"Look what you've gone and done," said Busby, reproachfully, displaying the yolk in the cup. Thereupon he received instructions which even he could follow; and at length the mess was down, stinging with the sexton's notion of a teaspoonful of whisky. This second accident was even happier than the first; there was instant agitation in every vein. And now Busby could hear without stooping.
"When did you find me?"
"That fare to be an hour ago, I suppose. Ah, but I thought as how you looked bad! Soon as ever I see you, I say to myself, 'The reverend's found what beat him at last,' I say; 'he do look wunnerful bad,' I say. And you see, I was right."
There was the tiniest gleam in the great bright eyes.
"You were partly right," said Carlton, "and partly wrong. I'm not done with yet, Busby. So then you lit the fire for me?"
"That wasn't wholly out."
"Ah!"
"That soon burnt up. Then I went and got another kettle."
The great eyes flashed suspicion.
"And told everybody you saw, I suppose!"
"I should be very sorry," said the sexton, significantly. "No, I come an' went by the lane, an' took wunnerful care that nobody set eyes on I. I thought as how you might fare to like a cup o' tea, an' that was a rare mess you'd made o'yourkettle."
"You've done well," whispered Carlton. "You've saved my—saved my cold from getting worse. You shall never regret it, Busby; only don't you tell anybody I've had one—do you hear? Don't you tell a single soul that you found me in bed!"
"No fear," chuckled the sexton. "I should be very sorry to tell anybody I'd found you at all. They might hear o' that somewhere else!"
Carlton lay still with thought and purpose; and death itself could not have given the lower part of his face a harsher cast; but the hot eyes were fixed upon the fading diamonds of the window over the table. At last he spoke—and it was a pity there was but the sexton to hear the firm tones of so faint a voice.
"Find my keys, Busby. I'm going to give you a sovereign——"
"A what?"
"The first of several if you do what I want!"
Not much later the sexton was hobbling towards Lakenhall, for the first time in many years; and the sick man lay greatly doubting whether he should ever see him again. His weakness was terrible now. The excitement of conversation had provoked a relapse as grave as it was inevitable in one so weak. The flickering lamp was only fed by the stimulus of suspense, the glow of the fire, and the man's own indomitable will. The latter, however, never failed him for a moment.
"Iwillpull through," he would mutter at his worst. "I will—I will . . . Oh, is he never, never . . ."
He came at last—with corn-flour, meat-extract, a bottle of port, and such other requisites as had entered the sick man's head under the spur of his overdose of ardent spirits. And, simple and inadequate as they were, these things spelt the first syllable of recovery.
The sexton came night after night; he also was a lonely man; and he dearly loved a pound. In a week he was richer than he had ever been before. It became difficult for him to take a disinterested view of the determined progress which the patient made towards complete recovery and consequent independence. The situation, however, had its little compensations: at all events it enabled the imaginary sufferer to crow over the real one to his heart's content.
"Ah, sir, you don't fare to know what that is to be right ill, like I.Younever had a fine fat frog settun in your middle an' keepun all the good out o' your stummick. That get every bite I eat, an' then that cry for more. Croap, croap, croap!"
One day brought forth an unsuspected fact. The sexton was no longer sexton at all. There had been no more burials. The school-bell was rung on Sundays, as all the week, by the schoolmaster's son. Busby had been dismissed with a present, as long ago as the month of August; but that was not all.He had thereupon left the Church in justifiable dudgeon, and thrown in his spiritual lot with the Particular Baptists in the little flint chapel between the Linkworth turning and the Flint House. He now exhorted Mr. Carlton to do the same.
"If you do, sir," said Busby, "you'll never fall no more."
Carlton winced. But the man had saved his life. Nothing should annoy him from the kind old imbecile who had come to his succour while the sound world stood aloof.
"You don't know that," he said quietly.
"But I do," declared the other. "I'm like to know. God's children can't sin, and I'm one on 'em."
Carlton opened his eyes.
"Do you mean to tell me you never sin?"
"I mean to tell you, sir," said the solemn sexton, "that, since God laid his hand on me, now seven month ago, I've never once committed the shadder of a sin."
"Then, if I were you, I should remember what St. Paul says—'Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed—lest—he—fall.'"
The text faltered; it was terribly two-edged; but Carlton had not perceived the pitfall until he was over the brink. He had forgotten himself in his scorn, and spoken impulsively as the man that he had been the year before. But the inveterate egotist was conveniently full of himself, and his pat retort quite free from offence.
"Fall?" said he, with his foolish eyes wide open."Why, I couldn't do that if I tried; and I have tried, just to see; but I fare to have forgotten how to sin. Do you believe me, sir, I can't even raise a swear at this little varmin what's killun me inch by inch. Why, I'm grateful to it! But I do sometimes fare to cry to think I have to stay another day in this world o' sin, when I know there's a place prepared for me in heaven above."
This stupendous speech was too much for even Mr. Carlton's self-control. Its snivelling tone, its evident conviction (confirmed by a gargoyle's grin of infinite self-esteem), were aggravated by the complete surprise of this spiritual revelation; and between them they awoke a dormant nerve. Robert Carlton did not exhibit that annoyance which he had determined to conceal; he did much worse. He burst out laughing in the sexton's face. And his laughter was long, loud, high-pitched and hysterical, alike from weakness and from long disuse.
The sexton on his legs, in a perfect palsy of horror and offence, alone put a stop to it.
"I beg your pardon," gasped Carlton, his eyes full of tears; "oh, I beg——"
And again that hysterical, high-pitched laughter got the better of him, ringing weirdly enough through the empty house.
"Ah!" said the dotard, when it had stopped at last; and the monosyllable contented him for some moments. "Well," he at length continued, with a brisker manner and a brighter face; "well, thank God I pulled you through; thank God I didn't let you die in your sins and go to everlasting hell without another chance of immortal life. You wicked man! You wicked man! I'll go and I'll pray for you; but I'll never come near you no more."
So the solitary regained his solitude; when he spoke again, it was to himself.
"Well, he has his money," he reflected aloud: he had paid the sexton some seven pounds in all. "And my gratitude!" he cried later. "I must never forget that I owe my life to that egregious old man."
Yet the greater gratitude was beginning to stir within him, as the sap was even then stirring in the trees. It was a mild, bright day, one of the last in March. The invalid had not yet been out; he would go out now. In an instant he was wrapping up.
Oh, but it was wonderful! the feel and noise of the moist gravel under the soles of his boots; the green, damp grass; the watery sun; the beloved birds; the mild, beneficent air.
His steps took the old direction of their own accord. In a minute he was there, at the church, and seated on the very wall which he had been building a fortnight before, surveying his work.
Had some one been carrying it on in his absence? Or was it only that one noticed no difference from day to day, but all the difference in the world after an unaccustomed absence? Yes, this was it; and he drew the deep breath which his first idea had checked.
Still it was wonderful: one wall seemed so much higher, another so much cleaner than before; and yet there was no stone either laid or scraped which Carlton did not recognize at a glance, with suddenmemories of special travail; and the string was still where he had stretched it to keep the line. He had under-estimated his progress at the time; that was all; but again it was as though the sap was rising in his heart.
The very tangle of blackened timber, which still cumbered nine-tenths of the inner area, no longer struck Carlton as the unconquerable chaos it had appeared on that bitter day which seemed so many days ago; yet, when he laid white hands upon such a beam as he had easily shouldered then, he could not lift it an inch. Ah, that day! It would take him weeks to undo its evil work. The wet feet and the cutting wind, he could feel them both again, with the sweat freezing on his body, and every pore an open door to death. There was the ridge of red-stemmed firs, too far east to blunt the cold steel of that deadly wind; and here beneath him the barrier he had been building last, and must finish now before he did another thing. How firm and true was this top course, that he had laid that day with the bony fingers at his throat! Well, he would have died with a good day's work behind him . . . It must have been a very near thing . . . he wondered how near when the sexton came, and why the sexton had come at all. The man had never given a good reason. He had only just fared to think there might be something wrong.
On the way indoors, the invalid stopped at a tree. It was one of the horse-chestnuts; and already every delicate extremity was swollen and sticky to the touch; and the birds sang of summer in thebranches. Carlton passed on with the short, quick steps of a feeble person in a hurry. Rivers were running in his heart; he wanted to be where he could kneel.
Three years later the man was still alone, and the church still growing under his unaided but untiring hand. Indeed, from one end, it looked almost ready for the roof, the west gable rising salient through the trees, with the original window intact underneath. But this window was the exception, the sole survivor from the fire, and for the past year the rest had been one long impediment. Even now, only the three single lights, in either transept and to the right of the porch respectively, had been wrought to a finish from sill to arch; a mullioned window was just begun; the remainder all yawned to the sky in ragged gaps of varying width. But the village looked daily on the one good end, flanked by the west walls of either transept, which happened not to have a window between them, and were consequently finished. And the village was softening a little towards its outcast, though no man said so above his breath; nor was a living soul known to have been near him all these years, unless it was the new sexton to dig a grave, or a Lakenhall curate to make an entry in the parish register.
There had, however, been one or two others; thefirst knocking at the study door on the evening of the first funeral, some months after Carlton's illness.
Carlton was reading at the time. His heart stopped at the sound. It was repeated before he could bring himself to open the door.
"Tom Ivey!"
"That's me, sir; may I come in?"
"Surely, Tom."
The hulking mason entered awkwardly, and refused a chair. His large frame bulked abnormally in a ready-made suit of stiff black cloth. He seemed to take up half the room, as he stood and glowered, a full-length figure of surly embarrassment and dark resolve.
"There was a funeral to-day," he began at last.
"I know."
"That was my poor mother, Mr. Carlton."
"Yes, I heard. Tom, I'm so sorry for you!"
Their hands flew together, and were one till Carlton winced.
"There's nothun to be sorry for," said Tom, with husky philosophy. "Her troubles are over, poor thing. So's one o' mine! You can start me to-morrow."
"Start you, Tom?"
"Yes, sir, I mean to work for you now. I'd like to see the man who'll stop me! You've shown 'em all the man you are; now that'smyturn."
And the broad face beamed and darkened with alternate enthusiasm and defiance. Carlton beheld it with parted lips and startled eye; and so they stood through a long silence, till Carlton sat downwith a smile. It was a singularly gentle smile, as he leant back in his worn old chair, and the lamplight fell upon his face.
"After all these months," he murmured; "after all these months!"
"I fare to hide my face when I count 'em up," admitted Ivey, bitterly. "But what was the good of comun when I couldn't come for good? And how could I in poor mother's time? It'd have meant—there's no sayun what that wouldn't have meant."
"You mean as regards Sir Wilton?"
"I do, Mr. Carlton."
"He will have been a good friend to you?"
"Oh, yes."
"Did those repairs, did he?"
"Yes," sighed Ivey, "he was better than his word about them; you would hardly know the place now. It made a lot of difference to mother. And I had the job."
"Oh!"
"He's kept me busy, I must say. I've never wanted work."
"Until now, I suppose?"
"To tell you the truth, sir, I'm at work for him still."
"For Sir Wilton Gleed?"
"Yes—odd jobs about the estate."
"Then my good fellow, what do you mean by offering yourself to me?"
"Mean?" exclaimed Ivey, his black determination leaping into flame. "I mean as I've made up my mind to give him the go-by for you. I'd have donethat long ago if it hadn't been for mother; but better late than never. You've shown 'em the man you are, and now that's my turn. Look at what you've done with your own two hands—there'll be other two from to-morrow! You shan't work yourself right to death before my eyes. Why, your hair's white with it already!"
Carlton wheeled further from the lamp.
"Not white," he murmured.
"But that is, sir. When did you look in a glass?"
"I don't know."
"Then do you look to-morrow. That's white as snow. And your beard's grey."
"It's certainly too long," said Carlton, covering half with his hand.
"And your hand—your hand!"
It was scarred and horny as the mason's own. Carlton removed it from the light, but said nothing.
"That's done its last day's work alone," cried Tom. "I start with you to-morrow, whether you want me or not. I'll show 'em! I'll show 'em!"
And he stood nodding savagely to himself.
"My dear fellow, you can't behave like that."
The words fell softly after a long silence.
"Why can't I?"
Carlton gave innumerable reasons.
"It would put us both in the wrong," was the last. "Go on working for Sir Wilton—at any rate for another year. You owe it to him, Tom. And don't you fret about me; I am a happier man than I ever deserved to be again. Last winter it was different; but God has shown me infinite mercy andcompassion. And now He has sent you to me, as a sign that even man may forgive me in the end! That is enough for me, Tom. You cannot do more for me than you have done to-night. But your duty you must do, by God's help, as long as it is as clear as it is now. Don't bother your head about me! I am getting into the knack. Perhaps by the time I come to the roof—if I ever do—the want of a church may induce others to help me finish mine. Then, if you like, you shall come back; but I won't have you made an outcast on my account; one is enough."
There were no more visits from Tom Ivey. This one came to the ears of Sir Wilton; and that diplomatist instead of playing into the enemy's hands by discharging his man, capped all his kindness to the mason by getting him the offer of an irresistible berth in that London district for which he himself sat. Thus Sir Wilton removed a wavering ally, and at the same time renewed the lease of his allegiance.
Carlton heard of it some months later, when there was another funeral, and the Lakenhall curate came in again to make the entry. This curate was a gentleman. He had a good heart and better tact. He not only conversed with Carlton as with the perfectly normal clergyman, in perfectly normal circumstances, but he would prolong these conversations as far as he deemed possible without exciting a suspicion of the profound pity which inspired him. He would bring bits of local gossip, or the latest national event; once he let fall that Sidney Gleed was up at Cambridge, and said to stand a chance of "coxing theeight," while Lydia was now a Mrs. Goldstein, the mistress of a splendid mansion in Holland Park, and another up the Thames. It was from the same source that Carlton obtained belated news of George Mellis, who had come through two campaigns without a scratch, yet never been back to play the hero on his native heath. In a word this curate, who was a very young and rather commonplace fellow, came soon to stand for the outside world, the world of newspapers and talk, to Robert Carlton, who liked him none the less because his older eye saw through the artless arts with which the lad sought to mask his charity.
The visitations of this curate, who also conducted the one weekly service in the village school, was a little arrangement between those fast friends, Sir Wilton Gleed and Canon Wilders, who would have been interested to learn the way in which their delegate improved the rare occasion of a funeral. For marriages and baptisms the Long Stow folk had taken to walking across the heath to Linkworth.
Early in the second year there came a visitor whom Robert Carlton knew at a glance, though he had never before seen him in the flesh. This was a person with the appearance of a rather dissipated sporting man, who tooled tandem through the village, and pulled up at the ruins in broad daylight. The thing was thus a scandal from the first moment of its occurrence, and the cockaded groom was beset by horrified rustics before his master's red neck had disappeared among the low and ragged walls.
Carlton had withdrawn into the invisible seclusionof the west end, where he was nervously scraping at the nearest stone when the visitor appeared, only to stop short with a whistle.
"I thought this was the church the parson was building with his own hands?"
"So it is, my lord."
"And you are what he calls his own hands!"
"No, I am he."
The visitor stared.
"You the parson?"
"I know I don't look like one," admitted Carlton, glancing from his ruined hands to the shabby clothes in which he worked; "nor can I fairly consider myself one at present. Yet I am still the only rector of this parish, and it was I who wrote to your lordship about the stone. Yours are the only quarries in this part of the country. The stone I am now using came from them. But it is just finished, and unless you will let me have some more I may have to stop; otherwise I believe that I could build up to the roof, in time, without assistance."
"And why should you?"
"My church was burnt down through my own—fault."
"I know all about that," said his lordship. "What I ask is, why should you insist upon building it up single-handed?"
"I didn't insist originally," sighed Carlton. "It is a very long story."
The earl regarded him with a pair of very penetrating little eyes; he was an ugly man with an ugly reputation, but one of those who take as little troubleto conceal their worst characteristics as to display their best.
"To be quite frank with you," said he, "I happen to know something of your story; and I consider it a jolly sight more discreditable to others than to you. That'smyopinion, and I don't care who knows it. So you are really and literally doing this thing with your own two hands?"
"Literally—as yet."
"And who looks after you?"
"Oh, no one comes near me; but I am bound to say that I have learnt to look pretty well after myself. I have found it absolutely necessary for my work."
"Cookin' for yourself, and all that sort of thing?"
"Cooking and even killing when necessary."
"Is the boycott as wide and as bad as all that?"
"It is no worse than I deserve."
The visitor, looking sharply to see whether this was cant, was convinced of its sincerity at a glance, though he loudly disagreed with the opinion.
"I call it a jolly shame," said he; "but I'm not going to hurt your feelings by expressing mine. I'm the last man to rake up the past. But it would be a different thing if you had really fired the church; that was the last iniquity, charging you with that! How do I know you didn't? There was a young friend of mine on the bench, and I had it from him as a fact, with a jolly lot more besides. Now show me what you've done before I go."
This did not take a minute; there was so little to show for the first long year and more of scraping, re-pointing, or rebuilding from the ground. Save atthe end where they had stood talking, there was scarcely a wall that reached to their shoulders, and their tour of inspection was closely followed from the road. It was conducted with few words on either side, though the noble Earl muttered several which would not have been muttered in other company. In the end he made a startling undertaking. He would not only send as much more stone as was required, but neither the stuff nor its delivery should cost Mr. Carlton a penny.
Carlton turned a deeper bronze, but begged as a favour to be allowed to pay. The new church was his debt to the parish. It was the one debt that he would pay. The uttermost farthing and the least last stone were to have come out of his own pocket. That had been his undertaking; it was still his heart's ambition; but as such he saw its unworthy side; and would place himself in his lordship's hands, sooner than be swayed by false pride in such a matter.
"Then you shall pay through the nose!" the other promised him; "and I'm damned if I don't think all the more of you. I beg your pardon. I was trying not to swear. But I never could stand parsons, and I suppose it'll shock you when I tell you straight that you're the best I've struck! You're a man, you are, and I take off my hat to you."
He did so openly before the wide eyes and wider mouths of those watching from the road; and so ended an incident which Sir Wilton Gleed described as one of the most scandalous in all his experience. "Birds of a feather," was, however, his ready anduntiring comment; and the saying went from door to door, as "not guilty but don't do it again," had gone before it; for there is nothing like a timeworn saying to crystallise a widespread sentiment.
This one did not come to Robert Carlton's ears, but he was perhaps the first to whom the obvious comment had occurred, and its easy justification did a little damp the glow in which his latest champion had left him. It were better to have won the allegiance of a better man. Yet who was he to judge his fellows? He had forfeited the right to criticise another. Let him then be truly and duly thankful; for with each waning year he had more and more occasion. Surely the heart of man was beginning at last to soften towards an erring brother, who repented very bitterly of his sin, and who was doing faithfully the little that he could to undo the least of his sin's results. Ah, that he could have done more! Ah, that by dying he could bring the dead to life!
He was only a man; he could only suffer in his turn. That he had done, was doing, and was still to do. And he thanked God for it again; so much of the old spirit still endured. Yet was he none the less thankful for every token of pardon or of pity from mere men. He knew that many would justly execrate his name until the end. He knew of one at least who would never forgive him in this life.
This one came on a moonlight night in the spring of this fourth year; came limping into the churchyard, leaning on his great stick, and growling savagely to himself; little suspecting that he had Carlton caught in the ruins, listening, watching, fascinated,from one of those ragged interstices with which even his perseverance and even his ingenuity could scarcely cope. To be exact, it was, or was to be, the mullioned window in the south transept; and as Musk advanced past this angle of the building, the clergyman first leant, then crept, over the sill to watch him.
He stole into the open. Musk had his back turned; his shoulders were very round. Carlton knew well at what grave the other stood staring, and his heart stirred heavily within him. Oh, his wickedness! Oh, his sin! How could there be any forgiveness, in heaven or on earth, for him a clergyman? The poor old man, so old, so bent! He must speak to him; he must throw himself at his feet; so bent, so lame! Oh, that that stick might strike the life out of him then and there!
He was creeping forward; suddenly he stopped. Musk was stooping, moving his stick to and fro across the grave, with a sweeping movement, as of a scythe. What was he doing? Carlton remembered—divined—and his blood ran cold. The snowdrops were out; he had put some on the grave. It had no stone, no name. It was only the tidiest and the greenest mound in all the churchyard. He saw to that. And yet his flowers desecrated it; must be swept to the winds . . .
Musk had come away. He was looking at the south wall where it had obviously been rebuilt. Carlton was skulking in the porch. The high moon fell heavily on the upturned face, covering it with white patches and black wrinkles; and these were working like a seething mass; but for a long time the greatframe stood motionless. Then, in a flash, a huge fist flew from the huge shoulder, struck the sandstone a sickening blow, swung round and was shaken at the rectory through the trees until the blood dripped from the mangled knuckles. Carlton was so near that he could both see and hear the heavy drops. He drew further within the porch: he had also seen his enemy's face.
Carlton had the fair mind and the true eye of the exceptional man. He saw most things immediately as they really were, not as he wished to see them, still less as they affected himself. He saw the moonlit face of Jasper Musk for many a day. It did not haunt him. He could have dismissed the vision from his mind at will; he preferred to consider it calmly in a white light. There was hate undying and invincible. There was something to respect. Carlton compared the petty though persistent enmity of Sir Wilton Gleed with the great dumb hatred of Jasper Musk; the last was inexorable as it was just; the first not wholly one or the other, or Carlton was mistaken in the smaller man. Sir Wilton might be the last man on earth to forgive him, yet in the very end he would follow the world, supposing for a moment that the world ever led. But Jasper Musk would hate the harder as the hate of others dwindled and died.
This conviction cast no new shadow across Carlton's life, but it brought a new name into his prayers, and put the fine edge on an old anxiety. He had always been anxious about his child, though in the beginning that sense had been overborne by others. Now, however, it was acute enough. What wasbecoming of the boy? Did he live? Was Musk bringing him up? Was he kindly treated? Yes, yes, they would be kind enough! Carlton trusted his enemy there; but his own position was none the less grieving as he came to realise what it was. He had no position at all towards the child—no rights, no control, no voice, nolocus standiwhatsoever. Was it better so, or worse? What were they teaching the child? Would he also grow up to deny God, and to execrate the name of his unworthy minister?
Yes, it was a shadow; but no new one; it only fell heavier and stretched further than before. And gradually Carlton became obsessed with the idea that he must do something, take some step, give some earnest of voluntary responsibility, no matter what new humiliation awaited him. But what to do, what step to take, for the best! As life grew a very little easier in other ways that have been shown, this problem came upon Carlton as a fresh complication, and as a poignant reminder of his original wickedness. It was not, however, a problem to be solved out of hand. It required infinite thought, and ceaseless prayer for that right judgment for which Robert Carlton now again looked upward as well as within. But while he thought, and even while he prayed, the walls were still growing under his hands.
And in his work he was strangely and serenely happy; there were no more spasmodic joys and qualms. Enormous difficulties lay between him and the impossible roof. He was at once artist and man enough to be stimulated by these. He drew in chalk, upon the bare floors of his disused rooms, full-size diagrams of all his arches, divided into as many parts as there were to be stones, according to the easy rule set forth in his precious book. Then he collected all the boxes, tin, wood, and cardboard, that he could find upon the premises, and cut these up into numbered patterns coinciding exactly with the diagrams on the floor, thus providing himself with evening occupation for a whole winter, and having all in readiness by the spring. Summer, however, found him still in travail with the mullioned window in the north transept; and the mullion and the tracery he was omitting altogether; the bare arch beat him long enough.
Prolonged solitude may debase a man to the savage or exalt him to the saint; it never leaves him the mere man he was. Robert Carlton was still too human to merit for a moment the hyperbole of saint; nevertheless he developed in his loneliness several of those traits which are less of this world than of a better. His mind dwelt continuously upon holy things; it had ceased altogether to feed upon itself. He had suffered no more sickness, either of body or of soul, such as that which had threatened to destroy both in the first awful winter. The whole man was chastened, purified, simplified and refined, by the consuming fires through which he had passed. His faith had never been stronger than it was now; it had never, never been so near in sheer simplicity to the faith of a little child. In a word, and little as he knew it, this great sinner, proven libertine, suspected incendiary, was now living in the very sight and smile of God; and even His humblest creatures loved andtrusted him as never in the days of prosperity and good report; for now he loved them first. Nature, indeed, had not endowed him with that sympathetic insight into inferior life—that genius for herself—which is born in most people who are to have it at all. To Robert Carlton the talent only came in his lonely and dishonoured prime, as the solace of his exile, as a new interest and occupation for his mind, and surely also as a sign of grace returning. There grew upon him in these years the knowledge and love of very little things, trodden under foot or brushed aside until now; a larger passion for nature in all her moods, and all their manifestations; and, above all, the equal peace and independence of him to whom the grasses whisper and the elements sing.
So one wind braced him to titanic effort, and another confirmed him in patient toil, and another relaxed both mind and members in merited ease; so he came to know the birds about him, almost as a shepherd knows his sheep, and even to discover some individuality beneath the feathers. There was one huge sparrow, a perfect demon for the crumbs which Carlton strewed every morning near the scene of his day's work, so that he might not be quite alone. The lowest human qualities came out in this small bird until finally, and with infinite ingenuity, it was trapped, rationed, and compelled to watch a feast of the smaller fry through the wires of a cage. Then there was a robin which in time came to perch upon the solitary's hat while he worked; only in the beginning were there crumbs in the brim. And again there was a starling that entertained him by thehour together, and all for love, from an elder-bush close to the shed.
But each of these years brought riper knowledge, until God's leafy acre, with its canopy of changing sky, both teeming with life to his quickened vision, became not only the outcast's second Bible, but all the almanac he needed or possessed. With no newspaper to distract his mind, and perhaps not a letter or a human voice for months, it was on bird and leaf that he came to rely for the time of year; while the field of his research was greatly extended by nocturnal exercise upon the pine-serrated plateau beyond the church. Now the tips of the chestnut twigs might bulge and bud, but spring was not spring until the plover paraded his new black breast, or a peewit rose screaming at the midnight intruder. All summer the small bird was king; hedgerows twittered; crumbs were scorned; man was jilted for slug and worm. But the end came in sight with the homebred mallard, flying feebly in his summer feathers; and the flight of the wild duck was the end of all. The third year found Carlton watching for the mallard as his bird of ill-omen, and redoubling his efforts while his ear prepared for the shrill music of the full-grown quills in final flight. Harsh experience had taught him how little he could do, with any certainty or any continuity, in the season when the little birds and he were best friends.
It was late in May, and the church would soon be hidden for another summer; meanwhile Carlton was still at work upon his transept window, in a corner which a great stack of undressed sandstone made invisible from the lane, as it already was from the road. The folk from other villages were beginning to stop and watch him longer than he liked, and he did not care to be a cynosure at all. He only asked to build his church in peace, and with it an example which should do at least a little to counteract the one he had already set; and he meant both for his own people, not for the outlying world. He really feared a reaction in his favour on the part of the sentimental outsider. It would do him fresh injury in the eyes of many of whom he honestly longed to win back in the end. Moreover, his head was very level in these days. He saw nothing heroic in his own conduct. With all his wish to undo a little of the harm that he had done to others, there was a very human eagerness to redeem his own past, so far as that was possible upon earth. Carlton was never unaware of this incentive. He entertained no illusions about himself, nor did he wish to create any in others. For example, there was his work. It was never easy, sometimes hopeless, always fascinating. But the man himself desired no credit for devotion to labour which he loved for its own sake, and in which he was still capable (but no longer ashamed) of forgetting the past.
The transept window engrossed him to the last degree; mullion or no mullion, it involved the largest arch that Carlton had yet attempted; and already it alone had occupied many weeks. The patterns had been the easy recreation of his winter evenings, but it had taken him all the spring to reproduce a score of these in solid stone; for though thewalls were coursed rubble, the windows must have ashlar facings, to be as they had been before; and ashlar is to coursed rubble what broadcloth is to Harris tweed. What with indefatigable labour, however, and the general proficiency which he had now attained in his self-taught craft, Carlton had his jambs up by the end of May, and his arched framework fixed between them, all ready to support the arch itself. He was now engaged upon the nine wedge-shaped stones to form the latter, working each to the fine ashlar finish, as also to the exact dimensions of its fellow in tin, wood, or cardboard, and laying them in couples on alternate sides of the wooden centre, so as to weight it evenly as the book ordained.
It was the middle of the afternoon, and the quiet corner was already in shadow; beyond, the wet grass glistened, for the day was a duel between sun and rain. Carlton was taking the busier advantage of a brilliant interval, and roughing out a new voussoir with the bold precision of the expert mason. Ting, ting, ting, fell the hammer on the cold-chisel; the soft, wet sandstone peeled off in curling flakes; the quick strokes rang like a bell through the cool and cleanly air. It had been honest rain, and it was honest sunshine. The green world broke freshly upon all the senses. Every colour was more vivid than its wont, from the reddish yellow of the rain-soaked stone to lilac and laburnum in the rectory garden; from the creamy castles of the full-blown chestnuts to the emerald sprays which were all that the slower elms had as yet to show against an uncertain sky. Every inch of earth, every blade and petal, was contributingits quota to the sweet summer smell. The birds sang; the bees hummed; the hammer rang. And Carlton was so intent upon his task, so bent upon making up for time lost that day, that it might have been mid-winter for the little he looked and listened; yet he heard and saw none the less; and his face was filled with quiet peace.
In appearance he was many years older; at a distance he might have passed for the father of the man who had drawn a larger congregation than the old church would hold. His hair was grey; his beard was grizzled. Incessant manual toil had aged him even more by giving his body a constant stoop. And the hands were the hands of a labouring man. But the brown eye, once inflammable, was now all gentleness and humility; the whole face was sweetened and exalted by solitude and suffering; in expression more patient, less austere; though the untrained beard and moustache, hiding mouth and jaw, had something to do with this.
To his gentleness, however, there was striking testimony even now, as his hammer rained ringing blows upon the cold-chisel; for within easy reach of it perched the tame robin on another stone, quizzically watching the performance. Then, in the same moment, three things happened. The robin flew away, Carlton turned his head, and the ringing blows broke off.
"The child must have a name, Jasper."
"All right, you give it one. That's nothun to me."
"But he must be christened properly."
"Why must he?"
"Oh, Jasper, if you don't fare to believe, his mother did, poor thing!"
"And a lot of good that did her . . . but do you have your way. Make a canting little Christian of him if you like. Do you think I care what you do with the brat? I know what I'd do with it, if that wasn't for the law!"
So, in the early days, while Robert Carlton was still learning to live alone, his son was trundled across the heath to Linkworth, and there christened George after no one in particular. Followed the remaining period of extreme infancy, during which Jasper Musk seldom set eyes upon the child, and was more or less oblivious to its concrete existence. Then one afternoon, the second summer, as Jasper sat smoking at a back window, in the big chair to which his sciatica would bind him from morning till night, there was a shuffling and a grunting in the passage, and in came the child on all fours, with the lamp of adventurealight and shining in grimy cheeks and great grey eyes.
Musk took the pipe from his mouth, and met the small intruder with an expressionless stare. Had his wife been by, no doubt he would have bidden her take the little devil out of his sight; he had done so before, using a harsher and more literal epithet for choice. But this afternoon he was alone, and very weary of his solitary confinement. So for the moment Musk sat stolidly intent; and the child, after a halt induced by the creaking of the open door and the austere apparition within, advanced once more, with the infantile equivalent for a cheer.
"Well, you've got a cheek!" said Jasper, grimly.
The boy had reached his legs, and was pulling himself up by the particularly lame one, chattering the while in the foreign tongue of one year old. Musk winced and muttered, then suddenly encircled the small body with his mighty hands, and set the child high and dry upon his knee.
"And now what?" said he. "And now what?"
For answer a chubby hand flew straight at his whiskers, grabbed them unerringly, and pulled without mercy, but with yells of delight that brought Musk's wife in hot haste from a far corner of the rambling house. In the doorway she threw up her arms.
"Oh, Georgie!" she cried aghast. "You naughty boy—you naughty boy!"
Jasper had already created a diversion in favour of his whiskers, and was in the act of blowing open an enormous watch when his wife appeared.
"Now you take and mind your own business," snapped he, "and we'll mind ours . . . Blow—can't you blow? Like this, then—p-f-f-f—and there you are! Now you try; blow, and that'll open again."
Georgie walked before the summer was over; and this was the year in which Jasper scarcely set foot to the ground, so he made use of the child from the first. Now it was his pipe, now his spectacles, now the newspaper; these were the first familiar objects which the child came to know by name before he could speak; and he never saw any one of the three without taking it as straight as he could toddle to the great grey man in the chair.
Mrs. Musk suddenly found half her work with Georgie taken entirely off her hands. She was even quicker over another discovery. Jasper would not own that he had taken to the child; in her presence, on the contrary, he ignored its very existence as utterly as heretofore. Yet now every day she could have found them together at most hours; only she knew better.
Cheerless environment for this new life—a gloomy old house—a grim old couple. Nevertheless, and in very spite of all the circumstances of his birth, Georgie from the first evinced that temperament which is a sun unto itself. An expansive gaiety was his normal mood, and for years the only variant was a terrible and overwhelming indignation with all his world. He was, in fact, an entirely healthy little savage, with all the wild spirits and facile affections of his age, and no exemption from its traditional ills.Once he had croup so severely that two doctors came in the middle of the night, and Georgie never forgot their grave faces and his grandfather's grim one at the foot of the bed. Indeed, the scene formed his first permanent impression, though the sequel was more memorable in itself. Georgie seemed to go to sleep for days and days, and to awake in another world, though the bed was the same, and the medicine-bottles, and the singing kettle; for it was day-time, and the room full of sun, and the doctors gone; but in the sunlight there stood instead the loveliest lady whom Georgie had beheld in his three or four years of earthly experience. Thereupon he lay with his firm little mouth pursed up, his grey eyes greater than even their wont, and his mind at work upon some surreptitious teaching of his grandmother. It was a very simple question that he asked in the end, but it made the lady kiss him and cry over him in a way he never could understand.
"Are you a angel?" Georgie had said.
Gwynneth happened to be somewhat morbidly aware of her own poverty in angelic qualities, though it was not this that made her cry. She was alone at the hall for the winter, which Sir Wilton and Lady Gleed were spending upon a well-beaten track abroad, while Sidney was still at Cambridge. Gwynneth also might have drifted from Cannes to Nice, and from Nice to Mentone, for she had been taken from school on Lydia's marriage, and assigned a permanent position at the side of Lady Gleed. In this capacity the girl had not shone, though her peculiar character had lost nothing by the duty andfaithful practice of consistent self-suppression. On the other hand, there was the demoralising sense of personal superiority, which was thrust upon Gwynneth at every turn of this companionship, causing her to take an unhealthy interest in her own faults, in order to preserve any humility at all; for she was full of mental and of bodily vigour, and her aunt was signally devoid of both. Consequently when Lydia petitioned to go instead (having become a mother to her great disgust, and demanding an immediate separation from her infant), the proposal was adopted to the equal satisfaction of all concerned. Gwynneth, for her part, was very sorry not to travel and see the world; but she knew, from a tantalising experience, that hotel life was all that one could count upon seeing with Lady Gleed; and from every other point of view it was infinite relief to be alone. Literally alone she was not, since the little German housekeeper never left the hall. But Fraulein Hentig was a self-contained and entirely tactful companion, with whom it was possible to enjoy the delights of solitude while escaping the disadvantages. The two were very good friends.
Gwynneth was now in her twentieth year, a tall and graceful girl, albeit with the slight stoop of the natural student that she was. At her school she had won all available honours, but it was not a modern school, and in those days such as Gwynneth had no definite knowledge of any wider arena. So she left her school without great regret. She had learnt all that they could teach her there. And she taught herself twice as much in stolen hours spent in thehall library, which had been bought with the place, and hitherto only used by Sidney on wet days. But now there was no need to steal an hour; the girl's time was all her own, and she held high revel among the books. Moreover, it was the dawn of the University Extension system, and Gwynneth heard of a course of lectures upon English literature, only eight miles from Long Stow, just in time to attend. To do so she had to fight a weekly battle with the coachman, but Fraulein Hentig took her side, and the opposition did not endure. Gwynneth took voluminous notes and wrote elaborate essays, bringing to the whole interest that energy, thoroughness and enthusiasm, to which, though each was an essential characteristic, she was only now enabled to give free play. Yet the young girl was no mere bookworm, though at this stage of her career she seemed little else. It was a phase of intellectual absorption, but all the while it needed but a touch of human interest in her life to awake the deeper nature of the eternal woman. Such awakening had come with the most alarming period of Georgie's illness. Gwynneth was starting for her lecture, primed with sharp pencils and her new essay, when she heard in the village that two doctors had been at the Flint House in the night. She did not go to that lecture at all, but for two days and nights was scarcely an hour absent from the bedside of a little boy whom she had barely known by sight before. And his first comprehensible words formed the question which Gwynneth, worn out by watching, had answered in the fashion he could never understand.
Well, she was destined to be the boy's good angel, though he never mistook her for one again; and sometimes she looked the part. The dark eyes, so ardent in the pursuit of knowledge, or of any other of her heart's desires, could yet sparkle with childish glee, or soften with the tenderness of the ideal Madonna. The self-willed mouth and nose were only sweet as Georgie saw them; and none but he knew the warmth of the pale brown cheek or the crisp electric touch of the dark brown hair. Little knowing it before, and never dreaming of it now, Gwynneth had long been hankering for all that the little child gave her out of the fulness and purity of his tiny heart. She supposed that she was happy because at last she was being of some trifling use to somebody; it made her think more of herself. Looking deeper (as she thought), through the deceptive lenses of her inner consciousness, Gwynneth took a still less favourable view of her latest interest in life. It was that and not much more to the imperfect introspection of her morbid mood.
Nevertheless, this was the happiest time that she had ever known. Georgie and she became inseparable, even when the boy was well again; and on him Gwynneth was really lavishing all the love and tenderness which had been gathering in her heart since the hour when she had kissed a dead forehead for the last time. The fact was that the girl had an inborn capacity for passionate devotion, and was now once more enabled to indulge this sweet instinct to the full. She still went to her weekly lecture, read every book in the syllabus, and wrote her essay withas much care for detail as her innate energy would permit. Nor was her work the worse for the counter-attraction which now filled her young life to the brim. Georgie spoke of Gwynneth as his "lady," with a sufficient emphasis upon the possessive pronoun, and to her by a succession of pet names of their joint invention.
Croup is an enemy that lives to fight another day, as Dr. Marigold said when he paid his last visit; and that word was sufficient for the Musks. Thenceforward Georgie had only to sneeze to be put to bed, where he wasted many days before the winter was over. But Georgie was not to be depressed, and as Gwynneth would come and play with him for hours it was perhaps no wonder. They both had some imagination; one showed it by extemporary flights of downright romance, and the other by following these with immense eyes and not a syllable of his own from beginning to end. Then and there they would dramatise the story, for it was usually one of adventure, and Georgie had a clockwork paddle-steamer called theDover, which sailed the bed manned by cardboard sailors of Gwynneth's making. In these seas the roughest weather was experienced in crossing Georgie's legs, but the best fun was in the polar regions, where the vessel lay wedged for months between two pillows, while the crew hunted bear and walrus over Georgie's person, and dug winter quarters under the clothes.
One day, when he really had a cold, and had fallen asleep upon the icebergs, Gwynneth took upon herself to search the cupboard for some picture-bookwhich he might not have seen before; and in so doing she came across the photograph of a comely young woman, not much older than herself, which compelled her attention rather than her curiosity, for she guessed at once who it was. Moreover, the face was striking and interesting in itself. The eyes had a strange look, half reckless, half defiant, but, even in a faded and inartistic photograph, of a subtle fascination. There was some slight coarseness of eyelid and nostril; but for all that it was a fine expression, full of courage and full of will. The will was obvious in the mouth. It had the strength of Musk himself. Yet there was something about the mouth—so firm—so full—that Gwynneth did not like. She could not have said what it was, but she preferred looking into the eyes. They fascinated her, and she did not lift her own eyes from them till Mrs. Musk entered and caught her thus engaged.
"Oh, where did you find that? Give it to me—give it to me!" and the poor soul held out hands that trembled with her voice. "That's Georgie's poor mother," she sobbed, "and I didn't know there was another left. I thought he'd taken and burnt them every one!"
And she slipped the photograph inside her bodice, and pressed her lean hands upon it, as though it were the babe itself at her breast once more. Next instant Gwynneth's arms were about the old woman's neck, and her fresh lips had touched the wet and shrivelled cheek of Georgie's grandmother.
"Ah! but you are good to us," said Mrs. Musk. "I never would have believed a young lady could be so sweet and kind as you!"
Not that Gwynneth was in the habit of going among the people; that was a practice which Lady Gleed would not permit in a young lady over whom she exercised any sort of control. Consequently there was some talk in the village at this time, and a little scene at the hall soon after Sir Wilton and his wife arrived for the Easter recess. But Gwynneth argued that in no sense could the Musks be accounted ordinary villagers; and the squire himself took her side very firmly in the matter.
"I won't have you rate Musk among the yokels," said Sir Wilton afterwards. "He is the one substantial man in the place, and a very good friend of mine."
"Well, I don't consider it nice for Gwynneth to be always with that child."
"She doesn't know the child's history; you have only to hear her talk about him to see that."
"I don't think it nice, all the same," Lady Gleed repeated.
"Then take her back to town with you."
"No, she is out now, and I can't be bothered with her this season. She is not like other girls. I've a good mind to send her abroad for a year."
"You can do as you like about that. It might be a very good thing. Meanwhile I'm not going to have Musk's feelings hurt; only yesterday, when I went to see him, he was telling me all Gwynneth has done for them during the winter. I'm not goingto break with a man like that by suddenly forbidding her to do any more."
So it was decided that Gwynneth should go for a year to a relation of Fraulein Hentig's at Leipzig, for the sake of her music, which the girl had neglected rather disgracefully since leaving school, but of which she was none the less fond, given the proper stimulus. Gwynneth herself acclaimed the plan, and indeed had a voice in it; there was only one reason why she was not entirely glad to go; and her devotion to Georgie was more constant than ever during the few weeks which were left to her.
Summer was beginning, and the boy was well and strong, with chubby cheeks and sturdy bare legs. Often Gwynneth had him to play in the hall garden—this on Sir Wilton's own suggestion—but more often she took him for a walk. There were beautiful walks all round Long Stow. There was the windy walk across the heather towards Linkworth; there were cool walks by the tiny river that ran parallel with the village street, bounding the hall meadow and both meadow and garden of the Flint House; there was a fascinating expedition, with spade and pail, to the sand-hills off the road to Lakenhall. Yet it was on none of these excursions that Gwynneth lost Georgie, but while leaving some papers at the saddler's workshop, in Long Stow itself.
Fuller would keep her to talk politics, or rather to listen to his own: it was the year of the first Home Rule Bill, and even Mr. Gladstone had never stirred the saddler's anger, hatred and contempt to such a pitch as they reached in this connection. Gwynneth,on her side, had an insufficient grasp of the measure, but an instinctive veneration for the man; and she was young enough to grow heated in argument, even with the saddler. When at length she turned away, more flushed than victorious, there was no vestige of the child.
"Georgie! Georgie!"
Neither was there any answer. Gwynneth turned upon the politician.
"Didn't you see him, Mr. Fuller?"
"Gord love you, miss, I thought you come alone!"
And the saddler leant across his bench until his spectacles were flush with the open window at which Gwynneth stood.
"Alone? Georgie Musk was with me; and I've lost him through arguing with you."
She inquired at the next cottage. Yes, they had seen him pass "with you, miss," but that was all. There were no cottages further on; the saddler's was the last on that side and at that end of the village. Opposite was the rectory gate, with the low flint wall running far to the right, overhung at present by the great leaves and heavy blossoms of the chestnuts. And all at once Gwynneth noticed that the chestnut leaves were very dark, the sky overcast, and another shower even then beginning.
"He will get wet—it may kill him!"
And the girl ran wildly on along the road; but it was a straight road, and she could see further than Georgie could possibly have travelled. So now there was only the lane running up by the church.
Gwynneth took it at top speed; an instant broughther abreast of the east end, gaping wide and deep for the east window, yet built like a rock on either side to the height of the eaves. Another step, and Gwynneth was standing still.
Already her sub-consciousness had remarked the silence of hammer and chisel, which had tinkled in her ears as she brought Georgie up the village, ringing more distinctly at every step, and quite loud when first they had stopped at the saddler's window. Then it must have ceased altogether. But now Gwynneth heard another sound instead.
Georgie stood beyond the mason's litter, his firm legs planted in the wet grass, his holland pinafore less brown than his knees. A sailor hat, with the brim turned down, threw the roguish face into shadow; but the flush of successful flight was not extinguished; and the great eyes fixed on Carlton were nowise abashed. Shyness had never been a feature of Georgie's character.
"Hallo!" said he.
Carlton stood like his own walls.
So this was the child.
A new instinct was awake in the man's breast; he had never an instant's doubt.
And it struck him dumb.
"I say," said Georgie, "are you angry?"
But he showed no anxiety on the point, merely beaming while the grown man fought for words.
"Angry? No—no——"
And now he was fighting for the power of speech—fighting hot eyes and twitching lips for his own manhood—and for the little impudent face that would fill with fear if he lost. But he won.
"Of course I'm not angry; but"—for he must know for certain—"what's your name?"
"Georgie."
"That's not all."
"Georgie Musk."
Carlton filled his lungs.
"And who sent you here, Georgie?"
"Nobody di'n't."
"Then how have you come?"
"By my own self, course."
"What! all the way from the Flint House? That's where you live, isn't it?"
Carlton put the second question with sudden misgiving. The name was not unique in that country; he might be mistaken after all. And already—in these few moments—he could not bear the idea of being thus mistaken in this sturdy, friendly, independent boy.
"Yes, that's where," said Georgie, nodding.
"Then what can have brought him here!"
"Well, you see," said Georgie, confidentially, "my lady taked me for a walk——"
"Your lady?"
"And I wunned away."
"But who do you mean by your lady?"
"My lady," said Georgie, turning dense.
"Your governess?" guessed Carlton.
"Oh, my governess, my governess!" cried Georgie, roaring with laughter because the word was new to him, but made a splendid expletive: "oh, my governess, gwacious me!"
"Well, whoever it is," muttered Carlton, "she oughtn't to have lost you; and you stay with me until she finds you."
"That's good," said Georgie, with conviction. "I liker stay wif you."
Carlton caught the child up suddenly, and swung him shoulder-high. What a laugh he had! And what a firm boy, so heavy and straight and strong! Carlton sat down in his barrow, taking the little fellow on his knee, yet holding him at arm's length for self-control.
"How can you like being with a person you've never seen before?" asked Carlton, tremulous again, for all his strength.
"'Cos I heard you makin' somekin," said Georgie, who was looking about him. "What are you makin', I say?"
It was here that, without any particular provocation, Robert Carlton's resolution suddenly failed him, so that he hugged and kissed the child, in a sudden access of uncontrollable emotion. This, however, was as suddenly suppressed. Georgie had wriggled from his knee; but instead of running away (as the other feared for one breathless moment), he continued looking about him as before, bored a little, but nothing more.
"What are you buildin', I say?" he now inquired.
"A church."
"What's a church?"
Carlton came straight to his feet.
"Do you never go to one?" he asked; but his tone was nearly all remorse.
"No, I never."
"Then have you never heard of God?"
And now the tone was his most determined one.
"Yes," said Georgie, subdued but not frightened.
"You are sure that you have been told about God?"
"Yes, sure."
"Who has taught you?"
"My lady and granny—not grand-daddy."
"You say your prayers to Him?"
"Yes, I always."
"Sure?"
"Yes, sure."
Carlton stood with heaving chest. He was spared something at last; his cup was not to overflow after all. And, as he stood, the grass whispered, and the rain came down.
Again Georgie was caught up, to be set down next instant in the shed; but this time he was really offended.
"I don't want to come in," he whimpered. "I want to build wif your bwicks. They're much, much bigger'n mine!"
"But it's raining, don't you see? It would never do for Georgie to get wet."
"Oh, I wish I would play wif your bwicks!"
"Why, Georgie, you couldn't lift them; you're not strong enough."
"But I are, I tell you. I really are!"
"Here's one, then," said Carlton, who kept his misfits in the shed. "You try."
Georgie did try. He rolled the stone over, though it was no small one; lift it he could not.
"You see, it was heavier than you thought."
"'Cos never mind," coaxed Georgie, in another formula of his own; "you carry it for me!"
"But it's raining, and we should both be wet through."
"'Cosnevermind!"
"But I do mind; and, what's more, everybody else would mind as well."
"Then whatshallwe do?" cried Georgie, from his depths.
Carlton had no idea. But the boy was weary, and must be amused; that was the first necessity; and he who had never laid himself out to conciliate men must strain every nerve to please this little child. His eyes flew round the shed. And there upon the shelf stood his gargoyles deep in dust.
"Oh, what a funny old man!" cried Georgie. "Oh, ho, ho!"
But Carlton, in his ignorance of children, had over-estimated a strong child's strength; the stone head slipped through the tiny hands, narrowly missing the tiny toes; and when Georgie stooped and rolled it over, it was seen that a terrible accident had really occurred.
"Oh, oh, oh!" cried an alarming little voice, "Oh, he's broken his nose, he's broken it to bits; oh, oh!"
Carlton made a dive for the other gargoyle; but this was a peculiarly sinister face; and Georgie's tears only ran the faster.
"Oh, I don't like that one. It's a ho'ble face. I don't like it."
Carlton cast the thing from him, and at the same moment became and looked inspired.
"Shall I make you a new face, Georgie? A better one than either of the others?"
"Yes, do, I say! A new face! A new face!"
And shouts of delight came from the tear-stained one: such was the sound that Gwynneth heard in the lane.
A very inspiration it proved. All unpractised in their earliest accomplishment, the hard-worked hands had never been so deft before; nor ever stone softer or chisel sharper than the first of each that could be found. They were trembling, those tanned and twisted fingers, but that only seemed to impart a nervous vigour to their touch. When the thing had taken rough shape, and a deep curve or two suggested a whole head of hair; when eyes and nose had come from the same sure delving, and the mouth almost at a touch; then the mouth of Georgie, long open in mere fascination, recovered its primary function, and yelled approval in surprising terms.
"Oh, my Jove, my Jove!" he roared. "What a lovely, lovely,lovelyface! Oh, my Jove, I must show it to my lady!"
Carlton looked upon a baby face on fire with rapture; and for once no dissimilar light shone upon his own.
"Will you—give me a kiss for it, Georgie?"
Without a word the little arms flew round a weatherbeaten neck that bent to meet them, and the glowing cheeks buried themselves, voluntarily, in the beard that had only hurt before; and not one kiss, but countless kisses, were Georgie's thanks for the lump of sandstone that had grown into a facebefore his eyes. And such was the scene whereon Gwynneth Gleed arrived.
At first she drew back, hesitating in the rain, because neither of them saw her, and she could not, could not understand! But her hesitation was short-lived, or, rather, it had to be conquered and it was. So with flaming cheeks—because they would not see her—and dark hair limp from the rain—eyes sparkling, lips parted, teeth peeping—came Gwynneth to the shed at last.