"Miss Marvin, does 'yestreen' mean 'last night'?"

"It does."

"Then I wish the fellow would say 'last night,'" grumbled Master Calvin. "And how could the new moon have the old moon in her arm?"

Hester explained.

"But moons haven't arms." He pushed the book away pettishly. "I hate this poetry! Why can't you teach me what I want?"

"That," said Hester, "is just what I am trying to discover. Will you tell me what you want?"

To her amazement, he bent his head down upon his arms and broke into sobbing. "I don't know what I want! Everyone hates me, and I—I hate it all!"

Somehow, Hester—who had started by misliking the child, and only with the gravest misgivings (yielding to pressure from his father) had consented to teach him in her spare hours—was beginning to pity him. This new feeling, to be sure, suffered from severe and constant checks; for he was unamiable to the last degree, and seldom awoke a spark of liking but he killed it again, and within five minutes, by doing or saying something odious. He differed from other children, and differed unpleasantly. He had taken the full tinge of his sanctimonious upbringing; he was pharisaical, cruel at times, incurably twisted by his father's creed that wrong becomes right when committed by a pious person from pious motives. (His mother had once destroyed a cat because she found herself growing fond of it and believed that a Christian's soul must be weaned of all earthly affections.) He appealed to Hester's pity because, with all this, he was unhappy.

She had been teaching him languidly and inattentively to-day, being preoccupied with a letter in her pocket; and to this letter, having set him to learn his verses from Sir Patrick Spens, she let her thoughts wander. It ran:—

"My dear Miss Marvin,—After much hesitation I have decided to commit to writing a proposal which has been ripening in my mind during our three months' acquaintance. My age and my convictions alike disincline me to set too much store on the emotion men call 'love,' which in my experience is illusory as the attractions provoking it are superficial. But as a solitary man I have long sighed for the blessings of Christian companionship, or a union founded on mutual esteem and fruitful in well-doing. While from the first not insensible to your charms of person, I have allowed my inclination to grow because I detected in you the superior graces of the mind and a strength of character which could not be other than sustaining to the man fortunate enough to possess you for a helpmeet. In short, my dear Miss Marvin, you would gratify me in the highest degree by consenting to be Mrs. R. I am, as you are probably aware, well-to-do. The circumstances of my being a widower will not, I hope, weigh seriously against this proposal in the mind of one who, while retaining the personal attractions above mentioned, may be reasonably supposed to have set aside the romantic illusions of girlhood. Awaiting your reply, which I trust may be favourable, I remain, yours very truly,"
"S. Rosewarne."
"P.S.—Your exceptional gifts in the handling of children assure me that my son Calvin would receive from you a care no less than motherly. He would meet it, I feel equally sure, with a responsive affection."

The tone of this letter made Hester tingle as if some of its phrases had been thongs to scourge her.

Yet it must be answered.

That this odious man should have dared—and yet for weeks she had seen it coming. Incredible as she found it that a man from whom every nerve of her body recoiled with loathing should complacently ignore the signs, should complacently persevere in assuming himself to be agreeable and in pressing that assumption, she had to admit that the offer did not take her wholly by surprise. What bruised her was the insufferable obtuseness of the wording. How was it possible for a human being to sit down in good faith and pen such sentences without guessing that they hurt or insulted?

Nevertheless she blessed the impulse which had prompted him to write; for in writing he could be answered. All day she had gone in dread of meeting him face to face.

Once or twice, while she pondered her answer, she had glanced up at the child, as if he could explain his father. What fatal unhappy gift had they both, by which in all that they said or did they earned aversion?

When the child broke down, she arose with a pang of self-reproach, crossed to his chair, and laid a hand on his shoulder.

"Listen to me, Calvin," she said. "You have told me one thing you want: you want people to like instead of disliking you. Well, the quickest way is to find out what they want, and do it, forgetting yourself; and then, perhaps quite suddenly, you will wake up and discover not only that people like you already, but that you yourself are full of a happiness you can't explain."

The gust of his sobbing grew calmer by degrees. He lifted his head a little, but not to look her in the face.

"Is that puzzling to you?" she asked. "Well, then, just give it a small trial in practice, and see how it works. I want you, for instance, to learn those verses. You don't like them; but by learning them you will please me, and you want to please me. Try now!"

He pulled the book towards him and bent over it, his head between his hands. After three or four minutes he stood up, red-eyed and a little defiant—

"'I saw the new moon late yestreen,
Wi' the auld moon in her arm;
And if we gang to sea, master,
I fear we'll come to harm.'"

"They hadna sail'd a league, a league,
A league but barely ane—"

Hester listened with eyes withdrawn, in delicacy avoiding to meet his tear-reddened ones; and just then from the upper floor a scream rang through the house—a child's scream.

Master Calvin heard it, and broke off with a grin.

"That will be Myra," he announced. "She's catching it!"

Had she been less distraught, Hester might have marked and sighed over his sudden relapse into odiousness. But she had risen with a white face; for scream folllowed scream overhead, and the sound tortured her.

"You don't tell me,"—she began, putting up both hands to her ears. "No, no—there has been some accident! The poor child is calling for help!"

She ran out of the parlour, up the two flights of stairs and along a dark winding corridor, still guided by the screams. At the end of the corridor she found Susannah, pale, wringing her hands, outside a door which, however, she made no attempt to enter.

"Oh, miss, he's killing her!"

"Is the door locked?" panted Hester, at the same time flinging her weight against it as she turned the handle. It flew open, and she confronted— not Myra, but Mr. Sam.

He stood between her and the window with an arm uplifted and in his hand a leathern strap; and while she recoiled for an instant, the strap descended across the naked back and shoulders of little Clem, who drooped under it with bowed knees, helpless, his arms extended, his wrists bound together and lashed to the bed-post. The child made no sound. The piercing screams came not from him, but from an inner room—Myra's bedroom—and from behind a closed door.

"You shall not!" Hester flung herself forward, shielding the child from another blow. "Oh, what wickedness are you doing! What horrible wickedness!"

Mr. Sam had raised his arm again. The man indeed seemed to be transported with passion, with sheer lust of cruelty. It is doubtful if he had heard her enter. His dark face twitched distortedly in the fading light.

"I'll teach him—I'll teach him!" he panted.

"You shall not!" Hester, covering the child's limp body, could not see his face, but her eyes fell on his little shirt, ripped from neckband to flap, and lying on the floor as it had been torn from his body and tossed aside. She called to Susannah, still lingering doubtfully outside upon the mat, and pointed to the door behind Mr. Sam. Susannah plucked up courage, stepped across and turned the key. An instant later, like a small wild beast uncaged, Myra came springing and crouched beside her brother, facing his tormentor with blazing eyes.

Hester, catching sight of the housekeeper's scissors which Susannah wore at her waist, motioned to her to cut the cords binding Clem's wrists. Mr. Sam made no effort to oppose her, but stood panting, with one hand resting on the dressing-table. Susannah managed indeed to detach the scissors, but held them out falteringly, as though in sheer terror declining all responsibility.

"Give them to me, then."

But as Susannah held them out Myra leapt up and, snatching them, dashed upon her uncle. His hand still rested palm downwards on the dressing-table, and she struck at it. Undoubtedly the child would have stabbed it through—for, strange to say, he made no effort to fend her off or to avoid the stroke—had not Hester run in time to push her smartly by the shoulder in the very act of striking. As it was the scissor-point drove into the table, missing him by a bare two inches. Then and then only he lifted his hand and stared at it stupidly. He seemed about to speak, but turned with a click of the throat—a queer dry sound, as though a sudden thirst parched him—and walked heavily from the room. Hester gazed after him and back at the scissors on the dressing-table. She was reaching forward to pick them up when a cry from Susannah bade her hurry. Clem had fainted, his legs doubled beneath him, his head falling horribly back from his upstretched arms, which still, like ropes, held him fast to the bed-post.

Twenty minutes later Hester descended the stairs. Clem was in bed with his sister's arms about him; and Myra's last look at parting had been one of dumb gratitude, pitifully asking pardon for old jealousies, old misunderstandings. At any other time Hester would have rejoiced over the winning of a friend.

But the sight of the weals on Clem's back had for the moment killed all feeling in her but disgust and horror. So deep was her disgust that the sight of Master Calvin, whom she surprised in the act of listening outside the door, scarcely ruffled it afresh. So complete was her horror that it left no room for astonishment when, reaching the foot of the stairs, she found Mr. Sam himself lingering in the hall, apparently awaiting her.

She walked past him with set face. All the smooth, pietistic phrases of his letter rang a chime in her brain, to be retorted upon him as soon as he dared to speak. But he did not speak. He looked up, as if awaiting her; took half a step forward; then drew aside and let her pass. She went by with set face, not sparing a look for him. In the open air she drew a long breath.

Above all things she desired to consult with Peter Benny. In this there was nothing surprising, for everyone in trouble went to Peter Benny. He himself—honest man—had to admit that the number of confidences which came his way were, no doubt, extraordinary. He explained it on the simple ground that he wrote letters for seamen and made it a rule never to divulge their secrets. "Not that anyone would dream of it," he added; "but my secrecy, happening to be professional, gets its credit advertised."

It appeared that these professional duties were heavier than usual to-night. At any rate, when Hester reached the little cottage by the quayside, it was to find that he had made a hasty tea and departed for the office. In her urgency, after merely telling Mrs. Benny that she would be back in a few minutes, Hester ran down the court to the office, tapped hurriedly at the door, and pushed it open.

Within, with his back towards her, erect and naked to the waist under the rays of an oil lamp swinging from the beam, stood a young man. The light falling on his firm shoulders and the muscles along his spine showed the gleaming flesh tattooed with interwoven patterns, delicate as lacework; and in the midst, reaching from shoulder-blade to shoulder-blade, a bright blue tree with a cross above, and beneath it, the figures of Adam and Eve.

As she drew back, Mr. Benny, on the far side of the office, raised his eyes from a table over which he bent to dip a needle in a saucer of Indian ink; and at the same moment the young man under the lamp, suddenly aware of a visitor, faced about with a shy laugh. It was Tom Trevarthen. Hester, with a short cry of dismay, backed into the darkness, shutting the door as she retreated. When Mr. Benny returned to supper he forbore from alluding to the incident until Hester—her trouble still unconfided—shook hands with him for the night.

"I've heard," he said, "folks laugh at sailors for tattooing themselves. But 'tis done in case they're drowned, that their bodies may be known; and, if you look at that, 'tis a sacrament surely."

That night Hester awoke from a terrifying dream; and still, as she dreamed again, she saw a lash descending on a child's naked back, leaving at each stroke the mark of a cross interwoven with a strange and delicate pattern; and at each stroke heard a girl's voice which screamed, "It is a sacrament!"

CHAPTER XXI.

MR. BENNY GETS PROMOTION.

Early next morning, having bound Mr. Benny to secrecy, she told him the whole story. At first his face merely expressed horror; but by and by his forehead lost its puckers. When she had done, his first comment took her fairly aback.

"Ay," said he, "I'd half guessed it a'ready. The poor creature's afflicted. It don't stand in nature for a man to deal around cruelty as he's been doing unless his brain is touched."

"Afflicted is he?" Hester answered indignantly. "I'm afraid I keep all my pity for those he afflicts."

"Then you do wrong," replied Mr. Benny, with much gravity. "That man wants help if ever a man did."

"He will get none from me, then," she said, and flushed, remembering the proposal in her pocket. "I won't endure the sight of him, after yesterday's work. I have written a letter resigning my teachership." "That isn't like you, somehow." Mr. Benny stood musing.

"Of course," she went on hastily, "I don't give my real reasons. The letter is addressed to you as Clerk, and you will have to read it to the Board. I am ready to fill the post until another teacher can be found."

"It seemed to me, some while ago, that Mr. Samuel had a fancy for you. Maybe I'm wrong, my dear; but you won't mind my speaking frankly. And if I'm right, and he has begun pestering you, I can't blame you for resigning. The man isn't safe."

His look carried interrogation at once shy and fatherly. She forced herself to meet his eyes and nod the answer which her cheeks already published.

"It is hateful," she murmured. "Yes, he asked me to marry him."

"I told you he was afflicted," said Mr. Benny, still with simple seriousness; then, catching a sudden twinkle in her eyes, "Eh? What did I say? My dear, I didn't mean it that way!"

Mr. Benny had judged at once more charitably and more correctly than Hester. Had she looked up yesterday when she passed Mr. Sam at the foot of the stairs, she might have guessed the truth from his face.

The man was afflicted, and knew it; had suddenly discovered it, and was afraid of himself—for the moment, abjectly afraid. All his life he had been nursing a devil, feeding it on religion, clothing it in self-righteousness, so carefully touching up its toilet that it passed for saint rather than devil—especially in his own eyes, trained as they were in self-deception. For every action, mean or illiberal or tricky or downright cruel, he had a justificatory text; for his few defeats a constant salve in the thought that his vanquishers were carnal men, sons of Belial, and would find, themselves in hell some day. He was Dives or Lazarus as occasion served. If a plan miscarried, the Lord was chastening him; if, as oftener happened, it went prosperously, the Lord was looking after His own; but always the plan itself, being his plan, was certainly righteous, because he was a righteous man. A good tree could not bring forth evil fruit.

But all this while the devil had been growing fat and strong; and now on a sudden it had burst forth like a giant, mad, uncontrollable, flinging away disguise, a devil for all to see. There was no text, even in Solomon, which could be stretched to excuse tying up a small blind child and flogging him with a belt. He had done a thing for which men go to prison. Worse, he had not been far from a crime for which the law puts men to death. In his rage he had been absolutely blind, each blow deadening prudence, calling for another blow. If Hester Marvin had not run in, where would he have ended?

It happened to him now as it has happened to many a man fed upon conventional religion and accustomed to walk an aisle in public and eminent godliness. In the moment that he overbalanced public approval his whole edifice crumbled and collapsed, leaving him no stay. He was down from his eminence—down with the wild beasts; and among them the worst was the wild beast within him.

He had not philosophy enough even to render account with himself why he hated the small blind child. One reason, and perhaps the chief, was that he had already injured Clem; another, that Clem stood all unconsciously between his conscience and his son Calvin. In his fashion Mr. Sam loved his son, doomed to suffer, if the truth should ever be known, for his father's bastardy. But—to his credit perhaps—Mr. Sam forgot all excuses in sheer terror of himself; terror less of what he had done than of what he might hereafter do.

In panic of that devil he had placed himself in Hester's way, hoping against hope that she might help. He had built some hopes on her, and now in an hour or two all these hopes were merged in a desperate appeal to be saved from himself. He almost forgot that he had written asking her to be his wife; he could think only that she might possibly be his salvation. But Hester had passed him by without a glance. After this, meaning no cruelty at all, but merely from the instinct of self-preservation (than which nothing is crueller), he did, as will be seen, the cruellest deed of his life.

Mr. Benny was one of those rare souls who never dream of asking a favour for themselves, but can be shamelessly importunate on behalf of a fellow-creature. On receipt of Hester's resignation, which she submitted to him first in private and then sent to him formally through the post, he panted up the hill to seek an interview with Sir George Dinham.

"Dear me!" said Sir George; "it happens oddly that I was on the point of sending for you for the first time; and yet you have been my tenant for close upon twenty years, I believe?"

Mr. Benny might have seized the occasion to urge that his roof leaked and the quay wall beneath his office badly needed repointing. For years he had submissively relieved Sir George of these and other repairs. But he had come to engage Sir George's interest for Miss Marvin, a young person who had just thrown up her position as schoolmistress across the water, in circumstances perfectly honourable to her. Sir George, perhaps, would not press to know what those circumstances were; but Mr. Benny had chanced to hear that the Matron of the Widows' Almshouses had earned her pension and was resigning, and he ventured to recommend Miss Marvin for the post.

"And that again is odd," said Sir George, "for I was wondering if the situation would be agreeable to her."

Mr. Benny could scarcely believe his ears.

"But I think," pursued Sir George, "we had better take one thing at a time; and I wish to get the first job off my hands, because, strictly speaking, it is not my business. Lady Killiow (as you may have heard) requires a new steward, and has commissioned me to choose him for her. I had thought of you, Mr. Benny."

"Sir George!"

"Why not? You were clerk to the late Mr. Rosewarne and enjoyed his confidence, I believe?"

"Sir George—Sir George!" Mr. Benny could only repeat with stammering lips. If, a while ago, he could not believe his ears, just now he felt as if the sky were tumbling about them.

"There, my friend, go home and think it over. If you think well of the offer, be at the ferry at nine o'clock to-morrow. I will meet you there with the dogcart, and we can talk matters over on our way to Damelioc. From Damelioc, after your interview with Lady Killiow, we will drive straight to Bodmin; for I think you may be able to guess the first task she will lay upon you as her steward."

But Mr. Benny was too far bewildered.

"She will ask you, if I am not mistaken, to make arrangements for bringing home old Nicholas Vro's body and burying him where, as he would have said, he belongs to lie—in his own parish churchyard. There are no relatives to be consulted?"

"Neither chick nor child, kith nor kin, Sir George."

"God forgive me, I had come near saying 'so much the better.' Lady Killiow is a proud woman, as you know, and of a pride that would rejoice in bearing the fullest blame and making fullest amends. But her friends can only be glad to get this scandal over and as quietly as may be. I have written for the necessary order."

Once before we have seen Mr. Benny tempted to keep a secret from his wife. This time he would have told, but could not. He sat down to tea with a choking breast and a heart so big within him that it left no room for food. He strove to eat, but could get no morsel past his lips. At one moment the news seemed to bubble up within him, and his mouth opened to shout it aloud; the next, his courage failed at his own vaunting thoughts, and he reached a hand down to the table-leg, to 'touch wood,' as humble men do to avert Nemesis if by chance they have let slip a boastful word. Once he laughed outright, wildly, at nothing whatever.

Nuncey set down the teapot and eyed her parent with a puzzled frown. That frown had sat too often on her cheerful face during the past three months. In truth, Mr. Benny as a regrater fell disastrously short of success, being prone to sell at monstrous overweights, which ate up the profits. When Nuncey at length forbade him to touch the scales, he gave away apples to every child that chose to edge around the tail of the cart.

"There's something wrong with father to-night," she said. "He's like a thing hurried-in-mind. What's up with 'ee, my dear?—is it verses?" She paused with a sudden dark suspicion. "I see'd William Badgery walkin' after you down the street. Don't tell me you've let 'en persuade you into buying that lot of eggs he was preachin' up for fresh? for, if you have, I get no shoes this Christmas—that's all. Fresh? He've been salting them down these three months, against the Christmas prices, and no size in 'em to start with. I wouldn't sell 'em for sixpence the dozen."

"Shoes?" Good Lord, what a question these boots and shoes had been for all these years! Never a Saturday came round (it seemed to him) but one or other of the family wanted soleing or heeling. And henceforth they could all have shoes to their heart's content—and frocks—and new suits— and meat on the table without stint—

He set down his cup and rose hurriedly. In the act of pushing back his chair he met his wife's eyes. They were watching him with anxious concern—not with apparent love; but he alone knew what love lay behind that look which once or twice of late he had surprised in them. His own filled with sudden tears. No, he could not tell her now. To-night, perhaps, when he and she were alone, he would tell her, as so often he had told his worries and listened to hers. He dashed his frayed cuff across his eyes and fairly bolted from the room.

"It's about Nicky Vro that he's troublin'," said Mrs. Benny. "Terrible soft-hearted he is; but you ought to know your father better by this time than to upset 'en so."

An hour later word came to Hester—it was Shake who brought it—that Mr. Benny would be glad to see her in the office. She obeyed at once, albeit with some trepidation when she came to mount the steps and tap at the door. She had learnt, however, from Nuncey that certain nights were set aside for tattooing. Doubtless this would not be one of them.

Four seamen sat within by the stove and under the light of the swinging lamp, smoking, patiently awaiting their turn. In the fog of tobacco smoke, which almost took Hester's breath away, they rose politely and saluted her. Big, shy boys they seemed to her, with the whites of their eyes extraordinarily clear against their swarthy complexions. Somehow she felt at home with them instantly, and no more afraid than if they had been children in her school.

One of them called Mr. Benny from the tiny inner office, or cupboard, where he conducted his confidential business, and the little man came running out in a flurry with one hand grasping a handkerchief and the other nervously thrust in his dishevelled hair.

"You will forgive me, my dear, for sending? The truth is, I am at my wits' end to-night and cannot concentrate myself. I have heard news to-day—no, nothing to distress me—on the contrary."—He gazed round helplessly. "It has upset me, though. I was wondering if you will be very kind and help me?"

"Help you?" echoed Hester. "Oh, Mr. Benny, you surely don't ask me to write your letters for you!"

"Not if you would find it distasteful, my dear."

"But I don't know; I assure you I haven't an idea how to do it!"

"You would find it come easy, for that matter." Mr. Benny drew a quill pen from behind his right ear, eyed its point dejectedly for a moment, and replaced it. "But, of course, if you feel like that, we'll say no more about it, and I'm sorry to have troubled you."

"If it's merely writing down from dictation—"

"You will find it a little more than that," Mr. Benny admitted.

Hester looked around on the faces of the seamen. They said nothing; they even watched her with sympathy, as though, while dumbly backing Mr. Benny's petition, they felt him to be asking too much; yet she divined that they were disappointed.

"I will try," she said with sudden resolve, and their approving murmur at once rewarded her. "Only you must be patient, and forgive my mistakes."

"That's a very good lass," said one of them aloud, as Mr. Benny shook her by the hand and led her triumphantly to the little inner office. Hester heard the words, and in spite of nervousness was glad that she had chosen to be brave.

The inner office contained a desk, a stool, and a deal chair. These, with a swinging lamp, a shelf of books, and a Band of Hope Almanack, completed its furniture. Indeed, it had room for no more, and its narrow dimensions were dwarfed just now by an enormous black-bearded seaman seated in the chair by the window, which stood open to the darkness. Although the month was December, the wind blew softly from the southwest, and night had closed in with a fine warm drizzle of rain. Beyond the window the riding-lights of the vessels at anchor shone across the gently heaving tide.

The black-bearded seaman made a motion to rise, but realising that this would seriously displace the furniture, contented himself with a 'Good-evening, miss,' and dropped back in his seat.

"Good-evening," answered Hester. "Mr. Benny here has asked me to take his place. I hope you don't mind?"

"Lord bless you, I like it."

"But I shall make a poor hand of it, I'm afraid."

The man eyed her solemnly for five or six seconds, slowly turned the quid of tobacco in his cheek, and spat out of window. "We'll get along famous," he said.

"He likes the window open," explained Mr. Benny, "because—"

"I see." Hester nodded.

"But I'll run and fetch a cloak for you." Without waiting for an answer, Mr. Benny hurried from the office.

To be deserted thus was more than Hester had bargained for, and for a moment she felt helplessly dismayed. A sheet of paper, half-covered with writing, lay on the desk, and she put out a hand for it.

"Is this your letter? Perhaps you'll allow me to read it and see how far you and Mr. Benny have gone."

"That's the way. Only you mustn' give me no credit for it: I sits and looks on. 'Never take a hand in a business you don't know'—that's my motto."

Hester wished devoutly that it had also been hers. She picked up the paper and read—

"Dear Wife,—This comes hoping to find you in health as it leaves me at present, and the children hearty. We made a good passage, and arrived at Troy on the 14th inst., a romantic little harbour picturesquely situated on the south coast of Cornwall. Once a flourishing port, second only to London and Bristol, and still retaining in its ivy-clad fort some vestiges of its former glories, it requires the eye of imagination to summon back the days when (as Hals tells us) it manned and sent forth more than forty ships to the siege of Calais, A.D. 1347—"

Hester glanced at her client dubiously.

"That's all right, ain't it?" he asked.

"Ye—es." "Far as I remember, it tallies with the last letter he fixed up for me. Something about 'grey old walls' there was, too."

"Yes, that comes two sentences below—

"Confronted with these evidences of decay, the visitor instinctively exclaims to himself, 'If these grey old walls could speak, what a tale might they not unfold!'—"

"So he've put that in again? There's what you might call a sameness about Benny, though he do write different to anybody else."

"And here are more dates, and an epitaph from one of the tombstones in the churchyard! Indeed, Mr."—

"Salt. Tobias Salt—and by natur'."

"Indeed, Mr. Salt, I can't write a letter like this. To begin with, I haven't the knowledge."

"The Lord forbid!"

"But I suppose your wife likes to read about these things?"

"She can't read a word, bless you. She gets the parson to spell it out to her, or the seamen's missionary. Yarmouth our home is."

"She likes to hear about them, then?"

"What? Sarah? Lord love ye, miss, you should see the woman!" Mr. Salt chuckled heavily, and wound up by sending a squirt of tobacco-juice out into darkness. "Mother of eight children, she is, and makes 'em toe the mark at school and Sunday school. A woman like that don't bother about grey old walls."

"You are proud of her, I see."

"Ought to be, I reckon. Why, to-day she can pick up two three-gallon pitchers o' water and heft 'em along for a mile and more without turning a hair."

"And the children? How old are they?"

"Eldest just turned eleven."

"Why, then he must be able to read?"

"'Tisn't a he, 'tis a her. Ay, I reckon 'Melia Jane should read well before this."

Hester took a fresh sheet of paper and began to write.

"Listen to this, please," she said after a few sentences, "and tell me if it will do—"

"Dear Wife,—This comes hoping to find you in health, as it leaves me at present, and the children hearty. I am sending this from Troy, and I daresay you will take it to some friend to read; but tell Amelia Jane, with my love, that in future she shall read her father's letters to you. She must be getting a scholar by this time; and if there's anything she can't explain, why you can take it to a friend afterwards. We reached this port last Tuesday (the 14th) after a good passage—"

"Now tell me about your passage, please."

At first Mr. Salt could only tell her that the passage had been a good one, as passages go. But by feeding him with a suggestion or two, as men feed a pump with a little water to make it work, by and by she found herself listening to information in a flood. Now and then she interposed a question, asking mainly about his wife and the home at Yarmouth. She had picked up her pen again, and he, absorbed in his confidences, did not perceive at what a rate she was making it travel over the paper.

The door opened, and Mr. Benny reappeared with a shawl on his arm. He glanced around nervously. "Mr. Salt, Mr. Salt! I put it to you, this isn't quite fair. A fine talk I can hear you're having; but our friends outside are getting impatient, and want to know when you'll let Miss Marvin begin."

"All right, boss. I've had a yarn here that's worth all the money. Here's your shilling for it, and the letter can stand over till to-morrow."

"But I've written it!" Hester exclaimed.

"Written it!" Mr. Salt's jaw dropped in amazement.

"I don't know if it will do. Shall I read it over?"

"Well, but this beats conjuring!" The reading ended, Mr. Salt slapped his massive thigh.

"You have done very well, my dear," said Mr. Benny; "very well indeed. You have caught, as I might say, the note. Now I myself have great difficulty in being literary and at the same time catching the note."

There was something in the little man's confession—so modest, so generous withal—which drew tears to her eyes, though her own elation may have had some share in them.

"Though there's one thing she've forgotten," said Mr. Salt, with a twinkle. "My poor Sarah will get shock enough over this letter as 'tis; but she'll get a worse one if we leave out the money order."

The order having been made out in form, ready for him to take to the post office, Mr. Salt bade farewell. They could hear him extolling, on his way through the outer office, the talent of the operator within.

"I feel like a dentist!" whispered Hester, turning to Mr. Benny with a smile. The little man was looking at her wistfully.

"Shall I call in the next?" he asked. "I am afraid, my dear, you are finding this a longer job than you bargained for."

"But I am enjoying it," she protested. "That is, if—Mr. Benny, you are not annoyed by his foolish praises?"

"My dear," he answered gravely, "they say that all literary persons are jealous. If I were jealous it would not be because Mr. Salt praised you, but because my own sense tells me that you do better than I what I have been doing for twenty years."

"If you feel like that, I won't write another letter," declared Hester.

"That would be very foolish, my dear. And now I will tell you another thing. Suppose that this discovery hurt me a little, yet see how good God is in keeping back all these years until a moment when my heart happens to be so full of good news that it forgets the soreness in a moment; and again, how wise in gently correcting and reminding me of weakness when I might be puffing myself up and believing that all my good fortune came of my own merit."

"What is your good news, dear Mr. Benny?"

"You shall hear later on when I have told my wife."

More than an hour later, having dismissed her clients (for the last of whom she had to compose a love-letter, the first she had written in her life), Hester stepped across to the cottage to announce that her work was over and ask if she might now turn down the lamps and rake out the stove.

The Bennys' kitchen at first glance was uninhabited; and yet, as she opened the door, she had heard voices within. Dropping her eyes to a lower level, she halted on the threshold and would have withdrawn without noise. In the penumbra beyond the circle of the lamp and the white tablecloth Mr. and Mrs. Benny, Nuncey, and Shake were kneeling by their chairs on the limeash, giving thanks.

While Hester hesitated, the little man lifted his head, and, catching sight of her, sprang to his feet. "Step ye in, my dear, and join with us! For you, too, have news to hear and be thankful for."

"But tell me your own good news and let me first be thankful for that."

"Do'ee really feel like that towards us?" asked Nuncey, rising and coming forward with joy and eager love in her eyes.

"I ought to, surely, after these months of kindness."

"Well, then—but first of all I must kiss 'ee, you dear thing!—well, then, Dad's been offered Damelioc stewardship, and you're to be Mistress of the Widows' Houses, and we're all going to be rich as Creases for ever and ever, Amen!"

"Croesus, my dear—besides, we're going to be nothing of the sort," protested her father.

Nuncey swept down upon him, caught him in her strong embrace, implanted a sound kiss on the top of his head, and held him at arms' length with a hand on either shoulder.

"You're a dear little well-to-do father, and the best in the world. But oh! you've come nigh breaking my heart these three months—for a worse regrater there never was, an' couldn' be!"

"Upon my word," said Mr. Benny, glancing over her shoulder at Hester with a twinkle, "I seem to be getting good fortune with a heap of chastening."

CHAPTER XXII.

CLEM IS LOST TO MYRA.

The post of 'Mistress' to the Widows' Houses was a somewhat singular one. The hospital itself had been founded in 1634 by an ancestor of Sir George Dinham's, and dedicated to St. Peter, as a retreat for eleven poor women, widows of husbands drowned at sea. From a narrow cobbled lane, behind the parish church and in the shadow of its tower, you passed into a quadrangle, two sides of which were formed by the lodgings, twelve in number (the twelfth occupied by the caretaker, or Mistress), the other two by the wash-house and store-buildings. In the centre of this courtyard stood a leaden pump, approached by four pebbled paths between radiating beds of flowers—Provence roses, Madonna lilies, and old perennials and biennials such as honesty, sweet-william, snapdragon, the pink and white everlasting pea, with bushes of fuchsia, southernwood, and rosemary. Along the first floor of the alms-buildings ran a deep open gallery, or upstairs cloister, where in warm weather the old women sat and knitted or gossiped in the shade.

The rule restricting admission to the widows of drowned mariners had been gradually relaxed during the last fifty years, and was now a dead letter; aged spinsters even, such as Aunt Butson, being received in default of applicants with better title. Also Sir George's father, having once on a time been called upon to depose a caretaker for ill-using the inmates, had replaced her by a gentlewoman; and thinking to safeguard them in future by increasing the dignity of the post, had rebuilt and enlarged the new Mistress's lodgings, and increased her salary by endowment to £eighty per annum.

All this Sir George explained very delicately to Hester, on the morning of Nicky Vro's funeral, having called at the school to seek an interview on his way back from the churchyard.

"But I am not a decayed gentlewoman," Hester objected; "at least, not yet. I shall be standing in the way of someone who really wants this post, while I am strong and able to earn my living. Also—please do not think me ungrateful or conceited—to teach is my calling, and I take a pride in it."

"From all I hear, you have a right to take pride in it. But may I say that these objections occurred to me and that I have a scheme for removing them—a very happy scheme, if you will help. Now, in the first place, will you put the personal question out of sight and consider my scheme on its merits? And next, will you, in advising me, take account of my ignorance?"

Hester smiled. "I know," she said, "that kindness can be cunning. I am going to be on my guard."

"Well, but listen at any rate," he pleaded, with an eager stammer. "Won't you agree with me that the education you give these children here is dreadfully wasteful?"

She glanced at him keenly. "If you are taking the ordinary ratepayer's view—" she began.

"I am not taking the ordinary ratepayer's view, except to this extent— that I think the ratepayers' and taxpayers' money should be spent to the best advantage. But is it?—either here or in any parish in England?"

"No, it is not."

"Will you tell me why, Miss Marvin?"

"Because," answered Hester, "we do a little good and then refuse to follow it up. If we were to take a child and say, 'You shall be a farm labourer,' or 'You shall be a domestic servant, and in due time marry a labourer and rear his family; 'and if, content with this, we were to teach these children just enough for their fate—the boy to plough and work a threshing machine and touch his cap to his betters, the girl to cook and sew and keep house on sixteen shillings a week—why, then there might be something to say for us. We have not the heart to do this, and yet in effect we do more cruelly. We are not tyrants enough to take a child of eight and label him for life: we start him on a kind of education which seems to offer him a chance; and then, just as the prospect should be opening, we suddenly lose interest in him, wash our hands of him, turn him adrift. Some few—a very few—have the grit to push on, unhelped by us, and grasp their opportunity. But for one of these a thousand and more fall back on their fate, and of our teaching the one thing they keep is discontent. We have built a porch, to nowhere. We invest millions; and just as our investment begins to repay us splendidly, we sell out, share by share. That is why I think sometimes, Sir George, in my bitterness, that education in England must be the most wasteful thing in the world."

"If, in this corner of England, someone were to set himself to fight this waste, would you help?"

"As Mistress of the Widows' Houses?"

Sir George laughed. "As Mistress of the Widows' Houses—and of a school attached. I am thinking of a Charterhouse or a Christ's Hospital in a small way; a foundation, that is, to include the old charity and a new and efficient school; modern education worked on lines of the old collegiate mediÆval systems—eh, Miss Marvin? To me, a high Tory, those old foundations are still our best models."

"Three or four of them have survived," said Hester gravely, and with as little of irony as she could contrive. "Forgive me, Sir George—once more I am going to speak ungratefully—but though neglect be our chief curse just now, a worse may follow when rich folks wake up and endow education in a hurry."

"You condemn me offhand for a faddist?"

"If you would only see that these things need an apprenticeship! Take this very combination of school and hospital. Three or four have survived, and are lodged in picturesque buildings, where they keep picturesque old customs, and seem to you very noble and venerable. So indeed they are. But what of the hundreds that have perished? And of these survivors can you tell me one in which either the school or the alms-house has not gone to the wall? The school, we will say, grows into an expensive one for the sons of rich men; the almshouse dwindles from a college for poor gentlemen down to a home into which wealthy men job their retired servants. I grant you that our modern attempts to combine almsgiving with teaching are not much better as a rule—are, perhaps, even a little worse. If you have ever walked through one of our public orphanages, for instance—"

Sir George's face fell. "I have never visited one, Miss Marvin, and I subscribe perhaps to half a dozen—out of sheer laziness, and because to subscribe comes easier than to say 'No.' Yes; I am an incurable amateur, and you are right, no doubt, in laughing at my scheme and refusing to look at it."

"But I don't, Sir George. I even think it may succeed, as it deserves, and reward your kindness. Yes, and I have been arguing against myself as much as against you, to warn myself against hoping too much. For there must be disappointments."

"What disappointments?"

"Well, to begin with, you rich folks are impatient; you expect your money to buy success at once and of itself. And then you expect gratitude."

"I do not," Sir George asserted stoutly.

"At least," said Hester, "it is only too plain that you are not getting it." She dropped him a small deprecatory curtsey and laughed. "And yet I am grateful."

"Yes," he answered gravely; "I understand. But since you do not quite despise my scheme, will you come and discuss it with me, believing only that I am in earnest?"

So it was arranged that Hester should call on him next evening and go through the plans he had been preparing for a week past. That such an interview defied convention scarcely crossed her mind or his, Sir George being one of those men who can neglect convention because their essential honour stands above question. He received her in his library, and for an hour they talked as might two men of business in friendly committee for some public good.

"By the way," said he, glancing up from his papers, "you were talking yesterday of public orphanages. Have you heard that your little friend Clem—the blind child—has been packed off to one?"

"To an orphanage?" Hester echoed. "The children were not at school to-day, but I had not heard a sound of this."

"It is true; for I happened to call in at the station this morning, and there on the platform I met Rosewarne with the child. The man was taking his ticket to Paddington—a single ticket half-fare; and overhearing this as we stood together by the booking-office, I made bold to ask him a few questions. The child was to travel alone, in charge of the guard; to be met at the journey's end, I suppose, by an official, and taken out to the orphanage—I forget its name—an institution for the blind somewhere out in the south-eastern suburbs."

"Poor Myra!"

"'Poor Clem!' I should rather say. He was not crying over it, but he looked pretty forlorn and white, and his blindness made it pitiable. I call it brutal; the man at least might have travelled up for company. A journey of three hundred miles!"

Nevertheless, Hester chiefly pitied Myra. As for Clem, the news relieved her mind in part; since after witnessing Mr. Sam's outburst, she had more than once shivered at the thought of child and uncle continuing to live under one roof.

Poor Myra had spent the day pacing up and down her room like a caged beast. The fate decreed and overhanging Clem had been concealed from her. Had it been less incredible, instinct surely would have wakened her suspicions before the last moment. At the last moment Susannah, having to dress the child for his journey, met inquiries with the half-hearted lie that he was bound on a trip to Plymouth with his uncle, to meet Aunt Hannah, and return after a day or two in the Virtuous Lady. Susannah— weak soul—had furthered the conspiracy because she too had begun to fear for Clem, and wished him well clear of his uncle's roof. She acted 'for the best,' but broke down in the act of tearing the children asunder, and told her lie shamefacedly. The result was that Mr. Sam, hearing Myra's screams overhead as he paced the hall, had rushed upstairs, caught her by both wrists as she clung to her brother, forced her into her own bedroom, and turned and pocketed the key.

Four times since, in that interminable day of anguish, Susannah had come pleading and whimpering to the door with food. Mr. Sam, on returning from the station, had given her the key with instructions to release the girl on a promise of good behaviour.

"Be sensible, Miss Myra—now, do! 'Tis to a home he's gone, where he'll be looked after and taught and tended, and you'll see him every holidays. A fine building, sure 'nough! Look, I've brought you a picture of it!"

Susannah, defying instructions, had unlocked and opened the door. Myra snatched the paper from her—it was, in fact, a prospectus of the institution—crumpled it up and thrust it in her pocket. With that, the last gust of her passion seemed to spend itself. She turned, and walking straight to the window-seat, coiled herself among the cushions with face averted and chin upon hand. To Susannah the traitress she deigned no word.

Thrice again Susannah came pleading, each time with a tray and something to tempt Myra's appetite. Myra did not turn her head. Departing for the fourth time, Susannah left the door ajar. The siege, then, was raised, the imprisonment over. Myra listened to her footsteps descending the stairs, walked to the door, shifted the key from the outer to the inner keyhole, and locked herself in. By this time the wintry dusk had begun to fall. Resuming her seat by the window, she fell to watching the courtyard again, her body motionless, her small brain working.

Dusk had deepened to darkness in the courtyard when she heard a footfall she recognised. It was Archelaus Libby's, on his way home from school to his loft, to deposit his books there and wash before seeking his tea in the kitchen.

Myra straightened her body, and opened the window softly.

"Archelaus!" she called as loudly as she dared.

"Miss Myra?" The footsteps halted.

"Hush, Archelaus, and come nearer. I want you to do something for me."

"Yes, Miss Myra."

"It may get you into trouble. I want you to fetch the short ladder from under the linhay, and fix it against the window here, without making a noise."

For a moment he made no answer. But he had understood; for she heard him walking away toward the linhay, and by and by he returned panting, and sloped the ladder against the sill as she bade him. By this time Myra had found a plateful of biscuits, and crammed her pocket full, and was ready to descend.

"But what is the meaning of it?" asked Archelaus, as she clambered down to him.

"They have stolen away Clem, and this morning they locked me in. Now take the ladder back and hang it in its place, and I will thank you for ever and ever."

"But I don't understand!" protested Archelaus. "Stolen away Master Clem? Who has stolen him? And what are you going to do?"

"I am going to find him—that's all," said Myra, and ran off into the darkness.

She could reckon on two friends in the world—Mr. Benny and Tom Trevarthen. Aunt Hannah was far away, and Miss Marvin (though now forgiven, and indeed worshipped for having interfered to protect Clem from his flogging) could not be counted on for effective help.

Tom Trevarthen and Mr. Benny—it was on Tom that she pinned her hope; for Tom (she had heard) was shipped on board the One-and-All schooner; and the One-and-All was ready to sail for London; and somewhere near London—so the paper in her pocket had told her—lay the dreadful place in which Clem was hidden. She could find the vessel; the One-and-All was moored—or had been moored last night—at the buoy under the hill, ready for sea. But to find the vessel and to find Tom Trevarthen were two very different things. To begin with, Tom would be useless unless she contrived to speak with him alone; to row straight to the schooner and hail her would spoil all. Moreover, on the night before sailing he would, most likely, be enjoying himself ashore. But where? Peter Benny might be able to tell. Peter Benny had a wonderful knack of knowing the movements of every seaman in the port.

She ran down the dark street to the alley over which poor Nicky Vro's signboard yet glimmered in the light of the oil lamp at the entrance. The cottage still lacked a tenant, and it had been nobody's business to take the board down. On the frape at the alley's end his ferryboat lay moored as he had left it. Myra tugged at the rope and drew the boat in.

As it drew alongside out of the darkness she leapt on board and cast off. The paddles, as she laboriously shipped them between the thole-pins, were unconscionably heavy; she knew little of rowing, and nothing of double-sculling. But the tide helped her. By pulling now one paddle, now another, she worked the boat across and down towards the ladder and the quay-door at the end of Mr. Benny's yard.

Nearing it, she found herself in slack water, and the boat became more manageable, giving her time between the strokes to glance over her shoulder and scan the dark shadow under the longshore wall, where each garden and alley-way had its quay-door and its ladder reaching down into the tide. Now the most of these quay-doors were painted green or blue, but Mr. Benny's a light grey, which in the darkness should have made it easily discernible. Yet for some while she could not find it.

Suddenly, as she threaded her way along, scarcely using her paddles now except to fend off the boats which, lying peaceably at their moorings, seemed to crowd around with intent to impede her, a schooner's masts and spars loomed up before her high against the inky night. Then she understood. The vessel—her name, the One-and-All, in white letters on her forward bulwarks, glimmered into sight as Myra passed—lay warped alongside the wall, with her foreyard braced aslant to avoid chafing the roof of Mr. Benny's office, and her mainmast and standing rigging all but entirely hiding Mr. Benny's quay-door, the approach to which she completely obstructed. A little above her forestay a small window, uncurtained and brightly lit, broke the long stretch of featureless black wall. This was the window of Mr. Benny's inner office, and within, as she checked her way, catching at the gunwale of one among the tethered boats, Myra could see the upper half of a hanging lamp and the shadow of its reflector on the smoky ceiling.

Mr. Benny would be seated under that lamp, no doubt. But how could she reach him?

The One-and-All lay head-to-stream, and so deep in the water that the tide all but washed her bulwarks, still grey with the dust of china-stone as she had come from her loading. Nowadays no British ship so scandalously overladen would be allowed to put to sea; but the Plimsoll-mark had not yet been invented to save seamen from their employers.

She lay so low that Myra, peering into the darkness, could almost see across decks to the farther bulwarks; and the decks were deserted. She mounted no riding-lamp, and no glimmer of light showed from hatchway, deckhouse, or galley.

Minutes passed, and, as still no sign of life appeared on board, Myra grew bolder and pushed across for a nearer view. Yes; the deck was deserted, and only the deck intervened between her and Mr. Benny's quay-door, by the sill of which the tide ran lapping and sucking at the crevices of the wall. She hardened her heart. Even if her footstep gave the alarm below, she could dash across and through the doorway before being seized or even detected. She laid both hands on the clay-dusted bulwarks and hoisted herself gently. The boat—she had done with it—slipped away noiselessly from under her and away into darkness.

She had meant to clear the ship with a rush; but as her feet touched the deck her courage failed her, and she tiptoed forward stealthily, gaining the shadow of the deckhouse and pausing there.

And there, in the act of crouching to spring across the few remaining yards, she drew back, crouching lower yet; for, noiseless as she, the dark form of a man had stepped forward and framed itself in the grey glimmering doorway.

For an instant she made sure that he was about to step on board. But many seconds passed, and still he waited there—as it seemed to her, in the attitude of a man listening; though to what he listened she could not guess. She herself heard no sound but the lapping of the tide.

By and by, gripping the ladder-rail and setting one foot against the One-and-All's bulwarks to steady himself, the man leaned outboard and sideways until a faint edge of light from the office window fell on his upturned face.

It was the face of her uncle.

Fascinated by terror, following his gaze—by instinct seeking for help, if any might be found—Myra lifted her face to the window. That too was darkened for the instant by a man's form; and as he crossed the room to the chair beside the desk, she recognised Tom Trevarthen.

CHAPTER XXIII.

HESTER WRITES A LOVE-LETTER.

Mr. Salt must have been preaching Hester's talent at large among seamen of the port, for when she returned from her interview with Sir George Mr. Benny met her at the kitchen door with news that no less than six sailors awaited her in the office, and that two or three had been patiently expecting her for an hour at least.

"Tis a great tax on you, my dear, and I tried to reason wi' them; but they wouldn't take 'No' for an answer. What's more, when I retire from the business I shan't be honestly able to sell you the goodwill of it, for they won't have my services at any price."

Hester laughed. "You won't even get me to bid," she assured him. "We shall soon be too busy for letter-writing, and must close the office; but to-night I suppose we cannot disappoint them."

So, with a sigh of resignation and an envious glance at the cosy fire, she turned and stepped briskly down the courtyard to the office. There, as Mr. Benny had promised, she found six expectant mariners, and for an hour wrote busily, rapidly. Either she was growing cleverer at the business, or her talk with Sir George had keyed her to this happy pitch. She felt—it happens sometimes, if rarely, to most of us—in tune with all the world; and in those illuminated hours we feel as if our fellow-creatures could bring us no secret too obscure for our understanding, no trouble hopeless of our help. "The light of the body is the eye; if, therefore, thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light." Hester found herself divining without effort what her clients wished her to write, and as easily translating the inarticulate message into words. It was superfluous for them to thank her as they did; her own inner voice told her she had done well.

At length they were gone, and she followed them so far as the outer office, to rake out the fire and tidy up for the night. As she stooped over the stove she was startled by a noise from the inner room—a noise as of someone moving the window-sash. But how could this be? Perhaps the sash-cord had parted, letting the pane slip down with a run—

It did not occur to her, though startled for the moment, to be afraid, or even to suspect any cause for fear. Her mind was still busy with this practical explanation when she opened the door and her eyes fell on Tom Trevarthen.

His back was turned towards her as he closed the window by which he had just entered; but he faced about with a smile, ignoring the alarm in her face and the hand she put out against the door-jamb for support.

"Good-evenin', miss! You'll excuse my coming by the shortest way—"

"But—but how did you come?" she gasped.

He laughed. "Easy enough: I swung myself up by the schooner's forestay. Eh? Didn't you know the One-and-All's moored here just underneath? Then I must ha' given you a rare fright."

"Yes," said Hester, slowly getting back her composure, "you certainly frightened me; and I call it a very silly trick."

She said it with a sudden vehemence which surprised herself. It brought the colour back to her face, too. The young sailor stared at her.

"Well," he said admiringly, "you have a temper! But there's times when you make mistakes, I reckon."

She supposed him to allude to her unhappy intrusion upon the tattooing. Her colour deepened to a hot and lively red, and between shame and scorn she turned and walked from him into the outer office.

"Nay, now!" He followed her, suppliant. "Nay, now!" he repeated, as one might coax a child. "Simme I can't open my mouth 'ithout angering you, Miss Marvin; an' yet, ignorant as I be, 'tis plain to me you don't mean no hurt."

Now Hester had meant to walk straight out of the office and leave him. It would be hard to say precisely on what second thought she checked herself and, picking up the poker, sedulously resumed her raking-out of the stove. Partly, no doubt, she repented of having taken offence when he meant none. He had been innocent, and her suspicion of him recoiled back in self-contempt. It was a relief to hear him in turn accusing her unjustly. It gave her fresh ground, on which she really could defend herself.

"Hurt?" she echoed half defiantly, stooping and raking at the cinders.

"Why, of course, you hurt," he insisted. "'Tis so queer to me you can't see it. Just reckon up all the harm this Rosewarne have a-done and is doing: Mother Butson's school closed, and the poor soul bedridden with rheumatics, all through being forced to seek field-work, at her time o' life and in this autumn's weather! My old mother driven into a charity-house. Nicky Vro dead in Bodmin gaol. Where was the fair play? Master Clem, I hear, parted from his sister and packed off this very day to a home in London—lucky if 'tis better'n a gaol—"

"Do you accuse me of all these wrongs?"

"No, I don't. But in most of 'em you've been mixed up, and in all of 'em you might have used power over the man. Where have you put in an oar except to make matters worse?"

It was on her lips to tell him that she had resigned the teachership; but she forbore.

"Do you know," she answered quietly, "that half-truths may be worse than lies, and a charge which is half-true the most cruelly unjust? We will agree that I have done more harm here than good. But do you accuse me of doing it wilfully, selfishly?"

"That's where I can't make you out," he said. "I can't even make out your doing wrong at all. Thinks I sometimes, ''Tis all a mistake. Go, look at her face, all made for goodness if ever a face was; try her once more, an' you'll be sorry for thinkin' ill of her.' That's the way of it. But then I come and find you mixed up in this miserable business, and all that's kind in you seems to harden, and all that's straight to run crooked. There's times I think you couldn't do wrong if you weren't so sure of doing right; and there's times, when I hear of your being kind to the school-children, I think it must be some curst ill-luck of my own that brings us always ath'art-hawse."

Beneath the lamplight his eyes searched hers appealingly, as a child's might; yet Hester wondered rather at the note of manliness in his voice—a new note to her, but an assured one. Whatever the cause, Tom Trevarthen was a lad no longer.

"Why should you suppose," she asked, "that I have power over Mr. Rosewarne?"

"Haven't you?"

The simple question confounded her, and she blushed again, as one detected in an untruth. It was as Tom said; some perverse fate impelled her at every turn to show at her worst before him.

"Good Lord!" he said slowly, watching her face. "You don't tell me you're going to marry him!"

She should have obeyed her first impulse and said 'No' hotly. The word was on her lips when a second wave of indignation swelled within her and swept over the first, drowning it, and, with it, her speech. What right had he to question her, or what concern with her affairs? She threw back her head proudly, to look him in the face and ask him this. But he had turned from her.

His disgust angered her, and once more she changed her impulse for the worse.

"It seems," said she contemptuously, "that you reserve the right of making terms with Mr. Rosewarne."

He turned at the door of the inner office and regarded her for a moment with a dark frown.

"What do you mean by that?" His voice betrayed the strain on his self-command.

"Mr. Rosewarne owns the One-and-All, does he not? If, after what has happened, you accept his wages, you might well be a little less censorious of other folk's conduct."

If the shaft hit, he made no sign for the moment. "I reckon," he answered, with queer deliberateness, "your knowledge of ships and shipowners don't amount to much, else you wouldn't talk of Rosewarne's doing me a favour." He paused and laughed, not aloud but grimly. "The One-and-All's insured, Miss Marvin, and pretty heavily over her value. I'd take it as a kindness if you found someone fool enough to insure me for a trip in her."

"I don't understand."

"No, I reckon you don't. They finished loading her last night, and we moored her out in the channel, ready for the tug this morning. Before midnight she was leaking there like a basket, and by seven this morning she was leaking worse than a five-barred gate. The tug had just time to pluck us alongside here, or she'd have sunk at her moorings; and when we'd warped her steady and the tide left her, the water poured out of a hole I could shove my hand through—not the seams, mark you, though they leaked bad enough—but a hole where the china-stone had fairly knocked her open; and the timber all round it as rotten as cheese. All day, between tides, they've been sheathing it over, and packing the worst places in her seams; and to-night the crew, being all Troy men, are taking one more sleep ashore than they bargained for. They want it, too, after their spell at the pumps."

"Then why are you left on board?"

"Mainly because I've no home to go to; and somebody must act night-watchman. The skipper himself has bustled ashore with the rest. I reckon this morning's work scared him a bit, hand-in-glove though he is with Rosewarne; but he must be recovering, because just before stepping off he warned me against putting up the riding-light. There's no chance of anyone fouling us where we lie, and we can save two-penn'orth of oil."

"But you don't tell me Mr. Rosewarne sends his ships to sea, knowing them to be rotten?"

He hunched his shoulders. "Maybe he does; maybe he don't. It don't matter to me, the man's going to hell or not. But you seem to think I take his wages as a favour."

"Then why do you take them at all, at such a risk?"

"Because," he burst out, "you've come here and driven my mother to an almshouse, and I must earn money to get her out of it. If I'd a-known you was coming here with your education, I'd have picked up some of it and been prepared for you. A mate's certificate doesn't mean much in these days. Men like Rosewarne want a skipper who'll earn insurance-money and save oil. Still, I could have tried. But, like a fool, I was young and in a good berth, and let my chances slip; and then you came along and spoilt all."

"Did you seek me out to-night to tell me this?" she steadied herself to ask.

He lowered his eyes. "I want you to write a letter for me," he said, and added, after a pause. "That's what comes of wanting education."

Another and a very awkward pause followed. This discovery of his illiteracy shocked and hurt her inexpressibly. She could not even say why. Good sense warned her even in the instant of disappointment that a man might not know how to read or write and yet be none the less a good man and trustworthy. And even though the prejudice of her calling made her treat the defect too seriously, why in Tom Trevarthen should that shock her which in other seamen she took as a matter of course?

Yet in her shame for him she could lift her eyes; and he still kept his lowered upon the floor.

"To whom do you want me to write?" she asked.

"It's to a girl," he answered doggedly; and the words seemed to call up a dark flush in his face, which a moment before had been unwontedly pale— though this she did not perceive.

"A girl?"

"That's so; a girl, miss, if you don't mind—a girl as it happens I'm fond of."

"A love-letter? Is that what you mean?"

"If you don't mind, Miss Marvin?"

"Why on earth should I mind?" she asked, with a heat unintelligible to herself as to him.

A suspicion crossed her mind that the young woman might not be over-respectable; but she dismissed it. If the message were such as she could indite, she had no warrant to inquire further; and yet, "Is it quite fair to her?" she added.

The question plainly confused him. "Fair, miss?"

"You told me a minute ago that you found it hard to earn money for your mother; and now it seems you think of marrying."

"No, miss," said he simply; "I can't think of it at all. And that's partly what I want to tell her."

Hester frowned. "It's queer you should come to me, whom you accuse of interfering to your harm. If I am guilty on other counts, I am guilty too of coming between you and this young woman."

He smiled faintly. "And that's true in a way," he allowed; "but you'll see I don't bear malice. The letter'll prove that, if so be you'll kindly write it for me."

He said it appealingly, with his hand on the doorhandle. She bent her head in consent. Flinging the door open, he stood aside to let her pass.

It was a moment later as he crossed over to the client's chair that Myra caught sight of him from the schooner's deck. The child cowered back into the shadow of the deck-house, her eyes intent again on the listener leaning out from the quay-door. He could not even see what she had seen; and if Tom was in talk with anyone inside her own ears caught no sound of it. Nevertheless her uncle's attitude left no room to doubt that he was playing the spy, and trying, at least, to listen.

"What name?" asked Hester, dipping her pen.

"What name? Eh, to be sure,"—Tom Trevarthen hesitated for a moment. "Put down Harriet Sands." She glanced up, and he nodded. "Yes, that'll do—Harriet Sands, of Runcorn."

"She must have some nearer address than that. Runcorn is a large town, is it not?"

He pondered, or seemed to ponder. "Then we'll put down 'Sailors' Return Inn, Quay Street, Runcorn.' That'll find her, as likely as anywhere."

Hester wrote the address and glanced up inquiringly; but his eyes were fastened on the desk where her hand rested, and on the virgin sheet of notepaper placed ready for use.

"A public-house? It wanted only that!" she told herself. Aloud she said, "'My dearest Harriet'—Is that how you begin?"

He appeared to consider this slowly. "I suppose so," he answered at length, with a shade of disappointment in his voice.

"And next, I suppose, you say, 'This comes hoping to find you well as it leaves me at present.'"

"Don't 'ee—don't 'ee, co!" he implored her almost with a cry of pain; and then, scarcely giving her time to be ashamed of her levity, he broke out, "They tell me you can guess a man's thoughts and write 'em down a'most before he speaks. Why won't you guess 'em for me? Write to her that when we parted she was unkind; but be she unkind for ever and ever, in my thoughts she will be the best woman in the world. Tell her that whatever she may do amiss, in my eyes she'll last on as the angel God A'mighty meant her to be, and all because I love her and can't help it. Say that to her, and say that there's degrees between us never to be crossed, and I know it, and have never a hope to win level with her; but this once I will speak and be silent all the rest o' my days. Tell her that there's bars between us, but the only real one is her own self; that for nothing would she be beyond my reach but for being the woman she is."

Hester laid down the pen and looked up at him with eyes at once dim and shining.

"I cannot write this," she said, her lips stammering on the words. "I am not worthy—I laughed at you."

"Tell her," he went on, "that I'm a common seaman, earnin' two pound a month, with no book-learning and no hopes to rise; tell her that I've an old mother to keep—that for years to come there's no chance of my marryin'; and then tell her I'm glad of it, for it keeps me free to think only of her. Write all that down, Miss Marvin."

"I cannot," she protested.

Very gently but firmly he laid a brown strong hand over hers as it rested on the letter. In a second he withdrew it, but in that second she felt herself mastered, commanded. She took up the pen and wrote.

"I have used your own words and none of mine," she said, when she had finished. "Shall I read them over to you?"

"No." He took the letter, folded it, and placed it in the envelope she handed him. "Why didn't you put it into better words?" he asked.

"Because I could not. Trust a woman to know what a woman likes. If I were this—this Harriet."—Her voice faltered and came to a halt.

"Yes?" He waited for her to continue.

"Why, then, that letter would make me a proud woman."

"Though it came from a common sailor?"

"She would not think first of that. She would be proud to be so loved."

"Thank you," said he slowly, and, drawing a shilling from his pocket, laid it on the desk. "Good-night and good-bye, Miss Marvin."

He moved to the window and flung up the sash. Seated astride the ledge, he looked back at her with a smile which seemed to say, "At last we are friends!" The next moment he had reached out a hand, caught hold of the One-and-All's forestay, and swung himself out into the darkness.

Hester, standing alone in the little office, heard a soft sliding sound which puzzled her, followed by the light thud of his feet as he dropped upon deck. She leaned out for a moment before closing the window. All was silent below, save for the lap of the tide between the schooner and the quay-wall.

As Tom Trevarthen opened the window and leaned out to grasp the forestay, Myra, still cowering by the deck-house, saw her uncle swing himself hurriedly back into the shadow of the quay-door. She too retreated a pace; and with that, her foot striking against the low coaming of an open hatchway, with a clutch at air she pitched backward and down into the vessel's hold.

She did not fall far, the One-and-All being loaded to within a foot or two of the hatches. Her tumble sent her sprawling upon a heap of loose china-clay. She felt it sliding under her and herself sliding with it, softly, down into darkness. She was bruised. She had wrenched her shoulder terribly, but she clenched her teeth and kept back the cry she had all but uttered.

The sliding ceased, and she tried to raise herself on an elbow out of the choking smother of clay-dust. The effort sent a stab of pain through her, exquisite, excruciating. She dropped forward upon her face, and there in the darkness she fainted.

Hester, having closed the window, put out the lights quietly, pausing in the outer office for a glance at the raked-out stove. Outside, as she locked the door behind her, she paused again at the head of the step for an upward look at the sky, where, beyond the clouds, a small star or two twinkled in the dark square of Pegasus. She never knew how close in that instant she stood to death. Within six paces of her crouched a man made desperate by the worst of terrors—terror of himself; and maddened by the worst of all provocatives—jealousy.

He had come to her on a forlorn hope, believing that she only—if any helper in the world—could be his salvation from the devil within him. Not in cruelty, but in fear—which can be crueller than cruelty itself—he had packed off the helpless blind boy beyond his reach. He had promised himself that by dismissing the temptation he could lay the devil at a stroke and finally. On his way back from the station he had heard whispered within him the horrible truth: that he was a lost man, without self-control.

He had sought her merely by the instinct of self-preservation. She had cowed and mastered him once. In awful consciousness of his infirmity he craved only to be mastered again, to be soothed, quieted. He nodded to the men and women he passed in the streets. They saw nothing amiss with him—nothing more than his habitual straight-lipped visage and ill-fitting clothes.

He had dogged her to the office and listened outside for one, two, three hours. In the end, as he believed, he had caught her at tryst with his worst enemy—with the man who had knocked him down and humiliated him. Yet in his instant need he hated Tom Trevarthen less as a rival in love, less from remembered humiliation, than as a robber of the sole plank which might have saved him from drowning.

So long had the pair been closeted together that a saner jealousy might have suggested more evil suspicions. His jealousy passed these by as of no account. He could think only of his need and its foiled chance: his need was more urgent than any love. He had come for help, and found her colloguing with his enemy.

In his abject rage he could easily have done her violence and as easily have run forward and cried her pity. Between the two impulses he crouched irresolute and let her pass.

Hester came down the steps slowly, passed within a yard of him, and as slowly went up the dark courtyard. For the last time she paused, with her hand on Mr. Benny's door-latch; and this was what she said there to herself, silently—

"But why Harriet?—of all the hateful names!"

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE RESCUE.

"Style," said Mr. Joshua Benny, "has been defined as a gift of saying anything, of striking any note in the scale of human feelings, without impropriety. We cannot all have distinction, Mr. Parker—what I may call the je ne sais quoi"—

Mr. Joshua put this with a fine modesty, the distinction of his own style being proverbial—in Spendilove's Press Supply Bureau at any rate. He might have added with a wave of the hand, "You see to what it has advanced me!" for whereas the rest of Spendilove's literary men toiled in two gangs, one on either side of a long high-pitched desk, and wrote slashing leaders for the provincial press, Mr. Joshua exercised his lightness of touch upon 'picturesque middles' in a sort of loose-box partitioned off from the main office by screens of opaque glass. This den—he spoke of it as his 'scriptorium'—had a window looking out upon an elevated railway, along which the trains of the London, Chatham, and Dover line banged and rattled all day long. For Spendilove's (as it was called by its familiars) inhabited the second floor of a building close to the foot of Ludgate Hill. The noise no longer disturbed Mr. Joshua, except when an engine halted just outside to blow off steam.

Mr. Joshua leaned back in his writing-chair, tapped a galley proof with admonitory forefinger, and gazed over his spectacles upon Mr. Parker—a weedy youth with a complexion suggestive of uncooked pastry.

"We cannot all have distinction, Mr. Parker, nor can it be acquired by effort. Vigour we may cultivate, and clearness we must; it is essential. On a level with these I should place propriety. Propriety teaches us to regulate our speech by the occasion; to be incisive at times and at times urbane; to adapt the 'how' to the 'when,' as I might put it. I do not think—I really do not think—that Christmas Eve is a happily chosen moment for calling Mr. Disraeli 'a Jew adventurer.'"

"Mr. Makins, sir, who wrote yesterday's Liberal leader for the syndicate, wound up by saying the time had gone by for mincing our opinion of the front Opposition Bench. He warned me last night, when I took over his job, to pitch it strong. He had it on good authority that the constituencies have been a good deal shaken by Mr. Gladstone's Army Purchase coup, and some straight talk is needed to pull them together, in the eastern counties especially."

"You are young to the work, Mr. Parker. You may depend upon it—you may take it from me—that Spendilove's will not fail in straight talking, on either side of the question. But we must observe what our Gallic neighbours term les convenances. By the way, has Makins gone off for the holidays?"

"He was to have gone off last night, sir; but he turned up this morning to write Sam Collins's 'Tory Squire' column for the Northern Guardian, and a syndicate-middle on 'Christmas Cheer in the Good Old Times.' Collins sent him a wire late last night; his wife is down with pneumonia."

"Tut, tut—send him to me. A good-hearted fellow, Makins! Tell him I've a dozen old articles that will fix him up with 'Christmas Cheer' in less than twenty minutes. I keep them indexed. And if he wants it illustrated I can look him out a dozen blocks to take his choice from—'Bringing in the Boar's Head,' and that sort of thing."

"I beg your pardon, sir, but before I send him there's a party of four in the lower office waiting to see you—one of them a child—and seafaring folk by their talk. They walked in while I was sitting alone there, finishing off my article, and not a word would they tell of their business but that they must speak to you in private. It's my belief they've come straight off a wreck, and with a paragraph at least."

"Seafaring folk, do you say?" It was a cherished hope of Mr. Joshua Benny's that one of these days Spendilove's would attract private information to its door, and not confine itself to decorating so much of the world's news as had already become common property.

"They asked for you, sir, as 'Mr. Joshua Benny, the great writer.'"

"Dear me, I hope you have not kept them waiting long? Show them up, please; and—here, wait a moment—on your way you can take Makins an armful of my commonplace books—eighteen sixty-three to seven; that will do. Tell him to look through the indexes himself; he'll find what he wants under 'Yule.'"

If Mr. Joshua's visitors had come, as Mr. Parker surmised, straight off a wreck, the first to file into his office had assuredly salved from calamity a wonderful headgear. This was Mrs. Purchase, in a bonnet crowned with a bunch of glass grapes; and by the hand she led Myra, who carried one arm in a sling. The child's features were pinched and pale, and her eyes unnaturally bright. Behind followed Mr. Purchase and Tom Trevarthen, holding their caps, and looking around uneasily for a mat to wipe their shoes on.

No such shyness troubled Mrs. Purchase. "Good-morning!" she began briskly, holding out a hand.

Mr. Joshua took it helplessly, his eyes for the moment riveted on her bonnet. It bore no traces of exposure to sea-water, and he transferred his scrutiny to the child.

"You don't remember me," pursued Mrs. Purchase cheerfully. "But I'd have picked you out from a thousand, though I han't seen you since you was so high." She spread out a palm some three feet or less from the floor. "I'm Hannah Purchase, that used to be Hannah Rosewarne, daughter of John Rosewarne of Hall. You know now who I be, I reckon; and this here's my niece, and that there's my husband. The young man in the doorway ain't no relation; but he comes from Hall too. He's Sal Trevarthen's son. You remember Sal Trevarthen?"

"Ah, yes—yes, to be sure. Delighted to see you, madam—delighted," stammered Mr. Joshua, who, however, as yet showed signs only of bewilderment. "And you wish to see me?"—

"Wish to see you? Man alive, we've been hunting all Fleet Street for you! Talk about rabbit warrens! Well, when 'tis over 'tis over, as Joan said by her wedding, and here we be at last."

She paused and looked around.

"Place wants dusting," she observed. "Never married, did 'ee? I reckoned I'd never heard of your marrying. Your brother now has eleven of 'em— children, I mean; and yet you feature him wonderful, though fuller in the face. But the Lord's ways be past finding out."

"Amen," said her husband, paying his customary tribute to a scriptural quotation, and added, "They don't keep over many chairs in this office." He addressed this observation to Tom Trevarthen with an impartial air as one announcing a scientific discovery.

"Thank you," said Mrs. Purchase, seating herself in a chair which Mr. Joshua made haste to provide. "You will oblige me by paying no attention to 'Siah. Well, as I was saying, it's a mercy the Lord has made you the man you be; for we're in want of your help, all four of us."

"If I can be of service,"—Mr. Joshua murmured.

"I remember," said Mrs. Purchase, arranging her bonnet with an air of one coming to business, "when I was a little girl, reading in a history book about a man called Bucket, who fell in love with a black woman in foreign parts; or she may have been brown or whitey-brown for all I can remember at this distance of time. But, anyway, he was parted from her, and came home to London here, and all she knew about him was his name 'Bucket.' Well, she took ship and kept on saying 'Bucket' till somewhere in London she found him. And if that happened once, it ought to be able to happen again, especially in these days of newspapers, and when we've got the address."

Mrs. Purchase produced a crumpled slip of paper, and handed it to Mr. Joshua, who adjusted his spectacles.

"An institution for the blind, and near Bexley, apparently." He glanced up in mild interrogation.

"What sort of place is it? Nice goings-on there, I'll promise you; and if 'tis better than penal servitude I shall be surprised, seeing that Sam Rosewarne is hand-in-glove with it. Never you mind, my dear," she added, turning to Myra, who shivered, holding her hand. "We'll get him out of it, or there's no law in England."

Mr. Joshua, still hopelessly fogged, wheeled his chair round to the bookcase behind him, and took down a Directory, with a smaller reference work upon Hospitals and Charitable Institutions.

"H'm," said he, coming to a halt as he turned the pages; "here it is—'Huntingdon Orphanage for the Blind'—'mainly supported by voluntary contributions'—address, 52 Conyers Road, Bexley, S.E. It seems to have an influential list of patrons, mainly Dissenters, as I should guess."

"It may keep 'em," said Mrs. Purchase, "so long as you get that poor child out of it."

"My dear lady, if you would be more explicit!" cried Mr. Joshua. "To what poor child do you allude? And what is the help you ask of me?"

"If the worst comes to the worst, you can denounce 'em." Mrs. Purchase untied her bonnet strings, and then slowly crossed her legs—an unfeminine habit of hers. "Tis like a story out of a book," she pursued. "This very morning as we was moored a little above Deptford in the Virtuous Lady— that's my husband's ship—and me making the coffee for breakfast as usual, comes off a boy with a telegram, saying, 'Meet me and Miss Myra by the foot of the Monument. Most important.—Tom Trevarthen.' You might have knocked me down with a feather, and even then I couldn't make head nor tail of it."

To this extent her experience seemed to be repeating itself in Mr. Joshua.

"For to begin with," she went on, "how did I know that Tom Trevarthen was in London? let alone that last time we met we parted in anger. But he'd picked us out among the shipping as he was towed up last night in the One-and-All to anchor in the Pool. And I defy anyone to guess that he'd got Myra here on board, who's my own niece by a second marriage, and shipped herself as a stowaway, but was hurt by a fall down the hold, and might have lain there and starved to death, poor child—and all for love of her brother that his uncle had shipped off to a blind orphanage. But there's a providence, Mr. Benny, that watches over children—and you may lay to that." Mrs. Purchase took breath. "Well, naturally, as you may guess, my first thought was to set it down for a hoax, though not in the best of taste. But with Myra's name staring me in the face in the telegram, and blood being thicker than water, on second thoughts I told 'Siah to put on his best clothes and come to the Monument with me, not saying more for fear of upsetting him. 'Why the Monument?' says 'Siah. 'Why not?' says I; 'it was put up against the Roman Catholics.' So that determined him; and I wanted company, for in London you can't be too careful. Sure enough, when we got to it, there was Tom waiting, with this poor child holding his hand; and then the whole story came out. 'But what's to be done?' I said, for my very flesh rebelled against such cruelty to the child, let alone that he was flogged black and blue at home. And then Tom Trevarthen had a thought even cleverer than his telegram. 'Peter Benny,' says he, 'has a brother here in London connected with the press; the press can do anything, and by Peter's account his brother can do anything with the press. If we can only find him, our job's as good as done.' So we hailed a cab, and told the man to drive us to the Shipping Gazette. But I reckon we must have started someways at the wrong end, for the Shipping Gazette passed us on to a place called the Times, where they kept us waiting forty minutes, and then said they didn't know you, but advised us to try the Cheshire Cheese, where I asked for the editor, and this caused another delay. But a gentleman there drinkin' whisky-and-water said he'd heard of you in connection with the Christian World, and the Christian World gave us over to a policeman, who brought us here; and now the question is, what would you advise?"

"I should advise," said Mr. Joshua, pulling out his watch, "your coming off to lunch with me."

"You're a practical man, I see," said Mrs. Purchase, "and I say again 'tis a pity you never married. We'll leave the whole affair in your hands."

In his published writings Mr. Joshua had often descanted on the power of the Fourth Estate; and in his addresses to young aspirants he ever laid stress on the crucial faculty of sifting out the essentials, whether in narrative or argument, from whatever was of secondary importance, circumstantial, or irrelevant. The confidence and accuracy with which Mrs. Purchase challenged him to put his faith and his method into instant practice, staggered him not a little. He felt himself hit, so to speak, with both barrels.

It will be allowed that he rose to the test admirably. Under an arch of the railway bridge at the foot of Ludgate Hill there is a restaurant where you may eat and drink and hear all the while the trains rumbling over your head. To this he led the party; and while Mrs. Purchase talked, he sifted out with professional skill the main points of her story, and discovered what she required of him. To be sure, the Power of the Press remained to be vindicated, and as yet he was far from seeing his way clear. The woman required him to storm the doors of an orphanage and rescue without parley the body of a child consigned to it by a legal guardian (which was absurd); or if not instantly successful, to cow the officials with threats of exposure (which again was absurd; since, for aught he knew, the institution thoroughly deserved the subscriptions of the public).

Yet while his own heart sank, the confidence of his guests, and their belief in him, sensibly increased. He had chosen this particular restaurant not deliberately, but with the instinct of a born journalist; for it is the first secret of journalism to appear to be moving at high speed even when standing absolutely still, and here in the purlieus of the clanging station, amid the thunder of trains and the rush of hundreds of feet to bookstalls and ticket-offices; here where the clash of knives and forks and plates mingled with the rumble of cabs and the calls of porters and newspaper boys, the impression of activity was irresistible. Here, as Mrs. Purchase had declared, was a practical man. Their business promised well with all these wheels in motion.

"And now," said Mr. Joshua, as he paid the bill, "we will take the train for Bexley, and see."

In his own heart he hoped that a visit to the Orphanage would satisfy them. He would seek the governor or matron in charge; they would be allowed an interview with the child, and finding him in good hands, contented and well cared for, would shed some natural tears perhaps, but return cheerful and reassured. This was as much as Mr. Joshua dared to hope. While piecing together Mrs. Purchase's narrative he had been sincerely touched—good man—by some of its details; particularly when Tom Trevarthen struck in and related how on the second night out of port he had been kept awake by a faint persistent knocking on the bulkhead separating the fo'c'sle from the schooner's hold; how he had drawn his shipmates' attention to it; how he had persuaded the skipper to uncover one of the hatches; and how he had descended with a lantern and found poor Myra half dead with sickness and hunger. Mr. Joshua did not understand children; but he had a good heart nevertheless. He eyed Myra from time to time with a sympathetic curiosity, shy and almost timid, as the train swung out over the points, and the child, nestling down in a corner by the window, gazed out across the murky suburbs with eyes which, devouring the distance, regarded him not at all.

The child did not doubt. She followed with the others as he shepherded them through the station to the train which came, as if to his call, from among half a dozen others, all ready at hand. He was a magician, benevolent as any in her fairy-tales, and when all was over she would thank him, even with tears. But just now she could think only of Clem and her journey's end. Clem!—Clem!—the train clanked out his name over and over. Would these lines of dingy houses, factories, smoky gardens, rubbish-heaps, broken palings, never come to an end?

They trailed past the window in meaningless procession; empty phenomena, and as dull as they were empty. But the glorious golden certainty lay beyond. "Just look to the poor mite!" whispered Mrs. Purchase, nudging her husband. Myra's ears caught the words distinctly, but Myra did not hear.

Bexley at last! with two or three cabs outside the station. Later on she remembered them, and the colour of the horse in the one which Mr. Joshua chose, and the driver's face, and Mr. Joshua leaning out of the window and shouting directions. She remembered also the mist on the glass window of the four-wheeler, and the foggy houses, detached and semi-detached, looming behind their roadway walls and naked fences of privet; the clapping sound of the horse, trotting with one loose shoe; Aunt Hannah's clutch at her arm as they drew up in the early dusk before a gate with a clump of evergreens on either side; and a glimpse of a tall red-brick building as Mr. Joshua opened the door and alighted.

He was gone, and they sat in the cab, and waited for him a tedious while. She did not understand. Why should they wait now, with Clem so near at hand? But she was patient, not doubting at all of the result.

He came running back at length, and radiant. As though the issue had ever been in doubt! The cab moved through the gateway and halted before a low flight of steps, and everyone clambered out. The dusk had deepened, and she blinked as she stepped into a lighted hall. A tall man met them there; whispered, or seemed to whisper, a moment with Mr. Joshua; and beckoned them to follow. They followed him, turning to the right down a long corridor not so brightly lit as the hall had been. At the end he halted for a moment and gently opened a door.

They passed through it into what, for a moment, seemed to be total darkness. They stood, in fact, at the head of a tall platform of many steps, semicircular in shape, looking down upon a long hall, unlit as yet (for the blind need no lamps); and below, on the floor of the hall, ranged at their desks in the fading light, sat row upon row of children. The murmur of many voices rose from that shadowy throng, as Myra, shaking off Aunt Hannah's grasp, stepped forward to the edge of the platform with both arms extended, her hurt forgotten.

"MYRA!"

The opening of the door could scarcely have been audible amid the murmur below. She herself had stretched out her arms, uttering no sound, not yet discerning him among the dim murmuring shadows. What telegraphy of love reached, and on the instant, that one child in the throng and fetched him to his feet, crying out her name? And he was blind. From the way he ran to her, heeding no obstacles, stumbling against desks, breaking his shins cruelly against the steps of the platform as he stretched up both hands to her, all might see that he was blind. Yet he came, as she had known he would come.

"CLEM!"

They were in each other's arms, sobbing, laughing, crooning soft words together, but only these articulate—

"You knew me?"

"Yes, you have come—I knew you would come!"

"Now I ask you," said Aunt Hannah to the Matron, who, unobserved by the visitors, had followed them down the corridor, "I don't know you from Adam, ma'am, but I ask you, as a Christian woman, if you'd part them two lambs? And, if so, how?"

The Matron's answer went near to abashing her; for the Matron turned out to be not only a Christian woman, as challenged, but an extremely tender-hearted one.

"I like the child," she answered. "I like him so much that I'd be thankful if you could get him removed; for, to tell the truth, he's ailing here. We try to feed him well, and we try to make him happy; but he's losing flesh, and he's not happy. Indeed we are not tyrants, ma'am, and if it pleases you his sister shall stay with him overnight, and I promise to take care of her; but he came to us from his legal guardian, and without leave we can't give him up."

It was at this point that inspiration came to Mr. Joshua.

"Why not a telegram?" he suggested. "As his aunt, ma'am, you might suggest a sea voyage for the child, and leave it to me to word it strongly."

"If I wasn't a married woman," said Mrs. Purchase, "I could openly bless the hour I made your acquaintance."

Between the despatch of Mr. Joshua's telegram and the receipt of his answer there was weary waiting for all but the two children. They, content in the moment's bliss, secure of the future, being reunited, neither asked nor doubted.

Yet they missed something—the glad, astounded surprise of their elders as Mr. Joshua, having taken the yellow envelope from Mrs. Purchase, whose courage failed her, broke it open, and read aloud, "Leave child in your hands. Only do not bring him home."

It was a happy party that travelled back that night to Blackfriars; and Mr. Joshua, after shaking hands with everybody many times over, and promising to eat his Christmas dinner on board the Virtuous Lady, walked homeward to his solitary lodgings elate, treading the frosty pavement with an unaccustomed springiness of step. He had vindicated the Power of the Press.

CHAPTER XXV.

BUT TOM CAN WRITE.

"A letter for you, Mrs. Trevarthen!"

Spring had come. The flight and finding of Myra had long since ceased to be a nine days' wonder, and she and Clem and Tom Trevarthen—received back into favour, and in some danger of being petted by Mrs. Purchase, who had never been known to pet a seaman—were shipmates now on board the Virtuous Lady, and had passed for many weeks now beyond ken of the little port. A new schoolmistress reigned in Hester's stead, since Hester, with the New Year, had taken over the care of the Widows' Houses. In his counting-house at Hall Samuel Rosewarne sat day after day transacting his business without a clerk, speaking seldom, shunned by all—even by his own son; a man afraid of himself. Susannah declared that the house was like a tomb, and vowed regularly on Monday mornings to give 'warning' at the next week-end. The villagers, accustomed to the Rosewarne tyranny for generations, had found it hard to believe in their release. Lady Killiow was little more than a name to them, Rosewarne a very present steward and master of their lives; and at first, when Peter Benny engaged workmen to pull down Nicky Vro's cottage and erect a modest office on its site, they admired his temerity, but awoke each morning to fresh wonder that no thunderbolt from Hall had descended during the night and razed his work to the ground. The new ferryman had vanished too, paid off and discharged for flagrant drunkenness, and his place was taken by old Billy Daddo the Methodist—a change so comfortable and (when you come to think of it) a choice so happy, that the villagers, after the shock of surprise, could hardly believe they had not suggested it. If they did not quite forget Nicky and his sorrows—if in place of Nicky's pagan chatter they listened to Billy's earnest, gentle discourse, and might hardly cross to meal or market without being reminded of God—why, after all, the word of God was good hearing, and everyone ought to take an interest in it. Stop your ears for a moment, and you could almost believe 'twas Nicky come back to life again. Nobody could deny the man was cheerful and civil. He rowed a stroke, too, amazingly like Nicky's.

As for Rosewarne, in the revulsion of their fears they began to despise him. They Had done better to pity him.

Across the water, in her lodging in the Widows' Houses, Hester found work to be done which, to her surprise, kept her busier than she had ever been in her life before—so busy that the quiet quadrangle seemed to hold no room for news of the world without. She found that, if she were to satisfy her conscience in the service of these old women, she could seldom save more than an hour's leisure from the short spring days; and in that hour maybe Sir George would call with his plans, or she would put on her bonnet and walk down the hill for a call on the Bennys and a chat with Nuncey. But oftener it was Nuncey who came for a gossip; Nuncey having sold her cart and retired from business.

Spring had come. Within the almshouse quadrangle, around the leaden pump, the daffodils were in flower and the tulip buds swelling. A blast from the first of those golden trumpets could hardly have startled her more than did her first sight of it flaunting in the sun. It had stolen upon her like a thief.

"A letter for you, Mrs. Trevarthen!"

The postman, as he crossed the quadrangle to the Matron's door, glanced up and spied Mrs. Trevarthen bending over a wash-tub in the widows' gallery. He pulled a letter from his pocket and held it aloft gaily.

"I'll run up the steps with it if you can't reach."

"No need to trouble you, my dear, if you'll wait a moment."

Mrs. Trevarthen dried her hands in her coarse apron, leaned over the balustrade, and just contrived to reach the letter with her finger-tips. They were bleached with soap and warm water, and they trembled a little.

"'Tis from your son Tom, I reckon," said the postman, while she examined the envelope. "Foreign paper and the Quebec postmark."

"From Tom? O' course 'tis from Tom! Get along with 'ee do! What other man would be writing to me at my time o' life?"

The postman walked on, laughing. Mrs. Trevarthen stood for some while irresolute, holding the envelope between finger and thumb, and glancing from it to a closed door at the back of the gallery. A slant low sun-ray almost reached to the threshold, and was cut short there by the shadow of the gallery eaves.

"Best not disturb her, I s'pose," said the old woman, with a sigh. She laid the letter down, but very reluctantly, beside the wash-tub, and plunged both hands among the suds again. "Quebec!" The word recalled a silly old song of the sailors; she had heard her boy hum it again and again—

"Was you ever to Quebec,
Bonnie lassie, bonnie lassie?
Was you ever to Quebec,
Rousing timber over the deck."—

A door opened at the end of the gallery, and Hester came through.

"Good-morning, Mrs. Trevarthen!"

"'Mornin', my dear."

These two were friends now on the common ground of nursing Aunt Butson, who had been bedridden almost from the day of her admission to the almshouse, her gaunt frame twisted with dire rheumatics.

Hester, arriving to take up her duties and finding Mrs. Trevarthen outworn with nursing, had packed her off to rest and taken her place by the invalid's bedside. In this service she had been faithful ever since; and it was no light one, for affliction did not chasten Mrs. Butson's caustic tongue.

"Is she still sleeping?" Hester glanced at the door.

"Ay, ever since you left. Her pains have wore her out, belike. A terrible night! Why didn' you call me sooner?"

"You have a letter, I see."

Mrs. Trevarthen nodded, obviously embarrassed. "Keeping it for her, I was," she explained. "She do dearly like to look my letters over. She gets none of her own, you see."

But Hester was not deceived, having observed (without appearing to detect it) Mrs. Trevarthen's difficulty with the written instructions on the medicine bottles.

"But she will not wake for some time, we'll hope; and you haven't even broken the seal! If you would like me to read it to you—it would save your eyes; and I am very discreet—really I am."

Mrs. Trevarthen hesitated. "My eyes be bad, sure enough," she said, weakening. "But you mustn't blame me if you come across a word or two you don't like."

"I shall remember no more of it than you choose," said Hester, slightly puzzled.

"My Tom han't ever said a word agen' you, and the odds are he'll say nothing now. Still, there's the chance, and you can't rightly blame him."

"Tom?" Hester's eyes opened wide.

"I know my own boy's writing, I should hope!" said Mrs. Trevarthen, with pardonable pride. "And good writing it is. Sally Butson says she never taught a boy whose hand did her more credit. But what's the matter? You'm as pale as a sheet almost!"

"I—I didn't know,"—stammered Hester, and checked herself.

"You've been over-tiring yourself, and to-night you'll just go off to bed early and leave the nursing to me. What didn' you know? That Tom was a scholar? A handsome scholar he'd have been, but for going to sea early when his father died. I wonder sometimes if he worries over it and the chances he missed. But Quebec's the postmark; and that means he's right and safe, thank the Lord! I don't fret so long as he's aboard a well-found ship. 'Twas his signing aboard the One-and-All—' Rosewarne's coffin,' they call her—that nigh broke me. He didn' let me know till two nights afore he sailed. 'Beggars can't be choosers,' he said; and afterwards I found out from Peter Benny that he'd covered his poor body with tattoo marks—his body that I've a-washed hundreds o' times, and loved to feel his legs kickin' agen' me. Beautiful skin he had as a child; soft as satin the feel of it, and not a blemish anywhere. 'Tis hard to think of it criss-crossed with them nasty marks. But there! thank the Lord God he's safe, this passage! Read me what he says, there's a kind soul; but you'll have to bear a child afore you know what I've a-been going through wi' that letter starin' me in the face."

Hester, resting a shoulder against one of the oaken pillars of the gallery, where the sunshine touched her face with colour, broke the seal.

"Here is an enclosure—a post-office order for fifty shillings."

"God bless him! 'tis Welcome; though I could have made shift at a pinch. Peter Benny manages these things for me," said Mrs. Trevarthen, folding it lengthwise and inserting it between the buttons of her bodice. What she meant was that Mr. Benny as a rule attested her mark and brought her the money from the post-office. But Hester, busy with her own thoughts, scarcely heard. Why had Tom Trevarthen pretended to her that he could not write? Why had he trapped her into writing a letter for him—and to this Harriet, whoever she might be? She unfolded the letter and read, in bold, clear penmanship—

Quebec, 14th February 1872.
"My dear Mother,—This is to enclose what I can, and to tell you we arrived yesterday after a fair passage, and dropped hook in the Basin below Quebec; all on board well and hearty, including Miss Myra and Master Clem. But between ourselves the old man won't last many more trips. His head is weakening, and Mrs. Purchase, though she won't own to it, is fairly worn with watching him. We hadn't scarcely cleared the Channel before we ran into dirty weather, with the wind to N.W. and rising. We looked, of course, for the old man to shorten sail and send her along easy, he being noted for caution. But not a bit of it. The second day out he comes forward to me, that stood cocking an eye aloft and waiting for him to speak, and says he, 'This is not at all what I expected, but the Lord will provide;' and with that he pulled out a Bible from his pocket and tapped it, looking at me very knowing, and so walked aft and shut himself up in his cabin. Not another glimpse did we get of him for thirty-six hours, and no message on earth could fetch him up or persuade him to let us take a stitch off her. As for old Hewitt, that has been mate of her these fifteen years, and forgotten all he ever knew, except to do what he's told, not a rag would he shift on his own responsibility. There she was, with a new foretop-sail never stretched before, and almost all her canvas less than two years old, playing the mischief with it all, let alone putting the ship in danger. At last, when she was fairly smothering herself and her topmasts bending like whips, up he pops, Bible in hand, and says he, with a look aloft and around, like a man more hurt than angry, 'Heavenly Father, this won't do! This here's a pretty state of things, Heavenly Father!' When the boys had eased her down a bit—at the risk of their lives it was—and the old man had disappeared below again, Mrs. Purchase came crawling aft to me in the wheelhouse, wet as a drowned rat; and there we had a talk—very confidential, though 'twas mostly carried on by shouting. The upshot was, she couldn't trust the old man's head. In his best days he'd have threaded the Virtuous Lady through a needle, and was capable yet; but with this craze upon him he was just as capable of casting the ship away for the fun of it. As for Hewitt, we found out his quality in the fogs of the Banks, when the skipper struck work again and let the dead-reckoning go to glory, telling us to consider the lilies. Hewitt took it over, and in two days had worked us south of our course by eighty odd miles. By the Lord's mercy, on the third day we could take our bearings, and so hauled up and fetch the Gulf; and here we are right and tight, and Mrs. Purchase gone ashore to ship a navigating officer for the passage home. But mates' certificates don't run cheap in these parts, as they do on Tower Hill, and the pilots tell me she'll be lucky if she gets what she wants for love or money.
"Dear mother, remember me to all the folks, and give my love to Granny Butson. Master Clem is putting on flesh wonderful, and I reckon the pair of them are in no hurry to get home to school.
"Talking of that, I would like to hear how the school gets along, and Miss Marvin—"

"Eh?" Mrs. Trevarthen interrupted. "Why, come to think of it, he's never heard of your coming to look after us, but reckons you'm still at the school-mistressing. And you standing there and reading out his very words! I call that a proper joke."

"—And that limb of ugliness, Rosewarne. But by the time this reaches you we shall be loaded and ready for sailing; so no news can I hear till I get home, and perhaps it is lucky. Good-bye now. If the world went right, it is not you would be living in the Widows' Houses, nor I that would be finding it hard to forgive folks; but as Nicky Vro used to say, 'Must thank the Lord, I reckon, that we be so well as we be.' No more at present from your loving son,"
"Tom."

"I don't understand the tail-end o' that," said Mrs. Trevarthen. "Would you mind reading it over again, my dear?—Well, well, you needn't to flush up so, that he finds it hard to forgive folks. Meanin' you, d'ee think? He don't speak unkindly of any but Rosewarne; and I don't mind that I've heard news of that varmint for a month past. Have you?"

Hester did not answer—scarcely even heard. The hand in which she held the letter fell limp at her side as she stood gazing across the quadrangle facing the sun, but with a soft, new-born light in her eyes, that did not owe its kindling there. Why had he played this trick on her? She could not explain, and yet she understood. For her he had meant that letter— yes, she was sure of it! To her, as though for another, he had spoken those words—she remembered every one of them. He had not dared to speak directly. And he had made her write them down. Foolish boy that he was, he had been cunning. Did she forgive him? She could not help forgiving; but it was foolish—foolish!

She put on her bonnet that evening and walked down to see Nuncey and have a talk with her; not to confide her secret, but simply because her elated spirit craved for a talk.

Greatly to her disappointment, Nuncey was out; nor could Mrs. Benny tell where the girl had gone, unless (hazarding a guess) she had crossed the ferry to her father's fine new office, to discuss fittings and furniture. Nuncey had dropped into the habit, since the days began to lengthen, of crossing the ferry after tea-time.

Hester decided to walk as far as the Passage Slip, on the chance of meeting her. Somewhat to her surprise, as she passed Broad Quay she almost ran into Master Calvin Rosewarne, idling there with his hands in his pockets, and apparently at a loose end.

"Calvin! Why, whatever are you doing here, on this side of the water?"

The boy—he had not the manners to take off his cap—eyed her for a moment with an air half suspicious and half defiant. "That's telling," he answered darkly, and added, after a pause, "Were you looking for anyone?"

"I was hoping to meet Nuncey Benny. She has gone across to her father's new office—or so Mrs. Benny thinks."

The boy grinned. "She won't be coming this way just yet, and she's not at the new office. But I'll tell you where to find her, if you'll let me come along with you." On their way to the ferry he looked up once or twice askance at her, as if half-minded to speak; but it was not until old Daddo had landed them on the farther shore that he seemed to find his tongue.

"Look here," he said abruptly, halting in the roadway, and regarding her from under lowering brows; "the last time you took me in lessons you told me to think less of myself and more of other people. Didn't you, now?"

"Well?" said Hester, preoccupied, dimly remembering that talk.

"Well, you seemed to forget your own teaching pretty easily when you walked out of Hall and left me there on the stream. Nice company you left me to, didn't you?"

"Your father,"—began Hester lamely.

"We won't talk of Dad. He's altered—I don't know how. I can't get on with him, though he's the only person hereabouts that don't hate me; I'll give him that credit. But I ask you, wasn't it pretty rough on a chap to haul him over the coals for selfishness, and then march out and leave him without another thought? And that's what you did."

"I am sorry." Hester's conscience accused her, and she was contrite. The child must have found life desperately dull.

"I forgive you," said Master Calvin, magnanimously, and resumed his walk. "I forgive you on condition you'll do a small job for me. When Myra turns up again—and sooner or later she'll turn up—I want you to give her a message."

"Very well; but why not give it yourself?"

"She don't speak to me, you know," he answered, stooping to pick up a stone and bowl it down the hill. It scattered a trio of ducks, gathered a few yards below and cluttering with their bills in the village stream, and he laughed as they waddled off in panic. "That's how I'm left to amuse myself," he said after a moment apologetically, but again half defiantly. "You've to tell Myra," he went on, picking up another stone, eyeing for an aim, and dropping it, "that I like her pluck, but she needn't have been in such a hurry to teach the head of the family. Will you remember that?"

"I will, although I don't know what you mean by it."

"Never you mind, but take her that message; Myra will understand."

He stepped ahead a few paces, as if unwilling to be questioned further. They passed the gate of Hall. Beyond it, at the foot of the Jacob's Ladder leading up to Parc-an-Hal, he whispered to her to halt, climbed with great caution, and disappeared behind the hedge of the great meadow; but by and by he came stealing back and beckoned to her.

"It's all right," he whispered; "only step softly."

Keeping close alongside the lower hedge, he led the way towards the great rick at the far corner of the field.

As they drew close to it he caught her arm and pulled her aside, pointing to her shadow, which the level sun had all but thrown beyond the rick.

"But what is the meaning of it?"

The question was on her lips when her ear caught the note of a voice— Nuncey's voice—and these words, low, and yet distinct—

"At the call 'Attention!' the whole body and head must be held erect, the chin slightly dropped, chest well open, shoulders square to the front, eyes looking straight forward. The arms must hang easily, with fingers and thumbs straight, close to one another and touching the thighs; the feet turned out at right angles or nearly. Now, please—'Tention!"—(a pause)—"You break my heart, you do! Eyes, I said, looking straight forward; and the weight of the body ought to rest on the front part of the foot—not tilted back on your heels and looking like a china cat in a thunderstorm. Now try again, that's a dear!"

Hester gazed around wildly at Calvin, who was twisting himself in silent contortions of mirth.

"Take a peep!" he gasped. "She's courting Archelaus Libby, and teaching him to look like a man."

"You odious child!" Hester, ashamed of her life to have been trapped into eavesdropping, and yet doubting her ears, strode past the edge of the rick and into full view.

Nuncey drew back with a cry.

"Hester Marvin!"

Hester's eyes travelled past her and rested on Archelaus. He, rigid at attention, caught and held there spellbound, merely rolled a pair of agonized eyes.

"Nuncey! Archelaus! What on earth are you two doing?"

"Learnin' him to be a Volunteer, be sure!" answered Nuncey, her face the colour of a peony. After an instant she dropped her eyes, her cheeks confessing the truth.

"But—but why?" Hester stared from one to the other.

"If he'd only be like other men!" protested Nuncey.

Hester ran to her with a happy laugh. "But you wouldn't wish him like other men!"

"I do, and I don't." Nuncey eluded her embrace, having caught the sound of ribald laughter on the other side of the rick. Darting around, she was in time to catch Master Calvin two cuffs, right and left, upon the ears. He broke for the gate and she pursued, but presently returned breathless.

"'Tis wonderful to me," she said, eyeing Archelaus critically and sternly, "how ever I come to listen to him. But he softened me by talking about you. He's a deal more clever than he seems, and I believe at this moment he likes you best."

"I don't!" said Archelaus firmly; "begging your pardon, Miss Marvin."

"I am sure you don't," laughed Hester.

"Well, anyway, I'll have to tell father now," said Nuncey; "for that imp of a boy will be putting it all round the parish."

But here Archelaus asserted himself. "That's my business," he said quietly. "It isn't any man's 'yes' or 'no' I'm afraid of, Miss Marvin, having stood up to her."

CHAPTER XXVI.

MESSENGERS.

In Cornwall, they say, the cuckoo brings a gale of wind with him; and of all gales in the year this is the one most dreaded by gardeners and cidermen, for it catches the fruit trees in the height of their blossoming season, and in its short rage wrecks a whole year's promise.

Such a gale overtook the Virtuous Lady, homeward bound, in mid-Atlantic. For two days and a night she ran before it; but this of course is a seaman's phrase, and actually, fast as the wind hurled her forward, she lagged back against it until she wallowed in its wake, and her crew gave thanks and crept below to their bunks, too dog-weary to put off their sodden clothes.

The gale passed on and struck our south-western coast, devastating the orchards of Cornwall and Devon and carpeting them with unborn fruit— dulcis vitÆ ex-sortes. Amid this unthrifty waste and hard by, off Berry Head, the schooner One-and-All foundered and went down, not prematurely.

Foreseeing the end, her master had given orders to lower the whale-boat. The schooner might be apple-rotten, as her crew declared, but she carried a whale-boat which had inspired confidence for years and induced many a hesitating hand to sign articles; a seaworthy boat, to begin with, and by her owner's and master's care made as nearly unsinkable as might be, cork-fendered, fitted bow and stern with air tanks, well found in all her gear. Woe betide the seaman who abstracted an inch of rope from her to patch up the schooner's crazy rigging, or who left a life-belt lying loose around the deck or a rowlock unrestored to its due place after the weekly scrub-down!

The crew, then, launched the boat—half filling her in the process—and, tumbling in, pulled for the lee of the high land between Berry Head and Brixham. The master took the helm. He was steering without one backward look at the abandoned ship, when the oarsmen ceased pulling, all together, with a cry of dismay.

On the schooner's deck stood a child, waving his arms despairingly.

How he came there they could not tell, nor who he was. The master, not understanding their outcry, cursed and shouted to them to pull on. But already the starboard oars were holding water and the bowman bringing her around head-to-sea.

"Good Lord deliver us!"

The master carried a pair of binoculars, slung in a leathern case about his shoulders inside his oilskin coat.

They had been given to him by public subscription many years before, with a purse of gold, as a reward for saving life at sea. Since then he had forgotten in whisky-drinking and money-getting all the generous courage of his youth. His business for many years had been to play with human life for his own and his owner's profit, with no care but to keep on the right side of the law. The noble impulse which had earned him this testimonial was dead within him; to recover it he must have been born again. He might even, by keeping his pumps going and facing out the peril for another couple of hours, have run the One-and-All into Torbay and saved her; but he had not wanted to save her. Nevertheless, when he had run down to collect his few treasures from the cabin, these binoculars were his first and chiefest thought, for they attached him to something in his base career which had been noble. So careful was he, so fearful of facing eternity and judgment—if drown he must—without them, that, although the time was short and the danger instant, and the man by this time a coward, he had stripped off oilskin coat and pea-jacket to indue them again and button them over his treasure.

Yet either his hands were numb or the sea-water had penetrated these wraps and damped the tag of the leathern case, making it difficult to open. When at length he tugged the binoculars free and sighted them, it was to catch one glimpse, and the last, of the child waving from the bulwarks.

"Good Lord deliver us!"

A high-crested wave blotted out the schooner's hull. She seemed to sink behind it, almost to midway of her main shrouds. She would lift again into sight as that terrible wave went by—

But she did not. The wave went by, but no portion of her hull appeared. With a slow lurch forward she was gone, and the seas ran over her as though she and her iniquity had never been.

In that one glimpse through his binoculars the master, and he alone of the crew, had recognised the child—Calvin Rosewarne, his owner's son.

To their credit, the men pulled back for the spot where the One-and-All had gone down. Not till an hour's battling had taught them the hopelessness of a search hopeless from the first did they turn the boat and head again for Brixham.

The news, telegraphed from Brixham, began to spread through Troy soon after midday. Since the law allowed it, over-insurance was accepted by public opinion in the port almost as a matter of ordinary business; almost, but not quite. In his heart every citizen knew it to be damnable, and voices had been raised in public calling it damnable. Men and women who would have risked nothing to amend the law so far felt the public conscience agreeing with their own that they talked freely of Rosewarne's punishment as a judgment of God. Folks in the street canvassed the news, insensibly sinking their voices as they stared across the water at the elm trees of Hall. Behind those elms lay a house, and within that house would be sitting a man overwhelmed by God's vengeance.

In the late afternoon a messenger knocked at Hester's door with a letter. It was brought to her where she sat, with Mrs. Trevarthen, by Aunt Butson's bedside, and it said—

"I wish to speak with you this evening, if you are willing." "—S. Rosewarne."

She rose at once, silently, with a glance at her two companions. They had not spoken since close upon an hour. When first the news came the old woman on the bed had raised herself upon her elbow, struggled a moment for utterance, and burst into a paÆn of triumphant hatred, horrible to hear. Mrs. Trevarthen sat like one stunned. "Hush 'ee, Sarah! Hush 'ee, that's a good soul!" she murmured once and again in feeble protest. At length Hester, unable to endure it longer, had risen, taken the invalid by one shoulder and forced her gently back upon the pillow.

"Tell me to go," she said, "and I will leave you and not return. But to more of this I will not listen. I believed you an ill-used woman; but you are far less wronged than wicked if you can rejoice in the death of a child."

Since then the invalid had lain quiet, staring up at the ceiling. She did not know—nor did Mrs. Trevarthen know—whose letter Hester held in her hand. But now, as Hester moved towards the door, a weak voice from the bed entreated her—

"You won't leave me! I didn't mean that about the child—I didn't, really!"

"She didn't mean it," echoed Mrs. Trevarthen.

"I know—I know," said Hester, and stretched out both arms in sudden weariness, almost despair. "But oh! why in this world of burdens can we not cast away hate, the worst and wilfullest?"

It seemed to her that in her own mind during these few weeks a light had been steadily growing, illuminating many things she had been wont to puzzle over or habitually to pass by as teasing and obscure. She saw the whole world constructed on one purpose, that all living creatures should love and help one another to be happy. Even such a man as Rosewarne found a place in it, as one to be pitied because he erred against this light. Yes, and even the death of this child had a place in the scheme, since, calling for pity, it called for one of the divinest exercises of love. She marvelled, as she crossed in the ferry-boat, why the passengers, one and all, discussed it as a direct visitation upon Rosewarne, as though Rosewarne had offended against some agreement in which they and God Almighty stood together, and they had left the fellow in God's hands with a confidence which yet allowed them room to admire the dramatic neatness of His methods. She longed to tell them that they were all mistaken, and her eyes sought old Daddo's, who alone took no part in this talk. But old Daddo pulled his stroke without seeming to listen, his brow puckered a little, his eyes bent on the boat's wake abstractedly as though he communed with an inward vision.

At the front door of Hall Susannah met her, white and tearful.

"I heard that he'd sent for you." Susannah sank her voice almost to a whisper. "He's in the counting-house. You be'n't afeard?"

"Why should I be afraid?"

"I don't know. He's that strange. For months now he've a-been strange; but for two days he've a-sat there, wi'out food or drink, and the door locked most of the time. Not for worlds would I step into that room alone."

"For two days?"

"Ever since he opened the poor child's letter; for a letter there was, though the Lord knows what was in it. You're sure you be'n't afeard?"

Hester stepped past her and through the great parlour, and tapped gently on the counting-house door. Her knock was answered by the sound of a key turning in the lock, and Rosewarne opened to her.

At the moment she could not see his face, for a lamp on the writing-table behind silhouetted him in black shadow. Her eyes wandered over the room's disarray, and all her senses quailed together in its exhausted atmosphere.

He closed the door, but did not lock it again, motioned her to a chair, and dropped heavily into his accustomed seat by the writing-table, where for a while his fingers played nervously with the scattered papers. Now by the lamplight she noted the extreme greyness of his face and the hard brilliance of his eyes, usually so dull and fish-like.

"I am much obliged to you for coming," he began in a level, almost business-like tone, but without looking up. "There are some questions I want to ask. You have heard the news, of course?"

"Everyone has heard. I am sorry—so sorry! It is terrible."

"Thank you," said he, with a slight inclination of the head, as though acknowledging some remark of small and ordinary politeness. "Perhaps you would like to see this?" He picked up a crumpled sheet of notepaper, smoothed out the creases, and handed it to her. Taking it, she read this, written in a childish, ill-formed hand—

"Dear Father,—When this reaches you I shall be at sea. I hope you won't mind very much, as it runs in the family, and some of those that done it have turned out best. I don't get any good staying at home. I love you and you love me, but nobody else does, and nobody understands. I thought Miss Marvin understood, but she went away and forgot. Never mind, it will be all right when I am a man. I will come back, for you mustn't think I don't love you." "—Your affect. son,"
"C. Rosewarne."

As Hester looked up she found Mr. Samuel's eyes fixed on her for the first time, and fixed on her curiously.

"You don't approve, perhaps, of cousins marrying?" he asked slowly.

Was the man mad, as Susannah had hinted?

"I—I don't understand you, Mr. Rosewarne."

"Your mother had an only sister—an elder sister—who went out to Dominica, and there married a common soldier. Did you know this?"

"I knew that my mother had a sister, and that there had been some disgrace. My father never spoke of it, and my mother died when I was very young; but in some way—as children do—I came to know."

"I thought you might know more, but it does not matter now. My father was that common soldier, and the disgrace did not lie in her marrying him. Before the marriage—I have a copy here of the entry in the register—a child was born. Yes, stare at me well, Cousin Hester, stare at me, your cousin, though born in bastardy!"

His eyes seemed to force her backward, and she leaned back, clasping the arms of her chair.

"I learnt this a short while before my father died. I had only his word for it—he gave me no particulars; but I have hunted them up, and he told me the truth. Knowing them, I concealed them for the sake of the child that was drowned to-day; otherwise, the estate being entailed, his inheritance would have passed to Clem, and he and I were interlopers. Are you one of those who believe that God has punished me by drowning my son? You have better grounds than the rest for believing it."

"No," said Hester, after a long pause, remembering what thoughts had been in her mind as she crossed the ferry.

"Why not?"

"The child had done no evil. God is just, or God does not exist. He must have had some other purpose than to punish you."

"You are right. He may have used that purpose to afflict me yet the more—though I don't believe it; but my true punishment—my worse punishment—began long before. Cousin, cousin, you see clearly! How often might you have helped me during these months I have been in hell! Can you think how a man feels who is afraid of himself? No, you cannot; but I say to you there is no worse hell, and through that hell I have been walking since the day I went near to killing Clem. You saved me that once, and then you turned and left me. I wanted you— no, not to marry me! When a man fears himself he thinks no more of affection. I wanted you, I craved for you, to save me—to save me again and again, and as often as the madness mastered me. A word from you would have made me docile as a child. I should have done you no hurt. On your walks and about your lodging at night I have dogged you for that word, afraid to show myself, afraid to knock and demand it. By this time I had discovered you were my cousin. 'Blood is thicker than water'—over and over I told myself this. 'Sooner or later,' I said, 'the voice in our blood will whisper to her, and she will turn and help my need.' But you never turned, and why? Because you were in love, and if fear is selfish, love is selfish too!"

He paused for breath, eyeing her with a gloomy, bitter smile. "Oh, there's no harm in my knowing your secret," he went on. "I'm past hating Tom Trevarthen, and past all jealousy. All I ever asked was that he should spare you to help me—a cup of cold water for a tongue in hell; I didn't want your love. But that's where the selfishness of love comes in. It can't spare even what it doesn't need for itself. It wants the whole world to be happy; but when the unhappy cry to it, it doesn't hear."

Hester stood up, her eyes brimming. "You are right," she said, "I did not hear. I never guessed at all. Tell me now that I can help."

"It is too late," he answered. "I no longer want your help."

"Surely to-day, if ever, you need your neighbours' pity and their prayers?"

He laughed aloud. "That shows how little you understand! You and my precious neighbours think of me as brooding here, mourning for my lost boy. I tell you I am glad—yes, glad! This is no part of God's punishment! It was the future I feared: He has taken it from me. I can suffer at ease now, knowing the end. See now, I have confessed to you the wrong I did that blind child, and the confession has eased me. I could not have confessed it yesterday—the burden of living grows lighter, you perceive. I don't repent; it doesn't seem to me that I have any use for repentance. If what I have done deserves punishment in another world, I must suffer it; but I know it cannot be half what I have suffered of late. No, cousin, I need you no longer. There is no sting to rankle, now that hope—hope for my boy—has gone. I can rest quiet now, with my own damnation."

She put out a hand, protesting, but he turned from her—they were standing face to face—and opening the door, stood aside to let her pass.

"I thank you for coming," he said gravely. "What I have told you—about the inheritance, I mean—will be no secret after the next few days."

She halted and looked at him inquiringly. "It will be a secret safe with me," she said. Her eyes still searched his.

For the second time he laughed. "The children will be home in a few days; I wait here till then. That is all I meant."

In the dusk by the ferry-slip old Daddo stood ready to push off. Hester was the only passenger, for it was Saturday, and on Saturdays, at this hour, all the traffic flowed away from the town, returning from market to the country.

Her eyes were red, and it may be that old Daddo noted this, for midway across, and without any warning, he rested on his oars, scanning her earnestly.

"You have been calling on Rosewarne, miss?—making so bold."

She nodded.

"I see'd you looking t'ards me just now as we crossed. I see'd you glance up as they, in their foolishness, was reckoning they knew the mind o' God. Tell me, miss, how he bears it?"

"He bears it; but without hope, for his trouble goes deeper."

Mr. Benny, arriving next morning at the ferry to cross over to his office, opened his eyes very wide indeed to see the boat waiting by the slip and his late master, Samuel Rosewarne, standing solitary within it, holding on to a shore-ring by the boat-hook.

"But whatever has become of Daddo?" Mr. Benny's gaze, travelling round, rested for one moment of wild suspicion on the door of the 'Sailor's Return,' hard by.

"With your leave he has given up his place to me for a while," said Rosewarne slowly. "I have come to ask you that favour, Mr. Benny."

The little man stepped on board, wondering, nor till half-way across could he find speech. "It hurts me to see you doing this, sir; it does indeed. If old Nicky Vro could look down and see you so demeaning yourself, you can't think but he'd say 'twas too much."

"I did Nicky Vro an injury once, and a mortal one. But I never gave him licence to know, on earth or in heaven, what my conscience requires. It requires this, Mr. Benny; and unless you forbid it, we'll say no more."

The common opinion on both shores was that grief had turned Rosewarne's brain. He had prepared himself against laughter; but no one laughed: and though, as the news spread, curiosity brought many to the shores to see, the groups dispersed as the boat approached. Public penance is a rare thing in these days, and all found it easier to believe that the man was mad. Some read the Lord's retributive hand again in the form his madness took.

In silence he took the passengers' coppers or handed them their change. Few men had ever opened talk with Rosewarne, and none were bold enough to attempt it in the three days during which he plied the ferry.

"You left him lonely to his sinning; leave him alone now," said old Daddo, tilling his cottage-garden up the hill, to the neighbours who leaned across his fence questioning him about his share in the strange business. His advice was idle; they could not help themselves. Something in Rosewarne's face forbade speech.

On the evening of the third day he saw the signal for which he waited—the smoke of a tug rising above the low roofs on the town quay, and above the smoke the top-gallants and royals of a tall vessel pencilled against the sunset's glow. With his eyes upon the vision he rowed to shore and silently as ever took the fees of his passengers and gave them their change; then, having made fast the boat, he walked up to Mr. Benny's office.

"You have done me one service," he said. "I ask you to do me a second. The Virtuous Lady has come into port; in five minutes or less she will drop anchor. Take boat and pull to her. Tell Mrs. Purchase that I have gone up the hill to Hall, and will be waiting there; and if you can persuade her, bring her ashore in your boat."

Mr. Benny reached up for his hat.

"Say that I am waiting to speak with her alone. On no account must she bring the children."

Up in the Widows' Houses, high above the murmur of the little port, no ear caught the splash as the Virtuous Lady's anchor found and held her to home again. In Aunt Butson's room Hester sat and read aloud to her patient. The book was the Book of Proverbs, from which Aunt Butson professed that she, for her part, derived more comfort than from all the four Gospels put together. For an hour Hester read on steadily, and then, warned by the sound of regular breathing, glanced at the bed and shut the Bible.

Rising, she paused for a moment, watching the sleeper, opened and closed the door behind her gently, and bent her steps towards Mrs. Trevarthen's room, at the far end of the gallery; but on the way her eyes fell on a group of daffodils in bloom below, in the quadrangle. Two flights of stairs led up from the quadrangle, one at either end of the gallery; and stepping back to the head of that one which mounted not far from Aunt Butson's door, she descended and plucked a handful of the flowers. Returning to the gallery by the other stairway, she was more than a little surprised to see Mrs. Trevarthen's door, at the head of it, almost wide open. For Mrs. Trevarthen, worn-out and weary, had left her only an hour ago under a solemn promise to go straight to bed, and Hester had been minded to arrange these flowers for her while she slept.

"Mrs. Trevarthen!" she called indignantly from the stair-head. "Mrs. Trevarthen! What did you promise me?"

A tall figure, dark against the farther window, rose from its stooping posture over the bed where Mrs. Trevarthen lay, turned, and confronted her in the doorway with a glad and wondering stare.

"Miss Marvin!"

"Tom! oh, Tom!" cried his mother's voice within. "To think I haven't told you! But you give me no time!"

A minute later, as Hester walked away along the gallery, she heard his step following.

"But why wouldn't you come in?" he demanded, and went on before she could answer, "To think of your being Matron here! But of course mother had no time to reach me with a letter."

"She gave me yours to read," said Hester mischievously; whereat Tom flushed and looked away and laughed. "Tell me," she went on. "What did she answer?"

"She? Who?"

"Why, Harriet—wasn't that her name?"

"There's no such person."

"What? Do you mean to say it was all a trick, and there's no Harriet Sands in existence?"

"You're wrong now. There is a Harriet Sands, and she belongs to Runcorn too; only she's a ship."

"A ship! And the letter you made me write—it almost made me cry, too—was that meant only for a ship?"

"No, it was not—but you're laughing at me." He turned almost savagely, and catching sight of something in her eyes, stood still. "If you only knew—-do you know?"

"I wish I did—I think I do."

He caught at her hands and clasped them over the daffodils.

"If ever I'm a widow," said a panting voice a few paces away, "if ever I'm a widow (which the Lord forbid!), I'll end my days on a ground floor 'pon the flat. Companion-ladders is bad enough when you've a man to look after; but when you've put 'en away and can take your meals easy, to chase a bereaved woman up a hill like the side of a house, an' then up a flight of stairs, for five shillings a week and all found—O-oh!"

Mrs. Purchase halted at the stair-head; and it is a question which of three faces was redder.

"O-oh!" repeated Mrs. Purchase. "Here come I with news enough to upset a town, and simmin' to me here's a pair that won't value it more'n a rush. Well-a-well! Am I to go away, my dears, or wish 'ee fortune? You're a sly fellow too, Tom Trevarthen, to go and get hold of a schoolmistress, when 'tis only a little schoolin' you want to get a certificate and be master of a ship. That's the honest truth, my dear,"—she turned to Hester. "'Twas he that worked the Virtuous Lady home, and if you can teach 'en navigation to pass the board, he shall have her and you too. Do I mean it? Iss, fay, I mean it. I'm hauled ashore. 'Tis 'Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant,' with Hannah Purchase."

Late that evening Clem and Myra walked hand in hand, hushed, through the unkempt garden—their garden now, though to their childish intelligence no more theirs than it had always been. They might lift their voices now and run shouting with no one to rebuke them. They understood this, yet somehow they did not put it to the proof. Home was home, and the old constraint a part of it.

Late that same evening Samuel Rosewarne passed down the streets of Plymouth and unlatched the door of a dingy house which, empty of human love, of childhood, of friendship, was yet his home and the tolerable refuge of his soul. He no longer feared himself. He could face the future. He could live out his life.