GIFT OF 
 
A MAN OF GENIUS 
 
By the Same Author 
 
 WIDDICOMBE 
 
 THE WINGLESS VICTORY 
 
A MAN OF GENIUS 
 
 A STORY OF THE 
 J U D G M K N r OF PARIS 
 
 BV 
 
 M. P. WILLCOCKS 
 
 We are children of splendour and flame, 
 
 Of shuddering, also, and tears. 
 Magnificent out of the dust we came, 
 
 And abject from the Spheres." 
 
 William Watson 
 
 NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY. MCMVIII 
 LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD 
 
Copyright, 1908, 
 By John Lane Company 
 

 
 TO 
 
 JOHN LANE 
 
 WHO FIRST TAUGHT 
 ME TO KNOW AND TO 
 LOVE HIS OWN WILD 
 CORNER OF DEVON 
 
 108751 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. 
 
 The Wind Among the Barley 
 
 rAOi 
 9 
 
 II. 
 
 Little Egypt .... 
 
 24 
 
 III. 
 
 Armiger 
 
 • 37 
 
 IV. 
 
 Hesperus ..... 
 
 45 
 
 V. 
 
 The King of Shadows 
 
 76 
 
 VI. 
 
 The Law of Life 
 
 95 
 
 VII. 
 
 The Wandering Gleam 
 
 114 
 
 VIII. 
 
 The Strength of the Hills 
 
 129 
 
 IX. 
 
 The Wood of the Golden Shadows 
 
 141 
 
 X. 
 
 The Leaping Flame . 
 
 159 
 
 XI. 
 
 The Prayer of Women 
 
 171 
 
 XII. 
 
 A Strong Man Armed 
 
 187 
 
 XIII. 
 
 The Bitter Chalice . 
 
 204 
 
 XIV. 
 
 The Riddle of the Sphinx . 
 
 230 
 
 XV. 
 
 The Manes of the Mighty Dead . 
 
 . 248 
 
 XVI. 
 
 The Cradle of a Child 
 
 26s 
 
 XVII. 
 
 The Mystery Play 
 
 278 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 The Wings of the Wind 
 
 • 293 
 
 XIX. 
 
 The Master Builders 
 
 308 
 
 XX. 
 
 The Judgment of Paris 
 
 315 
 
 XXI. 
 
 The Wings of Peace 
 
 327 
 
Contents 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 XXII. The Cosmic Dance . 
 
 XXIII. One Way of Love 
 
 XXIV. The Flight of a Seamew . 
 
 XXV. The Judgment of the Nether Gods 
 
 XXVI. The Gates of Dawn . 
 
 XXVII. Constantine's Banner 
 
 XXVIII; The Clear Shining of a Star . 
 
 PAGE 
 
 347 
 356 
 368 
 
 379 
 398 
 404 
 
A MAN OF GENIUS 
 
A MAN OF GENIUS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 THE WIND AMONG THE BARLEY 
 
 BY the table stood a man in a sailor's jersey, wearing in 
 his ears the thin rings of gold that seamen suppose to 
 be good for the eyes. From below the house came the 
 myriad voices of a tide that beats against a rock-bound 
 coast; the hiss of spray that breaks on jagged points, the 
 roar of pebbles as a wave recedes, the stifled boom of 
 imprisoned waters that churn the fretted crannies of the 
 cliff. In the grip of the wind-flaws the timbers of the 
 house were straining, as though they were the sides of a 
 storm-tossed vessel, and through the room shone a diffused 
 pallor of steel-grey light, like the reflection from a vast 
 mirror. It was, in truth, the storm-light reflected from the 
 greatest mirror in the world, the sea. 
 
 In the light of it John Darracott stood looking down at 
 a small box, roughly embossed in a design of ivy leaves. 
 His jet-black hair and beard were both now faintly threaded 
 with silver, and his quiet eyes, set deep in a swarthy face, 
 were dusky, like the dark shadows on a still pool. Through 
 his great frame the good blood circled steadily with the tide 
 of perfect health, for he had breathed little but the outdoor 
 air all his life. The massive outline of his rough-hewn 
 
 9 
 
lo A Man of Genius 
 
 head, the great jaws that cleft, ridge-like, round his cheeks, 
 all bore the same expression of quiet tenacity. Yet the 
 firm lips could soften into kindly lines. They were so 
 softened now, as he glanced from the box to the sea, his 
 work-broadened hands touching the toy he had made as 
 gently as he would have touched the woman for whom it 
 was meant. 
 
 The rising storm outside, the five hours' watch that 
 awaited him, the familiar outlines of his room, had faded in 
 the inner visions of the happiness that he hoped was 
 approaching. Very simple visions they were, for it was 
 mainly a picture of an imaginary corner-cupboard that 
 kindled his eyes into flame, a fancy of all the household con- 
 veniences he would put up in this room, if he ever brought 
 home to it the occupant who already flitted there before his 
 mind's eye. The thought of his own tall stature beside the 
 figure of this small person puckered his forehead anxiously, 
 as he calculated the height at which he must fix cupboards 
 and dressers so that she should not strain herself in reach- 
 ing up to them. 
 
 The low-ceiled room, with its bare rafters and clean- 
 scrubbed floor, was like the cabin of a ship kept sweet with 
 the nicety of a sailor's hands. A wreck-wood fire burnt in 
 an old hobbed grate, and one large window, curved like 
 the port-hole of an ancient galleon, looked out to sea. 
 Pinned to the wall were pictures of birds cut from illus- 
 trated papers, interspersed with rough daubs of fishes, 
 painted in the vivid colours of fish just taken from the 
 water. In one corner there was also a menagerie of sick 
 beasts, a rabbit-hutch, and a cage or two, for John Darra- 
 cott had a fine skill in mending the creatures that had come 
 to grief in the battle of life; at one time it would be a bird 
 with a broken wing that inhabited a cage until it could fly 
 again, at another, a rabbit with its leg in splints. 
 
The Wind Among the Barley i i 
 
 At last the dreamer tore himself from his visions, and, 
 slipping the box into his trouser pocket, opened the house 
 door and stepped out into the roar of sea and wind. On a 
 long ledge of rock crouched a double row of slated, weather- 
 beaten houses, from which rose contorted circles of chimney 
 smoke that eddied over the boiling cauldron of maddened 
 waters that surged just below. Over the edge of the grassy 
 escarpment above this human eyry, five grey donkeys 
 peered with the enquiring faces of abstracted curiosity. 
 Hartland Quay, so called because it had once been a coal 
 wharf, was now half hotel and half farm, and Darracott the 
 sole labourer employed on it, for the farm, being composed 
 chiefly of clifif-pastures, required but little labour. 
 
 ''You'll mind and be back in time, Darracott," called a 
 voice from the doorway of the main building as he passed, 
 "for it's going to be a dirty night, by the look of it." 
 
 "Ay, sir," he answered, as he began to ascend the wind- 
 ing cliff path, "I'll be sure to be back 'gainst 'tis dark. 
 'Tis looking up ugly and no mistake." 
 
 Darracott was one of the nineteen men employed by the 
 local agent for the Board of Trade to work the rocket 
 apparatus at Hartland Quay, and to-night it fell to his turn 
 to watch the sea for the five hours specified in the regula- 
 tions in case of stormy or foggy weather. For since Hartland 
 Point was a war signal station the coastguard were not re- 
 quired to patrol the coast, but merely to keep a centre, and 
 their work of watching the sea was supplemented by the 
 services of farm labourers who, at the widely separated 
 intervals of the rocket stations, were placed on duty to look 
 for signals of distress from the waterway. It is scarcely a 
 system likely to be of much use on so terrible a shore, built, 
 as it seems, for the mockery of man, the puny, stout-hearted 
 creature of Nature's weakest birth moment. 
 
 For this angle of North Devon, which culminates in the 
 
1 2 A Man of Genius 
 
 rocks of Hartland Point, is a coast given over, in times of 
 storm and mist, to all the forces of destruction. During a 
 winter gale the savagery of the scene is nerve-shattering, for 
 in the shrilling of a sea-mew, in the lash of a breaker, in the 
 contour of a rock outline, there seems to speak the antagon- 
 ism of the dumb brute forces that resist man and yet clamour 
 in the lust of his rage. To stand in a storm on the cliffs of 
 Hartland is to hear the echoes of the bestial roar of a Bastille 
 crowd, or the yell that rings from a thousand throats at the 
 fall of some human temple of the spirit. The paths traced 
 by the hand of history over the map of the past, blood- 
 stained as they are in reality, seem placid with sunlight 
 beside the irresponsible power that speaks in the crash of 
 the breakers on this iron shore, in the lash of the wind 
 across the lonely heaths, and even in the light that flickers 
 at night over the grass-grown crannies of the cliffs. For the 
 "jacky-lanterns" mock with their light footsteps still, like 
 ghostly wreckers' lights of long ago. 
 
 To Darracott, who was familiar enough with the work, 
 the thought of his night's watch was overlaid with the more 
 pressing anxiety as to whether he would be in time for the 
 delight to which he had been looking forward all day, a 
 walk with Thyrza Braund. As he turned away from the sea 
 there rose in the distance before him the splendid tower of 
 Hartland Church, springing from a film of woodland, like a 
 fortress above the houses it protects. This was Darracott's 
 objective, for he knew that Thyrza would be at the Church 
 to-night, helping in the decorations for the harvest festival. 
 At the stile that leads into the churchyard he waited, stand- 
 ing under the tiny avenue of six lime trees. The service 
 was not yet over, for from the windows fell long beams of 
 light, turning the tombstones into spectral forms that bent 
 at strangely human angles. The wind howled round the 
 summit of the tower, as though it would have torn it from 
 
The Wind Among the Barley i 3 
 
 its foundations, but below, here in the quiet gloom, there 
 was nothing but the play of light and shadow. To Darra- 
 cott's ears came the words of the closing hymn — 
 
 Peace, perfect peace, our future all unknown ? 
 Jesus we know, and He is on the throne. 
 Peace, perfect peace, death shadowing us and ours? 
 Jesus has vanquish'd death and all its powers. 
 
 So they sang, with the battering-ram of storm overhead, 
 and in their hearts the fear that waits for every life at some 
 turning of the road. To Darracott's throbbing heart this 
 resignation to the will of the Unknown seemed like the 
 wailing of those who have long closed their account with 
 earthly things. 
 
 At last, after the few women who made up the congrega- 
 tion had passed down the path, there came the figure for 
 which his eyes had been watching, and with a sudden leap 
 at his heart he came forward to be ready at the stile to help 
 her over. 
 
 **I thought you would be here," he said, as she put out 
 her hand. 
 
 It was too dark to see plainly the expression of her face, 
 but he knew it by heart. 
 
 ''You'll let me walk back with you?" he asked, as they 
 turned down the village street, where the friendly eyes of 
 the lighted windows peeped into their faces as they passed. 
 " *Tis too late for 'ee to go all that way back by yourself." 
 
 "Why, I've done it hundreds of times," she said with 
 a laugh. 
 
 There was a resonant quality about her voice that lin- 
 gered pleasantly on the ear, for all the blurred intonation 
 of country roughness. 
 
 "And you've a day's work behind you, too," she added, 
 after a pause, for this silent man was rather a perplexity to 
 Thyrza. 
 
14 A Man of Genius 
 
 "I'd do a deal to get a minute with you, and that you 
 know well enough. Don't you, Thyrza?" 
 
 " 'Tisn't what you ought to say to me, though," she said. 
 In the light from a passing trap Darracott caught the flash 
 of a dimple on her round cheek. 
 
 " 'Tis your birthday to-day," he said gently, "and I've 
 made a little box for you, if you'll accept of it." 
 
 With a round "Oh" of pleasure, Thyrza took the box 
 and looked inside. Within, there reposed three hedge- 
 sparrow's eggs on a layer of cotton wool. 
 
 "They're common eggs," he said apologetically, "but 
 they're just the colour of your eyes. That's why I put 
 'em in." 
 
 No one in the neighbourhood knew more than Darracott 
 of the ways of birds and beasts. He could tell where the 
 peregrine falcon had spent one summer, he could have told 
 where a pair of choughs were to be found on the cliffs: he 
 could have, but he did not. 
 
 Thyrza laughed as she lifted her eyes to his. Then her 
 glow-worm glance fell before the fierce tenderness of his 
 eyes, and she noticed how his hand trembled as he lifted 
 it to his face. For a moment she tasted the sweetness 
 of her own power, but presently the kindness which was 
 the deepest root of her nature had asserted itself. 
 
 " No, no ; take it back, Mr. Darracott," she said. " I can't 
 keep it. I can't really." 
 
 "You don't like it?" 
 
 "Oh, I do, I do. But " 
 
 "But what then?" 
 
 " 'Tis so serious," she faltered. "I can't say it proper; 
 but " 
 
 "I put a lot into that box, Thyrza. Much, much more 
 than ever I could show. 'Tis poor work, I know, but when 
 I sat at it I said, ' Thyrza 's little fingers '11 touch this, and 
 
The Wind Among the Barley i 5 
 
 perhaps she'll think of me.' For you don't know how all 
 these last months you've hardly been out of my mind. 
 Words hurt, when a man means it, but, my dear, you're the 
 very light to my eyes. You've made another man of me. 
 I seem to have been half-dead all the years afore I set 
 eyes on your little face. But now, I'll never be dead again 
 till they lay me in my coffin." 
 
 "I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't, indeed." 
 
 "Nay, 'tis work that can be done by a look," he laughed. 
 
 ''And you'll take my box?" 
 
 "No, John," she answered, standing still and looking 
 steadily into his face, "I can't. 'Tis beautiful, and I hate 
 to think of giving it back, when you've worked at it so long 
 for me, but I can't take it, John," she said in a low voice, 
 holding it out and looking away, lest she should see the 
 misery in his eyes. "Oh, John, I'm so sorry, so sorry." 
 
 His hand closed over the box and her hand that held it. 
 Suddenly Thyrza leant forward and touched his shoulder 
 with her left hand, seeing as she did so the strong ties of 
 kindred nature that bound her to this man; they were 
 moulded of the same clay, born for the same experiences of 
 life, and his rough toil she could understand. Three weeks 
 ago she had watched a group of women huddling together 
 to see the men launch the lifeboat. The storm and the 
 men meant but little to her, for she just wanted to stand 
 among the women, to feel what they felt, even though she 
 had been the weariest and most careworn of them all. 
 This would be her life by the side of John Darracott, a life 
 to whose measure her own heart-strings vibrated, even 
 v/hile her fancy desired quite another fate. 
 
 "I'm hungered for you," he said simply. "I want you. 
 I want you. I can't be content without you, my maid." 
 
 Every word was a stab to Thyrza, whose sole thought now 
 was to escape. 
 
1 6 A Man of Genius 
 
 "No, no," she cried; "I can't, I can't. Never." 
 
 Before the sincerity of this he let her hand fall. Then 
 as she touched him gently with her finger tips, he winced. 
 
 " Not that," he said savagely. " 'Tis a man you'm touch- 
 ing." 
 
 His next instinct was the desire to calm her trouble, 
 when he saw her moisten her dry lips, and guessed that her 
 heart was beating wildly like that of a creature just snared. 
 
 "Child, never mind, don't grieve," he said. "For, after 
 all, I thank God that 'tis a man you'm touching. I was 
 a stone before, but you've given me a heart, even if it aches." 
 
 "Forgive me, John. But I can't, for there's some one 
 else." 
 
 After a moment's pause, he said — 
 
 "Will 'ee just give me one kiss, my dear. Just to remem- 
 ber 'ee by?" 
 
 But as she lifted her face to his, he merely pressed his 
 cheek to hers, and holding her close to him by her clasped 
 hands, whispered, "God made you and life and death. I 
 can feel 'em all now. Don't you fret, my pretty, for you've 
 been a true woman. And if I can't live and die by the side 
 of 'ee, why, there's no law against thought." 
 
 "And we'll see each other sometimes," she sobbed. 
 
 "Surely, sometimes," said John steadily. 
 
 As he stood watching her walk along the road, he won- 
 dered how he was to live through the long days before him. 
 For every morning when he awoke, the first thought was 
 Thyrza, and through the working hours a light had shone, 
 because in the evenings, when the yoke of labour was 
 lifted, he had often managed to meet her. He looked 
 down at the box she had left in his hand ; it seemed some- 
 how like the crumb a prisoner has prepared for the mouse 
 that is dead. Then he roused himself, and forgetting his 
 night's watch, followed her along the road, for the mouse is 
 
The Wind Among the Barley 17 
 
 more precious to the prisoner than whole flocks to the man 
 of crowded pastures. 
 
 At last he reached the farm of Long Furlong, where 
 Thyrza lived as help to the mistress. The front of the 
 house was dark, but the yard was lighted by a gleam of 
 firelight from the open kitchen door. As Darracott stood 
 outside, the scent of the f'uchsia bush that was growing over 
 the wall of the garden mingled in dream-like fashion with 
 the squeak of a fiddle that was being played in the kitchen. 
 Gradually the magnetism of the tune drew him forward, till 
 he stood looking through the half-open door. 
 
 In the light of the fire that leapt in ruddy flames on the 
 white-washed walls there sat a lad leaning back in a 
 Windsor chair, as he cuddled a fiddle to his clean-shaven 
 chin. A brown spaniel with a bandaged paw lay warming 
 its stomach in front of the fire, and two candles set high on 
 the mantelpiece threw their light downward on the boy's 
 face. As Darracott watched, the fiddling ceased, and 
 presently through the room there cooed a bird-note, liquid 
 as the thrill of a thrush and mellow as the fall of rain-drops 
 on the leaves. It came from the pursed-up lips of the 
 fiddler, whom Darracott recognised as Ambrose Velly, the 
 only son of the farmer of Long Furlong. 
 
 Then the door behind the settle opened, and as Thyrza 
 came in, Ambrose called to her — 
 
 "Come, Thyrza, dance. For the Spirit of the Lord is 
 upon me to-night, and I can play." 
 
 Then, as he drew his bow with a backward swing of his 
 head, the measure of a dance tune rippled from the fiddle. 
 In the gallant pose of the lad's head, in the backward sweep 
 of a solitary lock of hair from his forehead, there was a 
 suggestion of those lawless winds of the fancy that blow 
 from unseen depths at the call of the spirit of youth. The 
 slight, yet muscular, frame of the player was a-taut with the 
 
1 8 A Man of Genius 
 
 nervous strain of elation. The keen, dancing eyes, sea-blue 
 in the daytime, yet green with the light behind them, 
 gleamed beneath the broad, domed forehead as he tilted 
 his chin backwards and joined the notes of the violin with 
 a sort of wordless song that bubbled from the depths of joy. 
 It was simple playing in its way, and the tunes were impro- 
 vised from snatches of old country song or fragments of 
 opera melodies that the player had learnt by ear; in the 
 spirit of the player there lived all the charm of it. 
 
 Opposite him, on the flags of the kitchen, Thyrza was 
 dancing with half-closed eyes and a body that answered 
 dreamily to the notes of the fiddle. She took as many 
 shapes, it seemed, as the curving back of a wave that falls 
 wind-driven, on the rocks. At one moment she was dancing 
 as lightly as the mist that rises from a waterfall, at another, 
 as gaily as the dewdrops that sparkle in the grass, and 
 again, as slowly as the foot of age that walks death-ward. 
 Her dancing was born of the joy and pain she could never 
 describe in words, born, too, of the nomad spirit of her 
 fathers; for she was one of the "Braunds of Bucks," the 
 colony of dark, half-Spanish people, who work as ship- 
 breakers along the coast and form a race alien to the native 
 folk. She was wholly unconscious of anything but the 
 sound that led her, now dreamy as the coo of a wood-dove, 
 now sadly sweet, like the song a mother sings to her baby, 
 now wild, like the flying pulses that rush to their delight. 
 For when Ambrose Velly took up his fiddle, in the sound 
 of it, to Thyrza, sang the things of creation, as clearly as in 
 the very mating song. 
 
 To Darracott it seemed that the tapping of her heels was 
 the beat of hob-nailed shoes that rattled on his heart. She 
 was, in truth, dancing away his homely visions of the 
 future; for vaguely he recognised that the zest of a life in 
 which he could not even breathe was thrilling through the 
 
The Wind Among the Barley 19 
 
 room where these two were so happy together. In the 
 glory of it he felt his own sluggishness as a stubborn jade 
 which no spur can rouse; with his halting speech and heavy 
 tread, he seemed rusting as he watched— outside. For 
 there he belonged, to the rough winds, the sea and the slow 
 earth. Then, with a pang of distrust, he gazed again into 
 the face of the youth who could thus turn Thyrza into a 
 sleep-walker. As Darracott watched, he held the carved 
 box tightly, yet even then, so carefully, that his great strength 
 avoided crushing the thin sides of it. For he possessed the 
 hands that can make minute models of full-rigged ships, fast- 
 en them delicately down and fit them into bottles, where they 
 start into upright position with the pull of a piece of elastic. 
 
 Ambrose was now playing the old tune, "The Wind 
 among the Barley," playing it with an intensity that thrilled 
 with the warmth of things. As he played, he passed in 
 fancy from one delight to another, from the rustling sweep 
 of the bearded heads in the rush of the jolly wind to the 
 lingering breath of cows in the lane; from the sigh of the 
 breeze in the pines to the roar of the tides that tear at 
 the cliffs. He had become a child of the wind ; for the lilt 
 of the tune sang in his heart as it was singing in Thyrza's, 
 but with this difference, that in the dancer it provoked but 
 the vague pleasure of a sensation that was instantly trans- 
 lated into movement, while in Ambrose himself it aroused 
 pictures that harmonised with the ideas called up by the 
 book he had been reading. 
 
 For he was just awaking to the dearest delight of the 
 old earth, the sweet savour of human life that is wrapt up 
 in the books men write, the songs they make, and the 
 pictures they paint. For the first time in his life he had 
 made out a passage in French by himself, in old French, 
 too, par le splendeur Dex, and life had given him a new 
 key to its wonder world. Joy ! Joy ! Joy ! sang his heart, 
 
20 A Man of Genius 
 
 from brain to nerve, from nerve to fiddle-strings. It was 
 old Villon's confession that rang in young Velly's head — 
 
 He Dieu ! Se j'eusse estudie 
 Au tems de ma jeunesse folle, 
 Et k bonnes moeurs dedie, 
 J'eusse maison et couche molle ! 
 
 "Ma jeunesse folle," he repeated under his breath. 
 There ought to have been "pretty maids all of a row" to 
 dance in front of him; there ought to have been vineyards 
 and olive-yards outside, instead of dun fields and grey 
 sea. But the player cared not, in the joy of the artist nerves 
 that thrilled to his finger-tips. 
 
 On the table lay the book that had wrought this witchery, 
 a history of French literature that he had been devouring 
 with a fastidious haste that rejected solid facts in the 
 pleasure of fine phrases, even at times in the joy of mere 
 names full of the sweetness of southern beauty. Maitre 
 Frangois Rabelais; the very echoes of it gave visions, and 
 over the soft syllables Francois Villon, he lingered like a 
 lover over his mistress's little heart-name, relishing the taste 
 of the old tavern rascal's human charm. 
 
 Suddenly a string snapped, and Ambrose laid his fiddle 
 on the polished seat of the settle, while Thyrza sank down 
 panting on the bench by the table, and laid her outstretched 
 arms along it. 
 
 "Thyrza, Thyrza," cried Ambrose, "what the devil has 
 got into us both to-night ? But you can dance, I'll say that 
 for you. And I can play a bit, too. Faith, I can play, and 
 no mistake." 
 
 His delight in his own achievements was as naive as the 
 pleasure of a lamb when it first discovers the blissful power 
 of tail-wagging to be a personal attribute. 
 
 "It does so make my heart beat," said Thyrza, "to hear 
 you play. Something comes up, up, into my throat almost." 
 
The Wind Among the Barley 21 
 
 "Up, up," mocked Ambrose, giving three trills on muted 
 strings; he could not bear to be long separated from his fiddle. 
 
 " You'm mazed, I do believe," laughed Thyrza, dimpling 
 below the traces of tears that Darracott had noted round 
 her eyes, but to which Ambrose remained entirely oblivious, 
 "and if anvbody else was to hear you, they'd think so too." 
 
 "Well, mother's upstairs. And she's often heard mc 
 before," said Ambrose, stretching out his legs to the fire in 
 luxurious ease. 
 
 "There might be somebody else for all you know," said 
 Thyrza in a small voice that trembled a little. "I don't 
 believe I came home alone to-night from the Church 
 decorating." 
 
 But if she wanted to arouse her hearer's jealousy, her 
 attempt was quite unavailing, for Ambrose merely stretched 
 out his hand to the table for his book, saying — 
 
 "There now, let me get on with this, there's a good girl. 
 I have piped unto you and you have danced. That, Thyrza, 
 ought to be enough for any reasonable woman. You're 
 a nice little thing in your way, but you're a terrible waste 
 of time to a busy man." 
 
 With a laugh he looked over his shoulder at her, as she 
 shook a plump fist at him in anger that was half-feigned, 
 half-real. For underneath the teasing tone she divined an 
 indifference to her that was, womanlike, infinitely more 
 alluring than Darracott's devotion. 
 
 "By Jove," said Ambrose, "you are a pretty piece, too. 
 Come over and give us a peck, child." 
 
 Thyrza Braund had the beauty of the dawn; her tawny 
 hair still retained the soft growth of a baby's, her lips the 
 kissable quality of a child's. Her large eyes alone, under 
 their full curved lids, were womanlike. The whole face 
 had the appearance of a bow, even to the upward-springing 
 dents at the corners of the lips and the tip-tilted chin and 
 
22 A Man of Genius 
 
 nose. The full curves of bosom and arms had the exuber- 
 ance of a ripening peach. 
 
 At the mocking words her lips began to tremble, and a 
 spasm of childish anger convulsed her face. She was 
 accustomed to be teased by Ambrose, but to-night her nerves 
 had been shaken by her pity for Darracott. 
 
 "You'm hard on me, Ambrose," she protested; "and I 
 always do everything you ask. There's nobody on earth so 
 unkind to me as you. And there's folks that like me very 
 much, too." 
 
 The idea of her wonderful secret burnt in her heart for 
 utterance, but her lips were sealed by the thought of how 
 the big man had trembled. Darracott's love was the first 
 secret she had ever kept to herself, but his reverent gentle- 
 ness towards her called up an answering instinct of reserve 
 to match his fine simplicity. 
 
 "You're a proper spitfire," said Ambrose. "Why, I 
 believe you'd like to beat me this minute." 
 
 "I hate you, I hate you! " she sobbed, flinging herself 
 out pf the room in a whirl of petticoats, with the echoes of 
 Ambrose's laugh ringing in her ears. 
 
 When the door banged behind Thyrza, Darracott drew a 
 deep breath of relief, as though an unbearable pressure had 
 been removed from his heart. For this slow man had read 
 the secret of her slavish dependence on a lad's caprice, and 
 with the painful foresight of love was able to view the scene 
 in the light of the future, as well as of the present. To 
 him this play-acting was diabolic possession, and Thyrza, no 
 girl on the verge of love, but an automaton swayed by the 
 will of a lad, unschooled by experience, ignorant even of 
 the nature of his own feelings. 
 
 As Darracott returned home, he recognised his own 
 powerlessness to help Thyrza in any way. He knew her to 
 be fatherless, of a wildish stock. She was, it is true, a 
 
The Wind Among the Barley 23 
 
 distant cousin of Mrs. Velly, and more in the position of 
 friend than servant. Yet, even while he cursed the base- 
 ness of his own imagination, he saw, in a series of pictures, 
 the ever-recurring possil^ihties of harm to the child in her 
 nearness to the youth who could draw her as the moon 
 draws the tides. Like all men who have lived natural lives, 
 Darracott was very reverent to womanhood, but in the 
 thought of her own recklessness, he wiped away the sweat 
 from his forehead. Self-pity is to a man what weeping is 
 to a woman, a safety-valve, but in strong hearts like Darra- 
 cott's there is no room for that gentle relief. In these 
 minutes he made a long journey, back along the road that 
 his race had travelled, to the primitive savage that lurks in 
 every man. He wanted to press the mocking light out of 
 the lad's eyes, to feel the starting veins under his thumb. 
 For in the exaggeration of jealousy Darracott felt that such 
 dancing as this was a subtle shame to womanhood. Then 
 the momentary impulse passed into a panic-stricken hurry- 
 ing to-and-fro of his thoughts in the search for help, for he 
 felt like a chained man watching a woman drown. 
 
 The moon riding high above the clouds lighted up the 
 coast, flashing into the black chasms of the bays and out- 
 lining the dark shadow of the rocket-house. Over the 
 Atlantic the light from Hartland Point pulsed out, alter- 
 nately white and red. But by now Darracott had forgotten 
 the storm, had forgotten his night's watch in the intense 
 weariness that follows passion. Great weights fell on his 
 eyelids, so that he could scarcely stagger down the cliff 
 path, and chains seemed to hold back his limbs; for to his 
 quiet mind had come the reaction that follows on e.xcite- 
 ment. Virtually he was sleep-walking, and when at last his 
 own door was reached, he flung it open, and throwing 
 himself with his arms across the table, fell into the deep 
 sleep that nothing can resist. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 LITTLE EGYPT 
 
 THE firelight and candlelight by which Ambrose Velly 
 was trying to read soon made his eyes ache, and fling- 
 ing aside the history of French literature, he lay back in 
 his chair, resting his head on his clasped hands. The air 
 was full of the scent of burning wood, which came from 
 four large branches that had been thrust lengthwise into 
 the fire. That stove was one of Mrs. Velly's trials, for in 
 the downgrade of the family fortunes the rent of the farm 
 had been unpaid for some years, and she had never dared 
 to ask the landlord for a new one. Hence, Long Furlong 
 still retained the old-fashioned oven called a Bodley, from 
 the name of the Exeter manufacturer who invented the first 
 stove with fountain and oven on either side. 
 
 Down the long kitchen, where the remains of fine plaster 
 work were still to be found on one wall, there hung from 
 the rafters of black oak tufts of feverfew and wormwood, 
 the first a cattle drench, the second a tonic, and both monu- 
 ments testifying to Mrs. Velly's thrift. It was a standing 
 cause of dispute that Ambrose had refused to swallow the 
 wormwood decoction ever since he read that it grows mainly 
 in old churchyards, where it was first planted in order that 
 the church floors might be sprinkled with it at certain 
 seasons. 
 
 The thoughts that flitted through Ambrose's head as he 
 sat before the fire were by no means concerned with Thyrza, 
 24 
 
Little Egypt 25 
 
 who was ver\' much like his fiddle to him, an instrument on 
 which he could play whenever he was seized with the desire 
 to do so. His mind had reverted to the wonderful moment, 
 several years before, in which there had been bom the real 
 passion of his life. We keep no registers of mental births, 
 we men who chronicle so carefully the events of the flesh, 
 yet a wiser race than ours would mark the first faint flicker- 
 ings of those wandering gleams that herald the birth of 
 a mental passion in a human soul. Out of the East, or out 
 of the West, tempest-driven, or carried by the softest breeze, 
 they come, the finer intuitions whence spring those visions 
 of inborn powers, afterwards to be incarnated in word or 
 colour, stone or sound. 
 
 Ambrose could see himself sitting at that very table by 
 his side, opening the book with fine plates of French 
 cathedrals that the vicar had lent him. As he turned over 
 the pages, he had come suddenly upon the phrase "flying 
 buttress," which struck him as so curious that he turned 
 back to find the meaning of the expression. Whilst he 
 read, all the cravings after beauty that had vaguely pos- 
 sessed him from childhood began to crystallise into defi- 
 nite desire. His education at the parish school had only 
 revealed tantalising glimpses of the world of letters, but 
 here, in this work on architecture, something burnt for him 
 like the fire which brings out the secret writing of a cipher, 
 the cipher of his own nature. He began to long for 
 instant possession of books on "figures," books of applied 
 mathematics, so that he, too, might grapple with the 
 question of strain in buildings. For he read how the 
 architects of the Middle Ages tried to solve the difficulty 
 of weight-bearing in their edifices by exterior buttresses 
 exposed to the weather, so that if these failed the whole 
 building collapsed, and how the mistake of one school was 
 repeated generation after generation, because of the lack 
 
26 A Man of Genius 
 
 of mathematical knowledge. In a fever he turned the 
 pages to see if there were any guides here to the hidden 
 parts of the mystery. But there were none, only a fact 
 which explained what had often puzzled him, that the 
 names of the architects of churches are usually unknown. 
 Learning that this was because they were ecclesiastics, 
 whose order absorbed the honour of their achievements, 
 he decided that when his cathedral was built, the name of 
 the architect should be blazoned abroad. The next mo- 
 ment he saw his folly and laughed at such thoughts in a 
 lad who had no art knowledge, no mathematical training, 
 and no possibilities of such. 
 
 He had travelled a long way since that night, for he had 
 just now come back from a three years' course of training 
 with a country architect, a friend of his mother's, who had 
 taken him for a smaller premium than would have been 
 accepted with another pupil. In a measure he had, then, 
 already entered the kingdom of promise that had looked so 
 far away on the evening when he first made the acquaint- 
 ance of a flying buttress. 
 
 Yet he was full of an undercurrent of vexation at the 
 shackling power of the circumstances that still remained to 
 be mastered. The sensation made him restless, so that 
 he got up and went to see to the stables and their occupants. 
 When he returned to the house he found that Thyrza had 
 lit the lamp and was now busy with the preparations for 
 supper. 
 
 ^' Old Caleb's daughter has come home unexpected to- 
 night," she remarked, with recovered composure. "She'll 
 be over to see the missus bime-by, I reckon." 
 
 Caleb Vinnicombe was the one labourer now employed 
 at the farm, and his cottage across the road was a swarming 
 nest of children, the offspring of a second marriage. There 
 was a long scraping sound as Thyrza drew out the table 
 
Little Egypt 27 
 
 for supper and threw a coarse tablecloth over one end. 
 Just at that moment the door from the house into the 
 kitchen opened, and Ambrose jumped up as his mother 
 appeared round the corner of the settle. 
 
 It was a fine, almost Roman head, that of Mrs. Velly, 
 with white hair that had once been wiry black, drawn back 
 from broad, straight brows. The contours of the features 
 had been refmed till they stood out like chiselled ivory, 
 but in the brown eyes alone there still burnt the fire of life 
 that age and trouble had driven from the rest of her face. 
 These could still Hash with rage and laughter, still melt 
 with tenderness as they had done years ago. 
 
 Behind Mrs. Velly there stood a blowsy country-wench, her 
 hard, red cheeks and hands fiaming like purple porcelain. 
 
 "Why, Mrs. Lapthorne," cried Thyrza, coming up to 
 shake hands with the girl, "what a stranger, to be sure ! " 
 
 "It's old Caleb's daughter," whispered iVIrs. Velly to 
 Ambrose, as she bustled about the preparations for a meal. 
 
 "Why, Thyrza, my dear life," said the visitor, throwing 
 back her beaded cape and revealing her broad bust decor- 
 ated with a whole cluster of pins stuck in the bosom of her 
 dress, "you'm behindhand; I buried Lapthorne two years 
 agone, and now I'm Mrs. Rosevear." 
 
 "Never ! " chimed in Mrs. Velly, bringing out the great 
 cheese-dish. "And you not twenty-four !" 
 
 Mrs. Rosevear flashed her row of perfect teeth in a wide 
 smile that showed the great joy of triumph. 
 
 "Why, however do 'ee compass it?" asked Thyrza. 
 "Here be I that haven't got one man, and on a farm and 
 all; and here be you with two. 'Tisn't looks and 'tisn't 
 money that done it, neither," she added, with true country 
 frankness. 
 
 Ambrose laughed outright, while Mrs. Velly looked at 
 him with a motherly pride in seeing him happy. 
 
28 A Man of Genius 
 
 "Thyrza, Thyrza," she interposed, ''now you behave 
 yourself." 
 
 But Mrs. Rosevear was in no way offended. 
 
 ''No," she said triumphantly, "'tisn't looks and 'tisn't 
 money that draws the men. 'Tis the 'Come hither' in the 
 eye. That's what 'tis, the 'Come hither' in the eye." 
 
 "But how's a body to get it, Mrs. Rosevear, so to 
 call 'ee what you lawful are?" said Thyrza, handing the 
 guest the cup of tea that graces every feast in the West. 
 "Was 'ee always gifted that way, my dear?" 
 
 "Not me," said Mrs. Rosevear frankly, pouring the tea 
 into the saucer to cool it. "Men be like sheep, let one 
 lead, t'others follow, and then you can easy slip the noose 
 on the one you fancies." 
 
 "But 'tis the getting of the first one that gallies (bothers) 
 a maid," interposed Mrs. Velly, while Thyrza nodded her 
 head in sad acquiescence. 
 
 "Tchuh, tchuh, missus," said Mrs. Rosevear, "and 
 what's wits been given to a woman for, I should like to 
 know, except to compass the management o' man. Now, 
 just you let me tell a bit," she continued, putting down her 
 cup and squaring her determined shoulders in the heat of 
 narrative. 
 
 "I'd a deal of bother with Lapthorne first-long. Us 
 was to have been married of a Saturday up to Plymouth, 
 where I'd been living a good bit then, and Lapthorne was 
 to come up there, him being a Holsworthy man. Now, if 
 you'll believe me, on the Thursday afore that Saturday he 
 was heard to say as he didn't know as he'd be able to find 
 time to come up to Plymouth a-Saturday." 
 
 "A pretty fantod (fuss) you must ha' been in," breathed 
 Thyrza sympathetically. 
 
 "But," said Mrs. Rosevear, lifting an impressive fore- 
 finger, "do you think I give him up for that? Not me. 
 
Little Egypt 29 
 
 I took and packed up and back to Holsworthy again, and 
 there I plumped down afore his mother's cottage and said 
 I'd come to stay. I filled the whole of their front room 
 with boxes and that. And in that front room they found 
 I was going to bide. Us lived like that for the better part 
 of a week, and at meals I didn't si)are the victuals neither. 
 Then, thinks I, 'tis getting on for the new year, and us'll 
 have to be called home again in church if I don't make 
 sure of Lapthorne afore then. And that'll be a double 
 expense. I must borrow Sam." 
 
 "Borrow Sam !" echoed Thyrza faintly, as Mrs. Rose- 
 vear's greatness became apparent. She was standing with 
 wide-open, round eyes in front of the visitor, while Ambrose 
 and Mrs. Velly watched the two from the table. 
 
 "Iss, fay, that's my brother-law up to Plymouth; only 
 Lapthorne and they didn't know 'en, never having been to 
 see us to Plymouth." 
 
 "Whatever good was he to 'ee?" 
 
 " 'Tis in these little ways, my dear, that you can tell 
 what a woman's made of. Why, of a Sunday morning 
 Sam came along to Holsworthy and took me out, same as 
 if 'twas courting he'd come for; arm-in-crook out and 
 clipsed round the waist back. Did the thing proper, did 
 Sam, though I'd always thought 'en slack-baked afore. But 
 then, anybody'd be slack-baked after living with my sister 
 Selina." 
 
 "And Lapthorne?" asked Ambrose. 
 
 "Went to church New Year's Eve like a lamb, with a 
 carriage and pair and two bottles of port, and wanted 
 to knock Sam into the middle of the road for a bouldacious 
 chap. A proper wedding, it was, with dancing till seven 
 the next morning. And no more trouble with Lapthorne; 
 noosed he was, and knowed it." 
 
 "Fine, I call it," chuckled Thyrza. 
 
30 A Man of Genius 
 
 " But the finest thing was that I'd got over his old mother, 
 who says to me, 'It's all very well for you, coming down 
 and talking about a wedding. How can us be put to the 
 bother of a wedding, with the cow due to calve?' " 
 
 "And," continued Mrs. Rosevear, after a pause, "Lap- 
 thorne didn't do so bad for hissel, neither; for when he lay 
 a-dying, he says, 'We've got on very well together. It's 
 a pity I've got to go, wife, isn't it ? ' But it struck innerds, 
 and so he'd to go — out over bar. The year afore that I'd 
 buried my little maid. I've got the penny some one gave 
 her a week afore her died, set in a fret-work cross." 
 
 There was a sympathetic silence in the room. 
 
 "Her dad made the cross," said Mrs. Rosevear gently; 
 "us thought the more of her, there being but the one. 
 But there— 'A hot May makes a fat church hay.' Diph- 
 thery, it was, in a mortal hot spring. And being wisht 
 without 'em I took up with Rosevear, over to Bradworthy." 
 
 "I know," said Ambrose; "John Rosevear, oldish and 
 a stuggy (stout and short) sort of a chap." 
 
 "Stuggy or no. Master Ambrose," said Mrs. Rosevear, 
 fiercely, "he earns a full meal for hisself and me most days. 
 And in my house, let me tell 'ee, I'm missus." 
 
 Mrs. Rosevear's temper was rising, for Mrs. Velly was 
 not over much of a mistress in her own house, according 
 to the generally accepted opinion. 
 
 "The very first morning after we'd been to church, 
 I says to Rosevear, 'Pluck that fowl.' "Tis plucked 
 already,' says he. And so it was plucked, though it had 
 slipped my mind — all but the wing-feathers that I'd trussed. 
 Then said I, 'Pluck every feather off the wings, for if I say 
 "Pluck," plucked it shall be.'" Mrs. Rosevear spread 
 out her knees, and planted her firm hands on them, as she 
 gazed round at her audience. 
 
 "And plucked it was," she continued, "though there 
 
Little Egypt 31 
 
 never was such a sight as that fowl without any wing- 
 feathers. Us had to eat 'en ourselves, for I couldn't send 
 'en to market like that. But I'd never no more trouble 
 with Rosevear, and what's an old hen to a man that knows 
 he'd better look alive when his missus bids 'en ? " 
 
 "A poor soft head, he must be," sniffed Thyrza, with 
 head in air. She adored Mrs. Velly, and intended to pay 
 back the slight about a woman who is mistress in her own 
 house. "Nooses and nets, indeed, I wonder you bain't 
 'shamed to sit there, telling up such old trade." 
 
 Mrs. Rosevear sat aghast at the minx ; then she turned to 
 Mrs. Velly, with a wink, and began to hum — 
 
 "A sweet pretty maiden sat under a tree, 
 She sighed and said, Would that I married might be." 
 
 " 'Tis a poor tale," she concluded, turning again towards 
 Thyrza, "for a woman that can't get a man. And your 
 cheeks be beginning to fall in, too." 
 
 The air Mrs. Rosevear left behind her in the room was 
 decidedly electric. 
 
 "Never mind, Thyrza," said Mrs. Velly, "she's only 
 teasing you, my dear." 
 
 But two round tears rolled down Thyrza's cheek, show- 
 ing the fine grain of her skin as they trickled across it. 
 
 "Fallen in, indeed," chuckled Ambrose. "Let's have a 
 look at 'em," he said, coming near and placing a hand 
 under her chin. 
 
 But thai was too much, and with a jerk Thyrza fled from 
 him and rushed upstairs again. 
 
 "Where's father?" said Ambrose, drawing a three-legged 
 stool up by the side of his mother's chair. 
 
 "In bed, my dear." 
 
 There was a sigh of relief from both, for it was always 
 pleasanter when Mr. Velly had retired. 
 
 "Lad, what's bothering you to-night?" said Mrs. Velly, 
 
32 A Man of Genius 
 
 softly putting a hand on her son's shoulder. She had 
 extinguished the light, and the smouldering firelight flickered 
 on the fronts of her knitting needles. She knitted in the 
 old country fashion, pushing her needles against two corks 
 that were slung round her waist. 
 
 "How did you know, mother?" asked Ambrose, looking 
 up in surprise. 
 
 "My dear, if mothers don't see things, who will? '* 
 
 "I got to thinking, I suppose." 
 
 "About what?" said Mrs. Velly, putting her knitting on 
 the settle and watching the bright head of her son. 
 
 " Of how before you're born everything is settled for 'ee. 
 You're set down in a place and there you have to bide, even 
 if it isn't what you want to do. Here am I, back again, and 
 set down to farm work once more. My three years' train- 
 ing thrown away, and all the struggle you had to get it for 
 me wasted. 'To plough and mow, and reap and sow, and 
 be a farmer's boy.' That's the size of life for me," he said 
 bitterly. 
 
 "Well," said Mrs. Velly, "you know it wasn't any one 
 but yourself that threw up the work in Cornwall to come 
 home here. Why did you do it, if you didn't mean it ? " 
 
 "Mother, it's not fair of you to say that. You know 
 there wasn't money enough for me to stay away longer, or 
 to pay another premium. And," he added in a low voice, 
 "I couldn't leave you any longer with no one to help you 
 with the work and with father." 
 
 "Ambrose," said Mrs. Velly, "I didn't want you to 
 leave, as you know. I've always been a fighter, and fight 
 I shall to the very end. I'd have strained somehow to get 
 you more teaching, I would, indeed. But you acted so 
 hasty. And now, my dear, perhaps it'll only be a short 
 time longer that you're wanted here. He's going down 
 very fast, much faster these last months than ever before. 
 
Little Egypt 33 
 
 Don't give way. Work all you can, and hope. I'll see yuu 
 a great man yet, maybe." 
 
 "Why didn't you leave father years ago?" said Ambrose 
 with uncompromising directness. "I heard a man say 
 to-day, 'Ay, Velly, he's going down, sure 'null.' He goes 
 and drinks away every penny of ready money, and we're 
 two years behind in the rent." 
 
 Mrs. Velly drew a quick breath, as the old do before 
 the daring lawlessness of young thought, that recks nothing 
 of the close ties of habit and ancient obligation. 
 
 "He's treated 'ee badly enough," Ambrose continued. 
 "Long Furlong used to be called Little Egypt, Caleb told 
 me the other day; because, as he said, 'There was a mort 
 of victuals of every sort upon it.' There isn't now, and 
 that's what he meant, of course." 
 
 "Well?" asked Mrs. Velly in a hard voice; there was 
 more to come, as she knew. 
 
 "And I'm tied to a plough handle and with nothing to 
 show for it, that's the worst of it. I can't even have six- 
 pence for a box of pencils. Why on earth you should 
 stick to him I don't know. It isn't as if it was any good, 
 either." 
 
 "Ambrose, I want to show you something, something 
 you've never heard tell of before," said Mrs. Velly, with a 
 laugh that had the quiver of tears in it. 
 
 Lighting a candle she led him down the passage to the 
 best room with its album-crowded table and ancient piano. 
 In the dark corner behind the door was a carved oak chest, 
 which Ambrose now remembered that he had never seen 
 open. Placing her candle on the ground and taking a key 
 from her pocket, Mrs. Velly knelt down, turned the key in 
 the lock and raised the lid. Then she lifted the candle- 
 stick and held it over the dark interior of the chest. Ambrose 
 exclaimed and suddenly knelt by his mother's side. The 
 3 
 
34 A Man of Genius 
 
 oak case looked like a tomb, for hidden in the shadows 
 of it lay a white baby j&gure. As he stooped closer he saw 
 that it was carved in marble, with tiny hands crossed over 
 its bare breast, above the curving limbs of infantile love- 
 liness. 
 
 "Mother, what is it?" he cried, putting both his arms 
 round her. As she felt the touch of his hard young body 
 she quivered, for to every woman, even to one who has 
 borne a man child, the half-known power of the body of 
 man, the life-bringer, is strange, mysterious, compelling. 
 
 "That's my baby girl Janie. She died when a sculptor 
 lodged here with us one summer. He asked if he might 
 make a model of her, and he did. Then, months after, 
 when he'd gone back to London, he sent me this. She was 
 born long afore I had you, cheeld. I'll tell 'ee all I can." 
 
 "Don't, if it hurts you. Don't, mother !'* He could 
 feel her heavy, painful breathing against his side. 
 
 "I must, Ambrose. It'll tell what I want 'ee to know. 
 Janie come to us, to father and me, after we'd been married 
 a year." 
 
 Ambrose nodded, his passionate eyes fixed on his mother's 
 face, as they both crouched by the side of the child's casket. 
 
 "But she wasn't born right," said Mrs. Velly at last, 
 " not as she ought to ha' been, not as she is there in the old 
 ancient chest." 
 
 The good, fair whiteness of the child's body gleamed 
 almost luminously from the shadowy corner. 
 
 "Your father wasn't steady one night when he took me 
 out in a boat, and in getting out I had a fall, and Janie was 
 born, only a seven months' child, with her little feet all 
 crushed. She never would have walked, Ambrose." 
 
 "And father?" 
 
 "He never looked but once at her. He cursed himself, 
 and — I hated him. I never let 'en come near me, as a wife 
 
Little Egypt 35 
 
 should, not for years." Mrs. Velly knelt, leaning over the 
 side of the chest to avoid her son's eyes. 
 
 *' Don't go on, mother. Why should you tell me this ? " 
 
 "I must, for you won't understand else. And then he 
 went away from me — not in one way, for he bided most 
 times home here, for all that folks could tell. But I wasn't 
 a wife to 'en all those years. I sent 'en away — to others, 
 and so he went down. I did it, Ambrose." 
 
 "No, no, mother," said Ambrose, getting up and moving 
 restlessly about the room. The strong, alert woman of 
 every day seemed pleading with her son. 
 
 "Yes, I did. And when I found out what he'd come to, 
 I had you, sonny." 
 
 "WTiy do you tell me this?" said Ambrose fiercely. 
 "Why should I know? And it's been agony for you to tell 
 me. Whatever you've done, he's paid back, God knows." 
 
 "This is why. I drove 'en down, because I'd a heart 
 that wouldn't forgive; for it was he that I had waited for, 
 trembling as a maid will when she waits in the dimpsy for 
 her man. He was the man that gave me the chillern that 
 lay on my breast; he was the man that loved me — ay, 
 and loves me still, for all I've had — blows." 
 
 "No, mother !" 
 
 "Iss, child; but he's the thing that makes me and keeps 
 me a woman with a heart in my breast, not a stone. He'd 
 be life to me down in hell. That's why women like me 
 don't leave their men." 
 
 " Mother, I'll help 'ee. I'll never be the least of a burden 
 to 'ee again. I'll keep things going; I'll chuck my darned 
 pencils out to sea. I'll work harder than I ever have afore." 
 
 "Eh, lad," she said, clasping him with a laugh and a 
 shake as he knelt beside her again. " Do you think 'twas 
 for that I ripped up my life for 'ee to look into? Young 
 things be like turkeys — a rare trouble to hatch, regular 
 
36 A Man of Genius 
 
 churchyard for worriting deaths, and little profit when they 
 come to market. It's this, lad," she said, drawing him 
 up to her shoulder, "you're a man now, and this man's 
 body that I bore has a man's passions. There's things 
 that a lad doesn't talk to his mother about, and so she must 
 talk to him as well as she can. Mind, boy, when your 
 members will hardly obey 'ee, that you'm making or marring, 
 not your own life, but a maiden's, and many more than one 
 maiden's, belike. 'Tis two souls and two lives that's held 
 in your straining arms and lives on and on, for ages and 
 ages, maybe; and pain or sorrow or peace and blessing 
 waiting for 'ee at the end of the lane. Eh, lad, God keep 
 'ee and bless 'ee and guide 'ee ! " 
 
 She held him for a moment and then watched him 
 stumble half -blindly out of the room, all the vivid fire of 
 the bliss and agony of the bygone years flashing from her 
 eyes. Then she shivered, and drew the grey, three-cornered 
 shawl closer over her tired body. 
 
 Still, she had misunderstood the meaning of her boy's 
 perplexity. Being a woman she saw mainly the passionate 
 side of life, the power that lights the hearth-fire and fills the 
 cradle or — devastates and wrecks and ruins. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 ARMIGER 
 
 SUDDENLY Darracott awoke, and sitting up stretched 
 the cramp from his stiffened limbs. From the ghm- 
 mering window-square came a faint hght, which at first he 
 took to be that of the evening dimness, till in one blinding 
 shock he remembered last night and his neglected watch. 
 Yet in the same moment came the frenzied attempt to flee 
 from consequences that follows hard on error; so often he 
 had watched uselessly that this night, of all nights, there 
 could have been no signals from the sea. Then, praying 
 madly that whatever had happened during the past night 
 might be as though it had not been, praying that the destiny 
 which had, like all destiny, flowed over him from behind, 
 might be reversed, he opened the door and went out. 
 Walking along the cliffs he strained his eyes under the 
 penthouse of his outstretched palm, while the sun rose. 
 
 Beyond the glittering channel of the Severn Sea the 
 Welsh shores lay drawn in shadowy lines of silver-grey. 
 Lundy was but a faint blue cloud when seen from the 
 uplands where the sunlight was beginning to flash on the 
 burnished barley fields and to blaze on the black cliffs, tree- 
 veiled on their slopes or heather-crowned in purple. Away 
 to the right, with its head in a veil of mist, stood Hartland 
 Point. Seawards the misty curtains, called the pride of the 
 morning, were lifting, while the sunlight pierced through 
 them here and there, kindling the sea into laughing discs 
 of quivering gold. 
 
 37 
 
38 A Man of Genius 
 
 Each wave that broke on the rocks below was a wonder, 
 for the wind, now blowing steadily off the land, caught the 
 spray ere the wave broke, and blew it backwards in silvery 
 foam across the translucent emerald behind. Wave after 
 wave was thus caught, tossed backward, and turned into 
 a glory of sight and sound. The sea and the wind were at 
 play in the shimmer of mist and sunshine; in the roar 
 of the incoming tide that mingled with the laughing fall 
 of spray; in the splash of foam on the shark 's-tooth rocks 
 beneath the encircling cliffs. Never a moment's pause was 
 there in the mighty diapason of sound, never a moment of 
 sameness in the shifting of sunshine and shadow. 
 
 Then, as Darracott reached the cliff called Damehole, 
 he saw what, after all, he had always expected to see — 
 wreckage. Heaving at the edge of the tide was a mass 
 of spars, the broken fragments of a ship's fittings, mingled 
 with bedding. No derelict was visible, though at low tide 
 her masts would probably rise above the water-line. 
 
 After this, Darracott knew he could never be the same 
 man again; for being one of the older volunteers at the 
 life-saving station, no watch had been kept on him to see 
 that he performed his duty. In the first moment his mind 
 reconstructed the scene of the tragedy, the dragging anchors, 
 the flares sent up again and again, without answer from the 
 shore where their own kin slept as peacefully as the sea- 
 mews. Yet he found that at the coastguard look-out, where 
 two men had been at watch all night, not a light had been seen . 
 
 "But from here," said the spruce young boatman in 
 charge, "she couldn't have been seen signalling; for if she 
 went ashore on Smoothlands she was never within sighting 
 range of the point. At Quay her lights would have been 
 seen. Who was there?" 
 
 "I was; and I never seed a light of any sort, beyond the 
 ordinary." 
 
Armiger 39 
 
 "Yet 'twasn't a thick night, neither." 
 
 "There wasn't any signal to be seen from there. If there 
 had been, I couldn't have missed it; of that I'll take my 
 oath," persisted Darracott. 
 
 Had he been more in the habit of shirking his duty, 
 Darracott would have repeated his untruth far less firmly. 
 But when all his world was crashing into atoms around 
 him, the only hope of being able to exist at all lay in denial, 
 and he clung to it as a drowning man to a spar; he would 
 have clung to it in the face of actual disproof. But of this 
 he knew there was no possibility, since his master, the 
 farmer appointed by the Board of Trade to be answerable 
 for the look-out, had doubtless relied so entirely on Darra- 
 cott's trustworthy character that he had made no inspection. 
 Almost worse than the lost lives was the thought of how 
 he had failed in his trust. 
 
 In the course of the day there came ashore one body 
 and a staved-in boat, with the name Flying Foam on it. 
 Although no derelict had yet been seen, it was ascertained 
 that she was a small Welsh coaler from Swansea, with five 
 men aboard, whether ill-found with life-saving appliances 
 and signalling apparatus could not be known until the 
 inquest on the body of the sailor. It was expected that the 
 other four would probably come ashore on the ninth day. 
 
 Darracott worked in the hours that followed with a vigour 
 that was almost superhuman, trying instinctively to deaden 
 his senses. There was something already of the furtive 
 look of a hunted thing about his eyes, for he became aware 
 that a rumour was spreading that he had not been at the 
 rocket-house. Somehow the man carried an unmistakeable 
 air of doubt about him — or so at least he himself fancied. 
 But in the thought of his own trouble, his fears for Thvrza 
 were heightened fiftyfold, and what had been before an 
 ebullition of jealousy was now a steady purpose to drive 
 
 ^ 0~ THE 
 
 I I?' JVC DC ITV 
 
40 A Man of Genius 
 
 him into precipitate and, therefore foolish, action. He had 
 determined on an appeal to Ambrose Velly. 
 
 In the afternoon of the same day Ambrose had ridden 
 over to the village of Sutcombe, there to make sketches 
 and notes of some of the most remarkable wood-carving 
 to be seen in any country church; for, as behoves a lover 
 of Gothic architecture, he was vastly enamoured of the 
 nervous, life-like studies of plants and animals to be found 
 in mediaeval stone and woodwork. For some time he had 
 been making it a practice to visit whatever churches he 
 could with portfolio and notebook; he was, like those of 
 his generation, keeping alight the Lamp of Memory, in 
 the hope that some day he would be able himself to light 
 the Lamp of Power. With this end in view he had, indeed, 
 worked many hours in a stone-carver's yard, only to be dis- 
 gusted at the rule-of-thumb methods. 
 
 Within the church at Sutcombe there was a cool, whisper- 
 ing silence, for the ancient building seemed reverting from 
 the hewn temple to the woodland shrine, from the later 
 creed of sacrifice to the earlier one of nature worship. 
 Emerald moss was creeping up the granite of the pillars, and 
 the carved bench-ends were gnarled and eaten as if by the 
 action of wind and rain. Against the window-panes green 
 boughs rustled tidings of bird-haunted forest peace. 
 
 Through the open doorway there came the thrill of a 
 humming monotone, that sounded like a droning incanta- 
 tion to some spirit of sunlight, or, maybe, some "Greek 
 invocation to call fools into a circle." Practically it only 
 meant that a human voice was being used as a tuning-fork, 
 for after a few seconds came the burst of song that the 
 humming had heralded. 
 
 See what love, like mighty oceans ! 
 
 See what floods of mercy rise ! 
 
 See Him now, the Prince of glory, 
 
 To redeem our life He dies I 
 
Armiger 41 
 
 The solemn minor thirds of men's voices came through 
 the porch as from a tunnel. They were singing *' Ebenezer," 
 the hymn which has gathered into its melody, through long 
 association, all the pain of loss and the hope of faith. The 
 lad in the church doorway vibrated to the deep tones, for 
 all his senses thrilled as easily to the breath of joy and 
 pain as the leaves of an aspen to the shiver of the wind. 
 
 Then he frowned and hastily shut the door behind him, 
 for the sounds meant that the choir excursion was probably 
 on its way to inspect the church, and that his solitude would 
 be disturbed. He stood for a moment listening, till the 
 hymn changed into the shouts that accompany the course of 
 a group of young men and boys through nutty hedges, with 
 festoons of honeysuckle to be pulled for the grasping. As 
 he waited, Ambrose Velly's face cleared, for he heard them 
 passing down the lane to the side of the church. 
 
 It was with a stealthy, almost furtive, air that he tip-toed 
 silently up the aisle in the manner of one approaching 
 something infinitely precious. Finally, at the altar rails, he 
 knelt, for in this place of woodland shadows, even at mid- 
 day, the light was dim. He began to pass his hands lovingly 
 over the carved woodwork, as a blind man touches a well- 
 loved face. That was not enough; ultimately he lit a 
 match to see better into those hidden corners where the old 
 workers often put their most loving toil. It was, indeed, 
 an exquisite thing before which Ambrose knelt, being all 
 that remains of a carved wooden screen that, for perfection 
 of design and craftsmanship, must have been of old one of 
 the glories of North Devon, the land of wood carvers. ^ 
 
 Outside the church the glittering haze of late summer 
 brooded over the lanes, now gorgeous with the purple and 
 gold of the August flowers, that from the hedges cast the 
 dust of pollen and the scent of lush growth in all directions. 
 Butterflies and moths of all species, from the homely 
 
42 A Man of Genius 
 
 meadow-brown and cabbage white to the splendid peacock 
 and the silvery fritillary, poised and fluttered above the 
 wild scented tangle. As he gazed and touched, the lanes 
 outside came back to the lad, just as, centuries ago, they 
 must have been present to the eye of the designer of these 
 panels. For here was twining ivy, bold hemp agrimony, 
 whose fluff of pollen had flown against his face half an 
 hour before, and wild maiden-hair fern, that clings to the 
 barrenest walls of this land. It was a revelation in design 
 to Ambrose, and he drew a breath of satisfaction as he 
 realised how the skilled worker thinks the thoughts of the 
 great artificer, nature, over again, for the glory of his own 
 handiwork. 
 
 The boy had been but a few minutes bending over his 
 drawing-board, for he was beginning a sketch of the panels, 
 when the door of the church burst open with a crash that 
 startled the artist, who jumped to his feet at the noise. 
 The great figure that advanced up the aisle was rumbling 
 out quaint sounds that echoed eerily, exotically, up the little 
 church, as it hummed the rollicking music of "Oberon in 
 Fairy Land " — 
 
 We eat their cakes and sip their wine; 
 
 Oh, then, what sport ! The wine runs short, 
 
 The blushing cheeks with anger glow; 
 
 Their cakes they miss, and shriek, "Who's this?" 
 
 We answer nought but ho! ho! ho! 
 
 "Naught but ho, ho, ho ! " repeated Dr. Cleopas Dayman, 
 his leathery lips playing in the mobile fashion of a baby's. 
 He was a huge man, big-boned and heavy, with a broad 
 paunch that he loved to cover with resplendent waistcoats, 
 and a wide face that glowed in its setting of silvery hair 
 like the polished pink lip of a great sea shell. He was 
 a skilful rider, otherwise the two stout roadsters who 
 carried him to his patients would never have been able for 
 
Armiger 43 
 
 their work. In a house he always plunged straight for the 
 nearest chair, sofa, bed, or bench; out-of-doors he was 
 always seen mounted on a great horse. Dr. Dayman, 
 in fact, sat through life, and "as tall as Dr. Dayman's 
 horse" had become as common as the familiar phrase in 
 these parts, "as dark as a Welcombe woman." 
 
 With wide-awake hat pushed far back, and great legs 
 a-straddle, he marched up the aisle. 
 
 "Hullo, boy," he cried, desisting from Oberon, "what 
 are you up to here? Hum, hum, not so bad," he said, in- 
 specting the drawing. "So," continued he, dropping heav- 
 ily on the cushioned seat of a pew, "you're back again. And 
 I hear you like the building trade fine. Well, it's a bit 
 hard on you. But — 
 
 There's many a dark and cloudy morning 
 Turns out to be a sunshiny day. 
 
 And there's one sure thing in this life that, in ninety-nine 
 cases out of a hundred, a strong desire finds a way. You'll 
 get back to your work somehow, I'll take my oath. You 
 like it, don't you ? " 
 
 "Like it," burst out Ambrose, "why it's the very King 
 of arts ! " 
 
 "So it is, boy, so it is. A great architect is the master- 
 artist, for he has to make every one of the arts serve him." 
 
 "My old master used to say that the ideal architect must 
 study everything; form, even the human, for that is the 
 most perfect; emotion, to know the most noble; matter, 
 for in that he works; colour, for by light and shade he must 
 express what the universe means to him. That's what he 
 told me once." 
 
 "Ay," said Dr. Dayman, bending shaggy brows at the 
 youth who stood in front of him, "you'd give your eye- 
 tooth to be a great artist, I see. A lusty chap, too, and 
 lusty when you were dropped, as I remember perfectly." 
 
44 A Man of Genius 
 
 The doctor laughed, recalling the spirit of prophecy that 
 had come upon him, when he had ushered the boy into the 
 world. He remembered now his own words, spoken as he 
 handled the little body and tested the pliant members with 
 his great finger and thumb. 
 
 "Dammy," said he, "this lad's made for the joys of earth. 
 For the joys of earth, or nobody ever was. He'll suck the 
 sweetness out of a posy or two, I'll go bail." 
 
 "Just you believe in yourself and your own desire," he 
 said, "and you'll get back to the work you love. Argent, a 
 chevron between three castles or," he continued medita- 
 tively. "It's bad heraldry, but do you know what it is ? " 
 
 "It's the Velly arms," said Ambrose. 
 
 "Spurious, of course," said Dr. Dayman, "but after a 
 fashion, I suppose you can call yourself Armiger. And 
 none the better for that, mind you. You're none the 
 more likely to succeed for having the blood of the petty 
 squirearchy in your veins. What was your mother's 
 name ? " 
 
 Dr. Dayman was great on breed in men and strains in 
 horses. 
 
 "Dark, De Arc, I've heard say. Weavers and smiths, 
 I believe," said Ambrose. 
 
 "That's better, that's better. Huguenots, that'll be. 
 You might get the fine artist hand that way." 
 
 "But it says the Velly family are extinct on the monu- 
 ment at Hartland." 
 
 "Oh, a collateral line, yours, perhaps. But what's 
 brought you over here as far as Sutcombe? It's a good 
 ride from Long Furlong. I saw your horse tied up outside, 
 so I came in to see what you were about." 
 
 Ambrose grinned, for the doctor's curiosity was as in- 
 satiable as a child's. 
 
 "I wanted to draw these panels. They're so fine," he 
 
Armiger 45 
 
 said, touching them lovingly. "There's the plant that is 
 growing outside." 
 
 "Ay, hemp agrimony. Carved here by hands that are 
 long since dead," said Dr. Dayman, who under his rough 
 exterior was a man of fine taste and cultured instincts. 
 
 "That's the wonderful part of it," Ambrose blurted out. 
 "But the earth's the oldest, after all. I thought of that 
 t'other day when I kicked a clod to pieces. It's a deal 
 older than this oak-work, and yet we like this because it's so 
 precious old, but we never think of the earth being old." 
 
 His cheeks flushed and his hands trembled. Like a 
 virgin at the door of the temple of life, Ambrose felt him- 
 self drawing the curtain of the world of thought, that world 
 of infinite renunciation and lasting peace. 
 
 "Hullo, hullo," said Dr. Dayman. "What's this? Can 
 'ee think then, lad ? " 
 
 But Ambrose had become sheepish again. He wanted 
 to talk of the interest of design, of the wave-forms he had 
 found in stone-work, but he dared not begin, partly from 
 shyness, and partly from that inability to marshal his ideas 
 which is the bane of the slow-moving country mind. 
 
 "Well," said the doctor, seeing that no answer was forth- 
 coming, "it's the human being who put brain and heart into 
 his work that interests us in old work, I reckon. The man 
 that Avrought it is in this oak- work. That's why we love it 
 more than the clod of earth." 
 
 Ambrose sighed with the satisfaction of solution, as they 
 began to walk round the church. 
 
 "But," said Ambrose, "what troubles me is how we've 
 lost the power of putting ourselves into our work. That's 
 just what we can't do. Look how crisp that leafage is," he 
 said, pointing to a carved bench-end. "All we can do is to 
 copy, and lifelessly at that." 
 
 "We've eaten of the tree of knowledge, boy," said 
 
46 A Man of Genius 
 
 Dr. Dayman; "they were eating of the tree of life. They 
 were children carving because they loved to do it; but we 
 are learned archaeologists, who know everything about the 
 angel fashions in dress of the fourteenth century — and 
 nothing about angels as they are to-day." 
 
 "We can never become children again, I suppose," said 
 Ambrose sadly. 
 
 "No; we've got to become men. When we can love 
 beauty as a man loves, we shall have the beautiful, manlike 
 things that only a man can make. But there ! the Sublime 
 and Beautiful isn't my province." 
 
 As a matter of fact, as Macaulay said of Horace Walpole, 
 Dr. Dayman's department was rather the Odd ; he loved a 
 collection of toby jugs infinitely more than the dusky 
 shadows of cathedral arches, if the truth must be told. 
 
 "And," said he, pointing to the fine bench-ends of carved 
 oak, "there's a deal more of humanity than that of the 
 craftsman in a place like this; for where the artificers gave 
 skill, the gentle family gave wealth. There you have the 
 arms of the Prideaux and Granville families, and the Com- 
 munion Service was given by the Prideaux ancestors. The 
 whole place is writ over with the men of the past. You 
 want, as they did, to write your name in stone. Isn't it so ? " 
 
 Ambrose nodded. 
 
 "I'll tell you something," said Dr. Dayman as they stood 
 in the porch. " When I was a lad I wanted to be a painter, 
 but when my father drove me to it I became a sawbones, 
 and felt like a Michael Angelo studying form whenever 
 I handled a leg-bone. Lord ! what a fool I was. But do 
 you know where the folly came in?" 
 
 "No," said Ambrose. 
 
 "In not sticking to what I loved," said he, emphasising 
 his point with a dig in Ambrose's ribs. " ' Go back to your 
 gallipots, John Keats,' said they. And I was fool enough 
 
Armiger 47 
 
 to go. Don't you stick to your furrows too long. But 
 they'll teach you what you won't learn from any one else. 
 What's outside there?" he said, pointing to the horizon. 
 
 "Sky and moor and fields and sea," said Ambrose. 
 
 "Sky and moor and fields and sea," repeated the doctor. 
 "Just so. And let them be your masters for the time." 
 
 The two stood looking at the mossy tombstones outside. 
 
 "Come over," said the doctor, "to Hartland, and see 
 me some evening. I've some new pictures to show you. 
 And you haven't been to see the Westaways yet. Why 
 not ? " he said, looking keenly in the lad's face. 
 
 Mr. Westaway was the Vicar of Hartland, and from him 
 had come the book on architecture that had carried all 
 Ambrose Velly's longings into one channel. 
 
 "I couldn't," he answered, looking away. "You see, it 
 was they who put me on the path like, and now I've turned 
 back. It seems ungrateful, but father forced it on me." 
 
 "Ay, I see. Full of high-falutin', as a lad should be. 
 Well, Ambrose, you're a nice boy, and I wouldn't say but 
 what you'll be a fine man, some day. You'll drop some of 
 the high-falutin' on the way, but you're the better for it 
 now. Only, I'd go and see the Westaways, if I were you." 
 
 "Mr. Westaway gave me my first lessons in mathematics 
 and Miss Damaris first showed me, in her night-class, what 
 a fine picture means." 
 
 "Ay," said the doctor, "so she did. I wonder whether 
 she was a fool to do it?" 
 
 "Princess Damaris, a fool !" exclaimed Ambrose. 
 
 "Well, for all she's Princess Damaris, yet she's a woman, 
 and there's apt to be a strain of folly in 'em. And as for 
 petticoats, just you keep clear of 'em, till you're my age," 
 he shouted back, till in the curves of the lane his leit motif 
 of Ho! ho! ho! was lost. 
 
 "The old buffoon," said Ambrose to himself. Yet he 
 
48 A Man of Genius 
 
 felt like a flower expanding its leaves in the sunshine; for, 
 after all, it was delightful to be at home again, where a 
 little court of admirers, including even this old free-talker, 
 paid toll to his charm. 
 
 A few hours later Ambrose had left Sutcombe, buried in 
 its mossy woodland behind him, and with Bradworthy on 
 his right hand, was entering the wild, bleak corner of North 
 Devon that is buttressed by the cliffs of Hartland, the 
 Promontory of Hercules of the ancients. 
 
 Over Bursdon Moor the wind shivered from off the sea, 
 whistling shrewdly through the stunted furze-bushes and 
 stirring the tufts of bell-heather that grew along the low 
 stone walls. The sunset light gleamed on the surface 
 of the road that wound, like a trail of white ribbon, up one 
 side of the hill and down the other. On either hand 
 stretched the moor, reed-clad and furze-dotted, with vivid 
 patches marking the "meshes" or "mires," perilous to the 
 bullocks of the twelve farmers who share the grazing rights 
 of the moor. Lundy Island, out beyond, lay stretched a 
 purple mirage against the sunset bar of golden red that 
 bounded the western horizon, dividing the silver of the sea 
 from the angry dun colour of the sky, and turning the 
 reeds at the edge of the moor into tendrils of waving soot 
 against the flame of its line of fire. 
 
 Presently out of the purple swung a globe of golden 
 light, swung for a moment and passed, like the visible sign 
 of a watcher who slumbers not. It was but Lundy Light, 
 yet in the midst of nature's sleep of hidden power, in the 
 menace of the grey waters and the whistle of the chill 
 wind, this puny sign of human forethought brought a quick 
 catching of the breath; not so helpless after all the men 
 who drag* a living from the rock-bound shore, the salt cliff 
 pastures, and the sedgy marshes inland. 
 
 It is a strange land, that corner of Devon through which 
 
Armiger 49 
 
 he rode, a' land that more than any other part of the west 
 recalls the loneliness of the scenery suggested in the Book 
 of Job. Bare-breasted to the starlight and sunshine lie the 
 quaggy moorlands and half-regained fields, intersected by 
 long white roads that wind past ancient farm-houses, built 
 with cob walls many feet in thickness, each with the stone 
 hepping-stock outside the door. All the westward roads 
 diverge towards the headland that gazes seawards like a 
 colossal fortress set against the raging of the Atlantic 
 breakers. 
 
 In summer the air has a quality of intense purity that 
 imparts an eastern brilliance to the stars. But over the 
 cliffs, at all times of the year, the sea-mist may come in 
 great waves, blotting out farm after farm in a curtain of 
 silvery foam, that covers the thatch with a gem-like moisture 
 and encourages the growth of lichen on the slate-roofs and 
 of clinging ferns in every cranny. A land it is where nature 
 visibly weaves the garment by which we know her, a land 
 where, in turns, the winds hurtle, the sea-fog creeps, the 
 stars gleam and the sun burns. 
 
 As Ambrose turned the corner of the lane that leads to 
 Long Furlong, he could see the light thrown across the road 
 in a long ray from the open door of Vinnicombe's cottage. 
 In the brightness of it, he could also discern a man's figure 
 leaning against the wall of the farm-garden, apparently 
 waiting there for some one. As he drew near he recognised 
 the hero of the day's excitement, the labourer supposed to 
 have been on the look-out at Hartland Quay. 
 
 The cheeping voices of children, like the cries of tiny 
 birds, issued from the tightly-shuttered cottage room. 
 From where Darracott stood he could hear every word 
 they said, as they sang in a ''round." 
 
 "Daddy in the pulpit," chirped one voice, llule-like in 
 its tone. 
 
50 A Man of Genius 
 
 "Wouldn't say his prayers," brayed a second. 
 
 "Down came the devil," yelled a third. 
 
 "And knocked 'en downstairs," concluded every one. 
 
 Darracott instinctively chopped with his hand, and off 
 went the head of a wild arum berry in the cottage, as the 
 shadows of three little heads nodded on the brightly lit 
 wall revealed by the open door. It seemed strange to him 
 that the laughter of children should have the temerity to 
 sound so gaily in the close neighbourhood of his tortured heart. 
 
 Then he came forward to meet Ambrose at the corner 
 where he must turn into the yard. 
 
 "Might I have a word with you, sir?" said Darracott, 
 putting up his hand to the younger man's bridle-rein. 
 
 "With me?" said Ambrose, reining in suddenly in 
 response to the urgency in Darracott's face. "Why," he 
 exclaimed, after a second's inspection to make sure, "you're 
 the man there's been all this talk about to-day! Well, I 
 don't know that I am surprised at your coming. I sup- 
 pose you thought you would take the bull by the horns." 
 
 Ambrose Velly's tone was half jesting, but his eyes grew 
 hard with determination and something that closely re- 
 sembled scorn. 
 
 Darracott noticed the hardening face above him, but 
 was completely at a loss to understand it. Yet his own 
 anger rose in answer to Velly's feeling of aversion. 
 
 "I wanted to speak to 'ee about something that's hard to 
 speak about betwixt man and man," he said slowly. 
 
 "Well, get on, man, and have it over," said Ambrose, dis- 
 mounting. "Come, walk down the road and have your 
 say. I reckon I can give a guess at what you want." 
 
 " 'Tis Thyrza Braund and what I seed last night — her 
 dancing to your fiddling." 
 
 "Why," said Ambrose, standing still in amazement, " what 
 the devil do you mean by speaking to me like this? And 
 
Armiger 5 1 
 
 what has it got to do with you what Thyrza and I may 
 choose to do ? " 
 
 "Ay, that's what I said to myself, too. But now that 
 I'm in trouble myself, I know how hard 'tis to bear. I'll 
 not stand aside and see wrong done." 
 
 ''Wrong done!" exclaimed Ambrose hotly. 
 
 "Wait a bit, sir. I said to myself, she's but a child and 
 he's but a lad, and they don't know what's in the heart of 
 men and women. For I love her dearly, and I wouldn't 
 have her come to harm. Last night, her let fall some 
 words that made me think, and then, when I seed 'ee with 
 her, I knowed what she meant. God know's there's trouble 
 enough in the world, without any more coming for want of 
 a little plain speaking!" 
 
 "Look here, Darracott. I should have thought if you 
 cared for her, you wouldn't want her name bandied about 
 same as this is." 
 
 "I thought of that, too; but when you see a body sinking 
 you don't ask where you're to grip. I want 'ee to leave the 
 cheeld alone. She isn't a mate for the likes of you." 
 
 "Good God, man, what harm should I do her?" 
 
 " I'm a man and you're a boy and she's a cheeld. That's 
 where it all is, sir. And nobody sees so plain as folks that 
 love." 
 
 "You think she cares for me?" asked Ambrose. 
 
 "I know it," answered Darracott quietly. 
 
 The idea was undoubtedly pleasant to Ambrose, more 
 especially as it fell in with certain suspicions of his own. 
 He saw a mental picture of a bright personality that flashed 
 triumphantly through life; it was himself, and he held him- 
 self very upright in the joy of the moment. 
 
 Then he laughed. 
 
 "W\v, what a fool you must be, to come and talk like 
 this to me, Darracott ! A stark, staring lunatic." 
 
52 A Man of Genius 
 
 "I've no hopes for myself; only thought for her, sir." 
 
 "You're a good fellow, anyway," said Ambrose heartily. 
 "And I'm not a cad, though you think so. I give you my 
 word of honour that I'll be as careful of Thyrza as you could 
 be yourself. There, will that satisfy you ? Why, I wouldn't 
 hurt a little kitten like that for worlds!" 
 
 He felt Armiger, indeed, in the warmth of his own 
 honourable intentions. 
 
 "And besides, I've other things to think about. You're 
 in trouble, and so you go and run your head into an imag- 
 inary mare's nest. Your fears are air-born, man; air-born, 
 I assure you." 
 
 For a moment his manner bore a ludicrous resemblance 
 to Dr. Dayman's, for the lad had an unconscious habit 
 of catching the tricks of voice and manner of any one with 
 whom he came in contact. 
 
 "Anyway," he continued, "in my mother's house Thyrza 
 is in as safe a nest as she would be in yours, Darracott. 
 That I can promise you," he said, shaking back his head 
 with a pleasant sensation of shedding peace all around him. 
 
 "Thank you, sir, for listening," said Darracott, turning 
 back. He had gained at least a little confidence that the 
 lad was forewarned. 
 
 "Here, Darracott, shake hands," said Ambrose, holding 
 out his hand, "for you're a fine chap. And, for the matter 
 of your own trouble, to-day's wreck and all the bother 
 there'll be, don't give it another thought, as far as I am 
 concerned, though I mean now to tell you what I know. 
 I thought 'twas for that you came to see me to-night." 
 
 Darracott stood still, with the stony expression he wore 
 when the wreck was mentioned. 
 
 "It's a damned bad system to give a man a five hours' 
 look-out at night when he's been at work all day. You're 
 the victim of a system. That's what I say about it." 
 
Armiger 53 
 
 "What do you mean — about knowing?" asked Darracott 
 slowly. 
 
 "You weren't on the look-out last night," said Ambrose 
 quietly, "and I know it." 
 
 "I was at the rocket-house," said Darracott dully. 
 
 "Not at two o'clock, then. For I was too excited to get 
 any sleep last night, and I walked over to Quay and looked 
 in at the rocket-station. There was no one there then. It 
 was coming in to gusts of rain; but if they'd sent up distress 
 signals, a man on watch at the Quay would have seen them." 
 
 "They didn't at the Point look-out." 
 
 " 'Twasn't within their sighting range. But you may be 
 perfectly certain that what I know I shall keep to myself. 
 And, as for Thyrza, she'll probably make you a hero, 
 especially if folks take sides against you a bit. That's a 
 woman's way. Anyhow, you've got to live this down. But 
 I shan't give you away." 
 
 As Ambrose turned away from the misery in the man's 
 face, something fluttered painfully in his own throat. But 
 the pity of the human spectacle was soon lost in the pleasant 
 reflection that Darracott's devotion weighed with Thyrza 
 as dust in the balance, compared with the magic of his own 
 indifference. 
 
 From a certain field-gate at Long Furlong, by sitting on 
 the topmost bar, one could see the strip of sea where glide 
 the ships, leaving a trail of black smoke behind them. Out 
 there to Ambrose Velly's boyish eyes had been the place 
 where men fight and win, gaining wealth and power, seeing 
 strange sights and meeting strange enemies; out there was 
 the world, far from the dull furrows of the fields and the 
 drear}' rustle of the reeds. Yet here in these very furrows 
 was Ambrose eating of the tree of life. Or was it the tree 
 of knowledge ? 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 HESPERUS 
 
 ONE evening, a few weeks later, the Rev. David 
 Westaway was sitting in his study at Hartland 
 Vicarage before the roll-top American desk that stood in 
 his mind as a symbol of parish affairs. He leant back in 
 his revolving chair, looking down the length of the room 
 which contained indications of the varying phases of his 
 sixty-one years of life. Floored with carefully-fitted planks 
 of polished wood, it was furnished on one side with a sort 
 of counter filled with trays of coins mounted on velvet; 
 above this stood glass shelves loaded with specimens of 
 china, especially Spode, Barum, and Plymouth ware. 
 Facing these, on the other side of the room, were book- 
 shelves stocked largely with scientific handbooks, from 
 chemistry and archaeology up to biology and psychology. 
 There was a curious absence of theology in any form, un- 
 less a pile of Hihhert Journals came under that head. In 
 strange juxtaposition to the material science of the West 
 a row of works dealing with the wisdom of the East occupied 
 the dark corner by the wall. There was the Rig Veda by 
 the Upanishads, and the Sutra of the Great Renunciation 
 of Gautama Buddha next door to the Koran and the Light 
 of Asia. Appropriately enough, the corner which sheltered 
 these aliens in a country vicarage was the whole length of 
 the room away from the parish desk, for the study, which 
 ran the width of the house, had windows that faced one 
 
 54 
 
Hesperus 55 
 
 another, the front looking out on the square of Hartland 
 village, and the back on a garden, now full of the gorgeous 
 colours of " red-hot pokers " and late sunflowers. The 
 desk looked out on the town place, but the Eastern sages 
 were tucked away in the garden corner. But the most 
 significant part of Mr. Westaway's library was not on these 
 shelves at all; it was packed into the lower drawers of the 
 bureau, and was neither scientific nor theological. 
 
 At the age of sixty most men show on which side of the 
 battlefield of life they have ranged themselves, for they are 
 then, not only men who have lost or won — whatever they 
 set out to gain — but they are also conscious of their own 
 success or failure. In Mr. Westaway's lined face, with the 
 deep wrinkle of depression trenching the base of the pouchy 
 cheeks, there was the look of a man who feared he was 
 beaten. Yet, in the wiry shock of white hair, in the keen 
 glance of his eyes, there was yet a spice left of the power 
 that grips circumstances by the throat and forces them to 
 yield their treasure of opportunity. It was evident, then, 
 that if Mr. Westaway were beaten, he had, at any rate, 
 not yet finished fighting. 
 
 Descended from a line of scholars, schoolmasters and 
 clerics for the most part, he had been a slow youth, whose 
 "late spring" was regarded as a sign of stupidity by his 
 relatives. The Church seemed his fit destiny, for his 
 steady virtues would make him an eminently respectable 
 parish priest, and on a moderate amount of preferment he 
 could certainly count, since several of his connections had 
 reached the safe harbourage of a Cathedral Close. Hence 
 it was almost without volition of his own that David Westa- 
 way found himself passing from one country rectory to 
 another, none of them possessing anything to speak of 
 in the way of income. 
 
 But five years ago, by the death of a north-country uncle 
 
5 6 A Man of Genius 
 
 who had amassed a fortune as a wool manufacturer, he had 
 become a rich man, a very rich man according to his own 
 frugal estimate. For he had known what it is to have to be 
 careful of the coals. The money, chielEly mine shares and 
 railway stock, carried with it no duties, according to the 
 modern habit of reckoning business responsibilities, and 
 merely gave Mr. Westaway an opportunity of gratifying his 
 own cultured tastes. He counted himself, therefore, an 
 exceptionally happy man. 
 
 But the issue proved quite otherwise ; for after his tastes 
 in numismatics had been gratified by the purchase of a few 
 trays of coins, and his virtuoso-like sensibilities soothed by 
 a china plate or two, he found that these delights only 
 scratched the surface of his mind, for he was in truth made 
 rather of the stuff of a thinker than an artist. 
 
 All his life he had known that the walls of the Church he 
 served were being battered by attacks from every side. Yet 
 he was aware that, as an honest man, his daily bread de- 
 pended on his performing the duties of church service and 
 prayer with a measure of belief in the efficacy of these 
 things. Wife and child, house and home, are wonderfully 
 narcotic to the brain and, like many another, Mr. Westaway 
 deliberately refused to know what would either have made 
 him a pauper or a conscious charlatan. Then, too, the 
 loving-kindness of his nature was satisfied by the hallowed 
 spirit of the past, no less than by the charitable oppor- 
 tunities of the present, and both lay within the power of 
 the Church to impart. 
 
 But his newly-acquired wealth gave him a sense of mental 
 freedom, of spiritual boldness and, like a woman who after 
 years of reputed ugliness suddenly finds herself transformed 
 into a beauty by a Paquin gown, Mr. Westaway flowered 
 mentally, giving way at last to his desire to face the truth, 
 or what was accounted truth by his own age. 
 
Hesperus 57 
 
 And now to him it seemed, in his depression, that all his 
 life had been a mere serving of the cult of conventional 
 respectability, of no more concern with man's little span of 
 daylight, or with his long curve of darkness, than the 
 beating of a tom-tom. Thirty years of a man's short life 
 thrown away; it was a bitter reflection and still more bitter 
 when, as Mr. Westaway fancied, the habits of a lifetime have 
 become like a skin which it is agony to slough off. The 
 parish visits, the preparation of sermons, the walk to church 
 with sober gait and eyes, if not commercing with the skies, 
 at any rate, decently cast down; without these what was 
 there left him to do ? Without such tasks, he would count 
 himself nothing but a shadow in a world of realities. 
 
 As he sat leaning back in the quiet room, reviewing the 
 destructive work of the past months, he asked himself what 
 account he could give of the non-faith, or rather of the 
 faith, that was in him. For the attitude of mind perforce 
 adopted by him during his clerical career, had made it as 
 impossible for him to live without some form of faith as it 
 would have been for him to breathe without air. 
 
 To-day the axes that hack at the structure of the Christian 
 Church are being forged everywhere; in the historian's 
 study, in the chemist's laboratory, in the market-place, 
 and in the lecture-room of the student of comparative 
 religion. It was this last that struck the most fatal blow at 
 Mr. Westaway 's faith. For the records of the historian 
 cannot touch the spirit that speaks in the Gospels, even 
 though they be no more than literary monuments; the 
 chemist can only show that beyond the physical world we 
 know, there are yet finer and finer phases of matter than 
 "this muddy vesture of decay," and the man of the world 
 who points to empty churches and millions deaf to the 
 clanging from the church spires has yet to confess that this 
 state of things leaves him dissatisfied. 
 
58 A Man of Genius 
 
 But in the comparative study of religion Mr. Westaway. 
 saw the Church of the East placed over against the Churchi 
 of the West, and found that while the former still tried to 
 preach its message of purity, the latter had largely forgottem 
 its message of love in the labours of the gigantic organisa- 
 tions which men call the Catholic, Protestant and Greekl 
 Churches. For to him the priesthoods stood but for the 
 inculcating of habits of obedience and deference, of mental 
 slavery in the service of a timid civilisation. "This is the|i? 
 way, walk ye in it," said the Churches. Mr. Westaway 
 found that although he had been walking that way, he did 
 not like it. For of what man really craves to know: of 
 whence he comes, whither he goes, and why he lives at all, 
 it seemed to Mr. Westaway that the Church was attempt- 
 ing to give but the vaguest of answers. And, said he to 
 himself, men have to-day lost the inclination to continue 
 burrowing in a rubbish heap for the jewel that their fore- 
 fathers told them was hidden there. 
 
 At this point in the Vicar's reflections the door opened 
 and Ambrose was announced. It was with a feeling that 
 a sunbeam had come into the room that Mr. Westaway got 
 up to greet the young man. He had often felt that it 
 would be the unpaid lessons given to lads like this that 
 would add up to his credit account. Besides, Ambrose 
 had always been his favourite pupil; for it had been a 
 delight to him to see the keen eyes flash, the bright head 
 toss backwards, when a law of number leapt to his mind I 
 within. Mr. Westaway rejoiced in Ambrose Velly's vivid 
 nature, in his craving for emotion, and his capacity for 
 getting it from thought — one of the rarest and most enviable 
 gifts in the world. It even delighted the Vicar to look 
 at the sheen of hair and eyes and skin, young and clear, 
 like the brain within. 
 
 "Well, Ambrose," he said as they sat down, "it*s two 
 
 J 
 
Hesperus 59 
 
 years since you have been here. And now you're home 
 again. I'm sorry for the cause of it; but no one's the 
 worse for having some tangible evil to struggle with some- 
 times. What have you been doing ? " 
 
 ''Learning to draw up sjiecifications mostly. Figuring 
 for ever, areas and strains and weights — and cheapness." 
 
 "Disappointed?" 
 
 "Not a bit, sir ! For that's what I had to learn first. 
 My master didn't talk much, but he knew; and now and 
 again he'd burst out and talk, so that you saw what he 
 cared for. First, I was sent surveying for mine 'setts' up 
 on Caradon, for you know Cornish mining is looking 
 up a bit. Then the last year I've sometimes been a sort 
 of clerk of works at the little buildings — a Methodist chapel 
 or a schoolroom, perhaps. I hked it; it sharpened a 
 fellow's wit. Then evenings I worked at drawing. Oh, 
 I played the virtuous apprentice, I can tell you, sir. The 
 old man had to struggle with — things. So I learnt to do 
 it, too." 
 
 "You went out to find a kingdom, and found " 
 
 "My father's asses," laughed Ambrose. "Well, perhaps 
 so ; but the asses'll come in uncommon handy when I enter 
 into my kingdom." 
 
 The laugh and the blush tempered the arrogance of his 
 speech, as he looked round the room with intense enjoy- 
 ment of its interests, for the bare, bookless, pictureless 
 farm rooms looked desert-like beside this place. 
 
 In many houses the most important part is the front door, 
 for it shuts so much selfishness inside and so much un- 
 satisfied need outside. The Westaway house was by no 
 means of this sort ; it was a wide-open place in every sense 
 of the word, with windows opened to the sunshine, planetary, 
 intellectual, and moral. Its low, wide, easy rooms smelt 
 of books and flowers, of kind thoughts and deep enthusiasms. 
 
6o A Man of Genius 
 
 There Free Russia and the Humanitarian lay cheek by jowl 
 with the Nineteenth Century or the Quarterly Review, for 
 David Westaway liked the bypaths as well as the open high- 
 ways of thought. Not in vain was there carved over the 
 study mantelpiece the sentence — 
 
 Homo sum, nihil humanum a me alienum puto. 
 
 Ambrose read the inscription and thought it somehow most 
 inappropriate to his host; for to the youth's knowledge of 
 the rougher side of life there was something old-maidish in 
 Mr. Westaway 's figure and surroundings. 
 
 Then he started to his feet as the Vicar's daughter came 
 into the room. Ambrose had been trying vainly to screw i 
 up his courage to enquire if she were at home. 
 
 At first sight Damaris Westaway's manner was her 
 greatest charm; gracious, peaceful and open-hearted, it 
 calmed irritated minds, soothed evil tempers and, greatest 
 triumph of all, suggested no shadow of lethargy. The mind 
 behind the blue-grey eyes, the blue-grey of the far hills, was 
 alert, the heart quick beating with the tide of life, and the 
 pulses rhythmic with the great calm things of the world. 
 The long oval of her face that seldom pulsed with colour, 
 the straight eyebrows, the firmly closed, yet full lips, matched 
 the direct glance of her eyes, the lithe swing of her slim 1| 
 body, the slight curves of her breast, neither full nor 
 meagre; a well-poised woman, whose body had not 
 grown at the expense of her head, nor her heart at the 
 expense of either. 
 
 She greeted Ambrose warmly, while Dr. Dayman stood 
 in the doorway behind with a great portfolio under his arm. 
 
 "Now," he said, without pausing for salutations, for he 
 was almost as much at home in this house as in his own 
 next door, "Now, I've had a deuced hard day and I'm 
 going to sit in the easiest chair in the room, lean back, shut 
 
Hesperus 6 1 
 
 my eyes, and listen to you, Princess, while you play Chopin 
 and then sing the Jewel Song from 'Faust,' over in the 
 drawing-room yonder. We'll have the two doors open, and 
 then your voice will come from the distance." 
 
 "Where you like it best, doctor," she said, laughing 
 back over her shoulder as she crossed the hall to obey his 
 orders. 
 
 "And if anybody has any objection, let him keep it to 
 himself," said the doctor, paying no attention to her gibe, 
 but settling himself comfortably for his pleasure. 
 
 Mr. Westaway moved restlessly in his chair, for the 
 moonlit passion of the Chopin music was disquieting to 
 him. The movement was symbolic of the contradiction 
 that had been a trouble to him all his life — a contradiction 
 that was crystallised, as it were, in the books on political 
 economy that lay packed in the bottom drawers of his 
 bureau. For the crisis in his mind was not intellectual 
 merely, but social mainly, and it w^as not only on his pro- 
 fession, but on his wealth, that the iconoclastic spirit of 
 to-day seemed to him to be laying its hands. 
 
 He read little political economy as a rule, till one day 
 there came into his hands, sent by mistake from his book- 
 seller, a packet of strangely disquieting works, translated 
 from Russian and German. As he read, the books hit 
 him through a curious personal foible, as, indeed, great 
 conceptions often do. He was a rabid lover of order, and 
 unless he knew the house from cellar to attic was what 
 Damaris called "straight," he was unhappy and restless. 
 He loved the country mainly because it brought less evi- 
 dence to his senses of the presence of wreckage — human 
 and otherwise. London was always unbearable to him 
 for more than a few days, because of the miserable phan- 
 toms who haunt its pavements and loom up its squalid side 
 Streets. But here, in the awful realism of the novels, or 
 
62 A Man of Genius 
 
 in the even more awful statistics of the political econo- 
 mists, there stared him in the face the disorder of the 
 human universe; so many millions hungry, so much that 
 might feed them going to waste. Room for all, and crowded 
 alleys swarming with human beings like lice on the crannies 
 of an ancient house. 
 
 The idea became an obsession, till now he was face to 
 face with his own life, his own wealth. For the conviction 
 came to him that he, personally, was a factor that added 
 to the sum total of the world's disorder. In this state of 
 mind he came across the work in which the great Russian 
 thinker, Tolstoi, dissects the cause of this evil, the human 
 reliance on force. "But I say unto you that ye resist not 
 evil"; night and day, of late, these words were before Mr. 
 Westaway. For his wealth was supported by the arm of 
 force, and protected by all the legal and political power of 
 the country. And in the horror of the wealth came a revolt 
 at the ease and beauty that springs from wealth; a mental 
 revolt only, for by temperament he loved the refinements 
 of civilisation. 
 
 His was, in truth, a nature wrested from its inborn in- 
 stincts for the refinements of pleasure by the intrusive 
 appeal of those who in all ages have called with clarion 
 voice for a new world, where the former things, the selfish- 
 ness, violence, and impurity, shall have passed away. In 
 the days of Savonarola, Mr. Westaway would have placed 
 his coins and prints on the bonfire of vanity, and have 
 mourned ever after for his departed treasures; in the days 
 of Luther, he would have cast off monkish traditions, and 
 have yearned incessantly for the cosy comfort of a cowl; 
 in the days of Walt Whitman, Tolstoi, and Ibsen, he took 
 to a diet of husks and sought simplicity in the cult of the 
 spade, or rather, one side of him longed to do so. For 
 fire-brand reformers achieve three results: they enhance 
 
Hesperus 63 
 
 the conscious greed of the greedy, they ennoble the lofty- 
 minded, and they make the minds of the weaker brethren 
 exceedingly uncomfortable: Mr. Westaway was a weaker 
 brother. 
 
 At last came the music of the Jewel Song in Damaris 
 Westaway's full, rich voice, while Dr. Dayman held up his 
 hand to make sure that no one creaked his chair. 
 
 "Ah, well," said he, as the song ended, "there's a fair 
 world for them that can get it, and there's another. I've 
 seen both to-night. I've just brought into this sublunary 
 scene a hopeless cripple, born of a half-witted drab — and 
 in there is Damaris singing the Jewel Song. Gad 1 how 
 comes it about, the Jewel Song and that knave-begotten 
 brat?" 
 
 "And," said Mr. Westaway bitterly, "how many knave- 
 begotten brats are not these Jewel Songs, these Wagner 
 Choruses, these lime-lighted passions, answerable for? 
 And as for that Chopin music, I wanted to shut the door 
 on it. It brought back the past." 
 
 "The dear, damned, delightful past," said Dr. Dayman 
 with a chuckle. "W^ell, I've loved many women, and what 
 I say of one, I say of all — brown-skinned, fair-skinned, 
 straight-haired and curly, matron and maid or little lassie 
 in her teens — God bless 'em, one and all ! But I don't take 
 things crosswise as you do. I've kissed my girl in the days 
 gone by, and I drink my wine now I'm old, and take no 
 shame to myself for either. And as for you, why, Gad-a- 
 mercy, man, didn't you have that damigella of yours 
 trained to sing? 'He that is merry, let him sing psalms,' 
 I suppose that's what you thought," fumed the doctor, 
 while Ambrose chuckled and wished he could have ex- 
 pressed the same sentiments as vigourously as the doctor 
 had done. 
 
 "Her mother," said Mr. Westaway slowly, "was singing 
 
64 A Man of Genius 
 
 like a bird when I first saw her — and scrubbing the floor 
 of a village inn. Yet she was a loving and a lovely gentle- 
 woman by nature. We had a year of heaven, and then she 
 died and left me Damaris." 
 
 "The only thing in the world I envy you for," said Dr. 
 Dayman. 
 
 "Well, Ambrose," he said, suddenly remembering that 
 he was not alone with Mr. Westaway, "what do you think 
 of it all?" 
 
 The lad leant forward, his cheek flushing. "It's fine, he 
 said; "the music, I mean. It shakes you up, till you 
 wonder what you're made of inside, to feel so." 
 
 "Made of mud," growled Dr. Dayman, "and snips and 
 snaps, and puppy dogs' tails, that's what you're made of. 
 Just you sit on your emotions a bit more, or — or you'll find 
 yourself in dock. You've to do with the plastic arts, with 
 stones and paint," he said, snapping each word like the 
 click of a revolver. "Pulse going anyhow, I'll warn. Sit 
 on your emotions, will you, and come over and look at 
 what I've got here." 
 
 Dr. Dayman drew a chair up to a table, and opened the 
 portfolio. He held each paper, as he took it out, directly 
 under his eyes, screwing up the lids in the light of the 
 lamp he had brought over from the desk. Mr. Westaway 
 sat watching the two, but Damaris had not returned to the 
 room. 'I 
 
 " Sit down, sit down, and let's hear what you've got to say 
 to that," said the doctor, placing a print before Ambrose, 
 and folding his hands comfortably upon the front of his 
 well-lined waistcoat. 
 
 It was a curious wood-engraving. Amid knotty tree- 
 trunks and coiling serpents a naked man held the handle 
 of a plough. From an attenuated figure to the left bright 
 rays gleamed upon the straining horses and the man who 
 
Hesperus 65 
 
 drove, upon a group of dancing nymphs, and a flock of 
 sheep. In one comer a man drove a stake into a serpent, 
 and in another rose a chister of standing corn. 
 
 "The Hght falls from the left," said Ambrose doubtfully, 
 after a pause. "I can't tell about the dancing figures, 
 though; they're out of it somehow." 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 "It's hard— the battle and"— he hesitated for a word— 
 "ugly." 
 
 "You know what it means?" 
 
 "It's the earth- the fight with it." 
 
 "Ay, man's fight with the forces of nature — hard and 
 ugly lighting, as you say." 
 
 The doctor took off the lamp-shade and flung it on the 
 'floor in order to look at Ambrose more closely. He was 
 surprised at finding so much intelligence. 
 
 "The figure to the left is the sun, I suppose," said Am- 
 brose, "or God." 
 
 j "And the dancing nymphs, lad, are the joys of the fight, 
 iof harvest and vintage, and the old earth licked with her 
 own weapons. You're no fool, boy. Now, look ye here," 
 he said, pushing forward another plate. 
 
 Ambrose laughed. "That's plain," he said, "anyway. 
 ' There's the moon on one side of the house and the stars on 
 't'other, and the cow and the sheep underneath 'em and 
 1 man and wife going to bed; in the storeroom it looks like, 
 for there's apples about and the man's bill-hook hung up. 
 . They'll be asleeo in each other's arms before long," he 
 I grinned. 
 
 i "That's as it may be," said the doctor virtuously. 
 "That's Edward Calvert's Chamber Idyll, Edward Calvert 
 of Appledore." 
 
 "It's a thatched roof," said Ambrose, paying no heed, 
 "a thatched roof that comes down pretty nigh upon the 
 5 
 
66 A Man of Genius i 
 
 bed — a regular old slee room, like the back bedrooms at I 
 Long Furlong." 
 
 "Do you know why I show you these?" asked Dr. , 
 Dayman, showing him the Cyder Feast with the breath 
 of joy that blows like a great wind through it, the tender 
 Return Home, with the woman waiting across the dim fields, 
 with that sweetest pillow for man's weariness, a true and « 
 faithful heart. 
 
 "No," said Ambrose, looking up with the light of new 
 thought smouldering in his eyes; "but they're mighty queer. 
 Who did 'em?" 
 
 "I told you. Edward Calvert, born at Appledore." 
 
 "Appledore?" said Ambrose in surprise. 
 
 "Yes; of course you know Appledore well enough. 
 He's pretty near one of our own people. But I didn't show 
 you these prints for that reason. I did it because here's 
 a man who loved the earth, just the earth that you turn 
 with your ploughshare. He loved the sweet dripping of the 
 cider juice, the clear shining of rain-drops in the sun, the 
 sheep that nibble in the water-meads. Ay, a man and wife 
 undressing themselves for bed, with the cow and the sheep 
 outside, and the sickle moon watching their hours of bliss. 
 Your fathers, Velly, loved the earth, too, ploughed it, trod 
 on it and sleep in it." 
 
 He stopped, carried away by the rush of his own fire. 
 Ambrose drew a deep breath, and was silent, but his eyes 
 glowed. 
 
 "Edward Calvert, North Devon artist, that has yet 
 to come into his own," said the doctor. "But that's 
 no matter. You're in the land of artists. East and 
 west, and north and south of 'ee, they be," he said, lapsing 
 further into Devon. "Just look at 'em, the great Sir 
 Joshua from Plympton, as great in portraiture as Turner is 
 in landscape; Sam Prout, who dreamt dreams and saw 
 
 ' 
 
Hesperus 67 
 
 visions in stone, and who loved the very timber and tiles 
 he drew; Calvert, the earth lover and dreamer of the golden 
 age, from Appledore; Thomas Hudson, Sir Joshua's 
 master; old Nicholas Hilliard, limner to Elizabeth and 
 James, of whom Dr. Donne says — 
 
 A hand or eye 
 
 By Hilliard drawn, is worth a history 
 
 By a worse painter made. 
 
 Cousins, the prince of mezzotint engravers from Exeter; 
 Richard Cosway, master of miniature, from Tiverton; 
 Haydon, Eastlake, and Northcote, dreamers of history, from 
 Plymouth; James Gandy, whom Sir Joshua found not 
 inferior to the Venetians in colouring, and William his son, 
 not far below him, whose names are mentioned in Gandy 
 Street, Exeter; as well as Opie from Cornwall. And the 
 greatest of them all called himself a Devon man, for didn't 
 Turner say to Cyrus Redding, 'They may put me down 
 among the Devon artists, for I was born in Devon ' ? I 
 went over to look at the graves of his ancestors in the wormy 
 old Southmolton churchyard the other day." 
 
 " And are there no Devon architects ? " asked Ambrose, 
 his cheeks burning at the temerity of his thought, which 
 Dr. Dayman guessed. 
 
 "So that Ambrose Velly may be the greatest in the 
 Pantheon, eh, lad ? Well, the list goes back to the sixteenth 
 century and begins with John Shute, the father of English 
 miniature painting, and the author of a book on architecture. 
 He played a scurvy trick on England, though, for when the 
 Duke of Northumberland sent him to Italy, in Queen 
 Bess's time, he came back with his head full of the fan- 
 dangles of Renaissance architecture. The -first and chieje 
 Grounds of Architecture used in all the ancient and famous 
 Monyments; that's the title of his book, or a bit of it, at any 
 rate. Ay, you'll be in good company, I assure you, among 
 
68 A Man of Genius 1 
 
 the Devon artists. And reason good, for look what a county 
 it is. Why, what is it you sing in church ? 
 
 " ^O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord; praise 
 Him and magnify Him for ever. 
 
 " 'O ye Mountains and Hills, bless ye the Lord; praise 
 Him and magnify Him for ever." 
 
 "I'll make a new reading. It ought to be — 
 
 "O all ye children of Devon, bless ye the Lord; praise 
 Him and magnify Him for ever. 
 
 "O ye Tors and Moors of Devon, bless ye the Lord; 
 praise Him and magnify Him for ever." 
 
 He burst into a fit of Homeric laughter that made the 
 servants in the kitchen wonder what was toward. 
 
 "Look at her, lad," he shouted; "wind-swept moors, 
 thundering surges, soft rains that fall like gossamer, valleys 
 deep in blossom, heather purple as the shadows thrown by 
 old wine. Look at her, boy, and all this in a climate, at 
 one moment iridescent like chrysoprase, pearls upon moon- 
 stone, as old Calvert has it; at another, clear, clear, clear, 
 like a wind out of the North. Ye Gods of Olympus, what 
 a land for a painter, what a land for a lover, what a land for 
 a poet!" 
 
 Then he flung himself back in his chair with a laugh at 
 his own vehemence, while Ambrose stood quite still with 
 bent head. Of old the Gods met men at the turning of 
 the road, and often but in lowly guise; had Dr. Dayman 
 been fancifully inclined, he might have imagined himself to 
 be Apollo, the light-bringer, for in the youth's heart there 
 had begun the clear shining of that fair Hesperus, Star of 
 the West, the finest passion of his life. 
 
 But the doctor had descended to the valleys. 
 
 "Where's that bottle of sloe gin," he asked, "that I sent 
 in last night?" 
 
 The doctor's sloe gin was famous, and, moreover, being 
 
Hesperus 69 
 
 niggardly in his old age, Dr. Dayman liked to get the full 
 credit for his somewhat rare gifts, and even to parti( ipate 
 personally in the enjoyment of them. It was often noticed 
 that if, in the morning, a fortunate household received 
 a crab from the doctor, the donor himself would drop in to 
 supper that night, for he was excessively fond of crab. 
 
 The sloe gin appeared, and Ambrose was just holding his 
 glass up to the light, in order to add the pleasure of another 
 sense to that of taste when, with a soft rustle of silk, Damaris 
 came into the room once more. 
 
 "Now," she said, "something tells me that there are 
 drawings in that case of yours, Mr. Velly." 
 
 "They're hardly worth looking at after these," he said, 
 colouring as he touched the Calvert portfolio. 
 
 "Well, you couldn't expect them to be," answered 
 Damaris briskly; "for these are the picked work of a 
 lifetime." 
 
 "But what," interposed Mr. Westaway, "did you really 
 think of those Calvert prints, Ambrose?" 
 
 It was chiefly, perhaps, a tinge of rugged honesty in 
 Ambrose, a certain Rabelaisian faculty of laughing at 
 solemn pretensions, that had first attracted Mr. Westaway 
 to him, next to the brightness of his look. For poor Mr. 
 Westaway had been so much smothered in the incense 
 of sanctity that he loved a lad who had no trace of senti- 
 mentality about him. 
 
 "Did you really like those pictures?" he asked curiously, 
 recalling, as he spoke, the idealism which is so marked in 
 Calvert's woodcuts. 
 
 "No," said Ambrose bluntly; "I don't believe I did. 
 I know they're good — in a way. But they aren't beautiful 
 in themselves. There's that Cyder Feast, the girl's a 
 skinny thing, and in the Return Home the man's an ugly 
 brute humped up on a deformed ass; and in the other 
 
"JO A Man of Genius 
 
 the man's muscles are as stiff as iron. They're not beau- 
 tiful," he repeated, "though I suppose they mean things." 
 
 He coloured furiously at the length of his speech, when 
 he felt the three pairs of eyes on him. 
 
 "They mean beautiful things," said Damaris coldly; 
 "the long, long battle of man's spirit, the beauty of faith- 
 ful love." 
 
 Then she stopped, carried away by a sort of anger, while 
 Dr. Dayman watched the two young people with a smile. 
 
 "He's a pagan, my dear," he interposed, "a frank 
 hedonist. He wants round curves, hair that curls, and lips 
 that pout. Leave the young rip alone, for he hasn't a 
 notion yet of the beauty that's under the skin. Come, 
 let's see the drawings," he said, taking pity on the boy's 
 downcast face. 
 
 The first was a picture of Mouth Mill Cove, or rather 
 of the contorted curves of strata called the Black Church 
 Rocks. The inky cliffs, the roaring surge, the echoes of 
 the valley, the booming of the pebbles: the place is stark 
 with power and vivid as the leap of a jet of blood. Mouth 
 Mill is the chief landing-place of the district, and is used 
 as a coal quay by the farmers; but even here it is only 
 possible to come in with one tide and go out with the same. 
 Wait for the second and the boat will be dashed to pieces 
 with the cannonade of rollers on the pebbles. 
 
 Damaris saw the failure of this painting; the rock 
 formations were right enough, but the wave-lines were rigid, 
 stone-carved. 
 
 "Ah, that's better !" she cried, as the doctor passed her 
 a second. 
 
 Through the arching strata gleamed the sea; set in 
 the frame of black stone, the waves shone luminous under 
 a lilac sky. It was a picture of the peace that passeth 
 all understanding. Silently the doctor passed her sketches 
 
Hesperus 71 
 
 of thatched cob-cottages and weather-stained farm build- 
 ings. 
 
 "You think in stone, Ambrose," she said at last. "You 
 remind me of Prout's failure to paint waves. But the 
 stone- work is very careful." 
 
 Ambrose flushed, for he had hoped for louder praise 
 than this, and, artist-like, prided himself on what he could 
 do least well. For at this stage of his work he was sending 
 out tentacles into every kingdom of endeavour — painting, 
 carving, practising black-and-white work. In some indig- 
 nation at this curt dismissal of his efforts, he packed up 
 his sketches and said good-night, while Damaris accom- 
 panied him to the door. 
 
 "What's troubling you, Westaway?" said Dr. Dayman, 
 as the door closed behind Ambrose and Damaris. Mr. 
 Westaway had evidently been in a brown study for the last 
 ten minutes — a sad one to judge by his looks. 
 
 "Dayman," he answered, "you're a man used to looking 
 things in the face." 
 
 "It's my business to do so," said the doctor placidly, 
 from the midst of the haze of tobacco smoke that wreathed 
 his great head. 
 
 "It's not been mine," said the Vicar; "for I seem to 
 have made it my business to look askance at everything." 
 
 "Professional habit, probably," said Dr. Dayman, with 
 a laugh. He had no very keen love of the cloth, though 
 he placed a high value on the individual worth of many 
 who wore it. 
 
 "That's what I feel," said Mr. W^estaway; "for 
 there comes a time in every man's life when he ought 
 to try and get away from the merely professional stand- 
 point." 
 
 " Humph ! " growled the doctor, recalling a sermon he had 
 heard Mr. Westaway preach on the great undone creative 
 
72 A Man of Genius 
 
 acts, the might-have-beens of the moral world. "You're 
 doing it too late, Westaway; for there's a deal of sense in 
 the notion of the old woman in George Eliot, that high- 
 learnt folks get their thinking done early, so as to get it 
 over once and for all. Thinking's like sugar — good for 
 the young, but gouty for the old. ' Omnia exeunt in mys- 
 terium'; it's the law and the prophets, and you can't get 
 beyond it. I should have thought that the habits of a 
 lifetime would have been a sufficient prophylactic against 
 the green-sickness of speculation." 
 
 "I'm in trouble, Dayman," said the Vicar, as though 
 appealing for something less like a sneer. "I've done the 
 thinking, indeed. Now comes the acting. I'm going to 
 leave the Church." 
 
 The doctor leant forward, nipping his pipe. 
 
 "Difficulties?" he asked. "Oh, come now. They're 
 out of date. We've all agreed to ignore 'em. In the days 
 of Darwin and Huxley, it might have been de rigueur; 
 but now it's the era of the reconciliation of soul and body, 
 or rather, body's soul and soul's body, and no man can tell 
 t' other from which nowadays." 
 
 "It isn't that at all. Dayman. It's life — ihe life of to-day 
 that's got at me. Everybody is mentally alive to-day, 
 except the priest and the mere drudge, and we are rapidly 
 reducing the numl^ers of the latter. Here is the scientist 
 pressing into the unknown world, passing point after point 
 in the uncharted seas of life; here is the social reformer 
 daring the rocks of experiment with a spirit bolder than 
 the purpose of a Columbus or a Pizarro. Look here, 
 Dayman," he said, getting up and beginning to quarter-deck 
 up and down, "we're on the verge of a new age of life, or 
 we shall be when we've placed our footstep on the North 
 Pole and the South. No, I'm not crazy," he said, with 
 a laugh at the doctor's face of surprise. "Think, What 
 
Hesperus 73 
 
 was it in the past that bred men of heroic stuff? What has 
 it always been?" 
 
 "War and exploration," snapped the doctor. 
 
 "Just so. And" — he pointed with the finger of pro- 
 phecv — "our inventions will in time make war — first, an 
 affair of mathematics, and then, impossible, while the last 
 inch of the Unknown will soon be mapped and surveyed on 
 this globe. What then? Shall we rot in spiritual in- 
 action? Nay, nay; wider fields than ever the mind of man 
 has conceived are opening before us daily — fields where the 
 vistas are more awful than any floes of polar ice; for with 
 matter that exists on many more planes than our common 
 senses show, and with age-long life coming daily within our 
 certain knowledge, who can say what we shall be?" 
 
 "I don't see why all this should prevent you from dis- 
 tributing blankets, or even offering prayer. Behind it all 
 — all these planes of matter — is the Unknown — the Un- 
 known God, if you will. It strikes me we'll want a damned 
 sight more prayer than ever before, if what you say is true. 
 And I grant you there do seem to be a few staggering facts 
 about the universe. Anyway, put it at its lowest, your 
 order is urbane; it oils things a bit, organises a lot of charity, 
 and employs the energies of an immense number of women." 
 
 "All very well; but as you know perfectly, that's not 
 what we're supposed to exist for. We ought to know as 
 much about the soul as the doctor does of the body. And 
 we don't. That's just all about it. We don't. The people 
 ask us plain questions as to what is the constitution of man, 
 and we're still disputing about St. Paul's analysis of the 
 human organism. We can't tell the nations half as much 
 as a man who looks into all the creeds and picks out the 
 little gem of truth that each enshrines; no, nor half as 
 much as the scientist who can talk of nothing but the fourth 
 dimension. And why have we nothing to tell? Because 
 
74 A Man of Genius | 
 
 it's nearly two thousand years ago that we learnt anything. 
 And of what we learnt then we've falsified two-thirds. We 
 talk as if the message given nineteen hundred years ago was 
 the last words from the unseen, when perhaps the newest 
 message is in — to-day's paper." 
 
 There was a long silence, then the doctor saia — 
 "Ay, you're right, Westaway; you must go. For the 
 priest of any Church is bound to back his own Church's 
 creed, his own Church's scheme of things. But yours is 
 all so draughty." 
 
 "So draughty?" questioned Mr. Westaway. 
 "Why, yes. Like other old folks, I like a nice cosy 
 room, and here you are, tossing me out into chaos, with 
 a howling wind of doubt giving me goose-flesh all over. 
 I like standing up to say a comfortable creed." 
 
 But the Vicar's mind was turned in quite a different 
 direction. For the oldest leaves on the tree shake most 
 easily in the wind, and now Mr. Westaway was passing in 
 age under those simplicities of the New Testament which 
 every period has interpreted in its own fashion. The 
 absolute literalness of the reading: "Give all that thou 
 hast," had at first struck him painfully, then with con- 
 viction. 
 
 "The other day," he said slowly, with an inward gaze, 
 "the other day I took part in a Cathedral service to which 
 there came in procession, the judge on circuit, the mayor 
 and corporation, the aldermen and police. They came to 
 thank God for having raised them up. And the day before 
 the judge had been employed in sentencing a poor, ignorant 
 fellow-creature to hard labour for stealing a pair of boots. 
 In the fanfaronade of trumpets from their gold-laced foot- 
 men, sounded the triumph of the lord of this world. And 
 they came to the temple of the Teacher who bade us turn 
 the other cheek to an assailant." 
 
Hesperus 75 
 
 "Well, top-dog, you know," said Dr. Dayman truculently; 
 "for that's what all that means. We can't do yet without 
 judges and police, though I shouldn't care to be one my- 
 self. Civilisation, at least in the present form, demands 
 that quite half the people who carry it on should have no 
 imagination. Look at that chap Darracott, for instance; 
 he's having a hell of a time. And for nothing more than 
 just because he happens to be able to see pictures — of 
 i what perhaps didn't happen at all as he sees it. I tell 
 you what it is, David, you've got a temperature of 104 
 degrees, Tolstoi — and I can't operate. If you'd only 
 caught something in itis^ instead of something in isw, I 
 might." 
 
 *'No," said Mr. Westaway, with a smile, *' 'tis I, Cleopas, 
 w^ho must do the operating this time.'^ 
 
 When moved below the surface they were David and 
 Cleopas to one another, for in truth they were mutually in 
 love with their weaknesses; for David was a student with 
 more ichor than blood in his veins, and Cleopas an earth- 
 bound, a carnal old rascal, perhaps, but heartsome, like a 
 squire out of the pages of Fielding. In any case, one was 
 the antithesis of the other. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 THE KING OF SHADOWS 
 
 SLOWLY the sunlight touched the billowy ridges of 
 the old slates on Long Furlong roof, turning the 
 lichen-patches into spots of gold, bathing the head of the 
 one gable in warmth, and showing up the depth of shadow 
 that still covered the walled garden, with its shrubs of 
 fuchsia and hydrangea springing from the deep, mossy 
 turf. 
 
 Suddenly there swept across the farm a film of rain, the 
 drops shining like gleaming points of silver against the 
 golden background of sunshine. Sighing, quivering, the 
 damp gossamer of it hovered over the place, bringing 
 out the goodly scent of earth and lichen, fern and weed. 
 Then the sunlight widened into the peace of a golden 
 dawn, and the sleeper within the gable-room sighed and 
 awoke, fixing his eyes on the moulded ceiling, the glory of 
 the house. Over the mantelpiece were the letters W. M. A. 
 and the date 1627, interwoven in a design of pine-apples, 
 with a long, flat buckled strap. This piece of ancient handi- 
 craft represented for Ambrose all the art treasures of the 
 world, the awe of cathedral arches, the mystery of marble 
 forms, the charm of painted canvas. 
 
 As he dressed, the racy homeliness of the scent of damp 
 earth came from the open window to his nostrils. These 
 two powers, the sense of skilled craftsmanship and the scent 
 of the earth, were to be the dominant forces in Ambrose 
 
 26 
 
The King of Shadows 77 
 
 Velly's destiny, coming as they did from the two strains 
 in his blood, that of the Huguenot worker and the EngUsh 
 squire. For underneath his love of beauty was the peasant's 
 love of the land, his craving to possess it, handle it, own it, 
 to make it his mistress. Out of this heritage of his fathers 
 there had, doubtless, grown his desire to create in stone, 
 the most material form of expression an artist can adopt. 
 Hence, too, no doubt, his instinctive love of Gothic, which 
 speaks almost as intimately of the life of the soil as the 
 very trees that grow from it. From his mother's line he 
 had possibly derived his sense of the fineness of skilled 
 labour that, coupled with the power of hand and eye, gives 
 the plastic artist. 
 
 Vet a third power was to rule, but of that only Mrs. 
 Velly and John Darracott guessed the presence. To a 
 fanciful mind, indeed, the fates always come in triple form. 
 With the skilled hand of Minerva to give him victor}^ in 
 art, and Juno of the fruitful breast to give him the produce 
 of the earth, Ambrose Velly might have fared well enough. 
 But there remained to him, also, a third goddess, she who 
 comes dove-drawn, but with the power of the great eagle, 
 to spoil and ravin; for Ambrose, the altar of Venus was to 
 stand hard by the temple of Juno and under the awful 
 frown of Minerva. 
 
 Whilst he huddled on his clothes, he glanced at the table 
 under the window where lay Vivian's Visitations of Devon, 
 lent him by Dr. Dayman, side by side with a modern 
 manual of heraldry that was his own. From the next room 
 there came the sound of a man's yawn. As he heard it, a 
 flush passed across the lad's face, for there in the pedigrees 
 of gentle families stood the name Velly, now sunk to yeoman 
 rank and possibly to sink lower; for in the next room, 
 in the shape of his father, was a living incarnation of the 
 slackness of fibre that had brought the Velly family low. 
 
yS A Man of Genius 
 
 Still, his ancestry was a comfort to Ambrose, and he held 1 
 his head the higher for it as he went downstairs to the ' 
 milking of the cows and the grooming of the horses. 
 
 An hour later square patches of sunlight dappled the ■ 
 blue slates of the kitchen floor. At the end of the table : 
 towards the fire the family were at breakfast, while at the 
 draughty end near the yard door was the place for the 
 retainers, now limited to old Caleb who, "man and boy," 
 had served the Velly family for nearly thirty years. 
 
 With a long squawk of the bench along the slates he 
 prepared for action, prefacing it with his usual grace before 
 meat. 
 
 ''Good stomich to 'ee, Maister," said he, with a nod. 
 ''Good stomich to 'ee. Missus; Good stomich to 'ee, 
 Maister Ambrose." 
 
 It was the "Now, good digestion wait on appetite, and 
 health on both," but more succinctly expressed. This 
 done, he addressed himself solemnly to the "good dollop 
 of fry" that steamed on the table before him. From his 
 round, weather-beaten face, fringed with a monkey frill of 
 ruddy hair, his queer eyes, one blue-grey, the other reddish- 
 brown, wrinkled cutely round the other end of the table. 
 
 "Market-merry last night again," he said to himself, eye- 
 ing his master out of the corner of his grey eye; "and sour 
 as a crab," he added by way of summary. 
 
 "Your daughter going to stay with you a bit, Caleb?" 
 said Mrs. Velly. 
 
 "No; her isn't going to bide over to-day. Missus. Didn't 
 know her was coming when her did come, nuther." 
 
 His voice seemed to come, thin and piping, from far 
 buried depths within. 
 
 "What's the matter with your voice, Caleb? It sounds 
 going to pieces like." 
 
 "Iss; there's summat in my oazle-pipe, I reckon. 'Twill 
 
The King of Shadows 79 
 
 be with me like 'twas with old Sol Sanguin that sung tenor 
 up to Holsworthy. The parson come along one forenoon 
 and seed 'en standing up to his neck in water in the stream. 
 Says he, 'Sol, what the gallis be doing there?' He didn't 
 say no more than that, being a man o' God and bound to 
 vent aisy. 'Why,' says Sol, 'the bass up to choir can't 
 sing to-morra morning, and here be I trying to get a hose 
 (cold) so's I can take the bass !" 
 
 " 'Tis a bit of a cold, Missus, thank 'ee, and I be already 
 as deaf as a addick," he added cheerfully. 
 
 "They calves down to Four Acres don't sim to me to 
 goody, Maister," he observed after a pause. "Might so 
 well shift 'em to-morra," he concluded, seeing that no 
 answer was vouchsafed. 
 
 Mr. Velly grunted in token of assent. 
 
 "They'll be carr'ing the first field up to Blegberry to-day, 
 I hear," said Caleb. 
 
 "Yes," said Ambrose; "they're short-handed, too. And 
 as 'tis slack time, now ours isn't cut, I'm going over to 
 lend a hand." 
 
 "What's that for?" said Mr. Velly, rousing himself. 
 "What's it to you if they are short-handed?" 
 
 "Nothing," said Ambrose, defiantly putting the bare 
 truth. "But harvest pay's harvest pay, and Caleb can rub 
 along for a day or so without me." 
 
 " So you're willing to play loblolly boy for a shilling or two, 
 as if there wasn't work enough for 'ee here — and mostly left 
 undone, too." 
 
 "Nay, nay, father, the lad's a good worker," said Mrs. 
 Velly, with a scowl at the offending Caleb, who was hur- 
 riedly packing up his plate and cup in preparation for a 
 rapid exit. "Don't 'ee be so maggotty-headed, there's a 
 good man. We're not the sort nowadays to ride the high 
 horse." 
 
8o A Man of Genius 
 
 ''That's always your way, Missus, always was, standing 
 up for the young varmint. If I'd give 'en the buckle-strap 
 every time that you wouldn't let me, he wouldn't be the 
 tom-fool he is now. Why, he's no son of mine; he's a 
 molly-coddle, and makes himself the laughing stock of the 
 parish — and all over an old hare." 
 
 "I only did what anybody who wasn't a brute would 
 have done," panted Ambrose, disregarding his mother's 
 imploring look. 
 
 "Any body but a gapper-mouth, you mean," sneered Mr. 
 Velly. "I shall never forget it." 
 
 One of the discomforts of living with Mr. Velly was his 
 habit of repeating perfectly familiar unpleasant stories, 
 merely because there was a sting in them. "The harriers 
 had a good run," he said, "a matter of five miles or so, till 
 a rum thing happened upon cliff top by Damehole Point. 
 I saw the hounds clear the cliff and scent the beach. Sure 
 'nuff, thought I, hare's took to sea. And so she had — 
 swam out a yard or two and the dogs barking in the surf. 
 Now what did this young hopeful of ours do, but nip in 
 after her and catch her up in his arms with a twist of his 
 whip ! Thought I, 'there's some spunk in the fellow after 
 all.' But I'm damned if he didn't let her go, with all the 
 huntsmen rounding on 'en from cliff edge." 
 
 " 'Twas run blind," stammered Ambrose. " It's devilish, 
 getting fun out of torture like that." 
 
 There flashed from the eyes of both disputants the hate 
 that comes of close kinship and close likeness, the ugliest 
 sort of hate in nature; for it springs from the most intimate 
 knowledge of all, self-knowledge. Blood of one's blood; 
 out of it leaps one's own cruelty, weakness, or lust, intimate, 
 familiar, abhorrent. 
 
 As Ambrose flung himself out of the room it was the 
 incessantly repeated taunt, in the same old words and 
 
The King of Shadows 8i 
 
 jhrases that produced a mad longing to escape from this 
 life of hopeless struggle. 
 
 "The lad's a good lad, James," said Mrs. Velly. " He's 
 given to fancies, maybe, but he's no trouble in other ways." 
 'Fancies or no, that lad'll give us trouble before we're 
 dead and gone. Vou mark my words." 
 
 'Then he'll only be the very spit of his father in that 
 way, James. It's a deal of trouble you've always been to 
 me and always will be. But there, 'tis what was to be. 
 Menfolk be made to worrit, and apern-folk (women) to put 
 up with 'em." 
 
 "Talk, talk, talk," growled Mr. Velly. "You and your 
 precious son be both alike in that. Buzz, buzz, buzz, and 
 do nothing all day long, like an apple-drane in a cow-flop." 
 
 Mrs. Velly smiled grimly, for if there was any one at 
 Long Furlong as useless as a wasp in a foxglove, it was 
 James Velly, often "market-merry," and always as slack as 
 a half-baked loaf. She often wondered what mental image 
 he saw of himself in the reflecting-glasses of his soul. 
 Then she laughed as he rubbed his shining, bald head, as 
 domelike as that of his son's. 
 
 'Let me tell you a story, James. Once there was a man 
 in a club getting sick-pay; so his wife said to their son, 
 'Jacky, if all goes well and your father keeps poorly, we'll 
 have a fortnight's holiday this year instead of a week.' 
 If only you were in a club and could get sick -pay, how 
 happy we should be, James; for, my dear soul, you'd be 
 more useful that way than you ever will be when you're out 
 and about." 
 
 Mr. Velly was not likely to go wrong for lack of plain 
 speaking from his wife. 
 
 Down the lonely lanes, through which Ambrose rode 
 to his work, the central ridges were grass-grown and mossy, 
 the side-ruts deep in soft dust. The long shadows of 
 6 
 
82 A Man of Genius 
 
 morning lay almost from one hedge to another, where 
 gossamer threads had been spun that glittered dew-gemmed 
 on the sunny side of the road. 
 
 Built of grey, weather-beaten stone, with an outer wallf 
 like the line of circumvallation of a fortress, Blegberry 
 stands almost on the cliffs. The sea wind whistles about 
 its huddled shoulders, the rain lashes its crouching back. 
 No window looks directly seaward, and the front door 
 opens into a tiny square pleasaunce enclosed on all sides 
 by high walls and crowded with fuchsias, myrtles, and 
 rock- work. The wind blows "true" up at Blegberry, for 
 there are no trees to groan and protest, only a low stone 
 house built for noiseless resistance. 
 
 To-day, as Ambrose stood on the cart he was loading, 
 the whole coast-line lay plain before him on both sides of 
 Hartland Point. The long ridges of shark-tooth rocks 
 that line the foot of the cliffs gleamed black as jet in the 
 glimpses of them revealed by the foam of the tide. Needle- 
 points of rock out beyond, in the spray of the churning tide, 
 blazed with the cruel glitter of steel in the sunlight. Head- 
 land after headland, contorted into grotesque shapes aeons 
 ago by the upheavals of the strata and now grass-grown, 
 with nodding heads of sea-pinks in the crevices, crouched i 
 prone, with sphinx-like heads gazing over the tossing lines 
 of Atlantic rollers. Smoothlands, at whose foot the tragedy, 
 of the Flying Foam had taken place, rose just below the 
 field they were saving, like the upward sweep of a wave 
 arrested in mid-course. From its verge there was a fall 
 of seventy-five feet to the sea, straight as a plummet could 
 drop, while bell-heather glowed all up the landward side. 
 The light gleamed on the light-houses of Lundy, ten miles 
 away, over the laughing ripples of the sun-flecked waves. 
 Away in the west the dim forms of Cornish headlands rose, 
 blue-grey in the silver of the sea. 
 
The King of Shadows 83 
 
 " Lundy high, sign of dry; 
 Lundy plain, sign of rain," 
 
 said Michael Prust, the man who was loading by the side 
 of Ambrose. He paused to dash the sweat from his face 
 fwith the back of a hairy, sun-burnt hand. 
 j ''And which is it to-day?" asked Ambrose. 
 I "Blest if I know. Ever bin to the Kingdom of Heaven, 
 'mister?" he asked, using the local synonym for Lundy, 
 derived from the name of its owner. 
 
 "No; nor don't expect to." 
 
 "No more don't I, if you come to that. But I've been 
 over there," he said, pointing to the island; "went over in 
 the Gannet from Appledore, and pretty nigh left my inside 
 i behind. There's a mort of fine granite there, though." 
 
 " 'Tis a bit of Dartmoor cropped up, they say. In 
 Jubilee year Lundy ran short of water," said Ambrose, 
 *'but when a thunderstorm with clouds of rain came upon 
 Dartmoor, the springs of Lundy filled." 
 
 "A bit of learning's a fine thing," said Michael. "That's 
 what I say if my boys take to miching from school, for 
 they'm 'nointed chaps, they be." 
 
 "How many is it now, Michael?" shouted Abraham 
 Ridd. 
 
 "Well, now, you've asked a question," said Michael wnth 
 a wink. "Whether it were nine or ten the last time missus 
 counted 'em, I'm danged if I can tell 'ee." 
 
 "Iss," said William Crocker, a long, melancholy Jaques 
 of a man, with a face like an ancient horn-lanthorn for 
 obscurity and bewilderment "that's a trade that never 
 fails." 
 
 "How many is it now, Bill?" asked Prust. 
 
 "Nineteen, as I'm a living sinner," said Bill; "us tried 
 hard for the twentieth, but our second girl had a mishap in 
 the fall, and that made up the twenty." 
 
84 A Man of Genius 
 
 "Ay, it tries a man, it do," said Ridd; ''and 'tis wonder- 
 ful what becomes of a pound of cheese with a family like 
 that." 
 
 "But there's nineteen golden sovereigns laid by for 'em," 
 said Bill. 
 
 "And none for the little twentieth?" asked Ambrose. 
 
 "Well, you couldn't look for it for the like of that. Born 
 wrong side of the blanket, you see, maister." 
 
 So little twentieth had to learn early in life the nature of 
 the world's justice. 
 
 "But pretty much alike when they get here," said Ambrose. 
 
 "So they be, so they be," chorussed the other three. 
 
 The husks and dust of the corn-sheaves gathered thickly 
 on everything as the blazing heat of the midday hours 
 passed over the field. The firkins of beer were emptied, 
 and still the dusty skins, parched throats, and bloodshot 
 eyes of the labourers called for more. 
 
 "Here's the drinkings, praise be!" said Prust at length, 
 as the fragrance of hot tea and the scent of saffron cakes 
 became perceptible along the lane outside the field. 
 
 The boy who had wheeled up the cans sat on a corn- | 
 sheaf grinning at the men's talk as they stretched out in 
 the shadow of the loaded wagon, wielding clasp knives over | 
 the great flat drinking cakes. Old Prust still lovingly 
 dandled his beer firkin; the tea he valued as bringing out 1 
 the sweat, but the beer for joy. 
 
 The horses harnessed to the wagon drooped wearily over ' 
 their nose-bags, and the bright red handkerchiefs of the 
 men flamed in the light that caught the steel of the prongs 
 and the metal points of the harness. 
 
 " Old mare's got a Devon coat-of-arms," said Bill Crocker, 
 pointing to the broken knees of the near horse, as he tipped 
 up the tea-can and in so doing poured a pint or two over 
 himself. 
 
The King of Shadows 85 
 
 "As spry as a cow with a musket, Bill, you be," 
 said Prust. 
 
 "Anyway," said the horseman hulTily, offended at the 
 slight to one of his charges, "her's got the strain of old 
 Jennifer to the making of her." 
 
 The other men regarded the old mare with new respect, 
 for Jennifer is the famous horse of the district — the Pretty 
 Polly of North Devon. Her mother was a Spanish jennet 
 saved from a wreck when in foal. Her offspring, thus 
 strangely droj^ped, saved hundreds of lives by her clever- 
 ness in dashing in and out of the surf, so that her rider 
 could help the wrecked. In the end Jennifer became an 
 heiress, for fifty pounds was left her by will, so that she 
 should never fall upon evil days, and her descendants, 
 however jaded and wind-broken, have a reputation still. 
 
 "Hark to the ground say!" said Prust suddenly 
 
 All held cans and cakes suspended while the awesome 
 roll of the pebbles on the beaches below came up like the 
 muffled beating of drums. 
 
 "Look there!" called the boy, who had climbed on to 
 the half-loaded wagon. Following the direction of his 
 outstretched finger the men gazed seaward. 
 
 Light puffs of mist, like smoke-wreaths from an unseen 
 fire, were blowing inland from the sea, coming every in- 
 stant thicker and thicker. The mist curtains had dropped 
 over Lundy and the Welsh coast; but silver points of light 
 still flickered here and there on the sea. Westward the 
 coast-line was blotted out, while they watched the smoke- 
 drifts gather, apparently driving hot blasts of air before 
 them. Still, dun lingers worked on cliff and field till Hart- 
 land Quay was gone and a lowering cloud of November 
 fog took its place. 
 
 "It comes with a breath and goes with another," said 
 Michael solemnly. 
 
86 A Man of Genius 
 
 "Best get on with this load before it catches us," said 
 Ambrose, leaping up. 
 
 Suddenly all the clatter ceased, and old Prust muttered, 
 ''The ground say didn't speak for nort." Then a rever- 
 berating sound, like minute guns, came from the coast- 
 guard station at Hartland. 
 
 "From Padstow Point to Hartland Light, 
 A watery grave by day and night," 
 
 said Michael. 
 
 By the time the load was carried a man could scarce see 
 his hand before his face, and the men walked back to the 
 barn at Blegberry in a thick, reddish haze that magnified 
 the size of everything till it seemed grotesque. 
 
 Up in the rough rafters of the barn bright pigeon eyes 
 peeped at the group of men settled in the hay. There 
 came a sleepy ''rookety coo" from time to time, and a 
 feather, soft and silvery, would drop from a well-preened 
 wing. The mist filled the shadowy corners and hid the 
 outlines of the carts at the far end, while over the half- 
 open doorway the world apparently ceased in the thick 
 wool of fog. 
 
 Michael Prust, the conversationalist of the party, felt the 
 influences of time and place; he became reminiscent. 
 
 "Us shan't carr' that field to-day," said Crocker. 
 
 " 'Twas laid down as us shouldn't," said Michael. 
 "Same as all things be laid down." 
 
 His voice sounded dreamy, and the sleepy fingers of the 
 dense quiet, combined with tobacco, began to lull every- 
 body into a dream. The farmer himself was away, so that 
 further activity than waiting seemed uncalled for. 
 
 "I followed the sea first 'long," said Prust, "till I married 
 Susan and come to live here. I was mate of the Unity 
 to Brixham, and Susan's sister was married to the skipper 
 
 
The King of Shadows 87 
 
 of her. That's how I got Susan. 'Twas all through being 
 laid down for us." 
 
 "Drive on, Michael," said Abraham Ridd; "you'm 
 pretty nigh as long getting to it as the donkey was when 
 they walked with a carrot two inches ofif his nose." 
 
 "The Unity put out 'pon a fair wind of a Tuesday 
 morning," said Prust, his voice beginning to drone like the 
 rhythm of a chanty. "Us didn't mean to be out long, for 
 skipper's missus, my Susan's sister, was near her lying-in, 
 I and skipper'd got her on his mind; but come Tuesday 
 night the wind shifted sudden, and there wasn't a chance 
 of us getting in for hours. I dunno how it come about, 
 but I reckon the old man lost his nerve. Anyway, there 
 was something wrong aloft, and the skipper went up, and 
 come down quicker than he meant, with his shoulder out 
 and the wind against our getting back. 
 
 "We carried 'en below and there a lay. And 'twas 
 Friday night afore us got 'en to a doctor, and his collar 
 bone broke, too, as they found after. 
 
 "* 'Tis like a circle,' said he, 'there'll be no getting out 
 of it till there's been more trouble. Somebody's been ill- 
 wishing us.' And I knowed he was thinking 'pon the missus. 
 ! But the two of us that was left did our best to work the 
 , boat and keep 'en up. There was but cocoa for 'en to 
 : drink, and by Friday the Unity made the bay. Never had 
 I I been so glad afore to pass the old Hob's nose. 'Twas 
 I coming in darkish and the shore-lights began to start. 
 I The skipper's little house looks out right over the bay, and 
 i most the first lights o' Brixham that you see is from their 
 1 windows. That's what I was looking for, and then I seed 
 I *em, two little points of yellow from the cliffs. Now I'd 
 ' seen one light scores o' times, but now they'd a light up- 
 ; stairs and down. Then I went below. 
 
 " 'Jim,' says I, 'there's two lights up home-along.' 
 
I 
 
 88 A Man of Genius | 
 
 " 'Then the cheeld's come,' saith he; 'for I told 'em to I 
 put a light in the parlour if 'twas so afore I got in.' 
 
 "I signalled for help the minute I could, and they got 'en 
 up to hospital. I left 'en patching him up, whilst I stepped 
 along quick to get the news about 'en up home along. 
 
 " 'Twas a bit dim in the passage, and afore I'd well shut ' 
 to the door behind me there was a bundle shoved into my , 
 arms without so much as a by-your-leave, and most o' Susan 
 followed it. I'm the same height as the skipper, and Susan 
 took me for 'en. 
 
 "'Here's a present for 'ee, Jim,' says she, 'the big 
 boy you've been wanting so.' They'd had but little maids : 
 afore. Then her called out, for her'd found her mistake. 
 Now, I'm timid mostly, but that night, with the bustle I'd 
 been in for days, I'd ha' kissed a boat-load of girls as easy 
 as winked. So I just held tight to her and the bundle, and 
 says I — 
 
 " 'But where's my present, Susan?' And somehow her 
 give it to me." 
 
 Ambrose watched Prust's sea-blue eyes grow misty, like the 
 steely surface of the sea when the grey mist touches it vv^ith 
 fairy fingers, for Susan and Michael were beautiful lovers still. 
 
 Ambrose was silent in wonder, for this rough man had 
 found beauty in a human relationship that he himself knew, 
 as yet, but by the pulsing of the blood. 
 
 Suddenly they all started to their feet. 
 
 "Hark, what's that?" said one. 
 
 Muffled by the layers of mist there came the rush 
 horses' hoofs and the shouts of men. 
 
 "A ship ashore in the fog betwixt Damehole and Berry!" 
 shouted a coastguardsman, as they hurried to the door of 
 the yard. 
 
 "Come on, soce!" yelled Michael, starting off towards 
 the sea. "I know the spot where it'll be." 
 
The King of Shadows 89 
 
 Into the peaceful dreaminess of sleepy talk there came 
 like an avalanche the rush of intense excitement as, guided 
 by Michael who knew the cliffs better than the coastguard, 
 they leapt the low field walls and plunged amid gorse and 
 heather down the steep sides of the valley, till they reached a 
 spot whence they could clearly hear the waves breaking 
 below. 
 
 "Here, mates!" shouted Prust to the coastguard, who 
 were wandering like dogs on a false scent. 
 
 Ambrose stood behind him, looking down on the dim 
 outline of a vessel that seemed directly under the over- 
 hanging brow of the clifT, though in reality it was several 
 yards out. Through the blanket of fog there came up to 
 them the sound of hoarse cries in some foreign tongue that 
 sounded like furious quarrelling. 
 
 "Here," shouted Michael to Bombie, the chief coast- 
 guardsman, "down over the cliff 'tis for 'ee. I'll give 'ee a 
 lead, and mind your footing. 'Tis pretty nigh like the side 
 of a house." 
 
 On hands and knees and clinging to every foothold in 
 the almost nocturnal darkness, the men dropped over the 
 cliff edge. Ambrose moved forward with his tongue cling- 
 ing to the roof of his mouth; then he stood still suddenly, 
 like one with poison creeping slowly through his veins. 
 Below he could see the deck of the strange ship right 
 beneath his feet. Then, as he peered downward, the mist 
 wavered for a second, and he saw the leaden waves licking 
 the rocks with curling, hungry tongues. The sea was snarl- 
 ing, green and livid, above its rocky bed. He turned sick 
 as at the sight of a hideous upheaval of human vileness, 
 and as the mist covered his hair with a thick coating of 
 tiny drops, the clammy sweat burst out from every pore of 
 his body. 
 
 He lay face downwards towards the cliff-edge, peeping 
 
90 A Man of Genius 
 
 into the cauldron of vapour with the snarling, coiling tongue 
 of green and livid spume below. Shouts came up, and he 
 could hear Bombie yell — 
 
 "You must clear out. Tide turns in half an hour, and 
 the ship's breaking up!" 
 
 "A chap with a chest like a hogshead," thought Am 
 brose, trying to pour contempt on a man who had done sc 
 easily what he himself could not. It seemed like an evil 
 dream, from the first coming of the mist fingers to the 
 time that there leapt at him from the cliff this revelation of 
 his own fear. Why had he been unable to fling himself 
 down the unseen path to the licking waters below? 
 
 Ambrose slunk away unnoticed, when heads began once 
 more to appear on the cliff side, but he knew what was 
 happening from the sounds. The crew, French apparently, 
 were drunk, but ultimately each man of them appeared, 
 clasping fondly a jar of liquor and supported by coast- 
 guardsmen. 
 
 "Stark mutiny and worse," fumed Bombie. "First thing 
 I tumbled upon was a pack of cards upon deck and the 
 mate asleep by 'em." 
 
 A man lay down close to young Velly's feet and began 
 sucking at the jar he carried, while Bombie aimed a kick at 
 the sneering face. 
 
 By the time the fog had lifted, twenty-three men were 
 camping out in the barns at Blegberry, but Ambrose still 
 lay cold and stiff at the edge of the cliff; over and over 
 again he saw the same scene; man after man climbing 
 down where he dared not go. Old Prust's tale of bewitch- 
 ment, of the circle of trouble, occurred to his mind as an 
 explanation of this sudden powerlessness that had come 
 upon him. 
 
 But he knew very well that, after all, it came from within; 
 since for every power that a man possesses he pays toll in 
 
The King of Shadows 91 
 
 a corresponding weakness, and straightforwardness is only 
 too apt to go with hardness, and power of thought with in- 
 capacity for action. Probably the artist pays the heaviest 
 toll of all; for from his vivid realisation of pain and joy 
 there spring that tendency to shrink from danger that 
 we call cowardice, and that egotistic pursuit of sensuous 
 joys that we call sensuality. Ambrose lay for a long time 
 face to face with the unknown depths of moral weakness that 
 he suspected now to be his inheritance. For to a lad born 
 within sight of the cliffs, the fear of that dangling journey 
 between land and sea is shame inexpressible. 
 
 The tide was turning now and the mist rising, when 
 Ambrose perceived a knot of men hurrying up the slope of 
 Smoothlands, carrying ropes and an iron stanchion. In- 
 stinct drove him after them till he stood at the edge of the 
 cliff looking down on the strata that curved into a series 
 of semicircles, forming the entrance to a cave that echoed 
 with the imprisoned tide. 
 
 "The cowardly hounds!" said a man at his elbow. 
 
 "What is it?" asked Ambrose. 
 
 "Left a man's body behind and never said so. Fell over- 
 board when she struck, and a lad says he's been carried 
 into the wash of the old cave." 
 
 Ambrose watched the men drive the stanchion into the 
 ground, for from this the line was to hang by which a 
 coastguardsman would descend the cliff. As he kicked off 
 his shoes a blindness descended upon him, but his will 
 conquered and he pushed his way forward, dragging slow 
 feet, with the sweat drops on his skin. 
 
 "I'll go down over," he said in an unnaturally loud voice. 
 "I'm lightest weight." 
 
 "Better way let a trained man go," said Bombie doubt- 
 fully. "Do 'ee know where to look for 'en? I doubt but 
 you'll make a mull of it." 
 
g2 A Man of Genius 
 
 "I'm damned if I will," said Ambrose, getting warmer 
 as he felt the eyes of the ring of men fixed on him. The 
 next moment he could have struck the coastguardsman for 
 taking the offer without any expression of astonishment. 
 The man's red cheeks, suffused with blood, his strained 
 and puffy eyes, his great trunk were revolting to the lad. 
 
 "A pottle-bellied ass," said Ambrose, talking to him- 
 self. But Bombie took no notice, and merely adjusted the 
 rope. 
 
 The first step over cliff edge would be like a leap into 
 eternity, but Ambrose felt it was far off yet. It would not 
 come till ages had passed, and he must live in the fear of 
 it. The next moment it came suddenly, as a thing leaping 
 out of the darkness, and he was at the verge, noting as a 
 strange phenomenon the quivering of the sea-thrift along 
 the edge of the cliff in the wind that blew inland. He 
 paused for a moment to compare this incessant shiver 
 with the stillness of the grasses on the flat surface of the 
 cliff. Then there came, from very far off, a shout — and 
 he stepped into nothingness, feeling only the sickening 
 strain of the rope under his weight. He wondered vaguely 
 that it should bear him at all, but he was more interested 
 in the grey beards of lichen that he saw as he passed down- 
 wards, hand over hand. Then from the lichen beards he 
 went on to think of Speke's Mouth Waterfall, for he knew 
 that if one gazed long enough at the falling sheet of water 
 there, the still cliffs on each side seemed, w^ien one turned 
 one's eyes on them, to be gliding upwards. They were, he 
 noted, doing so now, like black polished slugs. 
 
 As he watched his clasping hands and his springing 
 muscles a sense of elation came, and in the stillness he 
 shouted to the waters and the sea wind. At this moment 
 of mastery he tasted the supreme bliss of life — the conquest 
 of the will over those inner powers that threaten so often to 
 
The King of Shadows 93 
 
 betray us, the cowardice, lu^t, or rage tliat makes us slaves. 
 With this joy came the most vivid picture he had ever seen: 
 the sanctuary ring in Hartland Church; for the hunted 
 criminal in himself was saved. The next instant his feet 
 touched the foot of the clitT and tlie waves caught his legs 
 with a rush of spray. 
 
 And brought a new shuddering: the picture of the grey 
 pebbles in the pools that the tide left between the two walls 
 of rock; so would look a dead face, livid, iron-grey. 
 
 The next moment, churning in the sickening thud, thud 
 of the breakers, he had seen it — the quiet face, the hair just 
 stirring in the suck of the water, the partially clothed limbs. 
 
 At the sight his fear was gone, for the dead face was no 
 more terrible than the eyes of the old sheep-dog at Long 
 Furlong; he had looked in the face of the King of Shadows, 
 and lo! there was no more shuddering in it than in the sun 
 at noonday. With a thankful laugh he proceeded with his 
 task, the fastening of the body to the rope. 
 
 His own ascent was made as lightly as any sailor lad 
 could have done it. The gleam of the bird's-foot trefoil 
 below his hands as he clutched the slippery grass on the 
 summit was the loveliest thing his eyes had ever lighted on; 
 below, the dankness of weed, the lapping of waves on black, 
 jagged ridges; above, the gold of trefoil, the scent of 
 heather-honey, peace and safety and — mastery. 
 
 It was the moment of moments; for satisfied desire is 
 often bitter in the after-draught, but by the conquest of our 
 weakness we become as gods. 
 
 As they bore the body of the French sailor up to Bleg- 
 berry, Ambrose felt that extraordinary powers of observation 
 were his just now; he seemed to have got down to the 
 bones of things, to the beating heart of everything he saw. 
 A frenzy possessed him to draw the stark form and the 
 battered head over which some fool had thrown a coat. 
 
94 A Man of Genius 
 
 Bombie, a savage, laughed Ambrose to himself; he himself' 
 was the bold savage now, for he lusted to draw a dead man. 
 
 When they were opposite the old stone well-house of 
 Blegberry, Ambrose saw the dead flowers of every "penny- 
 pie'* that grew in the interstices of the stone as he had 
 never noticed them before, even when he made a sketch of 
 the well. The iron dipper with the hole in it had been 
 mischievously thrown into the middle of the road, and one 
 of the bearers kicked it aside as Ambrose walked in the* 
 procession. 
 
 Suddenly his eye fell on the protruding feet of the man ,, 
 they carried; there was a darn, in some lighter wool, on thetjj 
 rough blue sock, a darn perhaps made by a woman's hand. [ 
 
 At the pity of it, the men and the well faded, and he 
 heard some one call out — 
 
 "Hullo, hold up! what's this?" 
 
 A minute later there came the cold splash of water in his 
 face, and he found himself lying on the road with his head 
 on a blue- jersey ed arm. 
 
 "Turned 'ee a bit sickish, did it?" said Michael Prust 
 philosophically; "you've got your mother's milk still in 'ee, 
 my sonny." 
 
 But Ambrose wondered dully how the water had been 
 dipped from the well in a dipper that had no bottom to it. 
 Then he raged at the thought that a man who had just been 
 over cliff should be associated with mother's milk. He got 
 up hastily with the sensation of having fallen off a pedestal. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 THE LAW OF LIFE 
 
 THE next morning Damaris Westaway stood looking 
 down on the sheltered cove, east of Hartland Point, 
 that is called Shipload Bay. The sea was gleaming in 
 pools of rose-red shadow, that broadened here and there 
 into glittering mirrors of steel-blue as the sun emerged 
 from a smouldering bank of cloud mountains. Broader 
 the light grew and more vivid, till the eyes ached with the 
 jreflection of it. 
 
 Dancing in the foam at the line where the breakers 
 seethed there was one human figure. Seen from the cliffs 
 [above as it ran across the sand, it seemed to be racing the 
 cloud shapes that threw their shadow on the sea. Coming 
 jdown the cliff path, Damaris watched the pinkish figure 
 (dancing by the side of its hard, black shadow, and when 
 I she reached the sand she could hear the sound of singing 
 ;in a clear, half-boyish soprano. There seemed to be no 
 I words, but the harmony of voice and sea and wind was 
 'complete, for it was the wordless hour of joy that knows 
 no thought, no fear of the future, no after-taste of the 
 I past. 
 
 ; Damaris knew the singer very well, for Thyrza Braund 
 I had been quite the best dancer in the class that she had 
 {Conducted during the winter. Thyrza also possessed an 
 'additional interest as forming part of the Velly household; 
 there was even in the freshness of her simplicity something 
 I 95 
 
96 A Man of Genius 
 
 ii 
 
 of the charm that radiated from Ambrose himself, for be 
 were frankly in love with themselves — Ambrose with 1 
 brain, Th)Tza with her body. 
 
 ''It is sweet to lie in the sun"; such was the sum tol 
 of Thyrza Braund's philosophy, and the only differen 
 between her outlook and that of a little animal was tbi 
 she was sensitive to more kinds of sunshine than the anim; 
 She loved nothing savagely or greedily, but all pleasa 
 things sanely. The perfection of her own body gave h' 
 the sense of being at home in the world; she set her tee 
 in the bread and cream and licked her lips after it as merri, 
 as the most immoral cat that ever roved a dairy; she p: 
 her lips to the cider as a bee might have rifled a clove| 
 head. In summer lands she would have sucked the purpl 
 grape-skins dry with the pouting lips of a Hebe, as a moth 
 would have taken the same pleasure in her little ones \ 
 a hen with downy ducklings. All unkindness was foreij; 
 to her nature, for she basked even more happily in humj' 
 sunshine than in physical. The crystal clearness of h 
 simple heart was an instinctive appeal to " Mother Damaris 
 who felt about such human butterflies as this what Luth 
 felt when he watched his little Magdalen venturing aloi j 
 into the unknown universe that waits on the other side >' 3 
 death; for the big world is a strange place for little souls 1 ' 
 wander in. 
 At last Damaris called to her — j 
 
 ''Thyrza, Thyrza Braund!" i 
 
 The girl started, glancing seaward and landward an^ I 
 skyward, as if doubtful whether the voice were of earth c! i 
 heaven. Then she laughed. , | 
 
 "Why, Miss Damaris, I never knew there was a sov , 
 near," she said. • 
 
 She was not painfully embarrassed, for she danced up tbi 
 beach on bare toes, splashing through all the pools, an 
 
The Law of Life 97 
 
 singing to herself. As she came nearer Damaris could dis- 
 tinguish the words: — 
 
 "I've got one lover and I don't want two." 
 
 Damaris frowned, for her own sentiment, in view of the 
 ^aves and wind, had been ralluT — 
 " Holy, Holy, Holy. 
 
 "Why, Thyrza," she said, "you're quite mad to-day. 
 And how is it you're out like this?" 
 
 "I done up all my work, and I wasn't well yesterday," 
 said the girl shyly, "so Mrs. Velly sent me out." 
 
 Damaris glanced for a second at the angry red and white 
 ripple marks that scarred ThjTza's neck, for she was slightly 
 marked with the king's evil. Catching her eye, the girl 
 covered her neck with her hands, exclaiming — 
 
 "I'm spoilt with this. I always feel it's there; and I get 
 to mind it more and more as I grow older." 
 
 "But you have always had it, so that it's nothing new to 
 you. Why should you care more about it now?" 
 
 "Because there's somebody that I like — like — like very 
 much. And I thought he'd hate me for it. I wanted to 
 be clean and whole for 'en," she whispered as she began 
 to dress. 
 
 Damaris understood, for her chief gift was a certain 
 
 power of projecting herself into the lives of others. Even 
 
 now, in the sore trouble of her thoughts about her father 
 
 j and his changing life, she was able to live with Thyrza for 
 
 a few minutes. 
 
 "Yes," she said slowly, "one would wish to be perfect 
 for the man one loves. But, Thyrza, you must always 
 remember that a stain on our hearts hurts those we love far 
 more than a bodily blemish could do." 
 
 In awe at this serious tone, Thyrza looked up from her 
 task of fastening her shoes. 
 
98 A Man of Genius 
 
 "Why am I marked same as this?'* she asked. 
 
 " 'Tis for your forefathers' faults, they say." 
 
 "But what have I done to have they forefathers?'* 
 
 "Ah, Thyrza, that's the riddle of the world. If we 
 
 could answer that, we should know all about ourselves." 
 
 "But it wasn't his forefathers that brought all this: 
 
 trouble on poor John Darracott," cried Thyrza, rushing 
 
 into the trouble that was constantly recurring to her mind.| 
 
 "Oh, they speak shameful of 'en. They say he told a lie' 
 
 when he swore he was on the look-out that night. But 
 
 it isn't true, for I know 'en better than that comes to. 
 
 And he's going to get the sack, they say; and there's nobody 
 
 to throw 'en a good word, and he never speaks to anybody 
 
 now." i 
 
 I 
 So this, thought Damaris, was the secret of the distress 
 
 at the marred neck. 
 
 "Never mind, Thyrza," she said; "there's going to be; 
 a Board of Trade enquiry, and that will probably clear his' 
 name." 
 
 "And till then he's to bear all their scandalising without 
 a word," said Thyrza, with heaving breast. 
 
 "Suppose," said Damaris slowly, "that Darracott's 
 trouble should put an end to a bad system and bring back 
 the old way of watching the coast. Wouldn't it be worth 
 while for him to bear a little cruel gossip?" 
 
 "No, it wouldn't. For why should they tell lies about 
 'en? 'Tis bad enough for 'en to feel the lives gone. My 
 father was a pilot for twenty years, and I know what it 
 would ha' been to him." ; 
 
 "Come here," said Damaris, thinking more of Thyrza | 
 than of Darracott, "come and sit by me. I don't know 
 who it is that likes — likes — likes you." 
 
 "He doesn't. 'Tis I that likes him. 'Tis maidens after 
 men, these ways, you know," dimpled Thyrza. 
 
The Law of Life 99 
 
 "Well, whoever it is, wait and be sure that it's the right 
 one; for if it's the wrong one, he'll spoil you more than 
 ever these marks can do." 
 
 "Eh, dear," said Thyrza frankly, '*I don't mind men no 
 more'n I do varmints and angle-twitches. They'm all 
 living, and that's enough for me. I like what's alive." 
 
 "Yes," said Damaris, "we want the touch of strength 
 that a man can give us. But sometimes we've to wait all 
 our lives for the right touch." 
 
 "I shall try and be struck for the marks," said Thyrza, 
 turning Damaris's words to literal account. "They say that 
 if you lay the hand of a dead person on 'em, they'll go." 
 
 Tremblingly she thought in a flash of the French sailor 
 whose body lay at Blegberry. "Anyway," she whispered, 
 "they say you'll never have a baby with the marks." 
 
 Damaris took the girl's hand, all roughened with work, in 
 her own long, student's hands, thinking, as she did so, of 
 the power of imaginative sympathy shown by the child in 
 her sorrow for Darracott, in her tender thought of mother- 
 hood. After all, the root of things was in Thyrza. 
 
 "A baby with a neck all lily-white," she said; "that's 
 what you want, is it?" 
 
 Thyrza's eyes suddenly filled with teais. 
 
 "Eh, my Lord," she whispered, "how you know things!" 
 
 "Listen, Thyrza. There is more than one way of love. 
 There's instinct; that's of the animals. Women don't 
 know much of that, thank God. Anyway, it's not first with 
 them. Then there's the glory that is all a dream of a few 
 weeks. It passes, but it gives us the things women want, 
 little lips that kiss, little hands that cling." 
 
 "That's it," said Thyrza, sobbing. "How did 'ee know 
 — to say it?" 
 
 But Damaris did not know; she only dreamt, as women do. 
 
 "And," she went on, after a long pause filled by the 
 
loo A Man of Genius 
 
 roar of the wind and the sea and the throbbing of two 
 tender hearts, "there's a third love. The love that is all |i 
 star-like, that points upwards, that leads to the great heights 
 where the body is not felt, and the child of that love is m 
 puny, crying babe but a great deed that we call divine." 
 
 Thyrza looked awe-stricken, then she said timidly 
 ''That's lonesome — and cold," she added. 
 
 ''And not for you nor me," laughed Damaris. 
 
 Somehow Th)a-2a's face had grown suddenly quiet; 
 nothing of her former joy danced in her eyes. 
 
 "The sea's quieter," she said as they climbed up the 
 cliff. "I always know how the sea is, and when there's 
 a storm I'm mad-like. When a maid's like that she bears 
 her children to the flow of tide and goes out with the ebb. 
 I know how the tide is day and night. Even if you was 
 to wake me sudden, I should know." 
 
 Damaris looked out to sea and noticed that the mist was 
 closing in over the horizon. 
 
 "Mother bore me in a storm," said Thyrza; "and the 
 months afore I came, her was never out of sound of the 
 gulls. I mind her saying that ever so many times.'* 
 
 "Do you believe all that?" asked Damaris. 
 
 " 'Tis true as the Book," answered Thyrza. 
 
 At the top of the cliff they parted, and Damaris turned 
 back towards the village. 
 
 Hartland lies several miles inland from the cliffs, a group 
 of low buildings crouching under blackened thatch or grey 
 slate roofs, with little windows set deep in whitewashed 
 walls. The narrow streets look windswept even in bright 
 sunshine. An ancient plane tree leans against the end of 
 Dr. Dayman's house, if anything so prim as a plane tree 
 can be said to lean. The house, with its wide porch and 
 niggard window-spaces, had been the Manor House of the 
 Prust family, in the days when the village was a borough 
 
The Law of Life i o i 
 
 ►wn with a charter dating from the thirteenth century. 
 
 It is a place of wide light, where the north wind seems to 
 
 |l)Iow perpetually, yet the hydrangea clusters in the gardens, 
 
 he lemon-scented verbenas and flowering myrtles bear wit- 
 
 liiess to the softness of the sea-wind that blows inland from 
 
 he echoing clifTs. 
 
 At the entrance to the village Damaris met Dr. Dayman, 
 rho at sight of her face, dismounted, and holding the 
 nidle under his arm, prepared to walk back with her. 
 
 *'You don't look," said he, "as if you'd slept very well 
 last night." 
 
 "Father told me what you already know," she said, 
 "about what he means to do." 
 
 "And it's upset you." 
 
 "Dr. Dayman," she said, turning on him angrily, ''don't 
 lyou see that it takes away the only interest in my life, cuts 
 it off clean? For here I had found work to do; I could 
 help, even more than father could, and now there'll be 
 nothing left for me but to keep house for him and see he 
 doesn't catch cold. For I have tried hard to help here. 
 And although it's only a little place, somehow it was a 
 human link. I felt part of a big family." 
 
 "Do you know what I call you? Yes, you do quite 
 well, Mother Damaris. I know all you've done. Dozens 
 of girls pulled up, boys turned from louts into humans. 
 I always said that there wasn't anything you'd turn your 
 back on; nothing too low, nothing too dirty for Mother 
 Damaris to handle, God' bless her!" 
 
 The doctor lifted his hat, as he was wont to do at his 
 own lexical passages. 
 
 "It'll all be over in a few short months, I suppose," said 
 Damaris; "for, disguise the fact as you will, a woman is a 
 man's shadow, her husband's, her father's. I've no work 
 to do because I'm Damaris Westaway. Only I was given 
 
I02 A Man of Genius | 
 
 a little because I was my father's daughter. Look ats-; 
 Caroline Herschel, washing dishes while her brothers! 
 swept the heavens with their telescopes, and she with long-; 
 ings as keen as theirs." 
 
 The girl had been very lonely, for her scholarly training j! 
 had unfitted her for friendship with the country girls of ; 
 her own class, and with all the force of her nature she il 
 longed to do what she called 'Uhe real things," to be in i 
 at the doing of tangible tasks. True, she wrote notes ■[ 
 and corrected references for her father, but she had more 
 instinct for the practical than the scholarly life. She had 
 found, therefore, intense happiness in the nursing Dr. 
 Dayman often gave her to do, in the mental healing she was 
 sometimes able to bring. Although she was honest enough 
 to know that her father was only doing the straight thing 
 in leaving the Church, yet the blow had opened her eyes 
 to her dependent position. 
 
 With eyes that looked straight ahead she poured out 
 her sorrows to Dr. Dayman, as frankly as in her childish 
 days she had confided to him the broken toys that he used 
 to mend for her. 
 
 "It isn't a case of father and me only. It's the case 
 of one sex and another," she said. 
 
 "And one generation and another," said Dr. Dayman 
 quietly. 
 
 "Perhaps so. Father and I love each other dearly. 
 But it's the way life treats us women, that's where the 
 trouble lies." 
 
 "Yes; you've no locus standi, that's the trouble of it," 
 said Dr. Dayman. 
 
 "I have been educated to think; but here I am going 
 to be left with nothing to think about, except to cultivate 
 my own miserable talents, which is like breathing in a 
 bell-glass where there is no communication with the outer 
 
The Law of Life 103 
 
 air. We're always being pruned, we women. Long ago 
 
 ( they pruned our morals and mutilated our hearts by ignor- 
 
 ' ance and seclusion, in order that we might be chaste, that 
 
 we might bear children honestly. They only made us petty. 
 
 jThey couldn't make us chaste that way, not chaste with 
 
 * the chastity of real passion that keeps pure for love's dear 
 
 sake. But, forgive me, Dr. Dayman, for ramping on a 
 
 platform." 
 
 *'Gad, Damaris, keep it up," said the doctor, counting 
 an ebullition of rage a first-class feminine febrifuge. 
 I "Now they prune us mentally," she continued. "Oh, 
 ' yes, they give us books and toys and bid us play happily 
 in our nurseries, the schools and colleges that lead no- 
 j where. But we want our share in the direction of the 
 I world; we want to train our powers of judgment and 
 ! responsibility exactly as men train theirs — by using them. 
 Why, even the grocer in a back street has his vision above 
 the price of raisins, his vision of a greater people to be, 
 if it's only that they'll get better water from the improved 
 town-pump. But we women have to be contented with 
 the kitchen water-tap. We mustn't meddle with the town- 
 pump." 
 
 "Do you know," said Dr. Dayman, "that even now 
 ; you're being tested in your powers of sharing in the common 
 j life — and you're failing? Would it be well for your father 
 I to hold office in an organisation that he no longer believes 
 '■ in — even to satisfy his daughter's craving for helping lame 
 I dogs over stiles?" 
 
 I It was a blow between the eyes, but Damaris was made 
 of the finer stuff that can take blows. 
 
 "You're right," she said after a long silence. "But I'm 
 j so miserable. Tell me what I'm to do." 
 
 "Put out of your mind what's going to happen to you 
 next month or next year, and wait quietly, for wherever 
 
I04 A Man of Genius 
 
 you're blown you'll make a niche for yourself. There may 
 be going to be greater changes than you think," he said, 
 remembering that the upheaval in Mr. Westaway's life was 
 not merely religious. 
 
 "I'll try," said Damaris humbly. "But almost worse to 
 bear of all is the thought of what hard things will be said 
 of father." 
 
 "That kind of thing," said Dr. Dayman, "evil speaking, 
 lying and slandering, is largely a matter of class; for the 
 lower the breed, the more savagely the human birds peck a 
 wounded mate." 
 
 Like Thyrza, Dr. Dayman's thoughts often turned to 
 John Darracott, for, unlike Thyrza, he wished the man 
 would leave the neighbourhood instead of persisting in the 
 struggle against calumny. 
 
 That evening Darracott sat in his room, with his head 
 leaning forward on his breast, going over and over again 
 the same round of thoughts, the same hopeless speculations 
 as to what might have been done had he been at the rocket- 
 house. He counted much on the fact that it would have 
 taken at least an hour and a half to get the men together 
 at Smoothlands, and in all probability the actual wreck 
 was a matter of a few minutes. 
 
 It was nerve-shaking to him, in the wall of isolation that 
 had grown around him, to hear a low tapping on his door. 
 He glanced round the room before he went to open it, 
 feeling ashamed of the table piled high with dirty plates, 
 and of the grate thick in layers of ashes. 
 
 On the doorstep stood Thyrza, her breath catching pain- 
 fully from nervousness. Three times, indeed, she had 
 walked up and down outside the house before venturing to 
 knock. But one glance at Darracott's face brought her 
 the pluck that rarely fails a woman in desperate straits, her 
 own, or another's. 
 
The Law of Life 105 
 
 **I haven't seen 'ee for so long, Mr. Darracott," she said 
 calmly, "that I thought you must be ill. May I come in?" 
 
 "Surely," said John, the sound of his own voice echoing 
 -trangely in his ears. He was still working at the farm, 
 hut from his master he heard nothing now but a few curt 
 words that required no answer. 
 
 Thyrza was glad when the roar of the waves outside was 
 deadened by the closing of the door. She understood how 
 it must ring in Darracott's ears when she noticed how he 
 started at the shriek of the gulls overhead, for his nerves 
 were quivering like those of a horse that has been flogged. 
 
 "It's queer to think I've never been here before," she 
 said; "but, dear me, you do show you're a bachelor man. 
 Now, I'm going to wash up some of your things for you," 
 she continued, turning up the sleeves of her dress, and 
 giving him a little shove towards the steaming kettle. 
 
 " 'Tis day of judgment like enough," she said to herself, 
 "to have him grizzling like that, leave alone seeing his 
 room in such a muck. And before I leave I'll have his 
 room ship-shape, and that look out of his face. That I 
 will, if I stay here all night." 
 
 Suddenly Darracott threw down the tea-cloth she had 
 thrust into his hand. 
 
 "No, no, my dear," he said, "it won't do. You meant 
 kind by coming, but 'tis getting darkish, and you mustn't 
 stay no longer." 
 
 "John," she said, looking up at him in the darkening 
 room that somehow gave her greater courage, "night and 
 day I couldn't get 'ee out of my mind. So I couldn't bide 
 away no longer, for you're in sore trouble, John." 
 
 In the repetition of his name she felt herself calling to 
 be admitted to the depths of his sorrow; he should not be 
 alone down there, she said, repeating it to herself again and 
 again with the faith that moves mountains. 
 
io6 A Man of Genius 
 
 His ice-bound heart moved for a second, thrilling in the 
 warm beam of her words and looks. 
 
 "My dear," he said gently, "you oughtn't to ha' come; 
 for you're a maid with a good name to lose, and you might 
 ha' been seen coming here. What's to be borne, I can 
 bear." 
 
 "Listen to me," she said, holding his arms and stretch- 
 ing a-tip-toe in the effort to comfort; "do you think that 
 because I'm a maid, I'll let 'ee bear trouble alone? Let 
 me help, let me help, John. I want to say things to 'ee, 
 for I can't bear to see they hard eyes, John — hard, hopeless 
 eyes." 
 
 "My dear, my dear, what do 'ee want?" he asked, as he 
 felt her sobs go through him. "'Tisn't as if you cared for 
 me. Thank God, you don't as 'tis," he said, loosening her 
 hands. 
 
 "Why?" she asked sharply, standing very upright in the 
 middle of the room, and stamping her foot. "What's all 
 this fuss about? I know everything that there is to know. 
 The Flying Foam wasn't even seaworthy, jibs all wrong and 
 head sails worse. And for all a body can tell, with no 
 signals aboard to send up. What's all that got to do with 
 you ? The lying devils to take away a man's name same as 
 this is! And you, too, to sit down and bear it like this! 
 I'm ashamed of you, John Darracott; and I'm glad, I'm 
 glad, you and me's not keeping company. There," she 
 cried, stamping her foot again; "you're a poor spirited 
 thing, a regular toad under a harrow. And I'm sorry I 
 come here to-night, that I be." 
 
 She burst into an agony of tears. 
 
 "Thyrza," said Darracott, in a tone that stopped her 
 sobbing, "do you know what 'tis they say about me?'* 
 
 "Yes," she whispered; "they say you wasn't there." 
 
 "And it's true what they say," he answered; "it's quite 
 
The Law of Life 
 
 107 
 
 true. I lay across that there table and slept — and out- 
 side " 
 
 He made a gesture toward the heaving sea below, and 
 was silent. 
 
 Thyrza had often stood by men when they do the work 
 that tests their manhood; she understood in an instant 
 what this confession must mean to him. But in a flash 
 her pity pierced to the heart of his agony. 
 
 "Oh, John," she said, pushing him into a chair, and 
 thrusting herself into his arms in a hard, fierce eager- 
 ness to comfort; *'John, John, you must ha' been worn 
 out!" 
 
 **But nothing'll ever bring back they lives, nothing'll 
 make me the same as I was before that night," he said, 
 while he held her close in the mere comfort of humanity 
 that shared the pain. 
 
 "But," she said in low tones, "I don't believe but what 
 you'll be allowed some day to pay it back. John, some 
 day you'll pay it back." 
 
 "You thought of that too, Thyrza. And so did I. Ay, 
 though you don't love me, us think the same thoughts." 
 
 "And you didn't know what you was doing." She knew 
 well what the weariness of a field labourer can be. 
 
 For a moment he thought of telling her the part she had 
 played in his failure, for in the relief of partial confession 
 he saw how a full confession would comfort. Then he 
 rejected the idea of shadowing her brightness with such 
 an idea, and in the rejection of this temptation there blew 
 on his heart the first faint breath of returning self-respect. 
 
 "I slept like a log," he said evasively. "But you don't 
 I I shrink from me, and that's something. Thyrza, you'd feel 
 it more if you loved me, wouldn't 'ee, my dear?" 
 
 She was silent, but they both knew it to be true. Then 
 he got up and gently put her down. 
 
io8 A Man of Genius 
 
 "John," she said hesitatingly, "hadn't 'ee better say it 
 out open to everybody, same as you have to me?" 
 
 "'Tisn't in me to do it, not after what I swore. No 
 mortal man could do it." 
 
 "And I've done no good by coming," she said sadly, as 
 he opened the door. 
 
 Shutting it once more, he came back and, putting his 
 hands on her shoulders, looked down into her eyes. 
 
 "Thyrza," he said steadily, "you've done more than 
 ever I could tell 'ee. When you knocked at the door I was 
 thinking there was but one way for me. But I know now 
 that death's cowardice. I've got to bide on, till the time 
 comes when I can do what you said." 
 
 "Pay back," she whispered. 
 
 "Iss, lass; pay back." 
 
 The half-latched door burst open, and as the waves 
 sounded nearer, he said, "There'll come a way if only I 
 bide long enough." 
 
 In that moment there came to them both from the sea 
 the clear call of things high and hard, the things that the 
 struggle with nature has always called for, the great renun- 
 ciations that no history records, for they are written only in 
 the annals of lives which end in unmarked graves. 
 
 "John," whispered Thyrza, "will 'ee give me the box you 
 made for me?" 
 
 It was in her hand as they walked along the road to 
 Long Furlong. 
 
 Earlier in the evening Ambrose Velly sat drawing in the 
 farm kitchen. There was a certain savagery about the 
 great slashing strokes with which he worked, till at length 
 he tore the paper. With a half-oath he seized another 
 sheet, flinging the first on the floor by his side. 
 
 The night was still, and a faint murmur of the distant sea 
 crooned in at the open doorway. Suddenly a branch of 
 
 li 
 
The Law of Life 1 09 
 
 wood, hissing in the embers, gave out a ripping sound, and 
 in the nerve-tension of the moment, Ambrose started. 
 Then he flung down his charcoal and laid his head on his 
 hands. He could see the ring of sunburnt faces, the out- 
 stretched figure of the French sailor in their midst. 
 
 But what he saw was not on the paper, for his hand 
 refused obedience. Slowly he tore the second sheet across 
 and began laboriously to draw the well-house at Blegberry. 
 The drawing was a model of accurate memory-work, and 
 the completion of it a bitter exercise in self-humiliation, for, 
 like a man who has set out to conceive a design of traceried 
 arches, he ended by building a four-square pigsty. 
 
 Leaving his drawing on the table, at last Ambrose went 
 out of the house, ostensibly to stretch his limbs, really to 
 find Thyrza. For he had only begun to value the girl's 
 adoration now that it was beginning to fail him. To-night 
 she had left the house without a word, and for days she 
 had scarcely noticed Ambrose's presence. 
 
 When he saw the two figures of Darracott and Thyrza 
 drawing near the farm, the reason of it all flashed through 
 him; she had gone to meet Darracott, perhaps even to 
 visit him. In a white heat of rage he made as if to pass 
 the two, but Thyrza would not have it. 
 
 "Ambrose,'* she called, ''Mr. Darracott wouldn t have 
 me come back alone; but you'll see me safe home, won't 
 you?" 
 
 "Don't let me spoilsport," said Ambrose. "He must 
 have a great deal to talk to you about just now. Of that 
 I make no doubt," he finished with a sneer. 
 
 Darracott stood silent while the other's jibes rained 
 about his ears. Then he turned on his heel, and with a 
 brief "Good night," was gone. 
 
 Thyrza stood watching his retreating figure for a long 
 while, then she turned on Ambrose. 
 
no A Man of Genius 
 
 "I didn't think you were mean before," she said, walking 
 down the road to Long Furlong. The shrinking look on 
 Darracott's face had effaced the memory of the high thought 
 they had shared together, and she felt furious with Ambrose 
 for the bitter shadow he had thrown over her evening. 
 
 "I should think," said Ambrose, as he followed, "that 
 you might know better than to be seen with that fellow. 
 Anyhow, he ought to have more decency than to let you 
 speak to him." 
 
 "And why shouldn't I speak to him?" she asked, stop- 
 ping and turning on him. 
 
 As she did so he caught sight of the box in her hand, and 
 snatching it from her, opened it. When he looked from 
 the hedge-sparrow's eggs to her eyes, he knew why they 
 had been placed there. With an oath he crushed the 
 shells in his hand and flung them across the road. The 
 box would have followed, had not Thyrza wrested it from 
 him in time. 
 
 Suddenly in a flood of memory there came to Ambrose 
 the thought that he had in his hand a weapon that would 
 destroy Darracott's chance with Thyrza for ever. He knew 
 the truth about the Flying Foam and Darracott's unkept 
 watch. Thyrza would never give the man a second thought 
 if she knew the facts. 
 
 Ambrose walked on while the battle raged in him. But, 
 after a moment, the danger to Darracott was past, for he 
 could not rack the poor wretch any more. It was as im- 
 possible to do it as to give the hunted hare to the mercy of 
 the dogs. 
 
 But Th)Tza had read in his face the love she had so often 
 longed to rouse. With a heart beating to a suffocating 
 measure she walked by his side, while the fleecy clouds 
 overhead raced faster than her own pulses in the rhythmic 
 swell of life that was thrilling to-night. To Ambrose 
 
The Law of Life 1 1 1 
 
 there seemed to be danger somewhere, till in the mental 
 turmoil, partly jealousy and partly something to which he 
 could give no name, a solid band began to compress his 
 forehead. 
 
 Then he heard a quick breath by his side, that no stress 
 of Thyrza's will power could restrain. 
 
 "Thyrza," he said hoarsely, "Th>Tza." 
 
 As he stood still he saw the girl's figure sway. 
 
 "Did you go to see Darracott to-night?'* he asked at 
 last. 
 
 "Iss, Ambrose." 
 
 "To his house?" 
 
 "Iss, Ambrose. 'Twas that I thought night and day 
 about 'en and his trouble. For, oh, my heavens, he's the 
 only one that cares for me in all the world!" 
 
 She was sobbing bitterly. 
 
 "Thyrza, come here." 
 
 Then, as he held out his arms to her, all the supports of 
 will within seemed to give way. Yet falling, as it seemed, 
 into an abyss, he still held her close. In a flash he saw 
 the two sides of his life, the struggle to be an artist, to win 
 up, to make a way that no one else could make for him — 
 and this, that cooed on his heart, half a thing of flame and 
 half of tenderness. Shoals and shallows it might mean; 
 that he knew quite well, yet he stooped his lips to hers and 
 I all the world vanished. 
 
 I "I've loved 'ee all the time," whispered Thyrza, ''but 
 I you never give me a sign, and then I thought I'd sent away 
 the one man that loved me." 
 
 He laughed joyfully, as he whispered — 
 
 "But now you know there's another. Which of us is the 
 one you love, Thyrza?" 
 
 "You know," she said, slipping her hand into his with a 
 sigh of content. 
 
112 A Man of Genius 
 
 "Dear little soul," he answered, "you've wound round d 
 my heart every way. We're almost of the same flesh and a 
 blood, for your ancestors and mine sleep together in the | 
 dear old Devon earth, where you and I'll sleep together j 
 years hence, Thyrza." 
 
 What happiness he could give her, he reflected, laugh- j 
 ing to himself. He only wished it were possible to make a j 
 whole armful of women happy, for if ever a man felt a j 
 benefactor to the entire race of women that night, it was I 
 Ambrose Velly. I 
 
 "You couldn't live without me, could you, Thyrza?" he: ' 
 whispered as they said good night. "Say it now. Say, *]^ 
 couldn't live without you, Ambrose.'" i s 
 
 "Oh, I couldn't. That's true enough," she answered, i 
 "But I was afraid somebody had told 'ee of this." ; 
 
 She touched the high neck of her dress. ; 
 
 "Did 'ee know I was marked, Ambrose?" she asked. ( 
 
 He pulled her to him and pressed his lips to the ned i 
 that troubled her so. ' i 
 
 "Ambrose," she said, "I do hate what takes 'ee awa) i 
 from me. You're forever drawing and reading. You don' ; li 
 love me like I do you." '■ \ 
 
 "Thyrza," he answered gravely, "don't you know tha' I 
 if a man's worth anything he must put his work first? He'i: 'i 
 no man, else." i 
 
 She understood this of Darracott's work, for with j! i 
 beloved woman waiting for him, she knew that the mar j 
 worth loving would go to his death, if the sea called fo: i 
 sacrifice. But Ambrose's work was so different; for, libj \ 
 Mrs. Velly, Thyrza considered architecture, apart from th: ' 
 mere question of shelter, as scarcely a dignified occupatioi i 
 for a grown man, and when she thought of sculpture sb > 
 always remembered the Italian men who bring rounr i 
 baskets of "images" for sale. 
 
The Law of Life 113 
 
 < Two men that night sat reading the first law of life, 
 'which is written: "That ye bear much fruit." Darracott 
 fdreamt simply of the price paid for other human lives, 
 where Ambrose saw the fair children of his brain rising, 
 stone above stone, into the sunlight, but they both under- 
 jstood more than Thyrza. Yet she, too, had set out on the 
 long road which begins with the eating of the fruit of the 
 tree of knowledge. And since Edenic days the way to 
 the tree of life runs past the tree of knowledge. 
 8 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 THE WANDERING GLEAM 
 
 THE following day Ambrose and Mr. Westaway were 
 to visit that city of many sieges — Exeter. It was 
 practically the first time that the country youth had come 
 in contact with the life of an ancient historic city, for 
 Ambrose had but little knowledge of the western land that 
 was one day to become an inspiration to him, save of his 
 own wild corner. What he saw in Exeter came to him, 
 then, the more vividly for his dreams of what he would see, 
 for racial love has a trick, like other loves, of flourishing 
 most vigorously on short commons. 
 
 Behind them, up the wide ridges of Stepcote Hill, where 
 the guns of William of Orange had been dragged, there 
 once stood the town houses of the wool merchants by 
 whose wealth and enterprise the city lived. Now the road 
 was lined with squalid houses, filth-encrusted and teeming 
 with human life. Along West Street, once the outlook tower 
 of the merchants as they watched their ships bringing goods 
 from Spain, from France and the Lowlands, hung torn 
 bedding and drying clothes suspended by ropes from the 
 windows. "Below wall," as it is still called, lay crowded 
 factories, among which Ambrose noticed the firm of Bodley, 
 stove manufacturers. The name carried him back to 
 Long Furlong, to the oven his mother so often bewailed. 
 Beyond gleamed the river, up which the Danes came chant- 
 ing their deadly "Aoi! Aoi!" to the assault of the water 
 gate. 
 
 114 
 
The Wandering Gleam i i 5 
 
 "What does it make you feel, Ambrose?" asked Mr. 
 Westaway. "What do you see here?" 
 
 "That there's so much at the back of it all, so much 
 forgotten, besides what's remembered." 
 
 "Look at the want and sorrow and sin," said Mr. West- 
 away. 
 
 "There's a sort of beauty in that, too. Oh, I can't say 
 it, but Danes and merchants and squalling brats, somehow 
 it's life. That's what I like. All of it's fme, even the 
 dirty clothes, and they're alive too, I'll warn," he said with 
 a grin. 
 
 "What does it make you want to do?" 
 
 "To fight — and win. Same as they did in the past. I 
 want to build, so that when I'm gone, like those others, 
 what I did'll be here." 
 
 "Ay, you see straight. You were born for the lesser 
 light." 
 
 "What's that, sir?" 
 
 "To live for your own purposes. There's another, the 
 greater light, which is to seek not one's own, but to live in 
 the life of others. Just let me tell you something. The 
 saddest thing in all the world is to see the better way and 
 have no power to tread it. Think of those followers of 
 Him who had not where to lay His head, who live in fine 
 houses and fare sumptuously — with this," he pointed to 
 Stepcote Hill— "close by." 
 
 There was a silence, for Ambrose knew that something 
 more than his pupil's career was filling the Vicar's mind. 
 
 "But you live plainly," stammered Ambrose at last. 
 
 "But my simplicity would feed the hungry and clothe 
 the naked. All my life I have had to say, the way that I 
 know is too hard for me." 
 
 The breath of a larger emotion reached Ambrose for a 
 second, a bigger passion than even the love of beautiful 
 
1 1 6 A Man of Genius 1 
 
 achievement, the greatest passion of ail, the longing to get 
 down to the depths of evil, if so be that we may help, but 
 it produced a distinct sensation of antagonism. The sun 
 was shining, the water flashing, the blood flowing merrily 
 in his veins; such puling as this was monkish anachronism. 
 He hated it, and the hatred was expressed in a slight shrug 
 of the shoulders. A poor wretch in the gutter would move 
 Ambrose to a chance-flung penny, but he would whistle the 
 more loudly after the encounter in order to forget the 
 unpleasantness of it. 
 
 Men like Ambrose come into the world trailing no clouds 
 of glory with them. He had never displayed even the 
 usual sentimentality of youth; he never sang in the village 
 choir, nor had he ever feared a hell, the usual signs of 
 sanctity in the British-born boy. Yet neither had he been 
 actively irreligious; for, like a substance enclosed in a water- 
 proof membrane, his mind had simply remained impervious 
 to anything like spiritual influence, and the cult of humanity, 
 of which Mr. Westaway talked, was to him merely curious, 
 a sort of moral squint. 
 
 Such men must learn of the earth; there are no great 
 voices for them, either from past tradition or to-day's 
 appeal, there is only the school of the personal struggle of 
 the world for them. Ambrose had but for ladder to the 
 stars a love of seeing others happy and a dislike of causing 
 pain. 
 
 He had, in addition, his artistic birthright of sensitive- 
 ness to impressions; the sight of a berried autumn hedge 
 against the blue would send his pulses leaping in much the 
 same way as a great heroic act would have done in a soul 
 more spiritual. All the senses, lower as well as higher, 
 were very strong in him, and he was as eager for the joys of 
 the palate as for the pleasures of the eye. Apples, straw- 
 berries and asparagus not only delighted him, but made 
 
The Wandering Gleam i 17 
 
 him friendly towards other men who revelled in these good 
 gifts, and Ambrose preferred to share his strawberries with 
 another, because the spectacle of some one else rollick- 
 ing in earth's fruits gave an additional edge to his own 
 appetite. 
 
 Then Mr. Westaway began to tell the story of how the 
 Cornish rebels of the old faith besieged the city, and were 
 repulsed from the west gate by the skill of a miner within 
 the walls, who countermined above the besiegers' mine and 
 flooded it with water from the weavers' vats that poured 
 down Stepcote Hill, much helped by the miraculous inter- 
 vention of a thunderstorm. 
 
 ''They were fighting over the Prince of Peace," said Mr. 
 Westaway, "whose words they read to as little purpose as 
 we do to-day." 
 
 They went next into a backyard near the water gate, 
 where stood a tiny chapel, with clothes hung out to dry on 
 the very palings of it. 
 
 "When I was a boy," said Mr. Westaway, "I had an old 
 uncle who was fond of exploring churches. He brought me 
 here one night and we went in. 'Twas then a bare, white- 
 washed room, with a pulpit draped in linen, a great clock 
 and a long table. Round the table sat three figures, a 
 gaunt man, an old lady, and a boy. They were conducting 
 evening service, that is, the old man was reading Toplady's 
 sermons aloud. Now, who do you think these were?" 
 asked Mr. Westaway. 
 
 "I don't know." 
 
 "The last remnant of the Calvinist Independents of the 
 city, the sect of Cromwell and the Ironsides." 
 
 "But they were faithful," said Ambrose. 
 
 "It was but to lucre, then. For each of these Inde- 
 pendents was only waiting for the other to die. Yes, that's 
 what they were waiting for, that the survivor might profit by 
 
1 1 8 A Man of Genius 
 
 the endowment of the sect. That's how the burning, fiery 
 zeal of the Ironsides ended in this ever faithful city. But 
 the survivor was trapped, after all; for they found the 
 money couldn't be alienated from a sect, and it went to the 
 Congregationalists, who enjoy it now." 
 
 A few minutes later Ambrose pushed open the swing 
 door and entered the Cathedral. It was the first time he 
 had seen a great mediaeval building, save in prints and 
 section drawings, and the first idea that struck him was the 
 beauty that lies in cast shadows; the second, a memory of 
 old Sir Henry Wotton's theory that buildings were first 
 circular, because ''birds doe build their nests spherically." 
 For this was a forest in stone, thought Ambrose, catching 
 another glimpse of what he had noted in the village church, 
 the enshrining of nature forms in man's handicraft, the 
 wave-ripples of arch-mouldings, the leaves of crockets, the 
 human heads of corbels, the stone buttresses, cliff-like, of 
 church towers. As he watched the faint beams of sunlight 
 that stole through the mist between the fan-vaulting of the 
 roof, like sun-rays falling on forest arches, a great passion 
 of comprehension flushed all the boy's veins, till his limbs 
 trembled with a fever that was almost physical. For here 
 was not a copy of the earth's beauty, but a sublimated 
 essence of it, a suggestion of the characteristic loveliness of 
 every nature form to be found in the temperate zone. 
 
 Yet after a time he saw vaguely that this was not all, for 
 here in the dimness was a spirit not present in cliff forms or 
 forest arches. What was it ? he asked himself. What was 
 it that this possessed, that those lacked? For a moment 
 he thought it must be strength, remembering the story of 
 Sir Christopher Wren, who, when all the steeples of London 
 were damaged by a hurricane said quietly: "Not St. 
 Dunstan's, I am sure," so confident was he in the four- 
 square strength of his building's walls. "No," said Am- 
 
The Wandering Gleam i i 9 
 
 brose to himself, **it could not be strength, for the cliff 
 bastions are the very types of strength." 
 
 The next moment he had found the answer, a strange 
 answer to come to such a lad. For here he was face to 
 face with the unseen that is enshrined in all great work, the 
 unseen beauty that lies behind the seen. Every splendid 
 thing that man creates is an altar to the Unknown Loveli- 
 ness, of which he catches but flying glimpses now and then, 
 here and there, in a woman's face, in the features of a 
 landscape, in a Pisgah vision of thought. For every 
 picture, every statue, every building, is a confession of 
 faith, not in the maker's own powers, but in that ideal 
 beauty which is still unexpressed, when the picture is 
 painted, or the building raised. 
 
 So came the first gleam of the spirit to Ambrose, born 
 of joy and beauty, yet never to reach its clear shining, 
 except with the help of pain. For like the earth itself and 
 the race of men, the life of the spirit is born of *' shudder- 
 ing, also, and tears." 
 
 Then a boy's voice soared up and up, beyond the vault- 
 ing of the roof, beyond the city mist, beyond the stars, out 
 into the vastness of the universe; another gate of joy was 
 opened for Ambrose, the magic gate of sound that rides 
 the winds of passion, as well as the clear cold air of holi- 
 ness. For this music, unlike the notes of his own fiddle, 
 expressed, not the merry gleam of sunshine, not ''the wind 
 among the barley," but the vastness of the world spaces 
 and of man's dreams of his future. "It doth not yet 
 appear what we shall be," said the boy's voice, pealing up- 
 wards into the unknown. 
 
 Gate after gate of the spirit was opening now, as Ambrose 
 lost himself in thought, the greatest thought of the world, 
 the perception of the vastness of the universe that we 
 inhabit, vast both within and without. It is the most awful 
 
I 20 A Man of Genius 
 
 event, perhaps, in the mind's history, the coming of this 
 consciousness, which makes a man, for a moment, as a god. 
 This place where he sat seemed to Ambrose a temple built 
 in stone for the service of the infinite; it explained the 
 awe of the great rock shapes, the sport of sea and wind, 
 that had been the companions of his boyhood. Ambrose 
 began to fancy that among the angel hosts, of whom the 
 sermon spoke, there must be the creator of this building. 
 
 ''What good is like to this," thought he, ''to build like 
 this?" "Some day," he was saying to himself, as he 
 stepped out into the street, so misty after his own windy 
 land of marsh and moor and sea. It was the gallant 
 "some day" that makes the glory of these great hours of 
 youth, for he had seen the wandering gleam that opens a 
 way to the vistas of the spiritual world. 
 
 An hour later Mr. Westaway and Ambrose stood on the 
 hill above the town, looking down on the beautiful place 
 that sleeps in the circle of her hills, with the mist of her 
 chimneys lying over roofs and towers. Far in the distance 
 flashed a silver streak of sea; in the west flamed the sun- 
 set, in the east a row of elms was sharply outlined by the 
 intense blue of the sky. 
 
 "The secret of life as I have learnt it is this, Ambrose," 
 said Mr. Westaway, "sell all that thou hast and — not neces- 
 sarily give it to the poor, but give it to the one thing in the 
 world that you want. If it be painting, paint; if heaping 
 up wealth, heap; if helping the helpless, help. But re- 
 member that it wants a strong will. For the roadway of 
 life is strewn with the cast-off theories of the young. You 
 know a man gets up on Sunday morning with a great idea 
 that is to change all his ways; but by twelve o'clock on 
 Monday he is doing very much like other people." 
 
 "I won't forget," said Ambrose, who just then saw a new 
 earth, if not a new heaven. But at Long Furlong that very 
 
The Wandering Gleam 121 
 
 evening the old earth was awaiting him; for when we wonder 
 at the spiritual marvels of Gothic architecture, we should 
 bear in mind the monkish life of its designers, if not of 
 its craftsmen, who at any rate contrived in gargoyle and 
 crocket to get in a vast deal of the old earth's mockery of 
 the Sublime and Beautiful. Dr. Dayman, indeed, declared 
 a hundred times that he could feel twitching at his fmger- 
 tips the inspiration of a mediaeval humourist. 
 
 It was a pitch-dark night when Ambrose reached home. 
 After stabling his horse he stood for a moment in the yard 
 before going into the house. It was so still that not a leaf 
 stirred, not a whisper came from the sea; but suddenly 
 circles of yellow light flickered along the lichened garden 
 wall, where the fuchsia bush hung over the heppen stock. 
 As he craned forward round the gateway of the yard he 
 heard the tapping of light heels and saw that the light fell 
 from a lanthorn that Thyrza was carrying. When she had 
 turned the corner into the road, he raced after her, the 
 yellow circles dancing in front of him like a will o' the 
 wisp. The grass and sand of the gutter where he took care 
 to walk were friendly, and gave no hint that she was being 
 followed. 
 
 To Thyrza Braund the marks of the king's-evil on her 
 neck were a real sorrow, not, as they would have been to a 
 practical woman, a thing to necessitate high neck-bands, or, 
 to a clever one, a thing to forget. To women of her type 
 the daintiest bodily purity and perfection must be the 
 foundation of well-being; for the world where men fight to 
 win what satisfies the mind was unknown, save where the 
 simplest issues of duty were concerned. It was not the 
 mere ugliness of the scars that distressed her, but their 
 deep-rooted nature; she felt like a cat who, starting with 
 the disposition of a jet-black one, has yet by some ancestral 
 aberration, acquired a brownish tinge. In her intercourse 
 
122 A Man of Genius 
 
 with Darracott she was the inspirer, she met him on the 
 highest levels of his character; but with Ambrose, so richly 
 endowed beside her own poor nature, she felt a sense of 
 strain. So much in him was a sealed book to Thyrza, who 
 regularly fell asleep over a bound volume of the Quiver 
 every Sunday afternoon, that, in her love, she felt like a 
 priest who seeks the most perfect creature as an offering to 
 his god, for the body and heart that gave delight to Ambrose 
 must have the spotlessness of the immaculate. 
 
 Yet as she walked on to-night, the suffocating beats of 
 her heart almost choked her, and even while she drew near 
 the place of her trial, bent persistently on her task, she was 
 praying that the gods would avert the dreadful moment. 
 For the wormy terrors of physical death, the charnel house 
 horror, could be conquered by nothing save by the power of 
 devotion; there was no spiritual sense to lighten the horror 
 of that grim darkness. 
 
 At last, as the wider roads opened in front of them, 
 Ambrose began to see whither she was bound, for over the 
 tops of the hedges cavernous spaces of opal light yawned to 
 left and right, the meeting place of sea and sky. At first he 
 had imagined himself to be playing the Rabelaisian part of 
 eavesdropper at an assignation, but it almost seemed that 
 the scene was set for a tragedy, since it was for Blegberry 
 that they were bound, a spot inevitably tragic just now, 
 because, in the absence of a mortuary, the sailor's body lay 
 here, awaiting interment in the parish churchyard. 
 
 Thyrza turned into the quadrangle of farm buildings 
 which stands apart from the house. The dog kennelled on 
 the other side of the road made no sound, for the straw of 
 the courtyard muffled their footsteps. 
 
 Strange tremors, like the whirring of a loom, passed 
 from Thyrza to Ambrose, as he watched her in the crepus- 
 cular light from the sea, while she struggled to open the 
 
 
The Wandering Gleam 123 
 
 door of the barn, lifting firm hands to its heavy iron ring. 
 It was locked, and for a second she stood with hands pressed 
 to her face. Then, lifting her lanthorn with a swing of 
 decision, she ran up the flight of outside steps that led to 
 the hay tallat over the barn. 
 
 At last Ambrose dared to steal up the steps in his turn. 
 In the hay-scented stillness within, a shaft of light ran up 
 towards the shadowy roof in a long column of tawny 
 yellow; it came through an opening in the floor, from 
 Thyrza's lanthorn. Lying face downwards with his head 
 peering into the barn below, he could see a ladder down 
 which she must have climbed. In the rafters overhead a 
 bat wheeled in wide circles, beating itself nearer and nearer 
 to the shaft of light that pierced the dimness. Startled 
 pigeons fluttered sleepily, as the rays pierced to their 
 roosting-places, the beams that supported the tallat floor. 
 At the far end of the barn, in the light that radiated like 
 wheel-spokes in the darkness, knelt Thyrza by the side of 
 a trestle table that stood out, bare and startling, in the 
 centre of a cleared space. 
 
 The light shone faintly on her features, showing up the 
 mingled dread and desire that fought on them; the dread 
 was evident, but the desire only lay latent for the moment. 
 Then Ambrose saw her moisten the dry lips of great passion, 
 as she tried with trembling fingers to unhook the fastenings 
 of her cloak and the stud at the neck of her blouse. She 
 was evidently afraid to move freely, lest something should 
 awake. 
 
 It was a needless fear, thought Ambrose, as he traced the 
 outline that lay below the coarse sheet, the long shape, the 
 rise of the trunk, the feet resting upwards, toes in air, the 
 crossed hands on the breast. 
 
 At the hands Thyrza's eyes paused; it was with them 
 that she was concerned. Furtively, and with jerks that 
 
1 24 A Man of Genius 
 
 marked successive efforts of the will, she slipped her hand 
 beneath the sheet, slowly drawing out the dead man's hand, 
 without disturbing anything else. Then, kneeling suddenly, 
 with sobbing breaths that shook her whole body, she placed 
 the dead hand on her neck, pressing it close against the scars. 
 
 It had large, coarse fingers, whose blackened nails lent to 
 it something of the appearance of a claw, and against it 
 the girl's skin shone like semi-transparent porcelain. As 
 the cold struck downwards, from the skin to the blood 
 beneath, the dread passed from her face, leaving only 
 traces of past emotion, like wavemarks in sand, and tiny 
 points of perspiration on forehead and nose. She pressed 
 the hand closer and closer, with the movement of one 
 getting life from another; there was a suggestion of cruelty 
 in the action, like the savage sucking of a starving child. 
 
 At the sight the blood leapt torrent-like through Ambrose 
 Velly's veins and, as he jumped to his feet, the noise he 
 made startled the girl. He heard her shudder and start 
 away from the table, and the next moment he leapt down 
 the ladder, crying — 
 
 "Thyrza, Thyrza, it's only m.e, only Ambrose. Darling, 
 darling, don't be frightened!" 
 
 ^'Oh, my good Lord!" she sobbed as he caught her. 
 The long shivers that shook her communicated themselves 
 to him, and they clung together in wavering heart-beats. 
 
 ''Did 'ee do it for me, for me?" stammered Ambrose. 
 "It's the dead hand you came for. Oh, you dear, you 
 dear!" 
 
 He was pressing rough young lips to her face, her hands, 
 in a transport of love and gratified vanity. 
 
 "Did you do it for me, my darling; did you risk the 
 dread and steal through the darkness for me? Say it was 
 for me?" he whispered. 
 
 " Iss, lad; I couldn't bide blemished when you loved me." 
 
The Wandering Gleam i 25 
 
 "Oh, Th)Tza, I'm not worth the terror you've hcen in. 
 No man is, but I will be good to 'ee always, dear." 
 
 He was ashamed of the light gaiety with which he had 
 taken her love, rating it as an extra pleasure, quite separate 
 from the main current of his interests. 
 
 But as he would have kissed her again, she held him 
 away. 
 
 "No, no," she cried, "not now. I've got the chill of 
 the dead hand in me. It must work till the marks go." 
 
 "Do you really believe they'll go?" he laughed. "Oh, 
 Thyrza, you're a sad goose." 
 
 "Oh, I donno, I donno. But they say 'tis certain sure 
 your chillern won't be marked anyway." 
 
 In the dead silence they heard their hearts beat, and the 
 sleepy coo-coo of a pigeon above them sounded like an 
 echo from the garden of sleep. In a moment, however, 
 Thyrza went towards the trestle table. 
 
 "No," she said, full of the pity of a natural woman 
 towards the dead and the suffering, "I've took from him. 
 You mustn't love me here, for that's an affront to the dead. 
 He lies here to-day, but he'll be in clay to-morrow, with 
 folks' feet treading him down; but you and I have got all 
 the days to come." 
 
 Taking the hand that hung stiff, yet lax, from under the 
 sheet, she slipped it back into its former position. Then 
 she pulled from the breast of her blouse a little square of 
 white linen. "See," she said, putting it into Ambrose's 
 hands, "I wanted him to take something with 'en from me. 
 They'm hard to poor strangers, folks be; yet, maybe, he's 
 got them that love 'en somewhere. I'm going to tie that 
 round his poor bruised head." 
 
 As Ambrose watched her, a sense of her lovingkindness 
 stole over him. He remembered the tenderness with 
 which she would put down soaked bread for the chicken, 
 
126 A Man of Genius 
 
 or would sit with an ailing young animal in her lap, letting 
 it suck her kindly, warm hands. He began to feel ashamed 
 of his own crude hunger for self-gratification. For he knew 
 instinctively that to Thyrza the love which had arisen 
 between them was guided by forces that are themselves 
 of the noblest, desires which demand their satisfaction as 
 the holiest right of all. While life called in her, he knew 
 that to him she was but a passing joy. Then he dismissed 
 the thought, for was this not, after all, but man and woman ? 
 
 Taking the fine linen from his hand, she turned back 
 the sheet and did her work, with little sobbing breaths and 
 trembling fingers, that were paid as a debt to the love and 
 pity of the human lot. 
 
 "Why do you bother so about your marks?" asked Am- 
 brose, as they walked down the road from Blegberry to 
 Long Furlong. 
 
 "I want to be clean, same as others," said Th)T:za 
 shortly. He was colder, she fancied, and walked purposely 
 farther apart from her. 
 
 "Why, when maids strip for a swim, they point to me," 
 she continued. "Oh, Ambrose, 'tis the sole speck upon 
 me, dear heart. I couldn't bear to cheat 'ee, if 'twas ever 
 so little. I'm all fair else." 
 
 The accents of self-humiliation, of devotion, struck out 
 all there was of good in Ambrose's love for her. 
 
 "Thyrza, whatever happens, I will always be good to 
 you. Always, dear. For I love it all, every bit of your 
 dear body and your dear soul and your dear heart." 
 
 "I wish this night could last forever," she said, as, both 
 young hearts afire with the perfect trust in each other 
 that sees no future that is unlike the present, they crept 
 into the garden. Here they found the house-door open, 
 and just outside it, a burnt-down candle in a pewter candle- 
 stick that stood in a flower-bed. 
 
The Wandering Gleam i 27 
 
 "That's father!" exclaimed Ambrose bitterly. 
 
 As they stood for a moment in the dark at the foot of 
 the stairs, Thyrza whispered — 
 
 "Yes; he's back." 
 
 Her loving eyes were full of pity, as they listened to the 
 dull, heavy sounds from overhead. 
 
 All the past flashed over Ambrose; the nights he had 
 waited as a child, trembling in his bed, in fear of the waver- 
 ing footsteps; the unavailing prayers he had offered to a 
 deaf heaven that father might come home soon, so that 
 they might all go to sleep quietly. 
 
 A fire of passionate self-pity surged up in his heart. 
 Had he not himself his father's inability to resist the cravings 
 of a moment's pleasure? This was his inheritance, for 
 he was a Velly, of a dying stock. He sank down despond- 
 ently on the passage chair, while Thyrza watched him, 
 knowing, for the love that was in her, something of his 
 thoughts, though she simply could not follow them when 
 they concerned themselves with her. For to her simple 
 nature all the glory of the world was expressed in her call 
 to him, in his returning impulse. 
 
 At length, from the embers of the kitchen hearth, came 
 two cheery chirps that echoed through the house. 
 
 "Oh, the dear," cried Thyrza in a joyful whisper, ''the 
 dear of 'en! He's come back, that's the cricket, Ambrose, 
 that's been quiet for weeks." 
 
 The cricket had given her courage, it seemed, for sud- 
 denly kneeling on the floor, she slipped into his arms, and 
 holding his hands to her breast, whispered, "It'll be all 
 right, for I — love you, and you love me." 
 
 To the artist, life is infinitely vivid in all its aspects; 
 round him are things that provoke curiosity, that half 
 reveal their secret and then withdraw; these he would fain 
 know. There are also things that call for direction, for 
 
128 A Man of Genius 
 
 handling; lie would fain make, create, work. Above all, 
 there are things that thrill the nerves into a quivering 
 agony of bliss; he must love. Thus in youth the thinker, 
 the creator, the lover in him war for the mastery. 
 
 Of this Thyrza, asleep in a blissful ball, with her fingers 
 on the scarred neck, knew nothing, though to Ambrose, 
 sitting softly playing with muted strings, the world was 
 infinitely varied, for in its circle were contained the con- 
 ception of the world's pain that he had learnt of Mr. West- 
 away, the love of woman that Thyrza had taught him, and, 
 strangest of all, the wandering gleam that dimly lights the 
 darkness of the spiritual world. 
 
CHAPTER VIU 
 THE STRENGTH OF THE HILLS 
 
 SUDDENLY Ambrose noticed that the room where he 
 sat was full of smoke, and that flakes of soot were 
 falling in all directions. Remembering in a flash of sick 
 dread that their insurance against fire had been allowed to 
 lapse, he opened the door into the yard, thus admitting 
 fresh volumes of smoke into the house. From the door of 
 the stable a long tongue of fire leapt in the current of wind 
 that was fanning the smother of smoke into a trail of 
 destruction. There were two valuable horses in the stable, 
 and, as Ambrose ran across the yard, he knew that the loss 
 of them would mean ruin; so it had come, the terror that 
 Airs. \'elly had dreaded for thirty years. 
 
 When he pushed against the door he found there was 
 some obstruction in the way. As he hastily stooped, with 
 his left arm pressed across his face to keep the smoke from 
 his eyes, he came upon the body of a man stretched on the 
 floor. The terrified snorts of the horses reached him 
 through the smoke, as he pulled his father out of the reek- 
 ing place. In the next second he had rushed back, un- 
 fastened the terrified creaturss, and driven them out into 
 the yard, where they stampeded wildly for the open gate- 
 way, and awoke Caleb by the thundering of their hoofs as 
 they passed his cottage. 
 
 By this time Mrs. Velly had appeared, wrapped in an old 
 grey dressing-gown. She was calm enough to give her 
 husband a little flick with her foot as she passed him an 
 9 129 
 
130 A Man of Genius 
 
 her way to the pump, where Ambrose was furiously at 
 work. 
 
 "Here, I can do that," she said, pushing him away from 
 the pump-handle and beginning to work it with her gaunt, 
 sinewy arms. Even in that moment of stress, Ambrose 
 had time to feel a pang of disgust at the sight of his mother 
 toiling like a man. Caleb arrived at last, and the three 
 began to work furiously to save the interior fittings of 
 the stable, the stalls and loose-box. It was vain, however; 
 for the place was littered with loose straw that bore the 
 flames to every part, and by the time the fire was extin- 
 guished the whole building was gutted, with nothing but the 
 blackened walls and roof to form a chasm of ugly ruin. 
 Then Caleb and Ambrose carried James Velly upstairs, 
 and when they came down they found that Mrs. Velly was 
 setting to work to boil the kettle for tea. 
 
 *'Thank 'ee, missus, thank 'ee," said Caleb; "'tis cruel 
 hard, but the hosses'll be back by morn. They'll not 
 stray far." 
 
 *'It's all of a piece, Vinnicombe," said Mrs. Velly quietly. 
 "It's a losing game, but that I've always known." 
 
 There was a smear of smut across her face, and down it a 
 white channel that had been traced by smarting tears. 
 
 ** Mother," asked Ambrose, when Caleb had gone, 
 "where in the world is Thyrza all this time?" 
 
 "I turned the key in her door when I came down. 
 There's no call to let all the world see our shame." 
 
 "How's it all ever going to end?" said Ambrose, as they 
 crouched over the fire, in the cold shivers that come when 
 strained nerves relax. But Mrs. Velly's courage never 
 failed her long. 
 
 "All well, if so be you're strong, Ambrose." 
 
 "How can I be, with day by day that spectacle in front 
 of my eyes? And his blood in my veins, too." 
 
The Strength of the Hills 131 
 
 "There's mine, too," said Mrs. Velly quietly. "Afore 
 you come, it seemed to me as if some soul on t'other side 
 was asking me to give 'en life. And then, when your 
 little hand pressed my breast, it somehow seemed my man 
 himself that took his life from me. And now, though he's 
 dead to everything but his degradation, yet he's alive in 
 you." 
 
 "Mother, don't you see that it's just that fact that I 
 hate, fear — I don't know which. I sit here night after 
 night waiting for his footsteps, with no power of work in 
 me. 
 
 He pointed to the torn canvas, rent and slit with a knife 
 that was lying on the settle. 
 
 "That's how it always ends," he said. "To-night, after 
 my day away, I was in better spirits, — and then comes this." 
 
 He made a gesture of despair. 
 
 "Lad, you must win up where your father couldn't. 
 He'd got brains, so have you. He hadn't got my spirit, 
 but you have. Only believe in it, and you'll find the 
 strength." 
 
 "I know what you mean. I always said to myself that 
 father should be the last weak man in the line." 
 
 "Ay, you said it, you said it!" cried Mrs. Velly in a sort 
 of triumph; "and you got it from me, for 'twas in my heart 
 all the time before you come. Work, struggle, wait. Your 
 chance must come at last." 
 
 Pacing up and down the room, he wondered whether 
 Mrs. Velly had thought of the new trouble that faced them. 
 
 "The stables will have to be refitted," he said abruptly. 
 "Where's the money to come from?" 
 
 "You must borrow it of Mr. Westaway," she answered 
 instantly. She had, indeed, settled this matter in her mind 
 long before the fire was even extinguished. 
 
 "I can't ask that. How could it ever be paid back?" 
 
132 A Man of Genius 
 
 "I'm going to send Thyrza away, and the money saved 
 through that will pay Mr. Westaway — interest and principal 
 too." 
 
 "How can you possibly do without Thyrza?" 
 
 "When ruin's staring her in the face a woman doesn't go 
 about finicking with her little finger cocked up," snapped 
 Mrs. Velly. "Besides, she ought to go anyway. She's 
 getting too fond of you." 
 
 Should he tell his mother of the relationship between 
 himself and Thyrza, he wondered. But, by some process 
 of telepathy, Mrs. Velly took the answer out of his mouth. 
 
 "She's soft," she said brutally. "She'd hang about 'ee 
 and worship the very ground you trod on. But she wouldn't 
 make a man of you. She'd only choke her husband with 
 chillern and kisses. That's her sort." 
 
 "And isn't that a true kind of wife?" 
 
 "Oh, she'd be true enough. She'd never forget. She'd 
 want the man to be the same lovesick husband he was in 
 the first month." 
 
 "And I shouldn't be, you think?" 
 
 "A man can't be, that's got his work to do. You want 
 a woman that can open the windows of life for 'ee. That 
 can look into the distance, while you'm groping over the 
 next step. The man to walk, the woman to look far 
 ahead for 'en. That's the way it should be. Not to care 
 for naught but his kisses and his chillern on her breast." 
 
 "He wants both sorts, maybe." 
 
 "He may so," said Mrs. Velly grimly; "but till we're 
 all Turks he won't get 'em. Not easy, that is, nor open." 
 
 So Ambrose, naturally reluctant to bring fresh trouble 
 on his mother, left Thyrza in the dark corner of his life, 
 for the time, at any rate. 
 
 "I believe," said Ambrose, "that we ought to give up 
 the farm. I could earn, if I were to get away." 
 
 I 
 
The Strength of the Hills 133 
 
 Mrs. Velly held out her work-worn hand 
 
 'Tm going on/' she said sternly, "as long as I've got 
 hands to work with. For to give in now, with the rent un- 
 paid, is bankruptcy. That I'll never do, never. It's my 
 very life to keep up the struggle." 
 
 To Mrs. Velly there was, in truth, but one reliable way 
 of making money, and that was out of the earth. 
 
 The next morning Mr. Velly sent for Ambrose to come 
 to his room. 
 
 ''Read that," he said, flinging on the counterpane a 
 letter that his trembling hand had at last managed to 
 abstract from a worn pocket-book that was more familiar 
 with corn samples than papers. As Ambrose read it his 
 face darkened, for it was a notice to quit the farm on 
 account of seven years' arrears in rent, coupled with the 
 offer of a small cottage at a nominal rental *'on account of 
 the past connection of the Velly family with the estate." 
 
 ''I've made a mull of it," said Mr. Velly, as though 
 appealing for his son's pity. He had been born at Long 
 Furlong, like his father before him, and he knew every inch 
 of it, "like the back of his hand," as he was wont to boast. 
 Even now he could still remember a time when every 
 morning had brought a fresh spring of power to grapple 
 with work, and every evening the comfort of work done. 
 
 "Your mother mustn't know," said Mr. Velly. "I'll not 
 have that. She doesn't know how bad it is." 
 
 "But," protested Ambrose, "she must know sooner or 
 later. What's the good of putting off the evil day?" 
 
 "It'll be pretty nigh her death-blow," said Mr. Velly. 
 "But it'll be good for you when the time comes. You 
 ought to ha' gone long ago. But nobody asked me. I'm 
 of no account in my own house." 
 
 To Mr. Velly the boy's return from his course of training 
 had been a far greater blow than to Mrs. Velly, for in 
 
134 A. Man of Genius 
 
 mental faculty Ambrose and his father were far more on the 
 same level. In his boy, Mr. Velly saw himself over again, 
 and understood the pitfalls that life had ready, in a way 
 that was impossible to Mrs. Velly's stronger will. 
 
 ''Pin-pricks," he maundered on, while Ambrose watched 
 him, "pin-pricks, it was they that brought me here. All 
 the slights, the raised eyebrows, the looks from everybody, 
 from your mother most of all; for they all meant that folks 
 looked for nothing but what was bad in me. First-long, I 
 got drunk a time or two, and after that they always looked 
 for it again. I could see it. When I rapped out something 
 wild, they'd say, 'Ay, there's his father coming out, or his 
 grandfather mayhap. It's been a regular game of uppy- 
 down-daps with me, putting up a cockshy and flinging 
 stones at it." 
 
 With a sickening sense that these were his own fears 
 repeated in a stronger form, Ambrose turned away and went 
 downstairs. 
 
 In the keen atmosphere of a town, and above all, free 
 from the malaria of imaginative heredity, Mr. Velly might 
 have found strength to stand upright, for his very sensitive- 
 ness to impressions would have been a help, since to such 
 mimetic brains the country air is often sodden in its tran- 
 quillity. Here at Long Furlong, like a dog with a famous 
 sire, he had always been expected to betray the qualities 
 of his forebears, and he had thoroughly lived up to people's 
 expectations. 
 
 The next evening, with many cold tremors at his audacity, 
 Ambrose set out to call on Mr. Westaway. It was the first 
 time he had ever looked forward to a call at the Vicarage 
 with anything but feelings of pleasant anticipation. 
 
 One of the minor pleasures of Mr. Westaway's life was 
 the method and neatness displayed in his note-books, one 
 set of which was devoted to genealogical accounts of the 
 
The Strength of the Hills 135 
 
 Devon families, and the other to West-country folk-lurc 
 and dialect. It was a joy to him to inscribe the last page 
 of a beautifully kept register, and an even keener joy to 
 begin writing up a fresh one. He took pleasure in the 
 smoothness of the paper and the sweep of his fme letters; 
 for if this world is full of the possibilities of vexation, it 
 has also many out-of-the-way occasions of delight. 
 
 He needed a little relief to-night, for he had just been the 
 victim of the Rev. Samuel Vellacott's pastoral attentions. 
 
 ''But, my dear Westaway!" he exclaimed, ''the step 
 you propose will give a terrible handle to the enemy. It 
 cannot but be a mere phase, a temporary aberration in a 
 man so well-intentioned as yourself." 
 
 ^Ir. Vellacott was obsessed by the word "phase"; he 
 repeated it in various connections, till his own genial pur- 
 pose to make the ^ est of both worlds proved so irritating 
 to a man who felt himself a failure in each, that Mr. West- 
 away began to wish he had never been born. 
 
 "I understand that it isn't the oppositions of science, 
 falsely so-called, that are driving you to this course — I went 
 into that a good deal once — but merely the want of a 
 definite theological programme on the part of our Church. 
 Now couldn't something be done by a more judicious course 
 of reading?" 
 
 Mr. Westaway laughed outright, for Mr. Vellacott so 
 evidently regarded him as an infant, for whom something 
 temporary could be rigged up, with a teapot in lieu of a 
 feeding bottle. The good man had departed with the 
 intention of ransacking his library for Mr. Westaway's 
 benefit. 
 
 It was relief to Damaris, in the midst of her preoccupa- 
 tion with what was called in clerical circles "the Westaway 
 scandal," to bring Ambrose into the study, for he would 
 surely not be occupied with either theology or social science. 
 
136 A Man of Genius 
 
 She settled herself by the fire to hear his errand, rather to 
 poor Ambrose's disgust. For the painful task of borrowing 
 had never fallen to his lot before. 
 
 "I turned back twice," he said, "on my way here, because 
 I can't bear to ask you to help me." 
 
 "You can say anything to me, I hope, my boy," said 
 Mr. Westaway. "Perhaps it would help you if I were to 
 talk about myself first. You remember our talk in Exeter ? 
 Well, I'm going to act up to my convictions. I'm leaving 
 Hartland and going to try to spend some of my money on 
 the workers from whom it came. Now tell me what you 
 come for to-night." 
 
 Briefly Ambrose stammered out the story of the burning 
 of the stable. Before he had finished, Damaris crossed 
 the room, and, touching her father on the shoulder, said 
 impulsively — 
 
 "Father, we must help. Say you'll pay for the refitting." 
 
 "We'll pay interest regularly," said Ambrose with a 
 scarlet face. 
 
 As she saw it, Damaris felt that she had embarrassed 
 him further by her presence. 
 
 "My boy, you shall have it gladly. Damaris is right. 
 Get the estimate and reckon on me," said Mr. Westaway 
 warmly. "I wish I could help you professionally, too. 
 I got some curious information from my lawyer the other 
 day about what must have been at one time the estate 
 belonging to your forefathers." 
 
 "Tonacombe, you mean, sir," said Ambrose. "I've 
 heard mother say that father's people once owned it. But 
 that was years ago." 
 
 "Ay, Tonacombe," said Mr. Westaway, "over in Mor- 
 wenstow parish. It's a small estate now, for one of the 
 Velly ancestors divided it up and sold portions of it, but 
 the manor itself remains, and it's that rare thing, a barton — 
 
 i 
 
The Strength of the Hills 137 
 
 that is, land where all the boundiiry hedges are the pr()j)erty 
 of the estate, showing that it was originally held by the first 
 settlers in the country, who gathered neighbours after their 
 settlement." 
 
 With delicate tact Mr. Westaway was trying to give 
 Ambrose a lift-up out of his present humiliation. 
 
 ''You're of a fme stock, Ambro.se," he said. "Forget 
 your immediate ancestors and go back to the sources; 
 for those Vclly forebears of yours at Tonacombe were 
 straight in all the essentials of honest life. In all their 
 records there's written the story of clean living and high 
 endeavour.'" 
 
 "Father, father," said Damaris to herself, "what a 
 gentleman you are, for all your perverse thinking." Her 
 steadfast eyes shone on Ambrose with the light that always 
 seemed to him far above his stature, the light that is full 
 of the strength of the hills. 
 
 "What have you been doing lately?" she asked, as with 
 the characteristic swing of his head Ambrose recovered his 
 sense of personal dignity, lost for a moment in his father's 
 degradation. 
 
 "I've been a regular round of visits to the churches 
 hereabouts, drawing the wood-carving," he answered. "I 
 know why the old designers did better work; they never 
 carved from drawn designs as the moderns do." 
 
 Ambrose's chief attraction was that he always took the 
 nearest person into his confidence, feeling sure that he 
 would sympathise. He usually did, for nothing in the 
 world is so engaging as a truly childlike disposition. 
 
 Damaris sat leaning forward with her chin on her hands, 
 trying to realise his life, his double life as student and 
 farmer. For he was a relief from gentle scholarliness, and 
 she was prepared to idealise everything in so vivid a crea- 
 ture. Although she had always thought of him before as a 
 
138 A Man of Genius 
 
 youth of talent, she had often laughed at Mr. Westaway's 
 fondness for him. To-night she saw him with her father's 
 eyes, for to her the Westaway house was a house of age, 
 where even the low, easy steps seemed made for the faltering 
 tread of an old man. But here was a thing of sinews and 
 nerves and lusty keenness. She had once met him riding 
 a bare-backed horse, and it now seemed a revelation in 
 supple strength. For an imaginative girl will endow the 
 pulpiest curate with the thews of a Sandow and the nerve- 
 force of a Gladstone; the readiness is all. In Damaris 
 Westaway's longing for the real, too, Ambrose's life, with 
 the scent of newly turned earth about it and the manifold 
 humming of bees, was idyllic, and yet in a delicious sense, 
 coarse, with the coarseness of splendid labour that strains 
 in the traces and sweats in the sunlight. 
 
 "I've been fanciful," he was saying, "in talking about 
 people copying nature in stone. They did in carvings, but 
 not in building." 
 
 "How do you mean?" said Mr. Westaway, thinking 
 that trouble seemed to be turning the lad into a thinker. 
 True, they had been thought before, no doubt, these dis- 
 coveries of his, but they had not come to him from books, 
 since he saw scarcely any on architecture. 
 
 "Everything in building comes from practical need," 
 said Ambrose; "one man after another adds an idea to 
 the ideas of earlier ones. Look" — he took a scrap of 
 paper and a pencil and began to sketch — "the intersection 
 of the circular arch gave the pointed arch. And traceried 
 windows came from one man putting in a cusp and another 
 a window slit, and so on." 
 
 "No one ever evolved a whole new form?" asked 
 Damaris. 
 
 "They grew," sai4 Ambrose, "every one." 
 
 "I like it better that way," said she. "For bit by bit 
 
The Strength of the Hills 139 
 
 a great art is the joint work of man, not of a man. It's 
 one of the finest thoughts I've ever heard, for by it we are 
 all bound together, all seeking to express ourselves, and one 
 helping the other to do so." 
 
 "Father, too," she thought, "is trying instinctively to 
 join himself to the work of his age." Flashing along the 
 words came to Damaris a vague sense of a deeper meaning 
 still. 
 
 More life and fuller; it sums up all the desires that can 
 be. For from it springs that desire for the life of the whole 
 that leads men to purity and unselfishness, since evil leads 
 to the death of the whole. From it, too, springs the craving 
 for personal life that hurls men down the slope of death; 
 in desire for life dwells alike the strength of the hills and the 
 flame of hell. 
 
 In the beginning, say the mystics, the ineffable felt the 
 desire for manifestation — and to manifest oneself is to live; 
 out of desire for life, then, came the universe. 
 
 "It's wonderful, this progression," said Damaris, looking 
 into the fire. 
 
 "But it didn't go on," said Ambrose doggedly, "for the 
 Puritans killed all growth in architecture. And now all we 
 can do is to imitate." 
 
 "One mistake of one generation, and darkness follows," 
 commented Damaris. 
 
 She was inevitably turning all his thoughts to moral 
 issues. 
 
 "But that makes it easier to do the things that seem 
 hard," she said; "for if our bit of work isn't well done, we 
 are breaking a greater chain than we can ever measure. 
 That must be what the Atonement means. For we are all 
 one, the man that lives to-day and the man that lived a 
 thousand years ago. All one, because we work at one 
 great task, the manifestation of the divine." 
 
140 A Man of Genius 
 
 As Ambrose thrilled in response to the aspiration of her 
 voice, Th)n-za's devotion seemed to belong to another 
 planet, for to hirii Damaris was an incarnation of the 
 spiritual, another wandering gleam, like the boy's voice in 
 the cathedral. Of her as woman, he hardly thought at all, 
 she seemed so far above him. 
 
 Yet, after all, it was Mr. Westaway, and not Damaris, 
 who had given him a fresh brood of desires. His thoughts 
 were with those honest men of Tonacombe who walked 
 their acres in the light of day and of other people's approba- 
 tion. The very fact of the degradation of the present 
 representative of the family knit the thought into the fibre 
 of his heart-strings. Once back there at Tonacombe and 
 men would forget there had ever been a Velly of Long 
 Furlong who was constantly "market-merry." 
 
 The next moment he laughed aloud at the preposterous 
 folly of a penniless lad, who had just borrowed fifty pounds 
 to pay for the fitting of a stable, daring to lift his eyes to the 
 manor of Tonacombe. 
 
 Yet, preposterous as it was, he began to reckon up his 
 assets. On one gift he could rely: from the mere plan of a 
 building set before him, he could paint a picture in light 
 and shade, paint it as accurately as though he had set 
 up his easel in front of its walls. He had even been able to 
 visualise pictures of unbuilt machines and boats, for other 
 men's abstractions were to him solid realities. This gift 
 might gain him work in a large office, but it would be 
 a mere journeyman's wage that he would earn. At the 
 knowledge Tonacombe faded into a cloud vision, the 
 merest castle in Spain. 
 
 All the while Damaris sat in front of the study fire, 
 weaving visions, too, and the centre of them was a man, 
 as is, indeed, apt to be the case when the builder of the 
 cloud-castle is a woman. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 THE WOOD OF THE GOLDEN SHADOWS 
 
 THERE was a t»'-'se silence in the kitchen at Long 
 Furlong while one could count a hundred. Outside 
 the windows the gulls circled and screamed as, with eyes 
 that followed their wheeling flights unconsciously, Thyrza 
 stood in front of Mrs. Velly, feeling like a swimmer pushed 
 from a supporting plank. She continued to pass her hands 
 over the creases of the half-ironed tablecloth on which she 
 had been at work. 
 
 "I can't afford to keep you," said Mrs. Velly, with un- 
 usual nervousness. **If you've got any eyes in your head, 
 you'll see I can't." 
 
 ''Does Ambrose know I'm to go?" said Thyrza at last. 
 
 "Yes," said Mrs. Velly curtly. 
 
 Then all these days, thought Thyrza, Ambrose must 
 have known of the sentence of exile that had been passed 
 on her; all these days he had been silent, letting the blow 
 fall without any attempt to soften it. To-day he was away, 
 for Mr. Westaway had given him a commission to prepare 
 a dozen drawings of church screens for an article. 
 
 Beneath the woman who loves there is always the woman 
 who watches, noting, with the keen perception that she 
 would fain avoid, the amount of tenderness and protection 
 that her lover lavishes on her. For at first she expects " her 
 man^' to be the shadow of a rock at noonday to her; she 
 confidently looks for the ways of life to become padded 
 with ease for her footsteps. 
 
 141 
 
142 A Man of Genius 
 
 Thyrza flashed into hate in a second. She would not 
 be cast off so easily, for Ambrose should be made to pay 
 for his callousness. But as she turned to Mrs. Velly 
 she knew from the older woman's face that her secret was 
 guessed. The knowledge sealed her lips, for to tell now 
 would seem like pleading to be allowed to stay on suffer- 
 ance. 
 
 Then Thyrza turned on her heel, and without a word 
 walked out of the room. She had^^'-^t down to the bare 
 essentials of the fact that both Ambrose and Mrs. Velly 
 wanted her gone. That was all she meant now to either of 
 them — a thing to be quit of as soon as it became incon- 
 venient. Yet up till now, to Thyrza, encircled by the halo 
 of Ambrose's tenderness, the world had been a glory instead 
 of a menace. 
 
 Strong drink is a mocker; so is love, so is success. All 
 lie, but it is the lie that we love; for by it we escape the 
 root fact of the universe, the antagonism of life and nature. 
 They are all man's enemies; the fire that warms him, the 
 wind that fills his sails, the sea that bears his merchandise, 
 fierce beasts that wait for a moment's carelessness on his 
 part to fasten their fangs in him. And the antagonism of 
 nature runs all through into the spirit of man, for every 
 new face is the possible face of another enemy. Between 
 the universe and himself man craves, then, for a halo, an 
 ether through which the enmity may be unseen. We are 
 strangers in a hostile country, but we would fain forget it 
 in the glamour of love, the fumes of wine, or the exultation 
 of a moment's conquest. And now the ether was gone 
 from Thyrza. 
 
 A little while later she came down again, to find Mrs. 
 Velly going on with the interrupted ironing. The girl was 
 dressed in her outdoor clothes, and about her there was 
 a quiet decision that cowed even Mrs. Velly. 
 
The Wood of the Golden Shadows 143 
 
 "I'm going," she said to the old woman; "I've packed 
 my box, and when I want it I'll send for it." 
 
 "You know I never meant you to go like this. Why, 
 you've nowhere even to sleep!" exclaimed Mrs. Velly. 
 
 "It doesn't matter what becomes of me, I reckon," said 
 Thyrza; "but I shan't come to harm. Chrissie Rosevear's 
 often asked me to stop with her for a day or two. I can 
 look round from there to see after a place." 
 
 "Half-way down the lane she heard steps running after 
 her, and Mrs. Velly's voice calling — 
 
 "Here, child," said she, "here's a pasty for your dinner, 
 and your money. Don't 'ee be harder on me than you can 
 help. It cut me sore to see the way you took it." 
 
 They sobbed a minute, holding each other, while through 
 the minds of both flashed the memory of the pleasant 
 homely times that were over now; the needlework with 
 the long seams they had stitched together, the winter 
 afternoons spent baking the week's supply of cake or 
 buns. 
 
 "You'll give 'en my dear, dear love," whispered Thyrza 
 at last. She felt Mrs. Velly nod, but Thyrza knew perfectly 
 that Ambrose's mother would try to keep secret where she 
 had gone. 
 
 So they parted, in a mood of half-dissembled enmity. 
 
 Outside Hartland, Thyrza sat for a minute in the hedge 
 to wipe away the tears of self-pity that had rendered most 
 things on the road partially invisible. She was soon after 
 jogging along in the carrier's van that plies between Brad- 
 worthy and Hartland. 
 
 "My dear days, look at that!" exclaimed Tammy 
 Hockridge from the corner of the cart, where she sat 
 opposite to Thyrza. She was a lively, kissworthy soul, 
 and licensed to sell beer, snufif, and tobacco in Hartland 
 town. , 
 
144 A Man of Genius 
 
 '"Tis like sweethearting," said Mrs. Vanstone, who sat 
 by Tammy's side; '^you'm all nicey, he says as plain as 
 if he spoke." 
 
 The eyes of all the passengers turned from the oil swirl- 
 ing in the overhead lamp towards Thyrza, around whom 
 a bee was circling with a low humming note of pleasure, 
 neglecting the honey with which the van was packed for 
 her lips and hair. For a second or two he crept against 
 her neck, poising himself under her chin. 
 
 "Iss, he's a sweetheart and no mistake," said Tammy, 
 with a laugh as vivid as her hard, red cheeks. ''Terrible 
 scarce, chaps be, too," she added cheerfully. 
 
 "So us must put up with drumble drones, I s'pose," 
 sniffed a sour voice from the darkest corner; Mrs. Good- 
 enough was one of those fretful women who complain for 
 forty years because the sun refuses to shine on both sides 
 of the house at once. 
 
 "And scarcer up the country than they be here," con- 
 tinued Tammy. 
 
 "Well," said a withered, toothless remnant, "'tis all for 
 the best if they be scarce. Sister and me allays says what 
 a blessing 'twas when our only brother was put away safe in 
 his black box. For he'd have been sure to have made away 
 with our little bit of money, spekelating and that with it." 
 
 "How old was he when he died. Miss Beard?" asked 
 Thyrza. 
 
 "He was but two years old, my dear." 
 
 "Good land! that's early for spekelating," said Thyrza. 
 
 "Ay, they'm wearing, chaps be," said Mrs. Vanstone. 
 
 "'Tis dullish without 'em, though," chimed in Tammy. 
 "I've had two, and if Sam was to go, why, I should be on 
 the look-out for a third." 
 
 "One man gives 'ee a taste for 'em, I reckon," said the 
 **bitter weed" in the corner. 
 
The Wood of the Golden Shadows 145 
 
 ''My sister had the worst old bufflehead to deal with that 
 ever I come across," said Tammy, "for contrarier couldn't 
 be hatched than old Jim Lewarne, that was her husband's 
 father. He was allays over books, was my sister's father- 
 law, till what he read turned sour in 'en." 
 
 "Ay,"saidThyrza, "there's no good in too much o' that." 
 
 "Well, my dears," said Tammy, looking round at the 
 circle of womenfolk in motherly fashion, "at last he would 
 have it that there's too many folks by half in this 'ere world, 
 and that 'twas a sin that any more little innocents should 
 be brought into such a miz-ma^e as this be." 
 
 "Flying in the face of nature," said Mrs. Vanstone 
 firmly. 
 
 "And so I said," said Tammy; "but us cured 'en of that, 
 did us Hartland women. For when John — that's my sister's 
 man — died, her went to keep house for the old man, his 
 father, being his daughter-law. And that very night the old 
 rapscallion talked shameful to her. 'I'll have no squally 
 brats about my house,' said he." 
 
 "Ay, I can mind," chuckled Mrs. Goodenough, cheerful 
 for once; "he'd a voice like a girt bull." 
 
 "So he had, my dear. But for that saying, he had a 
 judgment. He went away to Plymouth for six weeks, and 
 when he came back he was a granfer, though he didn't 
 know it, for, as luck 'ud have it, the cheeld come when 
 he was away. And that poor woman, my sister Liza-Ann, 
 didn't dare have the dear cheeld in the same house with 
 that old I-talian." 
 
 Italian is a term of reproach in the West. 
 
 "Tchuh, tchuh, tchuh," cackled the company. 
 
 "Still the poor soul couldn't bear it out of her sight, so 
 her'd carr' it up to her room of a night, secret like. But 
 he heard summat, for he'd say of a morning, 'Never did I 
 hear anything like they cats a-squalling last night.' " 
 
146 A Man of Genius 
 
 " And that his own grandcheeld," said Thyrza, with up- 
 lifted hands. 
 
 "And him that could sleep through most nigh any- 
 thing! Contrairy he was, beyond all telling. 'But,' says 
 I to her, 'this can't go on, 'tis wearing of 'ee to skin and 
 bone.' So us settled something. One afternoon Liza-Ann 
 pretended to go away for the day. And in the afternoon, 
 when old Jim come into the house, there, all comfortable 
 before the fire, was a cradle, and in it a baby." 
 
 " The dear lamb," said every one in consort. 
 
 " Liza-Ann was watching from the stairs in the dimmet, 
 so that he couldn't see her." 
 
 "Her heart must ha' been going pit-a-pat," said Thyrza, 
 her eyes soft with childish delight in a story. 
 
 "He didn't say nort for a bit, then he went up, kind of 
 coorious, and turned back the blanket a bit. And there 
 he stood, with the cheeld's lips a-twitching at him." 
 
 " Ay; wanted rabbits' brains, it did," said Mrs. Vanstone. 
 It is the country remedy for a child's facial twitches. 
 
 " Presently, the dear doubled up his fistesses, and away 
 to go with a bawl. It come out just as us had planned. 
 And out rushed that old gubbins into the green, fair mad 
 with the noise, and roars, same as if he was hailing of a 
 ship — 
 
 "'Hi! Mrs. Nancarrow, Mrs. Hockridge, Mrs. Slee, 
 you'm wanted!' 
 
 "But us was all shaking behind our window curtains, 
 watching, and not a woman of us stirred. At last he 
 turned, fair beat, and he took that cheeld up and happing 
 upon the bottle — 
 
 "Well, when Liza-Ann come out of the corner, there 
 was the baby a-winking in the old man's face, and him 
 with his empty pipe in his mouth tor comfort, for he didn't 
 dare get his left arm from under the cheeld to light up. 
 
The Wood of the Golden Shadows i 47 
 
 ***And,' says Liza-Ann to 'en, 'that's your son's that is.' 
 
 ""Tisn't a bad little maid,' says he, 'but uncommon 
 boney.' 
 
 "'Maid,' says she, laughing; ' 'tis a fine boy-cheeld/ 
 
 " But here us be at last, thanks be," said Tammy. " I'm 
 that cramped that I couldn't tell which be my legs and which 
 be the baskets, if 'twasn't for the pain that's in 'em." 
 
 The low-roofed, whitewashed houses of Bradworthy have 
 never heard the whistle ot a train and the cry of a flock ot 
 seagulls passing storm -driven inland is the wildest sound 
 usually heard in this place of old-world peace. The four- 
 armed directing post in the grassy quadrangle round which 
 the houses cluster suggests the leisure of pack-horse travel- 
 ling, and is as full of the romance of the past as the magic 
 phrase "the great north road." To stand on the green in 
 the shadow of the coming night, when the light from the 
 inn doors lies ruddy across the grass and the forge fire 
 sends up a shower of sparks, is to feel the thrill of the days 
 when the highways were full of the zest of "stand and 
 deliver." 
 
 Pattens are, even now, not unknown in Bradworthy in 
 the fall, when woodlands are miry and the grass a pulp 
 of sodden roots, when lanthorns flicker across from house 
 to house in the long, dark autumn evenings, when the hours 
 strike solemnly from the belfry tower, and the only other 
 sound is the cackle of a goose, or, mayhap, the voices of 
 housewives calling from doorstep to doorstep. 
 
 Chrissie Rosevear's cottage looked on the green, and 
 Chrissie herself was kneading dough at the table of the 
 living-room. 
 
 "Well, I never did, Thyrza Braund!" she exclaimed, 
 "and have you come to market with all the rest of the 
 folks ? Come in the van, have 'ee ? Come right in and sit 
 ye down, my dear." 
 
148 A Man of Genius 
 
 It was market-day in Bradworthy, and down one side of 
 the square stood a few cows, dropping milk from full udders, 
 with tottering calves at their flanks. Over the stalls of the 
 market-women circled a mass of bees, supplementing the 
 bass and treble of the human chorus with their hum. 
 
 " I've left Long Furlong for good," said Thyrza. " Mrs. 
 Velly says she cannot afford to hire any more." 
 
 "Well, I don't know that I'm surprised, nuther. And 
 there's another thing. 'Tis never safe to have a woman 
 younger'n seventy -five in the house with a man about, and 
 I reckon that's what Mrs. Velly found." 
 
 Thyrza smiled a rather wan smile, although the sugges- 
 tion was not, on the whole, displeasing. 
 
 " Can I bide here with 'ee a bit, Chrissie ? I dunno where 
 else to go, and I can pay all right till I've got a new 
 place." 
 
 "There, cheeld," said Chrissie, getting up and giving her 
 a great smacking kiss. "Your bite and sup'll cost little 
 enough. You shall bide as long as ever you want to. As 
 long as you can put up with John," she laughed; " for he's 
 aggravating in some ways, though a long sight better'n he 
 used to be to live with. It gives me the toothache some- 
 thing cruel when he begins to whistle; but if a woman 
 makes her wedded man a worrit, her's worse than a hen 
 that complains of fleas in a poultry roost. So I never say 
 nothen to 'en about the whistling." 
 
 From outside the cottage, where John Rosevear was 
 occupying the dinner-hour in nailing up a creeper, there 
 came the words whistled through his teeth over and over 
 again without cessation — 
 
 Up and down the City Road, 
 
 In and out the Eagle, 
 That's the way the money goes, 
 
 Pop goes the weasel. 
 
The Wood of the Golden Shadows 149 
 
 Then Chrissie caught a glimpse of Thyrza's face. 
 
 " Just you come upstairs," she said, " now you've had a 
 cup of tea, and have a wash, and then go out and see 
 what's going on. I'd go with 'ee, but I must get this 
 baking done. And if I was you, I wouldn't set my mind 
 upon what might have been, but upon what is — and make 
 up my mind to like it." 
 
 Thus Chrissie voiced the gre:it working principle of 
 practical philo.sophy. 
 
 As Thyrza looked down on the tops of the peo[)lc's 
 heads from the bedroom above, she began to feel that aflcr 
 the stillness of the farm this was the great world, (jood 
 cheer came back to her, as she brushed out her hair and 
 watched it ripple under the strokes in a bright mass. Then 
 she leant for a moment over the window-sill. A cheap- 
 jack, or Johnny Fortnight, as travelling pedlars are called 
 by the "old ancient" folks in the west, was shouting from a 
 chair on which he stood. Against the directing post close 
 by four pigs scratched their black hides. Above the men's 
 shouts and the women's cackle Thyrza could just catch the 
 cheap-jack's words. He had passed from the selling of 
 toothache cure to deal with the matter of wedding rings, or 
 brass circles that passed for such at a distance. 
 
 "Here, ladies and gentlemen," said he, holding up a 
 disc that flashed in the sunshine, " is the time to provide 
 against the future. Here's a brand new wedding ring, 
 warranted to bring health, happiness and long life to the 
 happy pair, and all for half a crown." 
 
 "And how many kids?" shouted a voice. 
 
 " Just a baker's dozen," answered the chapman with a 
 grin. 
 
 "Then 'tis not for my money," said a yokel, while his 
 maiden nudged his ribs to reduce him to silence. 
 
 " It can't be that there's no more marrying and giving in 
 
150 A Man of Genius 1 
 
 marriage in this here charming village retreat! What offers, 
 gentlemen?" 
 
 "They'm all married a'ready, and wish they wasn't," 
 shouted some one. 
 
 "Tenpence," said a sheepish lad on the extreme out- 
 skirts of the crowd. 
 
 "Wedded bliss for tenpence!" cried the cheap- jack; 
 " and who says the Liberals have sent the prices up, with a 
 wedding ring going for tenpence?" 
 
 " One shilling," said a voice well known to Thyrza. She 
 stood on tip-toe with a wildly beating heart, and as she did 
 so she caught a flash from the bidder's eyes. It was 
 Ambrose; across the crowd their glances met, till he could 
 see her bosom heave. 
 
 "Ay, here's the gent for my money," said the Johnny 
 Fortnight, handing Ambrose the ring. 
 
 A few minutes later, at a sign from him, Thyrza hurried 
 downstairs and out of the house. At the sound of her 
 going, John and Chrissie stared, open-mouthed. 
 
 "My dear sawl, just look at that, John," said Chrissie 
 from the doorstep, as she saw Thyrza and Ambrose pass 
 the house with glances locked and hands not far off the 
 same linking. "The little rip!" she exclaimed. "Why, 
 she come over here on purpose to meet 'en! John, my 
 mind misgives me." 
 
 "Don't 'ee turn a vinegar-bottle in your old age, my 
 dear," said John, removing the nails from his mouth for 
 the purpose of enjoying a more commodious grin; "'tis 
 naught but a bit of sweethearting, and that'^ as sure to 
 come as death and taxes." 
 
 Mrs. Rosevear's sniff would have been audible on the 
 other side of the green on normal Bradworthy days as she 
 watched the two walking away from the crowd. , ,.4, 
 
 "Why, Thyrza, what on earth's the meaning of this?"*' 
 
The Wood of the Golden Shadows i 5 1 
 
 asked Ambrose. " I rode over to have a look at the c hurch, 
 and very peculiar it is to see so large a one supjx^rted 
 without pillars. But what in the name of wonder are you 
 doing here?" 
 
 He had taken her left hand and was slipping the ring he 
 had bought of the cheap- jack on her wedding finger. She 
 resisted a little, exclaiming pettishly, " 'Twill bring bad 
 luck, Ambrose, for 'tis but brass." But he persisted in his 
 effort. 
 
 "A Brummagem marriage," he laughed. "There, just 
 glance down at it. Doesn't it look fine?" 
 
 "Why, what is it?" he exclaimed, suddenly noticing her 
 pale, distressed face. " Don't let my foolishness worry you. 
 Here, let's take it off at once." 
 
 But she would not let him remove it. 
 
 " Your mother's turned me away," she said. " I know 
 what 'twas for, too. And you didn't care if I had to go, 
 not after all there's been between us." 
 
 At the sight of his face her bitter anger had died away, 
 but nothing could destroy her feeling of his unkindness. 
 
 "Thyrza, don't you know there's just one thing I can't 
 bear? I hate to see people miserable. I couldn't tell you 
 that mother wanted you to go; 'twasn't in me to see your 
 lips quiver and your eyes fill with tears. I did try to, but I 
 couldn't do it. I went away to-day, partly because I knew 
 she was going to speak to you. But here we are together 
 after all. Isn't it just too good to be true? The whole 
 world's in a conspiracy to bring you and me together, 
 love." 
 
 They wandered away from the houses into the country 
 stillness that laps the village close. Turning across a field 
 path that led from the road upwards to a wood, they 
 pushed open a rickety gate and found themselves in a cir- 
 cular plantation of trees, mostly ashes, the witch-ashes, 
 
152 A Man of Genius 
 
 that bleed when cut, according to country superstition. 
 Here in the centre of the trees there was a cleared space 
 where the sunlight, caught in a net by the branches, blazed 
 hotly on the pale primrose and tawny brown hues of bracken. 
 
 Thyrza sat on a felled tree-trunk and Ambrose lay down 
 beside her. The sound of the faintly sighing wind outside 
 sent shudders of joy through the girl's blood. Here, in 
 summer, the place was full of the acrid smell of the cow- 
 parsley, that speaks of love's cruelty, of the nepenthe of the 
 blue-bells, the nepenthe of love's yielding, full, too, of 
 waves of hawthorn scent, threaded with the keen savour 
 of woodruff. 
 
 Now only the golden shadows fell between the tree- 
 trunks, and as Ambrose looked down the glades all round 
 them, he seemed to have gone back to a time when men 
 and women were part of the glory, not the shadow, of a 
 world darkened by no human sense of pain. 
 
 " The wood of the golden shadows, my Thyrza," he said, 
 laying his head on her lap, while she stretched out her hand 
 to curl a lock of his hair round her finger. 
 
 But it was impossible for Thyrza to forget the sorrow of 
 parting in the joy of the moment; for to do that is the 
 man's gift, and is only learnt by women after a long ap- 
 prenticeship to trouble. 
 
 "Ambrose," she said, schooling herself to quiet speech 
 with a loving woman's instinctive terror of annoying a man, 
 " don't 'ee care that now we'll never meet ? And I thought 
 we'd soon be married, and that you'd go on living at the 
 farm." 
 
 "But we'll manage to meet sometimes, Thyrza." 
 
 "But 'tisn't the same as it used to be, as 'twas till only 
 this morning." 
 
 He moved restlessly, in hatred of tears. 
 
 "Do *ee care for me really, Ambrose ? " she asked at length. 
 
The Wood of the Golden ShadoWvS 153 
 
 "I love you, Thyrza. But you must remember that I've 
 my way to make." 
 
 But she could not understand how he could {)ut anything 
 before their love; it is the great limitation of such as 
 Thyrza. 
 
 "Ambrose," she asked, "do 'cc think if 1 never have 'ee 
 for my own here, I will somewhere else? I mean after 
 we're dead. For I feel now that you'm going away from 
 me. Leaving Long Furlong's altered everything." 
 
 "I don't know, Thyrza, for some don't think there is 
 another life for us at all." 
 
 "And I might miss 'ee, too," said Thyrza, the vastness of 
 fate overwhelming her fancy. 
 
 'But I shall often see you. Never mind about the 
 shades. We're solid lovers, child, you and I," protested 
 Ambrose. 
 
 "Do 'ee remember the cricket, Ambrose? We'll never 
 hear 'en together again." 
 
 "Never mind. We'll get another one somewhere, when 
 we set up house together." 
 
 They sat in silence, till Ambrose's lids sank and deeper 
 breathing came from him. He had been up all the night 
 before, as Thyrza knew, with a sick animal. When his 
 breathing told that he was sound asleep, she took off her 
 cloak and threw it over him. 
 
 The watching face above him became older, as the 
 shadows fell instead of the sunlight. Lines that would 
 be on it years later were faintly foreshadowed, as the purple 
 afterglow began to fill the sky. 
 
 To the thought of a woman who loves there is no present. 
 Backward in the lives of the women whose instincts thrill 
 through her nerves, she lives; forward into the future, her 
 fancies spring. In the first kiss a woman feels all her 
 life-5tory; she knows what it will be to feel the downy 
 
I 54 A Man of Genius 
 
 head of a child on her breast, almost she can hear the sound 
 of its cry. As Thyrza waited she grew desperate, for she 
 knew now that this man belonged to a world where she 
 could not follow him. With the faint hold over him that 
 absence would give her, she would soon fade to a grey 
 ghost, haunting in time the shadowy places of casual 
 recollection. She knew that it was getting late, that Chrissie 
 would wonder what had become of her. But these moments 
 were as gold to the miser, as honey of wheat to the famine- 
 stricken. 
 
 At last Ambrose moved, opened his eyes and sat up. 
 
 ''Why, Thyrza," he said, "what have you been doing to 
 let me sleep like this ? " 
 
 He bent down to look at his watch. 
 
 ''Come," he said, "you look pinched with cold." 
 
 They walked back to Bradworthy in silence, Thyrza in 
 the comatose condition that follows on emotion, and 
 Ambrose in a mood of annoyance. The clouds were 
 massed overhead by now, and the night was evidently 
 bringing rain. 
 
 As they entered the village Thyrza told him where she 
 was staying. 
 
 "But you must have some tea before you go back to 
 Chrissie's," he said, leading the way across the trampled 
 grass to the inn. He ordered their meal in the upstair 
 room that looks out across the square. 
 
 "You're frozen, little wife," he said, drawing her to the 
 fire that the waitress had just lit, and pulling off her wet 
 shoes. " There, listen to what I shall have to ride through," 
 he continued, as the lash of the rain began to sweep across 
 the house roofs. 
 
 There was a haste on him to be gone, but he would not 
 let her see it, lest she should misconstrue it, in her own 
 enjoyment of the sweet sorrow of parting. In his restless- 
 
 f 
 
The Wood of the Golden Shadows 155 
 
 ness he began to walk up and down the room. Yet he 
 tried to tell himself what a good day they had enjoyed 
 together. 
 
 ''When do 'ee start?" she asked later on, when the tea 
 things had been removed and she could sit curled up on 
 the rug. 
 
 "In a minute or two," he said, feeling a dreaa of him- 
 self that amounted to panic. 
 
 "That's good-bye," she whispered. "Ambrose, there'll 
 be other women, I reckon. But I'll have had 'ee for 
 to-day." 
 
 "Thyrza, Thyrza," he cried, drawing her up to him, 
 "there's no other woman but you." 
 
 But she persisted. 
 
 "It has been good to be with 'ee, Ambrose, even if it's 
 all I ever have." 
 
 The silence was full of voices. The wash of rain came 
 steadily down, and through the open window they could 
 see a lanthorn light flickering across the square. The 
 lowing of a cow robbed of her calf was the only other sign 
 of life. 
 
 "'Tis like home, this," she said, "home for you and me. 
 Like happy women live always, side by side with their man." 
 
 "Ay, 'tis home for to-night," said Ambrose. 
 
 Something strange in his voice made her glance at his 
 face. "Little missus," he whispered, lifting her hand where 
 the brass ring still shone. 
 
 In a flash of memory his words, "a Brummagem mar- 
 riage," sounded like a sneer; no gold, only brass for her. 
 And she had been driven from his mother's house this 
 morning. Pride turned the scale, changing her weakness 
 to strength. 
 
 "Now you must go," she said quietly. "I don't know 
 whatever Chrissie will say to me as it is." 
 
156 A Man of Genius 
 
 "Forgive me," he whispered, ''for all. But you're the 
 dearest thing there is in the world to me, a part of my life 
 for ever." 
 
 She managed to show quite a smiling face to him, as 
 she stood in the porch of the inn watching him ride away. 
 But it took her a long time to get across to Chrissie's cottage. 
 Before she had reached it, indeed, Ambrose had joined a 
 man he knew and was deep in horse-talk, deliberately 
 turning his thoughts from the sadness of parting. 
 
 Over the threshold of the cottage Chrissie was waiting 
 for her guest, whilst John, brushing up in the room above, 
 shook with silent laughter at the storm of her eloquence. 
 He was delighted to hear the thunder rattling about some 
 one else's ears, and through the unplastered ''planchin'" 
 he could hear every word. 
 
 "Now," said Chrissie, "just you sit down there and 
 hear what I've got to say to 'ee. I've kept company with 
 several in my time." 
 
 "Ho!" said her husband to himself. 
 
 "But, let me tell you, I always knew how to respect 
 myself. You'll come to a bad end, Thyrza Braund, and 
 Mrs. Velly had her reasons." 
 
 "She didn't want Ambrose to get to care for me, that 
 was all. Oh, Chrissie, don't scold me any more. I shan't 
 see 'en for nobody knows when." 
 
 "I wasn't born for the Garden of Eden afore there was 
 any need for fig-leaves," snapped Chrissie. "And you 
 can't fill up my mouth with a lot of old wool, telling me 
 you didn't know you'd meet 'en here." 
 
 " I didn't know it," said Thyrza doggedly; " but if you go 
 on same as this is, I shall go." 
 
 "Where?" 
 
 "Idunno. But I won't stay here." 
 
 "Yes, you will. You don't cross this dreshel to-night. 
 
The Wood of the Golden Shadows i 57 
 
 You'll sit down there and eat your supper like a decent 
 Christian." 
 
 Chrissie was scintillating with joy at the prospect of a 
 fresh campaign. Her hunger for material on which to work 
 was really the reason for her quickly recurrent matrimonial 
 ventures, for each new husband had a new set of habits 
 that required pruning. Thyrza was almost as great a god- 
 send as a new man would have been, for John, now rolling 
 about in piu-o.xysms of delight overhead, was really getting 
 a trifle too closely clipped to supply much practice for 
 Chrissie's special talents. 
 
 "What's that on your fmger?" she screamed, as she 
 caught sight of the ring. *'Now, I know how you got 
 that. Well, afore I'd allow a man to make game of me 
 like that, I'd see 'en to Flanders. You've let yourself be 
 treated light, that's plain, or there wouldn't be that old 
 mockery upon your finger. Eighteen carat gold wouldn't 
 be too good for me, I can tell 'ee, and it oughtn't to be for 
 you. Take it off and shy it on the fire, and the ne.xt young 
 man that comes along, tell 'en to respect 'ee." 
 
 Thyrza took it off with a trembling hand, and Chrissie 
 tossed it contemptuously into the stove fire. 
 
 "I like men myself," she said expansively, "and I like 
 to have plenty of 'em about. That's the worst of marriage," 
 she added frankly; "it gives 'ee but one to manage, and I 
 could easy keep a dozen of 'em going. But they'm like 
 great jolly chillern, and you must sweeten their porridge 
 for 'em yourself, else they'll empt the whole basin into it. 
 Just you keep all the sweets from 'em under lock and key, 
 and when I say sweets, I don't mean sugar. For you've 
 got to make up your mind to lead, just as far as you have a 
 mind for 'em to go, and no further. I've heard women say 
 they wish they'd been born men. I don't. Anybody can 
 be a man for me. For the men may do the work, as far's 
 
1^8 A Man of Genius 
 
 I'm concerned, if they'll only leave me one job — the manage- 
 ment of them that does it." 
 
 Thyrza sat dazed under this flood of eloquence, yet, 
 remembering the look in Ambrose Velly's eyes that night, 
 she had a dim comprehension of the trend of Chrissie's 
 cryptic utterances. 
 
 "My dear," said Chrissie kindly, "after a pause, never 
 mind how many men you have to do with, so long as you 
 keep to one rule." 
 
 She held up her forefinger impressively. 
 
 "Let 'em leave the better for having knowed 'ee and not 
 a mite the worse. For though they'm big and masterful 
 outside, 'tis from us women they learn to think high — or 
 think low — in their heart of hearts. And from nobody else. 
 I allays say, tell me what women he likes, and I'll tell 'ee 
 what the man is." 
 
 "But now," she said, in a hospitable bustle, "I wouldn't 
 run any more tears into that pancake if I was you, for 'twill 
 make it lie heavy on your stomich, and I kept it a-purpose 
 for you and popped it into the oven the minute I heard 'ee 
 coming up the path. And don't you worrit about Ambrose 
 Velly, for what's no good never comes to any harm. I 
 don't think any wrong of 'ee, not me. 'Twill work out to 
 'Will 'ee have this woman,' all right and proper, with you 
 and him. Just you see if it doesn't." 
 
 "No, it won't," sobbed Thyrza, regardless of pancake. 
 
 "Well, and if it don't, 'twill be somebody better then. 
 I've often thought I was rather too quick in settling on John, 
 when I've seed some fine upstanding chap or other." 
 
 "Good Lord!" said John to himself, wisely descending 
 the stairs, in order to avoid further revelations. 
 
 
CHAPTER X 
 THE LEAPING FLAME 
 
 WHISTLING now high, now low, with trills and 
 quavers most delightful in their happiness, Ambrose 
 bent over his work in the barn at Long Furlong. One 
 ray of sunlight from a window near the roof lit up the 
 musky stillness of the place where long trestle tables stood 
 piled with wood-carving tools and the materials for model- 
 ling in plaster. 
 
 It was Sunday, the only day when he could count on 
 uninterrupted leisure for some hours; and before him lay 
 a panel on which he was carving a design of wheatears, 
 working straight on to the material, without a drawn 
 design. The cranks and pistons of his brain were going full 
 steam ahead, while he watched the picture in his mind as 
 though it were an image reflected in the still waters of a 
 lagoon. Then suddenly the tune of the ''Raggle-taggle 
 gypsies" ceased, for he had struck upon the idea which 
 was to influence much of the aftercourse of his life; all the 
 time that he had been trying experiments on plaster or on 
 wood he had been learning the first lesson of the plastic 
 artist, the limitations of material. By beginning with 
 painting he had started at the wrong end. Instead, he 
 must set himself to learn the qualities of stone, wood, glass, 
 iron, even of drapery. In short, it concerned him to be 
 a craftsman first, for only so was it possible to rival the 
 work of the master-craftsmen of old who speak a language 
 
 »59 
 
i6o A Man of Genius 
 
 we understand, but which we stammer haltingly, as men 
 use a foreign tongue with which they are not at home. 
 
 "The working hands and the designing brain cannot 
 ultimately be separated, as they are now," he said slowly 
 to himself. Then, in a moment, he sketched the structure 
 of a life-work; in a flash he saw the great workshop, echo- 
 ing with saw and chisel, hammer and steam-crane, that he 
 would build. It pleased him to fancy that in his veins ran 
 the blood of a race of artificers, for out of goldsmiths' shops 
 there have come artists by the score. Already he could 
 hear the rhythmic tapping of hammers, beating in unison 
 like a mighty heart of labour, the warmest, most brotherly 
 sound in the world, and fuller far of hope than the chanted 
 benedictions of church aisles. For through all diversity of 
 purpose, it is the sense of the common aim of labour that 
 heartens to his task the loneliest thinker, no less than the 
 busiest engineer. 
 
 Then, as if a hand had passed a sponge across a slate, it 
 was all blotted out in the thought of his poverty and depend- 
 ence, of the practical struggle for mere existence that was 
 before him. 
 
 To the making of the plastic artist there go so many en- 
 dowments that it is no wonder so few have been given to 
 the world. The perception of the nature of the material in 
 which he works, the power to visualise what he would 
 create, these are the first half, the mental gift. But without 
 the power of the trained hand, shaped through dark, un- 
 traced channels of ancestry, the mental gift is of no avail. 
 And, most difficult of all, there must be a single-hearted 
 devotion that sees no other object worthy of effort save the 
 one. For the world only yields the rarest secrets of her 
 loveliness to the man of single mind, and knowledge of the 
 world's loveliness is genius, greater or less in proportion to 
 the secrets known. 
 
 I 
 
The Leaping Flame i6i 
 
 And that means death — death to many motives that rule 
 other men; for the artist has to learn to sport only with the 
 tangles of the Muse's hair. 
 
 Four great walls in the New Jerusalem, 
 Meted on each side by the angel's reed, 
 For Leonard, Rafael, Agnolo and me 
 To cover — the three first without a wife. . . . 
 
 So it runs, and with truth. Above all, art suffers no bowing 
 in the temple of Mammon, and over her temple is written — 
 "Abandon affairs, all ye who enter here." 
 
 But these things were, as yet, hidden from Ambrose, and 
 already between him and his work there had stolen the 
 thought of Thyrza Braund alone to-day over in Bradworthy, 
 for John and Chrissie Rosevear were spending the Sunday 
 with Caleb Vinnicombe. Smiling at the thought of how 
 her lips trembled when the tears came, he drew from his 
 pocket the sad little note he had received from her yester- 
 day. It was a matter of half an hour after that to 
 saddle Merrylegs and be off. 
 
 Over the country there lay the stillness of frost, death in 
 the earth grappling with the vital impulse of the cloudless 
 sunlight. The great dome of air, purple with distance and 
 tingling with frost and sunshine, throbbed over the rolling 
 ])lains where the marshy bottoms gleamed with ice-mirrors, 
 over the valleys grey with hoar-frost, and over the wooded 
 hilltops where the trees caught the glory of the molten sun. 
 The twitter of a half-dead bird from the hedge, the whirring 
 flight of field-fares from a thawing patch of grass-land, the 
 occasional call of snipe or woodcock from the sedge, were 
 the only clear sounds to be distinguished. 
 
 It was getting dim when he reached Bradworthy, and 
 tawny circles of light from cottage lamps were beginning to 
 shine like huge glow-worms from the rooms where the 
 women were spreading white tablecloths for tea. 
 II 
 
1 62 A Man of Genius 
 
 The Rosevears' cottage was dark, and at first Ambrose 
 thought his ride was going to be in vain, but he caught 
 sight of Thyrza sitting by the fire in the house next door. 
 She was balancing the bare pink toes of a baby on her 
 hand, while the little creature moved its body from side to 
 side, in the ecstacy of budding strength. As she held the 
 child, she sang the cuckoo song of the West. In the words 
 of it there came back to Ambrose the memories of his own 
 childhood, for it was from Mrs. Velly that Thyrza had 
 learnt it. In the rush of blood to his heart, he felt the 
 mighty force that sweeps men in the resistless current of 
 creation towards that birth and re-birth by which the pur- 
 pose of the ages is fulfilled. 
 
 **The cuckoo is a fine bird, 
 He singeth as he flies, 
 He bringeth us good tidings, 
 He telleth us no lies. 
 
 He sucketh the sweet flowers 
 To make his fine voice clear, 
 And when he sings 'cuckoo,* 
 The summer draweth near," 
 
 sang Thyrza. "Cuckoo! Cuck, cuck!" cried she, placing 
 her lips on the child's, while between the kisses Ambrose 
 could divine the loud breathing that in a healthy baby 
 always accompanies these active movements. But presently 
 the head sank forward with a sleepy murmur against the 
 girl's neck. Patting the round, beflanneled back, Thyrza 
 rocked herself to and fro. " I love to feel 'en give his little 
 snores," she said to the mother, who was bending over the 
 cradle preparing the smooth nest of sheets and pillows. 
 
 " My word! it's you that ought to have a dozen," laughed 
 the woman. Then, as they heard the sound of a footstep 
 outside, they both caught sight of Ambrose, Thyrza with 
 the sense of surprise always felt in looking, after absence, 
 
 
 1 
 
The Leaping Flame 163 
 
 on the longed-for face of a friend. With a word of excuse, 
 she got up and joined him. 
 
 "Oh," she said, as they walked away, "it seems so long 
 since I left Long Furlong." 
 
 At last, as they stood in the darkening fields, covered 
 now in the hollows by a rising mist, he said — 
 
 "Look at me, Thyrza." 
 
 His look drew her eyelids up, and in her eyes he read 
 the satisfaction for the deepest longing he possessed — the 
 sympathy that can see no wrong in the thing loved. This 
 alone held him to her, and would hold him even against 
 other attractions; for Thyrza saw him as every man likes 
 to be seen, with the weakness hidden and the faults glossed 
 over. 
 
 "Dear heart," he asked, "what would make you love me 
 less?" 
 
 "Nothing. But I should die if you flung me away." 
 
 "But if — I cared for some one else?" 
 
 "Then I would come back after she was gone." 
 
 "You would? Yes, I really believe you would." 
 
 "Don't you know 'tis for always that I love, Ambrose? 
 Nothing — not death even — could take 'ee from me. If I 
 died, I should just be waiting for 'ee, dear, to come." 
 
 "But what if there wasn't anything of you to wait, 
 love?" 
 
 For answer she laid his hand on her breast. "Can'st 
 hear it beat?" she asked. 
 
 " Yes," he whispered. 
 
 "'Tis only the body's heart that you feel. But behind 
 that there's another heart of me that lives always, and 
 always for you — in heaven or hell, or at the gates of death." 
 
 "Thyrza, Thyrza, what is it?" he cried. 
 
 "Oh!" she cried, trembling. "I know deep in me that 
 I cannot die; you cannot die; none can. We must go on 
 
1 64 A Man of Genius 
 
 and on, often to suffer, often to fall. We cannot die if we 
 would. Never to get away from ourselves. It's awful to 
 think that we cannot die." 
 
 " But why do you talk about dying ? You are so happy, 
 so merry, in my arms." 
 
 "Ah, but you're all to me. And I can't be all to you; 
 no one woman is to any man. God made men to love 
 many, and a woman to love but one. Ah, if I could only 
 die in your arms and never know anything more! For 
 the touch of your arms to be the last of life, the last of 
 feeling " 
 
 "Thyrza, if I came to do wicked things?" 
 
 "'Twould still be you. What do I care whether your 
 skin's dirty or clean, when under the skin there's you — the 
 you that holds me." 
 
 "But," he said to tease her, "when your roses fade and 
 the lines come and the hair grows grey, what if I don't 
 care then?" 
 
 "And," she smiled, "when you're bald and lined, do you 
 think it will make any difference to me? Ah, no. But 
 'tis different with a man, I know. Even then, there'll still 
 be the other side to look for, the other side of death. And 
 there'll be memories, too." 
 
 In the sighing of the wind, the pulsing of the star, the 
 swaying of the tide, lives the love of such as Thyi^a; for 
 it gauges the depths, not of human life only, but of the 
 very elements of wind and star and water, for of such 
 affinity was born the universe; deeper is it than the nerves 
 that thrill through the brain, closer than the blood that is 
 pumped through the heart; for it is a force that speaks 
 when nerves and blood are still, as it spoke when human 
 nerves and blood were not, save in creative thought. It is 
 the essence of love itself, this desire of the star for the 
 star, the atom for the atom, the living soul for the soul 
 
The Leaping Flame 165 
 
 of life. No thinking can destroy its intangible quality, for 
 it is deeper than the tool of any image-breaker can reach. 
 
 Then they turned back to the Rosevears' cottage, and over 
 their meal Thyrza told the story of how she had tramped 
 from farm to farm in search of work. She had, at last, 
 after many a weary pilgrimage, found daily work at a place 
 close by, so that she could still sleep at Chrissie's. 
 
 She stood by the open hearth fire, with the flimsy edge 
 of her dress, unperceived, lying close to the burning logs. 
 Suddenly a long flame darted to her waist, and with a cry 
 Ambrose had caught her, and was crushing the fire out 
 with his hands, pressing her against the cloth of his clothes. 
 It was one of the moments that women remember long 
 afterwards, in the years when the glamour of the man's 
 love has faded, in those years when great suffering is not 
 regarded half as anxiously as a hurt finger once was. 
 
 At last, when the fire had been extinguished, Ambrose 
 put out the lamp with his scorched hands, and drew her 
 down to him. Through the window pane there twinkled 
 the green ray of a solitary star, and they could hear the 
 night wind wandering round the walls. 
 
 As Ambrose held her in the quick breathing of his 
 startled nerves, he said — 
 
 "Think what might have happened if I hadn't been 
 here. I want to have you always by me." 
 
 " Ambrose, you must go now. You'll be very late home 
 else. Just a minute more and then I shall turn you out." 
 
 " I shan't leave you till Chrissie comes." 
 
 "She isn't coming to-night, for they'll get a lift home 
 first thing to-morrow morning." 
 
 In the upleap of a flame, Thyrza caught sight of his 
 strained face. Still she clung to Chrissie's words, "Let 
 every man be the better for 'ee, not the worse." 
 
 Suddenly three curious whistled notes came from outside 
 
1 66 A Man of Genius 
 
 the window. It was a gay, birdlike sound, and for the last 
 ten days it had awakened Thyrza every morning at five 
 o'clock, when William Bagelhole went to his work. At 
 the sound the lonely longing of those mornings came back 
 to her. 
 
 " Oh," she cried, " I want to be strong. 'Tis for you I 
 want it." 
 
 "Look outside," he said, pointing to the icy cold of the 
 night; " that's death, the symbol of lovelessness. Can you 
 bear it ? With my heart beating for you ? Look, Thyrza, 
 look at the flames. Body and soul, who knows the differ- 
 ence when the flames leap in one? And," he whispered, 
 " 'tis you women who rule the gates of life that the leaping 
 flame throws open. Thyrza, I saw you with that child 
 in your arms. Do you know what it told me about you ? 
 And even now, you are mine." 
 
 Still, with her feeble rushlight of intelligence, Thyrza 
 tried to pierce the darkness of the future. Yet, painfully 
 peering into his life, she could only see hers and his together. 
 He would forget his ambitions and settle with her at the 
 farm. Secretly, she believed Mrs. Velly expected that. 
 Besides, how could he fail to know what was best for both ? 
 He was so much above her, and Chrissie had only known 
 men like John Rosevear. 
 
 " You shall come back to Long Furlong," Ambrose whis- 
 pered, " and this time we'll be married with a real gold ring.'* 
 
 Soon within the cottage the great silence had fallen. It 
 is always the same silence, whether the city street roars out- 
 side, or only the night wind sighs, for it is the silence of a 
 woman's heart that waits. Then Thyrza heard through the 
 stillness a sound like the dripping of water-drops in the 
 depths of a well; it was the curious beating of tiny pulses 
 in herself. At last, that too ceased, and the darkness fell — ■ 
 the darkness that closes the eyelids as with weighted lead. 
 
The Leaping Flame 167 
 
 that stretches numbness on soft limbs, that arrests the 
 passage of time. 
 
 There was no time for her now, no past that remembered, 
 no future that hoped or feared. It was the endless Now. 
 This point in eternity was eternity, without end, as it had 
 been without beginning. She was the woman soul of the 
 ages. There was no time, no space, no pain, no want, no 
 longing. Little tremors, like the faint touches of the light 
 on aspen leaves, like the quivering wind-gusts on still 
 pools, passed through nerve and brain. Then the silence 
 and the warm darkness, all enveloping, enfolded her in the 
 eternal Now. 
 
 The window panes next morning were squares of sullen 
 light, and the ivy outside the window rustled with the move- 
 ments of the birds tumbling from boughs and nests. 
 
 Thyrza turned in her sleep, and with the turning came a 
 dream. 
 
 Peter at the gates of Paradise sternly shaking a key. It 
 was the huge door-key of Hartland Church, and Peter a 
 cruel, bearded, ear-ringed knave. There stood a woman 
 outside the gates with a dim crowd of waiting figures 
 behind her. 
 
 Dumbly she implored admittance; sternly he shook the 
 key. 
 
 Then she was aware of a great angel behind the grim 
 fisherman. 
 
 " I think," said the angel, " I'll see what it's like outside." 
 
 And the next moment he, too, stood outside by the 
 woman, whom she knew to be herself. 
 
 "Would you come in without — him ?" asked the angel. 
 
 "Nay, Lord; but where is he?" she stammered. 
 
 " Outside," answered the angel curtly. 
 
1 68 A Man of Genius 
 
 "Then I stay outside too. I only wanted entry to find 
 him." 
 
 Through the bars of the gate the light shone on sunny 
 vistas; without, the cruel wind smote shivering bodies, but 
 she turned away. 
 
 Then she looked down at her side, for at the bend of 
 the waist outside her drab clothes, a point of heavenly 
 white curved round tenderly; it was the tip of the angel's 
 wing. 
 
 " 'Twas where he used to clasp me close when he drew 
 me near. Lord Angel," she said. "Just where the waist 
 grows small." 
 
 "Ay," said the angel, "that's why they took out the rib, 
 for a man's close clasping in the tender, old earth-way. I 
 thought you'd like it." Then he laughed, for the angel had 
 a sense of humour. 
 
 "There's much love outside," said he to Peter, as he 
 passed within the gates once more. 
 
 Then only the wind blew in the chaos outside the gates, 
 as Thyrza awoke to the knowledge of her changed life 
 where there already waited the first gleaning of the harvest 
 of bitterness. For the prayer she had prayed last night 
 was answered, the prayer that whatever pain there was to 
 be borne should be her portion, since where his weakness 
 had called for her strength, it had called in vain. In the 
 one appeal that life had made to her for self-control, she 
 had failed, and in doing so had made the man she loved 
 "think low" of women. Henceforth, save by walking on 
 her own heart, she could never bring him any uplift, for 
 her weakness had dragged down in his eyes the honour of 
 women. 
 
 She covered her face with her hands, as though to shut 
 out the knowledge. 
 
 In the barn at Long Furlong, where he had thrown him- 
 
The Leaping Flame 169 
 
 self on the hay after his return, Ambrose, too, awoke at 
 the first daylight. His first thought was of Thyrza, and 
 hurriedly rising, he searched in the dimness for pencil and 
 paper to write her. 
 
 "My wife," he wrote, "I want you to have it always 
 before you that nothing can ever come between us now. 
 Never let any fear of the future, any sense of present lone- 
 liness trouble you; for, my Thyrza, I am always between 
 you and any sorrow that may threaten you — you, the one 
 great gift of my life. You shall be here at the farm as my 
 wife in a month or two at latest. I would ask for a secret 
 marriage, but there is no need. I only have to accustom 
 my mother to the thought of it, and then you shall come. 
 Have no misgivings, no mistrust. Nothing can ever come 
 between us now." 
 
 The face that bent above the paper was hardening into 
 a man's strength. For, here, in the downgrade of the 
 family fortunes, he had, by his own act, made the foothold 
 of all still more precarious. It was the death-blow, as he 
 believed, to his career; for with Thyrza as his wife he must 
 look for work as overseer, or land-agent, if he were very 
 lucky. Yet from all shadow Thyrza should be protected; 
 he would belittle their love by no weak repining, above all, 
 by no vulgarity of callous neglect. 
 
 Yet he knew, deep down, whence it never came to the 
 surface, that where the test of a man is his work, the supreme 
 test of a woman is the character of the love she inspires. 
 From that unspoken condemnation, living as it does in the 
 heart of things, no power on earth could free Thyrza, since 
 there can be no bringing back of yesterday. 
 
 As Ambrose packed up his tools, meaning never to 
 touch them again, he marvelled at the unknown strength of 
 the force that had arisen against him. In moments of vital 
 choice, something that we never before knew to exist in us 
 
170 
 
 A Man of Genius 
 
 leaps to life, something that we gaze at aghast, even while it 
 takes the direction of our destiny into its hands. Ambrose 
 knew this, but he was still unaware of the fact that this 
 something is the self our visions have framed; but from the 
 darkness where we bred it, it comes, created by the desires 
 we have cherished and the thought-shapes we have formed. 
 In the memory of yesterday Ambrose's fancies flew again, 
 in this fresh proof of the Velly degeneracy, to those ancestors 
 of his who long ago had been men of sterling honour. In 
 a measure, his letter was an offering to their Manes, though 
 born of his tender pity for Thyrza. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 THE PRAYER OF WOMEN 
 
 IN the larch plantation through which Thyrza was pass- 
 ing on her way home from work, the touches of spring 
 were becoming visible, for she had now been staying in 
 Bradworthy for nearly three months. She walked slowly, 
 for this was the usual trysting-place with Ambrose, whom 
 she expected to meet to-day. 
 
 In front of her, vistas of green shadow stretched, while 
 along the avenue between the trees lay a pathway of sun- 
 light across the carpet of moss. From the lower branches 
 of the trees hung hoary lichens, like the ancient memories 
 that thrill in the glance of the oungest child. The air was 
 filled with the murmur of numberless tiny water-courses 
 pushing their way through beds of moss and, where the 
 trees had been slightly cleared, the mist of sunlight gathered 
 in pools of topaz shadow. Like the ghost of a sound, 
 from the branches above came the faint roar of the wind, 
 never insistent, but always there like the unseen power 
 of fate. Under the trailing brambles a primrose peeped 
 from the huge leaves that woodland shadows always en- 
 courage in this plant, and as she stooped to pick it she saw 
 Ambrose Velly at the end of the avenue. 
 
 They stood for a moment hand in hand, each seeking 
 silently for courage to break through the strange loneliness 
 that enwTaps even those who love. 
 
 ''Turn back," he said at last, "and let us stay here until 
 171 
 
172 A Man of Genius 
 
 it's time for you to be going home. Chrissie won't be 
 expecting you yet, for it's quite early." 
 
 On the fallen trunk of a log he laid his coat for her. 
 Then again a silence fell between them, till, laying his 
 hand across hers, he asked, ''Thyrza, what's troubling you? 
 For there is something, I'm sure; you've never met me like 
 this before." 
 
 "And," she smiled, "you've something too. Tell yours 
 first." 
 
 "No; yours," he persisted. 
 
 "You know what you wrote about our marriage," she 
 said in a low voice, looking down at her hands as she spoke; 
 "you said in a month or two at latest." 
 
 "That brings me straight to my trouble my Thyrza. 
 Have you wondered why, in the times we've met since, I've 
 never said a word about it?" 
 
 She was silent, but he knew it was because she would 
 utter nothing that seemed like a reproach. 
 
 "It is just the weakest point in me that you have struck 
 now," he said. "You remember how I skulked about for 
 days like a tail-piped dog, because I knew mother wanted 
 to send you away? It's the same now. Every word that I 
 wrote, I meant — and mean it now. You are my own wife, 
 in my eyes; but just now I cannot add any more burdens 
 to what my mother already has to bear. Thyrza, you must 
 not ask it of me." 
 
 "That means," she said, in a hard voice, "that you 
 break your word — that we cannot be married." 
 
 He took her cold hands in his and drew her closer. 
 
 "Not yet," he said. Then, as she quivered, he watched 
 her closely, for indeed, it was a hard thing to tell her the 
 truth, to strike the brightness from her face and see the 
 leaden look of misery dawn instead. "I want you to face 
 things straight, child," he said tenderly. "My mother is 
 
The Prayer of Women 173 
 
 making a fight against terrible odds, against odds that she 
 knows nothing of, poor soul. Ask yourself, Thyrza, whether 
 her son can add another mite of pain to the load she 
 carries." 
 
 "You should have thought of that months ago, Ambrose," 
 she said, disengaging herself from him. Leaning forward 
 with eyes that saw nothing of the scene in front of her, she 
 was watching the cloud, now no bigger than a man's hand, 
 that was gathering over all her future. 
 
 "My heavens, I know, I know!" said Ambrose, as he 
 paced restlessly to and fro; "but we mustn't lose our heads 
 — we must think of every one and everything." 
 
 "Except me," she said, shivering, as an animal contracts 
 its muscles at a hostile touch. 
 
 "That's devilish unfair," he said angrily, and then check- 
 ing himself, continued quietly, "At home we're at our last 
 gasp, and mother's fighting with her back to the wall, which 
 is undermined beneath her very feet, though she doesn't 
 know it. We shall have to leave in less than si.x months 
 now, for father's had notice to quit, though he won't have 
 her told. There will have to be a sale then, when she 
 knows, to pay for the more pressing debts. My Thyrza," 
 he said, holding her to him, " I want you to be brave, and 
 not add any weakness to me now. I want every ounce of 
 fight there is in me. Little one, you are the dearest thing 
 I have; but not even for you can I aim another blow at 
 mother. She almost starves herself, as it is, for the debts 
 are adding up. And father knows too, and for whole days 
 at a time he'll sit never moving from his chair, or what's 
 worse, he'll go wandering over the fields he'll soon have to 
 leave. He's sober mostly; but how can I bring you 
 there?" 
 
 "What are you going to do, when the end comes, then?" 
 asked Th)Tza, listening to the muffled beatings of her 
 
1 74 A Man of Genius 
 
 heart. "I didn't know— I didn't know how bad it was, 
 Ambrose." 
 
 "How could I write such things?" he said impatiently. . 
 "But directly they're settled in a cottage, I must get away A 
 to some architect's office. I've a good all-round knowledge 
 of country work, and I've written to my old chief already. 
 Then, when I've got work, you shall come to me." 
 
 "Oh, no; oh, no," she cried, with breathless sobs; "I'd 
 shame 'ee. I'm only fit for rough country ways. I thought 
 you'd always be on a farm, where I do belong." 
 
 "Thyrza," he whispered, "can you forget so easily?" 
 
 "Forget! Ah, my God, 'tis you who've forgotten." 
 
 "Thyrza, there is no reason, is there, why we should be 
 married openly at once? No reason that makes it neces- 
 sary for you, I mean. Tell me, my own. Tell me frankly." 
 
 Praying blindly for strength to lie, she held her breath 
 for a moment, thinking of the weight of his trouble, gaug- 
 ing her own strength to endure, calculating where she could 
 count on help. In a moment she saw the bright eyes of 
 the bird that had watched her from the ivy, when she 
 awoke to the desire that all the pain of their sin might be 
 hers. Then she lifted her eyes to her lover's as they gazed 
 intently at her. 
 
 "No, Ambrose," she said in clear tones that sounded in 
 her own ears like a defiance to fate. "I know what you 
 mean, but there is no reason for me. I will wait and be 
 brave till you can take me openly." 
 
 The last words were very low, for, indeed, the future 
 was full of terror for her. But as she looked in his thank- 
 ful face, she would gladly have repeated the lie a hundred 
 times. 
 
 "I'll never add so much as a straw to your trouble, 
 Ambrose," she cried; "'tisn't in me to do it. For there's 
 nothing in the world I wouldn't bear for 'ee." 
 
The Prayer of Women 175 
 
 As Ambrose watched the brave light in her eyes, he felt 
 as though the mountain wind of self-reliance was blowing 
 through him. It was almost a shock to him to tind in 
 Thyrza the strong helpmate that is sometimes born out of 
 passion in an erring woman, 
 
 "Do you know," he said, "that at first I thought I must 
 put all my ambitious thoughts aside?" 
 
 She knew what he meant, in the intelligence that love 
 and pain were bringing, and shivered again at the thought 
 of the widespread evil she had so nearly wrought in him. 
 
 "Come," he continued; "you're cold. Let's get out of 
 this. Come out into the field. But now I know that such 
 a notion was the greatest folly. Why, I should feel like a 
 sea-gull with its wings dipt, if I were tied to a farm. Just 
 think of the dreary second-best of all the years, and there 
 might be forty or fifty of them! 'T wouldn't be bearable. 
 I wish you could understand, child, how I long to see the 
 thing that my brain begot showing in the face of men. I 
 want to realise myself — oh! if I only could. Lord!" — he 
 laughed — "what a fool I am to ramble on like this." 
 
 They were crossing the field now, and in the distance 
 Thyrza could akeady see the stile where Ambrose always 
 left her, lest they should be seen together by any of the 
 people of the village. 
 
 "Tell me," she said. "I want to understand." 
 
 "Th}Tza," he answered, stopping suddenly, "just think 
 what it must be to have secretly seen in your mind a beau- 
 tiful thing that no one else has any idea of. And then 
 to tell it out plainly to all the world. Why," he laughed, 
 as he looked at her, "it's like " 
 
 But her eyes were fixed in the glance of a sleep-walker. 
 
 "'Tis like," she said, "when a woman sees the child that 
 her love gave her." 
 
 "Thyrza," he cried, as they stood by the stile, "why, I've 
 
176 A Man of Genius 
 
 never seen you like this! You were always a little pigeon 
 that I love, but now, you understand." 
 
 ''Ay, Ambrose; more than once I thought I would, and 
 if ever you feel like thinking hardly o' me, remember that 
 there wasn't anything as went deeper than the love of you 
 — and yours," she added in a lower voice. 
 
 With a long kiss they parted, and Ambrose stood for a 
 long while watching her; but she never turned back to look, 
 lest he should see her sick white face. Yet she thanked 
 God that she had found courage to lie; for the little sun- 
 lover was a woman now, with a woman's sorrowful courage 
 to bear the lot she had chosen. 
 
 Ambrose would not follow till Thyrza was safe in 
 Chrissie's cottage, for he was anxious to shield her from 
 all possibility of gossip. But as he turned on his heel to 
 return to the wood, a man got up from the hedge and 
 came towards him. It was John Darracott, evidently on 
 tramp, for by the side of the hedge was a bundle in a 
 handkerchief at the end of the stick by which it had been 
 carried. 
 
 "Hullo, Darracott, that you?" said Ambrose, affecting 
 an ease that he was far from feeling. "I heard you were 
 leaving the Quay, but I didn't know it was to come to 
 Bradworthy." 
 
 The moment the words were out of his mouth he recog- 
 nised that they sounded like a sneer. 
 
 "I hope you'll have better luck," he finished, feeling a 
 slight tinge of contempt at remembering how Darracott 
 had given his false evidence at the Board of Trade en- 
 quiry with the uncompromising directness of an accom- 
 plished liar. Yet the poor devil must have suffered, too, 
 thought Ambrose, noticing the whitening of his hair and 
 beard. 
 
 "I'm deuced thankful," he said to himself, in a glow of 
 
The Prayer of Women i 77 
 
 self-approval, "that I didn't add a stone to the heaps he's 
 had tiung at him." 
 
 "I'm not going of my own free will," said Darracott. 
 "Master give me notice, but I've got work to Appledore, 
 at the gravel-loading." 
 
 At that very moment a farm-cart heaped with his bits of 
 furniture was rumbling along the Bideford road, on its way 
 to the coast. But his K)nging to see Thyrza once had 
 brought him to Bradworthy. Xow he carried with him the 
 picture of her with her head on Ambrose Velly's shoulder, 
 her whole attitude that of comj)lcte surrender. 
 
 "Stop a bit, sir," he said, as Ambrose was for leaving 
 him; "I've a word to say to 'ee." 
 
 In the tone, even more than the words, there was antag- 
 onism, but the younger man held himself well in hand. 
 
 "Now, Darracott," said he, with a laugh, "I know that 
 you watch over Thyrza Braund like an old hen with one 
 chick; but all the same, you know, nobody ever constituted 
 you her guardian. You aren't her godfather, I suppose, by 
 any chance, are you?" 
 
 "Believe it or not, as you please," said Darracott savagely, 
 "but I've not so much as set eyes on her till to-night, not 
 since you seed me with her last. Would to God I'd watched 
 her day and night afore she'd come to this!" 
 
 "Perhaps," said Ambrose in a cutting tone, "I'd better 
 say at once that whatever construction your foul thoughts 
 may have put on what you saw, Thyrza Braund " 
 
 "I know well that she's no wanton; but if all's straight 
 in your mind, why aren't you courting her open? For 
 you're not. You're not! And if others saw you and her 
 together, same as I did, where's her good name gone?" 
 
 The truth in the man's words stung, but Ambrose con- 
 cealed his annoyance. 
 
 "What a trusty old watch-dog you are," he said. "Any- 
 
178 A Man of Genius 
 
 how, a kiss or two won't do Thyrza any harm. I'll warrant 
 she knew what they were like before I taught her. 'Twas 
 only by the merest chance I met her to-day." 
 
 "That's a foul lie!" said Darracott. "And Thyrza 
 Braund never would ha' kissed any man that way without 
 she'd given him her whole heart and soul. And that I'd go 
 to hell to prove. You're lying to me as, I make no doubt, 
 you've lied to her!" 
 
 The deep breathing of the two men panted for a second 
 through the sudden gloom that was gathering from the 
 thunder-clouds all round. Then Ambrose crashed his fist 
 at Darracott's face, and the two men grappled, rocking to 
 and fro for a second, each trying to get a secure grip. 
 Curiously enough it was Ambrose that was the calmer of 
 the two, for Darracott's heart was bursting with mingled 
 pity and rage. But at last the stronger man lifted the 
 lighter off his feet, and in another second would have 
 given him a back-fall had not a sudden sense of the shame 
 of it all arrested the movement of every muscle. 
 
 Quietly Darracott set his enemy down, and struck up 
 his arm as Ambrose would have aimed a second blow at 
 him. 
 
 "Quiet, sir, quiet," he said, drawing deep breaths. 
 "What's the good of going at it like mad bulls? We're 
 making matters worse." 
 
 They stood at gaze for a second, till at last Ambrose held 
 out his hand. 
 
 "You've done me," he said; "or you would have in 
 another second. I'm sorry, Darracott, I've given you pain. 
 But I love her as honestly as you do, I believe." 
 
 " Thank God for that, sir," said Darracott in a low voice. 
 "But ye donno how easy 'tis to smirch the honour of a 
 maid." 
 
 It was with a pang, half of shame, half of relief, that 
 
The Prayer of Women 1 79 
 
 Ambrose recognised the man's simple belief in Thyrza's 
 honesty. He evidently knew nothing, surmised nothing 
 more than a concealed courtship. 
 
 "And I've acted wrong," continued Darracott sadly; 
 " for all the anger can do naught but make things worse. 
 You'll act true to her, sir; for there's men as would give 
 their ver}' life for one minute of her love, same as you've 
 had to-night." 
 
 " Darracott, I will," said Ambrose; " I never meant any- 
 thing else. She'll be my wife as soon as I can manage. 
 Only you maddened me so, I wouldnH say it. For I don't 
 want the whole story noised about by all the gossips of 
 the place." 
 
 "No gossip will come from me," said Darracott quietly. 
 
 So they parted, and Darracott turned his back on the 
 village. At the end of an hour his face was in the other 
 direction, and by night he was back in Hartland; for he 
 could not leave Thyrza helpless and alone. His hatred 
 for Ambrose had evaporated; but he felt that the lad was 
 somehow in a tangle from which he would not have strength 
 to extricate himself. Yet he must be forced to declare his 
 engagement to Thyrza, to make it no longer a hole and 
 corner business. How this was to be done, Darracott had 
 not the faintest idea; the only thing he knew was that he 
 could not go away. To his employer at Appledore he 
 wrote that his place must be filled up, if need be, for he 
 could not arrive for some days, possibly weeks. In the 
 simplicity of his great love there was no sense that he was 
 interfering in what was no concern of his, for to him every- 
 thing to do with Thyrza was his affair. 
 
 As Ambrose rode back to Long Furlong, through the 
 storm that was coming up against the wind, he remembered 
 that he must be especially careful of the mare, Merrylegs, 
 for she was already practically sold and belonged to him 
 
i8o A Man of Genius 
 
 no longer. This meant that riding would soon be a thing 
 of the past for him, and Thyrza and he farther apart than 
 ever. The sale of Merrylegs was thus a symbol of that 
 estranging power of mere circumstance that aids and abets 
 our frailties with a truly diabolic power. 
 
 All the while, with Chrissie singing cheerily in the room 
 below, Thyrza lay listening to the noise of the thunder, 
 gathering strength to act alone, as she had never acted 
 before; for Chrissie's song seemed to remind her how 
 detached each soul is from the one next to it, since Chrissie 
 could sing, with Thyrza facing untold dread. 
 
 Yet the child who once was Thyrza felt that she was 
 listening to another song, the great melody of love and 
 sacrifice that was carrying her on its wings to heights she 
 had never dreamt of in all her sunny life. For in her 
 loving lie for Ambrose Velly's sake, in the mystery of birth 
 that was coming to her, her soul was opening to the world 
 of awe where dwell the starry wonders of the universe, 
 where are the laws that bind Orion and the Pleiades, that 
 link the meanest with the greatest in the common reverence 
 of life. In shame borne for the man she loved, Thyrza 
 was finding her soul, learning the law of life that came to 
 Ambrose as the fruit of his brain, and to Darracott as the 
 fruit of sacrifice. Thus watching the Mystery Play of a 
 woman's life, she fell asleep, fearless of the thunder for the 
 first time in her life. Yet, before she slept, there flamed 
 along her heart silence the thought of the wonderful Prayer 
 OF Women, though its actual words she could only have 
 understood with difiiculty — 
 
 O Spirit that broods upon the hills 
 And moves upon the face of the deep, 
 And is heard in the wind, 
 Save us from the desire of men's eyes, 
 And the cruel lust of them. 
 
 i 
 
The Prayer of Women 1 8 1 
 
 Later on that evening Mr. Velly stood at the entrance 
 to the farm of Lower Titchberry. The light overhead was 
 livid, and the stifling air as hot as a furnace, while the u])per 
 branches of the tallest elms swayed slightly, bowing before 
 the wings of the coming storm. Dim shadows streaked 
 with tawny lights were moving across the sky. 
 
 "Better wait, Velly, till the storm's blown over," said the 
 farmer, as he watched his visitor trying to mount the 
 shivering animal from the heppcn-stock. 
 
 "Quiet, lass, quiet," said James Velly, as the terrified 
 creature quivered at every rattle of the storm overhead. 
 
 '"Tis pretty nigh madness," repeated the farmer, "to 
 ride her in a storm like this. Best get under the shelter of 
 a roof." 
 
 " Damn you, stand still," said Mr. Velly to the mare, as 
 he at last managed to swing himself into the saddle. In 
 the dim light his face shone white and set. 
 
 As he turned down the road the whole country was lit 
 with a vast sheet of yellow light, against which the houses 
 stood outlined in ink for a second. Far off on the coast 
 the steely sea yawned in the black cliff chasms. The 
 mare reared, but Velly struck her a savage blow that made 
 her quiver with pain. Shaking his head forebodingly, the 
 master of Titchberry stood watching the horse and rider 
 as they thundered down the road, till there came the rush 
 of a curtain of rain, and he went indoors for shelter. 
 
 Faster and faster in the rattle of hoof-beats James Velly 
 was escaping from thought, from the endless vain regrets 
 at the waste of his life. On him was the sense of head- 
 long flight from the sodden dreariness of these last weeks. 
 He shouted again and again in the relief of overcharged 
 nerves, till the mare, too, grew beside herself, for with 
 starting eyeballs and sweating flanks she was fleeing from 
 the terror of the opening skies above. At last in James 
 
1 82 A Man of Genius 
 
 Velly's brain there was nothing left but the joy of this 
 headlong rush, so different from the sickening despair 
 with which he had again and again handled his rabbiting 
 gun. 
 
 "Ambrose," cried Mrs. Velly, as her son came in drip- 
 ping wet from Bradworthy, "your father's not home yet. 
 He went to Titchberry two hours ago." 
 
 " Well, mother, I reckon he's waiting till this downpour's 
 over. There's nothing to be alarmed at in that. I'm wet 
 to the skin myself." 
 
 He left his mother looking out on the storm in a rare fit of 
 idleness; there seemed to be a terrible message, indeed, in 
 the black shadows that filled the house with darkness. 
 Suddenly amid the sounds of the storm, above the swirl of 
 the rain and the rushing of the shoots, there came a crash 
 from the house itself. Then followed the awe-stricken 
 silence that falls on inanimate things after some great 
 detonation. 
 
 "The house is struck," said Ambrose, hurrying down 
 from his room. 
 
 His first idea was that a chimney had fallen, and he 
 rushed into the yard, while Mrs. Velly ran upstairs, where 
 all was just as usual. At last Ambrose thought of the 
 eight-day clock in the hall that, with its solemn tick-tack, 
 had measured out the moments of many generations of 
 the Velly family. Opening the panel he looked inside. 
 
 "Come here, mother," he said, pointing to the interior, 
 where the great pendulum no longer swayed. 
 
 " It's fallen," exclaimed Mrs. Velly. 
 
 Across the minds of both flashed the belief that the 
 falling of a clock weight is as sure a sign of approaching 
 death as the beating of a wild bird against the windows of 
 a house. 
 
 The storm was travelling further away, but through the 
 
The Prayer of Women 183 
 
 wash of falling rain they began to distinguish a distant 
 sound. At first it was as slight as the rhythmic cry of a 
 man under the influence of an anaesthetic. Then it became 
 louder, more insistent; it was the noise of galloping hoofs, 
 and as it came nearer they could distinguish the furious 
 terror of the pace. 
 
 It was Clover, the mare his father rode, riderless now, as 
 Ambrose knew she would be, when he ran out of the house. 
 
 "Go and fetch Vinnicombe, and take a gate off its 
 hinges," said Mrs. Velly quietly, as Ambrose led in the 
 mare, covered with foam-spots, and reeking with the sweat 
 of intense fear. 
 
 "It'll be along the road from Titchberry," she said, as 
 she started ofiF, bareheaded, in the rain. 
 
 Twenty times before she reached the heap of stones 
 where lay the huddled mass she was expecting, she fancied 
 the dark marks on the road must be her husband. At last 
 she found him. 
 
 There were faint bubbles coming from the nostrils, and 
 blood was flowing from a scalp-wound. She feared to 
 move him at first, but when the men arrived with the gate, 
 they found her sitting with his head on her lap, the wound 
 carefully bound with strips of petticoat. 
 
 "He's gone," she said quietly. "He sighed twice. 
 Clover killed him," she repeated dully, like one repeating 
 a lesson. 
 
 At first she would not let them touch the body, pressing 
 her strained face against the breast of the dead man. It 
 was Caleb who induced her to move. 
 
 "Missus," he said, kneeling down by her side, "he was 
 coming home sober." 
 
 "Ay, he died sober," she said, and burst into tears. 
 
 "Thank God," said Ambrose, putting his arm round her 
 and lifting her to her feet. 
 
184 A Man of Genius 
 
 The rain had ceased and the road was beginning to 
 glitter with the freshness of a newly-washed surface, the 
 scent of the hedges and fields became perceptible and the 
 faint twittering of birds began from the trees. 
 
 "It's come too late," said Mrs. Velly, looking round at 
 the peace. "The storm's done its work. If he had but 
 come home an hour later," she said, for she felt at the 
 moment but the regret with which one looks at a broken 
 dish: ' if only I had not put it at the edge,' one says. 
 
 After they had brought him home and Dr. Dayman had 
 left, she sat quietly with Ambrose in the kitchen, opening 
 the pocket-book she had found on the body. 
 
 "So that's the end," she said, passing to her son the first 
 letters he found, which was the one her husband had received 
 from the landlord. 
 
 " Yes, mother, I suppose it is," assented Ambrose, as he 
 read it. 
 
 "And all the time I thought 'twas but two years' rent 
 owing. But it's too late now to think of blaming him." 
 
 " I'll pay it all back, mother," said Ambrose, catching up 
 the letter. " Some day I shall be well able to. Nobody 
 shall lose a penny by me or my father." He squared his 
 shoulders with a new sense of responsibility, of strength, 
 even of freedom, though he loyally reproached himself for 
 the feeling. 
 
 "You'll be able to go away now, Ambrose," said Mrs. 
 Velly quietly. "Lad, do you know what I'm thinking of 
 to-night, with him lying upstairs?" 
 
 "Of him as he was years ago, I expect," said Ambrose 
 gently. 
 
 "I'm thanking God that James Velly's dead and Am- 
 brose, his son, is alive. Ay, James Velly's dead, thaftk 
 God; but Ambrose is his resurrection. No, I'm not mad, 
 I'm not mad, boy. Come here," she said, pulling him down 
 
The Prayer of Women 185 
 
 to the flags till he crouched at the side of her chair; " h'sten 
 to me. The dead don't die, not always. They live in their 
 children. James Velly is alive in you. Oh, my God, to 
 win the battles he lost — in you. You must be strong where 
 he was weak, must stand where he fell." 
 
 "Mother, what is it?" 
 
 " Lad, it's the passion of a life-time that's speaking. ^ 
 loved a strong man, a man no slave to his own weakness, 
 and James Velly failed me. I hated 'en one way and loved 
 'en another. I want you to win for 'en, gain for 'en, be 
 strong for 'en. I loved him as I love you; you and he's one, 
 dear — one to me, somehow." 
 
 ''Mother, I will not fail you." 
 
 " You must go and see the land agent and ask him to 
 wait for the rent. It'll take us years, but it shall be done. 
 His master can afford to wait better than the others. There'll 
 have to be a sale of furniture as well as stock. They'll 
 find good old things, too, that ought to make a pretty 
 penny." 
 
 "Mother, it's hard for you," Ambrose burst out, for Mrs. 
 Velly had always been a houseproud woman. " But that'll 
 most likely pay the other debts and more." 
 
 "There shan't be a penny owing to any one in the end. 
 Never mind for me. I can get a two-roomed cottage and 
 live on ne.xt to nothing." 
 
 Then she broke down suddenly. "Eh, lad, lad," she 
 cried; "but it'll not bring back the years of happiness that 
 James missed. I mind the sunny afternoons he'd take me 
 driving before Janie came." 
 
 She was crying the rare, slow tears of a strong woman, 
 bitter like a man's. 
 
 "But," she said a^ last, "you'll have the happiness that 
 didn't last with him. You'll be the strong man he never 
 was. And there's one thing escaped, for that would have 
 
1 86 A Man of Genius 
 
 been sheer ruin. I sent Thyrza away, thank God. Now 
 you'll be able to go to the work your heart's set on, free 
 from the troubles there might have been round your neck." 
 
 As no man has ever tracked the eagle's flight that marks 
 the height of human strength, so no man has ever touched 
 the bed-rock of human weakness. Fresh vistas of degra- 
 dation must always open before the most degraded, for at 
 each successive fall the depths below seem fathomless. 
 
 Ambrose knew this in a moment, when he heard his 
 mother say — 
 
 "You haven't seen her since she left, have 'ee, lad?" 
 
 He answered, after a pause — 
 
 "No, mother." 
 
 To Ambrose human needs were the strongest of all 
 arguments, but he was powerless to weigh the opposing 
 claims of his mother and Thyrza. Only to-day, in the 
 bitterness of such a death as his father's, he felt that a 
 bare denial could do Thyrza little harm. He knew him- 
 self now to be, like all living things, on a slippery inclined 
 plane, on which one rose an inch or two to fall the next 
 second many feet. He just caught a momentary glimpse 
 of possibilities of baseness in himself that before to-night 
 he could never have imagined, for it was a relief to know 
 that Darracott was gone from the place. Yet, the next 
 second, he found himself thinking that Thyrza would be 
 terrified at the thunderstorm; for her name was truly 
 written on Ambrose Velly's heart, though in the strange 
 hidden writing that only becomes legible in the heat of the 
 fire. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 A STRONG MAN ARMED 
 
 ^^T REMEMBER so well," said Damaris Westaway, 
 
 1 ''how you used to tie your old dressing-gown round 
 you and screw yourself up over your work, because we 
 could only afford one fire in the house. That was before 
 the money came, and now you want to go back and live 
 like that again." 
 
 She was sitting with her father in the study, looking out 
 on the garden in its spring glories of daffodils and crocuses. 
 It was during the week that followed Mr. Velly's death. 
 
 "I don't want you to give up anything you value, my 
 child," said Mr. Westaway; "yet, for myself, there is but 
 one way to be even honest." 
 
 "Do you know what I did when the money came?" 
 asked Damaris. "I just went off and bought what I'd 
 always longed for — a silk petticoat and frillies and silver- 
 backed brushes and fur and lace. And when the things 
 came home I sat on the floor and cried for joy. You see it 
 shames a woman to be shabby. It makes her feel more 
 degraded than vice." 
 
 "Do you know," said Mr. Westaway, putting a hand on 
 her head, as she leant against the arm of his chair, "that 
 it was the thought of how you would miss your pretty things 
 that troubled me most? My dear, you mustn't go with- 
 out " 
 
 187 
 
1 88 A Man of Genius 
 
 "What my soul loveth, neither of savoury meat, nor of 
 finery," she laughed; "yet, father, there are things that even 
 a woman values more than show and dress. I value your 
 peace of mind, your honesty, more than delicate lace and 
 silk, father. Even I do that. For I understand quite well 
 how you think it not common honesty to get money out of 
 those who toil for you, who give them nothing that has cost 
 you a single effort and a single thought. For the capital 
 you never gained; it was the merest chance of relationship 
 that put such a weapon in your hand against the workers 
 who must have the use of it or they die. Oh, Fm like most 
 women, I hate socialism; it's uncomfortable, like the Sermon 
 on the Mount. Only I've enough imagination to see that 
 when it's got into your very bones, there's no escape from 
 it." 
 
 "But it is you, after all, who will have the greater part 
 of the discomfort." 
 
 "Oh, that's always the case with men's little ways, and 
 there's no denying that show means more to us women than 
 to men. By nature, a woman is timid. She feels herself 
 weak against the masterfulness of man, for he has such 
 strong nerves, such a steady frame. But put her in good 
 clothes and she has a weapon of confidence at once. The 
 light will come back to her eyes and the spring to her walk 
 and she'll twinkle in the eyes of the next overbearing man 
 she meets — and master him." 
 
 "A glass of wine or a dinner does that for a man," said 
 Mr. Westaway, with a smile. "He, as Ambrose would say, 
 'bucks up.'" 
 
 "Father, are you going to do anything for him?" asked 
 Damaris, eagerly. "Surely now is the time to do it, now 
 that he is free to get away." 
 
 "Fm going to pay a premium to put him in a good 
 office, and to get him a good position in it, too. A country 
 
A Strong Man Armed 189 
 
 office, I think; for I don't want his originality swami)cd at 
 once with the example or the overtaught opinions of much 
 older men." 
 
 "To do things like that," said Damaris, with shining 
 eyes, " I'd dress in sackcloth ever more. And I often think, 
 when I rustle about in my grand clothes, that they put a 
 bar between me and the real people," 
 
 She was thinking tenderly of the weak things of the 
 world, more especially of a little illegitimate child whom 
 she had come across in a hospital. His father, another 
 Ambrose, more careful of his chance-born brat than is 
 customary, used to come to the ward to see the child. 
 One day the boy in the next bed was heard to say, "Oh, 
 he's got no father, he's only got an Ambrose." 
 
 If her father's wealth was to go to the poor folks, who 
 have "only an Ambrose," she was well content to go with- 
 out silk and lace. This, indeed, she understood far better 
 than the abstract dogmas of comparative theology. 
 
 Air. Westaway watched his daughter with a comfort in 
 her growing sympathy, yet with a half-dread of her youth- 
 ful impetuosity. For, he knew, with a half-smile, that she 
 would, if she adopted his ideas, want to hurl him into 
 action before he had half weighed the pros and cons of 
 it. Indeed, Mr. Westaway, notwithstanding his boldness 
 in the world of ideas, had all the habitual dislike of the 
 old man to hurried action; there were days, in fact, when, 
 as Damaris said, he would hesitate about walking down the 
 garden path for fear of treading on a worm. 
 
 "But how," asked Damaris, "even if one thinks as you 
 do, that one must spend nothing on oneself beyond bare 
 necessaries, can one detach oneself sufficiently from the 
 whirring wheel in which we are all caught? How can we 
 go counter to the whole world?" 
 
 "Yes," said Dr. Dayman, coming in and throwing him- 
 
190 A Man of Genius 
 
 self into a chair, "that's just what I should like to know. 
 What are you going to do with your money?" 
 
 *' I propose to hand over the bulk of my capital to endow 
 and support a novel kind of hospital." 
 
 "Faugh," said the doctor. 
 
 "Wait a minute. I call it hospital, for want of a better 
 name. It will be an institution, set up in one of the most 
 densely populated parts of London, to minister to the 
 wants of women and children during the first two years 
 of the child's life. It will teach the mothers, as well as 
 give medicine, food, and nursing; for there will be a 
 trained staff, who will supplement the work of the Mater- 
 nity Hospital, from which the mothers are turned out 
 long before they are ready to struggle again with life. I 
 hope it will be the forerunner of many such institutions, 
 for it is the great way in which the municipalities can help 
 the future generations." 
 
 Mr. Westaway's eyes glowed with the supreme bliss of 
 the creator, for the scheme was the one thing that had 
 given him courage to persist in the face of clerical gossip 
 in a course of action which had come like a cataclysm 
 into his quiet life. 
 
 "Father," asked Damaris, "what in the world has stirred 
 you up like this?" 
 
 "Ay," said Dr. Dayman, "that's just what I want to 
 know." 
 
 "You ought to know. Dayman," said the Vicar quietly. 
 
 "Confound it all, who am I to see flies through a brick 
 wall? I tell you, you're a stranger to me. You were once 
 a decent, silk-hatted, no, clerical-hatted citizen, and now, 
 though you look the same " 
 
 "No, he doesn't," laughed Damaris; "for his hair stands 
 up straighter." 
 
 "Yet you have the key in your hand, doctor," said Mr. 
 
A Strong Man Armed 191 
 
 Westaway; ** don't you remember telling me that I wasn't a 
 very long-lived man? There's some heart-weakness, 
 Damaris." 
 
 " Oh, my father," she cried, kneeling suddenly by his side. 
 
 "Oh, it's nothing of immediate importance, my dear. 
 But I've always wanted to feel that I had given something, 
 done something, that had cost me effort and struggle. One 
 puts ofif everything when one fancies there's a long time to 
 do it in. And now, if the time's shortening, I want to see 
 the thing done. I've always felt that for me to show a 
 little charity and preach a few sermons meant nothing. It 
 was easier than doing wTong, in fact. Now I want to do 
 a good hard thing, something that I've to set my jaws 
 hard over." 
 
 "Damn!" bellowed the doctor. "I feel like a dying 
 chorister. No more to be trusted with a parish, or a 
 daughter, or an income, than a monkey with a Maxim gun." 
 
 But Damaris paid no attention. 
 
 "Father," she exclaimed, "let me help. I'll keep house 
 on next to nothing, if you'll only let me go and help weigh 
 the babies. They would be weighed, wouldn't they, Dr. 
 Dayman?" 
 
 Both men laughed, for Damaris would have cheerfully 
 upset every one for a baby's comfort any day. 
 
 "I shan't be able to live in town, Damaris," said Mr. 
 Westaway, "and as Beckland hasn't found a tenant, I 
 thought of removing there." 
 
 "Beckland!" exclaimed Damaris, thinking with dismay 
 of the desolate, half-ruined coast farmhouse, long unin- 
 habited and far off the main roads. It was her first taste 
 of the reality of the change that was coming into her life, 
 and for a moment, to her own chagrin, she found it an 
 effort to choke back childish tears. But her father never 
 noticed in his absorption. 
 
192 A Man of Genius 
 
 "Will you help me, Dayman?" he asked. "I want you 
 and Damaris to be the executors after I'm gone. Somehow 
 there seem to be strangely detached human beings without 
 tentacles, who fasten themselves to no one, and you are the 
 only man I could ask to do it. Damaris will weigh the 
 babies and bring the love, you'll supply the business side." 
 
 "And the other day," said the doctor, evading the 
 question, "you were talking about the discipline of suffer- 
 ing. Now here you are trying to take the discipline away 
 from a lot of poor wretches." 
 
 Dr. Dayman thoroughly enjoyed the part of devil's 
 advocate. 
 
 "It's only what you have been doing all your life," said 
 Damaris. 
 
 "I'm paid for it," snapped the doctor. "But if suffer- 
 ing, is the best discipline for the character, what's the good 
 of trying to bring about the Millennium? For, if you 
 remove want, banish pain, and improve people up to such 
 a standard that they all rush to bear each other's burdens, 
 what becomes of the training of the character? I say that 
 the man who gives his fellows a deuced bad time of it is a 
 benefactor of the species, and your philanthropist or your 
 man of science is the devil in sheep's clothing. Take 
 anaesthetics now; what a lot of discipline a man misses who 
 has his leg off without chloroform. And what a pity to 
 deprive a man of the spiritual help he would gain by going 
 through life with the cross of a crooked back. These wor- 
 shippers of pain and weakness, in stole and alb, that you're 
 turning your back on, Westaway, are the true thinkers." 
 
 "But," said Damaris, "surely both churchmen and 
 scientists aim at reforming the world, only not in the same 
 way ? I don't see that the thinking of one is any straighter 
 than that of the other." 
 
 "Ay," said Dr. Dayman with a sneer; "they're every 
 
A Strong Man Armed 193 
 
 man-jack of 'em bent on reform, one with wry-necked 
 saints and dried-up virgins, and t'other with germ-theories, 
 steriHsation and eugenics. But neither, thank heaven, has 
 the ghost of a chance of accomplishing it, as long as human 
 nature is made of what it is." 
 
 "What's that?" said Damaris, who loved to spur the 
 doctor to a rampage at things in general. 
 
 "Of the lust of the flesh for bed-rock and the pride 
 of life for top-dressing. Now I ask you, as a reasonable 
 woman, can antiseptic gloves or church millinery affect 
 either of these?" 
 
 "They can modify them, for we're certainly different 
 from primitive man, Dayman," said Mr. Westaway. 
 
 "There's not a tittle of evidence to prove that we're better 
 in brains or morals than the so-called savages. The high- 
 water mark reached ages ago has never been surpassed or 
 even equalled in the last three centuries of history. No, 
 no; the true symbol of man is the serpent with his tail in 
 his mouth. Round and round we go. That's the true 
 vicious circle. From the highest we fall to lower and 
 lower, and then up again. We're getting to the lowest 
 now. In fact, I think we're starting up again once more 
 in the old way, for it's monkey-tricks that the decadents 
 are, the true arboreals leaping from branch to branch of the 
 rotten upas of the city. We've two things yet to learn, to 
 remove human waste decorously, and to prevent the repro- 
 duction of the unfit. Then we can go on, merrily breeding 
 a race of contented hogs, fattening 'em in graduated tem- 
 peratures on patent foods, and removing their carcasses by 
 scientific machinery. And it's the happiest time ever 
 known on earth," said the doctor, describing a sudden 
 volte-face, "and will be happier yet. For contented hogs 
 are a damned sight better than discontented satyrs like the 
 artists we once had." 
 13 
 
194 A Man of Genius 
 
 "And so," said Mr. Westaway, "we shall soon have no 
 discipline of suffering?" 
 
 "Not if you and your like have their will," said the 
 doctor, "and drive wise people like myself on the mad 
 race of the contented swine." 
 
 "There would still," said Damaris quietly, "be the most 
 refined suffering possible, the rebellion against the laws 
 of the sty, the disgust at the hog state." 
 
 "Ay, you're right," said Dr. Dayman; "that's where 
 Shaw diatribes come from, and why people listen to 'em." 
 
 "But," said Damaris, "I deny your original hypothesis. 
 They're there, it's true, the lust of the flesh and the pride 
 of life, but they are there only that we may learn to choose 
 those other things that are more excellent — sacrificing love, 
 high enthusiasm, noble effort. Under these we can trample 
 the pride of life and the lust of the flesh. And so, father," 
 she said, getting up and turning to Mr. Westaway, "to- 
 morrow I'm going to walk over to Beckland, for that will be 
 a trampling on the pride of life for me. And I shall ask 
 Ambrose Velly to come with me, so that I can tell him 
 what you're planning for him, if I may." 
 
 "And," said Dr. Dayman to himself, as she left the 
 room, "though she talks like a book, she knows no more 
 of life than — her father. But she's a fine creature, is 
 Princess Damaris." 
 
 Then he turned to discuss the business arrangements of 
 the future with Mr. Westaway, for he was determined that 
 a suitable income should be settled on Damaris before Mr. 
 Westaway began to play ducks and drakes with his capital. 
 
 As Ambrose and Damaris stood outside the long, two*- 
 storeyed, slate-roofed house at Beckland on the afternoon 
 of the following day, it seemed to the girl exactly the place 
 for a dreary experiment. In truth, she was not without a 
 feminine joy in martyrdom as she contemplated the tangle 
 
 
A Strong Man Armed 195 
 
 of wild angelica, the "billery trade" of the North Devon 
 hedger that tilled the garden. The cold light from a 
 cloudy spring sky gleamed on the leaden surfaces of the 
 window-panes that faintly revealed the bareness of the 
 whitewashed walls and stone-flagged floors within. A strip 
 of sea lay beyond the headland of Wimbury, on which the 
 circular remains of a pre-historic village could still be 
 traced. Dense woodland tilled the combe to the right, 
 and two tall sycamore trees partly cut off the view from the 
 sea. The wind was playing in a rattling chimney-pot as 
 they brushed the rank growths of the garden with their feet, 
 and over the front door the snails had wound a shiny 
 pattern. Behind the house was a semi-circular dovecote, 
 from which wild pigeons peeped through the holes that 
 pierced the cob-walls like the portholes of a ship. Beyond 
 this was a wilderness of barns, with the thatch tumbling 
 inward in patches of moss-grown rottenness. The beams 
 of these ancient structures stuck out from the yellow cob 
 like black bones out of aged flesh. Two cottages, from 
 one of which rose a thin line of blue-grey smoke, stood 
 close by a scummy duck pond. 
 
 ''Let's go and see if they'll let us sit by their fire a bit," 
 said Ambrose, thinking his companion looked wan and 
 tired. 
 
 " You're kindly welcome," said the old man who answered 
 their knock. " 'Tisn't a many folks that come down along 
 this way." 
 
 In a moment they were sitting by a cheerful blaze and 
 looking through the deep-set window at the sea. The 
 dressers were loaded with china, and the walls had blos- 
 somed out into a wilderness of funeral cards and worked 
 samplers, recording the dates of the deaths and births of 
 relatives. 
 
 " Iss," said the old man, looking chirpily round at his 
 
196 A Man of Genius 
 
 comfortable mausoleum, " there's nobody lived to Beckland 
 since my Sal died, and I give up living in the old place to 
 come to this here cottage. 'Tis cosier-like than that ugly 
 barn." He jerked a contemptuous thumb towards the farm. 
 " 'Tis a poor, little, small sort of place, but my Sal made a 
 braave lot of money out of it." 
 
 *'How did she do that?" asked Damaris. 
 
 Old Josh Grylls had a voice that whistled in his throat 
 like the sound of a wind that has gone astray for centuries 
 in an ancient chimney. 
 
 " Lord-a-mussy, my dear, her had a saving soul," said he, 
 "and never lost a tooth, nor missed a market-day till her 
 laid up four year agone with brown-titus and went off 
 sudden. A wonderful good manager was Sally. Us never 
 seed a fresh egg nor a sound cabbage upon table if her 
 could find a stale one." 
 
 "And my father," said Damaris as they turned away 
 from Beckland, " is going to live in the same house as that 
 old skinflint." 
 
 "He'll drive out the spirit of old Sally," said Ambrose, 
 "if ever any man could." 
 
 On the way out Damaris had told him of what her father 
 proposed to do to help him, and in the first elation of the 
 prospect opening before him, not even Beckland could 
 depress Ambrose. Yet, as he looked back, he said — 
 
 "I do wish you weren't going there. It isn't the right 
 shell for you, somehow." 
 
 " Yet don't blame my father. For I feel with him, that 
 a man must live out the faith that is in him if he is to be 
 a man at all. And as for women, I suppose their cravings 
 seldom reach a height where they could be called faiths. 
 At any rate, mine don't yet. So don't blame him." 
 
 It was such a relief to feel the comrade in Ambrose that 
 she spoke out all her thoughts, without pausing to discuss 
 
A Strong Man Armed 197 
 
 the question of that discretion of which the Enghsh-woman 
 is usually so careful that she has made herself the most 
 inane talker in Europe. 
 
 *' I couldn't blame him, after what you've told me to-day. 
 Oh, if only I could make you see how it has opened the 
 future for me! But I can't. I've dreamt and dreamt and 
 seen visions for so many years." 
 
 Damaris watched him as he walked by her side, all the 
 swing of excitement in his gait and the light of the future 
 shining in his face. Visions and dreams amid all the sordid 
 realities of Long Furlong, she thought — what an idealist he 
 must be! Yet she knew that Mr. Westaway chiefly valued 
 him for a certain satiric capacity for mocking false pre- 
 tensions. 
 
 " But the visions aren't real to me yet," he said suddenly, 
 whirling her off with youth's egotism into the centre of his 
 own problems. 
 
 "How do you mean?" asked Damaris. 
 
 *' Why, this. When you look out at the cliffs before the 
 sun's high, you know how the shadows, solid shadows, fill 
 the ravines, don't you? How the light flashes full into the 
 upper halves of the chasms?" 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 ''Well, it's solid, it casts shadows, it catches the sunlight. 
 That's the way I must see the things I want to plan. I 
 want 'em solid. I want to know how they look in the 
 evening, when the shadows lengthen, how they look when 
 the first light catches them. That's what I want. When 
 I can do that, I shall be ready to begin." 
 
 "Yet are you sure? Because what you see might be as 
 clear to you as Hartland Lighthouse, and yet it might be 
 as mean as a squalid row of tenement houses. You must 
 remember that we're a great nation; we're populous, rich, 
 and healthier and cleaner than any nation has ever been. 
 
198 A Man of Genius 
 
 Yet we can't give you a church or a statue chat any sane 
 person would want to sit in front of for half an hour. We're 
 neat, clean, sanitary and policemanised. We've main drains 
 and water systems, and yet all our schools cannot give us 
 an inspired fiend like Cellini." 
 
 Ambrose had never even heard the name of the great 
 goldsmith; but, although facts were often strange to him, 
 ideas were not. 
 
 " It's too comfortable," he said after a pause, " that's how 
 it is. It's like a prison cell, all soapy and stuffy, this life 
 of towns to-day. And people like it, and so they don't 
 want to escape. That's what it is, to make beauty is to 
 escape." 
 
 "Out from the prison of the actual," said Damaris, com- 
 pleting his thought, like an echo that caught a clumsy 
 bellow to bring it back in sweetness, while he watched her 
 face in half adoring fashion. For only with her had Ambrose 
 ever known the delicate perception of a cultivated woman. 
 " Yes," she continued, " it's true that we have main drains 
 and water systems, but there are two things we haven't got; 
 we have neither a gutter nor an empyrean, and to have 
 great art you must have both, for it is from contrast that 
 the visions of beauty come. In the very sting of his suffer- 
 ing and degradation a man sees a glory, beautiful as his 
 dreams, rising like a fair white lily out of corruption. 
 That's art; a way of escape, a widening horizon, an uplift. 
 For art is freedom, the breadth of the far-off mountains 
 seen from the smoke of hell sometimes, and not from a 
 sanitary prison cell." 
 
 "But that means suffering," said Ambrose, with the fire 
 of excitement crimsoning his face. 
 
 "Then one must suffer," said Damaris quietly. " Some- 
 times, perhaps when I have suffered, I shall try, too, to 
 make a thing — in words." 
 
 
A Strong Man Armed 199 
 
 A sudden sense of kinship leapt from one to the other, 
 of loving service of the same ideal, the one tie on earth 
 that has no regret coupled with it — a bond, indeed, that 
 would not ill-fit the celestial hosts. 
 
 "You know," said Ambrose, after a silence full of the 
 interchange of sympathy, "how I used to worry over the 
 S)Tnbols in architecture. I know now there are no symbols, 
 for 'tis all one great symbol. Like music, it's the symbol of 
 a man's mind. Look," he said, speaking so hurriedly that 
 the words tripped each other up, "in painting, however 
 much you disguise it, you copy. So in sculpture. But 
 when you build in sounds, or in stone, it's a new thing, 
 yours, never seen anywhere till you saw it in yourself. 
 It's the symbol of you, the music or the palace or the 
 church." 
 
 "Or the dungeon," laughed Damaris. As they passed 
 in the dusk into the shadow of the street, she put her 
 hand for a moment, unperceived by him, on his arm. For 
 here, she believed, was a man who would one day be of 
 those who give some new human vision to their race. It 
 was a fatal moment for Damaris, since a man's mental 
 attraction would be the predominant force with her. She 
 was no lyre for passion's fingers to play what tune the 
 flame-winged god might choose, and for her to feel admira- 
 tion for a man's spiritual qualities was to cross the Rubicon. 
 
 Ambrose left her at the Vicarage door, where she was 
 told that a man was waiting to speak to her. Opening the 
 door of the little waiting-room that was used for parish 
 visitors, Damaris saw John Darracott rise. 
 
 "Wasn't it my father," she asked in surprise, "that you 
 wanted to see?" 
 
 "Nay, ma'am, I thought a woman would help a woman 
 best. That's why I've come to you. And if I've done 
 wrong, you'll please to tell me. Only I've heard again 
 
200 A Man of Genius 
 
 and again that there's many and many a girl you've been 
 good to." 
 
 " Tell me," said Damaris, laying aside her furs and sitting 
 down by John. As she did so, she recognised him as the 
 labourer about whom there had been all the gossip at 
 the Quay. 
 
 "It isn't easy to say it," he said hesitatingly, "but I've 
 come back to Hartland, when I ought to ha' left, because 
 I couldn't abide to think of the cheeld not knowing where 
 to turn to." 
 
 "Who is it you mean?" asked Damaris, who knew very 
 well the difficulty the uneducated find in stripping a story 
 of its unessentials. 
 
 But he was not listening to her at all, as she saw, in the 
 absorption of his own thoughts. 
 
 " 'Twas the very beginning of my trouble down to Quay," 
 he said, never noticing that he was telling his own story 
 too, "for I followed Thyrza Braund home that night, and 
 there I seed her dancing like a woman bewitched to the 
 sound of a fiddle." 
 
 "Whose?" asked Damaris sharply. 
 
 " Ambrose Velly was playing and she dancing. I had no 
 thoughts for aught but that, and so I never was on watch 
 that night, the night of the wreck." 
 
 " Darracott," said Damaris, pushing her chair back into 
 the shadow, " are you in your senses ? You cannot know 
 what you're saying." 
 
 " Ay, I know. 'Tis the bare truth. I warned 'en of what 
 it would lead to, and now 'tis come to what I said. The 
 day his father died, he met her secret-like over to Brad- 
 worthy, where she's biding. I was in the field, and I saw 
 her hold 'en same as a woman holds a man when she's his, 
 his thing, to do what he will with." 
 
 Damaris got up and turned away. Was it true ? It must 
 
A Strong Man Armed 201 
 
 surely be some mad dream from which she would soon 
 awake. But nothing came save the man's heavy breathing, 
 that irritated her beyond endurance. 
 
 Then the door opened, and a maid appeared with a lamp. 
 The homely everyday came with her. 
 
 "Darracott," said Damaris, " I feel sure youVe making a 
 great mistake somewhere. Ambrose Velly is too honour- 
 able to make love to a girl like that." 
 
 " I seed 'em together in Bradworthy woods, and I say 
 shame's threatening her. Else why don't he meet her open, 
 and let all the world know?" 
 
 " You're a good friend to her," said Damaris, looking at 
 the man curiously. 
 
 "Ay," he said slowly, " I'd bear a deal to see her happy. 
 She's not made for rough work, Thyrza isn't. I love her 
 dearly, and she's but a cheeld. And when you'm young 
 like she is, there's naught to tell 'ee the way the sweetness 
 ends. Ah, can't 'ee help? Go and see her, talk to her, 
 as only a woman can. I'm taking a liberty to ask, but 
 there's nobody else for me to go to. I thought of the 
 woman she's staying with, but for aught I know I might 
 be taking the roof off the maid's head by going to work 
 that way." 
 
 Damaris could not refuse to believe in the girl's danger, 
 or, at any rate, in Darracott's belief in it. 
 
 *' She shall have all the help I can give," she said. " What 
 I can do, I will. I will see her as soon as possible, though 
 I feel like a spy on an honest man." 
 
 "He's only a lad,too," said Darracott, "with a lad's hot 
 blood that's neither to hold nor to bind. 'Tis the woman 
 only that can save herself, not all the angels in heaven can 
 do it for her, for they don't know what a maid's tenderness 
 is to a man's fire." 
 
 Damaris stood white and trembling while the new world 
 
202 A Man of Genius 
 
 of passion opened before her, as though through the soHd 
 flooring under her feet a panel had been opened to show 
 the subterranean fires. For it was the first time she had 
 faced in her own fife that underworld, at which sheltered 
 women glance askance, even many of those who play at 
 the rescue of the submerged. For no mere brain know- 
 ledge of facts touches a woman's real nature; she knows 
 nothing till she has proved it on her own heart-strings. 
 
 "I do not believe it," she said at last. "Ambrose Velly 
 is a man of perfect honour, a man who thinks of nothing 
 but his work. Yet, to remove this accusation from him, I 
 will see the girl. It is work that I can do better than you." 
 
 "She's as dear to me as my heart's blood," said John, 
 "but 'tis o'er-delicate work for a man's hand, the likes o' 
 that." 
 
 For a moment the man himself interested Damaris, 
 since the first sounds of her own agony were but hammer- 
 ing far off on the doors of her heart. Nevertheless, under 
 all the brave cheer she made to herself, Damaris knew 
 there was a substratum of truth in his story. Yet she rose 
 to the challenge of the man's nobility, in the splendid assur- 
 ance that to the goodness of goodwill nothing is impossible, 
 for human power is stronger than all pain. 
 
 When the tiniest cog-wheel snaps in a power machine, 
 no engineer is needed to predict that the whole will be 
 thrown out of gear. Small wonder, then, that the machine 
 called humanity should racket so lumberingly to its aim, 
 when the minute cogs on which the great wheels turn are 
 so constantly disorganised. The fact that one can say of 
 the race, and still it moves, is proof enough of the miraculous 
 foundation of our life. So the cog of Darracott's simple 
 fidelity caught the great wheel of Damaris Westaway's 
 idealism, and whirled it forward to heights it could never 
 have gained alone. 
 
A Strong Man Armed 203 
 
 "I will do all that can be done for the woman you love," 
 she said quietly. 
 
 He knew that she meant it, but as he left the Vicarage he 
 felt suddenly old and tired. As long as there was some- 
 thing he could do, the world was full of Thyrza's need. But 
 now it was empty; for to Darracott, in all the wonders 
 beneath the star-strewn sky, there were but two things — a 
 wreck-strewn coast and a woman needing help. Even these 
 were almost memories now. Yet in every memory there is 
 contained a prophecy. 
 
 Left alone, Damaris sat screwing the heel of her shoe 
 round and round on a piece of grit on the floor, while the 
 day's events passed before her mind. Her own words 
 came mockingly back to her — the gutter and the empyrean. 
 She laughed as she recalled the glib eloquence of ignorance; 
 for here were both exemplified, not in a Cellini of Renais- 
 sance Italy, but in a man of Devon of to-day. It was the 
 picture suggested by Darracott's words, " as a woman holds 
 a man when she's his," that came uppermost now. The 
 values of life changed completely for Damaris in that 
 vision of a mingled shame and glory that she had never 
 known; for by such a woman, the world of passion is 
 never realised till it comes like a strong man armed, an 
 invading host. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 THE BITTER CHALICE 
 
 ALTHOUGH Damaris Westaway had tried hard to free 
 her mind of all injustice, yet the picture called up 
 by Darracott's words perpetually recurred to her, as she 
 faced Thyrza Braund across the tea-table of the inn sitting- 
 room at Bradworthy. A momentary act, it was yet con- 
 tinually before her, increasing its cruel effect by its per- 
 sistence and, like an instantaneous photograph of a leap- 
 ing horse, vivid with poses never seen by the spectator's 
 eye. 
 
 ''Thyrza," she said at last, breaking the silence that had 
 fallen between them, ''I came over to-day really to see 
 you, for there is something I must say to you." 
 
 ''What can there be for you to say?" whispered Thyrza, 
 her breath failing her. "I wondered why you came over 
 like this, and so did Chrissie. Her very last words, as I 
 came over here, were, 'There's something in the wind. 
 What to goodness have 'ee been up to, cheeld?'" 
 
 "Chrissie is a wise woman," said Damaris, with a smile. 
 "Do you remember, Thyrza, that morning when we met at 
 Shipload Bay, after you'd been bathing?" 
 
 Th)rrza nodded, her eyes wide open with fear of what 
 was coming. 
 
 "Do you remember that we said there was a third kind 
 of love that leads upwards, and the child of it is a great 
 deed?" 
 
 204 
 
The Bitter Chalice 205 
 
 "What is it?" cried Thyrza, "What have 'ee come to me 
 about?" 
 
 "I think, perhaps, that it is you, ThyTza, who will be 
 asked to do the great deed — to give up the man you love." 
 
 "What do 'ee mean? Speak plain, can't you?" 
 
 "You were seen in the woods with Ambrose Velly the 
 other day." 
 
 "And what if I was? He's my lover! And what shame 
 is there in that, I should like to know? He it was I meant 
 at Shipload Bay." 
 
 "Ah, if I had only known!" said Damaris, with an 
 irrepressible cry. 
 
 "And what difference would it ha' made if you had?" 
 shrilled Thyrza. "But you want 'en yourself, that's what 
 it is. You always have. I know you're up above me; but, 
 it seems, not above him. You always liked 'en, I know that 
 well enough!" 
 
 "You don't understand what I mean at all, Thyrza. 
 He's going to rise by his talents into a world where you'd 
 be strange, where you can't go with him. It doesn't matter 
 at all what he is now, it's what he will be. He's going 
 to live a quite different life from any you've been used to." 
 
 "Going to live with you, you mean," said Thyrza bit- 
 terly. 
 
 "I've no such thoughts at all, as you know." 
 
 "I don't know anything of the kind. You've always had 
 a hankering after Ambrose, else why has he been taken up 
 same as you have?" 
 
 "Because my father thinks he is worth helping, that he 
 has great powers." 
 
 "I dunno anything about that. I want to know why I 
 shall do 'en any harm. He's only a step above me, for my 
 mother was his mother's cousin. Now his father's dead 
 he'll marry me, and take me to live with 'en wherever he 
 
2o6 A Man of Genius 
 
 goes. 'Twas only that he couldn't take me to the farm 
 that's prevented him marrying me before." 
 
 "Has he told his mother of this?" asked Damaris slowly. 
 "Has she been to see you, or sent a message?" 
 
 There was a silence again, and the rising gusts of wind 
 sounded in the ears of both. To Damaris it seemed like 
 the roaring of the sea of reality, into which she was slowly 
 plunging like a timid swimmer, while Thyrza stood with bent 
 head resting on her clasped hands. To her mind Mr. 
 Velly's death had altered all the future, for now Ambrose 
 would be able to take her away as soon as he knew the 
 necessity for it. Yet here she was confronted with the 
 social laws of suitability of mind and character, for which 
 nothing in her past experience had trained her. 
 
 "Child," began Damaris. 
 
 "My Lord! don't you 'child' me," sobbed Thyrza. 
 "You're taking him away from me! Why do 'ee treat me 
 so cruel?" 
 
 "Come here, Thyrza," said Damaris, pulling the girl 
 nearer by the dimpled wrist. "It must be a pain to you, 
 I know; but if you love him you will try to understand 
 what I say." 
 
 "But if I love 'en, how can I hurt 'en?" 
 
 The words pierced Damaris Westaway's shield of com- 
 placency, and suddenly the vision of the gardener's daughter 
 who became Catherine Blake rose before her eyes. She 
 thought of the noble, ignorant woman, barely able to write, 
 who never complained of poverty, and was a true helpmate 
 to a genius. Then she recognised that Thyrza was no 
 Catherine Blake, nor was Ambrose, indeed, a dreamer of 
 vast dreams, to whom a garret-room would be the vestibule 
 of heaven. The social success, in which his wife must help, 
 would be absolutely necessary for his career. 
 
 "See, Thyrza," she said, "if he marries you, he will have 
 
The Bitter Chalice 207 
 
 to work just to get you a home. He will be poor and 
 struggling for a long time and, even if he gets on, you won't 
 be able to lead the life he must lead. His brains will make 
 people forget how he has risen, but you won't even have 
 the manners of the world in which he will live." 
 
 "You mean I'd demean him?" said Thyrza, in a very 
 small voice. 
 
 "I mean you'd be happier where you are. It would all 
 be so strange, ThyTza, to you, that you would be miserable. 
 And if he didn't marry you, but went on caring for you?" 
 
 '^Well," said Th>Tza, 'Td have 'en anyway." 
 
 ''Then," said Damaris, in still lower tones, "you would 
 be a shame to him, just a shame. And you'd be an out- 
 cast in your own eyes, even if no one else knew. Oh, I 
 know men often have such shames in their lives. But 
 don't you love him well enough to pray that there may be 
 no dark blot, caused by you, in the life of the man you say 
 you love ? Give him up, for his sake, if not for your own." 
 
 "My heavens!" said Thyrza, looking up for the first 
 time; "why, you love him yourself!" 
 
 The thin pocket-pencil with which Damaris had been 
 playing snapped in her hand, and she turned away up the 
 room, towards the cool air from the window. At that 
 moment came the first doubt of her own purposes; she 
 could not tell for what she was fighting, whether for Am- 
 brose's career, or for her own heart's desire. The next 
 moment she knew. 
 
 Thyrza came up to her, and scarcely reaching the taller 
 woman's shoulder, caught the sleeve that was half-turned 
 away from her. 
 
 "And his child's on its way," she said quietly — " his child 
 and mine." 
 
 "Oh, my God." 
 
 In a paroxysm that shook her from head to foot, Damaris 
 
2o8 A Man of Genius 
 
 turned, and stripping off the lamp-shade placed it on the 
 table. She looked in Thyrza's eyes and saw the truth, 
 looked into her own heart and knew with a certainty beyond 
 contradiction that she had been just a woman fighting 
 for her own hand. Face to face with herself, at last she 
 swam into the sea of reality, caught in the eddy of fact. 
 
 The next moment a storm of love and jealousy attacked 
 her, and she seized Thyrza, sweeping her into her arms, 
 pressing her close, raining kisses on the mouth that had 
 won all she herself must starve for. 
 
 ''Ay," said Thyrza to herself, ''you'm hungry, poor dear 
 soul," and held the agonised woman close, calling her tender 
 names. For in that moment of reality the two had sud- 
 denly changed places, and the weakling had the stronger 
 mind. 
 
 '"That's the way he loved me, only tenderer," thought 
 Thyrza to herself, till, though unsaid, the idea seemed to 
 reach Damaris and she pushed the girl away. 
 
 "I prayed," said Thyrza, "that whatever punishment 
 there was should come on me. It's come now; for after 
 what you've said, I must leave 'en free. Fll stand between 
 him and nothing that's good." 
 
 Her eyes had dark shadows under them now, like bruises 
 on a flower-head. 
 
 "What are you going to do, then?" asked Damaris, her 
 voice sounding in her own ears as if it came from a far 
 distance. 
 
 "Give him up. Go away where he can't find me." 
 
 "Is it true what you told me — absolutely, certainly true?" 
 asked Damaris with sudden suspicion. 
 
 "As true as that we'm standing here." 
 
 "Then how can you do it, Thyrza? His child to have 
 poverty, namelessness ? " 
 
 "But it'll be his child anyway. That'll be enough for it. " 
 
The Bitter Chalice 209 
 
 "You're beside yourself. You don't know what you're 
 saying." 
 
 "Oh, I don't, I don't," sobbed Thyrza, suddenly break- 
 ing down. "However shall I bear it?" 
 
 "Does he know?" asked Damaris, trying to regain her 
 own self-control. 
 
 "No; I lied to 'en when he asked. 'Twas before his 
 father died, when he'd a heap of trouble and misery to 
 bear. I wouldn't add to it. Now, if you hadn't come, I 
 should ha' told 'en, for he'll be freer. But what you've 
 said alters everything. He'll be a great man, mayhap, if 
 I don't hinder 'en." 
 
 "Oh, my dear, my dear," said Damaris; "I didn't 
 know how it was when I spoke. This, that you've told 
 me, alters ever}'thing. Forgive me, for I didn't know what 
 mischief I was doing. I was a girl ignorant of everything, 
 blundering in where I ought to have been afraid to meddle. 
 Sit down again, Thyrza, and let us think what can be done. 
 Forget what I said." 
 
 As Damaris sat holding the girl's hand she marvelled at 
 her own vulgarity. For now that she was actually in con- 
 tact with the "gutters and empyreans" of which she had 
 talked so glibly, even in the very gutter itself gleamed the 
 love that will bear hard usage and calumny rather than 
 injure. 
 
 But was it right to allow the sacrifice? To offer up 
 Thyrza and her child to an entirely problematic future, to 
 a promise that might see no fulfillment, based as it was, 
 solely on enthusiasm and hope? Again, might Ambrose 
 not be the stronger for the handicap? And, deeper still, 
 ought he not to pay? Why, in the name of justice, should 
 this girl pay for two? 
 
 Damaris could not answer any of these. questions. 
 
 Three hours later she softly opened the door of the 
 14 
 
21 o A Man of Genius 
 
 Vicarage, to which she had returned shortly before, and, 
 closing it behind her, walked down the main street of 
 Hardand. 
 
 Before morning she had walked miles, for during those 
 hours the powers of her own nature were rising in her like 
 some poison that waits, lurking in the system till it declares 
 itself by the agony it produces. 
 
 The house was a prison, the sleepers in Hartland an 
 offence; for under these roofs what vileness and deception 
 were concealed. Yet never had the beauty of a spring 
 night struck so vividly on her senses as now, when the 
 waves of meadow scent filled her nostrils, and the cry of a- 
 lamb sounded above the murmur of a stream in the valley 
 where the Abbey stands. 
 
 Presently out of the grey light there emerged the square 
 tower of Hartland church, a sombre rock with its base in 
 misty shadows, backed by the spaces of sea and sky, a 
 landmark for miles round. 
 
 A monument of human folly, it seemed to her, this 
 Church, whether, as here, set up in the wilderness, or in the 
 midst of reeking alleys. The deadliest blow of all had 
 been struck through it at the whole human race, so her 
 father had often told her. For had not that Church shut, 
 during many centuries, the tenderest hearts in monasteries 
 and convents, driving to the stake, or into exile, the boldest 
 thinkers, and leaving only the brutal or the dull to make 
 the ages yet to be by the children they bore ? 
 
 She passed by the sleeping cottages of Stoke, up to the 
 six gnarled lime trees that form a miniature avenue to the 
 church, and sitting down on the stone stile that leads to the 
 churchyard, she began to realise that she held in her hands, 
 at the present moment, the fate of several human beings. 
 
 Suddenly she covered her face with her hands, crouching 
 down on the wide steps of the stile, as the women in city 
 
The Bitter Chalice 211 
 
 archways do; for there seemed to come leaping towards her 
 with the clearness of a vision, a child form, rosy with sweet 
 blood, dim{)led and soft. 
 
 Then she understood Thyrza; there was now to Damaris 
 no question of forgiveness, for Thyrza and her like were 
 the women of nature, the women of barbarism. What are 
 social laws to them when the great forces of life call loudly? 
 
 Damaris drew a deep breath and rose from her crouching 
 attitude, for she wanted to face this new perception, terrible 
 as it was at first to her own fierce maidenliness. She walked 
 upright now, with swinging steps, towards the sea, 
 with something of the elation that the mind feels at the 
 first sight of a great idea, just caught in its bare outlines 
 through the shifting mist of fancies. Damaris, for a 
 second, felt herself full of fresh light for she had grasped 
 the meaning of an old worship, older than Christianity, 
 older than Judaism, the worship of the mother-soul that 
 goes back to far Egyptian days. Then she laughed at her 
 own pedantry. 
 
 But the next instant pity smote her, for though man 
 himself is only just emerging from barbarism, yet the social 
 organisation would cripple poor Thyrza's life. They pay 
 back with deadly power, these laws that women break so 
 lightly. They would pay, the woman and child. For the 
 innocent must pay most dearly after all. Now Damaris 
 thoroughly understood her father's passionate desire to help 
 the spoilt lives that crowd our cities, the human wreckage 
 everywhere. Was Ambrose's child to go down there among 
 the outcast, to live on the crumbs that fall from the tables 
 of plenty? 
 
 Ambrose's^ child? Then the agony struck home, such 
 agony as she had never even guessed at. 
 
 She sat on a rock, watching the foam fall like snow-mist 
 outside the inky shadows of the cliffs. 
 
212 A Man of Genius 
 
 At last the long rays of the dawn began to gleam over 
 the heaving surface of greyness, and in the lines of light 
 there seemed to reach worn senses the shining of the great 
 peace that comes with renunciation. For Damaris had 
 found her true self, the self that gives up its heart's desire 
 at the call of another's need. The dawn seemed like the 
 coming of the Son of Man to the spirits in prison; she 
 drew long, slow breaths that shook her whole body. It was 
 thus that she greeted the angel of the infinite that comforts 
 in the hour of unselfish rejection. 
 
 On the following evening Mr. Westaway stood up to 
 preach for the last time in Hartland Church. As the old 
 sexton went round lowering the lights one by one, the 
 Vicar watched the faces of his parishioners grow dimmer 
 and more dim, till nothing but white discs remained. He 
 saw Ambrose Velly seated by his mother all-beshrouded 
 in crape; not far from them sat Damaris, her face upturned 
 towards her father in the tenseness of sympathy; far away 
 at the back of the church he noticed John Darracott. Then 
 the last light was turned down; only against the rich carving 
 of the painted screen behind him, against its palms of 
 gold and red, the Vicar's white head shone out in the light 
 of the two candles that burned on the edge of the pulpit. 
 
 Mr. Westaway possessed the power, often found in shy 
 people, of speaking his most intimate thoughts to a crowd 
 as he could never have done to a friend. He gave out his 
 text automatically: ''Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall 
 he also reap." Then, with a sudden impulse, he pushed 
 aside the manuscript from which he had intended to read 
 his farewell sermon and plunged into the speech he had 
 not prepared. Leaning over the pulpit he looked into the 
 dim church, beyond which he could see the swallows wheel- 
 ing outside as he gazed through the open doorway. 
 
 ■'yje men," said he, "make many laws. But in God's 
 
The Bitter Chalice 213 
 
 world, the world in which we all live, there is but one law. 
 You have just heard it: 'Whatsoever a man soweth, that 
 shall he also reap.' It is the law that every Church, east 
 and west alike, has taught; it is the law that is written all 
 down the history of the ages, to the very last minute of 
 recorded time, which is — now. There is no other law. 
 
 "Yet you, wise farmers as many of you are, men who 
 never sow barley expecting wheat to come, or clover if you 
 want oats, you go on sowing strife and expecting the har^Tst 
 of peace, sowing lust and expecting the harvest of purity, 
 sowing penury and expecting plenty. Yet you know the 
 folly, and so you try to-day to undo what you did yesterday. 
 You often pray, though you may not know it, that God will 
 turn back His universe and blot out yesterday; make it as 
 though it had never been. For in nothing that we do are 
 we more impious than in our prayers. 
 
 "Yet there is no God in this, or any other universe, that 
 will do this — or can. For it is you yourselves who are your 
 own god, and what you do to-day is settling what your lot 
 will be to-morrow, and in the many, many to-morrows that 
 you cannot see. And this is as true of nations and peoples 
 as it is of individuals; the England of to-morrow will be 
 the England that is being manufactured to-day — by us. 
 For there is no secret in all the world. Things done in the 
 field shall be known in the street, and things in the bed- 
 room on the very housetop. There are women here who 
 try to cover their man's brutality; it can't be done. There 
 are men here who try to hide their wife's meanness; it 
 can't be done For the beating of a child, for the lust of 
 rage, or the torture of a wife, for the lust of the flesh, will 
 bear fruit one day, not in the cowering child, or in the worn- 
 out woman alone, but in the man himself. He i)ays, if not 
 now, then in the future, and with compound interest; for the 
 book-keepers of eternity never make a mistake. And the 
 
214 A Man of Genius 
 
 stingy woman who feeds her servants on cheese parings, if 
 there are any who will stand such treatment in these days, 
 starves her own life more effectually than she ever starved 
 any kitchen wench's. And a man who betrays a woman, 
 even though he hide the deed and its fruit, pays in some 
 other lot for the crime that he thought none knew save 
 one poor soul. Speak out you must, sometime, and in the 
 very meagreness of our lives to-day our past speaks elo- 
 quently enough. 
 
 ''My past speaks now to me more clearly than if blazoned 
 by the trumpet of an angel. For I have given meanly, 
 thought only selfish thoughts, failed through cowardice to 
 speak what I believed — and I reap the harvest to-day. 
 
 "For, like many of you, I am starving. In a world full 
 of glory, full of love, of deep enthusiasms, of blows for the 
 good and battles for the right, of the glow of comrade 
 valour, I have been satisfied with — what? 
 
 "A tepid respect from my parishioners, a more or less 
 conventional feeling of sympathy from a mere handful of 
 friends, good meals occurring frequently, and a little pur- 
 poseless thought. Just the things, in fact, that satisfy most 
 of you. Why, the most amazing thing in this world is not 
 the poverty, nor the suffering, nor the pain, nor the sin, 
 but that a creature thrilling from head to foot with capaci- 
 ties for bliss — yes, sheer bliss, you know the word, bliss, the 
 thing that seizes you on eagle's wings and bears you to the 
 heights — should be satisfied with soft beds, beef on Sunday, 
 a lukewarm smile, or a sour one, from his neighbour, and 
 a yawn from his wife. 'Twasn't that way that she greeted 
 you when all the wonder of life was in the touch of her 
 hands, in the glance of her eyes. 
 
 "My friends, it doth not appear yet what we shall be, for 
 worlds of power are already opening before us, if we will 
 only enter them. But we must not be content with fifth- 
 
The Bitter Chalice 215 
 
 rate satisfactions. And without courage, without the bold- 
 ness that speaks what is in us, and faces the consequences 
 of our own deeds, we can never be men, much less the gods 
 we were meant to be. 
 
 "This is my last word to you. I shall never s])eak from 
 this pulpit again. But I hope, when I've left it, to speak 
 more clearly than I have ever done in my life before. 
 
 **And now for my reasons for leaving it. I heard a man 
 say the other day: 'Passon's leaving because he thinks he's 
 too good for the Church.' Now, I'm leaving for precisely 
 the opposite reason. This Church follows a Man who 
 lived the life of toil, who had often no roof over His head 
 and but little food to eat, and I have all my life denied 
 Him by taking all the ease, all the money, all the food, all 
 the treasures on which I could lay hands. My friends, 
 I am not good enough for the Church of the Jewish car- 
 penter, the friend of harlots and fishermen and outcasts, 
 the close companion of the rejected of men." 
 
 He was gone from the pulpit by the time the lights were 
 all turned up, and he remained sitting quietly in his place 
 while the curate finished the service. In the bustle that 
 followed the sermon, all eyes were turned from Mr. West- 
 away to Damaris. Yet her thoughts were hardly with her 
 father at all, but with Thyrza, for the thought grew with 
 every horn- that passed, that the girl, for all her quietness, 
 was approaching a state of desperation. The sermon 
 brought this idea to a head, till Damaris felt almost panic- 
 stricken at seeing Ambrose sitting peacefully there, while 
 the consequences of his acts were perhaps writing them- 
 selves down for all men to see. 
 
 As she saw him stoop and whisper something to his 
 mother, she stood up in irrepressible excitement. Then, 
 when he slipped out before the rest of the congregation had 
 moved, she followed noiselessly down the aisle after him. 
 
2i6 A Man of Genius 
 
 Once outside, she recognised the folly of her half-thought, 
 for she saw that he merely took the road to Long Furlong, 
 probably hurrying back that he might relieve Vinnicombe 
 from some task. It was impossible that he could have 
 applied the sermon to the thought of Thyrza's need, as she 
 had done. 
 
 In her perplexity Damaris stood twisting her hands and 
 asking breathlessly for help. For she was afraid of her 
 own responsibility, since she alone knew of Thyrza's trouble. 
 At last she ran down the lane after Ambrose, counting 
 feverishly the gate spaces that yawned on the open meadows 
 in the dim light. Then, as she noticed the signs of emotion 
 on his face, her own courage came back. They walked 
 on together, the sound of their footsteps sending little 
 tremors through her brain. 
 
 "I have a message for s you," said she, "though I did 
 not know till to-night that I had it. It's from Thyrza 
 Braund. I was at Bradworthy yesterday and saw her." 
 
 With one great heart-beat Ambrose knew what was 
 coming. 
 
 "John Darracott asked me to go," she added. 
 
 "And you believed all that he told you," said Ambrose 
 hoarsely. 
 
 "He did not tell me all, for he did not know it himself. 
 But now I know everything, more even than you." 
 
 "That cannot possibly be," he laughed savagely. 
 
 "Never mind that," she cried impatiently. "The point 
 is that Thyrza cannot be left alone. You must go to her 
 to-night." 
 
 "To-night?" 
 
 "Yes; to-night. You ought to have gone this morning. 
 It's my fault that you didn't. But hour by hour I've seen 
 more clearly." 
 
 "But you must tell me more than this." 
 
The Bitter Chalice 217 
 
 "Think of the worst that could have happened — and then 
 go. Ah, you will regret it to the end of your days if you 
 don't." 
 
 "What must you think of me?" he cried, standing still. 
 
 "I try to think no evil. I try to understand," she an- 
 swered brokenly. 
 
 Then, as he saw her face, a gleam of comprehension 
 came to his masculine densencss. 
 
 "God forgive me," he said at last, "for all the trouble 
 I've brought on you." 
 
 "Most of all on her," she said pitifully; "but you will 
 go?" 
 
 "At once," he said. Then with a "God bless you, 
 Princess," he ran back to Hartland to meet his mother, 
 and hire a horse at the inn. 
 
 So far, most of Ambrose Velly's troubles had been 
 brought on him by other people, but now he faced the 
 worst misery in the world, the pain brought on him by his 
 own act. He scarcely dared think of what lay behind 
 Damaris Westaway's words. Yet he guessed, and knew 
 that Thyrza must have lied to spare him trouble. In the 
 quick thrust of this thought he winced, for he would not 
 willingly have hurt a living thing, yet had brought this on 
 a woman. Thus he looked on the face of his desire and 
 found it ugly. 
 
 As he rode through the dark to Bradworthy, he was 
 fighting for a foothold, up or down, in the great inclined 
 plane of e.xistence, and when he thundered at the door of 
 Chrissie's darkened house, the recording angel registered 
 ascent, for the sunny, artist nature had savoured, at least 
 once, the ugliness of basely gratified instincts. 
 
 At last Mrs. Rosevear put her head out of the window, 
 and seeing who stood below, hurried down in weird noc- 
 turnal array to open the door. They stood together by 
 
21 8 A Man of Genius 
 
 the table in the light of a candle that guttered in the draught 
 from the door. 
 
 "Ay," she said bitterly, "so you can come now when 
 it's too late. She's gone; for it's Thyrza that you want, of 
 course." 
 
 "Gone?" he repeated dully. 
 
 "Yes; gone out of this house, so she shouldn't shame it. 
 I charged her with it, and she told me last night." 
 
 "But why did she go?" 
 
 " She's paying for the both of you now, and the world'll 
 soon know," said Chrissie slowly. 
 
 Ambrose turned away. 
 
 " Chrissie, I swear to you I never knew it. I'd have cut 
 my right hand off before she should have suffered like 
 this." 
 
 "Ay, very like," said Chrissie miserably; "and God 
 forgive me, for I spoke sharp to her too, the poor little 
 soul. I never thought of her giving me the slip like this, 
 or I'd have watched her night and day." 
 
 The woman's eyes were swollen with crying, as he 
 noticed now. 
 
 "Chrissie," he said, "you're a good sort. But what are 
 w^e to do now ? She must be brought back. You'll take 
 her in, won't you?" 
 
 "My word, 'take her in,'" saith he; "why, don't I wish 
 I'd got her here this minute! I'd tuck her up safe and 
 warm, I'll warn. She never told me who the man was, but 
 I knowed when I saw your face." 
 
 Ambrose groaned inwardly; in the drumming of his 
 pulses he seemed to hear the flails of fate winnowing the 
 grain from the chaff on the dusty threshing-floor of the 
 world. But which is grain and which is chaff none but 
 the unseen threshers know, when such loyalty is found in a 
 frail woman. 
 
The Bitter Chalice 219 
 
 " Which way did she go ?" he demanded. 
 
 " I can't say," said Chrissie, with a gesture of despair. 
 
 "But didn't you send along the roads after her?" 
 
 "And give warning to all the world of her trouble! 
 Yah! you're naught but a fool," exclaimed Chrissie, her 
 temper giving way at last. "No, I dunno where she is. 
 At the bottom of the nearest pond, mayhap. And you 
 can't find her to-night. Nobody can. That's your 
 punishment, to think of her wandering, God knows 
 where." 
 
 "You really don't know?" 
 
 " I know no more than the dead. Now get out of my 
 house, for, though I'd be thankful to see her litde white 
 face again, I can't stomach the sight of 'ee nohow. 'Tis all 
 the man's fault when there's a rig like this," cried Chrissie, 
 deserting all her principles of man management in an out- 
 burst of sex loyalty. "But I've been a fool, too, letting 
 the cheeld traipse about free — me, me, that ought to have 
 known better than let her. For there's some so queachy 
 and prim that you'd think all the babbies grew upon 
 parsley-beds, and all the slaughtering was done with a 
 butter-knife. Mim's not the word for that sort. To look 
 at them mincing along, you'd think they didn't know milk 
 come from a cow nor eggs from a hen. Lord, I know that 
 sort. 'Oh, really,' says they, if you let fly something 
 powerful. But I'm not that sort, thank God, yet here I've 
 been acting like one. Never again will I be blinded like 
 this, though." 
 
 Over in his room at the inn Ambrose walked up and 
 down all night with a maddening repetition- of fancies 
 about Thyrza going on in his brain. He would not look 
 at the darker pictures painted by Chrissie's hysteria, but he 
 knew they were there. When the first light came he was 
 asleep with his head on his arms, lying across the bed in a 
 
220 A Man of Genius 
 
 restless slumber full of aches. He started up at last to 
 thank God for the return of daylight, when he could at 
 least move in the search for Thyrza. 
 
 On the Sunday afternoon, while Chrissie was at church, 
 the girl had slipped out of the house into a dense storm of 
 rain that was falling at the moment. At the end of the 
 village she stood under the hedge for a moment, till hear- 
 ing a trap approaching, she hurried out into the middle of 
 the road. 
 
 " Whoa, there," said the driver, pulling up when he saw 
 that the girl wanted to speak to him. She began a story 
 of a lost road, and the urgent need there was for her to 
 push on to her destination. 
 
 "Bideford," said the man, pushing his hat back from his 
 forehead. " Bideford's a brave way from here. I'm only 
 going back to Galsworthy farm. That's so fur as I go." 
 
 "Whatever shall I do?" asked Thyrza. 
 
 "You'd better bide here to-night." 
 
 " Oh, but I must get on. My husband's ill, and I 
 can't lose any time. Can't you help me?" 
 
 "Tell 'ee what, you seem a respectable young woman 
 and in a rare taking. I've got to be in Buckland Brewer 
 early to-morra, and I could set 'ee down there at the carrier's. 
 You can get a shake-down with Mrs. Leggo to Galsworthy, 
 I make no manner of doubt." 
 
 After a long, slow drive the trap drew up in front of a low 
 house, its ancient walls stone-fronted in grey and sheltered 
 by a chestnut tree that leant above a wood-rick, piled with 
 mossy branches and feathered with boughs cut from the 
 gorse. The iron-grey walls were meagre, not with the 
 squalor of poverty, but with its age-long struggle. Yet on 
 summer noons, between the sheltering trees of the meadow 
 in front, all the far distance shimmered for miles below in 
 the haze of sunlight, and from the field at the back, to west 
 
The Bitter Chalice 221 
 
 and east, lay the purple of Dartmoor and Exmoor, till both 
 were lost in the sky-line. 
 
 As Thyrza walked up the garden path she could see a 
 grey-haired woman bending over the seam of a nightdress. 
 The room was bright with the china that glittered on the 
 dresser in the fire-light, and in the meek, simple glance of 
 the lanthorn-jawed woman who answered her knock, Thyrza 
 found comfort. For the tightly braided hair, the squeezed 
 black bodice, even the cotton-wool in the ears, might have 
 comforted a starveling cur. The woman glanced from 
 Thyrza to the trap in the yard. 
 
 "What is it?" she asked. 
 
 " I'm on my way to meet my husband. Your man found 
 me at Bradworthy and offered me a lift, so that I could go 
 on to-morrow." 
 
 ''He's no man of mine. He works for Squire Polking- 
 horne. But 'tis a queer tale; for there's inns at Bradworthy 
 where you could ha' been put up." 
 
 "But I've never been to places like that by myself." 
 
 Mrs. Leggo fully understood that sentiment. 
 
 " I'm not a tramp woman," protested Thyrza, " and I can 
 pay." 
 
 " I don't want any pay. What's your husband ? " 
 
 "He's a sailor. I'm to meet him at Bideford." 
 
 "Mine was a sailor, too. But he died twelve months 
 agone, and then Squire Polkinghorne, for that's who 
 Galsworthy belongs to, put me in here 'gainst 'tis let again. 
 'Twas built for the Galsworthy family, I suppose, but they 
 must ha' left years upon years agone. 'Tis eight hundred 
 years old in some parts of the old walls, they say. I've 
 only the use of two rooms, and I've a young baby, too, as 
 well as two chillern." 
 
 "Oh," cried Thyrza, "do let me come in and see the 
 baby. I love a baby, and I've nowhere else to go." 
 
222 A Man of Genius 
 
 " By good rights you should never ha' come at all. But 
 that's just Tom Sanguin's way. Never does he come home 
 but what he picks up something on the way, if 'tis only a 
 flea, so his wife says. But you can't go to his cottage, for 'tis 
 a little small sort of place, and with ten children, too. I sup- 
 pose you must come in, for 'tisn't a night to turn a dog out." 
 
 By the side of the hearth was a cradle, and on the pillow 
 a sleeping head. Thyrza sank down by the side of it and 
 began to cry. 
 
 "There, there, you'm tired out," said the woman. "I 
 know, only don't 'ee drop a tear on 'en, there's a dear, for 
 'tis mortal unlucky. Now, have 'ee got anything dry to put 
 on?" 
 
 " May I go up and tidy ? I'm such a lerrups as never was." 
 
 If Thyrza had been " as deep as Garrick," as Mrs. Velly 
 would have said, she could have uttered nothing more 
 likely to please Mrs. Leggo than that, and when the guest 
 came down, clean and dry, all doubts about strange women 
 who stole spoons and cut throats had vanished. On a plate 
 in front of the fire was a hissing rasher of bacon, and on 
 the hob stood a teapot. 
 
 " There, now, sit ye down and take your supper comfort- 
 able," said her hostess. " I declare I'm quite set up to 
 see 'ee; for I don't so much as pass the time of day with 
 a stranger, not once in a month. And though I've been 
 used to a quiet life, for my husband was in the coastguard, 
 there's naught could be quieter than Galsworthy between 
 the four seas, as they say." 
 
 "But how do you come to be here?" asked Thyrza. 
 
 " I married from the squire's, ten years agone, and when 
 Zack, that's my man, died, they put me here for a bit, after 
 the cheeld come." 
 
 "Oh, he's waking," cried Thyrza, as a sleepy cry and a 
 heaving of blankets came from the cradle. 
 
 i 
 
The Bitter Chalice 223 
 
 "There's a treasure," said his mother, holding him up, 
 blanket and all, while the beady eyes of the little one 
 blinked at the "canna moon" on the table. 
 
 "Ah! give him to me," cried Thyrza, holding out her 
 arms. 
 
 The warmth of the bundle against her, the restless limbs, 
 awoke the pain in her, as the first spring day arouses a 
 torpid animal. 
 
 "There now, how good he is," said Mrs. Leggo. " 'Tis 
 easy to see you'll be a good mother. Now, I'll tell 'ee 
 about Zack, for you've got a heart to 'ee, though it did seem 
 queer for 'ee to turn up upon a body's doorstep like this. 
 A better nor a kinder man than Zack never broke England's 
 bread," she continued, "though a Primitive Methodist, 
 which I don't hold with myself. And never so much as 
 winked an eye at the maidens after us had stood afore the 
 parson. And the beer he'd drink in a twelvemonth wouldn't 
 ha' hurt a two-year-old." 
 
 "Ah, he must ha' been a good man," sighed Thyrza, 
 thinking of another who had winked his eyes at the maidens. 
 
 But Mrs. Leggo's inward eyes were fixed on the lonely 
 cottage above Gurnet's Head, her ears were filled with the 
 churning of the surf. 
 
 " It was over by the Land's End they sent 'en to, last of 
 all, the wishtest place that ever God made. There was but 
 the three cottages, and one empty at that, and as for the 
 fam'ly that lived in the second — well, there's fam'lies in the 
 coastguard that you couldn't be friends with for five minutes. 
 And three miles to go for as much as a loaf, and that over 
 seven stiles. The meeting-place, where one coastguard 
 meets the next man every day, was one of they camps that 
 the old ancient ones made back along." 
 
 It was a prehistoric coast castle, wind-swept, Atlantic 
 buffeted, and ghostly with the skin-clad hillmen. Thyrza 
 
224 A Man of Genius 
 
 shivered as the grey mist of night closed all rounc 
 the farm. 
 
 "And us come from Boscastle, where a body could find' 
 a sawl to speak to, and get for a bit sometimes out of the 
 sound of the roar." She meant the beating of the surf, endless 
 as the centuries, relentless as the nature forces behind it. 
 
 " 'Twas a punishment place to 'en, that's what it was. 
 There was two above Zack as sent the orders to my man, 
 and the boat that didn't put out, but that ought to ha' 
 done so, could ha' saved five lives, and one of 'em a cheeld's. 
 So they sent my man to Gurnet's Head, and I knowed 
 that he couldn't get they lives out of his head, for they 
 could ha' bin so easy saved, and him so tender to his own 
 chillern. Why, the last thing that ever he did was to 
 undress the little maid. 
 
 " And then the pains in his head come on. They called 
 it the influenzy, but I knowed better. Soon after he went to 
 Lightship, and his mates said a wouldn't touch not a drop 
 of beer or tay, but sat holding his head. When he corned 
 back I knowed a was worse, though a wouldn't be put on 
 the sick-list. And all the time the churn, churn of the say 
 in his ears. Why, I've known 'en start up of a night all in 
 a sweat with the skritch of the gulls, and when a man's 
 come to that You see, there wasn't naught to look for- 
 ward to, but the meeting and the six hours' shift of watch- 
 ing, with pay-day on the first of the month, though if the first 
 come on a Sunday, you don't get your pay till the Monday. 
 
 " One night I missed 'en. The gulls was a-calling, and 
 the say like lead. He'd just put the eldest cheeld to bed, 
 and I did what I'd never done afore — just laid down by 
 the side of her for a minute. 'Twas all quiet-like, till I 
 sort of missed 'en, and the goose-flesh shiver come upon 
 me. I went down to the passage, and there was his coat 
 and hat. 'Twas November, so I knowed a hadn't gone to 
 
The Bitter Chalice 225 
 
 meeting. I went out and called, and then I thought a 
 must be up to fowl-house, and I started across garden to 
 it. Zack had been digging up the patch, and the girt 
 ridges he'd left seemed to start up and hit me. But I 
 never got to fowl-house, for there come a sudden pufi of 
 mist — ouff ! like that — and I couldn't ha' opened that door. 
 I reckon 'twas then a did it. And that mist was his spirit 
 come out to warn me, for 'twould ha' bin the death o' me 
 and o' this one." 
 
 Pink Toes gurgled gleefully as the firelight crej)t closer 
 into the fla.xen tangle of curls, through which shone the red 
 flush of his little round head. 
 
 '"Mr. Marsden, Mr. Marsden!' I called to the man next 
 door. 'Where's Zack?' 
 
 " ' Why, gone to make a meeting, Mrs. Leggo. What be 
 all in a stour about?' saith a. 
 
 '"Zack's never gone to meeting,' says I. ' You go up to 
 fowl-house.' 
 
 "With that I went and fetched the chillern down. I 
 don't know why, for I took no more notice of 'em than of the 
 flags on the floor. And then the tears come, and that saved 
 me. Mrs. Marsden was by me now. I'd had words with 
 her the day before, but that didn't matter now; 'twas agony 
 point. And her looked out. I couldn't. Suddenly her 
 said, ' Jim's to the telephone.' 
 
 "And then I knowed I shouldn't see Zack again. And 
 presently her said — and all the time the churn, churn, 
 coming in through the window: 'There's Mr. Tregelles.' 
 That's the farmer to Lower Town, I thought, silly-like. 
 Then her slipped out. I would ha' followed her, but they 
 pushed me back. There was five men outside by now, and 
 ne'er a one of 'em could come in to tell me the truth. I've 
 often laughed since to think of they five; gabies though 
 they be, they're tender-hearted, they men. 
 IS 
 
226 A Man of Genius 
 
 " At last Mrs. Marsden come in, and I says, sharplike — 
 
 "'Well, what is it?' 
 
 " And her says, 'You'll never forgive me if I tell 'ee." 
 
 " 'Shall I ever see 'en again ?' 
 
 " 'No, never,' says she, quite quiet. 
 
 "And I never did, not even in his coffin, though the 
 coroner had left the knife upon the table when I come 
 into the 'quest room. I just told 'en, too, what I thought 
 of 'en, girt cabbage-head, for leaving it about. And they 
 took the coffin over seven stiles, but I couldn't ha' borne 
 the cheeld away from the churn of they waves, though 
 I pray I may never hear it again now he's come." 
 
 And Pink Toes, born within the sound of the surges, 
 tucked finger and thumb into his mouth and slept in the 
 firelight. And Zack slept, too, with never the call of a 
 seagull to break his rest. 
 
 Thyrza was crying softly. 
 
 "There now," said Mrs. Leggo, "'tis turned 'ee up. 
 I didn't ought to ha' told 'ee. Isn't your man good to 'ee, 
 my dear, or is it a little one that's gone?" 
 
 "We've had a quarrel, and I fear I've lost 'en," said 
 Thyrza. " He doesn't care for me any more." 
 
 " Is it another woman, my dear?" 
 
 Thyrza gave no answer, and Mrs. Leggo continued — 
 
 " That's bitterer than death, they do say. But I dunno 
 that 'tis so, for you can win 'en back. But for me, when 
 I wake in the night, there's naught but pillows and the 
 thoughts of what has been. If I'm ill, there's nobody 
 to say, 'Shall I make a cup of tea, my dear?' Ay, 'tis 
 bitter to ha' quarrelled, but there, your man's somewhere, 
 after all, if 'tis only to hold on to, when t'other woman isn't 
 by. 'Tis always something if you can feel a man near 'ee, 
 if 'tis only that you can scratch 'en. He's no shadow, and 
 'tis lonely with never a word, nor a blow, nor a sign." 
 
The Bitter Chalice 227 
 
 "But I've lost him all the same." 
 
 " For a bit, maybe. But just you bide awhile, and he'll 
 swing round and want 'ee same as ever. A man's like 
 a clock weight — left, right, he goes to, first one and then 
 another — but every swing he's straight once, and that's 
 where the wife can catch 'en. But there, 'tis time you was 
 betsveen the sheets, for Tom'U start early." 
 
 Thyrza awoke suddenly in the night and lay for a 
 moment with a wildly beating heart, for from the cradle by 
 the bed came a child's cry. In a moment she was standing 
 with the little one in her arms, in the ray of moonlight that 
 filtered under the half-drawn blind. Mrs. Leggo's snore 
 came steadily from the old four-poster, as the baby hands, 
 the clinging mouth, the soft thud of little feet, fell on 
 Thyrza's body. Her child would be fatherless like this 
 one — nay, nameless and helpless, but for her. Bending her- 
 self over the child's body, like an aged woman, in the 
 yearning of her loneliness. Thyrza carried the baby to its 
 mother. For a long while she lay listening to the sound of 
 its comforting, with throbs of pain shaking her own body 
 from head to foot. Mrs. Leggo knew, for suddenly fling- 
 ing an arm round the tortured woman, she said — 
 
 "There, there, go back to 'en, my dear, and never mind 
 the other woman, for he's more than just a man to 'ee. I 
 can see that. He's arms full against arms empty, and that's 
 life and death to a woman like you." 
 
 Before full daylight Galsworthy was far behind Thyrza, 
 and by the afternoon she had reached Northam, from which 
 it was understood that she would push on to Bideford. 
 Wandering into that famous churchyard corner at Northam 
 which faces the bay, she stood watching the sea that had 
 somehow been calling her all day. 
 
 Eastward, Baggy faded in foam of spindrift; westward, 
 Hartland towered in purple. Between them the grey shore 
 
2 28 A Man of Genius 
 
 echoed with the surges that break against the barrier of 
 pebbles and curl in lines of foam across the sandy bar 
 that shifts at Torridge mouth. To stand overlooking 
 Bideford Bay- is to hear the thunder-roll of eternity, in- 
 cessant, yet non-insistent, grey with the greyness of iniSni- 
 tude, sombre with the patience of the ages, yet restful to 
 the fret of breathing life. Miles inland the organ note of 
 that great volume of sea-sound is distinctly audible; at 
 sea it moans with the menace of an unseen force. 
 
 Over Thyrza's head the branches were green with young 
 leaves, round her were gravestones with mossy lines. In 
 these simple things quick thought came to birth within her: 
 a sense of the birth and death of other lives, of pain often 
 bravely borne, of the manifold burgeoning and fading of 
 the tree of human life. 
 
 Far from tears now, she walked out to the flagstaff which 
 rises from a heap of sixty boulders, each marked with a 
 name from the muster roll of great sailors, guardians of the 
 waters that beat upon the foreshore. Drake, Nelson, 
 Raleigh, Carew: even Thyrza had heard such names; 
 something, too, she knew of the men of Bideford in Devon, 
 who in the whistle of the shot and the roar of the waves 
 had obeyed the call of a need larger than the desires of 
 their own lives. 
 
 Below the steps an old man was breaking stones, at one 
 and sixpence a yard of broken stuff, which must be three 
 feet high — breaking stones and leaning a broken thigh that 
 refused to remain in its socket on an old sack. Whistling 
 he was, too, between whiles, on the bit of bread he earned. 
 
 Thyrza understood the clarion call of honour that 
 sounded for the men of the sea; she understood, too, the 
 long patience of steady toil. Slowly to her the dawn was 
 coming in the sense of other lives, in the knowledge that 
 no man liveth to himself — or dieth. The words came with 
 
The Bitter Chalice 229 
 
 a shock that revealed the thought that had been at the back 
 of her mind all the hours since she had tied. With dis- 
 tinct knowledge there came, too, a revulsion from the idea. 
 She must live and not die; for the life within her was a call 
 as clear as any clarion note of patriotism or of toil. She 
 must seek a place to rest in, first, for the long ache of 
 weariness racked all her limbs. 
 
 Then she turned and saw Ambrose coming towards her, 
 with the light from the sea shining full on the old, young 
 face that his night's vigil had given him. They stood 
 gazing silently at each other for a moment, till he held out 
 his arms, and with a stumbling run she flew to him and was 
 caught and held. 
 
 "My God!" he whispered, "why didn't you trust me? 
 Do you think I haven't suffered, too, since I knew ?" 
 
 " You know, Ambrose ?" 
 
 "Everything, my true little wife. And soon to be a 
 little wife with a real wedding ring on her finger." 
 
 "I've spoilt your life an>^ay. And she cares — for you, 
 too." 
 
 He was silent, till at last he shook off his absorption in 
 feigned gaiety. 
 
 " And now, Thyrza, a square meal, a drive home to 
 Bradworthy, and then — Chrissie." 
 
 Thyrza dreaded the latter item more than tongue could tell ; 
 but she knew her fears were groundless, once she was across 
 the Rosevears' threshold and in sight of her hostess's face. 
 
 "Come upstairs this minute," cried Chrissie, looking at 
 the girl's white face; " the kettle's boiling, and I've got a hot 
 jar ready for 'ee and some broth I can warm in two seconds. 
 And," she said drily, as she turned to Ambrose in the door- 
 way, " I reckon tJiafs your way." 
 
 That was apparently across the green. At any rate, it 
 was the direction Ambrose took, none saying him nay. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 THE RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX 
 
 *"^pHERE'S some,'* said Chrissie Rosevear, "that 
 
 1 wouldn't skip if there was an earthquake about, and 
 there's others that worrit if the kettle's likely to boil over in 
 an hour's time. I dunno which sort's the most wearing, but 
 I reckon both go to a boiling or they wouldn't be here." 
 
 Outside thin threads of smoke from the chimneys of 
 Bradworthy were staining the clear purity of the summer 
 sky. Through the open doorway of the Rosevears' kitchen, 
 where Thyrza and Chrissie sat sewing, came faint whiffs of 
 sweetbriar, as the cows crossed the green for the afternoon 
 milking, their udders swaying in time to the rhythm of 
 their pace. 
 
 Chrissie had just caught sight of Damaris Westaway 
 driving up to the door of the inn, and she deduced from 
 that fact the conclusion that she had come on an errand 
 connected with Thyrza 's marriage, which was to take place 
 in a fortnight's time. For Chrissie was a mistress of the 
 gift commonly called by the learned ex pede Herculem, and 
 she could assess a woman's income by her petticoat frill, 
 and unlock the door to her desires by the feather in her 
 hat. It is a social gift confined to no class, but common 
 to femininity itself. For the most stupid woman alive is 
 capable of blessing or banning her neighbour on the evi- 
 dence of a doorstep or a lamp globe. 
 
 "Now," continued Chrissie, "if there's anything that 
 wants doing, Miss Westaway is the one to do it. If her 
 
 230 
 
The Riddle of the Sphinx 231 
 
 thought you'd break your leg to-morrow at two sharp, hcr'd 
 be there at half-past one, against it happened." 
 
 "A finger in every pie, that's what you mean," said 
 Thyrza, whose mood was one of resentment towards 
 Damaris for the part she had played in her story. 
 
 ''Some pies are the better for a finger in them," snapped 
 Chrissie, "though they scorch a body's fingers, too. I 
 always lend a hand when I'm asked; but Miss Westaway'll 
 walk miles to see if aught can be done. For her won't 
 rest till every babby's tubbed constant, and every bad leg's 
 tended like your grandmother's. But for all her, there will 
 be bad legs in damp cottages, and children with the thrush, 
 if they'm fed dirty. And sluts'll be with us till the judg- 
 ment day." 
 
 "But getting a bit sharpish, is Miss Damaris, by what 
 I hear," said Thyrza; "they say she won't let any old 
 grumble-guts have his say out now, but catches 'en up quick 
 with: 'There, now, there's hundreds in a worse way than 
 you.' And allows no rory-tory feathers or fallals, same as 
 she used to laugh at in the maidens." 
 
 "A maid gets like that with no Mr. Right coming along," 
 said Chrissie judicially, "and she with frills to her petticoats 
 six inches if an inch. And that's husband-catching, if 
 anything is. But they must ha' lost money to go and live 
 at Beckland, and everything to be as plain as plain, so 
 I hear tell." 
 
 In common with all the neighbourhood Chrissie believed 
 that the Westaways had suddenly lost their fortune. Noth- 
 ing else could have caused them to remove to such a " wisht" 
 place as Beckland. 
 
 Yet, after all, it was night before Damaris knocked at 
 Chrissie's door. For in these first days it was only after a 
 great effort that she could summon up courage to see the 
 girl who had wrecked so many fine dreams. For Damaris, 
 
232 A Man of Genius 
 
 like an architect, had pictured the temple she would build, 
 had seen its pillared arches, even its very altar lights, the 
 temple of Ambrose Velly's future. Day after day during 
 the past winter it had been her great mental preoccupation, 
 what her father could do for Ambrose when at last Mr. 
 Velly had gone. Now the vision had been struck down 
 by the hand of a little woman, who had given Ambrose 
 what he valued most of all, the soft touches, the passion of 
 a woman. 
 
 Yet, in reality, Damaris knew that it was herself that she 
 grieved for, herself who had failed in her woman's power; 
 for the bitterest sting that a woman ever knows comes 
 from the knowledge that she has failed in charm, in a 
 power that the lightest fool can wield, the force that is 
 denied to her own wit, intelligence and mastery. Deep 
 down, 'tis the woman's hell, and a hell, too, that some of 
 the greatest women have known. 
 
 "Thyrza's gone upstairs to bed," said Chrissie, to the 
 visitor, "but I'll call her down, if you like." 
 
 "No, no; don't do that. I'd rather go up to her, if you 
 don't mind, Mrs. Rosevear," said Damaris. "You've been 
 a good friend to her, indeed." 
 
 "If I'd been a better, things wouldn't ha' come to this 
 pass," said Chrissie tartly, for in the career of benevolence 
 she felt her nose rather put out of joint by Damaris as a 
 rival philanthropist. 
 
 Damaris ran upstairs and tapped at Thyrza's door. All 
 the country round was wrapped in the dead quiet that rests 
 like a heavy hand on a sleepless brain. Somehow Damaris 
 felt it to be easier to touch the quick of things on a 
 night like this, when everything trivial is put out of 
 sight. 
 
 "Don't be frightened," she said, with a smile, as Thyrza's 
 startled eyes met hers above the yellow streak of candle- 
 
The Riddle of the Sphinx 233 
 
 light that faintly irradiated the blue shadows of the little 
 whitewashed room. 
 
 "Come over to the window-seat," she went on, wrapping 
 the rug from the bed around Thyrza's white-clad body. 
 ''I've got something, some plan to propose to you." 
 
 "Oh, how soft and warm you are, child!" she exclaimed, 
 as the girl's stiff body, at first rigid from shyness, gradually 
 relaxed into restfulness in her arms. Damaris was deliber- 
 ately encouraging all the kindness towards Thyrza that 
 she could manage to call up in herself. 
 
 "You didn't sleep last night, I believe?" said Thyrza, 
 looking up at her, and thinking that she looked as beautiful 
 as the moon-crescent that scudded across the sky outside 
 between the flying clouds. 
 
 "I've been thinking a good deal about you, Thyrza, 
 lately, and wondering how I could help you and Ambrose." 
 
 "I don't see what call there is for you to bother about 
 us. We'll rub along somehow, I reckon. An.>'way, we've 
 no claim on you." 
 
 "Ah, but it's that 'rubbing along' that I want to prevent 
 if I can. I want things to be all right for both of you." 
 
 "For him you mean," said Thyrza, restlessly trying to 
 free herself from Damaris's arms. 
 
 "And for you, because you belong to him," said Damaris 
 truthfully. "After you're married, you and he, I want you 
 to come to live with my father and me at Beckland, while 
 Ambrose goes away to his work and gets on with it for a 
 few months." 
 
 "To live with you?" said Thyrza wonderingly. "What 
 for?" 
 
 "As my friend, to be my friend. You know I shall have 
 to do all the housework there; for we're going to live like 
 quite poor people. You can help me if you like, but I 
 want you to stay with me." 
 
 /' 
 
234 A Man of Genius 
 
 "You want to make me a lady?" 
 
 "I want to make you a good, true woman, Thyrza." 
 
 "Ay, I've not been that, for it wasn't all his fault. I 
 wanted 'en terrible, and I've heard folks say 'tis as certain 
 a thing as death and taxes when a man loves 'ee." 
 
 She was trying clumsily to soothe the pain she divined 
 in Damaris. 
 
 "We'll put all that behind us," said Damaris; "let it be 
 as though it had never been and begin again — a new life, 
 a life of honour and noble things. We'll start on your 
 wedding day, and look forward, never backward. And 
 you'll come to live with me? I thought you might go 
 away with Ambrose for a week and then, when he goes on 
 to Bideford, you can come straight to me. I shall be very 
 glad to have you, for Beckland will be lonely at first. 
 Still, we've all the summer before us." 
 
 "I don't like to. But I could do the rough work for 
 'ee; you've never been used to that." 
 
 "Then, that's settled and — I'm going to give you your 
 wedding dress. I shall get it made for you and come over 
 and see you married in it." 
 
 "Oh, you are good," said Thyrza, lifting her lips shyly 
 to Damaris's cheek. 
 
 They sat for a long time, thinking of the unseen love 
 that lay at the back of all this. 
 
 "I want you to listen to something that matters very 
 much," said Damaris at last. "You know the world is 
 mostly carried on by men." 
 
 " Oh, I hate 'em — deep down. They don't know anything 
 about what it feels to be a woman. They only feel any- 
 thing once in an hour, and a woman feels all the 
 time. 
 
 Thyrza was not far wrong; if Nature had seen fit to 
 make man on the same day as woman, so that they might 
 
The Riddle of the Sphinx 235 
 
 have understood one another occasionally, this vale of 
 tears would have been lightened of half its misery. 
 
 ''Yet you told me once," said Damaris, "that you 
 minded them no more than angle-twitches. But listen to 
 me. Men grow the food for us and carry it where it is 
 wanted. They teach and they fight and they make the 
 laws and carry them out." 
 
 ''My daddy," said Thyrza, "used to say that the law is 
 crueller than a poacher's gin." 
 
 "So it may be. But I want you to understand what 
 I'm going to say. It's this: there's only one thing the 
 world in general asks of us women. And it's the greatest 
 thing that the world needs; greater than laws, than food, 
 than medicine, than books, or beautiful buildings." 
 
 Thyrza opened the eyes of a perplexed rabbit, and 
 Damaris pressed her lips to the little curved bow beneath 
 her own. 
 
 "Do you know what it is, Thyrza?" 
 
 Thyrza shook her head in awe-stricken silence. 
 
 "It's men and women," said Damaris with a break in 
 her voice. "Little men and women; clean, rosy, and 
 strong, full of good brains and fine blood. It's what you 
 have under your heart, child." 
 
 The two women clung together passionately. Thyrza 
 understood perfectly. 
 
 "I know," she said, with trembling lips. 
 
 "Yes, but listen," said Damaris, anxiously; "to give this 
 to the world means noble women, not animals merely who 
 bear and suckle, but women with pure thoughts and great 
 hearts. Child, do you know the world's full of pain and 
 misery that can only be bettered by great men and women 
 — a new race, finer than any known before ? There's food 
 enough, clothes enough, enough of everything but fine 
 human beings." 
 
236 A Man of Genius 
 
 ''Why aren't they here?" 
 
 "Because we're little, mean, paltry, we women. We've 
 never risen to the call of the world. We've borne the 
 children the men give us ignobly, ignorantly, as slaves, not 
 free women." 
 
 But Thyrza could not follow this. 
 
 ''I'd fight for it," she said; "I know that. I wanted it. 
 I want it now." 
 
 For a second's space Damaris looked forward with dis- 
 may to the task before her in the months to come, the 
 attempt to lead this little summer fly to the level of life's 
 great argument. Then her heart smote her, for how could 
 this child be expected to look backwards and forwards, as 
 a trained mind would, over the human story? How could 
 she know how to gain strength for hard things by imper- 
 sonal thought ? Even in her own trouble the comfort to be 
 derived from lifting the eyes to the hills was only momen- 
 tary, just the obhvion of a second's unconsciousness to a 
 soul on the rack. She would try the plain truth. 
 
 "Do you love Ambrose?" she asked. 
 
 "Iss, dearly," nodded Thyrza. 
 
 "So do I," said Damaris, in a matter-of-fact tone. 
 
 "Then why don't 'ee take 'en? Oh, you could if you 
 tried. There's nobody in the world he thinks so great as 
 you. He told me how John Darracott come to 'ee, and 
 how you sent 'en to me that night, when I tried to die." 
 
 "Thyrza, do you know, if I were you, I should be proud 
 to think how men so good as John Darracott think of me." 
 
 "He doesn't know this — bad thing of me, does he?" 
 
 " No, Thyrza. He only knows you're going to be married. 
 He went away, I hear, last week." 
 
 "He's good," said Thyrza, thinking how once she had 
 tried to help so strong a man. It was the sweetest memory 
 in her life. 
 
 i 
 
The Riddle of the Sphinx 237 
 
 "And," she said, ''he's written it all out, what he did 
 that night, I mean. So everybody knows?" 
 
 "Yes," said Damaris, quietly. 
 
 "Oh, I've been bad, I've been bad," sobbed Thyrza. 
 
 "I never can go back over the road. Even John Darra- 
 cott's deceived in me. Oh, I wish I had died that day! 
 But I couldn't. Life was too strong in me." 
 
 "And," said Damaris, firmly, "there's another life that, 
 I trust, was too strong for you. For your child is now the 
 task you have before you. Give him every gift you can; 
 strength and health and purity of thought." 
 
 "What, you ask that of — me, when you know what I've 
 done?" 
 
 "I ask it of you the more, for it is your atonement; the 
 only one you can ofifer, and the most splendid that anybody 
 could offer. Will you try, Thyrza?" 
 
 "Why do you take all this trouble to help me?" 
 
 "Because I love Ambrose too well to see him drag any- 
 one to the low levels of things, because I know he will have 
 a splendid life, if we women let him." 
 
 "And so you won't Hft a finger to have 'en, though you 
 could, for he's took the cream off me? Eh, my Lord; I 
 couldn't have done what you have; I couldn't never ha' 
 done it. But I will try, same as I would ha' tried alone, if 
 you hadn't fetched me back." 
 
 All along the roadway of existence march the human 
 lives, each with a little glow-worm of light, called personal 
 happiness. Some never see more than their own beam of 
 happiness, and the many millions walking the same way are 
 but to them as shadows. Such folk are the happiest; for to 
 see the other lights, to watch how one obscures the other's 
 joy, is to multiply the possibilities of pain a hundredfold, 
 even though it may steel the heart with courage to bear. 
 
 Damaris lay awake many hours that night in her bed at 
 
238 A Man of Genius 
 
 the inn, for she knew that Thyrza's words were true, that 
 had she chosen to fight, she might have driven Thyrza to 
 the wall — had she chosen to thrust aside all pity, that is. 
 She recognized frankly that she was putting away her own 
 happiness for the sake of the principle for which women 
 have sacrificed so much, for the one law that is woman- 
 made, the law of monogamy. And yet, not so; it was for 
 Ambrose's honour and Thyrza's salvation, for the unborn 
 child especially, that she was willing to take suffering herself. 
 For all laws come to women in the form of hearts that 
 agonise and shame that stings. 
 
 In the country peace a London picture returned to her, 
 death-white with electric glare: the picture of a woman, 
 fair and vivid, dressed in white, waiting at the edge of the 
 pavement for her night's engagement, watching with keen 
 eyes each man who passed in those hours when the wreckage 
 of the sea of human life comes Uppermost. To leave Thyrza 
 hopeless would have been to plunge her into that nameless 
 sea. Even for the sake of her own hunger, Damaris knew 
 she could never do it. 
 
 Thus she learnt the meaning of the wisest words ever 
 written, the true answer to the riddle of txie Sphinx: ap pren- 
 dre a souffrir, apprendre h mourir, c'est la gymnastique de 
 rEternite, c^est le noviciat immortel, even while in her ears 
 sounded the patter of tiny feet so longed for, even while 
 to her body came in thought the clasp of comrade arms — 
 comrade arms, yet sweet with a nearness that no mere 
 comradeship can ever give. 
 
 Damaris carried Thyrza back with her the next morning 
 to stay at Beckland for a few days that she might see her 
 future home. And right glad was Chrissie that she had 
 gone, when on the following Saturday she saw Mrs. Velly 
 approaching her cottage, the van from which she had just 
 alighted disappearing round the corner of the inn. 
 
The Riddle of the Sphinx 239 
 
 ''My dear days," said Chrissie to herself, "now the fat's 
 in the fire, for missus'll never take a marriage hke this easy, 
 not she. But, thank the Lord, Thyrza'll not be home till 
 late to-night. Not for all the king's gold would I have had 
 they two meet just yet." 
 
 For the first time in her life, Mrs. Velly had acknowl- 
 edged to herself that she was an old w'oman, with her grip 
 on life perceptibly slackening, when Ambrose had curtly 
 announced his approaching marriage to Thyrza. Pushed 
 aside like a dead log, she said to herself, with a bitter tighten- 
 ing of the lips. The great preoccupation of her thoughts, 
 the sale at the farm, faded completely from her mind, 
 though before it had seemed like a testing of her life's 
 efficiency, when all her household gear would be exposed 
 to the gaze of strangers. It was the secret history of the 
 last month that she was most bent on knowing, for that 
 Ambrose had lied to her when he denied having met 
 Thyrza was, of course, evident. 
 
 But Chrissie would know! Chrissie was, however, equally 
 determined that Mrs. Velly, at any rate, should not know. 
 
 "So," said Mrs. Rosevear, as she seated her visitor, 
 "you'm to have a wedding quick upon top of a funeral. 
 Leastways, we shall have it, I should say." 
 
 "Chrissie, I think you've behaved shabbily, and that I'll 
 say freely. If you'll believe me, I never heard a word of 
 it, till it was all arranged." 
 
 "You don't say so, missus? He's been down here, too, 
 pretty constant." 
 
 "Then you might have warned me." 
 
 "I never knowed a word about marriage till just a matter 
 of ten days ago. And that I can say true." 
 
 "'Tis a poor talc. Thyrza Braund's not the wife for my 
 son." 
 
 "Don't 'ee like it then, missus? Her's not exactlv a 
 
240 A Man of Genius 
 
 managing sort of woman, 'tis true; but there, it might ha' 
 been worse. Languishing her be, and husband-high, and 
 all the brains '11 run to milk for a good half-dozen years. 
 But her might have been a maid that looked all ways for 
 Christmas, with a squint; for you never know who he'll fix 
 upon, when once a man's looking out." 
 
 "A squint in the eyes, you mean, Chrissie; and what's 
 that to a squint in the nature. I tell you I'm not happy 
 about it. There's something behind all this, for it to have 
 been kept so quiet. And I warned him against her. The 
 girl's soft, and he wants a wife as hard as nails. There's 
 something behind all this." 
 
 ''There mostly is, missus." 
 
 ''Not the same as there is here, Chrissie," said Mrs. 
 Velly firmly. "A pack of chillern he'll soon have, and that'll 
 be ruination to all the fine plans he's so full of." 
 
 "Well, I never! said Mrs. Rosevear, looking round 
 frantically for a distraction, now that her visitor was coming 
 to the point. 
 
 It came, like a flash of inspiration, in the shape of fat 
 Mrs. Vaggers waddhng across the common. "He might 
 have started in at once with a family, as Mrs. Vaggers over 
 there did. 
 
 "Mrs. Vaggers!" she shouted down the street. "Mrs. 
 Vaggers, my dear, come in here and tell Mrs. Velly how 
 you got took in." 
 
 The black-eyed, lusty woman, her eyes shining with good 
 humour, turned back, and leaning her hand on the low half- 
 door, flashed her strong, white teeth in a gleam of laughter. 
 
 "Come in, Mrs. Vaggers, come in," said Mrs. Rosevear, 
 unhasping the door, while Mrs. Velly glowered sullenly at 
 the visitor. She had a shrewd suspicion that Chrissie 
 wished for the presence of a third person, in order to avoid 
 awkward questions. 
 
The Riddle of the Sphinx 241 
 
 "Got took in," said Mrs. \' aggers; "you mean by my 
 Sam? Law, I've told it so often. You must be tired o' 
 hearing of it." 
 
 "Go on, my dear," persisted Chrissie. 
 
 "Well," she said, turning to Mrs. Velly. "I come down 
 to Dartmouth to help my first man keep the 'Jolly Sailors,' 
 which is more of a seaman's lodging-house than aught else. 
 So I seed a deal o' men, one way and the other; and when 
 I was widow and looking around a bit, I thought to myself 
 that it would need a sharp chap to take me in." 
 
 "And were you?" asked Mrs. Velly politely. 
 
 "Shameful. First there come two or three that I didn't 
 take no stock in. And then come Sam." She paused 
 dramatically. "I thought I liked the looks of 'en, but 
 after he'd been nibbling a bit, so to say, I didn't feel exactly 
 sure of 'en, till one day he comes and says, 'Little wife,' 
 tender-like. Then thought I, 'That's talking, that is.' 
 
 "Now it so happened that Sam and I were sitting down 
 one on each side of the fire, with the picture of my first up 
 over the mantelpiece. Now Sam was a bit suspicious of 
 me, for he knowed I was a widow and thought there might 
 have been more besides, and at last he put it plain. 
 
 "'There isn't any behinds, is there, Liza?' 
 
 "And with the words down came the picture of my first 
 scat on the rug betwixt us. And then I thought, it shall be 
 a sign, for if he says a word against that dear, good, sainted 
 man, I won't have 'en. But he didn't, for he just picked up 
 the picture and wiped ofif the dust from the glass, for it was 
 all cracked across the face. 
 
 "'Never mind, Liza,' says he. 'I'll get 'ee a new glass 
 to-morrow.' 
 
 "And I said, 'Sam, I'll have 'ee, for you're a good man.' 
 
 "The very next week he had to go to hospital, for he'd 
 had yellow jack twice, and it left 'en queer. And one night 
 16 
 
242 A Man of Genius 
 
 matron sent for me to sit up with 'en, for they had a press 
 of work. And 'twas a mercy that I did, for being off his 
 head he talked a deal, and by his talk he had enough behind 
 en to scare any woman." 
 
 ''A wife?" asked Mrs. Velly. 
 
 "And chillern, my dear. And how many it was, whether 
 four or forty, I couldn't make out. But when he come 
 out of hospital I charged 'en with it plain, and he couldn't 
 deny it. 
 
 '"Liza, it's true,' he said, *but I couldn't bring my 
 tongue to tell 'ee. But her's been dead nigh upon a year. 
 That I swear. Come up to Plymouth, and I'll 
 prove it.'" 
 
 ''And you went?" 
 
 "I did. I was bound to see the outs of it now. And a 
 cheerful sort of day we had to Plymouth. First to the 
 cemetery we went, and then he took me to the woman 
 who'd nursed his wife, and said she — 
 
 "'A beautiful corpse she made. Made flowers, forget- 
 me-nots, stuck all roimd her face, too, and heartsease, like 
 watered silk, on the frills of her coffin. For he's a good 
 man, is Sam, and the best of biscuits and peppermint 
 water, as hot as hot, to the funeral. ' " 
 
 "And the chillern?" 
 
 "I sort of shied off 'em at first. Then he took me to 
 see the eldest boy — he lived as errand-boy to a grocer. 
 
 " 'Now,' says Sam, 'we'll go and look for Maria. I've 
 boarded her.' When this had been going on for hours, or 
 so it seemed, I said all of a burst — 
 
 '"Sam, for goodness sake, how many is it?' 
 
 "'Six, Liza,' says he, just as sudden, 'not counting the 
 baby.' 
 
 "'Which makes seven,' said I, all weak-like. I didn't 
 know where to look, or what to do, that's flat. But as I 
 
 
The Riddle of the Sphinx 243 
 
 worked through that family it seemed they got weaker and 
 dirtier and thinner. And the little maid, the baby, finished 
 it. A poor little thin soul, with a peaked face you could 
 barely see for the dirt of it, and bones pretty nigh coming 
 through the skin. Bound for Kingdom Come plain enough 
 if her stayed with the hussy he'd paid to look after her. 
 The little thing just cuddled into me with a sigh, and shut 
 her eyes all peaceful-like, when I took her." 
 
 There was a silence in the room, but the mother-heart of 
 a childless woman spoke quite clearly, 
 
 ''I took 'em all home save the eldest," Mrs. Vaggers 
 went on quietly, "and by the time I'd got the baby in a 
 tub of hot water, with the soapsuds flying, and her sauce- 
 pan of milk on the fire, I saw plain. 
 
 "'Here,' I said to Sam, who sot and sot, looking sheepish 
 on the edge of a chair, 'get out of this, and go and have 
 the banns put up at once, for if I'm to be the mother of 
 seven, I'd better see the thing through proper. For 'tis 
 bare decent as 'tis. And don't you let me set eyes on 'ee 
 till 'tis over.'" 
 
 Just then a little pinafored maid, as fat as a round rabbit, 
 raced by the corner of the cottage. 
 
 "There's the baby," said Chrissie, hurrying out. 
 "There's peeper's! there's diments!" said she, setting Sam's 
 youngest on the cottage table. The little one's kiss was as 
 sweet as the honey-butter scent of the gorse in the moor 
 wind. And Mrs. Vaggers was happy, for the way of a 
 childless woman is strange; but the way of a man with his 
 house to keep in order is wondrous cunning. 
 
 "Ay," said Mrs. Velly, as Mrs. Vaggers took her leave, 
 "that's all very well. Putting me off, that's what you're 
 doing. For that I'm sure of. There's something wrong 
 behind it all. Out of Ambrose there's not a word to be 
 got. And what I should like to know is why Miss West- 
 
244 A Man of Genius 
 
 away's meddling. Why should my son's wife go to live 
 with her? Chrissie, has it been all straight up and down 
 courtship or — is he forced to it?" 
 
 "There now," cried Mrs. Rosevear, bustling away, "that 
 fire's going home, and John '11 be back in less than ten 
 minutes. You'll stay and have a cup of tea, won't 'ee, 
 missus?" 
 
 But Mrs. Velly shook her head. 
 
 "Do you know what I've got in my mind to do?" she 
 asked slowly. "There's a little two-roomed cottage up at 
 Beckland, close to where Miss Damaris Westaway's going 
 to keep my son's wife to live. I shall go there. 'Tis as 
 cheap a place as I shall get anywhere. I've been kept out 
 of things that concern my own son. I'm bound to know 
 the rights of it — and I shall know if I go to Beckland, for 
 there is but three houses there in all, each but a couple 
 of stones' throw from one another. I'll be at their very 
 doorstep." 
 
 "If 'twas me, I wouldn't so much as look round a corner 
 where I thought there was trouble waiting," said Mrs. 
 Rosevear. 
 
 "That's not my way," said Mrs. Velly, "for I'd feel it 
 was there, if I didn't look. And after all, by looking I 
 might prove it wasn't there." 
 
 "'Tis mostly there," said Chrissie significantly, "but I'd 
 rather not know. I'm like the woman who heard her 
 husband talking in his sleep and calling out, 'Polly, my 
 dear,' her own name being Sally. 'Wake up, John,' said 
 she, digging 'en in the ribs, 'wake up and don't be a fool.' 
 A wise woman that, for if her'd listened more, her might 
 have known more." 
 
 "Chrissie," said Mrs. Velly quietly, "you know my 
 meaning all this time. Is it all straight, as far as you know, 
 between my son and that girl?" 
 
The Riddle of the Sphinx 245 
 
 "'Tis but an old maggot you've got in your head," pro- 
 tested Mrs. Rosevear. 
 
 ''Chrissie, is it all straight as far as you know?" repeated 
 Mrs. Velly solemnly. 
 
 "So far as I know 'tis all as straight as my first man's 
 eyes," said Chrissie quietly. "And cross-eyed they was to 
 be sure," she added to herself. 
 
 But Mrs. Velly had never made the acquaintance of 
 Mrs. Rosevear's first husband, and thus the cryptic meaning 
 was hidden from her. She departed somewhat comforted. 
 
 "May the Lord forgive me," said Chrissie to herself, as 
 she watched the carrier's cart drive out of the village. 
 
 "But what's the good of stirring up ill-blood anyway?" 
 she continued, "and Jim Braund's daughter couldn't be 
 expected to set more store on 'Will 'ee have this woman?' 
 on a passon's lips than any old seagull." 
 
 In the watches of the night it occurred to her that she 
 had been extraordinarily clever. She chuckled till she woke 
 her husband. 
 
 "Chrissie," said he crossly, "what be 'bout? The bed's 
 heaving like a ground sea under a man." 
 
 "And I didn't say more than the truth," she murmured 
 ecstatically, paying no attention to his plaints. 
 
 On the morning of the wedding Damaris drove over to 
 Bradworthy. As she entered the room where the bride 
 was dressing, she found Thyrza standing in front of the 
 looking-glass, gazing ruefully at her own image. Hearing 
 the noise of the opening door she turned, exclaiming — 
 
 "Oh, look at this grey rag that you've made me wear! 
 It makes me a proper old guy. I'll not go to church in it. 
 I'll not be seen in it. I believe you got it to spite me." 
 
 Then she flung herself, face downwards, on the bed. It 
 was true enough, as Damaris confessed to herself, that the 
 plain grey dress ought to have been exchanged for rose- 
 
246 A Man of Genius 
 
 pink. The child was now a rosebud set in the sheath of a 
 pale jonquil. To Damaris, who had been nerving herself 
 for the painful ordeal at the church, this was a totally 
 unexpected tragedy. 
 
 "I am very sorry," she said, ''that I made such a mistake. 
 See, I've brought you a present from father, the loveliest 
 white lilies he could get." 
 
 Thyrza wriggled pettishly away from the hand on her 
 shoulder. 
 
 "Oh," she sobbed, tapping her foot furiously against the 
 bottom of the bed, ''you're always right, you're the pink of 
 perfection and I'm as common as dirt. I won't do any- 
 thing you ask. I won't be married." 
 
 Damaris stood for a moment, realising, as she had not 
 done before, the magnitude of the task she had under- 
 taken. 
 
 "Thyrza," whispered Damaris at last, "think of how 
 you're going to be with the man you love so dearly. And 
 after a little while you'll be with him always. When I 
 think of the lonely women there are in the world, I Hke to 
 think of those who have a joy like yours." 
 
 Her voice broke, and Thyrza looked up. 
 
 "Are you going to spoil it all for the sake of a dress, 
 you who were so brave when you thought of giving him 
 up ? Think of how terrible things might have been for you." 
 
 "Because I'm so bad, you mean?" 
 
 "No; because you were reckless. There's a far bigger 
 debt to pay in this world for recklessness than for real 
 wickedness." 
 
 "Grapes are sour, I reckon. That's why you run me 
 down." Something like hate gleamed out of the feverish 
 eyes that watched her mentor. "You hadn't the chance 
 of 'en. I had, and I took it, and I'm glad I did. So there!" 
 
 Thyrza stood pettishly twisting the lace on the white 
 
The Riddle of the Sphinx 247 
 
 silk blouse that was the only sartorial satisfaction of the 
 day. 
 
 "Oh," she cried to herself, ''she's perfect, she is. She 
 never tells crams; she can talk French and keep her temper. 
 And I've said I'll go and Hve with her." 
 
 With trembling hands she pretended to be absorbed in the 
 grey hat on the bed, touching it gently with her fingertips. 
 
 ''I'm sorry," she said, turning suddenly to Damaris, who 
 stood watching her. "Only this day seems so sad some- 
 how. It's all gone wrong, and I dread to see his very face 
 to-day. But I'll never be bad to 'ee again. Never." 
 
 "I know, I know," said Damaris. "But it'll be all right, 
 once you're away with him. See, I shall pour eau-de- 
 Cologne into this water, and then you must bathe your 
 eyes thoroughly." 
 
 The little face, cold and scented, was held up a few 
 minutes later for the kiss of repentance. 
 
 "You mustn't get into such rages, Thyrza." 
 
 "Mother used to sclum father's face." 
 
 "But Ambrose wouldn't like that," protested Damaris. 
 
 "He's got too beautiful a face to be sclummed, I reckon," 
 said Thyrza dimpling. 
 
 Soon aftenvards at the gate of the churchyard, where the 
 light lay golden across the path, Damaris stood watching 
 them start for their week together. Suddenly Ambrose 
 turned and, standing bareheaded in front of her for a 
 moment, caught her hand. In that moment there flashed 
 across him the knowledge that other things, besides his 
 mother's ease of mind, were being sacrificed for Thyrza's 
 honour. 
 
 "How can I pay back?" he asked in a low voice. 
 
 "When the vision stands in stone ever}'thing will be 
 paid," she said, turning quickly away lest he should see 
 her eyes too closely. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 THE MANES OF THE MIGHTY DEAD 
 
 THE two partners of the firm of Trevithick and Jerman, 
 architects and land surveyors, which Ambrose had 
 joined as "improver," were known in Bideford as Dignity 
 and Impudence, or the Lion and the Rat, for the junior 
 partner, who could not possibly be called a mouse, found 
 his work cut out for him in the task of releasing Mr. Trev- 
 ithick from all manner of financial snares into which 
 he was driven by his easy-going nature. The firm had 
 a first class reputation for thorough workmanship; it 
 was also, which is by no means always a logical conclusion, 
 on a good business footing, thanks to the smartness of 
 the rat, Mr. Jerman. 
 
 The motto of a small country town is usually, *Tf I 
 don't get there to-day, I shall to-morrow," but there was 
 nothing of that spirit about Trevithick and Jerman, as 
 long, at least, as the junior partner was about; for then 
 everything in the great house, with its plate glass and 
 polished windows, ran on oiled wheels, including even the 
 great terrors of the country architect, the pupils. Then 
 even Dicky Dick, otherwise Mr. Richard Cobbledick, the 
 gay dog of the students' room, put his tail between his legs 
 and humbly plied the pencil and red-rubber of his pro- 
 fession. Especially the red-rubber, it may be said in pass- 
 ing, for he was a hopelessly inaccurate person, and only 
 remained in the business because his father was a rich man 
 and had paid a particularly large premium for him. 
 
 *48 
 
The Manes of the Mighty Dead 249 
 
 From the corner of the pupils' quarters which had been 
 assigned to Ambrose he could catch the tones of Mr. 
 Jerman's voice as he interviewed the cHents in his private 
 room. Dicky Dick called that room, indeed, the rough 
 filter-bed, for the first interview with a prospective client 
 always took place there, and was of a monetary character 
 chiefly. If that aspect of the case seemed satisfactory, the 
 visitor went upstairs to the brain of the establishment, the 
 great room overhead, looking down on the famous bridge 
 of Bideford, where lived Mr. Trevithick, far from the noise 
 of opening doors and the murmur of voices, which were 
 apt, in fact, to be very loud indeed on the rare occasions 
 when Mr. Jerman took a holiday. Then pandemonium 
 reigned among the articled pupils; for in a country office 
 one of the chief difficulties, next to the general "tightness" 
 of money is the rombustious nature of the untamed country 
 lads who pass through the mill there. 
 
 It was more than a fortnight before Ambrose was sent 
 upstairs for Mr. Trevithick 's inspection, but during these 
 days he had, unknown to himself, been going through the 
 ordeal of test at the hands of Mr. Jerman. His report on 
 Ambrose was: — 
 
 First-class draughtsman, best we've ever had. Accurate 
 at figures, remarkably so, considering he's the long-haired 
 type. Writes a good hand, opens his eyes, and has a fair 
 working knowledge of surveying. Wants pruning, but will 
 shape well when his ears are cut. 
 
 The junior partner had a capital breed of terriers in his 
 bachelor villa on the hill, and his phraseology was apt to 
 be doggy. Hence he divided the pupils into long-haired 
 and wiry, meaning by those synonyms, artistic and busi- 
 ness-like. 
 
 At last the summons came for Ambrose to go to Mr. 
 Trevithick's room, but, of course, the senior partner's 
 
250 A Man of Genius 
 
 great height and large, slow, kindly glance was a familiar 
 enough sight as he passed through the offices below. It 
 was a face more sympathetic than powerful, perhaps, 
 yet his head was like his buildings, of a massive sim- 
 plicity that caught the sunlight and threw the shadow 
 almost like a feature of the natural landscape. His lips, 
 too, could tighten, more especially over the matter of a 
 slippery contractor. He had a way of repeating a sentence 
 till it sounded like a fate, and, in truth, it often sealed the 
 fate of some builder, especially when it ran to the tune 
 of "all that concrete must come up," and when the 
 concrete ran over a carelessly cemented drain. 
 
 Mr. Trevithick was Jerman's trial, and knew it; he 
 was also a thorn in the flesh to his wife, and was perfectly 
 aware of that fact, too. For he was apt to be very late in 
 the mornings and to sit far into the night, working at the 
 office sometimes till early morning. To Jerman and Mrs. 
 Trevithick such habits were nothing better than intellectual 
 debauchery, and for no kind of debauchery had they a 
 grain of sympathy. 
 
 When Ambrose entered the room the senior partner was 
 bending over two curious vessels, which his clerk of works 
 had brought to him after the destruction of an old farm- 
 house. Each was a sort of basin cut out of a solid block 
 of elvan, the igneous rock found intruding in granite 
 beds, and each had a funnel-like aperture piercing its 
 side. 
 
 ''Come over here," said Mr. Trevithick, "and tell me 
 what you make of these. They're only found down west, 
 but I'm not quite sure what the use of them can have 
 been." 
 
 Leaning back in his chair, he watched Ambrose as he 
 took up one of the basins. Mr. Trevithick had just been 
 reading Mr. Westaway's eulogium of the new pupil and the 
 
The Manes of the Mighty Dead 251 
 
 young man attracted him, especially after the sorrowful tale 
 that the junior partner had just tokl him. For to Mr. 
 Trevithick's malicious humour, poor Jerman's Puritanism, 
 correct and prim to his least important button, was a source 
 of delight. It appeared that last Sunday Ambrose and 
 Dicky Dick had scandalised the town by shooting the arches 
 of the bridge to the accompaniment of a war march from 
 Ambrose Velly's fiddle. It would have gratified Jerman 
 exceedingly to learn, which was the fact, that the damp, 
 salt air had been most detrimental to the fiddle-strings. 
 
 "I've heard of these before," said Ambrose, after an 
 examination of the basins, "but I've never seen one. I've 
 heard my mother talk of them, though. They used to be 
 fastened to the back of the wall in an open fireplace, and 
 were used for scalding milk. The fire was hghted in the 
 basin part and the funnel is for scraping out the ash. Then 
 the pan of milk stood on the whole thing." 
 
 Though Ambrose did not know it at the time, much of 
 his future fortune turned on this scrap of information. 
 
 "You've the makings of an archaeologist," said the 
 senior partner. "Take any interest in it? It's a very 
 important part of your profession, you know. For nobody 
 has done more harm than the architects who try to restore 
 buildings without any real knowledge of the old work 
 they are touching." 
 
 "I've never been able to lay hands on much in the way 
 of books about it," said Ambrose, "but I want to know- 
 more." 
 
 Mr. Trevithick's ears almost stood up with excitement, 
 for here was a pupil who talked of books, no sickly, pigeon- 
 breasted fellow, either, but manly, well-set-up and bronzed. 
 He began to entertain hopes that here was the student he 
 had waited for so long, especially knowing as he did, 
 Jerman's grudge against "long-haired ones." 
 
252 A Man of Genius 
 
 ''Come over here," he said, opening the door into a back 
 room that looked across the roofs of the town. "There are 
 books, and you can have the run of them. There's a door 
 on to the landing by which you can come in without dis- 
 turbing me. Here's a translation of Viollet-le-Duc's 
 book, and he's the most valuable companion an ambitious 
 young architect can have." 
 
 Ambrose noticed his master's English-French pronun- 
 ciation of the name, and his heart warmed to the man who, 
 like himself, had known but few educational advantages. 
 
 "Now," said Mr. Trevithick, "I'm going to try an ex- 
 periment with you, for you've had three years' experience, 
 and this wuU put you on your mettle. I'm going to send 
 you to draw up a report of the repairs needed for an old 
 manor house. That is to say, I want you to draw a plan 
 of the buildings, making notes as you go of what you 
 think wants doing. Not decorating, but saving — d'ye 
 take me? Get a plan of the drainage, too. Saving, that's 
 the aim, mind, bits of masonry, traceried windows wanting 
 repair, that sort of thing. Then, when you've done, you'll 
 drive over with me and we'll go over it again according to 
 my notions. Then we shall see how far they square, yours 
 and mine." 
 
 Ambrose knew enough to recognise that a first-rate 
 opportunity was being offered him. 
 
 "I'll do my best," he said earnestly. 
 
 "It's Tonacombe, over in Morwenstow. It'll take a day. 
 You'd better ride over on a Saturday and then you needn't 
 get back till Sunday night. That'll give you an hour 
 or so in Hartland, for I'm told you are a married man." 
 
 Mr. Trevithick smiled at Ambrose's blush; all his 
 troubles before him, said the senior partner to himself, 
 and the eating of the apple behind; for he, too, had been 
 a lad and was now a man with a wife. 
 
The Manes of the Mighty Dead 253 
 
 "Tonacombc!" exclaimed Ambrose, "why, that's the 
 place that belonged to my family long ago. I've got a 
 plan of the house that I copied from the old records Mr. 
 Westaway showed me." 
 
 "If you've got it with you here, I wish you'd fetch it 
 and let me see it. It's lapsed now to an old London lawyer, 
 who wishes to sell, for it isn't entailed. He wants it put 
 ship-shape before it comes on the market." 
 
 "It was Velly land once, sir," said Ambrose. 
 
 The two spent the morning over the plan, while Jerman 
 was fuming below at the delay in the morning's mail that 
 was thus entailed, and when Ambrose returned to the 
 students the whole room was red-hot with excitement at 
 this prolonged interview with the Chief; the senior partner 
 was known as the Chief and the junior as the Governor. 
 
 ''Why," asked Ambrose as he walked away from the 
 office that evening with Mr. Cobbledick, "is it that the 
 Chief doesn't live in London? He's surely too good for 
 a country practice." 
 
 "Mrs. Tre," said Dickie, pushing his hat back on his 
 wiry red curls, "that's where the shoe pinches. She's set 
 up an establishment here and goes about solemnly deliver- 
 ing visiting cards. She doesn't believe she would get it in 
 town, and that's why he has to rot in this dead-and-alive 
 hole." 
 
 To Ambrose it was a novel sensation to walk into Mrs. 
 Trevithick's drawing-room next day; the huge mirrors, 
 impertinent sofas and hermetically sealed windows made 
 him giddy at first, and he was thankful to fmd himself 
 finally at anchor on a chair, with a cup of what Mrs. Velly 
 would have called dish-water in his hand. At last the 
 mist of nervousness cleared, and he was able to appreciate 
 Mrs. Trevithick's beautiful front of expensive hair. He 
 had never seen so sprightly a thing on such a lined face — 
 
254 ^ Man of Genius 
 
 a face that ought to have been framed in soft grey hair, 
 as it actually was at the "private view" to which only her 
 husband was admitted. 
 
 She was enlarging on the work of missions to Mr. Pearse, 
 a fatherly person who refused tea, preferring a "high" on'? 
 at home at six o'clock. It was an inelegant habit on his 
 part, and annoyed Mrs. Trevithick almost as much as his 
 trade. "Not to put too fine a point upon it," as Mr. Jerman 
 would have said, he was a prosperous grocer, whose con- 
 sciousness of his bank balance pervaded the air in his 
 immediate neighbourhood. His wife sat next to Ambrose, 
 with a white handkerchief outspread on her mourning 
 gown; Mrs. Pearse was one of the women whose crape- 
 edged veils carry more suggestion of "Brief life is here our 
 portion" than any undertaker's funeral plumes. 
 
 In the background hovered Mr. Trevithick, watching 
 with an amused face the lad's efforts to take part in a con- 
 versation that hurtled with abbreviations like C. M. S. and 
 Nw S. P. C. C. It was an island of rest to Ambrose when at 
 last the conversational gymnastics landed him on one he 
 knew well. Yet, as the Chief could see, this novel form of 
 entertainment pleased the boy hugely, for to appear in- 
 telligent when you have no notion of what is going on is 
 highly stimulating to the social sense. Before they finished 
 Ambrose knew what C. M. S. meant, and was giving his 
 opinion of the West African natives with great gusto. He 
 was also quite familiar with Mrs. Trevithick's favourite 
 phrase, "Then I thought of C. M. S.," and was laughing at 
 her up his sleeve. 
 
 Yet, after all, his youthful insolence was quite wrong- 
 headed. It is true that Mrs. Trevithick was something of 
 a snob, yet she was by no means a hypocrite, and the work 
 in the mission fields, "white for harvest," indeed, was, next 
 to her husband, the genuine passion of the poor woman's 
 
The Manes of the Mighty Dead 255 
 
 life, the one link between her and the great world of un- 
 selfish thought for others. Every spring, when the bright 
 sunshine made her long for pale greys and lavenders, she 
 regularly bought dark dresses and put aside the sum saved, 
 through their extra durability, for "C. M. S." True, she 
 buzzed domestic details all day, yet the milk-bread required 
 by her husband's indigestion was made by her own hands, 
 for fear the cook's should prove unequal to that important 
 task. 
 
 The trouble of the matter was that she was wrongly 
 married, yet in blissful ignorance of the fact, in her adoration 
 of the big idol whom she worried to death. She had, in fact, 
 taken the senior, when she ought to have chosen the junior 
 partner. Mr. Jerman, indeed, thought her perfection, 
 when he played the flute to her piano accompaniment while 
 Mr. Trevithick buried himself in his study. 
 
 ''Heavens," said Ambrose to himself, as he followed the 
 Pearses out of the room, ''how does the Chief stand it! 
 There isn't a breath of air in the house, mental or physical." 
 
 For a terrible catastrophe had happened; after the sweet 
 nothings that Ambrose had been politely murmuring, he 
 chanced to remark to Mrs. Pearse — 
 
 "What a beastly day," as he heard the fall of dripping 
 rain. 
 
 There was a sudden silence that filled the room. Then 
 Mrs. Pearse rose in her majesty and remarked — 
 
 "This is the day that the Lord hath made." 
 
 With crimson ears and abashed countenance Ambrose 
 hurriedly took his leave, much comforted, however, by the 
 suppressed laughter that convulsed Mr. Trevithick's great 
 frame. 
 
 After such simulacra of human beings, it w^as delightful 
 ;to feel that next Sunday he would be in the society of the 
 frankly sincere people of Beckland. Yet there was a 
 
256 A Man of Genius 
 
 certain shrinking even in that thought, for Thyrza wrote 
 that although Mrs. Velly had settled in her two-roomed 
 cottage by the pond, she had never yet crossed the threshold 
 of the Westa ways' house. She had refused to be present 
 at the wedding, and immediately after the sale at the farm 
 had removed her furniture with Vinnicombe's help to Beck- 
 land. "Nobody gets on my nerves hke mother," said 
 Ambrose to himself, as he thought angrily of her mannei 
 of conducting the removal, seated, like any cottage woman 
 in front of a cart piled up with feather-bed and eight-da) 
 clock, with chest of drawers and cooking utensils. 
 
 But on Ambrose's spirit annoyance weighed but lightly 
 and in a few minutes he was hurrying up the hill again tc 
 go and call on Mrs. Pearse to apologise for his rude speech 
 "I'm so sorry I annoyed Mrs. Pearse this afternoon,' 
 he exclaimed, coming impulsively into the ofhce at th( 
 back of the shop. "I said it quite without thinking." 
 
 Mr. Pearse, entirely oblivious of the fact that Ambrose 
 had his tongue in his cheek, or at least the tip of it, was 
 delighted with his frankness, and it ended in the lad goin^ 
 up to see "the young ladies, "'and singing duets with then 
 till ten o'clock, for never in his life was he shy for mor( 
 than five minutes, and he could talk missions with a bishoj 
 and bets with a barmaid with equal facility after ten minutes 
 practice. 
 
 He was voted "a great acquisition" by the Pearses, am 
 ended by lending Mr. Pearse The Seven Lamps of Archi 
 tecture, thereby laying one of the possible foundation stone 
 of his own temptation. For the grocer was so struck witl 
 the artistic piety of the work that his mind turned in thi 
 direction of a beautiful house overlooking the sea, to whicl 
 he could retire in the evening of his days. And in tha 
 scheme Ambrose was hereafter to be most intimately con 
 cerned. For, in truth, the dip into town life fired connectinj 
 
The Manes of the Mighty Dead 257 
 
 trains of enterprise in all directions for young \'clly's for- 
 tunes, as is usually the case with persons of marked vitality. 
 
 At the end of the week he was at Morwenstow, looking 
 down for the first time on the house that had played so large 
 a part in the inner drama of his fancy. Smiling in the grey 
 peace of the centuries, Tonacombe lay before him, closed 
 by high boundary walls and belfried against the clear sky, 
 in the faint murmur of the sea music t'uit had Ijut to cross 
 a field or two. Under his feet, as he walked up "the street," 
 or walled outer passage to the gates, the ground reverberated 
 in hollow tones, for from the house there runs an under- 
 ground way to the cliffs, for use in the days when "the 
 valley of the waves" was a wrecking stronghold and the 
 squire's house the central fortress. The low shrubs set in 
 green pots along "the street" are bent south-west by the 
 prevailing wind, and in the wall opposite the door is a niche, 
 probably for the doles that the great house distributed in 
 monastic fashion to the poorer tenants. 
 
 Once within the dusk of the hall, past the triangular hole 
 in the wall for the holy w^ater stoup, the centuries roll back; 
 the nineteenth century roars away in the hum of the steam- 
 engine, the eighteenth fades in the snuff of its gallants and 
 the silky sneers of its epigrams, the seventeenth clashes 
 away in the strife of its dogmas, and the sixteenth shrills 
 into oblivion in the lilting of pipe and tabor. The darker 
 shadows, the whiter light, of mediaevalism come back once 
 more. Through the long windows, lozenged and marked 
 with armorial bearings, the light filters on panelled oak 
 walls, on car\^ed minstrel galler)- and huge open fireplace. 
 At the windows hung curtains that had once formed part 
 of the household plenishing of that Armada dragon, that 
 Drake, whose drums beat yet in the echoes of English 
 seamanship. Tapestry was there with the totem of the 
 Stuarts, the caterpillar sign, and the firedogs were marked 
 
 17 
 
258 A Man of Genius 
 
 with the Tudor rose. All these treasures would have to be 
 removed, as soon as the workmen came, for safe preser- 
 vation, until they were sold with the old place itself, or 
 possibly separately. 
 
 In the ample vistas of such a house as Tonacombe the 
 sense of personal dignity starts into being, for, chameleon- 
 like, a man reflects his background. It takes a Bacon to 
 loom majestic in a garret, but in an ancient manor-house 
 even rusticity drops its loutishness and assumes the courtesy 
 that comes of a sense of human worth. 
 
 With the plan he had copied in his hand, Ambrose made 
 his inspection and wrote his notes, passing into the Queen 
 Anne parlour panelled in painted deal, and thence to the 
 oak-lined room that looks on the walled Pleasaunce. 
 
 *' Winged steps," beloved of antiquaries, lead to the raised 
 sea walk from which, as it roves over wooded combes and 
 cliff fields, the eye catches glimpses of the Atlantic. In the 
 sound of the mellow tones from the belfry, that once sum- 
 moned as many as forty apprentices to meals, the internal 
 completeness of an ancient country house is recalled. With- 
 out, it was supplied from deer paddock, cloth mill, fish-stews, 
 and farm; within, from malt-house, still-room, bakery, 
 and spinning wheel. Even now the log fire in the hall can 
 be fed by timber blown down in the winter gales. 
 
 Here, in sight of the five staircases and five courts sur- 
 rounded by granite walls, Ambrose heard not only the call 
 of the past, but also of the future, as he wondered how long 
 it would be before Tonacombe would be for sale. For the 
 first time the question of the financial success of his career 
 occurred to him, since ten years hence, with good luck, 
 he might possibly be rich enough to buy the manor-house, 
 for there was little enough land attached to it, merely a 
 farm and the private grounds. To do that would be to lift 
 the Velly fortunes straight out of the rut into which 
 
The Manes of the Mighty Dead 259 
 
 they had fallen; he thrilled even then with the thought of 
 what it would mean to his mother. 
 
 Somehow the memories of the place brought with them 
 the spiritual stimulus that had been present once or twice 
 before in his life: in Exeter Cathedral with the boy's voice 
 thrilling in his ears, in Damaris Westaway's eyes as she 
 talked of the age-long task of man, in Thyrza's chanting of 
 the love song of creation. For the unseen beauty that lies 
 behind the seen pervaded every inch of these old walls, 
 in the atmosphere of their honest past. 
 
 As he walked back to the Bush Inn the call of the place 
 became so strong that it was almost like demoniac possession, 
 and he began to feel a second Faust with the fatal black 
 dog circling round him. Nor was the mystic suggestion 
 of the pentagram wanting; for in the passage of the Bush 
 Inn is a cross traced within a circle, a curious piece of 
 mediaeval sacerdotalism, marking the place where the 
 priest stood to bless the house. 
 
 *'In the name of all the fiends at once," said Ambrose, 
 standing within the circle and laughing to himself, *'get 
 thee behind me." For, indeed, at the moment, the strong 
 craving to own these lands was no more than moonshine, 
 as ungraspable as the long sunset ray that traced a path 
 across the sea when he stood looking from the cliff across 
 the valley of St. !Morwenna, where the grey church juts up 
 like a cliff defying the sea of wrath all around. For in the 
 valley below the great shutter of Hennacliff all landward 
 sounds were deadened by the roar of the seething world of 
 breakers, lashed incessantly by the sting of the wind gusts. 
 Yet here, as ever)'^vhere, over the natural featm*es of the 
 scene, the superimposed atmosphere of human effort floats 
 like an aura, a finer body than the rock-shapes of cliff and 
 valley. For St. Morwenna built her grey hermitage in the 
 valley, and over her shrine is thrown the human radiance of 
 
26o A Man of Genius 
 
 a personality that speaks as surely in this sea-bordered 
 valley as the force of race that meets us in a city; for here is 
 the note of mysticism in the traditions of Hawker of Morwen- 
 stow, the priest who cherished his ewe lambs as daughters, 
 and stood for quaint lovingkindness in the midst of the 
 barbarism of nature and the cruelty of man. 
 
 The earth that has known us so long is now a whispering- 
 gallery of past follies and bygone victories. In olden cities 
 whole races speak, from the wool -weavers of Exeter who 
 built the pillars of her cathedral, to the princely doges of 
 Venice who helped to build empires. Yet in no spot does 
 a pleasanter fragrance linger than in the one-man memories 
 of Morwenstow cliffs, w^here the people still talk of the 
 priest who was '4ike a king" among them. 
 
 Before he rode back in the evening, Ambrose stood for 
 a moment at the cross-roads from which the cliffs can be 
 seen. Here he felt himself a man with a past of some 
 dignity, over in Bideford an unconsidered struggler; yet 
 Bideford was the reality and Tonacombe the dream, and 
 no bridge was there that could span the gulf between the 
 two. 
 
 As Damaris stood at her window at Beckland next 
 morning she heard a cry from the garden below, and looking 
 down saw Thyrza running to meet her husband. Standing 
 back for a moment she felt her eyes dimmed by a sudden 
 mist of pain, and in her throbbing sense that the future 
 must hold for her many moments like this, Damaris whis- 
 pered the deathless words that consecrate the bliss of all 
 uplifted souls — 
 
 ''Go where thou wilt, seek whatsoever thou wilt, thou 
 shalt not find a higher way above, nor a safer way below, 
 than the way of the holy cross." 
 
 Then she went down to greet the visitor, feeling intensely 
 relieved at two things, however — that Mrs. Velly was away 
 
The Manes of the Mighty Dead 26 i 
 
 it Bradvvorthy with Chrissie Rosevear, and that she Iicrsclf 
 vas to spend the day with Dr. Dayman. 
 
 At breakfast Ambrose was full of the beauties of Tona- 
 :ombe, and Damaris left the two men poring over gene- 
 ilogies and maps and plans, with Thyrzii, who had lost ^11 
 ler awe of Mr. Westaway, sitting by her husband's side, 
 A'ith her head pressed against his shoulder. 
 
 ''Happy, little girl?" whispered Damaris, as she left. 
 
 "In Heaven," said Thyrza, and Damaris saw how tight 
 was the hold she kept on Ambrose's hand. 
 
 The child had, indeed, been bearing the separation from 
 her husband very bravely, and Damaris was glad, for all 
 her own heartache, at this ray of sunshine that had 
 come. 
 
 After lunch, in the peace of a Sunday afternoon, Dr. 
 Dayman set himself to tackle a matter that had been dis- 
 turbing him a good deal lately. 
 
 "Just you come over here," he said, flinging himself into 
 ,a chair and passing a great silk handkerchief over his face. 
 Sit down opposite to me and listen to what I've got to 
 say." 
 
 Damaris seated herself demurely, with crossed hands, 
 waiting for the lecture she had been expecting for some 
 time. 
 
 'I want to know what's the meaning of this caper?" he 
 said, his slow, fish-like gaze absorbing her quiet placidity, 
 and his big nose snuffing angrily at the sight of it. 
 
 'What caper?" said Damaris, with a provoking tilt of 
 her chin. 
 
 "You know the caper I mean well enough. Aye, and 
 you know the mutton to it, too." 
 
 "My dear doctor, I haven't seen you for three weeks and 
 therefore I have got out of the way of taking huge conver- 
 sational leaps." 
 
262 A Man of Genius 
 
 *'How long is that little wench going to hang on at Beck- 
 land ?" he said, coming suddenly to the point. 
 
 ''Until her husband can make a proper home for her," 
 said Damaris calmly. 
 
 ''I tell you what, Damaris, you're doing a very foolish 
 thing. You are taking up a sort of responsibility for the 
 lives of these two children, a responsibility that is quite out 
 of your way." 
 
 "I am a grown-up woman. Am I to refuse responsi- 
 bilities because I am too foolish or too cowardly to undertake 
 them? Why should I wish to remain a baby all my life? 
 I should take responsibihties enough if I were marrying. 
 Then you would make no objection." 
 
 "You'd be meddling with your own life then, and even 
 a woman has to accept the responsibility for that. But 
 here, why, they'll be hanging round your neck, the pair of 
 them, till the end of the chapter." 
 
 ''I beheve in his talents. I think he will some day be a 
 great man, and I know that I can free him from a burden 
 just at the moment when it will be hardest for him — at the 
 start. Besides, by living with us his wife will have some 
 chance of knowing how a gentlewoman acts. I shall go on 
 doing what I am doing till there is no more need for it." 
 
 When Damaris took that tone he knew it was useless to 
 argue. 
 
 ''And she's a little cuss, too," said he. "I caught sight 
 of her two days ago, picking flowers in a hay field. For a 
 bit of a joke I jumped down and leant over the gate." 
 
 "Dr. Dayman," laughed Damaris, "do you think you 
 had better go on?" 
 
 "You're my mother-confessor. Princess, and always will 
 be. I said: 'Hillo, little 'im, do you know how to make 
 sweet hay?' At that she picked a great sheaf of the grass, 
 twisted it into a strand, put her foot on the gate and flung 
 
The Manes of the Mighty Dead 263 
 
 the ring of it round my great face. Then she held up her 
 Hps. She knew how to make sweet hay. She'd be a pretty 
 Httle toad for a man to find on his pillow." 
 
 ''You acknowledge she's charming, then?" 
 
 ''Well, I did think her so for a minute; but you and 
 your father are too quixotic for me. Here's he signing away 
 thousands and revelling in the process, and here are you 
 Hving in the lives of these two as if they were your own 
 people." 
 
 "It's nothing more than I have done before, or things 
 like it. \\Tiy are you so concerned ?" 
 
 "Because there's something at the back of it. I'm like 
 Mrs. Velly. She won't rest till she knows — and I shan't, 
 either. An honest woman, that, and a good plucked one. 
 It was fine, the way she gave up pretty nearly everything to 
 pay off the creditors." 
 
 "They're both fine, for there will be the rent paid to the 
 last penny if Ambrose can do it. But my intervention here 
 was imperative. Dr. Dayman, you shall know, if you like. 
 She will stay with me till her child is born." 
 
 "And that's why you worked that marriage? Phew — o! 
 So that's where they keep the cheese, as the rat said when 
 the trap nipped him. But I don't know that it makes your 
 action any wiser. Have you counted the cost, all the cost, 
 to him and to you?" 
 
 "I've counted the cost to her, and that's quite enough for 
 me," said Damaris quietly. 
 
 "God bless you, my dear!" said the old man simply. "I 
 wish I'd known a woman like you when I was young. It 
 would have saved me some regrets. And they say women 
 can't stand by one another, too. For," he held up a fore- 
 finger, "let me tell you, I can see round a corner sometimes, 
 and I know it's cost you more than you'll acknowledge." 
 
 As she looked up, he asked — 
 
264 A Man of Genius 
 
 "Is it easier to bear without words, my dear?" 
 "Yes, please, Dr. Dayman," she answered, leaning 
 against his shoulder for a minute. 
 And some people called Dr. Dayman rough. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 THE CRADLE OF A CHILD 
 
 IN the scented wind of midsummer the elm trees 
 swayed above the field; across the sky, like moving 
 towers, floated the masses of cumulus cloud called "the 
 cloud of the day"; a sighing breath of delicate sweetness 
 fluttered above the billowy mass of dried hay in the field 
 below the garden where Damaris was bending above a 
 bed of seedlings. Over the gate came a husky voice that 
 remarked — 
 
 ''I've been to see the old dummun over yonder. Thought 
 I, 'tis as well to know what's afore 'ee, if you can." 
 
 Damaris looked up to see old Grylls leaning on his stick 
 to watch her labours. Occasionally he went further, and 
 came into the garden to give her advice, or even actual 
 assistance. He had often made himself useful in breaking 
 up rough ground for her. 
 
 "Mrs. Velly, I suppose you mean. Well, do you think 
 she'll be an addition to our colony?" asked Damaris. 
 
 "An eye like a gimlet and a nose like a scenting hound," 
 said old Josh Grylls firmly, "and in a neighbour neither's 
 exactly what you'd wish to pray for. But I'll tell 'ee all 
 about it, missie," he added, taking a firmer hold on the 
 stick on which he leant. "Yesterday morning I stepped 
 across and stood in the woman's doorway. Her sat inside 
 knitting for dear life. 
 
 "'Good morning, ma'am,' says I. 'Fine morning for 
 the time of the year.' 
 
 ""Tis mostly fine in June,' says she. 
 265 
 
266 A Man of Genius 
 
 "'Well/ thought I, 'that's true enough, though vinegary 
 said.' 
 
 "'How's your health, ma'am?' I asked. 
 
 '"Health! I haven't any health,' snapped her. 
 
 '"Ay, you'm like me, naught but an aching carcass, 
 ma'am.' 
 
 "'Health,' her says; 'if I thought upon my health, I 
 should feel a pain fit to break my back, and a cruel stitch 
 in my side, and an ache like nails in my head. But I've no 
 time to think upon it.' 
 
 ""Tis the lumbagy with me, ma'am.' 
 
 " 'Then I shouldn't ha' thought you'd best stand in the 
 doorway, with the draught near cutting you in two,' saith 
 she. 
 
 '"Now,' thought I, 'that's asking me in as near as a lone 
 woman can go. So I thought I'd speak out.' 
 
 '"I'm a widowman,' said I, 'and never mean to leave 
 the state. For I'm a plain man, and as long as I can fry a 
 bit of bacon of a morning and shake a mat once a week, 
 I'll keep clear of holy matrimony.' 
 
 " 'Ay,' says she, 'saving Sally was your first. I've heard 
 tell of her. Never opened her front door once for the week, 
 and gave her stepson pasties made of eggs with dead chicks 
 in 'em. Till he up and went. The worm that turned they 
 call 'en hereabouts.' 
 
 "'Ay,' said I, 'but her didn't leave much after all, and 
 I've to rub along on but little.' You see, missie, I wanted 
 things put plain to her." 
 
 "I see," said Damaris with a laugh. The old man was 
 intensely conscious of his store of money in the bank, and 
 always on the look-out for man-traps. 
 
 "'Roast duck and onions yesterday,' sniffed Mrs. Velly, 
 looking out t'other side of me, as if I didn't stand in the 
 way. 
 
The Cradle of A Child 267 
 
 *"The old gander looked terrible peaky and oflF his feed,' 
 said I, 'and 'twas but to save 'en that I cut his throat. And 
 the onions spoiling for want of pulling, too. Rusty bacon 
 and hard cider is more in my line.' 
 
 '''And only enough for one,' saith she; 'thank 'ee for 
 telling me. But there wasn't any need, I do assure you.' 
 
 "Do 'ee think 'tis all plain between us now, missie? 
 For I wouldn't have her think I was making sheep's eyes at 
 her for all the gold in the mint." 
 
 "Perfectly plain, Grylls," said Damaris. "I feel abso- 
 lutely certain that Mrs. Velly hasn't the faintest idea of 
 setting her cap at you." 
 
 He turned away reassured, and Damaris heard him 
 chuckle as he crossed the green by the duck pond, his long 
 white beard, that hung like a curtain from his lower lip, 
 waving patriarchally against the rose-red of the sunset. 
 
 Between the three houses in the colony there had arisen 
 a state of armed neutrality, maintained, like the peace of a 
 mediaeval town, by the constant bearing of arms. For Mrs. 
 Velly passed her days furiously knitting jerseys and raging 
 at the way she had been displaced in her son's life by 
 Thyrza, while Damaris resented the constant espionage to 
 which she felt herself subjected. Finally, old Josh Grylls 
 had been dragged into the circle of strife by his dread of 
 Mrs. Velly. It fairly made his brain reel to see such a 
 sudden incursion of human beings into his corner of the 
 world where he had lived for years as lonely as a pelican. 
 Only ^Ir. Westaway, immersed in his dreams of the house 
 of hope that was rising in the w^elter of the city, and the 
 ducks, absorbed in the toothsome scum of the pond. 
 remained oblivious of this triangular duel. To Damaris the 
 thought of the old woman's bitter vigil was a daily annoy- 
 ance, for every one else in Beckland had some pleasant 
 fountain of delight, even if it were no more than the flight 
 
268 A Man of Genius 
 
 of pigeons from the dovecote, or the springing of God's 
 blessing out of the earth, as old Hooker hath it. But for 
 Mrs. Velly there was nothing but lonely bitterness, as she 
 brooded over the debt of £500 that yet remained owing. 
 
 At length came the earthquake that broke up this stagna- 
 tion. One morning, as the two girls passed the window of 
 Mrs. Velly's cottage, they saw a large picture propped up 
 on the table. Damaris knew at once that it must have 
 been placed there purposely, and at first she hoped that 
 Thyrza had not seen it. But one glance at the girl's tense, 
 white face undeceived her. 
 
 "I'm going in," said Thyrza in a quiet voice. "No, 
 don't try to stop me. It's no use at all." 
 
 The next moment she had pushed open the door and was 
 standing for the first time in her mother-in-law's cottage. 
 Mrs. Velly looked up from her incessant knitting. 
 
 "Ay," she said, "I thought you'd catch sight of it when 
 you passed. I put it there on purpose, for I wanted you to 
 see that though he has got a wife, he hasn't yet forgotten his 
 mother." 
 
 The three women stood facing the picture which seemed 
 to bind their lives together in a mingled bond of love and 
 hate. Mirrored in the still surface of a tree-encircled pool 
 the pictured sunset flamed, casting on the water red re- 
 flections that faded into purple in the far distance. 
 
 "He sent you that?" asked Thyrza, turning to the old 
 woman. Beneath her quiet tones there sounded an agony 
 of jealousy that was bliss unspeakable to Mrs. Velly's bitter, 
 lonely heart. 
 
 "Look, it's signed," she said, tilting the canvas slightly, 
 till they could read the signature and the date in the corner. 
 
 "He's never sent me a picture," said Thyrza stupidly, 
 being devoid of the pride that hides the sting of pain. 
 
 "Ah, well," laughed Mrs. Velly, "but there's been letters 
 
The Cradle of a Child 269 
 
 enough in all conscience. Do you think I haven't known 
 why the postman never misses a day except Sunday? And 
 there's been none for me for whole weeks at a time. Now 
 we're even, I reckon. There's a midsummer madness that 
 takes a man for a month or two, but that passes. You'll 
 find, my lady, that you've had your day, like me." 
 
 Damaris's heart was beating painfully in face of this bare 
 play of passion, for these women who faced one another, 
 bitter-lipped across the narrow table, were beyond her inter- 
 ference. 
 
 Thyrza suddenly put up her hand to her collar, and then 
 Damaris saw how white she was growing. 
 
 "Be careful," she cried to Mrs. Velly, ''you're doing 
 more harm than you know." 
 
 "Oh, I knew Thyrza's temper years before you ever set 
 eyes on her," sneered the old woman. "And what a fuss 
 because a man remembers the existence of his own mother. 
 Besides " 
 
 But she never finished her words, for the next moment 
 Thyrza swayed forward, in instinctive appeal for mercy or 
 help. 
 
 "You are a cruel woman," cried Damaris, moved outside 
 her usual quietude. 
 
 But again no one paid any heed to her, for Mrs. Velly, at 
 this sign of victory, was a changed woman. Putting her 
 arm round Thyrza she helped her to the old couch, and, 
 fetching water, held it to her lips, making her lie, white and 
 spent, on the patchwork cushions. 
 
 "Eh, my pretty, my pretty," cooed the old woman, hold- 
 ing the girl to her. "Why did 'ee never tell me anything? 
 Did you think I'd be cruel to my boy's wife? Why ever 
 didn't you come straight to me in your trouble?" 
 
 Neither of the two, in the kinship of race and blood, 
 even remembered the presence of Damaris. 
 
270 A Man of Genius 
 
 ''I was afraid," whispered Thyrza; "afraid you'd say I'd 
 ruined 'en." 
 
 ''But I knew it. I suspicioned it all the time, and it 
 angered me that you went to others for help. My son's 
 wife, the mother to be of my son's child," she said, rocking 
 the girl to and fro in an agony of joy at the renewal of life. 
 
 Damaris slipped out unnoticed; beside these mothers 
 o' men she felt a shadow from the dream world. The tears 
 smarted in her eyes as she walked away, marvelling at the 
 secrets of life that were hidden from her. 
 
 In the first gleam of dawn next day Damaris awoke, and 
 looking down the shadowy corridors of the inner life 
 expected to find them, as usual, full of nothing but memories 
 and old fancies, driving one another round in wearisome 
 iteration. But to-day, instead of the constant repetition 
 of bygone scenes which forms the content of so many 
 women's minds, she found a strange inward ferment; 
 from subliminal depths below they came, ideas, fancies, 
 pictures, scenes, characters, whirling like the cross currents 
 that falling raindrops sometimes show. Slowly she began 
 to disentangle the threads, fitting scene to character and 
 linking pictures to people, wondering all the time what 
 new birth had come to her. Before long, however, she had 
 learnt to recognise that this was a gift bom of sorrow and 
 disappointment. 
 
 For here, to the woman, is the power of inspiration. 
 Her personal grief becomes like the straining agony of the 
 violins when they work upon the quivering nerves; it 
 awakes her; it drives away the mental inertia that, given to 
 a woman for safeguard in her child-bearing duties, prevents 
 her from enjoying the actual strife of mental labour as a 
 man does. In the sting of personal disappointment the 
 mind seeks the narcotic of emotional creation. With the 
 passing of the pain the power often goes, but meanwhile 
 
The Cradle of a Child 271 
 
 the writer, the actress, has been bom. Were all the \v(jrkl 
 full of happy women there would be no artists among 
 them. For just as a man drinks because he likes it, and a 
 woman because it brings forgctfulness, so the creative im- 
 pulse in a woman is born of pain, not mentality. A wave 
 of sorrow, the empty heart — and some new human dream: 
 this is the history of a woman-artist's life. 
 
 Then, in the early mornings, Damaris began to write, 
 with Danny, the long-bodied Scottish terrier that Dr. Day- 
 man had given her as a consolation for Beckland, beside 
 her. He learnt to watch for his mistress's footstep on 
 these bright summer days, and to refrain from barking, as 
 he ran from his kennel, with his long-nailed toes going patter, 
 patter on the flags. Years after, whenever she looked at 
 the pages of the "Beckland book," Damaris always heard 
 the pattering of Danny's toes, though then he slept three 
 feet down in mother earth, and his lush red tongue would 
 never again lap milk from her early morning tea saucer. 
 
 They were good moments those, when Damaris felt her- 
 self coming into the birthright of power and the long beams 
 cf sunlight, drowsy with the drone of bees, fell in bands of 
 blessed gold before her eyes. For, like the seed in the 
 earth, creative power must lie hidden in the darkness of 
 death and winter, till it rise at the mandate of the life 
 spirit. And in the thin shoot of green is joy unspeakable. 
 
 Yet Damaris still sometimes slept with her pillow wet 
 with tears. For in the four-square walls of the city whose 
 streets are golden, and even amidst the hymning of the 
 psalms of victor}', a woman misses the homely |)lant called 
 heartsease, and the still homelier plant called lad's love, 
 both of which grow in many a simple woman's garden plot, 
 where the shouting of merry children sounds. 
 
 For Thyrza there was but one event in the day — the 
 arrival of a letter from Ambrose. Every morning, with 
 
272 A Man of Genius 
 
 palpitating tremors, she lay in wait for the postman at the 
 garden gate. Then there would come the sound of hurry- 
 ing footsteps and a whisper, ''It's come, it's come!" 
 
 "Well, how do you like this one?" asked Damaris, as 
 she rolled out the dough for a pie, while Thyrza, curled up 
 in the window-seat, pored over the day's joy. Every morn- 
 ing they discussed the quality of the letter, like connois- 
 seurs over a brand of wine. 
 
 ''I like the end, where it begins 'little wife,' very much," 
 said Thyrza, following the lines with her finger, and saying 
 the words over to herself. "But I don't care much for the 
 rest. There's only three 'dearests' in the whole, and not 
 a single 'darling,' though I ordered one. Most of it is 
 just an answer to what you made me write." 
 
 The daily letter to Ambrose had been rather in the 
 nature of a daily sorrow, till Damaris rashly undertook to 
 assist in the composition of the scholarly portions, where 
 Thyrza felt herself lost. It v/as all written in his wife's 
 handwriting, and foolish Ambrose merely supposed that 
 the child was mentally developing with tropic quickness. 
 The Thyrza he knew best of all revealed herself in the cir- 
 cular kiss-marks, in the wail of longing, or in the passionate 
 words of memory. 
 
 "There's something in it I don't like, though," said 
 Thyrza suddenly. "There was a packet this morning, and 
 it's got a present for my birthday." 
 
 "Well, Thyrza," said Damaris, briskly tapping her roll- 
 ing-pin to get the flour off, "I don't see why you shouldn't 
 have a packet, though it's a day too early. May I see?" 
 
 It was a gold buckle with Waller's lines engraved at the 
 back : — 
 
 " A narrow compass ! and yet there 
 Dwells all that's good, and all that's fair; 
 Give me but what this ribband bound, 
 Take all the rest the sun goes round." 
 
The Cradle of a Child 273 
 
 "It's beautiful, and the grace of the thought is what I 
 should like best if I were you," said Damaris. 
 
 "Oh, it isn't that I don't know it's beautiful. But some- 
 how, 'tis so like Ambrose to send me this and no money. 
 For," she added in a low voice, "I ought to pay something 
 for my keep, and I did ask 'en for it and he never noticed. 
 And there's all the debt that his mother remembers every 
 hour. I didn't ought to have presents, with things like 
 that. But he'd rather give presents than pay his debts." 
 
 Damaris was silent, for here was a sentiment of some 
 subtlety from an unexpected quarter. 
 
 "Oh," cried Thyrza, "I love to think 'en perfect, and 
 here I be talking about 'en like this." 
 
 "I know," said Damaris, "it's hard when one sees the 
 spots in our sun. The happiest women never see them, I 
 believe. They remain blind to the end, and remember 
 this, a man never worries about little debts and little duties 
 as women do. Don't make a mountain out of a molehill, 
 Thyrza. And as for paying for your keep, you do that with 
 your work." 
 
 "I give you such trouble about my lessons," said Thyrza 
 in a low voice, "but you always want me to read about 
 dead people, and I don't care to know what's over and done 
 with ever so long ago. You seem to think more about what 
 happened a hundred years ago than about what happens 
 now." 
 
 "There isn't much that does happen now, is there?" 
 
 "There's Ambrose's letter always," said Thyrza naively. 
 "There, you finish that," she said, thrusting her sewing at 
 Damaris. 
 
 "Oh, Thyrza, Thyrza, what cobbling," sighed Damaris 
 with a half-smile, as she inspected the work. She had con- 
 stantly to play the part of Penelope, and rip out at night the 
 work done by day on the cobwebby garments that Thyrza 
 18 
 
 4 
 
274 A Man of Genius 
 
 handled so lovingly and so inefficiently. "And have you 
 read your history yet ?" asked Damaris, lapsing virtuously 
 into the schoolmistress. 
 
 "No; I forgot," said Thyrza mendaciously. " Ambrose- 
 won 't love me any more for knowing who Drake was." 
 
 "Perhaps not," said Damaris with an edge in her voice; 
 "but there are other things in the world for you besides 
 Ambrose, I suppose." 
 
 "Only his baby," said Thyrza shamelessly, as she 
 luxuriously stretched her arms to the radiant sky. 
 
 So it always ended. The History oj the English People 
 was usually defeat number one for Damaris, the French 
 exercise, scribbled and illegible, always defeat number two, 
 in this tussle of the studies. 
 
 On the other hand, Thyrza greedily devoured any story 
 with a homely, familiar atmosphere, and Silas Marner was 
 the greatest comfort in those days to poor Damaris, as she 
 waged a losing fight with a mind devoid of background; 
 for over the village pictures of that exquisite idyll Thyrza 
 would pore by the hour. Damaris congratulated herself 
 on the fact that the girl turned to it, instead of to the highly- 
 spiced tales of fashionable life that she had feared would 
 be the chief attraction for her in the book world. But there 
 was, in truth, no trace of snobbery in such a child of the 
 nature powers. At last, Thyrza's impulsive, outspoken 
 womanliness, at once her greatest danger and her greatest 
 charm, vanquished even her slack habit of prevaricating; 
 for, as in a little animal, fear alone aroused deception in 
 her, and she had no longer any fear of either Mr. Westaway 
 or Damaris. 
 
 Ultimately Thyrza's preceptress gave up the struggle to 
 educate by books, for a far older teacher than Damaris had 
 taken the girl-wife by the hand, and as the glory of the 
 summer noons widened into ever greater brilliance, Thyrza 
 
The Cradle of a Child 
 
 275 
 
 entered into the lyric rapture of natural motherhood, lapped 
 like a child in the peace of happy waiting. 
 
 The sight of nature's wonder-working liand, indeed, 
 taught Damaris the great lesson she needed. For the first 
 effect of contact with the old devil of the flesh in women 
 whose lives have been passed in nun-like seclusion is a 
 strained seeking after spirituality. They become bitter 
 maids, to whom the warmth of life is no better than the 
 sun kissing carrion. Damaris was saved from this fate by 
 learning, as she watched Thyrza, that even the flesh has 
 its noble part to play in the growth of the spirit. 
 
 In her green dress, hatless and untrammelled, directly 
 her share of the household work was done, Thyrza would 
 start for the cliffs, where in some shaded cranny she would 
 sit for hours, crooning to herself low snatches of the tunes 
 she had learnt from Ambrose. Every evening Damaris 
 could hear, as :he returned, the notes of ''The Wind Among 
 the Barley." 
 
 7^ 
 
 fcj^M K i= N I h I hir r ^ 
 
 p^r:-- 
 
 I 
 
 mf 
 
 — M^=^ 
 
 
 
 tj 
 
 "MOWING THE BARLEY." 
 By permission of the collectors of the Folk Songs from Somerset, 
 Mr. Cecil J. Sharp and the Rev. Charles L. Marson. 
 
276 A Man of Genius 
 
 Over and over again she sang them from a body pulsing 
 with the sun's kiss and v^ild with the whisper of the sea 
 wind. Then, poppy-sweet with sunshine and freshness, she 
 would lie on the couch with Danny, often falling asleep to 
 the sound of Mr. Westaway's voice as he read aloud some 
 story of the childhood of the world. Every night she slept 
 in moonlight or in starlight, and the languor of summer 
 only strengthened the life-power of her heart, till even 
 Ambrose's letters had little power to rouse her. 
 
 At night she would whisper to Damaris, "He's coming 
 very near now. Every day he's coming faster and faster 
 to me." 
 
 And it was not of Ambrose that she spoke. 
 
 But the radiant well-being ceased in Thyrza when the 
 valleys began to fill every evening with "the cloud of the 
 night," as country people call the low-lying meadow fogs, 
 and as the sea-wind sighed o' nights across the window- 
 panes. The touch of chill gave Thyrza a pinched look that 
 only died away from her in the brilliant noonday sunshine. 
 
 Damaris sent for a white fur cloak, hoping that the 
 warm luxury and beauty of the garment would soothe the 
 child; but though she wore it gratefully enough, the spirit 
 of sad restlessness increased, till, whenever the sea was 
 moaning in the long nights, Damaris got into the habit of 
 crossing from her own room to Thyrza's and lying down 
 beside the little piece of magnetic life. 
 
 "I haven't been in rages much lately, have I?" asked 
 Thyrza one night as they lay listening to the wind in the 
 chimney-tops. "I remembered that I mustn't now." 
 
 "You've been very good," said Damaris. 
 
 "I'm not afraid with you, somehow," answered Thyrza. 
 
 "Why are you afraid, child?" 
 
 "'Tis all dark in front. Nobody knows what there may 
 be waiting for a body." 
 
The Cradle of a Child 277 
 
 "Do you mean in the future?" 
 
 "Iss; what's to be is hid. There's somcthinf; bchinrl the 
 child. Behind all I know that's coming, there's something 
 else." 
 
 "The child's father, you mean.'' 
 
 "No; I don't mean him. There's something else — 
 waiting." 
 
 "You don't feel ill, do you, Thyrza?" 
 
 "Not a bit. 'Tisn't that; it's something a long way off. 
 But I want to ask you to forgive me all for the way I woukhi't 
 write my exercises. For I know that, deep down, you 
 don't really love me — not really. You're only sorry because 
 I've been light." 
 
 "Not now, Thyrza, not now," cried Damaris. "I own 
 that once you seemed to me not really womanly, but I know 
 that now there is the true woman being born." 
 
 Somehow, to Damaris, Thyrza seemed infinitely precious, 
 a treasure won from the seven devils of spiritual emptiness. 
 She put out her hand and touched her tenderly, as a child 
 stealthily touches a beloved possession. For Thyrza was 
 being star-led, like the wizards of old, to the cradle of a 
 little child, where in the wonder of birth she was to put her 
 hand on one of the secrets of the unseen from which life 
 comes. 
 
I 
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 •THE MYSTERY PLAY 
 
 OVER the tables in Mr. Trevithick's workroom the 
 swing Hghts in their green shades threw circles of 
 light on the great sheets of architect's plans that lay every- 
 where. From the open windows came, in the night still- 
 ness, the lapping of the water against the edge of the quay. 
 
 ''Now," said the senior partner to Ambrose, as they both 
 lit their pipes and leant back in their chairs, "what you 
 want is staying power; you've no balance. You put furious 
 energy into some simple task that doesn't want it — and then, 
 ouf 1 you're down again, done, in body and mind. I beheve 
 you spend as much force cleaning your teeth of a morning 
 as Cobbledick does over a day's work. Not that I want you 
 to emulate Cobbledick's achievements." 
 
 Mr. Trevithick had a fine mellow voice, and his laugh 
 was as kindly as his nature. The two men had been sitting 
 till past midnight over a plan that ought to have been 
 posted in the morning to the secretary of a committee. 
 However, it was now gone, and Mr. Trevithick was perfectly 
 aware that people who knew him allowed a margin when 
 they named a time. 
 
 He now sat well into the fireplace, so that the smoke 
 from his pipe might escape by the chimney. It was a 
 habit derived from the time when, in his mother's cottage, 
 he had been allowed one pipe a night — after she had 
 gone to bed. The smoke regularly puffed into her room 
 above from the chimney, but it gave her a homely feeling, 
 V- 278 
 
The Mystery Play 279 
 
 and it is possible that the scent of Sam's pipe might have 
 added a joy to the golden pavements up above, had a 
 smoke-ring been suffered to escape through the interstices. 
 
 ''I know, sir," said Ambrose, ruffling his hair; ''but 
 there are such a devilish number of tricks a fellow has to 
 wring the neck of in himself." 
 
 Mr. Trevithick, who habitually understated in his desire 
 to be accurate, hated strong language even more than the 
 would-be smartness of epigram; he remained a peasant, 
 with a peasant's suspicion of anything facile or glib. He 
 went on more seriously, for he suspected Ambrose of a 
 spice of flippancy. 
 
 *'Now, that won't do. It may be all very well to fret 
 and fume, for a great man who can live by two hours' con- 
 centrated labour; but you'll have to work all day and half 
 the night for many a year to come." 
 
 With eyebrows raised almost to his thinning locks, Mr. 
 Trevithick lectured on. 
 
 "In this trade a man who goes far has to run long, and 
 that's all there is about it." 
 
 He watched a pupil in whom he was interested as he 
 would have watched a new "staying" process, for to Mr. 
 Trevithick the only difference between men and material 
 was that, unfortunately, the men were not the same grain 
 all through. 
 
 "Do you know why I never sent you again to Tona- 
 combe ? " 
 
 "I supposed it must be because the work was badly 
 done." 
 
 "No; 'twasn't ill done." This was the highest praise 
 ever extracted from the senior partner, who was never well, 
 but always "middling," and never prosperous, but always 
 "rubbing along." He had, in fact, nothing of the business 
 instinct that makes a man perpetually seem busier than he 
 
28o A Man of Genius 
 
 is. "But you've got to learn to take what comes along. 
 It was a bit of a lesson for you when Jerman gave it to 
 another chap. But now that we've seen what you're like 
 in the office, I want to put your nose to the grindstone at 
 outside work. I'm going to send you over to Instow to 
 work at that schoolhouse, and after a bit I shall put you 
 there as clerk of works. There's too much theory about 
 you; a bath of bricks and mortar's capital for that com- 
 plaint." 
 
 Ambrose flushed rather angrily, for he had been at work 
 all day and his nerves were on edge. Yet he knew that he 
 v/as getting the best possible training, and he went back to 
 his lodgings treading on air, to lie awake for hours in a 
 brain-whirl of imaginary labours and difficulties. For a 
 clerk of works has to pass, not only building stuff, but 
 men, and is expected to guide his principal in the tender 
 subject of money advances to builders, since he is on the 
 spot and can tell a man's financial standing better than 
 his chief who spends an hour or two at the works. It is a 
 double test of grip and honesty, of sense and foresight. 
 
 The senior partner often said that he spent his time 
 being ground fine between the nether millstone and the 
 upper. Though his person was not affected thereby, his 
 temper certainly was, for his clients wanted the utmost 
 expenditure of effort from him at the smallest possible 
 cost to themselves, and the pupils worked with one eye 
 fixed on the clock. But in Ambrose he had found a pupil 
 who would work after hours, toiling at the mechanical 
 labour of specifications or plans as cheerfully at midnight 
 as at mid-day, and Mrs. Trevithick saw less of her husband 
 than ever, for the senior partner paid Ambrose for his 
 help by opening up the stores of his experience. And in 
 everything he did Mr. Trevithick gave good measure. 
 
 In the months that followed Ambrose learnt to love the 
 
The Mystery Play 281 
 
 tinkle of the mason's trowel, the tapping of the carj^enter's 
 hammer, the rattle and fall of loads of bricks. For there 
 is a joy in the master)' of things that nothing else can give 
 — in the handling of stone and clay a faint shadowing forth 
 of the creative thrill that forms a universe from the germ 
 of protoplasm. Yet, sometimes he felt a passing sense of 
 regret, for in the hot noon of the workaday world his boyish 
 visions seemed to have about them the still beauty of the 
 dawn; so the woman in her kingdom may look back on 
 the maid that once drew aside the curtains of life. 
 
 They were ugly, too, very often, these schoolrooms and 
 chapels, ver}' far indeed from the pillared vistas of his 
 dreams. They even had the sash windows, which Ambrose, 
 as a devout lover of Gothic, had learnt to abhor. Yet in 
 material, at least, they were honest, and honesty in archi- 
 tecture is what truth is in theology, knowledge in law, and 
 faithfulness in medicine — the supreme test of a man's 
 worth. 
 
 "I suppose," said 'Mr. Pearse to Ambrose one night, as 
 he met him coming back from work, **you couldn't spare 
 a minute to look at a little lot I've got here?" 
 
 It was a mere ja^on de parler by way of apology, and 
 Ambrose followed the grocer as far as a field, marked by 
 one of those melancholy notice-boards that herald the 
 approaching death of some bit of natural beauty on the 
 outskirts of a town. 
 
 "Fine site, isn't it?" said Mr. Pearse. "I've just bought 
 it, and I'm going to run up a villa here. We're tired of the 
 racket of a business house, and the air's better up 
 here.' 
 
 "You'll come to us, I suppose," said Ambrose, thinking 
 gleefully how the senior partner would squirm at the 
 buttonholing that would be his portion at Mr. Pearse's 
 hands. 
 
282 A Man of Genius 
 
 "I'm coming to you," said he, with a twinkle. "You've 
 taste, that I can see, and I'd like to give 'ee a leg up. Now, 
 you can knock together a nice little plan for me, and if 
 there are points in it that I haven't a mind to, why, we'll 
 go over them together." 
 
 Mr. Pearse calculated that he was doing a good stroke 
 of business for himself, since Mr. Trevithick, as befitted a 
 master-workman, was autocratic, but with a 'prentice hand 
 he himself could do all the planning as a hobby and quote 
 enormously from The Seven Lamps. Besides, Ambrose 
 would be cheap. 
 
 "Couldn't be done, Mr. Pearse," said Ambrose. 
 
 "Oh, come now. I'll make it worth your while, for I'm 
 prepared to put my hand into my pocket, let me tell you. 
 And when you're up in the world, William Pearse will be 
 proud to remember he gave you your first order." 
 
 Ambrose laughed outright in joy at the man's naive 
 delight in his own patronage. 
 
 "No, no, Mr. Pearse," he said; "you see I'm in the 
 firm of Trevithick and Jerman. I can't take private jobs, 
 though, of course, I'm much flattered by your offer." 
 
 To Mr. Pearse's commercial experience this only signi- 
 fied "putting a figure on himself" on Ambrose's part. 
 Accordingly he named his price for the plan and ultimately 
 doubled it, but in vain, till at last he departed in high 
 dudgeon at the airs of understrappers. 
 
 In nothing is it more true than in the handling of money 
 that the hand gets engrained with what it works in, for its 
 power suggests the sudden ease with which a man rises at 
 the completion of a long, lonely task and goes out into the 
 gay bustle of the streets. Especially by a man in Ambrose 
 Velly's position everything is tried by the golden standard; 
 for the thickness of walls, the depth of cement, the width 
 of corridors, depend on this tiny symbol, and every oppor- 
 
The Mystery Play 283 
 
 tunity of beauty and convenience is weighed in the balance 
 of a cheque. As for himself, he sometimes felt like an 
 Atlas heaving the muscles of his body to cast off the burdens 
 that oppressed. Yet the mood of depression seldom 
 lasted long; for it was the lures of the world, rather than 
 its drawbacks, that provided a pitfall for Ambrose. 
 
 Mentally he was weak in construction as an architect, 
 but strong in detailed ornament. He could sketch decora- 
 tions for wall spaces, for cornices and niches, so rapidly 
 that his fancy outstripped his hand. Every time the men 
 at the office watched him work in this manner, he saw the 
 vision of a school of designers, trained by himself, as by a 
 craftsman of the Middle Ages. Behind all, there was the 
 power, the uplift, that the grey walls of Tonacombe could 
 give. For the land hunger bit sore in the days when a 
 bed-sitting room in a row of brick-built boxes was his fate. 
 
 He knew the itch of power, though not the itch of covetous- 
 ness. 
 
 Coming into the office next morning, he received a 
 message to go straight up to the senior partner's room. 
 He found Mr. Trevithick with his share of the morning's 
 mail, the sifted portion that had passed the rough filter- 
 bed below. 
 
 "Read that," he said, putting a letter into Ambrose's 
 hand. 
 
 It was a request from a London firm that a good draughts- 
 man should be sent at once for a two months' engagement 
 on detailed drawings for several sets of designs that were 
 wanted immediately. 
 
 ''Like to go?" asked Mr. Trevithick. 
 
 It was good pay and it was London. Moreover, the 
 work was well within his powers, and there would be a solid 
 satisfaction in undertaking it. Yet he hesitated. 
 
 "You think you're too good for the work, perhaps," 
 
284 A Man of Genius 
 
 said Mr. Trevithick testily. He was apt to be gouty and 
 snappish in the morning. 
 
 "That's not it, sir, at all. I should like the job very 
 much, but I must let my wife know before I settle on any- 
 thing." 
 
 ''It'll do you good to get into fresher air, for you've pretty 
 well sucked the ozone out of Bideford air. Not that it takes 
 long to do that." 
 
 ''I'd like to go. But it's my wife. I don't know that 
 she'll want me to go so far." 
 
 "Feeling his chains a bit," shrugged Mr. Trevithick to 
 himself. Aloud he said, "Ride over and see her this morn- 
 ing, and we'll wire to-night. That'll be soon enough." 
 
 "He'll go, if I know a woman when I see one," said the 
 senior partner to himself as Ambrose left. For during her 
 one visit to her husband at Bideford, Mr. Trevithick had 
 been greatly struck by Thyrza's simple directness, her 
 wide-eyed glance and freedom from pretence. Wife as she 
 was, she retained the virginal touch that never leaves a 
 woman who is a mere instrument of nature. Under the 
 deepening influences of her life it almost touched austerity, 
 and the austere is never more penetrating in charm than 
 when it is suggested amidst the opulence of physical beauty. 
 Such a woman as that would have, so Mr. Trevithick 
 thought, but little of the merely feminine about her, and 
 he was a good judge of the feminine, for he had made a 
 life-long study of it in his wife. Yet, he understood Thyrza, 
 whom he had seen for an hour, better than his wife, whom 
 he had known for twenty years. For it is the people we 
 live with whom we know least. 
 
 Ambrose, directed by Damaris, found his wife that after- 
 noon on Wimbury Head, as she sat facing the dim lines of 
 the far-off Welsh coast. 
 
 The surface of the sea, far below the ramparts of the 
 
The Mystery Play 285 
 
 prehistoric hill encampment, was heaving slowly in the 
 wide breaths of placid sleep. In the west, from beneath 
 the cloud that obscured the sun's disc, a mist of light, 
 sulphurous-red in splendour like a gauze of blood, veiled 
 all the distant peaks of the coast-line, till they vanished in 
 a mystery of fire. Across the heaving steel-blue mirror of 
 the sea the sun sent towards the east a long searchlight, 
 that fell on the two tree-crowned cliffs that tower below 
 the jutting tableland of Gallantry Bower. Slowly the red- 
 gold ray glorified each peak in turn, transforming the rock- 
 shapes into a summer of light and warmth, and, as it passed 
 to the next cliff, leaving black chasms of darkness in the 
 cavernous bays. Across the red ray, mid-way between 
 cliff top, and wave-foam, seamews, hovering for a second, 
 poised and floated into the surrounding shadow. 
 
 In this vision of splendour the senses were absorbed in 
 the pleasure of sight, but as the grey depths conquered, 
 the ear was filled once more with the roar of the ground 
 sea that echoed along the whole coast, till nothing was 
 left but the weaving of sound in a rhythm of ceaseless 
 music. 
 
 From this Thyrza turned with a sense that she was no 
 longer alone. She grew very pale when she saw who it was 
 that disturbed her reverie, for a week-day visit from Am- 
 brose was an unprecedented event. 
 
 "My dear," he said, drawing her down by his side, "I've 
 got some good news for you. The Chief wants me to go to 
 London as a draughtsman for a couple of months. He's a 
 thorough good chap, and he throws chance after chance in 
 my way. This will mean an opportunity to get in touch 
 with the headquarters of things." 
 
 Thyrza shut her eyes for a moment, tr>'ing to realise how 
 the busy whirlpool of city life must call to a man. Yet 
 she could not do it, for in the little round of sameness that 
 
286 A Man of Genius 
 
 was hers, nothing could be stranger than the hurrying rush 
 of a business man's Hfe. All she knew was that he was going, 
 and was glad to go. Yet she fought for self-possession. 
 
 ''When do you go?" she asked quietly. 
 
 " To-morrow or next day, I suppose. If I can get off, that 
 is. Aren't you glad for me ? But I wish it wasn't just now." 
 
 ''Oh, I'm glad you said that," she burst out, "for we 
 may not meet again, you know." 
 
 "Thyrza, for God's sake, don't talk like that. I ought 
 to have thought, but I'll not go. No, I'll tell the Chief how 
 things stand." 
 
 "Oh, but you must go. I wouldn't keep you, for a man 
 must go where his work calls him. But, Ambrose, there's 
 something I want to talk to you about. It's this. We're 
 taking too much from the Westaways; we've thrown our- 
 selves on them as if we were helpless. I don't like it. 
 You may not mind, but I do. For we're taking more than 
 we can ever pay back. I ought to have gone to live with 
 your mother, if I couldn't live with you." 
 
 "I don't feel that, for they both love you, my Thyrza." 
 
 "It's not for me they do it, it's for you." 
 
 "It's too late, now," he said, shrugging his shoulders 
 with a dull sense of annoyance. "Oh, Thyrza, don't spoil 
 the last minutes we can have together for ever so long." 
 
 She laughed. "What a child you are, Ambrose. If there 
 was the leastest little sweet at the bottom of a barrel of 
 shavings, you'd be sure to find it." 
 
 "Of course I would. That's my philosophy, and it's 
 better than Marcus Aurelius or Confucius, or any philo- 
 sophical Johnny whatsoever. Come, let's get into the 
 sunshine. It's cold and dark here." 
 
 At this practical expression of his philosophy she laughed 
 again, and as they walked along the cHff, following the sun- 
 light, she grew reconciled to Ambrose's absence, for nothing 
 
The Mystery Play 287 
 
 in his living presence could long withstand his deep-seated 
 happiness of disposition, 
 
 ''It's been a wonderful summer," she said, ''and when 
 you come again there'll be something for you to see, perhaps. 
 A new friend — a Httle, little friend, Ambrose." 
 
 She suddenly sobbed to herself in the luxur}' of self-pity. 
 
 "But," she continued, "I love you true, Ambrose, and 
 you're to be a great man. Now that I've a man, and am 
 soon to have a man-child, I must be great, too, and bear 
 things." 
 
 It was her confession of faith. 
 
 Watching her, Ambrose weakened unaccountably. "I 
 can't go and leave you like this," he said. "I really can't." 
 
 "Yes, you can," said Thyrza. It was a favourite phrase 
 of his, and they had often laughed over it. Yet it was a 
 fresh pang to Thyrza to remember the occasions on which 
 he had used it. At last she whispered, "Now I want you 
 to go and leave me here, for I don't want to see people 
 just yet. After all, I'm almost glad it's happened; for you 
 do care, and I wasn't quite sure you would. Now go and be 
 a great man." 
 
 He laughed, as he held her for a moment, at this sketch 
 of his future business in life. Yet it was a bitter moment, 
 even to him. 
 
 When she looked round from the sun he was out of 
 sight, hurraing down the headland as fast as his feet would 
 carry him. At Beckland he found Mr. Westaway alone 
 in the sitting-room, playing patience at the old "gate" 
 table, which Danny hated, for the square frame of it 
 got in his way. Damans considered those games of patience 
 a triumph on her part, f(jr at first Mr. Westaway had 
 abjured all the small alleviations of life, including patience 
 and backgammon, in the austere monkishness that had 
 become a mania with him. 
 
288 A Man of Genius 
 
 One night she placed a small case of patience cards on 
 his writing-table and silently watched the effect of sugges- 
 tion when her father came in, tired from an afternoon's 
 gardening. She laughed softly as he took up the case and, 
 automatically dealing out the cards, began a game. 
 
 It was incomprehensible to him when, in a sudden 
 outburst of pleasure at her own perspicacity, she implanted 
 a kiss on the back of his head. Then it dawned on him. 
 
 "Well, well," he said, "here I am at my old tricks again. 
 But where did the cards come from?" 
 
 "I sent for them," laughed Damaris, happy at seeing 
 him return to some of his old ways. 
 
 Ambrose thought that Mr. Westaway's changed method 
 of Hfe had added years to his age. The sudden upheaval 
 of his will, that had ended in his leaving the Church, 
 seemed almost a last effort of expiring vitaHty. For every 
 new environment demands fresh powers of reaction, 
 powers in which old age is necessarily deficient. One 
 must be young to enjoy experiment, and it was a hard 
 deprivation for Mr. Westaway to miss the routine of a 
 bustling life of small engagements, and harder still to feel 
 that all his effort would leave hardly a ripple on the sea of 
 life. Merely a new type of institution and an empty pro- 
 test against the current of the day's thought. 
 
 For Mr. Westaway longed vainly, like many men of his 
 generation, for some great conception that should ennoble 
 both personal and national life. Yet, in the shifting sands 
 of a period of religious transition, he foimd nothing solid in 
 the creeds, nothing noble in the material poHtics of his day, 
 for the mean success of commercialism has, for the time, be- 
 littled our hopes of human greatness. Sadly, then, he raised 
 an altar to an unknown God, who rules by causes that are 
 hard to see and effects that are harder still to bear. Yet, 
 like many thinkers before him, he found comfort in the 
 
The Mystery Play 289 
 
 simple tasks of helpfulness, and every stone of the new 
 building that was rising in London, every medical dis- 
 covery that could affect child-life, was followed by him with 
 an intensity of imaginative sympathy that was heightened 
 by his delicate health and consequent aloofness from the 
 concerns of active life. 
 
 When Ambrose had gone, Damaris went out to the yard 
 behind to search in the hen-house for eggs wherewith to 
 make pancakes for Thyrza's supper, while Mrs. Velly stood 
 watching her son ride away. Then the two women glanced 
 across the duck pond at one another, with a thought in 
 common of Thyrza to whom his departure would be a 
 great sorrow. For the waiting time that is woman's special 
 lot had drawn the women at Beckland very close together. 
 
 When Thyrza at last returned Damaris caught her cold 
 hands. "My dear," she exclaimed, "you're so cold. Why 
 did you stay so late?" 
 
 "I was getting used to things," said Thyrza, "and it 
 took a time; for self's like an onion that'll spoil a dozen pans 
 of milk and come up as strong as ever in the boiling." 
 
 Then she added, with a quaver, "Did you see 'en?" 
 
 "Yes," said Damaris, "and in two months' time he'll be 
 back." 
 
 "And he'll be here, too," said Thyrza with an April 
 smile. For to these women "he" was already an inmate 
 of Beckland, and his wardrobe was nightly smoothed by 
 his mother's dimpled hands. 
 
 Had they sufficiently realised Ambrose Velly's hfe 
 during these first London months, Damaris and Thyrza 
 would have recognised in his letters the most promising 
 augury for the future. For that they came regularly was 
 proof positive of the hold a kindly tenderness still exercised 
 over him. 
 
 To a sensitive mind the first inrush of city life is over- 
 
 19 
 
290 A Man of Genius 
 
 whelming, confusing, even painful, like the pressing urgency 
 of a great crowd. It swamps all past experience in a 
 violent outburst of new sensations, till out of the ferment 
 of stimulus the mind begins to distinguish the separate 
 strands of influence that work on it. 
 
 It is common to speak of the temptations of great cities; 
 it would be more true to speak of the infinite upHft pro- 
 vided by the spectacle of effort all round, of active con- 
 tinuous effort in every direction, of effort to conquer, to 
 win, to gain a share of the good things on the splendidly 
 furnished tables of life. To pass from ofl&ce to street, from 
 shop to theatre, from Westminster to the Inns of Court, is 
 like being in the centre of a magnetic storm. It is truly 
 the greatest magnetic storm ever experienced on our 
 planet, this city life, for the electrical flow that carries our 
 messages is nothing beside the human will to live that 
 eddies all around. 
 
 Ambrose bathed in it, till the sense of Hfe thrilled in 
 brain and nerve fibre, driving out the passion of the flesh 
 for the time, and substituting a finer ferment. By the side 
 of this fiery flow of the higher energies the country air 
 seemed leaden. In the city the atmosphere was tense with 
 the fighting instincts. When the great lights flared and the 
 sky-signs gleamed under the stars, Ambrose felt one unit 
 of the procession of Hfe that passes, falls often, stumbling 
 in the darkness — but sometimes wins. He was frequently 
 flushed in those days, but not with any wine, save the wine 
 of life; frequently thrilHng, but seldom with the pulse of the 
 flesh. For the stimulus to the higher gratifications only 
 begins to fail when the sense of baffled powers beats back 
 the soul to lower joys. 
 
 Yet there was a fierceness about this city life that appalled 
 the country lad, fresh from the brotherliness of a small 
 town. The continuously changing faces of millions to 
 
The Mystery Play 291 
 
 whom he was nothing, the hard self-centredness of every- 
 one, gave him, at first, a sense of the black loneliness that 
 pierces to the very marrow of the spirit. For a time it was 
 even a relief to nod familiarly to an omnibus driver, to 
 recognise a cabman, or a policeman on his beat, to know 
 that, for a second at least, Ambrose Velly had emerged in 
 somebody's mind as an individuality. 
 
 Then the black mood passed, for the city gave him a 
 niche. Above all, she showed him what youth specially 
 needs to learn, the line of least resistance for his efforts. 
 
 One night, a few weeks after his arrival in London, Am- 
 brose entered a city church and sat down for a moment. 
 For the miraculous had taken place, and fair}'land had been 
 realised on the solid earth. The whole profession was 
 buzzing with the recent success of a young architect who 
 had gained in open competition the prize for a design of a 
 cathedral. Full of the spirit of "what man has done, man 
 can do," Ambrose sat Ustening to the war-march that was 
 booming from the organ, in the dim silence of the place, 
 where the murmur of London sounded as dreamlike as the 
 roar of the waves in a sea-shell. 
 
 "The music for strife," he thought, "and the building 
 for rest — the two sides of art. For Hfe is tidal; rest is fol- 
 lowed by toil, war by peace, light by darkness." He almost 
 fell asleep, till, as if a hand had ripped apart a curtain, he 
 sat bolt upright, his pulses beating like muffled drums. 
 For what he had been waiting for had come: the clear 
 sight. In all its details, even to the changing hghts that 
 flickered hour by hour through the windows as the sun 
 moved on its course, came the picture of the Gothic hall 
 that a city company wanted built. From point to point he 
 switched his mind, turning it Hke a searchlight from ex- 
 terior to interior, from comer to window, from roof to lin- 
 tels. Though he had no knowledge of it, the music led him 
 
292 A Man of Genius 
 
 on till, when it ceased, the electric thrill died down and he 
 went out of the church, quickly calculating how many hours 
 he could give to his design after the day's work at other men's 
 plans was over. For the date at which the competition 
 would close was not far off. 
 
 With a shudder he remembered the piano-practising girl 
 next door, for on such small wheels do great wheels turn 
 that a carpenter's hammer here below can shatter the 
 clearest dream, the most solemn vision, as long as it is 
 only enshrined in nerve fibre and grey matter. But in an 
 hour Ambrose had sought fresh rooms, with nothing more 
 nerve-shattering to be heard than the drip of a water-tap and 
 the wails of the cats. 
 
 He was voted a morose fellow by his colleagues at the office; 
 but they would have changed their minds had they heard 
 the song of the fiddle late at night, when Ambrose played 
 out the gratified vanity that capered in his heart at the 
 sight of his brain-child on paper, whilst, as he wandered 
 from Cicely Sweet to Arscott of Tetcott, the scheme of 
 to-morrow's work came to his mind. 
 
 Then, at last, from his bedroom window he would glance 
 at Orion's Belt, for that always carried him to Beckland and 
 the life waiting at the gates. But Thyrza wrote gaily, and 
 in the shining of the next spring's sun-rays there would be 
 two creations — the child of brain and the child of body — 
 called out of nothingness by the will of the universe that 
 masquerades as man's will in the Mystery Play called life. 
 Yet it was a good time for both husband and wife, this 
 period of struggle and loneliness. 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 THE WINGS OF THE WIND 
 
 AT last there came at Beckland what Damans always 
 called the day of the great terror. About midday, 
 across the clear December sky, there began to gather a 
 strange darkness that grew, moment by moment, blacker 
 and more pitchy, till the numbness of cold that came with 
 it seemed almost due to mere absence of light. Bonie on 
 a north-wester, that soon shifted to north-east, tiny particles 
 of ice, congeahng too rapidly to form snowflakes, filled all 
 the lower currents of air. Every ivy leaf on walls that 
 faced the wind soon acquired a solid sheath of ice, and the 
 window-panes between shone iridescent and opaque with 
 the same steel covering. All through the day the wind was 
 gathering slowly in speed, till it had reached the hurricane 
 power that is usually only encountered in Atlantic storms. 
 
 In the pitch blackness of early evening ]Mrs. Velly heard 
 a hurried knocking at her door. Opening it quickly, she 
 found Damaris panting on the doorstep, after her struggle 
 with the wind that was now flying past at a rate very near 
 eighty miles an hour. The three houses were shuttered 
 close against the violent raging that shrieked overhead, yet 
 long, silted columns of ice had filtered through the eyelet 
 holes of shutters and between the door-hinges. In the roar 
 of the wind a shout a foot or two away was quite inaudible, 
 and at first Mrs. Velly was barely able to distinguish the 
 words that seemed torn away from Damaris's Hps. Quickly, 
 however, she pulled her visitor into the cottage and shut 
 the door. 
 
 093 
 
294 A Man of Genius 
 
 "There's trouble," she exclaimed. "I've felt it coming 
 all this wisht day. Now, out with it. There's never any use 
 m waiting." 
 
 "It's all my fault. I ought to have noticed before I 
 want you to come to Thyrza at once." 
 
 ''Ah!" breathed the old woman, -I reckoned the storm 
 would rouse the blood of her. That chimney will be down 
 before the morning," she said, with a glance at the fire that 
 was sendmg great puffs of smoke across the room She 
 was merely talking to allow Damaris's tremWing hps to 
 stiffen. ^ 
 
 "I must get to Dr. Dayman, somehow," said Damaris 
 Oh, why didn't I notice before? I almost think she's 
 dying." 
 
 /'Now," said Mrs. Velly, planting firm hands on the 
 girl's shoulders, ''you mustn't lose your nerve " 
 ''But she's so ill." 
 
 "Ay, I'll warn she is. What I've got to say is this: we've 
 got a pretty stiff fight before us, you and me. Now when 
 you're m a tight place 'tis no mortal use saying, 'Oh what 
 I've got to bear,' or, 'Oh, will what I do be any good>' 
 All you've got to say is, 'What's the next thing ?'-and do 
 
 It. 
 
 That "you and me" was unspeakably comforting to 
 poor, inexperienced Damaris. All this time Mrs. Velly had 
 been extinguishing the fire and throwing together a bundle 
 of clothes. 
 
 "Now for it," she said, opening the door. 
 Outside a strange thing waited. For over the drifted 
 snow that vaguely covered the famihar hedges there reigned 
 utter stillness. It was so calm that the match Mrs. Velly 
 lit to show the step just burnt down in her hand instead 
 of being blown out. In the dim light the duck pond shone 
 with the black greyness of ice that is edged with snow. 
 
The Wings of the Wind 295 
 
 "Here, wait a bit," said Mrs. Veily, pausing to hammer 
 at Josh Grylls' cottage; *'he'd best come and sit with your 
 father. An^'^vay, too, he can fetch and cany, and 'twill he 
 safer for 'en in the farm than here, for 'tis a crazy sort of a 
 roof he's got." 
 
 She felt like the captain of a beleaguered garrison on the 
 eve of the siege. 
 
 *'The storm seems to have died down," said Damaris 
 joyfully. 
 
 ''My God!" said Mrs. Velly, ''don't you know what this 
 lull means? 'Tis just that we'm in the very heart of it. 
 'Twill be upon us again worse than ever, afore long." 
 
 The calm, indeed, lasted a matter of thirteen minutes, 
 but before the three were housed in the farm a howling gust 
 had caught them that tore at the very foundations of the 
 house. It took the combined strength of the three to force 
 the door close, and when at last this was accomplished, the 
 staircase opposite was covered with a sheet of slippery- ice. 
 
 "You'll never do it," said Mrs. Velly. "You'll never 
 get to the doctor to-night." 
 
 The two stood in the dark passage listening to the gusts 
 that beat against the walls. 
 
 " Go upstairs and see," said Damaris, quietly twisting her 
 shawl more firmly round her head. 
 
 She stood waiting for a few minutes, watched by the two 
 old men from the door of the kitchen, till at last Mrs. Velly 
 appeared at the top of the staircase, holding high a candle- 
 stick that guttered in the draught. 
 
 "Some one must go," she said curtly. 
 
 "I knew it," answered Damaris. "Only I can go. You 
 must stay with her. No, no," she protested, as the old men 
 interposed; "it's out of the question for either of you to 
 go." 
 
 She was sick with a dull terror of the cruelty of nature 
 
* 1 
 
 296 A Man of Genius 
 
 that tore at the window-panes and racked the girl upstairs; 
 but once outside the door, her strength rose to the need. 
 Inch by inch she fought her way to the garden gate, there 
 to cling to the bars for minutes that seemed hours. 
 
 The road was clean-swept in spots by the force of the 
 gale, though with drifts against the hedges that by morning 
 were six and seven feet deep. The danger, however, came 
 neither from drifts nor cold, but from suffocation by the 
 ice particles that tore against her, cutting the skin with 
 myriads of steel points. Again and again, too, she had to 
 force her way on hands and knees, always with the hideous 
 consciousness that it was her own ignorance that was risk- 
 ing two lives. 
 
 Left alone in the kitchen the two old men sat close to 
 the fire, hstening to the wild voices outside that mercifully 
 drowned all sounds from the room overhead. Mr. Westaway 
 groaned once, laying his head on his hand, as he pictured 
 his daughter's journey and reahsed his own helplessness. 
 Old Grylls tried to comfort him. 
 
 ''I tell 'ee what 'tis, maister," he said; ''when us put 
 seed to ground, us ha' got to trusten, and when us put 
 corpse to clay, us ha' got to trusten. There's nort else for 
 it." 
 
 "And in what, Grylls, especially when we put corpse to 
 clay, as you call it?" 
 
 Even in the tension of this night a little excursion into 
 the abstract was a relief to Mr. Westaway. Josh Grylls 
 answered indirectly — 
 
 "This is the way I look at it myself," he said. "Us 
 shouldn't have summer if so be spring didn't come first, 
 nor winter without the fall. Same with life and death. 
 Us have come out of darkness into Hght once, and 'tis true 
 that us go again into darkness. Ay, but why shouldn't 
 there be a light t'other side of that darkness? For 'tis 
 
The Wings of the Wind 297 
 
 allays that way; night and day, and night and day, light 
 out of the darkness allays. And as us ha' seen light once, 
 why not twice? Can 'ee go one better than that, sir?" 
 
 "I can't even go as far as that, Giylls," said Mr. Westa- 
 way sadly. 
 
 *'Hark to the wind!" said Josh, holding up his hand. 
 
 The forces of death and destruction raged all round them, 
 seeking entrance by any cranny. The farm seemed set in 
 the midst of a sea of breakers, and great guns hke battering 
 rams roared against windows and doors. Every piece of 
 timber in the structure was straining, every slate in the roof 
 rattling. As each blast died away momentarily, they heard 
 strange whistling sounds Hke death signals to an unseen 
 sharpshooter. In a moment of comparative quiet, a rhyth- 
 mic moaning came from overhead, broken only by Mrs. 
 Velly's voice, or by the noise of coal being piled on the bed- 
 room grate. 
 
 For everywhere, even in the zone of warmth before the 
 fire, the cold crept death-like and numbing, as the floor 
 coverings lifted under an icy draught that nothing could 
 keep out, and the ice-shreds silted through the cracks. 
 
 ''The drifts must be as high as the hedges by now," said 
 Mr. Westaway. 
 
 ''There's no way out of it, but to go straight on and to 
 trusten," said Gr>'lls; "if 'tis laid down for missie to get to 
 Hartland, why, she'll get there, and if not, not. And fretting 
 your gizzard won't make a pin's point of difference to the 
 drifts, nor yet to the wind. And of that you may take your 
 davy." 
 
 Mrs. Velly came bustling into the room for a second, 
 pulling forward the great kettle and setting up a chair 
 covered with flannels before the fire. 
 
 "See that they don't bum," she snapped. 
 
 "How is she?" asked Mr. Westaway. 
 
298 A Man of Genius 
 
 ''Mortal bad. 'Tis the storm that racks her worse thau 
 nature itself. She's always been Hke it when the sea's high, 
 and what 'tis like to-night only God knows. 'Tis pretty" 
 nigh tearing the Hfe out of her, an3rway, with each wind 
 that comes. My Lord, will any help ever win through to; 
 us to-night? The storm's bringing the cheeld, but — " ' 
 
 The gaunt woman's face was grey. 
 
 "'Tisn't nature," she said, as she disappeared upstairs,; 
 her loose slippers going flop, flop, all the way up the stairs. ; 
 
 ''She's been such a merry Httle soul all through the:; 
 summer," said Mr. Westaway, patting Danny softly, "and. 
 the child would have been such a joy to her. Just an^ 
 hour's pleasure and then — that. You're an old man,* 
 an old wise man, perhaps I might say. What do you make' 
 of that now?" He pointed sorrowfully upstairs. 
 
 "'Tis a great big circle, maister," said old Grylls, holding 
 out his arms with clasped hands; "round and round it 
 goes, and when joy's greatest it comes nigh to agony, and ) 
 when the agony's deathly, I believe there's a sort of joy in ij 
 it. 'Tis all a circle where joy and pain run round and \ 
 round, and one ends where t'other begins. 'Tis like an \ 
 endless chain." j 
 
 Slowly the hour passed, till at last Mr. Westaway started j 
 from his chair. \ 
 
 "Hark!" he said. "What's that?" ] 
 
 Above the storm there were surely voices, the blessed ; 
 voices that bring help. Danny's hair rose on his neck. He i 
 flew to the door and began snuffing under it with joyful I 
 whines. 
 
 "Get out of the way, Danny; get out of the way, you | 
 fool," said old Grylls, struggHng with the fastenings of the | 
 door. When at last he got it open a wall of whirhng ice i 
 seemed to enter bodily with Dr. Dayman and Damaris. \ 
 
 "The sycamores are down," said she, sUding into the I 
 
The Wings of the Wind 299 
 
 firelight, followed by the huge white figure of the doctor. 
 They were both dripping into pools of white slush. 
 
 "Oh, how is she?" cried Damaris, hastily starting t(? 
 Strip Dr. Dayman of his layer of coats, as he fumbled 
 numbly at a brandy-flask. ''Quick," she said, almost 
 shaking him, "go upstairs at once. Don't waste a second." 
 
 After a gulp of brandy, the doctor grunted. It was the 
 first sound he had uttered since he entered the room. His 
 great face flamed red and blue as the girl hovered round 
 him, for he represented to her that divine thing called help. 
 In the terror of cold and fear, as he had dragged Damaris 
 with him, she almost prayed to the power of body and skill 
 of knowledge that he carried with him. 
 
 "Steady," he said, "steady," as, leaning his arm on 
 Grj'Us' Shoulder, he kicked off his huge boots. "Ha!" 
 he said, "that's better." 
 
 To Damaris there w^as something cruel in the deliberation 
 with which he pulled out the toes of his blue knitted socks 
 to see if they were damp, and stretched his toes like a 
 gigantic baby. Yet there was intense comfort, as she sank 
 on the floor in front of the fire, in the sound of the stairs as 
 they creaked under his weight. 
 
 "Child," said Mr. Westaway, "you're wet to the skin. 
 Go up and change, and then come down to some hot milk. 
 See, we'U get it ready for you." 
 
 Old Gr)'lls' trembHng hands were already busied with a 
 small saucepan he had discovered. 
 
 "Oh," cried Damaris, "I crept there on my hands and 
 knees. What a fool I've been, but the storm took me by 
 surprise." 
 
 "It needn't have, missie," said Josh, holding the sauce- 
 pan over the fire. "I've tasted snow for days, and I've 
 heard the tree branches snapping night after night." 
 
 "Then you might have warned me," said Damaris, 
 
300 A Man of Genius 
 
 dragging herself stiffly towards the door. "What's the use 
 of knowing things if you keep them to yourself?" 
 
 "And how was I to know 'twould bring a cry-out to Mrs. 
 Velly? But there, you can't teach a woman reason, no 
 more than you can teach a tiger to lap milk." 
 
 Tempers were getting short under the strain of the night. 
 
 "My dear," interposed Mr. Westaway, "did you think 
 of Ambrose?" 
 
 "They'll wire in the morning, if there are any wires 
 standing by them. But anyway, they think the rails will be 
 blocked by drifts for days. Oh, why didn't I foresee this?" 
 she wailed again. "Father," she whispered, coming back 
 to the fire, "it seems quiet above. What does it mean? 
 We haven't killed her between us, have we?" 
 
 "My dear, everything that mortal could do, you have 
 done." 
 
 But she was gone, slipping quietly upstairs to listen out- 
 side the room. 
 
 Standing there in the chill draught, it seemed that the 
 future came behind her, touching her with stealthy fingers. 
 Above the triangular staircase window there was a drift of 
 snow through the crumbling wall, and, on the ledge, the 
 cactus plant swayed in the wind. She stood with her hand 
 on the handle of the door, afraid to move lest the balls of 
 ice on her boot-heels should cause her to slip and make a 
 noise. 
 
 It could not be death, for there came a muttered sentence 
 from Dr. Dayman and the quick movements of a woman's 
 footsteps across the room. Then Damaris sank on the 
 floor of the landing, and to her exhausted senses it seemed 
 that again she was fighting the blind wall of whirring white- 
 ness. She was dumbly moving her lips by now, for she 
 could feel Ambrose's reproachful look at her for having 
 failed in her trust. 
 
The Wings of the Wind 301 
 
 Yet, what did Ambrose matter? The sex hatred was 
 uppermost now, in the memory of all the past months when 
 the child had been left alone to face this night. All these 
 months she had waited for the joy that perhaps would never 
 be. It was not fair, protested Damaris to the forces of hfe; 
 Thyrza had not received the wages of her trust. 
 
 At last, dumbly and prayerlessly, Damaris became aware 
 of cries, ver}' far off, ver^' thin and strange, like a tiny gnat 
 whistling in the sun-steeped air. All the glory of the past 
 summer, the peace of golden heat, seemed in the sound, the 
 far-off sound that meant hfe. Then there was a long wait, 
 words and 
 
 She drew breath sharply. For arnong the noises of this 
 planet there was a new one, the wail with which hfe begins. 
 Then Damaris crept away to her own room. 
 
 In the grey morning light she found Mrs. Velly standing 
 by her bed with a steaming cup of tea. The woman's face 
 was dr}' and inexpressibly worn. "Drink this," she said. 
 
 "Yes, she'll hve, she'll live. 'Tis a great boy. Did 'ee 
 send to Ambrose or not ? You've borne more for'n than you 
 ought to have been asked to bear. God forgive me for 
 letting it be so!" 
 
 "Yes; I sent urgent word. But he'll maybe not get here 
 for nobody knows how long." 
 
 "He's wanted here badly," said Mrs. Velly, fidgeting 
 with the tea-cup she had placed on the dressing table. 
 "Now, you'll stay in bed to-day, my dear, and get over last 
 night." 
 
 "Stay in bed, Mrs. Velly?" laughed Damaris. "Oh!" 
 she cried as she tried to move. 
 
 "Yes; you'll feel it worse than you thought for. You'll 
 stay where you be, won't you, my dear? The doctor's 
 staying till midday, and he shall give 'ee something against 
 a chill." 
 
302 A Man of Genius 
 
 "Why, you can't do it all! Whatever can you think of 
 me, to imagine I'm going to leave you to cope with a mother 
 and a baby, and a house and a father? Oh, I do want 
 to see the baby. Is he lovely and big and strong?" 
 
 "Ay, he's a lusty chap," said Mrs. Velly uneasily. 
 
 "Mrs. Velly, what is it?" asked Damaris, coming up to 
 the old woman. "You've been a tower of help in trouble." 
 
 "Eh, dear, and 'tis my own lad's lad." 
 
 "Mrs. Velly, what is it?" repeated Damaris. 
 
 "Oh, my dear," she said, beginning to wring her hands, 
 "I don't know how to tell 'ee, and there's the doctor fuming 
 below. He'll be up in two minutes, if I don't mind." 
 
 "See," she continued, putting her arm round the girl and 
 leading her back to bed, "my dear, 'twas life and death 
 that come last night." 
 
 "Thyrza?" whispered Damaris. 
 
 "No, no; Thyrza will do now. She's sleeping quietly. 
 Look, my dear, look at the light," she said, puUing up the 
 blind and pointing to the outer world. Then she opened 
 the shutters and flung up the window till the room was 
 flooded with the sunshine that sparkled from a sea of splen- 
 dour. Treeless and measureless all the earth seemed 
 now, for the hand of nature had blotted out the traces of 
 man's boundaries. A soft wind, pure with the purity of a 
 dream-heaven, fluttered Mrs. Velly's coarse white hair and 
 smarted on her tear-rimmed eyes. 
 
 "Mrs. Velly, tell me, what is it?" 
 
 "My dear, death came last night. He must have gone 
 soon after the baby came, they think." 
 
 "My father?" 
 
 "Yes. We found 'en, the doctor and I, sitting with his 
 hand leaning on the book he'd been reading. I've got it 
 npen here. His hand lay on it." 
 
 It was a dream from which she would soon awake. It 
 
The Wings of the Wind 303 
 
 must be the snow sleej), thought Damaris, which she had 
 feared last night. That was what the glare on her eyeljalls 
 meant. 
 
 Mrs. Velly drew from under her apron the open book and 
 laid it on the table at the foot of the bed. 
 
 "You'll maybe like to see where it was open," she said. 
 
 "Mrs. Velly, it isn't true, is it?" 
 
 "My dear soul, you'm broad awake, and sorrow's broad 
 awake, too. Look, there's the sunlight. The storm's done 
 its work. Old Gr)lls left 'en about two o'clock, he says, 
 with a great fire blazing. Then the doctor thinks he must 
 have fallen asleep. And the creeping cold of the morn- 
 ing struck home. He'd a weak heart, Dr. Dayman says, 
 and the trouble of the night and the cold touched 'en." 
 
 With the details came to Damaris the sense that there 
 was truth in the words she seemed to be hearing. 
 
 "I want to be alone," she said at last. 
 
 Then she got up instantly and put up her hair in a knot. 
 As she did so, her eyes fell on the book Mrs. Velly had 
 laid on the table. It was the Bible, on the fly-leaf of which 
 the Westaway births and deaths wxre recorded. Keeping 
 her hand on the open page, she turned back to the place 
 where the faded ink characters were traced. She saw her 
 own name, and before that her father's. She would have 
 to write the day of his death. Was it yesterday or 
 to-day ? 
 
 At that she realised. "There is no home now," she 
 sobbed, "for he was home to me. This house is nothing 
 but the strangest place." Then she turned to the pages in 
 Ecclesiastes at which the book was open — the final sum- 
 ming up of human wisdom, of the flux and reflux of life. 
 "One generation passcth away, and another generation 
 
 Cometh: but the earth al)ideth for ever The thing 
 
 that hath been, it is that whi( h shall be; and that which is 
 
304 A Man of Genius 
 
 done is that which shall be done: and there is no new 
 thing under the sun." 
 
 As she read, a kind of triumph filled her heart. For 
 from the troubles of this life, at any rate, he was safe. 
 Death passed, the gates of pain seemed closed. 
 
 They kept the death from Thyrza. But Damaris refused 
 to see the girl a second time; she only realised her own 
 loss fully as she watched the mother lying with her lips 
 close to the baby head in its swathing flannels. 
 
 ''A regular little Velly," said the grandmother, stretching 
 out the wonderful bones of the tiny hand. 
 
 With a shiver Damaris turned away, and a perception of 
 the truth suddenly struck Mrs. Velly. 
 
 "Ah," she said under her breath, "we'll win heaven easy, 
 we women, once we're the t'other side, for we shall have 
 paid the devil his due in pain this side of the river. 'Twill 
 be For Men only this way, I'll warn, on the way down to 
 the pit. Leastways, Hwill be so, if there's justice anywhere, 
 for pay they don't, the men-folk don't, not in blood and 
 tears as we do." 
 
 Half an hour later she was found carrying the child up 
 the rungs of a step-ladder, for it behoved her to make sure 
 that this latest scion of the Velly tree had his rights in life, 
 and to carry an infant downstairs for the first time is to 
 condemn him to ill-luck. So Ambrose II went up the 
 step-ladder, wailing miserably at his weird experiences, 
 combined with the pains of what Mrs. Velly bibUcally 
 termed his hungry little belly. 
 
 When the wire at last reached Ambrose, for a moment 
 he saw nothing but the colony at Beckland in the land 
 where his heart lay. For somehow it seemed news, not so 
 much of Thyrza and the babe, as of the homeland for 
 which she stood. 
 
 Then he roused himself to look out trains and interview 
 
The Wings of the Wind 305 
 
 his Chief. At Bristol, as he had requested, there was a 
 wire awaiting him, which told the tidings of Mr. Westaway's 
 death. 
 
 It was a slow journey for the ''roughed" horse along the 
 road that skirts the coast from Bideford to Hartland, and 
 night fell long before he could catch even a glimpse of the 
 Promonton- of Hercules. But at last, out of the gloom 
 swung the lights of the point, first red, then white, and in 
 the gleam of them came the memory of those first days 
 when the Star of the West began to shine for him. 
 
 At last he stood between the two heaps of piled-up snow 
 outside the door of Beckland, with the smoking horse 
 breathing heavily in the damp air. As he waited, there 
 came from within a child's cry and a woman's voice singing 
 "Hush-a-bye, baby." 
 
 Strange new things were to be found on the other side of 
 the closed door. 
 
 A few minutes later Thyrza crept into his arms with the 
 thankful sob of one who has received a great gift. In the 
 curve of his right arm she made him hold the child as she 
 lay beside him. 
 
 "It's yours and mine," she whispered; "God gave him 
 to us." 
 
 It was her creed; for this is what life teaches women like 
 Thyrza. "And I won him with pain," she added. 
 
 After the funeral Dr. Dayman came back with Damaris 
 to Beckland. He watched her anxiously, for her hands 
 were clasping and unclasping tremulously. 
 
 "Now, what are you going to do?" he asked abruptly. 
 "Sit down here, at once," he added, pushing forward a 
 chair. 
 
 "I can't stay here any longer," she said. "I have no 
 share in the life of it any longer." 
 
 "Damn him and her and it!" said the Doctor, jerking 
 20 
 
306 A Man of Genius 
 
 his thumb upstairs towards Thyrza's room, in a litany of 
 objurgation. 
 
 Damaris laughed a laugh that ended in a sob. 
 
 "Stop that!" said Dr. Dayman sternly. 
 
 "And join you in your prayer?" she said, crumbling a 
 biscuit for Danny; "it's like the Commination Service." 
 
 "Get out of the way, dog," roared the Doctor. "I can't 
 bear any more of this; what with worrying about you I 
 haven't had a rehshable glass of wine or a comfortable 
 snoose for a week. Now, look here, you're going to have 
 a home with me. I've no chick nor cheeld, and you know 
 I worship the ground you tread on. You shan't stay here 
 another minute to have your loneliness thrust at you. Come 
 here," he said, roughly pulling her up to his knees as though 
 she were a child; "what you all see in that Velly I'm 
 beggared if I know. Get down, dog." For Danny, con- 
 sidering his intentions sinister, was leaping up anxiously. 
 "You'll come," he asked; "come home with me?" 
 
 "Yes," she whispered. 
 
 "But not to-night," he said; "you're not fit for it. Do 
 you know what I'm going to do? Carry you over to old 
 Mother Velly, plump you into her bed and make you sleep 
 there. She's a comfortable soul, Velly though she be." 
 
 "But surely I can walk," said Damaris. 
 
 "No, you can't. By heavens, what you want now is 
 somebody to pad the stones for you, and keep the winds of 
 heaven from blowing too roughly on you." 
 
 Gathering her up he walked thus out of the house, to 
 the amazement of Danny, the pigeons and the four ducks 
 on the pond. 
 
 "Why did you never marry. Dr. Dayman?" asked 
 Damaris, lying like a lamb in the crook of a shepherd's 
 arm. 
 
 "Ccelebs sum et semper ero, madam," he cried. 
 
The Wings of the Wind 307 
 
 "Here," he shouted to Mrs. Velly, "come clown and 
 hear what I've got tt) say!" 
 
 The old woman ran with pattering steps down the steep 
 breakneck stairs. 
 
 **Got a chair-bed in the house?" he demanded. 
 
 *'Yes," she answered, laughing to Damans, who, with 
 Danny climbing on her laj), lay in the old chair before the 
 fire. 
 
 ''Well, then, you'll sleep in it to-night. This is a patient," 
 he said, pointing to Damans, ''who has to be cared for as 
 if she were melting snow\" 
 
 The simile w^as suggested by the slush outside. 
 
 "She's to sleep in your bed. Got a nice patchwork quilt 
 and a feather bed, hasn't it?" 
 
 Mrs. Velly nodded. 
 
 "Well, she wants feather beds and old cosy ways. That's 
 why I brought her to you. Put her to bed at once, and give 
 her a meal every two hours till night, when she's to sleep 
 for ten hours. I'll send up champagne and game and fowls 
 as soon as I get home, and I'll drive round for her to-morrow 
 afternoon. You go and pack her clothes, for she is not to 
 go inside that house again. And you mind what I say. 
 She's not to set eyes on the Blessed Trinity over there any 
 more." 
 
 So Damans passed away from Beckland, and soon Josh 
 Gr)'lls was left in undivided possession of his hermitage; 
 for, shortly after the child's birth, Mrs. Velly removed to 
 Bideford to take up her abode with Thyrza and Ambrose. 
 To Gr}lls it was as though a whirlwind of life had eddied 
 round the duck pond and passed, and he found it strangely 
 "wisht" to see no column of smoke from either house when 
 he opened his door of a morning. 
 
CHAPTER XIX 
 THE MASTER BUILDERS 
 
 AMBROSE VELLY stood for a moment with his latch- 
 key inserted in the door of the little house in Bideford 
 that he rented. Then he suddenly withdrew it and walked 
 away up the street, for to-night he could not face the welcome 
 that awaited him within, in the meagerly proportioned 
 sitting-room, with its rickety second-hand furniture. 
 
 His work in London had long since been finished, and 
 to-night the last episode of that hopeful time was over, in 
 the letter which he had just received announcing the award 
 of the competition. It struck him, at first, as comic that 
 the judges should have so Httle knowledge of beauty as to 
 have preferred another's design to his. For this was cer- 
 tainly the case; he had indubitably failed. Now, he only 
 knew that a feverish desire to begin again possessed him, 
 as a man who finds himself left behind in a race may put on 
 a frantic spurt for a minute or two. 
 
 Instead of going home, he turned away to get a supper 
 of stout and oysters and to think. In an hour's time he 
 had let himself into the office again, and was back at his 
 desk sketching a design for an Oratory, that rose before 
 him as rapidly as a magic beanstalk. Yet it was feverish 
 work and done at high pressure, so that, when he at length 
 went home, his nerves were strained to breaking point. It 
 was something like a toad squatting on an altar, he thought 
 mockingly, for Ambrose Velly to be working at incensed 
 aisles. 
 
 308 
 
The Master Builders 309 
 
 Somehow there was a root of bitterness in his life just 
 now. In truth, Thyrza wore badly; not her love, for that 
 was unchangeable, but Th}Tza herself. For, although she 
 could bum like a flame at the touch of the torch-bearing 
 Eros, she never succeeded in keeping her hearth-fire bright. 
 Energy she had in abundance, but unfortunately energy is 
 not a force that can be turned in every direction like a hose 
 pipe; your miUtant churchman would probably have 
 browsed away his life in bovine placidity if fate had denied 
 him an outlet in polemics. He would never have devoted 
 it to science or philanthropy, as people imagine who talk 
 of wasted energy-, and although Thyrza had passion enough 
 and devotion enough for fifty women, she wanted the 
 strength of brain that would make her housewife and in- 
 spirer. The child, too, was often aihng, and after sleepless 
 nights and toilsome days passed in one deep rut of domestic 
 care, Thyrza found it hard to be gay, as Ambrose loved to 
 see her, and although IMrs. Velly spent her time propping 
 up the tottering edifice of married life, she was in herself 
 too fiercely strenuous to diffuse an atmosphere of sunshine. 
 
 To-night Ambrose had scarcely shut the door behind 
 him, when Thyrza flew to his side, on the noiseless ward 
 slippers that she wore when waiting on the baby. 
 
 *' Ambrose," she cried, "there's such trouble. Baby's 
 ver}', very ill with bronchitis. Oh, I wanted you so, and you 
 left me alone to-night of all nights." 
 
 It was the last blow of a day that seemed interminable, 
 and Ambrose stood sullenly wordless. 
 
 **I don't believe you care," said Thyrza. They were the 
 first bitter words she had ever uttered, and in the stillness 
 of the firelit room they sounded with an awful distinctness 
 in her ears. 
 
 He cared inexpressibly, yet in the weariness of the 
 moment the httle devilish thoughts that come to sensitive 
 
3 1 o A Man of Genius 
 
 people told him what a pitiful drag a delicate child would 
 be in a life of failure. 
 
 "Ah, forgive me. You love him, I know," said Thyrza. 
 Then he held her hand for a moment and said, "May I go 
 up?" 
 
 They stood by the child together, but both were con- 
 scious that a wall of separation was rising. And as Am- 
 brose turned away to his room, Thyrza heard the key 
 turn in the door. He wanted to get a night's rest, apart 
 from the sorrow they ought to have shared together: he 
 wanted her shut out. 
 
 Mrs. Velly had heard the sound too. 
 
 "A man's life can't be a woman's, child," she whispered, 
 putting her hands on the wife's shoulders as they stood by 
 the fire on which steamed a bronchitis kettle. 
 
 "It'll never be the same again, mother," said Thyrza 
 quietly. "It's all changed since we've lived together." 
 
 Yet Ambrose lay staring into the darkness nearly all 
 night, listening to every sound from the child's room, in a 
 sullen disgust with himself for his weakness and with all 
 that had been and all that was to come. In the morning 
 Mrs. Velly gave him his breakfast, and he heard that the 
 baby was a shade better. But Thyrza never appeared. 
 
 Yet in the days Ihat followed he suffered far more than 
 she, for the child's hard, tearing cough sounded in his ears 
 perpetually. It went with him to the office and stayed with 
 him all day, even during the hours when at night he set his 
 teeth and went on with the plan of the Oratory. For nothing 
 now, not all the devils in the world of the brain, could come 
 between him and that design. Yet when Thyrza was out 
 for the hour's airing that the doctor ordered, he would 
 slip home whenever he could get away and walk up and 
 down with the little tired creature resting in his arms. 
 
 Mrs. Velly tried to tell her daughter-in-law of this, but 
 
The Master Builders 3 i i 
 
 she was stopped by the look of dead misery on the j^irr.s 
 face. For all that Thyrza understood in life was slipping 
 into the gulf, her husband's love and sympathy was already 
 gone into the limbo of things that have been, and her child 
 was passing through her loving hands. 
 
 At last the night came when Ambrose stood in the passage 
 and listened to the strange silence that filled the well-like 
 tunnel with its hideous mottled paper. The soaking rain 
 had beaten into the passage through the sodden mat, and 
 the gas-stove from the kitchen reeked. Yet his delicate 
 artist senses noticed none of these things, for the stillness 
 could mean but one thing — that the child who came on 
 the wings of the wind was gone. 
 
 He went upstairs softly in his stockinged feet, and 
 although he had sometimes felt that Ambrose II was a weight 
 in the race that is to the swift, now he remembered nothing 
 but the tiny fingers that had clasped his own big 
 hands. 
 
 The door of the child's room was ajar, and as he stood 
 outside he could see the mother bending over the baby's 
 crib, the brightest thing in the house. In her white face, 
 haggard with sorrow and fatigue, in the rough tangle of 
 hair that clung to her neck, there was no lovehness, nothing 
 of the girl who had danced for the joy of life. Yet on the 
 strained features there was a wonderful light, the light that 
 a woman's face wears when she looks in the face of life or of 
 death, the two poles on which her existence turns. Ambrose 
 took it to be Thyrza's farewell to the dearest thing she had 
 ever possessed. But one thing, at any rate, he knew for 
 certain, that the lovehness of it was almost divine, since no 
 uncomeHness of body could touch it. 
 
 Thus at last did Ambrose meet that ultimate beauty of 
 the spiritual that our race can only learn through sorrow, 
 the thing that gives the last pathetic touch of loveliness 
 
312 A Man of Genius 
 
 to the earth's splendour that without it would be mere ■ 
 glitter. 
 
 Then Thyrza looked up and, seeing her husband, came 
 out. Creeping downstairs again he followed her into the 
 sitting-room. 
 
 ''Is he gone?" asked Ambrose, his face working, so that > 
 even Thyrza understood. 
 
 At the sight the coldness of these miserable days broke : 
 up, and she cried — 
 
 ''No, no; it's hfe. He's given back to us. The turn 
 came this afternoon, and he's asleep and breathing quietly." 
 
 She could say no more, for Ambrose had caught her to 
 him, in a renewal of the love that springs from trial. 
 
 "And," said Thyrza, "I hardened my heart against 'ee, 
 when night after night, though he seemed dying, you'd go 
 off. Oh, Ambrose, and I thought you didn't care for our 
 little son." 
 
 They heard Mrs. Velly steahng upstairs to the child, and 
 then Thyrza got up quickly and shut the door, lest thej 
 sound of their voices should be heard in the quiet room] 
 upstairs. 
 
 "I couldn't watch the Httle one go," said Ambrose. "I 
 couldn't stay in the house. And, my dear, don't you know 
 what I've been doing all these terrible nights?" 
 
 "No, Ambrose, no. I know nothing but his pain, his 
 struggle for Hfe." 
 
 "Working at that," said Ambrose, pointing to the rolls 
 of designs he had laid on the table. "It must go by to- 
 morrow's post, and even now it's got hours of work on it." 
 
 "Ambrose," she said suddenly, "if baby were dead 
 to-night, should you finish it?" 
 
 She was in the mood when a woman drives herself on 
 the edge of truth's bayonet. But he would not have it so, 
 for laughing, he cried, "No, no; you're not bom for tragedy, 
 
The Master Builders 3 i 3 
 
 little Thyrza. If it wins, all our days of stmgglc are over." 
 
 But she understood, and for a moment hated the work 
 that was more a part of him than the child his love had 
 given her. 
 
 "I try to understand," she whispered, ''but 'tis all outside 
 me still." 
 
 Yet they held each other silently, in the memory of the 
 great hours that had been for them. And a great thankful- 
 ness filled the ugly little room, such thankfulness as has 
 filled, thank God, many an ugly little room before with 
 the benediction of human patience. 
 
 ''Come," said Thyrza at last, "you've work to do. You 
 must have supper before you begin. But, oh, my dear, how 
 woefully tired you are. Yet you can work with a good 
 heart now." 
 
 "Do you know," he said, smiling, "that to-night I saw 
 the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life? It was 
 your face bending over the child, and I thought — it was 
 good-bye." 
 
 "It was only good-bye to my hardness and blindness, 
 dear heart," she whispered. 
 
 Then Thyrza did a hard thing, for she went upstairs to 
 fetch Mrs. Velly to make the coffee that was to keep 
 Ambrose awake till the work was finished. Yet she longed to 
 do everything for "her man" to-night, in the sweet renewal 
 of love. But Mrs. Velly could make it much better, and he 
 must have the best of ever)'thing now. 
 
 Afterwards, through the hours of the night, Thyrza 
 watched in the room above, while Ambrose bent over his 
 plans in the sitting-room. He had often jested at things 
 that men call noble, yet there was no unseemhness to-night 
 in his absorption in this work, for its foundations had been 
 laid in honest struggle and its pillars raised to the music 
 of pain. And these things are realities. 
 
314 A Man of Genius 
 
 The package went by the morning mail, and Thyrza,; 
 stealing down from the child soon after, found her husband ! 
 asleep on the old draped couch. At the sight she posted! 
 off to the office and asked to see the senior partner. Mr..| 
 Trevithick rose at her entrance and put her quickly into his'^ 
 own chair, for he imagined that she had come to contradictJ 
 the good news of yesterday. | 
 
 "No, no," she said, seeing his alarm, "the boy's all! 
 right. But it's Ambrose. He's been working at his design i 
 all night and now he's asleep. So I came to tell you what] 
 had happened to him." 
 
 Trevithick laughed. 
 
 "Why," he said, "did you think I should birch him^ 
 for miching? When he wakes, tell him I'll never let him 
 inside this office again if he comes here to-day. But II 
 didn't think he'd get the thing off in time." Then he^j 
 added slowly, "It's a good piece of work, too." 1 
 
 Thyrza nodded wisely, but her heart leapt, for Mr. i 
 Trevithick seldom saw a fine thing anywhere. ! 
 
 "And now," said he in business-like tones, "tell mej 
 what the child may have. Give me a list, my dear." J 
 
 And in her round, childish hand Thyrza wrote a list of -j 
 luxuries for the baby. For through her, Mr. Trevithick 1 
 indulged in one of the great pleasures of his life, the! 
 filling of Ambrose Minor's little nursery and little i 
 stomach with good things from all the comers of the< 
 earth. \ 
 
 In the sunny days when the child was convalescent, he< 
 would perch on the senior partner's cushiony shoulder and , 
 ride up and down the path by the south wall in the garden^ 
 on the hill, while Mrs. Trevithick watched the pair from'^ 
 the drawing-room window, not, in truth, without a certain \ 
 regret, for a woman's heart can beat inside very tight] 
 corsets indeed. d 
 
CHAPTER XX 
 THE JUDGI\n:NT OF PARIS 
 
 MRS. VELLY'S first impression was that she had 
 been aroused from her sleep in the middle of the 
 night. Yet on striking a match she found that it was only 
 a few minutes to eleven. Then, as she heard the murmur 
 of men's voices from the room below, she was suddenly 
 wide awake and alert, as if at the call of some unknown 
 danger. Opening her door quietly, she leant over the 
 stair-rail to listen. From the front bedroom she could hear 
 Th}Tza hushing the whimpering baby in a tired, throaty 
 voice, and in the sitting-room below Ambrose was talking 
 to a stranger. 
 
 The smell of whisky that came up the narrow staircase 
 was associated with so much that was terrible in Mrs. 
 Velly's life that at first she felt as though the past had 
 risen from its grave. For she was perfectly certain that 
 she had heard the beating of the wings of trouble in the 
 air. As she crept down the stairs, she saw a thin ray of 
 light coming from under the closed door, through whose 
 ill-fitting woodwork she could catch most of what was said. 
 
 " It'll be thousands of pounds in your pocket in time," 
 said the sharp, rasping voice of a stranger, " and now that 
 you're in charge of the new asylum that your firm's got 
 in hand, you'll have a free hand in a matter like this." 
 
 Mrs. Velly's vague intuition of peril was changed now 
 into certainty, tor Am])rose must have had his reasons for 
 keeping quiet about the fact that he had been appointed 
 
 3'S 
 
3 1 6 A Man of Genius 
 
 clerk of works to the new county asylum, one of the largest 
 undertakings that Trevithick and Jerman had ever handled. 
 She held her breath lest she should lose a word of what j 
 was said. j 
 
 "Ten per cent," said Ambrose. | 
 
 "On every order that you get for our firm, and it's as I 
 good as any stuff our rivals can offer you." j 
 
 " Yet you're trying to square me," sneered Ambrose. 
 
 The man was silent, but Mrs. Velly saw him shrug his ! 
 shoulders as clearly as though no door had intervened. \ 
 
 "You can make yourself a rich man by the stroke of a j 
 pen. That is, provided you don't put your head out of J 
 window to say you're not at home to good luck when it j 
 comes." I 
 
 " I suppose you know it's a job that would strike me off j 
 the register as an architect?" 3 
 
 "If it got about, you mean. But that's not on the ) 
 cards at all. And anyhow, I shall give you a call again ] 
 shortly in a week or two." -j 
 
 The bird was limed, said the man to himself, as he \ 
 swung himself out of the house; Mrs. Velly understood ; 
 that perfectly. Neither of the men noticed her in the dark- 
 ness of the stairs, for the hall light had been extinguished. 
 Closing the front door Ambrose returned to the sitting- 
 room, and Mrs. Velly heard his chair creak under his 
 weight as he sat down. As she softly pushed open the 
 unlatched door and entered, he started to his feet. 
 
 "Mother!" he exclaimed. "What on earth's the mean- 
 ing of this?" 
 
 " Speak low," said Mrs. Velly, " for Thyrza's awake, and 
 there's no need for her to know." 
 
 "For her to know what?" he asked angrily. 
 
 "I heard what that man said, heard everything," said 
 Mrs. Velly. 
 
The Judgment of Paris 317 
 
 "Well?" asked Ambrose sullenly. 
 
 "Do you know," asked Mrs. Velly fiercely, "what it 
 means to a mother when she finds that her child is not as 
 God made her, that her girl-child she bore is no maid?" 
 
 "I really don't think you could expect me to," he an- 
 swered, with a savage laugh. " It's out of my province, 
 you see." 
 
 "And what chastity is to a maid, honour is to a man," 
 said Mrs. Velly quietly, "and the worst thing I heard 
 to-night was your silence. What's the stuff they're trying 
 to sell you?" 
 
 "Shoddy," he said curtly, turning on his heel to light his 
 pipe. He was intensely angry at this interference. 
 
 "And that's what you'll let Trevithick put into the build- 
 ings he's answerable for!" exclaimed Mrs. Velly. "Am- 
 brose, you must be mad. He's favoured you every way. 
 and he couldn't be kinder to Thyrza and the child if they 
 were his own flesh and t)lood. If it hadn't been for them, 
 I don't believe you'd be where you are now in the firm." 
 
 "Do you know I'm sinking into a mere drudge?" he said 
 bitterly. " If you heard all, you know that they've given 
 me the asylum to put through; the sort of thing a journey- 
 man builder might take in hand. Do you think Trevithick 
 would keep me at work like that, on and on for ever, if he 
 didn't count me an artistic failure?" 
 
 "That's unjust," exclaimed Mrs. Velly. "But if it's 
 true, what's that got to do with common honesty. Be a 
 drudge and an honest man, if it comes to that." 
 
 " Have you forgotten that even now, with all our cheese- 
 paring life, there's still a debt left? Do you think I like 
 this?" he exclaimed, j)oinling to the shabby room. "Do 
 you think I like grudging Thyrza a new dress?" 
 
 "It's only to wait, Ambrose; only a short time now," 
 she pleaded. " We've done wonders in reducing the debt 
 
31 8 A Man of Genius 
 
 that was left. And then there's this competition you 
 worked at when the boy was ill." 
 
 "It'll be the same as the other," he said in a mood of 
 black depression, "for it wasn't good work. Work! How 
 can I work when every artistic impulse is being slowly 
 strangled? I promised increase of power — and it's failed 
 me. I'm slowly bleeding to death." 
 
 At last Mrs. Velly exclaimed suddenly — 
 
 "There's something behind all this. There must be. 
 What is it, Ambrose? I won't leave this room till you tell 
 me." 
 
 He turned round quickly and looked her in the face. 
 
 "Mother," he said, bending close to her, "do you re- 
 member what you said when father died? That I must 
 
 wm up 
 
 To Mrs. Velly the longing of years was bearing a bitter 
 fruit of which she had never dreamt. 
 
 "I can do what you asked then," he said, "and do it at 
 one blow. I'm going to buy Tonacombe and get back a 
 fragment of the old Velly lands. It's dirt cheap, for the 
 present owner's tired of waiting for a purchaser. Think, 
 mother, out of this squalid struggle into — that!" 
 
 "Buy Tonacombe! Why, you couldn't even live there. 
 What's to become then of your work?" 
 
 "But you and Thyrza could." 
 
 Mrs. Velly probed deeper into Ambrose's mind than he 
 had gone himself, for it was his personal as well as his 
 mental freedom that he wanted. His next words echoed 
 her thought. 
 
 "I'm being stifled," he said. "My work's ruined with- 
 out my liberty." 
 
 "And can any man," said Mrs. Velly bitterly, "expect 
 to do fine work on the foundation of a lie? The walls 
 you're going to put up will bury your talents ten times 
 
 i 
 
The Judgment of Paris 3 i 9 
 
 deeper than care could do. And what kind of \'elly honour 
 .will you take back to the Velly lands, you who will have 
 sunk far lower than ever your father did?" 
 
 With a gesture of despair Mrs. Velly left her son and 
 went upstairs to her room; but instead of attempting to 
 lie down again, she dressed herself neatly and methodically, 
 even to her bonnet. Then, sitting still with her hands 
 folded, she waited for the morning, while Ambrose let 
 himself out of the house. 
 
 The lights of the embankment lamps glittered on the 
 waves of the tidal river that lapped at the jetties, and the 
 long avenue of trees stretched away along the river side. 
 In the sucking sound of the water flowing in from the open 
 sea to roar through the arches of Bideford bridge, there 
 was a noise of the coming and going of active life. As he 
 listened, Ambrose was revolted by the narrow limits in 
 which the strife of the mind has to be waged. He longed 
 for an escape into mental vacuity, envied the trawlers of 
 Appledore and the coal-heavers of the barges moored 
 alongside the quay, who slept now, forty fathoms deep in 
 slumber, w^hile he walked, a restless spirit condemned to 
 the strife of the mind. 
 
 He had listened in a half-dream to the man's suggestions, 
 dallying with the power they offered and shying mentally 
 from the conditions on which it depended. Now his mother 
 had forced him to face the other side of the medal and in 
 the grip of this temptation the master-passion of his life 
 came at last to the surface. 
 
 And the master-passion was his art; deeper than the land 
 ; hunger, deeper than his love of love was the power of his 
 I worship of beauty. Of the triple fates, of which the Judg- 
 \ ment of Paris is the everlasting symbol, it was she of the 
 skilled hand who ruled. For he knew now that if the cun- 
 ning of his brain and hand were to be injured by the miasma 
 
320 A Man of Genius 
 
 of a lie, then no glib-tongued agent of a cheating firm could 
 ever buy him. 
 
 Yet, it was not true that a man's morals affected his ; 
 work, else were all great artists saints. His Rabelaisian i 
 mockery of high things jeered, as he thought how far off J 
 the truth this was. Adultery, murder, false-swearing — all 
 these to be found in artists' lives no doubt; Cellini was , 
 not the only thief, fornicator and assassin of the noble j 
 guild of beauty-builders. S 
 
 Yet again, to his art not one true artist was ever false, j 
 They might lie in every other relation of life, but when the i 
 fiddler took up his bow, the painter his brush, and the poet 
 his pen, then, as far as the vision of it had reached them, 
 they told the truth. 
 
 And a building that was, in the very material of its; 
 structure, a lie, implied an architect who was a liar in his| 
 own art. From this verdict there was no escape. He, 
 paused, looking down to where the river broadened in its j 
 seaward course. To him it was a symbol of his thoughts! 
 that, widening into ever larger circles, embraced all the \ 
 worlds of desire. j 
 
 They carried him to Damaris Westaway at last, for it ^ 
 was she who had first shown him what the inspiration : 
 of beauty might be, and in the light of her ideal he knew < 
 how pinchbeck was the dignity of landed estates, or wealth, ^ 
 or any outward symbol whatever. Thus Ambrose judged j 
 between the goddesses who offer the kingdom of power or j 
 the kingdom of beauty. Yet there remained a third god- ■ 
 dess, she that tests the heart-strings of a man, and comes | 
 in as many forms as the quivering rays of light that dance ;i 
 on the sea-foam, for which reason, doubtless, she was known ] 
 of old as sea-born. i 
 
 Mrs. Velly caught the six o'clock brake for Hartland, ! 
 and by breakfast time was at Dr. Dayman's door enquiring j 
 
The Judgment of Paris 321 
 
 for Miss Westaway. Diimaris, coming downstairs to make 
 the doctor's coffee, saw her speaking to the maid on the 
 doorstep. 
 
 "No, no," cried the old woman, as the girl would have 
 ushered her into the breakfast-room. " I want to see Miss 
 Westaway alone." 
 
 After her sleepless night, the table sparkling in the sun- 
 shine with silver and china, made her eyes ache. 
 
 '' Come in here," said Damaris, opening a door at the 
 back of the house; "we shall be undisturbed here. But 
 you must let me get you some breakfast." 
 
 Mrs. Velly feverishly drained the tea they brought her, 
 but eating was impossible. 
 
 " I shouldn't have come if there wasn't mortal need of 
 your help," she said; "and once before you forced my son 
 to his duty." 
 
 "No; that's not the fact, Mrs. Velly. I only showed the 
 way, and his own justice carried him along it." 
 
 "Yet it was you and your father," said Mrs. Velly vin- 
 dictively, entirely forgetting her own anxiety that he 
 should go; "it was you that sent him from Long Fur- 
 long." 
 
 " Yes," said Damaris gently, " it was." 
 
 " To where he found himself cheek by jowl with the whore 
 of Babylon and all the gentry that bow down to Baal. For 
 that's what it's come to now," said Mrs. Velly grimly. " He 
 had a seed of weakness, and now it's sprung up to a tree in 
 one night." 
 
 "Tell me." 
 
 " He'll bear and bear, till all of a moment his strength's 
 gone. It's gone now. He says he'll have no woman 
 meddling. But he must." 
 
 She sketched the story quickly while Damaris listened, 
 white-lipped, as if at a nerve-shaking call for help. 
 21 
 
-322 A Man of Genius I 
 
 ] 
 
 "But, Mrs. Velly," she exclaimed, "think what you're j 
 asking. He would never forgive my interference." j 
 
 "Go and wrestle with him," said Mrs. Velly, being of I 
 the land where devil hunts were common not so long ago, \ 
 and where the evil eye is still dreaded in a furtive way. ; 
 
 " Oh, I know what I'm about," she continued. " There's i 
 no one on earth that is to him what you are. Away up i 
 above him, and yet down by the side of him all the same. I 
 I know, for that's just what I wasn't to the man that asked \ 
 it of me in the days gone by. And none but the harlots \ 
 know what it means to be a pure woman." 
 
 Damaris sat still, resting her head on her hand, while the ■ 
 old woman stood leaning over her. ^ 
 
 " I cannot help," said Damaris at last. " I have nothing ; 
 to do with it." \ 
 
 " Yes, you can. For he's more. to you than any man has J 
 ever been. Oh, don't turn away. It's death-grips now, 
 and I don't care what I say. They used to strip a poor soul 
 for the burning. ... I'm stripped now, and so shall you be. 
 I say he's more to you than any other man. And he's got 
 to be righted, as you righted 'en once before. You're a 
 woman with iron in your blood and can bear the truth. 
 And you know it's truth what I said about you; for you're 
 not the sort that goes out in an east wind and swears it will 
 make the lilies blow. Do you think I don't know why you ; 
 kept his wife with you all those months? You never did 
 that for any other maid, though you've helped a many. 
 And she knew, too." 
 
 "But you, his mother, have failed. How could I suc- 
 ceed?" 
 
 " I'm no more to him than the paring of his nail, except 
 that he feeds me and shelters me. What I eat matters to 
 'en. What I think, doesn't." 
 
 *'AndThyrza?" 
 
 I 
 
The Judgment of Paris 323 
 
 "Thyrza! Why, if he said to her, 'Jump, Th)Tza, up 
 into the noose and straight to Kingdom Come,' she'd just 
 wind her arms round 'en and say, ' Kiss me first, Ambrose,' 
 and then she'd jump. That's Th^Tza. She can't shake 
 herself free of him, no more than if he was in her bones." 
 
 *'I have no power over him. No human being can do 
 for him what you want me to do. Hasn't it been written, 
 'Let the lllthy be filthy still'?" 
 
 "Only God can say that, and not the woman who loves 
 a man. Ay, loves 'en better than her own happiness.** 
 
 Damaris leant her head on her arms. 
 
 ''I did it to 'en," whispered Mrs. Velly. "I did it. I 
 gave 'en the weakness though I didn't know it then. For 
 most women have their fancies when they'm quick. In 
 some 'tis pancakes, and in others 'tis broad-figs or roast pig. 
 With me 'twas nothing eatable, 'twas just strength. I 
 wanted a strong man as soon as I was husband-high." 
 
 Damaris lifted her head and looked at the old woman. 
 
 "I wanted it above all in my child. But I didn't lay 
 down what sort of strength 'twas to be, I reckon, and it 
 come up cross-wise, upside down. And so he thinks land's 
 strength, with the soul of a liar to till it. I've bred 'en 
 wrong." 
 
 "What's bred can't be unbred." 
 
 "Then what's the good of living if we can't better what 
 we was at birth; what's the good of living, I say?" 
 
 "I don't know," said Damaris bitterly; "I don't know 
 at all what's the use of living. Nor does any one." 
 
 "I thought you did. I hated 'ee for it when you forced 
 that girl on my son, but you knew your way well enough 
 then." 
 
 "I'm dazed. I must think. Let me go. I want to be 
 alone." 
 
 "Ay, the world's falling, same as it did round me. There's 
 
324 A Man of Genius 
 
 three women now, hanging on his yea or nay, although he 
 doesn't know it. But you'll wrestle with 'en, won't you, my 
 dear ? My God, if I could only have 'en back safe at Long 
 Furlong, if 'twas but to live on skim milk and potato 
 parings!" 
 
 To a woman of Mrs. Velly's calibre there are no subtleties 
 of offence, but the freedom of conscience gained by that 
 fact is counterbalanced by the deeper damnation of the sins 
 that are recognised. To her all prevarication was lying, all 
 xiinginess, dirt, all shady trade, plain theft. In the first 
 frenzy of her knowledge of her son's weakness, she would 
 have dragged the whole family into the depths of poverty 
 again. For the idea of such treachery was overwhelming 
 to Mrs. Velly, to whom the proper disposal of every hour 
 of the day, and perfect honesty in butter weighing and egg 
 counting had always been the ruling principle. A woman's 
 philosophy seldom penetrates beyond her brain, it leaves 
 her blood and nerves severely alone. Mrs. Velly was per- 
 fectly aware that she was not in any sense answerable for 
 her son's acts, yet to her feeling they were one flesh, in a 
 far deeper sense than could be true of man and wife. 
 
 "But," said she, with a slight return of cheerfulness, 
 "please God, I'll have the smacking of little Ambrose. He 
 shall grow up honest, if the smart on his little back can 
 make him. But Thyrza would spoil the spirit of a buck- 
 rat by coddling him, if she had the chance." 
 
 Damaris sat thinking for a long time, for she knew that 
 an appeal to Ambrose was out of the question, since weak 
 and futile action would be worse than useless. Mrs. Velly 
 sat watching her steadily, till Damaris felt obliged to get up 
 in order to avoid her glance. 
 
 "If you think you can help, you can," said Mrs. Velly at 
 last, enunciating the true doctrine of power. 
 
 Yet for the man that Ambrose still might be, nay, for the 
 
The Judgment of Paris 325 
 
 man he actually was — to her, what was there that Damaris 
 would not do? 
 
 In a flash of memory a picture came to her of a ploughed 
 field with a blackbird in the hedge, caught fast with its leg 
 in a gin and peering at her with pain-dimmed eyes. For 
 fear of the shock to herself, she had passed on, leaving the 
 creature in its agony. Yet all the night that followed, 
 her thoughts had been with the poor bird bearing the 
 mounting agony in its body to spare the woman's cowardly 
 nerves. It was dead in the morning when she went to it, 
 but the memory of her cowardice pained her still. She 
 knew that the thought of her helplessness in these dire 
 straits for Ambrose would be the bitterest thing she would 
 have to look back on in after years. 
 
 Then there came the way to her mind, in a thought that 
 flushed her face with excitement. 
 
 ''Mrs. Velly," she said, ''something that I can do has 
 occurred to me. Something that will make it impossible 
 for him to buy Tonacombe; and that idea ended, he will go 
 on bearing his povert}^ and struggling as bravely as before." 
 
 If Mrs. Velly guessed what the way was, she made no 
 sign, but waited with her eyes fixed on the other woman's 
 face. 
 
 *'But," she continued, ''it may take some little time to do 
 what I have in mind. And I cannot bear to think of being 
 too late." 
 
 Scorching painfully as she spoke, Mrs. Velly exclaimed — 
 
 "But he can't do anything yet, I think. Not till the 
 firm's agent is round again, and that may be weeks. No 
 writing must pass, you see. I don't ask what you'll do, for 
 I trust you; and all that there's best in my boy's life, I some- 
 times think, he owes to you. But you'll be as quick as you 
 can, my dear?" 
 
 "I shall n ver forget what you said, Mrs. Velly," whis- 
 
326 A Man of Genius 
 
 pered Damaris, with the tears starting; ''for often it's all 
 that we women can do— to lay the foundations for the man 
 we love. I will be quick. Only give me a day or two." 
 
 For there was no concealment possible between these two 
 women, and if ever any proof were needed of Ambrose 
 Velly's personal power it was to be found in the depth of 
 devotion in the women who loved him. 
 
 When Mrs. Velly was gone, Damaris sat down deliberately 
 to bear the pain that was mounting to her heart; for 
 nothing on earth can be more bitter than the suspicion of 
 weakness and meanness in those we love. It is, in truth, 
 the one agony that no personal purity can soothe. Yet 
 Damaris counted up the excuses for Ambrose, in the piti- 
 ful fashion of a woman who would shield a child from the 
 whip, lying to herself now and again with the piteous loving 
 lies that the angels themselves might envy. 
 
 But no woman can judge a man's acts as another man 
 would, for she is either in love with the man judged or she 
 is not. If she is in love, the love-light distorts everything, 
 even at times to the exaggeration of his faults; if she is 
 not, she sees everything through the shadow of her own 
 ideal, far from the glare of the market-place in which he 
 has to act. For a woman's moral judgment comes from 
 her own emotional ideal of purity, whereas a man attains 
 to his by the practical test of result. Hence her fall from 
 her own standard is absolute, for the fragments of a broken 
 ideal cannot be mended; whereas results are piebald horses, 
 and often very much like one another when they reach the 
 winning-post. 
 
CHAPTER XXI 
 THE WINGS OF PEACE 
 
 UNDER the archway of the porter's lodge at Tona- 
 combe Dr. Dayman and Damaris Westaway stood 
 for a moment to enjoy the cloistered stillness of the small 
 courtyard, set in grey walls where the ivy rustled with a 
 multitude of sparrows. At first it was the only sound that 
 the ear could distinguish, for the roar of the sea was dead- 
 ened by the enclosing walls. Gradually, however, they 
 could hear a droning note that hummed incessantly, now 
 rising to a hollow boom, now falling to a sonorous whistle: 
 it was the noise of a steam-thresher from where, on a 
 distant hill, the year's harvest was being winnowed. Hour 
 after hour of the day the note of the great engine con- 
 tinued, while even in cliff ravines, faintly perceptible above 
 the roar of pebbles and the hiss of spray, the throb of the 
 winnowing- fan sounded its undertone. 
 
 The next moment the arrival of the visitors was dis- 
 covered, and there came a rush of barking dogs round the 
 corner of the "street." The farmer who occupied the 
 rear portion of the building, once merely the kitchens of 
 the manor-house, was to show the place. 
 
 **Ay," said he, eyeing the cloudless sky with a cynical 
 glance, "it's a foxy day, this, that'll bring rain or snow 
 before long. Sun like this isn't natural to the time of 
 year." 
 
 "Pack o' nonsense, Vosper," said Dr. Dayman, as they 
 327 
 
328 A Man of Genius 
 
 followed the man into the hall; ''it's a ribbon day for me, 
 for it isn't often that I go gallivanting for a whole day like 
 this." 
 
 Dr. Dayrhan had now a partner, and it had not proved a 
 very hard matter for Damaris to persuade him to drive her 
 over to see the old place. 
 
 On the hearth a log-fire sent out the smell of oozing sap 
 and the deep walls shut off the noise of the winno wing- 
 fan. Tables and chairs of old oak still stood in the hall 
 and oi;ie ray of sunlight threw bright discs of colour high 
 up above the fireplace. 
 
 "We're obliged to light a fire here winter-times. Every- 
 thing smells dampish else," said the farmer. 
 
 Through the lozenged windows of the panelled drawing- 
 room Damaris caught a glimpse of the sunlight on the 
 smooth turf. In the rays of it she could almost see the 
 stately ladies in hoops and farthingales who had, in the 
 long chain of life, given the blessing of Ambrose Velly 
 to a grateful world. Passing through the room she leant 
 for a moment on the sill, looking out at the walled Plea- 
 saunce, where a black cat sat engaged with the cares of 
 the toilet. Outside on the cliffs the breakers were roaring, 
 yet here sat puss holding up a paw while, with the talons 
 extended like fingers, she pulled out the pads with her 
 white teeth, thus applying sharp massage to these dainty 
 members. In the intervals of labour she gazed with eyes 
 of butter-cup yellow at the sunshine that shone on the 
 winged eagles of the gateway. She was, thought Damaris, 
 in the complacency of her grace, the very image of Thyrza. 
 
 Upstairs Damaris stood for a long while by the arrow- 
 slit, or solar-window, in the wall of the large panelled bed- 
 room. Through this she could see straight into the hall, 
 where Dr. Dayman stood talking with the farmer. It was 
 late in the week, and Mr. Vosper's shaving-day was a Satur- 
 
The Wings of Peace 329 
 
 day, hence his cheeks, when he laughed, ran into furrows of 
 greyish stubble. 
 
 In the white purity of the light from the traceried windows 
 the memories of bygone lives seemed shining into a fastness 
 of the olden world, far remote from the roar of the present. 
 With a pang, Damaris remembered the mean little house 
 that Ambrose inhabited in Bideford; for the last time she 
 visited the town she had seized the opportunity to walk 
 down his street. The second room that opened on the 
 Queen Anne staircase should, she thought, have been the 
 nursery. Yet it was over-dark for a child, who would 
 want a gay room with a nursery paper on the walls, cov- 
 ered with baby pictures of lambs and other delights. 
 Damaris knew quite well how one would carry a child 
 round the room to look at them, cuddling his toes in one 
 hand as one did so. 
 
 When she went downstairs she found a meal of bread 
 and cheese laid for them, with a tea-tray for herself. The 
 doctor was holding up a bottle to the light. 
 
 ''Look at this," he cried, as Damaris appeared. 
 
 It was a ''seal" bottle, with the inscription, "Rev. R. S. 
 Hawker. Morwenstow, 1837." 
 
 "This was made by Passon Hawker," said Dr. Dayman, 
 "to commemorate the accession of Queen Victoria. The 
 cordial, I'll warn, is made from sloes grown at Stanbury 
 Lane, and Plymouth gin, the "Monk" brand. Taste it, 
 Princess," he said, smacking his lips amorously as the fme 
 scent rose from the glasses. "Do you know, Vosper, that 
 Plymouth gin is the chief ingredient in all the best cocktails 
 made in America?" 
 
 "All I know is," said the farmer, "that us found half a 
 dozen botdes in the cellar, of cowslip wine, and such old 
 trade; but beer's more to my taste." 
 
 "What sort of land is it, Vosper?" said he. 
 
330 A Man of Genius 
 
 "Well, the pasture's fair and dry, and there's not much 
 fear of caud in the liver for the sheep. And as for the 
 house, the dairy might be worse. Winter-times you want 
 all the mow-stones you can get to keep the ricks covered, 
 and there's more murs and gulls than folks, and not so 
 much as a pannier-market nearer than Bude. But there's 
 worse places than Morwenstow." 
 
 " 'Tis just the place for gobby (weird) tales," said the 
 doctor, who always used far more dialect than the 
 natives. 
 
 "There's a headless dog that walks down 'the street,' " 
 grinned Vosper. "And a hand, they say, unhapses the 
 door to the bottom of the staircase. 'Tis well," said he, 
 enjoying Damaris's shivers, "that we'm living when we be, 
 and not when my grandmother was a cheeld. For then, 
 all up the woods the yeth (hell) hounds would be baying. 
 And what's worse, 'They' was above ground by troops. 
 Seen 'em by the score, hundreds of times, so her used to 
 say." 
 
 Damaris felt herself passing back into the shadows of the 
 grey world. 
 
 "Who were 'They'?" she asked. 
 
 "Why, the dead folks, ma'am. But folks know what to 
 do now." 
 
 "What in the world do you mean?" asked Dr. Dayman, 
 thinking how Mr. Westaway would have seized note-book 
 and pencil. 
 
 "Why, back along, with the words 'dust to dust and ashes 
 to ashes,' they never threw so much as a handful of earth on 
 the coffin. But now the grave-digger always chucks in a 
 clod or two and it keeps 'em down. But that was never 
 done when my grandmother was a cheeld, and so the 
 dead come back then without so much as a by-your-leave. 
 But what's a ghost or two, or a headless dog, here and 
 
The Wings of Peace 3 3 1 
 
 there?" said he, in a generous s})irit. "They mostly pass 
 'ee by." 
 
 "Capital place for smuggling," said the doctor. 
 
 "There's an underground way to the smuggler's cave on 
 Greenvvay, the private bay of the estate," said Damaris, 
 and up every chimney there's a hiding place. Between 
 the Blue Room and the drawing room there's a money- 
 hoard, a sort of funnel between the two walls, and up in the 
 roof of Michael's room there's a secret chamber." 
 
 The doctor looked curiously at her, for she seemed as 
 familiar with Tonacombe as with the Prust manor-house, 
 and yet she had never seen it before, as far as he knew. 
 
 "Ay, 'tis a proper old cubby-house of deceits," said 
 Vosper, "and there's been witches in the parish and that 
 not so long ago. But, there, 'tis easy dealing with they 
 gentry. If they hags 'ee in the night, just you go out and 
 drive a nail in the ground, and the next person that comes 
 limping to the house is the witch. To keep 'em out o' nights, 
 drive a knife into the key-hole, for that spits 'em. But I 
 reckon 'tis time for me to leave 'ee to your dinner." 
 
 "I'll warn," said the doctor, as Damaris lifted the teapot, 
 "that they still sow seed from a zellip here, as they used to 
 when I was a boy. That's the old seed-lip, you know, used 
 before the drill came in." 
 
 He was as gay as a boy, as they ate and drank, with the 
 place getting more shadowy every minute outside the circle 
 of the fire, which they fed from a box of copse-cuttings that 
 stood by the hearth. 
 
 "Now," said he, drawing a paper from his pocket, "I 
 want your careful consideration of this. I went up to the 
 Devonshire dinner last year, and they gave us Devonshire 
 cream and junket." 
 
 "Well, why not?" laughed Damaris. 
 
 "Why not, saith she. Why, because one swallow doesn't 
 
332 A Man of Genius 
 
 make a summer, and that's all we had that was Devonshire. 
 Just you listen to this. Tell me how it strikes you." 
 
 Spectacles on nose he went solemnly through the menu, 
 marking the courses with a beat of his great forefinger. 
 
 Chives Soup 
 Tea-kettle Broth 
 
 Whitebait from the mouth of the Exe 
 Clovelly Herrings 
 
 Squab Pie 
 Leekie Pie 
 
 Venison from Exmoor 
 
 Saddle of Exmoor Mutton and Laver Sauce 
 
 Pig's Chitterlings 
 Hog's Pudding 
 
 Mazzard Tart and Clotted Cream 
 Whortleberry Tart and Clotted Cream 
 Junket 
 
 Coffee 
 Metheglin 
 Plymouth Gin 
 
 ''Now," said he, looking over his glasses at her, **do 
 you know what I'm going to do with that?" 
 
 "Use it for your next dinner party," said Damaris 
 maliciously, for she knew the Doctor's weakness for econ- 
 omy. 
 
 "No, madam," he shouted, "I'm going to send it to the 
 secretary of the Devonshire dinner, and if he uses it I'll 
 come up to dine with 'em, and if he doesn't I won't. And 
 I suppose you call that cheek?" he chuckled. 
 
 "Something rather like it," acquiesced Damaris. "But 
 
The Wings of Peace 333 
 
 you're both loyal sons of Devon, so I expect he'll love you 
 the better for it." 
 
 "Your hand's bleeding," said he, glancing at Damaris as 
 she ate jam piled on the top of her cream. 
 
 He caught her there, for with all her knowledge of the 
 dialect, she did not know the phrase that signifies jam and 
 cream together. 
 
 "And you, doctor, have got an eye too big for your belly," 
 said she, using the homespun expression that means an 
 over-large helping. She was trying to summon up courage 
 for an avowal. 
 
 "Doctor," she asked at last, "do you know why I brought 
 you here to-day? I know you thought it was because I 
 wanted an outing. But there was a more serious reason. 
 Who do you think is the owner of these wild acres and 
 this old house ? " 
 
 "A fellow called Kempthorne, you said. Not that it's 
 of any importance, since I don't want to buy it." 
 
 "You can't, unless you buy it from me. For I, moi qui 
 vous parle, am the owner of so much ling, heather, gorse, 
 and cliff." 
 
 "Now, what ridiculous rigs have you been up to?" said 
 he crossly. 
 
 "Do you remember that you once guessed a secret of 
 mine?" she said in a low voice. 
 
 "I thought you'd forgotten the fellow." 
 
 " In one sense, I have. He's very far away from me, now, 
 and yet very near. I may perhaps never see him again, 
 but I hope to see his work. You didn't think women ever 
 cared for a man's work, even more than for the man, I 
 suppose. But they do sometimes." 
 
 "I'm sitting on thorns, Damaris," said Dr. Dayman 
 plaintively, "till I know whether you are delirious or not." 
 
 Damaris laughed. 
 
334 ^ Man of Genius 
 
 "Ambrose Velly," she said, ''has had a sore battle with 
 himself and with things. And the things seemed likely to 
 get the better of him. Mrs. Velly came to me last week 
 in great trouble, for this place was a temptation to him. 
 He was tempted to sharp practice in order that he might 
 buy it." 
 
 She walked away to the window, while the doctor watched 
 her anxiously. 
 
 "All his life," she continued, coming back to the fire after 
 a silence, "all his life his mother has dinned into his ears 
 that he must retrieve the family fortunes. Then there 
 came the means of buying Tonacombe, if he would but 
 juggle a little with his honesty." 
 
 "And so you bought it over his head to save him," said 
 the doctor. 
 
 "There was no other way that I could think of," she 
 said. 
 
 "Will he like your doing it, Damaris?" asked the doctor. 
 
 "I cannot tell; but, somehow, I think he will under- 
 stand. For in mind we're very near to one another. And 
 when that's the case, one can know everything without 
 giving pain by the knowledge." 
 
 "And he is all that to you?" said the doctor. 
 
 "Oh, I don't grieve, I only want to see him what he 
 might be." 
 
 ''And so you give away your living. For on what are 
 you going to live, if you've sunk all your capital in this 
 place?" 
 
 Unknown to Damaris, the doctor's avarice was at bay 
 in him, for he saw a way to retrieve her error, though he 
 was averse to sacrificing himself. 
 
 "Do you remember, doctor, that years ago, whenever 
 I picked up a new dialect word, you used to say, 'Put 'un 
 in, my dear,' to the book I was to write? Well, I've 
 
The Wings of Peace 335 
 
 written that book and sold it. I've got the tip of my pen 
 in the world's oyster. It's called A Man oj Genius.''' 
 
 "Oh," cried he, with a shout, "so that's the way the cat 
 jumps, is it? Where will you get your next hero from?'' 
 he added mischievously. "For this, I fancy, might have 
 been called A Man oj Devon.'' 
 
 "That's been used," said Damaris with a blush. 
 
 "You know, my dear," he chuckled, "a woman of letters 
 has to have a new lover for every new book. But," he said, 
 following her out of the house, "if you're going to live here, 
 what's to become of me?" 
 
 "Will you come, too. Dr. Dayman? I don't think you 
 can get along now without me. And you shall have a 
 regular hospital to look after, for I mean to get city waifs 
 down for the sea to nurse." 
 
 Dr. Dayman had a theory that the sea, who ages ago 
 bore in her womb the seeds of both animal and human life, 
 is the elemental mother who can most quickly thrill the 
 weakly children of the race with vital force. Damaris knew 
 that he would thoroughly enjoy himself as the presiding 
 genius of her sea nursery. 
 
 But the doctor was shaking an apple tree in the garden, 
 and in a few minutes he came back to her with a handful 
 of the plump and red-streaked "sweet broadeyes" that carry 
 in their juicy flesh more of the pungent savour of the earth 
 than anything else that grows, save perhaps the Cornish 
 gillyflower and the hay-scented fern of the Devon hedges. 
 
 "This place '11 suit me uncommon," he said; "but it 
 won't belong to you much longer, for I'm going to buy it 
 of you. And you and the brats can come and lodge with 
 me. I'll adopt 'em all. It's high time I shut up shop." 
 
 Damaris understood; he had, as Ambrose would have 
 said, wrung the neck of the old man's peculiar complaint, 
 hatred of expenditure. 
 
336 A Man of Genius 
 
 Over the hills, as the two set out to explore, gleamed a 
 clear sky. Only "the cloud of the day" lay in a great 
 bank over the sea horizon, while all the land was luminous 
 with the shimmer of sunshine on woods and ploughland. 
 
 Along the valley, below the church of St. Morwenna, the 
 bed of the stream was marked by a line of trees, purple 
 with unburst buds above the hart's-tongue fern. Higher 
 on the hillside, branches festooned in lichen shaded the 
 tawny bracken with delicate shapes in grey gossamer. One 
 side of the valley lay in deep shadow, and on the sunny 
 side was reflected the outline of the church. In the still- 
 ness of the transforming light it seemed like the shadow of 
 a man's hand laid on the rough-hewn breast of nature. 
 
 "Down there," said Dr. Dayman, pointing to the rocks 
 below Hennacliff, "Hawker's men used to pick up the 
 gobbets of flesh from the drowned men. That was reality; 
 this," he said, pointing to the church and its shadow, "is 
 dream." 
 
 "Then," said she quietly, "we'll just go on dreaming." 
 
 "Men will," he answered softly, "as long as women love 
 as you do. Princess." 
 
 It was bedtime in the farmyard when they left. For at 
 sunset from the darkening fields the cows were filing in for 
 their long winter's night rest, which often lasts from five 
 o'clock in the evening to eleven next morning. There they 
 stood in patient groups, with tightly curled flanks and soft, 
 slow gaze, filling the yard with the sweetness of their breath, 
 while they waited for the shippen doors to be opened. 
 On the topmost branches of the trees the sunset glow still 
 lingered, and from the cliffs came the quiet breathing of 
 the sea. 
 
 Over in Bideford Mrs. Velly was hurrying to the office 
 of Trevithick and Jerman with Damaris Westaway's letter 
 in her pocket. She found Ambrose sitting at work in his 
 
The Wings of Peace 337 
 
 private room, and at the first sight of her white Hps and 
 trembling hands he imagined that she was the bearer of 
 bad news. 
 
 "What is it, mother?" he asked, putting her gently into 
 a chair. 
 
 "It's that night when I heard you talking," she said. 
 
 They had never mentioned the subject since her return 
 from Hartland, and Ambrose had never even asked where 
 she spent that day. 
 
 " I want you to read that," he said, handing her an open 
 typed sheet and watching her intently. There came back 
 to him the moment when he had gone down over the clifif 
 at Smoothlands, for the sweetness of a similar triumph was 
 here. 
 
 At first there was a mist before Mrs. Velly's eyes, but at 
 last she saw that it was a commission to a firm of con- 
 tractors to supply^the interior wooden fittings of the asylum. 
 So Damaris had sacrificed herself in vain, she said bitterly. 
 
 She swayed slightly in the agony of the moment, till her 
 son steadied her with his arm. 
 
 "That's not the firm that tried to buy me," he said gently. 
 "This" — he struck the paper — "is my answer to them." 
 
 In the next room there were short, sharp answers and 
 replies, and from the street came the wheezy groan of a 
 barrel-organ, but Mrs. Velly heard only the rustling wings 
 of peace. 
 
CHAPTER XXII 
 THE COSMIC DANCE 
 
 AT last there came to Thyrza the moment of which 
 Damaris Westaway had warned her long ago at 
 Bradworthy, the moment when she knew herself the wife 
 of a great man, and felt her little bark launched for the 
 open waters that she dreaded. The morning light shone 
 clear on them all as they sat round the breakfast-table; the 
 child in his high chair was drumming on the table for his 
 porridge, and Mrs. Velly leant forward, holding the teapot 
 poised in her hand. Before she put it down the world had 
 changed for them all; Ambrose held in his hand the open 
 letter which announced that he would be the architect of 
 the Oratory, for the design sent in at the time of bitter 
 struggle had been better work than he realised. 
 
 Suddenly, her eyes filling with tears, Thyrza got up 
 hurriedly and left the room, for the small house where they 
 had lived so meagrely seemed a paradise whose gates were 
 now closing behind her. Yet she could not bear to cloud 
 the radiance of his rapt face, white and tense with excite- 
 ment. But he had followed her upstairs. 
 
 ''Thyrza," he cried, "Thyrza, did you hear? It's come, 
 the great moment. Oh, my wife, aren't you glad?" 
 
 With a cry she turned towards him. 
 
 "Child, what is it?" he exclaimed, as he felt her shudder. 
 
 "You're going away," she said, "where I can't follow 
 you. I dread it so — the big world that's calling you. Long 
 ago she said I should disgrace you." 
 
 338 
 
The Cosmic Dance 339 
 
 "She? Who?" 
 
 "Miss Westaway." 
 
 "Why, that's queer," he said, "I forgot it in the excite- 
 ment of this. But by this same post there came an invita- 
 tion for you and me to go to Tonacombe for a few days. 
 And, by Jove, we will, too. I wouldn't have gone under 
 other circumstances, but this,'* he struck the letter he 
 carried, " changes everything. I don't fear even the charm 
 of Tonacombe, with a success like this at the back of me." 
 
 "That's the beginning," said Thyrza coldly, drawing 
 away from him. " You'll go to Tonacombe and then you'll 
 go to other places where you'll be ashamed of me. I shall 
 soon be nothing to you. I shall demean you, for I don't 
 even know how to dress right. I can only love you." 
 
 "Aren't you glad for me?" he asked, his face falling. 
 "When I opened the letter, I swear I thought of your joy 
 before my own. Why, there's mother below chanting the 
 Nunc Dimittis. Thyrza, what the deuce is the matter with 
 you?" 
 
 "I'm only fit to be the wife of a plain man," she said 
 bitterly. " She, over there, will be able to talk to you about 
 your work. I can see her now, while I look on at her talk- 
 ing to you, using words I couldn't even say. Oh, my 
 heavens, how can I live? How can I live?" 
 
 "Thyrza, is it all forgotten? That night when the boy 
 nearly died? Do you think I — or you — will ever get be- 
 yond that night?" 
 
 "But for him," she said, raising her head from the 
 mantelpiece on which she had hidden her face — "but for 
 him, you would never have married me. It never ought to 
 have been." 
 
 The next moment, as Ambrose turned on his heel and 
 left the room, she would have given the world, only to 
 recall her unwise words. Yet all the morning the absurd 
 
340 A Man of Genius 
 
 trifles of the future filled her fancy; as she carried her 
 basket to the market for butter and eggs and vegetables, 
 she wondered whether in the new life she would be obliged 
 merely to give orders. All the delights of cheapening here, 
 and saving a penny there, would be over for ever. 
 
 At last Thyrza caught sight of Chrissie Rosevear in a 
 crowd of chattering countrywomen, who were making up 
 for the social starvation of their normal days by a bout of 
 gossip over great market baskets filled with pallid fowls 
 and disembowelled geese. 
 
 " Oh, Chrissie!" she exclaimed, "what years and years it 
 seems since I saw you." 
 
 Laughing and buxom, Chrissie panted along by Thyrza's 
 side, till they reached a quiet side street. 
 
 "Well, how's the world been serving you, Thyrza?" she 
 asked. "I've had a mind to come and see 'ee several 
 times market days, but I didn't know whether you'd want 
 to see me." 
 
 " We shan't be here long, Chrissie, for Ambrose has won 
 a prize in competition. I dread it so, for I shan't know my 
 bearings among grand folks." 
 
 " I shouldn't fret my gizzard about that if I was you," 
 said Chrissie. " Folks is folks, and pretty much alike, too, 
 whether up or down." 
 
 " But you don't know, Chrissie, what 'twill be like. He'll 
 look at me and wonder if I'm looking right, and I shall be 
 afraid to open my lips with 'en." 
 
 "My dear soul, I shouldn't care if I was in my shift, if 
 so be as it suited me to wear it. And if my ways didn't suit 
 'en, why, 'twas for better, for worse, and that I'd soon let 'en 
 know." 
 
 "I can't hold 'en, Chrissie. There's days and days he 
 never knows whether I'm there or not. I stood behind 
 *en the other day, and he never knew I was waiting for 'en 
 
The Cosmic Dance 341 
 
 to look up. My word, I could have took up the paper and 
 torn it right across. I tell you, I'd hard work to keep my 
 hands off it. For I'm naught to 'en the side of an old 
 plan." 
 
 Her face worked furiously, and Chrissie waited till she 
 was quieter. 
 
 " Every woman goes through with that, sooner or later," 
 she said quietly. " Do 'ee think I wake John up o' nights 
 to say, 'John, do 'ee love me still'? Good Lord, he'd 
 think I was mazed. It can't be same as 'twas first go ofi", 
 my dear, but over the cheeld you'll meet." 
 
 " We did, we did," cried Thyrza. 
 
 "And he trusts 'ee, he respects 'ee. And that wears 
 better than the *Come-kiss-me-quick.'" 
 
 ''He's never forgotten," said Thyrza in a low voice, 
 " though he doesn't know that he remembers it. He's never 
 forgotten how the child was got. There's only one man 
 who respects me — and he doesn't know." 
 
 "Who's that?" asked Mrs. Rosevear sharply. 
 
 " John Darracott, the other man that cared for me. I 
 never see 'en now; for all I've heard tell he is still in Apple- 
 dore at the 'gravel-loading." 
 
 "Ay," said Chrissie, "that is a man, if you like. When 
 he spoke out about the job down to Quay and told the 
 truth at last, my John said to me, ' Chrissie, that's heart of 
 oak, if you like.' And it takes a sharp pin to make John 
 Rosevear jump." 
 
 Thyrza took it as a depreciation of her husband: she 
 was up in arms in a moment. "Why, yes," she said, 
 "Darracott's an honest man enough, but Ambrose is a 
 clever one." 
 
 To Thyrza, Ambrose was always "clever," for she never 
 knew what clever meant to the day of her death, to which 
 lack of perception many of her troubles may be assigned. 
 
342 A Man of Genius 
 
 "And," she continued, "I'd give my heart's blood for 
 him any day." 
 
 "Good land, child," cried Chrissie crossly, *'and what 
 good would that do 'en? A penn'ith of common sense 
 would be worth all the blood in your body to 'en." She 
 departed, shaking her head forebodingly over the future 
 developments of the Velly history. 
 
 The finest stimulus to the brain-worker is success, and 
 now to-night, as Ambrose sat at work on a last design for 
 Trevithick and Jerman, every nerve was thrilling with 
 power. A plank creaked overhead as he sat over his 
 drawing-board in the sitting-room, but he was dead to the 
 outside world in the concentration of the moment. In 
 front of him he saw the tower of a church, set in the midst 
 of billowy breasts of hills, and poised on the side of one, 
 like a ship that rides downwards into the trough of a 
 wave. He was studying the details of his scheme, like 
 a musician at work on a fugue; for nowadays so much 
 has the element of passion invaded the arts, that only in 
 architecture and fugue writing is the intellectual side 
 uppermost. 
 
 In the room above him, Thyrza was kneeling by the crib 
 of Ambrose II. Pressing her lips to his flower-cheek, she 
 prayed to the unseen disposer of fate. 
 
 "Ah, give him back to me. Give him back to me, for 
 he's wandering far away from me now. Let me hold 'en 
 a little longer yet. Only a little longer." 
 
 Then, like a gambler risking all on the cast of the dice, 
 she drew from the wardrobe the only beautiful dress she 
 had, a gown of filmy black. Standing in front of the glass 
 with it on, she watched the sequins on it running together 
 into molten streams with every movement of her body, 
 while she gazed at the grace of her figure, the suppleness 
 of her skin, with the confidence of a swordsman who 
 
The Cosmic Dance 343 
 
 handles a trusty blade, or passes his glance along the walls 
 of a well-equipped armour}'. 
 
 Outside the house, the guard-lights on the coast flashed 
 their message of warning to the passing vessels; the stars 
 pulsed and paled, and in the murmur of the wind sounded 
 the whirring undertone of the world's loom. But in the 
 pin-point focus of her own longing the outer world was 
 non-existent. All her life passed before her eyes, as before 
 a drowning man: the height she had reached with Darracott 
 on the last night she had ever spoken to him, the depth 
 she had touched in the fatal hour when she failed Am- 
 brose. 
 
 Still moving the sequins, she faced the two — the call 
 of the spirit, the call of the body. The same woman had 
 answered each — but not in the same man. The ties of 
 mind had never linked her to her husband, and the tie 
 of the body was going. To Ambrose her beauty, coarsened, 
 maybe, by a hard life, but still there, was among the things 
 that are old. For a man can only be held by the seduction 
 of change; he, not woman, being the truly mutable. 
 
 Yet what was it that Ambrose had once said ? The most 
 beautiful thing he had ever seen — herself, pale, worn, a 
 tired drudge, leaning over a baby's cot. Suddenly the 
 sequin dress had become the robe of shame; she stripped 
 it off and stole downstairs in her old brown frock. 
 
 Hour after hour she sat by the fire watching Ambrose. 
 Mrs. Velly looked in once or twice, but only to be motioned 
 away by Thyrza. The house became very still, for the old 
 woman, tired of waiting, had gone up to bed. 
 
 At last Ambrose threw down his pencil and, turning in 
 his chair, stretched himself in the blissful relaxation that 
 follows labour. 
 
 "Why, Thyrza, I made sure you were in bed long ago." 
 
 " I love to sit and watch you,*' she said quietly. 
 
344 A Man of Genius 
 
 "Ah, child, 'tis a wonderful, wonderful world," he cried, 
 " and the wonder of it only grows greater with the years.'* 
 
 He stood leaning with his shoulders against the mantel- 
 piece, looking not at the homely room, but at the splendour 
 of the future. "The glory of the setting sun, the music 
 that soars beyond our dreams, the palaces that rise in 
 vision, the great words that ring. And somebody called 
 it *a sorry scheme.' Good Lord, what a fool that man 
 must have been! It's a wonderful thing to be alive, in any 
 of the worlds there are for a man. Which of them do you 
 live in, Thyrza?" he asked, suddenly smitten with the sense 
 of her spiritual poverty. 
 
 It hurt him, as it hurts a man to see his beloved go bare- 
 foot and ragged. 
 
 "In you," she said, looking up at him, "the greatest 
 thing in the world to me is just you — and yours. It always 
 will be so, Ambrose. I'm sorry I grudged you your good 
 fortune. 'Twas only a part of me that did. For there's 
 nothing I wouldn't give up for you, really." 
 
 In truth, the hidden purpose of this life can be none 
 other than to learn the secret of the great rejections of the 
 world, as when a man sacrifices ease to unlock the gates of 
 knowledge, or refuses bliss to serve the higher purpose of 
 the ages, at which, as yet, he can only dimly guess. Com- 
 pared with the great arc-lights of such sacrifices as these, 
 Thyrza's small act of self-conquest was but a rushlight that 
 feebly flickers in the darkness of a great room. Yet a 
 rushlight may serve to mark a pathway. 
 
 Then Ambrose drew his bow across the strings of his 
 fiddle, and in the war-march that he played they both 
 heard the wonder of the fight: the hardly contested inches 
 in the upward strife, the bitter corners where the wind 
 blows cold in the zig-zag passage to the heights. 
 
 At last he softly touched the strings to the tune of "The 
 
The Cosmic Dance 345 
 
 Wind among the Barley," and as suftly, to his jigging, her 
 tears fell. 
 
 ''Dance, Thyrza," he whispered with a smile; but she 
 shook her head, for the girl who had danced at Long" 
 Furlong was dead. The Ambrose of those old days was 
 dead too, and on his face the lines were gathering — the fine 
 lines that mark the patient worker's face, the human carving 
 in which is written the finest record of our strange race 
 that fronts the sunlight of the divine, even though its feet 
 be in mire. 
 
 Yet the dancing was not missed entirely, for presently 
 Mrs. Velly appeared, carrying in her arms a bed-gowned 
 figure, whose bright eyes blinked at the lights in the room. 
 
 "Here's a rascal," she said. "Look at his eyes, like 
 diamonds. There's no sleep in them. I hear," continued 
 Mrs. Velly, on whom science seemed to be dawning as 
 once it shone on the Copernican age, " I hear that they 
 tell up some old tale now about our all going round with 
 the earth. Why, they might have learnt that from the 
 babies long ago; for when they've got the ache in their 
 little insides, 'tis round and round you've got to go with 
 'em. And when 'tisn't ache, 'tis up and down and up and 
 down, and way to go, and dance on little toes. That's the 
 old earth going round inside 'en, I reckon." 
 
 "That's your version of the cosmic dance, mother," 
 said Ambrose, as she set the baby on the rug in front of 
 the fire. "Well, I've heard worse ones than that, too." 
 
 Then he drew his bow and played a little trill, high up, 
 like the fluting of a gigantic gnat; to the sound of it the 
 merry pink toes moved solemnly up and down, and the 
 nut-brown head swayed gleesomely above the tumbled bed- 
 gown, which Mrs. Velly held by the tail. Every now and 
 then a little laugh rippled out for the joy of the dancing 
 blood in him. 
 
346 A Man of Genius 
 
 " 'Tis most as warming as a drink of home-made pepper- 
 mint-water to look at that," cried Mrs. Velly; "but, my 
 dear days, what a time for the blessed to be up!" 
 
 But she had not the heart to stop the clumsy little shuffle 
 of the feet, in which the purpose of the ages was fulfilled. 
 
 "Thyrza," said Ambrose, "never regret anything. For 
 life is wonderful — in its dawning, in its ending, and in the 
 hard time between." 
 
 To them both even the darker memories were illumined 
 by the unknown purpose that unfolds itself in flesh and 
 spirit alike. But Thyrza was glad that the sequin dress 
 hung still in the wardrobe. 
 
CHAPTER XXIII 
 
 ONE WAY OF LOVE 
 
 "■QUT," said Ambrose, ''you always did look at every- 
 D thing sub specie aetemitatis." 
 
 The strange words arrested Thyrza's attention. She was 
 playing backgammon with Dr. Dayman in the hall at Tona- 
 combe, while on the opposite side of the fireplace Damans 
 sat talking to Ambrose. 
 
 "I remember long ago," he continued, "how I used to 
 toil behind your idealism." 
 
 'Tt was my father's trick, I suppose," answered Damaris, 
 '*! must have caught of him. Mere breathing was never 
 enough for me, for I always want to wring the best out of 
 life, and that can only be done by giving 7}iy ver)^ best. 
 But Ambrosian life is a different matter, no doubt," she 
 added, with a laugh. 
 
 Thyrza watched her slim form, l>ing back in an old 
 carved chair, with her long hands resting on the arms of it. 
 She felt herself to be a thick-set farm-wench. 
 
 ''May I read the book in proof?" asked Ambrose. 
 
 "It's too intimate," said Damaris; "you could not read 
 it without recognizing the source of many things in it." 
 
 "But if the world reads, surely I may," he answered, 
 looking down at her bent head. 
 
 "That's the worst of the pen," said Damaris, "it runs 
 away with one's secrets." 
 
 "The mason's trowel doesn't, thank heaven," answered 
 he, with a laugh of pleasure at the mere interchange of 
 
 347 
 
348 A Man of Genius 
 
 thought. Thyrza's heart ached at the happiness in his 
 tones. 
 
 "She's put in every story she knows about me," grumbled 
 Dr. Dayman, joining in the conversation. Thyrza resented 
 his doing so, for it left her stranded, the one person who 
 had nothing to say. 
 
 ''She's actually got the tale of my fat-heads," he continued. 
 
 "Your fat-heads?" asked Ambrose. 
 
 "Why, yes; there were five old fools in Hartland, and 
 every time one died I planted an apple tree in the comer 
 of the orchard that I used to call my cemetery. I only 
 had the chance to plant three before she carried me off to 
 exile." 
 
 "Who is the Man of Genius?'^ asked Ambrose, suddenly 
 turning to Damaris, while the doctor prepared for a new 
 game. 
 
 Slowly the colour rose in Damaris Westaway's face, till 
 it flooded her very neck. As her eyes fell before Ambrose's 
 glance, he read the secret, while Thyrza watched the two, 
 and twisted her hands under cover of the tablecloth. But 
 Damaris soon recovered her self-possession. 
 
 "He never had your good fortune," she said, "but I've 
 put in a number of things that you told me. Even the 
 story about the old woman who wanted to know if the bees 
 were ear-marked that you claimed as yours. But I don't 
 think I have the real artist's instinct. I suppose you think 
 now of nothing but your buildings, and when you come to 
 die you will feel that your life has not been wasted, if you 
 have added to the beauty of the world. Now I can't feel 
 that. I want to be able to put my hand on some human 
 thing that is the better for me. That's why my father's work 
 is the most precious thing I have. The doctor and I are 
 going to supplement it down here, you know." 
 
 "Well, I must confess that I feel the world would get 
 
One Way of Love 349 
 
 along very well without my tinkering at it," answered 
 Ambrose. 
 
 The artist is the last man in the worid to understand 
 that vision of a better worid which forms the joy of public 
 work. For to the artistic mind the uplift of the spirit 
 which we seek in any widening of the horizon of our per- 
 sonal sympathies comes in the form of every day labour. 
 But by other men the vision of the larger work of the 
 world must be sought outside their profession. 
 
 "It was the sorrow of my father's peculiar convictions," 
 said Damaris, "that he seemed to stand aside from the 
 great current of life. I will not do so, although I have no 
 family ties. I can have no children of my body, as it were, 
 but I will of my mind." 
 
 Ail ages are ages of transition, but the fluctuations of our 
 time are almost more vital than those of any other; for this 
 is a time of change in the way men regard their work, the 
 boots they make, the hous-^s they build, the ships, of state 
 or of merchandise, which they steer. In the periods when 
 private work was well done, every man's share of the 
 world's task was just the little job he lived by, and the 
 cobbler stuck to his last. Now, more and more, the honesty 
 of plain craftsmanship is despised; for on all men has come 
 the vision of the larger work of the world, from the ideal of 
 privilege dethroned in favour of justice, down to the ques- 
 tions of public parks and water supplies. Hence the 
 cobbler is abroad tub-thumping, when he ought to be at 
 home hammering honest patches on his shoes whereby to 
 keep out the mud. And to women, who often have no 
 private work, the larger vision of pubHc work comes with 
 regenerating force, for they are not bound by the profes- 
 sional specialism of men, and all their human bias is 
 towards the greater future which dwells in childward-Iook- 
 ing thoughts. At present they may plead outside closed 
 
350 A Man of Genius 
 
 doors, yet in their hands is much of the higher future of the 
 world. 
 
 "I like you when you talk like that," said Ambrose; 
 "you look like a Valkyrie, a shield-maiden. Let me read 
 the book to-night, for if it resembles you at the present 
 moment it must be like burnished steel." 
 
 When Thyrza went upstairs to the solar that Damaris had 
 made the gues1«-chamber, the bright fire, the pink quilt, the 
 nestling warmth of the room seemed a mockery to her 
 agony of jealousy. She could have torn the quilt in rags 
 and scattered the fire over the room. They had been in 
 the house but two days, yet her brain was full of seething 
 annoyances. The very first night, as they went down to 
 dinner, Ambrose glanced at her, saying — 
 
 *'You should get Miss Westaway to give you some hints 
 on dressing, Thyrza." 
 
 She could hardly see the flowers on the table that evening 
 for tears, as she sat longing for the homely room in Bide- 
 ford where Mrs. Velly sat. Never before had she seen 
 Ambrose so gaily confident as he was that night; the very 
 buoyancy of his walk was an offence. She afterwards 
 lay sobbing softly for hours, while Ambrose slept peace- 
 fully. 
 
 Late at night he was sitting alone in the hall. At length 
 he turned the last of the proof sheets, and getting up threw 
 a fresh log on the fire. Though no critic he recognised 
 the pecuHar quaHty of Damaris Westaway's work, its 
 insistence on the movement of life, on its changing lights 
 and shadows. Just as colours in the plein air school 
 of painting shift and wane on the sohd shapes of the land- 
 scape, so the characters of A Man of Genius shone through 
 varying Hghts, unlike the soHd entities of the Victorian 
 novelists. 
 
 Yet the book pierced deeper far, for it was the story of 
 
One Way of Love 351 
 
 Damans Westaway's heart. Instinct in ever}' line was the 
 spirit of his own life; nothing was forgotten that had ever 
 happened between them, thought after thought that they 
 had shared together was there. In the story of struggle 
 that was told in the book, he read why Tonacombe had 
 passed into Miss Westaway's hands. So he was all this to 
 a woman great in sympathy and insight: at the know- 
 ledge his vanity and self-love shrivelled up like a pigmy 
 passion. He sat for a moment, seeing the thing that 
 was — and the thing that might have been; it was 
 impossible for him in that moment to escape the last 
 picture. 
 
 Suddenly looking up, his eyes caught the glimmer of 
 something white against the darkness of the portiere. 
 There was the other picture, the thing that was: Thyrza, 
 in her long white dress, with her arms tightly strained 
 in front of her. The very sight of the abandon of her 
 dress and attitude was an annoyance. But he tried to be 
 kind. 
 
 "Why are you standing there in the draught?" he 
 asked, taking her arm and leading her to the fire. "And 
 why aren't you asleep?" 
 
 "I've been waiting for you, crying for you so, dear," she 
 whispered, "and that," she added, pointing to the manu- 
 script, "is all about you, I know it is." 
 
 "Cultivate your sense of humour, my child," said he. 
 
 "I don't know what that is." 
 
 "No, faith, you don't. Neither do I, sometimes, and 
 that's what plays the deuce with us both. Anyhow, every 
 soul on this planet isn't busied solely with thoughts of 
 me." 
 
 "Her soul is," said Thyrza defiantly. "I know that. 
 Oh, Ambrose don't put me away from you." 
 
 "My dear, how could I put my basil plant away?" he 
 
352 A Man of Genius 
 
 said smiling. ''I couldn't, you know, for a basil plant 
 feeds on a murdered man's brains till he becomes a part 
 of it." 
 
 The next moment his heart smote him, for, recondite as 
 the allusion would have been to Thyrza in a less illuminating 
 moment, he saw that she understood. 
 
 ''There, child," said he wearily, ''you must be a more 
 considerate woman, if you can't be a rational one. For 
 such feelings as these are absurd — in both of us." 
 
 This time she did not understand his allusion, fortunately 
 for herself. 
 
 Fretted and fevered with a jealousy that nothing could 
 soothe, Thyrza dragged out the weary hours of the follow- 
 ing day, till at last, giving the excuse of a very real headache, 
 she went upstairs to her room. At the top of the staircase 
 she paused with her hand on the rail. Through the window- 
 panes opposite she could see the waving branches of the 
 old fuchsia-tree in the Pleasaunce. She had left Ambrose 
 alone with his hostess in the hall, and this was to be the 
 last day of their stay at Tonacombe. The two thoughts 
 were closely connected in her mind, for though it was evil 
 to spy, yet her doubt was unbearable. 
 
 Stepping cautiously across the floor of her bedroom, she 
 removed the blind that covered the arrow-slit and looked 
 into the hall. 
 
 There, like a picture set in a frame, she saw it; the fire- 
 light staining the long, narrow windows opposite the hearth, 
 glittering on the icicles that hung from the ivy, and throwing 
 patches of light on the courtyard. Inside the room, the 
 warmth and peace of the great fire filled the air with the 
 charm of summer. Ambrose stood as he had stood the night 
 before, gazing down at Damaris Westaway's bowed head. 
 Outside the firelit circle were the mistakes of the past 
 or these two; only in the present was the leaping flame. 
 
One Way of Love 353 
 
 Thyrza remembered another night by the fire, and strained 
 ever}' nerve in the effort not to miss a word. Her ears 
 gradually adapted themselves to the work they were called 
 upon to do, and she began to hear distinctly. 
 
 "I know why you bought Tonacombe, Princess," he said 
 quietly, as though holding himself back. 
 
 "Ah, can you ever forgive me?" cried Damaris, "for I 
 distrusted you. I feared for you." 
 
 "You cared so much, Damaris?" 
 
 Her head sank lower as he went on — 
 
 "I knew, when I read your book last night what I had 
 missed." 
 
 "No, don't say that; for the best still remains to us." 
 
 "Ah, Damaris," he laughed, "you used to call me a 
 disciple of Rabelais. I'm that still, I suppose; for to me 
 the best is" — he ])ent fonvard so that Thyrza could scarcely 
 catch his words — "the dear comradeship of nights and days, 
 the trust and help, the glow of Hves that bum in one." 
 
 Thyrza laughed; for somewhere in the past, she, too, 
 had heard words like this. So, she thought, when it came 
 to the last, the princess and the beggar woman were wooed 
 alike. 
 
 "You made me marry for the child's sake." 
 
 Then Damaris seemed to awake. 
 
 "No, Ambrose, no," she cried, "but for the sake of a 
 woman who loves you with every fibre of her true heart. 
 Loves you, yes, a^ well as I do." 
 
 Slowly the room was darkening. Then, at last he said 
 steadily, dropping the words one by one into the stillness. 
 
 "Then you love me? It is true." 
 
 Thyrza was quite cold and still now. She could hear 
 her husband's sneer at listeners; knew quite well the code 
 of morality. But now it concerned her no more than the 
 fashion of the night-dress in which she would die. 
 
 23 
 
354 A Man of Genius 
 
 "Yes, Ambrose," said Damans; "all these months and 
 years I've been learning the way of love." 
 
 Thyrza crouched closer, with breaths that came in jerks. 
 
 "My darling!" 
 
 "No; not as you think, Ambrose. The way of love, I 
 said. Real love, I mean. 'Tis the way of love to bear hard 
 things, to watch, to grow tired in the service of another. 
 The sweetest thing in all the world is to do the tiniest service 
 for one that's dear. That's why I bought this place, be- 
 cause I would have you stainless in honour. It's true, I 
 love you. I would say it before Thyrza." 
 
 They were standing now, and she placed her hand on 
 his shoulder. 
 
 "Why was I fool enough to wait so long?" he exclaimed, 
 bhndly misunderstanding her. 
 
 "Listen," said Damaris, while Thyrza felt tears that 
 were not all of misery start to her eyes, for she understood 
 though the man was bhnd. 
 
 "I met on the road the passion that you dream of," said 
 Damaris, "and I killed it. Now I can go without the love 
 that is Thyrza's. I want to suffer for you. Suffering is the 
 only passion I will know." 
 
 Only the sap hissed and the blood coursed in the veins 
 of three. Thyrza was rocking herself to and fro, like a 
 woman in bodily agony. 
 
 "It is the very height of life, that you refuse," said Am- 
 brose; "for all the greatest moments of life, the great 
 creative hours, are but the shadows of love's delight." 
 
 "And I tell you that 1 will give you the greatest love. 
 We must not meet again in the flesh, but I shall be always 
 there, in your greatest work, in your highest thought. I 
 call for the best in you, Ambrose, and I know I don't call 
 in vain. Give me up and I shall be part of the glory of the 
 world to you. The greatest thing in you is your love of 
 
One Way of Love ^r r 
 
 beauty. Let me be part of it, for you. If it came t6 pass 
 that we — fell, I should feel that both you and I were creatures 
 in filthy dress crawling into the banquet hall of a king. She 
 will give you little children," her voice broke for a moment, 
 '* but I will give you the great deed she cannot. I will have 
 nothing but the highest from you. 
 
 *'You shall have it," he said after a long silence. 
 
 Thus they shared the high joy that is the heart of agony. 
 
 As Ambrose left the hall, swinging the door into the 
 outer passage behind him, Thyrza sank down on the floor 
 of her room. The world had grown cold to her, like a 
 dead planet to the last man left alive on it. Yet in the 
 darkness one phrase sank deep, it was: ''I will give you the 
 great deed she cannot." 
 
 Thyrza almost smiled at the certainty that rang in the 
 words, for Damaris was so sure that the mean woman for 
 whom they stood apart could not share the greatness of 
 renunciation. 
 
 Then, hastily scrambling to her feet, she tore off her 
 dress and put on, instead, a shabby grey frock, with an old 
 black hat and ulster. Her inheritance stood her in good 
 stead now, for she was dressing for the open road that led 
 away from the old dark house of memories. 
 
CHAPTER XXIV 
 THE FLIGHT OF A SEAMEW 
 
 FLITTING like a shadow down the staircase and from 
 the Pleasaunce to the avenue, Thyrza stood between 
 the eagles on the gate-posts for a moment, looking back as 
 she recalled the night of their arrival, when Damans had 
 come down "the street" to meet them. Somewhere in the 
 midst of the walled paradise strewn with ash of hoar frost 
 and filmy with floating clouds overhead, there were words 
 whose echoes were ringing still. But everything came 
 deadened to Thyrza's senses now, for mortal injury of body 
 or mind is often painless. 
 
 On the ice of the slippery meadow-path she fell as she 
 climbed to the ancient Bush Inn, its thatch a glitter of 
 frost. Her way lay across the churchyard, but ghostly 
 terrors had no meaning now, and in the dusk she walked 
 as steadily down the graveyard path as between the trees of 
 the valley that leads to the sea. At the mouth of the combe, 
 where the stream falls over a lip of rock, she lay down and 
 flung the bundle of outdoor clothes that she carried on to 
 the rocks below, where the tide would wash them against 
 the toothed escarpment at the foot of Hennacliff. 
 
 Then she turned away inland. In the stillness she could 
 trace all along the coast the echoing note of every wave 
 that broke on the rocks, until at length the sea murmurs 
 lengthened into the faint stir of leafless tree-branches. As 
 hill and level passed and repassed, weighted lead instead 
 356 
 
The Flight of a Seamew 357 
 
 of fibre and muscle, seemed to fill her limbs, till she felt 
 the weariness that eats into the eye-sockets like a canker. 
 At last she came to a wood-stack by the side of a field, with 
 behind it a hay-mow where great ledges had been left in 
 the cutting. Into this she climbed, and wrapjMng herself 
 in wisps torn from the side, fell asleep, like a mouse in a 
 sweet-scented cranny. 
 
 Thyrza awoke at last to the stars that paled before the 
 dawn, and numbed now in feet and hands, she trudged on, 
 steadily setting before herself a fixed purpose to reach Brad- 
 worthy, where by now little Ambrose would be staying 
 with Chrissie Rosevear, whilst Mrs. Velly began the prep- 
 arations for the removal from Bideford. 
 
 The air was full now of the cold of coming snow. Yet 
 sunrise was near, and presently a robin hopped in the 
 withered hedge, as the red eye of the sun peered through 
 the russet leaves of the hazel bushes. Pausing on the brow 
 of a hill, between two pine trees that stretched out skinny 
 arms, red and tanned like the limbs of two old hags, Thyrza 
 began to pick sticks from the hedge for a fire. Over the 
 east a tawny smear of mist, like the smoke of a furnace, 
 was staining the frost; blue in the west lay a world of folded 
 hills. Over in Bradworthy Chrissie would be bathing the 
 boy: Thyrza remembered it as she glanced from her own 
 grimed hands to the leaden glitter of ice in the gutter. 
 
 As she took to the road again there came the first snow- 
 flakes, and before long the ways were thick in soft layers 
 that blotted out all footprints almost as soon as they were 
 traced. In a drift of vapoury snow the past was forgotten, 
 as the grey shadows closed round the solitary figure. She 
 wandered many times out of her way, for the farmhouses, 
 at which she halted twice to get a meal, were at long dis- 
 tances apart. Once she got a lift in a baker's cart. But 
 for the most part there was nothing but deep-cut lanes, 
 
358 A Man of Genius 
 
 where ice-sheathed branches closed overhead, alternating 
 with open country that seethed with flickering snowflakes. 
 Only the wind murmured of the road and the steady tread 
 of dogged feet through the silken whisper of the faUing 
 snow. Past and present had vanished now in sheer weari- 
 ness. 
 
 When at last she reached Bradworthy, every roof was a 
 weighted mass of snow. She knocked again and again on 
 the door of Chrissie's darkened house, but no answer came. 
 This rebuff awoke her fully, for now it seemed that the 
 whole universe was the enemy of Thyrza Velly. She felt 
 as a lad feels when a full-grown man strikes him across 
 the face. 
 
 "I'll not die," she cried; "I'll not be flung away." 
 
 At last, within, Mrs. Rosevear half turned at the sound 
 of the loud hammering. 
 
 "Chrissie, whatever can it be?" said John. 
 
 Wide awake she started up, and before his slower wits 
 had moved was leaning out of the bedroom window. 
 
 "It's me, Thyrza," said the snow-covered figure out- 
 side. 
 
 In a moment Chrissie was downstairs unbolting the 
 door. 
 
 "What is it? What is it?" cried John, as he followed, 
 his nightcap "pointing" like a dog at his shadow that 
 danced on the wall in the light of the candle. 
 
 "It's the dead come back, I reckon," snapped Mrs. Rose- 
 vear, even in that moment of excitement enjoying the 
 quiver she produced in her husband. When at last they 
 got the door open, she half carried Thyrza across the room 
 to the armchair, exclaiming — 
 
 "There now, I know it aU. They was here this afternoon 
 to look for 'ee." 
 
 "You'll not give me up, Chrissie?" 
 
The Flight of a Seamew 359 
 
 "Not if you don't want to go back," said she, unfasten- 
 ing Thyrza's sodden shoes, while John stirred the embers 
 into a blaze, his honest face a mask of perplexity at these 
 untoward happeninjj^s. 
 
 "What do they think?" asked Thyrza. "Did you see 
 Ambrose?" 
 
 "They believe you'm dead. No, he didn't come. He'd 
 gone to Bideford. Oh, Thyrza, whatever is all this stour 
 about?" 
 
 Thyrza had lost her way several times; it was owing to 
 this fact that she had not been overtaken. 
 
 "I'm not the wife of 'en. She is." 
 
 "Wild words, check!. You'll have to go back to 'en. 
 If the truth was known, you're longing to be back now." 
 
 "Chrissie," said Thyrza, standing up, "if you don't give 
 me your sacre<i word of honour that you'll never tell him 
 I've been here, I shall go straight away this minute. I'm 
 naught to Ambrose, but the thing that's spoiling his life. 
 She's ever^'thing to 'en." 
 
 "I'll warn he thinks so," snapped Chrissie, "and afore 
 he's clay-cold he'll think the same of a dozen more. 'Tis a 
 man's nature to, for they can't none of 'em keep more'n 
 half an eye off the maidens. But, Lord, what's that, when 
 you can always make a bed of thorns for 'en night times. 
 I'll warrant, if 'twas me, I'd give 'en what for. Who's the 
 maid?" 
 
 "Miss Westaway," said Thyrza curtly. 
 
 "And that I'll never believe," cried Chrissie; "and 
 you'm a downright little trollop to think such a thing." 
 
 "Oh, she talked about giving 'en up, as if there was 
 nobody else in the world that could do that," answered 
 Thyrza proudly. 
 
 This was overdeep water for Chrissie, so she changed 
 the subject. 
 
360 A Man of Genius 
 
 "Your cheeld's here now," said she; "he's upstairs a- 
 bed." 
 
 "Oh, Chrissie, let me go to 'en, there's a dear." 
 
 "No, no, you'll frighten the Pile soul into fits if you go 
 up same as you be now. Wait till you've had a sup of 
 something hot." 
 
 "No, Chrissie, let me go," she sobbed, as the good 
 woman would have held her back. "Let me have 'en. I 
 won't frighten 'en. I've been longing for 'en all day. He's 
 all I've got in the worid now." 
 
 "Let her go, woman," said John sternly; "don't keep 
 her back from her cheeld. Show her where the I'ile chap is." 
 
 And Chrissie, awestricken for once at her man's hand- 
 ling of the reins, led the way upstairs. Opening the door 
 of the boy's room, she whispered — 
 
 "There he is." 
 
 In the midst of a billowy wave of feathers there was 
 a slight depression, with hummocks on either side and 
 a dint on the pillow, where a shadow appeared. 
 
 Half an hour later Chrissie came in with a tray. Then 
 she exclaimed, for there lay Thyrza with the child's body 
 across her own. He was still sound asleep, for she had 
 managed to drag herself under him, without arousing him 
 to more than a sleepy whimper. His body lay across her 
 bare breast, and the healing streams of tears were running 
 down her cheeks. 
 
 "I didn't wake 'en," she whispered. "But, oh, Chrissie, 
 I've ached for this all the day, to feel his weight again." 
 Then, as Chrissie held the tea to her lips, she said, "His 
 father doesn't want me. But I'm his woman, for he gave 
 me this." 
 
 She fell suddenly asleep, while Chrissie stood watching 
 with the empty cup in her hand. The child wriggled 
 closer to the warmth, and in sleep the mother smiled. 
 
The Flight ot a Seamew 361 
 
 WTien she got downstairs Mrs. Rosevear's face was a 
 sat)T's, for she was forcing back the tears in a steady 
 grimace. 
 
 "What a poor wambling mortal you be, John," she 
 snapped. "What's the use of your staying up? You'll 
 be a reg'lar zany to-morrow, \\-ith all your eyes screwed up 
 for want of sleep." 
 
 Then she broke down. 
 
 "She's not wanted, John, she's not wanted; and I'm 
 sore af eared of what's coming to the poor soul." 
 
 ''Ay," said John, "when a wife leaves her man, 'tis 
 prett}' nigh as bad as death or making a hole in the water, 
 for life closes over her prett>- nigh afore she's touched 
 bottom." 
 
 The next day Th\Tza came downstairs and quiedy 
 announced that she was going on to Bideford to help Mrs. 
 Velly. She was quite calm now, but her farewell to the 
 child was said upstairs, away irom the presence of wit- 
 nesses, as Chrissie aftensards remembered. At the inn 
 she hired a trap and was rapidly driven along the Bideford 
 Road, while Chrissie stood for a long while watching the 
 dog-cart disappear in the distance. Had Th\Tza departed 
 as she had come, on foot and bedraggled, Chrissie would 
 have tried to prevent her lea\ing, but in her quiet assurance 
 and, above all, in her possession of money for the drive, 
 there was a certain aspect of power that overawed the good 
 woman. 
 
 At last ThNTza stood at the coastguard point of Apple- 
 dore. The wind had changed in the night, and over sea 
 and sky floated the delicate mist, half cloud, half veil of 
 glor}' that scuds before a sou'-wester, here rent into patches 
 that showed the blue, there massed into mountains of 
 cloud. At the river mouth a luminous mist against the 
 sky-line marked the spray of the bar; curling tongues of 
 
362 A Man of Genius 
 
 breakers rolled up the river between the sand-banks and 
 the quay, and up the tideway dashed a race of waters, 
 tearing to fill ''the guts" and embed the gravel flats that 
 at low tide lie like huge dank slugs in the river-bed. Behind 
 the lighthouse on the dunes facing Appledore itself shone 
 a tawny bed of sand, desert-like and sunscorched against 
 the blue of the estuary. 
 
 The life that was in some sort her own, the life of the 
 sea, had engulfed Thyrza's brain; she felt no pain now, as 
 she retraced her steps to an inlet of the beach where she 
 could remain till the evening. In front of her was the 
 workshop of a firm of ship-breakers, deserted by the men 
 at high tide. Against the lines of sea and sand the ribs 
 of a wooden hulk projected from the water, like the fin 
 of a mastodon. Next to it towered the black promontory 
 of a vessel only recently moored there for its execution. 
 The beach behind was heaped with spars of salted timber 
 and iron fittings that shone with the red leprosy of briny 
 rust. The place was a ships' charnel-house, hideous with 
 ruin and ominous with the powers of destruction, for to 
 these vessels the death that came not by wave or sand- 
 bank was inevitable at the hands of man. 
 
 As the sun set, in the stillness there came the song of 
 a robin. Persistently, gaily he piped, balanced on the edge 
 of a companion ladder, singing of the joys of nesting time 
 amid these ugly memories of the sea-horror. On and on 
 he trilled against the black shadows of the ships. 
 
 Over at the mouth of the river Torridge, John Darracott 
 sat in the door of the deserted boathouse where he lived, 
 mending a salmon net that trailed on the sand in front of 
 him. For next May he would be among the toiling figures 
 that haul the heavy meshes over the dunes by the Hght- 
 house. 
 
 The sand deadened Thyrza's footsteps, and the hum- 
 
The Flight of a Seamew 363 
 
 mocky mounds of bent grass over which she had to pass 
 hid her figure till she came quite close to him. 
 
 Then she cried, "John, John, I've come to 'ee." 
 
 As he started to his feet, the roar of the pebble ridge 
 receded to a far distance, and the hiss of spray on the bar 
 was stilled in the ears of the two. Then, as Darracott was 
 still silent, Thyrza moved closer, holding out her hands — 
 
 ''Take me in, John," she whispered, "for I've nowhere 
 else to go." 
 
 He led her into the boathouse. The ground floor, lit by 
 one dim window, was cobbled with pebbles and stacked 
 with logs of wreckwood. At one end a ladder led to an 
 upper story. 
 
 "Can 'ee get up this, my dear?" he asked, seeing her to 
 be half fainting. 
 
 "Yes, John, in a minute," she whispered. 
 
 But he would not wait, and lifting her like a child he car- 
 ried her up the ladder into a long, low room that looked 
 on the sea. Here the old furniture brought back Hartland 
 Quay, and as he laid her on a wooden bunk against the 
 wall she felt herself in safe harbourage at last. 
 
 Presently she was lifted by a hand that fitted cleverly 
 into the curves of her head, and a cup of tea, was held to 
 her lips. 
 
 "I'll be better in a minute," she said, as he gave her 
 more with bits of bread soaked in it. 
 
 Darracott stood looking at her with infinite tenderness 
 while she lay with closed eyes. Then he turned away, as 
 though to watch her resting was a sort of liberty. It was 
 wonderful how quietly he managed to move about the 
 room. 
 
 At last Thyrza roused herself, and standing up came 
 over to the hearth chair. With a stricture of heart John 
 remembered how many hundreds of times he had pictured 
 
364 A Man of Genius 
 
 her sitting there. It was all complete now, even to the 
 "yellow dog" of no special breed who licked her fingers 
 with his long red tongue. 
 
 "Thyrza," said Darracott at last, "can 'ee tell me what's 
 the matter? Or if you'd rather not, we'll let it bide till 
 you'm better." 
 
 She felt his anxiety under the quiet tones he had pur- 
 posely assumed. 
 
 "I came from terrible things, John," she said, looking 
 at him pitifully. 
 
 How was it possible, he asked himself, that Thyrza, 
 the wife of a man who loved her, could know anything 
 of "terrible things." Darracott knew a great deal of the 
 cruelty that Hves in sordid alleys beneath the blackened 
 roofs and patched slates of a fishing town, for across the 
 gleaming splendour of the estuary, ill-houses flourished, 
 where every room was a dumb horror. He knew one 
 indeed, where maids were drugged, and from which one 
 girl had fled to the outstretched arms of the clean sea. Yet 
 such could not be Thyrza's story. 
 
 "Tell me," he cried, "tell me, as if I was your own 
 brother, for there isn't anything as you couldn't say to me, 
 my dear. And if there's any help that can be given, by 
 God, you shall have it." 
 
 "John," she said, holding out her hands, "it's all been 
 took from me. I've no man, no child, no home. Will 'ee 
 take me, for I do belong to you?" 
 
 "Thyrza," he cried, touching her head gently as she 
 leant on his arm, "you don't know what you'm saying. 
 Will I take you? Oh, my maid, my maid!" 
 
 Then she pushed him away, and speaking mere col- 
 lectedly, tried hard to arrange her thoughts. 
 
 "I found out on the road to-day where you lived, but I 
 always meant to come to you from the first. There's 
 
The Flight of a Seamew 365 
 
 nowhere else for me to go, for they'd all give me up to him. 
 'Twas you that married me to him; but I won't go back." 
 
 ''What has he done, Thyrza?" 
 
 "He wants another woman. It's Damaris Westaway 
 that he would have married, if it hadn't been for you." 
 
 ''I'll not believe any evil of her," said Darracott sternly. 
 "She's not one as would come between man and wife." 
 
 "Oh," cried Th}Tza trembling, "they both think I've 
 spoiled his life. I heard 'em. I heard every word. I never 
 was the woman for him. John, will 'ee take me?" 
 
 "You've a child," said John quietly, after a moment's 
 pause. In the stillness she could hear his laboured 
 breathing. 
 
 "Yes," she said in a frightened whisper. 
 
 "The law would give it to him, if you was to come to 
 me hke this. Could 'ee bear that?" 
 
 "I shouldn't be good enough to care for a child, you 
 mean; that's what they'd think. Not my own child? 
 Surely, they wouldn't take it from me? It's mine; I bore 
 it. And you'd take it, I know." 
 
 "That's the law." 
 
 "I should hurt 'en, you mean. I shouldn't be a good 
 woman, then, that could teach a child good. John, I'm 
 not that now; for he had to marry me ... to save my good 
 name." 
 
 She had suffered before, but never as she did now, when 
 •she glanced for a second at his face. 
 
 "Nothing'll ever change 'ee to me," he said at length; 
 "nothing, not the ven' smoke of the pit. You'm always 
 Thyrza to me — the little maid that come down beside me 
 into the very depths." 
 
 "Then you'll take me? For you qo love me true." 
 
 "No; I'll not do 'ee this harm. What would it be like 
 when you turned on me as the man who made 'ee forget 
 
366 A Man of Genius 
 
 all that's good? For I should have robbed 'ee of every- 
 thing — child, honesty, all. Even the man you care for 
 still; for you love 'en still. Don't 'ee, my dear?" 
 
 '*Iss, John, somewhere I do. He loved me tender once, 
 and he gave me the child." 
 
 "Ay, lass," he said bitterly, '"twas a'most vs^orse than 
 a base born child would have been, to come to me, with 
 him in your heart all the time." 
 
 "But what can I do, John?" she asked humbly. 
 
 " Bide here till the heart comes back to 'ee. I'm a marked 
 man, so there's not a soul that ever comes into this place. 
 You may rest quiet here for months; and there's no need 
 for anybody to know you'm here, not if you'm careful. 
 'Twill give 'ee time to find your bearings." 
 
 "But you, John? I can't turn you out." 
 
 "I'm to work all day over on the banks, and night-times 
 I can easy sling a hammock below. You'll put me out no 
 more than the old yellow dog that come limping across the 
 flats last summer. Beaten and starved he'd been, but he's 
 got a home now." 
 
 To his simple straightforwardness they were both ship- 
 wrecked, with the yellow dog for company, and she no 
 more shrank from his offer than she would have from his 
 help on a desert island. 
 
 "That's right, my dear," he said cheerfully, as he saw 
 her look of acquiescence. "And now, when I come home 
 night-times, there'll be a bright fire waiting for me, I 
 know." 
 
 The existence of a love like Darracott's is hke a bursting 
 ray, a light from a leaden sky, giving promise of that golden 
 sun of blessing that still shines beyond the storms of this 
 rude world. Yet, in his hammock that night, he lay gazing 
 into the face of his own stern honesty, as he asked himself 
 whether the tide would ever carry Thyrza into safe anchor- 
 
The Flight of a Seamew 367 
 
 age; for she panted like a storm-driven bird that had dashed 
 against his window, and in his hands that held her there 
 was an answering passion. As he heard her sob once over- 
 head, his heart swelled with a love that it took all his strength 
 to conceal. Yet she was not his, and in her helplessness 
 less his than ever. 
 
CHAPTER XXV 
 
 THE JUDGMENT OF THE NETHER GODS 
 
 "\TO, no," cried Damans, startled out of her usual 
 i\ composure, "not that, not that. It isn't possible." 
 She had been schooling herself for the inevitable evening 
 that must be spent with her guests, for they would neces- 
 sarily be most difficult hours, but here, in Ambrose Velly's 
 curt words, there leapt at her a horror that turned the cosy 
 hall into a torture chamber. 
 
 "But," persisted Ambrose, "the shutter of the solar's 
 down and she — has not come back. I must get the farm 
 men to search the cHffs. I will tell them that we fear Mrs. 
 Velly must have met with an accident." 
 
 Presently she heard the shouts of men in the "streets," 
 as she tried to realize what Thyrza must have suffered, and 
 endeavoured to reconstruct the tragedy of these last hours. 
 But over all there was the sense of unreality, the dream-like 
 feeling that she must soon awake. Hastily running up- 
 stairs to the minstrel gallery, and thence to her room, she 
 threw on a cloak and hat. For to wait in that stillness for 
 what might be happening outside was impossible. 
 
 Once in the open air she turned towards Greenway, in 
 which direction she could see the lanthoms carried by the 
 searchers. As her footsteps echoed on the hard, dry road, 
 Damaris felt as though she were walking on her own heart, 
 for the place was filled with nothing but memories of these 
 last few days, and it was with these memories that she 
 
 368 
 
The Judgment of the Nether Gods 369 
 
 must live henceforth. In the moonlight the almost phos- 
 phorescent trunks of the trees round the ancient fish-stews 
 were a company of grey ghosts. Among them she could 
 see Thyrza, as she had knelt on the thick mould of leaf 
 castings to gaze into the ponds, then brown-speckled with 
 dapplings of sunlight and shadow, like the markings of a 
 trout's back. In the opposite field she had leant to look 
 into the well-house and listen to the hidden spring that 
 gurgled in its depths. And now Damans could see her 
 beating on weak wings against the hurricane, a life for 
 which her weakness was never intended. 
 
 At last she turned back towards the house again, for it 
 was impossible for her to walk the cliffs, as Ambrose and 
 the men were doing. Pacing up and down *'the street," 
 she waited, till at length there came the noise of hurried 
 footsteps. It was a farm-boy, breathless with running, 
 who handed her a page torn from a pocket-book, with the 
 word "Come," written on it in Ambrose Velly's hand. 
 
 ''They've found clothes under Hennacliff," said the boy, 
 his nostrils quivering with his breath. 
 
 In the valley by the church Damaris met the men re- 
 turning. Over the arm of one hung some dark garments, 
 and all along the coast came the lonely moaning of the 
 tide. Yet she thought, for all the noise, it told no secret. 
 Holding a lanthom up, Ambrose asked her in a low voice 
 to look at the clothes. 
 
 '* Yes, these were hers," she said, with dazed eyes, as she 
 turned them over on the man's arm. "Wait," she said as 
 the men passed up the narrow path. "Wait, Ambrose, 
 there's something I must say." 
 
 The undertone of the water below the rock sounded 
 thunderous, as they stood together in the rapidly increasing 
 darkness. 
 
 "It's not as you think," she said sharply, "I'm certain 
 24 
 
370 A Man of Genius ! 
 
 it's not. I've a woman's instinct, and I know you can j 
 trust it." I 
 
 "It'll be in on the ninth day, if not to-morrow," he said ; 
 dully. ] 
 
 ''She never drowned herself, Ambrose. A desperate , 
 woman would not have cast off her clothes; for the horror 
 of the cold would have made her keep on everything she 
 wore, with a vague sensation of warding off the chill of the i 
 water. I know it. I've sent men from the Bush along the ' 
 roads, for that's where she'll be found, if she has not been 
 gone too long to be overtaken." ; 
 
 "God bless you, Damaris." i 
 
 "Ah, no, for 'tis I who brought this on you. I, and I ^ 
 only. But we cannot go back now, and to wish words unsaid ; 
 is futile. Come quickly back to Tonacombe and see what i 
 she can be wearing." | 
 
 The brisk action of the last minutes had set her frozen 
 blood flowing, her paralysed brain working. 
 
 Yet, as they turned out the wardrobe in the solar, even 
 Damaris's confidence was shaken, for there appeared to be 
 none missing of all the dresses they had seen her wear, 
 except the garments found on the beach. 
 
 "That takes away the last hope," said Ambrose. "My 
 God, I'd give all the past and all the future to bring her 
 back. The future, what's that to me now!" 
 
 "No, no; there must have been other clothes that we 
 know nothing about, Ambrose. Go to your mother and 
 find out." 
 
 As he rode away, after one hand-clasp and a faltering 
 good-bye, Damaris tasted the bitterness of self, for now his 
 ambitions, his love for herself, were nothing, when weighed 
 in the balance with his passionate desire to make amends 
 to Thyrza. She went back to the lonely hall to sit down to 
 write Dr. Dayman, who had gone to London the previous I 
 
The Judgment of the Nether Gods 371 
 
 day. With a stab of pain, Damaris remembered that, had 
 he only put off his visit to town a day later this misery 
 would have been avoided. For with the old man bustling 
 in and out, intimate conversation would have been im- 
 possible. 
 
 By noon next day every coastguard point and every 
 j)ohce station had received notice of the tragedy, but it was 
 evening before Ambrose reached Bideford, and turning in 
 from the snowy street, opened the door of his house. The 
 sight of Mrs. Vclly ])lacidly packing china in great cases 
 unmanned Ambrose more than anything that had gone 
 before, so vivid were the pictures of their joint life that 
 it called up. Leaning on the mantelpiece, now fagged to 
 the uttermost point of endurance, he told his tale in five 
 curt sentences. 
 
 She never said a word, but pushing him into a chair, 
 stood softly patting his shoulder, as she had done hun- 
 dreds of times in his childhood at some fit of rage or im- 
 patience. 
 
 ''She'd never have stripped herself," she said at last, 
 ''with the real death agony upon her." 
 
 "Ah," cried Ambrose, "that's what Miss Westaway said. 
 But there's no good taking comfort in that, for we searched 
 her boxes, and there was nothing missing that she could 
 have worn." 
 
 "You don't know all she took with her, Ambrose, but 
 I do." 
 
 Then, after a moment's consideration, she said, "Was 
 there an old grey tweed in the box? For that's what she 
 would wear to walk in of a winter night. And her old 
 ♦ ulster and sailor hat. For she took 'em specially against 
 any cliff cHmbing, 'though,' says she, 'I'll hardly dare put 
 'em on, so grand it'll be there.'" 
 
 "Are you certain she took those clothes, mother?" said 
 
372 A Man of Genius 
 
 Ambrose, starting, ''for I know the ones you mean — and 
 they weren't there." 
 
 "Absolutely certain. But come upstairs and look for 
 yourself, if they're there." 
 
 With a fresh spring of hope in his heart, Ambrose wired 
 particulars to the police stations, but next morning Thyrza 
 drove into Bideford in clothes that Chrissie had lent her. 
 
 A fortnight later a dog-cart that splashed the pools into 
 flurries of mud was spinning into Hartland by the Bideford 
 road. As it approached the village the sudden glare of 
 fire lit up the faces of the occupants, Ambrose Velly and 
 a man hired at Bideford. 
 
 "There's some sort of a randy toward by the look of it," 
 said the driver, "and 'tisn't pancake day neither. And if 
 'twas, they've long given up going round begging and 
 throwing shards at every door that wouldn't give. I can 
 mind going round as a boy though, shouting — 
 
 * Flish, flash; flish, flash, 
 Watter, watter, ling, 
 Hev 'ee any pancakes? 
 Plaze to let us in. 
 
 'Have 'ee any best beer? 
 Have 'ee any small ? 
 Plaze vor give us some then, 
 Or nothen at all.' " 
 
 He swung his head in time to the measure. 
 
 "Get down," said Ambrose, "and hold the horse's head. 
 The place has gone off its head to-night." 
 
 From a bush of gorse that projected between two tar- 
 barrels sprang a hissing spiral of sparks and flame. The 
 light of it flashed on the windows of the King's Head 
 Hotel and on the blackened face of the man who was 
 holding the torch to the mass of logs and faggots that 
 stood in the village square. Since dusk stealthy figures 
 
The Judgment of the Nether Gods 373 
 
 had been hurrying to and fro between the wood-pile and 
 the hoards secretly stored in the houses and Hnhays of 
 Hartland. 
 
 At the signal the village began to hum like a hive of 
 bees, while from the darkness of the fields sounded a con- 
 fused roar, not coming in flashes hke the cheers from a 
 football field, but circhng in discordant cacophony over 
 hedges and ditches. It was apparently wheeling in narrow- 
 ing circles closer and closer to the huddle of houses among 
 the trees. As it approached, the roar became disintegrated 
 into the separate sounds that composed it, into the skirl of 
 mouth organs, the hee-haws of the human jackass, the 
 blast of horns and the rattle of tin pans and biscuit-boxes 
 loaded with stones. Clear above all was the ear-blasting 
 sound of a bullock's horn blown by lusty lungs. 
 
 The windows of the square were lined with grinning 
 heads that cheered lustily as the crowd flattened three sub- 
 stantial members of the rural poHce against the railings. 
 These homely men, whose main duty it is to see that sheep 
 are duly dipped according to regulations, were about as 
 able to cope with the trouble as Dogberry and Verges 
 would have been. One house alone, in all the place, was 
 dark and closely shuttered. 
 
 ''It's the hunting of the stag, sir," said the driver with a 
 grin, as Ambrose jumped down and joined him at the 
 horse's head, for with staring eyeballs it was dancing ner- 
 vously at the din. ''We'd best get 'un out of this, for he'd 
 go like the very wind if he got his head in this shindy. 
 There's a back way round to the stables, praise be." 
 
 "Who is it they're hunting?" asked Ambrose of a man 
 who stood near. 
 
 "Old Solomon Sadd. The lads ha' been getting tar- 
 barrels and vizards together since Michaelmas. He's a 
 married with a fam'ly, but he got a girl into trouble last 
 
374 A Man of Genius 
 
 spring and the boys'll make him pay for it, the old raps- 
 callion!" 
 
 From the window of the inn parlour Ambrose watched 
 the last stages of the orgy, feeling as though he himself 
 were being flayed by the mockery of his peers. It was 
 Solomon Sadd they were hunting for his actual mis- 
 demeanours, but it was Ambrose, with his quick sensitive- 
 ness, who was bearing the fullest pangs. For, had Damaris 
 been less noble, had they "fallen," as she phrased it, this 
 coarse rite would have been earned by them. To Ambrose, 
 the idea of such a trail of mud over the purity of her life 
 was as abhorrent as a leer of suggestion from the eyes of a 
 Madonna, and for a moment, in the horror of such profana- 
 tion, he lost even his sorrow for Thyrza's misery. As he 
 watched the flames that leapt towards the grinning masks, 
 he felt as though the noble effort of Damaris' struggle had 
 been washed away in a stream of ribaldry. How far it 
 seemed from the wood-scented stillness of Tonacombe to 
 this; yet behind the passion that masquerades as a god there 
 was this dance of satyrs, this judgment of the nether gods. 
 And weighed in the balance of the true facts of life, the 
 Rabelaisian verities, indeed, this judgment was the only 
 true one. 
 
 Had the "hunting" been aimed directly at himself, 
 instead of at Solomon, Ambrose would have fought it with 
 contempt, but this side blow grazed his skin with the 
 irritation of startled nerves. For to the spectator the 
 battle is often more nerve-shaking than to the actual com- 
 batants, who are themselves plunged back in the savagery 
 of earlier ages, since to glance into the seething depths of 
 the crude passion in which our forefathers wallowed is 
 more illuminating than to bathe in it. 
 
 The culminating ceremony of the judgment had begun 
 in the square by now. 
 
The Judgment of the Nether Gods 375 
 
 In the midst of a rout of blackened faces, rode a man, 
 on a hackney, holding in front of him a moon-faced efl5gy 
 that leered with chalky features and represented Solomon 
 Sadd. From the sleeves of the straw-stuffed figure pro- 
 jected dummy fingers, podgy and stiff. The ram's horns 
 fastened to the forehead of the image had slipped sideways 
 into one of the staring, chalk-rimmed eyes. Immediately 
 behind the "stag" rode a man in a vizard, with two "whips" 
 on either side, each carrying a bladder on a string. 
 
 The end came in the roar of flame and the press of 
 struggling bodies, when the bladders full of bullock's blood 
 were burst over the culprit's doorway and over the effigy 
 that, still smouldering, was finally dragged along the street 
 on a burning tar-barrel. 
 
 Once common in all the country from Exmoor to the 
 Cornish border, where the deer roamed wild in the days of 
 our forefathers, "the hunting of the stag" is a curious 
 survival of primitive savagery and of primitive justice. In 
 the words of one of the bystanders, it "always leaves the 
 female alone," and is always aimed at a married man who 
 betrays a maiden. The pack has to run over three parishes 
 to escape the "lash of the law," and in many villages in 
 the ancient stag-hunting district, there may be found a man 
 whose proudest boast it is that he was chosen to act the 
 stag, for in cases where no farmer will lend a horse, the 
 stags are chosen from the best runners of the district. 
 
 Ambrose had come over to Hartland to meet Dr. Day- 
 man, and as the hunting chorus faded in the distance, he 
 heard the doctor's voice from the passage. 
 
 "Yes, it's rough," said he, "and, Hke many rough things, 
 wholesome. If they'd carried the spirit of stag-hunting 
 into their law-making, we should have cleaner bills of health 
 by now. The heart of the people's right every time." 
 
 The two men greeted one another coldly, and then the 
 
376 A Man of Genius 
 
 doctor, nodding in the direction of the square, said grimly — 
 
 "So they got up an entertainment against your arrival 
 here. I suppose you saw that?" 
 
 A wave of hot colour flooded young Velly's face. 
 
 "Yes," he said; "I saw it." 
 
 "Brought things home a bit, I should say," remarked the 
 doctor; "for that's the way we treat a man who forgets 
 himself to a woman." 
 
 "Dr. Dayman, if I could undo — but that's futile, as Mr. 
 Westaway told us. You were to bring me a message from 
 Miss Westaway?" 
 
 "I bring one, young man. And, in my opinion, it's the 
 wisest thing she's said for a good spell. I knew it would 
 be wigs on the green if you came to Tonacombe. A sheer 
 matter of flame and pitch, as I told her. But she wouldn't 
 listen to a word, not she." 
 
 "You think my wife will never be found?" 
 
 "I think there'll be a shadow over another noble woman 
 till she is found," snapped Dr. Dayman. "That's what I'm 
 most concerned about." 
 
 It was a satisfaction to him to look at young Velly's 
 harassed, jaded face, with the quivering nerves that played 
 round the eye-sockets. 
 
 "I suppose," said Ambrose, "there are some things that 
 God himself can't undo. And one of those things is my 
 reverence and respect for Miss Westaway." 
 
 "There, boy, there, I know. Damn it all, I'm a prating 
 nincompoop, and if she could hear me maundering on like 
 this she'd never forgive me. But truth's truth, though the 
 devil say it. And when I watch her, day after day, trying 
 long jobs of mechanical drawing to tire herself out, why, 
 I wonder if the fiends do thumb-nail sketches of the topog- 
 raphy of the pit." 
 
 "But her message?" 
 
The Judgment of the Nether Gods 377 
 
 "Ay, her message. 'Twas this. That if she has any 
 influence with you, if you have even any thought of her 
 peace of mind, you'll not bring a double ruin on yourself." 
 
 "What do you mean?" 
 
 "That you'll go away to the building of the Oratory and 
 not throw away the chance that's been offered you." 
 
 "And not know whether my wife's above ground or not!" 
 exclaimed Ambrose. 
 
 "Any clue?" 
 
 "Not a ghost of one. I can't go." 
 
 "Yes, you can." 
 
 At the familiar phrase, remembrance quivered through 
 Ambrose Velly's ver)- heart-strings. 
 
 "Wait," continued Dr. Dayman, "I haven't finished yet. 
 If you will go and leave the work to her, no stone shall be 
 left unturned to find your wife. Without you, Damaris 
 will have a clearer hand. And she will begin with Chrissie 
 Rosevear." 
 
 "Why," exclaimed Ambrose, "I not only sent there, but 
 I went there myself afterwards." 
 
 "And what did she do?" 
 
 "Said Thyrza'd been there one time too many, and as 
 to where she was now, she Midn't know no more than the 
 dead.' And slapped the door in my face." 
 
 "She won't in Damaris Westaway's face," said Dr. 
 Dayman quietly. "So, I am to say that you'll go away and 
 fight your fight there?" 
 
 "And leave her to fight mine here," said Ambrose 
 bitteriy. 
 
 "Gad, man, that's just what she has done pretty nigh 
 always for 'ee." 
 
 "So she has." 
 
 "Then let her fight once more. It will give her more 
 peace than aught else, and at your hands she deserves that. 
 
378 A Man of Genius 
 
 She'll do it with all her heart, and she never broke her 
 word in her life. For if she swore she'd bite the head off 
 a tenpenny nail, she'd do it." 
 
 "I'm stripped of everything," said Ambrose. 
 
 "We mostly do begin stripped," said the doctor blandly, 
 "and for my part, I like 'ee best that way. For there's 
 something rather uppish about you at your top-dog times. 
 But I knew 'ee when you were mother-naked, and I can 
 stand 'ee very well like that." 
 
 Ambrose laughed and felt the better for it, since the 
 exercise brought with it a Httle strength for the backward 
 fling of the head with which he usually faced the fight. 
 
 "I don't believe Thyrza's really gone," said he incon- 
 'sequently. 
 
 "And if she came back, what then, Velly?" 
 
 "She should have everything I could give her, sir, of 
 peace and honour, for, my God, how she must have suffered 
 before she . . . went away." 
 
 Being a wise man Dr. Dayman said nothing, but he 
 knew that Ambrose, taught by the world's hard lessons, 
 was learning something of that patient forbearance which 
 has more to do with married happiness than any gift of 
 brain or body. 
 
 "Then," said he, seizing his chance, "give another 
 woman, one to whom you owe everything, the trust she 
 asks of you, and go and do the work she fought to gain for 
 you. Will you, my lad? For if you haven't sucked as 
 much sweetness out of posies as I reckoned you would, 
 yet all the same, I beheve that out of the fighter has come 
 forth strength. I think you'll go now," he added after a 
 pause. 
 
 And Ambrose did. 
 
CHAPTER XXVI 
 THE GATES OF DAWN 
 
 DOWN in West Appledore, Irsha Street was echoing 
 with hfe. Overhead a narrow slit of star-strewn sky 
 was visible, and below, from the low, whitewashed cottages, 
 sounded a concertina, accompanied by the wails of children 
 and the shouting of men. In the open doorways women 
 stood rocking babies to sleep and calling shrilly to each 
 other. Lovers whisj)ercd at the entrances to the side 
 "drangs," boys yelled at their games, cats hunted scraps 
 in reeking gutters. 
 
 Through the swarming life John Darracott swung along 
 in his high boots and fisherman's rig. At the window of 
 one of the houses a prim little girl crouched, gravely wrest- 
 ling with the knitting of a stocking, and Darracott paused 
 for a moment to watch her; the sight made him smile, 
 but the next moment he sighed. As he crossed Northam 
 burrows on his way to the boathouse, he saw that even 
 in this wind-swept place of regained sand, the spring was 
 busy with the low roots of thyme and sea-thrift. He st(M)(l 
 for a second in the shadow of the boathouse, watching 
 the light from the room above. For in his heart, as in the sea- 
 thrift, there was the uprising of the spring. He did not wait 
 long, however, for the light drew him, and soon he was 
 climbing the ladder. 
 
 "That's something like," he said, glancing from the 
 lamp-lit supper-table to the fire on the hearth. "It used 
 
 379 
 
380 A Man of Genius 
 
 to be a burnt-out grate that I come home to. And how've 
 'ee been all day, my dear?" He noticed a faint shadow on 
 the face that was beginning to regain its brightness. 
 
 "'Twas wisht-like, here alone all day," she said; "and 
 the sea's been very loud somehow. But I don't mind now 
 you're here. Though come to that, if it wasn't for the 
 sound of the sea, 'twould be lonier far. Besides, I like 
 to be near it, for I was bom in the sound of it." 
 
 She was pouring a stew of corned beef and vegetables 
 into a dish, as she talked. 
 
 "Ay," nodded John, "'tis old and strange, the sea is. 
 There's never any spring-time comes to it. 'Tis the oldest 
 thing on the earth, I reckon." 
 
 There was a sense of strangeness to-night, and the roar 
 of the pebble-ridge seemed coming nearer and nearer. In 
 its continuous booming, audible for miles inland, the hiss of 
 spray on the bar was lost. 
 
 "My boy come in a storm," said Thyrza, as they sat 
 down to their meal. 
 
 Darracott glanced at her curiously, for it was almost the 
 first time in all these weeks that she had mentioned the 
 child. 
 
 "Oh, John, I hear 'en crying sometimes," she said, 
 covering her face with her hands. "It comes on the 
 wind." 
 
 "My dear, my dear," said Darracott tenderly, "I doubted 
 but what you were a-hungered for 'en." 
 
 His tone awoke her to a sense of her own selfishness. 
 
 "There," she said, dashing away her tears, "don't 'ee 
 worrit about me, John. Did you draw those fishes?" she 
 asked, nodding at the sketches he had brought from Hart- 
 land Quay. 
 
 "Ay," he said; "I've sat upon a fish maund to Clovelly 
 many and many a time and drawed 'em in. I've always 
 
The Gates of Dawn 381 
 
 wanted to know about Her," he continued meditatively, as 
 he jerked a thumb towards the sea. "For 'tis dullish 
 going to work day after day with nothing for your mind to 
 play upon. I never was one to go w^ith a mate neither. 
 'Tis queer what stuff comes up from Her, particularly with 
 a dredger." 
 
 "Is it true about the queer marks on the drowned folk? 
 I've heard women talking about 'em." 
 
 "Iss, that's octopus marks. 'Tis like this here: the 
 conger is the only fish that can tackle an octopus, and when 
 the conger gets scarcer, the octopus gets more plentiful. 
 That's the w^ay of it. But," he continued, as they got up 
 from table, "I've got something for you to look at here." 
 
 He handed her a big parcel, and filling his pipe, sat 
 down to watch her open it. The question of its contents 
 had been a serious matter of cogitation to John, during 
 many hours of the monotonous toil of gravel-loading. 
 
 At length it was opened, and Thyrza laid on the table a 
 length of calico, sundry reels of cotton, a packet of blue 
 jersey wool, and a set of great knitting needles. 
 
 Her eyes filled, for now she remembered that three 
 evenings ago she had found him turning the folds of a 
 much-mended garment that lay across a chair-back by the 
 fire. It was the one she had carried in her pack on the 
 night when she fled from Tonacombe. 
 
 "For a new bedgown," he said simply; "and I thought 
 while you were about it, you might so well knit me a jersey 
 too." 
 
 In the cord of the parcel was caught a knot of violets. 
 Many times before, she had found on the table a little 
 bunch of flowers. At the sight of them she exclaimed — 
 
 "Oh, John, John, you're that good to me, and I can't 
 pay you back. There's nothing I can do for you, nothing. 
 And you spend too much on me. For I know you smoke 
 
382 A Man of Genius 
 
 a deal less than you used to do. Oh, John, it didn't ought 
 to be, it didn't, indeed." 
 
 The next moment she had slipped to her knees and he 
 felt a butterfly kiss on his hands. For all that his skin was 
 callous with labour, the touch of it reached his heart. 
 
 *'Thyrza, don't you never do that again," he said hoarsely. 
 
 She glanced at his face and shivered, for on it was the 
 worse fear a man can know, the fear of himself. Then he 
 got up and went quietly out of the room, and she saw no 
 more of him that evening. She sat motionless for a long 
 time after he had gone, knowing that the gates of this 
 refuge were closing behind her. In her lonely brooding it 
 was a rehef to feel the yellow dog slip a damp nose into her 
 hand. But his master did not come, and as she waited, 
 Thyrza fell to a low sobbing that tore her heart for pity, 
 since John, remembering her loneliness, must have sent 
 the dog back to her, for Rough would never have come 
 else. Darracott thought of everything, he forgot nothing 
 in his steady love, and the knowledge of the struggle he 
 was going through pierced deeper and deeper into her 
 heart. Yet where was there a place of shelter for her? 
 
 It was past midnight when Thyrza awoke from her first 
 sleep that night, and lying there in her bunk she felt that 
 she was alone in the house. Leaning on her elbow, she 
 Hstened for a moment: there was no sound save the snoring 
 of the dog on the rug. Softly rising, she crept to the top 
 of the ladder and listened. It was as she suspected — Darra- 
 cott was not there. Going down a few steps with a candle, 
 she saw his hammock hanging empty from the rafters. 
 Cold with more than the chill of the night, she lay for a 
 long time listening to the wind that stole round the house, 
 seeking for the entry denied it, hke the passion that was 
 knocking at John Darracott's heart. 
 
 A few days later there came an hour when the wild sou'- 
 
The Gates of Dawn 383 
 
 westers fell into a glorj' of sunlight that matched the celan- 
 dines in the hedges. Among owners of gardens the talk 
 was of ''tettics," of Early Puritans, Blue Wonders and 
 Naygurs' Teeth. The long-drawn note of flies, the hum of 
 bees in the gorse, the breaking of white-tipped waves, all 
 echoed with the tone of forth-looking that makes one doubt 
 what the Celestial City can give more delightsome than the 
 joys of the summer sun. 
 
 Here, where the sea is purple and emerald green, pearly 
 blue and opal grey, the earth green and golden, red-brown, 
 or starry with charlock and celandine, primroses and lady- 
 smocks, the cliffs dark and louring, where the glare of 
 whitewashed cottages vies with the scarlet of cactus and 
 geranium, humanity ought surely to borrow something of 
 the eagle's life to match the glory of its background. But 
 up fishy alleys the child is borne with weariness, brought 
 forth with pain and struggles into the narrow lot of care for 
 to-morrow's bread till the gathering winter closes round. 
 Only half a child of the open, he is harassed with fears 
 that the fish knows not, and cares that the bird never felt, 
 for in seeking to gain the mastery of two worlds he has 
 failed in both. 
 
 The belly-pinching days when the luggers are kept in the 
 harbour, the shadow of the poorhouse, and of the bursting 
 churchyard where the grass springs from what once felt: 
 no dreams of the gates of pearl that admit to the foursquare 
 city can master the fear of these. 
 
 In the broad light that comes with the spring evenings, 
 Thyrza stood at the door of the boathouse waiting for 
 Darracott. It was high tide, and the boat he used to carry 
 him to his work would bring him up close to the house. 
 Mischief was afoot; the sea, the wind, her own nature 
 called, as the breeze blew back the loose hair from her face. 
 
 *'Oh, John," she cried, running down the sandy spit 
 
384 A Man of Genius 
 
 where he was grounding the boat, "take me out a bit 
 'Tis getting lateish, and nobody will see us. Do, dear, for 
 I do so want a bit of a change." 
 
 She lived the Hfe of a hermit, for it was only in the dark 
 that she could venture out, lest any one should see her 
 coming out of the boathouse. Darracott hesitated, yet he 
 could not bear to refuse her an innocent pleasure like this. 
 In a moment, all panting and aglow, she had stepped on 
 the gunwale of the boat and was beside him. 
 
 "You don't mind," she said, ''I'm sure nobody will 
 know." 
 
 He was silent, as he wrestled with the fluttering sheet 
 of brown sail, whilst, in their swallow-like flight, she held 
 her breath for sheer joy. Taking off her hat, she leant 
 forward, while John watched her, as with parted lips she 
 drank the breath of the sea-wind. At last, as he sat leaning 
 forward with his hand on the rope, she slipped down to the 
 bottom of the boat beside him. With one great shudder 
 he caught her with his left arm and held her close. The 
 sea was darkening now, and with the night there came a 
 sense of the implacable forces that no man can fight. 
 
 "You're so strong," she whispered, "I like to feel you 
 there, for you're not against me, but for me." 
 
 Her breath caught quickly in her throat for the wind- 
 swept, sun-tanned manhood of him. Then there came a 
 flicker across his face like a sunray on the sea, and she felt 
 his lips on her cheek. 
 
 "Ay, lass," he said, "always for you, never against you, 
 don't you think it.'* 
 
 She yielded for a moment or two, while the boat rocked : 
 them together, like the beating of their two hearts. Then 
 she cried: "John, let us go back, let us go back." 
 
 As he turned the boat round, he heard her low sobbing 
 breaths. 
 
The Gates of Dawn 385 
 
 "Don't 'ee, my dear," he said at last, *"tis almost worse 
 than all, that I should ever have brought 'ee to a pass like 
 this." 
 
 As he followed her up to their Uving room, her terrified 
 heart was seeking strength for him rather than for herself. 
 They stood quite still for a full minute. Then, sweeping 
 her off her feet, Darracott caught her to him, and she 
 knew% in the mighty grip of his arms, that Ambrose was 
 still evcr}-thing to her. 
 
 *' Let me go! " she cried. *' I didn't know that night. No, 
 and not till now, that I'm still his." 
 
 "Forgive me, Thyrza," he said, gently putting her down. 
 
 "Oh," she cried, "'tis I that am to blame, to come here 
 and bring sorrow^ on 'ee like this." 
 
 "He's ever}'thing still to 'ee?" 
 
 "Everything." 
 
 When he was gone, she stood in the darkness to listen 
 to his footsteps on the cobbles below^ and as they were 
 deadened by the sandy hillocks, she knew that he was gone 
 out of her life. Lighting the lamp she fetched water, 
 and began a hard night's work at cleaning the room. It 
 was the last service she would be able to perform for him, 
 and sleep was impossible. When the floor and shelves were 
 scrubbed and neatly rearranged, she laid on the table the 
 jersey she had knitted for him; her own bundle was already 
 j)ackcd. It was a difficult matter to fmd pencil and paper, 
 but at last she discovered a fragment of coarse yellowish 
 notcpaper and a pencil stump. 
 
 "God bless you, John," she wrote, "for all the rest 
 and peace you have given me. Forget everv'thing else. 
 I am going away to get work, in Appledore if I can, for 
 I want to feel that there's still a friend near me. Thyrza." 
 
 By the time John returned in the evening to the boat- 
 house, she had found a berth. The people whom she 
 25 
 
386 A Man of Genius | 
 
 k 
 
 asked in the village were unanimously of the opinion that i 
 Mrs. Peter Quance, of the general shop in Market Street, i 
 would be more likely to know of work than any one else, ij 
 Before Mrs. Quance, Thyrza therefore presented herself, i 
 On her left hand she now wore her wedding ring. i 
 
 "My husband's dead, and I can't get work to Northam," ,; 
 she concluded, after she had told her errand. j 
 
 "There's the collar factory here, up Factory Ope. ^ 
 You might enquire there," said Mrs. Quance, her round ] 
 face gleaming moonlike out of the dark background of i 
 biscuit tins and sides of bacon. "Or there's the factory to _; 
 Bideford. You wouldn't get took on in a private house, | 
 not without a character." | 
 
 "I suppose there's no out-door work to be got," said | 
 Thyrza doubtfully. "I can handle a boat better than most | 
 men. I don't want to do factory work if I can help it." 
 
 "Out-door work's not for women," interposed the hugei 
 tun-like person who was wedging his Falstaffian person 
 sideways through the doorway. "Though if you'd lend' 
 a hand with the ferry, I'm danged if I wouldn't give 'ee a J 
 job, now that loitering scoundrel Daggry's failed me." j 
 
 "Lord, Quance, what old trade you do talk up. Wouldn't | 
 folks laugh at a maid working the ferry. 'Tisn't woman's 
 work at all." 
 
 "Let 'em laugh. What's a laugh anyway ? " said Quance, 
 to whom the idea became alluring now that his wife opposed 
 him. He had had "a few words" with her that morning' 
 just a thousand or so. 
 
 "I've managed boats pretty nigh all my life," said Thyrza. 
 
 "Can 'ee sail and scull? Tell 'ee what, I've a good 
 mind to try it. I can see 'ee now in cap and jersey crying, 
 'Ferry, sir.* Look at her, Maria," he said, as the girl 
 stood at attention. 
 
 "IVe got a jersey in my bundle, too," said Thyrza. 
 
The Gates of Dawn 387 
 
 "Go upstairs and put 'en on, my dear. Here, missus, 
 take her up. Upon my days, 'twill be a regular take with 
 the visitors, and they'm coming in as thick as cheese-mites 
 in all this warmth." 
 
 A few minutes later Thyrza followed the rolling figure of 
 her huge employer down the slip, as amid a fire of witti- 
 cisms from the loungers on the quay, she started on her 
 first voyage. Rosy-cheeked, with hands that shook, she 
 pushed off and set sail for the Instow side, while Peter sat 
 smoking comfortably, as he instructed her in the matter 
 of sandbanks and currents. Before nightfall the jest of 
 the thing had captured her fancy, and she accomplished 
 her task of calling, "Boat, sir," at the station gates. 
 
 The day's work was a good one for Quance, and the 
 rival ferr}'men would have fallen tooth and nail on him, if 
 he had not been fierce enough to rope-end the lot of them. 
 Thyrza found one reason for Quance's fancy was decidedly 
 the fact that he calculated the pay for a "faymale" would 
 be about one-third of a man's pay. However, as it included 
 food and a room under the roof, and as Mrs. Quance 
 seemed a decent body, Thyrza struck her queer bargain 
 under the name of Thyrza Minards. 
 
 As the three sat at tea in the back parlour, well scented 
 with soap and cheese, Mrs. Quance remarked to Thyrza — 
 
 "Back along you must have been a tidy looking maid. 
 Isn't her like 'Lisbeth Ann Pengelly, Quance? But I hope 
 you won't tum like her, though I did get a judgment along 
 of her, the nasty waspish toad." 
 
 "Do you believe in judgments, then?" asked Thyrza. 
 
 "I don't believe. I know. I've had one. Haven't I, 
 Quance?" 
 
 "So you say." 
 
 "You know 'tis so," retorted Mrs. Quance, as picking his 
 teeth after a meal (^f tinned salmon, Quance leant liack 
 
388 A Man of Genius 
 
 luxuriously. "'Twas long before I took up with Peter," 
 said Mrs. Quance. ''Reuben Isbell, he that lived down 
 Godfrey's Court, was fair wild for 'Lisbeth Ann. A third 
 share he had in the Saucy Sally, but it ought by rights 
 to have been the Luckless Lucy, for there never was a boat 
 with more mishaps. And 'Lisbeth Ann wouldn't hear 
 of the banns being called home without he'd give her 
 everything right and proper. 'There must be a bed and 
 a dresser, and a chest of drawers, and a clock and a table. 
 Else won't have 'en.' And at that the old Nick went into 
 Reuben Isbell." 
 
 Mrs. Quance's hands were trembling as she folded the 
 tablecloth. 
 
 "I wasn't so well off then as I be now, and that forenoon 
 one of the church ladies come to see me. Sometimes they'd 
 bring me a half pound of tea. Presently her come back 
 again, all gaspy-Hke, to know if I'd seen her purse. Though 
 I hadn't so much as ghmpsed the back of it, I knew in my 
 innerds her thought I'd got it. Twadn't found, and the talk 
 went buzz, buzz, buzzing about me. 
 
 "And all the folks said the Saucy Sally must ha' been 
 doing well, for 'Lisbeth Ann got all her wanted and the two 
 got married. Still, I never put the two things together, till 
 the judgment came. And then I knew. And if ever a 
 judgment come straight down from above, that one did. 
 'Twas just betwixt the night and the morning when there 
 come a shout that fair lifted me out of bed. 'Wake up, all 
 of 'ee, there's a high tide coming that'll sweep the 
 town.' 
 
 "I'd thought on a cup of tea the instant I heard the call, 
 but watter was nigh up to my knees when I put foot to 
 floor, and there wasn't the chance of a fire. And my best 
 bonnet, what I kept in a box under the bed " 
 
 "A sopping horror," said Thyrza. 
 
The Gates of Dawn 389 
 
 "I couldn't see for the tears," said Mrs. Quance, "for 
 though I piled up everything upon the chest of drawers, they 
 was all of a muck. And there I sot wrapt in the bed- 
 clothes — and I saw another lot o' furniture being spoilt too, 
 for the light had come to me. 'The second drawer,' said I, 
 'that'll reach their dressers and the cheers'U be a-floating 
 afore now. There's them above that knows what I've borne 
 by 'em, and now 'tis their judgment. Ever}' piece of their 
 stolen trade'U fail to bits and 'Lisbeth Ann'll lie on the 
 floor.' 
 
 **And then I must ha' nodded, for the next thing I knew 
 there was Reuben Isbell with a cloam taypot in one hand 
 and a cup hitched on to his little finger. 
 
 "'Here, missus,' he said, 'I've made a fire and been 
 feeding the court like so many blessed babbies. Here, take 
 a cup o' this.' 
 
 '"I wouldn't touch it for forty golden guineas.' 
 
 "'Woman's head gone,' saith a. 'Come, drink it up and 
 you'll be able to turn to a bit. The light's coming, thanks 
 be.' 
 
 '"Reuben Isbell, is your grand new furniture a-mucksied 
 same as mine?' 
 
 '"Iss, 'tis. Worse, I reckon, if anything.' 
 
 " 'Then 'tis a judgment. 'Twas stolen goods, that I 
 knaw, and so the watter's come down on 'ee. I've seen it 
 this very night.' 
 
 '"Will 'ee drink this 'ere tay or no?' 
 
 '"That I won't.' 
 
 "'Then here goes the tay and the taypot, too.' With 
 that scat went the taypot against the wall of the court. 
 
 '"I don't care a rush for the money,' saith a; 'one's all 
 Have and t'other's all Have-nots in this blessed world, and 
 the Haves with so much that they must leave it under a 
 man's very eye — as if to say, "Come, take it." 'Twas but a 
 
390 A Man of Genius 
 
 loan, and I'll pay it back. I'll make a clean breast of it, 
 though I be jailed for it, but I won't let 'ee bear the blame 
 a minute longer.'" 
 
 ''And was he jailed?" said Thyrza. 
 
 ''Not he. Paid it back within the two year, and now he 
 plays the concertina of a Sunday afternoon with the baby 
 on his knee. But," said Mrs. Quance, "the looking- 
 glass went crack when I put 'en by the fire to dry, and 
 the mattress I'd to heave over quay. Still, I had a judg- 
 ment." 
 
 As she worked at the ferry for the next two days, Thyrza 
 often strained her eyes towards the bank where Darracott 
 had been working, but at that distance it was impossible 
 to distinguish him from the other men. 
 
 She believed that her stay with him had escaped notice, 
 but all the town was agog with interest in the strange 
 spectacle of the ferry girl, and at last the bolt fell from a 
 clear sky. 
 
 On the third afternoon, off Appledore Quay the impish 
 figures of three naked children gleamed rosy against the 
 background of sea and sky, where a storm-cloud was begin- 
 ning to gather. The spirit of merry devilry shot from their 
 muddy little heels as they capered over the slime of the 
 beach, dipping every time they entered the water beneath 
 the anchor-ropes of two black-hulled coalers. Thyrza 
 stood for a moment to watch them, her body swaying 
 above the high sea-boots, for the purchase of which Quance 
 had made an advance of wages, to the motion of the dan- 
 cing gnomes. 
 
 Suddenly she felt an arm flung round her waist, and 
 smelt the reek of a pipe close to her cheek. Quick as 
 a flash she started back, giving the man a push that sent 
 him staggering. At the roars of laughter from the watchers 
 behind, he lost his temper, shouting — 
 
The Gates of Dawn 391 
 
 "So I'm not good enough for you, it seems. You'm 
 mighty particular all of a sudden — for a light o' love." 
 
 "Hullo! Hullo! What's the meaning of this?" called 
 Peter Quance from the sHp. "What the devil are you 
 doing with my ferryman?" 
 
 In his jesting tones Thyrza read more than she had 
 heard in the other man's insult. Then, in the ring of faces 
 round her, she saw something that drove the shamed blood 
 back from her cheeks, as though her dress had been rent 
 from head to heel. 
 
 She stood for a breath, watching the gap-toothed women 
 who seemed all mouth, the leering men who seemed all 
 eyes. Then she guessed that the secret of her stay at the 
 boathouse had leaked out. For a moment the grey dome 
 of sky at the back of these human gadflies seemed to gather 
 closer round them, as though their thoughts, like Samson's 
 hands, had pulled down the temple walls. As she watched 
 the sHme of evil thoughts creeping over the months she had 
 spent with Darracott, she knew the selfish thoughtlessness 
 she had shown in staying there. She shut her eyes, not at 
 the laughter in the eyes around her, but at the trouble she 
 had brought to him. 
 
 FHnging down the coil of rope she was carrying, she 
 pushed her way out of the crowd and passed along the quay, 
 thronged now at doors and windows by the mysterious 
 instinct that si)reads the news of a fracas. A boy threw a 
 stone that grazed her cheek, and a woman's voice shoutc<l 
 a vile word as she passed. 
 
 No one was in Quance's shoj), though the yelling boys 
 who followed her glued their eyes to the window-panes. 
 Against their pushing hands Thyrza fastened the door and 
 went upstairs to her room. On the lanch'ng outside she 
 swayed for a moment, after the ner\'e-sliattcring siege of 
 hate that she had endured. In the close air, reeking of 
 
392 A Man of Genius 
 
 dingy shop and squalid kitchen, she stood trying to get 
 back her composure. 
 
 But the sound inside her room roused the reasoned anger 
 that is strength. First there came from within the noise 
 of shuffling footsteps, followed by the opening of a drawer. 
 The next moment she entered to see what she had expected 
 — Mrs. Quance in carpet slippers and an old black shawl 
 bending over the few possessions that Thyrza had laid in 
 the drawers. 
 
 "Is there anything you want?" she asked quietly, and 
 at the start Mrs. Quance gave could scarcely, for all her 
 misery, forbear to laugh. "Ah, I thought so," said Thyrza, 
 coming forward and tossing out on the bed a bedraggled 
 ostrich feather. "You're giving this to me, I suppose," 
 she said, "but I don't want it, thank you. I quite under- 
 stand why you put it there, though. You wanted to make 
 me out a thief." 
 
 "That a brazen hussy should dare to speak to me like 
 this," screamed Mrs. Quance. "Why, all the town's agog 
 with the tale of you and John Darracott. He was always a 
 hang-dog fellow — " 
 
 "Go out of the room this minute," said Thyrza, her 
 breath coming in pants. 
 
 Mrs. Quance took this for fear and laughed taunt- 
 ingly. 
 
 "You're no better than a kept woman, but I suppose you 
 found 'twasn't over-good keep, so you thought you'd try 
 Quance instead. You that I brought into an honest house. 
 You've been here but three nights, and you've stayed your 
 last. I can tell 'ee that." 
 
 She was a heavy woman, but with Thyrza's hands on 
 her shoulders she rolled out of the room as though on 
 wheels. 
 
 "I'm going in half an hour," said Thyrza, locking the 
 
The Gates of Dawn 39-7 
 
 door, "out of this place, where you've the thoughts of 
 devils." 
 
 The fierce chastity of a wife, fiercer far than the chastity 
 of mere unknowing girlhood, burnt in her veins like a fever 
 transforming weakness into strength, vacillation into de- 
 cision, hysteria into the fire of steady anger. 
 
 There were not many possessions to be packed; and 
 with a little bundle in her hand, she managed to slip noise- 
 lessly down the stairs and out of the house. Hunying along 
 the street, she took the road that leads out west. Here 
 she was not known, and attracted but little notice as she 
 passed. From the coastguard point there runs up the 
 hillside a lane grown over with branches that form a com- 
 plete roof in places. Here, with the wind rising ever}' 
 moment, she determined to wait, till at nightfall she would 
 be able to cross the burrows to the boathouse, for she felt 
 it impossible to leave Appledore without seeing Darracott 
 once to warn him of the trouble that was brewing for him. 
 
 But the force outside man, a force that plays havoc with 
 all his purposes, was to take the reins of her life in its hands 
 that night. With the quick coming darkness there began 
 the roaring note of sea and wind, a note of rage that 
 Thyrza knew well, as she cowered in the mossy dampness of 
 the tree-roofed lane that leads to the Outlook Field. 
 Miles away in peaceful inland villages the roaring of the 
 ridge that night made heavy sleepers wake, while the foam 
 fell in solid yellow flakes on the fields above the bay. Thyrza 
 was soon drenched to the skin in the torrents of rain, and 
 in many of the houses of Ai)pledore the shutters were closed 
 against the cyclonic violence of the wind. 
 
 There came at length a buzzing of the human hive, a 
 mysterious influence that seemed to rise from the very 
 stones, as the women crowded to their doors and the men 
 began to fight their way, inch by inch, to the coastguard 
 
394 
 
 A Man of Genius 
 
 point. Out beyond the bar there came through the dark- 
 ness a red flare, Hke a steady lightning flash, that was 
 repeated again and again. Thyrza knew what it meant, as 
 it showed against the curtain of blackness over the bay. 
 Panting, dripping, and dishevelled, she fought her way to 
 the life-boat house, where the groups of men and women 
 were gathering rapidly. Within the house there came the 
 steady call of names and the hoarse voice of the cox, fighting 
 a losing match in noise with the roar of the storm. 
 
 Thyrza pushed her way steadily to the front, till she 
 could look into the brightly lit house, where the burly 
 figures mustered. Then, whilst her heart beat pantingly as 
 though it would burst from her breast, she heard the 
 whisper, ''They're a man short. Beara's to bed ill, and 
 there's his wife." 
 
 But they were not short many seconds, for instantly Darra- 
 cott stepped from the crowd, and, after a curt word or two 
 with the coxswain, fell into fine among the regular boat crew. 
 His great frame and herculean build matched the power 
 of the huge lifeboat. As another flare came from the sea 
 and was answered from the coastguard, the boat sHd 
 forward with a "heave-ho" from the crew. Unseen, 
 Thyrza touched the oilskins of the last man : it was Darra- 
 cott, but he never noticed her. 
 
 In the exaltation of the moment, Thyrza saw nothing 
 but the face that had passed her so close that she could 
 mark the firm-set Hps, could see the dazzle of the rings in 
 his ears. 
 
 Slowly, while she stood leaning by the low wall, the 
 watchers drifted away to seek shelter from the pitiless rain, 
 till only a woman or two remained, doggedly refusing 
 the offered hospitahty of the houses along the cliff, being 
 either too dazed or too tired to move. Ultimately they all 
 disappeared save Thyrza. 
 
The Gates of Dawn 395 
 
 Hours seemed to her to pass, till at length there came 
 out of the dark void once more the light that meant the 
 lifeboat was returning with its load. 
 
 In a few minutes the point was crowded again, and 
 Thyrza had to fight to keep her footing by the wall. In 
 the struggle she scarcely noticed the shout that came from 
 the shore, as the dark outline of the boat became visible 
 through the spray, but a woman sobbed softly by the side 
 of her, ''Thcy'm safe, and they've got 'em." 
 
 In the press Thyrza's arm was almost broken but she 
 thought of nothing but the wave-washed boat that rose and 
 fell outside the surf. 
 
 '^ There's my man," cried her neighbour. Then the 
 news passed through the crowd, " They've saved the crew, 
 but the boat capsized and righted herself again." 
 
 There was something more, Thyrza felt sure, as she fought 
 her way out close to the slip. Before she reached it, she 
 knew what it was: there was a man missing from the crew. 
 At last she pushed her way out to the dripping figure of the 
 coxswain, outhned in yellow oilskins against the light. 
 
 ''Iss," she heard him say, ''Darracott's gone; didn't 
 rise again when she righted herself. Struck on the head, 
 I reckon. 'Tis the first we've lost from this lifeboat. The 
 Marie RogeVs had her baptism to-night." 
 
 Then, as he saw Thyrza's eyes on him, the old man 
 poured out a lava stream of curses that recked from his 
 great lips, till the bystanders began to laugh. 
 
 As she stood in the open space on the slij), she knew 
 
 that the whisper was going round against her. She was 
 
 Darracott's woman — and she was proud of it. Lifting her 
 
 head bravely, she watched the ring of faces, as though they 
 
 ad assembled to do her honour. 
 
 At last a woman stepped forward and caught her 1 )y the arm. 
 
 ''Come with me, my dear," she said; "you'm wet 
 
396 A Man of Genius 
 
 through and worn out, and I doubt but that you've nowhere 
 to go. Come home with me." 
 
 She was a great gap-toothed, lusty woman, in a bodice 
 kept together with pins. In the morning she had joined in 
 the hue and cry after Thyrza, but to-night she was all 
 womanly towards this bitter need. 
 
 Holding Thyrza firmly Mrs. Bovey pushed her way 
 through the crowd, that made a lane for them now, a 
 guard of honour, indeed, and the only one that Thyrza 
 would ever know. At length they reached the tiny house 
 in Market Street where Mrs. Bovey lived. In the relief 
 of rest from the constant deluges of rain which she had 
 been enduring, Thyrza sank gratefully into an old beehive 
 chair by the hearth. 
 
 "My man's to Cardiff," said Mrs. Bovey, as she watched 
 the girl's white set face, "so you can bide to-night. There's 
 naught but chillem here," she laughed. 
 
 Two brats sprawled in front of the fire, playing with a 
 mangy kitten, and others were a-bed in the close, poverty- 
 stricken room upstairs. 
 
 "He was your man, wasn't he?" asked Mrs. Bovey. 
 
 "Not like you mean," said Thyrza, awaking to a sense 
 of her surroundings. "Not same as you all thought. 
 John had nought hke other men. But he's paid back now, 
 he's paid back." 
 
 Mrs. Bovey thought her visitor's wits were wandering. 
 Hastily lifting the sleeping baby from the packing-box 
 which was his cradle, she brought him to Thyrza. "Look," 
 she said, "we've woke him between us." 
 
 The baby's fists were squaring and his face puckering 
 against the coming yell. At the noise Thyrza burst into a 
 passion of tears. 
 
 "Oh," she cried, "he never had a child, never, never, 
 John never had." 
 
The Gates of Dawn 
 
 397 
 
 Mrs. Bovey stood gently patting her guest's shoulders, 
 while she rocked the screaming child on her other arm. 
 
 *'He was a good man," said Thyrza, *'and took me in 
 when I'd nowhere to go. And I gave 'en a bad name, 
 though I never meant to. I gave 'en a bad name." 
 
 "Never mind," said Mrs. Bovey gently, **I reckon there's 
 no call to fret over that; for he's gone where a bad name 
 doesn't matter, for there we'm known as we be." 
 
 "Known as we be:" it was the word that comforted 
 Thyrza most, as she lay that night listening to the sea that 
 beat above John Darracott's body. For him no storied urn, 
 no animated bust, only the rough and homely words of a 
 shrew and the worship of an erring woman's heart. 
 
 Yet beyond the gates of dawn, where men are stripped of 
 ever>'thing save the truth, John Darracott must stand high 
 indeed. 
 
CHAPTER XXVII 
 CONSTANTINE'S BANNER 
 
 "OTOP your gorging, John," cried Mrs. Rosevear, 
 
 O rushing to the window, ' 'for there's Miss Westaway 
 coming across the green. She'll be here in two minutes, 
 and us won't want you buzzing round, all ears and eyes." 
 
 It was the sweetest hour in the day, that of the labourer's 
 late tea, but John Rosevear knew better than to disobey. 
 Accordingly he gulped down his cup of tea, and swallowing 
 a last mouthful of bacon, betook himself to the circle at the 
 forge, for there could be no bar of the "Blue Boar" or of 
 the "Royal George" for the likes of Chrissie's husband. 
 
 In a trice she had cleared away the dirty cups and 
 saucers, and brewed a fresh pot of tea for her visitor. 
 
 "You're not very much surprised to see me, I think, 
 Mrs. Rosevear," said Damaris. 
 
 "No, I dunno as I am; but you'll take a cup of tea, 
 miss, and there's an apple-turnover, if you could fancy 
 one." 
 
 Damaris sat down, watching Chrissie out of the comer 
 of her eye, as the woman waited on her. 
 
 "Chrissie," she said at last, "Thyrza didn't die that 
 night. And she came here to you. But you wouldn't tell, 
 for she trusted you." 
 
 "However did 'ee know?" gasped Mrs. Rosevear, 
 standing with arms akimbo. 
 
 "I only guessed, for you were always the one she fled 
 398 
 
 I 
 
Constantine's Banner 399 
 
 to. In her worst trouble before, you were good to her. So 
 I knew." 
 
 "Ay," said Chrissie, "I wouldn't give the cheeld up to 
 any man of 'em all. But you're a woman and that's 
 different. Besides, you're wiser than me." 
 
 It was the greatest concession that Chrissie had ever 
 made. 
 
 "Yes," she continued, "she come here, and like a fool I 
 let her go the next morning. She swore solemn she was 
 going to Mrs. Velly." 
 
 "Where did she go, then? " 
 
 "To John Darracott, and with him she's been all this 
 time. I never knowed it till yesterday, though. For then 
 a cousin of John's come over here and told us how she's 
 been living with Darracott, and how she worked at the 
 ferry, till it got about that she was a loose woman," 
 
 "Ah; no, no!" exclaimed Damans, "she loved her 
 husband." 
 
 "I didn't say 'twas true what they thought, did I?" 
 demanded Chrissie fiercely. "But I reckon she felt he 
 didn't want her, and there was but one man that did. 
 That's of it, you may depend." 
 
 "Then," said Damaris, starting up, "where is the girl, 
 now that Darracott is dead?" 
 
 "Biding with a woman that's took her in. But I reckon 
 she'd be the better for a helping hand now. She's pretty 
 nigh at the last stand, I'll warn." 
 
 "God grant I'll not be too late," said Damaris, as she 
 stood up to go back to the inn. She could scarcely arouse 
 Appledore that night, but she would be there the first 
 thing in the morning. 
 
 Cold like the grey light on the face of the dead, the 
 dawn was creeping slowly over the sandy reaches of the 
 Torridge next morning. The tide was out and the river 
 
400 A Man of Genius ^ 
 
 i 
 but a sandy stream between sand-banks, where three i 
 
 ketches lay aground in the mud. The revolving light from 1 
 
 the dunes flickered sickly yellow across the waterway, as • 
 
 Thyrza came to the door of the boathouse, her eyes idly | 
 
 following the powdery spray of sand that the wind sifted \ 
 
 incessantly over the surface of the burrows. She had slept ; 
 
 in the old place last night, and now she was leaving it, for 
 
 Darracott's sister was coming over from Clovelly to take \ 
 
 away the furniture. Thyrza slipped the new key under the , 
 
 mat at the top of the ladder, for somewhere outside the : 
 
 bar the old key was shifting in Darracott's pocket. 
 
 With her pack strapped across her shoulders she walked ! 
 away. There was no fear of insult now, but she was leaving J 
 early merely to avoid the kindly anxiety that would have \ 
 bidden her stay. For rough and cruel as they are in certain I 
 aspects, waifs are often unselfishly tendered by the fisherfolk j 
 and Thyrza remembered just now the little offerings of fish ,; 
 that had been left at Mrs. Bovey's door for her. j 
 
 From the road that looks down the whole length of the j 
 
 burrows, she leant over a field gate to take a last look at | 
 
 the boathouse. Now, from where she stood, the fat rooks " 
 
 i 
 that rose from the newly ploughed land loomed larger in j 
 
 her eyes than the black speck that represented Darracott's j 
 
 boathouse. So time blots out the past and the lives that j 
 
 are part of it. 1 
 
 Turning slowly away, Thyrza resumed her walk towards \ 
 Northam. From thence she meant to make for Bideford, ^ 
 to try for work at the factory. For as Darracott had i 
 faced the slow ache of the long days, so could Thyrza now. 
 
 To avoid the dust of a carriage that was approaching, ■:\ 
 she stood for a moment by the stone that marks Bloody j 
 Comer, where Hubba the Dane was defeated by the Saxons. 1 
 The driver, as the carriage passed, pointed it out to the| 
 solitary occupant of the wagonette. It was Damaris* 
 
Constantine's Banner 401 
 
 Westaway, and in a moment, before Thyrza could collect 
 her wits, she was being driven on to Northam by the side 
 of the mistress of Tonacombe. 
 
 Thyrza was white with anger, as Damans drew her away 
 from the inn door, where the carriage put them down, into 
 the churchyard and round to the famous comer where she 
 had been found by Ambrose in those old days that now 
 seemed centuries ago. 
 
 "Why did you bring me here?" she cried. 
 
 "Sit down there," said Damaris, pointing to a seat, "for 
 we must fight this thing out, you and I." 
 
 "I heard everything," panted Thyrza. 
 
 "I know it." 
 
 "And you that have taken him, you come back to me 
 like this." 
 
 "If you heard all, you know that I have not taken him. 
 He is yours, now and always. I know why you ran away. 
 'Twas because you wouldn't be outdone in nobility by me." 
 
 "You say that?" whispered Thyrza. 
 
 "Yes, I say it. For I know you, even better than you 
 know yourself, and far better than he knows you." 
 
 "Have you heard what they say about me down there?" 
 
 "Yes, Chrissie Rosevear told me." 
 
 "She, too. My Heavens! Has all the world naught to 
 do but to blacken me?" 
 
 "But I know there was nothing but honour between 
 you and Darracott." 
 
 "Oh," said Thyrza, rocking herself to and fro, "and 
 that's true. For there never was a better man on God's 
 earth. That's why he's out yonder now, I suppose," she 
 added bitterly. 
 
 "To the noblest, Thyrza, hfe's often a burden," said 
 Damaris quietly. 
 
 They were both silent for a long while, till, taking her 
 26 
 
402 A Man of Genius 
 
 courage in her hands, Damaris said: "I want to tell you 
 about these last weeks. When you left, your husband's one 
 thought was for you, his one effort to find you. He left 
 no stone unturned. Did you never see the notices in the 
 papers ? " 
 
 "We never saw a paper, not unless it wrapped up a 
 parcel." 
 
 ''If you had, perhaps you might feel differently, for he 
 wants you. Deep down, 'tis you that are dearest to him, 
 not I. And if you've something to forgive, that is always 
 a woman's lot." 
 
 "Oh, where is he now?" 
 
 "Superintending the building of the Oratory, but he did 
 not want to go. It was I who persuaded him to leave the 
 task of finding you to me. But I thought it would be 
 a long search, and indeed it would have been, but for 
 Darracott's death and the consequent talk." 
 
 "Then he's not been with you?" 
 
 "I've never seen him since the night you left the manor- 
 house. Thyrza, how will you be able to live without him ? " 
 
 The words of Mrs. Leggo at Galsworthy came back to 
 the girl, "he's arms full against arms empty": and to 
 Thyrza empty arms made the ultimate tragedy of Hfe. 
 
 "So," said Damaris, "there's nothing hidden from you 
 anywhere. Your baby boy is waiting for you, as well as 
 Ambrose. And, perhaps, the flutter of life once more at 
 your heart, Thyrza," she whispered. "Can you forego the 
 very thing that life means to you?" 
 
 Thyrza's face was working terribly. 
 
 "He's just all the world to you," continued Damaris, 
 "and he wants you. If you had seen him, as I did, when 
 he found you were gone, you would know it." 
 
 When Thyrza shpped a hand along the bench Damaris 
 knew she had won. 
 
Constantine's Banner 
 
 403 
 
 Late that night they stood watching the street from a 
 window of the New Inn, at Bideford. Then, as they 
 caught sight of the hotel omniljus approaching, Damans 
 got up. Thyrza caught her hand, white-lipped and trem- 
 bhng, but Damans said quietly, "Yes, he'll be in that, 1 
 expect." 
 
 Out in the semi-darkness of the passage she stood for a 
 moment to watch the top of the stairs which led to their 
 sitting-room. Against the brightness of the room within 
 she saw Ambrose pause for a moment, as the waiter stood 
 back. Then the door was shut quickly, but not till the 
 watcher heard a half-stifled cry from Thyrza. 
 
 So at last the child had found rest on the heart that 
 loved her truly enough, though with divided affection, for 
 such is a man's way. 
 
 Before they came out to look for her, Damaris was 
 driving back to Hartland. As shi| let down the window in 
 the darkness of the night that seemed to rush past her, 
 there flamed in front a moon crescent that seemed, in her 
 elation, like the cross that pulsed in the sky before the 
 heathen Emperor. For, like Constantine, by this sign, she, 
 too, had conquered. Then the high moment passed and a 
 few bitter tears smarted in her eyes. Yet, over at Tona- 
 combe there were children waiting for her help, and at Hart- 
 land there was an old man fuming at the lateness of her 
 arrival. Also, in time to come, there would be much 
 fine work, the tnier for this baptism of pain. 
 
 So Damaris, too, faced the future, and with glance as 
 gallant as the eyes with which John Darracott had gone out 
 over the bar. 
 
CHAPTER XXVIII 
 THE CLEAR SHINING OF A STAR 
 
 THE door of the empty Oratory swung noiselessly 
 behind her as Damaris walked up the aisle and sank 
 into a seat. It was her first sight of the building that had, 
 long ago, made Ambrose Velly's fame, and as she gazed 
 about her, she smiled at the remark of a stranger whom she 
 had passed in the porch. 
 
 "What I like in his work is that there's nothing cheap 
 about it," he had said. 
 
 Assuredly there was nothing cheap about this building, 
 for its foundations had been laid in the effort of many lives 
 besides that of the thinker whose brain had first conceived it. 
 
 All around, close to the very walls, were squahd houses 
 festering with human misery, yet here the fluted pillars, 
 rising to the groined roof, held up, like the cup that is 
 formed by upHfted hands, a chalice of beauty that waited 
 for the dew and the rain and the sun from overhead. The 
 high spaces of the roof were shadowy now, as the sunlight 
 faded, but in the carving of the screen she could detect 
 the hand of Ambrose himself. Born of the earth, vivid 
 and living, were the beasts and plants that started from its 
 outlines. The dusk fell slowly, like incense from an unseen 
 censer, while in the light from the windows the tracery of 
 their arches gleamed in black lines. There was no colour 
 anywhere, no splendour of purple and gold: only the 
 whiteness of the hand held up. 
 
 404 
 
The Clear Shining of a Star 405 
 
 For what? Tnic, the thing was restful, the moments 
 when it spoke, an upHft. Yet Thyrza had knocked often on 
 the closed walls of a heart; Darracott had lost his homely 
 bliss; she herself, with hosts of friends, had missed the 
 woman's prize. And in Ambrose much had died: some 
 baseness, much selfishness, and a little joy. She never saw 
 him now, but she knew ver)' well that ''The Wind among 
 the Barley" was just an echo now to him, an echo from 
 the earlier world of his youth. 
 
 And round the uplifted hand still foamed the sea of 
 miser}'. The work of many, beside her father and herself, 
 had been, and would be, spent, yet still the sea was undried. 
 And, though it rose from their midst, the hand said nothing 
 to those who needed its message most. 
 
 Still the darkness fell as she sat on, until the tide that 
 beats on the cliffs of Hartland seemed to echo in her ears, 
 even in this midland city of labour. At last, through the 
 window over the altar, there shone the radiance of a solitary 
 star. Between the fingers of the uplifted hand there had 
 pierced one ray from the unseen depths of space. 
 
 The laughter of joy that fades, the victories that leave 
 scars, the sorrows that often harden, passion building the 
 walls of life, and lust the foundation of its structure: such 
 is the human lot to-day. 
 
 But out of the unseen peers the star, and even from the 
 heights of this life there are hands uplifted to its clear 
 shining, hearts that answer to its hope. 
 
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