paces the clergyman paused, said something to his companion, and the two turned back towards the boy.

"Were you wanting to know your way?"

"I was looking for the river," Taffy answered. He was thinking that he had never in his life seen a face so full of goodness.

"Then this is your first visit to Oxford? Suppose, now, you come with us? and we will take you by the river and tell you the names of the barges. There is not much else to see, I'm afraid, in Vacation time."

He glanced at his companion in the velvet cap, who drew down an extraordinary bushy pair of eyebrows (yet he, too, had a beautiful face) and seemed to come out of a dream.

"So much the better, boy, if you come up to Oxford to worship false gods."

Taffy was taken aback.

"Eight false gods in little blue caps, seated in a trough and tugging at eight poles; and all to discover if they can get from Putney to Mortlake sooner than eight others in little blue caps of a lighter shade. What do they do at Mortlake when they get there in such a hurry? Eh, boy?"

"I—I'm sure I don't know," stammered Taffy.

The clergyman broke out laughing, and turned to him. "Are you going to tell us your name?"

"Raymond, sir. My father used to be at Christ Church."

"What? Are you Sam Raymond's son?"

"You knew my father?"

"A very little. I was his senior by a year or two. But I know something about him." He turned to the other. "Let me introduce the son of a man after your own heart—of a man fighting for God in the wilds, and building an altar there with his own hands and by the lamp of sacrifice."

"But how do you know all this?" cried Taffy.

"Oh," the old clergyman smiled, "we are not so ignorant up here as you suppose."

They walked by the river bank, and there Taffy saw the college barges and was told the name of each. Also he saw a racing eight go by: it belonged to the Vacation Rowing Club. From the barges they turned aside and followed the windings of the Cherwell. The clergyman did most of the talking; but now and then the old gentleman in the velvet cap interposed a question about the church at home, its architecture, the materials it was built of, and so forth; or about Taffy's own work, his carpentry, his apprenticeship with Mendarva the Smith. And to all these questions the boy found himself replying with an ease which astonished him.

Suddenly the old clergyman said, "There is your College!"

And unperceived by Taffy a pair of kindly eyes watched his own as they met the first vision of that lovely tower rising above the trees and (so like a thing of life it seemed) lifting its pinnacles exultantly into the blue heaven.

"Well?"

All three had come to a halt. The boy turned, blushing furiously.

"This is the best of all, sir."

"Boy," said old Velvet-cap, "do you know the meaning of 'edification'? There stands your lesson for four years to come, if you can learn it in that time. Do you think it easy? Come and see how it has been learnt by men who have spent their lives face to face with it."

They crossed the street by Magdalen bridge, and passed under Pugin's gateway, by the Chapel door and into the famous cloisters. All was quiet here; so quiet that even the voices of the sparrows chattering in the ivy seemed but a part of the silence. The shadow of the great tower fell across the grass.

"This is how one generation read the lesson. Come and see how another, and a later, read it."

A narrow passage led them out of gloom into sudden sunlight; and the sunlight spread itself on fair grass-plots and gravelled walks, flower-beds and the pale yellow facade of a block of buildings in the classical style, stately and elegant, with a colonnade which only needed a few promenading figures in laced coats and tie-wigs to complete the agreeable picture.

"What do you make of that?"

As a matter of fact Taffy's thoughts had run back to the theatre at Plymouth with its sudden changes of scenery. And he stood for a moment while he collected them.

"It's different: I mean," he added, feeling that this was intolerably lame, "it means something different; I cannot tell what."

"It means the difference between godly fear and civil ease, between a house of prayer and one of no prayer. It spells the moral change which came over this University when religion, the spring and source of collegiate life, was discarded. The cloisters behind you were built for men who walked with God."

"But why," objected Taffy, plucking up courage, "couldn't they do that in the sunlight?"

Velvet-cap opened his mouth. The boy felt he was going to be denounced; when a merry laugh from the old clergyman averted the storm.

"Be content," he said to his companion; "we are Gothic enough in Oxford nowadays. And the lad is right too. There was hope even for eighteenth-century Magdalen while its buildings looked on sunlight and on that tower. You and the rest of us lay too much stress on prayer. The lesson of that tower (with all deference to your amazing discernment and equally amazing whims) is not prayer, but praise. And when all men unite to worship God, it'll be praise, not prayer, that brings them together.

Praise is devotion fit for noble minds
The differing world's agreeing sacrifice.

"Oh, if you're going to fling quotations from a tapster's son at my head.… Let me see … how does it go on?… Where—something or other—different faiths—

Where Heaven divided faiths united finds.…

And in a moment the pair were in hot pursuit after the quotation, tripping each other up like two schoolboys at a game. Taffy never forgot the final stanza, the last line of which they recovered exactly in the middle of the street, Velvet-cap standing between two tram-lines, right in the path of an advancing car, while he declaimed—

"By penitence when we ourselves forsake,
'Tis but in wise design on piteous Heaven;
In praise—

(The gesture was magnificent)

In praise we nobly give what God may take,
And are without a beggar's blush forgiven.

—Confound these trams!

The old clergyman shook hands with Taffy in some haste. "And when you reach home give my respects to your father. Stay, you don't know my name. Here is my card, or you'll forget it."

"Mine, too," said Velvet-cap.

Taffy stood staring after them as they walked off down the lane which skirts the Botanical Gardens. The names on the two cards were famous ones, as even he knew. He walked back toward Trinity a proud and happy boy. Half-way up Queen's Lane, finding himself between blank walls, with nobody in sight, he even skipped.

XX
TAFFY GIVES A PROMISE

The postman halted by the foot-bridge and blew his horn. The sound sent the rabbits scampering into their burrows; and just as they began to pop out again, Taffy came charging across the slope. Whereupon they drew back their noses in disgust, and to avoid the sand scattered by his toes.

The postman held up a blue envelope and waved it. "Here, 'tis come, at last!"

"It may not be good news," said Taffy, clutching it, and then turning it over in his hand.

"Well, that's true. And till you open it, it won't be any news at all."

"I wanted mother to be first to know."

"Oh, very well—only, as you say, it mightn't be good news."

"If it's bad news, I want to be alone. But why should they trouble to write?"

"True again. I s'pose now you're sure it is from them?"

"I can tell by the seal."

"Take it home, then," said the postman. "Only if you think 'tis for the sake of a twiddling sixteen shilling a week that I traipse all these miles every day——"

Taffy fingered the seal. "If you would really like to know——"

"Don't 'ee mention it. Not on any account." He waved his hand magnanimously and trudged off toward Tredinnis.

Taffy waited until he disappeared behind the first sand-hill, and broke the seal. A slip of parchment lay inside the envelope.

"This is to certify—"

He had passed! He pulled off his cap and waved it round his head. And once more the rabbits popped back into their burrows.

Toot—toot—toot!—It was that diabolical postman. He had fetched a circuit round the sand-hill, and was peeping round the north side of it and grinning as he blew his horn.

Taffy set off running, and never stopped until he reached the Parsonage and burst into the kitchen. "Mother—It's all right! I've passed!"

*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*

Somebody was knocking at the door. Taffy jumped up from his knees, and Humility made the lap of her apron smooth.

"May I come in?" asked Honoria, and pushed the door open. She stepped into the middle of the kitchen and dropped Taffy an elaborate courtesy. "A thousand congratulations, sir!"

"Why, how did you know?"

"Well, I met the postman; and I looked in through the window before knocking."

Taffy bit his lip. "People seem to be taking a deal of interest in us all of a sudden," he said to his mother.

Humility looked distressed, uncomfortable. Honoria ignored the snub. "I am starting for Carwithiel to-day," she said, "for a week's visit, and thought I would look in—after hearing what the postman told me— and pay my compliments."

She talked for a minute or two on matters of no importance, asked after old Mrs. Venning's health, and left, turning at the door and giving Humility a cheerful little nod.

"Taffy, you ought not to have spoken so." Humility's eyes were tearful.

Taffy's conscience was already accusing him. He snatched up his cap and ran out.

"Miss Honoria!"

She did not turn.

"Miss Honoria—I am sorry!" He overtook her, but she turned her face away. "Forgive me!"

She halted, and after a moment looked him in the eyes. He saw then that she had been crying.

"The first time I came to see you he whipped me," she said slowly.

"I am sorry; indeed I am."

"Taffy——"

"Miss Honoria."

"I said—Taffy."

"Honoria, then."

"Do you know what it is to feel lonely here?"

Taffy remembered the afternoons when he had roamed the sand-hills longing for George's company. "Why, yes," said he; "it used to be always lonely."

"I think we have been the loneliest children in the whole world—you and I and George—only George didn't feel it the same way. And now it's coming to an end with you. You are going up to Oxford, and soon you will have heaps of friends. Can you not understand? Suppose there were two prisoners, alone in the same prison, but shut in different cells, and one heard that the other's release had come. He would feel—would he not?—that now he was going to be lonelier than ever. And yet he might be glad of the other's liberty, and if the chance were given, might be the happier for shaking hands with the other and wishing him joy."

Taffy had never heard her speak at all like this.

"But you are going to Carwithiel, and George is famous company."

"I am going over to Carwithiel because I hate Tredinnis. I hate every stone of it, and will sell the place as soon as ever I come of age. And George is the best fellow in the world. Some day I shall marry him (Oh, it is all arranged!), and we shall live at Carwithiel and be quite happy; for I like him, and he likes people to be happy. And we shall talk of you. Being out of the world ourselves, we shall talk of you, and the great things you are going to do, and the great things you are doing. We shall say to each other, 'It's all very well for the world to be proud of him, but we have the best right, for we grew up with him and know the stories he used to tell us; and when the time came for his going, it was we who waved from the door——"

"Honoria——"

"But there is one thing you haven't told, and you shall now, if you care to—about your examination and what you did at Oxford."

So he sat down beside her on a sand-hill and told her: about the long low-ceiled room in the quadrangle of the Bodleian, the old marbles which lined the walls, the examiner at the blue baize table, and the little deal tables (all scribbled over with names and dates and verses and ribald remarks) at which the candidates wrote; also of the viva voce examination in the antechamber of the Convocation House, He told it all as if it were the great event he honestly felt it to be.

"And the others," said she, "those who were writing around you, and the examiner—how did you feel towards them?"

Taffy stared at her. "I don't know that I thought much about them."

"Didn't you feel as if it was a battle and you wanted to beat them all?"

He broke out laughing. "Why, the examiner was an old man, as dry as a stick! And I hardly remember what the others were like—except one, a white-headed boy with a pimply face. I couldn't help noticing him, because whenever I looked up there he was at the next table, staring at me and chewing a quill."

"I can't understand," she confessed. "Often and often I have tried to think myself a man—a man with ambition. And to me that has always meant fighting. I see myself a man, and the people between me and the prize have all to be knocked down or pushed out of the way. But you don't even see them—all you see is a pimply-faced boy sucking a quill. Taffy——"

"Yes?"

"I wish you would write to me when you get to Oxford. Write regularly. Tell me all you do."

"You will like to hear?"

"Of course I shall. So will George. But it's not only that. You have such an easy way of going forward; you take it for granted you're going to be a great man——"

"I don't."

"Yes, you do. You think it just lies with yourself, and it is nobody's business to interfere with you. You don't even notice those who are on the same path. Now a woman would notice every one, and find out all about them."

"Who said I wanted to be a great man?"

"Don't be silly, that's a good boy! There's your father coming out of the church porch, and you haven't told him yet. Run to him, but promise first."

"What?"

"That you will write."

"I promise."

XXI
HONORIA'S LETTERS

1

Carwithiel, October 25, 18—.

My Dear Taffy,—Your letter was full of news, and I read it over twice: once to myself, and again after dinner to George and Sir Harry. We pictured you dining in the college hall. Thanks to your description, it was not very difficult: the long tables, the silver tankards, the dark panels and the dark pictures above, and the dons on the daïs, aloof and very sedate. It reminded me of Ivanhoe—I don't know why; and no doubt if ever I see Magdalen, it will not be like my fancy in the least. But that's how I see it; and you at a table near the bottom of the hall, like the youthful squire in the story-books—the one, you know, who sits at the feast below the salt until he is recognised and forced to step up and take his seat with honour at the high table. I began to explain all this to George, but found that he had dropped asleep in his chair. He was tired out after a long day with the pheasants."

"I shall stay here for a week or two yet, perhaps. You know how I hate Tredinnis. On my way over, I called at the Parsonage and saw your mother. She was writing that very day, she said, and promised to send my remembrances, which I hope duly reached you. The Vicar was away at the church, of course. There is great talk of the Bishop coming in February, when all will be ready. George sends his love; I saw him for a few minutes at breakfast this morning, before he started for another day with the pheasants."

"Your friend,"⁠
"Honoria."

2

Carwithiel, November 19, 18—.

My Dear Taffy,—Still here, you see! I am slipping this into a parcel containing a fire-screen which I have worked with my very own hands; and I trust you will be able to recognise the shield upon it and the Magdalen lilies. I send it, first, as a birthday present; and I chose the shield—well, I dare say that going in for a demy-ship is a matter-of-fact affair to you, who have grown so exceedingly matter-of-fact; but to me it seems a tremendous adventure; and so I chose a shield—for I suppose the dons would frown if you wore a cockade in your college cap. I return to Tredinnis to-morrow; so your news, whatever it is, must be addressed to me there. But it is safe to be good news."

"Your friend,"⁠
"Honoria."

3

"Tredennis, November 27, 18—."

"Most Honoured Scholar,—Behold me, an hour ago, a great lady, seated in lonely grandeur at the head of my own ancestral table. This is the first time I have used the dining-room; usually I take all my meals in the morning-room, at a small table beside the fire. But to-night I had the great table spread and the plate spread out, and wore my best gown, and solemnly took my grandfather's chair and glowered at the ghost of a small girl shivering at the far end of the long white cloth. When I had enough of this (which was pretty soon) I ordered up some champagne and drank to the health of Theophilus John Raymond, Demy of Magdalen College, Oxford. I graciously poured out a second glass for the small ghost at the other end of the table; and it gave her the courage to confess that she, too, in a timid way, had taken an interest in you for years, and hoped you were going to be a great man. Having thus discovered a bond between us, we grew very friendly; and we talked a great deal about you afterwards in the drawing-room, where I lost her for a few minutes and found her hiding in the great mirror over the fire-place—a habit of hers."

"It is time for me to practise ceremony, for it seems that George and I are to be married some time in the spring. For my part I think my lord would be content to wait longer; for so long as he is happy and sees others cheerful he is not one to hurry or worry. But Sir Harry is the impatient one: and has begun to talk of his decease. He doesn't believe in it a bit, and at times when he composes his features and attempts to be lugubrious I have to take up a book and hide my smiles. But he is clever enough to see that it worries George."

"I saw both your father and mother this morning. Mr. Raymond has been kept to the house by a chill; nothing serious: but he is fretting to be out again and at work in that draughty church. He will accept no help; and the mistress of Tredinnis has no right to press it on him. I shall never understand men and how they fight. I supposed that the war lay between him and my grandfather. But it seems he was fighting an idea all the while; for here is my grandfather beaten and dead and gone; and still the Vicar will give no quarter. If you had not assured me that your demy-ship means eighty pounds a year, I could believe that men fight for shadows only. Your mother and grandmother are both well.…"

*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*

It was a raw December afternoon—within a week of the end of term— and Taffy had returned from skating in Christ Church meadow, when he found a telegram lying on his table. There was just time to see the Dean, to pack, and to snatch a meal in hall, before rattling off to his train. At Didcot he had the best part of an hour to wait for the night-mail westward.

"Your father dangerously ill. Come at once."

There was no signature. Yet Taffy knew who had ridden to the office with that telegram. The flying dark held visions of her, and the express throbbed westward to the beat of Aide-de-camp's gallop. Nor was he surprised at all to find her on the platform at Truro Station. The Tredinnis phaeton was waiting outside.

He seemed to her but a boy after all, as he stepped out of the train in the chill dawn: a wan-faced boy, and sorely in need of comfort.

"You must be brave," said she, gathering up the reins as he climbed to the seat beside her.

Surely yes; he had been telling himself this very thing all night. The groom hoisted in his portmanteau, and with a slam of the door they were off. The cold air sang past Taffy's ears. It put vigour into him, and his courage rose as he faced his shattered prospects, shattered dreams. He must be strong now for his mother's sake; a man to work and be leant upon.

And so it was that whereas Honoria had found him a boy, Humility found him a man. As her arms went about him in her grief, she felt his body, that it was taller, broader; and knew in the midst of her tears that this was not the child she had parted from seven short weeks ago, but a man to act and give orders and be relied upon.

"He called for you … many times," was all she could say.

For Taffy had come too late. Mr. Raymond was dead. He had aggravated a slight chill by going back to his work too soon, and the bitter draughts of the church had cut him down within sight of his goal. A year before he might have been less impatient. The chill struck into his lungs. On December 1st he had taken to his bed, and he never rallied.

"He called for me?"

"Many times."

They went up the stairs together and stood beside the bed. The thought uppermost in Taffy's mind was—"He called for me. He wanted me. He was my father and I never knew him."

But Humility in her sorrow groped amid such questions as these, "What has happened? Who am I? Am I she who yesterday had a husband and a child? To-day my husband is gone and my child is no longer the same child."

In her room old Mrs. Venning remembered the first days of her own widowhood, and life seemed to her a very short affair, after all.

Honoria saw Taffy beside the grave. It was no season for out-of-door flowers, and she had rifled her hothouses for a wreath. The exotics shivered in the north-westerly wind; they looked meaningless, impertinent, in the gusty churchyard. Humility, before the coffin left the house, had brought the dead man's old blue working-blouse, and spread it for a pall. No flowers grew in the Parsonage garden; but pressed in her Bible lay a very little bunch, gathered, years ago, in the meadows by Honiton. This she divided and, unseen by anyone, pinned the half upon the breast of the patched garment.

On the evening after the funeral and for the next day or two she was strangely quiet, and seemed to be waiting for Taffy to make some sign. Dearly as mother and son loved one another, they had to find their new positions, each toward each. Now Taffy had known nothing of his parents' income. He assumed that it was little enough, and that he must now leave Oxford and work to support the household. He knew some Latin and Greek; but without a degree he had little chance of teaching what he knew. He was a fair carpenter, and a more than passable smith.… He revolved many schemes, but chiefly found himself wondering what it would cost to enter an architect's office.

"I suppose," said he, "father left no will?"

"Oh yes, he did," said Humility, and produced it: a single sheet of foolscap signed on her wedding day. It gave her all her husband's property absolutely—whatever it might be.

"Well," said Taffy, "I'm glad. I suppose there's enough for you to rent a small cottage, while I look about for work?"

"Who talks about your finding work? You will go back to Oxford, of course."

"Oh, shall I?" said Taffy, taken aback.

"Certainly; it was your father's wish."

"But the money?"

"With your scholarship there's enough to keep you there for the four years. After that, no doubt, you will be earning a good income."

"But——" He remembered what had been said about the lace-money, and could not help wondering.

"Taffy," said his mother, touching his hand, "leave all this to me until your degree is taken. You have a race to run and must not start unprepared. If you could have seen his joy when the news came of the demy-ship!"

Taffy kissed her and went up to his room. He found his books laid out on the little table there.

*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*

4

Tredennis, February 13, 18—.

My Dear Taffy,—I have a valentine for you, if you care to accept it; but I don't suppose you will, and indeed I hope in my heart that you will not. But I must offer it. Your father's living is vacant, and my trustees (that is to say, Sir Harry; for the other, a second cousin of mine who lives in London, never interferes) can put in someone as a stop-gap, thus allowing me to present you to it when the time comes, if you have any thought of Holy Orders. You will understand exactly why I offer it; and also, I hope, you will know that I think it wholly unworthy of you. But turn it over in your mind and give me your answer."

"George and I are to be married at the end of April. May is an unlucky month. It shall be a week—even a fortnight—earlier, if that fits in with your vacation, and you care to come. See how obliging I am! I yield to you what I have refused to Sir Harry. We shall try to persuade the Bishop to come and open the church on the same day."

"Always your friend,"⁠
"Honoria."

5

Tredennis, February, 18—.

My Dear Taffy,—No, I am not offended in the least; but very glad. I do not think you are fitted for the priesthood; but my doubts have nothing to do with your doubts, which I don't understand, though you tried to explain them so carefully. You will come through them, I expect. I don't know that I have any reasons that could be put on paper: only, somehow, I cannot see you in a black coat and clerical hat."

"You complain that I never write about George. You don't deserve to hear, since you refuse to come to our wedding. But would you talk, if you happened to be in love? There, I have told you more than ever I told George, whose conceit has to be kept down. Let this console you."

"Our new parson, when he comes, is to lodge down in Innis Village. Your mother—but no doubt she has told you—stays in the Parsonage while she pleases. She and your grandmother are both well. I see her every day: I have so much to learn, and she is so wise. Her beautiful eyes—but oh, Taffy, it must be terrible to be a widow! She smiles and is always cheerful; but the look in them! How can I describe it? When I find her alone with her lace-work, or sometimes (but it is not often) with her hands in her lap, she seems to come out of her silence with an effort, as others withdraw themselves from talk. I wonder if she does talk in those silences of hers. Another thing, it is only a few weeks now since she put on a widow's cap, and yet I cannot remember her—can scarcely picture her—without it. I am sure that if I happened to call one day when she had laid it aside, I should begin to talk quite as if we were strangers."

"Believe me, yours sincerely,"⁠
"Honoria."

But the wedding, after all, did not take place until the beginning of October, a week before the close of the Long Vacation; and Taffy, after all, was present. The postponement had been enforced by many delays in building and furnishing the new wing at Carwithiel; for Sir Harry insisted that the young couple must live under one roof with him, and Honoria (as we know) hated the very stones of Tredinnis.

The Bishop came to spend a week in the neighbourhood; the first three days as Honoria's guest. On the Saturday he consecrated the work of restoration in the church, and in the afternoon held a confirmation service. Taffy and Honoria knelt together to receive his blessing. It was the girl's wish. The shadow of her responsibility to God and man lay heavy on her during the few months before her marriage: and Taffy, already weary and dispirited with his early doubtings, suffered her mood of exaltation to overcome him like a wave and sweep him back to rest for a while on the still waters of faith. Together they listened while the Bishop discoursed on the dead Vicar's labours with fluency and feeling; with so much feeling, indeed, that Taffy could not help wondering why his father had been left to fight the battle alone.

On the Sunday and Monday two near parishes claimed the Bishop. On the Tuesday he sent his luggage over to Carwithiel, whither he was to follow after the wedding service, to spend a day or two with Sir Harry. It had been Honoria's wish that George should choose Taffy for his best man; but George had already invited one of his sporting friends, a young Squire Philpotts from the eastern side of the Duchy; and as the date fell at the beginning of the hunting season, he insisted on a "pink" wedding. Honoria consulted the Bishop by letter. "Did he approve of a 'pink' wedding so soon after the bride's confirmation?" The Bishop saw no harm in it.

So a "pink" wedding it was, and the scarlet coats made a lively patch of colour in the gray churchyard: but it gave Taffy a feeling that he was left out in the cold. He escorted his mother to the church, and left her for a few minutes in the Vicarage pew. The bridegroom and his friends were gathered in a showy cluster by the chancel step, but the bride had not arrived, and he stepped out to help in marshalling the crowd of miners and mine-girls, fishermen, and mothers with unruly children—a hundred or so in all, lining the path or straggling among the graves.

Close by the gate he came on a girl who stood alone.

"Hullo, Lizzie—you here?"

"Why not?" she asked, looking at him sullenly.

"Oh, no reason at all."

"There might ha' been a reason," said she, speaking low and hurriedly. "You might ha' saved me from this, Mr. Raymond; and her too; one time, you might."

"Why, what on earth is the matter?" He looked up. The Tredinnis carriage and pair of grays came over the knoll at a smart trot, and drew up before the gate.

"Matter?" Lizzie echoed with a short laugh. "Oh, nuthin'. I'm goin' to lay the curse on her, that's all."

"You shall not!" There was no time to lose. Honoria's trustee—the second cousin from London, a tall, clean-shaven man with a shiny bald head, and a shiny hat in his hand—had stepped out and was helping the bride to alight. What Lizzie meant Taffy could not tell; but there must be no scene. He caught her hand. "Mind—I say you shall not!" he whispered.

"Lemme go—you're creamin' my fingers."

"Be quiet then."

At that moment Honoria passed up the path. Her wedding gown almost brushed him as he stood wringing Lizzie's hand. She did not appear to see him; but he saw her face beneath the bridal veil, and it was hard and white.

"The proud toad!" said Lizzie. "I'm no better'n dirt, I suppose, though from the start she wasn' above robbin' me. Aw, she's sly … Mr. Raymond, I'll curse her as she comes out, see if I don't!"

"And I swear you shall not," said Taffy. The scent of Honoria's orange-blossom seemed to cling about them as they stood.

Lizzie looked at him vindictively. "You wanted her yourself, I know. You weren't good enough, neither. Let go my fingers!"

"Go home, now. See, the people have all gone in."

"Go'st way in too, then, and leave me here to wait for her."

Taffy shut his teeth, let go her hand, and taking her by the shoulders, swung her round face toward the gate.

"March!" he commanded, and she moved off whimpering. Once she looked back. "March!" he repeated, and followed her down the road as one follows and threatens a mutinous dog.

*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*

The scene by the church gate had puzzled Honoria, and in her first letter (written from Italy) she came straight to the point, as her custom was. "I hope there is nothing between you and that girl who used to be at Joll's. I say nothing about our hopes for you, but you have your own career to look to; and as I know you are too honourable to flatter an ignorant girl when you mean nothing, so I trust you are too wise to be caught by a foolish fancy. Forgive a staid matron (of one week's standing) for writing so plainly, but what I saw made me uneasy—without cause, no doubt. Your future, remember, is not yours only. And now I shall trust you, and never come back to this subject."

"We are like children abroad, George's French is wonderful, but not so wonderful as his Italian. When he goes to take a ticket he first of all shouts the name of the station he wishes to arrive at (for some reason he believes all foreigners to be deaf), then he begins counting down francs one by one, very slowly, watching the clerk's face. When the clerk's face tells him he has doled out enough, he shouts 'Hold hard!' and clutches the ticket. It takes time; but all the people here are friends with him at once—especially the children, whom he punches in the ribs and tells to 'buck up.' Their mothers nod and smile and openly admire him; and I—well, I am happy and want everyone else to be happy."

XXII
MEN AS TOWERS

It was May morning, and Taffy made one of the group gathered on the roof of Magdalen Tower. In the groves below and across the river meadows all the birds were singing together. Beyond the glimmering suburbs, St. Clement's and Cowley St. John, over the dark rise by Bullingdon Green, the waning moon seemed to stand still and wait, poised on her nether horn. Below her the morning sky waited, clean and virginal, letting her veil of mist slip lower and lower until it rested in folds upon Shotover. While it dropped a shaft of light tore through it and smote flashing on the vane high above Taffy's head, turning the dark side of the turrets to purple and casting lilac shadows on the surplices of the choir. For a moment the whole dewy shadow of the tower trembled on the western sky, and melted and was gone as a flood of gold broke on the eastward-turned faces. The clock below struck five and ceased. There was a sudden baring of heads; a hush; and gently, borne aloft on boys' voices, clear and strong, rose the first notes of the hymn—

Te Deum Patrem colimus,
Te laudibus prosequimur,
Qui corpus cibo reficis,
Coelesti mentem gratia.

In the pauses Taffy heard, faint and far below, the noise of cowhorns blown by the street boys gathered at the foot of the tower and beyond the bridge. Close beside him a small urchin of a chorister was singing away with the face of an ecstatic seraph; whence that ecstasy arose the urchin would have been puzzled to tell. There flashed into Taffy's brain the vision of the whole earth lauding and adoring— sun-worshippers and Christians, priests and small children; nation after nation prostrating itself and arising to join the chant— "the differing world's agreeing sacrifice." Yes, it was Praise that made men brothers; Praise, the creature's first and last act of homage to his Creator; Praise that made him kin with the angels. Praise had lifted this tower; had expressed itself in its soaring pinnacles; and he for the moment was incorporate with the tower and part of its builder's purpose. "Lord, make men as towers!"—he remembered his father's prayer in the field by Tewkesbury, and at last he understood. "All towers carry a lamp of some kind"—why, of course they did. He looked about him. The small chorister's face was glowing—

Triune Deus, hominum
Salutis auctor optime,
Immensum hoc mysterium
Ovante lingua canimus!

Silence—and then with a shout the tunable bells broke forth, rocking the tower. Someone seized Taffy's college cap and sent it spinning over the battlements. Caps? For a second or two they darkened the sky like a flock of birds. A few gowns followed, expanding as they dropped, like clumsy parachutes. The company—all but a few severe dons and their friends—tumbled laughing down the ladder, down the winding stair, and out into sunshine. The world was pagan after all.

*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*

At breakfast Taffy found a letter on his table, addressed in his mother's hand. As a rule she wrote twice a week, and this was not one of the usual days for hearing from her. But nothing was too good to happen that morning. He snatched up the letter and broke the seal.

"My dearest boy," it ran, "I want you home at once to consult with me. Something has happened (forgive me, dear, for not preparing you; but the blow fell on me yesterday so suddenly)—something which makes it doubtful, and more than doubtful, that you can continue at Oxford. And something else they say has happened which I will never believe in unless I hear it from my boy's lips. I have this comfort, at any rate, that he will never tell me a falsehood. This is a matter which cannot be explained by letter, and cannot wait until the end of term. Come home quickly, dear; for until you are here I can have no peace of mind."

So once again Taffy travelled homewards by the night mail.

*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*

"Mother, it's a lie!"

Taffy's face was hot, but he looked straight into his mother's eyes. She too was rosy-red: being ever a shamefast woman. And to speak of these things to her own boy——

"Thank God!" she murmured, and her fingers gripped the arms of her chair.

"It's a lie! Where is the girl?"

"She is in the workhouse, I believe. I don't know who spread it, or how many have heard. But Honoria believes it."

"Honoria! She cannot——" He came to a sudden halt. "But, mother, even supposing Honoria believes it, I don't see——"

He was looking straight at her. Her eyes sank. Light began to break in on him.

"Mother!"

Humility did not look up.

"Mother! Don't tell me that she—that Honoria——"

"She made us promise—your father and me.… God knows it did no more than repay what your father had suffered.… Your future was everything to us.…"

"And I have been maintained at Oxford by her money," he said, pausing in his bitterness on every word.

"Not by that only, Taffy! There was your scholarship … and it was true about my savings on the lace-work.…"

But he brushed her feeble explanations away with a little gesture of impatience. "Oh why, mother?—Oh why?"

She heard him groan and stretched out her arms.

"Taffy, forgive me—forgive us! We did wrongly, I see—I see it as plain now as you. But we did it for your sake."

"You should have told me. I was not a child. Yes, yes, you should have told me."

Yes; there lay the truth. They had treated him as a child when he was no longer a child. They had swathed him round with love, forgetting that boys grow and demand to see with their own eyes and walk on their own feet. To every mother of sons there comes sooner or later the sharp lesson which came to Humility that morning; and few can find any defence but that which Humility stammered, sitting in her chair and gazing piteously up at the tall youth confronting her: "I did it for your sake." Be pitiful, oh accusing sons, in that hour! For, terrible as your case may be against them, your mothers are speaking the simple truth.

Taffy took her hand. "The money must be paid back, every penny of it."

"Yes, dear."

"How much?"

Humility kept a small account-book in the work-box beside her. She opened the pages, but, seeing his outstretched hand, gave it obediently to Taffy, who took it to the window.

"Almost two hundred pounds." He knit his brows and began to drum with his fingers on the window-pane. "And we must put the interest at five per cent.… With my first in Moderations I might find some post as an usher in a small school.… There's an agency which puts you in the way of such things: I must look up the address.… We will leave this house, of course."

"Must we?"

"Why of course we must. We are living here by her favour. A cottage will do—only it must have four rooms, because of grandmother.… I will step over and talk with Mendarva. He may be able to give me a job. It will keep me going, at any rate, until I hear from the agency."

"You forget that I have over forty pounds a year—or, rather, mother has. The capital came from the sale of her farm, years ago."

"Did it?" said Taffy grimly. "You forget that I have never been told. Well, that's good, so far as it goes. But now I'll step over and see Mendarva. If only I could catch this cowardly lie somewhere on my way!"

He kissed his mother, caught up his cap, and flung out of the house. The sea breeze came humming across the sandhills. He opened his lungs to it, and it was wine to his blood; he felt strong enough to slay dragons. "But who could the liar be? Not Lizzie herself, surely! Not——"

He pulled up short in a hollow of the towans.

"Not—George?"

Treachery is a hideous thing; and to youth so incomprehensibly hideous that it darkens the sun. Yet every trusting man must be betrayed. That was one of the lessons of Christ's life on earth. It is the last and severest test; it kills many, morally, and no man who has once met and looked it in the face departs the same man, though he may be a stronger one.

"Not George?"

Taffy stood there so still that the rabbits crept out and, catching sight of him, paused in the mouths of their burrows. When at length he moved on it was to take, not the path which wound inland to Mendarva's, but the one which led straight over the higher moors to Carwithiel.

It was between one and two o'clock when he reached the house and asked to see Mr. and Mrs. George Vyell, They were not at home, the footman said; had left for Falmouth the evening before to join some friends on a yachting cruise. Sir Harry was at home; was, indeed, lunching at that moment; but would no doubt be pleased to see Mr. Raymond.

Sir Harry had finished his lunch, and sat sipping his claret and tossing scraps of biscuits to the dogs.

"Hullo, Raymond!—thought you were in Oxford. Sit down, my boy; delighted to see you. Thomas, a knife and fork for Mr. Raymond. The cutlets are cold, I'm afraid; but I can recommend the cold saddle, and the ham—it's a York ham. Go to the sideboard and forage for yourself. I wanted company. My boy and Honoria are at Falmouth yachting, and have left me alone. What, you won't eat? A glass of claret, then, at any rate."

"To tell the truth, Sir Harry," Taffy began awkwardly. "I've come on a disagreeable business."

Sir Harry's face fell. He hated disagreeable business. He flipped a piece of biscuit at his spaniel's nose and sat back, crossing his legs.

"Won't it keep?"

"To me it's important."

"Oh, fire away then: only help yourself to the claret first."

"A girl—Lizzie Pezzack, living over at Langona—has had a child born——"

"Stop a moment. Do I know her?—Ah, to be sure—daughter of old Pezzack, the light-keeper—a brown-coloured girl with her hair over her eyes. Well, I'm not surprised. Wants money, I suppose? Who's the father?"

"I don't know."

"Well, but—damn it all!—somebody knows." Sir Harry reached for the bottle and refilled his glass.

"The one thing I know is that Honoria—Mrs. George, I mean—has heard about it, and suspects me."

Sir Harry lifted his glass and glanced at him over the rim. "That's the devil. Does she, now?" He sipped. "She hasn't been herself for a day or two—this explains it. I thought it was change of air she wanted. She's in the deuce of a rage, you bet."

"She is," said Taffy grimly.

"There's no prude like your young married woman. But it'll blow over, my boy. My advice to you is to keep out of the way for a while."

"But—but it's a lie!" broke in the indignant Taffy. "As far as I am concerned there's not a grain of truth in it!"

"Oh—I beg your pardon, I'm sure." Here Honoria's terrier (the one which George had bought for her at Plymouth) interrupted by begging for a biscuit, and Sir Harry balanced one carefully on its nose. "On trust—good dog! What does the girl say herself?"

"I don't know. I've not seen her."

"Then, my dear fellow—it's awkward, I admit—but I'm dashed if I see what you expect me to do." The baronet pulled out a handkerchief and began flicking the crumbs off his knees.

Taffy watched him for a minute in silence. He was asking himself why he had come. Well, he had come in a hot fit of indignation, meaning to face Honoria and force her to take back the insult of her suspicion. But after all—suppose George were at the bottom of it? Clearly Sir Henry knew nothing, and in any case could not be asked to expose his own son. And Honoria? Let be that she would never believe—that he had no proof, no evidence even—this were a pretty way of beginning to discharge his debt to her! The terrier thrust a cold muzzle against his hand. The room was very still. Sir Harry poured out another glassful and held out the decanter. "Come, you must drink; I insist!"

Taffy looked up. "Thank you, I will."

He could now and with a clear conscience. In those quiet moments he had taken the great resolution. The debt should be paid back, and with interest; not at five per cent., but at a rate beyond the creditor's power of reckoning. For the interest to be guarded for her should be her continued belief in the man she loved. Yes, but if George were innocent? Why, then the sacrifice would be idle; that was all.

He swallowed the wine, and stood up.

"Must you be going? I wanted a chat with you about Oxford," grumbled Sir Harry; but noting the lad's face, how white and drawn it was, he relented, and put a hand on his shoulder. "Don't take it too seriously, my boy. It'll blow over—it'll blow over. Honoria likes you, I know. We'll see what the trollop says: and if I get a chance of putting in a good word, you may depend on me."

He walked with Taffy to the door—good, easy man—and waved a hand from the porch. On the whole, he was rather glad than not to see his young friend's back.

*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*

From his smithy window Mendarva spied Taffy coming along the road, and stepped out on the green to shake hands with him.

"Pleased to see your face, my son! You'll excuse my not asking 'ee inside; but the fact is"—he jerked his thumb towards the smithy—" we've a-got our troubles in there."

It came on our youth with something of a shock that the world had room for any trouble beside his own.

"’Tis the Dane. He went over to Truro yesterday to the wrastlin', an' got thrawed. I tell'n there's no call to be shamed. 'Twas Luke the Wendron fella did it—in the treble play—inside lock backward, and as pretty a chip as ever I see." Mendarva began to illustrate it with foot and ankle, but checked himself, and glanced nervously over his shoulder. "Isn' lookin', I hope? He's in a terrible pore about it. Won't trust hissel' to spake, and don't want to see nobody. But, as I tell'n, there's no call to be shamed; the fella took the belt in the las' round, and turned his man over like a tab. He's a proper angletwitch, that Wendron fella. Stank 'pon en both ends, and he'll rise up in the middle and look at 'ee. There was no one a patch on en but the Dane; and I'll back the Dane next time they clinch. 'Tis a nuisance, though, to have'n like this—with a big job coming on, too, over to the light-house."

Taffy looked steadily at the smith. "What's doing at the light-house?"

"Ha'n't 'ee heerd?" Mendarva began a long tale, the sum of which was that the light-house had begun of late to show signs of age, to rock at times in an ominous manner. The Trinity House surveyor had been down and reported, and Mendarva had the contract for some immediate repairs. "But 'tis patching an old kettle, my son. The foundations be clamped down to the rock, and the clamps have worked loose. The whole thing'll have to come down in the end; you mark my words."

"But, these repairs?" Taffy interrupted: "You'll be wanting hands."

"Why, o' course."

"And a foreman—a clerk of the works——"

*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*

While Mendarva was telling his tale, over a hill two miles to the westward a small donkey-cart crawled for a minute against the sky-line and disappeared beyond the ridge which hid the towans. An old man trudged at the donkey's head; and a young woman sat in the cart with a bundle in her arms.

The old man trudged along so deep in thought that when the donkey without rhyme or reason came to a halt, half-way down the hill, he too halted, and stood pulling a wisp of grey side-whiskers.

"Look here," he said. "You ent goin' to tell? That's your las' word, is it?"

The young woman looked down on the bundle and nodded her head.

"There, that'll do. If you weant, you weant; I've tek'n 'ee back, an' us must fit and make the best o't. The cheeld'll never be good for much—born lame like that. But 'twas to be, I s'pose."

Lizzie sat dumb, but hugged the bundle closer.

"’Tis like a judgment. If your mother'd been spared, 'twudn' have happened. But 'twas to be, I s'pose. The Lord's ways be past findin' out."

He woke up and struck the donkey across the rump.

"Gwan you! Gee up! What d'ee mean by stoppin' like that?"

XXIII
THE SERVICE OF THE LAMP

The Chief Engineer of the Trinity House was a man of few words. He and Taffy had spent the afternoon clambering about the rocks below the light-house, peering into its foundations. Here and there, where weed coated the rocks and made foothold slippery, he took the hand which Taffy held out. Now and then he paused for a pinch of snuff. The round of inspection finished, he took an extraordinarily long pinch.

"What's your opinion?" he asked, cocking his head on one side and examining the young man much as he had examined the light-house. "You have one, I suppose?"

"Yes, sir; but of course it doesn't count for much."

"I asked for it."

"Well, then, I think, sir, we have wasted a year's work; and if we go on tinkering we shall waste more."

"Pull it down and rebuild, you say?"

"Yes, sir; but not on the same rock."

"Why?"

"This rock was ill-chosen. You see, sir, just here a ridge of elvan crops up through the slate; the rock, out yonder, is good elvan, and that is why the sea has made an island of it, wearing away the softer stuff inshore. The mischief here lies in the rock, not in the light-house."

"The sea has weakened our base?"

"Partly: but the light-house has done more. In a strong gale the foundations begin to work, and in the chafing the rock gets the worst of it."

"What about concrete?"

"You might fill up the sockets with concrete; but I doubt, sir, if the case would hold for any time. The rock is a mere shell in places, especially on the north-western side."

"H'm. You were at Oxford for a time, were you not?"

"Yes, sir," Taffy answered, wondering.

"I've heard about you. Where do you live?"

Taffy pointed to the last of a line of three whitewashed cottages behind the light-house.

"Alone?"

"No, sir; with my mother and my grandmother. She is an invalid."

"I wonder if your mother would be kind enough to offer me a cup of tea?"

In the small kitchen, on the walls of which, and even on the dresser, Taffy's books fought for room with Humility's plates and tin-ware, the Chief Engineer proved to be a most courteous old gentleman. Towards Humility he bore himself with an antique politeness which flattered her considerably. And when he praised her tea she almost forgave him for his detestable habit of snuff-taking.

He had heard something (it appeared) from the President of Taffy's college, and also from—(he named Taffy's old friend in the velvet college-cap). In later days Taffy maintained not only that every man must try to stand alone, but that he ought to try the harder because of its impossibility; for in fact it was impossible to escape from men's helpfulness. And though his work was done in lonely places where in the end fame came out to seek him, he remained the same boy who, waking in the dark, had heard the bugles speaking comfort.

As a matter of fact his college had generously offered him a chance which would have cost him nothing or next to nothing, of continuing to read for his degree. But he had chosen his line, and against Humility's entreaties he stuck to it. The Chief Engineer took a ceremonious leave. He had to drive back to his hotel, and Taffy escorted him to his carriage.

"I shall run over again to-morrow," he said at parting; "and we'll have a look at that island rock." He was driven off, secretly a little puzzled.

Well, it puzzled Taffy at times why he should be working here with Mendarva's men for twenty shillings a week (it had been eighteen, to begin with) when he might be reading for his degree and a fellowship. Yet in his heart he knew the reason. That would be building, after all, on the foundations which Honoria had laid.

Pride had helped chance to bring him here, to the very spot where Lizzie Pezzack lived. He met her daily, and several times a day. She, and his mother and grandmother, were all the women-folk in the hamlet—if three cottages deserve that name. In the first cottage Lizzie lived with her father, who was chief light-houseman, and her crippled child; two under-keepers, unmarried men, managed together in the second; and this accident allowed Taffy to rent the third from the Brethren of the Trinity House and live close to his daily work. Unless brought by business, no one visited that windy peninsula; no one passed within sight of it; no tree grew upon it or could be seen from it. At daybreak Taffy's workmen came trudging along the track where the short turf and gentians grew between the wheel-ruts; and in the evening went trudging back, the level sun flashing on their empty dinner-cans. The eight souls left behind had one common gospel— Cleanliness. Very little dust found its way thither; but the salt, spray-laden air kept them constantly polishing window-panes and brass-work. To wash, to scour, to polish, grew into the one absorbing business of life. They had no gossip; even in their own dwellings they spoke but little; their speech shrank and dwindled away in the continuous roar of the sea. But from morning to night, mechanically, they washed and scoured and polished. Paper was not whiter than the deal table and dresser which Humility scrubbed daily with soap and water, and once a week with lemon-juice as well. Never was cleaner linen to sight and smell than that which she pegged out by the furze-brake on the ridge. All the life of the small colony, though lonely, grew wholesome as it was simple of purpose in cottages thus sweetened and kept sweet by limewash and the salt wind.

And through it moved the forlorn figure of Lizzie Pezzack's child. Somehow Lizzie had taught the boy to walk, with the help of a crutch, as early as most children; but the wind made cruel sport with his first efforts in the open, knocking the crutch from under him at every third step, and laying him flat. The child had pluck, however; and when autumn came round again, could face a fairly stiff breeze.

It was about this time that word came of the Trinity Board's intention to replace the old lighthouse with one upon the outer rock. For the Chief Engineer had visited it and decided that Taffy was right. To be sure no mention was made of Taffy in his report; but the great man took the first opportunity to offer him the post of foreman of the works, so there was certainly nothing to be grumbled at. The work did not actually start until the following spring; for the rock, to receive the foundations, had to be bored some feet below high-water level, and this could only be attempted on calm days or when a southerly wind blew from the high land well over the workmen's heads, leaving the inshore water smooth. On such days Taffy, looking up from his work, would catch sight of a small figure on the cliff-top leaning aslant to the wind and watching.

For the child was adventurous and took no account of his lameness. Perhaps if he thought of it at all, having no chance to compare himself with other children, he accepted his lameness as a condition of childhood—something he would grow out of. His mother could not keep him indoors; he fidgeted continually. But he would sit or stand quiet by the hour on the cliff-top watching the men as they drilled and fixed the dynamite, and waiting for the bang of it. Best of all, however, were the days when his grandfather allowed him inside the light-house, to clamber about the staircase and ladders, to watch the oiling and trimming of the great lantern, and the ships moving slowly on the horizon. He asked a thousand questions about them.

"I think," said he one day before he was three years old, "that my father is in one of those ships."

"Bless the child!" exclaimed old Pezzack. "Who says you have a father?"

"Everybody has a father. Dicky Tregenza has one; they both work down at the rock. I asked Dicky, and he told me."

"Told 'ee what?"

"That everybody has a father. I asked him if mine was out in one of those ships, and he said very likely. I asked mother, too, but she was washing-up and wouldn't listen."

Old Pezzack regarded the child grimly. "’Twas to be, I s'pose," he muttered.

Lizzie Pezzack had never set foot inside the Raymonds' cottage. Humility, gentle soul as she was, could on some points be as unchristian as other women. As time went on it seemed that not a soul beside herself and Taffy knew of Honoria's suspicion. She even doubted, and Taffy doubted too, if Lizzie herself knew such an accusation had been made. Certainly never by word or look had Lizzie hinted at it. Yet Humility could not find it in her heart to forgive her. "She may be innocent," was the thought; "but through her came the injury to my son." Taffy by this time had no doubt at all. It was George who poisoned Honoria's ear; George's shame and Honoria's pride would explain why the whisper had never gone further; and nothing else would explain.

Did his mother guess this? He believed so at times, but they never spoke of it.

The lame child was often in the Raymonds' kitchen. Lizzie did not forbid or resent this. And he liked Humility, and would talk to her at length while he nibbled one of her dripping-cakes. "People don't tell the truth," he observed sagely on one of these occasions. (He pronounced it "troof," by the way.) "I know why we live here. It's because we're near the sea. My father's on the sea somewhere looking for us, and grandfather lights the lamp every night to tell him where we are. One night he'll see it and bring his ship in and take us all off together."

"Who told you all this?"

"Nobody. People won't tell me nothing (nofing). I has to make it out in my head."

At times, when his small limbs grew weary (though he never acknowledged this) he would stretch himself on the short turf of the headland and lie staring up at the white gulls. No one ever came near enough to surprise the look which then crept over the child's face. But Taffy, passing him at a distance, remembered another small boy, and shivered to remember and compare—

A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.

—but how when the boy is a cripple?

One afternoon he was stooping to inspect an obstinate piece of boring when the man at his elbow said:

"Hullo! edn' that young Joey Pezzack in diffities up there? Blest if the cheeld won't break his neck wan of these days!"

Taffy caught up a coil of rope, sprang into a boat, and pushed across to land. "Don't move!" he shouted. At the foot of the cliff he picked up Joey's crutch and ran at full speed up the path worn by the workmen. This led him round to the verge ten feet above the ledge where the child clung white and silent. He looped the rope in a running noose and lowered it.

"Slip this under your arms. Can you manage, or shall I come down? I'll come if you're hurt."

"I've twisted my foot. It's all right, now you're come," said the little man bravely; and slid the rope round himself in the most business-like way.

"The grass was slipper——" he began, as soon as his feet touched firm earth: and with that he broke down and fell to sobbing in Taffy's arms.

Taffy carried him—a featherweight—to the cottage where Lizzie stood by her table washing up. She saw them at the gate and came running out.

"It's all right. He slipped—out on the cliff. Nothing more than a scratch or two, and perhaps a sprained ankle."

He watched while she set Joey in a chair and began to pull off his stockings. He had never seen the child's foot naked. She turned suddenly, caught him looking, and pulled the stocking back over the deformity.

"Have you heard?" she asked.

"What?"

"She has a boy! Ah!" she laughed harshly, "I thought that would hurt you. Well, you have been a silly!"

"I don't think I understand."

"You don't think you understand!" she mimicked. "And you're not fond of her, eh? Never were fond of her, eh? You silly—to let him take her, and never tell!"

"Tell?"

She faced him, hardening her gaze. "Yes, tell——" She nodded slowly; while Joey, unobserved by either, looked up with wide, round eyes.

"Men don't fight like that." The words were out before it struck him that one man had, almost certainly, fought like that. Her face, however, told him nothing. She could not know. "You have never told," he added.

"Because——" she began, but could not tell him the whole truth. And yet what he said was true. "Because you would not let me," she muttered.

"In the churchyard, you mean—on her wedding day?"

"Before that."

"But before that I never guessed."

"All the same I knew what you were. You wouldn' have let me. It came to the same thing. And if I had told——Oh, you make it hard for me!" she wailed.

He stared at her, understanding this only—that somehow he could control her will.

"I will never let you tell," he said gravely.

"I hate her!"

"You shall not tell."

"Listen"—she drew close and touched his arm. "He never cared for her; it's not his way to care. She cares for him now, I dessay—not as she might have cared for you—but she's his wife, and some women are like that. There's her pride, any way. Suppose—suppose he came back to me?"

"If I caught him——" Taffy began: but the poor child, who for two minutes had been twisting his face heroically, interrupted with a wail:

"Oh, mother! my foot—it hurts so!"

XXIV
FACE TO FACE

The first winter had interrupted all work upon the rock; but Taffy and his men had used the calm days of the following spring and summer to such purpose that before the end of July the foundations began to show above high-water neaps, and in September he was able to report that the building could be pushed forward in any ordinary weather. The workmen were carried to and from the mainland by a wire hawser and cradle, and the rising breastwork of masonry protected them from the beat of the sea. Progress was slow, for each separate stone had to be dovetailed above, below, and on all sides with the blocks adjoining it, besides being cemented; and care to be taken that no salt mingled with the fresh water, or found its way into the joints of the building. Taffy studied the barometer hour by hour, and kept a constant look-out to windward against sudden gales.

On November 16th the men had finished their dinner, and sat smoking under the lee of the wall, when Taffy, with his pocket-aneroid in his hand, gave the order to snug down and man the cradle for shore. They stared. The morning had been a halcyon one; and the northerly breeze, which had sprung up with the turn of the tide and was freshening, carried no cloud across the sky. Two vessels, a brigantine and a three-masted schooner, were merrily reaching down-channel before it, the brigantine leading; at two miles' distance they could see distinctly the white foam running from her bluff bows, and her forward deck from bulwark to bulwark as she heeled to it.

One or two grumbled. Half a day's work meant half a day's pay to them. It was all very well for the Cap'n, who drew his by the week.

"Come, look alive!" Taffy called sharply. He pinned his faith to the barometer, and as he shut it in its case he glanced at the brigantine and saw that her crew were busy with the braces, flattening the forward canvas. "See there, boys. There'll be a gale from the west'ard before night."

For a minute the brigantine seemed to have run into a calm. The schooner, half a mile behind her, came reaching along steadily.

"That there two-master's got a fool for a skipper," grumbled a voice. But almost at the moment the wind took her right aback—or would have done so had the crew not been preparing for it. Her stern swung slowly around into view, and within two minutes she was fetching away from them on the port tack, her sails hauled closer and closer as she went. Already the schooner was preparing to follow suit.

"Snug down, boys! We must be out of this in half an hour."

And sure enough, by the time Taffy gained the cliff by the old light-house, the sky had darkened, and a stiff breeze from the north-west, crossing the tide, was beginning to work up a nasty sea around the rock and lop it from time to time over the masonry and the platforms where half an hour before his men had been standing. The two vessels had disappeared in the weather; and as Taffy stared in their direction a spit of rain—the first—took him viciously in the face.

He turned his back to it and hurried homeward. As he passed the light-house door old Pezzack called out to him:

"Hi! wait a bit! Would 'ee mind seein' Joey home? I dunno what his mother sent him over here for, not I. He'll get hisself leakin'."

Joey came hobbling out, and put his right hand in Taffy's with the fist doubled.

"What's that in your hand?"

Joey looked up shyly. "You won't tell?"

"Not if it's a secret."

The child opened his palm and disclosed a bright half-crown piece.

"Where on earth did you get that?"

"The soldier gave it to me."

"The soldier? nonsense! What tale are you making up?"

"Well, he had a red coat, so he must be a soldier. He gave it to me, and told me to be a good boy and run off and play."

Taffy came to a halt. "Is he here—up at the cottages?"

"How funnily you say that! No, he's just rode away. I watched him from the light-house windows. He can't be gone far yet."

"Look here, Joey—can you run?"

"Yes, if you hold my hand; only you mustn't go too fast. Oh, you're hurting!"

Taffy took the child in his arms, and with the wind at his back went up the hill with long stride. "There he is!" cried Joey as they gained the ridge; and he pointed; and Taffy, looking along the ridge, saw a speck of scarlet moving against the lead-coloured moors—half a mile away perhaps, or a little more. He sat the child down, for the cottages were close by. "Run home, sonny. I'm going to have a look at the soldier, too."

The first bad squall broke on the headland just as Taffy started to run. It was as if a bag of water had burst right overhead, and within a quarter of a minute he was drenched to the skin. So fiercely it went howling inland along the ridge that he half expected to see the horse urged into a gallop before it. But the rider, now standing high for a moment against the sky-line, went plodding on. For a while horse and man disappeared over the rise; but Taffy guessed that on hitting the cross-path beyond it they would strike away to the left and descend toward Langona Creek; and he began to slant his course to the left in anticipation. The tide, he knew, would be running in strong; and with this wind behind it he hoped—and caught himself praying—that it would be high enough to cover the wooden foot-bridge and make the ford impassable; and if so, the horseman would be delayed and forced to head back and fetch a circuit farther up the valley.

By this time the squalls were coming fast on each other's heels, and the strength of them flung him forward at each stride. He had lost his hat, and the rain poured down his back and squished in his boots. But all he felt was the hate in his heart. It had gathered there little by little for three years and a half, pent up, fed by his silent thoughts as a reservoir by small mountain streams; and with so tranquil a surface that at times—poor youth!—he had honestly believed it reflected God's calm, had been proud of his magnanimity, and said "forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us." Now as he ran he prayed to the same God to delay the traitor at the ford.

Dusk was falling when George, yet unaware of pursuit, turned down the sunken lane which ended beside the ford. And by the shore, when the small waves lapped against his mare's fore-feet, he heard Taffy's shout for the first time and turned in his saddle. Even so it was a second or two before he recognised the figure which came plunging down the low cliff on his left, avoiding a fall only by wild clutches at the swaying elder boughs.

"Hello!" he shouted cheerfully. "Looks nasty, doesn't it?"

Taffy came down the beach, near enough to see that the mare's legs were plastered with mud, and to look up into his enemy's face.

"Get down," he panted.

"Hey?"

"Get down, I tell you. Come off your horse and put up your fists!"

"What the devil is the matter? Hello!… Keep off, I tell you! Are you mad?"

"Come off and fight."

"By God, I'll break your head in if you don't let go.… You idiot!"—as the mare plunged and tore the stirrup-leather from Taffy's grip—"She'll brain you, if you fool round her heels like that!"

"Come off, then."

"Very well." George backed a little, swung himself out of the saddle and faced him on the beach. "Now perhaps you'll explain."

"You've come from the headland?"

"Well?"

"From Lizzie Pezzack's."

"Well, and what then?"

"Only this, that so sure as you've a wife at home, if you come to the headland again I'll kill you; and if you're a man, you'll put up your fists now."

"Oh, that's it? May I ask what you have to do with my wife, or with Lizzie Pezzack?"

"Whose child is Lizzie's?"

"Not yours, is it?"

"You said so once; you told your wife so; liar that you were."

"Very good, my gentleman. You shall have what you want. Woa, mare!" He led her up the beach and sought for a branch to tie his reins to. The mare hung back, terrified by the swishing of the whipped boughs and the roar of the gale overhead: her hoofs, as George dragged her forward, scuffled with the loose-lying stones on the beach. After a minute he desisted and turned on Taffy again.

"Look here; before we have this out there's one thing I'd like to know. When you were at Oxford, was Honoria maintaining you there?"

"If you must know—yes."

"And when—when this happened, she stopped the supplies?"

"Yes."

"Well, then, I didn't know it. She never told me."

"She never told me."

"You don't say——"

"I do. I never knew it until too late."

"Well, now, I'm going to fight you. I don't swallow being called a liar. But I tell you this first, that I'm damned sorry. I never guessed that it injured your prospects."

At another time, in another mood, Taffy might have remembered that George was George, and heir to Sir Harry's nature. As it was, the apology threw oil on the flame.

"You cur! Do you think it was that? And you are Honoria's husband!" He advanced with an ugly laugh. "For the last time, put up your fists."

They had been standing within two yards of each other; and even so, shouted at the pitch of their voices to make themselves heard above the gale. As Taffy took a step forward George lifted his whip. His left hand held the bridle on which the reluctant mare was dragging, and the action was merely instinctive, to guard against sudden attack.

But as he did so his face and uplifted arm were suddenly painted clear against the darkness. The mare plunged more wildly than ever. Taffy dropped his hands and swung round. Behind him, the black contour of the hill, the whole sky welled up a pale blue light which gathered brightness while he stared. The very stones on the beach at his feet shone separate and distinct.

"What is it?" George gasped.

"A ship on the rocks! Quick, man! Will the mare reach to Innis?"

"She'll have to." George wheeled her round. She was fagged out with two long gallops after hounds that day, but for the moment sheer terror made her lively enough.

"Ride, then! Call up the coast-guard. By the flare she must be somewhere off the creek here. Ride!"

A clatter of hoofs answered him as the mare pounded up the lane.

XXV
THE WRECK OF THE "SAMARITAN"

{{sc|}Taffy} stood for a moment listening. He judged the wreck to be somewhere on the near side of the light-house, between it and the mouth of the creek; that was, if she had already struck. If not, the gale and the set of the tide together would be sweeping her eastward, perhaps right across the mouth of the creek. And if he could discover this his course would be to run back, intercept the coast-guard, and send him around by the upper bridge.

He waited for a second signal to guide him—a flare or a rocket: but none came. The beach lay in the lew of the weather, deep in the hills' hollow and trebly land-locked by the windings of the creek, but above him the sky kept its screaming as though the bare ridges of the headland were being shelled by artillery.

He resolved to keep along the lower slopes and search his way down to the creek's mouth, when he would have sight of any signal shown along the coast for a mile or two to the east and north-east. The night was now as black as a wolf's throat, but he knew every path and fence. So he scrambled up the low cliff and began to run, following the line of stunted oaks and tamarisks which fenced it, and on the ridges—where the blown hail took him in the face—crouching and scuttling like a crab sideways, moving his legs only from the knees down.

In this way he had covered half a mile and more when his right foot plunged in a rabbit hole and he was pitched headlong into the tamarisks below. Their boughs bent under his weight, but they were tough, and he caught at them, and just saved himself from rolling over into the black water. He picked himself up and began to rub his twisted ankle. And at that instant, in a lull between two gusts, his ear caught the sound of splashing, yet a sound so unlike the lapping of the driven tide that he peered over and down between the tamarisk boughs.

"Hullo there!"

"Hullo!" a voice answered. "Is that someone alive? Here, mate—for Christ's sake!"

"Hold on! Whereabouts are you?"

"Down in this here cruel water." The words ended in a shuddering cough.

"Right—hold on for a moment!" Taffy's ankle pained him, but the wrench was not serious. The cliff shelved easily. He slid down, clutching at the tamarisk boughs which whipped his face. "Where are you? I can't see."

"Here!" The voice was not a dozen yards away.

"Swimming?"

"No—I've got a water-breaker—can't hold on much longer."

"I believe you can touch bottom there."

"Hey? I can't hear."

"Try to touch bottom. It's firm sand hereabouts."

"So I can." The splashing and coughing came nearer, came close. Taffy stretched out a hand. A hand, icy-cold, fumbled and gripped it in the darkness.

"Christ! Where's a place to lie down?"

"Here, on this rock." They peered at each other, but could not see. The man's teeth chattered close to Taffy's ear.

"Warm my hands, mate—there's a good chap." He lay on the rock and panted. Taffy took his hands and began to rub them briskly.

"Where's the ship?"

"Where's the ship?" He seemed to turn over the question in his mind, and then stretched himself with a sigh. "How the hell should I know?"

"What's her name?" Taffy had to ask the question twice.

"The Samaritan, of Newport, brigantine. Coals she carried. Ha'n't you such a thing as a match? It seems funny to me, talkin' here like this, and me not knowin' you from Adam."

He panted between the words, and when he had finished lay back and panted again.

"Hurt?" asked Taffy after a while.

The man sat up and began to feel his limbs, quite as though they belonged to some other body. "No, I reckon not."

"Then we'd best be starting. The tide's rising. My house is just above here."

He led the way along the slippery foreshore until he found what he sought, a foot-track slanting up the cliff. Here he gave the sailor a hand and they mounted together. On the grass slope above they met the gale and were forced to drop on their hands and knees and crawl, Taffy leading and shouting instructions, the sailor answering each with "Ay, ay, mate!" to show that he understood.

But about half-way up these answers ceased, and Taffy, looking round and calling, found himself alone. He groped his way back for twenty yards, and found the man stretched on his face and moaning.

"I can't … I can't! My poor brother! I can't!"

Taffy knelt beside him on the soaking turf. "Your brother? Had you a brother on board?"

The man bowed his face again upon the turf. Taffy, upright on both knees, heard him sobbing like a child in the roaring darkness.

"Come," he coaxed, and putting out a hand, touched his wet hair. "Come." They crept forward again, but still as he followed the sailor cried for his drowned brother, up the long slope to the ridge of the headland, where, with the light-house and warm cottage windows in view, all speech and hearing were drowned by stinging hail and the blown grit of the causeway.

Humility opened the door to them.

"Taffy! Where have you been?"

"There has been a wreck."

"Yes, yes—the coast-guard is down by the light-house. The men there saw her before she struck. They kept signalling till it fell dark. They had sent off before that."

She drew back, shrinking against the dresser as the lamplight fell on the stranger. Taffy turned and stared too. The man's face was running with blood; and looking at his own hands he saw that they also were scarlet.

He helped the poor wretch to a chair.

"Bandages: can you manage?" She nodded, and stepped to a cupboard. The sailor began to wail again like an infant.

"See—above the temple here: the cut isn't serious." Taffy took down a lantern and lit it. The candle shone red through the smears his fingers left on the horn panes. "I must go and help, if you can manage."

"I can manage," she answered quietly.

He strode out, and closing the door behind him with an effort, faced the gale again. Down in the lee of the light-house the lamps of the coast-guard carriage gleamed foggily through the rain. The men were there discussing, George among them. He had just galloped up.

The Chief Officer went off to question the survivor, while the rest began their search. They searched all that night; they burned flares and shouted; their torches dotted the cliffs. After an hour the Chief Officer returned. He could make nothing of the sailor, who had fallen silly from exhaustion or the blow on his head; but he divided his men into three parties, and they began to hunt more systematically. Taffy was told off to help the westernmost gang and search the rocks below the light-house. Once or twice he and his comrades paused in their work, hearing, as they thought, a cry for help. But when they listened, it was only one of the other parties hailing.

The gale began to abate soon after midnight, and before dawn had blown itself out. Day came, filtered slowly through the wrack of it to the south-east; and soon they heard a whistle blown, and there on the cliff above them was George Vyell on horseback, in his red coat, with an arm thrown out and pointing eastward. He turned and galloped off in that direction.

They scrambled up and followed. To their astonishment, after following the cliffs for a few hundred yards, he headed inland, down and across the very slope up which Taffy had crawled with the sailor.

They lost sight of his red coat among the ridges. Two or three— Taffy amongst them—ran along the upper ground for a better view. "Well, this beats all!" panted the foremost.

Below them George came into view again, heading now at full gallop for a group of men gathered by the shore of the creek, a good half-mile from its mouth. And beyond—midway across the sandy bed where the river wound—lay the hull of a vessel, high and dry; her deck, naked of wheelhouse and hatches, canted toward them as if to cover from the morning the long wounds ripped by her uprooted masts.

The men beside him shouted and ran on, but Taffy stood still. It was monstrous—a thing inconceivable—that the seas should have lifted a vessel of three hundred tons and carried her half a mile up that shallow creek. Yet there she lay. A horrible thought seized him. Could she have been there last night when he had drawn the sailor ashore? And had he left four or five others to drown close by, in the darkness? No, the tide at that hour had scarcely passed half-flood. He thanked God for that.

Well, there she lay, high and dry, with plenty to attend to her. It was time for him to discover the damage done to the light-house plant and machinery, perhaps to the building itself. In half an hour the workmen would be arriving.

He walked slowly back to the house, and found Humility preparing breakfast.

"Where is he?" Taffy asked, meaning the sailor. "In bed?"

"Didn't you meet him? He went out five minutes ago—I couldn't keep him—to look for his brother, he said."

Taffy drank a cupful of tea, took up a crust, and made for the door.

"Go to bed, dear," his mother pleaded. "You must be worn out."

"I must see how the works have stood it."

On the whole, they had stood it well. The gale, indeed, had torn away the wire table and cage, and thus cut off for the time all access to the outer rock; for while the sea ran at its present height the scramble out along the ridge could not be attempted even at low water. But from the cliff he could see the worst. The waves had washed over the building, tearing off the temporary covers, and churning all within. Planks, scaffolding—everything floatable-had gone, and strewed the rock with matchwood; and—a marvel to see-one of his two heaviest winches had been lifted from inside, hurled clean over the wall, and lay collapsed in the wreckage of its cast-iron frame. But, so far as he could see, the dovetailed masonry stood intact. A voice hailed him.

"What a night! What a night!"

It was old Pezzack, aloft on the gallery of the light-house in his yellow oilers, already polishing the lantern panes.

Taffy's workmen came straggling and gathered about him. They discussed the damage together but without addressing Taffy; until a little pock-marked fellow, the wag of the gang, nudged a mate slily and said aloud—

"By God, Bill, we can build a bit—you and me and the boss!"

All the men laughed; and Taffy laughed too, blushing. Yes; this had been in his mind. He had measured his work against the sea in its fury, and the sea had not beaten him.

A cry broke in upon their laughter. It came from the base of the cliff to the right: a cry so insistent that they ran toward it in a body.

Far below them, on the edge of a great boulder which rose from the broken water and seemed to overhang it, stood the rescued sailor. He was pointing.

Taffy was the first to reach him!

"It's my brother! It's my brother Sam!"

Taffy flung himself full length on the rock and peered over. A tangle of ore-weed awash rose and fell about its base; and from under this, as the frothy waves drew back, he saw a man's ankle protruding, and a foot still wearing a shoe.

"It's my brother!" wailed the sailor again. "I can swear to the shoe of en!"

XXVI
SALVAGE

One of the masons lowered himself into the pool, and thrusting an arm beneath the ore-weed, began to grope.

"He's pinned here. The rock's right on top of him."

Taffy examined the rock. It weighed fifteen tons if an ounce; but there were fresh and deep scratches upon it. He pointed these out to the men, who looked and felt them with their hands and stared at the subsiding waves, trying to bring their minds to the measure of the spent gale.

"Here, I must get out of this!" said the man in the pool, as a small wave dashed in and sent its spray over his bowed shoulders.

"You ban't going to leave en?" wailed the sailor. "You ban't going to leave my brother Sam?"

He was a small, fussy man, with red whiskers; and even his sorrow gave him little dignity. The men were tender with him.

"Nothing to be done till the tide goes back."

"But you won't leave en? Say you won't leave en! He've a wife and three children. He was a saved man, sir, a very religious man; not like me, sir. He was highly respected in the neighbourhood of St. Austell. I shouldn't wonder if the newspapers had a word about en …" The tears were running down his face.

"We must wait for the tide," said Taffy gently, and tried to lead him away, but he would not go. So they left him to watch and wait while they returned to their work.

Before noon they recovered and fixed the broken wire cable. The iron cradle had disappeared, but to rig up a sling and carry out an endless line was no difficult job, and when this was done Taffy crossed over to the island rock and began to inspect damages. His working gear had suffered heavily, two of his windlasses were disabled, scaffolding, platforms, hods, and loose planks had vanished; a few small tools only remained, mixed together in a mash of puddled lime. But the masonry stood unhurt, all except a few feet of the upper course on the seaward side, where the gale, giving the cement no time to set, had shaken the dove-tailed stones in their sockets—a matter easily repaired.

Shortly before three a shout recalled them to the mainland. The tide was drawing towards low water, and three of the men set to work at once to open a channel and drain off the pool about the base of the big rock. While this was doing, half a dozen splashed in with iron bars and pickaxes; the rest rigged two stout ropes with tackles, and hauled. The stone did not budge. For more than an hour they prised and levered and strained. And all the while the sailor ran to and fro, snatching up now a pick and now a crowbar, now lending a hand to haul, and again breaking off to lament aloud.

The tide turned, the winter dark came down, and at half-past four Taffy gave the word to desist. They had to hold back the sailor, or he would have jumped in and drowned beside his brother.

Taffy slept little that night, though he needed sleep. The salving of this body had become almost a personal dispute between the sea and him. The gale had shattered two of his windlasses; but two remained, and by one o'clock next day he had both slung over to the mainland and fixed beside the rock. The news spreading inland fetched two or three score onlookers before ebb of tide—miners for the most part, whose help could be counted on. The men of the coast-guard had left the wreck, to bear a hand if needed. George had come too. And happening to glance upwards while he directed his men, Taffy saw a carriage with two horses drawn up on the grassy edge of the cliff: a groom at the horses' heads and in the carriage a figure seated, silhouetted there high against the clear blue heaven. Well he recognised, even at that distance, the poise of her head, though for almost four years he had never set eyes on her,—nor had wished to.

He knew that her eyes were on him now. He felt like a general on the eve of an engagement. By the almanac the tide would not turn until 4.35. At four, perhaps, they could begin; but even at four the winter twilight would be on them, and he had taken care to provide torches and distribute them among the crowd. His own men were making the most of the daylight left, drilling holes for dear life in the upper surface of the boulder, and fixing the Lewis-wedges and rings. They looked to him for every order, and he gave it in a clear, ringing voice which he knew must carry to the cliff top. He did not look at George.

He felt sure in his own mind that the wedges and rings would hold; but to make doubly sure he gave orders to loop an extra chain under the jutting base of the boulder. The mason who fixed it, standing waist-high in water as the tide ebbed, called for a rope and hitched it round the ankle of the dead man. The dead man's brother jumped down beside him and grasped the slack of it.

At a signal from Taffy the crowd began to light their torches. He looked at his watch, at the tide, and gave the word to man the windlasses. Then with a glance towards the cliff he started the working chant—"Ayee-ho, Ayee-ho!" The two gangs—twenty men to each windlass—took it up with one voice, and to the deep intoned chant the chains tautened, shuddered for a moment, and began to lift.

"Ayee-ho!"

Silently, irresistibly, the chain drew the rock from its bed. To Taffy it seemed an endless time, to the crowd but a few moments before the brute mass swung clear. A few thrust their torches down towards the pit where the sailor knelt. Taffy did not look, but gave the word to pass down the coffin which had been brought in readiness. A clergyman—his father's successor, but a stranger to him—climbed down after it: and he stood in the quiet crowd watching the light-house above and the lamps which the groom had lit in Honoria's carriage, and listening to the bated voices of the few at their dreadful task below.

It was five o'clock and past before the word came up to lower the tackle and draw the coffin up. The Vicar clambered out to wait it, and when it came, borrowed a lantern and headed the bearers. The crowd fell in behind.

"I am the resurrection and the life.…"

They began to shuffle forwards and up the difficult track; but presently came to a halt with one accord, the Vicar ceasing in the middle of a sentence.

Out of the night, over the hidden sea, came the sound of men's voices lifted, thrilling the darkness thrice: the sound of three British cheers.

Whose were the voices? They never knew. A few had noticed as twilight fell a brig in the offing, standing inshore as she tacked down channel. She, no doubt, as they worked in their circle of torchlight, had sailed in close before going about, her crews gathered forward, her master perhaps watching through his night-glass had guessed the act, saluted it, and passed on her way unknown to her own destiny.

They strained their eyes. A man beside Taffy declared he could see something—the faint glow of a binnacle lamp as she stood away. Taffy could see nothing. The voice ahead began to speak again. The Vicar, pausing now and again to make sure of his path, was reading from a page which he held close to his lantern.

"Thine eyes shall see the King in His beauty: they shall behold the land that is very far off.

"Thou shalt not see a fierce people, a people of a deeper speech than thou canst perceive; of a stammering tongue that thou canst not understand.

"But there the glorious Lord will be unto us a place of broad rivers and streams; wherein shall go no galley with oars, neither shall gallant ship pass thereby.

"For the Lord is our judge, the Lord is our lawgiver, the Lord is our king; he will save us.

"Thy tacklings are loosed; they could not well strengthen their mast, they could not spread the sail; then is the prey of a great spoil divided; the lame take the prey."

Here the Vicar turned back a page, and his voice rang higher:

"Behold a king shall reign in righteousness, and princes shall rule in judgment.

"And a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.

"And the eyes of them that see shall not be dim, and the ears of them that hear shall hearken."

Now Taffy walked behind, thinking his own thoughts; for the cheers of those invisible sailors had done more than thrill his heart. A finger, as it were, had come out of the night and touched his brain, unsealing the wells and letting in light upon things undreamt of. Through the bright confusion of this sudden vision the Vicar's sentences sounded and fell on his ears unheeded. And yet while they faded that happened which froze and bit each separate word into his memory, to lose distinctness only when death should interfere, stop the active brain, and wipe the slate.

For while the procession halted and broke up its formation for a moment on the brow of the cliff, a woman came running into the torchlight.

"Is my Joey there? Where's he to, anybody? Hev anyone seen my Joey?"

It was Lizzie Pezzack, panting and bareheaded, with a scared face.

"He's lame—you'd know en. Have 'ee got en there? He's wandered off!"

"Hush up, woman," said a bearer. "Don't keep such a pore!"

"The cheeld's right enough somewheres," said another. "’Tis a man's body we've got. Stand out of the way, for shame!"

But Lizzie, who as a rule shrank away from men and kept herself hidden, pressed nearer, turning her tragical face upon each in turn. Her eyes met George's, but she appealed to him as to the others.

"He's wandered off. Oh, say you've seen en, somebody!"

Catching sight of Taffy, she ran and gripped him by the arm.

"You'll help! It's my Joey. Help me find en!"

He turned half about, and almost before he knew what he sought his eyes met George's. George stepped quietly to his side.

"Let me get my mare," said George, and walked away toward the light-house railing where he had tethered her.

"We'll find the child. Our work's done here, Mr. Saul!" Taffy turned to the Chief Officer. "Spare us a man or two and some flares."

"I'll come myself," said the Chief Officer. "Go you back, my dear, and we'll fetch home your cheeld as right as ninepence. Hi, Rawlings, take a couple of men and scatter along the cliffs there to the right. Lame, you say? He can't have gone far."

Taffy, with the Chief Officer and a couple of volunteers, moved off to the left, and in less than a minute George caught them up, on horseback.

"I say," he asked, walking his mare close alongside of Taffy, "you don't think this serious, eh?"

"I don't know. Joey wasn't in the crowd, or I should have noticed him. He's daring beyond his strength." He pulled a whistle from his pocket, blew it twice, and listened. This had been his signal when firing a charge; he had often blown it to warn the child to creep away into shelter.

There was no answer.

"Mr. Vyell had best trot along the upper slope," the Chief Officer suggested, "while we search down by the creek."

"Wait a moment," Taffy answered. "Let's try the wreck first."

"But the tide's running. He'd never go there."

"He's a queer child. I know him better than you."

They ran downhill toward the creek, calling as they went, but getting no answer.

"But the wreck!" exclaimed the Chief Officer. "It's out of reason!"

"Hi! What was that?"

"Oh, my good Lord," groaned one of the volunteers, "it's the crake, master! It's Langona crake calling the drowned!"

"Hush, you fool! Listen—I thought as much! Light a flare. Mr. Saul—he's out there calling!"

The first match spluttered and went out. They drew close around the Chief Officer while he struck the second to keep off the wind, and in those few moments the child's wail reached them distinctly across the darkness.

The flame leaped up and shone, and they drew back a pace, shading their eyes from it and peering into the steel-blue landscape which sprang on them out of the night. They had halted a few yards only from the cliff, and the flare cast the shadow of its breast-high fence of tamarisks forward and almost half-way across the creek, and there on the sands, a little beyond the edge of this shadow, stood the child.

They could even see his white face. He stood on an island of sand around which the tide swirled in silence, cutting him off from the shore, cutting him off from the wreck behind.

He did not cry any more, but stood with his crutch planted by the edge of the widening stream, and looked toward them.

And Taffy looked at George.

"I know," said George quietly, and gathered up his reins. "Stand aside, please."

As they drew aside, not understanding, he called to his mare. One living creature, at any rate, could still trust all to George Vyell. She hurtled past them and rose at the tamarisk-hedge blindly. Followed silence—a long silence; then a thud on the beach below and a scuffle of stones; silence again, and then the cracking of twigs as Taffy plunged after, through the tamarisks, and slithered down the cliff.

The light died down as his feet touched the flat slippery stones; died down, and was renewed again and showed up horse and rider scarce twenty yards ahead, labouring forward, the mare sinking fetlock deep at every plunge.

At his fourth stride Taffy's feet, too, began to sink, but at every stride he gained something. The riding may be superb, but thirteen stone is thirteen stone. Taffy weighed less than eleven.

He caught up with George on the very edge of the water. "Make her swim it!" he panted. "Her feet mustn't touch here." George grunted. A moment later all three were in the water, the tide swirling them sideways, sweeping Taffy against the mare. His right hand touched her flank at every stroke.

The tide swept them upwards—upwards for fifteen yards at least, though the channel measured less than eight feet. The child, who had been standing opposite the point where they took the water, hobbled wildly along shore. The light on the cliff behind sank and rose again.

"The crutch," Taffy gasped. The child obeyed, laying it flat on the brink and pushing it toward them. Taffy gripped it with his left hand, and with his right found the mare's bridle. George was bending forward.

"No—not that way! You can't get back! The wreck, man!—it's firmer——"

But George reached out his hand and dragged the child towards him and on to his saddle-bow. "Mine," he said quietly, and twitched the rein. The brave mare snorted, jerked the bridle from Taffy's hand, and headed back for the shore she had left.

Rider, horse, and child seemed to fall away from him into the night. He scrambled out, and snatching the crutch ran along the brink, staring at their black shadows. By-and-by the shadows came to a standstill. He heard the mare panting, the creaking of saddle-leather came across the nine or ten feet of dark water.

"It's no go," said George's voice; then to the mare, "Sally, my dear, it's no go." A moment later he asked more sharply:

"How far can you reach?"

Taffy stepped in until the waves ran by his knees. The sand held his feet, but beyond this he could not stand against the current. He reached forward holding the crutch at arm's length.

"Can you catch hold?"

"All right." Both knew that swimming would be useless now; they were too near the upper apex of the sand-bank.

"The child first. Here, Joey, my son! reach out and catch hold for your life."

Taffy felt the child's grip on the crutch-head, and drawing it steadily toward him hauled the poor child through. The light from the cliff sank and rose behind his scared face.

"Got him?"

"Yes." The sand was closing around Taffy's legs, but he managed to shift his footing a little.

"Quick, then; the bank's breaking up."

George was sinking, knee-deep and deeper. But his outstretched fingers managed to reach and hook themselves around the crutch-head.

"Steady, now … must work you loose first. Get hold of the shaft if you can: the head isn't firm. Work your legs … that's it."

George wrenched his left foot loose and planted it against the mare's flank. Hitherto she had trusted her master. The thrust of his heel drove home her sentence, and with scream after scream—the sand holding her past hope—she plunged and fought for her life. Still as she screamed, George, silent and panting, thrust against her, thrust savagely against the quivering body, once his pride for beauty and fleetness.

"Pull!" he gasped, freeing his other foot with a wrench which left its heavy riding-boot deep in the sucking mud; and catching a new grip on the crutch-head, flung himself forward.

Taffy felt the sudden weight and pulled—and while he pulled felt in a moment no grip, no weight at all. Between two hateful screams a face slid by him, out of reach, silent, with parted lips; and as it slipped away he fell back staggering, grasping the useless, headless crutch.

The mare went on screaming. He turned his back on her, and catching Joey by the hand dragged him away across the melting island. At the sixth step the child, hauled off his crippled foot, swung blundering across his legs. He paused, lifted him in his arms and plunged forward again.

The flares on the cliff were growing in number. They cast long shadows before him. On the far side of the island the tide flowed swift and steady—a stream about fourteen yards wide—cutting him from the farther sand-bank on which, not fifty yards above, lay the wreck. He whispered to Joey, and plunged into it straight, turning as the water swept him off his legs, and giving his back to it, his hands slipped under the child's armpits, his feet thrusting against the tide in slow, rhythmical strokes.

The child after the first gasp lay still, his head obediently thrown back on Taffy's breast. The mare had ceased to scream. The water rippled in the ears as each leg-thrust drove them little by little across the current.

If George had but listened! It was so easy, after all. The sand-bank still slid past them, but less rapidly. They were close to it now, and had only to lie still and be drifted against the leaning stanchions of the wreck. Taffy flung an arm about one and checked his way quietly, as a man brings a boat alongside a quay. He hoisted Joey first upon the stanchion, then up the tilted deck to the gap of the main hatchway. Within this, with their feet on the steps and their chests leaning on the side panel of the companion, they rested and took breath.

"Cold, sonny?"

The child burst into tears.

Taffy dragged off his own coat and wrapped him in it. The small body crept close, sobbing, against his side.

Across, on the shore, voices were calling, blue eyes moving. A pair of yellow lights came towards these, travelling swiftly upon the hillside. Taffy guessed what they were.

The yellow lights moved more slowly. They joined the blue ones, and halted. Taffy listened. But the voices were still now; he heard nothing but the hiss of the black water, across which those two lamps sought and questioned him like eyes.

"God help her!"

He bowed his face on his arms. A little while, and the sands would be covered, the boats would put off; a little while.… Crouching from those eyes he prayed God to lengthen it.

XXVII
HONORIA

She was sitting there rigid, cold as a statue, when the rescuers brought them ashore and helped them up the slope. A small crowd surrounded the carriage. In the rays of their moving lanterns her face altered nothing to all their furtive glances of sympathy opposing the same white mask. Some one said, "There's only two, then!" Another, with a nudge and a nod at the carriage, told him to hold his peace. She heard. Her lips hardened.

Lizzie Pezzack had rushed down to the shore to meet the boat. She was bringing her child along with a fond, wild babble of tender names and sobs and cries of thankfulness. In pauses, choked and overcome, she caught him to her, felt his limbs, pressed his wet face against her neck and bosom. Taffy, supported by strong arms and hurried in her wake, had a hideous sense of being paraded in her triumph. The men around him who had raised a faint cheer sank their voices as they neared the carriage; but the woman went forward, jubilant and ruthless, flaunting her joy as it were a flag blown in her eyes and blindfolding them to the grief she insulted.

"Stay!"

It was Honoria's voice, cold, incisive, not to be disobeyed. He had prayed in vain. The procession halted; Lizzie checked her babble and stood staring, with an arm about Joey's neck.

"Let me see the child."

Lizzie stared, broke into a silly, triumphant laugh, and thrust the child forward against the carriage step. The poor waif, drenched, dazed, tottering without his crutch, caught at the plated handle for support. Honoria gazed down on him with eyes which took slow and pitiless account of the deformed little body, the shrunken, puny limbs.

"Thank you. So—this—is what my husband died for. Drive on, please."

Her eyes, as she lifted them to give the order, rested for a moment on Taffy—with how much scorn he cared not, could he have leapt and intercepted Lizzie's retort.

"And why not? A son's a son—curse you!—though he was your man!"

It seemed she did not hear; or hearing, did not understand. Her eyes hardened their fire on Taffy, and he, lapped in their scorn, thanked God she had not understood.

"Drive on, please."

The coachman lowered his whip. The horses moved forward at a slow walk; the carriage rolled silently away into the darkness. She had not understood. Taffy glanced at the faces about him.

"Ah, poor lady!" said someone. But no one had understood.

*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*

They found George's body next morning on the sands a little below the foot-bridge. He lay there in the morning sunshine as though asleep, with an arm flung above his head and on his face the easy smile for which men and women had liked him throughout his careless life.

The inquest was held next day, in the library at Carwithiel. Sir Harry insisted on being present, and sat beside the coroner. During Taffy's examination his lips were pursed up as though whistling a silent tune. Once or twice he nodded his head.

Taffy gave his evidence discreetly. The child had been lost; had been found in a perilous position. He and deceased had gone together to the rescue. On reaching the child, deceased—against advice—had attempted to return across the sands and had fallen into difficulties. In these his first thought had been for the child, whom he had passed to witness to drag out of danger. When it came to deceased's turn the crutch, on which all depended, had parted in two, and he had been swept away by the tide.

At the conclusion of the story Sir Harry took snuff and nodded twice. Taffy wondered how much he knew. The jury, under the coroner's direction, brought in a verdict of "death by misadventure," and added a word or two in praise of the dead man's gallantry. The coroner complimented Taffy warmly and promised to refer the case to the Royal Humane Society for public recognition. The jury nodded, and one or two said "Hear, hear!" Taffy hoped fervently he would do nothing of the sort.

The funeral took place on the fourth day, at nine o'clock in the morning. Such—in the days I write of—was the custom of the country. Friends who lived at a distance rose and shaved by candle-light, and daybreak found them horsed and well on their way to the house of mourning, their errand announced by the long black streamers tied about their hats. The sad business over and done with, these guests returned to the house, where until noon a mighty breakfast lasted and all were welcome. Their black habiliments and lowered voices alone marked the difference between it and a hunting-breakfast.

And indeed this morning Squire Willyams, who had taken over the hounds after Squire Moyle's death, had given secret orders to his huntsmen; and the pack was waiting at Three-barrow Turnpike, a couple of miles inland from Carwithiel. At half-past ten the mourners drained their glasses, shook the crumbs off their riding-breeches, and took leave; and after halting outside Carwithiel gates to unpin and pocket their hat-bands, headed for the meet with one accord.

A few minutes before noon Squire Willyams, seated on his grey by the edge of Three-barrow Brake, and listening to every sound within the covert, happened to glance an eye across the valley, and let out a low whistle.

"Well!" said one of a near group of horsemen catching sight of the rider pricking toward them down the farther slope, "I knew en for unbeliever; but this beats all!"

"And his awnly son not three hours under the mould! Brought up in France as a youngster he was, and this I s'pose is what comes of reading Voltaire. My lord for manners, and no more heart than a wormed nut—that's Sir Harry, and always was."

Squire Willyams slewed himself round in his saddle. He spoke quietly at fifteen yards' distance, but each word reached the group of horsemen as clear as a bell.

"Rablin," he said, "as a damned fool oblige me during the next few minutes by keeping your mouth shut."

With this he resumed his old attitude and his business of watching the covert side; removing his eyes for a moment to nod as Sir Harry rode up and passed on to join the group behind him.

He had scarcely done so when deep in the undergrowth of blackthorn a hound challenged.

"Spendigo for a fiver!—and well found, by the tune of it," cried Sir Harry. "See that patch of grey wall, Rablin—there, in a line beyond the Master's elbow? I lay you an even guinea that's where my gentleman comes over."

But honest reprobation mottled the face of Mr. Rablin, squireen; and as an honest man he spoke out. Let it go to his credit, because as a rule he was a snob and inclined to cringe.

"I did not expect"—he cleared his throat—"to see you out to-day, Sir Harry."

Sir Harry winced, and turned on them all a grey, woeful face.

"That's it," he said. "I can't bide home. I can't bide home."

*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*

Honoria bided home with her child and mourned for the dead. As a clever woman—far cleverer than her husband—she had seen his faults while he lived; yet had liked him enough to forgive without difficulty. But now these faults faded, and by degrees memory reared an altar to him as a man little short of divine. At the worst he had been amiable. A kinder husband never lived. She reproached herself bitterly with the half-heartedness of her response to his love; to his love while it dwelt beside her, unvarying in cheerful kindness. For (it was the truth, alas! and a worm that gnawed continually) passionate love she had never rendered him. She had been content; but how poor a thing was contentment! She had never divined his worth, had never given her worship. And all the while he had been a hero, and in the end had died as a hero. Ah, for one chance to redeem the wrong! for one moment to bow herself at his feet and acknowledge her blindness! Her prayer was ancient as widowhood, and Heaven, folding away the irreparable time, returned its first and last and only solace—a dream for the groping arms; waking and darkness, and an empty pillow for her tears.

From the first her child had been dear to her; dearer (so her memory accused her now) than his father; more demonstratively beloved, at any rate. But in those miserable months she grew to love him with a double strength. He bore George's name, and was (as Sir Harry proclaimed) a very miniature of George; repeated his shapeliness of limb, his firm shoulders, his long lean thighs—the thighs of a born horseman; learned to walk, and lo! within a week walked with his father's gait; had smiles for the whole of his small world, and for his mother a memory in each.

And yet—this was the strange part of it; a mystery she could not explain because she dared not even acknowledge it—though she loved him for being like his father, she regarded the likeness with a growing dread; nay, caught herself correcting him stealthily when he developed some trivial trait which she, and she alone, recognised as part of his father's legacy. It was what in the old days she would have called "contradictions," but there it was, and she could not help it; the nearer George in her memory approached to faultlessness, the more obstinately her instinct fought against her child's imitation of him; and yet, because the child was obstinately George's, she loved him with a double love.

There came a day when he told her a childish falsehood. She did not whip him, but stood him in front of her and began to reason with him and explain the wickedness of an untruth. By-and-by she broke off in the midst of a sentence, appalled by the shrillness of her own voice. From argument she had passed to furious scolding. And the little fellow quailed before her, his contrition beaten down under the storm of words that whistled about his ears without meaning, his small faculties disabled before this spectacle of wrath. Her fingers were closing and unclosing. They wanted a riding-switch; they wanted to grip this small body they had served and fondled, and to cut out—What? The lie? Honoria hated a lie. But while she paused and shook, a light flashed, and her eyes were open and saw—that it was not the lie.

She turned and ran, ran upstairs to her own room, flung herself on her knees beside the bed, dragged a locket from her bosom and fell to kissing George's portrait, passionately crying it for pardon. She was wicked, base; while he lived she had misprised him; and this was her abiding punishment, that not even repentance could purge her heart of dishonouring thoughts, that her love for him now could never be stainless though washed with daily tears. "'He that is unjust, let him be unjust still.' Must that be true, Father of all mercies? I misjudged him, and it is too late for atonement. But I repent and am afflicted. Though the dead know nothing—though it can never reach or avail him—give me back the power to be just!"

Late that afternoon Honoria passed an hour piously in turning over the dead man's wardrobe, shaking out and brushing the treasured garments and folding them, against moth and dust, in fresh tissue paper. It was a morbid task, perhaps, but it kept George's image constantly before her, and this was what her remorseful mood demanded. Her nerves were unstrung and her limbs languid after the recent tempest. By-and-by she locked the doors of the wardrobe, and passing into her own bedroom, flung herself on a couch with a bundle of papers—old bills, soiled and folded memoranda, sporting paragraphs cut from the newspapers—scraps found in his pockets months ago and religiously tied by her with a silken ribbon. They were mementoes of a sort, and George had written few letters while wooing—not half a dozen first and last.

Two or three receipted bills lay together in the middle of the packet—one a saddler's, a second a nurseryman's for pot-plants (kept for the sake of its queer spelling), a third the reckoning for an hotel luncheon. She was running over them carelessly when the date at the head of this last one caught her eye. "August 3rd "—it fixed her attention because it happened to be the day before her birthday.

August 3rd—such and such a year—the August before his death; and the hotel a well-known one in Plymouth—the hotel, in fact, at which he had usually put up.… Without a prompting of suspicion she turned back and ran her eye over the bill. A steak, a pint of claret, vegetables, cheese, and attendance—never was a more innocent bill.

Suddenly her attention stiffened on the date. George was in Plymouth the day before her birthday. But no; as it happened, George had been in Truro on that day. She remembered, because he had brought her a diamond pendant, having written beforehand to the Truro jeweller to get a dozen down from London to choose from. Yes, she remembered it clearly, and how he had described his day in Truro. And the next morning—her birthday morning—he had produced the pendant, wrapped in silver paper. He had thrown away the case; it was ugly, and he would get her another.…

But the bill? She had stayed once or twice at this hotel with George, and recognised the handwriting. The bookkeeper, in compliment perhaps to a customer of standing, had written "George Vyell, Esq." in full on the bill-head, a formality omitted as a rule in luncheon-reckonings. And if this scrap of paper told the truth—why, then George had lied!

But why? Ah, if he had done this thing nothing else mattered, neither the how nor the why! If George had lied?… And the pendant—had that been bought in Plymouth and not (as he had asserted) in Truro? He had thrown away the case. Jewellers print their names inside such cases. The pendant was a handsome one. Perhaps his cheque-book would tell.

She arose, stepped half-way to the door, but came back and flung herself again upon the couch. No; she could not … this was the second time to-day … she could not face the torture again.

Yet … if George had lied!

She sat up; sat up with both hands pressed to her ears to shut out a sudden voice clamouring through them—

"And why not? A son's a son—curse you!—though he was your man!"

XXVIII
A L'OUTRANCE

Lizzie Pezzack had put Joey to bed and was smoothing his coverlet when she heard someone knocking. She passed out into the front room and opened to the visitor.

On the doorstep stood a lady in deep black—Honoria. Beyond the garden wall the lamps of her carriage blazed in the late twilight. The turf had muffled the sound of wheels, but now the jingle of shaken bits came loud through the open door.

"Ah!" said Lizzie, drawing her breath back through her teeth.

"I must speak to you, please. May I come in? I have a question …"

Lizzie turned her back, struck a match, and lit a candle. "What question?" she asked with her back turned, her eyes on the flame as it sank, warming the tallow, and grew bright again.

"It's … it's a question," Honoria began weakly; then shut the door behind her and advanced into the room. "Turn round and look at me. Ah, you hate me, I know!"

"Yes," Lizzie assented slowly, "I hate you."

"But you must answer me. You see, it isn't for me alone … it's not a question of our hating, in a way … it concerns others.…"

"Yes?"

"But it's cowardly of me to put it so, because it concerns me too. You don't know——"

"Maybe I do."

"But if you did——" Honoria broke off and then plunged forward desperately. "That child of yours—his father—alone here—by ourselves.… Think before you refuse!"

Lizzie set down the candle and eyed her.

"And you," she answered at length, dragging out each word— "you can come here and ask me that question?"

For a moment silence fell between them, and each could hear the other's breathing. Then Honoria drew herself up and faced her honestly, casting out both hands.

"Yes; I had to."

"You! a lady!"

"Ah, but be honest with me! Lady or not, what has that to do with it? We are two women—that's where it all started, and we're kept to that."

Lizzie bent her brows. "Yes, you are right," she admitted.

"And," Honoria pursued eagerly, "if I come here to sue you for the truth—it is you who force me."

"I?"

"By what you said that night, when George—when my husband—was drowned; when you cursed me. 'A son's a son,' you said, 'though he was your man.'"

"Did I say that?" Lizzie seemed to muse over the words. "You have suffered?" she asked.

"Yes, I have suffered."

"Ah, if I thought so!… But you have not. You are a hypocrite, Mrs. Vyell; and you are trying to cheat me now. You come here not to end that suffering, but to force a word from me that'll put joy and hope into you; that you'll go home hugging to your heart. Oh, I know you!"

"You do not."

"I do; because I know myself. From a child I've been dirt to your pride, an item to your money. For years I've lived a shamed woman. But one thing I bought with it—one little thing. Think the price high for it—I dessay it is; but I bought and paid for it—and often when I turn it over in my mind I don't count the price too dear."

"I don't understand."

"You may, if you try. What I bought was the power over you, my proud lady. While I keep tight lips I have you at the end of a chain. You come here to-night to break it; one little word and you'll be free and glad. But no, and no, and no! You may guess till you're tired—you may be sure in your heart; but it's all no good without that little word you'll never get from me."

"You shall speak!"

Lizzie shrugged her shoulders and picked up the candle.

"Simme," she said, "you'd best go back to your carriage and horses. My li'l boy's in the next room, tryin' to sleep; and 'tisn' fit he heard much of this."

She passed resolutely into the bedroom, leaving her visitor to darkness. But Honoria, desperate now, pushed after her, scarcely knowing what she did or meant to do.

"You shall speak!"

The house-door opened and light footsteps came running through the outer room. It was little George, and he pulled at her skirts.

"Mummy, the horses are taking cold!"

But Honoria still advanced. "You shall speak!"

Joey, catching sight of her from the bed, screamed and hid his face. To him she was a thing of horror. From the night when, thrust beneath her eyes, he had cowered by her carriage-step, she had haunted his worst dreams. And now, black-robed and terrible of face, she had come to lay hands on him and carry him straight to hell.

"Mother! Take her away! take her away!"

His screams rang through the room. "Hush, dear!" cried Lizzie, running to him; and laid a hand on his shoulder.

But the child, far too terrified to know whose hand it was, flung himself from her with a wilder scream than any; flung himself all but free of the bed-clothes. As Lizzie caught and tried to hold him the thin night-shirt ripped in her fingers, laying bare the small back from shoulder to buttock.

They were woman to woman now; cast back into savagery and blindly groping for its primitive weapons. Honoria crossed the floor not knowing what she meant to do, or might do. Lizzie sprang to defence against she knew not what. But when her enemy advanced, towering, with a healthy boy dragging at her skirts, she did the one thing she could—turned with a swift cry back upon her own crippled child and caught at the bed-clothes to cover and hide his naked deformity.

While she crouched and shielded him, silence fell on the room. She had half expected Honoria to strike her; but no blow came, nor any sound. By-and-by she looked up. Honoria had come to a standstill, with rigid eyes. They were fastened on the bed. Then Lizzie understood.

She had covered the child's legs from sight; but not his back—nor the brown mole on it—the large brown mole, ringed like Saturn, set obliquely between the shoulder-blades.

She rose from the bed slowly. Honoria turned on little George with a gesture as if to fling off his velvet jacket. But Lizzie stamped her foot.

"No," she commanded hoarsely; "let be. Mine is a cripple."

"So it is true.…" Honoria desisted; but her eyes were wide and still fixed on the bed.

"Yes, it is true. You have all the luck. Mine is a cripple."

Still Honoria stared. Lizzie gulped down something in her throat; but her voice, when she found it again, was still hoarse and strained.

"And now—go! You have learnt what you came for. You have won, because you stop at nothing. But go, before I try to kill you for the joy in your heart!"

"Joy?" Honoria put out a hand toward the bed's foot, to steady herself. It was her turn to be weak.

"Yes—joy." Lizzie stepped between her and the door, pointed a finger at her, and held it pointing. "In your heart you are glad already. Wait, and in a moment I shall see it in your eyes—glad, glad! Yes, your man was worthless, and you are glad. But oh! You bitter fool!"

"Let me go, please."

"Listen a bit; no hurry now. Plenty of time to be glad 'twas only your husband, not the man of your heart. Look at me, and answer— I don't count for much now, do I? Not much to hate in me, now you know the name of my child's father, and that 'tisn' Taffy Raymond!"

"Let me go." But seeing that Lizzie would not, she stopped and kissed her boy. "Run out to the carriage, dear, and say I'll be coming in a minute or two." Little George clung to her wistfully, but her tone meant obedience. Lizzie stepped aside to let him pass out.

"Now," said Honoria, "the next room is best, I think. Lead me there, and I will listen."

"You may go if you like."

"No; I will listen. Between us two there is—there is——"

"That." Lizzie nodded towards the child huddling low in the bed.

"That, and much more. We cannot stop at the point you've reached. Besides, I have a question to ask."

Lizzie passed before her into the front room, lit two candles and drew down the blind.

"Ask it," she said.

"How did you know that I believed the other—Mr. Raymond—to be—" She came to a halt.

"I guessed."

"What? From the beginning?"

"No; it was after a long while. And then, all of a sudden, something seemed to make me clever."

"Did you know that, believing it, I had done him a great wrong— injured his life beyond repair?"

"I knew something had happened: that he'd given up being a gentleman and taken to builder's work. I thought maybe you were at the bottom of it. Who was it told you lies about en?"

"Must I answer that?"

"No; no need. George Vyell was a nice fellow; but he was a liar. Couldn't help it, I b'lieve. But a dirty trick like that—well, well!"

Honoria stared at her, confounded. "You never loved my husband?"

And Lizzie laughed—actually laughed; she was so weary. "No more than you did, my dear. Perhaps a little less. Eh, what two fools we are here, fending off the truth! Fools from the start—and now, simme, playing foolish to the end; ay, when all's said and naked atween us. Lev' us quit talkin' of George Vyell. We knawed George Vyell, you and me too; and here we be, left to rear children by en. But the man we hated over wasn' George Vyell."

"Yet if—as you say—you loved him—the other one—why, when you saw his life ruined and guessed the lie that ruined it—when a word could have righted him—if you loved him——"

"Why didn't I speak? Ladies are most dull, somehow; or else you don't try to see. Or else——Wasn't he near me, passing my door ivery day? Oh, I'm ignorant and selfish. But hadn't I got him near? And wouldn't that word have lost him, sent him God knows where—to you perhaps? You—you'd had your chance, and squandered it like a fool. I never had no chance. I courted en, but he wouldn' look at me. He'd have come to your whistle—once. Nothing to hinder but your money. And from what I can see and guess, you piled up that money in his face like a hedge. Oh, I could pity you, now!—for now you'll never have en."

"God pity us both!" said Honoria, going; but she turned at the door. "And after our marriage you took no more thought of my—of George?" The question was an afterthought; she never thought to see it stab as it did. But Lizzie caught at the table edge, held to it swaying over a gulf of hysterics, and answered between a sob and a passing bitter laugh.

"At the last—just to try en. No harm done, as it happened. You needn' mind. He was worthless anyway."

Honoria stepped back, took her by the elbow as she swayed, and seated her in a chair; and so stood regarding her as a doctor might a patient. After a while she said—

"I think you will do me injustice, but you must believe as you like. I am not glad. I am very far from glad or happy. I doubt if I shall ever be happy again. But I do not hate you as I did."

She went out, closing the door softly.

XXIX
THE SHIP OF STARS

Taffy guessed nothing of these passions in conflict, these weak agonies. He went about his daily work, a man grown, thinking his own thoughts; and these thoughts were of many things; but they held no room for the problem which meant everything in life to Honoria and Lizzie—yes, and to Humility, though it haunted her in less disturbing shape. Humility pondered it quietly with a mind withdrawn while her hands moved before her on the lace pillow; and pondering it, she resigned the solution to time. But it filled her thoughts constantly, none the less.

One noon Taffy returned from the light-house for his dinner to find a registered postal packet lying on the table. He glanced up and met his mother's gaze; but let the thing lie while he ate his meal, and having done, picked it up and carried it away with him unopened.

On the cliff-side, in a solitary place, he broke the seal. He guessed well enough what the packet contained: the silver medal procured for him by the too officious coroner. And the coroner, finding him obstinate against a public presentation, had forwarded the medal with an effusive letter. Taffy frowned over its opening sentences, and without reading farther crumpled the paper into a tight ball. He turned to examine the medal, holding it between finger and thumb; or rather, his eyes examined it while his brain ran back along the tangled procession of hopes and blunders, wrongs and trials and lessons hardly learnt, of which this mocking piece of silver symbolised the end and the reward. In that minute he saw Honoria and George, himself and Lizzie Pezzack as figures travelling on a road that stretched back to childhood; saw behind them the anxious eyes of his parents, Sir Harry's debonair smile, the sinister face of old Squire Moyle, malevolent yet terribly afraid; saw that the moving figures could not control their steps, that the watching faces were impotent to warn; saw finally beside the road other ways branching to left and right, and down these undestined and neglected avenues the ghosts of ambitions unattempted, lives not lived, all that might have been.

Well, here was the end of it, this ironical piece of silver.… With sudden anger he flung it from him; sent it spinning far out over the waters. And the sea, his old sworn enemy, took the votive offering. He watched it drop—drop; saw the tiny splash as it disappeared.

And with that he shut a door and turned a key. He had other thoughts to occupy him—great thoughts. The light-house was all but built. The Chief Engineer had paid a surprise visit, praised his work, and talked about another sea light soon to be raised on the North Welsh Coast; used words that indeed hinted, not obscurely, at promotion. And Taffy's blood tingled at the prospect. But, out of working hours, his thoughts were not of light-houses. He bought maps and charts. On Sundays he took far walks along the coast, starting at daybreak, returning as a rule long after dark, mired and footsore, and at supper too weary to talk with his mother, whose eyes watched him always.

*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*

It was a still autumn evening when Honoria came riding to visit Humility; the close of a golden day. Its gold lingered yet along the west and fell on the whitewashed doorway where Humility sat with her lace-work. Behind, in the east, purple and dewy, climbed the domed shadow of the world. And over all lay that hush which the earth only knows when it rests in the few weeks after harvest. Out here, on barren cliffs above the sea, folks troubled little about harvest. But even out here they felt and knew the hush.

In sight of the whitewashed cottages Honoria slipped down from her saddle, removed Aide-de-camp's bridle, and turned him loose to browse. With the bridle on her arm she walked forward alone. She came noiselessly on the turf, and with the click of the gate her shadow fell at Humility's feet. Humility looked up and saw her standing against the sunset, in her dark habit. Even in that instant she saw also that Honoria's face, though shaded, was more beautiful than of old. "More dangerous" she told herself; and rose, knowing that the problem was to be solved at last.

"Good-evening!" she said, rising. "Oh yes—you must come inside, please; but you will have to forgive our untidiness."

Honoria followed, wondering as of old at the beautiful manners which dignified Humility's simplest words.

"I heard that you were to go."

"Yes; we have been packing for a week past. To North Wales it is— a forsaken spot, no better than this. But I suppose that's the sort of spot where light-houses are useful."

The sun slanted in upon the packed trunks and dismantled walls; but it blazed also upon brass window-catches, fender-knobs, door-handles—all polished and flashing like mirrors.

"I am come," said Honoria, "now at the last—to ask your pardon."

"At the last?" Humility seemed to muse, staring down at one of the trunks; then went on as if speaking to herself. "Yes, yes, it has been a long time."

"A long injury—a long mistake; you must believe it was an honest mistake."

"Yes," said Humility gravely. "I never doubted you had been misled. God forbid I should ask or seek to know how."

Honoria bowed her head.

"And," Humility pursued, "we had put ourselves in the wrong by accepting help. One sees now it is always best to be independent; though at the time it seemed a fine prospect for him. The worst was our not telling him. That was terribly unfair. As for the rest— well, after all, to know yourself guiltless is the great thing, is it not? What others think doesn't matter in comparison with that. And then of course he knew that I, his mother, never believed the falsehood—no, not for a moment."

"But it spoiled his life?"

Now Humility had spoken, and still stood, with her eyes resting on the trunk. Beneath its lid, she knew, and on top of Taffy's books and other treasures, lay a parcel wrapped in tissue paper—a dog collar with the inscription "Honoria from Taffy." So, by lifting the lid of her thoughts a little—a very little—more, she might have given Honoria a glimpse of something which her actual answer, truthful as it was, concealed.

"No. I wouldn't say that. If it had spoilt his life—well, you have a child of your own and can understand. As it is, it has strengthened him, I think. He will make his mark—in a different way. Just now he is only a foreman among masons; but he has a career opening. Yes, I can forgive you at last."

And, being Humility, she had spoken the truth. But being a woman, even in the act of pardon she could not forego a small thrust, and in giving must withhold something.

And Honoria, being a woman, divined that something was withheld.

"And Taffy—your son—do you think that he——?"

"He never speaks, if he thinks of it. He will be here presently. You know—do you not? they are to light the great lantern on the new lighthouse to-night for the first time. The men have moved in, and he is down with them making preparations. You have seen the notices of the Trinity Board? They have been posted for months. Taffy is as eager over it as a boy; but he promised to be back before sunset to drink tea with me in honour of the event; and afterwards I was to walk down to the cliff with him to see."

"Would you mind if I stayed?"

Humility considered before answering. "I had rather you stayed. He's like a boy over this business; but he's a man, after all." After this they fell into quite trivial talk, while Humility prepared the tea things.

"Your mother—Mrs. Venning—how does she face the journey?"

"You must see her," said Humility, smiling, and led her into the room where the old lady reclined in bed, with a flush on each waxen cheek. She had heard their voices.

"Bless you"—she was quite cheerful—"I'm ready to go as far as they'll carry me! All I ask is that in the next place they'll give me a window where I can see the boy's lamp when he's built it."

Humility brought in the table and tea-things, and set them out by the invalid's bed. She went out into the kitchen to look to the kettle. In that pause Honoria found it difficult to meet Mrs. Venning's eyes; but the old lady was wise enough to leave grudges to others. It was enough, in the time left to her, to accept what happened and leave the responsibility to Providence.

Honoria, replying but scarcely listening to her talk, heard a footfall at the outer door—Taffy's footfall; then the click of a latch and Humility's voice saying, "There's a visitor inside; come to take tea with you."

"A visitor?" He was standing in the doorway. "You?" He blushed in his surprise.

Honoria rose. "If I may," she said, and wondered if she might hold out a hand.

But he held out his, quite frankly, and laughed. "Why, of course. They will be lighting up in half an hour. We must make haste."

Once or twice during tea he stole a glance from Honoria to his mother; and each time fondly believed that it passed undetected. His talk was all about the light-house and the preparations there, and he rattled on in the highest spirits. Two of the women knew, and the third guessed, that this chatter was with him unwonted.

At length he too seemed to be struck by this. "But what nonsense I'm talking!" he protested, breaking off midway in a sentence and blushing again. "I can't help it, though. I'm feeling just as big as the light-house to-night, with my head wound up and turning round like the lantern!"

"And your wit occulting," suggested Honoria, in her old light manner. "What is it?—three flashes to the minute?"

He laughed and hurried them from the tea-table. Mrs. Venning bade them a merry good-bye as they took leave of her.

"Come along, mother."

But Humility had changed her mind. "No," said she. "I'll wait in the doorway. I can just see the lantern from the garden gate, you know. You two can wait by the old light-house, and call to me when the time comes."

She watched them from the doorway as they took the path toward the cliff, toward the last ray of sunset fading across the dusk of the sea. The evening was warm, and she sat bareheaded with her lace-work on her knee; but presently she put it down.

"I must be taking to spectacles soon," she said to herself. "My eyes are not what they used to be."

*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*

Taffy and Honoria reached the old light-house and halted by its white-painted railing. Below them the new pillar stood up in full view, young and defiant. A full tide lapped its base, feeling this comely and untried adversary as a wrestler shakes hands before engaging. And from its base the column, after a gentle inward curve—enough to give it a look of lissomeness and elastic strength— sprang upright straight and firm to the lantern, ringed with a gallery and capped with a cupola of copper not yet greened by the weather; in outline as simple as a flower, in structure to the understanding eye almost as subtly organised, adapted and pieced into growth.

"So that is your ambition now?" said Honoria, after gazing long. She added, "I do not wonder."

"It does not stop there, I'm afraid." There was a pause, as though her words had thrown him into a brown study.

"Look!" she cried. "There is someone in the lantern—with a light in his hand. He is lighting up!"

Taffy ran back a pace or two toward the cottage and shouted, waving his hand. In a moment Humility appeared at the gate and waved in answer, while the strong light flashed seaward. They listened; but if she called, the waves at their feet drowned her voice.

They turned and gazed at the light, counting, timing the flashes; two short flashes with but five seconds between, then darkness for twenty seconds, and after it a long steady stare.

Abruptly he asked, "Would you care to cross over and see the lantern?"

"What, in the cradle?"

"I can work it easily. It's not dangerous in the least; a bit daunting, perhaps."

"But I'm not easily frightened, you know. Yes, I should like it greatly."

They descended the cliff to the cable. The iron cradle stood ready as Taffy had left it when he came ashore. She stepped in lightly, scarcely touching for a second the hand he put out to guide her.

"Better sit low," he advised; and she obeyed, disposing her skirts on the floor caked with dry mud from the workmen's boots. He followed her, and launched the cradle over the deep twilight.

A faint breeze—there had been none perceptible on the ridge—played off the face of the cliffs. The forward swing of the cradle, too, raised a slight draught of air. Honoria plucked off her hat and veil and let it fan her temples.

Half-way across, she said, "Isn't it like this—in mid-air over running water—that the witches take their oaths?"

Taffy ceased pulling on the rope. "The witches? Yes, I remember something of the sort."

"And a word spoken so is an oath and lasts for ever. Very well; answer me what I came to ask you to-night."

"What is that?" But he knew.

"That when—you know—when I tell you I was deceived … you will forgive." Her voice was scarcely audible.

"I forgive."

"Ah, but freely? It is only a word I want; but it has to last me like an oath."

"I forgive you freely. It was all a mistake."

"And you have found other ambitions! And they satisfy you?"

He laughed and pulled at the rope again. "They ought to," he answered gaily, "they're big enough. Come and see."

The seaward end of the cable was attached to a doorway thirty feet above the base of the lighthouse. One of the under-keepers met them here with a lantern. He stared when he caught sight of the second figure in the cradle, but touched his cap to the mistress of Carwithiel.

"Here's Mrs. Vyell, Trevarthen, come to do honour to our opening night."

"Proudly welcome, ma'am," said Trevarthen. "You'll excuse the litter we're in. This here's our cellar, but you'll find things more ship-shape upstairs. Mind your head, ma'am, with the archway—better let me lead the way perhaps."

The archway was indeed low, and they were forced to crouch and almost crawl up the first short flight of steps. But after this Honoria, following Trevarthen's lantern round and up the spiral way, found the roof heightening above her, and soon emerged into a gloomy chamber fitted with cupboards and water-tanks—the provision room. From this a ladder led straight up through a man-hole in the ceiling to the light-room store, set round with shining oil-tanks and stocked with paint-pots, brushes, cans, signalling flags, coils of rope, bags of cotton waste, tool-chests.… A second ladder brought them to the kitchen, and a third to the sleeping-room; and here the light of the lantern streamed down on their heads through the open man-hole above them. They heard, too, the roar of the ventilator, and the ting-ting, regular and sharp, of the small bell reporting that the machinery revolved.

Above, in the blaze of the great lenses, old Pezzack and the second under-keeper welcomed them. The pair had been watching and discussing the light with true professional pride; and Taffy drew up at the head of the ladder and stared at it, and nodded his slow approbation. The glare forced Honoria back against the glass wall, and she caught at its lattice for support.

But she pulled herself together, ashamed of her weakness, and glad that Taffy had not perceived it.

"This satisfies you?" she whispered.

He faced round on her with a slow smile. "No," he said, "this light-house is useless."

"Useless?"

"You remember the wreck—that wreck—the Samaritan? She came ashore beneath here; right beneath our feet; by no fault or carelessness. A light-house on a coast like this—a coast without a harbour—is a joke set in a death-trap, to make game of dying men."

"But since the coast has no harbour——"

"I would build one. Look at this," he pulled a pencil and paper from his pocket and rapidly sketched the outlines of the Bristol Channel. "What is that? A bag. Suppose a vessel taken in the mouth of it; a bag with death along the narrowing sides and death waiting at the end—no deep-water harbour—no chance anywhere. And the tides! You know the rhyme—

'From Padstow Point to Lundy Light
Is a watery grave by day or night.'

Yes, there's Lundy"—he jotted down the position of the island— "Hit off the lee of Lundy, if you can, and drop hook, and pray God it holds!"

"But this harbour? What would it cost?"

"I dare say a million of money; perhaps more. But I work it out at less—at Porthquin, for instance, or Lundy itself, or even at St. Ives."

"A million!" she laughed. "Now I see the boy I used to know—the boy of dreams."

He turned on her gravely. She was exceedingly beautiful, standing there in her black habit, bareheaded in the glare of the lenses, standing with head thrown back, with eyes challenging the past, and a faint glow on either cheek. But he had no eyes for her beauty.

He opened his lips to speak. Yes, he could overwhelm her with statistics and figures, all worked out; of shipping and disasters to shipping; of wealth and senseless waste of wealth. He could bury her beneath evidence taken by Royal Commission and Parliamentary Committee, commissioners' reports, testimony of shipowners and captains; calculated tables of tides, sets of currents, prevailing winds; results of surveys hydrographical; all the mass of facts he had been accumulating and brooding over for eighteen long months. But the weight of it closed his lips, and when he opened them again it was to say, "Yes, that is my dream."

At once he turned his talk upon the light revolving in their faces; began to explain the lenses and their working in short, direct sentences. She heard his voice, but without following.

Pezzack and the under-keeper had drawn apart to the opposite side of the cage and were talking together. The lantern hid them, but she caught the murmur of their voices now and again. She was conscious of having let something slip—slip away from her for ever. If she could but recall him, and hold him to his dream! But this man, talking in short sentences, each one so sharp and clear, was not the Taffy she had known or could ever know.

In the blaze of the lenses suddenly she saw the truth. He and she had changed places. She who had used to be so practical—she was the dreamer now; had come thither following a dream, walking in a dream. He, the dreaming boy, had become the practical man, firm, clear-sighted, direct of purpose; with a dream yet in his heart, but a dream of great action, a dream he hid from her, certainly a dream in which she had neither part nor lot. And yet she had made him what he was; not willingly, not by kindness, but by injustice. What she had given he had taken; and was a stranger to her.

Muffled wings and white breasts began to beat against the glass. A low-lying haze—a passing stratum of sea-fog—had wrapped the light-house for a while, and these were the wings and breasts of sea-birds attracted by the light. To her they were the ghosts of dead thoughts—stifled thoughts—thoughts which had never come to birth—trying to force their way into the ring of light encompassing and enwrapping her; trying desperately, but foiled by the transparent screen.

Still she heard his voice, level and masterful, sure of his subject. In the middle of one of his sentences a sharp thud sounded on the pane behind her, as sudden as the crack of a pebble and only a little duller.

"Ah, what is that?" she cried, and touched his arm.

He thrust open one of the windows, stepped out upon the gallery, and returned in less than a minute with a small dead bird in his hand.

"A swallow," he said. "They have been preparing to fly for days. Summer is done, with our work here."

She shivered. "Let us go back," she said.

They descended the ladders. Trevarthen met them in the kitchen and went before them with his lantern. In a minute they were in the cradle again and swinging toward the cliff. The wisp of sea-fog had drifted past the light-house to leeward, and all was clear again. High over the cupola Cassiopeia leaned toward the pole, her breast flashing its eternal badge—the star-pointed W. Low in the north—as the country tale went—tied to follow her emotions, externally separate, eternally true to the fixed star of her gaze, the Waggoner tilted his wheels and drove them close and along and above the misty sea.

Taffy, pulling on the rope, looked down upon Honoria's upturned face and saw the glimmer of starlight in her eyes; but neither guessed her thoughts nor tried to.

It was only when they stood together on the cliff-side that she broke the silence. "Look," she said, and pointed upward. "Does that remind you of anything?"

He searched his memory. "No," he confessed: "that is, if you mean Cassiopeia up yonder."

"Think!—the Ship of Stars."

"The Ship of Stars?—Yes, I remember now. There was a young sailor— with a ship of stars tattooed on his chest. He was drowned on this very coast."

"Was that a part of the story you were to tell me?"

"What story? I don't understand."

"Don't you remember that day—the morning when we began lessons together? You explained the alphabet to me, and when we came to W— you said it was a ship—a ship of stars. There was a story about it, you said, and promised to tell me some day."

He laughed. "What queer things you remember!"

"But what was the story?"

"I wonder! If I ever knew, I've forgotten. I dare say I had something in my head. Now I think of it, I was always making up some foolish tale or other, in those days."

Yes; he had forgotten. "I have often tried to make up a story about that ship," she said gravely, "out of odds and ends of the stories you used to tell. I don't think I ever had the gift to invent anything on my own account. But at last, after a long while——"

"The story took shape? Tell it to me, please."

She hesitated, and broke into a bitter little laugh. "No," said she, "you never told me yours." Again it came to her with a pang that he and she had changed places. He had taken her forthrightness and left her, in exchange, his dreams. They were hers now, the gaily coloured childish fancies, and she must take her way among them alone. Dreams only! but just as a while back he had started to confess his dream and had broken down before her, so now in turn she knew that her tongue was held.

*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*

Humility rose as they entered the kitchen together. A glance as Honoria held out her hand for good-bye told her all she needed to know.

"And you are leaving in a day or two?" Honoria asked.

"Thursday next is the day fixed."

"You are very brave."

Again the two women's eyes met, and this time the younger understood. Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall he my people, and thy God my God—that which the Moabitess said for a woman's sake women are saying for men's sakes by thousands every day.

Still holding her hand, Humility drew Honoria close. "God deal kindly with you, my dear," she whispered, and kissed her.

At the gate Honoria blew a whistle, and after a few seconds Aide-de-camp came obediently out of the darkness to be bridled. This done, Taffy lent his hand and swung her into the saddle. "Good-night and good-bye!"

Taffy was the first to turn back from the gate. The beat of Aide-de-camp's hoofs reminded him of something—some music he had once heard; he could not remember where.

Humility lingered a moment longer, and followed to prepare her son's supper.

But Honoria, fleeing along the ridge, hugged one fierce thought in her defeat. The warm wind sang by her ears, the rhythm of Aide-de-camp's canter thudded upon her brain; but her heart cried back on them and louder than either—

"He is mine, mine, mine! He is mine, and always will be. He is lost to me, but I possess him. For what he is I have made him, and at my cost he is strong."

THE END

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