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DAN had come to grief over his Latin, and was kept in; so Una went alone to Far Wood. Dan’s big catapult and the lead bullets that Hobden had made for him were hidden in an old hollow beech-stub on the west of the wood. They had named the place out of the verse in Lays of Ancient Rome.

From lordly Volaterrae,
Where scowls the far-famed hold,
Piled by the hands of giants
For Godlike Kings of old.

They were the ‘Godlike Kings,’ and when old Hobden piled some comfortable brushwood between the big wooden knees of Volaterrae, they called him ‘Hands of Giants.’

Una slipped through their private gap in the fence, and sat still awhile, scowling as scowlily and lordlily as she knew how; for ‘Volaterrae’ is an important watch-tower that juts out of Far Wood just as Far Wood juts out of the hillside. Pook’s Hill lay below her, and all the turns of the brook as it wanders out of the Willingford Woods, between hop-gardens, to old Hobden’s cottage at the Forge. The Sou’-West wind (there is always a wind by Volaterrae) blew from the bare ridge where Cherry Clack Windmill stands.

Now wind prowling through woods sounds like exciting things going to happen, and that is why on blowy days you stand up in Volaterrae and shout bits of the Lays to suit its noises.

Una took Dan’s catapult from its secret place, and made ready to meet Lars Porsena’s army stealing through the wind-whitened aspens by the brook. A gust boomed up the valley, and Una chanted sorrowfully:

‘Verbenna down to Ostia
Hath wasted all the plain;
Astur hath stormed Janiculum,
And the stout guards are slain.’

But the wind, not charging fair to the wood, started aside and shook a single oak in Gleason’s pasture. Here it made itself all small and crouched among the grasses, waving the tips of them as a cat waves the tip of her tail before she springs.

‘Now welcome—welcome, Sextus,’ sang Una, loading the catapult—

‘Now welcome to thy home!
Why dost thou stay, and turn away?
Here lies the road to Rome.’

She fired into the face of the lull, to wake up the cowardly wind, and heard a grunt from behind a thorn in the pasture.

‘Oh, my Winkie!’ she said aloud, and that was something she had picked up from Dan. ‘I b’lieve I’ve tickled up a Gleason cow.’

‘You little painted beast!’ a voice cried. ‘I’ll teach you to sling your masters!’

She looked down most cautiously, and saw a young man covered with hoopy bronze armour all glowing among the late broom. But what Una admired beyond all was his great bronze helmet with a red horse-tail that flicked in the wind. She could hear the long hairs rasp on his shimmery shoulder-plates.

‘What does the Faun mean,’ he said, half aloud to himself, ‘by telling me the Painted People have changed?’ He caught sight of Una’s yellow head. ‘Have you seen a painted lead-slinger?’ he called.

‘No-o,’ said Una. ‘But if you’ve seen a bullet—’

‘Seen?’ cried the man. ‘It passed within a hair’s-breadth of my ear.’

‘Well, that was me. I’m most awfully sorry.’

‘Didn’t the Faun tell you I was coming?’ He smiled.

‘Not if you mean Puck. I thought you were a Gleason cow. I—I didn’t know you were a—a—— What are you?’

He laughed outright, showing a set of splendid teeth. His face and eyes were dark, and his eyebrows met above his big nose in one bushy black bar.

‘They call me Parnesius. I have been a Centurion of the Seventh Cohort of the Thirtieth Legion—the Ulpia Victrix. Did you sling that bullet?’

‘I did. I was using Dan’s catapult,’ said Una.

‘Catapults!’ said he. ‘I ought to know something about them. Show me!’

He leaped the rough fence with a rattle of spear, shield, and armour, and hoisted himself into Volaterrae as quickly as a shadow.

‘A sling on a forked stick. I understand!’ he cried, and pulled at the elastic. ‘But what wonderful beast yields this stretching leather?’

‘It’s laccy—elastic. You put the bullet into that loop, and then you pull hard.’

The man pulled, and hit himself square on his thumb-nail.

‘Each to his own weapon,’ he said, gravely, handing it back. ‘I am better with the bigger machine, little maiden. But it’s a pretty toy. A wolf would laugh at it. Aren’t you afraid of wolves?’

‘There aren’t any,’ said Una.

‘Never believe it! A wolf’s like a Winged Hat. He comes when he isn’t expected. Don’t they hunt wolves here?’

‘We don’t hunt,’ said Una, remembering what she had heard from grown-ups. ‘We preserve—pheasants. Do you know them?’

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‘I ought to,’ said the young man, smiling again, and he imitated the cry of the cock-pheasant so perfectly that a bird answered out of the wood.

‘What a big painted clucking fool is a pheasant,’ he said. ‘Just like some Romans!’

‘But you’re a Roman yourself, aren’t you?’ said Una.

‘Ye-es and no. I’m one of a good few thousands who have never seen Rome except in a picture. My people have lived at Vectis for generations. Vectis. That island West yonder that you can see from so far in clear weather.’

‘Do you mean the Isle of Wight? It lifts up just before rain, and you see it from the Downs.’

‘Very likely. Our Villa’s on the South edge of the Island, by the Broken Cliffs. Most of it is three hundred years old, but the cow-stables, where our first ancestor lived, must be a hundred years older. Oh, quite that, because the founder of our family had his land given him by Agricola at the Settlement. It’s not a bad little place for its size. In spring-time violets grow down to the very beach. I’ve gathered sea-weeds for myself and violets for my Mother many a time with our old nurse.’

‘Was your nurse a—a Romaness too?’

‘No, a Numidian. Gods be good to her! A dear, fat, brown thing with a tongue like a cowbell. She was a free woman. By the way, are you free, maiden?’

‘Oh, quite,’ said Una. ‘At least, till tea-time; and in summer our governess doesn’t say much if we’re late.’

The young man laughed again—a proper understanding laugh.

‘I see,’ said he. ‘That accounts for your being in the wood. We hid among the cliffs.’

‘Did you have a governess, then?’

‘Did we not? A Greek, too. She had a way of clutching her dress when she hunted us among the gorse-bushes that made us laugh. Then she’d say she’d get us whipped. She never did, though, bless her! Aglaia was a thorough sportswoman, for all her learning.’

‘But what lessons did you do—when—when you were little?’

‘Ancient history, the Classics, arithmetic, and so on,’ he answered. ‘My sister and I were thickheads, but my two brothers (I’m the middle one) liked those things, and, of course, Mother was clever enough for any six. She was nearly as tall as I am, and she looked like the new statue on the Western Road—the Demeter of the Baskets, you know. And funny! Roma Dea ! How Mother could make us laugh!’

‘What at?’

‘Little jokes and sayings that every family has. Don’t you know?’

‘I know we have, but I didn’t know other people had them too,’ said Una. ‘Tell me about all your family, please.’

‘Good families are very much alike. Mother would sit spinning of evenings while Aglaia read in her corner, and Father did accounts, and we four romped about the passages. When our noise grew too loud the Pater would say, “Less tumult! Less tumult! Have you never heard of a Father’s right over his children? He can slay them, my loves—slay them dead, and the Gods highly approve of the action!” Then Mother would prim up her dear mouth over the wheel and answer: “H’m! I’m afraid there can’t be much of the Roman Father about you!” Then the Pater would roll up his accounts, and say, “I’ll show you!” and then—then, he’d be worse than any of us!’

‘Fathers can—if they like,’ said Una, her eyes dancing.

‘Didn’t I say all good families are very much the same?’

‘What did you do in summer?’ said Una. ‘Play about, like us?’

‘Yes, and we visited our friends. There are no wolves in Vectis. We had many friends, and as many ponies as we wished.’

‘It must have been lovely,’ said Una. ‘I hope it lasted for ever.’

‘Not quite, little maid. When I was about sixteen or seventeen, the Father felt gouty, and we all went to the Waters.’

‘What waters?’

‘At Aquae Sulis. Every one goes there. You ought to get your Father to take you some day.’

‘But where? I don’t know,’ said Una.

The young man looked astonished for a moment. ‘Aquae Sulis,’ he repeated. ‘The best baths in Britain. Just as good, I’m told, as Rome. All the old gluttons sit in hot water, and talk scandal and politics. And the Generals come through the streets with their guards behind them; and the magistrates come in their chairs with their stiff guards behind them; and you meet fortune-tellers, and goldsmiths, and merchants, and philosophers, and feather-sellers, and ultra-Roman Britons, and ultra-British Romans, and tame tribesmen pretending to be civilised, and Jew lecturers, and—oh, everybody interesting. We young people, of course, took no interest in politics. We had not the gout: there were many of our age like us. We did not find life sad.

‘But while we were enjoying ourselves without thinking, my sister met the son of a magistrate in the west—and a year afterwards she was married to him. My young brother, who was always interested in plants and roots, met the First Doctor of a Legion from the City of the Legions, and he decided that he would be an Army doctor. I do not think it is a profession for a well-born man, but then—I’m not my brother. He went to Rome to study medicine, and now he’s First Doctor of a Legion in Egypt—at Antinoe, I think, but I have not heard from him for some time.

‘My eldest brother came across a Greek philosopher, and told my Father that he intended to settle down on the estate as a farmer and a philosopher. You see’—the young man’s eyes twinkled—’his philosopher was a long-haired one!’

I‘ thought philosophers were bald,’ said Una.

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‘Not all. She was very pretty. I don’t blame him. Nothing could have suited me better than my eldest brother doing this, for I was only too keen to join the Army. I had always feared I should have to stay at home and look after the estate while my brother took this.’

He rapped on his great glistening shield that never seemed to be in his way.

‘So we were well contented—we young people—and we rode back to Clausentum along the Wood Road very quietly. But when we reached home, Aglaia, our governess, saw what had come to us. I remember her at the door, the torch over her head, watching us climb the cliff path from the boat. “Aie! Aie!” she said. “Children you went away. Men and a woman you return!” Then she kissed Mother, and Mother wept. Thus our visit to the Waters settled our fates for each of us, Maiden.’

He rose to his feet and listened, leaning on the shield-rim.

‘I think that’s Dan—my brother,’ said Una.

‘Yes; and the Faun is with him,’ he replied, as Dan with Puck stumbled through the copse.

‘We should have come sooner,’ Puck called, ‘but the beauties of your native tongue, O Parnesius, have enthralled this young citizen.’

Parnesius looked bewildered, even when Una explained.

‘Dan said the plural of “dominus” was “dominoes,” and when Miss Blake said it wasn’t he said he supposed it was “backgammon,” and so he had to write it out twice—for cheek, you know.’

Dan had climbed into Volaterrae, hot and panting.

‘I’ve run nearly all the way,’ he gasped, ‘and then Puck met me. How do you do, Sir?’

‘I am in good health,’ Parnesius answered. ‘See! I have tried to bend the bow of Ulysses, but——’ He held up his thumb.

‘I’m sorry. You must have pulled off too soon,’ said Dan. ‘But Puck said you were telling Una a story.’

‘Continue, O Parnesius,’ said Puck, who had perched himself on a dead branch above them. ‘I will be chorus. Has he puzzled you much, Una?’

‘Not a bit, except—I didn’t know where Ak—Ak something was,’ she answered.

‘Oh, Aquae Sulis. That’s Bath, where the buns come from. Let the hero tell his own tale.’

Parnesius pretended to thrust his spear at Puck’s legs, but Puck reached down, caught at the horse-tail plume, and pulled off the tall helmet.

‘Thanks, jester,’ said Parnesius, shaking his curly dark head. ‘That is cooler. Now hang it up for me . . . .

‘I was telling your sister how I joined the Army,’ he said to Dan.

‘Did you have to pass an Exam?’ Dan asked, eagerly.

‘No. I went to my Father, and said I should like to enter the Dacian Horse (I had seen some at Aquae Sulis); but he said I had better begin service in a regular Legion from Rome. Now, like many of our youngsters, I was not too fond of anything Roman. The Roman-born officers and magistrates looked down on us British-born as though we were barbarians. I told my Father so.

‘“I know they do,” he said; “but remember, after all, we are the people of the Old Stock, and our duty is to the Empire.”

‘“To which Empire?” I asked. “We split the Eagle before I was born.”

‘“What thieves’ talk is that?” said my Father. He hated slang.

‘“Well, Sir,” I said, “we’ve one Emperor in Rome, and I don’t know how many Emperors the outlying Provinces have set up from time to time. Which am I to follow?”

‘“Gratian,” said he. “At least he’s a sportsman.”

‘“He’s all that,” I said. “Hasn’t he turned himself into a raw-beef-eating Scythian?”

‘“Where did you hear of it?” said the Pater.

‘“At Aquae Sulis,” I said. It was perfectly true. This precious Emperor Gratian of ours had a bodyguard of fur-cloaked Scythians, and he was so crazy about them that he dressed like them. In Rome of all places in the world! It was as bad as if my own Father had painted himself blue!

‘“No matter for the clothes,” said the Pater. “They are only the fringe of the trouble. It began before your time or mine. Rome has forsaken her Gods, and must be punished. The great war with the Painted People broke out in the very year the temples of our Gods were destroyed. We beat the Painted People in the very year our temples were rebuilt. Go back further still.” . . . He went back to the time of Diocletian; and to listen to him you would have thought Eternal Rome herself was on the edge of destruction, just because a few people had become a little large-minded.

‘I knew nothing about it. Aglaia never taught us the history of our own country. She was so full of her ancient Greeks.

‘“There is no hope for Rome,’ said the Pater, at last. ‘She has forsaken her Gods, but if the Gods forgive us here, we may save Britain. To do that, we must keep the Painted People back. Therefore, I tell you, Parnesius, as a Father, that if your heart is set on service, your place is among men on the Wall—and not with women among the cities.”’

‘What Wall?’ asked Dan and Una at once.

‘Father meant the one we call Hadrian’s Wall. I’ll tell you about it later. It was built long ago, across North Britain, to keep out the Painted People—Picts you call them. Father had fought in the great Pict War that lasted more than twenty years, and he knew what fighting meant. Theodosius, one of our great Generals, had chased the little beasts back far into the North before I was born: down at Vectis of course we never troubled our heads about them. But when my Father spoke as he did, I kissed his hand, and waited for orders. We British-born Romans know what is due to our parents.’

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‘If I kissed my Father’s hand, he’d laugh,’ said Dan.

‘Customs change; but if you do not obey your father, the Gods remember it. You may be quite sure of that.

‘After our talk, seeing I was in earnest, the Pater sent me over to Clausentum to learn my foot-drill in a barrack full of foreign auxiliaries—as unwashed and unshaved a mob of mixed barbarians as ever scrubbed a breastplate. It was your stick in their stomachs and your shield in their faces to push them into any sort of formation. When I had learned my work the Instructor gave me a handful—and they were a handful!—of Gauls and Iberians to polish up till they were sent to their stations up-country. I did my best, and one night a villa in the suburbs caught fire, and I had my handful out and at work before any of the other troops. I noticed a quiet-looking man on the lawn, leaning on a stick. He watched us passing buckets from the pond; and at last he said to me: “Who are you?”

‘“A probationer, waiting for a command,” I answered. I didn’t know who he was from Deucalion!’

‘“Born in Britain?” he said.

‘“Yes, if you were born in Spain,” I said, for he neighed his words like an Iberian mule.

‘“And what might you call yourself when you are at home?” he said, laughing.

‘“That depends,” I answered; “sometimes one thing and sometimes another. But now I’m busy.”

‘He said no more till we had saved the family gods (they were respectable householders), and then he grunted across the laurels: “Listen, young sometimes-one-thing-and-sometimes-another. In future call yourself Centurion of the Seventh Cohort of the Thirtieth, the Ulpia Victrix. That will help me to remember you. Your Father and a few other people call me Maximus.”

‘He tossed me the polished stick he was leaning on, and went away. You might have knocked me down with it!’

‘Who was he?’ said Dan.

‘Maximus himself, our great General! The General of Britain who had been Theodosius’s right hand in the Pict War! Not only had he given me my Centurion’s stick direct, but three steps in a good Legion as well! A new man generally begins in the Tenth Cohort of his Legion, and works up.’

‘And were you pleased?’ said Una.

‘Very. I thought Maximus had chosen me for my good looks and fine style in marching, but, when I went home, the Pater told me he had served under Maximus in the great Pict War, and had asked him to befriend me.’

‘A child you were!’ said Puck, from above.

‘I was,’ said Parnesius. ‘Don’t begrudge it me, Faun. Afterwards—the Gods know I put aside the games!’ And Puck nodded, brown chin on brown hand, his big eyes still.

‘The night before I left we sacrificed to our ancestors—the usual little Home Sacrifice—but I never prayed so earnestly to all the Good Shades, and then I went with my Father by boat to Regnum, and across the chalk eastwards to Anderida yonder.’

‘Regnum? Anderida?’ The children turned their faces to Puck.

‘Regnum’s Chichester,’ he said, pointing towards Cherry Clack, and—he threw his arm South behind him—‘Anderida’s Pevensey.’

‘Pevensey again!’ said Dan. ‘Where Weland landed?’

‘Weland and a few others,’ said Puck. ‘Pevensey isn’t young—even compared to me!’

‘The headquarters of the Thirtieth lay at Anderida in summer, but my own Cohort, the Seventh, was on the Wall up North. Maximus was inspecting Auxiliaries—the Abulci, I think—at Anderida, and we stayed with him, for he and my Father were very old friends. I was only there ten days when I was ordered to go up with thirty men to my Cohort.’ He laughed merrily. ‘A man never forgets his first march. I was happier than any Emperor when I led my handful through the North Gate of the Camp, and we saluted the guard and the Altar of Victory there.’

‘How? How?’ said Dan and Una.

Parnesius smiled, and stood up, flashing in his armour.

‘So!’ said he; and he moved slowly through the beautiful movements of the Roman Salute, that ends with a hollow clang of the shield coming into its place between the shoulders.

‘Hai!’ said Puck. ‘That sets one thinking!’

‘We went out fully armed,’ said Parnesius, sitting down; ‘but as soon as the road entered the Great Forest, my men expected the pack-horses to hang their shields on. “No!” I said; “you can dress like women in Anderida, but while you’re with me you will carry your own weapons and armour.”

‘“But it’s hot,” said one of them, “and we haven’t a doctor. Suppose we get sunstroke, or a fever?”

‘“Then die,” I said, “and a good riddance to Rome! Up shield—up spears, and tighten your foot-wear!”

‘“Don’t think yourself Emperor of Britain already,” a fellow shouted. I knocked him over with the butt of my spear, and explained to these Roman-born Romans that, if there were any further trouble, we should go on with one man short. And, by the Light of the Sun, I meant it too! My raw Gauls at Clausentum had never treated me so.

‘Then, quietly as a cloud, Maximus rode out of the fern (my Father behind him), and reined up across the road. He wore the Purple, as though he were already Emperor; his leggings were of white buckskin laced with gold.

‘My men dropped like—like partridges.

‘He said nothing for some time, only looked, with his eyes puckered. Then he crooked his forefinger, and my men walked—crawled, I mean—to one side.

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‘“Stand in the sun, children,” he said, and they formed up on the hard road.

‘“What would you have done,” he said to me, “if I had not been here?”

‘“I should have killed that man,” I answered.

‘“Kill him now,” he said. “He will not move a limb.”

‘“No,” I said. “You’ve taken my men out of my command. I should only be your butcher if I killed him now.” Do you see what I meant?’ Parnesius turned to Dan.

‘Yes,’ said Dan. ‘It wouldn’t have been fair, somehow.’

‘That was what I thought,’ said Parnesius.

But Maximus frowned. “You’ll never be an Emperor,” he said. “Not even a General will you be.”

‘I was silent, but my Father seemed pleased.

‘“I came here to see the last of you,” he said.

‘“You have seen it,” said Maximus. “I shall never need your son any more. He will live and he will die an officer of a Legion—and he might have been Prefect of one of my Provinces. Now eat and drink with us,” he said. “Your men will wait till you have finished.”

‘My miserable thirty stood like wine-skins glistening in the hot sun, and Maximus led us to where his people had set a meal. Himself he mixed the wine.

‘“A year from now,” he said, “you will remember that you have sat with the Emperor of Britain—and Gaul.”

‘“Yes,” said the Pater, “you can drive two mules—Gaul and Britain.”

‘“Five years hence you will remember that you have drunk”—he passed me the cup and there was blue borage in it—“with the Emperor of Rome!”

‘“No; you can’t drive three mules; they will tear you in pieces,” said my Father.

‘“And you on the Wall, among the heather, will weep because your notion of justice was more to you than the favour of the Emperor of Rome.”

‘I sat quite still. One does not answer a General who wears the Purple.

‘“I am not angry with you,” he went on; “I owe too much to your Father——”

‘“You owe me nothing but advice that you never took,” said the Pater.

‘“——to be unjust to any of your family. Indeed, I say you may make a good Tribune, but, so far as I am concerned, on the Wall you will live, and on the Wall you will die,” said Maximus.

‘“Very like,” said my Father. “But we shall have the Picts and their friends breaking through before long. You cannot move all troops out of Britain to make you Emperor, and expect the North to sit quiet.”

‘“I follow my destiny,” said Maximus.

‘“Follow it, then,” said my Father, pulling up a fern root; “and die as Theodosius died.”

‘“Ah!” said Maximus. “My old General was killed because he served the Empire too well. I may be killed, but not for that reason,” and he smiled a little pale grey smile that made my blood run cold.

‘“Then I had better follow my destiny,” I said, “and take my men to the Wall.”

‘He looked at me a long time, and bowed his head slanting like a Spaniard. “Follow it, boy,” he said. That was all. I was only too glad to get away, though I had many messages for home. I found my men standing as they had been put—they had not even shifted their feet in the dust, and off I marched, still feeling that terrific smile like an east wind up my back. I never halted them till sunset, and’—he turned about and looked at Pook’s Hill below him—‘then I halted yonder.’ He pointed to the broken, bracken covered shoulder of the Forge Hill behind old Hobden’s cottage.

‘There? Why, that’s only the old Forge where they made iron once,’ said Dan.

‘Very good stuff it was too,’ said Parnesius, calmly. ‘We mended three shoulder-straps here and had a spear-head riveted. The Forge was rented from the Government by a one-eyed smith from Carthage. I remember we called him Cyclops. He sold me a beaver-skin rug for my sister’s room.’

‘But it couldn’t have been here,’ Dan insisted.

‘But it was! From the Altar of Victory at Anderida to the First Forge in the Forest here is twelve miles seven hundred paces. It is all in the Road Book. A man doesn’t forget his first march. I think I could tell you every station between this and——’ He leaned forward, but his eye was caught by the setting sun.

It had come down to the top of Cherry Clack Hill, and the light poured in between the tree trunks so that you could see red and gold and black deep into the heart of Far Wood; and Parnesius in his armour shone as though he had been afire.

‘Wait,’ he said, lifting a hand, and the sunlight jinked on his glass bracelet. ‘Wait! I pray to Mithras!’

He rose and stretched his arms westward, with deep, splendid-sounding words.

Then Puck began to sing too, in a voice like bells tolling, and as he sang he slipped from Volaterrae to the ground, and beckoned the children to follow. They obeyed; it seemed as though the voices were pushing them along; and through the goldy-brown light on the beech leaves they walked, while Puck between them chanted something like this:

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‘Cur mundus militat sub vana gloria
Cujus prosperitas est transitoria?
Tam cito labitur ejus potentia
Quam vasa figuli quæ sunt fragilia.’

They found themselves at the little locked gates of the wood.

‘Quo Cæsar abiit celsus imperio?
Vel Dives splendidus totus in prandio?
Dic ubi Tullius——’

Still singing, he took Dan’s hand and wheeled him round to face Una as she came out of the gate. It shut behind her, at the same time as Puck threw the memory-magicking Oak, Ash, and Thorn leaves over their heads.

‘Well, you are jolly late,’ said Una. ‘Couldn’t you get away before?’

‘I did,’ said Dan. ‘I got away in lots of time, but—but I didn’t know it was so late. Where’ve you been?’

‘In Volaterrae—waiting for you.’

‘Sorry,’ said Dan. ‘It was all that beastly Latin.’

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THEY were playing hide-and-seek with bicycle lamps after tea. Dan had hung his lamp on the apple tree at the end of the hellebore bed in the walled garden, and was crouched by the gooseberry bushes ready to dash off when Una should spy him. He saw her lamp come into the garden and disappear as she hid it under her cloak. While he listened for her footsteps, somebody (they both thought it was Phillips the gardener) coughed in the corner of the herb-beds. ‘All right,’ Una shouted across the asparagus; ‘we aren’t hurting your old beds, Phippsey!’

She flashed her lantern towards the spot, and in its circle of light they saw a Guy Fawkes-looking man in a black cloak and a steeple-crowned hat, walking down the path beside Puck. They ran to meet him, and the man said something to them about rooms in their head. After a time they understood he was warning them not to catch colds.

‘You’ve a bit of a cold yourself, haven’t you?’ said Una, for he ended all his sentences with a consequential cough. Puck laughed.

‘Child,’ the man answered, ‘if it hath pleased Heaven to afflict me with an infirmity—’

‘Nay, nay,’ Puck struck In, ‘the maid spoke out of kindness. I know that half your cough is but a catch to trick the vulgar; and that’s a pity. There’s honesty enough in you, Nick, without rasping and hawking.’

‘Good people’—the man shrugged his lean shoulders—‘the vulgar crowd love not truth unadorned. Wherefore we philosophers must needs dress her to catch their eye or—ahem! —their ear.’

‘And what d’you think of that?’ said Puck solemnly to Dan.

‘I don’t know,’ he answered. ‘It sounds like lessons.’

‘Ah—well! There have been worse men than Nick Culpeper to take lessons from. Now, where can we sit that’s not indoors?’

‘In the hay-mow, next to old Middenboro,’ Dan suggested. ‘He doesn’t mind.’

‘Eh?’ Mr Culpeper was stooping over the pale hellebore blooms by the light of Una’s lamp. ‘Does Master Middenboro need my poor services, then?’

‘Save him, no!’ said Puck. ‘He is but a horse—next door to an ass, as you’ll see presently. Come!’

Their shadows jumped and slid on the fruit-tree walls. They filed out of the garden by the snoring pig-pound and the crooning hen-house, to the shed where Middenboro the old lawn-mower pony lives. His friendly eyes showed green in the light as they set their lamps down on the chickens’ drinking-trough outside, and pushed past to the hay-mow. Mr Culpeper stooped at the door.

‘Mind where you lie,’ said Dan. ‘This hay’s full of hedge-brishings.

‘In! in!’ said Puck. ‘You’ve lain in fouler places than this, Nick. Ah! Let us keep touch with the stars!’ He kicked open the top of the half-door, and pointed to the clear sky. ‘There be the planets you conjure with! What does your wisdom make of that wandering and variable star behind those apple boughs?’

The children smiled. A bicycle that they knew well was being walked down the steep lane. ‘Where?’ Mr Culpeper leaned forward quickly. ‘That? Some countryman’s lantern.’

‘Wrong, Nick,’ said Puck. ‘’Tis a singular bright star in Virgo, declining towards the house of Aquarius the water-carrier, who hath lately been afflicted by Gemini. Aren’t I right, Una?’ Mr Culpeper snorted contemptuously.

‘No. It’s the village nurse going down to the Mill about some fresh twins that came there last week. Nurse,’ Una called, as the light stopped on the flat, ‘when can I see the Morris twins? And how are they?’

‘Next Sunday, perhaps. Doing beautifully,’ the Nurse called back, and with a ping-ping-ping of the bell brushed round the corner.

‘Her uncle’s a vetinary surgeon near Banbury,’ Una explained, and if you ring her bell at night, it rings right beside her bed—not downstairs at all. Then she ’umps up—she always keeps a pair of dry boots in the fender, you know—and goes anywhere she’s wanted. We help her bicycle through gaps sometimes. Most of her babies do beautifully. She told us so herself.’

‘I doubt not, then, that she reads in my books,’ said Mr Culpeper quietly. ‘Twins at the Mill!’ he muttered half aloud. “And again He sayeth, Return, ye children of men.” ‘

‘Are you a doctor or a rector?’ Una asked, and Puck with a shout turned head over heels in the hay. But Mr Culpeper was quite serious. He told them that he was a physician-astrologer—a doctor who knew all about the stars as well as all about herbs for medicine. He said that the sun, the moon, and five Planets, called Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Saturn, and Venus, governed everybody and everything in the world. They all lived in Houses—he mapped out some of them against the dark with a busy forefinger—and they moved from House to House like pieces at draughts; and they went loving and hating each other all over the skies. If you knew their likes and dislikes, he said, you could make them cure your patient and hurt your enemy, and find out the secret causes of things. He talked of these five Planets as though they belonged to him, or as though he were playing long games against them. The children burrowed in the hay up to their chins, and looked out over the half-door at the solemn, star-powdered sky till they seemed to be falling upside down into it, while Mr Culpeper talked about ‘trines’ and ‘oppositions’ and ‘conjunctions’ and ‘sympathies’ and ‘antipathies’ in a tone that just matched things.

A rat ran between Middenboro’s feet, and the old pony stamped.

‘Mid hates rats,’ said Dan, and passed him over a lock of hay. ‘I wonder why.’

‘Divine Astrology tells us,’ said Mr Culpeper. ‘The horse, being a martial beast that beareth man to battle, belongs naturally to the red planet Mars—the Lord of War. I would show you him, but he’s too near his setting. Rats and mice, doing their businesses by night, come under the dominion of our Lady the Moon. Now between Mars and Luna, the one red, t’other white, the one hot t’other cold and so forth, stands, as I have told you, a natural antipathy, or, as you say, hatred. Which antipathy their creatures do inherit. Whence, good people, you may both see and hear your cattle stamp in their stalls for the self-same causes as decree the passages of the stars across the unalterable face of Heaven! Ahem!’ Puck lay along chewing a leaf. They felt him shake with laughter, and Mr Culpeper sat up stiffly.

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‘I myself” said he, ‘have saved men’s lives, and not a few neither, by observing at the proper time—there is a time, mark you, for all things under the sun—by observing, I say, so small a beast as a rat in conjunction with so great a matter as this dread arch above us.’ He swept his hand across the sky. ‘Yet there are those,’ he went on sourly, ‘who have years without knowledge.’

‘Right,’ said Puck. ‘No fool like an old fool.’

Mr Culpeper wrapped his cloak round him and sat still while the children stared at the Great Bear on the hilltop.

‘Give him time,’ Puck whispered behind his hand. ‘He turns like a timber-tug—all of a piece.’

‘Ahem!’ Mr Culpeper said suddenly. ‘I’ll prove it to you. When I was physician to Saye’s Horse, and fought the King—or rather the man Charles Stuart—in Oxfordshire (I had my learning at Cambridge), the plague was very hot all around us. I saw it at close hands. He who says I am ignorant of the plague, for example, is altogether beside the bridge.’

‘We grant it,’ said Puck solemnly. ‘But why talk of the plague this rare night?’

‘To prove my argument. This Oxfordshire plague, good people, being generated among rivers and ditches, was of a werish, watery nature. Therefore it was curable by drenching the patient in cold water, and laying him in wet cloths; or at least, so I cured some of them. Mark this. It bears on what shall come after.’

‘Mark also, Nick,’ said Puck, ‘that we are not your College of Physicians, but only a lad and a lass and a poor lubberkin. Therefore be plain, old Hyssop on the Wall!’

‘To be plain and in order with you, I was shot in the chest while gathering of betony from a brookside near Thame, and was took by the King’s men before their Colonel, one Blagg or Bragge, whom I warned honestly that I had spent the week past among our plague-stricken. He flung me off into a cowshed, much like this here, to die, as I supposed; but one of their priests crept in by night and dressed my wound. He was a Sussex man like myself.’

‘Who was that?’ said Puck suddenly. ‘Zack Tutshom?’

‘No, Jack Marget,’ said Mr Culpeper.

‘Jack Marget of New College? The little merry man that stammered so? Why a plague was stuttering Jack at Oxford then?’ said Puck.

‘He had come out of Sussex in hope of being made a Bishop when the King should have conquered the rebels, as he styled us Parliament men. His College had lent the King some monies too, which they never got again, no more than simple Jack got his bishopric. When we met he had had a bitter bellyful of King’s promises, and wished to return to his wife and babes. This came about beyond expectation, for, so soon as I could stand of my wound, the man Blagge made excuse that I had been among the plague, and Jack had been tending me, to thrust us both out from their camp. The King had done with Jack now that Jack’s College had lent the money, and Blagge’s physician could not abide me because I would not sit silent and see him butcher the sick. (He was a College of Physicians man!) So Blagge, I say, thrust us both out, with many vile words, for a pair of pestilent, prating, pragmatical rascals.’

‘Ha! Called you pragmatical, Nick?’ Puck started up. ‘High time Oliver came to purge the land! How did you and honest Jack fare next?’

‘We were in some sort constrained to each other’s company. I was for going to my house in Spitalfields, he would go to his parish in Sussex; but the plague was broke out and spreading through Wiltshire, Berkshire, and Hampshire, and he was so mad distracted to think that it might even then be among his folk at home that I bore him company. He had comforted me in my distress. I could not have done less; and I remembered that I had a cousin at Great Wigsell, near by Jack’s parish. Thus we footed it from Oxford, cassock and buff coat together, resolute to leave wars on the left side henceforth; and either through our mean appearances, or the plague making men less cruel, we were not hindered. To be sure, they put us in the stocks one half-day for rogues and vagabonds at a village under St Leonard’s forest, where, as I have heard, nightingales never sing; but the constable very honestly gave me back my Astrological Almanac, which I carry with me.’ Mr Culpeper tapped his thin chest. ‘I dressed a whitlow on his thumb. So we went forward.

‘Not to trouble you with impertinences, we fetched over against Jack Marget’s parish in a storm of rain about the day’s end. Here our roads divided, for I would have gone on to my cousin at Great Wigsell, but while Jack was pointing me out his steeple, we saw a man lying drunk, as he conceived, athwart the road. He said it would be one Hebden, a parishioner, and till then a man of good life; and he accused himself bitterly for an unfaithful shepherd, that had left his flock to follow princes. But I saw it was the plague, and not the beginnings of it neither. They had set out the plague-stone, and the man’s head lay on it.’

‘What’s a plague-stone?’ Dan whispered.

‘When the plague is so hot in a village that the neighbours shut the roads against ’em, people set a hollowed stone, pot, or pan, where such as would purchase victual from outside may lay money and the paper of their wants, and depart. Those that would sell come later—what will a man not do for gain? —snatch the money forth, and leave in exchange such goods as their conscience reckons fair value. I saw a silver groat in the water, and the man’s list of what he would buy was rain-pulped in his wet hand.

‘“My wife! Oh, my wife and babes!” says Jack of a sudden, and makes uphill—I with him.

‘A woman peers out from behind a barn, crying out that the village is stricken with the plague, and that for our lives’ sake we must avoid it.

‘“Sweetheart!” says Jack. “Must I avoid thee?” and she leaps at him and says the babes are safe. She was his wife.

‘When he had thanked God, even to tears, he tells me this was not the welcome he had intended, and presses me to flee the place while I was clean.

‘“Nay! The Lord do so to me and more also if I desert thee now,” I said. “These affairs are, under God’s leave, in some fashion my strength.”

‘“Oh, sir,” she says, “are you a physician? We have none.”

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‘“Then, good people,” said I, “I must e’en justify myself to you by my works.”

‘“Look—look ye,” stammers Jack, “I took you all this time for a crazy Roundhead preacher.” He laughs, and she, and then I—all three together in the rain are overtook by an unreasonable gust or clap of laughter, which none the less eased us. We call it in medicine the Hysterical Passion. So I went home with ’em.’

‘Why did you not go on to your cousin at Great Wigsell, Nick?’ Puck suggested. ‘’tis barely seven mile up the road.’

‘But the plague was here,’ Mr Culpeper answered, and pointed up the hill. ‘What else could I have done?’

‘What were the parson’s children called?’ said Una.

‘Elizabeth, Alison, Stephen, and Charles—a babe. I scarce saw them at first, for I separated to live with their father in a cart-lodge. The mother we put—forced—into the house with her babes. She had done enough.

‘And now, good people, give me leave to be particular in this case. The plague was worst on the north side of the street, for lack, as I showed ’em, of sunshine; which, proceeding from the Prime Mobile, or source of life (I speak astrologically), is cleansing and purifying in the highest degree. The plague was hot too by the corn-chandler’s, where they sell forage to the carters, extreme hot in both Mills, along the river, and scatteringly in other places, except, mark you, at the smithy. Mark here, that all forges and smith shops belong to Mars, even as corn and meat and wine shops acknowledge Venus for their mistress. There was no plague in the smithy at Munday’s Lane—’

‘Munday’s Lane? You mean our village? I thought so when you talked about the two Mills,’ cried Dan. ‘Where did we put the plague-stone? I’d like to have seen it.’

‘Then look at it now,’ said Puck, and pointed to the chickens’ drinking-trough where they had set their bicycle lamps. It was a rough, oblong stone pan, rather like a small kitchen sink, which Phillips, who never wastes anything, had found in a ditch and had used for his precious hens.

‘That?’ said Dan and Una, and stared, and stared, and stared. Mr Culpeper made impatient noises in his throat and went on.

‘I am at these pains to be particular, good people, because I would have you follow, so far as you may, the operations of my mind. That plague which I told you I had handled outside Wallingford in Oxfordshire was of a watery nature, conformable to the brookish riverine country it bred in, and curable, as I have said, by drenching in water. This plague of ours here, for all that it flourished along watercourses—every soul at both Mills died of it,—could not be so handled. Which brought me to a stand. Ahem!’

‘And your sick people in the meantime?’ Puck demanded.

‘We persuaded them on the north side of the street to lie out in Hitheram’s field. Where the plague had taken one, or at most two, in a house, folk would not shift for fear of thieves in their absence. They cast away their lives to die among their goods.’

‘Human nature,’ said Puck. ‘I’ve seen it time and again. How did your sick do in the fields?’

‘They died not near so thick as those that kept within doors, and even then they died more out of distraction and melancholy than plague. But I confess, good people, I could not in any sort master the sickness, or come at a glimmer of its nature or governance. To be brief, I was flat bewildered at the brute malignity of the disease, and so—did what I should have done before—dismissed all conjectures and apprehensions that had grown up within me, chose a good hour by my Almanac, clapped my vinegar-cloth to my face, and entered some empty houses, resigned to wait upon the stars for guidance.’

‘At night? Were you not horribly frightened?’ said Puck.

‘I dared to hope that the God who hath made man so nobly curious to search out His mysteries might not destroy a devout seeker. In due time—there’s a time, as I have said, for everything under the sun—I spied a whitish rat, very puffed and scabby, which sat beneath the dormer of an attic through which shined our Lady the Moon. Whilst I looked on him—and her—she was moving towards old cold Saturn, her ancient ally—the rat creeped languishingly into her light, and there, before my eyes, died. Presently his mate or companion came out, laid him down beside there, and in like fashion died too. Later—an hour or less to midnight—a third rat did e’en the same; always choosing the moonlight to die in. This threw me into an amaze, since, as we know, the moonlight is favourable, not hurtful, to the creatures of the Moon; and Saturn, being friends with her, as you would say, was hourly strengthening her evil influence. Yet these three rats had been stricken dead in very moonlight. I leaned out of the window to see which of Heaven’s host might be on our side, and there beheld I good trusty Mars, very red and heated, bustling about his setting. I straddled the roof to see better.

‘Jack Marget came up street going to comfort our sick in Hitheram’s field. A tile slipped under my foot.

Says he, heavily enough, “Watchman, what of the night?”

‘“Heart up, Jack,” says I. “Methinks there’s one fighting for us that, like a fool, I’ve forgot all this summer.” My meaning was naturally the planet Mars.

‘“Pray to Him then,” says he. “I forgot Him too this summer.”

‘He meant God, whom he always bitterly accused himself of having forgotten up in Oxfordshire, among the King’s men. I called down that he had made amends enough for his sin by his work among the sick, but he said he would not believe so till the plague was lifted from ’em. He was at his strength’s end—more from melancholy than any just cause. I have seen this before among priests and overcheerful men. I drenched him then and there with a half-cup of waters, which I do not say cure the plague, but are excellent against heaviness of the spirits.’

‘What were they?’ said Dan.

‘White brandy rectified, camphor, cardamoms, ginger, two sorts of pepper, and aniseed.’

‘Whew!’ said Puck. ‘Waters you call ’em!’

‘Jack coughed on it valiantly, and went downhill with me. I was for the Lower Mill in the valley, to note the aspect of the Heavens. My mind had already shadowed forth the reason, if not the remedy, for our troubles, but I would not impart it to the vulgar till I was satisfied. That practice may be perfect, judgment ought to be sound, and to make judgment sound is required an exquisite knowledge. Ahem! I left Jack and his lantern among the sick in Hitheram’s field. He still maintained the prayers of the so-called Church, which were rightly forbidden by Cromwell.’

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‘You should have told your cousin at Wigsell,’ said Puck, ’and Jack would have been fined for it, and you’d have had half the money. How did you come so to fail in your duty, Nick?’

Mr Culpeper laughed—his only laugh that evening—and the children jumped at the loud neigh of it.

‘We were not fearful of men’s judgment in those days,’ he answered. ‘Now mark me closely, good people, for what follows will be to you, though not to me, remarkable. When I reached the empty Mill, old Saturn, low down in the House of the Fishes, threatened the Sun’s rising-place. Our Lady the Moon was moving towards the help of him (understand, I speak astrologically). I looked abroad upon the high Heavens, and I prayed the Maker of ’em for guidance. Now Mars sparkingly withdrew himself below the sky. On the instant of his departure, which I noted, a bright star or vapour leaped forth above his head (as though he had heaved up his sword), and broke all about in fire. The cocks crowed midnight through the valley, and I sat me down by the mill-wheel, chewing spearmint (though that’s an herb of Venus), and calling myself all the asses’ heads in the world! ’Twas plain enough now!’

‘What was plain?’ said Una.

‘The true cause and cure of the plague. Mars, good fellow, had fought for us to the uttermost. Faint though he had been in the Heavens, and this had made me overlook him in my computations, he more than any of the other planets had kept the Heavens—which is to say, had been visible some part of each night wellnigh throughout the year. Therefore his fierce and cleansing influence, warring against the Moon, had stretched out to kill those three rats under my nose, and under the nose of their natural mistress, the Moon. I had known Mars lean half across Heaven to deal our Lady the Moon some shrewd blow from under his shield, but I had never before seen his strength displayed so effectual.’

‘I don’t understand a bit. Do you mean Mars killed the rats because he hated the Moon?’ said Una.

‘That is as plain as the pikestaff with which Blagge’s men pushed me forth,’ Mr Culpeper answered. ‘I’ll prove it. Why had the plague not broken out at the blacksmith’s shop in Munday’s Lane? Because, as I’ve shown you, forges and smithies belong naturally to Mars, and, for his honour’s sake, Mars ’ud keep ’em clean from the creatures of the Moon. But was it like, think you, that he’d come down and rat-catch in general for lazy, ungrateful mankind? That were working a willing horse to death. So, then, you can see that the meaning of the blazing star above him when he set was simply this: “Destroy and burn the creatures of the moon, for they are the root of your trouble. And thus, having shown you a taste of my power, good people, adieu.”’

‘Did Mars really say all that?’ Una whispered.

‘Yes, and twice so much as that to any one who had ears to hear. Briefly, he enlightened me that the plague was spread by the creatures of the Moon. The Moon, our Lady of ill-aspect, was the offender. My own poor wits showed me that I, Nick Culpeper, had the people in my charge, God’s good providence aiding me, and no time to lose neither.

‘I posted up the hill, and broke into Hitheram’s field amongst ’em all at prayers.

‘“Eureka, good people!” I cried, and cast down a dead mill-rat which I’d found. “Here’s your true enemy, revealed at last by the stars.”

‘“Nay, but I’m praying,” says Jack. His face was as white as washed silver.

‘“There’s a time for everything under the sun,” says I. “If you would stay the plague, take and kill your rats.”

‘“Oh, mad, stark mad!” says he, and wrings his hands.

‘A fellow lay in the ditch beside him, who bellows that he’d as soon die mad hunting rats as be preached to death on a cold fallow. They laughed round him at this, but Jack Marget falls on his knees, and very presumptuously petitions that he may be appointed to die to save the rest of his people. This was enough to thrust ’em back into their melancholy.

‘“You are an unfaithful shepherd, jack,” I says. “Take a bat” (which we call a stick in Sussex) “and kill a rat if you die before sunrise. ’Twill save your people.”

‘“Aye, aye. Take a bat and kill a rat,” he says ten times over, like a child, which moved ’em to ungovernable motions of that hysterical passion before mentioned, so that they laughed all, and at least warmed their chill bloods at that very hour—one o’clock or a little after—when the fires of life burn lowest. Truly there is a time for everything; and the physician must work with it—ahem!—or miss his cure. To be brief with you, I persuaded ’em, sick or sound, to have at the whole generation of rats throughout the village. And there’s a reason for all things too, though the wise physician need not blab ’em all. Imprimis, or firstly, the mere sport of it, which lasted ten days, drew ’em most markedly out of their melancholy. I’d defy sorrowful job himself to lament or scratch while he’s routing rats from a rick. Secundo, or secondly, the vehement act and operation of this chase or war opened their skins to generous transpiration—more vulgarly, sweated ’em handsomely; and this further drew off their black bile—the mother of sickness. Thirdly, when we came to burn the bodies of the rats, I sprinkled sulphur on the faggots, whereby the onlookers were as handsomely suffumigated. This I could not have compassed if I had made it a mere physician’s business; they’d have thought it some conjuration. Yet more, we cleansed, limed, and burned out a hundred foul poke-holes, sinks, slews, and corners of unvisited filth in and about the houses in the village, and by good fortune (mark here that Mars was in opposition to Venus) burned the corn-handler’s shop to the ground. Mars loves not Venus. Will Noakes the saddler dropped his lantern on a truss of straw while he was rat-hunting there.’

‘Had ye given Will any of that gentle cordial of yours, Nick, by any chance?’ said Puck.

‘A glass—or two glasses—not more. But as I would say, in fine, when we had killed the rats, I took ash, slag, and charcoal from the smithy, and burnt earth from the brickyard (I reason that a brickyard belongs to Mars), and rammed it with iron crowbars into the rat-runs and buries, and beneath all the house floors. The Creatures of the Moon hate all that Mars hath used for his own clean ends. For example—rats bite not iron.’

‘And how did poor stuttering Jack endure it?’ said Puck.

‘He sweated out his melancholy through his skin, and catched a loose cough, which I cured with electuaries, according to art. It is noteworthy, were I speaking among my equals, that the venom of the plague translated, or turned itself into, and evaporated, or went away as, a very heavy hoarseness and thickness of the head, throat, and chest. (Observe from my books which planets govern these portions of man’s body, and your darkness, good people, shall be illuminated—ahem!) None the less, the plague, qua plague, ceased and took off (for we only lost three more, and two of ’em had it already on ’em) from the morning of the day that Mars enlightened me by the Lower Mill.’ He coughed—almost trumpeted—triumphantly.

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‘It is proved,’ he jerked out. ‘I say I have proved my contention, which is, that by Divine Astrology and humble search into the veritable causes of things—at the proper time—the sons of wisdom may combat even the plague.’

‘H’m!’ Puck replied. ‘For my own part I hold that a simple soul —’

‘Mine? Simple, forsooth?’ said Mr Culpeper.

‘A very simple soul, a high courage tempered with sound and stubborn conceit, is stronger than all the stars in their courses. So I confess truly that you saved the village, Nick.’

‘I stubborn? I stiff-necked? I ascribed all my poor success, under God’s good providence, to Divine Astrology. Not to me the glory! You talk as that dear weeping ass Jack Marget preached before I went back to my work in Red Lion House, Spitalfields.’

‘Oh! Stammering Jack preached, did he? They say he loses his stammer in the pulpit.’

‘And his wits with it. He delivered a most idolatrous discourse when the plague was stayed. He took for his text: “The wise man that delivered the city.” I could have given him a better, such as: “There is a time for—” ‘

‘But what made you go to church to hear him?’ Puck interrupted. ‘Wail Attersole was your lawfully appointed preacher, and a dull dog he was!’

Mr Culpeper wriggled uneasily.

‘The vulgar,’ said he, ‘the old crones and—ahem! —the children, Alison and the others, they dragged me to the House of Rimmon by the hand. I was in two minds to inform on Jack for maintaining the mummeries of the falsely-called Church, which, I’ll prove to you, are founded merely on ancient fables—’

‘Stick to your herbs and planets,’ said Puck, laughing. ‘You should have told the magistrates, Nick, and had Jack fined. Again, why did you neglect your plain duty?’

‘Because—because I was kneeling, and praying, and weeping with the rest of ’em at the Altar-rails. In medicine this is called the Hysterical Passion. It may be—it may be.’

‘That’s as may be,’ said Puck. They heard him turn the hay. ‘Why, your hay is half hedge-brishings,’ he said. ‘You don’t expect a horse to thrive on oak and ash and thorn leaves, do you?’

Ping-ping-ping went the bicycle bell round the corner. Nurse was coming back from the mill.

‘Is it all right?’ Una called.

‘All quite right,’ Nurse called back. ‘They’re to be christened next Sunday.’

‘What? What?’ They both leaned forward across the half-door. it could not have been properly fastened, for it opened, and tilted them out with hay and leaves sticking all over them.

‘Come on! We must get those two twins’ names,’ said Una, and they charged uphill shouting over the hedge, till Nurse slowed up and told them. When they returned, old Middenboro had got out of his stall, and they spent a lively ten minutes chasing him in again by starlight.

WE WERE BORN, with many others, in the Black Week of ’99; and the story of our adventures would fill a book. It is enough for the world to know that the Marquis, the Squire, and the Farmer gave us leave to lay out a thousand-yard range over their broad Downs; that the Range was made and passed to National Rifle Association specification; that we number, perhaps, sixty working members, and hope to become fair shots. You may see us, any weekend, strolling down by ones and twos to the little loft where the Lee-Enfields live, under the eye of the Sergeant-Instructor. Six months ago we should have handled a rifle as a bachelor handles a baby, but now we know the vices and virtues of all our twelve. Gorman, of the Electric Light Works, picks out Number Nine (a free-thinking old lady, near-sighted, and hard-mouthed) with a disparaging grunt. Number Seven of the light pull is his favourite, but Andrews the carpenter has just taken her. ‘Never mind,’ says Hawkins the gardener, lengthening the sling of Number Two, ‘you can change on the ground with Andrews.’ ‘M’ yes,’ says Gorman, ‘after Andrews has gone and got her fouled. She throws up like a pump when she’s fouled — Seven does.’

Last autumn, we would marvellously tie ourselves up in our slings; but skirmishing-drill once, and range-work twice at least a week, has wonted us to the heft and balance of the long rifles. The accepted fashion is to sling our gun across our back, shove both hands into our pockets, and progress at ease. The range is not fifteen minutes’ walk from the village. Hawkins hurries on ahead. He has carnations to pot this afternoon, but is taking advantage of a spare minute to get off half his allowance (each man has ten rounds free a week) at two hundred. Our time, of course, is not all our own; but the Sergeant knows our business engagements pretty closely and takes urgent cases first. ‘Jimmy the Crack’ (he that won the prize rifle at the spring competition) passes us with the cheerful news that the new regulation Bisley target is in use — a seven-inch bull at two hundred. We do not need to be told that there is also a roaring north-easter on the Downs. It catches us as a razor catches a rough face; purring and scraping over the thyme-studded turf the moment we leave the village street. A mile away, very clear in the sun-glare, the lathy youngsters of the local training-stable are dancing in their body-cloths as they file towards Windy Height Barn. The trainer’s son, on a hot three-year-old who gallops alone, comes sidling and frisking behind us. He is a very good shot in process of being made. The three-year-old (also being made) bucks at the sight of the rifles, which he has not seen more than twenty times and makes pretence of flight. The boy catches him neatly on the first bound and laughs. ‘Comin’ down this evenin’?’ somebody calls out. He nods. ‘Bad for your hand, if he pulls much, isn’t it?’ ‘Ye-es, but he won’t pull.’ He turns his youngster on to the dry turf and gets off at a stretching canter. ‘Don’t wonder we don’t hit ’em when they’re ridin’ away—the Boers-much,’ says a bad shot meditatively, as horse and rider grow small across the green. We discuss this point as we breast the slope above the Squire’s kennels, and just below East Hill. Some one delivers himself of the final argument. ‘Young Carroll, he told us that at long range it don’t matter about hittin’ ’em so much. The thing is, he said, to pick up the range of the next ridge quick enough, and to keep on sprayin’ it down near enough an’ long enough to make ’em lie quiet.’

‘Young Carroll’ was a farmer’s son who served a year in the South African Light Horse, returned to his native village, en route for the Argentine, and out of his extended experience—for he had over a dozen big affairs to his credit—gave us valuable tips. Our Downs are precisely like the veldt, in that so soon as you have crowned one ridge you are deadlily commanded by the next. For instance, here we are on the top of East Hill, and all the range is spread below us. A thousand yards to the east, at the bottom of the three-hundred-foot hummock that Nature has so kindly built for a stop-butt, the windmill-targets flicker and wheel against their dun sod-backing; a line of gorse in bloom marks the Two-hundred range; a black tarred shed where we keep our oddments the Five-hundred firing-point. Behind that, Six, Seven, Eight, and Nine rise one above the other step-fashion from the smooth turf. They command every inch of the ground, and except at the Two-hundred all shooting is a little downhill. It looks big enough in all conscience, this treeless, roadless, fenceless cup of green on the edge of the English Channel. And yet from the hill behind the butts, where the red flag streams to where we stand, cannot be more than fifteen hundred yards; and that would mean most open order if bullets were coming the other way. Young Carroll and two or three other warriors have taught us to consider these things. Already we have learned to look at the scattered furze-patches among the sheep-walks with an eye to more than rabbits, and to think over the value of little dimples and wrinkles in what to a stranger would show for level ground.

At the Two-hundred we find our much-advertised Bisley bull, not more conspicuous than the head of a bonnet-pin. Hawkins and Yeo the chemist are hammering at it. The tricky wind, focused in the bottom of the valley, playfully pats and twitches their rifles, as a kitten pats a cork. We, waiting to get our hand steady after the run down, chuckle while shot after shot drives right and right again. ‘You won’t laugh in a minute/ says the Sergeant grimly. ‘Try your last three from the shoulder, Mr. Yeo.’ That is Yeo’s strong point. He jumps up relievedly and pumps in a bull and two magpies. Hawkins, after five shots, returns to his carnations. The business of gardening teaches one to wait on the weather. Hawkins, will further ‘pot’ that bull to-morrow when it may not be so gusty. Gorman and Number Nine get down alongside of young Nutley, that was a gardener’s boy, but is now becoming a man and a shot. ‘This wind’ll about suit her,’ says Andrews with a wink, as Gorman’s cheek cuddles the stock. ‘Hold!’ cries the Sergeant, and there is a roar of laughter. We are rather a doggy community. Billy, Babette, and Tim are lying down beside their owners, but the markers have taken Flossie into the trench, and that impudent little beast has escaped and is sitting precisely under the bull’s-eye. The breech-bolts clack as Gorman and Nutley rise to their knees; our red flag goes up and the Sergeant’s whistle cuts across the wind. Out crawls a marker, but Flossie has disappeared behind the sod-banks. The marker cannot see what we would be at, for our voices are carried away by the gale, and so re-signals the last shot. ‘Oh, get up and tell him, Ted,’ says Gorman. Young Nutley uncoils himself and flings his long arms abroad. He is the star of our signalling class which the Coastguard were teaching all last winter. He semaphores Dog’ twice. Flossie is caught and dragged down; the red flag falls, and Number Nine rewards Gorman with a magpie, — perfect elevation too. She must be feeling well to-day, — the old beast!

To Gorman succeeds Lauder of the Coastguard, — trim, alert, and brown. He gets in his five rounds Navy-fashion: fitting the rough ground as though he were poured into it. He and Purvis are full members of the Club. They can make or mend anything from a new wind-flag to an old target; and their uniforms give us a pleasant air of official responsibility. The Admiralty decree that Coastguards shall fire so many rounds a year, but do not supply a range. They serve out tins stuffed with cordite chips, which they call ‘reduced charge’ cartridges. A rude target is then painted on the cliffs, and our Coastguards blaze off at two hundred yards; using the seven-hundred-yard sight! (If this should meet the eye of the Admiralty, they may be interested to know that — for a consideration — we should be most happy to open the range to neighbouring Coastguards.) For the next hour or so we cut in and out like men at whist. Lauder gives place to Scott, the baker’s son; Scott is followed by Keeley, son of a farmer; then comes Fane, the black-smith’s assistant; Anderson, the butcher; a mechanic or two; a member from Brighton (he has cycled over five miles in the teeth of this wind, but shoots none the less closely); and half-a-dozen others. A man from Burma on sick leave, his fingers itching for the feel of the trigger again; the Vicar, an Australian, and a schoolmaster make up the gallery.

‘No more for the Bisley bull?’ says the Sergeant. ‘Then go back to six hundred. The wind’s dropping! Up flags! Quick!’ ‘Please, Sergeant, mayn’t I try a shot at six hundred?’ says a man newly emancipated from the Morris tube. We do not allow men to begin even at two hundred till they are dismissed their tube-course in thevillagedrill-shed. ‘Not yet,’ is the answer. ‘We’ll give you another turn at the Two-hundred first. You had beginner’s luck to-day.’ The man obeys without protest (you are not encouraged to argue with our Sergeant), but follows up the range, for the sight and the talk of the game lay strong hold upon him. Even our substitute postman (our permanent man is at the Front), who has not yet fired twenty shots with the Morris tube, spends his rare leisure here, listening and looking and learning. One can pick up knowledge for the asking, when the light is good, and the experts come down and lie down and demonstrate.

Over the hill, his rifle cased, walks Vansittart, a man of leisure, with a dozen years’ experience of shooting, — all at the service of the Club. He attends our days as though it were his one business in life, and his advice to the colts is invaluable. He drops beside young Dixon, who has just slipped away from the frieze of huge farm-horses filing home against the skyline to the left. We have hopes of Dixon the farm-hand, for he has good knowledge of the lights and shadows tinder which he spends most of his life. He has never missed a drill or a shoot, or spoken an unnecessary word, since the Club began. The wind at the firing-point has fallen, but it still trickles up and down the valley in heart-breaking fashion. Vansittart’s eye is on the wind-flag, which we others are apt to regard as mere ornament, and he follows the changes with some seventh sense denied to beginners. Then he falls back with young Keeley and two or three others, to whom the mystery of wind-allowance is not so black as it once was, — and they work it all out together at ease on the turf. The Sergeant checks each shot, explains, suggests, and, on occasion, casts himself down alongside to show by example. Hear his wisdom: — ‘It wasn’t the rifle’s fault; give her to me. There you are! The direction’s perfect, but you’ve been dropping your muzzle.’ It is absurdly easy to get a bull when you have mastered the Sergeant’s secret. He tells it to one concerned in these very words: — ‘You hang too long, and when you hang you wobble. Never mind when she’s going off,—keep your eye on the aim. Don’t drop your muzzle, and don’t pull at her. Press her! Press her!’ Or thus: — ‘Left again! Oh, you drive — that’s what it is. Your left’s your master-hand. Try not to give that near-side jerk when you loose off. She’ll throw to the near on her own account.’ This is to Maxwell, our local flyman, who, with the trainer’s son, has hurried up in the garments of his calling. The box-cloth gaiters twitch uneasily as he strives to overcome a professional instinct to pull to the near. Oddly enough, the trainer’s son, though his hands are yet red from the reins (the three-year-old did pull after all!), shoots as straight as a die. Then Jimmy the Crack lies down to fight it off with Gorman, who, having unloaded Number Nine on an innocent friend, has been lying low for Jimmy all the afternoon. Jimmy comes to us from the high veldt so to speak, — from a little lonely village in the Downs, where there may have been rabbits. At any rate he can shoot. He said the other day before some twenty of us: — ‘If a man smokes or drinks he is no good at this game.’ Then he turned on his belly and drave home bulls to clinch the sermon. A thousand tracts could not have taught us more. But Gorman in the blue jean overalls has the level eye and the steady hand of the mechanician, and in a few weeks there should not be much to choose between him and Jimmy.

Last of all — he has business in London all the week, and comes down specially early on Saturdays to do his turn — young Foster, son of the local innkeeper, bicycles over the hill. Vansittart snaps his sight down and turns to watch. This is important, for Foster, Gorman, and Jimmy may represent us if ever we dare to enter for the Spectator’s prize at Bisley. The light softens as the day and the wind go down together, the Channel recovers its unbroken blue, and the young thyme gives out the first true smell of summer. We are all quiet now, except Tim, the terrier, digging a field-mouse with squeakings somewhere on the edge of a wheatfield. ‘Get back from behind the sights!’ The Sergeant raises a warning hand. We tiptoe backwards and squat like partridges. They are proudstomached men, these three cracks. They are not grateful, as some others, for a chance-won magpie. If they get an inner, even, they scowl and the Sergeant scowls, and they ask why they ‘dropped’ so badly. ‘Bull, Gorman! Foster, bull—five! Jimmy—high—oh, high! Inner, high, right! Gorman, inner! Hold a minute till I get my glasses. That was bad, Gorman. Remember the light’s changing every minute. Foster—bull again! Good! Now, Jimmy, your last!’ . . . It is a hang-fire — a bad one, too — and you can hear our quick indrawn ‘Ah!’ of sympathy as Jimmy’s last goes away to the right. This ends the regular work, and the Club sits on the faulty cartridge, giving its opinion of Dum-dums and Service ammunition with entire lucidity. A member hands in a new rifle — his very own — to be shot for sighting; and while the Sergeant puts her through her paces, and a couple of us gamble for cartridges (five shots at six hundred; loser to pay for the whole packet), the Committee, cleaning out its rifles, discusses the terms of a challenge that has come in from the Newhaven Volunteer Engineers. We know nothing of their record — though we have all taken to reading the scores of local clubs, a fact which country editors should note — but we fear the worst. ‘Oh, take ’em on,’ says the Vicar. ‘They won’t do more than beat us. What do you think, Sergeant?’ The Sergeant smiles, but guarantees nothing. He led us to victory against an Essex Volunteer team. He will see to it that we turn out the best eight we have, and the rest is with Allah’s wind and sun and cloud. ‘Ye-es, take ’em on,’ says the Sergeant, and packs away the spare ammunition. The red flag slides down behind the butts, and we stroll home by twos and threes through the everlasting English twilight, explaining, arguing, chaffing, and reshooting every shot. This game has enlarged the skirts of our understanding. Whether we like it or not, we must, when we black our sights, for instance, learn a little neat-handedness; when we meet a visiting team we must entertain them as men of the world: when we use the verniers we must think with an approach to precision and when we wish to describe what is the matter with our shooting we must speak to the point and quickly. Our mistakes are all our own, — pitilessly signalled from the trenches on the echo of each shot. If we lose our tempers, the target will not answer back; we cannot impress the unseen markers by our rank, wealth, or achievement in the world without. They will credit us precisely with what we make, — neither more nor less; and our companions at the firing-point, who now know us very well, will do the same. We cannot patronise any one except a rank duffer fresh from the Morris tube (and he may beat our head off in a month), we dare not tell or act a lie; and if we have a weakness for excess in any shape, the score-book will check us off as scientifically as a German penologist. Unlike cricket, football, lawn-tennis, or fives, any man can play the game; for here, no more than on the high veldt, will the discreet bullet tell its billet whether the despatcher was old, unlovely, poor, weak, or ill-clad.

There are those who say: ‘Ah, but wait till this war-fever dies down, and then the men will get tired of coming down to fire off a gun.’ One hears very little of war-fever on the range, and the wonder (infinitely pathetic in grown men) of being allowed to fire and handle a real live rifle departed long ago. We are enjoying the game for its own sake; because it is sane, and healthy, and quiet (infinitely quieter than a cricket-match), does not knock our daily work to pieces, or necessitate drinks before, during, and after; because it wakes up in us powers whose existence we never dreamed of till now; and because it opens to us a happy new world of interests and ideas, — things that men need as urgently as inland cattle need salt. But if only the range could be open on Sundays!

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IT CAME without warning, at the very hour his hand was outstretched to crumple the Holz and Gunsberg Combine. The New York doctors called it overwork, and he lay in a darkened room, one ankle crossed above the other, tongue pressed into palate, wondering whether the next brain-surge of prickly fires would drive his soul from all anchorages. At last they gave judgment. With care he might in two years return to the arena, but for the present he must go across the water and do no work whatever. He accepted the terms. It was capitulation; but the Combine that had shivered beneath his knife gave him all the honours of war: Gunsberg himself, full of condolences, came to the steamer and filled the Chapins’ suite of cabins with overwhelming flower-works.“Smilax,” said George Chapin when he saw them. “Fitz is right. I’m dead; only I don’t see why he left out the ‘In Memoriam’ on the ribbons!”“Nonsense!” his wife answered, and poured him his tincture. “You’ll be back before you can think.”

He looked at himself in the mirror, surprised that his face had not been branded by the hells of the past three months. The noise of the decks worried him, and he lay down, his tongue only a little pressed against his palate.

An hour later he said: “Sophie, I feel sorry about taking you away from everything like this. I—I suppose we’re the two loneliest people on God’s earth to-night.”

Said Sophie his wife, and kissed him: “Isn’t it something to you that we’re going together?”

They drifted about Europe for months—sometimes alone, sometimes with chance met gipsies of their own land. From the North Cape to the Blue Grotto at Capri they wandered, because the next steamer headed that way, or because some one had set them on the road. The doctors had warned Sophie that Chapin was not to take interest even in other men’s interests; but a familiar sensation at the back of the neck after one hour’s keen talk with a Nauheimed railway magnate saved her any trouble. He nearly wept.

“And I’m over thirty,” he cried. “With all I meant to do!”

“Let’s call it a honeymoon,” said Sophie. “D’ you know, in all the six years we’ve been married, you’ve never told me what you meant to do with your life?”

“With my life? What’s the use? It’s finished now.” Sophie looked up quickly from the Bay of Naples. “As far as my business goes, I shall have to live on my rents like that architect at San Moritz.”

“You’ll get better if you don’t worry; and even if it takes time, there are worse things than—How much have you?”

“Between four and five million. But it isn’t the money. You know it isn’t. It’s the principle. How could you respect me? You never did, the first year after we married, till I went to work like the others. Our tradition and upbringing are against it. We can’t accept those ideals.”

“Well, I suppose I married you for some sort of ideal,” she answered, and they returned to their forty-third hotel.

In England they missed the alien tongues of Continental streets that reminded them of their own polyglot cities. In England all men spoke one tongue, speciously like American to the ear, but on cross-examination unintelligible.,

“Ah, but you have not seen England,” said a lady with iron-grey hair. They had met her in Vienna, Bayreuth, and Florence, and were grateful to find her again at Claridge’s, for she commanded situations, and knew where prescriptions are most carefully made up. “You ought to take an interest in the home of our ancestors as I do.”

“I’ve tried for a week, Mrs. Shonts,” said Sophie, “but I never get any further than tipping German waiters.”

“These men are not the true type,” Mrs. Shonts went on. “I know where you should go.”

Chapin pricked up his ears, anxious to run anywhere from the streets on which quick men, something of his kidney, did the business denied to him.

“We hear and we obey, Mrs. Shonts,” said Sophie, feeling his unrest as he drank the loathed British tea.

Mrs. Shonts smiled, and took them in hand. She wrote widely and telegraphed far on their behalf till, armed with her letter of introduction, she drove them into that wilderness which is reached from an ash-barrel of a station called Charing Cross. They were to go to Rockett’s—the farm of one Cloke, in the southern counties—where, she assured them, they would meet the genuine England of folklore and song.

Rocketts they found after some hours, four miles from a station, and, so far as they could, judge in the bumpy darkness, twice as many from a road. Trees, kine, and the outlines of barns showed shadowy about them when they alighted, and Mr. and Mrs. Cloke, at the open door of a deep stone-floored kitchen, made them slowly welcome. They lay in an attic beneath a wavy whitewashed ceiling, and, because it rained, a wood fire was made in an iron basket on a brick hearth, and they fell asleep to the chirping of mice and the whimper of flames.

When they woke it was a fair day, full of the noises, of birds, the smell of box lavender, and fried bacon, mixed with an elemental smell they had never met before.

“This,” said Sophie, nearly pushing out the thin casement in an attempt to see round the, corner, “is—what did the hack-cabman say to the railway porter about my trunk—‘quite on the top?’”

“No; ‘a little bit of all right.’ I feel farther away from anywhere than I’ve ever felt in my life. We must find out where the telegraph office is.”

“Who cares?” said Sophie, wandering about, hairbrush in hand, to admire the illustrated weekly pictures pasted on door and cupboard.

But there was no rest for the alien soul till he had made sure of the telegraph office. He asked the Clokes’ daughter, laying breakfast, while Sophie plunged her face in the lavender bush outside the low window.

“Go to the stile a-top o’ the Barn field,” said Mary, “and look across Pardons to the next spire. It’s directly under. You can’t miss it—not if you keep to the footpath. My sister’s the telegraphist there. But you’re in the three-mile radius, sir. The boy delivers telegrams directly to this door from Pardons village.”

“One has to take a good deal on trust in this country,” he murmured.

Sophie looked at the close turf, scarred only with last night’s wheels, at two ruts which wound round a rickyard, and at the circle of still orchard about the half-timbered house.

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“What’s the matter with it?” she said. “Telegrams delivered to the Vale of Avalon, of course,” and she beckoned in an earnest-eyed hound of engaging manners and no engagements, who answered, at times, to the name of Rambler. He led them, after breakfast, to the rise behind the house where the stile stood against the skyline, and, “I wonder what we shall find now,” said Sophie, frankly prancing with joy on the grass.

It was a slope of gap-hedged fields possessed to their centres by clumps of brambles. Gates were not, and the rabbit-mined, cattle-rubbed posts leaned out and in. A narrow path doubled among the bushes, scores of white tails twinkled before the racing hound, and a hawk rose, whistling shrilly.

“No roads, no nothing!” said Sophie, her short skirt hooked by briers. “I thought all England was a garden. There’s your spire, George, across the valley. How curious!”

They walked toward it through an all abandoned land. Here they found the ghost of a patch of lucerne that had refused to die: there a harsh fallow surrendered to yard-high thistles; and here a breadth of rampant kelk feigning to be lawful crop. In the ungrazed pastures swaths of dead stuff caught their feet, and the ground beneath glistened with sweat. At the bottom of the valley a little brook had undermined its footbridge, and frothed in the wreckage. But there stood great woods on the slopes beyond—old, tall, and brilliant, like unfaded tapestries against the walls of a ruined house.

“All this within a hundred miles of London,” he said. “Looks as if it had had nervous prostration, too.” The, footpath turned the shoulder of a slope, through a thicket of rank rhododendrons, and crossed what had once been a carriage drive, which ended in the shadow of two gigantic holm-oaks.

“A house!” said Sophie, in a whisper. “A Colonial house!”

Behind the blue-green of the twin trees rose a dark-bluish brick Georgian pile, with a shell-shaped fan-light over its pillared door. The hound had gone off on his own foolish quests. Except for some stir it the branches and the flight of four startled magpies; there was neither life nor sound about the square house, but it looked out of its long windows most friendlily.

“Cha-armed to meet you, I’m sure,” said Sophie, and curtsied to the ground. “George, this is history I can understand. We began here.” She curtsied again.

The June sunshine twinkled on all the lights. It was as though an old lady, wise in three generations’ experience, but for the present sitting out, bent to listen to her flushed and eager grandchild.

“I must look!” Sophie tiptoed to a window, and shaded her eyes with her hand. “Oh, this room’s half-full of cotton-bales—wool, I suppose! But I can see a bit of the mantelpiece. George, do come! Isn’t that some one?”

She fell back behind her husband. The front door opened slowly, to show the hound, his nose white with milk, in charge of an ancient of days clad in a blue linen ephod curiously gathered on breast and shoulders.

“Certainly,” said George, half aloud. “Father Time himself. This is where he lives, Sophie.”

“We came,” said Sophie weakly. “Can we see the house? I’m afraid that’s our dog.”

“No, ’Tis Rambler,” said the old man. “He’s been, at my swill-pail again. Staying at Rocketts, be ye? Come in. Ah! you runagate!”

The hound broke from him, and he tottered after him down the drive. They entered the hall—just such a high light hall as such a house should own. A slim-balustered staircase, wide and shallow and once creamy-white, climbed out of it under a long oval window. On either side delicately moulded doors gave on to wool-lumbered rooms, whose sea-green mantelpieces were adorned with nymphs, scrolls, and Cupids in low relief.

“What’s the firm that makes these things?” cried Sophie, enraptured. “Oh, I forgot! These must be the originals. Adams, is it? I never dreamed of anything like that steel-cut fender. Does he mean us to go everywhere?”

“He’s catching the dog,” said George, looking out. “We don’t count.”

They explored the first or ground floor, delighted as children playing burglars.

“This is like all England,” she said at last. “Wonderful, but no explanation. You’re expected to know it beforehand. Now, let’s try upstairs.”

The stairs never creaked beneath their feet. From the broad landing they entered a long, green-panelled room lighted by three full-length windows, which overlooked the forlorn wreck of a terraced garden, and wooded slopes beyond.

“The drawing-room, of course.” Sophie swam up and down it. “That mantelpiece—Orpheus and Eurydice—is the best of them all. Isn’t it marvellous? Why, the room seems furnished with nothing in it! How’s that, George?”

“It’s the proportions. I’ve noticed it.”

“I saw a Heppelwhite couch once”—Sophie laid her finger to her flushed cheek and considered. “With, two of them—one on each side—you wouldn’t need anything else. Except—there must be one perfect mirror over that mantelpiece.”

“Look at that view. It’s a framed Constable,” her husband cried.

“No; it’s a Morland—a parody of a Morland. But about that couch, George. Don’t you think Empire might be better than Heppelwhite? Dull gold against that pale green? It’s a pity they don’t make spinets nowadays.”

“I believe you can get them. Look at that oak wood behind the pines.”

“‘While you sat and played toccatas stately, at the clavichord,”’ Sophie hummed, and, head on one; side, nodded to where the perfect mirror should hang:

Then they found bedrooms with dressing-rooms and powdering-closets, and steps leading up and down—boxes of rooms, round, square, and octagonal, with enriched ceilings and chased door-locks.

“Now about servants. Oh!” She had darted up the last stairs to the chequered darkness of the top floor, where loose tiles lay among broken laths, and the walls were scrawled with names, sentiments, and hop records. “They’ve been keeping pigeons here,” she cried.

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“And you could drive a buggy through the roof anywhere,” said George.

“That’s what I say,” the old man cried below them on the stairs. “Not a dry place for my pigeons at all.”

“But why was it allowed to get like this?” said Sophie.

“Tis with housen as teeth,” he replied. “Let ’em go too far, and there’s nothing to be done. Time was they was minded to sell her, but none would buy. She was too far away along from any place. Time was they’d ha’ lived here theyselves, but they took and died.”

“Here?” Sophie moved beneath the light of a hole in the roof.

“Nah—none dies here excep’ falling off ricks and such. In London they died.” He plucked a lock of wool from his blue smock. “They was no staple—neither the Elphicks nor the Moones. Shart and brittle all of ’em. Dead they be seventeen year, for I’ve been here caretakin’ twenty-five.”

“Who does all the wool belong to downstairs?” George asked.

“To the estate. I’ll show you the back parts if ye like. You’re from America, ain’t ye? I’ve had a son there once myself.” They followed him down the main stairway. He paused at the turn and swept one hand toward the wall. “Plenty room, here for your coffin to come down. Seven foot and three men at each end wouldn’t brish the paint. If I die in my bed they’ll ’ave to up-end me like a milk-can. ’Tis all luck, dye see?”

He led them on and on, through a maze of back kitchens, dairies, larders, and sculleries, that melted along covered ways into a farm-house, visibly older than the main building, which again rambled out among barns, byres, pig-pens, stalls and stables to the dead fields behind.

“Somehow,” said Sophie, sitting exhausted on an ancient well-curb—“somehow one wouldn’t insult these lovely old things by filling them with hay.”

George looked at long stone walls upholding reaches of silvery-oak weather-boarding; buttresses of mixed flint and bricks; outside stairs, stone upon arched stone; curves of thatch where grass sprouted; roundels of house-leeked tiles, and a huge paved yard populated by two cows and the repentant Rambler. He had not thought of himself or of the telegraph office for two and a half hours.

“But why,” said Sophie, as they went back through the crater of stricken fields,—“why is one expected to know everything in England? Why do they never tell?”

“You mean about the Elphicks and the Moones?” he answered.

“Yes—and the lawyers and the estate. Who are they? I wonder whether those painted floors in the green room were real oak. Don’t you like us exploring things together—better than Pompeii?”

George turned once more to look at the view. “Eight hundred acres go with the house—the old man told me. Five farms altogether. Rocketts is one of ’em.”

“I like Mrs. Cloke. But what is the old house called?”

George laughed. “That’s one of the things you’re expected to know. He never told me.”

The Clokes were more communicative. That evening and thereafter for a week they gave the Chapins the official history, as one gives it to lodgers, of Friars Pardon the house and its five farms. But Sophie asked so many questions, and George was so humanly interested, that, as confidence in the strangers grew, they launched, with observed and acquired detail, into the lives and deaths and doings of the Elphicks and the Moones and their collaterals, the Haylings and the Torrells. It was a tale told serially by Cloke in the barn, or his wife in the dairy, the last chapters reserved for the kitchen o’ nights by the big fire, when the two had been half the day exploring about the house, where old Iggulden, of the blue smock, cackled and chuckled to see them. The motives that swayed the characters were beyond their comprehension; the fates that shifted them were gods they had never met; the sidelights Mrs. Cloke threw on act and incident were more amazing than anything in the record. Therefore the Chapins listened delightedly, and blessed Mrs. Shonts.

“But why—why—why—did So-and-so do so-and-so?” Sophie would demand from her seat by the pothook; and Mrs. Cloke would answer, smoothing her knees, “For the sake of the place.”

“I give it up,” said George one night in their own room. “People don’t seem to matter in this country compared to the places they live in. The way she tells it, Friars Pardon was a sort of Moloch.”

“Poor old thing!” They had been walking round the farms as usual before tea. “No wonder they loved it. Think of the sacrifices they made for it. Jane Elphick married the younger Torrell to keep it in the family. The octagonal room with the moulded ceiling next to the big bedroom was hers. Now what did he tell you while he was feeding the pigs?” said Sophie.

“About the Torrell cousins and the uncle who died in Java. They lived at Burnt House—behind High Pardons, where that brook is all blocked up.”

“No; Burnt House is under High Pardons Wood, before you come to Gale Anstey,” Sophie corrected.

“Well, old man Cloke said—”

Sophie threw open the door and called down into the kitchen, where the Clokes were covering the fire “Mrs. Cloke, isn’t Burnt House under High Pardons?”

“Yes, my dear, of course,” the soft voice. answered absently. A cough. “I beg your pardon, Madam. What was it you said?”

“Never mind. I prefer it the other way,” Sophie laughed, and George re-told the missing chapter as she sat on the bed.

“Here to-day an’ gone to-morrow,” said Cloke warningly. “They’ve paid their first month, but we’ve only that Mrs. Shonts’s letter for guarantee.”

“None she sent never cheated us yet. It slipped out before I thought. She’s a most humane young lady. They’ll be going away in a little. An’ you’ve talked a lot too, Alfred.”

page 4

“Yes, but the Elphicks are all dead. No one can bring my loose talking home to me. But why do they stay on and stay on so?”

In due time George and Sophie asked each other that question, and put it aside. They argued that the climate—a pearly blend, unlike the hot and cold ferocities of their native land—suited them, as the thick stillness of the nights certainly suited George. He was saved even the sight of a metalled road, which, as presumably leading to business, wakes desire in a man; and the telegraph office at the village of Friars Pardon, where they sold picture post-cards and pegtops, was two walking miles across the fields and woods.

For all that touched his past among his fellows, or their remembrance of him, he might have been in another planet; and Sophie, whose life had been very largely spent among husbandless wives of lofty ideals, had no wish to leave this present of God. The unhurried meals, the foreknowledge of deliciously empty hours to follow, the breadths of soft sky under which they walked together and reckoned time only by their hunger or thirst; the good grass beneath their feet that cheated the miles; their discoveries, always together, amid the farms—Griffons, Rocketts, Burnt House, Gale Anstey, and the Home Farm, where Iggulden of the blue smock-frock would waylay them, and they would ransack the old house once more; the long wet afternoons when, they tucked up their feet on the bedroom’s deep window-sill over against the apple-trees, and talked together as never till then had they found time to talk—these things contented her soul, and her body throve.

“Have you realized,” she asked one morning, “that we’ve been here absolutely alone for the last thirty-four days?”

“Have you counted them?” he asked.

“Did you like them?” she replied.

“I must have. I didn’t think about them. Yes, I have. Six months ago I should have fretted myself sick. Remember at Cairo? I’ve only had two or three bad times. Am I getting better, or is it senile decay?”

“Climate, all climate.” Sophie swung her new-bought English boots, as she sat on the stile overlooking Friars Pardon, behind the Clokes’s barn.

“One must take hold of things though,” he said, “if it’s only to keep one’s hand in.” His eyes did not flicker now as they swept the empty fields. “Mustn’t one?”

“Lay out a Morristown links over Gale Anstey. I dare say you could hire it.”

“No, I’m not as English as that—nor as Morristown. Cloke says all the farms here could be made to pay.”

“Well, I’m Anastasia in the ‘Treasure of Franchard.’ I’m content to be alive and purr. There’s no hurry.”

“No.” He smiled. “All the same, I’m going to see after my mail.”

“You promised you wouldn’t have any.”

“There’s some business coming through that’s amusing me. Honest. It doesn’t get on my nerves at all.”

“Want a secretary?”

“No, thanks, old thing! Isn’t that quite English?”

“Too English! Go away.” But none the less in broad daylight she returned the kiss. “I’m off to Pardons. I haven’t been to the house for nearly a week.”

“How’ve you decided to furnish Jane Elphick’s bedroom?” he laughed, for it had come to be a permanent Castle in Spain between them.

“Black Chinese furniture and yellow silk brocade,” she answered, and ran downhill. She scattered a few cows at a gap with a flourish of a ground-ash that Iggulden had cut for her a week ago, and singing as she passed under the holmoaks, sought the farm-house at the back of Friars Pardon. The old man was not to be found, and she knocked at his half-opened door, for she needed him to fill her idle forenoon. A blue-eyed sheep-dog, a new friend, and Rambler’s old enemy, crawled out and besought her to enter.

Iggulden sat in his chair by the fire, a thistle-spud between his knees, his head drooped. Though she had never seen death before, her heart, that missed a beat, told her that he was dead. She did not speak or cry, but stood outside the door, and the dog licked her hand. When he threw up his nose, she heard herself saying: “Don’t howl! Please don’t begin to howl, Scottie, or I shall run away!”

She held her ground while the shadows in the rickyard moved toward noon; sat after a while on the steps by the door, her arms round the dog’s neck, waiting till some one should come. She watched the smokeless chimneys of Friars Pardon slash its roofs with shadow, and the smoke of Iggulden’s last lighted fire gradually thin and cease. Against her will she fell to wondering how many Moones, Elphicks, and Torrells had been swung round the turn of the broad Mall stairs. Then she remembered the old man’s talk of being “up-ended like a milk-can,” and buried her face on Scottie’s neck. At last a horse’s feet clinked upon flags, rustled in the old grey straw of the rickyard, and she found herself facing the vicar—a figure she had seen at church declaiming impossibilities (Sophie was a Unitarian) in an unnatural voice.

“He’s dead,” she said, without preface.

“Old Iggulden? I was coming for a talk with him.” The vicar passed in uncovered. “Ah!” she heard him say. “Heart-failure! How long have you been here?”

“Since a quarter to eleven.” She looked at her watch earnestly and saw that her hand did not shake.

“I’ll sit with him now till the doctor comes. D’you think you could tell him, and—yes, Mrs. Betts in the cottage with the wistaria next the blacksmith’s? I’m afraid this has been rather a shock to you.”

Sophie nodded, and fled toward the village. Her body failed her for a moment; she dropped beneath a hedge, and looked back at the great house. In some fashion its silence and stolidity steadied her for her errand.

Mrs. Betts, small, black-eyed, and dark, was almost as unconcerned as Friars Pardon.

page 5

“Yiss, yiss, of course. Dear me! Well, Iggulden he had had his day in my father’s time. Muriel, get me my little blue bag, please. Yiss, ma’am. They come down like ellum-branches in still weather. No warnin’ at all. Muriel, my bicycle’s be’ind the fowlhouse. I’ll tell Dr. Dallas, ma’am.”

She trundled off on her wheel like a brown bee, while Sophie—heaven above and earth beneath changed—walked stiffly home, to fall over George at his letters, in a muddle of laughter and tears.

“It’s all quite natural for them,” she gasped. “They come down like ellum-branches in still weather. Yiss, ma’am.’ No, there wasn’t anything in the least horrible, only—only—Oh, George, that poor shiny stick of his between his poor, thin knees! I couldn’t have borne it if Scottie had howled. I didn’t know the vicar was so—so sensitive. He said he was afraid it was ra—rather a shock. Mrs. Betts told me to go home, and I wanted to collapse on her floor. But I didn’t disgrace myself. I—I couldn’t have left him—could I?”

“You’re sure you’ve took no ’arm?” cried Mrs. Cloke, who had heard the news by farm-telegraphy, which is older but swifter than Marconi’s.

“No. I’m perfectly well,” Sophie protested.

“You lay down till tea-time.” Mrs. Cloke patted her shoulder. “They’ll be very pleased, though she ’as ’ad no proper understandin’ for twenty years.”

“They” came before twilight—a black-bearded man in moleskins, and a little palsied old woman, who chirruped like a wren.

“I’m his son,” said the man to Sophie, among the lavender bushes. “We ’ad a difference—twenty year back, and didn’t speak since. But I’m his son all the ’same, and we thank you for the watching.”

“I’m only glad I happened to be there,” she answered, and from the bottom of her heart she meant it.

“We heard he spoke a lot o’ you—one time an’ another since you came. We thank you kindly,” the man added.

“Are you the son that was in America?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am. On my uncle’s farm, in Connecticut. He was what they call rood-master there.”

“Whereabouts in Connecticut?” asked George over her shoulder.

“Veering Holler was the name. I was there six year with my uncle.”

“How small the world is!” Sophie cried. “Why, all my mother’s people come from Veering Hollow. There must be some there still—the Lashmars. Did you ever hear of them?”

“I remember hearing that name, seems to me,” he answered, but his face was blank as the back of a spade.

A little before dusk a woman in grey, striding like a foot-soldier, and bearing on her arm a long pole, crashed through the orchard calling for food. George, upon whom the unannounced English worked mysteriously, fled to the parlour; but Mrs. Cloke came forward beaming. Sophie could not escape.

“We’ve only just heard of it;” said the stranger, turning on her. “I’ve been out with the otter-hounds all day. It was a splendidly sportin’ thing “

“Did you—er—kill?” said Sophie. She knew from books she could not go far wrong here.

“Yes, a dry bitch—seventeen pounds,” was the answer. “A splendidly sportin’ thing of you to do. Poor old Iggulden—”

“Oh—that!” said Sophie, enlightened.

“If there had been any people at Pardons it would never have happened. He’d have been looked after. But what can you expect from a parcel of London solicitors?”

Mrs. Cloke murmured something.

“No. I’m soaked from the knees down. If I hang about I shall get chilled. A cup of tea, Mrs. Cloke, and I can eat one of your sandwiches as I go.” She wiped her weather-worn face with a green and yellow silk handkerchief.

“Yes, my lady!” Mrs. Cloke ran and returned swiftly.

“Our land marches with Pardons for a mile on the south,” she explained, waving the full cup, “but one has quite enough to do with one’s own people without poachin’. Still, if I’d known, I’d have sent Dora, of course. Have you seen her this afternoon, Mrs. Cloke? No? I wonder whether that girl did sprain her ankle. Thank you.” It was a formidable hunk of bread and bacon that Mrs. Cloke presented. “As I was sayin’, Pardons is a scandal! Lettin’ people die like dogs. There ought to be people there who do their duty. You’ve done yours, though there wasn’t the faintest call upon you. Good night. Tell Dora, if she comes, I’ve gone on.”

She strode away, munching her crust, and Sophie reeled breathless into the parlour, to shake the shaking George.

“Why did you keep catching my eye behind the blind? Why didn’t you come out and do your duty?”

“Because I should have burst. Did you see the mud on its cheek?” he said.

“Once. I daren’t look again. Who is she?”

“God—a local deity then. Anyway, she’s another of the things you’re expected to know by instinct.”

Mrs. Cloke, shocked at their levity, told them that it was Lady Conant, wife of Sir Walter Conant, Baronet, a large landholder in the neighbourhood; and if not God; at least His visible Providence. George made her talk of that family for an hour.

“Laughter,” said Sophie afterward in their own room, “is the mark of the savage. Why couldn’t you control your emotions? It’s all real to her.”

“It’s all real to me. That’s my trouble,” he answered in an altered tone. “Anyway, it’s real enough to mark time with. Don’t you think so?”

page 6

“What d’you mean?” she asked quickly, though she knew his voice.

“That I’m better. I’m well enough to kick.”

“What at?”

“This!” He waved his hand round the one room. “I must have something to play with till I’m fit for work again.”

“Ah!” She sat on the bed and leaned forward, her hands clasped. “I wonder if it’s good for you.”

“We’ve been better here than anywhere,” he went on slowly. “One could always sell it again.”

She nodded gravely, but her eyes sparkled.

“The only thing that worries me is what happened this morning. I want to know how you feel about it. If it’s on your nerves in the least we can have the old farm at the back of the house pulled down, or perhaps it has spoiled the notion for you?”

“Pull it down?” she cried. “You’ve no business faculty. Why, that’s where we could live while we’re putting the big house in order. It’s almost under the same roof. No! What happened this morning seemed to be more of a—of a leading than anything else. There ought to be people at Pardons. Lady Conant’s quite right.”

“I was thinking more of the woods and the roads. I could double the value of the place in six months.”

“What do they want for it?” She shook her head, and her loosened hair fell glowingly about her cheeks.

“Seventy-five thousand dollars. They’ll take sixty-eight.”

“Less than half what we paid for our old yacht when we married. And we didn’t have a good time in her. You were—”

“Well, I discovered I was too much of an American to be content to be a rich man’s son. You aren’t blaming me for that?”

“Oh, no. Only it was a very businesslike honeymoon. How far are you along with the deal, George?”

“I can mail the deposit on the purchase money to-morrow morning, and we can have the thing completed in a fortnight or three weeks—if you say so.”

“Friars Pardon—Friars Pardon!” Sophie chanted rapturously, her dark gray eyes big with delight. “All the farms? Gale Anstey, Burnt House, Rocketts, the Home Farm, and Griffons? Sure you’ve got ’em all?”

“Sure.” He smiled.

“And the woods? High Pardons Wood, Lower Pardons, Suttons, Dutton’s Shaw, Reuben’s Ghyll, Maxey’s Ghyll, and both the Oak Hangers? Sure you’ve got ’em all?”

“Every last stick. Why, you know them as well as I do.” He laughed. “They say there’s five thousand—a thousand pounds’ worth of lumber—timber they call it—in the Hangers alone.”

“Mrs. Cloke’s oven must be mended first thing, and the kitchen roof. I think I’ll have all this whitewashed,” Sophie broke in, pointing to the ceiling. “The whole place is a scandal. Lady Conant is quite right. George, when did you begin to fall in love with the house? In the greenroom that first day? I did.”

“I’m not in love with it. One must do something to mark time till one’s fit for work.”

“Or when we stood under the oaks, and the door opened? Oh! Ought I to go to poor Iggulden’s funeral?” She sighed with utter happiness.

“Wouldn’t they call it a liberty now?” said he.

“But I liked him.”

“But you didn’t own him at the date of his death.”

“That wouldn’t keep me away. Only, they made such a fuss about the watching”—she caught her breath—“it might be ostentatious from that point of view, too. Oh, George”—she reached for his hand—“we’re two little orphans moving in worlds not realized, and we shall make some bad breaks. But we’re going to have the time of our lives.”

“We’ll run up to London to-morrow, and see if we can hurry those English law solicitors. I want to get to work.”

They went. They suffered many things ere they returned across the fields in a fly one Saturday night, nursing a two by two-and-a-half box of deeds and maps—lawful owners of Friars Pardon and the five decayed farms therewith.

“I do most sincerely ’ope and trust you’ll be ’appy, Madam,” Mrs. Cloke gasped, when she was told the news by the kitchen fire.

“Goodness! It isn’t a marriage!” Sophie exclaimed, a little awed; for to them the joke, which to an American means work, was only just beginning.

“If it’s took in a proper spirit”—Mrs. Cloke’s eye turned toward her oven.

“Send and have that mended to-morrow,” Sophie whispered.

“We couldn’t ’elp noticing,” said Cloke slowly, “from the times you walked there, that you an’ your lady was drawn to it, but—but I don’t know as we ever precisely thought—“ His wife’s glance checked him.

“That we were that sort of people,” said George. “We aren’t sure of it ourselves yet.”

“Perhaps,” said Cloke, rubbing his knees, “just for the sake of saying something, perhaps you’ll park it?”

“What’s that?” said George.

“Turn it all into a fine park like Violet Hill”—he jerked a thumb to westward—“that Mr. Sangres bought. It was four farms, and Mr. Sangres made a fine park of them, with a herd of faller deer.”

page 7

“Then it wouldn’t be Friars Pardon,” said Sophie. “Would it?”

“I don’t know as I’ve ever heard Pardons was ever anything but wheat an’ wool. Only some gentlemen say that parks are less trouble than tenants.” He laughed nervously. “But the gentry, o’ course, they keep on pretty much as they was used to.”

“I see,” said Sophie. “How did Mr. Sangres make his money?”

“I never rightly heard. It was pepper an’ spices, or it may ha’ been gloves. No. Gloves was Sir Reginald Liss at Marley End. Spices was Mr. Sangres. He’s a Brazilian gentleman—very sunburnt like.”

“Be sure o’ one thing. You won’t ’ave any trouble,” said Mrs. Cloke, just before they went to bed.

Now the news of the purchase was told to Mr. and Mrs. Cloke alone at 8 p.m. of a Saturday. None left the farm till they set out for church next morning. Yet when they reached the church and were about to slip aside into their usual seats, a little beyond the font, where they could see the red-furred tails of the bellropes waggle and twist at ringing time, they were swept forward irresistibly, a Cloke on either flank (and yet they had not walked with the Clokes), upon the ever-retiring bosom of a black-gowned verger, who ushered them into a room of a pew at the head of the left aisle, under the pulpit.

“This,” he sighed reproachfully, “is the Pardons’ Pew,” and shut them in.

They could see little more than the choir boys in the chancel, but to the roots of the hair of their necks they felt the congregation behind mercilessly devouring them by look.

“When the wicked man turneth away.” The strong, alien voice of the priest vibrated under the hammer-beam roof, and a loneliness unfelt before swamped their hearts, as they searched for places in the unfamiliar Church of England service. The Lord’s Prayer “Our Father, which art”—set the seal on that desolation. Sophie found herself thinking how in other lands their purchase would long ere this have been discussed from every point of view in a dozen prints, forgetting that George for months had not been allowed to glance at those black and bellowing head-lines. Here was nothing but silence—not even hostility! The game was up to them; the other players hid their cards and waited. Suspense, she felt, was in the air, and when her sight cleared, saw, indeed, a mural tablet of a footless bird brooding upon the carven motto, “ Wayte awhyle—wayte awhyle.”

At the Litany George had trouble with an unstable hassock, and drew the slip of carpet under the pewseat. Sophie pushed her end back also, and shut her eyes against a burning that felt like tears. When she opened them she was looking at her mother’s maiden name, fairly carved on a blue flagstone on the pew floor: Ellen Lashmar. ob. 1796. aetat 27.

She nudged George and pointed. Sheltered, as they kneeled, they looked for more knowledge, but the rest of the slab was blank.

“Ever hear of her?” he whispered.

“Never knew any of us came from here.”

“Coincidence?”

“Perhaps. But it makes me feel better,” and she smiled and winked away a tear on her lashes, and took his hand while they prayed for “all women labouring of child”—not “in the perils of childbirth”; and the sparrows who had found their way through the guards behind the glass windows chirped above the faded gilt and alabaster family tree of the Conants.

The baronet’s pew was on the right of the aisle. After service its inhabitants moved forth without haste, but so as to block effectively a dusky person with a large family who champed in their rear.

“Spices, I think,” said Sophie, deeply delighted as the Sangres closed up after the Conants. “Let ’em get away, George.”

But when they came out many folk whose eyes were one still lingered by the lychgate.

“I want to see if any more Lashmars are buried here,” said Sophie.

“Not now. This seems to be show day. Come home quickly,” he replied.

A group of families, the Clokes a little apart, opened to let them through. The men saluted with jerky nods, the women with remnants of a curtsey. Only Iggulden’s son, his mother on his arm, lifted his hat as Sophie passed.

“Your people,” said the clear voice of Lady Conant in her ear.

“I suppose so,” said Sophie, blushing, for they were within two yards of her; but it was not a question.

“Then that child looks as if it were coming down with mumps. You ought to tell the mother she shouldn’t have brought it to church.”

“I can’t leave ’er behind, my lady,” the woman said. “She’d set the ’ouse afire in a minute, she’s that forward with the matches. Ain’t you, Maudie dear?”

“Has Dr. Dallas seen her?”

“Not yet, my lady.”

“He must. You can’t get away, of course. M-m! My idiotic maid is coming in for her teeth to-morrow at twelve. She shall pick her up—at Gale Anstey, isn’t it?—at eleven.”

“Yes. Thank you very much, my lady.”

“I oughtn’t to have done it,” said Lady Conant apologetically, “but there has been no one at Pardons for so long that you’ll forgive my poaching. Now, can’t you lunch with us? The vicar usually comes too. I don’t use the horses on a Sunday”—she glanced at the Brazilian’s silver-plated chariot. “It’s only a mile across the fields.”

“You—you’re very kind,” said Sophie, hating herself because her lip trembled.

“My dear,” the compelling tone dropped to a soothing gurgle, “d’you suppose I don’t know how it feels to come to a strange county—country I should say—away from one’s own people? When I first left the Shires—I’m Shropshire, you know—I cried for a day and a night. But fretting doesn’t make loneliness any better. Oh, here’s Dora. She did sprain her leg that day.”

page 8

“I’m as lame as a tree still,” said the tall maiden frankly. “You ought to go out with the otter-hounds, Mrs. Chapin. I believe they’re drawing your water next week.”

Sir Walter had already led off George, and the vicar came up on the other side of Sophie. There was no escaping the swift procession or the leisurely lunch, where talk came and went in low-voiced eddies that had the village for their centre. Sophie heard the vicar and Sir Walter address her husband lightly as Chapin! (She also remembered many women known in a previous life who habitually addressed their husbands as Mr. Such-an-one.) After lunch Lady Conant talked to her explicitly of maternity as that is achieved in cottages and farm-houses remote from aid, and of the duty thereto of the mistress of Pardons.

A gate in a beech hedge, reached across triple lawns, let them out before tea-time into the unkempt south side of their land.

“I want your hand, please,” said Sophie as soon as they were safe among the beech boles and the lawless hollies. “D’you remember the old maid in ‘Providence and the Guitar’ who heard the Commissary swear, and hardly reckoned herself a maiden lady afterward? Because I’m a relative of hers. Lady Conant is—”

“Did you find out anything about the Lashmars?” he interrupted.

“I didn’t ask. I’m going to write to Aunt Sydney about it first. Oh, Lady Conant said something at lunch about their having bought some land from some Lashmars a few years ago. I found it was at the beginning of last century.”

“What did you say?”

“I said, ‘Really, how interesting!’ Like that. I’m not going to push myself forward. I’ve been hearing about Mr. Sangres’s efforts in that direction. And you? I couldn’t see you behind the flowers. Was it very deep water, dear?”

George mopped a brow already browned by outdoor exposures.

“Oh no—dead easy,” he answered. “I’ve bought Friars Pardon to prevent Sir Walter’s birds straying.”

A cock pheasant scuttered through the dry leaves and exploded almost under their feet. Sophie jumped.

“That’s one of ’em,” said George calmly.

“Well, your nerves are better, at any rate,” said she. “Did you tell ’em you’d bought the thing to play with?”

“No. That was where my nerve broke down. I only made one bad break—I think. I said I couldn’t see why hiring land to men to farm wasn’t as much a business proposition as anything else.”

“And what did they say?”

“They smiled. I shall know what that smile means some day. They don’t waste their smiles. D’you see that track by Gale Anstey?”

They looked down from the edge of the hanger over a cup-like hollow. People by twos and threes in their Sunday best filed slowly along the paths that connected farm to farm.

“I’ve never seen so many on our land before,” said Sophie. “Why is it?”

“To show us we mustn’t shut up their rights of way.”

“Those cow-tracks we’ve been using cross lots?” said Sophie forcibly.

“Yes. Any one of ’em would cost us two thousand pounds each in legal expenses to close.”

“But we don’t want to,” she said.

“The whole community would fight if we did.”

“But it’s our land. We can do what we like.”

“It’s not our land. We’ve only paid for it. We belong to it, and it belongs to the people—our people they call ’em. I’ve been to lunch with the English too.”

They passed slowly from one bracken-dotted field to the next—flushed with pride of ownership, plotting alterations and restorations at each turn; halting in their tracks to argue, spreading apart to embrace two views at once, or closing in to consider one. Couples moved out of their way, but smiling covertly.

“We shall make some bad breaks,” he said at last.

“Together, though. You won’t let anyone else in, will you?”

“Except the contractors. This syndicate handles, this proposition by its little lone.”

“But you might feel the want of some one,” she insisted.

“I shall—but it will be you. It’s business, Sophie, but it’s going to be good fun.”

“Please God,” she answered flushing, and cried to herself as they went back to tea. “It’s worth it. Oh, it’s worth it.”

The repairing and moving into Friars Pardon was business of the most varied and searching, but all done English fashion, without friction. Time and money alone were asked. The rest lay in the hands of beneficent advisers from London, or spirits, male and female, called up by Mr. and Mrs. Cloke from the wastes of the farms. In the centre stood George and Sophie, a little aghast, their interests reaching out on every side.

“I ain’t sayin’ anything against Londoners,” said Cloke, self-appointed clerk of the outer works, consulting engineer, head of the immigration bureau, and superintendent of woods and forests; “but your own people won’t go about to make more than a fair profit out of you.”

“How is one to know?” said George.

page 9

“Five years from now, or so on, maybe, you’ll be lookin’ over your first year’s accounts, and, knowin’ what you’ll know then, you’ll say: ‘Well, Billy Beartup’—or Old Cloke as it might be—‘did me proper when I was new.’ No man likes to have that sort of thing laid up against him.”

“I think I see,” said George. “But five years is a long time to look ahead.”

“I doubt if that oak Billy Beartup throwed in Reuben’s Ghyll will be fit for her drawin-room floor in less than seven,” Cloke drawled.

“Yes, that’s my work,” said Sophie. (Billy Beartup of Griffons, a woodman by training and birth, a tenant farmer by misfortune of marriage, had laid his broad axe at her feet a month before.) “Sorry if I’ve committed you to another eternity.”

“And we shan’t even know where we’ve gone wrong with your new carriage drive before that time either,” said Cloke, ever anxious to keep the balance true with an ounce or two in Sophie’s favour. The past four months had taught George better than to reply. The carriage road winding up the hill was his present keen interest. They set off to look at it, and the imported American scraper which had blighted the none too sunny soul of “Skim” Winsh, the carter.

But young Iggulden was in charge now, and under his guidance, Buller and Roberts, the great horses, moved mountains.

“You lif’ her like that, an’ you tip her like that,” he explained to the gang. “My uncle he was roadmaster in Connecticut.”

“Are they roads yonder?” said Skim, sitting under the laurels.

“No better than accommodation roads. Dirt, they call ’em. They’d suit you, Skim.”

“Why?” said the incautious Skim.

“Cause you’d take no hurt when you fall out of your cart drunk on a Saturday,” was the answer.

“I didn’t last time neither,” Skim roared.

After the loud laugh, old Whybarne of Gale Anstey piped feebly, “Well, dirt or no dirt, there’s no denyin’ Chapin knows a good job when he sees it. ’E don’t build one day and dee-stroy the next, like that nigger Sangres.”

“She’s the one that knows her own mind,” said Pinky, brother to Skim Winsh, and a Napoleon among carters who had helped to bring the grand piano across the fields in the autumn rains.

“She had ought to,” said Iggulden. “Whoa, Buller! She’s a Lashmar. They never was double-thinking.”

“Oh, you found that? Has the answer come from your uncle?” said Skim, doubtful whether so remote a land as America had posts.

The others looked at him scornfully. Skim was always a day behind the fair. Iggulden rested from his labours. “She’s a Lashmar right enough. I started up to write to my uncle—at once—the month after she said her folks came from Veering Holler.”

“Where there ain’t any roads?” Skim interrupted, but none laughed.

“My uncle he married an American woman for his second, and she took it up like a like the coroner. She’s a Lashmar out of the old Lashmar place, ’fore they sold to Conants. She ain’t no Toot Hill Lashmar, nor any o’ the Crayford lot. Her folk come out of the ground here, neither chalk nor forest, but wildishers. They sailed over to America—I’ve got it all writ down by my uncle’s woman—in eighteen hundred an’ nothing. My uncle says they’re all slow begetters like.”

“Would they be gentry yonder now?” Skim asked.

“Nah—there’s no gentry in America, no matter how long you’re there. It’s against their law. There’s only rich and poor allowed. They’ve been lawyers and such like over yonder for a hundred years but she’s a Lashmar for all that.”

“Lord! What’s a hundred years?” said Whybarne, who had seen seventy-eight of them.

“An’ they write too, from yonder—my uncle’s woman writes—that you can still tell ’em by headmark. Their hair’s foxy-red still—an’ they throw out when they walk. He’s in-toed-treads like a gipsy; but you watch, an’ you’ll see ’er throw, out—like a colt.”

“Your trace wants taking up.” Pinky’s large ears had caught the sound of voices, and as the two broke through the laurels the men were hard at work, their eyes on Sophie’s feet.

She had been less fortunate in her inquiries than Iggulden, for her Aunt Sydney of Meriden (a badged and certificated Daughter of the Revolution to boot) answered her inquiries with a two-paged discourse on patriotism, the leaflets of a Village Improvement Society, of which she was president, and a demand for an overdue subscription to a Factory Girls’ Reading Circle. Sophie burned it all in the Orpheus and Eurydice grate, and kept her own counsel.

“What I want to know,” said George, when Spring was coming, and the gardens needed thought. “is who will ever pay me for my labour? I’ve put in at least half a million dollars’ worth already.”

“Sure you’re not taking too much out of yourself?” his wife asked.

“Oh, no; I haven’t been conscious of myself all winter.” He looked at his brown English gaiters and smiled. “It’s all behind me now. I believe I could sit down and think of all that—those months before we sailed.”

“Don’t—ah, don’t!” she cried.

“But I must go back one day. You don’t want to keep me out of business always—or do you?” He ended with a nervous laugh.

Sophie sighed as she drew her own ground-ash (of old Iggulden’s cutting) from the hall rack.

“Aren’t you overdoing it too? You look a little tired,” he said.

“You make me tired. I’m going to Rocketts to see Mrs. Cloke about Mary.” (This was the sister of the telegraphist, promoted to be sewing-maid at Pardons.) “Coming?”

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“I’m due at Burnt House to see about the new well. By the way, there’s a sore throat at Gale Anstey—”

“That’s my province. Don’t interfere. The Whybarne children always have sore throats. They do it for jujubes.”

“Keep away from Gale Anstey till I make sure, honey. Cloke ought to have told me.”

“These people don’t tell. Haven’t you learnt that yet? But I’ll obey, me lord. See you later!”

She set off afoot, for within the three main roads that bounded the blunt triangle of the estate (even by night one could scarcely hear the carts on them), wheels were not used except for farm work. The footpaths served all other purposes. And though at first they had planned improvements, they had soon fallen in with the customs of their hidden kingdom, and moved about the soft-footed ways by woodland, hedgerow, and shaw as freely as the rabbits. Indeed, for the most part Sophie walked bareheaded beneath her helmet of chestnut hair; but she had been plagued of late by vague toothaches, which she explained to Mrs. Cloke, who asked some questions. How it came about Sophie never knew, but after a while behold Mrs. Cloke’s arm was about her waist, and her head was on that deep bosom behind the shut kitchen door.

“My dear! My dear!” the elder woman almost sobbed. “An’ d’you mean to tell me you never suspicioned? Why—why—where was you ever taught anything at all? Of course it is. It’s what we’ve been only waitin’ for, all of us. Time and again I’ve said to Lady—” she checked herself. “An’ now we shall be as we should be.”

“But—but—but—” Sophie whimpered.

“An’ to see you buildin’ your nest so busy—pianos and books—an’ never thinkin’ of a nursery!”

“No more I did.” Sophie sat bolt upright, and began to laugh.

“Time enough yet.” The fingers tapped thoughtfully on the broad knee. “But—they must be strange-minded folk over yonder with you! Have you thought to send for your mother? She dead? My dear, my dear! Never mind! She’ll be happy where she knows. ’Tis God’s work. An’ we was only waitin’ for it, for you’ve never failed in your duty yet. It ain’t your way. What did you say about my Mary’s doings?” Mrs. Cloke’s face hardened as she pressed her chin on Sophie’s forehead. “If any of your girls thinks to be’ave arbitrary now, I’ll—But they won’t, my dear. I’ll see they do their duty too. Be sure you’ll ’ave no trouble.”

When Sophie walked back across the fields heaven and earth changed about her as on the day of old Iggulden’s death. For an instant she thought of the wide turn of the staircase, and the new ivory-white paint that no coffin corner could scar, but presently, the shadow passed in a pure wonder and bewilderment that made her reel. She leaned against one of their new gates and looked over their lands for some other stay.

“Well,” she said resignedly, half aloud, “we must try to make him feel that he isn’t a third in our party,” and turned the corner that looked over Friars Pardon, giddy, sick, and faint.

Of a sudden the house they had bought for a whim stood up as she had never seen it before, low-fronted, broad-winged, ample, prepared by course of generations for all such things. As it had steadied her when it lay desolate, so now that it had meaning from their few months of life within, it soothed and promised good. She went alone and quickly into the hall, and kissed either door-post, whispering: “Be good to me. You know! You’ve never failed in your duty yet.”

When the matter was explained to George, he would have sailed at once to their own land, but this Sophie forbade.

“I don’t want science,” she said. “I just want to be loved, and there isn’t time for that at home. Besides,” she added, looking out of the window, “it would be desertion.”

George was forced to soothe himself with linking Friars Pardon to the telegraph system of Great Britain by telephone—three-quarters of a mile of poles, put in by Whybarne and a few friends. One of these was a foreigner from the next parish. Said he when the line was being run: “There’s an old ellum right in our road. Shall us throw her?”

“Toot Hill parish folk, neither grace nor good luck, God help ’em.” Old Whybarne shouted the local proverb from three poles down the line. “We ain’t goin’ to lay any axe-iron to coffin-wood here not till we know where we are yet awhile. Swing round ’er, swing round!”

To this day, then, that sudden kink in the straight line across the upper pasture remains a mystery to Sophie and George. Nor can they tell why Skim Winsh, who came to his cottage under Dutton Shaw most musically drunk at 10.45 p.m. of every Saturday night, as his father had done before him, sang no more at the bottom of the garden steps, where Sophie always feared he would break his neck. The path was undoubtedly an ancient right of way, and at 10.45 p.m. on Saturdays Skim remembered it was his duty to posterity to keep it open—till Mrs. Cloke spoke to him once. She spoke likewise to her daughter Mary, sewing maid at Pardons, and to Mary’s best new friend, the five-foot-seven imported London house-maid, who taught Mary to trim hats, and found the country dullish.

But there was no noise—at no time was there any noise—and when Sophie walked abroad she met no one in her path unless she had signified a wish that way. Then they appeared to protest that all was well with them and their children, their chickens, their roofs, their water-supply, and their sons in the police or the railway service.

“But don’t you find it dull, dear?” said George, loyally doing his best not to worry as the months went by.

“I’ve been so busy putting my house in order I haven’t had time to think,” said she. “Do you?”

“No—no. If I could only be sure of you.”

She turned on the green drawing-room’s couch (it was Empire, not Heppelwhite after all), and laid aside a list of linen and blankets.

“It has changed everything, hasn’t it?” she whispered.

“Oh, Lord, yes. But I still think if we went back to Baltimore “

“And missed our first real summer together. No thank you, me lord.”

“But we’re absolutely alone.”

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“Isn’t that what I’m doing my best to remedy? Don’t you worry. I like it—like it to the marrow of my little bones. You don’t realize what her house means to a woman. We thought we were living in it last year, but we hadn’t begun to. Don’t you rejoice in your study, George?”

“I prefer being here with you.” He sat down on the floor by the couch and took her hand.

“Seven,” she said, as the French clock struck. “Year before last you’d just be coming back from business.”

He winced at the recollection, then laughed. “Business! I’ve been at work ten solid hours to-day.”

“Where did you lunch? With the Conants?”

“No; at Dutton Shaw, sitting on a log, with my feet in a swamp. But we’ve found out where the old spring is, and we’re going to pipe it down to Gale Anstey next year.”

“I’ll come and see to-morrow. Oh, please open the door, dear. I want to look down the passage. Isn’t that corner by the stair-head lovely where the sun strikes in?” She looked through half-closed eyes at the vista of ivory-white and pale green all steeped in liquid gold.

“There’s a step out of Jane Elphick’s bedroom,” she went on—“and his first step in the world ought to be up. I shouldn’t wonder if those people hadn’t put it there on purpose. George, will it make any odds to you if he’s a girl?”

He answered, as he had many times before, that his interest was his wife, not the child.

“Then you’re the only person who thinks so.” She laughed. “Don’t be silly, dear. It’s expected. I know. It’s my duty. I shan’t be able to look our people in the face if I fail.”

“What concern is it of theirs, confound ’em!”

“You’ll see. Luckily the tradition of the house is boys, Mrs. Cloke says, so I’m provided for. Shall you ever begin to understand these people? I shan’t.”

“And we bought it for fun—for fun!” he groaned. “And here we are held up for goodness knows how long!”

“Why? Were you thinking of selling it?” He did not answer. “Do you remember the second Mrs. Chapin?” she demanded.

This was a bold, brazen little black-browed woman—a widow for choice—who on Sophie’s death was guilefully to marry George for his wealth and ruin him in a year. George being busy, Sophie had invented her some two years after her marriage, and conceived she was alone among wives in so doing.

“You aren’t going to bring her up again?” he asked anxiously.

“I only want to say that I should hate any one who bought Pardons ten times worse than I used to hate the second Mrs. Chapin. Think what we’ve put into it of our two selves.”

“At least a couple of million dollars. I know I could have made—” He broke off.

“The beasts!” she went on. “They’d be sure to build a red-brick lodge at the gates, and cut the lawn up for bedding out. You must leave instructions in your will that he’s never to do that, George, won’t you?”

He laughed and took her hand again but said nothing till it was time to dress. Then he muttered “What the devil use is a man’s country to him when he can’t do business in it?”

Friars Pardon stood faithful to its tradition. At the appointed time was born, not that third in their party to whom Sophie meant to be so kind, but a godling; in beauty, it was manifest, excelling Eros, as in wisdom Confucius; an enhancer of delights, a renewer of companionships and an interpreter of Destiny. This last George did not realise till he met Lady Conant striding through Dutton Shaw a few days after the event.

“My dear fellow,” she cried, and slapped him heartily on the back, “I can’t tell you how glad we all are. Oh, she’ll be all right. (There’s never been any trouble over the birth of an heir at Pardons.) Now where the dooce is it?” She felt largely in her leather-boundskirt and drew out a small silver mug. “I sent a note to your wife about it, but my silly ass of a groom forgot to take this. You can save me a tramp. Give her my love.” She marched off amid her guard of grave Airedales.

The mug was worn and dented: above the twined initials, G.L., was the crest of a footless bird and the motto: “Wayte awhyle—wayte awhyle.”

“That’s the other end of the riddle,” Sophie whispered, when he saw her that evening. “Read her note. The English write beautiful notes.”

George stared at his wife.

“Go on,” she twinkled, from the pillows.

“Well, I’m—”

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“Don’t swear,” said Sophie. “Bad for the infant mind.”

“But how in the world did she get at it? Have you ever said a word about the Lashmars?”

“You know the only time—to young Iggulden at Rocketts—when Iggulden died.”

“Your great-grandmother’s brother! She’s traced the whole connection—more than your Aunt Sydney could do. What does she mean about our keeping quiet?”

Sophie’s eyes sparkled. “I’ve thought that out too. We’ve got back at the English at last. Can’t you see that she thought that we thought my mother’s being a Lashmar was one of those things we’d expect the English to find out for themselves, and that’s impressed her?” She turned the mug in her white hands, and sighed happily. “‘Wayte awhyle—wayte awhyle.’ That’s not a bad motto, George. It’s been worth it.”

“But still I don’t quite see—”

“I shouldn’t wonder if they don’t think our coming here was part of a deep-laid scheme to be near our ancestors. They’d understand that. And look how they’ve accepted us, all of them.”

“Are we so undesirable in ourselves?” George grunted.

“Be just, me lord. That wretched Sangres man has twice our money. Can you see Marm Conant slapping him between the shoulders? Not by a jugful! The poor beast doesn’t exist!”

“Do you think it’s that then?” He looked toward the cot by the fire where the godling snorted.

“The minute I get well I shall find out from Mrs. Cloke what every Lashmar gives in doles (that’s nicer than tips) every time a Lashmite is born. I’ve done my duty thus far, but there’s much expected of me.”

Entered here Mrs. Cloke, and hung worshipping over the cot. They showed her the mug and her face shone. “Oh, now Lady Conant’s sent it, it’ll be all proper, ma’am, won’t it? ‘George’ of course he’d have to be, but seein’ what he is we was hopin’—all your people was hopin’—it ’ud be ‘Lashmar’ too, and that ’ud just round it out. A very ’andsome mug quite unique, I should imagine. ‘Wayte awhyle—wayte awhyle.’ That’s true with the Lashmars, I’ve heard. Very slow to fill their houses, they are. Most like Master George won’t open ’is nursery till he’s thirty.”

“Poor lamb!” cried Sophie. “But how did you know my folk were Lashmars?”

Mrs. Cloke thought deeply. “I’m sure I can’t quite say, ma’am, but I’ve a belief likely that it was something you may have let drop to young Iggulden when you was at Rocketts. That may have been what give us an inkling. An’ so it came out, one thing in the way o’ talk leading to another, and those American people at Veering Holler was very obligin’ with news, I’m told, ma’am.”

“Great Scott!” said George, under his breath. “And this is the simple peasant!”

“Yiss,” Mrs. Cloke went on. “An’ Cloke was only wonderin’ this afternoon—your pillow’s slipped my dear, you mustn’t lie that a-way—just for the sake o’ sayin’ something, whether you wouldn’t think well now of getting the Lashmar farms back, sir. They don’t rightly round off Sir Walter’s estate. They come caterin’ across us more. Cloke, ’e ’ud be glad to show you over any day.”

“But Sir Walter doesn’t want to sell, does he?”

“We can find out from his bailiff, sir, but”—with cold contempt—“I think that trained nurse is just comin’ up from her dinner, so ‘m afraid we’ll ’ave to ask you, sir … Now, Master George—Ai-ie! Wake a litty minute, lammie!”

A few months later the three of them were down at the brook in the Gale Anstey woods to consider the rebuilding of a footbridge carried away by spring floods. George Lashmar Chapin wanted all the bluebells on God’s earth that day to eat, and—Sophie adored him in a voice like to the cooing of a dove; so business was delayed.

“Here’s the place,” said his father at last among the water forget-me-nots. “But where the deuce are the larch-poles, Cloke? I told you to have them down here ready.”

“We’ll get ’em down if you say so,” Cloke answered, with a thrust of the underlip they both knew.

“But I did say so. What on earth have you brought that timber-tug here for? We aren’t building a railway bridge. Why, in America, half-a-dozen two-by-four bits would be ample.”

“I don’t know nothin’ about that,” said Cloke.

“An’ I’ve nothin’ to say against larch—If you want to make a temp’ry job of it. I ain’t ’ere to tell you what isn’t so, sir; an’ you can’t say I ever come creepin’ up on you, or tryin’ to lead you further in than you set out—”

A year ago George would have danced with impatience. Now he scraped a little mud off his old gaiters with his spud, and waited.

“All I say is that you can put up larch and make a temp’ry job of it; and by the time the young master’s married it’ll have to be done again. Now, I’ve brought down a couple of as sweet six-by-eight oak timbers as we’ve ever drawed. You put ’em in an’ it’s off your mind or good an’ all. T’other way—I don’t say it ain’t right, I’m only just sayin’ what I think—but t’other way, he’ll no sooner be married than we’ll lave it all to do again. You’ve no call to regard my words, but you can’t get out of that.”

“No,” said George after a pause; “I’ve been realising that for some time. Make it oak then; we can’t get out of it.”

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‘BOOK—Book—Domesday Book!’ They were letting in the water for the evening stint at Robert’s Mill, and the wooden Wheel, where lived the Spirit of the Mill, settled to its nine-hundred-year-old song: ‘Here Azor, a freeman, held one rod, but it never paid geld. Nun-nun-nunquam geldavit. Here Reinbert has one villein and four cottars with one plough—and wood for six hogs and two fisheries of sixpence and a mill of ten shillings—unum molinum—one mill. Reinbert’s mill—Robert’s Mill. Then and afterwards and now—tune et post et modo—Robert’s Mill. Book—Book—Domesday Book!’  ‘I confess,’ said the Black Rat on the crossbeam, luxuriously trimming his whiskers—‘I confess I am not above appreciating my position and all it means.’ He was a genuine old English black rat, a breed which, report says, is rapidly diminishing before the incursions of the brown variety.

‘Appreciation is the surest sign of inadequacy,’ said the Grey Cat, coiled up on a piece of sacking.

‘But I know what you mean,’ she added. ‘To sit by right at the heart of things—eh?’

‘Yes,’ said the Black Rat, as the old mill shook and the heavy stones thuttered on the grist. ‘To possess—er—all this environment as an integral part of one’s daily life must insensibly of course . . . You see?’

‘I feel,’ said the Grey Cat. ‘Indeed, if we are not saturated with the spirit of the Mill, who should be?’

‘Book—Book—Domesday Book!’ The Wheel, set to his work, was running off the tenure of the whole rape, for he knew Domesday Book backwards and forwards: ‘In Ferle tenuit Abbatia de Wiltuna unam hidam et unam virgam et dimidiam. Nunquam geldavit. And Agemond, a freeman, has half a hide and one rod. I remember Agemond well. Charmin’ fellow—friend of mine. He married a Norman girl in the days when we rather looked down on the Normans as upstarts. An’ Agemond’s dead? So he is. Eh, dearie me! dearie me! I remember the wolves howling outside his door in the big frost of Ten Fifty-Nine . . . . Essewelde hundredum nunquam geldum reddidit. Book! Book! Domesday Book!’

‘After all,’ the Grey Cat continued, ‘atmosphere is life. It is the influences under which we live that count in the long run. Now, outside’ she cocked one ear towards the half-opened door—‘there is an absurd convention that rats and cats are, I won’t go so far as to say natural enemies, but opposed forces. Some such ruling may be crudely effective—I don’t for a minute presume to set up my standards as final—among the ditches; but from the larger point of view that one gains by living at the heart of things, it seems for a rule of life a little overstrained. Why, because some of your associates have, shall I say, liberal views on the ultimate destination of a sack of—er—middlings, don’t they call them——’

‘Something of that sort,’ said the Black Rat, a most sharp and sweet-toothed judge of everything ground in the mill for the last three years.

‘Thanks—middlings be it. Why, as I was saying, must I disarrange my fur and my digestion to chase you round the dusty arena whenever we happen to meet?’

‘As little reason,’ said the Black Rat, ‘as there is for me, who, I trust, am a person of ordinarily decent instincts, to wait till you have gone on a round of calls, and then to assassinate your very charming children.’

‘Exactly! It has its humorous side though.’ The Grey Cat yawned. ‘The miller seems afflicted by it. He shouted large and vague threats to my address, last night at tea, that he wasn’t going to keep cats who “caught no mice.” Those were his words. I remember the grammar sticking in my throat like a herring-bone.’

‘And what did you do?’

‘What does one do when a barbarian utters? One ceases to utter and removes. I removed—towards his pantry. It was a riposte he might appreciate.’

‘Really those people grow absolutely insufferable,’ said the Black Rat. ‘There is a local ruffian who answers to the name of Mangles—a builder—who has taken possession of the outhouses on the far side of the Wheel for the last fortnight. He has constructed cubical horrors in red brick where those deliciously picturesque pigstyes used to stand. Have you noticed?’

‘There has been much misdirected activity of late among the humans. They jabber inordinately. I haven’t yet been able to arrive at their reason for existence.’ The Cat yawned.

‘A couple of them came in here last week with wires, and fixed them all about the walls. Wires protected by some abominable composition, ending in iron brackets with glass bulbs. Utterly useless for any purpose and artistically absolutely hideous. What do they mean?’

‘Aaah! I have known four-and-twenty leaders of revolt in Faenza,’ said the Cat, who kept good company with the boarders spending a summer at the Mill Farm. ‘It means nothing except that humans occasionally bring their dogs with them. I object to dogs in all forms.’

‘Shouldn’t object to dogs,’ said the Wheel sleepily . . . . ‘The Abbot of Wilton kept the best pack in the county. He enclosed all the Harryngton Woods to Sturt Common. Aluric, a freeman, was dispossessed of his holding. They tried the case at Lewes, but he got no change out of William de Warrenne on the bench. William de Warrenne fined Aluric eight and fourpence for treason, and the Abbot of Wilton excommunicated him for blasphemy. Aluric was no sportsman. Then the Abbot’s brother married . . . . I’ve forgotten her name, but she was a charmin’ little woman. The Lady Philippa was her daughter. That was after the barony was conferred. She rode devilish straight to hounds. They were a bit throatier than we breed now, but a good pack one of the best. The Abbot kept ’em in splendid shape. Now, who was the woman the Abbot kept? Book—Book ! I shall have to go right back to Domesday and work up the centuries: Modo per omnia reddit burgum tunc—tunc—tunc! Was it burgum or hundredum? I shall remember in a minute. There’s no hurry.’ He paused as he turned over, silvered with showering drops.

‘This won’t do,’ said the Waters in the sluice. ‘Keep moving.’

The Wheel swung forward; the Waters roared on the buckets and dropped down to the darkness below.

‘Noisier than usual,’ said the Black Rat. ‘It must have been raining up the valley.’

‘Floods maybe,’ said the Wheel dreamily. ‘It isn’t the proper season, but they can come without warning. I shall never forget the big one—when the Miller went to sleep and forgot to open the hatches. More than two hundred years ago it was, but I recall it distinctly. Most unsettling.’

‘We lifted that wheel off his bearings,’ cried the Waters. ‘We said, “Take away that bauble!” And in the morning he was five miles down the valley—hung up in a tree.’

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‘Vulgar!’ said the Cat. ‘But I am sure he never lost his dignity.’

‘We don’t know. He looked like the Ace of Diamonds when we had finished with him . . . . Move on there! Keep on moving. Over! Get over!’

‘And why on this day more than any other?’ said the Wheel statelily. ‘I am not aware that my department requires the stimulus of external pressure to keep it up to its duties. I trust I have the elementary instincts of a gentleman.’

‘Maybe,’ the Waters answered together, leaping down on the buckets. ‘We only know that you are very stiff on your bearings. Over, get over!’

The Wheel creaked and groaned. There was certainly greater pressure upon him than he had ever felt, and his revolutions had increased from six and three-quarters to eight and a third per minute. But the uproar between the narrow, weed-hung walls annoyed the Grey Cat.

‘Isn’t it almost time,’ she said plaintively, ‘that the person who is paid to understand these things shuts off those vehement drippings with that screw-thing on the top of that box-thing?’

‘They’ll be shut off at eight o’clock as usual,’ said the Rat; ‘then we can go to dinner.’

‘But we shan’t be shut off till ever so late,’ said the Waters gaily. ‘We shall keep it up all night.’

‘The ineradicable offensiveness of youth is partially compensated for by its eternal hopefulness,’ said the Cat. ‘Our dam is not, I am glad to say, designed to furnish water for more than four hours at a time. Reserve is Life.’

‘Thank goodness!’ said the Black Rat. ‘Then they can return to their native ditches.’

‘Ditches!’ cried the Waters; ‘Raven’s Gill Brook is no ditch. It is almost navigable, and we come from there away.’ They slid over solid and compact till the Wheel thudded under their weight.

‘Raven’s Gill Brook,’ said the Rat. ‘I never heard of Raven’s Gill.’

‘We are the waters of Harpenden Brook—down from under Canton Rise. Phew! how the race stinks compared with the heather country.’ Another five foot of water flung itself against the Wheel, broke, roared, gurgled, and was gone.

‘Indeed?’ said the Grey Cat. ‘I am sorry to tell you that Raven’s Gill Brook is cut off from this valley by an absolutely impassable range of mountains, and Callton Rise is more than nine miles away. It belongs to another system entirely.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said the Rat, grinning, ‘but we forget that, for the young, water always runs uphill.’

‘Oh, hopeless! hopeless! hopeless!’ cried the Waters, descending open-palmed upon the Wheel. ‘There is nothing between here and Raven’s Gill Brook that a hundred yards of channelling and a few square feet of concrete could not remove; and hasn’t removed!’

‘And Harpenden Brook is north of Raven’s Gill and runs into Raven’s Gill at the foot of Callton Rise, where the big ilex trees are, and we come from there!’ These were the glassy, clear waters of the high chalk.

‘And Batten’s Ponds, that are fed by springs, have been led through Trott’s Wood, taking the spare water from the old Witches’ Spring under Churt Haw, and we—we—we are their combined waters!’ Those were the Waters from the upland bogs and moors—a porter-coloured, dusky, and foam-flecked flood.

‘It’s all very interesting,’ purred the Cat to the sliding waters, ‘and I have no doubt that Trott’s Woods and Bott’s Woods are tremendously important places; but if you could manage to do your work—whose value I don’t in the least dispute—a little more soberly, I, for one, should be grateful.’

‘Book—book—book—book—book—Domesday Book!’ The urged Wheel was fairly clattering now: ‘In Burgelstaltone a monk holds of Earl Godwin one hide and a half with eight villeins. There is a church—and a monk …. I remember that monk. Blessed if he could rattle his rosary off any quicker than I am doing now . . . and wood for seven hogs. I must be running twelve to the minute . . . almost as fast as Steam. Damnable invention, Steam! . . . Surely it’s time we went to dinner or prayers—or something. Can’t keep up this pressure, day in and day out, and not feel it. I don’t mind for myself, of course. Noblesse oblige, you know. I’m only thinking of the Upper and the Nether Millstones. They came out of the common rock. They can’t be expected to——’

‘Don’t worry on our account, please,’ said the Millstones huskily. ‘So long as you supply the power we’ll supply the weight and the bite.’

‘Isn’t it a trifle blasphemous, though, to work you in this way?’ grunted the Wheel. ‘I seem to remember something about the Mills of God grinding “ slowly.” Slowly was the word!’

‘But we are not the Mills of God. We’re only the Upper and the Nether Millstones. We have received no instructions to be anything else. We are actuated by power transmitted through you.’

‘Ah, but let us be merciful as we are strong. Think of all the beautiful little plants that grow on my woodwork. There are five varieties of rare moss within less than one square yard—and all these delicate jewels of nature are being grievously knocked about by this excessive rush of the water.’

‘Umph!’ growled the Millstones. ‘What with your religious scruples and your taste for botany we’d hardly know you for the Wheel that put the carter’s son under last autumn. You never worried about him!’

‘He ought to have known better.’

‘So ought your jewels of nature. Tell ’em to grow where it’s safe.’

‘How a purely mercantile life debases and brutalises!’ said the Cat to the Rat.

‘They were such beautiful little plants too,’ said the Rat tenderly. ‘Maiden’s-tongue and hart’s-hair fern trellising all over the wall just as they do on the sides of churches in the Downs. Think what a joy the sight of them must be to our sturdy peasants pulling hay!’

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‘Golly!’ said the Millstones. ‘There’s nothing like coming to the heart of things for information’; and they returned to the song that all English water-mills have sung from time beyond telling:

There was a jovial miller once
Lived on the River Dee,
And this the burden of his song
For ever used to be.

Then, as fresh grist poured in and dulled the note

I care for nobody—no, not I,
And nobody cares for me.

‘Even these stones have absorbed something of our atmosphere,’ said the Grey Cat. ‘Nine-tenths of the trouble in this world comes from lack of detachment.’

‘One of your people died from forgetting that, didn’t she?’ said the Rat.

‘One only. The example has sufficed us for generations.’

‘Ah! but what happened to Don’t Care?’ the Waters demanded.

‘Brutal riding to death of the casual analogy is another mark of provincialism!’ The Grey Cat raised her tufted chin. ‘I am going to sleep. With my social obligations I must snatch rest when I can; but, as our old friend here says, Noblesse oblige . . . . Pity me! Three functions to-night in the village, and a barn-dance across the valley!’

‘There’s no chance, I suppose, of your looking in on the loft about two. Some of our young people are going to amuse themselves with a new sacque-dance—best white flour only,’ said the Black Rat.

‘I believe I am officially supposed not to countenance that sort of thing, but youth is youth. . . By the way, the humans set my milk-bowl in the loft these days; I hope your youngsters respect it.’

‘My dear lady,’ said the Black Rat, bowing, ‘you grieve me. You hurt me inexpressibly. After all these years, too!’

‘A general crush is so mixed—highways and hedges—all that sort of thing—and no one can answer for one’s best friends. I never try. So long as mine are amusin’ and in full voice, and can hold their own at a tile-party, I’m as catholic as these mixed waters in the dam here!’

‘We aren’t mixed. We have mixed. We are one now,’ said the Waters sulkily.

‘Still uttering?’ said the Cat. ‘Never mind, here’s the Miller coming to shut you off. Ye-es, I have known—four—or five, is it?—and twenty leaders of revolt in Faenza . . . . A little more babble in the dam, a little more noise in the sluice, a little extra splashing on the wheel, and then——’

‘They will find that nothing has occurred,’ said the Black Rat. ‘The old things persist and survive and are recognised—our old friend here first of all. By the way,’ he turned toward the Wheel, ‘I believe we have to congratulate you on your latest honour.’

‘Profoundly well deserved—even if he had never—as he has—laboured strenuously through a long life for the amelioration of millkind,’ said the Cat, who belonged to many tile and oasthouse committees. ‘Doubly deserved, I may say, for the silent and dignified rebuke his existence offers to the clattering, fidgety-footed demands of—er—some people. What form did the honour take?’

‘It was,’ said the Wheel bashfully, ‘a machine-moulded pinion.’

‘Pinions! Oh, how heavenly!’ the Black Rat sighed. ‘I never see a bat without wishing for wings.’

‘Not exactly that sort of pinion,’ said the Wheel, ‘but a really ornate circle of toothed iron wheels. Absurd, of course, but gratifying. Mr. Mangles and an associate herald invested me with it personally—on my left rim—the side that you can’t see from the mill. I hadn’t meant to say anything about it—or the new steel straps round my axles—bright red, you know—to be worn on all occasions—but, without false modesty, I assure you that the recognition cheered me not a little.’

‘How intensely gratifying!’ said the Black Rat. ‘I must really steal an hour between lights some day and see what they are doing on your left side.’

‘By the way, have you any light on this recent activity of Mr. Mangles?’ the Grey Cat asked. ‘He seems to be building small houses on the far side of the tail-race. Believe me, I don’t ask from any vulgar curiosity.’

‘It affects our Order,’ said the Black Rat simply but firmly.

‘Thank you,’ said the Wheel. ‘Let me see if I can tabulate it properly. Nothing like system in accounts of all kinds. Book! Book! Book! On the side of the Wheel towards the hundred of Burgelstaltone, where till now was a stye of three hogs, Mangles, a freeman, with four villeins and two carts of two thousand bricks, has a new small house of five yards and a half, and one roof of iron and a floor of cement. Then, now, and afterwards beer in large tankards. And Felden, a stranger, with three villeins and one very great cart, deposits on it one engine of iron and brass and a small iron mill of four feet, and a broad strap of leather. And Mangles, the builder, with two villeins, constructs the floor for the same, and a floor of new brick with wires for the small mill. There are there also chalices filled with iron and water, in number fifty-seven. The whole is valued at one hundred and seventy-four pounds . . . . I’m sorry I can’t make myself clearer, but you can see for yourself.’

‘Amazingly lucid,’ said the Cat. She was the more to be admired because the language of Domesday Book is not, perhaps, the clearest medium wherein to describe a small but complete electric-light installation, deriving its power from a water-wheel by means of cogs and gearing.

‘See for yourself—by all means, see for yourself,’ said the Waters, spluttering and choking with mirth.

‘Upon my word,’ said the Black Rat furiously, ‘I may be at fault, but I wholly fail to perceive where these offensive eavesdroppers—er—come in. We were discussing a matter that solely affected our Order.’

page 4

Suddenly they heard, as they had heard many times before, the Miller shutting off the water. To the rattle and rumble of the labouring stones succeeded thick silence, punctuated with little drops from the stayed wheel. Then some water-bird in the dam fluttered her wings as she slid to her nest, and the plop of a water-rat sounded like the fall of a log in the water.

‘It is all over—it always is all over at just this time. Listen, the Miller is going to bed—as usual. Nothing has occurred,’ said the Cat.

Something creaked in the house where the pigstyes had stood, as metal engaged on metal with a clink and a burr.

‘Shall I turn her on?’ cried the Miller.

‘Ay,’ said the voice from the dynamo-house.

‘A human in Mangles’ new house!’ the Rat squeaked.

‘What of it?’ said the Grey Cat. ‘Even supposing Mr. Mangles’ cat’s-meat-coloured hovel pullulated with humans, can’t you see for yourself—that——?’

There was a solid crash of released waters leaping upon the Wheel more furiously than ever, a grinding of cogs, a hum like the hum of a hornet, and then the unvisited darkness of the old mill was scattered by intolerable white light. It threw up every cobweb, every burl and knot in the beams and the floor; till the shadows behind the flakes of rough plaster on the wall lay clearcut as shadows of mountains on the photographed moon.

‘See! See! See!’ hissed the Waters in full flood. ‘Yes, see for yourselves. Nothing has occurred. Can’t you see?’

The Rat, amazed, had fallen from his foothold and lay half-stunned on the floor. The Cat, following her instinct, leaped nigh to the ceiling, and with flattened ears and bared teeth backed in a corner ready to fight whatever terror might be loosed on her. But nothing happened. Through the long aching minutes nothing whatever happened, and her wire-brush tail returned slowly to its proper shape.

‘Whatever it is,’ she said at last, ‘it’s overdone. They can never keep it up, you know.’

‘Much you know,’ said the Waters. ‘Over you go, old man. You can take the full head of us now. Those new steel axlestraps of yours can stand anything. Come along, Raven’s Gill, Harpenden, Callton Rise, Batten’s Ponds, Witches’ Spring, all together! Let’s show these gentlemen how to work!’

‘But—but—I thought it was a decoration. Why—why—why—it only means more work for me!’

‘Exactly. You’re to supply about sixty-eight candle lights when required. But they won’t be all in use at once’

‘Ah! I thought as much,’ said the Cat. ‘The reaction is bound to come.’

‘And,’ said the Waters, ‘you will do the ordinary work of the mill as well.’

‘Impossible!’ the old Wheel quivered as it drove. ‘Aluric never did it—nor Azor, nor Reinbert. Not even William de Warrenne or the Papal Legate. There’s no precedent for it. I tell you there’s no precedent for working a wheel like this.’

‘Wait a while! We’re making one as fast as we can. Aluric and Co. are dead. So’s the Papal Legate. You’ve no notion how dead they are, but we’re here—the Waters of Five Separate Systems. We’re just as interesting as Domesday Book. Would you like to hear about the land-tenure in Trott’s Wood? It’s squat-right, chiefly:’ The mocking Waters leaped one over the other, chuckling and chattering profanely.

‘In that hundred Jenkins, a tinker, with one dog—unus canis—holds, by the Grace of God and a habit he has of working hard, unam hidam—a large potato-patch. Charmin’ fellow, Jenkins. Friend of ours. Now, who the dooce did Jenkins keep? . . . In the hundred of Canton is one charcoal-burner irreligiosissimus homo—a bit of a rip—but a thorough sportsman. Ibi est ecclesia. Non multum. Not much of a church, quia because, episcopus the Vicar irritated the Non-conformists tunc et post et modo—then and afterwards and now—until they built a cut-stone Congregational chapel with red brick facings that did not return itself—defendebat se—at four thousand pounds.’

‘Charcoal-burners, vicars, schismatics, and red brick facings,’ groaned the Wheel. ‘But this is sheer blasphemy. What waters have they let in upon me?’

‘Floods from the gutters. Faugh, this light is positively sickening!’ said the Cat, rearranging her fur.

‘We come down from the clouds or up from the springs, exactly like all other waters everywhere. Is that what’s surprising you?’ sang the Waters.

‘Of course not. I know my work if you don’t. What I complain of is your lack of reverence and repose. You’ve no instinct of deference towards your betters—your heartless parody of the Sacred volume (the Wheel meant Domesday Book) proves it.’

‘Our betters?’ said the Waters most solemnly. ‘What is there in all this dammed race that hasn’t come down from the clouds, or——’

‘Spare me that talk, please,’ the Wheel persisted. ‘You’d never understand. It’s the tone—your tone that we object to.’

‘Yes. It’s your tone,’ said the Black Rat, picking himself up limb by limb.

‘If you thought a trifle more about the work you’re supposed to do, and a trifle less about your precious feelings, you’d render a little more duty in return for the power vested in you—we mean wasted on you,’ the Waters replied.

‘I have been some hundreds of years laboriously acquiring the knowledge which you see fit to challenge so lightheartedly,’ the Wheel jarred.

‘Challenge him! Challenge him!’ clamoured the little waves riddling down through the tailrace. ‘As well now as later. Take him up!’

The main mass of the Waters plunging on the Wheel shocked that well-bolted structure almost into box-lids by saying: ‘Very good. Tell us what you suppose yourself to be doing at the present moment.’

page 5

‘Waiving the offensive form of your question, I answer, purely as a matter of courtesy, that I am engaged in the trituration of farinaceous substances whose ultimate destination it would be a breach of the trust reposed in me to reveal.’

‘Fiddle!’ said the Waters. ‘We knew it all along! The first direct question shows his ignorance of his own job. Listen, old thing. Thanks to us, you are now actuating a machine of whose construction you know nothing, that that machine may, over wires of whose ramifications you are, by your very position, profoundly ignorant, deliver a power which you can never realise, to localities beyond the extreme limits of your mental horizon, with the object of producing phenomena which in your wildest dreams (if you ever dream) you could never comprehend. Is that clear, or would you like it all in words of four syllables?’

‘Your assumptions are deliciously sweeping, but may I point out that a decent and—the dear old Abbot of Wilton would have put it in his resonant monkish Latin much better than I can—a scholarly reserve does not necessarily connote blank vacuity of mind on all subjects?’

‘Ah, the dear old Abbot of Wilton,’ said the Rat sympathetically, as one nursed in that bosom. ‘Charmin’ fellow—thorough scholar and gentleman. Such a pity!’

‘Oh, Sacred Fountains!’—the Waters were fairly boiling. ‘He goes out of his way to expose his ignorance by triple bucketfuls. He creaks to high Heaven that he is hopelessly behind the common order of things! He invites the streams of Five Watersheds to witness his su-su-su-pernal incompetence, and then he talks as though there were untold reserves of knowledge behind him that he is too modest to bring forward. For a bland, circular, absolutely sincere imposter, you’re a miracle, O Wheel!’

‘I do not pretend to be anything more than an integral portion of an accepted and not altogether mushroom institution.’

‘Quite so,’ said the Waters. ‘Then go round—hard——’

‘To what end?’ asked the Wheel.

‘Till a big box of tanks in your house begins to fizz and fume—gassing is the proper word.’

‘It would be,’ said the Cat, sniffing.

‘That will show that your accumulators are full. When the accumulators are exhausted, and the lights burn badly, you will find us whacking you round and round again.’

‘The end of life as decreed by Mangles and his creatures is to go whacking round and round for ever,’ said the Cat.

‘In order,’ the Rat said, ‘that you may throw raw and unnecessary illumination upon all the unloveliness in the world. Unloveliness which we shall—er—have always with us. At the same time you will riotously neglect the so-called little but vital graces that make up Life.’

‘Yes, Life,’ said the Cat, ‘with its dim delicious half-tones and veiled indeterminate distances. Its surprisals, escapes, encounters, and dizzying leaps—its full-throated choruses in honour of the morning star, and its melting reveries beneath the sun-warmed wall.’

‘Oh, you can go on the tiles, Pussalina, just the same as usual,’ said the laughing Waters. ‘We shan’t interfere with you.’

‘On the tiles, forsooth!’ hissed the Cat.

‘Well, that’s what it amounts to,’ persisted the Waters. ‘We see a good deal of the minor graces of life on our way down to our job.’

‘And—but I fear I speak to deaf ears—do they never impress you?’ said the Wheel.

‘Enormously,’ said the Waters. ‘We have already learned six refined synonyms for loafing.’

‘But (here again I feel as though preaching in the wilderness) it never occurs to you that there may exist some small difference between the wholly animal—ah—rumination of bovine minds and the discerning, well-apportioned leisure of the finer type of intellect?’

‘Oh, yes. The bovine mind goes to sleep under a hedge and makes no bones about it when it’s shouted at. We’ve seen that—in haying-time—all along the meadows. The finer type is wide awake enough to fudge up excuses for shirking, and mean enough to get stuffy when its excuses aren’t accepted. Turn over!’

‘But, my good people, no gentleman gets stuffy as you call it. A certain proper pride, to put it no higher, forbids——’

‘Nothing that he wants to do if he really wants to do it. Get along! What are you giving us? D’you suppose we’ve scoured half heaven in the clouds and half earth in the mists, to be taken in at this time of the day by a bone-idle, old handquern of your type?’

‘It is not for me to bandy personalities with you. I can only say that I simply decline to accept the situation.’

‘Decline away. It doesn’t make any odds. They’ll probably put in a turbine if you decline too much.’

‘What’s a turbine?’ said the Wheel quickly.

‘A little thing you don’t see, that performs surprising revolutions. But you won’t decline. You’ll hang on to your two nice red-strapped axles and your new machine-moulded pinions like—a—like a leech on a lily stem! There’s centuries of work in your old bones if you’d only apply yourself to it; and, mechanically, an overshot wheel with this head of water is about as efficient as a turbine.’

‘So in future I am to be considered mechanically? I have been painted by at least five Royal Academicians.’

‘Oh, you can be painted by five hundred when you aren’t at work, of course. But while you are at work you’ll work. You won’t half-stop and think and talk about rare plants and dicky-birds and farinaceous fiduciary interests. You’ll continue to revolve, and this new head of water will see that you do so continue.’

‘It is a matter on which it would be exceedingly ill-advised to form a hasty or a premature conclusion. I will give it my most careful consideration,’ said the Wheel.

page 6

‘Please do,’ said the Waters gravely. ‘Hullo! Here’s the Miller again.’

The Cat coiled herself in a picturesque attitude on the softest corner of a sack, and the Rat without haste, yet certainly without rest, slipped behind the sacking as though an appointment had just occurred to him.

In the doorway, with the young Engineer, stood the Miller grinning amazedly.

‘Well—well—well! ’tis true-ly won’erful. An’ what a power o’ dirt! It come over me now looking at these lights, that I’ve never rightly seen my own mill before. She needs a lot bein’ done to her.’

‘Ah! I suppose one must make oneself moderately agreeable to the baser sort. They have their uses. This thing controls the dairy.’ The Cat, pincing on her toes, came forward and rubbed her head against the Miller’s knee.

‘Ay, you pretty puss,’ he said, stooping. ‘You’re as big a cheat as the rest of ’em that catch no mice about me. A won’erful smooth-skinned, rough-tongued cheat you be. I’ve more than half a mind——’

‘She does her work well,’ said the Engineer, pointing to where the Rat’s beady eyes showed behind the sacking. ‘Cats and Rats liven’ together—see?’

‘Too much they do—too long they’ve done. I’m sick and tired of it. Go and take a swim and larn to find your own vittles honest when you come out, Pussy.’

‘My word!’ said the Waters, as a sprawling Cat landed all unannounced in the centre of the tailrace. ‘Is that you, Mewsalina? You seem to have been quarrelling with your best friend. Get over to the left. It’s shallowest there. Up on that alder-root with all four paws. Goodnight!’

‘You’ll never get any they rats,’ said the Miller, as the young Engineer struck wrathfully with his stick at the sacking. ‘They’re not the common sort. They’re the old black English sort.’

‘Are they, by Jove? I must catch one to stuff, some day.’

Six months later, in the chill of a January afternoon, they were letting in the Waters as usual.

‘Come along! It’s both gears this evening,’ said the Wheel, kicking joyously in the first rush of the icy stream. ‘There’s a heavy load of grist just in from Lamber’s Wood. Eleven miles it came in an hour and a half in our new motor-lorry, and the Miller’s rigged five new five-candle lights in his cow-stables. I’m feeding ’em tonight. There’s a cow due to calve. Oh, while I think of it, what’s the news from Canton Rise?’

‘The waters are finding their level as usual—but why do you ask?’ said the deep outpouring Waters.

‘Because Mangles and Felden and the Miller are talking of increasing the plant here and running a saw-mill by electricity. I was wondering whether we——’

‘I beg your pardon,’ said the Waters, chuckling. ‘What did you say? ‘

‘Whether we, of course, had power enough for the job. It will be a biggish contract. There’s all Harpenden Brook to be considered and Batten’s Ponds as well, and Witches’ Spring, and the Churt Haw system.’

‘We’ve power enough for anything in the world,’ said the Waters. ‘The only question is whether you could stand the strain if we came down on you full head.’

‘Of course I can,’ said the Wheel. ‘Mangles is going to turn me into a set of turbines—beauties.’

‘Oh—er—I suppose it’s the frost that has made us a little thick-headed, but to whom are we talking?’ asked the amazed Waters.

‘To me—the Spirit of the Mill, of course.’

‘Not to the old Wheel, then?’

‘I happen to be living in the old Wheel just at present. When the turbines are installed I shall go and live in them. What earthly difference does it make?’

‘Absolutely none,’ said the Waters, ‘in the earth or in the waters under the earth. But we thought turbines didn’t appeal to you.’

‘Not like turbines? Me? My dear fellows, turbines are good for fifteen hundred revolutions a minute—and with our power we can drive ’em at full speed. Why, there’s nothing we couldn’t grind or saw or illuminate or heat with a set of turbines! That’s to say if all the Five Watersheds are agreeable.’

‘Oh, we’ve been agreeable for ever so long.’

‘Then why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Don’t know. Suppose it slipped our memory.’ The Waters were holding themselves in for fear of bursting with mirth.

‘How careless of you! You should keep abreast of the age, my dear fellows. We might have settled it long ago, if you’d only spoken. Yes, four good turbines and a neat brick penstock—eh? This old Wheel’s absurdly out of date.’

‘Well,’ said the Cat, who after a little proud seclusion had returned to her place impenitent as ever. ‘Praised be Pasht and the Old Gods, that whatever may have happened I, at least, have preserved the Spirit of the Mill!’

She looked round as expecting her faithful ally, the Black Rat; but that very week the Engineer had caught and stuffed him, and had put him in a glass case; he being a genuine old English black rat. That breed, the report says, is rapidly diminishing before the incursions of the brown variety.

page 1 of 5

WHEN Dan and Una had arranged to go out before breakfast, they did not remember that it was Midsummer Morning. They only wanted to see the otter which, old Hobden said, had been fishing their brook for weeks; and early morning was the time to surprise him. As they tiptoed out of the house into the wonderful stillness, the church clock struck five. Dan took a few steps across the dew-blobbed lawn, and looked at his black footprints.

‘I think we ought to be kind to our poor boots,’ he said. ‘They’ll get horrid wet.’

It was their first summer in boots, and they hated them, so they took them off, and slung them round their necks, and paddled joyfully over the dripping turf where the shadows lay the wrong way, like evening in the East. The sun was well up and warm, but by the brook the last of the night mist still fumed off the water. They picked up the chain of otter’s footprints on the mud, and followed it from the bank, between the weeds and the drenched mowing, while the birds shouted with surprise. Then the track left the brook and became a smear, as though a log had been dragged along.

They traced it into Three Cows meadow, over the mill-sluice to the Forge, round Hobden’s garden, and then up the slope till it ran out on the short turf and fern of Pook’s Hill, and they heard the cock-pheasants crowing in the woods behind them.

‘No use!’ said Dan, questing like a puzzled hound. ‘The dew’s drying off, and old Hobden says otters’ll travel for miles.’

‘I’m sure we’ve travelled miles.’ Una fanned herself with her hat. ‘How still it is! It’s going to be a regular roaster.’ She looked down the valley, where no chimney yet smoked.

‘Hobden’s up!’ Dan pointed to the open door of the Forge cottage. ‘What d’you suppose he has for breakfast?’

‘One of them. He says they eat good all times of the year,’ Una jerked her head at some stately pheasants going down to the brook for a drink.

A few steps farther on a fox broke almost under their bare feet, yapped, and trotted off.

‘Ah, Mus’ Reynolds—Mus’ Reynolds’—Dan was quoting from old Hobden,—‘if I knowed all you knowed, I’d know something.’ [See ‘The Winged Hats’ in Puck of Pook’s Hill.]

‘I say,’—Una lowered her voice—‘you know that funny feeling of things having happened before. I felt it when you said “Mus’ Reynolds.”’

‘So did I,’ Dan began. ‘What is it?’

They faced each other, stammering with excitement.

‘Wait a shake! I’ll remember in a minute. Wasn’t it something about a fox—last year? Oh, I nearly had it then!’ Dan cried.

‘Be quiet!’ said Una, prancing excitedly. ‘There was something happened before we met the fox last year. Hills! Broken Hills—the play at the theatre—see what you see—’

‘I remember now,’ Dan shouted. ‘It’s as plain as the nose on your face—Pook’s Hill—Puck’s Hill—Puck!’

‘I remember, too,’ said Una. ‘And it’s Midsummer Day again!’ The young fern on a knoll rustled, and Puck walked out, chewing a green-topped rush.

‘Good Midsummer Morning to you! Here’s a happy meeting,’ said he. They shook hands all round, and asked questions.

‘You’ve wintered well,’ he said after a while, and looked them up and down. ‘Nothing much wrong with you, seemingly.’

‘They’ve put us into boots,’ said Una. ‘Look at my feet—they’re all pale white, and my toes are squidged together awfully.’

‘Yes—boots make a difference.’ Puck wriggled his brown, square, hairy foot, and cropped a dandelion flower between the big toe and the next.

‘I could do that—last year,’ Dan said dismally, as he tried and failed. ‘And boots simply ruin one’s climbing.’

‘There must be some advantage to them, I suppose,’ said Puck, ‘or folk wouldn’t wear them. Shall we come this way?’ They sauntered along side by side till they reached the gate at the far end of the hillside. Here they halted just like cattle, and let the sun warm their backs while they listened to the flies in the wood.

‘Little Lindens is awake,’ said Una, as she hung with her chin on the top rail. ‘See the chimney smoke?’

‘Today’s Thursday, isn’t it?’ Puck turned to look at the old pink farmhouse across the little valley. ‘Mrs Vincey’s baking day. Bread should rise well this weather.’ He yawned, and that set them both yawning.

The bracken about rustled and ticked and shook in every direction. They felt that little crowds were stealing past.

‘Doesn’t that sound like—er—the People of the Hills?’ said Una.

‘It’s the birds and wild things drawing up to the woods before people get about,’ said Puck, as though he were Ridley the keeper.

‘Oh, we know that. I only said it sounded like.’

‘As I remember ’em, the People of the Hills used to make more noise. They’d settle down for the day rather like small birds settling down for the night. But that was in the days when they carried the high hand. Oh, me! The deeds that I’ve had act and part in, you’d scarcely believe!’

‘I like that!’ said Dan. ‘After all you told us last year, too!’

‘Only, the minute you went away, you made us forget everything,’ said Una.

Puck laughed and shook his head. ‘I shall this year, too. I’ve given you seizin’ of Old England, and I’ve taken away your Doubt and Fear, but your memory and remembrance between whiles I’ll keep where old Billy Trott kept his night-lines—and that’s where he could draw ’em up and hide ’em at need. Does that suit?’ He twinkled mischievously.

‘It’s got to suit,’ said Una, and laughed. ‘We can’t magic back at you.’ She folded her arms and leaned against the gate. ‘Suppose, now, you wanted to magic me into something—an otter? Could you?’

page 2

‘Not with those boots round your neck.’

‘I’ll take them off.’ She threw them on the turf. Dan’s followed immediately. ‘Now!’ she said.

‘Less than ever now you’ve trusted me. Where there’s true faith, there’s no call for magic.’ Puck’s slow smile broadened all over his face.

‘But what have boots to do with it?’ said Una, perching on the gate.

‘There’s Cold Iron in them,’ said Puck, and settled beside her. ‘Nails in the soles, I mean. It makes a difference.’

‘How?’

‘Can’t you feel it does? You wouldn’t like to go back to bare feet again, same as last year, would you? Not really?’

‘No-o. I suppose I shouldn’t—not for always. I’m growing up, you know,’ said Una.

‘But you told us last year, in the Long Slip—at the theatre—that you didn’t mind Cold Iron,’ said Dan.

‘I don’t; but folks in housen, as the People of the Hills call them, must be ruled by Cold Iron. Folk in housen are born on the near side of Cold Iron—there’s iron in every man’s house, isn’t there? They handle Cold Iron every day of their lives, and their fortune’s made or spoilt by Cold Iron in some shape or other. That’s how it goes with Flesh and Blood, and one can’t prevent it.’

‘I don’t quite see. How do you mean?’ said Dan.

‘It would take me some time to tell you.’

‘Oh, it’s ever so long to breakfast,’ said Dan. ‘We looked in the larder before we came out.’ He unpocketed one big hunk of bread and Una another, which they shared with Puck.

‘That’s Little Lindens’ baking,’ he said, as his white teeth sunk in it. ‘I know Mrs Vincey’s hand.’ He ate with a slow sideways thrust and grind, just like old Hobden, and, like Hobden, hardly dropped a crumb. The sun flashed on Little Lindens’ windows, and the cloudless sky grew stiller and hotter in the valley.

‘Ah—Cold Iron,’ he said at last to the impatient children. ‘Folk in housen, as the People of the Hills say, grow careless about Cold Iron. They’ll nail the Horseshoe over the front door, and forget to put it over the back. Then, some time or other, the People of the Hills slip in, find the cradle-babe in the corner, and—’

‘Oh, I know. Steal it and leave a changeling,’ Una cried.

‘No,’ said Puck firmly. ‘All that talk of changelings is people’s excuse for their own neglect. Never believe ’em. I’d whip ’em at the cart-tail through three parishes if I had my way.’

‘But they don’t do it now,’ said Una.

‘Whip, or neglect children? Umm! Some folks and some fields never alter. But the People of the Hills didn’t work any changeling tricks. They’d tiptoe in and whisper and weave round the cradle-babe in the chimney-corner—a fag-end of a charm here, or half a spell there—like kettles singing; but when the babe’s mind came to bud out afterwards, it would act differently from other people in its station. That’s no advantage to man or maid. So I wouldn’t allow it with my folks’ babies here. I told Sir Huon so once.’

‘Who was Sir Huon?’ Dan asked, and Puck turned on him in quiet astonishment.

‘Sir Huon of Bordeaux—he succeeded King Oberon. He had been a bold knight once, but he was lost on the road to Babylon, a long while back. Have you ever heard “How many miles to Babylon?”?’

‘Of course,’ said Dan, flushing.

‘Well, Sir Huon was young when that song was new. But about tricks on mortal babies. I said to Sir Huon in the fern here, on just such a morning as this: “If you crave to act and influence on folk in housen, which I know is your desire, why don’t you take some human cradle-babe by fair dealing, and bring him up among yourselves on the far side of Cold Iron—as Oberon did in time past? Then you could make him a splendid fortune, and send him out into the world.”’

‘“Time past is past time,” says Sir Huon. “I doubt if we could do it. For one thing, the babe would have to be taken without wronging man, woman, or child. For another, he’d have to be born on the far side of Cold Iron—in some house where no Cold Iron ever stood; and for yet the third, he’d have to be kept from Cold Iron all his days till we let him find his fortune. No, it’s not easy,” he said, and he rode off, thinking. You see, Sir Huon had been a man once. ‘I happened to attend Lewes Market next Woden’s Day even, and watched the slaves being sold there—same as pigs are sold at Robertsbridge Market nowadays. Only, the pigs have rings on their noses, and the slaves had rings round their necks.’

‘What sort of rings?’ said Dan.

‘A ring of Cold Iron, four fingers wide, and a thumb thick, just like a quoit, but with a snap to it for to snap round the slave’s neck. They used to do a big trade in slave-rings at the Forge here, and ship them to all parts of Old England, packed in oak sawdust. But, as I was saying, there was a farmer out of the Weald who had bought a woman with a babe in her arms, and he didn’t want any encumbrances to her driving his beasts home for him.’

‘Beast himself!’ said Una, and kicked her bare heel on the gate.

‘So he blamed the auctioneer. “It’s none o’ my baby,” the wench puts in. “I took it off a woman in our gang who died on Terrible Down yesterday.” “I’ll take it off to the church then,” says the farmer. “Mother Church’ll make a monk of it, and we’ll step along home.”

‘It was dusk then. He slipped down to St Pancras’ Church, and laid the babe at the cold chapel door. I breathed on the back of his stooping neck—and—I’ve heard he never could be warm at any fire afterwards. I should have been surprised if he could! Then I whipped up the babe, and came flying home here like a bat to his belfry.

‘On the dewy break of morning of Thor’s own day—just such a day as this—I laid the babe outside the Hill here, and the People flocked up and wondered at the sight.

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‘“You’ve brought him, then?” Sir Huon said, staring like any mortal man.

‘“Yes, and he’s brought his mouth with him, too,” I said. The babe was crying loud for his breakfast.

‘“What is he?” says Sir Huon, when the womenfolk had drawn him under to feed him.

‘“Full Moon and Morning Star may know,” I says. “I don’t. By what I could make out of him in the moonlight, he’s without brand or blemish. I’ll answer for it that he’s born on the far side of Cold Iron, for he was born under a shaw on Terrible Down, and I’ve wronged neither man, woman, nor child in taking him, for he is the son of a dead slave-woman.

‘“All to the good, Robin,” Sir Huon said. “He’ll be the less anxious to leave us. Oh, we’ll give him a splendid fortune, and we shall act and influence on folk in housen as we have always craved.” His Lady came up then, and drew him under to watch the babe’s wonderful doings.’ ‘Who was his Lady?’ said Dan. ‘The Lady Esclairmonde. She had been a woman once, till she followed Sir Huon across the fern, as we say. Babies are no special treat to me—I’ve watched too many of them—so I stayed on the Hill. Presently I heard hammering down at the Forge there.’ Puck pointed towards Hobden’s cottage. ‘It was too early for any workmen, but it passed through my mind that the breaking day was Thor’s own day. A slow north-east wind blew up and set the oaks sawing and fretting in a way I remembered; so I slipped over to see what I could see.’

‘And what did you see?’

‘A smith forging something or other out of Cold Iron. When it was finished, he weighed it in his hand (his back was towards me), and tossed it from him a longish quoit-throw down the valley. I saw Cold Iron flash in the sun, but I couldn’t quite make out where it fell. That didn’t trouble me. I knew it would be found sooner or later by someone.’

‘How did you know?’ Dan went on.

‘Because I knew the Smith that made it,’ said Puck quietly.

‘Wayland Smith?’ Una suggested. [See ‘Weland’s Sword’ in Puck of Pook’s Hill.]

‘No. I should have passed the time o’ day with Wayland Smith, of course. This other was different. So’—Puck made a queer crescent in the air with his finger—‘I counted the blades of grass under my nose till the wind dropped and he had gone—he and his Hammer.’

‘Was it Thor then?’ Una murmured under her breath.

‘Who else? It was Thor’s own day.’ Puck repeated the sign. ‘I didn’t tell Sir Huon or his Lady what I’d seen. Borrow trouble for yourself if that’s your nature, but don’t lend it to your neighbours. Moreover, I might have been mistaken about the Smith’s work. He might have been making things for mere amusement, though it wasn’t like him, or he might have thrown away an old piece of made iron. One can never be sure. So I held my tongue and enjoyed the babe. He was a wonderful child—and the People of the Hills were so set on him, they wouldn’t have believed me. He took to me wonderfully. As soon as he could walk he’d putter forth with me all about my Hill here. Fern makes soft falling! He knew when day broke on earth above, for he’d thump, thump, thump, like an old buck-rabbit in a bury, and I’d hear him say “Opy!” till some one who knew the Charm let him out, and then it would be “Robin! Robin!” all round Robin Hood’s barn, as we say, till he’d found me.’

‘The dear!’ said Una. ‘I’d like to have seen him!’ ‘Yes, he was a boy. And when it came to learning his words—spells and such-like—he’d sit on the Hill in the long shadows, worrying out bits of charms to try on passers-by. And when the bird flew to him, or the tree bowed to him for pure love’s sake (like everything else on my Hill), he’d shout, “Robin! Look—see! Look, see, Robin!” and sputter out some spell or other that they had taught him, all wrong end first, till I hadn’t the heart to tell him it was his own dear self and not the words that worked the wonder. When he got more abreast of his words, and could cast spells for sure, as we say, he took more and more notice of things and people in the world. People, of course, always drew him, for he was mortal all through.

‘Seeing that he was free to move among folk in housen, under or over Cold Iron, I used to take him along with me, night-walking, where he could watch folk, and I could keep him from touching Cold Iron. That wasn’t so difficult as it sounds, because there are plenty of things besides Cold Iron in housen to catch a boy’s fancy. He was a handful, though! I shan’t forget when I took him to Little Lindens—his first night under a roof. The smell of the rushlights and the bacon on the beams—they were stuffing a feather-bed too, and it was a drizzling warm night—got into his head. Before I could stop him—we were hiding in the bakehouse—he’d whipped up a storm of wildfire, with flashlights and voices, which sent the folk shrieking into the garden, and a girl overset a hive there, and—of course he didn’t know till then such things could touch him—he got badly stung, and came home with his face looking like kidney potatoes! ‘You can imagine how angry Sir Huon and Lady Esclairmonde were with poor Robin! They said the Boy was never to be trusted with me night-walking any more—and he took about as much notice of their order as he did of the bee-stings. Night after night, as soon as it was dark, I’d pick up his whistle in the wet fern, and off we’d flit together among folk in housen till break of day—he asking questions, and I answering according to my knowledge. Then we fell into mischief again!’ Puck shook till the gate rattled.

‘We came across a man up at Brightling who was beating his wife with a bat in the garden. I was just going to toss the man over his own woodlump when the Boy jumped the hedge and ran at him. Of course the woman took her husband’s part, and while the man beat him, the woman scratted his face. It wasn’t till I danced among the cabbages like Brightling Beacon all ablaze that they gave up and ran indoors. The Boy’s fine green-and-gold clothes were torn all to pieces, and he had been welted in twenty places with the man’s bat, and scratted by the woman’s nails to pieces. He looked like a Robertsbridge hopper on a Monday morning.

‘“Robin,” said he, while I was trying to clean him down with a bunch of hay, “I don’t quite understand folk in housen. I went to help that old woman, and she hit me, Robin!”

‘“What else did you expect?” I said. “That was the one time when you might have worked one of your charms, instead of running into three times your weight.”

‘“I didn’t think,” he says. “But I caught the man one on the head that was as good as any charm. Did you see it work, Robin?”

‘“Mind your nose,” I said. “Bleed it on a dockleaf—not your sleeve, for pity’s sake.” I knew what the Lady Esclairmonde would say.

‘He didn’t care. He was as happy as a gipsy with a stolen pony, and the front part of his gold coat, all blood and grass stains, looked like ancient sacrifices.

‘Of course the People of the Hills laid the blame on me. The Boy could do nothing wrong, in their eyes.

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‘“You are bringing him up to act and influence on folk in housen, when you’re ready to let him go,” I said. “Now he’s begun to do it, why do you cry shame on me? That’s no shame. It’s his nature drawing him to his kind.”

‘“But we don’t want him to begin that way,” the Lady Esclairmonde said. “We intend a splendid fortune for him—not your flitter-by-night, hedge-jumping, gipsy-work.”

‘“I don’t blame you, Robin,” says Sir Huon, “but I do think you might look after the Boy more closely.”

‘“I’ve kept him away from Cold Iron these sixteen years ,” I said. “You know as well as I do, the first time he touches Cold Iron he’ll find his own fortune, in spite of everything you intend for him. You owe me something for that.”

‘Sir Huon, having been a man, was going to allow me the right of it, but the Lady Esclairmonde, being the Mother of all Mothers, over-persuaded him.

‘“We’re very grateful,” Sir Huon said, “but we think that just for the present you are about too much with him on the Hill.”

‘“Though you have said it,” I said, “I will give you a second chance.” I did not like being called to account for my doings on my own Hill. I wouldn’t have stood it even that far except I loved the Boy.

‘“No! No!” says the Lady Esclairmonde. “He’s never any trouble when he’s left to me and himself. It’s your fault.”

‘“You have said it,” I answered. “Hear me! From now on till the Boy has found his fortune, whatever that may be, I vow to you all on my Hill, by Oak, and Ash, and Thorn, and by the Hammer of Asa Thor”—again Puck made that curious double-cut in the air—‘“that you may leave me out of all your counts and reckonings.” Then I went out’—he snapped his fingers—‘like the puff of a candle, and though they called and cried, they made nothing by it. I didn’t promise not to keep an eye on the Boy, though. I watched him close—close—close!

‘When he found what his people had forced me to do, he gave them a piece of his mind, but they all kissed and cried round him, and being only a boy, he came over to their way of thinking (I don’t blame him), and called himself unkind and ungrateful; and it all ended in fresh shows and plays, and magics to distract him from folk in housen. Dear heart alive! How he used to call and call on me, and I couldn’t answer, or even let him know that I was near!’

‘Not even once?’ said Una. ‘If he was very lonely?’

‘No, he couldn’t,’ said Dan, who had been thinking. ‘Didn’t you swear by the Hammer of Thor that you wouldn’t, Puck?’

‘By that Hammer!’ was the deep rumbled reply. Then he came back to his soft speaking voice. ‘And the Boy was lonely, when he couldn’t see me any more. He began to try to learn all learning (he had good teachers), but I saw him lift his eyes from the big black books towards folk in housen all the time. He studied song-making (good teachers he had too!), but he sang those songs with his back toward the Hill, and his face toward folk. I know! I have sat and grieved over him grieving within a rabbit’s jump of him. Then he studied the High, Low, and Middle Magic. He had promised the Lady Esclairmonde he would never go near folk in housen; so he had to make shows and shadows for his mind to chew on.’

‘What sort of shows?’ said Dan.

‘Just boy’s Magic as we say. I’ll show you some, some time. It pleased him for the while, and it didn’t hurt any one in particular except a few men coming home late from the taverns. But I knew what it was a sign of, and I followed him like a weasel follows a rabbit. As good a boy as ever lived! I’ve seen him with Sir Huon and the Lady Esclairmonde stepping just as they stepped to avoid the track of Cold Iron in a furrow, or walking wide of some old ash-tot because a man had left his swop-hook or spade there; and all his heart aching to go straightforward among folk in housen all the time. Oh, a good boy! They always intended a fine fortune for him—but they could never find it in their heart to let him begin. I’ve heard that many warned them, but they wouldn’t be warned. So it happened as it happened.

‘One hot night I saw the Boy roving about here wrapped in his flaming discontents. There was flash on flash against the clouds, and rush on rush of shadows down the valley till the shaws were full of his hounds giving tongue, and the woodways were packed with his knights in armour riding down into the water-mists—all his own Magic, of course. Behind them you could see great castles lifting slow and splendid on arches of moonshine, with maidens waving their hands at the windows, which all turned into roaring rivers; and then would come the darkness of his own young heart wiping out the whole slateful. But boy’s Magic doesn’t trouble me—or Merlin’s either for that matter. I followed the Boy by the flashes and the whirling wildfire of his discontent, and oh, but I grieved for him! Oh, but I grieved for him! He pounded back and forth like a bullock in a strange pasture—sometimes alone—sometimes waist-deep among his shadow-hounds—sometimes leading his shadow-knights on a hawk-winged horse to rescue his shadow-girls. I never guessed he had such Magic at his command; but it’s often that way with boys.

‘Just when the owl comes home for the second time, I saw Sir Huon and the Lady ride down my Hill, where there’s not much Magic allowed except mine. They were very pleased at the Boy’s Magic—the valley flared with it—and I heard them settling his splendid fortune when they should find it in their hearts to let him go to act and influence among folk in housen. Sir Huon was for making him a great King somewhere or other, and the Lady was for making him a marvellous wise man whom all should praise for his skill and kindness. She was very kind-hearted.

‘Of a sudden we saw the flashes of his discontents turned back on the clouds, and his shadow-hounds stopped baying.

‘“There’s Magic fighting Magic over yonder,” the Lady Esclairmonde cried, reigning up. “Who is against him?”

‘I could have told her, but I did not count it any of my business to speak of Asa Thor’s comings and goings.

‘How did you know?’said Una.

‘A slow North-East wind blew up, sawing and fretting through the oaks in a way I remembered. The wildfire roared up, one last time in one sheet, and snuffed out like a rushlight, and a bucketful of stinging hail fell. We heard the Boy walking in the Long Slip – where I first met you.

‘“Here, oh, come here!” said the Lady Esclairmonde, and stretched out her arms in the dark.

‘He was coming slowly, but he stumbled in the footpath, being, of course, mortal man.

‘“Why, what’s this?” he said to himself. We three heard him.

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‘“Hold, lad, hold! ’Ware Cold Iron!” said Sir Huon, and they two swept down like nightjars, crying as they rode.

‘I ran at their stirrups, but it was too late. We felt that the Boy had touched Cold Iron somewhere in the dark, for the Horses of the Hill shied off, and whipped round, snorting.

‘Then I judged it was time for me to show myself in my own shape; so I did.

‘“Whatever it is,” I said, “he has taken hold of it. Now we must find out whatever it is that he has taken hold of, for that will be his fortune.”

‘“Come here, Robin,” the Boy shouted, as soon as he heard my voice. “I don’t know what I’ve hold of.”

‘“It is in your hands,” I called back. “Tell us if it is hard and cold, with jewels atop. For that will be a King’s Sceptre. “

‘“Not by a furrow-long,” he said, and stooped and tugged in the dark. We heard him.

‘“Has it a handle and two cutting edges?” I called. “For that’ll be a Knight’s Sword.”

‘“No, it hasn’t,” he says. “It’s neither ploughshare, whittle, hook, nor crook, nor aught I’ve yet seen men handle.” By this time he was scratting in the dirt to prise it up.

‘“Whatever it is, you know who put it there, Robin,” said Sir Huon to me, “or you would not ask those questions. You should have told me as soon as you knew.”

‘“What could you or I have done against the Smith that made it and laid it for him to find?” I said, and I whispered Sir Huon what I had seen at the Forge on Thor’s Day, when the babe was first brought to the Hill.

‘“Oh, good-bye, our dreams!” said Sir Huon. “It’s neither sceptre, sword, nor plough! Maybe yet it’s a bookful of learning, bound with iron clasps. There’s a chance for a splendid fortune in that sometimes.”

‘But we knew we were only speaking to comfort ourselves, and the Lady Esclairmonde, having been a woman, said so.

‘“Thur aie! Thor help us!” the Boy called. “It is round, without end, Cold Iron, four fingers wide and a thumb thick, and there is writing on the breadth of it.”

‘“Read the writing if you have the learning,” I called. The darkness had lifted by then, and the owl was out over the fern again.

‘He called back, reading the runes on the iron:

And there he stood, in clear starlight, with a new, heavy, shining slave-ring round his proud neck.

‘“Is this how it goes?” he asked, while the Lady Esclairmonde cried.

‘“That is how it goes,” I said. He hadn’t snapped the catch home yet, though.

‘“What fortune does it mean for him?” said Sir Huon, while the Boy fingered the ring. “You who walk under Cold Iron, you must tell us and teach us.”

‘“Tell I can, but teach I cannot,” I said. “The virtue of the Ring is only that he must go among folk in housen henceforward, doing what they want done, or what he knows they need, all Old England over. Never will he be his own master, nor yet ever any man’s. He will get half he gives, and give twice what he gets, till his life’s last breath; and if he lays aside his load before he draws that last breath, all his work will go for naught.”

‘“Oh, cruel, wicked Thor!” cried the Lady Esclairmonde. “Ah, look see, all of you! The catch is still open! He hasn’t locked it. He can still take it off. He can still come back. Come back!” She went as near as she dared, but she could not lay hands on Cold Iron. The Boy could have taken it off, yes. We waited to see if he would, but he put up his hand, and the snap locked home.

‘“What else could I have done?” said he.

‘“Surely, then, you will do,” I said. “Morning’s coming, and if you three have any farewells to make, make them now, for, after sunrise, Cold Iron must be your master.” ‘So the three sat down, cheek by wet cheek, telling over their farewells till morning light. As good a boy as ever lived, he was.’

‘And what happened to him?’ asked Dan.

‘When morning came, Cold Iron was master of him and his fortune, and he went to work among folk in housen. Presently he came across a maid like-minded with himself, and they were wedded, and had bushels of children, as the saying is. Perhaps you’ll meet some of his breed, this year.’

‘Thank you,’ said Una. ‘But what did the poor Lady Esclairmonde do?’

‘What can you do when Asa Thor lays the Cold Iron in a lad’s path? She and Sir Huon were comforted to think they had given the Boy good store of learning to act and influence on folk in housen. For he was a good boy! Isn’t it getting on for breakfast-time? I’ll walk with you a piece.’

When they were well in the centre of the bone-dry fern, Dan nudged Una, who stopped and put on a boot as quickly as she could. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘you can’t get any Oak, Ash, and Thorn leaves from here, and’—she balanced wildly on one leg—‘I’m standing on Cold Iron. What’ll you do if we don’t go away?’

‘E-eh? Of all mortal impudence!’ said Puck, as Dan, also in one boot, grabbed his sister’s hand to steady himself. He walked round them, shaking with delight. ‘You think I can only work with a handful of dead leaves? This comes of taking away your Doubt and Fear! I’ll show you!’

A minute later they charged into old Hobden at his simple breakfast of cold roast pheasant, shouting that there was a wasps’ nest in the fern which they had nearly stepped on, and asking him to come and smoke it out. ‘It’s too early for wops-nests, an’ I don’t go diggin’ in the Hill, not for shillin’s,’ said the old man placidly. ‘You’ve a thorn in your foot, Miss Una. Sit down, and put on your t’other boot. You’re too old to be caperin’ barefoot on an empty stomach. Stay it with this chicken o’ mine.’

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THE VALLEY was so choked with fog that one could scarcely see a cow’s length across a field. Every blade, twig, bracken-frond, and hoof-print carried water, and the air was filled with the noise of rushing ditches and field-drains, all delivering to the brook below. A week’s November rain on water-logged land had gorged her to full flood, and she proclaimed it aloud.Two men in sackcloth aprons were considering an untrimmed hedge that ran down the hillside and disappeared into mist beside those roarings. They stood back and took stock of the neglected growth, tapped an elbow of hedge-oak here, a mossed beech-stub there, swayed a stooled ash back and forth, and looked at each other.

‘I reckon she’s about two rod thick,’ said Jabez the younger, ‘an’ she hasn’t felt iron since—when has she, Jesse?’

‘Call it twenty-five year, Jabez, an’ you won’t be far out.’

‘Umm!’ Jabez rubbed his wet handbill on his wetter coat-sleeve. ‘She ain’t a hedge. She’s all manner o’ trees. We’ll just about have to——’ He paused, as professional etiquette required.

‘Just about have to side her up an’ see what she’ll bear. But hadn’t we best——?’ Jesse paused in his turn; both men being artists and equals.

‘Get some kind o’ line to go by.’ Jabez ranged up and down till he found a thinner place, and with clean snicks of the handbill revealed the original face of the fence. Jesse took over the dripping stuff as it fell forward, and, with a grasp and a kick, made it to lie orderly on the bank till it should be faggoted.

By noon a length of unclean jungle had turned itself into a cattle-proof barrier, tufted here and there with little plumes of the sacred holly which no woodman touches without orders.

‘Now we’ve a witness-board to go by! ‘said Jesse at last.

‘She won’t be as easy as this all along,’ Jabez answered. ‘She’ll need plenty stakes and binders when we come to the brook.’

‘Well, ain’t we plenty?’ Jesse pointed to the ragged perspective ahead of them that plunged downhill into the fog. ‘I lay there’s a cord an’ a half o’ firewood, let alone faggots, ’fore we get anywheres anigh the brook.’

‘The brook’s got up a piece since morning,’ said Jabez. ‘Sounds like’s if she was over Wickenden’s door-stones.’

Jesse listened, too. There was a growl in the brook’s roar as though she worried something hard.

‘Yes. She’s over Wickenden’s door-stones,’ he replied. ‘Now she’ll flood acrost Alder Bay an’ that’ll ease her.’

‘She won’t ease Jim Wickenden’s hay none if she do,’ Jabez grunted. ‘I told Jim he’d set that liddle hay-stack o’ his too low down in the medder. I told him so when he was drawin’ the bottom for it.’

‘I told him so, too,’ said Jesse. ‘I told him ’fore ever you did. I told him when the County Council tarred the roads up along.’ He pointed up-hill, where unseen automobiles and road-engines droned past continually. ‘A tarred road, she shoots every drop o’ water into a valley same’s a slate roof. ’Tisn’t as ’twas in the old days, when the waters soaked in and soaked out in the way o’ nature. It rooshes off they tarred roads all of a lump, and naturally every drop is bound to descend into the valley. And there’s tar roads both two sides this valley for ten mile. That’s what I told Jim Wickenden when they tarred the roads last year. But he’s a valley-man. He don’t hardly ever journey up-hill.’

‘What did he say when you told him that?’ Jabez demanded, with a little change of voice.

‘Why? What did he say to you when you told him?’ was the answer.

‘What he said to you, I reckon, Jesse.’

Then, you don’t need me to say it over again, Jabez.,

‘Well, let be how ’twill, what was he gettin’ after when he said what he said to me? ‘Jabez insisted.

‘I dunno; unless you tell me what manner o’ words he said to you.’

Jabez drew back from the hedge—all hedges are nests of treachery and eavesdropping—and moved to an open cattle-lodge in the centre of the field.

‘No need to go ferretin’ around,’ said Jesse. ‘None can’t see us here ’fore we see them.’

‘What was Jim Wickenden gettin’ at when I said he’d set his stack too near anigh the brook?’ Jabez dropped his voice. ‘He was in his mind.’

‘He ain’t never been out of it yet to my knowledge,’ Jesse drawled, and uncorked his tea-bottle.

‘But then Jim says: “I ain’t goin’ to shift my stack a yard,” he says. “The Brook’s been good friends to me, and if she be minded,” he says, “to take a snatch at my hay, I ain’t settin’ out to withstand her.” That’s what Jim Wickenden says to me last—last June-end ’twas,’ said Jabez.

‘Nor he hasn’t shifted his stack, neither,’ Jesse replied. ‘An’ if there’s more rain, the brook she’ll shift it for him.’

‘No need tell me! But I want to know what Jim was gettin’ at?’

Jabez opened his clasp-knife very deliberately; Jesse as carefully opened his. They unfolded the newspapers that wrapped their dinners, coiled away and pocketed the string that bound the packages, and sat down on the edge of the lodge manger. The rain began to fall again through the fog, and the brook’s voice rose.

‘But I always allowed Mary was his lawful child, like,’ said Jabez, after Jesse had spoken for a while.

“Tain’t so. . . . Jim Wickenden’s woman she never made nothing. She come out o’ Lewes with her stockin’s round her heels, an’ she never made nor mended aught till she died. He had to light fire an’ get breakfast every mornin’ except Sundays, while she sowed it abed. Then she took an’ died, sixteen, seventeen, year back; but she never had no childern.’

‘They was valley-folk,’ said Jabez apologetically. ‘I’d no call to go in among ’em, but I always allowed Mary——’

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‘No. Mary come out o’ one o’ those Lunnon Childern Societies. After his woman died, Jim got his mother back from his sister over to Peasmarsh, which she’d gone to house with when Jim married. His mother kept house for Jim after his woman died. They do say ’twas his mother led him on toward adoptin’ of Mary—to furnish out the house with a child, like, and to keep him off of gettin’ a noo woman. He mostly done what his mother contrived. ’Cardenly, twixt ’em, they asked for a child from one o’ those Lunnon societies—same as it might ha’ been these Barnardo children—an’ Mary was sent down to ’em, in a candle-box, I’ve heard.’

‘Then Mary is chance-born. I never knowed that,’ said Jabez. ‘Yet I must ha’ heard it some time or other . . .’

‘No. She ain’t. ’Twould ha’ been better for some folk if she had been. She come to Jim in a candle-box with all the proper papers—lawful child o’ some couple in Lunnon somewheres—mother dead, father drinkin’. And there was that Lunnon society’s five shillin’s a week for her. Jim’s mother she wouldn’t despise week-end money, but I never heard Jim was much of a muck-grubber. Let be how ’twill, they two mothered up Mary no bounds, till it looked at last like they’d forgot she wasn’t their own flesh an’ blood. Yes, I reckon they forgot Mary wasn’t their’n by rights.’

‘That’s no new thing,’ said Jabez. ‘There’s more’n one or two in this parish wouldn’t surrender back their Bernarders. You ask Mark Copley an’ his woman an’ that Bernarder cripple-babe o’ theirs.’

‘Maybe they need the five shillin’,’ Jesse suggested.

‘It’s handy,’ said Jabez. ‘But the child’s more. “Dada” he says, an’ “Mumma” he says, with his great rollin’ head-piece all hurdled up in that iron collar. He won’t live long—his backbone’s rotten, like. But they Copleys do just about set store by him—five bob or no five bob.’

‘Same way with Jim an’ his mother,’ Jesse went on. ‘There was talk betwixt ’em after a few years o’ not takin’ any more week-end money for Mary; but let alone she never passed a farden in the mire ’thout longin’s, Jim didn’t care, like, to push himself forward into the Society’s remembrance. So naun came of it. The week-end money would ha’ made no odds to Jim—not after his uncle willed him they four cottages at Eastbourne an’ money in the bank.’

‘That was true, too, then? I heard something in a scadderin’ word-o’-mouth way,’ said Jabez.

‘I’ll answer for the house property, because Jim he reequested my signed name at the foot o’ some papers concernin’ it. Regardin’ the money in the bank, he nature-ally wouldn’t like such things talked about all round the parish, so he took strangers for witnesses.’

‘Then ’twill make Mary worth seekin’ after?’

‘She’ll need it. Her Maker ain’t done much for her outside nor yet in.’

‘That ain’t no odds.’ Jabez shook his head till the water showered off his hat-brim. ‘If Mary has money, she’ll be wed before any likely pore maid. She’s cause to be grateful to Jim.’

‘She hides it middlin’ close, then,’ said Jesse. ‘It don’t sometimes look to me as if Mary has her natural rightful feelin’s. She don’t put on an apron o’ Mondays ’thout being druv to it—in the kitchen or the hen-house. She’s studyin’ to be a school-teacher. She’ll make a beauty! I never knowed her show any sort o’ kindness to nobody—not even when Jim’s mother was took dumb. No! ’Twadn’t no stroke. It stifled the old lady in the throat here. First she couldn’t shape her words no shape; then she clucked, like, an’ lastly she couldn’t more than suck down spoon-meat an’ hold her peace. Jim took her to Doctor Harding, an’ Harding he bundled her off to Brighton Hospital on a ticket, but they couldn’t make no stay to her afflictions there; and she was bundled off to Lunnon, an’ they lit a great old lamp inside her, and Jim told me they couldn’t make out nothing in no sort there; and, along o’ one thing an’ another, an’ all their spyin’s and pryin’s, she come back a hem sight worse than when she started. Jim said he’d have no more hospitalizin’, so he give her a slate, which she tied to her waist-string, and what she was minded to say she writ on it.’

‘Now, I never knowed that! But they’re valley—folk;’ Jabez repeated.

‘’Twadn’t particular noticeable, for she wasn’t a talkin’ woman any time o’ her days. Mary had all three’s tongue . . . . Well, then, two years this summer, come what I’m tellin’ you. Mary’s Lunnon father, which they’d put clean out o’ their minds, arrived down from Lunnon with the law on his side, sayin’ he’d take his daughter back to Lunnon, after all. I was working for Mus’ Dockett at Pounds Farm that summer, but I was obligin’ Jim that evenin’ muckin’ out his pig-pen. I seed a stranger come traipsin’ over the bridge agin’ Wickenden’s door-stones. ’Twadn’t the new County Council bridge with the handrail. They hadn’t given it in for a public right o’ way then. ’Twas just a bit o’ lathy old plank which Jim had throwed acrost the brook for his own conveniences. The man wasn’t drunk—only a little concerned in liquor, like—an’ his back was a mask where he’d slipped in the muck comin’ along. He went up the bricks past Jim’s mother, which was feedin’ the ducks, an’ set himself down at the table inside—Jim was just changin’ his socks—an’ the man let Jim know all his rights and aims regardin’ Mary. Then there just about was a hurly-bulloo? Jim’s fust mind was to pitch him forth, but he’d done that once in his young days, and got six months up to Lewes jail along o’ the man fallin’ on his head. So he swallowed his spittle an’ let him talk. The law about Mary was on the man’s side from fust to last, for he showed us all the papers. Then Mary come downstairs—she’d been studyin’ for an examination—an’ the man tells her who he was, an’ she says he had ought to have took proper care of his own flesh and blood while he had it by him, an’ not to think he could ree-claim it when it suited. He says somethin’ or other, but she looks him up an’ down, front an’ backwent, an’ she just tongues him scadderin’ out o’ doors, and he went away stuffin’ all the papers back into his hat, talkin’ most abusefully. Then she come back an’ freed her mind against Jim an’ his mother for not havin’ warned her of her upbringin’s, which it come out she hadn’t ever been told. They didn’t say naun to her. They never did. I’d ha’ packed her off with any man that would ha’ took her—an’ God’s pity on him!’

‘Umm! ‘said Jabez, and sucked his pipe.

‘So then, that was the beginnin’. The man come back again next week or so, an’ he catched Jim alone, ’thout his mother this time, an’ he fair beazled him with his papers an’ his talk—for the law was on his side—till Jim went down into his money-purse an’ give him ten shillings hush-money—he told me—to withdraw away for a bit an’ leave Mary with ’em.’

‘But that’s no way to get rid o’ man or woman,’ Jabez said.

‘No more ’tis. I told Jim so. “What can I do?” Jim says.—“The law’s with the man. I walk about daytimes thinkin’ o’ it till I sweats my underclothes wringin’, an’ I lie abed nights thinkin’ o’ it till I sweats my sheets all of a sop. ’Tisn’t as if I was a young man,” he says, “nor yet as if I was a pore man. Maybe he’ll drink hisself to death.” I e’en a’most told him outright what foolishness he was enterin’ into, but he knowed it—he knowed it—because he said next time the man come ’twould be fifteen shillin’s. An’ next time ’twas. Just fifteen shillin’s!’

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‘An’ was the man her father?’ asked Jabez.

‘He had the proofs an’ the papers. Jim showed me what that Lunnon Childern’s Society had answered when Mary writ up to ’em an’ taxed ’em with it. I lay she hadn’t been proper polite in her letters to ’em, for they answered middlin’ short. They said the matter was out o’ their hands, but—let’s see if I remember—oh, yes,—they ree-gretted there had been an oversight. I reckon they had sent Mary out in the candle-box as a orphan instead o’ havin’ a father. Terrible awkward! Then, when he’d drinked up the money, the man come again—in his usuals—an’ he kept hammerin’ on and hammerin’ on about his duty to his pore dear wife, an’ what he’d do for his dear daughter in Lunnon, till the tears runnel down his two dirty cheeks an’ he come away with more money. Jim used to slip it into his hand behind the door; but his mother she heard the chink. She didn’t hold with hush-money. She’d write out all her feelin’s on the slate, an’ Jim ’ud be settin’ up half the night answerin’ back an showing that the man had the law with him.’

‘Hadn’t that man no trade nor business, then?’

‘He told me he was a printer. I reckon, though, he lived on the rates like the rest of ’ern up there in Lunnon.’

‘An’ how did Mary take it?’

‘She said she’d sooner go into service than go with the man. I reckon a mistress ’ud be middlin’ put to it for a maid ’fore she put Mary into cap an’ gown. She was studyin’ to be a schoo-ool-teacher. A beauty she’ll make! . . . Well, that was how things went that fall. Mary’s Lunnon father kep’ comin’ an’ comin’ ’carden as he’d drinked out the money Jim gave him; an’ each time he’d put up his price for not takin’ Mary away. Jim’s mother, she didn’t like partin’ with no money, an’ bein’ obliged to write her feelin’s on the slate instead o’ givin’ ’em vent by mouth, she was just about mad. Just about she was mad!’

Come November, I lodged with Jim in the outside room over ‘gainst his hen-house. I paid her my rent. I was workin’ for Dockett at Pounds—gettin’ chestnut-bats out o’ Perry Shaw. Just such weather as this be-rain atop o’ rain after a wet October. (An’ I remember it ended in dry frostes right away up to Christmas.) Dockett he’d sent up to Perry Shaw for me—no, he comes puffin’ up to me himself—because a big cornerpiece o’ the bank had slipped into the brook where she makes that elber at the bottom o’ the Seventeen Acre, an’ all the rubbishy alders an’ sallies which he ought to have cut out when he took the farm, they’d slipped with the slip, an’ the brook was comin’ rooshin’ down atop of ’em, an’ they’d just about back an’ spill the waters over his winter wheat. The water was lyin’ in the flats already. “Gor a-mighty, Jesse!” he bellers out at me, “get that rubbish away all manners you can. Don’t stop for no fagottin’, but give the brook play or my wheat’s past salvation. I can’t lend you no help,” he says, “but work an’ I’ll pay ye.”’

‘You had him there,’ Jabez chuckled.

‘Yes. I reckon I had ought to have drove my bargain, but the brook was backin’ up on good bread-corn. So ’cardenly, I laid into the mess of it, workin’ off the bank where the trees was drownin’ themselves head-down in the roosh—just such weather as this—an’ the brook creepin’ up on me all the time. ’Long toward noon, Jim comes mowchin’ along with his toppin’ axe over his shoulder.

‘“Be you minded for an extra hand at your job?” he says.

‘“Be you minded to turn to?” I ses, an’—no more talk to it—Jim laid in alongside o’ me. He’s no bunger with a toppin’ axe.’

‘Maybe, but I’ve seed him at a job o’ throwin’ in the woods, an’ he didn’t seem to make out no shape,’ said Jabez. ‘He haven’t got the shoulders, nor yet the judgment—my opinion—when he’s dealin’ with full-girt timber. He don’t rightly make up his mind where he’s goin’ to throw her.’

‘We wasn’t throwin’ nothin’. We was cuttin’ out they soft alders, an’ haulin’ ’em up the bank ’fore they could back the waters on the wheat. Jim didn’t say much, ’less it was that he’d had a post-card from Mary’s Lunnon father, night before, sayin’ he was comin’ down that mornin’. Jim, he’d sweated all night, an’ he didn’t reckon hisself equal to the talkin’ an’ the swearin’ an’ the cryin’, an’ his mother blamin’ him afterwards on the slate. “It spiled my day to think of it,” he ses, when we was eatin’ our pieces. “So I’ve fair cried dunghill an’ run. Mother’ll have to tackle him by herself. I lay she won’t give him no hush-money,” he ses. “I lay he’ll be surprised by the time he’s done with her,” he ses. An’ that was e’en a’most all the talk we had concernin’ it. But he’s no bunger with the toppin’ axe.

‘The brook she’d crep’ up an’ up on us, an’ she kep’ creepin’ upon us till we was workin’ knee-deep in the shallers, cuttin’ an’ pookin’ an’ pullin’ what we could get to o’ the rubbish. There was a middlin’ lot comin’ down-stream, too—cattle-bars an’ hop-poles and odds-ends bats, all poltin’ down together; but they rooshed round the elber good shape by the time we’d backed out they drowned trees. Come four o’clock we reckoned we’d done a proper day’s work, an’ she’d take no harm if we left her. We couldn’t puddle about there in the dark an’ wet to no more advantage. Jim he was pourin’ the water out of his boots—no, I was doin’ that. Jim was kneelin’ to unlace his’n. “Damn it all, Jesse,” he ses, standin’ up; “the flood must be over my doorsteps at home, for here comes my old white-top bee-skep!”’

‘Yes. I allus heard he paints his bee-skeps,’ Jabez put in. ‘I dunno paint don’t tarrify bees more’n it keeps ’em dry.’

‘“I’ll have a pook at it,” he ses, an’ he pooks at it as it comes round the elber. The roosh nigh jerked the pooker out of his hand-grips, an’ he calls to me, an’ I come runnin’ barefoot. Then we pulled on the pooker, an’ it reared up on eend in the roosh, an’ we guessed what ’twas. ’Cardenly we pulled it in into a shaller, an’ it rolled a piece, an’ a great old stiff man’s arm nigh hit me in the face. Then we was sure. “’Tis a man,” ses Jim. But the face was all a mask. “I reckon it’s Mary’s Lunnon father,” he ses presently. “Lend me a match and I’ll make sure.” He never used baccy. We lit three matches one by another, well’s we could in the rain, an’ he cleaned off some o’ the slob with a tussick o’ grass. “Yes,” he ses. “It’s Mary’s Lunnon father. He won’t tarrify us no more. D’you want him, Jesse?” he ses.

“No,” I ses. “If this was Eastbourne beach like, he’d be half-a-crown apiece to us ’fore the coroner; but now we’d only lose a day havin’ to ’tend the inquest. I lay he fell into the brook.”

“I lay he did,” ses Jim. “I wonder if he saw mother.” He turns him over, an’ opens his coat and puts his fingers in the waistcoat pocket an’ starts laugbin’. “He’s seen mother, right enough,” he ses. “An’ he’s got the best of her, too. She won’t be able to crow no more over me ’bout givin’ him money. I never give him more than a sovereign. She’s give him two!” an’ he trousers ’em, laughin’ all the time. “An’ now we’ll pook him back again, for I’ve done with him,” he ses.

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‘So we pooked him back into the middle of the brook, an’ we saw he went round the elber ’thout balkin’, an’ we walked quite a piece beside of him to set him on his ways. When we couldn’t see no more, we went home by the high road, because we knowed the brook ’u’d be out acrost the medders, an’ we wasn’t goin’ to hunt for Jim’s little rotten old bridge in that darkan’ rainin’ Heavens’ hard, too. I was middlin’ pleased to see light an’ vittles again when we got home. Jim he pressed me to come insides for a drink. He don’t drink in a generality, but he was rid of all his troubles that evenin’, d’ye see? “Mother,” he ses so soon as the door ope’d, “have you seen him? “She whips out her slate an’ writes down—“No.” “Oh, no,” ses Jim. “You don’t get out of it that way, mother. I lay you have seen him, an’ I lay he’s bested you for all your talk, same as he bested me. Make a clean breast of it, mother,” he ses. “He got round you too.” She was goin’ for the slate again, but he stops her. “It’s all right, mother,” he ses. “I’ve seen him sense you have, an’ he won’t trouble us no more.” The old lady looks up quick as a robin, an’ she writes, “Did he say so?” “No,” ses Jim, laughin’. “He didn’t say so. That’s how I know. But he bested you, mother. You can’t have it in at me for bein’ soft-hearted. You’re twice as tender-hearted as what I be. Look!” he ses, an’ he shows her the two sovereigns. “Put ’em away where they belong,” he ses. “He won’t never come for no more; an’ now we’ll have our drink,” he ses, “for we’ve earned it.”

‘Nature-ally they weren’t goin’ to let me see where they kep’ their monies. She went upstairs with it—for the whisky.’

‘I never knowed Jim was a drinkin’ man—in his own house, like,’ said Jabez.

‘No more he isn’t; but what he takes he likes good. He won’t tech no publican’s hogwash acrost the bar. Four shillin’s he paid for that bottle o’ whisky. I know, because when the old lady brought it down there wasn’t more’n jest a liddle few dreenin’s an’ dregs in it. Nothin’ to set before neighbours, I do assure you.’

“Why, ’twas half full last week, mother,” he ses. “You don’t mean,” he ses, “ you’ve given him all that as well? It’s two shillin’s worth,” he ses. (That’s how I knowed he paid four.) “Well, well, mother, you be too tender-’earted to live. But I don’t grudge it to him,” he ses. “I don’t grudge him nothin’ he can keep.” So, ’cardenly, we drinked up what little sup was left.’

‘An’ what come to Mary’s Lunnon father?’ said Jabez, after a full minute’s silence.

‘I be too tired to go readin’ papers of evenin’s; but Dockett he told me, that very week, I think, that they’d inquested on a man down at Roberts-bridge which had polted and polted up agin’ so many bridges an’ banks, like, they couldn’t make naun out of him.’

‘An’ what did Mary say to all these doin’s?’

‘The old lady bundled her off to the village ’fore her Lunnon father come, to buy week-end stuff (an’ she forgot the half o’ it). When we come in she was upstairs studyin’ to be a schoolteacher. None told her naun about it. ’Twadn’t girls’ affairs.’

‘Reckon she knowed?’ Jabez went on.

‘She? She must have guessed it middlin’ close when she saw her money come back. But she never mentioned it in writing so far’s I know. She were more worritted that night on account of two-three her chickens bein’ drowned, for the flood had skewed their old hen-house round on her postes. I cobbled her up next mornin’ when the brook shrinked.’

‘An’ where did you find the bridge? Some fur down-stream, didn’t ye?’

‘Just where she allus was. She hadn’t shifted but very little. The brook had gulled out the bank a piece under one eend o’ the plank, so’s she was liable to tilt ye sideways if you wasn’t careful. But I pocked three-four bricks under her, an’ she was all plumb again.’

‘Well, I dunno how it looks like, but let be how ’twill,’ said Jabez, ‘he hadn’t no business to come down from Lunnon tarrifyin’ people, an’ threatenin’ to take away children which they’d hobbed up for their lawful own—even if ’twas Mary Wickenden.’

‘He had the business right enough, an’ he had the law with him—no gettin’ over that,’ said Jesse.

‘But he had the drink with him, too, an’ that was where he failed, like.’

‘Well, well! Let be how ’twill, the brook was a good friend to Jim. I see it now. I allus did wonder what he was gettin’ at when he said that, when I talked to him about shiftin’ the stack. “You dunno everythin’,” he ses. “The Brook’s been a good friend to me,” he ses, “an’ if she’s minded to have a snatch at my hay, I ain’t settin’ out to withstand her.”’

‘I reckon she’s about shifted it, too, by now,’ Jesse chuckled. ‘Hark! That ain’t any slip off the bank which she’s got hold of.’

The Brook had changed her note again. It sounded as though she were mumbling something soft.

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WHEN Dan took up boat-building, Una coaxed Mrs Vincey, the farmer’s wife at Little Lindens, to teach her to milk. Mrs Vincey milks in the pasture in summer, which is different from milking in the shed, because the cows are not tied up, and until they know you they will not stand still. After three weeks Una could milk Red Cow or Kitty Shorthorn quite dry, without her wrists aching, and then she allowed Dan to look. But milking did not amuse him, and it was pleasanter for Una to be alone in the quiet pastures with quiet-spoken Mrs Vincey. So, evening after evening, she slipped across to Little Lindens, took her stool from the fern-clump beside the fallen oak, and went to work, her pail between her knees, and her head pressed hard into the cow’s flank. As often as not, Mrs Vincey would be milking cross Pansy at the other end of the pasture, and would not come near till it was time to strain and pour off.Once, in the middle of a milking, Kitty Shorthorn boxed Una’s ear with her tail.

‘You old pig!’ said Una, nearly crying, for a cow’s tail can hurt.

‘Why didn’t you tie it down, child?’ said a voice behind her.

‘I meant to, but the flies are so bad I let her off—and this is what she’s done!’ Una looked round, expecting Puck, and saw a curly-haired girl, not much taller than herself, but older, dressed in a curious high-waisted, lavender-coloured riding-habit, with a high hunched collar and a deep cape and a belt fastened with a steel clasp. She wore a yellow velvet cap and tan gauntlets, and carried a real hunting-crop. Her cheeks were pale except for two pretty pink patches in the middle, and she talked with little gasps at the end of her sentences, as though she had been running.

‘You don’t milk so badly, child,’ she said, and when she smiled her teeth showed small and even and pearly.

‘Can you milk?’ Una asked, and then flushed, for she heard Puck’s chuckle.

He stepped out of the fern and sat down, holding Kitty Short-horn’s tail. ‘There isn’t much,’ he said, ‘that Miss Philadelphia doesn’t know about milk—or, for that matter, butter and eggs. She’s a great housewife.’

‘Oh,’ said Una. ‘I’m sorry I can’t shake hands. Mine are all milky; but Mrs Vincey is going to teach me butter-making this summer.’

‘Ah! I’m going to London this summer,’ the girl said, ‘to my aunt in Bloomsbury.’ She coughed as she began to hum, ‘“Oh, what a town! What a wonderful metropolis!”

‘You’ve got a cold,’ said Una.

‘No. Only my stupid cough. But it’s vastly better than it was last winter. It will disappear in London air. Every one says so. D’you like doctors, child?’

‘I don’t know any,’ Una replied. ‘But I’m sure I shouldn’t.’

‘Think yourself lucky, child. I beg your pardon,’ the girl laughed, for Una frowned.

‘I’m not a child, and my name’s Una,’she said.

‘Mine’s Philadelphia. But everybody except Rene calls me Phil. I’m Squire Bucksteed’s daughter—over at Marklake yonder.’ She jerked her little round chin towards the south behind Dallington. ‘Sure-ly you know Marklake?’

‘We went a picnic to Marklake Green once,’ said Una. ‘It’s awfully pretty. I like all those funny little roads that don’t lead anywhere.’

‘They lead over our land,’ said Philadelphia stiffly, ’and the coach road is only four miles away. One can go anywhere from the Green. I went to the Assize Ball at Lewes last year.’ She spun round and took a few dancing steps, but stopped with her hand to her side.

‘It gives me a stitch,’ she explained. ‘No odds. ’Twill go away in London air. That’s the latest French step, child. Rene taught it me. D’you hate the French, chi—Una?’

‘Well, I hate French, of course, but I don’t mind Ma’m’selle. She’s rather decent. Is Rene your French governess?’

Philadelphia laughed till she caught her breath again.

‘Oh no! Rene’s a French prisoner—on parole. That means he’s promised not to escape till he has been properly exchanged for an Englishman. He’s only a doctor, so I hope they won’t think him worth exchanging. My uncle captured him last year in the Ferdinand privateer, off Belle Isle, and he cured my uncle of a r-r-raging toothache. Of course, after that we couldn’t let him lie among the common French prisoners at Rye, and so he stays with us. He’s of very old family—a Breton, which is nearly next door to being a true Briton, my father says—and he wears his hair clubbed—not powdered. Much more becoming, don’t you think?’

‘I don’t know what you’re—’ Una began, but Puck, the other side of the pail, winked, and she went on with her milking.

‘He’s going to be a great French physician when the war is over. He makes me bobbins for my lace-pillow now—he’s very clever with his hands; but he’d doctor our people on the Green if they would let him. Only our Doctor—Doctor Break—says he’s an emp—or imp something—worse than imposter. But my Nurse says—’

‘Nurse! You’re ever so old. What have you got a nurse for?’ Una finished milking, and turned round on her stool as Kitty Shorthorn grazed off.

‘Because I can’t get rid of her. Old Cissie nursed my mother, and she says she’ll nurse me till she dies. The idea! She never lets me alone. She thinks I’m delicate. She has grown infirm in her understanding, you know. Mad—quite mad, poor Cissie!’

‘Really mad?’ said Una. ‘Or just silly?’

‘Crazy, I should say—from the things she does. Her devotion to me is terribly embarrassing. You know I have all the keys of the Hall except the brewery and the tenants’ kitchen. I give out all stores and the linen and plate.’

‘How jolly! I love store-rooms and giving out things.’

‘Ah, it’s a great responsibility, you’ll find, when you come to my age. Last year Dad said I was fatiguing myself with my duties, and he actually wanted me to give up the keys to old Amoore, our housekeeper. I wouldn’t. I hate her. I said, “No, sir. I am Mistress of Marklake Hall just as long as I live, because I’m never going to be married, and I shall give out stores and linen till I die!”’

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‘And what did your father say?’

‘Oh, I threatened to pin a dishclout to his coat-tail. He ran away. Every one’s afraid of Dad, except me.’ Philadelphia stamped her foot. ‘The idea! If I can’t make my own father happy in his own house, I’d like to meet the woman that can, and—and—I’d have the living hide off her!’

She cut with her long-thonged whip. It cracked like a pistol- shot across the still pasture. Kitty Shorthorn threw up her head and trotted away.

‘I beg your pardon,’ Philadelphia said; ‘but it makes me furious. Don’t you hate those ridiculous old quizzes with their feathers and fronts, who come to dinner and call you “child” in your own chair at your own table?’

‘I don’t always come to dinner , said Una, ‘but I hate being called “child.” Please tell me about store-rooms and giving out things.’

Ah, it’s a great responsibility—particularly with that old cat Amoore looking at the lists over your shoulder. And such a shocking thing happened last summer! Poor crazy Cissie, my Nurse that I was telling you of, she took three solid silver tablespoons.’

‘Took! But isn’t that stealing?’ Una cried.

‘Hsh!’ said Philadelphia, looking round at Puck. ‘All I say is she took them without my leave. I made it right afterwards. So, as Dad says—and he’s a magistrate—, it wasn’t a legal offence; it was only compounding a felony.

‘It sounds awful,’ said Una.

‘It was. My dear, I was furious! I had had the keys for ten months, and I’d never lost anything before. I said nothing at first, because a big house offers so many chances of things being mislaid, and coming to hand later. “Fetching up in the lee-scuppers,” my uncle calls it. But next week I spoke to old Cissie about it when she was doing my hair at night, and she said I wasn’t to worry my heart for trifles!’

‘Isn’t it like ’em?’ Una burst out. ‘They see you’re worried over something that really matters, and they say, “Don’t worry”; as if that did any good!’

‘I quite agree with you, my dear; quite agree with you! I told Ciss the spoons were solid silver, and worth forty shillings, so if the thief were found, he’d be tried for his life.’

‘Hanged, do you mean?’Una said.

‘They ought to be; but Dad says no jury will hang a man nowadays for a forty-shilling theft. They transport ’em into penal servitude at the uttermost ends of the earth beyond the seas, for the term of their natural life. I told Cissie that, and I saw her tremble in my mirror. Then she cried, and caught hold of my knees, and I couldn’t for my life understand what it was all about,—she cried so. Can you guess, my dear, what that poor crazy thing had done? It was midnight before I pieced it together. She had given the spoons to Jerry Gamm, the Witchmaster on the Green, so that he might put a charm on me! Me!’

‘Put a charm on you? Why?’

‘That’s what I asked; and then I saw how mad poor Cissie was! You know this stupid little cough of mine? It will disappear as soon as I go to London. She was troubled about that, and about my being so thin, and she told me Jerry had promised her, if she would bring him three silver spoons, that he’d charm my cough away and make me plump—“flesh up,” she said. I couldn’t help laughing; but it was a terrible night! I had to put Cissie into my own bed, and stroke her hand till she cried herself to sleep. What else could I have done? When she woke, and I coughed—I suppose I can cough in my own room if I please—she said that she’d killed me, and asked me to have her hanged at Lewes sooner than send her to the uttermost ends of the earth away from me.’

‘How awful! What did you do, Phil?’

‘Do? I rode off at five in the morning to talk to Master Jerry, with a new lash on my whip. Oh, I was furious! Witchmaster or no Witchmaster, I meant to—’

Ah! what’s a Witchmaster?’

‘A master of witches, of course. I don’t believe there are witches; but people say every village has a few, and Jerry was the master of all ours at Marklake. He has been a smuggler, and a man-of-war’s man, and now he pretends to be a carpenter and joiner—he can make almost anything—but he really is a white wizard. He cures people by herbs and charms. He can cure them after Doctor Break has given them up, and that’s why Doctor Break hates him so. He used to make me toy carts, and charm off my warts when I was a child.’ Philadelphia spread out her hands with the delicate shiny little nails. ‘It isn’t counted lucky to cross him. He has his ways of getting even with you, they say. But I wasn’t afraid of Jerry! I saw him working in his garden, and I leaned out of my saddle and double-thonged him between the shoulders, over the hedge. Well, my dear, for the first time since Dad gave him to me, my Troubadour (I wish you could see the sweet creature!) shied across the road, and I spilled out into the hedge-top. Most undignified! Jerry pulled me through to his side and brushed the leaves off me. I was horribly pricked, but I didn’t care. “Now, Jerry,” I said, “I’m going to take the hide off you first, and send you to Lewes afterwards. You well know why.”

‘“Oh!” he said, and he sat down among his bee-hives. “Then I reckon you’ve come about old Cissie’s business, my dear.” “I reckon I justabout have,” I said. “Stand away from these hives. I can’t get at you there.” “That’s why I be where I be,” he said. “If you’ll excuse me, Miss Phil, I don’t hold with bein’ flogged before breakfast, at my time o’ life.” He’s a huge big man, but he looked so comical squatting among the hives that—I know I oughtn’t to—I laughed, and he laughed. I always laugh at the wrong time. But I soon recovered my dignity, and I said, “Then give me back what you made poor Cissie steal!”

‘“Your pore Cissie,” he said. “She’s a hatful o’ trouble. But you shall have ’em, Miss Phil. They’re all ready put by for you.” And, would you believe it, the old sinner pulled my three silver spoons out of his dirty pocket, and polished them on his cuff. “Here they be,” he says, and he gave them to me, just as cool as though I’d come to have my warts charmed. That’s the worst of people having known you when you were young. But I preserved my composure. “Jerry,” I said, “what in the world are we to do? If you’d been caught with these things on you, you’d have been hanged.”

‘“I know it,” he said. “But they’re yours now.”

‘“But you made my Cissie steal them,” I said.

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‘“That I didn’t,” he said. “Your Cissie, she was pickin’ at me an’ tarrifyin’ me all the long day an’ every day for weeks, to put a charm on you, Miss Phil, an’ take away your little spitty cough.”

‘“Yes. I knew that, Jerry, and to make me flesh-up!” I said. “I’m much obliged to you, but I’m not one of your pigs!”

‘“Ah! I reckon she’ve been talking to you, then,” he said. “Yes, she give me no peace, and bein’ tarrified—for I don’t hold with old women—I laid a task on her which I thought ’ud silence her. I never reckoned the old scrattle ’ud risk her neckbone at Lewes Assizes for your sake, Miss Phil. But she did. She up an’ stole, I tell ye, as cheerful as a tinker. You might ha’ knocked me down with any one of them liddle spoons when she brung ’em in her apron.”

‘“Do you mean to say, then, that you did it to try my poor Cissie?” I screamed at him.

‘“What else for, dearie?” he said. “I don’t stand in need of hedge-stealings. I’m a freeholder, with money in the bank; and now I won’t trust women no more! Silly old besom! I do beleft she’d ha’ stole the Squire’s big fob-watch, if I’d required her.”

‘“Then you’re a wicked, wicked old man,” I said, and I was so angry that I couldn’t help crying, and of course that made me cough.

‘Jerry was in a fearful taking. He picked me up and carried me into his cottage—it’s full of foreign curiosities—and he got me something to eat and drink, and he said he’d be hanged by the neck any day if it pleased me. He said he’d even tell old Cissie he was sorry. That’s a great comedown for a Witchmaster, you know.

‘I was ashamed of myself for being so silly, and I dabbed my eyes and said, “The least you can do now is to give poor Ciss some sort of a charm for me.”

‘“Yes, that’s only fair dealings,” he said. “You know the names of the Twelve Apostles, dearie? You say them names, one by one, before your open window, rain or storm, wet or shine, five times a day fasting. But mind you, ’twixt every name you draw in your breath through your nose, right down to your pretty liddle toes, as long and as deep as you can, and let it out slow through your pretty liddle mouth. There’s virtue for your cough in those names spoke that way. And I’ll give you something you can see, moreover. Here’s a stick of maple, which is the warmest tree in the wood.”’

‘That’s true,’ Una interrupted. ‘You can feel it almost as warm as yourself when you touch it.’

‘“It’s cut one inch long for your every year,” Jerry said. “That’s sixteen inches. You set it in your window so that it holds up the sash, and thus you keep it, rain or shine, or wet or fine, day and night. I’ve said words over it which will have virtue on your complaints.”

‘“I haven’t any complaints, Jerry,” I said. “It’s only to please Cissie.”

‘“I know that as well as you do, dearie,” he said. And—and that was all that came of my going to give him a flogging. I wonder whether he made poor Troubadour shy when I lashed at him? Jerry has his ways of getting even with people.’

‘I wonder,’ said Una. ‘Well, did you try the charm? Did it work?’

‘What nonsense! I told Rene about it, of course, because he’s a doctor. He’s going to be a most famous doctor. That’s why our doctor hates him. Rene said, “Oho! Your Master Gamm, he is worth knowing,” and he put up his eyebrows—like this. He made joke of it all. He can see my window from the carpenter’s shed, where he works, and if ever the maple stick fell down, he pretended to be in a fearful taking till I propped the window up again. He used to ask me whether I had said my Apostles properly, and how I took my deep breaths. Oh yes, and the next day, though he had been there ever so many times before, he put on his new hat and paid Jerry Gamm a visit of state—as a fellow-physician. Jerry never guessed Rene was making fun of him, and so he told Rene about the sick people in the village, and how he cured them with herbs after Doctor Break had given them up. Jerry could talk smugglers’ French, of course, and I had taught Rene plenty of English, if only he wasn’t so shy. They called each other Monsieur Gamm and Mosheur Lanark, just like gentlemen. I suppose it amused poor Rene. He hasn’t much to do, except to fiddle about in the carpenter’s shop. He’s like all the French prisoners—always making knickknacks; and Jerry had a little lathe at his cottage, and so—and so—Rene took to being with Jerry much more than I approved of. The Hall is so big and empty when Dad’s away, and I will not sit with old Amoore—she talks so horridly about every one—specially about Rene.

‘I was rude to Rene, I’m afraid; but I was properly served out for it. One always is. You see, Dad went down to Hastings to pay his respects to the General who commanded the brigade there, and to bring him to the Hall afterwards. Dad told me he was a very brave soldier from India—he was Colonel of Dad’s Regiment, the Thirty-third Foot, after Dad left the Army, and then he changed his name from Wesley to Wellesley, or else the other way about; and Dad said I was to get out all the silver for him, and I knew that meant a big dinner. So I sent down to the sea for early mackerel, and had such a morning in the kitchen and the store- rooms. Old Amoore nearly cried.

‘However, my dear, I made all my preparations in ample time, but the fish didn’t arrive—it never does—and I wanted Rene to ride to Pevensey and bring it himself. He had gone over to Jerry, of course, as he always used, unless I requested his presence beforehand. I can’t send for Rene every time I want him. He should be there. Now, don’t you ever do what I did, child, because it’s in the highest degree unladylike; but—but one of our Woods runs up to Jerry’s garden, and if you climb—it’s ungenteel, but I can climb like a kitten—there’s an old hollow oak just above the pigsty where you can hear and see everything below. Truthfully, I only went to tell Rene about the mackerel, but I saw him and Jerry sitting on the seat playing with wooden toy trumpets. So I slipped into the hollow, and choked down my cough, and listened. Rene had never shown me any of these trumpets.’

‘Trumpets? Aren’t you too old for trumpets?’ said Una.

‘They weren’t real trumpets, because Jerry opened his short-collar, and Rene put one end of his trumpet against Jerry’s chest, and put his ear to the other. Then Jerry put his trumpet against Rene’s chest, and listened while Rene breathed and coughed. I was afraid I would cough too.

‘“This hollywood one is the best,” said Jerry. “’Tis won’erful like hearin’ a man’s soul whisperin’ in his innards; but unless I’ve a buzzin’ in my ears, Mosheur Lanark, you make much about the same kind o’ noises as old Gaffer Macklin—but not quite so loud as young Copper. It sounds like breakers on a reef—a long way off. Comprenny?”

‘“Perfectly,” said Rene. “I drive on the breakers. But before I strike, I shall save hundreds, thousands, millions perhaps, by my little trumpets. Now tell me what sounds the old Gaffer Macklin have made in his chest, and what the young Copper also.”

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‘Jerry talked for nearly a quarter of an hour about sick people in the village, while Rene asked questions. Then he sighed, and said, “You explain very well, Monsieur Gamm, but if only I had your opportunities to listen for myself! Do you think these poor people would let me listen to them through my trumpet—for a little money? No?”—Rene’s as poor as a church mouse.

‘“They’d kill you, Mosheur. It’s all I can do to coax ’em to abide it, and I’m Jerry Gamm,” said Jerry. He’s very proud of his attainments.

‘“Then these poor people are alarmed—No?” said Rene.

‘“They’ve had it in at me for some time back because o’ my tryin’ your trumpets on their sick; and I reckon by the talk at the alehouse they won’t stand much more. Tom Dunch an’ some of his kidney was drinkin’ themselves riot-ripe when I passed along after noon. Charms an’ mutterin’s an’ bits o’ red wool an’ black hens is in the way o’ nature to these fools, Mosheur; but anything likely to do ’em real service is devil’s work by their estimation. If I was you, I’d go home before they come.” Jerry spoke quite quietly, and Rene shrugged his shoulders.

‘“I am prisoner on parole, Monsieur Gamm,” he said. “I have no home.”

‘Now that was unkind of Rene. He’s often told me that he looked on England as his home. I suppose it’s French politeness.

‘“Then we’ll talk o’ something that matters,” said Jerry. “Not to name no names, Mosheur Lanark, what might be your own opinion o’ some one who ain’t old Gaffer Macklin nor young Copper? Is that person better or worse?”

‘“Better—for time that is,” said Rene. He meant for the time being, but I never could teach him some phrases.

‘“I thought so too,” said Jerry. “But how about time to come?”

Rene shook his head, and then he blew his nose. You don’t know how odd a man looks blowing his nose when you are sitting directly above him.

‘“I’ve thought that too,” said Jerry. He rumbled so deep I could scarcely catch. “It don’t make much odds to me, because I’m old. But you’re young, Mosheur—you’re young,” and he put his hand on Rene’s knee, and Rene covered it with his hand. I didn’t know they were such friends.

‘“Thank you, mon ami,” said Rene. “I am much oblige. Let us return to our trumpet-making. But I forget”—he stood up—“it appears that you receive this afternoon!”

‘You can’t see into Gamm’s Lane from the oak, but the gate opened, and fat little Doctor Break stumped in, mopping his head, and half-a-dozen of our people following him, very drunk.

‘You ought to have seen Rene bow; he does it beautifully.

‘“A word with you, Laennec,” said Doctor Break. “Jerry has been practising some devilry or other on these poor wretches, and they’ve asked me to be arbiter.”

‘“Whatever that means, I reckon it’s safer than asking you to be doctor,” said Jerry, and Tom Dunch, one of our carters, laughed.

‘“That ain’t right feeling of you, Tom,” Jerry said, “seeing how clever Doctor Break put away your thorn in the flesh last winter.” Tom’s wife had died at Christmas, though Doctor Break bled her twice a week. Doctor Break danced with rage.

‘“This is all beside the mark,” he said. “These good people are willing to testify that you’ve been impudently prying into God’s secrets by means of some papistical contrivance which this person”—he pointed to poor Rene—“has furnished you with. Why, here are the things themselves!” Rene was holding a trumpet in his hand.

‘Then all the men talked at once. They said old Gaffer Macklin was dying from stitches in his side where Jerry had put the trumpet—they called it the devil’s ear-piece; and they said it left round red witch-marks on people’s skins, and dried up their lights, and made ’em spit blood, and threw ’em into sweats. Terrible things they said. You never heard such a noise. I took advantage of it to cough.

‘Rene and Jerry were standing with their backs to the pigsty. Jerry fumbled in his big flap pockets and fished up a pair of pistols. You ought to have seen the men give back when he cocked his. He passed one to Rene.

‘“Wait! Wait!” said Rene. “I will explain to the doctor if he permits.” He waved a trumpet at him, and the men at the gate shouted, “Don’t touch it, Doctor! Don’t lay a hand to the thing.”

‘“Come, come!” said Rene. “You are not so big fool as you pretend. No?”

‘Doctor Break backed toward the gate, watching Jerry’s pistol, and Rene followed him with his trumpet, like a nurse trying to amuse a child, and put the ridiculous thing to his ear to show how it was used, and talked of la Gloire, and l’Humanite, and la Science, while Doctor Break watched jerry’s pistol and swore. I nearly laughed aloud.

‘“Now listen! Now listen!” said Rene. “This will be moneys in your pockets, my dear confrere. You will become rich.”

‘Then Doctor Break said something about adventurers who could not earn an honest living in their own country creeping into decent houses and taking advantage of gentlemen’s confidence to enrich themselves by base intrigues.

‘Rene dropped his absurd trumpet and made one of his best bows. I knew he was angry from the way he rolled his “r’s.”

‘“Ver-r-ry good,” said he. “For that I shall have much pleasure to kill you now and here. Monsieur Gamm,”—another bow to Jerry—“you will please lend him your pistol, or he shall have mine. I give you my word I know not which is best; and if he will choose a second from his friends over there”—another bow to our drunken yokels at the gate—“we will commence.”

‘“That’s fair enough,” said Jerry. “Tom Dunch, you owe it to the Doctor to be his second. Place your man.”

‘“No,” said Tom. “No mixin’ in gentry’s quarrels for me.” And he shook his head and went out, and the others followed him.

‘“Hold on,” said Jerry. “You’ve forgot what you set out to do up at the alehouse just now. You was goin’ to search me for witch-marks; you was goin’ to duck me in the pond; you was goin’ to drag all my bits o’ sticks out o’ my little cottage here. What’s the matter with you? Wouldn’t you like to be with your old woman tonight, Tom?”

‘But they didn’t even look back, much less come. They ran to the village alehouse like hares.

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‘“No matter for these canaille,” said Rene, buttoning up his coat so as not to show any linen. All gentlemen do that before a duel, Dad says—and he’s been out five times. “You shall be his second, Monsieur Gamm. Give him the pistol.”

‘Doctor Break took it as if it was red-hot, but he said that if Rene resigned his pretensions in certain quarters he would pass over the matter. Rene bowed deeper than ever.

‘“As for that,” he said, “if you were not the ignorant which you are, you would have known long ago that the subject of your remarks is not for any living man.”

‘I don’t know what the subject of his remarks might have been, but he spoke in a simply dreadful voice, my dear, and Doctor Break turned quite white, and said Rene was a liar; and then Rene caught him by the throat, and choked him black.

‘Well, my dear, as if this wasn’t deliciously exciting enough, just exactly at that minute I heard a strange voice on the other side of the hedge say, “What’s this? What’s this, Bucksteed?” and there was my father and Sir Arthur Wesley on horseback in the lane; and there was Rene kneeling on Doctor Break, and there was I up in the oak, listening with all my ears.

‘I must have leaned forward too much, and the voice gave me such a start that I slipped. I had only time to make one jump on to the pigsty roof—another, before the tiles broke, on to the pigsty wall—and then I bounced down into the garden, just behind Jerry, with my hair full of bark. Imagine the situation!’

‘Oh, I can!’ Una laughed till she nearly fell off the stool.

‘Dad said, “Phil—a—del—phia!” and Sir Arthur Wesley said, “Good Ged” and Jerry put his foot on the pistol Rene had dropped. But Rene was splendid. He never even looked at me. He began to untwist Doctor Break’s neckcloth as fast as he’d twisted it, and asked him if he felt better.

‘“What’s happened? What’s happened?” said Dad.

‘“A fit!” said Rene. “I fear my confrere has had a fit. Do not be alarmed. He recovers himself. Shall I bleed you a little, my dear Doctor?” Doctor Break was very good too. He said, “I am vastly obliged, Monsieur Laennec, but I am restored now.” And as he went out of the gate he told Dad it was a syncope—I think. Then Sir Arthur said, “Quite right, Bucksteed. Not another word! They are both gentlemen.” And he took off his cocked hat to Doctor Break and Rene.

‘But poor Dad wouldn’t let well alone. He kept saying, “Philadelphia, what does all this mean?”

‘“Well, sir,” I said, “I’ve only just come down. As far as I could see, it looked as though Doctor Break had had a sudden seizure.” That was quite true—if you’d seen Rene seize him. Sir Arthur laughed. “Not much change there, Bucksteed,” he said. “She’s a lady—a thorough lady.”

‘“Heaven knows she doesn’t look like one,” said poor Dad. “Go home, Philadelphia.”

‘So I went home, my dear—don’t laugh so!—right under Sir Arthur’s nose—a most enormous nose—feeling as though I were twelve years old, going to be whipped. Oh, I beg your pardon, child!’

‘It’s all right,’ said Una. ‘I’m getting on for thirteen. I’ve never been whipped, but I know how you felt. All the same, it must have been funny!’

‘Funny! If you’d heard Sir Arthur jerking out, “Good Ged, Bucksteed!” every minute as they rode behind me; and poor Dad saying, “’Pon my honour, Arthur, I can’t account for it!” Oh, how my cheeks tingled when I reached my room! But Cissie had laid out my very best evening dress, the white satin one, vandyked at the bottom with spots of morone foil, and the pearl knots, you know, catching up the drapery from the left shoulder. I had poor mother’s lace tucker and her coronet comb.’

‘Oh, you lucky!’ Una murmured. ‘And gloves?’

‘French kid, my dear’—Philadelphia patted her shoulder—‘and morone satin shoes and a morone and gold crape fan. That restored my calm. Nice things always do. I wore my hair banded on my forehead with a little curl over the left ear. And when I descended the stairs, en grande tenue, old Amoore curtsied to me without my having to stop and look at her, which, alas! is too often the case. Sir Arthur highly approved of the dinner, my dear: the mackerel did come in time. We had all the Marklake silver out, and he toasted my health, and he asked me where my little bird’s-nesting sister was. I know he did it to quiz me, so I looked him straight in the face, my dear, and I said, “I always send her to the nursery, Sir Arthur, when I receive guests at Marklake Hall.”’

‘Oh, how chee—clever of you. What did he say?’ Una cried.

‘He said, “Not much change there, Bucksteed. Ged, I deserved it,” and he toasted me again. They talked about the French and what a shame it was that Sir Arthur only commanded a brigade at Hastings, and he told Dad of a battle in India at a place called Assaye. Dad said it was a terrible fight, but Sir Arthur described it as though it had been a whist-party—I suppose because a lady was present.’

‘Of course you were the lady. I wish I’d seen you,’said Una.

‘I wish you had, child. I had such a triumph after dinner. Rene and Doctor Break came in. They had quite made up their quarrel, and they told me they had the highest esteem for each other, and I laughed and said, “I heard every word of it up in the tree.” You never saw two men so frightened in your life, and when I said, “What was ‘the subject of your remarks,’ Rene?” neither of them knew where to look. Oh, I quizzed them unmercifully. They’d seen me jump off the pigsty roof, remember.’

‘But what was the subject of their remarks?’ said Una.

‘Oh, Doctor Break said it was a professional matter, so the laugh was turned on me. I was horribly afraid it might have been something unladylike and indelicate. But that wasn’t my triumph. Dad asked me to play on the harp. Between just you and me, child, I had been practising a new song from London—I don’t always live in trees—for weeks; and I gave it them for a surprise.’

‘What was it?’said Una. ‘Sing it.’

‘“I have given my heart to a flower.” Not very difficult fingering, but r-r-ravishing sentiment.’

Philadelphia coughed and cleared her throat.

‘I’ve a deep voice for my age and size,’ she explained. ‘Contralto, you know, but it ought to be stronger,’ and she began, her face all dark against the last of the soft pink sunset:

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‘I have given my heart to a flower,
Though I know it is fading away,
Though I know it will live but an hour
And leave me to mourn its decay!

‘Isn’t that touchingly sweet? Then the last verse—I wish I had my harp, dear—goes as low as my register will reach. ‘She drew in her chin, and took a deep breath:

‘Ye desolate whirlwinds that rave,
I charge you be good to my dear!
She is all—she is all that I have,
And the time of our parting is near!’

‘Beautiful!’ said Una. ‘And did they like it?’

‘Like it? They were overwhelmed—accablés, as Rene says. My dear, if I hadn’t seen it, I shouldn’t have believed that I could have drawn tears, genuine tears, to the eyes of four grown men. But I did! Rene simply couldn’t endure it! He’s all French sensibility. He hid his face and said, “Assez, Mademoiselle! C’est plus fort que moi! Assez!” And Sir Arthur blew his nose and said, “Good Ged! This is worse than Assaye!” While Dad sat with the tears simply running down his cheeks.’

‘And what did Doctor Break do?’

‘He got up and pretended to look out of the window, but I saw his little fat shoulders jerk as if he had the hiccoughs. That was a triumph. I never suspected him of sensibility.’

‘Oh, I wish I’d seen! I wish I’d been you,’said Una, clasping her hands. Puck rustled and rose from the fern, just as a big blundering cock-chafer flew smack against Una’s cheek.

When she had finished rubbing the place, Mrs Vincey called to her that Pansy had been fractious, or she would have come long before to help her strain and pour off.

‘It didn’t matter,’ said Una; ‘I just waited. Is that old Pansy barging about the lower pasture now?’

‘No,’ said Mrs Vincey, listening. ‘It sounds more like a horse being galloped middlin’ quick through the woods; but there’s no road there. I reckon it’s one of Gleason’s colts loose. Shall I see you up to the house, Miss Una?’

‘Gracious, no! thank you. What’s going to hurt me?’ said Una, and she put her stool away behind the oak, and strolled home through the gaps that old Hobden kept open for her.

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HE had suffered from the disease of the century since his early youth, and before he was thirty he was heavily marked with it. He and a few friends had rearranged Heaven very comfortably, but the reorganisation of Earth, which they called Society, was even greater fun. It demanded Work in the shape of many taxi-rides daily; hours of brilliant talk with brilliant talkers; some sparkling correspondence; a few silences (but on the understanding that their own turn should come soon) while other people expounded philosophies; and a fair number of picture-galleries, tea-fights, concerts, theatres, music-halls, and cinema shows; the whole trimmed with lovemaking to women whose hair smelt of cigarette-smoke. Such strong days sent Frankwell Midmore back to his flat assured that he and his friends had helped the World a step nearer the Truth, the Dawn, and the New Order.His temperament, he said, led him more towards concrete data than abstract ideas. People who investigate detail are apt to be tired at the day’s end. The same temperament, or it may have been a woman, made him early attach himself to the Immoderate Left of his Cause in the capacity of an experimenter in Social Relations. And since the Immoderate Left contains plenty of women anxious to help earnest inquirers with large independent incomes to arrive at evaluations of essentials, Frankwell Midmore’s lot was far from contemptible.

At that hour Fate chose to play with him. A widowed aunt, widely separated by nature, and more widely by marriage, from all that Midmore’s mother had ever been or desired to be, died and left him possessions. Mrs. Midmore, having that summer embraced a creed which denied the existence of death, naturally could not stoop to burial; but Midmore had to leave London for the dank country at a season when Social Regeneration works best through long, cushioned conferences, two by two, after tea. There he faced the bracing ritual of the British funeral, and was wept at across the raw grave by an elderly coffin-shaped female with a long nose, who called him ‘Master Frankie’; and there he was congratulated behind an echoing top-hat by a man he mistook for a mute, who turned out to be his aunt’s lawyer. He wrote his mother next day, after a bright account of the funeral:

‘So far as I can understand, she has left me between four and five hundred a year. It all comes from Ther Land, as they call it down here. The unspeakable attorney, Sperrit, and a green-eyed daughter, who hums to herself as she tramps but is silent on all subjects except “huntin’,” insisted on taking me to see it. Ther Land is brown and green in alternate slabs like chocolate and pistachio cakes, speckled with occasional peasants who do not utter. In case it should not be wet enough there is a wet brook in the middle of it. Ther House is by the brook. I shall look into it later. If there should be any little memento of Jenny that you care for, let me know. Didn’t you tell me that mid-Victorian furniture is coming into the market again? Jenny’s old maid—it is called Rhoda Dolbie—tells me that Jenny promised it thirty pounds a year. The will does not. Hence, I suppose, the tears at the funeral. But that is close on ten per cent of the income. I fancy Jenny has destroyed all her private papers and records of her vie intime, if, indeed, life be possible in such a place. The Sperrit man told me that if I had means of my own I might come and live on Ther Land. I didn’t tell him how much I would pay not to! I cannot think it right that any human being should exercise mastery over others in the merciless fashion our tom-fool social system permits; so, as it is all mine, I intend to sell it whenever the unholy Sperrit can find a purchaser.’

And he went to Mr. Sperrit with the idea next day, just before returning to town.

‘Quite so,’ said the lawyer. ‘I see your point, of course. But the house itself is rather old-fashioned—hardly the type purchasers demand nowadays. There’s no park, of course, and the bulk of the land is let to a life-tenant, a Mr. Sidney. As long as he pays his rent, he can’t be turned out, and even if he didn’t’—Mr. Sperrit’s face relaxed a shade—‘you might have a difficulty.’

‘The property brings four hundred a year, I understand,’ said Midmore.

‘Well, hardly—ha-ardly. Deducting land and income tax, tithes, fire insurance, cost of collection and repairs of course., it returned two hundred and eighty-four pounds last year. The repairs are rather a large item—owing to the brook. I call it Liris—out of Horace, you know.’

Midmore looked at his watch impatiently.

‘I suppose you can find somebody to buy it?’ he repeated.

‘We will do our best, of course, if those are your instructions. Then, that is all except’—here Midmore half rose, but Mr. Sperrit’s little grey eyes held his large brown ones firmly—‘except about Rhoda Dolbie, Mrs. Werf’s maid. I may tell you that we did not draw up your aunt’s last will. She grew secretive towards the last—elderly people often do—and had it done in London. I expect her memory failed her, or she mislaid her notes. She used to put them in her spectacle-case. . . . My motor only takes eight minutes to get to the station, Mr. Midmore . . . but, as I was saying, whenever she made her will with us, Mrs. Werf always left Rhoda thirty pounds per annum. Charlie, the wills!’ A clerk with a baldish head and a long nose dealt documents on to the table like cards, and breathed heavily behind Midmore. ‘It’s in no sense a legal obligation, of course,’ said Mr. Sperrit. ‘Ah, that one is dated January the 11th, eighteen eighty-nine.’

Midmore looked at his watch again and found himself saying with no good grace: ‘Well, I suppose she’d better have it—for the present at any rate.’

He escaped with an uneasy feeling that two hundred and fifty-four pounds a year was not exactly four hundred, and that Charlie’s long nose annoyed him. Then he returned, first-class, to his own affairs.

Of the two, perhaps three, experiments in Social Relations which he had then in hand, one interested him acutely. It had run for some months and promised most variegated and interesting developments, on which he dwelt luxuriously all the way to town. When he reached his flat he was not well prepared for a twelve-page letter explaining, in the diction of the Immoderate Left which rubricates its I’s and illuminates its T’s, that the lady had realised greater attractions in another Soul. She re-stated, rather than pleaded, the gospel of the Immoderate Left as her justification, and ended in an impassioned demand for her right to express herself in and on her own life, through which, she pointed out, she could pass but once. She added that if, later, she should discover Midmore was ‘essentially complementary to her needs,’ she would tell him so. That Midmore had himself written much the same sort of epistle—barring the hint of return—to a woman of whom his needs for self-expression had caused him to weary three years before, did not assist him in the least. He expressed himself to the gas-fire in terms essential but not complimentary. Then he reflected on the detached criticism of his best friends and her best friends, male and female, with whom he and she and others had talked so openly while their gay adventure was in flower. He recalled, too—this must have been about midnight—her analysis from every angle, remote and most intimate, of the mate to whom she had been adjudged under the base convention which is styled marriage. Later, at that bad hour when the cattle wake for a little, he remembered her in other aspects and went down into the hell appointed; desolate, desiring, with no God to call upon. About eleven o’clock next morning Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite called upon him ‘for they had made appointment together’ to see how he took it; but the janitor told them that Job had gone—into the country, he believed.

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Midmore’s relief when he found his story was not written across his aching temples for Mr. Sperrit to read—the defeated lover, like the successful one, believes all earth privy to his soul—was put down by Mr. Sperrit to quite different causes. He led him into a morning-room. The rest of the house seemed to be full of people, singing to a loud piano idiotic songs about cows, and the hall smelt of damp cloaks.

‘It’s our evening to take the winter cantata,’ Mr. Sperrit explained. ‘It’s “High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire.” I hoped you’d come back. There are scores of little things to settle. As for the house, of course, it stands ready for you at any time. I couldn’t get Rhoda out of it—nor could Charlie for that matter. She’s the sister, isn’t she, of the nurse who brought you down here when you were four, she says, to recover from measles?’

‘Is she? Was I?’ said Midmore through the bad tastes in his mouth. ‘D’you suppose I could stay there the night?’

Thirty joyous young voices shouted appeal to some one to leave their ‘pipes of parsley—’ollow’ollow—’ollow!’ Mr. Sperrit had to raise his voice above the din.

‘Well, if I asked you to stay here, I should never hear the last of it from Rhoda. She’s a little cracked, of course, but the soul of devotion and capable of anything. Ne sit ancillae, you know.’

‘Thank you. Then I’ll go. I’ll walk.’ He stumbled out dazed and sick into the winter twilight, and sought the square house by the brook.

It was not a dignified entry, because when the door was unchained and Rhoda exclaimed, he took two valiant steps into the hall and then fainted—as men sometimes will after twenty-two hours of strong emotion and little food.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said when he could speak. He was lying at the foot of the stairs, his head on Rhoda’s lap.

‘Your ’ome is your castle, sir,’ was the reply in his hair. ‘I smelt it wasn’t drink. You lay on the sofa till I get your supper.’

She settled him in a drawing-room hung with yellow silk, heavy with the smell of dead leaves and oil lamp. Something murmured soothingly in the background and overcame the noises in his head. He thought he heard horses’ feet on wet gravel and a voice singing about ships and flocks and grass. It passed close to the shuttered baywindow.

But each will mourn his own, she saith,
And sweeter woman ne’er drew breath
Than my son’s wife, Elizabeth . . .
Cusha—cusha—cusha—calling.

The hoofs broke into a canter as Rhoda entered with the tray. ‘And then I’ll put you to bed,’ she said. ‘Sidney’s coming in the morning.’ Midmore asked no questions. He dragged his poor bruised soul to bed and would have pitied it all over again, but the food and warm sherry and water drugged him to instant sleep.

Rhoda’s voice wakened him, asking whether he would have ‘’ip, foot, or sitz,’ which he understood were the baths of the establishment. ‘Suppose you try all three,’ she suggested. ‘They’re all yours, you know, sir.’

He would have renewed his sorrows with the daylight, but her words struck him pleasantly. Everything his eyes opened upon was his very own to keep for ever. The carved four-post Chippendale bed, obviously worth hundreds; the wavy walnut William and Mary chairs—he had seen worse ones labelled twenty guineas apiece; the oval medallion mirror; the delicate eighteenth-century wire fireguard; the heavy brocaded curtains were his—all his. So, too, a great garden full of birds that faced him when he shaved; a mulberry tree, a sun-dial, and a dull, steel-coloured brook that murmured level with the edge of a lawn a hundred yards away. Peculiarly and privately his own was the smell of sausages and coffee that he sniffed at the head of the wide square landing, all set round with mysterious doors and Bartolozzi prints. He spent two hours after breakfast in exploring his new possessions. His heart leaped up at such things as sewing-machines, a rubber-tyred bath-chair in a tiled passage, a malachite-headed Malacca cane, boxes and boxes of unopened stationery, seal-rings, bunches of keys, and at the bottom of a steel-net reticule a little leather purse with seven pounds ten shillings in gold and eleven shillings in silver.

‘You used to play with that when my sister brought you down here after your measles,’ said Rhoda as he slipped the money into his pocket. ‘Now, this was your pore dear auntie’s businessroom.’ She opened a low door. ‘Oh, I forgot about Mr. Sidney! There he is.’ An enormous old man with rheumy red eyes that blinked under downy white eyebrows sat in an Empire chair, his cap in his hands. Rhoda withdrew sniffing. The man looked Midmore over in silence, then jerked a thumb towards the door. ‘I reckon she told you who I be,’ he began. ‘I’m the only farmer you’ve got. Nothin’ goes off my place ’thout it walks on its own feet. What about my pig-pound?’

‘Well, what about it?’ said Midmore.

‘That’s just what I be come about. The County Councils are getting more particular. Did ye know there was swine fever at Pashell’s? There be. It’ll ’ave to be in brick.’

‘Yes,’ said Midmore politely.

‘I’ve bin at your aunt that was, plenty times about it. I don’t say she wasn’t a just woman, but she didn’t read the lease same way I did. I be used to bein’ put upon, but there’s no doing any longer ’thout that pig-pound.’

‘When would you like it?’ Midmore asked. It seemed the easiest road to take.

‘Any time or other suits me, I reckon. He ain’t thrivin’ where he is, an’ I paid eighteen shillin’ for him.’ He crossed his hands on his stick and gave no further sign of life.

‘Is that all?’ Midmore stammered.

‘All now—excep’’—he glanced fretfully at the table beside him—‘excep’ my usuals. Where’s that Rhoda?’

Midmore rang the bell. Rhoda came in with a bottle and a glass. The old man helped himself to four stiff fingers, rose in one piece, and stumped out. At the door he cried ferociously: ‘Don’t suppose it’s any odds to you whether I’m drowned or not, but them floodgates want a wheel and winch, they do. I be too old for liftin’ ’em with the bar—my time o’ life.’

‘Good riddance if ’e was drowned,’ said Rhoda. ‘But don’t you mind him. He’s only amusin’ himself. Your pore dear auntie used to give ’im ’is usual—’tisn’t the whisky you drink—an’ send ’im about ’is business.’

‘I see. Now, is a pig-pound the same thing as a pig-sty?’

Rhoda nodded. ‘’E needs one, too, but ’e ain’t entitled to it. You look at ’is lease—third drawer on the left in that Bombay cab’net—an’ next time ’e comes you ask ’im to read it. That’ll choke ’im off, because ’e can’t!’

There was nothing in Midmore’s past to teach him the message and significance of a hand-written lease of the late ’eighties, but Rhoda interpreted.

‘It don’t mean anything reelly,’ was her cheerful conclusion, ‘excep’ you mustn’t get rid of him anyhow, an’ ’e can do what ’e likes always. Lucky for us ’e do farm; and if it wasn’t for ’is woman——’

‘Oh, there’s a Mrs. Sidney, is there?’

‘Lor, no! The Sidneys don’t marry. They keep. That’s his fourth since—to my knowledge. He was a takin’ man from the first.’

‘Any families?’

‘They’d he grown up by now if there was, wouldn’t they? But you can’t spend all your days considerin’ ’is interests. That’s what gave your pore aunt ’er indigestion. ’Ave you seen the gun-room?’

Midmore held strong views on the immorality of taking life for pleasure. But there was no denying that the late Colonel Werf’s seventy-guinea breechloaders were good at their filthy job. He loaded one, took it out and pointed—merely pointed—it at a cock-pheasant which rose out of a shrubbery behind the kitchen, and the flaming bird came down in a long slant on the lawn, stone dead. Rhoda from the scullery said it was a lovely shot, and told him lunch was ready.

He spent the afternoon gun in one hand, a map in the other, beating the bounds of his lands. They lay altogether in a shallow, uninteresting valley, flanked with woods and bisected by a brook. Up stream was his own house; down stream, less than half a mile, a low red farm-house squatted in an old orchard, beside what looked like small lockgates on the Thames. There was no doubt as to ownership. Mr. Sidney saw him while yet far off, and bellowed at him about pig-pounds and floodgates. These last were two great sliding shutters of weedy oak across the brook, which were prised up inch by inch with a crowbar along a notched strip of iron, and when Sidney opened them they at once let out half the water. Midmore watched it shrink between its aldered banks like some conjuring trick. This, too, was his very own.

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‘I see,’ he said. ‘How interesting! Now, what’s that bell for?’ he went on, pointing to an old ship’s bell in a rude belfry at the end of an outhouse. ‘Was that a chapel once?’ The red-eyed giant seemed to have difficulty in expressing himself for the moment and blinked savagely.

‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘My chapel. When you ’ear that bell ring you’ll ’ear something. Nobody but me ud put up with it—but I reckon it don’t make any odds to you.’ He slammed the gates down again, and the brook rose behind them with a suck and a grunt.

Midmore moved off, conscious that he might be safer with Rhoda to hold his conversational hand. As he passed the front of the farm-house a smooth fat woman, with neatly parted grey hair under a widow’s cap, curtsied to him deferentially through the window. By every teaching of the Immoderate Left she had a perfect right to express herself in any way she pleased, but the curtsey revolted him. And on his way home he was hailed from behind a hedge by a manifest idiot with no roof to his mouth, who hallooed and danced round him.

‘What did that beast want?’ he demanded of Rhoda at tea.

‘Jimmy? He only wanted to know if you ’ad any telegrams to send. ’E’ll go anywhere so long as ’tisn’t across running water. That gives ’im ’is seizures. Even talkin’ about it for fun like makes ’im shake.’

‘But why isn’t he where he can be properly looked after?’

‘What ’arm’s ’e doing? ’E’s a love-child, but ’is family can pay for ’im. If ’e was locked up ’e’d die all off at once, like a wild rabbit. Won’t you, please, look at the drive, sir?’

Midmore looked in the fading light. The neat gravel was pitted with large roundish holes, and there was a punch or two of the same sort on the lawn.

‘That’s the ’unt comin’ ’ome,’ Rhoda explained. ‘Your pore dear auntie always let ’em use our drive for a short cut after the Colonel died. The Colonel wouldn’t so much because he preserved; but your auntie was always an ’orsewoman till ’er sciatica.’

‘Isn’t there some one who can rake it over or—or something?’ said Midmore vaguely.

‘Oh yes. You’ll never see it in the morning, but—you was out when they came ’ome an’ Mister Fisher—he’s the Master—told me to tell you with ’is compliments that if you wasn’t preservin’ and cared to ’old to the old understandin’, ’is gravelpit is at your service same as before. ’E thought, perhaps, you mightn’t know, and it ’ad slipped my mind to tell you. It’s good gravel, Mister Fisher’s, and it binds beautiful on the drive. We ’ave to draw it, o’ course, from the pit, but——’

Midmore looked at her helplessly.

‘Rhoda,’ said he, ‘what am I supposed to do?’

‘Oh, let ’em come through,’ she replied. ‘You never know. You may want to ’unt yourself some day.’

That evening it rained and his misery returned on him, the worse for having been diverted. At last he was driven to paw over a few score books in a panelled room called the library, and realised with horror what the late Colonel Werf’s mind must have been in its prime. The volumes smelt of a dead world as strongly as they did of mildew. He opened and thrust them back, one after another, till crude coloured illustrations of men on horses held his eye. He began at random and read a little, moved into the drawing-room with the volume, and settled down by the fire still reading. It was a foul world into which he peeped for the first time—a heavy-eating, hard-drinking hell of horse-copers, swindlers, matchmaking mothers, economically dependent virgins selling themselves blushingly for cash and lands: Jews, tradesmen, and an ill-considered spawn of Dickens-and-horsedung characters (I give Midmore’s own criticism), but he read on, fascinated, and behold, from the pages leaped, as it were, the brother to the red-eyed man of the brook, bellowing at a landlord (here Midmore realised that he was that very animal) for new barns; and another man who, like himself again, objected to hoof-marks on gravel. Outrageous as thought and conception were, the stuff seemed to have the rudiments of observation. He dug out other volumes by the same author, till Rhoda came in with a silver candlestick.

‘Rhoda,’ said he, ‘did you ever hear about a character called James Pigg—and Batsey?’

‘Why, o’ course,’ said she. ‘The Colonel used to come into the kitchen in ’is dressin’-gown an’ read us all those Jorrockses.’

‘Oh, Lord!’ said Midmore, and went to bed with a book called Handley Cross under his arm, and a lonelier Columbus into a stranger world the wet-ringed moon never looked upon.

Here we omit much. But Midmore never denied that for the epicure in sensation the urgent needs of an ancient house, as interpreted by Rhoda pointing to daylight through attic-tiles held in place by moss, gives an edge to the pleasure of Social Research elsewhere. Equally he found that the reaction following prolonged research loses much of its grey terror if one knows one can at will bathe the soul in the society of plumbers (all the water-pipes had chronic appendicitis), village idiots (Jimmy had taken Midmore under his weak wing and camped daily at the drive-gates), and a giant with red eyelids whose every action is an unpredictable outrage.

Towards spring Midmore filled his house with a few friends of the Immoderate Left. It happened to be the day when, all things and Rhoda working together, a cartload of bricks, another of sand, and some bags of lime had been despatched to build Sidney his almost daily-demanded pigpound. Midmore took his friends across the flat fields with some idea of showing them Sidney as a type of ‘the peasantry.’ They hit the minute when Sidney, hoarse with rage, was ordering bricklayer, mate, carts and all off his premises. The visitors disposed themselves to listen.

‘You never give me no notice about changin’ the pig,’ Sidney shouted. The pig—at least eighteen inches long—reared on end in the old sty and smiled at the company.

‘But, my good man——’ Midmore opened.

‘I ain’t! For aught you know I be a dam’ sight worse than you be. You can’t come and be’ave arbit’ry with me. You are be’avin’ arbit’ry! All you men go clean away an’ don’t set foot on my land till I bid ye.’

‘But you asked’—Midmore felt his voice jump up—‘to have the pig-pound built.’

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‘I ‘Spose I did. That’s no reason you shouldn’t send me notice to change the pig. ’Comin’ down on me like this ’thout warnin’! That pig’s got to be got into the cowshed an’ all.’

‘Then open the door and let him run in,’ said Midmore.

‘Don’t you be’ave arbit’ry with me! Take all your dam’ men ’ome off my land. I won’t be treated arbit’ry.’

The carts moved off without a word, and Sidney went into the house and slammed the door.

‘Now, I hold that is enormously significant,’ said a visitor. ‘Here you have the logical outcome of centuries of feudal oppression—the frenzy of fear.’ The company looked at Midmore with grave pain.

‘But he did worry my life out about his pig-sty,’ was all Midmore found to say.

Others took up the parable and proved to him if he only held true to the gospels of the Immoderate Left the earth would soon be covered with jolly little’ pig-sties, built in the intervals of morris-dancing by ‘the peasant’ himself.

Midmore felt grateful when the door opened again and Mr. Sidney invited them all to retire to the road which, he pointed out, was public. As they turned the corner of the house, a smooth-faced woman in a widow’s cap curtsied to each of them through the window.

Instantly they drew pictures of that woman’s lot, deprived of all vehicle for self-expression—‘the set grey life and apathetic end,’ one quoted—and they discussed the tremendous significance of village theatricals. Even a month ago Midmore would have told them all that he knew and Rhoda had dropped about Sidney’s forms of self-expression. Now, for some strange reason, he was content to let the talk run on from village to metropolitan and world drama.

Rhoda advised him after the visitors left that ‘If he wanted to do that again’ he had better go up to town.

‘But we only sat on cushions on the floor,’ said her master.

‘They’re too old for romps,’ she retorted, ‘an’ it’s only the beginning of things. I’ve seen what I’ve seen. Besides, they talked and laughed in the passage going to their baths—such as took ’em.’

‘Don’t be a fool, Rhoda,’ said Midmore. No man—unless he has loved her—will casually dismiss a woman on whose lap he has laid his head.

‘Very good,’ she snorted, ‘but that cuts both ways. An’ now, you go down to Sidney’s this evenin’ and put him where he ought to be. He was in his right about you givin’ ’im notice about changin’ the pig, but he ’adn’t any right to turn it up before your company. No manners, no pig-pound. He’ll understand.’

Midmore did his best to make him. He found himself reviling the old man in speech and with a joy quite new in all his experience. He wound up—it was a plagiarism from a plumber—by telling Mr. Sidney that he looked like a turkey-cock, had the morals of a parish bull, and need never hope for a new pig-pound as long as he or Midmore lived.

‘Very good,’ said the giant. ‘I reckon you thought you ’ad something against me, and now you’ve come down an’ told it me like man to man. Quite right. I don’t bear malice. Now, you send along those bricks an’ sand, an’ I’ll make a do to build the pig-pound myself. If you look at my lease you’ll find out you’re bound to provide me materials for the repairs. Only—only I thought there’d be no ’arm in my askin’ you to do it throughout like.’

Midmore fairly gasped. ‘Then, why the devil did you turn my carts back when—when I sent them up here to do it throughout for you?’

Mr. Sidney sat down on the floodgates, his eyebrows knitted in thought.

‘I’ll tell you,’ he said slowly. ‘’Twas too dam’ like cheatin’ a suckin’ baby. My woman, she said so too.’

For a few seconds the teachings of the Immoderate Left, whose humour is all their own, wrestled with those of Mother Earth, who has her own humours. Then Midmore laughed till he could scarcely stand. In due time Mr. Sidney laughed too—crowing and wheezing crescendo till it broke from him in roars. They shook hands, and Midmore went home grateful that he had held his tongue among his companions.

When he reached his house he met three or four men and women on horseback, very muddy indeed, coming down the drive. Feeling hungry himself, he asked them if they were hungry. They said they were, and he bade them enter. Jimmy took their horses, who seemed to know him. Rhoda took their battered hats, led the women upstairs for hairpins, and presently fed them all with tea-cakes, poached eggs, anchovy toast, and drinks from a coromandel-wood liqueur case which Midmore had never known that he possessed.

‘And I will say,’ said Miss Connie Sperrit, her spurred foot on the fender and a smoking muffin in her whip hand, ‘Rhoda does one top-hole. She always did since I was eight.’

‘Seven, Miss, was when you began to ’unt,’ said Rhoda, setting down more buttered toast.

‘And so,’ the M.F.H. was saying to Midmore, ‘when he got to your brute Sidney’s land, we had to whip ’em off. It’s a regular Alsatia for ’em. They know it. Why’—he dropped his voice—‘I don’t want to say anything against Sidney as your tenant, of course, but I do believe the old scoundrel’s perfectly capable of putting down poison.’

‘Sidney’s capable of anything,’ said Midmore with immense feeling; but once again he held his tongue. They were a queer community; yet when they had stamped and jingled out to their horses again, the house felt hugely big and disconcerting.

This may be reckoned the conscious beginning of his double life. It ran in odd channels that summer—a riding school, for instance, near Hayes Common and a shooting ground near Wormwood Scrubs. A man who has been saddle-galled or shoulder-bruised for half the day is not at his London best of evenings; and when the bills for his amusements come in he curtails his expenses in other directions. So a cloud settled on Midmore’s name. His London world talked of a hardening of heart and a tightening of purse-strings which signified disloyalty to the Cause. One man, a confidant of the old expressive days, attacked him robustiously and demanded account of his soul’s progress. It was not furnished, for Midmore was calculating how much it would cost to repave stables so dilapidated that even the village idiot apologised for putting visitors’ horses into them. The man went away, and served up what he had heard of the pig-pound episode as a little newspaper sketch, calculated to

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annoy. Midmore read it with an eye as practical as a woman’s, and since most of his experiences had been among women, at once sought out a woman to whom he might tell his sorrow at the disloyalty of his own familiar friend. She was so sympathetic that he went on to confide how his bruised heart—she knew all about it—had found so-lace, with along O, in another quarter which he indicated rather carefully in case it might be betrayed to other loyal friends. As his hints pointed directly towards facile Hampstead, and as his urgent business was the purchase of a horse from a dealer, Beckenham way, he felt he had done good work. Later, when his friend, the scribe, talked to him alluringly of ‘secret gardens’ and those so-laces to which every man who follows the Wider Morality is entitled, Midmore lent him a five-pound note which he had got back on the price of a ninety-guinea bay gelding. So true it is, as he read in one of the late Colonel Werf’s books, that ‘the young man of the present day would sooner lie under an imputation against his morals than against his knowledge of horse-flesh.’

Midmore desired more than he desired anything else at that moment to ride and, above all, to jump on a ninety-guinea bay gelding with black points and a slovenly habit of hitting his fences. He did not wish many people except Mr. Sidney, who very kindly lent his soft meadow behind the floodgates, to be privy to the matter, which he rightly foresaw would take him to the autumn. So he told such friends as hinted at country week-end visits that he had practically let his newly inherited house. The rent, he said, was an object to him, for he had lately lost large sums through ill-considered benevolences. He would name no names, but they could guess. And they guessed loyally all round the circle of his acquaintance as they spread the news that explained so much.

There remained only one couple of his once intimate associates to pacify. They were deeply sympathetic and utterly loyal, of course, but as curious as any of the apes whose diet they had adopted. Midmore met them in a suburban train, coming up to town, not twenty minutes after he had come off two hours’ advanced tuition (one guinea an hour) over hurdles in a hall. He had, of course, changed his kit, but his too heavy bridle-hand shook a little among the newspapers. On the inspiration of the moment, which is your natural liar’s best hold, he told them that he was condemned to a rest-cure. He would lie in semi-darkness drinking milk, for weeks and weeks, cut off even from letters. He was astonished and delighted at the ease with which the usual lie confounds the unusual intellect. They swallowed it as swiftly as they recommended him to live on nuts and fruit; but he saw in the woman’s eyes the exact reason she would set forth for his retirement. After all, she had as much right to express herself as he purposed to take for himself; and Midmore believed strongly in the fullest equality of the sexes.

That retirement made one small ripple in the strenuous world. The lady who had written the twelve-page letter ten months before sent him another of eight pages, analysing all the motives that were leading her back to him—should she come?—now that he was ill and alone. Much might yet be retrieved, she said, out of the waste of jarring lives and piteous misunderstandings. It needed only a hand.

But Midmore needed two, next morning very early, for a devil’s diversion, among wet coppices, called ‘cubbing.’

‘You haven’t a bad seat,’ said Miss Sperrit through the morning-mists. ‘But you’re worrying him.’

‘He pulls so,’ Midmore grunted.

‘Let him alone, then. Look out for the branches,’ she shouted, as they whirled up a splashy ride. Cubs were plentiful. Most of the hounds attached themselves to a straight-necked youngster of education who scuttled out of the woods into the open fields below.

‘Hold on!’ some one shouted. ‘Turn ’em, Midmore. That’s your brute Sidney’s land. It’s all wire.’

‘Oh, Connie, stop!’ Mrs. Sperrit shrieked as her daughter charged at a boundary-hedge.

‘Wire be damned! I had it all out a fortnight ago. Come on!’ This was Midmore, buffeting into it a little lower down.

‘I knew that!’ Connie cried over her shoulder, and she flitted across the open pasture, humming to herself.

‘Oh, of course! If some people have private information, they can afford to thrust.’ This was a snuff-coloured habit into which Miss Sperrit had cannoned down the ride.

‘What! ’Midmore got Sidney to heel? You never did that, Sperrit.’ This was Mr. Fisher, M.F.H., enlarging the breach Midmore had made.

‘No, confound him!’ said the father testily.

‘Go on, sir! Injecto ter pulvere—you’ve kicked half the ditch into my eye already.’

They killed that cub a little short of the haven his mother had told him to make for—a two-acre Alsatia of a gorse-patch to which the M.F.H. had been denied access for the last fifteen seasons. He expressed his gratitude before all the field and Mr. Sidney, at Mr. Sidney’s farmhouse door.

‘And if there should be any poultry claims——’ he went on.

‘There won’t be,’ said Midmore. ‘It’s too like cheating a sucking child, isn’t it, Mr. Sidney?’

‘You’ve got me! ‘was all the reply. ’I be used to bein’ put upon, but you’ve got me, Mus’ Midmore.’

Midmore pointed to a new brick pig-pound built in strict disregard of the terms of the lifetenant’s lease. The gesture told the tale to the few who did not know, and they shouted.

Such pagan delights as these were followed by pagan sloth of evenings when men and women elsewhere are at their brightest. But Midmore preferred to lie out on a yellow silk couch, reading works of a debasing vulgarity; or, by invitation, to dine with the Sperrits and savages of their kidney. These did not expect flights of fancy or phrasing. They lied, except about horses, grudgingly and of necessity, not for art’s sake; and, men and women alike, they expressed themselves along their chosen lines with the serene indifference of the larger animals. Then Midmore would go home and identify them, one by one, out of the natural-history books by Mr. Surtees, on the table beside the sofa. At first they looked upon him coolly, but when the tale of the removed wire and the recaptured gorse had gone the rounds, they accepted him for a person willing to play their games. True, a faction suspended judgment for a while, because they shot, and hoped that Midmore would serve the glorious mammon of pheasant-raising rather than the unkempt god of fox-hunting. But after he had shown his choice, they did not ask by what intellectual process he had arrived at it. He hunted three, sometimes four, times a week, which necessitated not only one bay gelding £94:10s.), but a mannerly white-stockinged chestnut (£114), and a black mare, rather long in the back but with a mouth of silk (£150), who so evidently preferred to carry a lady that it would have been cruel to have baulked her. Besides, with that handling she could be sold at a profit. And besides, the hunt was a quiet, intimate, kindly little hunt, not anxious for strangers, of good report in the Field, the servant of one M.F.H., given to hospitality, riding well its own horses, and, with the exception of Midmore, not novices. But as Miss Sperrit observed, after the M.F.H. had said some things to him at a gate: ‘It is a pity you don’t know as much as your horse, but you will in time. It takes years and yee-ars. I’ve been at it for fifteen and I’m only just learning. But you’ve made a decent kick-off.’

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So he kicked off in wind and wet and mud, wondering quite sincerely why the bubbling ditches and sucking pastures held him from day to day, or what so-lace he could find on off days in chasing grooms and bricklayers round outhouses.

To make sure he up-rooted himself one weekend of heavy mid-winter rain, and re-entered his lost world in the character of Galahad fresh from a rest-cure. They all agreed, with an eye over his shoulder for the next comer, that he was a different man; but when they asked him for the symptoms of nervous strain, and led him all through their own, he realised he had lost much of his old skill in lying. His three months’ absence, too, had put him hopelessly behind the London field. The movements, the allusions, the slang of the game had changed. The couples had rearranged themselves or were re-crystallizing in fresh triangles, whereby he put his foot in it badly. Only one great soul (he who had written the account of the pig-pound episode) stood untouched by the vast flux of time, and Midmore lent him another fiver for his integrity. A woman took him, in the wet forenoon, to a pronouncement on the Oneness of Impulse in Humanity, which struck him as a polysyllabic résumé of Mr. Sidney’s domestic arrangements, plus a clarion call to ‘shock civilisation into common-sense.’

‘And you’ll come to tea with me to-morrow?’ she asked, after lunch, nibbling cashew nuts from a saucer. Midmore replied that there were great arrears of work to overtake when a man had been put away for so long.

‘But you’ve come back like a giant refreshed . . . . I hope that Daphne’—this was the lady of the twelve and the eight-page letter—‘will be with us too. She has misunderstood herself, like so many of us,’ the woman murmured, ‘but I think eventually . . .’ she flung out her thin little hands. ‘However, these are things that each lonely soul must adjust for itself.’

‘Indeed, yes,’ said Midmore with a deep sigh. The old tricks were sprouting in the old atmosphere like mushrooms in a dung-pit. He passed into an abrupt reverie, shook his head, as though stung by tumultuous memories, and departed without any ceremony of farewell to—catch a mid-afternoon express where a man meets associates who talk horse, and weather as it affects the horse, all the way down. What worried him most was that he had missed a day with the hounds.

He met Rhoda’s keen old eyes without flinching; and the drawing-room looked very comfortable that wet evening at tea. After all, his visit to town had not been wholly a failure. He had burned quite a bushel of letters at his flat. A flat—here he reached mechanically toward the worn volumes near the sofa—a flat was a consuming animal. As for Daphne . . . he opened at random on the words: ‘His lordship then did as desired and disclosed a tableau of considerable strength and variety.’ Midmore reflected: ‘And I used to think . . . But she wasn’t . . . We were all babblers and skirters together . . . I didn’t babble much—thank goodness—but I skirted.’ He turned the pages backward for more Sortes Surteesianae, and read ‘When at length they rose to go to bed it struck each man as he followed his neighbour upstairs, that the man before him walked very crookedly.’ He laughed aloud at the fire.

‘What about to-morrow?’ Rhoda asked, entering with garments over her shoulder. ‘It’s never stopped raining since you left. You’ll be plastered out of sight an’ all in five minutes. You’d better wear your next best, ’adn’t you? I’m afraid they’ve shrank. ’Adn’t you best try ’em on?’

‘Here?’ said Midmore.

‘’Suit yourself. I bathed you when you wasn’t larger than a leg o’ lamb,’ said the ex-ladies’maid.

‘Rhoda, one of these days I shall get a valet, and a married butler.’

‘There’s many a true word spoke in jest. But nobody’s huntin’ to-morrow.’

‘Why? Have they cancelled the meet?’

‘They say it only means slipping and over-reaching in the mud, and they all ’ad enough of that to-day. Charlie told me so just now.’

‘Oh!’ It seemed that the word of Mr. Sperrit’s confidential clerk had weight.

‘Charlie came down to help Mr. Sidney lift the gates,’ Rhoda continued.

‘The flood-gates? They are perfectly easy to handle now. I’ve put in a wheel and a winch.’

‘When the brook’s really up they must be took clean out on account of the rubbish blockin’ ’em. That’s why Charlie came down.’

Midmore grunted impatiently. ‘Everybody has talked to me about that brook ever since I came here. It’s never done anything yet.’

‘This ’as been a dry summer. If you care to look now, sir, I’ll get you a lantern.’

She paddled out with him into a large wet night. Half-way down the lawn her light was reflected on shallow brown water, pricked through with grass blades at the edges. Beyond that light, the brook was strangling and kicking among hedges and tree-trunks.

‘What on earth will happen to the big rosebed?’ was Midmore’s first word.

‘It generally ’as to be restocked after a flood. Ah!’ she raised her lantern. ‘There’s two garden-seats knockin’ against the sun-dial. Now, that won’t do the roses any good.’

‘This is too absurd. There ought to be some decently thought-out system—for—for dealing with this sort of thing.’ He peered into the rushing gloom. There seemed to be no end to the moisture and the racket. In town he had noticed nothing.

‘It can’t be ’elped,’ said Rhoda. ‘It’s just what it does do once in just so often. We’d better go back.’

All earth under foot was sliding in a thousand liquid noises towards the hoarse brook. Somebody wailed from the house: ‘’Fraid o’ the water! Come ’ere! ’Fraid o’ the water!’

‘That’s Jimmy. Wet always takes ’im that way,’ she explained. The idiot charged into them, shaking with terror.

‘Brave Jimmy! How brave of Jimmy! Come into the hall. What Jimmy got now?’ she crooned. It was a sodden note which ran: ‘Dear Rhoda—Mr. Lotten, with whom I rode home this afternoon, told me that if this wet keeps up, he’s afraid the fish-pond he built last year, where Coxen’s old mill-dam was, will go, as the dam did once before, he says. If it does it’s bound to come down the brook. It may be all right, but perhaps you had better lookout. C.S.’

‘If Coxen’s dam goes, that means . . . I’ll ’ave the drawing-room carpet up at once to be on the safe side. The claw-’ammer is in the libery.’

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‘Wait a minute. Sidney’s gates are out, you said?’

‘Both. He’ll need it if Coxen’s pond goes …. I’ve seen it once.’

‘I’ll just slip down and have a look at Sidney. Light the lantern again, please, Rhoda.’

‘You won’t get him to stir. He’s been there since he was born. But she don’t know anything. I’ll fetch your waterproof and some top-boots.’

‘’Fraid o’ the water! ’Fraid o’ the water!’ Jimmy sobbed, pressed against a corner of the hall, his hands to his eves.

‘All right, Jimmy. Jimmy can help play with the carpet,’ Rhoda answered, as Midmore went forth into the darkness and the roarings all round. He had never seen such an utterly unregulated state of affairs. There was another lantern reflected on the streaming drive.

‘Hi! Rhoda! Did you get my note? I came down to make sure. I thought, afterwards, Jimmy might funk the water!’

‘It’s me—Miss Sperrit,’ Midmore cried. ‘Yes, we got it, thanks.’

‘You’re back, then. Oh, good! . . . Is it bad down with you?’

‘I’m going to Sidney’s to have a look.’

‘You won’t get him out. ’Lucky I met Bob Lotten. I told him he hadn’t any business impounding water for his idiotic trout without rebuilding the dam.’

‘How far up is it? I’ve only been there once.

‘Not more than four miles as the water will come. He says he’s opened all the sluices.’

She had turned and fallen into step beside him, her hooded head bowed against the thinning rain. As usual she was humming to herself.

‘Why on earth did you come out in this weather?’ Midmore asked.

‘It was worse when you were in town. The rain’s taking off now. If it wasn’t for that pond, I wouldn’t worry so much. There’s Sidney’s bell. Come on!’ She broke into a run. A cracked bell was jangling feebly down the valley.

‘Keep on the road!’ Midmore shouted. The ditches were snorting bank-full on either side, and towards the brook-side the fields were afloat and beginning to move in the darkness.

‘Catch me going off it! There’s his light burning all right.’ She halted undistressed at a little rise. ‘But the flood’s in the orchard. Look!’ She swung her lantern to show a front rank of old apple-trees reflected in still, out-lying waters beyond the half-drowned hedge. They could hear above the thud-thud of the gorged flood-gates, shrieks in two keys as monotonous as a steam-organ.

‘The high one’s the pig.’ Miss Sperrit laughed.

‘All right! I’ll get her out. You stay where you are, and I’ll see you home afterwards.’

‘But the water’s only just over the road,’ she objected.

‘Never mind. Don’t you move. Promise?’

‘All right. You take my stick, then, and feel for holes in case anything’s washed out anywhere. This is a lark!’

Midmore took it, and stepped into the water that moved sluggishly as yet across the farm road which ran to Sidney’s front door from the raised and metalled public road. It was half way up to his knees when he knocked. As he looked back Miss Sperrit’s lantern seemed to float in midocean.

‘You can’t come in or the water’ll come with you. I’ve bunged up all the cracks,’ Mr. Sidney shouted from within. ‘Who be ye?’

‘Take me out! Take me out!’ the woman shrieked, and the pig from his sty behind the house urgently seconded the motion.

‘I’m Midmore! Coxen’s old mill-dam is likely to go, they say. Come out!’

‘I told ’em it would when they made a fishpond of it. ’Twasn’t ever puddled proper. But it’s a middlin’ wide valley. She’s got room to spread . . . . Keep still, or I’ll take and duck you in the cellar! . . . You go ’ome, Mus’ Midmore, an’ take the law o’ Mus’ Lotten soon’s you’ve changed your socks.’

‘Confound you, aren’t you coming out?’

‘To catch my death o’ cold? I’m all right where I be. I’ve seen it before. But you can take her. She’s no sort o’ use or sense . . . . Climb out through the window. Didn’t I tell you I’d plugged the door-cracks, you fool’s daughter?’ The parlour window opened, and the woman flung herself into Midmore’s arms, nearly knocking him down. Mr. Sidney leaned out of the window, pipe in mouth.

‘Take her ’ome,’ he said, and added oracularly

‘Two women in one house,
Two cats an’ one mouse,
Two dogs an’ one bone—
Which I will leave alone.

I’ve seen it before.’ Then he shut and fastened the window.

‘A trap! A trap! You had ought to have brought a trap for me. I’ll be drowned in this wet,’ the woman cried.

‘Hold up! You can’t be any wetter than you are. Come along!’ Midmore did not at all like the feel of the water over his boot-tops.

‘Hooray! Come along!’ Miss Sperrit’s lantern, not fifty yards away, waved cheerily.

The woman threshed towards it like a panic-stricken goose, fell on her knees, was jerked up again by Midmore, and pushed on till she collapsed at Miss Sperrit’s feet.

‘But you won’t get bronchitis if you go straight to Mr. Midmore’s house,’ said the unsympathetic maiden.

page 8

‘O Gawd! O Gawd! I wish our ’eavenly Father ’ud forgive me my sins an’ call me ’ome,’ the woman sobbed. ‘But I won’t go to ’is ’ouse! I won’t.’

‘All right, then. Stay here. Now, if we run,’ Miss Sperrit whispered to Midmore, ‘she’ll follow us. Not too fast!’

They set off at a considerate trot, and the woman lumbered behind them, bellowing, till they met a third lantern—Rhoda holding Jimmy’s hand. She had got the carpet up, she said, and was escorting Jimmy past the water that he dreaded.

‘That’s all right,’ Miss Sperrit pronounced.

‘Take Mrs. Sidney back with you, Rhoda, and put her to bed. I’ll take Jimmy with me. You aren’t afraid of the water now, are you, Jimmy?’

‘Not afraid of anything now.’ Jimmy reached for her hand. ‘But get away from the water quick.’

‘I’m coming with you,’ Midmore interrupted.

‘You most certainly are not. You’re drenched. She threw you twice. Go home and change. You may have to be out again all night. It’s only half-past seven now. I’m perfectly safe.’ She flung herself lightly over a stile, and hurried uphill by the footpath, out of reach of all but the boasts of the flood below.

Rhoda, dead silent, herded Mrs. Sidney to the house.

‘You’ll find your things laid out on the bed,’ she said to Midmore as he came up. ‘I’ll attend to—to this. She’s got nothing to cry for.’

Midmore raced into dry kit, and raced uphill to be rewarded by the sight of the lantern just turning into the Sperrits’ gate. He came back by way of Sidney’s farm, where he saw the light twinkling across three acres of shining water, for the rain had ceased and the clouds were stripping overhead, though the brook was noisier than ever. Now there was only that doubtful mill-pond to look after—that and his swirling world abandoned to himself alone.

‘We shall have to sit up for it,’ said Rhoda after dinner. And as the drawing-room commanded the best view of the rising flood, they watched it from there for a long time, while all the clocks of the house bore them company.

‘’Tisn’t the water, it’s the mud on the skirtingboard after it goes down that I mind,’ Rhoda whispered. ‘The last time Coxen’s mill broke, I remember it came up to the second—no, third—step o’ Mr. Sidney’s stairs.’

‘What did Sidney do about it?’

‘He made a notch on the step. ’E said it was a record. Just like ’im.’

‘It’s up to the drive now,’ said Midmore after another long wait. ‘And the rain stopped before eight, you know.’

‘Then Coxen’s dam ’as broke, and that’s the first of the flood-water.’ She stared out beside him. The water was rising in sudden pulses—an inch or two at a time, with great sweeps and lagoons and a sudden increase of the brook’s proper thunder.

‘You can’t stand all the time. Take a chair,’ Midmore said presently.

Rhoda looked back into the bare room. ‘The carpet bein’ up does make a difference. Thank you, sir, I will ’ave a set-down.’

‘’Right over the drive now,’ said Midmore. He opened the window and leaned out. ‘Is that wind up the valley, Rhoda?’

‘No, that’s it! But I’ve seen it before.’

There was not so much a roar as the purposeful drive of a tide across a jagged reef, which put down every other sound for twenty minutes. A wide sheet of water hurried up to the little terrace on which the house stood, pushed round either corner, rose again and stretched, as it were, yawning beneath the moonlight, joined other sheets waiting for them in unsuspected hollows, and lay out all in one. A puff of wind followed.

‘It’s right up to the wall now. I can touch it with my finger.’ Midmore bent over the window-sill.

‘I can ’ear it in the cellars,’ said Rhoda dolefully. ‘Well, we’ve done what we can! I think I’ll ’ave a look.’ She left the room and was absent half an hour or more, during which time he saw a full-grown tree hauling itself across the lawn by its naked roots. Then a hurdle knocked against the wall, caught on an iron foot-scraper just outside, and made a square-headed ripple. The cascade through the cellar-windows diminished.

‘It’s dropping,’ Rhoda cried, as she returned. ‘It’s only tricklin’ into my cellars now.’

‘Wait a minute. I believe—I believe I can see the scraper on the edge of the drive just showing!’

In another ten minutes the drive itself roughened and became gravel again, tilting all its water towards the shrubbery.

‘The pond’s gone past,’ Rhoda announced. ‘We shall only ’ave the common flood to contend with now.. You’d better go to bed.’

‘I ought to go down and have another look at Sidney before daylight.’

‘No need. You can see ’is light burnin’ from all the upstairs windows.’

‘By the way. I forgot about her. Where’ve you put her?’

‘In my bed.’ Rhoda’s tone was ice. ‘I wasn’t going to undo a room for that stuff.’

‘But it—it couldn’t be helped,’ said Midmore. ‘She was half drowned. One mustn’t be narrow-minded, Rhoda, even if her position isn’t quite—er—regular.’

‘Pfff! I wasn’t worryin’ about that.’ She leaned forward to the window. ‘There’s the edge of the lawn showin’ now. It falls as fast as it rises. Dearie’—the change of tone made Midmore jump—‘didn’t you know that I was ’is first? That’s what makes it so hard to bear.’ Midmore looked at the long lizard-like back and had no words.

She went on, still talking through the black window-pane:

page 9

‘Your pore dear auntie was very kind about it. She said she’d make all allowances for one, but no more. Never any more . . . . Then, you didn’t know ’oo Charlie was all this time?’

‘Your nephew, I always thought.’

‘Well, well,’ she spoke pityingly. ‘Everybody’s business being nobody’s business, I suppose no one thought to tell you. But Charlie made ’is own way for ’imself from the beginnin’! . . . But her upstairs, she never produced anything. Just an ’ousekeeper, as you might say. ’Turned over an’ went to sleep straight off. She ’ad the impudence to ask me for ’ot sherry-gruel.’

‘Did you give it to her,’ said Midmore.

‘Me? Your sherry? No!’

The memory of Sidney’s outrageous rhyme at the window, and Charlie’s long nose (he thought it looked interested at the time) as he passed the copies of Mrs. Werf’s last four wills, overcame Midmore without warning.

‘This damp is givin’ you a cold,’ said Rhoda, rising. ‘There you go again! Sneezin’s a sure sign of it. Better go to bed. You can’t do anythin’ excep’’—she stood rigid, with crossed arms—‘about me.’

‘Well. What about you?’ Midmore stuffed the handkerchief into his pocket.

‘Now you know about it, what are you goin’ to do—sir?’

She had the answer on her lean cheek before the sentence was finished.

‘Go and see if you can get us something to eat, Rhoda. And beer.’

‘I expec’ the larder ’ll be in a swim,’ she replied, ‘but old bottled stuff don’t take any harm from wet.’ She returned with a tray, all in order, and they ate and drank together, and took observations of the falling flood till dawn opened its bleared eyes on the wreck of what had been a fair garden. Midmore, cold and annoyed, found himself humming:

That flood strewed wrecks upon the grass,
That ebb swept out the flocks to sea.

There isn’t a rose left, Rhoda!

An awesome ebb and flow it was
To many more than mine and me.
But each will mourn his . . .

It’ll cost me a hundred.’

‘Now we know the worst,’ said Rhoda, ‘we can go to bed. I’ll lay on the kitchen sofa. His light’s burnin’ still.’

‘And she?’

‘Dirty old cat! You ought to ’ear ’er snore!’

At ten o’clock in the morning, after a maddening hour in his own garden on the edge of the retreating brook, Midmore went off to confront more damage at Sidney’s. The first thing that met him was the pig, snowy white, for the water had washed him out of his new sty, calling on high heaven for breakfast. The front door had been forced open, and the flood had registered its own height in a brown dado on the walls. Midmore chased the pig out and called up the stairs.

‘I be abed o’ course. Which step ’as she rose to?’ Sidney cried from above. ‘The fourth? Then it’s beat all records. Come up.’

‘Are you ill?’ Midmore asked as he entered the room. The red eyelids blinked cheerfully. Mr. Sidney, beneath a sumptuous patch-work quilt, was smoking.

‘Nah! I’m only thankin’ God I ain’t my own landlord. Take that cheer. What’s she done?’

page 10

‘It hasn’t gone down enough for me to make sure.’

‘Them floodgates o’ yourn ’ll be middlin’ far down the brook by now; an’ your rose-garden have gone after ’em. I saved my chickens, though. You’d better get Mus’ Sperrit to take the law o’ Lotten an’ ’is fish-pond.’

‘No, thanks. I’ve trouble enough without that.’

‘Hev ye?’ Mr. Sidney grinned. ‘How did ye make out with those two women o’ mine last night? I lay they fought.’

‘You infernal old scoundrel!’ Midmore laughed.

‘I be—an’ then again I bain’t,’ was the placid answer. ‘But, Rhoda, she wouldn’t ha’ left me last night. Fire or flood, she wouldn’t.’

‘Why didn’t you ever marry her?’ Midmore asked.

‘Waste of good money. She was willin’ without.’

There was a step on the gritty mud below, and a voice humming. Midmore rose quickly saying: ‘Well, I suppose you’re all right now.’

‘I be. I ain’t a landlord, nor I ain’t young—nor anxious. Oh, Mus’ Midmore! Would it make any odds about her thirty pounds comin’ regular if I married her? Charlie said maybe ’twould.’

‘Did he?’ Midmore turned at the door.

‘And what did Jimmy say about it?’

‘Jimmy?’ Mr. Sidney chuckled as the joke took him. ‘Oh, he’s none o’ mine. He’s Charlie’s look-out.’

Midmore slammed the door and ran downstairs

‘Well, this is a—sweet—mess,’ said Miss Sperrit in shortest skirts and heaviest riding-boots. ‘I had to come down and have a look at it. “The old mayor climbed the belfry tower.” ’Been up all night nursing your family?’

‘Nearly that! Isn’t it cheerful?’ He pointed through the door to the stairs with small twig-drift on the last three treads.

‘It’s a record, though,’ said she, and hummed to herself:

‘That flood strewed wrecks upon the grass,
That ebb swept out the flocks to sea.’

‘You’re always singing that, aren’t you?’ Midmore said suddenly as she passed into the parlour where slimy chairs had been stranded at all angles.

‘Am I? Now I come to think of it I believe I do. They say I always hum when I ride. Have you noticed it?’

‘Of course I have. I notice every——’

‘Oh,’ she went on hurriedly. ‘We had it for the village cantata last winter—“The Brides of Enderby.”’

‘No! “High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire.”’ For some reason Midmore spoke sharply.

‘Just like that.’ She pointed to the befouled walls. ‘I say. . . . Let’s get this furniture a little straight . . . . You know it too?’

‘Every word, since you sang it, of course.’

‘When?’

‘The first night I ever came down. You rode past the drawing-room window in the dark singing it—“And sweeter woman——”’

‘I thought the house was empty then. Your aunt always let us use that short cut. Ha—hadn’t we better get this out into the passage? It’ll all have to come out anyhow. You take the other side.’ They began to lift a heavyish table. Their words came jerkily between gasps and their faces were as white as—a newly washed and very hungry pig.

‘Look out!’ Midmore shouted. His legs were whirled from under him, as the table, grunting madly, careened and knocked the girl out of sight.

The wild boar of Asia could not have cut down a couple more scientifically, but this little pig lacked his ancestor’s nerve and fled shrieking over their bodies.

‘Are you hurt, darling?’ was Midmore’s first word, and ‘No—I’m only winded—dear,’ was Miss Sperrit’s, as he lifted her out of her corner, her hat over one eye and her right cheek a smear of mud.

They fed him a little later on some chicken-feed that they found in Sidney’s quiet barn, a pail of buttermilk out of the dairy, and a quantity of onions from a shelf in the back-kitchen.

‘Seed-onions, most likely,’ said Connie. ‘You’ll hear about this.’

‘What does it matter? They ought to have been gilded. We must buy him.’

‘And keep him as long as he lives,’ she agreed. ‘But I think I ought to go home now. You see, when I came out I didn’t expect . . . Did you?’

‘No! Yes . . . . It had to come. . . . But if any one had told me an hour ago! . . . Sidney’s unspeakable parlour—and the mud on the carpet.’

‘Oh, I say! Is my cheek clean now?’

‘Not quite. Lend me your hanky again a minute, darling . . . . What a purler you came!’

‘You can’t talk. ’Remember when your chin hit that table and you said “blast”! I was just going to laugh.’

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‘You didn’t laugh when I picked you up. You were going “oo-oo-oo” like a little owl.’

‘My dear child——’

‘Say that again!’

‘My dear child. (Do you really like it? I keep it for my best friends.) My dee-ar child, I thought I was going to be sick there and then. He knocked every ounce of wind out of me—the angel! But I must really go.’

They set off together, very careful not to join hands or take arms.

‘Not across the fields,’ said Midmore at the stile. ‘Come round by—by your own place.’

She flushed indignantly.

‘It will be yours in a little time,’ he went on, shaken with his own audacity.

‘Not so much of your little times, if you please!’ She shied like a colt across the road; then instantly, like a colt, her eyes lit with new curiosity as she came in sight of the drive-gates.

‘And not quite so much of your airs and graces, Madam,’ Midmore returned, ‘or I won’t let you use our drive as a short cut any more.’

‘Oh, I’ll be good. I’ll be good.’ Her voice changed suddenly. ‘I swear I’ll try to be good, dear. I’m not much of a thing at the best. What made you . . .’

‘I’m worse—worse! Miles and oceans worse. But what does it matter now?’

They halted beside the gate-pillars.

‘I see!’ she said, looking up the sodden carriage sweep to the front door porch where Rhoda was slapping a wet mat to and fro. ‘I see. . . . Now, I really must go home. No! Don’t you come. I must speak to Mother first all by myself.’

He watched her up the hill till she was out of sight.

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‘IT has nought to do with apes or devils,’ Sir Richard went on, in an undertone. ‘It concerns De Aquila, than whom there was never bolder nor craftier, nor more hardy knight born. And remember he was an old, old man at that time.’‘When?’ said Dan.

‘When we came back from sailing with Witta.’

‘What did you do with your gold?’ said Dan.

‘Have patience. Link by link is chain-mail made. I will tell all in its place. We bore the gold to Pevensey on horseback—three loads of it—and then up to the north chamber, above the Great Hall of Pevensey Castle, where De Aquila lay in winter. He sat on his bed like a little white falcon, turning his head swiftly from one to the other as we told our tale. Jehan the Crab, an old sour man-at-arms, guarded the stairway, but De Aquila bade him wait at the stair-foot, and let down both leather curtains over the door. It was Jehan whom De Aquila had sent to us with the horses, and only Jehan had loaded the gold. When our story was told, De Aquila gave us the news of England, for we were as men waked from a year-long sleep. The Red King was dead—slain (ye remember?) the day we set sail—and Henry, his younger brother, had made himself King of England over the head of Robert of Normandy. This was the very thing that the Red King had done to Robert when our Great William died. Then Robert of Normandy, mad, as De Aquila said, at twice missing of this kingdom, had sent an army against England, which army had been well beaten back to their ships at Portsmouth. A little earlier, and Witta’s ship would have rowed through them.

‘“And now,” said De Aquila, “half the great Barons of the north and west are out against the King between Salisbury and Shrewsbury, and half the other half wait to see which way the game shall go. They say Henry is overly English for their stomachs, because he bath married an English wife and she hath coaxed him to give back their old laws to our Saxons. (Better ride a horse on the bit he knows, I say.) But that is only a cloak to their falsehood.” He cracked his finger on the table where the wine was spilt, and thus he spoke:—

‘“William crammed us Norman barons full of good English acres after Santlache. I had my share too,” he said, and clapped Hugh on the shoulder; “but I warned him—I warned him before Odo rebelled—that he should have bidden the Barons give up their lands and lordships in Normandy if they would be English lords. Now they are all but princes both in England and Normandy—trencher-fed hounds, with a foot in one trough and both eyes on the other! Robert of Normandy has sent them word that if they do not fight for him in England he will sack and harry out their lands in Normandy. Therefore Clare has risen, FitzOsborne has risen, Montgomery has risen—whom our First William made an English earl. Even D’Arcy is out with his men, whose father I remember a little hedge-sparrow knight nearby Caen. If Henry wins, the Barons can still flee to Normandy, where Robert will welcome them. If Henry loses, Robert, he says, will give them more lands in England. Oh, a pest—a pest on Normandy, for she will be our England’s curse this many a long year!”

‘“Amen,” said Hugh. “But will the war come our ways, think you?”

‘“Not from the north,” said De Aquila. “But the sea is always open. If the Barons gain the upper hand Robert will send another army into England for sure, and this time I think he will land here—where his father, the Conqueror, landed. Ye have brought your pigs to a pretty market! Half England alight, and gold enough on the ground”—he stamped on the bars beneath the table—“to set every sword in Christendom fighting.”

‘“What is to do?” said Hugh. “I have no keep at Dallington; and if we buried it, whom could we trust?”

‘“Me,” said De Aquila. “Pevensey walls are strong. No man but Jehan, who is my dog, knows what is between them.” He drew a curtain by the shot-window and showed us the shaft of a well in the thickness of the wall.

‘“I made it for a drinking-well,” he said, “but we found salt water, and it rises and falls with the tide. Hark!” We heard the water whistle and blow at the bottom. “Will it serve?” said he.

‘“Needs must,” said Hugh. “Our lives are in thy hands.” So we lowered all the gold down except one small chest of it by De Aquila’s bed, which we kept as much for his delight in its weight and colour as for any of our needs.

‘In the morning, ere we rode to our Manors, he said: “I do not say farewell; because ye will return and bide here. Not for love nor for sorrow, but to be with the gold. Have a care,” he said, laughing, “lest I use it to make myself Pope. Trust me not, but return!”’

Sir Richard paused and smiled sadly.

‘In seven days, then, we returned from our Manors—from the Manors which had been ours.’

‘And were the children quite well?’ said Una.

‘My sons were young. Land and governance belong by right to young men.’ Sir Richard was talking to himself. ‘It would have broken their hearts if we had taken back our Manors. They made us great welcome, but we could see—Hugh and I could see—that our day was done. I was a cripple and he a one-armed man. No!’ He shook his head. ‘And therefore’—he raised his voice—‘we rode back to Pevensey.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Una, for the knight seemed very sorrowful.

‘Little maid, it all passed long ago. They were young; we were old. We let them rule the Manors. “Aha!” cried De Aquila from his shot-window, when we dismounted. “Back again to earth, old foxes?” but when we were in his chamber above the Hall he puts his arms about us and says, “Welcome, ghosts! Welcome, poor ghosts!” . . . Thus it fell out that we were rich beyond belief, and lonely. And lonely!’

‘What did you do?’ said Dan.

‘We watched for Robert of Normandy,’ said the knight. ‘De Aquila was like Witta. He suffered no idleness. In fair weather he would ride along between Bexlei on the one side, to Cuckmere on the other—sometimes with hawk, sometimes with hound (there are stout hares both on the Marsh and the Downland), but always with an eye to the sea, for fear of fleets from Normandy. In foul weather he would walk on the top of his tower, frowning against the rain—peering here and pointing there. It always vexed him to think how Witta’s ship had come and gone without his knowledge. When the wind ceased and ships anchored, to the wharf’s edge he would go and, leaning on his sword among the stinking fish, would call to the mariners for their news a from France. His other eye he kept landward for word of Henry’s war against the Barons.

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‘Many brought him news—jongleurs, harpers, pedlars, sutlers, priests, and the like; and, though he was secret enough in small things, yet, if their news misliked him, then, regarding neither time nor place nor people, would he curse our King Henry for a fool or a babe. I have heard him cry aloud by the fishing-boats: “If I were King of England I would do thus and thus”; and when I rode out to see that the warning-beacons were laid and dry, he hath often called to me from the shot-window: “Look to it, Richard, do not copy our blind King, but see with thine own eyes and feel with thine own hands.” I do not think he knew any sort of fear. And so we lived at Pevensey, in the little chamber above the Hall.

‘One foul night came word that a messenger of the King waited below. We were chilled after a long riding in the fog towards Bexlei, which is an easy place for ships to land. De Aquila sent word the man might either eat with us or wait till we had fed. Anon Jehan, at the stair-head, cried that he had called for horse, and was gone. “Pest on him!” said De Aquila. “I have more to do than to shiver in the Great Hall for every gadling the King sends. Left he no word?”

‘“None,” said Jehan, “except”—he had been with De Aquila at Santlache—“except he said that if an old dog could not learn new tricks it was time to sweep out the kennel.”

‘“Oho!” said De Aquila, rubbing his nose, “to whom did he say that?”

‘“To his beard, chiefly, but some to his horse’s flank as he was girthing up. I followed him out,” said Jehan the Crab.

‘“What was his shield-mark?”

‘“Gold horseshoes on black,” said the Crab.

‘“That is one of Fulke’s men,” said De Aquila.’

Puck broke in very gently, ‘Gold horseshoes on black is not the Fulkes’ shield. The Fulkes’ arms are——

The knight waved one hand statelily.

‘Thou knowest that evil mans true name,’ he replied, ‘but I have chosen to call him Fulke because I promised him I would not tell the story of his wickedness so that any man might guess it. I have changed all the names in my tale. His children’s children may be still alive.’

‘True—true,’ said Puck, smiling softly. ‘It is knightly to keep faith—even after a thousand years.

Sir Richard bowed a little and went on:—

‘“Gold horseshoes on black?” said De Aquila. “I had heard Fulke had joined the Barons, but if this is true our King must be of the upper hand. No matter, all Fulkes are faithless. Still, I would not have sent the man away empty.”

‘“He fed,” said Jehan. “Gilbert the Clerk fetched him meat and wine from the kitchens. He ate at Gilbert’s table.”

‘This Gilbert was a clerk from Battle Abbey, who kept the accounts of the Manor of Pevensey. He was tall and pale-coloured, and carried those new-fashioned beads for counting of prayers. They were large brown nuts or seeds, and hanging from his girdle with his penner and inkhorn they clashed when he walked. His place was in the great fireplace. There was his table of accounts, and there he lay o’nights. He feared the hounds in the Hall that came nosing after bones or to sleep on the warm ashes, and would slash at them with his beads—like a woman. When De Aquila sat in Hall to do justice, take fines, or grant lands, Gilbert would so write it in the Manor-roll. But it was none of his work to feed our guests, or to let them depart without his lord’s knowledge.

‘Said De Aquila, after Jehan was gone down the stair: “Hugh, hast thou ever told my Gilbert thou canst read Latin hand-of-write?”

‘“No,” said Hugh. “He is no friend to me, or to Odo my hound either.” “No matter,” said De Aquila. “Let him never know thou canst tell one letter from its fellow, and”—here he yerked us in the ribs with his scabbard—“watch him both of ye. There be devils in Africa, as I have heard, but by the Saints there be greater devils in Pevensey!” And that was all he would say.

‘It chanced, some small while afterwards, a Norman man-at-arms would wed a Saxon wench of the Manor, and Gilbert (we had watched him well since De Aquila spoke) doubted whether her folk were free or slave. Since De Aquila would give them a field of good land, if she were free, the matter came up at the justice in Great Hall before De Aquila. First the wench’s father spoke; then her mother; then all together, till the hall rang and the hounds bayed. De Aquila held up his hands. “Write her free,” he called to Gilbert by the fireplace. “A’ God’s Name write her free, before she deafens me! Yes, yes,” he said to the wench that was on her knees at him; “thou art Cerdic’s sister, and own cousin to the Lady of Mercia, if thou wilt be silent. In fifty years there will be neither Norman nor Saxon, but all English,” said he, “and these are the men that do our work!” He clapped the man-at-arms, that was Jehan’s nephew, on the shoulder, and kissed the wench, and fretted with his feet among the rushes to show it was finished. (The Great Hall is always bitter cold.) I stood at his side; Hugh was behind Gilbert in the fireplace making to play with wise rough Odo. He signed to De Aquila, who bade Gilbert measure the new field for the new couple. Out then runs our Gilbert between man and maid, his beads clashing at his waist, and the Hall being empty, we three sit by the fire.

‘Said Hugh, leaning down to the hearthstones, “I saw this stone move under Gilbert’s foot when Odo snuffed at it. Look!” De Aquila digged in the ashes with his sword; the stone tilted; beneath it lay a parchment folden, and the writing atop was: “Words spoken against the King by our Lord of Pevensey—the second part.”

‘Here was set out (Hugh read it us whispering) every jest De Aquila had made to us touching the King; every time he had called out to me from the shot-window, and every time he had said what he would do if he were King of England. Yes, day by day had his daily speech, which he never stinted, been set down by Gilbert, tricked out and twisted from its true meaning, yet withal so cunningly that none could deny who knew him that De Aquila had in some sort spoken those words. Ye see?’

Dan and Una nodded.

‘Yes,’ said Una, gravely. ‘It isn’t what you say so much. It’s what you mean when you say it. Like calling Dan a beast in fun. Only grownups don’t always understand.’

‘“He hath done this day by day before our very face?” said De Aquila.

‘“Nay, hour by hour,” said Hugh. “When De Aquila spoke even now, in the hall, of Saxons and Normans, I saw Gilbert write on a parchment, which he kept beside the Manor-roll, that De Aquila said soon there would be no Normans left in England if his men-at-arms did their work aright.”

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‘“Bones of the Saints!” said De Aquila. “What avail is honour or a sword against a pen? Where did Gilbert hide that writing? He shall eat it.”

‘In his breast when he ran out,” said Hugh. “Which made me look to see where he kept his finished stuff. When Odo scratched at this stone here, I saw his face change. So I was sure.”

‘“He is bold,” said De Aquila. “Do him justice. In his own fashion, my Gilbert is bold.”

‘“Overbold,” said Hugh. “Hearken here,” and he read: “Upon the Feast of St. Agatha, our Lord of Pevensey, lying in his upper chamber, being clothed in his second fur gown reversed with rabbit——”

‘“Pest on him! He is not my tire-woman!” said De Aquila, and Hugh and I laughed.

‘“Reversed with rabbit, seeing a fog over the marshes, did wake Sir Richard Dalyngridge, his drunken cup-mate” (here they laughed at me) and said, ‘Peer out, old fox, for God is on the Duke of Normandy’s side.’”

‘“So did I. It was a black fog. Robert could have landed ten thousand men, and we none the wiser. Does he tell how we were out all day riding the marsh, and how I near perished in a quicksand, and coughed like a sick ewe for ten days after?” cried De Aquila.

‘“No,” said Hugh. “But here is the prayer of Gilbert himself to his master Fulke.”

‘“Ah,” said De Aquila. “Well I knew it was Fulke. What is the price of my blood?”

‘“Gilbert prayeth that when our Lord of Pevensey is stripped of his lands on this evidence which Gilbert hath, with fear and pains, collected——”

‘“Fear and pains is a true word,” said De Aquila, and sucked in his cheeks. “But how excellent a weapon is a pen! I must learn it.”

‘“He prays that Fulke will advance him from his present service to that honour in the Church which Fulke promised him. And lest Fulke should forget, he has written below, ‘To be Sacristan of Battle.’”

‘At this De Aquila whistled. “A man who can plot against one lord can plot against another. When I am stripped of my lands Fulke will whip off my Gilbert’s foolish head. None the less Battle needs a new Sacristan. They tell me the Abbot Henry keeps no sort of rule there.”

‘“Let the Abbot wait,” said Hugh. “It is our heads and our lands that are in danger. This parchment is the second part of the tale. The first has gone to Fulke, and so to the King, who will hold us traitors.”

‘“Assuredly,” said De Aquila. “Fulke’s man took the first part that evening when Gilbert fed him, and our King is so beset by his brother and his Barons (small blame, too!) that he is mad with mistrust. Fulke has his ear, and pours poison into it. Presently the King gives him my land and yours. “This is old,” and he leaned back and yawned.

‘“And thou wilt surrender Pevensey without word or blow?” said Hugh. “We Saxons will fight your King then. I will go warn my nephew at Dallington. Give me a horse!”

‘“Give thee a toy and a rattle,” said De Aquila. “Put back the parchment, and rake over the ashes. If Fulke is given my Pevensey, which is England’s gate, what will he do with it? He is Norman at heart, and his heart is in Normandy, where he can kill peasants at his pleasure. He will open England’s gate to our sleepy Robert, as Odo and Mortain tried to do, and then there will be another landing and another Santlache. Therefore I cannot give up Pevensey.”

‘“Good,” said we two.

‘“Ah, but wait! If my King be made, on Gilbert’s evidence, to mistrust me, he will send his men against me here, and, while we fight, England’s gate is left unguarded. Who will be the first to come through thereby? Even Robert of Normandy. Therefore I cannot fight my King.” He nursed his sword—thus.

‘“This is saying and unsaying like a Norman,” said Hugh. “What of our Manors?”

‘“I do not think for myself,” said De Aquila, “nor for our King, nor for your lands. I think for England, for whom neither King nor Baron thinks. I am not Norman, Sir Richard, nor Saxon, Sir Hugh. English am I.”

‘“Saxon, Norman, or English,” said Hugh, “our lives are thine, however the game goes. When do we hang Gilbert?”

‘“Never,” said De Aquila. “Who knows, he may yet be Sacristan of Battle, for, to do him justice, he is a good writer. Dead men make dumb witnesses. Wait.”

‘“But the King may give Pevensey to Fulke. And our Manors go with it,” said I “Shall we tell our sons?”

‘“No. The King will not wake up a hornets’ nest in the south till he has smoked out the bees in the north. He may hold me a traitor; but at least he sees I am not fighting against him, and every day that I lie still is so much gain to him while he fights the Barons. If he were wise he would wait till that war were over before he made new enemies. But I think Fulke will play upon him to send for me, and if I do not obey the summons that will, to Henry’s mind, be proof of my treason. But mere talk, such as Gilbert sends, is no proof nowadays. We Barons follow the Church, and, like Anselm, we speak what we please. Let us go about our day’s dealings, and say naught to Gilbert.”

‘“Then we do nothing?” said Hugh.

‘“We wait,” said De Aquila. “I am old, but still I find that the most grievous work I know.”

‘And so we found it, but in the end De Aquila was right.

‘A little later in the year, armed men rode over the hill, the Golden Horseshoes flying behind the King’s banner. Said De Aquila, at the window of our chamber: “How did I tell you? Here comes Fulke himself to spy out his new lands which our King hath promised him if he can bring proof of my treason.”

‘“How dost thou know?” said Hugh.

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‘“Because that is what I would do if I were Fulke, but I should have brought more men. My roan horse to your old shoes,” said he, “Fulke brings me the King’s Summons to leave Pevensey and join the war.” He sucked in his cheeks and drummed on the edge of the shaft where the water sounded all hollow.

‘“Shall we go?” said I.

‘“Go! At this time of year? Stark madness,” said he. “Take me from Pevensey to fisk and flyte through fern and forest, and in three days Robert’s keels would be lying on Pevensey mud with ten thousand men! Who would stop them—Fulke?”

‘The horns blew without, and anon Fulke cried the King’s Summons at the great door that De Aquila with all men and horse should join the King’s camp at Salisbury.

‘“How did I tell you?” said De Aquila. “There are twenty Barons ’twixt here and Salisbury could give King Henry good land service, but he has been worked upon by Fulke to send south and call me—me!—off the Gate of England, when his enemies stand about to batter it in. See that Fulke’s men lie in the big south barn,” said he. “Give them drink, and when Fulke has eaten we will drink in my chamber. The Great Hall is too cold for old bones.”

‘As soon as he was off horse Fulke went to the chapel with Gilbert to give thanks for his safe coming, and when he had eaten—he was a fat man, and rolled his eyes greedily at our good roast Sussex wheatears—we led him to the little upper chamber, whither Gilbert had already gone with the Manor-roll. I remember when Fulke heard the tide blow and whistle in the shaft he leaped back, and his long down-turned stirrup-shoes caught in the rushes and he stumbled, so that Jehan behind him found it easy to knock his head against the wall.’

‘Did you know it was going to happen?’ said Dan.

‘Assuredly,’ said Sir Richard, with a sweet smile. ‘I put my foot on his sword and plucked away his dagger, but he knew not whether it was day or night for awhile. He lay rolling his eyes and bubbling with his mouth, and Jehan roped him like a calf. He was cased all in that newfangled armour which we call lizard-mail. Not rings like my hauberk here’—Sir Richard tapped his chest—‘but little pieces of dagger-proof steel overlapping on stout leather. We stripped it off (no need to spoil good harness by wetting it), and in the neck-piece De Aquila found the same folden piece of parchment which we had put back under the hearthstone.

‘At this Gilbert would have run out. I laid my hand on his shoulder. It sufficed. He fell to trembling and praying on his beads.

‘“Gilbert,” said De Aquila, “here be more notable sayings and doings of our Lord of Pevensey for thee to write down. Take penner and inkhorn, Gilbert. We cannot all be Sacristans of Battle.”

‘Said Fulke from the floor, “Ye have bound a King’s messenger. Pevensey shall burn for this.”

‘“Maybe. I have seen it besieged once,” said De Aquila, “but heart up, Fulke. I promise thee that thou shalt be hanged in the middle of the flames at the end of that siege, if I have to share my last loaf with thee; and that is more than Odo would have done when we starved out him and Mortain.”

‘Then Fulke sat up and looked long and cunningly at De Aquila.

‘“By the Saints,” said he, “why didst thou not say thou wast on the Duke’s side at the first?”

‘“Am I?” said De Aquila.

‘Fulke laughed and said, “No man who serves King Henry dare do this much to his messenger. When didst thou come over to the Duke? Let me up and we can smooth it out together.” And he smiled and becked and winked.

‘“Yes, we will smooth it out,” said De Aquila. He nodded to me, and Jehan and I heaved up Fulke—he was a heavy man—and lowered him into the shaft by a rope, not so as to stand on our gold, but dangling by his shoulders a little above. It was turn of ebb, and the water came to his knees. He said nothing, but shivered somewhat.

‘Then Jehan of a sudden beat down Gilbert’s wrist with his sheathed dagger. “Stop!” he said. “He swallows his beads.”

‘“Poison, belike,” said De Aquila. “It is good for men who know too much. I have carried it these thirty years. Give me!”

‘Then Gilbert wept and howled. De Aquila ran the beads through his fingers. The last one—I have said they were large nuts—opened in two halves on a pin, and there was a small folded parchment within. On it was written: “The Old Dog goes to Salisbury to be beaten. I have his Kennel. Come quickly.”

‘“This is worse than poison,” said De Aquila, very softly, and sucked in his cheeks. Then Gilbert grovelled in the rushes, and told us all he knew. The letter, as we guessed, was from Fulke to the Duke (and not the first that had passed between them); Fulke had given it to Gilbert in the chapel, and Gilbert thought to have taken it by morning to a certain fishingboat at the wharf, which trafficked between Pevensey and the French shore. Gilbert was a false fellow, but he found time between his quakings and shakings to swear that the master of the boat knew nothing of the matter.

‘“He hath called me shaved head,” said Gilbert, “and he hath thrown haddock-guts at me; but for all that, he is no traitor.”

‘“I will have no clerk of mine mishandled or miscalled,” said De Aquila. “That seaman shall be whipped at his own mast. Write me first a letter, and thou shalt bear it, with the order for the whipping, to-morrow to the boat.”

‘At this Gilbert would have kissed De Aquila’s hand—he had not hoped to live until the morning—and when he trembled less he wrote a letter as from Fulke to the Duke, saying that the Kennel, which signified Pevensey, was shut, and that the Old Dog (which was De Aquila) sat outside it, and, moreover, that all had been betrayed.

‘“Write to any man that all is betrayed,” said De Aquila, “and even the Pope himself would sleep uneasily. Eh, Jehan? If one told thee all was betrayed, what wouldst thou do?”

‘“I would run away,” said Jehan. “It might be true.”

‘“Well said,” quoth De Aquila. “Write, Gilbert, that Montgomery, the great Earl, hath made his peace with the King, and that little D’Arcy, whom I hate, hath been hanged by the heels. We will give Robert full measure to chew upon. Write also that Fulke himself is sick to death of a dropsy.”

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‘“Nay!s cried Fulke, hanging in the wellshaft. “Drown me out of hand, but do not make a jest of me.”

‘“Jest? I?” said De Aquila. “I am but fighting for life and lands with a pen, as thou hast shown me, Fulke.”

Then Fulke groaned, for he was cold, and, “Let me confess,” said he.

‘“Now, this is right neighbourly,” said De Aquila, leaning over the shaft. “Thou hast read my sayings and doings—or at least the first part of them—and thou art minded to repay me with thy own doings and sayings. Take penner and inkhorn, Gilbert. Here is work that will not irk thee.”

‘“Let my men go without hurt, and I will confess my treason against the King,” said Fulke.

‘“Now, why has he grown so tender of his men of a sudden?” said Hugh to me; for Fulke had no name for mercy to his men. Plunder he gave them, but pity, none.

‘“Té! Té!” said De Aquila. “Thy treason was all confessed long ago by Gilbert. It would be enough to hang Montgomery himself.”

‘“Nay; but spare my men,” said Fulke; and we heard him splash like a fish in a pond, for the tide was rising.

‘“All in good time,” said De Aquila. “The night is young; the wine is old; and we need only the merry tale. Begin the story of thy life since when thou wast a lad at Tours. Tell it nimbly!”

‘“Ye shame me to my soul,” said Fulke.

‘“Then I have done what neither King nor Duke could do,” said De Aquila. “But begin, and forget nothing.”

‘“Send thy man away,” said Fulke.

‘“That much can I do,” said De Aquila. “But, remember, I am like the Danes’ King; I cannot turn the tide.”

‘“How long will it rise?” said Fulke, and splashed anew.

‘“For three hours,” said De Aquila. “Time to tell all thy good deeds. Begin; and, Gilbert,—I have heard thou art somewhat careless—do not twist his words from their true meaning.”

‘So—fear of death in the dark being upon him—Fulke began, and Gilbert, not knowing what his fate might be, wrote it word by word. I have heard many tales, but never heard I aught to match the tale of Fulke, his black life, as Fulke told it hollowly, hanging in the shaft.’

‘Was it bad?’ said Dan, awestruck.

‘Beyond belief,’ Sir Richard answered. ‘None the less, there was that in it which forced even Gilbert to laugh. We three laughed till we ached. At one place his teeth so chattered that we could not well hear, and we reached him down a cup of wine. Then he warmed to it, and smoothly set out all his shifts, malices, and treacheries, his extreme boldnesses (he was desperate bold); his retreats, shufflings, and counterfeitings (he was also inconceivably a coward); his lack of gear and honour; his despair at their loss; his remedies, and well-coloured contrivances. Yes, he waved the filthy rags of his life before us, as though they had been some proud banner. When he ceased, we saw by torches that the tide stood at the corners of his mouth, and he breathed strongly through his nose.

‘We had him out, and rubbed him; we wrapped him in a cloak, and gave him wine, and we leaned and looked upon him, the while he drank. He was shivering, but shameless.

‘Of a sudden we heard Jehan at the stairway wake, but a boy pushed past him, and stood before us the hall rushes in his hair, all slubbered with sleep. “My father! My father! I dreamed of treachery,” he cried, and babbled thickly.

‘“There is no treachery here,” said Fulke. “Go,” and the boy turned, even then not fully awake, and Jehan led him by the hand to the Great Hall.

‘“Thy only son!” said De Aquila. “Why didst thou bring the child here?”

‘“He is my heir. I dared not trust him to my brother,” said Fulke, and now he was ashamed. De Aquila said nothing, but sat weighing a wine cup in his two hands—thus. Anon, Fulke touched him on the knee.

‘“Let the boy escape to Normandy,” said he, “and do with me at thy pleasure. Yea, hang me to-morrow, with my letter to Robert round my neck, but let the boy go.”

‘“Be still,” said De Aquila. “I think for England.”

‘So we waited what our Lord of Pevensey should devise; and the sweat ran down Fulke’s forehead.

‘At last said De Aquila: “I am too old to judge, or to trust any man. I do not covet thy lands, as thou hast coveted mine; and whether thou art any better or any worse than any other black Angevin thief, it is for thy King to find out. Therefore, go back to thy King, Fulke.”

‘“And thou wilt say nothing of what has passed?” said Fulke.

‘“Why should I? Thy son will stay with me. If the King calls me again to leave Pevensey, which I must guard against England’s enemies; if the King sends his men against me for a traitor; or if I hear that the King in his bed thinks any evil of me or my two knights, thy son will be hanged from out this window, Fulke.”’

‘But it hadn’t anything to do with his son,’ cried Una, startled.

‘How could we have hanged Fulke?’ said Sir Richard. ‘We needed him to make our peace with the King. He would have betrayed half England for the boy’s sake. Of that we were sure.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Una. ‘But I think it was simply awful.’

‘So did not Fulke. He was well pleased.’

page 6

‘What? Because his son was going to be killed?’

‘Nay. Because De Aquila had shown him how he might save the boy’s life and his own lands and honours. “I will do it,” he said. “I swear I will do it. I will tell the King thou art no traitor, but the most excellent, valiant, and perfect of us all. Yes, I will save thee.”

‘De Aquila looked still into the bottom of the cup, rolling the wine-dregs to and fro.

‘“Ay,” he said. “If I had a son, I would, I think, save him. But do not by any means tell me how thou wilt go about it.”

‘“Nay, nay,” said Fulke, nodding his bald head wisely. “That is my secret. But rest at ease, De Aquila, no hair of thy head nor rood of thy land shall be forfeited,” and he smiled like one planning great good deeds.

‘“And henceforward,” said De Aquila, “I counsel thee to serve one master—not two.”

‘“What?” said Fulke. “Can I work no more honest trading between the two sides these troublous times?”

‘“Serve Robert or the King—England or Normandy,” said De Aquila. “I care not which it is, but make thy choice here and now.”

‘“The King, then,” said Fulke, “for I see he is better served than Robert. Shall I swear it?”

‘“No need,” said De Aquila, and he laid his hand on the parchments which Gilbert had written. “It shall be some part of my Gilbert’s penance to copy out the savoury tale of thy life, till we have made ten, twenty, an hundred, maybe, copies. How many cattle, think you, would the Bishop of Tours give for that tale? Or thy brother? Or the Monks of Blois? Minstrels will turn it into songs which thy own Saxon serfs shall sing behind their plough-stilts, and men-at-arms riding through thy Norman towns. From here to Rome, Fulke, men will make very merry over that tale, and how Fulke told it, hanging in a well, like a drowned puppy. This shall be thy punishment, if ever I find thee double-dealing with thy King any more. Meantime, the parchments stay here with thy son. Him I will return to thee when thou hast made my peace with the King. The parchments never.”

Fulke hid his face and groaned.

‘“Bones of the Saints!” said De Aquila, laughing. “The pen cuts deep. I could never have fetched that grunt out of thee with any sword.”

‘“But so long as I do not anger thee, my tale will be secret?” said Fulke.

‘“Just so long. Does that comfort thee, Fulke?” said De Aquila.

‘“What other comfort have ye left me?” he said, and of a sudden he wept hopelessly like a child, dropping his face on his knees.’

‘Poor Fulke,’ said Una.

‘I pitied him also,’ said Sir Richard.

‘“After the spur, corn,” said De Aquila, and he threw Fulke three wedges of gold that he had taken from our little chest by the bedplace.

‘“If I had known this,” said Fulke, catching his breath, “I would never have lifted hand against Pevensey. Only lack of this yellow stuff has made me so unlucky in my dealings.”

‘It was dawn then, and they stirred in the Great Hall below. We sent down Fulke’s mail to be scoured, and when he rode away at noon under his own and the King’s banner very splendid and stately did he show. He smoothed his long beard, and called his son to his stirrup and kissed him. De Aquila rode with him as far as the New Mill landward. We thought the night had been all a dream.’

‘But did he make it right with the King?’ Dan asked. ‘About your not being traitors, I mean?’

Sir Richard smiled. ‘The King sent no second summons to Pevensey, nor did he ask why De Aquila had not obeyed the first. Yes, that was Fulke’s work. I know not how he did it, but it was well and swiftly done.’

‘Then you didn’t do anything to his son?’ said Una.

‘The boy? Oh, he was an imp. He turned the keep doors out of dortoirs while we had him. He sang foul songs, learned in the Barons’ camps—poor fool; he set the hounds fighting in hall; he lit the rushes to drive out, as he said, the fleas; he drew his dagger on Jehan, who threw him down the stairway for it; and he rode his horse through crops and among sheep. But when we had beaten him, and showed him wolf and deer, he followed us old men like a young, eager hound, and called us “uncle.” His father came the summer’s end to take him away, but the boy had no lust to go, because of the otter-hunting, and he stayed on till the fox-hunting. I gave him a bittern’s claw to bring him good luck at shooting. An imp, if ever there was!’

‘And what happened to Gilbert?’ said Dan.

‘Not even a whipping. De Aquila said he would sooner a clerk, however false, that knew the Manor-roll than a fool, however true, that must be taught his work afresh. Moreover, after that night I think Gilbert loved as much as he feared De Aquila. At least he would not leave us—not even when Vivian, the King’s Clerk, would have made him Sacristan of Battle Abbey. A false fellow, but, in his fashion, bold.’

‘Did Robert ever land in Pevensey after all?’ Dan went on.

‘We guarded the coast too well while Henry was fighting his Barons; and three or four years later, when England had peace, Henry crossed to Normandy and showed his brother some work at Tenchebrai that cured Robert of fighting. Many of Henry’s men sailed from Pevensey to that war. Fulke came, I remember, and we all four lay in the little chamber once again, and drank together. De Aquila was right. One should not judge men. Fulke was merry. Yes, always merry—with a catch in his breath.’

‘And what did you do afterwards?’ said Una. ‘We talked together of times past. That is all men can do when they grow old, little maid.’

The bell for tea rang faintly across the meadows. Dan lay in the bows of the Golden Hind; Una in the stern, the book of verses open in her lap, was reading from ‘The Slave’s Dream’:—

‘Again, in the mist and shadow of sleep,
He saw his native land.’

‘I don’t know when you began that,’ said Dan, sleepily.

On the middle thwart of the boat, beside Una’s sun-bonnet, lay an Oak leaf, an Ash leaf, and a Thorn leaf, that must have dropped down from the trees above; and the brook giggled as though it had just seen some joke.