Marden Fee

CHAPTER 1 COMPANY AT THE NICK OF TIME, WITH ELOQUENCE IN SPATE AND MUCH TALK OF A HANGING

On a cool crisp evening in January, in the year seventeen hundred and fifty, the High Street of Marden Fee presents to us the appearance of a vivid dream. It is a broad street for so small a place: broad and brief, branching at its west end into three smaller roads whose junction forms two obtuse angles, and at the east end dwindling to a lane that winds unobtrusively past the parish church. The church, with its surrounding acre of tombs, stands on an eminence that was formerly cultivated ground and the scene of human sacrifice. It dominates the High Street, and is confronted at the other end by an inn, The Nick of Time, which stands, square and squat and comfortable, between two prongs of the fork, with the road to Glatting going north to the right of it, and two smaller roads, the one to Dyking Manor and the other to Medlock, running south-east and south-west. To a careless eye, as to a fanciful mind, these two buildings, the church and the tavern, close the street up, so that it looks like an island of habitation in a sea of field and forest. Some fourteen furlongs behind the church, and beyond our sight at the moment, stands the residence of young Squire Marden, whose grandfather was the first lord of this fee, a slice then newly-carved from the parish of Glatting. The High Street is deserted. It seems to float, without motion, in a clear white silence. The smoke curling from its chimneys oozes slowly upwards and is gently teased into wisps and tatters by the wind; and the hanging tavern-sign sends a long black banner streaming across the moonwashed wall. All the houses are in darkness, except the inn itself, whose parlour window, the life and heart of the scene, attracts the eye with a glowing square of red. Hovering we watch, surveying the whole; and presently can dimly discern something moving, with aged precision, in the shadow of Church Lane. Stepping at last into the brightness of the street, it is seen to be the figure of an old man, small and bent. The sound of his boots on the hard road breaks sharply into the surrounding silence; echo gives it back and sends it radiating in spirals to the sky. His walk is confident if slow. Without lifting his eyes from the ground he moves forward unfalteringly, as though drawn by the warmth of the red window. Nor does he for more than a moment pause at the inn door. His hand finds the latch. As the door opens, there escapes into the street, like heat from an oven, a warm gust of human sound. Then the door is slammed to, and the night is still, and the sounds that lately invaded it are become a memory.

Laughter greeted the old man’s entry, a laughter composed of many elements. Dick Mykelborne the wheelwright’s was genial, even admiring. Dick was a hearty and a godly fellow, big and black-bearded and nearing fifty. Like most other men of his age who wished themselves younger, he derived an unconscious comfort from the existence of this ancient man, took pleasure in his company, and respected him for having dodged death so long. The old man’s weakness made him feel his own strength, and the old man’s longevity made him feel immortal, for he was of a sanguine temperament and had that spirit in him that can read all signs in the sky as signs of fair weather. He sat near the fire, in the corner of the high-backed settle, and his large hand clasped lovingly a pint pot. His neighbour Tom Shellett, a lean stringy young fellow with eyes as placid as the cows he herded, laughed for no better reason than that the others laughed; Broome, the young master of twelve scattered acres, sounded a derisive note, being still insolent with youth; Gipsy Noke gave a shy hesitating grin, for he was conscious, as a borderer but newly settled, of his inferior status (moreover, the old man was gardener at the Vicarage and in that capacity had once rebuked him); and Roger Peakod, having drowned his small wit in ale, could only giggle and stare. The potman stared without giggling, and remained so, like a fool, till his master came close and spake a sharp word in his ear. This Erasmus Bailey, the innkeeper, was the only one who at this moment had attention for the company as well as for the old man from Squire’s. A comparative stranger among them, for he had been in the village but twenty years, he had the reputation of being something of a scholar, and a cut above the general run of men. Rumour called him a runaway schoolmaster. This gave him authority, without—for he was a genial fellow enough—making him the less liked by his humble patrons. If he smiled now at the comedy staged in his inn parlour, it was rather with wonder than with mirth, for a half-fledged thought fluttered in his head that if, instead of this aged man, a small precocious child had entered the inn parlour, the attitude of these fellows to their visitor could hardly have been much different; and a couplet—for he had the knack of such things—began shaping in his mind:

But he kept his sententiousness to himself. The thought was timely, but not timely to be spoken. He gave greeting to the newcomer.

‘Good evening to you, Mr Timms. Your servant, friend.’

‘Come you in, Coachy,’ cried Dick Mykelborne. ‘Come in and warm yourself, old gennelman.’

Coachy Timms, having shut the door behind him, stood with his bent back against it and peered at the company with his small cornflower-blue eyes. He had somewhat the look of an ancient and benign elf, being spare of body, with thin legs and small feet, and a head larger than the rest of him seemed to warrant. This suggestion of top-heaviness gave to his every movement an air of singular adroitness, as though he were a tight-rope walker. You half expected to see him lose his balance, and the wonder of him was that he encouraged this expectation while never satisfying it. He had a neatness, a grace of movement. His face was round and rosy, having the hard glossiness, as well as the colour, of a certain kind of ripe apple; and a nimbus of white beard, still stained with its original yellow, encircled this face without concealing its contours. The upper lip was clean-shaven; the cheeks were polished and hairless; the eyebrows made a thin high arch above the candid eyes. A tall hat hid the baldness of his crown, and set off to advantage the fringe of grey curls that remained to him. Withal his nose was thin, like the beak of a bird; thin and small and straight, the nostrils delicately curved and mettlesome with humour.

Coachy Timms regarded the company with twinkling irony. ‘God-a-mercy, neighbours. Tis a laamentable bright fresh night,’ he said. And the men round the fire began nudging each other, seeing in this simple remark far more than the words would have seemed to warrant. For that was the effect of Coachy Timms. He moved to the fire and was plied with drink. ‘A bright fresh night,’ he repeated, after a pause, smiling to feel the warmth of the liquor tingling through his body. ‘There be frost in ut, and a round moon, and stars a-plenty. As pretty a mixture as Goddle Mighty ever made. I’ll wager a clapped his hands and called his mother when a’d finished.’

‘Have a care, friend,’ said the innkeeper. ‘That smells to me of popery.’

‘Then thy nose be longer than thy years, Mus Bailey,’ retorted Coachy. He took a long swig from his glass. ‘But that’s all one. Twas a manner of speaking. As for popery, I’m no pope’s man, nor never was. But there be some we knows on that is, and haply what be good enough for Squire Marden be good enough for poor folk.’

His audience did not quite know what to make of this oracular utterance. They were baffled and silenced: no new experience for them. To the soberest among them, Mykelborne and Bailey, it sounded mighty like sedition; and they wondered what King George would have had to say about it had he been present. But Coachy Timms, when his tongue ran away with him, was notoriously a wilful and harmless old party: with which reflection the innkeeper quickly recovered his good humour. ‘Have a care you don’t let Parson hear you talk that way,’ said he, indulgently.

‘Parson?’ echoed Coachy, He gazed into his glass and shook his head solemnly, as if to say he could see no parson there. ‘There be parsons and there be parsons. Tis like harses. There be big and liddle, tempersome and quiet. There be them do goo camsteery at sound of a hedge-sparry, and them that will pick their road as choice as you please through a black starm, wi’ thunderbolts dancen like fleas in a hen-cup. There be all sarts and all manners; likewise all colours and kinds. Some do need the whip to make ’em trot, and others’ll race for a chirrup. Some goo gansing-gay if you give ’em rein a-plenty and ask no questions, but they won’t be druv. Try and putt they in double harness, and ups ’em goo on their hind legs like a preachen Methody. Yet others’ll run so sweet in pair as a brace of young ladies gwain to charch in their best bonnets. So you may take ut from Coachy Timms: there be harses and harses.’

‘And I’ll tell you something, old gennelman.’ Young Broome pushed his face forward with an air of great cleverness. ‘I’ll tell you something about harses.’

Coachy raised his eyes and glanced at the speaker in a way that would have silenced a more sensitive man. ‘I’m young yet, Master Broome. I’ll haply learn if you’ll pudder wi’ me.’

Broome struggled to ignore the laughter he had brought upon his head. ‘Yes, I know a thing or two, gaffer. There be stolen harses, tellee, besides this kind and that kind. There be stolen harses.’ He looked round in triumph.

‘Ay, tis true,’ said several of the company, nodding to each other. ‘Tis true enough.’

Coachy Timms rose slowly from his seat and turned frostily to the innkeeper. ‘What’s this?’ he asked.

His host begged him to be seated again. ‘There’s no offence, neighbour. No offence in the world, I’m sure. Twas for stealing a horse they hanged yon fellow from Glatting today. Farmer Broome here was telling us but now how he fared on the gallows.’

Broome eagerly took up the tale. ‘Ay, a villainous fellow a was. A countable ugly face on him, a had.’

‘Ah!’ said the company, greatly relishing the story. ‘Countable ugly, was he?’ said one. ‘A savage customer, I bluv,’ said another. The rest, impatient for a repetition of details they had already heard, said nothing, but stared expectantly at the enterprising Broome, who had travelled many miles and missed a day’s work to see this execution and was now come home with a rich treasure of memory.

With a selfconscious swagger Broome called to the potman for another pint. All eyes, except Coachy’s, were upon him. ‘He’ll steal no more harses, sartain sure.’ He laughed cockily, as though to himself belonged the credit of this achievement. And his neighbours, seeming to concede this point of view, took up the laugh with admiration.

‘So they hanged the villain, did ’em?’ said Roger Peakod invitingly.

‘You’re right, Roger,’ said Broome, with a lordly smile. ‘Hang un they did, I bluv. And with these two eyes I seen ’em.’

‘Sarve un fair for a thief,’ grumbled Mykelborne, with, nevertheless, a troubled look in his eyes.

‘Hangen, mark my words,’ said Shellett the cowherd, ‘be too good for some of they poxy knaves. Arnest folk same as us baint safe in our beds o’ night with they abroad.’ His placid eyes grew bright with fear.

‘Yet tis a shameful thing, all said,’ ventured Mr Bailey, ‘to send a man to his Maker with a noose round his neck.’

‘And how did a look?’ asked Peakod urgently. ‘Did a goo black i’ the face, farmer?’

‘A did so,’ said Broome. ‘But that worn’t the best on it. Now twas this way, neighbours . . .’

‘And another thing I’ve larned from harses,’ resumed Coachy Timms, in his clear, penetrating, high-pitched voice, ‘is to mind me manners and talk to ’em as man to man. All sarts and kinds and colours I’ve had dealens with . . .’

‘Chained up like a mad dog, you might say,’ said Broome. ‘And when they dragged un outa gaol, twoulda done you good, neighbours, to hear the brave clamour he do make . . .’

‘. . . blacks and whites and roans and chestnuts,’ went on Coachy relentlessly, ‘young and old and good and bad and ornary middlin sinners like you and me. I’ve seen ’em gotten, I’ve seen ’em born, I’ve broke ’em in, I’ve ridden and druv ’em. I’ve handled more harses than I’ve seen stars in the sky. But I’m willen to learn the head and tail of the business from any son of Smulkin as’ll be painful to teach me.’

‘Such a clamour as you never did, neighbours,’ said Broome. ‘Then up a goo on the cart, and away goo the cart to where gallows was waiting all spruce and ready. And here’s a fine new cravat for thee, says Jack Ketch, putten the noose on him. Then Parson brung out his book and we gives over shouten and doffs our hats like Christian men, and Master Thief do stand there all trussed up like a fowl and staren and listenen . . .’

‘A good drop of ale!’ cried Coachy, emerging from his glass. ‘And what’s more,’ he added, taking up the thread of his discourse, ‘harses is cunnen cattle. A deal more human than some folks on two legs, and a deal better worth looken at. If there be a prettier sight than a smart young foal balancing hisself on his long spindlies and nuzzlen his dam, tis not in this alehouse I do see ut. When I was a younger man . . .’ He paused to take another draught of ale.

‘Bind up the wretch’s eyes, cries Parson, dropping his book of a sudden. He be putten a curse on me, God shield us!’ Broome’s voice had become so strident as to command attention even from Coachy for a moment. There fell a sudden silence, in which his startled audience seemed to be hearing, in the quiet of the mind, more than Broome had told them, more indeed than he had witnessed. This silence puzzled and discomforted him: he was all for merriment. But the prime of the joke was yet to come. ‘And so, neighbours, when Parson do say that, we all stare at the prisoner, us and Jack Ketch and all. And the prisoner, he stares over our heads, you might say, at the sky, and looked as though he didn’t know we was there, not a mother’s son of us. But butter my wig if a wasn’t snivvellen on the sly. Tears in his eyes as big as gobs.’ The narrator burst into a loud guffaw; and Peakod, his most appreciative listener, responded with his customary giggle.

‘When I was a younger man,’ said Coachy, ‘my dad had a mare we called Brown Bess, which was named after the Queen of England herself. But she’s dead, I’ve heard, and there be a king now, bainta? Charles or James or William, or is it George, neighbours? That’s as may be. I’ve seen a lot come and goo, and it never made no manner of difference to the harses. Now this Bess, I’m speaken of the mare, markee, we had her sarved by Farmer Brisket’s Standish the First, and a fine upstanden stallion he was, and never known to fail. Nor a didn’t this time nuther, for a laamentable pretty foal he got on Bess, and I was there seeing him come into the warld. Tis in the end of a soft night he do come, and he come wropt round in a blanket of stars. Or a cloud haply. Tis all one: he were wet and steamen, and that’s the sense of ut. And now you’re here, I said, what might you make of ut, my coney? Pretty middlin, says he, blinken with his oily eyes. Oily and brown they was with a fleck of parple in ’em. Pretty middlin, says he, but wait till I’ve the use of my legs. And that were fair enough, so I come back to un at daybreak: And how now, my dear? Not so homelike, he says, but ut had to be, and once I get used to this dazzle o’ sunshine and bright grass I daun’t doubt but I’ll settle down snug. As for you, he says, bringen his hither eye close to mine, so that twas like staren into Glatting Mere on a dark quiet night, you look a likely lad, says he, and if you treat me right I’ll treat you right, and that’s a bargain. But if you or your dad are thinken to call me Standish the Second, or any such rubbidge as that, he says, you can just put it outa mind, and lively. For I’m Lubin, that’s my name, and Lubin I’ll be, says Lubin. And with that he frisked around and nuzzled up to his dam. I’ll allow, neighbours, that I took a fancy to that young foal from the first I set eyes on him; for I’d never knowed a piece of harse-flesh look so spry and talk so plain.’

‘I dunno what your way of thinken may be, Mus Mykelborne,’ said Broome, ‘nor yours, Mus Bailey, nor yours, Tahm Shellett. But to my mind a thief’s a thief and desarves no better.’

‘Ay, tis a lesson for us all,’ returned Mykelborne piously. ‘A youngish fellow, I’ll ’low. Thirty summers, no more. Cut off in his pinky prime, as Postle Paul do say. And them that saw ’un die’ll have the fear of God in their hearts for evermore.’

‘Thirty summers is a lot to lose,’ said Mr Bailey, and quoting from his own unpublished works he declaimed with some pomp:

Broome led the applause. ‘Well done, sir!’ said he. ‘Ay, larks is good eating, there’s no doubt. But the law’s the law, and them that saw what I seen today will think twice, I’ll ’low, afore they fall into scaddle ways like him. Come, landlord, I’ll pay scot, and you’ll oblige me, neighbours, by taken a round of liquor with Nat Broome. You too, old friend,’ he added, leaning towards Coachy Timms, to whose eyes he appeared to be invisible, and to whose ears inaudible. ‘You too, Coachman Timms, so we be all dutch cousins together.’ Lacking a response from Coachy, he shrugged his shoulders, winking at the company, and thrust his hand deep into an inner pocket. His fingers searched for a moment; the grin faded slowly from his face. He tried another pocket; scowled; gaped; and stood staring at the sanded floor with mouth open, unable to believe what his questing fingers told him.

All but Coachy were staring at him, and all who stared seemed to share his concern with guileless heart except one. The one exception was the dark slim tall fellow they called Gipsy Noke, a man neither old nor very young but of uncertain age, black-haired, black-browed, sallow-complexioned, but English enough, and of Sussex, though his speech had an alien tang in it. He was a squatter who had come, heaven knew whence, and planted himself on a bit of waste land just within the parish border, armed with a shy geniality, money in his pocket with which to satisfy the parish officer in case of need, sense enough to lie low and provoke few questions, and energy enough to begin at daybreak building himself a shack and have smoke curling from its chimney before sundown, so surviving the traditional test in these parts of a newcomer’s title to toleration and peaceful settlement. Till now he had watched and listened and taken his drink in silence.

‘Lost summat, Nat Broome?’ asked Gipsy Noke.

There was a brightness in the man’s eyes and a smile in his tone that meant mischief, but Broome was already too far gone in fury to notice anything amiss.

‘My purse of money,’ he stammered. ‘I had ut safe in this pocket here, and now tis garn.’ His mouth filled with oaths, and they trickled out in a muddy stream. ‘Five silver shillens there was, as I’m a martal man.’

‘Ah,’ said Gipsy Noke, with a sly look at the rest of the company, ‘I’ll ’low there be a tidy lot of rogues will goo see a fellow creatur hanged.’ The folk of Marden Fee were for ever ‘allowing’ this or that; but their ‘I’ll ’low’ heralded no mere concession or admission, but something between a strong opinion and a confident conjecture. Gipsy, with his talent for popularity, had been quick to see the wisdom of acquiring the local turns of speech. ‘How it do strike me, Nat, is this way,’ he continued, answering Broome’s angry stare. ‘You was watchen un kick and choke, and tellen yourself what a fine lesson twas for them others as seen ut. This’ll larn un, says you, to steal harses. Ha, ha, he daun’t like that sart of caper, I’ll ’low, you says. And these good folks’ll think twice afore they fall into scaddle ways same as him, says you.’ Gipsy Noke spat on the floor and gazed at his work pensively. ‘Seems to me some furrin file musta thought twice about picken your poke, farmer. And liked the jape so well that he took and played ut.’

‘Five silver shillens,’ cried Broome. ‘Five silver shillens, neighbours! If I had un here,’ he went on, larding his speech with bitches and bastards, ‘if I had un here that took that purse of mine, I’d spile his face for un . . .’ Having briefly outlined his plan of vengeance, he began to remember, or think he remembered, that someone had jostled him at the very moment when they took the cart away and left the horse-thief hanging. ‘A liddle dirty foxy fellow there was at side of me, and when I turned round there worn’t a shim of him to see, and I thought no more on ut. A little foxy son of a . . .’

‘Lubin were a good lad,’ said Coachy Timms, in a voice that rang shrill and resonant as a bugle and gathered volume with every word. He paused. There was silence. ‘Lubin,’ he repeated mildly, ‘were a good lad and a lad of sperrit. He was fond of his paddock, and fond of his dam, and took his nurridgement hearty. To see them together, him and Brown Bess, twas a sight to see. Five hands you may say, and her tall as a house and broad in the belly as a schooner. He’d trot by her side round the madda as nice and neat as you could wish, keepen his head turned t’ards her, but with a big shy brown eyeball well cocked and open to t’other side and not missen much as went on. Yes, a lad of sperrit, and us had many a talk together after that first talk.’

Coachy paused to lift the pot to his lips, and the landlord took this chance of remarking that Jim Dander was on the road again, as he had heard, and there, said he, was a man for you that better deserved hanging than any mere horse-thief, for twas a pity if honest folk must travel armed at all points like a soldier, on pain of being held up and robbed and left in a ditch by the roadside. ‘A very notable scoundrel indeed,’ concluded the landlord, shaking his grave head. ‘Tis not ten days since he murdered the turnpike-keeper down Ludworth way, and passed himself off as the corpse, as you might put it, when the gentry came driving by.’

‘Ay,’ said Mykelborne.

‘Ay,’ echoed Shellett.

‘True enough,’ said Gipsy Noke.

‘I’d like to see him tumblen me into a ditch,’ cried Broome, with a braggart air.

‘So would I, Nat,’ said Gipsy Noke.

‘So would ee what?’ demanded Broome.

‘Like to see Jim Dander tumblen you into a ditch,’ said Gipsy Noke. ‘Twould be a rare sight.’

‘Come, neighbours, no belvering in my parlour.’ said Mr Bailey, laying a swift hand on Broome’s arm. ‘There’s the street outside, Nat Broome, for those that can’t take a handful of chaff without spitting dirt.’

The silence that followed was a silence big with dramatic possibilities. It was broken by the voice of Coachy Timms blandly resuming his tale. ‘He’d a mind of his own, that liddle colt, and a was a dentical feeder. But I soon had him in trim shape, and no ill feelen atwixt us.’

‘What, going, Nat!’ said Mr Bailey pleasantly. ‘Good night to you, I’m sure.’

The door shut with a slam.

‘And that’s why I say,’ said Coachy Timms, ‘that there be parsons and parsons, just as there be harses and harses. And the same hand made ’em all didn’t a? And he’s his good days and his bad days same as any other journeyman. A quick worker too, as I telled Parson Croup. Seven days is no great time for to make a warld in. I hope, says Parson, you’re of the true faith, Coachy. Squire’s a good squire, says he, but dauntee be led into papistry, friend. There’s a tidy shatter of sin already in the Fee, says Parson. Ah, says I, but us can’t all be saints like yourself, Parson. Goddle Mighty took time and trouble over you. But us ornary folk, us be made out of the shavens left over. What kind of talk be this? cries Parson in a pet. Is this the way to speak of the Deity? And why not, Reverence? Ancient of Days they do call him, but he be not a day older than the first day, nor never will be, to my thinken. He be a lad still, and he made ut all in play, sun moon and stars a-plenty, like a five-year-old blowen soap-bubbles on washen-day. Look at ’em all a-shimper, says he. Look at ’em floaten in the sky, mother! And he clapped he’s hands and saw that ut was good, same as the Book do say.’

‘That’s queer doctrine indeed,’ said Mr Bailey. ‘That’s a doctrine I’ve never encountered in my reading. What said Parson to it?’

‘As to that, I dunnaw,’ answered Coachy. ‘For I din understand a word. But why,’ he added, complainingly, ‘why daun’t young Gipsy putt us in heart wi’ a song or two?’

Everyone welcomed the suggestion; and Noke, stepping forward, fixed his gaze on the floor, and coughed once or twice, and stroked his throat nervously.

‘Well, what shall ut be, neighbours?’

‘All in a Misty Morning,’ suggested Mr Bailey. ‘That’s a tuneful piece.’

‘Nay,’ said Tom Shellett,’ give us Two Bumpkins Loved a Lass. That be tarrible lacherous,’ he added, with solemn joy.

‘The one I do know best,’ said Noke, bashfully, ‘be Tibb of Tottingham.’ But haply you’ve had he too often, neighbours?’

They all applauded his choice, and the singer, as if communing with himself, tried over his tune in a kind of whisper. Then after a few tentative false starts, he found the right pitch and began, in a full baritone:

The applause was hearty. The singer’s face became creased with smiles. They cried him encore, and he stood with his eyes on the ceiling, waiting for the din to subside. Some ten yards below the soles of his boots lay the bones of Koor and Hasta and Nigh, untouched since their slaying; and in the veins of every man of this company, of this village, and of this country, ran the blood of Koor. From the great Pitt to the oafish Roger Peakod, they all had this ancestor in common.

‘Let’s have another,’ cried Coachy. ‘Give it rein, my coney.’

‘There be fi’ more varses,’ said Gipsy Noke, half diffident, half triumphant.

‘Let’s have ’em,’ said they all.

The singer opened and shut his mouth without sound, as though to make sure that his jaws were in working order. Then he opened it again: this time to sing:

But at that moment there came a sharp and peremptory tapping on the tavern door, and everybody turned in his seat to stare.

CHAPTER 2 IN WHICH FATHER GANDY BECOMES BROTHER RAPHE

In the dining-room at Maiden Holt, Jack Marden, the young lord of the Fee, sat alone at dessert. In accordance with his fancy, all traces of the evening meal had been cleared from the table, whose dark shining surface was patterned, now, only by silver bowls of fruit, a dish of nuts, coloured decanters, wine glasses, and certain pieces of fragile china acquired in an earlier century by his great-grandfather. A man not yet thirty, he sat surrounded by the small and faded remains of a substantial though never great inheritance. Beyond his private demesne was the Fee itself, comprising a numerous tenantry; commons in which he held certain manorial rights; and farmlands, of which one George Hayward was an arrogant and none too efficient bailey. Within that circle, and the dearer to his heart, was Maiden Holt Park, with its hundred or more head of red deer, its carp pond, its dovecote, its dells and spinneys. And within that again was a circle of tall pines surrounding house and garden. The room he sat in was long and low-ceiled: a room friendly and full of an enduring past. Its windows were close-shuttered and curtained in heavy damask. The fire was lively in its large hearth. The seven candles of the candelabra poured pools of light on the table as upon a dark lake, and set small shadows moving on the walls; and, sometimes, one or another of them would sputter and send a thin curl of smoke rising from a lank wick. The young man sat lost in a trance of thoughtfulness, neither eating nor drinking. His gaze, but not his thought, was held by the circle of candlelight that edged with a ring as of fire the brim of his glass.

In this mood he looks so boyish that we find it hard to believe what in fact we know: that so much as five years earlier, when in his first twenties, he had been accounted a likely source of danger to the state, and so had received, from his father’s old acquaintance, Mr Root, the Glatting magistrate, a demand that all the arms at Maiden Holt should at once be given up. With the official order came a very civil letter, a word in season, to the effect that my Lord Vernon, with two ninety-gun ships, was gone to the Downs. ‘I am sure Mr Marden needs no reminding,’ added Mr Root, being evidently sure of no such thing, ‘that as well his loyalty to King George, as the safety of his own person, requires that he act in these troubled times with all candour and discretion.’ With the Pretender occupying Carlisle, and panic hurrying hotfoot on its devious ways, Mr Root did no more than his duty, and did it, we must allow, with a certain grace. For his pains he became the temporary guardian of three bullet guns, two carabines, four shot guns, and a dozen pairs of plain screw-barrelled pistols: the which he promised to restore to their owner with a thousand times the satisfaction he had had in receiving them. The folk of Marden Fee were more nervous than Mr Root, and in the same degree less polite. Raphe Gandy, the resident priest of Maiden Holt, was hissed down the High Street and arrived home spattered with Protestant mud; and Paul Dewdney, as innocent of Jacobitism as any of them, had his head broken to the glory of King George. But, the danger past, the people repented, and good feeling between themselves and the Maiden Holt household was, by the measure of that repentance, not only restored but increased. The persuasion gained ground that the Jacobites had lost their last throw, and that papists, in consequence, could henceforward be regarded as no worse than queer. If these humble politicians could have read the mind of their young squire they would have found their new trust in him more than justified.

Jack Marden was a Catholic by force of tradition and habit, and he remained so, against his worldly interest, because he was too loyal to old memories, too stubbornly independent, to desert an unpopular cause, or (which is nearer the truth of his case) repudiate an unpopular label, no matter how little it meant to him. He had inherited his religion with the family plate and he was proud of it, as of all his possessions; but he was an Englishman first, a landed squire, with a deep dumb feeling for his home horizons, a sense of immediate duties, and a feudal bond with his servants and tenants, whom he had no wish to leave, and to neglect, in the pursuit of romantic foolishness. And, since a man’s heart will take sides with or without the authority of his considered judgement, he in fact resented Jacobitism and all its works. He was for leaving well alone, in the comfortable expectation of its becoming better—as apparently was its habit, for this new German king stood higher in general favour than ever his predecessor had done. The house of Stuart meant as much to Jack Marden, and as little, as the sentimental songs of one’s boyhood; as a child he had beglamoured it with heroic daydreams, but, so soon as he began to look on the world with a man’s eyes, whatever there was of poetry in him took another turn. The reign of God’s anointed had ended before his birth: it was a remote thing, a fairy tale, which he regarded with a rather perfunctory reverence that concealed from others, but not always from himself, a certain impatience of the political fervour that the royal name still had power to inspire in many breasts. Nor had the pervasive influence of Father Gandy, his priest and tutor and friend, tended to make an active Jacobite of him: rather it may be that it was the priest himself who, against all natural expectation, had guided him insensibly into the path of acquiescence. For Father Gandy, though neither renegade nor heretic, and though prompt in the performance of his priestly duties, cared more, it would seem, for religion than for the church that embodied it. He was lazy, virtuous, and wise; he was comfort-loving, and saintly; and if there are contradictions here, it is life that made the ravel, not we who but observe, that must resolve them.

If Jack Marden, staring at the bright brim of his wine glass, recalled for a brief instant the events and hazards of ’forty-five, it was Paul Dewdney that had prompted the recall: his manservant Paul Dewdney, who at this moment lay upstairs a-dying. Thinking of him, Squire Marden felt as he looked—a boy, and forlorn. Forlorn, and none the less so when the anger of feeling himself powerless to help the man made his mouth move and his nostrils dilate. At such times his eyes blazed, and he wanted to do murder upon the phantom that was destroying Paul. There was now but small hope of the fellow’s recovery. The little that human wit could devise had been done: the Glatting apothecary was with him now, and a great man from the remote royal village of Kensington in Middlesex had but recently left the house. Father Gandy, whose wine stood untasted, whose napkin lay in the chair where he had let it fall but five minutes ago, was at the bedside. Death is arrogant and graceless, a disturber of the peace. He affronts our dignity, interrupts us at supper, ignores our arguments, insults us with his peremptory airs. Nor does he disdain to take us at a disadvantage. He is without scruple or discrimination, and therefore is no gentleman. Marden was indignant with such manners and sore at heart; for he was losing something more than a servant and something more than a friend: one who had companioned him in boyhood, and in spite of their different stations had played the elder brother to him, teaching him to ride and fight and fish and shoot, and how to snare and skin a rabbit, and the nice points in cockfighting. That active comradeship was past these many years; but though the relationship had changed outwardly, keeping pace with the years, the old bond of affection had never been broken. Many memories pressed upward for release into his mind, where at present there was room only for anger and anxiety.

And now the door opened and the seven candle-flames bowed to their young master. The man who stood in the doorway, and paused for a moment before entering further, was dressed so soberly, and looked so shy, that you might at first glance have taken him for a servant or a poor relation but that there was something in his eyes betokening authority as well as the habitual kindness that is the visible part of wisdom. He was a smallish man with a round face, a broad nose, and a mouth slightly out of true; bald of crown, but with graying brown hair still copious about the temples; and plump of figure, as befits a man who enjoys a quiet mind and good living. As he stepped forward into the room he shifted his keen gaze from Marden, and, with head a little aslant, seemed to look down the side of his nose at the carpet, as if he saw there the answer to his questing thought. He moved to his chair and laid a hand on the back of it. It was a hand full of character, expressing something, of austerity and spiritual power, that the jolly contours of the face tended to disguise.

‘Well?’ asked Marden, breaking the silence between them.

The priest bowed his head. ‘Our friend is with God.’

‘No!’ The young man had expected this event, but now he must needs deny it. He rose, shading his eyes from the sight of his companion, and moved slowly towards the hearth, where there was warmth, fire, a beacon still unquenched. But in an instant he turned angrily. ‘Why didn’t you call me, sir? It is a day since I saw him.’

‘It was not his wish,’ said the priest. He smiled: not amusedly, but as one smiles in the presence of troubling beauty. ‘Nor did we know he was so near his end. He received the sacrament and died at peace. He said he was sorry to have caused such a parcel of commotion; he thanked us for our pains; and he wished, he said, that it might not prove a trouble to Master Jack.’

Jack Marden looked; then looked away. ‘Not for ten years has he called me that.’

Staring again into the red caverns and hills of the fire, he was away with the memories that now came crowding to him. He was nine years old, the only child of a fond mother. Fond, but tempering her fondness with a certain rough-and-tumble discipline. She corrected his manners when they were at fault; she expected obedience to her few commands, and got it without having recourse to his father, an expedient that would have been a betrayal of their comradeship, a breach of the deep and happy and unsentimental understanding between them; she demanded of him—in a ceremonious age—less ceremony in his commerce with herself than would have been considered the due of an elder sister; she was dogmatic, quick-tempered, generous, shrewd, loving; pretending to no more patience and forbearance than she possessed, and capable of playing with a small boy as with an equal. In all this she was but herself, spontaneous and unreflecting; for though she had many moments of thoughtfulness and self-questioning, and in secret pondered much upon her son’s unknown destiny, the last thing she would have dreamt of giving conscious attention to was her personal relation with him: that she took for granted, happily and easily, never doubting of success, as young lovers, being sure of each other, take their first kiss. The result was all that a mother could wish. By an instinct of genius that knew no art, nor needed any, she made herself the seal upon his multifarious happiness, his inexhaustible zest in the newness and colour and infinite humorous surprises of mortal life; so that however far he wandered in the rage of his infant curiosity, whatever fun he encountered or games invented or new playmates found, it was always to his mother that he brought back the tale of his day’s work, and the prospect of so sharing his experiences provided a delicate undertone in all he did and suffered. She was sometimes hasty in rebuke, but her anger came and went in swift flashes, fire from the flint of kindness: her very violence was friendly, presupposing intimacy and love; for with an offending stranger, even with a child if she could not love it, she would have been cool, dignified, careful to hide herself. From Jack she hid nothing, except her opinion (which we shall never know) of his father: a man much her senior who spent the greater part of his time in London, consorting with fashionable rakes and loud-laughing women, and industriously wasting his inheritance at cards and cockfights and other diversions of the town. With it all he was curiously reserved—‘the proudest gull that ever invited fleecing,’ they said who had best reason to know. A big morose man, with a vast face pitted with the small pox, and eyes in which one might perhaps have read that he was never at peace with himself, for nine days out of ten he would take no notice of his son, and on the tenth, unbending and becoming aggressively playful, would wax coarsely sarcastic, or sulkily self-pitying, at receiving a timid response. ‘Damnation, you’re my son, aint you? Twas I that gat him, did I not, madam?’ To which his wife would answer, with cold patience: ‘You are pleased to amuse yourself, Mr Marden.’ To the little boy, who made nothing of this that he could have put into words, his father was an impressive though unlovable personage when dressed in the grand clothes that were so seldom paid for; but seen in bed, wigless and unshaven, as Jack once or twice saw him, he was a grotesque and almost terrifying spectacle, from which a child not yet ten was glad to run away to the shelter of his mother’s warm, gay, mocking tenderness. Those were lonely years, though Jacky could not have told you that he was lonely. He could not be always with his mother, and except when his twin cousins from Stenham came visiting, Charles and Petronella, with the stately Aunt Chevenix and the uncle who was so much like Mamma, Jacky had no one of his own age to play with, and had perforce to spend much of his time alone. And he was kept ceaselessly busy in filling the emptiness he was unaware of. When the attractiveness of the actual was for a moment exhausted, he was quick to recreate it in terms of his childish imagination. He spun endless fantasy, peopling the house, the garden, the park, with imaginary boys and girls, with strange animals, with God and the angels of God, the Persons of the Trinity and the Holy Mother, and even with ghosts and goblins, sometimes terrifying himself in the process. But in the end he found the ideal companion in Nolly, the gradual creation of whom drained all vitality from these other phantoms and brought him much solace. Nolly was a boy of his own age. He and Nolly had been born on the same day, and therefore, argued Jacky, they were twins. Nolly was responsive to his every mood: he was always there when wanted yet never obtrusive. He could play and talk with Jacky; even quarrel with him (but they always made it up before parting); and he vanished instantly at the approach of a third person. Though he was Jacky’s brother he made no claim on Mamma, to whom he was nothing, indeed, but a shyly spoken name and the hero of a few fictions confided to her, and to no other in the world, by Jacky. At some points he differed from Jacky, being fair-haired and plump, whereas Jacky was a dark slim child; and very brave in the dark, brave and strong, whereas Jacky knew himself timid. With Nolly at hand a boy could not only have fun, but in pursuit of fun could face dangers that might otherwise have daunted him. And apart from Father Gandy his tutor, he had no other male companionship, except sometimes, for a few minutes, that of Paul Dewdney the stableboy, whose mother, then a brisk woman of forty, was housekeeper to the Marden establishment. Paul was friendly, but at first shy of so small and strange a boy, whose eyes seemed so often to be exploring the invisible or to be turned in upon his own thoughts; and he was shy, too, of appearing to be—in the estimation of his elders and betters—too familiar with his young master. So it fell out that in the earliest years their intercourse was confined to a brief exchange of question and answer. By means of this occasional catechism he learned much about horses that amused and delighted him, but he did not gain a friend comparable with Nolly, the friend of his dreams.

All this was changed by Mrs Marden’s strange and sudden illness. It began with a fainting fit. She fell downstairs and struck her head on a small protruding feature of the carved newel-post and was carried unconscious to her bedroom by the Dewdneys, mother and son. Mr Marden, arriving three days later in response to a hasty summons, snarled profusely at his domestics and studiously avoided meeting the desolate gaze of his son. Jacky, denied access to his mother, wandered like a pale wraith of himself about house and garden. Life lost its savour for him: the world was empty. And when, timidly or defiantly or with angry tears, he asked whether his mother was getting better and soon to come downstairs again, he was put off with palpable evasions. He was in the way; there was trouble enough in the house without his adding to it; he was assured that a really good and sensible child would be patient and ask no questions, for there were some things, many things indeed, that he couldn’t understand. Mrs Dewdney was the author of these maxims, which betokened no unkindness of heart, nothing worse than natural stupidity augmented by an excess of anxious love for her mistress and quaking fear of her master. Father Gandy, being with the physician in constant attendance on the patient, was for the most part beyond reach of the boy’s questions, which, at other times, he fended off by a benign and compassionate silence. In his few moments with his pupil he would talk much of God and the saints, but nothing of what was nearest his heart. And in this fashion many days passed, more days than Jacky could count, and at last, searching his mind for adequate reasons that should justify what he must do, he decided that Mamma could not be going to die, since the physician called more seldom than at first, and that if she were not going to die she must be getting better, and therefore—blissful conclusion to the whole matter—she would be as glad to see him as he to see her; and no words could ever tell how great his gladness would be. In these days of famine he had become conscious of something that hitherto only his inarticulate heart had known: that his mother was his world, and the love that made him one with her the joy of joys, the very bread and wine of his existence. His decision was forced in the end by the suspicion, fruit of judicious eavesdropping, that his elders were conspiring to send him away to the house of Aunt Chevenix. There he would have Charles and Petronella to play with, and of that thought was born a swift hatred of Charles and Petronella; for it was not they he wanted, it was his mother. If he could not have his mother he would have no one. And to go away without first seeing his mother—that was the blackest fear of all, a fear that filled him with bitterness and rage, which were presently, however, by force of his great need, translated into the quiet cunning, the similitude of patience, that would best serve him. He bided his time and watched his opportunity, and at last, one bright afternoon in May, he outwitted Mrs Dewdney’s vigilance and approached the forbidden door. Feverish and trembling with the anticipation of joy, he tapped softly; then, getting no response, tapped again, less softly; and at last, unable to wait longer, seized on the door handle, turned it, and pushed the door open by a few inches. But now, a new thought having visited him bringing remorse in its train, he was careful to make no noise; and it was in low excited tones that he asked, without venturing further, ‘Are you awake, Mamma?’ There was silence, broken after an agony of waiting by the rustle of bedclothes and the sound of a smothered cough. ‘Mamma,’ he repeated, on the verge of tears, ‘are you awake?’ At that a voice answered him, a voice that at once thrilled and dismayed him, so like and unlike was it to the voice he greatly loved. Had illness done this to her? Yet what the voice said was even more dismaying: ‘Who’s that coming after me? What are you doing at my door?’ And when he answered, stepping into the room, ‘It’s only me, Mamma,’ the voice said impatiently: ‘And who is me, pray?’ He was inside the room now, or this last rebuff would perhaps have deterred him. As it was, it made him yearn more passionately than ever to find his mother. He stared with saucer eyes at the woman who sat in the great canopied bed. ‘Well, Master Impudence,’ said she, and with all its difference it was his mother’s voice she used, ‘since you’ve come I’ll tell you a secret. Come hither, dearest, nearer, nearer. There’s a black cat in the belfry tower. Diddums know that, my pretty?’ Jacky could only stare. Her smile, glittering and false, froze his blood. ‘And tell me,’ said she, leaning towards him, ‘whose little boy are you?’

He backed across the room, unable to unfix his stare, and escaped into the passage. He ran downstairs, through the house, and out of it. Paul Dewdney, seeing his hurry, looked up with a friendly grin, and the next instant the child was clinging to him, screaming. ‘Husha, Master Jacky, where’ve you catched hurt, my champion? Tell Paul where you’ve catched hurt.’ But not yet could that tale be told. Indeed it was never fully told. After a storm of terror the child managed to falter out a few significant phrases, and Paul, who had sharper wits than most of bis kind, guessed the rest. ‘Ah, my dear, you mustn’t mind her. Her’ve had a fall, dauntee see, on her poor head, poor lady. She baint herself, Master Jacky, not she. And God send she’s not long for this warld, as we all says, and who wouldn’t? Now who’s for a ride on the pony, Master Jacky? Pony’s been asken after you, he has. Where’s that Master Jacky away to, says Pony . . .’

And so, being come full circle, young Squire Marden’s thoughts are back at Paul Dewdney, who now lies dead upstairs.

He had been absent in mind for but a moment, and now with a gesture he tried to shake off his load. ‘Well, we must all come to it.’ He turned again towards the priest, but would not meet his eyes. ‘He was a faithful fellow. God rest him.’

‘Amen,’ said Father Gandy. When he spoke again, after a long silence, it was in a quietly conversational tone. ‘Touching that other matter, my dear sir, I wish you may not distress yourself unduly about it. My lord Endham must wait for his money, as many a better man has done before him. You were at fault, I grant you, in hazarding a sum so far beyond your immediate reach; and still more at fault in nursing the pride that plunged you into that extravagance. But . . .’

‘He thought me a bumpkin,’ interrupted the young man. ‘He thought me a country cousin who for very prudery dared not risk a high stake.’

‘The devil himself,’ said Father Gandy, ‘feigns to think us timid when we resist him. It is his chief weapon against young men of spirit. But listen, my friend. I have formed a resolution. Tonight you have lost a servant, and needs must think of finding another.’

‘True.’ But deuced early, thought he, to be talking of that.

‘What were Paul’s duties?’

‘You know them as well as I,’ answered Marden, a trifle stiffly. ‘Multifarious. Paul does . . . Paul did everything except what his mother did.’

‘What he did I can do,’ said Father Gandy. ‘No, listen. This is a thought I have long had maturing. I came to this household twenty years ago, as tutor to yourself and chaplain to the family. But now you need no tutor, and could make shift, I dare wager, without a chaplain. It is often in my mind that I am a lazy fellow, and you have done me the honour to confess that you are not a man of fortune.’

‘Enough of that,’ said Marden, almost roughly. ‘I shall find it hard to forgive you, Father Raphe, if you abuse my confidence so far as to suppose that I could let you leave me . . .’

‘That was not my thought, and is not,’ said Father Gandy, with a half-bantering smile. ‘What I venture to propose is that I should ease my conscience at the expense of your comfort. Give me leave to be, in future, not a priest but a lay brother. Nay, I am serious, Jack. Call it a whim if you like, but it’s something more. It is my wish to wear the habit of humility, and scrub floors to the glory of God.’

‘Reverend sir,’ cried Marden in a tone of decision, ‘I cannot entertain so improper a notion . . .’

‘Say rather: Brother Raphe,’ said Raphe Gandy. ‘For I am resolved to have my way.’

CHAPTER 3 TWO TRAVELLERS: AND OF THE PEBBLE THEY FLUNG INTO THE POOL

The knocking on the tavern door startled the company. They sat staring with mouths agape, and something like alarm stirred among them when the knock was not immediately followed by an entry. Who could it be so timid as to await permission, or so arrogant as to demand ceremonious ushering-in? A woman? No, the rapping was peremptory, the work of no woman. A stranger certainly, for not even Coachy Timms himself could remember the last time a visitor had stood waiting to be admitted. This was an event, and they were alert with curiosity, all but Gipsy Noke, who thought ruefully of his unfinished song. He alone was angry with the stranger, telling himself that he cared not who it might be. This silence, emphasised by the ticking clock, quickened by the vibration of expectancy, endured for perhaps ten seconds, or less, and then the rapping was repeated, the potman went shuffling across the sanded floor, and at the same moment the door was flung open from the outside and a stranger came striding in. He was a lean swaggering fellow, muffled in a handsome cloak and wearing a three-cornered beaver-hat. His most conspicuous feature was a large Roman nose, surmounted by heavy eyebrows that made a continuous arch from under which two deep-set eyes flashed scornfully.

It pleased this gentleman to fly into a towering rage.

‘God blind ye,’ cried he. ‘Why in thunder do you keep me standing at your door! Speak, fellow!’ he shouted at the trembling potman. ‘Is this a company of mutes?’

The landlord hurried forward, and bowed obsequiously. ‘Good evening, sir. Was your worship requiring anything?’

‘My worship,’ said the stranger bitterly, ‘is requiring a meal, a roof, and a bed, if such things are to be had in this benighted place.’

A shrill but not unmusical noise interrupted this dialogue. Coachy Timms was enjoying a joke.

‘Benighted, sir, now that’s a very true word, sir. Because why, says you. Because the sun be garn down, says I. Now that be the sooth of it in these parts. When sun goo down, then tis night-time. Tis haply otherways where you come from, sir?’

The stranger, affecting not to hear these remarks, addressed himself to Bailey. ‘Are you the landlord here, my good man?’

‘At your service, sir.’

‘Then be good enough to see to the horses. On one of them you’ll find a lady. To be plain with you, my sister. Do you hear, landlord?’

‘Will the lady be taking a meal, sir, same as yourself?’

‘To be sure she will. Do you expect her to take her supper from a nosebag with the horses?’

This sally so greatly amused its author as to put him at once into a better humour. ‘Get along, old blockhead,’ he said gaily, slapping the landlord on the back, ‘persuade your good woman to prepare a meal for us, the best she can muster. And I will go bring the lady in.’ The better to display his magnificence, he removed his hat, revealing a stylish wig tied at the nape with a black ribbon.

Mr Bailey, being a somewhat timid man with an excessive respect for the gentry, was slightly confused by the variety of his instructions, and stood like a dog at a fair, not knowing which way to run: whether to set about stabling the horses or to rouse his wife from her kitchen and set her busying herself in the preparation of a meal. He was a man of sensibility, reflective by nature, distrustful of impulse. Having allowed this stranger to begin teaching him his duty as host, he seemed as unable to disregard his tutor’s orders as to execute them. But, the stranger offering no further remarks, but swaggering out into the road, the landlord was left with no alternative but to collect his own wits and obey their prompting. He followed his imperious guest, saw the lady assisted to the ground, and taking the two horses by their bridles led them round the house to the stables, which were approached from the other side. In his brief absence the potman had warned Mrs Bailey of what was toward, and Bailey returned to find that the gentleman and his sister had been conducted by that resourceful woman to the private parlour, where, by the intervention of a stout oak door, their ears would be protected from the conversation of low persons. No sooner, however, had Mr Bailey resumed his seat by the fire, with perhaps some hope of hearing what remained of the unfinished song, than that same oak door was opened, and a voice summoned him.

‘Ask the company to drink our health, my good man,’ commanded the stranger.

Mr Bailey, protesting that his honour was too kind, received sundry silver coins and came back into the public room with a respectful smile still lingering about his lips. ‘A pleasant enough gentleman,’ he remarked, ‘if you know how to manage him. And what if he does talk like a playactor—there’s room for all sorts in the world, surely? When first he came he was all for damning us and swearing and blaspheming, but when he saw I wasn’t a man to be treated so, did ye mark the change in him, neighbours? It comes of knowing how to handle folk. I claim no credit for it.

Why, we’re as thick as thieves now, he and I. We might have been born brothers.’

‘Thieves,’ said Coachy Timms, ‘is a good word and a true. But if you was yarnder gennelman’s brother, Mus Bailey, I’d as lief be pullen your nose as drinken good ale in your parlour. And talken of saucy coxcombs,’ went on Coachy, raising his voice a little, ‘talken of fine gennelmen with more money than manners, and more manners than arnesty, and more arnesty than looks, God help ’em; and talken of a gimsy jackass as comes asken beds of arnest folk when what he do need is a halter, twould do me good, neighbours, and twould do my heart good, and twould give my old eyes a rare cantle of joy, to have such in the shafts before me, harnessed tight and true, and drive him on his hands and knees down Glatting road in flood.’

‘He sartain sure do make a countable gurt hoe about naun,’ said Mykelborne. ‘And now we’ll haply have the dregs of our song, Gipsy. Always so be there’s no bawdry to it, for tis too late an hour for bawdry.’

‘Now why,’ asked Tom Shellett, with that air of profound sagacity which a few hours steady drinking will induce even in the least philosophical of us, ‘now why do ee say that, Mus Mykelborne? What matter do time o’ day make? A pot o’ beer be a pot o’ beer, and good drinken, whether tis breakfast or supper or no time at all. Likewise a plate o’ beef be a plate o’ beef, or I’m much bewildered.’

‘Tis this way, Tahm,’ began Mykelborne——

‘A fairer plan yet,’ said Coachy Timms, ‘a fairer plan yet ud be to give Lubin the driven of un. Ay, set my Lubin in the driver’s seat, with reins holden and whip to hand, and liddle Lard Lollop in the shafts. Ah, he were a gennelman, were Lubin. It’s him desarved a dilly-down bed if anyone did. And pretty a’d have looked,’ added Coachy, peering into the bottom of his mug, ‘pretty a’d have looked lyen under a silk healing.’

‘Ah,’ put in Mr Bailey, ‘there was a gentleman in London, a writing gentleman, that had just such another fancy as that. By and by I shall recall his name for you. Horses are human cattle and fit to teach men their manners. That was his idea.’

‘And that’s the Lard’s gospel,’ said Coachy. ‘Now Gipsy, my lad, where’s that song o’ yourn?’

‘I have it!’ cried Mr Bailey, excited and complacent. ‘Swift was his name. Swift.’

‘That it worn’t,’ said Coachy indignantly. ‘Naun of the kind. Swift by nature, if you like, my coney; but Lubin was his name, as I’ve telled ee, and who should know better?’

‘The way of it be this, Tahm Shellett,’ said Mykelborne, with owlish stare and inebriate unction, ‘there be a time for everything, likewise a due season, as the Book tells. There be a time for getten up of a marnen, and a time for gwain to bed. There be a time for laughen and a time for weepen. There be a time for swillen and swearen and suchlike lewdness, and a time for sitten quiet and godly by your own fireside. There be a time to be born and a time to be bedded. Mark that, Tahm Shellett. Mark that, Coachy Timms. And do you mark that too, Mus Bailey. Time and time and a dividen of time: twas Postle Paul said that, Tahm Shellett, and you wouldn’t set yourself up to know better than Postle Paul, a common sinful cowherd as we all know you to be. If Postle Paul says keep your breeches on, on you maun keep ’em, and drink a liddle wine for your stomach-ache same as Timothy, and that’s a holy text. But if Postle Paul says take ’em off, Tahm Shellett, if Postle Paul says take off they breeches and gird up thy loins with the shield of righteousness and the breastplate of fortication, then off you may take ’em, Tahm Shellett, and goo to ut like a man, and be damned to ee. And I should like to meet the man,’ said Mykelborne, rising from his seat in indignation and resuming it with some abruptness, ‘I should like to meet the man as would give me the lie to that, which is good gospel and naun better. Be he great or be he small, be he rich or be he poor, be he sickness and health till death us do part, I should like to meet un.’

‘A good knowledgeable piece of talk!’ said Coachy Timms, with surprising benevolence. ‘You’ve a bly of your father about you, Dick Mykelborne. As to time, here be another puzzle that do tarrify me. What be time? What be ut, I say?’

‘Ah,’ murmured Mykelborne, giving compliment for compliment, ‘now there be a clever dubersome question for you, Tahm Shellett.’

‘Ah,’ said Tom Shellett, stroking his stringy neck.

‘Touching that matter,’ said Mr Bailey, ‘I remember that when I was a younger man I wrote a copy of verses about Time. If you’ll bear with me——’

Enjoying his triumph, Coachy Timms glowed upon the company and repeated his mot: ‘What be time?’

‘That’s a tarrible true word,’ said Mykelborne, slowly nodding his head.

‘You can’t eat un,’ continued Coachy. ‘You can’t drink un. You can’t get un wi’ child. What do us folks want with un? Now a harse, there’s sense in a harse. You can ride a harse, and drive a harse, and call cousins with un. But time, tis nuther here nor there, tis nuther my ankle nor my elbow. It daun’t keep a man warm of nights. It daun’t feed him or clothe him. It do naught but turn his beard white and make his teeth fall out and sharten his wind and send him all doddlish into the dark ditch to make an end of all. He’s no manner of good to poor folks, this Time. Tis all a boffle and a blunder and we were best rid of him, neighbours.’

‘Tarrible true,’ repeated Mykelborne. ‘And why daun’t Government do something, the pack of fine rascals?’

‘But no,’ said Coachy firmly, ‘he goo on and on, whether us wants him or not. On and on he goo, and there’s no stoppen un. Now if I had the driving of un: Not so fast, my fine gennelman. I’d say. And I’d handle they reins to shew un who was master, and I’d pull un to a standstill if I had to lift un on his two legs like a Christian, and leave him kick his fill. But Time’s no harse, more’s the pity. Time’s no harse. He be water that slip through the fingers, he be wind that goo by. But he’s with us to the last, and if you scape him, tis as good as sayen you’re dead and gone. He daun’t visit the tomb, nor be halted there; in that quiet place there be never blink nor breath of un, and the patter of’s feet runnen past do make no hurry nor commotion to a man lyen at rest, for he daun’t stay at the tomb: there be naun to the purpose there: he’s away in the fields where there’s bright summer to sport with, and blossom to shake down, and leaves to trample, and lusty fine lovers to watch growen old and winded. Lie you down once and for all and he’ll leave you be. But that’s not Coachy’s way,’ said Coachy, with a serene smile. ‘I haply can’t catch him, and I haply can’t dodge him, but I can keep him company, and I can speak my bosom, and we’ll see who gets beazled first.’

Silence fell. There was no sound but the sound of drinking and loud breathing and the burble of the fire on the hearth. Coachy seemed to have fallen asleep. Mr Bailey stared at the fire. Gipsy brooded on the vanity of life, and the injustice of a fate that would cut short a smart man’s song. Roger Peakod grinned vacantly, peering from face to face. And Tom Shellett’s gaping mouth shewed Tom Shellett to be engaged in deep thought.

Mykelborne, emerging from a muttering reverie, looked up, looked round him, with the air of a man visited with a new and powerful idea.

‘But what I say is this, friends. What I do is to put a plain question. Time. That’s the question. Time. We be talken of time, bain’t us? Am I right, friends, or am I wrong?’

‘I take your meanen,’ said Tom Shellett, admiringly. ‘There’s no doubt, no manner of doubt, Mus Mykelborne, that you be a thinker. If there was more such——’

‘Very well then,’ said Mykelborne. ‘Now you may say this, and,’ he added, with generous concession, ‘you may say that. But what I say is this: what is this time, and what may it be?’

‘Ay, that’s a question right enough.’

‘Now listen to me, friends. Listen to me, one and all. Ask me this: what do Postle Paul say about time? And I answer: Just these two words. Time and tide, says Postle Paul, waits for no man. Which he spoke in parables for such as be of poor understanding, like poor Peakod here, or like yourself, Tahm Shellett. And which he meant that time and tide, you follow me so far, doon’t wait for no one, be he high, or,’—the speaker paused and let his voice sink impressively into his boots—‘be he low.’

‘Or be he low,’ echoed Shellett intelligently. ‘I see what you mean, Mus Mykelborne.’

‘Which is to say that this here Time, accorden to Postle Paul, and he’s Holy Writ as we all know, this here Time won’t wait for you, Tahm Shellett, nor yet for you, Coachy Timms, nor yet again for Mus Bailey, nor none of us, any mother’s son.’

There was no dissenting voice. The interpretation was accepted.

‘And here’s another thing about time,’ said Mykelborne, ‘and a tarrible strange thing, and a pretty thing, and a brave scholarly piece of work though I says ut. Listen here, neighbours. Mark my words and use your minds. Sometimes tis five o’claack, and sometimes tis six o’claack. Did you ever give thought to that, neighbours?’ He savoured his subtlety with a tender smile, and struggled carefully to his feet. With the instinct of the artist he knew that this was the right moment for departure. He would step from the peak of his triumph into the night, leaving his audience dazzled. He steered a jerky zig-zag course towards the door, and turned with his hand on the latch to say his parting word. ‘There be food for thought in that, my friends. Rich toothsome food. Food and drink and merry tomorrow we die, as Postle Paul said.’

With Mykelborne gone, the others began to think of moving. It had wanted but his example to set their thoughts towards home and bed. The talk seemed over, the money was spent, the genial spirit of Coachy Timms was away visiting the borderlands of sleep. One after another, but in a swift series, they rose, muttered their farewells, and filed into the street, leaving Bailey alone with his thoughts, his two strange guests, and Coachy, who sat quiet and still and with eyes closed but in an upright posture curiously at variance with, the idea of sleep. Bailey, staring down at the old man, wondered for a moment whether to rouse him and send him on his way. But a harsh voice calling for wine set him hurrying about his proper business.

‘Coming, sir. Coming.’

‘Do you keep wine in this house, landlord?’ asked our gentleman, with the air of a judge who has made up his mind to hang the prisoner no matter what he may answer.

‘Yes, your honour. Whatever your honour pleases.’

‘Indeed!’ The eyebrows went up, and the eyes widened. ‘I little thought to find it so.’

‘Tis my duty and privilege, your honour, to supply Squire Marden’s table from time to time. Now Squire has a liking for Mountain, your honour. A smooth and delicate drop of liquor is Mountain, which I would venture to recommend as well for its cheerful influence on the mind as for the refined pleasure which, quod bene notandum, it offers to the palate of a gentleman of taste.’

‘Ah,’ said the stranger, with a sneer, ‘you are a scholar, I find.’

‘No, sir. That I would not venture to claim, sir. Well, since it pleases you to insist, perhaps I am a little in that line, though my poor learning has been a-rusting these many years.

‘And a poet too, by Jupiter! Faith, you are a very paragon of innkeepers. Harkee, my dear love,’ roared the stranger, turning to his lady, ‘we’re lodged luckily tonight, with a landlord who talks Greek one minute and poetry the next. But that don’t quench our thirst, my good fellow. Your own was quenched an hour or more ago, I fancy, hey?’ With this last question the stranger flashed at him a piercing glance, as though something of consequence depended on his answer. But Bailey, intoxicated less by the little he had drunk than by the pleasure of being noticed, was not to be discouraged by sharpness. His spirit soared; he was in a mood to be discreetly merry, being conscious of the bright eyes of a young woman, and already transported to a time when he himself, with a little more luck and a spice of gallantry in his making, might have won just such a beauty for his own. He could not but notice that she was a personable and elegant creature, very genteel in her dress, very modest in her manners, and yet, he was fain to admit, with something of boldness as well as shyness in her, an enchanting mixture; for at times her eyes would sparkle saucily, her red lips pout as though to tempt a man to kissing, and at other times, when the gentleman was roaring his loudest and proudest, she would gaze with a wonder that was half fear, and let her mouth fall childishly open like any country wench. She sat very quiet, and, but for an occasional small laugh such as a less partial observer than Bailey might have called a giggle, and but for saying at intervals ‘La, sir, I wonder at you!’, she seemed content to let her eyes do her speaking, which they did very effectively, working considerable pleasant havoc in Mr Bailey’s heart.

‘I may not deny, sir,’ said he, ‘that I have quaffed somewhat in my day of the Pierian springs, but in the matter of strong waters of the more carnal sort and kind I acquit myself of immoderation. Innkeeper I am, as your honour has wittily said. Which is to say I keep an inn, and quis custodiet ipsos custodes, as the poet Juvenal inquires. And the answer to that, sir, if I may make bold to formulate it, is that tis your good self, and your like, who by your distinguished patronage of my humble house keep me alive and my inn standing.’

The stranger stared with scornful astonishment for a moment. Then he burst out laughing, and laughed his fill. ‘Devil take your pedantry,’ he said, recovering speech. ‘Go fetch me a bottle of your best sack. And see here, my good fellow. Since you’re so sociable, you may share it with us and give us the benefit of your learned conversation.’

In a very few minutes, for the innkeeper could move quickly when he chose, the bottle was broached and the conversation in full career. ‘I’ll wager you could tell a good story, had you a mind to,’ said the stranger, waxing civil. ‘Tis very evident that you’re no ordinary man. You’re a man that’s seen better fortunes, or I’m no judge of men. I’m eager to hear how you came to your present station, from what, I make no doubt, was a position of no little elegance and refinement.’ The gratified landlord was as eager to tell as his guest to hear; but the story, despite this common hunger for it, was subjected to a series of small delays. For first, it seemed, the stranger must be told something of the neighbourhood to which his travels had mysteriously brought him. Which was the nearest big town? Was Dyking Common accounted safe for a gentleman to cross on horseback? This Mr Root, the Glatting magistrate, was he a man of substance and spirit who could be relied upon to do his duty? Was Mr Marden of the Fee a brisk fellow? And, finally, since the lady was nervous of her safety, the gentleman her brother wished to be assured that she need have no anxiety while under this roof. ‘I hope you have honest servants about you, landlord, and can handle a pistol with credit. For myself, I carry no firearms. Foolish perhaps. Reckless, my friends tell me. But that’s my way,’ said he jauntily. ‘And, to be plain with you, I have something in my custody at this moment that would be worth a man’s risking his neck for.’

Mr Bailey stared his admiration. ‘Indeed, sir, but you had best be careful in such parts as these, I can answer for my own household, and this is an honest godfearing village enough, this Marden Fee. But twas no great distance from here, not above twenty mile, that yon terrifying fellow Jim Dander was at his villainous work.’

‘Say no more, my friend,’ said the stranger, ‘or you’ll send my poor sister into ten thousand vapours. Come, fill up, fill up. And then for your story.’

Mr Bailey willingly complied. ‘You hit the mark, sir,’ said he, ‘when you hint that I have seen better fortunes than could be guessed from my present circumstances. Eheu fugaces labuntur anni. Though in sooth I was my own enemy and proved so. My father was a gentleman and a man of substance. He designed to make a parson of me, but for this reason and for that I found myself at eighteen years of age acting as usher in a school for the sons of gentlemen. I was a young man of sufficient parts to entertain without impropriety the ambition of becoming headmaster; and I am persuaded that such would indeed have been my destiny had not the ardour of my temperament led me to commit an indiscretion which my respect for your lady sister forbids that I should more particularly describe. Thank you, sir. The merest sip. Your very good health, madam. Ah, the follies of youth, how small they seem in retrospect, how easily forgiven! But my father took a stern view of this misdemeanour . . .’

The gentleman was on his feet. ‘That was a shame, friend, so it was. We’re vastly obliged to you, pon my soul we are. And now shew us our beds and we’ll wish you good night. Ha ha, took a stern view, did he? As good a tale as I’ve heard these three months. It shall go the round of the coffee-houses, I promise you.’

Returning to the public parlour after shewing his guests to their rooms, Mr Bailey, sobered and a little sorry for himself, found Coachy Timms sitting where he had left him.

‘Rouse up, old gentleman.’

‘Eh?’ Coachy was awake.

‘Time to go, friend. Come, you’re in a sad way if you need telling that. Tis time to go, I say.’

Coachy nodded. ‘Tis a winter-proud night, my coney. I’d as lief stay where I be.’

‘And so you could and welcome, friend. But I’ve not a bed left spare in the house. And the wife would take it amiss if she found you here in the morning. Come, rouse up.’

Without a word Coachy got out of his chair and began moving towards the street door. He opened it and the sky entered to meet him. He stared out at the scintillation. ‘Ay, tis a rare brimmer tonight. Frost and stars a-plenty, and print-moonlight. Could a man light his innards with that glory, he’d have owdacious fine dreams to his bed.’

His foot was across the threshold when Mr Bailey called him back with a loud whisper.

‘Eh?’ said Coachy. ‘What’s afoot now?’

‘If you had a sister, Coachy Timms,’ said Mr Bailey, ‘would you call her your dear love?’

‘Eh?’ said Coachy. ‘Say ut once more, my coney.’

Mr Bailey said it again. ‘And yet,’ he added, half to himself, ‘they act like sister and brother, whatever their speech. For they have each a room to sleep in, as proper and nice as you please.’

Coachy shook his head sadly. ‘That daun’t make sense. If I’d a sister, would I call her my dear love? No, that I woon’t. And if I’d a dear love I woon’t call her sister, nuther.’ His moonlit face creased in an elfish smile. ‘I’d call her my jolly, I’d call her my dimple, I’d call her my primy lass. Doxy and deary I’d call her, and heartsease, and gillyvor, and marnen glory. I’d see her eat hearty and step pretty, and I’d see Goodman Time run past and never mark her. Where be Coachy’s fine fillikin, he’d say; for I’ll have my due of her, be she never so brisky. She be gone that way, I’d tell him, and this way, and that way. And I’d send him down one road after t’other, the sorry geck, and see him lose his labour . . . God-a-mercy, neighbour, and give you good night, what little be left of it. There baint above an admiral’s pint, by the moon’s look.’

CHAPTER 4 MR BAILEY’S MOON: HOW HE CRIED FOR IT AND GOT IT, AND HINTS OF WHAT IT WAS MADE OF

Erasmus Bailey, left alone in the sleeping house, became sharply aware of the quietness, and of the voice of his thought speaking in it. He was aware of that voice as of something hardly his own, something that came from a great distance. To be alone was luxury: he was so seldom alone. And to be alone on such a night as this, with Coachy Timms just gone, and with his mind curiously stirred by wine and talk and the flattering attentions of a real lady and a real gentleman, was an experience of rare quality. The talk had taken him back to a time when he had been a smart young usher, with golden prospects, a sparkling eye, and no little aptitude for learning. Perhaps his eye sparkled more in memory than it had ever done in fact; perhaps those vanished prospects seemed more golden now than they had seemed to the young man himself; perhaps his learning had not amounted to much. For that is the way of us: we must needs sharpen the knife of past felicity before leaning our sentimental breast upon its point. Had he not been busy at this moment in disparaging his present state at the expense of his past, he must have recognized—for alone with himself he was not witless—that the young man he contemplated neither had within reach, nor truly desired, a brilliant worldly career. At best he would have been a country schoolmaster lording it timidly among the humble villagers and paying in his turn obsequious deference to the gentry. If it pleased the young man to dress up that modest ambition in fine raiment, if he made some little parade of his knowledge and liked to fancy himself a gallant among the ladies, it was all, though he knew it not, a kind of make-believe designed to conceal the romantic excess of his heart’s true desire. At the core of him, to himself unknown, or known only in wild intuitive flashes, was a fantastic dream of some ultimate and all-sufficing self-fulfilment. Of whence comes this ache that drives, this star that seduces us; or whether, drifting each in his lonely night, we are sparks of one fire and vainly seeking a return to our source; or made in pairs, Jack and Jill, as romantic persons tell us, and sundered by birth and sent each in quest of our twin; or dupes of a blind power that has no thought beyond that of multiplication; whether we are moved, not by love as we conceive it, but by the dynamics of the blood, the chemistry of attraction, the course of the stars, a word uttered before ever the atoms began dancing; whether (in fine) the soul is a self-flattering conceit or (which is no less probable) the body a creation of mad fancy; whether sex is the beginning of desire, or its end, or its imperfect instrument, and desire the sum of human loves or only their lowest common factor; whether all meaning is not of our own idle making, and thought a disease, and speculation a vanity; whether the Eternal is the true goal of all our striving, and whether the Eternal is not Death himself in his church-going guise; whether it is, or not, a laughing matter for the gods, this riot of sublimities, and whether, if gods there be, they have, as we have, imperative need of such laughter to distract them from the heartache and beauty and busy emptiness of the universe they have created—of these questions young Erasmus Bailey took no account, for he was never called upon to entertain them. Nor did he now, a much older man, pause to conceive or to consider such unprofitable matters, though he did, as he had too often done since the event itself, pause to ask himself by what trick of the brain or the blood that young usher had been led to suppose, even for one adventurous instant, that he might find his dream, his fair remote fancy warmly embodied, in the bed of a plump placid amiable and acquiescent maidservant. That one escapade, he being what he was, had been the cause of what he now chose to regard, somewhat melodramatically (but there is comfort in that), as his downfall. He could not find it in his heart to blame the girl (of whom a leaner and more masterful version was at this moment snoring in the room overhead) unless she was to blame for having submitted too readily to his first stolen kiss and for having smiled thereafter with a certain sentimental emphasis. She had done no more than that: for the rest she had offered neither resistance nor very positive encouragement. There was no vice in her; she was quiet, simple, mildly maternal; and if you asked love of her, well why not? Nor did she prove to be a passionate woman. It was her pleasure to be kind, and Mr Bailey was a pretty enough gentleman, and clever too, they said. Fancy his liking her!—she dimpled at the thought. And that was that. But it was not all. For young Bailey had not been the first to discover Sarah’s complaisant nature, nor even the first in that household; and when the girl became big with his child, and the whole story must come out, his master resolved that the shameless pair should be made an example of. In this resolution he had the hearty support of his wife, who had never liked the hussy’s looks, and as for Bailey, said she, he was as full of his own importance as she didn’t know what. Before many hours had passed the hounds were in full cry, the Squire who loved law, the Parson who loved virtue, and the Mob who loved wholesome fun. The sinners were haled to the pillory, there to be taught good manners with such taunts and missiles as came to hand; thence they were conducted to church, where, in mid-service, and clad in penitential white, they made public confession of their sin; and finally, with every inducement to love one another, they were joined together in holy matrimony and driven out of the village. Their reception by Bailey senior, to whom after many adventures and misadventures they naively presented themselves, would perhaps have been kindlier had not rumour of their public humiliations preceded them. To get a young woman with child was in his eyes a trivial mischance. He could have forgiven that; he could even, at a pinch, have stomached the marriage of his dull prosing son to a country serving wench; but the stocks and the ceremonial confession proved too much for his pride, and disgust wrought so fiercely in him that Erasmus accounted himself lucky, as indeed he was, to find himself, within a little while, established as the landlord of a village inn as remote from his father’s house as from the scene of his own disaster. Here he had remained, and here he is now, pretending to regret his negligible loss of status in order by that pretence to hide from himself his real regret. And the endeavour succeeds, baffling both himself and us. His phantom trouble, even though we catch a glimpse of it mistily haunting him, is too vague for definition, too quickly gone, now here now away, to be caught in any category of our devising. The question that comes to him in this quiet and solitary moment is subtle and secret, like the night breath of flowers, like the finger of moonlight laid upon his hand. It is gone before his mind can begin to frame it. Can it be the moon, a mere reflector, that makes this music in us? And is it a moon, no more and no less, that this music sets us desiring?

Having made fast the doors, Mr Bailey turned his reluctant thoughts towards bed. The night was far advanced, but he felt wakeful, alert, excited; very much in the mood for adventure. Indeed in his own estimation he was already enjoying an adventure. The lady’s eyes had looked kindly upon him when she wished him good night; and throughout that all too brief interview with the strange pair he had been aware of a brightness in the wine, a flame and a delight, more disturbing than anything the grape could yield. The idea of bed repelled him. To smother this young expectancy in a blanket of sleep was not to be thought of; and to lie awake, with Sarah sleeping at his side, was still less to his fancy. He remembered, with a sort of relief, that the table at which his guests had taken their meal had been left in disorder. Here was something to do: a task outside his province indeed, but nevertheless a legitimate reason for not going to bed, and one having the additional advantage that it would save his daughter trouble in the morning, to say nothing of his wife’s temper. It was true that if Sarah woke and found him not in bed she would be perplexed and by her perplexity irritated; for she regarded the unusual, even the trivial unusual, with suspicion and dislike, herself being a person of fixed unalterable habits, a clockwork woman. But Sarah would not wake: she was safe asleep until the appointed hour for rising, and then, prompt to the minute, she would sit up, swing her plump legs out of bed, and sit for five thoughtful seconds on its edge before remarking: ‘Time to be stirring, Bailey!’ In the beginning it had been ‘Mr Bailey’, but time works wonders, and in twenty years the girl who had sirred him, and without irony, at her first surrender, had become a matron bold and casual enough to address him familiarly and think nothing of it. She had learned to take him and his odd little ways for granted; and it was his misfortune, though not perhaps a great one, that he had never learned to do the same with her. At moments he caught a glimpse of the girl she had been, and then it was in his heart to weep for her. She was a good wife, honest and faithful and stupid. But her goodness was dull and her stupidity a devastation, and it was this stupidity alone—for the years had dealt gently with her buxom person—that prevented her being handsome. With one gleam of wit, one flash of fancy, she might have been a beautiful woman: she was capable of neither. Each partner to the other was both a nuisance and a comfort; above all, a habit. Bailey was constantly trying not to wish that he had never married his wife, and often he succeeded. Tonight, as he busied himself with his self-imposed scullery duties, he made no such endeavour. A good wife, but she was not the moon, and—here lay the sting—he had never for a moment imagined that she was.

There was still some wine left in the bottle provided by the affable and generous stranger. Mr Bailey, sighing reverently in the direction of the young lady’s bedroom, fetched a clean glass, filled it, and drank to her bright eyes. Even so there remained a little wine, and this last morsel came like a benediction and a triumph, crowned his spirit with fire, and fortified him for further eccentricities of behaviour. He went back to the public parlour, rekindled the fire on the hearth, and reseated himself on the settle. He invoked his Muse, fishing from his pocket a notebook and a stub of pencil the further to encourage her. This was the night of nights; this, pre-eminently, an occasion most auspicious for the wooing of sweet Poesy. A quiet night, a lovely woman, a man fallen from greatness—what a theme! As for the form of his verses, that troubled him not at all: his fancy seldom ranged beyond the couplet, which he had so assiduously practised as a young man in emulation of his betters. And now the golden numbers came rolling into his mind:

These lines, to their author, seemed singularly delicate and expressive. He read them through several times, and they completed his intoxication. He was astonished by his facility in composition; nor paused to wonder whether in his sober morning senses he would think so highly of himself and his verses. But already he was conscious of a diminishing flow of inspiration: ‘her young Felicity’ did not altogether satisfy him. It had an extravagant air; it was over-fanciful: and, moreover, was it not rather his own felicity, were she won, that should be celebrated? This she of whom he sung was a phantom lady, nameless and formless and perhaps too fair for mortal imagining; but he could not deny that she looked at him now with the eyes, and spoke with the alluring lips, of one in whose company he had recently drunk wine. Even Mrs Lavender was forgotten: pretty young Mrs Lavender for whom he cherished a discreet tenderness, which was rekindled every time he received string or soap or candles across the counter of her husband’s little shop in the High Street. The fair stranger reigned unchallenged in his thoughts. In rapt if somewhat muddled contemplation of his work, and with numerous alternative rhymes to ‘he’ ringing in his mind, he fell asleep where he sat. At first he was vaguely aware of being asleep, and a drowsy satisfaction at not being in bed, at being adventurously carousing with the Muses in the small hours of the morning, like the gallant fellow he was, pursued him across the borderland and lent its colour to the crowding images of dream. But presently he quite lost sight of the waking world; his dreams came closer, surrounding him, shutting him in; he went on a long and strange voyage and gathered the fruits of eternal orchards. And then it seemed as though he were back again in his inn parlour, and watching through half-closed eyes a man in a dark cloak and a three-cornered hat tiptoeing towards the street door. He saw this apparition stop, stare in his direction, and remain for a moment very rigid, as though taking stock of him; then turn with careful step, and, proceeding on his way, draw the bolt of the door, lift the latch, and step into the moonlight. A very vivid dream, thought Mr Bailey; for he seemed positively to feel the cold air stealing in upon him from the street. But the door closed, and he sank again into deep slumber, to be roused presently by a sharp metallic clatter from outside. I know that sound, said he, with deep satisfaction: that’s horses, that is. Not one horse, but two horses. Wedded by Folly to a prior Claim. He had some notion of getting out of his seat to investigate this matter; he remembered his dream and wondered if aught was amiss. But now the clatter of hooves was a diminishing music; it vanished, beautifully, into an enchanted distance, into a past epoch, a golden time, a land misty with promise of love and idleness and a school of one’s own and a book of verses bound in morocco with the name of Erasmus Bailey Esquire on the title-page. ‘Pretty! Very pretty!’ he said aloud. ‘Clacketty clacketty clacketty clacketty . . . and away we go.’ The sound of his own voice, the movement of his own tongue, wakened him fully. He rubbed his eyes and his head; he yawned prodigiously, shivered a little, and got up. Vaguely disturbed in mind, and with some idea of putting everything right, he made his way to the door, opened it, and looked out. No one there. He nodded sagaciously at the empty street, as if to say ‘What did I tell you?’ He wagged an admonitory forefinger at himself. ‘That noise, Erasmus,’ said he, ‘was my fine gentleman taking his leave without paying his reckoning. God save the King, and confusion to traitors!’ The night air refreshed him; he stood for some few minutes quietly relishing its sharp assault.

When at last he turned back into the room he found he was not alone in it. After the brightness of the sky the firelit room was dim, but it seemed to Mr Bailey that someone, a woman, had tried to slip past him through the doorway. He shut the door with decision, and shot the bolt. There were to be no more fugitives from his tavern tonight. Then he faced her, the woman of his dreams. For in this place of shadows, this moment of magic, she was that, though earlier she had been no more than a hint of it. Bright eyes, a heaving bosom, black hair in heavenly disarray, and the whole effect that of a frightened lovely proud defiant daughter of moonlight—here was romance for you. She stood clutching her silk gown about her breasts: whether it was her only garment Mr Bailey dared not surmise (dared not but did, and spared no time to rebuke himself for the liberty of his thoughts). The cup of his night, this strange exhilarating night, was filled to the brim. He stood and stared, tasting its wonder, waiting for the woman to speak but not caring whether she spoke or not.

‘Oh it’s you, landlord! I declare you quite terrified me.’

‘Nay, madam,’ he stammered, ‘I had rather suffer hanging than cause you a moment’s disquiet.’

He came nearer. The habit of servility being discarded, tossed aside, shrivelled up in the romantic fire of this moment, his attitude was gallant, his eyes discreetly admiring. This was his hour, and he was equal to it. This, this was his hour and he asked no more than to be saved from an anticlimax.

At his movement she shrank back a pace and fell into a pretty confusion. ‘To have exposed myself thus . . . as it were in my very shift!’

‘Madam,’ said he, with a deprecating gesture, ‘my profound respect, my sincere devotion, my . . . my sense of the incomparable privilege . . . these alone were sufficient to clothe you, had you nothing else.’

She tittered. ‘La, sir! What fine language you have, to be sure!’

It was not the answer he would have chosen for her. Nor would he have wished her to titter. But in his present exalted mood he was incorrigible. As he had made of her the impossible fulfilment of his dream, so he would turn her dross into gold, her speech and her titters into the very music of love. His alchemy was swift: and unconscious and irresistible.

‘You are in . . . in trouble, madam?’

She wrung her hands. Even at risk of further exposure she wrung her hands, and the gesture was infinitely alluring. ‘Alas, yes . . . Tell me, landlord, did you hear anything? I was awakened by a noise and I thought . . .’ Her voice died away; her hand fluttered towards him; like a bird, he thought, like a bird seeking its nest.

He took the hand and bowed over it. ‘Was it the noise of horses you heard?’ he asked, with a hint of tenderness tinging his respect.

He thought she nodded, but she did not answer his question. ‘Have you seen aught of my brother?’ she asked. ‘How dark it grows here,’ she added, drawing away from him. ‘It would better become me to go back to my room than stand here conversing so freely with a stranger.’

She spoke to be contradicted, as even Mr Bailey was quick enough to see. He was enchanted by her coquetry. This was the game as it should be played; and he was not, he vowed, the man to disappoint her. He hastened to reassure her and to plead that she might stay a while yet. ‘It would desolate me to be denied the honour of learning the nature of your anxiety and of assisting you with such poor counsel as I am competent to offer.’ Involuntarily he began revolving in his mind a couplet upon this theme, for the habit of years is strong; but, shaking free of the untimely temptation, he remarked: ‘As for the darkness of the room, I will see to it.’ He strode—and ‘strode’ is accurate, for he was already a new man—to the hearth, thrust a taper into the flame of a blazing faggot, and with the taper lighted a tall candle. For this service he was richly rewarded. In shadow she had been a warm exciting mystery: in candlelight she was visibly and dangerously a woman. With a delicious shiver—movement careless enough to seem the symbol of an understanding between them, yet queenly enough to keep his thoughts still at an admiring distance—she came towards the hearth and stationed herself within reach of its warmth.

‘I confess,’ she said, ‘that I am anxious. It is my brother.’

‘Whom I saw,’ remarked Mr Bailey, with a rallying air, ‘making off with your horses not many minutes ago.’

‘You saw him!’ She seemed incredulous, indignant.

‘Your pardon, madam. The rebuke is just. That I saw him with the horses cannot be maintained. But I saw him pass through this room and go out by that door. A while afterwards I heard horses trotting away. Not one horse, but more than one; and, as I conjecture, two. I think it no very bold fancy to connect the one event with the other: id est, the gentleman with the horses.’

The lady cast a mournful look at him. ‘Then tis as I feared.’ She covered her face with her hands and turned away, a picture of desolation. But she quickly regained something of her composure, shewing her face once more, and seeming to shake off despair with an impatient toss of the head and to confront the future bravely. Mr Bailey found himself close at her side, ready, not to say eager, to support her in his embrace should she shew signs of fainting or faltering or giving any other suitable feminine expression to her emotions. His attitude struck a nice balance between ardour and respect, compassion and self-approval. It was as if he said: ‘Here is my shoulder. I do not ask you to lean upon it, but here it is, and very ready to be made use of. My faithful heart beats only for you. My not unmanly bosom asks nothing better than that your head, if it so please you, should rest gracefully and confidingly upon it. My arms, which are all discretion and politeness, can be trusted to support your enchanting person—should the occasion arise—without affront to your invincible modesty.’ The lady seemed aware of this devotion, and sweetly, sadly, grateful for it. She answered his eloquent silence with something between a sigh and a smile. But again she moved out of reach and was marvellously at once near and inaccessible.

‘I find, sir, you are a gentleman,’ she said, sketching a curtsey. ‘Indeed I had guessed as much long since; and the discretion of your behaviour and the refinement of your conversation do but confirm that earlier conjecture. What whim it is that persuades you to play your present part of innkeeper I do not know and have no title to inquire . . .’

‘The whim, madam,’ he cried, almost saucily, ‘of providing myself and my family with the means of life. A prejudice in favour of food and drink and a roof over my head. Tis true that I have seen happier fortunes, but none happier than to avow myself your devoted slave.’

He was a man translated and triumphant, and his choice of words was significant of that triumph. ‘Servant,’ from such as he, whose gentility was in question even while it was being affirmed, might have passed as obsequious; whereas ‘slave’ was ardent, gallant, a confident claim, a proud boast. This was indeed the most arrogant speech he had ever uttered in his life, and her fluttering reception of it made of him such a tremendous fellow, and of her a thing so small and fragile, so exquisite and lovely and forlorn, that he was hard put to it not to break the bounds of discretion and take her at once into his arms. But that were to risk all, and to risk it too soon. He had still sense enough to remember that. It was incredible that so high a goddess could stoop to him and suffer his embrace even for a moment. Moreover, he was already sufficiently exalted, and perhaps half knew it. In not attempting her he felt humble, and found humility delicious; chivalrous, and enjoyed his chivalry; politic, and knew his policy a safe one. And there remained, after all, his natural curiosity to be satisfied. His guest, the lady’s escort, had run off without paying the reckoning. A trifle, no doubt, compared with the measure of this golden hour: but a curious trifle none the less.

‘You are too kind, sir,’ said she. ‘I am happy to know I may trust your discretion. For trust you I must, and with a secret.’

At the word secret, the light in Mr Bailey’s eye burned more brightly still.

‘I am no better than other men,’ said he: and at least half sincerely, though the other half of him could not but suspect that by his very statement he proved the contrary. ‘I am no better than other men, madam. But I would sooner die than betray a secret confided to me by such lips as yours.’

There was urgency in her manner. She came nearer to him and said, with lowered voice: ‘This is no time for fine speeches. I am afraid for my brother. Ask me no details, my friend, but give me leave to rely on your discretion and goodwill. A grave danger threatens my brother, and his danger is necessarily mine. We have enemies. We are reduced in fortune. Persecution has dogged us these last five years—ever since the ill-starred adventure of ’45. Believe me, my kind friend, we are no less loyal than honest. But malice pursues us. My brother at this moment is engaged on a most delicate mission. He does not tell me all, and it is best that you know nothing. I am distressed by this sudden flight of his. I wonder indeed that he should have left my side with no word of warning or explanation. I have not deserved it of him.’

The quality of her voice was subtly changing: a note of anger, almost a note of hatred, could be heard in it. A sudden and devastating doubt assailed Mr Bailey.

‘Your side, madam? Left your side without forewarning you?’

The lady flushed. ‘Indeed yes. A very uncivil performance. But for hearing his door slam and the sound of his footsteps descending the stair, I should have known nothing of his movements.’

‘Are you sure it was he? May he not be still in his room . . . unless,’ said Mr Bailey casually, ‘you have already satisfied yourself to the contrary?’

‘Indeed, sir, I wonder at you. How is there room for question, since you yourself saw him go?’ She stared. ‘Is it possible that you doubt me?’

She looked, to Mr Bailey’s eyes, so lovely in her indignation that he was fired anew. ‘Madam, I am yours to command. As for doubting you, I would sooner doubt myself. You are in all things perfection.’ He impetuously seized her hand. ‘You are an angel. You are——’

She turned away from him. ‘Could I think you sincere,’ she said, in a low voice, ‘I would ask you to say nothing of my brother’s strange departure. Or rather to contrive some story that should make it appear less strange. If I could persuade myself that you mean even the half of what you profess, I could bear this affliction with some show of patience, and remain here, under your roof, until my brother’s return. But no, I am friendless and forsaken, and I must go from here at daybreak.’

‘What have I done,’ cried Mr Bailey, ‘how have I offended you that you can speak so cruelly of leaving my house before you must?’

She softened. She was manifestly touched. ‘Do you then wish me to stay, my poor friend?’

Her eyes dazzled him. He now possessed both her hands and stooped to kiss them. ‘With all my heart,’ he said.

A light hand stroked his hair; a word, softly spoken, caressed him. Then he was alone in the room, and the clock began striking three.

CHAPTER 5 THE LISTENERS: AND WHAT ELSE THEY HEARD THAN THE SOUND OF HORSES’ HOOVES

For a man bent on making a secret departure our gentleman in the three-cornered hat must be accounted unlucky, for at least three pairs of ears, besides those of the landlord and the deserted lady, listened to the sound of his vanishing horses. Mr Bailey’s daughter, for one, had needed no waking. She had lain for an hour or more listening to her own heart-beats, and feeling at intervals her child stirring in the womb, before the noise of footsteps tiptoeing past her door recalled her to a sense of where she was. The moment before, her thoughts had been with her dark slim honey-tongued lover: that romantic creature who looked, they said, like a gipsy, but could talk (whispered her heart) like a prince in a fairy-tale. She was remembering an August evening when she had wandered across Dyking Common into that fairy-tale. She saw him in the near distance driving his geese into their pen. He waved to her and waited. And it was this attitude of waiting that piqued her curiosity. There was no impudence in it: there was only a quiet satisfaction, as though they were already old friends and this a planned meeting. Nor did he approach her: that would have sent her running. He stood and smiled a welcome, and she from a little distance watched him with wide eyes. So this was the famous Gipsy Noke. She had seen him many a time in the street, but here he was different, here he was curiously a part of nature: and the best part. The bright grass, the trees, the bending blue sky: these seemed his natural setting: he was their comrade and their equal. She turned her gaze to the ground and sauntered slowly by, afraid lest he should pursue her, yet loth to leave him. She was not quite unintelligent, but her intelligence now was quiescent. Her behaviour was all but involuntary, for her mind formed no image of what she feared or of what she wanted. Two instincts working in her, a dumb fear and a dumb desire, she was deaf to the small, lisping, infant voice of reason. Her feet brought her to a standstill; her head turned; her eyes looked. The man’s dark eyes were still watching her. He smiled and called: ‘Come and lend a hand with these geese, missy, wilta now?’ He needed no help, but she went to him without further hesitation. ‘I pen they in for why?’ said Noke, serenely at his ease. ‘Because there be handy folk about, that’s for why, my dear. I pen they in, so there’ll be a squawken if em’s tampered with.’ He smiled at her. His eyes were bright with geniality and excitement. His speech fascinated her. She had never met anyone so queerly attractive. ‘You’re not of these parts, are you?’ she said shyly. ‘Nay,’ he answered, with a hint of teasing. ‘I be the King of Ameriky. They do call me a gipsy hereabouts. But you’ll call me Harry, wilta now, seeing we be friends, my pretty?’ She was too much excited to answer: the dark warmth of his glance made her tingle, mind and body. ‘You be Mus Bailey’s girl, bainta?’ She nodded. ‘Ah,’ said he, ‘come you into my cot, darlen, and see where I do live.’ He held out a hand to her. She was suddenly afraid, and wanted to run away. But she wanted, too, to stay. And she stayed. She was a true daughter of Wooma, and he a true son of Koor; but the centuries had taught the man more than the woman. He knew whither they were both tending: she knew nothing but a consciousness of delicious danger. And now her ignorance was half-wilful: she shut out thought, and drifted on the tide of an agelong impulse. Agelong, primitive, but not simple: an impulse, baffling in its complexity, whose direction we see but whose nature is not to be encompassed by any man’s definition, whether mystic or moralist or man of science. The biologist will draw you a map of its behaviour; the psychologist will explore its ramifications; the poet will find in the mystery the beauty and meaning he himself has put there. And it may be that the poet, who has the last word, had also the first; and that the word became flesh; and that flesh is the hieroglyphic of a mind in labour. ‘Come in now,’ said Harry Noke; and his hand, strong and persuasive, closed on hers. She struggled to free herself, but he only laughed, and she quickly gave up the struggle. She shrank from entering the cot, but she entered it willingly, and even, despite her dragging feet, eagerly. The place enchanted her: both its outward and inward aspects were a surprise and a delight. It was a one-roomed shanty built round the trunk of a great oak. It had an uneven boarded floor, raised from the ground (said its maker proudly) by large stones. On the tree-trunk, which was the centre and support of the whole structure, hung various kitchen utensils: a frying-pan, a saucepan, a kettle, and a pint jug. Outside, surrounding the whole, a ditch had been dug; and the site was a good one—the flat summit of a small natural eminence. At their entry, a large lean dog came bounding from his corner to greet them, and a voice said: ‘Pretty fellow!’ Noke’s parrot could say no more than that, but two well-chosen words can give a man perennial satisfaction. Letitia was startled, and her hand involuntarily clung to the fingers enclosing it. ‘Oh, it’s only a parrot,’ she said. ‘What a beauty!’ The place was warm and dim and filled with a strong smell of hay. ‘And so be you, my blossom,’ answered the prince of this darkness. His arm came round her. ‘You be a rare body of beauty, Tisha Bailey.’ She had been told substantially the same not seldom before, but never had the flattery seemed so sweet, nor induced in her so wild a hunger for more. In the past, a few light kisses had been all her knowledge of love; but now, body and soul, she felt herself burning, melting, liquefying, until she was all responsiveness. . . . This she had been remembering, and much more, as she lay and tossed in her bed and waited for sleep to visit her with quietness: how his eyes had shone in the darkness, how his hands had stroked her face, and how shy she had been of the dog’s presence, till the soft golden rain of her lover’s talk fell on her naked bosom and flooded her heart. This she had been remembering when that sound roused her from reverie: footsteps going past her door and descending the stairs, and then, after an interval tense with listening, the sound of horses. ‘I wonder who that can be? Is anyone ill?’

Jenny Mykelborne, a stone’s throw away, was asking the same question; for death ran in her mind tonight, a message having come from Maiden Holt that her father was to attend in the morning to measure Paul Dewdney for a coffin. She was reflecting on the chance of there being something already in stock that would do. For the wheelwright’s workshop generally contained at least one coffin of a likely size, Mykelborne’s first concern being, when one funeral was over, to begin making ready for another. ‘Tis martal folly to be took unawares,’ he said. ‘There be no manner of sense in that, my dearies.’ And while at work on the new coffin he would busy his mind with wondering who was most likely to occupy it: whether Gaffer This or Gammer That, or poor Sally Byfoot as had been these ten years abed poor soul, or yon fellow that fell sick a-Saturday. Without levity, and in his own sober and godly fashion, he would make bets on this matter, as it were with Death himself; and when his candidate was chosen he would greet the event with a suitable mingling of melancholy and triumph. ‘Deary me now, so he’s gone at last, poor soul. Now mark my words and whaddid I tella. All flesh is grass, I telled a, and tis old Roger as’ll stretch his length in you, I said, giving coffin a tap with my hammer. All flesh is grass, to be sure, as Postle Paul well knowed.’ But Death was more than his match and full of surprises, and as often as not outwitted him by passing over the gaffers and gammers, and never coming near the Sally Byfoots; for the green springing corn is as much to his fancy as the ripe grain or the rotten. To Jenny a coffin was a homely and familiar thing: as a child she had put her dolls to bed in it, and played at dinner-parties on the lid. Coffins meant nothing, and death meant very little. At nineteen she was immortal. Nor was she unwilling to share the sweet taste of her immortality with such of the village men as took her fancy. She was big and fair and sentimental, with the bold shy staring eyes of a child, a plump maturity of figure, and lips that were a perpetual invitation. Nothing so much surprised her as to be kissed, and her capacity for enjoying such surprises was inexhaustible. So her thoughts, though tonight they began with Paul Dewdney’s death and the coffin that her father must provide, did not long rest there, but went following the stranger and his horses down the Dyking road.

It was a slightly different sound that Noke heard, five or six minutes later; for the horses now trod on soft grass. It was so unusual for him to hear a passer-by at this time of night that he sat up in bed and listened. The traveller was very near: Noke judged him to be within five yards of the cot itself. He was apparently having trouble with his horses, for suddenly a volley of ferocious oaths broke the quiet of the night with an ugliness like that of murder. The fellow, whoever he was, seemed to be devil-possessed. Pricked by curiosity, and with his blood stirred to an answering tumult by the tumult outside, Noke scrambled off his bed and dressed quickly. He fancied he might be too late (he did not ask for what), but it was against his instinct to go in quest of adventure unbreeched. Anger raged round his house, now near, now less near: the brief thunder of hooves, the vile shouting of a man. What gutter-scum is there, thought Noke; for in the course of a life not over-gentle, even by the standard of the times, he had never heard a voice so cruel as this stranger’s. And now, having pulled on his boots, he was ready to go and see what was amiss. He opened the door and looked out upon a moonlit scene. At the moment the disturbers of his peace were not in sight, but he could hear them at his back, and the next moment they appeared: two prancing horses, with a man clinging to the back of one of them. The man was a masterful rider and was in no personal danger; but something had terrified the horses, perhaps he himself, and of the second, which he held by the bridle, he had lost command. Nor did his anger avail him, for at that very moment the animal broke away from him, and the one he bestrode began rearing and plunging anew. In the same instant a dog ran barking towards them. ‘Back, Roger! Here, Roger!’ shouted Noke, but the voice of the stranger drowned his. The fellow was now grinning with rage. Controlling his horse he stared down at the barking dog with a kind of glee. The next instant there was a pistol in his hand. He took careless aim and fired. The dog barked no more. The horse became frenzied. Noke knelt in the grass at Roger’s side. But not for many seconds: the dog was already quite dead. His master jumped up, uttered an inarticulate noise that was half sob half curse, and rushed towards the stranger. The horseman yelled at him to keep back. ‘Out the way, blast ye! Or I’ll serve you same as him.’ He struck out with the butt end of his pistol, but Noke, with a wolfish noise, dodged the blow, ran in, and seized him by the leg. The leg kicked him in the face and was free, but he seized it again, and gave a twist and a jerk and a heave, and the horse bolted, leaving its master lying limp in the grass. Noke, snorting and quivering, stood for a moment blinded by his own blood. It sealed his eyes, and he could feel the warm salt of it on his tongue. But presently he was able to look down at his work. The stranger had fallen on his head. The neck was broken, and in his dying convulsion he had flung himself backwards and now lay staring at the moon. His hat and wig had fallen off; his head was bald, his face vilely distorted, the face of a man who had died by violence and in anger. Noke thought him a mighty ugly customer, but he tried to suppress the thought. He had hated this fellow a moment ago: now that he was dead he feared him. Looking down on him he gulped a kind of prayer; glanced guiltily round; and then found himself afraid to confront that face again. Averting his gaze, fixing it not on the face but on the boots of the dead man, he tried a kind of argument. A nasty business, but you did kill my dog after all. No good looking at me like that: I’m not afeared of you, alive or dead. Still I’m sorry it happened. Mistakes on both sides, but you did kill my dog. Thur wornt no call to do that. Now wor thur? So his thoughts ended, on a note almost of appeal. He invited his enemy to take a reasonable view of the matter. He was in dread of being haunted.

The dread pursued him to his cot. He went in and shut the door, leaving the two corpses, the dog and the man, untouched where they had fallen. He was not a religious man, but he knew a bad omen when he saw one, and the way that protruding tongue had pointed at him could bode no good. And what had he done—was it murder? Well, they could prove nothing against him. A man falls from his horse and breaks his neck. Whose fault is that? Not Harry Noke’s, gipsy or no gipsy. He was less afraid of the law than of the unseen power whose business it was to visit a man’s sins upon him, and by many degrees less afraid of the law than of the corpse. For to the law, murder was no worse than theft: the same punishment served for either. Moreover the law could be outwitted, but there was no outwitting the Almighty, and no deceiving that corpse. A powerful sly carpse he made, did that one, an uncommon nasty figure of a carpse, with a sorta sneer or snarl in’s face, and a look of Now I’ve got you. Noke lay on his bed, sweating and cold, fearing nothing tangible, wishing almost for something tangible to fear. He had never in his life lacked animal courage, but now he was at a loss and wanted comfort. His thoughts turned gratefully to woman. He remembered how dearly Tisha Bailey loved him, and what a smooth soft complaisant bedfellow Jenny Mykelborne made; and he wished he were not alone in this cold quiet night. Mere habit, and the prompting of loneliness, brought the name of Roger to his lips—‘Hey Roger! Good old son!’—before he remembered the impossible truth about that familiar friend and housemate. He was alone, with only his thoughts for company—his thoughts and the ghost they conjured into being. Yet not quite alone, for his involuntary murmur evoked a response from the darkness.

‘Pretty fellow! Pretty fellow!’

The parrot was never at a loss: he always knew the right thing to say.

CHAPTER 6 A VISITOR FOR MR BAILEY AND OF THE CARGO HE CARRIED

Three o’clock. For a moment Mr Bailey stared at the face of his monitor as though its announcement of the hour had been addressed to him personally. But if the thought of bed had been repugnant before the lady’s visit, it was now doubly so. To sneak timidly upstairs and contrive to slip between the sheets without waking the wife who shared them would provide this romantic night with just the anticlimax he most dreaded; whereas by remaining where he was, in a room enchanted by memory, he could luxuriate in the sense of a continuing rapture. The lady had left the scent and savour of her femininity behind her; the benches, the shuttered windows, the worn brick floor, all were in some fashion transfigured by the light she had shed upon them; and the air still held for him echoes of her voice. Moreover there was here a fire burning, and capable of being coaxed into a blaze: a consideration not to be neglected on so cold a night by no matter how elated a man. Mr Bailey, with a sigh that was more than half satisfaction, went to the hearth and tended the fire lovingly. He set to work with the bellows and was soon rewarded. Here was a vital symbol of the high dream that consumed him: his few faggots burned bravely on the hearth, aspiring to the stars. And the distance between the one and the other was scarcely vaster than that which separated his present status from the beatitude he fancied he desired. Therein, it may be, lay his salvation; but Mr Bailey himself did not take that view, and would have rejected it with indignation had it been presented to him. For all that, and despite his sighing, he was as nearly contented as your true Romantic can ever be; and after a little while of musing and wishing, lamenting and exulting, he took up his tablets again and began adding verse to verse:

With this piece of self-admonition he had perforce to content himself. Drowsiness was stealing over him, and he could do no more. He had just enough energy left to consider his situation, briefly and finally, in its immediate and practical aspect. He resolved to have done, once and for all, with this nonsensical notion of going to bed. He would make a night of it down here in the warmth of the inn parlour, and when his wife came in the morning and found him he would tell her that he had risen early from her side and left her sleeping. She would perhaps not believe him; she would perhaps hale him upstairs and point accusingly at the undented pillow; she would perhaps upbraid him. But he was too wretched, too happy, above all too sleepy, to care very much what she said or did, poor stupid woman: for once he would please himself, let her say what she might. He fetched a couple of cushions from the other room, arranged them on the settle, and pillowed his head snugly. And was soon asleep.

He woke with a start an hour or so later, fancying he had heard a tapping at the door. He felt stiff and cold and unrefreshed. He rubbed his head vigorously, and yawned. And now there was certainly a knock at the door. So it was no fancy after all, he said to himself. There’s someone outside, and I must go see who tis. ‘A queer time for paying calls,’ he grumbled, with a glance at the clock. He heaved himself off the seat and padded in his stocking’d feet half way across the brick floor. There he stopped, to yawn again, and to toy with a vague hope that the visitor had got tired of waiting and had gone away. Although it was within half an hour of the family’s time for rising, he was suspicious and resentful of anyone who could come knocking at his door when all honest folk, as he told himself, were safe and sound in bed. His mood was exceedingly moral this morning, and he did not at all approve of the irregular life. But the visitor had by no means gone away: he rattled the door furiously and drummed upon it with his clenched fists. ‘Now bless my soul,’ said Mr Bailey, staring cantankerously at the door, ‘what a to-do upon my word! You’d think murder was done by the way that fellow be buffeting the door. Haply tis my fine gentleman come back to pay his reckoning.’ Being in no mood for fine gentlemen, being in no mood for anything but food and drink and a warm bed, he made no further move towards the door, but stood rubbing the sleep from his eyes, and yawning prodigiously, and reflecting on the vanity of human wishes. When the knocking began again he resumed his grumbling. ‘What right or title has he to be let in? Tell me that,’ he demanded of himself. ‘He went out of his own will and accord, didn’t he? Very well then. Let him stay out.

when he comes back. Hold your noise, you dirty scamp, while I finish my couplet.

Weak, Bailey. Very weak, my friend. Try again.

Oh, a pox take the rhymes! And a pox take you!’ he added heartily, with his hand on the bolt. ‘This is no time to drag a man out of his bed.’ He opened the door. ‘And what—oh, so tis you, Harry Noke? You’re up betimes this morning. What’s amiss with your face, man? Tis an ugly bruise, that.’

The clock had proclaimed it to be morning-time, but as yet it was a morning darker than the night it had displaced: dark with a kind of drifting darkness, and cold with a coldness that lacked the splendour of moon and stars to give it spirit. The street had a ghostly air, and Noke, standing whey-faced on the threshold, looked like the last forlorn survivor in a country of the dead. The sound of munching drew Mr Bailey’s eyes to where, at a couple of yards distance, stood a horse and cart.

Receiving no answer from his visitor, the landlord repeated his remark, adding: ‘Marketing already? But that’s a rare ugly bruise you’ve found for yourself, Who’s been fighting ye?’

‘Horse’ll be all right,’ said Noke, stepping into the house without waiting for an invitation. ‘I’ve putten the nosebag on un.’

‘I heartily wish you might put one on me, Harry Noke,’ said Mr Bailey bitterly, as he lit the candles. The thought of a horse filling itself with good corn while he himself still fasted was almost more than he could bear. But he was glad of Noke’s company, and obscurely comforted by the sound of his voice, which seemed the only friendly thing in a bleak universe. ‘Now you’re here, neighbour, we’ll have bite and sup together if so be you’re agreeable. I’ve been waking the night through, and fasting to boot. So what d’you say?’

‘God bless the giver, say I,’ answered Noke. ‘I be empty as a drum, and that’s gospel, Mus Bailey. What’s more, I took and had a nasty fall smarnen. That be how I got this face on me. A pesty stump of tree twas, and me a trifle consarned in drink.’

‘Ah,’ said Mr Bailey, nodding wisely, ‘and that’ll be why you’re not feeling yourself this morning. Now do you try kindling the fire, willee, while I go find food for us.’

‘There be a spark or two left still twinklen,’ remarked Noke, setting about his task at once. ‘Bythen you’re back twill be pretty-sure crackling.’ He was as good as his word, for by the time Mr Bailey returned with bread and boiled bacon on a tray he had coaxed the few sparks into a small blaze and added a handful of brushwood from the pile at the hearthside. He stared hungrily at the crackling brightness, and stretched out his hands to it as though he would gather it into himself and be warmed for ever. ‘A tarrible heartening sight is a fire on the hearth,’ he remarked with relish. ‘I’ve never breathed a day so raw as this day.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t say that,’ said Mr Bailey, already more cheerful. ‘It’s dark enough yet, and chill. But there’s no poisonous dank in it same as I’ve known in my time.’

Noke shivered. ‘Dank enough, Mus Bailey. It do rot a man’s bones in the rathe of morning, when there baint no wink of light, and you can hear the unfroze gobs of dew dripping from the branches on the roof of your house. It plenty do rot a man’s bones.’

‘Ah,’ said Mr Bailey, who had the knack, when he chose, of suiting his diction to his company, ‘I see what it is. You’re feeling a bit low in yourself. I can see that with half an eye. Does it give you much pain, that face of yours? Ah, I’ll ’low it does. You want a wife to keep you comforted. Tis lonely of a cold dark morning in that little house of yours, I rackon. Come, fall to, man, and get a bit of this fine fat bacon inside yourself. There’s nothing like it to drive away melancholy. Yes, tis a wife you need. A hearty wench that ud keep you warm of nights and make you so cross and crusty in the morning, with her chatter and her rattle and her hurry-skurry manners, or else with her lazy sluggabed doings and devices, for tis one or tother: she’d make you so cross and crusty, I say, that you’d never have time for sighing or sadness till you was downstairs safe and sound with your breakfast in your belly. . . . Take a drop of small ale with that bacon, my friend. You’ll find they go lovingly together.’

‘Ay,’ agreed Noke, with his mouth full, ‘there be no beverage to beat ut for breakfast. A man,’ he explained, as if for the benefit of an uninstructed audience, ‘daun’t want a heavy lumpish liquor to wash down his breakfast with. Do he now?’ He seemed to implore this hypothetical audience to use its commonsense and be reasonable. ‘Stands to sense, Mus Bailey, that what a man do want is a spry thinnish liquor with a kindly smatch of bitterness to un, bainta now? As for wenches,’ he added, after a pause for munching, ‘dear knows there’s a plenty wenches’ll come for the asken without bit or bridle or wedden-ring nuther.’ He spoke not vaingloriously nor with evident pride, but rather in the tone of his former melancholy. ‘And there be naught that goo better with a drop of small ale, master, than a collop of bacon the like of this. And fat bacon too. There be virtue and goodness in fat. Fat do travel the body and oil the innards and keep a man’s sperrit burnen bright. Lean daun’t. A waste of good time be lean. Three pun of bacon off the thick end: the thick end, minda. That’s what I do goo for in the market when I’ve means enough to pay for un.’

‘And is that,’ asked Mr Bailey,’ what you’re off to fetch today at five o’clock of the morning? What brings you out so early, man? If you asked me, I’d say you ought to put a bit of something on that nose of yours, Harry. I’ve never seen a nastier bruise than that.’

‘I’ve brought you news,’ said Noke. ‘Ay, and something besides. Gogzoons, I’ve had a tarrible queer night of it. A man needs a collop of bacon after such a night, and I’m much beholden, Mus Bailey, and I looks t’ards you.’

‘Well, what’s your news?’ asked Mr Bailey cheerfully. ‘Since it got you out of bed so early you’ve been a long time coming to it.’

‘Bad news’ll keep, I rackon.’ Noke, stopping in mid-munch, filled the unoccupied half of his mouth with ale before resuming speech. ‘You had a strange pair of folkses come last night, didn’t ye now?’

Mr Bailey nodded. His eyes shone with sudden interest.

‘A man,’ said Noke deliberately, ‘and a woman with him.’

‘A young lady,’ amended Mr Bailey.

‘That’s as may be,’ said Noke. ‘Woman or young lady, tis all one on Doomsday, bainta? Now last night, Mus Bailey, that same man or gennelman do come prancing along my common with a brace of nags.’ He paused, to watch the effect of his words. ‘Mark that.’

Mr Bailey could not control his impatience. ‘So that’s how tis. Tell me. This is mighty important. Where is he now, d’you ’low?’

‘I ’low naught,’ answered Noke. ‘I knows.’

He jerked a thumb towards the street. ‘He be outside.’

‘Outside!’ The landlord jumped to his feet.

‘Ay, outside in the street. I brought him along in my cart. Now——’

Mr Bailey was too deeply agitated to wait for explanations. ‘Now God bless my soul, I did the gentleman an injustice. How delighted the young lady his sister will be!’ He was suddenly full of fussy hospitality, so eager that he did not know which way to turn but could only stand hesitating and twittering. ‘And in your cart, you say, and us sitting here gossiping. God bless my soul, the gentleman will be wanting his breakfast.’

‘Nay,’ said Noke, ‘he’ll want no breakfast. He’ve had all the breakfast he can want. Besides, he can’t eat no breakfast, with his neck broke the way it is. Could you now?’

‘Broken his neck!’ stammered Mr Bailey. ‘D’you mean . . .’

‘Ay, indeed a has. Fell off his horse a did, and snap!—twas the end of breakfasts for him, Mus Bailey. And suppers too, I shoon’t wonder. And now he do lie quiet and cold under a cover of sacking. And the harse that throwed un be tied up at home, ready for them as claims un.’

‘But——’ Mr Bailey had not yet come to the end of his astonishment: sudden death compelled from him the customary tribute of wonder. ‘But I saw him myself only last night. With my own eyes I saw him, as hale and brisk a gentleman as you please. And now, you tell me, he’s dead and gone. I can’t believe it, Harry Noke. What a shocking affair, to be sure. I can’t believe it. And you saw him fall, did you? How came it to happen, and what in the name of goodness and mercy are we to do with him now?’ He glanced nervously towards the street. ‘And him in that cart of yours! What’s to be done? We can’t leave him lying there as though he was no more than a dead dog.’

Harry Noke winced at these words, and made an ugly wry grimace. ‘Do you bring un in, Mus Bailey, if you do feel so nice about ut. Gogzoons, that’s because why I brung un along, bainta? Bring un in and set un up on the bench and ask un how ut did chance.’ After a moody silence he went on in a milder tone: ‘Better goo and take a look at un. You’ll find un lying snug enough, and all his gear with him. Hat and wig and saddlebags and all: just as I found ’em. He be a quiet enough carpse: I’ll say that. But he’ve a look in his eyes I’ve never seen the like of, nor doon’t wanta.’

‘I’ll not have him in here unless I must,’ said Mr Bailey. ‘Twould bring nothing but bad luck, and twould frighten that poor dear young lady into ten thousand vapours to find she’d got a dead body for a brother.’

Noke’s voice became thick and quick with urgency and dread. ‘That be no way to talk, Mus Bailey. The carpse took a room in your house, didn’t a, and so there he must lie. Tis no carpse of mine, so why should I be moidered with un? If ut baint your consarn, ut be the young woman’s. And if ut baint hers, ut be Richard Mykelborne the coffin-maker’s.’

But the landlord had made up his mind. He spoke with decision. ‘Now hearken to me, Harry Noke. This is a matter for Squire Marden. He’s a gentleman and a magistrate, and what happens amiss in this Fee is for him to weigh and consider. Coroner’s inquest they do call it. I’m nothing but an innkeeper: Squire’s the man for you. Squire’s the man to say who tis, and why tis, and all about it. And if you want to find a home for that poor corpse, Harry Noke, and not have it by you for the rest of your born days, you’ll take counsel of me and drive away off to Squire Marden’s with it this very minute.’

There was force in this contention, and Mr Bailey’s persuasiveness proved irresistible. In his eagerness to be rid of Harry Noke, and of the responsibility the fellow sought to thrust upon him, he seized his arm and all but led him to the door. To the door but no further. One glance shewed him a street from which the darkness was lifting, a sky grown paler; and he turned quickly back into the room, his heart eased and comforted by the crunch and creak and rumble of the departing wagon. He addressed himself busily to the day’s work: unfastened the shutters, extinguished the candles, began sweeping the floor vigorously.

A step on the stairs disturbed him in the midst of these activities, and frightened him into wondering what he must tell the young lady. He was in no mind to be caught by her with a broom in his hand: an attitude much at variance with his notion of what was loverlike and gallant and genteel. Nor did he wish to be seen in his unwashed unshaven state by one to whom he had dedicated his life and soul. He was aware of having slept in his clothes, and felt incapable of sustaining a conversation upon the giddy heights he had reached last night with his charmer. Moreover he was a humane man, and dreaded the pain he must inflict on her by his tragic news. Already his attitude had insensibly changed. Exquisite and ravishing she still was, in his thoughts, but these things came second: she was now, first of all, a bereaved woman, and, by virtue of her bereavement, a child claiming protection. This was a sobering thought bringing many small anxieties in its train. His admiration was sincere; his devotion, he assured himself, was profound; but, when it came to protection, he could not shut his eyes to difficulties. He cast the broom from him, struggled back into his jacket, and assumed a selfconscious pose. All this, these thoughts and movements, occupied no more than a second or two. The next moment the stiffness of his attitude relaxed. He picked up the broom and resumed his sweeping. The footsteps drew nearer, and without alarming him, for he now knew that they were not those of the fair stranger. Yes, there were difficulties in the way of his offering protection to chance young women in trouble; and the chief of them, as his ears told him, was at this moment descending the stairs.

CHAPTER 7 A WEEK LATER: THE ROAD TO UPCHURCH: AND WHAT PASSED BETWEEN JACK MARDEN AND A BEREAVED WOMAN

Twenty-five miles south of Marden Fee, and within an hour’s slow ride of the coast, stands the little town of Featherham. So it is spelt by pedantic and official persons, in church registers and the like; but most of us, in this mid-eighteenth century, are content to write it (if we write at all) as we speak it: Fedrum. It is a mellow and friendly town, very small and compact, very clean and bright. Its High Street is cobbled; its half-timbered houses lean across to each other like gossiping cronies; its church is ancient. But the general effect is one not of age but of a timeless perfection, something neither ancient nor modern but at once fresh and mature like this January morning. In Fedrum the sun shines more brightly than elsewhere; rain falls like a benediction; an east wind is the kind of foe that a man of spirit is glad to cross swords with; snow is a wonder, and frost a tingling delight. Here nothing can happen, whether fair or foul, but its beauty is enhanced, or its foulness redeemed, by the kindness and candour and quiet self-assurance that seem to pervade the very air. The quintessence of this genius loci is to be found in the white house that stands, surrounded by a high-walled garden, in the middle of the town. It is but twenty years old and built in the best modern style, though already, being of Fedrum, it is mellow in quality as well as serene and sensible in design; and it has recently become the residence of Dr Humphrey and his daughter. This last circumstance is a matter of no little interest to Jack Marden, whom we now see riding towards Fedrum in the company of the bereaved young woman who played such havoc in Mr Bailey’s breast a week ago. For she, it appears, has friends in Upchurch; and Upchurch lies but a few miles to the east of Fedrum. . . .

And now, for the hundredth time in a few hours, that young woman broke the silence, snapped the golden thread of Marden’s thought, by her expressions of gratitude. She was vastly obliged for his civility, she was greatly beholden for the protection of his escort, she trembled to think what might have happened had he not so befriended her, and she wished it might be in her power to repay his kindness. Here she fetched a deep sigh, and flashed an almost tender glance at him, and, being caught in this act, was covered with a pretty blushing confusion. He had already taken her measure, and found it widely at variance with the measure of her pretensions. She owed him more than she knew: she owed him, indeed, that for which she was thanking her own cleverness, her liberty. But her provocativeness piqued him into taking a momentary interest in her person, which he now observed to be by no means lacking in feminine attractiveness. He knew her, or thought he knew her, for trash. An easy woman, he said to himself, mine for the asking, or any man’s. And there was nothing here, he told himself, to stir a man’s soul. But the soul can take care of itself: one need not always be exercising it. Nor need one, thought he, disdain an adventure merely because the soul is not engaged in it; for though he was a boy at heart, with a boy’s shy adoration of the beauty that is beyond sense, he was also a man and a man of his times: profoundly curious and questing, not uninfluenced by a tradition of gallantry, and no more disposed than the next man to ignore a woman’s challenge. In a word, he might, at any other time, have risen to the bait of that wistful sigh, that downcast look. But now he was triple-armed against such an assault: she was easy, she was of dubious honesty, and, above all, his mind as well as his heart was already crowded with another. His thoughts were all with Celia Humphrey, whom, as he hoped, he was soon to see again. For two days his heart had been beating with that hope, and a resolution was forming in him to put his fortune to the test as soon as might be. Reacting from the misery of the past week, he felt a new zest filling him. With Paul buried, he turned instinctively away from the dark thoughts that had oppressed him. The idea of death, the sharp reminder of his own mortality, set him hotfoot in quest of the more abundant life that only Celia, he vowed, could give him, if she but would; and his imagination glowed with the wonder of her. Hitherto he had hardly dared to do more than toy with the idea of winning her: he could not conceive that she, so perfect, and so securely and quietly in possession of herself, could ever come within reach of so ordinary a fellow as he. What have I to offer, he asked himself? And the answer was discouraging. His fortune was small; he was not dashing or witty; his prowess in the hunting field was nothing above the ordinary; he was comparatively untravelled; and there was nothing in his appearance that could make a woman look twice at him. Finally, though it counted in his favour that he professed her religious faith, it must tell against him that she was devout and he too desperately honest to conceal his indifference. He could find, indeed, no cause for hope, and no excuse for engaging in an enterprise manifestly impossible of success. But hope he did: or rather, giving rein to his wishes and leaving his reasons to limp along as best they could, he moved forward impetuously at last, neither stopping to consider his chances nor deterred by his lack of any personal merit. He felt joyous and ardent and irresistible, for an instinct wiser than reason told him that only by so feeling, in despite of logic, could he win his heart’s desire. The time for humility was not yet: courage, even a reckless courage, must come first. He, more than most men, needed this prompting of the blood; for by nature and habit, and by the circumstances of his childhood, he was lonely, and self-mistrustful, and proud with the pride of a heart so hungry for love, so eager to escape its prison of isolation, that it shrinks from the exposure involved in offering itself. But, today, spring was in his blood, though there was nothing but January frost and January sunlight in the air about him. As he rode through rural England, crossing commons and skirting severals, his gaze travelled lightly over the hedgeless fields; ribbons of cultivation shewing green spears or brown furrows; wooded hills; cattle at grass; small lanky lambs capering after their mothers. But these sights did not for a moment interrupt or blur his vision of Celia Humphrey. All that they possessed of beauty was somehow translated into terms of her. In his mind’s eye he saw her as he had seen her some three months ago: slim and brown, cool and friendly, very much mistress of herself and serenely unaware of being also mistress of him. Because she was town-bred he was very ready to feel himself something of a bumpkin in her presence, for his own excursions to the metropolis had taken him to the resorts of men, and of women indeed, but not of gentlewomen. There were memories in him that he would gladly have been rid of; and never more gladly than now, when he was riding into the presence of a being so far removed from that world of trivial desperate dissipations with which a lonely and obscurely frustrated man may sometimes seek to solace himself. But her urban antecedents did not dismay him as they might have done, for by adoption she was already heart and soul a countrywoman. She sat a horse bravely; took pleasure in the conversation of her humbler neighbours; humorously prided herself on being weather-wise; managed her rustic servants with discretion; and was a welcome and familiar figure in the streets of Fedrum. Of her inner mind he knew little enough, and so had the more scope for delighted and ardent conjecture. She had read a book or two; she could talk intelligently, as well as worshipfully, of David Garrick; she sang enchantingly in French, in Italian, and even in English, accompanying herself on her grandmother’s harpsichord. Her dark eyes looked upon the world with neither arrogance nor timidity. This he knew: the rest was mystery. What she could give a lover, what riches her heart might reveal to a husband, he dared not ask himself, yet could not abstain from radiantly surmising. His heart quickened its pace, and the horse he rode responded to that quickening. The young woman he escorted was forgotten.

She was not slow, however, to recall herself to his attention. ‘I vow, Mr Marden, my poor beast is going lame.’

‘Are you sure of that?’ His tone was discouraging. Being within ten miles of his golden destination, he was galled by the idea of delay. ‘He looks to me fresh enough yet.’

‘Poor Hector! Poor boy!’ She cooed at her horse, stroking his neck fondly. He had lapsed into a walk. ‘You’re tired, my handsome. You need a rest, don’t you?’ Obedient to her designs, the horse came to a standstill.

‘But this is nonsense,’ exclaimed Marden, incontinently. ‘We must press on, or we shall not reach Upchurch before nightfall. It’s no great distance truly; we have more than half the journey behind us; but the days are short, and the last mile or two is a lonely ride, and in darkness a hazardous one.’

‘Oh,’ she cried, looking suddenly small and helpless and appealing, ‘I beg that you won’t be angry with us, Mr Marden. Poor Hector is so very sorry. Aren’t you, darling?’ She leaned forward in the saddle and peered into the horse’s face. ‘Come, tell Sally. Can you not trot briskly on till nightfall? What, not even to please your Sally! . . . Ah no,’ cried Sally, turning again to her escort, ‘poor Hector is weary and footsore. He says he cannot go further till he is rested, Mr Marden. Please do not be angry with him. That were too sad an ending to your kindness to us. Indeed, sir, your black looks terrify me: I vow they do.’ In witness of her terror she allowed a dazzling smile to play about her pretty features, which smile, however, pretending to find it of no effect, she quickly dismissed, putting in its place a half-rueful half-playful pout. She found a pocket-handkerchief and began dabbing her eyes with it. ‘Of course, if you are resolved to be cruel . . .’ She finished with a shrug of her small pathetic shoulders.

‘Nay,’ said Marden tolerantly, ‘don’t distress yourself, my dear. I am not after all such an ogre.’ He knew her tricks for what they were, and yet he felt some little compunction about overriding them. Tricks, yes: but these tricks were designed for the man’s amusement, no less than for the woman’s; and up to a point he was prepared to help her play her game. To do otherwise had proved him, he thought, a bad sportsman, a prig, a solemn humourless fellow. Moreover the courtesy with which he had already treated her obliged him to persist in courtesy: trash though she was (his thoughts warningly repeated that epithet), he found satisfaction in what he supposed to be her conception of him, and was unwilling to incur dislike when gratitude and admiration, and more besides, could be had for less than the asking. But he could not resist the temptation to banter. ‘Hector has chosen his moment well, for here is an inn, the last we shall see today. Hector’s weariness is timely, madam.’

The landlord came out to welcome them, a short squat barrel of a man, bald, with heavy eyebrows, bearded jowls, and red whiskers gushing fiercely from cavernous nostrils. The horses were stabled, and Marden and his companion sat down and ordered refreshment. Having seen no strange face for many days, the landlord was ready to wax loquacious. He was boisterous, as though his recent isolation had starved him and the sight of company were going to his head like strong wine. When Marden contemptuously called his attention to a bug crawling across the windowsill, he burst into a loud guffaw, as though it had been the best joke in the world and his guest the wittiest of gentlemen. And when he was asked by the lady to provide a dish of tea, he was riotous in his astonishment. ‘Tea, ma’am? Bless my old bones, but I never seen the stuff. We be plain folk hereabouts as eats good bread and drinks good ale and plenty, and knows naught of such fangledangles as tea. Meaning no offence, ladyship, for there’s no doubt tis dainty fine vittles for the gentry. My brother Tom’s wife’s daughter, what she got by her first man, for Tom got caught by a widder woman, and she brung her daughter with her, wedlock or no wedlock, as I always tell ’im, for he’s a man as likes a joke and can take one, is brother Tom. And this daughter, which is to say Tom’s wife’s daughter by her first: this young female, which her name is Nancy Borage, Borage being the name of him that got her, not Tom’s name, no such thing, Tom’s my brother and her stepdad, as the saying is: well this Nancy Borage, she’ve seen this ere tea of yourn, and had it in her two hands, and tasted it, same as it might be a lady. And pretty fair muck, saving your ladyship’s presence, pretty fair muck she christened it, for twas like a handful of birdseed it was, and so she gob it out. But she worn’t a one to give in, nor she shouldn’t be seeing she’s a niece of mine, or would a bin if brother Tom had bin her getter, which he nearly was, for twas touch and goo: she worn’t one to give in, and she knew this ere tea for a dainty eddicated dish. So when they tells her try spreading it on a bit of lardy toast, and there’s nothing to beat a bit of lardy toast of a cold morning cep tis a lump of fat bacon wi’ good rich cracklin, I’m willin, says Nancy Borage, I’m willin, says she. But twornt no manner of good to ’er, like grit it wor, so she gob it out again. And then, if you please, someone says to bile it, so bile it she did, and the dirt that come out of it was a sight as they say to see. Biled it twice she did, to make sarten sure, and then twas none so bad, soft and swelled up, soft like biled cabbage, said Nancy Borage, which she’s a truth speaking slut with all her faults, but no taste to un says she, no taste at all. Now I be a man, ladyship, as likes what you mi’ call taste or contrariwise flaviour to me vittles. If vittles has no taste or flaviour, you can keep ’em, ladyship, for I wunt say thankee for ’em. But when it come to gentry tis another story, and if the likes of me was in the way of sarving the gentry which I mean in a regular way and style of business, which no one would be more pleased than myself, there again as I said to Nancy Borage, straight to her face I said it . . .’

But what he said to Nancy Borage was judged to be of less importance than what Mr Marden had to say to his companion. He interrupted the discourse and dismissed the landlord with a firmness that made his intention unmistakable.

‘Ale I have, sir. Your humble servant, sir. My ’ouse is yours, sir.’ He waddled away, and in a few minutes came back carrying a jug of ale. ‘Which another thing, sir,’ he said, bending confidentially towards Mr Marden, and casting a sly glance at the young woman, ‘which another thing, sir. There is, as the saying goo, beds above, if you and ladyship should be thinking to spend the night under my ’umble roof.’

‘We shall not,’ said Marden curtly. ‘We must press on in a few minutes.’

The young woman intervened. ‘Indeed, sir, but must we?’ She turned charmingly to the landlord. ‘My husband is too proud, landlord, to confess himself wearied by our long day’s journey. Cannot you help me persuade him?’

Marden started; flushed; glared at the landlord. ‘Have the goodness to leave us, fellow. You are too officious.’ The landlord hesitated; Marden rose with a threatening gesture. ‘Here!’ He flung some money on the table. ‘There’s my scot. Now be off with you. And have those horses ready in ten minutes, d’you hear? And let there be no nonsense about it, or I’ll skin the back off you. . . . And now, madam, since when have I been your husband, pray?’

He had turned to her expecting, even hoping, to find fear shining in her eyes. What he saw was admiration and more than a hint of tenderness. He was disconcerted, but he made shift to conceal the fact. ‘I am waiting for your answer,’ he said.

‘Lud, sir, how can I answer you? When you are angry you terrify me. Is it a crime that I should be grateful to so obliging and handsome a gentleman? And so scrupulous withal. How many in your place but would have sought to take advantage of an unprotected woman? But that,’ she ended, with a wide-eyed adoring look, ‘is something you would never do.’

A flicker of self-complacency kindled in his heart. The flattery was gross enough; but was there not, after all, something to be said for her point of view? Embarrassed by the thought of his own nobility he gave a nervous cough and fixed his gaze on distance. But when his glance travelled, as it needs must, in her direction again, he found her eyes still softly shining upon him with undiminished radiance. And it could not be denied that they were uncommonly pretty eyes in their fashion.

‘You never would,’ she repeated. ‘Would you?’

‘Indeed I trust not,’ he answered: awkwardly enough, for self-satisfaction was giving place now to discomfort.

‘No,’ she said, in melting accents, ‘you would never betray me. Not even,’ she added, sighing wistfully, ‘not even if I asked you to.’

‘What do you mean?’ He looked at her steadily, but she did not flinch. Her meaning was evident enough, but her motive was obscure. If her passion was real, it was as inconvenient as flattering; but it was flattering first of all, and disturbing. If feigned, what did she think to gain by the pretence? But the answer to that was not beyond all conjecture; and suddenly it flashed into his mind that this was a woman who had just been bereaved of one she called her brother, and it made the case no better that in calling him so she had probably lied. ‘Mrs Robinson,’ said Marden coldly,’ for that is what you call yourself, I fancy, I think it time you heard some plain speaking. The man you called George Robinson, the man you called your brother, carried on his person some very curious marks and some very curious articles of property. Item, on his forearm an obscene drawing tattooed—unusual decoration for a gentleman. Item, an ill-scrawled letter written in thieves’ jargon: still more unusual. Item, a black mask for the eyes, such as gentlemen of the road are in the habit of assuming in their more modest moments. Item . . . but perhaps I weary you with these details?’

The change in her face startled him, even though he had expected it. Fear distorted her. She was hunted, an outcast. He wondered that he had ever thought her pretty.

‘I am a magistrate, Mrs Robinson, and during those days when you so wisely kept yourself retired to your room, prostrated as you were with your grief, I did my best to get at the truth of this affair. Your brother, or whatever he was to you, met his death by falling from his horse, the very horse you have been riding today. There was a witness, a man called Noke, and it would have been my duty to question that witness’s honesty but for one or two circumstances. First, the body had not been robbed; and there was no mark on it to suggest that he had been assaulted. Second, the pretty trifles I have enumerated for you, and other evidence which I took the trouble to obtain from other sources, convinced me that the world was well rid of a rascal.’ He paused, to note the effect of his words. The woman did not speak. Her face was gray, and she lacked even the presence of mind to faint. ‘There was another thing we found. A lady’s jewel-case.’

Her eyes grew wider. She nodded.

‘The jewels are yours?’ asked Marden.

She nodded again.

‘Or your mistress’s?’ said he. ‘Which is it?’

There was a long silence. The woman summoned all her reserves of courage, and Marden, watching, could not but admire her for it. She spoke at last in a voice quivering with suppressed hysteria. ‘I thought he was a gentleman. I swear I did. If I’d thought he was such a dirty rat . . .’

‘If he was the fellow I believe him to have been,’ said Marden, seeing that she was disinclined to continue, ‘he was not without a smattering of education. That makes him the more a scoundrel. These smooth-tongued gentlemanly rogues are the worst of a poisonous crew, and you were fortunate, my girl, that you did not have your throat cut. But that’s not all, as I’d best warn you. Had I done my strict duty I should have committed you to the Assizes on suspicion of being that fellow’s accomplice. But it would give me no pleasure to be the means of bringing a young woman to the gallows, so here we are, on our way to Upchurch, where, whatever you do or have done, you will be outside my jurisdiction.’ He rose. ‘Come along, madam,’ he said, with grim friendliness, ‘we must go see if our horses are ready. We’ve spent time enough here. We must make haste. And on the road you shall tell me who taught you to play the lady so deftly. It will make a good story, I’ll warrant.’

CHAPTER 8 IN WHICH, ACCORDING TO ITS CUSTOM, THE IMPOSSIBLE HAPPENS

Fedrum, when Marden reached it, was already full of dusk; but the dusk, to his quickened imagination, was no more than a soft dark cloak for the shining limbs of beauty. He left his horse in the care of a servant, and having been shewn to his room, and having washed away the soil and weariness of the journey, he went in search of Dr Humphrey, whom he found, according to his expectations, at work or at dream in his laboratory. At Marden’s entry the doctor looked up, fixed his gaze upon him, but gave no sign of greeting. His eyes were lit with a remote speculation. He was a small spare man, in age a trifle over sixty. The angularity of his features, his sharp nose and his shaggy brows, gave him the look of a highly intelligent and benevolent dog. As befitted a man of his age and station, he was dressed soberly, and in a less recent mode than that affected by Marden; and, unlike his young friend, he wore a wig, a grey wig whose colour contrasted sharply with the blackness of his brows. The curve of his nostril, the firm line of his mouth, suggested delicacy and resolution; the large eyes, heavy-lidded and with pouches pendent, were so brightly illumined by the mind that looked through them as to quicken the whole aging face with the animation of quest. He gazed unseeing at his guest; and Marden stood in the doorway waiting patiently, amusedly, for recognition.

‘Ah, Marden! I am delighted to see you, my dear sir. So you’ve arrived at last, I see. Yes, I see you have.’ As though to see still better, he came forward to meet the young man. ‘Is your horse looked to? Has my daughter been informed?’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Marden. ‘At least I fully believe so. If not, there’s time enough. I would not have her disturbed yet. Bad news will keep.’ He ended with a wry, selfconscious smile. For now the idea of meeting Celia made him nervous; and he was ready to think himself an interloper, and to shun the encounter he had so eagerly sought all day.

‘Bad news? What bad news is this?’ The doctor blinked sympathetically.

‘I was referring, sir, to my own audacity, to my . . . that is . . . in short, to my unexpected arrival at your house.’ He hurried on, blushing for his gaucherie. ‘Guessing you to be here, sir, I took the liberty of seeking you unannounced. But I see you are engaged——’

‘Liberty fiddlesticks!’ said his host, with some asperity. ‘Engaged I am truly: poking and prying into the nature of things, like any child staring at an ant-hill: but never so deeply engaged as not to welcome you, my dear sir.’ The two men bowed to each other. ‘You come at a happy moment,’ added Dr Humphrey. ‘I am on the point of trying an experiment in aerostatics. Come now: you shall see it.’ His voice was excited, his eyes fiery with eagerness. ‘But first,’ said he, with an abrupt difficult resumption of formal politeness, ‘tell me your news. You have had an agreeable journey?’

‘Very agreeable,’ said Marden. ‘But I am interrupting you——’

‘And,’ said the doctor, almost sternly, as though resolved to fulfil the very letter of civility, ‘you have enjoyed good health, you and your household?’

‘Alas, no,’ answered the young man. ‘For myself I have nothing to complain of. But my man Dewdney——’

‘Excellent!’ The doctor turned back to his bench. ‘Now this little experiment, my friend, is . . .’ His voice trailed away.

‘My man Dewdney,’ repeated Marden, ‘who had been of my household longer than I can remember . . .’

‘Ah yes,’ agreed the doctor. ‘Faithful fellow. . . . This little experiment, Marden, is one that may have very far-reaching results. But you were telling about your servant?’

Marden thought it best to come to the point quickly and have done. ‘We buried him last week.’

‘Yes?’ said the doctor, smiling pleasantly. ‘Very far-reaching results indeed. So you buried him, did you?’ Seeing his guest’s grave look, he tried to recall his wandering thoughts. ‘What was that! Did you say you had buried him? Buried, did you say?’

Marden nodded.

‘Poor fellow! God rest his soul. Now this is what I propose to do. Here is a basin of common water. Very sad indeed, Marden. Upon my word it is. Common well water, d’ye see? And here is the allantois of a calf, which I’ve had specially prepared for me at the Faculty. Now from this common water I am going to extract a vapour, and with that vapour I am going to fill the allantois. And then—che sera sera, signor, as my old master, Salvemini, used to say.’ He contemplated this prospect in silence for a moment. Marden was forgotten, and knew it.

‘I think, if you don’t mind, sir——’

‘Eh? Yes, certainly, my boy. You’ll find Celia in the music-room, or the library, or perhaps the . . . music-room. We shall meet later.’

‘Doctor,’ said Marden, speaking stiffly to hide his embarrassment, ‘I propose, with your permission, to ask Miss Humphrey’s hand in marriage.’

‘Quite so. Quite so,’ returned Miss Humphrey’s father. And he spoke in the rather loud cheerful tone of one who has not heard a word of what was said to him and will resort to any subterfuge rather than have it repeated. ‘She will be delighted to see you. The music-room, I think. Delighted.’

Whether she were indeed delighted was more than the young man dared ask himself when presently, as her father had foretold, he found her in the music-room, sitting by the fire. She sat as though spiritually folded into herself, her hands resting in her lap, her glance held by the glowing logs; and something in her posture, some small quietness, some hint of a serenity at once childlike and mature, touched in her lover a chord so intimate and dear, stirred so ancient and compelling a music, that for a moment he forgot himself, his hopes and his timidity, and stood in a trance as if listening. Under this sudden assault of beauty his heart took refuge in admiration of detail: the long lashes, the russet-brown ringlets, the candid boyish mouth, the small straight nose that was somehow both proud and mischievous. Not in any one of these features, nor in their sum, lay the secret of his enthralment. These were but the outward signs of a mystery. Not his sight alone, his ear, too, was enchanted: her voice greeting him made the spell more binding. But so soon as he himself spoke, the world of habit closed in on him, and remembering his errand he felt courage ebbing away. Now surely was the time, he told himself. But no: it must be later: if I am precipitate I ruin all. If I speak now it will astonish and alarm her and she will think me a boor. And to distract himself, while he stammered his replies, he fell to praising in his mind her simple elegance and to comparing her appearance, greatly to its advantage, with that of the fine urban ladies with their vast hoops and enormous head-dresses. In her exquisite person were combined, he thought, the wholesome natural beauty of a Theocritan shepherdess and the charm of refined sensibility. Even so, with all his newly returned selfconciousness, he found courage to beg her for a song; and though at first she quietly evaded the request, at its repetition she moved without protest to the instrument, and touched the keys, and with the first warm tingling response of the plucked strings became blissfully enclosed in the world her music made. And this is her world, he thought in his rapture: this eternity, this perfection, this radiant and all-sufficing harmony of delights: this is hers, and this she is. It was a love song she sang, in her cool clear voice, and a song centuries old; but the dew was still fresh upon it, and that the sentiment was perhaps more manly than womanly made her rendering of it the more serenely impersonal:

Yes, this, he swore, was her world and her dominion: of this paradise, this shining universe wrought of spun silk and melting harmonies, this pattern of sweet sound, these rhyming silences, this art that could distil intoxication from the very dregs of human melancholy: of this she was queen. As he listened, and in the pause that followed his listening, he dreamed himself to be sharing that dominion with her, all the heartache of the world forgotten, or remembered only that it might enhance their joy by contrast, as on summer days we sharpen our delight in birds and flowers and grass and golden sky by recollections of winter. And still, as he half-knew, he was weaving—of her looks, her graces, her accomplishments—a fantasy that should screen him, till he had courage enough to face it, from the loveliness, dimly surmised, of the real Celia, the living and secret heart. He was not new to gallantry, but he was new to love; his occasional amours had brought no ease to the hidden hunger that lived in him, had brought indeed nothing but a half-despised pleasure and a dull disillusionment. He had never knowingly desired, as now he desired, an intimate communion of the spirit; or at least had never been drawn, as now he was being drawn, into the persuasion that this glory was perhaps imminent. It was this hope, and the fear shadowing it, that made him tremble and falter; made him, at the supper table, first garrulous, talking much of his interest in Dr Humphrey’s researches, and then tongue-tied, so that Celia was moved to tease him into speech again. He became stern with himself, and formed an inflexible resolve; yet when, an hour later, in the music-room, the old doctor rose from his chair and with a mumbled apology went off to the studies he could no longer resist, leaving the two young people alone together, Celia’s lover fell a-trembling again, telling himself, with desperate resolution: Before we leave this room I shall have asked her to marry me. And she will have said—what? Conjecture bereaved him of breath and made his heart gallop. If he won her, the world would burst into flower and flame; if he failed, there were no words that could describe the desolation that would engulf him.

‘Another song,’ he pleaded. And he came close to where she sat, that he might lead her to the instrument.

With a half shrug she rose, placed her hand lightly in his arm, walked the three necessary steps, and sat down at the keyboard.

‘Perhaps, Mr Marden, you would prefer something of a newer fashion this time?’

He did not hear her; or, hearing, did not understand. For he was suddenly in the throes of a gigantic struggle. He had forgotten his request that she should sing. He was unaware that she had asked him a question and awaited the answer. Everything was vanished from his mind except the task that tormented it and the remote vision that was the goal of its striving. He stood stiff and straight, and almost angry, with his gaze fixed on the wall opposite him.

And he said, like a boy repeating a lesson: ‘Madam, I have Dr Humphrey’s permission to ask your hand in marriage.’

It seemed that an age passed, an age of silence and terror and expectation, before he could bring himself to glance at her. And then it was too late to read her answer, unless anything of significance could be read in her drooping posture, hands in lap, eyes downcast: just such a posture as had startled him earlier in the day by its beauty and bravery. Despite his fever, his liquefying knees, his parched mouth, he contrived to speak again, addressing her bowed head.

‘I hope . . . may I hope . . .’ But this was sheer arrogance: how dared he hope anything! ‘Miss Humphrey, this silence is torture. Your father, I say, consents to my . . . my asking . . . in short . . .’ But his ‘in short’ proved very long indeed; for without a sign from her he could not go on.

At last she looked up, with a whimsical half-wry smile. ‘Well, Mr Marden? My father . . . ?’

‘Consents,’ said Marden eagerly. ‘I have . . . I have his permission to address you. If I may speak . . .’

‘Indeed, sir,’ she cried, with a little laugh, ‘I am waiting for you to speak. You have my father’s permission, you say. And now you have mine. I am all attention.’

‘Ah, you are laughing at me.’ But, despite that or because of it, he was more at ease. ‘But I’m resolved to tell you that I love you, that I am your devoted slave, and that I shall count myself the happiest man in the world if you will be my wife. . . . Oh Celia, I’m no hand at making speeches——’

‘On the contrary, Mr Marden, you make them very prettily. I find you are full of unsuspected talent.’

He looked at her ruefully, ready to believe himself disdained. There was mockery in her smile, but there was friendliness too. Amused she might be, and he did not grudge her that: but she was not displeased. Thinking that her air of mischief was perhaps designed to wean him without unkindness from his hopes of her, ‘I doubt it is impossible,’ he surmised, ‘that you should care for me.’

‘Is it?’ said she, still smiling.

Impetuously, with sudden hope, he put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Do you mean, can you mean . . . ?’

‘Nay, sir, but I perfectly agree with you. It is impossible that I should care.’ He withdrew his hand hastily. A flush mounted his cheek. But before he could find words she went on: ‘And even did I disagree, it would not become me to contradict you, would it, Mr Marden? . . . Oh Jack, what a precious booby you are!’ He was at her side again, with his hands upon her. She leaned back, laughing up at him.

There was tenderness already kindled in her teasing eyes, and with the first kiss it became a clear light, and the laughter vanished from them, leaving only the sweet pain of love to reinforce the mute language of her lips. In the touch of those lips, in the light of those eyes, he found wonder and assuaging and the rapture of homecoming. The darkness was cast out of him; his exile from some long-lost and long-forgotten paradise was at an end; he had lost his small lonely self, had found release and fulfilment, in this largeness of love; his spirit and hers mingled with their mingling breath. And now, with the light of confessed love shining in her face, she was a new Celia: a surprised, happy, trustful child, born into a new world. They gazed at each other, and every tick of the clock added another coin to the heaped treasure. Each face, in the other’s sight, was a country at once new and familiar: every small discovery was greeted, in their hearts, with a cry of startled recognition: It’s you, you! Their pulses beat to that music. The wonder was less that they had found each other than that they had ever been made twain at all, so close now, it seemed, was their communion.

‘You have another name, haven’t you?’ he said.

She nodded. ‘Celia Ann.’

‘Celia is cool, and Ann is kind, and both are lovely . . .’

‘And both of us are yours,’ she assured him, ‘if . . .’

‘If!’ he exclaimed, in mock reproach. ‘I’ll have no ifs.’

‘If you are sure you love me,’ she said slipping away from him, ‘and if,’ she added, and with no smile to cloak the warning, ‘if I am myself sure of it.’

‘My dearest,’ he protested solemnly, ‘I am your faithful lover till death, and beyond. You cannot doubt me.’

‘I cannot doubt,’ said she coolly, seating herself at some little distance from him, ‘that you are in a mood now to be faithful. And indeed I heartily wish you may prove so, Mr Marden.’

Mr Marden! Was he become Mr Marden again! He stared in alarm. ‘Celia! My dear!’

A smile reassured him, but she would not let him approach her. She had resumed possession of herself, and the unexpectedness of her demeanour delighted as well as disconcerted him. ‘How cruel you are,’ he said fondly. His enthralment was complete.

CHAPTER 9 BROTHER RAPHE WRITES A LETTER AND TALKS WITH HIS DOVES

Time passed quickly at Fedrum, but Jack Marden and Celia, living in their new world, the world of each other, took small account of its passing. Sooner or later, as he knew, Marden must go back to his Fee, resume supervision of the estate and make arrangements for his wedding, which Celia, without committing herself to a precise date, had promised should not be delayed unduly. He was aware of possessing, in Raphe Gandy, a steward on whose riper wisdom he could depend more securely than on his own, so that a day or two more or less of absence made no great matter. Meanwhile, at Maiden Holt, Brother Raphe was far from dull. Despite his newly assumed duties, which he performed as punctually as might be, he still found occasion for the busy idleness, the fruitful meditation, that was his life’s habit. In this he was aided, against his will and far more than he suspected, by the contriving of Mrs Dewdney the housekeeper, who, being deeply shocked at the sight of His Reverence with sacking tied round his middle and secular mop and pail in his hand, did everything in her power, which was considerable, to frustrate his industrious intentions. So on the fifth day of his stewardship he was able to devote a large part of the morning to the composition of a letter:

At this point Brother Raphe put down his pen and took a turn or two round the room, the better to recall the scene to his mind. It puzzled him to remember that while one part of his judgment had applauded Mrs Bailey, her anger and distress, another part was won to the reluctant verdict that Tisha was the better woman. Despite her sullen looks and stubbornly evasive answers, and even despite the scandal of her deeds, he judged her to be sound at core; and, whether by intuition or guesswork, he quickly surprised her secret, perceiving her to be ashamed less of her passion than of her malice. That she seemed too little repentant of her carnal sin distressed him, but he rejoiced to find her purged of the deadlier and spiritual distemper, and could not in his heart think so ill of her as her parents were resolved to do. He resumed his letter:

With this salutary reflection Brother Raphe again laid down his pen; and presently, leaving the letter unfinished, he rose and went in search of food for the doves. In these gentle creatures he took great pleasure: the delicate sheen of their plumage charmed him; their voices comforted his heart and conjured him out of winter into a paradise of sunshine and green shadow and running water; and the pattern of their flight was a continuing counterpoint, innocent and subtle as the love of God. He sometimes indulged the fancy that the spirits of the blest would from time to time assume the form of doves, and that he himself might some day spread wings and fly away and be at rest in flight, and, in that contemplation of the Eternal which was God’s bounty to the disimprisoned soul, forget the cruelties and enmities and dolorous disasters of earth. The dovecote was a stout red-bricked building surrounded by tall birches: in summer a cool refuge, in winter feathery warm with duskiness and soft crooning and fluttering wings. This morning, as he entered, he experienced more than ever a feeling of sanctuary. At his first word of greeting, the air became full of wings, a winged cloud that settled upon him, his head, his shoulders, his outstretched arms: he stood like a man drenched in a fountain of birds, drenched and contented. ‘Now, my dears,’ said he, ‘it is breakfast-time. Let me see what I can find in my pocket. But first of all . . .’ First of all, lest there should chance to be a Christian among them, he said grace, and at the words ‘et spiritus sancti’ he thought of the Holy Dove and became lost for a moment in radiant conjecture. . . .

When the birds had been fed with the food he brought them, and their spirits quickened (let us hope) by his homilies, he went back to his letter:

CHAPTER 10 CHANCE, WITH THE HELP OF A PROUD LADY, MAKES TROUBLE FOR JACK MARDEN

Within an hour of receiving this letter, Jack Marden shewed it to Celia.

‘I’ve escaped a great deal of vexation, it seems. But at poor Father Gaudy’s expense.’

As she read the letter she said to herself: He is too sure of me, or he would not ask me to read so squalid a story. Were I his wife already he could hardly treat me with less ceremony. She was not in fact shocked or offended: the lower orders being so remote from her world, their misdemeanours were as little embarrassing to discuss as the habits of farmyard creatures. But she wondered whether Jack did not take her too much for granted, and this speculation, this fear, this conviction—for the matter grew worse with thinking on it—was born of the fancy that she had perhaps been too easy with him, and by yielding her heart too readily had encouraged him to think himself irresistible. She was not vain: she thought Jack wonderful and herself not at all so. But she was afraid—for now her light fancy had suddenly assumed the dimensions of terror—lest by impulsiveness, by the very honesty of her love, she had made herself of less account in his sight. The fear kindled a flush in her cheeks.

‘I think you need not pity him overmuch.’ She handed back the letter. Her voice and manner were cool.

He was bewildered, and cursed himself for a clumsy fool. ‘Need I not?’ he said. ‘And, pray, why?’

There was constraint between them, and she avoided looking at him. ‘It would seem to have amused him, this vulgar comedy.’

‘I did not read his letter so,’ said Marden. ‘I have the greatest respect and love for Father Gandy, and he is not the man to think lightly of such a matter, even did his cloth permit it.’ This was true, but its implications did less than justice both to the priest’s urbane temper and to Marden’s own honesty. ‘I assure you, my dear Celia, he is the worthiest of men.’

‘I have no doubt of it,’ she answered. ‘I find he is far too worthy a man to think harshly of a woman, so she be pretty, no matter how grossly she has smirched her sex’s honour. No doubt you are with him in that?’

Marden summoned an uneasy laugh. He came nearer and took her hand. ‘But are you not forgetting, my love, that he is our spiritual father? Who am I—who are we—to pit our judgement against his?’

Before she could answer, her father came into the room. He bustled over to the fire, rubbing his hands and blowing out his cheeks, and saying ‘Ah! Phew . . . ah!’: in fine, doing all those things by which your man of sedentary habits advertises that he has been taking exercise. Dr Humphrey had ridden that day to Upchurch and back, visiting his old friend Captain Matters, a retired naval man under whose command he had sailed twenty years back as ship’s doctor. The ride, he felt, had done him good; his muscles were agreeably fatigued; his blood flowed more freely than its wont; and he felt extremely virtuous. With Captain Matters he had taken a bottle or two of good wine, besides eating heartily of a saddle of mutton, a couple of boiled fowls, a pig’s face well roasted, and some apple tarts and damson cheese. He had enjoyed his ride, he had enjoyed his meal, and he had greatly enjoyed the talk, which had consisted, as so much good talk does, mainly of sentences beginning ‘Yes, and do you remember . . .’ By this incantation the two friends had conjured their vanished past into being, and lived in it for an hour or two from the depths of their easy chairs, sitting one each side of the purring fire and with a jar of tobacco between them. It gave a wonderful relish to this comfort to remember how mountainous and green the sea had looked that bleak March morning in ’28 (‘or was it ’27—how time flies, to be sure!’) when they had thought, with good reason, that their last hour was come; and there was pleasure, as well as a momentary sadness, in recalling poor Benjamin Creed, who thought himself a singer, and a politician, and a deep thinker, and a rake, and could not hear of any achievement without wishing it had been his own, and yet in spite of his nonsense was a good seaman and a good fellow, and died absurdly, like a hero, in trying to rescue the ship’s cat. This rich feast of reminiscence, following the more material feast, had warmed and stimulated Dr Humphrey, so that he was now, for the moment, a changed man, and within an ace of being boisterous.

‘Well, my children,’ he cried gaily, ‘here I am back again. And I hope you have borne my absence with fortitude. Eh, Jack, you rascal? Did the time lag heavily, my boy, with none but my daughter to entertain you? I trust not, i’ faith, for in a moment or two I must leave you again and pursue my studies.’ He winked at his prospective son-in-law, standing with his back to the hearth and enjoying the sensation of warming calves. Marden smiled not very happily, but the older man took this to be a sign of lover’s shyness and was the merrier for it. ‘Ah yes, Jack, and I’ve been hearing a sad tale about you from my old friend Matters. Seems you had a thieving trollop in your custody and failed to get her hanged.’

Marden gaped. The allusion, whatever it imported, was untimely. ‘Indeed, sir, you are merry with me. I’m no hangman, nor judge either.’

‘Well, that’s as may be, my boy. But what of this Robinson woman, as she calls herself? Who is she that she claims acquaintance with you?’

‘Robinson?’ The young man changed colour, for he felt his mistress’s eyes upon him, ‘Does she claim so? I wonder at her impudence.’

‘You need not wonder long,’ said Dr Humphrey, ‘for her impudence is shortly to be dealt with at the Assizes. It seems she was brought before Matters on a charge of horse-stealing. Twas my young Lord Halford’s horse that had been snatched from his stables a se’nnight or more since, and he himself caught her riding it; and though the young scamp has been bedded with the wench, if all tales be true, he takes it very ill that she should prove a thief. And now what does she do but declare, on oath, that she had the horse from a fellow that was killed last month on Dyking Common, which is in Squire Marden’s Fee, she says; and Squire Marden, says she, was a very kind handsome gentleman and would speak for her. So there’s your character, Jack. And let’s hope you can give the wench herself as good a one. Ha ha ha!’

‘Indeed,’ said Marden gravely, ‘but I must say what I can for the unhappy wretch. She is indifferent honest where virtue is in question, but I believe she is not a thief. I must ride over to see your friend Captain Matters, sir, and tell him what I can in her favour. I will go tomorrow.’ He turned to Celia and with a bow added: ‘With your kind leave, my dear Celia?’

She acknowledged his attention with icy politeness. ‘Is it wise to delay so long, since your friend, it seems, is in danger of hanging?’

‘Come, my dear, what’s this?’ cried her father. ‘Tomorrow’s time enough, and the lad don’t want to turn out for a cold ride at this time of day.’

‘We do not know what he wants, father. In his eagerness to save his friend from the gallows he will hardly stay to consider his comfort, let alone ours. It is not to be expected of any man.’

Dr Humphrey shrugged his shoulders and made at Marden a comical guilty grimace. ‘She is resolved to quarrel with us, Jack. Alas, alas, we are in disgrace, my friend.’ He glanced uneasily from one to the other of the lovers and saw that they wanted to be rid of him. He had innocently made mischief between them and he blamed himself, but the matter was beyond his mending. With a sigh and a shrug he betook himself out of the room.

‘Celia, what have I done to displease you?’

‘Why should you suppose me to be displeased?’

He was nettled by this evasion. ‘Twice you have called this woman my friend, and you must know that she is no such thing. It is true that I was of some service to her in her extremity, but that is all. She was seduced by a rogue, who brought her to the Fee, lodged with her at the inn there, and then deserted her, riding off on one horse and leading another. Within an hour of that treachery—indeed within ten minutes of it, if my reckoning is right—he was thrown and killed, embarrassed, as I understand, by the conduct of the led horse. A man called Noke—the rascal mentioned in Father Gandy’s letter—witnessed the accident, secured the remaining horse to a tree, and brought me the dead man to Maiden Holt. It fell to my lot, therefore, to hold an inquest on the matter. And there’s small doubt that by falling from his horse that fellow cheated the executioner of a duty. He was certainly a thief and likely enough a cut-throat. As to that, I need not weary you with the evidence.’

‘You need not,’ said Celia coldly. ‘Already I begin to see the matter more clearly. You are asking me to approve of your friend Mrs Robinson on the grounds that she was a thief’s drab. I confess it is strange pleading, but no doubt there is method in it.’

Marden was not only indignant: he was even stupid enough to be astonished. That women were incapable of fairness to each other was a maxim he had often enough heard and assented to. But Celia was Celia; and Celia, he had thought, was perfection. Stung by her speech, ‘You are unjust, madam!’ he cried. ‘Upon my soul you are. You condemn an innocent woman without a hearing. It happens that I gave her the protection of my escort as far as Upchurch, and during that ride I got from her the whole story. She has been weak and foolish, and over-fond of a scoundrel. But I do not and cannot believe her to be vicious at heart. And I believe that you, too, could you but see her, would think as I do.’

‘At least I can congratulate her upon her advocate,’ retorted Celia. ‘You defend the creature with much spirit, Mr Marden: I might almost say, with heat. Whatever the nature of your debt to Mrs Robinson, I think you may now count it paid.’

‘Debt? I do not understand you.’

‘I cannot believe you so obtuse.’ For a moment her irony wavered, and her anger shewed nakedly. ‘Can you not see that by your solicitude for this woman you insult me? Innocent indeed! You are too ardent. And why, pray, did you conceal from me that you had had a companion on your journey here?’

Why? His mind uneasily echoed the question. It was a small enough matter, but he had preferred not to mention it. Then, it would have provoked no more than mild surprise; now, it wore another colour.

‘I see you have no answer ready,’ said Celia. ‘Do not trouble to invent one.’

He became desperate; his heart cried out to her; but pride and anger would not let him use the language of persuasion. ‘If you are resolved to think ill of me,’ he said stiffly, ‘I cannot prevent you.’

‘If you persist in your officiousness on this creature’s behalf,’ she answered, ‘I shall know what to think, and what to do.’

They left it at that, and for what little remained of the day treated each other with studied politeness, greatly to the discomfort, when he was present, of Dr Humphrey. Retiring early, Celia cried herself to sleep, and woke a dozen times in the drear night, frightened of what she had done, seeing the prospect of happiness slip from her, yet feeling unable to arrest the course of events. She was frightened and lonely and perplexed, a forlorn child, hating Jack, angry with him, loving and wanting him: wanting him so much that she dared not surrender to him but on the terms her pride dictated, for if I yield now, she thought, he will think me an easy conquest and cease to care for me. And with the thought that he cherished a kindness, if nothing more, for that wretched unknown woman, she tried to harden her heart against him; and in this, when morning came, she seemed to have succeeded, for she presided at the breakfast-table without any sign of discomposure, and sustained with him and her father an elegant and unmeaning conversation.

The old man was gleeful at heart, thinking that the cloud had passed out of the lovers’ sky. But to Marden this calm seemed more ominous than open warfare. Nevertheless he saddled his horse and rode away and made his affidavit to Captain Matters. He did what he must; but it was not alone a sense of justice that moved him, and not alone compassion for an outcast woman. Celia had in effect ‘dared’ him, and even had he been so little scrupulous as to be willing to withhold his evidence, he would still have lacked courage to refuse battle with her. If I let her rule me in this, he said, she will despise me for a weakling; and because he was truly weak, because he was so much in dread of losing her, he dared not appear so. But now, he thought, as he rode quickly back to her, now I can crave her forgiveness, even though I have done no wrong. And he tasted in anticipation the sweetness of reconciliation.

She greeted him stonily. ‘May I ask where you have been? It is a matter that concerns us both.’

He bowed, trembling and angry: angry that she must force these formal manners upon him. ‘To Upchurch, as you well know. On the business we discussed yesterday.’

She thought: I hate him, I hate him. If she had said as much to Marden, he would perhaps have known the true violence of her love and made all right between them. But she controlled and concealed herself. ‘Very well,’ she said. And it seemed by her air to be a matter of infinite unimportance. ‘You are released from your engagement, Mr Marden.’

‘You cannot mean that—for so small a thing.’ He suddenly seized her hands, and the contact made him for a moment forget her words, so that he would have kissed her. But she, though longing to surrender, and sick with loneliness, turned sharply away and with her hands, her stiff body, her disdainful looks, repulsed him.

He bowed, accepting dismissal. ‘Your pardon, madam. I will go saddle my horse again.’

So he rode back to his Fee. The sights he had taken pleasure in a week ago because they had been the background for his vision of Celia were for the same cause hateful to him now. He looked in upon himself and shuddered at the ugliness he saw there. Because he was rejected by love he felt himself to be unlovable and loathsome, and he tried to hate the girl who had made him feel so; and did at moments hate her, with a murderous and lustful hatred, an impulse to ravish and destroy. This, he thought, proved him vile, and so justified the verdict he imputed to her; and he was alone with his vileness, an outcast from the family of mankind. That final gesture of hers, seeming to speak her disgust of his very person, had changed and unmanned him, filling him with an ugly and angry shame. Deep in his unconscious heart the child he had been ran in terror from a beloved face turned strange; but this memory lay beyond reach of his introspection and the poison worked the more shrewdly because it worked in secret. By the time he reached home he was drugged with his own gall, so that there seemed to be two of him: the man who smiled and was evasively polite with Brother Raphe, confessing to no greater disease than weariness and an aching head; and this other, this proud, tortured, and self-torturing Ishmael, this demon of hate and self-hate, this exile from life, who would never again, he vowed, allow it to be guessed that he had a heart like other men. In dreams that night, charmed by the sleek grace of her form and the shy beauty of her wondering eyes, he pursued a hind in the forest, and caught her, and coaxed her into friendship, and felt her body turn to writhing maggots under his touch. He woke sweating, and remembered Celia; but presently he found he had fallen into a deep well; his bare feet touched a slimy bottom; the water, creeping with cold life, came up to his armpits. It was dark and cold and silent, and he thought that he must stay there for ever, dreadfully immortal, and never again hear a human voice or feel the sun on his hands. The world above was infinitely remote, a mere mind-picture of something long lost or perhaps only imagined. He exhausted himself with sobbing and shouting, and the walls of the well gave back a hollow sound like madness, till at last that too failed him, and, though he seemed to be shouting still, the silence was absolute, a vast void. If only someone would let the bucket down for me, he thought; and with the thought came hope and a renewal of longing. In this expectation, with the sickness of despair often intervening, he lived many long years, years as many and as slow as the small slimy things that lived in the dank mud of the walls and were his only companions. At last, light from above blazed down on him, and in that shaft of radiance, partly obscuring it, the dark shape of the bucket slowly descended. And presently his feet were in the bucket, his hands were clinging to the rope, and he was being drawn up, up, into the world again, and could hear the rhythm and creak of the windlass—a ravishing music. And now, being within a yard of the top, and hearing a friend’s voice calling him by name, he became crazy with eagerness and joy, and thought himself already in heaven, until he saw a hand thrust over the well’s brink, and the hand held a knife, and the knife began gently, gently, sawing at the rope that supported him. He fell. The world of light became a distant star; dark water engulfed him; silence surged back into his ears. But with the terror of the fall he woke, to remember Celia and the face of her scorn. And to shut out that sight, which was so much more terrible than any nightmare, he tried to fight his way back into the country of dreams, and dozed, and woke, and dozed, and woke again. And now, at each waking, Celia came to him with love in her eyes; and he, knowing himself mocked, shuddered and shrank from her.

But in the morning the world had a different colour, so that he forgot the blackest of his resolutions and was betrayed into telling something of his story to Brother Raphe. ‘I have a mind,’ he ended bitterly,’ to marry poor Tisha Bailey, and let another man’s child inherit my patrimony.’

‘To what end?’ asked Brother Raphe mildly.

‘To no end,’ returned the young man,’ unless we account it the end of me and my hopes. Indeed the project pleases me. I have no other use for my name. Why should I not fling it as a cloak to this poor naked creature?’

‘Why indeed?’ echoed Brother Raphe, staring sideways at the floor, as was his bashful habit. ‘It has a charitable sound, your project. But God looks not only to the act, my son: He reads the heart whence it came. And even I, the least of His servants, can see an inch beyond the end of my nose, Jack. Let me see if I cannot tell you your true motive. It is in your mind, perhaps, that by means of what the world will count disgrace you may revenge yourself upon Miss Humphrey. Hearing of this she will know, you tell yourself, to what a pass she has brought you, and in that knowledge will suffer. So argue those weak souls who, in such a case as yours, lay impious hands upon their own lives. By dying thus, they say, I shall force the world to see how much I have suffered, and shall make those that wronged me writhe in remorse. That is the sad logic that seduces ’em; and I think it is this arrogant self-pity and this malice, more than the fatal act itself, that earns damnation of heaven.’

Marden shrugged his shoulders. ‘You have shrewd eyesight, sir, and cool judgement. But, with all respect, you are a stranger to love. I have suffered a gross humiliation. I am humbled to the dust, and there’s nothing left me but to make a meal of it.’

‘The remedy for humiliation is humility, Jack. Or so I read the matter. A truly humble soul knows its own worth, whether in good fortune or bad. It is your proud man alone that can suffer humiliation; for pride is the cloak of a fearful heart. Forgive me if I am sententious: I speak only in love of you.’ Marden answered nothing, and after a long silence the priest said shyly: ‘Are you still inclined to marry Tisha Bailey?’

Marden was already ashamed of that intention, and wished to forget that he had entertained it. ‘Then is there nothing I can do but sheepishly kiss the rod?’

‘Alas, how can I advise you, Jack? I am, as you say, a stranger to love,’ said Brother Raphe, his eyes twinkling. ‘But if you would indeed have counsel of this stranger, I would humbly suggest that you marry Miss Humphrey.’

Marden stared in indignation. ‘You are pleased to joke about it.’

‘Do you not love Miss Humphrey?’ persisted the priest.

‘What has that got to do with it?’ asked Marden sulkily. ‘She does not love me. That would seem to settle the affair once and for all.’

‘Forgive me, Jack, and be patient. Remember that I am speaking of something that lies outside my province. I cannot advise you in this difficult matter.’ His voice trailed off into silence. But presently, as if gaining hope, he remarked casually: ‘All I dare say is this: that if I were a young man in love, and my lady had first taken me to her heart and then for a seeming trifle cast me out, I should not believe too readily that she no longer loved me. And if I found myself, one fine February morning, within a day’s ride of her, I should not waste time discussing her with a prosy old priest, who, of necessity, could know nothing of the ways of women.’

Having blandly addressed these remarks to a particular square-inch of carpet, Brother Raphe slowly raised his eyes and smiled at his young friend with an air of apology. His innocent gaiety of heart was infectious, and Marden, with sudden emotion, ran to him like a boy and clasped his arm. ‘Sir, you are goodness itself. You make me ashamed. And I believe you may be right in this. I do indeed. She loved me two days ago, and if I can prove myself innocent she may love me again, why not?’

‘Resolve that she shall,’ said Brother Raphe, ‘and I’ll wager she will. But never mind about proving your innocence, Jack. That can come later if come it must. Ask her forgiveness first; and if she loves you, as I believe she does, all will be well. Woman is a sealed mystery to me, as to all men; but I remember to have heard it said that a woman will forgive a man anything except his being in the right when they quarrel. Be ardent, Jack, ardent and sudden. And if she deny you, do not hear her. As for your innocence, that can wait till after the wedding.’

‘Heaven bless you,’ cried Marden fervently, ‘I’ll go now and bid her name the day. No, I won’t. I have a better plan still. I’ll name it for her and take no denial.’

Brother Raphe’s eyes widened in wonder, and his plump face became rosy with admiration and goodwill. ‘Why, what a resourceful fellow you are, upon my word!’ he exclaimed. ‘I wager she’ll never resist you.’

But Marden did not hear this prophecy, for he was already gone.

CHAPTER 11 A SECOND WOOING: CONTAINING FEW WORDS BUT OF MUCH MOMENT

While Celia Humphrey, in a trance of misery, went woodenly about her household duties, supervised her domestics, listened mechanically to her father’s talk, and told herself that she had done with men for ever, a horse called Tarquin, the best in the Marden stables, carried his master swiftly towards her. To be riding so gallant an animal gave Marden a sense of exhilaration and power, which, added to the new hope that beat in him, made him feel irresistible. On fire with love, and with a kind of glad fury goading him, he had already persuaded himself of success; and this persuasion endured until the moment when he found himself entering the drive of the house at Fedrum. There, a trembling came over him, and he wondered at himself. How came I here, and what am I doing? She does not love me: I had best go back. But Tarquin carried him on: and here the drive ended, here was the house, and here, within ten yards of him, was Celia herself, returning from a walk, with her favourite dog, a large black retriever, following at her heels. His heart turned over in his breast; hope worked a dire agony in him; but suddenly, with anger, he recalled her scornful face of yesterday, and so at last went forward gladly and sternly as to battle. She was not yet aware of his presence. She walked slowly towards the house; and because the world was empty, the fair sky a mockery, the sunlight cruel, she looked only on the ground, and told herself, for the twentieth time, that she would never see that presuming wretch again; nor wanted to, since it was clear that he did not truly love her.

‘Good morning, madam!’

He was dismounted; and Tarquin, knowing his manners, trotted quietly away in the direction of the stables. Celia turned and stared, for a moment unbelieving. ‘So you are back?’ she said. How cool she is, he thought: a bright sword, finely tempered. But he smiled grimly, and bowed. ‘I am back.’

They faced each other with bright angry eyes. From the house came the sound of a gong, militant, challenging, rousing to battle.

‘Why have you come?’ she asked. ‘I have come to tell you, my dear, that everything is arranged and we are to be married at once, you and I.’

Her cheeks reddened; her eyes flashed. ‘You are impudent, sir.’

‘I am resolved, madam.’

Her eyes became brighter still, and her mouth trembled. ‘It is very civil in you, Mr Marden, that you take the trouble to inform me of my future, since it seems I am given no voice in the matter.’

He was silent.

‘So I am to marry you? And at once, I think you said?’

‘At once.’ He stood his ground. ‘That is,’ he added, sadly conscious of the anticlimax, ‘next week, on any day of your choosing.’

Celia laughed. ‘I am glad,’ she said, ‘that we are permitted to dine first. Shall we go in, Jack? My father will be waiting.’