Chapter 13

CHAPTER XXVI.THE FORGING OF THE RING.Mrs. Sharland was failing. The excitement of the marriage had roused her to activity, but when that was over she relapsed, her energy evaporated, and she took to her bed with the avowed intention of not leaving it again, except for a christening in the family, till carried to her grave. She did not understand Mehalah, she fretted because the arrangements after the eventful day remained the same as before; her daughter shared her room and kept as much away from Elijah as was possible, showed him none of the love of a wife to her husband, and was distressed when spoken to by her new name.'You are either Mistress Rebow or you are not,' said the old woman peevishly to her daughter one night, in their room, 'and if you are not, then I don't understand what the ceremony in the church was for. You treat Elijah Rebow as coldly and indifferently as if he were naught to you but master, and you to him were still hired servant. I don't understand your goings on.''He and I understand each other, that is enough,' answered Mehalah. 'I have married him for his name and for nothing else. In no other light will I regard him than as a master: I told him when I agreed to go to church with him that I would be his no further than the promise to obey went; I take his name to save mine—that is all. He is not my husband, and never shall be, in any other way. I will serve him and serve him devotedly, but not give him my love. That I cannot give. I gave my heart away once for all, and it has not been restored to me.''That is all nonsense,' said Mrs. Sharland. 'Didn't I love Charles Pettican, and weren't we nigh coming to a declaration, only a fit of the ague shivers cut it short? I married your father, and loved him truly as a good wife and not as a hired servant, for all that.''Elijah and I understand each other,' answered Mehalah. 'I suppose there is something of truth in what he says over and over again, that he and I are different from others, and that there's none can understand us but our two selves.''Then you are made for one another.''So he says, but I will not believe it. No. That cannot be. Some have peace and happiness drop into their lap, others have to fight their way to it, and that is our fate. But that we shall find it in each other, that I never will admit. In George——' she covered her eyes, and left her sentence unfinished.The charge of Mrs. Sharland was, to some extent, unjust. Mehalah did attend to Elijah with as much care and as assiduously as she was able, considering the amount of work which had devolved upon her. Her mother was ill and in bed, Elijah helpless. She had to see after and direct everything about the farm and house, beside ministering to the two invalids. Consequently she was unable to devote much time to Elijah, but whenever she had a few moments of relief from work she devoted them to him. She took her needlework either to him in the oak parlour, or brought him into the hall. She had now somewhat lightened her labours by engaging a charwoman, and was therefore more able than before to be with Rebow and her mother. Each complained if left long alone, and she had much difficulty in portioning her time between them. She tried, but tried in vain, to induce her mother to make an effort and come downstairs, so that she might sit with both at once; this would save her from distraction between two exacting and conflicting claims, and some restraint would be placed on the intercourse between Rebow and herself by the presence in the room of a third party.Elijah was not entirely blinded, he was plunged not in darkness but in mist. He could see objects hazily, when near; he could distinguish figures, but not faces, when within a few yards of him, but nothing distant. The wall and a black cloud on the horizon were equally remote to his vision.He wandered about, with a stick, and visited his cattle sheds and workmen; or sat under the south wall of his house in the sun. The pump was there, and to it Mehalah sometimes came. He listened for her step. He could distinguish her tread from that of the charwoman. He took no notice of this woman, though she came up to him occasionally and said a few commiserating words.The men thought that he was gentler in his affliction than he had been before. He did not curse them, as had been his wont. He asked about the cattle, and the farm, and went his way. Mehalah also noticed that he was less fierce; she was able also to attribute this softening to its right cause, to her own influence. He was, to some extent, happy, because she was often with him, sought him instead of shunning him, spoke to him kindly, instead of rebuffing him when he addressed her, and let him know and feel that she thought of him, and was endeavouring to make him comfortable in his great deprivation.As he sat in the sun and looked up at the bright orb, which he saw only as a nebulous mass of light, she was ever present before his inward eye, she in her pride and beauty. He did not think; he sat hour by hour, simply looking at her—at the image ever before him, and listening for her step or voice. An expression of almost content stole across his strongly marked features, but was occasionally blurred and broken by an uneasy, eager, enquiring look, as if he were peering and hearkening for something which he dreaded. In fact, he was not satisfied that George De Witt would never reappear. Had he been set at rest on this point, he could have been happy.Mehalah was touched by his patience, his forgiveness of the irreparable wrong she had done him. He had said that if she loved him he would pardon all. He was ready to do this at a less price; though he craved for her love, he was contented, at least for the present, with her solicitude. He had been accustomed to open hostility and undisguised antipathy. Now that he met with consideration and tenderness from her, he became docile, and a transformation began to be operated in his nature. Love him, she could not, but she felt that but for what he had done to George, she could regard him without repugnance. Pity might ripen into friendship. Into a deeper and more rich feeling it never could, for he had barred the way to this possibility by his dealing with De Witt.She ventured occasionally to approach the subject, but it always produced such agitation in the manner of Rebow that she was obliged to desist from seeking explanation of the particulars which perplexed her. The slightest allusion to George De Witt troubled the master of Red Hall, made his face darken, and brought on an access of his old violence, from which he did not recover for a day or two.Mrs. De Witt came to see him.'Lawk a day!' she said; 'what a job to find you in this predicament!'He turned his whitened eyes on her, with a nervous twitch in the muscles and a tremour of the lips. 'Well! What news?''News!' echoed the lady; 'dear sackalive! who'd expect to find news in Mersea? you might as well drag for oysters in a horsepond.'He was satisfied, and let her talk on without attending to her.A few days later, he called the charwoman to him as she was going to the pump.'What is your name?''Susan Underwood. I'm a married woman, with three small children, and another on its way.'He fumbled in his pocket, and took out a crown.'Any news?—from Mersea, I mean.''I don't come from Mersea. Thank your honour all the same.''But if there were news there it would get to Virley or Salcott, or wherever you live.''It would be sure. I did hear,' she said, 'that Farmer Pooley has been a-wisiting a little more nor he ought at widow Siggars' cottage, her as has a handsome daughter, and so, they do say, has Farmer Pudney; and the other day they met there, and was so mad each to find the other, that the one up with his hunting whip and the other with his bible and knocked each other down, and each had to be carried home on a shutter.''Go and tell those tales to the old woman upstairs. I have no patience to listen to them. That's the sort of garbage women feed on, as maggots on rotten meat.''But it is true.''Who cares whether true or not? It is all the same to me. Has anyone arrived at Mersea?''Not yet, sir, but they do say that the parson's wife has expectations.''Go back to the kitchen,' growled Elijah, and relapsed into his dream.A few minutes after, Mehalah came out, and seated herself on the bench beside him. She was knitting. He put out his hand and felt her, and smiled. He raised his hand to her head.'Glory! when you wear the red cap in the sun I know it, I see a scarlet light like a poppy, and it pleases me. Let me hold the ball, then I can feel every stitch you take with your fingers.'She put the wool gently into his palm; and began to talk to Mm concerning the farm. He listened, and spoke in a tone and with a manner different from his habit formerly.Presently his hand stole up the thread, and he caught her fingers and drew her hand down on her lap. Her first impulse was to snatch it away, but she conquered it, and let him feel over her hand without a movement of dislike.'You have not yet a ring,' he said; 'you have no gold wedding circle like other married women.''Our union is unlike all others,' she said.'That is true; but you must wear my ring. I shall not be happy till you do. I shall think you will cast me off unless I can feel the ring that has no ending round your finger. Where is the link with which I married you?''I have it here,' she said; 'I have not cast it off, and I shall not cast you off. I have fastened it by a string and carry it in my bosom.'He seemed pleased. 'You wear it for my sake.''I wear it,' she replied, truthfully, 'because I took a solemn oath on that day, and I will not go from it. What I undertook that I will fulfil, neither more nor less. What I did not promise I will not do, what I did undertake that I will execute.''And you bear the ring in your bosom——''As a reminder to me of my promise. I will not be false to myself or to you. Do not press me further. You know what to expect and what not to expect. If I could love you I would; but I cannot. I did not promise that then and I will not promise it now, for I know the performance is out of my power.''You must wear the wedding ring on your finger.''I cannot wear this link, it is too large.''I will get you a gold ring, such as other women wear.''No. I cannot wear a lie; the gold ring belongs to the perfect marriage, to the union of hearts. It befits not ours.''You are right,' he said, and sighed. He still held her hand; she made a slight effort to withdraw it, but he clasped the hand the tighter.'Let me touch and hold you, Glory,' he said. 'Remember I can no more see you, except mistily. You must allow me some compensation. I know what you are now, sitting here in the sun, with your hair full of rich coppery gleams, and your eyes full of light and darkness at once, and your cheek like a ripe apricot. I know what you are, splendid, noble, as no other girl in the whole world; but you have shut my eyes, that I may not see you, so allow me, at least, to feel you.' He paused. Then he went on: 'You are right, our union is unlike any other, as you and I are different from all others in the world. The married life of some is smooth and shining and rustless like the gold, but ours is quite contrary, it is rough and dark and full of blisters and canker. It may be different some day——' he turned his dim eyes enquiringly at her, 'but not now, not now. Nevertheless as the ring is without an end so is our union. Give me the link of iron, Glory, and come with me to the forge. I will beat out a bit of the metal into a ring, one small enough and light enough for you to wear.'He got up, and holding her hand, bade her lead him to the forge.Near the bakehouse was a small smithy, fitted up with all necessary appliances. Rebow was a skilful workman at the anvil, and shod his own horses, and made all that was needed in iron for the house and farm.Mehalah conducted him to the shop, and brought fire from the kitchen for the forge, she worked the bellows and blew the fire into size and strength, whilst Elijah raked the coals together.'Where is the link, Glory?' he asked, and went up to her. He put his hand to her neck, before she did, and drew out of her bosom something.'That is not the link, Elijah,' she said; 'it is my medal—the medal that——'He uttered a fierce cry, and wrenching it off, dashed it on the ground. He would have stamped on it had he been able to see it.Mehalah's cheek flushed, but she said nothing. She saw where the coin had rolled. She stooped, picked it up, impressed a kiss upon it, and hid it once more in her bosom.'Here is the iron link,' she said; he took it from her sullenly.The flame gleamed up blue above the wetted coal, and glared out white through the crevices in the clot, as the bellows panted, and Rebow drew the coals together or broke into the glaring mass with an iron rod.'I heard a preacher once take as his text,' said he, 'Our God is a consuming fire; and he told all in the chapel that this was writ in Scripture and therefore must be true to the letter, for God wrote it Himself, and He knew what He was better than any man. He said that fire warms and illumines at a distance, but if you come too close it dazzles and burns up. And he told us it was so with God. You can't keep too far off of Him to be comfortable and safe; the nearer you get, the worse it is for you; and to my thinking that is Hell, when you get sucked into the very core of the fire in the heart of God. You must be consumed because you are not divine, fire alone can live in fire; most folks are clay and water, and they are good enough, they get light and warmth, but when they die they burn up like this dock of coke. But there are other folk, like you and me, Glory! who are made of fire and clay; it takes but a word or a thought to make us roar and blaze and glow like this furnace. There is passion in us—and that is a spark of the divine. I do not care what the passion be, love or hate, or jealousy or anger, if it be hot and red and consuming so that it melts and burns all that opposes it, that fiery passion is of God and will live, live on for ever, in the central heart and furnace, which is God. When you and I die, Glory! and are sucked into the great fiery whirlpool, we shall not be burnt up altogether, but intensified. If I love you with fiery passion here I shall love you with fiery passion ten thousand times hotter hereafter; my passion will turn to glaring white heat, and never go out for all everlasting, for it will be burning, blazing in God who is eternal. If you hate me, you will be whirled in, and your fury fanned and raked into a fiery phrenzy which will rage on for ages on ages, and cannot go out, for it will be burning in the everlasting furnace of God. If I love, and you hate with infinite intensity for an infinity of time—that is Hell. But if you love and I love, our love grows hotter and blazes and roars and spurts into one tongue, cloven like the tongues at Pentecost, twain yet one, and that is Heaven. My love eating into yours and encircling it, and yours into mine, and neither containing nor consuming the other, but going on in growing intensity of fiery fury of love from everlasting to everlasting, that is Heaven of Heavens.'He was heating the link, held between the teeth of long shanked pincers, and then withdrawing it, and forging it on the anvil as he spoke.'Glory!' he said; 'tell me, you do not hate me?'She hesitated.'Glory!' he repeated, and laid hammer and pincer on the anvil, and leaned his head towards her, as she shrank into the dark corner by the bellows, 'Glory! tell me, you do not hate me.''Elijah,' she said, 'I must be candid with you. When I think of what, by your own confession, you have done to him whom I loved more than all the world——'He raised his hammer and brought it down on the link, cutting it in half, and sending one fiery half across the smithy.'When I think of what you have done to him, I feel that I do hate you, and that I have every cause and right to hate you. I could forgive everything else. I have turned over in my mind all that you have done to me, the cruel way in which you worked till you had brought me within your power, the heartless way in which you got my good name to be evil spoken of, and drove me out of self-defence to take your hand before the altar of God, I have thought of all this, and I feel that my act—unintentional though it was—yet my act, which has blinded you, has expiated all those offences. You have wronged me, and I have wronged you. I have ruined your life, but you have also ruined mine. We are quits so far. You have my frank forgiveness. I blot out all the past, as far as it concerns me, from my memory. It shall no more rankle in my heart. You have shown me a generous forgiveness of my misdeed, and I would imitate you. But what you did to George is not to be expiated. You sinned against him more terribly, more wickedly than against me, and he alone can pardon you. That I cannot forgive; and for that crime I must still hate you.'He stood trembling—a strange weakness came over him—he was not angry, savage, morose; he seemed a prey to fear and uncertainty.'Tell me, tell me truly, Glory! Does that alone prevent you from loving me? Had I never done what I said I had done, could you love me?''I do not say that,' she replied. 'As I have told you before, I gave my heart once for all to George De Witt. I never could love you with my fresh full heart, as a woman should love her husband, but I feel that I could like you as a friend. I do pity you. God knows how bitterly I have suffered from remorse for what I did unwittingly, and how sincere I am in my repentance and desire to deal tenderly and truly by you, Elijah. I feel sometimes as if I could like you; I do acknowledge that you and I stand apart from others, and alone can understand each other; but then that great crime of your life against George rises up before me and drives back my rising compassion.'Rebow worked again at the link, beating out the fragment into a wire, and cutting it again. He was thinking whilst he wrought.'Sooner or later,' he muttered at last, 'all will out.'He worked with difficulty, and slowly, as he could not see, and was obliged to feel the iron, and cool it repeatedly to ascertain whether it was as he desired it.'Look here, Glory!' he said, 'when iron is taken from the smelting furnace it is crystalline and brittle; there is no thread and texture in it, but we burn it and beat it, and as we work we beat our stubborn purpose into the metal, and it is the will of the smith which goes through his arm and hammer into the iron and converts it to steel; he drives his will into the metal, and that becomes the fibre in it. You don't find it so in nature. The human soul must part with something and transfuse it into the inanimate iron, and there it will lie and last, for the will of man is divine and eternal. It is much the same with all with which we have to do. I have spent time and labour over you, and thought and purpose have been consumed in making you my wife; they are none of them lost, they are all in you, they have become fibres in your soul. You may not be aware of it, but there they all are. The more one thinks and labours for the other the more he ingrafts himself in the nature of the other. I have heard of sound men having their healthy blood drawn off and injected into the veins of the sick, and restoring them thus to activity and health. We are always doing this with our wills, injecting their fire into the hearts of others, and so by degrees transfusing their natures. You are pouring yourself into me, and I into you, whether we know it or not, till in time we are alike in colour and tone and temperature.'He had worked the piece of steel into a rude ring, not very cumbrous, and he bade Mehalah try it on her finger. It was too small. He easily enlarged it, and then got a file to smooth off the roughnesses.'I had rather you wore this than a ring of gold,' he said, 'for there is part of my soul in this iron. I have made it in spite of my blindness, because I had the will to do so. The whole metal is full of my purpose, which tinctures it as wine stains water; and with it goes my resolve that you shall be mine altogether in heart and soul, in love as well as in pity, for now and for all eternity. You will wear that on your finger, the finger that has a nerve leading from the heart. Stretch out your hand, Glory, and let me put it on. Stretch out your hand over the hearth, above the fire, our God is a consuming fire, and this is His proper altar.'He stood on one side of the furnace, she on the other; the angry red coals glowed below, and a hot smoke rose from them.She extended her hand to him, and he grasped it with the left above the fire, and held the steel ring in his right.'Glory!' he said in a tremulous voice. 'At the altar in the church you swore to obey me. In the hall you knelt and swore to cherish me; here, over the fire, the figure of our God, as I put the iron ring on, swear to me also to love me.'She did not answer. She stood as though frozen to ice; with her eyes on the door of the smithy, where stood a figure—the figure of a man.Suddenly she uttered a piercing cry. 'George! my George! my George!' and withdrew her hand from the grasp of Elijah. The iron ring fell from his fingers into the red fire below and was lost.CHAPTER XXVII.THE RETURN OF THE LOST.Mehalah was clasped in the arms of George De Witt.'Who is there? Where is he?' shouted Elijah, staggering forward with his great pincers raised ready to strike.George drew the girl out of the way, and let the angry man burst out of the door and pass, beating the air with his iron tool. He put his arm round her, and led her from the house. She could not speak, she could only look up at him as at one risen from the dead. He led her towards the sea-wall, looking behind him at the figure of the blind man, rushing about, and smiting recklessly in his jealousy and fury, and hitting bushes, rails, walls, anything in hopes of smiting down the man whose name he had heard, and who he knew had come back to break in on and ruin his hopes.George De Witt walked lamely, he had a somewhat stiff leg; otherwise he seemed well.'How manly you have grown!' exclaimed Mehalah, holding him at arms' length, and contemplating him with pride.'And you, Glory, have become more womanly; but in all else are the same.''Where have you been, George?''At sea, Glory, and smelt powder. I have been a sailor in His Majesty's Royal Navy, in the Duke of Clarence, and I am pensioned off, because of my leg.''Have you been wounded?''Not exactly. A cannon-ball, as we were loading, struck me on the shin and bruised the bone, so that I have been invalided with swellings and ulcerations. I ain't fit for active service, but I'm not exactly a cripple.''But George! when did this take place? I do not understand. After your escape?''Escape, Glory? I have had no escape.''From confinement in Red Hall,' she added.'I never was confined there. I do not know what you are talking about.'Mehalah passed her hand over her face.'George! I thought that Elijah had made you drunk and then put you in his cellar, chained there till you went mad.''There is not a word of truth in this,' said De Witt. 'Who told you such a tale?''Elijah himself.''Elijah is a rascal. I have enough cause against him without that.''Then tell me about yourself. I am bewildered. How came you to disappear?''Let us walk together to the spit by the windmill, and I will tell you all.'They turned the way he said, and he did not speak again till they had reached the spot.'We will sit down, Glory; I suffer still somewhat from my leg, so that I am always glad to rest. Now I will tell you the whole story. You remember the evening when we quarrelled. You had behaved rather roughly to Phoebe Musset.''I remember it only too well, George.''After you had left, I went to the Mussets' house to inquire after Phoebe, who had been well soused in the sea by you; and on my return I fell in with Elijah Rebow. He took me to task for not having gone after you and patched up our little difference. He said that a quarrel should never be allowed to cool, but mended while hot. He persuaded me to let him row me in his boat to the Ray. He said he was going there after ducks or something of that sort, I do not remember exactly. I agreed, and got into his punt with him, and we made for the Rhyn. We had scarcely entered the channel when a lugger full of men ran across our bows and had us fast in a jiffy. I was overpowered before I knew where I was, and taken by the men in their boat.''Who were they, George?' asked Mehalah, breathlessly.'They were some of the crew of theSalamander, a war schooner then lying in the offing, come to press me into the service with Captain Macpherson, who had been on the coast-guard, but was appointed to the command. I was carried off as many another man has been, without my consent, and made to serve His Majesty on compulsion.''But, George! how about your medal that I gave you? That was returned to me the same night.''I suppose it was,' he replied coolly. 'As I was taken, Elijah said to me, "Have you no token to send back to Glory?" I bade him tell you how I was impressed, and how I would return to you whenever the war was over and I was paid off; but he asked for some token, that you might believe him. Well, Glory! I had nothing by me save your medal, and I handed it to him and told him to give it to you with my love.'Mehalah wrung her hands and moaned.'I have a notion,' continued George, 'that Rebow was somehow privy to my being pressed; for he went out that afternoon to theSalamanderin his cutter, and had a private talk with Captain Macpherson, who was short of men. Now I fancy, though I can't prove it, that he schemed with the captain how he should catch me, and that Elijah with set purpose took me into the trap set for me. He is deep enough to do such a dirty trick.'Mehalah's head sank on her knees, and she sobbed aloud.'And now, Glory, dearest!' he went on, 'the rascal has got you to marry him, I am told. How could you take him? Why did you not wait for me? You were promised to me, and we looked on one another as soon to be husband and wife. You must have soon forgotten your promise.''I thought you were dead,' she gasped.'So did my mother. I do not understand. Elijah knew better.''But he told no one. He allowed us all to suppose you were drowned in one of the fleets.''It is very hard,' said George, 'for a fellow to return from the wars to reclaim his girl, and to find her no longer his. It is a great blow to me, Glory! I did so love and admire you.'She could only sway to and fro in her distress.'It is very disappointing to a chap,' said George, putting a quid in his cheek. 'When he has calculated on getting a nice girl as his wife, and in battle and storm has had the thoughts of her to cheer and encourage him; when he has some prize-money in his pocket, and hopes to spend it on her—well, it is hard.''George,' said she between her sobs, 'why did you return the medal? I gave it you, and you swore never to part with it. You should not have sent it to me.''Did I really swear that, Glory?' he answered; 'if so, I had forgotten. You see I was so set upon and flustered that night, I did not rightly consider things as they should have been considered.' He stopped.'Well?' asked Mehalah, eagerly.'Don't catch me up, Glory. I only stopped to turn the quid. As I was about to say, I did not remember what I had promised. I had nothing else to send you that would serve as a token. The medal was an article about which there could be no mistake. I knew when you saw that you would make sure Elijah's story was true, and my promise would be sacred—I have kept it, I have returned to you, Glory, and if you were not married I should make you my wife. I love you still, as I always did love you. I've seen a sight of fine girls since I left Mersea. There's more fish in the sea than come out of it; but I'm darned if I have seen a finer anywhere, or more to my liking than you, Glory. You were my first love, and the sight of you brings back pleasant memories. The more I look at you now, the more I feel inclined to wring that old prophet's neck. You are too good for such a chap as he; you should have waited for me. You had promised, and might have had patience. But, Lord bless me! how the girls do run after the men! Glory! I have seen the world since I left Mersea, and I know more of it than I did. I suppose you thought that as I was gone to Davy Jones's locker you must catch whom you could.''George!' exclaimed Mehalah, 'do not speak to me thus. I cannot bear it. I know you are only talking in this way to try me, and because you resent my marriage. I promised once to be true to you, I gave you my heart, and I have remained, and I will remain, true to you; my heart is yours, and I can never recover it and give it to another.''This is very fine and sentimental, Glory,' said George; 'I've smelt powder and I know the colour of blood. I've seen the world, and know what sentiment is worth; it is blank cartridge firing; it breaks no bones, but it makes a noise and a flash. I don't see how you can call it keeping true to me when you marry another man for his money.''You are determined to drive me mad,' exclaimed Mehalah. 'Have mercy on me, my own George, my only George! I have loved and suffered for you. God can see into my heart, and knows how deeply it has been cut, and how profusely it has bled for you. You must spare me. I have thought of you. I have lived only in a dream of you. The world without you has been dead and blank. I have not had a moment of real joy since your disappearance; it seems to me as though a century of torment had drawn its slow course since then. No, George! I have married for nothing but to save my self-respect. I was forced by that man, whom I will not name now, so hateful and horrible to me is the thought of him—I was forced by him from my home on the Ray to lodge under his roof. He smoked my mother and me out of our house as if we were foxes. When he had me secure he drew a magician's circle round me, and I could not break through it. My character, my name were tarnished, there was nothing for it but for me to marry him. I did so, but I did so under stipulations. I took his name, but I am not, and never shall be, more to him than his wife in the register of the parish. I have never loved him—I never undertook to love him.''This is a queer state of things,' said George. 'Dashed if, in all my experience of life and of girls, I came across anything similar, and I have seen something. I have not spent all my days in Mersea. I've been to the West Indies. I've seen white girls, and yellow girls, and brown girls, and copper-coloured girls, and black ones—black as rotted seaweed. I have—they are all much of a muchness, but this beats my experience. You are not like others.''So he says; he and I are alone in the world, and alone can understand one another. Do you understand me, George?''I'm blessed if I do.'She was silent. She was very unhappy. She did not like his tone: there was an insincerity, a priggishness about it which jarred with her reality and depth of feeling. But she could not analyse what offended her. She thought he was angry with her, and had assumed a taunting air to cover his mortification.She drew the medal from her bosom.'George! dear, dear George!' she said vehemently, 'take the pledge again. I give it you with my whole heart once more. I believe it saved you once, it may save you again. At all events, it is a token to you that my heart is the same, that I care for and love none but you in the whole wide world.'He took it and suspended it round his neck.'I will keep it for your sake,' he said; 'you may be sure it will be treasured by me.''Keep it better than you did before.''Certainly I will. I shall value it inexpressibly.''George!' she went on, trembling in all her limbs, and rising to her feet. 'George! my first and only love! as I give it you back now, I make you the same promise that I made you before. I will love—love—love you and you only, eternally. I swore then to be true to you, and I have been true. Swear again to me the same.''Certainly. I shall always love you, Glory! I'm damned if it is possible for a fellow not to, you are so handsome with those flashing eyes and glowing cheeks. A fellow must be made of ice not to love you.''Be true to me, as I to you.''To be sure I will, Glory!' and added in an undertone, 'rum sort of truth hers, to go and marry another chap.''What is that you say, George?''Take care, Glory!' exclaimed the sailor; 'here comes the old prophet with a pair of tongs over his shoulder, staggering along the wall towards us. I had better sheer off. He don't look amiable. Good-bye, Glory!''Oh, George! I must see you again.''I will come again. You will see me often enough. Sailors can no more keep away from handsome girls than bees from clover.''George, George!'Elijah came up, his face black with passion.'Mehalah!' he roared, as he swung his iron pincers.She caught his wrist and disarmed him.'I could bite you, and tear your flesh with my teeth,' he raged. 'All was so peaceful and beautiful, and then he came from the dead and broke it into shivers. Where are you?' He put out his hands to grasp her.'Do not touch me!' she cried, loathing in her voice. 'With my whole soul I abhor you, you base coward. You lied to me about George, a hateful lie that made me mad, and yet the reality is almost as bad—it is worse. He is alive and free, and I am bound, bound hand and foot, to you.'CHAPTER XXVIII.TIMOTHY'S TIDINGS.'Mehalah!' roared the wretched man, smiting at her with both his clenched fists, and nearly precipitating himself into the mud, by missing his object, 'Mehalah! where are you? Come near, and let me beat and kill you.''Why are you angry, Elijah?' asked the girl. 'The man you betrayed to the pressgang has returned, are you vexed at that?''Come near me,' he shouted.'You have gained your end, and may well be content that he is alive. You have separated us for ever; what more could you desire? His hopes and mine are alike shattered by your act. You lied to me about his madness, but though that wickedness was not wrought to which you pretended, you have done that which passes forgiveness.''Where is he?''He is gone. He would not meet you. He could not deal the punishment you deserve on a blinded man.''You have been discussing me—the blinded man,' raved Elijah. 'Yes, you first blind me that I may not see, and then you meet and intrigue with your old lover, in security, knowing I cannot watch, and pursue, and punish you.''Go back to the house, Elijah. You are in no fit temper to speak to on this subject.''Oh yes! go back and sit in the hall alone, whilst you are with him—your George! No, Mehalah! I tell you this. I will not be deceived. Though I be blind, I can and will see and follow you. I will sell my soul to the devil for twenty-four hours' vision, that I may track and catch and crush your two heads together, and trample the life out of you with my big iron-heeled boots. You shall not see him, you shall never see him again. Give me back my pincers, and I will make an end of it all.''Elijah, you must trust me. I married you in self-respect, and I shall never forget the respect I owe to myself.''I cannot trust you,' he answered, 'because you are just one of those whose movements no one can calculate. I tell you what, Mehalah. God made most folks of clockwork and stuck them on their little plots of soil to spin round and run their courses, like the figures on an Italian barrel-organ. You look at Mersea island, that is the board of such a contrivance, and on it are so many dolls; they twist about, and you know that if God turns the handle for ten minutes or for ten years, or for ten times ten years, they will do exactly the same things in exactly the same ways, just as He made them and set them to spin. But as He was making the dolls that were to twirl and pirouette His breath got into some, and they are different from the rest. They don't go according to the clockwork, and don't follow the circles of the machine, as set agoing by the organ-handle. God himself can't count on them, for they have free wills, and His breath is genius and independence in their hearts. They go where they list, and do what they will, they follow the impulse of the breath of God within, and not the wires that fasten them to the social mechanism. I do not know what I may do. I do not know what you may do. We have the breath of God in us. I am sure that you have, and I am sure that I have; but I know that there is none in your mother, none in such as George De Witt. The laws of the land and of religion are the slits in the board on which the dolls dance, and they only move along these slits; but you and I, and such as have free souls, go anywhere, and do anything. We have no law. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth; so is everyone that is born of the Spirit. I heard a preacher once explain that text, and he said that the wind was the Spirit of God and it went where it willed, and so all who were born of the Spirit followed their wills, and there was neither right nor wrong to them, for they were blown about, across and up and down, where others not so born dare not step, and they never forfeited their sonships whatever they did, for it was not they, but the divine will in them that drove them. Mehalah! you are one with a free, headlong will, and how can I count on what you will do? There is no cut track along which you must run. The puppets dance their rounds, but you rush in and out and upset those that are in your way. I am the same. You have seen and learned my way. Who could reckon on me? I never mapped out my course, but went on as I was impelled; and so will you. But be sure of this, Mehalah! I shall not endure your desertion of me. Beware how you meet and speak to George De Witt again.''Elijah,' said the girl; 'I give you only what I promised you, my obedience, never expect more. Your crooked courses are not such as can gain respect, much less regard. You say that you act on impulse, and have not mapped your course. I do not believe you. You have worked with a set purpose before you to get rid of George, and obtain hold over me. Your purpose was deliberate, your plans laid in cold blood. You have got as much as you can get. You have obtained some sort of control over me, but my soul is free, my heart is free, and these you shall never bring into slavery.''I was ready half an hour ago to forgive you for having blinded me. I cannot forgive you now. You have done me a wicked wrong. You acted on impulse, without purpose, you say. I do not believe it. There was set design and cold scheming in it all. You knew that George De Witt was not dead—or you thought he might be yet alive and might return, so you dashed the firejuice into my eyes to blind them to what would take place on his reappearance.''This is false!' exclaimed Mehalah indignantly.'So is it false that I schemed and worked,' he said. 'Do you not understand, Mehalah, that what we do, we do for an end which we do not see? We act on the spur of passion, and the acts link together, and make a complete chain in the end. I did at the moment what I thought must be done, and so it was brought about that you became my wife. You acted as anger and love inspired, and now I am made helpless, whilst you sport with your lover. But I tell you, Mehalah, I will not endure this. I don't care if you die and I die, but parted we shall not be. You and I must find our heaven in each other and nowhere else. You are going after wandering lights if you expect a port away from my heart. Wrecking lights attached to asses' heads.' He stamped and caught at her.'My heart was given to George before I knew you,' said Glory sadly; 'I have long known him, and we had long been promised to each other. We had hoped to be married this spring and then we should have been happy, unspeakably happy. He has been true to me and I will be true to him. We cannot now marry. You have prevented that; but we can still love one another and be true to each other, and live in the thought and confidence of the other. He trusts me and I trust him. He is now bitterly distressed to find that you have separated us, but in time he will be reconciled, and then it will be as of old, when I was on the Ray. We shall see one another, and we shall be true, loving friends, but nothing more; nothing more is possible. You have barred that.''Is this your resolve?' he asked, turning livid with anger; even his lips a dead leaden tint.'It is not a resolve, it is what must be. I must love him, I cannot help it. We must see each other. We can never be man and wife, that you have succeeded in preventing, and for that I shall never forgive you. But I will not be false to my oath. I will still serve you, and I will cherish you in your wretchedness and blindness.''This will not do,' he cried. 'My whole nature, my entire soul, cries out and hungers for you, for your nature, for your soul. I must have your whole being as mine, I will not be master of a divided Glory! allegiance here, love there, cold obedience to me and gushing devotion to him. The thought is unendurable. O God!' he burst forth in an agony, 'why did I not take you in my arms when the Ray house was burning, and spring with you into the flames and hold you there in the yellow wavering tongue of fire, till we melted into one lump? Then we should both have been at peace now, both in one, and happy in our unity.' He strode up and down, with his head down.'Mehalah! have you seen water poured on lime? What a fume and boiling takes place, the two fight together which shall obtain the mastery, but neither gets it all its own way in the end, but one enters into and penetrates every pore of the other, and the heat and the steam only continue till every part of one is impregnated with the other. You and I are mixing like water and lime, and we rage and smoke, but there is peace at the end, in view, when we are infused the one into the other, when it is neither I nor you, but one being. The mixture must be complete some day, in this life or the next; and then we shall clot into one hard rock, imperishable and indivisible.''Elijah! try to take interest in something else; think of something beside me. I can be nothing more to you than what I am, so rest contented with what you have got, and turn your thoughts to your farm, or anything else.''I cannot do it, Mehalah. I put a little plant once in a pot and filled the vessel with rich mould, and the plant grew and at last broke the pot into a hundred pieces, and I found within a dense mat of fibres; the root had eaten up and displaced all the soil and swelled till it rent the vessel. It has been so with my love of you. It got planted, how I know not, in my heart, and it has thrown its roots through the whole chamber, and devoured all the substance, and woven a net of fibres in and out and up and down, and has swelled and is thrusting against the walls, till there is scarce love there any more but horrible, biting, wearing pain. I cannot kill the plant and pluck it out, or it will leave a great void. I must let it grow till it has broken up the vessel. It grows and makes root, but will not flower. There has been scarce leaf, certainly no blossom, to my love. It is all downward, inward, clogging, bursting tangle of fibre. Can you say it is so with you? You cannot. Your care for that fool George is but a slip struck in that may root or not, that must be nursed or it will wither. Tear it up and cast it away. It is not worthy of you. George is a simple fool. I know him. A clown without a soul. Why, Glory! there are none hereabouts with souls but you and me. Your mother has none, Mrs. De Witt has none, Abraham has none. They can't understand the ways and workings of those that have souls. They are bodies, ruled by bodily wants, and look at all things out of bodily eyes, and interpret by bodily instincts all things done by those spiritually above them. But you understand me, and I understand you. Soul speaks to soul. I've heard a preacher say that once on a time the sons of God went in unto the daughters of men, and what they begat of them were cursed of heaven. That means that men with souls married vulgar women with only instincts and appetites, and such unions are unnatural. The sons of God must marry the daughters of God, and leave the animal men and women to pig together and breed listless, dull-eyed, muddle-headed, dough-hearted, scandal-mongering generations. The curse of God would have rested upon you if you had married George De Witt. I have saved you from that. You have mated with your equal.''What happiness, what blessing has attended our union?' she asked bitterly.'None,' he replied, 'because you oppose your will to the inevitable. We must be united entirely, and blended into one, but you resist, and so misery ensues. I am blinded and wretched, and you, you——''I am wretched also,' she said; 'but stay! here comes someone to speak to us.''Who is it?''I do not know exactly. A young man who came here one day with Phoebe Musset.''What does he want with us? I will have no young men coming here.'The person who approached was Timothy Spark, 'cousin' to Admonition Pettican. He was dressed in a new suit of mourning. He lounged along the sea-wall with his hands in his pockets.'Your servant, master,' he said to Elijah as he came up. 'Your most devoted servant,' he added with a bow to Mehalah, and a simper. 'Charmed to see my dear and beautiful cousin so well.''Cousin!' exclaimed Rebow, stepping back and frowning.'Certainly, certainly,' said Timothy. 'I am cousin to Admonition, wife, or rather let me say widow of the late lamented Charles Pettican, and he was first cousin to Mrs. Sharland, so my pretty cousin Mehalah will not, I am sure, deny the relationship. Let me offer you an arm,' he wedged his way between Rebow and Glory.'First cousin once and a half removed,' he said. 'Drop the fractions and say cousin, broadly. Certainly, certainly so. Is it not so, my dear?' In an undertone and aside to Mehalah. 'Let us drop the old fellow behind. I have a word to say in your ear, cousin Mehalah! By the way, how do you shorten that long name? It is such a mouthful. But I forget, where is my memory going? Glory is the name you go by among relatives and friends. Come along, Glory! Lean on my arm. The blind gentleman is a little unsteady on his pins and can't keep up with us. He will be more comfortable taking his airing slowly by himself; we shall distract him with our frolicsome talk. He is in a serious mood, perhaps pious.''Say what you have to say at once,' said Elijah surlily. 'I must hear it. What did you say aboutlateCharles Pettican?''The poor gentleman is deceased,' said Timothy; 'and his disconsolate widow is drinking down her grief in hot toddy.''Mr. Charles Pettican dead!' exclaimed Mehalah with grief.'Dead as Nebuchadnezzar,' replied Timothy; 'rather rapid at the last, the paralysis attacked his vitals, and then it was all over with him in a snap. Fortunately, he had made his will. You haven't taken my arm yet, my pretty cousin. You won't? well then, I will continue. I flatter myself that my influence prevailed, and he made a will not in favour of Admonition, who had really become too exacting towards myself, and inconsiderate towards him, for us to endure it much longer. He threw himself on my honour, and I told him I relied on his gratitude. We put our heads together. Admonition has had a fall. She gets only a hundred pounds. My friend Charles, in token of my friendship, has kindly, I may say handsomely, remembered me,—and all the bulk of his property he has bequeathed to my good cousin here, Glory. I need hardly say that this has proved as great a surprise to Admonition as it must be to you. Admonition brought it on herself. She should not have attempted to displace me; I am not a person so unimportant as to be dispensed with at pleasure. Admonition cannot recover from the shock and mortification, and I left her at Wyvenhoe, venting it in language not flattering to the late lamented. She led me a dance, and him she treated like a galley-slave, so that she has got her deserts. I saw that she was carrying it on a little too far for the endurance of Charles, so I had a talk with him on the matter, and offered to help him in the management of his affairs for a trifling salary, and he was good enough to see how advantageous it would be to him to have me as a friend and adviser; so we put our heads together, and then Admonition tried to bundle me out of the house, and much to her surprise learned that I was as securely installed therein as herself. I was private secretary and accountant to Charles, and cousin Admonition had to knuckle under then. Curiously enough, she had picked up another cousin about that time, one I had never heard of before in my life, and she wanted to bring him into the house in my place; I did not allow that game to be played. I kept my berth, and Admonition was in a pretty temper about it, you may be sure. How Charles chuckled! He enjoyed it. Upon my word I believe he chuckles in his grave to think how he has done Admonition in the end; and he smirks doubtless to consider also how he has served me.''What has he left Mehalah?' asked Rebow surlily.'I cannot tell you exactly, but I suspect about two hundred and fifty to three hundred pounds a year; a nice little fortune, and dropping in very unexpectedly, I presume. I am executor, and shall have the choicest pleasure in explaining all to my sweet cousin. Is it not near about your dinner-time?''Yes.''Then I don't mind picking a bone and drinking a glass with you. The drive is long from Wyvenhoe. You happen perhaps to have a spare room in the house?'No answer was given to this question.'Because I have brought over my little traps. I thought it best. We can talk over matters, and I will show you what the amount of property is that Charles has left. I have the will with me, it is not proved yet. I shall do that shortly.''There's an inn at Salcott. The "Rising Sun." You can go there. We do not take in strangers.''Certainly, certainly! only you see,' touching Elijah knowingly in the ribs, 'I'm not a stranger, but a friend and relative of the family, a cousin; you understand, a cousin, and ready to make myself agreeable to one,' with a bow to Mehalah, 'and useful to the other,' with a tap on Rebow's arm.'You can settle all you have to say on business in an hour if you stick to it, and then you can be gone,' said Elijah in ill-temper, withdrawing his arm from the familiar touch.'Certainly, certainly,' said Timothy. 'But then, I must call again, and yet again, always I am sure, with increasing pleasure, but still at some inconvenience to myself. I thought I might just settle in here, you might give me a shake-down in any nook, and I would make myself a most invaluable member of the family. You, old gentleman, with your affliction, want an overlooker to the farm, and who could serve your purpose better than myself, a friend and a relation, a cousin, almost first cousin, with just a remove or so between, not worth particularising. I could devote my time to your affairs——''I don't want you. I will not have you!' exclaimed Rebow angrily. 'Why have you come here, you meddling puppy? Did I ask you to come? Did Mehalah want you? I know you and your ways. You got into Pettican's house hanging on to the skirts of his wife, and then made mischief between man and wife; and now you come here to play the same game; you come because I am blind and helpless, and sneaking behind my Glory; you want to steal in to play the fool with her and set us one against the other. We want none of you here. We are not so tender together that we desire another element of discord to enter into the jangled clash of bells. Be off with you. As for the matter of Mehalah's inheritance, the lawyers shall communicate with us, and between you and her. I will not have you set your foot inside my house.''Stay,' said Glory; 'I must know if this be really true. Am I really inheritor of such a fortune?''I have the will in my pocket.''Show it me.'Timothy produced the document and read it to Elijah and Mehalah. Both drew near.'Let me see it!' said Rebow vehemently, and grasped at the paper with nervous hand.'My good friend,' remarked Timothy patronisingly; 'the state of your eyes, if I mistake not, will prevent your being able to read it.''I must feel it then.'He grasped it fiercely and in a moment tore it with his hands, and then, biting the fragments, rent it further and further.'For heaven's sake!' exclaimed the young man in dismay.'Ha! Glory! Did you suppose you were to be made independent of me? Did you think I would let you get a fortune of your own, to emancipate you from me? That you might go off with it, and enjoy it along with your George De Witt?'He dashed the tatters about him.'You mad fool!' exclaimed Timothy Spark. 'Do you suppose that by such a scurvy trick as this you will despoil my pretty cousin of her money, and perhaps of her liberty?''I have done it,' shouted Rebow wrathfully. 'You cannot make the will whole, I have chewed and swallowed portions, and others the winds have taken into the sea.''Indeed!' said Timothy. 'Do you suppose that this is the original? Of course not. It is an authenticated copy. The original will is left with Morrell the lawyer, and this is but a transcript.'Rebow gnashed his teeth.'It seems to me,' said Timothy, 'that after all I shall be called upon to step in between husband and wife, and to protect my pretty dark-eyed, rosy-lipped cousin. I am sure you have a spare room where I can have a shake-down.'

CHAPTER XXVI.

THE FORGING OF THE RING.

Mrs. Sharland was failing. The excitement of the marriage had roused her to activity, but when that was over she relapsed, her energy evaporated, and she took to her bed with the avowed intention of not leaving it again, except for a christening in the family, till carried to her grave. She did not understand Mehalah, she fretted because the arrangements after the eventful day remained the same as before; her daughter shared her room and kept as much away from Elijah as was possible, showed him none of the love of a wife to her husband, and was distressed when spoken to by her new name.

'You are either Mistress Rebow or you are not,' said the old woman peevishly to her daughter one night, in their room, 'and if you are not, then I don't understand what the ceremony in the church was for. You treat Elijah Rebow as coldly and indifferently as if he were naught to you but master, and you to him were still hired servant. I don't understand your goings on.'

'He and I understand each other, that is enough,' answered Mehalah. 'I have married him for his name and for nothing else. In no other light will I regard him than as a master: I told him when I agreed to go to church with him that I would be his no further than the promise to obey went; I take his name to save mine—that is all. He is not my husband, and never shall be, in any other way. I will serve him and serve him devotedly, but not give him my love. That I cannot give. I gave my heart away once for all, and it has not been restored to me.'

'That is all nonsense,' said Mrs. Sharland. 'Didn't I love Charles Pettican, and weren't we nigh coming to a declaration, only a fit of the ague shivers cut it short? I married your father, and loved him truly as a good wife and not as a hired servant, for all that.'

'Elijah and I understand each other,' answered Mehalah. 'I suppose there is something of truth in what he says over and over again, that he and I are different from others, and that there's none can understand us but our two selves.'

'Then you are made for one another.'

'So he says, but I will not believe it. No. That cannot be. Some have peace and happiness drop into their lap, others have to fight their way to it, and that is our fate. But that we shall find it in each other, that I never will admit. In George——' she covered her eyes, and left her sentence unfinished.

The charge of Mrs. Sharland was, to some extent, unjust. Mehalah did attend to Elijah with as much care and as assiduously as she was able, considering the amount of work which had devolved upon her. Her mother was ill and in bed, Elijah helpless. She had to see after and direct everything about the farm and house, beside ministering to the two invalids. Consequently she was unable to devote much time to Elijah, but whenever she had a few moments of relief from work she devoted them to him. She took her needlework either to him in the oak parlour, or brought him into the hall. She had now somewhat lightened her labours by engaging a charwoman, and was therefore more able than before to be with Rebow and her mother. Each complained if left long alone, and she had much difficulty in portioning her time between them. She tried, but tried in vain, to induce her mother to make an effort and come downstairs, so that she might sit with both at once; this would save her from distraction between two exacting and conflicting claims, and some restraint would be placed on the intercourse between Rebow and herself by the presence in the room of a third party.

Elijah was not entirely blinded, he was plunged not in darkness but in mist. He could see objects hazily, when near; he could distinguish figures, but not faces, when within a few yards of him, but nothing distant. The wall and a black cloud on the horizon were equally remote to his vision.

He wandered about, with a stick, and visited his cattle sheds and workmen; or sat under the south wall of his house in the sun. The pump was there, and to it Mehalah sometimes came. He listened for her step. He could distinguish her tread from that of the charwoman. He took no notice of this woman, though she came up to him occasionally and said a few commiserating words.

The men thought that he was gentler in his affliction than he had been before. He did not curse them, as had been his wont. He asked about the cattle, and the farm, and went his way. Mehalah also noticed that he was less fierce; she was able also to attribute this softening to its right cause, to her own influence. He was, to some extent, happy, because she was often with him, sought him instead of shunning him, spoke to him kindly, instead of rebuffing him when he addressed her, and let him know and feel that she thought of him, and was endeavouring to make him comfortable in his great deprivation.

As he sat in the sun and looked up at the bright orb, which he saw only as a nebulous mass of light, she was ever present before his inward eye, she in her pride and beauty. He did not think; he sat hour by hour, simply looking at her—at the image ever before him, and listening for her step or voice. An expression of almost content stole across his strongly marked features, but was occasionally blurred and broken by an uneasy, eager, enquiring look, as if he were peering and hearkening for something which he dreaded. In fact, he was not satisfied that George De Witt would never reappear. Had he been set at rest on this point, he could have been happy.

Mehalah was touched by his patience, his forgiveness of the irreparable wrong she had done him. He had said that if she loved him he would pardon all. He was ready to do this at a less price; though he craved for her love, he was contented, at least for the present, with her solicitude. He had been accustomed to open hostility and undisguised antipathy. Now that he met with consideration and tenderness from her, he became docile, and a transformation began to be operated in his nature. Love him, she could not, but she felt that but for what he had done to George, she could regard him without repugnance. Pity might ripen into friendship. Into a deeper and more rich feeling it never could, for he had barred the way to this possibility by his dealing with De Witt.

She ventured occasionally to approach the subject, but it always produced such agitation in the manner of Rebow that she was obliged to desist from seeking explanation of the particulars which perplexed her. The slightest allusion to George De Witt troubled the master of Red Hall, made his face darken, and brought on an access of his old violence, from which he did not recover for a day or two.

Mrs. De Witt came to see him.

'Lawk a day!' she said; 'what a job to find you in this predicament!'

He turned his whitened eyes on her, with a nervous twitch in the muscles and a tremour of the lips. 'Well! What news?'

'News!' echoed the lady; 'dear sackalive! who'd expect to find news in Mersea? you might as well drag for oysters in a horsepond.'

He was satisfied, and let her talk on without attending to her.

A few days later, he called the charwoman to him as she was going to the pump.

'What is your name?'

'Susan Underwood. I'm a married woman, with three small children, and another on its way.'

He fumbled in his pocket, and took out a crown.

'Any news?—from Mersea, I mean.'

'I don't come from Mersea. Thank your honour all the same.'

'But if there were news there it would get to Virley or Salcott, or wherever you live.'

'It would be sure. I did hear,' she said, 'that Farmer Pooley has been a-wisiting a little more nor he ought at widow Siggars' cottage, her as has a handsome daughter, and so, they do say, has Farmer Pudney; and the other day they met there, and was so mad each to find the other, that the one up with his hunting whip and the other with his bible and knocked each other down, and each had to be carried home on a shutter.'

'Go and tell those tales to the old woman upstairs. I have no patience to listen to them. That's the sort of garbage women feed on, as maggots on rotten meat.'

'But it is true.'

'Who cares whether true or not? It is all the same to me. Has anyone arrived at Mersea?'

'Not yet, sir, but they do say that the parson's wife has expectations.'

'Go back to the kitchen,' growled Elijah, and relapsed into his dream.

A few minutes after, Mehalah came out, and seated herself on the bench beside him. She was knitting. He put out his hand and felt her, and smiled. He raised his hand to her head.

'Glory! when you wear the red cap in the sun I know it, I see a scarlet light like a poppy, and it pleases me. Let me hold the ball, then I can feel every stitch you take with your fingers.'

She put the wool gently into his palm; and began to talk to Mm concerning the farm. He listened, and spoke in a tone and with a manner different from his habit formerly.

Presently his hand stole up the thread, and he caught her fingers and drew her hand down on her lap. Her first impulse was to snatch it away, but she conquered it, and let him feel over her hand without a movement of dislike.

'You have not yet a ring,' he said; 'you have no gold wedding circle like other married women.'

'Our union is unlike all others,' she said.

'That is true; but you must wear my ring. I shall not be happy till you do. I shall think you will cast me off unless I can feel the ring that has no ending round your finger. Where is the link with which I married you?'

'I have it here,' she said; 'I have not cast it off, and I shall not cast you off. I have fastened it by a string and carry it in my bosom.'

He seemed pleased. 'You wear it for my sake.'

'I wear it,' she replied, truthfully, 'because I took a solemn oath on that day, and I will not go from it. What I undertook that I will fulfil, neither more nor less. What I did not promise I will not do, what I did undertake that I will execute.'

'And you bear the ring in your bosom——'

'As a reminder to me of my promise. I will not be false to myself or to you. Do not press me further. You know what to expect and what not to expect. If I could love you I would; but I cannot. I did not promise that then and I will not promise it now, for I know the performance is out of my power.'

'You must wear the wedding ring on your finger.'

'I cannot wear this link, it is too large.'

'I will get you a gold ring, such as other women wear.'

'No. I cannot wear a lie; the gold ring belongs to the perfect marriage, to the union of hearts. It befits not ours.'

'You are right,' he said, and sighed. He still held her hand; she made a slight effort to withdraw it, but he clasped the hand the tighter.

'Let me touch and hold you, Glory,' he said. 'Remember I can no more see you, except mistily. You must allow me some compensation. I know what you are now, sitting here in the sun, with your hair full of rich coppery gleams, and your eyes full of light and darkness at once, and your cheek like a ripe apricot. I know what you are, splendid, noble, as no other girl in the whole world; but you have shut my eyes, that I may not see you, so allow me, at least, to feel you.' He paused. Then he went on: 'You are right, our union is unlike any other, as you and I are different from all others in the world. The married life of some is smooth and shining and rustless like the gold, but ours is quite contrary, it is rough and dark and full of blisters and canker. It may be different some day——' he turned his dim eyes enquiringly at her, 'but not now, not now. Nevertheless as the ring is without an end so is our union. Give me the link of iron, Glory, and come with me to the forge. I will beat out a bit of the metal into a ring, one small enough and light enough for you to wear.'

He got up, and holding her hand, bade her lead him to the forge.

Near the bakehouse was a small smithy, fitted up with all necessary appliances. Rebow was a skilful workman at the anvil, and shod his own horses, and made all that was needed in iron for the house and farm.

Mehalah conducted him to the shop, and brought fire from the kitchen for the forge, she worked the bellows and blew the fire into size and strength, whilst Elijah raked the coals together.

'Where is the link, Glory?' he asked, and went up to her. He put his hand to her neck, before she did, and drew out of her bosom something.

'That is not the link, Elijah,' she said; 'it is my medal—the medal that——'

He uttered a fierce cry, and wrenching it off, dashed it on the ground. He would have stamped on it had he been able to see it.

Mehalah's cheek flushed, but she said nothing. She saw where the coin had rolled. She stooped, picked it up, impressed a kiss upon it, and hid it once more in her bosom.

'Here is the iron link,' she said; he took it from her sullenly.

The flame gleamed up blue above the wetted coal, and glared out white through the crevices in the clot, as the bellows panted, and Rebow drew the coals together or broke into the glaring mass with an iron rod.

'I heard a preacher once take as his text,' said he, 'Our God is a consuming fire; and he told all in the chapel that this was writ in Scripture and therefore must be true to the letter, for God wrote it Himself, and He knew what He was better than any man. He said that fire warms and illumines at a distance, but if you come too close it dazzles and burns up. And he told us it was so with God. You can't keep too far off of Him to be comfortable and safe; the nearer you get, the worse it is for you; and to my thinking that is Hell, when you get sucked into the very core of the fire in the heart of God. You must be consumed because you are not divine, fire alone can live in fire; most folks are clay and water, and they are good enough, they get light and warmth, but when they die they burn up like this dock of coke. But there are other folk, like you and me, Glory! who are made of fire and clay; it takes but a word or a thought to make us roar and blaze and glow like this furnace. There is passion in us—and that is a spark of the divine. I do not care what the passion be, love or hate, or jealousy or anger, if it be hot and red and consuming so that it melts and burns all that opposes it, that fiery passion is of God and will live, live on for ever, in the central heart and furnace, which is God. When you and I die, Glory! and are sucked into the great fiery whirlpool, we shall not be burnt up altogether, but intensified. If I love you with fiery passion here I shall love you with fiery passion ten thousand times hotter hereafter; my passion will turn to glaring white heat, and never go out for all everlasting, for it will be burning, blazing in God who is eternal. If you hate me, you will be whirled in, and your fury fanned and raked into a fiery phrenzy which will rage on for ages on ages, and cannot go out, for it will be burning in the everlasting furnace of God. If I love, and you hate with infinite intensity for an infinity of time—that is Hell. But if you love and I love, our love grows hotter and blazes and roars and spurts into one tongue, cloven like the tongues at Pentecost, twain yet one, and that is Heaven. My love eating into yours and encircling it, and yours into mine, and neither containing nor consuming the other, but going on in growing intensity of fiery fury of love from everlasting to everlasting, that is Heaven of Heavens.'

He was heating the link, held between the teeth of long shanked pincers, and then withdrawing it, and forging it on the anvil as he spoke.

'Glory!' he said; 'tell me, you do not hate me?'

She hesitated.

'Glory!' he repeated, and laid hammer and pincer on the anvil, and leaned his head towards her, as she shrank into the dark corner by the bellows, 'Glory! tell me, you do not hate me.'

'Elijah,' she said, 'I must be candid with you. When I think of what, by your own confession, you have done to him whom I loved more than all the world——'

He raised his hammer and brought it down on the link, cutting it in half, and sending one fiery half across the smithy.

'When I think of what you have done to him, I feel that I do hate you, and that I have every cause and right to hate you. I could forgive everything else. I have turned over in my mind all that you have done to me, the cruel way in which you worked till you had brought me within your power, the heartless way in which you got my good name to be evil spoken of, and drove me out of self-defence to take your hand before the altar of God, I have thought of all this, and I feel that my act—unintentional though it was—yet my act, which has blinded you, has expiated all those offences. You have wronged me, and I have wronged you. I have ruined your life, but you have also ruined mine. We are quits so far. You have my frank forgiveness. I blot out all the past, as far as it concerns me, from my memory. It shall no more rankle in my heart. You have shown me a generous forgiveness of my misdeed, and I would imitate you. But what you did to George is not to be expiated. You sinned against him more terribly, more wickedly than against me, and he alone can pardon you. That I cannot forgive; and for that crime I must still hate you.'

He stood trembling—a strange weakness came over him—he was not angry, savage, morose; he seemed a prey to fear and uncertainty.

'Tell me, tell me truly, Glory! Does that alone prevent you from loving me? Had I never done what I said I had done, could you love me?'

'I do not say that,' she replied. 'As I have told you before, I gave my heart once for all to George De Witt. I never could love you with my fresh full heart, as a woman should love her husband, but I feel that I could like you as a friend. I do pity you. God knows how bitterly I have suffered from remorse for what I did unwittingly, and how sincere I am in my repentance and desire to deal tenderly and truly by you, Elijah. I feel sometimes as if I could like you; I do acknowledge that you and I stand apart from others, and alone can understand each other; but then that great crime of your life against George rises up before me and drives back my rising compassion.'

Rebow worked again at the link, beating out the fragment into a wire, and cutting it again. He was thinking whilst he wrought.

'Sooner or later,' he muttered at last, 'all will out.'

He worked with difficulty, and slowly, as he could not see, and was obliged to feel the iron, and cool it repeatedly to ascertain whether it was as he desired it.

'Look here, Glory!' he said, 'when iron is taken from the smelting furnace it is crystalline and brittle; there is no thread and texture in it, but we burn it and beat it, and as we work we beat our stubborn purpose into the metal, and it is the will of the smith which goes through his arm and hammer into the iron and converts it to steel; he drives his will into the metal, and that becomes the fibre in it. You don't find it so in nature. The human soul must part with something and transfuse it into the inanimate iron, and there it will lie and last, for the will of man is divine and eternal. It is much the same with all with which we have to do. I have spent time and labour over you, and thought and purpose have been consumed in making you my wife; they are none of them lost, they are all in you, they have become fibres in your soul. You may not be aware of it, but there they all are. The more one thinks and labours for the other the more he ingrafts himself in the nature of the other. I have heard of sound men having their healthy blood drawn off and injected into the veins of the sick, and restoring them thus to activity and health. We are always doing this with our wills, injecting their fire into the hearts of others, and so by degrees transfusing their natures. You are pouring yourself into me, and I into you, whether we know it or not, till in time we are alike in colour and tone and temperature.'

He had worked the piece of steel into a rude ring, not very cumbrous, and he bade Mehalah try it on her finger. It was too small. He easily enlarged it, and then got a file to smooth off the roughnesses.

'I had rather you wore this than a ring of gold,' he said, 'for there is part of my soul in this iron. I have made it in spite of my blindness, because I had the will to do so. The whole metal is full of my purpose, which tinctures it as wine stains water; and with it goes my resolve that you shall be mine altogether in heart and soul, in love as well as in pity, for now and for all eternity. You will wear that on your finger, the finger that has a nerve leading from the heart. Stretch out your hand, Glory, and let me put it on. Stretch out your hand over the hearth, above the fire, our God is a consuming fire, and this is His proper altar.'

He stood on one side of the furnace, she on the other; the angry red coals glowed below, and a hot smoke rose from them.

She extended her hand to him, and he grasped it with the left above the fire, and held the steel ring in his right.

'Glory!' he said in a tremulous voice. 'At the altar in the church you swore to obey me. In the hall you knelt and swore to cherish me; here, over the fire, the figure of our God, as I put the iron ring on, swear to me also to love me.'

She did not answer. She stood as though frozen to ice; with her eyes on the door of the smithy, where stood a figure—the figure of a man.

Suddenly she uttered a piercing cry. 'George! my George! my George!' and withdrew her hand from the grasp of Elijah. The iron ring fell from his fingers into the red fire below and was lost.

CHAPTER XXVII.

THE RETURN OF THE LOST.

Mehalah was clasped in the arms of George De Witt.

'Who is there? Where is he?' shouted Elijah, staggering forward with his great pincers raised ready to strike.

George drew the girl out of the way, and let the angry man burst out of the door and pass, beating the air with his iron tool. He put his arm round her, and led her from the house. She could not speak, she could only look up at him as at one risen from the dead. He led her towards the sea-wall, looking behind him at the figure of the blind man, rushing about, and smiting recklessly in his jealousy and fury, and hitting bushes, rails, walls, anything in hopes of smiting down the man whose name he had heard, and who he knew had come back to break in on and ruin his hopes.

George De Witt walked lamely, he had a somewhat stiff leg; otherwise he seemed well.

'How manly you have grown!' exclaimed Mehalah, holding him at arms' length, and contemplating him with pride.

'And you, Glory, have become more womanly; but in all else are the same.'

'Where have you been, George?'

'At sea, Glory, and smelt powder. I have been a sailor in His Majesty's Royal Navy, in the Duke of Clarence, and I am pensioned off, because of my leg.'

'Have you been wounded?'

'Not exactly. A cannon-ball, as we were loading, struck me on the shin and bruised the bone, so that I have been invalided with swellings and ulcerations. I ain't fit for active service, but I'm not exactly a cripple.'

'But George! when did this take place? I do not understand. After your escape?'

'Escape, Glory? I have had no escape.'

'From confinement in Red Hall,' she added.

'I never was confined there. I do not know what you are talking about.'

Mehalah passed her hand over her face.

'George! I thought that Elijah had made you drunk and then put you in his cellar, chained there till you went mad.'

'There is not a word of truth in this,' said De Witt. 'Who told you such a tale?'

'Elijah himself.'

'Elijah is a rascal. I have enough cause against him without that.'

'Then tell me about yourself. I am bewildered. How came you to disappear?'

'Let us walk together to the spit by the windmill, and I will tell you all.'

They turned the way he said, and he did not speak again till they had reached the spot.

'We will sit down, Glory; I suffer still somewhat from my leg, so that I am always glad to rest. Now I will tell you the whole story. You remember the evening when we quarrelled. You had behaved rather roughly to Phoebe Musset.'

'I remember it only too well, George.'

'After you had left, I went to the Mussets' house to inquire after Phoebe, who had been well soused in the sea by you; and on my return I fell in with Elijah Rebow. He took me to task for not having gone after you and patched up our little difference. He said that a quarrel should never be allowed to cool, but mended while hot. He persuaded me to let him row me in his boat to the Ray. He said he was going there after ducks or something of that sort, I do not remember exactly. I agreed, and got into his punt with him, and we made for the Rhyn. We had scarcely entered the channel when a lugger full of men ran across our bows and had us fast in a jiffy. I was overpowered before I knew where I was, and taken by the men in their boat.'

'Who were they, George?' asked Mehalah, breathlessly.

'They were some of the crew of theSalamander, a war schooner then lying in the offing, come to press me into the service with Captain Macpherson, who had been on the coast-guard, but was appointed to the command. I was carried off as many another man has been, without my consent, and made to serve His Majesty on compulsion.'

'But, George! how about your medal that I gave you? That was returned to me the same night.'

'I suppose it was,' he replied coolly. 'As I was taken, Elijah said to me, "Have you no token to send back to Glory?" I bade him tell you how I was impressed, and how I would return to you whenever the war was over and I was paid off; but he asked for some token, that you might believe him. Well, Glory! I had nothing by me save your medal, and I handed it to him and told him to give it to you with my love.'

Mehalah wrung her hands and moaned.

'I have a notion,' continued George, 'that Rebow was somehow privy to my being pressed; for he went out that afternoon to theSalamanderin his cutter, and had a private talk with Captain Macpherson, who was short of men. Now I fancy, though I can't prove it, that he schemed with the captain how he should catch me, and that Elijah with set purpose took me into the trap set for me. He is deep enough to do such a dirty trick.'

Mehalah's head sank on her knees, and she sobbed aloud.

'And now, Glory, dearest!' he went on, 'the rascal has got you to marry him, I am told. How could you take him? Why did you not wait for me? You were promised to me, and we looked on one another as soon to be husband and wife. You must have soon forgotten your promise.'

'I thought you were dead,' she gasped.

'So did my mother. I do not understand. Elijah knew better.'

'But he told no one. He allowed us all to suppose you were drowned in one of the fleets.'

'It is very hard,' said George, 'for a fellow to return from the wars to reclaim his girl, and to find her no longer his. It is a great blow to me, Glory! I did so love and admire you.'

She could only sway to and fro in her distress.

'It is very disappointing to a chap,' said George, putting a quid in his cheek. 'When he has calculated on getting a nice girl as his wife, and in battle and storm has had the thoughts of her to cheer and encourage him; when he has some prize-money in his pocket, and hopes to spend it on her—well, it is hard.'

'George,' said she between her sobs, 'why did you return the medal? I gave it you, and you swore never to part with it. You should not have sent it to me.'

'Did I really swear that, Glory?' he answered; 'if so, I had forgotten. You see I was so set upon and flustered that night, I did not rightly consider things as they should have been considered.' He stopped.

'Well?' asked Mehalah, eagerly.

'Don't catch me up, Glory. I only stopped to turn the quid. As I was about to say, I did not remember what I had promised. I had nothing else to send you that would serve as a token. The medal was an article about which there could be no mistake. I knew when you saw that you would make sure Elijah's story was true, and my promise would be sacred—I have kept it, I have returned to you, Glory, and if you were not married I should make you my wife. I love you still, as I always did love you. I've seen a sight of fine girls since I left Mersea. There's more fish in the sea than come out of it; but I'm darned if I have seen a finer anywhere, or more to my liking than you, Glory. You were my first love, and the sight of you brings back pleasant memories. The more I look at you now, the more I feel inclined to wring that old prophet's neck. You are too good for such a chap as he; you should have waited for me. You had promised, and might have had patience. But, Lord bless me! how the girls do run after the men! Glory! I have seen the world since I left Mersea, and I know more of it than I did. I suppose you thought that as I was gone to Davy Jones's locker you must catch whom you could.'

'George!' exclaimed Mehalah, 'do not speak to me thus. I cannot bear it. I know you are only talking in this way to try me, and because you resent my marriage. I promised once to be true to you, I gave you my heart, and I have remained, and I will remain, true to you; my heart is yours, and I can never recover it and give it to another.'

'This is very fine and sentimental, Glory,' said George; 'I've smelt powder and I know the colour of blood. I've seen the world, and know what sentiment is worth; it is blank cartridge firing; it breaks no bones, but it makes a noise and a flash. I don't see how you can call it keeping true to me when you marry another man for his money.'

'You are determined to drive me mad,' exclaimed Mehalah. 'Have mercy on me, my own George, my only George! I have loved and suffered for you. God can see into my heart, and knows how deeply it has been cut, and how profusely it has bled for you. You must spare me. I have thought of you. I have lived only in a dream of you. The world without you has been dead and blank. I have not had a moment of real joy since your disappearance; it seems to me as though a century of torment had drawn its slow course since then. No, George! I have married for nothing but to save my self-respect. I was forced by that man, whom I will not name now, so hateful and horrible to me is the thought of him—I was forced by him from my home on the Ray to lodge under his roof. He smoked my mother and me out of our house as if we were foxes. When he had me secure he drew a magician's circle round me, and I could not break through it. My character, my name were tarnished, there was nothing for it but for me to marry him. I did so, but I did so under stipulations. I took his name, but I am not, and never shall be, more to him than his wife in the register of the parish. I have never loved him—I never undertook to love him.'

'This is a queer state of things,' said George. 'Dashed if, in all my experience of life and of girls, I came across anything similar, and I have seen something. I have not spent all my days in Mersea. I've been to the West Indies. I've seen white girls, and yellow girls, and brown girls, and copper-coloured girls, and black ones—black as rotted seaweed. I have—they are all much of a muchness, but this beats my experience. You are not like others.'

'So he says; he and I are alone in the world, and alone can understand one another. Do you understand me, George?'

'I'm blessed if I do.'

She was silent. She was very unhappy. She did not like his tone: there was an insincerity, a priggishness about it which jarred with her reality and depth of feeling. But she could not analyse what offended her. She thought he was angry with her, and had assumed a taunting air to cover his mortification.

She drew the medal from her bosom.

'George! dear, dear George!' she said vehemently, 'take the pledge again. I give it you with my whole heart once more. I believe it saved you once, it may save you again. At all events, it is a token to you that my heart is the same, that I care for and love none but you in the whole wide world.'

He took it and suspended it round his neck.

'I will keep it for your sake,' he said; 'you may be sure it will be treasured by me.'

'Keep it better than you did before.'

'Certainly I will. I shall value it inexpressibly.'

'George!' she went on, trembling in all her limbs, and rising to her feet. 'George! my first and only love! as I give it you back now, I make you the same promise that I made you before. I will love—love—love you and you only, eternally. I swore then to be true to you, and I have been true. Swear again to me the same.'

'Certainly. I shall always love you, Glory! I'm damned if it is possible for a fellow not to, you are so handsome with those flashing eyes and glowing cheeks. A fellow must be made of ice not to love you.'

'Be true to me, as I to you.'

'To be sure I will, Glory!' and added in an undertone, 'rum sort of truth hers, to go and marry another chap.'

'What is that you say, George?'

'Take care, Glory!' exclaimed the sailor; 'here comes the old prophet with a pair of tongs over his shoulder, staggering along the wall towards us. I had better sheer off. He don't look amiable. Good-bye, Glory!'

'Oh, George! I must see you again.'

'I will come again. You will see me often enough. Sailors can no more keep away from handsome girls than bees from clover.'

'George, George!'

Elijah came up, his face black with passion.

'Mehalah!' he roared, as he swung his iron pincers.

She caught his wrist and disarmed him.

'I could bite you, and tear your flesh with my teeth,' he raged. 'All was so peaceful and beautiful, and then he came from the dead and broke it into shivers. Where are you?' He put out his hands to grasp her.

'Do not touch me!' she cried, loathing in her voice. 'With my whole soul I abhor you, you base coward. You lied to me about George, a hateful lie that made me mad, and yet the reality is almost as bad—it is worse. He is alive and free, and I am bound, bound hand and foot, to you.'

CHAPTER XXVIII.

TIMOTHY'S TIDINGS.

'Mehalah!' roared the wretched man, smiting at her with both his clenched fists, and nearly precipitating himself into the mud, by missing his object, 'Mehalah! where are you? Come near, and let me beat and kill you.'

'Why are you angry, Elijah?' asked the girl. 'The man you betrayed to the pressgang has returned, are you vexed at that?'

'Come near me,' he shouted.

'You have gained your end, and may well be content that he is alive. You have separated us for ever; what more could you desire? His hopes and mine are alike shattered by your act. You lied to me about his madness, but though that wickedness was not wrought to which you pretended, you have done that which passes forgiveness.'

'Where is he?'

'He is gone. He would not meet you. He could not deal the punishment you deserve on a blinded man.'

'You have been discussing me—the blinded man,' raved Elijah. 'Yes, you first blind me that I may not see, and then you meet and intrigue with your old lover, in security, knowing I cannot watch, and pursue, and punish you.'

'Go back to the house, Elijah. You are in no fit temper to speak to on this subject.'

'Oh yes! go back and sit in the hall alone, whilst you are with him—your George! No, Mehalah! I tell you this. I will not be deceived. Though I be blind, I can and will see and follow you. I will sell my soul to the devil for twenty-four hours' vision, that I may track and catch and crush your two heads together, and trample the life out of you with my big iron-heeled boots. You shall not see him, you shall never see him again. Give me back my pincers, and I will make an end of it all.'

'Elijah, you must trust me. I married you in self-respect, and I shall never forget the respect I owe to myself.'

'I cannot trust you,' he answered, 'because you are just one of those whose movements no one can calculate. I tell you what, Mehalah. God made most folks of clockwork and stuck them on their little plots of soil to spin round and run their courses, like the figures on an Italian barrel-organ. You look at Mersea island, that is the board of such a contrivance, and on it are so many dolls; they twist about, and you know that if God turns the handle for ten minutes or for ten years, or for ten times ten years, they will do exactly the same things in exactly the same ways, just as He made them and set them to spin. But as He was making the dolls that were to twirl and pirouette His breath got into some, and they are different from the rest. They don't go according to the clockwork, and don't follow the circles of the machine, as set agoing by the organ-handle. God himself can't count on them, for they have free wills, and His breath is genius and independence in their hearts. They go where they list, and do what they will, they follow the impulse of the breath of God within, and not the wires that fasten them to the social mechanism. I do not know what I may do. I do not know what you may do. We have the breath of God in us. I am sure that you have, and I am sure that I have; but I know that there is none in your mother, none in such as George De Witt. The laws of the land and of religion are the slits in the board on which the dolls dance, and they only move along these slits; but you and I, and such as have free souls, go anywhere, and do anything. We have no law. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth; so is everyone that is born of the Spirit. I heard a preacher once explain that text, and he said that the wind was the Spirit of God and it went where it willed, and so all who were born of the Spirit followed their wills, and there was neither right nor wrong to them, for they were blown about, across and up and down, where others not so born dare not step, and they never forfeited their sonships whatever they did, for it was not they, but the divine will in them that drove them. Mehalah! you are one with a free, headlong will, and how can I count on what you will do? There is no cut track along which you must run. The puppets dance their rounds, but you rush in and out and upset those that are in your way. I am the same. You have seen and learned my way. Who could reckon on me? I never mapped out my course, but went on as I was impelled; and so will you. But be sure of this, Mehalah! I shall not endure your desertion of me. Beware how you meet and speak to George De Witt again.'

'Elijah,' said the girl; 'I give you only what I promised you, my obedience, never expect more. Your crooked courses are not such as can gain respect, much less regard. You say that you act on impulse, and have not mapped your course. I do not believe you. You have worked with a set purpose before you to get rid of George, and obtain hold over me. Your purpose was deliberate, your plans laid in cold blood. You have got as much as you can get. You have obtained some sort of control over me, but my soul is free, my heart is free, and these you shall never bring into slavery.'

'I was ready half an hour ago to forgive you for having blinded me. I cannot forgive you now. You have done me a wicked wrong. You acted on impulse, without purpose, you say. I do not believe it. There was set design and cold scheming in it all. You knew that George De Witt was not dead—or you thought he might be yet alive and might return, so you dashed the firejuice into my eyes to blind them to what would take place on his reappearance.'

'This is false!' exclaimed Mehalah indignantly.

'So is it false that I schemed and worked,' he said. 'Do you not understand, Mehalah, that what we do, we do for an end which we do not see? We act on the spur of passion, and the acts link together, and make a complete chain in the end. I did at the moment what I thought must be done, and so it was brought about that you became my wife. You acted as anger and love inspired, and now I am made helpless, whilst you sport with your lover. But I tell you, Mehalah, I will not endure this. I don't care if you die and I die, but parted we shall not be. You and I must find our heaven in each other and nowhere else. You are going after wandering lights if you expect a port away from my heart. Wrecking lights attached to asses' heads.' He stamped and caught at her.

'My heart was given to George before I knew you,' said Glory sadly; 'I have long known him, and we had long been promised to each other. We had hoped to be married this spring and then we should have been happy, unspeakably happy. He has been true to me and I will be true to him. We cannot now marry. You have prevented that; but we can still love one another and be true to each other, and live in the thought and confidence of the other. He trusts me and I trust him. He is now bitterly distressed to find that you have separated us, but in time he will be reconciled, and then it will be as of old, when I was on the Ray. We shall see one another, and we shall be true, loving friends, but nothing more; nothing more is possible. You have barred that.'

'Is this your resolve?' he asked, turning livid with anger; even his lips a dead leaden tint.

'It is not a resolve, it is what must be. I must love him, I cannot help it. We must see each other. We can never be man and wife, that you have succeeded in preventing, and for that I shall never forgive you. But I will not be false to my oath. I will still serve you, and I will cherish you in your wretchedness and blindness.'

'This will not do,' he cried. 'My whole nature, my entire soul, cries out and hungers for you, for your nature, for your soul. I must have your whole being as mine, I will not be master of a divided Glory! allegiance here, love there, cold obedience to me and gushing devotion to him. The thought is unendurable. O God!' he burst forth in an agony, 'why did I not take you in my arms when the Ray house was burning, and spring with you into the flames and hold you there in the yellow wavering tongue of fire, till we melted into one lump? Then we should both have been at peace now, both in one, and happy in our unity.' He strode up and down, with his head down.

'Mehalah! have you seen water poured on lime? What a fume and boiling takes place, the two fight together which shall obtain the mastery, but neither gets it all its own way in the end, but one enters into and penetrates every pore of the other, and the heat and the steam only continue till every part of one is impregnated with the other. You and I are mixing like water and lime, and we rage and smoke, but there is peace at the end, in view, when we are infused the one into the other, when it is neither I nor you, but one being. The mixture must be complete some day, in this life or the next; and then we shall clot into one hard rock, imperishable and indivisible.'

'Elijah! try to take interest in something else; think of something beside me. I can be nothing more to you than what I am, so rest contented with what you have got, and turn your thoughts to your farm, or anything else.'

'I cannot do it, Mehalah. I put a little plant once in a pot and filled the vessel with rich mould, and the plant grew and at last broke the pot into a hundred pieces, and I found within a dense mat of fibres; the root had eaten up and displaced all the soil and swelled till it rent the vessel. It has been so with my love of you. It got planted, how I know not, in my heart, and it has thrown its roots through the whole chamber, and devoured all the substance, and woven a net of fibres in and out and up and down, and has swelled and is thrusting against the walls, till there is scarce love there any more but horrible, biting, wearing pain. I cannot kill the plant and pluck it out, or it will leave a great void. I must let it grow till it has broken up the vessel. It grows and makes root, but will not flower. There has been scarce leaf, certainly no blossom, to my love. It is all downward, inward, clogging, bursting tangle of fibre. Can you say it is so with you? You cannot. Your care for that fool George is but a slip struck in that may root or not, that must be nursed or it will wither. Tear it up and cast it away. It is not worthy of you. George is a simple fool. I know him. A clown without a soul. Why, Glory! there are none hereabouts with souls but you and me. Your mother has none, Mrs. De Witt has none, Abraham has none. They can't understand the ways and workings of those that have souls. They are bodies, ruled by bodily wants, and look at all things out of bodily eyes, and interpret by bodily instincts all things done by those spiritually above them. But you understand me, and I understand you. Soul speaks to soul. I've heard a preacher say that once on a time the sons of God went in unto the daughters of men, and what they begat of them were cursed of heaven. That means that men with souls married vulgar women with only instincts and appetites, and such unions are unnatural. The sons of God must marry the daughters of God, and leave the animal men and women to pig together and breed listless, dull-eyed, muddle-headed, dough-hearted, scandal-mongering generations. The curse of God would have rested upon you if you had married George De Witt. I have saved you from that. You have mated with your equal.'

'What happiness, what blessing has attended our union?' she asked bitterly.

'None,' he replied, 'because you oppose your will to the inevitable. We must be united entirely, and blended into one, but you resist, and so misery ensues. I am blinded and wretched, and you, you——'

'I am wretched also,' she said; 'but stay! here comes someone to speak to us.'

'Who is it?'

'I do not know exactly. A young man who came here one day with Phoebe Musset.'

'What does he want with us? I will have no young men coming here.'

The person who approached was Timothy Spark, 'cousin' to Admonition Pettican. He was dressed in a new suit of mourning. He lounged along the sea-wall with his hands in his pockets.

'Your servant, master,' he said to Elijah as he came up. 'Your most devoted servant,' he added with a bow to Mehalah, and a simper. 'Charmed to see my dear and beautiful cousin so well.'

'Cousin!' exclaimed Rebow, stepping back and frowning.

'Certainly, certainly,' said Timothy. 'I am cousin to Admonition, wife, or rather let me say widow of the late lamented Charles Pettican, and he was first cousin to Mrs. Sharland, so my pretty cousin Mehalah will not, I am sure, deny the relationship. Let me offer you an arm,' he wedged his way between Rebow and Glory.

'First cousin once and a half removed,' he said. 'Drop the fractions and say cousin, broadly. Certainly, certainly so. Is it not so, my dear?' In an undertone and aside to Mehalah. 'Let us drop the old fellow behind. I have a word to say in your ear, cousin Mehalah! By the way, how do you shorten that long name? It is such a mouthful. But I forget, where is my memory going? Glory is the name you go by among relatives and friends. Come along, Glory! Lean on my arm. The blind gentleman is a little unsteady on his pins and can't keep up with us. He will be more comfortable taking his airing slowly by himself; we shall distract him with our frolicsome talk. He is in a serious mood, perhaps pious.'

'Say what you have to say at once,' said Elijah surlily. 'I must hear it. What did you say aboutlateCharles Pettican?'

'The poor gentleman is deceased,' said Timothy; 'and his disconsolate widow is drinking down her grief in hot toddy.'

'Mr. Charles Pettican dead!' exclaimed Mehalah with grief.

'Dead as Nebuchadnezzar,' replied Timothy; 'rather rapid at the last, the paralysis attacked his vitals, and then it was all over with him in a snap. Fortunately, he had made his will. You haven't taken my arm yet, my pretty cousin. You won't? well then, I will continue. I flatter myself that my influence prevailed, and he made a will not in favour of Admonition, who had really become too exacting towards myself, and inconsiderate towards him, for us to endure it much longer. He threw himself on my honour, and I told him I relied on his gratitude. We put our heads together. Admonition has had a fall. She gets only a hundred pounds. My friend Charles, in token of my friendship, has kindly, I may say handsomely, remembered me,—and all the bulk of his property he has bequeathed to my good cousin here, Glory. I need hardly say that this has proved as great a surprise to Admonition as it must be to you. Admonition brought it on herself. She should not have attempted to displace me; I am not a person so unimportant as to be dispensed with at pleasure. Admonition cannot recover from the shock and mortification, and I left her at Wyvenhoe, venting it in language not flattering to the late lamented. She led me a dance, and him she treated like a galley-slave, so that she has got her deserts. I saw that she was carrying it on a little too far for the endurance of Charles, so I had a talk with him on the matter, and offered to help him in the management of his affairs for a trifling salary, and he was good enough to see how advantageous it would be to him to have me as a friend and adviser; so we put our heads together, and then Admonition tried to bundle me out of the house, and much to her surprise learned that I was as securely installed therein as herself. I was private secretary and accountant to Charles, and cousin Admonition had to knuckle under then. Curiously enough, she had picked up another cousin about that time, one I had never heard of before in my life, and she wanted to bring him into the house in my place; I did not allow that game to be played. I kept my berth, and Admonition was in a pretty temper about it, you may be sure. How Charles chuckled! He enjoyed it. Upon my word I believe he chuckles in his grave to think how he has done Admonition in the end; and he smirks doubtless to consider also how he has served me.'

'What has he left Mehalah?' asked Rebow surlily.

'I cannot tell you exactly, but I suspect about two hundred and fifty to three hundred pounds a year; a nice little fortune, and dropping in very unexpectedly, I presume. I am executor, and shall have the choicest pleasure in explaining all to my sweet cousin. Is it not near about your dinner-time?'

'Yes.'

'Then I don't mind picking a bone and drinking a glass with you. The drive is long from Wyvenhoe. You happen perhaps to have a spare room in the house?'

No answer was given to this question.

'Because I have brought over my little traps. I thought it best. We can talk over matters, and I will show you what the amount of property is that Charles has left. I have the will with me, it is not proved yet. I shall do that shortly.'

'There's an inn at Salcott. The "Rising Sun." You can go there. We do not take in strangers.'

'Certainly, certainly! only you see,' touching Elijah knowingly in the ribs, 'I'm not a stranger, but a friend and relative of the family, a cousin; you understand, a cousin, and ready to make myself agreeable to one,' with a bow to Mehalah, 'and useful to the other,' with a tap on Rebow's arm.

'You can settle all you have to say on business in an hour if you stick to it, and then you can be gone,' said Elijah in ill-temper, withdrawing his arm from the familiar touch.

'Certainly, certainly,' said Timothy. 'But then, I must call again, and yet again, always I am sure, with increasing pleasure, but still at some inconvenience to myself. I thought I might just settle in here, you might give me a shake-down in any nook, and I would make myself a most invaluable member of the family. You, old gentleman, with your affliction, want an overlooker to the farm, and who could serve your purpose better than myself, a friend and a relation, a cousin, almost first cousin, with just a remove or so between, not worth particularising. I could devote my time to your affairs——'

'I don't want you. I will not have you!' exclaimed Rebow angrily. 'Why have you come here, you meddling puppy? Did I ask you to come? Did Mehalah want you? I know you and your ways. You got into Pettican's house hanging on to the skirts of his wife, and then made mischief between man and wife; and now you come here to play the same game; you come because I am blind and helpless, and sneaking behind my Glory; you want to steal in to play the fool with her and set us one against the other. We want none of you here. We are not so tender together that we desire another element of discord to enter into the jangled clash of bells. Be off with you. As for the matter of Mehalah's inheritance, the lawyers shall communicate with us, and between you and her. I will not have you set your foot inside my house.'

'Stay,' said Glory; 'I must know if this be really true. Am I really inheritor of such a fortune?'

'I have the will in my pocket.'

'Show it me.'

Timothy produced the document and read it to Elijah and Mehalah. Both drew near.

'Let me see it!' said Rebow vehemently, and grasped at the paper with nervous hand.

'My good friend,' remarked Timothy patronisingly; 'the state of your eyes, if I mistake not, will prevent your being able to read it.'

'I must feel it then.'

He grasped it fiercely and in a moment tore it with his hands, and then, biting the fragments, rent it further and further.

'For heaven's sake!' exclaimed the young man in dismay.

'Ha! Glory! Did you suppose you were to be made independent of me? Did you think I would let you get a fortune of your own, to emancipate you from me? That you might go off with it, and enjoy it along with your George De Witt?'

He dashed the tatters about him.

'You mad fool!' exclaimed Timothy Spark. 'Do you suppose that by such a scurvy trick as this you will despoil my pretty cousin of her money, and perhaps of her liberty?'

'I have done it,' shouted Rebow wrathfully. 'You cannot make the will whole, I have chewed and swallowed portions, and others the winds have taken into the sea.'

'Indeed!' said Timothy. 'Do you suppose that this is the original? Of course not. It is an authenticated copy. The original will is left with Morrell the lawyer, and this is but a transcript.'

Rebow gnashed his teeth.

'It seems to me,' said Timothy, 'that after all I shall be called upon to step in between husband and wife, and to protect my pretty dark-eyed, rosy-lipped cousin. I am sure you have a spare room where I can have a shake-down.'

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