Chapter 23

Boy Sees a Vision

Joses when in liquor was wont to boast that his memory was good, and he was right upon the whole. But on this occasion he had forgotten something, and that something was Billy Bluff. Billy and Joses had met before, as Monkey Brand had pointed out to Mat, and had agreed to dislike each other. And when Joses began his stalk, Billy Bluff started on a stalk of his own.

Boy Woodburn, peeping between two rocks, watched with grim glee. Her senses, quick as those of a wild creature, had warned her long ago of the Great Beast's approach. For Joses to imagine he could take her by surprise was as though a beery bullock believed that he could catch a lark. The girl was almost sorry for the man: his fatness, his fatuity appealed to her pity. Alert as a leopard, she was not in the least afraid of him. In the wood, true, he had caught her, but her downfall there she owed to a sprain. Here in the open, in her riding things, she could run rings about her enemy.

Lying on her face behind the rock, she watched the little drama.

Billy Bluff, wet still from the sea, his hair clinging about his ribs, and giving him the air of a heraldic griffin, crept on the puffing fat man and hurled at him with a roar.

The assault was entirely unexpected.

"You--bear!" blurted Joses, the picturesque phrase popping out of him like a cork from a heady bottle of champagne.

He struggled to his feet, picked up a stone, and slung it at the charging dog.

Billy Bluff meant business; and it was well for his enemy that the stone struck him on the fore-paw. The blow steadied, but it did not stop, the dog. He gave a little gurgle and came again on three legs in silent fury.

Joses made for the cliff, where a fall had constituted a steep ramp. He scrambled up it, an avalanche of chalk slipping away from beneath his feet and half burying the pursuing dog.

He panted up to the top of the ramp, and stood with his back to the cliff, looking down on his attacker.

Billy Bluff could not make his footing good upon the shale.

He lay at the foot of the cliff, one eye on his prey, licking his damaged paw, and swearing beneath his breath. And it was clear he did not mean to budge.

Joses turned his face to the cliff. He got his hands on the top, and lifting himself, could just peer over the edge of the cliff and see the green and the gorse beyond. Unaided, he could do no more.

Happily help was at hand.

A man on a chestnut pony was standing on the turf not twenty yards away.

"Give me a hand up, will you?" he panted. "That ---- of a dog!"

The young man approached.

"By all means," he said, in a deep, familiar voice.

It was Silver.

Joses did not mind that. He was not at all above taking a hand from an enemy in an emergency.

And young Silver seemed surprisingly kind. Big men usually were.

The young man got off his pony, came to the edge of the cliff, and gave the perspiring tout his hand. With a heave and a lurch Joses scrambled to the top.

How strong the fellow was! No horse would ever get away with _him_.

"Good of you," panted the fat man, rising to his feet.

"Not at all," replied Silver. "It was less trouble to pull you up than to come down to you."

There was a note in his quiet voice Joses did not like.

"What you mean?" he asked.

"I'm going to give you a hiding," observed the other mildly.

Joses looked aghast at his rescuer and snorted. He shot forward his shaggy face, and the action seemed to depress his chest and obtrude his stomach.

"Whaffor?" he asked, in tones that betrayed the fact that such experiences were not entirely new to him.

"I don't know," said Silver in his exasperatingly lazy way. "I feel I'd rather like to."

He seemed quietly amused, much more so than was Joses. And he meant what he said. His clean, calm face, his mouth so determined and yet so mild, his steady eyes and the thrust of his jaw, all betrayed his resolution.

"Here, stow it!" stammered the fat man. "Chuck the chaff. A gentleman!"

"I'm not chaffing," said Silver in a matter-of-fact way. "How d'you like it?"

"What ye mean?"

"Will you put your hands up--or will you take it lying?"

His pony's rein was over the young man's arm; and they were standing on the edge of the cliff. Joses, weighing his chances with the swift and comprehending eye of fear, marked it greedily. Silver was young, strong, an athlete; but he was handicapped.

Joses's cunning was returning to reinforce his doubtful heart.

"That's Heart of Oak, isn't it?" he asked.

"Is it?" said the young man.

"The model polo pony," continued Joses. "Refused £600 for him at Islington, didn't you? And I don't blame you. You're rich, we all know, Mr. Silver. £600's no more to you than sixpence to me. But there's the pony! You can't replace him. Pity if he got away here on the edge of the cliff and all."

For the second time that morning Joses's luck deserted him.

"I'll hold your pony," said a deep voice from behind.

The fat man turned.

Boy Woodburn stood behind him.

Fresh from the sea, her hair in short, thick plaits of gold, dark and wet and bare; with the eyes of a sword and the colour of an apple-blossom; the brine upon her and the brown of wind and sun; in her breeches, boots, and jersey, her big dog straining on his lead, she looked like Diana turned post-boy.

"Thank you," said the young man, handing over his pony.

Joses snorted.

"Call yourself a woman!" he cried.

"I'm all right," answered the girl, seating herself critically on a mound, the pony in one hand, the dog in the other. "Don't hit him over the heart," she advised out of some experience of race-course scraps. "There might be trouble."

"I sha'n't hit him at all," replied the young man. He seized the fat man by the shoulder and spun him round. "I shall--_shake_ him, and--_punt_ him."

The girl did not know what punting meant, but it sounded good and was not so bad to watch.

Silver was applying his knee to his victim with precision and power. The fat man's teeth seemed to rattle under the pounding shocks. The words came joggling out of him, and they were not pretty words. He struck backward with his arms and feet, wriggling to get his plump shoulders free; but he was helpless as a baby in the arms of a nurse.

Silver was strong. Joses was right in that if in nothing else.

"He's killing me!" he gasped. "Fetch the coastguard!"

"No, thank you," said the girl.

The young man loosed his prey at last, and sent him spinning forward, projecting him with a kick.

Joses fell on his face, and stayed there fumbling, while he vomited oaths.

"Look out!" cried the girl sharply. "He's got a knife, and he'll use it."

She was right. Joses was busy with that wooden-handled sheath-knife of his.

Silver took a step forward.

"Ah, then!--would you?" he scolded, and hit the other a tap over the wrist with the handle of his hunting crop.

Joses yelped and dropped the knife.

Then he scrambled to his feet, wringing his hand.

The brown of his face had turned a dirty livid.

"I see what it is!" he cried. "Assignation. And I spoiled the sport--what! You and the dandy toff.

_Him and me, Beside the sea._

_Quite_ unintentional, I assure you!"

He bowed, cackling horribly.

Silver looked ugly.

"Now then!" he said, and advanced a pace.

The girl put a staying hand upon him; and the tout shambled away toward the Gap, muttering to himself.

Silver turned to his companion. He was breathing deep, but outwardly unmoved.

"Are you all right?" he asked.

"Yes," she said. "He knocked Billy Bluff out, but he didn't touch me. Hold your paw, Bill! It's nothing much. I shall put him on a wet bandage soaked in borax when I get home."

A sound of hand-clapping and hoarse laughter ascended to them from the Gap.

Joses had slipped Ragamuffin's reins over the post, and was clapping his hands. Then he took up a pebble and threw it at the roan. The old pony went off at a gallop and with trailing reins.

Boy watched him calmly.

"I should have thought of that," she said.

Silver was starting off down the hill toward the mocking figure at the mouth of the Gap; but the girl stopped him.

"You get on and ride up the valley," she said. "Ragamuffin'll stop to graze under the lighthouse; and you'll collar him there."

Silver hesitated.

"What about you?" he asked.

"I shall be all right," she answered. "I've got the legs of him."

He mounted and went off at a canter, Billy Bluff pursuing him.

The girl walked down toward the Gap, looking ridiculously slight in her post-boy attire.

Joses had disappeared.

As she came to the mouth of the Gap and picked up her coat, her towel, and the tackle she had thrown down, she saw him.

He was standing in the Gap, between the white chalk walls, nursing his hand.

She was glad he was down there. He would be safe at least from Mr. Silver.

As she put on her coat she looked at him with calm, musing eyes. The Spirit of Action was laid to sleep in her. In its place a Moving Dream, welling up as it were out of Time into Eternity, possessed her slowly. These Other-Conscious Moments, as Mr. Haggard called them, grew on the girl with the growing years. She was aware of them in others--in her mother, Mr. Haggard, her grand-dad--but hardly so in herself. They were of her, yet beyond her--mysterious invasions from she knew not where, gleams of Eden from exile. At these times she saw men as trees walking and all created things as part and expression of a Huge Vague Life of Wonder and Beauty without end.

And now, as she looked at the man in the Gap she said with quiet severity, as though addressing one of the lads at Bible Class:

"You _are_ a naughty boy."

He glanced up at her from his earth.

She saw his eyes, and the suffering in them, and recognised them with a start. They were the eyes of a fox she had seen last season dug out of an earth to the screams of men and halloos of women, after a long run, that hounds might not be defrauded of blood.

And she felt now as she had felt then. A passion of sympathy, a sea of furious indignation, boiled up within her. Something pitifully forlorn about the man struck her to the heart. Quite suddenly she felt sorry for him; sorry with the sorrow that has sent heroes and saints throughout the ages to persecution and death with joy, if only they may relieve by ever so little the sufferings of sinful humanity.

Boy Woodburn was not a saint and was not a hero; but she was on the way to be a woman. The Voice that was not hers spoke out of her deeps.

"Why did you do that?" she asked quietly.

There was no anger in her tone or spirit; no sorrow, no surprise. She was curiously impersonal.

The fox showed his teeth.

"I'll do worse than that yet," he said.

The girl found herself gulping.

She looked at him through shining eyes. And as she did so it came in upon her that this degraded creature had once been beautiful. Ruin as he was, there was still about him something tragic and forlorn as of a great moor over which a beaten host has retreated, leaving desolation in its wake.

The man in the Gap wrung his wrist.

The girl took a step toward him.

"May I look at it?" she said.

He glanced up at her again, much as glances a dog which has had a licking and is uncertain whether the hand stretched out is that of an enemy or a friend.

"Likely," he snarled. "You'd bite."