How Jack Rattenbury came to Bath must now be told.

Jack had found work, or it had been found for him. Whilst Winefred had been settling into new quarters at Bath he had been finding a temporary home and occupation at Beer. It had come about in this way. He had gone to Mrs. Jose, at Winefred's suggestion, and told her his difficulties, and that kind-hearted woman had induced her brother, James Ford, or, as he was locally termed, Captain Ford, to give him employment in the Beer quarries.

These are excavations extending for a great distance underground in a fine-grained stone composed of carbonate of lime, that cuts like cheese, but hardens on exposure to the air.

The Beer quarries are no scar and disfigurement to the landscape. They produce but little refuse, and that little is rapidly overrun with grass.

In the face of a cliff of white rock gape square openings, and these lead to a labyrinthine underground world, where piers of stone support the upper beds, and every block that is extracted serves for building purposes. The quarries have been worked during many centuries. From them houses, cathedrals, have been built, and yet in outward appearance they are insignificant.

Jack was not employed as a common quarryman, but was given a stool in the office.

No sooner was it settled between him and Captain Ford that he was engaged, than he started for Bindon, as in duty bound, to thank Mrs. Jose for her intervention in his favour.

But as he passed out of the village of Axmouth he saw the farmer's wife in a tax-cart driving down the road with Winefred at her side, and behind was an arched trunk, covered with hair and traced with brass-headed nails, attached to the back of the cart by ropes.

As Mrs. Jose approached he noticed how her fresh face beamed with yellow soap and good-nature. She saw him at once, and drew up.

'Well, Jack, my boy!'

'I have come to thank you,' said he, patting the rough cob. 'You have done me a real good turn, Mrs. Jose, and if your eyes could look down into my heart as they can into sea-water, you would see true gratitude at the bottom.'

'Like a sea-anemone, open and asking for more,' said Winefred.

'Not another word,' said the good woman, ignoring the girl's malicious aside. 'I am putting both of you out in the world, both you and Winefred. One is as much indebted as the other. Her I am taking to Bath, you I have disposed of at Beer. Well, good luck attend you, my boy; you have my best wishes—and luck will come to you if you are steady. That is my doctrine. Gee-up, Robin!'

But he would not let go the cob. He held the rein whilst he renewed his thanks. Then the jolly woman became impatient and cracked her whip. 'Have done,' said she. 'You cannot thank me better than by remaining where you are and profiting by your position. Now, Jack, say good-bye to Winefred and wish her luck, as she wishes it for you.'

Winefred looked at him without a word, and this paralysed his tongue.

Mrs. Jose waited for a moment, but as neither spoke she drove on with an impatient lifting of the elbows.

Jack looked after the trap, but Winefred did not turn her head to give him a parting salute and kindly look.

'She might have been more gracious,' he said, 'but one cannot gather figs off thistles. She hates me, moreover, for all the contradictions she has had to endure, and the sours she has been forced to swallow because of that nonsense about my father's savings.'

He walked away, reached the ferry, and hailed Olver to take him across.

Dench was profuse in his expressions of regret at losing the society of the young man. Jack said a word of civility in response. He disliked and mistrusted the man, and was glad to be rid of his company. Nevertheless, the fellow had been a comrade of his father, and Jack had lived with him since the death of his father, and he accordingly did feel some regret at parting with Olver, though it was a regret largely qualified with relief.

'Come, lad!' said the ferryman. 'Let us go to the Lion. We will have a glass to your good fortune.'

Jack could not refuse. He shouldered his bundle and accompanied the elder man into the village of Seaton, and with him entered the public-house kept by Mrs. Warne.

But when there, he was unable to talk, his heart was troubled, his mind engaged. He was thinking of the girl Winefred and of her ill-humour, rather than of his new start in life.

Happily for him there were others in the house at their beer, and with them Dench fell into talk. Jack sipped at his glass, looking dreamily before him.

'This is a poor beginning,' said Dench, presently noticing how absent the lad was. 'It is not what the captain would have liked—ah! there was a man if you will. He'd have said, "You were not chipped off the old block, but whittled out of the soft wood of your mother." He would have had you take to a more stirring life and one connected with the salt water.'

'A man must take, in these times, whatsoever offers,' answered Jack. 'I have been sufficiently long out of work to take up any work with relish.'

'But you need not have been without a job,' said Dench, with a wink to his fellows at his table.

'I could get none that suited me.'

'Well! There is no more understanding the fancies of boys than the whimsies of girls. There is Winefred Marley, or as she is pleased to call herself, Holwood, gone off to be a fine lady at Bath. We shall hear next of her marrying some fine gentleman, and when he comes to learn who and what she is, there will be the deuce to pay. However, she has a tongue that can parry as well as lunge.'

Jack stood up.

'I cannot remain here,' he said. 'I have no stomach for ale; moreover, Captain Ford expects me at Beer.'

'Well, go along with you, boy, and may you soon sicken of sawing stone and take to cutting the waves.'

Beer village or hamlet was to be reached by one or two ways. There was the road, which was the shortest, that ran along a dip in the land, between green hedges; and there was the way by the White Cliff, that was pleasantest but longest. Jack chose the latter, solely because it was unfrequented, and in his then mood he was indisposed for conversation.

What ailed him?

He had at length obtained that for which he had been in search, and for which he had chafed: work, and work eminently suitable, work, moreover, sufficiently well paid to support him. He was entering the service of a master who, if he possessed a tithe of his sister's good qualities, would be to him a friend and a father. He had accordingly every reason to be elated. On the contrary he was depressed.

What ailed him?

Undoubtedly he felt his loneliness, yet he was not so lonely as he had been, for Mrs. Jose had been a good friend to him, and had enlisted for him the sympathies of her brother. There is such a sensation in a young breast as home-sickness without a home for which to be sick; it is a vague yearning and regret after something unknown, undefined.

The young spirit is like young wheat—it grows weak, watery, yellow, there has been overmuch rain, overmuch cold. All it needs is the sun.

That which burrowed in his heart like a mole was the thought of Winefred's treatment of him. He could understand that there was occasion for it. On his account she and her mother had suffered great annoyance, had undergone wounding suspicion. They had been sent to Coventry by the neighbourhood. Winefred was sensitive to the slights she had encountered, and held him to have been prime mover in the combination against her mother and herself. It was natural that she should regard him with resentment, and yet, that she should do so, knowing as he did that he had personally done nothing to stir up the hostile feeling against her and her mother, distressed him greatly.

Now that Winefred had departed he ought to have felt relieved. There was no further chance of an encounter in which he always came off worsted. Yet he was not so.

In all likelihood he would see Winefred no more. She had gone to Bath; there she would make new friends, form new associations, and forget Axmouth and its vexations together with those who had occasioned them. This, again, should have relieved his mind; on the contrary, it depressed it further.

Certainly he was unhappy, without being able to account for his unhappiness. What was Winefred to him but one with whom he measured swords whenever they met? What could Winefred be to him in the future? A recollection, an unpleasant one, and nothing other. Why did he think of her? Why did her angry eyes haunt his soul? Why did her stabbing words still make his heart tingle?

He seated himself on the chalk cliff above the harbour of Beer, this latter a snip taken by the sea out of the soft and crumbling rocks.

The choughs were flying beneath his feet, building in the crags that overhung the beach.

Below was the pebble strand. Boats were drawn up on it. A thread of weed marked the retreat of the tide from the shore, a fringe of foam on the grey water a few yards from the land told also that the sea was in ebb.

Gulls chattered and fluttered and dropped to secure some little fish left stranded. The evening was closing in, and a pale light hung over the sea, that looked dull as lead, but gave to the chalk cliffs a moonlight whiteness.

At the flagstaff where the Beer streamlet trickled into the shingle and lost itself were fisher lads congregated in idleness. When nothing can be done at sea, none more listless, inert, pictures of dolce far niente than those who live by the harvest of the water. They will occupy a bench by the harbour hour after hour, smoking, occasionally talking, but doing absolutely nothing with hand or foot or brain.

These fisher lads, several hundred feet below where sat Jack, were chattering, laughing, and sometimes singing.

Then a boy's clear voice sounded:

Then the boys burst out laughing, and there was a chatter as of birds, so that the singer was not suffered to finish his ballad.

They all belonged to an age at which the emotions, the pangs of love, were unfelt, and a song that expressed them touched no fibre in the soul.

But it was other with Jack. He knew the song, and his lips moved as he completed it, and his mind travelled away, not seaward but overland.

He remained some time on the cliff, but finally shook himself, picked up his bundle and descended into Beer.

He had taken lodgings with a widow at the higher end of the village, in a picturesque cottage that leaned against the hill and faced every way except into the rock against which it leaned.

This was near his work and away from the harbour, a double advantage, as he was not favourably eyed by the boatmen, who regarded him as a deserter from the cause of free trade, and as weak-spirited in abandoning a life of adventure for an office stool. Not only could he go to his work from the cottage without running the gauntlet of the inhabitants of the village, but he was also able with the same immunity to go to Seaton or ramble on the cliffs. Jack was not timid, but every lad is thin-skinned and sensitive to ridicule, and when it was possible to avoid unpleasantness he very judiciously did so.

He had been resident in Beer before; put there by his ambitious father to be educated by the curate, so that he had many acquaintances in the place, but in his then temper of mind he preferred solitude; and in the evenings, when his work was over, in place of looking up friends in their homes, at the harbour, or in the public-house, he preferred to saunter alone on the downs. His friend and teacher, the curate, had recently departed to another cure.

When he rambled on the headland he often stood looking south, where sea and sky melted into each other in the evening haze, and his thoughts, his desires were altogether as indefinite as was that horizon.

He was angry with himself for thinking of Winefred. The sense of his folly in caring for her was as a hot coal in his heart that he laboured to eject, but always ineffectually.

If he sat on the top of the White Cliff his eyes often turned in the direction of Bindon Undercliff, though Winefred, as he knew well enough, was not there; yet there were spots there associated with her in his memory.

No single lad of Axmouth or Beer had any suspicion of what passed in his mind. None would have credited it, had they been assured that he who had been robbed by Winefred's mother had set his heart on the girl.

Moreover, in the opinion of these lads there was nothing to attract in Miss Winefred, except her money, and that was ill-gotten. The rustic youth has not a discriminating eye for beauty. He is blind to those points and lines and colours which draw the admiration of the man with the artistic faculty. In the country the ugly girl stands as good a chance of securing a lover as does a beauty, if only she possess an attractive character and pleasant ways. The shy mind of the peasant boy starts back from the ready wit and the nimble tongue. That Winefred was good-looking would have been admitted with listless indifference; that she was a spiteful minx was a conclusion to which all would have leaped and to which held. A bumpkin would handle the girl ready at repartee with as great reluctance as a fisherman would handle an electric eel.

On Sunday Jack had an excuse for crossing the water. He must see Mrs. Jose and report to her how he got on.

But when he was on the farther bank of the Axe, he bent his steps first of all to the Undercliff, to the elder-bushes, where he had retained Winefred from falling over the precipice, to the gate where she had kept him at a distance with a twig of thorns, to the slit in the barn wall through which he had watched her at the dance; and only finally did he enter the farmhouse and present himself before Mrs. Jose.

She had much to relate about Bath, and its beauties, about the splendours of the Tomkin-Jones mansion, about the cordiality of her reception, and about the prospects that opened before Winefred.

Jack listened in silence. It pleased him to hear about Winefred, yet it was a pleasure fraught with pain, for it riveted in him the conviction that he and she were parted not so much by space as by the wider separation of social standing.

And yet, what did he want with her?

Nothing could come of his fancy, even were Winefred to lay aside her dislike for him. But he knew, too surely, that she hated him. When they had met, they were like two goats on a plank, clashing horns.

A couple of weeks later Captain Ford said to Jack, 'My lad, I have an errand for you. I can't go myself. You must do the job for me. Borrow as many eyes as there are in a peacock's tail, and use every one. I want you to go to Bath. They tell me that there they saw the stone. It is harder than ours, but it is done, I believe, by water power. Make pencil notes of all particulars, and if the outlay be not too great, as it need not be if you bring every contrivance away with you in your head or on paper, and we can rig up the concern with our own workmen, we shall save a lot of cost and time.'

Jack flushed with delight, but that delight soon gave way to anxiety. He might, indeed, see Winefred, but only to discover how much further she was removed from him at Bath than she had been at Bindon. Then only the Axe had flowed between, and a current of prejudice. He might find that a mightier stream was parting them, and one that was to him impossible to cross.

'I wish first to go to Bindon,' said Jack. 'Mrs. Jose may have some message to her cousins at Bath.'

'Right,' said Captain Ford. 'I suppose you cannot see Mrs. Marley, and learn if she has anything for her child?'

Jack shook his head.

'No,' said the captain, 'I reckon not. You ain't on speaking terms. Communication made must be through Eliza Jose.'