The Project Gutenberg eBook, Mary Lee, by Geoffrey Pomeroy Dennis

MARY
LEE

MARY LEE

BY

GEOFFREY DENNIS

NEW YORK
ALFRED A. KNOPF
MCMXXII

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc.

Published, August, 1922

Set up, electrotyped, and printed by the Vail-Ballou Co., Binghamton, N. Y.
Paper (Warren's) furnished by Henry Lindenmeyr & Sons, New York, N. Y.
Bound by the Plimpton Press, Norwood, Mass.

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

PART
ONE

CHAPTER I: I AM BORN

I was born at Tawborough on March the Second, 1848.

It seems to have been a great year in the history books. Fires of revolution sweeping over Europe; half the capitals aflame. From Prague to Palermo, from Paris to Pesth, the peoples rising against their rulers. Wars and rumours of wars; civil strife everywhere. Radicals in Prussia, revolutionaries in Italy, rebels in Austria, republicans in France. Even in old England we had our chartists.

All such troubles failed to touch Tawborough. What did she know of it all, or care if she knew? She was a good old peaceful English country town, with her own day's work to do. The great world might go its way for all she cared—a wild and noisy way it seemed. She would go hers.

Not that Tawborough had always been without a say in England's affairs. She had indeed a long and honourable history. At the dawn of time there was a settlement in the marshes where the little stream of Yeo empties itself into the Taw: a primitive village of wattled huts, known to the Britons as Artavia. The Phœnicians record the name for us, and describe the place as a great mart for their commerce. Here the tin of the western mines was bartered against the rich products of the East: camphire and calamus, spikenard and saffron, fine linen and purple silk. This was the origin of Tawborough market, which is the first in Devonshire to this day. Artavia seems to have been an important seat of the old British worship. The see of the Arch-Druid of the West was near at hand in the Valley of the Rocks at Lynton; from the sacred oak-groves above the Taw on a clear day the Druids could see the fires of the great altar on the Promontory of Hercules—Hartland Point they call it now.

Religion, indeed, in one way or another, seems to have coloured most of the big events of the town's history. The next great fight was between pagans and Christian men.

It was the foeman from the North, threatening the men of Wessex with desolation. One day the terrified townsfolk heard clanging in their ears the great ivory horns of the Northmen, and beheld the blood-red banners sailing up the Taw. One of the standards had upon it a Raven. Then the Englishmen knew their foe for the wild Hubba, King of the Vikings; since the Raven floated always at his mast. The banner was of crimson. It had been worked by the King's three sisters in a noontide and blessed by a strange Icelandic wizard, who endowed the Raven sewn upon it with this magical gift: that she clapped her wings to announce success to the Viking arms, and drooped them to presage failure. Never till this day had the black wings drooped; they drooped this winter's morning. So the English took heart. Odin, Earl of Devon, sallied forth from Kenwith Castle, defeated and slew King Hubba, and captured the magic banner. Then came peace for a while. King Alfred, full of piety, came to Tawborough and set up the great Mound by the Castle. King Athelstan gave the town a charter, and housed himself in a magnificent palace at Umberleigh hard by.

In the wake of the Normans came the religious orders. The Cluniacs built a monastery in the town, the Benedictines another at Pilton just outside. With the monks came light and learning, better lives and milder ways. Tawborough became rich and prosperous. Her trade excelled that of Bristol. Her fair and market were famous "tyme out of mynde." For many years the Taw—that "greate, hugy, mighty, perylous and dredful water"—became a highway for the ships of all nations.

When the New World was found, Englishmen sailed west for glory. Devon led the way, Tawborough men among the foremost, and Tawborough ships did valiant deeds against the Invincible Armada. Those were the great days of England. The townsfolk were all for the new religion. Spaniard and Papist were twin-children of the devil. A murrain on both! They favoured the Puritan party in the civil wars, stood out against the rest of the county, and shouted for the Parliament. Though when the Royalists took the town and gay Prince Charles made it his headquarters, the townspeople were charmed with His Merry Highness; and he, as he told Lord Clarendon, with them. All the courtiers were of the same mind. Lord Clarendon himself declared that Tawborough was "a very fine sweet town as ever I saw," while Lady Fanshawe thought that the cherry pies they made there "with their sort of cream" were the best things that man, or woman, could eat. Gay John Gay, who wrote the Beggar's Opera, showed to the world the fair and likeable character of his native town, which at heart, however, was always of the godly serious-minded quality, Puritan to the core. No town in England gave a warmer welcome to the poor Huguenots, who were flying from King Lewis. One Sunday morning as the townsfolk were coming forth from Church they saw against the sky—not this time the scarlet banners of the North—the brown sails of an old French schooner, bearing up the Taw a band of exiled French Puritans, weary and wretched after their voyage. Tawborough found every one of them a home. In return the grateful Frenchmen taught the natives new ways of cloth-weaving, which sent the fame of Tawborough Bays through all the land.

Later came a change, a new century, the reign of King Coal; and Tawborough, like many another historic Western town, sank into comparative decay. What did the new industrial cities know of such as her, or care if they knew? For her part, she was indifferent to their ignorance or their indifference alike. She was a good old English country town with her own day's work to do. Troubles, invasions, vicissitudes had assailed her before. New blood, Saxon, Danish, Norman, Huguenot had coursed through her veins. Her dead had buried their dead. The people pass, the place alone is abiding.... Abiding, yet not eternal; for there comes the day when the old earth will fall into the sun.... Meanwhile, Town Tawborough had her daily life to live, her townsfolk had theirs.

Two of them, indeed, were living theirs with plenty of zest, somewhere in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Jael and Hannah Vickary were the daughters of an old sea-captain, Ebenezer Vickary of Torribridge. He and his brother had three or four vessels of their own, trading with the Indies in sugar and molasses, or with the Spanish Main, as it then still was, in logwood and mahogany. The brother died in Cuba of the yellow fever. Soon afterwards Ebenezer gave up the sea, settled down in Tawborough, and died in his time. He left his two daughters enough money to live upon in the quiet style of those days, together with a big dwelling house by the old North Gate. Here Jael and Hannah Vickary lived alone, with an old servant whose years were unknown and unnumbered, and whose wages were six pounds a year. They had a few friends and visitors, faithful women of the Parish Church, chief among whom were the Other Six of "the Seven Old Maids of Tawborough." By a strange coincidence seven female children had been born in Tawborough on August the First 1785, all of whom had risen to be devout handmaidens of the Lord in the work of the Parish Church, shining lights around the central figure of the Vicar, and all of whom had dwindled into a sure spinsterhood. "We are the wise virgins," said Jael Vickary, their leader and spiritual chief, in whom the scorn of all menfolk except the Vicar (who had a meek wife and twelve children) amounted to a prophet's passion. This passion was shared in various degrees by the Other Six, to wit: Miss Lucy Clarke, Miss Fanny Baker, Miss Keturah Crabb, Miss Sarah Tombstone, and last but not least the Heavenly Twins, the Misses Glory and Salvation Clinker. The Twins were the only regular visitors at Northgate House. There were a few others, no relatives among them. Jael and Hannah had indeed an elder brother, John: Ebenezer's only son. He had gone to London as a boy, worked his way up in a wholesale sugar house in the City, and become passing rich. His sisters were kept aware of his existence only by receiving occasional presents and more occasional letters. He never married. Thus it was that his death, if nothing so crude as a self-acknowledged source of financial hope to Miss Jael, would nevertheless have been borne by her with true Christian fortitude.

If alike in a salt and shrewdness of personality unknown to our end of the century, in most ways the two sisters differed as much as two human beings can. Miss Jael was hard, Miss Hannah kindly; Miss Jael stern, Miss Hannah gentle; Miss Jael was feared, Miss Hannah loved. Though Hannah was less than eighteen months her sister's junior, this unbridgeable gulf enabled Miss Jael throughout life to refer to Miss Hannah as "a young woman," and to treat her accordingly. Then, behold, in the year 1822, when both were nearer forty than thirty, the Young Woman brazenly gave ear to the suit of one Edward Lee, an old sea-captain, who had sailed under her father, and was twenty years her senior. Jael mocked (Why did he choose her? asked her heart bitterly); yet stayed on at Northgate House, when Captain Lee came to live there, to bully and bludgeon the dear old man into his grave. This procedure took but five years. The old man died, leaving to his widow two little girls and a boy: Rachel, Martha and Christian.

In the godlier activities of Tawborough life Jael and her widowed sister were leading lights, with the parish church as General Headquarters of their operations. Miss Jael was the vicar's right-hand man. She ran his poor club, his guild, his Dorcas-meeting, effacing completely the meek many-childrened little lady of the Rectory. He thought her a queen among women, a tower set upon a rock.

All this was in the twenties and thirties of the century, ere yet the Church of England had taken her earliest step on the swift steep path to Rome. The same wave of evangelical fervour that had swelled Wesley's great following had strengthened also the Church from which they broke away. This fervour, whether Methodist or Established, did not however go nearly far enough for certain pious souls, especially in the West country, who formed themselves into little bodies for the Worship of God in the strictest and simplest Gospel fashion. "They continued steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayer." They called themselves the Saints, or more modestly the Brethren. Outsiders called them the Plymouth Brethren—they flourished in the great seaport—or more profanely, the Plymouth Rocks. They were drawn from all communions and no communion, if principally from the Established Church; from all classes and conditions, the humbler trades-folk perhaps predominating. In Tawborough they were especially active. From the days of the primitive Druids away through the long story of missionaries and monks, seafaring Protestants and Huguenot exiles, here was a town that took her religion neat. She preferred the good Calvin flavouring, and thus it was that the Plymouth evangel sent up a savoury smell in her nostrils. There were literally hundreds of converts. The Parish Church lost some of its leading members. Arose the cry "The Church in danger!"; and of all who responded, most valiant was the Vicar's right-hand man. She stemmed the tide of deserters with loins girt for battle. Like St. Paul, she breathed out threatenings and slaughter against the new sect. She encouraged the faithful, visited the wavering, anathematized deserters. To crown her efforts she counselled the vicar to summon a great Church Defence Meeting in the Parish Room, to rally and re-affirm the confidence of the faithful. The Vicar agreed. The hour of commencement saw a right goodly and godly assembly foregathered together. On the platform sat a Canon of Exeter, the old Marquess of Exmoor, several county bigwigs, the Mayor and the Churchwardens. Seven o'clock struck, the Vicar was about to open the proceedings, everything was ready—except—except that two honoured places on the platform (in those days a place on a platform was for a woman an honour indeed) were not yet occupied. Miss Vickary and her sister were late. The Vicar hesitated. There was a distinguished company, true: but start the meeting without its guiding spirit—never! Give her five minutes.... Some one handed the Vicar an envelope. He opened it, read through the contents, and fainted then and there.

How the reverend gentleman was brought round from his swoon by the joint endeavours of the Canon, the Marquess, two Churchwardens, nine ladies and a bottle of sal-volatile; how the great Church Defence Meeting fizzled to an inglorious end; and how Jael Vickary and Hannah Lee were baptized in the Taw in the presence of three thousand five hundred spectators, there is no need to relate here. The facts were well enough known to the older generation in the town. Some say that the Vicar made a last despairing effort to retain his apostate right-hand man; that, with tears in his eyes, he went down on his knees before her. If so, as Hannah wickedly said, he was the only man who ever did so, and in any case he achieved nothing. On the contrary The Great Betrayal encouraged wholesale desertions. The Other Six deserted en masse.

Henceforward Jael Vickary's life was occupied with two main things: building up the new sect, and bringing up her sister's family. She filled the vacant post of father with thoroughness and vigour. Her method was the rod, or to be accurate the thorned stick, and a horrible weapon it was. Hannah approved the method in moderation, though she could never have applied it herself. Much of her life, indeed, was spent in protecting her children from her sister. Rachel, the eldest, was best beloved. She was a sweet, gentle child; bright, tender and gay. Martha was quieter, even morose. Christian was a peevish child, weak and ailing from birth. With no husband to help her, and her sister on the scold from morn till night, Hannah Lee's life was not an easy one. She gave her two daughters the best schooling in Devonshire, as schooling for girls went in those days; so that when they grew up they were able to take positions as governesses in the best families of the county. Rachel went to Woolthy Hall to teach Guy, the Lord Tawborough's five year old heir. Martha was employed by the Groves, of Grove House near Exeter, to begin the education of their daughter. The two girls' attainments and appearance explained their good fortune. Rachel in particular was a refined and attractive young woman, with bright eyes, a peerless skin, and a gentle winning expression. Dressed oftenest in a dove-coloured cotton robe, she had a Quakerish charm, simple yet sure.

Hannah was left alone at Tawborough with Jael and young Christian. As the years passed, life turned greyer. When the Devon and Three Counties' Bank collapsed, nearly half the household income disappeared. Jael's imperiousness grew with her years, while her temper soured. Christian was in a decline, dying slowly before his mother's eyes. Then came Martha's marriage. She had fallen in with one Simeon Greeber, a retired chemist, who lived over at Torribridge—the Taw's twin-river's port, and Tawborough's immemorial rival. This Greeber was the local leader of the extreme wing of the Saints, the Close or Exclusive Brethren; a man twice Martha Lee's age, and one who filled her aunt and her mother with a special sense of dislike and mistrust. Against their will she married him, gave up her excellent post with the Grove family, and went to live at Torribridge.

Hannah's consolation was always Rachel, whom she loved most dearly. Then, in its turn, came Rachel's marriage.

At Woolthy Hall the young governess had come into contact with Lord Tawborough's cousin, Mr. Philip Traies, who was a frequent if not welcome guest. He had served in the Navy, but had left the service under doubtful circumstances. He had led a scandalous life and earned a reputation to match it. A clear-cut handsome mouth set in a proud aristocratic face, a fine bearing, a fine speech, and an honoured name, deluded many and were his own undoing. In ill odour with his family and his Maker, he decided to come to terms with the latter. At the age of forty, he joined the Plymouth Brethren. When the Devil turns saint he does a very sharp round-about, and no withered Anglo-Indian colonel who communed with the Saints in his dotage to ensure himself as gay a time in the next world as he had passed in this, ever excelled Mr. Philip Traies in fervour and piety. He worshipped occasionally with the Tawborough Saints, who were duly honoured. Sometimes here, and sometimes at his cousin's, he met Rachel Lee, at this time a girl of twenty-one. He bestowed upon her the favour of eager kindly patronage, as such men will; though if she were beneath him in station, and his equal in manners and good looks, she was far above him in everything else: goodness and purity and wholeness of heart. Quite how it happened nobody knew; but one day Rachel came home from Woolthy Hall, and said to her mother, "I am going to marry Mr. Philip Traies."

Hannah entreated. A "good" match with a bad man had no attraction for her. She pleaded with Rachel. Aunt Jael would not stoop to plead; she gave her niece instead a plain outline of Mr. Philip Traies' past.

"I know," said the girl, and murmured something about "reforming" him.

Neither mother nor aunt achieved her surrender. Pleading and plain-speaking did nothing, nor ever do. The wedding took place at the registry office, as in those days the Brethren's Meeting Houses were not licensed for solemnization of marriages, and neither bride nor bridegroom would enter a church or chapel: temples of Antichrist. Hannah sat through the ceremony with a queer sense of foreboding, of sickness, and coming sorrow; an order of sentiment which, as a sensible Devon woman with no tomfool tombstone fancies ever in her head, in sixty years she had not known. Immediately after the ceremony, at the registry office door, the bridegroom suddenly loosened himself from the bride's arm, and walked sharply away without saying a word. Nobody knew why. Everybody stared. The wedding breakfast at Northgate House began without him. They waited; he did not come. After an hour the tension became unbearable. The guests whispered in groups; Rachel and her mother bore already on their brows the sorrow of the years to come. Aunt Jael's face was a gloomy triumphant "I told you so." Pastries were nibbled, wine was sipped; the joy-feast continued. After nearly two hours a bell rang, and the bridegroom appeared.

"Your explanation?" asked Hannah. Rachel dared not look.

"Oh, I had another woman to see. A glass of sherry please. Besides, it amused me."

He took her away to his house at Torquay. Their married life was wretched from the start. Among many evil passions these two predominated in Mr. Philip Traies: desire and cruelty. Here was a lovely and gentle girl who would satisfy both. The first was soon appeased (shattering love in her heart once and for all), the second never. Cruelty is insatiable. With this man it was a devouring passion. It is doubtful perhaps if he was sane. Taunts, foulness, sneers.... He starved her sometimes, taunted her with her lowlier birth, engaged the servants on the condition of ill-treating their mistress, dismissed them if they wavered. All the time he talked religion. The knees of his elegant trousers were threadbare with prayer. He could fit a text to every taunt. Then a baby-boy came to cheer the sinking heart. A few hours after the child was born, when the young mother lay in the agony and weakness she alone can know, Mr. Philip Traies entered the room—with a gentler word to-day surely?—no, with this: "So this is how you keep your fine promises to make a good lady of the house, a busy housewife and the rest of it"—he raised his voice savagely—"idling in bed at four in the afternoon. Get up, you idle bitch!" Leaning over the end-rail, he spat in her face.

The baby soon died. He taunted her with nursing it badly; and doubled every cruelty he knew save blows.

"Strike me," she said once.

Her patience was a fool's, a saint's, a loving woman's; her goodness, if not her spirits, unfailing. In writing home she made the best of things. But her heart was broken, her spirit wasting away.

"Why did you marry me?" she asked.

"To break your spirit," was the amused reply.

"Then your marriage has fulfilled its purpose," she said wearily. "My spirit is broken. Now I can go home."

That night she wrote to Hannah. The letter is faded, and stained with three women's tears, wife's, mother's, daughter's. "Dearest Mother," she wrote, "I am ill and weary. Another little child is coming, but I may not live for it to be born. I can leave him without failing in my wife's duty now, for the end is very near. I am coming home to die. Your loving broken-hearted Daughter."

Next day she packed for home.

"Deserting me, are you? Fine Jezebel ways! A good Christian wifely thing to do, I'm sure. I thought we were proud of doing our duty."

His sneers did not move her now. She was going home to die.

Northgate House was a dismal place to return to. It was a wet cheerless winter. Hannah was tired and heart-sore. Christian was dying. Jael was evil-tempered, scolding harshly: her comfort to her mother and daughter was still "I told you so." Rachel went straight to bed. In a few days Christian died, a sickly pitiful boy of twenty. "It is the Lord's will," said his mother. Hannah had everything to do, for Simeon Greeber would not let Martha come over from Torribridge, and Jael took to her bed with a convenient fit of the ague. Faith in the eternal love of God was Hannah's only stay. Always, ever, "It was the Lord's will." This sufficed her, though the times were bitter. The day after Christian's funeral was wet and wintry: March the Second 1848. Rachel was twenty-four. Three years ago she had been a happy healthy girl. Now she was a dying broken woman. The morning of that day she gave birth to a daughter. Then she was very weak. Her eyes closed, yet she seemed to see something.

"What do you see, Rachel, my dear?" asked her mother.

The spirit was already half away, looking through the golden gates of Heaven.

"There is a little angel born. I see her in God's cradle. My little angel, God's little angel. I shall be with her always—though far away. I see ... the King in His beauty ... I behold the land ... that is very far off."

Her face was radiant as a lover's, yet sad as Love is. Hannah could not reply. The dying woman seemed to sleep. Her mother watched. An hour passed. Rachel opened her eyes.

"Mother."

"Yes, my dear."

"Love my little baby for me; and—tell him—I forgive him." The eyes closed, this time for ever.

My poor mother.

CHAPTER II: BEAR LAWN

My first memory in this life is of a moving. I am sitting in a high chair, kept in by a stick placed through a hole in each arm. I am surrounded by the utmost disarray. In front of me is an old sponge-bath, crammed full of knick-knacks and drawing-room ornaments. I stretch out my hands yearningly, acquisitively, and make signs of wrenching from its offensive gaolerlike position the stick which bars my way. My Grandmother coaxes me to keep it in, and uses the words she is to use so often later on—words which will punctuate my daily life in days to come:

"Don't 'ee do it, my dear. Sit 'ee still and give no trouble. Ye'll tumble and hurt yourself, so leave the stick alone. Don't 'ee do it."

"If she don't, I'll take it out myself and lay it about her," comes another voice, which is to punctuate as regularly and much more raucously my early doings. And Aunt Jael shakes her fist, and lowers at me.

Perhaps I don't really remember the trifling incident. Most likely I only remember that I remember. It is a photograph of a photograph, smudged by the fingers of Time. Yet I see as clearly as ever the dark room in disarray, my Grandmother kind and coaxing, Aunt Jael threatening and harsh. The memory is clearer because Time has not blurred but rather sharpened it. I grew up the gauge of an unequal battle between Grandmother and Great-Aunt. Moving-day is merely the moment in which my infant intelligence first caught news of the struggle.

At this time I must have been about three years old, for it was some three years after my mother's death that we moved from the High Street, at the time when—I think it was in 1852—the old North Gate was removed, and our house pulled down. Our new house was Number Eight, Bear Lawn. The Lawn was a biggish patch of grass with houses on both sides. At the far end from the road it merged into a steep grassy bank, crowned with poplars, which allowed no egress. At the near end a big iron gate barred us off from the plebeian houses of Bear Street, to which the Lawn mansions felt themselves notably superior.

The Lawn lay to the right of the street some little way out of the town. In reality it was an old barrack-square, "converted." The houses on each side of it were barracks put up during the French Revolutionary Wars. When Boney was beaten and the soldiers sent away, an enterprising builder turned the barracks into two terraces of houses, and sowed the barrack-square with grass seed. Bear Lawn became one of the most elegant quarters of Tawborough, a quiet preserve of genteel habitation; though the houses never quite lost their barrack quality. They were too square and bare and big to be truly genteel. And too roomy.

Number Eight was one of the squarest and barest.

It was gloomy. How far the aspect it will always bear in my mind may be a reflection of the dark and unhappy days I spent there, and how far it was real, I cannot ever say. It was a house of big empty corridors, dark bare spaces, and an incommunicable dreariness that somehow stilled you as you crossed the doorstep. There was none of the cosy warmth that makes so many dark old houses a homely joy to the senses and a warm fragrance for the memory. It had the silence in it that only large empty spaces can create, did not seem inhabited, and smelt of coffins, I used to think. Even in summer there was a suggestion of damp and cold and bleakness, and always there was the silence which made me wait—and listen.

Downstairs there were three big rooms: Aunt Jael's, the dining-room and the kitchen. Aunt Jael's was the front one. The door was always unlocked, yet the key was left on the outside of the door, and I was forbidden to enter. Like Mrs. Bluebeard (of whom I had never heard) or our first mother Eve (in the knowledge of whom I grew to understanding), I felt that prohibition made perfect; and the forbidden room attracted me beyond all others. I visited it usually in the afternoon, when the thunder and trumpets of Aunt Jael's after-dinner doze in the dining-room announced that the road was clear. The blinds were always drawn, winter and summer alike; and the windows closed. The room seemed filled with a dull yellowish kind of mist, the ochre-coloured blind toning the darkness, and just permitting you to see a yellowish carpet and dull yellowish furniture. A row of dismal plants, standing in saucers on the floor, filled the bay window. There was a great oak sideboard, stuffed with Aunt Jael's preserves and pickles; though it was long before I had the courage and the opportunity to ransack it thoroughly. The walls were covered with spears and daggers, trophies of the Gospel in distant lands. In a corner reposed the supreme trophy, a huge wooden god, sitting with arms akimbo. His votaries (until salvation, in the person of Brother Immanuel Greeber, had turned them from their ways) dwelt, I believe, in the Society Islands; though he looked for all the world like a Buddha, with his painless impenetrable eyes and his smile of changeless calm. In his dark unwholesome corner he dominated the room. The yellow mist was incense in his nostrils.

The middle room we called the dining-room, though Aunt Jael favoured "back parlour." Here we lived and prayed and ate, and here a large part of this story took place. The window overlooked our small backyard, which being flanked by out-houses gave little light; so this room too was dark, though not as dark as Aunt Jael's, since the blinds were not usually drawn. It was more barely furnished. There was the table, a chiffonier, a side-board, a bookcase, and two principal chairs: a "gentleman's" armchair to the left of the fireplace, with two big arms; and a "lady's," armless, to the right. One was comfortable, the other was not. One was Aunt Jael's, the other was my Grandmother's. There were four bedrooms on the first floor, and I must note their strategic positions. Aunt Jael's was the first on the right, my own the second; we were over the dining-room and surveyed the backyard. My Grandmother's chamber, the first on the left, and the spare-room beyond it overlooked the Lawn. At the half-landing above was Mrs. Cheese's bedroom, while the top of the house consisted of an enormous whitewashed attic, lighted by an unwashed skylight and suffused by a cold bluish gloom that contrasted queerly with the foggy yellow of the front room downstairs yet excelled it in silent cheerlessness. Here I would spend hours, or whole days, either of my own free will, that I might moon and mope to my heart's content, and talk aloud to myself without fear of mocking audience; or perforce, banished by the frequent judgment of Aunt Jael.

It was our moving into this house that supplies my first earthly memory. My first important—dramatic, historic—remembrance must date from several months later, when I was nearly four years old. The scene was our evening reading of the Word. We were sitting in our usual positions round the dining-room fire after supper.

To the left of the chimney-piece, in the big black horsehair chair—the comfortable one, the one with sides and arms—sat my Great-Aunt Jael. This was her permanent post. From this coign of vantage she issued ukases, thundered commands, hurled anathemas and brandished her sceptre—that thorned stick of whose grim and governmental qualities I have the fullest knowledge of any soul (or body) on earth. She was a short, stout, stocky, strong-looking woman, yet bent; when walking, bent sometimes almost double. Leaning on her awful stick, she looked the old witch she was. Peaky black cap surmounting beetling black brows and bright black eyes, wrinkled swarthy skin, beaky nose, a hard mouth whiskered like a man's, and a harder chin: feature for feature, she was the witch of the picture-books. All her dresses, silk, serge or bombazine, were black. On the night I speak of, an ordinary week-night, she was dressed in her oldest serge. The great Holy Bible on her knees might have been some unholy wizard's tome.

To the right of the chimney-piece sat my Grandmother. She resembled her sister in feature; the character of the face was as different as is heaven from hell. This indeed was the very quality of the difference, and I had a fancy that they were the same face, one given to God, the other sold to Satan. My Grandmother had the same beaky nose and nut-cracker face. Her mouth and chin were firm, but kind instead of cruel. Her skin was milk-white instead of swarthy, her caps were of white lace. Her eyes were as bright as my Great-Aunt's, but bright with kindliness instead of menace. Her whole face spoke of goodwill to others and perfect peace. It was a sweet old face. I love it still.

In the middle, facing the fire, sat Mrs. Cheese. She was a farmer's daughter and widow from near South Molton; and looked it. She was short, fat and ruddy; a few years younger than her mistresses, perhaps at this time a woman of sixty.

I myself crouched on a little stool between Mrs. Cheese and Aunt Jael; but nearer the latter, that I might be watched, and cuffed, with ease. On this particular evening, my heart was hot with rage against Aunt Jael, who had flogged me and locked me in the attic: I don't remember what for. She ordered me more sternly than usual not to dare to move my eyes from her face as she read the nightly portion from the Word of God. To-night it was from her favourite Proverbs, the thirtieth chapter: the words of Agur the son of Jakeh, even the prophecy; the words the man spake unto Ithiel, even unto Ithiel and Ucal.

Aunt Jael read, or rather declaimed the Word, in a harsh staccato way; not without a certain power, especially in the dourer passages of Proverbs or the dismaller in Job or Lamentations. In one of her favourite Psalms, the eighteenth or the sixty-eighth, reeking with battle and revenge, and bespattered with the blood of the enemies of Jehovah, her voice would rise to a dark triumphal shout, terrible as an army with banners. This evening I looked sullenly at the floor as she boomed forth the words of Agur, determined not to fix my eyes on her face at any rate until Stick coaxed me. Suddenly my eyes were transfixed to the floor. A gigantic cockroach was crawling about near my feet. I wanted to cry out but managed to contain myself until, behold, the creature crawled away from my left foot towards the leg of Aunt Jael's chair, reached the chair leg, began to climb it with resolution. I watched, half in fascination, half in fear. It reached the level of the horsehair upholstery. Aunt Jael had reached verse thirteen.

"Their eyelids are lifted up." She looked meaningly at me.

Fortunately my eyelids were by this time well lifted up, as the beetle was now half way up the chair, approaching the awful place where Aunt Jael's shoulder touched the upholstery. No—yes: it crawled on to the arm, and mounted her sleeve right up to the shoulder. Righteous revenge for her cruelty and harshness counselled silence. "Let her suffer," I said to myself, "let the cockroach do his worst." Fear of interrupting gave like counsel. On the other side spoke the prickings of conscience and pity, and above all a wild desire to scream.

Aunt Jael read on, innocent of the unbidden guest upon her shoulder. "The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid—"

"Ay, and the way of a beetle with a Great-Aunt," I could have shouted. The beast, after a moment's hesitation and survey, had now turned along the shoulder to the neck. The warm hairy flesh of Aunt Jael's neck was but six inches away.

"The ants are a people not strong, yet they prepare their meat in the summer; The conies are but a feeble folk, yet they make their houses in the rocks; The locusts have no King, yet go they forth all of them by bands; The spider taketh hold with her hands—"

"Yes," I shrieked—in a moment shot through with terror, joy, relief; suffused by a new beatific sense of speaking historic words—"and the beetle taketh hold with his claws!" As I uttered the words the insect crawled from her collar on to the very flesh of her neck. She understood, with Spartan calm took hold of him, squashed him carefully between her thumb and forefinger and threw him on the fire, where he sizzled sickeningly.

"Surely the churning of milk bringeth forth butter, and the wringing of the nose bringeth forth blood: so the forcing of wrath bringeth forth strife."

There the chapter ended. She slammed the book and turned on me.

"You have forced wrath, Child. I shall bring forth strife."

And despite my Grandmother's entreaties, she led me from the room by the nose, which she pulled unmercifully: though no blood was brought forth. Out in the passage she gave me a cruel beating with the thorned stick, till I screamed for mercy, and my Grandmother intervened.

"'Tis cruel, Jael. The child cried out about the beetle for your sake."

"Sake or no sake, she cried out unseemly and irreverent. That's all I look at."

I was sore in body and sorer in heart. I had screamed out to warn Aunt Jael of the insect's approach, and now I was flogged for my pains. I knew in my own heart that what Grandmother had pleaded was not in point of fact quite true, I knew I had been secretly glad to see the creature making for Aunt Jael's skin, and for this reason had kept silence for so long. The physical instinct to scream had merely been stronger in the end than my resolution to say nothing. In a dim sort of way I realized this, and saw that my Grandmother's plea was unwarranted. But I saw more clearly that the common-sense of the position was that I had done Aunt Jael a good turn, and that the flogging was—in the light of the facts as she (not the Lord or I) knew them—mean and undeserved. I brooded revenge, as always. Aunt Jael's beatings were always more or less cruel, always more or less unjust; this I knew with a child's instinct, distorted and exaggerated no doubt by wretchedness and pride. So always I planned revenge, which sooner or later brought on the next flogging.

This time, however, my revenge was undetected. Next morning I came downstairs just as Mrs. Cheese was beginning to lay the table for breakfast. There were two separate sets of everything—breakfast-ware, dinner-services, tea-things, plate, knives and forks, even cruets—Grandmother's and Aunt Jael's, which the latter insisted on keeping rigorously separate. So, every day for breakfast or tea there would be two cups and saucers and plates with the gold pattern for my Grandmother and me, and one solitary cup and saucer and plate of Willow-pattern for my Great-Aunt. She had her own tea-pot too, a great fluted thing in old silver-plate, which could have held tea for a dozen; but never a taste of tea was poured forth from it for any one else, save on occasions so rare that I can number them on the fingers of my hand. So there was no mistaking the utensil with which, in which, from which, or out of which Aunt Jael would partake of nourishment. I was wandering round the table when I noticed, at first with fright, then, when I ascertained that it was dead, with interest and purpose, a large beetle much the same as its fumigated brother of the night before, lying on its back, claws heavenward. A divine idea possessed me. I picked it up, squashed it between my thumb and forefinger in the true Aunt Jaelian manner, and smeared the loathsome substance all over my Great-Aunt's teaspoon and the inside of her cup. It was an act of genius, that rare thing: the Revenge Perfect. "With the beetle hast thou slain," I said solemnly out loud, "by the beetle shalt thou perish."

"Perish" was a poetic flight, as Aunt Jael entirely failed to notice the mess in her cup, which she filled with tea from her exclusive pot, or the mess on her spoon, with which she stirred lustily. She drank three cupfuls, and belched as blandly as usual. Now I saw the imperfection of my revenge perfect. In idea and execution it had been superb, and to see her guzzling down the embeetled tea was very sweet. But she did not know she was drinking it—this was the eternal thorn that mars the everlasting rose. I had, however, the compensation of safety. All through breakfast, I looked meek and forgiving. Aunt Jael relented.

"Here, child, have a drink of tea out of my cup; 'twill do 'ee more good than the milk-and-water stuff your Grandma always gives 'ee."

"No, thank you, Aunt," I replied. And I triumphed in my heart.

Fate was about to triumph over me. Beetle had led to beating, and I had used beetle (with tea-cup) for revenge. Now Fate used tea-cup for triumph. It befell at tea-time, I think the same day. My arm was on the table-cloth, and, before I knew what I was doing, it (and Fate) had swept Aunt Jael's own old blue exclusive willow-pattern cup on to the floor, where it lay in a thousand avenging fragments. A brutal cuff full in the face changed fear and remorse into rage.

"Careless little slut!" she shouted. "What are 'ee biding there for staring like a half-daft sheep?—Say you're sorry, say you're sorry."

"I was sorry," I faltered, "but I'm not now."

This was the first brave thing I ever did, so brave that I hold my breath now to think of it. I shrank from some monstrous blow.

No blow came; partly because my Grandmother looked warningly ready to interfere, partly because my Great-Aunt had decided on another punishment, the only one I feared worse than blows.

"Oh, not sorry, eh, careless little slut?—"

"Stop it, Jael, I tell 'ee," broke in my Grandmother. "The child must try to be more careful and handy, and she's to say she's sorry, but—"

"Say she's sorry?" echoed Aunt Jael. "But she's just said she's not. 'I'm not sorry now' quoth she! Not sorry, not sorry, young huzzy, do 'ee know where Not-sorry goes? Do 'ee? I'll tell 'ee: straight to Hell. Obstinacy in sin is the worst sin, and its reward is Hell. Hell, child, where your body will be scorched with flames and racked with awful torments. Devils will twist and twease your flesh, and 'twill be for ever too. You've done a wrong thing, and your nasty proud soul is too wicked to say you're sorry. You spurn the chance of repentance, the free offer of God A'mighty, made through me His servant. You shall suffer eternal punishment."

I quailed. At four the fear of that word had fallen on my soul. She knew it: the beady eyes gleamed.

"No hope, no escape. Flames, pains, coals of fire, coals of fire! Ha, ha, ha!" (Here she cackled.) "Not sorry, eh? Very like you'll be sorry then, when you look across the gulf and see all your dear ones in Abraham's bosom. No hope of ever joining them. Torture for all eternity. Have you thought what the word Eternity means, child? You're young in your sins as yet, but you know that well enough, ha, ha, ha!" (She chuckled again, three hard little cackling noises they always were, cruel enough.) "It means that you will suffer the torments of the lake of fire that is burning with brimstone, not for a mere thousand thousand years, but for ever and ever and ever—"

I was less than four years old, and I could bear it no longer. I flew to my Grandmother's arm for safety, sobbing brokenly, half-wild for fear.

Aunt Jael leaned back, content, pleased with the success of her punishment, and sure of heaven. Though if there be the Hell she raved of, it is for such as her.

My Grandmother comforted me. She was torn, I suppose, between two feelings. Her faith told her that what her sister said was true, her heart that it was cruel. I felt somehow even then that this was the nature of my Grandmother's struggle. The good heart turns away from cruelty, even when it speaks with all the authority of true religion, and so my Grandmother always turned away. She compromised: said nothing to Aunt Jael, while she comforted me; while soothing the victim, did not scold the scolder.

"Don't cry my dearie, and don't 'ee be frightened. Nought can harm 'ee. Your good aunt is right. 'Tis true that Hell is terrible, 'tis true that you're a sinful child, and 'tis true that you'll be going to the cruel place, if you have no sorrow and repentance in your heart. You broke your Aunt's fine cup; run to her now, tell her you're sorry. Only then can you be saved from the wrath of Jehovah, freed by repentance, cleansed by love of Christ. And even as Hell is awful, so is Heaven good. Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him. Run to your Aunt. Say: 'I'm sorry, Aunt.'"

I hesitated. Like my Grandmother's, my four-year-old heart found it had to decide between two calls. The call of fear was, "Say you're sorry, and escape surely from Hell." The call of hate was "Why? She is a bad cruel woman; and you're not sorry at all, you're glad you've smashed her evil cup."

"Besides," added the Tempter, "as you're not sorry, it would be lying to say you are."

I hung doubtfully. At length I pouted, "I don't want to."

"But true repentance," said my Grandmother, "means doing things you don't want to."

I said nothing.

"Mary, child—" my Grandmother paused a moment, "there is a bright angel in heaven who wants you to give way—your dear mother. I seem to hear her speaking to me now, and telling me so."

It is hard for me to explain the power that word had over me from my earliest days. I had a dear angelic vision of kind eyes and two white shining wings. I would shut my eyes in bed at night and see her. Sometimes she seemed to come very near, sometimes she would seem to bend over me and kiss me. Now, as my Grandmother finished speaking, I seemed to see her near. I ran across the room to the old arm-chair.

"I'm sorry, Great-Aunt," I said.

CHAPTER III: CHILD OF PRIVILEGE

Such a life and such a household encouraged unchildlike emotions. I was puzzled far too soon in life by the puzzle of all life. I could not reconcile the wrath of Jehovah with the love of Christ, or the harshness of my Great-Aunt with the kindness of my Grandmother, which was the near and earthly form of that discrepancy. The world was a mysterious battlefield between Wrath and Love, as No. 8 Bear Lawn was a nearer and more familiar battle-place between Aunt Jael and Grandmother. Hell versus Heaven was another aspect of the battle. These two words were part of our daily life. They helped to make the two battles seem but one; for all the innumerable struggles between Aunt Jael and my Grandmother were conducted in the words and in the ways of our religion.

Our whole life was indeed our religion, or rather our religion was our life. From morn till night our daily life at Bear Lawn was an incessant preparation for our eternal life above. First we said our own private bedside prayers and read our "bedroom portions" of the Word. Then down in the dining-room after breakfast, Aunt Jael read the Word and prayed aloud for half-an-hour or more; the same after supper in the evening. Then, last thing at night, my Grandmother came to my room and prayed with me by my bedside. We lived in the world of our faith in a complete and intense way almost beyond the understanding of a modern household, however God-fearing. The promises of the faith, the unsearchable riches of Christ, the hope of God, the fear of Hell were our mealtime topics. Sin, as personified by me, was a fruitful subject. Both my Grandmother and Aunt Jael returned to it unwearied, the former mournfully because she loved me, the latter with a rough relish because she loved me not.

The main principles of our faith may be summed up in a few capital-letter words. First, there was THE LORD: the God whom all men worship: Who is One. My child's difficulty was that He seemed to be Two. There was Aunt Jael's God, a Prince of battles, revenge and judgment, dipping His foot in the blood of enemies and the tongue of His dogs in the same; a King terrible in anger, dark as a thundercloud; Jehovah, the great I AM. There was my Grandmother's God, a loving Heavenly Father, slow to anger and plenteous in mercy, pitying His children like a Father, Whose mercy was from everlasting to everlasting, Whose loving kindness was for ever.

"I will avenge," thundered Aunt Jael from her horsehair throne.

"God is Love," replied my Grandmother.

There was the WORLD, a comprehensive word which covered all concerts, entertainments, parties—whatever they might be, for I cannot say I knew—all merrymakings, junketings, outings, pleasures, joys; all books save the Book; all affection save for things above; all finery, furbelows, feathers, frills; smart clothes, love of money, lollipops, light conversation and unheavenly thoughts. Everything was of this world worldly which did not savour strongly of the next. There was the FLESH or the World made manifest in our bodies. It existed to be "mortified," chiefly by dancing attendance on Aunt Jael. Not to be up and about, getting Aunt Jael's morning cup-of-tea was fleshly, though it does not seem to have been fleshly to drink the same. Then there was the DEVIL, styled Personal, whom Mrs. Cheese in a fit of regrettable blasphemy once identified with Some One Else, and though the blasphemy shocked, I cannot truly say it pained me.

"She'm the very Dow'l hissel, th' ole biddy," said our bonds-woman one day after an encounter in the kitchen in which "th' ole biddy" had brandished big words, and had ended by brandishing the frying-pan also before leaving the beaten Mrs. Cheese to blaspheme, and later to be soothed by th' ole biddy's sister.

Then there was the BEAST, the so-called Pope of Rome: and his Mistress, that great WHORE that sitteth upon many waters, that Woman sitting upon a scarlet-coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns, that Strumpet arrayed in purple and scarlet, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations, upon whose forehead was her name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH—known also, in cravener circles, as the Roman Catholic Church. Beast and Whore were inextricably mixed up in my mind: an amorphous twin mass of scarlet and monstrous horror. I hated them with the passionate hate of ignorance, religion and mystery.

There were the ELECT, the Saints, the Few, God's Chosen Ones. There was the ROOM they worshipped in, the BLOOD which redeemed them, the GRACE which sustained them, and the eternal Rest or REWARD on High they aspired to. There was the WAY they reached it, the PLAN of Salvation which shewed them the Way, and the BOOK in which the Plan was to be found.

The Book! We read it aloud together twice a day, and privately many times. We delved into its pages early and late, in season and out of season. They say that the old Cromwellians were men of one book; No. 8 Bear Lawn was a house of one book with very vengeance, for Aunt Jael would suffer no trumpery sugar-tales such as "The Pilgrim's Progress"—a book which many even of the staunchest Puritans stooped, I have learnt later, to peruse. There were other books in the dining-room bookcase—works of devotion, exhortation and exposition that I shall speak of later—but until I was ten years old, my Grandmother and Aunt decided I should read no other word whatsoever save The Book. Looking back, I do not regret their decision.

Day and night we searched the Scriptures. Aunt Jael and Grandmother discussed them interminably, and sometimes I dared to join in. Our preferences varied, and were the best index of our characters. Aunt Jael's favourite book was without doubt the Proverbs. Its salt old wisdom found echo in her mind. Its continual exhortations to chasten and to correct, nor ever to spare the rod, because of the crying of the chastened one, appealed to her nearly. They were quoted at me daily; usually, alas, as the prelude to offensive action with the thorned stick. Job was another favourite, and the din and bloodshed of the Books of Kings. Jeremiah, prophesying vengeance and horror, was her best-loved Prophet. Parts of Isaiah found favour too, most of all the thirty-fourth chapter where the prophet sings of the wild terrors that shall fill the day of the Lord's vengeance, when the screech-owl shall make her resting place in Zion and the vultures be gathered together. Of the Psalms she read most the forty-sixth, "God is our refuge and strength!" and the sixty-eighth, "Let God arise, let His enemies be scattered." Ah, she was an Old Testament woman. "Eye for eye, tooth for tooth" was a dispensation she could follow better than "Love your enemies." The law of Moses was more acceptable in her sight than the Law of Christ, Jehovah's word from the mountain than the Sermon on the Mount. The Epistle to the Romans, where Saint Paul scolds and scourges the saints of the Imperial City, was her favourite New Testament book. She loved the whole Bible, however, and knew it better than any one I have ever met except my Grandmother. She kept all the commandments, except perhaps the tenth. For she coveted Miss Salvation Clinker's fine white teeth. Her own were few—and black.

My Grandmother was a New Testament woman. She loved the Gospels best: the story of Jesus. She knew—and lived—better than any one the Sermon on the Mount, but came most often to St. John: the third chapter, "God so loved the world"; the tenth, "I am the Good Shepherd"; and the fifteenth, "I am the True Vine." She read through the Epistles every week, quoting most often from I Corinthians XIII—the Charity chapter—and the Epistles of John. In the Old Testament, she loved best the Psalms. She knew them of course by heart, as did I. The twenty-third and the hundred-and-third meant most to her. Aunt Jael's favourite, the savage sixty-eighth, was alien to her whole faith. She would not say she disliked it—to dislike a word or a letter of God's Word would have been sin. She obeyed the ten commandments that God gave to Moses and the two greater ones that Christ gave to the questioning scribe. She loved the Lord, and she loved her neighbours as herself. She was the only Christian I have ever met.

My own early loves in the Book I can record faithfully. From the age of four to the age of twelve, I always used the same copy; a large musty old Bible that had belonged to my Mother, though not too large to hold comfortably in both hands. It was heavily marked.

There were three different kinds of mark: in ordinary black lead pencil, to show chapters I was studying with Grandmother and Aunt Jael, or portions I had to learn by heart; in blue crayon to indicate well-liked places; in red crayon to mark the passages I loved best of all. That old Bible is open before me now as I write: the red marks are faded a little, but they still tell me what I liked best in those far-off days, and (nearly always) like best still.

My preferences fell under three main heads. First, the bright-coloured stories of the beginning of the Bible, the wondrous lives of the men who began the world: Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Abraham and Isaac, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and Benjamin; with Princes such as Chedorlaomer the King of Elam, Tidal King of nations, and Pharaoh, full of dreams. There were revengeful women and some who suffered revenge: Hagar turned forth by Sarah into the wilderness of Beersheba; Lot's wife on whom God took vengeance and turned into a pillar of salt, and Potiphar's, who took vengeance on Joseph. There were mysterious places: Eden and Egypt, Ur of the Chaldees, the Wilderness and the Cities of the Plain, the land of Canaan flowing with milk and honey, and the slime pits of Siddim into which the Kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fell. Wonders of earth and heaven: the Tower of Babel, the Serpent in the garden, the Tree of Knowledge; the Creation, the Plagues and the Flood; the Ark of refuge and the fugitive Dove.

My second bent was for the mournful places of the Word; a morbid taste, but then so was I. The gloom of Job and the menace of Lamentations and the Woes of Matthew XXIV seemed to belong to our forbidding house. Up in the dim blueness of the attic I would declaim aloud the twenty-fourth chapter, where Christ spoke of the signs of His coming: wars and rumours of wars, famine and pestilence and earthquakes:

"Wheresoever the carcase is, there the eagles will be gathered together."

In my weak childish treble it must have sounded comic, though nobody ever laughed except, maybe, the God above the attic skylight. More even than gloom, I love pure sorrow: Ecclesiastes, where the Preacher talks of the sadness of all life, the eternal misery of Man; and the story of the Passion, the Son of Man Who tasted human bitterness and death. The subtlety of the Preacher may have been beyond me; it needs no wit but a child's understanding of English words to feel his unplumbable woe in her heart. Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities: all is vanity. While Gethsemane saw the whole world's sorrow in a night-time.

My third, and chief, happiness was in the words. Passages there are of sounding wrath or matchless imagery. I did not understand them, for they pass all understanding. But I loved them, plastered them marginally with three thicknesses of red crayon, cried them aloud. I have counted, and the books with most markings are these four: The Psalms, the Song of Solomon, Isaiah, and The Revelation. In the last I revelled with a pure ecstasy of awe: in the sixth chapter, where the sun becomes black as sack-cloth of hair, and the moon as blood; in the twenty-first, which tells of the City of Heaven, a city of pure gold, like unto clear glass, the foundations of whose rocks are garnished with jasper and sapphire and chalcedony and emerald and sardonyx and sardius and chrysolyte and beryl and topaz and chrysoprasus and jacinth and amethyst, whose light is the Lamb; most of all in the seventh chapter: "What are these which are arrayed in white robes? And whence came they? These are they which came out of great tribulation and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb."

My Psalms, as I called them, as against Grandmother's or Aunt Jael's protégés, were the hundred-and-thirty-seventh, By the waters of Babylon, and the twenty-fourth, Who is the King of glory?

However much I might write about the Book, it would fail to fill the place in this record that it filled in our lives, of which it moulded the very moods. Aunt Jael as lover of the Mosaic law and student of the Proverbs, was herself stern lawgiver and sayer of dark sayings. She ruled. Ruled my Grandmother (nearly always and in nearly everything, though there were exceptions); ruled me (except in one or two awful occasions I shall tell of); ruled Mrs. Cheese (until the latter's Exodus); ruled the household, ruled the Meeting, and could have ruled the whole world with a due sense of her fitness for the post. The old armchair was her throne, the thorned stick her sceptre. As a woman she had, as I can see now, many high qualities. She did her duty as she saw it; was honourable and straightforward. She loved the truth, especially when it was unpalatable to other people. She had a deep fund of common-sense. She was a thrifty, hard-headed, sensible house-wife; and, as I said before, observed with zeal some nine of the Commandments. But of kinder or more endearing qualities I remember none. No doubt some of the child's bitterness and the child's bias remain with me still—perhaps it is merely vain to imagine that I hold the scales evenly and do not let prejudice weight memory—but I look across many years and see, as I believe the world saw, a hard bad old woman. Heaven, they say, forgives those who love much; maybe it forgives also those who are little loved, for they need forgiveness most. Aunt Jael started life hard, but I feel certain that the hardness was made a hundredfold harder because no love—no lover—had ever come her way. Bitter because she had no family of her own, she strove to embitter her sister's. Cheated of the two things we women need most—lordship and love—in revenge she lorded it over everybody, and loved not a soul in the world. Not but what she could have wedded many a time if she'd felt so inclined, including some as "others" didn't mind stooping to take though they were her leavings; not but what—in short, to all the tragical-comical backward boastings of the unchosen woman she would treat us at times. It was one of her few weaknesses, and I have since wondered if, failing to deceive six-year-old me, she succeeded in deceiving herself. During a tirade of this kind, I always fell a-musing what "Uncle Jael" would have been like. I decided he would wear smoked black glasses, like the man who came to tune our old piano; because I once fancied that Aunt Jael's eyes had rested upon the latter with a suspicion of unwonted coyness. This must have been a freak of my imagination, if not of Aunt Jael's after-dinner brandy. "For two good qualities," she used to say, "I thank and praise the Lord. That he has preserved me all my life from all wanton sentiment; and that it has pleased Him to make me the most fearless and outspoken woman in this town."

What I have said about my Grandmother's pastures in the Bible shows what manner of woman she was. Yet not quite completely. She was gentle and forgiving, and the most unselfish human being I have ever met, or ever shall; but this and more. She was as shrewd a housewife as her sister; a woman of common-sense and plain seeing. Nor was she weak or meek. She gave in to Aunt Jael, certainly; but on principle, that is through strength rather than weakness. And whenever she chose to fight ungloved, she would usually beat her sister. I was the chief battle-ground. When Aunt Jael's abuse or ill-treatment of me became too outrageous, Grandmother would show fight, and on her day could leave Aunt Jael drubbed and apologetic upon the stricken field. But if my Grandmother thus defended me to Aunt Jael, she never had a good word to say of me to myself, or to the Lord. Every night at my bedside she poured out my wickedness before my Maker; and in all her life she only praised me once. With rare instinct she refused to water the plant of self-righteousness which she saw ready to flourish in me like the bay-tree. In her mild way she could be as outspoken as her sister; indeed what with the two of them and Mrs. Cheese, who "called a spade a spade, and a pasnip a pasnip," ours was a stark outspoken house, a dark palace of Plain Speaking. Despite all my Grandmother's loveliness of character, she lacked one thing. Demonstrative affection, warm clinging love, the encircling arm, the kiss, the gentle madness, the dear embrace,—things I did not know the existence of till a later unforgettable moment, though they were the mystery, the hunger, never perfectly visualized, never in the heart understood, that till that moment I was seeking always to solve, to satisfy; the thing I cried for passionately without knowing what thing it was—these had no meaning for her, no place ever in her life. The nearest she had known was in her love for my mother. Did they kiss? I wonder. In all the years of her love and goodness to me, she never once kissed me upon the mouth, nor hugged me, nor let me hug her; nor said the word for which my little wild heart was waiting. For so good and affectionate a woman she was strangely phlegmatic. As she did not embrace in love, nor did she weep in sorrow. Even when my mother died, her eyes, she told me, were dimmed for a moment only. It was the Lord's will: wherefore weep? Yet I have seen her shedding tears of joy over a missionary chronicle which told of the conversion of some African negro. She had tears, that is, for the Lord; as her strongest love was for Him. Humans mattered much; but less. Thus I was lonely.

To give a picture of myself in those early days I find harder, though once again the Bible helps. I liked the imaginative old stories of Genesis, I liked the sad and gloomy books, I liked mysterious words; that is, I was imaginative, morbid, and fond of the unknown and the beautiful: much what any other child brought up under the same circumstances would have been. If not a remarkable, and certainly not a clever child, I was no less certainly out-of-the-ordinary. With my morbid environment it was inevitable. I was serious, solemn and sensitive beyond what any child should be. In fact my oddness really amounted to this, that I was unchildlike—chiefly because I was unhappy. If ever there were a moping miserable little guy, it was I. I had no companions of my own age whatever, nor up till just before the time I left Tawborough for Torribridge had I ever been alone with any other child for half an hour in my life. Aunt Jael forbade intercourse with worldly children, and my Grandmother agreed. They were an unknown race. All my companions were old women; the youngest, Mrs. Cheese, was sixty. I was never allowed to play with the Lawn children, indeed never allowed to play with anybody or "at" anything. I was kept indoors all day long to mope about in the gloomy house.

The distractions allowed were two: searching the Scriptures, and plain sewing. At six in the morning I got up, and, from the age of five or six onwards, made my own bed and dusted my bedroom. Then I went into Aunt Jael's room, and helped her to dress. Aunt Jael was usually in an evil temper first thing, and the only coin in which she repaid my services was hard words and harder bangs. It was a painful half-hour passed in an atmosphere of laces and buttons, hooks and eyes, blows and maledictions. Sometimes if I failed to do her boots up quickly enough, she would kick me. The next duty was helping Mrs. Cheese and Grandmother with the breakfast, which was eaten at half past seven punctually. After breakfast, prayers; then I dusted the dining-room; then from nine to eleven, two wretched hours with Aunt Jael styled Lessons, a hotchpotch of Proverbs, pothooks and multiplication-tables, served up with the usual seasoning of cuffs and imprecations. Every day I cried wretchedly, though tears brought nothing but the stick—and tears again. From eleven to twelve I sewed with my Grandmother; at noon we had dinner. After dinner Grandmother usually studied the Word in her bedroom, while Aunt Jael snored in her chair: I was left to moon about the house alone, with no plaything, no books, no companions; no resources whatever but my own imagination. I would sit for hours in the great blue attic, talking to myself, inventing imaginary scenes in which I triumphed over Aunt Jael and humbled her before the world, or reciting from the Word, or often merely weeping. After supper, came prayers and reading the Word; then bedside prayers with my Grandmother; then bed, which was not a much happier place, as I dreamt often, usually nightmares of hell and eternity, Satan and Aunt Jael.

It was a dreary life. I was a dreary little girl, and I must have looked it. No photograph was ever taken to perpetuate the prim, sulky, pale Quakerish little object I am told I was. My odd appearance was not helped by decent clothes. There was to be no indulgence of the Flesh, and I was dressed with due unbecomingness, always in the same way. I wore a dark green corduroy blouse and skirt, and a little corduroy bonnet to match, bedecked with a gaunt duck's feather. For winter I had an ugly black overcoat with a cape. I had black woollen mittens and square hobnailed boots.

I had no martyr's idea of myself, however, no exquisite self-pity, and any trace of such that may appear here is to be laid at the door of the authoress aged fifty, not of her chrysalis aged five. All I knew was that I was miserable. I had a child's sure instinct for injustice. I knew it was unjust that Aunt Jael should beat and abuse me all day long. I hated her bitterly, and hate makes no one happier. Lovelessness is even worse than hate, and the two beset me. My Grandmother loved me tenderly no doubt, but her ways were not my ways. She had no understanding of what I longed for. I wanted somebody—I only half guessed this, not daring to believe the visualization when it suggested itself—in whose bosom I could bury my face and cry for pure happiness. I would whimper myself to sleep thinking of my mother. Sometimes I seemed to see her as an angel. She looked kind and radiant, and comforted me. When my Grandmother caught me crying for my mother, I would say it was because of Aunt Jael's latest flogging.

Fear ruled me. The Devil and Hell frightened me terribly, and Eternity more. The thought of living for ever and ever and ever, the attempt of my child's mind to picture everlastingness, to visualize my own soul living through the pathless spaces of a billion years, and to be still no nearer the end than at the beginning,—this morbid unceasing trick of my imagination filled me with an ecstasy of fear, that froze and numbed my brain. I would sit up in bed too terrified to scream, voiceless with fear. My heart beat wildly. The realization that there was no hope, no way out—oh, heart, none ever—that because I was once born I must live for all eternity, seized my body and brain alike. I would jump out of bed, cry brokenly "God, God" in wild agony of soul, until, at last, the terror passed. Then, in a strange way, the blood rushed warmly back into my brain, and a languorous feeling of ease succeeded the terror of a moment before. Sometimes I was wicked and foolish enough to suffer the horror of thus "thinking Eternity out" for the sake of the luxurious backwash of comfort and physical peace which followed. But most often the terror came imperiously, and I could not escape it. I would be looking at the stars, I would think of their ineffable distances, then from eternity in space my mind would be dragged as by some devil to eternity in time, and I would have to live through the terror of the attempt—against my own will as it were—to think out, to live out, the meaning of living for ever. It is the worst agony the poor human soul can know; for a child, unnameable. There is no escape. The soul must go through the agony of the whole visualization—it may only be seconds, though it seems (perhaps is) Eternity Itself—right to the moment when the brain and body can abide the horror no longer, and from the very depths the soul cries out to "God."

A happy healthy child would know nothing of such bogeys; but I was neither. I was puny and ailing; I rarely went out of doors. Market on a Friday morning, Meeting on Sundays, and an afternoon walk once in a long while constituted my record of outings. The only real advantage I gained from this unhappy and unhealthy life was the development of a quite unusual power of instinct and intuition. Shut up all day long with no companions but the same three faces, I could read every mood and movement of them with unerring skill. Like the savage, or any one else who lives in an abnormally narrow world, I felt things rather than knew them. And the thing I felt and knew most sorely was that I was wretched. And when Aunt Jael moralized and said, "You are a privileged child indeed," I felt and knew that she was lying.

"Your holy kinsfolk, your saintly mother, your godly surroundings, your exceptional chances of grace, all show you to be a Child of Privilege."

All this, from the earliest days that I could understand, was usual enough. One day, however, when I was about five, she paused here with an air of special importance that I scented at once, then proceeded, "Your Grandmother and I have come to a decision, Child. Everything points out that the Lord has chosen you for special privileges, and special works for Him. If you were a boy, Child, the way would be clear. We should train you for the Ministry of His Word. Yet the way has been made plain. Your Grandmother and I have decided, after much seeking of the Lord in prayer, that your lot is to be cast—(she looked towards my Grandmother for confirmation, and concluded majestically)—in the field of foreign labour. You will bear witness to the Lord among the heathen. 'Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel, for lo! I am with you alway'!"

I looked appealingly towards my Grandmother. "Yes," she said, "I think it is the Lord's will."

So that was my life work. I was to spend Eternity as a missionary.

"You are indeed a Child of Privilege," Aunt Jael was booming.

CHAPTER IV: I GO TO MEETING

On Lord's Day, March the Sixth 1853, being the first Sabbath after my fifth birthday, I was taken to Meeting.

Meeting!—one social sphere my Grandmother and Great-Aunt knew; their one earthly club, set, milieu; company of saints, little flock of the elect, assembling together of the chosen of God from Eternity!

I awoke to find Grandmother standing by my bed; which was unusual, for I always woke myself.

"'Tis a great and notable day, my dear; the day you are to join with the Lord's people in prayer and praise. I want to pray with 'ee."

I got out of my bed, and when she had put around me the old red dressing gown, we knelt down together by the bedside, and the Lord was besought to vouchsafe that my first public acquaintance with His People might be abundantly blessed to me. After breakfast I was sent upstairs to my bedroom to meditate apart for an hour before Meeting; an exercise ordained henceforward every Sunday of my life.

About a quarter-past-ten we sallied forth, Mary in green corduroy between Grandmother in her Sunday black and Aunt Jael with her go-to-Meeting blue-velvet-ribboned bonnet. I should now behold the inside of the Room, antechamber of Heaven; I should join in public worship with the Saints. Curiosity alone did not stir me; in some vague exalted way, I hoped to get nearer to the Lord.

The Room was a bare little tabernacle in a side-street, built in the Noah's Ark style dear also to Methodism. Grandmother took my hand as we mounted the steps from the street; we passed into the Holy Place. I received at once the curious effect of a light bluish mist which, though brighter, reminded me of the thick blue gloom of my attic, and which was caused by the light blue distempered brick of the walls and ceiling. There were eight windows in the Room, which was many times larger than our parlour and by far the largest place I had ever entered; each consisted of twenty-four small square panes, six in the perpendicular by four breadthways, a source for years to come of endless countings and pattern-weavings and mystical mathematical tricks. There were two of these windows at each end of the room, and two down each side. All eight were set so high as almost to merge into the ceiling. The curious result was that while near the floor it was comparatively dark, the upper part of the room was very light. A symbol, I thought; for Earth is dark, but Heaven bright. Aunt Jael led the way up a druggeted sort of aisle to the front row where we alone sat: the family's immemorial place, though purchased by no worldly pew-rent. In the first rush of newness I but dimly apprehended the benches of black-clad figures we had passed. Immediately in front of us stood the Lord's Table, covered with spotless white damask, and laden with two tall bottles of wine, two great pewter tankards, and two cottage-loaves on plates. Beyond the Table was a low raised dais from which the Gospel was preached at the evening meetings for unbelievers; never used at the Breakings of Bread, for all Saints are equal, and none may stand above his fellows. On either side of the Table, however, respectively to our right and left were the (unofficial) seats of the mighty: Mr. Pentecost Dodderidge and Brother Brawn on one side, Brother Quappleworthy and Brother Browning on the other. On the wall at the far end was a clock, loudly audible in the abysmal silences of prayer.

I did not absorb all the details at a first glance; nor do I really remember the particular texts, expositions and hymns of that initiatory day. What I do always retain and rehearse in my mind is rather one "Type" meeting, from first silence to final benediction; an ideal combination of many different Lord's Days, in which I have unconsciously fitted together Brothers, events, homilies, each in most typical essence.

This morning meeting, the Breaking of Bread, was the meeting par excellence. The Breaking of the Bread and the drinking of wine were the central acts of a tense and devout program of prayer, of reading and exposition of the Word, and of hymn-singing, unaccompanied by any choir or instrument of music. Only Saints were bidden, i. e., those who had testified aloud to the saving grace of the body and the blood, and had taken up their Cross in public baptism. We were no ordinary Dissenting chapel, where "All are welcome":—the more the merrier, more grist to the mill, more pennies on the plate, more souls for the Kingdom. Only the Lord's own chosen testified people were deemed worthy of this solemn privilege of eating His sacred Body and drinking His sacred Blood; and only they were admitted. The only exceptions were a few children, like myself, who could not be left at home by their elders. A few non-privileged adults very occasionally came: old friends of the Meeting who for some reason of reluctance or uncertainty were untestified and unbaptized, or strangers, drawn by sympathy or curiosity; but earthen platter and pewter mug were zealously snatched away if such alien hands essayed to grasp them. (So too was the collecting-box. I have seen visitors with outstretched arm and generous shilling gasp with surprise as the money-box was drawn rudely out of their reach. Unlike worldlywise church or chapel, we would touch none but hallowed gold. The collection was as close a privilege as the communion.)

On an average morning we were fifty or sixty strong; more women than men, more old than young, more wan than hale, more humble than high. With dough of small shopkeepers, masons, artisans, gardeners, old women with pathetic private incomes, washerwomen, charwomen, servants, we had leaven of more comfortable middle-class people like Grandmother and Aunt Jael, or "better" folk still like Mr. Pentecost Dodderidge, or best of all dear Brother Quappleworthy, our graduate of the University of Oxford, our cousin by marriage with a peer of England! Believers in the aristocratic principle would have noted with satisfaction that from this blue-blooded minority were drawn almost all the "Leading Saints."

We were a community. The better-to-do helped the poor, and remembered that all were equal before God. Odd folk and sane folk, stupid folk and wise folk: with all their failings, a more gentle, worthy, sincere and trustful company of followers of Jesus of Nazareth could not have been found in this whole world or century. The fault they were farthest from is the one the fool most often imputes: hypocrisy. They were, of course, a varied company; it takes all sorts to make a Meeting.

Our Leading Brothers were Mr. Pentecost Dodderidge, with Brothers Brawn, Browning, Briggs, Quappleworthy, Quick, and Quaint. The last was only included just to round things off and to justify Mr. Pentecost's holy pleasantry "The Lord is watching us: let us mind our B's and Q's," for he was really quite an obscure brother who rarely broke silence, and then to pray so pessimistically that he can never have expected his petitions to be heard, let alone answered.

To be Leading Brother implied merely this: to stand out of the ruck of silent members, either in prayer or exposition of the Word. Many an obscure Brother, however, who would never have risked his hand at prayer or exposition occasionally blurted into a morning's modest fame by announcing a hymn. A stir of special interest was always felt in the Meeting on such occasions, and it was whispered that "the Lord was notably working in Brother So-and-So." Giving out a hymn was after all not so mean a performance. Every line of every verse was slowly enunciated by the chooser before we began to sing. The church and chapel habit of reading out only the first verse (or even line!) struck me as very odd and meagre when I first encountered it many years later. Prayer, however, was the favourite form of self-expression. All the Leading Saints were "powerful in prayer."

Exposition either followed or accompanied the reading of a portion of the Word. It was our "sermon." Our five regular expounders were Mr. Pentecost, Brothers Quappleworthy (the chief), Brawn, Browning and Briggs.

Though in theory we allowed no official ruler of the synagogue, in practice Mr. Pentecost Dodderidge was our Great High Priest. He alone was spoken of as Mister. He alone was immune from error and criticism. It is hard for me to reconstruct his personality now, when my own mentality is so different from when I knew him, when he prayed for me, blessed me, took me on his knees. It is still harder to convey to this generation the reverence in which his venerable white hairs were held. The world in which he ruled, the Saints' world, may have been small; but within its pale, through all England, he was revered as the holiest child of man. And we of the Tawborough Meeting possessed him for ourselves: in his old age he ceased to travel, and left us but little. We shone in the reflected glory of his presence; knew ourselves the Meeting of Meetings, called blessed of the Lord. He lived by prayer alone: the anonymous gifts of money on which he chiefly lived came to him whence he did not know, except that they came from God. In the old ancestral house another famous Pentecost Dodderidge had built he still lived; in one hallowed room he welcomed all who came to him for their souls' good; another was fitted as a workshop, and here till after his eightieth year he spent a portion of every day at the lathe. He could preach in eight languages, in five of them fluently. He never rose later than four and devoted the three hours before breakfast to "knee-drill," i. e., incessant prayer. He baptized believers in the river Taw till his eightieth year. One memorable immersion of which I shall speak later took place when he had turned eighty-four. His one kink was a trick of godly epigrams and holy repartees, cunningly led up to, of which he was as nearly vain as he could be. I remember Aunt Jael once saying to him in our dining-room at Bear Lawn:

"Your 'Life' should be written, Mr. Pentecost."

"But it is being written, dear sister," he replied. "It will be published in the morning."

"Published? Where?"

"Beyond the sky. The author is the Lord Jesus Christ. The ink is His precious Blood."

Another day my Grandmother asked him if he would begin to remember me in his prayers.

"I cannot," he replied gently.

"Cannot?" faltered my Grandmother.

"No, I cannot begin to pray for her. I have begun already."

For all his eminence Pentecost took no preponderating share in worship, nor ever made himself like the "Ministering Brothers" of some other meetings, who prayed almost all the prayers, chose almost all the hymns, gave one long sermon-like piece of exposition, and officiated alone at the Lord's Table—for all the world like a dissenting parson in his chapel or a priest in his church.

Second in importance stood Brother Brawn, a fat, doddering, bleating, weak-at-the-knees old bachelor and Christian; the maid-of-all-work of the Meeting, who distributed the offertory, paid the caretaker, saw to the heating and cleaning of the room, and bought the bread and wine. With his white waggly little beard and gentle animal features he looked absurdly like a goat, and ba-a-a-d just like one too. He had two little homilies only, which he and we knew by heart; one on 'Ell and the other on Mysteries, often given one after the other to form a continuous whole. Some of the Saints, I fear, dared to think these holy discourses dull. Not so Miss Salvation Clinker, who declared that "ivry word wat falls from 'is blessed lips is a purl uv great price."

Brother Quappleworthy, who stood equal in importance, was a striking contrast. He was our intellect, our light of learning, our peer's cousin-in-law. His erudition in real Hebrew and real Greek ranked with Brother Brawn's devotion, if a little lower than Pentecostal saintliness. Sneer we never so smugly at the filthiness of mere book knowledge, not one of us but was somehow elated to hear that favourite phrase: "Now in the original Greek—" His supplications, if acceptable to many, were perhaps too much of a muchness. It was all "Yea Lord, Nay Lord, Oh Lord, Ah Lord, If Lord...."

After Brother Quappleworthy, Brother Browning was our most frequent speaker. He came to Meeting accompanied by his little boy Marcus, the most youthful person present save me, but not, alas, by his spouse, who belonged, alas, to that pernicious sect of Bible Christians whom he (seven times alas) did occasionally himself frequent.

There was Brother Briggs, by vocation an oilman's handyman, whose face always shone with oil of happiness and hope, whose utterances were charged with an uncontrollable optimism and joy, a ringing, shouting, h-less content with the universe. The learned would call it cosmic expansiveness. Beside him Walt Whitman was a prophet of despair, Mark Tapley a misanthrope. His favourite word was "bewtivul" and he used it without mercy. There was Brother Quaint, the gloomy pray-er. There was Brother Lard, who emitted from his mouth periodic noises—signs of bad manners and digestion—which it is unusual to mention on paper: endemic endeavours that punctuated the subtlest exposition of Quappleworthy, the dreariest prayer of Quaint's, and added a spice of charm and unexpectedness to the whole service. I enjoyed them coarsely; with solemn face, pious unawareness. One joyous occasion I remember when Brother Quappleworthy was beginning the eighth chapter of the Revelation in his most impressive style. At the words "There was silence in heaven about the space of half-an-hour," he paused dramatically to illustrate, as it were, the meaning. Then, after five seconds of rapt silence, Brother Lard trumpeted forth: long, loud, luscious, lingering; a diapason of swaying sound and chronic indigestion. To the eternal credit of my Grandmother and Great-aunt, I record it that they smiled.... There was Brother Marks, a thin unhappy-looking man, wearing large black-rimmed spectacles, who mourned in a far corner apart, and never uttered a word or even joined in the hymns. I thought him a sinister figure; his goggles repelled me; I associated him by some vague but authentic impulse with the Personal Devil.

The Sisters were of course less important than the Brothers. "Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak." Above all the others towered Sister Vickary and Sister Lee. My Grandmother was universally loved. Before Aunt Jael the whole meeting quailed. Brother Briggs grovelled. Brother Brawn obeyed, Brother Quappleworthy deferred. She herself deferred to Pentecost Dodderidge alone; indeed the veneration she felt for the venerable instrument of her conversion, her Ananias of Damascus, was touching in so masterful a soul. In the ledgers of the Lord, I make bold to guess, it stands to her credit. In the counsels of the elders she was supreme; she was the wise woman of the Proverbs. No decision affecting the welfare of the flock could be taken by Pentecost or Brawn without the assent of the Shepherdess, as the former called her, perhaps not unmindful of her crook. No meeting felt it had the right—or courage—to begin without her presence. When it was over, she walked out first, bowing to right and left like an Empress as she stalked the length of the Room. She had as much common-sense as any other three Saints added together. Not a soul of them loved her.

* * * * * * *

We arrived each Lord's day about twenty-five past ten. When all were assembled, there was a period of five or ten minutes' absolute silence, broken only by the strident ticking of the clock. Some pairs of eyes were closed in silent prayer, others stared straight before them at some heavenly object of reflection.

Up rose Brother Browning. "Let us sing together to the glory of the Lord hymn number one-four-two: 'We praise Thee, O Jehovah!'" There was a turning of leaves, for at this time most of us possessed hymn-books, though a few of the older generation, including Aunt Jael, viewed all hymn-books as snares of the Devil, and bore witness against the fleshly innovation by still singing always from memory. Brother Browning read aloud the whole hymn:

We praise Thee, O Jehovah!
We know, whate'er betide,
Thy name, "Jehovah Jireh,"
Secures, "Thou wilt provide."

We praise Thee, O Jehovah!
Our banner gladly raise;
"Jehovah Nissi!" rally us
For conflict, victory, praise.

We praise Thee, O Jehovah!
In every trouble near;
"Jehovah Shalom"—God is peace,—
Dispels each doubt and fear.

We praise Thee, O Jehovah!
And, clothed in righteousness,
"Jehovah" great "Tskidkenu!"
Complete, we gladly bless.

We praise Thee, O Jehovah!
Thou wilt for Israel care!
"Jehovah Shammah," precious thought!
Henceforth "The Lord is there."

We sang sitting. Oh, inharmonious howl! Some Brother—usually Brother Schulz, who was fancied to possess musical talent—pitched the key and set the time as he fancied. The latter was always funereally slow, the former more often than not much too high or too low to be persevered with. Not that that mattered. Somebody would merely switch off into another key anything from a semitone to an octave higher or lower as the case might be: switching part of the way back again if the change proved too drastic. The consequence of this go-as-you-please policy was that a hymn would sometimes be sung in four different times and seven or eight different keys. Above all the holy din you could hear Brother Briggs bawling forth his joy in the Lord; higher still the awful metallic howl of Sister Yeo.

When the hymn was done there was another space of complete silence till the spirit moved Brother Quappleworthy to utterance. Once on his feet, he found his two Bibles, English and Greek, rather difficult to wield, especially as his reading from the Word hardly ever consisted of one solid chapter read straight through, but of snippets of two or three verses each from half-a-dozen different books, connected only by their (imagined) relevance to the topic he had in mind: grace or trustfulness or hope or sin. We all followed him in our own Bibles: so that his Reading had orchestral accompaniment of zealous page-rustlings. "Let us read together in the Book of Genesis, that sixth chapter and those fifth, sixth and seventh verses ... and now let us turn to the Book of Job, the fifth chapter and the thirteenth verse ... and now a verse in that sweet Second Epistle of Peter, the second chapter and that fourth verse...."

After we had rustled backwards and forwards for a few minutes, Brother Quappleworthy closed first one Bible and then the other with two emphatic snaps, and put them under his left arm, leaving his right hand free to gesticulate,—more especially the right forefinger, which ever and anon he brandished to exhort, to emphasize, to warn, to wheedle. "Well, brethren, the upshot and outcome of all that we have read is—ah—manifest. It is—ah—this. He alone saved us from the pit. He alone, not—ah—another. He saved us—miserable sinners, grovelling worms—us and none others. Far be it from us ever to think ourselves worthy of such grace and favour! Far otherwise!—but so He willed. Our souls—your soul, ah, my soul—would have gone into eternal darkness save for Him, the Lord,—Κὑρiοϛ [Greek: Kyrios]—how I love it in the old Greek! He alone, brethren, can—ah—renew our natures; and can—ah—shape better desires for our natures when renewed—can show us the more excellent way!..."

After a new silence, the spirit would move Brother Brawn to clamber to his feet, and give us his changeless utterance on "'Ell" or "Mysteries." I give it with a word for word accuracy I cannot often vouch for. His er-er was a bleating sort of stammer much less elegant than Brother Quappleworthy's ah.

"My mind, brethren, 'as bin—er—er dwellin' much all through the mornin' on the subject of 'Ell. On the torments and 'orrors that all the 'eathen and unsaved will taste down there below, yes, and are tastin' at this very minnit as we are praisin' the Lord 'ere in this Rume. Torments and—er—er—er—'orrors. You know. I know. And they torments are for all the sinners an' unsaved: ivry wan uv them, not for some jis', as I've 'eard folk say. No for all, all, ALL, A L L. You mark my words. All the 'eathen shall be 'urled to 'Ell, whether they've 'eard or whether they 'aven't!" (This last sentence he sing-songed with violent emphasis, clapping his hands together at the syllables I have marked) "O Yes! I can imagine 'em wallering in the brimstone and sulphur. I know. We shall be wi' Lazarus in Abraham's—er—er—bosom, and they will be down the fiery gulf, down in the fiery pit. So, brethren, let us be ready for the Lord, let us make sure uv our place in the bosom, not the pit. Bosom for us! BOSOM! We must watch and er—er—pray. We must. I'm sure we must."

A pause. He shifted his feet clumsily. His thick lips moved stupidly as he made mental preparations for Part Two.

"My mind, brethren, 'as been—er—er—dwellin' much on another subjict this mornin', the subjict of Mysteries. It has; I'm sure it has. There are two mysteries. There is the mystery of godliness, that's one; and the mystery of iniquity, that's two. It all 'appened at the Fall. The Fall was when the mystery of godliness became the mystery of iniquity; an' the mystery of iniquity became the mystery of godliness; all mixmuddled up together as you mid say. It became 'ard to-er—er—tell 'em apart. 'Tis only 'Is chosen ones as can do it—that's you and me, brethren—and 'tain't orwis easy for us. Let us try to know one from the other, and if we tries our 'ardest, the Lord will 'elp us to. Yes 'E will. I'm sure 'E will."

After Brother Brawn, the beginning of the meeting was well over. We knew that the great moments were drawing near. A deeper silence filled the little room: the hush of pure holiness. There was a prayer or two, and then we sang the Bread hymn. Usually this one:

Through Thy precious body broken
Inside the veil.
Oh, what words to sinners spoken—
Inside the veil.
Precious, as the blood that bought us;
Perfect, as the love that sought us;
Holy, as the Lamb that brought us;
Inside the veil.

When we see Thy love unshaken,
Outside the camp.
Scorn'd by man, by God forsaken,
Outside the camp.
Thy loved cross alone can charm us;
Shame doth now no more alarm us;
Glad we follow, nought can harm us;
Outside the camp.

Lamb of God! through Thee we enter
Inside the veil.
Cleansed by Thee, we boldly venture
Inside the veil.
Not a stain; a new creation;
Ours is such a full salvation!
Low we bow in adoration,
Inside the veil.

Unto Thee, the homeless stranger,
Outside the camp.
Forth we hasten, fear no danger,
Outside the camp.
Thy reproach far richer treasure
Than all Egypt's boasted pleasure;
Drawn by love that knows no measure,
Outside the camp.

Soon Thy saints shall all be gathered,
Inside the veil.
All at home, no more be scattered,
Inside the veil.
Nought from Thee our hearts shall sever,
We shall see Thee, grieve Thee never;
"Praise the Lamb!" shall sound for ever
Inside the veil.

We sang it to a slow drawling tune, incommunicably dreary.

Pentecost arose, white and priestly. "Little children, every time I come to this Table, I come with a joy, a peace and a gratitude that are ever new. My heart is too full of love for my Saviour for any words of mine to tell you. Let us bear in mind, little children, rather His own precious words: This is my Body, which is given for you."

As he ceased, Brother Brawn arose from his seat at the right of the Table, took each of the loaves, held them sacrificially aloft, broke them in twain. One plate he himself passed round among the Saints, Brother Browning the other. I watched with evergreen curiosity and reverence how each Saint broke off a piece of bread and with closed eyes slowly munched it away. Once in a way the impious thought seized me that 'twas all farce, mummery, tomfoolery: this chewing of dough. The next instant I would flush crimson to have let such wickedness find place for an instant in my mind: I would look and behold the rapture on the munching faces; and understand beyond all doubting that here was something mystical, magical, holy. I could see that those who took bread obtained thereby some supernal joy that I was too young or too sinful to share. It could not be tomfoolery if it gave you the rapture I could see on the faces around me. Besides, Jesus had ordained it.

Another silence—the middle space of the double sacrifice—ere we sang the Wine hymn:

It is the blood, it is the blood,
Which has atonement made;
It is the blood which once for all
Our ransom price has paid.

It was the blood, the mark of blood
The people's houses bore;
And when that mark by God was seen
His angel passed the door.

Not water, then, nor water now,
Has ever saved a soul;
Not Jewish rites, but Jesus' stripes
Can make the wounded whole.

"I see the blood," "I see the blood,"
A voice from Heaven cries,
The soul that owns this token true,
And trusts it, never dies.

For He who suffered once for all,
That we might life obtain,
Will never leave His Father's throne
To shed that blood again.

Brother Quick, in a low voice trembling with passion, prayed that God would make us worthy of this chief experience.

There was a moment of the holiest and most breathless silence I have ever known. I have stood alone at midnight when no birds sang, no leaf stirred, and the autumn stars shone silently through the unwhispering roof of a dark Russian forest. I have stood on the summit of the Great Gable and gazed at the wild soundless mountains all around, in that wild soundless moment before the dawn arrives. But never except in the Romish Mass, at that multitudinous most sacred moment when the heart stops beating, have I tasted so awful a silence as this, when the Spirit of God moved in the hearts of our little company. I did not greet Him in mine—not yet.

Brother Brawn uncorked the two bottles of wine and filled the tankards. The rapture on the faces round me was tenser than after the Bread: especially, I thought, in Pentecost's and my Grandmother's. The longing to share it possessed me more and more every day as I grew up. I hoped that at a very tender age I too might break the bread and drink the wine.

The third and last stage of the Meeting usually began with an utterance from Brother Briggs. If everything before had led up to the communion, Brother Briggs led on from it. He bellowed so loud that at times the roof rang. "Aw, my dear brethering, after the cup us all 'ave tasted, there be only one thing I'ze goin' to zay—Praise the Lawd, O my Sowl! Praise ye the Lawd! I'm only a pore hignorrint zinner, but I knaws this yer: That Jesus zhed 'Is bled vur me, and that 'tis uv 'Is precious bled as I've bin a-privil'ged to drink this mornin'. 'E 'ath 'olpen hus! O 'ow I luv that word hus! O 'ow I luv that word hus! Turn wi' me to the gauspel accordin' to St. Matthew, chapter eight verse zeventeen: 'Imself took our infirmities and bare our zickness. Praise 'Im, zes I, praise 'Im! Let ivry thing that 'ath breath praise the Lawd! Bewtivul! Bewtivul!

"Us shud orwis be praisin' 'Im, brethering, and us shud orwis be 'appy in 'Is love. Orwis 'appy! If us be un'appy, 'tis along of this yer—that us 'ave bin drinkin' of zum voul stream, instead uv they vountains uv 'Is love. And us are 'appy, arn't us, brethering? As I luke round at 'ee, all brothers and zisters, and zee what triumphs and trophies of grace ye all be, I zes to missel', and I cries aloud to 'eaven: Praise ye the Lawd! Bewtivul!

"'E 'ave dragged us up out of a norribull pit, a norribull pit, out o' the moiry clay, and shed 'Is blid that us may live wi' 'Im vur iver and ivermore. Turn wi' me to the blessid gauspel according to St. Jan, the sixth chapter and vivty-zixth verse, and 'earken to vat my Lawd zes there: 'E that eateth my flesh, 'e zes, an' drinketh my blid, dwelleth in me, 'e zes, an' I in 'im. O 'ow I luv that word 'Im.' O 'ow I luv that word 'Im! O the blessed thought: to dwell for iver in 'Im, an 'Im in us! Bewtivul! Bewtivul! Bewtivul!..."

Then would he bellow forth and would we sing "He sitteth o'er the waterfloods" or "I hear the Accuser Roar":—

I hear the Accuser roar
Of ills that I have done,
I know them well, and thousands more—
Jehovah findeth none.

Sin, Satan, Death, press near
To harass and appal;
Let but my risen Lord appear,
Backward they go and fall.

Before, behind, around,
They set their fierce array,
To fight and force me from my ground,
Along Emmanuel's way.

I meet them face to face,
Through Jesus' conquest blest,
March in the triumph of His grace,
Right onward to my rest.

There, in His Book, I bear
A more than conqu'ror's name,
A soldier, son, and fellow-heir
Who fought and overcame.

Bless, bless the Conqueror slain—
Slain in His victory;
Who lived, Who died, Who lives again,
For thee, dear Saint, for thee!

Brother Brawn made the Announcements. On that first occasion, I remember, he made some reference to me ("One of tender years worshipping with us for the first time"), to my dedication to the Lord, and to his hopes that I might be made meet therefor.

Everybody stared. I flushed, with infant conceit rather than pious ecstasy: it was my first appearance in public. After Announcements, the Offertory. This was taken in a large square box divided into four slit compartments labelled in white painted capitals: MINISTRY, FOREIGN FIELD, POOR, EXPENSES. My Grandmother was always much exercised in her giving. Her own inclinations were more towards Poor and Foreign Field, but she felt she ought not to neglect less showy and alluring Expenses nor coyer, more elusive Ministry. She would compromise between duty and pleasure by putting a sixpence in all four, with perhaps an extra copper or two in Poor; of her modest income giving half-a-crown to the Lord at this morning service alone. Aunt Jael with a rather larger income (and no Mary to support) never gave more than a shilling between all four compartments. She also had a penchant for Expenses: I suppose it pleased her—waywardly—as the least human of the four.

(This fourfold collecting-box allowed a pleasurable width of choice, but a quite different consideration had led to its introduction and the supersession of the cloth bag formerly in use. During a period of several years a lump of sugar had been put in the bag every Lord's day at Breaking of Bread, and though clouds of prayer were offered up to soften the heart of the sinner-Saint who played this weekly prank upon his Meeting and his Maker, they were all of no avail. He (or she) hardened his heart; every Lord's day the bag was found to contain yet another impious lump. Stare Brother Brawn never so stark at every giving hand, the sinner remained undetected in his sweet career. It was finally suggested by Aunt Jael that a new type of box, with but a narrow slit for the coins to pass through, would baffle the evil-doer. The choice-of-beneficiare partisans united with her, and they evolved between them this fourfold enormity, with its meat-dish dimensions and its four defensive slits. Vain precautions! Idle hopes! All the sugar-sinner did was to insert a much smaller piece than before; usually in Foreign Field. It was a marvel to the Saints how he squeezed it through; a tragedy how he persevered in his sin.)

After the Offertory came perhaps another hymn and prayer; then the End. We all stood up and sang the following:

When we will be
Where we would be,
When we shall be
What we should be,
Things that are not
Now, nor could be,
Then shall be—ee
Our own!

While we remained standing, Pentecost raised his hands in benediction. And so to dinner.

* * * * * * *

Breaking of Bread, though the principal service, was only one of five each Lord's Day at the Room, all of which I attended regularly before I was seven. There was but an hour at home for dinner ere I set forth for Lord's Day School at half past one, which lasted for an hour and was followed immediately by the Young Persons' Prayer-Meeting. I got home for tea, after which we all sallied forth to the Gospel Address for Unbelievers, usually delivered by Brother Browning, two hours long and dreary beyond belief, in a ghostly atmosphere of guttering candle-light. This was followed by another Prayer-Meeting, followed again, at least in the summer months, by the Street Testimony, when we all repaired to the Strand, and gathered together a mixed circle of friends and curious and scoffers—like the Salvation Army in the next generation. Even this was not the end; for at home there was Reading and prayers, just as on week-days. If I were more deadly-tired than usual after that awful Sunday, Aunt Jael would spin the prayer out and choose a specially long chapter. Most Sundays I went to bed half sick with fatigue, my head aching, hardly able to undress.

Smiling was forbidden, and I had little reason to break the rule. Tears, however, were allowed, and I shed them in plenty.

* * * * * * *

If Breaking of Bread was not our only Meeting, nor was our Room the only Meeting in the town. I knew of four others. First, the Grosvenor Street Branch Meeting, offspring of ours, in the special care of Brother Quappleworthy, who preached there on Sunday evenings. Salvation always derided my Grandmother and Aunt for calling it Grow-vner Street. "I'm no scholard," she said, "but tidden common-sense to mispernounce like that. Gross-veener 'tis, and Gross-veener ollers 'twill be!"

Second, there was the Close, Exclusive or Darbyite Meeting, ruled over by one Mr. Nicodemus Shufflebottom, a giant-tall man with a flat white face, who reminded me of a walking tombstone. The Exclusives or Darbyites regarded us, I suppose, much as we regarded the rest of Christendom; as walkers in darkness. We regarded them as wandering sheep, foolish perhaps, rather than sinful. "Those brethren," Mr. Pentecost described them, "whose consciences lead them to refuse my fellowship and to deprive me of theirs." I never went to their Tawborough Meeting while I was a child.

Third, there was Brother Obadiah Tizzard's Upper Room for Celibate Saints, a kind of loft in which half-a-dozen old maids and two or three bachelors met together for meditation and breaking of bread. All were singular as all were single. Their service was one of silent hymnless worship interspersed by personal quarrels; silence broken by backchat. The last word as well as the first was with Salvation. Glory did duty for Brother Lard; less vulgar if more incessant. All were sustained by the conviction of their unique fidelity to scripture. "We break bread in an upper room," said Glory to my Grandmother time and again on Tuesday afternoons, "as did Jesus with the Twelve. We are poor an' 'umble: an' so was Jesus. We are not wed, an' no more was Jesus. We shall go to heaven pure: an' so did Jesus."

Fourth, there was Ebenezer. The name was applied indifferently to the meeting-room itself or to the one gentleman who attended it. He was the Meeting, the whole Meeting, and nothing but the Meeting. He sat on a bench for silent prayer all alone by himself, got up and read the Word aloud to himself, mounted on a little dais and lengthily harangued himself, handed round the bread and wine to himself, and (for all I know) took the collection from and appropriated it to himself. Ebenezer had once belonged to our Meeting, but in some occult way we had displeased him, and he left us for Mr. Nicodemus Shufflebottom, leaving him also in turn for the straiter ways of Brother Obadiah Tizzard. Him even too he left finally, to worship God in his own way all alone. I doubt if he was really mad: odd only, and nearer to Heaven than Hanwell. His real name, if he had one, I never knew.

* * * * * * *

Perhaps I have said too much of the Meeting; for though the one great piece of the whole outer world I saw during many years, it was never more than that: something I saw. I was never of it, as of Eight Bear Lawn. It never helped to fashion my child's life or longings, nor touched at any time the inside life I led: the real Mary.

One other thing stands clearly apart in my memory as taking place that first Lord's Day.

Alone together at my bedside my Grandmother confirmed my dedication to the Lord's service. She told me of her vision, renewed that day as she had drunk the sacred wine, that I should serve Him as a Missionary in the foreign field with glory and honour. She told me of the trials and tribulations I should have to face; but that if a faithful steward, I should find my reward in heaven. Then she read aloud my favourite seventh Chapter of Revelation. When she came to the fourteenth verse, These are they which came out of great tribulation, I could keep silence no longer. I cried to her to stop. Words had already a magical effect on me, and could throw me into ecstasy. All through my childhood "tribulation" was big magic. Now it threw me into a trance of disordered emotion and delight.

"O Grandmother," I cried, "I will! I will! I will serve Jesus for ever! I am longing to go through tribulation, through lovely lovely tribulation!"

I broke into crying and laughing. I hungered to suffer, to embrace, kiss, adore, go mad, abase myself, throw myself on the floor before her feet, love, hold, possess, be possessed, mingle.... Why could she not put her arms around me, seize me, comfort me, crush me?

For one imperceptible moment my child's soul understood. The moment passed; too swift to be retained, even remembered.

Had I been dreaming? What was it all?... Yes, I had wanted something, something that Grandmother could not give, could not take.

"You're overwrought and tired, my dear," she was saying. "What you want is a good sleep."

CHAPTER V: I GO TO SCHOOL

Next morning Grandmother and I sallied forth. It was a bright spring day, with a high wind blowing. We went down Bear Street and along Boutport Street to where it joins the High Street; and just beyond, on the far side of the road, saw the old ivy-coloured house whose door was to be my portal of worldly understanding.

My future instructresses, the Misses Glory and Salvation Clinker, were our only regular visitors at Bear Lawn. They were third cousins of a sort, though a social grade or two lower than ourselves, I apprehended,—more Devonshirey, "commoner" than we. Tuesday after Tuesday they came to our house for a long-established weekly afternoon of tea and godly discoursing. Glory was a tall, thin, bony old woman, with a bleary far-away stare. She wore a faded black serge dress, whereon the only ornaments were dribble-marks in front, which spread fan-wise from her chin to her waist; and a tiny black bonnet, tied round her chin sometimes by a ribbon, oftener by a piece of string, at one whimsical period by a strip of carefully-prepared bacon-rind. She spoke little, chiefly of Death and the New Jerusalem, though a perpetual clicking noise—represented most nearly by er-er-er, and variously explained—always kept you aware of her presence. "Life," ran her favourite aphorism, "is but one long prercession o' deathbeds." She was quite mad, very gentle, wrapped in gloom, and beatifically happy. Er-er-er-er was unbroken and continuous. You could have used her for a metronome.

Salvation was a saner, a coarser type: a noisy, aggressive woman, whose chief subject of conversation was herself; a pious shrew with a big appetite and a nagging tongue. She always ate an enormous tea, though Aunt Jael, of whom alone in the world she was frightened, would sometimes keep her hunger roughly in check. Glory, on the other hand, always brought special provisions of her own, and at tea-time made her own exclusive preparations. First she went into the far corner, where she had deposited a net-bag full of parcels. From this she abstracted a saucepan, a little spirit-lamp, a box of rusks shaped like half moons, a bottle of goat's milk, a porringer and a great wooden spoon. She put the lamp on the floor, lighted it, boiled the milk in the little saucepan, threw in six or eight of the rusks and stirred with the wooden spoon until she produced a steaming mush. She didn't eat this, nor yet did she drink it; neither word describes the fearful and wonderful fashion in which she imbibed, absorbed, inhaled, appropriated it. Of every spoonful she managed to acquire perhaps a quarter; the other three-quarters strolled gently down her chin. As she was short-sighted, and as when she ate she ignored her food and looked steadily ahead at the glories of the New Jerusalem, she often missed the spoon altogether. The noise she made was notable. Hence Aunt Jael always refused to allow her to eat at our table, and consigned her to "Glory's corner."

Though I saw the Clinkers in our house Tuesday after Tuesday, I had never yet beheld them in their own. My eyes fastened on the brass door plate:

The Misses Clinker
ELEMENTARY EDUCATIONAL ESTABLISHMENT
For the Daughters
of Gentlemen.

The top line was in elegant copy-book writing.

"Look, Grandmother," I cried, "Misses is spelt wrong. Why do they put M-i-f-s-e-s? It's silly." I resented the absurd "s". My faith in the infallibility of the twin Gamaliels at whose feet I was to sit was dashed on their very doorstep. Could the blind lead the blind?

"Why, 'tis often written that way," rejoined my Grandmother, "'tis an old way of writing a double S. You've plenty to learn, you see."

If the first line was offensive to common-sense, the remainder of the notice challenged mere truth. Elementary you could not gainsay, but Educational Establishment for a description of that frowsy den and those two ignorant old maids was florid rather than faithful, while Gentlemen as a term to connote the male parents of the clientèle was—even in the most dim and democratic sense of that unpopular word—just false. Finally, there were sons as well as daughters: some three or four of the fifteen pupils who comprised the school.

Salvation opened the door, grinning an aggressive welcome, but we were officially received by Glory. "Welcome! Welcome to this place!" she cried impressively. I saw that the sisters' rôles were here reversed. Glory was as unkempt as ever, the "black" serge she wore shades greener than her Tuesday afternoon one, and quite four inches higher one side than the other. As next-worldly and bleary-eyed as in our house, her part here was the part of a Principal: Principal of an Educational Establishment for the Daughters (yea and Sons) of Gentlemen. Salvation, screech she never so loudly, was in this schoolroom but second fiddle.

* * * * * * *

The schoolroom was an old-fashioned kitchen. The day's dinner was cooked before our eyes on a spit before the fire; the pupils acted as turnspits. The room was low, smoke-begrimed and dingy; the windows opaque with dirt. On the filthy walls were a print of the Duke of Wellington (?), all nose and sternness, an old Map of the World on Mercator's Projection with the possessions of the Spanish crown yellow, and the possessions of the British crown red, and many framed texts worked in white and blue wool. One huge text, worked in many colours, stood over the doorway: A ROD FOR THE FOOL'S BACK. Prov: xxvi. v. 3. There were two classes, on different sides of the room. I was put with the younger. They were all new faces, except one or two that I had seen the day before at the Room. They were, indeed, the first children I had ever spoken to. In grown-up parlance the pupils would have been dubbed lower-middle class, though Marcus Browning, whom I knew by sight because he lived in the Lawn in a house just opposite ours, was as middle-middle class as Aunt Jael and my Grandmother. I felt these distinctions perfectly, and regarded one Susan Durgles, a lank untidily-dressed fluffy-haired child of seven or eight, and the leading spirit in our class, with that feeling of quiet disdain which the sureness of higher caste can alone bestow: her father was a mere cobbler in Green Lane, and while I looked at her as though I knew it, she looked back lovingly as though she knew I did. Between Susan and myself sat a pale thin child, Seth Baker, who had St. Vitus' dance. I had never seen anything of the sort before, and stared more through curiosity than pity as his slate and slate-pencil shook in his hand.

The first lesson was Rithmetick with Miss Glory called (vulgarly) by Miss Salvation Figurin'. With her best far-away look Miss Glory peered forth into eternity: "If eggs be twenty-eight a shilling" (they were in those days, at any rate in Spring) "how many be you agwain to get for, er-er-er-one poun' three shillin' and vourpence ha' penny?"

Up shot the grimy hand of little Seth Baker. "Please'm, please'm," appealingly. He was always first and always right, but the rest of us were not suffered to dodge the labour of calculation, as Miss Glory would oftenest ignore Seth and drop on weaker members of the flock, myself or Susan Durgles.

"Now then, Susan Durgles. 'Ee heard the question. How many then-er-er-er-er-er-?"

"Please'm, I-er-er-er-er-er-don't know."

This shameless mockery was allowed to go unpunished. My mind strove to picture Aunt Jael coping with a like impertinence. I imagined the black wrath, the awful hand upon my shoulder. With what new weapon would she scourge me? Scorpions, perhaps, if obtainable.

During our mental arithmetic lesson, the advanced students at the other end of the room were receiving combined instruction from the deputy-principal in crochet-work and carikter-formation. Miss Salvation was shouting technical advice of the stitch, slip, three treble, four chain, and draw-through-the-first-loop-on-the-hook order, together with more general instructions how to earn the joys of heaven and eschew the fires of hell.

After a while the sisters changed places, and my efforts were transferred from high finance to handwriting, called (whimsically) by Miss Glory, Penmanship. Miss Salvation distributed dirty dog-eared copy books. I was set to work on the last page, the Z page, of an otherwise completed and wholly filthy book, to reproduce fourteen times in zealous copper-plate: "Zeal of Thy House hath eaten me up." Meanwhile Miss Salvation transferred to us her godly bawling as to the way we should, or chiefly, shouldn't go: interlarding this with fragments of more specialized holy information, which being entirely useless I have never forgotten; e. g., which was the longest verse in the Word of God, and which was the shortest; the number of books in the Old Testament, and in the New; that "straightway" was the private and particular word of St. Mark, while "That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet" was the chosen cliché of St. Matthew.

Miss Glory took turn with us again for the third lesson: Reading. Our book was of course The Book. One mouldy old Bible was passed round, and we read in turn from its brown-spotted and damp-smelling pages. I think it was my first or second day that it fell to my turn to read from the eighteenth chapter of the Book of Genesis, where the Lord appeared unto Abraham in the plains of Mamre, and Abraham said unto the Lord concerning the destruction of Sodom, Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked? I knew the passage well, and read with relish and excitement the diminuendo Peradventures.

"Good, my child, good. Your readin' is a credit to your dear Grannie and your dear Great-Aunt. You read it fine, as to the manner born."

For the first time in my life the enchanting incense of praise filled my nostrils. I flushed, and while others read of Lot at the gate of Sodom and what-not else, I ceased to listen. My heart was beating to this refrain: You read it fine—as to the manner born. So I was good for something, for all Aunt Jael's daily blows and curses, my Grandmother's nightly She-is-weak-Lord-and-sinful petitions. I read fine!

The first day Mrs. Cheese called for me; but afterwards I was entrusted to Marcus Browning as escort. He was two years older: "a good child, not like some I could name" (Aunt Jael), "Born of Saints" (Grandmother), and possessed of the more fleshly merit of also living on the Lawn. We spoke little together.

The event I remember best of my first days at the Elementary Educational Establishment was a fight. Susan Durgles was for ever making fun of poor little Seth Baker's affliction. One day when Miss Glory and Miss Salvation were both out of the room Susan went a little too far.

"Look to 'im, look to 'im!" she mocked. "He looks like wan o' thase yer weather-cocks what wag and wobble about on the church steeple. Goes like this, do he? Ha, ha. Can't help hisself, can't he, palaverin' li'l wretch?" She flapped her hands in Seth's walrus way, and nodded her head convulsively in mocking imitation of poor little St. Vitus.

He was a meek child, but this time he could stand it no longer. "Dirty cobbler's lass!" he cried, and banged Susan full in the face with his small clenched fist. A regular fight began. My sympathies were wholly pro-Seth. Was not Susan the sneerer, the tormenter, the tyrant, the Aunt Jael, and Seth the harried one, the oppressed one, the victim, the me?

Seth punched and lunged and butted with his head. Susan slapped and shoved and scratched. The boy kicked in payment for the scratching, and the girl tore at his hair to get even for the kicks. Fair play and fair-weather methods went by the board. Rules are for the ring; when ultimate things are at stake, a child's sneer at her schoolfellow's deformity to be repaid, a nation's existence to be lost or won in war, then red tooth and claw tear the paper conventions of sport asunder, and each side fights to win. Miss Glory returned to witness a bleeding and bedraggled pair still scuffling savagely. Not one of the rest of us had dared or wished to intervene. Very properly Miss Glory decided that we were the guiltier ones, and while the two principals amid tears of gradual forgiveness were hustled away to soap and water, we lookers-on had to stand up on our forms for one solemn hour with our hands behind our backs while Miss Glory preached us a sermon; the text being Matthew five, nine.

A brighter feature of school-life was the frequent sweetmeats brought, passed round and devoured. There were chocolate drops, sticks of Spanish, peppermint humbugs, jujubes, lollipops and toffees. I had never tasted such dainties before.

"Wude 'ee like a sweetie?" asked Susan Durgles one day.

"Yes please," said I.

"Quite sure, are 'ee?"

"Yes please. Please give me one."

"Nit likely, nit likely," she sneered.

"But why?" I flushed, not understanding.

"Why? And a very gude raison fer why. 'Cause 'ee gobble up other volks' sweeties fast enough, but you'm not so slippy about bringin' any of yer own fer me to eat, are 'ee? Nit likely."

I felt as though she had struck me in the face. All the other children were looking and listening. It was not that I ever had any sweets of my own which I consumed in greed and secret, it was not that I had any money, or hope of money, for buying any. The sting of Susan's words lay in this: that I ought to have seen and pondered on the fact that while I took all that was offered me I offered nothing in return. I was in the wrong, and therefore all the angrier.

"You wait!" I cried. My tone was not too confident, for in a second's rapid survey I could not see the how or the wherewithal of obtaining sweets to fling at Susan. It must however have been confident enough to inspire her with a lively sense of joys to come.

"I didn't mean nort. Only my li'l joke. Have a lollipop—or two."

On the way home I left Marcus Browning in silence, and evolved plans. Suppose I were to ask Aunt Jael to give me a penny! My heart beat at the thought. I rehearsed to myself my opening "Please Aunt Jael" a score of times. Such rehearsings, inspired by my timidity, served always to increase it. Then I remembered a bottle of acid-drops in the medicine cupboard in the bedroom. Dare I beg a few? Or take a few? suggested the Tempter, take being His pretty word for steal. This was the easier plan, but I shunned its dishonesty. I would ask her first. Or ask even for the penny, I decided, if at the moment I found courage enough.

All the way through dinner I put off making my appeal. Several times I moistened my lips and came to the very brink, where the glimpsed precipice of Aunt Jael's wrath drove me back. Yet brave the precipice I must, or tumble into the abyss of Susan's scorn on the morrow.

At last I blundered in, heart beating and face flushed: "Please may I have a penny?"

"A penny?"

"To buy some sweets."

"Highty-tighty! Don't you get enough to eat here? Never heard of such a thing. Your Grandmother and I never had pence for sweetmeats and such trash. Be off with you."

"But—"

"No buts here." The thorned stick stamped the floor. Grandmother concurred.

Fair means had failed. I would try foul. By her meanness she had forced me to help myself to her acid-drops. My guilt be on her head.

I waited until she was well away into her after-dinner doze, and Grandmother safely closeted for her afternoon's study of the Word. Then I stole softly up to Aunt Jael's bedroom. Her physic-cupboard was on the far side of the bed. It had a sliding door; inside there were four shelves, the bottom shelf dedicated to Aunt Jael's night-needs. At every watch she fed. Once or twice I had slept with her, and discovered that though she had rusks and beef-tea just before getting into bed (soon after a heavy supper) and rusks and a cup of green tea while she was dressing (just before a heavy breakfast), yet she got out of bed twice during the night to brew herself a potion and chew old crusts or gingerbread-nuts or rusks. The bottom shelf was complete with every accessory of these four bedroom feasts: spirit lamp, matches, saucepan, cups; green tea, Ceylon tea, beef-tea, meat extract, herbs of divers properties and powers; gin, cowslip wine, elderberry wine, brandy; with many tins devoted to gingerbreads, half-moon rusks (bought at the same baker's as Miss Glory's), seed-cake, Abernethy biscuits, and old crusts rebaked in the oven. The upper shelves bristled with medicine bottles and jars. These were grouped methodically according to the ills they combated. There was a cough-and-colds corner. For burns scalds and chaps, bruises weals and wens, there was poor-man's-friend, a great jar of goose grease, and a small white pot of mixed whitening, most drastic of all; often my Grandmother used it on my body after a bad beating, fitly borrowing Aunt Jael's whiting to ease the marks of Aunt Jael's stick. The particular galaxy of bottles from which Grandmother had oftenest to beg and borrow for me consisted of various telling encouragements and exhortations to those like myself whose mills ground slowly and withal exceedingly small. Castor oil, Epsom salts, senna pods, fennel seeds and roots of jalep: I knew them all. It was to King Senna I answered swiftliest (five pods to be soaked in a tumbler of water for a few hours, and drunk last thing before retiring to bed); to replenish this jar meant frequent visits to the druggist's, for which my Grandmother paid. To pods she added prayers. Whenever the last thing before retiring chanced to be the tepid tumblerful, the last thing but one was always a supplication to Heaven to speed the parting dose. "O Lord," pleaded my Grandmother on her knees, "Bless the means! Bless the means, Lord; and if it be Thy will grant her relief!" But Aunt Jael relied on worldly remedies exclusively. Her medicine cupboard was her shield and buckler, and like the cupboard in the front room downstairs, ministered to her pride of possession also. And the night-life made possible by that festive bottom shelf! O 'twas a Prince of Cupboards, a vineyard planted with bottles.

Today I had eyes for one bottle only. I reached it down, and regarded the precious objects which would confound the sneers of Susan. Thief! said a voice within, as I tipped the bottle up and curved my other hand to receive.

Susan's sneers! urged the Tempter. How just they are, and how they wound you! I hung doubtfully; the acid-drops' fate and my own trembled in the balance. I remembered how Aunt Jael counted everything. For a certainty every acid drop was counted; she would miss the meanest couple, and then the sequel! No, I dare not.

The moment my indecision was over, I was braver. Once I had decided I dare not eat any, I dared to reflect how pleasant they would have been to eat. It was the bravery of cowardice, that valour that is the better part of discretion. I smelt the bottle's mouth long and longingly. Suddenly the fair odour inspired in me a new idea. I would just suck the drops, and then put them back. They were of the shiny sort, which judicious sucking would hardly change; not your dangerous powdery acid drops, which merest touch of the tongue transforms. I set to sucking as evenly as possible, so that none would look smaller than the rest. They were delicious, and I enjoyed recompense for my noble decision not to steal. Suddenly my heart stood still. The door-handle turned. To fling the bottle into its place in the cupboard, and slide the cupboard door to, was the work of a fevered moment. Aunt Jael entered. She must surely have seen. My guilt was clear, for all the look of meekness I sought to wear. She had her suspicions too of what the guilt was: she seized my arm and ducked her nose down to my mouth to confirm them. Acid-drops have a tell-tale odour, unique, unmistakable. My smell bewrayed me. Out of my own mouth I stood convicted.

"I thought as much,"—even for her the words came grimly—"how many have you stolen?"

"None, Aunt Jael."

There coursed through my veins the perverse exultant delight of her who utters a great white lie. Not for anything would I have told a downright falsehood. Here was an answer true as Truth herself—sucking is not stealing—yet by the look (and smell) of things plainly false. Aunt Jael darkened.

"I-have-not-stolen-one. I-have-not-eaten-one," I repeated, noddingly.

"Liar, black little liar!" she shouted. "The rope-end at last; you'll taste it now."

She rummaged under the bed. As she barred the egress by the foot of the bedstead, I scrambled over the bed, gained the door, and fled to the attic. She was after me at once, wielding the famous weapon, a good yard of stout old ship's rope, a relic of Grandfather Lee or maybe Great-Grandfather Vickary. In the middle of the attic stood a large elliptical table. Round and round it she chased me. It was a defiance I had never shown before. She was appalled. I was appalled. Defiance was a quality she never encountered, and now for meek miserable little me to show it! Her features were a livid blue-black. She lashed out with the rope frequently; I dodged and ducked. The attic was wide enough for me to elude her reach. In a corner I should have had no chance; so Knight of the Round Table was the part I played. Once the rope grazed my shoulder. After ten minutes perhaps, the part of slasher at emptiness had become so undignified that Aunt Jael suddenly stopped. A ruse? A minute's rest before a last wild spring for victory? No; for she could hardly breathe. Then she gave me a long cruel stare, eyes saying I Will Repay: for all my defiance I cowered. She went out, slammed the door behind her, and stumped heavily down the uncarpeted attic-stairs.

The heat of battle over, my spirits sank. Why had I defied her? There was no ultimate escape. For every gesture of defiance, every moment of that round-the-table chase, she would repay me a hundredfold. Yet what else could I have done? If I had owned up to stealing her sweets and thus (perhaps) incurred a lesser wrath, I should have owned up to something I had not done. I should have lied. I had told the truth instead, and my only reward was a clear conscience. (I was staring, as so often, at the great blue picture on the wall, whose deep violet blue seemed to be toned down by the cold grey-blue of the room; an old print of some tropical sea with a volcano belching forth fire, smoke and lava in the background,—the Caribbean Sea perhaps, with one of the Mexican craters, or the Mediterranean with Vesuvius; a gaudy gorgeous thing such as sailors buy on their travels.)

I waited over an hour before risking a descent. When I turned the half-landing by Mrs. Cheese's bedroom door, I sprang back. There beneath me, sitting on the stairs, her feet on the main landing just outside her bedroom door, was Aunt Jael. A small table was drawn up to the foot of the stairs. A good tea was spread thereon; she was eating and drinking heartily. I spied the rope by her side; she heard my footsteps above her, and her hand closed on it. I went back. She meant grim business. Still, she could not stay there all night. I sat down outside the attic door and listened. Mrs. Cheese cleared away her tea things, grumbling; Grandmother came up to her, gently remonstrating. She stayed on. Darkness set in. I heard her stamp the floor for Mrs. Cheese to bring her supper. After all, she might stay there for the night: knowing her will to be not weaker than mine, I put my self in her place, and I felt almost sure she would. I was hungry, and there would be no escape. Escape I must. How? My first plan was that Mrs. Cheese—Aunt Jael would have to get up to let her pass, I reflected, since either one of them was as broad as the attic staircase—should bring me something to eat when she came upstairs to bed. Then I could survive till the morrow, sleep on the attic floor, and confound Aunt Jael. I would show her who had the stronger will. The weak point of this notion was that I could not shout instructions to Mrs. Cheese to bring me something to eat, nor rely on her doing it unprompted. A more desperate plan suggested itself, and before I had time to shrink back, I put it into action.

I slid down the banisters and took a flying vault safely over Aunt Jael's head and the little supper table in front of her. If there had been a big open space beyond, all might have been well. Unfortunately the banister that surrounded the sort of well in which you saw the ground floor began only a yard beyond Aunt Jael's door; my flying feet knocked against it, and I fell; I was hurt badly, and could not get up. In a second Aunt Jael was up, and at me with the rope, savagely. She saw I was in pain and helpless, so lammed the more brutally. I screamed. Grandmother came running upstairs, and with a strength and daring she rarely used wrenched the rope from her sister's hands.

I limped downstairs.

"Before you eat, child, confess your lie, and apologize to your aunt for telling it." Grandmother was unwontedly stern.

"What lie?" I did not flinch.

"Smell her! Smell her!" shouted Aunt Jael.

"Mary, in all her life your mother told not one single lie."

"It's not a lie," feebly. "I swear it," pitiably.

At last Grandmother succeeded where Aunt Jael had failed (this was a little sub-triumph in my defeat). I told the true version and for all the Tempter's hints I knew that my Grandmother was right that evening when in our bedside prayer she pleaded, "Forgive her, Lord; in her heart she lied!"

Next day, I learnt from Mrs. Cheese that the bottle of acid drops had been flung by Aunt Jael into the ashpit. I rescued it, and pocketed the contents, which were stuck together like a coarse hard sponge, emerald bright. There were thirty-seven in all. By the distribution of this lordly largesse I rose high in the esteem of the school. A pocket full of acid drops: my position was assured. None doubted their virginity, all consumed them with zest. Thus did I triumph over Susan Durgles, who sucked humbly; humblier, had she known that another had sucked before her.

* * * * * * *

School took but a small place in my life. The music-lessons I began to take at home were much more to me: for piano-playing was a worldly luxury some generous whim of Aunt Jael's supplied. Her reward was her own loud announcement, whenever topics even remotely musical were mentioned, "I pay for the child's music." These lessons, and a very occasional dress and hat—once a pair of mittens—were all she contributed to my upkeep in all those years. I am glad it was never more. She had no call to do it, she often explained. Well and good: I had no call to be beholden to her. All my expenses, nothing heavy, but heavy enough for a light purse, were borne by my Grandmother: and thus at the end of their lives, Aunt Jael had three times as much to bequeath as her sister. Grandmother accepted five pounds a year from my great-uncle John on my behalf, refusing his offer of more, and taking nothing of what my father's relatives had proposed from the beginning. Yet she would have laughed, and the mirthless Saints would have laughed, if you had called her proud. Meanwhile, because of these music lessons, Aunt Jael cried her generosity from the house-tops. I little cared: I was grateful. I could soon play all the simpler tunes in Hoyle's Anthems.

My life was still entirely spent in the Bear Lawn household; I was never allowed to see anything of the other schoolchildren, Saints or no Saints, beyond school hours. None ever crossed our threshold, nor I theirs. I watched the daily struggle between the two old women, Grandmother and Great-aunt. I read the Word. I prayed, and I lived wild lives within myself. I was for ever visualizing, thinking out dramas in which I and those I knew would figure, living in a self-fashioned self-fancied future, deciding on lines of conduct in innumerable situations I invented. At this time my imaginings did not run, as with megalomaniac little boys, to ambitious futures for myself: great sounding deeds done before admiring multitudes. My castle building was conditioned by the narrow humble life I knew. The stuff of my dreams was my own hates and loves.

At this early time my surest emotions were I think three: hate of my tyrant aunt; longing for some one to love and some one to love me; fear of eternity and hell. I would play with these terrible ideas sometimes with the cheerfulness natural to six-years-old, more often with the despondency more natural to myself. Hate achieved no triumph of hate even, would eat itself out miserably and everlastingly in my visions as hate always. Longing was never appeased; love would never come to me. Fear was justified of her child.

A cheerful vision I conjured up was Aunt Jael on bended knee before me, making a hoarse and humble appeal to be forgiven for her wrong-doings, to be shriven of her many sins. I revelled in the delightful picture. How I dealt with it depended on my mood. If it was soon after a beating (a real-life beating) my conduct would be just, stern, inexorable. "Go to, thou vixen, thy judgment awaits thee!"; and I would deliver her over to the tormentors. If beatings of late had been few or frail, and a sentimental rather than revengeful mood held me, then I would act with a high Olympian generosity, imagination's sweetest revenge, and lifting her gently to her feet would say "Thy sins are forgiven thee—Go, and sin no more!"

I often tried to create an imaginary person to love, some one I could embrace and be embraced by. Once I got as far as picturing a face for perfect loving, but I found that it was the spirit, the soul, the person who gave you love, and my perfect face (a dark young girl's) though I named it Ruth Isabel, remained a face and a name only. There was no real Ruth Isabel behind the face; so she faded away. I had one success, one consolation. By a hard effort—closed eyes, clenched fists and fervid prayer to God—I could sometimes picture my dead mother so vividly, that I could literally feel and return her embraces. She was clad always in white; her face was warm, and glowed. "Kiss me, Mary," I could make the vision say, though whensoever I put out my hungry arms to draw her closer to my breast, the vision fled.

Of my chief fears, hell and eternity, the first was always terrible—I pictured it in all the luxurious completeness of horror Brother Brawn described—yet I had this comfort: I believed in the Lord, and He could save me. But save me for what? He rescued me from hell to grant me eternity in heaven, and from His boon there was none to rescue me. Eternal life! Once my brain attempted to grapple with everlastingness and to think out the full frightful meaning of living for ever, I sickened with fear. There was no escape: ever: anywhere. A terror, unanswerable, unpitying, controlled me. One way out of it, one mad child's trick to cheat Infinity was to convince myself I had never been born. "You're not real!" I would say to myself, "You're only dreaming you're alive. You're a dream of God's. You have never really lived, so you can never really die. So you escape eternity. You cannot live for ever, if you are not alive at all!"

This belief I helped by staring into my own eyes in the glass, my face close up to its reflection. After a minute or two, a tense expectancy would seize me. I was elated, exhilarated.

"Mary, what are you, who are you?" I cried to the face in the mirror.

My own voice sounded strange and far away, belonged to some one else, proved that I had no voice, that there was no real me, that I was Another's dream.

"What are you? What are you?"

The exhilaration and the expectancy grew. I was on the brink of solving the mystery of all life: my child's mind would find what the universe was, what I was.... The exaltation was almost more than I could bear. I kissed wildly the reflection of my own mouth in the mirror. Suddenly, imperceptibly, elusively, the great hope vanished. There was a swift reaction in my mind and body, and I half swooned away on to a chair.

In other moods my picturings were completely black. I saw my future as an unbroken series of savage triumphs for Aunt Jael. She discovered new and horrible beatings. I should be left quite alone with her: Grandmother would die. She would flog me from morn till night, always brutally, always unjustly. Or I would think of love as a thing I should never, never know. I pictured myself a lonely old woman, loved by none, loving none. Or, if I thought of hell, I doubted my salvation, and suffered in imagination all its pains. Or, with eternity, the fiction that I was not alive failed me dismally. I pictured myself sitting for ever on a throne near God, bearded and omnipotent. A billion years rolled away, I was still no nearer the end, no nearer escape from my soul, from life, from me. Sometimes I shrieked. My cries rent heaven. God motioned the golden harps to cease and consigned me to the torments of hell. I was borne downwards at incredible speed by two bright angels who, as we got lower and lower, took on the shape of devils. They cast me shrieking into the lake of fire and brimstone. Sometimes in heaven I could keep my agony mute. This was no better. Amid the angels' psalmody there rang in my heart like a beaten bell: For ever, for ever, for ever!—taunting me into a supreme feverish effort to think For ever out. Then came the last moment, the crisis of hypnotized fear, as my finite mind flung itself against the iron door of the Infinite. The struggle lasted but a few seconds, or I should have gone mad. Then the warm back-rush of physical relief as the blood poured back into my brain.

I came to believe there were two persons in myself, two distinct souls in my body. It was my way of accounting for the two strangely different manners of thought I experienced. I thought and felt things in an ordinary, conscious, methodical way—the self-argumentative, cunning, careful little girl that most often I was. At other times, ideas, promptings, wishes, beliefs came to me in quite different fashion—or not so much to me as from within me, from some inner source of my being. They coursed through my blood and stormed my brain; they were blind, warm, intuitive; supernatural, sudden. There is no one word in my vocabulary, still less was there in those seven-year-old days, to define or explain this distinction. It was no matter of Reason with Common-sense on the one hand, and Conscience or Instinct on the other. Conscience—"God knocking at your heart's door," Grandmother called it—is a very incomplete description; at most it could apply only to the good promptings of the other Self. For the reverse reason Instinct will not suffice. It was no question of two modes of thought or feeling, but of two persons inhabiting my body. The Mary Lee every one saw and knew was the two of them taken together. I called them Me and the Other Me. I felt the difference between them in a physical way. With the more usual self, my blood flowed gently, my pulse was normal. The other self marched through my flesh like an army with banners; the hand of this more mysterious me literally knocked at my heart; she came from some deep inmost place and vanished as swiftly as she came. She went; my pulse flagged.

My loneliness too encouraged the sociable idea that there were two people inside me—Two's company, one's none! In bed or blue attic, duologues were better than monologues: but as a rule I could not arrange these, because Other Me blew where she listed; I could never fix her for a talk as I chose. She came with some sudden word or warning, prompting or precept—and was gone. When I was bent on some moment's peccadillo, she—he?—would come, whisper "It is wrong"; for one moment the whispering voice was my voice, the voice of another Me, a new person and soul whose being seemed to flood my veins. She fled, and I was alone again. The way I tried to formulate the experience was this: One is my normal human sinful Self, is Me, Mary; Two is the Spirit of God possessing me, the movement in me of the divine, the indwelling spirit, the Holy Ghost made manifest in my flesh. I saw it all as a special privilege, a new proof that the Lord had set me apart.

Sometimes the two selves battled for mastery. I thought that one thing was the right course to follow, and felt that another was. I knew it was the feeling I ought to obey, though sometimes I was not positive of its divine, Other Me, Apostolic quality. In such cases my plan was to count thirty-seven—aloud as a rule—and if at the end of my count the impulse was still in me, I obeyed it. The test itself was of course of Other origin. "In cases of doubt, count thirty-seven" came to me one day with a warm lilt of authority I did not question. I adopted it as my sacred number for all emergencies. When Aunt Jael was flogging me—I remember well how it helped me in that rope-end beating after I had sucked the sweets—I would shut my eyes and see if I could count thirty-seven between each stroke. Success depended on my rate—and hers; in any case the mere endeavour seemed to lessen the pain.

Note, too, that there were thirty-seven acid drops in the fatal bottle, and that my favourite psalm, number 137, was on page 537 of my old Bible:—Heavenly proofs of the pure metal of my golden number.

(Note: This chapter in my notes fills exactly 37 pages!-M. L.)

CHAPTER VI: CHEESE, LUMPS, CREWJOE, THE SCARLET WOMAN AND THE GREAT GOD BENAMUCKEE

That rope-end beating was a bad one, but I can remember worse. The worst one of all came a year or so later, when I was about seven years old, and formed part of a series of events that stands out with peculiar clearness in my memory.

It all began with porridge lumps.

One morning Aunt Jael went into the kitchen before breakfast, and began stirring at the porridge pan and looking for something to grumble at.

"Lumps!" she cried angrily. "Lumps! What's this mean? 'Tis a pity if a woman of sixty don't know how to cook a panful of porridge. Or too idle to stir it, most likely. Lumps! Lumps!"

Mrs. Cheese lost her temper: the end desired.

"What d'ye expect? Do 'ee think I cude see to the stuff while I'm trapsing up and downstairs to yer bedrume all the time waiting on 'ee 'and an' foot, an' you thumpin' and bangin' away wi' yer stick ivry blissid minute? I can't be in two places at once, and I ain't agwain ter try. Lumps indade! I've 'ad enuff o'n. You do'n yersell, ol' lady."

Whereupon did Aunt Jael aim the lid of the pan at Mrs. Cheese's head, which it just managed to miss. A frying-pan full of half-cooked potatoes lay to the wronged one's hand for retort perfect. She mastered the dear temptation when she saw my Grandmother quietly edging up toward Aunt Jael; found vent instead in bitter irony. Sarcasm hits surer than sauce-pan-lids, and harder.

"Behavin' like a true Brethering, aren't us? Like a meek bleatin' Christyun lamb as doesn't know it's weaned? I tells yer straight, Miss Vickary, I crosses your doorstep this same day. Ye'll be done wi' yer lumps termorrer."

Grandmother contrived to calm her down till she consented to stay after all; and, with more difficulty, to close her sister's mouth.

Mrs. Cheese, however, was not the one to sit down under a saucepan lid, and I think it was revenge, joining forces with a long-repressed love for a good "tell," which prompted her to close the kitchen door that afternoon when the dinner things were put away, and to sit down to tell me a story. She had once begun to speak to me of fairies, and Aunt Jael's reproof was too violent and too recent for her to have forgotten. Rather it was that she remembered it, and rejoiced, as she posed me the unfamiliar sweet question:

"Wude 'ee like me to tell 'ee a story?"

"Yes, please, Mrs. Cheese." I cocked my ear. Far away in the dining-room the dread one snored.

"Wall then. This tale is all about what a sailor-man did. Even 'er" (she jerked her finger in the proper direction) "cude say nothin' agin it, for 'tis all true. 'Tis true gospel, I'll be blummed if tidn': tho', Dear Lawr, some o' the things is that wunnerful that if a body had told me, and I did'n knaw fer certain that 'twas all true, and all written 'pon a buke that the party wrote hisself, I shude 'a zed they was lyin', I shude railly. 'Tis'n everybody, you knaws, as lives a life like we, always quiet and peaceful like, always the same ol' place. There's many volk, sailor chaps and sich like fer the bettermos' part, that has middlin' excitin' times in these yer vorrin parts, and zees the most wunnerful things. Wall, this one chap in partic'lar lived for thirty year all alone on a desert island with not another soul to pass the time o' day with, thirty years I tell 'ee if 'twas a day. Robinson Crewjoe 'is name was—"

"Why?"

"'Cos fer why? 'Cos that's what 'e were caaled, o' course, silly mump'ead! Anyway, there 'twas. Some say 'e 'ad 'is wife and childer to the island with 'im, and they talks of the Zwiss Vamily Robinson, but 'tisn't true anyway; first 'cos 'e weren't alone in an island if there was other folk with 'im, second 'cos he wasn't a Zwiss, or any sort o' them vurriners, third because 'e 'adn't got no vamily, 'cept for 'is ol' vamily at 'ome that is, as tried to stop'n runnin' away to sea, 'is ol' father and 'is ol' mother—"

"What did his father do?"

"Didn't du nort."

"I mean like Brother Briggs is an oilman and Brother Quaint keeps a baker's shop—"

"Oh I don't know thikky. 'Tis some 'undreds o' years agone since it all first 'appened, you knows. 'Owsomever—" And so on: the whole imperial tale.

When in later years I read the book for myself I found how accurately she had stressed the salient points. The father of young Robinson, always growlin' and scoldin' like some others she cude mention; the young raskel himself with whom these methods were not entirely displaced; the flight to sea; the ship doing battle with Turks and Portugeeses and Vrenchies and Spanyerds; the wreck on the desert island, young Robinson alone being saved; his infinite resource, practical, mechanical, architectural, culinary, dietetic; his ills, moral and physical.—Every known pain of the body he suffered, finding some slight alleviation, it is true, in the miniature Aunt Jaelian physic-cupboard from the all providing Wreck. His worst affliction was a malady—the Blues or Deliverums—at once moral and physical, a kind of soul's nightmare accompanied by sharp "abdominable pains." All around him, as he writhed in agony, roared an islandful of wild beasts; tigers and jeraffs and hullyfints and camyels and drumming-dairies—

"What's that?" I remember asking.

"Wull, either 'tis camyels wi' one 'ump to the back, or else 'tis camyels what 'ave one 'ump and drummy-dairies two; 'tis one or 'tother—and bears and munkeys and girt sarpints what they caal boy-constructors, I don't knaw fer why:—a regler munadgery like Tobbery Vair—and birds too. The pore chap 'ad one particler parrit or cocky-two as they caals 'un, what 'e taught to 'oller out: 'Pore ol' Robinson Crewjoe! pore ol' Robinson Crewjoe!' 'Tis true what I tell 'ee, my dear, 'tis true's I zit yer."

Nor did I doubt it. The notion of an invented story was one I could not have conceived.

The narrative came particularly near home with the arrival of the savages, and the domestication and conversion of Man Vriday—"or Man Zaturday maybe—I know 'tis one o' the days o' the wake." Robinson saw that he could atone for his own unholy past by snatching this black-skinned brand from the burning. I listened eagerly, with conscious professional interest; the snatching of black-skinned brands was the very work for which the Lord had set me apart.

"And so he praiched the Gospel to 'im, and shewed 'im all the mercies o' God A'mighty."

"But could he, Mrs. Cheese? Was he a Saint, was he one of the Elect?"

"I don't knaw fer certin'. Don't rekellect it ackshilly zaying 'pon the buke that 'e was a Plymith Brethering in so many worrds as the sayin' is. A Methody maybe. But that's neither 'ere nor there."

"But it is, it's very important," I cried, "it's everything!"

"'Owsomever, 'e taught this yer Man Vriday ter pray ter the Lord. That's gude nuff. 'You goes down on yer knees, and you prays to Im,' 'e zes. 'Why that's jis' what we do too,' zes Man Vriday, to our God'—meanin' a girt idol set up on a hill in the other island 'e com'd from, zummat like the girt idol o' Miss Vickary's in the corner there in that ol' front-room uv 'ern. 'Us valls vlat on our vaces before un,' 'e zes, 'and us 'owls out O-o-o-o Benamuckee! O-o-o-o Benamuckee!' that bein' the god's name, as yer mid say. Tis a fac', I'll ait vire an smoke if tid'n."

"Did he convert him?" anxiously.

"Zome zay 'e did, but I shudn' 'ardly think 'tis true, fer Man Vriday turns to ol' Robinson Crewjoe—'e was an ol' chap now, you knaws, 'aving been there the bettermos' part o' thirty years—and 'e zes to 'im, zes 'e, 'I don't zee much odds to't, master. You prays to your God up i' the sky, and you zes 'O God' and we prays to our god up i' the mountain, and we zes 'O Benamuckee.' He'm a great god too, a mighty great god like yourn; I don't zee much odds to't, master,' 'e zes. So if 'e did convert 'im, it was a middlin' stiff job, I reck'n. And I ain't afraid ter zay that ol' Robinson was a middlin' big fule ter try. If a vorrin savage is so big a fule as to lay down flat on 'is stummick and 'oller out 'O-o-o-o Benamuckee' and sich like jibberish, 'e's a bigger fule still as tries to make 'im mend 'is ways. Missyunaries can't du much gude wi' such fules as they—"

Blasphemy supreme. The listener behind the door could restrain herself no longer. Aunt Jael stumped in.

"Well?"

"Wull?" said the raconteuse, bold and unabashed. She had the morning's score to settle.

"Well? Well this: 'ee talked about notice this morning, madam. Now I give 'ee notice."

"Du yer, Miss Vickary, du yer? Wull, I don't take it then. I'm Missis Lee's servant as much as I'm yourn. You only pays 'alf my money, tho' you may du six-vivths o' the mistressin'. An' 'tis no lies I've been tellin'; 'tis all true gauspel—"

"Order!" stamped the thorned stick. "'Ee leave a week to-day. Silence!" (For repartee was ready.) "And for you, Child, there's no excuse. None. You knew. You knew your sin sitting listening all through that pack of lies—"

"'Tiz not lies!" cried Mrs. Cheese. "'Tis true's I stand yer," for she had risen to face the adversary. "Can't the poor lil chil' listen to a trew story? Thank the Lawr there aren't many little children in Tobbry cooped up like 'er is, as can't move her lil finger wi'out gettin' cussed and banged; I ain't got no patience wi't, and there's plenty uv other volks as I cude mention as 'ave passed a few remarks too—"

"Silence!" shouted Aunt Jael, furiously stamping the stone floor two-to-the-second with her stick.

In came my Grandmother, drawn by the tumult. At once both Aunt Jael and Mrs. Cheese began defending themselves: the first word with neutrals counts for much. To Mrs. Cheese: "Miss Vickary first"; to Aunt Jael: "Speak, sister."

"I've caught her telling the child a long lying rigmarole about savages and idolatry—"

"'Tis not lies! 'Tis truth!" blazed the other, "and don't yer let the pore chil' be punished for listenin', Missis Lee."

Grandmother apportioned blame: for me "You knew you ought not to have listened"; for Mrs. Cheese "Be more careful in what you talk about, and don't forget your manners with Miss Vickary"; for Aunt Jael "There's not much harm been done, Sister; no need whatever to carry on so."

Aunt Jael was infuriated. The balance of Grandmother's judgment was obviously against her; the fact that her younger sister was judging at all was against the first principles of the household, a slight to her position—and to all those sixty-nine years' of an eighteen-months' seniority.

"There!" looked Mrs. Cheese and I, and though neither of us smiled nor spoke, Victory sang in our eyes. My triumph was short. She struck me with her clenched fist; my shoulder received all she owed to Mrs. Cheese and Grandmother as well. So brutal and unexpected was the blow that it stirred me to a spontaneous and venomous cry: "Ugh, I hate you."

Fear and forethought which shrouded and bowdlerized most of my remarks when angry had no time to give me pause. "I hate you!" I repeated savagely.

Silence, Sensation, Crisis. Who would resolve it? How?

Grandmother spoke first: "Hush, child, hush. Your Aunt is angry, but you are beside yourself. Jael, I'm ashamed; to strike like that! But 'hate,' child: the Devil speaks in you. Think, do you mean it?"

"Not quite, no, not—not so bad as that," I faltered convincingly, not from contrition, but to ward off, if might be, another blow, which in the logic of things lay near ahead.

"H'm. 'Tis as well as not. It all comes to this, young minx: You're bad all through; the Devil's in 'ee all the time. Your Grandmother and I have always forbidden 'ee tales of fairies and such like. 'Ee knew, and 'ee listened. Were 'ee wrong—or were 'ee not? I correct 'ee, and all I get for years of care is that 'ee spit out hate. Are 'ee sinful—or are 'ee not?"

I looked at Grandmother: I must take care not to alienate supporters. I looked at Aunt Jael: that blow must be exorcised. "Yes."

She thirsted for super-victory. "Repeat: 'Yes, Aunt Jael, I was sinful and wrong.'"

"Yes, Aunt Jael, I was sinful and wrong."

"And so when I reproved 'ee for being wrong and gave 'ee a well deserved blow, I was right?"

No reply. Her brow darkened. Blow nearer again.

"Come now, quick about it: 'ee were wrong?"

"Yes, Aunt Jael."

"And I was right."

No reply. She half raised her stick—not fist this time—but noting Grandmother's eye, restrained herself with an effort. Both belligerents played still for neutral sympathy. She must be moderate, as Salvation said of her scholastic fees.

"Now, child, I'll give 'ee five minutes. If by that time 'ee haven't looked me in the face and repeated twice ''Ee were right, Aunt Jael, and I'm very sorry,' then I'll bang 'ee till 'ee won't be able to sit down. Now then."

She leaned against the table, eyeing the clock. Mrs. Cheese sat silent, but ready I could see for intervention. That was Grandmother's look too. Both were ready to ward off the soon-to-be-uplifted stick. Aunt Jael feared this, and was uneasy. She broke the silence after about two minutes.

"I warn 'ee. For your own good, mark. 'Tis no odds to me: I'd as lief thrash you. Don't 'ee know your Proverbs, child: 'Chasten thy son while there is hope, and let not thy rod spare for his crying.' I'll not spare for your crying. And 'ee'll be free from me for a spell, for 'ee'll dwell up in the attic for a few days all alone to give 'ee time to think over your sins. Now then. What d'ye say to that?"

"What do I say?" I shouted. "I say this: 'It is better to dwell in a corner of the housetop than with a brawling woman in a wide house!' Don't 'ee know your Proverbs, Aunt Jael?"

The supreme defiance of my childhood; the aptest quotation of my life. Never before nor after was I so great. There was no hope now, the beating would equal my deserts, and I had doubtless alienated my best ally. Even so, there mingled with my fear delight in my retort-perfect. It was worth living to have said that; I must be brave and show that it was worth dying for.

For a moment my boldness had staggered her; for a moment only. Then she brought down the great stick with a crash on my shoulder that sent me reeling against the dresser. Grandmother snatched at the stick; she flung her roughly aside, and sent her tottering against the flour-bin with a savage shove.

"How dare you? How dare you knock my Grandmother about? You bad, cruel old woman!"

"There's perlice in this town, Miss Vick'ry, you'm forgetting."

"Jael!"

For answer to the three of us, she struck me brutally twice, once on the leg, and once on my ear, which began to bleed. The two others made a joint rush for the stick.

"Jael, you're beside yourself."

"'Old 'ard, ol' biddy."

I had one idea: flight. There was a nightmare sort of struggle now in progress, swaying first toward one side of the kitchen, then toward another: three black-bodiced old ladies in a Rugby football scrum, Aunt Jael and Mrs. Cheese, as far as one could see, scuffling for the stick, and Grandmother half-scuffling for the stick also, scuffling also to prevent the other two from scuffling each other to death: at once participant and peacemaker, and certainly not blessed. Past this black swaying mass I dashed, along the hall, hatless out on to the Lawn, and on into the forbidden street outside the Lawn gates.

I ran blindly; where, I did not know. It was a sultry day; my aches and bruises began to tell, and I had to slow down before my rage was worked away. I was wild and rebellious, not only against Aunt Jael, but against God Who allowed her to treat me so. I was walking slowly now. I looked about me; stared at a new brick building on the other side of the road, crossed to read the notice-board outside. "Roman Catholic Church!" Aunt Jael had spoken of this;—this monster we had weakly allowed to be erected in our midst, this Popish temple, this Satan's Synagogue.

"Go in!" said Instinct. This was puzzling: the suggestion was clearly sinful, yet here it came with the authority of my trusted better self. Well, I would commit the sin, the sin deadlier than the seven, the sin crying to heaven for vengeance, the sin against the Holy Ghost! No modern mind could grasp the sense of supreme ultimate wickedness with which my deliberate contact with the Scarlet Woman filled me, for there is no live anti-Popery left among us today. As I pushed open the red baize door, my heart beat fast. Here indeed was defiance to Aunt Jael and to God Who permitted her. I was making a personal call on the Devil in his own private residence. I should have been much less surprised than frightened to find him inside the chapel, seated on a throne of fire; tail, hoofs and all. What should I find? I trembled with emotion.

My first impressions were of the darkness and the smell. This curious odour was doubtless the "insects" against which Miss Salvation thundered; that burnt-offering which cunningly combined cruelty with idolatry. It was an interesting smell; I thought of the paint-and-Bibles odour of our Room. Much of the character of churches, as of books, is discovered in their smell: it is by my nose rather than my mind that I can best recall the rich doctrinal differences between Calvinistic Methodists, and (say) Particular Baptists. You may smell out a Tipper—or a Bunker—or a Believer in the Divine Revelation of Joanna Southcote—with blindfold eyes; and the odour of an English Roman Catholic Church is, I think, the most distinctive of them all. So too its darkness. How unlike the bare lightness of the Room. This Papistry reminded me of Aunt Jael's front parlour with its perpetual yellow darkness, its little heathen images and its great wooden god. Everywhere there were images and idols, though I was disappointed—and surprised—not to see more sensational symbols of evil. I dared not begin to think so, though I felt already that this mysterious place gave (somehow) pleasure.

"Habitation of devils and cage of every unclean and hateful bird": our phrases did not fit here,—but perhaps I should soon behold a Sign. A young man came in and knelt before one of the idols: a mother and baby-boy, the Mary Mother and the Son of God. I watched him on his knees before the graven image, Man Vriday on his knees before God Benamuckee. I had a wild notion of crying aloud; I would then and there testify to the true God. But I could not—something held me back—the incense, the holiness, the young man's face, pale and kind and pure.... I looked away. In the side aisle were two or three old women in prayer. How like our old-lady Saints were these Papist women! However different their souls, how alike their clothes and faces! The one nearest me reminded me at once of my Grandmother. Kneeling with her eyes closed and her lips moving in prayer, she looked strangely like the dear devout face I watched each night at bedside prayers. Said Reason: this is an old Papist sinner, a lost soul, an eldest beautiful daughter of Antichrist, who hath glorified herself and lived deliciously, whose sins have reached unto heaven, whose iniquities God hath remembered. Said Instinct, which came from the Lord: "She is good." (Perhaps she was one of those two or three Papists who were going to heaven, as Grandmother said, despite all.) The kind old face, rapt, adoring, the lips praying as my Grandmother prayed; the pale clean sorrowful young man too; above all, the rich sacramental stillness—these things of course were wrong. In the swifter more intuitive way I knew that they were right, and that I was wrong. I was baffled; and frightened. These impressions come back to me dimmed maybe, or rather, over-clarified by the notions of later years; but however vaguely and childishly, they are what I surely felt. I had come into this place to commit sin: I knew now that I was committing sin by having come here in such a spirit. I had known it was sacrilege to hold communion with the evil thing; now the sacrilege seemed to be in the mood in which I had come here. For Papist temple or no, God was somewhere here. The dark incensed holiness of this unholy place was sapping my faith and will. I must fly.

And my revenge? I had forgotten that. I slunk out feebly, fleeing from the church and fleeing too from new thoughts I dare not think. I ran to stop myself thinking.

There was no alternative but home. They must be wondering where I was, searching perhaps. They would be anxious; Aunt Jael's conscience, I hoped, would be smiting her. It was already near dusk when I slipped through the Lawn gates. When I reached the door my fear grew again; but I was too tired to wander further. Beatings or no beatings, I would go into Aunt Jael's own front room, curl myself up in the armchair; the place was so strictly forbidden that she would never dream of searching for me there. The key, as always, stood in the door; mean and purposeful temptation. It was not far from supper-time, and with the blind drawn the room was pretty well dark. I lay back in the armchair and looked around me at the yellow darkness, at the great oak cupboard, the blanched plants in their row of saucers on the floor, the walls covered with spears and clubs, the mantelpiece littered with gods. There straight ahead, high on his walnut whatnot, the great idol blinked down at me.

Here, here was my revenge! The notion stormed me. Dare I? Dare I go down on my knees and worship the graven image? 'Twas a fine way of getting even: to kneel on the floor of her sacred room, and there perform that idolatry which was for her the nameless sin, through even talking of which today's trouble had begun. It would be getting even with God too. If He allowed cruelty and injustice to go on, if He let me be treated as I was, if He failed to deal fairly and faithfully between Aunt Jael and me, if He came short in His duty to Himself and myself; then in my turn I would fail in my duty to Him, I would break His commandments. From the second the notion came, I knew I should obey; though it puzzled me to hear what seemed to be the Tempter's voice speaking for the second time today with the voice of God. To give the Right every chance, and as a sop to fear, I would count a slow and impartial thirty-seven. If at the end of my count the desire to sin was still there, I should have no choice but to obey: the deed must have been predestined, foreordained. Slowly I counted, trying desperately not to influence the decision, and keeping an even balance between wickedness and fear: ... thirty-five ... thirty-six ... thirty-seven. Yes. The idol still leered invitation; worship him I must. Yet fear numbed me as I sank on my knees; so I made this pitiful pretence, that I was only pretending to do it, not really performing idolatry, but just making believe that I was. (In a way this was true.)

Aloud I piped feebly in faint shameful voice: "O-o-o-o Benamuckee," but dare not face the idol yet. In my heart I screamed, "O God, God, I'm not doing this really. Strike me not dead, show no vengeance, spare me, O Lord. 'Tis all make-believe, that I'm worshiping this idol. Thou knowest it. Spare me, spare me!" Every second I expected some dread sign, waited God's stroke. Surely it must come. Here was I—a Christian child, Saint of Saints, dedicated to preach the gospel to the heathen, who in their blindness bowed down to wood and stone—doing the self-same thing, and with no blindness for an excuse. Jehovah would bare His terrible right arm in one swift gesture of supreme revenge—lightning, thunder-bolt, death—only let the stroke come quickly! I waited through a moment of abject fear. Nothing happened; nothing. Was God—? I dare not ask myself the question I dared not formulate.

The first moment passed. I grew less fearful. I grew bold. I felt confident in the instinct that had prompted me, morbidly delighted with the quality of my sin, mighty in its importance and in my own. I felt I was the central spot in the universe: all the worlds were standing still to gaze upon my wickedness. God did nothing. He gave no sign. I took courage; I abandoned all pretence that I was pretending, and flung myself prostrate on the carpet.

"O-o-o-o-Benamuckee! O-o-o-o-Benamuckee!" with all the fervour of true prayer.

Still no sign. By now I was not afraid, but rather disappointed. Why had the Omniscient and Omnipotent left me unpunished, unreproved, unscathed? Swiftly the answer rushed to my brain—I counted a desperate thirty-seven, but the notion stuck—He gave no heed because He so utterly despised me. He saw nothing in me but a miserable play-acting little worm, too mean even for punishment. It was true, and in the same moment I despised myself. "O-o-o-o" died lamely on my lips. As I got up from my knees I dared not look around me for fear some one was watching my folly and shame. Had anybody seen? And what harm had I done to Aunt Jael, the source of all my misery, the real author of all my folly? None. First by going into a house of idolatry, and now by performing it myself, I was wreaking no hurt on her, while imperilling my own eternal soul. I was a fool.

Then came the day's third notion. Cupboard, cupboard!—rifle it! Open, look, steal! This massive piece of oak excelled the physic cupboard in mystery, while equalling it in Aunt Jael's affections. Its contents were largely unknown: I knew it housed a jar of ginger, and in benignant mood Aunt Jael would make it yield a box of Smyrna figs, from which she doled me one or two for senna's sake—as dainty supplement or shy substitute. Like the door of the room itself, the door of the rich cupboard stood always key in lock. Once before I had reached this point of handling the key; today, the day of many sins, I took the one step further, and opened to my gaze a new world of jars, pots, boxes and bags. I opened my campaign on a jar of French plums, the jar massive stone and broad-necked, the plums large black and luscious. I had eaten perhaps my sixth (one of my unlucky numbers), when—a sound—and I half dropped the jar in fright. The door, there was a noise at the door; the handle turned, it was opening. An opening door is the thief's nightmare; I dared not get up from my knees. The noise ceased; I peered through the darkness. Then the atoms of seen atmosphere that sometimes fill a half-darkened room played me a cruel trick. They shaped into a great leering face—half Aunt Jael, half Benamuckee;—it peered round the door, it mocked, it sneered. I was petrified with fear, and for something to hold clutched fiercely at the stone jar. Was the face real? Look, it was fading away. Then, without any manner of doubt, the door softly shut. So the face was real, and I knew its owner.

What new tortures would she find to meet the score I was running up? Why had she withdrawn? Ah, she had gone for the ship's rope, was coming back to give me the last flogging of all, the one that would kill me. A few minutes passed. As in the Papist chapel, and again during my idol-worship, I waited for a great something to happen. Nothing happened. I attended a sign. No sign came.

I must venture forth; sooner or later I had to face the music. I had no stomach left for plums. I put the jar back, locked the cupboard door, and stole softly out into the hall. Far away along the passage I could see Mrs. Cheese bustling about in the kitchen; it must be supper-time. She was still in the house therefore; she had ignored her notice and survived the mêlée in which I had seen her last. I turned the key softly behind me, then stole to the house front-door, which I noisily opened and shut, to pretend I had just come in.

I walked straight into the dining-room.

Aunt Jael smiled. I had foreseen many things, but not this. She said nothing. This proved that the face at the door was hers. A grim smile.

"At last!" said my Grandmother. "It was wrong to run away and scare us like this. I'll talk to you afterwards upstairs. Have your supper now, as you've had no tea. Then to bed."

I ate. Aunt Jael sat and smiled. A grim smile.

Upstairs in my bedroom Grandmother asked me where I had been. "I walked about the town" satisfied her. She rebuked my initial sin in encouraging Mrs. Cheese, my second in insulting Aunt Jael, my third in running away; she anointed my sores, first on the ear, second on the calf, third on the shoulder where the first ruffianly stroke had fallen; she prayed with me, and said good-night.

* * * * * * *

Alone in bed I went over the day's events: from porridge pan to plums, from lumps to Aunt Jael's smile. Suddenly, causelessly in the way one finds in a dream lost objects whose hiding place is long forgotten—I saw the stone cover of the plum jar lying in the middle of the front-room carpet. Remembrance followed vision, and I knew I had hastily put the jar away without it. At all events the cover must be restored; if by any wild chance the face at the door had not been Aunt Jael's this tell-tale object would anyhow give me away if she should find it; if the face were hers the cover would be fine "evidence."

I got up. I always lay awake till after midnight; Aunt Jael and Grandmother were long ago in bed. The day's horrible excitements had made me more cowardly than usual. The darkness frightened me, the creaking stairs frightened me, my conscience frightened me. Shapes loomed everywhere. The pillar at the foot of the banisters towered down on me like some avenging ghost. At last I reached the front-room door; I turned the key slowly and carefully; it clanged unpiteously in the silence. I peeped in. The moonlight piercing through the drawn blind lit up ghoulishly the god's evil face. I stared a moment; his features moved; and I fled in frantic terror.

Though the object I sought was but a couple of yards away, I could not for all the world have dared a single step nearer. I shut the door and, praying fervently all the way, crept up to bed again. I would go and pick up the cover of the jar first thing in the morning; Aunt Jael never went in till after breakfast; the daylight I could dare.

CHAPTER VII: THE END OF THE WORLD

All night I did not sleep. Conscience busy with the day past and fear anxious for the day ahead gave me quite enough to think about, and I was feverish and overwrought. As soon after daylight as I dared I set forth downstairs. It was early enough for me to retrieve the tell-tale object before Aunt Jael was astir and light enough for me to brave Lord Benamuckee. At the foot of the stairs I met Aunt Jael, fully dressed, nearly two hours before ordinary time; smiling.

"Good morning, child. You're up betimes."

I did not dare a tu quoque, but uttered a feeble tale about helping Mrs. Cheese to clean the boots, Friday being her busiest day.

Aunt Jael, by a singular coincidence, had risen in the same helping spirit, and the two of us burst upon the astonished Mrs. Cheese in the midst of her first matutinal movements. Though I was by now quite certain that the face at the door had been Aunt Jael's, this did not prevent my wishing to restore the jar-cover to its place. It was preparing for the best, so to speak, on the faint off-chance that I was deluded. Meanwhile her smile prepared me for the worst. It was more complex than a blow, for it portended blows to come and added to their evil charm by heralding them afar off. Aunt Jael's floggings had at least this merit, that as a rule they came suddenly; the stick was across my back before I knew where I was.

I walked out of the kitchen, straight through to the front room door. Before touching the handle, I took a glance down the length of the hall. Yes, there she stood at the kitchen door, watching me like a hawk. At breakfast, hope pointed out one more chance. I would gobble down my food, and essay a dash for my objective just as I was leaving for school. I ate as fast as I could; she at once ate faster. I got up, she got up too. There was no chance, and she even saw me to the house-door as I set out for school. In the game we were playing, no word was spoken. Her weapon was her smile, which was the proof too that she was winning.

On my way to school, as I thought now of this latest menace, now of yesterday's deeds, I admitted that here at last was a case when I deserved punishment. "I hate you"—entering a House of Sin, and approving it almost—breach of the third commandment—common theft—a white lie to Grandmother as to where I had been—what an awful record for one day! Truly I was a queen of sinners. Perhaps God saw fit to humble me in the exaltation of my sin by scorning direct vengeance Himself (three times I had waited for the sign), and had chosen as the vehicle of His vengeance Aunt Jael, my every-day inglamorous tyrant. In any case vengeance was certain; the sultry thunder-weather of the new day seemed to announce it.

Soon after I got to school, it began to grow dark, then very dark. It was one of those rare occasions when the pitch-black of utter darkness falls in the day-time; I only remember one other in nearly fifty years. Miss Glory wondered; Miss Salvation exclaimed; we children cowered. I alone had an inkling of what the portent really betokened. It was the Sign. Now that I felt certain once again that the moment of my doom was at hand, all the exquisite extreme fear of yesterday came back.

It was swiftly too dark to read. Panic set in. All the children, from both classes, clustered round Glory. She, not Salvation, was the refuge and strength which instinct pointed out on this Last Day. The situation was worthy of her prophet's soul: to her was assigned the awful honour of ushering in Eternity, and announcing the sure signs of the beginning of the end. She stood up, gaunt, prophetic, towering far above the children who clustered round her, waved one hand towards the heavens, and chanted forth:

"The End, little children, is here! Fear not! Repent! 'And the fourth angel sounded and the third part o' the sun was smitten, and the third part o' the moon and the third part o' the stars; so as the third part o' them was darkened, and the day shone not for a third part uv it, and the night likewise.' The End is here! The bottomless pit is opened, then cometh forth smoke out o' the pit, and the sun and the air are darkened. Out o' the smoke come great locusts upon the earth, great locusts—" Some of the children shrieked.

Now at one stride came utter darkness. Salvation fell on her knees in a corner apart, yelling and howling to the Lord to save her. "O Lord, Lord, remember us as is chosen, remember, Lord. Smite the ungodly, Lord, smite 'em all, but spare the righteous, spare the righteous! Strike the goats with thy angur, but zave the pore sheep; smite the zinners, but zave Thy own Zaints! Oh, aw, ow! Zave, Lord, zave!"

While this pitiable object yelled away, and the children cried, Miss Glory's solemn voice chanted on, awaiting God's stroke. I the Papist, the idolater, the liar, the thief—this visitation was for me. And if it was the end of the whole world too, as I believed, I was the cause, and I should be the first victim.

"Plagues, locusts, scorpions, the pit, the great tribulation! Life is death, me children: 'tis one long prercession o' death beds. Listen, hearken. First the darkness, now 'tis the thunders and lightin's that is at hand. Watch, oh, my children, watch; pray and fear not. 'Tis the end o' the Worrld, I tell 'ee, the end o' the Worrld." And all the children clutched at her in a frightened desperate ring, so that they should all go to heaven or hell together. I could just distinguish the group a few feet away; it looked in the darkness like a swarm of giant insects. Miss Salvation was pleading and howling away for a heaven to herself, and hell for all folk else. Still I waited; the slowness of God's stroke was half its terror. It was too hard to bear.

Then, far more suddenly than it came, the darkness lifted. With returning light came confidence. I breathed freely. Once again respite. Fear, prime instigator of goodness, lost his hold as the shadows faded. I began to expect escape; to think, after so many favours, that I was privileged, and could take the risk of wrongdoing. I was a chartered libertine.

When I got back to Bear Lawn before dinner, no sign of Aunt Jael. There was still a chance then to put things right if it was not too late. I stole into the front room. There, in the middle of the floor, just as I had seemed to see it in bed, lay the stone jar-cover. Good fortune once again. After all Aunt Jael could know nothing. Those smiles were innocent; their menace must have been born of my disordered mind. Anyway, here was yet another stroke of luck. But, alas, these perpetual escapes emboldened me. Fear is the guardian of virtue, safety the guide to sin. God's repeated forgivenesses for my sins inspired in me security rather than gratitude: a feeling that I could sin safely.

So why not another French plum? Only just one,—or two. Before fixing the cover on the jar, it was natural enough just to taste. I knelt down to open the cupboard. I tilted the heavy jar to look down into it and make my choice. In a second I dropped it with a wild frenzied shriek, wrung from the depths of my heart. Staring at me from inside the jar, painted there in great letters of shining fire, lay the Sign:

THOU GOD SEEST ME.

The King of Terrors had got hold of me, and I shrieked and shrieked again. I writhed on the floor like a wild thing, clasping now my side, now my knees and again my forehead in all the pitiful gestures of terror. I cut my hand against the broken fragments of the jar that lay scattered on the floor. I licked at the blood. Now the air seemed filled with those awful letters, in blood-red capitals everywhere. I shut my eyes: against the blackness the letters stood forth more bright and terrible than ever: THOU GOD SEEST ME. He saw, the Almighty saw. God had given me rope and I had hanged myself. It had needed this miracle to bring me to a sense of my sins: this Sign whereby the Lord God wrote with His own finger in letters of fire in the plum-jar; the earthen vessel of my sin. This was but the beginning of terrors. "Tis the End o' the World, I tell 'ee, the End o' the World," rang my brain. I waited the next sign: a stealthy sound—the door, the door!—then again that face, leering, mocking, horrible. It was Aunt Jael—no, it was Benamuckee—it changed again, it was the Devil himself! I fainted away.

In the "mental illness" that followed I came near to losing my life and nearer still to losing my reason. For many days I was unconscious, and then for long weeks I lay in bed under my Grandmother's loving care. In my delirium I must have told her everything. Sometimes I can recall that fevered time; it comes back to me in the swift evanescent way that one remembers a dream long afterwards, and it is one long hideous nightmare. I live again those dark delirious days when I knew myself for a lost soul flying in terror from God, the Devil, the Pope, Aunt Jael, Benamuckee and Eternity, who menaced me in turn with their various and particular terrors, in all the formless frightfulness of dreams. The pursuit was everlasting. An evil black shadow prowled close at my heels with pitiless, unbroken stride. The face, which kept forcing me against my will to turn round to look at it as I ran, changed from time to time. First I thought my pursuer was Aunt Jael, brandishing a huge stick studded with thorns and spikes of inhuman size. As I looked, hate of the coarse old face rose within me: then the face changed, I thought, into God's; stern, just and terrible, seeking me out to stifle the wicked hate in my heart. Now again it was the Pope, horned and horrible, seeking to avenge my sacrilege in his temple, and now Benamuckee, hastening to devour me for having repented of my idolatry and deserted his shrine. I ran, it seemed, for ever. I had no strength left, and fear alone worked my weary limbs. Now the face was formless: a black shapeless mass without limbs or features was pursuing me. He was the grimmest of them all, and followed for ever and ever. I knew the formless face; it was the last worst terror, Eternity Himself! Sometimes, as my Grandmother told me long afterwards, I shrieked in my delirium till my voice failed me and I could shriek no more.

Perhaps it was at such moments that the dream changed. I thought that I was God, with all the labour and responsibility of creation upon my soul. Every clod of earth that went to make the world I had to go and fetch from some far-away corner in utmost Space; I staggered with them, in it seemed a million journeys, to the central place where with infinite labour I had to piece them all together one by one. When I came to making the first man, my conscience—God's conscience—smote me: "Think and ponder well: if you fashion but one man, it is you who must bear the guilt for all the awful sorrows and wretchedness of the millions of men who will come after, it is you who will be responsible for all the agony of eternal life you are conferring upon a new race." I shut my ears to the voice (Who is God's conscience?—the Devil?), hardened my heart, and created mankind. Then as I beheld his fall, and all the unhurrying centuries of woe and pain and cruelty and sorrow that followed, and knew that every one of those creatures I had called forth was damned into everlastingness without hope of happiness or death; suddenly on me too, on me the Lord God, there fell the terror of the Everlasting. All the fear I knew so well as Mary Lee was now a hundred times intensified when I was God. I too, the Almighty, was a victim on the wheel of Space and Time; and as my brain pictured the awful horrible loneliness that would face me for ever watching the birth and death of all the stars and half-a-million worlds, and knowing there was no escape, I made a wild despairing attempt to fling myself headlong over the edge of Space and commit soul-murder if I could. I flung myself over what seemed to be the margin of the universe; I was falling, falling—then arms restored me;—and Grandmother saved me just in time, and put poor delirious brain-sick little God back into bed.

I was in bed for many weeks; it was three or four months before I went back to school. The permanent effect of my illness was an increased nervousness I have never shaken off. To this day, whenever a door opens suddenly without warning, my heart stands still, and try as I may not to see it, the vision of a cruel mocking face comes back. The most immediate effect was that I became a "better" child. My Grandmother's daily gentleness and sacrifice during those long long days, made me resolve to be more like her; and I prayed God fervently to make me so. I saw too, for all Aunt Jael's provocations and harsh treatment, that I had been wrong and wicked. I numbered my sins one by one and repented of each and all. A miracle had been wrought to save me: the finger of the Almighty had sketched in letters of flame the reminder that HE SAW ME. He had intervened miraculously and directly, to secure my spiritual state. I determined to be worthy of this signal proof of God's special favour. By a sacrifice not easy to exaggerate I managed to see that Aunt Jael might have been God's "instrument" throughout: perhaps the idea was more possible since now, during my recovery, she treated me far better than at any time before: kept a sharp hold on her tongue, indulged in no recriminations or abuse, and bought me a bottle of barley-sugar. I saw nothing more of that curious mocking smile that had helped to haunt me into delirium. Once or twice I thought she had a guilty look, especially once when Grandmother made some reference to the plum-jar. Was it possible? Never. For if so, how? No; it was the Lord's doing.

Mrs. Cheese had left. I gathered from Grandmother that there had been a stormy scene, Mrs. Cheese accusing Aunt Jael of directly and deliberately causing my illness, and Aunt Jael ordering Mrs. Cheese out of the house then and there. She refused to go till she had helped my Grandmother to see me through the worst days.

In the stead of Mrs. Cheese arose a dim unapostolic succession of fickle and fleeting bondswomen. Most of them were Saints. All of them quarrelled with Aunt Jael. Their average sojourn with us was perhaps ten months, which in those stable and old-fashioned days would equal (say) two weeks in this era of quick-change kitchen-maids and kaleidoscopic cooks.

There was Prudence, rightly so-called, for although she skimmed each morning the milk the dairyman had left overnight, she cautiously concealed her jugful of cream in the remotest corner of the least-used scullery cupboard. Aunt Jael, however, was on the watch. She thought the milk woefully thin, and Prudence's explanations still thinner. Then one morning she found the prudent one busy at early dawn, spoon in hand, her little jug half-full; caught in the very act.

There were Charlotte, Annie, Miriam, Ethel, May, Jane, Sarah, Bessie, Ann, Mary, the Elizas (two), Kate, Keturah, Deborah, Selina, and Sukie: I am not sure of their strict order of precedence. Nor do I remember their life with us half so well as the manner of their leaving it. The climax came variously. Charlotte told me what I now know to have been dirty stories. Annie told Aunt Jael herself a very dirty story indeed—precisely what she thought of her (Aunt Jael); Miriam spat in her (Aunt Jael's) porridge, Kate when attacked with a shovel hit back with a floury rolling-pin, Bessie stole a shilling, Ann (Anglican) giggled during prayers, Jane—or may be this was Sarah—brought unsaved "followers" into the house, Selina did no work; one of the Elizas swore and the other was a Baptist. May and Keturah were fetched away by indignant parents. Deborah disappeared. One only died a natural death—Mary, my namesake, who left us to get married.

CHAPTER VIII: SATAN COMES TO TAWBOROUGH

"Yes," said Miss Glory shaking her head gravely one Tuesday afternoon. "I fear 'tis true. Satan hisself is coming to this town."

"Oh," said Aunt Jael, "I should have thought he was here already."

"The ole Devil hisself," continued Glory, staring far into space and ignoring Aunt Jael.

"Now what do you think you mean?" snapped my Great-Aunt.

"She means the ole Devil hisself, which is what she said," interposed Salvation, hoping to raise ill feeling.

"Peace, sister! All I means is this 'ere. God A'mighty meant us to travel on our two legs or by the four legs of four-footed beasts. 'Tis only the Devil as can want to go any other way. We know 'ausses, an' donkeys, and mules too for the matter o' that, but when it comes to carriages and truck loads o' folk being pulled along as quick as a flash of lightning by an ole artifishul animal belchin' up steam and fire, like the n'orrible pit it is, 'tis some'at a thought too queer for an ole Christian woman like myself and for God A'mighty too I should think. No wonder there are orwis actsodents—act o' God, I calls 'un. I've heard tell of these 'ere railway trains in vorrin parts, but I never did think we should see 'un in North Devun. But 'tis true I fear; Salvation went across the bridge to see with 'er own two eyes, and saw a pair o' lines as the wicked thing runs along on, and bills and notices all braggin' about it. There didn't used to be no sich things, and there didn't ought to be now; 'tis all the Devil's works and there'll be a judgment on them as 'elps 'em, a swift an' n'orrible judgment, you mark my words."

"Stuff and nonsense!" cried my Aunt. "'Ee may both like to know that I sold that field o' mine, down beyond the meadow, to this railway company. There! Got a middling good price for it too, as all the Meeting will soon learn from yer two wagging tongues. Judgment indeed! Poor ignorant old fool. 'Tis a sensible invention, and the Lord permits it. Be you daft? 'Ee just show me a scripture that's against railway trains!"

"An' 'ee just show me one that's for 'un!" cried Salvation.

"I'm sorry, Jael," said Glory, ignoring her sister as always, "but I assure 'ee I didn't know when I spake they solemn words. 'Tis a very seldom thing for me to speak out, but I feels deep. Even if 'tissen the spirit of Satan that's moving in these 'ere railway trains, what's the good of 'un anyway? Will the worrld be any happier, will there be a single sinner the more as repenteth? Will there be less poor folk in the worrld and less souls going to 'Ell? You wake up in a hundred years and see if these 'ere railway trains 'ave brought the kingdom 'o God on earth! There's no two ways about it, the worrld is getting wickeder, and these new invenshuns a sign. Things bain't what they used to be, and they'm gettin' worse."

"That field, Sister Jael," added Salvation, with gleaming teeth, "that field you sold was a field of blood. Alcedama! There'll be a judgment, a n'orrible judgment, you mark my words."

* * * * * * *

A few weeks later Aunt Jael heaped coals of fire by asking the Sisters to accompany us to the official ceremony of the Devil's arrival in Tawborough. All, I suppose, who had sold land to the Company were invited to this function. Aunt Jael had a white ticket giving right of admission to the uncovered platform at which the Devil would draw up—"the Company's railway station" as the ticket grandly called it. It was a preliminary trip from Crediton to Tawborough, before the general opening for traffic: a kind of dress rehearsal.

The day, July 12th, 1854, stands clear in my memory. It was the chief purely secular event of my childhood, the only time before I was a grown woman that I went to any assembling together of people other than the Lord's. I marvelled to see how numerous they were, and I remember the dim suspicion that haunted me throughout the day, and never completely left me afterwards, that perhaps, despite Brother Brawn, not quite all of them were being 'urld to 'Ell. They did not seem aware of it, and the moments when I did not doubt their fate were filled with pity.

The day was to be treated as a holiday. Glory was persuaded by Aunt Jael to announce that there would be no school. I was up betimes, wakened by the bells of the parish church, which rang a merry peal, and by the firing of guns. It was one of those fresh glorious summer mornings which promise delight, and do not leave the memory. Soon after breakfast the Clinkers arrived in a carriage. Glory with brand new bacon-rind strings to her bonnet, Salvation ominously cheerful, confident of some awful disaster. Grandmother, Aunt Jael and I were ready waiting, and the five of us drove to the scene of action. I felt elated and important, perched up on the box, as we drove slowly along streets thronged with crowds in their Sunday best. Every one appeared in high spirits; I conjectured that those who shared Miss Glory's gloomy views must all have stayed at home. The crowds became denser as we approached the railway station, a kind of long wooden platform with a high covering. It looked like a very odd top-heavy sort of shed. A few feet below the platform and close beside it ran two parallel metal lines on which the Thing would arrive. A high triumphal arch covered with green-stuff and laurel leaves and bedecked with flags, the first I had ever seen, English, French and Turkish ("Our Allies": There was a war, said some one), spanned the line. The platform was crowded with people, and very gay and worldly they looked. Our little company of Saints tried to cling together, and I held tight to my Grandmother's hand, but the crowd was too close all round for us to look as separate as we tried to feel. Quite near was a body of gentlemen dressed in ermine and rich surprising costumes and furs and wigs and cocked hats, and holding mysterious gold and silver weapons. Some, said my Grandmother, were the Mayor and Corporation, others were Oddfellows and Freemasons. I had not the least idea what these words might mean, and was too busy staring to ask which were which. My heart was filled with envy of those portly gentlemen and their gorgeous robes; a hankering envy as real as any sentiment I have ever felt.

As the time of arrival drew near the excitement and jostling on the platform increased. One lady fainted; "A jidgment," commented Miss Salvation.

I overheard some saying the train would never arrive, others that It would be hours or even days late; others again that It would arrive to time and confound all doubters. Excitement rose to a pitch of frenzy when two galloping horsemen drew up at the platform and announced that within five minutes It would be here. Only half of It however would arrive, as the back portion had somehow got detached and left behind at Umberleigh: "The Devil losing his tail," said Miss Salvation. When about two minutes later a tall gentleman near us shouted excitedly that he sighted It afar off, there was such a tiptoeing and straining and squashing and peering that I could have cried with vexation at being so small. My Grandmother lifted me for a moment, and I had a perfect view of the monstrous beast as it drew near. The first carriage was belching fire and smoke from a funnel—just as Glory had said—and the carriages behind it, brown scaly looking things, were like the links in a hell-dragon's tail. The fear seized me for a swift moment that perhaps after all she was right. Then the people broke into deafening cheers and hurrahs, and waved handkerchiefs and funny little flags. Aunt Jael and Grandmother stood impassive, but excited a little in spite of themselves. Glory and Salvation set their mouths, and determined to hold out. As the great engine puffed past us I was trembling with excitement. It was the purest magic.

When the Thing stopped we were about in the middle of its length, opposite the second carriage, or link of the tail. We were all pressed back to make room for the great people who were emerging. The majority were gentlemen, a few grandly and mysteriously dressed like ours, more Corporations and Oddfellows and Freemasons I supposed, but most of them, including some very angry-looking gentlemen, whispered to be His Worship the Mayor of Exeter and the Aldermen of that ancient city, in plain clothes. Alas, all their toggery had been left behind in the back half of the train which had been shed at Umberleigh.

A very stylish gentleman dressed in black came forward in front of everybody else: Chairman of the Company, I heard whispered—whatever that might mean. He shook hands with several of our dressed-up gentlemen, and then one of the latter, a fat man with a wig and white curls, read to the stylish gentleman from a long roll of paper a very long and very dry speech congratulating him on bringing the railway train to Tawborough and describing his person in very flattering terms. The stylish gentleman made a speech (without roll of paper) in response; it was much shorter, but about as dry.

Then some of the dressed-up members of our side came forward in a body and poured out corn and oil and wine, very solemnly. When the wine had been spilled, a solemn man dressed like a high priest (the Provincial Grand Chaplain of the Order of Freemasons, I discover forty years later from the files of a local paper) lifted up his hands and prayed over the Oblation. So people who were not Saints prayed!

The next thing I remember was our dressed-up people and the visitors moving off the platform to form themselves into a procession to march round the town, and all the rest of us repairing to witness it. In the stampede that ensued Aunt Jael tripped over a beam that was lying on the platform, and went flying.

"A jidgment," began Salvation, triumphant at last; when she tripped on the beam and went flying too—which was a "jidgment."

We were only just in time to get a good view of the procession, as it took Aunt Jael and Miss Salvation some time to limp along. All the Mayors and Oddfellows and Corporations and Freemasons were there, carrying symbols and rods and devices; there were soldiers, Mounted Rifles and officers gay with swords; shipwrights in white trousers, and clergymen in black; uninteresting looking people in ordinary clothes who had no more right to be there, I thought, than I had; and at least four bands of music. The glamour of martial music and brilliant costumes raised me to a pitch of ecstasy and envy; from that moment blare and pomp filled a great place in my hankerings and hopes.

After the procession we took a walk round the streets, which were crowded with people from all North Devon. There were flags at nearly every window. A great triumphal arch was erected in the middle of the bridge inscribed "Success to the North Devon Railway." The High Street was one series of festoons, from upper storey windows of one side to upper storey windows of the other. One said "God Save the Queen," another "Prosperity to our Town," and another which puzzled me a good deal, hanging from the windows of what I now know to have been the local newspaper office, declared in huge red bunting capitals

THE PRESS,
THE RAILROAD OF CIVILIZATION.

We got home to dinner tired and excited. Glory and Salvation left to attend a Tea in the North Walk given by the tradespeople to six hundred poor people, amongst whom the Clinkers had hastened to number themselves.

"It may be the Lord's way after all," said Miss Glory. "God moves in a mysterious way."

Aunt Jael and Grandmother had been asked to take tickets (not gratis) to a great banquet in the Corn Market, but whether for economy's or godliness' sake, decided not to go. I gather from the old local paper before me that they did not miss much; for despite the giant "railway cake," a wonderful affair covered with viaducts and trains and bridges all made of icing sugar, and despite the vicar who ably "performed the devotions of the table," the dinner is candidly described as "poor" and the caterer roundly trounced for her failure.

Soon the railway passed into the realm of ordinary accepted things. The Meeting was at first a little exercised about its attitude. A few, including Brother Brawn, agreed with Glory and Salvation that it was the Devil's works. The majority, including my Grandmother, took the pious and common-sense view that since the Lord permitted the thing it must be His Will, and prayed that he would bless and sanctify it to His own use and glory.

CHAPTER IX: AND SO DOES UNCLE SIMEON

August the First, 1855, was the seventieth birthday of Aunt Jael.

Moreover, as the Old Maids of Tawborough were seven, six other ladies completed their seventieth year on this self-same day, to wit: Miss Sarah Tombstone, Miss Keturah Crabb, Miss Lucy Clarke, Miss Fanny Baker, with the Misses Glory and Salvation Clinker. When Aunt Jael decided on the astonishing plan of a great dinner party to celebrate the day, by the very nature of things the Other Six figured at the head of her list of prospective guests.

Who else should be invited? This question was lengthily discussed with Grandmother, discussed of course in Aunt Jael's way; i. e. she decreed, Grandmother agreed. The party was to be a representative one, with a worldly element and a spiritual element, a rich element and a poor element, a this-world element and a next-world element. There were four main divisions: first, the Other Six; second The Saints (selected); third, old friends; and fourth—a grudging fourth—relations.

Of the Saints, Aunt Jael invited Mr. Pentecost Dodderidge, the Lord's instrument for her own spiritual regeneration forty years before; Brother Brawn and Brother and Mrs. Quappleworthy; and Brother Quick, he who had once proposed to young Jael Vickary, then the Belle of Tawborough—though Grandmother always averred that his shot at Aunt Jael was at best a ricochet.

After much discussion and more prayer, the Lord guided Aunt Jael's mind to but one solitary Old Friend; a Mr. Royle, churchwarden at the Parish Church, the only friend dating from Jael Vickary's young unsaved days with whom she had kept up, if indeed decorous chats in the market when they chanced to meet might be so considered; for he never came to the house.

Relations were a simpler problem. There were no close ones except the elder brother of my Great-Aunt and Grandmother, my unknown Uncle John, who was too rheumaticky to travel down from London even if Aunt Jael had had a mind to invite him or he to accept her invitation; and my mother's sister and Grandmother's only surviving child, Aunt Martha of Torribridge, with her husband, Uncle Simeon Greeber, whom I had never seen; there was some feud between Aunt Jael and Uncle Simeon, dating from before I can remember, sufficiently formidable to prevent his crossing our threshold for many years, although he lived but eight miles away. Aunt Martha, however, paid us fairly frequent visits. She was a pale thin, indeterminate-looking woman, who impressed me so little that I was often unable to conjure up her face in my imagination; a vague, tired face, in which Grandmother's gentleness had run to feebleness. When her husband was unpleasant with her, which according to Aunt Jael was pretty often, she submitted feebly; when Aunt Jael spent the whole of one of her afternoon visits to Bear Lawn abusing her, she listened feebly. For this one occasion, however, Aunt Jael decided to sacrifice her dislikes to that ancient law by which the family must be represented at all major festivals and feeds. For some time, too, Aunt Martha had been insisting, with all the feebleness of which she was capable, on Mr. Greeber's longing for a reconciliation with his revered aunt by marriage. So he too was invited. The only other askable relative was a niece-in-law of my Grandmother's, the daughter of old Captain Lee's only sister, now a fat widow of forty-five, Mrs. Paradine Pratt. She lived over at Croyde, on three hundred pounds a year of her own; was a Congregationalist, and fond of cats.

The final list thus comprised: Old Maids of Tawborough (including the hostess), seven; Saints, five; Old Friend, one; Relations, three. Total with Grandmother and myself, eighteen. Never before had such a multitude assembled within our doors.

The problems of space and food were next envisaged. The sacred front-room was to be thrown open; there the guests would be entertained before and after the meal. Dinner would of course be served in the back-parlour; by putting the two spare leaves into the table and tacking a smaller table on at one end, Aunt Jael calculated that there would be adequate eating-space and breathing-space for all.

"'Twill be a tight fit though. You, child, will have your meal in the kitchen."

"Then so will I," said my Grandmother.

Aunt Jael was taken aback. She was silent for a moment, casting about for another unreasonable suggestion with which Grandmother would have to disagree; the old trick by which she always strove to pretend that the guilt of cantankerousness was my Grandmother's.

"Glory, of course, will be in her usual stool in the corner."

"Now, sister, don't be foolish—"

"There you go! Disagreeing with everything I say. Whose party is it, mine or yours?..."

Miriam—Miriam who used the Great One's porridge plate as spittoon—was our cook at the time. Sister Briggs, humble little Brother Briggs' humbler little wife, was called in for the day itself as extra hand. "Proud to do it, I know," said Aunt Jael, "and glad of the meal she'll get and the pickings she'll carry away." Aunt Jael held with no nonsense of class-equality, no "all women-are-equal" twaddle. Spiritually the Briggses ranked far above unsaved emperors, or kings who broke not bread. Spiritually, but not socially. So while Brother Brawn and Sister Quappleworthy were summoned to the seats of the mighty in the parlour, Sister Briggs, their co-heiress in salvation, came to the scullery to wash-up at the price of her dinner, a silver shilling and pickings.

Vast preparations went forward: a record Friday's marketing, a record scrubbing and cleaning, a record bustle and fuss.

The great day dawned. Both armchairs had been removed from the back-parlour to the front-parlour to increase the table-space in one and the sitting accommodation in the other. In her familiar chair, therefore, though in an unfamiliar setting, my Great-Aunt sat enthroned: robed in her best black silk, crowned with a splendid cap all of white lace and blue velvet ribbon that I had not seen before, and armed with that stout sceptre I had seen (and felt) from my youth up.

The first arrivals were Aunt Martha and her husband. They came over early from Torribridge, and had arranged to spend the whole day and stay the night with us. I was curious to see Mr. Greeber, as I had never seen an uncle before. Aunt Jael's dislike of him whetted my curiosity, and also of course prejudiced me in his favour. Any such preconceived sympathy fled from me the moment I set eyes on him. Can I have foreseen, half-consciously, that this was the creature to be responsible for the wretchedest moments and the worst emotions of my life? Anyhow, I remember with photographic accuracy every look, every gesture, as he minced through the doorway behind Aunt Martha, springing softly up and down on the ball of the toe, moving quite noiselessly. He was a thin little man, narrow shouldered, small-made in every limb. His face was pallid, without a trace of blood showing in the cheeks. He had a mass of curious honey-coloured hair, that you would have thought picturesque, if it had crowned the head of a pretty woman or a lovely boy. Of the same hue was his pointed little beard. His mouth I did not specially notice till he began speaking, when he moistened his lips with his tongue between every few words and showed how pale and thin and absolutely bloodless they were. His eyes changed a good deal. For a moment, as when they rested on mine and read there my instant dislike, they answered with a moment's stare of hard cruelty, such as blue eyes alone can give; most of the time they rolled shiftily about, chiefly heavenward. His gestures were exaggerated; he bent his head forward, poked it absurdly to one side, and gave a sickly smile—intended to be winning—whenever he spoke. With his soft overdone politeness, his pointed little beard, his gestures, he looked like the traditional Frenchman of caricature; except for his eyes, which whether for the moment cruel or pious, had nothing in common with that amiable creature. He was unhealthy and unpleasant in some undefined way new to my experience. Aunt Jael had a sound judgment after all.

He advanced to greet her, oozingly.

"Good day, good day, dear Miss Vickary. One rejoices that the Lord has watched over you these three-score years and ten; one is thankful, thankful indeed. M'yes. Your kindness, too, in extending one your invitation—believe me, one will not readily forget it! And you too, dear Mrs. Lee, one is pleased to see you, to be sure. So this is the little one! One is well pleased to meet one's little niece."

He chucked me under the chin, saw the expression in my eyes, and never tried the playful experiment again. It was hate at first sight, and he knew it.

Aunt Jael's voice sounded gruff—and honest—enough after the unctuous flow. "Well, good day to 'ee, Simeon Greeber, and make yourself welcome." (Meaning: "You know I dislike you and always shall. Still, now that for once in a way you are in my house, I shall try to put up with you.")

A slight pause, while his eyes wandered piously round the room, encountering everywhere spears, clubs, tomahawks, idols, charms. "What interesting objects! Trophies of the Gospel, one may surmise! Why, surely not, surely not, can that great heathen image in the corner be the same, the selfsame one, as was brought back by one's dear late cousin, Immanuel Greeber, Immanuel Greeber of Tiverton, one's well-loved cousin Immanuel?"

Benamuckee stared impassively. "Yes," said Aunt Jael. "It is the same."

"Ah, what a symbol of folly, what a sign of darkness! The field of foreign labour is, of course, your own special interest in the Lord's work, both yours and dear Mrs. Lee's, is it not? That is well known."

"Yes," replied my Grandmother, "as you know, the child here is dedicated to the Lord's work among the heathen." I puffed inwardly.

"What an honour, ah, what an honour! For oneself, one confesses, the home field comes nearest to one's heart; to one's earnest, if humble endeavours. M'yes. There is sad darkness far away, in the heathen continents and pagan isles, one knows, one knows: but here in England among one's nominal Christians, there is, alas, greater darkness still. Ah, these half-believers, these almost-persuaded Christians!—Once one was one oneself. So one knows. One was a Baptist, as you know, dear Sisters; one hardened one's heart against the ministrations of the Saints. Then one blessed day, the scales fell from one's eyes—one saw the error of one's ways—and one joined the one true flock."

I disliked him curiously as he murmured and whispered away in a soft treacly flow punctuated only by sticky lip-moistenings and heavenward sniffs; this miracle-man who never ever used the best beloved pronoun of all the human race.

His utterance was cut short by new arrivals. Grandmother received them in the hall, saw to the hat and coat doffing, and ushered them into the throne-room. I noted the slight variations in my Great-Aunt's manner as she motioned the different guests to chairs and accepted their congratulations and good wishes. With Mr. Pentecost Dodderidge she was regal.

"Thank 'ee, we are old friends, you and I. Yes, thanks be to the Lord. I'm well enough. And you? How are 'ee?"

"I am burdened this morning," he said, with that kingly glance all round him to see that all his subjects were attentive, which we knew to herald some pearl of godly epigram. "Yes, I am burdened this morning."

"Burdened?" echoed Aunt Jael.

"Burdened?" echoed my Grandmother.

"Yes, dear sisters. 'He daily loadeth us with benefits.' Psalm sixty-eight, nineteen."

This was the old patriarch's immemorial trick: to make some statement that was certain to provoke query, and then to explain its apparent paradox by swift quotation from the word of God. A later generation might think his method crude, his texts subtly irrelevant; but there is no question that the Saints, including my Grandmother and Great-Aunt, admired the godly wit and treasured all the texts. So when "the pilgrim patriarch of Tawborough" came up to me in the corner from which I was staring at him, I felt a high sense of pleasure and importance.

"Well, well, and how is this little sapling in the Lord's vineyard?" Paternally, pontifically, he patted my head.

"Well enough, thank 'ee," replied my Grandmother for me, "but not always a good little handmaiden for Him. She likes better to waste her time sitting and doing nothing than mending her socks or studying the Word. She could testify by a happier frame of mind and busier fingers in the house and by speaking more freely of the things of the Lord. Would you not urge her, Brother, even at this tender age to do something for the Master?"

"No, I would not." Query invited, epigram looming ahead.

"Then what would you do?" asked my Grandmother.

"I would recommend her to do 'all things' for the Master. Titus, two, nine."

Mr. Royle stumped in, a fat short old man, with a cheerful unsaintly countenance and a general air of wealth and prosperity that I could put down to nothing definite except a heavy gold watch chain which spanned the upper slopes of his enormous stomach. His only rival in this particular quarter of the body was Mrs. Paradine Pratt. These two alone, who wandered wearily outside the fold in the darkness of Congregationalism and the Church of England, had contrived to put on plenteous flesh. Was there some subtle hostility, I recollect asking myself, between corpulence and conversion?

The before-dinner conversation was preoccupied and scanty. Brother Quappleworthy came alone, as Sister Quappleworthy was "not—ah—too well."

The company repaired to the dining-room. Mr. Pentecost Dodderidge pronounced the Blessing, and we all sat down to do justice to that mighty meal. How odd this great assembly seemed in our austere room, now for once looking reasonably well filled; I could see that the experience was as odd to most of the guests as it was to me. Great feasts were not within the ordered course of their spare and godly lives. There was a certain constraint around the table, quite unmistakable, marked by loud and sudden silences.

This is how we sat:

(Note that the masculine element was stronger, both in quality and quantity, at Aunt Jael's end of the table than at ours. I was put on the music stool, by my Grandmother's side at the doorway end of the table, flanked by Glory on the left. Salvation had pleaded for a place by dear beloved Brother Brawn; Aunt Jael condescended so far as to place them nearly opposite each other, but Brother Brawn was too nervous of his exposed right flank to allow his utterances to be a feast of good things. He could not forget the piece Miss Crabb had—long ago—bitten out of his beard.)

It was a royal spread. In the old West Country fashion, of course—no new-fangled foreign nonsense or London messes. First appeared a great roast goose, a very queen of geese, turning the scale at fifteen pounds if an ounce. Her entourage included green peas, a vegetable marrow with white sauce, gravy, and an onion stuffing beyond the power of my poor pen to praise. Aunt Jael carved the monster, apportioning of course the choicest tit-bits to herself, the next choicest to Mr. Royle and Pentecost Dodderidge, the next choicest to Brother Quappleworthy, and so on; the quality of your portion varying with your position in Aunt Jael's esteem. Thus I had a rather gristly piece of leg, and Miss Salvation some scraggy side-issues with that part more politely imagined in the mind's eye than mentioned on paper. The second course was a great squab pie, made on Aunt Jael's own recipe: slices of apple and second-cooked mutton alternately, six layers deep, a sprinkling of shredded onion, with plenty of salt and Demerara sugar, pepper and cloves, a covering of delicious pie-crust. The third meat course (cold) comprised a fine ham and one of Mrs. Cheese's special beef and ham rolls covered with bread crumbs and as big as a large polony: with pickled onions (Aunt Jael's) and pickled plums (Grandmother's), to help them down. For Sweets, which honest folk call pudding, you could choose between dear little cherry tartlets, made in our best shell-shaped patty-pans, all crinkled-edged; or stewed raspberries and black currants with junket and Devonshire cream, this fourfold alternative being my choice and (to this day) my own private notion of what they eat in heaven. On, on the banquet rolled: Cheddar cheese, biscuits, nuts, pomegranates, and home-made apple ginger. In contrast with Aunt Jael's closeness and our every-day plain living, this sardanapalan spread was the more sensational. The drinks were sherry, raspberry vinegar and water.

My Great-Aunt was in a rarely serene mood, enthroned far away at the head of the table, with white-haired Pentecost on her right hand and bald-headed Mr. Royle on her left. Salvation chewed enjoyingly; the fork method of picking your teeth at table struck me, uninstructed as I was, as somehow unsuitable for an important social gathering. She remarked in a noisy whisper to Glory that it was just as well we'd begun at last as she was feeling "turrible leer."[1] Mrs. Paradine panted as she ate; her damp and diminutive handkerchief was applied incessantly, often only just in time to prevent a trickling on to her immense bombazine bosom. I spied Uncle Simeon with a higher quality of curiosity. He knew I was watching him. In return he began craftily eyeing me when I was looking elsewhere: I pretended I was unaware of his scrutiny. In this specially feminine habit I was already an adept; and I feel sure I deceived Uncle Simeon, who stared his fill. When, however, I took my turn at staring, and he tried the same pretence, he failed utterly to deceive me, for I could see his eyelids twitch, while the faintest flush came to his pallid cheeks.

I cannot pretend to remember much of the conversation, though I could invent it and be near enough the truth. The awkward silences were still apparent. My explanation of it is this: that everybody present (for all but two were Saints) was quite unused to meet together except for godly discoursings. Though it was the creed they believed (and practised) to testify of holy things in season and out of season, yet all dimly felt that today was somehow exceptional, that it was neither necessary nor suitable to preach to each other over roast goose and squab pie Christ and Him crucified. Yet what other topics had they? Hence the uneasy quiet, which the clatter of knives and forks and the orchestration accompanying Miss Glory's curious methods of absorbing nourishment only seemed to heighten. What a slobbering and sipping and a spluttering and a splashing! The liquid mush consisting of tiny morsels of goose-meat (chopped up by Grandmother) and scraps of soft bread mixed with stuffing and sauce and soaked in gravy, which she was now administering to herself with her wooden spoon, offered good scope for her talent; though being of a greater consistency than her usual goat's milk and rusks, it did not allow her to display her supreme effects. Even so, she made herself heard by her far-away hostess. A warning look shot from the table-head:—"Quieter there, or to the corner yer go!" it said.

For a moment Glory subsided, but this made the general silence only more obvious and painful. Aunt Jael realized that though good eating is the object of a dinner, good talk is the condition of a successful one. She stooped to conquer, broke the last canon of hostship, and as the great squab pie was placed before her, praised it blatantly. The success was instantaneous. Echoes of praise rang up the table. "Ay indeed!—a fine one that!—you're right, Sister Vickary!"—and what not. Two tributes distinguished themselves, as you might expect.

"There's squab pie and squab pie," said Miss Salvation. "This is squab pie," and, last of all, when every one else had tired of eulogy, the still small voice: "One wonders if one ever tasted anything one liked so well."

Tongues were at last set wagging. Different recipes were discussed and their respective merits compared. Some thought the mutton should be fresh, others that second-cooked gave the best flavour; some that moist white sugar cooked better than Demerara, others that you should use hardly any sugar at all, as a squab pie wasn't a sweet pie after all, now was it? Some thought it was, however: the idea of cooking apples without sugar, mutton or no mutton! Then the puff-paste issue was raised, and here the gentlemen joined in, as this was a question of taste rather than technique. Gradually the conversation veered to the wider topic of food in general; and before long every one present was exchanging tender confidences in that most intimate form of self-revelation: "one's" favourite things to eat. Even Grandmother joined in. I alone said nothing, being under strictest orders "to be seen and not heard." (I felt the restraint keenly, for I was proud of my own catalogue, viz:—Devonshire cream, whortleberry jam, mussels, tripe and treacle; then pancakes, potato-pie (the browned part), sage stuffing, seed-cake, junket, crab, apple-dumpling, bread-and-butter-pudding, especially the "outside," brawn, cockles, and black-currant jam.)

I must have been reflecting on my own pets rather than hearkening to the praise of other people's, for the conversation had changed, and they were discussing "degrees." One of my favourite psalms, the 121st, I will lift up mine eyes to the hills, was described in the Bible as "A Song of Degrees," and I had always wondered what they were.

"Degrees, degrees? That means puttin' letters after yer name, does it? Wull, then"—Salvation fumbled in her reticule, always a veritable mine of papers, letters, photographs of herself, and other pièces d'identité (as though she lived under the fear of perpetual arrest) and produced triumphantly an addressed envelope—"There now!" It was passed round that all might read this legend:

Miss Salvation Clinker,
Sinner Saved by Grace,
High Street,
Tawborough,
N. Devon.

"What splendid testimony for the postman, zes I, what splendid testimony for the postman!"

"But—" Brother Quappleworthy alone dared a "but," for had not he alone among the Saints achieved the honour of putting real letters after your name? He smiled; with maybe a dash of quiet superiority, with just a seasoning of annoyance, just a nice Christian seasoning, mark you, nothing more. "But—is that a real degree, sister?"

"Rale degree? 'Course 'tis: S.S.G.—Sinner Saved by Grace. None o' yer cheap truck: S.S.G.!"

"Yes, yes; but like B.A. for instance, dear sister?"

"B.A.? I'm a B.A. too."

"You a B.A.?" echoed voices.

"Yes: Born Again!" shouting.

"Quite so, quite so, please God so are we all. But I am talking of earthly degrees."

"Are yer? Wull, I'm a-talking uv 'eavenly ones!"

"There's B.B. too," put in little Lucy Clarke, nervously seeking to pour oil on troubled waters, "two B's arter your name, I think it is, tho' mebbe I'm wrong."

"Two B's or not two B's!" observed Mr. Royle, and laughed loudly when he found that no one else did. I wondered why. I doubt if any one present saw the point except my Great-Aunt and Grandmother and Brother Quappleworthy. It was many years before I did.

"Good, sir, good," said the latter worldlily, "a quotation from the works of Shakespeare, if I mistake not."

"Shakespeare!" shrieked Miss Salvation, as though uttering some lewd word, "I'm surprised at 'ee, 'avin' the chick to mention such a sinner's name in a Christian 'ouse; an 'eathen play-actin' sinner, now wallerin' in everlastin' torment for his sins."

"How do you know he is?" asked my Grandmother quietly.

"And 'ow du 'ee know 'e isn't? A Papis' too."

Blessed are the peacemakers, so Lucy Clarke tried again.

"I don't think 'tis B.B. at all after all; 'tis D.D., two D's arter your name in a manner o' spaikin'."

"Yes, it's D.D.," said Aunt Jael. "All the big preachers in the Establishment print it after their names; not but what their preaching is poor enough. Letters after your name don't put either a tongue into your head or the knowledge of God into your heart. I've no patience with D.D.'s."

"None," echoed the table.

"Not so," corrected Mr. Pentecost Dodderidge. "It is a great pity there are so few D.D.'s."

"Surely not!" exclaimed the table, awaiting pearls.

"Yes, we want more Down in the Dust. Psalm one hundred and nineteen, verse twenty-five. Then we would also have more 'quickened according to Thy Word.'"

A pause, forced by the awkward finality of the patriarch's utterance.

"Er—let me see," said Mr. Royle to Brother Quappleworthy, "you are an M.A. of the University of Oxford, are you not, sir?"

"Yes," was the reply, spoken with just a seasoning of pardonable pride, just a Christian seasoning, mark you, nothing more. "Yes" (confidentially) "as a matter of fact I am. I took my degree, second-class honours, in the classics: 'Greats' as we say—"

"Did yer?" interrogated Salvation (for pride is a deadly sin and a weed that must be checked, lest it grow apace). "Wull, I took my degree in summat greater, in God's great Scheme o' Salvation, and I passed with first-class honners, glory be! Unuvursity uv Oxvurrd eh? My schoolin' 'as been in the Unuvursity uv God!"

* * * * * * *

After that I recollect nothing clearly till all the guests, save Uncle Simeon and Aunt Martha, were gone, and late in the evening we sat talking in the unfamiliar idol-haunted dusk of the front parlour. I can feel again as I write the heat of that stuffy August night, and hear Aunt Jael's and Uncle Simeon's voices engaged in the talk that is stamped indelibly on my mind. I recall the scene most intimately when the same external circumstances recur. The heavy-laden atmosphere of a hot August evening, at that still murmurous moment when twilight is yielding to night—the smell, the touch, the impalpable feel of the atmosphere—always brings back to me every phase and pulse of my feelings as I sat listening to the warfare of deep raucous voice and soft honeyed one. The memory of the senses far transcends the memory of the mind. Memory in its most intimate possessions is physical.

Though mental too. In this particular instance, quite apart from any physical aid to memory that atmosphere brings, I remember, verbally, almost all that was said. It is odd that while for stretches of whole months I can often fill in but the dimmest background of my early days, at other times I retain the fullest details of a long and intricate conversation, with the gestures of the speakers and the very words they used. The explanation is to be found partly, I think, in the extreme monotony of my life and the uncommonly vivid impression which any break in the monotony always made; so that this record tends to be a stringing-together of the odd and outstanding events rather than an even and continuous narration of my "early life"; for it was a life of landmarks. But the chief explanation of the uncanny degree to which I remember certain particular scenes lies in my nightly "rehearsals." If there had been any scene or words of special interest in the day's round—if I had observed a new phenomenon (such as a Madonna or a gold watch-chain)—if I had heard a new word (like University) or had new light shed on an old one (like Degrees)—if in short the day had yielded any new fact or idea, the same night saw it deliberately stored in my mind; a treasure-house—a lumber-room—which stood open to all comers. Every night, as soon as I was in bed and my Grandmother had blown out the candle and closed the door behind her, I began. I thought my way through the day, from the moment I had risen onwards. Every new notion or notable event, I recalled, re-lived, and received into the fellowship of things I knew, felt and remembered; into myself. I had also weekly, monthly and yearly revisions.

This seventieth birthday of Aunt Jael's was a red-letter day. My emotions as I lay awake watching with memory's eye that curious dinner party, with its wealth of new food, new faces, new situations, new sensations and new talk, were of the same order as those of a playgoer who lives over in his mind the pleasures of a new and brilliant drama he has witnessed. New persons and new conversations were my favourite acquisitions; these were in the strict sense dramatic, and they approached most nearly the other habit of my inner life—my visualizings and imaginings—of which indeed they furnished the raw material. I would only memorize conversations from the point at which they began to interest me; hence, even when I remember them best, they begin suddenly, and causelessly.

So it was with the conversation on that memorable evening. I fancy Aunt Jael and Uncle Simeon had already been talking for some time—probably on the things of the Lord, which were not new and not dramatic—but I recall nothing until Uncle Simeon was well set in a review of his life; his holy, if humble life.

"M'yes, ah yes, the Lord found it good to try one's faith; from the very day on which one saw the error of one's ways, and the scales fell from one's eyes, and one closed with God's gracious offer, from that very day the Lord found it good to extend His hand in chastisement and to visit one with trials and afflictions. One bowed one's head: but it was a sore trial for one's faith, one's earnest, if humble, faith. First one's sister passed away, one's dear sister Rosa. Then came one's business troubles, one's ill health, one's grave illness. Last of all one's dear old father went before—"

"Your brother too," interrupted my Great-Aunt. "You don't mention him; and he was the best of the Greebers, from all accounts."

"Ah, surely not, surely not?" ignoring the main point of the interruption, "what of Immanuel Greeber, who gave you these glorious trophies of the field of missionary labour, one's well-loved cousin Immanuel?"

"There was some mystery about his death," pursued she, ignoring red-herring missionaries. "They never really knew how he died. Immanuel told me. He went to lie down in his bed one afternoon, saying he felt sick, and within the hour he was dead."

"Ah, yes," sighed Uncle Simeon, passing his hand over his brow in anguish, "one had not spoken of him; one could not; one's love was too tender. Heart-failure, one thought oneself. M'yes." His head m'yessed sadly to and fro.

"More like something he'd been eating," suggested my Grandmother.

"Too sudden for that," objected Aunt Jael. "No bad food could kill you so sudden. 'Twas something a deal quicker than bad food; more mysterious, folk said."

"Poison," said I.

I was staggered at the sound of my own voice. All day I had been mute, observing so obediently Aunt Jael's "To be seen and not heard" mandate that she had been almost annoyed. Listening was more remunerative than talking; it yielded the wealth for my lonely talks with myself. I think it was that in my interest in this mysterious death I forgot I was not alone; and so uttered aloud the word "Poison" that leapt absurdly to my mind.

The effect on Uncle Simeon's face amazed me.

His look of meek head-nodding sorrow gave place to one of such unmistakable guilt that the most monstrous suspicions seized me; nor did they disappear when guilt changed to fear, then fear to hate; still less when hate in its turn gave place to the meek accustomed mask. Mask it was, for I had seen him deliberately twitch the muscles of his face back into position. From that moment, and with no other evidence than a few seconds' change of expression, in which my eyes might have been deceiving me, I believed him a murderer.

Grandmother and Aunt Jael saw nothing of this. The first was too short-sighted—the room was nearly dark, and no candle had been lighted—the second was too busy for the moment rating me for breaking laws and talking "outrageous nonsense" to keep her eyes on him.

This gave him time to twitch the muscles of his brain and tongue back into position also.

"Anyway, whatever the sad cause of his earthly death, one may rejoice that he went to be with the Lord."

"Yes, and that he left all his money to you. Leastways there was no will found, and you were next of kin. That helped to console you a little, maybe."

"Miss Vickary!"

"Yes, more than a little, too. It left you enough to close your shop in Bristol and do nothing ever since."

"Nothing, Miss Vickary, nothing? All one's years of hard, if humble, toil in the Lord's vineyard, one's ministrations to the Saints—nothing? And poor Joseph's wealth, it was but a modest sum—"

"So modest no one's ever heard. It's mock poverty yours, and you know it."

"But one's humble manner of life should show—"

"Folk as are mean aren't always poor."

"Aunt!" pleaded Martha feebly.

"Mean; dear Miss Vickary, may you one day regret that unjust word. Far be it from one to speak of all that one has given to the gospel work in Torribridge, of all that one has lent to the Lord. Yet what are worldly riches? One cares only for the unsearchable riches of Christ. What are the earthly gifts one may have given away? One has given to many a greater gift far. Not only the knowledge of Salvation, but a Christian deed here, a helping hand there—"

"Open sepulchre! Helping hand—like when Rachel and Christian lay dying, and you forbade Martha to leave Torribridge even for a few hours to come and help her mother. Let your wife's mother half kill herself, and her brother and sister crawl into their graves before you'd let her move. 'Couldn't spare her' from the side of yer 'dear little son'—ugly little brat, I'm glad you've not brought him here today."

Now there was a spice of righteous protest in the meek voice. "Pray what has one's poor little son done to be so spoken of? Or one's dear wife to hear him so spoken of?"

Martha was silently wiping her eyes. Aunt Jael, struggling with temper, made no reply.

"Or oneself to see one's wife so wounded? One has never forgiven oneself for not realizing till alas too late how near the end dear Rachel and dear Christian were; but at the time one's little baby-boy was ailing, and Martha none too strong. One was selfish, perhaps."

"Ay." Temper rising.

"One failed in one's duty to dear Mrs. Lee, because of one's jealous care of one's dear child and wife."

"Fiddlesticks! I know some of your goings-on. Poor Martha!"

"Poor Martha? One fails to understand. If Martha had been treated as poor Rachel's husband treated her; if she had suffered cruelty—adultery—vileness—sin; if one were hounding her to her grave as he hounded poor Rachel; if one had killed her and broken her heart, and then sneered that one could not pay to bury her—"

"The brute," cried Aunt Jael, sidetracked.

His crude attempt to transfer her rising wrath on to the head of another had succeeded. He knew the quality of the memories he evoked.

"The brute; the cruel, fleshly scoundrel!"

"Hush, Aunt," whispered Aunt Martha, "after all it is the Child's father."

I coloured violently, and my heart beat fast. The unfamiliar phrase "Rachel's husband" had conveyed nothing. Now I was throbbing with excitement, curiosity and shame.

"Well, let her know the truth."

"O Mother, plead with Aunt not to talk so!" Aunt Martha was trying to stifle the topic on to which her husband had so successfully emptied the vials of Aunt Jael's wrath. He gave her a "you wait till afterwards" glance that told me a good deal, concentrated though I was on this other overshadowing thing.

"I don't know," said my Grandmother, "leave your Aunt be. The child will have to know it some day; and 'tis the truth." She sighed.

"There you are! If a child has the wickedest beast of a man on earth for her father, the sooner she knows it the better, so that she may mend her ways and turn out a bit different herself. She has more than a spice of his ways about her already. She'd best be told every jot and tittle of the whole story. No one's too young to hear the truth. 'Tis your task though, Hannah. You tell her, if you think fit. But not tonight, it's past the child's bed-time. Be off now! To bed!"

I undressed feverishly, that I might be the sooner in bed to go through all I had heard. I recited hymns rapidly to myself so that I should not think at all till I could do so properly and at peace.

Grandmother came in for her nightly prayer.

"Grandmother, is it true? My father. Who is he? What did he do? Tell me, is it true?"

"Yes, my dear."

"Did he do—all those wicked things?"

"Yes, my dear."

"Will you tell me everything?"

"Yes, my dear, if the Lord so wills. Let us approach the throne of grace and discover His good pleasure."

Down on my knees by her side I watched her as she asked the Almighty whether He willed that the story of my father and mother should be told me. Grandmother was always fair. She did not try to influence the Lord's decision, as Aunt Jael might have done, by giving undue weight in her supplications to the arguments either for or against.

"Dost Thou will that at this tender age she should learn of these sorrows, that they may be sanctified to her for Thy name's sake; or dost Thou ordain that I should wait yet awhile before I speak?"

We waited the Answer. I knew it would be "Yes," I knew it with the sudden instinct that so often served me. Prayer and intuition were indeed sharply commingled in my mind. One was your speaking to God, the other God speaking to you. God is swifter; instinct is swifter than prayer; answer than question.

"Tell the child now? So be it, Lord; since such is the answer that Thou hast vouchsafed."

Then she prayed that the story might be richly blessed to me, and that he whom it chiefly concerned might be given, despite all, contrite heart and true forgiveness.

When she left me to myself and darkness, I was repeating to myself the stinging words I had heard. Cruelty, adultery, vileness, sin—the fleshly scoundrel—he had hounded my mother to her grave, broken her heart—killed her. He my father. I had a father then. It is proof of the gaps in my many-sided visualizings day after day and night after night that I had never thought of this, never even wondered whether I had a father or not.

I did not know how to wait till the morrow. Perhaps they were talking about it downstairs; I jumped out of bed, crept halfway down the stairs, and listened. The front-room door was shut, and though I soon heard that a duologue between Aunt Jael and Uncle Simeon was in progress, I could make out only a few words here and there. My imagination constructed a conversation connected with myself, and somehow too at the same time with Torribridge and Aunt Martha and studies. I did not think much of it at the time, as my ears were hungry for "father" and "mother" only—"Rachel" and "Rachel's husband."

I went back to bed. Early next day Uncle Simeon and Aunt Martha returned to Torribridge.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] Empty.

CHAPTER X: OLD LETTERS

Next day after dinner, when Aunt Jael had settled down for her doze, Grandmother called me upstairs to her bedroom, pulled out an old brown tin box from under the bed, unlocked it, and drew forth a large brown paper packet. We sat down, and she told me my mother's story.

"Your father belonged to a different class from us, my dear, quite to the gentlefolk of the county. Your mother met him at his cousin's, Lord Tawborough's, when she was governess there.

"This Lord Tawborough died a few years ago. The boy who now bears that name is a lad of maybe seventeen or eighteen, who I expect knows nothing about it at all, although he was very fond of your mother when she taught him as a little boy."

"Shall I ever see him?"

"No, my dear, no. You are in a different walk of life. Young squires don't come to visit us. Not that his father ever had any false pride; I know he was always very kind to me. He came to Rachel's funeral, and never had his cousin—your father, that is—inside his house after the trouble. He wanted to help us too in educating you, but I said No. I would not touch money belonging in any way to him, though I've forgiven him long ago, as I trust the Lord has. He thought I was too independent, but maybe he understood all the same. I've heard that the young boy is as good-hearted as his father. He lives at the family house over near Torribridge; he's just going up to Oxford, I believe, like his father, or maybe 'tis Cambridge—"

"What is Oxford-and-Cambridge? Brother Quappleworthy was there."

"They're two big colleges, or universities as they call them, where the gentlefolk go. Anyway, his father was always kind to us and ashamed of his cousin. He said to me when he called to see us after your dear mother's death that he felt guilty because Rachel met her husband in his house. However, there 'tis, they were married. I never took to him and your Aunt Jael could never abide the sight of him. 'Twas a cruel time. I can't tell you all now, my dearie, though one day you may know. But I'm going to read you some of the letters she wrote. Here they all are, I've not had the heart to touch this package since they were tied up ten years ago. She wasn't happy from the start, though she wrote brave letters home. We first got to know how it was with her through your great-uncle, her uncle John. She'd stayed once or twice with him in London, as a little girl, and he loved her dearly. We have never seen much of him since he first went away over fifty years ago. He and Jael don't get on together; he's an invalid too, and not able to take a journey. After your dear mother died he let me see all her letters to him, and I copied them out. Here is one of the first, written just three or four months after she was married, the 'long letter' I call it:"

The White House.
Torquay,
August 14th, 1845.

Dear Uncle John,—

Thank you for you kind letter of sympathy. Yes, I am an unhappy woman, and unhappy for life.

Perhaps it will simplify matters for me to say that he is in a very precarious mental condition. The doctor tells me he has every symptom of softening of the brain. Though the disease may not culminate for several years. He says my one object must be to keep him quiet and not oppose or excite him in any way, as that would always tend to hasten the climax, and would make things very trying for myself, especially just now; for I must tell you that something will be happening to me, about next February I think. Last week he had a dreadful turn, and said the most cruel things, shouting and sneering at me like one demented. I went off then to the doctor, really thinking myself he was there and then going or gone out of his mind. He told me what I have said, and through all subsequent improvement adheres to the same opinion; he is very kind and sympathizing to me, calls it, "a painful and extraordinary case," and tells me not to be upset when he gets into this state with me—that it is an almost invariable symptom of the disease for the patient to set upon his wife and bring against her outrageous accusations of every sort, that I must not contradict him in whatever he says, but rather "assume contrition for faults you have not committed, regarding him as an invalid that cannot be dealt with by ordinary rules." I must tell you that I have begun to doubt all this, I don't mean the doctor but my husband. He has a nervous weakness, it is true, but exaggerates this when he goes to see the doctor by getting himself into a state, then the doctor says he has softening of the brain and that will excuse all his ill-treatment to me.

That is not all, the two youths, Maurice and Trevor who are living in the house and whom he calls his "cousins," are really his illegitimate sons, he told me so outright and mocked at me when I blushed. They swear and shout at me, and he encourages them. With all this he is the leader at the Room, the meeting of the Close Brethren we go to. The Saints don't seem to like him very much. I think they know something of his goings on. My dear uncle, I charge you not to speak of all this; I should not on any account like mother to know it, it could do no good for her to worry. He may keep like this for years, or perhaps I might be taken away to the Lord first.

I was glad of your loving letter; had begun to think there must be one awaiting me (from the style of your previous one) before yesterday morning confirmed it. They raise objection however at the Post Office, saying it is against the rules for residents to have them left there, so I suppose you must address to me here. Philip seems never to expect me to show him my letters. I did one a few weeks ago, in which there was some business message or statement. So you will always be safe in writing direct. It is one of his peculiarities that though he has often thrown at me my depth, "keeping matters to myself," "telling him nothing," etc. etc., yet from the very first he declined to see my letters. I used even to press him to do so but he replied one day, "I take no interest in letters from people I don't know, still less from common people" (among whom my relations are included). Then if I tried reading him any specially interesting extracts he would say it wearied him or would assure me I had read or told him all that before. Since he said one day, "Dear me, what shopkeeper's talk!" I have quite given up intruding my correspondence on him. At rock bottom it is a sort of jealousy. Some husbands seem to have the idea that their wives should throw to the winds all old ties and relationships.

As to my going home now; it is utterly out of the question. All other objections apart, I could not now take the journey. Then as to having Mother here, as things are (even if he would allow it), the worry of it would do me more harm than her presence could do me good. There might be an actual outbreak on his part, and Maurice and Trevor would give her an experience such as I would spare her at all costs. What could she do for me? Later on, I should have a nurse and of course a doctor, the kind one I spoke of, the one Philip consults. You rather mistake me as to the possible end these matters may bring. I don't mean that I should be more likely to die from what has been taking place, simply that from natural causes it is a thing that has to be faced at such a time. Many women do, who have all the love and devotion they can require, and I have all along felt (not forebodingly or morbidly, but as a matter of fact) that such an event might be of more than ordinary risk in my case. I am not very strong, and always lacking in power of endurance, and then I am so wretchedly unhappy and lonely. All my trouble and despondency will lessen the natural clinging to life and give me instead a longing to be at rest beyond it all, as far as self only is concerned. But on the other hand if the baby lives, that will be sufficient counteractive against my giving-away tendency. I shall feel more than a mother in ordinary case could do that I must try to live for its sake. Any other issue I am content to leave in God's hands but cannot face the thought of leaving the child behind me—with him. So if I should be taken, don't trouble yourself with the thought that my end has been hastened by these things that ought not to have been. For the Lord, I believe, has taken special care of me and given me more health of body than I could under ordinary circumstances have expected, to meet the extra strain laid on mind and spirit. So we may trust surely by what has gone before that He will uphold me all through with special health and strength. "He setteth His rough wind in the day of His east wind" has been constantly before me of late.

I shall not leave my husband as long as it can anyhow be avoided. Death is to me a far more welcome thought to face than being a trouble or a burden for my friends. There are troubles in which sympathy makes all the difference, but between husband and wife it is different, and the quieter one can keep things the better. Uncle, dear, don't you see that the sting and real heart-bitterness a woman must feel at wrong and unkindness from the one from whom she has expected only love and protection, can never be healed or soothed by proclaiming it to the world at large or by leaving him? It may be pride or self-respect that makes me shrink from the thought of such a thing, but have no scruples as to your responsibility in keeping it quiet, since I told you I have no bodily fear of him, and he knows it. Suppose you tell mother or any one else, if they share your view they can but repeat the same arguments, and if repeated twenty times my feelings and instincts remain the same. Say nothing, uncle, for my sake if not for his—for mother's too. It is true if I came away he could not rail at me but still that is only the outward expression of what is within and which distance would not alter, and with the baby it will be easier to bear. I shall have something to live for and comfort myself with, and considering his condition I cannot see that it would be right to leave him unless I am in danger of my life. It is a wife's duty to endure. I have thought of speaking to Mr. Frean, a leading Brother at the meetings and a very kind man. I think a fear of exposure in this quarter would have more weight with him. While he can afford to set at nought the opinions of my friends and relatives at a safe distance, he clings very tenaciously to his religious position. I should have sympathy there. I think they know I have something to put up with and they show me great kindness and would show more if I availed myself of it. Philip remarked one day it was strange that "his wife should be popular at the Room while he never had been!"

On one point your anxiety is needless. I have what I wish for in the shape of nourishment. Was never a large or extravagant eater, but what I want I have. Was reflecting only a day or two ago that this is the one point on which he uniformly shows me consideration. In fact, I think he does this on purpose to salve his conscience, and to have something to throw back at me. Once when I said "Oh, Philip, don't be so unkind to me," he replied, "Unkind? Damn you, I don't see what you have to complain of, you're living on the fat of the land, better than with your shopkeeper friends." Sometimes, you know, I believe he imagines he loves me; perhaps he does as much as he would any wife, but I have told him he does not know what love is. Love!

The only thing which sometimes nearly drives me to the breaking point is this; he praises my amiability, meekness, wifeliness, obedience, and says "you are different from most women who are always either nagging and answering back or gloomy and sulky." I am "so much better than he ever expected." When he talks like that I feel stirred up to say some pretty plain things to him, and clear my mind at all costs, but then if I do I might excite him and bring on a fit of apoplexy or paralysis as the doctor said. If I say the least little word he holds this over my head. I wonder now, after only a few short months, why I ever married him. I have spoilt my whole life. Two years ago, I was a happy young woman; and now— Don't write to him, don't threaten him, and don't come near here, it can do no good. Good-bye, Uncle dear.

Your ever loving
Rachel.

My Grandmother paused. I know what I thought—I can live my feelings again at this moment, forty years later.

"At the time," said my Grandmother, "Rachel said very little to me. I knew it was difficult, but not as unhappy as it was. In the March of the next year a baby boy was born. You're not old enough, my dear, to know what it is to be a mother when her baby comes; a man should be good and kind to his wife more than at any time, and thank the Lord most of 'em are. He was wicked. May the Lord in his mercy forgive him. Still, the baby made her happier. Here is a letter she wrote to me a month or two after it was born."

The White House.
Torquay,
May 20th, 1846.

My Dearest Mother,—

Thank you for all the loving sympathy from all. Am getting on well, though the heat has been trying me greatly. I came downstairs yesterday. I cannot stand a minute without help, as the lying in bed has made me so weak. Baby is doing first-rate, grows more engaging every day. It was rather too bad of you to rejoice in my disappointment, especially as the little girl was to have been named after my dear mother. What is the supposed advantage you see in a boy? Why is a boy thought more of than a girl? Perhaps you are proud of having a grandson; I certainly have centred all my ideas on a girl; I have always had an idea that the child I should have that would be most like me, and who would do what I might have done if I had been happier, would be a girl. I feel so still; though I can't tell you why.

But this is a dear little man and I should not like to spare him now he has come. He never squeals but stares the whole time; the doctor says he is big enough for five or six months old. After the miserable state I've been in, I rather wondered whether his brain would be right, but he is certainly "all there," and a bit over, if it comes to that. He is very sharp. But he is very good at night and has slept seven hours right off for five nights past. He notices everything, his little eyes will dance round after any one who notices him and when the door one day suddenly rattled with the wind he turned his eyes towards it with a look of inquiry and astonishment. Some wagging ends on Nurse's cap are a source of unfailing interest. He has not a flaw or even a sore upon him, has a nice little round, comfortable, sensible face, just plump enough to be well conditioned but not coarse. I think he is something like Martha. He has nice eyes, dark blue, which when closed take rather a Japanese curve, the Traies' snub nose, a pretty little mouth, large hands, very long fingers with pretty little filbert nails. He is more like his father than anybody in face. He is full of pretty little antics, will clasp his hands as if in prayer, or shade one over his eyes with a thumb extended, exactly like "saying grace." Will labour hard sometimes to stuff both fists into his mouth at once, it is amusing to see his wriggles and struggles, getting quite angry, till at last he gets hold of some knuckle or thumb and settles down to enjoy it. He wants his milk very irregularly, but so far I've kept pace with him.... We have not yet decided on his name. Not Philip, I think, for I don't like the "big Bessie, little Bessie, old George, young George" plan. I should like Harold or Edgar, or perhaps Christian—by the way I'm sorry to hear that Chrissie is still so weak, give him my best love. Do you know that baby's birth made me want to like Philip more than ever? I told him so the other day, he just sneered. It's hard, mother, isn't it? But I must not worry you, or make you think he is really treating me so very badly, he sees that I get all the food and nourishment I need. Don't believe all Uncle John says!

Here I must conclude as I'm not yet strong enough to write more. Give my love to Aunt Jael, and to Hannah, and my respects to Mr. Greeber, when you write. With my dearest love to you mother, I remain

Your loving
Rachel.

"Here is one she wrote to her Uncle about the same time:"

The White House.
Torquay,
June 24th, 1846.

My dearest Uncle John,—

Many thanks for your kind and prompt reply to my note. My reason for requiring a promise was that I feared that on knowing how things stood you might be unwilling still to do nothing, as I know you have even as much of the outspoken Vickary disposition as Aunt Jael! You will be sorry if not surprised when I tell you that my husband leads me a more trying life than ever. I cannot repeat or write the words he uses or the things he abuses his position as a husband to do. My little boy is the only earthly comfort I have, and but for him and the dear Lord I don't think I could have borne up at all. I have kept it carefully from my own family all along, it is not my fault that mother knows as much as she does. I hate her to have to hear my troubles. Then, too, I've excused things on the ground of disease, for his mind is disordered, but still he is nothing like so far gone but that he could behave better if he chose. I am surer than ever that he deceives the doctor so that he can use the bad view of his health which the doctor takes, as a cloak for all his cruelty. 'Tis very good of you to assure me of your help but I will still try to stay with him, and so far he has not used actual bodily violence. He has gone the length of threatening it, of lifting up his foot as though to kick me and shaking his fist in my face but stopped short each time, saying he was "not such a —— fool as to give me a chance of getting the law for him!" I will promise this: to make your silence conditioned on his behaviour not getting worse. That may have some effect on him. But mother must not be worried. In any case it would not be worth while to try to come here to see him, he has threatened he will set the dogs on them if he finds any of my relatives "prowling about the place."

Don't worry about me. Now that I have my little boy to kiss and comfort me I can put up with everything.

Your loving niece,
Rachel.

"And here is another to me:"

The White House,
Torquay.
Aug. 20th, 1846.

My dear Mother,—

Many thanks for kindly sending on the vests, they are (both sizes) a nice easy fit, and I'm very pleased with them. I am feeling better, though Torquay is very relaxing and in the summer, at times, unbearable.

Now that Uncle John seems to have told you all it is no good pretending any longer that I am anything but absolutely wretched. Believe me, mother, it was not dishonesty but for your sake only that I said so little. Now it is getting so bad that I should not have been able to keep it from you longer. They are all behaving disgracefully, worse than ever. Not only all the family, the two boys Maurice and Trevor, I mean, but all the servants too, and the very errand lads who come to the house are encouraged to be insulting. I'm really afraid to go about the house and when keeping in my own immediate quarters am shouted at and annoyed from stairs and windows. He and Maurice attacked me together last week, or rather he called Maurice to join in, and the two called forth the most unprovoked and outrageous insolence while the scullery maid shrieked with delight and clapped her hands at the fun. Another day, the cook threw a cabbage root at me when I went into the kitchen, hitting me on the neck. Mr. Traies' only redress when I turned to him was "That's nothing, you shouldn't go into quarters where you're not wanted. A wife in her kitchen, indeed! what are we coming to?" It is something sickening the whole time; I know I shall go mad before long. Have run right out of the house twice lately but the poor child drags me back. I don't know that you can do anything beyond plainly speaking your mind, or threatening to expose him right and left if that would do any good. There certainly ought to be some law to prevent a woman being hounded out of her life by the very servants in the house. If I say the least word or attempt to expostulate he puts his hand up to his forehead, begins to moan and say "the doctor said I was on no account to have opposition, he said it might bring on a fit, indeed I think it is coming." The wretched man—is there no law in England to save a woman from cruelty far worse than the things for which she can get the courts for her? Last week, he actually laughed in my face, "Your heart is breaking I suppose," he sneered. I said "Yes," looking him straight in the face. "It's a damned long time about it," he said. Yet I can do nothing; that is not cruelty! I do wish he would do me some real bodily harm that would give me a hold over him as long as he didn't permanently incapacitate me. I have thought of asking Brother Frean at the Meeting to find me a safe temporary lodging where I could go, and say I would not return until he dismissed these insolent maids. That would be at least one point gained. But until he sent Maurice away there would be no real improvement. You cannot imagine, mother the filthy things he says, and does before me. They have made a complete tool of the new servant too. She has been very unsatisfactory in every way, refusing to get up in the morning and shouting at me. However she kept within bounds till I gave her a week's notice last Wednesday. Immediately he came and raved and sneered at me: "Come, come, the mistress of the house dismissing a housemaid, surely this is going a little too far," and he ordered her to stay. Since then she has behaved shamefully, they all of course upholding and cheering her, making her presents, etc. Today I have proved her having stolen some silk handkerchiefs of mine, in even this he upholds her. "Freely ye have received, freely give," he said! Yesterday it reached the climax. The whole pack were howling at me, he, looking on and mocking and encouraging them. Then Maurice tripped me up as I was going out of the room, and I went full length on the floor. In my weak state, I nearly fainted. He laughed. I still want to hold out; I will never leave him unless it is to come home and die. All I have to comfort me is your sympathy, my little baby and the love of Christ.

In haste, your loving daughter,
Rachel.

My throat was very dry, I could not trust myself to speak.

"Soon after," went on my Grandmother, "the little baby boy died, and then we persuaded her to take a holiday. At least we put it to her that we thought we hoped it might be bringing her away from him for good. She came home, spending November and December of 1846 with us at home in the old house in the High Street, and then went to her Uncle John's in London for the first few weeks of '47. When your mother left her uncle, she came to us again for a few days and then decided to go back to her husband. Jael was against it, but she was sure it was her duty to the Lord, and I would not persuade her though my heart sank when she left us. He behaved worse than before. The last few months at Torquay were beyond her endurance and she began to sink away. Now here is a letter your great-uncle wrote me just before she left him, when things had reached their worst."

Messrs Vibart & Vickary,
Mincing Lane,
London.
Jan. 3rd, 1848.

Dear Hannah,—

I have been out of patience with you as you will know. Since last March when she stayed with you and you allowed her to go back to the fellow. If I don't hear definitely that she has left him within the next ten days, infirm though I am, I shall take the coach to Exeter and on to Torquay taking a friend with me, and if we have any trouble whatever with Traies he will get such a thrashing that he will not be able to appear in public for some time. If ever there was a cruel, damned scoundrel who deserved shooting he does, and should not in the least mind putting a few bullets into him. What annoys me more than anything is that you should encourage the poor girl, agreeing with her that it is her Christian duty to remain there all this time and put up with such diabolical cruelty; worst of all now that there is another child on the way.

Let me know at once that she has left him or I shall act without delay.

Your affectionate brother
John.

"And here is the last letter she ever wrote me herself. It was snowing the day it reached me:"

The White House.
Torquay,
Jany 7th, 1848.

My dearest Mother,—

Your kind and loving letter came yesterday. Well, mother dear, I have given in. I have decided to go away. I am weaker now, broken in body and spirit, and if I stay here with his taunts and ill-treatment I shall go mad or die. In any case I think it is the latter; but now that there is a child coming, for its sake I must go where I shall have more peace. My life is a broken failure. Four short years ago what a happy girl I was at the Hall with kind people around me, a loving little boy as my daily companion, and I was a credit and pride to you all. I know you never wanted me to marry him. I chose my way and I have failed utterly. Yes I know, mother, I know with a positive assurance that I could have loved a good and loving husband as much as any woman in the world; it was in me. Well, it is no good talking of that now, for I have not very long before me now. Today I told him I was leaving him for the last time. He mocked in his usual sort of way, but I am beyond minding that. He is too much of a coward, I have come to know, to prevent my leaving by physical force. I hope to get away tomorrow, and am already halfway through my packing, so expect me very soon.

Your loving
Rachel.

My Grandmother spoke in a calm way, much sadder than any sobbing or crying. Here for the only time she put her handkerchief to her eyes for a moment. "Just at the time your dear mother came back to us to die, my little boy Christian was dying too. The day after we buried him you were born, then seven days later your mother died. Your Great-Aunt was a good sister to me, she took turns at sitting with your mother every night; saw the friends who called and wrote all the letters. Here is a copy of what she wrote to your Great-Uncle:

Northgate House,
High Street,
Tawborough.
March 2nd, 1848.

Dear Brother,—

You will be glad of a line to tell you a fine girl was born this morning at half past five; the baby is doing splendidly, but Rachel is very weak. Nurse and doctor are in constant attendance. Hannah stays with her all the time and doesn't go downstairs. With young Christian just buried the Lord is trying us hard. We are truly passing through the waters of affliction. Hannah is too busy to write herself or I should not be writing to you, the first time I think for nearly thirty years.

Your affectionate sister,
Jael Vickary.

"Here is your Great-Uncle's reply, addressed to me:"

London.

In haste.

Dear Hannah,—

Do everything possible for dear Rachel as regards nursing and doctors that money can command. I pay everything.

John.

"And two more letters your Great-Aunt wrote to your Great-Uncle will tell how your dear mother died:"

Northgate House,
High Street,
Tawborough.
March 8th, 1848.

Dear Brother,—

I write again to give you news of Rachel. Upon receiving your kind note we decided on calling in Doctor Little but I don't think he can do more than Dr. Le Mesurier has, he has been unremitting in attention but there will be nothing to regret in having had further advice. Nurse Baker looks after the baby, she is a very nice child and is doing well. Hannah is wonderfully sustained, she sat with Rachel last night, I was with her the night before. It would make things very much easier if Martha would come over from Torribridge but Mr. Greeber, her husband, will not allow it, pleading their own child who is as healthy as he is ugly and now quite a year old. Rachel has been wandering today, sewing and arranging garments for the child. She suffers badly. The doctor thinks it is peritonitis. I fear it will be but a few days more, it wrings my heart to write it.

I have just taken the liberty of writing a note to Lord Tawborough to ask him to use his influence with his cousin that the child may remain to be brought up by us in case of Rachel being removed from this world. He replies he will insist on it. It has comforted Rachel greatly. I wrote to Mr. Traies a few lines on the day she was confined to state the fact of a girl being born and that his wife was not doing too well, commencing "Dear Sir" (being civil). I am glad it was done, although he did not respond; we have done our part and shall not write to him again until she ceases to be his wife. Oh brother, when I think of how the wretched man has hounded her and brought her down in health and strength to an early grave (for the doctor says she had not the strength to go through her confinement because of the harass and ill-treatment that preceded) I feel he will have a recompense even in this world for his cruelty ... God's vengeance is sure, and He will avenge. The doctor now says twenty-four hours will decide. We give her Valentine's extract of milk and ice which she takes every half hour ... nothing has been left undone. May God bless the means and give us grace to bear His will.

Regret you are not well enough to travel. If you had been well enough to come I need not say that for Hannah's and Rachel's sake I would have let by gones be by gones, so with our united love, I remain,

Your affectionate sister,
Jael Vickary.

Northgate House,
High Street,
Tawborough.
March 9th, 1848.

Dear Brother,—

Dear Rachel was unconscious all the night but didn't seem to suffer. She gradually sank and peacefully departed at a quarter past ten. I know you will not be able to come to the funeral but we know all your love to your beloved niece during her life. Hannah scarcely realizes it as yet. Dear Rachel wished the baby to be called Mary. She gave a few directions most calmly and quietly, and wished the text, if we had cards, to be "Made meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the Saints in light," or else "These are they which came out of great tribulation." Hannah is hearing up well, sustained by the Lord's grace. Thy will be done.

With our united love,
Your affectionate sister,
Jael Vickary.

* * * * * * *

"And so she died," concluded my Grandmother, "and left you to me."

I wanted to hear more. "And the man?"

"What man?"

"My—father." It was one of the hardest things I ever did to utter that word. I felt foolish, flushed, and somehow wicked. The word was unfamiliar, and it was vile.

"Well, I wrote him a letter saying I forgave him for everything—"

"Forgave him, Grandmother!" I cried. "That was wicked!"

"I forgave him as I hoped the Lord would too. I just told him in the letter about her funeral and how it had passed off."

"Did he write back?"

"Yes, and in all his life there was nothing so cruel as the reply he sent me. Here it is. I know the foreign note-paper; for he went abroad straight away to avoid the scandal and trouble, though the Saints at Torquay publicly expelled him from their Meeting when they knew the facts. Listen:—

Hotel Meurice, Paris.
March 31st, 1848.

Madam,—

Your letter apprehending me of my late wife's funeral has been forwarded to me. If you imagine this thinly veiled hint that I should bear the funeral expenses will succeed, you are singularly mistaken. For such a wife, nominally Christian, who deserted her husband, I propose to do nothing of the kind. You may sue me at law, of course; but pause for a moment: would your dead daughter have wished you to?

Yours truly,
Philip A. G. Traies.

"May God in His mercy forgive him for writing that. It took me years to be able to. I have never heard from him since. I heard he sold the house in Torquay and lives mostly abroad. That, my dearie, is the end of a long story. Always love the memory of your dear, good mother and try if you can to forgive your father, for whatever he has done, he is your father."

"I will never forgive him, it would be wrong to forgive people who have done things to you like that. Never!"

"It's the only true forgiveness, my dear, to forgive those who wrong you cruelly."

"I shall forgive every one in the world; but him, never."

* * * * * * *

I don't think these events are told out of their place. It was at this stage of my life that all these past doings entered my life; it is here they should be told. For me they took place now; from now onwards they influenced my life and thoughts. Of the impressions I received, pity and love for my mother, and hate and loathing for my father ranked equally. I thought of her still as an angel, but her eyes were sadder. As for him, I vowed to myself that afternoon, that some day in some way I would avenge my mother. How I kept that vow is another story; till then this resolve had a constant place in my life and imagination. It did a good deal to embitter a view of the world already gloomy enough for ten years old.

These were not the only emotions rushing through my heart that afternoon. There was admiration and love of my Grandmother; how greatly she had suffered, how little she complained, how heroically she forgave. There was a new reluctant respect for Aunt Jael; and a quickening affection for all who had been good to my mother, chiefly for Great-Uncle John, who in two short hours had been transformed for me from a shadowy name into a warm and noble reality; for others also who took a lesser part, such as the kind people where she had been governess and the little boy who loved her; for Brother Frean and the sympathetic Saints at Torquay. While I sat biting my nails and thinking a hundred new things, some kind, some sad, some hideous and bitter, Grandmother was still rummaging among the letters.

"Why, here's a bundle of those she wrote when she was at Woolthy Hall, in her first happy days there. Listen, my dear, I'll read you the first she wrote:"—

Woolthy Hall,
North Devon.
Friday.

Dearest Mother,—

I hope you got my first note saying I had arrived safely. I am very happy here, I have a nice little room to myself commanding a lovely view of the Park. I went to see Lord Tawborough in his study the same night that I arrived, and he was very kind. There will be no invidious treatment here, of the kind you hear governesses sometimes have to put up with. The work will be pleasant, the little boy took to me at once. He has brown eyes and a frank little face, rather solemn for his age, indeed I think he likes reading books too much and not too little. The meals are of course very good and I never felt better. Yesterday we went a carriage drive to Northbury, and picked primroses in the woods there, five huge bunches. The spring is a lovely time. It makes me happy because it is the beginning of the year and promises so much, just as I am at a new beginning of my life here, feeling sure I shall have a very happy time. Send the cotton blouses and straw hat, for there's a fine summer ahead!

With love to Aunt Jael and very much to your dear self from

Your loving
Rachel.

As Grandmother finished reading, I sobbed as though my heart would break, for that happy letter was the saddest of them all. I have read somewhere that with old letters, the happier they are, the more full of hope and life the writers, the more vivid and intense and joyful the sense of the present time the more melancholy they are to read in later years. The hopes then so warm and fresh seem now so far away. Men and women who when they wrote were hoping and planning are now but hollow-eyed and rotting dust. Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, all is vanity.

CHAPTER XI: EXTRAORDINARY MEETING FOR PRAYER, PRAISE AND PURGING

For some time all had not been well among the Saints. There was evidence of worldliness, backsliding, apostasy and sin. The Devil was active in our midst.

Certain Saints, after tasting for years the privilege of fellowship, had left us: for chapel, or church, or nowhere. Others were becoming irregular in their attendance or took part in our devotions without fervour. There was moral backsliding too: chambering and wantonness. Blind Joe Packe had been discovered by Brother Quappleworthy in a drunken stupor on the floor of the attic in which he lived, when the latter was paying him one of his customary visits of Bible-reading and exhortation. There walked abroad also a vaguer, darker sin than drink that I did not clearly apprehend, of which certain of the younger Brothers who were "keeping company" with certain of the younger Sisters were whispered to be guilty. The most flagrant example, I gathered from a shrouded conversation between Grandmother and Aunt Jael, was Sister Lucy Fry, who had a baby, but no husband. I thought this a curiosity rather than a crime. For whatever reason, it aroused a sharp difference of opinion; Aunt Jael denounced the awfulness of Lucy's sin, Grandmother urged that she was more sinned against than sinning.

Then Sister Prideaux had been to some concert or "theatre" during a holiday at Exeter. The precise nature of the godless entertainment was not ascertained. Nor was it clear how the news had reached us, though most thought it was wormed out of Sister Quappleworthy by Sister Yeo. The latter openly taxed Miss Prideaux with it.

"So you went to the theayter did you, over to Exeter? Next time you're there I suppose you'll be a-going to the Cathedril!"

Then there were the parliamentary elections in which some of the Saints had been taking an unsaintly interest, voting for and championing this candidate or that; a form of meddling with this world's affairs which Pentecost regarded with special disfavour. Indeed Rumour had it that one or two of the younger Brethren took part in the famous polling-day brawl in the vegetable market. Several of even the most prominent Saints expressed preferences. Brother Browning being a draper was Radical, Brother Quappleworthy being an intellectual was Whig, Brother Briggs being an oilman was Tory.

Aunt Jael was an unbenevolent neutral. "They're all much of a muchness and none of 'em any good to folk, neither in the next world nor in this either. In our family, if we had been anything at all, we'd always have been Whig—except the child's mother. She was Tory, or liked to think she was. All the gentlefolk belonged to the Tories, and that was always enough for Rachel."

I was henceforward a fanatical Tory, though I had not the dimmest notion what it meant, except that it was somehow connected with London and the Parliament. Aunt Jael refused to explain; Grandmother said it was not worth explaining.

Brother Brawn related how on the occasion of a visit from some canvassers he had struck a blow for righteousness. "They knocked at my front door," he told Aunt Jael, "folk as I'd never spoken to avore, nor so much as seen; 'Good mornin' sir,' said one of them, a tall, thin man with spectacles he was, 'whose side are you on? Davie and Potts[2] I trust.' 'No,' I said, 'I'm on the side of the Laur Jesus Christ,' and I slammed the door in their faces. 'Twas a word in season."

About this time there was an epidemic of minor illnesses, which Grandmother said could only be the hand of the Lord extended in chastisement for sins which the suffering ones had committed. More modern folk would have sought explanation in low vitality, indoor habits or bad drainage, but point was given to my Grandmother's contention by the fact that Sister Prideaux and Lucy Fry, prominent among the sinners, were about this time laid low with illness—the latter not unnaturally. Her own attack of bronchitis, she attributed to the selfish indulgence she had shown of late in perpetually studying her own favourite portions of the Word and neglecting (comparatively) those she favoured less.

Worst of all, that piece of sugar which for nineteen years—the period is always the same in my memory—had been placed in our offertory as an insult to the Lord had now for two Sundays past become four pieces, one in each of the four partitions, a little bit of sugar for Expenses, a little bit of sugar for Foreign Field, a little bit of sugar for Ministry, a little bit of sugar for Poor. It had been serious enough years ago when the box with the narrow slits had been substituted for the bag, and the sinner had merely retaliated by putting a small piece through one of the slits instead of a large lump down the gaping abyss of the bag. But now—four pieces, one in each partition,—what deftness in utter sin! What zeal in ill-doing! Who was this wolf in sheep's clothing, this sinner who could sit at the Lord's table for nineteen years and harden his heart Lord's day after Lord's day by offering this mockery of an oblation to his Saviour? Who was this evil spirit slim-fingered enough to perform this fourfold naughtiness, and yet remain undetected, unguessed? We all peered at our neighbours. Brother Brawn even began following the box in its voyage round the Meeting, instead of merely handing it to the first giver and taking it from the last; for all his spying he could find nothing. Was he the man?

Thus in devious ways was the Devil active in our midst. He must be exorcised.

Sister Yeo's idea of a Special Extraordinary Meeting to chase him out was finally adopted. All the Saints should assemble on a week night to pray for help, and for the discovery, confession and true repentance of all the various sinners; to purge the repentant of their sins and to praise the Lord for pardoning them; to purge the Meeting itself of the stubborn and unrepentant—to cast them into the outer darkness. There should be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

A preliminary meeting to decide on procedure and agenda was held in our dining-room. The committee which assembled was chosen by Aunt Jael and consisted of herself, Grandmother, Pentecost, Brothers Quappleworthy (despite theatre-going sister-in-law and known electioneering lapses), Brawn and Browning. Also, at Pentecost's special plea—"'Twill be a sacrifice of self, I know, dear Sister Vickary; that is why I urge it"—Sister Yeo was admitted. As soon as all the committee had arrived I was bundled out of the room, so I knew nothing of what was to happen except what I gathered from ear-straining on the staircase, and chance conversation between Grandmother and Aunt Jael afterwards. I gathered this much: that the Extraordinary Meeting was to be preceded by a Tea.

To this same Tea on a memorable Saturday afternoon we proceeded; Grandmother, Aunt Jael, Mrs. Cheese and I. It is the only single occasion in my memory when the Saints met together for public eating. In nothing did we differ more from the general body of nonconformists with their socials, bun-fights, feastings, reunions, conversazioni and congregational guzzles.

The Room presented an unusual sight. There were four long trestle tables covered with white cloths and laden with food, with forms drawn up beside them. The Saints, dressed in their Sunday best, were standing about in groups when we arrived. Aunt Jael, puffed with the energies of her walk, sat down at once on the end of a bench. Her weight sent the other end soaring gaily into the air while she landed on the floor with a most notable thud. The form banged back, not into position, but with a swirling movement on to a plate of bread and butter.

There is proof of the awful respect in which Aunt Jael was held in this: that not a soul dared to smile as she sat there on her broad posterior. For a moment or two no one even dared to help her to her feet, fearing an outburst, for people like Aunt Jael are most dangerous when you try to help them out of a predicament. Then by a sudden gregarious instinct every one ran forward together in a sheep-like mass, and bore Aunt Jael—red, antagonistic and threatening—to her feet.

After a blessing had been asked by Pentecost, we sat down to tea. I recall ham, bath-buns and potted-meat sandwiches. After tea the tables were cleared, the trestles packed away and the crockery and cutlery, all of which had been lent, were put back uncleansed in clothes-baskets in which they had been brought by the owners; for the Room possessed no washing-up facilities. The forms were then rearranged as for Breaking of Bread. Pentecost sat in his accustomed place at the right of the Table as you faced it; we in our usual front row; Brother Briggs to the right, Brother Quick to the left, Brother Marks, the old Personal Devil of my imagination, far away in his goggled corner. In the pulpit or dais, which was only used for the evening gospel meeting, were ranged Brother Quappleworthy—in the centre, in charge of proceedings—Brother Brawn on the right and Brother Browning on the left. Precedence and position had been arranged at the committee meeting in our dining-room, when Brother Quappleworthy had been chosen as chairman. The whole staging was as for a meeting in the secular meaning of the word. Indeed I remember feeling that the whole affair was a sort of excitement or entertainment rather than a religious service. This feeling vanished like dew with the dawn when Pentecost stood up and in a short prayer of exceeding solemnity craved the Lord's blessing on our proceedings. The keynote was SIN, its detection, confession, atonement; "and Sin, Lord, is a terrible thing."

Brother Quappleworthy rose to deal with the business before the house. "First now, brethren, there's the question of those Saints who have absented themselves from our—ah—mutual ministrations, those backsliders who have left the Lord's table for other so-called Christian bodies or the walks of open indifference and—er—infidelity." Brawn and Browning murmured agreement.

Sister Yeo's voice rang out accusing and metallic: "You're a fine one, Brother Browning, to um-um-er, and to sit in judgment on others. First cast out the beam from thine own eye! What of your own wedded wife who goes openly to the Bible Christian chapel, and 'as done these fifteen years; a source of stumbling and error to all the weaker brethren." (Sensation.)

"Silence, Sister," cried Brother Quappleworthy, "none may speak here to accuse others, only to accuse self."

"True," murmured the Meeting, and the Chairman resumed his discourse. "A list has been—ah—prayerfully prepared of all the Saints who have withheld themselves from fellowship for a space of time. Do all our Brothers and Sisters agree that they be struck off our roll of grace? Shall we say 'Ay' as we call each name? Brother Mogridge."

"Ay," arose murmurously.

"Sister Mogridge."

"Ay."

"Sister Polly Mogridge."

"Ay."

"Brother Richardson."

"Ay."

"Sister Petter."

This time our tongues (I say "our" because I had joined unctuously in the Ay's) stopped short just in time as we remembered that Sister Petter was present. We all turned towards her. Her hand was over her eyes, and she was weeping.

"Sister Petter," called Brother Quappleworthy in a solemn voice. "You who scoffed to unbelievers of the ministrations of the Saints, You, I say!..."

"Lord forgive me," she moaned. "Oh Lord forgive me."

Pentecost arose with beaming face. "There's joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth." He went over to her and put his hand on her shoulder saying, "Sister, be of good cheer, the Lord hath forgiven thy sin."

"Amen," said we all.

Drink and theatre-going and elections and illnesses were all dealt with then in their turn; I remember them hazily. When the denouncing voice uttered the name Lucy Fry, I woke up into the most wide-awake interest, for a visible hush descended on the Meeting.

Brother Quappleworthy had lost his usual urbanity: "Sin of sins, abomination of abominations." His face was hard and fanatical.

My eyes kept straying to the place where Lucy sat. She was a young fresh-faced country girl. Tonight her rosy cheeks were pale, her eyes drawn and she sobbed quietly but continually as her shame was exposed before us.

"Sister, repentest thou? Stand up, I say! Repent!"

It was too much. The poor girl fainted. They bore her out insensible. "Her first time out of doors," I heard it whispered, "since the child was born."

A feeling of pity was evident among the Saints. Brother Quappleworthy realized this and was determined to crush it. "Remember, brethren, it is a sin too grave, too vile for God to wink at. No dallying with sin! I put it to you that Sister Fry be excluded from fellowship. A fleshly sinner must not pollute the Lord's table."

"Chase her out, Lord," cried Brother Brawn, "this adulterous woman!"

"No," said Brother Browning, nervously, bravely. "She repents; the Lord will be for mercy." The three Brothers fell to disputing on the dais, and the discussion spread to the whole body of the Saints till there was a veritable hubbub in the Room. Brother Quappleworthy quelled it by calling out in a loud voice: "The Lord will show His will by means of a vote. Now those brethren who think it right that Sister Lucy Fry, the self-confessed sinner, be excluded from the Lord's table put up their hands."

Thirty-six hands were counted.

"Now those brethren who think that she, the sinning woman, should remain in fellowship."

Twenty hands only were shown. Thus by sixteen votes the Lord, who is merciful, voted against poor Lucy.

Then a surprising thing happened. My Grandmother, for the only time in my experience, stood up: "I have one question, brethren. Who is the man?"

No one had thought of that. No one does.

There was a whispering. It was confirmed that Lucy's guilty partner—whatever that might mean—was not a Saint and that nothing could therefore be done.

Brother Quappleworthy with sure dramatic instinct had reserved till the last the super-sin: Sugar. "This work of Satan persevered in over so long a period in a human heart ... For nineteen years ..." and so on. He wound up by conjuring the sinner to confess, to repent ere it was too late.

There was no response to his appeal, and a flat and rather foolish silence ensued. Then Pentecost Dodderidge prayed lengthily and earnestly that the sinner might be moved to reveal himself. Then another long fruitless silence.

Pentecost arose again, solemn and determined: "Brethren, we must slay the Evil One working in one poor sinner's heart, now, this evening—now or never. No one shall leave this room until the guilty one has confessed, not if we stay here for forty days and forty nights. Let us pray silently that he may be moved."

A new silence followed, but this time I was somehow expectant. The minutes, however, dragged on, five, ten, fifteen; I watched the crawling clock. Surely it could not last for ever, surely the patience of the sinner must be worn out by our unending vigil.

There was a noise of some one moving. Every one opened their eyes and looked up. It was only Pentecost Dodderidge on his feet again. "The Lord hath made it plain to me. He saith 'I will send a sign and then the sinner will confess.'" Hardly had he sat down than there was a great pelting of hail on the roof which continued for two or three minutes. With the noise no one heard Brother Marks, my spectacled Personal Devil, until he stood in front of the Lord's Table facing us all with a countenance of ghost-like white.

What followed I could never have believed had I not seen it with my own eyes. He took a dark blue paper package from one pocket and emptied it on one side of the Lord's Table; a shower of sugar came forth: little white lumps, the sort with which he had fooled us—preserving sugar the grocers call it, the sort with which jam is made. Then he took out from his other pocket a little cloth bag and poured out into a separate heap on the other side of the Lord's Table a shining heap of golden coins. Then he knelt down in front of us all and sobbed and groaned and rocked himself to and fro in an extreme agony that was terrible to see.

No one knew what to do, no one except Pentecost, who went up to him and lifted him to his feet; "Jesus forgives thee," he said, "let all of us praise His Holy Name."

The whole Meeting sprang to its feet, and burst forth into a hymn of praise. A solemn fast was declared for seven days, and we sang the Good-night Hymn:

Good night, dear saints, adieu! adieu!
Still in God's way delight;
May grace and truth abide with you—
Good night, dear saints, good night.

When we ascend to realms above,
And view the glorious sight,
We'll sing of His redeeming love,
And never say Good night.

Good night, dear saints, adieu! adieu!
Still in God's way delight;
May grace and truth abide with you—
Good night, dear saints, good night.

FOOTNOTE:

[2] Colonel Ferguson-Davie of Crediton and Mr. George Potts of Trafalgar Lawn, Tawborough, the two candidates successfully returned for the Borough at the Election of 1859.

CHAPTER XII: THE GREAT DISCLOSURE

Soon after this, somewhere about my tenth birthday, in the early spring of 1858, an important relaxation in my rule of life was made. I was allowed, under strict limitations, to go out on the Lawn for a certain period every afternoon, and to mix with the children there.

In view of my Great-Aunt's principle, namely, to make my life as harsh and pleasureless as possible, and of my Grandmother's steadfast prayers and endeavours to keep me pure and unspotted from the world, this was a big concession. The reason was my health. Grandmother saw that I never got out of doors half enough, and that a couple of hours' play with other children in the open air would be likely to make me brighter in spirit and to bring colour to my cheeks. One Lord's Day, as we were walking home from Breaking of Bread, I overheard Brother Browning: "If you don't take care she will not be long for this world,"—nodding his head sadly, sagely and surreptitiously in my direction. Anyway, the amazing happened, and with stern negative injunctions from Aunt Jael not to abuse the new privilege, nor to play "monkey tricks," for which I should be well "warmed," and with more positive and more terrible instructions from my Grandmother to use my opportunity among the other children to "testify to my Lord," I was launched on the sea of secular society, the world of the Great Unsaved.

Except for what little I saw of them at the Misses Clinkers' I had no acquaintance with other children, nor any knowledge of their "play." While in the obedient orbit of my own imagination, I was bold, none bolder, in the situations I created, the climaxes I achieved, the high astounding terms with which I threatened the attic walls; face to face with flesh-and-blood children of my own age, I soon found I was shy to a degree, until they were out of my sight, and I was alone again, when they joined the ever-lengthening cast of my puppet show, and, like everybody else, did as they were bid. Not that I was shy of grown-ups; it was the fruit of my upbringing that I was at ease with any one but my equals.

It was a horrible ordeal, that first afternoon, when I stepped through our garden gate on to the Lawn. I walked unsteadily, not daring to look towards the grass slope at the higher end, where all the Lawn children were assembled in a group. "Waiting for you! Staring at you!" said self-consciousness; and fear echoed. I flushed crimson. I was half sick with shyness. It seemed to my imagination that every child was staring at me with a hundred eyes—they knew, they knew! Marcus had heralded the fact, had played Baptist to my coming—they were all assembled here to stare, to flout, to mock. How I wished the earth would open and swallow me up or that the Lord would carry me away in a great cloud to Heaven. I dared not fly back into our garden: that way lay eternal derision. Yet my legs would not carry me forward to the group of children who stood there staring at me without mercy, without pity, with the callous fixity of stars. I was filled with blind confusion, and prayed feverishly for a miraculous escape.

Miracle, in the body of Marcus, saved me. He came forward from the group.

"Hello, Mary Lee, we've been talking about you." (Of course they had.) "I've told everybody you're allowed to play on the Lawn now, but we don't know which League you ought to belong to."

"What do you mean? What's a League?"

"Well, all Lawn children are in two sides for games and everything. Leagues means that. If your father and mother go to Church, you belong to the Church League, if they go to Chapel, you belong to the Chapel League."

"I see." Secular distinction based on religious ones was a principle I understood.

"Yes, but you're not one or the other. Brethren aren't Church, are they? And they aren't really Chapel."

"You're a Brethren too."

"Not like you are. Mother goes to the Bible Christian Chapel, and father really belongs there too, for all he goes to your meeting. So I count as Chapel."

"What do Papists count as?"

"There aren't any. If there were any and if they were allowed to go about, they'd be like you, neither one thing nor the other."

"Like me indeed! Papists like Brethren! Saints like sinners!"

"Not really, not like that; Brethren are more like Chapel, I know. Besides I want you to belong to our League, but—Joe Jones says you're not to. There's a meeting about it tomorrow. All our rules and sports and everything are decided at the meeting we have—not like Brethren meetings—usually up at the top of the bank, near the big poplar. Joe Jones sits on the wall, and he's our president. I'll let you know what happens about you afterwards. Till then I don't think you'd better play with us. I don't mind, but the others say you'd better not. If Joe Jones caught you! I don't like Joe Jones,—don't you ever whisper that, it's a terrible secret—but he doesn't like you, and he's the top dog."

Joe Jones, topmost of dogs, Autocrat of the Lawn, pimpled despot against whose evil pleasure little could prevail, was a good deal older than the rest of the children, by whom he was obeyed and feared. From what Marcus said his heavy hand was against me from the start. I knew why. He lived next door to us at Number Six, with an invalid, widowed mother (whom I had only seen once or twice in my life, as she was kept indoors by some mysterious infirmity which some described as grief and others drink) and his sister Lena, a big freckled flaxen girl about a year younger than himself. We rarely saw any of the three, and our household of course had nothing to do with theirs (Church of England, strict). But one morning as I was walking up the Lawn path on my way from school, Lena had called out to me over the privet hedge.

"Hello, you!"—and then something else, including a word I did not know, though instinct told me it was bad. The obscenity of the traditional filth words lies as much in their sound as in their signification. She repeated the words several times, combining artistic pleasure of mouthing the abomination with sheer joy of wickedness in shocking me and staining my imagination.

I went straight indoors and appealed to the dictionary. No help there; Lena Jones had wider verbal resources than Doctor Johnson. Grandmother would be sure to know. I went to that dear blameless old soul with the foul word on my lips.

"What does —— mean?"

"Nothing good, my dear," she replied calmly, imperturbably, without a trace of the flush that would have appeared in the cheeks of ninety-nine parents out of a hundred. "Nothing good, my dear. Where did you hear it?"

"Lena Jones—just now."

Grandmother walked out of the house and rang the next-door bell. What passed between her and the grief- (or gin-) stricken Mrs. Jones I do not know, but the results were, first, that Lena was sent away to a boarding-school, where I have no doubt she added suitably to the virgin vocabulary of her companions; second, that Joe, taking up the cudgels for his sister's honour, became suddenly and most unfavourably aware of my existence. He would threaten me if I passed him on my way to school, when I would cower to Marcus for protection. Once he chased me with a cricket bat. And now that at last I was near to gaining the status of "one of the Lawn children," he was going to revenge himself by standing in my way. With the Lawn community a word from Joe Jones could make or mar. If he forbade the others to speak to me, they would not dare to; if he ordered them to persecute or tease me, they would obey. He was the typical bully ruling with the rod of fear by the right of size. He was the typical plague-spot too, polluting the whole life of the little community.

For the Lawn was, in the true sense, a community. The well-defined bournes that were set to the oblong patch of greensward—the steep, poplar-crowned grass bank at one end, surmounted by a wall over which you looked down into a back lane and a stable some twenty feet below you; at the opposite end that marched with the street the high brick wall with one ceremonious gate in the middle for only egress to the outside world; then the two rows of houses the full length of both sides—gave to it a separate and self-contained character; the charm and magical selfishness of an island. All the children who lived in the Lawn houses played there, and played nowhere else. Though divided into two mutually hostile leagues, they felt themselves to be one blood and one people as against the strange world without the gates. Of this community Joe Jones was the uncrowned King. Like the early Teutonic monarchs he was limited in power by the folk-moot, or primitive parliament of all his subjects. Questions of Lawn politics were decided at democratic meetings under the poplars at the top of the grass bank. There were equal suffrage, decisions by majorities, and the feminine vote. Unfortunately Joe Jones had the casting vote, and as there prevailed the show-of-hands instead of the secret ballot, a look from his awful eye influenced a good many other votes as well. In short, the Lawn, like all other democracies, was, as wise old Aristotle saw, always near the verge of tyranny. At the tribal meetings were discussed and decided sports and competitions, penalties and punishments, ostracisms and taboos; unpopular proposals were consigned to Limbo, unpopular persons to Coventry. In all doings that allowed of "sides"—cricket, nuts-in-May, most ball games, tug of war, tick, Red Indians, clumps (what were they, these mysteries?)—the two leagues, Marcus told me, were arrayed in battle against each other.

The Church League was of course led by Joe Jones, seconded, until her departure for wider spheres of maleficence, by his devoted sister Lena. Then there were Kitty and Molly Prince, also fatherless. Their late parent was a "Rural Dean," and they were thus our social élite (Mr. Jones, Senior, had been a mere butcher;—nay, pork-butcher even, said the slanderers, with a fine feeling for social shades). Kitty and Molly were dull, stupid girls. Molly was as sallow as a dried apple; Kitty lisped; they were always dressed in brown, with large brown velvet bows in their hats. There was a dim George Smith; a loud-voiced Ted King, Joe Jones' principal ally, with his two sisters Cissie and Trixie. I hate them vaguely to this day, that silly giggling pair with their silly giggling names. I do not forget or forgive that they wore nice clothes, and mocked cruelly at mine. About this time, Aunt Jael had my hair shorn—it was my one good feature, and Aunt Jael knew that I knew it, and decreed that I must "mortify the flesh" accordingly—and sent me out into a mocking world in school and Lawn, with my face full of shame and my hair clipped to the head like a boy's. How those King girls sneered and giggled, and how I loathed them. Finally there was little John Blackmore, of whom it was whispered abroad that "his father died before he was born." The import of this fact was dimly apprehended, but Lawn opinion was unanimous in regarding it as something unique and special, something sufficient to endow little Johnny Blackmore with an air of quite exotic velvet-trousered mystery. He was a gentle, dark-eyed, olive-skinned child, and the only member of the Establishment party I could abide. He shared the fatherlessness which was common to his League—the Kings were an exception—and which probably accounted for their eminence in ill-behaviour. Another coincidence was that all the members of the Church League, except George Smith, lived on our side of the Lawn, i. e. the same side as my Grandmother's house. In defiance of Number Eight, Fort of Plymouth, halting-place for heaven, they called it "the Church side!"

The leader of the Chapel League was Laurie Prideaux, whose father kept the big grocer's shop in High Street; a tall, pretty, picture-book boy with golden curls, a Wesleyan Methodist, and I think the nicest of all the Lawn children, with whom his influence was second to Joe Jones' only, and for good instead of evil. The power of one was because he was liked, of the other because he was feared: those two forms of power that hold sway everywhere—Aunt Jael and Grandmother, Old Testament God and New Testament Christ; fear and love. If there was any weeping, Laurie was there to comfort it; any injustice, Laurie would champion it. Against Joe Jones he was my rod and my staff. His second-in-command was Marcus, Marcus who hovered on the marge between Bible Christianhood, which qualified him for admission to the Lawn, and Plymouth Brethrenism, which qualified him for admission to Heaven only. He was a nice boy, Marcus, for all the uncertainty of his theological position, and I remember him as one of the few bright faces of my early life. The strength of Lawn Dissent lay in the unnumbered Boldero family, a seething brood of Congregationalists, who lived over the way in the corner house opposite Number Eight. Only five of them were of appropriate age to possess present membership of the Lawn—Sam, Dora, Daisy, Bill and Zoë—but on either side of the five stretched fading vistas of babes and grown-ups. Dora was clever, Daisy good-natured, fat, dull and bow-legged, Zoë fat only, Sam and Bill rough, stupid and friendly. Finally there were Cyril and Eva Tompkins—twins; Baptists: a spiteful couple who vied with the Kings in mocking me.

To sum up. On the whole, despite Joe Jones, the boys were kinder than the girls; a first impression which life, in the lump, has borne out; and on the whole, despite the Tompkinses, the Chapel League was the nicer of the two; the brainier also, despite the Boldero boys, and Johnny Blackmore, who was the shining intellect of the Establishment. Though I have no longer the faintest hostility to the Anglican Communion, I find inside me a dim ineradicable notion of some moral superiority, some higher worth, however slight, which I concede to the Nonconformists; and I trace it back to my first experience of the two. If I bow my head in reverent humility before the Dissenters of England, I know that the real reason is because Laurie and Marcus and the happy Bolderos were such, while Joe and Lena and the Kings and the Princes—Beware of Kings! Put not your trust in Princes!—were not.

Church League and Chapel League, and I could belong to neither! My first feeling should have been sorrow that among that score of young souls there was not one single sure inheritor of glory; I fear it was pride instead; in my heart I rejoiced as the Pharisee, that I was not as other children, and that in me alone had the light shined forth. Yet at the same moment, parallel but contradictory, I found this question in my heart: why am I not as other children? Why cannot I mix with them as one of them, and belong to their Leagues and joys? After all, my right to belong to the Church League was about as good as Marcus' Chapel pretensions: had not Grandmother and Aunt Jael both been Churchwomen once? Or again, if Marcus, who was at least half a Saint, was allowed to belong to the Chapel League, then why not I, who was only half a Saint more? I had for a moment a rebellious notion of forming a new League of my own, a Saints' League, a Plymouth League, a League of the Elect; but reflection soon showed me that one member was barely enough. Could I convert others though? The notion warmed my heart, the more luxuriously because though at root ambitious, it seemed so virtuous and noble. Missionary zeal would further personal ambition. In testifying to the Lord, I would raise up unto Him followers who should be my followers too; forming at one and the same time the Lord's League and my League. There burned together in me for a queer exalted moment the red flame of ambition and the pure white fire of faith; burning together in Mary as in Mahomet; as in the souls of the great captains of religion. The fires died down; till there burned within me just the candle flicker of this humble hope: that the morrow's meeting would suffer me to join the Lawn at all, as the lowliest novice in whichever League would take me.

Next day after tea, I watched from afar the deliberations of the assembly that was handling my fate.

Some one shouted my name; I approached and appeared before the tribe. On the wall that surmounted the mound of justice sat Joseph Jones, surrounded by his earls and churls. I observed his pimples, his ginger hair, his fish-like bulging eyes.

"Come here. Stand straight. Look at me."

I obeyed. He faced me. The tribe surrounded me.

"Your name?"

"Mary Lee."

"You're allowed now to come out and play on the Lawn?"

"Yes."

"You can't just play and do as you like, you know. There are Laws of the Lawn. And there are two Leagues, and you must belong to one of them."

This sounded encouraging; he was not going to stand in my way after all.

"I know," I said. "Which shall I belong to?"

"We'll see. Let me see, which are you, Church or Chapel?" He was too dull to conceal the wolf in the sheep-like blandness of his voice. Well, I would fight for my footing.

"Neither. You know that."

"Neither?" incredulously. "How do you mean?"

"I belong to the Brethren, the Saints. That's neither Church nor Chapel."

"Well then, you can't belong to the Church League or the Chapel League, can you, if you aren't either? Of course you can't. We're sorry, but you can't belong to the Lawn at all. Still" (generously) "we'll let you walk about." He dismissed me with a nod. I did not move.

"But—"

"Now shut up. No damned chatter. You should belong to a decent religion."

"It is a decent religion," I cried. "Don't you talk so; it is my Grandmother's. 'Tis as good as any of yours, and a lot better. And 'tis not a good enough reason for keeping me out."

The Lord of the Lawn was not accustomed to being addressed thus. He darkened—or rather flushed; gingerheads cannot darken.

"If you want another reason, 'tis because you are a dirty little tell-tale sneak."

"Hear, hear! Sneak, Sneak!" Chorus of Kings and Princes.

"I'm not a sneak. I'm not a sneak, and I don't want to belong to your miserable Lawn. I'm a Saint anyway, and better than you churches and chapels."

I turned and moved away. "Saint, Saint, look at the Saint! The sneaking Saint, the saintly sneak. The Brethering kid. Plymouth Brethering, good old Plymouth Rocks. Three cheers for the Plymouth Rocks!" Church and Dissent mingled in this hostile chorus that pursued me to our gate.

"Look at the corduroy skirt, he, he, he!—just like workman's trousers," was the last thing I heard. My cheeks burned with rage and shame.

I ran up to the attic to sob and mope in peace. I was Hagar once again, turned out into the wilderness alone. Every child's hand was against me. I sobbed away, until at last the luxury of extreme grief brought its comfort. Mine was the chief sorrow under the heavens, it was unique in its injustice; I was the unhappiest little girl in all the world. I regained a measure of happiness.

After this experience, I went out on to the Lawn as little as possible; which achieved the result of Aunt Jael driving me there.

I could take no part in games, but after a while I became a kind of furtive hanger-on in the outskirts at the frequent "Meetings" of the Lawn, at which the division into Leagues did not usually persist. I only dared approach the company when Joe Jones was absent, which, however, inclined to be more and more usual as he became absorbed in gay adult adventures in the world outside the Lawn gates. The moment Joe was gone, and Laurie Prideaux had stepped without question into the shoes of leadership, the bullies who, under Joe's encouraging eye, would have driven me off, were silent and left me alone, obeying with slavish care the whim of the new Autocrat. So I stood away, just a little outside the ring of children, and listened.

Under Laurie's influence, the meetings were more concerned with affairs of universal moment and abstract truth than with the intrigues and vendettas so dear to Joseph Jones. Is the moon bigger than the sun? How far away are the stars? Does it really hurt the jelly-fish like the big yellow ones you see at Ilfracombe and Croyde, if you cut them in two with your spade? Do fish feel pain? Is the donkey the same as an ass, or is ass the female of donkey? What is the earliest date in the year you can have raspberries in the garden, or thrush's—or black-bird's—or cuckoo's eggs out in the country? What is the farthest a cricket-ball has ever been thrown? and will there be a war between England and the French Empire? With any insoluble question, i. e. a question to which nobody brought an answer which the meeting regarded as final, the procedure adopted was for every one present to refer it to his or her father or mother, and to report the result at the next meeting. Much valuable information was gleaned by this means. The final decision was by a majority of votes. Then if five parents said the moon was bigger than the sun, and only four that the sun was bigger than the moon, then the moon was bigger than the sun. Voting was by parents. Thus the Bolderos counted as one vote only; which was not unjust, for the brood, who were inclined, under Dora's orders, to stand or fall together, would otherwise have swamped the meetings; as indeed they frequently did when the question was not one which had been referred back to parental omniscience.

One day the supreme problem was raised. Joe Jones was not present, but perhaps he had inspired the discussion. It came breathlessly, with the swift tornado-strength of great ideas. Every one of us knew at once that we were face to face with something bigger than we had ever encountered before. Into our camp of innocence it fell like a bursting bombshell, scattering wonder in all directions. Of the innocence I feel pretty sure; I do not believe a single child knew.

"They are born, of course," said one, sagely.

"Yes; but how?"

"Storks bring them," said little Ethel Prideaux. "On my panorama, there is a picture of a big white stork carrying a baby in its beak, and it puts it down the chimney."

"Where does it get it?" objected Marcus. "Besides storks are only in Holland and places abroad; there aren't any left in England, and there are babies in England just the same."

"I think it has something to do with gooseberry bushes," said Trixie King. "I overheard my Auntie saying so."

"Well, we have nothing but flowers in our garden," said Billy Boldero, "and there are twelve in our family, and no gooseberry bushes."

"It is neither storks nor gooseberries," said Dora Boldero, aged thirteen, importantly. "These are only fairy tales for children. The real reason" (she lowered her voice impressively) "is this. Doctors bring them. Whenever we have a baby born" (at least an annual event in the Boldero ménage) "the doctor comes. He always brings with him a Black Bag. That's it!" (Sensation.)

Marcus was the first to recover. Even Black Bag was inadequate as First Cause.

"Yes, but where does he get the baby first, before he puts it in the bag to bring? He must get it somewhere."

"From the gooseberry bush, of course," said Trixie King, in a bold effort to recover her position. "I expect there is a special garden behind doctors' houses where they grow."

"But if there isn't?" objected Marcus pitilessly. "Doctor Le Mesurier has no garden at all, neither has Doctor Hale."

"No," said Laurie Prideaux. "And I don't believe the Black Bag story one bit. Because if it were that, the doctor could take the bag anywhere, and give whoever he liked a baby, just whenever he liked. And he can't, I know. Anybody can't have a baby just when they like. Mother says Mrs. Pile at Number Three has wanted one for years. Besides, any one can't have one. Only mothers have babies."

"And fathers," said some one.

"Fathers and mothers together; there must be both. At least there always is both."

"Except—" We all looked awkwardly at Johnny Blackmore, the posthumous one. He flushed slightly under his olive skin.

"No, I had a father too; he was my father, though he died before I was born."

"Well, if your father can die before you are born, what makes him your father? What does 'being your father' mean?" We were getting to fundamentals.

"Can a mother die too before her baby is born?"

Nobody could answer this. Somehow it seemed more improbable. Besides, we had no motherless counterpart of Johnny Blackmore to support the notion.

"Whether they die or whether they don't," said Laurie, summing up, "all that we've found out so far is that there must be a father and there must be a mother; a gentleman and a lady, that is, who are married. They must be married."

"No, they needn't be," I cried eagerly. "Sister Lucy Fry at our Meeting is not married, and she has a baby four months old!"

The sensational character of my information allowed my first utterance in a Lawn assembly to pass unreproved. There was an impressed silence. Everybody waited for more.

"It is not often, I don't think," I went on. "It was a mistake of some kind, and a sin too. Much prayer was offered up, and Aunt Jael nearly had her turned out of fellowship. It is wrong to have a baby if you are not married. Wrong, but not impossible."

"That's important," said Marcus, "but we've really found nothing out. How are they made? What makes them come?"

"The Lord," said I, sententiously. This was a falling off.

"I know. But how?"

Marcus was final. "This is a thing that has got to be asked at home. Tomorrow evening at half-past-five you will all report what you have found out. It is a thing we ought to know. We shall have to have children ourselves one day."

"I don't like to athk," simpered Kitty Prince. "Mother'd not like me to I'm thure."

Perhaps she really knew, though more likely vague instinct coloured her reluctance.

It was a reluctance I did not share. The meeting was about to disperse, and I was resolving in my mind the words I should use when asking my Grandmother, wondering what her answer might be, when "There's Joe coming in at the gate," was shouted, "let's ask him."

We crowded round him as he approached.

"Well, what is it, kids?" he said, in his royal cocksure way.

Laurie told him. He smiled: an evil important smile.

"And nobody knows anything," concluded Laurie.

"Don't they?" leered Joe, looking around to see that all the Lawn children were listening, and no one else. "Don't they. I know."

He told us. He told us with a detail that left no room for doubt and a foulness that smote our cheeks with shame.

"It is not true." I kept whispering to myself. My cheeks burned, and I was shaking all over. Against myself, I believed him. It was horrible enough to be true.

He gave us fatherhood as it appeared to him. When he came to the mother's sacrifice of pain, and desecrated it with filthy leering words, I could bear it no longer, and eluding all attempts to stop me, I fled wildly into the house, and upstairs to my Grandmother.

She looked up from the Word, surprised in her calm fashion.

"What is it, my dear?"

I told her. "O Grandmother, it is not as cruel as that, is it? It is not true? Tell me it is not true!"

"It is true, my dear."

"And does it hurt like that?"

"Yes, my dear."

"Why—why isn't there some easier way? So horrible the first part, and then so cruel. It is wrong."

"It's the Lord's will, my dear. It always has been and always will be. Meanwhile, you are not to go on the Lawn again till I have spoken to your Aunt. I must seek the Lord's guidance. Leave me to lay it before Him."

The look on Aunt Jael's face at supper-time soon banished the far terrors of motherhood: Grandmother had clearly told her all. It was unjust, of course: it was no crime on my part to have heard something—and something true—to which I could not help listening, which I had not sought to hear, and which terrified me now that I had heard it. It was unjust that she was angry. But there 'twas.

All through supper she said nothing. I feared to receive her wrath, yet I could not bear that visit should be delayed till the morrow, which would mean a sleepless night of visualizing. As we rose from our knees after evening worship, Aunt Jael turned a grim eye on me and spoke.

"I shall write to Simeon Greeber tomorrow."

CHAPTER XIII: I GO TO TORRIBRIDGE

I knew what that meant. It had been hinted at on several occasions since the birthday party. I was to go to Torribridge to live with Uncle Simeon.

I disliked Uncle Simeon, and did not want to leave my Grandmother. On the other hand I longed to see the world, and to get away from Aunt Jael. I must show her how glad I was at the prospect.

"You mean you're going to write to him about my going to live there?"

I said it in a cool pleased fashion, then at once regretted I had done so, for I knew Aunt Jael well enough to see that the pain the punishment she proposed would cause me was a more important thing than saving me from baneful Lawn influence; if I showed her too plainly I was glad to go to Torribridge, which on the whole I fancied I was, she might cancel the plan without more ado.

So I repeated: "You mean you're going to write to him about my going to live there?"—but this time my voice had a note of mournfulness; Aunt Jael sat up and stared. She failed to see through me, however; could not probe the depths of my cunning, as I the depths of her ill-will.

Grandmother comforted me: "'Twill be a change, my dear. Your Aunt and I think 'twill be a good and useful change for you. Your Aunt Martha will teach you many new things. Don't 'ee be tearful, my child: the Lord will watch over you."

Two days later Uncle Simeon arrived to take me. Pasty faced, white-livered, cringing little wretch, with his honeyed smile and honey-coloured hair. He sniffed as always.

"Good day, dear Miss Vickary. Good morning, dear Mrs. Lee. You too, dear little one. One is well pleased to see all one's kinsfolk looking so well in mind and body, well pleased indeed! One scarce knows how to express oneself. But one can give thanks, ah yes, one can give thanks."

We sat down to dinner. Food punctuated but did not check his flow of eloquence. He got the food on to his fork, but did not lift it. Instead he ducked his head and snatched, tearing the food from the fork as a wolf warm flesh from a bone. His eyes glistened as Mrs. Cheese placed a steaming mutton-pie before Aunt Jael.

"Your daughter, dear Mrs. Lee? Yes, dear Martha was well, when one left her this morning, and—D. V.—still is. She sends her fond greeting to you both. One took leave of her with a heavy heart, though 'tis only for a day, for one's love is so jealous, one's absences so rare. One took the eleven o'clock railway-train from Torribridge.... There were two ladies in the compartment with one. One was glad, ay glad indeed, to observe that ere the train started, they both whipped out their Bibles. One entered into earnest conversation with them. One was overjoyed, if surprised, to find that, although they were Baptists, they were good Christians."

"There are many such," interposed my Grandmother. "Don't 'ee be narrow, Simeon Greeber."

"Maybe, maybe, dear Mrs. Lee. God gives grace in unlikely places. Be that as it may, however, at Instow both ladies got out, and a gentleman entered the carriage, a man of means from his appearance, one would say. One remembered that he was but a sinner. One remembered the heavenly injunction: In season and out of season. One spoke a quiet word to him as to the Gospel plan. One was polite, if earnest. Alas, the poor sinner answered roughly. The Devil spoke in him. He used an evil word one's modesty forbids one to repeat. But in the Lord's service one must endure much. One suffered, but one forgave. Tonight he will be remembered in one's prayers. One was pained, hurt, wounded, grieved—but angry,—no! Anger is not the sin which doth most easily beset one." (What was? I wondered. Gluttony perhaps, I thought, as I watched his staccato snatches at a big second helping of the mutton-pie.) "One looked again at the face of the handsome sinner opposite. A voice spoke within one: 'Be not weary in well doing,' but a second effort at godly conversation yielded, alas, no better result. One had done one's duty, and for the rest of the journey one reflected on the different Eternities facing the poor sinner's soul and one's own. The railway train reached Tawborough in the Lord's good time, and here one is, rejoiced to see all one's dear relatives ... rejoiced indeed...."

The moment Mrs. Cheese had cleared away the table-cloth, Aunt Jael was curt: "To business, to business!" And to me, "You're not wanted. Make yourself scarce."

I went upstairs to the spare bedroom, meaning to sit on a settee by the window and daydream away the time. I opened the window. The dining-room downstairs must have been open too, for I could hear Aunt Jael's voice booming away. "Eight shillings" and "Child" I heard. I should never have tried to overhear, but now I found I could hear without trying—by the window here, whither I had come quite by accident. I could not help hearing if I tried—perhaps I had been led to the window-seat by the Lord, perhaps it was providential, perhaps I ought to listen. Besides, Mrs. Cheese did it: I caught her red-handed listening outside the door one day when Aunt Jael and Grandmother were discussing a rise in her wages. And eavesdropping was not a sin. There was no commandment, "Thou shalt not eavesdrop"—Our Lord had never forbidden it—there was nothing in the Word against it. And what harm would be done? As they were discussing my future, I should know soon enough in any case what they decided, so why not know at once?... No deceivers in the world are so easily deceived as self-deceivers. I leaned right out of the window.

"Agreed then, Simeon Greeber. You will take her for twelve months, treat her as your own boy, and have the same lessons taught her by Martha. And eight shillings a week for the board."

"Eight shillings?" queried a treacly voice, yet pained as well as treacly. "Eight shillings?" It is impossible to describe the sweet sad stress he laid on the numeral, or the wealth of poignant sentiment that stress conveyed. Not of greed or graspingness, oh dear no! Rather of pained sorrow at the greed and graspingness of Aunt Jael. "Eight? One fears 'twill be difficult. If it were nine, one might hope, one might struggle, one might endeavour—"

"Stuff and nonsense. A child of nine years old, eating little; and your table don't groan with good things. Eight is enough and to spare. Not one ha'penny-piece more. Yea or nay?"

A pause, ere Christian meekness gave in to unchristian ultimatum.

"Well then, dear Miss Vickary, one will try, one will hope—"

"Call the child," she cut him short.

I fled from the window guiltily. "Yes, Grandmother, I'm coming," I called back.

Uncle Simeon stayed the night: my last at Tawborough. Grandmother was kind. I did not know how I loved her till I felt I was going to lose her. This was my first big step in life. I was losing my old moorings, and sailing off to a new world. My mouth was dry, as it is when the heart is sick and apprehensive. Aunt Jael was adamant against my spending even occasional Lord's Days at Tawborough. I was to visit Bear Lawn but once during the year, though 'twas but nine miles away. There was no appeal against this: Aunt Jael had decided it.

Grandmother came to my bedroom. We read the twenty-third psalm together. Then she prayed for me, and we sang an old hymn together. At "Good-night, my dearie" I clung to her more than usual.

"There's only you in the world that really likes me."

"No, my dear, there is your good aunt. And there is God. Don't 'ee say nobody loves you when He is there. Don't 'ee think all the time of yourself. Think of making others happy. There'll be your little cousin Albert to befriend. Your Aunt Martha is kind, and will treat you well. That is why I'm letting 'ee go. Your Uncle Simeon too—"

"He's not kind," daringly.

"Hush, my dear, don't 'ee say so. He's a godly man, and fears the Lord exceedingly. He will treat you in a Christian way. And God will always be near you. Pray to Him every night, read in His word, sing to Him a joyful song of praise. Never forget that threefold duty and joy. Never forget, my dear. You will promise your Grandmother?"

"Yes, Grandmother, but 'twill be lonely."

"Your mother—my little Rachel—had worse trials than you, please God, will ever know; yet she praised God always. Will you be brave like her?"

"Yes, Grandmother," huskily, and I kissed her twice.

Next day, after an early dinner, we left Bear Lawn. I had a grim godspeed from the old armchair.

"No highty-tighty, no monkey tricks, no stubborn ways. Fear the Lord at all times,"—and a swift formal peck which was not swift enough to conceal perhaps a faint tinge of regret.

* * * * * * *

We left by rail. Uncle Simeon read his Bible the whole way to Torribridge, and never spoke a word. It was only my second journey by railway, and I had enough to interest me in looking out of the window. The country-side was bright with spring. Little did I foresee the different circumstances of my return journey.

I well remember our arrival. There was a tea-supper on the table, so meagre that my heart sank at the outset. There was my Aunt Martha. She seemed like a weak tired edition of my Grandmother. She looked miserable and underfed; I soon came to know that she was both. I regarded Albert, a dull heavy-faced boy with a big mouth and thick lips.

The latter soon opened. "Don't stare, you! Father, she's staring at me."

"It's not true. I'm not staring. I was just looking at him."

"Come, there, no answerings back in this house, learn that once for all." There was still a good deal of honey about Uncle Simeon's, still small voice, but it was flavoured with aloes now and other bitter things, whose presence he had kept hidden at Bear Lawn. The honeyed whine was now very near a snarl, as he showed his shiny white teeth and repeated, "Once for all." The Tawborough mask was being put aside already.

A clock outside struck the hour. I looked at the time-piece, which registered eight o'clock. So did he.

"She knows her bedroom, Martha? Yes. At eight she goes to bed, and eight in the morning we take our humble breakfast. Come now, to bed!"

I was faced with the Good-night difficulty. Albert I ignored, and he me. Aunt Martha was plain sailing. She looked kind, if weak and blurred. We kissed each other listlessly on the cheek. But from Uncle Simeon I shrank instinctively as I came near him. He saw my feelings, I saw he hated me for them, he saw that I felt his hate. That refusal to kiss was a silent declaration of inevitable war.

He took the offensive that very night, as the clock hands showed next morning.

I went upstairs with my candle, and sat down on a chair in the middle of the room. There was an unused smell about everything which seemed to add to my homesickness and sense of lost bearings. Bear Lawn had never been a gay and festive place, but it was home, and here in the dreary room the first-night-away-from-home feeling overcame me badly with all its disconsolate accompaniments of damp eyes and dry throat. The old injustice burned in my heart, the old bitterness came back. Why had I had to leave my Grandmother, the only one in the world who cared for me? Why was there nobody who loved me even more than that, in whose bosom I could hide my face and cry, whose love to me was wonderful? Why had the Lord left me no Mother who would have loved me best of all? The same old questions reduced me to the same old tears ... I pulled myself together and remembered my three-fold duty: to say my prayers, to read my psalm, to sing my hymn. I decided, with a true Saint's whim, to choose my nightly psalm by opening my Bible at random—I could gauge the whereabouts of the Psalms well enough, if only by the used look on the edge—and reading always the first psalm that caught my eye. Whether the Lord guided me to a choice of His own, or whether it was that my Bible opened naturally at so familiar a place, I do not know: anyway, there before me was the dirty, well-loved, well-thumbed page (page 537 I remember), and in the middle of it, plastered around with affectionate red crayon, stood my favourite 137th Psalm. I read aloud:

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

At once the appropriateness of the words came to me. Never had I felt till now what I had been told a hundred times, that the Bible was written for me. Here was a psalm which expressed my identical sorrow:

We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive required of us
a song; and they that wasted as required of us mirth, saying,
Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?

I finished the psalm and then tried to sing my hymn as I had promised my Grandmother, but I could not. My heart and my voice failed me: How could I sing the Lord's song in a strange land?

I awoke next morning, refreshed, to see the bright sun shining in. I did not know the time, as nobody had called me, and I had no watch. Just as I had finished dressing, a clock outside struck, the same clock as the night before. I counted; one, two, three, four, five, six, seven—on the eighth stroke I went downstairs. I'll be punctual, I said to myself. Uncle Simeon, Aunt Martha and Albert were already at the table. I looked at the timepiece; it marked nearly a quarter after the hour! Yet last evening it had tallied with the chime outside. Aunt Martha and I exchanged a brief matutinal peck; I found it easier, after the first effort the night before, to keep away from Uncle Simeon. "Good morning, Uncle," was all I said.

"Good morning," he replied, with a new touch of spite and venom in his whispering honeyed voice. "Not a good start, young woman. One said eight punctual for breakfast. 'Tis now fourteen minutes past."

"I came down the second the clock outside struck the hour. Last night it was the same time exactly. One of them must have gone wrong all of a sudden, or been altered perhaps."

"Altered? So you hint that this clock has been deliberately changed?" (I never thought of this till he suggested it, but then I knew; his shifty eyes betrayed him.) "One is not used to that sort of hint, and one has a way of dealing with it, a certain way."

I began my bowl of porridge. Meanwhile Uncle Simeon and Albert were beginning their eggs, and as soon as I had emptied my porringer, I looked around for mine. There was no egg within sight. I waited; none appeared. I plucked up my courage to ask.

"When is my egg coming, Aunt Martha?" There was a dead silence. Aunt Martha went red in the face, and looked uncomfortable. Uncle Simeon broke the silence. He looked hard at me, though never into my eyes.

"When is your egg coming? It is not coming. In one's house little girls are not pampered. They do not live on rich, unhealthy foods, nor wear sumptuous apparel. They do not lie upon beds of ivory, and stretch themselves upon their couches until a late hour, nor eat the lambs out of the flock, nor the calves out of the midst of the stall. They do not live in kings' houses; they live at Number One the Quay, Torribridge; under this Christian, if humble, roof. They eat humble Christian fare, and thank our Lord for it in a humble Christian way. If a fine generous bowl of porridge does not suffice, there is always plenty of good, plain bread. Your Aunt will give you as many crusts as you can wisely eat."

So I was to be starved, and preached at in my starvation! He was going to make sure of his eight shillings' worth. I felt red with anger, but held my tongue, schooled to silence by ten years of Aunt Jael. Aunt Martha looked ashamed of his meanness, but was far too weak to fight it. What will she ever had was stamped out of her on her wedding-day, poor wretch. Albert, dull, greedy little beast, gloated coarsely over my discomfiture, his tongue (all yellow with egg) hanging out of his mouth. Uncle Simeon tried to disguise his triumph under his usual loathsome mask of meekness, or perhaps he felt that he had gone too far too soon.

"Come, come! One is forgiving, one can be generous, merciful," and handed me the little top of his egg slit off by his breakfast knife.

This was adding insult to injury. Tears of anger stood in my eyes, but I managed to get out a calm "No, thank you," which enabled him to write to my Grandmother, I afterwards found, that "the little one refuses even part of an egg for her breakfast."

After breakfast came prayers. He whined where Aunt Jael thundered. Then came lessons with Albert and Aunt Martha. The former was stupid to a degree; the latter was very interesting to me, after my years of Miss Glory, especially in the French, to which I took at once. Dinner consisted of an interminable grace, three times as long as Grandmother's longest, and a tiny portion of hash. For "afters" there was a roly-poly pudding, quite plain, with no lovely hot jam worked in between the folds. Uncle Simeon and Albert had cold raspberry jam with theirs, out of a jar on the table. Aunt Martha and I did not. Manifestly the womenfolk at Number One the Quay did not live in Kings' houses, if the males did. Uncle Simeon was the King and Albert the King's son. My slice, the nasty dry bit at the end, was not four mouthfuls. He served everything.

After dinner Albert and I were sent out for a walk together.

"Where are we going to?" I asked.

"Where I like," was the reply, in a sulky voice, ruder than he dared use before his father. "And look here you, learn at the start, when you go walks with me you'll do what I tell you. And if you see me doing aught as I choose to, and there's any sneaking—I've got a fist you know."

The little brute lowered. I wondered what the dark things he hinted at might be; pitch-and-toss with boon companions of a like age, I afterwards discovered. Anyway, his hand too was against me: I was a young Hagar. For tea I had a bit of plain bread and a mug of hot milk and water, though Uncle Simeon and Albert had butter and whortleberry jam with their bread, and tea to drink. Afterwards I worked at the morning's lessons, sums and grammar and je donne, tu donnes, il donne. Then knitting—grey woollen socks for Brethren missionaries—evening prayers—my own bedside devotions—and bed.

All days were much like the first one, when not worse. It was the most miserable period of my life. Soon the daily round at Bear Lawn became almost cheerful in my memory. I was wretchedly underfed; though I sometimes lost appetite, and could not even eat the scanty fare he allowed me. When I left food on my plate, unlike Aunt Jael he did not force me. Rather he made it a good excuse for saying I had more to eat than I needed. My morning porridge was what I liked best, and one day I said so. "Ah, gluttony!" he cried, and snatched my porringer, pouring off the milk and scraping the brown sugar on to his own plate; "Whosoever lusteth after her victuals, the same is lost. Ah, to make one's belly one's God, 'tis a sin before the Most High!"

A starvation day in the attic was a favourite punishment, as it combined economy with cruelty. At times I should have fainted away half-famished but for what Aunt Martha privily conveyed me.

Three evil passions, I soon found, held pride of place in Uncle Simeon; meanness, greed and cruelty. Sometimes, if at a meal-time Aunt Martha went into the kitchen for a moment, he would get up with a cat-like speed, scrape all the butter off her slice of bread-and-butter, and spread it on his own piece. Aunt Martha said nothing, to such depths of fear and obedience can women sink; though she flushed the first time she saw that I saw this husbandly deed. He was too mean to keep a servant; helped once a week by a charwoman, a tall funereal Exclusive Sister named Miss Woe. Aunt Martha did all the work of a house twice the size of Bear Lawn.

Cruelty came nearest to his heart. He flogged me brutally. The first time the trouble began over a letter, a few days only after I arrived at Torribridge. He came into the dining-room, sniffing spitefully. I knew something was afoot by the look of mean anticipated triumph in his eyes. He held out a letter for my inspection, placing his thumb over the name of the person to whom it was addressed. I could read "1, The Quay, Torribridge"; the handwriting was my Grandmother's.

"'Tis a letter from my Grandmother," I cried, "a letter for me."

"A letter from your dear Grannie, true, true; but who said it was for you? Who said that? ha! ha!"

"It is, I know it is. Give it me, please."

Sniffing and sneering, he handed it across. There was "Miss Mary Lee" true enough; but the envelope had been opened.

"'Tis mine then; who opened it?"

"Who opened it? One who will open every letter that comes if one chooses, in accordance with your dear Great-Aunt's wishes."

"It's not true. I'm ten years old. Can't I open my own letters from my own Grandmother? She's my only friend in the world. It's not true."

"Have a care what you say, young miss, have a care. There is another little friend for you in the drawing-room. You shall be introduced at once."

I followed him upstairs, rabbit-like, not knowing what to expect. He locked the door. "Here is the Little Friend," he said, fetching from a corner a ribbed yellow cane. He gave me a cruel thrashing, clawing my left shoulder and whirling me round and round. The room was enormous; a spacious thrashing place. He hurt me as much as Aunt Jael on a field-day with the ship's rope, but I bawled less; no pain could draw from me the shrieks I knew he longed to hear.

Never more than four or five days passed without his thrashing me. I could review impartially the modes and methods of the two tyrants I knew: Aunt Jael with her stout thorned stick, Uncle Simeon with his lithe ribbed cane. Aunt Jael dealt hard brutal blows, Uncle Simeon sly mean strokes. She hit and banged and bruised. He swished and stung and cut. Hers was the Thud and his the Whirr. Both of them would have been prosecuted nowadays; there was no N.S.P.C.C. then to violate the sacred right of the individual to maltreat his human chattels. Both Great-Aunt and Uncle always left me bruised, and sometimes-bleeding. Yet of the two I dreaded his canings more; because he seemed so much the viler. Not that the dust of the Torribridge beatings formed as it were a halo round the Tawborough ones, not that Aunt Jael's grim masterpieces were becoming a winsome memory, not that a safe distance lent any enchantment to my mental view of her strong right arm. But with a child's instinctive perspicuity, I felt, though I could not have put my feelings into words, that there was some notion with my Great-Aunt beyond mere brutality; some sense of duty, of loyalty to her own Draconian creed. Her Proverbs counselled her thus. Chasten thy son while there is hope, and let not thy soul spare for his crying—little she spared for mine;—I found it needed loud houseful of crying for briefest moment of sparing. He that spareth his rod hateth his son, but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes—then indeed was her love for me exceeding great, out-measuring far the love of Paris for Helen for whose sake terrific war was made and Ilion's plains shook with thunder of armed hosts and Troy town fell, or King Solomon's for his Beloved in the garden of lilies and pomegranates. She thought she was doing her duty.

I knew that Uncle Simeon had no such excuse, and that he was something much worse than Aunt Jael: a coward. He was craven, creeping, caddish. He liked to flog me because I was weak and small and defenceless. His pale face sweated, his eyes lit up with a loathsome triumph, his lips were wet with joy. His cold clammy hands—like wet claws—gripped my shoulder. As evil breeds always evil, his hate bred hate in me: a physical, unhealthy hate I feel to this day, though he is long since gone to his judgment.

I had no friend, no affection, to protect me from this creature or compensate me for his presence. Aunt Martha, in whom her mother's gentleness ran to feebleness, was sometimes petulant, often kind (if she dared), and always null. With Albert, except on walks, I had little to do. Sometimes he bullied me, or spat or cursed at me, when there was nobody about. At times he was bearable, because too idle to be anything else. I missed my Grandmother terribly, whom I saw through this dark atmosphere as a very angel of kindness.

Life was even now more monotonous than at Bear Lawn, except for the daily walks: there were no changes, no variety, no visitors. Once indeed Mr. Nicodemus Shufflebottom, who had been ministering on Lord's Day to the Torribridge Exclusive Saints, and had missed the last conveyance back to Tawborough, was reluctantly put up for the night by Uncle Simeon. The ill-concealed tortures the latter endured at beholding the egg and bacon Aunt Martha had the temerity to put before Mr. Nicodemus for his breakfast, was a delight that stands fresh in my memory today.

On Sundays the week's monotony was hardly broken by the Meeting, a dull funereal affair, with none of the godly enthusiasm of our Great Meeting. Some ten dull or consumptive-looking creatures attended. Uncle Simeon was the one High Priest: he did fifty per cent of the praying, seventy-five per cent of the exposition, chose and called out almost all the hymns, and always took and "apportioned" the offertory. Nobody else counted for anything. I can just recall one Brother Atonement Gelder, who sniffled richly throughout the service in away that reminded me of oysters. I see, vaguely, a Brother Berry; and, more vaguely, a Brother Smith. They are shadows; the Meeting never filled a place in my life as at Tawborough. I remember more clearly Uncle Simeon's long sticky half-whispered supplications to the Lord, and one particular hymn we droned out every Lord's Day:

Come to the ark! come to the ark!
Oh come, oh come away!
The pestilence walks forth by night
The arrow flies by day.

Come to the ark! the waters rise,
The seas their billows rear:
While darkness gathers o'er the skies
Behold a refuge near.

Come to the ark! all—all that weep
Beneath the sense of sin;
Without, deep calleth unto deep,
But all is peace within.

Come to the ark! ere yet the flood
Your lingering steps oppose!
Come, for the door which open stood,
Is now about to close.

Most of the hymns were in the old London Hymn Book we used at Tawborough, so I could join in the singing from the very first. It pained me to hear the thin peevish rendering the Torribridge Exclusives gave of He sitteth o'er the water-floods, or their pale piping of Brother Briggs' stentorian favourite I hear the Accuser Roar. Aunt Martha and I squeaked feebly, Brother Atonement Gelder sniffled in tune, and Uncle Simeon whispered the words to himself with his eye in godly thankfulness turned heavenward. We stood up for the hymns; it is the only Meeting—but one—at which I have known this done. We worshipped in a dark stuffy little room behind a baker's shop. Aunt Martha scarcely spoke to the other Saints or they to her.

My one idea was to get back to Bear Lawn. Aunt Jael said I was to live here for at least one year, and for three if it proved satisfactory—satisfactory to her. I was to have one holiday in Tawborough each year; but not till the first year was out. Grandmother had said she would come over sometimes; I knew that Uncle Simeon was not eager to have her and would find excuses for delaying her visits. Could I abide it for a year? Fear and ill-usage and hunger were worrying me into a state of all-the-time nervousness and wretchedness beyond what I had ever experienced. How could I tell Grandmother this, and how much I wanted to come back to her? He read all my letters, and I knew she would disapprove if I tried to write without his knowing. What should I do? Counting the days and crossing them off each night on the wall-almanac in my bedroom might help to make them pass more quickly.

After all Aunt Jael was no magnet drawing me back to Tawborough. If life was worse here with him, it was bad enough there with her. Life was a wretched business altogether. Still, Uncle Simeon was worse than Aunt Jael, and if the walks and fresh air I got here compensated for the better food at Bear Lawn, my Grandmother weighed down the balance overwhelmingly in favour of the latter. I must get back. But how? I was ignorant and inexperienced beyond belief. I first thought of just leaving the house one day, and running back to Tawborough. I could manage the nine miles from one door to the other,—but the doors! I already felt Uncle Simeon's claws dragging me in as I sought to cross his threshold, and Aunt Jael's heavy hand on my shoulder at the other end if ever I should reach it. If I dared to run away, even if not sent back to worse days here, I could see a bad time of punishment and wrath ahead at Bear Lawn. It would be jumping out of the frying-pan into the fire, bandying myself between the thorned stick and the ribbed cane, escaping from unhappiness to unhappiness. It was hell here, and near it there—hell everywhere. If my face was as disagreeable as my heart was bitter and wretched, I must have looked a dismal little fright. Albert assured me that I did.

CHAPTER XIV: I BECOME CURIOUS

Uncle Simeon did not improve on closer acquaintance; nor on closer reflection did my chance of foregoing that acquaintance improve. Just as he abandoned all pretence of being kind and affable, so I began to abandon all hope of getting back to Tawborough for the present. How could I escape him? gave place to: How could I harm him?