CHAPTER I.

AN OLD HOVEL.

THERE was not another home like it in all the parish of Broadmoor. It was a half-ruined hut, with walls bulging outwards, and a ragged roof of old thatch, overgrown with moss and yellow stonecrop. A rusty iron pipe in one corner served as a chimney to the flat hearth, which was the only fireplace within; and a very small lattice-window of greenish glass, with a bull's-eye in each pane, let in but little of the summer sunshine, and hardly a gleam of the winter's gloomy light. Only a few yards off, the hut could not be distinguished from the ruins of an old lime-kiln, near which it had been built to shelter the lime-burners during their intervals of work.

There was but one room downstairs, with an earthen floor trodden hard by the trampling of heavy feet, whilst under the thatch there was a little loft, reached by a steep ladder and a square hole in the ceiling, where the roof came down on each side to the rough flooring, and nowhere was there height enough for even a short person to stand upright.

The furniture was as rude and simple as the home itself. The good household chattels, on which Ruth Medway had prided herself when she lived in her pretty cottage in the village street, had never come to this poor hovel. There was a broken chair or two, a table-top propped upon an unbarked trunk of a young fir-tree from the woods behind the lime-kiln, a little cracked crockery, two or three old boxes, and the indispensable saucepan and kettle in which she did all her cooking. Upstairs was a low pallet bedstead with a flock bed, and, on the floor beside it, a mattress stuffed with chaff, close under the roof, where the thatch must almost have touched the sleeper's face. There was no window into this loft; the only light came through the square hole in the floor.

"Home is home, be it never so homely;" and Ruth Medway had learned to love the quiet place where her youngest and her dearest child had been born. Behind the house lay the Lime-kiln Woods; once a busy place of quarries and kilns, but left long ago to the growth of trees and brushwood; the haunt of all kinds of wild woodland creatures, hollow with rabbit-burrows, and thickly peopled with singing birds, and with the game that the squire loved to preserve. Excepting in the shooting season, when the sharp crack of guns was to be heard all day long, there was no noise to drown the buzz of the humble-bee, and the low whirring of the unseen grasshopper, and the hundred faint and delicate sounds which fill the stillness of an unfrequented greenwood. Day and night, summer and winter, had their special signs and sounds there, all well-known to Ishmael, the youngest son of old Humphrey Medway.

He was the youngest son, and the most unwelcome to his father. Humphrey had given but a scanty welcome to his first-born child, and each successor had been received with growing surliness. Ishmael came the last, when his mother's hair was already grey, and her back bent with hard toil at out-door labour. The eldest son was grown up and married, and the little love he might have once felt for his mother had hardened into indifference, whilst the other children, those who were living, were scattered abroad, seldom caring to return home. Humphrey never mentioned any of them; but sometimes of an evening, when Ruth rested for a little while, and sat watching the kettle boil on the crackling fire of sticks, she would count their names over on her fingers; eight names over which she sighed, but at the ninth her brown wrinkled face wore a fleeting smile as she muttered, "Ishmael."

On the whole, Ruth was not given to brooding over the past; for she lived too hard a life to keep her memory green. She had grown fond of this lonely hut, where Ishmael had been born; and he had never known any other home. There was nothing in it to prevent him keeping pet dormice, and hedgehogs found in the hollows of the wood; though the gamekeeper would not let him have a rabbit, or allow Ruth to keep a cat; and a dog was not to be thought of. But a tame starling, and the white owl which had chosen its roost under their thatch, and answered his call in the dusk, swooping noiselessly through the air, made the place full of life and interest to him. All the woods behind had been his play-ground from his earliest childhood; and not the finest house in Broadmoor could have tempted Ishmael to exchange his home for it.

Ruth had taught herself to read after she was married; when Humphrey soon began to leave her alone in the evening, and kept her sitting up late for his return from the village inn. Her loneliness had led her to reading the Bible—the only book she possessed beside a Prayer-book and an old collection of hymns. She had learned to believe quite simply, with no doubt in her inmost heart, that "God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life;" and that Jesus Christ had really "given His life as a ransom" for her. With these two thoughts firmly rooted in her mind she read the Bible eagerly; and it was from its old well-worn pages she had chosen the name of her youngest and dearest child, "Ishmael; because the Lord hath heard thy affliction."

Ruth had never been a woman of many words; and she was very silent about those things which were deepest in her heart. Humphrey was accustomed to boast himself of her subjection to him, as not daring to "cheep" a word against him. In her young days she had been one of the village choir; and now Ishmael sat in the singing gallery in her old place. It was one of her greatest pleasures to creep just within the church door, where her poor clothing would be least noticed, and listen to the voices in the gallery overhead, and to join in singing "Glory be to the Father" at the close of each familiar Psalm. There her bent back seemed to ache less, and her wearied limbs felt rested.

Often in the week, as she picked stones or hoed thistles in the fields, her withered lips would murmur the words, "Glory be to the Father," and she would feel as a way-worn traveller feels in a hot and desert country, when he comes across a little fountain of fresh water springing up in his path. His journey is not over, but the living waters give him strength to go on with it.

So bad a name did Humphrey and his eldest son bear in the parish, as being idle and drunken vagabonds, that it overshadowed Ruth and Ishmael, and they found themselves banished by it from all intercourse with decent and friendly neighbours. Ishmael did not feel it until he went to the village school, where the other children were warned against Humphrey Medway's boy. The women who worked with Ruth in the fields kept aloof from her; not so much because they were better off than she was, but because she was so silent in her ways.

Thus there was no companionship for them but in each other; and it was sufficient. It was enough for Ruth to think of her boy all day, and to hear his regular healthful breathing beside her all night; and for Ishmael, the woods that lay all around his home gave him never-ending occupation and delight.

But though they were without friends, they were not without an enemy. The nearness of the low hovel to the woods was enough to arouse the suspicions of the squire's gamekeeper, even if he had had no reason to dislike Humphrey Medway and his family. But, before Ishmael was born, there had existed a bitter hatred between Nutkin, the gamekeeper, and young Humphrey, Ishmael's eldest brother.

Humphrey had succeeded in winning away from Nutkin the girl he had wished to make his wife; and though the keeper had himself married shortly afterwards, he had never forgiven the offence, or ceased to hold him and all belonging to him in bitter enmity. The very name of Medway was hateful to his ears. Of late, too, Ishmael had won two or three prizes at the village school over the head of his own boy, who was about the same age, and who lamented loudly over his defeat by old Humphrey's despised son.

Yet in spite of all Nutkin's efforts, he had been unable to dislodge old Humphrey from the miserable hut. The rent of a shilling a week was paid punctually by Ruth, who would rather have gone without food than omit its regular settlement, since nothing else could keep her drunken husband and herself from the parish workhouse. The farmer, who held a lease of the lime-kiln and the hut, found her work on his farmstead and showed her some little favour. So all the keeper could do was to suspect and to watch, ready to take advantage of any trespass that could be punished by the law.

For thirteen years now Ruth had worked upon the Willows Farm; and many a hot summer day had Ishmael, when a baby, lain all day long under the hedgerows, carefully swathed in an old shawl; while his mother toiled in the harvest fields. He had himself begun to earn a few pence as soon as he could scare crows from the springing corn, or could help to tend the sheep in the chilly days of spring during the lambing season.

For the last two years his father had been grumbling at his being an idle mouth to feed; though it was rarely Ruth saw a penny of his money, and it had been with difficulty that she had been able to keep her boy at school. But now the time was come when Ishmael must cease to be a child, and must begin to get his own living by regular work. Mr. Chipchase, the farmer, had consented to try him as waggoner's boy; and had promised if he was a good and steady lad, to "make a man of him."

"Mother," said Ishmael, as they sat together on their door-sill in the long, light June evening, listening to the cuckoo and the thrushes singing in the woods, "I told teacher I'm going to service on Monday; and she says I may take little Elsie into the woods to-morrow; and she'll give us dinner to eat there; for me as well as her, mother; because she says I've always been a good boy at school, and she's sorry to lose me."

"I'm glad she's sorry to lose thee," said Ruth; "and if thee weren't to sleep at home every night, I hardly know what I could do without thee, Ishmael. I almost wish thee were a tiny little lad once again."

"When I'm a man," he answered eagerly, "you shan't ever go out working in the fields, or tire yourself, mother. We'll never, never leave here, because there's no place like it; but get the master to let me build a better house that 'll keep you warm and dry, and we'll live together till we die: won't we, mother?"

"Please God!" she said softly, with a smile on her brown face, as she thought how much earlier she must die than the young lad, little more than a child, who sat beside her.

"I should think it would please God," answered Ishmael, in a quiet voice. "He doesn't want us to be always very poor, poorer than other folks, mother?"

"Nay, I don't know," she replied; "His own Son was born in a stable, and died upon the cross, with folks mocking at Him. I don't know what thee and me have to go through, Ishmael. We can only say 'Please God!'"

It was late before Ishmael mounted the ladder to the close loft overhead, and crept into his bed on the floor under the low thatch. But it was after midnight when Ruth, with her wrinkled yet sinewy arms, helped her drunken husband from one rung to another, fearful every night lest her strength should fail her, and that he might fall, crippled or lifeless, on the floor below.

"Thank God!" she always cried in the depth of her soul, when his sluggish and leaden feet were safely planted on the floor above.