What are you doing here?"
"What is that to you, my good girl?"
"True. Tell him you saw me here; and tell him, when next he hears of me, it will be in a very different place."
She turned and vanished among the crowd. Lancelot almost ran out into the night,--into a triad of fights, two drunken men, two jealous wives, and a brute who struck a poor, thin, worn-out woman, for trying to coax him home. Lancelot rushed up to interfere, but a man seized his uplifted arm.
"He"ll only beat her all the more when he getteth home."
"She has stood that every Sat.u.r.day night for the last seven years, to my knowledge," said Tregarva; "and worse, too, at times."
"Good G.o.d! is there no escape for her from her tyrant?"
"No, sir. It"s only you gentlefolks who can afford such luxuries; your poor man may be tied to a harlot, or your poor woman to a ruffian, but once done, done for ever."
"Well," thought Lancelot, "we English have a characteristic way of proving the holiness of the marriage tie. The angel of Justice and Pity cannot sever it, only the stronger demon of Money."
Their way home lay over Ashy Down, a lofty chalk promontory, round whose foot the river made a sudden bend. As they paced along over the dreary hedgeless stubbles, they both started, as a ghostly "Ha!
ha! ha!" rang through the air over their heads, and was answered by a like cry, faint and distant, across the wolds.
"That"s those stone-curlews--at least, so I hope," said Tregarva.
"He"ll be round again in a minute."
And again, right between them and the clear, cold moon, "Ha! ha!
ha!" resounded over their heads. They gazed up into the cloudless star-bespangled sky, but there was no sign of living thing.
"It"s an old sign to me," quoth Tregarva; "G.o.d grant that I may remember it in this black day of mine."
"How so!" asked Lancelot; "I should not have fancied you a superst.i.tious man."
"Names go for nothing, sir, and what my forefathers believed in I am not going to be conceited enough to disbelieve in a hurry. But if you heard my story you would think I had reason enough to remember that devil"s laugh up there."
"Let me hear it then."
"Well, sir, it may be a long story to you, but it was a short one to me, for it was the making of me, out of hand, there and then, blessed be G.o.d! But if you will have it--"
"And I will have it, friend Tregarva," quoth Lancelot, lighting his cigar.
"I was about sixteen years old, just after I came home from the Brazils--"
"What! have you been in the Brazils?"
"Indeed and I have, sir, for three years; and one thing I learnt there, at least, that"s worth going for."
"What"s that?"
"What the Garden of Eden must have been like. But those Brazils, under G.o.d, were the cause of my being here; for my father, who was a mine-captain, lost all his money there, by no man"s fault but his own, and not his either, the world would say, and when we came back to Cornwall he could not stand the bal work, nor I neither. Out of that burning sun, sir, to come home here, and work in the levels, up to our knees in warm water, with the thermometer at 85 degrees, and then up a thousand feet of ladder to gra.s.s, reeking wet with heat, and find the easterly sleet driving across those open furze-crofts-- he couldn"t stand it, sir--few stand it long, even of those who stay in Cornwall. We miners have a short lease of life; consumption and strains break us down before we"re fifty."
"But how came you here?"
"The doctor told my father, and me too, sir, that we must give up mining, or die of decline: so he came up here, to a sister of his that was married to the squire"s gardener, and here he died; and the squire, G.o.d bless him and forgive him, took a fancy to me, and made me under-keeper. And I loved the life, for it took me among the woods and the rivers, where I could think of the Brazils, and fancy myself back again. But mustn"t talk of that--where G.o.d wills is all right. And it is a fine life for reading and thinking, a gamekeeper"s, for it"s an idle life at best. Now that"s over," he added, with a sigh, "and the Lord has fulfilled His words to me, that He spoke the first night that ever I heard a stone-plover cry."
"What on earth can you mean?" asked Lancelot, deeply interested.
"Why, sir, it was a wild, whirling gray night, with the air full of sleet and rain, and my father sent me over to Redruth town to bring home some trade or other. And as I came back I got blinded with the sleet, and I lost my way across the moors. You know those Cornish furze-moors, sir?"
"No."
"Well, then, they are burrowed like a rabbit-warren with old mine- shafts. You can"t go in some places ten yards without finding great, ghastly black holes, covered in with furze, and weeds, and bits of rotting timber; and when I was a boy I couldn"t keep from them. Something seemed to draw me to go and peep down, and drop pebbles in, to hear them rattle against the sides, fathoms below, till they plumped into the ugly black still water at the bottom.
And I used to be always after them in my dreams, when I was young, falling down them, down, down, all night long, till I woke screaming; for I fancied they were h.e.l.l"s mouth, every one of them.
And it stands to reason, sir; we miners hold that the lake of fire can"t be far below. For we find it grow warmer, and warmer, and warmer, the farther we sink a shaft; and the learned gentlemen have proved, sir, that it"s not the blasting powder, nor the men"s breaths, that heat the mine."
Lancelot could but listen.
"Well, sir, I got into a great furze-croft, full of deads (those are the earth-heaps they throw out of the shafts), where no man in his senses dare go forward or back in the dark, for fear of the shafts; and the wind and the snow were so sharp, they made me quite stupid and sleepy; and I knew if I stayed there I should be frozen to death, and if I went on, there were the shafts ready to swallow me up: and what with fear and the howling and raging of the wind, I was like a mazed boy, sir. And I knelt down and tried to pray; and then, in one moment, all the evil things I"d ever done, and the bad words and thoughts that ever crossed me, rose up together as clear as one page of a print-book; and I knew that if I died that minute I should go to h.e.l.l. And then I saw through the ground all the water in the shafts glaring like blood, and all the sides of the shafts fierce red-hot, as if h.e.l.l was coming up. And I heard the knockers knocking, or thought I heard them, as plain as I hear that gra.s.shopper in the hedge now."
"What are the knockers?"
"They are the ghosts, the miners hold, of the old Jews, sir, that crucified our Lord, and were sent for slaves by the Roman emperors to work the mines; and we find their old smelting-houses, which we call Jews" houses, and their blocks of tin, at the bottom of the great bogs, which we call Jews" tin; and there"s a town among us, too, which we call Market-Jew--but the old name was Marazion; that means the Bitterness of Zion, they tell me. Isn"t it so, sir?"
"I believe it is," said Lancelot, utterly puzzled in this new field of romance.
"And bitter work it was for them, no doubt, poor souls! We used to break into the old shafts and adits which they had made, and find old stags"-horn pickaxes, that crumbled to pieces when we brought them to gra.s.s; and they say, that if a man will listen, sir, of a still night, about those old shafts, he may hear the ghosts of them at working, knocking, and picking, as clear as if there was a man at work in the next level. It may be all an old fancy. I suppose it is. But I believed it when I was a boy; and it helped the work in me that night. But I"ll go on with my story."
"Go on with what you like," said Lancelot.
"Well, sir, I was down on my knees among the furze-bushes, and I tried to pray; but I was too frightened, for I felt the beast I had been, sir; and I expected the ground to open and let me down every moment; and then there came by over my head a rushing, and a cry.
"Ha! ha! ha! Paul!" it said; and it seemed as if all the devils and witches were out on the wind, a-laughing at my misery. "Oh, I"ll mend--I"ll repent," I said, "indeed I will:" and again it came back,--"Ha! ha! ha! Paul!" it said. I knew afterwards that it was a bird; but the Lord sent it to me for a messenger, no less, that night. And I shook like a reed in the water; and then, all at once a thought struck me. "Why should I be a coward? Why should I be afraid of shafts, or devils, or h.e.l.l, or anything else? If I am a miserable sinner, there"s One died for me--I owe him love, not fear at all. I"ll not be frightened into doing right--that"s a rascally reason for repentance." And so it was, sir, that I rose up like a man, and said to the Lord Jesus, right out into the black, dumb air,--"If you"ll be on my side this night, good Lord, that died for me, I"ll be on your side for ever, villain as I am, if I"m worth making any use of." And there and then, sir, I saw a light come over the bushes, brighter, and brighter, up to me; and there rose up a voice within me, and spoke to me, quite soft and sweet,--"Fear not, Paul, for I will send thee far hence unto the Gentiles." And what more happened I can"t tell, for when I woke I was safe at home.
My father and his folk had been out with lanterns after me; and there they found me, sure enough, in a dead faint on the ground.
But this I know, sir, that those words have never left my mind since for a day together; and I know that they will be fulfilled in me this tide, or never."
Lancelot was silent a few minutes.
"I suppose, Tregarva, that you would call this your conversion?"
"I should call it one, sir, because it was one."
"Tell me now, honestly, did any real, practical change in your behaviour take place after that night?"
"As much, sir, as if you put a soul into a hog, and told him that he was a gentleman"s son; and, if every time he remembered that, he got spirit enough to conquer his hoggishness, and behave like a man, till the hoggishness died out of him, and the manliness grew up and bore fruit in him, more and more each day."
Lancelot half understood him, and sighed.
A long silence followed, as they paced on past lonely farmyards, from which the rich manure-water was draining across the road in foul black streams, festering and steaming in the chill night air.
Lancelot sighed as he saw the fruitful materials of food running to waste, and thought of the "over-population" cry; and then he looked across to the miles of brown moorland on the opposite side of the valley, that lay idle and dreary under the autumn moon, except where here and there a squatter"s cottage and rood of fruitful garden gave the lie to the laziness and ignorance of man, who pretends that it is not worth his while to cultivate the soil which G.o.d has given him. "Good heavens!" he thought, "had our forefathers had no more enterprise than modern landlords, where should we all have been at this moment? Everywhere waste? Waste of manure, waste of land, waste of muscle, waste of brain, waste of population--and we call ourselves the workshop of the world!"
As they pa.s.sed through the miserable hamlet-street of Ashy, they saw a light burning in window. At the door below, a haggard woman was looking anxiously down the village.
"What"s the matter, Mistress Cooper?" asked Tregarva.