Chapter VIII: Part 8

Elijah, however, came to the top of the steps after she had descended, and looked into the yard where she was. Mehalah at once desisted from lavishing her tenderness on the animal.

Abraham stood sulkily by.

'I've had a long bout,' he said.

'I dare say you have, Abraham,' she answered.

'I want something to eat and drink, I haven't bit nought since morning. There's nothing but ashes on the Ray now, and they are red-hot. You don't expect me to fill my belly on them.'

Mehalah put her hand to her mouth and checked her tongue, as she was about to tell him to go indoors and get some supper. She had now nothing to give the old man. She lived on the bounty of Rebow.

'I cannot go without my wittles,' persisted Abraham. 'Now I want to know where my wittles are to come from. I paid fourpence at the Rose for some bread and cheese, and you owes me that.'

'There is the money,' said Mehalah producing the coin.

'Ah! that is wery well. But where am I to get my wittles now? Am I your servant or ain't I? If I am,--where's my wittles?'

'Come here, Abraham,' said Elijah, from the kitchen door. 'There is bread and cold potatoes and meat here. You shall have your supper, and you can sleep in the loft.'

'Look here, master,' pursued the sullen old man, 'I want to know further where I'm to look for my wages.'

'To me,' said Rebow. 'I take you on.'

'Where am I to work?'

'Here, or on the Ray, looking after the sheep.'

'The sheep are not yours, they are hers,'--pointing to Mehalah with his thumb.

'The Ray and Red Hall are one concern,' answered Rebow. 'You look to me as your master, and to her as your mistress;' then he entered and slammed the door.

Abraham shrugged his shoulders. He leered at Mehalah, who had put her hands to her forehead.

'When are you going to church? Eh, mistress? I thought it was coming to this. But I don't care so long as I gets my wittles and wage.'

Abraham went slowly into the cattlehouse with the cow. Mehalah remained rooted to the spot, pressing her brow.

This was more than she could endure. She ran up the steps, she would speak to Rebow while her heart was full. She dashed through the kitchen and into the hall. He was not there. As she ran on, she tripped and almost fell; and recovered herself with horror. She had almost precipitated herself through the trap into the vault beneath. The door was thrown back, her foot had caught this. Faugh! an odour rose from the cellar as from the lair of a wild beast. She looked in, there was the maniac racing up and down in the den fastened by his chain, jabbering and uttering incoherent cries. He was almost naked, covered with filthy rags, and his hair hung over his face so that she could distinguish no features by the dim light that strayed down from the trap, and from the horn lanthorn that Elijah had placed on the steps. Rebow had a pitchfork, and he was tossing fresh straw to his brother, and raking out the sodden and crushed litter of the wretched man.

Mehalah could not bear the sight; she withdrew. She needed a little while by herself to consider what was best to be done, to think of what had taken place. She opened the front door, and descended by the long flight of steps over the arch. Then she saw that a shutter covered the circular window that in summer lighted the den of the maniac. This was now closed to shut out the cold of winter. There was a door. As she looked, Rebow opened it from within, and appeared, raking out the litter and the gnawed bones, the relics of his brother's repasts. He did not notice her, or he pretended not to do so, and she shrank back. Her wish to speak with him had gone from her. She was not equal to an interview till she had been alone for a while, and had gathered up her strength. An interview with him must be a contest. It was clear to her that he was resolved that she should stay at Red Hall. She was equally determined not to do so. But how to get away and remove her mother was more than she could discover.

She left the house and the garden round it, and walked through the meadow till she reached the sea-wall. She ascended that, and went along it to the spot where the Red Hall marsh divided the Tollesbury Fleet from the Virley and Salcott Creeks.

Then she threw herself beneath the windmill, the mill that pumped the water out of the dykes, and worked day and night whenever there was wind to move the sails. The mill was now at work. The wings rushed round, and the pump painfully creaked, and after every stroke sent a dash of water into the sea over the wall.

Mehalah hoped that here, away from her mother and Rebow, and the sights and sounds of Red Hall, she might be able to think. But it was not so. Her numbed head was unable to form any plans. She looked out at sea, it was leaden grey, ruffled with angry waves, and the mews screamed and dipped in them. The sky overhead was overcast. The Bradwell shore looked grey and bleak and desolate; there was not a sail in the offing. The fancy took her to sit and wait, and if she saw a ship pass to take it as a good omen, a promise of escape from her present perplexity.

She sat and waited. The sea darkened to a more sullen tint. The mews were no longer visible. Mersea with its trees and church tower disappeared. Bradwell coast loomed black as pitch against the last lingering light of day. Not a sail appeared.

Far away, out to sea, as the darkness deepened, gleamed a light. It gleamed a moment, then grew dim and disappeared in the blackness. A minute, and then it waxed, but waned again, and once more all was night. So on, in wearisome iteration. What she saw was the revolving Swin light fifteen miles from land, a floating Pharos. She thought of Elijah's words, she thought of the horrible iterations in the barrow on the hill, the embracing and fighting, embracing and fighting, loving and hating, loving and hating, till one should conquer of the twin but rival powers.

*CHAPTER XVII.*

*FACE TO FACE.*

Mehalah returned slowly to the house, her spirits oppressed with gloom. It was night without and within, before her face, and in her soul. The wind sighed and sobbed among the rushes and over the fen, in a disconsolate, despairing manner, and the breath of God within--the living soul--sighed and sobbed like His breath that blew over the wintry marsh without. Not a star looked down from His heaven above, and none looked up from His heaven below in the little confines of a human heart. Mehalah could scarce see her way in the fen, among the dykes and drains; she was as unable to find a path in the level of her life.

She reached Red Hall at last, and mounted the front stairs to the principal door. She would see Elijah now. It were better to speak with him and come to some understanding at once. It was intolerable to allow the present position to remain unexplained, and the future undetermined. She hesitated at the door. It was not without a struggle that she could open it and go in and face the man whose hospitality she was receiving and yet whom she abhorred. She knew that she was greatly indebted to him. He had saved her mother's life, he had secured from destruction a large amount of their property; yet she could not thank him. She resented his intrusion into their affairs, when anyone else would have been unobjectionable. She disliked him all the more because she knew she was heavily in his debt; it galled her almost past endurance to feel that she and her mother were then subsisting on his bounty.

'Come in, Glory!' shouted Elijah from within, as she halted at the door.

She entered. He was seated by the fire with his pipe in his hand; he had heard her step on the stairs, and had paused in his smoking, and had waited in a listening, expectant attitude.

He signed her to take a chair--her mother's chair--on the other side of the hearth. She paid no attention to the sign, but stood in the middle of the room, and unconsciously covered her eyes with her hands. Her pulses quivered in her temples. Her heart grew cold, and a faintness came over her.

'The light is not too strong to dazzle you,' said Elijah, 'put your hands down, I want to see your face.'

She made an effort to retain them where they were, but could not; they fell.

'Sit down.'

She shook her head.

'Sit down.'

'I want to speak with you, Elijah, for a moment. I must speak with you.' Her heart palpitated, her breast heaved. She could only utter short sentences.

'Sit down there!' he beckoned with the stalk of his pipe.

She still refused to obey. Her power was slipping from her. The exhaustion after the excitement she had gone through had affected even her stout will. She resolved to oppose him in this trifling matter, but knew that her resolution was infirm. She clung desperately to what remained to her of power.

'I will not listen to a word you say unless you sit down.'

He paused, and looked at her; then he said, 'Go to your mother!' and continued his smoking, with face averted.

'Elijah, I know what you have done, and are doing now for my mother.'

He sprang from his seat, and strode up and down the room, turning and glowering at her, sucking at his pipe, and making it red and angry like his eyes in the firelight. He walked fast and noisily on the brick floor, with his high shoulders up and his head down. She watched him with painful apprehension; he reminded her of the mad brother pacing in the vault below. She could not speak to him whilst he persisted in this irritating, restless tramp. There was no help for it. She dropped into her mother's leather chair.

'There!' said he, and he flung a ring with some keys attached to it, into her lap. 'Take them. They are yours now. The keys of everything in the house, except of----' he jerked his pipe towards the den beneath.

'I cannot take them,' she said, and let them slide off her lap upon the floor.

'Pick them up!' he ordered.

'No,' she said firmly, 'I will not. Elijah, we must come to an understanding with each other.'

'We already understand each other,' he said, pausing in his walk. 'We always did. I can read your heart. I know everything that passes there, just as if it was written in red letters on a page. I understand you, and there's nobody else in the world that can. I was made to read you. I heard a Baptist preacher say one day that God wrote a book, and then He created mankind to read it. You are a book, and God made me to read you. I can do it. That wants no scholarship, it comes by nature to me. Others can't. They might puzzle and rack their heads, they'd make nothing of you. But you are clear as light of day to me. You understand me?'

'I do not.'

'You _will_ not. You set your obstinate, wicked mind against understanding me. I heard a preacher once say--I went to chapel along of my mother when I was a boy; I goes nowhere now but to the Ray after you--What is God? It is that as makes a man, and keeps him alive, and gives him hopes of happiness, or plunges him in hell. Every man has his own God; for there is something different makes and mars each man. What do I want but you, Glory? It is you that can make and keep me alive, and you are my happiness or my hell.'

'But,' said he standing still again, and flourishing his hand and pipe, 'as I was saying, I heard a preacher say once, that God made every man of a lump of clay and a drop of spittle, and that He made always two at a time. He couldn't help it. He has two hands and ain't right and left handed as we, but works with both, and then He casts about the men He has made, anywhere. Hasn't He made all things double? Have not you two hands and two feet and two eyes? Is there not a sun and a moon, are there not two poles to the earth, and two sexes, and day and night, and winter and summer? and--' he went up before Mehalah, and with a burst of passion--'and you and me?' Then he recommenced his pacing, but slower, and continued, 'Wherever those two are that God made with His two hands, they must come together. It don't matter where they be, if one is in Mersea, and t'other is in Asia, or Africa, or China, or America, or London, it don't matter, soon or late, they must come together, and when they come together then they are in heaven. Now if a man takes some other left-handed figure--it was the left hand made woman--then it don't matter, he can't go against his destiny. He has taken the wrong woman, and he is not happy. He knows it all along, and he feels restless and craving in his soul, and if he does not find the proper one in this world when he goes out of it, he waits and wanders, till the proper one dies and begins to hunt about for her right-hand man. That is what makes ghosts to ramble. Ghosts are those that have married the wrong ones, wandering and waiting, and seeking for their right mates. Do you hear the piping and the crying at the windows of a winter night? That is the ghosts looking in and sobbing because they are out in the cold shivering till they meet their mates. But when they meet, then that is heaven. There's a heaven for everyone, but that is only once for all when the two doubles find each other, and if that be not in this life, why it is after. And there is a hell too, but that isn't reserved for all, and it does not last for ever and ever, but is only when one has taken the wrong mate and has found it out.' He stopped. He had become very earnest and excited by what he had said. He came again over against Mehalah. 'Glory!' he continued, 'don't you see how the moon goes after the sun and cannot come to him? She is his proper mate and double, and the sun don't know, and won't have it, and so day and night, and winter and summer, and waxing and waning goes on and on. But that won't go on for ever. The sun will grow sad at heart, and wane for want of the moon some day, and then there will be a great flare and blaze and glory, and they will be in heaven. And now the two poles of the earth are apart, and so long as they keep apart, the world rolls on in misery and pain, and that is what makes earthquakes, and volcanoes, and great plagues--the poles are apart which ought to be together. But they are drawing gradually nearer each other. The seasons now are not what they used to be, and that is it. The poles are not where they were, they are straining to meet. And some day they will run into one, and that will be the end. I've heard say that in the Bible it is spoken that there'll be an end of this world. I could have known that without the Bible. The poles must come together some day, and be one. Glory!' he went on, 'you and I are each other's doubles, you was made with God's left hand, and I with his right, at the same moment of time, and He cast you into the Ray, and me to Red Hall. There was not much space between, only some water and ooze and marsh, and we've been drawing and drawing nearer and closer for ever so long, and now you are here, under my roof. You can't help it. You cannot fight agin it. You was made for me and I for you, and you'll have a life of hell unless you take me now. I must be yours. You thought you'd resist and take George De Witt. It might have been. Suppose you had, and I had died years before you. You would have heard me crying at your window and beating at your door, and you would have felt me drawing and drawing of you, whether you chose or not, taking the heart away from your George, and bringing it to me. Then at last, you'd have died, and then, then, you'd have been mine, and you would have found our heaven after thirty, forty, fifty years of hell.'

The terrible earnestness of the man imposed on Mehalah. He spoke what he believed. He gave utterance, in his rude fierce way, to what he felt. She, untaught, full of dim gropings after something higher, vaster, than the flat, narrow life she led, was startled.

'Heaven with you!' she cried, drawing back; 'never! never!'

'Heaven with me, and with none but me. You can't get another heaven but in my arms, for you was made for me by God. I told you so, but you would not believe it. Try, if you like, to find it elsewhere. God didn't make you and George De Witt out of one lump. He couldn't have done it--You, Glory! strong, great, noble, with a will of iron, and that weak, helpless, vulgar lout, tied to his mother's apron. He couldn't have done it. He made, like enough, Phoebe Musset and George De Witt out of one piece, but you and me was moulded together at the same time, out of the same clay, and the same breath is in our hearts, and the same blood in our veins. You can't help it, it is so. You can not, you shall not, escape me. Soon or late you must find your proper mate, soon or late you must seek your double, soon or late find your heaven.'

He came now quietly and seated himself in his chair opposite Mehalah.

'What did you fare to say, Glory?' he asked. 'I interrupted you.'

'I must thank you first for what you have done for my mother.'

'I have done nothing for her,' said Elijah sharply.

'You drew her out of the burning house. You saved her goods from the flames. You have sheltered her here.'

'I have done nothing for her,' said Elijah again. 'Whatever I have done, I did for you. But for you she might have burned, and I would not have put out a finger to help her. What care I for her? She is naught to me. She wasn't destined for me; that was you. I saved her because she was _your_ mother. I collected your things from the blazing house. I have taken you in. I take her in only as I might take in your shoe, or your cow, because it is yours. She is naught to me. I don't care if I never saw or heard her again.'

He got up and went to the window, took a flask thence; then brought his gun from a corner, and began to polish the brass fittings with rag, having first put on the metal some of the vitriol from the bottle.

'Look at this,' he said, dropping some of the acid on the tarnished brass. 'Look how it frets and boils till it has scummed away the filth, and then the brass is bright as gold. That's like me. I'm fretted and fume with your opposition, and I dare say it is as well I get a little. But after a bit it will bring out the shining metal. You will see what I am. You don't like me now, because I'm not shapely and handsome as your George De Witt. But there is the gold metal underneath; he was but gilt pinchbeck--George De Witt!' he repeated. 'That was a fancy of yours, that he was your mate! You could not have loved him a week after you'd known what he was. Marriage would have rubbed the plating off, and you would have scorned and cast him aside.'

'Elijah!' said Mehalah, 'I cannot bear this. I loved once, and I shall love for ever,--not you!--you--never,' with gathering emphasis, 'George, only George, none but George.'

'More fool you,' said Rebow sulkily. 'Only I don't believe it. You say so to aggravate me, but you don't think it.'

She did not care to pursue the subject. She had spoken out her heart, and was satisfied.

'Well, what else had you to say? I didn't think you was one of the bread and butter curtsey-my-dears and thanky, sirs! That is a new feature in you, Glory! It is the first time I've had the taste of thanks from you on my tongue.'

'You never gave me occasion before.'

'No more I did,' he answered. 'You are right there. And I don't care for thanks now. I'd take them if I valued them, but I don't. I don't care to have them from you. I don't expect thanks from my body when I feed it, nor from my hands when I warm 'em at the fire; they belong to me, and I give 'em their due. What I do for you I do for myself, for the same reason. You belong to me.'

'I must speak,' said Mehalah. 'This is more than I can endure. You say things of me, and to me, which I will not suffer. Do you mean to insult me? Have I ever given you the smallest reason to encourage you to assume this right?'

'No. But it must be. You can't always go against fate.'

'I do not believe in this fate, this destiny, of which you talk,' said the girl gathering up her strength, as her indignation swelled within her. 'You have no right over me whatever. I have been brought here against my will, but at the same time I cannot do other than acknowledge your hospitality. Had you not given us a shelter, I know not whither we should have gone. I ask you to let us shelter here a little longer, but only a little longer, till I have found some situation where I can work, and support my mother. We must sell our little goods, our sheep and cow, and with the proceeds----'

'With the proceeds you will have to pay the rent of the Ray to Lady Day.'

'You cannot be so ungenerous,' gasped Mehalah, flashing wrathfully against him. 'This undoes all your kindness in housing us. But if it must be, so be it. We will sell all, and pay you every penny; yes, and for our keep in this house, as long as we are forced to remain.'

'Not so fast, Glory,' said Elijah composedly. 'There are various things to be considered first. You can't find a situation--no one would take you in along of an old bedridden mother.'

'I can but try.'

'Aye, try; try by all means, and then come back to me. You have tried a deal of tricks to escape me, but you can't do it. You tried by borrowing money of George De Witt, you tried by going to that old palsied shipbuilder, you tried at Parson Tyll's, you tried, I don't know how at last, and you got the money; but yet you couldn't escape me. You tried to get George De Witt as your husband, to keep you from me in life, but it came to naught. He's gone out of the path that leads from you to me. You may heap up what you will, but the earth will open, and swallow all obstructions, and leave the way smooth and open. Did you ever see the old place--they call it the Devil's Walls--by Payne's? No, I dare say you don't know thereabouts. Well, I'll tell you how that spot lies waste, and covered with brambles and nettles now. The old lords D'Arcy thought to build a castle there. Then the Salcott creek ran up so far, and they could row and sail right up to their gates, were the mansion built. But it could not be. The masons built all day, and at night the earth sucked the walls in. They worked there a whole year, and they brought stones from Kent, and they poured in boulders, and they laid bricks, but it was all of no good, the earth drank in everything they put on it, as water. At last they gave it up, and they built instead on the hill where stands Barn Hall. It will be the same with you. You may build what you like, and where you like, it will go; it cannot stand, it will be swallowed up; you can only build on me.'

'Elijah! I insist on your listening to me. I will not hear this.'

'You will not? I do not care, you must. My will will drink in yours. But go on; say what you wish.'

'I am going to propose this. Pay me a wage, and I will work here. I will attend to the house and the cows, and do anything you require of me. You have no servant, and you need one. You shall let me be your servant. I shall not be ashamed to be that, but I will not remain here unless my place be determined and recognised.'

'You shall be the mistress.'

'I do not want, I do not choose to be anything else in this house but your hired servant. Pay me a wage, and I will remain till I can find some other situation; refuse, and, if I have to leave my mother, I will go out of this house to-night.'

'If you leave your mother, I will throw her out.'

'I would fetch her away. I would carry her in my arms. I will not stay here on any other terms.'

'I will humour you. You shall be paid. I will give you five shillings a week. Is that enough?'

'More than enough, with my keep and that of my mother. I thank you now. In future speak of me to the men as their fellow-servant, and not as you did recently to Abraham as their mistress.'

'I shall speak to them as I like. Am I to be controlled by you?'

'Then I will leave. I will carry my mother to the inn at Salcott, and rest there till I can find some other shelter.'

'Now look here, Glory,' said Elijah. He put his gun aside, and leaned his elbows on his knees, and faced her. 'It is of no use your talking of running away from me. You may run, but I can draw you back. I sit here of a night brooding over my fire, I begin thinking of you. I think, I think, and then a spirit takes me as it were, and fills me with fierce will, to bring you here. I feel I have threads at every finger and threads to my knees and to my feet, all fast to you, and if I stir, I move you. I lift my finger, and you raise yours. I wave my hand up, and you throw up yours. You don't know it. I do. I know that I have but to rise up from my chair, and I lift you up wherever you may be, in your bed, in your grave, and then, if I draw in with my will, I wind up these threads, and you come, you come, from wheresoever you are, out of your bed in your smock, out of your grave in your shroud; doors are nothing, my will can burst them open; locks are naught, my will can wrench them off; the screws in the coffin lid and five feet of earth are nothing, I could draw you through all. I could draw you over the ooze, and you would not be sucked in by it. I could draw you over the water, and you would not wet your foot. I could draw you through the marsh and you would not break a bullrush; look there--' he waved his arm towards the door. 'That door would fly open, and there you would stand, like one dreaming, with your eyes wide open as they are now, with your cheek colourless as now, with your lips parted as now, helpless, unable to stir a finger, or utter a sound, against my will, and you would rush into my arms, and fall on my heart. I can do all that. I feel it. I know it. I have sat here and wanted to do it, but I have not. I would not have you come to me in that way, but come of your own free will. You must come to me one way or other. Look here!' he raised his hand, and involuntarily, unconsciously, she lifted hers.

'Pick up the keys.'

She stooped and took them up.

'One day,' he said, 'you refused to take a piece of money that fell, when I bade you. Now you are more compliant. My will is gaining over yours. Your will is stout and rebellious, but it must bend and give way before mine. Go; I have done with you for the present.'

*CHAPTER XVIII.*

*IN A COBWEB.*

A month passed. Mrs. Sharland recovered, as far as recovery was possible to one of her age and enfeebled constitution, much shaken by the events of the night that saw the destruction of her home and the abrasion of the ear and tail of her biscuit-china poodle. After remaining in bed for more than a week, Mehalah almost by force obliged her to get up and descend. When once she had taken this step and found that her leather high-backed chair was before the fire in the hall, she showed no further desire to spend her days upstairs. Her life resumed the old course it had run at the Ray, but she sat more by the fire, and did less in the house than formerly. She devolved most of the domestic work on her daughter. That she had declined in strength of late was obvious. Old people will go on from year to year without any visible alteration, till some shock, or change in their surroundings takes place, when they drop perceptibly a stage, and from that moment declension becomes rapid.

Mrs. Sharland was unmistakably contented with her position at Red Hall. She enjoyed comforts which were not hers at the Ray. She saw more people, some gossip reached her ears. There was a village, Salcotty within two miles, and the small talk of a village will overflow its bounds, and dribble into every house in its neighbourhood. Every little parish throws up its coarse crop of vulgar tittle-tattle, on which the inhabitants feed, and which is exactly adapted to their mental digestion. Human characters as well as skins are subject to parasitic attacks, but human beings are the vermin which burrow their heads into, and blow themselves out on the blood of moral life. There are certain creatures which will lie shrivelled up on their backs, and endure flood and frost and burning sun, without its killing them, with suspended animation, till the animal on which they feed chances to come that way, when they leap into activity and voracity at once. Mrs. Sharland had been laid aside on the Ray, without neighbours, and therefore without matter of interest and objects of attack. She was now within leaping, lancing, and sucking distance of fresh life, and she rejoiced in renewed vigour, not of body, but of mind, if mind that can be called which has neither thought nor instinct, but only a certain gravitation which sets the tongue in motion. The brain of the rustic is as unlike the brain of the man of culture as the maggot is unlike the butterfly; the one is the larva of the other. They feed, live, move in different spheres; one chews cabbage, the other sips honey; one crawls on the earth, the other flies above it; one is clumsy in all its motions, the other agile; one is carnal, the other is spiritual. And yet--wondrous thought! the one is the parent of the other.

Mehalah had a great deal to do, and that work of a sort she had not been much engaged on at the Ray. No female hand had been employed at Red Hall since the death of Elijah's mother, and everything was accordingly falling out of repair and into disorder. She saw nothing of Rebow except at meals, and not always then, for he was often away with beasts at market, or at sales making purchases.

The rich marshes of Red Hall were unrivalled for the grazing of cattle, and the rearing of young stock.

As Mehalah was well occupied, her mind was taken off from herself, and she was for a while satisfied with her position. Rebow had not spoken to her in the manner she so disliked, and she had small occasion to speak with the men. Her mother, on the contrary, seized every occasion to entangle them in talk, or to initiate a conversation with Rebow. He maintained a surly deference towards her, and condescended at times to answer her queries and allow himself to be drawn into talk by the old woman. When that was the case, Mehalah found excuse to leave the room and engage herself in the kitchen or among the cows.

Abraham Dowsing saw much less of her than formerly. The old man, with all his sulky humour and selfish greed, had got a liking for the girl. He was much at the Ray, but often about Red Hall, where he got his food.

If he went after the sheep for the day, Mehalah provided him with 'baggings,' provision during his absence.

Lambing time was at hand, when he would be away for some weeks, returning only occasionally. Mehalah noticed that the shepherd hesitated each time he received his food, as though he desired to speak to her, but put off the occasion. At last, one day at the beginning of February, when he was about to depart for the Ray, and would be absent some days, he said to her in a low dissatisfied tone, 'I suppose, when I come back after the lambing, you'll have been to church with him.'

'What do you mean?'

'What do I mean?' repeated Abraham, 'I mean what I say. I ain't one of those that says one thing and means another. Nobody can accuse me of that.'

'I do not understand you, Abraham.'

'There's none so dull as them that won't take,' he pursued.

'I don't hold, myself, that much good comes of going to church with a man, except this, that you fasten him, and he can't cast you off when he's tired of you.'

Mehalah flushed up.

'Abraham,' she said angrily, 'I will not allow you to speak thus to me. I understand you now, and wish I did not.'

'Oh! you do take at last! That's well. I'd act on it if I was you. A man, you see, don't make no odds of taking up with a girl, and then when he's had a bit of her tongue and temper, he thinks he'd as lief be without her, and pick up another. He'd ring a whole change on the bells, he would, if it warn't for churches. That is my doctrine. Churches was built, and parsons were made, for tying up of men, and the girls are fools who let the men make up to them, and don't seize the opportunity to tie them.'

'Abraham, enough of this.'

'It is no odds to me. I don't care so long as I has my wittles and my wage. Only I'd rather see you mistress here than another. I'd get my wittles more regular and better, because you know me and my likings, and a new one wouldn't. That's all. Every man for himself, is my doctrine.'

'I forbid this for once and all. I am servant on wage here just as you are; I am that, and I shall never be anything else.'

'Oh, there you think different from most folks. You don't think according to your interests; and mistress, let me tell you, you don't talk as does the master.'

He went away mumbling something about it being no concern of his, and if some people did not know how to eat their bread and butter when they had it in their hands it was no odds to him.

Mehalah was hurt and incensed. She went to her mother.

'Mother,' she said, 'when will you be able to move? I shall look out for a situation elsewhere.'

'What, my dear child! Move from here, where I am so comfortable! You can not. Elijah won't hear of it. He told me so. He told me you was to remain here, and I should spend the rest of my days here in quiet. It is a very pleasant place, and more in the world than was the Ray. I am better off here than I was there. Now we get everything for nothing, we don't lay out a penny, and you get wage beside.'

'Mother, Abraham has been speaking to me. He has hinted, what I do not like, that I ought to marry Elijah----'

'So you ought,' said the widow. 'Elijah, I am sure, is willing. It is what he has been wishing and hoping for all along, but you have been so stubborn and set against him. After all he has done for us you might yield a bit.'

'I will never marry him.'

'Don't say that. You will do anything to secure a comfortable home for me. It may not be long that I may have to trouble you,--I know you look on me as a trouble, I know that but for me you would feel free, and go away into the world. You think me a burden on you, because I can do nothing: you are young and lusty. But I bore with you, Mehalah, when you was young and feeble, and I laid by for you money that would have been very acceptable to me, and bought me many little comforts that I forbore, to save for you----' The old woman with low cunning had discovered the thread to touch, to move her daughter.

'Say no more, say not another word, mother,' exclaimed Mehalah. 'You know that I never, never will forsake you, that you are more to me a thousand times than my own life. But there is one thing I never will do for you. I never will marry Elijah.'

'I am afraid, Mehalah, that folks will talk.'

'I fear so too, but they have no occasion. I will show them that. I will find a situation elsewhere.'

'You shall not, Mehalah!'

'I must, mother.'

She thought for some time what she should do, and then put on her bonnet, and walked into Salcott. She had not been into the village since her arrival at Red Hall.

Salcott is a small village of old cottages at the head of a creek that opens out of the Blackwater. It has a church with a handsome tower built of flints, but with no chancel. Within a bowshot, across the creek, connected with it by a bridge, is Virley church, a small hunchbacked edifice in the last stages of dilapidation, in a graveyard unhedged, unwalled; the church is scrambled over by ivy, with lattice windows bulged in by the violence of the gales, and a bellcot leaning on one side like a drunkard. Near this decaying church is a gabled farm, and this and a cottage form Virley village. The principal population congregates at Salcott, across the wooden bridge, and consisted--a hundred years ago--of labourers, and men more or less engaged in the contraband trade. Every house had its shed and stable, where was a donkey and cart, to be let on occasion to carry smuggled goods inland. At the end of the village stands a low tavern, the Rising Sun, a mass of gables; part of it, the tavern drinking-room, is only one storey high, but the rest is a jumble of roofs and lean-to buildings, chimneys, and ovens, a miracle of picturesqueness. Mehalah walked into the bar, and found there the landlady alone.

'I have come here, mistress,' she said abruptly, 'in search of work. I am strong and handy, and will do as much as a man. I will serve you faithfully and well if you will engage me. I have an infirm mother who must be lodged somewhere, so I ask for small wage.'

'Who are you? Where do you come from?' asked the landlady eyeing her with surprise.

'My name is Mehalah Sharland. I lived on the Ray till the house was burned down. Since then I have been at Red Hall.'

'Oh!' exclaimed the woman, her countenance falling. 'You are the young woman, are you, that I heard tell of?'

'I am the young woman now in service there, but wanting to go and work elsewhere.'

'I've heard tell of you,' said the landlady dryly.

'What have you heard of me?'

The woman looked knowingly at her, and smiled.

'Pray what does Master Rebow say to your leaving him? You and he have fallen out, have you?' said the hostess knowingly. 'You'll come together all the faster for it. There's nothing like a good breeze for running a cargo in.'

'Can you give me work?'

'I dursn't do it.'

'Have you need of anyone now?'

'Well,' with a cough, 'if Master Rebow were agreeable, I might find such a girl as you wery handy about the house. I've lost the last girl I had; she's took with the small-pox. You could have her bed, and her work, and her wage, and welcome. But unless the master gave his consent,' she began to dust the table, 'I dursn't do it.'

'Is he your landlord?'

'No, he is not.'

'Then why need you doubt about taking me?'

'Because Rebow wouldn't allow of it.'

'He could not stop me. I am not engaged to him for any time.'

'I dursn't do it. How long have you been with Rebow?'

'A little more than a month.'

'You've never gone against him perhaps. If you had, you wouldn't ask me the reason why I dursn't stand in his way.'

Mehalah considered. She had opposed Elijah from the very beginning.

'There's no one would dare to do it,' continued the landlady. 'If you want to get from Master Rebow, you must go farther inland; but I doubt if you'll escape him. However,' and she tossed her head, 'you only want to make him fast. If a girl gives way at once, she's cheap.'

'You mistake me, you altogether mistake me,' said Mehalah indignantly. 'I will not remain in his house any longer; I must and I will go elsewhere.'

'If Elijah Rebow was to take the purse out of my pocket, or the bed from under me, if he was to take my daughter from my side, I dursn't say nay. If you think to escape against the will of the master, you are mistaken.'

'I shall.'

'Look here,' said the landlady; 'take my advice and go back and be mum. I won't say another word with you, lest I get into trouble.' She turned and left the bar.

Mehalah went out, more determined than ever to break away from Red Hall, whether her mother desired it or not.

She crossed the creaking rude wooden bridge to Virley. The churchyard and the farmyard seemed all one. The pigs were rooting at the graves. A cow was lying in the porch. An old willow drooped over a stagnant pool beneath the chancel window. Shed roof-tiles and willow leaves lay mouldering together on the edge of the pond. The church of timber and brick, put up anyhow on older stone foundations, had warped and cracked; the windows leaned, fungus growths sprouted about the bases of the timbers. Every rib showed in the roof as on the side of a horse led to the knackers.

The farm was but little more prosperous in appearance than the church. Patched windows and broken railings showed a state of decline. Mehalah walked into the yard, where she saw a man carrying a pitchfork.

'Who is the master here?' she asked.

'I am.'

'Is there a mistress?'

'Yes. What have you to say to her?'

Mehalah told her story as she had told it to the landlady of the Rising Sun. 'I will work for my keep and that of my mother, and work harder than any man on your farm.'

'Where do you come from?'

'Red Hall.'

'Oh!' said the farmer, with a whistle, 'Rebow's girl, eh?'

'I am working for him now.'

'Working for him, come now that's fine.'

'I am working for him,' repeated Mehalah with clouding brow.

'And you want to come here. You think my missus would let you, do you? Now tell me, what put you on to coming to me? Has Elijah picked a quarrel with me, that he sends you here? Does he want occasion against me? Do you think I want to run any risks with my barns and my cattle and my life? No, thank you. I dursn't do it.'

'Tell me, where can I find work?'

'You must go out of the reach of Rebow's arm, if you find it.'

'You won't give me any?'

He shook his head. 'For my life, I dursn't do it.' He laughed and put out his hand to chuck her under the chin, she struck his fingers up with her fist. 'There ain't a better judge of beasts in all the marshes than Rebow, nor in horse-flesh neither. You ain't a bad bit of meat neither. I approve his taste.'

Mehalah wrenched the pitchfork out of his hand. Her eyes flamed. She would have struck him; but was suddenly assailed from behind by the farmer's wife.

'Now then, hussy, what are you up to?'

The girl could not answer; her anger choked the words in her throat.

'She's that wench of Rebow's, you know,' said the farmer. 'I guess it is cat and dog in that house.'

'Get you gone,' shouted the woman, 'go out of my premises, hussy! I don't want my place to be frequented by such as you. Get you gone at once, or I will loose the mastiff.'

Mehalah retired with bowed head, and her arms folded on her bosom. She halted on the bridge, and kicked fragments of frozen earth and gravel into the water. A woman going by looked at her.

'Where is the parson?' asked Mehalah.

'Yonder, you go over the marsh by the hill with the windmill on it, and you come to a road, you'll find a blacksmith's shop, and you must ask there. He's the curate, there's no rector hereabouts. They keep away because of the ague.'

Mehalah cross the fen indicated, passed beside the windmill and the blacksmith's shop, and found the cottage occupied by the curate, a poor man, married to a woman of a low class, with a family of fourteen children, packed in the house wherever they could be stowed away. The curate was a crushed man, his ideas stunned in his head by the uproar in which he dwelt. His old scholarship remained to him in his brain like fossils in the chalk, to be picked ont, dead morsels. There was nothing living in the petrified white matter that filled his skull.

Mehalah knocked at the door. The parson opened it, and admitted her into his kitchen. As soon as the wife heard a female voice, she rushed out of the back kitchen with her arms covered with soap suds, and stood in the door. A little-minded woman, she lived on her jealousy, and would never allow her husband to speak with another woman if she could help it.

'What do you want, my dear?' asked the curate.

'Ahem!' coughed the wife. 'Dear, indeed! Pray who are you, miss?'

Mehalah explained that she sought work, and hoped that the parson would be able to recommend her.

'You don't, you don't----' faltered he.

'You don't suppose I'd take you on here,' said the parson's wife. 'You're too young by twenty years. I don't approve of young women; they don't make good servants. I like a staid matronly person of forty to fifty, that one can trust, and won't be gadding after boys or----' she shook her suds at her husband. 'But I don't at present want any servant. We are full.'

'We don't keep any,' said the pastor.

'Edward! don't demean us, we do keep servants--occasionally. You know we do, Edward. Mrs. Cutts comes in to scour out and clean up of a Saturday. You forget that. We pay her ninepence.'

'Who are you, my dear--I mean, young woman?' asked the curate.

'Yes, who are you?' said his better half. 'We must know more of you before we can recommend you among our friends. Our friends are very select, and keep quite a better sort of servants, they don't pick up anybody, they take so to speak the cream, the very purest quality.'

Mehalah gave the required information. Mrs. Rabbit bridled and blew bubbles. The Reverend Mr. Rabbit became depressed, yet made an effort to be confidential. 'You'd better--you'd better marry him,' he hinted. 'It would be a satisfaction on all sides.'

'What is that? What did you say, Edward? No whisperings in my house, if you please. My house is respectable, I hope, though it mayn't be a lordly mansion. I do drive a conweyance,' she said, 'I hire the blacksmith's donkey-cart when I go out to make my calls, and drop my cards. So I leave you to infer if I'm not respectable. And Miss--Miss--Miss--' with a giggle and a curtsey, 'when may I have the felicity of calling on you at Red Hall, and of learning how respectable that establishment has become? There's room for improvement,' she said, tossing her nose.

At that moment a rush, a roar, an avalanche down the narrow stairs, steep as a ladder. In a heap came the whole fourteen, the oldest foremost, the youngest in the rear.

'We've got him, we're going to drown him.'

'What is it?' feebly enquired the father, putting his hands to his ears.

'We'll hold him to the fire and pop his little eyes.'

'No, they're too small.'

'Into the water-butt with him!'

A yell.

'He's bitten me. Drown him!'

'What is it?' shouted the mother.

'A bat. Tommy found him in the roof. We're going to put him in the butt, and see if he can swim.'

The whole torrent swept and swirled round Mehalah, and carried her to the front door.

The curate stole out after her.

'My good girl,' he whispered, 'botch it up. Marry. Most marriages hereabouts are botches.'

'Edward!' shouted Mrs. Rabbit, 'come in, no sneaking outside after lasses. Come back at once. Always wanting a last word with suspicious characters.'

'Marry!' was the pastor's last word, as he was drawn back by two soapy hands applied to his coat tails, and the door was slammed.

Mehalah walked away fast from the yelping throng of children congregated about the water-butt, watching the struggles of the expiring bat. She took the road before her, and saw that it led to Peldon, the leaning tower of which stood on a hill that had formed the northern horizon from the Ray. There was a nice farm by the roadside, and she went there, and was met with excuses. The time was not one when a girl could be engaged. There was no work to be done in the winter. The early spring was coming on, she urged, and she would labour in the fields like a man. Then the sick mother was mentioned as an insuperable objection. 'We can't have any old weakly person here on the premises,' said the farmer's wife. 'You see if she was to die, you've no money, and we should be put to the expense of the burying; anyhow there'd be the inconvenience of a corpse in the house.'

Mehalah went on; and now a hope dawned in her. Another two miles would bring her to the Rose, the old inn that stood not far from the Strood. There she was known, and there she was sure, if possible, she would be accommodated and given work.