True Tilda Part 44

The Minister broke into prayer--at first in smooth, running sentences, formal thanksgivings for the feast just concluded, for the plenty of seedtime and harvest, for the kindly fruits of the earth, with invocations of blessing upon the house and the family. But by and by, as these pet.i.tions grew more intimate, his breath came in short gasps.

"O the Blood!" he began to cry; "the precious Blood of Redemption!"

And at intervals one or other of his listeners answered "Amen!"

"Hallelujah!" Tilda wondered what on earth it was all about; wondered too--for she knelt with her back to the great fireplace--if the shepherd had laid by his pipe and was kneeling among the ashes. Something in the Minister's voice had set her brain in a whirl, and kept it whirling.

"Glory! Glory! The Blood! Glory be for the Blood!"

And with that, of a sudden the man was shouting a prayer for _her_--for her and Arthur Miles, "that these two lambs also might be led home with the flock, and sealed--sealed with the Blood, with the precious Blood, with the ever-flowing Blood of Redemption--"

Her brain seemed to be spinning in a sea of blood . . . Men and women, all had risen from their knees now, and stood blinking each in the other's faces half-stupidly. The Minister's powerful voice had ceased, but he had set them going as a man might twirl a teetotum; and in five or six seconds one of the men--it was Roger, the young giant--burst forth with a cry, and began to e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e what he called his "experience." He had been tempted to commit the Sin without Pardon; had been pursued by it for weeks, months, when alone in the fields; had been driven to wrestle with it in hollows and waste places, Satan always at his ear whispering to him to say the words of blasphemy, to cross the line, to have rest of mind though it were in d.a.m.nation. To Tilda this was all mere gibberish, but to the youth and to his hearers all real and deadly earnest. His words came painfully, from a dry throat; the effort twisted him in bodily contortions pitiful to see; the sweat stood on his handsome young forehead--the brow of a tortured Apollo. And the circle of listeners bent forward to the tale, eager, absorbed, helping out his agony with groans and horrified murmurs. They held their breath, and when he reached the crisis, and in a gush of words related his deliverance--casting up both arms and drawing one long shuddering breath--they could almost see the bonds burst on the muscles of his magnificent chest, and broke afresh into exultant cries: "Glory!"

"Hallelujah!" "The Blood--the Blood!" while the shepherd in the ingle-nook slowly knocked out the ashes of his pipe against the heel of his boot. He was a free-thinker, an ex-Chartist, and held himself aloof from these emotions, though privileged, as an old retainer, to watch them. His face was impa.s.sive as a carved idol's.

The young giant dropped back into his chair, and doubtless a second spiritual gust was preparing to shake the company--you could feel it in the air--when G.o.dolphus intervened. That absurd animal, abashed by a series of snubbings, probably saw a chance to rehabilitate himself.

For certain during the last few minutes he had been growing excited, sitting up with bright eyes, and opening and shutting his mouth as in a dumb effort at barking. Now, to the amazement of all, including the sheep-dogs, he lifted himself upon his hind legs and began to gyrate slowly.

Everyone stared. In the tension n.o.body yet laughed, although Tilda, throwing a glance toward the chimney-corner, saw the shepherd's jaw relax in a grin. Her head yet swam. She felt a spell upon her that must be broken now or never.

"'Dolph!" she called, and wondered at the shrill sound of her own voice.

"'Dolph!" She was standing erect, crooking her arm. The dog dropped on his fore-paws, crouched, and sprang through the hoop she made for him; crouched, sprang back again, alighted, and broke into a paean of triumphant yelps.

Tilda was desperate now. With a happy inspiration she waved her hand to the ancient jack against the wall, and 'Dolph sprang for it, though he understood the command only. But he was a heavy dog, and as the rusty machine began to revolve under his weight, his wits jumped to the meaning of it, and he began to run like a turnspit demented.

"Faster! 'Dolph!"

The Minister had arisen, half-scandalised, on the point of calling for silence; but his eyes fell on Tilda, and he too dropped back into his chair. The child had raised both arms, and was bending her body back--back--until her fingers touched the hem of her skirt behind her.

Her throat even sank out of view behind her childish bust. The shepherd's pipe dropped, and was smashed on the hearthstone. There was a silence, while still G.o.dolphus continued to rotate. Someone broke it, suddenly gasping "Hallelujah!"

"Amen! Tis working--'tis working!"

In despite of the Minister, voice after voice took up the clamour.

Farmer Tossell's louder than any. And in the height of the fervour Tilda bent her head yet lower, twisted her neck sideways, and stared up at the ring of faces from between her ankles!

CHAPTER XXI.

THE HUNTED STAG.

"_Three hundred gentlemen, able to ride, Three hundred horses as gallant and free, Beheld him escape on the evening tide Far out till he sank in the Severn Sea . . .

The stag, the runnable stag._"--JOHN DAVIDSON.

Early next morning the two children awoke in clean beds that smelt deliciously of lavender. The feeling was so new to them and so pleasant, that for a while they lay in luxurious ease, gazing out upon so much of the world as could be seen beyond the window--a green hillside scattered with gorse-bushes, sheeted with yellowing brake-fern and crossed by drifting veils of mist: all golden in the young suns.h.i.+ne, and all framed in a tangle of white-flowered solanum that clambered around the open cas.e.m.e.nt. Arthur Miles lay and drank in the mere beauty of it. How should he not? Back at the Orphanage, life--such as it was--and the day's routine had always taken care of themselves; he had accepted, suffered them, since to change them at all lay out of his power. But Tilda, after a minute, sat upright in her bed, with knees drawn up beneath the bedclothes and hands clasped over them.

"This is a good place," she announced, and paused. "_An'_ decent people, though rummy." Then, as the boy did not answer, "The best thing we can do is stay 'ere, if they'll let us."

"Stay here?" he echoed. There was surprise in the echo and dismay.

"But why should we stay here?"

"W'y not?"

She had yet to break it to him that Sir Miles Chandon was abroad, and would (so Miss Chrissy had told her) almost certainly remain abroad for months to come. She must soften the blow.

"W'y not?" she repeated. "They're kind 'ere. If they'll keep us we can look about an' make inquiries."

"But we must get to the Island."

"The Island? Oh, yes, I dessay we'll get there sometime or another.

What're you doin'?" she asked, for he had leapt out of bed and run to the window.

"Looking for it."

But the Island was not visible. This gable of the house fronted a steep coombe, which doubtless wound its way to the sea, since far to the right a patch of sea shone beyond a notch in the enfolding slopes.

"It'll stay there, don't you fret," Tilda promised. "'Wish I could be as sure that _we'd_ stay _'ere_: though, far as I can see, we're safe enough for a few days. The old lady's puzzled about me. I reckon she don't attend circuses--nor the Minister neither--an' that Child-Acrobat turn fairly fetched 'em. They set it down to the 'fects of grace. I 'eard them talkin' it over, an' that was 'ow the Minister put it-- whatever 'e meant."

"Well, but wasn't it?"

Arthur Miles had come back from the window, and stood at the foot of the bed in a nights.h.i.+rt many sizes too large for him.

"Wasn't it _wot?_"

"Hadn't--hadn't it anything to do with the praying?"

"Garn!" Tilda chuckled. "But I'm glad it took _you_ in too.

The foolishness was my overdoin' it with 'Dolph. Dogs don't 'ave any religion, it seems; and it rattled 'em a bit, 'is be'avin' like a person that 'ad just found salvation. The Minister talked some science about it to Mother Tossell--said as 'ow dogs 'adn't no souls but a 'eap of _sympathy_; and it ended by 'er 'avin' a good cry over me when she tucked me up for the night, an' sayin' as after all I might be a brand plucked from the burnin'. But it didn' take in Miss Chrissy, as I could tell from the look in 'er eyes."

Whatever Miss Chrissy's doubts may have been, she chose a curious and perhaps a subtle method of expressing them. After breakfast she took Tilda to her room, and showed her a small volume with a cloth binding printed over with blue forget-me-nots and a gilt t.i.tle, _The Lady's Vade-Mec.u.m, or How to s.h.i.+ne in Society_. It put forth a preface in which a lady, who signed herself "One of the Upper Ten Thousand" but gave no further clue to her ident.i.ty, undertook (as she put it) "to steer the aspirant through the shoals and cross-currents which beset novitiate in the _haut-ton_;" and Miss Chrissy displayed the manual shyly, explaining that she had bought it in Taunton, and in a foolish moment. "It flies too high for me. It says, under 'Cards,' that no lady who respects herself would talk about the 'Jack of Spades'; but when I played _Fives and Sevens_ at the last harvest supper but one, and started to call him a Knave, they all made fun of me till I gave it up."

She opined, nevertheless, that Tilda would find some good reading in it here and there; and Tilda, sharp as a needle, guessed what Miss Chrissy meant--that a study of it would discourage an aspirant to good society from smiling up at it between her ankles. She forgave the divined intention of the gift, for the gift itself was precisely what her soul had been craving. She borrowed it for the day with affected nonchalance--Tilda never gave herself away--and hugged the volume in her pocket as she and Arthur Miles and 'Dolph explored the coombe's downward windings to the sea.

A moor stream ran down the coombe, dodging and twisting between the overlaps of the hills, and ended in a fairy waterfall, over which it sprang some thirty feet to alight on a beach of clean-washed boulders.

Close beside the edge of the fall stood a mud-walled cottage, untenanted and roofless, relic of a time when Farmer Tossell's father had adventured two or three hundred pounds in the fishery, and kept a man here with two grown sons to look after his nets. Nettles crowded the doorway, and even sprouted from crevices of the empty window sockets.

Nettles almost breast-high carpeted the kitchen floor to the hearthstone. Nettles, in fact--whole regiments of nettles--had taken possession and defended it. But Tilda, with the book in her pocket, decided that here was the very spot for her--a real house in which to practise the manners and deportment of a real lady, and she resolved to borrow or steal a hook after dinner and clear the nettles away.

Farmer Tossell had promised the children that on the morrow he would (as he put it) ride them over to Miss Sally's house at Culvercoombe, to pay a call on that great gentlewoman; to-morrow being Sunday and his day of leisure. But to-day he was busy with the sheep, and the children had a long morning and afternoon to fill up as best they might.

Arthur Miles did not share Tilda's rapture over the ruined cottage, and for a very good reason. He was battling with a cruel disappointment.

All the way down the coombe he had been on the look-out for his Island, at every new twist and bend hoping for sight of it; and behold, when they came here to the edge of the beach, a fog almost as dense as yesterday's had drifted up Channel, and the Island was invisible.

Somewhere out yonder it surely lay, and faith is the evidence of things not seen; but it cost him all his fort.i.tude to keep back his tears and play the man.

By and by, leaning over the edge of the fall, he made a discovery that almost cheered him. Right below, and a little to the left of the rocky pool in which the tumbling stream threw up bubbles like champagne, lay a boat--a boat without oars or mast or rudder, yet plainly serviceable, and even freshly painted. She was stanch too, for some pints of water overflowed her bottom boards where her stern pointed down the beach-- collected rain water, perhaps, or splas.h.i.+ngs from the pool.

The descent appeared easy to the right of the fall, and the boy clambered down to examine her. She lay twenty feet or more--or almost twice her length--above the line of dried seaweed left by the high spring tides. Arthur Miles knew nothing about tides; but he soon found that, tug as he might at the boat, he could not budge her an inch.

By and by he desisted and began to explore the beach. A tangle of bramble bushes draped the low cliff to the right of the waterfall, and peering beneath these, he presently discovered a pair of paddles and a rudder, stored away for safety. He dragged out one of the paddles and carried it to the boat, in the stern-sheets of which he made his next find--five or six thole-pins afloat around a rusty baler. He was now as well equipped as a boy could hope to be for an imaginary voyage, and was fixing the thole-pins for an essay in the art of rowing upon dry land, when Tilda, emerging from the cottage (where the nettles stung her legs) and missing him, came to the edge of the fall in a fright lest he had tumbled over and broken his neck. Then, catching sight of him, she at once began to scold--as folks will, after a scare.

"Come down and play at boats!" the boy invited her.

"Shan't!" snapped Tilda. "Leave that silly boat alone, an' come an'

play at houses."