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The Lord of the Sea

by M. P. Shiel · English · Gutenberg #6993 · 504,883 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Lord of the Sea

Author: M. P. Shiel


        
Release date: November 1, 2004 [eBook #6993]
                Most recently updated: March 16, 2018

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LORD OF THE SEA ***




Produced by Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreaders







THE LORD OF THE SEA

By M. P. Shiel





CONTENTS

      I. THE EXODUS

     II. THE FEZ

    III. THE HUNTING-CROP

     IV. THE SWOON

      V. REID'S

     VI. “PEARSON'S WEEKLY”

    VII. THE ELM

   VIII. THE METEOR

     IX. HOGARTH'S GUNS

      X. ISAAC

     XI. WROXHAM BROAD

    XII. THE ROSE

   XIII. OUT OF THE WORLD

    XIV. THE PRIEST

     XV. MONSIGNOR

    XVI. THE ROPE

   XVII. OLD TOM'S LETTER

  XVIII. CHLOROFORM

    XIX. THE GREAT BELL

     XX. THE INFIRMARY

    XXI. IN THE DEEP

   XXII. OLD TOM

  XXIII. UNDER THE ELM

   XXIV. FRANKL SEES THE METEORITE

    XXV. CHURCH ARCHITECTURE

   XXVI. FRANKL AND O'HARA

  XXVII. THE BAG OF LIGHT

 XXVIII. THE LETTER

   XXIX. PRIORITY OF CLAIM

    XXX. MR. BEECH

   XXXI. THE HAMMERS

  XXXII. WONDER

 XXXIII. REEFS OF STEEL

  XXXIV. THE “KAISER”

   XXXV. THE CUP OF TREMBLING

  XXXVI. THE “BOODAH” AND THE BATTLESHIPS

 XXXVII. THE STRAITS

XXXVIII. THE MANIFESTO

  XXXIX. THE “BOODAH'S” LOCK-UP

     XL. THE WEDDING

    XLI. THE VISIT

   XLII. REBEKAH TELLS

  XLIII. THE LAND BILL

   XLIV. THE REGENCY

    XLV. ESTRELLA, THE PROPHETESS

   XLVI. THE ORDER IN COUNCIL

  XLVII. THE EMIGRANTS

 XLVIII. THE SEA-FORTS

   XLIX. THE DÉBACLE

      L. THE DECISION

     LI. THE MODEL




I

THE EXODUS


In the Calle Las Gabias--one of those by-streets of Lisbon below St.
Catherine--there occurred one New Year a little event in the Synagogue
there worth a mention in this history of Richard, Lord of the Sea.

It was Kol Nidrè, eve of the Day of Atonement, and the little Beth-El,
sweltering in a dingy air, was transacting the long-drawn liturgy, when,
behind the curtain where the women sat, an old dame who had been gazing
upward smote her palms together, and let slip a little scream: “The Day
is coming...!”

She then fainted, and till near ten lay on her bed, lit by the Yom
Kippur candle, with open eyes, but without speech, her sere face
still beautiful, on each temple a little pyramid of plaits, with
gold-and-coral ear-rings: a holy _belle._ About ten P.M. three women
watching heard her murmur: “My child, Rebekah...!”

She was childless, and whom she meant was not known. However, soon
afterwards there was a form at the amulet-guarded door, and Estrella sat
up, saying: “Rebekah, my child...”

A young lady of twenty-two ran in and embraced her, saying: “I have been
to Paris and Madrid with my father--just arrived, so flew to see you. We
leave for London to-night”.

“No: I shall keep you seven days. Tell Frankl _I_ say so. What jewels!
You have grown into a rose of glory, the eyes are profounder and
blacker, and that brow was made for high purpose. Tell me--have you a
lover?”

“No, mamma Estrella”.

“Then, why the blush?”

“It is nothing at all,” Miss Frankl answered: “five years ago when at
school in Bristol I thrice saw through a grating a young man with whom I
was frivolous enough to speak. Happily, I do not know what has become of
him--a wild, divine kind of creature, of whom I am well rid, and never
likely to see again”.

The old lady mused. “What was he?”

“A sailor”.

“Not a common sailor?”

“I fancy so, mamma”.

“What name?”

“Hogarth--Richard”.

“A Jew?”

“An Englishman!”

She laughed, as the old lady's eyes opened in sacred horror, and as she
whispered: “Child!”

Within three months of that night, one midnight the people of Prague
rose and massacred most of the Jewish residents; the next day the flame
broke out in Buda-Pesth; and within a week had become a revolution.

On the twelfth morning one of two men in a City bank said to the other:
“Come, Frankl, you cannot fail a man in this crisis--I only want 80,000
on all Westring--”

“No good to me, my lord,” answered Frankl, who, though a man of only
forty--short, with broad shoulders,--already had his skin divided up
like a dry leaf; in spite of which, he was handsome, with a nose ruled
straight and long, a black beard on his breast.

But the telephone rattled and Frankl heard these words at the receiver:
“Wire to hand from Wertheimer: Austrian Abgeordneten-haus passed a
Resolution at noon virtually expelling Jewish Race....”

When Frankl turned again he had already resolved to possess Westring
Vale, and was saying to himself: “Within six months the value of English
land should be--doubled”.

The bargain was soon made now: and within one week the foresight of
Frankl began to be justified.

Austria, during those days, was a nation of vengeful hearts: for the
Jews had acquired half its land, and had mortgages on the other half:
peasant, therefore, and nobleman flamed alike. And this fury was
contagious: now Germany--now France had it--Anti-Semite laws--like
the old May-Laws--but harsher still; and streaming they came, from
the Leopoldstadt, from Bukowina, from the Sixteen Provinces, from all
Galicia, from the Nicolas Colonies, from Lisbon, with wandering foot and
weary breast--the Heines, Cohens, Oppenheimers--Sephardim, Aschkenasim.
And Dover was the new Elim.

With alarm Britain saw them come! but before she could do anything, the
wave had overflowed it; and by the time it was finished there was no
desire to do anything: for within eight months such a tide of prosperity
was floating England as has hardly been known in a country.

The reason of this was the increased number of hands--each making more
things than its owner could consume himself, and so making every other
richer.

There came, however, a change--almost suddenly--due to the new demand
for land, the “owners” determining to await still further rises, before
letting. This checked industry: for now people, debarred from the land,
had only air.

In Westring Vale, as everywhere, times were hard. It was now the
property of Baruch Frankl: for at the first failure of Lord Westring to
meet terms, Frankl had struck.

Now, one of the yeomen of Westring was a certain Richard Hogarth.




II

THE FEZ


Frankl took up residence at Westring in September, and by November
every ale-house, market, and hiring in Westring had become a scene of
discussion.

The cause was this: Frankl had sent out to his tenants a Circular
containing the words:

“...tenants to use for wear in the Vale a _fez with tassel_ as
the Livery of the Manor...the will of the Lord of the Manor...no
exception...”

But though intense, the excitement was not loud: for want was in many
a home; though after three weeks there were still six farmers who
resisted.

And it happened one day that five of these at the Martinmas “Mop,” or
hiring, were discussing the matter, when they spied the sixth boring his
way, and one exclaimed: “Yonder goes Hogarth! Let's hear what _he's_ got
to say!” and set to calling.

Hogarth twisted, and came winning his way, taller than the crowd, with
“What's up? Hullo, Clinton--not a moment to spare to-day--”

“We were a-talking about that Circular--!” cried one.

At that moment two other men joined the group: one a dark-skinned Jew
of the Moghrabîm; the other a young man--an English author--on tour. And
these two heard what passed.

Hogarth stood suspended, finding no words, till one cried: “Do you mean
to put the cap on?”

He laughed a little now. “_I!_ The whip! The whip!”--he showed his
hunting-crop, and was gone.

His manner of speech was rapid, and he had a hoarse sort of voice,
almost as of sore-throat.

Of the two not farmers, one--the author--enquired as to his name, and
farm; the other man--the Moghrabîm Jew--that evening recounted to Frankl
the words which he had heard.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

One afternoon, two weeks later, Loveday, the author, was leaning upon
a stile, talking to Margaret Hogarth; and he said: “I love you! If you
could _deign_--”

“Truth is,” she said, “you are in love with my brother, Dick, and you
think it is me!”

She was a woman of twenty-five, large and buxom, though neat-waisted,
her face beautifully fresh and wholesome, and he of middle-size, with a
lazy ease of carriage, small eyes set far apart, a blue-velvet jacket,
duck trousers very dirty, held up by a belt, a red shirt, an old cloth
hat, a careless carle, greatly famed.

“But it isn't of your brother, but of _you_, that I am wanting to speak!
Tell me--”

“No--I can't. I am a frivolous old woman to be talking to you about
such things at all! But, since it is as you say, wait, perhaps I may be
able--But I must be going now--”

There was embarrassment in her now: and suddenly she walked away, going
to meet--another man.

She passed through stubble-wheat, disappeared in a pine-wood, and came
out upon the Waveney towing-path. On the towing-path came Frankl to meet
her.

He took her hand, holding his head sideward with a cajoling fondness,
wearing the flowing caftan, and a velvet cap which widened out a-top,
with puckers.

“Well, sweetheart...” he said.

“But, you know, I begged you not to use such words to me!”--from her.

“What, and I who am such a sweetheart of yours?”--his speech very
foreign, yet slangily correct, being, in fact, _all_ slang.

“No,” she said, “you spoke different at first, and that is why--But this
must be the last, unless you say out clearly now what it is you mean--”

“Now, you are too hard. You know I am wild in love with you. And so are
you with me--”

“_I_?”--with shrinking modesty in her under-looking eyes. “Oh, no--don't
have any delusions like that about me, please! You said that you liked
me: and as I am in the habit of speaking the truth myself, I thought
that--perhaps--But my meeting you, to be frank with you, was for the
sake of my brother”.

“Well, you are as candid as they make them,” he said, eyeing her with
his mild eye. “But what's the matter with your brother? Hard up?”

“He's worried about something”. “He must have some harvest-money put
away?”

“He has something in Reid's Bank at Yarmouth, I believe”.

“Well, shall I tell you what's the matter with him? He's _afraid_, your
brother. He has refused to wear the cap, and he thinks that I shall be
down upon him like a thousand of bricks...But suppose I exempt him, and
you and I be friends? That's fair”.

“What _do_ you mean?”

“Give us _one_--”

“Believe me, you talk--!”

“Don't let your angry passions rise. I am going to have a kiss off those
handsome lips--”

Before she could stir he was in the act of the embrace; but it was never
accomplished: for he saw her colour fade, heard crackling twigs, a step!
as someone emerged from the wood ten yards away--Richard.

The thought in Margaret's mind was this: “Father in Heaven, whatever
will he think of me here with this Jew?”

Hogarth stopped, staring at this couple; did not understand: Margaret
should have been home from “class-meeting”...only, he observed her
heaving bosom; then twisted about and went, his walk rapid, in his hand
a hunting-crop, by which, with a very sure aim, he batted away pebbles
from his path, stooping each time.




III

THE HUNTING-CROP


Along the towing-path to the farmhouse. He did not look behind: was like
a man who has received a wound, and wonders whence.

A pallor lay under his brown skin, brown almost as an Oriental's, and he
was called “the Black Hogarth”--the Hogarths being Saxon, on the mantel
in the dining-room being a very simple coat--a Bull on Gules. But
Richard was a startling exception. His hair grew away flat and sparse
from his round brow; on his cheeks three moles, jet-black in their
centre. Handsome one called his hairless face: the nose delicate,
the lips negroid in their thick pout, the left eye red, streaked with
bloodshot, the eyes' brown brightness very beautiful and strange, with
a sideward stare wild as that sideward stare of the race-horse; and the
lids had a way of lifting largely anon.

He passed through Lagden Dip orchard into the old homestead, into the
dining-room, where cowered the old Hogarth, smoking, his hair a mist of
wool-white.

He glanced up, but said nothing; and Richard said nothing, but walked
about, his arms folded, frowning turbulently, while the twilight
deepened, and Margaret did not come.

Now he planted a chair near the old man, sat, and shouted: “Listen,
sir!”

Up went the old Hogarth's hand to push forward the inquiring ear,
while Richard, who, till now, had guarded him from all knowledge of the
Circular, snatched it from his breast-pocket, and loudly read.

As the sense entered his head, up the old man shot his palms, shaking
from them astonishment and deprecation, with nods; then, with opening
arms, and an under-look at Richard: “Well, there is nothing to be said:
the land is his....”

Hogarth leapt up and walked out; he muttered: “The land is his, but he
is mine....”

The question at the bottom of his mind had been this: “Does _Margaret_,
too, go with the land?” But he did not utter it even to himself: went
out, fingering the crop, stalking toward the spot where he had left the
man and the woman. But Margaret was then coming through the wood;
Frankl had gone up to the Hall; and Hogarth crossed the bridge and went
climbing toward the mansion.

It was a Friday evening, and up at the Hall the Sabbath had commenced,
two Sabbath-tapers shining now upon the Mezuzzah at the dining-room
door, Frankl being of the Cohanîm, the priestly class--a Jew of Jews. As
he had passed in, two Moghrabîm Jews had saluted him with: “Shabbath”;
and mildly he had replied: “Shabbath”.

But swift upon his steps strode Hogarth: Hogarth was at the
lodge-gates--was on the drive--was in the hall.

But, since Frankl was just preparing to celebrate the _kiddush_, “He
cannot be seen now”, said a man in the hall.

“He must”, said Hogarth.

As he brushed past, two men raised an outcry: but Hogarth continued
his swift way, and had half traversed a _salon_ hung with a chaos of
cut-glass when from a side-door appeared the inquiring face of Frankl in
pious skull-cap.

“What is it?” he cried--“I cannot be seen--”

He recognized the man of the towing-path, and on his face grew a look of
scare, as he backed toward a study: but before he could slam the door,
Hogarth, too, was within.

“Who are you? What is it?” whined Frankl, who was both hard master and
cringing slave.

Hogarth produced the Circular: but of Margaret not a word.

“Caps-and-tassels, you?”--flicking Frankl on the cheek with a fillip of
his middle finger.

“You dare assault me! Why, I swear, I meant no harm--”

Down came the whip upon the Jew's shoulders, Frankl, as the stings
penetrated his caftan, giving out one roar, and the next instant, seeing
the two Jews at the doorway, groaned the mean whisper: “Oh, don't make a
man look small before the servants”, crying out immediately: “Help!”

Soon five or six servants were at the door, and, of these, two Arab Jews
rushed forward, one a tall fellow, the other an obese bulk with bright
black eyes, the former holding a slender blade--the knife with which
“shechita”, or slaughtering, was done: and while the corpulent Jew threw
himself upon Hogarth, the other drew this knife through the flesh of
Hogarth's shoulder, at the same time happening to cut the heavy Arab
across the wrist.

Now, there was some quarrel between the two Arabs, and the injured Arab,
forgetting Hogarth, turned fiercely upon his fellow.

Hogarth, meanwhile, had not let go Frankl, nor delivered the intended
number of cuts: so he was again standing with uplifted whip, when his
eye happened to fall upon the doorway.

He saw there a sight which struck his arm paralysed: Rebekah Frankl.

Two months had she been here at Westring--and he had not known it!

There she stood peering, of a divine beauty in his eyes, like
half-mythical queens of Egypt and Babylon, blinking in a rather
barbarous superfluity of jewels: and, blinded and headlong, he was in
flight.

As for Frankl, he locked that door upon himself, and remained there,
forgetting the sanctification of the Sabbath.

The Hebrew's eyes blazed like a wild beast's. The words: “As the Lord
liveth...” hissed in whispers from his lips.

He took up a pinch of old ashes, and cast it into the air.

As Shimei, the son of Gera, cursed David, so he cursed Richard Hogarth
that night--again and again--with grave rites, with cancerous rancour.

“I will blight him, as the Lord liveth; as the Lord liveth, I will
blight him...” he said repeatedly, his draperied arms spread in pompous
imprecation.

As a beginning, he sat and wrote to Reid's Bank, requesting the payment
in gold of £14,000--to produce a stoppage of payment at the little Bank
in which were Richard's savings.

Afterwards, with mild eyes he repaired to the dining-hall, and
sanctified the Sabbath, blessing a cup of wine, dividing up two napkined
loaves, and giving to Rebekah his benediction.




IV

THE SWOON


Hogarth went moodily down the hillside to the Waveney, across the
bridge, and home, his sleeve stained with blood.

In the dining-room, he threw himself into an easy-chair in a gloom lit
only by the fireglow, in the room above mourning a little harmonium
which Margaret was playing, mixed with the sound of Loveday's voice.

The old man said: “Richard, my boy...”

Hogarth did not answer.

“Richard, I have somewhat to say to you--are ye hearkening?”

Richard, losing blood, moaned a drowsy “Yes”.

And the old Hogarth, all deaf and bedimmed, said: “I had to say it to
you, and this night let it be: Richard, you are no son of mine”.

At this point Hogarth's head dropped forward: but many a time, during
long years, he remembered a dream in which he had heard those words:
“Richard, you are no son of mine...”

The old Hogarth continued to ears that did not hear:

“I have kept it from you--for I'm under a bargain with a firm of
solicitors in London; but, Dick, it doesn't strike me as I am long for
this world: a queer feeling I've had in this left side the last hour or
two; and there's that Circular--I never heard of such a thing in all my
born days. But what can we do? You'll have to wear the cap--or be turned
out. Always I've said to myself, from a young man: 'Get hold of a bit of
land someways as your own God's own': but I never did; the days went by
and by, and it all seems no longer than an after-dinner nap in a barn on
a hot harvest-day. But a bit of land--the man who has that can make all
the rest work to keep him. And if they turn me out, I couldn't live,
lad: the old house has got into my bones, somehow. Anyhow, I think the
time is come to tell you in my own way how the thing was. No son are you
of mine, Richard. Your mother, Rachel, who was a Londoner, served me an
ill turn while we were sweethearting, hankering after another man--a Jew
millionaire he was, she being a governess in his house; but, Richard, I
couldn't give her up: I married her three months before you were born;
and not a living creature knows, except, perhaps, one--perhaps one: a
priest he was, called O'Hara. But that's how it was. Your father was
a Jew, and your mother was a Jew, and you are a Jew, and in the
under-bottom of the old grey trunk you will find a roll of papers. Are
you hearkening? And don't you be ashamed of being a Jew, boy--_they_ are
the people who've got the money; and money buys land, Richard. Nor your
father did not do so badly by you, either: his name was Spinoza--Sir
Solomon Spinoza--”

At that point Margaret, bearing a lamp, entered, followed by Loveday,
and at the sight of Richard uttered a cry.




V

REID'S


By noon Hogarth knew the news: his hundred and fifty at Reid's were
gone; and he owed for the Michaelmas quarter--twenty-one pounds five,
his only chattels of value being the thresher, not yet paid for, half a
rick, seed, manure, and “the furniture”. If he could realize enough for
rent, he would lack capital for wages and cultivation, for Reid's had
been his credit-bank.

After dinner he stood long at a window, then twisted away, and walked
to Thring, where he captained in a football match, Loveday watching his
rage, his twisting waist, and then accompanying him home: but in the
dining-room they found the lord-of-the-manor's bailiff; and Loveday,
divining something embarrassing, took himself away.

The same evening there were two appraisers in the house, and the
bailiff, on their judgment, took possession of the chattels on the
holding except some furniture, and some agricultural “fixtures”. The
sale was arranged for the sixth day.

From the old Hogarth the truth could no longer be hidden...

Two days he continued quiet in the old nook by the hearth, apparently in
a kind of dotage doze; but on the third, he began to poke about, hobbled
into the dairy, peered into the churn, touched the skimmer.

“You'll have to wear the cap”, Margaret heard him mutter--“or be turned
out”.

As if taking farewell, he would get up, as at a sudden thought, to go to
visit something. He kept murmuring: “I always said, Get a bit of land as
your own, but I never did; the days went by and by....”

Margaret, meantime, was busy, binding beds with sheets, making bundles,
preparing for the flitting, with a heaving breast; till, on the fifth
day, a van stood loaded with their things at the hall-door, and she,
with untidy hair, was helping heave the last trunk upon the backboard,
when the carman said: “Mrs. Mackenzie says, mum, the things mustn't be
took to the cottage, except you pay in advance”.

Now Margaret stood at a loss; but in a minute went bustling, deciding
to go to Loveday, not without twinges of reluctance: for Loveday, with
instinctive delicacy, had lately kept from the farm; and to Margaret,
whose point of view was different, the words “false friends” had
occurred.

Passing through an alley of the forest, she was met by a man--a
park-keeper of Frankl's--a German Jew, who had once handed her a note
from Frankl. And he, on seeing her, said: “Here have I a letter for your
brother”.

“Who from?” she asked.

“That may I not say”.

When he handed her an envelope rather stuffed with papers, she went
on her flurried way; and soon Loveday was bowing before her in his
sitting-room at Priddlestone.

“You will be surprised to see me, Mr. Loveday,” said she, panting.

“A little surprised, but most awfully glad, too. Is all well?”

“Oh, far from that, I'm afraid. But I haven't got any time--and, oh my,
I don't know how to say it,--but to be frank with you--could you lend
Richard two pounds--?”

Loveday coloured to the roots of his hair.

He could not tell her: “Open that envelope in your hand”, for that would
have meant that it was he who had sent the £50 it contained; and he had
now only one sixpence in Priddlestone.

“That is”, she said--“if it is not an inconvenience to you--”

He could find no words. Some fifteen minutes before, having enclosed
the notes, he had descended to the bar to get mine host to find him a
messenger, and direct the envelope--for Hogarth knew his handwriting.
Mine host was not there--his wife could not write: but she had pointed
out the Jewish park-keeper sipping beer; so Loveday had had the man
upstairs, had made him write the address, and had bribed him to deliver
the envelope with a mum tongue.

“I'm afraid I've taken a great liberty--” she said, shrinking at his
silence.

Then he spoke: “Oh, liberty!--but--really--I'm quite broke myself--!”

“Then, good-afternoon to you”, said she: “I am very sorry--but you will
excuse the liberty, won't you--?”

In the forest she began to cry, covering her eyes, moaning: “Why, how
could he be so _mean_? And I who loved that young man with all my heart,
God knows--!”

Her eyes searched the ground for two sovereigns. Then she happened to
look at the envelope: and instantly was interested. “Why, it is the
Jew's hand!” she thought, for the letters were angular in the German
manner, making a general similarity with Frankl's writing.

Curiosity overcame her: she opened, and saw...

“Oh, well, this is _generous_ though, after all!” she exclaimed.

And now she ran, coming out from mossy path upon wide forest-road: and
there, taking promenade, was Frankl, quite near, with phylacteried left
arm.

“Why, sweetheart...” said he.

She stopped before him. “Well, you can call me what you like for the
time being”, said she, laughing rather hysterically; “for I am most
grateful to you for your generous present to my brother, Mr. Frankl!”

She had still no suspicion of Richard's visit of chastisement to the
Hall!

“Now, what do you mean?” said Frankl.

“Why, you might guess that I know your handwriting by this time!” she
said coquettishly, and held out the notes and the envelope.

His eyes twinkled; he meditated; he had, more than ever, need of her;
and he said: “Well, you are as 'cute as they make them!”

“But instead of sending us this, which I am not at all sure that Richard
will touch, why couldn't you pay it to yourself, and not turn us out--”

“I let business take its course: and afterwards I do my charity. But it
wasn't for your brother, you know, that I sent it--but for _you_”.

“I must be running--”

When she reached the farm, she gave the carman a secret glimpse of the
notes, while Hogarth, who was now there, went to seek the old Hogarth,
for whom a nest had been made among the furniture in the cart.

He was found above-stairs in an empty room, searching the floor for
something.

“Come, sir”, said Hogarth, and led him step by step.

But as the old man passed the threshold, he fell flat on the slabs of
the porch, striking his forehead, printing a stain there.

And the next day, the day of the sale, he still lay in the old chamber,
on the ancient bed, dead.




VI

“PEARSON'S WEEKLY”


“Rose Cottage” was without roses: but had a good-sized “garden” at the
back; and here Hogarth soon had a shed nailed together, with bellows,
anvil, sledges, rasps, setts, drifts, and so on, making a little smithy.

He engaged a boy; and soon John Loveday would be leaning all a forenoon
at the shed door, watching the lithe ply of Hogarth's hips, and the
white-hot iron gushing flushes; while Margaret, peeping, could see
Loveday's slovenly ease of pose, his numberless cigarettes, and hear the
rhymes of the sledges chiming.

As to Loveday's £50, she had dared to say nothing to Richard, but kept
them, intending to make up the amount already spent, and give them to
Frankl. Loveday, meantime, she avoided with constant care.

So two weeks passed, till, one day, Loveday, leaning at the forge-door,
happened to say: “Are you interested in current politics? The East
Norfolk division is being contested, one of the candidates, Sir Bennett
Beaumont, is a friend of mine, and I was thinking that I might go to the
meeting to-night, if you could come--”

“I invite you to supper here instead”.

“Not interested?” queried Loveday.

“Not at all. Stop--I'll show you something in which I _am_ interested”.

He ran to a corner, picked up a _Pearson's Weekly_, and pointed to a
paragraph headed:

“FIVE HUNDRED-POUND NOTES!

“FIFTY TEN-POUND NOTES!!

“ONE HUNDRED FIVE-POUND NOTES!!!” --a prize for “the most intelligent”
 article, explaining the cause, or causes, of “the present distress and
commercial crisis”.

Loveday read it smiling.

“Ah”, said he, “but who is to be the judge of 'the most intelligent'
article? Pearson must himself be of the highest intelligence to decide”.

“True”, said Hogarth. “But the man who offered that prize has indicated
to the nation the thing which it should be doing. If I was able to form
an Association to enter this competition--and why not? Stop--I will go
with you--”

So that evening they walked to Beccles, and took train for Yarmouth.

The candidate to speak was a Mr. Moses Max, a Liberal Jew; the chair to
be taken by Baruch Frankl; and in the midst of a row, the stately great
men entered upon the platform and occupied it, hisses like the escape
of steam mixing with “He's a jolly good fellow”. Midway down the pit sat
Loveday, and with him Hogarth, whose large stare ranged solemnly round
and down from galleries to floor.

Frankl sipped water, and rose, amid shouts of: “Circular!”
 “Caps-and-tassels!”

He made a speech of which nothing was known, except the amiable bows,
for a continual noising filled the hall; and up rose Mr. Moses Max, a
stout fair Jew, whose fist struck with a regular, heavy emphasis. After
ten minutes, when he began to be heard, he was saying:

“...Sir Bennett Beaumont! Is _he_ the sort of man you'd send to
represent you? (Cries of: “Yes!”) What is he?--ask yourselves the
question: a fossilized Tory, a man who's about as much idea of progress
as a mummy--people actually say he's _got_ a collection of mummies in
his grand fashionable mansion at Aylesham, and it's only what we should
expect of him. (Cheers, and cries of: “Oh, oh!”) And what has he
ever done for East Norfolk? Gentlemen, you may say as you like about
Jews--Jews this, and Jews that--and every man has a right to his opinion
in this land of glorious Saxon liberty--but no one can deny that it's
Jews who know how to make the money. (Cheers and hisses.) They know how
to make it for themselves (hisses)--and, yes, they know how to make it
for the nation! (Loud triumph of cheers.) _That's_ the point--_that_
touches the spot! (Cries of: “Oh, oh!”) Righteousness, it is said,
exalteth a nation: well, so do Jews--”

“That is false”, said a voice--Hogarth, who had stood up.

The words were the signal for a shower of cheers swept by gusts of
hisses; and immediately one region of the pit was seen to be a scrimmage
of fisticuffs, mixed with policemen, sticks, savage faces, and bent
backs; while the two galleries, craning to see, bellowed like Bashan.

Moses Max was leaning wildly, gesticulating, with shouts; while Loveday,
who had turned pale on Hogarth's rising, touched Hogarth's coat-tail,
whereupon Hogarth, stooping to his ear, shouted: “We will have some
fun...”

“The paid agents of Beaumont!” now shouted Moses Max; “sent to disturb
our meeting! Englishmen! will you submit to this? The nation shall
hear--”

At that point Moses Max, in his gesticulation, happening to touch a
switch in the platform-rail, out glowered into darkness every light
at that end of the hall: at which thing the audience was thrown into a
state of boisterous lawlessness, a tumult reigning in the gloom like the
constant voice of Niagara, until suddenly the platform was again lit up,
and the uproar lulled.

And now again Moses Max was prone to speak, with lifted fist; but before
ever he could utter one single word, a voice was ringing through the
Assembly Rooms:

“_Where_ was Moses when the light went out?”

This again was Hogarth; and it ended Moses Max for that night.

Hogarth had not sat since he had called out “That is false”: his tall
figure was recognized; and, with that electric spontaneity of crowds, he
was straightway the leader of the meeting, men darting from their seats
with waving hats, sticks, arms, and vociferous mouth, the chairman half
standing, with a shivering finger directed upon Hogarth, shrieking to
the police: but too late--Hogarth had brushed past Loveday's knees--was
dashing for the crowded platform-steps--was picking his way, stumbling,
darting up them.

Crumpled in his hand was a _Pearson's Weekly_.

Now he is to the front--near Frankl.

“Friends! I have ventured to take the place of our friend, Moses,
here--no ill-will to him--for with respect to the question before us,
whether we elect Beaumont or Max, I care, I confess, little. I'm rather
an Anti-Jew myself (hissing and cheers), but it strikes me that the Jews
are the least of our trouble. To a man who said to me that the cause of
all our evil days is the inability of England to feed these few million
Jews I'd answer: “I don't know how you can be so silly!” Why, the whole
human race, friends, can find room on the Isle of Wight--the earth
laughs at the insignificant drawings upon her made by the small infantry
called Man. Then, why do we suffer, friends? We _do_ suffer, I suppose?
I was once at Paris, and at a place called 'the Morgue' I saw exposed
young men with wounded temples, and girls with dead mouths twisted, and
innocent old women drowned; and there must be a biggish cry, you know,
rising each night from the universal earth, accusing some hoary fault in
the way men live together! What is the fault? If you ask _me_, I answer
that I am only a common smith: _I_ don't know: but I know this about the
fault, that it is something simple, commonplace, yet deep-seated, or we
should all see it; but it is hidden from us by its very ordinariness,
like the sun which men seldom look at. It _must_ be so. And shall we
never find the time to think of it? Or will never some grand man, mighty
as a garrison, owning eyes that know the glances of Truth, arise to see
for us? Friends! but, lacking him, what shall we do to be saved?--for
truly this 'civilization' of ours is a blood-washed civilization,
friends, a reddish Juggernaut, you know, whose wheels cease not: so we
should be prying into it, provided we be not now too hide-bound: for
that's the trouble--that our thoughts grow to revolve in stodgy grooves
of use-and-wont, and shun to soar beyond. Look at our Parliament--a
hurdy-gurdy turning out, age after age, a sing-song of pigmy
regulations, accompanied for grum kettledrum by a musketry of suicides,
and for pibroch by a European bleating of little children. We are still
a million miles from civilization! For what is a civilized society? It
can only be one in which the people are proud and happy! The people of
Africa are happy, not proud; not civilized; the people of England have
a certain pride, not a millionth part as superb as it might be, but are
far from happy: far from civilized. The fact is, Man has never begun to
live, but still sleeps a deep sleep. Well! let us do our best, we here!
I have here a paper offering a prize to the man of us who will go to the
root of our troubles, and my idea in usurping the place of our friend,
Mr. Max, was to ask you to form an association with me to enter that
competition. There is no reason why our association should not be large
as the nation, nor why it should not spread to France and Turkey. For
the thing presses, and to-morrow more of the slaughtered dead will be
swarming in the mortuaries of London. Will you, then? The understanding
will be this: that each man who writes his name in a note-book which
will lie at Rose Cottage, Thring, or who sends his name, will devote
sixty minutes each day to the problem. I happen to be in a position to
use a chapel at Thring, and there I will hold a meeting--”

At this point Frankl rose: Thring was _his_, his own, own, own; and now
his eyes had in them that catlike blaze which characterized his rages.

“Here, police! police!” he hissed low, “what's the use of police
that don't act!” And now he raised his voice to a scream: “Jews! Shew
yourselves! Don't let this man stay here...!”

About twenty Jews leapt at the challenge; at the same time Hogarth,
seeing two policemen running forward from the back, folded his arms, and
cried out: “Friends! I have not finished! Don't let me be removed...”

Whereupon practically every man in the pit was in motion, for or against
him, the galleries two oblongs of battle.

As up the two curving stairs stormed the mob, by a sudden rush like an
ocean-current he was borne off his feet toward the side, and was about
to bring down his sharp-pointed little knuckles, when his eye fell upon
the face of a lady who had fainted.

He had had no idea that she was there!--Rebekah Frankl.

She had quietly fainted, not at the rush--but before--during Hogarth's
speech.

Hogarth managed to fight his way to a door at the platform back with
her, entered a room where some chairs were, but, seeing a stair, could
not let her go from his embrace, but descended, passed along a passage
and out into a patch of green.

She, under the dark sky, whispered: “It is you”, her forehead on his
shoulder; and added: “My carriage, I think, is yonder”.

Hogarth saw the carriage-lights at the field's edge, bore her thither,
laid her with care on the cushions, kissed her hand: and this act Frankl
saw--with incredulity of his own eyes. As he approached, Hogarth walked
away.

Frankl mastered his voice to say blandly in Spanish: “Well, how did you
get through, sweet child? Who was that man--? But stay: where are those
two fools?”

This meant the two familiars--the Arabs, Isaac and Mephibosheth, one of
whom had come as footman, the other as coachman--and, as he went raging
about the carriage, with stamps, his boot struck against a body. There
was enough light to reveal to his peering that it was Mephibosheth, whom
Isaac had stabbed, and fled...

Frankl lowered his ear--doubted whether he could detect a breathing; and
though scared, he being a Cohen, and the presence of death defilement,
yet he stayed, bending over Mephi several minutes, thinking, not of him,
but of Hogarth.

“It is that fool, Isaac, has done it”, he thought; “and if the man be
dead--” What then? “_If_ he be dead, I've got you, Mr. Hogarth, in the
hollow of this hand....”

His fingers passed over the body: there, sticking in the breast, was a
cangiar which Isaac, in his panic, had left, and Frankl's hand rested on
the handle; if he did not consciously press the knife home, very heavily
his hand rested on it, eyes blazing, beard shaking....

Then he drew out the knife carefully, to hide it in the carriage,
listened again close, felt sure now that death was there, and now
scuttled, as if from plague, guiltily hissing: “Putrid dog...!”

Presently he led his carriage to the station, and made a deposition of
the murder.

Asked if he had any suspicion as to the culprit, he said: “Not the
least: I left the man alone with the carriage, and who could have had
any motive for killing him beats me.”




VII

THE ELM


Hogarth, meantime, had made his way to the front of the room, then
vomiting its throng, discovered Loveday, and, deciding to walk home,
they were soon on the cliffs.

And suddenly Loveday: “To-morrow will conclude my fifth week in
Westring. What, do you suppose, has made me stay?”

“I have wondered”.

“I work better here...Hogarth, you inspirit me”.

“Is that so?”

“It is, yes. Merely your presence is for me a freshness and an
enthusiasm: I catch in the turn of your body hints of adventurous
Columbuses, Drakes, nimble Achilles; and sibylline meanings in some
glance of yours infect my fancy with images of Moses, blind old
Homers--prophet, lawgiver, poet--”

They were passing along a stretch of sand, with some lights of Lowestoft
in sight, arm in arm; and Hogarth said: “Well, you speak some big words.
But my life, you understand, has been as simple and small as possible.
I will tell you: my father sent me to an extraordinary school--where he
got the coin I could never find out--Lancing College at Shoreham. There
I did very well--only that I was continually _getting_ it! What was
the matter with me when a boy I can't understand: I was the devil. One
summer vacation (I was fourteen) I stole three pounds from the old
man, and ran away one Sunday night. Passed through London and soon was
apprentice in a blacksmith's shop in a Kent village called Bigham. But
in six months I had the forge at my fingers' ends, and was off: nothing
could hold me long. One day I turned up before the Recruiting Office
of Marines in Bristol--just of the right age for what they call
'second-class boys'--and decided upon the sea--that sea there--which,
from the moment I saw it at the age of four, caused me a swelling of
the breast with which, to this day, it afflicts me. Well, I got the
birth-certificate of another boy, scraped through, was entered into a
District Ship, and finally sailed in the _St. Vincent_ to the Pacific
Station.

“However, my trial of His Majesty's ships was not a success: twice I was
in irons, once leapt into mid-ocean; nor could the battleship hold me
when she had nothing to teach me; so I did to the King what I had done
to the old man--cut and ran.

“It was at Valparaiso, and I made my way across the continent to Buenos
Ayres.

“I forget now what took me to Bristol: but there I was one day when I
happened to see--what do you think?--a girl--sixteen--I a stripling of
nineteen, or so--but she most precocious, spoke like a woman--a grating
in a wall between us. Ah, well, God is good, and His Mercy endureth for
ever. But she said it could never be--she a Jewess: though that, by the
way, is nonsense, for she is a Jewess, and a Parisienne, and a Hindoo,
and a Negress, and a Japanese, and the man who marries her will have a
harem. My friend, I have seen her this very night!”

He was silent. Suddenly he broke out: “I came home raving! The old man
was scared out of his wits by my frenzy--I drank like ten men--in a
month was the terror of Westring. One midnight, going home through the
beech-wood--I don't know if you have noticed a hollow elm-tree which
stands to the right of the path?”

“I think I have”, said Loveday.

“We shall pass near it presently; and at the moment when we approach it,
I shall feel a little thrill in my back: always it is so with me. But I
was saying: that midnight, as I passed the tree, drunk as I was, I saw
a naked black man with a long beard run out; I took to my heels; he was
after me; till I reached the bridge, when I stopped, faced him, fired a
blow into his eyes, and he vanished.

“During the week I continued to see apparitions. My groans were heard in
the farm-yard: Lord have mercy upon me! Christ have mercy upon me! I was
visited by the Methodist preacher at Thring; and finally I found solace:
I became a class-member, a leader, a local preacher.

“For some time I have been conscious of dissatisfaction among the people
with my preaching, who say that my God 'is not a personal God', and that
my Christianity is 'rum stuff': I am therefore meaning to give it up.
But I still preach every second Thursday night.

“It was about that time that, by accident, I found out the power of my
hand to cure headache, and things like that, and the sensation among
these villagers was enormous, I can tell you, six years ago; now they
come to be touched without the slighest sense of the unusual. But what I
have done well in was--the farming. I knew little of agriculture--”

At this point they turned into the lane to Westring: and Loveday went
with him a little beyond Priddlestone to see the fatal elm.




VIII

THE METEOR


The next morning, after breakfast, Hogarth went down old Thring Street,
and spent a penny for a note-book to contain the signatures of his
association.

But this was no day for interest in that scheme: for under the
projecting first-floor of the paper-shop were newspaper placards bearing
such words as:

THE EARTH IN DANGER

SHALL WE PERISH TO-NIGHT?

and Hogarth was soon bending in the street over a paragraph, short--but
in _pica_.

M. Tissot, the astronomer, had, at half-past ten the previous night,
observed through the 40-inch telescope of the Nice observatory a body
which seemed a tiny planet or aerolite of abnormal size. It was sighted
at a point two degrees W. of _a_ Librae at an angle of 43 1/2° with
the horizon, and had been photographed, its elements calculated, its
spectrum taken. The ascertained diameter was 3° 17”, or about 73 miles,
and its substance seemed to consist of ironstone mixed with diamond.

By noon a fresh light was thrown upon the little world, the Yerkes
observatory and Greenwich both uttering their voice, the Astronomer
Royal announcing that the so-called planet was merely a meteor--not more
than 400 yards in diameter, with a low velocity of two miles a second;
and its distance was less than a tenth of that estimated by Tissot. The
Yerkes observatory fixed the diameter at 230 yards. All, however, agreed
in the opinion that it must strike the earth between ten and twelve that
night.

These later announcements so much allayed the panic, that by one o'clock
Hogarth, on peeping into the note-book on the box before the smithy, saw
six signatures; and a young man who came about six P.M. to sign, cried
out: “Hullo! the book is filled up!” on which Hogarth ran out, saying:
“Don't run away on that account, I'll run and get--” darting into the
house to ask Margaret where a certain account-book was.

“Didn't I throw it into the box of rubbish in the cellar at Lagden, when
we were leaving?” she asked; on which he threw off his apron, and was
off toward Lagden Dip to get it.

He had almost cleared the village when he was blocked by a crowd before
a cottage, from out of which were coming screams--a woman's; and he ran
in, found a man named Fred Bates beating his wife, planted a blow on his
chest.

The next morning the wife of Bates was found dead, greatly disfigured
about the face, whereupon Bates was arrested, and Hogarth, as we shall
see, was subpoenaed to give evidence of the beating.

In ten minutes he was at the old farm-house of the Hogarths.

The new tenant was a Mr. Bond, a bankrupt metal-broker, who had
two hobbies--farming and astronomy; and, as Hogarth approached the
yard-gate, he saw Mr. Bond, his two daughters, his servants, grouped
round an optic tube mounted on a tripod. He asked permission to get the
account-book, got it, in a few minutes was again passing through, and,
as he went by, bowing his thanks, Mr. Bond said: “But--have you seen the
asteroid?”

“No--whereabouts?”

“Not quite visible to the naked eye yet: but come--you shall see”.

He himself looked through, fixing the sight, turning the adjuster; then
with fussy suddenness: “Now, sir--”

Hogarth put an eager eye to the glass.

“You see her?” said Mr. Bond, rubbing his soft old palms; “straight for
us she comes--in a considerable hurry by this time, I can tell you! and
if she happens to break up in the air, then, pray, sir, that a splinter
of her may fall into your back yard--not too big a one! but a nice
little comfortable _piece_”--he rubbed his palms--“for you know, no
doubt, of what her substance is composed? Diamond, sir, in extraordinary
evidence! in conjunction with specular iron ore, commonly called the red
haematite, and the ferrous carbonate, or spathic iron. You see her, sir?
you see her?”

Hogarth whispered: “Yes”.

There, fairest among ten thousand, sailing the high seas she came; and
longer than was modest he stopped there, gazing, then ran, wondering at
her daisy loveliness, not dreaming that between himself and her was--a
relation.

She broke up with a European display soon after eleven that night over
the North Sea.




IX

HOGARTH'S GUNS


At the moment when Hogarth was peering through the telescope, a man was
loitering before his cottage--one of the Hall's park-keepers; and
when Margaret put out her head to look for Richard's coming, the man
whistled.

In a moment a note was in her hand.

“DEAR MISS HOGARTH,

“This is to ask you to be certain sure to meet me this evening at 9 P.M.
on the towpath. It isn't to-day that you are well aware of the state of
my feelings toward you: but it is not to talk sweethearting that I
wish to see you now, but about your brother, and the matter is about
as important as can be. If I were in your place, I should destroy this
letter.

“Yours, with my respects,

“BARUCH FRANKL”.

Margaret tore it up, and “My goodness!” she thought, “what is anyone to
do? If I only had the money to make up those fifty pounds! May the Holy
Spirit guide me now...!”

Later in the evening she stole out, and met Frankl.

He assumed a very respectful tone.

“Miss Hogarth”, said he at once, “have you heard?”

“No, sir”.

“You have not been told that your brother has been to the Hall?”

“What in patience for?”

“He came--you couldn't believe--to beat me!”

“Richard! I don't understand. When?”

“Yesterday”. (In reality it was four weeks before.)

“But what about?”

“Revenge! Blind, murderous revenge for turning him neck and crop out of
Lagden!”

“You _are_ in a temper! But I can't understand a word of it!”

“Well, that is what I had to tell you. He came to my house--And how good
have I been to this man! Didn't I send him the fifty pounds--?”

“Well, that _was_ kind. But I must tell you, Mr. Frankl, that Richard
knows nothing of the fifty pounds--”

“Well, then it is _your_ fault! Oh, he did not know of the fifty
pounds? Then it is your fault entirely, this rage of his against me--He
threatened to shoot me dead--thrice he threatened--soon, he said--”

“Not Richard?”

“Yes, Richard!--your nice Richard! But what did I want you for to-night?
It was to let you see that I have it in my power to let your brother in
for three months hard--not less. But you know, my dear, don't you, that
I wouldn't do anything to give you pain? That is why, so far, I've
taken no steps. But your brother must be unarmed. I can't have my life
exposed, after his threats, and all”.

“Unarmed....”

“Yes. I have it on good authority that your brother has guns. I must
have those guns put into my own hands by you...”

“But I couldn't! He would find out...”

“Then I must act, that's all. Or no--I give you another chance--tell him
of the fifty pounds I sent--that may disarm him in another way--”

He was sure that this she would not now do, yet felt relieved when she
cried out: “I couldn't! Not now! Can't you see?”

“Well, there is nothing to be done, then. I must act, that's all”.

“But don't be _hard_! What can I do? Sooner or later he'd be sure to
miss them!”

“Poh! he is not always shooting, I suppose? And after a few weeks I'd
give them back. Anyway, think it over: and I'll be here on Tuesday night
next at nine to receive them. Good night--”

She looked palely after him, her feet in a net, new to her, woven of
concealments and deceit.

At eleven that night she was sitting in their diminutive
parlour,--Hogarth at a table inscribing the association's names received
by post that evening; and at last, bending low over her sewing, she
said: “Richard, is it true you have been to the Hall?”

He started! “Yes. Who told you?”

“I heard it”.

He looked at her piercingly. “_Answer!_”

“I heard it”, she said with a stubborn nod, quite pallid.

He turned upon her a stare of displeasure; but in that second they heard
a shouting down the village, ran to the front, and saw heaven all like
cancer and cracked window-panes, for from a central plash of passion the
shattered asteroid had shot long-lingering ribbons of lilac light over
the bowl of the sky.




X

ISAAC


On the Tuesday was the inquest on the murdered Mephibosheth; ending in a
verdict of wilful murder against some person unknown.

The same night at nine Frankl had Hogarth's two guns from Margaret on
the towing-path, she now well inveigled into his net, and under his
commands.

“I want you”, he said, “to meet me-here again on Thursday night, at
7.30”.

“But you will tell one why, I suppose!”

“When you come you will hear. And don't let anything keep you away--not
_anything_, mind--if you take my hint”.

She left him with her head hung, praying for deliverance, but
consenting.

The next (Wednesday) morning Frankl was in a high room of the Hall, in a
corner of which cowered the Arab, Isaac, and he said in his strong bass
in Arabic: “Well, Isaac, well”.

A groan broke from the obese heap of grief; down each side of his kefie
streamed waves of trembling; on his square-cut beard of ritual flecks of
foam.

“Isaac, why did you kill Mephibosheth?”

Vigorously sputtered Isaac, spitting out the ill-omened words. He said:
“Your servant did not kill Mephibosheth”.

“Well, there was an inquest to-day, the Court decided that you did, and
has sentenced you to be hanged by the neck like a dog”.

The Arab sprang up, his thick bluish under-lip shivering.

“An eye for an eye”, said Frankl solemnly: “it is written in the Torah”.

“_Mercy_ My father served your father--”

“I have remembered that: that is why I have saved you from hanging like
a dog at the hands of these _Goyim_ vermin: but, Isaac, you must die--”

“God of--!”

“You dare raise your voice! Blood for blood--”

“_Mercy_!--I did not mean to kill--!”

“Blood for blood, you dog! Raise it, and I fell you! Raise it, and the
noose sinks into your fat swine's-throat! Can't you understand?--you
have been tracked by the avengers of blood! and you may swing
lingeringly, with a crowd of Christian boys and girls mocking round you,
or you may shoot yourself in one painless flash. Which shall it be?”

Isaac, again dropping a-heap, covered his face, without answer.

“Well”, said Frankl, walking away, “I can't wait all day. The detectives
are at this moment downstairs--”

Now the Arab leapt up, and, in a movement of great dignity, with an
out-rush of both arms, rent his caftan from the top to its muslin
girdle.

“I will shoot myself”, he said quietly.

Frankl took snuff.

The same night he took his secretary's typewriter, and spelled out the
following note:

“SIR,

“Permit me to ask you as an old friend of your father's if you are
aware that your sister Margaret is the lover of the lord of the manor?
Everybody seems to see it, but yourself. I have reason to know that the
very day you receive this she will be meeting him at about 7.30 P.M.
under the old elm in the beech-wood near the Hall-park.

“ONE WHO SHALL BE NAMELESS”.

Hogarth received it by post the next morning.

He had to think, as he worked, of something to say at the service that
night on the text: “God's way is in the Sea”, but the glare of forge and
heated metal swam vaguely, a fog of red, about his consciousness. And
mixed with those recurring words: “the old elm”, “God's way”, something
with a voice shouted inside him--a name--_Margaret!_ Anon his face
flushed to a dusky turbulence, and he hurled the sledge high to shatter
the earth, like Thor.

Suddenly he had the thought that he would clean his rifle, and, dropping
a hot iron which vanished with a stifled cry into black water, he tossed
his tongs clattering, and almost ran toward the cottage.

He had not, however, reached the back door when he heard his name called
from behind.

And now happened to him the most momentous event of his life--though
nothing could have seemed more commonplace.

It was an old fellow named Tom Bates who had called him--father to
that Fred arrested for the murder of his wife--a Yarmouth fisher and
herring-curer.

And when Hogarth twisted round, with that stare of his large and
bloodshot eye, “Here”, said the old man, “take them”--holding out a
basket of herrings.

Hogarth seemed not to understand, but then said: “All those for me?”

“Every bloomin' one!” answered Bates, with the dropped jaw of pantomime,
and a far-away look of blue astonishment which he had.

“It is extremely handsome of you. Can you spare all that--?”

“Spare, _ya'as!_ They're easy enough come by, for that matter. Why, the
day's work of a fisherman gives him enough fish to live on all the week,
and he could lie around idling the other six days, if he chose, only
anybody can't live on nothing but fish “.

These words, destined to produce a horror of great darkness, and a cup
of trembling of which all the nations should drink, hardly affected
Hogarth at the time. He _did_, indeed, shoot an interested glance at the
old man, but the next moment his mind, numb that morning, was left dark.

“Here--take them--they are yours”, said Bates. “But with regard to
that God-forsaken son of mine: you'll be givin' evidence agen him, I'm
told--”

When his sleeve wiped a tear, Hogarth promised to make his evidence
mild, and was left alone.

Now his purpose of cleaning the rifle was turned: he went back to the
forge, and worked till Margaret, at one o'clock, called: “The dinner is
on the table”.

At that table, for a long time, silence reigned, Margaret's eyes fixed
on his face, his on his plate.

Toward the end he said: “Are you going to chapel to-night?”

Her bosom heaved; she cleared her throat: she had to meet Frankl by the
towing-path.

“I don't think I shall...”

_Margaret!_

“Why not?”

“I have something to do”.

“_What?_”

Silence.

“_What?_”

“Something”--with a stubborn nod, and pallor--“if I tell you _something_
that should be enough”.

“You will go to chapel to-night”.

“That I shan't”.

“Yes”

Silence.

A little before seven they left the cottage together for the chapel,
Hogarth taking his hunting-crop--from habit; he had also a little Bible;
in his jacket, tight at the slight waist, unbuttoned at the breast, lay
the anonymous letter, and a little poetry-book, neither moon nor star
lighting the night, bleak winds swooping like the typhoon among the
year's dead leaves.

The chapel was a paltry place, though in the wall to the right of the
preacher was a slab bearing the inscription:

                      ON THIS STONE
                  JOHN WESLEY PREACHED
                 IN THE VILLAGE, ON THE
                      9TH JULY 1768

And they sang a hymn; Hogarth “prayed”; read a chapter; once more the
harmonium mourned; Hogarth gave the text: “God's way is in the sea...”

Even as he uttered it, he happened to glance toward the “mission-pew”--a
square pew rather behind the pulpit: Margaret no longer there.

A paleness as of very death--then a dreadful wrath reddened his dark
face.

He seized his hunting-crop; and, without a word, sped bent and thievish
down the steps--and was gone.

Upon which Loveday in a middle pew, perceiving here something sinister,
like a still wind flew to a back door, before ever the amazement of the
people had given place to a flutter like leafage; and running fast, he
came up with Hogarth by a stile twenty yards behind the chapel, touched
his shoulder.

“To the devil with you...!” shouted Hogarth, running still, and there
Loveday stood.

Margaret, meantime, was hurrying toward the towing-path, while Richard,
in a direction at right angles to hers, was pelting toward that spot
terrible to him--the elm.

At the moment when he entered the deep darkness of the beeches, he heard
what sounded like a pistol-shot, rain now falling drop by drop, and
through the forest with an uplifting whoop, like batsmen, swooped the
tomboy winds.

Now, approaching the elm, again he felt that thrill which the spot had
for him, and came peering, at slower pace: no sound but the gibbering
rout of the stiff-stark beech-leaves. Some steps more, and now he was
at the mound which surrounds the tree: stood, listened: silence,
sightlessness: Margaret not there.

One more forward step: and now his foot struck a body.

As he stooped, his hand touched a revolver--which was his own; another
moment, and he saw running lanterns borne by two park-keepers, and by
their light saw the body of Isaac, who but now had shot himself with the
weapon that was in Hogarth's hand.

The park-keepers had just been urged by their master to the spot, he
having, he told them, heard a pistol-shot; and before anyone could speak
Frankl himself was there, defiled with the presence of the dead.

He looked from Hogarth to the corpse, and from the corpse to Hogarth,
then, snatching the weapon from Hogarth's hand, exclaimed: “Why, bless
my heart, you've _murdered_ the man....”




XI

WROXHAM BROAD


In a cottage in Thring Street, marked “E. Norfolk, E. 58, Constabulary”,
Hogarth passed the night, having been arrested the moment he returned
home from the elm.

A few minutes afterwards Margaret, who had found no Frankl at the
towing-path, came home to the ghastliest amazement throughout Thring, so
that sleep overcame the village only toward morning.

At 7.30 A.M. Hogarth was marched to Beccles, then after an
inquest-verdict appeared before the magistrates' court, and was
committed.

One of the witnesses in the summary-jurisdiction court had been Loveday,
who had deposed that Hogarth, on leaving the chapel, was, beyond doubt,
in a passion; and mixed with the crowd was Margaret, who, standing
thickly veiled, heard that evidence. And thought she: “Is it possible
that he can be giving evidence against Richard like that? And smiling,
the mean, false thing--”

She had disappeared on the morning after the arrest: and Loveday was now
racked by disquiet, wondering how she was living, though she and he were
in the same train, unconscious of each other, when he followed Hogarth
to Norwich; and, as Margaret stepped upon the Thorpe platform there, a
Jew, who was watching the arrival of every train, spied and shadowed
her to the old Maid's Head, this intricate city being now crowded, the
Assizes all in the air, mixed with the Saturday cattle-market.

At ten the next morning Margaret learned at the Guildhall the address
of her brother's defending solicitor, and set out to find him, the
wretchedest woman on earth now.

But as she passed by the archway in the tower of St. Peter Mancroft,
Loveday stood before her; and she started like a shying horse.

“Good morning”--she went on past him.

He took two steps after her. “Are you in a hurry? Can I come with you?”

“It is quite near. Thank you--I'd liefer go alone”.

He, a delicate being, all nerves, was repelled; lifted the old cloth
hat; but then again stepped after her, saying: “But are you angry with
me for something?”

“Why should I be? I have no right to expect anything from you, Mr.
Loveday”.

“No right? You _have_, a little, I fancy!”

He said it at her ear with such a lowering of the eyelids, that it
pierced to her fond heart, and she smiled with a “H'm!” uncertain, half
turned to him; but said: “I must be getting on--”

“But it is most important that I should talk to you about everything.
Where are you staying?”

“It is some distance from here”, she answered, undecided whether or not
to give her address.

“Ah--in that case--but still--will you meet me? Say here--this evening?”

“I will see if I can”.

“At seven?”

“I will see”.

So they parted, she to tread that intricacy of streets round the Market,
with stoppages for enquiries, till she found the office, where she
presently sat in an inner room, veil at nose-tip, and before her at a
grate stood Hogarth's solicitor.

What, till now, for shame, she had concealed, she revealed: showing how
Richard could not possibly have taken the revolver with him to the elm,
since she, two days previously, had secretly given it to--someone.

Mr. Carr, the solicitor, frowned, elaborating his nails.

“This is very extraordinary”, he said. “Whyever did you keep us in
the dark as to all this before? And to whom was it that you gave the
revolver? and why?”

“Am I bound to tell that?”

“No, but you may be sure that the truth will be got from you. Stay--I
must ask you to excuse me now. But tomorrow morning at this hour--will
you? As for your brother, have no fears at all: he is now absolutely
safe”.

Margaret went rapidly away, not knowing whither, only returning toward
late afternoon to her inn. As she entered, a letter was handed her from
Frankl.

“Dear Miss Hogarth:

“It is only due to you that I should see you at once to explain the
mystery of this affair, so as to clear your brother, and as it would not
do for me to call upon you for obvious reasons, the only thing for us to
do is to meet to-night on Mousehold Heath at 7 P.M. without fail...”

What now was she to do? At “7 P.M.” she had half promised Loveday to
meet him.

And what had her meetings with Baruch Frankl, innocent as they were,
brought upon her and hers!

Yet Frankl _must_ be kindly intentioned, she reasoned--since he had sent
them the £50; and she thought of that agony of humiliation when she had
asked Loveday for £2, and he had refused.

And he had given evidence against Richard with his down-turned smile.

But he had said a word at her ear--and her crushed heart had leapt. She
did not know what to do, fell by her bedside and prayed to be taught
which of the two was Richard's best friend.

As she passed over the inn-threshold, she decided in favour of Frankl:
and a few minutes past seven was on Mousehold Heath.

Frankl hurried to meet her, and the hand which he held out was rather
cold; but she did not take it.

“No, Mr. Frankl”, said she, “before I give my hand, it is only what
is due to me to hear how Richard's pistol, which I trusted to you, was
found where it was--”

“Well, that is only fair”, answered Frankl; “that is only fair. But I
have a carriage there, let us get into it, and sit as we talk”.

She could see no carriage in that dark, yet it stood only some yards
away--Frankl's own.

“I think I prefer to stand...” said she.

“As you like. But with regard to the gun, I should have thought that
you could have guessed how it was--but no, you always mistrust me
instead--the Jew. Don't you know that the dead man was a servant in my
house? Well, I left the two guns in my study, and he, wanting to shoot
himself, stole one, that's all”.

“It was _he_ shot himself?”

“Why, who else? You don't suppose Richard shot him! You are as cool as
they make them”.

“Well, that was how it was! But couldn't you say that at the
police-court--?”

“I am _going_ to at the big trial, of course. But I was ill, am ill now,
and here have I been running about all day on your brother's behalf, and
dead tired--and ill, and all--and you won't let me have a rest in the
carriage--”

“Well, as you put it in that way...” she said.

So they walked to a motor-brougham, sat within, and as they commenced to
talk again, the brougham moved.

“Tell me”, said Frankl, “have you mentioned to anyone that you had given
the guns to me?”

“I told Richard's solicitor this morning--”

“That was horribly imprudent, without consulting me!”

“I think I have been silent long enough, don't you? I didn't mention
your name, but--”

“Oh, you didn't mention my name! That's all right, then! Look here, do
you know--?”

“Well?”

“I believe you love me in your heart. Can't help yourself”.

“Oh, Mr. Frankl, do I look as if I was in the mood for that kind of fun
to-night, a poor wretch like me, steeped in misery, my God knows”.

“_I_ love _you_!”

He suddenly grasped her wrist, his eyes blazing.

“Stop--let me get out of this--” she said.

“Wait!--I give you your chance!--Listen: I am not a man whose mind you
can read right off like a book, I twist like an eel, I am deep, I am
tricky, and I never yet met the man that I didn't hoodwink. Ninety-nine
per cent of what I say is a lie; even when it is the truth, it is a
lie just the same. But at this particular moment I am talking the God's
truth: I want you! You shall be my little girl! Chuck Richard!--chuck
the swine's-flesh!--I'll take you right away--to Paris--this very
night--”

She had arisen, alarmed by his hissed fury. “But, you are stark,
staring, raving mad”, she said proudly, “that is what you are”.

Frankl struck the side of the brougham, it flew, and Margaret tottered
backward with an exclamation. The next moment she sent forth a scream,
the grip of Frankl on her wrist agonizing her bones.

“Where are we going?” she cried out.

“I gave you your chance!” was Frankl's fierce answer.

“Let me get out!--you must be a wretch--to take advantage--”

He put his mouth to her ear till it touched. “Your nice Richard flogged
me like a dog! I felt the cuts to the marrow of my damned soul! Now I've
got him in the hollow of this hand! Why, you helped me! you helped me!
That's good! And I've got you, too”.

Blackness and swiftness bound her; a dizziness overcame her. Soon they
were by a great pool of gloomy water--Wroxham Broad--where hern, wild
duck, and the mast of the darkling boat brooded among bulrush; and
now in three minutes more the brougham was sweeping over the lawn of a
lonely building, surrounded by walls.

She, peering, saw with joy both lights and a well-dressed man and woman;
and, as the carriage stopped, she sprang out with alacrity, Frankl with
her, still grasping her wrist.

“Sir”, she blurted out at once, “you will help me, I know. I am a poor
unfortunate woman--my name is Margaret Hogarth--”

“We know!” said the gentleman, and, approaching Frankl's ear, asked in
Yiddish: “How long has she had her delusion?”

“Only about a week, I think. She may be violent at first, but--”

“Come in, Miss--Hogarth”, said the gentleman.

Margaret passed the threshold; the doors closed upon her...




XII

THE ROSE


On the third morning of his confinement in Norwich, Hogarth was hurried
into the hall of justice and the witness-box--in the dock Fred Bates.

Bates had denied--with sufficient impudence, it seemed: for his wife
had been found dead, battered and burned about the face, Bates' own hand
also burned by the poker with which, _red-hot_, he was presumed to have
beaten her.

The same afternoon Bates was sentenced to death: but, having had
sunstroke in Egypt, was afterwards reprieved.

And two mornings later Hogarth heard the bar of the prisoner's dock
clang behind himself.

The speech of leading counsel for the Crown was short: a letter, found
on the prisoner, would be produced, in which some busybody had falsely
informed the prisoner that Mr. Frankl would meet his sister under a
certain elm-tree: and the prisoner, in a crisis of passion, had hurried
from the pulpit to that tree, on observing that his sister had left the
chapel (to keep a real appointment with Mr. Frankl elsewhere). Under
that tree the prisoner had encountered the murdered man, whose Oriental
dress on a dark night would give him a resemblance to Mr. Frankl,
himself a Jew. The prisoner had then shot the deceased, mistaking him
for Mr. Frankl, and had been found holding the smoking weapon, which
he admitted to be his own. It was a painful case; but the chain of
inference was not assailable.

“Not assailable” found an echo in the minds of solicitor and counsel for
Hogarth, who with growing anxiety were awaiting the coming of Margaret
with her story of the weapons. Margaret was where her name was changed
to Rachel.

Now was the régime of examining counsel for the prosecution. The usher
called: “Baruch Frankl!”

A voice in the gallery shouted: “Caps and tassels!” while Frankl, in the
witness box, bowed largely to both bench and bar. He put his palms on
the red-hot rail, caught them up, put them again, caught up, put them;
and still he bowed, while a trembling of the chin gave to his beard a
downward waving.

“Now explain to the court the reasons for the state of the prisoner's
feelings toward you”.

“For one thing I had turned him out, because he could not pay his rent;
for another, his sister was inclined, my lord, to be a little bit weak
on my account--”

“A little bit _what_?” asked his lordship.

“Just a little bit weak, my lord”.

“A _reciprocal_ weakness?”

“Well, my lord, you know the world--so do the gentlemen of the jury--”

“And of the Jewry!” screamed his lordship, amid laughter from the merry
wigs.

As Frankl stepped down, a name was called at which Hogarth went cold as
a ghost: “Rebekah Frankl”.

And in she stepped splendent, to stand like a Nubian woman, with that
retreat of the hips, her ears torn with their load of gold, her throat
and breast ablaze, she bringing into that English court the gaudy heat
of the Orient, Baal and Astarté, orgies of Hindoo women in temples of
Parvati, the pallid passion of Bacchantes. Though not tall, she was
lofty, and her ebon eyes had that very royalty of the stare of the bent
form in the dock, whose heart throbbed quick like paddle-wheels that
thrash the sea, she his wild divinity, wild wife of his wild youth....

At her shocking beauty the Court stood hushed.

She suggested the East: but in her speech was the energy of the
West--sharp--a bass almost like her father's.

“You recognize the prisoner?”

“Yes”. She smiled.

“You were present on the day of the 11th November when the prisoner
entered your father's house, and attempted to strike him?”

“Did strike him”.

“He did?”

“Yes”.

“Did he seem in a passion?”

“Seemed severe”.

“Severe! But was he not highly excited?”

“He did not seem so. Frowned and flogged”.

“By whom was he ejected?”

“Went of his own accord”.

“But--try to remember. What made him go?”

“He suddenly saw _me_, and fled”.

Laughter droned through the court, in which she naïvely joined, while
Hogarth's eyes and hers met one instant, blazed outrageously, and
dropped....

That was all. Counsel bowed.

The day grew toward evening, and still the stuffy Court sat.

But Margaret Hogarth did not come; a defending counsel finished
examination, counsel on the other side again addressed the Court,
and again defending counsel. The judge then held the scales, the jury
trooped away, the crowd buzzed.

The light in the room seemed to brood to a denser yellow, and anon to
grow dim; the stuffed court festered; voices spoke, but low. The King of
Terrors was here.

When the jury came, the judge was called, Hogarth stood up, and the
clerk of arraigns put a question to the foreman.

The foreman said: “We find the prisoner guilty: but beg to recommend him
to the mercy of the Crown”.

“On what grounds?” asked his lordship.

“On the grounds of past good conduct and strong provocation”.

The judge then placed on his head a square of velvet and passed the
sentence of the Court.

During the reign of stillness that followed, while the court clock's
ticking was still loud, something which was thrown struck Hogarth on the
arm, a red rose, black at heart, that had lain on the breast of Rebekah,
who, when Hogarth looked round at her, was calmly drawing her mass of
cloak about her throat.




XIII

OUT OF THE WORLD


A week later a governor and a chaplain together entered Hogarth's cell
with news of his reprieve.

Eight months later he was being trundled in “Black Maria” to Paddington
Station amid a Babel of escaped tongues, when, sitting in his
pigeonhole, he heard the unknown voice before him cry: “Well, Jim, we're
away to the mountain's brow!”

Jim, nothing but a voice, was heard: “Worse luck! I knows Colmoor, and
I knows the Scrubs, and I knows Portland; and of the five I say--give me
Jedwood. Who's the guy in front o' you?”

“Hi, you in front there, who _are_ yer?” cried the first, pounding.

He was answered by a deep voice, which said:

“I AM WHO I AM”.

“All right, keep yer 'air on, if you've any left! It's the Lawd Chief
Justice, mate! 'E says 'e's 'oo 'e are!”

“'Old on! _I_ knows who it is: it's that new-comer, 33. They say he was
once a priest--”

But now speech was swallowed up in hubbub, as the van ran battering down
a rough street near the station.

Then again Hogarth was whirled into night and space, and, toward
morning, after the bumping climb of a van, was bidden to alight on
moorland, where he spied, far off, set on a hill, a mighty palace of
Romance, all grim, aloof, which was Colmoor.

The next morning while the outdoor gangs were being searched on parade
before the exit, Hogarth saw a face which he knew; and “You, Bates”, he
said, “I thought you were in Eternity!”

But no: there stood Bates, all capped and arrowed, cropped and neat, not
wearing the filthy old scarf of liberty any more.

The neighbor of Hogarth now was a stout man, with black hair, and grey
eyes.

He it was who had been--a priest: and in “Black Maria” had given that
answer: “I am who I am”.




XIV

THE PRIEST


A year passed, during which John Loveday exhausted the resources of
civilization, (1)in seeking Margaret, and (2)in investigating the
innocence of Richard.

He had, however, a sprightly, adventurous nerve in the mind, and would
pull his velvet sleeves busily up--such was his little way. He began to
plot.

About the same time the ex-priest, in that far-off world of Colmoor,
said one day to Hogarth: “_You_ won't be here long!”

“You jest,” Hogarth answered; “if I had the chance of escape, I should
never take it. I am here by due legal process”.

“Tut, if I say that you will escape, it is not because I am a prophet,
but a man of the world, and know what happens in it”.

Converse with this deep, world-wise, and fluent man had now become to
Hogarth like manna, or rather a vice, like opium: for in those grey eyes
of the cleric was hinted anon the baleful glint of the cobra's.

That day, a Saturday, outdoor gangs were recalled early, to “clean up”
 for Sunday, and out across the heath rang the great bell, Colmoor being
famous for its bell, its tone and great size, larger than even the
eight-ton “Mighty Tom” of Christ Church, for though its thickness was
only six inches, it weighed, bell and clapper, ten tons, and was seven
feet high and seven in diameter.

A busy Saturday afternoon ensued, and whatsoever Hogarth's hand found to
do he did it with his might, though his face now seemed all eyes--brown,
bloodshot, imperially large, morbidly staring.

He was giving the finishing touches of order to his wooden spoon and
salt-cellar, his tin knife, plate, and pint cup for gruel, when a Warder
Jennings peeped in with, “No. 76--you are to follow the assistant warder
at once”, and Hogarth descended to an ante-room where an official
handed him a letter, which had been read and initialed by governor and
chaplain.

An event!--a letter in Colmoor, like a shark's fin on the voyages of old
sailing ships.

It was from Loveday, and concluded with a reference to Hogarth's “poor
old grandmother”.

So Hogarth, who had no “grandmother”, propped his forehead to ponder
that thing; and presently said: “Oh, it is a cypher”.

And by noting little peculiarities in the shapes of the letters,
a double cross to a t, a q like a g, etc., he soon had
“flemecops-leftquary”--which he took to mean: “flee to me in the copse
to the left of the quarry”.

He smiled with tenderness at the dear heart planning and daring so
very much for him. But in his smile was a touch of disdain also, he not
intending to “flee”.




XV

MONSIGNOR


Hogarth's first thought, as getting-up bell clattered réveille through
the gallery, was of Loveday's cypher, and by the time the warder came
to ask if he would see governor or doctor, a thought of Monsignor O'Hara
had somehow mixed itself with the thought of the cypher; when an orderly
handed in the day's brown loaf, he was thinking, “Strange that he never
told me what he has done”; eating his pint of gruel, he thought: “If I
will not escape myself, I might perhaps let another.”

“What!” said O'Hara on the march out, “you still here?”

“Where should I be?” answered Hogarth, dull and sullen.

“Where palaces stand open for you, and bank-notes--have you ever
realized something very charming in the Helen pallor of a bank-note,
Hogarth? And gold-yellow, sparkling gold! Hogarth, I--_love_ gold! It is
a confession--”

“Is it that love which brought you here?” Hogarth asked with his
sideward stare.

Whereupon the priest turned a cold gaze upon him--had regarded Hogarth
as a well-bred man, or would hardly have conversed with him.

“I had a motive for asking”, said Hogarth, eyeing the face of the
prelate--a man of very coarse feature; a small head, made to receive the
tonsure, with a low brow; a stern bottom lip, and long upper; a fat neck
held majestically erect; and up stuck his double chin. In profile,
the part between the sharp edge of the bottom lip and the chin-tip was
divided, down near the chin tip, by an angle and crease; and the lower
face seemed too massive for the size of the head.

Nothing could be more exquisite than the contrast between his air of
force, authority and importance, and the knickerbockers, the coarse cap,
the canvas slop-jacket, which he wore.

Outwardly calm, he was yet very excited by that “I had a motive”; he
said to himself: “Suppose this man has some plan! He could invent ten,
if he only knew it. And suppose he would tell me it, if I make him
believe me innocent! It would be like him!”

When the eleven o'clock dinner-bell rang, and they two were again
together, O'Hara said: “Hogarth, I have for some time been intending to
give you my story. Have I in your eyes the air of a guilty man?”

“God knows,” answered Hogarth, with a shrug; “you talk nicely, and you
know much”.

“So much for the hollowness of friendship!”

“Don't be sentimental”, said Hogarth: “I never pretended to be any
friend of yours; but I do respect your talents, do pity your misery:
and if I knew the solid facts of, as you have said, your 'innocence', I
might--”

“_What_?” whispered O'Hara with a thievish, fierce glance.

“Help you”.

“_In God's truth?_”

“I might”.

O'Hara said: “I don't find it so cold as it was this morning. You must
have observed a certain peculiarity of moorland climates--the same
being true of the Roman Campagna, and of Irish peat-lands--that they
are colder than elsewhere in the absence of the sun, and warmer in its
presence. This afternoon--_I will tell you_--”

They had reached the great gates, and were marched to parade-ground for
the second of the four daily searches; then, after three ounces of fat
mutton and forty minutes' rest, the third search, the second march-out.

And immediately beyond the gates O'Hara began: “In order to paint you my
life, Hogarth, I must give you at once to understand what has been its
mainspring and secret: my passion for my Church--”

He paused, while his lips moved in prayer, and he crossed himself.

“From boyhood my dream was to see my Church supreme in the warfare of
the world, I being a King's College and Maynooth man, at twenty-three
was Senior Chancellor's Medallist, and seven years later, sent to Rome
was quickly received into the Vatican household. It was recognized that
I had a future: both gifts and graces; piety; a versatile tongue; a
powerful voice; some learning; could dine, I could look august; above
all, I knew my man and could talk him over. My great day came when, one
morning, in St. Gregory the Great on Mount Coelius, I was consecrated
Bishop Coadjutor to his Eminence the Archbishop of Westminster. Now
I was on the heights. My life during the next ten years was a life of
bustling action--and was led always with one unselfish object. No man
ever spoke a greater number of words than I, Hogarth. I have breakfasted
with the Prime Minister, lunched with a President of the Conference, and
dined with the Bishop of London: between the three meals I have written
a hundred letters and pitched into ten cabs. Such a life is very
exhilarating, in comparison, for example, with quarrying. Oh, my God
what am I fallen! Most of that time I was running over Europe: from
Madrid to Vienna, from Rouen to Rome. It happened that the Archbishop
of Paris was organizing a scheme of Church-workhouses in France, in the
absence of municipal ones, such as we have here.... Well, it was a grand
thing, but was falling through for lack of funds: so I, on my way to
Rome, undertook the mission to plead the cause before his Holiness, and
succeeded to this extent that, on my return, I had with me a casket from
the good old man containing seven diamonds, which I might either dispose
of personally, or hand over to the Paris fund. Now, it was during my
stay at Rome that that series of events, culminating in the Jewish
exodus from Europe, occurred; and on my journey home I was seized with
the mighty thought that, since many of the Jews were perishing of want,
_that_ was the moment to reach their spirit through the body, and add
their race to the trophies of the Church. Was it not a thought? You
yourself, who are a Jew--”

Hogarth's eyes opened in surprise.”_I_ am not a Jew “.

“No? I should have said that there was a hint of expression
somewhere--But to resume. I retained those seven diamonds, and disposed
of them”.

“Honest behaviour!”

“Perfectly honest! I acquainted the Pope--he sanctioned it! And now, I,
single-handed almost, threw myself into that task. I hired, I built, I
begged, I borrowed, I formed committees, I haunted Religious Houses, I
sweated, I ran, I wept, I visited dens, I smoked opium, I drank gin,
I framed memorials, I learned Yiddish, I read the Mishna and Gemara, I
interviewed Rabbonim, I wrote tracts: I was busy. In the midst of it, I
had to visit Rome ceremoniously, to assist at an interview between
the Duke of York and his Holiness--arrived on the Monday, and on the
Wednesday, I remember, attended a Court Ball in the suite of his Royal
Highness. That night, when I returned to the Vatican, I found all the
Piazza di San Pietro crowded. I do not know if you were free at the
time when my friend, M. Tissot, startled everybody by predicting the
collision of an asteroid with the earth? Tut, the silly being--he
should have known from the body's response to the spectroscope that its
condition was too friable to resist our atmosphere. But I never yet
knew an astronomer not imbued with sensationalism they acquire a certain
megalomania from their intercourse with space. But, at all events, the
people, dreading the destruction of everything, had crowded toward the
Vatican. The Duke of Genoa, I, and some of the College of Cardinals,
stood watching from a balcony; and very imposing, I remember, was the
moment when a glare appeared--I must stop--”

They were at the face of the rock, and the “halt” and “set to work”
 parted them.

But again on the final march back at 5.15 when nightshades were falling
fast like snow, and the arm now felt the pick a load, O'Hara began his
muttering:

“I was telling you about the asteroid”, he said. “Now this body, it was
given out, contained diamonds in large evidence, and the mere thought of
such a thing bursting in mid-air, and scattering itself about was, I--I
confess, a little fascinating to my mind. A man might let his soul
gloat upon such a hope till he went lunatic with lust! I--I confess, the
thought was alluring to me. Diamond, my son: lucid--But when the body
burst, and none of it came my way, I drove it from my mind: in fact, I
never heard of a trace of it having been seen--hissed itself into gases
in mid-air. Except in one instance--one instance.

“When I reached Calais on my homeward way, stopped there a day, awaiting
the coming of Rouen, for whom I had nuncio communications, and in the
evening went to visit a cottage where I had once been a great favourite
with an old fellow called Santé-you know those Calais fishers, with
painted sabots, and ochred trousers. And 'What!' said I to Santé,
'the nets already spread at this hour?' 'Nothing to be done to-day, my
Father', he answered, and explained that he had attempted to pick up a
stone before his door, and--it had burned him: he showed it me: it had
the appearance of a piece of ferruginous rock, stuck with pieces of
dirty glass; and it had burned Santé on the midnight of the asteroid's
scattering.

“Imagine my excitement: 'The asteroid', I thought, 'may add fifty
thousand Jews to the Church'. I asked Santé for the stone--Do you blame
me?”

“Go on,” said Hogarth.

“That day two months I had the diamonds lying polished in a casket in
my house. My evil destiny, Hogarth, ordained that the casket was the
one given me for Paris by the Pope, the number of the new diamonds
the same--seven: and one day, about that time, the Vatican organ, the
_Osservatore Romano_, published a dreadful article, hinting that I had
applied to my own purposes seven diamonds entrusted me for Paris: the
Pope, just dead, must have left some record of his gift. My friend,
before I had heard a whisper of the attack upon me, the casket, whose
lid was mosaicked with the Papal fanon, was secretly searched by a
secretary in my house: the seven diamonds were seen.

“Imagine the horror of what followed: I was abandoned by all--superior
and inferior; the story of the meteor was received with sneers. The
scandal reached the public papers--the public prosecutor. And here now
is the wretch, Patrick O'Hara.”

The latter part of this narrative was fiction! The Pope's diamonds
O'Hara had duly handed to the Archbishop! and though there was such a
man as Santé, no asteroid had ever fallen at his door. In fact, O'Hara
was “serving time” for an assault upon a lady in a railway compartment
between Whitchurch and Salisbury.

But Hogarth spent that night in meditating the pros and cons as to
O'Hara's escaping; and, in a moment of destiny, said at last: “If he is
undeservedly doomed--” and swooned to sleep.

The very next day was foggy....

On the march out O'Hara said: “Here is something like a fog. On the
Carinthian Alps, where you have dense woolly fogs, there is a race of
goats, which--”

“Would you like to escape?” whispered Hogarth.

“_Who?_”

“You”.

“Hogarth--! My God--!”

A trembling seized the priest's leathery left cheek, he at that
instant seeing a vision of the world--Andalusian wines, hued ices, the
opera-house, and great greyhounds of the sea, and a snuff which his
gross nose loved at Gorey.

“Hogarth, you are not mocking me?” chattered the priest's jaws, hurrying
like a jarred spring.

“I am quite serious. You will have to run for it though”.

“_Run!_ I am not such a young man! Have pity Hogarth”.

“Bah! Be a man”.

The priest approached his mouth to Hogarth's ear: “_I should die of
fright!_ My heart--”

“What would it matter? I thought you had more beans”.

“But have you--a plan?”

“Yes. You must run to the copse--”

“I shall be shot!”

“Probably”.

“I _could_ not--”

“Then, do not”.

“Tell me, boy! Tell me, Hogarth...”

“Within the copse to the left of the quarry there is almost certainly
at this moment waiting a man who, as soon as you pronounce my name, will
help you--”

“You say _almost_ certainly”.

“I can't see him, O'Hara. But I should say he is there on a morning like
this”.

“_What_ a risk! _What_ a risk!” went the priest with lifted eyelids each
time.

“You cannot escape from prison without risk. But I, personally, would
venture upon ten times as much, if I thought it becoming. There is,
however, another risk: that you may not strike the part of the copse
where he is. But near the 1 middle it is high--”

“Why, it is nothing but risks!” whined O'Hara with opening arms.

“You are not bound to try it. By the way--can you swim?”

“Yes--I suppose so--yes”.

“Then lift yourself to it, and risk it. I should, if I were you. Think
of liberty, activity. Prick your spirit, grip at it, and spring it”.

“Do you think I shall be shot?”

“No! It does not matter! Crush your doubts, martyr yourself to your aim,
and your aim will give you the crown of martyrdom”.

“Well--God reward you--I will think of it--”

“_Do_ it!”

“I will!”

“In that case, don't trust to your own eyes--_I_ will give you the
signal with my handkerchief--so: you keep your eyes fixed on me. Then
run, zigzagging. And tell Loveday for me to look after you, and not make
any more plans for me. Good-bye, O'Hara! All this is very unselfish of
me, for I lose my old talky-talky O'Hara--”

They parted at the rock, and set to work.

As minutes, half-hours passed, the condition of O'Hara became piteous,
hideous. His knees knocked together. Like death he dreaded, like life
awaited, that signal. He said to himself: “This Hogarth will be my
ruin...God deal not with me after my sins...!”

Hogarth was waiting that the warders' morning watchfulness might yield
to the influence of use and time; but near nine, when the morning fog
showed signs of thinning, he approached the water-can to ask for a
drink, O'Hara being then two yards from him, wheeling a barrow.

As he stooped to the water, his huge stare ranged the moor, took in the
truth of it, and, after waiting ten, fifteen seconds, he upset the can.
As two officers, at the outcry, ran toward the spot, Hogarth, his eyes
fixed upon them, waited--and all at once, with a flourish, drew his
handkerchief.

O'Hara, with a heavy but impassioned run, was away...

He had not run five yards when a chorus of whistles was shrilling.

And quick, that monotony reels into a very frenzy of sensation: it is no
more the same world, the same men. Lo, in the Palace of Continuity is an
Event.

33 was off.

Five hundred pairs of eyes lit up, and the flurried warders ran in
random dismay to see to it! How if all the five hundred should do
the like, simultaneously?--a possibility underlying, through all its
breadth, the little social “system” which has produced Colmoor.

But the five hundred, exhorted, stamped at, shouted at, remained quiet,
though restive, only the wild eye showing the wild thought, while two
of the warders pursued O'Hara who had also to run the blockade of two
pickets of the civil guard.

The escaping convict, however, has this advantage: that his mind is
strung to a far higher pitch than his pursuers'; and, given a certain
ecstasy, everything can be accomplished.

So O'Hara separately dodged the two pickets, and was making bolt for the
copse before three rifles, aimed at a large vague ghost, rang out, and
did not hit. He plunged madly into the brambly bush.

Immediately a bleating like a child's trumpet was heard from its midst;
and in a few seconds, not one, but _four_, men were seen to rush toward
the river, all in convict knickerbockers, stockings, caps, all in black
overcoats: and one carried a bundle.

Beyond the river one was shot in the leg--a black sailor, who, with two
roughs, had undertaken the risk for lucre. The rest escaped.




XVI

THE ROPE


Soon after this Hogarth was taken with vomitings, his heart retching at
Colmoor. His dark cheeks jaundiced; those mobile nostrils of his small
bony nose yawned, like an exhausted horse's; his face was all a light of
eyes.

Whether or not some suspicion of his complicity with O'Hara had occurred
to the authorities, he now found himself transferred to another “graft”:
from quarrying was set to trenching.

Four things are inexhaustible in the earth: the hope of a gambler; the
sea; the lip of a lover; and the capacity of Colmoor to be trenched and
quarried.

And in Hogarth's new gang was--Fred Bates.

One day, Hogarth, intent upon his work, heard a sob and, glancing, saw
that Bates had dropped his spade and buried his face in his hands.

“What, Fred, not giving in?” He went quickly and pressed his palm on
Bates' brow, saying: “Patience! Stiffen your back: look how _I_ slip
into it!”

“Ah, Hogarth, you don't know. I am an innocent man”.

“So am I.”

“Yes, but _I_ was certain in my own mind to be out within anyway, six
months; _you_ wasn't. That makes a difference, don't it? That touches
the nerve, don't it? Ah!”

“And how did you expect to be out?”

“I had a brother-Bob-in the 9th Lancers in Punjab and his regiment was
ordered home just a week before I was arrested. Well, the morning after
the missus was killed, I went early--for I knew I'd soon be arrested--to
a stableman at Beccles--you know old Harris--and I made him swear to
give a letter to Bob the moment Bob put foot in Southampton, and
to nobody else. In the letter I told Bob where he was to look for
so-and-so, and how he was to prove my innocence--”

“But I don't understand a word of what you are saying”, interrupted
Hogarth.

“I'll tell you. I did not kill my Kit. The burn on her face, and on my
hand, wasn't any red-hot poker. Did you ever hear such bosh? Look here,
you mind, don't you, the talk that week about the world getting blowed
up by some comet? Well, about 3 P.M. on the comet day, as I was walking
home through Lagden Dip, an old gent, the same as took the farm over
after you, he comes up to me, and he says: 'If you should happen to see
anywhere in your travels', sez 'e, laughin' and rubbin' his hands, 'a
piece of hot iron after eleven to-night, you bring it to me, and I'll
put a cheque for One Thousand Pounds there in the middle of your palm'.
Well--I said it was a Wednesday, didn't I? And Wednesday bein' the
pay-day on the Eastern, me and the missus had a drop o' beer that
afternoon, and you know 'ow you come and catched me a-paying of
her--dirty dog that I was those days. But, Hogarth, you hadn't hardly
gone when we made it up between us, and the rest of that evening we was
just like--well--two bloomin', cooin' doves! kissin', blubblin', havin'
drinks, and doin' our week's shoppin' together. Well--stop, here's
Black--”

They were interrupted, and for two days found no other chance.

Two days during which Hogarth received another letter from Loveday, of
which one paragraph was as follows: “The fifteen pounds which you left
in Lloyd's Bank I have managed to withdraw for you on the authority of
your aunt, Miss Sarah Hogarth”, and at once he scented a cypher, having
no fifteen pounds, and no aunt.

When he had unravelled it as before, he had: “Why you failed?
Expect--Balloon--Rope”.

He was astounded: and could only conclude that O'Hara had not delivered
his message.

And as the image of O'Hara had mixed itself with his thoughts of the
copse, so now the image of Fred Bates mixed itself with the balloon.

It was partly through _his_ evidence that Bates was here...!

On the third day Bates, as though he had just left off, resumed his
story:

“You know Seely's, the general shop, at Priddlestone”, said he; “it was
there we always did our Wednesday-night marketin'--nobody would believe
what high old jinks those Wednesday pay-days was to us Great Eastern
blokes! By the time we reached Priddlestone, we had a quart of four-ale
down us, let alone what we'd had before, and, as the saying is, one
glass leads to another. By now we was feeling just nicely, thank you,
and instead of going to Seely's, we took a short cut to 'The Broom', and
it was going on for past eleven when we found ourselves in--you know the
beechwood between Priddlestone and Thring--she singing all the time with
her head thrown back, at the top of her voice.

“Hogarth, it gives me the creeps to think of! Suddenly it looked as if
the whole wood was lit up: there was the sky all cut up with streamers,
I saw my Kit quite plain, then all at once there was a whishin' and a
rushin' among the trees, like steam--and I saw my Kit drop smack. In two
ticks my head was sober: but, as I ran to her, I staggered sideways upon
my left hand, and I let such a _yell_ out of me--had put my hand upon
something flamin' hot.

“The minute I bent over my old woman I knew she was a deader; and I
dropped down, and I called of her, and I shook of her, and it was quite
two hours before I come to myself properly, by which time the affair
what struck her down was gone out in darkness. Of course, the first
thing I thought of was the old gent at Lagden. 'This should mean a cool
thou', says I to myself. But I knew I should be arrested first thing in
the morning, except I told plain out what had happened: and that, you
bet, I didn't mean to do, for if once I mentioned that there piece of
iron before I had it safe off the lord-o'-the-manor's land, I knew it
'ud be taken from me. But to take it off before another day or two was
out of the question--it was too hot. So says I to myself: 'I'll _get_
convicted; and to-night I'll write a letter to Bob, telling him where
to find the affair, how to get the thou, and _after_ he's got it, how to
set about gettin' the case retried '.

“Well, so said, so done. You know that old elm in the beech-wood? I dug
a grave at the foot of it, and managed to kick and roll the affair into
the grave, then I took up my Kit, carried her home, and by the time I
pegged out the letter to Bob, I saw day breakin'. So I made paces for
Beccles, knocked up old Harris, and gave him the letter for Bob. By
eight o'clock I was arrested--”

At this point the 5.15 recall-bell rang out, and there was falling into
line.

The next time that they had speech together, Hogarth said: “And were you
such a clown, Fred Bates, as to imperil your life for a paltry thousand
pounds?”

“_Paltry_ thousand pounds?” answered Bates, surprised: “Hark at this!
Didn't I peril my life ten times more in Egypt for a bob a day? I tell
you I was certain in my own mind of getting out in a few weeks!”

“Well, what happened to prevent you?”

“Only this: Bob died on the troop-ship coming home; that's all”.

“But you could write old Harris to open your letter to Bob, and act on
it, or else hand it over to your father”.

“My word, but haven't I wrote? Old 'Arris is either dead and buried, or
gorn away, or somethin'. I've waited a year and nine months--good God!
and no answer yet”.

“Poor Fred! I could weep blood for you. Believe in God!”

“More Devil than God about Colmoor, it strikes me”.

“As though _you_ knew! Suppose I strike you blind--_now_--with a flash
of Him?”

“I don't take your meaning, sir”, said Bates, with a strange heart-bound
and sense of awe.

“Do you remember 33 of the quarry-gang, Fred?”

“Yes”.

Hogarth whispered: “It was _I_ who got him off”.

Bates whitened to the lips. “I--I thought as much”.

“There is yet another chance, which _you_, if you like, may take”.

Bates saw heaven opening; but with this vague hope was left two days.

On the third, Hogarth explained what he assumed to be the new plan of
Loveday.

“I take it”, he said, “that he will pass over the moor in a balloon
trailing a rope, which will have a loop to be slipped under the arms. I
tell you, there are dangers in this scheme: you may be shot. Are you for
trying it?”

“Trying it, aye”, said Bates, with fifty times the boldness of O'Hara.

And now began for these two a painfulness of waiting days, the sleep of
both, meanwhile, being one nightmare of confused affrights, balloons and
deliriums.

Ten times they re-discussed every possibility of the scheme, Hogarth
giving messages for Loveday, heaping counsels upon Bates. Nothing
remained to be said, and still the days passed over the time-worn
hearts, till a month went by.

At last something was observed in the sky--afar to the N.W.--in the
afternoon turn, about two o'clock, a mist on the moor, but the sky
almost cloudless.

Whereupon Hogarth, who first saw the object, stepped, as if looking
for something, close to Bates, hissing: “_Goodbye!_ Keep cool--choose
well--”

Bates shovelled on steadily, as though this was a day like others; but
twice his knees gave and bent beneath him; and there was a twitching of
the livid under-lip, piteous to see.

It drew nearer, that silent needle, while Bates worked, delving,
barrowing, making little trips; plenty of time; and no one noted his lip
which pulled and twitched.

Without visible motion it came, wafted on the breaths of high heaven:
half an hour--and still it was remote, fifteen hundred feet up. Bates
and Hogarth peered to see a rope, but could none.

After fifty minutes it was actually over the moor, all now conscious of
it; but the rope was indistinguishable from the air.

Yet it was there, walking the ground, at its end a horizontal
staff....Hogarth, with wiser forethought than Loveday's, had predicted,
not a staff, but a loop.

It passed twenty yards from the quarry, Loveday no doubt imagining that
Hogarth still worked there; but the quarry was some hundred and fifty
yards from the trench.

Its course, nevertheless was toward the trench: and on walked
deliberately the fluctuating rope, the staff now travelling the gorsey
ground, now bounding like a kangaroo yards high, to come down once more
yonder.

A moment came when Hogarth, with intense hiss, was whispering to
himself: “If I were he, I should dash _now_”.

But Fred Bates did not move.

Hogarth suffered agonies not less excruciating than the rack.

“Oh, whyever does he wait?” he groaned.

But now--all suddenly--it was known, it was felt, deep in five hundred
ecstatic hearts, that a convict was gone--a man overboard--a soul in the
agony--battling between life and death.

Like tempests the whistles split the air.

Where is he? Who is he? What mother bare him? It is 57! And he is
_there!_--on high--caught, to the skies.

The tumbling of four ballast bags from the balloon was marked: the
balloon darted high, wildly high; and with her, seated on the bar, the
cord between his thighs, darted high Fred Bates.

Exultant! the five hundred faces wax fire-eyed, each heart a flame of
madness. But yonder is Warder Black taking trembling, yet careful, aim:
now the report is echoing from the two Tors, the granite-works; and
that smoke no sooner thins than a whole volley of crackling musketry is
winging toward that dot under the clouds.

And it was hideous--pitiful--the quailing heart waited and was still to
see the dot dissever itself from its rod: he had been hit: was in the
middle of the vast and vacant air: and wheeling he came.

A shockingly protracted interval did that fall fill up: the five
hundred, gazing as at some wonder in heaven, did not, could not,
breathe: the outraged heart seemed to rend the breast in a shriek. Would
it _never_ end, that somersault? Wheeling he came.

In reality it occupied much less than a minute: and now he is no more
ethereal, but has grown, is grossly near, attended by the raving winds
of his travelling: is arrived. And the thump of his coming was heard. As
he touched the earth he jerked out circular....

Here was a tragedy remembered many a year at Colmoor, and always with
feelings of the deepest awe.




XVII

OLD TOM'S LETTER


The fate of Bates filled Hogarth's mind with a gloom so funereal, that
now his strength, his great patience, all but succumbed.

One evening, while his broom lay stuck out under the notch of his
cell-door in order that Warder Black might count him, he took his tin
knife, and began to scratch over the hills and valleys of his corrugated
wall some shining letters:

     VEN

He was now, after long reflection, convinced that he was the victim of
a plot of Baruch Frankl's: yet in his heart was little rancour against
Frankl, nor, when he wrote his “V E N”, was he thinking specially of
Frankl--hardly knew of whom, or what. It may have been of the system of
things which had given to Frankl such vast powers over him; but, the “N”
 finished, he pshawed at himself, and threw the knife down. If something
was wrong, he knew not at all how to right it, supposing the world had
been his to guide.

But a simple incident was destined to transform his mood--a letter from
old Tom Bates, the father of Fred.

And as hitherto we have seen him passive, bearing his weight of pain
with patience, after that letter we shall find him in action.

Old Bates' letter was handed him three weeks after the scratching of his
vague “VEN”.

“DERE MISTER HOGARTH:

“thise fu lines is to ast you how you er getn on, and can you giv a pore
old feller ane noos ov that godfussakn sun ov mine hopn they ma find you
as they leave me at present wich i av the lumbeigo vere Bad and no Go
the doctor ses bob wot you no was in the ninth lansers he dide comen
home so ive only fred left out of the ate. I rote to im fore munths
agorne, but no anser, no doubt becos i cum to london soon arter, so no
more at present from

“Yours trule,

“TOM BATES”.

The old fellow, Hogarth saw, did not know of Fred's fate: Fred, the last
of eight. He would find it hard to answer that letter.

When “beds down” was called, his head was still full of one thought: old
Tom Bates; and he could not sleep; heard the bell ring for the change
of warders; the vast silence of the prison's night; and still his brain
revolved old Tom.

The stealthy slipper of the night-warder passed and re-passed. Anon a
click of metal on metal, and the bull's-eye searched him.

Suddenly he remembered that visit to the forge at Thring, and the
present of herrings which old Tom in his guernsey, had brought.

“Here--take 'em--they're yours”, old Tom had said.

He had just then, he remembered, been on the point of going into the
cottage to examine his guns, when the old man came, and stopped him--a
fatal, appointed thing, apparently. Had he actually gone, he would have
found the guns vanished, and would never have been condemned....

And what was it that the old man had said about fish, and fishermen, and
the sea?

He bent his brow to it, and finally remembered: “The day's work of a
fisherman gives him enough fish to live on all the week, and he could
lie round idling the other six days, if he chose; only anybody can't
live on nothing but fish all the time”.

Was it true? Yes! He remembered facts of Yarmouth....

But since true, it was--strange.

Was the sea, then, a more productive element for men to work in than the
land? No, that was absurd: the land, in the nature of things, was more
productive.

Then, why could not _all_ men procure an easy superfluity by one day's
work, as the fisher could, if he chose to live naked in a cave, eating
fish alone? In that case the fisher could change some of his day's-work
fish for the shore people's day's-work things, and so all have a variety
as well as superabundance.

At the interest of this question, he leapt from his hammock, peering
into that thing, and his fleet feet were away, running after the truth
with that rapt abandonment that had characterized his hunting and
football. This was clear: that there was some difference between land
and sea as working-grounds for men. Shore people, like a shoemaker, did
not have for themselves enough shoes from even five, or six, days' work
on which to live in plenty for a week: and hence would take nothing less
than an enormous quantity of the fisher's fish in exchange for a pair of
shoes, making him, too, poor as themselves. But since land work was
as productive as sea work, and far more so, it could only be that the
shoemaker did not get for himself all the shoes which he made, as the
fisher got for himself all the fish which he caught: some power took
from shore people a large part of what they made, a power which did not
exist on the sea. That much was sure.

What was this power, this inherent difference?

He could think of no inherent difference except this: that shore workers
paid rent for land--directly and indirectly--in a million subtle ways;
but fishers paid none for the sea.

So, then, if shore folk paid no rent, they would have a still greater
superfluity of shoes, etc., from one day's labour in six than the
fish-rich fisher?

So it seemed. So it _was_--as with savages. He started! But one minute's
reflection showed him that it was in the very nature of the shore to pay
rent: because one piece of land was better than another--City land, for
instance--and those working on the better must pay for that benefit.
Civilized land, therefore, was bound to pay rent.

So that the shore people could never have the easy superfluity of the
fish-rich fisher--because land was bound to pay rent? And the fisher
must buy the shore things so dear with his easy-got fish, toiling, he,
too, all the week--because land was bound to pay rent?

The wretchedness of Man, then, was a Law?

Hogarth, confronted by a wall, groaned, and while his body was cold, his
brow rolled with sweat, he feeling himself on the brink of some truth
profound as the roots of the mountains....

“Land was bound to pay rent”: he reached that point; and there remained.

“But suppose the workers on shore paid the rent _among themselves_....?”

At last those words: and he gave out a shout which begat mouths of echo
through the galleries of Colmoor.

“If the workers on shore paid rent among one another”--then they
would--on the whole--be in the very position of the fish-rich workers
on sea, who paid no rent at all, the nation--as a whole--living on its
country rent-free: England English, America American, as the sea human:
and our race might then begin to think, to live!

It seemed too sublime--and divine--to be true! Again, point by point, he
went over his reasoning with prying eye; and, on coming back to the same
conclusion, hugged himself, moaning. At last--he knew.

And away now with the dullness and lowness! That blithe and
hand-clapping day! Good-bye, Colmoor! the daily massacre, the shame and
care. Men could begin--if in a baby way at first--to think, to see, to
sing, to live.

He saw, indeed, that that would hardly have been fair business if he,
for example, had paid his rent to the English Nation instead of to
Frankl, Frankl having bought Lagden with money earned. But he thought
that Frankl would hardly be slow to resign that rent, if once he was
shown....

But if Frankl _was_ slow--what then?

The oblong of ribbed glass over his flap-table showed a greyness of
morning, as he asked himself that thing.

In that case--Frankl could be argued with.

But if he still refused?

Then the question could be gone into as to whether that which is good
for forty millions, though apparently bad for Frankl, is not _forty
million times_ more just than unjust, goodness being justice; also, as
to which had the primary right to England, Frankl or the English.

But if he still refused?

Suddenly Hogarth giggled--his first laugh in Colmoor.

_That_ could be arranged....

For him, Hogarth, the great fact was this: that he saw light. Into that
humble cell the rays of Heaven had blazed.

After standing motionless a long time, he dropped to his knees, and “O,
Thou, Thou”, he said....

An hour later, when asked by an orderly if he wished to see doctor or
governor, he replied: “The Governor”.




XVIII

CHLOROFORM


(Captain Bucknill, the Governor, was making his morning rounds, when he
heard that among the convicts claiming to see him was 76.)

A little man, prim, snappy, compact: an army officer, with moustachios
stuck upon him, to curve and finish him off.

“Well, what is it, 76?” said he busily at the cell door.

Hogarth struck a hand-salute--his old habit on His Majesty's ships.

“Sir, I wished to tell you that I have determined to escape from this
prison--if I can”.

“Indeed, now! This is a most refreshing candour, 76!”

“I have said what I had to say”, said Hogarth. “You keep a sharp eye on
me, and I, too, will keep a sharp eye”.

The Governor puffed a breath of laughter, turned on his heels, walked
away, and that day spoke to three officials with regard to Convict 76.

And during a week Hogarth lay deep, chained, in a punishment-cell.

But during its first four days he had invented three separate plans of
escape, and had determined upon the one which seemed the surest, though
longest.

When he again came up into the light, he was a marked man, under Warder
Black's constant suspicion.

Now, however, his expression was changed: he no longer belonged to
Colmoor, though he was there. Sometimes he felt like shouting at the
burden of his secret. In his impatience to proclaim it, he pined to
write to Loveday--but now his punishment had lost him that privilege.

Meantime, the problem was to get ten good miles beyond Colmoor: a hard
one; but his brain had already accomplished a task far harder: and the
greater implied the less.

His first thought, when he had begun to plan, had been Loveday; his
second, that on no account could he permit Loveday to incur further
risk, or expense, for him; his third, that he might yet use Loveday to
any extent not involving risk or expense.

At the next weekly “School” he sat near a Thames-works hackle-maker,
who, though he could write, was no scholar, and was laboriously spoiling
a second letter-sheet, when Hogarth whispered him: “Can I help you? I
see it's to your mother. I could get her a quid from a friend of mine”.

“Well, I'm much obliged....!”

The laborious letter, after half an hour, had in it:

“If you go to 15, Cheyne Gardens, the gentleman will give you a
sovereign which he owed me for cutting down the elm in the beech-wood at
Teddington for him”.

Now, Loveday lived at 15, Cheyne Gardens, and had only to see those
words “_the elm in the beechwood_,” to scent a cypher from Hogarth.

He offered five pounds for that letter: but it was two weeks before he
decided upon the intended words: “Small chloroform--trenches--rock”.

There were several trenches, many rocks: yet one midnight, when a
blustering wind huddled the bracken, and the prison stood darkling,
wrapped in mystery, a lonely figure in an ulster was there; and under
each of three rocks he deposited two vials: for the formation of only
three gave the least chance of concealment.

What Hogarth's plan could be he racked his brain in vain to dream,
guessing that prisoners, on returning from the moor, must be searched,
even to the ears: Hogarth, therefore, could never use the vial within
the walls, and must mean to use it without--a sufficiently wild
proceeding. But the finding of the vials, was sure: for the “rock” which
Hogarth had had in mind was one of those granite ones common on Colmoor,
standing five feet high on a small base; and one day he swept his hand
among the gorse under it, and, with a glad half-surprise, touched two
vials.

Three days later he again swept his hand among the gorse, touched the
vials, breasted his handkerchief, laid the vials on it, and presently
contrived to tie them together with a twig.

At his feet now was a wheelbarrow full of marl, and two yards off Warder
Black, waiting for him to roll the barrow; but, inserting his spade
between a wheel and a side of the barrow, his back toward Black,
Hogarth, with a tug, bent the spade: then walked to Black.

“Look here”, he said, “that spade isn't much good now....”

Black strode to look, Hogarth a little behind him: and at the instant
when the officer was a-stoop to lift the spade, Hogarth took the vials
from his breast, and laid them upright in the little pocket of Black's
tunic, near his bayonet-sheath and cartridge-box, above the belt.

By the time the matter of the spade was settled, the great bell rang,
the gangs went marching over the old familiar level, up the old path in
the grass-mound on which the Palace stands, and so, in lax order, like
shabby French conscripts, powdered, toil-worn, into the gates.

Then the search on parade: during which, as Black busily searched him,
Hogarth said: “Search well”.

They were then led up to cells.

And the moment Hogarth's door closed upon him, he put his skilly-can on
the floor, and, with one stamp, stamped it out of shape; also he broke
his cup, and pocketed two fragments of it.

A few minutes afterwards, before cocoa, Black, trotting in heavy haste
here and there in the gallery, looked in to say: “Bath to-night”.

And Hogarth: “Warder! a word with you! sorry, I have trodden on my
can....”

Upon which Black went stooping to look, the can now standing on the low
shelf; and as he said “I shall report this”, Hogarth, stooping, with
quick deftness had the vials picked from the thick pocket.

“Well, fall in”, said Black to him; “better take your precious can, and
give it to a bath-room warder for the store-keeper to change”.

Hogarth, as he passed out, placed the vials on the shelf over his
door, where they were secure, since cells were never searched; and, the
bathers having formed in single file, five feet between man and man,
away they moved and down--away and down--lost in space, treading the
journey of galleries, till, at the bottom, they passed up a vaulted
corridor, monastically dim, across a yard open to starry sky, and
into the door of a semi-detached, steep-roofed building, which was the
bath-house.

A row of thirty-five baths; a very long bench for undressing; in the
space between bench and baths three warders walking: such was the
bath-house: all whitewashed, galvanized iron, and rigour; but for its
old record of uneventfulness a scandal was preparing that night.

Outside the door a fourth officer paced, and a cord within rang a little
bell in one click, to tell when, the bathing over, the door should be
unlocked outside.

After giving up his can near the door to a warder, who laid it on the
bench, Hogarth undressed slowly; got off his boots; and now had on only
knickerbockers and stockings: he got off his stockings.

And the moment his bare soles touched the floor, he felt himself once
more agile on the ratlines, larky for a shore-row, handy in any squall.
Let them all come, therefore! He smiled; passed his palms down his crib
of lean ribs.

“Good gracious, why don't you hurry up there...?” an officer came
asking, stooping.

At “there” he saw stars-and-stripes, dropped upon his back: Hogarth was
away toward the door, while the bathers started with shouts, though in
no bosom arose any impulse to follow, the bath-house being the centre of
a maze of twenty unscaleable walls, prison within prison.

But as for Hogarth, in such a dazzling flash did he dash toward the
door, that he had struck down the second officer before the outcry of
the first, and had pulled at the door-bell before the third could cry
_“Don't open!”_--a cry muffled into his maw by a cuff prompt as thunder.

This third man, however, grasped the fugitive by the middle: and while
the overthrown two were running up, and the key without seeking the
lock, a short, venomous tussle was waged just near the door, till
Hogarth, wringing his naked body free, tossed his antagonist by the
knees to slide into the path of the two on-comers; at the same time,
catching up his battered can, and smashing it into the face of the
door-orderly, who now peeped in, he slipped through, and was gone into a
yard, small, of irregular shape, and dim, with one wall-lantern, and
but one egress (except the egress into the prison-hall), namely a
blind-alley between the laundry and carpet-makers' building on one side,
and stables on the other: blind alley, yard, and all, being shut in by
big buildings.

By the time the door-orderly opened his eyes, and one of the inside
three had rushed out, Hogarth had vanished; and these two, shrilling
whistles to reinforce the bath-room guard, pelted down the blind-alley
to effect, as they thought, a sure capture. But Hogarth was not there.

Back they came trotting, breathless, rather at a loss. One panted: “He
must have run back into the great hall....”

The other panted: “He'd hardly do that--hiding in the yard still, _must_
be. There's that little nook....”

The “little nook” is a three-sided space in a corner, very dark, formed
by one wall of the campanile, or bell-tower, together with a wall of the
laundry-house, and a third wall which shuts in the yard; the entrance to
it narrow, and one looking up within it seems to stand at the bottom
of a triangular well, split at one corner. It is not far from the
bathhouse, and into it Hogarth had really darted; but when the officers
came peering, no trace of him.

He had, in fact, gone up the lightning-conductor, which runs down
a bell-tower remarkably high, Colmoor having been built during the
Napoleonic wars for French prisoners at a time when the theory was
accepted that a lightning-conductor protects a space whose radius is
double the height of the conductor. The tower is a five-sided structure
with a Gothic window into which it is impossible to get from the
conductor, because a corner intervenes, and it is a feat to swing from
the conductor to the laundry-wall coping, and thence, leaping up, to
grip the window: at each of which ordeals Hogarth hesitated, pierced
with chills; to his observations from afar it had seemed so much less
stupendous; but in each case he dared, and reached.

All this time the can was between his teeth.

Arrived on the window, his arms out groping, he felt a slanting
beam--climbed it--found it short-mounted upon a horizontal one, all
here, as he had expected, being a chaos of beams, raying every way.
Thrice he sneezed low, and felt cobwebs in his face.

And groping he went, seeking the great Bell of Colmoor, which he had
doomed, hearing sounds of the to-do, echoes that ran below, and the
vague shout of somebody, till he touched the flat top of the bell,
clamped to the swing-beam on which he sat astraddle; felt also that
along the top of the beam lay an iron bar; made sure that this was in
actual contact with the clamps of the bell: and, no longer hesitating,
set to work upon the can.

Tugging with his dog-teeth under the upper rim, he got a loose end, and
wrenched the rim off; then, tearing along the solder, got the cylinder
separated from the bottom; and, opening it out, had a sheet of tin.
And now, by the help of his fragments of cup, he set to hack-sawing,
breaking, tearing this into strips, no easy thing, in spite of the
thin-worn condition of the can: but finally had six strips.

The edge of one strip he inserted under an end of the bar of iron on the
beam; then connected that strip with another by loops, slid again to the
window, and there lay connecting the six strips by a smith's-trick, with
skew loops, non-slipping, getting a tin string five feet long. He
then took the leap to the laundry coping, and thence the spring to the
conductor, this being all the more ticklishly perilous because he could
barely see it.

Hanging away now from the conductor by the left elbow, he reached out
the right arm across the corner to catch the tin, which stuck toward him
from the window: and he wound its end round the conductor, electrically
connecting the bell with the conductor.

And now, standing with one foot on a staple below the tin, he twice
sawed the conductor's soft metal with the fragments of cup, cutting and
tugging out three inches of it, thus isolating the conductor's point
atop from its earthing; then he tossed the piece cut out behind the
laundry-coping.

This done, he listened, cast a searching eye below, slid down the rod.

The yard was at present silent, but as he moved to give himself up in
the prison-hall, five night-warders with bull's-eyes fell out, still
seeking him.

And as he knelt with clasped hands of supplication and bent bare back,
like a captured slave, they fell savagely upon him, and cried one:
“Well, of all the idiots...!”




XIX

THE GREAT BELL


The next morning Hogarth was not marched out, and near dinner-time was
summoned before the Governor. Here he stood in a cage of bars in a
room of “No.1” prison, devoted to prison-offences; and before him, at a
littered table, sat governor and chief warder, with the witnesses of the
outbreak near.

The case was gone into, the report made: whereupon the Governor looked
up and down the length of Hogarth, and suddenly gave vent to a laugh.

“So, No. 76”, said he, “this was the threatened escape?”

Hogarth was now all contrition and hanging head.

“I beg for mercy”, he said, with a little smile.

“Oh, I am not your judge...Where were you when the officers were looking
for you in the yard?”

“I was hiding in that little nook”.

“Confounded carelessness on someone's part...And what cut and swelled
your mouth?”

“I bashed into the wall in the nook” (The can had cut him!).

“You must have been mad!”

“Yes, sir”.

During the next two weeks he had round his ankles a chain which, rising
in two loops, was fastened to a band round his waist; and he was set to
turn “the crank”.

Finally, he was led forth to stand before the periodic Director, who,
after reading the report, turned to a volume of writing in which was
Hogarth's record: good--till lately; and the Director addressed him with
sternness, which yet was paternal: he would sentence him to one month in
a punishment cell, to two months in chains, and to one dozen lashes.

And two days later he was led to the flogging-hall, which, as he
approached it, sent forth screams; the doctor looked at him and
consented; the Governor said: “Get it over”.

Hogarth stripped to the waist, his teeth chattering: but not with fear.
On the contrary, he felt a touch of exultation.

The wrists of his outstretched arms having been bound to “the triangle”,
the Governor gave the sign, the cat rose, and sang, and fell.

Slowly up, and whistlingly down, rasping, reaping. At the seventh shock
he fainted: and thence onward had a long dream, in which he saw Rebekah
Frankl in Hindoo dress and jewellery, and she threw at him a red rose
black at heart with passion, and her body balanced in dance, and her
hands clapped at him.

During the next month he tholed the cold of that same punishment-cell;
and during the next was in his old cell, but in chains, picking oakum.
All this time, if he was aware of high winds by night, he was in an
agony, till the next day the great bell rang its treble.

About the middle of February he was once more trenching in the open air.

But a fear had stolen into his mind: for the string of tin was not
strong, and the winds of the last month may have dislocated it. In any
case, he might have to wait a year, two, ten....

Occasionally he would redden with suppressed and turbulent energy.

But on the 17th of March, toward evening, England was visited by a storm
long remembered, lasting three days, during which the poor prisoners
were comforted with rations of hot soup and cocoa.

On the morning of the fourth day when the gangs were once more taken out
Hogarth was hardly conscious of frigid winds or agued limbs: for three
days the great bell of Colmoor had not rung; and his ears were open.

Of the prisoners, who, by practised instinct, get to know the moment at
which it should sound, three presently straightened up, spade in hand,
to glance at the prison: and suddenly heard--a sound.

A dull something somewhere--from the prison? unless it was some shock
of the wind...Hogarth gazed piteously into the faces near him...No one
seemed to have heard.

A few seconds, like eternities...Then he saw a warder look at his watch;
then--another! and--they glanced at the prison; and--they approached
each other; and--they laid whispering heads together.

Then--joy!--came five officers, wildly running from the prison gates,
calling, waving....

And now he knew, and smiled: the babble of that lalling tongue was dumb.

And the very next day, when the afternoon-gangs were marching out, they
saw descending from a carriage before the Deputy Governor's house a
gentleman with a roll of diagram-paper--a bell-foundry expert, summoned
by telegraph from Cardiff.

Hogarth resolved to act that night.




XX

THE INFIRMARY


As soon as the cell-door clicked upon him, he commenced to work: first
took off his boots; then felt over the doorshelf for the chloroform;
wet his handkerchief with some of it: then inserted the vials across the
toes of his boots, which were a succession of wrinkles, far too large;
then put on the boots again.

He then lay on the floor, close to the low shelf; and, pressing the
handkerchief over his mouth and nose, breathed deep, knowing that in
four minutes, when he did not obey the order of “brooms out”, his cell
would be opened.

As he sank deeper and deeper into dream, it was with a concentration of
his will upon one point--the handkerchief, which, if smelled by anyone,
would ruin all; and finally, as he drew the last gasp of consciousness,
he waved it languidly from him under the shelf; then, with a sigh, was
gone.

He had known that he must have about his body the unmistakable signs of
an abnormal condition in order to sleep a night in the infirmary--which
was what he wanted. And thither, when shakings and the bull's-eye had
sufficiently tested him, he was swung away, and the doctor's assistant
summoned.

Hogarth's pupils were hurriedly examined, his heartbeat tested; and the
freshman frowned, smelling an odour which, in another place, might have
been chloroform, but here was pharyngitis; and he muttered, “Digitalis,
perhaps....”

From a table Hogarth was swung to a bed by two of those well-behaved
convicts who act as hospital-orderlies, and there two hours later had
all his wits about him, and a racking headache.

His first thought was his boots--expecting to find them under his
stretcher, and himself in flannels; but he had them still on, and also
his work-clothes, humanity to the sick in the first stages not being in
the Colmoor code.

He spent half an hour in stealthily tearing a square foot from his
shirt-tail; then, weary and sick, went to sleep.

When, soon after 3 A.M. his eyes again opened, all was still. He lay in
a long room, rather dim, in the midst of a row of stretchers which were
shut in by bars containing locks and gates, and on the other side of the
room a row of stretchers, shut in by bars. At a table in the middle,
on which were bottles, lint, graduated glasses, sat a warder, with
outstretched legs and fallen head: near him, standing listless, a
convict hospital-orderly, who continually edged nearer the stove; and,
half-way down the room, another.

Occasionally there were calls from the sick-beds--whispered
shouts--apologetic and stealthy, as of men guiltily conscious of the
luxury of being ill; but neither night-warder nor orderlies made undue
haste to hear these summonses. There was, beside, an octagonal clock,
which ticked excessively in the stillness, as though the whole place
belonged to it.

Hogarth took off his boots under his blanket, and from them took out the
vials; then, sitting up, commenced to call the warder, at the same time
wetting the torn piece of shirt with some of the fluid.

“All right, I'm coming--shut up!” said the warder, but did not come.

So Hogarth grew loud; and the warder, presently rousing his drowsy bulk,
unlocked the gate of that compartment, as Hogarth said to himself: “Do
it handy...”

And as the warder stooped, Hogarth clapped the rag upon his mouth and
nose. A struggle followed a muffled sob, both standing upright now, till
the warder began to paw the air, sank, toppled upon the bed, whereupon
Hogarth slipped into the blanket again, and called out in the voice of
the warder: “Come here, Barrows--see if this man is dead “.

He had now drawn the warder over him, holding up his chest with one arm,
had also poured chloroform upon the rag, and when the convict-orderly
came, Hogarth, by means of a short struggle, had him asleep, then seized
the warder's truncheon and keys, and ran out in his stockinged feet.

At that sight, the sick, the dying, the two rows of stretchers, were
up on elbow, gazing with grins. To the second convict-orderly who came
running to meet him Hogarth hissed: “Not a word--or I brain you with
this! If I tie your feet, you won't have to answer for anything. Come
along....”

He was an old fellow, and when he realized the impending truncheon, the
menace of Hogarth's eyes, and the silence of the warder, he permitted
himself to be dragged toward Hogarth's stretcher; and his feet were
quickly knotted in his own stockings.

Now again Hogarth ran: but not many steps, when he felt himself tapped
on the back, and, glancing in a horror of alarm, saw one of the two
patients who had occupied with him his cage of bars--a wiry, long-faced
Cockney shop-boy, who had had his ankle crushed by a rock at the quarry.

“Are you off?” he asked.

“That's _my_ business--”

“No, you don't. Part, or I give the alarm”.

“What is it? Do you want to come with me?”

“That's about it”.

“But--your foot's sick, you fool”.

“You'll carry me in your awms, as a father beareth his children....”

“You are cool! What are you in for?”

“Murder, my son-red, grim, gory murder!”

“Guilty?”

“Guilty, ya'as. What do _you_ think?”

“Then you may go to hell”.

“_'Ell_ is it? I'm _there_: and if I linger longer loo in it, you
linger, too, swelp me Gawd!”

Hogarth was nonplussed.

“But the foot...”

“Never mind the _foot_. Foot's still good for a run. Do we go shares?”

“Come along, then”.

“But you ain't 'alf up to snuff, I can see, though you are pretty smart
in your own way: I'd 'ave felt the confidence of a son in you, if you
'adn't overlooked that wine--”

To Hogarth's dismay, he turned back to the table, put a black bottle,
half full, to his lips, and with tilts anc stoppages set to gulp it,
while eager jokes, touched with jealousy, began to jeer from the beds.

“Lawd Gawd, that was good!” said the Cockney with upturned eyes, “and
what do I behold?--broth, ye gawds!”

Now a saucepan of cold broth was at his lips; and not till he had drunk
all did he run after Hogarth into the other arm of the ward, where one
of the keys unlocked the door at its end, and they passed out into the
infirmary exercise-hall, now dark, Hogarth dragging the Cockney, who
limped, and kept up a prattle of tipsy ribaldries.

Then, emerging upon a platform of slabs, from which the jump into the
infirmary exercise-yard is twenty feet, Hogarth leapt. The Cockney stood
hesitating on the brink.

“As sure as my name's 'Arris, you'll be the bloomin' ruin of me...” he
said aloud.

“_Sh-h-h_”, went Hogarth, “one more word, and I leave or knock you
speechless”.

Now at last Harris jumped, Hogarth catching him, and they ran across the
yard northerly, Harris complaining of cold, being in hospital flannels,
his feet bare, Hogarth bitterly regretting the burden of this companion,
meditating on deserting him. Accordingly, when they had run down a
passage, and were confronted by a great gate, spiked a-top, Hogarth
said: “I'll get up first”, and, forcing the small end of the truncheon
into the space at the hinges, he got foot-hold from which he caught the
top hinge and scaled, a feat of which he considered Harris incapable;
and, instead of helping him up, leapt down with a new feeling of
lightness, hearing from the other side “Dastardly treachery...!”

Again he ran through dark night wild with winds wheeling snowflakes;
and, seeing in the unpaved court in which he now was a clothes-line
supported on stakes, he seized both, to run with them to where the court
is bounded by the great outer wall: for though it is thirty feet of
sheer rock, the mere fact of stakes being found there, and of a vanished
rope, would furnish grounds for the belief that he had scaled it: he
therefore leant the stakes against it, and kept the rope.

About to turn, he felt his back touched; and, spinning round, saw Harris
panting.

“There's a friend that sticketh closer than any bloomin' brother, Mr.
76”, Harris said. “Try that game on again, and I give myself up; and
where will _you_ be then?”

“You silly wretch!” said Hogarth: “before I am free, there'll be a
hundred difficulties and pains. Are you prepared to undergo them? You
couldn't, if you tried”.

“Bear ye one another's burdens, it _is_”, said Harris: “with thee by me
what need I fear? Lawd Gawd, that wine was good! it's got into my poor
'ead, I believe. On, general; where thou leadest, I will follow”.

Hogarth looked at him, half inclined to knock him down, and half to
shelter, and save.

“All right”, said he. “Can you climb?”

“Climb, yes, like a bag of monkeys”.

“Come, then”.

He mounted three low steps before four doors at the north end of the
infirmary buildings, where, as he had observed from the moor, a spout
runs up the wall at its east end; and up this he began to climb.

“'Old on!” called Harris: “I can't do that lot”.

“_Sh-h-h!_--you must!--come--”

Harris made three attempts before he reached the first footrest, and
there stuck, vowing in loud whispers that he would no further go, and
Hogarth had to come back, and encourage him up. Finally, they went
running southward on the leads between the infirmary roof and its
coping, and had hardly reached the south end when a whistle shrilled,
and they saw a warder run across the exercise-yard with a lantern.

“Stoop!” whispered Hogarth.

Crouching, they stole along the south coping, and thence dropped to a
flat cistern-top, Hogarth, with a painful “_Sh-h-h_”, catching Harris as
he fell, for the signs of alarm and activity every moment increased.

Up a series of little brick steps, the base of a chimney over the
kitchen--then across another stretch of leads beneath which is the
tailor's shop--then, stealing in shadow under the beams of overhanging
eaves by a garret window, behind which was a light, and someone
moving--then a spring of three feet between two cornices--then a running
walk at a height of a hundred feet along a beading four inches wide,
holding on with the upstretched arms--then, with course changed from
south to east, along more leads--then a climb of ten feet up a glazed
main--and now they were skulking behind the coping of the great No. 2
prison.

Now, contiguous with the back of the bath-house is a wall which runs
from No. 2 prison to the bell-tower, dividing the bath-house yard
from the bell-yard; but the top is not horizontal, being lower at the
bell-tower end, neither is it broad, and to reach it from the prison
coping a drop of seven feet is necessary: this Harris refused to do.
“Not for Joe”, said he: “I've already run my 'ead into enough perils
by land and sea on your account. If this is what you've brought me out
moonlighting here for....”

Hogarth did not wait, but disappeared over the side: and Harris, after
five minutes' pleadings, followed. They then drew on the belly to the
bell-tower; and here again Harris refused the leap to the conductor.
When finally he dared, and Hogarth sought to steady him, as he came
sprawling upon the rod, both went gliding down, till checked by a
staple.

But they climbed again; Hogarth undid the half-fused string of tin from
the conductor, swung to the laundry coping, caught Harris, leapt to
the window, drew up Harris; and was ensconced far up among the beams in
thick darkness in the belfry an hour before daybreak.

At this time the great gates were open, and the moor being scoured for
the two.




XXI

IN THE DEEP


They had not been ten minutes in the tower when Harris began to whine of
the cold; whereupon Hogarth took off his slop-jacket and waistcoat, and
put them upon the Cockney.

As from two sound-escapes far down near the bell some twilight came in,
near eight Hogarth descended, working from beam to beam, to find that
on one side the bell-metal had been melted into a lumpish mass, its rim
shrivelled up, leaving an empty space under the motto _Laudate Domino_
(mistake for _Dominum_) _omnes gentes_; and on the opposite side ran a
crack from top to rim. Sliding still lower on a slanting beam, he could
look obliquely upward into the bell's interior, and see the clapper, a
mass weighing eight hundredweight, and so long, that quite down at the
bell's rim were two hollows where it had constantly struck. It, too, had
been blasted; but the bell-rope hung intact from a short beam at right
angles to the swing beam; and, having found this much, he searched where
he had left the bottom of his tin can, and clambered back with it into
the upper regions.

About eleven, lying along two beams, they could see the portal below
opened, and four men came in, looking unreal and small; whereupon the
leverage wheel was pulled, the swing-beam swung, the bell struck the
clapper, and throughout the tower growled grum sounds: after which the
four stood talking half an hour, and went away.

A little later--it must have been after the forty minutes'
dinner-interval--about twenty convicts entered with two warders, bearing
three ladders. When these had been fastened together and set up, and the
leverage wheel removed, they went away.

It was evidently to be slow work. Not till about four did a solitary man
mount the ladder, and take stand, far down under the bell, gazing up a
long while, with stoops, and changes of posture. Hogarth thought that it
was the bell-foundry expert whom he had seen; but could only guess: for
all here was dim and remote.

By now he had sawed the clothes-line into two pieces with the tin,
one piece eight feet, the other much longer--had intended tearing his
clothes into strips for ropes, but the clothes-line was still better. In
both ropes he made knots for hand-hold, a large knot at one end of
the short one, and he attached the string of tin to the other end.
Descending now, he tied the longer rope round the swingbeam, let himself
down to the rim of the bell, and with the right hand pushed the tin
into the hole in which the clapper swung, reaching up, until the tin
over-balanced, ran, and toppled down beside the clapper; drawing the tin
now, he brought the rope down till it was stopped by the knot; and now,
by a swing off from rope to rope, could climb into the bell. He then
reascended, taking the longer rope, and the tin, with him.

As night fell, he judged that by the next he would succumb. Happily,
Harris, who had eaten later than he, was snoring in a nook; but toward
morning began to whine again, and sulk, and kept it up all the day. Not
a soul now entered, and as the blackness of night once more filled the
place, Harris threw up the sponge, with “Here goes for this child....!”
 Hogarth flew across the space which divided them, and a quarrel of
cats ensued, both being under the influence of the fury called
“hunger-madness”. It was only when Harris felt the grip of Hogarth
at his windpipe that he squealed submission, whereupon Hogarth threw
himself away; and half the night they sat, nothing but four eyes, eyeing
each other.

That night what was a revival of the great gale took place, belling like
bucks about their heads, and noising through the tower in many a voice.
This so increased their sense of desolation, that even the heart of
Hogarth fainted, they like castaways on some ocean whose glooms no
sunrise ever goldens; and now a doubt arose whether, even if the bell
were removed on the morrow, Harris would have strength to cling on
during the descent.

However, early the next day hope revived when five men entered, four
mounting among the beams to the swing-beam with tools, one at the
ladder-head shouting up orders; and Hogarth, when they had gone,
whispered Harris: “They have been unscrewing the sockets in which the
bell-beam swings”.

“Let them unscrew away”, said Harris, his chin shivering on his hand.

Five more hours; during which only once did three men enter, seeming to
do nothing but talk, with upward glances.

But at three it was evident that there was considerable to-do, though
above there the row of the winds drowned all sound. A crowd, chiefly of
convicts, passed in and out; then twelve men, one after the other, ran
up the ladder, and thence climbed among the beams, with six cables. Half
went to the east, half to the west, side of the bell; and three of the
cables were fastened round the swing-beam near one end, three near
the other end; one three were then cast over a beam higher than the
swing-beam, to the north of it; the other three cast over a beam to the
south of it; and the six ends lowered--operations which Hogarth, lying
on his face, could just see; and the twelve had hardly begun to descend,
when he saw a lorry backed into the gateway, filling half 1 the area
of the tower; whereupon over a hundred convicts were swarming over and
round it.

“Now”, said Hogarth; and he hurried down, tacking his way with slides
and runs among the intricate beams, tied the rope to a beam above the
swing-beam, and let himself down to the bell's rim; reached out then,
caught the knotted rope that was within the bell, and climbed, the
clapper now so rough, that hand and knee found grip; and he spent a
minute in estimating his power of holding on with one arm, and with
both, to its support-shaft.

And now he whispered Harris, and caught and half-sustained the Cockney.

Now they could hear echoes of the tongues below; and now Harris,
clinging alternate with Hogarth, arms and legs, face to face, by rope
and shaft and clapper, whispered: “But-good Lord-look 'ere-there are
some people coming up!”

Four convicts were indeed climbing: but even directly beneath the bell,
where it was impossible to come, they would hardly have distinguished
the forms huddled in its dark cavern, and their aim was higher, to stand
ready, when the beam should lift, to swing it diagonally across the
square of beams which had supported it, so that it might find space to
descend. And soon the bell-beam stirred at the tightening ropes: the
fugitives felt themselves swinging, rising, poised--descending.

They were dizzily aware of shouted orders, the creaking of the toiling,
slipping ropes, little jolts and stoppages, two hundred eyes blinking
up, not seeing their cringed-up limbs--unnecessary cautious: for the
nearer they descended to-ward the half-light, the surer did the area
of the lorry make their invisibility. At last they were near; the bell
lingered, swinging; babel was around them; the Governor's voice; a
cheer: the bell was on the lorry.

Someone struck the bell with a hammer, there was talk, swarmings round
it, then shoulders pushed at the lorry wheels, which squealed and moved
amid a still fussier babel drawn by four horses, and seven yoke of
cattle. The fugitives could hear the opening of the great gate, the
laborious exit, and, in a moment's pause, again the Governor talking, it
seemed far off, to the expert....

Wearily creaked the cart--beyond the moor--to a country road.

Now chattering words came from Harris: “All damned fine! I don't deny
that you know your way about--”

“Way out”, said Hogarth.

“Yes, a gamesome sort of cock you are in all weathers...but what next?”

“'Next' is to fall upon your knees and worship me, you cur”.

“Thou shalt worship the Lawd thy Gawd”, chattered Harris; “no bloomin'
fear! This is only a new kind of punishment cell. You've got me in; 'ow
are you going to get me out?”

Hogarth believed that the lorry was _en route_ for the railway, and
hoped to escape in the transfer of the bell; but that night lorry and
bell slept in a shed outside a village _en route_ for the sea.

At four A.M. they were again _en route_, and at intervals during the
day, opening their now feeble and sleep-infected eyes, could hear the
hoots of the two cattlemen, the sound of winds, the rowdy gait of
the crooked-legged oxen, and stoppages for drink or rest, and anon an
obstruction, with shouting and fuss. It was night before the waggon came
to rest on a jetty, the elaborate day's journey done.

The fugitives were then deep in sleep, and only awoke at the rattle of
a steam-crane in action above them, to find the bell beginning to tilt,
lift and swing; then they were on a deck; and soon afterwards knew
that it was a steamer's, when they heard the bray of her whistle, and
presently were aware of blaring winds, and billows of the sea.

Harris was for then and there crying out, but Hogarth, now his master,
said: “To-morrow morning”; and they fell again into their morbid
slumber.

When they again awoke, uproar surrounded them, voices, a heaven-high
shouting of quenched fires and screaming steams; moreover, the bell was
leaning steeply, they two huddled together at its edge.

Harris began to bellow: but he was not heard, or not heeded.... There
had been a collision.

“If you can't swim, better catch hold of me”, Hogarth shouted--“there
will be--”

But the earth turned turtle, and Hogarth felt himself struck on the
shoulder, flung, and dragged down, down, into darkness.

After an upward climb and fight to slip the clutch of the ship's
suction, in the middle of a heavy sea he managed to get off his clothes,
and set to swimming, whither he did not know, a toy on mountains of
water.

Exultation raged in him--a crazy intoxication--at liberation attained,
at the sensation of warmth, at all that water and waste of Nature.

But within ten minutes it is finished: he shivers, his false strength
changing to paltriness, the waves washing now over his head; and now he
is drowsing...drowning...




XXII

OLD TOM


He continued, however, to swim after his conscious efforts ceased:
for his body was found next morning on a strip of Cornish sand between
Gorran and Mevagissey, washed by every sheet of surf.

His rescuer, a shrimp-fisher, occupied one of three cots perched on a
ravine; and there on the evening of the second day he opened his eyes on
a settee, four children screaming in play around him; he so far having
been seen only by a reporter from Mevagissey, and the doctor from
Gorran, who, on his wide rounds, had been asked into the cottage.

The same night Hogarth spoke to the fisher: told him that he was not a
wrecked sailor, had reasons for avoiding observation, and would pay
for shelter and silence: whereat the fisher, who was drinking hot beer,
winked, and promised; and the next day took for Hogarth a telegram,
signed “Elm Tree”, to Mevagissey, asking of Loveday five pounds.

Finally, one midnight, after two weeks of skulking, he reached
Whitechapel, where, the fact of his brown skin now giving him the idea
of orientalizing himself, at a Jew's, in a little interior behind the
counter, he bought sandals, a caftan, a black sudayree, an old Bagdad
shawl for girdle, and a greenish-yellow Bedouin head-cloth, or kefie,
which banded the forehead, draped the face like a nun's wimple, and fell
loose. For these he discarded the shrimp-man's clothes; and now dubbed
himself “Peter the Hermit”.

For he meant to start-a Crusade.

At a police-station on the third day he saw a description of himself:
three moles, bloodshot eye, white teeth, pouting mouth; but over the
moles now hung the head-cloth.

For several days he lay low in a garret, considering himself, abandoning
himself to sensuality in cocoa, vast buns, tobacco: rioting above all in
the thought of the secret truth which lay in his head.

Up to now, not a word to anyone about it; but on the seventh night he
spoke.

It was in some “Cocoa Rooms” in a “first-class room”, strewn with
sawdust, where, as he sat alone, another man, bearing his jug, came and
sat; and soon he addressed Hogarth.

“Talk English?”

“I am an Englishman”, answered Hogarth.

“What, in those togs? What countryman?”

“Norfolk”.

“Know Manchester?”

“I was there one day”.

“Difference between Manchester and London, isn't there? I am a
Manchester man, I am. All the difference in the world. This cold, stiff,
selfish city. Londoners, eh? A lot of peripatetic tombstones!”

And so he went on; this being his whole theory of God and Man: that
Londoners are peripatetic tombstones, but Manchester-men just the other
way--seemed a mechanic, brisk-eyed, small; a man who had read; but now,
evidently, down on his luck.

“Then, why come to London?”--from Hogarth.

“Looking for work”,--with a shrug--“looking for a needle in a bundle of
hay. What would you have? the whole place overrun with Jews. England no
longer belongs to the English, that's the long and short of it”.

Hogarth looked him in the face. “Did England belong to the English
before the Jews came?”

“How do you mean? Of course it did”.

“Which part of it?”

“Why, all of it”.

“But fix your mind upon some particular piece of England--some street,
or field, that you know--and then tell me: did that belong to the
English?”

“Belonged to some Englishman”.

“But you don't mean to say that some Englishman is the English?”

“Ah, yes, I know what you are driving at”, said the mechanic, with
a patronizing nod: “but the point is this: that, apart from vague
theorizing, a man did manage to make a good living before these dogs
overran the country”.

“But--a _good_ living? How much did you make?--forty shillings a week?
toiling in grime six days, sleeping the seventh? I call that a deadly
living”.

“Well, I _don't_, you see. Besides, I made, not forty, but forty-_five_
shillings, under the sliding-scale”.

“Yes, but no brave nation would submit one day to such petty squalors
after it was shown the way to escape them”.

“There _is_ no way”, said the mechanic: “there are the books, and the
talkers; but the economic laws that govern the units like you and me
are as relentless as gravitation. Don't believe anyone who talks to you
about 'ways of escape'”.

“But suppose someone has a new thought?”

“There can be no new thoughts about _that_. The question has long since
been exhausted”.

“Well, come “--with sudden decision--“I will tell you a thought of my
own “. And he told.

If the English people paid the rent for England to themselves--to their
government--instead of to a few Englishmen, then, by one day's labour in
six, Englishmen would be much more rich in all things than a fisherman,
by one day's labour in six, was rich in fish.

The expression which he awaited on the face before him was one of
illuminated astonishment; but, with a chill in his nerves, he saw the
workman's lips curve.

“Bah!” said the Manchester man, “that is an exploded theory!”

_Exploded!!!_

Hogarth was rather pale.

Yet he knew that it was true....Who, then, could have been exploding the
Almighty?

“Who has exploded it?”

“Been exploded again and again!” said the Manchester man; “of all the
theories of land-tenure, that is about the weakest: _I_ should know,
for I've studied them all. The fact is, no change in the system of
land-tenure will have the least effect upon the lot of the masses; would
only make things worse by unsettling the country--if it didn't mean a
civil war”.

“I begin to see”.

Hogarth got up, walked home meditating: and suddenly blushed.

It was known! by mechanics in cocoa-rooms!--that secret thing of his
secret cell. And it was not believed!

As for him, what was he now doing outside Colmoor? That question he
asked himself, as he sat unsandaling his feet; and he commenced to dress
himself again: but paused--would first see Loveday.

Accordingly, the next night, the two friends met at Cheyne Gardens.

And a long time they sat silent, Loveday feeding his eyes upon his
friend's face, that hard, rounded brow which seemed harder, and frowned
now, that gallant largeness of eye which seemed now wilder, and that
manly height, which seemed Mahomet's in the Oriental dress.

“But where have you been for five weeks?” asked Loveday.

“Skulking, and thinking. But about my sister....”

“Do not ask...” said Loveday.

There was a long silence.

“Did not O'Hara tell you to make no more efforts for my escape?” asked
Hogarth.

“Who is O'Hara?”

“Why, the priest who escaped, instead of me, through the copse”.

“O'Hara was not the name he gave me; and no, he said nothing about
that. I got him off to America, and only saw him twice. I thought him
rather--But why didn't you escape youself?”

“I thought it improper”.

“But you did finally?”

“For a reason: you remember the association which I was forming to
answer the question as to the cause of misery? Well, that question I
have answered for myself in prison”.

“Really? Tell me!”

Hogarth absently took up a water-colour drawing from the table, and
turned it round and round, leaning forward on a knee, as he told how the
matter was. Meantime, he kept his eyes fixed upward upon Loveday's face,
who stood before him.

In the midst of his talk Loveday scratched the top of his head, where
the hair was rather thin, and said he, twisting round: “Forgive me-let
me ring for some brandy-and-soda--”

Hogarth stood briskly up.

“What I say, I can see, is not new to you?” said he.

“No, not new”, Loveday confessed: “I believe that it is quite an ancient
theory; there are even savage tribes whose land-tenure is not unlike
what you advocate--the Basutos, for example”.

“And are these Basutos richer, happier, prettier fellows than average
Englishmen?”

“Oh, beyond doubt. Don't suppose that I am gainsaying you: I am only
showing you that the theory is not new--”

“But why do you persist in calling it a _theory?_ Is the fact that
one and one make two a _theory?_”--Hogarth's brow growing every moment
redder.

“What can one call it?”

“Call it what you like! But do you believe it?”

“It is quite possibly true; and now that you say it I believe it; but I
have never seriously considered the matter.”

“Why not?”

“Because--I don't know. It is out of my line”.

“Your line! Yet you are a human being--”

“Well, partly, yes: say--a novelist”.

“Do not jest! It is incredible to me that you have written book after
book, and knew of this divine thing, and did not cram your books with
it!”

Loveday flushed. “You misunderstand my profession; and as to this theory
of land-tenure, let me tell you: it will never be realized--not in
England. Anyway, it would mean civil war....”

Again those words! “Civil war....”

And as, for the second time, he heard them, Hogarth dashed the picture
which he held to the ground, shattering glass and frame: which meant
that, then and there, he washed his hands of the world and its wagging;
meant also his return to Colmoor.

He dashed from the room without a word; down the stairs; out into the
street.

As he ran along the King's Road, he asked a policeman the way to the
nearest police-station, then ran on through a number of smaller streets,
seeking it, till, at a corner, he stopped, once more uncertain, the
night dim and drizzling.

He was about to set off again, when, behind him, he heard: “Excuse me,
mister--could you give a poor man a penny to get a night's lodging?”

Turning, he saw--old Tom Bates: still in the guernsey; but very senile
and broken now.

The fish-rich fisher...! he had come to this...

Hogarth had twenty-eight shillings about him, and, without disclosing
himself, put hand to pocket to give them all, just as the old man
reached up to his ear to say: “It's the lumbago; I got it very bad; but
it won't be long now. It wur a bad day for me as ever I come to Lunnon!
I'm Norfolk born, I am: and I had eight sons, which the last was Fred,
who, they say, met his death in Colmoor....”

At that word, “Fred”, Hogarth started: for under the elm in the
beech-wood between Thring and Priddlestone Fred had concealed a thing
fallen from heaven, which could be sold for--a thousand pounds.

That would keep the fisher rich during the few days that remained to
him!

But the old man could hardly go himself; if he could, would bungle: the
thing was heavy--on the lord-of-the-manor's land....

Do a kind act, Hogarth. He would see the old place, his father's grave;
and there was a girl who lived in the Hall at Westring whom it was a
thrilling thing to be near, even if one did not see....

“Here are two shillings”, said he, in an assumed voice: “and if you be
at this spot, at this hour, on Thursday night coming, you shall have
more. Don't fail”.

Again he ran, and took train, two hours later, for Beccles.




XXIII

UNDER THE ELM


His risk of arrest here, round about his old home, was enormous, and he
drew the Bedouin kefie well round his face, skulking from the station to
the “Fen”, northward, where he got an urchin to buy him a paper lantern
in a general shop, and now trudged up to Priddlestone, then down through
meadows to the beech-wood, the night rough with March winds.

It was not the winds, however, which made him draw close his Arab cloak,
but his approach to the elm: there, one night, he had seen a naked black
man! there had fallen the Arab Jew.

He stood twenty yards from the tree, till, with sudden resolution, he
strode, soon had the lantern ruby, and since the grave of “the affair”
 had been digged with a piece of wood, for such a piece he went seeking,
having thrown off his caftan.

Instead, he found the rusted half-blade of a spade, and commenced to dig
round the roots, the lantern shine reddening a face strangely agitated,
uncertainty of finding what he sought heightening his excitement: for
the earth showed no disturbance, and since three years had passed since
that night of Bates in the wood, the object might have been already
unearthed. After an hour his back was aching, his hands dabbled, his
brow beaded, while the night-winds blew, the light now was commoved, and
now glowed a steady red; and still he grovelled.

Presently, as he shovelled in a circle, always two feet deep, moving
the light as he moved, he saw on the top of a shovelful of marl--a twig:
barkless, black, cracked--_scorched!_

To an immoderate degree this thing agitated him--some whisper in the
back of his head--some half-thought: he began now to root furiously,
with a frowning intentness.

But suddenly he shuddered: a finger seemed to touch his shoulder behind;
and he twisted with wild eyes, caught up the light, peered, saw no black
man--nothing: but quite five minutes he stood defiant, with clenched
fists; then resumed the work, though with a constant feeling now that he
was being watched by the unseen seers.

After two new strokes he struck upon something hard, and, digging
eagerly round it, found a quart-can, full of earth. And instantly all
doubt vanished: for this must have been the beer-can carried by Bates.

Strong curiosity now wrought in Hogarth, a zeal to lay eyes upon that
object which had careered through the heights of space to find that
beech-wood and that elm-tree; and during fifteen minutes his little
implement digged with the quick-plying movement of a distaff-shuttle, he
fighting for breath, anon casting a flying wild glance behind, but still
digging.

Now, frequently, he came upon burned objects, twigs, cinders. Even the
marl had a scorched look; and his agitation grew to ecstasy.

Something very singular had happened to his mind with regard to this
“affair” of Bates: Bates had said that it had fallen on the asteroid
night; and O'Hara had told him--falsely, indeed--that a piece of the
asteroid, fallen upon the French coast, had had diamonds; yet, somehow,
never once had his mind associated the Fred Bates “affair” with the
thought of diamonds, but only with the “thousand pounds” which Bates had
been promised by old Bond. So at the moment when he had begun to dig,
his whole thought was of “a thousand pounds”; but, somehow, by the time
his implement at last grated against something two feet down, that word
“diamonds” had grown up in his brain.

But diamonds! In the midst of his shovelling the thought flashed through
him: “The world is God's! and to whom He wills He gives it....”

Now at last the thing lay definitely before him: he grated the spade
from end to end, scraping away the marl; and it was very rough....

The size and shape of a man's leg, and red, anyway in the red
lantern-shine--his sight dim--he moved and saw in an improbable dream;
and when he tried to lift the object and failed, for a long time he
sat on the edge of the trench, passing one palm across and across his
forehead, till the lantern-light leapt, and went out.

He sprang upright then--awake, sure: they were diamonds, those bits of
glass, big celestial ones, not of earth, in hundreds; when he passed his
hand along the meteorite he felt it leprous, octahedron, dodecahedron,
large and small: if they were truly diamonds, he divined that their
owner must be as wealthy as some nations.

About three in the morning he managed to raise the meteorite; refilled
the trench; and since it still rained, rolled the meteorite to the
hollow of the elm, put on his caftan, and with his back on the interior
of the tree, his feet on the meteorite, tumbled into a wonderful
slumber.




XXIV

FRANKL SEES THE METEORITE


He was awaked by a footstep, and, starting, saw rocking along the forest
path one Farmer Pollock, wearing now fez and tassel, and he saw his
clothes all clay, and, with a smile of fondness, saw how, even beneath
its grime, the meteor dodged and jeered, with frolic leers, in the
beams of a bright morning that seemed to him the primal morning, a fresh
wedding-morning, swarming with elves and shell-tinted visions, imps and
pixy princes, profligate Golcondas.

Going first to the spot where he had digged, to give to the surface a
natural look, he trampled the lantern into the mire, threw the tin can
far, then, taking a quantity of marl, plastered the meteorite, to
cover its roughness; then boldly left it, starting out with consummate
audacity for Thring, where everybody, police and all, knew him well.

A singular light now in his eyes, an evil pride; and he had the step of
a Prince in Prettyland. Corresponding to an inward majesty, of which,
from youth, he had been conscious, he now felt an outward, and had not
been awake eight minutes when his brain was invaded by plans--plans
of debauchery, palaces, orgy, flying beds of ivory arabesqued in
fan-traceries of sapphire, in which Rebekah Frankl lolled, and smiled;
and on toward Thring he stepped, prince new-crowned, yet by old
heredity, high exalted above laws, government, and the entire little
muck of Man.

At one point where the path ran close to Westring-park proper, the park
on higher ground, a grass-bank seven feet high dividing them, he saw
a-top of the bank in caftan, priest-cap, and phylacteries, taking
snuff--Baruch Frankl.

Hogarth skipped up, and stood before the Jew, having drawn his
face-cloth well forward.

“What's the row?” asked Frankl.

“Could you give a poor man a job?”

“You a Jew?”

“Yes”, replied Hogarth, not dreaming how truly: “London born”.

“A Froom?”

“I keep the fasts”.

“What you doing about here?”

“Tramping”.

“Fine mess you are in”.

“I slept in a hollow tree down yonder--an elm tree”.

“Well, there's many a worse shake-down than that. Who are you? Ever been
about here before?”

“I was once”.

“You put me in mind of an old chum of mine....Well, here's half-a-crown
for you to go on with”.

“Make it a crown”, said Hogarth, “and get me to clean up down there; in
a shocking state with mast and leaves”.

Frankl considered. “All right, I don't mind”.

“I shall want a spade, and--a barrow”.

“Go down the path yonder, till you come to the stables, and tell them”.

Frankl resumed his musing stroll, and Hogarth ran for the barrow.

In twenty minutes he was again at the elm tree, and, with a scheme in
him for seeing Rebekah, heaped the barrow with refuse, pushed it between
a beck and the wood, till, wearying of this, he was about to get the
meteorite into the barrow, when he had the mad thought that Frankl must
be made to see and touch it, so set off to seek him: and a few yards
brought him face to face with Frankl.

“Well, how goes it?” asked the Jew.

“There is a weight there which I can't lift”, said Hogarth. “Then you
must do the other thing. Don't lift it, and you don't get the pay. What
weight is it?”

“It is here”.

Hogarth led him, led him, pointing. Frankl kicked the meteorite.

“What is it?” he asked.

“It can't be a branch”, said Hogarth; “too heavy--more like a piece of
old iron”.

“Well, slip into it. A strapping fellow like you ought to be able to do
that bit”.

“But suppose it's valuable?”

“I make you a present of it, as you are so hard up”.

Now Hogarth, by tilting the barrow, with strong effort of four limbs,
got the meteorite lodged, while Frankl, his smile lifting the wrinkles
above his thick moustache, watched the strain: then, with arms behind,
went his contemplative way.

Hogarth rolled the barrow toward Thring.




XXV

CHURCH ARCHITECTURE


It was already eleven o'clock, the sun shining in a bright sky, under
which the country round the Waveney lay broad to the hills of mist which
seemed to encompass the valley; yet, when one came to them no hills were
there, but were still beyond. When Hogarth came out from the wood upon
a footbridge, to his right a hand-sower was sowing broadcast, with a
two-handed rhythm, taking seed, as he strode, from his scrip; and to the
left ran a path between fields to an eminence with a little church on
it; straight northward some Thring houses visible, and north-east, near
the river, Lagden Dip orchard. Only two stooping women in fields near
Thring could Hogarth see; also, still further, a gig-and-horse whose
remote motion was imperceptible; also the trudging two-handed process of
the sower nourishing the furrows. But for these, England, supposed to be
“overcrowded”, seemed a land once inhabited, but abandoned.

To Hogarth the whole, so familiar, looked uplifted now, the sunlight of
a more celestial essence. Westring he would buy--though one memorable
night in Colmoor he had arrived at the knowledge that it was not just
that Westring should be anyone's; but then what one bought with his own
diamonds was surely his own--his name being Richard.

He had passed the bridge, when, glancing to the left, he saw a fifth
person in the landscape--a man under a sycamore near the church, gazing
up, with hung jaw, at the apse window--dressed in a grey jacket, but
a clerical hat, and he had a note-book, in which he wrote, or drew.
Hogarth, whose mind was in weathercock state, rolled the barrow to the
hill, left it, went stealing fleetly up, and gripped the man's collar,
to whisper: “In the King's name I arrest you”.

The man's hand clapped his heart, as he turned a face of terror.

“There is--some mistake--My God! Are you--?”

“Yes”.

“Hogarth?”

“Who else?”

“But you have killed me! My heart--”

“Serves you right. Why didn't you give your right name to Loveday? And
what are you doing here?”

“I was just examining this lovely old church, with its two south aisles,
and one north, like St. John's at Cirencester. When the church fell in
England, architecture was abolished--But as to why I am in Norfolk at
all, I am skulking: and here is as another place. Your friend packed
me off to America; but for some reasons I should prefer Golmoor--old
Colmoor, eh? I fear I am a voluptuary, my son, fond of comfort, and old
things, and pretty things. And all that I shall have yet! Tut, O'Hara is
not done with the world, nor it with him. As to Norfolk, I once knew--a
person--in this neighbourhood--”

The priest paused, regarding Hogarth with a smile, the “person” meant
being Hogarth's mother; and he said: “But you are quite the Jew in
dress: do you know now, then, that you are of the Chosen Race?”

“Singular notion! This is a mere disguise”.

“Ah. But you look quite radiant. You must have come into a fortune. When
I heard of your escape, I said to myself--”

“How did you hear?”

“Why, from Harris”.

“Harris is drowned”.

“Harris is now under that little roof down there--there”--the prelate
stabbed with his forefinger: “Harris is my shadow; Harris is my
master. He was picked up naked by the ship which ran down your vessel,
recognized me one day in Broadway, and threatened to give me in charge
if I did not adopt him 'as my well-beloved son'. Well, from him I heard
all, how you called fire from Heaven--it was gallant. But aren't you
afraid of capture down here in your own country?”

“I cannot be captured”.

Those stony eyeballs of O'Hara, bulging from out circular trenches
round their sockets, surveyed Hogarth, weighing, divining him, while his
bottom lip, massive as the mouth of Polynesian stone gods, trembled.

“How do you mean?”

“I can buy King on throne, Judge on bench, Governor and Warder, the
whole machinery. Even O'Hara I could buy”.

“I am for sale! Hogarth! I _smelled_ it about you, the myrrh of your
garments! And didn't I prophesy it to you years ago? What a development!
That beast, Harris, will dance for joy! Oh, there is something very
artistic to my fancy, Hogarth, in the metal gold--brittle, bright,
orpimented--”

“And diamonds?”

“Hogarth, have you diamonds?”

“Yes”, said Hogarth, smiling at the effect of ecstasy upon O'Hara.

“Prismic diamond!” cried the prelate: “but how--?”

“Do you want to enter my service?”

“Do I _want_?”

“Well, I want a tutor, O'Hara; and you shall be the man. Undertake,
then, to teach me all you know in two years, and I'll give you--how
much?--twenty thousand pounds a year”.

“My son”, whispered O'Hara, “what a development--!”

“Good-bye. In Thring Street there is a little paper-shop. Come there
to-night at seven”.

He ran down the hill: and as he went northward, pushing his barrow,
O'Hara had a lens at his eyes, saw the meteorite, and wondered.




XXVI

FRANKL AND O'HARA


Mrs. Sturgess, of the paper-shop, a clean, washed-out old lady, held up
both averting hands at her back door, as Hogarth threw back his kefie,
finger on lips; but soon, her alarm warming into welcome, she took him
to a room above, to listen to his story of escape.

“And to think”, said she, “there is the very box your sister, poor
thing, left with me to keep the day she went away, which never once have
I seen her dear good face from that day to this. Anyway, _there's_ the
box--” pointing to a trunk covered with grey goat's-hair, the trunk to
which the old Hogarth had referred in telling Richard the secret of his
birth, saying to deaf ears that it contained Richard's “papers”--a box
double-bottomed, on its top the letters “P. O.”, with a cross-of-Christ
under them.

“But, sir”, said Mrs. Sturgess, “you must be in great danger here. I
hope”--with a titter--“I shan't be implicated--”

“Don't be afraid, Mrs. Sturgess, it will be all right, and, for
yourself, don't trouble about the paper-shop any more, but buy a little
villa near Florence, where it is warm for the cough--don't think me
crazy if I tell you that I am a very rich man. Now give me a steak”.

Mrs. Sturgess served him well that day with a pang of expectancy at
her heart! Always, she remembered, Richard Hogarth had been
strange--uplifted and apart--a man incalculable, winged, unknown, though
walking the common ways. He _might_ be a “very rich man”...

His meal over, Hogarth threw himself upon a bed, to dream another
trouble of bubbles and burden of purples; woke at four; and, with a
procured cold-chisel, hammer, and a calico bag, went to the fowl-house
where he had left the meteorite, shut himself in.

Sitting in the dust there, he set to chisel out the gems from the porous
ore, and as the chisel won the luscious plums, held them up, glutting
his gaze, scratched his name on a fragment of window-pane, and was
enchanted that the adamant rim ripped the glass like rag: the whim,
meanwhile, working in him to purchase Colmoor, to turn the moor into a
paradise, the prison into a palace; where his old cell stood in Gallery
No. III to be the bedroom of Rebekah.

To see _her_ that very night was a necessity! and when it was dark he
set out.

But that plot failed: on presenting himself at the front of the mansion,
he was sent round to the back, where he received payment, and was
dismissed; and when he again started for the front, intending to force
his way in, he decided upon something else, and walked back to Thring.

He reached the Sturgess cottage soon after six, ate, with a candle
returned to the lean-to to resume his work, and was still intent upon it
at seven, when Mrs. Sturgess ran out to tell him that “the gentleman had
come”. He said: “Show him up to my room”.

The first thing which O'Hara noticed in that room was the goat-hair
trunk, with the initials and cross, the initials his own.

After some minutes he furtively turned the key, dived into a mass of
things, paused to remember the whereabouts of a spring, found it, and,
lifting the upper bottom, peered beneath; saw a bundle of papers;
and, without removing the band, ferreted among them, and was
satisfied---Hogarth's “birth-papers”.

He presently went to a back window, and saw ruddy streaks between the
boarding of the shanty, while sounds of the hammer reached him.

He would go and meet Hogarth: no harm in that; but it was stealthily
that he hurried down the stair and carried himself across the yard,
grinning a grimace of self-conscious caution, to peep through a cranny.

Hogarth's back was toward him, the iron leg lying near a box in which
was a sitting hen, on its top a candlestick, the calico bag, and a lot
of the gems: at which the priest's palm covered his awed mouth, and with
a fleet thievishness, like a cat on hot bricks, he trotted back to the
cottage.

Ten minutes later Hogarth entered, nodding: “Ah, O'Hara...”; and he
called down: “Mrs. Sturgess! pen, ink, and paper!”

When these came, he sat and wrote:

“I have escaped from prison, and come into great power. I summon you to
meet me at the elm in the beech-wood to-night at nine. I beseech you, I
entreat you. I burn to ashes. Rebekah! My flames of fire! I am dying.

“R. H.”

He enclosed, and handed it, without any address, to O'Hara.

“O'Hara”, said he, “I want you to take that for me. Come--I will show
you the place. You ask in the hall to see 'the young lady': her name
does not concern you; but you can't mistake her: she is so-pretty.
Give the note to no one else, of course: it mentions my escape, for one
thing. I know you will do it well”.

He conducted O'Hara, till the two towers of Westring were visible;
pointed them out; then went back, and in an hour had finished his work
on the diamonds.

O'Hara, meantime, going on his way alone, muttered: “You go fast,
Hogarth: prelates of the Church your errand boys? But there is a little
fellow called Alf Harris...if he had seen what I have seen to-night, you
would be a corpse now”.

In twenty minutes he was at Westring, which he knew well, for
twenty-five years before he had lived in the Vale: but he supposed that
Lord Westring de Broom was still the inmate.

He asked to see “the young lady”, persisted, and after a time Rebekah
came with eyebrows of inquiry.

The moment O'Hara saw her well, his visage acquired a ghastly ribbed
fixity. Even before this, _she_, by one flashed glance, had known him.

But she took the envelope with easy coolness. And, instead of then
returning upon her steps, went still beyond, and whispered to two men in
the hall: “Do not let that man pass out!”

As she again returned inward past O'Hara, she remarked: “You might wait
here a little”.

She travelled then, not hurrying, down the breadth of a great apartment
to a side room where her father sat, capped and writing; and she said:
“Papa, the man who assaulted me in the train is now in the hall. As his
sentence was three years, he must have escaped--” She was gone at once,
the unaddressed envelope, still unopened, shivering a little in her
hand.

Frankl leapt up, rather pale, thinking that if the man had come _here_,
he must mean mischief; but remembering that the man was a gentleman, a
priest, he took heart, and went out.

O'Hara, meantime, stood at bay, guessing his exit blocked, while
the terrors of death gat hold upon him, the flesh of his yellow jaw
shivering. But he was a man of stern mind--stern as the rocky aspect of
his face, and the moment he saw Frankl coming (he had seen him in the
Court), he started to meet him--stooped to the Jew's ear, who shrank
delicately from contact.

“There isn't any good in running me down, sir”, he whispered in
sycophant haste. “I pledge you my word I came here without knowing
to whom. O do, now! I have already suffered for my crime; and if you
attempt to capture me, I do assure you, I strangle you where you stand!
Do, now! I only brought a letter--”

Frankl, half inclined to tyrannize over misery, and half afraid, swept
his hand down the beard.

“Letter?” said he: “from whom?”

“From a friend”.

“Which friend?”

“A man named Hogarth”.

O'Hara said it in an awful whisper, though not aware of any relation
between Hogarth and Frankl.

Whereupon an agitation waved down Frankl's beard. The news that “a man
named Hogarth” had written to his daughter would hardly have suggested
_Richard_--safe elsewhere; but, one night at Yarmouth, he had seen
Richard Hogarth inexplicably kiss his daughter's hand.

“Hogarth?” said he: “what Christian name?”

“Richard”.

The agonized thought in Frankl's brain was this: “Well, what's the
good of prisons, then?”--he, too earnest a financier to read newspaper
gossip, having heard not a word of the three escapes from Colmoor.

He said: “Well, sir, generally speaking, I'm the last to encourage this
sort of thing; but, as yours is a special case, I tell you plain out
that, personally, I don't mean a bit of harm to you. Just step into a
room here, and let us talk the matter quietly over”.

He led O'Hara to his study; and there they two remained locked half an
hour, conferring head to head.




XXVII

THE BAG OF LIGHT


Rebekah, having excused herself from three ladies, her guests, alone in
her room opened her letter.

Glanced first at the “R. H.”, and was not surprised. He had “escaped”,
had “come into great power”: that seemed natural; but he “summoned” her
to meet him, and she saw no connection between his “great power” and his
right to summon her.

She held the paper to a fire, and, as it began to burn, in a panic
of flurry extinguished the edge, and hustled it into her bosom; then
perambulated; then fell to a chair-edge with staring gaze; then, rocking
her head which she had dropped upon a little table, moaned: “He is
mad....”

“My flames of fire! Rebekah! I am dying....”

He suffered; and a pussy's wail mewed from her; but with a gasp of anger
which said “Ho!” she sprang straight, and went ranging, with a stamping
gait, through the chamber, filling it with passion. “I _won't go_!” she
went with fixed lips, as something within her whispered: “You must”.

To escape herself, she went again to see what had happened with regard
to the convict, whose face would carry to the grave the scars of her
nails.

There were no signs of any disturbance; and she asked a footman: “Where
is the man who was here?”

“With your father in the study”.

That seemed a strange proceeding: she felt a touch of alarm for her
father, and, passing again by the study, peeped; could see nothing for
the key, but heard voices.

This messenger of Hogarth, she next thought, was a criminal: he might
betray...so she stole into an adjacent room, to peep by a side door of
the study, and though a key projecting toward her barred her vision, the
talkers were near this point, and she could hear.

“The diamond block”, O'Hara said, “is the same which he rolled across
the bridge this morning; to that I'll swear”.

“Then it must be the very same block he showed me”, Frankl said in a
whisper; “that thing was worth millions....!”

“Undoubtedly it was the same”.

“Oh, but Lord”, groaned the Jew in an anguish of self-deprecation,
“where were my _eyes_? where were my _wits_? I must have been
_dreaming_! No, that's hard!”

“Well--_nil desperandum_! Let us be acting, sir!”

“My own land--!”

“They are still safe enough: come--”

“He may have lost one or two--in his excitement. Thousands gone! He may
have hidden some!”

“Tut, he has hidden none”, said O'Hara; “we may have all. Let us make a
move”.

“But he is a strong man, this Hogarth. Why do you object to the
assistance of the police?”

“What have the police to do with such a matter? Hogarth would simply
bribe. And there are three of us--”

“Who is this Harris?”

“He is a Cockney--assassin”.

Frankl took snuff, with busy pats at alternate nostrils.

“What will you tell him is in the bag?”

“Anything--rings--something prized by you for sentimental reasons. We
offer him a thousand--two thousand pounds. And he will not fail. He
strikes like lightning”.

“And we share--how?”

“Come--let us not talk of that again, sir. What could be more generous
than my offer? You divide the diamonds into two heaps, and I choose
one; or I divide, you choose; and, before I leave you, you give me a
declaration that it was by your contrivance that I escaped prison, and
that the gems which I have, once yours, are duly made over to me”.

“And you collar half!” gibed the Jew with an ogle of guile; “that's
about as cool a stroke of business as I've come across. You don't
take into account that the whole is mine, if the concern fell, as you
confess, on my own land! And just ask yourself the question: what is to
prevent me handing you over this minute to the police, and grabbing the
lot? Only I'm not that sort of man--”

O'Hara drew a revolver.

“You talk to me as though I was a schoolboy, sir”, said he sternly. “Be
good enough to learn to respect me. I am not less a man of the world
than you are, and quite competent to safeguard my own interests.
Supposing I was weak enough to permit you to send for the police, the
moment they had me I should tell of Hogarth in hiding; they would go for
him, and he, after bribing, may be trusted to take wing with the stones,
leaving you whistling. Or perhaps you would care to tackle him
in person? He would wheel you by the beard round his arm like a
Catherine-wheel, I do assure you. All this you see well, and pretend not
to. Do let us be honest with each other!”

“Well, I don't want to be hard”, said Frankl, looking sideward and
downward, plotting behind an unwrinkled brow, intending to have every
one of the diamonds; so did O'Hara, who already had his plot.

“No, don't be hard”, said O'Hara: “_I_ am not. I give you an
incalculable fortune; I take the same. Live and let live! Why should two
shrewd old fellows like you and me be like the dog which, wanting two
bones, lost the one he had? Come, now--give me your hand on it”.

“Well, I'm hanged if you are not right!” cried Frankl, looking up with
discovery: “Share and share alike, and shame the devil! That's the kind
of little man I am, frank, bluff, and stalwart--Ha! ha! Give me your
hand on it, sir!”

“Ha! ha! you are very kind. That is the only way--absolute sincerity--”
 and they shook hands, hob-nobbing and fraternizing, with laughs and
little nods, like cronies.

“Stop--I'll just ring for a drop of brandy--” said Frankl.

“No! no ringing!--thanks, thanks, no brandy--”

“Well, you are as cautious as they make them. Oh, perfectly right, you
know--perfectly right”--he touched O'Hara's chest--“not a word to say
against that. I am the same kind of man myself--”

“Come; are you for making a move?”

“Agreed. Where is my hat? I suppose a man may get his hat!--ha! ha!--I
can't very well go in this cap---”

“You use mine--with the greatest pleasure. I do not need--Ah? quite the
fit, quite the fit”.

“Why, so it is. Ha! ha! why, it's a curate's hat, and--_I'm a Jew_!”

“Excellent, excellent, ha! ha!”

So they made merry, and, with the bitter lip-corners of forced
merriment, went out, while Rebekah, who had caught a great deal of that
dialogue, crouched a long time there, agitated, uncertain what to do.

That her father should coolly look on at an assassination for a
fortune was no revelation to her: she had long despised, yet, with an
inconsistency due to the tenderness of Jewish family ties, still loved
him; the notion of appealing to the police, therefore, who might ruin
Hogarth, too, did not enter her head.

She ran and wrote: “Your life and bag of gems are _at this moment_ in
danger”; and sent it by a mounted messenger addressed to “The Guest at
the Paper Shop”.

But in twenty minutes the messenger returned to her with it, Hogarth
having gone to the _rendezvous_ at the elm--long before the appointed
time.

When, accordingly, Frankl, O'Hara, and Harris arrived at the paper-shop
back yard, and Harris had stolen up the back stairs, he presently, to
the alarm and delight of the others, sent a whisper from the window: “No
one 'ere as I can see!”

And the search for the diamonds was short: for Hogarth had actually left
the bag containing them on the trunk, and Frankl and O'Hara returned
with it to Westring, holding it out at arm's length, one with the right,
one with the left hand, like standard-bearers.

Hogarth, meantime, was striding about the elm, and once fell to his
knees, adoring a vision, and once, at a fancied step, his teeth-edges
chattered.

Rebekah! He called, groaned, hissed that name, while his to-and-fro
ranging quickened to a trot.

And now, fancying that he heard a call “_Come !_” he stood startled,
struck into a twisting enquiry to the four winds; but could not locate
the call, ran hither and thither, saw no one.

“Come to me, little sister”, he wailed tenderly, while to swallow was a
doubtful spasm for him, her name a mountain in his bosom.

When he was certain that it must be nearer ten than “nine”, he set out
in the sway of a turbulent impulse to spurt for the Hall: but as he
reached the point of proximity between path and park, just there where
her father had stood that morning he saw her patiently waiting--ever
since that “_Come!_”

He flew, and was about to skip up the bank, when, with forbidding arm,
she cried: “Don't you approach me!”--and he stood checked and abject,
one foot planted on the bank, looking up, ready to dart for her in her
Oriental dress, flimsy, baggy at the girdle, her arms bare, her fingers
clasped before her, making convex the two tassels of the girdle, from
her ears depending circles of gold large enough to hoop with, a saffron
headdress, stuck backward, showing her hair in front, falling upon a
shawl which sheltered her frank recumbent shoulders. She did not see
Hogarth at all, but stood averted, implacable, unapproachable, looking
across the park, while Hogarth occupied a long silence in gazing up to
where, like a show, she stood, illumined by the moon.

At last he sent to her the whisper, “Did you call just now? Did you say
'_Come_'?”

“What is it you want with me, Hogarth? You have '_summoned_' me: but be
very quick”.

“I told you: I am wealthier than all the princes--”

“Well, let me inform you that your life is in danger here; if you are a
wise man, you will not fail to leave this neighbourhood this night”.

“But no one knows--”

“It is known, Hogarth: your friends are false, and your enemies crafty.
You will have to walk with your eyes open, my friend. What will you do
with all the money?”

“I will buy the world, because _you_ are in it”.

Now she flashed upon him one glance, in which there was astonishment,
and judgment.

“You said that so like my father! Hogarth among the dealers? I thought
you would be more squeamish, and arduous, and complex”.

“But if a man is famished, he is not complex, he runs to the baker's.
You can have no conception how I perish! And I cannot be contradicted-I
claim you-I have the right-I am the lord of this lower world--”

“But you do not see the effect of your words: you disappoint me Richard.
How of what the poet sings:

  ...this is my favoured lot,
  My exaltation to afflictions high?

That is more in your line, you know, but you are dazzled, Hogarth-fie.
To _buy me_! And how would you like me afterwards, having renounced my
obligations? And how would I like _you_-I whose name is Rebekah, who
will mate with none but a wrestler, a fellow of heroic muscle? I feel
certain that you are dazzled. It is natural, I suppose--But are all the
people in the world so happy, that _you_ too, can find nothing to occupy
you but the market-place, with its buying and selling? And to buy _me_?
I am _not_ for sale! How dare you, Hogarth?”

With this she walked off; but, having a creepy instinct in her back
that he was on the point to follow, catch, and snatch her away, she span
round again, crying: “Do not follow me! Mind you! If you like, be at
the elm-tree again at half-past ten-and I will communicate with you.
Goodbye--”

Now she did not once look back; and he had not heard that fainting
“Good-bye”, it had fainted so.

He found himself presently in his room at the paper-shop, and lay biting
the bed-clothes, spasm after spasm traversing his body.

Then, turning on his back, he lay with his face now toward the trunk,
and a little clock ticked ten more minutes before the fact stole into
his consciousness that the bag was not on the trunk.

For some time the disappearance was too stupendous to find room in his
brain. He got up and paced, stunned, just conscious of a feeling of
unease.

Now he was searching the room mechanically. It was not there....

And again he paced, tapping his top teeth with a finger-nail; and now he
called down the stair: “Have you seen, Mrs. Sturgess, the calico bag you
gave me to-day?”

“Why, no”.

“Has anyone been in my room?”

“Why, _no_, sir! Only myself”.

Again he began to pace, and suddenly the grand reality stabbed his brain
like a dagger: he was poor....

O'Hara! Where was he....?

His forehead dropped upon the mantel-board, and he leant staring
downward there, a miserable man.

But suddenly the man said quietly aloud, raising himself: “All right:
better so. O, I have not been myself--virtue has gone out of me--!”

Presently he noticed that it was near the hour of her unexpected
_rendezvous_ under the elm....

And nearly all the way he ran--wild to see her again--until he neared
the tree, when, descrying a female form, he came stooping with humility,
but soon saw that it was a girl, her head in a shawl, whom he did not
know.

And she, coming to meet him, said: “What is your name, sir?”

“Why?”

“I am Miss Frankl's messenger”.

“My name is Hogarth”.

“Will you turn this way that I may see your eyes?...All right: Miss
Frankl directs me to give you these”.

The girl, who had been weighted down toward the left, handed him an
envelope, and a steel box.

Never was he so bewildered! On the way home, he observed that the box
had three knobs of gold, surrounded by rays, and, inlaid in the top, the
letters “R. F.”; when he tore open the envelope in his room he found in
pencil on one half-sheet:

“Turn the 10 of the right knob to the ray 5; the 5 of the middle knob
to the ray 0; the 15 of the left knob to the ray 10: and the box will
open”.

No more. When he had set wildly to work, and the lid turned back, his
eyes beheld the calico bag.

Rebekah had, in fact, before setting out to the _rendezvous_ at nine,
seen her father and O'Hara return to the Hall, bearing the bag between
them; and, she, crouching at the side door, as before, had heard them
talk, arranging details. Her father had then said that before he could
write any document, he must either ring or go search for paper: and
suddenly she had heard an oath, a thud, a scuffle, had turned the
key, softly entered, seen the men struggling against the other door, a
revolver, held by the muzzle, in O'Hara's hand; and before she had been
sighted by the two desperate men, had had the bag, lying near on an
escritoire, and was gone. She had then sent some servants to the scene,
and hurried to her chamber.

Later she had heard that O'Hara had escaped through a window, and that
her father was raving below in a sort of fit: for Frankl supposed that
O'Hara had the jewels, as O'Hara that Frankl had them; and after tending
her father, she had dashed out to the _rendezvous_, the jewels then in
her room.

As for Hogarth, he did not neglect her warning: and, having left a note
for O'Hara, telling him where to find him, at Loveday's, took a late
train southwards.

By what marvel Rebekah had become possessed of the jewels he did not
even seek to fathom; but one of his uppermost feelings was shame for
having suspected O'Hara of stealing them: and for years could never be
got to believe in the bad faith of the prelate, his tutor.

Near midnight, on reaching the obscure townlet of Hadston, he there took
a bed--not to sleep.

At the tiny inn-window he made periodic arrivals, looked out unseeing at
a cart, a wall of flint and Flemish brick, and a moonlit country, then
weighed anchor, and swerved away on another voyage; then arrived anew,
looked out, saw nothing, and weighed.

He walked now in the dark of the valley of humiliation, with those words
written in flame in his brain: “This is my favoured lot--my exaltation
to afflictions high”: he had allowed a woman to say them to him, and he
went “_I!_”

He, the richest of men, was, therefore, that night poorer than any
wretch, brought right down, naked, exposed to death, and he filled that
chamber with his moans: “God have mercy upon me! a vulgar rich man...a
dreadful contented clown....”

But toward morning he lay calmer, weeping like Peter, and at peace.

Being without money, he sent the next day a small stone to Loveday,
asking him to sell it; also to meet old Tom Bates on the night
appointed, and keep him till he, Hogarth, came to London.

Four days later he received the money in the name of “Mr. Beech”,
but the old Bates had not kept the _rendezvous_; and a month later a
detective agency discovered that the fisher was dead.

At Hadston Hogarth remained two months, the most occupied man anywhere,
yet passing for a lounger in the townlet.

Here and now he was descended deep into himself, aspiring to greatness,
set on high designs; and, as the days passed, his thoughts more and more
took form, though sometimes, with a sudden heart-pang, he would flinch
and shrink, pierced by a consciousness of the unwieldy thing which he
was at; and he would mutter: “I _must_ be mad”. Anon he would start and
cower at a distinct sound of cannon in his ears.

Usually, during the day, he had with him an atlas, a pair of compasses.

One day he took train, to see the sea.

Another day, happening to look into the goat-hair trunk, he saw that
account-book, containing 

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