A question of faith

Chapter I

On a mild day in February, an English gentleman, by name Matthew Knighton, was walking across a bit of moorland on the borders of his own estate. He was bound for a neighboring hamlet to meet a friend who was expected to arrive there by the weekly coach, which at this season was the only public means of passenger transport in the locality.

Knighton had just ascended a short steep hill to reach the upland which he was now crossing. Before him, stretching in ridge beyond ridge, green fore-ground merging into gray and misty distance, was one of the great moors that lie south of the Bristol Channel.

His path was a narrow cart-road. On either side the turf, wherever it was seen, was of very vivid and tender green, by reason of moss that grew thickly in the grass; but on the greater part of the ground, heather with its brown seeds, and gorse with a few winter blossoms, were the covering. A few minutes brought him to where, in a hollow of the undulating ground near the descent of a steep combe, half a dozen old cottages were falling into ruins. There was no sign of life about any of these hovels except one, in the door of which stood an old woman who appeared to be the only inhabitant of the place, unless a jackdaw with clipped wings, who hopped at her feet, could be looked upon as her companion.

The old woman’s eye was still bright and her features shapely, although her skin was withered, wrinkled, and brown. She was dressed in such garments as an old witch might wear. She no sooner saw who was coming than she waved the stick she held with a sort of majestic welcome,

A QUESTION OF FAITH 3 “Well, what now?” asked Knighton, with testy tolerance, arrested, when he came near, by this peculiar demonstration.

He was a man perhaps about fifty, with iron-gray hair and shaven face; he was not above medium height, but strong both of feature and of limb; he looked like a country gentleman who did not often bestir himself to go up to town, but he looked also as if he brought what was best in town down to him, for in his face there was no lack of | that keener intelligence which mental activity gives.

This middle-aged man and aged woman stood facing one another on the windy moor, the one possessing all the advantage of what is called education and good breeding; the other, nothing but what nature had bestowed of long experience and wit. And yet they were not altogether unlike, these two; many encounters had given to each a sort of rough conception that they two looked out upon the world of men around them from very similar standpoints.

4 A QUESTION OF FAITH “T ’]l tell ’ee a thing I’ve been a-thinken of, zir. There’s beatles as crawl about; » they ’ve got fedlers, zoo they can knaw where they be going an’ what they be doing. If half the beatles wer’ a-given no fealers, an’ had to run among them as has, would that be right and vair?”’

‘“‘Very hard on them, Gor, I should say.”

“But moast o’ men are a-made thet way zhure enough, an’ it’s no vault to them thet they know no moor of God or man than they can zee and ’ear and zmell — beatles wi’out fealers they be. Is it right and vair?”

The Squire meditated a moment. He was accustomed to have many questions brought to him to decide, but perhaps few as congenial. .

“Their forefathers neglected to use the feelers that. were given them; they grew weak and dropped off, so their children had none.”

He looked, not without a good deal of inward curiosity, to see how far the shrewd old woman would understand.

“Oh, thee be allus a-squaring things for th’ Almighty for us poor volks; but don’t tell I—I zay it’s not vair.”

Knighton went on his way over a ridge of hill.

When the coach stopped, it put down only one passenger and his luggage. He was a young man, and, seen at a little distance, he was quite like the ordinary young man that one sees in the illustrations of magazine stories. That is to say, his clothes were made by a good tailor, his features were regular, and his hair and mustache were just what they ought to be. Observed more closely, he had, of course, an individuality; it would have been natural to suppose that he was a person of good taste and good feeling, probably strongly actuated by both. Knighton greeted him.

‘Good of you to come,”’ said the traveler. ‘““A tremendous comfort to see some one person I know. Old Crusoe, marching out of the waves, couldn’t have been much more in terra incognita than I am.” He spoke in a rather excited way, as if his speech was more wordy than usual. |

“Will you walk?” asked the other. “You will want to stretch your legs; and the trap has a circuit to make.”

The two men started back upon the path across the moor.

The younger man’s name was Henry Harvey. He was an artist. Although descended from a family of this neighborhood, he had never visited the place before. It was he who spoke.

‘““When my father and I met you in town you were so tremendously kind that I feel as if I must talk to you a bit about this affair. I hope it won’t bore you; you see you know her so well; and about the place and everything. You see, theoretically I don’t believe in being married by family arrangement, and neither, of course, does my cousin Alice; but we’ve had to write a good many letters to one another. Hang me if I’m not half bowled over, and I think Alice”? —

A QUESTION OF FAITH T

“Ts favorably inclined toward you.”

“Well, apart from the question of liking, it is a decidedly good arrangement for us both. The rents here are barely enough for her to scratch along on, and I would like to have the old place and can afford to keep it up.”

Here no remark came in answer. Harvey, who was sensitive to approval or disapproval, began again.

“You see, of course, we don’t mean to dispense with love, but I was merely showing why, liking each other as we do, Alice might think it worth while to come and have a try for it.” |

“Quite a situation for a novel.”

“Yes, isn’t it; only, some way, in real life things never smack of romance as they do in books —at least not until they are long past: there is too much detail, too much or too little personal responsibility, £ don’t know which. But, you know, of course it all depends on Miss Bolitho. You have known her all her life, and, to tell the truth, I am frightened at her character. I know she has been up to Cambridge like a man, and taken a degree, or whatever they give the feminines. Is she appallingly strong-minded ?”’

“By strong-minded do you mean” —

“Oh — wearing big boots, you know, and a top-coat, and pot-hat, and’ —

“The strength of Miss Bolitho’s clothing is, as far as I have observed, proportioned to the severity of the weather and her need to expose herself to it. If by ‘ the strength of her mind’ you mean the strength of her will, I should think that, also, would be brought into force only when it was required.”

“Ts she such a paragon? A fellow wrote to me the other day, and said that his wife had no faults, but she was also very nice; and that the ‘ but’ was not inadvertent. And there is something in that view of it, you know; it’s the best proof, I always say, of the ‘ Adam’s fall’ story that we can’t even conceive of a person being charming and faultless.”’

Knighton spoke mildly. ‘“ Faultlessness, then, in your idea involves one of those two greatest faults against God and man, — insipidity or arrogance? ”’

“But about Miss Bolitho — she wrote to me that she was not religious. That is the worst of modern women — not being religious.”’

‘All women in other ages you conceive to have been devout and holy?”

“Well, she meant she was an agnostic or something. Now, I am not grand at religion, but [ had about as soon hang myself as believe that things were bounded by the evidence of my senses.”

“YT do not know that ‘ agnostic’ applies to her in its exact meaning.”’ ;

“Hang it, if I have used the word wrongly ! I am just like the lady who met the vicar after he had given a lecture on the Gnostics, and said that she was so much obliged to him, for she had never known precisely what agnostics were before.”’

They passed the cottages where the witch lived, and just beyond they left the road by which Knighton had come an hour before, keeping to a path running beside a combe, that here cut into the hill over which they were walking. The sides of the combe were not bare, but thickly wooded with a low growth of oak which still retained its sere leaves; and although among them in some places hollies grew luxuriant, the myriad of dead leaves and the grotesque shapes of the roots of a former generation of oaks, out of which, in many cases, the younger trees grew, gave the hollow a peculiarly desolate appearance. A stream which gathered in the higher hill above was seen pitching down the rocky centre of the place, and heard after it ceased to be seen.

At the edge of the wood the path again divided into two. The one led downward along the side of the combe, about halfway between the stream and the summit, but the trees were so thick that a little way below neither path nor stream could be descried from the top; the other path led on, through some cultivated fields, over the open brow of the bluff on which they were. It was this that Knighton took. Harvey, who had been observing the prospect with eager eyes, felt disappointment.

“What a shame our way does not lie down there! What a romantic place! ” Then after a pause, in which the rugged grandeur of the moor above, the soft color of the leaves of the wood and strange shapes of its roots, grew upon him, he added, with some quiet strength of purpose in his tone, “YT will make a picture of that.”

“In summer?’’ said Knighton.

“No; now. Look at the grays of that sky. Look at the mass of tawny leaves and the stream ’’? —

“And kill yourself — you, unaccustomed to a damp climate.”

“Tt 7s bleak up here in the wind.”

‘Nothing to-day to what it usually is.”

“Nevertheless, I will make the picture.”’

There was something about him when he spoke of the picture that commanded Knighton’s respect. He spoke in a more cordial tone.

“As a matter of fact we can get to Norcombe as well by the lower path, but farther down it runs rather narrow at the edge of a steep bit of rock. It is hardly safe in my opinion. In any case it is a shut-in place. I prefer the open.”

This prosaic preference jarred on Harvey’s tastes; he did not listen intently to what Knighton went on to say; the idea of the new picture had taken possession of him. The artistic faculty is stimulated just in proportion as the whole mind is stimulated. Harvey had, as it were, lately fallen heir to an engagement of marriage with his second cousin Miss Bolitho —in so far, at least, as a will can entail such an engagement. He had come quickly to ratify or cancel the arrangement. He was deeply excited; at the very source of all his ordinary thoughts and feelings life was pulsing more strongly; and that his art was an integral part of him was proved in this — that he was now more perfectly an artist than at ordinary seasons. He looked back lingeringly at the place he had chosen, as they walked on.

Behind them, as they now walked, the higher ridge of the moorland rose with its vivid greens of moss and gray greens of wintry heaths; before them, below the descent, could be seen the low meadows of the valley of Norcombe, to which they were bound. Beyond that, again, another hill rose, gray because it was well-wooded and leafless. Before they came to the descent they stopped at a good-sized cottage or small farmhouse, the only house on the hill. It was a lonely place, but its inmates had no appearance of leading a solitary life. They were a stalwart, peaceful, country couple, who in summer let their best rooms to such chance tourists as might wish to explore the beauty of the secluded neighborhood. Knighton had stopped at the cottage on business of his own. While they tarried, Harvey learned these particulars.

“IT will take these rooms,” he said to Knighton. “I can live here as well as at Norcombe Inn, and I can make my picture.” : |

Knighton raised his eyebrows. “You will be farther from Norcombe,” he said.

“Just at present I am a good deal more frightened of Norcombe than of any other place in the wide world. And, look here, you won’t desert me this evening; you promised to let me make my first visit under your protection. I am really very much alarmed, you know. Just put yourself in my place! But I suppose you are one of those very magnificent fellows who would never be frightened of a woman.”

There was nothing in Knighton’s face that expressed either assent or denial with regard to the flattery thus thrust at him.

Harvey engaged his lodging. After that he walked on with Knighton down to the village of Norcombe, to the inn whither his luggage had been sent.

Chapter II

THAT same afternoon, an hour later, Alice Bolitho came downstairs in the old house which had lately come into her possession, and showed herself at the door of a lower sitting-room, equipped for walking. Inside the sitting-room sat a lady who might still properly be described as a young lady, except that the wearing of a wedding-ring and tokens of widowhood in the black dress prevented the conventional use of that term.

‘Alice!’ (Gin great surprise) “are you going out? Oh, I don’t think I would if I were you; you know you might meet— © Do you think it would seem quite ladylike, dear, to go out to meet him? He would be sure to think that, you know.”’

“If he did, I should think him a duffer, and which would be the worse? You are always alarmed, my pretty Amy, about what other people will think; but you never get up any very great alarms about what you and I may think of them, which is quite as important.”

“Oh, if I were you, Alice, I would n’t begin by thinking that he is this or that. I would just try to make him think me as nice as I could.”

“Yes” (good-naturedly), “I am sure that is just what you would do if you were I; and I suppose it is what you will do, not being I.”

The other, not being very quick of mind, did not take in the point of the retort; a smiling manner was more to her than the precise meaning of words.

“YT don’t think you had better go out until he has called; it would seem, you know, as if you were in a hurry to see him.”

“On the contrary, it is because he will probably call that I am going out to avoid him. That is ladylike enough, surely, even to please you. And if, when he arrives, my motives do not strike him in the true light, you can readjust his thoughts to suit yourself.”’ |

Miss Bolitho went out, and walked down the drive that led to the village street. The house that she left was of white rough-cast, large and low. To one side of it rose the mossy thatch roof of an enormous stone barn, and into the court of which this barn formed one side,an old oak gateway gave entrance. ‘The gateway had about it some rude carving, which was almost falling to pieces with age. On the other side of the house was a high brick wall and the roofs of smaller cottages; a little babbling stream ran all the way across the small park through which the drive made way. The grass was rich under leafless elm trees, and lusty daffodil clumps, among all the grass, were gorgeous with yellow flowers.

It did not take more than ten minutes to walk through the village, —a village of rough-cast cottages and thatched roofs. A quarter of a mile beyond the road bridged the stream from the combe, which here passed onward into level meadows. On one side, the hill rose high, and the way to the moor was either over it or through the combe. Alice Bolitho, restless and eager for a laborious walk, turned into the latter, because she argued that if Mr. Knighton had taken Harvey to his own house for luncheon, — which appeared to her the probable course, — they would after that walk back to Norcombe House on a road where the hillpath would be very visible. The combe stream in the course of ages had made a deep cutting, and on one side the precipice was steep. To the top of this precipice the path ascended and ran on halfway below the hilltop; the scrubby trees, even the old gnarled roots, overhung the path, and made it a concealed and secret sort of place. The length of this secluded way was not so great as to make it an unusual country walk to any one accustomed to such rambles; but when Alice had advanced a certain distance and left the opening almost halfway behind, she was surprised to find that to-day the loneliness of the place struck her with a dismal impression which she had never derived from it before. She remembered, too, that Knighton had told her that he doubted the safety of the path, but that was no sufficient reason for going back; being warned, she could watch for a broken place, and the bank above was not so steep but-that she could climb and pass among the outgrowing trees. Why, then, she asked herself, annoyed, did the recollection of this warning and the seclusion depress her? She was in the habit of walking in this place and enjoying its gloom.

It is probable that when what is called a presentiment is anything more than a curious coincidence, the law that governs it is that of mind acting upon mind without the ordinary medium of the senses. Alice Bolitho did not know of any danger that menaced, but some one else was at that moment thinking upon it intently.

Alice had her dog with her —a golden collie, in whose companionship she took the greatest delight. He was smiling now, as collies can smile, and bounding in front and bounding behind, barking with preposterous delight at the echo of his own voice. He was not depressed by any loneliness in the scene or fear of the narrow path; why should she be? She watched the path carefully to see that it was firm; she set the heel of her will, as it were, upon her unaccountable and unreasonable fear.

Quite unaccountable and unreasonable this fear —and yet where the precipice was high it suddenly sprang up before her, visible. A man crouching behind a wild hollyshrub rose with a cat-like spring. She swerved at the sight of him, but he had laid hold of her arm with an iron grasp.

She screamed. Her scream almost died on her lips, piercing only a little way into the air of the solitude around, falling again into a nervous moan, horrible to her own ears, so weak and hopeless was the sound. She screamed again, and again she knew that her voice had not carried beyond the trees of the lonely place. With all the strength that she possessed she tried without avail to wrench her arm from the grasp that. held it. The stick in her hand was taken from her, and tossed like a child’s plaything over the rocks into the stream below.

She called to her dog in breathless haste; she had enough voice, hoarse and unnatural as it sounded, to bid him spring upon her assailant. The dog, alas! had received no special training for the one accident of a lifetime. The man who had sprung from the trees wore no rags, nor did he smell like a beggar; the dog, eager to help his mistress in her obvious distress, decided that it was his most pleasing duty to seek the missing stick, and dashed away by a long détour to reach the foot of the precipice. Alice, unable at the moment to realize whither he had gone, only had this weird feeling added to her horrid plight, that the villain in whose violent hold she was had exercised some mysterious repellent force by which the dog had been terror-stricken.

The aspect of her enemy lent force to the thought. He was not strong or brutal, as one commonly thinks of brutal strength; he was an old man, thin, white-haired, a face and form in which it seemed as if mildness, by some awful chemistry, had been changed into a wolf-like ferocity.

“You are mad!” she exclaimed fiercely.

“Yes, young lady; mad—mad enough for any extremity!”

‘What do you want?”

For answer he began with sinewy strength to press her forward to the edge of the precipice.

It was only, perhaps, a hundred seconds — since he had first touched her, and now she felt little hope, and believed that he would cast her down upon the rocks beneath. The shock, acting on a woman’s weakness of nerve, which until then she had never suspected in herself, deprived her of physical strength, almost of breath; and that her mind did not fail, but grasped with steady clearness her whole situation, did not aid her—a delirium of fear or anger might have given back her strength.

“Listen, girl!’’ The man’s eyes glared at her; she felt his hot breath with his words. ““My son and [ are hunted to death. We have taken refuge in a cellar of a mud hut on the heath yonder. My son is dying; he will never walk again in the light. Dying! Do you know what that.means? No matter what he has done; they would catch him and drag him, dying as he is, into courts and prisons if they could. We are starving, starving! Do you know what that means?”

Quickly as the strenuous words were poured into her ear she began to understand. “I will give you money.”

“Money, girl! I could give you more.”

“TY will give you food.”

He began to speak again; his voice was slightly changed; his words did not come so terribly fast. At first she did not understand at all; his subject seemed to have changed; his words to be the utterance of the wildest lunacy. Then, again, a light came to her as to his meaning; he was repeating an oath which he demanded that she should repeat after him.

She was silent a minute longer, listening to the words he poured upon her, her mind terribly alive, her breath and pulses still almost failing her. A promise extorted by force need not, ought not, to be binding! He would have her swear that she would not convey to any human being the knowledge of himself or his hiding, that she would bring to him food such as a sick man might live upon, that she would conceal what she did as if her own life depended upon the concealment. The interests of law and justice, the merest humanity to her neighbors, demanded that such a promise should be broken. The man was mad, and therefore the threat of a horrible death which his looks and actions pressed hard upon her would, without this promise, be fulfilled. The man was mad, and therefore words said to pacify him were as nothing.

“T swear to God ’’ — whispered the man.

“T swear to God ” — she repeated faintly.

“By His Son who loved us” — he continued.

And she went on repeating the words of the oath as he whispered them, like a child that lisped its first prayer.

Near the path the roots of bygone oaks held out queer arms and heads like gargoyles, and from these grew the young trees that held the canopy of dead leaves. Above was the quiet sky, around the silent hills, beneath the rocks and foaming stream. On the narrow ledge under the trees the old man and young woman stood almost quiet, the desperate antagonism of mind and will that was between them only showing in the fierce, nervous grasp by which he held her so perilously near the verge, and her pallid face and shrinking gesture.

‘You think to break your oath,”’ said the old man. He seemed to read, but without certainty, the thoughts in her mind. “You will say I compelled you; that you will not regard it!”

“T will keep the oath,” she said, with white lips.

“Listen! Do you know what a soul is? The life that is you, that will live somewhere —think, act, live somehow, somewhere, for ever and ever and ever?” ‘The fevered words sighed out over the rocky steep, and their whisper seemed to be echoed not by the rocks, but by the hissing movement of the sere leaves, “for ever and ever.” “Can you think what it is to be a father, and have given such life to a son? to stand by and see that life hurled out of this mortal state, hurled on the downward track to a hell of evil deeds?”’ His mind dominated hers: she saw the vision he saw; it might be only a mad vision, not a reality, but she saw it. “Listen! You keep this word you have said, and I shall keep my son long enough to teach him a thing he needs to know, —a thing that will redeem his soul.

LI will teach him what love and mercy mean, and he will understand G'od’s justice, and it will redeem his soul. You break these words you have spoken, and’’— His tones, now threatening, stopped; he looked wildly towards heaven.

Was he so mad, even now, when she had given the promise, as to think that her own soul would be more safe if hurried to instant death than if she had the chance to profane the vow?

His grasp upon her relaxed; he motioned her to the path with a gesture that told of gentle breeding, but it told also of trust reposed in her. It was just one moment — more of his presence, but that moment of trust, too quickly gone to be arrested, appalled her more than the words she had said. Her mind, made up as to action, did not pause to know that this trust was appalling. She darted from her tormentor because she was free.

The dog, who, some forty feet below, had spent the time in excited movements upon the last accessible rock, trying to decide whether or not he would risk his life for the stick, now conveniently solved the problem ‘by forgetting its existence, and incontinently raced back by the way he had come, making much scuffling with the earth and the dead bracken. When he came past the spot of the encounter, the old man was going up the bank under the holly trees, and his mistress had gone on by the accustomed path; but so little notice did she take of him that he felt reproached in his mind, and remembered the stick, and went back once more to look at the whirling pool in which it lay.

Alice Bolitho ran upon the upward path. Her one thought was to find some one who would avenge her suffering and secure the enemy who was so mad and dangerous.

Chapter III

THE laws which govern circumstance do not arrange the details of life to suit the lovers of a perfect tale. It might so easily have happened that one or both of the men who were chiefly interested in Alice Bolitho should have passed by, or just above, the place of her misadventure at the right time, and have heard her ery and rescued her; but, instead of that, Harvey and Knighton together had left the place long before she _ approached it, and Harvey, returning to it by himself, came just too late.

He had taken lunch at the inn, looked at the quaint little village, and glanced curiously through the gates at Norcombe House. After that he returned and established himself in the cottage upon the hill, and strolled again to the spot whose beauty had so fascinated him — the upper entrance to the combe.

The path here was a descending ledge, and the side of the hill curved in and out with the winding of the stream below. Descending a little way, Harvey was standing above the path among the trees, and was feeling rather than observing the prospect before him, when suddenly in the stillness of the place he heard a light footfall coming up with speed. As he looked, a girl came round the turning into view. Her face was very white; indeed, it appeared to Harvey to be so blanched of all color that he did not truly know for a moment whether he looked at a woman or at a ghost—if a ghost could sustain the weight of ordinary clothing.