Chapter IX: Part 9

"Come yer ways an' let 's 'ave supper," she said, with her head through the door. "Pam weean't be wi' us; she 's ganned to bed. Ah telt 'er she 'd better. Lass 's gotten a 'eadache, plain to see, wi' trampin' about i' sun this afternoon-lookin' after other folks' comfort. Ah div n't want 'er settin' to, to side things away when we 're done. She would, for sure, if she set up. Ah 'd to say good-night to ye both for 'er, she telt me."

And that same evening, during a moment of the schoolmaster's absence, the shoemaker delivered himself of a strange remark to his wife and daughter. He was struggling with the big black Book at the time.

"'Ave ye noticed..." he inquired, in a confidential undertone, and gazing at Emma and his wife over the thick silver rims of his spectacles, "onnything about our Pam, latelins?"

Emma Morland looked up sharply.

"What sewd there be to notice?" she asked, as though the idea were charged with the sublimated essence of the ridiculous.

"Div ye think ... there 's owt betwixt 'er an'..." he jerked his thumb in the supposed direction of the absent one, "t' schoolmester?"

"Div ah think stuff and nonsense!" Emma Morland said.

"Ay, bud ah 'm tellin' ye," the postmaster insisted. "Noo, mark mah wods. Ah 've watched 'em a goodish bit o' late, an' ah 've seed a little o' seummut when they did n't think there was onnybody to see owt."

"What 'ave ye seed wi' ye, then?" Miss Morland inquired sceptically, but with a sharp eye.

"This much," the postmaster told her. "Ah 've seed 'em talkin' together a dozen times when they did n't use to talk one. Ah 've knowed time when they 'd set i' a room while clock ticked round almost, an' them nivver say a wod--or they 'd gan their ways oot after a while, mebbe. Watch an' see if they 'll set i' a room aif a minute noo wi'oot speakin'? Ay, an' ah 've seed 'im kickin' 'is 'eels about passage end for 'er, when 'e did n't think ah knowed owt about 'im, an' she 's come down tiv 'im i' end. Ay, an' ah 've tekt notice on 'im when she 's ganned out o' room. 'E 's all of a fidget to be up an' after 'er, an' get a wod wi' 'er on 'er way back. Ay, an' 'e sets up for 'er when she comes back fro' Vicarage. It 'll be a rum 'un if 'e wants 'er--an' ah 'm ready to lay 'e diz, onny time. Ah div n't know as all could wish better for 'er, so far as my own inclination gans. 'E 'd mek 'er a good 'usband, an' 'ave a good roof to gie 'er, bud ah 'm jealous t' General 'ud 'ave to be considered. An' ah 've my doots whether 'e 's man to think ower much about syke [such] as schoolmesters."

"T' old 'umbug," Miss Morland ejaculated--though whether in reference to the schoolmaster or the General or his Reverence the Vicar, would be a difficult point to decide.

But the subject, temporarily suspended by the entrance of the schoolmaster himself, took deep root in the family imagination--deeper root, still, indeed, in the well-nourished soil of Miss Morland's common-sense, and testing the hypothesis by what she had seen of Pam's conduct to-night, and finding it in accord, she prepared herself to wait and watch events with an eye as keen as that of one of her own needles.

*CHAPTER XXII*

Up rose the sun in the morning as though nothing had happened, and spinning over the red and thatched roofs of Ullbrig, took stock of the harvest fields, the wheat in sheaf and stock, the oats outstanding; measured the work to be done with a jocose eye as though he had said "Aha!" and rubbed his hands in anticipation of a glad time.

Into Pam's bedroom he peeped--prudently, through a corner of the white blind--and found the girl open-eyed upon her bed; thrown across it transversely in abandonment of disorder, with her moistened handkerchief clasped like a snow-ball in one hand. It had been a night of anguish and unutterable torture. She had wept, she had prayed, she had resolved, she had renounced, she had slept--at once the mere fact of sleeping had awakened her--she had tossed from pillow to pillow, turned them incessantly to find some coolness for her fevered cheek; she had risen, and watched from her window the slow arrival of day; had seen the firmament of stars sliding away in the west, like the giant glass of a cucumber frame. The doings of the day before were a delirium. In her dreams the schoolmaster, the dying man, the Spawer, Emma Morland, the tea-room at Shippus, the donkeys, the moon--were all mixed up in a horrid patchwork mantle of remembrance. The Spawer was going. There would be no more music; no more French; no more walks and talks in the morning; no more evenings at the Vicarage; no more evenings at Cliff Wrangham. In the days when they had touched upon this final parting with the light inconsequence for a thing far distant--as people speak of death--she had entered into schemes for the continuance of all the studies that he had inaugurated. She should go to Hunmouth for piano lessons. She should have conversational French lessons _chez_ M. Perron, whose brass plate and dirty windows she had seen often on her visit to Hunmouth. Ah, but that was when the Spawer had been with her. It had been bitter-sweet at times to dwell on future sadness, with the warm hand of present happiness to take hold of, as a little child likes to peer round the bogey-man's corner, holding tight to its mother's fingers.

Now!

Ah, now! All was different. She wanted to die. Life was n't worth living any longer. Now she knew for herself the feeling that the schoolmaster had suffered and told her of: the dull undesire to live, the carelessness of existence, the agonies of hopeless despair. She knew it, but it made her pity him no more. The thought of him, sleeping within a mere yard or two of her, through a couple of frail thicknesses of bricks and mortar, filled her with horror and repugnance. All the night through his cough had come to her at intervals, telling of that one undesirable companion of her sleeplessness. She was being left to him. Like a shadow now he would dog her steps. And with the instinctive fear that he would finally overcome her, in spite of all, that she would drift powerlessly to him, for lack of anchor to hold her firm, or impulse to move, she shuddered tears into her pillow, and clenched the coverlet with tightened fingers.

For there was only one man in the world for her, and he was going. She loved him; she loved him; she loved him. She knew that she was not for him or he for her; that he was above her on the ladder of life, treading cruelly upon her fingers, as it were, without knowing it, and she too proud to cry out; that this love of hers could never be consummated. But she loved him for all that; drove the sharp knowledge of it into her shrinking soul with the vindictive pleasure of a spur.

She knew now, now that he was going and it was ended, that she loved him with all the love of which her soul was capable. Would he have had to plead at her skirts ... as the schoolmaster had pleaded? No, no, no! She knew it. She would have kept him waiting no longer at the door of her heart than at the door of the Post Office itself. Had he just come to her and looked at her, and said "Pam" ... oh, she would have known. She would have known and gone into his open arms without shame, like a bird to the nest. But she was not for him; never had been; never would be. She had no anger against him because she was smitten. He was above all anger. She had no silly impulses of passion to declare herself deceived; no reproaches because he had never before pronounced himself a man pledged. Her own heart had been so pure that it saw no impurity in his. Even when he had put his arm about her and drawn her to him, and uttered her name and looked at her ... there was nothing in that to cast dishonor upon the other girl. It was only that he had detected her suffering, had understood that she was weeping and unhappy at his departure ... had put his arm about her to give her comfort, as though she 'd been a little child. It was a beautiful act of tenderness and compassion ... nothing more. Poor girl! poor girl! She was sick with the misery of love, that, not knowing whence came this sudden sorrow, multiplied causes without end; shames, ignominies, degradations. Even the scene with Emma Morland, that would have slipped away from her like water off the breast-feathers of a swan, had her heart been sound, was branded now into her remembrance with the sear of red-hot iron. Emma's look; her inquiries; the grasp of her hand; the drop of her voice; her anxious whisper--somehow, wretched girl that she was, she seemed in some fashion to have deserved them; to be guilty of some great unknown shame; to be a lost sister, sinking like sediment through the clear waters of life to its dregs, touching here and there as she descended. The day was full of terrors for her; the morning meeting with Emma and with the schoolmaster; the facing of her uncle and her aunt; their solicitude about a headache that had never been. More Ullbrig hypocrisy to wade through; more shame of lying and untruth.

From her bed she rose at length, a soulful picture of trouble; replaced the fallen pillow and drew up the blind. An echo of its sound of cord and creaking roller reached her faintly from elsewhere, with a muffled cough, and telling her that her own activity was being duplicated by the ever-vigilant shadow, struck pain across her mouth. The slide window was already part open, but she flung it to its extreme width, and resting her hands upon the white-painted sill, put out her head with red lips parted, and tried to air her bosom of its close, suffocating atmosphere of trouble that she had been breathing and rebreathing all through the hours of this night. Down below, under a thin attenuated mist, lay the little patchwork kitchen garden of potatoes and onions and peas and kidney beans, and the dingy vegetable-narrow frame, like a crazy quilt. And beyond that, away to her left, rolled out the fields in the face of the sun to Cliff Wrangham ... where he was. From her place she could distinguish the misty shadow, like a frost picture on a pane, that proclaimed Dixon's. How often, in the days that were gone, had she opened this casement and looked just so across the fields, and said to herself: "Will there be any letters for him this morning? ... and shall I see him?" But now she looked across and said: "I dare not see him. God send there may be no letter this morning." All the world looked strange to her. It seemed that her eyes, like the eyes of an infant, were not yet trained to correct the images formed upon her retina.

Poor girl! poor girl! She had been so happy once. So very happy with her six shillings a week, and no desires beyond the desire to be at peace with her neighbors and return good for evil.

At last she lighted her little oil stove, that had once been the supreme of her ambition throughout a month's saving, and set her can of bath-water to boil. Every morning she made the complete ablution of her body ... and in summer sometimes twice. In this respect, at least, there was nothing of the Ullbrig hypocrite about her. As Father Mostyn told the Spawer, and more than once, for Pam was a subject to his liking:

"Ha! different class; different class altogether. No mistaking it. You can trust her inside and out. Does n't dress herself first and then put a polish on her face with a piece of soapy flannel, taking care to rub the lather well in. Ha! that 's our Ullbrig way. Leave the neck for Sunday, and rub the soap well in.

"But, thank heaven, that 's not Pam's way. Can't mistake it. Has the instincts of the bath. Tubs herself like an officer of dragoons. No mistaking the derivation of that. It does n't come from the people; it's a pure blood inheritance; a military strain. She keeps her body as clean as her mind. You could put her in a duchess's bed, and her grace need n't be frightened of going in alongside of her. Ha! beautiful, beautiful! the grace of cleanliness that is next to godliness. Her body would almost get her into heaven."

And indeed, St. Peter is scarcely the man I take him for if he would n't.

Leighton's Psyche unwound herself from long veils of diaphanous drapery on the brink of a marble bath, and immersed herself in azure water without soap--so far as the artist indicates in the picture. Pam's setting was a big, round, sponge bath, scrupulously enamelled white by her own hand; she did not stand pensive by its side, as though wondering whether to-morrow or the day after would do as well; she unwound herself from no sensuous mists of lawn; she held an active-service towel in her hand, rough like a tiger's tongue, and in place of the diaphanous draperies the steam from the hot water rolled and curled and licked about her lovingly as she poured it into the bath, and tried it with fingertips of no indecision--but she was Psyche for all that. Her body was as sleek and supple as the picture Psyche; her flesh, where the sun had not browned, was as white as alabaster and as sound as a young apple; her limbs as shapely as any that Leighton's brush could have given her. When she stood up, with her firm, round bosom thrown out, and dipping the big Turkey sponge into the wash-basin of cold water, pressed it to her with both hands as though she were hugging the desire of her heart, while the water slid down her snowy torso, tinged with warm glow of pink now, like marble, and ran, still clinging about her limbs and body, to her feet; and dipped again, and again pressed, and again and still again, till the water at her service was exhausted, she was the best, most beautiful type of English girl; unforced in growth, but developed gradually in pure air and pure thought; not one member of her corporeal republic in advance of the other, or of herself; all of them, indeed, reserved in their development rather than in advance of it, but awaiting only the ripening. The beautiful picture of a girl on the threshold of womanhood, and waiting in all chastity to be called, without any indecorous rush to be in advance of the summons. Ah, girls, girls, girls! Always anxious to be women. Do not struggle so inordinately to be ripe for the market. Do you think man is such a poor judge that he does not know the merits of green fruit, or so witless that he does not know the dangers of the ripe? Keep your thoughts and bodies green, like oranges for shipment, for indeed you are perishable fruit.

The stimulus of the bath restored to some extent the freshness of the girl's mind, and gave to her sorrow a cleanly, less bedraggled emotion. From her eyes she swilled away all traces of the night's tears. Thank Heaven, she renovated very easily; a porcelain girl could not have ceded the dust of trouble more completely. She showed no redness about the lashes; no swelling of the lids; no dark hollows above the cheek-bone. Her flesh had not sickened in the least. A little press of the fingertip on its plumpness, and lo! it sprang back alive and responsive, like a cushion, with a little pink blush at the salutation; it did not respond with doughy sluggishness. Her lips had lost none of their fire of ruby; they had not consumed at all to grey ash; there was no dryness to show how great the flame had been, no withering like the dried leaf of a rose. Moist and elastic they looked as ever; the beautiful downward pull about their corners--as though an invisible Cupid were trying hard to bend this bow of his--might be more divinely accentuated, but that would only be to an acute observer who, holding the secret of the girl's sorrow as we do, searched keenly upon her face for the outward signs of it. Her cheeks were still as smooth and creaseless as ivory; her brow like a tablet on which nothing evil could ever be written. The same old Pam she looked and seemed to everybody but herself. Ah, if only one's mind would wash like one's body--what blissful sinners we could be.

And with the strangely awakened desire for cleanliness, the feverish thirst of a mind to counteract by outward purity its inward contamination, the desire even to change all the old garments of yesterday's turpitude, to invest herself in a new atmosphere, to give herself a new mind and a new body and a new environment, if she might, she drew on her legs black cotton-silk stockings of the sort she wore on Sundays; buckled them with the best pretty blue silk garters of her own making (Emma had a pair like these too), clad herself in linen of snowy white, unfolded from her neat store in drawer and cupboard; and hid all this dazzling envelopment under a pretty pale print frock that could have stood up of its own cleanliness--cool and fresh and rigid as an iceberg. And round her throat she clipped a snowy collar, and tied it with a crimson bow of silk. To be cool and clean, and be conscious of it. Let the mind burn, if it will, so long as the body does not reproach us.

Thus she was clad at last, and came forth to face the day, diffusing little wafts of cool print and white linen at every movement of her body; little breaths, fresh and unperfumed, smelling of nothing but young girlhood and cleanliness, that the nostril curled gratefully to inhale and retain, as reviving to the spirit as puffs of breeze blown into some burning valley from snow-clad mountains.

Slowly the early hours of the day wore on, and shaped themselves, outwardly at least, to the semblance of all other days that had gone before. Days in Ullbrig are as alike as pennies. This might have been yesterday, or a day out of last week, or a day out of last year. Only the change in oneself and one's outlook told of the relentless passage of time. They sat at breakfast in the second kitchen, this strange assortment of table company. The girl, like a star plucked from heaven, cleansed with the dew, and exhaling the freshness of skies and dawn; the postmaster, with his genial honest face of shrewd stupidity, brown as snuff and wrinkled like morocco leather, who cut bread with his knife and thumb and shoved it home with the haft, making a pouch of one cheek while he talked out of a corner of the other; who stirred his cup with the noise of a grindstone, and looped his thumb round his spoon while he drank to prevent its slipping down his throat. Mrs. Morland, with her relaxed face of maternal good-nature, like a well-buttered muffin, who looked as though she lacked the energy for long-sustained anger, which, in truth, she did. The vigilant Emma, sitting bolt-upright, as a sort of human cruet, vinegary and peppery--whose acidulated conversation almost lent the zest of pickles to the meal. And last of all the schoolmaster, peering ruminatively--not to say furtively--into his plate as though it were a book he pored over. When he masticated there were muscles that worked in his temples and imparted an air of grave, cerebral activity. His cough troubled him this morning, and his face bore the haggard evidences of sleeplessness.

No word of allusion to last night's matter passed between these two, but the constrained silence of each towards the other was like a finger laid inexorably upon this page of their past. He was present when the postmaster inquired of Pam about her headache, but recorded no expression of sympathy. Perhaps Pam's crimson blush deterred him; but he lingered, brushing his hat in the passage before departing for school, and when Pam happened to make a journey into the front parlor he interposed himself by the door against her return. Pam finding him there, still brushing his hat as though he were an automatic hat-brusher, stopped in the doorway coming out, and stood before him without speaking--not angrily or resentfully or reproachfully--but decidedly with the unhappiness of awakened remembrance upon her downcast face and trembling lip.

"I only wanted..." he began, in a low voice, almost inaudible, "... to tell you. Last night I--I said things to you ... that perhaps I ought n't to have said. I can't remember now exactly what I did say, but I 'm ... I 'm very sorry I said anything."

Pam told him it did n't matter the least bit. He was n't, please, to trouble.

"I did it for the best," he explained, "... at the time."

Pam said ... she was sure he did. He was n't, please, to think about it. It appeared, however, the only thing he was capable of thinking about. He seemed to have a difficulty in tearing himself away from it; brushing his hat the while. It is fortunate school started when it did, or he would have worn all the remaining nap off.

"Will you please try ... and forget what I said to you ... and forgive me?"

Pam said ... she had forgotten already. A shade crossed over his face to think that she should so soon have forgotten words that had been so vital to him at the time, but the forgiveness that accompanied it relieved the momentary disquietude.

"I hope..." he suggested--and in the pauses he brushed his hat fiercely--"... that it will make ... no difference to us. I hope we shall be ... as we ... as we were before."

Pam hoped so too, an invalid hope that walked slowly, and touched the walls of silence for support as it went.

"Noo," said the postmaster triumphantly, in the clean little kitchen, holding up a hand to enjoin attention, and jerking his thumb violently in the direction of the parlor door, whence the brushing of the hat and the low murmur of voices could plainly be heard. "What did ah tell ye? There they are agen, whisperin' an' mummelin'. As soon as ivver 'e got agate wi' 'is 'at i' passage Pam started to be after 'im."

"Sh! Be still wi' ye, then," said Miss Morland, going nearer to the door. "Div ye want to mek 'em think we 're listenin' tiv 'em?"

But even while she spoke the sound of the hat-brush ceased, and the subsequent shutting of the front door announced that the schoolmaster had departed to his duties--having told Pam that after this morning these duties would be at an end until harvest was over.

*CHAPTER XXIII*

Half an hour later the mail cart rattled up before the two-fold Governmental door over the big round cobbles, and the fiery figure of James Maskill, red and shining like a new-boiled lobster, fresh from his sun-bath, invaded the Post Office, blowing the sweat off his mouth on to the floor in a fierce "Bf-f-f!" with a shake of the head, and slammed the letter-bag on to the counter in a strenuous but not aggressive greeting.

"Noo," he said to the postmaster, mopping his face at him with a red handkerchief, and "Noo," again to Pam, mopping the inside of his cap. "Mah wod! Bud it 's gannin' to be warm to-day, before it's done."

"Will you have a drink, James?" Pam asked him.

At the sight of that ominous bag, so full of deadly inertness and possibility, her heart had thumped her like a stone in a box. Yes or no; yes or no; yes or no?

"What of?" James asked her straightway.

"Of ... of ... what would you like?"

"Nay ... 'appen ah 'm best wi'oot," James decided, a great mantle of modesty falling over him at this suggestion of choice.

"Not if you want one, you 're not," Pam said.

Her fingers were burning, and her heart was dreading the opening of the bag. Was there? Was n't there? Was there? Was n't there? She put her hand to her side again. James only thought she slackened the grip of her belt.

"Ah could do wi' un," he admitted reluctantly, "so far as that gans."

"Milk ... would you like?" Pam suggested.

"Nay ... ah mun't mix 'em," he declared oracularly, and licked his parched lips with a smack of apprehension.

"Mix what?" Pam asked.

"Ah 've 'ad one ... o' t' road," he explained. "Bud 'appen yon barril 's thruff by noo. She wor drawin' a bit thick last time ye asked me."

"Ye 're best wi'oot, Jaames Maskill," came the voice of Emma Morland, from the interior of the Post Office, "... this time o' mornin'."

"Ay, ah think ah 'm, mebbe," said the postman, plunging hands into his pockets and screwing up his mouth for a broken-hearted whistle.

"Gie 'im a glass o' lemonade," said the voice again. "'E can 'ave that an' welcome."

"Will you have a glass of lemonade?" asked Pam.

"Ay, ah 'm willin', if it suits ye," the postman acknowledged.

A hand appeared at the inner door holding a lemonade bottle and a thick tumbler (the latter looking as though it had once held marmalade in Fussitter's window), and a second hand, when Pam had possessed herself of these, held forth a boxwood lemonade opener.

The postman drew forth the effervescing liquid thirstily into his profounds, with his red chin mounting up step by step as though it were going upstairs, and a great fizzling sound from within as if he were a red-hot man, and let the glass rest on inverted end upon his lips for a space, to make sure it had yielded its last drop, and set it down on the counter with a great breathed "Ah!" of appreciation, holding his mouth open while the sparkles needled his inside.

"Noo let 's away," he said, "... or we s'll be 'avin' old Tankard prawtestin' us to Goovinment agen."

He said this because Pam had already opened the bag and was sorting the letters with quick, nervous fingers. Those for James Maskill's district went to the right hand of her; those for her own to the left. Her heart began to beat furiously. Now the impulse seized her to spread out all these letters over the counter and to furrow with both hands among them for the letter she feared to find. She knew by an instinct so strong that she never for a moment questioned it, what characteristics the fatal letter would possess. In her mind's eye she saw, with such clearness that her actual eye could scarcely add aught to the confirmation, the thin foreign envelope, the green stamps, the familiar superscription. She went cold and she went hot. Her ears burned, and there were strange noises opening inside them like whistles and hummings, as though in protest to the insupportable outer silence, the imperturbable calm of the Post Office. But the postman was watching her, and the postmaster from his high deal stool. It seemed as though they were all three silently concentrated upon the appearance of that fatal missive. Her emotions hastened, delayed, evaded, shuffled, ceased; but before these two onlookers her fingers went on regularly as clockwork.

Right, left. Right, right, right.

Left, left.

Right....

Left....

James Maskill, watching her, thought she hesitated there for an almost inappreciable moment, as though she had detected her fingers in blundering, and expected to see her transfer the letter from her own pile to his. But she had not blundered. No, no; she had not blundered. The distribution of the envelopes went on again apace, as though she were dealing hands from Fate's pack. Left, right; left, right; left, left, left. She allotted the last letter, and pushed James Maskill's budget towards him across the counter with a heroic smile, enough to make his eyes water. It was the smile such as a dying martyr might bequeath to those she loved, and by whom she had been loved. All was death and the coldness of it underneath, but at times like these death, coming from within, drives out the soul from its earthly tenement, and as it lingers on the threshold of the flesh before departing, the flesh is glorified. Many smiles had Pam given the postman in his time ... but this one clung to him--so far as anything seemed to him--that she might almost love him. That smile accompanied James Maskill throughout his morning's round. Ullbrig, looking beneath its blinds and through its muslin curtains, and out of the cool, gauze-protected windows of its dairies at the toiling figure of the postman--hot, perspiring, and dusty--could have little imagined that he was the carnal receptacle of a smile; that he held Pam's last look enclosed in his secretive body as though it had been the precious pearl and he the rugged oyster. But so it was. He scarcely noticed the shining of the outer sun, to such extent did the internal brightness light him.

And meanwhile, while James Maskill fed his heart upon that one smile and thought what a treasury of bliss it would mean to possess the possessor of it, the possessor walked along, a miserable bankrupt of happiness. Scarcely another smile remained to her. She had given him that one, but it was about her very last. Under the broad brown strap of her letter-bag she strode, with her lips locked and her soul as far away from her eyes as though the body were a house in the hands of the bailiffs; the key elsewhere; the occupants dispersed. For all the sun beat upon the red poppies in her hat till the straw cracked again and planted burning kisses on her neck, she was almost cold, from her feet in their black cotton-silk stockings upward. Once or twice even, she could have shivered for a thought. And the burden of the bag! Strange that one letter should make such a difference.

All about her the harvest was in full swing; the reapers whirling from seen and unseen quarters like the chirruping of grasshoppers. The morning's mist was quite absorbed; the scene was as clear and detailed as one of those colored Swiss photographs, with a blue sky, showing perhaps here and there a little buoyant white cloud floating cool and motionless in it, like ice in wine. Towards Garthston way the moving sails of the self-binder beat the air above the hedges. Half a dozen fields distant a pair of red braces, crossed over a calico shirt, struck out clear and distinct as though the whole formed a banner. Now and again she heard "Helloes," and looking, saw remote figures hailing her through their trumpeted hands. When she raised her own hand in response they made semaphores with the twisted bands of straw or shook rakes in the blue air. It was not many harvest fields that would have liked Pam to pass along the road without noticing them. From their side of the picture they saw the scarlet poppies dancing lightheartedly on their errand, and took the friendly uplifting of the girl's arm for token of the smile they never doubted would be there. If they could but have seen the smile of their blissful imagination at close quarters--a mere strained drawing back of the lips--as significant of pain as of pleasure, it would have furnished them with ample material for their harvest-field converse.

Ah, yes. She was very sick and wretched and unhappy. All the natural spring was out of her step. She wanted to walk flat-footed, with both her hands hanging and her chin down; but by sheer resolve she held her head high, and broke the dull concussion of her step with that lissom responsiveness of toe which was now the vanished inheritance of her happiness. She did not want to meet him ... this morning. She did not feel equal to it. She prayed, as she walked, that she might have this one good favor bestowed upon her in her trouble: the blessed privilege of avoiding him. Without the culminating straw to her sorrow, the letter in her bag, she could have met him ... perhaps ... with some amount of courage and confidence. But now ... to have to be the bearer of what she bore ... and repeat all the history of her misery in this summarised form; to give him the letter ... be witness while he read it even; hear him tell her definitely that he must go ... that all was over! Oh, no, no, no! It was too much for her to sustain. And she did n't want to break down before him again. She did n't want to degrade herself in his sight. It was one thing to shed tears at a sudden intelligence ... but it was another to be always shedding them. If she showed tears again ... he would suspect her. Had he been another girl she could have wept her weep out upon his shoulder. That was admissible between girls. But because he was a man ... she could not weep. There were no friendships possible between men and women; it was love or nothing. She must just let her heart break--if only it would--in silence and solitude.

All in thinking upon her trouble, her step, accommodating itself spontaneously to the mental retardation of her progress, grew slower and slower. The nearer she came to Cliff Wrangham, the more time she needed to prepare herself. If possible she must try and slip round through the Dixon's paddock, cut across the stackgarth, and leave the letter with one of the twins--if only she could come upon them--without being seen. They would be sure to be somewhere about. Then she tested her stratagem by all sorts of contingencies. Suppose Miss Bates came upon her instead, and asked her to wait ... for any letters in return. Suppose ... he was out in the lane ... waiting anxiously for the very letter she so feared delivering. She might leave it at Stamway's, and ask Stamway's if they 'd let Arthur drop across the fields with it ... as she was in a hurry to get back. And she would give Arthur a penny.

And now her step was slowed almost to a standstill. George Middleway even could have run her down. All the activity was up above; there was none left for her legs. Already she was past the halfway house in the little elbow of road before you get first sight of Stamway's. It is a part enclosed; except from the immediate fields, which were untenanted, she could n't be seen here in the pursuit of wasting Government time. The next turn would bring her into sight again; she would be under the eyes of Stamway's; Dixon's would be able to follow her progress henceforward, all but a yard here or a yard there, to the paddock stile. Before she came into public view again ... she ought to think; she ought to make sure. And one cannot think, standing erect in the roadway like a scarecrow. It looks suspicious, even to the suspicious eye of self--that at these times suspects everything. Instinctively she drew into the shelter of a hospitable gateway. There, at least, she could profess for her own satisfaction that she had succumbed to the midday lassitude; was listening to the music of the reapers, with her arm over the rail and her foot on one of the lower bars.

Was the past a dream? ... or the present? Had the Spawer ever been? ... or was he ever going? Which was easier to realise? The joyousness of then or the misery of now? Should she wake up to discover that all her unhappiness was a nightmare, that there was no question of the Spawer's going, no dread of a letter? She dipped her hand, almost unconsciously, into the bag to see if, perchance, the whole affair was an unsubstantial fabric of fancy.

Ah, no! No fancy; no fancy. She had not wakened yet. There were the two letters at the bottom of the bag; the one for Stamway, the other ... it came out with her hand. She had not wilfully drawn it, but it seemed to cling to her fingers. Oh yes, how well she knew its motley of stamps and postmarks; how well the superscription in that familiar feminine hand. She held it before her eyes, and gazed at the writing as though she would have wrested the invisible scribe out of it; called up the astral body of the girl who, in these shapely lines, and all innocently and unknowingly, had dealt her happiness such an irreparable blow. Who was she? Where did she live? When, where, and how had he met her? Did she love music? Had he taught her? Had he taught her French? Was she beautiful? Ah, she was sure to be. And a lady. That would be a fashionable way of affixing the stamps. And young. Rich too, perhaps. She must be, for poor people could not afford to spend long holidays in foreign places like this. Assuredly the writer of these words did not tramp the country roads with a bag over her shoulder for six shillings a week.

Something white and moving grew into the corner of her unconscious eye as she gazed in absorption upon the fatal envelope--a cow or a horse or a sheep or a cloud, over the hedge line.

But no; it was not a cow. It was too erect for a cow; too tall for a sheep; too progressive for a cloud. There was a patch of color about it too, somewhere. Cows did not wear ribbons, or sheep or clouds.

It was a figure; the figure of a man; a man in white; a man in flannels--the Spawer.

All at once her dormant consciousness awoke with a start to his imminence, as though her eye had been giving no warning of his approach all this while. She turned round, and a great spreading sickness of guilt took hold of her. Her blood seemed rushing all ways, like an anthill in confusion. The hand with the letter dropped suddenly, as though it were a wounded wing. It was the right hand that held it now, and the bag was on her left side. Had he seen her? Could she pass it into the bag without notice. He was horribly near ... and looking at her. Her heart pitched downward like a foundering vessel into the trough of her fear.

Into the pocket at the back of her her guilty hand crept, trembling and craven, and lay there, in its thief's refuge, burning unbearably like the firebrand of her infamy.

*CHAPTER XXIV*

The hot sunlight about the Post Office was savory with the smell of Yorkshire pudding--you might have almost imagined that it was the house itself a-cooking--when Pam returned, beneath the sling of the empty letter-bag.

On other mornings she would take her way in through the two-fold Governmental door; announce her arrival in musical pleasantry to the postmaster in his little shoemakery; hang up the flabby letter-bag on its peg behind the counter; pop in upon Emma Morland, if she were at work in the trying-on room, to commend her diligence or express surprise at the amount of the work achieved, or ask in what way she could be of assistance; give a look into the little clean kitchen to feel the pulse of the oven, and proffer herself for some kind service to her aunt-by-courtesy, as red as boiled beetroot, and fitting her clothes as tightly as if she 'd been a bladder set before the hot grate. But this morning the girl made no parade of arrival. She drew nearer to the house by the shadow of its walls, and let herself meekly in through the spick-and-span household door--white painted, with fashionable brass knob and knocker--that gives entrance between the twelve-paned parlor window beyond the scraper and the smaller eight-paned window of Miss Morland's trying-on room, whose austere starched curtains (drawn in primly at the pit of the stomachs with pink sashes to reveal the polished oak cover of the sewing-machine, and sundry dress fabrics in course of construction, casually displayed) always proclaimed any particularly sacred rite of disrobement proceeding within its sanctuary by being discreetly pinned.

Whereat, though man's religious fibres might be stirred to their utmost, it was useless his stopping to spell out the familiar capitals of Emma's card with all the earnestness of the anxious (and short-sighted) inquirer after Truth.

Up to her bedroom she stole, a soft-toed figure, by the best Sunday staircase, with white holland over the carpet. If she were dead they would bring her down this staircase in her coffin. She wished she were dead. She was dead in all but the flesh--and in truth she looked but the phantom of her former self--but the ghost of the girl that had gone out this morning. All the color was struck out of her blanched cheeks as though a hand had smitten them white, and no blood returned to reproach the blow. Her eyes were fixed in front of her whichever way she walked; it seemed something horrible had been stamped upon them and set over them for seal. Her lips were hard and rigid; wax-work lips, artificially colored, upon a wax-work mouth. It looked as if such a mouth could never open in speech; it was a mold, a cast, struck off the face of grief. Slowly, but very surely, the old Pam was being squeezed out of her bodily habitation. As a house in the hands of new tenantry loses its old outward characteristics and takes on new features of blinds and curtains and window-palms, so this body of Pam's in the hands of its new possessor was beginning gradually to display evidences of the invisible occupant that, hidden behind its walls, wrung fingers and wept, and spent its moments in the torturing austerities of self-examination and penance.

... Once in her bedroom, the hardness fell off the girl's face as though it had been stucco; the hidden occupant came to her trembling lips, looked out of her eyes, gazed forth upon the outer world, as an escaped prisoner might, full of horror of his position, and dreading every moment the summons that should announce his discovery. But there were no tears this time. Tears are but the petty cash of woman's trouble account; the noisy silver and copper, which make a great jingle, are parted with and never missed. Pam's trouble was no longer in silver and copper, not in gold even. It was in silent bank-notes. All the tears in the world could not liquidate such a liability. One might as well attempt to compound with a handful of irate creditors out of the loose coin at the bottom of one's pocket. Besides, it was not sorrow now, it was horror. In trouble women weep; but in horror they stare with open eyes, for fear the thing dreaded may come upon them when they are unaware. So children, who rain tears at a dog by day, will lie abed silent at night, with their great, dry eyes fixed upon the darkness, and fear to cry or close them. Tears, scalding tears, were all about the hot lashes of the girl's eyes; but into her eyes themselves they did not enter. Like a thief she had stolen round her own door; like a thief she pressed it to, with a hand over its sneck, and shot the little catch under the lock; like a thief she listened--she, who had feared nothing before but herself and her own conscience; feared everything now.

The big grandfather's clock downstairs went "Br-r-r-r-r!" It was a way he had; he meant nothing by it; but it sent the girl's hand to her bosom this morning as though she had heard in the sound the announcement of her whereabouts to the world at large. Now she strained her ears for the sounds of feet, the calling of her own name, the approach of pursuers ... but there came none. Only down below were audible the muffled intermittent click click click of Emma's industrious machine; the tapping of the shoemaker's hammer; the sound of the little kitchen poker thrust energetically through the bars of the grate to rouse the sleepy fire to its duty by Mrs. Morland; the clash of saucepan lids and the jangle of a pail. Satisfied that her entrance had been unobserved, and that the clock's warning had been in vain, she unslung the post-bag from her shoulder and hung it over the foot of the bed; removed her hat of red poppies, and laid it on the chest of drawers.

What had she come for? For a moment even she herself seemed scarcely to know, standing by the bedside with dangling head as though she had been some wild driven creature fleeing for refuge, of which now, in possession, she knew not to make what use. Then as she stood, her right hand crept round to the back of her, found the entrance to her pocket, burrowed its way out of sight into its depths like a mole; delved there for a while, lay still, and came forth into the open, dragging its prize--something white and square and unsubstantial, that crackled resentfully under the holding. An envelope; a letter.

In the stillness of death the girl held this helpless prey of her fingers under gaze and stared at it. She did not read. It was no act of curiosity. It was the horror-struck stare of a face that had been seeking confirmation of its guilt and found it. She did not look at details of writing or of the address; she fastened her great eyes upon the thing in gross--the four inches by three of her everlasting turpitude. She had not given it to him. Into her pocket it had gone; in her pocket it had stayed. She had stolen it. She was a thief; a thief; a thief!

On her soft, clean bed she threw herself and lay face downwards, without a tear. In her grief, as in everything else that she did, she was beautiful. Her light dress of print gathered under her and wound about her body as she rolled, and outlined the supple firmness of her figure with something of gusto in the task. In abandonment there seemed no bones in it; it was supple as a salmon; as lissom as a wand cf green lancewood. Backward or forward, this way, that way, it looked as though you might have bent it and broken nothing--not even its heart. Her ankles, dear indices to a fascinating volume, so sleek and tight and flexible, lost nothing by their encasement in black cotton-silk; into the little soft leather Sunday shoes her feet fitted like a hand into a glove; press your thumb and finger anywhere and the leather would gently resist you. Poor little shoes, that had walked so happily in their time, how very still and lifeless they lay now, side by side on the white counterpane, with their soles still fresh and lemon-colored, turned pathetically towards the foot-rail. This burden at least is too heavy for you, little patient smugglers. And little arms that had swung so blithely; how resistless you are now. Many lovers have sought to be enfolded within them in their time, but you have repulsed them all. Now is come a lover whom you cannot repulse. They shall clasp him, unresisting, and he shall enter them. Shame is your lover. He has been in your waking dreams all this night past, seen dimly and distorted. Now you have him face to face. Lie still in his arms and be mute before the hot caress of his kisses. Your Gingers and your James Maskills, your doctors, your parsons, your schoolmasters, your Jevons, and your Steggisons have sought you in the flesh, but this lover has found you through the spirit. Now that the spirit is surrendered the flesh lies prone enough.

Poor beautiful flesh. Even Shame's kisses cannot corrupt the beauty of it. In this moment of its weakness and surrender, if the Spawer could but be witness of you, it is probable (only you do not know it) that your defeat would gain you the victory. For the weakness of a woman is her strength, and to see beauty so overthrown, by a lover less relenting than himself, rouses a man's best instincts of honor and protecting chivalry.

But the Spawer is three good miles away, and cannot enter damsels' bedrooms as the sun does. Perhaps, as human nature is constituted, it is well. If you cried on him he could not hear you, and with that label of your guilt between your fingers, though you knew he could hear you, you dared not cry.

Poor child! Poor child! So young, so beautiful, and so wicked! So dreadfully, horribly wicked!

To say that she thought would be to convey a wrong impression of her state. Thought, like her eyes, was wide open, but it did not think--any more than her eyes saw. It stared--stared fixedly, without blinking, at the consciousness of her great wickedness.

Dreadful images passed over the darkened curtain of life, like the pictures of a magic-lantern.

In Sproutgreen a poor girl had taken some clothes that did not belong to her. Only a bodice (very much worn), an old skirt, a vest or two (she was badly off for vests), and some stockings. She had not meant to take them, she said ... but all the same she had taken them, and they had sent her to prison.

That picture showed on Pam's screen too.

She had not meant to take it. No, no; but she had taken it. Why should n't she be sent to prison? Why should the one poor girl be made to suffer and she go free?

A man in Hunmouth had stolen a leg of mutton from a butcher's shop when the butcher's back was all but turned. If he 'd only waited a moment longer or set off a moment sooner all would have been well. But his wife was starving and he was in a hurry. He wanted the mutton ... it was noble of him to risk himself for a dying wife. But the law recognises no nobility in theft, and sent him to prison.

That picture showed on Pam's mind too.

She was n't starving; there was no excuse for her, even of pity. She had stolen something she did n't want. She was a thief, unworthy to receive the weight of honest people's eyes. Looks now, the lightest of them, smiles and glances, were all insufferable burdens deposited upon the bowed shoulders of her shame.

Poor girl! poor, unhappy girl! Wrong from first to last. Seeing the world upside down. Cast forth from the cool leafy oasis of hope into the burning desert of despair. If she could have taken but one peep into the man's heart the rain of blessed relief would have fallen in abundance; she would have kissed that dread letter for token of her forgiveness; would have risen, smiling in glory, like the sun through April clouds.

But she could not see. These two souls, surcharged with their vapors of unshed trouble, that only needed to come together to combine and pour forth all their misery in one great shower of gladness and rejoicing--these two souls lay asunder.

While the girl stared dumbly into the blackness of her pillow, the man gazed with the vacant stare of a harmless idiot over Dixon's first gate. If his state had been hopeless before, he told himself, it seemed doubly hopeless now.