CHAPTER XVIShe wore a great hat of coarse Zulu straw, trimmed with white muslin and scarlet poppies, and a pale cream muslin dress, beneath whose hem her neat shoes and trim, black ankles showed themselves so demurely, like sleek twin witches of seductive enchantment. In her left hand she carried a snowy-topped basket emblematic of Faith, Hope and Charity—particularly this last—while the thumb of her cotton-gloved right hand was tucked, at the time of their recognition, into a green crocodile leather belt. She was just passing the corner, indeed, as she caught sight of the Spawer, and had to fall back on her heel to verify the impression; then she stood waiting for him, swinging the basket in front of her skirt with both hands, and showing the glad smile for a welcome and unexpected meeting. All the gloomy necessities of the encounter were packed up and stowed away at the back of the Spawer's being with the first slight shock of realisation. Almost spontaneously he discarded his reflections as though they had been impersonal and bearing no reference to the girl before him, and advanced upon her with the sunny face that seemed never to have known the clouds of disquietude."How funny," said Pam simply, as he came near. "... I was just thinking about you.""I can see you were," he laughed."Can you?" asked Pam, smiling, but a shade incredulous."By your ears," he told her.Pam put her fingers to them."It is the sun," she said, nipping a little crimson lobe between cool white-cottoned fingers. "Yours burn too. Were you thinking about me?""Perhaps.""Were you? What were you thinking?""Tell me first what you were thinking about me?""I was thinking whether I should see you if I looked up the Cliff Wrangham road. But I never thought I should. And you?""I was thinking the same thing.""Were you really? Did you want to see me ... about anything?"It was the Spawer's opportunity to say what he had come to say, but like a faint-hearted jumper, feeling he had not bite enough for his purpose, he burked the hurdle."I don't know that I wanted to see you ... about anything," he answered, covering up his momentary hesitation with a smile, "... but I was perfectly agreeable to see you about nothing at all.""Perhaps you 're coming to the post?" Pam hazarded."Nothing so reputable," said he. "Fact is, I 'm afraid I 've broken loose to-day. I 'm on the laze.""You lazy!" laughed Pam, in incredulous amazement."Oh, horribly lazy, dear girl," he said. "If you don't know that you don't know me. It comes on at periods. I can't yet decide whether my hard work is sheer activity of a guilty conscience, or my laziness is the collapse of a conscience too highly taxed, but the one follows the other as night follows day. I 've not done a stroke of work since getting up. This morning I washed myself and bathed—you 'll say that's a good work done. This afternoon I determined to stroll inland and see if there was anybody disposed to take pity on my sad idleness. What a pretty basket!"Pam held it up for his inspection."May I lift the cover?"Pam nodded and laughed, showing all her white, small teeth in assent."Bottles," said he, taking a peep under the snowy serviette. "We 're well met. Which way are you going?""I 'm going to Shippus," said Pam, with a little wistful accent on the "I 'm," expressive of solitude."The very thing," said the Spawer. "And we won't touch them till we get there. Not a drop. Will you take me with you?""Will you go with me?" said Pam, a light of desire suddenly dawning in her eyes at his half-bantering suggestion."If you 'll have me.""I 'll have you. But perhaps you would n't care ... it's a sick call.""I don't care what it is," said the Spawer, "so long as it 's nothing catching. Tell me it 's not smallpox and I 'm with you.""Oh, it is n't smallpox," Pam reassured him. "It 's only poor old Mr. Smethurst.""Come," said the Spawer, relieved, "that does n't sound so alarming. I 'll risk it. And are the bottles his or ours?""His," said Pam, as the Spawer disengaged her of them, and they commenced to walk forward together. "Poor old gentleman. There 's a lemon jelly and a bottle of port and a bottle of whiskey. Those are from Father Mostyn—the very same that he drinks himself." Her eyes kindled luminously at the mention. "Is n't it good of him? Nobody knows but me what lots of things he gives away ... and what lots of things he does for people. He 'd do anything for anybody. They don't understand him in Ullbrig a bit. I did n't always, but I do now. They talk about his house, and say it wants painting. And of course it does. And they say he 's a Roman Catholic, and gets paid by the Pope for every conversion he makes; but that 's not true. He 's nothing at all to do with the Pope. And then they laugh at him because he goes down on his knees in church, but as he said one day to Mr. Stevens (Sheppardman): 'You touch your hat to me because I 'm his reverence the vicar, but you 're too proud to bow to the Lord Jesus.' And it 's not a matter of what he does in church. They ought n't to go by that—and they can't truthfully, because they 're never there to see. It's what he does in Ullbrig. If anybody 's ill, it 's always him they send for, and he always goes, whether it 's by night or day. When they 're well he talks about their hypocrisy and their sinfulness, and about their pride—you 've heard him, have n't you? But when they 're ill ... oh, you would n't know him. He 's as gentle as a woman. He looks at their medicine, and feels their pulse, and smooths their pillow; and oh, he talks so beautifully. When little Annie Summers died of diphtheria he sat up all the night after the operation, keeping her throat clear with a feather (that was very dangerous, of course, and he might have died of it), and when she was dead her father told him: 'I 've never given you a good word all my days, Mr. Mostyn,' and Father Mostyn only shook his head and told him: 'Well, well, John, give it me now.' And when poor old James Marshall was dying they sent for Father Mostyn, of course, and James told him he was a bit fearsome he had n't done the right thing in spending so much of his time at chapel. And Father Mostyn said: 'Make your mind easy, James, there are no churches or chapels up there.' Old Mr. Smethurst used to go to chapel, too, when he was well enough to go anywhere, but as Father Mostyn says, we can't help that. The wine will do him as much good as if he had been to church. And it was a long time ago. He 'll never go there any more.""Is he so ill as that?" asked the Spawer."He 's dying," said Pam.The little tremor of her lip, and the sudden moistness about her eyes—though he had witnessed these wonderful manifestations of her tender nature before on many an occasion—went to the Spawer's heart in the present instance like an arrow. Pam's tears were in everybody's service. Not idle tears, but tears that seemed the sacred seal of noble self-sacrifice and devotion.And to think he was so soon going to remove himself from the soft-dropping springs of their sympathy."What a ministering angel you are," he said, looking at her lightly enough, and yet—though Pam could not know that—with a kind of tightness about the throat."I 'm afraid I 'm not an angel," the girl regretted. "Not a bit of one. I wish I were.""On the contrary," he said, "wish nothing of the kind.""Why not?" she asked."Because Ullbrig would miss you so. Angels' visits are few and far between, and when they come they don't bring bottles. Be what you are," he told her. "A lay angel.""Don't you believe in real angels?" Pam asked him ingenuously. "Dr. Anderson does n't."The Spawer smiled."Kindness is the greatest angel in the world," he said, and looked at her. "I believe in kindness.""So do I," said Pam."And do you never, never get tired of doing kind actions?" he asked her curiously. "... Surely you must."Pam gave him a quick look and dropped her lip, as though a little lead-weight of admission were upon it."Sometimes I do," she admitted, and turned her face away from him as though the thought of her own offend-ing troubled her. "But somehow ... kind acts always seem to pay for themselves, don't you think?""Do they?" he asked hazily."Why, yes," Pam said, after a moment, just a little shaken in her confidence by his question. "The more you don't want to do a thing, the more you 're glad when you 've gone and done it—a kind thing I mean."The more you did n't want to do a thing the more you were glad when you 'd gone and done it. How did that apply to him?"... Father Mostyn says you must beware of doing kindnesses for the mere gratification of being thanked. He says that's a deadly sin—one of the prides of charity. There are a lot more, but that 's the worst. What do you think?""What do I think? Gracious!" laughed the Spawer, "I dare n't contradict his Reverence. I think so too.""But you! You 're quite different from me," the girl objected. "I could n't be kind at all if it were n't for Father Mostyn. All my kindnesses have been taught me by him." Such is the power of loyalty and loving adherence, that transfers its own virtues to the object of affection. "But you. I don't think you can help being kind. Some people can't. You seem to do things from the heart somehow, as though they came naturally to you; but me, I do all mine from the head, because I 've been taught what things are kind and what things are cruel. And often I make mistakes too." She was thinking of the schoolmaster. "But you never do."Did n't he? What were all his trumpery smiles and petty kindnesses, his smooth words and minor generosities, but little errors of excess in a grand sum of cruelty, that had brought the total to an amount he dared scarcely contemplate, and were compelling him this day to cancel these labyrinthine workings of arithmetic by a wholesale application of the sponge?"That," said he, looking leniently upon her, "is because your kindness, little woman, won't let you find flaws in mine. But there are flaws in it—great flaws.""Where?" asked Pam, with the earnestness of a child."All over," said the Spawer."You have always been kind to me," said Pam."Don't let 's talk of that," he responded cheerfully, affecting—double-dyed hypocrite that he knew himself to be—a sublime disregard of such kindnesses as had been his, which but served to illuminate his conduct in the girl's eyes with letters of celestial gold paint."May n't I talk to you about it ... ever, please?" the girl asked him."Oh, if it 's a question of pleases," he said, with laughing concession, "I would n't deny you for worlds. Talk away, dear child."Did he realise how much store the girl set by these diminutive titles of affectionate address? Did he know that each time he called her "Dear child" and "Dear girl" and "Little woman" (mere friendly substitutes for the Pam he never used) her heart leaped up in responsive gladness? Did he know that each of these designations, so lightly uttered by him, was a nail driven into the door against his departure, and that door the girl's own heart? Surely and truly he never knew it, or even our hero, Maurice Ethelbert Wynne, for all his blackguardism, would have shrunk from the usage of them."Now I don't know what to say," Pam said."Why ever not?""Because you told me to talk away.""How like a girl! Wants to do a thing until she 's bidden, and then ... be hanged if she will. You contrary little feminine."All the same, as soon as he adjured her not to mind, but to say no more about it, she found plenty to say in a sudden gush respecting his past kindness to her. He had been so good to her. She had told Father Mostyn to be sure and tell him how grateful she felt to him for all his goodness.... Had he? But she had been dying to tell him herself too. And somehow, whenever she had begun, he had always turned her off so kindly that she had never done any more than tell him that she wanted to tell him, and never told him; but to-day, when he had spoken aboutherkindness, she felt she must tell him about his. There had been no reason why he should have been kind to her. He had done it all so beautifully ... that there seemed nothing in it, and at times she 'd almost believed that there was nothing in it either, and that it was just happening so, and no more. But when she 'd come to look into it she saw exactly how much there was, and how it could have happened otherwise—oh, quite otherwise—but for his great kindness in preventing it. Why had he been so good to her? It was n't—as he 'd tried to make out—that there was anything to gain, because she 'd nothing in the world to give him except her thanks—and until to-day he 'd never even accepted those from her. Father Mostyn had told her, as he 'd told her himself, that he did n't give lessons to anybody else ... and that she was his only pupil. She 'd tried not to feel proud about that, because it was no merit of her own, but simply his own goodness; but she could n't help it. Father Mostyn said you might feel proud if your pride were pride of loyalty—as pride in the Church, or in the goodness of another—and in that way she 'd felt proud. But it was difficult dealing with prides; they got the better of you somehow. He 'd given her music because he said he knew where to send for it, and could get it down quicker—being known to the people—but that was just so that she need n't have to pay for it. And he 'd made her a present of Erckmann-Chatrian's "L'ami Fritz" and "Le Blocus," and a beautiful French Dictionary...."Well," he asked her, "... where 's the goodness in that?""It was all of it goodness.""Nothing of the sort, dear girl. It 's all pure selfish pride."Oh, no, no, no! Pam could n't believe that.Oh, but she must believe it. He 'd given her lessons solely for his own pleasure—not hers—because teaching her had interested him, and it was a sort of recreation. And he 'd taught her French for the same reason, and for the pride of being looked up to as a great French authority. And he 'd given her books and music so that she might say what a kind, generous fellow he was,—oh, she must n't make any mistake about the matter; it was precious little goodness she 'd have found about him. Oh, he was a bad one at heart!So, arguing agreeably on the subject of goodness specific and general, they walked along the high-road lane that leads to Shippus.Thus they came at last upon a group of two or three detached cottages along the roadside, white-washed and blinding, with thatched roofs and tarred palings, and a profusion of giant nasturtiums clambering over the doors and licking at the window-sills with a great yellow-scarlet blaze, as though the porches were on fire. Here Pam slowed up, and held out her hand for the basket."Shall you be long?" the Spawer asked, giving it to her."Perhaps you won't care to wait?" she suggested wistfully, though offering him his liberation."Trot along," said he, smiling back refusal of the proffered freedom. "I 'll hang about outside for you. Only promise me you won't slip away by the back."He smiled and raised his hat to her with that delightful blending of familiarity and homage which had won the girl's heart from the first. There were points about his kindness which she could not touch upon, even to him, and this was one. Other men might have made her position unbearable, but he never. The raising of the hat itself meant nothing, for she knew it was an instinctive recognition of her sex which accomplished itself, in his case, even when the sex was adequately disguised beneath harden aprons and masculine caps; but the action as he performed it had none of the odious insinuating gallantry to which the Saturday Hunmouth trippers had accustomed but never reconciled her. With no man had she ever been so intimate as with this one; and yet no man had ever so helped her to preserve her own modest self-respect.Ah, Pam, Pam, Pam! Do you see that queer little hunched-up shadow, carrying a shapeless lump of a basket, that keeps close by your side as you cross the road and lay your finger upon the latch of the tarred wooden wicket? It is the little old lady, as plain as plain can be. She makes no noise; her footsteps merge in yours; but day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment, she never leaves you. The time approaches when she shall rise up in her hideous deformity and declare you a prisoner in her dwelling. And you shall gaze upon the features of an altered world through wet windows of running tears.CHAPTER XVIIOutside the Spawer strolled gently to and fro along the white, staring roadway, stopping always a little short of the cottages lest his constant recurrence in face of the window might seem like an embargo upon Pam's moments. To a casual observer he looked, in his light flannels and straw hat—tilted a little over his nose for facing the sun—the typical figure of a summer lounger, with no endeavor beyond indolence, and no thought above keeping cool. But within, his brain was busily clanking and clamoring, like an overpressed newspaper office; editing, sub-editing, inserting, deleting, putting all his conduct into orderly columns and making ruthless "pi" of it. One item of intelligence alone remained stable amid the vast jumble of worthless, inconsequential paragraphs:DEPARTURE OF THE SPAWER.He was still pacing up and down the roadway, his eyes engrossed in some systematic method of placing his toes, engaged on the task of convincing himself that he had let no real possible opportunity slip during their walk of acquainting the girl with the inevitable, when the atmosphere of a sudden lighted up, as it were, and he saw the red poppies over the gateway, stooping somewhat at the latch."What! So soon?" he asked; and again, by the apparently spontaneous mental process, he threw off his heavy mantle of musing, and smiled as though he had nothing to think of but happiness. "Come! You 've let me off handsome."Then he saw that Pam's lips looked a little troubled, and her eyes sought his face with trepidation."It 's not that..." she said, watching his gaze like a compass. "... I 'm not done yet. But they ... they saw you were with me ... and ... and won't you come in?""It 's awfully good of 'em, little woman," he said. "Just tell 'em so, won't you? But really, I don't mind a bit. In fact, I 'd rather be out here in the sun.""I thought you would n't," Pam said, more to herself, as though his reply constituted a refusal of something not uttered, but in her mind only. And still she stood; and while she looked at the Spawer her eyes filled with that sublime wistfulness of theirs that finds no translation in words. "That 's not all," she said, after a pause. "I have n't told you. They know ... who you are.""Jove!" exclaimed the Spawer. "What a reputation I have in this part of the globe. If only it were universal.""It's my fault..." Pam confessed."There 's no fault about it, dear girl," he made haste to reassure her. "On the contrary, it 's a jolly kind thought.""But I 'm afraid ... I told them it was you when they asked if it was. And they know how beautifully you play." Her eyes were absolutely sealed down upon his now, so that not a flicker of their expression could escape her. "... And ... and poor old Mr. Smethurst said there were n't many that could play like you. And I told him, indeed there were n't. And I was telling him how beautifully you did play ... and all of a sudden he said he should just like to hear you play 'Sound the loud timbrel' ... before he died. Did I think you would? And Mrs. Smethurst was frightened, and said: 'Oh, John,' you must n't ask such things of a gentleman like that. He does n't play to such as us.' And he said, oh, so sadly: 'Nay, nay, I suppose I must n't. But I feel he 'd do it if only we dared ask him.' And I did n't know what to say ... because, of course, I know it's a dreadful thing to ask you. But I made a pretence of coming out to see whether you would come in and sit down."The Spawer wrinkled his brows."It 's not so much the asking," he said, with a perplexed smile, "but it 's the doing, little woman. Have they a piano forte?""No, no." Pam sank deeper into her trouble. "It 's only a harmonium ... a very old one. I know it 's a dreadful thing to ask you to sit down to a harmonium—and a hymn tune too. I 'd never, never have asked you to do such a thing for myself—but for somebody else that 's never going to get better again. Sometimes it does sick people you don't know how much good to have their fancies gratified. I offered to try and play it myself, but he told me: 'You can play it and welcome ... but it won't be him.'""Little woman," said the Spawer, "no one knows better than you what an act of martyrdom it is for a pianist to sit down to a harmonium and humble himself to a hymn tune. But because it 's you that have asked me, for your sake and through sheer pride—to show you how good I am—I 'll do it. It sounds good, but it's sheer, downright pride, remember. Only pride could get through with it. Now; lead on, kindly light."He took hold of her indulgently by the arm, and for a few paces walked so with her. To the girl that touch was the crowning patent of his nobility and goodness; to him it was so magnetically charged with the dangerous communion of red, warm blood that he let go of it by slow, imperceptible degrees, but with no less the feeling that he was discarding a deadly temptation. The warmth of a woman's body is an enervating atmosphere to the moral fibres of a man when that body is the object of his renunciation, and his fibres are slackened to start with. And the proud illumination about the girl's eyes as she went forward at his instigation was like the high, bright blaze of a lighthouse for holding him prisoner to its beacon against all the futile beating of his wings.Through the tarred gate and under the trailing flames of nasturtium Pam led him into the cottage of the dying man. It was a kitchen living-room they stepped into. All about the threshold and nasturtium porch was enveloped in its own stifling atmosphere of hot leaves and baking—as distinct from the corn-scented suffocation of the outer air. The kitchen itself seemed congested with a close, oveny odor; the accumulated smell of many meals and many bakings, never expelled, and the peaty reek of a place where the fire burns day in, day out.In a high-backed wooden chair by the warm side of the oven sat the dying man, not so nearly dead as the Spawer had pictured him, perhaps, but obviously stricken. He sat, an old withered figure, with the strange inertness of body characteristic of the aged and the very sick, alive seemingly no lower than his head, which moved slowly in the socket of a grey plaid muffler, wrapped about his neck and tucked away beneath the lapels of his dingy green-black coat. There was a red cotton cushion propped under his shoulders. His legs, motionless as the padded legs of a guy, and as convincing, looked strangely swollen and shapeless by contrast with his white and wasted face. At their extremity a pair of lifeless, thick ankles were squeezed into clumsy country slippers, whose toes never once, during the course of the Spawer's visit, stirred away from the red spot on the hearthrug where he had at first observed them. The invalid's breathing was the labored wheezy usage of lungs that bespoke asthma and bronchitis, and the hands that clasped the arms of the wooden chair might have been carved in horn. A couple of crooked sticks placed in the projecting angle of the range showed his extremity in the matter of locomotion. To the Spawer, whose experience with the dark obverse of life's bright medallion was restricted, and whose acquaintance with death and death's methods was more by hearsay, as of some notorious usurer, the picture was not a pleasant one. He had rather been left out in the pure sunshine with his own tormenting thoughts than be brought face to face with the actual draught that all men mortal must drain. And yet, he told himself, this was the sort of thing that Pam was almost daily sacrificing some portion of her young life to; giving generously a share of her own freshness and healthfulness and vitality to keep burning these wan and flickering flames. Wonder of wonders, the magic chalice of a woman's heart, that can pour forth its crystalline stream of love and comfort and consolation, and yet not run dry.An elderly woman, in a print dress, whose hands were nervously fidgeting with the jet brooch at her throat, and who seemed employed in watching the door with a smile not devoid of anxiety, curtseyed with painful respectfulness at the Spawer's entrance, and dusting the surface of a wooden chair, begged him to be seated. If he had lacked Pam's assurance that his presence was coveted he might have almost reproached himself for entering at some inopportune moment. A great air of formality seemed to enter with his advent, and stiffen all about them—he felt it himself—as though they were on the brink of some important ceremony with whose procedure they were unacquainted, like Protestants at High Mass. He took the chair, however, with the utmost friendliness and thankfulness he could assume, and tried to sit down upon it with a pleasant air of relief, as though it were a welcome accessory to his comfort, and he were grateful. He was very anxious, for his pride's sake, to do Pam credit."Ah!" he said, seeming to welcome the discovery of the fire as something, in these chill times, to be glad for, and addressing himself to the sick man, made pleasant allusion to it. "You keep a bit of a blaze, I see," he said."Ye 'll 'a to speak up tiv 'im a bit, sir," the woman instructed him deferentially. "'E weean't a 'eard ye. 'E 's gettin' that deaf it 's past mekkin' 'im understand at times."The man's head turned slowly in its grey woolen socket, as though he had caught the fact of his being in question, but was out of the reach of the inquiry, and seeking by the petition of his eye to be informed."'E 's speakin' about fire, gentleman is," the woman told him."What fire?" the sick man asked, in a frail, piping voice—a voice that a three-days' chicken might almost have challenged.He asked the question mechanically, with his eyes on the Spawer, but his interest lay somewhere beyond the borderland of earthly things, as though his mind, through much solitude of wandering, had strayed in advance of his body towards the bourne of them both, and was recalled to the flesh with increasing difficulty."Kitchen fire," his wife explained to him. "Fire i' grate yonder."The man followed the line of her knotted, bony forefinger, and let his eyes fall on the wasted red cinders, so symbolical of his own condition."Ay," he said, after a moment, when it had almost come to seem that the connection between finger and fireplace was quite lost. "Fire 's a bit o' company to me. We 've been good friends a goodish piece noo, but ah s'll not need 'er so much longer, ah 'm thinkin'.""Ye div n't know what ye 'll need," his wife admonished him, with the sharpness of personal anxiety. But to the Spawer she added, catching at her brooch: "Cough troubles 'im a deal o' nights noo. Doctor says 'e misdoots 'e 'll see another winter thruff. 'E 'd seummut to do to get thruff last."The sick man knew, with the dumb instinct of a dog, that his case was being discussed. He fastened his eyes on the Spawer's face to see whether it would give him any clue to the words that were being uttered. His wife's, by experience, he knew would tell him nothing; but a stranger's might."Ah 'm about at far end," he piped, in his placid, piteous harmonic of a voice, that issued between his lips with a sound like the blowing of a cornstraw. "Ah 've been a sad, naughty slaverbags i' my time, bud ah 'm done noo. It's 'arvest time wi' me, an' ah 'm bein' gathered in, ah think. Doctor 's patched my bellows up a deal o' times, bud they weean't stan' mendin' no more.""Why weean't they? Ye 've breathed a deal free-er last few days," his wife tried to instil into him. "It 's 'is 'eart as well," she told the Spawer. "Doctor says it 's about worn out. Ay, poor man, poor man! What a thing it is to sit an' watch 'im gan, ah-sure. An' 'im so active as 'e was. Bud cryin' weean't alter it, for ah 've tried, an' it 's no use. It 's Lord's will, an' we mun just be thankful 'at 'E 's spared 'im as long as 'E 'as, wi' me to look after 'im an' see 'e gans off comfortable. There 's monny 'at is n't blessed so well as that."The sick man fastened his eye on the Spawer again."Ye come fro' Dixon's?" he said inquiringly; and when the Spawer gave him an illuminative "Yes"—"Ay," he said, through his thin lips. "It 's long enough sin' ah seed 'im. Mebbe ye 'll do me the kindness to gie 'im mah respecks when ye get back. Monny 's the time 'im an' me 's met i' Oommuth market an' driven wum [home] i' Tankard's 'bus together.... Ah 've been nowt bud trouble tiv 'er sin' day she wor fond enough to tek me, an' she would n't 'a tekken me then, bud ah begged ower 'ard. An' ah 'm nowt bud trouble tiv 'er noo.""Ay, an' ah 'd tek ye agen lad," the thin, worn woman told him, with an assurance that was almost fierce. "Ne'er mind whether ye 're a bad un or no. Ah 've nivver rued day ah tekt ye—though ye 'd gie'n me twice trouble ye did. Ah mud 'ave looked far to fin' a better, an' then not fun' [found] 'im. Let ye be as drunk as ye would, ye nivver gied me a bad wod nor lifted 'and agen me.""Nay, ah nivver lifted 'and agen ye," the man assented. "Ah 'ad n't need. Bud that 's little to my credit. Ah trailed ye thruff tribulation. What time ye was n't workin' to mek good what ah 'd wasted ye was weepin' an' waitin' o' me. There 's scarcelins a Saturday neet, at one time, ye set oot wi' a dry eye.""Ay, bud ye nivver stayed away ower Sunday," his wife claimed, with pride. "Ye was allus back an' to spare when Oolbrig bells got set o' ringin'. An' it's not ivvery man's wife about this district 'at can say same of 'er 'usband."The sick man listened to her, and a pale, wintry smile flickered across his face and over his frost-nipped lips. Years ago, perhaps, it had been a smile as full of sunlight as the Spawer's own, and dear to the woman's heart. Perhaps her soul had pined for that very smile, and drunk of its remembrance, in the dark hours that clouded her life from time to time. The sick man turned his eyes upon the Spawer, while yet the feeble ray illuminated them."Ah did n't chose so badlins," he said, with a tinge of the dry humor that sparkles mirthfully in the men of these parts like the crackling of blazing twigs under a pot. "Nay, ah got best o' bargain when she fastened 'ersen. Chosin' a wife 's same as chosin' a mare or owt else, an' there 's a deal o' ways o' chosin' wrong. Don't tek notice o' way a lass gans on tiv you, if ye want to pick a good un—for they 're all t' same when they 're carryin' on wi' a man. Good uns an' bad uns acts alike then. Div n't tek a woman 'll 'at fin's ower much fault wi' 'er neighbors—syke a woman 'll fin' plenty wi' you when she 's gotten ye fast. Ye want to 'ave a sharp eye when ye gan coortin'. There 's some on 'em 'at gans coortin' by neet, 'at scarcelins knows look o' their lass by day. That 's no way. Don't tek on wi' a lass because she carries a 'ymn book. Onny lass can carry a 'ymn book. Tek one 'at 's gotten all 'er 'ymns i' 'er 'eart. Don't trust yersen tiv a lass 'at wastes all 'er time i' runnin' after ye. Think on it 's 'er feythur's time she 's wastin', 'appen, an' when she 's gotten ye she 'll waste yours. Ay, an' try an' pick a wench 'at dizz n't mind doin' what she can to mek it a bit brighter for them 'at 's gannin' quick down shady side o' life. 'Appen she 'll do t' same when it comes tiv your ton [turn]."All these things the Spawer promised to bear in mind when the time came, with the despicable hypocrisy that assumed, as a cloak, the smiling improbability of any such occurrence. Cad that he felt himself, he dared not look at Pam, seated apart on a chair by the door leading into a small scullery beyond. Like Peter he kept denying—by inference, at least—the facts of a case that would so unpleasantly involve him. Like Peter, each successive denial smote him to the heart; he wept in spirit over his own spirit's weakness. And yet, as he asked himself very naturally, even as he held his smile towards the old man, and studiously away from the girl that fulfilled (either in actuality or in the guilty similarity set up by his soul) every condition of the old fellow's warning—was this the proper moment to declare to her what he had to declare to her? Could he for the first time acquaint her with facts for which she was all unprepared before strangers? No, no, no. Later on, he swore it, he would fulfil his afternoon's mission. He was merely a musician, he told himself, using destiny as his fiddle, tuning the strings of circumstance to the tune needed of him. So, catching sight of the little despicable harmonium for the hundredth time, with the suddenly sparkling eye for a revelation, "What," said he, in accents of surprised pleasure that even deceived Pam—(though he dared not have thought it)—"a harmonium?"The old woman whipped off its meagre tippet of oilcloth in a twinkling, and displayed its poor double octave of discolored celluloid with a toothless smile of proud possession."Mester bought it," she said. "He was allus fond of a bit o' music."How was she to know, poor soul, the strickening effect that fatal use of the diminutive had on the sensitive fibres of the Spawer's nature? Not from his face, surely, for he smiled pure sunlight.They dusted the keys for him, and a chair, and put up the fragile desk, that subsided like a schooner before the blast, with its masts bending, and the Spawer sat down and did his best.Heavens, what a best!The very tone of the instrument that cried out under his touch shook his soul and almost frightened his fingers from the keys. So raucous it was; so noisily sanctimonious; so redolent of blind musicians; of street-corner meetings; so unblushingly bald; so callous; so unsensitive; so ostentatious; so utterly awful. Every nerve, fibre, and tissue of musical organization was offended; it was a crying offence against every instinct of musical art. And all the while, as though the soul itself were not being sufficiently punished by humiliation, the body was being subjected to the physical indignity of working its legs like a journeyman scissors-grinder.Ye gods! the tragic absurdity of it all. To musical natures less cultured, to senses less susceptible than the Spawer's, there would have been the rising of throats and the wetness of tears during this scene, for, truth to tell, it lacked none of the elements of moving pathos and tragedy. The dying man; the care-worn woman; the girl with the compassionate lips; the musician bending over his task of devotion; the hymn tune evolved into harmony by his shaping fingers from the low humming of the girl's lips:"Sound the loud timbrel o'er Egypt's dark sea;Jehovah hath triumphed, His people are free..."the half-drawn blind—so soon to be drawn down to its full; the sun beating on the window and on the red-tiled floor....Not one witness in a thousand, drawn independently to consider the scene, would have pierced to the heart of the pathos, and grasped through the tearful confusion of their sympathies, that perhaps the most beautiful focus-point of emotion was in the seated figure of the musician, castigating his musical soul with biting thongs for the sake of one girl and a dying man, and showing no sign.And what recompense of moral gratification did he receive in return for his act of artistic abnegation? Little enough, it must be confessed, that the Spawer could discover. The old man looked older, he thought; the old woman's prefatory smile of appreciative pride had been quenched by the music, and her attitude when he turned round upon her was the incomprehending silence of respect. All her face, so to speak, had fallen to pieces like an over-shortened pie, with no concentration of interest to hold up the crust of its expression. Perhaps the very harmonies with which the Spawer had clad the naked melody of a hymn tune had so baffled their decaying, primitive hearing that they had failed to recognise it in its new garb. He had done better, possibly, to play the melody out for them with one finger. Pam's face alone compensated him. She, he knew—and was glad to know—was too much awakened to the scope and magnitude of music to have derived anything approaching personal pleasure from a crude performance such as this; but she had realised what nausea it must have been to him, and in the light of a sacrifice alone she had rejoiced in his achievement.Well, however, the achievement was over, and they were ready to go any time now. The old woman replaced the oilcloth over the harmonium with a look of relief (or so the Spawer thought, but he thought wrong), and Pam was just opening her lips to suggest departure when the old man piped out in his faltering treble:"Ay, bud ye 'll gie me a chapter before ye gan, lass, weean't ye?"Pam turned a troubled eye part-way towards the Spawer, as though it were accompanying a thought of hers on its own account; but she stopped it before it reached him, and dropped submissive hands."Would you like me to?" she asked gently."Ay; ah s'd tek it kindly if ye would.""You don't mind?" she asked the Spawer softly; and with his assent, readily given, "I will," she said."Gie 'er the Book, lass," he ordered his wife; and the careworn woman lifted it from beneath a pair of folded spectacles, and delivered it reverently into the girl's receiving fingers."What shall I read you?" Pam asked, setting the book on her knees, and turning over the pages, now backwards, now forwards."Ah 'll 'ave that bit o' John," he told her, "about mansions an' such-like, if ye 've no objections.""Is that the fourteenth chapter?" Pam suggested inquiringly. "Did n't we have it last time?""Ay, an' we mud as lief 'ave it this," he decided placidly. "It 'll be none the wuss of a time or two. Book 's not same as other things. There 's allus seummut fresh in it for them 'at gans tiv it wi' a right 'eart. Ah s'd 'a done better if ah 'd ganned tiv it when ah 'ad use o' legs Lord gid me. It 's ower late to larn me to walk straight i' this wuld noo, but 'appen ah s'll be about ready to scrammle along to next, when time comes.""The fourteenth chapter of the Gospel according to St. John," Pam announced, as signifying that she had found the place, and smoothing down the page with her soft finger, lifted her voice and read:"Let not your heart be troubled.... Ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you."When Pam said: "If it were not so ... I would have told you," one felt it must be so indeed. Such lips could never lie. And as the girl's clear voice rose and filled that little kitchen—so compassionate, so truthful, so natural—the full sublimity of the picture of a sudden swelled up in the Spawer's soul and mounted to his throat. The ingredient elements of the scene were unchanged, but now how exalted. He saw, in a flash, as though his spiritual eyes had been opened, the true pathos of the picture: the dying man, seated so motionless in his chair, with his faded blue eyes gazing into Heaven through the blind; the worn woman, the better portion of whose years and loving energy the man was taking to the grave with him; the sweet, purifying sunlight bathing the world outside; the girl with the lips of celestial compassion, drawing old truths from the battered and thumb-marked Bible, distilling them anew in pure liquid sound, and dropping them so coolingly into the overheated kitchen of death. All these he saw—acutely with his inward vision, dimly with his material—and wondered, as he saw it, that the girl could proceed so courageously and so unfalteringly on her consolatory path. He himself would have fared along it badly, and knew it. But it was not the last time he was to marvel at the girl's self-possession when circumstances demanded, and perhaps this second time he would remember it even better."Ye 'll tek liberty to call agen, mebbe," the old man invited him as they stood finally for departure, "... if ah 'm not mekkin' ower free to ask ye; but it 's a lonely road when a man draws to yend of 'is days. Busy folk can't reckon to be treubled wi' 'im—an' i' 'arvest an' all. Ah wor no better mysen when ah 'ad my faculties. Ye 'll be stayin' wi' Dixon a goodish while yet, mebbe?"At the direct question the Spawer's resolution spun round and made as though to turn tail. There was just a slight pause—quite inappreciable to the others about him, but painfully magnified to himself—while he struggled whether to ignore the opportunity or seize it like a man, and sign irrevocably the bond of his departure."Perhaps..." he was quibbling with the reply even yet, while speaking, not knowing whether to evade or to grapple with his chance. Then he grappled suddenly, but always with that frank, pleasant smile of his that showed no inkling of an inward perplexity. "... On the other hand," he said, "... it 's possible I may be going any time now—any day even." He sensed rather than saw the quick turn of the girl's eyes upon him, and knew, too, in what kind of mild, protesting surprise she was looking at him. She could not credit that he should first communicate such an important piece of intelligence to strangers, without having prepared her by a single word, and was wondering sorrowfully whether it were not an excuse to evade any promise of visiting the old man again."It all depends," the Spawer explained, throwing his explanation over the truth of the matter like a pleasant nebula, "... on a letter. I 'm expecting to hear. One can't stay for ever, you know," he added amiably, "even where one 's happy.""Nay, nay," the old man acquiesced mournfully. "When a man comes to my years 'e fin's that oot tiv 'is sorrer. Well, well; ah awpe [hope] when ye think fit to change ye 'll change for t' better, young gen'leman, an' ah thank ye for yer company an' yer kindness." He turned the faint flicker of his long-ago smile upon Pam, like the sunlight stealing over an autumn landscape."Pam 's not likely to change yet a bit," he said, with a sense of comfort in the thought, as though the girl were a true staff to rest on in time of trouble. Pam shook her head reassuringly. "Nay, Pam mun 't change yet a bit," he admonished her. "She mun stop an' see t' old man 's time oot, ah think. 'E weean't keep 'er so long noo, but 'e 's a selfish old chap; 'e dizz n't want to part wi' 'er no sooner nor need be. She 's been as good tiv 'im as if she 'd been 'is own bairn. Ay, an' better. There 's not monny bairns 'at 'ud 'a done as much—an' said as little. Nay, nay; they 'd 'a telt 'im 'e was a treublesome old feller long sin'. Good-by, lass; good-by—an' gie my respecks tiv 'is Rivrence when 'e comes back."His eye kindled momentarily as the girl laid light fingers on the horny right hand and stooped and kissed him. But the light of this died out of them as soon as he had done speaking, and the pressure of her clasp relaxed. As they passed out of the kitchen his gaze followed them dimly from afar, seeming to inquire who were these figures departing, and whence came they and what their errand, and in what remote, unintelligible degree their presence concerned himself.
CHAPTER XVI
She wore a great hat of coarse Zulu straw, trimmed with white muslin and scarlet poppies, and a pale cream muslin dress, beneath whose hem her neat shoes and trim, black ankles showed themselves so demurely, like sleek twin witches of seductive enchantment. In her left hand she carried a snowy-topped basket emblematic of Faith, Hope and Charity—particularly this last—while the thumb of her cotton-gloved right hand was tucked, at the time of their recognition, into a green crocodile leather belt. She was just passing the corner, indeed, as she caught sight of the Spawer, and had to fall back on her heel to verify the impression; then she stood waiting for him, swinging the basket in front of her skirt with both hands, and showing the glad smile for a welcome and unexpected meeting. All the gloomy necessities of the encounter were packed up and stowed away at the back of the Spawer's being with the first slight shock of realisation. Almost spontaneously he discarded his reflections as though they had been impersonal and bearing no reference to the girl before him, and advanced upon her with the sunny face that seemed never to have known the clouds of disquietude.
"How funny," said Pam simply, as he came near. "... I was just thinking about you."
"I can see you were," he laughed.
"Can you?" asked Pam, smiling, but a shade incredulous.
"By your ears," he told her.
Pam put her fingers to them.
"It is the sun," she said, nipping a little crimson lobe between cool white-cottoned fingers. "Yours burn too. Were you thinking about me?"
"Perhaps."
"Were you? What were you thinking?"
"Tell me first what you were thinking about me?"
"I was thinking whether I should see you if I looked up the Cliff Wrangham road. But I never thought I should. And you?"
"I was thinking the same thing."
"Were you really? Did you want to see me ... about anything?"
It was the Spawer's opportunity to say what he had come to say, but like a faint-hearted jumper, feeling he had not bite enough for his purpose, he burked the hurdle.
"I don't know that I wanted to see you ... about anything," he answered, covering up his momentary hesitation with a smile, "... but I was perfectly agreeable to see you about nothing at all."
"Perhaps you 're coming to the post?" Pam hazarded.
"Nothing so reputable," said he. "Fact is, I 'm afraid I 've broken loose to-day. I 'm on the laze."
"You lazy!" laughed Pam, in incredulous amazement.
"Oh, horribly lazy, dear girl," he said. "If you don't know that you don't know me. It comes on at periods. I can't yet decide whether my hard work is sheer activity of a guilty conscience, or my laziness is the collapse of a conscience too highly taxed, but the one follows the other as night follows day. I 've not done a stroke of work since getting up. This morning I washed myself and bathed—you 'll say that's a good work done. This afternoon I determined to stroll inland and see if there was anybody disposed to take pity on my sad idleness. What a pretty basket!"
Pam held it up for his inspection.
"May I lift the cover?"
Pam nodded and laughed, showing all her white, small teeth in assent.
"Bottles," said he, taking a peep under the snowy serviette. "We 're well met. Which way are you going?"
"I 'm going to Shippus," said Pam, with a little wistful accent on the "I 'm," expressive of solitude.
"The very thing," said the Spawer. "And we won't touch them till we get there. Not a drop. Will you take me with you?"
"Will you go with me?" said Pam, a light of desire suddenly dawning in her eyes at his half-bantering suggestion.
"If you 'll have me."
"I 'll have you. But perhaps you would n't care ... it's a sick call."
"I don't care what it is," said the Spawer, "so long as it 's nothing catching. Tell me it 's not smallpox and I 'm with you."
"Oh, it is n't smallpox," Pam reassured him. "It 's only poor old Mr. Smethurst."
"Come," said the Spawer, relieved, "that does n't sound so alarming. I 'll risk it. And are the bottles his or ours?"
"His," said Pam, as the Spawer disengaged her of them, and they commenced to walk forward together. "Poor old gentleman. There 's a lemon jelly and a bottle of port and a bottle of whiskey. Those are from Father Mostyn—the very same that he drinks himself." Her eyes kindled luminously at the mention. "Is n't it good of him? Nobody knows but me what lots of things he gives away ... and what lots of things he does for people. He 'd do anything for anybody. They don't understand him in Ullbrig a bit. I did n't always, but I do now. They talk about his house, and say it wants painting. And of course it does. And they say he 's a Roman Catholic, and gets paid by the Pope for every conversion he makes; but that 's not true. He 's nothing at all to do with the Pope. And then they laugh at him because he goes down on his knees in church, but as he said one day to Mr. Stevens (Sheppardman): 'You touch your hat to me because I 'm his reverence the vicar, but you 're too proud to bow to the Lord Jesus.' And it 's not a matter of what he does in church. They ought n't to go by that—and they can't truthfully, because they 're never there to see. It's what he does in Ullbrig. If anybody 's ill, it 's always him they send for, and he always goes, whether it 's by night or day. When they 're well he talks about their hypocrisy and their sinfulness, and about their pride—you 've heard him, have n't you? But when they 're ill ... oh, you would n't know him. He 's as gentle as a woman. He looks at their medicine, and feels their pulse, and smooths their pillow; and oh, he talks so beautifully. When little Annie Summers died of diphtheria he sat up all the night after the operation, keeping her throat clear with a feather (that was very dangerous, of course, and he might have died of it), and when she was dead her father told him: 'I 've never given you a good word all my days, Mr. Mostyn,' and Father Mostyn only shook his head and told him: 'Well, well, John, give it me now.' And when poor old James Marshall was dying they sent for Father Mostyn, of course, and James told him he was a bit fearsome he had n't done the right thing in spending so much of his time at chapel. And Father Mostyn said: 'Make your mind easy, James, there are no churches or chapels up there.' Old Mr. Smethurst used to go to chapel, too, when he was well enough to go anywhere, but as Father Mostyn says, we can't help that. The wine will do him as much good as if he had been to church. And it was a long time ago. He 'll never go there any more."
"Is he so ill as that?" asked the Spawer.
"He 's dying," said Pam.
The little tremor of her lip, and the sudden moistness about her eyes—though he had witnessed these wonderful manifestations of her tender nature before on many an occasion—went to the Spawer's heart in the present instance like an arrow. Pam's tears were in everybody's service. Not idle tears, but tears that seemed the sacred seal of noble self-sacrifice and devotion.
And to think he was so soon going to remove himself from the soft-dropping springs of their sympathy.
"What a ministering angel you are," he said, looking at her lightly enough, and yet—though Pam could not know that—with a kind of tightness about the throat.
"I 'm afraid I 'm not an angel," the girl regretted. "Not a bit of one. I wish I were."
"On the contrary," he said, "wish nothing of the kind."
"Why not?" she asked.
"Because Ullbrig would miss you so. Angels' visits are few and far between, and when they come they don't bring bottles. Be what you are," he told her. "A lay angel."
"Don't you believe in real angels?" Pam asked him ingenuously. "Dr. Anderson does n't."
The Spawer smiled.
"Kindness is the greatest angel in the world," he said, and looked at her. "I believe in kindness."
"So do I," said Pam.
"And do you never, never get tired of doing kind actions?" he asked her curiously. "... Surely you must."
Pam gave him a quick look and dropped her lip, as though a little lead-weight of admission were upon it.
"Sometimes I do," she admitted, and turned her face away from him as though the thought of her own offend-ing troubled her. "But somehow ... kind acts always seem to pay for themselves, don't you think?"
"Do they?" he asked hazily.
"Why, yes," Pam said, after a moment, just a little shaken in her confidence by his question. "The more you don't want to do a thing, the more you 're glad when you 've gone and done it—a kind thing I mean."
The more you did n't want to do a thing the more you were glad when you 'd gone and done it. How did that apply to him?
"... Father Mostyn says you must beware of doing kindnesses for the mere gratification of being thanked. He says that's a deadly sin—one of the prides of charity. There are a lot more, but that 's the worst. What do you think?"
"What do I think? Gracious!" laughed the Spawer, "I dare n't contradict his Reverence. I think so too."
"But you! You 're quite different from me," the girl objected. "I could n't be kind at all if it were n't for Father Mostyn. All my kindnesses have been taught me by him." Such is the power of loyalty and loving adherence, that transfers its own virtues to the object of affection. "But you. I don't think you can help being kind. Some people can't. You seem to do things from the heart somehow, as though they came naturally to you; but me, I do all mine from the head, because I 've been taught what things are kind and what things are cruel. And often I make mistakes too." She was thinking of the schoolmaster. "But you never do."
Did n't he? What were all his trumpery smiles and petty kindnesses, his smooth words and minor generosities, but little errors of excess in a grand sum of cruelty, that had brought the total to an amount he dared scarcely contemplate, and were compelling him this day to cancel these labyrinthine workings of arithmetic by a wholesale application of the sponge?
"That," said he, looking leniently upon her, "is because your kindness, little woman, won't let you find flaws in mine. But there are flaws in it—great flaws."
"Where?" asked Pam, with the earnestness of a child.
"All over," said the Spawer.
"You have always been kind to me," said Pam.
"Don't let 's talk of that," he responded cheerfully, affecting—double-dyed hypocrite that he knew himself to be—a sublime disregard of such kindnesses as had been his, which but served to illuminate his conduct in the girl's eyes with letters of celestial gold paint.
"May n't I talk to you about it ... ever, please?" the girl asked him.
"Oh, if it 's a question of pleases," he said, with laughing concession, "I would n't deny you for worlds. Talk away, dear child."
Did he realise how much store the girl set by these diminutive titles of affectionate address? Did he know that each time he called her "Dear child" and "Dear girl" and "Little woman" (mere friendly substitutes for the Pam he never used) her heart leaped up in responsive gladness? Did he know that each of these designations, so lightly uttered by him, was a nail driven into the door against his departure, and that door the girl's own heart? Surely and truly he never knew it, or even our hero, Maurice Ethelbert Wynne, for all his blackguardism, would have shrunk from the usage of them.
"Now I don't know what to say," Pam said.
"Why ever not?"
"Because you told me to talk away."
"How like a girl! Wants to do a thing until she 's bidden, and then ... be hanged if she will. You contrary little feminine."
All the same, as soon as he adjured her not to mind, but to say no more about it, she found plenty to say in a sudden gush respecting his past kindness to her. He had been so good to her. She had told Father Mostyn to be sure and tell him how grateful she felt to him for all his goodness.... Had he? But she had been dying to tell him herself too. And somehow, whenever she had begun, he had always turned her off so kindly that she had never done any more than tell him that she wanted to tell him, and never told him; but to-day, when he had spoken aboutherkindness, she felt she must tell him about his. There had been no reason why he should have been kind to her. He had done it all so beautifully ... that there seemed nothing in it, and at times she 'd almost believed that there was nothing in it either, and that it was just happening so, and no more. But when she 'd come to look into it she saw exactly how much there was, and how it could have happened otherwise—oh, quite otherwise—but for his great kindness in preventing it. Why had he been so good to her? It was n't—as he 'd tried to make out—that there was anything to gain, because she 'd nothing in the world to give him except her thanks—and until to-day he 'd never even accepted those from her. Father Mostyn had told her, as he 'd told her himself, that he did n't give lessons to anybody else ... and that she was his only pupil. She 'd tried not to feel proud about that, because it was no merit of her own, but simply his own goodness; but she could n't help it. Father Mostyn said you might feel proud if your pride were pride of loyalty—as pride in the Church, or in the goodness of another—and in that way she 'd felt proud. But it was difficult dealing with prides; they got the better of you somehow. He 'd given her music because he said he knew where to send for it, and could get it down quicker—being known to the people—but that was just so that she need n't have to pay for it. And he 'd made her a present of Erckmann-Chatrian's "L'ami Fritz" and "Le Blocus," and a beautiful French Dictionary....
"Well," he asked her, "... where 's the goodness in that?"
"It was all of it goodness."
"Nothing of the sort, dear girl. It 's all pure selfish pride."
Oh, no, no, no! Pam could n't believe that.
Oh, but she must believe it. He 'd given her lessons solely for his own pleasure—not hers—because teaching her had interested him, and it was a sort of recreation. And he 'd taught her French for the same reason, and for the pride of being looked up to as a great French authority. And he 'd given her books and music so that she might say what a kind, generous fellow he was,—oh, she must n't make any mistake about the matter; it was precious little goodness she 'd have found about him. Oh, he was a bad one at heart!
So, arguing agreeably on the subject of goodness specific and general, they walked along the high-road lane that leads to Shippus.
Thus they came at last upon a group of two or three detached cottages along the roadside, white-washed and blinding, with thatched roofs and tarred palings, and a profusion of giant nasturtiums clambering over the doors and licking at the window-sills with a great yellow-scarlet blaze, as though the porches were on fire. Here Pam slowed up, and held out her hand for the basket.
"Shall you be long?" the Spawer asked, giving it to her.
"Perhaps you won't care to wait?" she suggested wistfully, though offering him his liberation.
"Trot along," said he, smiling back refusal of the proffered freedom. "I 'll hang about outside for you. Only promise me you won't slip away by the back."
He smiled and raised his hat to her with that delightful blending of familiarity and homage which had won the girl's heart from the first. There were points about his kindness which she could not touch upon, even to him, and this was one. Other men might have made her position unbearable, but he never. The raising of the hat itself meant nothing, for she knew it was an instinctive recognition of her sex which accomplished itself, in his case, even when the sex was adequately disguised beneath harden aprons and masculine caps; but the action as he performed it had none of the odious insinuating gallantry to which the Saturday Hunmouth trippers had accustomed but never reconciled her. With no man had she ever been so intimate as with this one; and yet no man had ever so helped her to preserve her own modest self-respect.
Ah, Pam, Pam, Pam! Do you see that queer little hunched-up shadow, carrying a shapeless lump of a basket, that keeps close by your side as you cross the road and lay your finger upon the latch of the tarred wooden wicket? It is the little old lady, as plain as plain can be. She makes no noise; her footsteps merge in yours; but day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment, she never leaves you. The time approaches when she shall rise up in her hideous deformity and declare you a prisoner in her dwelling. And you shall gaze upon the features of an altered world through wet windows of running tears.
CHAPTER XVII
Outside the Spawer strolled gently to and fro along the white, staring roadway, stopping always a little short of the cottages lest his constant recurrence in face of the window might seem like an embargo upon Pam's moments. To a casual observer he looked, in his light flannels and straw hat—tilted a little over his nose for facing the sun—the typical figure of a summer lounger, with no endeavor beyond indolence, and no thought above keeping cool. But within, his brain was busily clanking and clamoring, like an overpressed newspaper office; editing, sub-editing, inserting, deleting, putting all his conduct into orderly columns and making ruthless "pi" of it. One item of intelligence alone remained stable amid the vast jumble of worthless, inconsequential paragraphs:
DEPARTURE OF THE SPAWER.
He was still pacing up and down the roadway, his eyes engrossed in some systematic method of placing his toes, engaged on the task of convincing himself that he had let no real possible opportunity slip during their walk of acquainting the girl with the inevitable, when the atmosphere of a sudden lighted up, as it were, and he saw the red poppies over the gateway, stooping somewhat at the latch.
"What! So soon?" he asked; and again, by the apparently spontaneous mental process, he threw off his heavy mantle of musing, and smiled as though he had nothing to think of but happiness. "Come! You 've let me off handsome."
Then he saw that Pam's lips looked a little troubled, and her eyes sought his face with trepidation.
"It 's not that..." she said, watching his gaze like a compass. "... I 'm not done yet. But they ... they saw you were with me ... and ... and won't you come in?"
"It 's awfully good of 'em, little woman," he said. "Just tell 'em so, won't you? But really, I don't mind a bit. In fact, I 'd rather be out here in the sun."
"I thought you would n't," Pam said, more to herself, as though his reply constituted a refusal of something not uttered, but in her mind only. And still she stood; and while she looked at the Spawer her eyes filled with that sublime wistfulness of theirs that finds no translation in words. "That 's not all," she said, after a pause. "I have n't told you. They know ... who you are."
"Jove!" exclaimed the Spawer. "What a reputation I have in this part of the globe. If only it were universal."
"It's my fault..." Pam confessed.
"There 's no fault about it, dear girl," he made haste to reassure her. "On the contrary, it 's a jolly kind thought."
"But I 'm afraid ... I told them it was you when they asked if it was. And they know how beautifully you play." Her eyes were absolutely sealed down upon his now, so that not a flicker of their expression could escape her. "... And ... and poor old Mr. Smethurst said there were n't many that could play like you. And I told him, indeed there were n't. And I was telling him how beautifully you did play ... and all of a sudden he said he should just like to hear you play 'Sound the loud timbrel' ... before he died. Did I think you would? And Mrs. Smethurst was frightened, and said: 'Oh, John,' you must n't ask such things of a gentleman like that. He does n't play to such as us.' And he said, oh, so sadly: 'Nay, nay, I suppose I must n't. But I feel he 'd do it if only we dared ask him.' And I did n't know what to say ... because, of course, I know it's a dreadful thing to ask you. But I made a pretence of coming out to see whether you would come in and sit down."
The Spawer wrinkled his brows.
"It 's not so much the asking," he said, with a perplexed smile, "but it 's the doing, little woman. Have they a piano forte?"
"No, no." Pam sank deeper into her trouble. "It 's only a harmonium ... a very old one. I know it 's a dreadful thing to ask you to sit down to a harmonium—and a hymn tune too. I 'd never, never have asked you to do such a thing for myself—but for somebody else that 's never going to get better again. Sometimes it does sick people you don't know how much good to have their fancies gratified. I offered to try and play it myself, but he told me: 'You can play it and welcome ... but it won't be him.'"
"Little woman," said the Spawer, "no one knows better than you what an act of martyrdom it is for a pianist to sit down to a harmonium and humble himself to a hymn tune. But because it 's you that have asked me, for your sake and through sheer pride—to show you how good I am—I 'll do it. It sounds good, but it's sheer, downright pride, remember. Only pride could get through with it. Now; lead on, kindly light."
He took hold of her indulgently by the arm, and for a few paces walked so with her. To the girl that touch was the crowning patent of his nobility and goodness; to him it was so magnetically charged with the dangerous communion of red, warm blood that he let go of it by slow, imperceptible degrees, but with no less the feeling that he was discarding a deadly temptation. The warmth of a woman's body is an enervating atmosphere to the moral fibres of a man when that body is the object of his renunciation, and his fibres are slackened to start with. And the proud illumination about the girl's eyes as she went forward at his instigation was like the high, bright blaze of a lighthouse for holding him prisoner to its beacon against all the futile beating of his wings.
Through the tarred gate and under the trailing flames of nasturtium Pam led him into the cottage of the dying man. It was a kitchen living-room they stepped into. All about the threshold and nasturtium porch was enveloped in its own stifling atmosphere of hot leaves and baking—as distinct from the corn-scented suffocation of the outer air. The kitchen itself seemed congested with a close, oveny odor; the accumulated smell of many meals and many bakings, never expelled, and the peaty reek of a place where the fire burns day in, day out.
In a high-backed wooden chair by the warm side of the oven sat the dying man, not so nearly dead as the Spawer had pictured him, perhaps, but obviously stricken. He sat, an old withered figure, with the strange inertness of body characteristic of the aged and the very sick, alive seemingly no lower than his head, which moved slowly in the socket of a grey plaid muffler, wrapped about his neck and tucked away beneath the lapels of his dingy green-black coat. There was a red cotton cushion propped under his shoulders. His legs, motionless as the padded legs of a guy, and as convincing, looked strangely swollen and shapeless by contrast with his white and wasted face. At their extremity a pair of lifeless, thick ankles were squeezed into clumsy country slippers, whose toes never once, during the course of the Spawer's visit, stirred away from the red spot on the hearthrug where he had at first observed them. The invalid's breathing was the labored wheezy usage of lungs that bespoke asthma and bronchitis, and the hands that clasped the arms of the wooden chair might have been carved in horn. A couple of crooked sticks placed in the projecting angle of the range showed his extremity in the matter of locomotion. To the Spawer, whose experience with the dark obverse of life's bright medallion was restricted, and whose acquaintance with death and death's methods was more by hearsay, as of some notorious usurer, the picture was not a pleasant one. He had rather been left out in the pure sunshine with his own tormenting thoughts than be brought face to face with the actual draught that all men mortal must drain. And yet, he told himself, this was the sort of thing that Pam was almost daily sacrificing some portion of her young life to; giving generously a share of her own freshness and healthfulness and vitality to keep burning these wan and flickering flames. Wonder of wonders, the magic chalice of a woman's heart, that can pour forth its crystalline stream of love and comfort and consolation, and yet not run dry.
An elderly woman, in a print dress, whose hands were nervously fidgeting with the jet brooch at her throat, and who seemed employed in watching the door with a smile not devoid of anxiety, curtseyed with painful respectfulness at the Spawer's entrance, and dusting the surface of a wooden chair, begged him to be seated. If he had lacked Pam's assurance that his presence was coveted he might have almost reproached himself for entering at some inopportune moment. A great air of formality seemed to enter with his advent, and stiffen all about them—he felt it himself—as though they were on the brink of some important ceremony with whose procedure they were unacquainted, like Protestants at High Mass. He took the chair, however, with the utmost friendliness and thankfulness he could assume, and tried to sit down upon it with a pleasant air of relief, as though it were a welcome accessory to his comfort, and he were grateful. He was very anxious, for his pride's sake, to do Pam credit.
"Ah!" he said, seeming to welcome the discovery of the fire as something, in these chill times, to be glad for, and addressing himself to the sick man, made pleasant allusion to it. "You keep a bit of a blaze, I see," he said.
"Ye 'll 'a to speak up tiv 'im a bit, sir," the woman instructed him deferentially. "'E weean't a 'eard ye. 'E 's gettin' that deaf it 's past mekkin' 'im understand at times."
The man's head turned slowly in its grey woolen socket, as though he had caught the fact of his being in question, but was out of the reach of the inquiry, and seeking by the petition of his eye to be informed.
"'E 's speakin' about fire, gentleman is," the woman told him.
"What fire?" the sick man asked, in a frail, piping voice—a voice that a three-days' chicken might almost have challenged.
He asked the question mechanically, with his eyes on the Spawer, but his interest lay somewhere beyond the borderland of earthly things, as though his mind, through much solitude of wandering, had strayed in advance of his body towards the bourne of them both, and was recalled to the flesh with increasing difficulty.
"Kitchen fire," his wife explained to him. "Fire i' grate yonder."
The man followed the line of her knotted, bony forefinger, and let his eyes fall on the wasted red cinders, so symbolical of his own condition.
"Ay," he said, after a moment, when it had almost come to seem that the connection between finger and fireplace was quite lost. "Fire 's a bit o' company to me. We 've been good friends a goodish piece noo, but ah s'll not need 'er so much longer, ah 'm thinkin'."
"Ye div n't know what ye 'll need," his wife admonished him, with the sharpness of personal anxiety. But to the Spawer she added, catching at her brooch: "Cough troubles 'im a deal o' nights noo. Doctor says 'e misdoots 'e 'll see another winter thruff. 'E 'd seummut to do to get thruff last."
The sick man knew, with the dumb instinct of a dog, that his case was being discussed. He fastened his eyes on the Spawer's face to see whether it would give him any clue to the words that were being uttered. His wife's, by experience, he knew would tell him nothing; but a stranger's might.
"Ah 'm about at far end," he piped, in his placid, piteous harmonic of a voice, that issued between his lips with a sound like the blowing of a cornstraw. "Ah 've been a sad, naughty slaverbags i' my time, bud ah 'm done noo. It's 'arvest time wi' me, an' ah 'm bein' gathered in, ah think. Doctor 's patched my bellows up a deal o' times, bud they weean't stan' mendin' no more."
"Why weean't they? Ye 've breathed a deal free-er last few days," his wife tried to instil into him. "It 's 'is 'eart as well," she told the Spawer. "Doctor says it 's about worn out. Ay, poor man, poor man! What a thing it is to sit an' watch 'im gan, ah-sure. An' 'im so active as 'e was. Bud cryin' weean't alter it, for ah 've tried, an' it 's no use. It 's Lord's will, an' we mun just be thankful 'at 'E 's spared 'im as long as 'E 'as, wi' me to look after 'im an' see 'e gans off comfortable. There 's monny 'at is n't blessed so well as that."
The sick man fastened his eye on the Spawer again.
"Ye come fro' Dixon's?" he said inquiringly; and when the Spawer gave him an illuminative "Yes"—"Ay," he said, through his thin lips. "It 's long enough sin' ah seed 'im. Mebbe ye 'll do me the kindness to gie 'im mah respecks when ye get back. Monny 's the time 'im an' me 's met i' Oommuth market an' driven wum [home] i' Tankard's 'bus together.... Ah 've been nowt bud trouble tiv 'er sin' day she wor fond enough to tek me, an' she would n't 'a tekken me then, bud ah begged ower 'ard. An' ah 'm nowt bud trouble tiv 'er noo."
"Ay, an' ah 'd tek ye agen lad," the thin, worn woman told him, with an assurance that was almost fierce. "Ne'er mind whether ye 're a bad un or no. Ah 've nivver rued day ah tekt ye—though ye 'd gie'n me twice trouble ye did. Ah mud 'ave looked far to fin' a better, an' then not fun' [found] 'im. Let ye be as drunk as ye would, ye nivver gied me a bad wod nor lifted 'and agen me."
"Nay, ah nivver lifted 'and agen ye," the man assented. "Ah 'ad n't need. Bud that 's little to my credit. Ah trailed ye thruff tribulation. What time ye was n't workin' to mek good what ah 'd wasted ye was weepin' an' waitin' o' me. There 's scarcelins a Saturday neet, at one time, ye set oot wi' a dry eye."
"Ay, bud ye nivver stayed away ower Sunday," his wife claimed, with pride. "Ye was allus back an' to spare when Oolbrig bells got set o' ringin'. An' it's not ivvery man's wife about this district 'at can say same of 'er 'usband."
The sick man listened to her, and a pale, wintry smile flickered across his face and over his frost-nipped lips. Years ago, perhaps, it had been a smile as full of sunlight as the Spawer's own, and dear to the woman's heart. Perhaps her soul had pined for that very smile, and drunk of its remembrance, in the dark hours that clouded her life from time to time. The sick man turned his eyes upon the Spawer, while yet the feeble ray illuminated them.
"Ah did n't chose so badlins," he said, with a tinge of the dry humor that sparkles mirthfully in the men of these parts like the crackling of blazing twigs under a pot. "Nay, ah got best o' bargain when she fastened 'ersen. Chosin' a wife 's same as chosin' a mare or owt else, an' there 's a deal o' ways o' chosin' wrong. Don't tek notice o' way a lass gans on tiv you, if ye want to pick a good un—for they 're all t' same when they 're carryin' on wi' a man. Good uns an' bad uns acts alike then. Div n't tek a woman 'll 'at fin's ower much fault wi' 'er neighbors—syke a woman 'll fin' plenty wi' you when she 's gotten ye fast. Ye want to 'ave a sharp eye when ye gan coortin'. There 's some on 'em 'at gans coortin' by neet, 'at scarcelins knows look o' their lass by day. That 's no way. Don't tek on wi' a lass because she carries a 'ymn book. Onny lass can carry a 'ymn book. Tek one 'at 's gotten all 'er 'ymns i' 'er 'eart. Don't trust yersen tiv a lass 'at wastes all 'er time i' runnin' after ye. Think on it 's 'er feythur's time she 's wastin', 'appen, an' when she 's gotten ye she 'll waste yours. Ay, an' try an' pick a wench 'at dizz n't mind doin' what she can to mek it a bit brighter for them 'at 's gannin' quick down shady side o' life. 'Appen she 'll do t' same when it comes tiv your ton [turn]."
All these things the Spawer promised to bear in mind when the time came, with the despicable hypocrisy that assumed, as a cloak, the smiling improbability of any such occurrence. Cad that he felt himself, he dared not look at Pam, seated apart on a chair by the door leading into a small scullery beyond. Like Peter he kept denying—by inference, at least—the facts of a case that would so unpleasantly involve him. Like Peter, each successive denial smote him to the heart; he wept in spirit over his own spirit's weakness. And yet, as he asked himself very naturally, even as he held his smile towards the old man, and studiously away from the girl that fulfilled (either in actuality or in the guilty similarity set up by his soul) every condition of the old fellow's warning—was this the proper moment to declare to her what he had to declare to her? Could he for the first time acquaint her with facts for which she was all unprepared before strangers? No, no, no. Later on, he swore it, he would fulfil his afternoon's mission. He was merely a musician, he told himself, using destiny as his fiddle, tuning the strings of circumstance to the tune needed of him. So, catching sight of the little despicable harmonium for the hundredth time, with the suddenly sparkling eye for a revelation, "What," said he, in accents of surprised pleasure that even deceived Pam—(though he dared not have thought it)—"a harmonium?"
The old woman whipped off its meagre tippet of oilcloth in a twinkling, and displayed its poor double octave of discolored celluloid with a toothless smile of proud possession.
"Mester bought it," she said. "He was allus fond of a bit o' music."
How was she to know, poor soul, the strickening effect that fatal use of the diminutive had on the sensitive fibres of the Spawer's nature? Not from his face, surely, for he smiled pure sunlight.
They dusted the keys for him, and a chair, and put up the fragile desk, that subsided like a schooner before the blast, with its masts bending, and the Spawer sat down and did his best.
Heavens, what a best!
The very tone of the instrument that cried out under his touch shook his soul and almost frightened his fingers from the keys. So raucous it was; so noisily sanctimonious; so redolent of blind musicians; of street-corner meetings; so unblushingly bald; so callous; so unsensitive; so ostentatious; so utterly awful. Every nerve, fibre, and tissue of musical organization was offended; it was a crying offence against every instinct of musical art. And all the while, as though the soul itself were not being sufficiently punished by humiliation, the body was being subjected to the physical indignity of working its legs like a journeyman scissors-grinder.
Ye gods! the tragic absurdity of it all. To musical natures less cultured, to senses less susceptible than the Spawer's, there would have been the rising of throats and the wetness of tears during this scene, for, truth to tell, it lacked none of the elements of moving pathos and tragedy. The dying man; the care-worn woman; the girl with the compassionate lips; the musician bending over his task of devotion; the hymn tune evolved into harmony by his shaping fingers from the low humming of the girl's lips:
"Sound the loud timbrel o'er Egypt's dark sea;Jehovah hath triumphed, His people are free..."
"Sound the loud timbrel o'er Egypt's dark sea;Jehovah hath triumphed, His people are free..."
"Sound the loud timbrel o'er Egypt's dark sea;
Jehovah hath triumphed, His people are free..."
the half-drawn blind—so soon to be drawn down to its full; the sun beating on the window and on the red-tiled floor....
Not one witness in a thousand, drawn independently to consider the scene, would have pierced to the heart of the pathos, and grasped through the tearful confusion of their sympathies, that perhaps the most beautiful focus-point of emotion was in the seated figure of the musician, castigating his musical soul with biting thongs for the sake of one girl and a dying man, and showing no sign.
And what recompense of moral gratification did he receive in return for his act of artistic abnegation? Little enough, it must be confessed, that the Spawer could discover. The old man looked older, he thought; the old woman's prefatory smile of appreciative pride had been quenched by the music, and her attitude when he turned round upon her was the incomprehending silence of respect. All her face, so to speak, had fallen to pieces like an over-shortened pie, with no concentration of interest to hold up the crust of its expression. Perhaps the very harmonies with which the Spawer had clad the naked melody of a hymn tune had so baffled their decaying, primitive hearing that they had failed to recognise it in its new garb. He had done better, possibly, to play the melody out for them with one finger. Pam's face alone compensated him. She, he knew—and was glad to know—was too much awakened to the scope and magnitude of music to have derived anything approaching personal pleasure from a crude performance such as this; but she had realised what nausea it must have been to him, and in the light of a sacrifice alone she had rejoiced in his achievement.
Well, however, the achievement was over, and they were ready to go any time now. The old woman replaced the oilcloth over the harmonium with a look of relief (or so the Spawer thought, but he thought wrong), and Pam was just opening her lips to suggest departure when the old man piped out in his faltering treble:
"Ay, bud ye 'll gie me a chapter before ye gan, lass, weean't ye?"
Pam turned a troubled eye part-way towards the Spawer, as though it were accompanying a thought of hers on its own account; but she stopped it before it reached him, and dropped submissive hands.
"Would you like me to?" she asked gently.
"Ay; ah s'd tek it kindly if ye would."
"You don't mind?" she asked the Spawer softly; and with his assent, readily given, "I will," she said.
"Gie 'er the Book, lass," he ordered his wife; and the careworn woman lifted it from beneath a pair of folded spectacles, and delivered it reverently into the girl's receiving fingers.
"What shall I read you?" Pam asked, setting the book on her knees, and turning over the pages, now backwards, now forwards.
"Ah 'll 'ave that bit o' John," he told her, "about mansions an' such-like, if ye 've no objections."
"Is that the fourteenth chapter?" Pam suggested inquiringly. "Did n't we have it last time?"
"Ay, an' we mud as lief 'ave it this," he decided placidly. "It 'll be none the wuss of a time or two. Book 's not same as other things. There 's allus seummut fresh in it for them 'at gans tiv it wi' a right 'eart. Ah s'd 'a done better if ah 'd ganned tiv it when ah 'ad use o' legs Lord gid me. It 's ower late to larn me to walk straight i' this wuld noo, but 'appen ah s'll be about ready to scrammle along to next, when time comes."
"The fourteenth chapter of the Gospel according to St. John," Pam announced, as signifying that she had found the place, and smoothing down the page with her soft finger, lifted her voice and read:
"Let not your heart be troubled.... Ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you."
When Pam said: "If it were not so ... I would have told you," one felt it must be so indeed. Such lips could never lie. And as the girl's clear voice rose and filled that little kitchen—so compassionate, so truthful, so natural—the full sublimity of the picture of a sudden swelled up in the Spawer's soul and mounted to his throat. The ingredient elements of the scene were unchanged, but now how exalted. He saw, in a flash, as though his spiritual eyes had been opened, the true pathos of the picture: the dying man, seated so motionless in his chair, with his faded blue eyes gazing into Heaven through the blind; the worn woman, the better portion of whose years and loving energy the man was taking to the grave with him; the sweet, purifying sunlight bathing the world outside; the girl with the lips of celestial compassion, drawing old truths from the battered and thumb-marked Bible, distilling them anew in pure liquid sound, and dropping them so coolingly into the overheated kitchen of death. All these he saw—acutely with his inward vision, dimly with his material—and wondered, as he saw it, that the girl could proceed so courageously and so unfalteringly on her consolatory path. He himself would have fared along it badly, and knew it. But it was not the last time he was to marvel at the girl's self-possession when circumstances demanded, and perhaps this second time he would remember it even better.
"Ye 'll tek liberty to call agen, mebbe," the old man invited him as they stood finally for departure, "... if ah 'm not mekkin' ower free to ask ye; but it 's a lonely road when a man draws to yend of 'is days. Busy folk can't reckon to be treubled wi' 'im—an' i' 'arvest an' all. Ah wor no better mysen when ah 'ad my faculties. Ye 'll be stayin' wi' Dixon a goodish while yet, mebbe?"
At the direct question the Spawer's resolution spun round and made as though to turn tail. There was just a slight pause—quite inappreciable to the others about him, but painfully magnified to himself—while he struggled whether to ignore the opportunity or seize it like a man, and sign irrevocably the bond of his departure.
"Perhaps..." he was quibbling with the reply even yet, while speaking, not knowing whether to evade or to grapple with his chance. Then he grappled suddenly, but always with that frank, pleasant smile of his that showed no inkling of an inward perplexity. "... On the other hand," he said, "... it 's possible I may be going any time now—any day even." He sensed rather than saw the quick turn of the girl's eyes upon him, and knew, too, in what kind of mild, protesting surprise she was looking at him. She could not credit that he should first communicate such an important piece of intelligence to strangers, without having prepared her by a single word, and was wondering sorrowfully whether it were not an excuse to evade any promise of visiting the old man again.
"It all depends," the Spawer explained, throwing his explanation over the truth of the matter like a pleasant nebula, "... on a letter. I 'm expecting to hear. One can't stay for ever, you know," he added amiably, "even where one 's happy."
"Nay, nay," the old man acquiesced mournfully. "When a man comes to my years 'e fin's that oot tiv 'is sorrer. Well, well; ah awpe [hope] when ye think fit to change ye 'll change for t' better, young gen'leman, an' ah thank ye for yer company an' yer kindness." He turned the faint flicker of his long-ago smile upon Pam, like the sunlight stealing over an autumn landscape.
"Pam 's not likely to change yet a bit," he said, with a sense of comfort in the thought, as though the girl were a true staff to rest on in time of trouble. Pam shook her head reassuringly. "Nay, Pam mun 't change yet a bit," he admonished her. "She mun stop an' see t' old man 's time oot, ah think. 'E weean't keep 'er so long noo, but 'e 's a selfish old chap; 'e dizz n't want to part wi' 'er no sooner nor need be. She 's been as good tiv 'im as if she 'd been 'is own bairn. Ay, an' better. There 's not monny bairns 'at 'ud 'a done as much—an' said as little. Nay, nay; they 'd 'a telt 'im 'e was a treublesome old feller long sin'. Good-by, lass; good-by—an' gie my respecks tiv 'is Rivrence when 'e comes back."
His eye kindled momentarily as the girl laid light fingers on the horny right hand and stooped and kissed him. But the light of this died out of them as soon as he had done speaking, and the pressure of her clasp relaxed. As they passed out of the kitchen his gaze followed them dimly from afar, seeming to inquire who were these figures departing, and whence came they and what their errand, and in what remote, unintelligible degree their presence concerned himself.