PART I. CHAPTER I. I FIRST SEE JOSHUA PILBROW.
 PART I.
CHAPTER I.
I FIRST SEE JOSHUA PILBROW.
When I was a very little boy my mother died. I was too young to feel her loss long, though I missed her badly at first; but the compensation was that it brought my father nearer to me. He was a barrister, a prodigal love of a man, dear bless him! And he felt his bereavement so cruelly that for a time he seemed incapable of rallying from the blow. But presently he plucked up heart, and went, for my sake, to his business again.
 
He was more liked than lucky, I believe. I had evidence enough, at least of the former; for after my mother’s death, not bearing that we should be parted, he carried me with him on the last circuit he was ever to go. Those were the days when Bench and Bar dined well, and sat up late telling tales. Sometimes my father would slip me into his pocket, so to speak, and from its shelter—when, to be candid, I had been much better in bed—I heard fine stories related by the gentlemen who put off gravity with the horsehair they wore all day. They were a merry and irresponsible lot, rather like a strolling company of actors; and, indeed, it was no less their business to play many parts. There were types among them which I came to associate with certain qualities: such as the lean vivacious ones, who ate and drank hungrily, and presently grew incoherent and quarrelsome; such as the rosy bald-headed ones, who always seemed to make most laughter; such as the large, heavy-browed ones, who sulked when they were bettered in argument. But my friend amongst them all, next to my father, was Mr. Quayle, Q.C.
 
I fancied I had discovered, after much consideration, why he was called Q.C. He was a little man, quite bald and round all over his head and face except for a tuft of hair on his chin, and there was the Q; and he wore a pouter-pigeon ruff under his chin like this, Q/C, and there was the Q.C. I may have been wrong; but anyhow I had precedent to justify me, for many of these jolly souls bore such characteristic nicknames. There was Plain John, for instance, who had so christened himself for ever during a dispute about the uses or abuses of multiple titles. “Plain John” had been enough for him, he had said. Again, there was Blind Fogle, so called from his favourite cross-examination phrase. “I don’t quite see.” They were all boys together when off duty, chaffing and horse-playing, and my father was the merriest and most irrepressible of the crew.
 
There was one treat, however, of which he was persistent in baulking me. Pray him as I might, he would never let me see or hear him in his character of Counsel. The Court where he would be working by day was forbidden ground to me, and for that very reason I longed, like Bluebeard’s wife, to peep into it. This was not right, even in thought, for I knew his wishes. But worse is to be confessed. I once took an opportunity, which ought never to have been given me, to disobey him; and dreadful were the consequences, as you shall hear.
 
We were travelling on what is called the Home Circuit, and one day we came to Ipswich, a town to mark itself red in the annals of my young life. On the second morning after our arrival I was playing at horses with George, my father’s man, when Mr. Quayle looked in at our hotel, and, dismissing George, took and sat me upon his knee.
 
“Dad gone to Court?” said he.
 
“Yes,” I answered; “just.”
 
He grunted, and rubbed his bald head, with a look half comical, half aggravated. His eyes were rather blinky and red, and he seemed confused in manner and at a loss for words.
 
“Dicky,” he said, suddenly, “did you live very well, very rich-like, when mamma was alive?”
 
“Yes,” I answered; “’cept when mamma said we must retrench, and cried; and by’m-by papa laughed, and threw the rice pudding into the fire, and took us to dine at a palace.”
 
“And that was—very long before—hey?”
 
“It was a very little while before mamma went away for good,” I murmured, and hung my head, inclined to whimper.
 
Mr. Quayle twitched at me compunctious.
 
“O, come!” he said, “we must all bear our losses like men. They teach us the best in the world to stand square on our own toeses. There! Shall I tell you a story—hey?”
 
I brightened at once. He knew some good ones. “Yes, please,” I said.
 
“O, lud!” he exclaimed, rubbing his nose with his eye-glasses. “I am committed! Judex damnatur. Dicky, I sat up late last night, devouring briefs, and they’ve given me an indigestion. Never sit up late, Dicky, or you’ll have to pay for it!”
 
He said the last words with an odd emphasis, giving me a little shake.
 
“Is that the beginning of the story?” I asked, with reserve.
 
“O, the story!” he said. “H’m! ha! Dear take my fuddled caput! Well, here goes:
 
“There were once two old twin brothers, booksellers, name of Pilbrow, who kept shop together in a town, as it might be Ipswich. Now books, young gentleman, should engender an atmosphere of reason and sympathy, inasmuch as we talk of the Republic of letters, which signifies a sort of a family tie between A, B, and C. But these fellows, though twins, were so far from being united that they were always quarrelling. If Joshua bought a book of a stranger, Abel would say he had given more than its worth, and sell it at his own valuation; and if Abel attended a sale, there was Joshua to bid against him. Naturally, under these conditions, the business didn’t flourish. The brothers got poorer and poorer, and the more they lost the worse they snapped and snarled, till they took to threatening one another in public with dear knows what reprisals. Well, one day, at an auction, after bidding each against t’other thremenjus for a packet of old manuscripts and book rubbish—which Abel ended by getting, by-the-by—they fastened together like tom-cats, and had to be separated. The people laughed and applauded; but the end was more serious than was expected. Abel disappeared from the business, and a few days later the shop took fire, and was burned to the ground.
 
“So far, so plain; and now, Mr. Dickycumbob, d’ye know what’s meant by Insurance?”
 
“No, sir?”
 
“Well, look here. If I want to provide against my house, and the goods in it, being lost to me by fire, I go to a gentleman, with a gold watch-chain like a little ship’s cable to recommend him, and says I:—‘If I give you so much pocket-money a year, will you undertake to build up my house again for me in case it happens to be burned down?’ And the gentleman smiles, and says ‘Certainly.’ Then I say, ‘If I double your pocket-money will you undertake to give me a thousand pounds for the value of the goods in that house supposing they are burned too?’ And the gentleman says, ‘Certainly; in case their value really is a thousand pounds at the time.’ So I go away, and presently, strange to say, my house is actually burned to the ground. Then I ask the gentleman to fulfil his promise; but he says, ‘Not at all. The house I will rebuild as before, and for the goods I will pay you; but not a thousand pounds, because I am given to believe that they were worth nothing like that sum at the time of the fire?’ Now, what am I to do? Well, I will tell you what this Joshua did. He insisted upon having the whole thousand pounds, and the gentleman answered by saying that he believed Joshua had purposely set fire to his own house in order to secure a thousand pounds for a lot of old rubbish in it that wasn’t worth twopence ha’penny. D’yunderstand?”
 
“Yes, I think so.”
 
“Very well, then, and listen to this. If the gentleman spoke true, Joshua had fallen in Scyllam cupiens vitare Charybdim, which means that he had jumped out of the frying-pan into the fire, or, in other words had, in trying to catch the Insurance gentleman, been nabbed himself by the law. For arson is arson, and fraud fraud, and the gentleman with the watch-chain isn’t to be caught with a pinch of salt on his tail. But that was not the worst. Human bones had been found among the débris of the building, and ugly rumours got about that these bones were Abel’s bones—the bones of an unhappy victim of Joshua’s murderous hate. The man had disappeared, the brothers’ deadly quarrel was recalled; it was whispered that the fire might owe itself to a double motive—that, in short, Joshua had designed, at one blow, to secure the thousand pounds and destroy the evidences of a great crime. Joshua, sir, was arrested and put upon his trial for murder and arson.”
 
I was listening with all my eyes and ears.
 
“Who defended him?” I whispered, gulping; for I knew something of the legal terms.
 
The answer took me like a smack.
 
“Your father, sir.”
 
“O!” I exclaimed, thrilling. And then, after a pause, with a pride of loyalty: “He got him off, didn’t he?”
 
Mr. Quayle put me down, and yawned dyspeptically.
 
“What!” he said. “If any man can, papa will. I ask your pardon, Master Dicky, I really do, for palming off fact instead of fiction on you. But my poor brain wasn’t equal. The case is actually sub judice—being tried at this moment. Yesterday began it, and to-day will end. If you whisper to me to-night, I’ll whisper back the result.”
 
The delay seemed insupportable. He had read and worked me up to the last chapter of the story, and now proposed to leave me agonising for the end. It was the first time I had ever been brought so close to the living romance of the law, and my blood was on fire with the excitement of it.
 
“O, I wish——” I began.
 
The barrister looked down at me oddly, and shook his head.
 
“Ah, you little rogue!” he chuckled.
 
I felt too guilty to speak. He knew all that was in my mind. Suddenly he took my hand.
 
“Come along, then,” he said, “and let’s have a peep. Papa needn’t know.”
 
He shouldn’t have tempted me, nor should I have succumbed. A murder romance was no book for a child, though my father figured in it as a Paladin championing the wronged and oppressed.
 
I hung back a moment, but the creature cooed and whistled to me. “Come and see Joshua,” he said, “with his back to the wall, and papa in front daring ’em all to come on.”
 
The picture was irresistible. I let myself be persuaded and run out, tingling all over.
 
It was a dingy November morning. The old town seemed dull and uneasy, and a tallow-faced clock on a church dawdled behind time, as if it had stopped to let something unpleasant go by. That might have been a posse of melancholy javelin-men, who, with a ludicrous little strutting creature at their head—a sort of pocket drum-major, in sword and cocked hat and with a long staff in his hand—went splashing past at the moment. The court-house, what with the fog and drip, met us like the mouth of a sewer, and I was half-inclined to cry off so disenchanting an adventure, when my companion tossed me up in his arms and carried me within. Through halls and passages, smelling of cold, trodden mud, we were passed with deference, and suddenly were swung and shut into a room where there were lights and a great foggy hush.
 
I saw before me the scarlet judge. I knew him well enough, but never awful like this—a shrunk ferret with piercing eyes looking out of a gray nest. I saw the wigs of the counsel; but their bobtails seemed cocked with an unfamiliar viciousness. I saw the faces of the Jury, set up in two rows like ghostly ninepins; and then I saw another, a face by itself, a face like a little shrewd wicked gurgoyle, that hung yellow and alone out of the mist of the court. And that face, I knew, was the face of Joshua.
 
The terrible silence ticked itself away, and there suddenly was my father standing up before them all, and talking in a quick impassioned voice. My skin went cold and hot. If I reaped little of the dear tones, I understood enough to know that he spoke impetuously for the prisoner, heaping scorn upon the prosecution. Never, he said, in all his experience had he known calumny visit a soul so spotless as the one it was now his privilege to defend. The process would be laughably easy, it was true, and he would only dwell upon what must be to the jury a foregone conclusion—the accused’s innocence, that was to say—with the object to crush with its own vicious fallacies a prosecution which, indeed, he could not help remarking bore more the appearance of a persecution.
 
Mr. Quayle at this point laughed a little under his breath and whispered, “Bravo!” in my ear, as he eased his burden by resting my feet on the back of a bench. As for me, I was burning and shooting all over with pride, as my eyes went from my father to the poor little ugly prisoner in the dock, and back again.
 
The accused, went on my father (in substance. I can only give the briefest abstract of his speech), would not deny that there had been differences between him and his brother. Indeed, it would be useless to, in the face of some recent notorious evidence to the contrary. But did not all history teach us the folly of jumping, on the strength of an unguarded word, to fatal conclusions? Had not one of our own monarchs (surnamed Fitz-Empress, as he need not remind the jury) suffered a lifelong regret from the false interpretation put upon a rash utterance of his? “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” he had cried, in an unthinking moment. “You shall pay for this!” had been Joshua Pilbrow’s threat to his brother, under a like aggravation, in the sale-room. “Gentlemen,” said my father, “how deadly the seeming import, how laughable the explanation in either case. King Henry cried only distractedly for some one to persuade his importunate Chancellor to leave him alone. Joshua Pilbrow meant no more than to insist that his brother should ‘stand the whole racket’ of a purchase of which he himself had disapproved. Hence, gentlemen, these tears!”
 
There was a little stir in court, and my companion chuckled delightedly in my ear again.
 
My father then proceeded triumphantly to give the true facts of the case. The packet of books had, it appeared when opened, revealed one item of unexpected value, in the profits from which Joshua, as partner, insisted upon sharing. To this, however, Abel, quoting his own words against him, demurred. It was his—Abel’s purchase, Abel contended, to do with as he chose. The dispute ran so high as to threaten litigation; when all of a sudden one night Abel was found to have taken himself off with the cherished volume. Joshua, at first unable to credit such perfidy, bided his time, expecting his brother to return. But when, at last, his suspicion of bereavement settled into a conviction, he grew like one demented. He could not believe in the reality of his loss; but, candle in hand, went hunting high and low amongst the litter with which the premises were choked, hoping somewhere to alight, in some forgotten corner where cupidity had concealed it, on the coveted prize. Alas! it never rains but it pours. He not only failed to trace the treasure, but, in his distracted hunt for it, must accidentally have fired the stock, which, smouldering for awhile, burst out presently into flame, and committed all to ruin.
 
 
Such was the outline of the story, and, for all that I understood of it, I could have clapped my father to the echo, with the tears gulping in my throat, for his noble vindication of a wronged man. There were other points he made, such as that Joshua had himself escaped with the utmost difficulty from the burning building (and did that look like arson?); such as that he had instructed his lawyers, after committal, to advertise strenuously, though vainly, for his brother’s whereabouts (and did that look like murder?); such as that the bones found amongst the ruins were the bones of anatomical specimens, in which the firm was well known to have dealt. I need not insist on them, because the end was what I knew it must be if men were not base and abominable enough to close their ears wilfully to those ringing accents of truth.
 
The prosecution, poor thing! answered, and the judge summed up; and still Mr. Quayle, quite absorbed in the case, did not offer to take me away. I had my eyes on my father all the time. He had sunk back, as if exhausted, after his speech, and sat in a corner of the bench, his hand over his face. The jury gave their verdict without leaving their places. I heard the demand and the answer. The cry, “Not Guilty,” rang like a pæan in my ears; and still I kept my eyes on my father.
 
The prisoner, freed from the dock, had left the court, when suddenly some people stirred, and a whisper went round. A barrister bent over the resting figure, and arose hurriedly. In a moment there was a springing up of heads everywhere, so that the dear form was blotted from my sight. Mr. Quayle, looking over my shoulder, caught a word, and gave a quick little gasp.
 
“Dicky,” he said, catching at me, “come out at once! We must get away before—before——” and he left the sentence unfinished as he hurried me into the street.
CHAPTER II. A GREAT LOSS AND A QUEER EQUIVALENT.

I looked in Mr. Quayle’s face; but I asked him no question. The mud we trod seemed colder, the houses we passed more frowning than before; but I asked no question. I could not form one in my mind; only suddenly and somehow I felt frightened, as if in dreams before a great solitude. Then in a moment I was sobbing fast and thickly.
 
Ah, what is the use to skate round the memory! Let it clutch me for a moment, and be faced and dismissed. My father, my dear, ardent, noble father was dead—struck down in an instant—shaken out of life by the poignant utterances of his own spirit. While the flower of his fervour was blossoming and bearing fruit, the roots thereof were dead already—smitten in their place in his heart. That, its work done, had ceased beating. Sometimes afterwards in my desolation I recalled the church clock, with its poised motionless hands, and thought what a melancholy omen it had been.
 
Mr. Quayle was kindness itself to me in my utter terror and loneliness. He took upon himself, provisionally, the whole conduct of my affairs. One morning he came in, and drew me to him.
 
“Dicky—Dicky-bird, me jewl!” he said. “I’ve found the fine cuckoo that’s to come and father the poor little orphaned nestling.”
 
I must observe that he had his own theories about this same “harbinger of spring,” which, according to him, was the “bird that looked after another bird’s young.” I remembered the occasion on which he had so defined it, and the laughter which had greeted him; and his alternative, “Well, then, ’tis the bird that doesn’t lay its own eggs, and that’s all one!” But the first definition, it appeared, was the one he kept faith in.
 
“D’you remember Mr. Paxton?” he said.
 
“Uncle Jenico?” I asked.
 
He nodded.
 
“Uncle Jenico Paxton, mamma’s own only brother. Poor papa, my dear—always a wonder and an honour to his profession—has left, it seems, a will, in which he bequeathes everything to Uncle Jenico in trust for his little boy, Master Dicky Bowen. And Uncle Jenico has been found, and is coming to take charge of little Dicky Bowen.”
 
Was I glad or sorry? I was too stunned, I think, to care one way or the other. Any one would do to stop the empty place which none could ever fill, and neither my sympathies nor my dislikes were active in the case of Uncle Jenico. I had seen him only once or twice, when he had come to spend a night or so with us in town. My memory was of a stout, hoarse old man in spectacles, rather lame, with a little nose and twinkling eyes. He had seemed always busy, always in a hurry. He bore an important, mysterious reputation with us as a great inventive genius, who carried a despatch-box with him choked with invaluable patents, and always left something behind—a toothbrush or an umbrella—when he left. Let it be Uncle Jenico as well as another.
 
While we were talking there was a flurry at the door of the room, and a man, overcoming some resistance outside, forced his way in. I gave a little cry, and stood staring. It was the acquitted prisoner, Joshua Pilbrow. George appeared just behind him, flushed and truculent.
 
“He would do it, sir,” said the servant, “for all I warned him away.”
 
Mr. Quayle had put me from him and arisen. There was a bad look on his face; but he motioned to George to go, and we were left alone.
 
The intruder stood shrugging his disordered clothes into place, and looking the while with a sort of black stealth at the barrister. His face held and haunted me. It was bleak and sallow, and grey in the hollows, with fixed dark eyes—the face, I thought, of a malignant, though injured, creature. But it did not so affect Mr. Quayle, it was evident.
 
“The verdict was ‘Not guilty,’ sir,” said the man, quite suddenly and vehemently.
 
Mr. Quayle gave an unpleasant laugh.
 
“Or else you wouldn’t be intrudin’ here,” he said shortly.
 
“I came to thank my benefactor,” said the man. “I had heard nothing till this moment of the tragic sequel.”
 
“Well,” said the barrister, in the same cynical tone, “you have come too late. The price of your acquittal is this little orphaned life.”
 
He put his arm about my shoulders. The stranger looked hard at me.
 
“His son?” he muttered.
 
“There are some verdicts,” said Mr. Quayle, “bought too dear.”
 
In a moment the man turned upon him in a sort of fierce concentrated bitterness.
 
“With the inconsistency of your evil profession,” he cried, “you discount your own conclusions. The law guarantees and grudges me my innocence. A curse upon it, I say! Did he there sacrifice his life for me? He sacrificed it for truth, sir, and it’s that which you, as a lawyer, can’t forgive.”
 
“You will observe,” said Mr. Quayle, icily, “that I have not questioned the truth.”
 
“Not directly,” answered the visitor. “I know, I know. You damn by innuendo; it’s your trade.”
 
The little lawyer laughed again.
 
“You malign our benevolence,” he said. “The law, by its artless verdict, has entitled you to sue on the insurance question. Think, Mr. Pilbrow; it actually offers itself to witness to your right to the thousand pounds.”
 
“And I shall force it to,” cried the other; “and would to heaven I could make it bleed another thousand for the wrong it has done me. It would, if equity were justice.”
 
“Equity is justice,” said Mr. Quayle. “Good morning.”
 
The man did not move for a moment, but stood looking gloomily at me.
 
Now, I cannot define what was working in my little soul. The pinched, shorn face was not lovely, the eyes in it were not good; yet there was something there of loss and hopelessness that touched me cruelly. And was not my father lying in the next room in solemn witness to its innocence? Suddenly, before Mr. Quayle could stay me, I had run to the visitor and plucked at his coat.
 
“You did not do it,” I cried. “My father said so!”
 
He gave a little gasp, and fluttered his hand across his eyes, sweeping in a wonderful way the evil out of them.
 
“Ah!” he said, “if your father, young gentleman, would whisper to you where Abel lies hidden! He knows now.”
 
He stepped back, with a strange, wintry smile on his lips, stopped, seemed about to speak, waved his hand to me, and was gone.
 
“Dicky, Dicky,” cried Mr. Quayle, “you’re the son of your father; but, dear me, not so good a lawyer!”
CHAPTER III. UNCLE JENICO.

That same evening Uncle Jenico arrived. I was just put to bed at the time, but he came and stood by me a little before I went to sleep and dreamt of him. He was not the least grown from his place in my memory—only, to my wonder, a little more shabby-looking than I seemed to recollect. The round gold spectacles were there, and the big beaver hat, and the blue frock coat, and the nankeen trousers, and the limp—all but the first and last a trifle the worse for wear. His smile, however, was as cherubic, his despatch-box as glossy, his walking-stick as stout as ever; and he nodded at me like a benevolent Mandarin.
 
“Only we two left, my boy,” he said. “Poor papa, dear papa! He’s learnt by now the secret of perpetual motion.”
 
It was an odd introduction. I cried a little, and, moved by his kindness, clung to him.
 
“There!” he said, soothing me. “That’s all right. We are going to be famous friends, we are. We’ll invent things; we’ll set the Thames on fire, we will.”
 
Whether from exhaustion or from the dreamy contemplation of this amazing feat to be performed by us, I fell asleep in his arms, lulled for the first time out of my grief, and did not awake till bright morning. The fog was gone; the birds were singing to us to carry my father to his rest under the blue sky.
 
By-and-by we set out, Uncle Jenico very grave, in black, with a long weeper round his hat. Mr. Quayle, and one or two more, who had lingered a day behind the Assizes to do honour to the dead, came with us; and others, including the judge, sent flowers. It was a simple, pathetic service, in a green corner of the churchyard. I felt more than understood its beauty, and when once I caught a glimpse of Uncle Jenico busily and stealthily writing something with a pencil on the inside lining of his hat, I accepted the fact naturally as a detail of the ceremony.
 
But it was on the way home in the carriage that he disillusioned me by removing his hat, and showing me a little drawing of a gravestone he had made therein.
 
“Just an idea that occurred to me,” he said, “to perpetuate the memory of poor papa. We want to do something better than keep it green, you see. The weather and the lichen pay us all that compliment. So I suggest having the inscription very small, on a stone something the shape of a dining-room clock, and over it a magnifying glass boss, like one of those paperweights, you know, that have a little view at the back. The tooth of Time could never touch that. What do you think now?”
 
I thought it a very pleasant and kind idea, and told him so, at which he was obviously pleased. But it was never carried out, no more than many another he developed; and in the end—but that was long afterwards—a simple headstone, of my own design, commemorated my beloved father’s virtues.
 
The few mourners returned with us to the hotel, where, in a private room, we had cake and sherry wine. Afterwards Mr. Quayle, when all but he were gone, asked the favour of a final word with Uncle Jenico.
 
He appeared to find it a word difficult of utterance, walking up and down, and puffing, and getting a little red in the face, while Uncle Jenico sat beaming in a chair, his legs crossed and finger-tips bridged.
 
At length Mr. Quayle stopped before him.
 
“Mr. Paxton,” said he, “when time’s short formalities are best eschewed, eh?”
 
Uncle Jenico nodded.
 
“Surely,” said he. “I ask nothing less.”
 
“Then,” said Mr. Quayle, stuttering a little, “you are prepared to accept our friend’s trust, for all it’s worth?”
 
Uncle Jenico nodded again, though I thought his countenance fell a trifle over the emphatic qualification. However, he recovered in an instant, and rubbed his hands together gleefully.
 
“Capital, sir,” he said; “a little capital. That’s all Richard and I need to make our fortunes.”
 
He spoke as if we had been long partners, but hampered by insufficient means.
 
“Ah!” said Mr. Quayle, decisively; “but that’s just the point.”
 
“Just the point,” echoed Uncle Jenico, still nodding, but weakly, and with a dew of perspiration on his forehead.
 
“Just the point,” repeated Mr. Quayle. “I stood close to our friend. I know something of his affairs—and habits. He was—d’ye understand French, Mr. Paxton?”
 
“Yes, certainly,” answered my uncle, proudly.
 
“Well, listen to this, then: ‘Il a été un joueur invétéré celui là; c’est possible qu’il a mangé son blé en herbe.’”
 
He drew back, to let his words take effect.
 
“God bless me!” said Uncle Jenico, weakly. “You have reason to know?”
 
“My dear sir,” replied Mr. Quayle, “I know how some of us occupy our time on circuit when we’d be better abed. I know a punter when I see one. I may be right; I may be wrong; and for your sake I hope I’m wrong. But the point is this: A good deal of our friend’s paper has come my way; and I want to know if, supposing I take it to market with bad results to the estate, you are going to swear off your trust?”
 
Then Uncle Jenico did an heroic thing; how heroic I could not realise at the time, though even then I think a shadow of the truth was penetrating my bewilderment. He got to his feet, looking like an angel.
 
“Mr. Quayle,” he said, “you’ve spoken plainly, and I don’t conceal your words are a disappointment. But if they are also a prophecy, rest assured, sir, that Richard and I stand or fall together. We are the surviving partners of an honourable firm, and there is that in there, sir” (he pointed to his inseparable despatch-box), “to uphold our credit with the world.”
 
Mr. Quayle seized his hand, with an immense expression of relief on his face.
 
“You’re a good soul,” he said. “Without that assurance I should have felt like robbing the orphan. I hope it may turn out better than we suppose.”
 
“I hope so, too,” said Uncle Jenico, rather disconsolately.
CHAPTER IV. MY FIRST VIEW OF THE HILL.

It turned out not so badly, yet pretty badly. Uncle Jenico took cheap lodgings for us in the town, and for two or three months was busy flitting between Ipswich and London winding up my father’s estate. At the end, when the value of every lot, stick, and warrant had been realised, and the creditors satisfied, a sum representing perhaps £150 a year was secured to us, and with this, and the despatch-box, we committed ourselves to the future.
 
It appeared that my Uncle Jenico’s inventions had always been more creditable than profitable to him, and this for the reason that unattainable capital was necessary to their working. Given a few hundreds, he was confident that he could make thousands out of any one of them. It was hard, for the lack of a little fuel, so to speak, to have so much power spoiling on one’s hands. I would have had him, when once I understood, invest our own capital in some of them; but, though I could see he loved me for the suggestion, he had the better strength of affection to keep loyal to his trust, which he administered scrupulously according to the law. Afterwards, when I came to know him better, I could not but be thankful that he had shown this superior genius for honesty; for his faith in his own concerns was so complete, and at the same time so naïve, that he might otherwise have lacked nothing but the guilt to be a defaulter.
 
As to the patents themselves, they represented a hundred phases of craft, every one of which delighted and convinced me by its originality. There was a design amongst them for an automatic dairy-maid, a machine which, by exhausting the air in a number of flexible tubes, could milk twenty cows at once. There was a design for making little pearls large, by inserting them like setons in the shells of living oysters. There was a plan for a ship to be driven by a portable windmill, which set a turbine spinning under the stern. Uncle Jenico’s contrivances were mostly on an heroic scale, and covered every form of enterprise—from the pill which was to eliminate dyspepsia from the land, to a scheme for liquidating the National Debt by pawning all England for a term of years to an International Trust. At the same time, there was no human need too mean for his consideration. He was for ever striving to economise labour for the betterment of his poorer fellow-creatures. His inventiveness was a great charity, which did not even begin at home. His patents, from being designed to improve any condition but his own, suffered the neglect of a world to which selfishness is the first principle of business competence. His “Napina,” a liquid composition from which old clothes, after having been dipped therein, re-emerged as new, could find no market. His “Labour-of-Love Spit,” which was turned by a rocking-chair moving a treadle, like that on a knife-grinder’s machine, so that the cook could roast her joint in great comfort while dozing over her paper, could make no headway against the more impersonal clock-work affair. And so it was with most of his designs, but a few of which had been actually tested before being condemned on insufficient evidence. What more ridiculous, for instance, than to denounce his “Burglar’s Trap” on the score that one single idiot of a householder had blundered into his own snare and been kept there while the robbers were rifling his premises? What more scandalous than to convict his Fire-Derrick—a noble invention, like a crane dangling a little cabin, for saving life at conflagrations—because the first time it was tested the box would not descend, but kept the insurance gentlemen swinging in the air for an hour or two; or his Infallible Lifebelt, which turned upside-down in the water for the single reason that they tried it on a revenue officer who had lost his legs in an explosion? No practical innovation was surely ever started without a stumble. But Uncle Jenico had no luck. He sunk all his capital in his own patents without convincing a soul, or—and this is the notable thing—losing his temper. That one only of his possessions remained to him, fresh and sound as when, as a little boy, he had invented a flying top, which broke his grandmother’s windows. No neglect had impaired it, nor adversity ruffled for more than a moment. If he had patented it and nothing else, he could have made his fortune, I am certain.
 
Still, when we came to be comrades—or partners, as he loved to call us—his restless brain was busy as ever with ideas. Nothing was too large or small for him to touch. He showed me, on an early occasion, how his hat—not the black one he had worn at the funeral, but the big beaver article that came over his eyes—explained its own proportions in a number of little cupboards or compartments in the lining, which were designed to carry one’s soap, toothbrush, razor, etc., when on a short visit. He had the most delightful affection for his own ingenuities, and the worldliest axioms for explaining the secret of their success. On the afternoon when Mr. Quayle, after the kindest of partings with me, had left us, and while he was yet on the stairs, Uncle Jenico had bent to me and whispered: “Make it a business principle, my boy, never to confess to insolvency. You heard the way I assured the gentleman? Well, Richard, we may have in our despatch-box there all Ophir lying fallow for the lack of a little cash to work it; but we mustn’t tell our commercial friends so—no, no. We must let them believe it is their privilege to back us. Necessity is a bad recommendation.”
 
It may be. But I was not a commercial gent; and Uncle Jenico had all my faith, and should have had all my capital if it had rested with me to dispose of it as I liked.
 
During the time my uncle was engaged in London, George, good man, remained at Ipswich to look after me, though we were forced reluctantly to dismiss him as soon as things were settled. It was impossible, however, on a hundred and fifty pounds a year to keep a man-servant; and so presently he went, and with him my last connection with the old life. Not more of the past than the clothes I stood in now remained to me. It was as if I had been shipwrecked and adopted by a stranger. But the final severance seemed a relief to Uncle Jenico, who, when it was accomplished, drew a long breath, and adjusted his glasses and looked at me rosily.
 
“Now, Richard,” he said, “with nobody any longer to admonish us, comes the question of our home, and where to make it. Have you any choice?”
 
Dear me; what did I know of the world’s dwelling-places? I answered that I left it all to him.
 
“Very well,” he said, with a happy sigh; “then I have an original plan. Suppose we make it nowhere?”
 
He paused to note how the surprise struck home.
 
“You mean——” I began, hesitating.
 
“I mean,” said he, “supposing we have no fixed abode, but go from place to place as it suits us?”
 
What boy would not have jumped at the suggestion? I was in ecstasies.
 
“You see,” said Uncle Jenico, “moving about, I get ideas; and in ideas lies our future prosperity. Let’s look at the map.”
 
It was a lovely proposal. To enter, in actual being, the mysterious regions of pictures-on-the-wall; to breathe the real atmosphere, so long felt in romance, of tinted lithographs and coloured prints; to find roads and commons and phantom distances, wistful, unattainable dreams hitherto, made suddenly accessible to me—it was thrilling, it was rapturous. My uncle humoured the thought so completely as to leave to me the fanciful choice of our first resting-place.
 
“Only don’t let it be too far,” he said. “Just at present we must go moderate, and until I can realise on the sale of a little patent, which I am on the point of parting with for an inadequate though considerable sum.”
 
I spent a delightful hour in poring over the county map. It was patched with verdant places—big farms and gentlemen’s estates—and reminded me somehow of those French green-frilled sugarplums which crunch liqueur and are shaped like little vegetables. One could feel the cosy shelter of the woods, marked in groves of things that looked like tiny cabbages, and gaze down in imagination from the hills meandering like furry caterpillars with a miniature windmill here and there to turn them from their course. The yellow roads were rich in suggestion of tootling coaches, and milestones, and inns revealing themselves round corners, with troughs in front and sign-boards, and perhaps a great elm shadowed with caves of leafiness at unattainable heights. But the red spit of railway which came up from the bottom of the picture as far as Colchester, and was thence extended, in a dotted line only, to Ipswich, gave me a thrill of memory half sad and half beautiful. For it was by that wonderful crimson track that my father and I had travelled our last road together as far as the old Essex town, where, since it ended there for the time being, we had taken coach for Suffolk.
 
“Made up your mind?” asked Uncle Jenico, by-and-by, with a chuckle.
 
I flushed and wriggled, and came out with it.
 
“Can’t we—mayn’t we go to the sea? I’ve never been there yet; and we’re so close; and papa promised.”
 
“The sea?” he echoed. “Why, to be sure. I’ve long had an idea that seaweed might be used for water-proofing. It’s an inspiration, Richard. We’ll beat Mr. Macintosh on his own ground. But whereabouts to the sea, now?”
 
I could not suggest a direction, however; so he borrowed for me a local guide-book, which dealt with places of interest round the coast, and left me to study it while he went out for a walk to get ideas.
 
I had no great education; but I could read glibly enough for my eight years. When Uncle Jenico returned in an hour or two, our choice, so far as I was concerned, was made. I brought the book, and, laying it before him, pointed to a certain description.
 
“Dunberry,” he read, skipping, so as to take the gist of it—“the Sitomagus of the Roman occupation, and later the Dunmoc of East Anglia. Population, 694. (H’m, h’m!) Disfranchised by the Reform Act of ’32. (H’m!) Formerly a place of importance, owning a seaport, fortifications, seven churches and an abbey. In the twelfth century the sand, silting up, destroyed its harbour and admitted the encroachments of the sea, from which date its prosperity was gradually withdrawn. (H’m, h’m!) Since, century by century, made the devouring sport of the ocean, until, at the present date, but a few crumbling ruins, toppling towards their final extinction in the waves below, remain the sole sad relics of an ancient glory which once proudly dominated the element under which it was doomed later to lie ’whelmed.”
 
Uncle Jenico stopped reading, and looked up at me a little puzzled.
 
“There’s better to come,” I murmured, blushing.
 
He nodded, and went on—
 
“A hill, called the Abbot’s Mitre, as much from its associations, perhaps, as from its peculiar conformation, overlooks the modern village, and is crowned on its seaward edge by the remains of the ancient foundation from which it takes its name. Some business is done in the catching and curing of sprats and herrings. There is an annual fair. Morant states that after violent storms, when the shingle-drifts are overturned, bushels of coins, Roman and other, and many of considerable value, may be picked up for the seeking.”
 
Uncle Jenico’s face came slowly round to stare into mine. His hair seemed risen; his jaw was a little dropped.
 
“Richard!” he whispered, “our fortune is made.”
 
“Yes,” I thrilled back, delighted. “That’s why I chose it. I thought you’d be pleased.”
 
He looked out the direction eagerly on the map. It was distant, by road, some twenty-five miles north-east by north from Ipswich; by sea, perhaps ten miles further. But the weather was fine, and water-transport more suited to our finances. So two days later we had started for Dunberry, in one of the little coasting ketches that ply between Harwich and Yarmouth carrying farm produce and such chance passengers as prefer paying cheap for a risk too dear for security.
 
It was lovely April weather, and a light wind blowing up the shores from the south-east bowled us gaily on our way. I never so much as thought of sickness, and if I had, Uncle Jenico, looking in his large Panama hat like a benevolent planter, would have shamed me, with his rubicund serenity, back to confidence again. Our sole property, for all contingencies, was contained in the despatch-box and a single carpet bag; and with no more sense of responsibility than these engendered, we were committing ourselves to a future of ravishing possibilities.
 
Throughout the pleasant journey we hugged the coast, never being more than a mile or two distant from it, so that its features, wild or civilized, were always plain to us. It showed ever harsher and more desolate the farther we ran north, and the tearing and hollowing effect of waves upon its sandy cliffs more evident. All the way it was fretted, near and far, with towers—a land of churches. They stood grey in the gaps of hills; brown and gaunt on solitary headlands. Sometimes they were dismantled; and once, on a deserted shore, we saw a belfry and part of a ruined chancel footing the tide itself. It was backed by a great heaped billow of sand, which—so our skipper told us—had stood between it and the sea till storms flung it all over and behind, leaving the walls it had protected exposed to destruction.
 
As evening came on I must confess my early jubilation waned somewhat. The thin, harsh air, the melancholy cry of the birds, the eternal desolation of the coast, chilled me with a creeping terror of our remoteness from all that friendly warmth and comfort we had rashly deserted. Not a light greeted us from the shore but such as shone ghastly in the lifeless wastes of foam. The last coast town, miles behind, seemed to have passed us beyond the final bounds of civilization. So that it was with something like a whimper of joy that I welcomed the sudden picture of a hill notched oddly far ahead against the darkening sky. I ran hurriedly to Uncle Jenico.
 
“Uncle!” I cried. “Uncle, look! The Abbot’s Mitre!”
 
The skipper heard me, and answered.
 
“Aye,” said he, “it’s the Mitre, sure enow,” and spat over the taffrail.
 
There was something queer in his tone. He rolled his quid in his cheek.
 
“And like enow, by all they say,” he added, looking at Uncle Jenico, “to figure agen for godliness.”
 
“Eh?” said my uncle; “I beg your pardon?”
 
“Granted,” answered the skipper shortly; and that was all.
 
There was an uneasy atmosphere of enigma here. But we were abroad after adventure, when all was said, and had no cause to complain.
 
I stood holding my uncle’s hand, while we ran our last knot for home in the twilight. As we neared the hill its peculiar shape was gradually lost, and instead, looking up from below, we saw the cap of a broken tower showing over its swell. Then hill and ruin dropped behind us, a shadowy bulk, and of a sudden we were come opposite a sandy cleft cutting up into the cliff, and below on the shingle a ghostly group of boats and shore-loafers, though still no light or sign of houses.
 
We brought to, the sails flapping, and the skipper sent a long melancholy boom sounding over the water from a horn. It awoke a stir on the beach, and presently we saw a boat put off, and come curtseying towards us. It was soon alongside, revealing three men, of whom the one who sat steering was a little remarkable. He was immensely tall and slouching, with a lank bristled jaw, a swarthy skin, and, in spectral contrast, eye-places of such an odd sick pallor as to give him the appearance, at least in this gloaming, of wearing huge spectacles. However, he was the authoritative one of the three, and welcomed us civilly enough for early visitors to Dunberry, hoping we should favour the place.
 
“None so well as thee, Jole, since thy convarsion,” bellowed the skipper, as we pushed off.
 
There followed a chuckle of laughter from the ketch, and I noticed even that the two men pulling us creased their cheeks. Their companion, unmoving, clipped out something like an oath, which he gruffly and hastily coughed over.
 
“The Lord in His wrath visit not the scoffer,” he said aloud, “nor waft him blindfold this night upon the Weary Sands!”
 
In a few minutes we slid up the beach on the comb of a breaker, and half a dozen arms were stretched to help us out. One seized the carpet-bag, another—our tall coxswain’s itself—the despatch-box; and thereby, by that lank arm, hangs this tale. For my uncle, who was jealous of nothing in the world but his box, in scrambling to resecure it from its ravisher, slipped on the wet thwarts, and, falling with his head against a corner of the article itself, rolled out bleeding and half-stunned upon the sand.
 
I was terribly frightened, and for a moment general consternation reigned. But my uncle was not long in recovering himself, though to such a dazed condition that a strong arm was needed in addition to his stick to help him towards the village. We started, a toilful procession, up the sandy gully (Dunberry Gap its name), I carrying the precious case, and presently, reaching the top, saw the village going in a long gentle sweep below us, the scoop of the land covering it seawards, which was the reason we had seen no lights.
 
It had been Uncle Jenico’s intention to look for reasonable lodgings; but this being from his injury impracticable, we let ourselves be conducted to the Flask Inn, the most important in the place, where we were no sooner arrived than he consented to be put to bed, with me in a little closet giving off his room. It was near dark by the time we were settled, and feeling forlorn and bewildered I was glad enough, after a hasty supper, to tuck my troubles between the sheets and forget everything in sleep. But how little I guessed, as I did so, that Uncle Jenico had, in falling, taken possession, like William the Conqueror, of this new land of our adoption.
CHAPTER V. THE STORY OF THE EARTHQUAKE.

Providence, I cannot but believe, had all this time humoured us along a seeming “Road of Casualty,” which was, in truth, the direct path to its own wonderful ends. We talk of luck and accident and coincidence. They are, I am certain, but the veils with which It blinds us to Its inexorable conclusions. My chance selection of our destination, my uncle’s mishap—what were these but second and third acts in the strange drama which had begun in the law courts of Ipswich, where my father had given his life for a truth, which was to be here, thirty miles away, proven and consummated. The dénouement was distant yet, to be sure, for Providence, having all eternity to plot in, works deliberately. Nevertheless, It never loses sight, I think, of what we call the Unities of Art.
 
I awoke from a dreamless sleep, a restored and avid little giant. It was bright morning. A clock on the stairs cleared its throat and sang out six times. The house was still, save for a shuffling of drowsy maids at their dusting below. I lay quiet, conscious of the most unfamiliar atmosphere all about me—of whitewashed walls; of a smell between wood-smoke and seaweed and the faint sourness of beer; of cold boarded floors gritty with sand; of utter remoteness from the noise of traffic habitual to a young denizen of towns. This little gap of time had lifted me clean out of my accustomed conditions, and dumped me in an outpost of civilization, amongst uncouth allies, friendlies in name, but as foreign as foes to my experience.
 
I got up soon very softly, and washed and dressed and went out. I had to pass, on my way, through my uncle’s room; and it relieved me to see him slumbering peacefully on his pillow, though the white bandage across his forehead gave me a momentary shock.
 
I emerged upon a landing, on a wall of which, papered with varnished marble, hung a smoke-stained print of a hunt, with a case of stuffed water-birds on a table beneath. No one accosted me as I descended the little creaking flight of stairs. I passed out by the unlatched private door of the tavern, and found myself at the sea-end of the village street. It was a glowing morning. Not a soul appeared abroad, and I turned to the path by which we had come the night before, thrilling to possess the sea.
 
The ground went gently up by the way of a track that soon lost itself in the thin grass of the cliffs. Not till I reached the verge did I pause to reconnoitre, and then at once all was displayed about me. I drew one deep delighted breath, and turned as my foremost duty to examine the way I had come. The village, yawning from its chimneys little early draughts of smoke, ran straight from the sea, perhaps for a quarter of a mile, under the shelter of a low, long hill on which a few sheep were folded. Beyond this hill, southwards, and divided from it by a deepish gorge, whose end I could see like a cut trough in the cliff edge, bulged another, the Abbot’s, the contour which gave it its name but roughly distinguishable at these closer quarters. The ruins we had passed overnight crowned this second slope near its marge; and inland both hills dropped into pastures, whence the ground rose again towards a rampart of thick woods which screened all Dunberry from the world beyond.
 
It looked so endearing, such a happy valley of peace, one would scarcely have credited the picture with a single evil significance; yet—but I am not going to anticipate. Tingling with pleasure, I faced round to the sea.
 
It was withdrawn a distance away, creaming at the ebb. All beyond was a sheet of golden lustre fading into the bright mists of dawn. Right under the rising sun, like a bar beneath a crest, stretched the line of the Weary Sands, a perilous bank situate some five miles from shore; and between bank and coast rode a solitary little two-masted lugger, with shrouds of gossamer and hull of purple velvet, it seemed, in the soft glow. Even while I looked, this shook out sails like beetles’ wings, and, drawing away, revealed a tiny boat speeding shorewards. I bent and peered over. Ten fathoms beneath me the gully we had climbed in the dark discharged itself, a river of sand, upon the beach; and tumbled at its mouth, as it might be débris, lay a dozen pot-bellied fishing boats. Right and left the cliffs rose and dropped in fantastic conformations, until they sank either way into the horizon. It was a wonderful scene to the little town-bred boy.
 
Presently I looked for the rowing-boat again, and saw it close in shore. In a minute it grated on the shingle, and there heaved himself out of it the tall fisherman who had escorted us last night. I was sure of him, and he also, it appeared, of me; for after staring up some time, shading his eyes with his hand, he turned, as if convinced, to haul his craft into safety. I watched him awhile, and was then once more absorbed in the little vessel drawing seawards, when I started to hear his voice suddenly address me close by. He must have come up the gully as soft-footed as a cat.
 
His eyes were less like a marmoset’s by daylight; but they were still a strange feature in his gaunt forbidding face. I felt friendly towards every one; yet somehow this man’s expression chilled me, as he stood smiling down ingratiatory without another word.
 
“Is that your little ship out there?” I asked, for lack of anything better.
 
“Lor’ bless ’ee, no, sir,” he answered, heartily, but in a sort of breathless way. “What makes ’ee think so?”
 
“Weren’t you coming from it?”
 
“Me!” He protested, with a panting chuckle. “Jole Rampick own that there little tender beauty! I’d skipped out fur my morning dip, sir—if you must know. A wonderful bracing water this—if folks would only credit it.”
 
His unshorn dusky face was not, I could not help thinking, the best testimony to its cleansing properties. But I kept my wisdom to myself, and turned to go back to the inn. Mr. Rampick volunteered his company, and on the way some instructive information.
 
“Aye,” he panted huskily; “man and boy fur nigh on fifty year have I known this here Abbot’s Dunberry, but never—till three months ago—the healing vartues of its brine.”
 
“Who told you of them?” I asked.
 
“The Lord,” he answered, showing the under-whites of his eyes a moment. “The Lord, sir, through his minister the parson—that’s Mr. Sant. Benighted we were—and ignorant—till the light was vouchsafed us; and parson he revealed the Bethesda lying at our very doors.”
 
“What’s Bethesda?” I had, I am sorry to say, to ask.
 
“A blessed watering-place,” he said—“I’m humbly surprised, sir; like as parson calc’lates to make of this here, if the Almighty will condescend to convart our former wickedness to our profit.”
 
“Were you wicked?”
 
“Bad, bad!” He answered, setting his lips, and shaking his head. “A nest of smugglers and forswearers, till He set His hand on us.”
 
“Mr. Rampick! How?”
 
“It tuk the form of an ’arthquake,” he said, with a little cough.
 
I jumped, and ejaculated: “O! Where?”
 
“Yonder, in the Mitre,” he said, waving his hand towards the hidden bluff. “It’ll be fower months ago, won’t it, as they run their last contraband to ground in the belly of that there hill. A cave, it was supposed, sir; but few knew for sarten, and none will ever know now till the day when the Lord ‘shall judge the secrets of men.’ There was a way in, as believed, known only to the few; and one night, as believed, them few entered by it, each man with his brace o’ runlets—and they never come out agen!”
 
I gasped and knotted my fingers together. It did not occur to my innocence to question the source of his knowledge, or conjecture.
 
“Why?” I whispered.
 
“Why?” he echoed in a sort of asthmatic fury. “Why, sir, because it was a full cargo, and their iniquity according; and so the Lord He spoke, and the hill it closed upon ’em. In the dark, when we was all abed, there come a roaring wind from underground what turned our hearts to water; and in the morning when we gathered to look, there was the hill twisted like a dead face out of knowledge, and the Abbey—two-thirds of what was left—scrattled abroad.”
 
I could only stare up at him, breathing quick in face of this wonderful romance. It had, I knew, been a year strangely prolific in earth-shocks.
 
“Yes, sir,” he said soberly; “if all what’s believed is Gospel true, there at this moment lays those poor sinners, bedded like flints in chalk—and the hill fair reeking with Nantes brandy.”
 
He groaned hoarsely.
 
“Hallerloojer! It was a sign and a warning. The shock of it carried off th’ old vicar, and in a week or two arter Mr. Sant he come to take his place. He found us a sober’d people, Hallerloojer! and soil meet fur the Lord’s planting. You be the fust fruits, sir; and we favourably hope as when you go away you’ll recommend us.”
 
Perhaps I vaguely understood by this something of the nature of our welcome. Given an isolated fishing village skipped by tourists because of its remoteness; given the sudden withdrawal from that village of its natural advantages for an illicit trade; given a clerical enthusiast, introduced at the right moment, to point out to a depressed population it’s locality’s potentialities as a watering-place, and to show the way for them to win an honest prosperity out of the ruins of evil; given, to top all, a dressing of local superstition, and the position was clear. Such deduction, no doubt, was for the adult rather than the child; but though I could not draw it at the time, it was there to be drawn, I am sure.
 
As we talked we had reached the inn, and my companion, touching his cap, passed on. But he came back before I had time to enter, and addressed me breathlessly, as if on an after-thought.
 
“Begging your pardon, sir—but you makes me laugh, you reely does—about that there lugger belonging to poor Jole Rampick.” And he went off chuckling, and looking, with his little head and slouching shoulders and stilts of legs, like the hind-quarters of a pantomime elephant.
 
I found my uncle sitting up in preparation to breakfast in bed. He was very genial and happy; but, so it seemed to me, extraordinarily vague. I told him about my adventure and the story of the earthquake, which he seemed somehow unable to dissociate from his own accident.
 
“I knew it, Richard,” he said; “but it was taking rather a mean advantage of a lame man, eh? There’s no security against it but balloons—that I’ve often thought. You see, when the ground itself gives underneath you, where are you to go? If one could only pump oxygen into one’s own head, you know. I’ll think about it in the course of the morning. I don’t fancy I shall get up just at present. That despatch-box, now—it was a drastic way of impressing its claims upon me, eh? Well, well!”
 
He laughed, rather wildly I thought.
 
“Uncle,” I said, “you’ve never told me—how did you get lame?”
 
“How did I get lame?” he murmured, pressing the bandage on his forehead. “Why, to be sure, it was a parachute, Richard—a really capital thing I invented. But the wires got involved—the merest accident—and I came to the ground.”
 
He was interrupted by two young ladies, daughters of the inn, who came themselves—out of curiosity, I think—to serve us breakfast. They were over-dressed, all but for their trodden slippers, with large bows of hair on their heads, and they giggled a good deal and answered questions pertly.
 
“Well, my dears,” said Uncle Jenico, “how about the earthquake?”
 
They stared at him, and then at one another, and burst out laughing.
 
“O, there now!” said one; “earthquake yourself, old gentleman! Go along with you!” And they ran out, and we heard them tittering all down the stairs.
 
Uncle Jenico got clearer after his meal, though he was still disinclined to move. I sat with him all the morning, while he showed and explained to me more of the contents of his box; and about midday a visitor, the Reverend Mr. Sant, was announced. I stood up expectant, and saw a thin, dark young man, in clerical dress, enter the room at a stride. He had the colourless face, large-boned nose, and burning eyes of a zealot, and not an ounce of superfluous flesh anywhere about him. Much athletic temperance had trimmed him down to frame and muscle, but had not parched the sources of a very sweet smile, which was the only emotional weakness he retained. He came up to the bed, took my uncle’s hand, and introduced himself in a word.
 
“Permit me,” he said; “I heard of your accident. I know a trifle of surgery, and our apothecary visits us but twice in the month. May I look?”
 
He examined the hurt, and, saying he would send a salve for it, settled down to talk.
 
Now, I could not follow the persuasive process; but all I know is that within a quarter of an hour he had learned all my uncle’s and my history, and the reason for our coming to Dunberry, and that, having once mastered the details, he very ingeniously set himself to appropriating them to the schemes of Providence.
 
“It is clear,” he said, “that you, free-lances of Destiny, were inspired to select this, out of all the world, for your operations. We looked for visitors to report for us upon the attractions of the place; you for a quiet and healthful spot in which to develop your schemes.”
 
“Very true,” said Uncle Jenico. “I’ve long had an idea for extracting gold from sea-water.”
 
“You see?” cried Mr. Sant, greatly pleased. “It’s a clear interposition of Providence. This coast is, I am sure, peculiarly adapted, from the accessibility of its waters, to gold-seeking.”
 
I could not restrain my excitement.
 
“Please,” I said, “did-d-d the smugglers hide it there?”
 
Mr. Sant glanced at me sharply.
 
“Who told you about smugglers?” he demanded.
 
“Mr. Rampick,” I whispered, hanging my head.
 
“Ah!” he exclaimed, and turned to my uncle. “Old Joel Rampick, was it? One of the most cherished of my converts, sir; a deeply religious man at bottom, though circumstances long obscured the light in him. Old Rampick, now! And talked about smuggling, did he? He’ll have drawn the moral of it from his own experience, I don’t doubt. Dunberry, there’s no use concealing, has been a long thorn in the side of the Revenue, though happily the earthquake has changed all that.”
 
“Ah, to be sure!” said my uncle; “the earthquake.”
 
“It was without question a Divine visitation,” said Mr. Sant, resolutely.
 
“Do you think so?” said my uncle, his face falling. “My purpose in coming here was really most harmless, sir.”
 
Mr. Sant looked puzzled; then went on, with a dry smack of his lips:
 
“I am afraid that my predecessor lacked a little the apostolic fervour. He was old, and liked his ease, good man. Perhaps long association with the place had blunted his prejudices. I must not play the Pharisee to him, however. No doubt so circumstanced I should have failed no less to sow the seed. Heaven sent me at a fruitful moment: to Heaven be the credit and the glory! This little boy now—nephew Dicky? He knows his catechism?”
 
“Ah!” said Uncle Jenico, with a cunning look; “does he?”
 
“Chit-chit!” protested the clergyman. “I hope not altogether ignorant of it?”
 
He was decently shocked, and won an easy promise from my uncle that I should come up to him for an hour’s instruction every day. Then he rose to go.
 
“You’ll excuse me,” he said, bending his brows, “but I trust you are satisfied with your quarters?”
 
“Well, yes,” answered my uncle, hesitating; “but—an inn, you see. It’s a little more than we can—than we ought to—eh?”
 
Mr. Sant brightened immediately. We came to know afterwards that he strongly disapproved of these flashy Miss Flemings, and had once expressed in public some surprise that they had not been impounded as skittish animals not under proper control.
 
“There’s the widow Puddephatt, ripe and ready for visitors,” he said, “and perfectly reasonable, I am sure. May I give you her address? It’s No. 3, the Playstow.”
 
My uncle thanked him warmly; and, smitten with a sudden idea, caught at his coat as he was leaving.
 
“O, by the way!” he said, “these coins to be picked up on the beach, now. There are enough left to make it profitable, I suppose?”
 
Mr. Sant stared at him.
 
“The coins, Roman and other,” persisted Uncle Jenico, anxiously scanning the clergyman’s face; “the antiques, which Morant tells us litter the beach like shells after storms?”
 
Mr. Sant shook his head.
 
“I have heard nothing of them during my time,” he said; “but I should hardly think smuggling would have got such a hold here if it were the Tom Tiddler’s ground your friend supposes it to be.”
 
Directly he was gone, Uncle Jenico turned to me, rubbing his hands, with a most roguish smile puckering his mouth.
 
“Richard,” he said, “we are in plenty of time. The obtuseness of the rustic is a thing astonishing beyond words! Here, with all Pactolus at his feet, he needs a stranger to come and show him his opportunities. But, mum, boy, mum! We’ll keep this little matter to ourselves.”
CHAPTER VI. MRS. PUDDEPHATT AND FANCY-MARIA.

The following day my uncle was near himself again, and we left the Flask inn and took lodging with the widow Puddephatt. The Playstow was a little green, about half-way down the village, where the villagers reared their may-pole on May-day, and built their fires on Midsummer’s Eve, and caroused in September on the harvest-largesse won from passers-by. Round about, in a little square, were cottages, detached and exclusive, the élite of Dunberry; and to one side was the church—but now in process of completion—in whose porch the daring would seat themselves on St. Mark’s eve to see, at midnight, the wraiths of the year’s pre-doomed come and knock at the door. Mr. Sant had, however, limited that custom, as well as some others less reputable; and the fact that he was able to do so spoke volumes for his persuasiveness. At the present time the villagers, under his stimulus, were transferring, stone by stone, to the long unfinished fabric and its adjoining school-house, the less sacred parts of the ruined foundation on the hill.
 
Mrs. Puddephatt, though Dunberry-born, was a comparative acquisition to the village, to which she had been summoned, and to her natural succession in No. 3, the Playstow, through the death of an only sister without encumbrances. She had, in fact, gone very young, a great many years ago, into service in London, and had never set foot again in her native place until this inheritance, now two years old, had called her. She brought with her an ironic atmosphere of the great world, and a disdainful tolerance towards the little, in which her lot was now to vegetate. She had, in her high experience, “’tweenied,” “obliged,” scullery-maided, kitchen-maided, house-maided, parlour-maided, and old-maided; and she had somehow emerged from this five-fold chrysalis of virginity the widow Puddephatt—no one knew by what warrant, other than that of a sort of waspish charity-girl cap, with a knuckle-bone frill round her face. But then her knowledge of men was so matrimonial that it was admitted nothing but a husband could have inspired it. Her dictums, in respect to this mystic experience, were merum sal to the wives of Dunberry.
 
“Look in the pot for your new gownd,” and “The way to a man’s purse is through his mouth,” may be bracketed for utterances cryptic to the “general,” but not to their delighted understandings.
 
“A hopen ’and comes empty ’ome.”
 
“A man shuts his sweet’art’s mouth with a kiss, but his wife’s heyes.”
 
“Be careful of a Saturday morning to mend the ’ole in your man’s pocket.”
 
“When your ’usband talks of his hage, be sure he means yours.”
 
Such and the like shrewd axioms served the widow Puddephatt at least as well as marriage lines; and, if more were needed, her mastery of the exact science of nagging and of the conquering resource of hysterics supplied it. Sometimes, it was whispered, she was to be seen in her front garden viciously dusting a man’s coat with a stick; and on this moral implication alone, late tavern roysterers, lurching home after closing-time past the little wicket where she was often to be seen watching spectral and ironic, had been known to slink by, meanly conscious of deserting, and surrendering into her gloating hands a purely imaginary Puddephatt, their late boon companion.
 
This tremendous lady undertook the care of us with infinite condescension, and, hearing that we were Londoners bred, gathered us at once under the protection of her maternal and metropolitan wing.
 
“Lork, Fancy-Maria!” she would say, with an air of amused tolerance towards the little Suffolk rawbones who “generalled” for her; “we don’t breathe on the knives and polish ’em in our haprons in London!” Or, “That won’t do, Fancy-Maria! We know better in London than to dust the ’ot plates with our helbers.”
 
With this shibboleth of sarcastic comparison, she had won, not only Fancy-Maria, but all feminine Dunberry to a perspiring emulation of her gentility, so that in the course of her two years the social code had grown quite elevated, and it was no longer fashionable to dine in one’s shirt-sleeves.
 
Fancy-Maria was her adoring, but unable lieutenant. She tried hard, and breathed very hard; yet her fervour led to frequent disaster. It was the management of trays that tested her most severely. If she rose with one from the depths, she invariably struck it against the lintel of the parlour door, and shot everything from it into the hall. If she descended with one from the heights, she tripped at the corner where the stairs turned, and tobogganed down on it the rest of the way, preceded by an avalanche of cups and dishes. She always did her best to keep the contents steady with her thumbs; but her thumbs, though large, were not universal, and were generally occupied in holding secure the bread and butter, for choice, on one side, and the fried fish on the other. Some people make a point of leaving a little piece on each dish “for manners.” We always cut out and left Fancy-Maria’s thumb-marks for that mysterious retainer of our childhood.
 
It was not long before Uncle Jenico questioned Mrs. Puddephatt about the earthquake. She turned up her nose at the first mention of it, and tittered the shrillest sarcasm.
 
“Lork, sir!” she said, “you’ve never abin took hin by that stuff! And you a Londoner!”
 
“Stuff, is it?” said Uncle Jenico, genially. “And why, now?”
 
She cocked her head and folded her arms across her chest, like a tricksy saint in an old woodcut.
 
“I wouldn’t a’ believed it of you,” she said; “no, not if you’d gone and took me by the ears and battered my ’ed on the table.”
 
“But, my good woman,” began my uncle, “Mr. Sant——”
 
“Bless ’im for a hinnercent suckling-dove o’cooing among the sarpints!” she interrupted, with a tight little laugh.
 
We looked at her quite bewildered, and Uncle Jenico was evidently at a loss for an answer.
 
“What ’e wants, that ’e believes,” said Mrs. Puddephatt, nodding her head many times. “But he ain’t a Londoner, and hi ham!”
 
The advantage, one would have thought, lay with the untainted clergyman.
 
“Herthquake, indeed!” exclaimed Mrs. Puddephatt, with withering contempt. “And grace took hout of it? No, sir; not more than what Elijah looked to find in his’n, and was deceived in the Almighty. A fine show convert we’ve got in our Mr. Rampick, haven’t we? Ho, yes! Tee-hee! And I ’opes as he makes it pay, sinst the loss of his liveli’ood by the herthquake.”
 
The amount of scorn she got each time into the word was simply blasting.
 
“He lost——” began my uncle, surprised.
 
“Ah! what would he lose, now?” interrupted the lady, acridly humorous. “That’s just hit, sir. Talked of the wicked smugglers to Master Bowen here, didn’t he? Well, supposin’ he were hisself the most howtdacious of the lot? I don’t say he was, you know. I wouldn’t so commit myself. I merely states as a curious fact that this Rampick, as was formerly as warm and dangerous a man as the best in the place, is, sinst the herthquake, become a loafer, without any visible means of substance. Ho, yes! A pretty convert, I don’t think!”
 
“You believe him to be at heart a smuggler still?” said my uncle. “Now, now, Mrs. Puddephatt!”
 
“Sir,” she answered, with dignity, “I thank you for the himplication; but whatever my apperient greenness, I wasn’t born yesterday. We may have our faults in London, but to be Suffolk paunches isn’t among them. Once a smuggler, sir, is halways a smuggler.”
 
“Indeed?” said Uncle Jenico, much abashed.
 
“Yes, sir,” said Mrs. Puddephatt; “just as to be born a gipsy is to laugh at the rates. A ’ottentot, sir, isn’t ashamed of his own nekkedness, nor a smuggler of his smugness. Reform, hindeed!”
 
“Well, well,” said Uncle Jenico. “But what makes you suppose it wasn’t an earthquake?”
 
The landlady laughed sarcastic.
 
“In London, sir,” she said, “herthquakes—as is p’raps beknownst to you—sends out sulfurious perfumes, and not the heffluvium of brandy.”
 
“Good heavens!” exclaimed my uncle. “But what——?”
 
“I reveal nothing, Mr. Paxton,” she interrupted him, “but what my nose tells me. You may smell it yet, sir, begging your pardon, about the Mitre.”
 
“But——”
 
“I’ve ’eard tell, sir, of ile wells, but never of brandy. I may be wrong; and halso I may be wrong in doubting that gunpowder forms of itself in the ’oller places of the herth,” and with these enigmatic words she left us.
 
But it must be said that, for all her withering gentility, she made us an excellent landlady, as we had full opportunity of proving. For—I may as well out with it at once—we had come to Dunberry to stay.
CHAPTER VII. MR. SANT.

I think, perhaps, Uncle Jenico foresaw it no more than I. Without doubt, at first, he would have laughed to scorn the idea of sinking all his eager interests in this little Suffolk fishing village, whose communications with any town of even fifth-rate importance, such as Yokestone, were by seven miles at least of villainous roads. Our settlement was gradual; our departure postponed, in the beginning, week by week, probably like that of the man who went to Venice for a fortnight and stayed for thirty years. The initiatory step towards our continued residence was certainly my uncle’s acceptance of Mr. Sant’s offer to instruct me. That was, as the French say, le premier pas qui coûte. Afterwards, the offer—being extended, with infinite consideration for our means, to one for my general tuition by the clergyman—grew to confirm our attachment to the place, until it came to be tacitly understood that Dunberry was to see me through my education.
 
But there was another reason. Uncle Jenico seemed never quite to recover from the stun inflicted upon him at his landing. His affection, his geniality, his inventiveness were no whit impaired; yet somehow the last, one could have thought, had relapsed from the practical upon the theoretic. He was a trifle less restless; a trifle more inert. He appeared to bask in a sort of luminous placidity, and more and more his concern in his patents diminished. I do not mean by this to imply that his schemes for our enrichment were all forgotten. On the contrary, they concentrated to an intensity as pathetic as it was single in its object. I know at this date that Uncle Jenico was a lovable failure. I recognize, moreover, as I hardly recognized then, that a wistful realization of this fact—minus its qualifying adjective—was beginning to dawn upon him, and that he was inclining to consider his “lame and impotent conclusions” a right judgment upon him for his self-seeking. God bless him, I say! He thought to atone for this, his egotism, dear charitable soul, by devoting all his remaining energies to the task of making the fortune of the little trust committed to his care. He wrought, in fact, that he might die content, leaving me rich; and, in the furtherance of this object, his schemes were not, as I say, forgotten, but transferred. They were consolidated, in short, into one, which in the end was to become an obsession. But of that I will treat in its place.
 
As soon as we were settled, I began at once to go to Mr. Sant’s for my daily lesson, the scope of which imperceptibly enlarged itself from Catechism to the Classics. The rectory stood inland beyond the Playstow, in a rather lonely position under the drop of the hill. It was a dark, mossy old building, shrouded in trees, and a by-road went past its gates up to the woods beyond, in the depths of whose shadows lay the Court Manor-house and its bed-ridden old squire.
 
Mr. Sant was a bachelor, a tough militant Churchman and Church reformer. He taught me the uses of my fists as well as of the Decalogue. No doubt it was this constitution of his which made such way with the villagers, for Englishmen respect piety the better for its being knocked into them. I took my share of his excellent influence, and I trust it helped to make a man of me. You shall hear by-and-by about the first practical use to which I put it.
 
He had the motto from Cicero framed and hung over the mantelpiece in his study. I will quote it to you, because it speaks the man more perfectly than I can do. Quidquid agas, agere pro viribus! Whatever you do, to do with your whole strength—that was it. It was a maxim very apt to one whose own strength, both of will and body, was of tempered steel.
 
One among his many characteristic innovations was “The Feast of Lanterns,” as he called it. A lecture, to combine instruction with amusement, would be called for delivery in the church after dark. Whosoever listed might, on a single condition, attend this. He would find set up, spectrally discernible in the chancel, which, like the rest of the building, would be unlighted, a screen of white linen, on which had been roughly sketched in crayon, by the courageous lecturer himself, a number of objects—to become, in their turn, subjects—which might range, say, from a leg of mutton to the dome of St. Paul’s. The condition of attendance was simply that each comer should bring his or her own lantern, with the natural consequence that the greater the company the brighter the illumination. Now, with the first arrival began hymns, and were so continued until sufficient lights were congregated to reveal the drawings on the screen, a right identification of any one of which, by any member of the audience, at the close of any verse, put a period to the singing and started a disquisition on the object named. It must be said that the identification was not always accurate, in which case the singing was continued. For religious and artistic fervour are not necessarily associated, and the splendid daring which Mr. Sant put into his work sometimes obscured its intentions, as when his bellows, designed to introduce a dissertation on pulmonics, were taken for a ham. But the vigour and resourcefulness of the lecturer neither allowed an impasse, nor, while he was always quite ready to join in the laughter over his own artistic shortcomings, permitted criticism to degenerate into fooling. He did not object to laughter; on the contrary (I am afraid it will scandalize some people), he credited the Almighty with an almighty sense of humour, only he insisted upon its being tempered to the sacredness of the place in which it was evoked. And, for the rest, he had a fund of bright and ready information at his constant disposal.
 
Such is an example of his methods, and, if any pious reactionaries object, I can only say that in the result it was educational; that it won tavern-loafers to at least one wholesome evening in the week; that, in short, it attained such popularity, that any dissipated seceder attempting to sneak out of the church, and thereby obscure the light by so much as the loss of a taper, would be roughly grabbed back by his fellows, and forced, willy-nilly, to hear the lecture out.
 
Mr. Sant, to sum him up, was a zealot without being a bigot, and a devoted servant to his Master without prejudice to human nature. He was also a capable boxer. I came to love as much as to respect him.
CHAPTER VIII. TREASURE-HUNTING.

For a fortnight succeeding our arrival the weather remained calm and bright, so that Uncle Jenico and I were able to explore the locality with great comfort and satisfaction. The coast, which we followed up both north and south for miles, was extremely desolate and unvisited, though bearing at intervals all along it the traces of former settlements. It would seem to have been quite thickly populated once, during a period which dated probably from the incursions, first, of the Roman legions, and, after, of those salt sea-wolves who preferred squatting round the fringes of their conquered island—with the open door of the sea beside them, and its smell in their briny nostrils—to penetrating into the traps of the close-shut valleys. Later, Christianity had come to fret these windy, foam-whipped settlements with pinnacles, and monastic walls, and stone fanes with jewelled windows and airy bell-towers, so that church might peal to church all down this long front line of the position it had won. But corruption creeping in with prosperity, and lawlessness with the tides, God had withdrawn His countenance from the temples that abused His service, and had permitted the ocean to break in their defences and one by one devour them. The priest who had evaded his vows had ages ago tucked up his cassock and fled; the parson who succeeded him, and to the reversion of his benefices, could not so hoodwink Heaven by taking his tithes of smuggled tobacco and brandy, as to stay for one season the hunger of the gluttonous waters. Year by year, century by century, the storms had fed on these devoted sand-built coasts, and were still feeding when we came to know them. Towns and once-flourishing colonies had disappeared as utterly as if they had never existed. Not only they, but the very soil on which they had been planted, paved the floor of the ocean for miles out. There were legends of foundered bells rung by unseen mermen at incredible distances from shore. There were stories of treasure chests and sculptured marbles revealed to storm-belated fishermen in the deep troughs of monstrous, bottom-scouring waves. So far away as the Weary Sands themselves, it was said, traces of the ancient Dunberry could be spelt out, in calm seasons, by those who gazed intently enough and long enough into the green, deep waters. It was a fable, probably, in a land of fables; yet it served to emphasize the wreck of time, and will show upon what a haunted border-land of ghosts we had come to make our home. The modern village itself was old. How ancient, then, those grey ruins on the cliff, which had survived to see the last of the glory, of which they had once been a part, claimed by the deep, and their own hoary traditions engulfed into the pettier traditions of a little clan!
 
These same ruins consisted of the great tower of the abbey, with a mass of tumbled and complicated masonry at its foot; of the line of the nave, picked out in an avenue of shattered arches which ran seawards until stopped by the upward and outward sweep of the cliff; and, finally, of a maze of huge fragments, mostly on the inland side, which marked the sites of monastic buildings, lazar house, boundary walls, and so forth. Elsewhere were traces of aisles, cloisters and supernumerary offices uncountable, the whole buttressed with ivy. But the most significant ruin of all, to my thinking, was one which stood under the cliff, and for three-fourths of its depth apart from it. This was no other than the abbey well, which generations of storms had gnawed out of its deep bed in the ground without being able to crunch and devour the sturdy relic itself. There it stood, a Titan of the vanished race, sprouting stubborn from the littered sand below, cemented, as it seemed, by the very drift which was yearly flung upon it to destroy. Exposed and isolated, choked with parching rubbish as it was, how thrilling was the thought of the monks who had once drunk from it; of the waters it had drained from the hill; of the hill itself with its one-time springs lying under the salt sea! It was the very gaunt dead monument to the desolation of this land, and as such, it seemed, would endure when all else was vanished. The storms which took the rest stone by stone, could do no more than stone by stone reveal this; the earthquake, which at a blow had rent the massive tower and tumbled half the remaining walls, had left this unshaken. It was a wonderful and impressive relic.
 
The first time I had entered among the ruins was by myself. I climbed the slope early on the morning before breakfast, and stood in the midst of them, thrilled and awestricken. A little grassy valley divided me from the hill which concealed the village, of which not so much as a roof was visible from where I stood. I seemed entirely cut off and alone, a pigmy in the stupendous shadows of these “ruined choirs.” The ground swept in a steepish curve to the cliff edge, and again, inland, in one slightly shallower. These were the “Old and New Testaments” of the Mitre; and in the “Valley of Knowledge” that lay between, was built the abbey, its monastery, chapter-house, refectory and other buildings taking and topping the western slope, which, on its further side, went shelving down to the Cemeterium Fratrum, and the confines of the old grounds.
 
I poked about among the shattered stones with a feeling between fear and curiosity. I could tell by the fresh edges of the rents, and the way in which little avalanches of mortar were constantly falling with a whispering sound, that much of the devastation was recent. The tower had been breached by the earthquake all down its seaward front, opening a monstrous gap from which a cataract of stones had thundered, and piled themselves in foam, as it were, at the foot. In one place, near the cliff slope, a mighty plinth had been heaved on to its side, and I saw the mould on the under surface of it yet grooved with the tracks of slugs and beetles. It had sunk, with the mass of masonry cemented to it, two-thirds of its breadth into the earth, and all about the ground was strangely wryed, and distorted, and cracked, and bubbled up into mounds, as if here the underheaval had made itself peculiarly felt. I was gazing on it half-fascinated, when, happening to raise my eyes, I started to see other regarding me fixedly from a face which seemed to have sprouted from the earth.
 
I gave a little cry and uttered Mr. Rampick’s name. At the word, the man himself rose to his height, from the position in which it appeared he had been crouching, and ascended the last steps of a cliff pathway, of the existence of which I had not known. He came up to me, rubbing the back of his bony hand across his mouth.
 
“Come to see fur yourself, sir?” he said, in his breathless, fawning way.
 
“Yes,” I answered. “It was here, wasn’t it?”
 
He stamped with his great foot.
 
“Here, or hereabouts,” he said, “they lays under—as supposed—each with his brace o’ runlets.”
 
It was a fearful but thrilling thought.
 
“Why don’t they dig for them?” I whispered.
 
He gazed at me a moment, breathing hard. His eyes seemed blacker, the rims round them more livid than I had yet noticed.
 
“What!” he cried, so hoarsely that his voice cracked. “Displace these here sacred ruins fur the likes of they! The Lord, sir—begging your pardon—set His own trap for them in His own way; and it been’t fur us to rise His dead. May I make so bold to axe if your uncle knows you’re out?”
 
I felt the insolence of the question, but was too young to resent it.
 
“No!” I exclaimed, surprised.
 
“Ah!” he said. “I lay he won’t be best pleased, sir, with humility. This here hill, sir, if all what’s said is Gospel true—is risky ground to walk fur them as knows it not, nor its toppling stones, sir, nor its hidden abscesses. I’d go home, sir, if I was you, with favour, sir.”
 
I was offended, but a little frightened also. Blushing scarlet, I turned away, without a word, and ran down the slope homewards.
 
I told Uncle Jenico of my adventure and encounter. To my further surprise he commended Mr. Rampick’s warning.
 
“What should I do, if anything happened to you, Richard, when I was not by?” he pleaded.
 
There was a note of emotion in his voice which touched me, and I promised I would never seek the Mitre again out of his company. I meant it when I said it; but, alas! the venturesomeness of youth led me later on, I am ashamed to confess, to disregard my promise.
 
That was not till long after, however; and in the meanwhile the weather remaining fine, as I have said, we had plenty of opportunity for exploring the district. Not a day was allowed to pass, moreover, without our investigating at least once in the twelve hours, a section of the coast. Uncle Jenico would prod all the way, with his thick stick, into the moraine of shingle which ran along the shore above the high tide mark. At these times he would be very absent-minded, answering my questions at random, and I knew that he had Morant and his golden bushels in his thoughts. He never found anything, however, and each evening would look up at the sky and predict stormy weather with a sham deprecation of the inconvenience it would be to us.
 
But at last the weather really did break, and dark evening settled in, with a high wind and rising sea. It blew a gale all night and throughout the following day, and Uncle Jenico bemoaned our detention in the house with a gratified face.
 
It was not until the second morning that it had cleared sufficiently to enable us to go out, which we did immediately after breakfast. The sun was blinking waterily, and the surf pounding yellow as we came down to the beach; but the wind had fallen and the rain ceased, which was enough for us.
 
Uncle Jenico, with his blue coat fastened tightly across his chest, was looking extraordinarily swollen, I thought, until the reason was explained to me. We had not gone far, when—first glancing all about him with an air of twinkling mystery—he cautiously unbuttoned, and revealed, neatly folded upon his chest, a little bushel sack such as they use for potatoes.
 
“Hush!” he whispered, though not a soul was in sight; “the difficulty will be to avoid observation when we bring it back full. I dare say they’re honest here, Richard; but it’s a wrong business principle to presume upon a sentiment. We must dine and sup out—I’ve brought some sandwiches with me, and Mr. Sant will excuse you for once—and return with our booty after dark.”
 
“Do you expect to fill that, Uncle?” I said, aghast for all my infancy.
 
“Well,” he answered, laughing joyously but privately, “I hope not quite, or it would puzzle us to carry it. But, in common wisdom we must make the best we can of this rare opportunity.”
 
He hung the sack over his arm, and we started off. The storm had certainly overturned the shingle, and scattered much of it abroad in a tangle of seaweed and dead dog-fish. For hours we hunted on, groping sedulously among the litter; and at last, late in the afternoon, we found a penny. At least, I was convinced it was one, being intimately acquainted, like most boys, with the coin. But Uncle Jenico would not hear of it. He was shaking with excitement as he examined it. It was so rubbed by the action of the waves as to exhibit nothing but a near-obliterated bust, which I was sure was that of our late lamented King. My uncle, however, pointed out to me distinct traces, though I could not see them, of a Latin inscription, and was jubilant over the find. It did not make much impression on the sack, it is true; but he was careful to point out to me that the value of a nugget, such as it would take two men to carry, might all be contained in a diamond which one could slip into one’s waistcoat pocket. It was not so much quantity we needed, he said, as quality; and he was quite satisfied, entirely so, with the result of our day’s exploration.
 
I was glad of this, at least, being dog-tired long before the sun-setting, as it justified us in going home to supper. But my faith in Morant, I am afraid, was already sadly shaken.
 
CHAPTER IX. HARRY HARRIER.

It was that obnoxious penny, I believe, which was responsible for my uncle’s continued pursuit of his new Lobby, until the hobby itself became an obsession. If we had come home that first day empty-handed, I have little doubt but that his baulked imagination would have found itself some other and more practical outlet. As it was, the discovery was held by him to justify every proverb which values itself upon small beginnings. He was so little cast down by its meagreness, that there was no limit to the golden dreams of which he made it the basis. Most crazes, I fancy, are so built upon a pennyworth of fact.
 
He did not take out the sack again, but replaced it by a sponge-bag, and the bag, later, by a stout leathern purse. Finally, he decided that his trouser-pockets would serve all our needs, with the additional advantage that our hands would be freer thereby, and the risk of comment on our proceedings avoided. It may have been, for it had certainly little to feed upon. During those early weeks, beyond some scraps of old iron, we found nothing.
 
At first, it must be said, Uncle Jenico was not so entirely possessed by his infatuation, but he found time to experiment in other directions. For days he made our lodgings almost uninhabitable by boiling and decomposing seaweed, until Mrs. Puddephatt complained that her reputation was suffering by the incessant “hodour of ’ot putrid fish” which emanated from her premises.
 
The patent, upon which he had expected to realize, turned out, after all, a disappointment, and had never, it appeared, been regarded as other than a joke by the man who, he had supposed, had been going to buy it. He was a little disconsolate at first, but soon brightened up when he thought of the potential riches lying under the shingle.
 
“We’ll laugh at ’em all by-and-by, Richard,” he said. “What a joke it’ll be when we’ve got our own capital to work upon, and these ninnies find out the good things they’ve missed. But we won’t be relentless, my boy, and disinherit the honest labourer because of the shortsightedness of his employer. Work for the good of mankind, remember, and you work for your own.”
 
Fine weather, at this time, made him thoughtful and restless. It was only when the wind blew and the waves rose that he cheered up and became excited like a seagull. Then he would laugh aloud, and button up his coat and, telling me to follow him when my lesson was over, limp off to the beach, and there untiringly weave his ropes of sand, growing more and more absorbed in his task the faster it melted beneath his hands. The coins were there, he was convinced; and it only needed patience and luck (and he plumed himself upon his being rather a spoilt child of the latter) to hit upon the deposits.
 
In the meanwhile I was going to my daily lesson, and getting absorbed in my own way. Mr. Sant was a delectable tutor, inspiring and invigorating, and by-and-by, unconsciously to me, my hour extended itself to two, and sometimes more. So months passed, and then a year, and I was nine.
 
One morning I was on my way to the rectory when I made a notable acquaintance. I had to pass, on my setting out, the new school, which was now in full activity, and battling its first successful steps in the moral and intellectual reformation of infant Dunberry. The children were generally trooping to the bell-call as I started, and I have no doubt that the sense of superiority my consciousness of private tuition gave me made itself apparent to some of them in my air and demeanour.
 
A little beyond the Playstow the road to the rectory, and to the Court on the hill, ran up obliquely through the village side, passing very soon into privacy and loneliness. I had almost reached the rectory palings when I saw a boy start out, at sight of me, from the shadow of them and come swiftly on, as if to accost me while yet short of shelter. He was about my own age or a little older, and had a round, freckled face, with dark red hair curled as tight as astrakhan, and a very fat little pug-nose. He was dressed in a brown velveteen jacket and strong corduroy breeches and leathern gaiters, and he looked what, in fact, he was, a miniature gamekeeper. I knew him well enough by sight, having passed him for the last two or three weeks near the school-house, and always, I verily believe, with an odd little tremor of foreboding in my inside. He had proved, on inquiry, to be the only child of Harrier, the squire’s gamekeeper, from whom, and that only on his master’s initiative, a scowling consent to his son’s attending the new school had been wrung by Mr. Sant. But the boy came, though near as rebellious as his father, and had even, until this morning, arrived punctual.
 
Now he advanced, swaggering and whistling, with his hands in his breeches’ pockets, and a fine air of abstraction. I tried to dodge him, but for all that, in spite of his pretended preoccupation, he brought his shoulder smack against mine with a force that knocked me sprawling, and, from the mere pain of it, drove the angry tears to my eyes.
 
He wheeled round at once, as I gathered myself up, with a mock apology so impudent that I longed to hit him, but was deterred by the front he showed me. He stood square, balancing on his heels, as tight-knit a young mischief as health and muscle could produce.
 
“Mighty!” he said, with a pretence of being scared. “What I done, Lor? Blest if I ain’t knocked into the dirt the young gen’leman what treats we for sich!”
 
Then my uneasy consciousness understood the nature of this retaliation.
 
“You did it on purpose,” I said sullenly, trying not to whimper as I dusted myself.
 
“Me!” he cried, in beautiful astonishment. “Why, howsomever can you charge it to me, master, walking with your nose in the air?”
 
“It’s you that has your nose in the air,” I retaliated malevolently.
 
He flushed through his tan, and squared up to me.
 
“Say that agen!” he hissed, lifting his lip like a weasel.
 
“Once is enough,” I answered.
 
He danced about me, making play in the air with his fists.
 
“Is it!” he gasped, spasmodic. “O yus, o’ course!—I’ll larn you—you dursen’t—foonk!—private poople—yah!—take your lickun, then!”
 
Something must have stirred in the garden at the moment, for he suddenly flounced round and off, his mouth drawn down contemptuous, and his chin stuck out. But I had not done with him by any means.
 
Mr. Sant received me that morning, I thought, oddly, and made no allusion to my battered appearance. Neither did I, at which, perhaps, he cleared a little.
 
The next morning Harry Harrier—for such was the young sportsman’s name—met me as before. I gave him the path, though with anger in my heart; and he openly jeered at me as he went by. The following day it was the same, and for many days after. He would have risked, I believe, ten times the punishment he deserved, and got, for being late, rather than baulk himself of this recurrent treat. Presently he altered his tactics in such a way as to eat his cake and have it, so to speak. He did not pass me one day at the usual hour, and I confess I breathed relief, for all my own inefficiency was gall to me. Mr. Sant’s manner, as was usual now, was chilling almost to repulsion. I was very unhappy. I had grown to brood on my grievance until it almost choked me. Dunberry was becoming to me a miserable Siberia, and I longed to be out of it, and hinted as much to my uncle. But, to my dejection, he would not understand—could not, perhaps, as pride had always prevented me from revealing my difficulty to him or to any of my real friends. Moreover, the picking-up of some trumpery oddments on the beach had by now established him unshakably in his craze, which had been further confirmed by the action of certain unscrupulous Dunberryites in palming off on him some faked-up coins, which I could have sworn had never been minted out of my own generation.
 
The relief I enjoyed on this particular morning was, however, delusive. The cunning little gamekeeper had got himself credited with punctuality, only that he might descend upon me on his return journey as I left the rectory. Nor was this the worst; for he came reinforced by half a dozen schoolfellows, the dirty little parasites of his corduroy lordship. I found them awaiting me at a quiet turn of the road, and, before I knew it, was being hustled and insulted. I pushed my way through, however, with a lump swelling in my throat, and was trying to stifle the inclination to run, when a cry from Harrier brought me to the roundabout with a scarlet face.
 
“Cowardy-cowardy-custard! Dursen’t peach to old Crazy, what broke his leg a-kicking of yer!”
 
I rushed back and faced him.
 
“He broke his leg falling from a parryshoot. He isn’t crazy. I’m not such a coward as you!” I blazed out in a breath. I was bristling and tingling all over. The worm had turned at last.
 
Harry Harrier, whistling softly, took his hands from his pockets.
 
“Yus?” he said. “Anythink else?”
 
“You’re a liar!” I answered, boiling; “you’re a coward and liar!”
 
I was down and up again in a moment, and rushing blindly at him with a cut lip and bloody mouth. He kept quite cool, and met me over and over again with stunning blows. I didn’t care. I hardly felt them in my rage; my long pent-up feelings had burst their bonds and I was quite beside myself. In the midst I was caught in the leash of a sinewy hand and torn away. For some moments I fought and screamed in my madness; then suddenly desisted, gasping and trembling all over. Red seemed to clear from my eyes, and I saw. The parasites were fled; Harry Harrier stood opposite me, hanging his head and his twitching hands; and in possession of us both was Mr. Sant.
 
A little silence followed; then suddenly the clergyman released me and stepped aside.
 
“You’re a strong boy, Harrier,” he said, quietly. “You’ve had the advantage of some training, too. This was hardly brave.”
 
“He called me a coward, sir,” muttered the boy.
 
“You’ve got to prove he was wrong, then.”
 
Harrier twitched his shoulders, and gave a defiant upward look.
 
“What!” said Mr. Sant. “Do you call it proving it to attack him six to one?”
 
“I takes no count of that raff, sir,” said the boy. “’Twas him and me fought.”
 
“But you used them to provoke him—not content with insulting him yourself day by day as he came to his lesson. Yes; I know.”
 
I looked up amazed, and then down again. Certain tell-tale rustlings that had reached my ears occasionally from the back of the rectory palings occurred to me, so that I hung my head with shame.
 
“Well, your reverence,” said the boy, rather insolently, “pay me, and get it over. I takes my capers with my mutton.”
 
“I shall pay you, sir,” said Mr. Sant, with, I could have thought, the ghost of a grin, “as one gentleman pays another. You think, perhaps, that Master Bowen here has told of your bullying him. He has not breathed a word about it to anybody. Now that, I think, shows him to be the better man of the two.”
 
The surprise, the gratification were so great, I could have cried out to him like a silly girl.
 
The young gamekeeper grinned, incredulous and sarcastic.
 
“You think not?” said Mr. Sant. “Well, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do—I’m going to back my man to whop you by-and-by.”
 
The boy looked up at him, breathless now.
 
“You’ve all the advantage at present, you know,” went on the clergyman. “You’ve got constitution, muscle, and a little of the science—not so much as you think, but still a little. Now Master Bowen isn’t your equal in any of these, as I suspect you knew, or you wouldn’t have attacked him.”
 
“I would!” said the boy, furiously.
 
“Well,” said Mr. Sant, smiling, “I’ll take your word for it, because I believe, after all, it’s an honest word. But the point is this. Muscle and constitution are slow growers, and while my man was training to improve his, you could be improving yours. Science, on the other hand, can be taught, and I mean to teach him science until I consider he’s your equal and better. When that comes about you shall fight again, and I’ll umpire. Do you agree?”
 
“Don’t I!” said the boy.
 
“Very well. Only I must have an understanding. You must leave him unmolested in the mean time.”
 
“I’ll do it!” cried the lad. “I’ll do more. I’ll fight any one as putts a finger on un.”
 
“The right spirit, that,” said Mr. Sant, with an approving face. “We’ll agree to decide it, then—in a month’s time, say? I’d keep it to myself if I were you. Good morning!”
 
The boy pulled his forelock, hesitated, mumbled with a blush and grin, “You’re a gen’leman, sir,” and casting a saucy, triumphant glance at me, retreated. Simultaneously, Mr. Sant took me by the shoulder, and, hurrying me back to the rectory study, procured cold water and a sponge, and shut himself in with me.
 
I felt half stupefied between the blows I had received and the prospect of others yet to come, in the matter of which, it appeared, I was to be allowed no choice. But there I was wrong. Mr. Sant, as he sponged with great consideration my swollen places, took up the tale at once.
 
“Now, Richard,” he said, “this is going to be, I think, the first great test of your life. You can refuse it if you like, without any loss of honour. You were bullied by a stronger boy, and you endured your ill-treatment without telling tales. That was to be a gentleman. You suffered insult—a little too long, perhaps—and only resented it when directed against some one whom you very rightly love and respect. Well, that was again to be a gentleman.”
 
I flushed crimson with pleasure, and he mopped hard away, talking all the time.
 
“You heard the engagement I made for you? Well, I tell you, you can decline quite honourably to stand by it. If you do, don’t think I shall blame you. On the contrary, I will see that an effective end is put to this tyranny. You have proved yourself, and that is enough. Now, if you would like me to state the facts to your uncle, I will do so at once.”
 
“Yes, please,” I stuttered through the sponge.
 
“Very well,” he answered, but dryly, I thought. “I could have trained you, perhaps, to stand up to this young bruiser; but without doubt you choose the Christian part. I will speak to Mr. Paxton.”
 
“Please, sir,” I said, “I don’t think he’d understand why I’ve got to fight, unless you told him.”
 
His hand quite bumped my poor nose with the start he gave.
 
“You want it to come off, then, Richard? This is a little shocking, I’m afraid; but perhaps I can’t altogether blame you. He’s a young Samson, mind.”
 
“You said, sir, that science——” I began, but he plugged my mouth hastily, and gave me no opportunity to speak more till he had cleaned my wounds to his satisfaction. Then he put me up between his knees and, while dabbing my face spasmodically with a towel, recited to me the fable of the brass and the earthenware pots.
 
“The brass pot, you see, was the gentleman,” he said. “He illustrated the Christian science of self-defence. He didn’t invite an encounter; but, when it was forced upon him, his art got the better of the coarser clay.”
 
He stretched out my arms and pinched their muscles.
 
“Well enough,” he said; “but that little Antaeus owes his to his mother earth. He could lick you with one hand, Dicky—easy, he could. Aren’t you afraid?”
 
“Yes, I am,” I said, honestly.
 
He nodded approvingly.
 
“Real courage, Dicky, doesn’t mean not being afraid. We must all be afraid sometimes, when we are called upon to fight men or animals who are much stronger and fiercer than we are. But when we know that wrong or unjust things are being done to us by people who do these things just because they are stronger, then, if we fight them in spite of our being afraid, that is the real courage. On the other hand, it isn’t brave to force people to fight who we know are much weaker than we are. But when God has given us good health and strong arms, it is noble to use them to help people who are weaker than we are, and to punish the bullies who would take advantage of their weakness. That’s what it is makes a true gentleman—not riches, nor titles, nor having a tutor instead of a public teacher. The little boy who is just, and very truthful, and who never does anything that he would be ashamed of good people knowing, is on the way to be a gentleman, whether he lives in a palace or a cottage. But if, added to these, he trains all his faculties to oblige other people to repay him the truth and justice and honour which he gives them, then he is a complete gentleman already.”
 
He broke off to feel me all up and down.
 
“There’s good material here,” he said; “very good. We’ll use it to counterbalance brute strength. That’s the fine moral of boxing, little man—to see that the weak don’t go to the wall. Now, shall I confess a secret? I love Harry Harrier pretty equal with you, sir. He’s got the makings of a gentleman—my sort—in him; only no amount of persuasion from me will educate him like a scientific licking from one less than his own size. You don’t see that, perhaps; but, all the same, I look to you to knock him into my fold for me. You are the Church’s champion, Richard, and you shall gain me a new convert, or I’ll never put faith in the gloves again. Now come along with me home.”
 
Uncle Jenico received us with surprise, and some consternation over my appearance; nor did the recital of the affray much reassure him. Still more was he confounded by the rector’s frank avowal of his object in approaching him.
 
“He is a mere child, sir,” said my uncle.
 
“‘The childhood shows the man,’” quoted the other.
 
“To be sure. But, as he isn’t going to be a prize-fighter——”
 
“Every true Christian, sir, is a prize-fighter. He champions the right in order to win heaven.”
 
“Well, where was the right here?”
 
“I regret to have to confess, sir, in an insulting expression about you, which he very properly resented.”
 
“Me!” cried my uncle, amazed. Then suddenly he stumped across to where I stood, and patted my shoulder rather tremulously. “Well, well,” he said; “no doubt I’m a funny old fellow. So you stood up for old Uncle Jenico, Dicky?”
 
His voice shook a little. I wriggled and flushed up crimson.
 
“It was a lie!” I cried, choking; “and I’m going to fight him and lick him for it.”
 
Mr. Sant struck in.
 
“Broughton rules, sir, I pledge my word.”
 
“Eh?” said my uncle. “Who’s Broughton, and what does he rule?”
 
“I mean,” said Mr. Sant, “this little affair shall be conducted strictly according to the regulations of Broughton, the famous boxer.”
 
“O!” exclaimed Uncle Jenico, palpably misled by the last word, and proportionately relieved. “O, to be sure! ‘Mufflers,’ you call ’em, I think?”
 
“Yes, yes!” said Mr. Sant, hastily. “A contest of science, sir; no vulgar hammering;” and he repeated, with warm conviction, his little dissertation on the true moral courage.
 
“If Richard, sir, don’t assert himself at the outset,” he ended with, “I won’t answer for his life here remaining endurable.”
 
Perhaps this prospect of our moral banishment clinched the matter with Uncle Jenico, whose attachment to the place was becoming quite morbid. He stipulated only that the umpire should stop the fight the moment it might appear I was getting the worst of it. More or less satisfied on this point, he rubbed his hands, and rallied me on being the young gamecock I was.
 
“I’ve given some thought, myself, to a new boxing-glove,” he confessed; “one with a little gong inside to record the hits, you know.”
 
Mr. Sant lost no time in taking me in hand. He fashioned me a little pair of gloves out of some old ones of his own, and gave me half an hour’s exercise with them every day after lessons. I am not going to record the process. The result was the important thing.
 
During all this interval, with the single exception of the morning following that of my encounter with Harry Harrier, I was left in peace by the village boys. On that morning, however, I again found myself in the midst of a little mob of them, who, emboldened by yesterday’s sport, were come to waylay me after school hours. I was not yet so proficient as to regard the situation with equanimity; when, behold! my enemy resolved it for me. He appeared suddenly in the midst, his knees and elbows in a lively state of agitation. One or two fell away, protesting, their hands caressing their injured parts.
 
“Where be a coomen, ’ar-ree!” expostulated one boy, holding his palm to his ear.
 
“Mighty!” exclaimed the young ruffler; “bain’t the road free to none but yourself, Jarge? Here be a yoong gen’lman waiting to pass, now.”
 
They took it as aimed at me, and hedged in again. He clawed two by the napes of their necks, and cracking their heads comfortably together, flung both aside. His intentions were quite unmistakable, and his strength a thing to regard. I was painfully conscious of it as I went through the sullen lane the others, discomfited, made for me; but I plucked up courage, as I passed, to express my gratitude.
 
“Thank you, Harry!” I said.
 
He was after me in a moment.
 
“It’s not a’going to make no differ’,” he whispered fiercely. “You onderstand that?”
 
“It shan’t, anyhow, till after the fight,” I answered back in his ear, and nodded and ran on.
 
At last the great day came. Mr. Sant, in order that my uncle might be saved anxiety, and me the necessity of deception, had given me no warning until the very moment was on me. He had manœuvred to hold me a little longer than usual over my lessons; and suddenly returned to me after a short absence from the room.
 
“Dick,” he said, “Harrier’s waiting for you in the garden.”
 
My heart gave a twist, and for a moment pulled the blood out of my cheeks. Then I saw Mr. Sant looking at me, and was suddenly glowing all over, as if after a cold douche.
 
“For the right, Dicky!” he said. “To win your spurs in Christendom! Remember what I’ve taught you, and keep your head.”
 
It was all very well to say so, with that part of me like a bladder full of hot air. But I followed him stoutly, trusting to the occasion to inspire me with all the science which, for the moment, had clean deserted me.
 
There was a little plat of lawn at the back, very snug and private behind some trees; and here we found my adversary waiting, in charge of Jacob, the gardener, a grizzled, comfortable old fellow in complete Christian subjection to his master. Jacob was to second Harry, and Mr. Sant me. The old fellow grinned and ducked as we appeared. There were no other witnesses.
 
“Now,” said Mr. Sant, “when I say ‘Go!’ go; when I call ‘Time!’ stop.”
 
He fell back with the words, and we stood facing one another. I was utterly bemused, at that instant, as to the processes by which I had reached this situation. I could only grasp the one fact that I was put up to batter, if I could (which seemed ridiculous), this confident, taut little figure in the shirt and corduroy smalls and gaiters, who held out, as if for my inspection, two bare brown arms, made all of bone and whipcord; and that I must proceed to try to do this, without any present quarrel—but rather the reverse—to stimulate me. It was so different to the circumstances of that other mad contest. I could have laughed; I——
 
“Go!” said Mr. Sant.
 
Something cracked on my forehead, and I fell.
 
“Time!” cried Mr. Sant.
 
He pulled me to my feet.
 
“Get your wits, Dicky,” he said.
 
I had got them. The bladder seemed to have burst, and let out all the hot air. I was quite cool, now, and pretty savage over this treatment.
 
“All right, sir,” I said; and I think he understood. He kept me simmering, however, for the regulation three minutes.
 
I came up to time now, Broughton’s commendable pupil. The first round had been, what we call in cricket, a trial ball. This that followed was the game—muscle and a little science against science and a little muscle. The brass pot, I am happy to say, prevailed, and sent the earthenware spinning with a crack on its stubborn little nose. Jacob mopped the vanquished, who could hardly be kept still to endure it. As for me, I was cockahoop, crowing inside and out. My second laughed, and let me go on, warning me only that the battle wasn’t won.
 
It was not, indeed. Our bloods were up, and the next round was a hot test of our qualities. It was give and take, and take and give; until, lunging under a loose defence, Harry hit me in the wind, and, while I was gasping and staggering, levelled me to the ground with a blow on my mouth. He was mad by now, and was rushing to pummel me, prostrate as I was, when Jacob, with a howl, clutched him and bore him struggling away.
 
“Law, ye little warmint!” cried the old man.
 
“No more of that, Harrier!” said Mr. Sant, from where he was kneeling, nursing and reviving me; “or I take my man away. To hit one that’s down, sir! That’s neither Christian nor professional.”
 
Then he whispered in my ear, “Three minutes, Dicky! Can you do it? else I’m bound in honour to throw up the sponge.”
 
There was an agitation in his voice which he tried vainly to control. I made a desperate effort, and rose as he began to count. I felt a little sick and wild; but the lesson of over-confidence had gone home. This time I played warily, tiring out my adversary. At last the moment came. He struck out furiously, missed, and, as he recovered his guard, I hit him with all my strength between the eyes. He staggered, gave a little cry, and, quite blinded for the moment, began to grope aimlessly with his fists.
 
“Noo, sir!” howled old Jacob, excited (I am afraid he was an unsympathetic second); “noo, sir’s your time. Walk in and finish en!”
 
“I won’t,” I cried. “It isn’t fair. He can’t see.”
 
Trying to mark me by my voice, the boy let out a furious blow, and, as his fist whizzed near me, I caught and clutched it in my own.
 
“Harry!” I said hurriedly, “let’s be friends!”
 
He tore his hand away, stood with his face quivering a moment, then all of a sudden fell upon his knees, and, putting his arm across his eyes, began to sob as if his heart were broken.
 
A silence and embarrassment fell upon us all. Then Mr. Sant walked over to the boy and addressed some words to him. He turned a deaf ear, repulsing him.
 
“You have fought like a man,” said the clergyman. “Come, take your beating like one.”
 
The lad started and looked up. He could see again now, but glimmeringly.
 
“Be the three minnuts past?” he said.
 
“I’m afraid so,” said the other.
 
The boy got to his feet, sniffing, and, without uttering a word, began rolling down and buttoning his shirt sleeves.
 
“There’s a good hot dinner waiting for you inside,” said Mr. Sant. “Come now, and do the man’s part by it and by us!”
 
Still he would not speak; but shook his head sullenly, and, fetching his coat and cap, walked off.
 
“Humoursome, humoursome!” said old Jacob. “Let en go for a warmint.”
 
“No,” said Mr. Sant, rather wistfully. “He’s got the stuff in him. We’ll have him on our side yet, Richard.”
CHAPTER X. FRIENDS AT LAST.

When I had been washed, and my cuts and bruises salved, Mr. Sant took me in to dinner, having already sent a message to my uncle that I should be late. I was horribly stiff, with blubber lips, and knobs and swellings everywhere; yet I would not for the world have missed one pang which my jaws suffered in eating. For was not each twinge an earnest to me that I was redeemed in my own eyes? The penance was as gratifying as, I think, a Catholic’s must be after confession and absolution given.
 
Before we were well finished Uncle Jenico came in, a little flurried and apologetic over his intrusion. He had guessed pretty well the reason of my detention, and his anxiety would not let him rest. His hands trembled as he adjusted his spectacles to look at me, and removed and wiped them, and put them on again for a second scrutiny.
 
“So you have conquered?” he said, “My poor boy; my poor, dear boy! Why I had no idea boxing punished so. You should not have minded what they said about me, Richard—a tough old rascal, and ready to take it all in the day’s luck.”
 
“I don’t think Richard will agree with you, sir,” said Mr. Sant. “He has won his spurs, and a convert, I hope. He has fought like a gentleman and a Christian—by George, sir, it was poor Broughton and the Norwich butcher over again—and you, I am sure, are as proud of him as I am.”
 
“Eh?” said my uncle, half laughing and half crying; and then falling suddenly grave. “If it’s to inculcate respect—the stitch in time, you know—certainly. But I can’t help wondering, if this is the victor, what is the state of the vanquished?”
 
“A state of grace, I hope,” said the clergyman, smiling. “But it’s a very proper reflection, sir, and one which, I am sure, Richard will take to heart.”
 
The reminder, nevertheless, was not out of place. It is well at the feast of triumph to remember who pays the cost. I had been self-glorifying a little overmuch; and here, of a sudden, was the picture before me of my beaten enemy slinking away to hide his battered face, at the very moment that I was crowing to everybody to come and look at mine. Uncle Jenico was the true gentleman among us all; and it was he who had been insulted.
 
I soon mended of my knocks, and the very next day was ruffling it to my lessons with a new self-confidence that made nothing of possessing the world. Dunberry was no longer a Siberia to me, but a conquered country full of breezy possibilities. I should have welcomed the prospect of an attack; but no one interfered with me. On the contrary, awed and covert glances greeted me on my way past the school. I dropped a book. An obsequious little courtier scurried to pick it up for me. The news of the fight had got abroad, it was evident, and Harry was no longer the cock of the walk. From this moment, with other than the youth of Dunberry, I am afraid, my position was secured.
 
I hope I took no base advantage of the knowledge; yet I won’t say but I might have if Mr. Sant had not been at my back to prevent it.
 
“Don’t forget you fought for a principle,” he would remind me. “It’s no manner of Christian use to turn out a bully that you may usurp his place.”
 
To prove to me that boxing was not the whole duty of a gentleman, and to school me from presuming on any idea of indulgence because of my victory, he rather put the screw on in my education, and for a time was something of a martinet on questions of study and discipline. I was hurt, and a little bit rebellious at first; but soon, having a fair reason of my own, came to recognize his consistency.
 
During this time, and for some weeks after the fight, I saw next to nothing of Harry Harrier. He kept out of my way, sulking and grieving, though he attended school—with phenomenal punctuality, too, I believe—regularly. His father, I heard from old Jacob, had been very savage over his beating, and had dressed him well for it. I was furious when I was told, and wanted Mr. Sant to complain to the Squire; but, before he could do so, something happened which made any complaint futile. A new steward, a Draco of a man, was appointed to the Court, and one day, shortly after his arrival, lo and behold! there was the gamekeeper handcuffed, and being carried off to Ipswich gaol in a tax-cart by the officers of the law. It had been discovered that for years he had been in collusion with a gang of poachers, and in the end he had been watched, and caught in flagranti delicto. His wife followed him to the county town, and devoted most of her savings, poor woman, to his defence, but without avail. He was convicted and transported, and I may as well say at once that that was the end of him so far as his family was concerned, for he never turned up again. While the trial was pending, Harry—it is not, under all the circumstances, to be wondered at—gave the schoolhouse a wide berth; but, after his father had been sentenced and their home broken up, to the surprise of every one he put in an appearance there again, coming dogged and punctual to a task which must have grown nothing less than a perpetual ordeal to him. We did not, in truth, know the strength of will of the desperate humbled little spirit—not any of us, that is to say, but Mr. Sant. He had gauged it, I am sure; and, having set his heart on the boy’s reclamation, was watching with an anxious interest the development of the odd little drama which he had helped to engineer. He visited, of course, in virtue of his office, the gamekeeper’s unhappy wife, who had been forced to betake herself to a mean little tenement in the village, where she eked out the small means remaining to her by washing for the rectory; and though, as yet, the son would hardly notice or be civil to him, the mother did not fail to acquaint him, with many fond tears, of her poor, wild little fellow’s real love and resolution, and of the courage which was determining him to train himself to take the place of the breadwinner they had lost. All of which, I knew, made Mr. Sant the more eager to have the lad recognize him for a friend; only pride stood in the way. For, the truth is, poor Harry’s prestige was gone down to zero. Always owing in some part to the local reputation of his father for a bully and rowdy, the removal of that gentleman had finished what my victory had begun. And now it was the case of the sick lion. The cowardly little jackals who had formerly cringed to him, egged on by their more cowardly elders taunted him with his disgrace. If he retaliated, they overwhelmed him with numbers, or ran, squealing injured righteousness, to appeal against him to their parents. His heart, swelling in his plucky little breast, must often have had a business of it not to let loose the tears; but he had an indomitable soul, and only time and tact could find the way into it.
 
One day Mr. Sant and I, when walking together, came unnoticed upon the rear of such a scene. The victim moved on in front, his head hanging a little, though he would not force his pace an inch to accommodate his tormentors, who followed behind, at a safe distance, hooting and jeering at him.
 
“OO stole the pawtridges! When did ’ee last ’ear from the ’ulks! Why don’t ’ee git your mawther to wash your dirty linen, ’ar-ree?” and such-like insults they bawled.
 
I burned with indignation, and was running to retaliate on my enemy by helping him as he had once helped me, when Mr. Sant seized me with a determined hand, and bent to whisper in my ear—
 
“He will hate you, if you do. Leave him to fight his own battles.”
 
As he spoke the little wretches let fly a shower of small missiles, and a stone struck the boy smartly on the neck. He leapt about at once, and came rushing back with clenched fists and a blazing face. The mob dispersed before his onset; but he cut off one panic-stricken unit of it, and smote the lubberly coward with a thorny crash into the hedge. His eyes looked red, his breast was heaving stormily; he would have done some evil, I think, had not Mr. Sant run and put himself between. Then he backed away, without a word; but his cheeks were quite white now, and the wings of his nostrils going like a little winded horse’s.
 
Consternation held the scattered enemy. They stood each where he had been halted by the unexpected vision of their rector and me. The assaulted one, sitting on spikes, stuffed his face into his elbow and boo-hoo’d from stentorian lungs. Mr. Sant smiled with rather an ugly look.
 
“Blubber away, Derrick,” he said. “You’ve been well served for a dirty act.” Then he scowled abroad. “Are you English boys, to kick a downed one! Not one of you, cowards, but if he passed this Harrier alone would hug his fists in his pockets! It is no shame of his, but yours. To bait him ten to one—O! what fine courageous fellows! But I’ll have no more of it; d’ye hear? I’ll have no more of it!”
 
He stamped, in a little access of passion, and again turned sharply on the fallen.
 
“Get up!” he said.
 
His tone was so peremptory that the boy rose, snuffling and wiping his eyes with his cuff.
 
“It was you threw the stone,” said Mr. Sant. “I saw you. Very well, then, it’s got to be one of two things: fight, or put your tail between your legs and run. Quick now! Which is it to be?”
 
Derrick did not move, but raised his wail to a pitch so artificially dismal that I had to laugh.
 
“Ah!” exclaimed Mr. Sant, still very grim for his part, and snapped himself round. “He means fight, Harrier.”
 
If he did, the battle he contemplated was a Battle of the Spurs. Clapping his hand to the thorns in him, and too frightened now to remember to cry, he took to his heels and, turning a corner, was out of sight in a moment. His answer to the resolution claimed for him was so ludicrous that even his little abettors were set off chuckling.
 
I was looking across at Harry, and saw his face, too, relax and lighten. Drawn by its expression, I walked up to him, with my hand held out.
 
“Why won’t you, Harry?” I said.
 
He stared at me, but made no response.
 
“We knew you could look after yourself,” I went on, “and—and I wasn’t going to interfere; at least—I mean—why won’t you let us stand up for one another, Harry?” I ended, with a burst and a blush.
 
His face, too, was very red again, and I could see his lips were trembling. Pride and gratitude were fighting within him for mastery; but the former—still too hot with recent suffering to surrender—remained the more stubborn of the two. While my hand was yet held out, he turned his back on me, on us all, and walked off erect.
 
I was bitterly hurt and chagrined. I felt that I had done the handsome thing by a boor, and had been meetly rebuffed for my condescension. I came back to Mr. Sant, swelling with indignation. He understood at a glance.
 
“Give him time, Dick,” he said quietly; “give him time.”
 
“He shall have all the time he likes, sir,” I said, “before I meddle with him again.”
 
He did not answer, which was perhaps wise; and we continued our walk. But thenceforth my heart was darkened to my unchivalrous foe, and when we passed in the street I ignored him.
 
My studied indifference had not, however, the effect of making him avoid me. On the contrary, he seemed rather to resume his earlier practice, going out of his way to get in mine, and strutting by whistling to show his unconsciousness of my neighbourhood. Yet all the time, I knew, he was never more in need of a friend. Mr. Sant’s protest, followed by a public rebuke in the school, had put an end to the active bullying; but, to compensate themselves for this deprivation, his companions had, by tacit agreement, sent poor Harry to perpetual Coventry. He was disclaimed and excluded from all games and conversation; isolated in the midst of the others’ merriment. What this meant to the bright fallen little spirit only Lucifer himself, perhaps, could say; and only Lucifer himself, perhaps, so endure with unlowered crest while the iron ate into his soul. But, in justice to myself, I could make no further overtures where my every advance was wilfully misunderstood.
 
So the year went its course without any reconciliation between us; and early in November fell a hard frost, with snow that seemed disposed to stop. Awaking one morning, we saw the whole land locked in white under a stiff leaden canopy, as if sea and sky had changed places. The desolation of this remote coast winter-bound it is impossible to describe. We seemed as cut off from the world as Esquimaux; and Uncle Jenico, who had never conceived such a situation, stood aghast before the prospect of a beach ankle-deep in snow. So we found it. The golden sand was all replaced by dazzling silver, into which the surf, so spotless in summer, thrust tongues of a bilious yellow. The sea, from being sportive with weak stomachs, looked sick unto death itself; and the wind in one’s teeth was like a file sharpening a saw. And all this lifelessness cemented itself day by day, until it seemed that we could never emerge again from the depths of winter into which we had fallen.
 
One afternoon I was loitering very dismal, and quite alone as I thought, near the foot of Dunberry Gap, when a snowball took me full on the back of the head and knocked my cap off. I was stooping to pick it up, when another came splosh in my face, blinding, and half suffocating me. I staggered to my feet, gasping, only to find myself the butt of a couple of snow forts, between whose fires I had unconsciously strayed. A row of little heads was sprung up on either side, and I was being well pounded before I could collect my wits.
 
I must premise that at this time my empire was much fallen from its former greatness. Never having confirmed it by a second achievement, it had gradually lost the best of its credit, and, though I was still respected by the unit, there was a psychologic point in the association of units beyond which my reputation was coming to be held cheap. I was learning, in fact, the universal truth that to rest on one’s laurels is to resume them, in case of emergency, in a lamentably squashed condition.
 
Now, with half the breath knocked out of my body and my arm protecting my face, I tried to struggle out of the line of fire, only to find the opposing forces basely combining to pelt me into helplessness. I made some show of retaliating; but what was one against twenty? In the midst, I looked up the Gap, my one way of retreat, and there, standing halfway down, watching the fray, was Harry Harrier. I was smarting all over, with rills of melted snow running down my neck, and still the bombardment took me without mercy.
 
“Harry!” I cried. “Come and help me!”
 
The appeal did at a stroke what months of propitiation would have missed. It put him right with himself once more. Like a young deer he came leaping down, stooping and gathering ammunition as he approached. The shower ceased on the instant; the craven enemy retreated pell-mell to its double lines of shelter.
 
“Are you ready, sir?” said Harry, excitedly. “Git your wind and coom on. We’ll drive en out of one o’ them places, and take cover there ourselves.”
 
He was eagerly gathering and piling the snow as he spoke. In a minute I was myself again, and burning for reprisals. Each of us well armed, we charged upon the left-hand position, which seemed the more accessible of the two, and carried it by storm against a faint show of resistance. The garrison shot out and fled, encountering a volley from the opposing force, while we peppered it in the rear. Our victory was complete. As we sank back, breathed but glowing, I looked Harry silently in the face and held out my hand for the last time. He took it in his own, hanging his silly head; but the nip he gave it felt like a winch’s.
 
“That’s all right, then,” said I. “It’s pax between us, ain’t it, you old fool?”
 
He nodded. A long silence fell between us, and I began to whistle. Suddenly he looked up shyly, but his eyes were quick with curiosity.
 
“I say,” he said, “what’s a parryshoot?”
 
The problem had evidently haunted him ever since I had told him that my uncle had fallen from one.
 
“Well, what do you think?” says I.
 
“I dunno,” he answered carelessly. “Thought, maybe, ’twas one o’ them things that shoots the malt refuge out of brewhouses.”
 
I sniggered with laughter. Fancy Uncle Jenico having been shot out of a brewery!
 
“It’s an umbrella,” I said; “a thing that you jump into the air with off a cliff, and come down without hurting yourself.”
 
“Mighty!” he cried, all excitement. “Is it reelly? Let’s make one—and try it first on that Derrick,” he added, with commendable foresight.
 
My heart crowed at the idea. We discussed it for many minutes. In the midst we heard a sound of distant jeering, and cautiously raised our heads above the snow rampart. The whole body of our enemies was in full retreat, and already nearing the top of the Gap. We were left alone, sole inseparable masters of the field. It was the happiest omen of what was to be.