At Hall, that same morning had broken on Squire Cleverdon in his office or sitting-room—it might bear either name—leaning back in his leather armchair, with his hands clasped on his breast, his face an ashen grey, and his hair several degrees whiter than on the preceding day.

When the maid came in at an early hour to clean and tidy the apartment, she started, and uttered a cry of alarm, when she saw the old man in his seat. She thought he was dead. But at her appearance he stood up, and with tottering steps left the room and went upstairs. He had not been to bed all night.

Breakfast was made ready, and he was called; but he did not come.

That night had been one of vain thinking and torturing of his mind to find a mode of escape from his troubles. He had reckoned on assistance from Fox or his father, and this had failed him. Fox, may be, for all his brag, could not help him. The Justice might, were he at home; but he had gone off to join the Duke of Monmouth, and, if he did return, it might be too late, and it was probable enough that he never would reappear. If anything happened to Mr. Crymes, then Fox would step into his place as trustee for Julian till Julian married; but could he raise money on her property to assist him and save his property? Anyhow it was not possible for matters to be so settled that he could do this within a fortnight.

The only chance that old Cleverdon saw was to borrow money for a short term till something was settled at Kilworthy—till the Rebellion was either successful or was extinguished—and he could appeal to Fox or his father to secure Hall.

But to have, ultimately, to come to Fox for deliverance, to have his own fate and that of his beloved Hall in the hands of this son-in-law, who had insulted, humiliated him, publicly and brutally, the preceding night, was to drink the cup of degradation to its bitter and final dregs.

It was about ten o'clock when the old Squire, now bent and broken, with every line in his face deepened to a furrow, reappeared, ready to go abroad. He had resolved to visit his attorney-at-law in Tavistock, and see if, through him, the requisite sum could be raised as a short loan.

The house was in confusion. None of the workmen were gone to their duties; the serving-maids and men talked or whispered in corners, and went about on tip-toe as though there were a corpse in the house.

His man told the Squire that Fox was gone, and had left a message, which the fellow would not deliver, so grossly insolent was it; the substance was that he would not return to the house. The Squire nodded and asked for his horse.

After some delay it was brought to the door; the groom was not to be found, and one of the maids had gone to the stable for the beast, and had saddled and bridled it.

The old man mounted and rode away. Then he heard a call behind him, but did not turn his head; another call, but he disregarded it, and rode further, urging on his horse to a quicker rate.

Next moment the brute stumbled, and nearly went down on its nose; the Squire whipped angrily, and the horse went on faster, then began to lag, and suddenly tripped once more and fell. Old Cleverdon was thrown on the turf and was uninjured. He got up and went to the beast, and then saw why it had twice stumbled. The serving girl, in bridling it, had forgotten to remove the halter, the rope of which hung down to the ground, so that, as the animal trotted, the end got under the hoofs. That was what the call had signified. Some one of the serving-men had noticed the bridle over the halter as the old Squire rode away, and had shouted after him to that effect.

Mr. Cleverdon removed the bridle, then took off the halter, and replaced the bridle. What was to be done with the halter? He tried to thrust it into one of his pockets, but they were too small. He looked round; he was near a saw-pit a bow-shot from the road. He remembered that he had ordered a couple of sawyers to be there that day to cut up into planks an oak-tree; he hitched up his horse and went towards the saw-pit, calling, but no one replied. The men had not come; they had heard of what had taken place at Hall, and had absented themselves, not expecting under the circumstances to be paid for their labour.

The old man wrapped the halter round his waist, and knotted it, then drew his cloak about him to conceal it, remounted, and rode on. Had the sawyers been at the pit he would have sent back the halter by one of them to the stable. As none was there, he was forced to take it about with him.

Five hours later he returned the same way. His eyes were glassy, and cold sweat beaded his brow. His breath came as a rattle from his lungs. All was over. He could obtain assistance nowhere. The times were dangerous, because unsettled, and no one would risk money till the public confidence was restored. His attorney had passed him on to the agent for the Earl of Bedford, and the agent had shaken his head, and suggested that the miller at the Abbey Mill was considered a well-to-do man, and might be inclined to lend money.

The miller refused, and spoke of a Jew in Bannawell, who was said to lend money at high rates of interest. The Jew, however, would not think of the loan, till the Rebellion was at an end.

All was over. The Squire—the Squire!—he would be that no more—must leave the land and home of his fathers, his pride broken, his ambition frustrated, the object for which he had lived and schemed lost to him. There are in the world folk who are, in themselves, nothing, and who have nothing, and who nevertheless give themselves airs, and cannot be shaken out of their self-satisfaction. Mr. Cleverdon was not one of these, he had not their faculty of imagination. The basis of all his greatness was Hall; that was being plucked from under his feet; and he staggered to his fall. Once on the ground, he would be proper, lie there, an object of mockery to those who had hitherto envied him. Once there, he would never raise his head again. He who had stood so high, who had been so imperious in his pride of place, would be under the feet of all those over whom hitherto he had ridden roughshod.

This thought gnawed and bored in him, with ever fresh anguish, producing ever fresh aspects of humiliation. This was the black spot on which his eyes were fixed, which overspread and darkened the whole prospect. The brutality with which he had been treated by Fox was but a sample and foretaste of the brutality with which he would be treated by all such as hitherto he had held under, shown harshness and inconsideration towards. He had been selfish in his prosperity, he was selfish in his adversity. He did not think of Anthony. He gave not a thought to Bessie. His own disappointment, his own humiliation, was all that concerned him. He had valued the love of his children not a rush, and now that his material possessions slipped from his grasp, nothing was left him to which to cling.

He had ridden as far as the point where his horse had fallen, on his way back to Hall, when the rope twined about his waist loosened and fell down. The old man stooped towards his stirrup, picked it up, and cast it over his shoulder. The act startled his horse, and it bounded; with the leap the rope was again dislodged, and fell once more. He sought, still riding, to arrange the cord as it had been before about his waist, but found this impracticable.

He was forced to dismount, and then he hitched his horse to a tree, and proceeded to take the halter from his body, that he might fold and knot it together.

Whilst thus engaged, a thought entered his head that made him stand, with glazed eye, looking at the coil, motionless.

To what was he returning? To a home that was no more a home—to a few miserable days of saying farewell to scenes familiar to him from infancy; then to being cast forth on the world in his old age, he knew not whither to go, where to settle. To a new life of which he cared nothing, without interests, without ambitions—wholly purposeless. He would go forth alone; Bessie would not accompany him, for he had thrown her away on the most despicable of men, and to him she was bound—him she must follow. Anthony—he knew not whether he were alive or dead. If alive, he could not go to him whom he had driven from Hall, and to Willsworthy, of all places under the sun, he would not go. Luke he could not ask to receive him, who was but a curate, and whom he had refused to speak to since he had been the means of uniting his son to the daughter of his deadly rival and enemy. What sort of life could he live with no one to care for him—with nothing to occupy his mind and energies?

How could he appear in church, at market, now that it was known that he was a ruined man? Would not every one point at him, and sneer and laugh at his misfortunes? He had not made a friend, except Mr. Crymes; and not having a friend, he had no one to sympathise with, to pity him.

Then he thought of his sister Magdalen. Her little annuity he would have to pay out of his reduced income; he might live with her—with her whom he had treated so unceremoniously, so rudely—over whom he had held his chin so high, and tossed it so contemptuously.

What would Fox do? Would he not take every occasion to insult him, to make his life intolerable to him, use him as his butt for gibes, anger him to madness—the madness of baffled hate that cannot revenge a wrong?

Anything were better than this.

The old man walked towards the saw-pit. The tree was there, lying on the frame ready to be sawn into planks, and already it was in part cut through. The men had been there, begun their task; then had gone off, probably to the house to drink his cider and discuss his ruin.

Below his feet the pit gaped, some ten or eleven feet, with oak sawdust at the bottom, dry and fragrant. Round the edges of the pit the hart's-tongue fern and the pennywort had lodged between the stones and luxuriated, the latter throwing up at this time its white spires of flower.

A magnificent plume of fern occupied one end of the trough. Bashes and oak-coppice were around, and almost concealed the saw-pit from the road.

That saw-pit seemed to the old man to be a grave, and a grave that invited an occupant.

He knelt on the cross-piece on which the upper sawyer stands when engaged on his work, and round it fastened firmly the end of the rope; then fixed the halter with running knot about his own neck.

He stood up and bent his grey head, threw his hat on one side, and looked down into the trough.

He had come to the end. Everything was gone, or going, from him—even a sepulchre with his fathers, for, if he died by his own hand, then he would not be buried with them, but near that saw-pit, where a cross-way led to Black Down. It was well that so it should be; so he would retain, at all events, six foot of the paternal inheritance. That six foot would be his inalienably, and that would be better than banishment to the churchyard of Peter Tavy. But he would make sure that he carried with him something of the ancestral land. He crept along the beam, with the rope about his neck, fastened near the middle of the saw-pit, like a dog running to the extent of his chain, and scrabbled up some of the soil, with which he stuffed his ears and his mouth, and filled his hands.

Thus furnished, he stepped back, and again looked down. He did not pray. He had no thought about his soul—about heaven. His mind was fixed on the earth—the earth of Hall, with which he must part, with all but what he held, and with which he had choked his mouth.

"Earth to earth!"

No words of the burial office would be said over him; but what cared he? It would be the earth of Hall that went back to the earth of Hall when he perished and was buried there. His flesh had been nourished by the soil of Hall, his mind had lived on nothing else. He could not speak as his mouth was full. How sweet, how cool tasted that clod upon his tongue under his palate!

Though he could not speak he formed words in his mind, and he said to himself—

"Thrice will I say 'Earth to earth!' and then leap down."

Once the words were said, and now he said them again, in his mind—

"Earth to earth."

There was a large black spider on the oak-tree, running up and down the chopped section, and now, all at once, it dropped, but did not fall—it swung at the end of its silken fibre. Mr. Cleverdon watched it. As the spider dropped, so, in another minute, would he. Then the spider ran up its thread. The old man shook his head. When he fell he would remain there motionless. What then would the spider do? Would it swing and catch at him, and proceed to construct a cobweb between him and the side of the pit? He saw himself thus utilised as a sidestay for a great cobweb, and saw a brown butterfly, with silver underwings, now playing about the pit-mouth, come to the cobweb and be caught in it. He shook his head—he must not yield to these illusions.

"Earth to——"

A hand was laid on his shoulder, an arm put about his waist; he was drawn to the side of the pit, and the rope hastily disengaged from his throat.

With blank, startled eyes old Squire Cleverdon looked on the face of his preserver. It was that of Luke, his nephew.

"Uncle!—dear uncle!"

Luke took the halter, unloosed it from where it had been fastened to the beam, knotted it up, and flung it far away among the bushes.

The old man said nothing, but stood before his nephew with downcast eyes, slightly trembling.

Luke was silent also for some while, allowing the old man to recover himself. Then he took his arm in his own and led him back to the horse.

"Let me alone! Let me go!" said old Cleverdon.

"Uncle, we will go together. I was on my way to you. I had heard in what trouble you were, and I thought it possible I might be of some assistance to you."

"You!" the Squire shook his head. "I want over a thousand pounds at once."

"That I have not got. Can I not help you in any other way?"

"There is no other way."

"What has happened," said Luke, "is by the will of God, and you must accept it, and look to Him to bless your loss to you."

"Ah, you are a parson!" said the old man.

Luke did not urge him to remount his horse. He kept his arm, and helped him along, as though he were conducting a sick man on his walk, till he had conveyed him some distance from the saw-pit. As the Squire's step became firmer, he said,

"A hard trial is laid on you, dear uncle, but you must bear up under it as a man. Do not let folk think that it has broken you down. They will respect you when they see your courage and steadfastness. Put your trust in God, and He will give you in place of Hall something better than that—better a thousand times, which hitherto you have not esteemed."

"What is that?" asked the old man, loosening his arm, standing still, and looking Luke shyly in the face.

"What is that?" repeated Luke. "Wait! Trust in God and see."