CHAPTER XIII

SURSUM CORDA

It was very still on the great headland of Wooda as the doctor reined in his horse for a moment, so still, although the time was November, that the sleepy hiss of the waves could be heard for miles away, as they curled over the rocks, or crept over the sands. Gulls floated white against the evening dimness wherever the rocks opened seaward in weed-hung caverns; their cries echoed shrill and harsh from the nesting-places. To the left a ring of fire, the shorelights of the fashionable watering-places on the other side of the bay, was beginning to spring up round the coast. Dr. Borlace was tired by the day's work, and as he took off his hat in order to feel the cool wind on his forehead, one could see, in fancy, some connection between its profile and the supposed story of his race. For he was a Pomeroy on his mother's side, and the Pomeroys believed themselves to have been originally court-jesters, chosen for quaint diablerie of face or mind, to amuse the savage Norman court. Whence, so it was said, the name Pomeroy, or Pomme Roi, apple-king, because they came in with the dessert. Dr. Borlace, of course, knew that the voice of the fairy-teller must have been pretty busy with this genealogy, but the fancy amused him none the less, and certainly had much to do with his oddity of expression, which was, if partly natural, also partly acquired.

Slowly he rode back over the foundations of the Napoleonic camp that rest on still earlier Roman foundations,

for this headland is the supposed landing-place of Vespasian, and, honeycombed as it is with caves and wells, was certainly a Roman fort. As he crossed the wooden drawbridge that still spans the moat, the faint moon-crescent began to shine like the ghost of a golden sickle amongst clouds of palest lavender. The wind came faintly from inland, scented with the moor-breath, and smelling of dried heath, chamomile, and gorse-the wind that, dreamt of in equatorial swamps, is sweeter than the memory of water in the desert. The glow on the sky-line showed where the fires of Challacombe were lit. Suddenly, from a gorse bush at his feet, a lark started up, and the frightened thud of sheep-pads sounded. In the distance a bird tried a few notes that gurgled away into space as his eyelids closed to the peace that lives in wild places, and a rabbit, sitting at his hole, fled in terror from the shadow of horse and man.

As Dr. Borlace rode on, there started, almost from beneath his horse's hoofs, a woman, bare-headed and in some deadly terror.

"Will you come back with me," she cried, seizing his bridle, "my child's ill, and I was running to Challacombe to fetch 'ee for it?"

"Where?" said the doctor.

"Only over there. 'Tis but a step." She pointed across the down to a dim light that shone from beneath eyelids of shaggy thatch.

Breaking through the gorse-bushes, and heedless of rents and scratches, the woman led the way to the garden gate, where Dr. Borlace hitched his mare.

The child, a splendid creature of a few months old, lay panting for life on an old settle in the firelight. For some time the doctor had no time to heed the room or its occupants. Only, as a doctor always does, he caught the

lithe intelligence of the mother as she obeyed his directions, in preparing hot water, or catching the import of a muttered word. At last there came a breathing space, when the tortured limbs found rest, and the quieter breathing told of safety.

"All right now, if you're careful," said he, smoothing back the soft hair from the baby's forehead, and noting with a smile the blue-veined skin, a sign of race, so they say, which he had last observed in his wife.

"It's a good thing I happened to be passing," he said at last; "it was touch-and-go for a time."

"I was afraid to ask 'ee to come first-long, till I saw what 'twas, and then I didn't care any more."

Dr. Borlace lifted the lamp-shade and raked woman and room with his glance.

"Of course," said he, after a pause of recollection, "I remember now. I didn't recognize you before."

"Yes, I'm Johanna Buckingham," she said, with a toss of the head that was belied by her quivering voice.

"So I see," said the doctor, dryly.

"I've been stopping for a bit with Mr. and Mrs. Lapthorne. They took me in afore the child was born, though I dunno that I shall ever be able to pay 'em back."

An old woman, who had been waiting meekly in the background, now came forward. Mrs. Lapthorne's redrimmed eyes and dirt-engrained skin were in quaint contrast to her fluffy white fringe of hair, the gay flowers stuck in her bonnet, and the bugles on her withered body. Her husband shook and trembled, deaf and wordless, at her side.

"She's a good girl, is Johanna, for all the trouble she's been in," she quavered. "I've had three men myself, and they've all been good to me, and though John here is doting, a poor old trade, he's allays made a nest for his canary bird-that's me, sir. Haven't 'ee, John? But Johanna

never got a man that did aught for her but break her arm. But she'd took us in, John and me, before that, and give us a cup of tea, and I don't know that ever I wanted a cup of tea more'n I did the one she give us. So when she'd nowhere to turn to in Challacombe, she come up here to us."

"Well," said Dr. Borlace, "you look comfortable enough now."

"Ah," said Mrs. Lapthorne, "just you see me in my Sunday bonnet! Beautiful, ain't it, John?" she shouted. John nodded vigorously.

The doctor watched the woman as she leant sullenly against the head of the settle.

"Your child will do well enough now," he said.

She never answered, but flushed a fiery red as he touched the left arm that she carried strapped to her breast. "Set properly?" he asked.

But Mrs. Lapthorne was not to be silenced. "Iss, 'tis her cheeld; I'm not denying it for her. I've had plenty myself, though I dunno where they be now. Reared 'em careful, I did, with but an accident or two; but I've never seed anything to equal the way Johanna's tended that cheeld, though she'd be better with 'en dead, as I've told her scores of times if I've told her once."

"Come outside a minute," said Dr. Borlace to Johanna, as he took up his hat. "Good-bye," he said to Mrs. Lapthorne," old mother-o'-millions. It's Sunday to-morrow, and I shall be out here again; so don't forget the bonnet."

His manner changed as Johanna latched the door behind and they stood on the path between the hollyhock sticks. She was still sullen, but something in both woman and child had surprised him, for the poor wrappings of the baby, though in rags, had been spotless, and no gentlewoman's child could have been more carefully tended.

"What's this?" he asked again, touching a rent in the

bodice of her dress through which the skin showed. He also noticed how the old brown dress she wore clung about her body.

"I've pawned every stitch of underclothing," she said.

"What are you going to do? The old people

"No, I can't take no more from them. They've kept me weeks from afore baby come till now, and they've but a few shillens a week from the parish."

Dr. Borlace stood for a moment with the bridle under his arm, considering what he knew of this woman, who had long been regarded as a scandal to Challacombe. Yet for all her veiled defiance he surmised an undertone of appeal to himself, not as to a doctor, but as to another human being. In this idea he was helped by the insistent fact of her devotion to the unfortunate, ill-begotten child, surely one of the most forlorn creatures that the world can show. He remembered the Buckingham family, the handsome, half-foreign-looking daughters, who supported a good-fornothing father on the wages of sin. He bent steady eyes on her, wondering to find this woman in even such cleanly surroundings as these downs, for the courts of Challacombe were more native to such human wreckage.

Suddenly the instinct of the mother triumphed, and she burst into a lame kind of explanation.

"Dr. Earwaker," she said explosively, "won't tend the likes of her and me if he can help it. I didn't know as you'd really come to her when I stopped 'ee upon the down. But if you'd sent me to clink for stopping 'ee, I was bound to do it."

"How are you going to live till you can go back? You know he can be made to pay, the man that did this "—the doctor touched the strapped arm with his stock-"if not for the child."

"Not for the child," she said—"not to the likes of me;