CHAPTER IX

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So Ginger went over to the great majority of those that loved Pam and lost her, and in his own hour was as sick a man as ever you might wish to meet outside the chapters of a mediaeval romance, where gallant knights are wont to weep like women, and women stand the sight of as much blood, unmoved, as would turn the average modern man's stomach three times over. But anything like a complete account of all the hopeless loves that had Pam for their inspiration would crowd the pages of this book from cover to cover, and still leave material for a copious appendix, and any amount of lesser contributory literature. "Pamela Searle: her Time, Life, Love, and Letters," including several important and hitherto unpublished meat-bills rendered to Mrs. Gatheredge by Dingwall Jackson, with a frontispiece. "'Pamela Searle,' being a barefaced attempt to confound the thinking public as much as possible on the subject of this fascinating character, and present her to them in an altogether novel and unreliable light, as a means of catching their pennies--(truth being worse than useless for the purpose)--with a vindication of Sheppardman Stevens from sundry charges that have been customarily laid against him."--"'Ullbrig, Past and Present'--(also 'Rambles Round')--fully illustrated; containing a special chapter on Pamela and Father Mostyn in the light of recent investigation. Compiled to serve as a guide-book to the district." "'Pamela Searle, the Ullbrig Letter-Carrier; or, What can Little Ladies do?' A tale and a lesson. By Mrs. Griffin (Good Children Series, No. 105.)."

It is no secret that the Garthston parson wanted Pam as badly as he wanted a new pair of trousers, and would have had her at a moment's notice if she 'd only asked him, but she never did; and he wore the old pair to the end. And the Merensea doctor wanted her too--the same that came in for six thousand pounds when his father died, and married his housekeeper--but Pam went very sad and soft and sorrowful each time he asked her (which was generally from his gig, driving some seven miles out of his way, by Ullbrig, to reach an imaginary patient on the Merensea side of Whivvle), and said "No," just the same as she said it to everybody else, with not the least shade of an eyelid's difference because he happened to be a doctor--which was the girl all over. No supplicant that ever supplicated of Pam was too mean or too poor, or too ridiculous or too presuming, in her eyes, ever to be treated with the slightest breath of contumely. When poor Humpy from Ganlon, whose legs were so twisted that he could n't tell his right from his left for certain without a little time to think, asked a Ganlon lass to have him, she screamed derision at him like a hungry macaw, and ran out at once to spread the news so that it should overtake him (being but a slow walker, though he walked his best on this occasion) before he had time to get home. When he asked Pam to have him, Pam could have cried over him for pity, to think that because God had seen fit to spoil a man in the making like this, human love was to be denied him; and though, of course, she said "No," she said it so beautifully that Humpy could hardly see his way home for the proud tears of feeling himself a man in spite of all; and if, after that, there had been any particular thing in the whole world that twisted legs could have done for a girl, that thing would have been done for Pam so long as Humpy was alive to do it.

Lastly, two years before the Spawer's arrival, the old schoolmaster grew tired of teaching and died, and there came a new one in his place; a younger man, pallid and frail, with the high white student's forehead, worn smooth and rounded like the lamp globe he 'd studied under; the weak brown moustache and small chin, and a cough that troubled him when the wind was east, and took up his lodgment at the Post Office. Every day he sat four times with Pam at the same table--breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper. Every morning, when the clock struck ten, he manoeuvred over his toes for a sight of the roadway through the school-room window, and if the veins in his forehead swelled and his jaw muscles contracted:

"Ah knaw 'oo yon 'll be," went the whisper round behind him.

Once he was ill, drawing the breath into his lungs like great anchor chains dragged through hawse-holes, and Pam nursed him. Dressed the pillows under his head; laid her cool hand on his hot forehead; gave him his medicine; sat through the night with him, clasping courage and comfort and consolation into his burning fingers, wrote letters for him; read for him. "Noo we s'll be gettin' telt seummut before so long," said Ullbrig to itself. "A jug gans to pump adeal o' times, but some fond lass 'll brek it before she 's done,"--but the schoolmaster consumed in stillness like the flame of a candle. There were days when "Good morning, Yes, No, Please, Thank you, and Good-night" would have covered all that he said to Pam directly--and even then the veins in his forehead and the tightening muscles about his jaws reproved him straightway, as though he had already said too much. If, by any chance, Pam addressed him suddenly, the blood would mount up to his forehead and the outlines of his face would harden, like a metal cast in the setting, before he spoke, till it almost looked as though he were debating whether he should give her any reply. And the reply given, he would take the first opportunity of turning his back. Indeed, there were times when he barely waited for the opportunity, but clipped his sentence in the middle and threw an abrupt word over his shoulder to complete the sense of it, while Pam stood sorrowfully regarding the two familiar threadbare tail buttons and the shine about the back of the overworked morning coat, whose morning knew no noon, wondering if she 'd said anything to offend him. Once, when he had swung round more abruptly than usual, giving her the reply so grudgingly that it fell altogether short of her hearing, as though he had cast a copper to some wayside mendicant for peace's sake, Pam--who could never bear to leave anything in doubt that a word might settle--asked him softly if he were angry with her. The question fetched him suddenly round again, with the appearance of warding a blow.

"Angry with you?" he repeated. There was the hoarseness of suppressed emotion about his voice, and his lip trembled.

"You are angry with me now, though," said Pam mournfully, "for asking you."

And indeed, by the way he had turned upon her and spoken, he seemed like a man brought to the sudden flash-point of passion by some injudicious word.

"I am not angry with you," he said, in the same constrained, hoarse voice, and said no further, but put his shoulders between them again as though the subject were too unimportant to be discussed.

Then Pam made a discovery.

"He does not like me," she told herself, and without showing that she held his secret, she set herself in her own quiet, gentle fashion to verify the fact by observation. He was never a man of many words at any time, but she saw he was never a man of so few as when he was with her. He had words for the postmaster; he had words for the postmaster's wife; he had words for Emma; he had words--stray, detached, pedagogic schoolroom words, read up aloud from the chalkings on an invisible blackboard--for the villagers. But for Pam--Pam saw herself--he had only the constrained, hard words between his teeth like the enforced bit of a horse, that he champed fretfully in the desire to break away from her.

No. Pam knew what it was. He liked the postmaster because they could talk the papers over together, and predict terrible things about the country to each other; and he liked Emma because Emma was so straightforward and sensible and earnest looking--even if she was n't pretty, which perhaps, after all, she was n't--and never said silly things she did n't mean; and he liked Mrs. Morland because nobody could help liking her--she was so kind and motherly and sympathetic and talkative, and so full of allowances for other people. But Pam! ... Well, he did n't care about Pam because ... oh, because of heaps of things, perhaps. It was n't any use trying to put them all together. Because he thought she was a silly, empty-headed gad-about, who cared for nothing but showing herself around the countryside ... (but that was n't true a bit; he knew it was n't!) ... and being asked if she 'd have people....

Pam doubled up one little hand in anguish, and stared at an invisible something in front of her--that seemed to be a bogey by the startled look she gave it--with a bitten underlip twisting and struggling like a red live thing to be free; and a drawn grey cheek--till the great round tear-drops gathered in her eyes and fell hotly on her knuckles one by one.

But that was only for a moment.

Then Pam dashed the tears aside and shook her glorious head with new-found resolve. Pam would be brave; and strong; and steadfast; and still; and modest; and nobly feminine; and true. And would show him by her actions that he had done her a wrong in his heart.

Pam was still engaged upon the work of showing him when the Spawer took up his quarters at Cliff Wrangham.

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