Title:      Rogue Herries (1930)
Author:     Hugh Walpole
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Language:   English
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Date first posted:          January 2004
Date most recently updated: August 2009

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Production notes: Part 1 of "The Herries Chronicles"

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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      Rogue Herries (1930)
Author:     Hugh Walpole

Part 1 of "The Herries Chronicles"



A Novel




FOR A TRUSTED FRIEND

AND

IN LOVE OF CUMBERLAND




CONTENTS


PART I

THE CUCKOO IS NOT ENCLOSED


The Inn--The House

The Mountain

Family

The Devil

Chinese Fair

The Sea--Father and Son

Christmas Feast

Death of Margaret Herries


PART II

'FORTY-FIVE


Laughter of a Spaniel

Into the Cave

Witch

The Rocking Wood

Siege in Fog

The Prince


PART III

THE WILD MARRIAGE


Candlelight Respectability

The Wild Marriage

The Voice

Saga of David:  I. The Young Sarah

Saga of David:  II. The Fight above Wasdale

Herries in 1760

The Lover

Mirabell in Flight

Uldale:  I. Founding of a Family


PART IV

THE BRIGHT TURRETS OF ILION


Return of a Wanderer

Uldale:  II. Family Life

They meet in Penrith, Feb. 4, 1772

Phantasmagoria in the Hills

They are Alone and are Happy

Departure from Herries




Over this country, when the giant Eagle flings the shadow of his
wing, the land is darkened.  So compact is it that the wing covers
all its extent in one pause of the flight.  The sea breaks on the
pale line of the shore; to the Eagle's proud glance waves run in to
the foot of the hills that are like rocks planted in green water.

From Whinlatter to Black Combe the clouds are never still.  The
Tarns like black unwinking eyes watch their chase, and the colours
are laid out in patterns on the rocks and are continually changed.
The Eagle can see the shadows rise from their knees at the base of
Scawfell and Gable, he can see the black precipitous flanks of the
Screes washed with rain and the dark purple hummocks of Borrowdale
crags flash suddenly with gold.

So small is the extent of this country that the sweep of the
Eagle's wing caresses all of it, but there is no ground in the
world more mysterious, no land at once so bare in its nakedness and
so rich in its luxury, so warm with sun and so cold in pitiless
rain, so gentle and pastoral, so wild and lonely; with sea and lake
and river there is always the sound of running water, and its
strong people have their feet in the soil and are independent of
all men.

During the flight of the Eagle two hundred years are but as a day--
and the life of man, as against all odds he pushes toward
immortality, is eternal. . . .




PART I

THE CUCKOO IS NOT ENCLOSED



THE INN--THE HOUSE


A little boy, David Scott Herries, lay in a huge canopied bed, half
awake and half asleep.

He must be half awake because he knew where he was--he was in the
bedroom of the inn with his sisters, Mary and Deborah; they were in
the bed with him, half clothed like himself, fast sleeping.  Mary's
plump naked arm lay against his cheek, and Deborah's body was
curled into the hollow of his back and her legs were all confused
with his own.  He liked that because he loved, nay, worshipped, his
sister Deborah.

He knew also that he was awake because, lying looking up, he could
see the canopy that ran round the top of the bed.  It was a dull
faded green with a gold thread in it.  He could see the room too,
very large, with rough mottled white walls and a big open stone
fireplace; there was a roaring, leaping fire--the only light in the
room--and he could see very clearly the big, shining brass fire-
dogs with grinning mouths like dragons and stout curly tails.

He knew, too, that he was awake, because he could see Alice Press
sitting there, her clothes gathered up to her knees, warming her
legs.  He did not like Alice Press, but she always fascinated him,
and he wondered now of what she was thinking, so motionless, her
head with its red hair pushed forward, her naked neck above her
silver brocade.

He knew that he was awake, because he could hear the sounds of the
inn, voices calling, doors banging in the wind, steps on the stair,
and even the snap-snap of horses' hoofs on the cobbles of the yard.
He could hear the wind too, rushing up to the windows and shaking
the panes and tearing away again, and then he shivered, pleasantly,
luxuriously, because it was so warm and safe where he was and so
cold and dangerous outside.

Then he shivered again because he remembered that he, with the
others, must soon plunge out again into that same wind and mud and
danger.

He would like to stay thus, in this warm bed, for ever and ever.

But, although he was awake enough to know all these things, he must
be asleep also--asleep because, for one thing, the room would not
stay still, but leapt and rollicked with the fire.  All the things
in it moved; the fire-dogs grinned and yawned; over a large arm-
chair of faded red silk, oddly enough, some harness had been slung,
and it lay there in coils of silver and dark brown leather, and
these coils turned and stretched and slipped like snakes.  Then
against the wall there was a long, thin mirror in tarnished silver
and, in this, Alice Press was most oddly reflected, the side of her
face that was shown there being very thin and red, her hair tawny-
peaked like a witch's hat; her eyebrow jumped up and down in a
terrifying manner.

Only David was not afraid.  He was a very fearless boy.  But he
thought, as he lay there and watched, how ugly she was in the
mirror, and that if his father saw her thus he would not chuck her
beneath the chin and so make his mother unhappy.  And, although he
was not afraid, he was glad nevertheless that Mary's warm arm was
against his cheek and the round shape of Deborah's body against his
back.

Because it might be that after all Alice Press was a witch.  (He
had always had his secret suspicions.)  The way that she sat there
now, so motionless, bending forward, was just as though she were
making spells--and the silver harness blinked and the glass of the
mirror trembled as the flame of the fire rose and fell again.

Then, again, it must be that he was still asleep because, although
he knew that he was lying in his bed, he knew also that he was yet
bumping and tossing in the coach.  In that coach they had surely
been for weeks and weeks, or so at least it had seemed to his tired
and weary body.

At first when they had set out from Doncaster--how long ago?--he
had been all pride and pleasure.  It had been a fair and lovely
morning--one of the last of the late summer days.  The sun was
shining, the birds singing, such gay bustle about the cobbled
courtyard of the inn, the maids looking down from the windows, the
hostlers busy about the horses, the postilions polite and eager to
his father, all of them, Mother and Father Roche and Alice Press
and Mary and Deborah fitting so comfortably into the soft warm
inside of the coach, that had even pictures of hunting painted on
the walls and little windows with gold round the edges.

Yes, it had been all gay enough then, but how miserable it had soon
become!  He could not now divide the days and nights from one
another: moreover, he was still there in the coach, bumped up and
down, thrown here and there, sleeping, waking with cramp and pins
and needles, and Deborah crying and needing comforting, and Mary
cross, and his mother frightened, and Alice Press sulky.  Only
Father Roche, reading in his purple book, or looking steadily in
front of him, never perturbed nor upset nor unhappy, always grave
and kind, and miles and miles away from them all!

Then the Great North Road, which had sounded so fine and grand when
he had first heard of it, how different it was in reality!  Not
fine and grand at all, but full of deep ruts and mud so fearful
that again and again the coach was hopelessly stuck in it, and
everyone had to pull and push, cursing and swearing.  Once they
were almost upset.  The coach went right over on its side and the
horses went down, and they were all on the top one of another.  He,
David, had a bruise on his right leg, and his mother's cheek was
cut.

The further they went the colder it became.  They seemed, almost at
once, to leave summer right behind them.

Nor were the inns where they stopped fine and clean like the
Doncaster one, but cold, draughty, and the floors and walls often
crawling with spiders and other more evil things.

He seemed, lying there in the bed watching the leaping fire, to be
transferred suddenly back into one of the worst of them--where,
tired and bruised with the rough travelling, he had stumbled into
the low-ceilinged, ill-lighted, ill-smelling room, huddled with his
mother and sisters at a dirty table in a dim corner, and there
stared out into the rude, confused babble--men, women, children,
dogs, drinking, shouting and singing, the dogs waiting, mouths
agape, while the food was tossed to them, four men playing at some
game in a corner, a man with a fiddle and a monkey dressed in a
crimson jacket dancing in the middle of the sandy floor, the heated
damp of the room rising to the ceiling and trickling in wet smeary
streaks down the walls, a smell of straw and human breath and dung
and animals and tallow--and in the middle of this his father
standing, in his dark purple riding-coat, his high hat cocked, his
waistcoat of silver thread showing between the thick lapels of his
coat, his whip with the silver head in his hand--like a god, like a
king, demanding a private room, aweing at last the fat landlord,
round like a tub, causing all that coarse roomful to feel that a
great man had come among them.  There was little, tired though he
was, that David had not that night noticed, from the painting of
the King over the fireplace to a swinging gilt cage with a blue
bird, and a man who said he was from the wars and crept to their
table on his wooden stumps showing that his right hand had no
fingers. . . .

Yes, he remembered everything of that night (was not the man with
no legs and no fingers over there now by the fire watching Alice
Press, her back of stiff brocade?), because on that night a great
happiness had come to him.  He had slept with his father.  His
father and Father Roche and himself had slept in the one small,
dirty room, all three on the low, dirty bed.  At first it had been
almost terrible because his father had been in one of his rages,
cursing the place and the dirt and the cold, cursing his family,
too, for persuading him to the expense and danger of a private
coach, when they would all of them have been so much better on
horseback.

Then, seeing his little son straight and sturdy there in his
smallclothes, looking up and waiting for orders as to whether he
should go naked to bed or no, with one of his sudden gestures he
had caught him up and hugged him, then thrown off only his outer
clothing, then taken David and wrapped him, close up against
himself, in his great riding-coat--and the two of them stretched
out on the bed, Father Roche bodily beside them but spiritually a
world away.

How wonderful that night had been!  David had slept but little of
it.  He had lain close against his father's heart, his hands across
his father's breast, feeling the great beat of the heart and the
iron ribs beneath the thin shirt, his cheek against the smooth
softness of his father's neck.

That had been a great happiness, but after that night there had
been only trouble.  On the high ground towards Kendal they had
suffered a fearful storm of wind and rain.  It had seemed to them
that the end of the world had come; the coach had sunk into the mud
so that for hours they could not move it.  They had been warned, at
the last town, that they must beware of footpads, and at every
sound they had started.  Quite a crowd of travellers had been
accompanying them for safety--farmers, pedlars and other
pedestrians.  The weather perhaps had saved them.  All the footpads
were within doors, warm and cosy beside their fires.

In Kendal they had left the coach and had ridden the remainder of
their journey on horseback.  David, tired though he was, had found
that glorious, riding in front of his father, mounting the hills,
then dropping under the faint misted morning sun down beside the
miraculous waters and mountains, a land of faery such as David had
never dreamt of, sheets of white and silver, the mountains of rose
and amber and the trees thick with leaves of gold.

They had ridden into Keswick in the afternoon, quite a cavalcade of
them, with their possessions on pack-horses, the women and children
so desperately fatigued that they could scarcely keep their seats.
So, in a dream, to the inn, and the children stripped of their
outer clothing and flung into the great bed, the two little girls
at once dropping off into heavy slumber.

So should David have done, but instead he had lain there in this
strange state of waking sleep.  It was, possibly, that he was too
greatly excited.  For months past, in their home outside Doncaster,
he had been anticipating this journey.  He had not been happy in
the Doncaster home.  His father had been so much away, his mother
so unhappy, there had been no one save his sisters with whom he
could play.  He had hated the stuffy little house, the rooms
so small and dark, the country surrounding it so dull and
uninteresting.  And always there had been this unhappiness, his
father angry and rebellious, his mother often in tears, Alice
Press, whom he hated, supposedly looking after the children but
doing nothing for them, gentlemen arriving from Doncaster,
drinking, playing cards, singing and shouting all night long.  His
only interest had been his lesson with Father Roche, who, while
teaching him Latin and Greek, would talk to him about many
wonderful things, about London with its palaces and theatres and
gardens that ran down to the river, and Rome where England's
rightful King lived, and then of God and Heaven, and how one must
live to please God--to obey Father Roche in all things and to keep
secret in his heart everything that Father Roche told him.

The only other entertainment had been the times when he was with
Nathaniel and Benjamin, the men-servants.  Nathaniel taught him the
small-sword and cudgel, and Benjamin taught him to box and to
wrestle, and he had been twice with Nathaniel to a cock-fight and
once to the village to see a bear baited.

Nevertheless, had it not been for his father and Deborah the days
would have been heavy indeed.  He was a boy of passionate
affections and his whole heart was given to his father and his
sister.  His love for his father was worship and his love for
Deborah was protection.

His father was entirely a being from another world like St. Michael
or St. George who came in the Christmas plays.  His father who was
so handsome and splendid could do no wrong, although when he was
drunk he was hard to understand; when he beat Benjamin until the
blood ran down Benjamin's back David was sorry for the man, but yet
was certain that his father was in the right.

But Deborah was of his own flesh and blood.  So, too, was Mary, but
he did not care for Mary.  She, although she was so young, had
already her own independent fashion of living and, because she was
so pretty, could have her way when she pleased, which she very well
knew.  But Deborah was not pretty and was often afraid.  Deborah
believed that David could do anything, and she always came to him
when she was in trouble and trusted him to help her.  He could do
no wrong in Deborah's eyes, and so he loved her and guarded her as
well as he could from every harm.

At the thought of Deborah he turned a little and put his arm about
her, which she feeling, although deep in sleep, recognised by a
little dreamy murmur of pleasure.

Just then he heard the door (which was behind the canopied bed so
that he could not see it) open, and an instant later it was all
that he could do to withhold a cry of pleasure.  For it was his
father who had entered, who was now standing quite close to them,
looking down upon them.  David closed his eyes--not because he
wanted to be deceitful, but because he knew that his father wished
that he should be asleep.

Nevertheless, one look had been enough.  His father was resplendent!
For days and nights now he had seen him soiled and disarrayed with
the storms and struggles of that awful journey, muddied and blown
and uncaring whether he were neatly kept or no. There were times
when his father seemed to prefer dirt and disorder, and they were
bad times too.  An unkempt wig, tarnished buckles and buttons, a
soiled cravat, and David had learnt to know that the disarray and
rebellion were more than physical.

Only an hour ago David had seen him striding about the courtyard of
the inn, mud-splashed to the thighs, raging and swearing.  That had
been his last thought before he had fallen into this half-slumber,
that his father was still out there in the wind and rain ordering
Benjamin and the rest, seeing to the horses that were to carry them
the final stage of their weary journey.  But now, how resplendent
in the white-walled fire-leaping room!  David in that one glance
had seen it all.

The fine curled chestnut wig, the beautiful claret-coloured, gold-
embroidered coat with the long spreading skirts, the claret-
coloured breeches and grey silk stockings, the fluted grey-silk
waistcoat stamped with red roses, the little sword at his side--ah!
glory upon glory, was anything in the world anywhere so glorious as
his father thus!  No, nothing in London or Rome of which Father
Roche had told him--nothing that China or India itself could show!

His heart swelling with pride and happiness he lay there,
pretending to be asleep, watching through half-closed eyes.  He saw
then an odd thing.  He saw his father, on tip-toe, approach the
fire, steal upon Alice Press, she motionless gazing into the flame,
lean forward, put then his hands, deep in their splendid white
ruffles, lightly about her face, closely across her eyes.  She gave
a little scream, but David knew that at once she was aware who this
was.

Laughing, Francis Herries withdrew his hands.  She looked up,
smiling that strange smile of hers, half pleasure, half rebellious
anger.

'Why, sir,' (she was, like David, greatly surprised at his
grandeur), 'what fine feathers we're wearing!'

'Hush,' he put his fingers to his lips, 'the children are
sleeping.'

'I fancy so.  They sound still enough.  Poor babies--after such a
devilish journey!'  She turned again from him and stared back into
the fire.  'You are dressed to meet your brother?'

'Why not to meet yourself, beautiful lady?'

He was laughing, that careless, jolly, kindly, good-to-all-the-
world laugh that, as David knew, came only when he was happy.  So
he was happy now!  David was glad.

'Myself?'  She turned to him fully, showing the deep swell of her
bosom beneath the brocaded vest.  'No, I think not.  God! that I
had not consented to come on this madcap journey.'

For answer he bent down and, still laughing, caught her head in his
hands, brought his mouth to hers, kissed her on the lips, the
cheeks, the eyes, then, almost violently, flung her away from him,
straightening his body as he did so.

'Do you like that better?  Does that make you more content with
your journey?'

'No, why should it?'  She shrugged her shoulders, turning back to
the fire.  'Do you love me?  No.  Then what is a kiss?'

'Love--and love.'  He laughed.  'I am no captive to it, if that's
your meaning.  I visit it, wish it good day, spend a pretty hour in
its company--so I am never weary of it nor it of me.  Love?  And
what do you mean by love?'

'I mean,' she answered fiercely, 'those foul, filthy, beggarly days
and nights of mud and dung and stinking beds; the pains and bruises
that I have known on this journey and the idiocies of your wife and
the wailings of your children and the evil dirty tempers of
yourself. . . .  And what do I receive in return for these things?'

She rose up suddenly and turned to him--a tall broad woman, with
scarlet hair and a white face, who would soon be stout.

David, watching her, had never seen her like this, so alive, her
big eyes with the fair, faint eyebrows staring, the big bosom under
the silver brocade heaving, the big mouth in the pale face half
open.

Francis Herries looked at her gently, kindly and with amusement.
'What do you get?' speaking low so that the children should not be
waked.  He put a hand on her shoulder, and she stood strong and
sturdy without moving.  David could see her full face now in the
mirror and he watched absorbed because it was so awake.  Always it
had been yawning, the lazy eyes half closed, the cheeks heavy with
indolence as she sleepily ate sugar-plums and cakes and sugar figs.

'What do you get? . . .  Something.  Nothing.  And what is there to
get?  A little hugging and fumbling, sweating and panting, and then
satiety.'  He looked at her even with more earnest study, as though
in truth he had never seen her before, and her eyes did not fall
before his.  'You elected to come--to the end of the world.  No
roads.  Savages.  A chill house with the rain always falling--and
the ghosts of all your sins, my dear.'

She, with a sudden movement that surprised him, caught him round
the cheek and with her white face against his ruddy brown one
whispered eagerly, furiously in his ear.  The fire leapt as though
in sympathy with her urgency, and the figures swayed and swelled in
the silver mirror.

Francis Herries withdrew from her slowly, carefully, as though he
would not hurt her, no, neither her body nor her soul.  But he was
many, many miles away from her as he answered:

'So that's the way of it. . . .  To leave them in the mud and rain
and find sunshine, the two of us, alone--alone.'  He smiled--a
beautiful smile, David, who did not understand the most of this
strange conversation, thought.  'Alone with me, Alice, you'd be in
despair in a half-hour.  No one has been alone with me ever and not
suffered the intensest weariness.  I have suffered it with myself,
recurring agonies of it.  And you are not made to be wearied.

'Nevertheless, you will be infinitely dull.  Days of rain and mud
in a half-tumbled house cut off from everything but the savages.
It's your own choice, my dear.  And only my body to comfort you.
My body without my soul, I fear.  My soul has flown.  I lost it a
week back.  I shall find it doubtless on a tree in Borrowdale.'

David saw that she did not understand him, that she gazed at him
with a look that he himself did not understand, a look of rage, of
love, of uncertainty, of disappointment.  She was not very clever,
Alice Press.  Young though he was, David already had an instinct of
that.

His father came softly to the bed and looked down on them.  David,
his eyes tightly closed, could nevertheless see him, the gold of
his coat, the white silk of the lapels, the curling splendour of
the chestnut wig.  It was as though his father were weaving a spell
over him--his eyes so fixedly closed that they burnt.  A spell, a
spell!  The crystal in the silver mirror turning, Alice Press
mounting her broomstick and riding through the dark heavy-hung
sky, and his father riding on a silver horse into the moon and
stars. . . .  A spell!  A spell!

'Wake up! wake up!'

It was Alice Press's soft white hand shaking his shoulder.  He
opened his eyes.  His father was gone as though he had never been.
They were to be up and have their clothes on and see their good
uncle and aunt--Uncle Pomfret and Aunt Jannice.

The two little girls, like little round fluffy owls bewildered by
their sleep, dazed with the strange light of the leaping fire,
fastened their own clothes.  Mary was eight years of age, and
Deborah seven, and they had been taught from a long time to do for
themselves.  They had been wearing their winter dresses these last
days, and Mary's had dark fur edging the green velvet and Deborah's
grey fur upon crimson.  David was dressed in a short yellow jacket
and long tight breeches, buff-colour, reaching down to his ankles.
He tied Deborah's ribbons and points and fastened her shoes.  She
was very frightened.  She was scarcely as yet awake.  She did not
know what this great room was nor where they were now going.  She
was terrified of her Uncle Pomfret and Aunt Jannice.  She was
weary, utterly weary after the days of the journey.  She wanted her
mother.  She, like David, hated Alice Press.  She was like a little
downy bird, her head covered with soft flaxen curls.  She stood
there biting her lips so that she would not cry.  Had David not
been there she MUST have cried.  But she stood near him looking up
into his face.  Where David was no harm could come.

It was now time for them to go down, but they had to delay because
Mary must have her horn-book to carry with her.  It was a fine one,
and its back was of gilded and embossed leather, crimson with
silver wire.  David knew at once why Mary must have it.  It was to
show off before Aunt Jannice that she might notice how exceptional
a child Mary was.

They searched here and there.  Mary had had it with her before she
fell asleep.  Alice Press swore and threatened.  It was of no use.
Mary had a marvellous obstinacy when the purpose was concerned with
herself.  The horn-book was found beneath one of the fire-dogs, and
Mary walked out, holding it virtuously by the handle, her head up
as though she were leading a procession.

They went down the wooden staircase, which was from Elizabeth's
time, very beautiful and broad, the newels thick and strong, the
handrails framed into the newels, the balustrade beautifully
arcaded, a lovely symmetry of delicacy and strength.  In the hall
below it was very dark, save in the doorway that looked out into
the street where the light of the afternoon still gleamed in pale
shadow against black cloud.  Great gusts of the gale blew into the
hall, at the end of which was a huge stone fireplace with a roaring
fire.  On broad tables candelabra held many candles that also blew
in the wind.

Across the shining floor servants, drawers, maids, men from the
kitchen were constantly passing into the wild light and out of it
again.  Uncertain though the light was, it was enough for David to
see his father, standing very stiff and upright, his mother also,
and a lady and gentleman who must, David knew, be his uncle and
aunt.

The children were brought up to their parents.  Mary at once went
to her mother, caught her mother's hand, and so stayed, looking
very pretty.  David kissed his aunt's hand, bowed to his uncle,
then stood straight and stiff beside his father.  His uncle Pomfret
was a big, broad, stout man with a very red face, large wide-open
eyes and a little snub nose.  He was dressed in rough country
clothes, his long boots were splashed with mud.  He smelt strongly
of wind, rain, liquor and the stables.  He seemed good-natured and
friendly, laughed much and struck his leg often with a riding-whip.
Aunt Jannice was thin and tall, with a peaked face and a big brown
wart in the middle of her cheek.  She wore a broad hat and had a
curly brown wig which sat oddly about her yellow leathern face.
She was very composed, dignified and superior.  She contrasted
strangely with David's mother, who was always so stout and red and
flustered and was given to breaking into odd little hummings of
tunes from simple nervousness.

David knew that there was nothing that irritated his father so much
as this habit of hers.  But David's attention was fixed upon his
father.  He wished desperately--although he did not know why he
wished--that his father had not dressed so grandly.  Only half an
hour before he had been so proud of his father's grandeur, now he
was ashamed of it.

He was sure that Uncle Pomfret and Aunt Jannice were laughing at
his father for being in such grand clothes.  Not that his father
would care, but he, David, cared for him.  Uncle Pomfret was much
older than his father (he was indeed twenty-two years older; he was
the eldest, as Francis Herries was the youngest, he fifty-two years
of age and Francis only thirty).  He looked as though he might be
David's grandfather.

There was indeed no physical resemblance between the two brothers.
David discovered also another thing--that they were all striving to
persuade his father of something, and his father was very
obstinate.  He knew how his father looked when he was obstinate, he
smiled and was haughty and said little.  So it was now.

They were trying to persuade him to stay in his brother's house at
least to-night and not to go on in the wind and wet and darkness
into Borrowdale.  But his father only smiled.  He had planned to be
in the house to-night and be in the house he would, and the others
should be there too.

David saw that his mother was very near to tears, her round mottled
face all puckered, and she bit continually at her lace handkerchief.
She was desperately weary, poor woman, and afraid and very unhappy.

'Why, blast you and damn you, brother,' said Uncle Pomfret very
heartily.  'You must stay with us to-night or prove yourself most
unbrotherly.  We had always expected it so--Had we not, Janny?
There's no road over to Herries.  You are going among the savages
there, brother.  I can swear you were dismayed enough at seeing
this griddling little inn after your great Doncaster houses, but
this is Paradise to what you're going to.  Don't say I didn't warn
you now.  Damn me for a curmudgeon, brother, if I bottomed you into
doing it--but to-night you shall stay with us.  There's your lady
sunk with weariness, and the babes too, damn me if they're not.'

He shouted all this as though across a windy common, and all that
Francis Herries said to it was:

'Herries sees us all to-night, and we'll take our luck with the
road.'

'You'll be the rest of this day on horseback,' his brother assured
him.  'There's not a cart in Borrowdale, brother, nor a road to
carry one.  It's all horseback round here.  Damn it, you're in
Chiney in Borrowdale, but never say I didn't warn you.  You wanted
cheap living and you've got it.  Naked bottom and bare soil! that's
life in Borrowdale.'

David had never heard so rough and coarse and hearty a voice, and
it seemed to him strange that this big red man should be his
father's brother.  He jumped, too, from the sharp contrast when a
moment later his aunt spoke:

'Come now, Francis.  Have some softness for the family.  The
children can scarce stand with their weariness.  Margaret, persuade
him.  There is room enough with us for so long as you please to
remain.'

Her voice was cold and thin like the steady trickle of a determined
pump.  When she spoke, she stared in front of her, looking neither
to right nor left, as though she were reciting a set piece.

David's mother, thus appealed to, very nervously and not looking at
her husband, answered:

'Indeed, it's very kindly of you, Jannice.  We are weary and 'tis
late.  To-morrow would be time enough.'

'There, brother!' Sir Pomfret broke in with a roar, 'have you no
tender parts?  Your wife and the children at least shall stay with
us.  You shall ride alone if you are resolved--you and the priest,'
he added, suddenly dropping his voice.

'There--that's sufficient,' Francis Herries answered sharply.  'My
wife will be thankful enough when she's there and settled.  In an
hour's time the horses will be moving and ourselves on them.  Thank
you for your goodwill, brother.  And now for a meal.  It is ready
and waiting.'

It was now late for dining.  To the children, indeed, it would,
before this tremendous journey of theirs, have seemed an incredible
hour, for their dinner had been at three of the afternoon ever
since they could remember, but now all their customs and habits
were in ruin, and they accepted, poor things, blindly and without a
murmur what came to them.

They were, however, all three, too tired to have an appetite.  In
the little private room they were crowded about the small table.
David to his distress was next to his uncle, who roared and rattled
and laughed as he helped the food, so that it was like being seated
next an earthquake.

There was a good baked pie of a leg of mutton, and roasted chickens
with pease and bacon, and a fine fruit tart that would, at another
time, have made David's mouth water.  There was much wine, too, and
of this Uncle Pomfret began to drink very heartily indeed, and
shouted to the others to do the same.  The noisier he became the
more upright and magnificent was Aunt Jannice.

Very fine, especially, was she when she rose to wash her spoon in a
bowl of water behind the table, so that, having just used it for
pease and bacon, it should not now be soiled for the fruit tart.
David's mother, who had never seen anyone do this before, could not
hide her staring wonder.

David, in spite of his weariness which made everything around him
like a dream, fancied that his aunt was storing all things up in
her mind, so that for many weeks she would be able to retail to her
genteel friends all the strange things that this wild family had
done.  He did not love her the better for fancying this.

But he was in so dreamy a state that he could be sure of nothing.
He, in his half-dream, saw--and he knew that his mother saw this
too--that his father was drinking in a defiance of his stout red-
faced brother.  He knew what his father was like when he was
drunken, and he hated his uncle that he should tempt him.
Throughout this journey his father had been very fine, drinking
nothing, aware perhaps of the charge there was upon him.  And in
any case he drank little when Father Roche was there.

But in everything that he did, while his brother was present, there
was defiance.  There had been defiance in his grand clothes,
defiance in his refusing to stay in Keswick, defiance now in every
gesture.  David, because he adored his father, knew all this with a
wisdom beyond his years.  Meanwhile, in this dreamy state, it was
all that he could do with his wits to defend himself against his
uncle, who was pushing pieces of meat and of pie on to his plate
and even holding his head back and poking food into his mouth.  But
once when he was about to force some wine down his throat Francis
Herries called out quietly:

'Nay, brother, leave the boy alone.  He shall have wine when he
wishes for it.  It shan't be thrust on him.'  Pomfret broke out
into a flurry of magnificent and filthy oaths.  He then thrust
David in the ribs and cried at him:  'Why, damn thee, boy, dost
thou not follow thy father?  He's a lecherous foul-dealing knave
enough, I'll be bound--no Herries, an he ain't.  Drink thy uncle's
health, boy, and be damned to thy father!'

'Pomfret!' said Aunt Jannice.  It was enough.  The uncle was cowed
like a dog under a whip and took some sugar-plums from a plate and
swallowed them, three at a time, like a confused child.  David
looked across to his father.  It seemed to him then, as it was to
seem to him increasingly in the coming days, that they were younger
and elder brother, not father and son.  And, indeed, there was only
the difference of nineteen years between them.

In his dreamy state it seemed to him that he and his father were
circled round with light together, they two, and that his father's
crimson and gold shone, and the room burnt against its panelling
with a strange and sombre glow.

But his next thought was for Deborah.  With every attention that
his uncle had permitted him he had watched her and had seen that
she was very unhappy.  Poor child, with weariness and fear of her
relations and her seated distance from David, she was nearly
distraught.  She did not understand what had happened to her, but
it was something terrible.  She understood that more terrible
things were shortly to occur.  David, watching her, could at last
endure it no longer; her frightened eyes, the way that her head
bobbed and nodded and then bobbed again, her fashion of pretending
to eat and not eating, hurt him as though it were himself.

While his uncle was busy with a long and excited account of his
country sports and pastimes, with vociferous curses on the French
and praise of the Hanoverian succession, he stepped from his chair
and went to her side, bending forward and whispering to her.

But, alas, this kind attention was too much for her; she broke into
sobs, not loudly but with a soft titter-witter like a wounded bird.

Uncle Pomfret broke off his account of what he would do to a French
Papist an he caught him, to tumble into a bellow of laughter.

'Why, pox on it, here's a little master . . . comforting your
sister. . . .  Why, damn it, boy, but I like your heart.  There's a
good one for the ladies.  He knows a thing or two, I warrant.  But
come hither, little Deb.  Come to thy old uncle.  He'll buy thee a
baby, one of your china sorts with pink cheeks, none of your
stuffed rags.  Come to thy uncle, Deb, and he'll comfort thee.'

'David.'  It was his father's voice.  'Leave Deborah.  Come to me.'
He went up to his father, fearless, but not knowing whether a
caress or a blow was to be his fate.  Then he looked into his
father's eyes and saw that they were soft and humorous and knew
that all was well.

'Go, find Benjamin.  We must shortly be starting.'  Then, turning
to his brother, 'She has babies enough, Pomfret; she is weary, and
there's a bed at Herries waiting for her.'

He did not hear his uncle's retort, which was something fine and
free about beds and ladies and general courtship.  He was glad to
be away, he didn't care if he never saw his uncle or aunt again; he
hated them and Keswick and the inn.  But coming into the bustle of
the kitchen where serving-men and maids were shouting and pushing,
where dogs were waiting for chance pieces of food, and a man with a
feather in his broad hat was seated on the corner of a table
playing a fiddle, the stir and adventure of it all heartened him
and he was glad that he was alive and pushing, shoving forward into
this grand new world.  The kitchen smelt of everything in the world--
meat and drink and the heat of the great fire.  He looked around
him and found Benjamin seated in a corner near the fire, his arm
round a girl.  She was feeding him with pieces of meat off his
plate.

'Benjamin,' he said, ordering him as though he were a hundred years
his master, 'my father says that it's time for the horses.'

Many of them heard him and turned laughing, and a big woman with an
enormous bosom would have made him come to her, and a brawler
wanted him to drink, but he fixed his eyes on the stout Benjamin,
who put his plate down, gave the girl a kiss, and came without a
word.  So much power had Francis Herries over his servants.

Benjamin was plump and rosy; he should have been a fine figure of a
man, but he could eat all day without ceasing.  This was one of the
reasons that he was beaten by his master, but he bore his master no
grudge.  Everything that came his way he took, and over the bad he
shrugged his shoulders and over the good he laughed and grunted.

First or all he loved himself, then food, then women (all kinds,
young, old, ugly and fair--there was not the ugliest woman in the
country who was too ugly for him, and with his round, rosy cheeks,
merry eyes, broad shoulders and stout legs he could do what he
would), then cock-fighting, dog-fighting, football, bear-baiting,
rat-hunting, witch-hunting, all kinds of sport (he was himself not
a bad sportsman with the staff and cudgel, and boxing and running
and swimming), then every kind of a horse, then young David, for
whom he cared, perhaps, more than for any other single human being,
but not for him very deeply, only lazily and with easy good-nature.
He was from the South, and had, as yet, no good word for this
northern country.

He grumbled as they made their way into the dusky yard.  'Pox on
it,' he said, 'I'll pepper my own legs with shot, but I thought his
honour would give us another hour's quiet and plenty.  What's he
want riding on to-night for?  There's but few like the master for a
restless spirit. . . .  I'd match that white dog in the kitchen
there,' he went on irrelevantly, 'for a hundred guineas against the
grey bitch the master had in Doncaster.  There's a dog.  You could
see he never blinked a bird in his life.  And you needn't tell
master I was kissing Jenny neither!  They all say their name's
Jenny--'

'I shall not tell him,' said David proudly.

'How many miles is it from this Borrowdale to Keswick?' asked
Benjamin.

'Around seven, I fancy,' said David.

Benjamin nodded his head but said nothing.  'It's a little inn as
you might say, this,' he remarked.  'Small beside the south-country
inns.  Not much business in this little town.  Kendal's the way the
business runs.  Not but there won't be some sport in Borrowdale.  I
may be a poor man and not bred for writing and accounts, but I know
a dog when I see one.'

David missed many more of his remarks.  For one thing Benjamin was
always talking, not like the other man Nathaniel, who was a little
spare fellow, very silent and grim, and anyone who was often with
Nathaniel must accustom himself to think his own thoughts while
Benjamin chattered.  Besides this, David again was in his dream
state.  As he stood in the yard listening to the horses striking
the cobbles, hearing the curses of the hostlers, smelling the hay
and straw, catching the sharp cold of the breeze about his face, he
seemed to move, not on his own feet, but through the air, alighting
here and there and then up again, softly, breezily like the wind.

Thus dreaming he found himself standing with the others at the inn
door.  Father Roche was there, and Alice Press, his father, mother,
uncle, aunt, and his sisters--all dreamy and wavering together.  A
crowd had collected to watch their departure.  A great wind was
hurrying through the sky above the black gables and chimneys,
carrying soft grey clouds with it, and between the clouds once and
again a burning star stared and vanished.  The horses were stamping
and pulling at the heads.  Everything was ready for this last ride.

In the doorway stood the stout host of the inn, bowing as Francis
Herries very grandly thanked him for his courtesy.  Uncle Pomfret
laughed and shouted.  Then, as it seemed, a moment later one of
life's great happinesses had occurred, for David was sitting a
horse in front of his father.  He had expected that he would be in
front of Nathaniel, because all the way from Kendal he had been
with his father, and surely such luck would not come to him twice.
But here he was pressed against his father's body, and he could
feel the movement of his thighs and above his head the throb of his
heart, and in his face the wind was beating like a whip.

They were off, trotting over the cobbles, the horse slipping now
and then in the mud or refuse, his father stiffening as he pulled
at the reins, and at their side seen dimly his mother, pillion
behind Father Roche with Mary in her lap, Alice Press with Deborah
pillion behind Benjamin, the rest duskily in the rear.

The little town was very still; a light glimmered here and there
through a shutter, a watchman going from his warm room, perhaps, to
his night-duty passed them swinging his lamp, a chair in which a
lady highly muffled could just be seen went swiftly with its
bearers round the corner.  They turned out of the square to the
left, and the clatter that they made as they swept round the corner
drew some heads to the window and an aproned man with a candle in
his hand to the doorway.  Then as they began to clear the town
another thing occurred.  David was aware that certain figures were
running at their side and a man on a little nag was keeping pace
with them.  The same thing had happened to them on their way to
Kendal, when a number of farmers and others had gone with their
coach.  That had been because of footpads, and now this must be for
the same reason.

That made his heart beat faster.  They were passing out of the
guarded town and were running into dangerous country, dangerous
country that, although he did not know it, was to be his country
for many a year.  He had perhaps some sense of it there under the
biting wind, for he shivered a little and drew closer to his
father.

They pulled up a little hill and were aware now at once of the open
country, for the road beneath them was treacherous.  The horses
began to walk, and even so they slipped and stumbled in the mud.
In the centre the path (it was little more than a path) was hard
and well-trodden but on either side a quagmire.  There was a faint
silver misty light in the sky, but this shifted and trembled with
the driving clouds.  On the left of them there were thick trees,
but on the right the landscape sloped to the mere, and in front of
them were black shadows that waited like watchers for their coming,
and these, David knew, were the mountains.  He was aware then of a
further thing, that his father was drunk.  Not bestially drunk.
Not ferociously drunk.  Happily drunk.  His body closed a little
about his son as he sang softly the children's game:


     'Lady Queen Anne who sits in her stand,
      And a pair of green gloves upon her hand,
      As white as a lily, as fair as a swan,
      The fairest lady in a' the land.
      Come smell my lily, come smell my rose,
      Which of my maidens do you choose?
      I choose you one, and I choose you all,
      And I pray, Miss Jenny, yield up the ball.
      The ball is mine and none of yours.
      Go to the woods and gather flowers;
      Cats and kittens hide within;
      But all young ladies walk out and in.'


David knew the words very well, because, although this was a girls'
game, he had played it to please his sisters.  His father repeated
again:

'And I pray, Miss Jenny, yield up the ball--And I pray, Miss Jenny,
yield up the ball.'

Why had he chosen the name Jenny?  Was not that the name by which
Benjamin had called the kitchenmaid?  Did they, as Benjamin had
said, always cry Jenny for a name?  His father swayed slightly as
he sang, but the horse seemed to understand.  In any case they were
going slow enough.  No harm could come.  A little man trotting at
their side called up to them:

'I have a fiddle with me, your honour, and will play to you by your
fire.'

And Francis Herries answered him happily:  'I'll swear you have a
fiddle and know how to play on it too.'  Then he began to talk very
pleasantly to his young son.  The path now was bending down until
it almost touched the mere, and David could hear the little waves,
driven by the wind, slapping the shore and rippling away again into
space.

All his life he was to remember that moment; the clap of the
horses' hoofs on the path, the slap and ripple of the water, the
little panting breaths of the man running beside them, the warmth
and intimacy of his father's body, the dark woods above them, the
black hills in front of them, the fiercely moving sky, and the
gentle good-humoured voice in his ear.

'And so, David, we are passing into the perilous country where the
savages live, where there is only hay to eat and dirty water to
drink, where it rains for a hundred days.  Dost thou think there
will be bears there, David, my son?'

'I don't know, father.  I hope so,' said David.

'Bears of one family or another there will be, and snakes in the
grass and peacocks on the garden wall.  Is it not as though we were
escaping?  Escaping from what, think you?'

'We are not escaping,' answered David proudly.  His voice came in
little jolts.  They were now on harder ground and were moving more
swiftly.  'You would never run away.'

'No, would I not?  Art thou so sure, little son?  I have run from
the lions in my time and then again I have braved them.  But this
is the most perilous adventure of all.  We will not come from this
save with our naked skins; and if I am hard pressed will you always
stay by me, David?'

'Always,' said David, nodding his head.  'I could never be
frightened an you were there.'

'Couldst thou not, couldst thou not, my son?  Although the she-
devil with the silver hams and the glassy tongue came to down us
both?'

'I'm afeared of no woman,' David answered, but the trees now were
gathering about him very darkly, and it was cold.  In spite of
himself he shivered a little.

His father laughed, bent forward and touched ever so lightly with
his lips the boy's neck.

'So we are together, side by side, whatever the peril--for ever?'

David straightened his back.  'Yes, sir,' he answered proudly.

''Twas a maid in the inn said her name was Jenny when I kissed
her,' his father said, 'though she's no maid any more.  Not by my
doing, I had no time to test her virtue.  Eh, little son?'

David understood this only vaguely.  'I don't like women,' he said.

'Not your sister Deborah?'  His father laughed softly, deeply, as
though he were thinking of other things.

'I love Deborah,' David answered.

'And your Aunt Jannice?'

But David did not reply.  He could not.  He was fast asleep,
leaning back against his father's breast.

He woke again with a start to see that all the horses were at a
standstill and were gathered about a small stone bridge.  At that
same moment, as though it had been arranged, a round moon, cherry-
coloured, broke out from shadowy banks of cloud.

She stared down at them, and at once, as it seemed in his sleepy
half-wakened state to David, the clouds fled away; she sailed
gloriously in the sky of shining light scattered with stars.  The
world around them was like a world seen through glass, pale and
unreal, with the trees and hills of ebony sharpness.  A hamlet was
clustered beyond the bridge and the river, which was running full
and throwing up, under the moon, little white waves alive and
dancing.

After a consultation they moved on upwards over a little hill with
hills on their left side and the flooded gleaming river on their
right.  It was all very quiet and still.  The storm had altogether
died away.  No one spoke, and the only sound was the hoofs of the
horses, now soft, now sharp.  The scene was now to David, who had
only all his life seen flat and shallow country, incredibly
wonderful.

They were passing through a gateway of high rock into a little
valley, still as a man's hand and bleached under the moon, but
guarded by a ring of mountains that seemed to David gigantic.  The
moonlight made them larger and marked the shadows and lines of rock
like bands of jagged iron.  In colour they were black against the
soft lighted sky and the myriads of silver stars.  A little wind,
not sharp and cold as it had been before, but gentle and mild,
whispered across the valley.

As they advanced, the only live things in all the world, it seemed
that in a moment someone must break the strange moonlit silence
with a cry:  'Ahoy! ahoy! who comes to meet us?'

But not even an owl hooted from the listening trees.  After a while
one mountain detached himself from the skies, coming towards them--
large, sprawling, very dark and solid, with a ragged edge.  To the
left of this mountain there was a straight thin ledge like a tight-
rope, and on the right a very beautiful cluster of hills, in shape
like the grouped petals of an opening flower.

Then quite suddenly they stopped.  'That is the house on the left
of us,' someone said.  It was the first voice for half an hour, and
the hills seemed to repeat:  'Yes, that is the house.'  The horses
trotted over soft, rather boggy, grass, up a little hill, through a
thick group of trees, and at once they were all outside a rough
stone wall that guarded a ragged, grass-grown courtyard.  David
looked at the house and was sadly disappointed.  Under the black
hills it seemed so very small, and in the white moonlight so cold
and desolate.  It appeared to be two houses: on the right it was
high, with a gabled roof and thin latticed windows; then it dropped
suddenly to a low rough-seeming building with shaggy farm byres at
its hinder end.  He noticed, especially, the windows of the higher
house, because there were two little attic windows like eyebrows,
and he could see, because the moonlight made everything so clear,
that the door of this house had handsome carving.  But the other
building was low and shabby and forsaken.

While they waited at the gate three dogs came out furiously
barking, and directly they were followed by a broad thick-set man,
walking clumsily, who hurried down to meet them.

Then a light was in the doorway, but still the house watched, cold,
desolate, under the moon, with no greeting for them.

'So--we are home,' he heard his father murmur.

Then he felt himself picked up in his father's strong arms, lifted,
then carried across the courtyard.

His father set him down, and he ran over the threshold of the
doorway.  The hall where he stood was flooded with moonlight, and
opposite him were two shining suits of armour.  People were moving
and talking behind him, but he did not hear them.

He was first in the house.  As he stood there in the moonlight he,
who had been asleep so long, was suddenly awake.

And he made his compact with the house.



THE MOUNTAIN


Charles Francis Herries woke when the light of the fine new day was
throwing silver shadows across the misty fields.  Pushing back the
creaking diamond-paned window, standing there in his purple bed-
gown he looked down on the courtyard, the thick clustered yews that
guarded, as though with fingers on their lips, the house, the
ragged stone wall, then, beyond, the river, the thatched roofs of
the nearest yeoman's farm, the fields and the dark sombre hills.

He drew a deep breath, flung off the bed-gown and stood there
naked.  He did not feel the cold, nor the sharp crisped air; he was
at that time impervious to all physical pain and discomfort, a
magnificent creature in all bodily force and feeling.  He stared
out, then looked back into the little, thin, low-ceilinged room.
It was furnished scarcely at all--only a narrow truckle-bed on
which he and his son had been sleeping--David, his flushed cheek
against his arm, still lay there soaked in sleep--a big carved
chest with the date 1652 roughly cut upon it, a mirror on the
chest, and against the farther wall some old green tapestry (very
faded) that flapped and rustled now in the breeze from the open
window.  There was one high-backed and clumsy chair, and into this
his clothes had been carelessly flung.  David's little things,
carefully folded, were on the top of the chest.

He felt his body, punching it here and there, pinching it, kicking
out a leg, stretching an arm.  He might have been proud that he was
so handsome and in such splendid health--such marvellous health
indeed, considering the life that for ten years now he had led.
But he was scornful of that as he was of everything else.  What
good had his beauty, health, strength brought him?  Not so much
good as that silver moon setting now in a pale rosy sky beyond the
latticed window.

He stood there, the breeze blowing on his bare back and thighs,
looking down on his little son.  Here, too, he was scornful.  His
young son loved him, but would he love him as the years passed and
he grew to realise his father?  Would there not develop in him that
same withdrawal that seemed to come to every human creature after a
short contact with him--yes, even to so poor a thing as Alice
Press, who was already beginning to look at him with that strange,
surmising glance?  David at present trusted and adored him, and in
the centre of Herries' universal scorn, scorn of himself, of all
human beings, of the round world and all that moved in it, there
stayed this pleasure and pride that his young son so thought of
him.  That he could neither deny nor reject.  But for how long was
it to remain?  Would he take any steps to retain it?  He knew
himself too well to fancy that he would.

He turned again to look out of the window on to the scene that was
to be his now, he was determined, for evermore.  Whatever came of
this step that he had taken, whatever misery, ruin, disgrace, he
would hold by it.  It was final.  Only thirty years of age, he yet
seemed to see far, far into the future, and something told him that
at the very last these dark hills would encircle him.

The hill that chiefly his window faced seemed especially to tell
him this.  The houses of this time in this country were not built
that their tenants might look out on beautiful views, but rather
for safety and shelter, tucked tight in under the hill, guarded by
heavy yews.

Beyond the fields, in far distance, this humped, lumpish hill,
Glaramara, sprawled in the early morning light.  Herries knew well
its name.  For so long as he could remember he had known precisely
how this house must stand, and all its history.  In 1565, the year
following the founding of the Company of Mines Royal, Sir Francis
Herries, his great-great-grandfather, had come from his house
Seddon, north of Carlisle, in part charge of the 'Almaynes,' the
foreign miners, and built him a little house here, called it
Herries, and, at last, liking it and the country, had lived in it
altogether, giving up Seddon to his younger brother.

In all his young days at Seddon, Francis had heard of Herries, the
strange house in the strange country, shut in under the mountains
behind rocky barriers, cut off from all the world.  His grandfather,
Robert Herries, had tried for a while to live in it, but it had
been too isolated for him.  That, too, his father Matthew had
found, and had moved back to Seddon, and after this the old house
had been held by a yeoman, Satterthwaite, farm-buildings had been
added to it, and much of the older house had been allowed to fall
into ruin.

When Francis' elder brother, Pomfret, had made a fortune in
speculation (this largely by chance, because Pomfret was no
brilliant financier) he had built him his house in Keswick, caring
nothing for Herries, which, although so near to him, seemed yet at
the very world's end.

Satterthwaite, a clever yeoman above the abilities of his fellows,
had done well for himself, and built a farm-house over towards
Threlkeld.  It was then, after some years of desolate neglect, that
Herries had been suggested to Francis by his brother, and, driven
both by his romantic love for the notion of it and by his own
desperate circumstances, he had accepted with an eagerness that had
amazed the unimaginative Pomfret.  Yes, an eagerness that was
amazing even to himself.  What was it that had driven him?  That
part of him that loved to be alone, that loved to brood and dream
and enfold about him, ever closer and closer, his melancholy and
dark superstition and defiant hatred of the world.  That part of
him, too, that felt, as neither Pomfret nor Harcourt, his brothers,
felt, his passionate pride in his family.  Why that pride?  God
only knew.  There was no reason for it.  The Herries men had never
done great deeds nor supplied to the world famous figures.  For
hundreds of years they had been drunken, robbing Border freebooters;
only, in Elizabeth's time, his great-great-grandfather, Francis,
having some good fortune at the Court, had pushed up a little the
family fortunes.  That Francis had been a hard-headed fellow, a
flatterer, a time-server, a sycophant, but not ungenerous if he got
his way, and no fool at any time.  Elizabeth had a fancy for him,
would have kept him with her, and was none so well pleased when,
quite eagerly, he accepted the opportunity of surveying the foreign
miners who were sent to Keswick.

Something hurried him thither, that odd strain that was for ever
cropping up in every Herries generation, the strain of the dreamer,
the romanticist, the sigher for what was not, the rebel against
facts; and in that old Elizabethan Herries this romantic dreaming
went ill enough with hardness, his pushing ambitions, his desire
for wealth.

Between the two stools of temperament he fell to the ground, as
many another Herries had done before him.  This land in Borrowdale
caught his fancy; he stayed on and on there, losing at length his
interest in the mines, mooning, a dirty unlaced old man, behind the
rocks that bounded that valley, keeping company with the yeomen,
pursuing their daughters, drinking, riding, dicing--dying at last
in his old tumble-down house, a little soiled rat of a man with ale
dribbling at his ragged beard.

That was great-great-grandfather Herries.  The place had done
something to him, and Francis Herries, gazing now out of his
window, thought it an odd fancy that this same sprawling hill,
Glaramara, had looked across into that old man's eyes, seeing them
grow ever more bleary, more dim, more obstinately sodden.

And so it might be with him!  He had come even as that old man had
come, in the vigour of his prime and strength, and he had in him
those same things--that longing for what was not, dream of Paradise
round the corner, belief in a life that could never be.  And in him
also, riding him full strength, were lechery and drunkenness,
lasciviousness and cruelty.

As he stood there, idly gazing, he had a passionate family feeling.
Not for individuals.  He hated Pomfret, despised Harcourt, cared
nothing for his cousins, the children of his uncle Robert, who
lived London way, nor for his other two cousins, Humphrey and
Maurice Cards and their children, Dorothy, Jeremy, and Henry.
Humphrey Cards, a man a good deal the elder of Francis, lived now
at Seddon and was said to be a tight-lipped Quaker.  Francis had
never seen the Cards brothers; they inhabited London when he, as a
boy, lived at Seddon, but Pomfret knew them and despised them both.

No, there was not one of the family for whom Francis cared a rap,
neither agricultural Pomfret and his yellow-faced wife, nor
bachelor Harcourt, there on the edge of that dirty sea-coast at
Ravenglass, nor the purse-proud Kensington children of Uncle Robert
with their family coach and fine Queen Anne house and garden, nor
Humphrey at Seddon, nor ship-owning Maurice (his eyes, they said,
so deeply stuck into his business that he could see nothing else)
down at Portsmouth--not for a single one of them had he a warm
feeling or a kindly thought--they were all rogues and fools
together--and yet here he was, new-come to this tumbled old ruin,
gazing out on a couple of shabby hills and some grass-greasy
fields, and his heart was swelling at the thought of Herries and of
the Herries men and women before them, the Scotch and English blood
that had gone to the making of them, the English soil that had seen
the breeding of them.

He felt suddenly the cold, and with a shiver pulled to the window
and took on his bed-gown again.

There was a pump in the yard behind the house--he could hear the
handle going; he would go and soak his head under it.  He pulled on
a pair of breeches, thrust his feet into some slippers, and then
softly, lest he should wake his son, stole out.

The morning was deepening now, but the small heavily paned windows
let in little light.

The part of the old house that remained had not been ill designed,
the rooms lofty and the staircase wide enough for two to go
abreast, still something of a wonder in Queen Anne's day and
exceedingly unaccustomed in Elizabeth's.

This old house was of two floors, a most unusual thing in that
country, the court-room, the dining-hall, the withdrawing-room
leading one from the other.  Out of the court-room a stair led to a
loft that held the three bedrooms, two very small (in one of them
he had slept last night with David, in the other Alice Press with
the two little girls), and the other larger, containing a grand
bed, and in this his wife was still sleeping; Father Roche had a
small room below.

On the ground floor there was the entrance-hall and the kitchen,
and on to the kitchen abutted the farm-buildings rented by
Satterthwaite.  These were a diminutive example of the yeoman's
dwelling.  This building was slated, the ridge made of what were
known as 'wrestlers,' slates notched so as to interlock.  The rest
was primitive enough, the upper floor open to the oaken beams, an
oak partition portioning off the sleeping-place for master and
mistress.

Below was the house-place, the parlour and the kitchen.  A man and
his wife called Wilson had been caring for the house ever since the
Herries family had forsaken it.

Coming down the rickety stair from the loft in the dim light,
Francis Herries could see at once that their care had been neither
vigilant nor arduous.

He stood in the dining-hall and looked about him.  In that dim air
without a sound in the world it seemed forlorn and desolate enough.

At the withdrawing-room end there was a raised dais, and at the
court-room end, opposite the dais, some high oak screens,
intricately carved.

Along one wall hung a fine spread of tapestry, fresh and living
still, worked in colours of red, brown, amber, dark purple, its
subject a hunting-scene, so handsomely wrought that all the wall
seemed alive with straining hounds and noble horses, huntsmen
winding their horns, and for their background dark hills and
clustering trees.

This was a fine piece, and Herries, looking at it, wondered that it
should be so well preserved.  For the rest the hall was furnished
barely--one long oak table, some stiff-backed chairs, a carved
chest, and a portrait hanging above the dais.

It was this portrait that drew now Herries' attention.  In the dim
light it seemed marvellously alive.  He did not question but that
it was the portrait of old great-great-grandfather Herries himself.
It had been undoubtedly painted after his coming to Herries,
possibly by some wandering artist who had strayed into these wilds
or by some London friend passing through Kendal on his way to
Scotland--whoever had executed it, he was, in that wavering light,
alive and dominating.  An old man, his face wrinkled and seamed,
his head poked forward out of some dark furs, his eyes dimmed, half
closed, and one thin hand stretching forward out of the picture, as
though to seize some prize or arrest some attention.

What Francis Herries felt, looking at it, was that there was here
an odd resemblance to himself.  Was it in the eyes?  How could that
be when his own were so bright and eager?  Or the mouth?  But this
mouth was puffed and seemed as you looked at it to tremble.  Or the
skinny neck between the furs?  Or the grasping hand?  He looked at
it, nodded his head as though the sight of it had decided some
problem for him, and passed on down the stairs, through the shabby
little entrance-hall into the open.

Behind the house he found an old-fashioned pump, and leaning
against the wall, scratching his head and yawning, was Benjamin.

By the side of the pump was a wooden bucket.  He signed to Benjamin
to come and help him, stripped (this was the blind side of the
house, and in any case he did not care who might see him).
Benjamin splashed him.  The water was ice-cold.  He pulled on his
breeches again, bid Benjamin rub his chest and back.  He was in a
splendid glow.

Over the low wall he could see the lights of the sky clustering
about Glaramara's shoulders.  Long swaths of yellow lay across the
pale ivory, and the edge of the hills rippled with fire.  A bird
sang, a little uncertainly, from the yews, and in the fresh
stillness other birds could be heard beating their way through the
shining air.

Benjamin, his mouth open, stared at his master, waiting for orders.

'Strip, you devil,' Francis Herries said, laughing.  'You are
sodden with sleep.'  Benjamin stripped at once, and his plump,
stout body began to shiver and quake as the cold air caught his
flesh.  Francis laughed, then filled the bucket and splashed the
water over the man, who did not, however, flinch, but stood there,
shaking, but at attention.

'I will repay your courtesy,' Francis said, and seizing him, rubbed
his naked body with a ferocious vigour.  Then, giving him a kick
with his soft slippers, cuffed him on the cheek and bid him put on
his clothes.

'How does this place seem to you, Benjamin?'

Benjamin, pulling up his breeches, answered:

'We shall come to a handsome knowledge of one another's customs,
hidden here from the world--but 'tis a good place for horses.'

Francis Herries looked about him.  'I haven't seen so clear a water
nor smelt so fresh an air for years.  But you can leave me when you
will.  I'll have no man stay who's a grumbler.'

'If I would leave you, master,' Benjamin answered with that odd,
half-sulky, half-humorous speech that was so especially his, 'I'd
have left you long ago.  There's been often reason enough.'

'Why do you stay then?' asked Herries.

Benjamin, rubbing his wet head, answered:  'I can't tell.  There's
no reason for why I do things.'  He paused, then added:  'Where you
are, master, there's food and dogs and horses.  Day come, day go,
life is the same anywhere in the world, I fancy.'

'And when I beat you?'

'All men are beaten,' answered Benjamin, shuffling inside his
clothes.  'I'd sooner be beaten by you than another.'  He added,
looking about him at the hills as though he were seeing them for
the first time--'  The fellow in the house tells me there's fine
bull-baiting, wrestling and other games round these parts.  Life's
not over for us yet, master,' and, as he shuffled off with his fat
walloping walk he grinned at Herries, showing himself half servant,
half friend; half hireling, to be kicked, beaten, abused; half
equal, knowing secrets and sharing confidences that must breed
equal contact.

As he turned to go back into the house Herries saw, looking at him
from the corner of the house-wall, an old, bent, infinitely aged
woman.  She had long, white, ragged hair, and a thin, yellow face.
She stood without moving, looking at him.

'Who's that?' he asked Benjamin.

'The house-man's mother.'

The old woman raised her hand as though to feel the wind, then
disappeared.

He went into the house to see his wife.  The bedroom was dark.  He
pulled back the curtains and then stood by the window looking
across at her.  That was a fine bed in which she was lying, the
curtains of faded crimson velvet, the woodwork splendidly carved.
Crimson velvet, torn and shabby, was tacked also on to some of the
panelling of the walls.  There was a portrait of a young lady in a
green dress and a white ruff over the fireplace.

His wife was yet sleeping.  He came to the bed and stood there
watching.  There was something pathetic in poor Margaret Herries as
she lay there, happy for a while at least in dreamless slumber.
All the anxieties, woes and bewildered distresses that attacked, so
increasingly, her waking life were for the moment stilled.

She looked a fool as she slept.  She was a fool, she would always
be one, but there was something gentle, kindly, appealing in her
stout characterless features.  And it might be that there was more
character there than anyone, herself most certainly, at this time
knew.

Maybe Herries, as he looked at her, felt something of this.
Drawing his purple gown closely around him, he gazed at her, lost
in his own disappointed ironical thoughts.

Why in folly's name had he ever married her?  They had been young
enough, he eighteen, she seventeen.  They had been idiots enough,
he vain beyond all vanity, she adoring beyond all conceivable
adoration; she had been pretty, innocent and wealthy.  Her father,
Ephraim Harden, a very successful City merchant, had died a year
before their meeting, her mother being already long-time dead.  She
was an only child and sent to an aunt in Carlisle on a holiday.
They had met at a Carlisle ball, he handsome, without a penny,
loathing the dull life at Seddon, where he hung on because he had
no means wherewith to live in any other more lively place.

Seddon was still his brother Pomfret's at that time, and Francis
and his brother Harcourt were permitted to remain there on a kind
of tolerating sufferance.  How he had hated that place with its
dull grey walls, its poverty and greasy indolence.  You might say
that this place, Herries, to which he had now come was dull and
grey enough, but, from the first moment seen on that moonlit night,
he had thrilled to it.  It had touched, and he knew this
absolutely, some deep fundamental chord in him.

But Seddon and brother Harcourt!  Harcourt with his thin, shanky
frame, peering eyes and most exasperating cough, his passionate
absorption in his books, so that he was only happy when they were
piled high around him, sending up their dusty thick smell on every
side of him.  Harcourt who, in his twenties, had been a gay spark
in London, an acquaintance of Swift and Addison and Steele, who had
helped in the exposure of the great Psalmanazar, been present at
the trial of John Tutchin, and even spent an evening with the
infamous Mrs. Manley of the New Atalantis!

But as Harcourt had grown, his zeal for letters had grown with him;
he had abandoned the town, buried himself in Seddon with his books,
and then, at Francis' marriage, taken himself to the sea-coast,
near Ravenglass, where he lived, a contented hermit.

It had not been altogether Francis' desire for money that had
driven him into marriage with Margaret Harden.  His motives were
never unmixed in anything that he did, always there was nobility
with his greed, tenderness with his cruelty, humour with his
pessimism.  He cared for her prettiness and innocence.  He might
have had her without the marriage ceremony, her body and her money
too, she adoring him so that from the first moment she could deny
him nothing, and he did not.

Nor was it only his weariness with Seddon.  From the first he had
realised that it was likely that Margaret Harden would weary him
more than ever Seddon had done.  He had felt a tenderness (which he
might now allow was principally a weak sentiment) for this lonely
orphaned girl, tied, until some man should carry her away, to the
strings of a dumpy, frowzy aunt whose only interest was in cards
and the scandals of the country town.

He had been stung to the venture also by the sharp pleasures of
rivalry.  The neighbouring squires, the sparks of the little town,
even some of the graver, more aged officers of the garrison, had
seen in Miss Harden's pretty face and splendid fortune an exciting
prize.  But from the first moment of Francis Herries' appearance
there had been no chance for any other.  He had been for her, poor
silly fool, the god of all her dreams and maiden longings.

Yes, she had been cheated as vilely as he--nay, in the issue of it,
much more vilely.  She was no judge of men, poor thing, and had
thought him as noble in character as he was handsome in person.
The aunt, tired swiftly of the burden of this innocent girl for
whom cards were too intricate a pleasure and scandal too
distressing a pastime, was delighted to have her off her hands.

Herries had, indeed, considered the thing at some surprising length
for a boy so young, but even at that age he had no illusions about
himself, knew himself very well for what he was.  But he wanted the
money, her face pleased him, he had a certain kindness for her, and
so the thing had been.

Looking down at her now he could not believe that, so short a while
back, she had been that pretty, slender girl.  Marriage had at
least agreed so far with her that, in the very first year, she had
begun to thicken.  The three children that had come to her (the
only happiness the poor lady had known) had not assisted her
beauty; you could not believe that now she was but twenty-nine
years of age.

And he would swear that all their quarrels and distress had not
been his fault alone.  She had never tried at all to grow to his
taste and wishes; she had developed in nothing during the twelve
years of their life together.  She had no curiosity, no
inquisitiveness, no sensitiveness, no humour--only sentiment, a
liking for good food, a weak indulgence of the children and an
infinite capacity for tears.  Unfortunately all his ill-temper, his
infidelities, his squandering of her fortune had not caused her to
love him less; rather she adored him more to-day than when she had
married him.  Even this last insult, of carrying Alice Press to
this place with them, had not stirred her resentment.

It was that above all that irked him.  Although he had tried again
and again to kill it, he had deep shame at his treatment of her--a
shame that never drove him to better behaviour, but that for ever
irritated and vexed him.  Had she abused him, sworn at him, there
would have been some reason for him to despise himself less, but
this submission to his unkindness made him, when he was conscious
of it, hate her for his reproach of himself.

Not one of his mistresses had ever been anything to him, and Alice
Press the least of all.  He had taken them in a kind of impatient
scorn of their eagerness.  What did it matter, one thing more or
less, since all had gone so ill?

She was stirring.  She raised her arm, let it fall again, sighed in
her half-sleep, sighed again and woke.  Seeing him, she gave a
little cry.  He must have looked wild enough standing there in the
half-light, his shaven head with its short, bristling hairs, his
chest showing bare through the lapels of the bed-gown.

'Francis!' she said, and smiled that trusting, half-deprecating,
appealing smile that he so thoroughly detested.

'It is a fair morning,' he answered, 'and time you were about.'

'I know.'  She raised herself, putting her hand modestly over her
breasts.  'I was dreaming.  I dreamt that my aunt Hattie was here
again and her dog Pompey, and that she was giving it chocolate.'

'Thank God,' he answered grimly, 'that the reality is more
gracious.  You are at Herries, and the cesspool below this window
is in full odour, and there is a witch in the house.'

'A witch?' she cried, alarmed.  She was crammed with superstitions,
old wives' tales of warlocks and broomsticks, prophecies and magic
spells.

'A witch.  I saw her but now alight on her broomstick, scratch a
flea from her ear and whisper with her familiar hedgehog.'

Margaret Herries smiled that nervous smile with which she always
greeted his pleasantries, not knowing whether he were in jest or
earnest; whichever way her conclusion went she was always wrong.

Now she thought that he was jesting and tittered.  Also she was but
half awake and could not see his face clearly in the half-light.
He came nearer to the bed and bent over her.  He was moved by one
of those sudden and to himself most exasperating impulses of
compassion.

'You had best stay where you are,' he said.  'The last week has
been exhausting enough for a hide-bound alligator.'  He smiled, sat
down on the high bed's edge and touched her hand.

'Lie here, and the woman shall bring you some food.'

Margaret was awake enough now.  Any kindness from this adored
husband set her heart wildly beating, her cheeks flushing, her
tongue dry in her mouth.

'If you think it wise--' she stammered.  She had a desperate
impulse to press his hand, even to put her arm up, pull his head
towards her and embrace him, but she knew by bitter experience how
dangerous those actions would be.  Her hand lay pulsing in his.

'Margaret,' he said, 'if you find that I have done you wrong to
bring you here, if you cannot endure the remoteness of the place
and the savagery of the inhabitants, you must go for intervals of
every year to some town.  York is not so far--even Scotland.  There
is Carlisle . . .'  He broke off, remembering certain old scenes in
Carlisle.

'And you shall take the children with you.  Only you shall not keep
David too long.  I have done wrong to bring you to this forsaken
country.'

The flush yet on her cheeks, she answered:

'Whilst you care to have me here, Francis, I care to stay.'

It was the most aggravating thing that she could have said.  It
called up in its train a thousand stupidities, placidities,
nervousnesses, follies that had, in their time, driven him crazy
with irritation.  Never a mind of her own, always this maddening
acquiescence and sentimental fear of him.

He drew his hand away.

'The rocks that hem us in are not more implacable than your
amiability, my dear.  I remember that your aunt, prophesying (how
truly!) our wedded bliss, said that you had a nature, mild,
trustful and clinging.  With what knowledge of human character she
spoke!  Cards and the frailties of her neighbours yielded her human
wisdom.  Then you shall not go--you shall stay and love and cherish
your husband, caring nothing for the odour of the cesspool, the
machinations of the household witch, the rustic brutalities of the
neighbouring yeomen!  I will see that some food comes to you.'

He got up from the bed with that abrupt, impatient movement that
she knew so well.  She recognised, poor lady, that she had already
lost her momentary advantage, how she could not tell.

She looked at him, loving his every feature, then said:

'Yes, Francis, I thank you.'

She was an exasperating woman.  As he went from her room he felt
that he did not care how unhappy she might be in this desolation to
which she had come.  She might make friends with the pigs for all
that he cared, and good luck to her.  And she was but twenty-nine
and growing fatter with every hour!  Was ever man so cursed?



And yet once again, as, later in the day, he rode out on his black
horse, Mameluke, he was affected by his compassion.  He had escaped
them all; he had not stayed for the meal which now that it was past
three o'clock would soon be on the table.  He must be alone and
facing his own strange thoughts.

At first, as Mameluke trotted quietly along the rough path, he did
not notice the country round him.  He saw for a while nothing but
himself and he saw himself in a mirror, his features caricatured by
the distorting glass, his body lengthened to a hideous leanness,
his forehead peaked to a white cone-shaped dome.  Well, thus he was--
and thus.  This sudden quiet, this hush of the fields and sharp,
refreshing coldness of the air seemed to bring the issue of the
situation before him in sharper form than it had taken for many
months.

The issue was this--that unlike all the men and women that he knew,
the squires and boon-companions of Doncaster, the women, loose and
otherwise--alone of them all he longed for something that he could
not touch.  He had a vision, a vision that took, when he was with
Father Roche, a religious shape, when he was with Alice Press a
fleshly, with little David a pride in family, with the beauty of
landscape and fine stuffs and rare pieces a poetic, but all these
only forms and vestures of a vision that was none of them, but of
which thing all were.  And with this vision there was the actuality
of his life--his life wasteful, idle, cruel, sensual, selfish,
vain.  He did not, as he rode now on Mameluke, turn his head away
from a single aspect of it.

He had once dreamed a dream.  It was some five years back at the
end of a race-meeting in Doncaster.  He had stayed in an inn in the
town for the night.  Drinking heavily, he was yet not drunk as were
his companions.  He had shared a room with one of them, pulled his
boots off him, flung him down on his bed, where he lay loathsomely
snoring.  Himself he had gone to the window, pushed it open and
stared out on a splendid night flaming with stars.

And there, it had seemed, propped forward on a little chair, his
head almost through the window (so that he might easily have
tumbled on to the cobbles below), he had fallen asleep.  Had he
slept or no?  How many times since then he had asked himself that
question!  In any case, through his dream he had seemed to hear the
sounds of the night.  The slow, lazy call of the watchman, the love
duet of cats, the rumbling of a country cart on distant cobbles,
the snores of his neighbour, these had been behind and through his
dream.

His eyes open, he would have sworn, staring into the stars he had
beheld a vision.  He was in a region of vast, peaked, icy
mountains.  Their fierce and lonely purity, as silver-pointed they
broke the dark sky, caused him to cry out with wonder.  The sky was
dark; the mountains glittering white, they ringed round a small
mere or tarn, black as steel in shadow.

There was absolute silence in this world.  Then as he looked he saw
a great white horse, glorious beyond any ever beheld by man, come,
tossing his great white mane, to the edge of the mere.  He
hesitated, lifting his noble head as though listening, then plunged
in.  He swam superbly, tossing his mane, and Francis could see
silver drops glistening in the icy air.  He swam to the farther
edge; and then Francis was seized with an agonising terror lest he
should not be able to climb, out of the mere, up the icy sides of
the cliff that ran sheer into the water.  That moment of suspense
was fearful and compounded of a great love for the splendid horse,
a great tenderness, a great reverence and an anguish of
apprehension.

Then, tossing his mane once more, the beautiful horse mounted out
of the mere, strode superbly across the ice and vanished.  Then,
again, there was great loneliness.

Waking from this dream and staring back at the little room, stuffy
and smelling of drink, the floor tumbled with clothes, his thick,
open-mouthed, red-faced companion, he knew an instant of acute,
terrible disappointment.  For a moment he thought that he would
throw himself out, end everything, so as to kill the disappointment;
and perhaps it would have been as well had he done so, because,
since then, that disappointment had been always with him.

The more that he had hated the noise and filth and confusion of his
life in Doncaster, the more he had plunged into it.  Now, as he
slowly passed along the darkening path that was leading him
gradually into the shadow of the hills, he saw one incident after
another of the Doncaster life, stretching out their hands to him as
though they were figures that kept pace with him.  The foolish duel
with young Soltery, a quarrel about nothing when they were both
drunk, Soltery who was terrified, and then more terrified yet that
he should seem terrified.  He saw young Soltery's eyes now, as they
faced one another in the early morning light on the fields outside
Doncaster, eyes of a frightened, bewildered child--and he had shot
away one of young Soltery's ears, so that he would be disfigured
for life.

Or fat Maitchison the surgeon with his brilliance, his obscenity,
his odd beliefs in magic and other humbug--that foolish night in
Maitchison's rooms when they had defied the Devil, smashed the
mirror, stripped Maitchison's mistress naked and painted her
yellow.  He could see now the room, furniture overturned, the glass
of the big mirror scattered over the floor, and fat Maitchison with
gusts of drunken laughter painting the naked back of the swearing
girl. . . .  And the sudden opening of the door, the breeze blowing
in from the street, the candles going out, and someone crying that
bats were hanging on the ceiling. . . .

Yes, the races, the cock-fights, the bull and bear baiting, the
debauchery and smells and noise--a roaring in his ears, a stink at
his nostrils, and always in his heart this longing for the icy
peaks of his dream, the black tarn, the splendid horse with the
snow-white mane.

He was young, and should do something with his talents.  That he
was talented he knew.  They all told him so.  He had infinite
courage, splendid physique, an interest and curiosity in many
things.  What should it be?  Which way should he go?  And meanwhile
the years slipped by, and now, obeying some mad, mysterious
impulse, he had cut himself right off, hidden himself among the
savages.

Was he to laze here, slouching about, making familiars of the
yeomen, riding with them, chaffing their wives, perhaps seducing
their daughters?

For what had he come here?  He only knew that already the place was
working into his veins--the silence, the air with an off-scent of
ice in it, the hills that were perhaps only little hills and yet
had so strong a power--witchcraft hills, hiding in their corners
and wrinkles magic and spells.  As he rode on, the outside world
was beginning to slip ever farther and farther away from him.  His
was the only figure in the landscape; the whole country, as the
afternoon shadows lengthened, seemed naked.  Above the clustered
group of mountains at the end of the valley a little minaret of
pale grey clouds was forming, one cloud stealing upon another as
though with some quiet purpose; a purple shadow fell over these
hills as though a cloak had been suddenly dropped over them.

He saw on his right then a group of buildings.

His empty world was in a moment peopled with life.  Near him at the
fork of the road was a small crowd gathered about a pedlar who had
slung his box off his neck and rested it on a flat stone.  Herries
drew nearer and, sitting his horse, watched quietly.

The scene that had been a moment before wild and haunted was now
absolutely domestic.  Three healthy, red-faced girls stood there,
their arms about one another's necks, laughing and giggling, one
stout yeoman, some farm boys, and a little man, tow-coloured like a
wisp of hay, who, by his drab dress, should be one of those
itinerant parsons and schoolmen who went from house to house in
country districts, taking odd services of a Sunday and teaching the
children.

The pedlar was a tall, thin scarecrow of a man, having on his head
a peaked faded purple hat, and round his neck some of the coloured
ribbons that he was for selling.  By his speech, which was
cultivated, he was no native, and, indeed, with his sharp nose and
bright eyes he seemed a rascal of unusual intelligence.

The little scene was charming in its peace and security.  Some
cattle were being brought across the long field, two dogs at their
heels; a voice calling in rising and falling cadence sounded, as it
seemed, from the hills, and in the foreground there was the sharp
humorous note of the pedlar, the laughter of the girls and young
men and, once and again, the deep Cumbrian accents of the yeoman.

At first they had not noticed Herries, but when one of the girls,
looking up, gave a cry of surprise, they were not disturbed, and
after a glance went on with their private affairs, governed by a
certain dignity and independence of their own.

The pedlar, however, was aware of him although he continued his
patter.  He had 'Fine thread satins both striped and plain, Persia
nets, anterines, silks for scarves and hoods, shalloons, druggets,
and some Scotch plaids.'  On his tray there were some pieces of
fine bone lace, Chinese boxes, necklaces, gold rings set with
vermilions, several gold buttons, and red watch bottles ribbed with
gold--or he said it was gold.  And some books.  Chap-books and
calendars, Poor Robin, The Ladies' Diary, some old sheets of the
London Gazette, and some bound volumes of Plays.  These things of
fashion looked strange in the open fields before the little country
group, who fingered and laughed and fingered again.  The jewellery,
indeed, had a false air, but the ribbons and lace were pretty, and
above, Herries must fancy, the purses of the locals.  Herries
noticed, too, that the pedlar did not seem too intent upon his
sales or purchases, and that his sharp eyes went everywhere, and
especially to Herries and his horse.

He thought to himself that this would not be the last time that he
would see that pedlar.

The shadows of the hills now covered the valley; the light flashed
palely above Glaramara and then fell.  Herries turned his horse
towards home.  As he moved away the little tow-haired parson
detached himself from the others and approached him.

His long parson's coat was green with age, shabby and stained, and
his breeches were tied about the knees with string, his bony
fingers purple with cold, his nose red; but he had about him a very
evident dignity.  He bowed, but not subserviently.

'It has been a fine afternoon,' he said, keeping pace with
Mameluke's gentle step.

Herries, impressionable ever to the moment's atmosphere, his spirit
touched now by some quiet and happiness, answered, as he could when
he so pleased, with charm and courtesy.

'The day falls quickly in these valleys.'

'And the light is for ever changing,' the little clergyman answered
with pleased eagerness.  'You are newly arrived here, sir?'

'But yesterday.'

'I know everyone in this neighbourhood--man, woman and child.  You
are the gentleman who has come to Herries by Rosthwaite?'

'I am,' answered Herries.

'There has been much interest in your coming, sir.  It will be the
wish of everyone that you will find it pleasant here, and stay with
us.'

'Do you also belong here?' asked Herries.

'I do the Lord's will and go whither He sends me.  For some years
now I have taught the children of these villages, assisted at
services, done what the Lord has bidden me.'

'You are not a native of Cumberland then?'

'No, sir, I am from the South.  I was born in Bideford in Devon.
For many years I was chaplain to the Earl of Petersham.'

'Why, then, have you come here?  It must seem a severe exile to
you.'

'The Lord spoke to me in a dream and ordered me to go North.  I was
to walk forward until I saw a naked man tied to a tree, and in that
place to abide and do His will.'

'Where saw you your naked man?'

'After many months, begging and preaching my way through the
country, I came at last to the village of Grange on a summer
evening.  And above the river where the bridge is, I saw a man
naked and bound with ropes to a tree.  The men of the village were
throwing stones at him: he was near death.  He had been caught
robbing a yeoman of the place of two hens.  I urged them to release
him, the Lord prevailed, and afterward I lodged in his house.  I
lodge there yet.'

'And what, then, do you teach the children?' asked Herries,
entertained by this simplicity.

'The Lord's Word, the Catechism, and, when they wish it, Greek and
Latin.'

'You have no family?'

'My wife is with God.'

The dark was falling more swiftly now, and it was difficult to see
the path.  Herries jumped off his horse and walked beside the
clergyman.

'What is your name?' he asked him.

'Robert Finch.'

'How shall I like this place?  It is cut off from the world.'

There was a sudden odd note of scorn in the little man's voice as
he answered:

'It IS the world, sir.  Here within these hills, in this space of
ground is all the world.  I thought while I was with my lord
Petersham that the world was there, but in every village through
which I have passed since then I have found the complete world--all
anger and vanity and covetousness and lust, yes, and all charity
and goodness and sweetness of soul.  But most of all, here in this
valley, I have found the whole world.  Lives are lived here
completely without any thought of the countries more distant.  The
mountains close us in.  You will find everything here, sir.  God
and the Devil both walk on these fields.'

'And if I believe neither in God nor the Devil?'

'You are a young man for such confident disbelief.  God was
speaking to me now, and has told me that you will find everything
that you need for the growth of your soul here in this valley.  You
have come to your own place, sir.  You are young and strong, but
the day will come when you will remember my words.'

Herries looked back down the path.  In the dusk he could see it
point like a pale, crooked finger straight at the heavy black hump
of Glaramara that was dark against lighter dark.  Again he felt ice
in the air and shivered.

'They are little hills by your foreign sort,' he said, 'and yet
they impress.'

The small voice beside him answered:

'They are the loveliest hills in all God's world.'  Then it
continued, taking another tone, very mild and a little anxious:
'You have children, sir?'

'Three,' answered Herries.

'If you were in need--' he hesitated.  'My Greek and Latin are
good, and I have authority with children.  If I could serve you--'

Herries laughed.

'I must warn you,' he said, 'there is a priest in the house.'

There was a pause while the wind, rising, began to blow fiercely,
swaying the branches and turning the dead leaves about their feet.

The voice began again:  'He instructs your children?'

'A little.'

'Your own religion--?'

'Nay, I am no Catholic.  I have told you I have no religion.  How
think you, Mr. Finch?  In this drunken, debauched world what is
your God engaged upon?  He is busy elsewhere improving some other
planet.'

'Christ died upon the Cross suffering a worse bewilderment.'

Herries laughed again.

'Well, you shall try your luck upon them.  But we are a wild house,
Mr. Finch, and may, in this desolate country, become yet wilder.'

They had come to the gate that led to Herries.'  They paused.  To
Francis' surprise the little man laid his hand on his arm.

'You are young, sir.  I have ten years' advantage of you.  I fancy
your wildness does not frighten me.'

'On thy head be it then,' Herries cried, as he led Mameluke up the
path.  The way here was very rough, and he began to curse as he hit
the loose stones, plunged into mud, fearing that his horse might
stumble and damage his knees.  His mood was changing with the
swiftness that belonged to his moods.  Oddly enough his mind had
turned to Father Roche.  The little clergyman had reminded him.
Why was he burdened with this priest and the risks and penalties
connected with his presence?  It was true that just now there was a
lull in the Catholic agitation, but it might burst out again at any
instant.  Herries did not doubt but that Roche was busied in a
thousand intrigues both political and religious, and they were
intrigues with which he had no sort of sympathy.  Jacobitism made
no appeal to him--he hated the French influence behind it.  He
wanted no king for England who would be ruled by French money and
ambition.  Moreover, he took in any case but little interest in
politics, and had no romantic feeling for that world.  Nor had the
Catholic religion attraction for him; he despised what seemed to
him its mummery, the child's play, as he saw it, of its tinkling
bells and scented air.  But Roche's influence over him was strong
and subtle.  Ever since his first meeting with the man some five
years before, it had persisted.  And for what reason?  Roche was
stern, unsympathetic to all Herries' pleasures, showed no warmth of
feeling to Herries (no warmth of feeling to anyone, indeed, save
little David), used Herries' house quite openly for his own private
purposes, had carried on in Doncaster, as Herries well knew, a
network of plans and plots with an odd audacity and defiance.  When
he spoke intimately with Herries it was to rebuke him.  And yet
Herries would endure from him things that from another he would
most furiously resent.  Where lay Roche's power?  In the continued
suggestion that he held somewhere a solution for Herries' sickness
of soul?  Not in any dogma lay that solution, but in something
deeper, something far more profound. . . .

But (and here the house with its lighted windows loomed suddenly up
before him as though it had been pushed up through the rough
ground) was the priest to remain?  Why?  He and Alice Press should
both be sent packing.  One must start fair in this new place--and
for a moment before he pushed back the heavy door he had a picture
before his eyes of the country group in the fading afternoon light,
the coloured scene, the quiet and the animals and the purple-shaded
hills.  Here in this good land there should be no place for the
priest and the woman. . . .  Here in this good land--and a moment
later he was caught into one of his dark, bestial, frantic rages.

He had left his horse outside the door and, calling Benjamin,
pressed up the staircase to the little tapestried dining-hall.  A
high, thick-clustered candelabrum was burning on the table, all the
candles blowing in the winds that came from the floor-cracks, the
slits in wall, roof and window.

At the table his wife was seated crying.  Alice Press, very gay in
a crimson gown, was turning scornfully away from her, even as he
entered.  The three children were playing together by the oak
chest.  Over all the room there was a frantic disorder.  Some of
the boxes, brought by the pack-horses the night before, were there,
and scattered about were suits, gowns, china, stuffs, linen,
children's toys.

A strange thick scent of burning wax, damp straw and odours from
the neighbouring cesspool lay heavy about the candle-shine.  He had
ordered that the boxes were not to be touched until the morrow,
when he could supervise the opening of them.

By whom had he been disobeyed?  Both women began to chatter, his
wife wailing, Alice Press loud and shrill and defiant.  The little
girls began to cry.  At that moment Benjamin, a foolish smile on
his chubby face, appeared at the stair-head.

Francis Herries caught him by the neck, then, raising the riding-
whip that was still in his hand, cried:

'What said I to these boxes?  Hast thou no wit, thou lubber-pated
bastard?'

Benjamin shouted something; everyone began to call aloud at once.
The room, the house, the world was filled with shouting and stink
and a raging anger.

To come thus, from an afternoon so quiet and promising, to this
vileness!  Anger boiled in his heart, choking him.  He had
Benjamin's coat off his back, struck the bare flesh again and
again, lashed him about the head, the legs, the thighs, and when
suddenly the man hung his head and began to droop in his arms he
let fall his whip and began to beat him with his hands, letting him
at last drop, a huddled, half-naked heap.

The man had fainted.  Raising Benjamin's head, Herries was suddenly
remembering how that morning in the fresh air by the pump he had
rubbed in friendliness the man's body while the birds wheeled
through the sky.

A sickness caught him at the heart.  He told David to run for some
water, but before the boy had returned the man was reviving.  He
was lying back, his head on his master's knee.  He looked up, then,
flicking his eyelids, said:

'It was not by my word, master, that the boxes were opened.'

Clumsily he rose to his feet; he caught his coat to his bare chest--

'I'll be rubbing the horse down,' he said, and stumbled down the
staircase.



FAMILY


Pomfret Herries lived at this time in one of the most beautiful
houses in Keswick.  It was beautiful, not by his own taste or
fancy, but because he wished to have a better house than any one of
his neighbours.

This has always been a habit with certain of the Herries.  Desiring
this, he chose for architect that strange, saturnine hermit, old
John Westaway, known in Keswick for a madman and the best architect
in the North, a desperate traveller who knew Italy as you might
know Skiddaw, who had been invited again and again to London, but
preferred to live in his little house above the river, seeing no
one, liking no one, buried in his books and art treasures.  All
over the North Westaway's fame ran.  He was an old man now, had
been, it was said, in his youth the friend and intimate of
Chesterman and Van der Vaart and Vanbrugh, a curmudgeon, a surly
bachelor, in league, some whispered, with the Devil himself,
pottering about that house, with its pictures and statuary, and his
dark Italian servant--a devil, but the finest architect, it might
be, in England.

He had made Pomfret pay for his fancy, and when it was done Pomfret
had grumbled so that you might hear him from John o' Groat's to
Land's End--but it was a beautiful house.  People came from Kendal
and Carlisle and Penrith to look at it, so that at the last Pomfret
and his wife had grown proud of it and spoke of it as entirely
their doing.

In fine proportion, its roof covered with red tiles, the wrought
ironwork across its front showing like lace against the stone, the
house was oblong without gables.  The windows were for their period
most modern.  They were sash windows, a great rarity, and they were
beautifully spaced.  The doorway had fluted columns and over it
there was a charming and delicate fanlight.

The house was outside the town near to Crosthwaite Church, and the
gardens ran down to the weeds and rushes of the lake-end.  The
garden held lime trees and the lawn was bordered with tubs of
orange and bay trees.  There was a little terrace and a rosy wall
of red brick, and beyond the formal garden a meadow, the lake and
the rising hills.  To the right some greenhouses, a flower garden
and a kitchen garden.

Inside, the house was wide, spacious and full of light.  First a
pillared hall, on the right the parlour, on the left a fine, wide
staircase opening into a splendid saloon.  Beyond the parlour a
large bedroom leading to a greenhouse.  On the upper floor other
bedrooms.

Pomfret's chief pride was the saloon, the decoration of which
Westaway had designed and executed--the subject was Paris awarding
the apple.  Lady Herries had been disturbed by the naked goddesses
until it was seen that no one else minded.

In this fine house Pomfret inhabited only one room, a dusky
apartment crowded with guns, stuffed animals and fishing-rods.
Here he drank merrily with his friends.

Lady Herries' home was the parlour, where she read her medicine
books, scolded the maids, suffered in a bitter silence that ancient
lady, Pomfret's aunt, fed a screaming macaw, and gave her
neighbours tea and chocolate.  The three children had their own
room far away at the top of the house.

There was a great array of domestics, from Mrs. Bellamy the
housekeeper to little Peter the black boy, who had been purchased
in London, shivered in the cold, and stole everything that he, with
safety, might.

Mrs. Bellamy was of the family of Mrs. Slipslop, and made all the
mischief both in the house and in the neighbourhood that time and
talents permitted her.

They could scarcely be called a united family, for they were never
together.  Pomfret diced, drank, rode, hunted with his masculine
friends, who liked his company because he was stupid enough for
them to rob him at will.  Jannice, his wife, bullied him when she
was with him, forgot him when she was not.  She loved him only when
he was ill, and this was often enough, for his intemperate habits
and his swinish feeding caused him constant attacks of biliousness
and vertigo.  There was nothing that Jannice Herries loved like a
medical treatise; her familiar and, after Mrs. Bellamy, most
constant companion was old Dr. Ellis, who would discuss with her by
the hour the whole works of that excellent practical physician, Dr.
Thomas Sydenham!

She experimented on her staff, her family and any neighbours who
would permit her.  Little Peter, who was sick every other day from
stealing confitures from the store-room, was her most unhappy
patient.  And yet, of course, this is not all that can be said
about Pomfret and his lady.  At heart they were kindly and well-
dispositioned.  Only they had no imagination, and had been covered
with a thin skin of wealth that, like a rash upon their souls,
discomforted them, made them uneasy, suspicious, unhappily proud.

Pomfret loved his children, but did not know how to approach them.
He cuffed them and spoiled them and cuffed them again.  He was
generous-natured and desired that his friends should be happy, but
he suspected that they laughed at him, and so was pompous and grand
when he wished to be easy and familiar.

His money he had made, as he well knew, from his obedience to the
advice of a London friend, Hartwell, who, at a certain moment, had
directed his affairs.

Although his companions robbed him he had wisdom sufficient to
leave his affairs in Hartwell's hands.  He pretended to a knowledge
of commerce and exchange; it was, as he knew in his heart, a bare
pretence.  He did nothing well, rode badly, shot badly, fished
badly.  He knew moments of great unhappiness.

Jannice Herries was also without imagination.  She was acrimonious
and bitter, but she knew that this was not her real life.
Somewhere real feeling was hidden, but day succeeded day and
nothing was done.  She knew that she was unpopular among the ladies
of Keswick, but she swallowed every compliment that Mrs. Bellamy
gave her, and at the end was more lonely than before.

After her interest in medicine her most active passion was her
hatred for Pomfret's Aunt Maria, that very ancient lady, who, born
in 1645 and for a time in the fashionable world, was now a hideous
remnant of a dead and musty past.  She longed for this old lady to
die, and would have poisoned her ere this, but alone of the
household Aunt Maria refused all of her niece's drugs.  She was now
eighty-five years of age.

Finally with both Pomfret and his lady there remained a constant
uneasiness about their wealth.  It had come so oddly, without any
true justification.  It might go as oddly again.  They had
witnessed in the last twenty years a series of financial panics.
Now with the abominable French ready for any villainy, all this new-
fangled independence of servants and labourers, who knew what the
next event might be?  The Catholics were listening at every window.
Why, here was Francis Herries coming to live in the neighbourhood
and bringing with him quite openly a rascally priest.  Although
Walpole and the Whigs were in, who knew how strong was their power?

Jannice Herries' favourite remark to Mrs. Bellamy was:  'Things are
not as they were.'

To which Mrs. Bellamy with a shudder would reply:  'No, my lady.
If I know my own mind there was never a truer word spoken.'

'And what will you do, Bellamy, if your master is ruined?'

'Heaven strike me dead if I ever desert you, my lady!  Marry come
up, don't I know a virtuous place when I see one?'

But Bellamy had been lining her pocket for many a year, and being
Mrs. Bellamy only by courtesy had her eye on a handsome victualler
in Kendal, whose hearth and home she proposed to encompass and
govern on the first signs of distress in the Herries country.

The three children, Anabel, Raiseley and Judith, lived in their own
world.  They, like their father, were Herries of the unimaginative,
matter-of-fact breed.  They took things as they came, and each, in
his or her own fashion, worked quietly and obstinately for personal
profit.  Anabel was good-natured, plump and easy.  Raiseley was
clever.  It would not be true of him to say that he was without
imagination, but it was imagination of an educational kind.

He was studious, priggish, aloof and cold, rarely roused to anger
but unforgetful of the slightest injury.  He had the wise,
calculating side of the Herries blood; he was studious, honest to
chilliness, and despised both his father and his mother.  Judith
would be beautiful; she was dark and slender and already cherished
her beauty as her most important asset.

These three were all typical Herries on the stony side of the
family character.  They saw everything in front of their noses and
nothing beyond.  They did not mind in the least their social
isolation.  They might contemn one another, but united at once in
condemnation of all other children.

They were waiting now in their high, chilly room for the visit that
their cousin in Borrowdale was to pay them.  Only the little boy,
they understood, was coming with his father and mother.  They had
already gathered from the conversation of their elders that Uncle
Francis was a disgrace.

Of the three of them at this time it may be said that Raiseley and
Judith held out no hope of later humanity; for Anabel, because of
her good-nature and a certain carelessness that went with it, there
were possibilities.

On this afternoon the three children were in their chill room
quietly busy.  Judith was seated motionless in a high chair, a
collar round her neck, a board tied to her back.  This was for her
figure.  She was watching the grandfather clock in the corner.
Five minutes of her daily half-hour remained.  This half-hour was
valued greatly by her, because she knew that this discipline was
for the benefit of her beauty.  She was only nine years of age, but
had already a grave and considered air.  Anabel, who was thirteen,
was curled up in the window-seat looking at the pictures of some
chap-books, Babes in the Wood, Bluebeard, Little Tom Thumb.  But
she was not reading.  She knew the old stories by heart.  She was
wondering what her little cousin would be like.

She, unlike her brother and sister, was sometimes lonely.  She
confessed it to no one, but she loved parties and fun.  Maybe this
little boy would be agreeable.

Raiseley was yawning over his Virgil.  Mr. Montgomery, who came
every day to teach him Latin and Greek, had but just now gone.

'Jam pater Aeneas . . .' murmured Raiseley, and fingered a little
box in which he had a cocoon concealed.  He hid this from his
parents and Mr. Montgomery, because they would disapprove if they
knew.  But soon the cocoon would be liberated.  No one told him any
of the things that he wanted to know about animals, about the
stars.  Now, when he thought of these things, a new expression came
into his eyes.  He was suddenly alive with a questioning,
investigating alertness.  His cold, pale, pointed features gained
an interesting sharpness.  The book fell from his hand.  There were
many things that he would know one day; they should not stop him
pursuing his knowledge.  Mr. Montgomery with his sing-song voice,
his perpetual cold at the nose, his eagerness to please, how
Raiseley despised him!

He would like to see Mr. Montgomery whipped as little Peter was
whipped, or standing as the man they had seen one day in the
pillory in the market, his face smeared with the mud and the yellow
of the eggs that people had thrown at him.  And, as he thought of
these things, his face achieved an added sharpness, coldly,
intellectually speculative--'Jam pater Aeneas. . . .'

He looked at the little pile of books beside him--A Guide to the
English Tongue, by Thomas Dyche, schoolmaster in London; Paul's
Scholars' Copy-Book, by John Raynor; The Use of the Globes.

He did not look at them resentfully.  He would extract from them
everything that they had to give him.

'Judith,' he said, 'I should know more than Mr. Montgomery knows in
a year or two.  I would think it fine to see him in the pillory as
a week back we saw that man.'

Judith, motionless, her eyes on the clock, answered:  'We are to go
downstairs when our uncle and aunt come.  I am to wear the grey-
blue.'

Anabel, from the window, said:  'I like David for a boy's name.'

'I heard them say,' went on Raiseley, 'that Uncle Francis is always
drunken and beats Aunt Margaret.'

'But he is very handsome,' said Judith.  'He was wearing such fine
clothes the other day that father was shabby beside him.'

'Fine clothes,' said Raiseley scornfully, 'and they living in mud
and dirt up to their elbows!  They say that Borrowdale is full of
witches and giants--wolves too.  I would like mightily to see a
wolf.  I shall ask Uncle Francis to take me.'

The clock struck the half-hour.  Judith very carefully separated
herself from her board and collar.  At that same moment the door
opened.  They were told that it was time for them to dress.

David and his mother had indeed already arrived.

Poor Margaret Herries had been for weeks dreading this visit.  It
was now a month since they had come to Herries, and the weather had
been so terrible that the ride to Keswick had been impossible.  It
had rained and rained; not as it rained in Doncaster, with gusts
and flurries and pauses and whispering, but in a drenching flood,
falling from the grey, lowering sky like sheets of steel.

And the mountains had crept closer and closer, and the cold stolen
into the very webbing of the sheets, the torn tapestries beating
against the wall, and the mice boldly running for comfort to the
peat fire.  A horrible month it had been, but with all the courage
at her command she had faced the rain, the isolation, her loathing
for Alice Press, gathered her children round her as she might and
made what she could out of the situation.

Oddly enough she had not been unhappy.  Francis had been ever close
at hand.  He did not go off for nights at a time as he had done at
Doncaster.  That might come later--but at present it was as though
the place cast a spell upon him.  He pottered about the house, rode
out to Stye Head, walked up Glaramara and the neighbouring hills,
wandered along the lake by Manesty and Cat Bells, made himself
known to some of the neighbouring yeomen, was silent often enough,
drunken at times, angry once and again, but on the whole more her
companion than he had been since their first marriage year.

And so there had increased in her heart her ever-constant loyalty
to him.  What she had suffered watching the degradation of his
reputation during these past years no one would ever know.  She
would never tell.  Here it was as though he had begun a new life.
Stories long commonplace round Doncaster would here not be known.
He would start again, and she would do everything in her power to
assist him.  Only his brother's family could spoil this fair
beginning; she had seen and heard enough already to feel that
Pomfret and his wife were Francis' detractors and would from the
first take care to be dissociated from any scandal.

She was as fiercely prepared to fight her brother- and sister-in-
law as any lioness in defence of her cubs, but her trouble was that
she was not a lioness.  She was a coward; while she was riding
pillion behind her husband and her son, she was aware that at the
first sight of Jannice in her own domain she would lose courage,
she would tremble, she would show faint-heartedness.  Francis had
things that he must do in Keswick.  He would come later to his
brother's house to fetch her.  She must face Pomfret and Jannice
alone.

So she stood, David at her side, in the little hall with its
rounded pillars, its stone floor in black and white squares, its
fine picture of an Italian scene, with dim greys and purple for
colour, hanging on the right of the staircase.

They were ushered into the parlour.  It was lit with candles, and
David had never seen such a room.  But before he could examine the
room he must be startled by the persons in it, by his aunt Jannice,
who was dressed superbly in a high wig mounted over a cushion and
decorated with roses and daisies, her hoop spread about her, the
outer skirt of crimson velvet and the front of her dress white and
silver.  On one brown cheek she wore a black patch.  She was
grander than any lady that he had ever seen; no one who came to
their house in Doncaster had dressed like that.  Young though he
was, he realised that her thin, meagre figure and brown complexion
ill suited such finery.

But his childish attention was soon drawn from his aunt to the
terrific figure who sat in a high chair under the window.  This was
his great-aunt Maria.

He would never have believed, had he not seen it with his own eyes,
that any person could be so old and yet live.  Her wig of a bright
brown colour was arranged in a fashion of fifty years ago, falling
about her strange mask of a powdered, painted face in long curled
ringlets.  Over one eye was a black patch.  Her green bodice was
peaked, and her full, open sleeves were caught together with
jewelled clasps.  Her wide skirt was of purple satin.  Her fingers,
so thin that they were like the ivory sticks of a fan, were loaded
with jewels.

On her lap was a small King Charles spaniel.

She appeared a painted image.  Except for her one visible eye
nothing in her face moved.  David was a polite little boy, but
again and again he had to stare.  Here was a portent, a revelation
in his young life.

The little black boy was standing behind Lady Herries' chair, and
as soon as greetings had been exchanged they all sat down.  The
little black boy handed chocolate; a bright purple macaw in a gilt
cage by the window screamed.

For a little while there was a terrible silence.  The room was very
hot; there was a large log fire.  The sky beyond the window was
bright with a silver glow.

When the talk had started David could look more easily about him.

He was indeed enchanted with the softness and beauty of everything.
Beyond the wide window he could see the trim hedges, the paved
path, the fountain with a strange stone bird, long-necked and
violent-beaked, rising out of it, and beyond the fountain the line
of trees guarding the waters of the lake.

Within the room there were countless objects that he longed to
examine more closely, a screen worked in gold thread, a silver
casket, a clock with the sun, moon and stars on its face.  But more
than these, the terrible old woman with her strange ringlets, her
painted face, the cascades of her bright purple dress, the sharp-
pointed fingers weighted with flashing jewellery. . . .

'Indeed,' his aunt was saying, 'I wonder at Mr. Flammery.  'Tis a
poor child that doesn't know its own father, and there's a
multitude of his own poor children must be in a fine confusion.'

This puzzled David, who, looking first at his aunt and then at his
flustered mother sweating in the face with the heat of the room and
the agitation of this her first so important visit, wondered how it
could be that any child should not know its own father.  He of a
certainty knew his well enough.

'Yes, indeed,' his aunt continued, looking, as he was even now old
enough to discern, with an odd mixture of curiosity and contempt at
his mother.  'You must be well aware, Margaret, of the world into
which you have come.  In winter I doubt that you'll be able to move
a step.  You live in the heart of savages, and when the lake is too
wild for passage and the roads all of a muck to your armpits the
civilised world will be as distant from you as the Indies.'

'I don't doubt,' said Margaret, flushing and perspiring the more,
for she knew that it was at her own abandoned Francis that these
remarks were made, 'but that the days will pass.  There's
sufficient to do about the house to take a month of winters. . . .'

David then was aware that his great-aunt's eye had turned in his
direction.  He was fixed by it as a rabbit by the eye of a
snake. . . .  It was as though he, sitting on the edge of his
chair, and this very ancient lady, both of them motionless, were
holding some strange secret communication.  Then he was aware of
something further--that his great-aunt was about to speak.

In an odd, cracked but exceedingly piercing tone she said:  'God
save His Gracious Majesty.'

The worst had happened.  The old woman was silent often enough for
days together, and this was well, because she was a burning
fanatical Jacobite.  The terrors into which her dangerous political
opinions had again and again plunged Pomfret and his wife were both
ludicrous and tragic.  Sometimes for weeks she kept to her room,
and on every occasion that saw her enter that sanctuary everyone
about her breathed the hope that it would be for the last time, but
her powers of revival were incredible, and down once more she would
come to sit and watch and await her awful moment.

She had been born on the 14th of June 1645, the day of the battle
of Naseby, but her great days had been during the last years of
Queen Anne, when she had known Godolphin and Marlborough and been
received by Lady Masham, having her feet planted in both camps.

But she had been nevertheless, heart and soul, Jacobite, and, it
was said, played some part in the intrigues of those last dramatic
months.  The Elector of Hanover had been for her the Devil himself,
and when his cause had been definitely won she had retired from
London, professed openly her Jacobite sentiments and chattered and
prayed for the coming of the Day.

No one had much regarded her; she had lived in a small house in
Winchester, until, her brain softening, Pomfret, driven by one of
the kindest and gentlest impulses of his life, had given her
shelter and protection.

How many thousands of times since then he had longed for her
decease was a secret between himself and his Maker.

Now with terror and dismay Jannice Herries heard her speak.  Here
was their skeleton clattering straight out from the cupboard and
before that fool Margaret Herries.  But Margaret was too deeply
buried in the warmth of her confusion to pay much regard.  Only the
little boy felt the power of those few cracked words; something
spoke in his heart, some strange sympathy that he suddenly felt, to
which he quite blindly and unknowingly responded.  He was to
remember at a later time this queer muffled moment.

The situation was immediately saved for Jannice Herries by the
entrance of her children.  The children had beautiful manners.
Mrs. Bellamy in black silk, her hands folded across her stomach,
stood behind them--the boy bowed, the little girls curtsied.
Anabel's eyes smiled at David.  He was quick enough at once to
perceive that the other girl was thinking of her own looks.  She
was like his own sister Mary in that.

And then the eyes of the two boys met, and they knew one another at
once for foes.  David had as friendly a heart as any boy in the
kingdom, but he realised an enemy when he saw one.  One straight
look at Raiseley's cold reserve and proud consequence and something
within him said:  'I hate my cousin.'  Just as the cracked voice of
the old woman speaking to him five minutes before out of an ancient
past was to return to him with significance in years to come, so
that first glance exchanged with Raiseley was to influence the
Herries family fortunes for many future generations.

Looking at Anabel, David thought to himself:  'That's a friendly
girl.'  He was uncomfortable among these grown-up persons, and
hoped that it would be suggested that he should go with his cousins
to see the garden or their toys.  He would like finely to inspect
more closely that fountain of the beaked bird or to hunt among the
reeds at the water's edge.

But no suggestion was made.  He too was standing now, his hands
stiffly at his side as his father had taught him.  The room grew
ever hotter and hotter, and with every moment he felt more
indignantly Raiseley's scornful eyes upon him.

Margaret Herries must talk to her nephew and nieces.  She was never
at her ease with children.

'Fine children,' she said nervously to her sister-in-law, 'and
seemingly in grand health.'

The word 'health' was the trumpet to sound the charge to Jannice
Herries, who answered proudly:  'Fine and sound they are, sister.
Six months last sennight Judith here was sorely threatened with the
Falling Sickness--hast thou heard of the Antepileptic Crow,
sister?'

'I fear not,' said Margaret timidly.

''Tis a perfect cure for the Falling Sickness.  Judith was cured by
the crow.  Deplume and eviscerate a large crow, casting away its
Feet and Bill; put into its Belly the Heart, Liver, Lungs, Bladder
of the Gall, with Galangal and Aniseeds; bake it in a new Earthen
Vessel well shut or closed in an Oven with Household Bread; after
it is cooled, separate the Flesh from the Sides or Bones, and
repeat this Operation of baking the second or third time, but
taking great care that it may not be burnt, then reduce it into a
fine powder.'  She recited this in a high sing-song as though it
were poetry, her eyes almost closed.  Opening them she saw that
Margaret was gazing at her with great humility and reverence.
Maybe the woman was not such a fool after all.  She would make, it
might happen, something of a companion.  A kindliness stole about
Jannice Herries' heart.  It would be something to have a friendly
creature near her whom she could patronise and gratify and
instruct.  The days in truth were lonely enough. . . .

'You must come and see us at Herries,' Margaret went on to the
children.

'Yes, ma'am,' Raiseley answered, gravely bowing.  'It is said that
there are wolves in Borrowdale.  I would gladly see a wolf.'

Margaret smiled timidly.  'David shall show you the wolves.  He has
been already in the mountains.  Have you not, David?'

Judith, who, since the Falling Sickness had passed as a topic, felt
perhaps that she was not receiving sufficient attention, smiled her
prettiest smile, so that her aunt, thinking how beautiful a child
she was, said, speaking directly to her:

'My little girls, Mary and Deborah, will wish to show you their
toys and babies.'

'Yes, ma'am,' said Judith in her softest, gentlest voice, so that
her aunt looking at her loved her.

Once more they were interrupted, and this time it was the two men
of the family.  David waited for his father's entrance.  First
there was Uncle Pomfret, red-faced, noisy, with his:  'Well, then--
here's all the family!  Haste away!  Haste away!' and then a sudden
look of almost childish discomfort and unease.  Quietly behind him
David's father, kindly to-day and, for David, so handsome in his
dark suit and lace ruffles that all the colour in the room went out
before him, dimmed to abasement.

Yes, his father was in good humour to-day, coming forward and
kissing the old lady's hand, saluting his sister-in-law's brown
cheek, turning then to the children, pinching the cheeks of the
girls, tapping Raiseley on his shoulder. . . .  How proud of him
David was and how ardently longing for the moment to come when he
would catch that glance and, perhaps, that smile.  But for a while
he did not.  His father paid him no attention.  The parlour was
overcrowded with figures and the sound of Uncle Pomfret's
demonstrations.  Now he was being jolly with his children:  'You
will be the death of your poor father . . . I promised your mother
to give up half the afternoon to your entertainment, and wasn't I
to show you the best pack of dogs in England?  But no, Mr.
Montgomery don't allow.  Pox on Mr. Montgomery--and here's your
uncle and little cousin come to visit us--yes, and your aunt
too. . . .  Pleased to see you, sister . . . and there's no Mr.
Montgomery to stop a family welcome, odrabbit it!  I am determined
upon your being good children now and welcoming your little
cousin . . . fine boy, brother Francis.  He shall come a-hunting.
Canst ride, boy?'

'Yes, uncle,' said David, 'a little.'

'That's more than thy cousin Raiseley can do then.  Put him on a
horse and he's like the Witch of Endor on a broomstick. . . .  Wilt
thou learn to ride then, Raiseley, to please thy father?'

This public mockery was anguish to Raiseley, nor did he fail to
ledger it in the account against his young cousin.  But his pale
face did not alter; no shadow of a change was upon it.  Looking his
father in the face, he answered steadily:

'I will learn, sir, an you wish it.'

'An I wish it!'  His father broke into a roar of laughter--'Hark to
that now!  An I wish it!  Have I wished, then, to have a milksop
for a son?  'Tis all your Montgomerys and their Latin grammars that
have spoilt thee, boy--Here,' catching David suddenly by his
breeches and raising him in the air, 'here's the spit of a tree!
Here's a lad knows a dog when he sees 'un, that I'll wager!  Wilt
come with thy uncle hunting, David?'

But he waited not for an answer.  He was aware that his wife
thought him foolish and noisy.  He turned confusedly to chatter to
his sister-in-law.

It was then that David had a word with his father.  They were
standing a little back from the others.  'David, you are to go now.
Your mother will ride home with me.  You will find Father Roche to
the left along the road.  He is waiting now at the turn to
Crosthwaite Church.  You will ride back with him.'

At once David obeyed.  He turned, bowed to his great-aunt, kissed
his aunt's hand, heard above his head the excuses for his
departure, smiled at his girl cousins, exchanged one look with
Raiseley and was gone.

How proud he was to be treated thus--as though he were already a
man!

He pushed open the heavy house-door, stepped through the courtyard,
between the high gates and into the dusky road.  It was almost
dark; shadows lay about the broad path and little winds ran
whispering about his feet.

A great sense of adventure possessed him.  Behind him was the
lighted town, near him the warm house with its fires and talking
company, and outside the house the garden with the bird fountain
and all its ordered discipline running to the wild edge of the lake
with the clustered reeds.  Young though he was, he yet felt the
humanity and safety of this world crowded with all its persons so
diverse as the ancient lady and little Peter and Cousin Raiseley,
his enemy.  All this within firelit walls, but, outside, the long
road running, as though on a secret purpose, below the mountain
that seemed to him huge in the night air, Skiddaw; by now he knew
its name.  But here, also, there was a church, and men might ride
with ease, and at short distance all the traffic of the town.  But
away from it the road ran on, curving at the lake's end, running up
the hill, then above the lake's side until at last it reached that
little bridge and the high rocks behind it that were the barrier of
his own dark country.  There was danger, there, romance and
adventure.  Cousin Raiseley had said that there were wolves there.
He did not know how that might be, but a month's living there had
shown him how strange and removed a world it was, and already it
was beginning to pull at his boy's heart, so that he was ready to
defend it and feel that he was citizen of it.  Yes, he would know
every tree, every rock, every corner of it before long; he would
push his way into every one of the mysteries. . . .

He had been walking swiftly down the road, a little afraid,
although he would not have owned it to anyone, of the sound of his
own footsteps, when he saw at the parting of the two ways a horse
and a figure standing beside it.

The figure came to meet him, and at first he did not recognise it,
because Father Roche was dressed as an ordinary gentleman in plain
riding clothes.

'Father Roche,' he whispered.  He had not intended to whisper, but
the silence and loneliness of the road commanded him.

He was taken up and in another moment was seated in the front of
the saddle.  They started off.

'Not Father Roche any more,' the figure behind him murmured.  'Mr.
Roche . . . the times move, and we must move with them.'

His voice had to-night more than ever before the power to move
David.  He was himself already excited and stirred, and, as they
moved over Derwent Hill, through the village of Portinscale and
then up over Swinside Hill, with every step they seemed to be
moving into some mysterious country, and it was Father Roche's
power and spirit that was leading them.  Was he then no longer a
priest?  Could you at one moment be a priest and then, at the next
moment, not?  Was it at his father's orders that he had ceased to
be a priest?  But for the moment he was too deeply excited by his
own experiences.  'Uncle Pomfret's house is very grand.  It is
grander than ours at Doncaster.  There is a garden with a fountain
that is a bird's head, and a clock with the sun and moon on its
face.  My great-aunt Maria is a very old lady--she looks a hundred
years.  She has long hair falling about her face.  My cousins were
present, and my cousin Raiseley is very grave as though he thought
well of himself. . . .'  He paused, then added:  'We will fight one
day.  And I shall win.'  His little back straightened and his short
legs tightened about the horse's neck.  'Uncle Pomfret always
speaks at the top of his voice.  He lifted me by my breeches and
said that I should go hunting with him.  Will my father permit me,
think you?'

'Yes, David, when you are older.'

David sighed.  'It is always when I am older.  My cousin Raiseley
asked whether there were wolves in Borrowdale.  He said that he
wished to see one, but I doubt it.  I think he does not care for
dogs and horses and wild animals.'

They were going more slowly now, climbing the hill.  It was
bitterly cold, even a little snow was falling, and a few stars were
like points of ice in the sky.  They were climbing to high ground.
There were three paths on this farther side of the lake, but as
Father Roche had been warned in Keswick only one was passable for a
horse and that the highest.

'My great-aunt Maria,' David went on, drawing a little back on
Father Roche for greater warmth, 'said once "God save His Gracious
Majesty."  Aunt Jannice was vexed, so that I knew that it could
not be the King in London.  It is forbidden, is it not, to speak of
the other King in Rome?'

Father Roche drew the boy closer to him.  The time had come, then,
to speak.  The boy was now of a sufficient age.  For years now he
had been waiting for this moment, and he was well pleased that it
should be at this instant, cold and sharp under the winter night
sky, with the world so silent on every side of them.  It had been
the lesson of his life that he should have no human passions, and
he had learnt it well, but in spite of all his lessons human
feeling had grown in his heart for this boy and this boy's father.
There were many other plans and schemes in his life that went far
beyond his momentary relations with the Herries family.  He stayed
with them only because it suited his larger purposes to do so, but
growing up in his heart in these last years had been the longing to
turn this boy on to his own paths.  During these weeks since coming
to Borrowdale David seemed to have grown in mind and perception.
He was already wise in some things beyond his years.

'David, will you listen a little as we ride?  I have wished for
some time past to speak to you.  You are of an age enough now to
understand.'

David nodded his head proudly.  The only sound in all the world was
the clap-clap of the horse's hoofs on the frozen ground.

Father Roche went on:  'There was a King in England once who was a
martyr.  Wicked men in the malice of their hearts slew him, and so
interfered with one of God's most holy laws--the Divine Right that
He hath given to those whom He has appointed as His rulers on this
earth.  This martyr, King Charles of blessed memory, was, perhaps
more than any other man on this earth, near in his sufferings to
our Saviour Himself.  When Christ suffered there was darkness over
all the land, and so when King Charles was under trial there were
mighty wonders in the sky.  You have read of the centurion who was
assured that He was the Son of God, and his servant was healed; so
with the Blessed Martyr, one of his guards was driven by conviction
of sin to repentance.  Did they not part our Sovereign's garments
among them?  Even so have they taken his houses, his possessions,
his very garments from our master. . . .  And in his life, in his
gentleness, his courtesy, his love of his fellow-men, did King
Charles approach most closely that blessed prototype.'

Father Roche paused.  The road ran now over Cat Bells and
Brandelhow; from its bend the land dropped straight to the lake,
which could be seen now like a dark mirror of jet below hills that
were faintly silver.  The horse's breath rose in front of them in
clouds of steam; facing them was the hump, black as ebony, of the
Castle Crag, and, more gently grey, the hills behind it.  For young
David, to whom this view was to become one of life's eternal
symbols, he was to hear always, when he beheld it, the beautiful,
melodious voice of the priest and to see again the scattered steely
points of the stars in the velvet sky.

'His was an unrenounced right of sovereignty.  None could take it
from him.  He had been placed there by God, and man had no voice in
that choice and circumstance.  He was murdered and betrayed by the
sons of the Devil. . . .'

A thrill of sympathy touched David's heart.  Oh, had he been there,
he would have died for that King!

'Even as Christ did, so could he work miracles.  Have you ever
heard how, being taken by his captors through the town of
Winchester, an innkeeper of that city, who was grievously ill and
suffocating, flung himself on his knees before His Majesty, crying
"God save the King!", and the King said:  "Friend, God grant thee
thy desire," and the tumours and sores disappeared, and the man was
made whole?  And the kerchiefs dipped in the King's blood after his
death had also this miraculous property.

'His son had also this virtue, and, it is said, touched one hundred
thousand persons to cure them. . . .  Since this family appointed
by God to rule over England have been in exile God's face has been
turned away from us.  Nothing is so sure and certain in this world
as that our beloved country shall not again prosper until our
rightful King returns to us.  Do you understand what I have been
saying to you, David?'

'Yes, sir,' answered David in an awed voice.

They clattered through the little village of Grange.  Some woman
came to a lighted door to watch them pass.  Under the stone bridge
the river, flooded with the recent rains, rushed to the lake.  They
turned into their valley under the dark rocks.  'The time may come,
David, when every true man will be challenged.  Under which King,
God's or man's?  What will thy answer be, boy?'

'Under God's King, sir,' answered David.

'Keep silence about what I have said even to your father, but talk
to me when you have a mind.  Wonder at nothing that you may see me
do.  I shall come and be gone again, but wherever I may be I shall
know that I can trust thee. . . .'

'Yes, sir.'

'You will not be afraid if a day should come . . .'

'No, sir.  Only my father . . .'  It was not for him then to know
how little in later harsh fact this picture of God's King would
affect him.

'Your father is my friend.  He knows me.'

'Yes, sir. . . .  Will he, too, be ready when the day comes?'

Roche hesitated--

'Every true man who loves his God and his country will be ready.'

'Yes, sir,' answered David again, suddenly sleepy and very cold.
Loyalties?  He now had many.  To his father, to Deborah, to this
King in Rome.  Life was beginning to be filled with great
adventure.  There was his father in his dark suit with the silver
cuffs, there was the old lady a thousand years old, Cousin
Raiseley, whom he would one day fight, his uncle who would take him
out hunting, the King in Rome who made people well by touching
them, Father Roche who was now no more a priest, his mother whom he
loved and Mrs. Press whom he hated, and the old woman in Herries
who was a witch, and the hill with the caves, and the more distant
hills, where one day he would make great discoveries.

They turned to the house, black and cold under the scattered stars.
But it was home, and there would be fire and something to eat, and
then falling asleep in the room where his father would afterwards
come . . . and then the King in Rome . . .

He was shivering with cold when Father Roche lifted him down from
the horse and carried him in.



THE DEVIL


David looked up at the woman whom he so thoroughly detested, with
fearless eyes.

'I went out because I wanted.'

'Yes, and the muck and all you've got into,' she answered crossly.
'But it isn't for me to say, I've no authority.  And the horses not
returned yet from Keswick, and the hills darkening the whole place.
I hate this house--from the first instant I set foot in it I've
hated it.  A nice, pretty kind of life for one who's young enough
and handsome enough for a frolic or two.'

She swung the silver chain that lay about her neck and touched the
crimson velvet of her sleeves.

'And you fast with the priest all the morning,' she continued, her
sharp eyes darting about the shadowy room.  'What is it he must
speak so long about with a child like you?'

'He teaches me Latin,' David answered quietly.

'Yes, and many another lesson, I'll swear,' she answered.

He could see that her ears were ever straining for a sound.

'Ugh!' she shivered, 'the rain's coming down again, and all the old
tapestries flapping against the wall.  It wasn't so in Doncaster, I
can promise you, before your father engaged me.'

'No,' said David, hating her.

'No, indeed.  There was music there and dancing and the Fair at
midsummer and the Plays at Yule.  But here . . .'

She broke off.  She thought that she had caught the clap of the
horses' hoofs on the ragged stones of the little court.  She sprang
to the darkening window, then turned impatiently back, caught the
flickering taper and held it to the leaded pane.  Once again she
was disappointed.  There were no horses there--only the tap of some
branches against the wall and the seeping drip of the rain.

'Why did you come here?' asked David.

She struck her hand violently on the table--'Why? why? why?' she
answered passionately.  'You are a child.  How should you know?
And yet--'  She came over to him, caught him by the shoulders and
stared into his eyes.  'You hate me, do you not?  Young though you
are, you know enough for that.  You all hate me here and wish me
gone.  And most of all that priest--who has persuaded him against
me.'

'He is not a priest now,' answered David.  'He is only Mr. Roche
now.'

'No priest?  Yes, that is fine talk.  Once a priest always a
priest.  And where has he gone this afternoon, riding away to
Keswick?  Where is it that he goes for nights together?'

'I don't know,' answered David.

'I'll tell you more,' she continued.  'He can be in prison any day.
There are the laws against the Catholics, and he serving Mass in
that upper room.  Have I no ears nor eyes?  So he shall be in
prison if he returns and I have my way.'

She stopped again to listen.  The house was intensely silent.  The
two little girls were with their mother in her room.  There could
be heard even through the rain and the wind the noise of falling
water, the swollen stream tumbling down the side of the hill at the
house's back.  She stood thinking, then came closer again to David.
He moved as though he would shrink from her, then firmly stood his
ground.

'David, do you not think you could speak to him, to your father?
When nobody else is by--he listens to you.  I have noticed that
when no other can speak to him he can be patient with you.  Ask him
if he will not ride out with me for an hour--I would tell him
certain things.  For weeks now I have not been alone with him, and
I shall go mad . . . this desire . . . this longing. . . .'

She broke off as though the words choked her, putting one hand to
her throat and with the other gripping the boy's arm.  David saw
that she was in great suffering, and could have been sorry for her
had he not hated her so.  He remembered that night at the Keswick
inn when his father had come in and kissed her.  He hated that she
should touch him, but he did not move.

'You must speak to him yourself,' he answered.  'My father, these
past weeks, has had business in Keswick and in the country here.'

'Business in Keswick!' she answered scornfully, pushing him from
her so that he almost fell.  'Fine business!  Such as he had in
Doncaster.  Riding into Keswick to play at cards and look at the
women, stumbling about in these mucky country paths to find a girl
with bright eyes. . . .'

David cried:  'You shall not speak against my father.  When he
wishes to talk with you he will tell you.  Yes, it is true that we
all hate you here and wish you gone.  My mother cries because of
you.  You struck Deborah when she had done no wrong.  You should
return to Doncaster, where there are games and music. . . .'

He was trembling with rage and with a desire that in some way he
might persuade her to go.  Oh, if only she would go away. . . .

But already she had forgotten him.  Her ears again had caught a
sound, and this time she was not deceived.

The clatter of hoofs was on the stones of the court, and at the
same instant Margaret Herries, the two little girls beside her,
appeared, holding a light, at the stair's head.

'Is he come?  Is he come?' she cried eagerly, and then started down
the rickety stairway, moving heavily and awkwardly, the children
close behind her.

The hall, that had been only a moment before so dark and drear with
the faint light and old Herries sneering from the wall, was now all
alive.

Francis Herries in his deep riding-coat, Wilson following him with
candles, entered, and his wife and the children ran to him.  Alice
Press stayed in the dusk.  They could see at once that he was in a
good mood.  He laughed as he saw them, caught Deborah and David to
him, bent forward and kissed his wife.

'Yes, something to eat and drink.  I'm parched and famished.  The
rain blew against us like the plague.  I thought Mameluke would
have fallen twice, and it was such thick darkness along Cat Bells
that it was God's miracle we were not in the lake.'  He pulled
Deborah's hair.  'Thou knowest there's something here for thee and
for Mary too--the other pocket for David. . . .'  Laughing and
shouting with excitement, they felt in the pockets and pulled out
the bundles.  For Deborah there was a 'baby' with bright flaxen
hair and a dress of green silk, for Mary a toy tea-set, cups and
saucers decorated with pink roses, and for David battledore and
shuttlecock.

With every moment the room grew more lively.  A big log-fire was
leaping in the open fire-place.  Wilson and his daughter were
setting the table; Benjamin had come in (Nathaniel had left them at
Martinmas), a bottle of wine in either hand, his round face smiling
with the pleasantry of the familiar servant who knows that to-night
he has nothing to fear from his master's temper.  Only Alice Press
stood back against the wall, without moving, her hand against her
heart.

Francis Herries, his riding-coat flung into a chair, stood before
the fire, his legs spread, warming his back.

'Dear brother Pomfret is to visit us tomorrow,' he said.  'He will
condescend to take the journey.  Keswick was a pool of muck; you
couldn't stir for the mud.  And so, Deb, you love your baby?'

Deborah was sitting on a stool at her mother's feet, hugging her
doll.  She was in an ecstasy of happiness, rocking the doll in her
arms, then straightening it to smooth its stiff hair, her eyes
shining, looking at her brother every once and again to see that he
was sharing in her pleasure.

Francis Herries, looking out at them all, hummed in a half-whisper
the children's song:


     'Lady Queen Anne who sits in her stand,
     And a pair of green gloves upon her hand,
     As white as a lily, as fair as a swan,
     The fairest lady in a' the land.'


To-night he was well content.  The mood was upon him when
everything seemed fair.  It was good thus to come home to his own,
to find the candles shining and his own things about him, and his
children, whom he loved, longing for him.  The devil of
restlessness was not with him.  That afternoon in Keswick he had
won three fine bets at the cock-fighting.  He had drunk just enough
to make the world glow.  Even Margaret, his wife, could seem, close
to him, neither so stout nor so foolish. . . .  Ah, if they would
let him alone, his little pack of demons, he could make a fine
thing of this life yet.

His eyes, roaming, found Alice Press, motionless against the wall.
His voice changed.

'Have the babies been good?' he asked her.

She came forward into the candlelight.

'Well enough,' she answered, and turning sharply, left the room.

The food came in.  The others had dined long ago, but they crowded
about him as he ate, and Benjamin stood behind them, smiling
beneficently, as though they were all his handiwork.

While he ate and drank he told them little things about his Keswick
day--how they had been baiting a bull in the market-place and two
dogs had been killed; how there had been a medicine man pulling out
teeth, and he had pulled two wrong ones from an old woman, and she
had demanded her money back, but he had not given it: the old
woman's son had fought him and knocked his tub over; how he had had
a talk with old Westaway, the architect of Uncle Pomfret's house,
and what a strange old man he was and had been the world over and
seen the Pope in Rome and the Czar of all the Russias, and spoke in
a shrill piping voice, and trembled with anger, so they said, at
the sight of a woman; how there was a little black boy for sale
like the one Aunt Jannice had, and some splendid dogs, big and
fierce, who would do finely for defending the house in the winter;
how there had been in the market-square the day before a gathering
of those strange people, the Quakers, and they had been set upon
and two of them stripped naked and splashed with tar; how they told
him that there was a band of robbers now in Wasdale that came down
from Scafell and had murdered two shepherds in the last week; and
there was a fine gathering of gentlemen for the cock-fight and he
had not done so ill there. . . .

Here he broke off; he knew what Margaret thought of his cock-
fighting--another evening he might have teased her and been pleased
to see the fear come into her eyes, but not to-night. . . .  He was
young as David to-night.  He had David on his knee, his hand
fingering his hair.  His wife, Margaret, was praying:  'Oh, Lord,
let this last awhile.  Let this last awhile.'

After his supper they played Blind-man's Buff.  Francis Herries'
eyes were bound with the handkerchief.  The children ran, screaming
and laughing; Margaret herself played and ran into his arms, and
once again--after how many years--her husband had his arms about
her, held her, kissed her cheek.  It was David's turn to be
blinded, and, as he stood in darkness, he could hear all the sounds--
the crack and tumble of the fire and the hiss of the falling ash,
the rain against the window, the breathing of the people about him;
and it seemed to him that all the room was lit with red light and
old great-great-grandfather Herries came down from his picture-
frame and ordered him to come to him.  He ran forward; an instant
of awful terror came to him.  But all was well; it was into
Benjamin's arms that he had run, and as he felt the stout, soft
body with his hands he screamed with excited relief:  'It's
Benjamin!  It's Benjamin!'--then Benjamin was blind man.



After breakfast the whole world is filled with light.  Everything
moves together.  Round Herries the entire universe centres itself,
spreading out to endless distances that are mysteries--China, Pera,
the kingdom of Samarcand--but pouring all its waters into this one
deep purple pool--purple of Glaramara, purple of the shadows and
eaves and door-post, purple of the feathers in the peacock fan
carried by the Princess in Deb's chap-book, purple of the darker
river shadows that lie beneath the spume and froth tumbling through
Grange to the lake.  Through the shadows of this purple February
morning, David, standing at the road-bend, Deborah beside him, saw
the moving of all the people around him--Alice Press yawning at the
window, his father drinking his breakfast ale; Benjamin in the
little court, his hand on Mameluke; his mother hearing Mary her
morning prayer; the old witch grandmother Wilson silent against the
wall, her white kerchief about her chin, leaning on her stick;
Wilson himself moving to the cows; then, a little more distantly,
Moorcross, the home of the statesman Peel--Peel, the tallest,
stoutest man David had ever seen--famous for his wrestling, with a
boy of David's own age, whom David would like to know; and beyond
the Peels again, all Borrowdale, with the names that were becoming
part of him, Rosthwaite and Stonethwaite, Seathwaite and Seatoller,
and the hills, glittering on this lovely morning, Glaramara,
Scafell, the Gavel; wolves, maybe, above Stye Head, and robbers,
his father had said, in Wasdale, and fairies, gnomes, devils,
witches. . . .

Deb's hot hand held his more tightly.

'What are you looking for, David?'

What was he looking for?  He did not know.

But this was to be a day of days.  His happiness last evening, the
games, sleeping on the small pallet beside his father's bed and
then waking to so wonderful a day!  After all the rain and wind,
this stillness and shining glitter, small fleecy clouds like
puddings or puppies plump against the shadowed softness of the
blue, the branch of no tree stirring, so clear that the crowing of
a cock far away towards Seatoller could plainly be heard, but, as
always here, the sound of running waters, now one, now two, now
fast as though an urgent message had come to hasten, now slow with
a lazy drawling sound. . . .

He knew that to-day he could have the small shaggy pony, Caesar,
that his father had bought from Peel.  It was a whole holiday.  Mr.
Finch would not appear.  No one would care what he did nor where he
went.  He would like to ask the Peel boy to go with him, but he was
shy, and the Peel boy spoke so odd a language and then, of course,
had his work to do. . . .

At that instant, so miraculous is life, the Peel boy passed them.
The Peel boy was bigger and stronger than David, very broad of the
chest and thick of the leg; his eyes were blue and his hair very
fair; his cheeks were rosy, and he whistled out of tune.  He was
whistling now, but when he saw Deborah and David he stopped.  He
paused and smiled.

'Good day,' said David, also smiling.

''Day,' said the boy, shuffling his feet.  They grinned and said
nothing.

'Have you a knife, please?' David asked.

'Aye.'

David did not need one, but when the large rough cutlass was put in
his hand he chipped off the small branch of a tree.

'Thank you.'  He tried again.  ''Tis a fine day.'

'Aye.'

'We have holiday.'

'Aye.'

'I shall ride Caesar to the valley end.'

'Aye.'

Then the Peel boy bobbed his head and went on down the path.  He
turned back.

'You may have t' knife,' he said.

'Oh, no, I thank you,' said David, very greatly touched.  Then
seeing disappointment--'Well--if you wish--'

He took the knife, and the Peel boy, delighted, started down the
path again, whistling once more out of tune.

The day was well begun.

He walked slowly back to the house, his hand tight in Deb's.  She
asked:  'David, may I come with you on Caesar?'

'No,' he answered, 'I go alone.'  He felt her hand give a little
quiver--'Why, you are not afeared?  I shall be back by dusk.'

She nodded her head bravely.  'I shall wash my new baby.'  But she
had something in her mind.  She noticed so much more than Mary.
She was exceedingly sensitive and would always be.  She would
always live alone, however many people were near her, and would
give herself in passionate devotion to one or two, realising that
it was the law of her life that she should give rather than
receive.

Already, although she was only seven years of age, she knew of many
little things in and around Herries that no one else had seen--the
face of a woman, thin and sharp, carved on the oak chest in the
dining-hall; a ruby ring that old great-great-grandfather Herries
wore on his finger in the picture; the way that Alice Press had of
looking scornfully at her finger-nails; the fashion that old Mrs.
Wilson had of walking like a blind woman, her eyes tightly shut;
the coarse crowing laugh of her granddaughter--and she knew
everything about David: the straightness of his back when he was
standing waiting for something, how one leg would rub against the
other when he began to be eager in talking about something; his
smile, when one end of his mouth seemed to curl more than another;
the roughness that a wind would make of his hair when he wore no
cap, the beautiful coolness of his forehead when he let her put her
hand on it.  She did not know that she knew these things--she had
as yet no self-consciousness.

The most common sensation for her would always be fear, and the
constant duty of her life would be building up sufficient courage
with which to meet it.  Apprehension would attack her at every
turn.  It was as though she had three skins less than other folk.
Even as a baby she had seen shadows in the room that no one else
had seen, heard footsteps that no one else had heard.  Things
assumed significance for her beyond all fact and reason.  There had
been a tree in the Doncaster garden, stout in the trunk, thinly
carved in its branches.  How she had hated that tree, what terrors
undefined it had brought to her, how, in all the other excitements
of leaving Doncaster, this had been predominant--that she need
never see that tree again!

And here at Herries already there were terrors.  Alice Press and
old Mrs. Wilson of course--these were natural alarms--but also the
pump in the yard, the two suits of armour within the house-door
that seemed to her to have faces, one white and one yellow, and the
steps of someone walking on the floor of the parlour-loft when they
were in the dining-hall.

All around her, everyone was insensitive.  It was not a time when
people noticed such things.  There were witches and warlocks,
fairies and gnomes, but they were real and active with persons as
positive as the serving-man or the night watchman.  She kept--as
she was always to keep--everything to herself.  David alone
understood something of her sensitiveness, and this not because he
shared it with her, but because he loved her so deeply that she was
like part of himself.  Only when she was with him she knew no fear.
Her confidence in him was as though he were someone divine.  Where
he was no fear could come, no evil live.

This morning as they neared the house he wanted to go into the yard
behind to see whether Benjamin were there.  She shrank back.

'Come, Deb.  Benjamin hath a new puppy Peel's man gave to him.'

She shook her head and, breaking from him, ran in by the front
door.  He remembered then that he must see his mother.  Every
morning he was with her for half an hour, and read out of the Life
of King Arthur or the Bible for her.  He read very well; he liked
books when there were not horses and dogs and games like football
and battledore.  But to-day he did not want to read.  It was not a
day for books, and as he moved slowly into the house, he felt
impatient with his mother.  He shared a little with his father the
intolerance of her clumsiness, her habit of tears, her absent-
mindedness, and, as with all of us when we are impatient with those
who love us, he wished that she did not love him quite so much.

She was so easily hurt.  She was always asking him what he was
doing, where he was going, with whom he had been; and although
there was no reason at all why he should not tell her everything,
he inclined to be secret with her because of her curiosity.  Then
he had seen, so many times, his sister Mary flatter and cheat her
mother because of something that she had wanted, and that made him
honest to the point of discourtesy.  He loved her better when he
was not with her; he hated Alice Press because she made his mother
unhappy, but he did not mind also making her unhappy.  Now, when he
went in, he would be forced to tell her about what he was going to
do, how he would ride Caesar to the valley's end, and fish in the
stream below Stye Head and watch to see if a wolf should be
prowling under Glaramara.  And he did not want to tell her these
things.  It would spoil them a little, make them more ordinary and
less adventurous.

He found her in her room, alone, the room darkened by the big
canopied bed; it was a little chill.

He saw at once that to-day there would be no reading.  His mother,
dismayed and distraught, was standing in the middle of the room,
her hand at her cheek, her eyes crowded with alarm.

So soon as she saw him she began:  'No, David. . . .  Leave me. . . .
This is too vile. . . .'  She was not near to tears: no, for
once anger had mastered her.  She had even a certain grandeur,
pulled to her full height, massive, her gaze upon the door.  Before
he could wonder, someone had come in, and at once a spate of words
broke about the place; the room crackled with fury.

He knew, without turning, that it was Alice Press; no need to
question that shrill voice that rose in a kind of sweeping tide of
temper to a scream.

'And so you mean to banter me, madam--a fine figure before your own
children.  Was I put here to direct them or no?  It is no
disparagement to a woman, I suppose, that before all your household
I should be told my place and then left to find it by their easy
insulting courtesy.  Oh, no, indeed--I am not to be averse to every
slavish duty that a gentlewoman can be put to, having been dragged
from Doncaster by the heels, and then flung into this muck-heap and
cesspool to keep proper company with old witches, who by rights
should be stripped of every cloth on their backs and then thrown to
the river to let them sink or swim!  Oh, no, you say, I honour you
ever more and more, but I insult you as I may, and as convenience
suits me.  I do not remember to have ever had the pleasure of
witnessing your own rules of law and order in this house or any
other.  You are quiet enough until the fit moment comes to abuse me
properly, and then you have words enough. . . .  I can't express
the satisfaction, truly, that it gives me to know the meaning of
your feeling towards me, and if I should go naked and be on my
knees before you, that would give you satisfaction, perhaps--you
who have not your own children to order, nor your husband to bed
with you--yet you would teach ME my lesson and my proper order in
this house. . . .'

She paused for breath.  David saw her now, her pale face crimson,
her hands clenched, her breast heaving.

'I will not have you,' Margaret Herries answered, 'abuse my
privileges.  It was not by my wish nor order that you were here.
God knows I have surrendered in these years many of my proper
rights, and God He also knows that I have suffered my own
bitterness, and such it may be must come to every woman, but yet I
am mistress in this house.'

'Mistress!' Alice Press broke in, 'and in a fine house!  Mistress
when there is such a master here and a house where the mice and
rats are the true familiars.  Mistress you may be in your own
privacy, but mistress, as the veriest hireling on this place knows,
in no public fashion.  Mistress!  Then who is master here?  Know
you your master and his company?  Ask your master his pleasure in
Keswick and the drabs that he fumbles, so that after barely a six
months' stay in this place his name is a byword!  Mistress--'

'I will not,' Margaret Herries broke in.  'This is enough.  I have
suffered your company long enough, but now it is you or I who go--
and I care not how soon!'

'Go!'  Alice Press moved a step forward.  'Yes, though we had been
at the same charity school and I had gone the round of neighbours
asking for bread, I would not go at your bidding.  No, nor do aught
else at your bidding.  Neither I nor anyone else in this place.
You for a weak trembling fool who have neither the courage nor the
discipline to bid a mouse go when you would wish it.  Oh, I could
tell you things, madam, that would make your eyes sore.  I have
waited in patience, borne your insults and laughed at your silly
little pieces of pride, but now at last my silence has lasted long
enough. . . .'

Silence fell on the room.  Francis Herries stood in the doorway,
and David moved towards his mother.  He came close to her, scarcely
knowing that he did so, and suddenly he felt her trembling hand on
his shoulder and steadied himself that he might support it.

'Well,' Herries said quietly, looking about the room, 'here is a
scramble . . . the whole house shares in it.'

For once Margaret Herries was not cowed.  Her hand tightening on
David's shoulder, her voice trembling ever so lightly, she replied
to him:

'Mrs. Press has some complaint that I have ordered her unjustly
before the servants.  She has been impertinent . . .'

David saw, and triumphantly, that it was the other woman who was
afraid.  In a voice that was strangely stilled after its earlier
shrillness, looking straight at Herries, forgetting, it would seem,
that there was any other in the room, she answered:

'I have my place here, a place that you have appointed me.  Your
wife has forgotten . . .'

Herries smiled.

'Your place?  No place unless you yourself fulfil it.'

It was possible that in that one quiet word she saw her sentence;
she had known, it might be, that for months it had been coming to
her.  It might be that, beyond that again, she realised now her
folly in provoking this scene, in forgetting a patience that it had
been, this last year, no easy task to tutor her natural hot temper
towards.

'I have fulfilled it,' she answered proudly.  'It is you who have
neglected to keep me in it.'

'That may well be,' he answered lightly; 'there is so much to be
done and little time to see to it all.  And now I advise that you
leave us. . . .  Wherever your place may be, it is certain that it
is not in this room.'

She would, it seemed, speak; then with another glance at him, her
colour now very white, she passed through the door.

He looked at his wife with a strange mixture of scorn and
kindliness.

'You should know better, Meg, than to suffer her impertinence . . .
but at least you shall not suffer it long.'

He went out.  David felt still the pressure of his mother's hand.
She did not move; then, at last, turned from him, went to the
window and stood there looking out.  There was nothing that he
could do--only he would never speak to Alice Press again.  Never!
Not though his father whipped him till the blood ran.  With this
high resolve he left the room, and then, after a pause, the house.
He hated it and everyone in it.

He found Benjamin and Benjamin found Caesar.  No one prevented him;
from the outside court the house within seemed dead.  No sound came
from it.  It was strange that by merely closing a door you shut
everything off--anger, fears, greed, joys.  Already, at his early
years, it seemed to him that one of the ways to secure happiness
was to escape from people, to be by yourself in the open.

He wasn't happy as he found his way, past Moorcross, on to the main
path, but he was too young and too healthy to be unhappy for long.
And there was the consciousness that he was sharing now more in
real grown-up life than he had done in Doncaster.  But why had his
father brought Alice Press with him from Doncaster?  That was what
he COULD not understand.  It was from her that all the trouble
came, she who made his mother unhappy, his father angry, Deb
frightened, himself in a rage.  Were she gone, they would all be
tranquil again.  But WHY had his father brought her?  Why had he
kissed her in the inn?  There was something strange here that
caused his heart to beat and his cheeks to redden.  Children then
lived from the earliest years in contact with great grossness of
word and action.  David almost from babyhood had been aware of the
physical traffic between men and women, had at the age of seven
seen a woman give birth to a child in the streets of Doncaster, but
he had as yet translated none of these physical acts to mental or
spiritual significance.

Life from the very first was for him far coarser and more brutal
than it would be for his great-grandchildren, but for that reason,
perhaps, his consciousness of it was purer and less muddled than
theirs would be.  In any case he drove these things very swiftly
from his mind as he drew out from the Rosthwaite hamlet into the
open country.

Open country, indeed, it was.  At this time it was scarcely
cultivated save in a few fields round Seathwaite or Rosthwaite.  It
lay in purple shadows with splashes of glittering sunlight, a lost
land, untenanted by man, no animal anywhere visible, dominated
entirely by the mountains that hemmed it in.  To David's right ran
the path up to Honister, where the mines were; this country was
forbidden ground, for here all the rascals and outcasts of the
neighbourhood would congregate to scrape among the mine refuse and
then sell the scraps of plumbago to the Jews in Keswick, who would
meet them at 'The George' or 'The Half-Moon' and then bargain with
them.  The stories were that titanic battles were fought above Stye
Head and on Honister between rival bands of robbers, disputing
their plunder, and it was true enough that many a time, walking up
Honister, you would find a dead man there, by the roadside, his
throat cut or a knife in his belly and often enough stripped naked.

For David, that road up to Honister was the most magical passage of
all, and one day he would investigate it, robbers or no robbers, to
its very heart; but to-day he was out to catch fish, and it was by
the bridge under Stye Head that he would catch them--were he lucky!
It was not a great day for fishing with this glittering sun and
shining sky.

The farther he got from Herries the happier he became.  Of late he
had been cluttered about with people.  All of them--his father, his
mother, Deb, Mary, his cousins, Father Roche, the Press woman, old
Mrs. Wilson and her son, Peel and his boy--some of them he loved
and some of them he hated, but all of them hindered his perfect
freedom.

He, he was wise enough even now to realise, would always be
hampered by people--you couldn't be FREE of people, nor did he want
to be--but there would be moments and days when you would be free,
absolutely, nakedly free, and, oh! how glorious they were!

It was such a moment now.

Caesar was no very magnificent steed, but he was a good enough
pony, and quite able to grasp his own moments of freedom.  As they
came deeper under the hills the path was so rough and uncertain
that David let him pick his own way.  The group of mountains that
closed the valley in were lovely in their wine-grape colour under a
sky that had been a stainless blue, but that now, in the fashion of
these parts, was suddenly the battlefield for two angry clouds, one
shaped like a ragged wheel, the other like a battering ram.  The
wheel was a thin grey edged with silver and the ram was ebony.  The
empty valley--the little boy on the pony was the only moving thing
in the whole landscape--seemed to wait apprehensively as the wheel
and the ram approached one another.  The sun appeared to retreat in
alarm, but the wheel stretched out a wicked hand with swollen
fingers and seized it--then the ram crashed down upon it.

The end of the valley was darkened although behind him, by Castle
Crag, the sun was in full glory, and the world blazed like a sheet
of dazzling metal.  Within the shadow it was cold, and David,
shouting to give himself company, kicked Caesar forward.

He came now to three houses, brooding like witches at the side of
the rough path, quite deserted, it seemed, open, like many of the
other cottages, to the sky.

Before the third cottage stood three men and a girl.  David felt
his heart beat at the sight of them.  They were the wildest-looking
men he had ever seen.  They were copies the one of another,
seemingly of the same height and the same age, the age maybe of his
father, broad and strong, and all with dark rough beards.  The girl
was only a baby, younger than David, slight and dark like the men,
but rosy-cheeked, and, as David passed them, she was laughing.  One
of the men stepped forward and stood in David's way.

'A fine day,' he said.

David nodded.  He was frightened, but he wouldn't let anyone, not
even Caesar, know it.  He wished, though, that the sun would come
out again.

'Where'st going?'

The man had a deep, rumbling, husky tone with a rasp in it.

'To fish at the bridge.'

'To fish at the bridge?'  All the men laughed.

'Pass, little master.'  The man stepped back and ironically doffed
a very filthy and greasy hat.  Then David, seeing the laughing eyes
of the small girl fixed upon him, smiled.

She had in her hand a small switch.  She ran into the path, struck
Caesar's buttocks and then, as he started forward, laughed with a
shrill crying tone like a bird.  He looked back and saw her
standing in the middle of the path against the sun.  He cared
nothing for girls--Deb wasn't a girl, she was his sister--but it
did seem to him exciting and adventurous that this small girl
should be quite alone with these three wild men, and, apparently,
happy with them.  She was perhaps the daughter of one of them.  It
might be that they were some of the robbers who came down from Stye
Head and murdered defenceless people and returned.  Well, there was
nothing about him for them to murder.  He had a tin with worms in
it, and a home-made fishing rod and a few pence.  He was safe
enough.

The country now grew ever wilder and wilder.  A rough, ragged
stream, swollen with the rains and the snow from the tops, rushed
along over a deep bed of slabs and boulders.  Fragments of rock lay
everywhere about him here, so that he had to dismount and lead
Caesar.  Above his head the two clouds had made truce and after a
meeting had separated, one now in the form of a ship that, lined
with silver, sailed off into the blue, the other dispersed into a
flock of little ivory clouds that stayed lazily, as though playing
a game, in lines and broken groups.  The sun had burst out again
and flooded all the land.  David had already learnt that, in this
country, the sky was more changeable than in any other in the
world, that if you lived here your days were bound up with the sky,
so that after a while it seemed to have a more active and personal
history than your own.  It became almost impossible to believe that
its history was not connected with yours, keeping pace with you,
influencing you, determining your fate.  He had never considered
the sky very greatly at Doncaster, but in this world, it drove
itself into your very heart.  The brilliant sun now struck sparks
from every stone, while every splutter of the stream against a
boulder flung into the air a shower of light.  The whole valley
glittered, while above it the mountains, streaked like a wild
beast's skin with snow, were black.

He came to the bridge, let Caesar loose, clambered over the smooth
wet stones to the deep, green pool under the waterfall, chose his
worm and began to fish below the pool.  There was shadow here from
an overhanging tree and the curve of the bridge.  He was
exceedingly happy.  He had the great gift of complete absorption in
the task or play of the moment.  He was never to know the divided
moods, divided loyalties of his father.  His character was not
subtle, but steadfast, fearless, unfaltering.  He did not realise
for how long he fished.  He moved below the bridge and then back
again.  He caught nothing.  He never had a bite.  The sun was too
bright.  He sat, his legs apart, his eyes intently fixed on the
water.  A shadow was flung.  He looked up.

Leaning on the bridge, looking down at him very gravely was a
pedlar with a coloured hat and a sharp bright face.  He had rested
his pack on the bridge's wall.

'A fine sun to-day,' said the pedlar.

David nodded.

'Too strong a sun for good fishing,' said the pedlar.

David sighed.  'That's true.'  He scrambled up to the sward above
the stones.  He looked at the pack.

'Have you something for me to buy?' he asked, smiling.  He had some
money in his purse--money his father had given him--and it would be
pleasant to buy something for Deborah.

The pedlar shook his head.

'Nothing for you.'  Then he felt in a pouch at his waist.  'Do you
fancy boxes?  I have a little box here . . .'  He fumbled, then
brought out a small silver box and gave it to David.  His hand was
nut-brown, with long, thin, tapering fingers.  It was a beautiful
little box.  On one side was carved a picture of girls dancing
round a maypole, on the other a picture of gentlemen hunting.

David looked at it, then shook his head.  ''Tis a beautiful box,
but I have not money enough.'

The pedlar smiled.  'It is yours.  Keep it until your marriage-
day.'

'Thank you,' said David, dropping it into his pocket.  'But I shall
never be married.'

'You will be married,' said the pedlar, 'and have fine sons.'

'How do you know?' asked David, looking into his tin and seeing
that the worms that remained were few and poor.  He would not fish
any more.  He found bread and meat in his pocket and offered some
to the pedlar, who took more than his share and ate voraciously.

'I know everything,' said the pedlar.  'I am the Devil.'

David believed him.  He looked both wicked and gay as he stood
there in the sunlight, and Francis Herries had always told him that
the Devil was both these things.

'I am not afraid of you,' said David, laughing.  'My father has
always told me not to be afraid.'

'I know your father,' said the pedlar, licking his fingers after
the bread and meat and looking as though he would like also the
piece that David had in his hand.  'Your father is an old friend.'

'He is the finest man in the world,' said David proudly.  'Why will
you not show me the things that you have in your pack?'

'I am weary of showing them,' said the pedlar, yawning and
displaying a splendid row of sharp white teeth.  'Time enough.  You
shall see them one fine day.'

'If you are the Devil,' said David, who was always interested in
everything, 'you can tell me where there is good fishing.'

'There is good fishing everywhere,' said the pedlar, 'if you have
patience.  You have patience.  It will carry you through the world--
patience and courage, two stupid qualities but valuable.'

'Do you live round here?' David asked.

'Here or anywhere.  When you have lived for ever as I have, one
place or another is the same.'

'Do you never grow any older?' David asked.

'Never,' said the pedlar.  'A wearisome business.  Good day.  We
shall often encounter one another.  Keep the little box.  I am not,
in my intentions, always unamiable as people say.'

He shouldered his pack, started up the Stye Head and was quite
suddenly lost in the sunlight.

David jogged back happily through the sunny afternoon.  He took his
time; he saw no human being.  The sun falls behind the hills like a
stone over this valley, leaving in the sky a long, wide strath of
white and blue.  When David reached Herries the shadows were
straddling giants across the little stone court.

He found his father alone in the shadowed hall; he leant across the
long table, on which a map was spread.  'He's looking grand,'
David, who relished him in his plum-coloured coat, thought, 'and he
has a temper.'  So, like a knowing puppy, he slipped quietly past
the fading fire.  In the room above he heard Deborah's funny little
piping voice, singing to herself or her baby.  Beyond the leaded
window the sky was a lovely pale green like early spring leaves and
the low spread of the land was purple again as it had been in the
morning.  Against this gentle, pure light the room was very dark,
although two candles were lit.

His father saw him.

Without looking up from the map:  'Where have you been, David?'

David told him.  It might be that there would be a whipping or it
might be that there would be a game--you never could tell with his
father.

'Thou hast missed thine uncle, boy.'

David had nothing to say to that--as there was a pause he filled
it.

'I saw the Devil by the bridge.'

His father did not answer but suddenly raised himself.

'David, come here.'  David came to him.

He put his arm round his neck.  'David, I love no one but you--no
one--no one in all the world.  And I hate your uncle.  Remember
this day, for on it I surrender all wishes for a good union between
your uncle and me.  Silly, patronising fool!'  He looked furiously
about him at the table which was clustered with a mess of things--
tankards, a platter with bread on it, a riding-whip, a velvet glove
with a jewelled clasp.  'I'll twist his neck for him, brother or no
brother, an he comes this way again.  Aye, you should have seen
your uncle riding his fine horse and stepping over the muck and
cobbles, he fat as an otter and red as an infant's bum.  'Tis his
lady wife sent him to spy the land out--a fine stretch she'll be
the wiser for his coming--a dark house, a dull woman and his
debauched good-for-nothing brother . . . I'll warrant he's sad that
he had me here--a fine tear on his famous reputation.  And now that
I'm here I'll stay.  The place charms me, naked though it is.
There's some ale for you, David.  Drink to your good-for-nothing
rump of a father, naked-bottomed in a cesspool and pleasantly
forgot by the gay world.'

But David didn't drink.  He felt in his pocket and brought out the
little silver box.

'The Devil gave me this,' he said.

His father, his eyes angry yet good-humoured, wandered round the
room then came to it.

'A pretty thing.  And how did the Devil look?'

'He was a pedlar.  He said he knew you.'

'Yes--there is a pedlar here I have spoken with. . . .'

His mind was away, then he caught his son to him and held him
close.

'My good brother's son is a damned smug; and gives him no joy--I
can beat him there.'

He crooked his son's chin upwards and looked at him.  David gazed
back at him fearlessly.

'Remember this day,' his father said.  'We shall be alone against
the world, you and I.'



CHINESE FAIR


Herries returned, one September morning, after his walk abroad,
without his coat.  It had been one of his finest, the plum-coloured
coat laced with silver.  He walked into the house in his white
sleeves, and the old witch, Mrs. Wilson, leaned over the top of the
stairs and smiled.  She never laughed.  'You're grand without your
coat,' she said.  They seemed to have a kind of understanding, the
two of them.  He, as did all the valley, believed her to be a
witch.  He thought none the worse of her for it.  He was happy this
morning like a boy.  It was a bright fresh morning, with clean
white clouds leaning negligently on the hills.  With the beauty and
the youth and the kindly look that he had when he was happy, he was
a good sight for an old witch.  And she was no misanthrope.  Life
was too busily interesting for her to despise mankind.

'I'm going to the Fair,' he said like a boy.

She nodded her head, put out her long brown hand, and touched the
white linen of his sleeve.

'You're not to give t'coat,' she said.  'It'll be remembered.'

He didn't care whether it were remembered or no.  Out on the
Watendlath path, looking up at a bright silver waterfall poised
like a broken ladder against the green cliff, he had seen by the
stones of the beck a dead man with his throat cut and a woman
shivering beside him.  A dead man was no extraordinary sight; this
man was naked save for his shirt, and his white legs stretched
stiffly as though they had been carved.  The woman did not cry nor
ask for alms, but she shivered in the keen September air.  He did
not speak to her, but obeying the impulse of the instant, took off
his plum-coloured coat and threw it over her trembling shoulders.
He strode back to the house.  Seeing Benjamin in the yard, he
leaned from the window and bade him go and fetch the woman to the
house.  Ten minutes later Benjamin returned to say there was no
sign of woman or man.

He did not care.  He was too cheerful in spirit to be bothered by a
dead man or a shivering woman.

He sat in his sleeves at the window looking out on to the
beautifully coloured world, Glaramara plum-coloured like his coat,
and the long stretch of green valley.

He was like a schoolboy about this Fair.  It was an accidental
chance-by-night Fair for Keswick.  It had been intended for Kendal
and then for Carlisle, a motley company of entertainers and rogues
and rascals travelling slowly to Scotland.

But the smallpox was savage this summer in Kendal, and so they had
changed to the smaller town.  In the past Keswick had had few Fairs
but its own.  It was too small a place.  The chartered Fair on the
2nd of August for the sale of leather, and the Cattle Fairs on the
first Thursday in May and on each Thursday fortnight for six weeks
after; on the Saturday nearest Whitsuntide and Martinmas for hiring
servants, and on the first Saturday after the 29th of October for
the sale of cheese and rams.  Saturday the year through was market-
day for provisions and corn.

But these Fairs were local, and business was their purpose.  This
present Fair was the maddest, wildest thing in Keswick's memory.
It would be generations before the week of it would be forgotten.
They said, too, that there was a company of Chinese people
travelling with the Fair, and they wore strange clothes, such as
had never been seen in that neighbourhood, and they juggled with
gold balls and swallowed silver swords, and had an old man with
them three hundred years of age.  It was always afterwards called
the Chinese Fair.

But it was not of the Fair that Herries was now thinking as he sat
at the window.  He was thinking of how well satisfied he was with
this place.  He had been here full two years, and his strange
instinct that had driven him here had been right.  He already loved
the valley, and had even now caught some of the sense of its
intimacy that led its inhabitants to cling to it with an obstinacy
and stubbornness that made them a byword for the rest of the world.
It was said that the men of Borrowdale were so stupid as to be
scarcely human, and that they did such idiotic things, like
building a wall to keep the cuckoo in their valley, that they must
be half-witted--that they never stirred from their valley, that
some of them had never even seen Keswick, that they spoke a strange
language of their own and were like men in a dream.

Herries had heard how the people in Keswick and from Newlands and
St. John's and the rest mocked and gibed, but he knew now what it
was that held the men of Borrowdale: although he was not yet one of
them (they were greatly suspicious of newcomers), one day he would
be.  Something was in his blood that was in their blood: it was a
doom, a judgement, the fulfilment of a prophecy.

He thought of other things too, as he sat there.  He was well
pleased that he had cut himself off from his brother and his
brother's family.  Since that day when Pomfret had ridden over to
Herries he had never set foot in his brother's house.  Margaret and
the children had visited--he did not care whether they did or no--
and when he met Pomfret in Keswick he talked with him, but he had
never been within his brother's door.

He loved his pride, his fierce intolerance.  He cherished it, fed
it, adored it.  It had been one of his fears, on coming to live in
Herries, that perhaps he would find his brother a better fellow
than he had thought he was, and so would be forced to see him and
keep company with him because his heart drove him.

That was why, on the first evening at the inn, he had worn his
finest clothes--because that might annoy his brother, and then
Pomfret would appear less pleasant than he was.  And so in the
event it had been.  Now he cherished his scorn of his brother--it
was a fine silver flower in his coat.

The thing, however, of which he was mainly thinking now was what he
should do to be rid of Alice Press, for rid of her he would be.
Although so reckless a man, he knew, as every imaginative Herries
has always known, that you can't rid yourself of past deeds.  Kill
a fox, give your coat to a trembling woman, drink of the water of
Sprinkling Tarn, and you are a doomed man.  He was doomed because
he had kissed Alice Press, doomed because he had shot off that
young fool's ear in Doncaster, doomed because on entering Herries
he had put the right foot before the left, doomed anyway and a
thousand times a day; but to be bored, because he was young and
full of life, was a worse thing than to be doomed.  And he was
bored by Alice Press, bored to the very hilt of his sword.  He
thought now that he had always been bored with her, although there
had been, at the very first, a flashing moment of startling
splendour.  Now he was bored with everything about her, from her
heavy sallow face, her long sad brooding gaze at him, her stealthy
eagerness to be alone with him, down to the paste buckles on her
scarlet shoes, the scarlet shoes that he had once bought for her on
a Fair day in Doncaster, and that she wore now in persistent
petulant reminder.  Moreover, she had been insulting to Margaret,
and he would have no one rude to Margaret but himself.  Yes, he
must be rid of her, but how?

He looked out at the great shoulder of the hill.  'How, old
Glaramara?  You are old enough to know.  Come and tell me your
plan.'

As though in answer to his question, hearing a deep breath he
turned round to find Alice Press at his side.

She was very grand in black velvet, with a heavy silver chain and
her scarlet shoes.

She came close to him, and the scent that she used, a scent of
roses, stifled his nostrils.

'Francis,' she said, her large sombre eyes staring into his.  'You
will take me to the Fair, will you not?'

'No,' he answered, smiling at her and patting her white hand.  She
drew her hand away from the arm of his chair.

'You promised me.'

'I break my promise.'

'You must not.  I am bent to go.  You have been unkind to me all
these months, and I have borne you no grudge.  I knew that I could
wait.  To-day it shall be like one of our old times.'

'Old times never return,' he answered her, looking at her with an
intentness that matched her own.  How strange it was, this passing
of love!  A never-ending marvel!  At one moment the merest touch of
the hand is Paradise, at the next, dead flesh.

'Have you not been selfish in this,' she went on quietly, 'and
blind too, perhaps?  Because you are tired of loving me you think
our intercourse is at an end.  But no intercourse is at an end when
two have loved one another as we have.'

'Loved!' he interrupted her.  'Love and love!  Do you call that
love?  I have never known what love is.  'Tis a wonder that waits
always round the corner.  If ever I do know, then I will be
faithful.  But OUR love!  My dear, you use words too lightly.'

He hit her hard there, but she gave no sign.  Her eyes did not
quiver.

'Of course you are faithless,' she said.  'I have always known
that, but I am not quite like the other women you have kissed.  I
always told you I was not.  You cannot rid yourself of me so
easily.'

'Can I not?'  He looked at her speculatively.  'I have never been
false to you.  I warned you not to come here.  I told you what it
would be.  Go back to Doncaster, my dear, and find a better man.'

That 'better man' hit her the hardest of all, because, although she
thought him rotten, he was yet better for her than any other man in
the world.  A woman's bitter fidelity is always the honestest thing
she has.

'Take me with you to the Fair to-day,' she repeated, 'and we will
see.  I've made no request for months but have faithfully stayed in
this house, suffered every scorn at the hands of your wife, been
hated by your children, been faithful to your interests--now, to-
day, you will take me to the Fair.'

'I will not,' he answered, smiling up at her.  'David is the only
one who goes with me.'

She turned past him and stood facing him, with her back to the
window, blotting out the scene as though she thought that the
mountain, at which he gazed so persistently, was her enemy.

'Listen, Francis.  You are a bad man but a fair one.  Here is a
bargain.  You have spoiled my life, shamed me before everyone,
wrecked all my prospects, but I will feel nothing for all this if
you will give me this day, one day as we used to have it, as we had
it in Doncaster that Fair day when you bought me these shoes.'  He
knew that she was saying to herself:  'If I can but get him from
this house and away with me as he used to be, I can charm him
again.'

He answered her unspoken thought.  'You cannot charm me any more,
not by one day nor by twenty.  It is over.  All done.  I never
promised fidelity.  I never loved you.  I have never loved anyone
save my son.  These things are not for our asking, my dear.  Nature
is rough when she tosses us our moods.  "This one for you," she
says, "and this for you," and no tears or scarlet slippers will
change her indifference.  Blame no one.  Life is not understood by
scolding.'  Then he went on very kindly.  'Alice, go back to
Doncaster and forget me.  There was that fellow--how was he named?
Matthew Priestly--he always loved you.  He loves you, I doubt not,
still.  Blow no more on these dead coals.  Forgive my indifference.
It is the fault of neither of us.'

She saw something in his face that she understood.  She gave him
one long look and then slowly went.  An hour later he was riding
with David to Keswick.  He could not quite rid his mind of her.
Oddly enough it was now in connection with David that he thought of
her.  David, ever since that quarrel between the two women, had
kept his vow.  He had refused to speak to Alice Press.  The woman
had taken it for the most part with a cold, haughty indifference,
as though she could not be disturbed by the impertinence of a
child, but yesterday there had been a scene.  She had demanded of
Herries that he should make his son answer her.  Herries had
ordered him.  David, with set face and an odd little frown between
his brows that was his father's own, had refused.  Herries would
whip him for disobedience.  David, his body drawn tight together,
kept to his refusal.  He was stripped and whipped.  Herries drew
blood from his young son's white back, because he loved him so
dearly and was so deeply bored with Alice Press.  David put on his
shirt and jacket without a word.

'And now will you speak to her?' his father asked him.

'No,' said David.

Then his father kissed him and gave him some fine ointment for his
back.  To-day it was as though this had never been.  David was in
perfect happiness as he rode Caesar, laughing and chattering as he
did sometimes when he was excited, making Caesar gallop on the free
turf of Cat Bells, coming down into Portinscale as though he were
heading a charge.  The boy was growing.  There would soon come a
time when he would judge with a man's thoughts.  He was a fine boy,
of a stiff, brave, honest character, full of courage and obstinate.
What would he think of his father?

The Fair was on the farther lake side of Keswick, on the broad
meadows that ran to the lake's edge, not far from Pomfret's grand
house, and it pleased Francis to think how greatly Pomfret must
dislike to have all this rapscallion world at his very door.
Keswick, at this time, was a town of one fair street and a huddle
of filthy hovels.  In the minor streets and 'closes' the cottages,
little houses and pig-sties were thronged very largely with a
foreign and wandering population--riff-raff of every sort who came
to steal plumbago from the mines or were wandering their way
northward, off the main route; these houses were crowded with foul
middens and encroached on by large open cesspools, pig-sties and
cow-sheds.  The refuse stagnated and stained the air and tainted
the soil.  Here were women of ill-fame, hucksterers, thieves, many
Jews who paid high prices for the stolen lead.  At once on entering
the town you were in another world from the honest and independent
country of the statesmen and yeomen of the valleys--these statesmen
who for centuries had lived on their own land, their own masters,
and owed no man anything.

In the former year, 1731, in Keswick, out of a population of some
twelve hundred, nearly five hundred persons had died of smallpox,
cholera and black fevers.  During the summer months the channels of
ordure, the cesspools, became intolerable, and in the lower parts
of the town respectable citizens could scarcely breathe.

The natural inhabitants of those parts, however, showed no
discomfort and made no protest.

On this fine morning the principal street was shining with its
white cobble-stones and a throng of people who pressed hither and
thither, giving themselves up with complete child-like abandon to
the fun of the occasion.  The Fair had spread from its proper
surroundings out into the street, and David and his father had to
push through the groups surrounding booths and cheap-jacks and
fancy quacks.

But the Fair itself, when they reached it, was a glory.

So many were the booths and stalls that the waters of the lake were
invisible.  On every side were announcements of wonders.

'Here is the Dancing on the Ropes, after the French and Italian
fashion, by a Company of the finest Performers that ever yet have
been seen by the whole World.  For in the same Booth will be seen
the two Famous French Maidens, so much admired in all Places and
Countries where they come, for their wonderful Performance on the
Rope, both with and without a Pole; so far outdoing all others that
have been seen of their sex, as gives a general satisfaction to all
that ever yet beheld them, to which is added Vaulting on the High
Rope and Tumbling on the Stage.'

And here again:  'Here is to be seen a little Fairy Woman lately
come from Italy, being but Two Foot Two Inches high, the shortest
that ever was seen in England, and no ways Deformed, as the other
two Women are, that are carried about the streets in Boxes from
House to House for some years past, this being Thirteen Inches
shorter than either of them. . . .  Likewise a little Marmozet from
Bengal that dances the Cheshire Rounds and Exercises at the word of
Command.  Also a strange Cock, from Hamborough, having three proper
legs, and makes use of them all at one time.'

Here was a play announced in front of a booth all gay with crimson
cloth and gold tinsel--

'An Excellent new Droll called The Tempest or The Distressed
Lovers.  With the English Hero and the Highland Princess, with the
Comical Humours of the Enchanted Scotchman, or Jockey and the three
Witches.  Showing how a Nobleman of England was cast away upon the
Indian Shore, and in his Travels found the Princess of the Country,
with whom he fell in love, and after many Dangers and Perils was
married to her; and his faithful Scotchman, who was saved with him,
travelling through Woods, fell in among Witches, where between them
is abundance of Comical Diversion.  There in the Tempest is Neptune
with his Tritons in his Chariot drawn with Sea-Horses, and
Mairmaids singing. . . .'

And then the marvellous animals:  'The true Lincolnshire Ox
Nineteen Hands high and Four Yards long, from his Face to his Rump,
and never was Calved nor never sucked, and two years ago was no
bigger than another Ox, but since is grown to this prodigious
Bigness.  This noble Beast was lately shown at the University of
Cambridge with great satisfaction to all that saw him. . . .

'The large Buckinghamshire Hog above Ten Foot long . . . the
wonderful Worcestershire Mare, Nineteen Hands high, curiously
shaped, every way proportionable; and A little Black Hairy Pigmey,
bred in the Deserts of Arabia, a Natural Ruff of Hair about his
Face, Two Foot high, walks upright, drinks a glass of Ale or Wine,
and does several other things to admiration; and the Remark from
the East Indies; and the little Whifler, admired for his
extraordinary Scent.'

Although David did not know it, some of these same animals must
have been of an amazing age, because the celebrated Mr. Pinkeman
had himself shown them in the days of Queen Anne.

For David, however, hours must pass before he could take in any
detail.  He did not know that already behind the colour and show
there was disgust and discontent on the part of the showmen,
because the takings were so small, and there was no one there but
gaping country-fellows, the discontent leading in the last day of
the Fair to a free fight and riot that spread, before all was over,
into the heart of the town.

It all seemed to him so grand and magnificent that there had been
nothing in the world like it before.  Walking close at his father's
side he was caught up into a world of colour and scent--the faint
September blue held the flare of the fires that blazed upon
roasting meat and fish, popping corn and scented sweetmeats, the
thick swaying tendrils of smoke that crawled about the booths, the
waving of coloured pennants, the flaunting of flags, and, under
this shifting roof of colour, everything broke and mingled again,
dogs nosing for food, naked children sprawling in the mud, mummers
in gold and blue, women, bare-breasted, shrieking after their men,
tumblers somersaulting, a monkey loosed, dragging after him a
silver chain, his face weary with age and loneliness, three dwarfs
in crimson hose, with huge heads, counting money, a black woman, a
yellow kerchief round her head, selling silver rings, clowns,
soldiers, girls dressed like angels with white wings, the booths
with the drum beating and shrill trumpets blowing, men stripped to
the waist, their skin pouring sweat, fighting before a shouting
crowd, everywhere eating and everywhere drinking, men tumbling
women and women fingering men--and through these crowds the
countrymen, the farmer, the dignified statesman, the gaping yokel
moving like strangers, suspicious, aloof, and gradually tempted by
ale and women and silver, by noise and food and curiosity, tumbling
into the reeking tub and so kicking and shouting and screaming like
the rest as the sun went up the sky.

Yes, hours passed.  Somewhere, at some time, David had a sudden
curious vision of all the colour, reek and noise of the Fair
parting like a drawn curtain, and there in the clear space was the
lake, misted yellow under a misted sun, cool and still, the line of
Cat Bells rising softly above the woods on the farther side, the
water still without a ripple, very cool and sweet.  Then it closed
again, and the stench of roasting meat and uncleanly bodies and
painted boards melting in the heat of fires and frying corn and
burning wood swept over him again, bringing with it into the very
heart of his nostrils the whole pageant of bright colour, purple
and gold and saffron, and the odd wildness of a thousand faces,
eyes staring, mouths agape, and a roar of bells and whistles,
shouts and curses and cries, the neighing of horses and barking of
dogs and the shrill human scream of a crimson-pated cockatoo.

He was aware then that he had lost his father.  He stood for a
moment dismayed.  On every side figures were pushing against and
around him; now someone would run past him shouting; now two
singing, falling from side to side, would lurch drunkenly his way;
now with a cry, as though it had come from the ground itself, there
would be a rush from a whole group; and all of this dreamlike--a
flash of a sword, a trembling coloured flag, a creaking board of a
booth, a ringing silver bell, the scream of the crimson-pated
cockatoo, the wail of the lost monkey dragging his silver chain, a
man bending a woman backwards against a boarded trestle, a naked
muddied baby crying for its mother, all in a dream; where the
clear, tranquil, golden-misted lake was, there was reality.

But he had no fear; he would see his father again; it was fine to
be independent in a noisy world and to hold your own against the
Devil.  So, looking around him, he saw that he was before the very
booth where he had most set his heart, the booth where the Chinamen
were.  On the outside of the booth a Chinese curtain hung in
brilliant splashes of gold and red, a temple, a grove of golden
bells, soldiers in armour, a bridge of blue, and in front of the
curtain a Chinaman with a yellow face and an ebony pigtail was
inviting everyone to enter.  A bell clanged, the Chinaman called
out in a shrill voice and at the same moment the thick pushing
crowd shoved forward.  David was caught in it, carried off his
feet; he was pressed against smelling clothes and warm sweating
flesh; he clutched, that he might not fall, at a man's waist and
held to it; his fingers stuck to the damp waist-belt and his arm
was driven into a soft belly.  For a moment he was almost under a
dozen feet, then lifted up again on the sheet of a thousand smells
and so almost hurled into the inside of the booth.  He did not know
whether he should pay money or no, he had lost his breath and found
himself enclosed within the thick arm of a huge country-fellow,
black-bearded, bare at the neck; their sense of one another was
instantaneous, and the black-bearded man laughed, standing him in
front of him, pressing him back against his chest, his hot naked
arm against David's cheek.

He could see where he was.  He was high on some raised boards.
Everything around him was quiet.  The noise of the Fair had been
shut out.  On every side of him the people with staring eyes,
speechless, stood waiting.  A little empty stage was in front of
him and above it some curtains idly flapped.

All his senses were centred on this empty stage.  It became to him
full of omen and suspense.  What was about to happen?  Who would
come there?  A very ancient man came with a long face of yellow
parchment.  He wore a long stiff garment of purple brocaded silk.
He sat, quite silently and quite alone, on a little round stool.
He was motionless, carved in colours against the dark shadows of
the flapping tent.  He looked neither to right nor left, was
unaware of the sweating crowd.  Perhaps he was the Chinaman who was
three hundred years old.  If you were three hundred years of age
you would not pay attention to any crowd; you would have seen so
many.

Then the curtains parted, two young men in gold trousers, stripped
to the waist, their bodies glistening, came and threw into the air
coloured balls.  They threw up a dozen balls at once, and the
balls, green, yellow, red, made whirls of colour above the head of
the old man who never moved.

Then there came two short fat men with very yellow bodies; they
were clad only in loin-cloths.  Standing in a corner of the stage
they began silently to wrestle.

Then six young men came in trousers of gold and jackets of silver;
they had poles up which they climbed; they threw ropes to one
another and with pointed red slippers on their feet walked on the
ropes.  Lastly a number of little yellow-faced children, also
dressed in bright, shrill colours, ran silently forward, spread
their legs and their arms and stood in a pyramid: the child who
climbed to the top and stood balancing there with his little feet
seemed only a baby with tiny black eyes and a doll's pigtail.

Now all of them--the young men with the balls, the naked wrestlers,
the men balancing on the ropes, the pyramid children who suddenly
melted to the floor and were turning like bright bales a hundred
somersaults and cart-wheels--were moving ceaselessly round the old
man who sat motionless on his little stool, never flickering, you
could be sure, an eyelid.  Faster and faster they turned, but
always without a sound, and as they moved the tightly packed crowd
moved with them: the crowd began to sway and to murmur: everyone
was smiling: the black-bearded countryman who smelt of good fresh
dung put his arm tight round David's neck, pressing his body to
him.  They were all smiling as though they were in a dream, and it
must have seemed to many of them that they too were tossing balls
into the air, turning somersaults, climbing poles, balancing on
ropes.  Their bodies must have appeared free to them and clean and
strong: the ordure and the filth, the daily toil, the cruelty and
sickness and pain, the darkness and rain and cold freezing nights,
the life with animals and the wrestle with the hard ungrateful
soil, the penury and ignorance and darkness, the loneliness of
rejected lovers, the injustice of tyrannous masters, the narrow,
constrained horizons, the proud brutalities of a swollen-headed
upper class against whom they struggled dumbly, whom one day--and
that day was not far distant--they would conquer--all these hard
things fell away, the sky was bright and clear, the air fresh like
crystal, all for a moment was joy and happiness in a free world
where it was always day.

As for David he could see nothing but the silent old man sitting on
his stool.  The old man seemed to be staring directly into David's
eyes.  However David moved his head he could not escape that old
man.  He began to be frightened.  He wanted to run away.  The old
man appeared to have a message especially for him.  In another
moment something terrible would happen.  His father was in danger.
And it spread beyond the moment--all his life he would remember
that old Chinaman, and whenever he remembered him he would shiver
with apprehension.  Life was dangerous, and you could only know how
dangerous it was when you sat quite still and listened, waiting for
a sound to break.

Anyway, he must go.  He must find his father.

He wriggled away from his black-bearded friend, then, dropping down
from the raised boards, pushing through legs and arms, shoving with
his head now this way, now that, at one instant stifled by the
human stench, at another brought up against a solid body that would
never move again, at last he was by the flap of the tent and
tumbled into the free air, leaving behind him, it seemed, a crowd
hypnotised, in a trance, a dream. . . .

He was in the open air again and frantically hungry.  It must be
afternoon.  The sun was high in the sky.

So, looking rather desolate and half lost, his father, Francis
Herries, saw him.  Herries was a little drunk and soon would be
more so.  Somewhere in the heart of the Fair where they were
bargaining about cattle he had discovered an old woman with a store
of wine.  She sat under an awning, on either side of her a cask of
wine.  A strange woman, very fat, with a purple face.  She did not
seem to want to sell her wine, but sat there idly.  Once and again
she broke into a strange raucous song in a deep, rumbling voice.
She ladled the wine out of the casks into long, thin glasses: the
wine was a shilling a glass, Portuguese on one side of her,
Florence the other.  Herries drank the Portuguese.  What was it?
He neither knew nor cared.  Was it White Vianna or Passada or
Barabar?  Carcavellos or Ribadavia?  He drank many glasses.  The
old woman did not speak to him nor he to the old woman.  After that
everything entertained him.  He had always been very easily amused
by little things, and there was something in him that liked the
stench and the common crowd and the press of animals human and
other--

He watched for a long while two men who, drunk with gin, tumbled
about in the mud together.  Close beside him was a fellow selling
medicines.  The two drunkards, suddenly weary, kissed one another
and lay there in the mud head by head, looking up at the sunny sky.

The quack, long, thin and brown, like a gnarled tree-branch, with a
high black hat--'Here's a plaister will cure old Ulcers and
Fistulas, Contusions, Tumours and any Dislocations or Hurts, and
when it has performed Fifty Cures 'twill be ne'er the worse but
still keep its Integrity.'

He moved leisurely, looking for a pretty face.  Where were all the
pretty women?  Here at least not one.  The country girls hanging on
the arms of their lovers were each more blowzy than the other.
There seemed to be none of his own class here.  What was it that
gave him a sudden sense of freedom so that he was happy as though
he had thrown off bonds?

All these strange faces interested him, wizened and twisted and
swollen; he could throw off his fine clothes, put on these tinsel
rags and go wandering with them, drinking, wenching. . . .  Then
looking about him he saw his small son.  With a pang of reproach,
oddly sharp as he saw his air, half defiant, half frightened, he
cursed himself for the rottenest parent.  To leave that child in
such a place, at such a time!  And yet he did not move at once
towards him, but watched him, loving him, proud of him, sturdy and
self-reliant among all the oddities, the shouting, the flaming
fires.  Whatever occurred that boy would not cry out, but would
stand on his courage to the last, letting endurance father him were
no other father there.  And was not that because he had no spirit
of imagination?  Imagination was the devil.  Let your fancy move
and there, by that booth where the boxing was, you could see the
sun roll down from the sky and sweep them all--pimp and trollop,
bully and jade, monkey and dwarf, Indian and Chinaman--with its
fiery heat, screaming into perdition.  As he one day would go.  But
David would not stir, not till he felt his duty was done.

Then he moved forward and was happy to see the boy's pleasure
spring into his eyes at sight of him.

'Did you think me lost?'

'No, father.  I've been in the Chinaman's tent.'

'And what did you see there?'

'There was an old man, they say he is three hundred years old, and
young men throwing balls.'

Then he added rather wistfully:

'Father, I'm hungry.'

'Come, we'll eat then.'

They moved through the packing crowd and came to a kind of
temporary hostelry.  It had a grander, larger front than the
booths, and, inside, there were long trestle tables with benches
stretched on the grass and at the far end a defended fire with a
grid.  The place was very full with people eating and drinking, and
many were already drunk, singing and shouting.  David and his
father found places at the end of the tent near the fire.  A stout
jolly man with an apron and a white cap asked them what they would
have.  There was Pudding and Roast Beef, Boiled Beef and Ox Tripe,
Pigeons, well moistened with butter, without larding.

'Pudding and Boiled Beef,' said David.  It was then that he saw
that his father had been nobly drinking.  He was too thoroughly a
boy of his time to be disturbed by drunkenness, but, during these
last weeks, he had grown greatly and taken a more manly place in
the world, and in nothing more than in his attitude to his father.
His father was weak where he himself would never be.  He did not
know this with any priggish sense of virtue: it came to him simply
that there were times when he must look after his father just as
there were times when he must look after Deborah.

He was a sort of guard to them, not because he was better than they--
all his life and through everything that happened he would always
look up to them, but only because he loved them.

He was uneasy now, as looking about the tent he felt that in some
way or another this was not a place for his father to be riotous
in.  The men and women around them were of mixed kinds: there were
some sober and solid yeomen and townsmen, eating their meat with
grave seriousness, with the Cumbrian air of guarding their own;
there were some rascals of the Fair's own company, one of them in a
shabby gay jacket of gold thread, another like a pedlar in a
crimson cap (he reminded David of the Stye Head Devil who gave him
the little box) with a small gibbering monkey sitting on his
shoulder.  With them were two loose women very gaudily attired,
laughing and shouting.  One of the women fondled the pedlar,
thrusting food into his mouth.  Near his father was a group of
better-class people.  They might be townsmen from Kendal or
Penrith.  One was very stout with a double chin and little mouse-
eyes.  He was rather drunken already and spilt his meat on his
green velvet waistcoat.  Another was a little man, thin as a
spider, with a shrill feminine voice.  He was over-handsomely
dressed with an elaborately curled wig, a full-bottomed coat of
bright blue, and many rings on his fingers.  He was also drunken,
and said many times over that he wanted a full-bosomed woman to go
to bed with, that he might wake in the morning and find her near to
him.

Herries, as was his way when he was drunk, had become very grand
and proud.  The wine that now was brought to him, added to the wine
that he had already had, increased his grand dignity.  David, who
very soon had eaten all that he wanted, began to be unhappy and to
plan some way of escape out into the air again.

Glancing here and there he knew that there were a number in the
tent who had recognised his father.  He had long known that there
was much curiosity about his father and his father's family, as to
why he had chosen to exile himself in Borrowdale, as to his
dangerous liking for women, as to his mingling with anyone he met
and caring nothing for the quality of his company, as to his having
a fine mistress hidden away there in Herries and his flaunting her
full in his wife's face--David knew that all these things were said
and that already a queer chancy air had grown about the building of
Herries, and that they had all become the more suspicious to the
outside world because on their first coming they had sheltered a
Roman Catholic priest (and who knew on what errand he had vanished
less than a year ago?), and had under their roof the most famous
witch in Borrowdale.

All this was in David's mind and consciousness.  His determination
was set on getting his father away before some open scandal
occurred, and through all the murk and smell of the crowded tent,
stinking of meat, spilt drink and unclean bodies of men, he saw the
old Chinaman's eyes, that Chinaman who was three hundred years old
and sat like an image.

His father was very haughty, ate and drank without speaking to
anyone.  He seemed like a god to his son, sitting there so grand
and handsome with his thin, brown face, his clear eyes and the
silver waistcoat with the ruby buttons.

The spidery man in the full wig buried his nose in his glass, and
then, in his shrill high voice, bowing to Herries, said:

'A drink with you, sir.'

Herries drank.

'I am from Kendal,' the little man went on, while the very stout
fellow laughed immoderately.  'I have come hither to see the pretty
women, but by Jesus there are none!'

'There are several,' Herries replied, eyeing him severely.

'There are several.'  The little man tittered:  'You are fortunate,
sir.  My name is Rosen--may I be honoured by knowing yours, sir?'

'My name,' said Herries very proudly, holding up his glass and
looking at the beads of colour in the yellow wine, 'is Charles
Henry Nathaniel Winchester, Duke of the Pyrenees and the district
of the Amazon.'

Mr. Rosen became very serious.  His little brow was puckered.

'I understand you, sir--a secret, between gentlemen.'

'There are women here,' said Herries, 'but no gentlemen--all the
gentlemen are at the lake's bottom feasting with the mermaids.'

'I have heard,' said Mr. Rosen, who realised only the last word of
Herries' sentence, 'that a mermaid was indeed seen off the northern
coast of Scotland a month back.  I was told by one who had read of
it.  I could go to bed with a mermaid,' he hiccuped, and looked
gravely distressed, 'were her tail not too long.  Could one choose
one's mermaid?'

It was then that a terrible thing occurred.  David, more and more
restless, seeing that the tent was now fully crowded, that several
had moved near to them and were listening, had his eye on the
tent's door.  Through it he could see a patch of bright sunlight, a
woman dancing on a tub and many figures passing in shadow.  It was
clear by the door.  Someone entered, a woman, Alice Press.

He stared, first thinking that he was blinded by the sunlight, then
that he had mistaken some other woman of a like figure for her--
there was no mistake.  She was wearing the black velvet dress of
the morning.  He could see the silver chain lying against it.  And
she wore the scarlet shoes.  She stood quite by herself, staring
about her.  She looked up and down the tent.  Then she saw Herries.
She saw him, looked full at him, then very slowly began to move up
the tent.

David's eyes were fixed.  He had become an image of apprehension
and fear.  He could see only the green waistcoat of the fat man and
that down it there was trickling a little stream of wine, while his
big belly rose and fell in spasms of laughter.  He did not look at
his father, but he knew, quite suddenly, that his father had seen
her.  He felt for a moment his father's hand touch his shoulder,
then he heard Alice Press' voice.

'I have come, you see.  Will you give me something to eat?'

There was a place at Herries' other side.  She took it with great
ease and composure, but David, who, because of his detestation of
her, had her in his very bones, knew as though it had been himself
that she was suffering from throbbing nervousness and a devilish
fear.

Herries, his face very stern, answered her quietly.

'Yes, since you are come. . . .  What will you have?'

She ordered something from the smiling man with the apron, and,
attempting a perfect ease, looked about her.  She must have seen at
once that no women of any quality were there, but only drabs and
Fair ladies.  All stared at her.  At the door-end of the tent a
thick rabble was quarrelling and laughing at its own affairs, but
at the fire-end all eyes were upon her.

She smiled swiftly at Herries, and then began to talk.

'A kind fellow from Seathwaite brought me.  I watched him passing.
'Twas dull at the house and the day bright, so I thought that I
would venture for an hour.  But I am hungry and 'tis three o'clock.
'Tis a gay Fair and of a size for a little town, as large as the
Doncaster Fair.  There are things to buy, I can be sure--will you
buy me something, Francis?'  She put her hand for a moment on his
arm, laughing in his face.  'Yes,' he answered slowly, 'I will buy
you something.'  He did not look at her, but stared in front of him
as though he were lost in thought.

Her food was brought, and she began nervously to eat.  The heat of
the tent, her fear and excitement had brought colour to her sallow
cheeks.  The black dress suited her and her full half-revealed
bosom.  The little spidery man in the blue coat regarded her with
all his eyes, his mouth open, the stout man also.

She continued talking:

'And will you take me to see the sights?  There is a Chinaman three
hundred years old and a play . . .'  She broke off.  She was
gathering courage.  ''Tis time you showed me the world again.'

Herries, for the first time since she had come, looked at her.

'I will show you the world.  It would be ungracious did I not when
you have come so far.  First you shall eat . . .'

It was then that the little Mr. Rosen of Kendal caught up his
courage and spoke to her.  He raised his glass.

'May I drink to you, madam?  You honour us by your company.'

She smiled at him, raising her glass, but her nervous thoughts were
fast on Herries.

'We are all friendly together here,' she said.  'Pleasant company.
Can you tell me, sir, whether the Chinaman has truly three hundred
years?'

'They say so.'

'A very Methuselah.  Are you an inhabitant of Keswick?'

'My town is Kendal.'  The little man's eyes were now bursting from
his head at the sight of the lady's opulence and beauty.

''Tis a finer town than Keswick.'

'Larger.  'Tis not for me to say that 'tis finer.  We who are
citizens of it have our private conceit.'  He sighed, swelled out
his chest, felt for the hilt of his sword.

After a little she looked at Herries.  'I have done eating,' she
said.  'Will you take me to the sights?'

Herries drank his glass, looked at it after, with a firm hand, he
had placed it on the table, then turned to her gently.

'Alice,' he said, 'as you have taken this on yourself so you take
the consequences.  When we leave this tent we part. . . .  You do
not return to Herries.'

His voice was quiet, but he had not wished especially to lower it.
Mr. Rosen and his stout friend, and indeed all at that end of the
table, heard the words.

The colour in her face deepened.  She put her hand to her bosom, an
action of hers that David knew well.

'Come, then,' she said, half rising, 'this is too public a
place . . .'

'Nay.'  He put his hand on her arm, holding her down.  'You have
chosen it.  Before we move hence you must tell me that you
understand--at the tent door we part.  You go no more to Herries.'

Her rage at the public insult--her temper was always beyond her
command--flushed her cheeks.  She, too, had in these ten minutes
been drinking to give herself control.  David saw her white hand
pressed with desperate force on the table until the blue veins
stood out.

'Be ashamed,' she murmured.  'In this place. . . .'

'Yes,' he replied.  'In this place.  I want your assurance.'

'No, then,' she cried, her voice suddenly rising.  'You bought me.
You shall keep me.'  It was odd how, with her anger and the freedom
from the drink, the commonness that was in her blood suffused, like
a rising colour, all her body and spirit.

'I bought you.  Yes,' he answered quietly.  'Then I can sell you
again.'

Everyone around them was silent.  The stout man, very drunk,
rolling his head, suddenly exclaimed:

'Aye, and who would not have her, this beautiful lady--though she
cost him--his--his house and--and--horses?'

But David saw that she was very afraid.

'Francis, you have been drinking.  I did wrong to come--I confess
it--I will do all that you wish.  But not here--not in this
place. . . .'

But he went on steadily.

'You have said it.  I have bought you, and now, our bargain being
ended, I will sell you again.'  He fixed Rosen with his eye:  'You,
sir, how much will you give me for this lady?'

Several men murmured shame, but everyone here was very drunken:
there was some laughter, and a man began to sing a song.  A woman
very gaudily dressed and painted had come over and, leaning her
bosom on the stout man's back, eagerly watched the scene.

'You insult the lady,' little Rosen began, half rising from his
seat and feeling for his sword: then something in Herries' face
constrained him, and he sat down again.

'I am indeed serious,' said Herries sternly.  'This lady and I are
weary of one another and would part, but she is mine and I would
have compensation.  You, sir,' staring into Rosen's face, 'how much
will you give for her?'

Alice Press rose--'I will pay you for this . . . in good
coin. . . .'  She made as though to go, but he rose also, laid
his hand again on her arm, then, his voice clear so that all heard,
said:  'This lady is for sale--for the one who will bid the
highest.'

Cries broke out--some were laughing, some swearing, most too
drunken to understand the affair; the garish woman laughed loudest
of all.

A man said:  'Five silver shillings.'

Rosen, fuddled but struggling, in his funny feminine voice
screamed:  'You are a filthy dog--you shall be caned for this--'
Nevertheless he could not take his eyes from Alice Press.  His
whole body hung towards her.

Herries answered him quietly.

'Come, sir, will you give me forty shillings?'

'He'll give forty shillings . . .' some drunken voice murmured like
a refrain.  The garish woman cried shrilly:  'More than she's
worth, the bitch.'

Something happened then to Rosen.  With a frenzied gesture he
plunged his hand in his pocket, flung down on the table a heap of
silver coin, then leaned forward, his face almost in Herries'.

'I'll take her.  I'll take her.  She shall come if she's willing--
I'll care for her--zounds and the devil, I will--an she's willing.'

The money struck the table, and some of the coins, like live
things, danced in the air, springing to the ground.  A heap,
shining there, lay before Herries.

'Have her then,' he said.  'I drink to you both.'

As he did so Alice Press turned to him and struck the glass from
his hand.  The wine splashed in his face.

She said something to him that no one could hear.  Then clearly:

'You shall never be free from this.'

She looked about her once, proudly, and David, who still hated her,
nevertheless at that moment mightily admired her.

Then she turned, brushed through the men and was gone.

Mr. Rosen rose and hurried after her.

Herries picked up one of the pieces of silver, looked at it
intently, then placed it in the deep pocket of his coat.

Quietly, without any haste, he went out.  David, his head up, his
eyes shining, followed him.



THE SEA--FATHER AND SON


It was on a windy April night in the year 1737 that David and his
father arrived at a new understanding together.  The manner of it
was on this wise.

The years that had passed since the very public exit of Mrs. Alice
Press had suffered this and that figure to rise for a moment before
their indifferent background, and then to be whirled like a tumbled
leaf into windy space.

There had been the cheerful, friendly Gay, who, dying of an
inflammation of the bowels in three days, had drawn this unusual
sincerity from Mr. Pope:  'He was the most amiable by far, his
qualities were the gentlest. . . .  Surely if innocence and
integrity can deserve happiness . . .'

It was Mr. Pope's profound opinion that they could not.

On the 13th of March, 1734, one Mr. William Bromley had proposed
that 'leave be given to bring in a Bill for repealing the
Septennial Act, and for the more frequent meeting and calling of
Parliaments'--and the echoes of that appeal were one day to affect
even the remotest hearthstones of Borrowdale.

Other figures, oddly contrasted, beckon for a moment on the mirror.
Bolingbroke, cursing everyone save himself, takes boat for France
on a windy June morning; then Louis of France, making rude
gestures, fingers at nose, that he may irritate, polished
sophisticate that he is, the barbarian Stanislaus; and a heavy-
jowled, good-tempered cynic is fingering women in a gilded London
bedroom and refusing most resolutely to be irritated by either
Louis or Stanislaus.  He has seen, with a smile, the packing of
Bolingbroke's boxes, has signed and smiled cynically again because
Nature that leaves so many dullards lagging on the stage has taken
the great Arbuthnot after only sixty-eight years of noble
brilliance, has snorted with his closest friend and intimate, snuff-
taking Queen Caroline, over the rude, personally insulting
despatches posted indignantly by His Gracious Majesty, the Emperor
Charles the Sixth, and has turned with a grunt back to his women
and bottles again, strong in this policy of masterly inactivity,
this heavy-jowled, good-tempered, massive-bellied cynic Walpole.

One more, before the mirror darkens and the months hurry to a more
desperate destiny--a bright-cheeked, rosy boy receiving his baptism
of fire at the siege of Gaeta, aged only fourteen, Don Carlos
touching the boy's arm with his long hand, and thus angering
Caroline and George in their London palace so that they must send
to Walpole to soothe them--that boy Charles Edward, whose happiest
moment, maybe, is just this when, from that little close-walled
flowered garden, he looks across, a fire of ambition at his heart,
to a thin line of smoky plum-coloured hills.

In Borrowdale, at Herries, David and his father, on the morning of
the 10th of April, 1737, were preparing to ride over to Ravenglass
to spend several nights with brother Harcourt.

David, who was almost eighteen now, and had broadened, strengthened,
darkened, so that you would not know him for the same little boy
who had pretended to sleep in the four-poster at the Keswick inn,
knew nothing of Gay or Arbuthnot, of The Beggar's Opera or the
malicious devilries of Mr. Pope; but he knew by now a great deal
about Borrowdale.

He knew the name of every Statesman in the valley and the faces and
bodies of most of the humans there.  He knew the innermost,
intimate history of every possible fishing locality, the name of
every bird, the lair of every fox.  He had seen a wolf round the
Glaramara caves, he had seen a golden eagle fly in the sun above
Castle Crag, he had shared (without shame or shrinking--that
sensitiveness did not belong to his time) in nearly every bull-
baiting, dog-fighting, cock-fighting that the valley had to offer.
He had learnt something of the spinning and weaving, and there had
not been a Christmas Feast, a stanging at Twelfth Night, a pace-
egging at Easter, a late summer rushbearing, a Hallowe'en or a
local wedding at which he had not played his part.  He was as
popular (although he did not know it and would not have thought of
it had he known it) as his father was not.

His whole young life had become absorbed by this valley world and
by the close history of his own immediate family.  They had been
the seven happiest years of his life.  He was a boy no longer.  He
was on the threshold of his manhood.

This journey to Ravenglass was to show him this.  He had been
anticipating eagerly a visit to his uncle Harcourt ever since he
had first come to Herries.  Uncle Harcourt was to be different,
different from anyone he had seen or known.  Harcourt had lived in
the great world, he cared for the Arts, he was brilliantly read, a
scholar, he could answer many of the questions that, for years now,
David had been longing to ask.

For, although he loved everything that had to do with the outside
world, he had, too, an intellectual eagerness that was perhaps the
growth from seeds that Father Roche had sown.  This had not been
satisfied.

Simple, gentle little Robert Finch had come and taught the three of
them what he could.  That had not been a great deal.  From the
outside world the family at Herries had been more and more shut
off.

Here, in spite of his externally happy life, lay the reason for the
apprehension and misgiving that were in David's heart.  For himself
all might be well, for his family and for those whom he loved, all,
as he very thoroughly knew, was not well at all.

The clouds had begun to gather after the scandal of the Chinese
Fair.  That scandal had been in its effects infinitely more public
than seemed at the time possible.  It had, indeed, been shameful
enough for himself, and its effect on him had altered the whole
balance of his character.  Although five years now intervened he
could yet see and feel every detail of it, the close and ill-
smelling tent, the leaping fire, the genial host, the garish woman
with the painted face, the bright blue coat of the little shrill-
voiced man, the silver coins lying on the table, the broad stout
hand of Alice Press stark on the table-board--but it had been, it
had seemed, a private drama for himself and his father.  For months
he had caught no outside word of it.  All that they had known at
home had been that Alice Press was gone, and for ever: that had
been relief enough.

Then, even to his boy's ears, bit by bit and piece by piece the
story had come to him: the Peel boy knew it, Benjamin knew it, at
last, as he found, his mother and his sisters knew it.  It was a
story incredibly distorted.  It seemed to him, when at last he met
it face to face, to have no relationship to the truth.  Of course
he hotly defended his father--but the mischief was done.  Here was
the man who had sold his woman in public for 'thirty pieces of
silver.'  Even to that country tradition in that uncouth time the
event was memorable.

It clothed his father with a kind of 'apartness'--yes, even for
himself.  His father had always been for him like no other man, but
that had been, in his youngest years, a difference of glory.  Now
it was a difference of peculiarity.

His was a character that must face everything truly and honestly as
it came to him, and now he must face this--that his father could do
shameful things and yet feel no shame.  This, oddly enough, made
him love his father more than he had done before, but it was a love
very different from the earlier one.  Now he must guard and protect
this man who moved under some kind of influence that was straight
from the Devil.  David, of course, believed in the Devil--did he
not know him as he was in human form?

His father must be loved and guarded because he was different from
other men, but no longer could he be worshipped--and this brought
him nearer to David.  There had been from the beginning something
fraternal in their relationship.  That was now strengthened.

Other changes had come upon Francis Herries in these five years.
He was not the beautiful, young, elegant person that he had been on
his first coming to Herries.  His body had stoutened, his dress was
more slovenly, his air more careless.  He bore at times--although
he was worlds apart from him--an odd resemblance to his brother
Pomfret.  At least you could tell now that they were brothers.

In mood he was very much as he had been, gay, charming, sullen,
angry, kindly, cruel.  He did not appear to feel his apartness.  He
had his acquaintances in Keswick, men with whom he rode, betted and
attended the country events, also women.  But David now knew he
carried his secret life within him and was never, for an instant,
unaware of its presence.

They would have been, as a family, more thoroughly isolated than in
winter they were, had it not been for David's country popularity on
the one side that made him friends with everyone in the valley and,
on the Keswick side, strangely enough, because of David's sister
Mary.

Mary was now fifteen years of age and Deborah fourteen.  Mary was
handsome--she would be a true Herries woman, big-boned, broad-
breasted, carrying herself with that mixture of arrogance and
confidence and grace--that blending of hardness and courtesy, of
indifference and kindly attention, that brought in every country,
society, and age such Herries women to the front.  She was indeed
hard, determined, and ambitious.  Of her true feelings for her
father she had given as yet no sign, but she must from her very
earliest age have felt that he was her enemy, her thwarting
opponent in every desire and longing that was hers.  In truth,
every element in him must have always been distasteful to her, his
recklessness, his irony, his grossness, and, above all, his
unconsciousness of and disregard for public opinion.  For she was
cautious, unaware of subtlety, grimly virtuous and alive to every
public wind that blew.

Very early, indeed, she must have surveyed the scene and decided
that not for her were the isolation of Herries, the mire of
Borrowdale, the rusticity of the country company, the coarseness
and crudity of living.  She had never any eye for any beauty save
her own, her only tenderness was to herself, and she had a power of
cautious waiting on the event, an ability to spin over months and
even years the web of her own secret plans, that was both in its
strength and secrecy extraordinary.

Very soon she had begun to turn her eye to Keswick and her cousins
there.  That was her future world, or rather the stepping-stone to
a larger, grander one, and, at once, she began to use it.  Very
early she won the admiration of her uncle and aunt.  She was in
truth the very type that they could understand and admire.

She found, as she grew older, ways and means of reaching Keswick
that only ruthless determination could have taught her.  At first
her father had angrily forbidden her his brother's house, but soon
he had grown indifferent and lazy.  He had never cared for this
daughter of his.  He did not mind where she went.  When she was
fourteen she persuaded her mother that she must have dancing-
lessons and, riding her own horse, would vanish into Keswick and no
one question her.

It may have been that Pomfret and his wife found a certain triumph
and pleasure in thus alienating one of the children of Francis, but
it is more probable that they had not enough subtlety of mind for
this.  They gained a certain definite pleasure in hearing the child
rail against her father, as she did in quiet, measured, determined
tones, but soon it was reason enough that she was there simply
because she dominated all the family and had already a kind of
social power and authority that neither they nor their children
would ever acquire.

Of Deborah, as she grew older, no one save David ever thought.  She
was not a pretty child.  Pale of face, very thin of body, silent.
Only her brother knew her and the rare, sweet spirit that she had.

It was from her that he obtained his deeper and more subtle
consciousness of the beauty of the country around him.  Child
though she was, she was sensitive to the minutest beauties--a brown
dry tree on a moonlight night, a glittering stream, the softness
that snow on the hill-tops gives to the reflective valley, the
yellow bunches of leaves on the oak tree, the purple depth of the
lake seen beyond a bank of primroses, the low singing of the
swallows, the whiteness of frost-bleached stones, the sudden
flashing out of lights after a sullen storm, a brown stream running
turbulently below a white cottage--above all, the sky of whose
pageantry this country seemed more than any other to offer
extravagant splendours.  She would watch it constantly with a deep
enwrapped contemplation, and yet she did not seem a dreamer, helped
with a steady unobtrusiveness in all the business of the house; but
she was, like her father, although in a very different way, a
spirit alone, the only citizen of her mysterious world.

She had a passion for no other human being save David.  More than
anyone else in the family, she was attentive to Margaret Herries,
never irritated by her stupidities or exasperated by her tears; but
she had no close contact with her.  That was, it might be, her
mother's fault.  It was her husband whom Margaret Herries loved,
ceaselessly, deprecatingly, monotonously, and her daughter Mary
whom she admired.  She would ask Mary wistfully about Keswick and
Pomfret and Jannice.  She did not go to see them because she was
afraid of them and because her husband would be angry if she did,
but theirs was the life that she would have preferred had she had
the good fortune--to be in a fine house in a lighted town with
company and cards and an occasional ball--but these only if Francis
shared them with her.

As he did not choose that life she preferred this isolated one so
that he shared it with her.  Shared was perhaps too strong a word
for anything that he did with her.  He told her nothing, approached
her always with that same mixture of sarcastic humour and rough
careless kindness: she would never understand him at all; perhaps
if the moment of comprehension had ever come to her she would not
have loved him any longer, so that it was well as it was.

This, however, can at least be said, that, after Alice Press'
departure, she was happier than she had been before.  If he had
other mistresses she did not know of them, and like many another
wife, after her and before, so long as she did not know she did not
question.

So these years had passed, a strange, slow mist of isolation
creeping up around Herries, a mist not of fact but of suggestion,
an atmosphere that slowly marked off this family as different from
other families, a family of another colour, as though they had
been, these Herries, of foreign blood, and had come from some very
distant land where odd beasts dwelt and dangerous rivers ran.

It was just about now that, for the first time, someone said in
Keswick:  'He's a rogue, Herries--a fantastic rogue.'

Meanwhile, in this April month, Francis and his son David rode
together to Ravenglass to stay, for several nights, with brother
Harcourt.  They rode over the Stye Head Pass and down into Wasdale.
David rode on Caesar, and Francis on a little shaggy horse that he
called Walpole because he had a belly and was cynically indifferent
to any morality.  The little horses picked their way very carefully
up the hill with deliberate slowness.

No one hurried them.  The day was grey and still with little pools
of sunlight in a dark sky.  The hills had snow on their tops, but
in the valleys the larches were beginning to break into intense
green flame.  As they wound up the Pass, the hills gathered about
them, not grandly and with arrogant indifference as larger hills do
in other countries, but with intimacy and friendliness as though
they liked human beings and were interested in their fates.

By the Stye Head Tarn it was grim and desolate.  This Tarn lies, an
ebony unreflecting mirror, at the foot of the Gavel--beyond it, to
the left, soft green ridges run to Esk Hause and the Langdales and
lonely Eskdale.

Above the green stretches there are the harsh serrated lines of
Scafell Pike and the thin edge of Mickledore.  It was here,
however, and on this day that David had his first sharp
consciousness of the Gavel, the grand and noble hill that was one
day to watch him struggling for his life.

It was not to be seen at its finest here from the Tarn, for it
sprawled away to the right almost without shape and form:
nevertheless the spirit of it, dauntless, generous and wise, seized
and held him.  The sunlight, hidden elsewhere, broke above its head
and caressed it; long strathes of water, blue like the cold spring
streams that ran below the snowdrops, spread about its shoulders.

The whole expanse of land here is wide and strong, so that although
no plan or form is visible it makes of itself a form, the Tarn, the
green stretches, the grouping hills having their own visible life
without any human thought or agency to assist them.

They stayed for a little while beside the black Tarn.  Herries,
climbing the Pass, had been very genial, speaking of anything that
came into his head, of a bull-baiting in Keswick, of funny days in
Doncaster and of his old long-ago life near Carlisle.  When he was
thus he and David were like brothers.  But suddenly now beside the
Tarn he became morose and gloomy.  He withdrew into himself.  In
silence they rode down into Wasdale, along the road, past the
little church to the long lake's edge.  Here there was great
beauty, the grey lake without a ripple and descending into it the
black precipitous Screes, savage and relentless, while on the bank
where they rode everything was soft with golden sand, green
shelving meadow on which sheep were grazing, and the larches
bursting into leaf.  All the afternoon they rode in silence turning
inland over rough, dull country.

It was not until they came to Santon Bridge that Francis Herries
broke the silence.

'Thy uncle Harcourt is Jacobite.  He is a romantic jackanapes.  Let
him not talk thee over.'  Then he laughed, twisting himself round
on his horse to look at his stolid, thickset, square-shouldered
son.  'Not much romantic notion in thy head, David.'

David to his own surprise did not answer.  Perhaps it was that the
scene had now of itself become romantic.  They were riding through
thick woods, and between the spaces of the trees the evening sky
was faintly rose.  A bird, singing, seemed to accompany them.  But
it was not only the place and the hour.  David found that his
father had unexpectedly touched something in him that was deep and
fervid.  Was this the consequence of that ride, seven years ago,
with Father Roche?  He could hear the melody and worship of the
priest's voice now--'Even as our Blessed Saviour, so the King . . .'

And, realising this, he was aware that there was something in him
here that his father could neither govern nor command--nay,
something that his father could not touch.  And yet the folly of
it!  What did he know about Jacobitism, its rights or wrongs?  And
yet he seemed in those few moments between the dark trees to have
started some conflict with his father.

'Where has Father Roche been these years?' he asked.

Herries tossed his head.  'How do I know?  He is a fool, a fanatic.
He had fine parts but must needs waste them on a mare's nest. . . .'
Then he added abruptly:  'He hath been in Rome, tying the Pretender's
shoe-strings.'

He went on as the evening gathered under the rosy sky.  'He had a
power over me.  He has had a power over many.  But, believe me, if
ever he returns it will be for no good.  An ill-omened bird.  Yes,
a fanatic--better that, though, than a half-nothing like your
father.  David, have you ever dreamt a recurring dream?'

David shook his head, laughing.

'I am too heavy of nights to dream.'

'I believe that.'  Walpole stumbled.  Herries pulled at him with a
curse.

'I have a dream. . . .'  He stopped abruptly.  'There are the
lights of Ravenglass.  We are almost in.'  They came clattering
over the cobbles of the little place and smelt the salt sea and
heard the sharp questioning cry of the gulls.  A fellow standing in
a doorway directed them to Harcourt's house.

Although it was now dark David could see the little square white-
fronted house thrust back from the street in a small, walled
garden.  He smelt, as they waited by the door, the sting of the sea
and an aromatic scent of herbs and could see here and there the
faint yellow of blowing daffodils.

A little old man, very ancient, in a white wig, knee-breeches, and
with large silver buckles to his shoes, holding a candle above his
head, opened the door cautiously to them, after much unbolting and
unbarring and rattling of chains.  A moment later Harcourt Herries
was there to greet them.

They all went together round with the horses to the stables which
were at the back of the garden.  The stars were coming out and a
strong wind blowing.  They returned to the house, and Harcourt, a
silver candlestick held high in either hand, led them up to their
room.

In the candlelight as he stood and talked to his brother, David
could see him clearly.  He was a little thin spindle-shanked man
very elegantly dressed in an old fashion.  He had the high, white
forehead and the air of breeding that belonged to the Herries, the
breeding that even Pomfret could not quite lose.  You could see
that he was brother to Francis, but although he was only twelve
years older, forty-nine to Francis' thirty-seven, he might have
been his brother's father.

His face was thin and drawn and covered with a network of wrinkles;
his body was so slight and delicate that as with rare china you
might expect to see through it.

Everything about him was refined, from the thin gold ring with a
green stone on his finger, to the rich rose-colour of his skirted
coat.  His voice, when he spoke, was very gentle and kind, and
there was in it a note, full and harmonious, that resembled
something in Francis' voice.

He looked exceedingly fragile as he stood in the candlelight beside
his brother, whose body was beginning to thicken, and his nephew,
whose strength and health shone through his young limbs.  He had
things about him that were like Francis and Father Roche and
Deborah, the three people for whom David had, in his life, cared
the most.

Harcourt left them to wash off the dirt and weariness of the ride.
The jugs and basins in the room were of old beaten silver, and
round the top of the four-poster ran a fine tapestry with friezes
in rose and old saffron.

Before they went down, Francis said to his son:  'You will find no
woman in the house.  Harcourt was once in his youth crossed in
love.  He cannot abide women, and will have none about him.'

Downstairs in a charming panelled parlour they had a meal that was
to David a delight.  The candlelight trembled before the dark
panels.

It was late indeed for dinner, but there was fine fare--a grand
salmon, a patty of calf's brains, a piece of roast beef, a dish of
fruit with preserved flowers, spinage tarts, sweet with candied
orange and citron peel mixed with the spinage, marrow and eggs, and
fresh fruit, pears and China oranges and muscadine grapes.  There
were French wines, Pontack and Hermitage, and later when the table
was cleared and showed a pool of splendour under the candles, a
bowl of Brunswick Mum, the most intoxicating liquor known to man.
Neither Harcourt nor his nephew was drunk.  The boy felt perhaps
that for the first time, outside his own house, he was treated as a
man.  Harcourt was a most charming host, telling them in his gentle
voice the romantic things about Ravenglass--how its name meant grey-
blue river, how three rivers--the Esk, the Irt, and the Mite--
joined here to make the almost landlocked harbour, how once the
Romans had been here and made a camp.  How in those days it was a
place of importance, had its charter in the beginning of the
thirteenth century, and at Muncaster Castle near by, the
Penningtons would take refuge from the sea raiders, how Henry VI.
fleeing there after a lost battle gave his host an enamelled bowl
of green glass, 'the Luck of Muncaster,' how still there was
traffic in the harbour and much smuggling to and from the Isle of
Man, which was but forty miles away.  He said that, as he sat there
in his room, he could see the Romans and the men of the Middle Ages
and all the busy citizens of the place, when it was a prosperous
town, come crowding about him with their long, thin faces and
strange distant voices--and at that Francis, who was now drunk with
the Mum, laughed at him and called him a romantic fool.

It was then that David felt again an odd wave of antagonism to his
father sweep over him.

There was something moving between them, something new that had
never been between them before: soon it would appear and would be
defined.

He became in that first evening attached to his uncle, and it was
plain enough that his uncle delighted in him; on the next morning,
which was cold and windy, Francis was oddly morose and, saying very
little to either of them, went off by himself.  Uncle and nephew
sat by the coal fire in the parlour.

Harcourt talked of the days when he was a boy in the London of
Queen Anne.  He had been fourteen years of age when he first went
there.  He had been present at the sacking of the New Court in the
Sacheverell riots and had seen the huge bonfire of its furniture in
Lincoln's Inn Fields; he had had nights on the Folly, the Thames
barge opposite Whitehall, although it had already then fallen out
of fashion; he described the coffeehouses as though he were still
frequenting them--Anderton's, the Bay Tree, Button's, Child's,
where you might, an you were lucky, see learned celebrities like
Dr. Mead and Sir Hans Sloane; or Don Saltero's, set up by Sir Hans
Sloane's servant, where there was a collection of curiosities such
as the Queen of Sheba's cordial bottle, Gustavus Adolphus' gloves
and King Charles II.'s beard which he wore in disguise in the Royal
Oak.

He had been a great lover of the drama, he told David, a faint
flush of enthusiastic memory staining his wrinkled cheek.

In the Dorset Gardens Theatre, he had witnessed a performance by
the lovely Mrs. Tofts.  This theatre was pulled down in 1709, and
the world of pleasure knew it no more.  In the Theatre Royal, in
Drury Lane, he had been thrilled by the performance of the second
part of The Destruction of Jerusalem.  He would never forget the
splendour of Mrs. Rogers as Berenice.

But his chief love had been the Italian Opera.  He had himself been
present at the great event of its opening on the 9th of April,
1705, when Vanbrugh and Congreve had been there and Mrs.
Bracegirdle had spoken the Prologue.  The opera on this occasion
had been The Triumph of Love.

As he talked he seemed to recreate about him all the distant and
vibrating life of that old time, already so quaint and unmodern,
with the busy scenes on the river, the perils of the night Mohawks,
the chatter of the shops and coffeehouses, and great figures like
the Queen and Harley and Marlborough moving in splendid ghostly
grandeur.

But what held young David and made this talk memorable to him for
ever was the note of wistful and yet acquiescent regret in his
uncle's voice.  That had been the time when life had been so full
of energy and eagerness: everything had been promised then--love
and fame and great company--now in this little house, with the sea-
coal's thin glow between the fire-dogs, the whisper and rustle of
the sea beyond the dark windows, the sense of the little dead and
abandoned town once of so busy a prosperity, the remoteness, the
half-death-in-life, the eternal melancholy of the indifferent
passing of time. . . .

Nevertheless, Uncle Harcourt was cheerful enough.  He opened with
delicate, reverent fingers his bookcases and produced his Spensers
and Miltons and Ben Jonsons.  His favourite poet was Mr. Pope.  He
had Lintot's Miscellany with the first publication of 'The Rape of
the Lock,' and the earliest editions of the Iliad as the volumes
appeared from 1715 to 1720.

But most of all did he love the 'Elegy to the Memory of an
Unfortunate Lady,' and, with tears in his eyes, recited, his voice
quivering a little as he spoke:


     'By foreign hands thy dying eyes were closed,
     By foreign hands thy decent limbs composed,
     By foreign hands thy humble grave adorned,
     By strangers honoured, and by strangers mourned!
     What tho' no friends in sable weeds appear,
     Grieve for an hour, perhaps, then mourn a year,
     And bear about the mockery of woe
     To midnight dances and the public show!
     What tho' no weeping Loves thy ashes grace,
     Nor polished marble emulate thy face!
     What tho' no sacred earth allow thee room,
     Nor hallowed dirge be muttered o'er thy tomb!
     Yet shall thy grave with rising flowers be drest,
     And the green turf lie lightly on thy breast:
     There shall the morn her earliest tears bestow;
     There the first roses of the year shall blow;
     While Angels with their silver wings o'ershade
     The ground, now sacred by thy reliques made.'


So long as he lived David was never to forget that scene--the
little man, his wig a trifle awry, the volume in one hand, the
other hand behind the heavy skirt of his coat, the gentle,
melodious voice, the rain, that had now begun to fall, beating on
the pane, the distant surge of the sea, the steady friendly murmur
of the grandfather's clock.  He was not imaginative as his father
was; he was never to care very passionately for art and letters,
but he made, in this morning, a new friend and acquired for ever
some sense of the tragedy of the passing of time and the deep
intangible beauty of old loyalties.

His uncle afterwards began to speak of his father.  David at once
perceived two things, one that his uncle had in his youth deeply
loved his father.  His older years had given him a protective
maternal love of him.  There was something very feminine in Uncle
Harcourt's nature, and more and more as the morning passed he
reminded David of Deborah.  And, secondly, Harcourt was greatly
distressed at his brother's appearance.  He had not seen him for
six years and although he said but little and asked but few
questions David could see that some unexpressed alarm worked in
him.

He spoke of Francis' youth, of how he had been always different
from the others, capable of the greatest things, but that some
instability had always checked him.  'He hath always imagined more
than he grasped, dreamed more than he could realise.  There is a
wild loneliness in his spirit that no one can reach.'

Then coming and putting his hand most affectionately on David's
shoulder he added:  'But he hath bred his greater self in his son,
who will fulfil his dearest hopes.  I can see that, and it gives me
great happiness.'

They were thus affectionately together when Francis Herries came
in.  He stayed in the doorway then came forward.  'A very pretty
picture,' he said.  They were both immediately conscious of anger
in his voice.  David drew away from his uncle, getting up and
moving to the window.

'Welcome, brother,' said Harcourt.  'Be warm by the fire and tell
us where you have been.'

'Nay,' Francis continued, his voice dry with sarcasm, 'I am one too
many.  I have a book to read--in my room.'  But Harcourt came
across to him, laughing, put his hand on his shoulder and drew him
to the fire.

Francis was like a child.  He sat by the fire, his feet stretched
out, and sulked.  Their evening meal was not very gay.  David felt
in every vein antagonism to his father.  To repay his brother's
courtesy with such childishness!  At the age that he had, to sulk
and pout like an infant!  And yet behind the childishness there was
something real.  Jealousy?  Loneliness?  Discontent?  Through the
evening the antagonism between them grew.  By the close of the meal
David was miserable.  This was none of the old childish quarrels
that ended in a beating.  And yet what was it about?  Where was its
growth?  A ride through darkening woods, drunkenness over Mum, a
flurry of rain. . . .

Sitting there Harcourt raised his glass.  'The King!'  He crossed
the glass in the air.

Francis sprang to his feet.  'None of that humbug, brother!  The
boy has enough nonsense in his head.'

Harcourt flung his glass behind him.  It smashed on the wall.

'I have drunk my toast in my own house,' he answered evenly.

An idiotic moonlight fluttered at the window, very feeble and
wavering.

Francis walked to the door, stayed, then came back and put his hand
on his brother's shoulder.  'I am become too serious.  I have had a
day with only ill thoughts for company.'  Then, surprisingly, he
turned to his son.  'Will you come out with me, David?  There is a
moon.'

The boy nodded, then turned, smiling, to his uncle:

'You will not be lonely for an hour?'

The little man smiled back at him.

'Mr. Pope will drink a glass with me.'  They all smiled at one
another.  Friendliness had suddenly returned.

Francis and David walked out into the little street, which was
quite deserted.  There were two sounds, the even whisper of the sea
and some drunken fellow at a distance shouting a chorus.  The
moonlight was a faint, grey, glassy shadow dimming the sharp
outline of the houses, but at the sea-edge it was stronger,
flooding the water and giving an unreal size and shape to the
distant sand-dunes that lay like lazy, grey whales on either side
of the harbour.

A little boat stayed very faintly rocking at the shore's edge.

'Shall we take the boat out to the sand?' Francis asked.  'There's
no one to prevent us.'  They climbed in, Francis took the oars and
in silence rowed over the water.

It was not excessively cold, and as they went forward the clouds
shredded away, the moon came out riding in a misty, starless
heaven.  Round her was a ring dark red in colour.

David wondered what his father was going to do.  He had some
purpose.  David on his side felt his own independence resolutely
strengthen.  Some subservience that there had always been to his
father was no longer there.  The boat shelved gently on to the sand
and they stepped out.  The sand was hard and crisp under the feet:
the dune was naked save for a thick black post that stood up, like
a finger in the moonlight.  They walked over the dune and stood on
the farther side.  The sea was stronger here, coming in fiercely
and drawing back with a powerful grating reluctance.  They stood
together looking out.

'I will not have you play with this Jacobite folly,' Francis said
suddenly.  'Understand me in this.  You are a child--your uncle is
an old dreamer and babbles of Queen Anne.'

David straightened his shoulders.  'I have played with no Jacobite
folly,' he said.  'I have only spoken of it once and that for a
brief while.'

Francis felt the new tone in the boy's voice.  'You had some fine
intimate confidences with your uncle,' he said scornfully.  'I
should have remembered that he has a way with young men.  Had I
remembered I would not have brought you.'

In each of them anger was rising; their isolation, thus standing
quite alone in a bare world that was all moonlight and water,
increased their sense of opposition.

David said coldly:  'I am no child, father, any longer.  I must
have my own judgement.  My uncle is a generous host.  To-day you
have left him all afternoon and he has not seen you for six years.'

His father turned to him passionately.  'And so the babe has
grown. . . .  By Christ, I'll sit meekly by and have my son read
me a lesson.  Has the hair grown above your belly yet, and how many
women are with child by you?'

David stood his ground, but strange old fears, born of whippings
and terrors and childish nightmares, crowded over the sand-dune and
caught at his feet.  'I am on the edge of manhood and you should
know it.  I have been child to you long enough.  If I find my uncle
care-worthy I have a right to care for him.  It is time when I must
think for myself.  I love you, father, as I love no one else alive.
There is a bond between us, and, I suppose, will always be, that we
can have with none other.  You have often recognised it.  But I am
my own man.  I have my own life to carry, and yield my liberty to
no one--'

Francis laughed.  'Your liberty--who constrains it?  You speak
bravely of love, but there is also a word duty.  When I say bend
you shall bend.  When I command you shall go.  No doubt but your
uncle's flattering enlarges you--but not with me . . . come here.'

David came close to him.  Francis caught his cheek and pinched it.
'You are mine, my fine son--strip now.  Here, under this moon.  I
will run you naked into the sea--cold bathing for a rebellious son.
That shall cool thy Jacobite notions.  Strip then.'

'I will not,' David said.  He was trembling from head to foot, but
neither with chill nor with fear.

'You will not? . . .  Better for thee far to obey.  Strip--naked as
you were born.'

'I will not,' David said again.

Francis had in his hand a small cane with a gold-stamped head.  He
raised it and struck David across the cheek with it.  David caught
it, flinging it far into the sea.

They stood staring the one at the other.

'That--never again,' David said quietly.  The moonlight showed the
red weal from his eye to his mouth--'The last time . . .'

Francis stayed without a word.  Then he turned and walked away
across the sand.

David stood there looking at the red ring around the moon, knowing
that something fundamental that would affect all his life had
occurred.  He had the quality of common sense in melodrama; the
unreality of any scene did not lead himself to unreality.  This was
unreal, the desolate sand, the crazy moon red-ringed, the mildewed
sea, his father's assault, his own action--all unreal and yet at
their heart a real and true fact, that he was child no longer.

He waited: he was sure that his father would return and that then,
perhaps, they would be companions as they had never been before.
His father did return, slowly coming across the sand, his figure
thin and hard in the soft moonlight.

When he was near David went up to him, holding out his hand and
smiling.  'You must know for yourself,' he said, 'that the water is
too cold.  And for your cane you shall have another.'

Francis caught him, gripped his shoulder, then stood close, his
hand against his wounded cheek.

'You are a boy no longer.  You are right in that.  But I have been
jealous to-day, suffering torture for you.

'Always I have been judged to lose anything where I put value, and
to catch to me closer than a flea anything that was worthless.

'For years I have been prepared for you to go like the rest.  When
you were a baby I would watch and say, "Now, in a moment his eyes
will change.  He will know me for a rogue."  And then, as one
accident after another passed and still you were the same, I would
say, "He is only a child.  He hasn't heard.  He hasn't years enough
to understand."  When my temper or my lust has driven me I have
thought, "This will take him away the sooner," and I have almost
wished for that, because my dread of losing you would be the
earlier satiated.  And now, to-day, watching your happiness with
your uncle, I went out so that he should tell you everything--how
as a child I did this and as a youth that, this way a rogue, that
way a villain.

'I thought, "When I return he will know me for what I am, and our
time together will be over.  Then everything and everyone will have
gone from me and I need fear no more."

'And I came in and saw his arm about your neck and hated you,
loving you never so dearly as then.  Never so dearly--save now.'

He broke off, then drawing David closer to him, waved his hand at
the moon.  'The red ring--so it was when I ruffled my first girl,
twelve years of age as I was, in a hay-loft.'  Then he turned David
towards him and looked at him:  'One day you will go from me--but
not yet.'

David, smiling, said:

'Why should I ever leave you?  I have no light sentiment about
persons.  You and Deborah I could never leave.  You have told me,'
he went on, hesitating a little, 'that I have no imagination nor
fancy.  I think that is true.  I see what is before me and only
that.  But I am the easier faithful.  I have noticed that those who
have much fancy are but rarely steadfast.  But this I know.  Were I
made more cleverly I would be of less enduring service to you.'

He said this with a very grave air, as though he had long been
elderly.

His father answered him:  'There are only nineteen years between
us, and as time goes they will lessen.  Soon we shall be of an age:
then you will pass me and be old before I am weaned.  But remember
this,' he touched the boy's arm lightly, almost withdrawing from
him, 'whatever others say, I have it in me to be faithful--only as
yet I have found neither cause nor person nor quality fit for that
fidelity.  I say this with no arrogance.  I know what I am, and
that is no fine thing.  Nor do I say that with modesty.  God may
answer, if He is, for it is He that has made a man in a mouldy
broken image of a divine ambition. . . .  But always with us
Herries there have been one or two who see farther than they can
reach and hope for more than they shall ever get.

'Their place is to break up that pattern formed so beautifully by
such as your dear uncle Pomfret.  So the strife goes on, and will
always go between the marred angels and the belly-filling citizens
who have their fine houses and thank God they are not as others.

'The Herries have always been thus, and will always be, so making a
fine study for your social observer.

'But I can dream of beauty, and if one day it is put in my
hand . . .'

He broke off.  'What I would say,' he added, kicking the sand with
his shoe, 'is that crab-apples are deceiving when they shine in
moonlight, and the taste is stale.'

Then, almost passionately, he cried:

'Ah, but stay by me, David.  I am going the wrong way, and what
matters it?  It is only another man lost.  But one day I may be
faithful to something, and then I would have you witness of it.'

David, who only saw the principal fact, that his father needed him,
answered, as Ruth once answered:

'I will never leave you.'

His father, looking at him ironically, said:

'Your imagination saves you, Davy.  That you have none, I mean.
But you have made a vow here.  I must have something for the loss
of my gold cane.'

And then, the wind once more rising, whipping up the waves, they
turned back across the sand.



CHRISTMAS FEAST


The December weeks that winter of 1737 were wonderful.  Frost held
the valley: Derwentwater Lake was frozen from end to end for
thirteen days; the hills were powdered with thin patterns of snow
hardening to crystal under a blue sky.

The valley was now truly enclosed.  The outer world did not exist
for it.  The autumnal rains had been very violent, and, after them,
Borrowdale barred its door.

The Herries family itself took the fashion.  Even Mary deserted her
Keswick cousins.  As Christmas approached they were all caught into
the general eagerness.  In every house in the valley such a baking
and brewing was going on as the Herries children had never seen in
their Doncaster days.  And the materials for this were all self-
provided.  No going into Keswick for town provisions.  The valley
was sufficient for itself.  Down the path below Herries the
Statesman Peel would be striding, his hands in huge home-made
mittens, his jacket buttoned up to his chin, passing his dairy-maid
who, with her piggin in her hand, was hurrying to the cow-house,
relishing the warmth and smell of the cows after the bitter cold
that descends from the snowy hills; the boys sliding on the little
pond beyond Herries in their wooden clogs, the blue sky, the snowy
hills over all, the Wise Man with the pink ribbons to his moleskin
hat moving up the road to Seathwaite, witches hiding, no doubt, in
the Glaramara caves, the Devil warm at a farm-house fire with his
pedlar's pack, and all the wives and daughters washing, baking,
churning; the puddings and pies will be enough for all Cumberland.

As Christmas approached more nearly David became uneasy and
restless.  It may have been that there was something ominous for
him in the strange isolation of this valley.  It was not that he
was dull; every moment of the day seemed to be filled.  He was now
friend to all the valley.  Whatever they might feel about his
father there was no differing opinion about himself.  His handsome
looks and splendid body (he promised to be a giant both in breadth
and height; he was already as tall as his father), his courage,
openness and sincerity, the absence of all conceit and social
arrogance, his simplicity, a certain animal lack of subtlety, his
kindliness of heart and warmth of feeling--here promised to be a
man of no ordinary colour, and everyone realised it.  He had that
greatest of all powers--he loved his fellows without being
conscious that he loved them.  Had he been a little less simple he
might have seen them more justly, but in the end have judged them
more untruly.

With all its simplicity, his character, as it was developing, was
not uninteresting.  His fearlessness, honesty and warmth of heart
gave even his smallest adventures a richness of colour.  He was of
the race around whom legends grow: already people told stories of
his strength, of how he had bent an iron bar in Peel's kitchen,
beaten a shepherd from Watendlath, and whacked a Seathwaite farmer
at singlestick and he champion of the valley--small stories, but he
was already talked of beyond Bassenthwaite and over Buttermere and
Loweswater.  Borrowdale was the proudest of all the valleys and the
stickiest to foreigners, but its natives already showed signs of
adopting young Herries.  Young Herries, but no other of the
Herries, family.  It was possibly of this that David was subtly
aware, partly this that roused his uneasiness.

It seemed to him that this valley had entrapped them.  He was not
sorry to be entrapped--he was happier here than he had ever been
anywhere--but the sense that they were caught and held roused his
fear.  It was the only fear that life perhaps could give him--the
fear of confinement--and now not so much for himself as for his
father.  He was growing now to be a man and ever since that night
at Ravenglass he had been on shoulder-level with his father.  His
father seemed to him more alone than anyone in the world.  No one
in the valley was his friend.  He was someone of a different nation
from all of them--from his own son as well.

And the valley, because it was at this time almost savage in its
isolation, hated and feared, like all savage things, what was
different from itself.  David loved his father now more than he had
ever done, but he understood him less the older he grew, and feared
for him more with every day.

He saw with his own eyes once a small child run from his father
screaming.  He did not yet know that the mothers of the valley told
their babies that Rogue Herries would eat them if he caught them.

Nearer to David's father than any other man in the valley was
Statesman Peel.  He was himself a rather isolated man, gigantic in
build but silent, keeping to himself.  Rendal Peel, his son,
David's dearest friend, was frightened of his father and could
manage no contact with him.  He too was a silent boy, adoring
David, following him like a dog.

So there they were this Christmas that was fated to add another
legend to the Herries story.  Rogue Herries who sold his woman for
thirty silver pieces and Rogue Herries who was slashed in the cheek
by young Osbaldistone. . . .  Nothing stands still.  The course
that the lives of Francis Herries and his son David were to take
was largely fashioned that winter.

All England was at this time wrapped in superstition: the Age of
Reason was only now stirring in that romantic womb--and no valley
in England was more superstitious than this little one of
Borrowdale.  Perhaps you could not call it superstition, so active
a part in daily life did they play, pixies and warlocks, gnomes and
little green Johnnies, the Devil and his myriad witches.  It was
not far back that men of Borrowdale, seeing a red deer on the
hills, had thought it a horse with horns and pursued it for a
magical twist of the Devil; and the wall to keep in the cuckoo
would yet have succeeded had it been but a story higher.

It was unlikely that David, a child of his time, would escape this
magic.  As he sat now, a week before Christmas, with Deborah before
the open fire in the Herries hall and saw the snow swirl like
twisting worsted beyond the leaded panes, he felt that they were
both held there by a spell--the spell, it might be, of his wicked
old ancestor hanging on the panelled wall.

His great shoulders and long legs sprawled beyond his chair; his
fair head was thrown back; his eyes, warm in spite of their bright
blueness, stared into the black beams above him.  Deborah, seated
at his feet, looking up at him, thought that she had never seen
anyone so splendid.

'Deb, why is it that they hate father so?'

For how long now had this question been hovering between them!

'There is a separateness about father.'  She stared into the golden
cavern that hung, lit with sparks of fire, between the black logs.
'They cannot understand him nor he them.'

'Deb, do you understand him?'

'Yes, I fancy so.  He dreams of what life should be and because it
falls so far behind his dream he abuses it.'

David let his hand fall on her hair.

'I am no dreamer, but I can see how a man in this life may have
ambitions to alter it.  I am a poor oaf, Deb.  I love every moment
of the day.  Just to feel the blood in my veins is enough for me.
Such a day as yesterday with Rendal on the Gavel when, from the
summit, you could look out to the sea like a green shawl and all
the tops hushed with snow. . . .  That's enough for me, Deb.  And
always will be.  I shall never go from here.  I shall never do
anything in the world. . . .  I cannot be unhappy like my father.'
Then he added, dropping his voice:  'I am afraid for our father.'

And she whispered:  'I also.'

They had never, although their lives had been so intimate,
confessed so much to one another, and in their young hearts,
courageous and generous, there beat a tremendous impulse of loyalty
and protection to him.

They offered their young bodies and their strong souls as shields
and bucklers for his protection, whatever he might do or be.  No
matter how valueless his worth they were his guard and would always
be.

Deborah looked up to David and clasped his hand; as they looked at
one another that was what they meant.  Then they both saw, leaning
a little heavily against the window-ledge, their mother.  Her face
was pallid: her hands gripped the wood.  She was like a heavy
ghost: she had made no sound and her eyes did not move.

'I am unwell,' she suddenly gasped.  'I have a sharp pain at my
breast.'

David jumped up and ran to her.  He put his arm about her and with
his great strength almost carried her up the little stairs to her
room.  She smiled very faintly as he laid her on the bed.

'The pain is nothing,' then, closing her eyes, she murmured,
'Christ is kind. . . .  He moves gently. . . .'  She caught her
son's hand.  'Don't tell your father. . . .  How cold it is in this
valley.'

She was better again by Christmas Eve, and was up seated in the
hall, watching them dance to the fiddle of old Johnny Shoestring,
whose bow squeaked like a dying hen.  That was the happiest evening
they had yet had in Borrowdale.  The hall was bright, the fire
leaping, the candles burning, the floor shining.  Wilson had hung
three old flags that had been buried in the oak chest, one of
crimson with a white cross, one of faded purple and one of green.
Whose flags?  From what wars?  No one knew.  The holly was thick
with red berries that year and hung from the rafters.  They could
hear the bells ringing from the Chapel above the splash and crackle
of the fire.  Francis was a child, younger than any.  They danced
till they sank on the floor with weariness.  Margaret Herries never
moved her eyes from her husband.

Next night, Christmas night, they were invited to Statesman Peel's.
It was not as it was in most parts of England where, at Christmas
time, the Squire was the King of the Castle and his subjects were
graciously bidden to enjoy his hospitality with a proper sense of
his grand benignancy and their inferior peasantry.  In Borrowdale
every Statesman was master of his own house and owed allegiance to
no one.  Every Statesman's house was open on Christmas night to all
the world, rich and poor.  There were the guests, indeed, who had
their special places there, but the doors were wide open to the
stars and the line of friendly hills and the hard-frosted road.

Peel's kitchen this night was a place of splendour.  Its warmth and
colour, its happiness and hospitality, stretched to the farthest
heavens.  Glaramara and the Gavel looked in at the windows, the
Derwent rolled its waters past the door, and every star scattered
its light over the roof-tree.

There is no house like Peel's house anywhere in England any more,
but, as it stood then, in its life and strength and happiness, it
was thus.  It was a strong place, secured with strong doors and
gates, its small windows crossed with bars of iron.  It held three
rooms on the ground floor and two on the second story.

The front door was covered with a low porch, the entrance from
which was called the 'thresh-wood' or threshold, and on this thresh-
wood crossed straws, horse-shoes and so on, were laid to hinder the
entrance of witches.  From this there was a broad passage through
the house called the 'hallan'; sacks of corn were deposited here
before market-day, pigs were hung after killing, and there was a
shelf over the door where sickles hung and carpentry tools were
laid.

In Peel's house the hallan opened straight into the 'downhouse'.
This was in his case the great common room of the family, the place
of to-night's Christmas Feast.  Here, in the course of the year,
everything occurred, baking, brewing, washing, meals, quarrelling,
courting, tale-telling.  This downhouse had no second story but was
open to the rafters.  In later days a second story was often built
over the downhouse.  The sides of this room were smeared with clay
and cow-dung.  Joints of meat hung dry for winter use.  From the
smoky dome of the huge fireplace dropped a black sooty lee called
the 'hallan drop'.  Under this the women knitted or spun wool or
flax, the men sometimes carding the wool, the children learning
their lessons, the old men telling their tales.  At the opposite
end of the passage was the mill-door and beyond this another
passage known as the 'heck', and this heck was terminated by a huge
octagonal post.  Into this post sometimes a hole was bored and in
it a piece of cow-hair secured by a wooden peg for the purpose of
cleaning combs, and behind the heck was a bench.

The windows were separated by stone munnions, and here were the
Bible and Prayer Book, Tom Hickathrift and Sir William Stanley's
Garland.

The chimney wing was spacious.  Indeed, this was a really vast
chamber, for it was the 'house' or dwelling-room and 'downhouse' or
kitchen thrown into one.  Part of it therefore stood for kitchen
with the great chimney and hearth; here, on the heap of wood ashes,
was the 'handreth,' an iron tripod on which was placed the 'girdle'
for baking oat-bread.  Before the fire stood a spit.  The two
standards, which were three feet high with seven hooks, were
hinged, so that they could be folded and put away when not in use.
The spit, a slender rod, was six feet in length, and on the rod
were two pairs of prongs to hold the meat, and beneath it a
dripping-pan.  There was a handmill or 'quern,' a malt mill, a
spindle and a 'whorl,' a spinning wheel.  In the chimney wing were
hung hams and sides of bacon and beef, and near the fire-window was
an ingle-seat, comfortable most of the year save when the rain or
snow poured down on to the hearth, as the chimney was quite
unprotected and you could look up it and see the sky above you.
Such was the kitchen end of the room.  The floor to-night was
cleared for the dancing, but at the opposite end trestle-tables
were ranged for the feasting.  Here was also a large oak cupboard
with handsomely carved doors.  This held the bread, bread made of
oatmeal and water.  On the mantel and cupboard there were rushlight
holders and brass candlesticks.  In other parts of the room were
big standard holders for rushlights.

All these to-night were brilliantly lit and blew in great gusts in
the wind.

Francis Herries, arriving with his children, David, Mary and
Deborah, found that already everything was in a whirl.  Peel
himself greeted them magnificently, standing his six foot four,
splendid in his dark coat of native fleece and buckskin breeches,
and Mrs. Peel, stout, very red of face, in russet, all the little
Peels (and there were very many) gathered together behind her.

Many were already dancing.  It was a scene of brilliant colour with
the blazing fire, the red berries of the holly glowing in every
corner, old Johnny Shoestring in bright blue breeches and with
silver buckles to his shoes perched on a high stool fiddling for
his life, the brass gleaming, faces shining, the stamp of the
shoon, the screaming of the fiddle, the clap-clap of the hands as
the turns were made in the dance--and beyond the heat and the light
the dark form of the valley lying in breathless stillness, its face
stroked by the fall of lingering reluctant snow.

After the first greeting the Herries family stood quietly by the
wall.  Fragments of talk, slow cautious words like the repetition
of some magic recipe, circled the light.

'Hoo ayre ye to-day?  Hey ye hard ony news?' . . .

'Ye say reet, nowt se sartain.  Gud day.  Ayre ye all weel at
heam?' . . .

'Aye, they said she was worth brass. . . .'

'Whya, he's nobbut read about it; what can he knaw?  I sud think if
he minds his awn job it'll be as weel.'

Peel came and asked Francis Herries to sit by him.  His elder girl
took Mary and Deborah.  David found Rendal.

Francis had come with some of the gaiety and happiness of the
preceding night and, as always when he was happy, it seemed to
shine in him.  He was dressed simply to-night in a suit of grey and
silver; although in these last years he had stoutened and broadened
he was still handsome beyond all ordinary men.  His charm, when he
was charming, was so gracious and natural that it won everyone near
him.

From the moment of his entering every eye had been upon him.  To
these people of the valley, although they had talked for months of
his wickedness, cruelty, and the strange mystery that led him to
isolate himself in this loneliness, he was yet at sight something
miraculous and magnificent beyond belief.  He was the Dark Angel of
their secret dreams.

Romantic--but to himself he was not romantic.  As he sat there
beside Peel, he could feel the old devilish struggle beginning in
him.  Partly this was an evening after his heart.  He cared nothing
for class--all the world was his fellow.  He liked to see this
common happiness; he could feel in this little, hot, sweating,
smelly world all the animal satisfaction that had no ill in it.

He would set them all, had he his way, eating, drinking,
fornicating, singing--the whole world singing over its surfeited
belly--and mingled with this a tenderness, a kind of familiar
protection so that he could love these owl faces, these humped
bodies, these spindle legs for their little homely tragedies and
satisfactions.


     So go we all
     Down the dark path,
     Alien, to the friendly tomb.


This sense of common luck with the veriest hind was something that
had always separated him from Pomfret, Harcourt and the rest--yes,
and from his own children.

To-night he could feel it to the full as the rushlights scattered
streams of light in the wind and the smell of unwashen bodies,
perspiring chaps, dog's offal, burning wood and cooking meat
gathered in the air, and all the faces turning in the middle of the
room, dilated with the music and the movement--dog faces, horse
faces, pig faces, bird faces--but gathering an extra humanity as
they felt happiness encouraging them and leading them on to
confidence.

He would jump down and share this with them, the drink and the food
and the tousling the girls.  But he was alone.  He could share
nothing with anyone.  His touch was enough; at the feel of it
everything withdrew.  Within the heart of the burning candle he was
isolated; at its core it was ice.  He was ringed with flame and
could not get out.

He looked at Peel whom he liked, his big body set back, his broad
face spread in laughter: he looked at David whom he loved, moving
into the middle of the room crowded now with faces.  No one was
alone save himself, and he by his own mysterious fault.  He was
well aware by now of how suspicious they were of him.

This suspicion had blown like a subtle poison through the valley.
What had he done to create it?  Been drunk once or twice, kissed a
girl or two, lost his temper on an occasion--nothing definite save
that foolish affair with Alice Press. . . .  She had spoken truly.
Since that day he had never been rid of her.

But he knew well that it was no positive deed on his part that had
separated him.  It was something in his spirit.  They suspected
that battle that was never still in himself, disgust fighting with
longing, lechery with an icy purity, a driving dream with sodden
reality, the devil in him that would never leave him alone, try as
he would to throttle it with self-contempt, irony and the
discipline of his impulses.

Sitting now beside Peel he envied that great healthy body, that
steady mind, that serene soul, and even as he envied knew that this
very thought was separating him, driving him into loneliness and
this bitter isolation.

The door would open and the snow blow through in little impatient
gusts and all the valley would pour in with it.  The room was
crowded now against the wall and in the corners.  The ale was
passing round, and voices were loud and laughter ferocious.  But
everyone behaved in seemly fashion: a dignity, that seemed to
radiate from the grand figure and quiet hospitality of the host
himself, pervaded the place.  Only--as Francis Herries could feel--
he could sniff it in the air--there was a kind of madness behind
the dignity, something that belonged to the witches and old
crippled warlocks, to the naked shapes playing under the stars
above Seatoller, to the broomsticks flying dimly like thin clouds
towards the moon.

Suddenly there was a cry:  'They coom.  They're here.'  It was the
'Play-Jigg.'  This was the drama in verse played by the actors who,
tonight, were passing from Statesman's house to Statesman's house.

Johnny Shoestring ceased his playing, the dancers vanished, the
centre of the room was clear.  Packed against the walls now were
bodies and faces, legs and backs.  There was whispering and
tittering, but quite clearly in the immediate silence could be
heard the hiss of the snow hovering down through the open chimney
on to the fire.

They came forward.  Francis was amused as he saw that the Master of
these Ceremonies was his old friend the pedlar, David's Devil.
Very roguish he was to-night in a cocked purple hat and purple
tights showing his thin, spidery limbs, his face with its crooked
ironic smile, and his black shining eyes.

He introduced his little company, Old Giles, a bent old man with a
long chin, Pinch, a clown, a stout and jolly fellow, a husband and
a wife, and young Go-to-Bed who at once in a high, shrill treble
introduced himself:


     'My father is old and decrepit,
     My mother deceased of late,
     And I am a youth that's respected,
     Possessed of a good estate.'


The old couple did a little dance of joy at this, and then Pinch
the clown came forward and asked young Go-to-Bed if he wanted to
increase his fortune.  Of course young Go-to-Bed was eager, so
Pinch introduced him to Old Giles, who said he would show him how
to make money out of nothing.  This young Go-to-Bed was delighted
to know, so Old Giles told him that he must have his arse kicked a
dozen times by friend Pinch, and then he must put his head in a
bucket of water and then must sit up a night alone in a churchyard:
all these things young Go-to-Bed performed to the infinite delight
of the audience, especially in the churchyard when Pinch, dressed
as a painful ghost, emptied a sack of flour over young Go-to-Bed
and set the dogs on to him.

The 'Jigg' ended in a grand dance and in this the audience soon
joined.  Go-to-Bed, his face white with flour, led off with Mrs.
Peel, and Peel took the Old Lady, and soon all the room was turning
to Johnny Shoestring's music.

Still Francis Herries did not move.  He was alone on the raised
seat near the fire-window.  All his children were dancing; even
Mary now had forgotten her superior airs and breeding and was
smiling at young Curtis, son of a Newlands Statesman.  The pedlar
came across to Francis.

'Good day.'

'Good day,' said Francis.

'You are not dancing, sir.'

'In my own time,' said Francis.

The pedlar stood there smoothing his hands down the sides of his
legs with a look of infinite satisfaction.

'It is very cold up at the valley end,' the pedlar said, 'but the
moonlight warms the air.  Leave this and take a walk with me.'

Herries felt an impulse to go.  The thought of the cold, the black
ridge of the hills, and the sky silver-thickened, the freshness,
the icy air, was fiercely attractive.  His dream--the splendid
horse breasting the dark lake under the icy spears--seemed to
penetrate the very heart of the thickly smelling, heated room.
Close to him the hams and the dried beef swung ever so slightly in
the great chimney.  A country girl mopped her sweating brow.
Beyond the fire-window he fancied that he could hear a cow,
desolate in the dark field, lowing for its calf, but of course
there would be no cow outside at Christmas.  He was about to say
that he would go when the pedlar touched his arm.

'Here are strangers,' he said, pointing with his long white finger.

Francis Herries followed his direction and saw pressed near the
door at the hallan end a man and a woman and a child.  The man was
rough, bony, with long black hair that tumbled on to his shoulders,
the woman white-faced, crouching a little as though she feared a
blow, and pressed against her dress was a very young child.  It was
the child that held Herries' notice.  She could not have been above
seven or eight years of age, her face so white that it might have
been blanched by moonlight.  But it was her hair that was
astonishing.  She was wearing a little peaked man's cap of grey
with a russet feather in it and under this her hair fell almost to
her tiny waist.  Its colour was flame.  Flame.  Francis,
incredulously smiling at his interest, repeated the word.  Flame.
As though her head were on fire.  Flame smouldering, with a sudden
movement of her little shoulders glancing in coloured shadow as
though it were alive.  It sank into darkness as fire does, then
lifted into amber and rolled about her head in smoky sombre red.
She pressed farther back against her mother, and the flame seemed
to creep across the dress, to move, to stir, then to lie there,
idly licking the dull stuff.

Between this fire the little face looked out, the face of a tired
baby, weary, scornful, ironically interested and alone.

'I have never seen such hair,' Herries said, as though to himself.

'Come and burn your hand in it,' said the pedlar.

Herries got up and looked about him.  The brightness of that baby's
hair seemed to have dimmed and hushed the room.  The candlelight
was smoked, the voices, the laughter, the trampling of feet shut
away behind glass.  Herries followed the pedlar across the floor.
As they approached the man frowned and drew his body together
animal fashion.  He was all animal, he smelt animal, looking out
with sharp suspicious eyes from his shaggy black hair.  The woman
did not move, but looked up at Herries.  The pedlar smiled at her:
'Hey, Jane Starr,' he said.

Then the woman spoke to Herries: he was astonished at her voice,
which was soft and musical and without any real accent.

'You have forgot me, sir.'

He smiled down at the child.  'I fear that I have.'

'Once you gave me your coat,' she said softly, staring into his
eyes.  So that was it!  The morning of the day that was to prove so
eventful to him, the morning of the Chinese Fair.  The tang of that
walk came back to him, his happiness, the freshness, the waterfall
clinging like a ladder to the rock, the dead man, the patient
woman.

'You were welcome to it,' he said, looking at her for the first
time.  Her face was not comely.  White and weary, but there was
strength and courage in it.

'And this is your child?' he asked.

'My child,' the woman answered.  But the man made no movement, only
stared moodily into the whirling room.  It was strange that her
voice was so soft yet came clearly through all the racket and din
of voices, music and stamping feet.

'Of what age is she?'

'Eight,' the woman answered.

Eight!--and so independent and alone in this jostling cruel world.
He thirty-seven, and yet already there was some kinship between
them. . . .

'What is her name?'

'Mirabell,' and then after a little pause with a quick glance at
the man beside her--'Mirabell Starr.'

Mirabell Starr--so he heard for the first time the name that would
never leave his consciousness again.  He could be very sweet with
children.  He squatted on his hams, his silver sword trailing on
the floor.  He put out his strong hand and took her tiny one.

'Mirabell.  That is a man's name, you know. . . .  Shall we be
friends?'

Her strange grey eyes, shining with deep lights, regarded him very
gravely.  She sighed, then very indifferently answered:

'If my mother wishes.'

Her voice was low, sweet and distant, a little as though it were
caught in the echo of a shell.  He was charmed with it.  Squatting
a little lower he put out his arm and drew her in to him, pressing
her gently between his knees.  The silver thread on his sleeve
rubbed her neck, but she did not draw back.  Nor did she come to
him of her own will.

'Where do you live, my pretty?'

'I live with my mother.'

'And where is that?'

The woman spoke.

'We are from Ennerdale, sir.'

'Ah, from Ennerdale.'

At last, drawing a little breath as though he foretold the emotion
that it would give him, he put up his hand and stroked her hair: it
seemed that a wave of pleasure passed through his body.  Its
texture was infinitely soft and lay against the back of his hand
like music.

'How come you here?  You should be at home on Christmas night.'

The man spoke for the first time.  'We have no settled place.  I am
a horse-dealer.'  His voice was rough and very ungracious, but it
had no tang of the North.

Herries caught the child closer.  Her head was almost against his
breast, and it was as though his heart leapt towards it to greet
it.  He felt in his pocket and found a charm, a negro's head in
gold with ruby eyes--it was a charm against the ague.

'Will you take this from me--a Christmas gift?' he asked.

For a moment, to steady herself, she laid one tiny hand on his
thigh while with the other she took the little negro.  A thrill of
happiness ran through him.  She looked at the charm very gravely.

''Tis against the ague,' he told her.  'You will not catch it an
you keep this with you.'

She looked up at her mother, then at the man.

'It is very pretty,' she said.  'I thank you.'  But although her
expression was that of a grown woman her fingers tightened round it
as a baby's would.

He kissed her forehead, then straightened himself to his full
height.

'I wish you good day,' he said, bowing to the woman very slightly,
then turned and walked into the room.  He turned confusedly like a
man in a dream.  For a while he could not see the room clearly.
Strange coincidence!  That this should be the woman whom carelessly
that morning he had for a moment protected!  What had been her
history?  Who was the dead man, who now this present animal, this
horse-dealer, horse-thief he did not doubt?  She did not look a
woman who would pass lightly from man to man--but what did she at
all in that company?  Mirabell . . . Mirabell. . . .  So the child
was called.  Poor little misery, already bearing in her eyes the
knowledge of hardship, cruelty, aloneness.  What a life must she
have with such a man and his company!  Almost he was tempted to
turn aside, go back and make some mad demand for the child's
protection.  A nice affair--to be mixed in such a throng!  As
though there were not already scandal enough.  But he looked back
nevertheless.  There was no sign of them.  They were hidden by the
dancers.  The Christmas Feast was at its height.

This was a scene from Breughel.  The trestle-tables were piled with
food, pies and puddings, hams and sides of beef.  The drink was for
the most part ale, but there was creeping into the valley now that
new destroying devil of the English countryside, the demon gin.
There were signs of it here to-night--men were pressing the girls
now, their faces flushed, their hands fumbling for breast and side.
The women were giggling, the dogs snapping at food and legs and one
another.  An old man with long white hair, thin as a scarecrow, was
dancing very solemnly alone in the middle of the floor, twisting
his body into corkscrew shapes.  At a table near the chimney a
group of old people were playing at cards.  But wildness was coming
in, coming in from the caverns of the hill, and the high, cold
spaces round Sprinkling Tarn and the lonely passes above the
listening valleys.  It was Christ's Day no longer.  He had been
turned out when the wind had changed, and all the doors and
shutters of the house had rattled their shoulders at His going.

Peel himself felt perhaps that his hand was losing its hold on the
scene.  And perhaps he did not care.  He was a man of his time, and
that was a rough time, a cruel and a coarse.  They had a small,
wild, starving dog, strayed in from the valley, and they had tied
him to the leg of a table, and were holding meat just beyond his
nose, while he yelped in his agony of hunger, and his little fierce
protesting eyes darted wildly about the room.

Up in the half-darkness of the hallan one of the shepherds was
stripping to a whispering group of men and girls to show his
tattooed body, made when he was in the Indies as a boy, marvellous,
they say, a whole love-story on his legs and back.  Although the
night was bitter, couples twined closely together wandered out of
the house up the road, kissing to the eternal murmur of the running
water.

Then the house-door burst wide and a strange crew broke into the
room.  They came shouting, singing and very drunk.  Their shoulders
were powdered with snow, and their frosty breath blew in clouds
about them.  This was a party that had ridden over from Keswick and
Portinscale and Grange, had found their way under the moon to
Rosthwaite, and now, drinking at every stage, were turning back
again (an they were sober enough to ride) to Keswick.  Here was the
Lord of Misrule and his followers, a young fellow with very flushed
face, a crown awry on his crooked wig, his clothes of purple satin
and gold, carried on the shoulders of four half-naked men blacked
like Indians and followed by a motley baggage-heap dressed
fantastically as jesters, Chinamen and clowns.  There was a Hobby-
horse and old Father Neptune with his trident.  They burst the
doors, then paused to arrange their procession.  The naked Indians
threw off their cloaks in which they had been wrapped against the
cold, caught up their young Lord of Misrule and shouldered him, and
so marched up the room, followed by the Jester with his bauble, a
lady with a flaxen wig and very naked bosom, Neptune and a
posturing, shouting throng.

The natives of the valley drew back against the wall.  Here were
foreigners from the town, and though their intrusion was no new
thing at a Christmas time, yet it boded no good.  It had ended
before in a bloody riot and so might do again.  Francis had been
looking for his children, and finding them had bidden David take
his sisters home, then, if he would, return.  So he was once again
alone, a great stillness in his heart in the midst of the riot,
once or twice looking to see whether he could catch sight of the
child and her mother: it seemed that they were gone.

Watching this new invasion he found that he recognised three at
least of the company, two from Keswick.  The Lord of Misrule
himself was young Cuthbertson, son of a wealthy merchant; one of
the black men young Fawcett, a Squire's eldest boy; and the Jester
himself with his cap and bells Osbaldistone from Threapthwaite,
near Whitehaven.  Young Osbaldistone was often at Keswick, and
Herries had been with him at cards and cock-fighting.  There was no
love between them.  Herries had won his money, which the young fool
could ill afford to lose, and Herries had kissed a girl that
Osbaldistone had also been pursuing.

At the sight of him a spasm of revolt and disgust caught his heart.
He had drunk nothing: he had been moved to-night by the courteous
friendliness of Peel, by the happy simplicity of the earlier part
of the evening, and, at this last, by his meeting with the child.
Apart and reserved as he seemed standing there alone, yet his heart
had been filled with kindliness and an almost childlike desire to
be friends with the world.

At the sight of this rabble he was tempted to slip away and find
his bed.  Had he gone, the whole course of his life would have been
other.  Nevertheless our lives are dictated by character, not by
chance.  Some foolish pride kept him.  He fancied that from the
corner by the fire-window the pedlar sardonically watched him.  It
was true that many eyes were on him, as they had been all the
evening; so, because he had some conceit and felt a challenge in
the air, he stayed.

Events followed then with dreamlike swiftness.  Afterwards if he
ever looked back to this night it seemed to him that he had from
the very first been trapped.  He could not have escaped; he did not
pity himself for this (in all his life-history from the first page
to the last there was no self-pity), but he did ask himself whether
he could have avoided the event: he could not.

The procession settled itself about its Lord: drink was brought:
there was much sham ceremony: subjects knelt and sentences were
passed; the lady in cloth of gold with the naked bosom was
proclaimed Queen.  The peasants stood around, mouths agape, the
little wild dog, who had been forgotten, yelped dismally, then
broke his rope, crawled to a corner where he feasted ravenously.
Everyone was at ease again.  Dancing took the floor.  Figures,
fantastic, painted in orange and scarlet and purple, laughing,
singing, kissing, whirled and turned; some fell upon the floor and
lay there.  Still in the farther corner the old people, like
characters painted on the wall, played gravely their cards.

Young Osbaldistone, his cap awry, the laced waistcoat unbuttoned,
pursued a girl and encountered Herries.  He stopped short.

Herries gravely bowed.  Osbaldistone looked.  The drink cleared
from his eyes.  He straightened himself.  He was a cold-tempered,
severe lad in his natural life, debauched enough but ready at any
moment to clear debauchery from his system.  He stood back fumbling
the hilt of his sword.

'Mr. Francis Herries.'

'Mr. Richard Osbaldistone.'

He yet stuttered a little.  The drink was not all cleared.  'Dick
to my friends,' then added softly, 'but not to you, Mr. Herries.'

No one heard him.  Herries frowned.  He did not want a quarrel with
the boy here, not to-night, Christmas night, and in Peel's house.
He bowed.

'I wish you good evening,' he said and turned.

Osbaldistone touched his shoulder.  Herries, turning back, was
amazed at the hatred that formed and edged the other's face like a
mask.  To hate him like that!  And for what?  For nothing--a loss
at cards, a girl's kiss.  No--for what he himself in his very
spirit was.  And at the consciousness of that his heart sank and
his anger grew.

'You will not wish me good evening,' Osbaldistone said.  'I will
have no good evening from you.  Since our meeting of last week I
have been determined on a word with you.  You are a cheat, Mr.
Herries, a liar and--it may be--a coward.  For the last we will
see.'

Then he raised his hand and struck Herries' cheek.  Miraculously
this, too, no one saw.  It gave the dreaminess of this strange hour
an added colour--the shrill, discordant music of the violin, the
thick steaming air, the great chimney with its smoky fire, the
figures confused in colour, unreal in chin and eye and limb, the
movement striving, it seemed, to make significant pattern--and yet
Herries quite alone in a frozen place with this boy who hated him.

But no man had ever struck him and had no answer.  He frowned
sternly on young Osbaldistone, who was breathing now fiercely as
though driven by some terrific emotion.

'Not here,' he said quietly.  'There is a green behind the house.
The moon is bright.  I will join you there in an instant.  But take
care; we must go separately.  My host to-night is my friend.'

At once, again as in a dream, young Osbaldistone had disappeared.
Herries looked about him.  Oh! how desperately he did not wish this
to happen!  It was from no fear for himself.  But he seemed to be
haunted to-night by the past; something was pulling him back into
that other life that he had abandoned; something would not let him
escape.

But he must find a second.  It must be, if possible, someone not
from Keswick.  The less that this was known. . . .  He turned
towards the door and saw the pedlar standing against the wall,
smiling ironically and stroking his thighs with his hands.

'You can do me a service,' Herries said.  The pedlar followed him
out.  The moon was full.  No snow was falling.

Against the green behind the house everything was marked as though
it had been cut from black paper, the ridge of hill, the roof-line,
the thick wall of jagged stones.

Osbaldistone was waiting there and Fawcett, a stout, plump youth,
absurd with his blackened face and thick cloak heavily furred.  He
came to Herries.

'For God's sake, Mr. Herries, this must be avoided. . . .'  His
teeth were chattering.

'Too damned cold for talk,' said Osbaldistone.

They spoke in whispers.

'If Mr. Osbaldistone will apologise for his insult,' said Herries.

'I will not,' said Osbaldistone.

They faced one another: every detail in the scene was clear under
the moon.  It was indeed bitterly cold.  The frost seemed to creep
upon the flat stones that lay about the field.  Herries was aware
of the tiniest details and would remember them all his days.  A
snail-track glittered in crystal on the farm wall behind him; a
little wind ran over the grass, fluttering the light snow that lay
loosely on the ground, and on the path beyond the field he could
see the moonlight shine on the ice that the cold was forming on the
little pools.

They advanced.  At once he knew that Osbaldistone was no swordsman--
and a moment later Osbaldistone knew it too.  Again the thought
tapped Herries' heart:  'How he must hate me to run this crazy
risk!' and again 'Why?'  In another moment or two he was aware of
the sword's instinct, something much more deadly and determined
than his own.  He could never strike another's weapon with his and
not feel that separate aliveness in his blade, as though it said:
'You have called me out.  You have liberated me.  Now I am my own
master.'  And now he was very curiously aware that he must restrain
this creature, use all his force and power, otherwise the boy would
be hurt.  But as they parried and struck and parried again a warmth
of companionship with his sword swelled in his throat as though it
had said to him:  'Come.  We are comrades now.  We march together.
You wouldn't desert me when you have brought me so far.'

His pride in his accomplishment grew in him.  His body grew warm,
taut, eager.  He forgot his opponent, felt only the moon shining
above that cold field, the splendid panoply of stars exulting in
his skill.

He had the boy utterly at his mercy, and, at the same moment, the
boy's face swung down to him as though it had been lowered from a
height.  He gazed into it and saw terror there, the certain
expectation of instant death.

Death.  Yes, one more link in the ridiculous binding chain.  This
time at least he would be master of his fortune.

He lowered his blade and stepped back.  An instant later
Osbaldistone's sword had carved his right cheek in two, a deep
riven cut from temple to chin.

His face was flooded with blood.  Dropping his sword, the field
whirring about his ears like a top, he sank to his knee.

He heard young Fawcett cry 'Enough . . .' and a word about honour,
then the frosted stones leapt up and hit him into darkness.  But
before he sank he felt the pedlar's hand on his arm.



DEATH OF MARGARET HERRIES


Deborah found her way one March afternoon through Stonethwaite
Valley home.

She had been as far as the Stake Pass, turned back, stayed where
the waterfall tumbles over the rocks before the Grasmere turning,
looked up at the quiet hills lying against the quiet sky, then down
again to the tumbling stream that spread fanwise over the white
stones shining in the sun under the water.

Spring was so late here that hardly yet were there signs of it, but
Deborah saw every bud and smiled at every pushing green.  The
spirit of spring was in the faint rain-washed blue of the sky, the
purple shadow that hung intangibly about the branches and the pale
primrose sunlight that fell in white patterns on rock and stone.
The air was cold and snow streaked even the lowest hills.

She was a very slight and lonely child as she walked over the green
turf that here in this valley was like the ancient lawns of noble
families, so smooth it was and deep.  She would soon be fifteen,
but children in those years were almost women at fifteen.  And she
had had much to make her mature.  Since her mother had fallen so
ill this Christmas, since Mary had grown so proud and was so often
with her cousins in Keswick, all the duties of the house had fallen
on to Deborah.  She was hurrying now for fear of what might have
happened while she was away.  All last night she had sat with her
mother, fighting a thousand terrors, her mother's strange ceaseless
talk, the house that was never still, the calling of the owls, but
worst of all the anticipated presence of old Mrs. Wilson the witch.
Since her mother was ill Mrs. Wilson had been for ever appearing,
now here, now there.  She spoke little, but at first had offered
again and again her remedies.  Deborah could hear her now in
her odd, croaking voice pressing her herbs, her spells, her
incantations.  Deb had from the very first been terrified by the
old woman, but against her will she had been forced to realise that
there was something pathetic and something kind in the old wrinkled
face, the little eyes almost hidden by the brown lids, but now
anxious and beseeching like an animal's.  The old snuff-nosed,
wrinkled-faced Doctor Absom, their only resource, once a fine
doctor in Carlisle but reduced by liquor to a peddling house-to-
house livelihood, had soon stopped her solicitings.  He had
threatened her in so many words with the gaol for a witch.  She
had not spoken again after that, but she was always, night and
day, hovering there.  It seemed, so her son said, that she had
formed some affection for Margaret Herries.  He said, almost
apologetically, that he had never known her take to anyone before
as she took to Mistress Herries; and Deborah, walking now in her
cold green valley, seemed still to be haunted by her presence, and,
against her fear, something forced her to wonder whether after all
Mrs. Wilson's magic might not be of more value than the old
doctor's dirty ministrations, he never sober, stinking of snuff,
and with bleeding ever his principal remedy.

Poor Margaret!  She had been bled enough.  There was no more blood
left in her.  She was dying.  Nothing could save her.

The stroke that had slashed her husband's face had struck her down.
He had made nothing of it.  His face was bound.  He had called it a
scratch, but from the first instant she had seen deeper than this,
had known that here was something predestined.

Child though she was, Deborah had marvellously understood her
mother's longing.  She was perhaps the only living soul in the
world to understand what her mother's love for her father was, how
for years she had been praying the God in whom she believed to give
her opportunity to show that love without foolishness.  Now it
might be that the moment had come, and she was too weak to offer
it.  Not that Herries gave her opportunity: he would have no pity,
no tenderness, no allusion to the event.  No one spoke to him of
it.  Everyone pretended that nothing had occurred.

But Deborah knew how her mother ached over him as though he were a
child bullied at school and the agony that it was to her, far
surpassing her bodily pain, that she could say nothing.  She rose
to great heights of character in these last days.

But for Deborah life had never yet been so threatening.  How would
it be when her mother was gone and she alone with her father?
Again and again she tried to beat down her fear of him, but it
seemed to be something in her very veins.  There was David.  Had
there not been David she might have turned and run back, over the
Stake Pass to Langdale and Grasmere, wandered the world and never
returned.  So long as David was there she could endure any test,
but would he always be there?  Anyone as wonderful as he must be
caught into the outside world.  They would call for, shout for him!
And then . . . as the light fell and she thought of the darkening
house, her father with the fresh purple scar that ran from temple
to mouth, catching up one corner of his lip, of her mother's room,
of Mrs. Wilson, her white cap, the black stick on which she leaned,
she stayed for a moment by the wall of the field and the little
chapel looking back to Glaramara, her hand at her throat, her knees
trembling.

The thought of David reassured her and she smiled.  Where he was no
harm could come.

At the turning in of the grassy court two figures made her pause--
two men on horseback.  In the fading afternoon light she could not
at first tell who they were, then, realising, amazement stayed her:
they were her uncle Pomfret and her cousin Raiseley.

They had but now arrived, for they got from their horses as she
came to them (she was pleased indeed to see how clumsy Cousin
Raiseley was as he climbed down).  Uncle Pomfret greeted her with a
confusion of heartiness and embarrassment, which showed that he was
in no way at ease over his visit.  She curtsied and he kissed her,
swimming her in an odour of ale and snuff.  He was becoming a
mountain of flesh.  His belly swung before him.  Cousin Raiseley,
who was pallid and thin as his father was purple and corpulent,
bowed to her gravely.  She hated her cousin Raiseley because David
did.  'Hey, little lass . . .' (her uncle addressed her as though
she were a favourite hound) 'here's your old uncle come all the way
through the muck to cheer your poor mother up.'  He threw a
cautious look around him.  'And your father . . . is he about?'
She replied quietly.  She did not dislike her uncle.  There was
something kindly and simple about him.  She thought:  'He hates
coming. . . .  It's his good-nature.'

David came out to them, and Deborah flushed with pride as she saw
his splendid strength beside his pale shambly-kneed cousin.
Benjamin was called to care for the horses, and they all went into
the house.  What deep shame Deborah felt as they climbed the
stairs!  She knew Raiseley would be seeing everything, sniffing the
farm-smells, the dung and the cesspool, hearing the trickling of
water, catching the gleam of the damp on the walls, and, as they
came into the upper hall, marking down the holes in the furniture,
the bareness of the rafters, the tapestry that was never still
against the panelling.  She hated Raiseley the more because her
home was shabby.

In the hall now there were David and Mary.  It was Mary, of course,
who at once commanded the scene.  She flung her arms around her
uncle's short, thick neck and kissed his ill-shaven chin, then with
a smiling demureness that was beautiful to witness offered her
cheek for Raiseley to kiss, which he did with a very pleasant
eagerness.

Uncle Pomfret explained with a great many oaths and confused
sentences that he and their Aunt Jannice had been distressed indeed
to hear of the grave illness of poor Margaret and that Aunt Jannice
had sent with him some cures and recipes.

For himself, would it be possible for him to see her?

The room was dark.  The evening glow penetrated the little windows
very thinly.  Suddenly a figure bearing high two lighted
candlesticks appeared on the staircase.  It was Francis, his face
quivering in the blown flame of the candles.  He seemed very tall
in that semi-light, in a long, purple dressing-gown, and the scar
was leaping on his face.

It might be that Pomfret had not expected that: he stared, his
thick legs wide planted, his chin raised.  He said afterwards to
his wife:  ''Twas no man standing there.  Someone raised from the
dead.  The cut lined on his cheek.'

Francis said no word, but came slowly down.  Then he placed the
candlesticks on the table and holding out his hand said quietly:
'How are you, brother?'

Pomfret began a tumbled and confused explanation, but in a whisper
as though he were in church there; finding the whisper arduous,
broke into a kind of congested roar, then sank to a whisper again.

Francis nodded his head.

'That was kindly thought . . . Margaret would wish to see you.  She
is awake--but she is sadly weak.'

He picked up the candles and led the way upstairs again.  Pomfret,
stepping with his big feet as though on eggs, followed him.

The children, left alone together, were embarrassed.  Even Mary,
conscious perhaps that the eyes of her brother and sister were upon
her, had very little to say.  At last Raiseley muttered something
about going to see after the horses.  He started down the stairs,
and David stoutly marched after him.  In the dusk, wrapped in the
cold air, the two stood stiffly side by side.  At last Raiseley,
patronage in every word that he uttered, said:

''Tis isolated here . . . and muck at every step.'

David, anger throbbing in his throat, answered:

'It is no place for soft bodies.'

'Nor for active minds,' Raiseley answered.

'Keswick,' David said with a scornful laugh, 'is scarcely the
Athens of the world.'  (He thought this a fine phrase and told Deb
of it afterwards.)

Raiseley sniffed.  He had a maddening habit in this as though he
suffered from a perpetual cold.

'I wonder, cousin,' he said, 'that you can endure the mud and rain
and nothing but yokels for company.  But maybe it suits you.'

'It does,' David answered.  'Better than by your looks Keswick
might.'

Raiseley laughed.  'Keswick is no abiding-place.  I shall be in
London in a six-months.'

'Well,' said David, 'for me you can keep your London.  There is air
here and space, horses to ride and hills to climb.  There is no
finer spot in England.'

'I can understand that you would find it so,' Raiseley answered.

The poor white worm--David thought--one crack with the singlestick
and he'd go over.  One push with the thumb and down he'd be!  He
hated him with every pulse in his body, but at the heart of the
hate there was a sort of wistfulness.  He would be clever,
Raiseley, and getting a fine education.  Already he would know so
many things that David would never know.

The darkness fell.  Benjamin held a flare.  The horses clamped with
their hoofs on the grassy stones.  The two boys stood without
speaking, hating one another.  Then the two men came out.  They
were very quiet.  Margaret on her death-bed had brought them closer
together than they had ever been or would be.  Pomfret's simple
heart was deeply touched.

'Poor soul,' he said.  'Poor soul . . .'

'She is a woman of great courage,' Francis said.

'Poor Margaret,' their voices echoed on the night air.  Pomfret and
his son climbed on to their horses.

'That was kindly of you, brother,' Francis said, and held for a
moment Pomfret's hand.

'Come and visit us.  There is a bed for thee,' Pomfret answered,
bent down and kissed his brother's cheek.  Then they rode away,
their horses stumbling over the dark track.

Francis went back into the house.  From these few whispered words
both children had realised that their mother was indeed dying.
They stood there close together in the dark courtyard, the wind
that had suddenly risen whistling about their heads.  Deborah began
to cry.  She clung to David, who put his arm around her, holding
her very close.  She was a little hysterical with lack of sleep,
too incessant labour, fear of the future.

'Oh, David, I'm frightened.  Mother will die and you will go into
the world and I shall be left here with father. . . .  I don't want
to be left. . . .  I don't want to be left.  'Tis cruel, this
valley, when you are alone in it, and there are spirits in the
house.  The house hates us.  There has been no luck for us since we
came to it, and I'm weary of the mice and the holes and the
shabbiness that will not be cleaned. . . .  Oh, David, don't leave
me here alone. . . .  Don't leave me!'

She sobbed on his breast and he comforted her.  'Deb, little Deb.
There's no fear.  I'll not leave you.  Mother will be happier gone.
She was never rightly settled here and the rain and wind destroyed
her.  Poor mother.  She will be warm again and comforted if there's
a heaven as they say, and if there's none she'll not be aware of
it.  But, Deborah, you must not fear father.  He's worst with
anyone who fears him.

'He will love you an you go to him bravely.  He has himself a
shyness of spirit.  See how happy the three of us will be together--
and you are the bravest of us all.  The house is well enough.  I'd
have it a thousand times before that popinjay place of Uncle
Pomfret's in Keswick.

'And I'll not leave you.  I'll never leave you.  You are the only
woman in all the world I love, Deb, save our mother.'

Deborah smiled through her tears.

'There'll be a woman for you one day: every woman who sees you must
love you.'

'Ah, but it takes two for that,' David answered laughing.  'There
was a girl once up by Seathwaite hit my horse with her stick.  Do
you know, Deb, it was but a moment and I've never seen her since,
but she had a face like a laughing rose. . . .  For the rest they
are all alike.  I warrant marriage is a false tale.  I would be
free, and who is free with a wife?'

Deborah sighed.

'I shall be left one day. . . .  'Tis so silly, but although I'm
fourteen years I'm frightened of the dark. . . .  The true dark
when there are only owls and mice.  And Mistress Wilson.  David, is
she truly a witch?'  She dropped her voice to a low whisper.

David tightened his arm round her.  'I think she's a witch,' he
whispered back.  'She never sleeps.  She has a fire with blue
flame.  She makes dolls of wax.  I've seen one with a needle
through.  But she cannot touch thee, Deb. . . .  Christ is at the
back of thee, and all the holy angels.'

'Maybe,' Deborah answered, shivering against his breast, 'she is a
good witch.  I'm sure she means no ill to our mother.  Maybe she
would have cured her.'

But David shook his head.  'Better our mother die than be cured of
the Devil,' he answered.  Then he folded his little sister yet more
closely in his arms and kissed her.

'I will swear an oath, here in this place, never to leave you,
Deborah.  An I marry, you come also.  And if I do not marry, you
shall ever keep house for me and father.  Now listen, little
sister, I will swear.  By Christ and His holy angels I, David Scott
Herries, will never, while breath is in my body, leave thee,
Deborah Herries--unless,' he hurriedly added, 'there is hunting on
the hills or travelling to see new countries--an adventure, you
understand.  You would not hold me from that.'

'I would not hold you from anything,' Deborah answered, standing on
tiptoe to kiss him.  'I am not that sort of selfish woman.  I know
that you will have a grand life, David, of adventure and enterprise,
and do you think I would hold you back?  I love you too well.'

She was quite happy now, and, their arms around one another, they
went into the house.

Francis Herries had gone to his wife's room.  He sat there beside
the big bed, very patient, staring into the round light of the two
candles.  Margaret lay, her eyes closed, breathing stertorously.
There were beads of sweat on her brow, and her two hands, tightly
clenched, lay on the coverlet.  Little Absom had gone for a meal
but would return.  It might well be that Margaret would die before
he came back, but it did not matter; he could do nothing.

Herries sat there without moving, looking at his wife.  He had
never loved Margaret: he did not love her now nor did he let
sentiment chafe him, but, as he watched her, he was sorry that her
life had been spent with a man whom she could not understand.

It was this lack of comprehension that affected him most deeply as
he sat there.  She had loved him, but had not understood him at
all.  He had not loved her, but had understood her only too well.

All human relationships seemed to him miserable things as he sat
there--all false, all betraying.  Well, for himself, it did not
matter.  On the Christmas night at the moment when young
Osbaldistone had slashed his cheek, he had finished with human
beings.  As he felt the blood gush over his face he had, at that
instant, stepped aside from all his fellows.  He had been coming to
that point through many months.  Now the division was made.

In the weeks that had followed, he had nursed his cut with a quiet
sense of completion.  He knew that he would be marked for life and
terribly, that this would be the first thought that all men would
have, the first thing that they would see.

He could look back now and understand that for years he had been
slowly separating himself from his fellow-men.  His fault or
theirs, what mattered it?  Their fault because he had a dream that
could not be fulfilled, or his because he was ever putting himself
wrong with them by loss of temper or arrogance or other passion?
So he was done with them.  Even poor Margaret was leaving him.
Only David remained.  David he could not separate himself from, but
he was sure that the hour would come when David too would go.  But
that would be for David to recognise.

And instead of human beings, he would embrace this valley, this
soil, this house itself.  He had plans that he would get some land
from Peel, that he would sow corn, grow trees perhaps, have cattle.
He would work with his own hands here.  All day and every day
during those last weeks he had, when he had not been at Margaret's
side, been digging and cutting wood, mending holes, carrying water,
Ben, Wilson, David, assisting, but going and coming, whereas he
stayed, sweat pouring from him, his nails grimed with dirt, his
face raised to Glaramara, then bent again to the ground.  And it
seemed to him that the soil came and built itself about his heart.
He was earthed in: the smell and the tang and the grit of it were
in his eyes and his nostrils.  He was growing his own hair.  Soon
it would be long about his brows.  His heavy boots were caked with
mud, and when he straightened himself this fresh, sharp ache in his
back called out to him with a friendly voice.

Margaret stirred.  Her hands rose and fell with a little flutter as
he had so often seen them do, and a rush of memory swept over him.
How badly he had treated her, and how she had asked to be badly
treated!  What absurd ironic fate had driven them together?  Why
was life thus, so that you were caught of your own good intentions
and held in a trap to which there was no purpose?  He had meant to
do her kindness and had done her nothing but ill: but was not that
indeed the whole motto of his life?

He could think of so many occasions when he had returned from some
ride or visit meaning so many courtesies to her, and she, in the
very first word, had roused his ironic irritation.  And how poor
was he that, knowing her love for him and that she was stupid and
could not help herself, he had not been kinder to her, more
indulgent!  His sins had been frightful, thrusting his mistresses
under her very nose, coming back drunk to her and forcing her
against her will, until in the last matter of Alice Press he had
been most evil of all.  For all this he must pay, and when the day
came for payment he was not to squeal about injustice.

He thought then of her many, many kindnesses and of her great
patience, but the thought of her patience only again exasperated
him.  Why had she been so patient?  It would have been better had
she been rash with him sometimes and called him what he was.  And
so, as most men do who have ill-treated their wives, he came to an
odd mixture of feelings, of shame and irritation, of self-blame and
wonder that women could be so persistently provoking.  At least he
was glad that now she suffered no pain.

She stirred and woke.  She looked about her without raising her
head from the pillow.  Then she saw him and smiled, and then, as
she had done on a thousand other occasions, checked her smile lest
he should think it foolish.

'What hour is it, Francis?' she asked him in a thin, very distant
voice.

'Six of the clock,' he said, bending forward and taking her hand.
That pleased her and she smiled again.

'My head is very clear . . . I have had strange dreams.  I would
speak to David.  May I?'

He nodded.  That 'May I?' touched him deeply.  In the first year of
their marriage when she had been a young girl and first afraid of
him, she had said about this or that little pleasure and
excitement, 'May I?' and often enough he had answered:  'No, you
may not.'

Now he nodded and went from the room to fetch his son.

He sent David in.  The boy came and stood by the bed, his breadth
blocking the window.  Then a terrible pity and tenderness for his
mother, self-reproach for himself, and a consciousness of the
imminence of death wrung his heart.  He dropped on his knees, put
out his great brown hands and took her thin white ones.  He seemed
for the first time in his life now to realise her.  There had
always been somebody or something else standing in his view of her.
He had caught from early babyhood something of his father's idea of
her.  Now, when it was too late, she seemed to stand before him as
she really was, going on this journey all alone with no one to help
her.  The room was so dark that it was only by the candlelight that
he saw her face, and in that flickering gleam she was not foolish
any more--she had courage and dignity, and these things all her
life she had never seemed to him to have before.

She put up her hand and stroked his hair.  Her voice was faint and
he had to lean nearer to her to catch her words.  Her arm fell
about his neck.

'Davy, I've not been a wise mother to you . . . I've not been a
wise woman, but I have loved you with all my heart.'

'I know you have, mother,' he answered.

'I want you to promise me . . . never to leave your father.'

'I will never leave my father.'

'It is strange,' she looked at him rather timidly, 'that love does
not bring understanding.  I have loved Francis so much but have
never known the way to be easy with him.'  She paused between the
sentences, and David heard the wind tugging at the leaded panes,
and in some way the little sound, as of a friendly companion, was
comforting and understanding.

'It is too late now for me not to fear your father.  Oh, Davy, how
have I said again and again, "Now you must not mind him," but I
have always minded him and the sight of him has made my heart beat
and driven every word from my head.  I know so well why he should
be irritated with me.  How should I not know, being so irritated
with myself?  But that is all over . . . past . . . away . . .'
She stopped, lay back, closed her eyes.  David placed his arm
around her and held her close to him.  He could feel the sweat of
her body beneath the nightdress.  'I meant to make him proud of me
and I have not.  I meant that he should continue in love with me
and he was not.  I meant many things and have not wrought them,
but--' and here her voice grew stronger and she seemed to wake to
new life, 'I have given birth to a fine son who will be heard of
in the world.  Oh, I am proud of you, Davy, my darling, my darling.'

He held her closer, moved to his very soul, because in all these
years she had never told him how she loved him.

'And you are strong and grand and fearless.  You will be a man
among men so that they look up to you and come to you.  So, Davy,
my darling, you must never leave your father, who is alone and will
be more alone as the years go.'  She raised herself a little on
David's arm.

'Breed sons, my David.  Great, strong-limbed men like yourself.
Davy, Davy . . .'  Her hand clutched his sleeve.  'I am no Herries,
but I have borne a son to the Herries.  Though they have mocked me,
in my womb was carried the finest of them all, and from your seed,
David, all the grand Herries shall come.'  She sank back and the
strangest elfin smile came to her lips.  'Your aunt and your uncle
have bred niddering children, but two hundred years hence there
shall be Herries who shall know that it was I, Margaret Herries,
who gave suck to the man of them all. . . .  Your children,
Davy. . . .  You must have men children to carry the Herries name
farther . . . farther . . . farther . . .'  She seemed exhausted.
She lay back on the pillow and he bent and stroked her forehead.
'Wrong thoughts, Davy,' she whispered, 'for a dying woman, but they
have struck your father in the face and your sons must revenge . . .
I have loved him so . . . even now to have his cheek against mine,
his poor wounded cheek.'

'Shall I call him, mother?' David whispered.

'Nay.'  She smiled again.  'He would not know what to do or say.
He was ever awkward in a scene.  Like a child . . . I would have
been mother to him rather than wife, but he would not allow me.
Dear Francis . . . Francis, dear . . .'

Then she motioned him to raise her up.  Her face was against his.
She kissed him.  Her lips were damp with sweat.

'Is it not odd that I who have been afraid all my life should not
now be afraid?  Our good Lord understandeth my awkwardness.  His
arms are around me. . . .  To die is simpler than to live.

He laid her down again.  Her hand closed with exceeding tightness
about his.

'Dear Francis. . . .  Call him, Davy . . . I am dying.'

Gently he unloosed his hand, went to the door and called softly:
'Father, father.'

Francis came in, and kneeling by the bed put his arms round her and
held her as her spirit passed.

Her last word uttered against his cheek:  'Francis, dear.'



END OF PART I




PART II

'FORTY-FIVE




LAUGHTER OF A SPANIEL


Maria Herries died on the morning of February 14, 1745, thus
missing by exactly four months the attainment of her hundredth
year.

This lamentable failure afforded great grief and a sense of
affronted egotism to the whole of the Herries family.  Bad news
flies apace, and in a surprisingly short time the event was known
to, and greatly bewailed by, the children and grandchildren of
Robert Herries in Kensington, the family of Maurice in Portsmouth,
of Humphrey at Seddon, and the Golds (only far relations-in-law,
but nevertheless of a very definite Herries consciousness) in
Edinburgh.

They all united in blaming Pomfret and Jannice for this disaster,
and indeed very rightly, for who was to blame if they were not?
Having kept the old lady alive so long, the least for them to do
was to keep her alive that little bit longer.  Moreover, it was
pleasant to blame Pomfret and Jannice, who had made money in a very
sudden and vulgar manner, in a fashion that was not the Herries
manner: Herries always inherited, or if they worked, did so slowly
and cautiously and with an air of indifference.

Wealth meant little in the Herries blood: they had not at all like
certain other famous English families the sense of property.  They
were indeed quite above and outside this sense, because to be
Herries was enough and, rich or poor, you were of an equal and
exceptional importance.  No, the Herries pride (of which there was
always God's plenty) was based on two magnificent foundations:
England and Common Sense.  When you said English you said Herries,
and when you said Herries you said No Nonsense.  In this lies any
interest that there may be in a study of Herries' family history--
that there was something in the Herries blood demanding that their
castle of common sense should be persistently attacked, and almost
always from within.  Again and again these attacks occur, and with
every fresh battle new history is made.  'I am a sensible man,'
chanted the first Herries, striding across the naked body of his
enemy, Romance or Illusion--and so ever since have his stalwart
descendants chanted.

'The man's a fool.'  'The woman's an ass.'  'I can't think what
he's after.'  'A madman.'  'A lunatic'  'A dirty dog.'  'Traitor to
his country.'  'An artist.'  'A ne'er-do-well.'  'Fantasy.'
'Imagination.'  'An atheist'--such and so have ever been the words
and phrases of contempt in the mouths of following generations of
Herries.

And rightly so.  For just as Common Sense has always served them
soundly and well in all their history, so have Imagination,
Originality, the hopeless pursuit of the shining star, led them to
ruin and disaster, public scandal and disgrace.  They have learnt
to dread and with justice the dreamer; he has ever haunted the
sleep of right-minded Herries men and women.

This Common Sense, on the other hand, has been with them no
unstudied art.  They have penetrated every nook and cranny of this
temple, have studied with hundreds of years of patient learning the
shifting features of the God.

At the moment of birth young Herries know precisely the sensible
thing to do, how to watch and wait, to avoid all eccentricity, to
embrace only those things and persons that are of good report and
general repute, to believe only in what they see, to handle only
what they can in reality touch, to give their blessing to all that
is normal, firmly traditional, safely found.  Within the world of
common sense they are kindly, generous and open-hearted: let them
for a moment stray into that howling wilderness of stars and
mandrakes and they are ferocious and bloodthirsty: alarm partly
makes them so, the knowledge given to them by history that they are
a family especially susceptible to attacks of the dreamer's
incongruity, the rebel's immorality.  They go, therefore, armed to
the teeth: divided as they sometimes are (being yet human) among
themselves, they unite instantly at the call of one of their
members:  ''Ware Wolf!'  They have made England what it is: they
are rightly proud of their magnificent achievement.

But, it must be repeated, their principal interest to the observer
of them is that they have, at their heart, the poison of their
qualities and intentions.  Every generation, it seems, is condemned
to this warfare against its own home-born traitors, and from this
warfare comes always a stouter, more determined resolve.

The death of Maria Herries, so lamentably previous, offered a fine
example of their common sense in action.  One thing that had never
been understood by them was that Herries men must die so soon.  It
was natural for the majority, who waste their days in dreams, in
pursuit of the thing that is not, in longing for what does not
exist, to wear themselves untimely away, their proper punishment
and condemnation.  But for Herries, who never ran after a vain
thing nor stared at the moon, life should be indefinitely extended,
and because they believed in a just God (the God of the
contemporary majority) it was hard to see why His justness did not
perceive exactly this.

There had been already examples in history of what a Herries could
do when he tried.  Old Polyphemus Herries, barnacled and lichened
with tradition, who eight hundred years ago in Fife (the Herries
were all Scotch then) had lived to a hundred and sixty-one; old
Mary Herries of the Wars of the Roses, who, defending Lancaster
Castle, upset pots of boiling pitch on to the heads of invaders,
she had lived to a hundred and thirty-nine, and had had fifty-eight
grandchildren.  Ronald Herries, friend of James I., had lived in
sin and iniquity into his hundred and twentieth year--a black
sheep, but honoured by the Herries because of his arrogant resolve
to beat Death back to Hell, which for a hundred and twenty years at
least he succeeded in doing, then drink had him and he died, his
head in a butt of Canary!

Since old Ronald no one had passed the century, although Elizabeth
Herries of Charles I.'s time had been ninety-three, and little
Johnny Herries the hunchback, uncle of Maria and Matthew, had seen
ninety-four.

Old Maria as she approached the century had become an object of
reverence to all of them, and Pomfret and Jannice, hitherto
contemned, had been more honourably considered for preserving her.
Here again was something that the Herries did better than anything
else--show Death that they would stand no nonsense.

There was nothing that the Herries prided themselves upon more
justly than the health and excellence of their bodily vigour.  They
were not eccentric in this; they did not produce strong men for
exhibition at a Fair, or wrestlers at a pageant, but just vigorous,
sound Englishmen with no nonsense about them, destined to die
calmly in their beds at a ripe old age.  And how often in these
last years had the words been murmured in Kensington, in
Portsmouth, in Carlisle, in Edinburgh, at Seddon, at Hatton, at
Brighthelmstone.  'The Herries live long. . . .  Maria Herries in
Keswick neareth her hundredth year. . . .  Nothing ails her. . . .
She is bled once and again. . . .  She has all her teeth.'

And now she was gone and had missed her goal.  A hundred in four
months' time!  The irony of it!

By an odd coincidence it happened that for Maria's funeral there
was a remarkable Herries gathering.  Movement over considerable
distances was not easy, although easier than it had been, but it
was not difficult, of course, for Humphrey Cards, his wife
Charlotte, his daughter Dorothy, her husband Anthony Forster, and
their little son Will to come over from Seddon, and Grandison, son
of Robert, cousin of Pomfret and Francis, had been paying a visit
in Edinburgh with Mary his wife, and Helen and Pelham his children,
so they came down: and last but not, of course, least there was
Henry, son of Maurice Cards, and Lucilla his wife.  In this company
three quite separate impulses of the Herries blood could be traced.

Humphrey Cards, hidden away at Seddon, had been suspected of
turning Quaker.  He had at any rate been oddly religious enough to
frighten all decent-minded Herries.  His daughter Dorothy, who had
married one of the Northumberland Forsters, was grimly religious
enough, but not, thank Providence, in any eccentrically dangerous
fashion.

Dorothy Forster then (cousin to a more famous Dorothy Forster of
this same time) represented the spiritual vein of the Herries body.

Her thin, pale, ramrod-straight body, her dark clothes and quiet
misgivings about her other fellow-humans, made this manifest.

Robert's son, Grandison, and his children Pelham and Helen
represented fashion.  They lived in Kensington, and everything
outside London was too odd and peculiar to be true.  Grandison had
never understood how a Herries could bring himself to live out of
London--it was a sort of lèse-majesté against the blood.  His eyes,
protruding out of his round pale face, expressed perpetual surprise
and wonder.  He was tall, stout and most elegantly dressed.
Clothes were of great concern to him, and food, and the order of
entrance and exit.  Not greatly distinguished in the village of
Kensington, he was an exquisite in Keswick.  Aunt Jannice thought
him the most marvellous creature in all the world, and had he but
allowed himself to be bled more frequently he would have been
perfect.

His girl Helen was in no way remarkable, but his son Pelham
promised well as the Herries rake of his generation.  There must
always be a Herries rake, and he must go so far and no farther.  He
must gamble, drink, womanise to a certain degree, fight duels
enough for glory and not enough for scandal, be handsome and
dashing and outrageous, but always within the limits of common
sense.  Other Herries must be able to shake their heads over him,
but admire him too, and at last when a new younger rake is maturing
he, the elder, must marry a virtuous girl with wealth, settle down
and breed a family.

Young Pelham, aged at this time twenty-seven, understood all this
perfectly, and had in fact a certain private store of ironic
amusement which bewildered at times his fat father and irritated
his august mother.

This mother, a magnificent figure, both snobbish and stupid on a
large scale, had been a Titchley and, as everyone knows, it is
difficult for a Titchley to yield place even to a Herries.  She had
in fact never quite yielded.  She was still just enough rebel
against the Herries tradition to need watching; not that she was
interesting in her rebellion--she neither thought nor spoke enough
to be interesting.  Only once and again she would look at a stray
Herries with a dumb air of wonder as much as to say:  'In a
Titchley world this creature would not be permitted.'

In her quite young days she had known Sarah Marlborough and
although now she was in a Kensington set she always got Court news
before anyone else.

Henry, son of Maurice, and Lucilla his wife, represented the third
strain in the Herries blood.  Henry, who was thirty-two years of
age, was thin and spare, with eyes gravely fixed.  They were fixed
upon the markets and he never permitted them to rest anywhere else.
For one brief moment of sensual delight he had allowed them to rest
upon his wife Lucilla.  Ten years ago she had been a beautiful
girl.  Three years following their marriage she had been attacked
by the smallpox, and, quite naturally, after that business had
claimed him again.  They had no children; the multiplying of coins
of the realm was their only increase.

Henry was able and kept his eyes open for all the mechanical
improvements and developments that were now beginning to alter the
country, how permanently and irretrievably even he did not suspect.
He was one of the first men in England to be aware of the deep
importance of John Kay's invention of the fly-shuttle in 1733, of
John Lombe's discovery in Italy of those improvements in machinery
that gave such an impetus to the silk trade, and, in later years,
he was to recognise at once the value of Crompton's mule, of Highs'
water-frame and the spinning jenny of Hargreaves.

Oddly, with all his cleverness, his attention to business and
parsimonious industry, he was never to make a fortune.  This too
was characteristic of the Herries; they were never in their money-
making destined to be middle-men because if, in their tribe, genius
showed its head it was instantly suspect and exiled.  Henry was no
genius, but he was industrious, honest, cross-grained, conceited
and quite without poetic fancy.  That was well, for had this last
been his he would have been unfaithful to Lucilla, who was no woman
to endure patiently infidelity.

Gathered there together on some general ground, had they for an
outside observer any physical characteristic in common?

Only this: that in them all there was some attribute of the horse--
Pomfret the cart-horse, Dorothy Forster the funeral hack, young
Pelham the dashing pony, his father the well-fed favourite of the
Countess's barouche, Henry the little dark horse of the race-
meeting, and so-and-so . . . these traits of chin, high cheek-
bones, long forehead, brooding, patient and unimaginative eyes
marking the Herries tribe, giving them their place in English life
and history.

And with all this they had great qualities.

They had a great force of fidelity, so that under pain of urgent
torture they would not desert their loyalties, their loyalties of
creed, of family, of ethics, of social conduct.  These loyalties
were English, and therefore the easier because no light of
imagination was ever let in upon them.  Two hundred years ago they
had been, to a letter, the same: two hundred years later they would
not have changed to a hair's-breadth.  They were loyal to their
country, to their family, to their loves, to their friends, with a
stolid wonder that anybody could be anything else.  When those ill-
smelling traitors were discovered within their own households (as
with every generation they were discovered) that taunt of
disloyalty was the first stone that was flung.

As to their country so also to them disloyalty meant everything
that was base; abnormality, cowardice, the vilest selfishness,
dirty living, obscene thinking.  And the certainty of their
judgements was only equalled by the swiftness.

It was tragedy for the Herries that they must live in a constantly
changing world.  When, as now with Maurice's son Henry, these
changes were sharply perceived, the Herries strain of orthodox
tradition modified the use that was made of them.  Loyalty came in
there.

The changes were always unfortunate, even when they were most
inevitable.  The old days were always the good old days for the
Herries; that was why, for example, Harcourt, who on this occasion
had come over from Ravenglass, was accepted by all of them as a
perfect member.

For him only all that was old was worthy.  It had been Mr. Pope's
only fault that he was not old enough.  The thought that old Maria
had been born on the day of the Battle of Naseby embalmed her, even
though she had so impertinently missed her hundredth birthday, with
an especial fragrance.

And behind this reverence there was something very kindly and
genial.  The Herries men especially were warm of heart.  Pomfret
and Harcourt, Robert's sons, and in the younger line, Francis'
David, young Pelham--there was strong generous humanity here.
Only, faced with what they thought to be heresy, vain worship of
false gods, treachery to Church or State, to Country and the
Marriage Vows and sound fact, only then they were as fierce, as
prejudiced, as bloodthirsty as any Spanish Inquisitor.  And for
confidence in their own eternal rightness there was no family in
Britain to rival them.

Here, then, they were, two days after Maria's funeral, on an
afternoon of driving rain, gathered together in Jannice's
withdrawing-room: lean Henry and his pale-faced Lucilla, little
dainty Harcourt, Mrs. Dorothy black and austere, Pelham's mother
stout and frosted, Pelham gay in a coat of orange and silver,
Raiseley bitterly envious, Grandison fat and flabby, amiable Anabel
and beautiful Judith--the Herries stable--one of these Herries
family gatherings that any Herries chronicler is compelled in their
history to confront.

Jannice, Lucilla, Grandison, his wife Mary and Helen their
daughter, were busy at Ombre.  The men, bored with the wet, had
come in to take tea with the women.  Henry was giving Pomfret a
rather patronising lecture on profit and loss (he thought Pomfret
the veriest fool), Pelham was tantalising Raiseley with London
splendours and besieging the lovely Judith with all his polished
arts, and on the crimson sofa the dead Maria's spaniel lay, staring
with sad angry eyes at the hated company.

The room was lit with candles, but the curtains were not drawn, and
beyond the windows a furious sky tore in sweeping battalions of
smoky clouds from horizon to horizon.  To-day as so often in this
country of clouds the sky imposed itself upon the farthest interior
seclusion.  The glittering furniture of the room, the gilt of the
chairs, the jewellery of the little clocks and boxes, the crimson
silk, the shining silver candlesticks, the amber of the fluttering
flames of lights and fire surrendered without question to the black
shapes of the sky that seemed so vast and threatening, dragging at
the distant tops of the hills as though to fling them across the
lake on to the houses of the town.

Everyone in the room was irritated by the storm, but no one asked
for the curtains to be drawn.  There had been also during these
last days other irritations.

The friendly scorn felt in different degrees by them all for their
host and hostess reacted upon themselves.  It was exasperating to
feel that a Herries, whose hospitality they had accepted, was below
the proper Herries mark, and Pomfret, who was only at his ease
when he was out of doors killing something, who was always too
uncomfortable in his wife's presence, had flustered through these
days, now roaring in a noisy and false good humour, now putting on
an air of deep seriousness that his words, alas, only betrayed, now
sinking into a schoolboy silence of discomfort.

Jannice too was unhappy.  For many years now she had been
comfortable here in her own little circle, testing neither her wit
nor her beauty against broader standards.  But she detested the
large pompous body of Grandison's wife after the first half-hour of
her arrival.  For Mary Herries, Jannice had the double aggravation
that she was neither a Titchley nor a worthy Herries.  She had
indeed, with her provincial airs, her silly cures and recipes, her
little conceits and ugly appearance, everything against her.
Pomfret had never cared for his wife so protectively as during
these last days when 'the Titchley woman,' as he called her, had
mocked with every word.  He longed to humiliate fat Grandison, to
put him on a horse that would throw him at the first ditch, to fire
a gun in his ears, to win his money at a cockfight, even to strip
the clothes off his flabby body and soak him in the lake.  He would
show these Kensington puppies what real life was like up here in
the North Country.  Even as he listened to Henry Cards' dry words,
hoping that he might gather a business wheeze or two, his other ear
was on the Ombre table listening to the thick voice of Mary Herries
as she instructed the others in the Kensington fine shades of Ombre
play.

Mary Herries indeed was indignant with every pulse in her large
body at the company that she was forced to keep.  The very cards
that Jannice had provided seemed to her contemptible with their old-
fashioned pictures of 'the Bishops in the Tower, Popish Midwife,
Captain Tom, Army going over to the Prince of Orange,' etc.  They
were Jannice's best cards, 'the best superfine Principal Ombre
cards at 2s. 9d. a Dozen.'  She had been playing with them these
twenty years.  If good enough for anyone in Keswick, why not for
anyone in Kensington?

Mary Herries had other causes for dissatisfaction.  She knew that
her son Pelham was attracted by Jannice's girl Judith.  She adored
her son; this was the strongest, fiercest motive of life for her.
His handsomeness, cleverness, gaiety, made her the proudest woman
in all England, and her pride was the more defended because it was
mingled with a worshipping fear of an irony in him that she would
never understand.

That by any horrible chance he should throw himself away on the
girl of these country bumpkins was terrifying to her.  Fool though
she was she could see that Judith was a dark beauty: dressed
properly and educated in Kensington she might make others than her
son stare.  She knew too that Pelham meant as a rule but little by
his gallantries--there was already a fine list of momentary
conquests behind him--but the dullness of these last days (was it
for ever raining in this pernicious country?), his idleness and
something arrogant and distant in Judith might lead to some
desperate impetuosity.  She could scarcely hold her cards as she
thought of some dreadful crisis suddenly exploded before them: her
husband, poor fool, would perceive nothing, and would never dream
of acting until all was over.

And she had a further irritation.  This was the King Charles
spaniel on the crimson sofa.  This, the last of dead Maria's many
spaniels, was the only true mourner of that poor lady.  She was
missing her now with every wheezy breath that she drew.  She was
old, fat, the victim of many pains and tortures; life had long ago
been misery to her had it not been for the touch of those strange
dry fingers, the scratch of those multitudinous rings, the warmth
of that thin shrivelled body, a bag of bones under the coloured
shining silks.  Alone she had shared her mistress's recent life,
her longings, her prides, her greeds, her ignorances, her
loneliness.  Alone she had called out of that aged woman, so nearly
deceased long before the actual moment of death, tenderness and
unselfishness, the only cause in her of anxiety for another.
During those long nights when Maria had lain looking up at a
remorseless ceiling, seeing pageants of vanished scenes and
figures, her pride her only refuge, the spaniel had breathed
against her withered hand, rested its head against her dried bosom.

Together they had faced a world that seemed to them both worthless
and ugly; all the old glories were over, but so long as they were
together pride would sustain them both.

Now they were no longer together, and the spaniel, only aware that
her mistress called her no more, ached her old heart away in angry
wasted rebellion.  But there was more than despair and loneliness
there.  There was also a spirit of impotent and sarcastic rage.
She was of blood royal, descendant of a line of kings.  It had
always seemed to her that Jannice and Pomfret, their offspring
also, were low and degenerate creatures.  She hated that they
should touch her, and when Raiseley or Judith teased her, her whole
soul rose in affronted disgust.  While Maria lived she had been
protected, and in sublime confidence of her dear mistress had been
able to scorn those others, but now she knew that she was open to
the world. . . .  Pains racked her, dim fears besieged her, and
with these the scorn that she knew her mistress had felt ever
increased within her.

She was no Herries: her alliance had been to a single soul, not to
the herd.  So now as they passed around her with their strange
scents and movements and sounds she hated them even as she despised
them, and most bitterly of all she hated and despised the stout,
crackling, silk-swishing, fan-waving, scent-distilling Mary
Herries.

It may have been that in this woman beyond the others she detected
false arrogances and knew that of them all it was she who would
have most fiercely affronted her mistress.  In any case it was upon
Mary Herries that she fixed her filmed and fading eyes,
concentrated her aching body, curled her upper lip, showing two
sharp and yellow teeth.

Mary Herries was telling some tale of a friend:  'But a miserly
temper.  She is as expressive to her husband as a casket of jewels.
Many's the night I've seen her lug out her old green net purse full
of old jacobuses while her waiting woman in the room behind is
diving into the bottom of her trunk hoping for a stray piece or
two . . .' when she was aware of the spaniel's eyes.

She moved her chair ever so slightly and was aware of them the
more.  The spaniel was laughing at her, or maybe it was the spirit
of old Maria that mocked her through the dog.

She felt suddenly an accumulation of miseries: she saw Grandison
her husband as he stood in his night-shirt, his ugly naked toes
spread, his bristling head bare of its wig, and in that figure, so
deeply accustomed that it seemed to be part of her own, she groaned
at the weariness of her life.  What was all this pretence of
Kensington finery, this elaborate mention of old Duchess Sarah, Sir
John and the rest, when a yard away Pelham was making eyes at that
hoydenish country girl, and her stomach ached beneath her tightened
stays and her feet were pinched in their silver shoes, and
Grandison, scratching at his wig for the thousandth time, cleared
his throat over his cards preparatory to playing the wrong one?
What were these Herries but second-rate country bumpkins?  Henry
with his spare money-calculating eyes, who yet could make no
fortune, Dorothy in her thin black with her psalm-singing pieties,
Pomfret stinking of drink and the miry road, his miserable Raiseley
with his splay feet and mean little nose.  Oh! she was sick of the
lot, she had messed her life through her own silly folly, storms of
rain beat the windows and the spaniel mocked her!

A point had come in the game and she flung her cards on the table.
'I play no more,' she said in her thick soft voice that was like
the stirring of suet in the pan.  She had been winning (a fact that
until now she had quite honestly not noticed) and at once she was
aware that Jannice Herries found in this the reason of her
withdrawal.

Jannice had not at sixty improved in appearance.  She was thinner,
more sallow, more drawn and by her odd unsuited clothes more
painfully quartered than ever.

'An old witch,' thought Mary Herries.

'A fat mean cook of a woman,' thought Jannice.

'Why, cousin, you are winning,' said Jannice sharply.  'You must
give us our revenge.'

But Mary Herries, raising her stout body painfully, pushing back
the chair, feeling freshly the agony of her pinching shoes,
answered:

'That dog should be poisoned.'

Everyone felt the unseemliness.  A Herries, the oldest of all the
Herries, had been but two days buried.  This was her dog, all that
remained of her, almost you could say a Herries dog.  But worse
followed.

Mary, her voice quivering to an unexpected plaintiveness:  'I am
sick to death of this: it rains and rains again.  Maria is happily
buried if it was here that she must look out of window.'  Then with
a toss of her head, the painted flowers in her white wig nodding
their petals, she waddled from the room, her little feet protesting
with sad little creaks against the weight that they must carry.

Grandison knew what this meant.  She was feeling Titchley, and when
she felt Titchley he was in for a terrible hour.  He hastened after
her.  The dog still laughed, motionless like a dead dog.

But the men, Henry and Pomfret, young Pelham and Harcourt, like all
Herries men when a woman made a scene, came together.  Young
Pelham, leaning back against the purple brocaded chair near the
door, smiling, said:  'My mother has vapours often enough at this
hour.  She will be happy only in a land where the sun always
shines.  I appeal to you, sir' (smiling at Pomfret), 'this is a
handsome country, but it rains unduly.'

'It would not be so handsome a country,' said Harcourt, 'did it not
rain so frequently.'  And he turned from them, looking out of
window across the lake to the hills where a sudden flash of pale
sunlight had pierced the storm, striking an arrow of gold that
cleft Cat Bells in two.  He loved it, every stick and stone of it!
How he loved it!  And as he looked, a deep homesickness for his own
home at Ravenglass, his little garden, his gleaming book rows, the
faint flash of the sea beyond his windows, took him.

All of them in that room caught from him some sense of English
soil.  The men moved together to the window and stood there side by
side looking out.  They were Herries in this: that however far they
might be drawn from the English soil, they yet belonged to it.
Even in Kensington they felt the stirrings of ancient waterways and
the tuggings of prehistoric roots.  Which partially explains
perhaps that they were never good travellers abroad, queasy,
irritable, of an arrogant critical mind; and if they must settle in
a foreign land they must turn it speedily to a Scotch or English
likeness.

They felt now that urgent need to break out into the open air that
every Herries feels when his women are badgering him.

Pomfret's indignation at the insult to his wife was mingled with a
twofold satisfaction: it was not he who for once was the clown of
the occasion and, although he would never confess to this, his own
dear Jannice had been found to be less than perfection.  There came
to him indeed at that moment, gazing out at the steel wall of rain
that fell now like a vengeance from the muddy sky, a thought of
what life would have been had Jannice never existed.  He cast an
uneasy backward glance at the spaniel, who was now wheezily
sleeping.  How many things dogs knew, and how greatly the more at
ease he was with them than with humans!  Now with a dog . . . !

And he thought again of Jannice, of how to this day, although they
had been married so long, he was afraid of her, afraid of that
sudden sharp tap in her voice like a knock on the window, that
chilly glaze of contempt in her eye when he had been an especial
fool.  Yes, and his own children. . . .  Only Anabel was friendly
and easy, and she was easy with all the world.

He was sixty-seven years of age now, a tun of a man with a floating
hulk of a belly, and he was lonely as perhaps were all men of sixty-
seven.  Only with horses and dogs and a drinking parson and a
swearing friend or two, killing, hunting those animals that he yet
so dearly loved, only thus might he for a driving hour cheat
himself of his loneliness.  Staring out of window, not hearing
anything of the voices in the room behind him, he thought suddenly
of his brother Francis.  Why, he could not say.  He did not think
of him more often than he must, partly because he was a scandal,
partly because he loved him.  At heart it might be that Francis was
more to him than anyone else in the world: Francis, digging away in
that miry patch of stinking mud in that nook-shotten valley,
Francis shouted at by the peasant children, Francis, adulterer and
vagabond, known to have sold his woman at a public fair, to have
killed his wife with unkindness, to have driven one of his own
daughters away from her home, to be sheltering under his roof the
most notorious old witch in the country, Francis--'Rogue Herries'
to all the world, so that he brought with every hour disgrace on
the Herries name--yet Pomfret loved him.  His mind flung back to
that first windy evening when Francis and his family arrived in the
town, Francis so young and handsome then in all his gay clothes,
and to that other time, the day that poor Margaret died, when he
had ridden over to Herries and Francis had been so grave and
kindly, so noble in spirit, and he, Pomfret, had kissed his
brother, loving him and wishing in his own clumsy speechless way to
protect him.

Oh! Francis was bad and not to be mentioned, but through the sheets
of rain Pomfret had a mad, monstrous wonder of a moment whether, if
he had been with him out there in rugged tumbled Herries, life
might not have been richer, more valorous, better worth . . .

And so wondering, turning because he heard the door open, saw to
his stricken, open-mouthed amazement his brother, Francis Herries,
standing in the room.

He had not seen his brother for three years; the last time had been
in a Keswick street when Francis, riding past on a huge kind of
cart-horse, had patronised Pomfret and sent him home in a fuming
fury.

But now how strange he looked standing there, wearing his own black
shaggy hair, muddily booted to the thighs, his long brown coat
faded and stained, his face brown and spare, the shape and form of
it altered by the deep white scar that ran from brow to lip.  His
face was yet shining with raindrops, water dripped from his boots,
the back of his brown hand shone with rain.  Years back he had
promised to be stout; now he was lean and spare, and seemed of an
immense height.  He had aged strangely.  Pomfret had a quick vision
of him that other first time at the inn when glittering in gold and
crimson he had been so young and handsome.  Now the soil was in the
furrows of his cheeks.

To Jannice, staring from above the card-table, it was as though the
Devil had sprung out of the floor.  Francis was to her as the
Devil.  Sharing no blood with him, disliking him from the very
first, her dislike was now hatred--hatred mingled with deep fear.
For years he had threatened everything in which she believed, her
morality, her family, her social position.  Especially her social
position.  Every little success in Keswick was threatened with the
consciousness that only a mile or two away there was this sinister
figure, outlaw, adulterer, vagabond, and, because she never saw
him, her sense of his evil power grew and grew with imagination.
She was a woman compact of superstition.  Witches and warlocks,
mandrakes and goblins were as real to her as her own children.  The
two worlds were, with her, one.  Had Francis been arrested for
dealings with the Devil and been burnt at the stake she would not
have thought it an injustice.

She had sworn that never again should he pass her door.  He was
here, and it seemed to her as she looked across the room at him
that fire and brimstone smoked at his nostrils.

Harcourt was the first to speak.  He was enchanted with pleasure.
He came forward, holding out both hands:  'Francis, my dear
brother!'  That explained to the others who this was.  Young
Pelham, greatly interested, thought:  'So this is my dangerous and
exiled relation.  This is a man.  Worth the lot of us here.'  He
was drawn naturally to the rebel in life.  He had a complete
intellectual appreciation of rebellion, although his love of
comfort would always keep himself on the side of safety.

Francis looked about him, bowed to Jannice and Dorothy Forster,
then, smiling (his smile was odd now because the scar caught his
upper lip and twisted it), said:

'Forgive me.  I would not have intruded, but, passing, thought that
I would greet the family . . . very briefly.  It can be so seldom
that we are all together.  Not, you know,' he continued, smiling
more broadly, 'that I enjoy family gatherings, and I fear that I
have not impertinence enough to invite you to Herries, unless
anyone has an affection for potato-gathering.  But I would not wish
to be remiss in paying some reverence to my great-aunt.'  He looked
at the handsome boy by the chair.  'You must be Grandison's boy?'

'How are you, sir?' said Pelham, coming forward and holding out his
hand.

Francis rested for a moment his hand on his shoulder.  'You should
know my son David,' he said.  'If you care for the country a day or
two at Herries. . . .  But I suspect that you have better things to
do.'

Pomfret here blustered forward.  'Well, brother, damn it, now that
thou art here . . . a drink in this damp weather. . . .  Why, damn
it, man . . .'  Then, conscious of his wife behind him, stopped
abruptly.

'Nay, nay,' said Francis, smiling.  'My horse is outside and I have
business.  I heard you were all here.  Doubtless you thought of me
and wished my presence but were shy of asking me.'

He saw the spaniel, crossed to the sofa, bent down and stroked it.
'Poor bitch.  You have as little place here as myself.  I'll be
coming to see thee one of these days, Harcourt.'  Then was gone
abruptly as he came.



INTO THE CAVE


Francis Herries rode off into the rain, his mind a strange torment.
To enter that house over whose threshold he had not stepped for so
many years had been an impulse of the moment.  He had been inside
before he had known that he was going, and, brushing past the
startled manservant, he had entered that room and almost blinked,
like an owl, at the unaccustomed light.  It had been more than the
candlelight; to himself who had been having for so long no intimate
contacts save with the wind, the air, the hard grit of unyielding
soil and the soft friendliness of the land after rain, these
figures were like fish swimming in a strange sea.  Like fish, and
yet they had tugged at his heart.

He had entered the house in a childish play-acting spirit of dare-
devil as though he would say 'Bo!' to a goose, but the very sight
of silly Pomfret with his hanging belly and little Harcourt whose
eyes had shone with pleasure at sight of him, and that handsome lad
Grandison's boy, and all his Herries blood had pressed about his
heart.  It was to conceal this--which had been as violent as an
unexpected blow in the face--that he had moved to the dog, stroked
it, said those false sentimental words--the play-actor in him
again.  But behind the false sentiment there had been that swift
ache of loneliness.

He knew it: he could confess it to himself: for all his intolerance
and truculence he would have loved to stay with the men, with
Pomfret, Harcourt, young Pelham, even with stiff Henry and flabby-
faced Grandison, spent the night with them, laughed and drunk and
changed bawdy stories with them, felt HERRIES again, felt the
family blood in him and all England behind his tread and that
ancient old tree-man whispering in his ears the ancient Herries
password . . . and then perhaps to have taken the boy Pelham off to
Herries and to have shown him David, who was a giant now and the
hero of the country-side and the simplest, grandest Herries of them
all.  Then to have put on his decent clothes again and found a good
horse once more (Mameluke buried beneath the yews behind the house)
and ridden off to Seddon for a week or two, and then perhaps to
stay with Grandison in Kensington. . . .  He!  He grinned, the rain
blinding him as he climbed the steep hill to Cat Bells.  That was
never again for him nor would he care for it did he have it.  In a
day he would be quarrelling with Harcourt, mocking Pomfret,
laughing at Grandison, corrupting Pelham.  But the Herries blood
was there.  He had been a fool to enter that place.

There was something further for him to consider.  In Keswick that
afternoon he had talked with Father Roche.  He had been crossing
the market-place, his head up, looking neither to right nor left,
in enemy's country and knowing it, when a country fellow dressed
like a carter had touched his arm.  He had turned about with his
accustomed haughty stare, and that voice, once so powerful over
him, came back to him across all the years.  He knew him
immediately, the voice with its seeming musical resonance, the eyes
with their strange commanding glow belonging to one man only in the
world.  Roche had smiled, his broad hat pulled over his brows.
Francis had asked him to Herries.  Roche had refused, saying that
he was on his way to Carlisle.  The business was urgent.  Very
shortly the world would hear startling things.  The hour for which
they had all been waiting so long had struck at last.  The voice
was not raised, but behind it was that old fanatical undoubting
spirit, and it had for Francis its ancient power.  Standing there
in the marketplace, the rain soaking down upon them, the old times
swung back, days in Doncaster when it had seemed to him that he
would follow Roche anywhere, evenings when it had appeared no odd
fancy that, threading the stars, God and all His cohort of angels,
the chariots of fire and the horsemen thereof, could plainly be
discerned.  Roche had given him an address--Walter Frith, in charge
of John Stope, English Street.  Carlisle.  He would be found there.
They had parted.

So all the old life was swinging back.  You could not escape it,
throw it off as you fancied, dig yourself into the very stomach of
the soil--one tap on the shoulder, one glance through the dark
branches of the yew and you were caught again.  As Francis rode
down to Grange Bridge the rain cleared.  The clouds were rolling
away above the Castle Crag, and a faint fair wash of crocus spread
in a sea of light over the black pointed hill.  On either side
above Watendlath and the slow slopes beyond Grange white fleecy
mists still lay low like bales of wool, but you could feel the
light that burnt behind them, and the soft fields beyond the stream
toward the lake were richly green.

He crossed the little bridge, turned to the right, rode between the
trees beside the swift river along the track to Rosthwaite.  In the
village he had not seen a soul.  It had been like a dead place.
And well it might be.  All the valley from Seathwaite to Grange had
been cursed that winter.  Misfortune had followed misfortune.
Cattle had died, agues and fevers and plagues of pests had seemed
to choose the valley for their camping-ground, and at the last
smallpox had come, had raged right down the valley and only here.
None over in Grasmere nor the other way in Newlands nor more than
ordinary in the Keswick slums.  The valley had been marked out.  He
knew well enough what the people were saying, that there was a
curse, a spell, and he knew further that the old Wilson woman under
his own roof was marked as the agent.  And he knew that behind her
he was himself marked out.

Yes, and he knew more than that: that, had it not been for David,
weeks ago the roof would have been burned down over his head,
Herries a heap of ashes and himself, perhaps, stoned to death.  He
did not care for their hatred, but he did not wish to die.  There
was something in life that was, like the beat of a drum,
insistently enthralling.  He had always felt it: he would never
escape it: and it was as though, did he live long enough, he would
discover the answer to this incredible mixture of beauty and filth,
wizardry and commonplace, stagnation and unceasing activity.  He
did not want to die, but he did not want, either, that it should be
by permission of his son that he should live.

But this was not for long.  David was going: he knew it as though
David had told him.  And he did not want David to go.  No, he did
not. . . .

David was now twenty-five years of age, six feet five inches tall,
as broad as a wall, the strongest man in the county beyond
question, and many thought, with his fair blanched hair, blue eyes
and splendid carriage, the handsomest.  Let that be as it might.
It did not matter.  He was simple, modest, a man without words,
quite direct in thought and act and with few subtleties.  He had,
for his years, scarcely stepped farther than Seascale on one side,
Penrith on the other, very rarely left his valley, made few friends
in Keswick, though all the world was friendly.  His own valley
loved him and said, as Francis well knew, that Rogue Herries had
never fathered him.  And yet he was clear Herries enough, the line
of his jutting chin, the high strong cheek-bones made him plainly
of the 'horse' family.  He moved, tossed his head, swung his body
like some high-bred animal, held, confined.

For eight years now he had helped his father in the land around
Herries, ploughing, planting, digging, all as he very well knew,
but never said, to little effect.  His constant companions were his
father and Deborah; he was friend to all the valley, but had no
other close intimacy save that old childhood one with Peel's boy,
Rendal, who was now a man almost as big and strong as David
himself.  Of love affair there had been as yet, it seemed, no sign.

He was a man of few words save possibly with Deborah.  When he went
to sport or meeting, to hunt or local games, and performed some
miracle of strength, he came home afterwards without a word of it.
His thoughts were certainly slow in labour: you could almost see
them move behind his smooth clear forehead.  He had a long, slow
laugh that began as a murmur, spread into a long rumble, ended in a
roar.  He had a slow temper.  He had two faults: that he was
suspicious of men and, although courteous in manner, desperately
hard to make a friend of.  And he never forgot nor forgave an
injury.  When, that is, he had proved it to be one.  He paid no
attention to gossip, drank as men drink, but kept the effects of it
to himself.  He showed no resentment at the cruelties, foulnesses,
obscenities of his time.  He was a man of his time.  He did not
trade with women because he did not as yet apparently care very
greatly for women's company save Deborah's.  He was tongue-tied
with women and impatient of their ways.  He did not care very much
for any company and preferred best to be away on the hills alone.
He was very Herries in some things: in his passion for England--he
had all the Herries' ignorant contempt for and dislike of
foreigners; in his interest in the family--he would ask his father
many questions about Herries history and relationship; in his
inability to see anything that was not in front of his nose.

It was his father who was the rebel, not he.  Unless he were
passionately roused--a very rare thing--there was something lazy
and comfort-loving in his great size and strength.  He seemed to be
never physically tired, but he liked to lie back staring into fire
or sky, seeing nothing, perhaps thinking nothing, letting light and
warmth soak into him.

But what were his thoughts of his father?  How many times, in the
instant of digging or planting, hoeing or carrying, walking or
riding, Francis had looked up at the sky, at the long hump of
Glaramara, or, from Grange, at the opening flower of Skiddaw,
and asked himself that question.  David was infinitely kind,
ceaselessly patient.  Since that night so long ago at Ravenglass
no word of impatience had passed his lips, he had shown no angry
movement towards his father.  But they had moved, these last
years, with a sort of mist between, loving one another and yet
distrustful: or Francis on his side at least had held distrust.
What must David feel about his father's isolation, self-adopted,
ironically self-proclaimed, and about the ever thicker wall of
hatred built by the world against him?

We love most, perhaps, those of whom we are a little afraid.  David
was the only creature in the world of whom Francis was afraid, and
this was a fear only of a sudden blazing word, a glance of
contempt.  Then, the word spoken, the glance flung, Francis would
pass into the final ostracism.

When Mary, two years earlier, had left him, Francis thought that
the word would be spoken.  Mary, who had grown increasingly
beautiful and contemptuous, had gone without a sign one morning to
her aunt in Keswick.  She had sent a letter from there saying that
she would not return.  No other word came from her.  They heard
that she went afterwards to stay in Carlisle, then that she was
back in Keswick, then in London.  Then it was said that Francis had
beaten and abused her.  He smiled at that.  In earlier days he had
beaten David often and Deborah on occasion: on Mary he had never
laid a finger.

Would David blame him for Mary?  He did not.  David blamed him for
nothing.  Was his silence criticism?  Maybe not.  He was always so
very silent.  Once, when they were together in Langdale, Francis
looking down the long green sward and then up to the Pikes, rosy in
sunset, said:

'You must hate me, David.'  And David, after a long silence while
the birds swept above their heads home, answered:

'I have three friends.  You are one--and the first.'

But what comfort, his irony urged on him, was he to find in that?
David had not answered his question, only asserted his loyalty; and
David's loyalty was so unsubtle that it offered no reward to one's
pride.

Not that Francis' pride was in question.  He was so proud that his
son's approval or disapproval altered nothing.  He was so proud
that he would tell his son to go to the devil did he patronise him.
But he did not patronise him.  He stood at his side and worked with
him.  That was all.

So he rode into the little stone court of Herries, shouted to fat
Benjamin to come for his horse, and longed, as he stumbled up the
dark staircase, to see David waiting for him.

David was there.  He was standing in the dark brown room upon whose
surface the firelight was very faintly flickering, listening, and
so intent was his attitude that Francis also stayed motionless by
the door: the only sound in the room was the soft settling of the
ash from the piled logs.

'What is it?' Francis asked at last.  Then he heard, but so faint
that it was like the scratching of mice on the wainscot, a
trickling crooning sound; someone, at a distance, behind walls, was
singing, singing in a high-pitched murmur of a voice a little tune
like an incantation or a prayer monotonously reiterated.

'Mrs. Wilson,' David said, then coming close to his father and
laying his hand on his arm:  'She sings to keep herself company.
She's afraid.'

'Of whom?' asked Francis, although he knew the answer.

'They are very impatient. . . .  I've been telling her she should
go from here.'

'Turn her from this roof . . . after these years?'

'No, no. . . .  Help her to the Low Countries.  At the Hague there
is some family she was nurse to once.  They would take her.  We
could secure her a passage.'

'She is old,' Francis answered.  He liked the warmth of his son's
body close to his.  He hoped that David would not move.  That visit
to the family had made him lonelier. . . .

He put his arm across David's vast shoulders.  His long brown
fingers pressed a little into the smooth warmth of his son's neck.

'I think she is going mad with terror,' David said.  The room too
seemed a little mad: the dusk wrote letters on the wall with the
firelight and then erased them again.  The wind that was getting up
and rattling the leaded panes drowned the little song and then by
contrast raised it again.  It was more dangerous in the dusky room
because both men believed in witches and thought that Mrs. Wilson
was one.

Then Benjamin came clumping up the staircase, holding the lighted
candles in their tall silver candlesticks in either hand, and
Deborah came in to lay the table for some supper; there was life
and movement and the little song could be heard no more.

Deborah, who was now twenty-two years of age, was little and
insignificant until you noticed her eyes, which were large, soft,
grey, very beautiful.  Her shyness was her trouble.  She could not
be courageous about people.  She was afraid of every person in the
world save David, and especially of her father.  She had had the
same fear for seven years, ever since the death of her mother, that
David would go and leave her with her father alone.  That fear was
now a torture, and no reassurance on David's part could comfort
her.

Francis knew, of course, that she was afraid of him, and that
exasperated him.  Every time that she shrank from him his old
ironic dislike of himself increased in him and she was included in
that.  When the supper had been cleared away and she had gone up to
her room, the two men were left alone in front of the fire.  The
rain had returned and in violence; it slashed the panes, roared
with the wind away, then fell again upon the house as though it
would batter it to the ground; the fury passed and the rain
softly stroked the windows, whispering indecent and chuckling
secrets, then ran in a hurry as though it were pattering after
someone, burst after that once more into a frenzy of rage and
exasperation . . . an evil frustrated old woman, the rain that
night.

Secure from it the two Herries drew close together.  Suddenly they
were intimate as they had not been for months.  Francis put his
hand on David's broad thigh, drawing his great body a little nearer
to him.  When he told him about his visit to the family that
afternoon David was excited.

'Oh, why did you not stay?' he said.  'The awkwardness would have
worn away.  How did Cousin Pelham look?  And Henry Cards . . . and
Cousin Dorothy . . .'  He sighed.  'I would that I'd been with
you.'

Francis sharply withdrew his hand.  'You could go. . . .  Why don't
you?'

David shook his head, laughing.  'What would they want with me?
I've no head for their company.  No, no.  It was your opportunity,
father.  But you frightened them.'

Francis said:  'David, I've been wishing to ask you.  We've been
working side by side these years.  It's come to but little.
Everything here must seem to you cursed, the house, the soil, the
life, the loneliness.  I fancy that it's in that very cursedness of
the place that I find some salvation.  I would have it hard and
ungrateful.  Here for the first time in all my days I've found
response to my own temper and some aggravating comfort.  But for
you!  Already you are doing good business in Keswick and with your
friend in Liverpool.  Why should you stay?  There's no place in the
world where you wouldn't make your way, and you should see the
world, find a woman of your own breed, not bury yourself in this
windy hole for hinds and pigs. . . .  I'm other than you.  The dirt
of the soil is more to me than any man, aye, or woman either.  I am
stuck here, my feet in the clay, and am accustomed.  But it is not
your abiding-place and will never be.'

He was amazed then at how roughly, after he had ended, his heart
was beating as he waited for the boy's answer.  What would it be
here without David?  How could he endure it?  But better that David
should go rather than he should indulge his father by staying.
Francis would take no patronage.  Yes, but his heart hammered as he
waited.

David was slow as always.  At last he answered:  'I'm glad you've
spoken at last, father.  All these months I've wondered what was in
your mind.  But I can't leave you.  We're bound together, I fancy,
different though we are.  And yet . . . there IS something I should
say.  Father, why should we stay by Herries?  The place has never
cared for us.  As a boy I ran first into the house and shivered at
its greeting.  Everything has been wrong for you here.  The people
have been wrong for you, the soil stubborn; nothing that you have
planted has grown: you have been with every year more alone here.
Why should we stay?  We owe nothing to the house.  In the South
together, the three of us, where it is warmer and the sun shines
and people's hearts are more friendly. . . .  Father, let us leave
here.  Everything has been wrong for you here.'

'No,' his father answered in a strange, low voice, as though he
were speaking to something within him.  'Everything is not wrong
for me here.  Here is my home, the only one I've ever known or
shall know.  I feel the touch of the peat, the scratch of the dried
bracken, and it is my place.'

His voice had its accustomed ironic tone.  'So they've been
persuading you, David, my son?  "Take your father away, David
Herries.  He stinks in our noses, he is warlock and dirty liver and
murderer maybe.  Remove his carcase or we will remove it for you."
They've persuaded you, David . . . but there must be more than a
word before they can move me.  I am stuck fast, and there's my
ghost to come after me when they've knocked my head in and
scattered my entrails for dung over their fields: there's still my
ghost, David.'

David got up.  His voice was cold with anger when at last after a
long while he spoke.

'That is unjust.  No man could persuade me against you save
yourself.  I am no traitor.  But guard yourself against irony with
me.  I am a fool, you know, and may understand it wrongly.'

He went out.

So that was that.  Herries was alone.  He got up very early next
morning, washed himself at the pump and went off, walking, his head
in the air, not caring a damn if he never saw his bullock of a son
again.  Or he said not.  His heart within his heart ached, as it
always did, for his son.  That heart would have gone, waked the
boy, embraced him.  The only heart to which David responded, the
only one that he understood.  For David had all the simple
sentimentality of his period; for him there were these actual
contrasted powers, God and the horny Satan, Michael and all the
angels, dragons and rescuing princes, shepherds, shepherdesses, and
the ravening wolf, the good old man by the fireside reading out of
the Book to his family clustered at his knees, wedding bells and
Innocence wed under roses to Purity and Strength.  Yes, David
believed in all these things.  He saw life like that.

Francis, as he strode off into the early morning rain that sung
about his ears in a feathering mist, said aloud:  'I'm done with
the boy.  What's the use? . . .  No ground between us,' and the
rain whispered in his ear:  'It's a lie!  It's a lie!'  Once he
almost turned back.  It would be very easy to run up those stairs,
climb to David's room, see him sunk in sleep there, his chest bare,
his knees curled up.  Francis knew how he lay, his cheek on his
hand, dreaming of his princesses and his shepherdesses.  He had no
more subtlety than that.  The Herries sentimentalist.  No, not
conscious enough to be called anything.  A sweet-breathed, mild-
eyed animal, with the obstinacy of a mule, the strength of a horse,
the fidelity of a dog.  He should be breeding.  He should be let
out, like a stallion, to the women of the country to get fine sons.
All this true enough did you forget his heart, which in its
strength, sweetness, sympathy, durability was of another order from
the animal.  There was his immortality, and, likely enough, the
immortality of all of us.

For there was immortality in us!  The great white horse of
Herries' dream striking up from the ebony lake to the icy peaks.
Sentimentality, that again, thought Herries, and arrogance,
planning for your little peapod of a marionette so handsome a
destiny.  But the very fact of the planning. . . .  Why this
burning, eager, rebellious, longing fury between his miserable bag
of bones, the thick coiled entrails, the stringy nerves, the flat-
faced pancreas, that silly mechanism that one blow from a fool
could tumble as a child tumbles a toy.  Burning there between the
bones and fat, the blood and gristle, this fierce arrogant
ambition, this persistent dream, this lovely vision. . . .  'All we
like sheep . . .'  Nay, like gods rather, lost in a strange land.

Herries often, as he dug and sweated, cursed the reluctant soil and
his aching back and blistered hands, turned back and back to those
same common platitudes, fresh to him because they were his own and
mingled with so many strange things for which he could find no
words.  His brain, heart, generative organs: how to reconcile these
three in a common harmony and drive them to a fine destiny, his
brain that was clogged with lack of education, his heart that led
him only to self-contempt, his generative powers that had known
their best days, and they nothing to boast over.  All keys to some
event, but all out of control and discipline, all leading to silly
ends.

Not intelligent enough, not kind enough, not even lecher enough.  A
botched machine set in a country veiled with mist. . . .

He had crossed the fields, passed the little cottages of Seatoller
and the yews, and started up the hill to Honister.  On the left of
him Hause Gill tumbling in miniature cataracts with the recent
rain, on the right of him the ever-opening fells.  He drew great
gulps of air into his lungs.  That was for him, that unenclosed
fell.  As soon as he reached a point where the moss ran unbroken to
the sky all his troubles dropped away from him and he was a man.
There was no place in the world for open country like this stretch
of ground in Northern England and Scotland, for it was man's
country: it was neither desert nor icy waste; it had been on terms
with man for centuries and was friendly to man.  The hills were not
so high that they despised you; their rains and clouds and becks
and heather and bracken, gold at a season, green at a season, dun
at a season, were yours; the air was fresh with kindliness, the
running water sharp with friendship, and when the mist came down it
was as though the hill put an arm around you and held you even
though it killed you.  For kill you it might.  There was no
sentimentality here.  It had its own life to lead and, as in true
friendship, kept its personality.  It had its own tempers with the
universe and, when in a rolling rage, was not like to stop and
inquire whether you chanced to be about or no.  Its friendship was
strong, free, unsentimental, breathing courage and humour.  And the
fell ran from hill to hill, springing to the foot, open to the sky,
cold to the cheek, warm to the heart, unchanging in its fidelity.
As he breasted the hill and turned back to look across Borrowdale
the sky began to break.

He stared, as though the scene were new to him, to Glaramara and
then over Armboth to the Helvellyn range.  It was new to him: never
before had it held those shapes and colours nor would it again:
with every snap of the shuttle it changed.

Now across the Helvellyn line the scene was black and against the
black hung the soft white clouds.  Borrowdale glittered in sun like
a painted card, flat, emerald and shining.  Above his head all the
sky was in motion: beyond him over Honister tenebrous shadows
thrust upward to one long line of saffron light that lay like a
path between smoking clouds.  All the fell smelt of rain and young
bracken, and two streams ran in tumult across the grass, finding
their way to the beck.  The sunlight was shut off from Borrowdale,
which turned instantly dead grey like a mouse's back; then the sun
burst out as though with a shout over the low fells that lay before
the Gavel.  A bird on a rock above the beck began to sing.

He was filled with a delicious weariness.  He lay down there where
he was, his full length on a thin stone above the beck, and on that
hard surface fell happily, dreamlessly, asleep.

He woke to a strange sense of constriction.  He moved and found
amazingly that his arms and legs were tied with rough rope.  He
raised his head and stared into the eyes of a man who sat
motionless on a rock near him.  A horse grazed in the grass close
by.

Francis stared at the man: the man stared back again.

'You sleep fast,' the man said.  'I bound you and you didn't
waken.'  He was a man with a thin dry face, long shaggy black hair,
a coat and breeches of some colour that had faded into a dirty
green.  He looked like part of the fell.  His legs were thin and
long and sharp.  He was not young, fifty years of age maybe.

'Why have you bound me?' Herries asked quietly.

'You are my prisoner,' the man replied.

'My body is--for the moment,' Herries answered.

The man was, from his voice, not of the North.  His tone was firm,
quiet, reflective.

'You are Herries of Herries in Rosthwaite.'

'Yes.  How do you know me?'

'I've seen you many times.'

'What have you against me?'

'Nothing.'

'Then why have you bound me?'

'You are my prisoner,' the man answered again.

'Yes; but why?'

'I have a curiosity to ask you some questions.  Would you come
peacefully with me?'

'Whither?'

'By Honister.'

'Yes,' said Herries.

'You swear it?'

'Yes.'

'Then I will untie you.'

He came forward and, quite gently, with some care, undid the bonds.

Herries sat up and felt his arms and legs where the rope had been,
but he had been bound only a moment or so: it was the binding that
had waked him.  Then he rose and stretched himself.  The man also
got up.  He was of great height and very thin with a long nose.
His face was pitted with smallpox marks.

They started to walk together forward to Honister, the man leading
the horse.  The air was deliciously fresh and the sky filled now
with little dancing white clouds.

'What is your interest in me?' Francis asked at last.  They were on
the higher ground, about to turn the corner, and before he turned
he looked back and saw, picked up by the sun, on the low ground
before Armboth a little wood of silver birch.  The sun hung over
the little wood in a brooding lighted mist and the thin silver
trunks stood up proudly, burnished.  Herries, because of what
happened afterwards, was never to forget them.

This fellow was a man of not many words, but at last he said, long
after Francis' question:

'Can you recall, once, many years gone, you gave your coat to a
woman by the road?'

'Yes,' said Herries, his heart beating.

'And once later on a Christmas night you talked with her?'

'I remember,' said Herries.

'I was there, that second time,' the man said.

'There was with her,' Herries said, 'a young child.'

The man nodded.  'The woman was my sister.  The child was her child
and is with me yet.'  He waited awhile and then went on.  'I bound
you because you would not have come with me else.  Or I thought so.
They say in the valley that you are the Devil and eat human flesh.

Herries looked at the man smiling.  'Do you think so?'

The man looked back at Herries.

'No,' he said.  'When my sister died she said I was to give you the
only thing she had.  I have kept it for you.'

'But why,' asked Herries, 'must you bind me to give it me?'

The man answered:  'Our place is rough in Honister.  We are in bad
repute here, my brother and I, though not so bad as yourself.  I
thought you would fight before you came, and because of my sister I
would not strike you.  Are you as bad as men say?'

'I am as bad,' answered Herries, 'as other men.  And as good.  We
are as the fancy hits us.'

The man nodded his head gravely.  'That's true.  One man's life is
this way, another's that.  We have little choice.'

They struck up the fell to the left and climbed.  The man led the
horse patiently and with kindness.  When they were high on the moor
they could see the guards of the mines pacing on the path below.

All the fell rolled beneath them now like the sea, and the clouds
rolled above them, driven by a sunny dancing wind.  On the brow of
the hill the man took Herries' arm, led him over boulders, dipped
down the shelving turf, then pushed up again on the hinder shoulder
of Honister.

Then, loosening his grip, he vanished.  Herries stood alone,
hearing no sound but the wind and running water.  He could see,
icily blue, the thin end of Buttermere Lake far below.  He heard a
whistle and saw the black head of the man just below him.  He went
down.

He saw then the grey opening of a cave in the hill, fenced with
dead bracken and furze.  He followed the man in.  At first he could
see nothing, but could smell cooking food, an odd sweet scent of
flowers and a musty animal tang.  The man had his hand on his arm
and very gently, as though he were speaking to a child, said:  'Sit
you there.  You can sleep if you will.  The straw's dry.'  Francis
turned back, shifting the bracken a little; and the sun flickered
on to him, dancing before his eyes.

But he did not wish to look about him.  He was oddly incurious and
infinitely weary.  Why this weariness?  It was as though the kind
black-haired man had laid a spell upon him.  So he slept, long and
almost dreamlessly.  The nearest to a dream was that he was led
again through the incidents of the morning, following the lean man
over ever-darkening fell, then was pushed from a height and heard,
as he raised himself from a hard cold ground, a voice say to him:
'Into the cave!  Into the cave!  You have been outside too long.'

With that he woke, wide-eyed, oddly happy, extremely hungry.  He
sat up and looked about him.  The sun streamed in from the fell.
He could see all the cave, which was not indeed quite a cave, but
rather the opening of some deserted entrance to a long-neglected
mine.  In the black cavern beyond him there was a fire and on the
fire a round black pot.  A girl sat on the ground watching the pot.

At once he knew her.  Her hair, which fell all about her face and
almost to her waist, told him--there was no colour like that
anywhere else in the world; but something thin, poised, intent,
alert, independent, in her attitude also told him: his eyes saw
once again that figure never in all these years lost sight of, the
tiny child, crowned with its flaming hair, pressed back against its
mother's skirts.  Instinctively, he put his hand up to his cheek
and felt his scar.

He had found her again.  He had the oddest sense of having reached
the end of some quest, a sense of rest, of fulfilment, of
motionless certainty.

'Well?' he said quietly.

'Well?' she answered, without turning or taking her eyes from the
fire.  'So you've waked?'

'I've waked.'

'I never saw a man sleep so sound.'  Then after bending forward and
stirring the fire she added, but still not looking at him:  'So
you've come at last.'

'At last?'

'Yes.  I knew that you would come one day.'  Her voice, he noticed,
had the very same sweet, remote tone that all those years ago it
had had.  Seven years, and they were as though they were yesterday.

He got up and stretched himself.  His clothes were stuck with
bracken.  He came across to the fire, looking at her hair that was
dark in the cave like the sombre shadows in flame when the smoke is
thick.  Even now she did not look up.

'Well, I have waited for you too,' he said.

At that she turned and looked up at him, and as his eyes met hers
he knew two things: that he loved her and that he had never before,
in all his ventures, known at all what love was.  He knew,
instantly afterwards, a third thing: that he meant nothing at all
to her and that she would be glad when he went.  He knew that by
the way that she looked beyond him to the mouth of the cave, a
little impatiently, her mind on the fire and also on some possible
escape for her.

She was a child, under eighteen.  He was over forty.  This
folly . . .

But he could not take his eyes from her.  They were locked there,
and all his body moved in its inner spirit towards her so that
already, although his hand had not touched hers, his arms were
round her, his head, so heavy with fruitless work and anger and
impatience, resting on her child's breasts.

'How did you know,' he said at last, his voice husky, 'that I would
come one day?'

'Oh,' she answered, 'mother would speak of you, and my uncle, and I
would see you in the woods, Borrowdale-way.  I begged once of your
son by Stonethwaite.  He gave me a silver shilling.  He is the
finest man I have ever seen.  He has the grandest body.  But I
could never love him.  He is too thick.  But I have seen too much
love.'

'You are only a child,' Herries said, 'and cannot know.'  The force
within him was too strong.  Had it meant death in the next moment
he could not have prevented himself.  He put out his hand and
touched her hair.  But it did not mean for her anything at all.
She did not move her head but allowed him to stroke it as he would.

He felt that, and his hand came back to him.  Then she got up from
the fire, straightening herself.  Her body was very thin and still
a child's body, but lovely to him in its slender line, the long
legs and high carriage of the head and the lovely bosom, breathing
on the very edge of maturity.

'My uncle is out watching,' she said.  'The guards are active to-
day.  They killed two men last night.  Some day soon they will find
this place and then we must move on again.'

'What does your uncle do?'

'My two uncles.  Oh, they do what they can.  Steal from the mines
and sell to the Jews in Keswick, or they poach, or my uncle George
fights in the Fairs . . . whatever comes.  But they are hoping for
news soon from France.  Then we will go to Carlisle or Scotland
maybe.'

'From France?'

She smiled.  'They never tell me anything.  Why should I care?  It
is all the same to me.  One day they will be killed, and I shall
sell myself to some wealthy man.'

'You would do that?'

'And why not?  I must have food.  To feed my body, I give my body.
What is my body?  It is not myself.  That I keep for my own.'

'If your uncles are killed, you must come to me.  I will take care
of you.'

She looked at him, smiling.  'You are very ugly, and they say in
Borrowdale that you are very wicked.  I don't care if you are
wicked--but how rich are you?'

'I am very poor.'

'Then why should I come to you if I don't love you?'

'Because I would care for you and work for you and protect you.'

'Maybe I should lie with your son.  Would you still protect me?'

He turned his eyes away from her.

'Yes; even then.'

She put her hand lightly on his shoulder.

'No; if I ever came to you I would be honest.  My mother always
said a woman must be honest or she is nothing.  Men can be as
dishonest as they please.  That is the difference between men and
women.'  She smiled at him like a small child, enchantingly.  'I
would be honest if I came--but I will never come.'

Her two uncles crossed the light.  They were in excellent spirits,
amused by some joke they had had with one of the guards.  One of
them, Anthony, had rabbits and a hare.

They all sat round and ate.  The food was excellent: savoury meat
cooked in the pot, tasting of herbs and sun and all the rich juices
in the world.  There was good wine too.  The two men--Anthony was
round and fat, with a broad chest and short thick neck: he was
coloured dark brown and had sharp suspicious eyes like a ferret's--
curled up and went to sleep.

All through the sunny afternoon, while the clouds raced past the
cave's entrance driven by the wind, Herries sat where he was,
silent, watching the girl.  She sat quite near to him, sewing at
some garment and then afterwards lying back on the hay, the sun on
her cheek, and falling easily, comfortably asleep.

He sat there thinking of nothing, nothing at all.  He did not want
to move.  The air was cold although the sun shone, but he was hot
with a kind of fever; once and again he trembled.  Once he leaned
forward and touched her cheek with his hand.  He withdrew abruptly
as though he had, by so doing, pledged himself to some awful
danger.  But he did not think at all, neither of his past nor of
his future, nor of himself in any way.  He simply knew that his
fate had come and that what-ever way he turned now he could not
escape it.

He did not want to escape it.  He, forty-five years, she sixteen.
This child who cared nothing for him and perhaps never would care.
A child of vagabonds.  That did not matter.  He was himself a
vagabond.  They were both outcasts.  He sat staring there like a
drunken man or an idiot.  There was utter silence in the cave; only
the wind, rushing by outside, sometimes cried out like a struck
harp not quite in tune.

When the shadows began to lengthen and the sky beyond the cave was
a pale washed blue with no clouds in it, the men stirred and woke
together.  George looked gravely at Herries as though he were going
to lecture him.  Then he got up, found an old green box behind the
fire, fumbled in it and brought to Herries a simple rough silver
chain with a little crucifix of black wood on its end.

'This was what she left for you,' he said.

Herries expected that he would say more.  He had spoken in the
morning of questions that he would ask.  But he said no more, only
stood there as though dismissing him.

Herries took the chain.  He did not want to go.  He wanted with a
desire stronger than any that he had ever known to stay, but the
two men stood there waiting for him to go.

The girl had waked, stretched her arms, then walked to the cave
opening: the evening wind blew her hair so that it seemed to be
fire blowing about her head and against the grey stuff of her
dress.

'Hadn't you questions that you would ask me?' he said.

'No,' said the lean man.

'I don't understand why you brought me here.'

'To give you that.'

'Well, then, tell me your names.'

'I am George Endicott.  He is Anthony Endicott.'

'And the girl?'

'The girl's name is Mirabell Starr.'

'Maybe we shall meet in another place.'

'Maybe.'

'In Carlisle, perhaps?'

'Maybe.'

Anthony, the fat one, turned back into the cave as though the
matter were closed.  George held his hand out.

'I bound you because I was afraid you wouldn't come.'

Herries exchanged a handgrasp.

'That's no harm.  I shall keep the chain.  My thanks for the meal.
At Herries there's a meal for you.'

Then he went out of the cave.  He held out his hand to the girl.

Lowering his voice, staring into her eyes, he said:  'You have
promised to come to me if you are all alone.'

She answered like her uncle.

'Maybe,' she said.  She let him hold her hand, and for a moment, in
the wind that was now very strong blowing from the sea, his body
pressed against hers.

'I will be good to you,' he said.

'So they all say,' she answered, 'until they've got what they
wanted.'

'I shall never get what I want,' he answered.  He longed to kiss
her pale thin cheek, but the indifference in her eyes humiliated
him.  So he turned, bending his head a little, and went up the
fell, not looking back.



WITCH


Mrs. Wilson stood, as was her habit, at the foot of the stairs,
listening and looking up.  No one was moving in the house.  It was
after mid-day.  She knew that Herries was digging at the back of
the house, that his son was away for that day in Keswick, that his
daughter was in Rosthwaite and Benjamin the servant at the stable:
she was therefore quite alone in the house.

She stood there endeavouring to make up her mind to what was for
her a great venture.  She was planning to go to Grange.  She had
not been out of that house for six months: she had not been in the
village of Rosthwaite for a year.  This enterprise of hers needed
immense resolution and courage.  Although, since early morning, she
had been summoning her will to this expedition, she was not yet
completely resolved on it.

Old Tom Mounsey, deaf and dumb, had contrived to send her word that
his wife Old Hannah Mounsey was dying and wished to see her before
she went.  Hannah Mounsey, once Hannah Armstrong, a gay and
beautiful young thing, was Katherine Wilson's oldest friend.  She
was now, like Katherine, so old that she didn't know how old she
was.  And she was dying.  She was the first human who had asked to
see Katherine Wilson for more than twenty years.

The old woman had been strangely stirred by the summons.  She was
so old that the days of her youth were as yesterday.  They were
very vivid and alive to her.  She saw Hannah still with red cheeks,
bright flaxen hair, and a blue gown.  She heard Hannah laugh as she
hid with Katherine in Statesman Armstrong's barn, while young
Johnny Turnbull had searched for her to fumble and kiss her.  Young
Johnny Turnbull had been hanged in Carlisle for stealing a sheep.
As everyone knew, it was not he who stole the sheep but Daniel
Waugh.

She was very old, but she could make the journey.  Her legs could
still carry her.  It would take her two hours or more to walk to
Grange, but she could do it.  It was not her legs that frightened
her.  Something else.

She was frightened of the outside world, and with reason.  The
outside world hated her.  They hated her as much as they were
afraid of her.

They said she was a witch.  Was she a witch?  She did not know.
They said that the troubles of the last year were her doing.  Were
they?  She did not know.  Sometimes she thought that they were and
felt an odd impulse of power.  Was it true that by crooking her
finger or nodding her head she could kill sheep, scatter the palsy,
burn hay-ricks, poison food?  It might be so.  She did not know.

It was not of course true that she could fly on a broomstick or
that she had danced naked with the Devil in Glaramara caves.

But she HAD danced naked in the woods one moonlit night.  That was
a great many years ago.  Many, many years.  She had had a child by
Joe Butterfield because of that dancing.  The child had been
happily still-born, and Joe Butterfield had been gored to death by
his own bull many years back. . . .  He had been a fine big young
fellow, with a tattoo of a mermaid on his chest.

She could not remember many things, and many things she remembered
in every detail.  But all that she wished now was to be let alone:
all the passions save fear had died right down in her.  Her love of
fun and gaiety, her recklessness, her vicious tempers, her courage,
her loyalty to those whom she loved, her passion for her son who,
after living in this house with her so long, had left her, all
these fires had sunk to grey ashes.  The only thing remaining to
her was fear.

The first time that she had been really afraid was one day shortly
before the coming of these Herries, when, walking out on the path
to Seathwaite, some boys had thrown stones and shouted 'Witch!'
after her.  Long before this she had been suspected of witchcraft,
she and Mary Roberts and Ellen Wade and Alice Leyland.  Alice
Leyland had been much older than the others.  It may be that Alice
had been a witch.  She had made an image of Gabriel Caine and burnt
it at a slow fire, and he had died within three days.

She had, too, her famous love-philtre, and Katherine herself had
mixed this in her own man's drink, a year after their marriage,
when he was going with the Hoggarty girl in Keswick.  It had not,
however, caused him to leave the Hoggarty girl, not until she had
had the smallpox and grown ugly.

The old woman sat down at the foot of the stairs.  Did she dare to
venture into Grange?  She sniffed danger in the very air, but that
might be her fancy.  Much of it might be her fancy.  She had stayed
alone in this house until she scarcely knew what she believed.
But, from the very beginning, there had been something about her
that set her apart from the others.  She had been a pretty girl:
they had all said so.  She had cared for men no more and no less
than the others, but the difference had been that men were not
enough: no, love was not enough, nor courting, nor childbirth, nor
any of the dreary, dull, day-by-day life in that dreary, dull
valley.

She must have excitement, but then, after that, it was not
excitement that she wanted, not excitement only.  She was curious,
inquisitive.  She wanted to see INTO things, and when she had seen
Alice Leyland and the others dance naked across the grass under the
moon and then vanish into the black wood she had been curious to
see what they did there.  So she, too, had danced naked into the
wood, and all that had happened had been Joe Butterfield's baby.

Had it not been for that odd sense of power that sometimes came to
her she would have left it alone.

But there had been hours when she felt that she held all the valley
in her hand to do with as she would.  She felt that sometimes even
now.  What was that accompanying her, lifting her up, taking her to
the very verge of some discovery?  Was it only her fancy?  In later
years she had yielded to the temptation to see in the eyes of
others that look of fear, of terror. . . .

When they came to her, as they used to do, to ask her to heal their
cattle, to help them with a lover, to injure an enemy, she had
always told them to go away again, that she knew no spells, no
charms, had no powers.

But they did not believe her, and she did not believe herself.  Had
she no power?  Why was it then that she would rise in the night and
walk to the window and see the shadows under the moon come flocking
to her call, and had she not killed Janet Forsse by looking at her
after Janet had called her a witch outside Rosthwaite Chapel?  Had
not Janet gone home, lain down on her bed and died?  That had done
her much harm, that death of Janet.  They had feared and hated her
from that moment.  She had felt the power rise in her breast, fill
her breast, well into her eyes.  But was that truth or falsehood?
Janet had eaten meat from a poisoned pot and so died. . . .

All her life she had wished others well.  Only when they insulted
her she must turn and defend herself.  And in these last years,
from loneliness, desolation, unhappiness, she had scarcely known
what she did.  She had made wax figures, watched from the window,
spoken sometimes with shadows.  Why not with shadows when no one
else would speak with her?

Everything had been worse with her since the coming of Herries.
From the first day she had hated the father and loved the son.  The
father had something in common with her.  Although she was an
untaught woman, and he was a grand gentleman, yet they shared
something.  He had looked at her and she at him.  It might be that
he was the Devil.  Some thought so in the village.  It might be.
He looked like the Devil once and again.  Perhaps he could answer
the questions that she never dared to ask.  She was afraid of him,
and she hated him.  She had always loved his son David since, as a
little boy, he had run first into the house.  All that was simple
and good and maternal in her responded to him.  He had always been
kind to her, talked to her, asked her how she did, and now that he
was the finest, grandest man in the valley she was proud of him, as
though he had been her work.  When his mother had died she had
wanted to protect and care for him.  He had not needed her--he
needed no one--but she prayed for him night and morning.

That had been until the last year, but in the last year fear had
grown in her breast, swallowing up everything else in her.

The thing that she feared most now was to dream, because in her
dreams she was quite unprotected.  So soon as she slept she was
outside the house in the naked road, or the house was without
walls, or she was on the mountain-side.  Then while she waited
alone in this awful space she could hear them coming, hundreds of
them; the present and past came together--Alice Leyland, Joe
Butterfield, Turnbull, Hannah Armstrong, and with them many
strangers.  But they all looked alike.  They had terrible faces,
and that look in the eyes of lust and hatred, curiosity and
pleasure.  Years ago, when a young woman, she had seen a boy stoned
to death in Keswick market.  They said that he had burnt a rick.
That look then had been in their faces.  It had been perhaps also
in her own.

In her dream they came always nearer and nearer, quite silent, and
she had no strength to escape them.  Then one had called 'Witch!'

She would awake trembling and the sweat would run down into her
eyes; then she would sigh with relief at the respite, and would get
up and touch the familiar things, the clock, the settle, the pots
and pans, to reassure herself.

When her son had left her he had said nothing, but had looked at
her once before he went, and the look in his eyes had held fear,
just as her own eyes held fear.  She had not tried to keep him.
Only after he had gone she sat and remembered all the things he had
done as a child and especially when he had sucked at her breast and
she had crooned songs to him.

And now should she go in to Grange?  It might be that it would
break the spell, it might be that she would meet folk who would be
kind to her, and, seeing Hannah again, she would recover her
courage.

She moved slowly back into the empty kitchen.  She was still
strong.  Her bodily health had been always amazing; she had never
known a day's sickness, and that, too, had made her sometimes
wonder whether she were not under the Devil's especial protection.

She stirred about the kitchen, raising her head, sniffing the air;
her brown face was a network of wrinkles, her hair was snow-white,
her eyes dimmed in vision.  She moved on her legs easily and with
freedom.

Suddenly she knew that she was going into Grange: it was as though
someone had bent over and whispered in her ear.  The great grey
cat, with one eye green and one brown, her only friend in the
world, had come and rubbed itself against her legs.  It was he,
perhaps, who persuaded her.

Every witch must have a cat.  She had seen Alice Leyland once take
a glove that she had soaked in blood and water and rub it on her
cat's belly, murmuring some spell. . . .  What were the words?  She
had known them all once.  Words, words, words . . . words from
where?  They had come to her once, without her own desire: there
had been the day when she had seen Statesman Peel's man rubbing
between the horns of his oxen the grease from the Paschal Candle,
eyeing her as he did so.  Yes, then, against her own will, not at
all by her agency, the words had come to her lips.  He had seen her
lips move and had told them in the village.

But her cat.  She bent down and stroked it, letting her old dried
fingers press into the fur, liking to feel the cat's response as it
bent its back a little, stiffening, stretching its legs, its eyes
closing with pleasure.  She had thought often that her cat knew
more than she did.  Watching sometimes at night from the high
window she had seen it slip off across the fields, moving with
quiet secret purpose, just as Alice Leyland had once moved.  The
cat and Alice Leyland knew things that she would never know.

She went to the cupboard and found her cloak and high-crowned, old-
fashioned hat.  She found her crooked, gnarled stick.  She started
out.

When she came into the path beyond the courtyard her heart beat so
furiously that she must stop: it leapt with wild angry stabs as
though it were telling her not to go.  For a whole year she had not
been beyond the courtyard.  She was encouraged by the stillness of
the world about her, not a sound save the running water that was
never silent, and the scrape, from behind the house, of Herries'
spade as it struck the hard soil.  She was always scornful of
Herries' labour; the soil here was like stone or mire, harsh,
ungrateful, contemptuous: it hated Herries as she did.  A little
pleasure stirred her heart as she thought of Herries' labour and
the small reward he had for it.

She walked down the path, moving with marvellous strength for an
old woman.  She thought that she heard the cat following, and she
turned to forbid it, but there was nothing there.

It was a grey, overhanging, autumn day with no wind: the light on
walls and trees trembled once and again as though thunder was
coming, but the leaves that still lingered, brown and shrivelled,
on the trees, never shivered.

She walked as she had lived, in a half-dream.  Sometimes it seemed
to her that figures were walking with her, sometimes that she was
alone.  When she reached the river she muttered a little with
pleasure, as though she were blessing it.  Perhaps she was.  This
river, the Derwent, had been part of her from birth.  Her parents'
cottage had bordered it: her first instinct as an infant had been
to find it, and now, because for so long she had not seen it, she
greeted it again as an old friend.  There had been a time in her
life when, if she did not see it every day, she was miserable.
From Seathwaite to the lake she had known every inch of it, its
deeps and shallows, its moods of anger, rebellion, calm, blue
content, shrill chatter, acquiescence, curiosity; its colours,
brown like ale, blue like glass, grey like smoke, white like cloud;
she had bathed in it, fished in it, sat beside it.  Often, shut up
in that house, she had listened to it, especially when it was in
flood; then it was happiest, most violent.  It was the only thing
in the world now that she could trust: it would never harm her.  It
did not care whether she were witch or no.

As she passed beside it now, happy in a dim confused way at
recovering it again, she seemed to speak to it, telling it how
sorry she was that it was shrunken, that its stones and boulders
must be exposed, and its voice have fallen to a murmur.  Never
mind.  The rains were coming again.  Patience, patience. . . .  And
as she looked her husband rose out of it, his brown tangled beard
wet, his eyelashes dripping water, his breast, thick with soaking
hair, exposed, his flanks too shining with damp fine yellow hair,
his toes crooked about the stones of the river-bed; his bare arm
rose up as he brushed his hair from his eyes as he used to do.  He
called out something to her, and his voice had just the old husky
growling note, but she could not hear what he said.

She walked on, resolutely, her stick striking the path, her head in
its high black hat, and very far away, beyond Grasmere maybe, the
thunder dimly rumbled.  She gathered confidence as she went: a
silly old woman she had been to stay in that dark house letting
fear gather upon her.  She would not wonder now but it was that
devil Herries that had put those thoughts into her head.  It was
himself that the people hated, and she had taken his contempt for
her own.  Just because, forsooth, some boys had thrown stones after
her and a labourer cast a word at her, she had hidden away and
missed her proper company.  It would be good to see Hannah once
more.  Hannah was dying, they said, but she would be able enough to
remind her of the old days when they had both been young and happy
together.  One kindly look from Hannah's eyes would be a fine
thing, and she would walk all the way back to Herries again and
show the village that she was no witch, but an old woman who liked
company and chatter and friendly faces in candlelight.

As she walked, strength seemed to increase in her.  She had no ache
nor pain in all her body.  She was still good for life.  Death had
not got her yet.  She breathed the air, even though it were close
and packed with thunder, and as the hill grew steeper by the Bowder
Stone, she set her knees to it and braced her back and climbed
bravely to the turning of the road.  Then, at the sight of the
Grange cottages across the river, again her courage failed her.
She was passing Cumma Catta Wood, a place that she had always
feared because, when she was a girl, young Broadley had drowned
himself in the pool there below the wood.  It was a pretty place, a
little hill thick with trees hanging over a broad pool, where the
river gathered itself together for a while and stayed tranquilly
reflecting the sky.  But they said that young Broadley haunted it,
and that, in ancient days, there had been pagan sacrifices there.
You could see the two projecting stones where the sacrifices had
been.

The old woman moved on.  She paused before she crossed the bridge
that raised itself up like a cat's back over the divided strands of
the river.  The Grange cottages, huddled on the other side, seemed
to be waiting, watching for her.

Their faces were white, shining in the grey shadows of the thundery
air.

She crossed the bridge, wondering that she saw no human being: she
must herself, to those who, behind dark window-panes, watched her,
have seemed a curious figure alone in that still grey landscape, in
her high hat and black cloak, tapping with her stick.

She knew Hannah's cottage, a little grey dwelling twisted like a
crumpled ear over the river.  She knocked with her stick on the
door.  There was no answer, and she had never felt the world so
breathlessly still.  The rattle of her stick on the door had been
so sharp that she would not knock again.  She pushed the door back
and went in.  The interior was very dark and smelt of damp hay.
Some hens ran squawking from under her feet into the open.  Her
eyes were dim and the light was dusk, but she soon saw that the
very old man, Hannah's husband, was sitting in a chair by a black,
empty grate and that a large stout woman was bending over him,
making signs with her hands.  But he did not look: he stared,
without any movement, in front of him.

The woman looked up and saw Mrs. Wilson.  She stared then with a
start of recognition, turned as though she would motion to the old
man, then turned again, and, with a muttered explanation, almost
hurled her stout body out of the cottage.  Mrs. Wilson could hear
her feet hastening over the cobbled path; once more there was
breathless waiting silence. . . .

The old man could not hear her, could not speak to her.  She was as
old as he, but he looked infinitely older.  He was a little man
like a grey nut, and on his head he was wearing a bright-red
nightcap.  It was of no use to waste time with him, so she fumbled
her way up the twisted wooden staircase.  Half-way up she paused:
she was suddenly very tired.  Her legs were aching and she was a
hundred years old.  The door of the room at the stair-head was open
and she went in.  A large four-poster bed with faded red hangings
occupied most of the room, placed a little unevenly on the crooked
wooden floor.  Hannah Mounsey was stretched out on the bed in her
grave-clothes, her long, thin face, with the closed eyes, looking
spiteful, because the mouth had fallen in and the sharp brown chin
stuck forward aggressively.

So Hannah was dead, an old grey bag of bones under the long white
clothes.  This was young Hannah with the flaxen hair and blue gown.
There was a faint odour in the room, and a mouse scuttered across
the floor.  Beyond the dim, diamond-paned window you could hear the
Derwent carelessly running.

Death was nothing odd to Mrs. Wilson, yet peering half blindly over
the bed she shivered.  She would not be greeted by Hannah, then;
her journey had been fruitless.  Suddenly she felt a deep sorrow
for herself.  Hannah was gone, the only one who in all these years
had sent for her.  Nobody now wanted her at all.  To pass from this
dead house to the dead house Herries was all the same.  And yet she
had the capacity still to love someone, to take trouble for someone
or something.  She was not dead, as Hannah Mounsey was, and she had
a sudden vision of herself coming out on a sunshiny morning,
sitting outside her cottage, other neighbours gathering round, all
of them chatting, laughing together.

Then something made her prick up her ears: she did not know what it
was, but it was something that caused her altogether to forget the
dead woman on the bed.  Fear leapt into her body.  Her legs were
trembling, so that she caught the post of the bed.  She had a sense
of being trapped, and yet when she listened again there was no
sound, only the careless running of the river.  Nevertheless, she
knew that there was reason for her fear.  She looked about the
room, at the looking-glass, the wooden box painted with red hearts,
a chair with a thin curved back.  She listened, her head bent
forward, her hat a little crooked.  There was a sound behind the
soundlessness: the still air was full of it, and the odour of musty
decay in the room grew with every second stronger.  She must get
out, get away, get to Herries.

Although her legs that had been so strong were now trembling like
slackening cord, she found her way down the wooden staircase.
Nothing was changed in the room below.  The old man in the red
nightcap still sat there without moving, staring in front of him.

She pulled back the door, peered out on to the ragged garden, and
beyond it the grey smooth running water, and beyond that the field
rising to Cumma Catta Wood.  Then, although no sound reached her,
she turned and stared, across the cobbled path, into a group of
faces.

Men and women, close together as though for protection, were
gathered at the end of the cobbled path.  They stood, huddled
together, not speaking, staring at her.  Although she could not see
well and was so deeply frightened that it was as though her heart
were beating in her eyes, yet certain faces were very distinct to
her.  One belonged to a large stout man in a brown wig and green
coat and breeches.  His face was red as a tomato and his eyes wide
and staring.  There was the smooth white face of a young woman; a
face with a black beard; there was a young girl's face, very fresh
and rosy, with a mole on one cheek.

She looked back behind her; there was no way out there, only a
thick rough-stone wall.  They could easily stop her if she ran in
front of the river.

She walked forward towards them, leaning on her stick because her
knees trembled so badly, and at her movement a hoarse whisper broke
the thick air:  'T'witch . . . t'witch . . . t'witch.'  She
stopped, rubbing at her eyes with her hand.  The people stood and
she stood; then, not knowing what she was doing now, she turned
back towards the cottage door.

Her movement released them.  A second later two had her, one, the
big red-faced man, dragging at her arm, the other a little man with
a hump who caught her with twisting hands round the waist.

She heard someone cry:  'A trial!  A trial!'  She tumbled on to her
knees, not for supplication but because, her legs shaking as they
did and the man dragging her, she had no strength.  She looked now
a ridiculous old woman, her hat knocked sideways, her head bent,
one thin arm up as though she were shielding herself.  But having
gone so far with her they paused.  The two men stood away from her.
The rabble--for it was now a great crowd, some having run and told
the others what was toward--broke into every kind of babel, some
shouting one thing, others another.

Meanwhile she stayed there murmuring:  'Oh, Christ save me!  Oh,
Lord Christ save me!  Oh, Christ save me!' but her thoughts were
like wild terrified birds flying from one place to another, so that
she was thinking of her knee that was cut by the sharp stone, of
Hannah lying dead, and of a great weariness that had seized her,
turning all her body to water.  But mostly she was afraid of the
large red-faced man.  Then, in the pause, life coming a little back
to her, she looked up and searched some of the faces to see whether
there was kindness in any of them.  With a horror that was the most
terrible confirmation of all her earlier fears, she realised that
all these faces had that look that so often, alone in Herries, she
had anticipated: the look of lust and hatred, curiosity and
pleasure.  And they all seemed strangers to her.

As was perhaps to be expected, it was a woman who took the next
step.  A long, thin, elderly woman whose head wagged on her neck as
though it were loosely tied there.

Crying out something in a shrill, high voice like a bird's, she
rushed forward and, bending down, struck the old woman on the
cheek.  It was as though that had been a signal.  The crowd tumbled
across the path, loosed, it seemed, by a word of command.  A funny
babble of sound came from them, not human, not animal:  'Swim her!'
'Swim her!'  'Sink or swim!'  A little girl danced delightedly
round and round, like a leaf spinning, crying:  T'witch! . . .
T'witch! . . . T'witch!'

Inside the cottage, the widower of Hannah Mounsey sat staring in
front of him, hearing nothing, seeing Hannah as a young, laughing,
fresh-faced girl.  He moved his hand a little, enclosing with his
arm her waist.

They dragged Mrs. Wilson along the path, bumping her head on the
stones, pulling her by her feet and her hands.  They tumbled her
out on to the green sward between the bridge and the river.

Then again they stood back from her.  She crouched there, her head
hanging forward.  Her hat was gone, her white hair was loose about
her face, her gown was torn, exposing her withered brown breasts;
she clasped her arms together over these.  Tears trickled down her
cheeks.

There was a desperate impulse in her now to say something, but she
could not speak.  Her terror urged her that if she could only make
them listen she would persuade them that she was no witch, but only
a harmless old woman who had never done any harm.

But she could not speak: fear constricted her throat, and her
tongue moistened her dry, dead lips.  Her other thought was that
soon they would hit her again.  She bent her head over her arms to
shelter herself from the blows.

The crowd now had no individual consciousness.  Some cried that
they must take her to the little house at the back of the village
and that she must be tried there all in proper order and decently.
But these were the minority.  The others must see her swim; then
they'd know whether she were witch or no.  Then there was a
moment's strange silence.  Every voice fell.  For an instant the
only sounds were the very distant rumbling thunder, the running
river and the old woman's crying, a whimper like a child's.

Three women ran forward.  They bent down over her; shouting they
tore her clothes from her.  They threw her clothes over their heads
into the crowd.  They tore her flesh as they dragged her things
away.  One stood up, tugging at her white hair, and so she pulled
the thin, bony body up, raising it to its knees.

Someone threw a stone.  It struck the body between the breasts.

Then the stout, red-faced man, shouting as though he were
proclaiming some great news, called for order.  Everything must be
done properly.  No one should say that they were out of justice.
He strode forward, laughing.  He caught the body in his arms, then
dropped it again as he felt in his breeches pocket, from there
brought faded green cord.  He took the body again and roughly, as
though he would tear one limb from the other, took the right foot
and fastened it to the left hand, the left foot and fastened it to
the right hand.  So trussed, she lay motionless.  Then suddenly
raising her face, which now streamed with blood, she sent forth two
screeches, wild, piercing, sounding far over the crowd out into the
village, down the road.  Then her head fell again.

Triumphantly he raised her in his arms, holding her, her head
against her knees, as a woman might an infant.  He danced her for a
moment in his arms.  Then he ran forward, the crowd shouting,
yelling, laughing, and up the bridge some children ran that
they might see better, singing and dancing:  'T'witch . . .
t'witch . . . t'witch.'

He lifted his stout arms and flung her out, high into air.  The
little white body gleamed for a moment, then fell, like a stone,
into the water.



Herries straightened his aching body and leaned on his spade.  He
had been clearing a patch of hard, stiff ground.  Later there
should be an orchard here: he saw it in his eye, the strong,
gnarled trunks, the blossom, the apples hanging in shining
clusters, the sun blinking through the leaves.

He spat on his hands and bent again to the spade.  Around him
nothing had grown well save a strange ruffian-like grass that had
sharp-pointed blades like jagged knives.  Some stunted blooms, some
ragged naked vegetables.  It was the wrong place, the wind caught
it too fiercely, there was not sun enough, the soil was too
resolutely stubborn.  Meanwhile, to the house many things should be
done.  Windows were broken, pipes had fallen; one corner towards
the hill had tumbled right in, and stones lay in a careless heap.

Nevertheless, the house looked stout and obstinate, its colour was
of a pale gentle ivory, stained here and there with orange and
pink, stains of rain and wind.  Its feet were dug resolutely in the
ground.  It was alone but not lonely, defiant but not complaining.

Herries raising himself again, turning to look at it, loved it.

He saw fat Benjamin, sweat pouring from him, hurry towards him.

'They are drowning Mrs. Wilson, by Grange Bridge, for a witch.'

He turned and listened as though he expected to hear something.
Only a faint rumble of thunder over Grasmere way.  He said nothing
to Benjamin, but dragging on his old faded long-skirted coat,
strode into the yard.  Benjamin, silent as himself, brought out his
horse.

At once, without a word to one another, they rode off along the
rough track to Grange.  Then, after a little, Benjamin, in the
husky voice which ale, weather and stoutness of body had produced
in him, explained that he had been riding back through Portinscale.
Passing Grange he had heard that the old witch Wilson was in
Mounsey's cottage, saying spells over his dead woman, and that they
were going to have her out and 'swim' her.  He had hastened on to
his master.

Herries had long been expecting this.  He did not doubt but that
Mrs. Wilson was a witch.  He had a horror of her for that.  He was
glad that now she would be out of his house.  He felt no pity, no
sense of a hunted thing, of a crowd lust-baiting.  Such feelings
were not of his time, class or education.

Had he been a magistrate and she been brought before him with
evidence of her dirty dealings, he would have condemned her without
hesitation and watched her sentence without a shudder.  But here he
also was involved.  His pride drove him to protect his house.  They
would touch one of his servants?  He would see to it.  He hated
them as he rode, the whole dirty foul rabble of them.

Then as he went something else moved in him.  Since his day in the
Honister cave a new element had stirred, a kind of softness, a glow
of unanalysed, almost unrealised kindliness.  He had not wanted it.
He would scorn it if he dragged it into day-light.

But he did not drag it.  It stayed within him like a secret fire
that burnt stealthily without his feeding it.  Every little thing
was happier to him now than it had been.

His gaze softened, even now as he stared through the trees at the
river, pounded up the hill, saw the humped bridge and the crowd at
the water's edge.

He leapt off his horse and came down to them.  He spoke to no one.
As he came to the stream he saw an old white bundle of flesh with
hair that streamed behind it rise, eddy in a little pool, sink
again.

He plunged in, waded up to his thighs.  The crowd said no word.
The body rose again right at his hand.  He plunged his arms in and
caught it, dragging it to his breast.  The head wagged against his
coat.

He turned, standing and looking at them all for a moment, then
breasted his way back to the bank.  On dry ground he felt his hands
chill against the bare flesh, so he laid the sodden body delicately
on the ground, took off his faded coat, wrapped it round, then,
holding the little corpse like a child against his shirt, strode up
the hill, all the people silently withdrawing from him.

He mounted his horse and rode away.



THE ROCKING WOOD


As they rode through the rocking wood, the wind tearing at their
heels, Herries talked to David.

It was the wild stormy afternoon of Friday, 8th November, 1745.  It
had been Herries' suggestion that they should be riding to
Carlisle.  For months now he had been longing for this.

In the Scots Magazine for July, at the barber's in Keswick, David
had read:

'There have lately been several rumours of some designs upon
Scotland or Ireland by the Pretender's eldest son.'  Then, a month
later, at that same barber's, it was said that there had been a
landing in Scotland.

Now this very morning Keswick was frantically buzzing.  The rebels
were in Jedburgh.  At any moment they would be South. . . .

Francis Herries had shown no interest.  His mind was elsewhere.
David even was surprised at his own indifference.  His principal
thought was of Father Roche.  After all these years his chance had
come!  After all these years!  David was a child again riding under
Cat Bells, his body tight between Roche's thighs, and that
beautiful, persuasive voice in his ears:  'Even as our Lord
suffered . . .'  But he was practical now, was David, a grave
and serious man with a liking for the steady security of the
reigning dynasty.  He had been prospering lately.  He had bought
land near Cockermouth.  He had an interest in two vessels trading
from Liverpool.  There was a farm at the back-end of Skiddaw
that he might buy if things went well.  He had no hunger for
rebellions. . . .

But the romantic soul still breathed close to his heart.  The
memory of Roche could stir it, some woman one day, but most of all,
now and ever, his love for his father, this strange man, removed in
temperament, thought, passion so far from him, so mysterious and
alone.  Of late so silent, but united to him as no other human
being was united.

Therefore when, quite suddenly, in the dark hall at Herries last
evening, his father had said:  'Shall we ride to-morrow to
Carlisle?' David had at once agreed.  No more than that.  No reason
given.  In all these years at Herries David had been only once to
Carlisle, his father twice.  But it seemed that now, riding alone
together, they might come to some fresh intimacy.  It must come
from Herries.  David was a man of few words and deep shyness in
close relations.  There was something, too, in the isolation of
Herries that drove speech deep down.  They talked less and less in
Herries.

They were silent out of Keswick until they rode into the woods
below Skiddaw.  A terrific wind was surging among the trees; all
the wood was rocking, and light mists spun and shifted over the two
humps of the mountain-top that were powdered with snow thin like
smoke.  Beyond the wood Bassenthwaite Water was whipped into curls
of white and an angry spray.

Herries began to speak, his thought that had followed its own
secret course ever since they left Herries breaking into spoken
word:  '. . . When I came to the river's edge she was bobbing, a
white bundle, in the water.  I strode in and picked her out, and
they stood there while I carried her off.  At that moment, David,
when I held her wet and sodden against my body I felt something new
in me.  I had been coming to that as I had been coming to many
things through these years. . . .  She cried against my heart
although she was dead.  She cried something, telling me a road to
go.  She was a witch and foul-living.  In all those years that she
was with us, David, I don't doubt but that she was evil.

'But she had been alone as I also had been alone.  They hated her
as they hated me.  Not that I care at all for their hatred, but
there was a bond in our loneliness.  I had always known it.'  (He
thought, as he went on:  Why am I telling him this?  He can never
understand that loneliness.  He will never feel this thing that I
feel.)  '. . . I have had to bear my difference all my life, David,
as she had to bear it.  By no choice and no wish.  I have no faith
in God.  I have never had; but for those of us who are different
there is a compulsion to listen that is almost a faith.  Nature, I
suppose, chooses once and again to separate a few from the rest.
She understands them and speaks to them.  But why should we who are
thus separated expect human nature to understand?  Human nature
must protect itself.  I perceive that it must be so.  Human nature
is narrower than Nature, less wise and less secure.

'We who are different cannot come into that general company,
however we may desire it.  It is our lot.  Myself, I do not grumble
at it.  What have I ever done worse than these others, than Pomfret
or Harcourt?  But every dice has been loaded against me, every act
removed me further. . . .  Nothing strange there, since it is
understood.  Think you that she was a witch, David?'

Through the groaning of the boughs and the rocking wind David's
voice came out sturdily:

'Most certainly she was a witch, father.'

'Yes . . . most certainly.  They were cruel because they were
afraid, and I was compassionate because I, too, have suffered.  Do
you think it has meant nothing to me that I could not be like other
men?  I, too, have my pride, my sense of honour, my friendliness,
although it does not do to speak of these things.  But with them
all, my brothers, my wife, my mistresses, my children, that final
intimacy has been forbidden.  Only with my own kind could I be
intimate, and I could not find my kind.  Often I have wished to put
my case' (Herries thought:  I am putting my case to him now and he
does not understand it at all, not a word of it), 'but my case has
not been their case.  I am, in some sense, it must seem to them,
against Nature, but it is not against Nature but rather against
human nature.

'Nevertheless, there is compensation in loneliness.  I am growing
to find that.  There is strength in it, and a compelled wisdom.  I
learnt that from the witch.  The evil that she knew was not so
weighty as the strength that she caught from her isolation.  They
might stone her, but their stones would not bring her into their
company nor would they stay her.  Nothing can stay us, no physical
death.'  (He smiled to himself thinking:  All these words go to the
wind.  He has not caught any of them.)

And David, stolid on his horse, his back broad as a wall, his head
finely set, was thinking:  'He is talking to me now as man to man.
He has never before done that.  But this talk of feelings: I can't
be with him there.  What's the use of it?  I love him whatever he
is, different or no, but it's uncomfortable to speak openly about
love. . . .  Easier here, though, with this wind blowing and the
trees creaking.  If the Calliope does well this voyage I could pay
a price for that farm.  It will mean leaving Herries.  It must come
to that one day.  But not yet.  I must take Deb with me and that
would leave him alone.  I can't leave him alone; and he wouldn't go
from Herries.  But one day if I marry, which I shall . . .'

He felt the cold rain on his face and the wind swooping down and
then up again.  He threw back his head, stretched his great chest,
turned to his father, smiling:

'Maybe, father,' he said, 'you force yourself to be different by
thinking that you are.  Folks take one for what one says one is.
You have always refused them, thought poorly of them, frightened
them maybe.  Will you never leave Herries, father?'

'Leave Herries?'

'Aye.  Maybe I'll buy that farm at the back of Skiddaw--
Penhays. . . .  John Tennant and I have done well lately with the
Calliope and the Peggy Anne.  If this Pretender doesn't upset the
world. . . . Herries is a hard place, father.  No soil, no sun,
rock and mire. They have this thought of you in the valley and
will never be rid of it.

'But at Penhays you could have your own land and work it, and it
would be brighter for Deb. . . .'  He waited, then continued more
shyly.  'Uncle Pomfret loves you, father, at heart.  I know he
does.  Aunt Jannice is sick now and has little say.  My dear cousin
Raiseley is in London.  If we were at Penhays we would be more in
the world.  At Herries . . .'  He broke off, afraid suddenly, as he
had so often before been afraid, of his father's anger.  Some word
would be spoken and all the good of their talk be gone, and they
would ride on in offended silence.  David had his own temper in his
own way and it showed most easily with his father, simply because
he loved him most.

But to-day he need not have been afraid.  His father turned to him
with a strangely childlike, ingenuous gaze as though he were
David's junior and had been asking advice from him.

'Herries is a bitter place for you and Deborah.  I've always known
it.  But for me there is none other nor ever can be.  I'm held
there and it's for ever.  But you will go, of course, when the
right time comes.  And, for that, I may not be alone.  It may be
that, one day, I shall marry again.'

The rocking wind, as though driven by that word to a frenzy of
derision, cracked in his ear:  'Marry again!  He'll marry again!
Crack!  Crack!  Crack!  He'll marry again!'  David brushed the rain
from his eyes.  Marry again!  He thought that his father had done
with women.  For a long time now there had been no sign of any
traffic with them.

'Well,' he said, 'have you seen a woman?'

'Yes . . . there is someone.  She is a child.  She could only need
me through weariness and fear of loneliness.  But I am in love
again.  Again!  I have never loved before.  I am very happy in the
mere thought of it.'

David had an instant of deep comprehension and of an aching
affection for his father.  With a swift vision of imagination, born
only through love and exceedingly rare with him, he saw his father
as he had been, so handsome and grand.  As he was now, his face
disfigured, his body gaunt and bent with digging and grubbing. . . .
Could a woman care for him now?  A sense of his father's isolation
came over him as it had never done before.

Now, however, they had come out of the woods and were in open
country across which the icy rain was blowing in furious sweeps.
On a good day a great stretch of land spread grandly to the Firth
and the hills behind it, but now everything was blotted out.

For Herries, although to-day he could not see, this coming into the
open was like walking out of a house and closing the door behind
him.  That was why he chose this route, because he loved it.  The
regular riding path was by Threlkeld.  That little world of hills
and lakes was gone in an instant, folded away.  On a clear day you
could look back and see Skiddaw, the Helvellyn range, the group
above Stye Head, Grasmoor and the rest lying gently like lions
above the land, their heads resting on their paws.  One step and
you were in a new world, a world as romantic perhaps in spirit as
that other, but not this, as beautiful but not with this beauty.
That odd sense of magic, so that with one foot forward you lost it.
He would always, on reaching this spot, know a little shiver of
fear that when he came back again that lovely country would be
gone, a mirage dreamed of by him and by him perhaps alone.  But to-
day in his head he carried with him the rocking wood.  The trees
creaked around him long after he had left them.

The wind fell: the rain drew off: the air was colder.  The thick
sky watched them maliciously and once and again sent down a flake
of snow to spatter their eyes.

They had come into new country in another sense.  The cottages and
farms that they passed gave them a consciousness of agitation.
Women stood at the doors.  A man called after them some question.
A horseman rode past them furiously towards Carlisle.  Unconsciously
themselves they drove their horses faster, the mud scattering up
about them as they went.

'The Pretender may be in Carlisle ere this,' said David suddenly.
'What then?'

'We'll ride back again,' said Herries.

'What do you think, father?  Has he a hope?  In Keswick they wished
him back in France, to a man they did.  Disturbing their affairs.
It's odd to remember it, but I thought it a fine thing as a boy
when Father Roche spoke of it.  Now, because I may buy a farm, I
see other things.  Is Roche in Carlisle, do you think?'

'Yes, so I fancy.  When I was a boy at Seddon, in '15, thirty years
ago, there was a peacock screamed under the hedge by the pantries.
I thought him the finest, most defiant bird in the kingdom, and
when they were out in '15 he was like the Old Pretender, that bird.
I had a fancy about him that if their foray failed he'd die; and,
sure enough, he died.  Died of spoilt pride.  I've always thought
rebellion a grand thing, but now I don't know. . . .  I love this
ground and the men on it, although they'd thank me little if they
knew it.  If Charles Edward has his way, every field will be blood-
stained.  Either way my peacock dies. . . .  No, he can't win.
He's too late.  And if he wins it can be only for a moment.
Hanover's a hog by my peacock, but he's made his sty of our home,
and it's quieter for him to lie there.  I told Roche once that the
notion of beauty to a plain people like the English is too
upsetting.  They stand by their stomachs.  They are poets only by
protest.'

The scene cleared: the sky lifted and the snow fell faster.  A man
on a horse passed them, then drew up and waited for them.

He was a short fat man on a short fat horse, hunched forward rather
absurdly, not a good rider.  He had a dark-crimson coat with silver
buttons: his face was round, red and anxious, rather a baby face
with open wondering eyes and startled eyebrows.

'I beg your pardon, gentlemen--'

They drew up their horses.

'Are you for Carlisle?'

David said that they were.

'What news have you?'

'None.'

'Ah, things are bad.'  The little man looked at them beseechingly,
as much as to say:  'Be kind to me.  Tell me some good news, even
though it's lies.  Tell me anything, only that I may calm down and
regain my dignity.'  It was plain enough that he was frightened of
Francis Herries, who, straight on his horse, his scarred face
showing pale and impervious under his broad black hat, was silent
and grim enough.  David, with his health and ruddiness and open
smile, reassured him.  He confided in him.

'You see, gentlemen, I'm riding out of my way, but I had the news
at Sockbridge last night that the rebels were in Jedburgh, and that
they were already moving South.  My God, they may be in Carlisle at
this instant, and my poor wife and Hetty . . . I said to Mr.
Wordsworth--Mr. Richard Wordsworth, Superintendent of the Lowther
Estates, I was to-day staying under his roof, my worthy friend;
maybe you know him, gentlemen?--'Sdeath, Mr. Wordsworth, I said, it
can't be that they are in Carlisle already, and our house in
English Street, the very centre of the town, my wife sick of a
nervous complaint these last five years, ever since William Gray,
the best surgeon in the whole of Carlisle, gentlemen, cut her for
the bladder.  And it isn't as though Hetty had a head on her
shoulders neither.  The sight of a soldier makes a fool of the
child, and these breechless Highlanders are beyond law, as we all
know well enough.  Eh, gentlemen, forgive this uneasiness, but I
fancied that you'd have some good news, maybe of a defeat or a rout
and the Pretender taken, or driven back to France again, where,
Heaven is witness, it were better for him to have stayed.'

The words came with panting eagerness, but there was a childish
simplicity and good nature behind them that won David, who was as
childish, simple and good-natured as himself.

'I fear, sir,' he replied, 'we can give you little comfort.  We are
riding from Keswick where we had only the news that you yourself
have had.  We know nothing of what is happening in Carlisle.'

The little stout gentleman looked anxiously about him.  'It's
cold,' he said, 'and the snow is in our faces.  Would you give me
the courtesy of your company?  With every step we may be meeting
danger.  I am no coward, but I will confess that this news has
quite unnerved me.  It is only what I have been expecting these
thirty years, but that it should drop on to us when I was away from
home and my wife none too well . . .'

'Certainly we will keep company,' said David cheerfully.  'I think
you are unduly apprehensive, sir.  We should have heard, I am sure,
were the Pretender already in Carlisle.  I scarcely think that the
Royal troops will allow him so much advantage.  If one may go by
the common feeling in Keswick the sense of the country is against
him, and a company of raw Highlanders is hardly a match for an
English army.  Moreover, the farther they come from their own
Highlands the less stomach they'll have for the job.'

This was the kind of comfort that the little man was needing, and
in return for it, as they went forward, he gave them all his
history.  His name was Cumberlege, John Cumberlege of the Moor
House, English Street, Carlisle, and he was a corn-dealer like his
father before him.  He had had three children, and two had died in
infancy, one of the staggers and one of the croup.  He had been
twice married, and Hetty, his only child, was of the second
marriage.  He was of good standing in Carlisle, and numbered among
his friends there the worthy Dr. Waugh; young Mr. Aglionby, Mayor
of the City; Thomas Pattinson, Deputy-Mayor; and Colonel Durand,
Commander of the City.  They might see from this how safely they
might trust themselves to his company.  He had also much to say of
his late host, Mr. Richard Wordsworth, who had but recently been
appointed Receiver-General of the County of Westmorland.

Altogether, as they jogged along, he recovered in this general
recital of his famous friends a good deal of his natural confidence
and genial humour.

David was glad of the little man's companionship.  Francis Herries
had fallen into one of his grim and arrogant moods again and would
vouchsafe not a word.  The afternoon was early dark, and there was
a spectral air over the scene.

Indeed, the uncertainty of the situation influenced David in spite
of himself.  Moving thus through the cold dusk over a flat and
silent land one could not be sure that at any moment one might not
stumble upon the whole of the Prince's army.  Where were they?  How
had they fared?  It might be that this adventurer was truly
destined for some glorious success and England would fall into his
hands like a fine plum?  Then back the Catholics would come again
and with them the French dominance, and who knows after that the
sequel?  At this all the Herries English rose rebellious in David's
soul.  He wanted no French power here nor Catholic either.  It was
at this moment, perhaps, little Cumberlege pressing near to him,
the few chill snowflakes striking his cheek and a great silence on
every side of him, that he knew once and for all what he was.
Scottish ancestry or no, he was English Herries.  Men and women for
two hundred years afterwards were to have some consequence in their
lives from this moment of conviction.

Little Cumberlege asked them where they were lodging in Carlisle.

David told him that they had no settled place.

'Then, sirs, you must come to us.  To be frank with you, I shall
relish your company.  There's no man in the house but the boy
Jeremiah, and he's a witling with a wall-eye.  I only took him to
pleasure his father, who did me a service in '32, the year they
hanged Humpy Dillon for sheep-stealing.  You're a man of your
inches, sir,' he added, looking appreciatively up at David, 'and
might render us a service at a dangerous pinch.'

David looked at his father, who said no word.  He smiled at the
eager excited little man, the skirts of whose crimson coat stuck
out from his fat buttocks as though with an indignant life of their
own.

'For to-night at least,' David said, 'we'll take you at your word
and thank you.'

A strange world had now come up about them, for the wind had
dropped, the snow ceased to fall, and instead a fog rolled in thick
grey folds across the fields.  This fog was to take a great part in
the alarms and fears of the coming days: many, looking back
afterwards and telling their story, gave it a personal form and
body as though it were a creeping devil of an especial malignancy
created by the Pretender himself.

David, who was never given to vague imagination, himself felt it an
oddly alive thing.  It came creeping towards them, now slipping
along the road on its belly, licking the horses' hoofs, then
raising a white swollen arm, wreathing their necks with it, then
slipping away again, mounting into a wall in front of them, closing
about them, stifling them, blinding them, dropping again to a thin
shallow vapour that swathed the hedges with spider-web.

For Herries, it filled his dreams.  For half an hour now he had not
realised where they were nor cared.  He rode forward, possessed by
his vision.  Since the word 'Carlisle' had, carelessly perhaps,
passed Mirabell's lips it had been his one thought to go there.
But with that burning impulse came also the resolve not to be
defeated by it, because he felt that, let him surrender to it, and
he would be beaten.  Some prevision of the future told him that
this journey taken through the fog, into the Lord knew what, was
the beginning of a pursuit for him that was far more than physical,
and, being spiritual, must fail in its aim.

He stared through the fog, her body, her soul, dancing in front of
him.  A child who had given him no single thought, a vagabond,
ruthless and heartless perhaps, intolerant certainly of any of the
bonds that he would put upon her.  But all his history had led him
to this, his rebellions, scorns, arrogances, dreams, self-
contempts, Alice Press and the like, his wife Margaret, every woman
whose tongue he had ever twisted beneath his own led him to this.
He wanted nothing for himself, only to be good to her, to know that
she was happy, that she had what she wanted.  That she had what she
wanted!  Ironic, ironic desire, for it would not be himself that
she longed for. . . .  And so he rode on.



They came upon Carlisle quite suddenly and were challenged at the
gate.

Carlisle had at this time a population of some four thousand
persons, the majority of these living within its walls.

The Castle Walls and Citadel had still their original force: the
Castle was held by a nonresident governor and a company of
invalided veterans: the city gates were shut at the firing of the
evening gun.  Nevertheless, its life as a centre of warfare was now
still and dead.  The union of the kingdoms of Scotland and England
had silenced the Border warfare, turned guns into knitting needles
and cannon-balls into peppermint rock.  Here, perhaps, lay the root
of the Prince's advantage, that any Scottish invasion of England
was by now undreamt of in Carlisle and the town was in no way
prepared for it.

On this evening the bustle at the gate was tremendous.  The Herries
would most certainly not have been admitted had they been alone,
but their little friend, Mr. Cumberlege, had not said too much
about his popularity in Carlisle.  Especially did a large, pompous
and terribly flustered military officer appear delighted to see
him, even to the extent of embracing him.  He was not, Mr.
Cumberlege explained, sotto voce, a real and proper military
gentleman, but rather a volunteer, in his time and natural state a
wealthy bachelor with a taste for wine and a talent for the game of
bowls, moreover a relation of good Doctor Bolton, the Dean of
Carlisle.  He had in his private garden a fountain with a naked
mermaid who blew water out of her tail, considered by many a
marvel.

At the moment he was thinking of neither bowls nor mermaid, but was
in a dreadful flutter of indecision.

Scouting parties had been sent out to discover, if they might, the
Rash Adventurer's (such was the title decided on by those who
wanted to land safely in the ultimate result) whereabouts.  That
afternoon, so Mr. Bolton told Cumberlege, Lieutenant Kilpatrick had
advanced beyond Ecclefechan and sighted a body of rebels.  A
Scottish quartermaster, seeking quarters for his troops in
Ecclefechan, had been seized and was now in Carlisle Castle.  That
was as much as was known for the present.

A strange contrast was to be found in Mr. Bolton's manner, he
suddenly rapping out most authoritatively a military order, then
sinking his voice to a nervous, confidential murmur with John
Cumberlege, who was as apprehensive as himself.  They made a funny
enough pair, their contrast in size, their bodies starting at every
sound, and once when a horseman clattered over the cobbles suddenly
clutching one another as though for protection.

They rode up English Street to Cumberlege's house, which was a neat
little Georgian building with a brass knocker on the door showing a
sea-fish swallowing a trident, and a sundial on the lawn by the
street, and a fine little gate with small dragons on either side of
it.  A good light burning in a cresset over the door blew in the
wind.  The street was deserted.  The fog had cleared, and the sky
was full of cold and glittering stars.

'Come in.  Come in, gentlemen,' said Cumberlege, looking about him
before he opened his front door as though he scented a Highlander
round every corner.  'It's a poor hospitality I shall offer you,
taking me unexpected and my wife an invalid, but--' and here he
dropped his voice still further, 'there's wine in the house.  Wine
too good for the Highland rabble that's coming upon us.'  And then
to himself, as he unfastened his door:  'Poor Bolton!  Poor Bolton!
I'll wager he wishes himself back safe with his mermaid.'

Half an hour later they were seated in Cumberlege's gay little
dining-room, a beef pie, an apple tart and some of the finest
Madeira in front of them.  It was a handsome little room with dark-
red wallpaper hung with scenes from Mr. Gay's masterpiece, 'The
Beggar's Opera,' and a handsome oil painting of Mr. Cumberlege's
grandfather in a green coat and ruffles, over the mantelpiece.  A
noble old gentleman with a face like a codfish and a neck so thick
that it was no wonder to hear, later in the evening, that he had
died of an apoplexy.  Silver candlesticks, a glass bowl of oranges
and figs, a fire in the hearth, the curtains warmly drawn, and best
of all Cumberlege's daughter Hetty, who was as pretty a dark child
as David had ever seen.

Two things were very plainly visible: one that to John Cumberlege
this daughter was the life and light of his being.  He sat with one
stout arm round her and fed her with figs as though she had been a
child in arms, his eyes moving ever and again about her pretty face
with its nose a little snub, its eyelashes beautifully dark and
long, its rounded chin and soft cheeks, as though all his happiness
were there.

The other evident fact was that the child had fallen in love with
David at sight.  She sat there shyly smiling at him, her cheeks
flushed, her eyes burning with pleasure and adventure.  She was in
a dress of white calico sprayed with pink roses, as David was long
after to remember.  A pretty face was a pretty face to David.  Many
times of late he had thought that he must fall in love, but Keswick
did not offer so many varieties.  Now he wondered whether his fate
were not here.  It was not, but it was near enough to make his
heart beat, his tongue stammer and his big body move clumsily as
though, in spite of itself, it must be impelled towards her.

John Cumberlege too, perhaps, as he looked across the table at
David, had his dreams.  It was true that he knew nothing about
these visitors of his, and the elder was alarming in his
taciturnity and grim seclusion, but you could not look at the
younger Herries and doubt him.  Honesty was in every glance, every
breath, simplicity, a courageous rectitude.

For Hetty Cumberlege this threat of the Scottish invasion was a
grand and enchanting game.  Was it true that the Prince was the
most beautiful young man?  When he came to the city would there be
routs and balls as she had heard there had been in Edinburgh?  For
herself she didn't care what her father thought; she was all for
seeing him, and it would be a wicked shame were he stopped before
he got to Carlisle.  But he would not be.  He was already there.
He had been at Ecclefechan that day.  Perhaps to-morrow he would be
in the city, and if there was a ball she had no dress fit to wear.
But oh, she was glad her dear father was safe (this with an
especial hug of her father, a blushing glance at David).  Mother
had been in a great way all day and hadn't had her afternoon sleep
and had been bled again this evening, and she had run to the window
and the door a thousand times to see whether he were not coming,
and would there be firing and the windows broken and people
wounded?

Why shouldn't the Prince come into the town if he wanted to?  That
was the feeling of most of the militia anyway, and it was only that
old jackanapes Colonel Durand who was for everybody fighting.  She
was sure that no one wanted to kill anyone else, the idea was
perfectly horrid.  And as the Madeira mounted into David's head and
the weariness bred of his long forty-mile ride dazzled his eyes, it
seemed to him that he was already kissing those blushing cheeks and
stroking ever so gently that bare and gleaming shoulder.

Francis Herries said no word beyond mere politeness.  He could not.
He saw the figures of little Cumberlege and his daughter, the
silver candlesticks, the glittering glass about the fruit, the
portrait of old Cumberlege senior, in a thin and gauzy dream.  He
was here in Carlisle, and every beat of blood in him urged him,
weary though he was, to go out and search for her.  It seemed to
him that there was more than mere vague urgency in this.  Opposite
him where he sat was a small round mirror with a dark oak frame.
Its glass was blistered and cracked with age, so that the candle-
flame flickered and redoubled in it, and the colours of the room,
dark crimson, white and green, were a blurred and mellowed fog.
Staring in it, half-asleep maybe, the voices coming to him with a
faint chirping hum, he seemed to see that child Mirabell step into
the mirror, break the misted colours, turn to him that strange,
cold, indifferent face, gravely surveying him, oddly and harshly
inviting him.

He pushed his napkin and wine-glass from him and asked his host to
excuse him while he found a little air in the street.  His head was
hot and he must cool it before he went to his bed.  He was aware
that they felt, all three of them, a certain freedom from restraint
at his departure.

In the street the wind had now quite fallen and only, as though
dropped by the multitudinous shining stars, thin flakes of snow
fell lazily as though they were too indifferent to reach the
ground.  No one was about.  There were few lights in the windows.
The sense of suspense might have been his own imagining, but it
seemed to him that behind the doors and the windows folk were
listening.  He could hear the hearts throbbing, could see the eyes
straining, and over his head and about his body the stems and
branches of the rocking wood seemed still to be beating and
groaning.  He had been in that wood all day.  He was not clear of
it yet.

As though led by a guide at his elbow he turned up a dark and
narrow street that was as silent as an empty pocket.  On his right
there was a light blowing above the name, 'The Silver Horn.'  Here
as well as another place.  He pushed back the heavy wooden door and
stumbled on to the uneven stone floor of an inn-room filled with a
rough glare of men, women, smoke, thickly smelling of dried fish,
tobacco and stale drink.

He sat down at a long deal table, men, countrymen, farmers, making
easy way for him, too deeply intent on their talk to consider him.
A thin wasp of a serving-man brought him some ale; a heavy thumping
clock, hiccupping once and again as though it had taken in the
drink as steadily as its customers, tick-tocked just above his
head; a parrot, whose bright-green colour he could just see swaying
on a perch through the smoke, called out in a thick husky caw; and
still through it all the wind and creaking of the morning's wood
kept him company.

He discovered soon enough that there was only one topic and
that the natural one.  Where was the Pretender and where his
Highlanders?  Even now they might be at the walls.  What would
Durand do?  What Pattinson the Deputy-Mayor, young Aglionby being
safely away in the country somewhere?  What would the Dean and
Chapter do?  What would the Cumberland and Westmorland Militia do?
What was everyone going to do?  Were they all to be blown to bits?
What was Wade going to do?  What was the King in London doing that
he hadn't sent any reinforcements?  Didn't he care what happened to
old Carlisle, and if he didn't why should old Carlisle care what
happened to the King?

Ah! but those Highlanders!  Here fear crept through the smoke,
skins went shivering, the tick-tock of the old clock took on a
deeper tone.  Those Highlanders. . . .  Hadn't you heard, then, of
what they'd been doing in Edinburgh and Glasgow, of the women
they'd been raping and the destruction they'd been causing?  The
story went tonight that back at Kelso Spital they had shot all the
sheep, hanged all the farmers, drunk the warm blood of the sheep
like so many cannibals.  There was the tale, too, of the farm-wife
at Langholm who refused to tell the rebels where her husband had
hid the horses and cattle, she lying in bed with a new-born child.
She refused, even though the rebel officer threatened her with
cutting down the beam that supported the roof of the farm-house.
He cut away at the beam, but it stoutly withstood, and the house
was spared.

And what of Carlisle?  What is the good of holding out, the Castle
as rotten as it is, the Gate not covered by any outworks, the Wall
over the Lady's Walk very low with neither parapet nor flank to
defend it, the old gateway not defended by any flank, and we having
nothing to oppose seven thousand rebels save a few invalids? . . .
Surely better, then, to let the Pretender come in under guarantee
of decent behaviour on both sides.  Hick, hick, hick, stammered the
clock.  It was then that, staring through the smoke into the light
of the roaring fire, Herries saw Mirabell.

This gave him no sense of surprise nor question of undue
coincidence.  It seemed to him the most natural thing in the world
that she should be sitting there, and his only sensation was one of
great happiness, a happiness oddly tranquil and secure.  He had at
first no ambition to speak to her, only to sit there and know that
she was alive and in the same room with him.

He could not, from where he was, see her very clearly.  She was
wearing an amber-coloured hat with a feather in it and a deep dark-
red cloak with a high collar; he could see, from where he was, that
the cloak was faded and old.  He could not deny but that she seemed
bedraggled and shabby.  He could not distinguish her features, only
sufficient to know that it was surely she, but indeed where else in
the world was there hair of such a colour?  It was piled up,
burning between the tawny colour of her hat and her white neck, a
fire in smoke and under creaking windy trees.

He was half-asleep, perhaps, with weariness, or the heat of the
room bemused him, but after a little while it appeared that he and
she were quite alone in the wood and that they rode forward
silently to some unknown destination.

After a while he wished to see her more clearly, rose from where he
was, pushed through the farmers and countrymen and came to another
place across the room.  He was sitting in a corner now, near the
fire, quite close to the bright-green parrot; it was fiercely hot,
but he did not feel the heat.

He was beside her now, and at once his heart was shot through by a
sharp and intolerable agony.  That was no exaggerated figure of
speech.  It was like that.  He felt the pain before he realised the
cause.  This cause was that, beside her, his arm around her red
cloak, was a young man, a fellow of little more than twenty
perhaps, yet a boy with a boy's fresh colour, a boy's laugh, a
boy's bright eyes.  Those eyes were fixed on her and her eyes on
his.  That they loved one another, and to a pitch that excluded the
scene and everything in it, was clear to any casual onlooker.  How
sharply, deeply clear to Herries, in whose ears might be echoing
yet the crash of the derisive boughs.  'Crack-crack!  Crack-crack!
He means to be married!  He means to be married!'

As he watched he saw her hand come out and take the broad brown
hand of the young man.  Then she smiled at him, a shy, delicate,
happy child's smile that drew her, although they did not move, deep
into the young man's heart.

Her note for Herries had always been her remoteness; he had never
seen her intimate with nor close to anything.  He had never dared
to imagine how she would look when she was in love.  His only hope
had been that she had never known what that was, and so he had
wondered whether he might not be the first to teach her.  For he
had taught in his day many lessons in love.  Now he knew that that
would never be.

When some control came back to him he studied the boy carefully.
He was dressed roughly in a dark coarse coat and homespun breeches,
and gaitered to the thigh for riding.  His body was slim and well-
formed, he carried his head high: everything about him was honest
and upright, strong and smiling.  He was a proper man.  It was
after concluding this (and his pride allowed him to flinch from no
challenging comparisons) that Herries noticed a third figure.  This
was a thick, short, black-bearded fellow who sat behind the pair,
swinging his legs from the table-end.  His face was covered with a
shaggy black beard and his hair lay in a black tangle over his
forehead.  There was black hair on the back of his hands.  He was
dressed soberly and cleanly, and his large, steadily open, black
eyes never left the face of the girl.

Once and again he said a word to her, but when he spoke it did not
rouse the girl, who smiled at the boy as though it were he who had
spoken.  But they were all three of them very quiet, not joining at
all in the conversation around them, making a little world and
history apart by themselves.

For Herries it was as though a new fresh chapter of his life had
opened.  When we fall in love the desire in us is so strong that we
argue a like desire in the other, and stay cheated so long as we
may.  Well, his cheat was over, but he was in no kind of way
released from her.  He realised at once that he was only the more
strongly bound because he would never forget now how she looked
when she was in love, and would never again be able to defend
himself against her with a sense of her remoteness.

Often since the day in the cave, lying on his bed, working in the
field, riding solitary up Stonethwaite, standing on Esk Hause and
seeing the valleys glitter and smile beneath him, he had wondered
how she would look at him the first time that she knew she could
trust him.  For that was what he had meant to do; by great
kindliness and patience to make her trust him as she had never
trusted anyone before.  Now he knew that that would never happen.

He saw, too, how all his actions since the day in the cave had been
for her.  He had never once been free of her.  When he had taken
the witch from the river and held her to his heart it had been this
child that he had held.  All the new compassion and softness that
had lately been growing in him so that the sterner, more ironical
part of him had been frightened at the change and tried to drive it
away, all this had been from her.  It had been as though he had
been educating himself out of the nastiness and pride of his
earlier life, so that he might be ready for her when she came to
him: and now she would never come.

She would never come.  The trees of the wood gathered about his
head very thickly and now with silence because the wind had died.
The green parrot swung from bough to bough watching him with beady
eyes.  Then he heard her speak, and her voice was as deeply
familiar to him as though he had been in company with it all his
life.

She spoke to the parrot.

'For a penny,' she said,' I'd wring your neck, you evil bird.'

The young man, looking at her as though he would drown her in his
love, answered in a voice that was roughly boyish and eager:

'I shall buy the bird for you.'

And she answered, holding his hand very tightly:  'Two is company.'

The black-bearded man behind them swung off the table and stood,
thick and stocky, looking up at the parrot.  He went up to it and
stroked its neck.  The parrot bent its head, eyeing him obliquely
with a beady eye.

Herries had seen enough.  He went out, into the street.



SIEGE IN FOG


Herries woke early the next morning, and under a sharp agitation of
disturbance and fear.  The room in which he was lying was foreign
and strange to him.  His eyes slowly picked up one thing after
another; the faded green hangings of his bed, the uneven boarding
of the floor, a print hanging against the dark panel of the wall,
showing apprentices playing football in the Strand, and another
with a crudely coloured presentation of Bear-Baiting.  On an old
chest under the window was a bowl of thick green glass, rough in
texture so that the colours of the green glass seemed to shift and
change.

The light from the window was dim.  There was no sound anywhere.

Where then was he?  With a rush as of charging horses, events,
pictures, words came back to him.  He sprang from his bed as
though, at once, he would hasten out into the street and start
about his affairs.  He went to the little window and pushed it
back.  A thin, wet, wispy fog met him.  He was in the house of Mr.
Cumberlege of Carlisle.  He was also in the 'Silver Horn,' and
close to him Mirabell Starr was looking into the young man's eyes,
while the green parrot rocked on its perch.  And he was in the
ground behind Herries, digging while Glaramara humped its back over
him and the light came down in misty ladders over Stye Head, and he
was rowing slowly from Lord's Island, while the water slipped in
ripples of steel from hill to hill.

He passed the back of his hand across his eyes, pulling himself
together.  He was here in Carlisle.  The Prince and his Highlanders
. . . Mirabell . . . this green bowl above whose colours the thin
fog shifted. . . .  His hand touched his bare chest and felt for
the chain and the wooden cross that Mirabell's mother had left for
him.  He had not been without it since that day, and now, as his
hand touched it, a new determination came to him: that he would
find the child and talk to her and see how he might serve her.  She
was not for him and now would never be, but he might help her.

He stretched his legs and his arms, smiled; his face just then was
kindly, not sardonic, but a little old and rough, battered and torn
above his body, for his skin was fair and delicate like a woman's.

The door creaked open, and David came in.  He was in an excitement
unusual for his calm temper.  He was fully dressed.

'Father, what are we going to do?  They say this morning the town's
under siege.  There's a fine to-do, and half the city's downstairs
swearing the militia are going to give in before they are fairly
started, and the other half's in the street screaming about the
Highlanders, and there's a fog so thick you can't see the back of
your hand.  Are we going to stay here?  I doubt if we can get out
now if we want to.'

'Of course we stay,' said Herries, sitting on the bed's end and
swinging his bare legs.

'What did you hear last night when you were in the town?'

'Oh, naught, but that a parrot has green eyes.'

'Old Cumberlege loves me like a son this morning.  He's plucky
enough for himself, but his lady and his lady's woman are raped
already by bony Highlanders in their imagination.  They can't tell
whether to be sorry or glad.  The girl's brave, though.  She calls
me her brother.'

David grinned and put his arm around his father's bare neck.

'So we're to stay here?'

'Of course we're to stay, seeing we can't get out.'

'But who are we for?  The Prince and his Highlanders?'

'For ourselves.'  Herries stood up, stretching his arms.  'We're in
a green city with warlocks and witches.  Take care of the witch
downstairs, David.  Or love her if you wish to.  A fog's the place
for true love.  My stomach's empty.  Is there any food in this
siege, or do we live from now on upon snails and puppies' tails?
And water.  There's a tin basin here, but no water.'

'I'll fetch you some.'

David returned with a bucket of water.  He watched his father
bathe.  'You're strong.  Stronger than you used to be.'

'Aye, I'm strong--and damned ugly.  The fog's to my advantage.
Hast kissed the girl downstairs, Davy?'

'Yes, I kissed her.'  David was crimson.  'She liked it.'

Herries, drawing on his hose, laughed.

'Good enough now.  There'll be tears later.'  They went down the
crooked stairs, arm-in-arm.

But that day went for nothing.  For the most part father and son
were together, walking the town, watching the country people (for
it was Martinmas Hiring Day), listening to a thousand silly rumours
and stories.

At three in the afternoon there was a real sensation.  A party of
fifty or sixty horsemen appeared on Stanwix Bank, overlooking the
city.  The road was crowded with country people going home.  When
these were cleared away the ten-gun battery of the Castle fired,
but the troopers were in safety by then.

Francis was in his little room washing his face in the tin basin
when the guns fired.  The floor seemed to quiver; the little panes
of the windows rattled; a scatter of birds flew past, and there was
a woman's scream, shrill and sharp, through the house.  Then
silence.

He went to the window.  The fog was clear and the sky silver with
threads of blue above the crooked roofs.  He leaned out.  On a
cobbled corner of the side-street (he could see only a fragment of
it) a man stood, looking up.  Herries had the oddest fancy, seeing
dimly in that faint afternoon light, that it was the pedlar
standing there, the pedlar whom he had not seen since that
Christmas night of the duel. . . .  Oddly like him, with a peaked
cap, the thin straining body.  He fancied that he could certify the
sharp, piercing eyes.  He stepped back into the room in whose dusk
the green glass bowl was the only light.  Of course it was not the
pedlar, but the fancy held him.

He yet seemed to have the echo of the guns in his ears, and the
woman's scream.  What was to happen to him here?  An odd burning
shiver ran through him like the first warning of a fever: he knew
in that second, staring into the green glass of the bowl, that one
of the crises of his life was approaching.  He knew it quite
certainly.  He did not care for his life--it was not of so precious
a quality to him--but this crisis that was coming was of deep
import and would change, whichever way it went, all his fortune,
physical and spiritual.

He knew it, as though the guns had blown away a veil from his eyes.

He went out to see what was toward.  The country people were all
hastening home.  There was a stir in the Square like a scare among
sheep when a wolf is by.  Little groups collected like flies round
sugar, and yet over all the bustle and movement there was a strange
hush as though no one dared to raise a voice.  He heard the names
pass back and forth:  'Wade,' 'Durand,' 'Aglionby,' 'Waugh,'
'Pattinson.'  The pigeons came strutting at his very feet, and
above the roofs the sky suddenly tossed up arms and wreaths of red
and gold, proclaiming the setting sun.

He turned his steps towards the Cathedral.  In the Close everything
was very still.  Someone stood in a side door of the Cathedral
looking up at the flaming sky.  It was as though everyone he saw
were straining an ear for the sound of the guns again.

Someone was speaking to him.  'A fine evening, Mr. Herries.'

He turned, as one turns in a dream, because he knew the voice.  He
passed his hand before his eyes, and in his ears the cannon dimly
sounded, for it was Mirabell Starr very quietly standing there.

'I have followed you, Mr. Herries--most indecently.  I saw you ten
minutes ago.'

She looked at him with that clear-eyed indifference so known to
him.  But she was pleased, perhaps.  The sky sank to smoky grey,
and he could scarcely see her face.  The bells chimed five o'clock.
But she was glad to see him, less indifferent than she had been.
He caught that and cherished it.  She looked a baby, wearing the
same shabby red cloak.  His heart throbbed.  He held himself
sternly at attention, his arms stiff at his sides, lest he should
touch her.

'I'm bold to address you.'

'No,' he answered.  'I'm well pleased.'

She saw in his eyes that he was worshipping her, this odd, ugly,
elderly, scarred man.

She was frightened, perhaps, and for the honest child that she was
wanted to put everything in a clear, defined light.

'I followed you--' she caught her breath a little.  'I wanted to
tell you. . . .  There at Honister, when we talked, I told you that
I didn't believe in love.  Well, now, you were kind and asked me to
come to you if I needed anything, and my mother trusted you, so you
must know I am very happy and I love someone, and he loves me.'

'That is good,' he said sternly.  'And it is a good man you love?'

'Yes, it is a good man.'

'He will care for you?'

'Oh, always.'

'I am happy.  But you should not be here.  This town will be
dangerous now.'

'I have been in danger all my life,' she answered.  'Danger is
nothing--for myself,' she added hastily.

Then, smiling at him so sweetly that his heart ached, she said
quickly:

'I wished you to know.  Good night,' and was gone.

He stood without moving, for how long he did not know.

There was a bitter, almost despairing, pain at his heart, such as
he had never known before.  He had always been too proud to despair
of himself, but now, under the black shadow of the Cathedral, he
really despaired.  He was isolated, ostracised, hateful to all men.
At once, at first sight of him, these Cumberleges had drawn
back. . . .  That he could face, but now, all pride flung aside, all
fear of weakness discarded, he felt the bitterest anguish.  Because,
for a moment, he had been in touch with a kind of joy, a sort of
happiness that he had not known before existed.  He had seen it in
the distance, stretched his hand, touched its wings; it had flown.
Sternly, his back against the Cathedral wall as though he were
hammered on to it, he stared in front of him, his palms gripped.
He had not known before that his love for her was so deep that the
hooks of it were in his very entrails.  He knew now, and that he
would always love her so.



On the following morning, the Sunday, Francis and David were
summoned to the defence of the city.  The fog was this morning
thicker than ever and added to the general confusion and increasing
alarm.  Every kind of rumour was about.  No one knew where the
Prince and his army might be.  Some said that he was already inside
the city.  Some said that Wade and his forces were marching to
relieve them, others that they were to be left to their fate, their
children would be eaten alive, their women raped and the houses
burned to the ground.

Among the most gloomy of Carlisle's citizens was Mrs. Cumberlege,
who continued to scream from her bed of sickness.  At one moment
she succeeded in staggering as far as her doorway (rumour had it
that she could have staggered a great deal farther had she so
wished) and crying:  'The Highlanders are here!  The Highlanders
are here!  Help!  Help!  We are all to be murdered!'

This was, of course, desperately upsetting for Mr. Cumberlege, who
was forbidden by her to leave her defenceless in the house.  At the
same time he wished to do his duty as a loyal citizen and surrender
himself to Colonel Durand's orders.  It ended in his slipping, with
Herries and David, off into the fog, and leaving her in the care of
her beautiful daughter.

They went to the Castle and were enrolled for defence.  Prospects
were not cheerful.  From the room in which they stood, crowded
about with an extraordinary tumbled and disorderly mixture of old
men, young men and boys, they could hear the echo of trowel and
hammer on the city walls.  The original garrison was but eighty old
'invalid' soldiers.  The guns were so ancient that they were
reputed to have been, in the jest of the drinking-bouts and tea-
parties, Boadicea's.  Durand had augmented them with ten small
ship's guns brought from Whitehaven, and the old ruined walls were
now in course of being altered that they might fit these.

Forty townsmen were in charge of the Whitehaven guns, and another
eighty served the Castle artillery.

Confusion was the more confounded by the bringing from neighbouring
towns and villages of small companies of militia, but their arms
were of different bores, and every man made his own ball fitting
the size of the piece.

All the worst trouble, Herries soon perceived, came from these same
militia.  Colonel Durand had proposed that the militia officers
should do duty by detachment from their several companies, but this
they emphatically and turbulently opposed, and drew lots, among
themselves, for their posts.  The result of this was that there was
no order nor discipline, and men wandered where they would and were
already demoralised and fatigued.

As the morning drew on, the confusion in the room where Herries was
grew ever more active.  Men ran about like children, crying out,
fingering arms in so uncertain a manner that it was likely at any
instant that one would blow another to pieces, starting up and
running to the windows, chattering, crying, shouting, now boasting,
now bewailing.  An old countryman stood near Herries, an ancient
man with a long grizzled beard who, again and again, called out:
'Who is for the Lord?  Who is for the Lord?'  Little Cumberlege
walked to the window and back, stopping every other minute by
David, whose strength and imperturbability seemed to give him an
immense satisfaction.  It seemed to be impossible for the present
to come near Durand, who was in an inner room.

Then, about mid-day, the fog rolled off, and a young man with a
long yellow face like a turnip came in shouting:

'They are upon us.  The whole army.  At the very walls.'

He had scarcely spoken when the guns were heard to fire.  'That's
from Shaddon Gate,' someone cried.  There was a moment of
transfixion when everyone stood, not seeing what to do, where to
go, waiting for they knew not what.  Then two men ran in, shouting
hysterically:

'We have beat them.  They are retreating.'  And almost at once the
fog came down again, blotting everything out.

Some said now that they had retreated all together, others that it
was but a blind, others that they had marched round to the other
side of the city and were already creeping about the streets.

Some swore that they could hear the skirl of the Highland pipes.
Even for Herries who, in such an affair, had no unsteady nerves,
there was an odd thrill from the knowledge that in the brief
interval of clarity the whole of the Prince's army had been seen at
the very walls.  It was true, then.  They were in the real heart of
this situation, not imagining it.  Shortly there might be--nay,
surely would be--massacre and bloodshed.  And where would she be in
this?  A chance bullet?  A drunken Highlander?  His whole body
trembled. . . .  The old countryman clutched his arm and peered
into his face.

'Who is for the Lord?  Who is for the Lord?'

It was late in the afternoon before he and David were marched off
to the part of the wall that was their post.  As they marched
through a portion of the town it had a weird effect, because the
order had gone out that there were to be lights in all the lower
windows, darkness in the upper.  The fog, too, hung high, so that
they seemed to be stepping along a stream of uncertain watery glow,
while above them was a bank of blackness.  All was silent; behind
the lighted windows there was no sound.  Against his will every man
was listening for the guns.

No one spoke.  They might have been moving to some secret
rendezvous.  Herries had at his side a short, round, very stout,
little man who groaned, panted and seemed to be bursting with some
tremendous secret.

They paused at a lighted corner while their destination was
settled.  At once the little fat man, whose face was beetroot
colour (his head trembled with a queer jerky movement), burst into
the middle of excited, despairing sentences as though he were
continuing a long, already uttered speech.  He caught Herries' arm
and held it, and this oddly pleased him.  There was someone in this
foggy world who did not shrink from him.

'. . . The eldest but five and a half. . . .  One every year, and
the five of them alone in the house with their grandmother, deaf as
a post, to mind them. . . .  I said to them that I would not be
gone a half-hour, and what service can I be with a musket, serving
out butter and sugar for the last twenty years? . . .  But what do
you think, sir?  Shall we beat them off, do you think?  My sister
would have been in to mind them, but only two days back she was on
a visit to Allonby to her brother-in-law, as indeed I told her at
the time that he was but inviting her to take advantage of her.
He was never a man, from his boyhood up, to do a thing and not
expect anything back for it, as Margaret my sister has herself said
many a time . . . and the children crying their hearts out in the
dark. . . .'

The light from a flare that someone carried swung in the breeze, as
though a tongue were licking the cheek of the fog.  In that sudden
illumination Herries saw two things: that David was not with him
and that quite close to him, almost in touch of him, was Mirabell's
young lover.

At that knowledge he caught his breath as though he expected a
blow.  The boy (for he was little more) stood stiffly, his head
upstaring straight into Herries' face.

He did not, of course, recognise him, but he looked at him as
though he would know him.  And yet he was looking beyond him.
Herries saw now that he was not seeing anyone.  He was swimming
deep in his own thoughts, and his mouth was smiling.

The order came again to move forward.  The young man was very near
to him.  It was as though he had been placed there in David's
stead.

The little fat man stayed close at Herries' side.  Whistling
ejaculations came from between his lips.  'Eh, sirs! . . .  Eh,
sirs!'  'The pity of it!  The pity!'  'The waste in this town!'

Mirabell's boy, the second coincidence.  First the 'Silver Horn'
and now this.  He felt a dead weight upon him, as though he were
caught in some trap.  The conviction that had been with him in his
room when he heard the first gun, came back to him, that he was
moving to some deep crisis in his affairs and that all his future
would depend on the way that he now acted.

Oddly, at the very first sight of him u