Lady Good-for-Nothing / Quiller-Couch, Arthur Thomas, Sir, 1863-1944

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Lady Good-for-Nothing, by A. T. Quiller-Couch


This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net





Title: Lady Good-for-Nothing

Author: A. T. Quiller-Couch

Release Date: March 2, 2005  [eBook #15228]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)


***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LADY GOOD-FOR-NOTHING***


E-text prepared by Lionel Sear



LADY GOOD-FOR-NOTHING

A Man's Portrait of a Woman

by

ARTHUR THOMAS QUILLER-COUCH ('Q')

First Published in 1910.

This story originally appeared in the weekly edition of the "Times,"
and is now issued in book form by arrangement with the Proprietors of
that Journal.







TO My Commodore and old Friend Edward Atkinson, Esq.
of Rosebank, Mixtow-by-Fowey.


NOTE

Some years ago an unknown American friend proposed my writing a story on
the loves and adventures of Sir Harry Frankland, Collector of the Port
of Boston in the mid-eighteenth century, and Agnes Surriage, daughter of
a poor Marble-head fisherman.  The theme attracted me as it has
attracted other writers--and notably Oliver Wendell Holmes, who built a
poem on it.  But while their efforts seemed to leave room for another, I
was no match for them in knowledge of the facts or of local details;
and, moreover, these facts and details cramped my story.  I repented,
therefore and, taking the theme, altered the locality and the
characters--who, by the way, in the writing have become real enough to
me, albeit in a different sense.  Thus (I hope) no violence has been
offered to historical truth, while I have been able to tell the tale in
my own fashion.

"Q."



CONTENTS.


BOOK I.--PORT NASSAU.


I.       THE BEACH.

II.      PORT NASSAU.

III.     TWO GUINEAS.

IV.      FATHER AND SON.

V.       RUTH.

VI.      PARENTHETICAL--OF THE FAMILY OF VYELL.

VII.     A SABBATH-BREAKER.

VIII.    ANOTHER SABBATH-BREAKER.

IX.      THE SCOURGE.

X.       THE BENCH.

XI.      THE STOCKS.

XII.     THE HUT BY THE BEACH.

XIII.    RUTH SETS OUT.


BOOK II.--PROBATION.


I.       AFTER TWO YEARS.

II.      MR. SILK.

III.     MR. HICHENS.

IV.      VASHTI.

V.       SIR OLIVER'S HEALTH.

VI.      CAPTAIN HARRY AND MR. HANMER.

VII.     FIRST OFFER.

VIII.    CONCERNING MARGARET.

IX.      THE PROSPECT.

X.       THREE LADIES.

XI.      THE ESPIAL.

XII.     LADY CAROLINE.

XIII.    DIANA VYELL.

XIV.     MR. SILK PROPOSES.

XV.      THE CHOOSING.


BOOK III.--THE BRIDALS.


I.       BETROTHED.

II.      THE RETURN.

III.     NESTING.

IV.      THE BRIDEGROOM.

V.       RUTH'S WEDDING DAY.

VI.      "YET HE WILL COME--".

VII.     HOUSEKEEPING.

VIII.    HOME-COMING.


BOOK IV.--LADY GOOD-FOR-NOTHING.


I.       BATTY LANGTON, CHRONICLER.

II.      SIR OLIVER SAILS.

III.     MISCALCULATING WRATH.

IV.      THE TERRACE.

V.       A PROLOGUE TO NOTHING.

VI.      CHILDLESS MOTHER.


BOOK V.--LISBON AND AFTER.


I.       ACT OF FAITH.

II.      DONNA MARIA.

III.     EARTHQUAKE.

IV.      THE SEARCH.

V.       THE FINDING.

VI.      DOCUMENTS.

VII.     THE LAST OFFER.


EPILOGUE




"An innocent life, yet far astray."   Wordsworth's _Ruth_.





BOOK I.




PORT NASSAU.



Chapter I.


THE BEACH.


A coach-and-six, as a rule, may be called an impressive Object.
But something depends on where you see it.

Viewed from the tall cliffs--along the base of which, on a strip of
beach two hundred feet below, it crawled between the American continent
and the Atlantic Ocean--Captain Oliver Vyell's coach-and-six resembled
nothing so nearly as a black-beetle.

For that matter the cliffs themselves, swept by the spray and humming
with the roar of the beach--even the bald headland towards which they
curved as to the visible bourne of all things terrestrial--shrank in
comparison with the waste void beyond, where sky and ocean weltered
together after the wrestle of a two days' storm; and in comparison with
the thought that this rolling sky and heaving water stretched all the
way to Europe.  Not a sail showed, not a wing anywhere under the leaden
clouds that still dropped their rain in patches, smurring out the
horizon.  The wind had died down, but the ships kept their harbours and
the sea-birds their inland shelters.  Alone of animate things, Captain
Vyell's coach-and-six crept forth and along the beach, as though tempted
by the promise of a wintry gleam to landward.

A god--if we may suppose one of the old careless Olympians seated there
on the cliff-top, nursing his knees--must have enjoyed the comedy of it,
and laughed to think that this pert beetle, edging its way along the
sand amid the eternal forces of nature, was here to take seizin of
them--yes, actually to take seizin and exact tribute.  So indomitable a
fellow is Man, _improbus Homo_; and among men in his generation Captain
Oliver Vyell was Collector of Customs for the Port of Boston,
Massachusetts.


In fairness to Captain Vyell be it added that he--a young English blood,
bearing kinship with two or three of the great Whig families at home,
and sceptical as became a person of quality--was capable as any one of
relishing the comedy, had it been pointed out to him.  With equal
readiness he would have scoffed at Man's pretensions in this world and
denied him any place at all in the next.  Nevertheless on a planet the
folly of which might be taken for granted he claimed at least his share
of the reverence paid by fools to rank and wealth.  He was travelling
this lonely coast on a tour of inspection, to visit and report upon a
site where His Majesty's advisers had some design to plant a fort; and a
fine ostentation coloured his progress here as through life.  He had
brought his coach because it conveyed his claret and his _batterie de
cuisine_ (the seaside inns were detestable); but being young and
extravagantly healthy and, with all his faults, very much of a man, he
preferred to ride ahead on his saddle-horse and let his pomp follow him.

Six horses drew the coach, and to each pair of leaders rode a
postillion, while a black coachman guided the wheelers from the
box-seat; all three men in the Collector's livery of white and scarlet.
On a perch behind the vehicle--which, despite its weight, left but the
shallowest of wheel-ruts on the hard sand--sat Manasseh, the Collector's
cook and body-servant; a huge negro, in livery of the same white and
scarlet but with heavy adornments of bullion, a cockade in his hat, and
a loaded blunderbuss laid across his thighs.  Last and alone within the
coach, with a wine-case for footstool, sat a five-year-old boy.

Master Dicky Vyell--the Collector's only child, and motherless--sat and
gazed out of the windows in a delicious terror.  For hours that morning
the travellers had ploughed their way over a plain of blown sand, dotted
with shrub-oaks, bay-berries, and clumps of Indian grass; then, at a
point where the tall cliffs began, had wound down to the sea between
low foothills and a sedge-covered marsh criss-crossed by watercourses
that spread out here and there into lagoons.  At the head of this
descent the Atlantic had come into sight, and all the way down its
echoes had grown in the boy's ears, confusing themselves with a
delicious odour which came in fact from the fields of sedge, though he
attributed it to the ocean.

But the sound had amounted to a loud humming at most; and it was with a
leap and a shout, as they rounded the last foothill and saw the vast
empty beach running northward before them, league upon league, that the
thunder of the surf broke on them.  For a while the boom and crash of it
fairly stunned the child.  He caught at an arm-strap hanging by the
window and held on with all his small might, while the world he knew
with its familiar protective boundaries fell away, melted, left him--a
speck of life ringed about with intolerable roaring emptiness.
To a companion, had there been one in the coach, he must have clung in
sheer terror; yes, even to his father, to whom he had never clung and
could scarcely imagine himself clinging.  But his father rode ahead,
carelessly erect on his blood-horse--horse and rider seen in a blur
through the salt-encrusted glass.  Therefore Master Dicky held on as
best he might to the arm-strap.

By degrees his terror drained away, though its ebb left him shivering.
Child though he was, he could not remember when he had not been curious
about the sea.  In a dazed fashion he stared out upon the breakers.
The wind had died down after the tempest, but the Atlantic kept its
agitation.  Meeting the shore (which hereabouts ran shallow for five or
six hundred yards) it reared itself in ten-foot combers, rank stampeding
on rank, until the sixth or seventh hurled itself far up the beach,
spent itself in a long receding curve, and drained back to the foaming
forces behind.  Their untiring onset fascinated Dicky; and now and
again he tasted renewal of his terror, as a wave, taller than the rest
or better timed, would come sweeping up to the coach itself, spreading
and rippling about the wheels and the horses' fetlocks.  "Surely this
one would engulf them," thought the child, recalling Pharaoh and his
chariots; but always the furious charge spent itself in an edge of white
froth that faded to delicate salt filigree and so vanished.  When this
had happened a dozen times or more, and still without disaster, he took
heart and began to turn it all into a game, choosing this or that
breaker and making imaginary wagers upon it; but yet the spectacle
fascinated him, and still at the back of his small brain lay wonder that
all this terrifying fury and uproar should always be coming to nothing.
God must be out yonder (he thought) and engaged in some mysterious form
of play.  He had heard a good deal about God from Miss Quiney, his
governess; but this playfulness, as an attribute of the Almighty, was
new to him and hitherto unsuspected.

The beach, with here and there a break, extended for close upon twenty
miles, still curving towards the headland; and the travellers covered
more than two-thirds of the distance without espying a single living
creature.  As the afternoon wore on the weather improved.  The sun, soon
to drop behind the cliff-summits on the left, asserted itself with a
last effort and shot a red gleam through a chink low in the cloud-wrack.
The shaft widened.  The breakers--indigo-backed till now and turbid with
sand in solution--began to arch themselves in glass-green hollows, with
rainbows playing on the spray of their crests.  And then--as though the
savage coast had become, at a touch of sunshine, habitable--our
travellers spied a man.

He came forth from a break in the cliffs half a mile ahead and slowly
crossed the sands to the edge of the surf, the line of which he began,
after a pause, to follow as slowly northwards.  His back was turned thus
upon the Collector's equipage, to which in crossing the beach he had
given no attention, being old and purblind.

The coach rolled so smoothly, and the jingle of harness was so entirely
swallowed in the roar of the sea, that Captain Vyell, pushing ahead and
overtaking the old fellow, had to ride close up to his shoulder and
shout.  It appeared then, for further explanation, that his hearing as
well as his eyesight was none of the best.  He faced about in a puzzled
fashion, stared, and touched his hat--or rather lifted his hand a little
way and dropped it again.

"Your Honour will be the Collector," he said, and nodded many times, at
first as if proud of his sagacity, but afterwards dully--as though his
interest had died out and he would have ceased nodding but had forgotten
the way.  "Yes; my gran'-darter told me.  She's in service at the
Bowling Green, Port Nassau; but walks over on Lord's Days to cheer up
her mother and tell the news.  They've been expectin' you at Port Nassau
any time this week."

The Collector asked where he lived, and the old man pointed to a gully
in the cliff and to something which, wedged in the gully, might at a
first glance be taken for a large and loosely-constructed bird's nest.
The Collector's keen eyes made it out to be a shanty of timber roofed
with shingles and barely overtopping a wood pile.

"Wreckwood, eh?"

"A good amount of it ought to be comin' in, after the gale."

"Then where's your hook?"--for the wreckwood gatherers along this part
of the coast carry long gaffs to hook the flotsam and drag it above
reach of the waves.

"Left it up the bank," said the old man shortly.  After a moment he
pulled himself together for an explanation, hollowed his palms around
his mouth, and bawled above the boom of the surf.  "I'm old.  I don't
carry weight more'n I need to.  When a log comes in, my darter spies it
an' tells me.  She's mons'rous quick-sighted for wood an' such like--
though good for nothin' else."  (A pause.)  "No, I'm hard on her; she
can cook clams."

"You were looking for clams?"  Captain Vyell scrutinised the man's face.
It was a patriarchal face, strikingly handsome and not much wrinkled;
the skin delicately tanned and extraordinarily transparent.
Somehow this transparency puzzled him.  "Hungry?" he asked quickly; and
as quickly added, "Starving for food, that's what you are."

"It's the Lord's will," answered the old man.


The coach had come to a halt a dozen paces away.  The child within it
could hear nothing of this conversation; but to the end of his life his
memory kept vivid the scene and the two figures in it--his father, in
close-fitting riding-coat of blue, with body braced, leaning sideways a
little against the wind, and a characteristic hint of the cavalryman
about the slope of the thigh; the old wreck-picker standing just forward
of the bay's shoulder and looking up, with blown hair and patient eyes.
Memory recalled even the long slant of the bay's shoulder--a perfectly
true detail, for the horse was of pure English race and bred by the
Collector himself.

After this, as he remembered, some command must have been given, for
Manasseh climbed down, opened the coach door and drew from under the
seat a box, of which he raised the lid, disclosing things good to eat--
among them a pasty with a crisp brown crust.

The wreck-picker broke off a piece of the pasty and wrapped it in a
handkerchief--and memory recalled, as with a small shock of surprise,
that the handkerchief was clean.  The old man, though ragged enough to
scare the crows, was clean from his bare head to his bare sea-bleached
feet.  He munched the rest of the pasty, talking between mouthfuls.  To
his discourse Dicky paid no heed, but slipped away for a scamper on the
sands.

As he came running back he saw the old man, in the act of wiping his
mouth with the back of his hand, suddenly shoot out an arm and point.
Just beyond the breakers a solitary bird--an osprey--rose with a fish
shining in the grip of its claws.  It flew northward, away for the
headland, for a hundred yards or so; and then by some mischance let slip
his prey, which fell back into the sea.  The boy saw the splash.
To his surprise the bird made no effort to recover the fish--neither
stooped nor paused--but went winging sullenly on its way.

"That's the way o' them," commented the old wreck-picker.  "Good food,
an' to let it go.  I could teach him better."

But the boy, years after, read it as another and different parable.



Chapter II.


PORT NASSAU.


They left the beach, climbed a road across the neck of the promontory,
and rattled downhill into Port Nassau.  Dusk had fallen before they
reached the head of its cobbled street; and here one of the postillions
drew out a horn from his holster and began to blow loud blasts on it.
This at once drew the townsfolk into the road and warned them to get out
of the way.

To the child, drowsed by the strong salt air and the rocking of the
coach, the glimmering whitewashed houses on either hand went by like a
procession in a dream.  The figures and groups of men and women on the
side-walks, too, had a ghostly, furtive air.  They seemed to the boy to
be whispering together and muttering.  Now this was absurd; for what
with the blare of the postillion's horn, the clatter of hoofs, the
jolting and rumbling of wheels, the rattle of glass, our travellers had
all the noise to themselves--or all but the voice of the gale now rising
again for an afterclap and snoring at the street corners.  Yet his
instinct was right.  Many of the crowd _were_ muttering.  These New
Englanders had no love to spare for a Collector of Customs, a fine
gentlemen from Old England and (rumour said) an atheist to boot.  They
resented this ostent of entry; the men more sullenly than the women,
some of whom in their hearts could not help admiring its high-and-mighty
insolence.

The Collector, at any rate, had a crowd to receive him, for it was
Saturday evening.  On Saturdays by custom the fishing-fleet of Port
Nassau made harbour before nightfall, and the crews kept a sort of
decorous carnival before the Sabbath, of which they were strict
observers.  In the lower part of the town, by the quays, much buying and
selling went on, in booths of sail-cloth lit as a rule by oil-flares.
For close upon a week no boat had been able to put to sea; but the
Saturday market and the Saturday gossip and to-and-fro strolling were in
full swing none the less, though the salesmen had to substitute
hurricane-lamps for their ordinary flares, and the boy--now wide awake
again--had a passing glimpse of a couple of booths that had been wrecked
by the rising wind and were being rebuilt.  He craned out to stare at
the helpers, while they, pausing in their work and dragged to and fro by
the flapping canvas, stared back as the coach went by.

It came to a halt on a level roadway some few rods beyond this bright
traffic, in an open space which, he knew, must be near the waterside,
for beyond the lights of the booths he had spied a cluster of masts
quite close at hand.  Or perhaps he had fallen asleep and in his sleep
had been transported far inland.  For the wind had suddenly died down,
the coach appeared to be standing in a forest glade--at any rate, among
trees--and through the trees fell a soft radiance that might well be the
moon's were it only a tinge less yellow.  In the shine of it stood
Manasseh, holding open the coach door; and as the child stepped out
these queer impressions were succeeded by one still more curious and
startling.  For a hand, as it seemed, reached out of the darkness,
brushed him smartly across the face, and was gone.  He gave a little cry
and stood staring aloft at a lantern that hung some feet above him from
an arched bracket.  Across its glass face ran the legend BOWLING GREEN
INN, in orange-coloured lettering, and the ray of its oil-lamp wavered
on the boughs of two tall maples set like sentinels by the Inn gateway
and reddening now to the fall of the leaf.  Yes, the ground about his
feet was strewn with leaves: it must be one of these that had brushed by
his face.

If the folk in the streets had been sullen, those of the Inn were eager
enough, even obsequious.  A trio of grooms fell to unharnessing the
horses; a couple of porters ran to and fro, unloading the baggage and
cooking-pots; while the landlady shouted orders right and left in the
porchway.  She deemed, honest soul, that she was mistress of the
establishment, until Manasseh undeceived her.

Manasseh's huge stature and gold-encrusted livery commanded respect in
spite of his colour.  He addressed her as "woman."  "Woman, if you will
stop yo' cacklin' and yo' crowin'?  Go in now and fetch me fish, fetch
me chickens, fetch me plenty eggs.  Fetch me a dam scullion.  Heh?
Stir yo' legs and fetch me a dam scullion, and the chickens tender.
His Exc'llence mos' partic'ler the chickens tender."

Still adjuring her he shouldered his way through the house to the
kitchen, whence presently his voice sounded loud, authoritative, above
the clatter of cooking-pots.  From time to time he broke away from the
business of unpacking to reiterate his demands for fish, eggs,
chicken--the last to be tender at all costs and at pain of his
tremendous displeasure.

"And I assure you, ma'am," said Captain Vyell, standing in the passage
at the door of his private room, "his standard is a high one.  I believe
the blackguard never stole a tough fowl in his life. . . . Show me to my
bedroom, please, if the trunks are unstrapped; and the child, here, to
his. . . . Eh?  What's this?--a rush-light?  I don't use rush-lights.
Go to Manasseh and ask him to unpack you a pair of candles."

The landlady returned with a silver candlestick in either hand, and
candles of real wax.  She had never seen the like, and led the way
upstairs speculating on their cost.  The bedrooms proved to be clean,
though bare and more than a little stuffy--their windows having been
kept shut for some days against the gale.  The Collector commanded them
to be opened.  The landlady faintly protested.  "The wind would gutter
the candles--and such wax too!"  She was told to obey, and she obeyed.

In the boy's room knelt a girl--a chambermaid--unstrapping his small
valise.  She had a rush-light on the floor beside her, and did not look
up as the landlady thrust open the lattice and left the room with the
Collector, the boy remaining behind.  His candle stood upon a chest of
drawers by the window; and, as the others went out, a draught of wind
caught the dimity curtain, blew it against the flame, and in an instant
ignited it.

The girl looked up swiftly at the sudden light above her, and as
swiftly--before the child could cry out--was on her feet.  She caught
the fire between her two hands and beat it out, making no noise and
scarcely flinching, though her flesh was certainly being scorched.

"That was lucky," she said, looking across at him with a smile.

"Ruth!--Ruth!" called the landlady's voice, up the corridor.
"Here, a moment!"

She dropped the charred curtain and hurried to answer the call.

"Ruth!  Where's the bootjack?  His Honour will take off his
riding-boots."

"Bootjack, ma'am?" interrupted the Collector, leaning back in a chair
and extending a shapely leg with instep and ankle whereon the
riding-boot fitted like a glove.  "I don't maul my leather with
bootjacks.  Send Manasseh upstairs to me; ask him with my compliments
what the devil he means by clattering saucepans when he should be
attending to his master. . . . Eh, what's this?"

"She can do it, your Honour," said the landlady, catching Ruth by the
shoulder and motioning her to kneel and draw off the boot.
(It is likely she shirked carrying the message.)

"Oh, very well--if only she won't twist my foot. . . . Take care of the
spur, child."

The girl knelt, and with her blistered hand took hold of the boot-heel
below the spur.  It cost her exquisite pain, but she did not wince; and
her head being bent, no one perceived the tears in her eyes.

She had scarcely drawn off the second boot, when Manasseh appeared in
the doorway carrying a silver tray with glasses and biscuits; a glass of
red wine for his master, a more innocent cordial for the young
gentleman, and both glasses filmed over with the chill of crushed ice.

The girl was withdrawing when the Collector, carelessly feeling in his
pocket, drew out a coin and put it into her hand.  Her fingers closed on
it sharply, almost with a snatch.  In truth, the touch of metal was so
intolerable to the burnt flesh that, but for clutching it so, she must
have dropped the coin.  Still with bowed head she passed quietly from
the room.

Master Dicky munched his macaroon and sipped his cordial.  He had a
whole guinea in his breeches pocket, and was thinking it would be great
fun to step out and explore the town, if only for a little way.
To-morrow was Sunday, and all the stores would be closed.  But Manasseh
was too busy to come with him for bodyguard--and his father's boots were
off; and besides, he stood in great awe and shyness of his admired
parent.  Had the boots been on, it would have cost him a bold effort to
make the request.  On the whole, the cordial warming him, Master Dicky
had a mind to take French leave.



Chapter III.


TWO GUINEAS.


Though the wind hummed among the chimneys and on the back of the roof,
on either side of the lamp over the gateway the maples stood in the lee
and waved their boughs gently, shedding a leaf now and then in some
deflected gust.  Beyond and to the left stretched a dim avenue, also of
maples; and at the end of this, as he reached the gate, the boy could
spy the lights of the fair.

There was no risk at all of losing his way.

He stepped briskly forth and down the avenue.  Where the trees ended,
and with them the high wall enclosing the inn's stable-yard, the wind
rushed upon him with a whoop, and swept him off the side-walk almost to
the middle of the road-way.  But by this time the lights were close at
hand.  He pressed his little hat down on his head and battled his way
towards them.

The first booth displayed sweetmeats; the next hung out lines of
sailors' smocks, petticoats, sea-boots, oilskin coats and caps, that
swayed according to their weight; the third was no booth but a wooden
store, wherein a druggist dispensed his wares; the fourth, also of wood,
belonged to a barber, and was capable of seating one customer at a time
while the others waited their turn on the side-walk.  Here--his shanty
having no front--the barber kept them in good humour by chatting to all
and sundry while he shaved; but a part of the crowd had good-naturedly
drifted on to help his neighbour, a tobacco-seller, whose stall had
suffered disaster.  A painted wooden statue of a Cherokee Indian lay
face downward across the walk, as the wind had blown it: bellying folds
of canvas and tarpaulin hid the wreck of the poor man's stock-in-trade.
Beyond this wreckage stood, in order, a vegetable stall, another
sweetmeat stall, and a booth in which the boy (who cared little for
sweetmeats, and, moreover, had just eaten his macaroon) took much more
interest.  For it was hung about with cages; and in the cages were birds
of all kinds (but the most of them canaries), perched in the dull light
of two horn lanterns, and asleep with open, shining eyes; and in the
midst stood the proprietor, blowing delightful liquid notes upon a
bird-call.

It fascinated Dicky; and he no sooner assured himself that the birds
were really for sale--although no purchaser stepped forward--than there
came upon him an overmastering desire to own a live canary in a cage and
teach it with just such a whistle.  (He had often wondered at the things
upon which grown-up folk spent their money to the neglect of this
world's true delights.) Edging his way to the stall, he was summoning up
courage to ask the price of a bird, when the salesman caught sight him
and affably spared him the trouble.

"Eh! here's my young lord wants a bird. . . . You may say what you
like," said he, addressing the bystanders, "but there's none like the
gentry for encouragin' trade. . . . And which shall it be sir?  Here's a
green parrot, now, I can recommend; or if your Honour prefers a bird
that'll talk, this grey one.  A beauty, see!  And not a bad word in his
repertory. Your honoured father shall not blame me for sellin' you a
swearer."

The boy pointed to a cage on the man's right.

"A canary? . . . Well, and you're right.  What is talk, after all, to
compare with music?  And chosen the best bird of my stock, you have; the
pick of the whole crop.  That's Quality, my friends; nothing but the
best'll do for Quality, an' the instinct of it comes out young."
The man, who was evidently an eccentric, ran his eye roguishly over the
faces behind the boy and named his price; a high one--a very high one--
but one nicely calculated to lie on the right side of public
reprobation.

Dicky laid his guinea on the sill.  "I want a whistle, too," he said,
"and my change, please."

The bird-fancier slapped his breeches pockets.

"A guinea?  Bless me, but I must run around and ask one of my neighbours
to oblige.  Any of you got the change for a golden guinea about you?" he
asked of the crowd.

"We ain't so lucky," said a voice somewhere at the back.  "We don't
carry guineas about, nor give 'em to our bastards."

A voice or two--a woman's among them--called "Shame!"  "Hold your
tongue, there!"

Dicky had his back to the speaker.  He heard the word for the first time
in his life, and had no notion of its meaning; but in a dim way he felt
it to be an evil word, and also that the people were protesting out of
pity.  A rush of blood came to his face.  He gulped, lifted his chin,
and said, with his eyes steady on the face of the blinking fancier,--

"Give it back to me, please, and I will get it changed."

He took the coin, and walked away resolutely with a set white face.
He saw none of the people who made way for him.

The bird-fancier stared after the small figure as it walked away into
darkness.  "Bastard?" he said. "There's Blood in that youngster, though
he don't face ye again an' I lose my deal.  Blood's blood, however ye
come by it; you may take that on the word of a breeder.  An' you ought
to be ashamed, Sam Wilson--slingin' yer mud at a child!"


The word drummed in the boy's ears.  What did it mean?  What was the
sneer in it?  "Brat!" "cry-baby," "tell-tale," "story-teller," these
were opprobrious words, to be resented in their degree; and all but the
first covered accusations which not only must never be deserved, but
obliged a gentleman, however young, to show fight.  But "bastard"?

He felt that, whatever it meant, somehow it was worse than any; that
honour called for the annihilation of the man that dared speak it; that
there was weakness, perhaps even poltroonery, in merely walking away.
If only he knew what the word meant!

He came to a halt opposite the drug store.  He had once heard Dr.
Lamerton, the apothecary at home, described as a "well-to-do" man.
The phrase stuck in his small brain, and he connected the sale of drugs
with wealth.  (How, he reasoned, could any one be tempted to sell wares
so nasty unless by prodigious profit?)  He felt sure the drug-seller
would be able to change the guinea for him, and walked in boldly.
His ears were tingling, and he felt a call to assert himself.

There was a single customer in the store--a girl.  With some surprise he
recognised her for the girl who had beaten the flame out of the curtain.

She stood with her back to the doorway and a little sidewise by the
counter, from behind which the drug-seller--a burly fellow in a suit of
black--looked down on her doubtfully, rubbing his shaven chin while he
glanced from her to something he held in his open palm.

"I'm askin' you," he said, "how you came by it?"

"It was given to me," the girl answered.

"That's a likely tale!  Folks don't give money like this to a girl in
your position; unless--"

Here the man paused.

"Is it a great deal of money?" she asked.  There was astonishment in her
voice, and a kind of suppressed eagerness.

"Oh, come now--that's too innocent by half!  A guinea-piece is a
guinea-piece, and a guinea is twenty-one shillings; and twenty-one
shillings, likely enough, is more'n you'll earn in a year outside o'
your keep.  Who gave it ye?"

"A gentleman--the Collector--at the Inn just now.

"Ho!" said the drug-seller, with a world of meaning.

"But if," she went on, "it is worth so much as you say, there must be
some mistake.  Give it back to me, please.  I am sorry for troubling
you."  She took a small, round parcel from her pocket, laid it on the
counter, and held out her hand for the coin.

The drug-seller eyed her.  "There must be some mistake, I guess," said
he, as he gave back the gold piece.  "No, and you can take up your
packet too; I don't grudge two-pennyworth of salve.  But wait a moment
while I serve this small customer, for I want a word with you
later. . . . Well, and what can I do for you, young gentleman?" he
asked, turning to Dicky.

Dicky advanced to the shop-board, and as he did so the girl turned and
recognised him with a faint, very shy smile.

"If you please," he said politely, "I want change for this--if you can
spare it."

"Bless my soul!" exclaimed the man, staring.  "What, _another?_"

"The bird-seller up the road had no change about him.  And--and, if you
please," went on Dick hardily, with a glance at the girl, "she hurt her
hands putting out a fire just now.  I expect my father gave her the
money for that.  But she must have burnt her hands _dreffully!_"--Dicky
had not quite outgrown his infantile lisp--"and if she's come for stuff
to put on them, please I want to pay for it."

"But I don't want you to," put in the girl, still hesitating by the
counter.

"But I'd _rather_ insisted Dicky.

"Tut!" said the drug-seller.  "A matter of twopence won't break either
of us.  Captain Vyell's boy, are you?  Well, then, I'll take your
coppers on principle."

He counted out the change, and Dicky--who was not old enough yet to do
sums--pretended to find it correct.  But he was old enough to have
acquired charming manners, and after thanking the drug-seller, gave the
girl quite a grown-up little bow as he passed out.

She would have followed, but the man said, "Stay a moment.  What's your
name?"

"Ruth Josselin."

"Age?"

"I was sixteen last month."

"Then listen to a word of advice, Ruth Josselin, and don't you take
money like that from fine gentlemen like the Collector.  They don't give
it to the ugly ones.  Understand?"

"Thank you," she said.  "I am going to give it back;" and slipping the
guinea into her pocket, she said "Good evening," and walked swiftly out
in the wake of the child.

The drug-seller looked after her shrewdly.  He was a moral man.


Ruth, hurrying out upon the side-walk, descried the child a few paces up
the road.  He had come to a halt; was, in fact, plucking up his courage
to go and demand the bird-cage.  She overtook him.

"I was sent out to look for you," she said.  "I oughtn't to have wasted
time buying that ointment; but my hands were hurting me.  Please, you
are to come home and change your clothes for dinner."

"I'll come in a minute," said Dicky, "if you'll stand here and wait."

He might be called by that word again; and without knowing why, he
dreaded her hearing it.  She waited while he trotted forward, nerving
himself to face the crowd again.  Lo! when he reached the booth, all the
bystanders had melted away.  The bird-seller was covering up his cages
with loose wrappers, making ready to pack up for the night.

"Hello!" he said cheerfully.  "Thought I'd lost you for good."

He took the child's money and handed the canary cage across the sill;
also the bird-whistle, wrapped in a scrap of paper.  Many times in the
course of a career which brought him much fighting and some little fame,
Dicky Vyell remembered this his first lesson in courage--that if you
walk straight up to an enemy, as likely as not you find him vanished.

But he had not quite reached the end of his alarms.  As he took the
cage, a parrot at the back of the booth uplifted his voice and
squawked,--

"No prerogative!  No prerogative!  No prerogative!"

"You mustn't mind _him_," said the bird-seller genially.  "He's like the
crowd--picks up a cry an' harps on it without understandin'."

Master Dicky understood it no better; but thanked the man and ran off,
prize in hand, to rejoin the girl.

They hurried back to the Inn.  At the gateway she paused.

"I let you say what was wrong just now," she explained.  "Your father
didn't give me that money for putting out the fire."

Here she hesitated.  Dicky could not think what it mattered, or why her
voice was so timid.

"Oh," said he carelessly, "I dare say it was just because he liked you.
Father has plenty of money."



Chapter IV.


FATHER AND SON.


The dinner set before Captain Vyell comprised a dish of oysters, a fish
chowder, a curried crab, a fried fowl with white sauce, a saddle of
tenderest mutton, and various sweets over which Manasseh had thrown the
elegant flourishes of his art.  The wine came from the Rhone valley--a
Hermitage of the Collector's own shipment.  The candles that lit the
repast stood in the Collector's own silver candlesticks.  As an old
Roman general carried with him on foreign service, packed in panniers on
mule-back, a tessellated pavement to be laid down for him at each
camping halt and repacked when the troops moved forward, so did Captain
Vyell on his progresses of inspection travel with all the apparatus of a
good table.

Dicky, seated opposite his father in a suit of sapphire blue velvet with
buttons of cut steel, partook only of the fried fowl and of a syllabub.
He had his glass of wine too, and sipped at it, not liking it much, but
encouraged by his father, who held that a fine palate could not be
cultivated too early.

By some process of dishing-up best known to himself (but with the aid,
no doubt, of the "dam scullion") Manasseh, who had cooked the dinner,
also served it; noiselessly, wearing white gloves because his master
abominated the sight of a black hand at meals.  These gloves had a
fascination for Dicky.  They attracted his eyes as might the
intervolved play of two large white moths in the penumbra beyond the
candle-light, between his father's back and the dark sideboard; but he
fought against the attraction because he knew that to be aware of a
servant was an offence against good manners at table.

His father encouraged him to talk, and he told of his purchase--but not
all the story.  Not for worlds--instinct told him--must he mention the
word he had heard spoken.  Yet he got so far as to say,--

"The people here don't like us--do they, father?"

Captain Vyell laughed.  "No, that's very certain.  And, to tell you the
truth, if I had known you were wandering the street by yourself I might
have felt uneasy.  Manasseh shall take you for a walk to-morrow.
One can never be sure of the _canaille_."

"What does that mean?"

Captain Vyell explained.  The _canaille_, he said, were the common folk,
whose part in this world was to be ruled.  He explained further that to
belong to the upper or ruling class it did not suffice to be well-born
(though this was almost essential); one must also cultivate the manners
proper to that station, and appear, as well as be, a superior.  Nor was
this all; there were complications, which Dicky would learn in time;
what was called "popular rights," for instance--rights which even a King
must not be allowed to override; and these were so precious that (added
the Collector) the upper classes must sometimes fight and lay down their
lives for them.

Dick perpended.  He found this exceedingly interesting--the more so
because it came, though in a curiously different way, to much the same
as Miss Quiney had taught him out of the catechism.  Miss Quiney had
used pious words; in Miss Quiney's talk everything--even to sitting
upright at table--was mixed up with God and an all-seeing Eye; and his
father--with a child's deadly penetration Dicky felt sure of it--was
careless about God.

This, by the way, had often puzzled and even frightened him.  God, like
a great Sun, loomed so largely through Miss Quiney's scheme of things
(which it were more precise, perhaps, to term a fog) that for certain,
and apart from the sin of it and the assurance of going to hell, every
one removed from God must be sitting in pitch-darkness.  But lo! when
his father talked everything became clear and distinct; there was no sun
at all to be seen, but there was also no darkness.  On the contrary, a
hundred things grew visible at once, and intelligible and
common-sensible as Miss Quiney never contrived to present them.

This was puzzling; and, moreover, the child could not tolerate the
thought of his father's going to hell--to the flames and unbearable
thirst of it.  To be sure Miss Quiney had never hinted this punishment
for her employer, or even a remote chance of it, and Dicky's good
breeding had kept him from confronting her major premise with the
particular instance of his father, although the conclusion of that
syllogism meant everything to him.  Or it may be that he was afraid.
 . . . Once, indeed, like Sindbad in the cave, he had seen a glimmering
chance of escape.  It came when, reading in his Scripture lesson that
Christ consorted by choice with publicans and sinners, he had been
stopped by Miss Quiney with the information that "publican" meant
"a kind of tax-collector."  "Like papa?" asked the child, and held his
breath for the answer.  "Oh, not in the least like your dear papa,"
Miss Quiney made haste to assure him; "but a quite low class of person,
and, I should say, connected rather with the Excise.  You must remember
that all this happened in the East, a long time ago."  Poor soul! the
conscientiousness of her conscience (so to speak) had come to rest upon
turning such corners genteelly, and had grown so expert at it that she
scarcely breathed a sigh of relief.  The child bent his head over the
book.  His eyes were hidden from her, and she never guessed what hope
she had dashed.


It was a relief then--after being forced at one time or another to put
aside or pigeon-hole a hundred questions on which Miss Quiney's
teaching and his father's practice appeared at variance--to find a point
upon which the certainty of both converged.  Heaven and hell might be
this or that; but in this world the poor deserved their place, and must
be kept to it.

"That seems fine," said Dicky, after a long pause.

"What seems fine?"  His father, tasting the mutton with approval, had
let slip his clue to the child's thought.

"Why, that poor people have rights too, and we ought to stand up for
them--like you said," answered Dicky, not too grammatically.

"They are our rights too, you see," said his father.

Dicky did not see; but his eagerness jumped this gap in the argument.
"Papa," he asked with a sudden flush, "did you ever stand up to a King
on the poor people's side, and fight--and all that?"

"Well, you see"--the Collector smiled--"I was never called upon.
But it's in the blood.  Has Miss Quiney ever told you about Oliver
Cromwell?"

"Yes.  He cut off King Charles's head. . . . I don't think Miss Quiney
liked him for that, though she didn't say so."

The Collector was still smiling.  "He certainly helped to cut off King
Charles's head, and--right or wrong--it's remembered against him.
But he did any amount of great things too.  He was a masterful man; and
perhaps the reason why Miss Quiney held her tongue is that he happens to
be an ancestor of ours, and she knew it."

"Oliver Cromwell?"  Dicky repeated the name slowly, with awe.

"He was my great-great-grandfather, and you can add on another 'great'
for yourself.  I am called Oliver after him.  They even say," added
Captain Vyell, sipping his wine, "that I have some of his features; and
so, perhaps, will you when you grow up.  But of your chance of that you
shall judge before long.  I am having a copy of his portrait sent over
from England."

For a moment or two these last remarks scarcely penetrated to the boy's
hearing.  Like all boys, he naturally desired greatness; unlike most,
he was conscious of standing above the crowd, but without a guess that
he derived the advantage from anything better than accident.  His
father had the good fortune to be rich.  For himself--well, Dicky
was born with one of those simple natures that incline rather to
distrust than to overrate their own merits.  None the less he
desired and loved greatness--thus early, and throughout his life--and
it came as a tremendous, a magnificent shock to him that he
enjoyed it as a birthright.  The repetition of "great"--"he was my
great-great-grandfather;"  "you can add another 'great' for yourself"--
hummed in his ears.  A full half a minute ticked by before he grasped at
the remainder of his father's speech, and, like a breaking twig, it
dropped him to bathos.

"But--but--" Dicky passed a hand over his face--"Miss Quiney said that
Oliver Cromwell was covered with warts!"

Captain Vyell laughed outright.

"Women have wonderful ways of conveying a prejudice.  Warts?  Well,
there, at any rate, we have the advantage of old Noll."  The Collector,
whose sense of hearing was acute and fastidious, broke off with a sharp
arching of the eyebrows and a glance up at the ceiling, or rather (since
ceiling there was none) at the oaken beams which supported the floor
overhead.  "Manasseh," he said quickly, "be good enough to step upstairs
and inform our landlady that the pitch of her voice annoys me.  She
would seem to be rating a servant girl above."

"Yes, sah."

"Pray desire her to take the girl away and scold her elsewhere."

Manasseh disappeared, and returned two minutes later to report that
"the woman would give no furdah trouble."  He removed the white cloth,
set out the decanters with an apology for the mahogany's indifferent
polish, and withdrew again to prepare his master's coffee.

At once a silence fell between father and son.  Dicky had expected to
hear more of Oliver Cromwell.  He stared across the dull shine of the
table at his parent's coat of peach-coloured velvet and shirt front of
frilled linen; at the lace ruffle on the wrist, the signet ring on the
little finger, the hand--firm, but fine--as it reached for a decanter or
fell to playing with a gold toothpick.  He loved this father of his with
the helpless, concentred love of a motherless child; admired him, as all
must admire, only more loyally.  To feel constraint in so magnificent a
presence was but natural.

It would have astonished him to learn that his father, lolling there so
easily and toying with a toothpick, shared that constraint.  Yet it was
so.  Captain Vyell did not understand children.  Least of all did he
understand this son of his begetting.  He could be kind to him, even
extravagantly, by fits and starts; desired to be kind constantly; could
rally and chat with him in hearing of a third person, though that third
person were but a servant waiting at table.  But to sit alone facing the
boy and converse with him was a harder business, and gave him an absurd
feeling of _gene_; and this (though possibly he did not know it) was the
real reason why, having brought Dicky in the coach for a treat, he
himself had ridden all day in saddle.

Dicky was the first to resume conversation.

"Papa," he asked, still pondering the problem of rich and poor, "don't
some of the old families die out?"

"They do."

"Then others must come up to take their place, or the people who do the
ruling would come to an end."

"That's the way of it, my boy."  The Collector nodded and cracked a
walnut.  "New families spring up; and a devilish ugly show they usually
make of it at first.  It takes three generations, they say, to breed a
gentleman; and, in my opinion, that's under the mark."

"And a lady?"

"Women are handier at picking up appearances; 'adaptable' 's the word.
But the trouble with them is to find out whether they have the real
thing or not.  For my part, if you want the real thing, I believe there
are more gentlemen than gentlewomen in the world; and Batty Langton says
you may breed out the old Adam, but you'll never get rid of Eve. . . .
But, bless my soul, Dicky, it's early days for you to be discussing the
sex!"

Dicky, however, was perfectly serious.

"But I _do_ mean what you call the real thing, papa.  Couldn't a poor
girl be born so that she had it from the start?  Oh, I can't tell what I
mean exactly--"

"On the contrary, child, you are putting it uncommonly well; at any
rate, you are making me understand what you mean, and that's the A and Z
of it, whether in talk or in writing.  'Is there--can there be--such a
thing as a natural born lady?' that's your question, hey?"
The Collector peeled his walnut and smiled to himself.  In other
company--Batty Langton's, for example--he would have answered cynically
that to him the phenomenon of a natural born lady would first of all
suggest a doubt of her mother's virtue.  "Well, no," he answered after a
while; "if you met such a person, and could trace back her family
history, ten to one you'd discover good blood somewhere in it.
Old stocks fail, die away underground, and, as time goes on, are
forgotten; then one fine day up springs a shoot nobody can account for.
It's the old sap taking a fresh start.  See?"

Dicky nodded.  It would take him some time work out the theory, but he
liked the look of it.

His drowsed young brain--for the hour was past bedtime--applied it idly
to a picture that stood out, sharp and vivid, from the endless train of
the day's impressions: the picture of a girl with quiet, troubled eyes,
composed lips, and hands that beat upon a blazing curtain, not flinching
at the pain. . . . And just then, as it were in a dream, he beat of her
hands echoed in a soft tapping, the door behind his father opened
gently, and Dicky sat up with a start, wide awake again and staring, for
the girl herself stood in the doorway.



Chapter V.


RUTH.


"Hey, what is it?" the Collector demanded, slewing himself to the
half-about in his chair.

The girl stepped forward into the candle-light.  Over her shoulders she
wore a faded plaid, the ends of which her left hand clutched and held
together at her bosom.

"Your Honour's pardon for troubling," she said, and laying a gold coin
on the table, drew back with a slight curtsy.  "But I think you gave
me this by mistake; and now is my only chance to give it back.
I am going home in a few minutes."

The Collector glanced at the coin, and from that to the girl's face, on
which his eyes lingered.

"Gad, I recollect!" he said.  "You were the wench that pulled off my
boots?"

"Yes, sir."

"Well, upon my honour, I forget at this moment if I gave it by mistake
or because of your face.  No, hang me!" he went on, while she flushed,
not angrily, but as though the words hurt her, "it must have been by
mistake.  I couldn't have forgot so much better a reason."

To this she answered nothing, but put forward her hand as if to push the
coin nearer.

"Certainly not," said he, still with eyes on her face.  "I wish you to
take it.  By the way, I heard the landlady's voice just now, letting
loose upon somebody.  Was it on you?"

"Yes."

"And you are going home to-night, you say.  Has she turned you out?"

"Yes."  The girl's hand moved as if gathering the plaid closer over her
bosom.  Her voice held no resentment.  Her eyes were fixed upon the
coin, which, however, she made no further motion to touch; and this
downward glance showed at its best the lovely droop of her long
eyelashes.

The Collector continued to take stock of her, and with a growing wonder.

The lower half of the face's oval was perhaps Unduly gaunt and a trifle
overweighted by the broad brow.  The whole body stood a thought too high
for its breadth, with a hint of coltishness in the thin arms and thick
elbow-joints.  So judged the Collector, as he would have appraised a
slave or any young female animal; while as a connoisseur he knew that
these were faults pointing towards ultimate perfection, and at this
stage even necessary to it.

For assurance he asked her, "How old are you?"

"Sixteen."

"That's as I guessed," said he, and added to himself, "My God, this is
going to be one of the loveliest things in creation!"  Still, as she
bent her eyes to the coin on the table, he ran his appraising glance
over her neck and shoulders, judging--so far as the ugly shawl
permitted--the head's poise, the set of the coral ear, the delicate wave
of hair on the neck's nape.

"Why is she turning you out?"

"A window curtain took fire.  She said it was my fault."

"But it was not your fault at all!" cried Dicky.  "Papa, the curtain
took fire in my room, and she beat it out.  The whole house might have
been burnt down but for her.  She beat it out, and made nothing of it,
though it hurt her horribly.  Look at her hands, papa!"

"Hold out your hands," his father commanded.

She stretched them out.  The ointment, as she turned them palms upward,
shone under the candle rays.

"Turn them the other way," he commanded, after a long look at them.
The words might mean that the sight afflicted him, but his tone scarcely
suggested this.  She turned her hands, and he scrutinised the backs of
them very deliberately.  "It's a shame," said he at length.

"Of course it's a shame!" the boy agreed hotly.  "Papa, won't you ring
for the landlady and tell her so, and then she won't be sent away."

"My dear Dicky," his father answered, "you mistake.  I was thinking that
it was a shame to coarsen such hands with housework."  He eyed the girl
again, and she met him with a straight face--flushed a little and
plainly perturbed, but not shrinking, although her bosom heaved--for his
admiration was entirely cool and critical.  "What is your name?" he
asked.

"Ruth Josselin."

He appeared to consider this for a moment, and then, reaching out a hand
for the decanter, to dismiss the subject.  "Well, pick up your guinea,"
he said.  "No doubt the woman outside has treated you badly; but I can't
intercede for you, to keep you a drudge here among the saucepans; no,
upon my conscience, I can't.  The fact is, Ruth Josselin, you have the
makings of a beauty, and I'll be no party to spoiling 'em.  What is
more, it seems you have spirit, and no woman with beauty and spirit need
fail to win her game in this world.  That's my creed."  He sipped his
wine.

"If your Honour pleases," said the girl quietly, picking up the coin,
"the woman called me bad names, and I was not wanting you at all to
speak for me."

"Oho!"  The Collector set down his glass and laughed.  "So that's the
way of it--'_Nobody asked you, sir, she said._' Dicky, we sit rebuked."

"But--" she hesitated, and then went on rapidly in the lowest of low
tones--"if your Honour wouldn't mind giving me silver instead of gold?
They won't change gold for me in the town; they'll think I have stolen
it.  Most Sundays I'm allowed to take home broken meats to mother and
grandfather, and to-night I shan't be given any, now that I'm sent away.
They'll be expecting me, and indeed, sir, I can't bear to face them--or
I wouldn't ask you.  I beg your Honour's pardon for saying so much."

"Hullo!" exclaimed the Collector.  "Why, yes, to be sure, you must be
grandchild to the old man of the sea--him that I met on the beach this
afternoon, t'other side of the headland.  Lives in a hovel with a wood
pile beside it, and a daughter that looks out for wreckage?"

"Your Honour spoke with them?"  Into Ruth's face there mounted a deeper
tide of colour.  But whereas the first flush had been dark with
distress, this second spread with a glow of affection.  Her eyes seemed
to take light from it, and shone.

"I spoke with the old man.  Since you have said so much, I may say more.
I gave him food; he was starving."

She bent her head.  Her hands moved a little, with a gesture most
pitiful to see.  "I was afraid," she muttered, "with these gales, and no
getting to the oyster beds."

"He took some food, too, to his daughter, with a bottle of wine, as I
remember."

A bright tear dropped.  In the candle-light Dicky saw it splash on the
back of her hand, by the wrist.

"God bless your Honour!"  Dicky could just hear the words.

The door opened and Manasseh entered, bearing the coffee on a silver
tray.

"Manasseh," said his master, "take that guinea and bring me change for
it.  If you have no silver in the treasury get the landlady to change it
for you."

Manasseh was affronted.  His hand came near to shaking as he poured and
handed the coffee.

"Yo' Hon'ah doan off'n use de metal," he answered.  "Dat's sho'.
But whiles an' again yo' Hon'ah condescends ter want it.  Dat bein' so,
I keep it by me--_an'_ polished.  I doan fetch yo' Hon'ah w'at any low
trash has handled."

He withdrew, leaving this fine shaft to rankle, and by-and-by entered
with a small velvet bag, from the neck of which he shook a small cascade
of silver coins, all exquisitely polished.

"Count me out change for a guinea," commanded his master.

Manasseh obeyed.

"Now empty the bag, put into it what you have counted, and sweep up the
rest."

Manasseh dropped in the coins one by one, and tied the neck of the bag
with its silken ribbon.  The Collector took it from him and tossed it to
the girl.

"Here--catch!" said he carelessly.

But her burnt hands shrank from closing on if, and it fell to the floor.
She stooped, recovered it, and slipped it within her bodice.  As she
rose erect again her eyes rested in wonder on the black servant who with
a crumb-brush was sweeping the rest of the money off the table and
catching it upon the coffee-salver.  The rain and clash of the coins
appeared to confuse her for a moment.  Then with another curtsy and a
"Thank your Honour," she moved to the door.

"But wait," said the Collector sharply, on a sudden thought.  "You are
not meaning to walk all the way home, surely?"

"Yes."

"At this hour?"

"The wind has gone down.  I do not mind the dark, and the distance is
nothing. . . . Oh, I forgot: your Honour thinks that, with all this
money, some one will try to rob me?"

The Collector smiled.  "You would appear to be a very innocent young
woman," he said.  "I was not, as a fact, thinking of the money."

"Nobody will guess that I am carrying so much," she said simply; "so it
will be quite safe."

"Nevertheless this may help to give you confidence," said he.
Feeling in the breast pocket of his laced satin waistcoat, he drew forth
a diminutive pistol--a delicate toy, with a pattern of silver foliated
over the butt.  "It is loaded," he explained, "and primed; though it
cannot go off unless you pull back the trigger.  At close quarters it
can be pretty deadly.  Do you understand firearms?"

"Grandfather has a fowling-piece," she answered; "and, now that his
sight has failed, on Sundays I try to shoot sea-birds for him.  He says
that I have a good eye.  But last week the birds had all flown inland,
because of the gale."

"Then take this.  It is nothing to carry, and you may feel the safer for
it."

She put up a hand to decline.  "Why should I need it?"

"We'll hope you will not.  But do as I bid you, girl.  I shall be
passing back along the beach in two days' time, and will call for it."

She resisted no longer.

"I will take it," she said.  "By that time I may have thought of words
to thank your Honour."

She curtsied again.

"Manasseh!" Captain Vyell pointed to the door.  The negro opened it and
stood aside majestically as she passed out and was gone.


Let moralists perpend.  Ruth Josselin had knocked at that door after a
sharp struggle between conscience and crying want.  The poverty known to
Ruth was of the extreme kind that gnaws the entrails with hunger.
It had furthermore starved her childhood of religion, and her sole code
of honour came to her by instinct.  Yet she had knocked at the door with
no thought but that the Collector's guinea had come to her hand by
mistake, and no expectancy but that the Collector would thank her and
take it back.  She was shy, moreover.  It had cost courage.

"Honesty is the best policy."  True enough, no doubt.  Yet, when all is
said, but for some radical instinct of honesty, untaught, brave to
conquer a more than selfish need, Ruth had never brought back her
guinea.  And, yet again, from that action all the rest of this story
flows.  When we have told it, let the moralists decide.



Chapter VI.


PARENTHETICAL--OF THE FAMILY OF VYELL.


Captain Oliver Vyell, as we have seen, set store upon pedigree: and
here, as well in compliment to him as to make our story clearer, we will
interrupt it with a brief account of his family and descent.

The tomb of Sir Thomas Vyell, second Baronet, at whose house of
Carwithiel in Cornwall our Collector spent some years of his boyhood,
may yet be seen in the church of that parish, in the family transept.
It bears the coat of the Vyells (gules, a fesse raguly argent) with no
less than twenty-four quarterings: for an Odo of the name had fought on
the winning side at Hastings, and his descendants, settling in the West,
had held estates there and been people of importance ever since.

The Wars of the Roses, to be sure, had left them under a cloud, shorn of
the most of their wealth and a great part of their lands.  Yet they kept
themselves afloat (if this riot of metaphor may be pardoned) and their
heads moderately high, until Sir William, the first Baronet, by
developing certain tin mines on his estate and working them by new
processes, set up the family fortunes once more.

His son, Sir Thomas, steadily bettered them.  A contemporary narrative
describes him as "chief of a very good Cornish family, with a very good
estate.  His marrying a grand-daughter of the Lord Protector (Oliver)
first recommended him to King William, who at the Revolution made him
Commissioner of the Excise and some years after Governor of the Post
Office. . . . The Queen, by reason of his great capacity and honesty,
hath continued him in the office of Postmaster.  He is a gentleman of a
sweet, easy, affable disposition--a handsome man, of middle stature,
towards forty years old."  This was written in 1713.  Sir Thomas died in
1726, of the smallpox, having issue (by his one wife, who survived him
but a few years) seven sons and three daughters.

1.  Thomas, the third Baronet: of whom anon.

2.  William, who became a Senior Student of Christ Church, Oxford, a
    page to Queen Mary, and a Fellow of the Royal Society.  A memoir
    of the time preserves him for us as "a tall sanguineman, with a
    merry eye and talkative in his cups."  He married a Walpole, but his
    children died young.

3.  John, who, going on a diplomatic mission to Hamburg, took a fever
    and died there, unmarried.

4.  Henry, the father of our Collector.  He married Jane, second
    daughter of the Marquis of Lomond; increased his wealth in Bengal as
    governor of the East India Company's Factory, and while yet
    increasing it, died at Calcutta in 1728.  His children were two
    sons, Oliver and Henry, with both of whom our story deals.

5.  Algernon, who went to Jesus College, Cambridge, became a Fellow
    there, practised severe parsimony, and dying unmarried in 1742, had
    his eyes closed by his college gyp and weighted with two penny
    pieces--the only coins found in his breeches pocket.  He left his
    very considerable savings to young Oliver, whom he had never
    seen.

6.  Frederick Penwarne, barrister-at-law.  We shall have something to do
    with him.

7.  Roger, who traded at Calcutta and making an expedition to the
    Persian Gulf, was killed there in a chance affray with some Arabs.

8.  Anne, who married Sackville.

9.  Frances Elizabeth, who married Pelham.

10. Arabella, whose affections went astray upon a young Cornish yeoman.
    Her family interfering, the match was broken off and she died
    unmarried.


Oliver and Henry, born at Calcutta, were for their health's sake sent
home together--he one aged four, the other three--to be nurtured at
Carwithiel.  Here under the care of their grandparents, Sir Thomas and
Lady Vyell (the Protector's grand-daughter), they received instruction
at the hands--often very literally at the hands--of the Rev. Isaac
Toplady, Curate in Charge of Carwithiel, a dry scholar, a wet
fly-fisher, and something of a toad-eater.  They had for sole playmate
and companion their Cousin Diana, or Di, the seven-year-old daughter of
their eldest uncle, Thomas, heir to the estates and the baronetcy.

This Thomas--a dry, peevish man, averse from country pursuits, penurious
and incurably suspicious of all his fellow-men--now occupied after a
fashion and with fair diligence that place in public affairs from which
his father had, on approach of age, withdrawn.  He sat in Parliament for
the family borough of St. Michael, and by family influence had risen to
be a Lord of the Admiralty.  He had married Lady Caroline Pett, a
daughter of the first Earl of Portlemouth, and the pair kept house in
Arlington Street, where during the session they entertained with a
frugality against which Lady Caroline fought in vain.  They were known
(and she was aware of it) as "Pett and Petty," and her life was
embittered by the discovery, made too late, that her husband was in
every sense a mean man, who would never rise and never understand why
not, while he nursed an irrational grudge against her for having
presented him with a daughter and then ceased from child-bearing.

Unless she repented and procured him a male heir, the baronetcy would
come to him only to pass at his death to young Oliver; and the couple,
who spent all the Parliamentary recesses at Carwithiel because Mr.
Thomas found it cheap, bore no goodwill to that young gentleman.
He _en revanche_ supplied them with abundant food for censure, being
wilful from the first, and given in those early years to consorting with
stable-boys and picking up their manners and modes of speech.  The uncle
and aunt alleged--and indeed it was obvious--that the unruly boys passed
on the infection to Miss Diana.  Miss Diana never accompanied her
parents to London, but had grown up from the first at Carwithiel--again
because Mr. Thomas found it cheap.

In this atmosphere of stable slang, surrounded by a sort of protective
outer aura in their grandparents' godliness, the three children grew up:
mischievous indeed and without rein, but by no means vicious.
Their first separation came in 1726 when Master Oliver, now rising ten,
left for London, to be entered at Westminster School.  Harry was to
follow him; and did, in a twelve-month's time; but just before this
happened, in Oliver's summer holidays.  Sir Thomas took the smallpox and
died and went to his tomb in the Carwithiel transept.  Harry took it
too; but pulled through, not much disfigured.  Oliver and Diana escaped.

The boys, to whom their grandfather--so far as they regarded him at
all--had mainly presented himself as a benevolent old proser, were
surprised to find that they sincerely regretted him; and the events of
the next few weeks threw up his merits (now that the time was past for
rewarding them) into a sharp light which memory overarched with a halo.
Tenderly into that halo dissolved his trivial faults--his trick, for
example, of snoring between the courses at dinner, or of awaking and
pulling his fingers till they cracked with a distressing sound.
These and other small frailties were forgotten as the new Sir Thomas and
his spouse took possession and proceeded in a few weeks to turn the
place inside out, dismissing five of the stable-boys, cutting down the
garden staff by one-third, and carrying havoc into the housekeeper's
apartments, the dairy, the still-room.

In these dismissals I have no doubt that Sir Thomas and Lady Caroline
hit (as justice is done in this world) upon the chief blackguards.
But the two boys, asking one another why So-and-so had been marked down
while This-other had been spared, and observing that the So-and-so's
included an overbalancing number of their own cronies, found malice in
the discrimination, and a malice directed with intent upon themselves.

Young Oliver, as soon as Harry was convalescent, discussed this
vehemently with him.  Harry, weak with illness, took it passively.
He was destined for the Navy.  To him already the sea meant everything:
as a child of three, on his voyage home in the _Mogul_ East Indiaman, he
had caught the infection of it; on it, as offering the only career fit
for a grown man, his young thoughts brooded, and these annoyances were
to him but as chimney-pots and pantiles falling about the heads of folks
ashore.  But he agreed that Di's conduct needed explaining.  She had
taken a demure turn, and was not remonstrating with her parents as she
ought--not playing fair, in short.  "It must be pretty difficult for
her," said Harry.  "I don't see," said Oliver.


The two boys went back to Westminster together.  They spent the
Christmas holidays with their Uncle Frederick, the barrister, who
practised very little at the law either in court or in chambers, hut
dwelt somewhat luxuriously in the Inner Temple and lived the life of a
man-about-town.  Their summer vacation was to be spent at Carwithiel;
but, as it happened, they were not to see Carwithiel again, for before
summer came news of their father's death at Calcutta.  He had amassed a
fortune which, translated out of rupees, amounted to 400,000 pounds.
To his widow, in addition to her jointure, he left a life interest of a
thousand pounds _per annum_; a sum of 20,000 pounds was set aside for
Harry, to accumulate until his twenty-first birthday; while the
magnificent residue in like manner accumulated for young Oliver, the
heir.

Lady Jane returned to England, to live in decent affluence at Bath; and
at Bath, of course, Oliver and Harry spent their subsequent holidays,
while their Uncle Frederick continued by occasional dinners and gifts of
pocket money, by outings down the river to Greenwich, by seats at the
theatre or at state shows and pageants, to mitigate the rigours of
school.  Had it occurred to Oliver Vyell in later life to set down his
"Reflections" in the style of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, he might
have begun them in some such words as these: "From my mother, Lady Jane
Vyell, I learned to be proud of good birth, to esteem myself a
gentleman, and to regulate my actions by a code proper to my station in
life.  This code she reconciled with the Gospels, and indeed, she rested
it on the rock of Holy Scripture.  From my Uncle Frederick I learned
that self-interest was the key of life; that the teachings of the
priest-hood were more or less conscious humbug; that all men could be
bought; that their god was vanity, and the Great Revolution the noblest
event in English history. . . ."

The sane infusion of Father Neptune in Master Harry's blood preserved
him from these doctrines, and before long indeed removed him out of the
way of hearing them.  Soon after his fifteenth birthday he sailed to
learn his profession shipping (by a fiction of the service), as
"cabin boy" under his mother's brother.  Lord Robert Soules, then
commanding the _Merope_ frigate.

Oliver proceeded to Christ Church, Oxford, and thence (without waiting
for a degree) to make the Grand Tour; in the course of which and in
company with his cousin, Dick Pelham, and a Mr. Batty Langton, a Christ
Church friend, he visited Florence, Rome, Naples, Athens, and
Constantinople, returning through Rome again and by way of Venice,
Switzerland, Paris.  He reached home to find that his mother, who
believed in keeping young men employed, had procured him a cornetcy in
Lord Lomond's Troop of Horse.  He was now in possession of an ample
fortune.  He would certainly succeed to the baronetcy, and to the Vyell
acres, which were mostly entailed.

But the grave itself could not give lessons in greed to a true Whig
family of that period.  Lady Jane had it in her blood, every tradition
of it.  Her son (though within a few months he rose to command of a
troop) detested all military routine save active service.  He despised
the triumphs of the Senate.  To keep him out of mischief--or, rather, as
you shall hear, to extricate him from it--the good dame made application
to the Duke of Newcastle; and so in the year 1737, at the age of
twenty-one, Captain Oliver Vyell was appointed to the lucrative post of
Collector to the port of Boston.

He had held it, now, for close upon seven years.



Chapter VII.


A SABBATH-BREAKER.


Now, in his twenty-eighth year, Oliver Vyell, handsome of face, standing
six feet two inches in his stockings, well built and of iron
constitution, might fairly be called a sensual man, but not fairly a
sensualist.  The distinction lay in his manliness.  He was a man, every
inch of him.

He enjoyed hard riding even more than hard gaming, and far more than
hard drinking; courted fatigue as a form of bodily indulgence; would
tramp from twenty to thirty miles in any weather on a chance of sport;
loved the bite of the wind, the shock of cold water; and was a bold
swimmer in a generation that shunned the exercise.

He awoke next morning to find the sun shining in on his window after a
boisterous night.  He looked at his watch and rang a small bell that
stood on the table by his bed.  Within ten seconds Manasseh appeared,
and was commanded first to draw up the blind and then, though the hour
was early, to bring shaving-water with all speed.

While the negro went on his errand Captain Vyell arose, slipped on his
dressing-gown, and strolled to the window.  It looked upon the ocean,
over a clean stretch of beach that ran north-west, starting from the
pier-head of the harbour and fringing the town's outskirt.  Half a dozen
houses formed this outskirt or suburb--decent weather-boarded houses
standing in their own gardens along a curved cliff overlooking the
beach.  The beach was of hardest sand, and just beneath the Collector's
window so level that it served for a second bowling-green, or
ten-pin-alley.  Thus it ran out for some twenty rods and then shelved
abruptly.  Captain Vyell, who had an eye for such phenomena, judged that
this bank had formed itself quite recently, since the building of the
pier.

A heavy sea was running, and evidently with a strong undertow.  When
Manasseh returned with the hot water, Captain Vyell announced that he
would bathe before taking his chocolate.

"Yo' Hon'ah will bathe befor' shaving?"

"You d----d fool, did you ever know me do _any_thing before shaving?"

Manasseh chose a razor, stropped it, and worked the shaving soap into a
lather.

"Beggin' yo' Hon'ah's pardon," said he, "it bein' de Lawd's Day, an'
these Port Nassau people dam' ig'orant--"

"Hand me the _peignoir_," commanded his master sharply.

He sat, and was shaved.  Then, having sponged his chin, he ordered
Manasseh to lay out his bathing-dress, retire, find a back way to the
beach and, having opened all doors, attend him below.  He indued himself
in his bathing-dress very deliberately, standing up for a minute stark
naked in the sunshine flooding through the open window--a splendid
figure, foretasting battle with the surf.

Then, having drawn on his bathing-dress and thrust his feet into
sand-shoes, he cast his dressing-gown again over him and went down the
stairs at a run.  The doors stood open, and on the beach the negro
awaited him in the right attitude of "attention."  To him he tossed his
wrap and shoes, and ran down to the beach as might swift-footed Achilles
have run to be clasped by the Sea-Goddess his mother.

Through the shallow wavelets he ran, stepping high and delicately
splashing merry drops against the morning sunlight, leaped over one or
two that would have "tilled" him to the knee (to use an old boyish
phrase learnt at Carwithiel where he had learnt to swim), and came to
the shelf beyond which the first tall comber boomed towards him, more
than head high, hissing along its ridge.  There, as it overarched him,
he launched his body forward and shot through the transparent green,
emerging beyond the white smother with a thrill and a laugh of sheer
physical delight.  Thrice he repeated this,--

    "Like a dive-dapper peering through a wave,
     Who, being look'd on, ducks as quickly in. . ."

passed the fourth wave, gained deep water, and thrust out to sea with a
steady breast-stroke, his eyes all the while on the great embracing
flood which, stretch as it might from here to Europe, for the moment he
commanded.

Manasseh watched him from the beach.  From the cliff above two
scandalised householders calling to one another across their gardens'
boundary pointed seaward and summoned their families to the windows to
note the reprobate swimmer and a Sabbath profaned.

The eyes of a long-shore population are ever on the sea from which comes
their livelihood, and nothing on the sea escapes them long.
The Collector's head by this time was but a speck bobbing on the waves,
but ere he turned back for shore maybe two hundred of Port Nassau's
population were watching, from various points.  The Port Nassauers,
whatever their individual frailties, were sternly religious--nine-tenths
of them from conviction or habit, the rest in self-defence--and
Sabbatarians to a man.  The sight of that heathen slave, Manasseh,
waiting on the beach with a bath-gown over his arm, incensed them to
fury.  Growls were uttered, here and there, that if the authorities knew
their business this law-breaker--for Sabbath-breaking was an indictable
offence--should be seized on landing, haled naked to justice, and
clapped in the town stocks; but fortunately this indignation had no
concert and found, for the moment, no leader.

The Collector, having swum out more than half a mile, turned and sped
back, using a sharp side-stroke now with a curving arm that cleft the
ridges like the fin of a fish.  His feet touched earth, and he ran up
through the pursuing breakers--a fleet-footed Achilles again, glittering
from the bath.  Manasseh hurried down to throw his mantle over the
godlike man.

"Towel me here," was the panting command.  And, lo! slipping off his
bathing-dress and standing naked to the sea.  Captain Vyell was towelled
under the eyes of Port Nassau, and flesh-brushed until he glowed (it may
be) as healthily as did the cheeks of those who spied on him.  On this
question the Muse declines to take sides.  For certain his naked body,
after these ministrations, glowed delicious within the bath-gown as he
mounted again to his Olympian chamber.  There he allowed Manasseh to
wash out his locks in fresh water (the Collector had a fine head of
hair, of a waved brown, and detested a wig), to anoint them, and tie
them behind with a fresh black ribbon.  This done, he took his clothes
one by one as Manasseh handed them, and arrayed himself, humming the
while an air from Opera, and thus unconsciously committing a second
offence against the Sabbath.

He descended to find Dicky already seated at table, awaiting him.
Dicky had slept like a top in spite of the strange bed; and awaking soon
after daybreak, had lain cosily listening to the boom of the sea.
To him this holiday was a glorious interlude in the regime of Miss
Quiney.  His handsome father did not kiss him, but merely patted him on
the shoulder as he passed to his chair; and to Dick (though he would
have liked a kiss) it seemed just the right manly thing to do.

They talked merrily while Manasseh brought in the breakfast dishes--for
Master Dicky bread-and-milk followed by a simple steak of cod; a
bewildering succession of chowder, omelet, devilled kidneys, cold ham,
game pie, and fruit for the Collector, who professed himself keen-set as
a hunter, and washed down the viands with a tankard of cider.
He described his bathe, and promised Dicky that he should have his first
swimming lessons next summer.  "I must talk about you to your Uncle
Harry.  Craze for the sea?  At your age if he saw a puddle of water he
must stick his toes in it.  He's cruising just now, off South Carolina,
keeping a look-out for guarda-costas.  He'll render an account of them,
you may be sure.  He writes that he may be coming up Boston way any time
now.  Oh, I can swim, but for diving you should see your Uncle Harry--
off the yard-arm--body taut as a whip--nothing like it in any of the old
Greeks' statues.  Plenty of talk about bathing; but diving?  No.  In the
east, must go south to the Persian Gulf to see diving.  The god Hermes
descending on Ogygia--if you could imagine that, you had Uncle Harry--
the shoot outwards, the delicate curve to a straight slant, heels rising
above rigid body while you counted, begad! holding your breath.
Then the plumb drop, like a gannet's--"

Dicky listened, glorious vistas opening before him.  With the fruit
Manasseh brought coffee; and still the boy sat entranced while his
father chatted, glowing with exercise and enjoying a breakfast at every
point excellent.

It was in merest thoughtlessness, no doubt, that having arranged for
Dicky's morning walk, and after smoking a tobacco leaf rolled with an
art of which Manasseh possessed the secret, the Collector so timed his
message to the stables that his groom brought the horse Bayard around to
the Inn door just as the Sabbath bells began tolling for divine worship.
For as a sceptic he was careless rather than militant; ridiculing
religion only in his own set, and when occasion arose, and then without
fanaticism.  For such piety as his mother's he had even a tolerant
respect; and in any event had too much breeding to affront of set
purpose the godly townsfolk of Port Nassau.  At the first note of the
bells he frowned and blamed himself for not having started earlier.
But he had already made appointment by letter to meet the Surveyor and
the Assistant Surveyor at noon on the headland, to measure out and
discuss the site of the proposed fortification; and he was a punctilious
man in observing engagements.

It may be asked how, if civil to other men's scruples, he had come to
make such an appointment for the Sabbath.  He had answered this and (as
he hoped) with suitable apologies in his letter to the surveyor,
Mr. Wapshott: explaining that as His Majesty's business was bringing him
to Port Nassau, so it obliged him to be back at Boston by such-and-such
a date.  He was personally unacquainted with this Mr. Wapshott, who had
omitted the courtesy of calling upon him at the Bowling Green, and whom
by consequence he was inclined to set down as a person of defective
manners.  But Mr. Wapshott was, after all, in the King's service and
would understand its exigencies.

He mounted therefore and rode up the street.  The roadway was deserted;
but along the side-walk, sober families, marching by twos and threes,
turned their heads at the sound of Bayard's hoofs on the cobbles.
The Collector set his face and passed them with a grave look, as of one
absorbed in affairs of moment.  Nevertheless, coming to the whitewashed
Church where the streams of worshippers converged and choking the
porchway overflowed upon the street, he added the courtesy of doffing
his hat as he rode by.  He did this still with a set face, looking
straight between Bayard's ears; but with the tail of his eye caught one
glimpse of a little comedy which puzzled and amused him.

A small rotund, red-gilled man, in bearing and aspect not unlike a
turkey-cock, was mounting the steps of the portico.  Behind this
personage sailed an ample lady of middle age, with a bevy of younger
damsels--his spouse and daughters doubtless.  Suddenly--and as if, at
sight of the Collector, a whisper passed among them--the middle-aged
lady shot out a hand, arrested her husband by the coat-tail and drew him
down a step, while the daughters ranged themselves in semicircle around
him, spreading their skirts and together effacing him from view, much as
a hen covers her offspring.

The Collector laughed inwardly as he replaced his hat, and rode on
speculating what this bit of by-play might mean.  But it had passed out
of his thoughts before he came to the outskirts of the town.



Chapter VIII.


ANOTHER SABBATH-BREAKER.


The road--the same by which he had arrived last night--mounted all the
way and led across the neck of the headland.  His business, however, lay
out upon the headland itself and almost at its extremest verge; and a
mile above the town he struck off to the left where a bridle-path
climbed by a long slant to the ridge.  Half an hour's easy riding
brought him to the top of the ascent, whence he looked down on the long
beach he had travelled yesterday.  The sea lay spread on three sides of
him.  Its salt breeze played on his face; and the bay horse, feeling the
tickle of it in his nostrils, threw up his head with a whinny.
"Good, old boy--is it not?" asked the Collector, patting his neck.
"Suppose we try a breather of it?"

The chine of the headland--of turf, short-cropped by the unceasing
wind--stretched smooth as a racecourse for close upon a mile, with a
gentle dip midway much like the hollow of a saddle.  The Collector ran
his eye along it in search of the two men he had come to meet, but could
spy neither of them.

"Sheltering somewhere from the breeze, maybe," he decided.  "_We_ don't
mind it, hey?  Come along, lad--here's wine for heroes!"

He touched Bayard with the spur, and the good horse started at a
gallop--a rollicking gallop and in the very tune of his master's mood;
and if all Port Nassau had not been at its devotions, the chins of its
burghers might have tilted themselves in wonder at the apparition--a
Centaur, enlarged upon the skyline.

Man and horse at full stretch of the gallop were launching down the dip
of the hollow--the wind singing past on the top note of exhilaration--
when the bay, too well trained to shy, faltered a moment and broke his
stride, as a figure started up from the lee-side of the ridge.

The Collector sailing past and throwing a glance over his shoulder, saw
the figure and lifted a hand.  In another ten strides he reined up
Bayard, turned, and came back at a walk.

He confronted a lean, narrow-chested young man, black-suited, pale of
face, with watery eyes, straw-coloured eyelashes and an underbred smile
that twitched between timidity and assurance.

"Ah?" queried the Collector, eyeing him and disliking him at sight.
"Are you "--doubtfully--"by any chance Mr. Wapshott, the Surveyor?"

"No such luck," answered the watery-eyed young man with an offhand
attempt at familiarity.  "I'm his Assistant--name of Banner--Wapshott's
unwell."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Mr.--Mr. Wapshott--sends word that he's unwell."  Under the Collector's
eye the youth suddenly shifted his manner and became respectful.

"I beg your pardon?" the Collector repeated slowly.  "He 'sends word,'
do you say?  I had not the honour at my Inn--from which I have ridden
straight--to be notified of Mr. Wapshott's indisposition."

Mr. Banner attempted a weak grin and harked back again to familiarity.

"No, I guess not.  The fact is--"

"Excuse me; but would you mind taking your hands out of your pockets?"

"Oh, come!  Why?"  But none the less Mr. Banner removed them.

"Thank you.  You were saying?"

"Well, I guess, between you and me"--Mr. Banner's hands were slipping to
his pockets again but he checked the motion and rested a palm
nonchalantly on either hip--"the old man was a bit too God-fearing to
sign to it."

"You mean," the Collector asked slowly, "that he is not, in fact,
unwell, but has asked you to convey an untruth?"

"You've a downright way of putting it--er--sir" Mr. Banner confessed;
"but you get near enough, I shouldn't wonder.  You see, the old--the
Surveyor is strict upon Lord's Day Observance."

The Collector bent his brows slightly while he smoothed Bayard's mane.
Of a sudden the small scene by the Church porch recurred to him.
"Stay," he said.  "I have not the pleasure of knowing Mr. Wapshott, but
may I attempt to describe him to you?  He is, perhaps, a gentleman of
somewhat stunted growth, but of full habit, and somewhat noticeably red
between the ear and the neck-stock?"

"That hits him."

"--with a wife inclining to portliness and six grown daughters, taller
than their parents and not precisely in their first bloom.  I speak,"
added the Collector, still eyeing his victim, "as to a man of the
world."

"You've seen him anyhow," Mr. Banner nodded.  "That's Wapshott."

"I saw him entering his place of worship; and I note that he thinks what
you call the Lord's Day well worth keeping at the cost of a falsehood.
May I ask, Mr.--"  The Collector hesitated.

"Banner."

"Ah, yes--pardon me!  May I ask, Mr. Banner, how it comes that you have
a nicer sense than your superior of what is due to His Majesty's
Service?"

Mr. Banner laughed uneasily.  "Well, you mightn't guess it from my
looks," he answered with an attempt to ingratiate himself by way of
self-deprecation, "but I am pretty good at working out levels.  I really
am."

"That was not my point, though I shall test you on it presently.
You are, it appears, a somewhat less rigid Sabbatarian than Mr.
Wapshott?"

Hereupon Mr. Banner became cryptic.  "You needn't fear about that," he
answered.  "I have what they call a dispensation; and until you startled
me, I was up here keeping the Lord's Day as well as the best of 'em.
Better, perhaps."

"We will get to business," said the Collector.  "Follow me, please."

He wheeled his horse and, with Mr. Banner walking at his stirrup, rode
slowly out to the end of the headland and as slowly back.  The Collector
asked a question now and then and to every question the young man
responded pat.  He was no fool.  It soon appeared that he had studied
the trajectory of guns, that he had views--and sound ones--on coast
defences, and that by some study of the subject he had come, a while
ago, to a conclusion the Collector took but a few minutes to endorse;
that to build a fort on this headland would be waste of public money.

Professionally, Mr. Banner was tolerable.  The Collector, consulting
with him, forgot the pertness of his address, the distressing twang of
his accent.  He had dismounted, and the pair were busy with a tape,
calling out and checking measurements, when from the southward there was
borne to the Collector's ears the distant crack of a shot-gun.

At the sound of it he glanced up, in time to see Mr. Banner drop the
other end of the tape and run.  Almost willy-nilly he followed, vaguely
wondering if there had happened some accident that called for aid.

Mr. Banner, when the Collector overtook him, had come to a halt
overlooking the long beach, and pointed to a figure--a speck almost--for
it was distant more than a mile.

"That Josselin girl!" panted Mr. Banner.  "I call you to witness!"

The Collector unstrapped his field-glass, which he carried in a
bandolier, adjusted it, and through it scanned the beach.  Yes, in the
distant figure he recognised Ruth Josselin.  She carried a gun--or
rather, stood with the gun grounded and her hands folded, resting on its
muzzle--and appeared to be watching the edge of the breakers, perhaps
waiting for them to wash to her feet a dead bird fallen beyond reach.

"See her, do you?  I call you to witness!" repeated the voice at his
elbow.

"Why, what is the matter?"

"Sabbath breakin'," answered Mr. Banner with a curious leer.

"Ah!"

"But you yourself don't take much account of the Lord's Day, seemingly.
Bathin', f'r instance."

"Indeed!" The Collector eyed his companion reflectively.  "You honoured
me with your observation this morning?"

Mr. Banner grinned.  "Better say the whole of Port Nassau was hon'rin'
you.  Oh, there'd be no lack of evidence!--but I guess the magistrates
were lookin' the other way.  They allowed, no doubt, that even a
Sabbath-breaker might be havin' friends at Court!"

The Collector could not forbear smiling at the youth's impudence.

"May I ask what punishment I have probably escaped by that advantage?"

"Well," said Mr. Banner, "for lighter cases it's usually the stocks."

Still the Collector smiled.  "I am trying to picture it," said he, after
a pause.  "But you don't tell me they would put a young girl in the
stocks, merely for firing a gun on the Lord's Day, as you call it?"

"Wouldn't they!" Mr. Banner chuckled.  "That, or the pillory."

"You are a strange folk in Port Nassau."  The Collector frowned, upon a
sudden suspicion, and his eyes darkened in their scrutiny of Mr.
Banner's unpleasant face.  "By the way, you told me just now that you
were here upon some sort of a dispensation.  Forgive me if I do you
wrong, but was it by any chance that you might play the spy upon this
girl?"

"Shadbolt asked me to keep an eye liftin' for her."

"Who is Shadbolt?"

"The Town Beadle.  He's watchin' somewhere along the cliffs."
Mr. Banner waved a hand towards the neck of the headland.
"It's a scandal, and by all accounts has been goin' on for weeks."

"So that is why you called me to witness?  Well, Mr. Banner, I have a
horsewhip lying on the turf yonder, and I warn you to forget your
suggestion. . . . Shall we resume our measurements?--and, if you please,
in silence.  Your presence is distasteful to me."

They turned from the cliff and went back to their work, in which--for
they both enjoyed it--they were soon immersed.  It may have been, too,
that the wind had shifted.  At any rate they missed to hear, ten minutes
later, a second shot fired on the beach, not more distant but fainter
than the first.



Chapter IX.


THE SCOURGE.


Next morning, at ten o'clock, the Collector's coach-and-six stood at the
Inn gate, harnessed up and ready for the return journey.  In the
road-way beyond one of the grooms waited with a hand on Bayard's bridle.

The Collector, booted and spurred, with riding-whip tucked under his
arm, came up the pebbled pathway, drawing on his gauntleted gloves.
Dicky trotted beside him.  Manasseh followed in attendance.  Behind them
in the porchway the landlady bobbed unregarded, like a piece of
clockwork gradually running down.

"Hey!"  The Collector, as he reached the gate, lifted his chin sharply--
threw up his head as a finely bred animal scents battle or danger.
"What's this?  A riot, up the street?"

The grooms could not tell him, for the sound had reached their ears but
a second or two before the question; a dull confused murmur out of
which, as it increased to a clamour and drew nearer, sharper outcries
detached themselves, and the shrill voices of women.  A procession had
turned the corner of the head of the avenue--a booing, howling rabble.

The Collector stepped to his horse's rein, flung himself into saddle,
and rode forward at a foot's pace to meet the tumult.

Suddenly his hand tightened on the rein, and Bayard came to a halt; but
his master did not perceive this.  The hand's movement had been nervous,
involuntary.  He sat erect--stood, rather, from the stirrup--his nostril
dilated, his brain scarcely believing what his eyes saw.

"The swine!" he said slowly, to himself.  His teeth were shut and the
words inaudible.  "The swine!" he repeated.

Men have done, in the name of religion and not so long ago--indeed are
perhaps doing now and daily--deeds so vile that mere decency cannot face
describing them.  It is a question if mere decency (by which I mean the
good instinct of civilised man) will not in the end purge faith clean of
religion; if, while men dispute and hate and inflict cruelty for
religion, they are not all the while outgrowing it.  Libraries, for
example, are written to prove that unbaptized infants come out of
darkness to draw a fleeting breath or two and pass to hell-fire; the
dispute occupies men for generations--and lo! one day the world finds it
has no use for any such question.  Time--no thanks to the theologians--
has educated it, and this thing at any rate it would no longer believe
if it could, as it certainly cannot.  Faith never yet has burnt man or
woman at the stake.  Religion has burnt its tens of thousands.

Behind the first two or three ranks of the mob--an exultant mob of grown
men, grown women, and (worst of all) little children--plodded a grey
horse, drawing a cart.  Behind the cart, bound to it, with a thong tight
about her fire-scorched wrists--But no; it is not to be written.

They had stripped her to the waist, and then for decency--_their_
decency!--had thrown a jacket of coarse sacking over her, lacing it
loosely in front with pack-thread.  But, because their work required it,
this garment had been gathered up into a rope at the neck, whence it
dangled in folds over her young breast.

She walked with wide eyes, uttering no sound.  She alone of that crowd
uttered no sound.  A brute with a bandaged jaw walked close behind her.
Oliver Vyell saw his forearm swing up--saw the scourge whirl in his
fist--met the girl's eyes. . . . She, meeting his, let escape the
first and last cry she uttered that day.  He could have sworn that
her face was scarlet; but no, he was wrong; while he looked he saw
his mistake-she was white as death.  Then with that one pitiful cry
she sank among the close-pressing crowd; but her hands, by the cord's
constraint, still lifted themselves as might a drowning swimmer's;
and the grey horse--the one other innocent creature in that
procession--plodded forward, dragging her now senseless body at the
cart's tail.

"You swine!"

It does a man good sometimes to get in his blow.  It did Oliver Vyell
good, riding in, to slash twice crosswise on the brute's bandaged face;
to feel the whalebone bite and then, as he swung out of saddle, to ram
fist and whip-butt together on the ugly mouth, driving in its
fore-teeth.

"Stop the horse, some one!" he commanded, as the Beadle reeled back.
"She has fainted." He added, "The first man that interferes, I shoot."

The crowd growled.  He turned on the nearest mutterer--"Your knife!"
The fellow handed it; so promptly, he might have been holding it ready
to proffer.  The Collector stooped and cut the thongs.  This done, he
stood up and saw the Beadle advancing again, snarling through the
bloody gap in his mouth.

"You had best take that man away," said the Collector quietly, pulling
out his small pistol.  "If you don't, I am going to kill him."
They heard and saw that he meant it.  He added in the same tone,
"I am going to take all responsibility for this.  Will you make way,
please?"

His first intention was to lift the body lying unconscious in the
roadway, carry it to the coach and drive out of Port Nassau with it,
defying the law to interfere.  For the moment he "saw red," as we say
nowadays, and was quite capable of shooting down, or bidding his
servants shoot down, any man who offered to hinder.  It is even possible
that had he acted straightway upon the impulse, he might, with his
momentary mastery of the mob, have won clean away; possible, but by no
means likely, for already a couple of constables were pushing forward to
support the Beadle, and half a dozen broad-shouldered fellows--haters of
"prerogative"--had recovered themselves and were ranging up to support
the law.  Had he noted this, it would not have daunted him.  What he
noted, and what gave him pause, was the girl's white back at his feet,
upturning its hideous weals.  He stooped to lift her, and drew back,
shivering delicately at the thought of hurting the torn flesh in his
arms--a vain scruple, since she had passed for the moment beyond pain.
He picked up the scourge, and stood erect again, crushing it into his
pocket.

"Will you make way, please," he ordered, "while I fetch a cover to hide
your blasted handiwork?"

He strode through them, and they fell back to give him passage.
He walked straight to the coach, pulled the door open, and, in the act
of dragging forth a rug, caught sight of Dicky's small, scared face.

"Oh papa, what has happened?"

"An accident, child.  Jump inside; I will explain by-and-by."

"Begging your Honour's pardon"--a heavy-featured fellow, who had
followed the Collector to the coach, put out a hand and touched the
child's shoulder--"I don't hold in whipping maidens, and if it's a fight
I'm with you.  But you can't carry her out of it, the way you're
meaning.  They've seen blood, same as yourself.  This child of yours--he
stands as much chance to be hurt as any, if you push it.  Your Honour'll
have to find some other way."

The Collector glanced over his shoulder, and saw that the man spoke
truth.

"Dicky," he said easily, but in a voice the child durst not disobey,
"there has been an accident.  Go you down and amuse yourself on the
sands till Manasseh calls you."

He walked back coolly, carrying the rug on his arm.

"Where was she to be taken?" he asked.

"To the stocks!" answered a voice or two.  "To the Court-house!" said
others.

"It's the same thing," said the heavy-browed man, at the Collector's
elbow.  "The stocks are just across the square from the Court-house.
You'll find the magistrates there; they're the ones to face.  They took
her case first this morning, and this is the first part of her
sentence."

Oliver Vyell walked back to the crowd.  It was--a glance assured him--
more hostile than before; had recovered from its surprise, and was
menacing.  But it gave way again before him.

He called on them to give more room.  He stooped and, spreading the rug
over the girl's body, lifted and laid her in the straw of the cart.
A constable would have interfered.  The Collector swung round on him.

"You are taking her back to the Court-house?  Well, I have business
there too.  Where is your Court-house?"

The constable pointed.

"Up the road?  I am obliged to you.  Drive on, if you please."



Chapter X.


THE BENCH.


The wooden Jail and the wooden Court-house of Port Nassau faced one
another across an unpaved grass-grown square planted with maples.
To-day--for the fall of the leaf was at hand--these maples flamed with
hectic yellows and scarlets; and indeed thousands of leaves, stripped by
the recent gales, already strewed the cross-walks and carpeted the
ground about the benches disposed in the shade--pleasant seats to which,
of an empty afternoon, wives brought their knitting and gossiped while
their small children played within sight; haunts, later in the day, of
youths who whittled sticks or carved out names with jack-knives--ancient
solace of the love-stricken; rarely thronged save when some transgressor
was brought to the stocks or the whipping-post.

These instruments of public discipline stood on the northern side of the
square, before the iron-studded door of the Jail.  The same hand, may
be, that had blackened over the Jail's weather-boarded front with a coat
of tar, had with equal propriety whitewashed the facade of the
Court-house; an immaculate building, set in the cool shade, its
straight-lined front broken only by a recessed balcony, whence, as
occasion arose, Mr. George Bellingham, Chief Magistrate, delivered the
text of a proclamation, royal or provincial, or declared the poll when
the people of Port Nassau chose their Selectmen.

This morning Mr. Bellingham held session within, in the long, airy
Court-room, and dispensed justice with the help of three
fellow-magistrates--Mr. Trask, Mr. Somershall, and our friend
Mr. Wapshott.  They sat at a long baize-covered table, with the
Justices' Clerk to advise them.  On the wall behind and above their
heads hung a framed panel emblazoned with the royal escutcheon, the lion
and unicorn for supporters, an inscription in old French to the effect
that there is shame in evil-thinking, and another:--

          CAR         II.


          FID         DEF.

distributed among the four corners of the panel, with the date 1660
below.  This had been erected (actually in 1664, but the artist had
received instructions to antedate it) when the good people of
Massachusetts after some demur rejoiced in the Restoration and accepted
King Charles II. as defender of their Faith.

The four magistrates had dealt (as we know) with a case of
Sabbath-breaking; had inflicted various terms of imprisonment on two
drunkards and a beggar-woman; had discharged for lack of evidence (but
with admonition) a youth accused of profane swearing; and were now
working through a list of commoner and more venial offences, such as
cheating by the use of false weights.

These four grave gentlemen looked up in slightly shocked deprecation;
for the Collector entered without taking account of the constable at the
door, save to thrust him aside.  The Clerk called "Silence in the
Court!" mechanically, and a deputy-beadle at his elbow as mechanically
repeated it.

"Your Worships"--the Collector, hat in hand advanced to the table and
bowed--"will forgive an interruption which only its urgency can excuse."

"Ah!  Captain Vyell, I believe?"  Mr. Bellingham arose from his
high-backed throne of carved oak, bowed, and extended a hand across the
table.  "I had heard that you were honouring Port Nassau with a visit;
but understanding from our friend Mr. Wapshott that the visit was--er--
not official--that, in fact, it was connected with government business
not--er--to be divulged, I forbore to do myself the pleasure--"
Mr. Bellingham had a courtly manner and a courtly presence.  He was a
tallish man, somewhat thin in the face and forehead, of classical
features, and a sanguine complexion.  He came of a family highly
distinguished in the history of Massachusetts; but he was in fact a weak
man, though he concealed this by some inherited aptitude for public
business and a well-trained committee manner.

"I thank you."  The Collector shook the preferred hand and bowed again.
"You will pardon my abruptness?  A girl has fainted outside here, in the
street--"

Mr. Bellingham's well-shaped brows arched themselves a trifle higher.

"Indeed?" he murmured, at a loss.

"A young girl who--as I understand--was suffering public punishment
under sentence of yours."

"Yes?" Mr. Bellingham's smile grew vaguer, and his two hands touched
finger-tips in front of his magisterial stomach--an adequate stomach but
well on the right side of grossness.  He glanced at his
fellow-magistrates right and left.  "It--er---sometimes happens," he
suggested.

"I dare say." Captain Vyell took him up.  "But she has fainted under the
punishment.  She has passed the limit of her powers, poor child; and
they tell me that what she has endured is to be followed, and at once,
by five hours in the stocks.  Gentlemen, I repeat I am quite well aware
that this is most irregular--you may call it indecent; but I saw the
poor creature fall, and, as it happens, I know something that might have
softened you before you passed sentence."

Here the Clerk interposed, stiffening the Chief Magistrate, who wore a
smile of embarrassed politeness.

"As His Honour--as Captain Vyell--suggests, your Worships, this is quite
irregular."

"To be sure--to be sure--of course," hemm'd Mr. Bellingham.  "We can
only overlook that, when appealed to by a person of your distinction;"
here he inclined himself gently.  "Still, you will understand, a
sentence is a sentence.  As for a temporary faintness, that is by no
means outside our experience.  Our Beadle--Shadbolt--invariably manages
to revive them sufficiently to endure--er--the rest."

I'll be shot if he will this time, thought the Collector grimly, with a
glance down at a smear across the knuckle of his right-hand glove.
The sight of it cheered him and steadied his temper.  "Possibly," said
he aloud.  "But your worships may not be aware--and as merciful men may
be glad to hear--that this poor creature's offence against the Sabbath
was committed under stress.  Her mother and grandfather have starved
this week through, as I happen to know."

"That may or may not be," put in Mr. Trask--a dry-complexioned,
stubborn, malignant-looking man, seated next on the Chairman's right.
"But the girl--if you mean Ruth Josselin--has not been scourged for
Sabbath-breaking.  For that she will sit in the stocks--our invariable
sentence for first offenders in this respect."  From under his
down-drawn brows Mr. Trask eyed the Collector malevolently.
"Ruth Josselin," he continued, "has suffered the scourge for having
resisted Beadle Shadbolt in the discharge of his duty, and for unlawful
wounding."

"Excuse me," put in Mr. Somershall, speaking across from the Chairman's
left.  Mr. Somershall was afflicted with deafness, but liked to assert
himself whenever a word by chance reached him and gave him a cue.
He leaned sideways, arching a palm around his one useful ear.
"Excuse me; we brought it in 'attempted wounding,' I believe?  I have it
noted so, here on the margin of my charge-sheet."  He glanced at the
Clerk, who nodded for confirmation.

"It didn't matter," Mr. Trask snapped brutally.  "She got it, just the
same."

"Oh, quite so!"  Mr. Somershall took his hand from his ear and nodded,
satisfied with having made his point.

"Wounding?" echoed the Collector, addressing the Chairman.  "To be frank
with you, sir, I had not heard of this--though it scarcely affects my
plea."

Mr. Bellingham smiled indulgently.  "Say no more, Captain Vyell--pray
say no more!  This is not the first time an inclination to deem us
severe has been corrected by a fuller acquaintance with the facts. . . .
Yes, yes--chivalrous feeling--I quite understand; but you see--"
He concluded his sentence with a gentle wave of the hand.  "You will be
glad to hear, since you take an interest in the girl, that Providence
overruled her aim and Shadbolt escaped with a mere graze of the jaw--so
slight, indeed, that, taking a merciful view, we decided not to consider
it an actual wound, and convicted her only of the attempt.  By the way,
Mr. Leemy, where is the weapon?"

The Clerk produced it from his bag and laid it on the table.
Captain Vyell drew a sharp breath.

"It is my pistol."

"Eh?"

"I have the fellow to it here."  He pulled out the other and handed it
by the muzzle.

"To be sure--to be sure; the pattern is identical," murmured Mr.
Bellingham, examining it and for the moment completely puzzled.
"You--er--suggest that she stole it?"

"Certainly not.  I lent it to her."

There followed a slow pause.  It was broken by the grating voice of Mr.
Trask--

"You remember, Mr. Chairman, that the prisoner stubbornly refused to
tell how the pistol came in her possession?  Does Captain Vyell give us
to understand that his interest in this young woman is of older date
than this morning's encounter?"

"My interest in her--such as it is--dates, sir, from the evening before
last, when she was dismissed from the Bowling Green Inn.  The hour was
late; her home, as you know, lies at some distance--though doubtless
within the ambit of your authority.  I lent her this small weapon to
protect herself should she be molested."

"And she used it next day upon the Beadle!  Dismissed, you say?  Why was
she dismissed?"

"I regret that I was not more curious at the time," answered the
Collector with the politest touch of weariness.  "I believe it was for
saving the house from fire--something of that sort.  As told to me, it
sounded rather heroical.  But, sir--" he turned again to the Chairman--"
I suggest that all this does not affect my plea.  Whatever her offence,
she has suffered cruelly.  She is physically unfit to bear this second
punishment; and when I tell you on my word as a gentleman--or on oath,
if you will--that on Saturday I found her grandparent starving and that
her second offence was committed presumably to supply the household
wants, surely I shall not entreat your mercy in vain?"

The Chief Magistrate hesitated, and a frown showed his annoyance.
"To tell you the truth, Captain Vyell, you put me in a quandary.
I do not like to refuse you--"  Here he glanced right and left.

"But it can't be done," snapped Mr. Trask.  Mr. Wapshott, sitting just
beyond, shook his head gently and--as he hoped--unperceived by the
Collector.

"You see, sir," explained Mr. Bellingham with a sigh, "we sit here to
administer justice without fear or favour.  You see also to what scandal
it might give rise if a culprit--merely on the intercession of a
gentleman like yourself--influential--er--and, in short--"

"--In short, sir," the Collector broke in, "you have in the name of
justice committed one damnable atrocity upon this child, and plead your
cowardice as an excuse for committing another.  Influential, am I?
And you prate to me of not being affected by that?  Very well; I'll take
you at your word.  This girl resisted your ruffian in the discharge of
his duty?  So did I just now, and with such effect that he will resume
it neither to-day nor to-morrow.  She inflicted, it appears, a slight
graze on his chin.  I inflicted two cuts on his face and knocked in
three of his teeth.  You can take cognisance of _my_ wounding, I promise
you.  Now, sir, will you whip _me_ through your town?"

"This is mere violence, sir."  Mr. Bellingham's face was flushed, but he
answered with dignity.  "The law is as little to be exasperated as
defied."

"I will try you in another way, then," said the Collector, recovering
grip of his temper and dropping his voice to a tone of politest
insolence.  "It is understood that you have not the courage to do this
because, seated here and administering what you call justice, you have,
each one of you, an eye upon England and preferment, and you know well
enough that to touch me would play the devil among the tailors with your
little ambitions.  I except"--with a bow towards Mr. Trask--"this
gentleman, who seems to have earned his influence on your counsels by
rugged force of character, And--" for here Mr. Trask, who enjoyed a dig
at his colleagues, cast his eyes down and compressed a grin--"is, I
should judge, capable of striking a woman for the mere fun of it."
Here Mr. Bellingham and Mr. Wapshott looked demure in turn; for that
Mr. Trask led his wife a dog's life was notorious.

"--In truth, gentlemen," the Collector continued easily, "I am at some
loss in addressing you, seeing that through some defect of courtesy you
have omitted to wait on me, albeit informed (I believe) that I came as
His Majesty's Commissioner, and that therefore I have not even the
pleasure of knowing your names.  I may except that of Mr. Wapshott, whom
I am glad to see convalescent this morning."  Here he inclined to Mr.
Wapshott, whose gills under the surprised gaze of his colleagues took a
perceptibly redder tinge.  "Mr. Wapshott, gentlemen," explained the
Collector, smiling, "had a slight attack of vertigo yesterday, on the
steps of his Place of Worship.  Well, sirs, as I was saying, I will try
you in another way.  You have not the courage to bring me to trial for
assaulting your beadle.  You have not even the courage, here and now, to
throw me out.  I believe, however, that upon a confessed breach of the
law--supported by evidence, if necessary--I can force you to try me.
The Clerk will correct me if I am wrong. . . . Apparently he assents.
Then I desire to confess to you that yesterday, at such-and-such an
hour, I broke your laws or bye-laws of Lord's Day Observance; by bathing
in the sea for my pleasure.  I demand trial on this charge, and, if you
convict me--here you can hardly help yourselves, since to my knowledge
some of you witnessed the offence--I demand my due punishment of the
stocks."

"Really--really, Captain Vyell!" hemm'd the Chief Magistrate.
"Passing over your derogatory language, I am at a loss to understand--"

"Are you?  Yet it is very simple.  Since you reject my plea for this
poor creature, I desire to share her punishment."

"Let him," snapped the mouth of Mr. Trask again, opening and shutting
like a trap.

"_You_ at any rate, sir, have sense," the Collector felicitated him and
turned to the Chief Magistrate.  "And you, sir, if you will oblige me,
may rest assured that I shall bear the magistracy of Port Nassau no
grudge whatever."



Chapter XI.


THE STOCKS.


In the end they came to a compromise.  That Dame Justice should be
hustled in this fashion--taken by the shoulders, so to speak, forced to
catch up her robe and skip--offended the Chief Magistrate's sense of
propriety.  It was unseemly in the last degree, he protested.
Nevertheless it appeared certain that Captain Vyell had a right to be
tried and punished; and the Clerk's threat to set down the hearing for
an adjourned sessions was promptly countered by the culprit's producing
His Majesty's Commission, which enjoined upon all and sundry "_to
observe the welfare of my faithful subject, Oliver John Dinham de Courcy
Vyell, now travelling on the business of this my Realm, and to further
that business with all zeal and expedition as required by him_"--a
command which might be all the more strictly construed for being loosely
worded.  To be sure the Court might by dilatory process linger out the
hearing of the Weights and Measures cases--one of which was being
scandalously interrupted at this moment--or it might adjourn for dinner
and reassemble in the afternoon, by which time the sands of Ruth
Josselin's five hours' ignominy would be running out.  But here Mr.
Somershall had to be reckoned with.  Mr. Somershall not only made it a
practice to sit long at dinner and sleep after it; he invariably lost
his temper if the dinner-hour were delayed; and, being deaf as well as
honest, he was capable of blurting out his mind in a fashion to confound
either of these disingenuous courses.  As for Mr. Wapshott, the wording
of the Commission had frightened him, and he wished himself at home.

It was Mr. Trask who found the way out.  Mr. Trask, his malevolent eye
fixed on the Collector, opined that after all an hour or two in the
stocks would be a salutary lesson for hot blood and pampered flesh.
He suggested that, without insisting on a trial, the Captain might be
obliged, and his legs given that lesson.  He cited precedents.
More than once a friend or relative had, by mercy of the Court, been
allowed to sit beside a culprit under punishment.  If, a like leave
being granted him, Captain Vyell preferred to have his ankles
confined--why, truly, Mr. Trask saw no reason for denying him the
experience.  But the Captain, it was understood, must give his word of
honour, first, to accept this as a free concession from the Bench, and,
secondly, not to repent or demand release before the expiry of the five
hours.

"With all my heart," promised Captain Vyell; and the Chief Magistrate
reluctantly gave way.


Ruth Josselin sat in the stocks.  She had come so far out of her swoon
that her pulse beat, her breath came and went, she felt the sun warm on
her face, and was aware of some pain where the edge of the wood pressed
into her flesh, a little above the ankle-bones--of discomfort, rather,
in comparison with the anguish throbbing and biting across her
shoulder-blades.  Some one--it may have been in unthinking mercy--had
drawn down the sackcloth over her stripes, and the coarse stuff,
irritating the raw, was as a shirt of fire.

She had come back to a sense of this torture, but not yet to complete
consciousness.  She sat with eyes half closed, filmed with suffering.
As they had closed in the moment of swooning, so and with the same look
of horror they awoke as the lids parted.  But they saw nothing; neither
the sunlight dappling the maple shadows nor the curious faces of the
crowd.  She felt the sunlight; the crowd's presence she felt not at all.

But misery she felt; a blank of misery through which her reviving soul--
like the shoot of a plant trodden into mire--pushed feebly towards the
sunlight that coaxed her eyes to open.  Something it sought there . . .
a face . . . yes, a face. . . .

--Yes, of course, a face; lifted high above other faces that were
hateful, hostile, mocking her misery--God knew why; a strong face, not
very pitiful--but so strong!--and yet it must be pitiful too, for it
condescended to help.  It was moving down, bending, to help. . . .

--What had become of it? . . . Ah, now (shame at length reawakening) she
remembered!  She was hiding from him.  He was strong, he was kind, but
above all he must not see her shame.  Let the earth cover her and hide
it! . . . and either the merciful earth had opened or a merciful
darkness had descended.  She remembered sinking into it--sinking--her
hands held aloft, as by ropes.  Then the ropes had parted. . . .
She had fallen, plumb. . . .

She was re-emerging now; and either shame lay far below, a cast-off weed
in the depths, or shame had driven out shame as fire drives out fire.
Her back was burning; her tongue was parched; her eyes were seared as
they half opened upon the crowd.  The grinning faces--the mouths pulled
awry, mocking a sorrow they did not understand--these were meaningless
to her.  She did not, in any real sense, behold them.  Her misery was a
sea about her, and in the trough of it she looked up, seeking one face.

--And why not?  It had shone far above her as a god's; but she had been
sucked down as deep again, and there is an extreme of degradation may
meet even a god's altitude on equal terms.  Stark mortal, stark god--its
limit of suffering past, humanity joins the celestial, clasping its
knees.

Of a sudden, turning her eyes a little to the left, she saw him.

He had come at a strolling pace across the square, with Manasseh and the
deputy-beadle walking wide beside him, and the Court-house rabble at his
heels, but keeping, in spite of themselves, a respectful distance.
At the stocks he faced about, and they halted on the instant, as though
he had spoken a word of command.  He smiled, seated himself leisurably
at the end of the bench on Ruth Josselin's left, and extended a leg for
Manasseh to draw off its riding-boot.  At the back of the crowd a few
voices chattered, but within the semicircle a hush had fallen.

It was then that she turned her eyes and saw him.

How came he here?  What was he doing? . . . She could not comprehend at
all.  Only she felt her heart leap within her and stand still, as like a
warm flood the consciousness of his presence stole through her, poured
over her, soothing away for the moment all physical anguish.  She sat
very still, her hands in her lap; afraid to move, afraid even to look
again.  This consciousness--it should have been shame, but it held no
shame at all.  It was hope.  It came near, very near, to bliss.

She was aware in a dull way of some one unlocking and lifting the upper
beam of the stocks.  Were they releasing her?  Surely her sentence had
been for five hours?--surely her faintness could not have lasted so
long!  This could not be the end?  She did not wish to be released.
She would not know what to do, where to go, when they set her free.
She must walk home through the town, and that would be worst of all.

Or perhaps _he_ was commanding them to release her? . . . No; the beam
creaked and dropped into place again.  A moment ago his voice had been
speaking; speaking very cheerfully, not to her.  Now it was silent.
After some minutes she gathered courage to turn her eyes again.

Captain Vyell sat with his legs in durance.  They were very shapely
legs, cased in stockings of flesh-coloured silk with crimson knee-ties.
He sat in perfect patience, and rolled a tobacco-leaf between his
fingers.  At his shoulder stood Manasseh like a statue, with face
immobile as Marble--black marble--and a tinder-box ready in his hand.

"Why? . . ."

He could not be sure if it were a word, or merely a sigh, deep in her
breast, so faintly it reached him.  She had murmured it as if to
herself, yet it seemed to hang on a question.  His ear was alert.

"Hush!" he said, speaking low and without glancing towards her, for the
eyes of the crowd were on them.  "The faintness is over?"

"Yes."

"Do not talk at all.  By-and-by we will talk.  Now I am going to ask you
a selfish question, and you are just to bend your head for 'yes' or
'no.'  Will the smell of tobacco distress you, or bring the faintness
back?  These autumn flies sting abominably here, under the trees."

She moved her head slowly.  "I do not feel them," she said after a
while.

He glanced at her compassionately before nodding to Manasseh for a
light.  "No, poor wretch, I'll be sworn you do not," he muttered between
the puffs.  "Thank you, Manasseh; and now will you step down to the Inn,
order the horses back to stable, and bring George and Harry back with
you?  I may require them to break a head or two here, if there should be
trouble.  Tell Alexander"--this was the coachman--"to have an eye on
Master Dicky, and see that he gets his dinner.  The child is on no
account to come here, or be told about this.  His papa is detained on
business--you understand?  Yes, and by the way, you may extract a book
from the valise--the Calderon, for choice, or if it come handier, that
second volume of Corneille.  Don't waste time, though, in searching for
this or that.  In the stocks I've no doubt a book is a book: the
instrument has a reputation for levelling."

Manasseh departed on his errand, and for a while the Collector paid no
heed to his companion.  He and she were now unprotected, at the mercy of
the mob if it intended mischief; and the next few minutes would be
critical.

He sat immersed apparently in his own thoughts, and by the look on his
face these were serious thoughts.  He seemed to see and yet not to see
the ring of faces; to be aware of them, yet not concerned with them, no
whit afraid and quite as little defiant.  True, he was smoking, but
without a trace of affected insouciance or bravado; gravely rather,
resting an elbow on his groin and leaning forward with a preoccupied
frown.  Two minutes passed in this silence, and he felt the danger
ebbing.  Mob insolence ever wants a lead, and--perhaps because with the
return of fine weather the fishing-crews had put to sea early--this Port
Nassau crowd lacked a fugleman.


"Are you here--because--of me?"

"Hush, again," he answered quietly, not turning his head.  "I like you
to talk if you feel strong enough; but for the moment it will be better
if they do not perceive. . . . Yes, and no," he answered her question
after a pause.  "I am here to see that you get through this.  You are in
pain?"

"Yes; but it is easier."

"You are afraid of these people?"

"Afraid?"  She took some time considering this.  "No," she said at
length.  "I am not afraid of them.  I do not see them.  You are here."

He took the tobacco-leaf from his lips, blew a thin cloud of smoke with
grave deliberateness, and in doing so contrived to glance at her face.

"You have blood in you.  That face, too, my beauty," he muttered,
"never came to you but by gift of blood."  Aloud he said, "That's brave.
But take care when your senses clear and the strain comes back on you.
Speak to me when you feel it coming; I don't want it to tauten you up
with a jerk.  You understand?"

"Yes. . . ."

"I wonder now--" he began musingly, and broke off.  The danger he had
been keeping account with was over; Manasseh had returned with the two
grooms, and they--perfectly trained servants on the English model--took
their posts without exhibiting surprise by so much as a twitch of the
face.  George in particular was a tight fellow with his fists, as the
crowd, should it offer annoyance, would assuredly le