As soon as he was dressed he went out into the yard to look after Spotty. He had rubbed her carefully with liniment yesterday, and made her bed as soft as possible; and she was now able to wag her tail feebly when he stroked her. "Never mind, old girl!" he said consolingly; "he's a beast,but I've got to put up with him too, and I don't care a hang!"
Having given Spotty what comfort he could, he went into the garden to see how the puppies were getting on. It was a lovely morning, fresh and dewy, andthe clean salt air seemed to sweep the remnants of last night's mawkishnessof his head.
The tool house, where the puppies lived, was almost hidden by a thick growth of tamarisk and fuchsia. As Jack stooped to lift up a fat and cheerful puppy, footsteps crunched the gravel on the other side of the bushes, and his uncle's voice sounded close against his ear: "Have you seen my nephew this morning, Milner?"
There was a tremendous hammer beating somewhere, beating so that the earth shook, so that the air was full of the sound. But that was only for a moment; before the postman's footsteps had died away along the path, he realised that the hammer was beating in his own pulses.
He leaned idly against the fuchsia hedge. It was all true, then, this dreadful fancy of last night. It was ridiculous, it was impossible, there was no understanding it; but it was true. He had changed, and the world had not changed with him. The things that were daily commonplaces to every one had become death and damnation to him.
But the day passed, and nothing happened; evidently the Vicar had still not missed his knife. For three days Jack waited, hourly, momently, for the thunderbolt to fall. Every sound.or movement in the house caught at his heart with a cold hand; the very lifting of his uncle's eyelids would bring the sweat out on his forehead. Once he got up in the night and dressed himself, on fire to go into the Vicar's room and say: "Wake up! look in your desk. I have stolen your knife." Then, whatever should come, this suspense would be over. But when he opened his door, the silence of the dark house drove him back, chilled with fantastic dread. On Monday, the fourth morning, he came down to breakfast so pale and heavy-eyed that Mrs. Raymond was frightened.
"The boy is ill, Josiah; he looks like a ghost."
Jack assured her wearily that there was nothing wrong with him. Indeed, what was wrong with him he himself could not have told her, even had he dared to try.
"You had better not go to school to-day," said the Vicar kindly; he made a point of always being kind when anybody was unwell, and Jack hated him the more for it. "You can do a little Latin at home if you feel up to it; but not if it makes your head ache. Perhaps you were too much in the sun yesterday."
Jack went up to his room in silence. It was some time before he could get rid of his aunt; she fussed about with well-meant importunity, till at last a ringing of the frontdoor bell and a sound of voices in the hall sent her downstairs to see who had called at so unusual an hour. "To see the master on urgent business," Jack heard the servant answer. He shut the door and sat down, glad to be alone.
His Latin Reader was lying on the table, and he took it up listlessly; one had better be doing lessons, dull and unprofitable as they were, than brooding in idleness over a secret dread. He looked through the index; bits of Cicero, bits of Horace, bits of Tacitus — all duller one than another. At last he opened the book at random, and came upon the story of Lucrece.
He read it through, not for the first time, in the curious, detached way in which schoolboys read the classics, as matter relating to the parts of speech, not to the lives of men and women. What was Lucrece to him, or he to Lucrece? Indeed, had the story been of his own time and race he still would not have understood much about it.
A country boy, brought up among dogs and cats and horses, he had perforce become familiar with a few elementary physiological facts; but to connect those facts with the joys and griefs of human beings had never occurred to him. A splendidly clean and wholesome body; a healthy, regular outdoor life, filled with swimming and rowing, cricket and foot-ball, bird's-nesting and orchard robbing, and the absorbing responsibilities which devolved upon him as captain of a gang of larrikins, had prolonged his childhood beyond the age at which most boys begin to put away childish things. The one human passion that he knew was hatred; about all others he retained, at fourteen, the dense ignorance, the placid indifference, of a child of six years old.
He was in the middle of parsing a sentence when the door opened and Mrs. Raymond came in. She stood looking at him, with parted lips, but quite silent, and he saw that her face was white and scared, as he remembered seeing it four years ago, when the telegram came to say that his father was drowned. He sprang up.
"Aunt Sarah!.."
She spoke at last, in a quick, terrified voice.
"Go down. Your uncle wants you; in the study."
There was a rushing noise in his ears as he went downstairs; something seemed to catch and hold him by the throat. He opened the study door. By the window, with their backs to him, stood the curate and Mr. Hewitt, talking earnestly together in undertones. The Vicar sat at his writing desk, his grey head bent, his face buried in both hands.
Jack looked from one to another. The fanciful terrors of the last days had slipped entirely out of his mind; evidently some dreadful news had come, and his thoughts flew, as a Cornish lad's will, to wrecks and disasters by sea. But the weather had been so fine lately, it could not be that; perhaps some one was dead. He went up to the Vicar, forgetting, for once, the long feud between them.
"Uncle, what is it?"
Mr. Raymond lifted up his face, with a look upon it that Jack had never seen before. He rose, brushing tears away from his eyes with an angry gesture, and turned slowly to the curate and schoolmaster.
"Gentlemen," he said, "I have to ask your pardon for this weakness: I have loved my flock for all these years, and if I have failed in my duty, God knows I am heavily punished."
"No one can blame you, sir," said the curate; "how could you or any one suspect?"
"If any one is to blame," Mr. Hewitt put in, "it is I, who am so constantly with the boys."
"We are all to blame," the Vicar answered sternly: "and I most of all. I have not kept guard over Christ's lambs, and they have strayed and fallen into the pit."
He took up the Bible from his desk.
"At least, gentlemen, I will do my duty now, and sift the tares from the wheat, as is commanded in God's Word. You may rest assured that I will probe this matter to the bottom, not sparing my own flesh and blood."
As the two men went silently out, he closed the door behind them and turned to his nephew with a terrible face.
"Jack," he said; " I know all."
Jack stared at him blankly; the words conveyed no meaning to his mind.
"Mr. Hewitt kept his suspicions from me," the Vicar went on, in the same hard, monotonous voice, "until he had proof. This morning he held an enquiry at the school, and several of your accomplices have already confessed. As soon as we know all the details, the boys found to be guilty will be expelled. As for the man you dealt with, he has been arrested and is now in Truro jail. How long have you been spreading this poison among your schoolfellows?"
Jack put up a hand to his forehead.
"I... I don't understand," he said at last.
"You don't understand..." The Vicar broke off, and opened a drawer in his desk. "If it will save you from adding to your damnation by useless lies, there is the knife you stole and sold, and there is what you bought with it."
He flung the bishop's knife on the table, and beside it a large envelope. "You see," he added with a kind of dreary scorn, "you may as well confess at once."
Until now Jack's mind had been an utter blank; but here, at least, was something definite and tangible. He picked up the envelope; its contents, whatever they might be, would show him of what he was accused.
He drew out of it first a little book, villainously printed on bad paper, and glanced at the title. It was in English, but might
as well have been in Chinese, for all he understood of it. Shaking his head, with a hopeless sense of living in a nightmare, he took out the remaining contents of the envelope, a set of coloured photographs. He looked them over, one by one, first in sheer amazement, then, as some conception of their meaning gradually forced itself upon his understanding, with speechless, breathless horror; and suddenly flung them down in a panic of furious disgust.
"What is it? Uncle, I don't understand. Oh, what are they all for?"
The Vicar's smothered rage blazed up uncontrollably. He wheeled round in a flash, and sent the boy staggering backwards with a violent blow in the face.
"Is this a play-house?" he cried. "Am I to have hypocrisy and lying here as well as harlotry?"
He let his hand fall by his side and unclench itself slowly; then turned away and sat down with a bitter little laugh.
"I congratulate you, my boy; you're clever at acting — like your mother."
Jack was standing still, both hands spread out against the wall, as he had put them instinctively to save himself from falling. His face was as white as paper.
"I can't understand," he repeated helplessly. "I can't understand..."
"You'll understand presently," said the Vicar in a quiet voice. "Come here and sit down."
Jack obeyed silently; the room was beginning to heave and sway, and he was glad to sit still for a moment, whatever was going to happen next. He did not think of resenting the blow or the words which had followed it; they all seemed part of the nightmare. The Vicar leaned on the table, shading his eyes with one hand. When he spoke there was a stony hopelessness about his voice which made his words sound in the boy's ears like a death sentence.
"I may as well tell you at once how many of your secrets have come out. We know all about the gambling, and the circulating of this sort of filth, and the practices that have been going on in the cave by Trevanna Head, and the seducing of Matthew Roscoe's daughter. She has confessed that the guilty person is one of Mr. Hewitt's boys, but she won't tell the name. I suppose it is not you who have committed this last abomination; an hour ago I should have believed it impossible at your age; but it seems I have much to learn."
He paused. Jack was looking straight before him, his lips a little parted, his great eyes wide and blank. There was no place left in his mind even for amazement; he seemed to have fallen into a world of spectres at cross purposes, a hollow, ghostly world, where he, and his uncle, and everyone wandered through fantastic evolutions, like dancing shadows in a fire-lit room, void of all form and meaning,
"Probably," the Vicar went on, "it is one of yourolder schoolfellows who has ruined thegirl; but there can be no doubt that the ruin of the little boys lies chiefly on your head. Thompson has confessed, and Greaves, and Polwheal; and their statement implicates you directly, apart from the evidence of the knife."
"The knife..." Jack repeated, catching at thefirst word which brought up a definite image in this ghastly confusion of dreams.
"It was found in the possession of the agent who sold you the books and — other things. He acknowledged to the police that he had received it in part payment of a debt for his wares from a Porthcarrick schoolboy, who had been dealing with him for some time. No boy but you knew where the knife was kept."
After a moment he rose to leave the room; but paused and looked back with his hand on the door.
"Jack," he said, "when your father died I took you and your sister in for his sake; but I did it with a heavy heart, for you have in you the blood of a harlot. I have fed and clothed you and dealt with you as if you had been my own; and now I have my reward. You have brought the abomination of desolation into my house and the pit of hell before my door; you have made me ashamed among my neighbours, and blackened my face in the eyes of my congregation. I thank God that your father is dead."
He turned and went out.
Jack slowly lifted his head and looked round him. A few images had begun to shape themselves, more or less distinctly, out of the chaos of his mind. One thing, at least, was quite plain: he was being made the scape-goat for some one; perhaps for the whole gang, but certainly for Billy Greggs, and for Thompson and Greaves and Pol-wheal. "Of course," he told himself wearily, "they knew uncle would believe anything against me." It was simple enough; he had been leader in mischief to all these boys; again and again he had taken things upon himself to shield them, accepting, for his part, as a faithful captain should, the smallest share of booty and the largest of punishment; and all the while they had been dabbling in black secrets, and laughing at him for a fool behind his back. Now they had turned and sold him to his enemy to save their own skins.
He took up the photographs again and looked at them, wearily struggling to understand what use or pleasure things so meaningless and ugly could be to any one. Then, suddenly, the story that he had been reading upstairs came back upon his memory, and he understood why Lucrece had killed herself. He laid down the photographs and sat still
He understood it all now, the mysterious terror of the last few days; the whole thing was so easy, so hideously easy and simple. You jog along in your ordinary way and live your ordinary life, until your uncle, or Tarquin, or somebody else — what matter for the person or the manner of the thing? — some one whose muscles are stronger than yours are, pounces down upon you, and does some horrible shame to your body, and goes his way; and you, that were clean, are never clean any more. Then, if you can bear it, you go on living; and if not, you end like Lucrece.
As Mrs. Raymond came in with tears running down her face, and clasped him in her arms, he looked up, wondering, in a dull, careless way, for whom she was so sorry.
"My dear, my dear," she sobbed, "why will you not confess?"
Jack drew himself away from her and rose.
He looked at the photographs on the table; then at the weeping woman.
"Aunt Sarah, do you believe I did that sort of thing?"
"Oh, Jack!" she burst out; "if you had ever been a good boy I would believe you, no matter how much appearances might be against you: but you know yourself..."
She broke off to dry her eyes with her handkerchief.
"Yes, I know," he answered slowly; "I've always been wicked, haven't I? I suppose I was born so. Aunt Sarah, if I were to die now, do you think I should go straight to hell?"
She came up to him and took his hand gently.
"Listen, my dear; I'm hot wise and clever, like your uncle, but I mean well by you. I do indeed; and I think... perhaps... It's partly our fault that you have fallen into the snares of the evil one. I mean... we may have been a little harsh... sometimes... and you were afraid to confess the first sin, and went on from bad to worse — and you see — you must see, this is the path that leads to hell. Oh, my dear, I know it's hard to confess now... and your uncle is so terribly angry — of course, he's right, for it's a deadly sin. But he'll forgive you in time — I know he will. And Jack, I'll do my best to stand between you and him, — I will indeed, — if you'll only confess."
He listened gravely till the piteous, confused appeal was finished; then he drew his hand away, standing very straight and still. He was tall for his age, and his eyes were nearly on a level with hers.
"Aunt Sarah, I think you had better let me alone. It's a deadly sin, of course. Is it true that my mother was a harlot?"
She drew back with a little cry of horror.
"Jack!"
"Uncle says so. It's a word in the Bible. And if she was, I can't help it, can I? And anyhow, what's the use of crying? It won't help me — oh, you'd better go away!"
"Go away," a hard voice echoed behind them. "A Christian woman has nothing to do with these abominations."
The Vicar took up the photographs and put them into his desk.
"Go away," he repeated sternly. "This is no place for you; Jack knows how to tell you of things that are not for my wife to hear."
"Josiah!" she cried out, and caught him by the arm, "Josiah, — for G
od's sake — remember, he's a child."
The Vicar turned on her with another burst of rage.
"A child! A child who can teach me, with my grey hair, things that I ------ Go out, go out! it is for men to deal with such children."
She went out, weeping bitterly. Then Jack looked up, and understood. He came forwards gravely, quite self-possessed now.
"Uncle, I want to tell you. This is all a mistake; I know nothing about these things; I never saw them in my life before; I never heard a word about them."
The Vicar took up the knife. "And this?"
"Yes, I took the knife, that's true; and
sold it; but not for those things, and not to the man that you said ------"
"What did you sell it for?"
" I sold it to a boy — for ------"
" To what boy? And for what? "
Jack stopped short. His heart seemed to give one great bound, and then stand still. He saw once more the cage door opened wide, and the happy bird, with outstretched wings, darting away into a golden sunset, like the dove that returned not again.
"What did you sell it for? "
For an instant Jack paused, considering what explanation he could invent; then he resigned himself. Somehow, he could not find a lie to tell, nor indeed would lies avail him anything; and the truth was worse than useless. Even if he could force himself to drag into speech a thing so secret and so holy, there was no one in all the world who would believe him.
"Oh," he cried; "it's hopeless! I can't tell you; I can't tell you — and if I did you'd never understand."
"I understand enough," the Vicar answered. "May Christ defend me from understanding any more!"
He sat down at his desk, motioning the boy to sit opposite him, took out his watch and laid it between them on the table.
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