Despair's Last Journey Part 6

For, my lad, if I flay your back, and break my heart to do it, I'll win at the truth.'

They went down the long dark garden together, and at the kitchen-door Armstrong paused.

'It's a sore thing,' he said, 'for a man to have to misuse his ain flesh an' blood. But ye're not of an age to understand that. Remember, Paul, this is not my seeking; but I'll have the truth by foul means or fair.

And it's just you to choose.'

Paul entered the kitchen, and his mother was for instant justice, as she saw it, but Armstrong intervened.

'This matter is in my hands,' he said.

He was a very quiet and yielding man in many things, but when he chose to speak in that way he made his word law.

Then came the lonely night. The wretched poet, a weedy lad who had overgrown his strength, lay in bed and cried in anguish. He topped his father by a head already, though he was but three months beyond his fifteenth birthday, and if he had chosen to fight he might perhaps have held his own. But a thought so impious never entered his mind. He was helpless, and he lay blubbering, undignified, with a breaking heart. He did not think much or often of the coming pain, but he brooded on the indignity and injustice until he writhed with yelps of wrath and hatred and agony of heart, and awoke d.i.c.k, who wanted to know what was the matter, and was roughly sympathetic for a time, until, finding he could make out nothing, he turned and went to sleep again.

There were black looks in the morning everywhere, for Paul was known to be in deep disgrace again. He swallowed a cup of the thin, washy coffee--its flavour of chicory and coa.r.s.e brown sugar was nauseous on the palate of the man at the tent door--and then his father, pale as himself, rose amidst the affrighted boys and girls, and motioned him silently to the sitting-room. This was a sort of family vault, with its scanty furniture in grave-clothes, and a smell of damp disuse about it always, even in summer-time.

'Are ye ready with the truth?' asked Armstrong. Paul looked at him like a dumb thing in a trap, but said never a word. 'Very well,' The gray man's hands shook and his voice, and his face was of the colour of gray paper. 'Go to the back-kitchen and strip.'

Paul, dry-eyed, gloomy, and desperate, walked before, and his father followed. The girls clung to each other. There had been no such scene as this in the house for years. The tawse had hung idle even for Paul for many and many a day. Armstrong took the instrument of justice from its hook, and laid it on the table He took off his coat, and rolled up his left s.h.i.+rt-sleeve. He was left-handed. The arm he bared was corded and puny. It shook as if he had the palsy. His wife had a sudden pity for him, and ran at him with a gush of tears.

'William,' she said, 'don't break your heart for the young vil'in; he isn't worth it Oh, G.o.d! I wish he was no child o' mine.'

She dropped into a chair and cried. Armstrong pa.s.sed out of the kitchen.

The girls listened, and d.i.c.k, chalky white, with his mouth open, as Paul had seen him on his way through. They heard the swish, swish, swish of the tawse, and not another sound but hard breathing for a full minute; then Paul began to groan, and then to shriek.

'Now,' panted Armstrong, 'shall I have the truth?'

There was no answer, and he fell to again; but Paul turned and caught his arm, and after an ineffectual struggle, the old man dropped the tawse and walked into the kitchen. Paul dressed and sat on the table, quivering all over. He sat there for hours, and n.o.body approached him until at last the servant, with frightened eyes, came to make ready for dinner; then he got up and went to his old refuge in the lumber-room.

One of his sisters brought him food after the family dinner-hour, but he refused it pa.s.sionately.

'Oh, Paul,' she said, clinging to him till he shook her from his writhing shoulders, 'why don't you confess?'

'Confess what? snarled Paul. 'Confess I was born into a family of fools and nincomp.o.o.ps? That's all I've got to confess.'

He was left to himself all day, and at night he went un-chidden to the larder, and helped himself to bread and cheese. He took a jug to the pump, and coming back, ate his meal, standing amongst his people like an outlaw.

'Well, Paul,' said his father, 'are ye in the mind to make a clean breast of it?'

'No,' said Paul, 'I'm not.'

The defiance fell like a thunderbolt, and eyes changed with eyes all round the room in horror and amazement.

'We'll see in the morning,' Armstrong said.

'All right,' answered Paul; and so finished his meal, and took his cap from its hook behind the door.

'Where are you going?' cried his mother.

'That's my business,' said Paul, breaking into sudden pa.s.sionate defiance. 'What am _I_ flogged like a dog for? _You_ don't know. There isn't one of you, from father down to George, who knows what I've been doing. I can't remember an hour's fair play from the day that I was born. Look here, father: you may take another turn at me to-morrow and next day, you can come on every morning till I'm as old as you are, but you'll never get a word out of me. I've done no harm, and anybody with an ounce of justice in him would prove something before he served his own flesh and blood as you've served me.'

He was in a rage of tears again, and every word he spoke was tuned to the vulgar accent of his childhood. 'Father' was 'feyther' and 'born'

was 'boorn.' He did not speak like a poet, or look like one to whose full soul all things yielded pleasure. These thoughts. .h.i.t Paul, and he laughed loud and bitterly, and went his way into the street.

The upshot of it was that Paul was flogged no more. Armstrong sickened of the enterprise, and gave it up.

The lonely man was thinking of it all, seeing it all. Suddenly a voice seemed to speak to him, and the impression was so astonis.h.i.+ngly vivid that before he knew he had answered it aloud. He started awake at the sound of his own voice, and his skin crisped from head to heel.

'There's no rancour, Paul, lad?' the voice had said, or seemed to say.

'Rancour?' he had answered, with a queer tender laugh. 'You dear old dad!'

For the first time the sense of an actual visitation rested with him, and continued real. He felt, he knew, or seemed to know, that his father's soul was near.

CHAPTER III

Paul was standing in a room in the old house in Church Vale, the room in which the fiddles hung around the wall in their bags of green baize. A sound of laughter drew him to the kitchen, and he had to make his way through a darkened narrow pa.s.sage, with the up-and-down steps of which he was not familiar. At the turn of the pa.s.sage he came upon a picture.

To the man at the tent door it was as clear as if the bodily eye yet rested upon it.

The kitchen floor was of cherry-red square bricks; the door was open to the June sunlight, framing its sc.r.a.p of landscape, with the windla.s.s of the well and the bucket overgrown with mosses and br.i.m.m.i.n.g with water crystal clear, and there were flowering plants in the window, with leaves and blossoms all translucent against the outer dazzle. The whole family was gathered there: Uncle Dan, with his six feet of yeoman manhood, bald and rufous-gray; Aunt Deborah, with her child's figure and the kind old face framed in the ringlets of her younger days; the girls and the boys, a houseful of them, ranging in years from six-and-twenty to four or five, and every face was puckered with laughter, and every hand and voice applauded. In their midst was a stranger to Paul, a girl of eighteen, who marched up and down the room with a half-flowered foxglove in her hand. She carried it like a sabre at the slope, and her step was a burlesque of the cavalry stride. She issued military orders to an imaginary contingent of troops, and her contralto voice rang like a bell. Her upper lip was corked in two dainty black lines of moustache, and on her tumbled and untidy curls she had perched a shallow chip strawberry-pottle, which sat like a forage-cap.

'Carry--so! she sang out; and at that instant, discerning a stranger, she turned, with bent shoulders and a swift rustle of skirts, and skimmed into the back garden.

'Oh, you silly!' cried one of the girls; 'it's only Paul.'

She came back, and as she pa.s.sed the old moss-grown bucket she bent to it and scooped up a palmiul of water, and washed away the moustache of burnt cork; then, with a coquettish lingering in her walk, she came in, patting her lips with her ap.r.o.n, her roguish head still decorated with the strawberry-pottle. Her eyes sparkled with an innocent baby devilry, but the rest of her face was as demure as a Quakeress's bonnet Her hair was of an extraordinary fineness and plenty, and as wayward as it was fine, so that with the shadow of the doorway round her, and the bright sunlight in every thread of it, it burned like a halo.

'Paul?' she said, pausing in front of him, and looking from a level right into his eyes, whilst her rosy little hands smoothed her ap.r.o.n.

'Is Paul a cousin, too?'

'Of course he is,' said the girl who had called her back; 'he's our first cousin, Paul is.'

'Is he,' she asked, with demure face and dancing eye--' is he--in a kissing relations.h.i.+p?'

'Try him, my wench,' said Paul's uncle.

She bunched her red lips for a kiss, like a child, and advanced her head. Paul's face was like a peony for colour, but he pouted his lips also, and bent to meet hers. When they had almost met, she drew her head back with a demure shake and a look of doubt The kitchen rang with laughter at Paul's hangdog discomfiture. The innocent, wicked, tantalizing eye mocked him, and he was awhirl with shame; but he found in the midst of it a desperate courage, and, throwing one arm around her neck, he kissed her full on the lips with a loud rustic smack.

'Well,' she said, with a face of horrified rebuke, all but the eyes, which fairly danced with mirth and mischief, 'if that's Castle Barfield manners, I'd better go home again.'

'Quite right, Paul,' said Paul's uncle. 'Stand none o' their nonsense, lad.'

'Oh, but, uncle,' said she, 'you _would_ think him milder to look at him--now, wouldn't ee?'

Paul knew the speech of the local gentry, he knew his father's Ayrs.h.i.+re accent, and his own yokel drawl; but this new cousin spoke an English altogether strange to his ears, and it sounded fairylike. He stared in foolish wors.h.i.+p.