No More Learning

This tale may be explained by those who know how souls are made, and
where the bounds of the Possible are put down. I have lived long enough
in this country to know that it is best to know nothing, and can only
write the story as it happened.

Dumoise was our Civil Surgeon at Meridki, and we called him "Dormouse,"
because he was a round little, sleepy little man. He was a good
Doctor and never quarrelled with any one, not even with our Deputy
Commissioner, who had the manners of a bargee and the tact of a horse.
He married a girl as round and as sleepy-looking as himself. She was
a Miss Hillardyce, daughter of "Squash" Hillardyce of the Berars, who
married his Chief's daughter by mistake. But that is another story.

A honeymoon in India is seldom more than a week long; but there is
nothing to hinder a couple from extending it over two or three years.
This is a delightful country for married folk who are wrapped up in one
another. They can live absolutely alone and without interruption--just
as the Dormice did. These two little people retired from the world after
their marriage, and were very happy. They were forced, of course,
to give occasional dinners, but they made no friends hereby, and the
Station went its own way and forgot them; only saying, occasionally,
that Dormouse was the best of good fellows, though dull. A Civil Surgeon
who never quarrels is a rarity, appreciated as such.

Few people can afford to play Robinson Crusoe anywhere--least of all
in India, where we are few in the land, and very much dependent on each
other's kind offices. Dumoise was wrong in shutting himself from the
world for a year, and he discovered his mistake when an epidemic of
typhoid broke out in the Station in the heart of the cold weather, and
his wife went down. He was a shy little man, and five days were wasted
before he realized that Mrs. Dumoise was burning with something worse
than simple fever, and three days more passed before he ventured to call
on Mrs. Shute, the Engineer's wife, and timidly speak about his trouble.
Nearly every household in India knows that Doctors are very helpless
in typhoid. The battle must be fought out between Death and the Nurses,
minute by minute and degree by degree. Mrs. Shute almost boxed Dumoise's
ears for what she called his "criminal delay," and went off at once to
look after the poor girl. We had seven cases of typhoid in the Station
that winter and, as the average of death is about one in every five
cases, we felt certain that we should have to lose somebody. But all did
their best. The women sat up nursing the women, and the men turned
to and tended the bachelors who were down, and we wrestled with those
typhoid cases for fifty-six days, and brought them through the Valley of
the Shadow in triumph. But, just when we thought all was over, and were
going to give a dance to celebrate the victory, little Mrs. Dumoise
got a relapse and died in a week and the Station went to the funeral.
Dumoise broke down utterly at the brink of the grave, and had to be
taken away.

After the death, Dumoise crept into his own house and refused to be
comforted. He did his duties perfectly, but we all felt that he should
go on leave, and the other men of his own Service told him so. Dumoise
was very thankful for the suggestion--he was thankful for anything in
those days--and went to Chini on a walking-tour.

Chini is some twenty marches from Simla, in the heart of the Hills, and
the scenery is good if you are in trouble. You pass through big,
still deodar-forests, and under big, still cliffs, and over big, still
grass-downs swelling like a woman's breasts; and the wind across the
grass, and the rain among the deodars says:--"Hush--hush--hush. " So
little Dumoise was packed off to Chini, to wear down his grief with a
full-plate camera, and a rifle. He took also a useless bearer, because
the man had been his wife's favorite servant. He was idle and a thief,
but Dumoise trusted everything to him.

On his way back from Chini, Dumoise turned aside to Bagi, through the
Forest Reserve which is on the spur of Mount Huttoo. Some men who have
travelled more than a little say that the march from Kotegarh to Bagi is
one of the finest in creation. It runs through dark wet forest, and ends
suddenly in bleak, nipped hill-side and black rocks. Bagi dak-bungalow
is open to all the winds and is bitterly cold. Few people go to Bagi.
Perhaps that was the reason why Dumoise went there. He halted at seven
in the evening, and his bearer went down the hill-side to the village
to engage coolies for the next day's march. The sun had set, and the
night-winds were beginning to croon among the rocks. Dumoise leaned on
the railing of the verandah, waiting for his bearer to return. The man
came back almost immediately after he had disappeared, and at such a
rate that Dumoise fancied he must have crossed a bear. He was running as
hard as he could up the face of the hill.

But there was no bear to account for his terror. He raced to the
verandah and fell down, the blood spurting from his nose and his face
iron-gray. Then he gurgled:--"I have seen the Memsahib! I have seen the
Memsahib! "

"Where? " said Dumoise.

"Down there, walking on the road to the village. She was in a blue
dress, and she lifted the veil of her bonnet and said:--'Ram Dass, give
my salaams to the Sahib, and tell him that I shall meet him next month
at Nuddea. ' Then I ran away, because I was afraid. "

What Dumoise said or did I do not know. Ram Dass declares that he said
nothing, but walked up and down the verandah all the cold night, waiting
for the Memsahib to come up the hill and stretching out his arms into
the dark like a madman. But no Memsahib came, and, next day, he went on
to Simla cross-questioning the bearer every hour.

Ram Dass could only say that he had met Mrs. Dumoise and that she had
lifted up her veil and given him the message which he had faithfully
repeated to Dumoise. To this statement Ram Dass adhered.

He did not know where Nuddea was, had no friends at Nuddea, and would
most certainly never go to Nuddea; even though his pay were doubled.

Nuddea is in Bengal, and has nothing whatever to do with a doctor
serving in the Punjab. It must be more than twelve hundred miles from
Meridki.

Dumoise went through Simla without halting, and returned to Meridki
there to take over charge from the man who had been officiating for him
during his tour. There were some Dispensary accounts to be explained,
and some recent orders of the Surgeon-General to be noted, and,
altogether, the taking-over was a full day's work. In the evening,
Dumoise told his locum tenens, who was an old friend of his bachelor
days, what had happened at Bagi; and the man said that Ram Dass might as
well have chosen Tuticorin while he was about it.

At that moment a telegraph-peon came in with a telegram from Simla,
ordering Dumoise not to take over charge at Meridki, but to go at once
to Nuddea on special duty. There was a nasty outbreak of cholera at
Nuddea, and the Bengal Government, being shorthanded, as usual, had
borrowed a Surgeon from the Punjab.

Dumoise threw the telegram across the table and said:--"Well? "

The other Doctor said nothing. It was all that he could say.

Then he remembered that Dumoise had passed through Simla on his way
from Bagi; and thus might, possibly, have heard the first news of the
impending transfer.

He tried to put the question, and the implied suspicion into words, but
Dumoise stopped him with:--"If I had desired THAT, I should never have
come back from Chini. I was shooting there. I wish to live, for I have
things to do. . . . but I shall not be sorry. "

The other man bowed his head, and helped, in the twilight, to pack up
Dumoise's just opened trunks. Ram Dass entered with the lamps.

"Where is the Sahib going? " he asked.

"To Nuddea," said Dumoise, softly.

Ram Dass clawed Dumoise's knees and boots and begged him not to go.

Ram Dass wept and howled till he was turned out of the room. Then he
wrapped up all his belongings and came back to ask for a character.
He was not going to Nuddea to see his Sahib die, and, perhaps to die
himself.

So Dumoise gave the man his wages and went down to Nuddea alone; the
other Doctor bidding him goodbye as one under sentence of death.

Eleven days later, he had joined his Memsahib; and the Bengal Government
had to borrow a fresh Doctor to cope with that epidemic at Nuddea. The
first importation lay dead in Chooadanga Dak-Bungalow.




TO BE HELD FOR REFERENCE.

By the hoof of the Wild Goat up-tossed
From the Cliff where She lay in the Sun,
Fell the Stone To the Tarn where the daylight is lost;
So She fell from the light of the Sun,
And alone.

Now the fall was ordained from the first,
With the Goat and the Cliff and the Tarn,
But the Stone Knows only Her life is accursed,
As She sinks in the depths of the Tarn,
And alone.

Oh, Thou who has builded the world,
Oh, Thou who hast lighted the Sun!
Oh, Thou who hast darkened the Tarn!
Judge Thou The Sin of the Stone that was hurled
By the Goat from the light of the Sun,
As She sinks in the mire of the Tarn,
Even now--even now--even now!
--From the Unpublished Papers of McIntosh Jellaludin.

"Say, is it dawn, is it dusk in thy Bower,
Thou whom I long for, who longest for me?
Oh be it night--be it--"

Here he fell over a little camel-colt that was sleeping in the Serai
where the horse-traders and the best of the blackguards from Central
Asia live; and, because he was very drunk indeed and the night was dark,
he could not rise again till I helped him. That was the beginning of my
acquaintance with McIntosh Jellaludin. When a loafer, and drunk, sings
The Song of the Bower, he must be worth cultivating. He got off the
camel's back and said, rather thickly:--"I--I--I'm a bit screwed, but a
dip in Loggerhead will put me right again; and I say, have you spoken to
Symonds about the mare's knees? "

Now Loggerhead was six thousand weary miles away from us, close to
Mesopotamia, where you mustn't fish and poaching is impossible, and
Charley Symonds' stable a half mile further across the paddocks. It was
strange to hear all the old names, on a May night, among the horses
and camels of the Sultan Caravanserai. Then the man seemed to remember
himself and sober down at the same time. He leaned against the camel and
pointed to a corner of the Serai where a lamp was burning:--

"I live there," said he, "and I should be extremely obliged if you would
be good enough to help my mutinous feet thither; for I am more than
usually drunk--most--most phenomenally tight. But not in respect to my
head. 'My brain cries out against'--how does it go? But my head rides on
the--rolls on the dung-hill I should have said, and controls the qualm. "

I helped him through the gangs of tethered horses and he collapsed on
the edge of the verandah in front of the line of native quarters.

"Thanks--a thousand thanks! O Moon and little, little Stars! To think
that a man should so shamelessly. . . . Infamous liquor, too. Ovid in
exile drank no worse. Better. It was frozen. Alas! I had no ice. Good
night. I would introduce you to my wife were I sober--or she civilized. "

A native woman came out of the darkness of the room, and began calling
the man names; so I went away. He was the most interesting loafer that
I had the pleasure of knowing for a long time; and later on, he became
a friend of mine. He was a tall, well-built, fair man fearfully shaken
with drink, and he looked nearer fifty than the thirty-five which, he
said, was his real age. When a man begins to sink in India, and is not
sent Home by his friends as soon as may be, he falls very low from a
respectable point of view. By the time that he changes his creed, as did
McIntosh, he is past redemption.

In most big cities, natives will tell you of two or three Sahibs,
generally low-caste, who have turned Hindu or Mussulman, and who live
more or less as such. But it is not often that you can get to know
them. As McIntosh himself used to say:--"If I change my religion for my
stomach's sake, I do not seek to become a martyr to missionaries, nor am
I anxious for notoriety. "

At the outset of acquaintance McIntosh warned me. "Remember this. I am
not an object for charity. I require neither your money, your food,
nor your cast-off raiment. I am that rare animal, a self-supporting
drunkard. If you choose, I will smoke with you, for the tobacco of the
bazars does not, I admit, suit my palate; and I will borrow any books
which you may not specially value. It is more than likely that I shall
sell them for bottles of excessively filthy country-liquors. In return,
you shall share such hospitality as my house affords. Here is a charpoy
on which two can sit, and it is possible that there may, from time to
time, be food in that platter. Drink, unfortunately, you will find on
the premises at any hour: and thus I make you welcome to all my poor
establishments. "

I was admitted to the McIntosh household--I and my good tobacco.

But nothing else. Unluckily, one cannot visit a loafer in the Serai by
day. Friends buying horses would not understand it.

Consequently, I was obliged to see McIntosh after dark. He laughed
at this, and said simply:--"You are perfectly right. When I enjoyed
a position in society, rather higher than yours, I should have done
exactly the same thing, Good Heavens! I was once"--he spoke as though
he had fallen from the Command of a Regiment--"an Oxford Man! " This
accounted for the reference to Charley Symonds' stable.

"You," said McIntosh, slowly, "have not had that advantage; but, to
outward appearance, you do not seem possessed of a craving for strong
drinks. On the whole, I fancy that you are the luckier of the two. Yet
I am not certain. You are--forgive my saying so even while I am smoking
your excellent tobacco--painfully ignorant of many things. "

We were sitting together on the edge of his bedstead, for he owned
no chairs, watching the horses being watered for the night, while the
native woman was preparing dinner. I did not like being patronized by a
loafer, but I was his guest for the time being, though he owned only one
very torn alpaca-coat and a pair of trousers made out of gunny-bags.
He took the pipe out of his mouth, and went on judicially:--"All things
considered, I doubt whether you are the luckier. I do not refer to
your extremely limited classical attainments, or your excruciating
quantities, but to your gross ignorance of matters more immediately
under your notice. That for instance. "--He pointed to a woman cleaning
a samovar near the well in the centre of the Serai. She was flicking the
water out of the spout in regular cadenced jerks.

"There are ways and ways of cleaning samovars. If you knew why she
was doing her work in that particular fashion, you would know what the
Spanish Monk meant when he said--

'I the Trinity illustrate,
Drinking watered orange-pulp--
In three sips the Aryan frustrate,
While he drains his at one gulp. --'

and many other things which now are hidden from your eyes. However, Mrs.
McIntosh has prepared dinner. Let us come and eat after the fashion of
the people of the country--of whom, by the way, you know nothing. "

The native woman dipped her hand in the dish with us. This was wrong.
The wife should always wait until the husband has eaten.

McIntosh Jellaludin apologized, saying:--

"It is an English prejudice which I have not been able to overcome; and
she loves me. Why, I have never been able to understand. I fore-gathered
with her at Jullundur, three years ago, and she has remained with me
ever since. I believe her to be moral, and know her to be skilled in
cookery. "

He patted the woman's head as he spoke, and she cooed softly. She was
not pretty to look at.

McIntosh never told me what position he had held before his fall.

He was, when sober, a scholar and a gentleman. When drunk, he was rather
more of the first than the second. He used to get drunk about once a
week for two days. On those occasions the native woman tended him
while he raved in all tongues except his own. One day, indeed, he began
reciting Atalanta in Calydon, and went through it to the end, beating
time to the swing of the verse with a bedstead-leg. But he did most of
his ravings in Greek or German. The man's mind was a perfect rag-bag
of useless things. Once, when he was beginning to get sober, he told
me that I was the only rational being in the Inferno into which he had
descended--a Virgil in the Shades, he said--and that, in return for
my tobacco, he would, before he died, give me the materials of a new
Inferno that should make me greater than Dante. Then he fell asleep on a
horse-blanket and woke up quite calm.

"Man," said he, "when you have reached the uttermost depths of
degradation, little incidents which would vex a higher life, are to you
of no consequence. Last night, my soul was among the gods; but I make no
doubt that my bestial body was writhing down here in the garbage. "

"You were abominably drunk if that's what you mean," I said.

"I WAS drunk--filthy drunk. I who am the son of a man with whom you have
no concern--I who was once Fellow of a College whose buttery-hatch you
have not seen. I was loathsomely drunk. But consider how lightly I am
touched. It is nothing to me. Less than nothing; for I do not even feel
the headache which should be my portion. Now, in a higher life, how
ghastly would have been my punishment, how bitter my repentance!
Believe
me, my friend with the neglected education, the highest is as the
lowest--always supposing each degree extreme. "

He turned round on the blanket, put his head between his fists and
continued:--

"On the Soul which I have lost and on the Conscience which I have
killed, I tell you that I CANNOT feel! I am as the gods, knowing good
and evil, but untouched by either. Is this enviable or is it not? "

When a man has lost the warning of "next morning's head," he must be in
a bad state, I answered, looking at McIntosh on the blanket, with his
hair over his eyes and his lips blue-white, that I did not think the
insensibility good enough.

"For pity's sake, don't say that! I tell you, it IS good and most
enviable. Think of my consolations! "

"Have you so many, then, McIntosh? "

"Certainly; your attempts at sarcasm which is essentially the weapon
of a cultured man, are crude. First, my attainments, my classical and
literary knowledge, blurred, perhaps, by immoderate drinking--which
reminds me that before my soul went to the Gods last night, I sold the
Pickering Horace you so kindly lent me. Ditta Mull the Clothesman has
it. It fetched ten annas, and may be redeemed for a rupee--but still
infinitely superior to yours. Secondly, the abiding affection of Mrs.
McIntosh, best of wives. Thirdly, a monument, more enduring than brass,
which I have built up in the seven years of my degradation. "

He stopped here, and crawled across the room for a drink of water.

He was very shaky and sick.

He referred several times to his "treasure"--some great possession that
he owned--but I held this to be the raving of drink. He was as poor and
as proud as he could be. His manner was not pleasant, but he knew enough
about the natives, among whom seven years of his life had been spent,
to make his acquaintance worth having. He used actually to laugh at
Strickland as an ignorant man--"ignorant West and East"--he said. His
boast was, first, that he was an Oxford Man of rare and shining parts,
which may or may not have been true--I did not know enough to check his
statements--and, secondly, that he "had his hand on the pulse of native
life"--which was a fact. As an Oxford man, he struck me as a prig: he
was always throwing his education about. As a Mahommedan faquir--as
McIntosh Jellaludin--he was all that I wanted for my own ends. He smoked
several pounds of my tobacco, and taught me several ounces of things
worth knowing; but he would never accept any gifts, not even when the
cold weather came, and gripped the poor thin chest under the poor thin
alpaca-coat. He grew very angry, and said that I had insulted him, and
that he was not going into hospital. He had lived like a beast and he
would die rationally, like a man.

As a matter of fact, he died of pneumonia; and on the night of his death
sent over a grubby note asking me to come and help him to die.

The native woman was weeping by the side of the bed. McIntosh, wrapped
in a cotton cloth, was too weak to resent a fur coat being thrown over
him. He was very active as far as his mind was concerned, and his eyes
were blazing. When he had abused the Doctor who came with me so foully
that the indignant old fellow left, he cursed me for a few minutes and
calmed down.

Then he told his wife to fetch out "The Book" from a hole in the wall.
She brought out a big bundle, wrapped in the tail of a petticoat, of old
sheets of miscellaneous note-paper, all numbered and covered with fine
cramped writing. McIntosh ploughed his hand through the rubbish and
stirred it up lovingly.

"This," he said, "is my work--the Book of McIntosh Jellaludin, showing
what he saw and how he lived, and what befell him and others; being also
an account of the life and sins and death of Mother Maturin. What Mirza
Murad Ali Beg's book is to all other books on native life, will my work
be to Mirza Murad Ali Beg's! "

This, as will be conceded by any one who knows Mirza Ali Beg's book, was
a sweeping statement. The papers did not look specially valuable; but
McIntosh handled them as if they were currency-notes.

Then he said slowly:--"In despite the many weaknesses of your education,
you have been good to me. I will speak of your tobacco when I reach the
Gods. I owe you much thanks for many kindnesses.

"But I abominate indebtedness. For this reason I bequeath to you now the
monument more enduring than brass--my one book--rude and imperfect in
parts, but oh, how rare in others! I wonder if you will understand it.
It is a gift more honorable than. . . Bah! where is my brain rambling
to? You will mutilate it horribly. You will knock out the gems you call
'Latin quotations,' you Philistine, and you will butcher the style to
carve into your own jerky jargon; but you cannot destroy the whole of
it. I bequeath it to you.

"Ethel. . . My brain again! . . Mrs. McIntosh, bear witness that I give
the sahib all these papers. They would be of no use to you, Heart of my
heart; and I lay it upon you," he turned to me here, "that you do not
let my book die in its present form. It is yours unconditionally--the
story of McIntosh Jellaludin, which is NOT the story of McIntosh
Jellaludin, but of a greater man than he, and of a far greater woman.
Listen now! I am neither mad nor drunk! That book will make you famous. "

I said, "thank you," as the native woman put the bundle into my arms.

"My only baby! " said McIntosh with a smile. He was sinking fast, but
he continued to talk as long as breath remained. I waited for the
end: knowing that, in six cases out of ten the dying man calls for his
mother. He turned on his side and said:--

"Say how it came into your possession. No one will believe you, but my
name, at least, will live. You will treat it brutally, I know you will.
Some of it must go; the public are fools and prudish fools. I was their
servant once. But do your mangling gently--very gently. It is a great
work, and I have paid for it in seven years' damnation. "

His voice stopped for ten or twelve breaths, and then he began mumbling
a prayer of some kind in Greek. The native woman cried very bitterly.
Lastly, he rose in bed and said, as loudly as slowly:--"Not guilty, my
Lord! "

Then he fell back, and the stupor held him till he died. The native
woman ran into the Serai among the horses and screamed and beat her
breasts; for she had loved him.

Perhaps his last sentence in life told what McIntosh had once gone
through; but, saving the big bundle of old sheets in the cloth, there
was nothing in his room to say who or what he had been.

The papers were in a hopeless muddle.

Strickland helped me to sort them, and he said that the writer was
either an extreme liar or a most wonderful person. He thought the
former. One of these days, you may be able to judge for yourself.

The bundle needed much expurgation and was full of Greek nonsense, at
the head of the chapters, which has all been cut out.

If the things are ever published some one may perhaps remember this
story, now printed as a safeguard to prove that McIntosh Jellaludin and
not I myself wrote the Book of Mother Maturin.

I don't want the Giant's Robe to come true in my case.





VOLUME VI THE LIGHT THAT FAILED




THE LIGHT THAT FAILED



CHAPTER I

So we settled it all when the storm was done
As comf'y as comf'y could be;
And I was to wait in the barn, my dears,
Because I was only three;
And Teddy would run to the rainbow's foot,
Because he was five and a man;
And that's how it all began, my dears,
And that's how it all began.
--Big Barn Stories.

"WHAT do you think she'd do if she caught us? We oughtn't to have it,
you know," said Maisie.

"Beat me, and lock you up in your bedroom," Dick answered, without
hesitation. "Have you got the cartridges? "

"Yes; they're in my pocket, but they are joggling horribly. Do pin-fire
cartridges go off of their own accord? "

"Don't know. Take the revolver, if you are afraid, and let me carry
them. "

"I'm not afraid. " Maisie strode forward swiftly, a hand in her pocket
and her chin in the air. Dick followed with a small pin-fire revolver.

The children had discovered that their lives would be unendurable
without pistol-practice. After much forethought and self-denial, Dick
had saved seven shillings and sixpence, the price of a badly constructed
Belgian revolver. Maisie could only contribute half a crown to the
syndicate for the purchase of a hundred cartridges. "You can save better
than I can, Dick," she explained; "I like nice things to eat, and it
doesn't matter to you. Besides, boys ought to do these things. "

Dick grumbled a little at the arrangement, but went out and made the
purchase, which the children were then on their way to test. Revolvers
did not lie in the scheme of their daily life as decreed for them by the
guardian who was incorrectly supposed to stand in the place of a mother
to these two orphans. Dick had been under her care for six years, during
which time she had made her profit of the allowances supposed to be
expended on his clothes, and, partly through thoughtlessness, partly
through a natural desire to pain,--she was a widow of some years anxious
to marry again,--had made his days burdensome on his young shoulders.

Where he had looked for love, she gave him first aversion and then hate.

Where he growing older had sought a little sympathy, she gave him
ridicule. The many hours that she could spare from the ordering of her
small house she devoted to what she called the home-training of Dick
Heldar. Her religion, manufactured in the main by her own intelligence
and a keen study of the Scriptures, was an aid to her in this matter. At
such times as she herself was not personally displeased with Dick, she
left him to understand that he had a heavy account to settle with his
Creator; wherefore Dick learned to loathe his God as intensely as he
loathed Mrs. Jennett; and this is not a wholesome frame of mind for the
young. Since she chose to regard him as a hopeless liar, when dread of
pain drove him to his first untruth he naturally developed into a liar,
but an economical and self-contained one, never throwing away the least
unnecessary fib, and never hesitating at the blackest, were it only
plausible, that might make his life a little easier. The treatment
taught him at least the power of living alone,--a power that was of
service to him when he went to a public school and the boys laughed at
his clothes, which were poor in quality and much mended. In the holidays
he returned to the teachings of Mrs. Jennett, and, that the chain of
discipline might not be weakened by association with the world, was
generally beaten, on one account or another, before he had been twelve
hours under her roof.

The autumn of one year brought him a companion in bondage, a
long-haired, gray-eyed little atom, as self-contained as himself, who
moved about the house silently and for the first few weeks spoke only
to the goat that was her chiefest friend on earth and lived in the
back-garden. Mrs. Jennett objected to the goat on the grounds that
he was un-Christian,--which he certainly was. "Then," said the
atom, choosing her words very deliberately, "I shall write to my
lawyer-peoples and tell them that you are a very bad woman. Amomma
is mine, mine, mine! " Mrs. Jennett made a movement to the hall, where
certain umbrellas and canes stood in a rack. The atom understood as
clearly as Dick what this meant. "I have been beaten before," she said,
still in the same passionless voice; "I have been beaten worse than you
can ever beat me. If you beat me I shall write to my lawyer-peoples
and tell them that you do not give me enough to eat. I am not afraid of
you. " Mrs. Jennett did not go into the hall, and the atom, after a pause
to assure herself that all danger of war was past, went out, to weep
bitterly on Amomma's neck.

Dick learned to know her as Maisie, and at first mistrusted her
profoundly, for he feared that she might interfere with the small
liberty of action left to him. She did not, however; and she volunteered
no friendliness until Dick had taken the first steps. Long before the
holidays were over, the stress of punishment shared in common drove the
children together, if it were only to play into each other's hands as
they prepared lies for Mrs. Jennett's use. When Dick returned to school,
Maisie whispered, "Now I shall be all alone to take care of myself;
but," and she nodded her head bravely, "I can do it. You promised to
send Amomma a grass collar. Send it soon. " A week later she asked for
that collar by return of post, and was not pleased when she learned that
it took time to make. When at last Dick forwarded the gift, she forgot
to thank him for it.

Many holidays had come and gone since that day, and Dick had grown into
a lanky hobbledehoy more than ever conscious of his bad clothes. Not
for a moment had Mrs. Jennett relaxed her tender care of him, but the
average canings of a public school--Dick fell under punishment about
three times a month--filled him with contempt for her powers. "She
doesn't hurt," he explained to Maisie, who urged him to rebellion, "and
she is kinder to you after she has whacked me. " Dick shambled through
the days unkempt in body and savage in soul, as the smaller boys of the
school learned to know, for when the spirit moved him he would hit them,
cunningly and with science. The same spirit made him more than once try
to tease Maisie, but the girl refused to be made unhappy. "We are both
miserable as it is," said she. "What is the use of trying to make things
worse? Let's find things to do, and forget things. "

The pistol was the outcome of that search. It could only be used on the
muddiest foreshore of the beach, far away from the bathing-machines and
pierheads, below the grassy slopes of Fort Keeling. The tide ran out
nearly two miles on that coast, and the many-coloured mud-banks, touched
by the sun, sent up a lamentable smell of dead weed. It was late in the
afternoon when Dick and Maisie arrived on their ground, Amomma trotting
patiently behind them.

"Mf! " said Maisie, sniffing the air. "I wonder what makes the sea so
smelly? I don'tlike it! "

"You never like anything that isn't made just for you," said Dick
bluntly. "Give me the cartridges, and I'll try first shot. How far does
one of these little revolvers carry? "

"Oh, half a mile," said Maisie, promptly. "At least it makes an awful
noise. Be careful with the cartridges; I don't like those jagged
stick-up things on the rim. Dick, do be careful. "

"All right. I know how to load. I'll fire at the breakwater out there. "

He fired, and Amomma ran away bleating. The bullet threw up a spurt of
mud to the right of the wood-wreathed piles.

"Throws high and to the right. You try, Maisie. Mind, it's loaded all
round. "

Maisie took the pistol and stepped delicately to the verge of the mud,
her hand firmly closed on the butt, her mouth and left eye screwed up.

Dick sat down on a tuft of bank and laughed. Amomma returned very
cautiously. He was accustomed to strange experiences in his afternoon
walks, and, finding the cartridge-box unguarded, made investigations
with his nose. Maisie fired, but could not see where the bullet went.

"I think it hit the post," she said, shading her eyes and looking out
across the sailless sea.

"I know it has gone out to the Marazion Bell-buoy," said Dick, with a
chuckle. "Fire low and to the left; then perhaps you'll get it. Oh, look
at Amomma! --he's eating the cartridges! "

Maisie turned, the revolver in her hand, just in time to see Amomma
scampering away from the pebbles Dick threw after him. Nothing is sacred
to a billy-goat. Being well fed and the adored of his mistress, Amomma
had naturally swallowed two loaded pin-fire cartridges. Maisie hurried
up to assure herself that Dick had not miscounted the tale.

"Yes, he's eaten two. "

"Horrid little beast! Then they'll joggle about inside him and blow up,
and serve him right. . . . Oh, Dick! have I killed you? "

Revolvers are tricky things for young hands to deal with. Maisie could
not explain how it had happened, but a veil of reeking smoke separated
her from Dick, and she was quite certain that the pistol had gone off in
his face.