CHAPTER XXXIV

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And now, thinks the Spawer, with the fine egoism of wounded love, there is not in the whole world a heart so heavy as his.

But he is wrong, for here in Ullbrig hangs a heavier.

Heaven knows Pam had sinned in a hard market, and bought her iniquity dear. Other people, worldly people of experience and sagacity, know how to obtain all their sins below par, at the expense of the widow and orphaned. Pam, knowing nothing of this moral stock-and-share market, was paying for her shares with everything that she possessed. To the last penny of her self-respect she was paying for them. Of all moral and conscientious coinage she was void and bankrupt. There was nothing left her now but the body she lived in--all its beautiful furnishment of soul had been distrained and bundled out by the bailiffs long ago. And the body was mortgaged.

For this marriage--that to the Spawer looked but a callous flaunting of her bliss before his stricken eyes, a cruel demonstration of how little she was dependent upon him for any share of her happiness in life--what was it but a foreclosure? She who had preached the gospel of true love, of the necessary unity of the body and the soul in marriage; who had proclaimed to Ginger that "there must be no chance about it, Ginger! ..." she who above all girls knew a love as free of carnality as any earthly love can be--she was selling her body now for its price.

Would she ever forget the night of horror that saw the compact made. The lonely, dusty highroad to Hunmouth, with its wide grass borders sloping down to the ditch bottoms, between the trimmed, stunted hedgerows, where the schoolmaster led her; the rising moon; the sickly, suffocating mist of harvest; the dim stars. And there, backward and forward over the powdery road, she had fought that last fateful fight for her soul's freedom--and failed.

Give her the letter back ... only give her the letter back ... and she would try to love him in earnest. She would force herself to love him. This time she should not fail. Give her the letter back. It was not his; it was not hers. Come with her himself if he doubted, and see her hand it in at Dixon's door. She swore she would give it. He did not understand. It had been all a mistake. She had not meant to take it. If he only knew the horror she had felt of herself. Oh, she promised! she promised!

But the man would have no promises. She had made him promises before and broken them. Here was the letter--here in his possession--and here it should remain, for witness against her, if need be, until the thing was settled. Let her call him what she would now; abuse him as she liked; hate him--all was one. This night she must let it be proclaimed in the family that they were plighted. As soon as Father Mostyn returned, she must plead for them both with him. Not until she had pledged herself publicly beyond all prospect of withdrawal would he give the letter up. Promises availed nothing. He was done with promises. If she would not accept him on these terms it was a plain proof that she did not mean to fulfil them, and unless she was prepared to fulfil them she must abide by the consequences.

And more tears; and more entreaties; and pitiable shows of rebellion, quickly subdued; and petty resistances; and tortured turnings to and fro over the road; and at last surrender.

At last surrender!

Death even, had death been his condition, she would have accepted sooner than this dire alternative. Only one idea possessed her now--that the Spawer should never know the presumption of her love.

But the letter! Till he got that ... he would not go at all. The longer its restitution was delayed, the longer must she endure her agony.

Strange reversal of misery. In the beginning she had suffered with the sickness of his going. Now, in the end, she suffered doubly with the sickness that he should stay. Of a truth, she was snared in her own wicked net. The sin that she had committed against him was turned into an all-sufficing punishment more than meet for the offence. And when would she be able to ease her pain in delivering the letter?

She did not know. Since that night of shameful surrender no further mention of the letter had passed between these two guilty partners, and because of the cruel mercy at which this man held her she would ask him nothing. To appeal to him respecting his intentions respecting her--to inquire of my lord's pleasure, as though she were a bond slave, purchased with gold ... no, no, she could not! When he deemed the time ripe to return her his ill-gotten seal of authority--once it had stamped the bond to his service--let him do so, and she would take it. Till then, let them both keep silence respecting their compact.

Hardly a word, indeed, passed between them on any topic. And by trifling, wordless actions the schoolmaster tightened his hold upon the girl's shrinking muscles, and held her to him as in a vice. Mere little attentions of courtesy they were, for the most part, that the household regarded--and kept watch for--with significant looks to one another, seeing in them the pleasant ripples on the seductive surface of true love--but to the girl they were but bolts being driven home, one by one, into the padlocked door of her prison. For she was this man's prisoner in thought, word, and deed. Whenever she moved, he moved with her. If she hid herself from him in her bedroom, be sure he was keeping safe guard over its door from his own. If she changed rooms, he was after her like thought. In all except the derision of the outer world she was a felon, convicted, imprisoned, and under close surveillance; unworthy a grain of trust or credence. When he handed her an apron, or helped her into her mackintosh, she felt the act as keenly as though she were being given a gaol garb to wear. Oh, the degradation of it all! lacking only the degradation of men's eyes. But for that one pair of eyes which held her to her purpose, she would rather have gone to a real prison than suffered this horrible incarceration. And yet, it was plain to see, the man was only doing his best to gain her love. He had trapped her like a bird, cruelly, no doubt; but now that she was his, and caged, he was ready to whistle to her, to give her sugar; gild her captivity the best he knew how. Her love to him was like the lark's song; he had snared her for that, and counted on hearing her sing to him. Once she was his, and he would save her life with his own if it might be. But meanwhile, teaching her and taming her, he made sure that the cage was secure; passed his fingers feverishly over its wires a hundred times a day to assure himself that he had overlooked no loophole for her escape. There were letters for Ullbrig during those days of rain, and he proffered to take them in the girl's stead. With a rain like that there was nothing to be feared. But the girl would not. To his cruelty she had had to submit, but to his kindness never. So they went, the two of them--for though he could venture to leave her behind, he dared not be the one left--battling through the downpour beneath mackintoshes and umbrellas, with their heads down, the whole roadway apart, exchanging never a word. And Ullbrig, safe at home, behind its starched curtains, saw the letters come thus, and smiled.

Truly, many waters cannot quench love.

Sunday--that never-to-be-forgotten Sunday, that seemed like the climax of the girl's shame, when to her horror she had found the Spawer in his pew beneath her; bless Heaven for the timely storm that kept them apart--Sunday came and went.

Monday replaced it; a promiseful, rainless day. All the sky was heaped up with great broken masses of cloud from yesterday's storm, that a persistent warm breeze swept over the cliff edge and across the sea, in ceaseless waves of sunlight and shadow. Throughout the day figures were moving about the fields, turning the limp and soddened sheaves to catch the wind. Still the breeze blew, and the countless host of clouds--like another Exodus of the Children of Israel--passed steadily over the land from the west to the east; to the brink of the sea and beyond. By evening they were nearly all gone over. Only detached bands of them here and there rode up silently from the great west, as though they had been horsemen of a rear guard, and moved slowly across the sky in the wake of that mighty passage. And as the last of these departed, the sun, like a great priest garbed in glorious gold vestments, rose to his height on the far horizon with arms extended to Heaven, and pronounced a benediction over the land.

Rest in peace now, oh, Ullbrig farmers! Have no fear, oh, faint-hearted tillers of the soil! Rejoice, ye harvesters, for the Lord God of the harvest-field is come into His own again. The corn shall ripen in the ear; there shall be reaping, binding, and gleaning, and an abundant return for all your labors.

That same night, while the land lay still under the sacred hush of that benediction, in the little front parlor, all flushed glorious with the exultation of the sun's message, the schoolmaster returned to Pam what, on just such as evening as this--millions of ages ago, in some remote epoch of the world's history--he had taken from her.

Not a word accompanied the restoration. In silence the girl's hand went forth--with not even her own eyes watching its shameful errand--to meet it and receive that precious, hateful pawn that she was redeeming with her body. For some seconds they stood, maintaining their respective attitudes in that surreptitious transfer; the man with bent head and averted gaze as he had given; the girl with high, rebellious bosom for a great grief, and her chin shrinking in the nest of it, while the recipient hand at the back of her worked slowly downward in the depths of her skirt-pocket.

Then suddenly, before the man had time to realise or utter the words his mind was slowly coining, the girl's high breast fell in the convulsion of silent sobs. With both hands pressed to her cheeks, and the tears streaming fast through her spread fingers, she brushed abruptly by him.

At the door, for he had something to say, he spoke her name and laid a restraining hand upon her shoulder, but she shook it off with the hateful shudder for a serpent, and passed swiftly from him up the Sunday staircase.

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