CHAPTER XVII.

THE MOON TURNED ROUND AGAIN.

Of the written records on which this tale has partly depended, neither Matthew Moon’s books nor the voluminous official documents, all criss-crossed with signatures and stamps and seals and arms, make mention of the departure of Arthur Monjoy from Liverpool. After he had (according to one description) “most feloniously fired and consumed the moor,” he ceased, officially, to exist. But word of mouth, that, with scarce more husks and wrappings, holds now and then as good a kernel of truth, goes a little further. To be sure, for dates and suchlike the documents are the safer authority; for while it was said by some that he sailed within a week, others had it that not until the month of October did he set foot on the deck of a merchant brig bound for Boston, the reason for the delay being the illness of his wife. But documents and tradition together make a pretty tangle, and he who would get at the truth of the matter must dip his cup at both sources. Partaking, perhaps, a little of both was the letter that arrived for the Wadsworth parson from Boston some time in the following spring, informing him of their settling in the new-made Republic and of the birth of a little foster-sister for Jimmy Northrop.

The official records had best be taken first. There is still extant a letter of William Chamberlayne, Solicitor to His Majesty’s Mint, in which oath is made, and it is said, that he and the Solicitor for the Crown in this particular prosecution “are not prepared to proceed further in the trials of Raikes, Dean and Thomas, or any of them, at the assize now being held at the Castle of York, by reason, as he, this deponent, has been informed, of the lack of clear and certain information and the great difficulties in the coming at evidence material to the prosecution;” and, with an extra quirk and pomposity or two, you may read the same of Matthew Moon. Moreover, certain persons were now to be brought to book on a more serious count than clipping and coining, or even the unlicensed smelting of ores (though it is difficult to see how, the penalty being the same, the distinction in guilt is drawn), and that was the murder of Jeremy Cope, Supervisor of Excise when it suited his purpose, Chief of the Bow Street Eight, and a good deal besides--an officer whose lustre was only eclipsed a quarter of a century later by that of the famous Townshend. There is yet to be seen a proclamation in the _London Gazette_, wherein His Majesty declares himself pleased to promise his most gracious pardon to anyone (save the person who actually shot the said Mr. Cope) who shall declare his or her accomplice or accomplices therein, so that he, she, or they may be apprehended and convicted thereof--ending with an offer of a reward to be paid by the Right Honourable the Lords Commissioners of His Majesty’s Treasury, and signed, “Weymouth.” The reward was supplemented by a similar one on the part of “the gentlemen and merchants of the Town and Parish of Horwick, to be paid by the Constables.” And for the account of how these rewards were never paid we must leave the documents for a moment, and turn to the fireside gossip of the weavers and sheepmasters in the ingles on winter nights.

From that source, and similar ones, we learn how Mish Murgatroyd lay hidden in the bellpit until after the advancing fire had roared away above his head, and the soldiers had retired before the flames. Three days in all (so the story went) he stayed there, and, effecting his escape at the end of that time, he returned to his home and followed his ordinary calling--which, to be sure, was little enough good. Maybe he did not know they were provided with his name; if he did, he showed uncommon coolness; for shortly afterwards he went to Horwick Thursday market, got rather more than market-drunk, and set off at six o’clock in the evening with (however he came by them) two heavy budgets of cloth, one under either arm, the straps about his neck. He reached Wadsworth, and took a sheep-track up the Scout; but near the top his foot, or the drink, or both, betrayed him. He slipped and rolled down. He did not roll any great distance, for he lodged against two mountain-ash trees, already reddening with berries. His fetching up against them was the end of Mish Murgatroyd. The heavy budgets bounded forward over an edge; they stopped with a horrible jerk; Mish was hanged at his own cost instead of at that of his country; and the hangman himself could not have done the job more neatly. That was a stroke of luck for the country, for there is no sense in wasting money.

Dick o’ Dean’s end was, too, in its way, remarkable. Of the blood-money that had been subscribed in the loom-loft of the “Fullers’ Arms,” only forty-five pound odd had been actually collected, and the three lucky wolves had taken fifteen pound apiece. When he heard of the hanging of Mish, Dick o’ Dean had the effrontery to go to his widow and to demand the unspent balance of Mish’s fifteen pounds, averring that he had incurred certain expenses on Mish’s behalf that had included a bribe to a sergeant to permit of Mish’s escape from the bellpit. The tale was thin enough, but it seems to have sufficed for Mrs. Mish. By that time, however, Parker of Ford was very busy in Horwick, straightening up certain matters with Captain Ritchie; and this exploit of Dick o’ Dean’s came to his ears. (Dick had already found it an easy matter to get fifteen pounds out of the distracted Charley.) Proceedings for blackmail were promptly instituted, and Dick was laid by the heels. Blackmail or what you like, once they had him they were little likely to let him go again, and they made short work of him in York. His end was not as satisfactory as Mish’s, costing more. The youth Charley was suffered to enjoy such peace as his conscience would allow him; and the parson shrugged his shoulders, but could do little more, when, in course of time, Charley and Pim o’ Cuddy became stalwart pillars of the Church.

For a matter of some significance, we have to return again to the documents. It is obvious that if you are permitted to select such documents as you require, and to ignore the rest, they may be made very serviceable things; but you will be prudent to make away entirely with such as do not tally with the case you have thus conveniently proved. It was an odd thing that there should have come to light, years afterwards, a paper that in all decency should have been destroyed, namely, another deposition of Eastwood Ellah’s. This deposition flatly contradicted the one which Cope had put with a chuckle into his pocket. Cope may or may not have seen this paper; of its existence he must have known, from the circumstances under which it was found; and it is always possible that orders he may have given for its destruction were disregarded. The suppression of it made some difference to Northrop and Haigh, but Cope was not the first, or last, who disregarded what was inconvenient, and, each in our different way, most of us do it. As Cope himself had said, the Law’s a queer thing; all’s past now, and they didn’t get Big Monjoy.

The parson of Wadsworth, too, had his cross to bear, and he reddened when, meeting Captain Ritchie one day in Horwick, the captain looked straight through him, ignoring his existence. Explanation was impossible; the matter must be let go at that; and for long afterwards that hot blush mounted into the parson’s cheek, often at inopportune moments. So, the horse being gone, he locked the stable door to save the harness; and the vows of amends that his praying presently gave him strength to make he kept as well as, or, maybe, a trifle better than, most of us. Then one fine day it suddenly occurred to him that he was getting rather sentimentally fond of his delinquency and making quite the most of it. “Hallo,” he thought, “this’ll never do!” and a laugh shook him.--“A good thing too!” he declared roundly. “The fellow was a man, anyway, and his wife a treasure, and I’d do it again rather than he should be stretched!”

There was very little hope of the parson after that.

Such parts of Back o’ th’ Mooin as had been heather were a sad sight for long enough to come. The fire burned here and there for a fortnight, and then there came a light shower or two that set the hills a-steam with opaque white smoke. For days after the apparent extinction of the blaze, you could, by stamping your foot on the consumed patches, set sparks glowing and little flames flickering; and then all died down. It had swept clear over the Slack to the Causeway, and there its progress had only been arrested by the tearing up of stretches of heather, in which work both soldiers and Back o’ th’ Mooiners had joined.--But a good deal of heather has grown on the hills since then, and Back o’ th’ Mooin is not very different to look at. In the villages they gradually returned to the weaving of kerseys and shalloons, and some hold that the saw,

“Three great ills come out o’ the north-- A cold wind, a cunning knave, and a shrinking cloth”

had its rise somewhere between Horwick Town and Trawden Edge.

One particular may be added, that, when all’s said, is very like Back o’ th’ Mooin. A little grisly it is, but things are to be valued according to the store you set by them, and the atlas-bone of a king went the same way. It is this: Bit by bit, the two bodies hanging in chains on Wadsworth Shelf began to disappear by other agency than the crows and the weather. A man began it by taking a phalange, then another took a metatarsal bone. Others, seeing the mementoes brought from pockets or placed on the chimney-pieces of their neighbours, followed their example; and so it went on, just as they had bought the rope at sixpence an inch. The things were prized; more than a few in Horwick joined in the filching; and one November nightfall the remains were taken in a lump in a cart by a party of Back o’ th’ Mooiners returning from the last Thursday market of the year. For long the relics were treasured; then they began to lie about the cottages, and to be lost sight of during a succession of dustings and cleanings. One only, a dorsal vertebra, probably the seventh or eighth, is now known to exist; and it may be added to the documents and the fireside tradition that is testimony to the truth of this tale.

THE END.

* * * * *

THE PILLERS.

I.--THE NIGHTINGALE.

Since the first cuckoo, weeks ago, their talk had been of little but the coming of the anemones and bluebells, the pairing of the birds in hedgerow and brake and copse, and all the merry bustle of the spring of the year; so that you might have imagined that, hale men and buxom women as well as the younger sort, the posy-verses of the last Valentine’s Day had left them all poetical crazy. But a little acquaintance with the good folk and their business would have instructed you how much hung for them on the chances of air and wind and dew; and you would then have watched as jealously as they for that half-hour’s frost of an April night that will stiffen the sap of trees, and set wood and bark together past the power of any pilling-iron to part them.

Every year, as early as the middle of April or as late as the middle of May, they set forth in a band, and the whole village assembled to see them off. The two great waggons, packed the day before, and the pole-wain on which the long ladders trailed almost to the ground, would be had out of the sheds at the town end; and the talk and laughter of the villagers would mingle with the singing of the larks and the bleating of the lambs on the bare hillsides and all the noises of the morning. The horses would be brought out and backed into the shafts with a great clatter and stamping, and the brass discs and buckles of the harness would flash and jangle in the sun. The manes of the horses had been decked with red, blue, and white ribbons, and straw had been trimmed and plaited into their tails; and while lads frolicked and ran in and out, the smallest of the children would be held up to tie rosettes and favours to the whips. The foremost waggon was always hung round with crocks and kettles like a tinker’s caravan, and to this the three or four women who were to accompany the men would mount. Good-byes would be said, handkerchiefs waved, and a man would take the head of the leading horse. The crocks and kettles would set up a clangour; the second waggon, that carried the saws and axes and boiling-irons, would fall in; and the lads would run behind the long wain, swinging on the ladders that rocked up and down like a rantipole. So they would pass between the dewy hawthorn hedges, and at the turn of the road, where the wheels were clogged to drop down the hill, the village would lose sight of them for maybe three weeks or a month.

Sometimes they pilled (or “barked,” as some call it) for others, being then paid by the day or contract, sometimes they bought the bark themselves to sell again to the tanners; and when the timber was not to come down at once they left the stripped trees, naked and white and ghostly, to stand for another year that the sap might retire and the tree season as it stood. While the men worked in the woods, the women cooked and mended, plied the pilling-irons on the smaller branches, stacked the bark into light sheds, and perchance plaited osiers or wove straw basses for beehives meanwhile. Sometimes they slept in inns and farm-kitchens, and sometimes barns and sheds were prepared against their coming.

After this fashion they came, on a May afternoon, to the Ladyshaws Wood, that belongs to the township of Portsannet under the headland; and from the height several of them saw, for the first time in their lives, the sea. The warden of Portsannet and his bailiff grow the oaks of the Ladyshaws wide and spreading, for tough, crooked pieces for the knees and ribs of ships; and in the higher wood the columns of the pines are crowded together to make the taller masts. Two score of them, oaks and pines, had been marked to come down, and the placid bailiff, red-faced, and smoking very strong tobacco, had first taken the Pillers round the woods, and then shown them their accommodation, a small cluster of barns and a penthouse that had once been a smithy. They made a fire that night on the disused forge-hearth; and as they sat about it they told one another how fair and settled the air was, and how grandly the Ladyshaws were golding, and spoke of the sea and ships, and of the sea-worm that bores the oak, and of bark and tanning and markets and prices. Soft clouds lay low to the earth; scents and odours, now from the pine woods, now from the hawthorn hedges, and again the whiff of Portsannet and the sea, drifted in tracts on the mild air; and if now and then a man winked at his neighbour and said something about a pheasant or an egg, it was no such great matter after all. They sought their blankets early; the retriever bitch and the two terriers stretched themselves across the thresholds of the sheds; and the whole company slept long before moonrise.

* * * * *

High in the dark laithe the four women lay on the top of a half-cut stack; and Jessie Wheeler had avoided the corner immediately under the great square hole that yawned in the floor of the loft overhead. Instead, she had spread her blanket near a small vent-hole that had been made by the leaving out of a wall-stone. Against this aperture she could barely distinguish the shape of her arm as the tips of her fingers touched the floor only a couple of feet above her. The women had taken off only their upper garments; and the niche where they lay smelt of stale hay, and the trusses crackled and whispered with each of their movements.

A short harsh call outside startled her, and she raised herself on her elbow to listen. The call was repeated; and then there stole on the May night a series of long liquid notes. A nightingale had begun to sing in the thorn hedge. The sound ceased, and the notes seemed to take flight and diminish and die away. She waited. Again came the low liquid call, and broke into trills that increased in volume. Another long pause left the air trembling; and then, as if by the giving way of some barrier, the full flood of song gushed like a torrent from the bird’s throat. The piercing melody filled the night; it mounted and hovered and rang under the low clouds, as if under rafters; it spread to the woods and out over the headland; and Jessie’s heart lifted, and her lips shaped the name of Willie Ramsey.

To poets the nightingale might sing of unattainable things; to Jessie it sang only of Willie--Willie had all. The torrent of melody filled the dark loft where she lay with memories and images only of Willie; and she closed her eyes in bliss as the bird sang ever louder and clearer.

What the beginning had been she could hardly have told. They had sought the nuts and blackberries together, and watched the trout in the shallow brook, and popped the bags of the foxgloves. They had played and kissed and wrangled; and he, too, with the other lads, had twisted the stalks of the pulling-grass into her hair, and pointed at her for her outbursts of passion.... Perhaps her hair had been the beginning. Once the children had plaited chaplets of green leaves for their hair, and on hers Willie had set the leaves of the copper beech, and laughed that hair and leaves should be of one colour. Long after, she had set her hair in a coil above her white nape; and when someone had again made sport of this, in place of the fit of temper had come quick tears.... The memories came faster as the bird sang ecstatically--of the season when their companionship had seemed, like Willie’s calf-voice, all broken and here and there; of the day when she had fashioned the straw mell-doll for the corner of the last stack, and the farm men had laughed, and jested at her “babe,” and Willie had seen her miserable flush ... and then of the evening in the milking-shed when he had so kissed her that it had seemed wonderful they could ever have kissed before as boy and girl. In spite of her passionateness, then, he had loved her.... From the yard came the sound of a horse’s stamping, and the dragging of the chain and the munching at the crib; she heard it even through the song. A faint light glimmered in the vent-hole--the moon had broken for a moment through the soft clouds, and the nightingale sang as though the hand of a man had seized him and were crushing the heart within him....

And so they had become lovers, and had been so for well-nigh a year. The moon became clouded again; the bird’s song changed to lovely aching notes, that somehow Jessie could hardly bear; and her hand stole to her breast and sought the little gold locket that contained the tiny ring of hair that Willie’s mother had cut from him while yet he was scarcely bigger than the mell-doll.

* * * * *

The morning star shone over the sea, and the first cock crowed down in Portsannet. The nightingale ceased to sing. The moon still rode high among the clouds; but a breeze came from the east, and a greyness and lifting altered the air. The cocks made an increasing din. A splendour of rose and gold, in the midst of which the sun burned like a brazier, turned the vault to an ineffable blue, and flushed the tops of the Ladyshaws. And as the earliest of the Pillers to rise trudged down the meadows for water, he saw that a man-o’-war, under half canvas, stood motionless beyond the headland. He stopped to watch the men who moved about her like ants, and saw the little fleck of white as she dropped anchor.

II.--THE LADYSHAWS.

The woods resounded with the calling of the men, the hacking of the grub-axe at roots, the clash of irons flung down, and the ceaseless snapping and crackle of the undergrowth. The wide spaces that had been cleared for the fall of the oaks were trampled and trodden, mould and bluebells and the dead brown bracken; and hazel and thorn and dark holly were speckled white as if with cuckoo-spit where the bill-hooks had shorn through them. Now and then men, stacking the brushwood about the clearings, peered into it for eggs and nests; and the frightened birds fluttered continually here and there, refusing to leave their young.

At the gnarled oak that stood lowest down the slope of the wood Willie Ramsey and Jerry Holmes were already at work with the great-axe. They swung alternately, and the white chips lay thick over their boots, and the deep notch, that was rapidly becoming deeper, made the tree look as if it was balanced on a blunt apex. A few yards beyond the flying chips lay the great double saw, a tin of grease for easing it, and a coil of rope; and Jerry’s wrinkled face twitched into wonderful folds and creases as he delivered each blow. As again, for the tenth time, the thought of the forenoon drinking that the women would bring occurred to him, he grunted “Spell,” dropped the head of his axe, and leaned on the heft to recover his breath.

“Ye look thirsty, too, my lad,” he observed by and by, glancing up at Willie.

Willie passed his fingers across his brow and looked at them all wet. He was tall, black-browed, and black-haired, and his neck lifted at his chest with his breathing, and the muscles of his forearm started sharply as his fingers played on the heft of his axe.

“Ay, this ought to be grand stuff for ribs, if th’ chopping of it’s aught to reckon by,” he answered.

“Nay, ye’re limber enow; ’tis owd bones like me it finds out,” quoth Jerry, grinning. “’Tis th’ season o’ life wi’ ye to think more o’ th’ women nor th’ drink they bring. I ken your ways; but me, I’m naughbut rare and thirsty.”

“Well, maybe I’se mend o’ that.”

“Ay, Jessie ’ll mend ye, if ye’re mendable. Ye may laugh; ginger’s for game, and al’ays was----”

“They ken best where th’ shoe pinches that has it on, Jerry.”

“Ay, when they get it on; thou’rt not shod yet, lad.--Well, wisdom’s wasted o’ youth; let’s to th’ ribs an’ knees again---- Spell----”

They turned to with the axes again.

Somewhere up the wood a man was setting a hone to a bill-hook, and away to the right they had begun to chop at another tree. Willie and Jerry were well ahead, and nowhere were they sawing yet; and as the chips started and flew, and the keen axes cut deeper and deeper into the bole, and Jerry’s mouth and eyebrow flickered and dipped, they began to pass round the tree and to cut more carefully here and there. A whiff of strong tobacco came down the glade, and the placid bailiff stood and watched them.

“Ye’ll be almost ready for th’ ropes and cross-cut,” he remarked, “and then there’ll be _one_ on ’em down.--Eh, they must ha’ seen some scenes, must these oaks! Ay, they must.--Are ye acquainted wi’ these parts? No, say ye? Eh, things has happened i’ this neighbourhood, hundreds o’ years back. It were off th’ Head, yonder, that Paul Jones fought, that ye ’ll ha’ heard tell of.--No! Well, that’s surprising!”

He continued to talk in his mild, easy way, telling them his story of Paul Jones; and, by and by, Willie shouted out loud, “Skipjack!” A call up the wood answered him.

“Skipjack” was Charlie Dodd. He came, an ungainly youth with a long neck, a back shaped like a lad’s kite by reason of his sloping shoulders, and enormous hands and wrists.

“Nay, don’t hang yoursel’,” the bailiff observed as Charlie passed a loop of rope about his neck; and Jerry and Willie hoisted him up to a bough.

Dead bark and twigs and tree-scurf came down as the Skipjack swung from branch to branch; and he made fast the loop to a high fork, gave a grimace and shout, and came down it in three perilous-looking swings, his especial feat. Jerry smeared the great cross-cut with grease, and they set it into the notch. The sun shone warmly through the bare branches, and the ruddy oak-apples made a rich colour against the sky. Sawdust lodged in the folds of the clothing of the two men as they bent their backs to the cross-cut, and the birds cried more and more loudly. They were chopping in several places at once now, and from the top of another tree the Skipjack gave another shout. Now and then Willie and Jerry loosened the saw and rested, their faces crimson; and the bailiff mused among the oaks and told over again the story of Paul Jones. Then Willie and Jerry set the saw aside; the tree was ready for the fall; and men ran from here and there, and gathered round the oak, and took the rope and set the huge tree gently rocking on its base. The tree-scurf descended on them, and the birds made a piteous clamour. Willie ran in with a wedge; the tree tottered, hung for a moment beyond its point of balance, and then gave a long groan and twisted slowly. Men sprang for safety as it came over. There was a rushing and breaking of branches, the fibres burst with a loud crack, the boughs whipped out dangerously, and the tree left a great white blade like that of a sword standing a yard up from the butt. They stood back for a minute, as men stand back from the dying body of a formidable beast; then they ran in and set to work with saws and axes in half a dozen places at once. While some sawed and lopped its branches, Willie and Jerry marked the trunk into six-foot lengths and took the cross-cut again. Soon the women brought the morning ale; and then the pilling and bolling irons, like spoons with a solid bowl, were got out.

Fat Maggie had brought a straw hassock, and as she sat wide-lapped on it and worked her pilling-iron the points of her elbows were redder than her red arms. Nan and Jennie Holmes, Jerry’s wife and daughter, sat in a litter of brushwood, and Jennie’s face worked like her father’s as she cut the slashes with a knife and thrust in the iron. The sun caught Jessie Wheeler’s hair as she sat in the brown bracken with her skirts tucked close about her ankles; and now and then she glanced across to where Willie thrust at the noisy cross-cut. The air became fragrant with the smell of sawdust and the sharp odour of the new green timber, and the sap glistened in bright films and webs as the bark parted from the white wood. The piles of the smaller bark accumulated about the women, and the white-stripped twigs and billets turned a pale buff in an hour. The creak and rush of another falling tree came from up the wood. Fat Maggie clapped her black hands to her ears as a man began to set a saw immediately behind her; and Willie’s oak lay in three great sections, the middle one of which had rolled to one side.

The easy-going bailiff came up again as Jerry stooped to examine the face of the butt section. “What is it?” he said; and Jerry pointed at something. Willie took a bar and rolled the middle section away; and all three of them stooped again to the cut.

“If that’s a ring-shake----” Jerry began; but the bailiff rubbed his hands and beamed.

“It isn’t a ring-shake; I’ll lay I know what it is. Look you! saw this slice clean out, here.”

Other men gathered round and watched them saw a three-inch slice out of the tree. The saw polished the heart of the oak like marble, and a foot or so within the bark, and three or four inches in length, a curious mark showed. The bailiff took an axe and chopped into the flat disc; then he took up the disc and one of the fragments.

“Well!” he said, his mild face radiant, “I wouldn’t ha’ missed that for a crown! I’ve heard tell of ’em, too! D’ye see?”

Buried in the heart of the tree, and fitting together like a die and matrix, were two letters, an M and a V. They had been cut long ago in the wood itself, and had become overgrown with the newer wood, but had never healed. Men called to one another, and all pressed for a sight of the marvel. Jessie’s head rested for a moment against Willie’s shoulder, and his hand sought hers as the pieces were passed from hand to hand; and soon the bailiff said, “I’se take these home,” and put them into his pocket.

The women fetched the dinner at midday, and, after it, Willie and Jessie sat apart in a little copse of hazels. A lean-to of thick base-bark screened them from the others, and the green tassels of the hazels dangled over them. His fingers strayed in her rich hair; as she smiled up at him the corners of her mouth were dewy as the sap that glistened under the rind of the great oaks. Nellie, the retriever bitch, blinked drowsily at them both.

“It’s no deeper nor I ha’ for thee,” she whispered by and by, as if he knew without telling what she spoke of.

“What, dear?”

“Th’ tree,” she murmured; and again he caressed her burnished hair.

“Only ten days and we’se be home,” he said, presently; “shall ye be glad, Jess?”

“Yes, love; there’s no comfort wi’ yon sea all about ye, like as if something were al’ays watching ye. I’d sooner meet thee aback o’ th’ little lambing-shed at home o’ th’ hill. An’ when we’re back I’se mak’ thee a dozen shirts wi’ my wages, dear----”

Willie laughed. “And what shall we gi’e her, Nellie?” he asked the retriever; and the animal moved her tail lazily, hearing her name. Soon they heard stirrings behind the hazel copse; the women began to pack up tins and dishes; and Jerry’s voice called, “Where’s my mate?” The men scattered again about the clearings. Again the wood became noisy with the chop of the axe, the knock of the iron, and the hoarse voice of the saw. The huge sections, stripped of their thick rinds, lay white on the bracken. White faggots gleamed against the tan of the inner bark, against the pink-budding thorn and the slate-purple brambles and the quick green of the hazels and elders. The men made another spell of half-an-hour late in the afternoon; and when the sunset gun boomed sullenly from the ship off the Head, they covered the irons and saws and axes with sacking, hid them under a stack of brushwood, and turned their faces towards the sheds for supper.

III.--THE PRESS.

Dim riding-lights twinkled down in Portsannet Harbour, and a few swinging oil lanterns crowded the narrow streets with dense shadows. Threads of light came through cracks of barred and shuttered windows, and the rusty glimmerings of the horn lanterns that hung in antique iron brackets on the angles of houses showed the short flights of cobbled steps and the precipitous ladders of wood that seemed to tumble from one level of the streets to another. The strong odour of dead fish, brine, tarred nets, and groynes and timbers half rotted by the sea-worms, lay over the town; and incessant tuggings and gruntings, with over all the sigh and rustle of the sea, came from the smacks and keels and cobles that moved at their moorings.

From an alley down by the bridge a harsh clamour broke out, and half a mile away you could distinguish the shouts and oaths and cries. It was down by the bridge that the sailors’ taverns and kitchens lay, and the men who sat snug by their own firesides nodded, as much as to say they had expected it. They knew that Portsannet was not a quota-port; but they knew also that the lieutenants of His Majesty’s ships did not stick at niceties when the gun-deck complement ran low, and they had been wary of a press as soon as the ship had dropped anchor. And so the bolts had been shot, and the cumbrous bars set into the staples; as for the “Mermaid” and the “Anchor,” the press was welcome to the tinkers and rogues and gipsies they would find there with the women.

Jews and water-side men and sellers of old copper and iron and cordage kept the shops adjacent to the “Mermaid” and “Anchor,” and such among them as had no dread of the press were gathered with three or four women about the closed door of the “Mermaid.” Half a dozen unkempt sailors, with cudgels and stretchers, thrust them back, keeping the door; and the shrill cries of the women and the gruff voices of the men filled the narrow alley. From an upper window opposite the inn a ship’s chandler shook his fist; and a score of yards away a few men peered round corners, ready to take to their heels. A bony virago, who had been cast half drunk from the tavern, screamed at the men-o’-war’s men in the fishwives’ tongue; and a coxswain with a tarred hat pushed her back continually as she ever advanced.

“See you’re not taken, you scald trull!” he menaced her; “you lack little but a beard o’ being a man, and we have two bonnie Lord-Mayor’s men you could berth between!”

“Ay, ye damned tarrybreeks, ye women i’ petticoats; what th’ jails turns out th’ gun-deck doesn’t mak’ dainty wi’, ye----!”

“Dainty, ho, ho!” another bawled; “chuck, chuck, come wi’ me, dainty----!”

“Yah, ye rascals!” the chandler shouted from his window, “ye rotten mast-greasing rogues--ye captain’s chicken-crammers--wi’ a red-checked shirt at th’ gratings once a month----”

He cursed them, and they taunted him for his stolen tallow and canvas, and bade him stop hammering the King’s arrow out of copper bolts and untwisting the coloured strand that marked his cordage as filched from the King’s dockyards. The rakish woman broke a window with a stone, and cried through the opening, “Ned! Ned!” and the coxswain thrust her back with his hand on her flat breast, and took her a rap over the knuckles. The men handled their stretchers as if they would as lief have broken a head or two as not.

Suddenly the inn door opened, and there was a press forward. A lieutenant appeared in the entrance, his cocked hat athwart like a half-moon and his hooked nose sticking out scarcely less prominently as he turned his profile. Other men could be seen behind him, and the woman darted forward with a cry of “Ned!”

“Turn that slut off!” the lieutenant ordered curtly; and he grumbled to himself: “A pretty lot o’ cattle to pink! I want men with bodies!--We’ll try the Wood, then.... Here, you long rascal: in case you’re deceiving me, do you know what they keep on a ship in a red-baize bag?”

The fellow the woman had addressed as Ned snivelled, and the chandler across the alley cried, “That’s him that robs th’ roosts! Feel in his pocket for handkerchiefs----!”

“You don’t, eh? Well, it makes your back black--black, like dead liver, d’you hear? And some have chosen hanging before a flogging with it. If it isn’t as you say in the Wood, that’s your choice, too, my man!”

The man blubbered in his fear: “It’s so, captain. There’s one fellow swings down a tree on a rope, a right sailor for you--Skipjack they call him--there’s a two-three sheds, wi’ a long pole-wain----”

“Bring those other tinkers out, coxswain; they shall go with us. Which way?--Back, you woman!”

The chandler screamed, hanging half out of his window: “Yah, ye walking fever! Ye’d sell a real man to save your skin, would ye? But ye’ll go yet for a sessions-bird! Choose th’ hanging afore th’ red check--save up your rum and tak’ it drunk----”

“Fling a stone at that man, somebody,” the officer said.

The “Mermaid” emptied itself into the street--a score or so of the men of the press, seven or eight wretched vagrants, and one or two of the sailors’ doxies who had remained in hiding. A few of the seamen slung their lanterns on their cudgels; the whole company moved; and, as they passed to the harbour front, candles and heads appeared in windows, and groans and hootings followed them. They turned up the main street; the sailors thwacked their miserable captives as they failed to make haste enough up the cobbled steps and timber stairways; one or two of the women dropped behind, breathless; and at the top of the street the Portsannet folk stayed and watched the men of the press take the road that led to the Ladyshaws.

* * * * *

Jessie Wheeler slept soundly in the niche on top of the hay. The nightingale on the thorn was silent, and the embers of the fire on the hearth in the penthouse had sunk to a grey wood ash, that only now and then the light breeze fanned to a faint pink glow. The clouds were close folded overhead; hardly a whisper came from the Ladyshaws. Nellie and the two terriers slept across the thresholds, and with a last soft settling the fire itself seemed to go to sleep.

The retriever heard the noise first, and, suddenly alert, dropped to the down-charge. The terriers set their heads and fore feet low, and growled softly. A man asleep in a shed muttered mechanically, “Quiet!” and turned over. From the brow at the bottom of the meadows came the sound of voices and of a moving company; and then the voices dropped, but the moving came nearer. The terriers broke suddenly into a hubbub of barking; and Jessie woke, and started and trembled.

Jerry Holmes, without his boots, came out of the shed with a lantern; it showed the furrows of his own face, but not the forms that were approaching. They had muffled their lanterns about with coats and handkerchiefs, and the shrouding of one had been done with a spotted neckerchief that showed dabbled with a dusky pattern. Jerry knew no more than that honest men do not wander about the country at night, a score in a band, with doused lanterns; and he gave a shout of “Up, lads!” The terriers barked furiously; the shout was answered by a score of voices; the cloths were twitched off the lanterns; and the press and the seven or eight pressed rushed forward. Jerry, for all he was inland, knew what it was, and his hand tightened on a mattock that all at once he seemed to find in his grasp without being able to tell how he had come by it.

In the big barn doorway the Skipjack and Willie Ramsey appeared. They, too, had caught up what lay nearest to hand--Charlie, the crooked iron handle of some machine, and Willie a breadth of a split lid with a batten across it full of bent nails. There were no doors to the barn, and behind these three other faces peered out anxiously. Old Jerry muttered, “Nay, this is no good; we’re done afore we start”; and he thought of the axes that lay under the brushwood in the Ladyshaws.

“That’s the Skipjack, him wi’ th’ crook; what did I tell ye?” a tall fellow, bound, cried appealingly to a man with a hooked nose and a blue coat with white facings. “And him wi’ th’ black hair’s Willie something--he were back of a hazel bush wi’ a lass--it’s true what I say----”

“Close in and seize them,” the lieutenant ordered. “Creep along the wall, one or two of you, and the rest rush in.”

“Ay, that’s th’ road,” Jerry muttered again, bitterly; “well, we’ll ha’ one knock----”

And, indeed, there could be but one end to it; the plight was hopeless. The short scuffle barely lasted two minutes. A stretcher cracked across Jerry’s shins and he went down; at the very first stroke that Willie struck, his batten nailed itself fast to a cudgel, and, having no handle, was wrenched from his hand; and the Skipjack’s crank, having a wooden case for the grip, twirled uselessly this way and that. They struck with their hands, but were overborne and rolled over with their assailants, and the sailors leaped over them as they rolled, and poured into the barn. Half of them had not even their boots on, but desperate grunts and scuffles sounded inside the dark sheds. Jerry, his arms already secured, was crouched up against a wall, his head bowed almost to his injured shins. The Skipjack lay near him with the breath knocked out of him; and as Willie Ramsey lay flat on his belly with a heavy knee in his back he suddenly made a “Tss, Nell!” between his teeth, and the retriever fastened herself to the officer’s hand. The lieutenant gave a cry and an oath with the pain, and then he drew and shortened his sword and ran the retriever through the body.

Suddenly Willie shouted in a loud voice, “Bide where ye are, Jessie!” and at that the informer pressed nearer to the lieutenant.

“Ay, they ha’ some women wi’ em, four of ’em, but I don’t know where they are----”

“Curse ’em,” snarled the officer, wringing the dark blood from his hand; “where there’s women there’s men. Rout ’em out.”

A dozen men were already at the door of the laithe. Suddenly they fell back, and the informer, raising himself on his toes, cried, “Ay, her wi’ red hair; wasn’t it true what I told ye, captain?...”

Her arms were white and bare to the short shift that showed at her shoulders, and her brown hands fumbled at her waist. Her hair lay in a heavy mass half down her back, and her boots were thrust on unlaced. Her mouth was open, and her eyes shifted rapidly, seeking Willie. She saw him, and made a little shuffling run, her boots slipping; and a sailor barred her way and glanced at the officer for orders.

The lieutenant advanced and peered into her face.

“Wife?... Ah, sweetheart!” His eyes rested on the gold locket at her naked bosom. He put out his hand to touch it, and Willie cried in a low, husky voice, “Man, loose my hands ... gi’e me my billet o’ wood and tak’ your sword ... or wi’ my naked hands----”

Jessie dropped to her knees and seized the officer’s hand. He drew it away with a sharp exclamation.

“Oh, ’tis blood!” she cried.--“Nay, I didn’t mean to hurt thee, sir, but dinna tak’ him! Let me bind thy hand, i’ pity and friendliness, and dinna tak’ him! A handkercher and some watter--see, let me cleanse it and heal it wi’ herbs and draw th’ foulness out wi’ my mouth. But poor wood-folk we are, fro’ th’ inland parts, and harm none, but pill th’ trees i’ springtime, ask th’ bailiff else.... He’s my lad, and’ll wed me this back-end, and’ll ha’ th’ farm when his father’s ta’en--nay, I sorrow to see thee bleed so!--and thou’s ha’ my prayers every night....”

His blood had dripped to her own naked arms, and then, all at once, she saw the dead retriever. Her mouth went round as an O with horror. Still kneeling, she sank back till she had to put one hand behind her for support; and she breathed softly, “Oh--Nellie!” The next moment she was up on her feet, quivering and ugly with passion.

“Ay?” she cried in a high voice, “Ay? Th’ dog too? Let’s see thee, Nell.--Ay, right through; th’ dog, too! They tak’ their swords to dogs, gentlemen does; cocked hats and lace on ’em, they kill dogs. Tak’ her and wash her, Maggie, for me to bury: and ye ken herbs.--Did I touch yon man’s hand that kills dogs?--Ye ken herbs: tell me o’ one that keeps wounds oppen, and lets ’em drain, and sets a venom i’ ’em so they shriek at th’ sight o’ watter, dog-killers, and slaver at their cruel mouths through their teeth that’s locked i’ torment----”

“Oh, come away, Jessie!” Maggie implored, seizing her arms.

“A sword! Ay, a sword to a dog, but a man wi’ his bare hands is bound fast wi’ cords----”

“Do you know who you’re wreaking this on?” said the lieutenant, in a smothered voice; “not on me, my lass!----” His voice changed, and he cried abruptly, “Come, stir; do we need a whole night for a bare dozen capstan-pushers? Fall in! Gag that whining pickpocket! Form ’em up, coxswain! Ready?”

“Ye’d best tak’ th’ dog’s tongue,” Jessie cried, “chance another gentleman boasts he’s killed him. Lend me thy sword while I cut it out!”

“By God, your own ought to be cut out, you red witch!--Faugh!--Up, men!”

“Ay, forward; I’m walking Portsannet way mysel’; I’ve a dead dog to show folk; me and Nellie’s for Portsannet!--Come, poor lass.”

She took the dead retriever up in her arms. The women strove to restrain her, but she answered them in a hard voice; and the hook-nosed lieutenant, grinding his teeth as she railed, was yet unable to keep his eyes from her throat and shoulders. She saw it, and laughed shrilly, and made a display of the bare arms that held the dog for him. He swore a filthy oath under his breath; Fat Maggie and Jerry’s wife and daughter wept; the men’s faces were hard set; and the two terriers leaped and barked about the lieutenant as Jessie clucked them on with her tongue and asked him where his sword was. They set forward down the meadows; a dim ring of orange showed where the moon swam behind the clouds; and as they left the meadows and began the descent to the valley the coxswain stepped back to Jessie, who was heaping taunt on taunt, and said, “Let it alone--ye’re but making it worse for him....”

IV.--AT PORTSANNET.

The news had spread in Portsannet, and many of the decent fisherfolk had joined the common sort at the head of the street. They murmured, but it was little of their business, after all. Had any of their own kin been seized, they might have resisted; as it was, Portsannet was well rid of a rogue or two; and as for the Pillers, they, too, were in a sort vagrants. True, when a red-haired, slipshod, unkempt wench appeared, holding a dead retriever bitch in her arms, they wondered, and some called her a hussy; but others, looking again, cried that it was a shame. But a dead dog was not a deal to make a trouble about, and what they would be gladdest to see was the stern of the longboat that was fastened down by the jetty.

And why did Jessie, with her lover pinioned and about to be reft from her, take his case less passionately than that of the cold and heavy animal? She could not have told you. Maybe her mind could comprehend only the small evil; or, as men in moments of stress will occupy themselves with foolish, trivial things, an instinct bade her hold the unbearable thought away from her. Likely enough it was this last; for, suddenly seeing Willie’s haggard eyes on her, she cried, faintly: “Dinna look at me now, or ’twill be th’ last! Turn thy face away! And ye--some o’ ye--show me where th’ bailiff lives----”

A woman took her own shawl and set it over her shoulders. “Dinna shame us, lassie,” she said; and “Ay, ay--where d’ye say he lives?” Jessie replied.

“Best tak’ her to our spare cham’er, Ellen,” a man’s voice said; but Jessie called again for the bailiff: he was a harmless man, wi’ a pleasant word for folk; his oaks and pines were but half cut; nay, they had not started with the pines....

“I’ll tak’ ye to th’ bailiff, dearie. Come, then,” said the woman who had given her the shawl; and suddenly Jessie began to tremble. Without glancing once at Willie, she crossed to the narrow entry of a passage, laid down the dog’s body, and then turned to the woman. “Come, make haste,” she said. She passed the lieutenant without seeming to see him. The two women turned into a dark lane that was deep rutted with carts, as if it led to a farm. By and by Jessie began to run.

Through a bare orchard a candle shone in the bailiff’s window. They found him in his comfortable kitchen smoking his strong tobacco. The two pieces of wood he had brought from the Ladyshaws lay on the table before him, and with the point of his penknife he was counting the rings of the tree’s growth. “A hundred and ninety-six--a hundred and ninety-seven--a hundred and ninety-eight,” he said, counting aloud; and when he got to the two hundredth ring he stuck the point of his penknife into the wood and looked up mildly and enquiringly.

Jessie’s railing was past now; she thought no more of Nellie.

“They’re taking th’ men--th’ press--that’s cutting the trees; they’re taking ’em down th’ street now,” she announced shortly; “go stop ’em.”

“Men?” the bailiff enquired, quite unruffled: “Oh, ay, the Pillers. I remember ye were with ’em. Dear, dear, now; that’s awk’ard. Two more days o’ this weather and the leaves’ll be breaking out everywhere. We shall lose the price o’ the bark--wi’out we could prosecute for it--no--now that’s vexing.... Ye’d see this piece of oak this morning? Of course. I’ve counted two hundred; think o’ that! Two hundred year sin’ them letters were cut, and more to count yet.”

“But they’re taking ’em--Willie and Jerry,” Jessie murmured, dazed. “Like enow ye wouldn’t know Willie’s name--it were him cut them pieces for ye.... Oh, man!” she cried suddenly, “he’s my lover--chance ye’re wed yoursel’----”

“Eh?” said the bailiff; “No.”

“Oh, think, wi’ your talk o’ two hundred year--happen lovers cut them marks, same as ye’ve cut a lass’s name on a tree!”

“Them that I heard tell of was King’s marks,” the bailiff mused, “but ay, happen this would be some lad----”

Jessie dropped face foremost on the table, and the fisherwoman spoke sharply.

“Come out o’ your moon-trances, Matthew Hudson!” she cried; “think what can be done. They’ll up anchor in a couple of hours wi’ th’ turn o’ th’ tide.--Wad th’ Warden stop ’em?”

Jessie moaned softly on the table, and the bailiff deliberated.

“Ay--no--there’s no knowing; the Warden might.”

“Then put th’ horse i’ the trap, ye daft fool, and tak’ us ower!” the woman cried, losing her temper.

And as the bailiff set his pieces of wood aside with a sigh, he murmured, “Me wed? No----”

In ten minutes the trap was ready, and the bailiff started the horse at a walk down the rutted lane.

“Give me them reins, ye fat oaf!” Ellen exclaimed. “D’ye think to-morrow’ll do for this?”

She shook up the horse, and the trap rocked and jolted. She made a cut with the whip as they reached the street; but Jessie, her face buried in the shawl, saw nothing of the throng a couple of score yards away.

“He trots better nor he gallops,” the bailiff suggested mildly, as they turned into another miry lane.

Soon Ellen passed the reins to the bailiff and set her arm about Jessie’s swaying, jolting body. She turned back a corner of the shawl to say in her ear, “‘Twill be all right yet, dearie! Come, be easy, now.”

Before them, where the road wound round the headland, spread the impenetrable blackness of the sea. A sharp turn showed lights half a mile ahead, a little way up the hill; and as they drew nearer the bailiff remarked, as if the fact were not without interest, “He’s up, for a wonder; I’d have laid a crown he’d gone to bed.”

He pulled up at a wooden gate that had neither lodge nor avenue. One end of the large house a little way up the hill was brightly lighted.

“Lean on my shoulder, lassie,” Ellen said. “And you, Matthew, just step as if ye knew what ye’d come about.”

They passed up the treeless drive, and at a dark side door the bailiff rang a bell. A servant appeared with a candle, the bailiff said a few words, and they were shown into a small office with a desk and ledgers and tin boxes. The servant left the candle on the desk, and they waited.

In five minutes a heavily-built, grave-looking, elderly man appeared in the doorway. He looked first at one, then at another of the three, and, finally, he turned to the bailiff.

“What’s the meaning of this, Hudson?” he demanded.

The bailiff glanced at Ellen and murmured, “Ay, ’tis late--past eleven--half-past eleven, I should say----”

“I’ll tell ye th’ meaning of it, sir,” Ellen said, abruptly. “They’ll be off afore Matthew’s done looking for his wits i’ th’ candle-flame.” She told him how eight or nine unoffending landsmen, going quietly about their trade, had been seized for service on the gun-deck of the third-rater that lay off Portsannet Head.

“Well?” said the Warden; and Matthew removed his eyes from the flame of the candle.

“Ay,” he said. “It’s them that’s pilling up at Ladyshaws, and the question is, sir, in two days the sap’ll be set and ye’ll lose the price o’ the bark. Wi’ them off and away, an action would never lie. The best ye could do would be to seize the odd day’s pilling.”

“I know this woman; who’s the other?”

“Nay, I’m sure I can’t tell ye,” the bailiff replied; and then, at a touch from Ellen, Jessie let the shawl slip from her head, and looked at the grave face of the Warden. She did not speak. Quietly, as quietly as if she had been at her own bedside, she sank to her knees and folded her hands. She closed her eyes, and the Warden looked on her with knitted brows for a moment, and then began to walk up and down the small apartment.

“I think I see,” he said, by and by, stopping before Jessie, and taking her hand and raising her. “I passed Edward my word,” he continued, half to himself, “on condition our own people were unmolested. That I can’t withdraw, not even on the plea that these are in my own employ. But I’ll do what I can. Follow me.”

He led the way along a dark passage, and at the end of it drew a curtain aside. A soft glow of light spread about them. “Go in that door,” the Warden said, pushing Jessie gently forward; and Jessie found herself in a dining-room where half a dozen candles in silver sticks stood over their own still images in a polished table. “There’s the Commander himself,” said the Warden.

A white-haired gentleman, in a rich uniform of blue, white, and gold, sat at one corner of the shining-table. A decanter of wine stood at his elbow, the breaking of the soft light through which dyed the white ruffle at his wrist with ruby red. He was looking at a watch that he held in his hand, and Jessie knew not what beauty it was in his face that seemed to steal like a comforting balsam over her heart. The Warden crossed and spoke in a low voice to him, and presently he looked up from his watch. At a sign from him Jessie stood forward, and Ellen and the bailiff fell back.

“What is your name?” he asked her, in a very gentle voice; and when she had told him, “Where do you live?” he asked again. She told him that, too; and then he began to ask her many questions. What brought her so far from her home? Of what sort were her friends? What her daily life?--She answered all very tremblingly; she felt that there could be no passion in this man’s presence; and by and by he knew all about Willie and Jerry and Fat Maggie and the fatal journey that had given her her first sight of the sea.

“Come nearer, my maid.--And so you have but now seen the sea and a ship?”

“Ay, sir, to my sorrow.”

“So?” answered the stately gentleman. “Ah, women, women, never one of you yet but dreaded the sea!--Tell me, Henry: is it that they know the sea is more powerful than they? Do they know the dream that we, we others, dream--the discontent that lies in all achievement, the urge?... And not the youth only; the old man, too, is drawn from the chimney-corner, as I am drawn--as I must go even now with the turn of the tide.--Well, I had my choice, and twice or thrice I have warmed my hands at a fire that glows on no husband’s hearth. Perhaps I shall do so once more, and so die content. For marrying some, but we others are for the sea, the dream, the unrest....” He mused, and Jessie wondered if the face of a saint could be more beautiful than that on which her eyes were fixed.

“Well, that is my destiny, not another’s,” he resumed by and by.--“My child, have they told you why the acorn is set in the ground, and tended and fostered till it becomes a tree, and then dies, as we all die, to a nobler service?”

Jessie did not reply, not rightly understanding him; and the white-haired commander, putting his fingers into the pocket of his waistcoat, drew out two acorns. He considered them as they lay in the palm of his hand.

“Heart o’ the oak, that holds it all for us, for us others--the rest we scorned in our youth, the boundless sea, the endeavour that must be its own reward, the pleasantness of life foregone.... It may be that we chose ignorantly, blindly; perhaps we have doubted since, doubted but it had been better to choose the shelter of the rafters and the woman at our side and the little ones ... no matter. Twice or thrice, and once more under God’s pleasure.... Girl, I come ashore but thrice in ten years, and there are hardly ten of years now remaining to me. For thirty years I have carried acorns in my pocket, and have planted them when opportunity came, and have seen tall oaks of my own planting. And your woodsmen come in the season and cut them down, and they are bolted together to be the houses of some of us--our hearths, homes, lodging, we others who have chosen it so.... Think of it when you see your lover set his hand to the axe, and when you feel his arms about you in the darkness, too.... You, too, have your choice; go--nay, stay.--You shall see the last of me, Henry: the gig is waiting now.--Plant me these last acorns, girl; heart o’ the oak, heart o’ the oak....”

* * * * *

The tide rustled and talked as it receded swiftly down the river channel, and here and there one of the stakes that marked out the waterway could be distinguished dimly in the darkness. The craft in the harbour began to heel over as the water left them. The tide washed and slapped against hulls and pebbles and wooden groynes and stone angles; and at the top of the breakwater half a dozen lanterns showed a group of dark figures that looked seaward.

The riding-lights of the ship had changed position; and between the ship and the harbour mouth the grunt of oars on rowlocks could be heard. A light appeared at the bow of a boat and shone on the water that broke at its foot. The groups shuffled to one side of the breakwater as the creaking of the oars drew nearer, and they could see the effort of the rowers as the current became rapid and confined. The boat laboured up past the stone entrance, and a man ran along the breakwater, leaped down to the crunching pebbles, and cast a rope. The pebbles grated harshly as the group followed him and pressed down to the boats. A man sprang from the ship’s boat to a rocking dinghy, and thence to another and another; and the boats tossed and knocked, and the water lapped loudly. The man sprang down to the beach, and Jessie Wheeler ran to him with a low cry. Another followed him, but, except that Jennie Holmes cried once “Father!” nobody spoke. In a few minutes all were landed, and the boat was thrust off immediately. Mechanically the group moved towards the breakwater again; they stood there as the boat dropped down the harbour and went out on the whispering tide.

Suddenly Jennie Holmes broke into hysterical sobs, and Willie Ramsey caught Jessie in his arms as she reeled against a wooden butt.

A woman touched his arm.

“Are ye him?... Ay, she’s overwrought. Ye’d best carry her to my house while morning. Happen a two-three neighbours’ll put the rest o’ ye up. What say ye, folk?”

--And the Pillers turned their backs to the sea, filed off the breakwater, and followed the men and women of Portsannet.

SKELF-MARY.

A wise man loves the ocean, A good man loves the hills.

I.

With the wearing on of the afternoon, the flat, treeless country to which for half a day I had steadily dropped had but increased in monotony, and long before nightfall I had begun to weary for other company than that of my own meditations. The road, of a reddish gravel, had begun to cross, by wooden bridges, innumerable drains and channels and narrow waterways; and that there was clay beneath it was evident no less from the wreaths and wisps of vapour that crept fantastically over carr and mere than from the sudden chills of the air, that seemed to stand in banks or to move in thick, idle currents. The clatter of the mare’s hoofs on the bridges flushed multitudes of waterfowl, that rose with harsh cries and beatings of wings; and from the number of gulls I had noticed among these while yet a little light remained, I had judged I could not be far from the sea.

How it came to pass that I, having had lands of my own, should find myself so circumstanced as to be fain to look after those of somebody else as factor or steward, is of no present moment; it is more to the point that, if this was the domain of the Master of Skelf, I liked it exceedingly little. The continual flurry and commotion of the waterfowl seemed to rouse in me a restlessness; and, remembering what Cardan had said of lands with a dark and fennish air, that they had the property of folding our thoughts back on themselves, I could only hope that I should not prove the worse bailiff for being acquainted with Cardan.

At first I mistook the man’s lantern for an ignis fatuus; but I heard a whistle and the panting of a dog, and he gave me good-evening. He was a tall fellow, with a sheepskin about him; he carried his lantern at the end of a long pole; and he told me, as he trotted by my side, that I was within the confines of Skelf Decoy. I eased the mare that he might keep pace with me.

“Ay, this is Skelf Decoy, and I tend it; they call me Ducky Watt, but they mean Decoy. It isn’t what it were, not for fish, sin’ they drained it, but there’s Friday-meat yet, and birds.... Ower th’ Wolds, are ye? Well, it’s a good air o’ th’ Wolds. They ha’ farmed part about here too, but it’s a black ear and thin crops; that’s th’ fogs.... Ay, we fish--hark! yon’s a pike--trout and eels and roach and pike--and tak’ birds for th’ markets. Ye’ll be a arable man; all’s carrs hereabouts; but I don’t doubt ye know all about Skelf-Mary.”

I told him that I had never been there before.

“Ay? H’m!... Ye’ll know nowt o’ th’ sea i’ these parts, then?”

I said that I did not.

“H’m!--well, this is how it is. Th’ sea’s taking it, as it’s ta’en Auburn and Hartburn and Ravenspur; and a two-three stops, but th’ most’s flitted months back; ye’ll see to-morrow.--Ye won’t ha’ heard o’ Buttevant-Mary neither: no. Well, they talk o’ bells chiming under th’ sea o’ still nights, and folks seen walking up and down th’ wharves and marts, and all that; I think them’s tales; but Kempery and Flaxton isn’t tales. Th’ Sheriff o’ Kingston, he’ll show ye th’ Court Rolls o’ Flaxton; and Kempery--I’ll show ye where Kempery is to-morrow, for ye’d best bide wi’ me to-night.--Ay, they took Flaxton Church to Windlesea i’ carts; and then there’s sea-marks....”

“In a word, the sea’s advancing?”

“Ay; sometimes just licking-like, and sometimes a dozen yards of a sudden; ye’ll see to-morrow.--And th’ sea doesn’t keep all it taks, neither. Ye’ll be a arable man, say; well, there’s a thousand acres o’ warp come up out o’ Humber, and wheat on it now; a foot-bridge joins it; but there’s men has seen deep keels, half a dozen on ’em, passing up yon same channel. That’s that side; and o’ this, as I tell ye, a farmer can go to bed i’ reaping-time and wake up wi’ a swath or two less to reap....”

He continued to tell me tales of lost villages, of broken houses with their chambers open to the winds, of wooden groynes that had been put up and abandoned, and a deal more well fitted to the hour and place. Suddenly I asked him about the Master of Skelf-Mary; and the light of the lantern shone on his knuckles as he thumbed his chin.

“Ay, ye’re th’ new steward.... What wad ye know o’ him?” he asked, slowly.

“Seeing I know nothing, you can’t get wrong.”

“And that’s providential--if it was true,” he retorted. “Well, sir, if ye can’t bide while morning, ye can put your questions now.”

But, though I interrogated him, he so fubbed me off with bland and wary answers that I was little the wiser by the time I desisted. The Master of Skelf-Mary, I gathered, was all but bed-ridden, and in very ill fame with such as read their Bibles (but that might have been because he had turned the chapel of the mansion into a library); but my friend was sensible, and careful to assign to others certain tales of devils and familiars and voices that servants, with their ears at the rosewood door of the library, had heard o’ nights. Nevertheless, his reluctance was evident, and by and by he pointed out a beam of light smothered in the fen-mists; that was his cottage.

I supped and lay that night in his hut; and by eight o’clock next morning he had conducted me to the village of Skelf-Mary. It was much as he had described it. One or two houses on the north side of the market-place, opposite an ancient butter-cross, appeared to be tenanted, as did also a row of very poor cottages that ran towards the sea; the rest was desolate, and already grass pushed between the cobbles. Two or three folk appeared at upper windows, hearing the sound of hoofs (having no business to take them abroad, I judged they were still abed); and as we left the cottages a couple of rabbits scampered across the street. Half a mile before us lay the church and hall, and beyond it the smooth sea, with a brig motionless far out.

“This road,” said the keeper, indicating a bridlepath to the right; but that was so plainly not the road that I answered shortly, “No, it isn’t,” and pushed forward towards the church. Five minutes brought me level with it; and then I stopped with an exclamation.

A few yards beyond a rail of hedge-stakes the road ended as suddenly as if it had been cut off with a knife. The fencing, that was continued on either hand, straggled to the north across the middle of the graveyard, and the marks of wheels in the red clay and the unsightly mounds in which they ended showed what had recently been done. Over the rails, hulks and shoulders of earth fouled the beach; and from the point to which, with a dreadful curiosity, I advanced I saw three square ends, ochrous with the clay, sticking out to the tide like “throughs” in a stone wall.

The keeper pointed to a three-inch fissure at my feet.

“That’s th’ next,” he said, gloomily; “th’ first heavy rain--a touch o’ frost--th’ sea eats it down there, and a touch o’ frost and rain.... Yonder’s Kempery.” ... He pointed to the motionless brig.

“Let’s get to the hall,” I said; and we did not speak further till we reached the mansion that had so gruesome a prospect to the north of it. It was of grey pebbles, set in a sort of mud-mortar, and was very ancient and handsome. The south lawn was overlooked by an octagonal bay-window, from the flat leads of which (so the keeper said) dead and gone lords of the manor and their chaplains had addressed the assembled tenantry; and this bay formed one end of a long western wing that I judged to be the chapel turned library. To the north lay the courtyard and outbuildings; and to the east, not twenty yards away, was the placid sea and the brig motionless over Kempery.

II.

Knowing what I now know, I think I might almost have guessed, from my first glance at him as the bandy-legged servant closed the rosewood door of the library behind me, what manner of man he was; nevertheless, this knowledge was not long delayed. The bed he seldom left was wheeled into the octagonal window-bay; he was propped up in wraps and blankets, with a book set against his sharp knees; and as he turned, his profile, for flat brow and beak, was for all the world like some grotesque bird carved on a pillar or spout. His large dull eyes, too, protruded remarkably; and the tying of the clout wherewith his head was bound as if for study resembled ears laid back.

“Ye are a day late, sir,” he said at once in a sick, querulous voice; and when I answered that I had been stayed on the road, “Ay,” he complained, “it was a dark night last night; enough.--And now that ye have seen the place in the daylight, ye’ll be of the same mind as the rest of them, eh?”

For all his sickness, this nettled me a little, and I replied that if the opinion of others was that the coast in the immediate vicinity was not a pleasing sight, I was disposed to agree with them; “but,” I added, “for that matter, I have some acquaintance with the sciences, and am free from superstition.”

“Eh?” he said sharply. “And what may that amount to?”

Certainly he had in some measure the right to catechise me, albeit not to be both petulant and domineering, as he was; and as I answered his questions as to the extent of my reading, I noticed with what ease I could have taken up his shrivelled figure. By and by he changed abruptly to matters of business; and as in this I wish to imitate his own brevity, I will only say that to a factor’s ordinary duties was to be added all the care of a considerable _déménagement_. He ceased; and I had bowed and was for leaving him when he beckoned me to come nearer. I stooped over the couch.

“Tell me,” he said, dropping his voice to a whisper, “tell me, has it been your chance in the course of your reading to come across--this?”

His face was within a foot of mine, and I barely checked a sound that, for all the early morning, was one of fright. Few men but in an idle moment now and then have tried that trick of gazing into metals, and phials, and flames of candles; and of the stupor or lethargy a man can work in himself by these means I had read in Olaus Magnus, in Suavius, and elsewhere. Neither was I entirely ignorant of that disordered function of the mind whereby a man can people the world with images of his own raising; but he was an ugly devil at best, and the abominable expression into which for a moment his eyeballs were deliberately set--the Squint Upwards and Inwards--added a sensible horror to the already horrible.... As I turned away his gaze righted again; but I knew him now. “I see ye know it,” he said.

“I do, sir,” I answered curtly over my shoulder. “What good the Platonists had of it I could never see, and, by your leave, I will confine myself to my stewardship, which I take to be the godlier business.”

“He, he!” he chuckled weakly. “Free from superstition, too!--So we both know it; good, we will talk of it later.”

“You shall pardon me,” thought I; and left him.

Here, then, was Cardan out-Cardaned; and there rose in my mind an image, not of this terrestrial sea that overwhelms the pleasant habitations of men, but of a dreader ocean, that of the terror of the Spirit, which, when men with anguish and labour have raised creeds and customs and laws against the void the thought of which they could not else endure, licks and laps till darkness cover all again. In this more heinous destruction and treason against all mankind this man trafficked. But if I am to tell my tale--or, rather, to set down this inconclusive record--I must trust you to take my meaning without further words.

The conversation of the bandy-legged servant was, as I should have expected, of the commonplace of desolate neighbourhoods, and I omit it that I may come the sooner to the man under whose influence, within a week, I found myself. For it was easier to say that I would have no commerce with him other than that of my office than it was to perform it; and, being inveigled willy-nilly into it, I salved my conscience by persuading myself that my study was of him and not of his theories. Unless you had read somewhat of the books I have mentioned, you would have found the fabric of folly that composed even the ordinary of his conjectures hard to credit; and since I cannot omit it altogether, it was of such stuff as this: Whether spirits do not commonly assume the globular shape, as being the most perfect of shapes; whether, could we but see them, the air might not be (as Leo Suavius held) thick with them as with snowflakes; whether that be true of the witches of Lapland, _ecstasi omnia prædicere_; and, above all, of the substance of spirits and of the texture of those light essences that, being divided, come with such celerity together again. That he should need a doctor to come over from Kingston twice in the week was little wonder to me; and when, shortly, this doctor persuaded me that my companionship would be good for my employer’s unsettled mind, I only stipulated that I should be spared that distortion of his face that had first shocked me.

The night whereon the invalid first broke his word in this respect was one evening in the middle of October, when I had been, maybe, a month at Skelf-Mary. For several days we had had thick, misty weather (I remember I had been that afternoon to the Decoy, and I leave it to you which was the more dismal, carr or coast), and the fog, penetrating the library, made haloes about the two tapers. The master’s face was very white and peaked that evening, and the little nodule of his hooked nose where bone joined cartilage showed sharply. The chamber was full of vague mists and shadows; now and then a ship’s horn hooted far out; we had ceased to talk; and while I had settled down to a bundle of lawyer’s tangle, he had apparently dozed over the book that was propped against his knees.

I know not what it was that caused me to look up, but I did so as if I had been bidden; and from the way his glassy corneas were set they might have been so for hours. He would no more have felt it had a fly crossed his eyeballs than do cattle. He had managed again to put himself into his trance, and instinctively I glanced over my shoulder to the upper end of the library.

“This is beyond the bargain, sir!” I cried, bringing my hand down on the table. He did not hear. I passed a taper before his eyes, but he did not see. It lasted for some minutes; then the balls traversed the farther end of the library, and the lids flickered and fell. He was asleep. Again I thumped the table, and he woke sluggishly.

“I had your promise,” I said sternly.

“Eh, eh? What’s that ye say?... I have been asleep.”

“Man, do you call _that_ sleep?----”

“Eh?... Ah, yes!... It is my weakness, sir, and ye shall pardon it,” he replied; and I truly believe that for the moment the creature felt a sort of contrition. Suddenly there came over me a feeling nearer to compassion than to disgust; God knows I am backward to judge those He has seen fit to set in the world with me; and I turned to him earnestly.

“’Tis for your own good,” I said in a moved voice; “good Heaven!... Tell me what you were looking at yonder.”

The weakness following that vile ecstasy seemed to have made him tractable. “’Tis not in the classics,” he muttered; “ye may walk through them without resistance ... how then should there be a mutilation?... I cannot see.”...

This I set down in pity to his lunacy, and he continued to mutter fragments. “A mischance to the mortal remains ... but the hinds in yonder vault were too terrified ... and then, what correspondence.... _I tell ye, sir, ye know nothing_ ... why does it not reunite?”...

And as he chattered thus, I wondered that I, who dreaded no spectre, should dread exceedingly the mind that could so conjure one up.

On the morrow I again sought Watt the keeper; I had now a purpose, and as he packed hampers in a flat-bottomed boat he again sought to ward off my questions.

“What did he mean by mutilation? You said nothing to me,” I demanded; and “Ye didn’t ask me,” Watt replied; “----come, Bess!”

“And what’s this about a vault?”--“Ay, that’ll be th’ vault i’ th’ churchyard,” he answered; “ye’ll find th’ door there yet, all red wi’ rust and green wi’ verdigris.”

“Don’t fool me,” I cried; and with that the keeper turned fairly on me.

“So ye willn’t let it bide? Very well.--There’s little gossip i’ Skelf-Mary now, by reason o’ there being few folk, but I’ll be rid o’ what I know. They say it’ll be Eustace he sees, that was a priest; but ye needn’t tak’ that fro’ me. When he had th’ vault oppened he asked this and that and t’other, and if he says th’ men was flayed, he’s right.--They couldn’t sort out which were which--ye understand--and th’ breed’s as ugly living as dead to my way o’ thinking. He talked about nowt but ‘knees’ ... faugh! Whose knees he wanted ye know as much as me; but th’ sexton lives ower at Windlesea. Mysel’, I’m a decent wed man, and tak’ no count o’ ghosts and such, ye understand?”...

And Watt’s way of thinking being a good deal my own, I troubled him no further. But, busy as I was, I had found time within three days to see the sexton (who, professionally, had little reluctance), and had pieced roughly together this delusion of the afflicted Master’s. I know not whether it was Eustace who walked the library. That to all intents and purposes his mind conjured up some figure I was as convinced as I was that I myself should never see it. It has been enough for me that, looking where he looked, I have seen but air, while he has seen, stumping across a floor of boards, a shape on thighs that were broken midway.

And with this I come to my own confounding.

III.

My own apartment was one that had been made in the vaulting of the chapel by the insertion of a ceiling; and this ceiling or floor, having no underdrawing, but consisting simply of planks laid athwart the baulks, was little hindrance to the passage of sound. I now did most of my work here, and it was now my turn to hear him babbling half the night beneath me. Many times I could have raged to hear him; but, my wages being good, my own folly, had I quitted his service, would scarce have been less than his, and I began to welcome as a diversion each journey to Kingston or Beverley, where I had to consult with agents and lawyers.

For a good part of the estate was like to be well disposed of, and I had negotiations in hand for the fishing and shooting of the Decoy. Also, with the estate charged with the cost of proper draining, there was no bad prospect of farming, water-carriage being excellent and cheap. Now and then, for form, I went to see the Master in his bed; but the doctor and the servant knew more of his condition than I, and it was only afterwards that I learned how suddenly and alarmingly he had altered for the worse.

The Christmas Eve of that year I remember better than I wish. There was frost enough in the air to set the fires burning brightly, and to give to the stars a wonderful keenness; and so exhilarating was the night that I had taken a walk, returning by way of the forsaken village. But, home again, I noticed as I crossed the courtyard that an unusual number of lights were burning, and with a vague apprehension I made haste to enter.

The Master lay rigid on the bed, and the servant bathed his temples from a kitchen-vessel of vinegar; but it was less of vinegar than of a surgeon that he stood in need. It was useless to address him, seeing how his eyes again were; but when, coherently, though in a very weak voice, he spoke to me, it flashed upon me what had happened. He had, as I take it, strained the muscles of them, and was now cramped so; and even as I stood in awe of the stroke, gazing on the harpy-face, he made as if to point with his finger, and fell back in a fit with a horrid noise of gargling in his throat.

The doctor was due on the morrow, and I arranged with the servant watch and watch for the night. He took the first, and I retired to bed without undressing, and fell into a broken sleep.

I think the noise as of blows with a hammer must have mingled with some dream I had, for although I was conscious of it I did not readily awake. Then I heard a cry. It was midnight by my watch, and I sprang from my bed and hurried to the library. As I set my hand to the rosewood door it was flung open, and the servant, blubbering like a child, all but embraced me. I pushed past him, and stopped.

Six feet within, in a huddle of blankets on the floor, lay the form of the Master of Skelf; I had to glance at the empty bed to realise it. One taper was overturned by his side, but the other showed the heavy poker that had been the cause of the knocking. The servant moaned that he had not dozed--had not dozed; but I know not how else the Master could have found opportunity, as he had found strength in his extremity (acting on who knows what revelation of his mad brain) to rise from his bed, reach the other end of the library, and to prise up a plank from the floor. Into the opening he had made his arm was plunged to the shoulder. I saw at once that he was dead; then I took the taper and peered down into the hole.

I withdrew his arm and composed his body; then deliberately I set to work to pull up the adjoining plank. It came half way up with a harsh noise, and the rusty nails bent and held it so; and all at once the poker fell from my hand, a violent shiver passed through me, and I found myself gazing stupidly at the older floor that lay a couple of feet beneath.

LAD-LASS.

The white walls of the farmhouse were hot and blinding to look upon in the sunlight, and the row of scoured dairy-pans and vessels that leaned against them blazed in spots like the sun himself. The hills across the narrow Dale quivered in the June afternoon as if seen over a furnace of charcoal, and no sounds were heard but the soft clucking of poultry and the heavy droning of the bees as they spun in and out of the bass-hives. The sky was of a bleached blue; the dripping from the spout of the pump dried where it fell on the baked earth; the smell of hay and hot dust filled the air; and in the grey limestone village lower down the valley not a soul was to be seen abroad.

Harriet Stubbs stood in her dairy at an upright churn. The lime-washed walls glowed with imprisoned sunlight, and only a narrow strip of shade lay without the door. She was six-and-thirty, too tall, too thin, too quick-moving. Rusty freckles gathered thickly over the bridge of her nose and spread over a face that was of the hue of washleather. Her lips had no red; the lower one was dented with an old frost-bite, now healed; and over the upper one a few straggling hairs showed. Her arms as she churned were sinewy as those of a man; and her bluntly-lidded grey eyes were searching and shrewish.

A rank whiff of tobacco came on the hot air, and a man of fifty crossed the bright yard and entered the dairy. She did not stop churning.

“Put that pipe out, Henry Butler; I’ll ha’ no reek i’ my dairy,” she cried; “I had a kern o’ butter as rank as owd hippins last week wi’ one o’ yon gormless wenches settin’ a stinkin’ cheese o’ th’ shelf; th’ De’il himself couldna watch some o’ ye.--An’ what brings ye up fro’ th’ Cotes?”

“I put a owd apron ower th’ horse’s head an’ rade up,” said the farmer, mopping his brow with an old snuff-handkerchief; “it’s blistering hot!”

“If ye cam’ thro’ th’ Cotes to tell me that I’m obliged to ye, but I kenned it, thank ye.”

“Nay, I come for a bit crack wi’ ye, Harriet, aboot yon lad o’ mine.”

“Ay?--Tak’ a turn at th’ kern, for ye could wring my shift.”

The farmer took the poss-stick in his knotted hands, and she mopped her freckled brow with her apron; then she sat a-straddle on the corner of the stone table and said: “what’s wrang wi’ Harry?”

“Wrang?” said the farmer, making the churn rock with his energy. “And what should be wrang wi’ short o’ ane-and-twenty but ye perdition women?”

“Ay,” said Harriet composedly, “we’re winsome things, an’ ye canna resist us; not that I’ve seen ye sweat overmuch wi’ trying. Is’t----?”

“Ay, is’t: yon black-haired besom, Bessie Wyatt; but th’ sullen trash is packing to-neet.”

“Packin’! An’ what’s Harry say?”

Farmer Butler scowled out over the hot stackyard.

“’Tis what I cam’ to talk to ye aboot.--Now i’ one word, Harriet: wad ye ha’ him?”

A little blood came into her dry cheeks.

“Ha’ him? Dost mean wed him?”

“Ay, and join the farms--there wadna be another property like it this side o’ Pateley Brigg.”

“He’s not sent thee?--Not he,” she said sourly; “I’d liefer he did his own courtin’.”

The farmer churned angrily, and she watched him keenly.

“Then by ----, he shall,” he cried, “or I’ll sell out and build a kirk!”

“Th’ Butlers’ll build a lot o’ kirks,” she remarked drily. “Wad I ha’ him? Well, I’ll answer him that when he asks me; but I’ll answer ye this now, Henry: They say th’ De’il likes to muck o’ a gurt lump, an’ th’ twa farms wad mak’ a pretty property; but a bonnie thing ’twad be to hear th’ love he’d whisper to th’ flawpin’ Lad-lass Harriet Stubbs! ‘My own four-hundred acre! My darlin’ twenty-score head o’ beasts! My lovely farm an’ house an’ first mortgage o’ three rows o’ cottages i’ Pateley Town!’ A bonnie wooin’!--When he whispered ‘Bessie!’ at th’ side o’ me at neet I’d say: ‘’Tisna Bessie, love; ’tis thy precious ninety pund a year i’ th’ bank; kiss thy owd Skipton market; kiss thy butter an’ eggs; kiss thy bit o’ horse-trade!’ A pretty wooin’!--Happen I’d see him lookin’ yonderly-like i’ th’ chimley-corner, thinkin’ why I didna bring him a bairn; I’d say, ‘There’s young blood an’ bairns enow; we’ll adopt one, an’ thou can call it Bessie.’--Tch!--’Tis naughbut ye owd nontkates that thinks all women’s th’ same i’ th’ dark! Wadna I ken? Wadna I ken when I were his Bessie? Wadna I brak my heart, bein’ his Bessie? Wadna I brak all three o’ we’r hearts?--Not I, as it chances, for I’m any kind o’ a fool but that kind, so get thy kirk built, Henry. They ha’na named me Lad-lass for naught.”

“Thou doesna ken right what thou’s sayin’,” said the farmer.

“No? So we live and learn, but I thought I did,” she replied imperturbably. “Now thou’s had thy bit crack, an’ there’ll be a mug o’ ale for thee at th’ loupin’-stane.--When wilt call an’ mak love o’ thy own account, Henry? ’Twad be a rare thing to be wed i’ your ain kirk.”

The farmer passed out, and she turned to the churn again.

The butter would not come, and now and then she muttered a man’s oath. The strip of shade outside the door became narrower as the sun crept round. A burnished cock mounted a fence and shrilled out a call that rang over the hot valley, and she unbuttoned her bodice at the throat and fumed.

Suddenly the figure of a girl appeared in the doorway.

She was heavily, moodily handsome, and her coal-black hair escaped from a cotton bonnet that had been pink but was now almost white with washing and exposure to the sun. Her lad’s clogs were white with dust, her round arms were brown and bare above the elbow, and her dark beauty showed brilliantly in the cool light of the dairy.

“I ha’ come to say good-bye, Miss Stubbs,” she said timidly; “I leave to-night.”

Harriet pursed her faded, cracked lips, and blinked her eyes at the other’s shrinking loveliness.

“And thou’s come to say good-bye to me? Well, God grant we may al’ays ha’ more friends nor we ken; I thank ye.”

“I’m Bessie Wyatt, an’ I’ve slipped out unknown o’ purpose to see ye.”

“An’ that’s a jade’s trick, dodgin’ th’ last o’ your wark instead of straightenin’ up for them that’s to follow ye.”

“’Tis what I wad do--straighten up for her that’s to follow me--wi’ Harry.”

The last words were almost inaudible, and Harriet Stubbs let go the poss-stick.

“My garters, but here’s a coil about this Harry to-day! First his father wi’ his kirk-building, an’ then a milkin’-wench comin’ to say good-bye to neist to a stranger!--How’st mean, to follow ye wi’ Harry?”

Bessie’s bosom rose rapidly.

“An’ if a milkin’-wench makes bold for once wi’ th’ mistress o’ her own house an’ lands, ’tis that I ha’ lile time to waste. Miss Stubbs, ye’ll be--oh!--ye’ll be kind to him!” She buried her face in her sleeve against the white wall, and Harriet, bewildered, seized the poss-stick again.

“Is th’ lass gane daft? Here’s another doin’ thy courtin’ for thee, Harriet; thou’ll dee a wed woman yet, th’ next earthquake or th’ next after that.--Now, thou foolish wench, when thou’s done greetin’ happen thou’ll gi’e thy tongue a chance?”

“I am na’ greetin’,” said the girl, raising her big eyes that were quite dry, “an’ I’ll tell ye i’ four words. He wad ha’ borne me on to Rigg village, i’ Scotland, where Davie Laing th’ blacksmith weds ’em for a crown; but I wadna. He maun wed wi’ his father’s goodwill, if it braks my heart; an’ I ken who that is. ’Twad be a sin to lo’e him, another’s; I winna think mair o’ him, an’ I’ll see him na mair.”

Harriet bent her eyes on her.

“So that’s it? Thou’s like Joss Tait, th’ cobbler, who says fowk’s welcome to what he doesn’t want. I’m obliged to ye, Miss Elizabeth Wyatt.--Why, thou hussy,” she broke out suddenly, but she looked away from Bessie, “hast th’ face to come here wi’ thy handin’s-on? Daur ye tell me I canna choose where I like? D’ye tell me I’m six-and-thirty, an’ ha’ packthread o’ my lip, an’ maun be thankful for what I can get?--Ay, but I ken Harry Butler better nor ye, an’ he’s a bonnie ’un to ken--a bonnie ’un to ken!”

“Ye ken na wrang o’ him!” the girl said, flashing her handsome eyes suddenly.

“Tch, ye baggage, dinna tell me what I ken, chance I fetch ye a thwack wi’ th’ poss-stick! I maun tak’ ower thy cast-off an’ be kind to him!--Are his kisses o’ thy lips this day?”

“Ay, are they!” the girl replied proudly, “an’ wad they were branded there wi’ a coal if I could remember him th’ longer for it!”

Harriet winced, and fixed her shrewish eyes on Bessie.

“So that’s thy forgettin’ him that’s another’s! Well, I bless th’ Lord for every freckle I’ve got, for ye red and black witches, good men losses their heads at th’ blink o’ th’ de’il i’ your een! Scotland! Are ye na feared o’ Rebecca an’ her Sweepin’s, then?”

“I’d ha’ feared naught; but ’tis ower.”

“Nor th’ men-women ye mought meet at any Pike?”

“I’d ha’ feared naught; but I’m leavin’ him.”

“An’ ye cam to say good-bye to me?”

Bessie turned half away, and spoke over her shoulder.

“Ay, an’ to tell one that I thought were a woman that which if onnybody told it to me wad ha’ been gentler ta’en, an’ happen a tear betwixt th’ two on us.”

Harriet laughed a short, dry laugh.

“I kenned it when I saw ye come in, bairn; an’ now here’s a makkin’ o’ butter settled an’ spoiled. Nay, nay; ye cam’ to gi’e me naught; ye cam’ to greet o’ this bosom o’ mine, if I naughbut had one. Well, greet, bairn.--Thou fool!” she whispered, as Bessie laid her cheek, sobbing, on her flat breast, “up-saddle to-neet, an’ off wi’ him! De’il tak’ me, he lo’es thee; up-saddle an’ off! Rebecca wadna mell on ye; ’tis for the poor fowk she sweeps--th’ poor fowk that bides at home an’ pays under th’ Pike Act for th’ roads that th’ rich gads about on. Has--has he said he lo’es ye?”

“Ay, a thousand times!” Harriet closed her eyes for a moment.

“Then, up an’ off, wer’t i’ thy sark! Harry wad never ha’ had me, e’en if I’d ha’ had him; I’m naughbut an owd shoe to fling at others’ weddings; I’m ... up an’ off, to-neet, Bessie; ’tis odds a blacksmith can weld as strong a hoop as a parson!”

* * * * *

The hot June night had fallen two hours back, and the full moon bathed a dozen dales in a soft brilliance. The hills swam in mysterious shadows, and not a breath stirred the tall field-flowers in the meadows. Now and then the cry of a nightjar was heard or that of a corn-crake; and now and then a tree would seem to sigh gently of itself in the still night. The road, of a silver-grey, dipped and wound and disappeared, reappearing a mile or two ahead where it crept over the shoulder of some moonlit moss.

The young man drove the quick-trotting mare in the trap with his right hand, and his left held the girl. Her face was heavy with drowsiness. From time to time she glanced at the trees and fields and shapes of hill and dale in the dreamy moonlight; and as they passed under the dark hawthorn hedges she murmured: “Th’ flowers looks like spirits.... How far are we now, love?”

“Yon’s Newton Moss, an’ ower it Lang Preston. We’se be at Litton Pike i’ an hour, an’ Horton by day-leet. We’ll put up i’ Sedbergh till to-morn th’ neet.--What is’t, love?”

She drew closer to him.

“I tell’d Harriet I wadna be feared, but Rebecca dresses i’ women’s clothes, an’ blacks her face, an’ burns yetts an’ toll-houses.--Hark! Dost hear naught at th’ back o’ us?”

“Again, my precious! Nay, there’s naught; an’ I doubt Rebecca wadna sweep as far as Litton. True, she might; she’s busy these nights; but ’tis time enow to meet trouble when it meets ye. Sitha; thou can see into Lancashire; yon’s Pendle.”

The girl took a sharp breath at the sight of the great valley on the left flooded with moonlight, and at the dim mountain rising fifteen miles away; then she pressed close to Harry and said: “I’se gan to sleep awhile; I can scarce keep my een oppen.”

“Then sleep, sweetheart.”

He kissed her, and she slept almost immediately. Slowly the moon touched the summit of her arc and began to decline; the hour of midnight came faintly over the hills from some distant church-tower; and the mare sped tirelessly along the road towards Litton Turnpike.

* * * * *

The setting moon showed no more than half her shape over the crest of Litton Wood, and the old grey stone village under the Brow was lost in night. No sound broke the profound stillness of the Dale, not so much as the rustle of a stalled beast nor the moving of a bird in its nest; and the Bear lay low over the dark fell across the valley. The single stroke of a bell broke from the church belfry, pealed, spread away and failed over the Dale as ripples spread over a still pond; and the silence closed in again.

A faint confused noise, a mile and more away, arose, hardly audible at first. Slowly the noise drew nearer, and snatches of singing could be heard, and a dull thumping on a drum or tub. As it swelled and drew still nearer a light appeared in an upper window, and a man’s head was pushed forth from the casement. Candles showed in other windows; more heads appeared; single voices could now be distinguished in the approaching hubbub; and a street door was thrown open and a man in his shirt and trousers shouted: “Th’ Rebeccas!”

In ten minutes three-score men had swarmed up the village street.

You would hardly have known they were men save by their voices. Their faces were hideously smeared with soot, all but their eyelids, which showed grotesquely white when they blinked. They wore the petticoats of women, gaping, fastened with belts or hitched up with string, and they carried lighted lanterns. Half of them bore faggots on their shoulders, other brooms of rush and twig. They thumped on tubs, sang doggerel songs, and whooped up at windows; and at the clamour they made many of the Litton folk retired within their houses, barring the doors and watching the commotion from the windows.

“Mun t’ poor mak rooads for t’ rich to use?” a voice bawled; and in a kind of droning singsong came a chorus of “Sweep, Rebecca, Sweep!”

Their feet caught in their skirts as they capered, and some had rolled their petticoats about their waists, showing their men’s legs beneath. Some had shawls tied over their head, others bonnets; and they lighted pipes at the lanterns. A big fellow demanded the name of the toll-keeper.

“’Tis Matthy Lee, an owd man,” a piping voice replied. “What gars Rebecca sweep so far fro’ hame?”

“Shoo’ll sweep fro’ here to London Town afore shoo sets t’ broom back i’ t’ corner.--I wish there were more wind; a bit o’ breeze mak’s a merry sweepin’.”

“Eh, all’s as dry as kin’lin’-wood this weather. Which is t’ road?”

“This road; step out, lads.”

The leaders set off through the village towards the pike that lay a little way beyond it. The others followed; the singing sounded fainter and fainter down the road, and a few of the Litton men, half dressed, walked after them at a distance.

The single-storied, white-painted toll-house was in darkness, and the white bar-gate glimmered across the road. The dancing lanterns and the singing drew near it, and the hubbub roused the old pike-keeper, who unbarred his door and peered forth, his nightcap on his head. He had lighted a candle, and his nutcracker face showed scared in the light of it. “The Lord save us!” he said tremblingly; and then the begrimed faces of the Rebeccas, their white eyelids blinking ludicrously, swarmed at the pike.

“Gate! Gate!” they bawled; “three score noblemen’s come to pay their gatecloys!” and one fellow shouted: “If thou wants to save thy bits o’ sticks, owd man, out wi’ ’em into th’ road!”

“My garden! My garden!” the old man whimpered. “Dinna walk ower my garden!”

They laughed. He was thrust aside, and a dozen men climbed the gate and poured into the toll-house. They began to strip walls, to tear up matting, to bundle out bed and bedding, tables and chairs, and pans, and crockery. Others set faggots against the bar-gate, the wooden window-shuts, and the fuel-shed at the back of the house; and the old man sat among his chattels in the road and moaned: “My garden, my garden!”

Soon every faggot was disposed, and the men stood round.

“Ready?” they cried; and fire was laid to the twigs and faggots in a dozen places at once.

* * * * *

“Listen!” said Bessie Wyatt fearfully; “I’m sure there’s wheels at th’ back o’ us, Harry--I ha’ heard ’em this half-hour!”

“Ay, I hear ’em,” Harry replied grimly; “but th’ mare’s doin’ th’ best she can, an’ it’s what’s afore us that’s troublin’ me, sitha!”

She caught her breath.

“Yon’s never th’ dawn, Harry!”

“Not wi’out th’ dawn’s come i’ th’ north for once,” he muttered. “Come up, then, Polly!”

The mare sprang more quickly forward at the trailing of the whiplash over her quarters, and the dark hedges made a long blur on either hand. The odd brightness rose and sank over the distant fell.

“Rebecca afore, an’ th’ father ahint,” he said to himself, “an’ we canna hide th’ trap; we maun chance it. Come up, Polly!--Hark!--Ay, yon’s Beeswing; I ken her trot; thou canna leave Beeswing, Polly, poor lass; we can but go forrard. Polly’s my own, but I ha’ borrowed th’ trap. Come closer, Bess.”

“Oh, Harry, ha’ a care; we were a’most i’ th’ dike then! Sitha, how th’ hills swing!--Yon leet’s growin’ breeter.”

“We’se see at th’ next turn,” he said between his teeth.

“Ho’d me close.”

Again he touched the mare; the sombre fell seemed to close in on them, and then to open out again into a further fold. The luminousness ahead grew brighter, and an outlying barn flashed past. They took the dip at Litton village and the rise on the other side without a check; two of the trap wheels left the ground at the turn, touching again twenty yards further on; the light leaped; they saw the blazing toll-bar and the figures that moved about it; and Harry muttered, “We can but go forrard--nay, we maun stop. I could ha’ ta’en yon burnin’ yett alone, but wi’ lass and trap--we’re done!”

He drew up within a dozen yards of the blazing toll-house.

“Where are ye for?” the shape of a woman demanded, laying a man’s hand on the bridle.

“Horton--Sedbergh--Carlisle. For God’s sake, fling yon yett back!”

“Wi’ whose leave?”

“Th’ leave o’ Rebecca--aught--oppen th’ yett! ’Tisna th’ likes o’ us ye want to keep. We’re poorer nor ye, an’ followed. Fling th’ yett back, an’ let’s be on!”

The man looked the vehicle up and down.

“A tidy trap an’ mare for a poor man! Followed, are ye? Down ye get, both on ye--a lass, begow! We’re that mony lasses to-neet a man gits mixed ameng ’em.--Followed, are ye? I’m none so capped at that; poor men doesn’t drive traps an’ mares like yon; we arena thieves.--Tak’ th’ mare out.”

The mare was fastened to a tree, and Harry--Bessie wide-eyed at his side--watched the spectacle. Cattle gazed over walls, and moths and buzzards fluttered here and there. The ceiling-baulks of the toll-house bulged beneath the weight of the flagged roof, and the red glare of the fire lighted the filthy faces on which the sweat had trickled and run into the soot. Sparks and flame streamed straight upwards, and a fierce crackling mingled with the shouts of the men. The old toll-keeper on his heap of furniture held his head in his hands and moaned, “My garden, my garden!”

“’Tis awful!” said Bessie, shuddering and pressing closer to Harry.

Suddenly a dozen voices burst forth in a cry of “Heigh, there--stop!” The man who had spoken to Harry turned to him and said, “Yon’s som’b’dy after a trap an’ mare”; and Farmer Butler roared, “D---- ye, hands off! Where is he?”

“Rebecca hes him, same as shoo hes thee,” somebody replied; and Farmer Butler and Harriet Stubbs descended from the trap. Harriet’s sharp eyes scanned the rabble eagerly; they met Harry’s; and while the men-women gathered about Butler with questions she slipped quickly to his side.

“I couldna’ set him wrang--there’s naughbut one road--ye’s get awa’ yet,” she said low and rapidly. “De’il be good to us, what a seet!--Get ye amang th’ villagers yonder, Harry, an’ dinnat be seen; I’se manage for ye. Can th’ mare carry th’ two o’ ye a post or so? Awa’, an’ dinnat be seen. Wait for me yonder, an’ dinnat let him see ye.... Now, Henry, her’s ane o’ ’em, an’ t’ither winna be far off.”

“Bide ye wi’ this unskelped hussy while I find him!” cried the farmer.

“Nay--I spy him!” said Harriet. “Yonder he is!” She darted off, and mingled with the men. Her eyes shone, and she seemed to set herself to some effort.

A huge fellow barred her way.

“Where for, i’ such a hurry?” and she broke into a shrill laugh.

“My ain gait, my owd love--kiss thy Nancy!” She took the man’s bleared face between her hands, and set her own cheek against it.

“Out, ye trollop!”

“An’ out yoursel’, ye greasy muck-slut; tch, ye filthy dozen! Here’s my man.--Doady, come, let’s shak’ a leg, Doady! Wilt dance wi’ thy Nancy? ‘Shak’ it a little, a little, a little. An’ turn ye roundabout!’” she sang, and flung her arms about another fellow. “Nay, thou’s beslubbered my face, chuck; never heed; ain muck’s sweet, an’ thou’s my ain Charlie; a kiss, now! Sink, but we’re as threng as three i’ a bed! Hey, my bonnie black boys!” She turned this way and that among the men, making herself outrageous; and then she slipped out of the ring and sought Harry.

She found him, hidden from the leaping of the fire behind the old pike-keeper’s heap of furniture.

“Whatever are ye doin’ here, Harriet?” he whispered.

“Tch! Dinnat waste a minute,” she replied hoarsely; “come, thy face. There’s th’ muck o’ a dozen greasy rascals here,” she chattered, as she besmirched him. “I’ll lend thee brass for another trap i’ Horton--whisht! ye gormless fool; tak’ it an’ owe it! I ha’ scarce grime enow; we maun mak’ it do. Faugh, what a stock-pot it is! But ’tis worth a crown a scrape. Lig thy cheek agen mine, Harry.--There, there, twa seconds; all th’ muck we can!” He felt how she trembled throughout her frame. “Now thou’s foul enow for hell-kitchen.--O my heart!--Come, don this, quick!”

Her hands fumbled at her waist, and she thrust a petticoat down hurriedly. He stared like a wittol.

“Dinnat stand there gapin’ like a throttled cat; step into ’t, an’ put this about thy shoulders. De’il tak’ me if th’ Lad-lass isna mair a man nor onny o’ em! But woman maist: O Harry!--Awa’ wi’ thee now! I’ll go smear Bessie, an’ ye maun off o’ th’ mare. Here’s brass--an’ bless ye!”

She was off with her hand at her breast.

“Where is he?” the farmer roared. He was at Harry’s elbow, but did not recognise him; and Harriet drew Bessie towards the tree where the mare stood, and fouled her face. “Up ye get; leave room for him i’ front; he can swing up by th’ branch. Nay, he’d best lead her ower by yon pasture.” Bessie flung her arms about Harriet’s neck.

“Oh, Harriet!” she said chokingly; “whether we get awa’ or not, how I lo’e thee!”

“Ho’d thy whisht; dinnat begin to be a fool now! He’ll hire a trap i’ Horton; ye’ll be i’ Sedbergh to-morn; nay, to-day, for sitha at th’ hills yonder. I’ll tak’ th’ linchpins out o’ both traps. Here, rub this bit o’ earth on, an’ tee th’ han’kercher round thy chin! And now kiss me afore I go find him.--Th’ hengments! What’s yon?”

A sudden new roaring and crackling had broken forth from the toll-house. The roof stones had crashed through the burnt baulks, and from the standing walls fountains of fire and sparks shot high into the sky, as if from a huge Jack-in-the-box. The rioters shouted and danced madly, the old pike-keeper looked up with a dazed look, and the birds hopped in the illuminated trees. “Now I’ll send him, while that’s amusin’ ’em,” Harriet muttered; she pressed Bessie’s hand--all of her she could reach--against her cheek for a moment; then she disappeared among the shouting crowd.

* * * * *

The hills in the east were revealed against the grey sky. A light breeze drifted the smoke from the toll-house in the direction of Litton village, and the glow shone luridly on the rolling masses. A cock gave a rousing call, and was answered from farm to farm throughout the grey dale. “Barnaby Bright, langest day an’ shortest night,” a farmer muttered; and russet frets appeared over the hills. The fire burned down, and the embers glowed through a white ash. The Rebeccas were gathered together for departure; and Harriet Stubbs, a grimy, ungainly figure, in a short under-petticoat that revealed her sharp tibias, stood a little apart and watched a man in a woman’s attire who led a horse with a figure upon it quietly round by a wall and down a pasture to the open northward road. Farmer Butler was cursing here and there, and shouting, “Harriet! Harriet Stubbs!”

The high hills to the east showed a vast and mysterious shape, with an edge that burned. The two figures on the mare waved their hands to Harriet, and disappeared down the road. For many minutes she stood gazing after them; the birds twittered loudly; and then she laughed her short hard laugh.

“A Lad-lass to some purpose!” she muttered. “An’ his cheek were agen mine. O my love!--De’il tak’ me, I’m whinin’ again! Get thy face washed, Harriet Stubbs, an’ seek a house an’ mak’ a decent woman o’ thyself, an’ cover them shallacky ankles, for thou’s a offald thing i’ th’ dayleet. Speed ye, Harry! Happen he’ll call th’ bairn Harriet--or Harry--th’ Lad-lass wad serve for auther--an’ ’tis better nor calling mine Bessie.--Now I’ll find Henry.”

The sky flamed in hues of amber and coral, and she turned again to where the last of the Rebeccas were departing from the ruins of the toll-house.

THE FAIRWAY.

Except that he called the gipsies the “Johnnie Faws,” there was little of the rustic in his speech; and as he told the tale we seemed to see them, these Johnnie Faws, coming down the hill on that wild January forenoon. They did not come by the Portsannet road--it would have passed mortal eyes to find a road in the whirl and scurry and drift of white he described--but spread out like pheasant-beaters, crying one to another in the Romany, sometimes flung forward by the tempest, sometimes huddled down and covered over almost entirely by the snow. Perhaps the fact that he had been a schoolmaster accounted for an occasional positiveness in his manner,--it seems to remain with schoolmasters to the end of their days,--and he was an old man, who must be let talk after his own fashion. He told us how the wind swept out the tracks of the Johnny Faws behind them, and how the South Ness women looked compassionately on their wilder sisters, who did not cover their breasts once in ten years, but who had sought refuge from the storm, as the hares and foxes had done before them; and then he wandered off again, schoolmaster-wise, to tell us how the footprints of a fox over the snow made but a single line, and how a hare would lie at form, and what sort of tracks a robin made.... By and by he took up his tale again.

“----So we knew it was bad when the Johnnie Faws came down. Queer people--dark, whipcord-looking fellows, and one singularly handsome woman, very swarthy and black-eyed. I remember our women looked at her as if--as if--but our women lived in houses, you see.... Well, first of all we asked them about the _Lizzie Martin_; but they’d never heard of her. Was she a South Ness boat? they asked. Next we asked them if there was much snow on the Heights; and they answered, No; the Heights were swept clean, but a man could not stand upright there for the wind. No snow was falling, they told us; all was being whirled up from the ground again, dry and powdery. There was one fellow they called Nunan. He carried a knife and wore gold earrings and talked in a shrill, eager voice; and he told us how up there the white world and the pale apple-green sky was one brilliant intermingling that spun and sparkled in the cold sunlight and smoked.... We asked them where they had left their horses. It seemed they’d dug a way for them under what looked like the lee of an old quarry, in an immense drift: they would weather it as best they could, as sheep do.

“The Johnnie Faws moved restlessly up and down the village; but most of them gathered at the ‘Dotterel,’ though they drank nothing. The greater part of the time they were silent, but occasionally they all talked at once in their own tongue; and I dare say we shouldn’t have had any tidings of Portsannet at all if the group about the door of the ‘Dotterel’ hadn’t quarrelled, or seemed to. It was something about a slipper-brake. It appeared that one of their men, Osa Couper, had turned down into Portsannet earlier in the day, before the storm had got quite so bad, to get a new hook or rivet for this brake. He had promised to overtake them; but (they said) somewhere over yonder--over the Heights--a man with a pair of long wooden runners on his feet (it was Andrews, we learned afterwards, mate of an old Norwegian timber-barque, turned farmer)--Andrews--had suddenly appeared among them from nowhere in particular,--just dropped in on them from out of the smothering white, and had advised them to avoid the shelter of the hollows: the hollows, you see, were drifted, but the short brown grass showed on the tops. Then Andrews had reported that a tall, Egyptian-looking fellow had flung himself into the Portsannet boat as she had put forth for the second time that morning; and then all at once the Johnnie Faws had missed him. He had seemed to vanish while they had all thought he was talking to Osa Couper’s woman yonder.... Of course we asked again if it was the _Lizzie Martin_ they had put out for; but they didn’t know.

“You know what South Ness is like,--houses at all levels, and how you can step from the door of Broadwood’s house yonder almost on to the ‘Dotterel’ chimneys. Well, if the Heights were swept, we had the sweepings. We were blocked with snow up to the chamber windows,--the bedroom windows,--and there was right of way through anybody’s yard or passage or kitchen that was convenient. I remember it interested me (perhaps it won’t interest you) the way the wind seemed to have been deflected from the houses in a sort of backwash. It had made great scoops and trenches, ten foot high and clean-cut at the edges, as if shaped in marble; and men and women passed up and down these trenches. These cliffs, as you might call them, darkened the interiors of the cottages; and the wind hooted in the chimneys just as lads blow across the barrel of a key. Farmers with shovels, frozen over white as snow men, returned from digging out their cattle, but the fishermen idled moodily. The cobles and smacks tossed down in the harbour; but the wind drowned most noises except that of the surf away out on the Spit, and that was like continuous explosions. This was only midday, you know, but you could see nothing but white--white; bits of ice like diamonds on your lashes; and here and there a bit of blue or apple-green sky, all tossed together. I thought I had never seen anything so wild and beautiful; but then, I hadn’t a _Lizzie Martin_ out....”

“Lizzie Martin--the woman, not the boat--kept the ‘Dotterel.’ She was a pleasant body, plump (when she was twelve or thirteen she had one of these creases round her neck that means a double chin later on), and she was very honest and comfortable and motherly, though she hadn’t a child--just then. About two o’clock three of the gipsies had come into the ‘Dotterel,’--four, if you reckon the babe at the handsome woman’s breast,--and they sat over by the snowed-up window. There would be a dozen or so men round the hearth; but nobody was drinking, and nobody said anything in Lizzie’s presence about what we’d heard of this Osa Couper and the Portsannet boat, you understand. Now and then the child gave a little throaty cry, and once or twice Willie Harverson--he was a young giant, and his curly head always looked too little for his shoulders when he’d got his two or three winter ganseys on,--Willie had told her to bring the child nearer the fire. But she had only shaken her head and pointed behind her at the window. The panes had warmed a little, and the snow had peeled a couple of inches from them and then frozen again. Except for that narrow gleam of cold light, you’d have thought it was evening, for the candles were lighted, and they swealed and guttered every time the door opened. The gipsy woman had opened her breast again,--a sort of sling to carry the babe passed across it,--and she looked straight before her, like a handsome statue, a beautiful animal--like everything, else in nature except this self-conscious creature man.... I can’t tell you; never mind....

“Willie told her again to come near the fire, and then up piped Nunan in his high, eager voice. She’d do there till her man came back from Portsannet, he said (they didn’t seem to doubt that he’d gone out with the boat). I remember Willie muttered, ‘Christ rest his soul for a brave man if ...’ You see, the Portsannet boat was an old Greathead boat, nearly as old as the century, fit for chopping up for kindling any time this five-and-twenty years; but ours at South Ness was a new, thirty-three-foot boat, mahogany, double-banked, self-emptying, self-righting, nearly seven hundred pounds with belts and tackle and carriage. She’d only been out twice, and there wasn’t a scratch on her blue and white. John Broadwood was cox. I knew what John thought of their chances of getting round the Spit if they were to put out; but they were so proud of the new boat that they were eager as lads to try it. Men were watch and watch about down at the boathouse, where they could see if Reuben Ward signalled from the station on the hill; but it wasn’t our day. With the wind due north, if a boat cleared Portsannet Head she cleared the Spit too. It was Portsannet’s turn, and the old boat’s....

“The men in the ‘Dotterel’ then were talking about the boat, when suddenly I heard John Broadwood say ‘Whisht!’ Lizzie stood there in the doorway, under a model of a brig in a glass case there used to be. ‘Did some of ye call?’ she said; and the men shuffled their feet and shifted about on stools and benches.--‘We told ye not to bother, Lizzie,’ Broadwood says; ‘we’ll wait on we’rsels.’--‘It must ha’ been the babe I heard,’ says Lizzie; ‘let her bring it near th’ fire, Willie.’ But the woman said again that she’d do till Osa Couper came; and Lizzie asked Nunan if he wasn’t her husband.”

* * * * *

He paused; and when in a minute he resumed again, there was the same magisterial, slightly querulous note in his voice that we had heard before--the schoolmaster’s note.

* * * * *

“Before we go further, let’s understand one another,” he said. “When I said that Nunan had a knife, I saw some of you anticipating--making ready--saying to yourselves, Ah! knives mean stabbing; never mind your comments; come to the tale and the knife!--Well, you’re wise in your day and generation, but for all that I think you’re a little wrong too. The tale’s a good deal, but the man who tells it is also something. I could show you Willie Harverson’s house, and you’d gape round for five minutes with your caps in your hands, thinking--well, goodness knows what you’d be thinking! You’ve seen ’em, perhaps, tourists, open-mouthed, in the room where somebody was born or died. To me it would always seem stupid if it weren’t so comical. Facts are neither the most interesting nor the most important things in the world--not that sort of fact. The knife was a fact, and we’re coming to the knife; but it’s a good deal like other things in life you look forward to--nothing when you get it. One of these new writers I don’t pretend to understand says there are two tragedies in life--not getting what you want, and getting it. I know I used to think that if ever I became head of a decent grammar-school ... well, I’ve been head of a grammar-school. When I’d got that I wanted something else; and so on. And here I am, back again where I was born, with grammar-schools and suchlike all behind me. Garrulous too.... But tragedy or not, there’s little satisfaction in getting things. You see, you don’t drop dead in the perfect, glorious, fit moment when you attain ’em. Life goes on, a dull, stretched-out anti-climax; and there seems to be only one finish to it all. I’m an old man, and probably nearer it than you....

“So when Lizzie asked Nunan if he wasn’t the handsome gipsy’s husband, there was John Broadwood shaking a great fist with a blue anchor on it over Lizzie’s shoulder, and Willie making foolish shapes with his mouth without a sound, and Jemmy Wild hawking in his throat and knocking his pipe out noisily; ... but Nunan popped out with it--about Osa and the guns at Portsannet, and so on--and then he spluttered out a ‘Hey! Would ye do that, man?’ You see, Willie had clapped his hand over his mouth, and there was a wicked gleam in Nunan’s eyes, and his hand went to the small of his back where the knife was; and that’s all about the knife, except that the woman told Nunan to sit still.

“But Lizzie was trembling pitifully; and when I saw her eyes go round the men I backed away behind the settle, so that somebody else might tell her. Then her head came down on her arms and thumped on the table, while Nunan sulked. We watched her broad back heaving; and then all at once she threw up her head. ‘Oh, hear it goyling down th’ chimley!’ she cried; and I saw John Broadwood biting his pipe hard; ‘Frank--Frank o’ th’ _Lizzie Martin_--ye were his mates, and here ye sit--he called her after me--she were Lizzie Martin afore I were--I were Lizzie Collison o’ th’ Heights----’ ...Broadwood bade her Whisht! whisht! but she went on. ‘It were a Valentine’s day, a Thursday, and he came into th’ kitchen that morning--Jess never barked when he came courting, but she’d never let him go without I took him to th’ gate----’ ...And so on, young gentlemen. Lizzie and Frank had seen the valentine from the top of the hill, on the sea below, as if on a sheet of glass. ‘Don’t, Lizzie!’ says Broadwood, choking; ‘we can’t bide to hear ye!’...

“John Broadwood was a fine, independent, self-sufficient sort of fellow, with a good deal of John Broadwood about him altogether, but he broke down. Lizzie’s eyes, wandering wildly, fell on the gipsy woman and the babe. The gipsy’s husband, for anything we knew, was in peril too; but I think it was something else that came over Lizzie--the sight of the child: I see you understand. She sobbed something;--I didn’t hear what--and the gipsy woman turned, quite unmoved, and looked at Lizzie from head to heel. ‘I see your time’s coming,’ she said, ‘and them that lives in chambers of stone need comfort; come then.’ And with that she moved the babe in the sling, and produced an old pack of cards. Strange folk....

“They say symbols are what you take them for, or else a cross might just as well be a gallows, but those cards looked very secular to me. It was a grim, cheerless power that those were a symbol of. I think Lizzie thought so too, for the sight of them seemed to bring her round a little. She knitted her fat fingers together on the gipsy’s knee and sank to the floor. ‘Nay, woman,’ she said, ‘we’ll have a surer comfort than that, you and I;’ and the woman glanced from the cards, as she cut and cut them, to Lizzie’s head on her knee, incuriously.... I went out. I’d seen one or two of the men glancing at the door, as if they’d have liked to be on the other side of it; but I just walked out. I thought I’d take a walk--to see Reuben Ward at the station.

“Coming out of the candle-light, I blinked like a flittermouse. The sky was still a keen blue, with the snow whirling and glittering and dancing; but the light was dying, and I guessed it would be about half-past four--the hands of the school-house clock were fast frozen to its face. I turned up the blacksmith’s alley to get a shovel: it was smooth to the eaves with snow, and little wisps and curls played on the surface like smoke. The wind was blowing big guns intermittently, and in the intervals I could hear the thunder of the Spit. I set out for the station, and in a dozen yards was up to my waist in a river of snow.

“There was a windmill before you came to the station. There’s one yet, but it’s a dummy--a sailing-mark for ships, and the Board of Trade looks after it. It worked in those days, and belonged to a fellow called Rhodes. I was a strongish chap, you must know, not so tall as Willie Harverson, but as broad, or thereabouts; but by the time I reached the mill I was glad enough of its shelter. And then I looked up, and backed away again. The sail-shutters were open, and the wind screamed through them; but the gearing--all those cranks and elbows about the pin--that had gone; and two or three blades of the steering-fan hummed like bits of ribbon in the wind. The whole thing had swung round like a weathercock, and the heavy top storey rocked and lifted, like a mouth opening and shutting. Underneath it a man was lying on his back in the snow, watching it as if it were a plaything.

“I shook him and bawled in his ear. He didn’t speak. His face glittered all over with ice particles, and I knew who he would be by his hair and eyes. I dragged him out from under the toppling mill; by his mouth I could make out that he was saying something about ‘my people,’ and I nodded, and shouted, ‘What about Portsannet?’

“I made out a few words: ‘Twice--oars broke--old boat--help.’ And then I asked, ‘What about the station?’ It seemed Reuben was helpless. The mast and cones and drums had gone; he’d been firing, but we hadn’t heard, and he was waiting for dark to signal with the rockets. ‘D’ye know what boat?’ I shouted, putting my arm round his neck and my mouth at his ear; and he tried two or three times to tell me, but had lost his voice. He stooped down and wrote in the snow with his finger, ‘SN, 102.’ Seeing that that was the _Lizzie’s_ number, I didn’t bother about Reuben and the station. I collared him, and off we blundered into the drifts between Rhodes’s mill and South Ness.

“They were much as I’d left them when Osa and I got to the ‘Dotterel.’ The tall Johnnie Faw wouldn’t touch brandy, I remember. The two women were not to be seen. I told them to stir themselves, and they were on their feet in an instant. John Broadwood, who had said she could never live round the Spit, was first at the door. ‘Out o’ the road, ye farmers!’ he grunted; and I was for telling Osa to go into the kitchen to his wife, when all at once I saw Lizzie in the doorway. ‘Reuben’s signalled, then?’ she said; and somebody said ‘Ay.’ The gipsy woman didn’t take her eyes off Osa, who was talking to Nunan in the Romany; but she didn’t speak.”

* * * * *

He stopped for so long that we thought he wasn’t going on again. It was minutes before he resumed; but evidently he had got his digression over within himself, for he went straight on.

* * * * *

“There were lights and moving figures down by the boat-house, but they were blotted out from time to time: the night had fallen. The cobles and craft were huddled close in, and they were tossing and hissing and groaning--fenders grunting and rubbing on wood, blocks banging, tackle shrieking, parted ropes cracking like whips.... The little jetty seemed to run out a yard or two into the night. The surf thundered out on the Spit, a deep solemn sound. A fellow was bawling through a trumpet: his voice sounded throttled, something like a bassoon. The moon wasn’t due up for a couple of hours yet.

“We ran her down on the carriage,--men at the wheels and life-lines and at the horse’s heads,--and then we stood in the knee-deep water to see her lift. She lifted, and every man flung himself headlong out of the way. She came up from the carriage in a monstrous cant, and then she came down broadside in the broken, boiling wave. I heard the snapping of the port oars,--it was a short crackle in the tempest,--and then I was thirty yards away, scrambling among the carriage and horses and men. A broken shaft danced up and down in the white backwash.

“We beached her by hand, and already the wheelwright had a wrench and was unscrewing the nuts of the broken shaft. We carried four men to the boathouse, two of them with their hands on their chests where the broken oars had caught them. Eh? Oh yes, they’d jackets on.... We tried again, waiting till the breaker had spread away roaring in the darkness, and she rose again. She seemed to hang for a dreadful long time between the two crests of curling white that rushed together to meet her,--the wave was a slanting wall all laced over with a pattern of grey foam,--and then she disappeared. But she was on the wrong side still, and her rudder was smashed. A man struck at me as I dragged him out of the water: it was John Broadwood. I’d got hold of his right wrist, and it dangled when I let it go; so I took him by the other arm. We headed the horses round to try again, edging close under the shelter of the jetty and the plunging cobles; and that time I turned my face away as she lifted--she was so frightfully near the jetty. But when I looked again, there she was. She’d neither ridden it nor got through it; and the Spit, booming a mile away, seemed to mock us that we couldn’t get through the breakers.

“We all gathered in the boathouse again--farmers, fishermen, injured men, gipsies. Osa Couper was talking to old Joe Barker, and a fellow who was listening turned suddenly away and pulled out his pipe. That cut us--cut those who saw him: it seemed all there was to do--to light your pipe. And then we heard women’s voices again: Lizzie and the gipsy woman were among us. What were we waiting for? they asked; and the man who was lighting his pipe nodded at the injured men. Lizzie’s bosom lifted, and she began to talk again. She talked as she had talked before in the ‘Dotterel’....

“The boat was high on the beach, and they’d taken the horses out; they put them in again and made a fourth attempt--a fifth--a sixth. After the sixth we went back to the boathouse; another man had given it up now, and had taken up an old lobster-pot and was setting the broken ends straight. Useful occupation....

“I told you--did I tell you?--about old Joe Barker. He had turned sixty then. He’d a wrinkled, nut-cracker face, and his mouth and chin chopped up and down together when he spoke, like one of these talking dolls; he’d deep furrows from the corners of his mouth, just like one of these ventriloquist’s dolls. He was chopping and chewing now to Osa Couper; and all at once he cried out, ‘Have ye done all ye can, ye fishermen?’ They scowled at him.

“‘Then let th’ farmers have a try; Jerry--Tom--Matthy Dodd----’ He jumped about here and there, singling out men and giving orders, all about horses. Broadwood sprawled on a locker, and he raised himself on his sound arm. ‘Yours is no good if ours won’t face it,’ he cried; but Joe took no notice. He and Dodd began to fetch out sweeps and spars and ropes and tackle, and the men outside pitched them into the boat. ‘Up!’ he cried to Broadwood; and John slid down while he got a stone jar of brandy and a couple of pannikins out of the locker. Some walked slowly out and up the beach, looking back over their shoulders, and then all at once a man broke into a quick trot. A dozen hangers-about followed, questioning as they ran. In ten minutes the clattering of horses was heard on the beach; and a man, coming in for more ropes, said that a hundred shovels were clearing the village street....

“Well, you’ve heard the tale, or you wouldn’t have come to me: you know what we did and how it ended. What more do you want? To be told what you don’t know, you’ll say. Not you. Nobody wants to be told what they don’t know. They want to be told what they do know, or think they know. Why, all the fellows we glorify are those who tell us in the main what we already know--tell us we’re nearly quite right; a bit--eh?--here, or a trifle there that our worships have overlooked in our general rightness, but wonderfully right on the whole. You’ll listen as long as I tell this tale as you already know it; then you’ll go away and say, Queer old chap; been master of a grammar-school--disappointed--disillusioned; but for all that he was one of ’em.... Well, just as you like.

“A hundred yards out of the village we turned the women back. All of a sudden Willie Harverson’s wife sprang forward and kissed him, and then the pent cheer broke out. It was as if for the first time we had all thought clearly what we had begun to do. The wind scattered it, but our hearts rose passionately. We hadn’t spoken coming up through the village; we had started beaten, or at least just to endure as much as men could endure; and now that shout made all the difference. It was arrogant, boastful, young, foolish, victorious. Heigho! You see, we forget all the shouts of the same sort that end in failure: we only remember them when they come off. The other sort are like the revolts that never succeed: they’re revolutions when they do. But then, I suppose we could never endure to remember all our pride and confidence that’s come to nothing.... So the men kissed their wives. I had nobody to kiss--I’ve never been married. I saw Reuben’s rocket rise clear above the gale, and then we started.

“We had twenty horses, and perhaps twice as many men with shovels. We’d lashed a spar to the boat-carriage, a sort of whiffle-tree, and from that to the ten pair of horses ran such a tackle of ropes and traces as you never saw--all thicknesses, plain and hawser, pieced out and joined everywhere with sailors’ knots and hitches. Willie Harverson, on the frame of the carriage, was shouting orders through the speaking-trumpet--to find the ridge past the mill, to rouse High Lee village on the way--I don’t suppose anybody heard half he said, for already the digging had begun. Old Joe Barker had donned a cork jacket for warmth, and was flat on the fore air-chamber: he was directing, and Willie, off and on the carriage continually, was his spokesman. Without a captain, you see, forty diggers are little better than a dozen. The men who weren’t digging were scouting, starting her after each halt, or standing by to see that the traces didn’t get mixed.

“I said the snow was dry: it was so dry that half of it fell from the shovels of the diggers, blown away by the wind. That meant twice as much stooping, and the men were up to their waists in it. The fellows who scouted for rising ground appeared and disappeared in the drifts, and the snow crusted on their lanterns, melting and freezing both at once. We couldn’t hear the sea now; instead there rose the shrill notes of trees and the silky soft whistle of the ice particles over the snow. We came to a quickset hedge: they dug through the drift to it, slapped the quarters of the horses with the shovels, and we came through with branches of briar and thorn caught in the trace-ropes.

“It’s seven miles to Portsannet, with High Lee village half way, and after that the Heights, seven hundred feet of them. I came on to shovel with the second shift. You can dig till you can’t straighten your back. I thought myself strong, but--well, a grammar-school was what I was really working for in those days. You may be strong, but you can’t pitch stuff behind you at three times the ordinary rate with men who are always forking hay, or hoeing turnips, or loading peats; and by the time my turn came round to dig for the second time and the third, I wasn’t the only one who was fagging. Then you can go on digging till you don’t mind so much; you’re getting stupid then--what employers of bodily labour call a ‘good man’; and I began to be a good man--except that a good man shouldn’t quarrel with his tools, and at the last change I’d got hold of a garden spade instead of a flanged shovel--a thing that carried about half a pound--and a self-emptier, like the new boat. I became so good a man that when a fellow took that spade from me I asked him what an odd hum of vibrating iron was that I’d heard for some time past; and he pointed to Rhodes’s mill not a dozen yards away. It was the pin-shaft that hummed. I can’t tell you how it had managed to stop up there while the rest of the top storey lay a heap of wreckage below; I suppose things don’t smash quite as you expect ’em to.... During my rest I’d been hanging on to one of the flapping life-lines of the boat. Another man had now got it, and I felt irritated, as if he might have found one of his own; but I clutched the next one, and by and by noticed that the moon was rising. And somewhere about that time we struck the ridge to High Lee.

“The moon showed a grotesque procession. She rose, a bloated disc of dull orange, over the steaming horses and labouring figures, over the big boat squatted among the drifted hills.... The wind wasn’t blowing quite in such gusts neither, and I remember thinking that if it would only stop for an hour the snow might pack. We had eased on the digging with the beginning of the ridge, and with the help of the men at the wheels were going at a good three miles an hour. Soon I let go my life-line: I hadn’t come as a passenger. There was digging--always more or less digging; a ridge of land isn’t the same thing as a ridge on a second-form school-map. And there were walls too, and cross-walls, and drifts at each. But it only took a minute or two to uncape and break the walls. As I say, we were going nicely; and as the moon mounted and the wind dropped more and more, we could hear the coughing of the horses and the creaking and straining of the tackle on the spar.... And now let me see; let me see....

“H’m! Never mind. It doesn’t matter so much about Nunan the gipsy; but Nunan was daft about his horses--the Johnnie Faws’ horses. He thought the quarry where they’d left them would be somewhere about there. He wanted us to stop and look for them, and climbed up into the boat to put the matter in a reasonable light to Joe. He woke Osa Couper--did I say that Osa was asleep in the boat? He was; but of course Joe wasn’t going to burrow up and down the headland for the Johnnie Faws’ horses, and Nunan became morose. By and by Joe packed him off with another fellow to rouse Hadwen--he was a farmer--and to meet us with the farm-horses at the Beck; and I began to envy Osa in the boat myself. Let me see....”

* * * * *

He tapped with his lean fingers, as if continuing to himself: it is not unlikely we missed part of the tale. He was very old; and when at last he went on again, it was with a little rousing and pulling of himself together.

* * * * *

“Well, we saw it at last, when the moon got high--what the wind had done to the snow. It was glorious, that mounting ... all in a frost of brilliant stars, ... and it showed us a miracle. We could see half over the Head now. Acre after acre was fluted and rippled and ravelled, all so still and quiet and spotless; ... and only thin copses, a mile, two, four miles away, broke the whiteness. The wind had touched and left it in tresses and flounces; ... far away it was channeled like billows, and again thick and smooth; ... and trees and bushes were as if something thick and white had been poured over them, all coronets and garlands. The lanterns were murky orange spots, and every detail of the boat, the horses, the harnessing, old Joe’s artificial chin over the gunnel.... The _Lizzie Martin_ might be driftwood by this time on the other side of the Heights. I didn’t think of the _Lizzie Martin_; I didn’t think of that grammar-school I was going to have one day; I only wanted to look at the snow and the serene moon.... Ah well!...

“From the top of the next rise we could see Lee Wood, black below us, and the grey Heights beyond. For the first time the grass showed in patches, and the boat rocked on the carriage, and we dragged back as we descended the slope. Then all at once Joe Barker shouted, ‘Don’t turn ’em!’

“It seemed that a cart-track ran through the wood that would save a mile and more. In the deep dip at the bottom Nunan was waiting with Hadwen’s horses; and we had taken the dip and risen again on the other side through a gap in a wall before anybody had fairly counted the risk. It was too late to turn them, or perhaps worth chancing--a thirty-foot boat, and all that tangle of cordage.... Anyway, we went on, and the wood closed in behind us.

“I think Joe saw his mistake as soon as a branch whipped his hat from his head, for he began to dance and curse. We could hear him blundering about in the boat for the one carpenter’s axe we carried. Lifeboats are specially made with a big beam, and they’ve no business in woods anyway. There was now little snow, but that only made the wood the darker.

“So, soon our spar fetched up against an elm or something, and startled a screeching white owl: we backed the horses and freed it. The shouting and smashing and ripping of branches must have been heard a mile off; and then the check came. She wedged between two ash-trees, and Joe sprang down with his axe.

“‘For God’s sake, keep them cattle to th’ track!’ he screamed, beside himself; and a young farmer snatched the axe from him and ran round to the nearest ash. The delay cost us a quarter of an hour, and then we moved forward again. We were savage now, and the farmers flogged the horses and kicked them cruelly under their bellies. The next check was a deep ravine with a beck at the bottom, and the team was in heaps, slipping, stumbling, pulling all ways at once. We lifted her over,--lifted her, with shoulders at spokes, sweeps and spars for levers, men at the ropes among the horses. Then Joe served brandy round. Nunan trotted off to warn the men of High Lee that we were coming, and to get their help. We didn’t stop. We forced back bushes with our bodies, and tore at branches, and wedged the wheels with stones while we chopped partly through trees and then fetched them down with ropes. A rage of cursing took us as we laboured, and some shook torn and bleeding fists at trees. Joe Barker gesticulated impotently, and whimpered that this was bird-nesting, nutting, black-berrying; and he danced up and down whenever a sapling gave with a loud crack, or twenty yards of clear track showed ahead.

“I don’t know how long we were in the wood,--no very great time, I suppose, as time is reckoned; and then all at once I seemed to see John Swire of High Lee among us, and Nunan again, and a dozen axes going at once. Dreaming? Oh no, I wasn’t; there really were the axes. The High Lee men had come to help us out, and their horses were waiting at the edge of the wood. We soon came through then, of course, and saw, a field’s-length away, dark shapes and lanterns in the snow.

“John Swire was right: she didn’t look much like a new boat by this time. Not that she was splintered much,--double cross mahogany from gunnel to gunnel doesn’t splinter much,--but half her life-lines were gone from the ring-bolts, and her new paint was fouled with bark and earth and tree-scrapings--a sight to see. Men swarmed up and overhauled her anxiously; but she was little the worse save in appearance, and they swarmed down again and began to take out our exhausted horses and to put in their own. They were at the knotted cordage thick as flies round a treacle-string in summer--lengthening, splicing, piecing, sheepshanking, stretching all out, it seemed interminably; for they had twice our number of horses--too many, I think. They fixed another spar for a double-tree, and set oars across at intervals to keep that monstrous cat’s-cradle in something like position: men were told off specially to watch it. A fellow came shouting up with some oxen; but we couldn’t begin to make yokes for his oxen--the fool hadn’t brought any; and they were sent back with the lads and worn-out horses to High Lee.

“I forget lots of things that happened just then; but I remember one thing distinctly--I laughed at the High Lee men when we set off again, for they cheered. I suppose it seemed silly to me. Cheer when you’ve done things, if you’ve nothing better to do; but where on earth is the sense in.... We knew what cheering was worth. Cheering didn’t help Nunan much, who was fretting again about his horses; nor Joe Barker, who was bewailing the time his blunder had lost us--for we remembered now and then that we were going to Portsannet. It didn’t help anybody except perhaps the High Lee men themselves, and they’d come to their senses before we were over the moonlit Heights.... We let them do the work for a bit: it was digging, digging again, and the rise and fall of their backs was wearisome to watch. There was little choice of roads now, Osa said (we woke him to ask him). As nearly as he could tell, he’d come fairly straight past the alum-works; and for the alum-works we made. Soon our feet felt the rise....”

* * * * *

He seemed very tired, as if the memory of the weariness wearied him again. He rested for three or four minutes. He nodded; and it is possible that again he had lost the direct thread of his tale, for when he resumed after his rest it was apparently nowhere.

* * * * *

“You need purpose, you see. No amount of work kills if you have the purpose. You needn’t achieve it; they say it’s often as well for you when you don’t; but without it you’re hitting the air. Practically, you must have a little reward, too--just enough to make it worth your while to go on; it’s only once in five centuries that a hero’s born who can see his work apparently swallowed up in the ocean with equanimity. Yes, yes; principle’s the biggest thing--the vision, the ideal; nobody denies that. But, as the world’s arranged, it’s much if you can get forward a step at a time and catch a glimpse of your vision between whiles. If you’d asked us, we should have told you, of course, that we were going to Portsannet. We should have thought you a fool; and yet I doubt if it really occurred to us. I don’t say that I myself didn’t think (if you call it that) of the _Lizzie Martin_. We’ve all thought we’ve been thinking things all our lives, till one day something happens and we think them really and piercingly; but I do say I think we went on mainly because we’d started. It wasn’t what we thought--it was what we didn’t think: we didn’t think of stopping.... They used to call me ambitious when, as a youngster, I sometimes spoke of my grammar-school. Well, every fool’s ambitious, if ambition is only thinking that your grammar-school, whatever it is, would be a nice comfortable thing to have. Ambition--purpose--means a lot more than that to me. It’s a positive, a vital thing--not mere patience and endurance. It’s never to forget that first presumptuous cheer; it’s both to see your goal and never to lose sight of the means to it. You haven’t got to let the work get its grind in.... But we were half way there, you say?--we had a little reward to encourage us? Yes, more than half way. We were past the first lift of the Heights. But what besides? Twice the boat had slid clean off the tail of the carriage, spilling belts and jackets and paraphernalia in the snow; and twice we lashed her on again; and there’s so mighty little carriage to lash a big lifeboat to that we had to tauten up every few minutes, and men were hauling direct on the boat to keep her somewhere near the wheels. And what besides? Till we’d come to the Heights we hadn’t done enough work to keep us warm, and the High Lee men were frenzied, as we’d been in the wood. Nunan was seeing his quarry every hundred yards, and looking for air-holes, as if his horses had been sheep. Willie Harverson had been left half a mile back at a house--ribs crushed the first time the boat shifted. We digged and hauled and righted the boat, and digged again. The horses rolled with their legs among the ropes; ... the load, ... the keel alone weighed half a ton.... Men were sleeping as they went, and shoving as they slept.... I tell you, you don’t know anything about it. It’s the purposeless work that kills, and practically we had no purpose. You can’t have purpose and be frantic.... Wait a bit....

“And I knew it was silly to keep on thinking with every step, ‘This brings you nearer the grammar-school--Portsannet--Portsannet and the grammar-school.’ Rousseau did it, you know. But once in a while, when you’ve laboured till your spirit seems freed from your body, it does seem all one--all part of something you’re trying to do, you don’t know what--something you’re trying to make of your life.... It was only seven miles; but seven miles or seven hundred isn’t the point. The point is just the limit of your endurance: if it’s only seven yards, seven hundred, or seven million, it comes to just that.... Wait a minute.... The moon was very little higher, so we couldn’t have been very long. I remember noticing this and shouting it out, but I don’t know whether it steadied them or not. My mind was somewhere in advance, over the Heights. I was thinking that, once over the top, the men who were pulling would fall back to check her; that without a pole the team would be useless; that a pole might be made of a long spar; that we might zigzag down; put props through the valve-holes; elementary mechanics, parallelogram of forces, grammar-school again, and a lot more light-witted stuff. Then somebody sighted the alum-works, a quarter of a mile to the left.... One minute....

“We were at the top. It’s forty-five years ago, and you can persuade yourself of a lot in less than that time. We persuaded ourselves afterwards that it was a moment of triumph--there was no harm in that; but we knew better really. We knew in our hearts that the Portsannet men would have to man the boat for themselves, for we reeled like drunkards, went forward like drunkards, with the drunkard’s instinct for his bed. But we boasted foolishly: we would put out ourselves--take her back that night--show what men could do,--I don’t know what. Nobody said it was nonsense. Joe Barker alone seemed to realise that it didn’t follow that because we’d got through, the _Lizzie Martin_ had. We could hear the sea now, a dull roar, and far on our right the Abbey light flashed white and red. There was a babel of talking. Men with horses seemed to join us every few minutes. A man called Lockwood came from Lizzie’s old home with two Galloways and a mare in foal, and they hitched them on behind. As they did so we stood for a moment looking down on Portsannet, the river, the scattered lights far up the valley, the grey beyond the harbour-wall....

“They came up, the fish-wives of the quay--the women who swear so--they turned out with the men; men and women, there were enough to carry the boat and us with it. Three boats had managed to keep head-up the whole of the day--you know that--and the _Lizzie_ was one of them. The shouts and lanterns were bewildering, and I heard a fellow give a shout of recognition to Osa Couper. We turned into the street that leads to the movable bridge over the river. The river’s tidal, of course, and there was a beach of mud and pebbles; and the Portsannet men fought for places as we put her in. She danced on the water again, and they pulled down the river. We trooped across the bridge to the boat-house. They were jacketed, and had fresh oars by the time we caught them up, and the sea was bursting on the sea-wall with tremendous shocks. They got out the very first time....

“You know how many they saved? Frank and another man and a lad from the _Lizzie_, and seven from a barque, and six from a Lowestoft boat. We saw them all in, and then they wanted us to go to bed. ‘Why should we go to bed?’ we said. We didn’t want to go to bed. I went to bed sometime the next day, but it wasn’t till the following night that I slept--not to call sleeping.... Nunan, they said, was worse than I; the horses, perhaps, though they got them the next day but one, all but two....”

His eyes were half closed, and we prepared to leave him: he opened them again, hearing us move.

“I want to know if you can tell me something before you go,” he said; “it’s often puzzled me. I can tell you in half a minute. It’s this: If you were to ask me whether I thought my own life worth such and such a vast deal of labour,--the risk of other lives too, maybe,--I think I should have to say, No. At any rate, it would be a question of balance, value for value, and so on, you see. And I know other men think the same. But as soon as it’s a question of anybody else’s life, the case seems to be different. John Broadwood would have jumped up just the same if Frank Martin had been the biggest rapscallion who ever handled a net. Now where’s the sense in it? I’m not saying there isn’t any; I’m asking. I went too. I’d have gone in the boat, but it would have kept a better man out of a place; and I ask myself the reason of it all. It isn’t reason--can’t be; and yet reasonable men will do it. ‘Thank God for that,’ you say. Well, that’s unanswerable too.... I see you can’t help me. I’ve been asking such questions all my life, and shall go on, I suppose, till the end now.... I’m very tired.... Good-night....”

_Printed by The Chapel River Press, Kingston, Surrey._