CHAPTER XLIII

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To this day the tale of that eventful midnight is told in Ullbrig. How Barclay, returning from Hunmouth market, where he had sold three beasts and a score of sheep, and drunk the money, heard Pam's last despairing cries for assistance, beaten out of her by the sea itself. How he ran to the edge of the cliff, and looked over, and saw the two drenched figures sticking to the side of it like wet flies against a pudding basin. How, even while he watched them, the sea boiled up again as though it were milk, and rose bubbling above where they were, and made him shut his eyes with a groan for what he might not see when the milk subsided. How, praise God, they were still there when the water sank down. How he untackled his waggon-rope, shouting courage to them all the while, and made a loop to one end, and hitched the other to the adjacent stile-post, and cast the slip-knot down the cliff. And how, for an age, while he swore at them from above, the girl would not come up before the man; and the man would not come up before the girl. And how, owing to considerations which he did not then know or understand, namely, that the man was powerless to give any help to his own ascent, and the girl feared their rescuer might be unable to haul him unaided--the girl slipped the noose under her shoulders, and struggled and clambered up the cliff-side while Barclay pulled upon her. And how, almost before she was on the top, she had detached the securing loop and thrown it down to the man. And how he had just had time to slip it over his neck and under his shoulders before the next sea came, cursing and swearing because of the loss of them, and seethed up three parts of the cliff, so that the foam of it slashed their faces. And how they felt the rope first slacken and then go dead heavy in their hands, and knew the man was off his feet, and would have been swept away but for their hold upon him. And how they tugged together, the two of them, and how, at certain intervals of progression, the girl had wound the slack rope round the post, against all possible danger of slip or relapse. And how, in the end, the man's face showed above the cliff-brink, and how they had toiled him over; and how the girl had thrown herself beside him, and taken him into her arms, and wiped his streaming face, and called upon him by name, with a hundred solicitations and endearments, and kissed him.

Till, in Barclay's own words: "Ah think theer 's one ower monny on us," he told them.

And the tale, continuing, recounted how these two, Barclay and the girl, made a seat with their hands, and bore the man back to Dixon's between them; and how the man, wringing wet though he was, kept falling asleep on the shoulders of one or other of them, and telling Barclay he was the boy for mushrooms, and he 'd eat them now she 'd given him up. And how they got him home at last, and how Barclay took double handfuls of earth and flung them up at Dixon's window, and how Dixon put his head out first of all, and cried:

"Naay, Barcl'y, man! Naay, naay! Next farm. Ye want to tek more care i' countin' when ye come 'ome this time o' daay."

And would n't believe Barclay's reasons for bringing him down, till Pam joined her voice with his, when he said: "Well! Ah don't know!"--and the whole household stood on its legs that same moment.

And then a mighty fire was roused up in the kitchen, out of the grate's still hot embers, at Miss Bates' blowing, and the blinds were pulled down carefully by Mrs. Dixon, and all extraneous elements--men, and so forth--were unceremoniously banished, and Pam, shivering, crimson-eared, bright-eyed, and hectic--but wildly joyous--let them skin her of her sodden habiliments as though she had been a drowned rabbit, and was rubbed dry with coarse kitchen towels till her white, starved body glowed like a sunset over snow. And Jeff, having been despatched at Pam's instigation to the cliff, and having run all the way there and all the way back, thumped lustily against the outer panels of the kitchen door, and Pam's parcel--looking, oh, so frail and pitiable and shamefaced in its new surroundings--was drawn in by Mrs. Dixon, and its contents bestowed, as the circumstances demanded, upon Pam's own body. And Pam seemed so genuinely overcome with their kindness that all questions of a controversial nature were by one consent avoided; and not a word asked--beyond mere details of the rescue--as to the strange juxtaposition of Pam and her bundle, and Mr. Maurice Ethelbert Wynne, along the cliff at this time of morning. To such degree, indeed, did Pam's own tearful, lip-quivering emotion of gratitude play upon her two ministrants, that they discharged their self-sought duties in a reflected emotion scarcely less profound than the original; giving the girl tear for tear, and quiver for quiver.

And when they had rubbed and towelled her, they dressed her in the same loving, lavish way, and vied with each other in finding articles from their own wardrobe which might fit the girl; and when they had finished with her, they looked upon her completed presentment as proudly as though they 'd actually made her.

And while Pam was being in this way taken to pieces and readjusted and put together again, Barclay and Dixon did the same by the Spawer, upstairs in his own bedroom; and laid him between the blankets with a hot-water bottle at his feet, that was fetched from the kitchen; and Arny harnessed Punch to the spring-cart and drove off for Father Mostyn and the Doctor--not that Father Mostyn's presence seemed called for on any urgent or spiritual grounds, but that Pam knew what a slight he would think had been administered upon his vicarial office, were he to be left one moment uninformed of such an occurrence as this.

And until the arrival of the Doctor, Pam's courage and good hope had never once deserted her. He for whom she would have died gladly twice over was saved from death; but now there were other vague things to fear. And as soon as she heard the ominous rattle of the spring-cart's return, that well-known clear-cut voice of the ecclesiast, and the sharp, Scotch, businesslike tones of the Doctor--as direct and straight to their purpose as a macadamised road ... she quailed, and her fortitude left her. It seemed as though the whole atmosphere were charged at once with electrical dangers at lightning-point.

She sat with her face plunged in her hands, by the side of the roaring kitchen fire, not daring to rise, or move, or go out to meet these awful newcomers, lest her movement might precipitate the danger. All her hearing was drawn out from her like wire, insupportably fine, to the doors of that dread bed-chamber. Sounds near at hand, the roaring of the fire, the fall of cinders, the subdued babel of downstairs voices, had no existence for her. Her hearing, as though it had been a telescope, was aimed above them to some distant star, and missed these terrestrial obstacles by miles and miles--but every sound from the far landing, every whisper, every turning of the handle, every creak of the bedroom floor-boarding, was magnified a hundredfold. To support such auricular sensitiveness it felt she needed the strength of a hundred bodies, instead of that poor tortured one.

But at last, lifting her face from her hands with the blanched cheek of high tension for the very worst, she heard the tread of general exodus; the resonant "Ha!" of Father Mostyn, and the Doctor's little sharp-tongued, Scotch-terrier voice, giving out its reassurance to the applicants at the staircase foot.

"Na doot he 's had a narra squeak, an' ah 'm no goin' to say he 's oot o' the wood yet," she heard him tell them. "His back will have had a nasty twist, an' there 's some concussion, but there 's naethin' broken, and no dislocation. Na, na, he 's no sae bad. Shock 's the worrst o' 't. Dinna mek yerselves onhappy, he 'll mend verra nicely. Oh, he 'll mend fine!"

And going on beneath the Doctor's voice like an organ pipe, to support and sustain and enrich it with ecclesiastical authority, was the voice of his Reverence.

"Ha! No doubt about it. Concussion. That 's the mischief. But nothing broken. No fractures or dislocation. No injury to the clavicle, or more important still, to the dorsal vertebra. It's purely a case of shock. Keep him well wrapped up in blankets, get some hot brandy and water for him, and see that the bottle is n't allowed to grow cold. Ha! that's the way. Beautiful! beautiful! We 'll soon bring him round again."

And the tale, as it is told, goes on to tell how in Dixon's kitchen that morning--for day was breaking now--Pam made long confession of something to his Reverence the Vicar. Nobody in Ullbrig knows for sure what that confession was, except the Doctor, who did not share the Dixons' delicacy in withdrawing, but sat in Dixon's chair on the other side of the fire, with his steaming toddy glass--compounded out of the sleeping man's decanter--and stirred the fire with the poker when it needed it, and was heard quite plainly to level his voice on such direct interrogation as:

"But ye hae not explained ... so-and-so."

Or, "He may thank his guid stairs ye were there to hear-r-r! But hoo cam ye by the cliff at midnight?"

But as Pam would have told him freely anything about her body if illness had required it, and as she could trust him like Father Mostyn's second self, it would have been cruelly, distrustfully invidious to divide her carnal and spiritual confidences on this occasion with so fine a line; and since the Doctor felt no compunction in their acceptance, Pam felt quite tranquil in their bestowal. To these two men she told the history of her past few days, shielding everybody save herself; how she had come to love the Spawer, and how he had told her of his departure; and how she had wept on her bed; and how she had feared facing him that morning, lest she might weep betrayal of herself, and of a love she had no right to let him see, or trouble him with; and how, while she was trying to gain time for her terror, he came on her before she was aware; and how she had plunged the letter into her pocket; and how she had taken it back with her, not daring to deliver it after that ... and how ... and how...

Here, in her desire to screen the guilty partner of her trouble, her nervous narrative seemed all plucked to pieces. Her words, indeed, were less for the purpose of telling than for the purpose of stopping their own lips from asking.

"... And so ... he said he wanted me ... and he said he loved me.... I know he loved me, because he 'd told me so before. Only then.... And after that...."

But the Doctor, comfortably ensconced in Dixon's fireside chair, with its red chintz cushion in the small of his back, and half a steaming tumblerful of toddy inside him, was in no mood to be put off with such ambiguous verbal impressionism.

"Stop, stop, stop!" said he, holding up an arrestive toddy-tumbler at her. "I haena got the sense o' that. What d' ye say happened to the letter?"

"Oh ... I cannot ... I cannot," Pam said, the tendons of her narrative relaxing suddenly as though never could they be brought to bear her over this part of the history. But in the end, with point-blank questions from the Doctor, and gentle leading-words from the Vicar, Pam passed over that rocking bridge of all that had happened--only, every admission made against the man's interest was coupled with a pleader for his great love of her. And she imparted to them, with a face glorified, how that, when nothing seemed sure but death, the Spawer had told her his other attachment was broken. and had confessed his love of her all the time, and she had poured out her love of him ... and ... and they knew the rest.

"Ay, it 's a very quairr complaint, this love!" the Doctor reflected, pulling out his pipe, "... an' harrd to diagnose. Ye never can tell. Ye never can tell. But losh! ah thocht ye were clean gyte when ah hairrd ye were goin' ta marry yon fellow!"

But Father Mostyn was n't astonished in the least; waltzed gravely on his feet with a superior, restrained tightness about the corners of his mouth, and a far-away sparkle in his keen grey eyes, as of one to whom revelation is no new thing.

"Beautiful! beautiful!" he mused, when Pam had finished, and was looking with a timid, sub-radiant eagerness from one to the other. "There 'll be a scandal, of course. That 's the proper penalty for not having confided your trouble into the care of Holy Church." Here the Doctor made a savage thrust with the poker through the gratebars, and stirred and stirred up the red coals till they glowed to incandescence. "But better late than never. Leave it to me. Leave it to me, dear child. Our spiritual Mother never yet turned away from any supplicant that sought her with true faith and humility. We 'll do our best for you. Of course, the business is not so bad as it would be if it had been unexpected. But fortunately, we 've been prepared for it. No mistaking the symptoms."

And the tale, as Ullbrig will tell it to you to this day, goes on to relate how Pam would not return to the Post Office, but took up her post as nurse by the Spawer's bedside, and could hardly endure to let a bite pass her lips thereafter, for her care of him, till he made the mend.

And that same morning, news traveled to Ullbrig that the schoolmaster had been found, roaming and raving like a madman, in the neighborhood of Prestnorth--where a married cousin of his was living--and was in bed now at her house, with brain fever. Not likely to get better, the rumor said, but therein it proved false, for a fortnight later he resigned the mastership of Ullbrig School, and wrote, at the same time, to Miss Morland, requesting that his effects might be despatched to him by carrier as soon as she could conveniently find leisure to undertake the commission. Another letter accompanied it, addressed to Pam in his clear Board School script. In proclamation it was a penitential acknowledgment of his sins; in effect it was a cacophonous outburst of reproach, love, despair, and recriminations. She sorrowed for the man and his hard lot--for if he had loved her so torturingly it was no fault of his own, but he had taught her to fear him, and sympathy can never truly subsist in the same bosom where fear is.

There were those in Ullbrig at first, as Father Mostyn had predicted, who, with their sharp tongues, whittled the affair to a fine point of scandal; those who considered the schoolmaster an ill-used man, and Pam a conscienceless hussy who had jilted him under circumstances that would not too well bear the stress of investigation; those who whispered; and those who nodded their chins with compressed lips of meaning. But they had the melancholy dissatisfaction of fearing, each one in his own heart, that these things might not after all be true. Before such a man as Barclay it would never have been politic to repeat this primitive creed at any time. A champion of Pam's from the beginning--when he cried reproof upon them for their uncharitableness towards the child--he was doubly her champion now; strode up and down over the district like a mighty sower, spreading seed of her heroism broadcast from both his hands. And so it came to be that the real history of the girl burst its early grain of scandal, as though it had been sprouting wheat, and sent up its produce into the clear blue heaven of truth. To-day, when Ullbrig tells you of that Monday midnight, it only gathers breath of proud inflation to breathe how one of its daughters--by name Pam--went down the cliff for the man she loved, and how Barclay saved them both.

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