CHAPTER IV

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Whatever the Spawer might choose to say of himself for purposes of humor (not, I am afraid, an invariable pole-star to truth), he was no sluggard. By agreement, dated the first night of his arrival, Jeff Dixon was to get a penny a day for bringing up the bath-water and having him into it at seven in the morning. Something short of the hour Jeff would stumble up the little steep staircase, with his tongue out, behind a big bucket of cold water (the last of three drawn to get the full freshness of the pump), and anticipating a few minutes in his statement of the time, make preliminary clamor for the Spawer's acknowledgment before departing to fetch the hot. From which moment forth the Spawer was a marked man, whom no subterfuge or earthly ingenuity could save. Once a drowsy voice begged Jeff to be so good as to call again.

"An' loss my penny!" cried Jeff, with fine commercial scorn at the suggestion. "Nay, we 'll 'ave ye oot o' bed an' all, noo we 've gotten started o' ye."

And tramped diabolically downstairs after the second bucket.

But though a little comedy of this sort, now and again, served to test the validity of the agreement, and show the Spawer that nothing--short of repealing the penny--could save him from the inexorable machinery that his own hand had set in motion, there was little real need of the bond, except to guarantee that the bath-water should be up to time. More often than not Jeff came upon a man alertly drawn up in bed, with a full score spread across his knees, who had been writing and erasing hard since sunrise.

Early in the morning after the girl's visit the sun peeped over the Spawer's sill according to custom, and the Spawer jumped out of bed to let him in. Already Nature's symphony was in full swing--a mighty, crescive, spinning movement of industry, borne up to him on a whirr of indefatigable wings. The sun had cleared the cliff railings and was traveling merrily upward on an unimpeded course, though still the grassland lay grey in the shadow beneath its glistening quilt of dew, and every spider's web hung silver-weighted like a net new-drawn with treasure from the sea. He stayed by the window a space, and then let go the curtain with an amused, reminiscent laugh.

"I wonder who on earth she is?" he said.

He scooped up the bulky armful of music-sheets that constituted his present labors at the concerto, and went back to bed with them. But though he made a determined desk of his knees and spread the papers out with a business-like adjustment of pages, the work prospered but poorly when it came to the pencil. After a short spell of it he sat back in bed, with his hands locked under his neck staring at the window. For the events of last night were a too inviting vintage to be left uncorked and untasted, and out of this glowing wine of remembrance he attempted to win back the girl's face, and did not altogether succeed. He reclaimed certain shifting impressions of red lips exaggeratedly curled; of great round eyes; of multiplied freckles about the brows and nose; of a startling white throat beyond where the sun had dominion; of a shabby blue Tam-o'-Shanter and a perfect midnight of hair--but all of them seen grotesquely, as it might be at the bottom of the cup, with himself blowing on the wine.

"The thing is," he decided, "I was a fool not to stare harder and ask more questions. This comes of trying to act the gentleman."

Duly before seven came Jeff Dixon stumbling up the staircase, and dumped the first bucket down at the Spawer's door with a ringing clash of handle.

"Noo then," he called under the door, when he had summoned the Spawer lustily by name, and hit the panel several resounding flat-handers (as specified in the agreement). "It 's tonned [turned] seven o'clock, an' another gran', fine day for ye an' all. Arny 's gotten ye some mushrooms--some right big uns an' some little conny [tiny] uns, a gret basket full oot o' big field. Will ye 'ev 'em for breakfast?"

"Will I?" The Spawer shot together the loose sheets gathered in attendance upon an idle muse, and tossed them dexterously on to the nearest chair, as though they were a pancake. "Ah, me bhoy! me bhoy!" he called out, in the rich, mellow brogue of one whose heart was on a sudden turned to sunlight.

"Ay, will ye?" inquired the mouth behind the door-crack.

"Ay, wull Oi?" echoed the voice of glowing fervor. "Wull Oi, bedad! me bhoy? Mushrooms, ye say! Is 't me the bhoy for mushrooms! Arrah, thin, me bonny bhoy, is 't me the bhoy for mushrooms!"

After a pause: "D' ye mean yes?" asked the mouth dubiously, and with meekness.

"Ah, phwat a bhoy it is to read the very sowl o' man an' shpake it! Yis 's the word, bi the beard o' St. Pathrick, iv he had wan (which Oi 'm doubtin'), an' a small, inconsiderable jug o' rale cowld boilin' wather whin ye retoorn convanient wid yer next bucket, me bhoy, bi yer lave an' savin' yer prisince!"

"Will yon little un wi' yaller stripes do?" says the mouth, brimming with the enthusiasm of willing, and making from the door-crack for immediate departure.

Whereupon, in receipt of the Spawer's agreement, the boots stumbled down the stairs again, as though there were no feet in them, but had been thrown casually from top to bottom. A minute or so later, when they had staggered up with the second bucket, and been cast down again to fetch the jug, and come back with it, the owner of them bestrode all these accumulated necessities laid out upon the little landing, and let himself into the Spawer's room--a blue-eyed, fair-haired Saxon of thirteen, with white teeth and a quick smile, sharpened like a razor on the cunning whetstone of the district.

"'Ere 's yer cold," said he, stooping to lift it in after him. "An' 'ere 's yer warm," bringing to view the steaming wooden pail, with as much reminiscence of milk about the water as we have to pay for by the gill in town. "An' 'ere 's yer rale cold boilin'. 'Ow div ye fin' yersen this mornin'?"

"In bed," says the Spawer, "thanking you kindly, where I put myself last night."

"Noo then, noo then!" with that indulgent tone of grown-up wisdom which is the birthright of every baby in Ullbrig, and on which it practises its first lisp; "are ye agate o' that road already? Ye mun 'a got the steel i' bed wi' ye, ah think--ye seem strange an' sharp, ti-morn." He pulled the bath from its hiding under the bed, set the mats about it, and brought the pails over within reach. "Noo, it 's all ready an' waitin', so ye 'ad n't need to start shuttin' yer eyes. Let 's see ye movin', an' ah 'll be away."

The Spawer made a feeble shuffle of legs under the blankets, and smiled with the seraphic content of one who has done his duty.

"Nay, ah s'll want to see ye on end, an' all," Jeff said sternly, "before ah gan mi ways. Come noo, Mr. Wynne--one, two, three!"

Thus adjured, the Spawer found strength to raise his eyelids after a few moments of bland inertness under Jeff's regard, and turned out affably (with them down again) on to the pegged rug alongside.

"That 's better," said Jeff, with conciliatory admiration.

"Is it?" the Spawer inquired sweetly, sitting down on the bedside to think over the matter, and rubbing form contemplatively into his hocks. "Oh! ... Then get me the third razor from the right-hand side of the case, and I 'll kill myself. Also the strop and the brush and jug and soap-tube...."

"D' ye mean a shave?" asked Jeff, with some curiosity.

"Merely another name for it," the Spawer told him.

"What div ye want ti get shaved for?" Jeff persisted.

"Oh!" ... The Spawer sifted a few replies under rapid survey, as though he were rolling a palmful of grain, and picked out one at random. "... For fun."

"Ah thought ye was n't gannin' to shave no more while ye 'd gotten that there piece o' yours written!"

"Whatever put that idea into your head?" asked the Spawer, in surprise.

"You," said Jeff, with forceful directness. "It was you telt me."

"I? How wicked of me to tell such a story," the Spawer said warmly.

"Ah do believe you 're gannin' after some young lady or other," Jeff declared, by a quick inspiration.

"How dare you," said the Spawer, rising from the bed in protest, "try to put such ideas into the head of an innocent young man, old enough to be your father. Hither with the razor at once," he commanded, "and let 's shave your head."

But inside, out of sight behind all this laughter, he sent a knowing, sagacious glance to his soul.

"The young divil!" he said.

He shaved, like the Chinese executioners, with despatch; whistled blithely through his bath as though he were a linnet hung out in the sun, and was downstairs as soon as might be. The little room greeted him cheerfully in its cool breakfast array, holding forth a great, heavenly-scented garland of wall-flowers and sweet-williams and mignonette--for all the world like some dear, diminutive, old-fashioned damsel in white muslin--and his eye softened unconsciously to an appreciative smile. There, too, was the sofa consecrate to Dixon. He looked at it with a more conscious extension of smile--thinking, no doubt, of Dixon. Then he shook the bell for breakfast, being an-hungered, and smelling the mushrooms.

The door flew wide to Miss Bates' determined toe, as she entered with the mushrooms in company with the bacon and toast and steaming hot milk and coffee on the big, battered tray of black Japan, securely held at either foremost corner with a salmon-colored fist.

Now Miss Bates was Dixon's orphan niece, whose case deserves all the pity you can afford to give it, as we shall see. Left quite alone in the world by the death of her father (who had no more thought for her future than to fall off his horse, head downwards, in the dark), she was most cruelly abducted by her wicked uncle to Cliff Wrangham (much against her will--and his own), and imprisoned there under the humiliating necessity of having to work like one of the family. You must not call her the scullery-maid or the dairy-maid or the kitchen-maid, but rather, with the blood-right to give back word for word and go about her day's work grumbling, you must appoint her a place among the ranks of unhappy heroines--reduced, distressed, and down-trodden beneath the iron-shod heel of labor. She was, indeed, the persecuted damosel of mediaeval romance, brought up to modern weight and size and standard--not the least of her many afflictions being that she was forcibly christened Mary Anne by heartless parents, while yet a helpless infant, and that nobody called her anything else. Her lips were full of prophetic utterances as to last straws; as to what certain people (not so very many miles away) would find for themselves one morning (not so very far ahead) when they got up and came downstairs, and said, "Where 's somebody?" and never an answer, and no need to say then they were sorry, as if they had n't been warned!

"Now who," the Spawer inquired craftily, dipping a liberal measurement of spoon into the mushrooms, and smiling confidentially at Miss Bates, who was balanced gently by the door, with its edge grasped in her red right hand, and her cheek pressed touchingly against the knuckles--"who is the prettiest girl in Ullbrig?"

Miss Bates threw up her nostrils at this direct challenge of romance, and squirmed with such maidenly desire to insist her own claims through silence, that the tray in her left hand banged about her knees like distant thunder.

"Cliff Wrangham allus reckons ti count in wi' Oolbrig," she said, coyly.

"But leaving Cliff Wrangham out of the question," suggested the Spawer, in a voice of bland affability.

Miss Bates' knees stiffened.

"Ah see no ways o' doin' it," she declared, tossing her head as though she were champing a bit.

So the Spawer was left smiling over his cup, knowing no more about the blue Tam-o'-Shanter than ever. He enjoyed his mushrooms very much, and went twice to coffee. Then, breakfast over, he crossed over to the piano, ran his hands over the keys, and set himself to his daily occupation without loss of time.

Thick saffron of sunlight filled the little room. Down below the window-sash, about the shelterless roots of the rose-tree, moored along the wall line in barge-like flotilla and at anchor over the hard, sunbaked path, lay gathered the Spawer's faithful band of feathered friends, awaiting recurrence of the bounty so liberally bestowed upon them at meals. Each time the blind stirred they uprose in spires of expectant beak, whereat the Spawer, squinting sideways, would see the window space set with jeweled, vigilant eyes, while afloat on the wavy green border of grass beyond the pathway a snow-white convoy of ducklings drew their bills from beneath fleecy breasts and got under soft cackle of steam, ready to sail for the window at the first signal of crumbs.

After his departure, for an hour or more nothing but sunlight stirred the Spawer's blind. Then the voice of Miss Bates was heard in close proximity outside, and the next moment the Spawer's first crop of Cliff Wrangham letters was extended to him in Miss Bates' gentle fist.

"Three letters, a post-card, an' a fortygraft," said Miss Bates, relaxing the proprietary clench of thumb (tightened recently for dominion over the downcast Lewis), and suffering the Spawer to gather them from her confiding hand with all the romantic symbolism of a bouquet. "It 's good to be you an' 'ev letters sent ye wi'oot nobody pesterin' where they come fro'. Will there be onnything for 'post' to tek back?"

"Let 's see..." said the Spawer, skimming the postcard more rapidly than Miss Bates had done before him. "Is he waiting?"

"It 's not a 'e," Miss Bates replied, with no manifest relish of the fact. "An' she 's stood at kitchen door. 'Appen she 's waitin' to be asked twice to come in an' sit 'ersen down--bud she 'll 'ave to wait. Once is good enough for most folk, an' it mun do for 'er."

The Spawer finished the post-card, tossing it on the table, and forced his fingers beneath the flap of the next envelope.

"What?" said he, with a smile of amused surprise. "Is the postman a lady, then?"

"Nay," repudiated Miss Bates, stripping the amusement off his surprise, and treating the question in grim earnest. "She 'd onnly like to be. It 'd suit 'er a deal better nor tramplin' about roads wi' a brown bag ower 'er back."

"It sounds charming enough," said the Spawer, throwing himself with a diabolical heartiness into the idea. "What sort of a postman is she?"

"No different fro' nobody else," Miss Bates gives grudgingly, "though she 's 'ods [holds] 'er chin where most folk's noses is. They gie 'er six shillin' a week for carryin' letters to Cliff Wrangham an' Far Wrangham an' round by Shippus--an' it mud be ten bi t' way she sets up."

"Six shillings a week," the Spawer mused wonderingly. "Just a shilling a day and be a good girl for nothing on Sunday. She 'll need all the pride she can muster to help her through on that."

"There 's twenty for t' job onny day she teks into 'er 'ead to leave it," Miss Bates reflected, with callous indifference. "She's n' occasion to keep it agen [unless] she likes."

The Spawer put down the first letter and opened the second. It was a bill. "There 'll be no answer to this," he said grimly, and passed on to the third. He gave one glance at the green Helvetian stamps under the Luzern post-marks, and toyed with it irresolutely unopened. "I don't think the post need wait," he said, this time casting the office considerately into the neuter gender.

"Ah 'll tell 'er to gan, then," Miss Bates decided, with a foretaste of the asperity that would characterise the dismissal.

"Please," said the Spawer. "With my thanks for her kindness in waiting."

"There 's na kindness in it," Miss Bates disclaimed. "She 's got to gan back, onny road. An' 'appen she would n't 'ave offered bud ah was ower sharp to call of 'er before she 'd chance to get away. She mun gan 'er ways ti Far Wrangham, then."

The Spawer had opened the third envelope, and Miss Bates was blowing herself out in great gusts like a strenuous candle, fighting hard against extinction, when she heard herself suddenly recalled.

"After all," he said, "I 'm going to be a woman and change my mind. Who writes quickly writes double, and saves two pages of apology. Then I can get back to work with a clear conscience."

"Ah 'll tell 'er she 's got to stop, then," said Miss Bates. "An' if ye 'll ring bell when ye 've finished, Lewis 'll let me know, an' ah 'll come for letter. Ye need n't trouble to bring it."

She blew herself out to total extinction this time, and the Spawer, throwing a leg over the table-end, turned his attention to the letter in hand--a thin sheet of foreign note-paper, covered on three of its pages with a firm feminine handwriting. He read it very carefully and earnestly, his eyes running from end to end of the lines like setters in a turnipfield, as though they followed a scent, till they brought up to a standstill by the signature. Then he took up the photograph.

It was the face of a girl, and he studied it in such stillness and concentration that his eyelids, lowered motionless over the downward gaze, gave him the semblance of a sleeper. Without being beautiful, the face had beauty, but though it took all its features under individual scrutiny, it seemed, less as though he were concerned with their intrinsic worth than that he was searching through them the answer to a hidden train of inquiry. Whether he came near it or not would be difficult to tell. The smile with which he looked up at last and dispersed the brooding cloud of concentration might have been purely recollective, and with nothing of the oracular about it; for it set him straightway to pen and ink and writing-paper, staying with him the while, and through the next few minutes the sound of his industry was never still. Not until well over on the fourth page did the pen stay behind in the ink-pot, as he sat back to review what was written. Then the pen was rapidly withdrawn again, to subscribe his name, and he addressed the letter:

"Miss WEMYSS, Luzernerhof, Luzern, Switzerland."

With this in his hand, and the big bath towel and red bathing drawers slung over his arm from their drying place on the hot sill, he made off down the baked pathway, whistling pleasantly like a new pied piper--a whole throng of feathered followers at his heels. By the wooden gate, where the red-tiled pump-walk makes junction with the front path at the kitchen end, Miss Bates waylaid him, holding out damp semi-wiped fingers, and saying an expectant "Thank ye."

"What for?" asked the Spawer, trying to dodge on either side of her ample bosom with an active eye for the kitchen door.

"For t' letter," said Miss Bates, unperturbed, "if ye 've written it. Ah 'll gie it to 'er as she gans back."

"Back where from?" inquired the Spawer, with a sudden thirst for information.

"Fro' Far Wrangham," Miss Bates told him, "... wi' letters for Barclay. But she 'll call again on 'er way 'ome, an' ah 'll see she teks it an' all, then."

"Thanks..." the Spawer decided on consideration, "but I think I 'll see her myself. I want to ask about posts...."

"There 's nobbut one," Miss Bates interposed hurriedly, "an' it gans out at 'alf-past four."

"That 's not the one I mean," the Spawer explained, and tacked on very quickly: "Which way does she come back?"

"It 's none so easy ti say," Miss Bates parried. "She mud come back bi Barclay's road ... or bi--bi"--the task of devising a second route being somewhat beyond her powers at the moment, she fell back upon a generality--"bi some other road," adding for justification: "She 'd come thruff [through] 'edge an' all if it suited 'er."

"It 's on my way, anyhow," the Spawer determined lightheartedly. "I 'll sit on Barclay's gate and take my chance."

He had been sitting on Barclay's gate some time, and would have sold all share of interest in the chance for a wax vesta, when suddenly he heard the stir of someone swiftly coming, and turning a leisurely head--with a hand laid ready to drop to his feet when they should reach the gate--became in a moment keenly alert to an object that showed now and again through the green hedge: a moving object that was neither a bird, nor a blossom, nor a butterfly, ... but a blue Tam-o'-Shanter.

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