CHAPTER XXI

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The "Good-night" so soullessly inflected, that the girl gave to the Spawer with her tepid fingers of politeness, was to her the leave-taking of all her happiness. In joy she was an orphan. Her heart was choking her as she surrendered herself to the sombre shadow in the roadway; the black anchor that seemed to hold her fast now at the end of an iron cable. If she could have died then, in her mingled agony and shame, sorrow, mortification, and sickening despair, she would have wished it. For a while no word was spoken. She and the gloomy figure of the man walked towards Ullbrig together, very far apart, without looking at each other, almost as though they were ignoring each other's presence. A great silent wall of division rose up between them, a barrier of disgrace, on the shady side of which walked Pam. Through all this silence was going on a mighty struggle. The man, with throbbing neck and veins of whipcord in his forehead, was desperately striving to find his pretext to scale the barrier or break through and speak to the girl on ground of common understanding, but a sense of shame for what he had seen withheld him. Great waves of heat and cold swept him alternately. That which he had witnessed chilled him with a horrible fear for the terrors of that which he had not witnessed, and yet fired him to torrid anguish. That embrace that had struck him sickly to stone in the roadway ... was it the beginning, or was it the end? Had the girl been playing him false all through? With the magnified doubts of his class concerning the evil magnetism of musicians and the slackness of their scruples, his heart was wrung with horrible apprehensions as to how far the Spawer possessed this power, and how far he had used it. Was this girl--whom he loved with a pure, blind, white-heat passion--was she, while scorning his approaches, so deeply infatuated with the visitor from the Cliff that she coveted rather to be the temporary toy of the one than the honored wife of the other? The doubt stung him to the quick. He wanted to speak, yet dared not for fear his words might betray this thorny crown of his torture. Oh, what he would have given to know the history of that walk from Shippus to Ullbrig; what would he not have given to be able to wipe it out of all their lives and memories as though it had never been.

"Let me ... carry your basket," he said awkwardly, after a while. He tried to round his voice mentally before using it, to file down its roughness of emotion; but it came out hoarse and unequal in spite of him.

To the girl, troubled with her own personal misery and the gnawing misery of speculation as to how much of her weakness he had witnessed, and what he was thinking of her, and the acute irksomeness of his presence at this crisis of her life, when she sought only solitude, the mere relinquishing of the basket seemed like another surrender. She clung to it in spirit, as though it were a straw on the black waters of her foundering.

"It is nothing ... thank you," she told him. "I can carry it."

He felt the resistance to his offer, and the motive that urged it, and the blood swept up about his head again. The girl, though she did not look at him, saw the hands go up to his throat.

"You were ... not carrying it ... before," he hazarded.

"We are so near home." The girl hesitated, and there was a tremble in her voice. "You may carry it, if you like," she said, and handed it to him.

"Thank you."

He took it from her with an awkward scuffle of untutored politeness. Even as he felt the pride of the possession he felt the shame and degradation of it too--to walk by the side of her as the Spawer had done; to carry her basket as the Spawer had done; to try and delude his poor, anguished soul with these fragments of a banquet to which he had been an uninvited spectator (a guest never), and make himself believe he was in some sort enjoying her favor. Ah, poor fool! poor fool! By his side walked the phantom figure of the Spawer, communing with the girl, and his miserable guard of flesh and blood was powerless to prevent it, or intercept the messages of remembrance passing between them. Ah, if he could; if he could. All his life was bound up in the girl. He had wrestled for her in body and soul. On his knees he had prayed for her, begging God to give her to him, to incline her heart, to soften her, to pour into her breast the grace to love him. He had got out of his bed to pray for her in the sleepless night-time when she ... had been dreaming-of this visitor, perhaps ... And now.

"Have you been fair to me?" he asked her suddenly, in a low drenched voice. The words rushed up to his mouth on a tide of hot blood.

The girl had felt the imminence of the attack. She had been, in spirit at least, a participant of the man's agony; had felt the blood rushing up again and again with its impulsion of speech.

"What do you mean?" she asked faintly, and turned her head aside momentarily, as though to the gust of a strong wind.

"Have you been fair to me?" he asked her again.

For very fear he dared not alter these words that he had once uttered and was sure of, lest the alteration might involve him too much.

"I have not been unfair..." she said.

She put out the defence like an arm that almost recognises the justice of the blow aimed, and makes no real effort to ward it.

"You have been very unfair," he said hoarsely. "You know you have been very unfair. Even your voice betrays you." He was on the point of calling upon his eyes for corroboration of her unfairness, but he stopped himself with an effort that the girl heard and understood. "You made me a promise," he said. "One night ... what did you promise?"

"It was n't a promise," the girl protested. "I never promised you anything. I told you I dared not promise ... and I could n't promise ... and I did n't promise."

"It was a promise," he said again. "If it was n't a promise ... it was your word, and I trusted your word. You said there was no bar to my loving you. You told me ... and you know you told me, that I might go on loving you, and try to win ... your esteem. All this time I have been believing you and your word.... Are you going to tell me now that I 've misjudged you?"

He spoke very rapidly and jerkily and hoarsely, as though he were himself ashamed of this necessity to put his thoughts into words and hear them.

"I only said it because ... it was because you pressed me so hard. You would not take my answer. You looked so ill." The slow stream of tears was trickling through the broken pauses of her speech. "It was you that put the words into my mouth. You told me it would kill you if I said there was no hope. How could I say there was no hope? I could n't; I could n't. You forced me to say that you might go on loving me ... but I told you it was n't a promise."

Her tears were running with her words now. She wept for herself and for this man. The thing she had been dreading, it had come to pass. She was an Ullbrig hypocrite, a deceiver, a faith-breaker, an actor and a worker of lies.

Ah, miserable little sinner, whose only sin perhaps, had she known it, was the sin of an overflowing, over-generous heart ... her day of reckoning was upon her now, and her tears were bitter.

They walked along in silence for a step or two. Though the man by her side was burning to burst forth in a fiery Etna of denunciation and reproach, to subjugate her and gain dominion over her by the sheer conflagration of righteous anger, he dared not, lest she might admit his charges, confess herself a sinner, and own an unconquerable disregard of him. To be allied to her by an indefinite hope, frail as a silkworm's thread, was heavenly compared with the blank severance of despair. He was a retainer upon her favor, and must keep his place. What authority he held, to assume authority over her, came from her.

"You told me ... I might love you," he said, straining his voice to breaking point in his fierce desire to hold it steady and keep its control, "... that there was no other bar--no other bar. Have you been making a mock of me all this time?"

"No, no." He knew the girl's two hands were together in their agony of protestation, but they both spoke with their faces unturned, each looking before them fixedly. "Believe anything of me ... but that," she begged him. "I have never mocked you. I would never mock you."

He hesitated a moment, and then:

"Are you ... making a mock of yourself?" he asked her.

The question shook her first like a wind, and then stilled her suddenly.

"What do you mean?" she asked him.

"Are you making a mock of yourself?"

They were at the first of the houses now, in the little high street, and there were figures moving about between them and the Post Office; figures that might stop; figures that might speak; figures that might peer into her tear-stained face when the light of some yellow window shone on it.

"I cannot go on ... like this," she said, with a half-sob and a shiver. "I 'm not fit to meet anybody. Let us turn back."

They turned back, facing the moon. The girl walked with her white, troubled face set before her, glistening under its tears, like a second moon. The man, stealing one covert look at it, saw that no resumption of this subject was likely from her quarter. She was in the clairvoyant state of trouble that would have led her to Shippus again, unchecked, without a word.

"You say you have not made a mock of me," he took up again, in his monotonous, tightened voice, "... but you are making a mock of somebody. Who is it? Is it yourself?"

"Why am I making a mock of somebody?" the girl asked.

"Is it fair to yourself?" he said, and his voice grew tighter and tighter, "... to be taking walks down the Shippus road ... at night ... with a stranger? You know ... what sort of a reputation the Shippus road has at night-time. You know what sort of company ... you are likely to meet ... what sort of company you have met to-night." His voice so constricted about his throat that it seemed like to strangle him. "Is it fair to yourself ... putting me out of the question altogether ... that you should give people ... give them the opportunity of saying ... saying things about you?"

The girl had no answer but the faster flow of her tears. She knew well enough that he had spoken no more than the truth. Judged from an external standpoint, she looked no better than her misguided sisters--farm wenches and hinds' lasses--that wandered to their shame by the hedgerows under the shades of night. And for this, and all her other delinquencies, and all her other sins, unhappinesses, and penances of suffering ... she wept.

"I think too much of you ... ever to risk bringing you within reach of people's slanders. I would rather cut my hand off ... than that I should hear you spoken lightly of. To me ... your character is more sacred than my own. I would guard it with my life if need be. But what is it ... to others?" The reins of his passion slipped his grasp a little; the girl's tearful endurance encouraged him to speak more forcibly. "What do men of towns care for the character ... of a girl? They come to-day and they go to-morrow. What does it matter to them whether they leave shame ... and broken hearts behind? A girl's heart is a plaything for them ... and when they have broken it ... they throw it aside. There are plenty more hearts to be broken in the big cities."

Like all others of his untraveled kind, he had the wild, generic idea of cities and of the large places of the earth as being seats of sinfulness and iniquity. Wickedness filled them and saturated the dwellers therein. Outside Ullbrig, and the little bit of Yorkshire contiguous with which he was acquainted, the rest of the world (of which he had the fleetingest personal knowledge) was Sodom and Gomorrah. All the men who came from afar, and had the faint traces of fashion about their raiment, were men of danger; ministers of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Perhaps, in his own narrow track of ignorant bigotry, he was not so very far from the truth after all; but it shocks one's cosmopolitan soul to have to subscribe to such tenets. Not because of what they contain, but because of the uncatholicity of the formula--a very stocks, indeed, for the confinement of one's belief.

"What does it matter ... to him ... whether he makes you food for people's tongues? All he cares about is his own pleasure and gratification. The attentions ... of such a man ... are an insult in themselves. He will know you down here, for his own purposes ... will flatter you ... will walk with you; but would he know you in the towns? Would he walk with you ... before his fine friends? No, he would not. He is treating you as though you were a rose by the roadside, to be plucked and cast away the moment he is tired of you. Your friends are not his friends. You ought to see it ... and know it. You have no right to be associating yourself ... with a man whose acquaintance ... is so ambiguous. Does it matter to him that you are seen with him ... along the Shippus lane by night? Does he care whether you are the talk of every corner and gateway? Does he ask for you honorably ... as I do, and seek to guard your reputation by every means in his power? No, no. When your name has become a byword he will go back to his fine ladies and forget all about you."

"It is not true. You are wrong," Pam struck in tearfully, catching at the breast furthest away from him and pressing under it with her rounded hand as though to hold up her weak and trembling body, "... wickedly wrong. You have no right to say those things ... and I have no right to listen to you. You think ... because ... because you saw us at Hesketh's corner, and we were together.... But you are mistaken. He met me ... as I was going to Mr. Smethurst's, quite by accident, and went with me. And then ... we had tea ... at Shippus together, and music, and stayed to watch the moon ... and came back. It was every bit my fault. He does n't know anything about Shippus lane ... and I thought of it, but I dared not tell him. How could I? He has been kinder to me than anybody else in the world--except Father Mostyn. He is a gentleman, and I know it as well as you ... and so does he. Is a gentleman wicked because he 's a gentleman? All the things he has done for me ... he has done without ever taking advantage of his kindness by a single word. Other men have done things for me ... and asked me to love them or marry them at once. He has never played with my heart as you say, or tried to make love ... or make me unhappy. He is too proud to do such things. You are wrong ... wickedly wrong. Because ... you love me ... you think everybody loves me. He likes me ... but he does n't love me. I wish he did. Oh, I wish he did! But I 'm not good enough for him ... and I know it. There has never been any question of his loving me. He is engaged to marry somebody else ... and he may leave Ullbrig any day. When he told me he was going ... I was so unhappy that I began to cry. I could n't help it. I did n't think he would notice ... but he did ... and tried to comfort me. And then ... then ... you were there and saw. And I love him," she said, almost fiercely--certainly fiercely for Pam--"I love him. I love him, and I tell you. Because he has been kind, and taught me things, and played to me. I love him in the same way I love Father Mostyn. What if he would n't walk with me before his friends? He has walked with me so kindly here ... and made life so happy for me ... that it will be like death without him. Oh, I wish I were dead now! I wish I were dead now that he 's going!"

And turning aside by Lambton's gate, close on Hesketh's corner, she laid her two arms upon the top rail, and lowering her forehead, poured forth her wet sorrow into the loose folds of her handkerchief, with her back upon the man. He stood, mortified and helpless, while the girl's figure shook in the silent agony of wringing forth her tears. Even from her grief he was shut out. He could not touch her, could not solace her, could not draw near upon her. He was but a beggar, permitted by her bounty to sit at the gate of her heart; a wretched, love-stricken leper, whose confessions of homage were as unpleasant to her as the sight of raw wounds. And now she had turned the tables upon his whining reproaches. It was he that stood guilty, not the girl--and yet his guilt was mingled with an exultant sense of triumph too, at the news she had told him. The Spawer was going; this evil weaver of charms was under order of departure. Till then he would hold his tongue; bear with the surging of his love. When once this stumbling-block on the pathway to the girl's heart was removed he could renew his approaches--fill the void, even, that this stranger should leave in it.

"I was actuated ... only by desire for your happiness," he told Pam, after he had suffered her to weep awhile without interruption. "What I have said to you," he tugged at his collar, "has been said ... through love and for love."

The girl raised her head, wiped her eyes with the damp ball of her handkerchief, and put it away into her pocket.

"Let us go back," she said. And not another word passed between them that night.

"'Ave ye brought 'er back wi' ye?" Emma Morland called, coming to the passage end by the big clock, to inquire of the schoolmaster when they entered by the front door, and catching sight of Pam: "Goodness, lass, where 'ave ye been to all this time? We was beginnin' to think ye mud 'a gotten lost."

"I went to take Mr. Smethurst ... his wine," Pam said.

The schoolmaster passed through into the little kitchen.

"Ay, bud ah s'd think 'e 'll 'a drunken it all by this time," Emma exclaimed, with not unkindly sarcasm. She had a reputation, even well deserved, in the district of a tart tongue when occasion called for it--which it frequently did--but to Pam her asperity was something in the nature of a loving shield. She could say the hardest and flintiest utterances to Pam, and yet convey the sense of kindness through them. Her hand, indeed, was bony, but its grasp was tender. "An' 'ow did ye find t' old gentleman? No better, ah s'd think."

"No."

"Nay, 'e 'll nivver be no better i' this wuld, ah doot. They gied ye yer tea, it seems."

"No-o."

"What! En't ye 'ad it, then?"

"Yes, thank you, Emma."

"Where?"

"I had it at Shippus."

"At Shippus. Well, ah nivver! Did ye gan by yersen?"

"I met Mr. Wynne."

"An' 'as 'e been wi' ye all time?"

"Yes."

"'Ave ye onnly just come back?"

"... A little while ago."

Miss Morland's opinion was expressed by a pause.

"Come in an' get yer supper. It 's all sett'n ready."

"I don't want any supper ... thank you, Emma."

"Not want yer supper? What 's amiss wi' ye?"

"Nothing. At least ... I have a headache."

"Ye 'ad n't a headache when ye started."

"It 's the heat. It was very hot in the sun. Where 's uncle?"

"I' t' parlor."

"And aunt?"

"Ay."

"Say good-night to them both for me ... will you, Emma?"

"What ... are ye away to bed?"

"I think ... I shall be better there."

"That 's soon done wi' ye, onnyways."

Emma came closer and took a keen glance into the girl's eyes.

"Ye look to me as though ye 'd been cryin'," she said. "'Ave ye?"

Pam pretended not to hear the question. Moreover, she was quite prepared to cry again at the slightest opportunity. Emma took her by the arm.

"You 're all of a shake," she said, and held the girl under scrutiny. "Pam lass," she said, and dropped her voice to a terrible whisper; "there 's nowt ... nowt wrong wi' ye? Ye 've not been gettin' into trouble?"

"Emma!"

Pam shook herself free of scrutiny with a burning face of repudiation.

"Thank goodness!" Emma said devoutly. "Bud it can 'appen soon enough to onny on ye." Emma testified freely at all times to the frailty of her sex, from which weakness, however, she dissociated herself, as a woman possessed of the superior lamp of wisdom and common-sense kept always burning. And indeed, it shone so conspicuously in her window that any bridegroom of burglarious intentions would have been singularly intrepid not to have been scared away by such a plain indication of this virgin's alertness. "Onnyway," Miss Morland decided, "... seummut 's come tiv ye beside a 'eadache. 'As 'e been sayin' owt tiv ye?"

"Who?"

"Either on 'em."

"How can you, Emma! ..."

"'Ave they?"

"No...."

"Ay ... bud ah 'm none so sure."

"Good-night, Emma."

"Good-night, lass."

But before the others in the parlor Emma spoke with happy unconcern:

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

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

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

Emma Morland looked up sharply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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