THE
SECRET IN THE HILL

When I was a very little boy my mother died. I was too young to feel her loss long, though I missed her badly at first; but the compensation was that it brought my father nearer to me. He was a barrister, a prodigal love of a man, dear bless him! And he felt his bereavement so cruelly that for a time he seemed incapable of rallying from the blow. But presently he plucked up heart, and went, for my sake, to his business again.

He was more liked than lucky, I believe. I had evidence enough, at least of the former; for after my mother’s death, not bearing that we should be parted, he carried me with him on the last circuit he was ever to go. Those were the days when Bench and Bar dined well, and sat up late telling tales. Sometimes my father would slip me into his pocket, so to speak, and from its shelter—when, to be candid, I had been much better in bed—I heard fine stories related by the gentlemen who put off gravity with the horsehair they wore all day. They were a merry and irresponsible lot, rather like a strolling company of actors; and, indeed, it was no less their business to play many parts. There were types among them which I came to associate with certain qualities: such as the lean vivacious ones, who ate and drank hungrily, and presently grew incoherent and quarrelsome; such as the rosy bald-headed ones, who always seemed to make most laughter; such as the large, heavy-browed ones, who sulked when they were bettered in argument. But my friend amongst them all, next to my father, was Mr. Quayle, Q.C.

I fancied I had discovered, after much consideration, why he was called Q.C. He was a little man, quite bald and round all over his head and face except for a tuft of hair on his chin, and there was the Q; and he wore a pouter-pigeon ruff under his chin like this, Q/C, and there was the Q.C. I may have been wrong; but anyhow I had precedent to justify me, for many of these jolly souls bore such characteristic nicknames. There was Plain John, for instance, who had so christened himself for ever during a dispute about the uses or abuses of multiple titles. “Plain John” had been enough for him, he had said. Again, there was Blind Fogle, so called from his favourite cross-examination phrase. “I don’t quite see.” They were all boys together when off duty, chaffing and horse-playing, and my father was the merriest and most irrepressible of the crew.

There was one treat, however, of which he was persistent in baulking me. Pray him as I might, he would never let me see or hear him in his character of Counsel. The Court where he would be working by day was forbidden ground to me, and for that very reason I longed, like Bluebeard’s wife, to peep into it. This was not right, even in thought, for I knew his wishes. But worse is to be confessed. I once took an opportunity, which ought never to have been given me, to disobey him; and dreadful were the consequences, as you shall hear.

We were travelling on what is called the Home Circuit, and one day we came to Ipswich, a town to mark itself red in the annals of my young life. On the second morning after our arrival I was playing at horses with George, my father’s man, when Mr. Quayle looked in at our hotel, and, dismissing George, took and sat me upon his knee.

“Dad gone to Court?” said he.

“Yes,” I answered; “just.”

He grunted, and rubbed his bald head, with a look half comical, half aggravated. His eyes were rather blinky and red, and he seemed confused in manner and at a loss for words.

“Dicky,” he said, suddenly, “did you live very well, very rich-like, when mamma was alive?”

“Yes,” I answered; “’cept when mamma said we must retrench, and cried; and by’m-by papa laughed, and threw the rice pudding into the fire, and took us to dine at a palace.”

“And that was—very long before—hey?”

“It was a very little while before mamma went away for good,” I murmured, and hung my head, inclined to whimper.

Mr. Quayle twitched at me compunctious.

“O, come!” he said, “we must all bear our losses like men. They teach us the best in the world to stand square on our own toeses. There! Shall I tell you a story—hey?”

I brightened at once. He knew some good ones. “Yes, please,” I said.

“O, lud!” he exclaimed, rubbing his nose with his eye-glasses. “I am committed! Judex damnatur. Dicky, I sat up late last night, devouring briefs, and they’ve given me an indigestion. Never sit up late, Dicky, or you’ll have to pay for it!”

He said the last words with an odd emphasis, giving me a little shake.

“Is that the beginning of the story?” I asked, with reserve.

“O, the story!” he said. “H’m! ha! Dear take my fuddled caput! Well, here goes:

“There were once two old twin brothers, booksellers, name of Pilbrow, who kept shop together in a town, as it might be Ipswich. Now books, young gentleman, should engender an atmosphere of reason and sympathy, inasmuch as we talk of the Republic of letters, which signifies a sort of a family tie between A, B, and C. But these fellows, though twins, were so far from being united that they were always quarrelling. If Joshua bought a book of a stranger, Abel would say he had given more than its worth, and sell it at his own valuation; and if Abel attended a sale, there was Joshua to bid against him. Naturally, under these conditions, the business didn’t flourish. The brothers got poorer and poorer, and the more they lost the worse they snapped and snarled, till they took to threatening one another in public with dear knows what reprisals. Well, one day, at an auction, after bidding each against t’other thremenjus for a packet of old manuscripts and book rubbish—which Abel ended by getting, by-the-by—they fastened together like tom-cats, and had to be separated. The people laughed and applauded; but the end was more serious than was expected. Abel disappeared from the business, and a few days later the shop took fire, and was burned to the ground.

“So far, so plain; and now, Mr. Dickycumbob, d’ye know what’s meant by Insurance?”

“No, sir?”

“Well, look here. If I want to provide against my house, and the goods in it, being lost to me by fire, I go to a gentleman, with a gold watch-chain like a little ship’s cable to recommend him, and says I:—‘If I give you so much pocket-money a year, will you undertake to build up my house again for me in case it happens to be burned down?’ And the gentleman smiles, and says ‘Certainly.’ Then I say, ‘If I double your pocket-money will you undertake to give me a thousand pounds for the value of the goods in that house supposing they are burned too?’ And the gentleman says, ‘Certainly; in case their value really is a thousand pounds at the time.’ So I go away, and presently, strange to say, my house is actually burned to the ground. Then I ask the gentleman to fulfil his promise; but he says, ‘Not at all. The house I will rebuild as before, and for the goods I will pay you; but not a thousand pounds, because I am given to believe that they were worth nothing like that sum at the time of the fire?’ Now, what am I to do? Well, I will tell you what this Joshua did. He insisted upon having the whole thousand pounds, and the gentleman answered by saying that he believed Joshua had purposely set fire to his own house in order to secure a thousand pounds for a lot of old rubbish in it that wasn’t worth twopence ha’penny. D’yunderstand?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Very well, then, and listen to this. If the gentleman spoke true, Joshua had fallen in Scyllam cupiens vitare Charybdim, which means that he had jumped out of the frying-pan into the fire, or, in other words had, in trying to catch the Insurance gentleman, been nabbed himself by the law. For arson is arson, and fraud fraud, and the gentleman with the watch-chain isn’t to be caught with a pinch of salt on his tail. But that was not the worst. Human bones had been found among the débris of the building, and ugly rumours got about that these bones were Abel’s bones—the bones of an unhappy victim of Joshua’s murderous hate. The man had disappeared, the brothers’ deadly quarrel was recalled; it was whispered that the fire might owe itself to a double motive—that, in short, Joshua had designed, at one blow, to secure the thousand pounds and destroy the evidences of a great crime. Joshua, sir, was arrested and put upon his trial for murder and arson.”

I was listening with all my eyes and ears.

“Who defended him?” I whispered, gulping; for I knew something of the legal terms.

The answer took me like a smack.

“Your father, sir.”

“O!” I exclaimed, thrilling. And then, after a pause, with a pride of loyalty: “He got him off, didn’t he?”

Mr. Quayle put me down, and yawned dyspeptically.

“What!” he said. “If any man can, papa will. I ask your pardon, Master Dicky, I really do, for palming off fact instead of fiction on you. But my poor brain wasn’t equal. The case is actually sub judice—being tried at this moment. Yesterday began it, and to-day will end. If you whisper to me to-night, I’ll whisper back the result.”

The delay seemed insupportable. He had read and worked me up to the last chapter of the story, and now proposed to leave me agonising for the end. It was the first time I had ever been brought so close to the living romance of the law, and my blood was on fire with the excitement of it.

“O, I wish——” I began.

The barrister looked down at me oddly, and shook his head.

“Ah, you little rogue!” he chuckled.

I felt too guilty to speak. He knew all that was in my mind. Suddenly he took my hand.

“Come along, then,” he said, “and let’s have a peep. Papa needn’t know.”

He shouldn’t have tempted me, nor should I have succumbed. A murder romance was no book for a child, though my father figured in it as a Paladin championing the wronged and oppressed.

I hung back a moment, but the creature cooed and whistled to me. “Come and see Joshua,” he said, “with his back to the wall, and papa in front daring ’em all to come on.”

The picture was irresistible. I let myself be persuaded and run out, tingling all over.

It was a dingy November morning. The old town seemed dull and uneasy, and a tallow-faced clock on a church dawdled behind time, as if it had stopped to let something unpleasant go by. That might have been a posse of melancholy javelin-men, who, with a ludicrous little strutting creature at their head—a sort of pocket drum-major, in sword and cocked hat and with a long staff in his hand—went splashing past at the moment. The court-house, what with the fog and drip, met us like the mouth of a sewer, and I was half-inclined to cry off so disenchanting an adventure, when my companion tossed me up in his arms and carried me within. Through halls and passages, smelling of cold, trodden mud, we were passed with deference, and suddenly were swung and shut into a room where there were lights and a great foggy hush.

I saw before me the scarlet judge. I knew him well enough, but never awful like this—a shrunk ferret with piercing eyes looking out of a gray nest. I saw the wigs of the counsel; but their bobtails seemed cocked with an unfamiliar viciousness. I saw the faces of the Jury, set up in two rows like ghostly ninepins; and then I saw another, a face by itself, a face like a little shrewd wicked gurgoyle, that hung yellow and alone out of the mist of the court. And that face, I knew, was the face of Joshua.

The terrible silence ticked itself away, and there suddenly was my father standing up before them all, and talking in a quick impassioned voice. My skin went cold and hot. If I reaped little of the dear tones, I understood enough to know that he spoke impetuously for the prisoner, heaping scorn upon the prosecution. Never, he said, in all his experience had he known calumny visit a soul so spotless as the one it was now his privilege to defend. The process would be laughably easy, it was true, and he would only dwell upon what must be to the jury a foregone conclusion—the accused’s innocence, that was to say—with the object to crush with its own vicious fallacies a prosecution which, indeed, he could not help remarking bore more the appearance of a persecution.

Mr. Quayle at this point laughed a little under his breath and whispered, “Bravo!” in my ear, as he eased his burden by resting my feet on the back of a bench. As for me, I was burning and shooting all over with pride, as my eyes went from my father to the poor little ugly prisoner in the dock, and back again.

The accused, went on my father (in substance. I can only give the briefest abstract of his speech), would not deny that there had been differences between him and his brother. Indeed, it would be useless to, in the face of some recent notorious evidence to the contrary. But did not all history teach us the folly of jumping, on the strength of an unguarded word, to fatal conclusions? Had not one of our own monarchs (surnamed Fitz-Empress, as he need not remind the jury) suffered a lifelong regret from the false interpretation put upon a rash utterance of his? “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” he had cried, in an unthinking moment. “You shall pay for this!” had been Joshua Pilbrow’s threat to his brother, under a like aggravation, in the sale-room. “Gentlemen,” said my father, “how deadly the seeming import, how laughable the explanation in either case. King Henry cried only distractedly for some one to persuade his importunate Chancellor to leave him alone. Joshua Pilbrow meant no more than to insist that his brother should ‘stand the whole racket’ of a purchase of which he himself had disapproved. Hence, gentlemen, these tears!”

There was a little stir in court, and my companion chuckled delightedly in my ear again.

My father then proceeded triumphantly to give the true facts of the case. The packet of books had, it appeared when opened, revealed one item of unexpected value, in the profits from which Joshua, as partner, insisted upon sharing. To this, however, Abel, quoting his own words against him, demurred. It was his—Abel’s purchase, Abel contended, to do with as he chose. The dispute ran so high as to threaten litigation; when all of a sudden one night Abel was found to have taken himself off with the cherished volume. Joshua, at first unable to credit such perfidy, bided his time, expecting his brother to return. But when, at last, his suspicion of bereavement settled into a conviction, he grew like one demented. He could not believe in the reality of his loss; but, candle in hand, went hunting high and low amongst the litter with which the premises were choked, hoping somewhere to alight, in some forgotten corner where cupidity had concealed it, on the coveted prize. Alas! it never rains but it pours. He not only failed to trace the treasure, but, in his distracted hunt for it, must accidentally have fired the stock, which, smouldering for awhile, burst out presently into flame, and committed all to ruin.

* * * * * *

Such was the outline of the story, and, for all that I understood of it, I could have clapped my father to the echo, with the tears gulping in my throat, for his noble vindication of a wronged man. There were other points he made, such as that Joshua had himself escaped with the utmost difficulty from the burning building (and did that look like arson?); such as that he had instructed his lawyers, after committal, to advertise strenuously, though vainly, for his brother’s whereabouts (and did that look like murder?); such as that the bones found amongst the ruins were the bones of anatomical specimens, in which the firm was well known to have dealt. I need not insist on them, because the end was what I knew it must be if men were not base and abominable enough to close their ears wilfully to those ringing accents of truth.

The prosecution, poor thing! answered, and the judge summed up; and still Mr. Quayle, quite absorbed in the case, did not offer to take me away. I had my eyes on my father all the time. He had sunk back, as if exhausted, after his speech, and sat in a corner of the bench, his hand over his face. The jury gave their verdict without leaving their places. I heard the demand and the answer. The cry, “Not Guilty,” rang like a pæan in my ears; and still I kept my eyes on my father.

The prisoner, freed from the dock, had left the court, when suddenly some people stirred, and a whisper went round. A barrister bent over the resting figure, and arose hurriedly. In a moment there was a springing up of heads everywhere, so that the dear form was blotted from my sight. Mr. Quayle, looking over my shoulder, caught a word, and gave a quick little gasp.

“Dicky,” he said, catching at me, “come out at once! We must get away before—before——” and he left the sentence unfinished as he hurried me into the street.

CHAPTER II.
A GREAT LOSS AND A QUEER EQUIVALENT.

I looked in Mr. Quayle’s face; but I asked him no question. The mud we trod seemed colder, the houses we passed more frowning than before; but I asked no question. I could not form one in my mind; only suddenly and somehow I felt frightened, as if in dreams before a great solitude. Then in a moment I was sobbing fast and thickly.

Ah, what is the use to skate round the memory! Let it clutch me for a moment, and be faced and dismissed. My father, my dear, ardent, noble father was dead—struck down in an instant—shaken out of life by the poignant utterances of his own spirit. While the flower of his fervour was blossoming and bearing fruit, the roots thereof were dead already—smitten in their place in his heart. That, its work done, had ceased beating. Sometimes afterwards in my desolation I recalled the church clock, with its poised motionless hands, and thought what a melancholy omen it had been.

Mr. Quayle was kindness itself to me in my utter terror and loneliness. He took upon himself, provisionally, the whole conduct of my affairs. One morning he came in, and drew me to him.

“Dicky—Dicky-bird, me jewl!” he said. “I’ve found the fine cuckoo that’s to come and father the poor little orphaned nestling.”

I must observe that he had his own theories about this same “harbinger of spring,” which, according to him, was the “bird that looked after another bird’s young.” I remembered the occasion on which he had so defined it, and the laughter which had greeted him; and his alternative, “Well, then, ’tis the bird that doesn’t lay its own eggs, and that’s all one!” But the first definition, it appeared, was the one he kept faith in.

“D’you remember Mr. Paxton?” he said.

“Uncle Jenico?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Uncle Jenico Paxton, mamma’s own only brother. Poor papa, my dear—always a wonder and an honour to his profession—has left, it seems, a will, in which he bequeathes everything to Uncle Jenico in trust for his little boy, Master Dicky Bowen. And Uncle Jenico has been found, and is coming to take charge of little Dicky Bowen.”

Was I glad or sorry? I was too stunned, I think, to care one way or the other. Any one would do to stop the empty place which none could ever fill, and neither my sympathies nor my dislikes were active in the case of Uncle Jenico. I had seen him only once or twice, when he had come to spend a night or so with us in town. My memory was of a stout, hoarse old man in spectacles, rather lame, with a little nose and twinkling eyes. He had seemed always busy, always in a hurry. He bore an important, mysterious reputation with us as a great inventive genius, who carried a despatch-box with him choked with invaluable patents, and always left something behind—a toothbrush or an umbrella—when he left. Let it be Uncle Jenico as well as another.

While we were talking there was a flurry at the door of the room, and a man, overcoming some resistance outside, forced his way in. I gave a little cry, and stood staring. It was the acquitted prisoner, Joshua Pilbrow. George appeared just behind him, flushed and truculent.

“He would do it, sir,” said the servant, “for all I warned him away.”

Mr. Quayle had put me from him and arisen. There was a bad look on his face; but he motioned to George to go, and we were left alone.

The intruder stood shrugging his disordered clothes into place, and looking the while with a sort of black stealth at the barrister. His face held and haunted me. It was bleak and sallow, and grey in the hollows, with fixed dark eyes—the face, I thought, of a malignant, though injured, creature. But it did not so affect Mr. Quayle, it was evident.

“The verdict was ‘Not guilty,’ sir,” said the man, quite suddenly and vehemently.

Mr. Quayle gave an unpleasant laugh.

“Or else you wouldn’t be intrudin’ here,” he said shortly.

“I came to thank my benefactor,” said the man. “I had heard nothing till this moment of the tragic sequel.”

“Well,” said the barrister, in the same cynical tone, “you have come too late. The price of your acquittal is this little orphaned life.”

He put his arm about my shoulders. The stranger looked hard at me.

“His son?” he muttered.

“There are some verdicts,” said Mr. Quayle, “bought too dear.”

In a moment the man turned upon him in a sort of fierce concentrated bitterness.

“With the inconsistency of your evil profession,” he cried, “you discount your own conclusions. The law guarantees and grudges me my innocence. A curse upon it, I say! Did he there sacrifice his life for me? He sacrificed it for truth, sir, and it’s that which you, as a lawyer, can’t forgive.”

“You will observe,” said Mr. Quayle, icily, “that I have not questioned the truth.”

“Not directly,” answered the visitor. “I know, I know. You damn by innuendo; it’s your trade.”

The little lawyer laughed again.

“You malign our benevolence,” he said. “The law, by its artless verdict, has entitled you to sue on the insurance question. Think, Mr. Pilbrow; it actually offers itself to witness to your right to the thousand pounds.”

“And I shall force it to,” cried the other; “and would to heaven I could make it bleed another thousand for the wrong it has done me. It would, if equity were justice.”

“Equity is justice,” said Mr. Quayle. “Good morning.”

The man did not move for a moment, but stood looking gloomily at me.

Now, I cannot define what was working in my little soul. The pinched, shorn face was not lovely, the eyes in it were not good; yet there was something there of loss and hopelessness that touched me cruelly. And was not my father lying in the next room in solemn witness to its innocence? Suddenly, before Mr. Quayle could stay me, I had run to the visitor and plucked at his coat.

“You did not do it,” I cried. “My father said so!”

He gave a little gasp, and fluttered his hand across his eyes, sweeping in a wonderful way the evil out of them.

“Ah!” he said, “if your father, young gentleman, would whisper to you where Abel lies hidden! He knows now.”

He stepped back, with a strange, wintry smile on his lips, stopped, seemed about to speak, waved his hand to me, and was gone.

“Dicky, Dicky,” cried Mr. Quayle, “you’re the son of your father; but, dear me, not so good a lawyer!”

CHAPTER III.
UNCLE JENICO.

That same evening Uncle Jenico arrived. I was just put to bed at the time, but he came and stood by me a little before I went to sleep and dreamt of him. He was not the least grown from his place in my memory—only, to my wonder, a little more shabby-looking than I seemed to recollect. The round gold spectacles were there, and the big beaver hat, and the blue frock coat, and the nankeen trousers, and the limp—all but the first and last a trifle the worse for wear. His smile, however, was as cherubic, his despatch-box as glossy, his walking-stick as stout as ever; and he nodded at me like a benevolent Mandarin.

“Only we two left, my boy,” he said. “Poor papa, dear papa! He’s learnt by now the secret of perpetual motion.”

It was an odd introduction. I cried a little, and, moved by his kindness, clung to him.

“There!” he said, soothing me. “That’s all right. We are going to be famous friends, we are. We’ll invent things; we’ll set the Thames on fire, we will.”

Whether from exhaustion or from the dreamy contemplation of this amazing feat to be performed by us, I fell asleep in his arms, lulled for the first time out of my grief, and did not awake till bright morning. The fog was gone; the birds were singing to us to carry my father to his rest under the blue sky.

By-and-by we set out, Uncle Jenico very grave, in black, with a long weeper round his hat. Mr. Quayle, and one or two more, who had lingered a day behind the Assizes to do honour to the dead, came with us; and others, including the judge, sent flowers. It was a simple, pathetic service, in a green corner of the churchyard. I felt more than understood its beauty, and when once I caught a glimpse of Uncle Jenico busily and stealthily writing something with a pencil on the inside lining of his hat, I accepted the fact naturally as a detail of the ceremony.

But it was on the way home in the carriage that he disillusioned me by removing his hat, and showing me a little drawing of a gravestone he had made therein.

“Just an idea that occurred to me,” he said, “to perpetuate the memory of poor papa. We want to do something better than keep it green, you see. The weather and the lichen pay us all that compliment. So I suggest having the inscription very small, on a stone something the shape of a dining-room clock, and over it a magnifying glass boss, like one of those paperweights, you know, that have a little view at the back. The tooth of Time could never touch that. What do you think now?”

I thought it a very pleasant and kind idea, and told him so, at which he was obviously pleased. But it was never carried out, no more than many another he developed; and in the end—but that was long afterwards—a simple headstone, of my own design, commemorated my beloved father’s virtues.

The few mourners returned with us to the hotel, where, in a private room, we had cake and sherry wine. Afterwards Mr. Quayle, when all but he were gone, asked the favour of a final word with Uncle Jenico.

He appeared to find it a word difficult of utterance, walking up and down, and puffing, and getting a little red in the face, while Uncle Jenico sat beaming in a chair, his legs crossed and finger-tips bridged.

At length Mr. Quayle stopped before him.

“Mr. Paxton,” said he, “when time’s short formalities are best eschewed, eh?”

Uncle Jenico nodded.

“Surely,” said he. “I ask nothing less.”

“Then,” said Mr. Quayle, stuttering a little, “you are prepared to accept our friend’s trust, for all it’s worth?”

Uncle Jenico nodded again, though I thought his countenance fell a trifle over the emphatic qualification. However, he recovered in an instant, and rubbed his hands together gleefully.

“Capital, sir,” he said; “a little capital. That’s all Richard and I need to make our fortunes.”

He spoke as if we had been long partners, but hampered by insufficient means.

“Ah!” said Mr. Quayle, decisively; “but that’s just the point.”

“Just the point,” echoed Uncle Jenico, still nodding, but weakly, and with a dew of perspiration on his forehead.

“Just the point,” repeated Mr. Quayle. “I stood close to our friend. I know something of his affairs—and habits. He was—d’ye understand French, Mr. Paxton?”

“Yes, certainly,” answered my uncle, proudly.

“Well, listen to this, then: ‘Il a été un joueur invétéré celui là; c’est possible qu’il a mangé son blé en herbe.’”

He drew back, to let his words take effect.

“God bless me!” said Uncle Jenico, weakly. “You have reason to know?”

“My dear sir,” replied Mr. Quayle, “I know how some of us occupy our time on circuit when we’d be better abed. I know a punter when I see one. I may be right; I may be wrong; and for your sake I hope I’m wrong. But the point is this: A good deal of our friend’s paper has come my way; and I want to know if, supposing I take it to market with bad results to the estate, you are going to swear off your trust?”

Then Uncle Jenico did an heroic thing; how heroic I could not realise at the time, though even then I think a shadow of the truth was penetrating my bewilderment. He got to his feet, looking like an angel.

“Mr. Quayle,” he said, “you’ve spoken plainly, and I don’t conceal your words are a disappointment. But if they are also a prophecy, rest assured, sir, that Richard and I stand or fall together. We are the surviving partners of an honourable firm, and there is that in there, sir” (he pointed to his inseparable despatch-box), “to uphold our credit with the world.”

Mr. Quayle seized his hand, with an immense expression of relief on his face.

“You’re a good soul,” he said. “Without that assurance I should have felt like robbing the orphan. I hope it may turn out better than we suppose.”

“I hope so, too,” said Uncle Jenico, rather disconsolately.

CHAPTER IV.
MY FIRST VIEW OF THE HILL.

It turned out not so badly, yet pretty badly. Uncle Jenico took cheap lodgings for us in the town, and for two or three months was busy flitting between Ipswich and London winding up my father’s estate. At the end, when the value of every lot, stick, and warrant had been realised, and the creditors satisfied, a sum representing perhaps £150 a year was secured to us, and with this, and the despatch-box, we committed ourselves to the future.

It appeared that my Uncle Jenico’s inventions had always been more creditable than profitable to him, and this for the reason that unattainable capital was necessary to their working. Given a few hundreds, he was confident that he could make thousands out of any one of them. It was hard, for the lack of a little fuel, so to speak, to have so much power spoiling on one’s hands. I would have had him, when once I understood, invest our own capital in some of them; but, though I could see he loved me for the suggestion, he had the better strength of affection to keep loyal to his trust, which he administered scrupulously according to the law. Afterwards, when I came to know him better, I could not but be thankful that he had shown this superior genius for honesty; for his faith in his own concerns was so complete, and at the same time so naïve, that he might otherwise have lacked nothing but the guilt to be a defaulter.

As to the patents themselves, they represented a hundred phases of craft, every one of which delighted and convinced me by its originality. There was a design amongst them for an automatic dairy-maid, a machine which, by exhausting the air in a number of flexible tubes, could milk twenty cows at once. There was a design for making little pearls large, by inserting them like setons in the shells of living oysters. There was a plan for a ship to be driven by a portable windmill, which set a turbine spinning under the stern. Uncle Jenico’s contrivances were mostly on an heroic scale, and covered every form of enterprise—from the pill which was to eliminate dyspepsia from the land, to a scheme for liquidating the National Debt by pawning all England for a term of years to an International Trust. At the same time, there was no human need too mean for his consideration. He was for ever striving to economise labour for the betterment of his poorer fellow-creatures. His inventiveness was a great charity, which did not even begin at home. His patents, from being designed to improve any condition but his own, suffered the neglect of a world to which selfishness is the first principle of business competence. His “Napina,” a liquid composition from which old clothes, after having been dipped therein, re-emerged as new, could find no market. His “Labour-of-Love Spit,” which was turned by a rocking-chair moving a treadle, like that on a knife-grinder’s machine, so that the cook could roast her joint in great comfort while dozing over her paper, could make no headway against the more impersonal clock-work affair. And so it was with most of his designs, but a few of which had been actually tested before being condemned on insufficient evidence. What more ridiculous, for instance, than to denounce his “Burglar’s Trap” on the score that one single idiot of a householder had blundered into his own snare and been kept there while the robbers were rifling his premises? What more scandalous than to convict his Fire-Derrick—a noble invention, like a crane dangling a little cabin, for saving life at conflagrations—because the first time it was tested the box would not descend, but kept the insurance gentlemen swinging in the air for an hour or two; or his Infallible Lifebelt, which turned upside-down in the water for the single reason that they tried it on a revenue officer who had lost his legs in an explosion? No practical innovation was surely ever started without a stumble. But Uncle Jenico had no luck. He sunk all his capital in his own patents without convincing a soul, or—and this is the notable thing—losing his temper. That one only of his possessions remained to him, fresh and sound as when, as a little boy, he had invented a flying top, which broke his grandmother’s windows. No neglect had impaired it, nor adversity ruffled for more than a moment. If he had patented it and nothing else, he could have made his fortune, I am certain.

Still, when we came to be comrades—or partners, as he loved to call us—his restless brain was busy as ever with ideas. Nothing was too large or small for him to touch. He showed me, on an early occasion, how his hat—not the black one he had worn at the funeral, but the big beaver article that came over his eyes—explained its own proportions in a number of little cupboards or compartments in the lining, which were designed to carry one’s soap, toothbrush, razor, etc., when on a short visit. He had the most delightful affection for his own ingenuities, and the worldliest axioms for explaining the secret of their success. On the afternoon when Mr. Quayle, after the kindest of partings with me, had left us, and while he was yet on the stairs, Uncle Jenico had bent to me and whispered: “Make it a business principle, my boy, never to confess to insolvency. You heard the way I assured the gentleman? Well, Richard, we may have in our despatch-box there all Ophir lying fallow for the lack of a little cash to work it; but we mustn’t tell our commercial friends so—no, no. We must let them believe it is their privilege to back us. Necessity is a bad recommendation.”

It may be. But I was not a commercial gent; and Uncle Jenico had all my faith, and should have had all my capital if it had rested with me to dispose of it as I liked.

During the time my uncle was engaged in London, George, good man, remained at Ipswich to look after me, though we were forced reluctantly to dismiss him as soon as things were settled. It was impossible, however, on a hundred and fifty pounds a year to keep a man-servant; and so presently he went, and with him my last connection with the old life. Not more of the past than the clothes I stood in now remained to me. It was as if I had been shipwrecked and adopted by a stranger. But the final severance seemed a relief to Uncle Jenico, who, when it was accomplished, drew a long breath, and adjusted his glasses and looked at me rosily.

“Now, Richard,” he said, “with nobody any longer to admonish us, comes the question of our home, and where to make it. Have you any choice?”

Dear me; what did I know of the world’s dwelling-places? I answered that I left it all to him.

“Very well,” he said, with a happy sigh; “then I have an original plan. Suppose we make it nowhere?”

He paused to note how the surprise struck home.

“You mean——” I began, hesitating.

“I mean,” said he, “supposing we have no fixed abode, but go from place to place as it suits us?”

What boy would not have jumped at the suggestion? I was in ecstasies.

“You see,” said Uncle Jenico, “moving about, I get ideas; and in ideas lies our future prosperity. Let’s look at the map.”

It was a lovely proposal. To enter, in actual being, the mysterious regions of pictures-on-the-wall; to breathe the real atmosphere, so long felt in romance, of tinted lithographs and coloured prints; to find roads and commons and phantom distances, wistful, unattainable dreams hitherto, made suddenly accessible to me—it was thrilling, it was rapturous. My uncle humoured the thought so completely as to leave to me the fanciful choice of our first resting-place.

“Only don’t let it be too far,” he said. “Just at present we must go moderate, and until I can realise on the sale of a little patent, which I am on the point of parting with for an inadequate though considerable sum.”

I spent a delightful hour in poring over the county map. It was patched with verdant places—big farms and gentlemen’s estates—and reminded me somehow of those French green-frilled sugarplums which crunch liqueur and are shaped like little vegetables. One could feel the cosy shelter of the woods, marked in groves of things that looked like tiny cabbages, and gaze down in imagination from the hills meandering like furry caterpillars with a miniature windmill here and there to turn them from their course. The yellow roads were rich in suggestion of tootling coaches, and milestones, and inns revealing themselves round corners, with troughs in front and sign-boards, and perhaps a great elm shadowed with caves of leafiness at unattainable heights. But the red spit of railway which came up from the bottom of the picture as far as Colchester, and was thence extended, in a dotted line only, to Ipswich, gave me a thrill of memory half sad and half beautiful. For it was by that wonderful crimson track that my father and I had travelled our last road together as far as the old Essex town, where, since it ended there for the time being, we had taken coach for Suffolk.

“Made up your mind?” asked Uncle Jenico, by-and-by, with a chuckle.

I flushed and wriggled, and came out with it.

“Can’t we—mayn’t we go to the sea? I’ve never been there yet; and we’re so close; and papa promised.”

“The sea?” he echoed. “Why, to be sure. I’ve long had an idea that seaweed might be used for water-proofing. It’s an inspiration, Richard. We’ll beat Mr. Macintosh on his own ground. But whereabouts to the sea, now?”

I could not suggest a direction, however; so he borrowed for me a local guide-book, which dealt with places of interest round the coast, and left me to study it while he went out for a walk to get ideas.

I had no great education; but I could read glibly enough for my eight years. When Uncle Jenico returned in an hour or two, our choice, so far as I was concerned, was made. I brought the book, and, laying it before him, pointed to a certain description.

“Dunberry,” he read, skipping, so as to take the gist of it—“the Sitomagus of the Roman occupation, and later the Dunmoc of East Anglia. Population, 694. (H’m, h’m!) Disfranchised by the Reform Act of ’32. (H’m!) Formerly a place of importance, owning a seaport, fortifications, seven churches and an abbey. In the twelfth century the sand, silting up, destroyed its harbour and admitted the encroachments of the sea, from which date its prosperity was gradually withdrawn. (H’m, h’m!) Since, century by century, made the devouring sport of the ocean, until, at the present date, but a few crumbling ruins, toppling towards their final extinction in the waves below, remain the sole sad relics of an ancient glory which once proudly dominated the element under which it was doomed later to lie ’whelmed.”

Uncle Jenico stopped reading, and looked up at me a little puzzled.

“There’s better to come,” I murmured, blushing.

He nodded, and went on—

“A hill, called the Abbot’s Mitre, as much from its associations, perhaps, as from its peculiar conformation, overlooks the modern village, and is crowned on its seaward edge by the remains of the ancient foundation from which it takes its name. Some business is done in the catching and curing of sprats and herrings. There is an annual fair. Morant states that after violent storms, when the shingle-drifts are overturned, bushels of coins, Roman and other, and many of considerable value, may be picked up for the seeking.”

Uncle Jenico’s face came slowly round to stare into mine. His hair seemed risen; his jaw was a little dropped.

“Richard!” he whispered, “our fortune is made.”

“Yes,” I thrilled back, delighted. “That’s why I chose it. I thought you’d be pleased.”

He looked out the direction eagerly on the map. It was distant, by road, some twenty-five miles north-east by north from Ipswich; by sea, perhaps ten miles further. But the weather was fine, and water-transport more suited to our finances. So two days later we had started for Dunberry, in one of the little coasting ketches that ply between Harwich and Yarmouth carrying farm produce and such chance passengers as prefer paying cheap for a risk too dear for security.

It was lovely April weather, and a light wind blowing up the shores from the south-east bowled us gaily on our way. I never so much as thought of sickness, and if I had, Uncle Jenico, looking in his large Panama hat like a benevolent planter, would have shamed me, with his rubicund serenity, back to confidence again. Our sole property, for all contingencies, was contained in the despatch-box and a single carpet bag; and with no more sense of responsibility than these engendered, we were committing ourselves to a future of ravishing possibilities.

Throughout the pleasant journey we hugged the coast, never being more than a mile or two distant from it, so that its features, wild or civilized, were always plain to us. It showed ever harsher and more desolate the farther we ran north, and the tearing and hollowing effect of waves upon its sandy cliffs more evident. All the way it was fretted, near and far, with towers—a land of churches. They stood grey in the gaps of hills; brown and gaunt on solitary headlands. Sometimes they were dismantled; and once, on a deserted shore, we saw a belfry and part of a ruined chancel footing the tide itself. It was backed by a great heaped billow of sand, which—so our skipper told us—had stood between it and the sea till storms flung it all over and behind, leaving the walls it had protected exposed to destruction.

As evening came on I must confess my early jubilation waned somewhat. The thin, harsh air, the melancholy cry of the birds, the eternal desolation of the coast, chilled me with a creeping terror of our remoteness from all that friendly warmth and comfort we had rashly deserted. Not a light greeted us from the shore but such as shone ghastly in the lifeless wastes of foam. The last coast town, miles behind, seemed to have passed us beyond the final bounds of civilization. So that it was with something like a whimper of joy that I welcomed the sudden picture of a hill notched oddly far ahead against the darkening sky. I ran hurriedly to Uncle Jenico.

“Uncle!” I cried. “Uncle, look! The Abbot’s Mitre!”

The skipper heard me, and answered.

“Aye,” said he, “it’s the Mitre, sure enow,” and spat over the taffrail.

There was something queer in his tone. He rolled his quid in his cheek.

“And like enow, by all they say,” he added, looking at Uncle Jenico, “to figure agen for godliness.”

“Eh?” said my uncle; “I beg your pardon?”

“Granted,” answered the skipper shortly; and that was all.

There was an uneasy atmosphere of enigma here. But we were abroad after adventure, when all was said, and had no cause to complain.

I stood holding my uncle’s hand, while we ran our last knot for home in the twilight. As we neared the hill its peculiar shape was gradually lost, and instead, looking up from below, we saw the cap of a broken tower showing over its swell. Then hill and ruin dropped behind us, a shadowy bulk, and of a sudden we were come opposite a sandy cleft cutting up into the cliff, and below on the shingle a ghostly group of boats and shore-loafers, though still no light or sign of houses.

We brought to, the sails flapping, and the skipper sent a long melancholy boom sounding over the water from a horn. It awoke a stir on the beach, and presently we saw a boat put off, and come curtseying towards us. It was soon alongside, revealing three men, of whom the one who sat steering was a little remarkable. He was immensely tall and slouching, with a lank bristled jaw, a swarthy skin, and, in spectral contrast, eye-places of such an odd sick pallor as to give him the appearance, at least in this gloaming, of wearing huge spectacles. However, he was the authoritative one of the three, and welcomed us civilly enough for early visitors to Dunberry, hoping we should favour the place.

“None so well as thee, Jole, since thy convarsion,” bellowed the skipper, as we pushed off.

There followed a chuckle of laughter from the ketch, and I noticed even that the two men pulling us creased their cheeks. Their companion, unmoving, clipped out something like an oath, which he gruffly and hastily coughed over.

“The Lord in His wrath visit not the scoffer,” he said aloud, “nor waft him blindfold this night upon the Weary Sands!”

In a few minutes we slid up the beach on the comb of a breaker, and half a dozen arms were stretched to help us out. One seized the carpet-bag, another—our tall coxswain’s itself—the despatch-box; and thereby, by that lank arm, hangs this tale. For my uncle, who was jealous of nothing in the world but his box, in scrambling to resecure it from its ravisher, slipped on the wet thwarts, and, falling with his head against a corner of the article itself, rolled out bleeding and half-stunned upon the sand.

I was terribly frightened, and for a moment general consternation reigned. But my uncle was not long in recovering himself, though to such a dazed condition that a strong arm was needed in addition to his stick to help him towards the village. We started, a toilful procession, up the sandy gully (Dunberry Gap its name), I carrying the precious case, and presently, reaching the top, saw the village going in a long gentle sweep below us, the scoop of the land covering it seawards, which was the reason we had seen no lights.

It had been Uncle Jenico’s intention to look for reasonable lodgings; but this being from his injury impracticable, we let ourselves be conducted to the Flask Inn, the most important in the place, where we were no sooner arrived than he consented to be put to bed, with me in a little closet giving off his room. It was near dark by the time we were settled, and feeling forlorn and bewildered I was glad enough, after a hasty supper, to tuck my troubles between the sheets and forget everything in sleep. But how little I guessed, as I did so, that Uncle Jenico had, in falling, taken possession, like William the Conqueror, of this new land of our adoption.

CHAPTER V.
THE STORY OF THE EARTHQUAKE.

Providence, I cannot but believe, had all this time humoured us along a seeming “Road of Casualty,” which was, in truth, the direct path to its own wonderful ends. We talk of luck and accident and coincidence. They are, I am certain, but the veils with which It blinds us to Its inexorable conclusions. My chance selection of our destination, my uncle’s mishap—what were these but second and third acts in the strange drama which had begun in the law courts of Ipswich, where my father had given his life for a truth, which was to be here, thirty miles away, proven and consummated. The dénouement was distant yet, to be sure, for Providence, having all eternity to plot in, works deliberately. Nevertheless, It never loses sight, I think, of what we call the Unities of Art.

I awoke from a dreamless sleep, a restored and avid little giant. It was bright morning. A clock on the stairs cleared its throat and sang out six times. The house was still, save for a shuffling of drowsy maids at their dusting below. I lay quiet, conscious of the most unfamiliar atmosphere all about me—of whitewashed walls; of a smell between wood-smoke and seaweed and the faint sourness of beer; of cold boarded floors gritty with sand; of utter remoteness from the noise of traffic habitual to a young denizen of towns. This little gap of time had lifted me clean out of my accustomed conditions, and dumped me in an outpost of civilization, amongst uncouth allies, friendlies in name, but as foreign as foes to my experience.

I got up soon very softly, and washed and dressed and went out. I had to pass, on my way, through my uncle’s room; and it relieved me to see him slumbering peacefully on his pillow, though the white bandage across his forehead gave me a momentary shock.

I emerged upon a landing, on a wall of which, papered with varnished marble, hung a smoke-stained print of a hunt, with a case of stuffed water-birds on a table beneath. No one accosted me as I descended the little creaking flight of stairs. I passed out by the unlatched private door of the tavern, and found myself at the sea-end of the village street. It was a glowing morning. Not a soul appeared abroad, and I turned to the path by which we had come the night before, thrilling to possess the sea.

The ground went gently up by the way of a track that soon lost itself in the thin grass of the cliffs. Not till I reached the verge did I pause to reconnoitre, and then at once all was displayed about me. I drew one deep delighted breath, and turned as my foremost duty to examine the way I had come. The village, yawning from its chimneys little early draughts of smoke, ran straight from the sea, perhaps for a quarter of a mile, under the shelter of a low, long hill on which a few sheep were folded. Beyond this hill, southwards, and divided from it by a deepish gorge, whose end I could see like a cut trough in the cliff edge, bulged another, the Abbot’s, the contour which gave it its name but roughly distinguishable at these closer quarters. The ruins we had passed overnight crowned this second slope near its marge; and inland both hills dropped into pastures, whence the ground rose again towards a rampart of thick woods which screened all Dunberry from the world beyond.

It looked so endearing, such a happy valley of peace, one would scarcely have credited the picture with a single evil significance; yet—but I am not going to anticipate. Tingling with pleasure, I faced round to the sea.

It was withdrawn a distance away, creaming at the ebb. All beyond was a sheet of golden lustre fading into the bright mists of dawn. Right under the rising sun, like a bar beneath a crest, stretched the line of the Weary Sands, a perilous bank situate some five miles from shore; and between bank and coast rode a solitary little two-masted lugger, with shrouds of gossamer and hull of purple velvet, it seemed, in the soft glow. Even while I looked, this shook out sails like beetles’ wings, and, drawing away, revealed a tiny boat speeding shorewards. I bent and peered over. Ten fathoms beneath me the gully we had climbed in the dark discharged itself, a river of sand, upon the beach; and tumbled at its mouth, as it might be débris, lay a dozen pot-bellied fishing boats. Right and left the cliffs rose and dropped in fantastic conformations, until they sank either way into the horizon. It was a wonderful scene to the little town-bred boy.

Presently I looked for the rowing-boat again, and saw it close in shore. In a minute it grated on the shingle, and there heaved himself out of it the tall fisherman who had escorted us last night. I was sure of him, and he also, it appeared, of me; for after staring up some time, shading his eyes with his hand, he turned, as if convinced, to haul his craft into safety. I watched him awhile, and was then once more absorbed in the little vessel drawing seawards, when I started to hear his voice suddenly address me close by. He must have come up the gully as soft-footed as a cat.

His eyes were less like a marmoset’s by daylight; but they were still a strange feature in his gaunt forbidding face. I felt friendly towards every one; yet somehow this man’s expression chilled me, as he stood smiling down ingratiatory without another word.

“Is that your little ship out there?” I asked, for lack of anything better.

“Lor’ bless ’ee, no, sir,” he answered, heartily, but in a sort of breathless way. “What makes ’ee think so?”

“Weren’t you coming from it?”

“Me!” He protested, with a panting chuckle. “Jole Rampick own that there little tender beauty! I’d skipped out fur my morning dip, sir—if you must know. A wonderful bracing water this—if folks would only credit it.”

His unshorn dusky face was not, I could not help thinking, the best testimony to its cleansing properties. But I kept my wisdom to myself, and turned to go back to the inn. Mr. Rampick volunteered his company, and on the way some instructive information.

“Aye,” he panted huskily; “man and boy fur nigh on fifty year have I known this here Abbot’s Dunberry, but never—till three months ago—the healing vartues of its brine.”

“Who told you of them?” I asked.

“The Lord,” he answered, showing the under-whites of his eyes a moment. “The Lord, sir, through his minister the parson—that’s Mr. Sant. Benighted we were—and ignorant—till the light was vouchsafed us; and parson he revealed the Bethesda lying at our very doors.”

“What’s Bethesda?” I had, I am sorry to say, to ask.

“A blessed watering-place,” he said—“I’m humbly surprised, sir; like as parson calc’lates to make of this here, if the Almighty will condescend to convart our former wickedness to our profit.”

“Were you wicked?”

“Bad, bad!” He answered, setting his lips, and shaking his head. “A nest of smugglers and forswearers, till He set His hand on us.”

“Mr. Rampick! How?”

“It tuk the form of an ’arthquake,” he said, with a little cough.

I jumped, and ejaculated: “O! Where?”

“Yonder, in the Mitre,” he said, waving his hand towards the hidden bluff. “It’ll be fower months ago, won’t it, as they run their last contraband to ground in the belly of that there hill. A cave, it was supposed, sir; but few knew for sarten, and none will ever know now till the day when the Lord ‘shall judge the secrets of men.’ There was a way in, as believed, known only to the few; and one night, as believed, them few entered by it, each man with his brace o’ runlets—and they never come out agen!”

I gasped and knotted my fingers together. It did not occur to my innocence to question the source of his knowledge, or conjecture.

“Why?” I whispered.

“Why?” he echoed in a sort of asthmatic fury. “Why, sir, because it was a full cargo, and their iniquity according; and so the Lord He spoke, and the hill it closed upon ’em. In the dark, when we was all abed, there come a roaring wind from underground what turned our hearts to water; and in the morning when we gathered to look, there was the hill twisted like a dead face out of knowledge, and the Abbey—two-thirds of what was left—scrattled abroad.”

I could only stare up at him, breathing quick in face of this wonderful romance. It had, I knew, been a year strangely prolific in earth-shocks.

“Yes, sir,” he said soberly; “if all what’s believed is Gospel true, there at this moment lays those poor sinners, bedded like flints in chalk—and the hill fair reeking with Nantes brandy.”

He groaned hoarsely.

“Hallerloojer! It was a sign and a warning. The shock of it carried off th’ old vicar, and in a week or two arter Mr. Sant he come to take his place. He found us a sober’d people, Hallerloojer! and soil meet fur the Lord’s planting. You be the fust fruits, sir; and we favourably hope as when you go away you’ll recommend us.”

Perhaps I vaguely understood by this something of the nature of our welcome. Given an isolated fishing village skipped by tourists because of its remoteness; given the sudden withdrawal from that village of its natural advantages for an illicit trade; given a clerical enthusiast, introduced at the right moment, to point out to a depressed population it’s locality’s potentialities as a watering-place, and to show the way for them to win an honest prosperity out of the ruins of evil; given, to top all, a dressing of local superstition, and the position was clear. Such deduction, no doubt, was for the adult rather than the child; but though I could not draw it at the time, it was there to be drawn, I am sure.

As we talked we had reached the inn, and my companion, touching his cap, passed on. But he came back before I had time to enter, and addressed me breathlessly, as if on an after-thought.

“Begging your pardon, sir—but you makes me laugh, you reely does—about that there lugger belonging to poor Jole Rampick.” And he went off chuckling, and looking, with his little head and slouching shoulders and stilts of legs, like the hind-quarters of a pantomime elephant.

I found my uncle sitting up in preparation to breakfast in bed. He was very genial and happy; but, so it seemed to me, extraordinarily vague. I told him about my adventure and the story of the earthquake, which he seemed somehow unable to dissociate from his own accident.

“I knew it, Richard,” he said; “but it was taking rather a mean advantage of a lame man, eh? There’s no security against it but balloons—that I’ve often thought. You see, when the ground itself gives underneath you, where are you to go? If one could only pump oxygen into one’s own head, you know. I’ll think about it in the course of the morning. I don’t fancy I shall get up just at present. That despatch-box, now—it was a drastic way of impressing its claims upon me, eh? Well, well!”

He laughed, rather wildly I thought.

“Uncle,” I said, “you’ve never told me—how did you get lame?”

“How did I get lame?” he murmured, pressing the bandage on his forehead. “Why, to be sure, it was a parachute, Richard—a really capital thing I invented. But the wires got involved—the merest accident—and I came to the ground.”

He was interrupted by two young ladies, daughters of the inn, who came themselves—out of curiosity, I think—to serve us breakfast. They were over-dressed, all but for their trodden slippers, with large bows of hair on their heads, and they giggled a good deal and answered questions pertly.

“Well, my dears,” said Uncle Jenico, “how about the earthquake?”

They stared at him, and then at one another, and burst out laughing.

“O, there now!” said one; “earthquake yourself, old gentleman! Go along with you!” And they ran out, and we heard them tittering all down the stairs.

Uncle Jenico got clearer after his meal, though he was still disinclined to move. I sat with him all the morning, while he showed and explained to me more of the contents of his box; and about midday a visitor, the Reverend Mr. Sant, was announced. I stood up expectant, and saw a thin, dark young man, in clerical dress, enter the room at a stride. He had the colourless face, large-boned nose, and burning eyes of a zealot, and not an ounce of superfluous flesh anywhere about him. Much athletic temperance had trimmed him down to frame and muscle, but had not parched the sources of a very sweet smile, which was the only emotional weakness he retained. He came up to the bed, took my uncle’s hand, and introduced himself in a word.

“Permit me,” he said; “I heard of your accident. I know a trifle of surgery, and our apothecary visits us but twice in the month. May I look?”

He examined the hurt, and, saying he would send a salve for it, settled down to talk.

Now, I could not follow the persuasive process; but all I know is that within a quarter of an hour he had learned all my uncle’s and my history, and the reason for our coming to Dunberry, and that, having once mastered the details, he very ingeniously set himself to appropriating them to the schemes of Providence.

“It is clear,” he said, “that you, free-lances of Destiny, were inspired to select this, out of all the world, for your operations. We looked for visitors to report for us upon the attractions of the place; you for a quiet and healthful spot in which to develop your schemes.”

“Very true,” said Uncle Jenico. “I’ve long had an idea for extracting gold from sea-water.”

“You see?” cried Mr. Sant, greatly pleased. “It’s a clear interposition of Providence. This coast is, I am sure, peculiarly adapted, from the accessibility of its waters, to gold-seeking.”

I could not restrain my excitement.

“Please,” I said, “did-d-d the smugglers hide it there?”

Mr. Sant glanced at me sharply.

“Who told you about smugglers?” he demanded.

“Mr. Rampick,” I whispered, hanging my head.

“Ah!” he exclaimed, and turned to my uncle. “Old Joel Rampick, was it? One of the most cherished of my converts, sir; a deeply religious man at bottom, though circumstances long obscured the light in him. Old Rampick, now! And talked about smuggling, did he? He’ll have drawn the moral of it from his own experience, I don’t doubt. Dunberry, there’s no use concealing, has been a long thorn in the side of the Revenue, though happily the earthquake has changed all that.”

“Ah, to be sure!” said my uncle; “the earthquake.”

“It was without question a Divine visitation,” said Mr. Sant, resolutely.

“Do you think so?” said my uncle, his face falling. “My purpose in coming here was really most harmless, sir.”

Mr. Sant looked puzzled; then went on, with a dry smack of his lips:

“I am afraid that my predecessor lacked a little the apostolic fervour. He was old, and liked his ease, good man. Perhaps long association with the place had blunted his prejudices. I must not play the Pharisee to him, however. No doubt so circumstanced I should have failed no less to sow the seed. Heaven sent me at a fruitful moment: to Heaven be the credit and the glory! This little boy now—nephew Dicky? He knows his catechism?”

“Ah!” said Uncle Jenico, with a cunning look; “does he?”

“Chit-chit!” protested the clergyman. “I hope not altogether ignorant of it?”

He was decently shocked, and won an easy promise from my uncle that I should come up to him for an hour’s instruction every day. Then he rose to go.

“You’ll excuse me,” he said, bending his brows, “but I trust you are satisfied with your quarters?”

“Well, yes,” answered my uncle, hesitating; “but—an inn, you see. It’s a little more than we can—than we ought to—eh?”

Mr. Sant brightened immediately. We came to know afterwards that he strongly disapproved of these flashy Miss Flemings, and had once expressed in public some surprise that they had not been impounded as skittish animals not under proper control.

“There’s the widow Puddephatt, ripe and ready for visitors,” he said, “and perfectly reasonable, I am sure. May I give you her address? It’s No. 3, the Playstow.”

My uncle thanked him warmly; and, smitten with a sudden idea, caught at his coat as he was leaving.

“O, by the way!” he said, “these coins to be picked up on the beach, now. There are enough left to make it profitable, I suppose?”

Mr. Sant stared at him.

“The coins, Roman and other,” persisted Uncle Jenico, anxiously scanning the clergyman’s face; “the antiques, which Morant tells us litter the beach like shells after storms?”

Mr. Sant shook his head.

“I have heard nothing of them during my time,” he said; “but I should hardly think smuggling would have got such a hold here if it were the Tom Tiddler’s ground your friend supposes it to be.”

Directly he was gone, Uncle Jenico turned to me, rubbing his hands, with a most roguish smile puckering his mouth.

“Richard,” he said, “we are in plenty of time. The obtuseness of the rustic is a thing astonishing beyond words! Here, with all Pactolus at his feet, he needs a stranger to come and show him his opportunities. But, mum, boy, mum! We’ll keep this little matter to ourselves.”

CHAPTER VI.
MRS. PUDDEPHATT AND FANCY-MARIA.

The following day my uncle was near himself again, and we left the Flask inn and took lodging with the widow Puddephatt. The Playstow was a little green, about half-way down the village, where the villagers reared their may-pole on May-day, and built their fires on Midsummer’s Eve, and caroused in September on the harvest-largesse won from passers-by. Round about, in a little square, were cottages, detached and exclusive, the élite of Dunberry; and to one side was the church—but now in process of completion—in whose porch the daring would seat themselves on St. Mark’s eve to see, at midnight, the wraiths of the year’s pre-doomed come and knock at the door. Mr. Sant had, however, limited that custom, as well as some others less reputable; and the fact that he was able to do so spoke volumes for his persuasiveness. At the present time the villagers, under his stimulus, were transferring, stone by stone, to the long unfinished fabric and its adjoining school-house, the less sacred parts of the ruined foundation on the hill.

Mrs. Puddephatt, though Dunberry-born, was a comparative acquisition to the village, to which she had been summoned, and to her natural succession in No. 3, the Playstow, through the death of an only sister without encumbrances. She had, in fact, gone very young, a great many years ago, into service in London, and had never set foot again in her native place until this inheritance, now two years old, had called her. She brought with her an ironic atmosphere of the great world, and a disdainful tolerance towards the little, in which her lot was now to vegetate. She had, in her high experience, “’tweenied,” “obliged,” scullery-maided, kitchen-maided, house-maided, parlour-maided, and old-maided; and she had somehow emerged from this five-fold chrysalis of virginity the widow Puddephatt—no one knew by what warrant, other than that of a sort of waspish charity-girl cap, with a knuckle-bone frill round her face. But then her knowledge of men was so matrimonial that it was admitted nothing but a husband could have inspired it. Her dictums, in respect to this mystic experience, were merum sal to the wives of Dunberry.

“Look in the pot for your new gownd,” and “The way to a man’s purse is through his mouth,” may be bracketed for utterances cryptic to the “general,” but not to their delighted understandings.

“A hopen ’and comes empty ’ome.”

“A man shuts his sweet’art’s mouth with a kiss, but his wife’s heyes.”

“Be careful of a Saturday morning to mend the ’ole in your man’s pocket.”

“When your ’usband talks of his hage, be sure he means yours.”

Such and the like shrewd axioms served the widow Puddephatt at least as well as marriage lines; and, if more were needed, her mastery of the exact science of nagging and of the conquering resource of hysterics supplied it. Sometimes, it was whispered, she was to be seen in her front garden viciously dusting a man’s coat with a stick; and on this moral implication alone, late tavern roysterers, lurching home after closing-time past the little wicket where she was often to be seen watching spectral and ironic, had been known to slink by, meanly conscious of deserting, and surrendering into her gloating hands a purely imaginary Puddephatt, their late boon companion.

This tremendous lady undertook the care of us with infinite condescension, and, hearing that we were Londoners bred, gathered us at once under the protection of her maternal and metropolitan wing.

“Lork, Fancy-Maria!” she would say, with an air of amused tolerance towards the little Suffolk rawbones who “generalled” for her; “we don’t breathe on the knives and polish ’em in our haprons in London!” Or, “That won’t do, Fancy-Maria! We know better in London than to dust the ’ot plates with our helbers.”

With this shibboleth of sarcastic comparison, she had won, not only Fancy-Maria, but all feminine Dunberry to a perspiring emulation of her gentility, so that in the course of her two years the social code had grown quite elevated, and it was no longer fashionable to dine in one’s shirt-sleeves.

The secret in the hill

THESECRET IN THE HILL

CONTENTS.