Sabine Baring-Gould

“ She threw herself at his feet.
"My mother! my mother!"
"She is dead," said Elijah. "I knew it. I heard her feebly cry for you, an hour ago, and I crept upstairs, and I listened by her bed, and held my hand to her heart till it ceased."
Mehalah did not speak, her frame shook with emotion. He took the candle, raised her face with his hand under the chin and held the light close to it.
"I cannot see much," he said; "I can see scarce anything of the dear face, of the great brown eyes I loved so well; I can see only something flame there. That is the cap." ”

“ Eh! Glory! When I hold, I hold fast." He turned in his chair and leered at her.
"There, there," said she, "lay hold of your rent, and hold fast till death. We want none of it."
"What is that?" exclaimed Rebow, starting out of his seat. " What money is that?"
"The rent," said Mehalah; she stood erect beside the table in her haughty beauty, and laughed at the surprised and angry expression that clouded Rebow's countenance.
"I won't take it. You have stolen it."
"Master Rebow," put in the widow, "the money is yours; it is the rent, not a penny short." ”

“ Mehalah looked up, with a gasp as though stung.
"Yes, Glory! To-day is Valentine's Day. Valentine's Day it is, I have my little gig here. It accommodates two beautifully. I am going to take you up by my side, and drive you home, home, to your home and mine, Glory, in it; and all along the road, here at the Rose where the horse is standing, at Peldon, at Salcot and Virley,—all along the road,—at the parson's, at the Rising Sun, at Farmer Goppin's,—everywhere I'll let them see that I'm out a-junketing to-day along with my Valentine." ”

“ Mehalah could not care greatly for a bird. But presently from out of the shadow of the bake-house floated a few white feathers. The gull was still wending its way on, with unerring instinct, towards the rolling sea. Just then Mehalah heard a thud, as though some heavy body had fallen, accompanied by a short clank of metal. She would have paid it no further attention had she not been roused by seeing the madman striding and then jumping, with the chain wound round one arm. He looked up at the moon, his matted hair was over his face, and Mehalah could not distinguish the features. ”

“ She loved George. Her love for him was the one absorbing passion of her life. She loved her mother, but no one else—only her and George. She had no one else to love. She was without relations. She had been brought up without playfellows on that almost inaccessible islet, only occasionally visiting Mersea, and then only for an hour. She had seen and known nothing of the world save the world of morass. She had mixed with no life, save the life of the flocks on the Ray, of the fishes and the seabirds. Her mind hungered for something more than the little space of the Ray could supply. ”

“ Look up at the sky. Do you see, there is Charles' Wain, and there is Cassiopæa's Chair. There the Serpent and there the Swan. I can see every figure plain, but your landsman rarely can. So I can see every constellation in the dark heaven of Mehalah's soul, but you cannot. You would be wrecked if you were to sail by it. Now, George, take Glory while she is between two moods, or lose her for ever. Go after her at once, George, ask her forgiveness, blame yourself and your mother, blame that figure-head miss, and she will forgive you frankly, at once. ”

“ I suppose it is the window and the sunshine. I feel the heat of the rays; I cannot see them save as streaks of wool."
"Elijah! " exclaimed the girl, "let me bandage your eyes again. You were ordered to keep all light excluded."
"Bah! I know well enough that my eyesight is gone. I know what you have done for me. Do you think that a few days in darkness can mend them? I know better. Vitriol will eat away iron, and the eyes are softer than iron. You knew that when you poured it on them." "I never intended to do you the harm," said Mehalah passionately, and burst into tears. ”

“ If Mersea was a trap, how much more so the Ray! The Sharlands had not even a lock to their door. No one was ever seen on the island after dark save those who dwelt there, for the hill was surrounded on all sides, save where girt by the sea, by a labyrinth of creeks and pools. A robber there would be like a fly in a cobweb, to be caught at once. The sheep were allowed to ramble all over the marsh and saltings, they could thread their way; and it was only when the moon was full or new, and the wind in the south-east, that the shepherd drove them into fold till the waters subsided. ”

“ I don't spend a penny myself. The money is spent for me. I don't keep the key of my cashbox. Admonition has it."
"Then," said Mehalah, rising from her seat, "all is over with us. My mother, your cousin, will in her old age be cast destitute into the world. But, if you really wish to help her, be a man, use your authority, and do what you choose with your own."
"Bless me!" exclaimed Mr. Pettican, touching his brow with his trembling hand, "I will be a man. Am I not a man? If I don't exert my authority, people will say I am in my dotage. I—I—in my flower and cream of my age—in the dotage! ”

“ But, as you see, I am unable to live alone. If Liddy and her daughter will not come to me, I shall be driven to do something desperate. My life has become intolerable; I will bear with Admonition no longer."
"What will you do?" asked Elijah with a sneer. "I tell you, I do not care. I am reckless, I will even fire the house, and burn it over their heads." "What good would that do?"
"What good would it do?" repeated Pettican. "It would no longer be a shelter for Admonition and that beau Timothy. I am not going to be trifled with, I have endured too much. I Will be a man. ”

“ The whole metal is full of my purpose, which tinctures it as wine stains water; and with it goes my resolve that you shall be mine altogether in heart and soul, in love as well as in pity, for now and for all eternity. You will wear that on your finger, the finger that has a nerve leading from the heart. Stretch out your hand, Glory, and let me put it on. Stretch out your hand over the hearth, above the fire; our God is a consuming fire, and this is His proper altar."
He stood on one side of the furnace, she on the other; the angry red coals glowed below, and a hot smoke rose from them. ”

“ I don't see how you can call it keeping true to me when you marry another man for his money."
"You are determined to drive me mad," exclaimed Mehalah. "Have mercy on me, my own George, my only George! I have loved and suffered for you. God can see into my heart, and knows how deeply it has been cut, and how profusely it has bled for you. You must spare me. I have thought of you. I have lived only in a dream of you. The world without you has been dead and blank. ”

“ There is no way out of the marsh but over the dyke. There is no peace which is not won by a fight and wounds. Let me go back." He drew her in at the door, a ferocious expression flickered over his face, like phosphorescent illumination over dead fish.
"I cannot endure this longer. Mehalah! you are killing me. This is worse than the fire-juice in my eyes; you are drenching my heart and brain in vitriol, I feel it gnawing and stinging and blackening as it consumes a way to the inner core, leaving charred matter behind." ”

“ You treat Elijah Rebow as coldly and indifferently as if he were naught to you but master, and you to him were still hired servant. I don't understand your goings on."
"He and I understand each other, that is enough," answered Mehalah. "I have married him for his name and for nothing else. In no other light will I regard him than as a master: I told him when I agreed to go to church with him that I would be his no further than the promise to obey went; I take his name to save mine—that is all. He is not my husband, and never shall be, in any other way. ”

“ I could at least have comforted my soul with the thought that I was ministering to the welfare of one unhappy wretch and lightening his lot. But now," she shrugged her shoulders. "Now everything is all one to me. I can laugh," she did so, harshly. "There is nothing in the world that I care for now, except my mother, and I do not know that I care very much for her now. I feel as if I had no heart, or that mine were frozen in my bosom."
"You do not care now for your mother!" exclaimed Rebow. "Then leave her here to my tender mercy, and go out into the world and seek your fortune. ”

“ I know that you are one who will never yield till you have found a man who is mightier in will and in power than you; those who have fought are best friends after the struggle, when each knows his own strength and the full measure of the resistance of the other. We have had one wrestle, and I have flung you at every round; you in your pride have stood up again, and wiped the blood from your heart, and the tears from your eyes, and tried another fall with me; but now. Glory, you have tried your last. ”

“ I don't want them to stay at your farm at all. I want them to come here and take care of me. I cannot defend myself. If I try to be a man—that girl, I forget her name, you confuse me about it—told me to be a man, and I will be a man, if she will back me up. I have been a man somewhat, have I not, master, in chucking cousin Timothy's traps to the gull?—that I call manly. You will see the girl—Mehalah—I have the name now. I will keep my note-book open at the place. Mehalah, Mehalah, Mehalah, Mehalah. ”

“ I'll lay into him with the whip, so as he shall not forget. He'll be quieter in future."
"Do not," said Mehalah. "It is a shame; it is wicked to treat a poor afflicted wretch thus."
"Oh! you are turned advocate, are you? You take the side of a madman against the sane. That is like a perverse creature such as you. What has he done for you, that you should try to save his back?" "No mercy is to be looked for at your hands," said Mehalah sullenly.
"Look you here. Glory! the moon is full, and that always makes him madder. ”

“ Glory, what you have hung round my neck."
"It is a medal, George."
"Whatever it be, it comes from you, and is worth more than gold."
"It is worth a great deal. It is a certain charm."
"Indeed!"
"It preserves him who wears it from death by violence." At the word a flash shot out of the rushes, and a bullet whizzed past the stern.
George De Witt paused on his oars, startled, confounded.
"The bullet was meant for you or me," said Mehalah in a low voice. "Had the lanthorn been in the bows and not in the stern it would have struck you." ”

“ The rent-paying day was bright and breezy. The tide was up in the morning, and Mehalah and her mother in a boat with sail and jib and spritsail flew before a northeast wind down the Mersea Channel, and doubling Sunken Island, entered the creek which leads to Salcot and Virley, two villages divided only by a tidal stream, and connected by a bridge.
The water danced and sparkled, multitudes of birds were on the wing, now dipping in the wavelets, now rising and shaking off the glittering drops. A high sea-wall hid the reclaimed land on their left. ”

“ So there are things in Nature respond to each other without your knowing why it is, and in what their sympathy consists. So I know all that passes in Mehalah's mind. I feel my own soul dance and taper to her pulses. If you had not been a fool, George, you would already have been after her. What are you staying for now?"
"My mother; what will she say?"
"Do you care for her more than for Glory? If you think of her now, you lose Glory for ever. Once more I ask you, do you waver? Are you inclined to forsake Mehalah for milk-face?" ”

“ You will escape out of darkness into sunshine, and leave all your miseries in this hateful marsh behind your back."
"George! George!" she moaned.
"Elijah deserves not a thought," he went on, "He had behaved like a villain from beginning to end, and if he is served out now, no one will pity him."
"It is impossible, George!" exclaimed Mehalah, lifting herself on her knees and holding her knitted lingers against her heart. "It cannot be, George. It never can be. There is another tie that I cannot break." ”

“ We have the breath of God in us. I am sure that you have, and I am sure that I have; but I know that there is none in your mother, none in such as George De Witt. The laws of the land and of religion are the slits in the board on which the dolls dance, and they only move along these slits; but you and I, and such as have free souls, go anywhere, and do anything. We have no law. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth; so is everyone that is born of the Spirit. ”

“ Elijah put his hand inside his door, drew out his gun, and in a moment the gull was seen to fall.
"She is not dead," said Mehalah, with a gleam of triumph in her sad face.
"No, but winged. The wretch will flutter along disabled. She will try to rise, and each effort will give her mortal agony, and grind the splintered bones together and make the blood bleed away. She will skim a little while above the water, but at length will fall into the waves and be washed ashore dead."
"Yes," said Mehalah; "you will not kill, but wound—wound to the quick." ”

“ Mehalah dropped her brow again on her hands. What was to be done? It was in vain to question Abraham. His thick and addled brain would baffle enquiry. Like a savage, the peasant when questioned will equivocate, and rather than speak the truth invent a lie from a dim fear lest the truth should hurt him. The lie is to him what his shell is to the snail, his place of natural refuge; he retreats to it not only from danger, but from observation. ”

“ There they were, in the old hollow womb of the ship down in the earth in darkness, loving one another as brothers, fighting each other as rivals; the conflict lasting till one shall master the other, a thing that never can be, for both were born with equal strength, and equal purpose, and equal stubbornness of will. The fumes of the spilled spirits hung in the air, and stimulated Mehalah's brain. ”

“ Her deep pity for George forced her to hate his torturer, and grudge him no suffering to expiate his offence. When she thought of what George De Witt must have endured in the vault, of his privations there, of the gradual darkening and disturbance of his faculties, and then of how Elijah had stepped between him and her, and spoiled their mutual dream of happiness, and ruined both their lives, the hot blood boiled in her heart, and she felt that she could deal Rebow the stroke again, deliberately, knowing what the result must be, as a retributive act. ”

“ Mehalah had suffered in mind agonies equal in acuteness to those endured in body by Elijah.
Horror and hatred of herself predominated. She had destroyed, by one outburst of passion, the eyesight of a man, and wrecked his life. What henceforth for thirty or forty years could life be to Rebow?—to one who could not endure existence without activity? She had rendered him in a moment helpless as a babe, and dependent on herself for everything. She must attend to his every want, and manage the farm and his business for him. ”

“ In the hall you knelt and swore to cherish me; here, over the fire, the figure of our God, as I put the iron ring on, swear to me also to love me."
She did not answer. She stood as though frozen to ice; with her eyes on the door of the smithy, where stood a figure—the figure of a man.
Suddenly she uttered a piercing cry. "George! my George! my George!" and withdrew her hand from the grasp of Elijah. The iron ring fell from his fingers into the red fire below and was lost. ”

“ That is just it, George. As soon as passion abates, her generous heart will turn to self-reproach, and she will be angry with herself for what she has done. She will accuse herself with having been violent, with having acted unworthily of her dignity, with having grown in too great a heat about a worthless doll. She will be vexed with herself, ashamed of herself, unable in the twilight of her temper to excuse herself. ”

“ She is his proper mate and double, and the sun don't know, and won't have it, and so day and night, and winter and summer, and waxing and waning goes on and on. But that won't go on for ever. The sun will grow sad at heart, and wane for want of the moon some day, and then there will be a great flare and blaze and glory, and they will be in heaven. And now the two poles of the earth are apart, and so long as they keep apart, the world rolls on in misery and pain, and that is what makes earthquakes, and volcanoes, and great plagues—the poles are apart which ought to be together. ”

“ By jaggers! where is Phœbe Musset? What have you done with her? Where have you put her? What were those screams about?"
"Sheer off while you may," whispered De Witt; "the old woman is not to be faced when wexed no more than a hurricane. Strike sail, and run before the wind."
"What have you done with the young woman? Where is she? Produce the corpse. I heard her as she shruck out." "She insulted me," said Mehalah, still agitated by passion, "and I flung her overboard." ”

“ The old woman was shivering with the ague, and shook the chair on which her daughter leaned; every now and then she raised a white faltering hand to wipe the drops of cold sweat away that hung on her eyebrows like rain on thatching.
"I did not catch the chill here," she said. "I ketched it more than thirty years ago when I was on Mersea Isle, and it has stuck in my marrow ever since. But there is no ague on the Ray. This is the healthiest place in the world, Mehalah has never caught the ague on it. I do not wish ever to leave it, and to lay my bones elsewhere." ”

“ I have a word to say in your ear, cousin Mehalah! By the way, how do you shorten that long name? It is such a mouthful. But I forget, where is my memory going? Glory is the name you go by among relatives and friends. Come along, Glory! Lean on my arm. The blind gentleman is a little unsteady on his pins and can't keep up with us. He will be more comfortable taking his airing slowly by himself; we shall distract him with our frolicsome talk. He is in a serious mood, perhaps pious."
"Say what you have to say at once," said Elijah surlily. ”

“ The wind sighed and sobbed among the rushes and over the fen, in a disconsolate, despairing manner, and the breath of God within—the living soul—sighed and sobbed like His breath that blew over the wintry marsh without. Not a star looked down from His heaven above, and none looked up from His heaven below in the little confines of a human heart. Mehalah could scarce see her way in the fen, among the dykes and drains ”

“ One thing I be sure of. Whenever somebody comes here, the master knows it; he knows it by a sort of instinct, I fancy. I see him at the head of the steps looking out as though he could see, and biting at the air, just as a mad dog snaps at everything and nothing."
"There is George!" suddenly exclaimed Mehalah, as she saw the young sailor's figure rise on the sea-wall.
"And there is the master," muttered Abraham, pointing to Elijah, who appeared at his door, peering about, and holding his hand to his ear. ”

“ Why do you turn hard and hate the world? Because you are on a wrong road, you are battling against your destiny. All goes across with you, because you are across your proper path. Why do you hate me? Because you feel in your soul that you must sooner or later be mine, and your haughty will rebels against having your future determined for you. Yet I know it. The time is at hand when you will take me for better, for worse, for all life. We cannot live a moment the one without the other. If I were to die you would die too, you would rage and writhe against death, but it would come. ”

“ There is passion in us—and that is a spark of the divine. I do not care what the passion be, love or hate, or jealousy or anger, if it be hot and red and consuming so that it melts and burns all that opposes it, that fiery passion is of God and will live, live on for ever, in the central heart and furnace, which is God. ”

“ When the new moon appears, the flesh grows on their bones, and the blood stanches, and the wounds close, and breath comes back behind their ribs. When the moon is full they rise in the ship's hold and fall on one another, and if you listen at full moon on the hoe you can hear the brothers fighting below in the heart of the barrow. You hear them curse and cry out, and you hear the clash of their swords. But when the moon wanes the sounds grow fainter, their armour falls to bits, their flesh drops away, the blood oozes out of all the hacked veins, and at last all is still. ”

“ But, Lord bless me! how the girls do run after the men! Glory! I have seen the world since I left Mersea, and I know more of it than I did. I suppose you thought that as I was gone to Davy Jones's locker you must catch whom you could."
"George! " exclaimed Mehalah, "do not speak to me thus. I cannot bear it. I know you are only talking in this way to try me, and because you resent my marriage. I promised once to be true to you. I gave you my heart, and I have remained, and I will remain, true to you; my heart is yours, and I can never recover it and give it to another." ”

“ There you must remain till you come to me and bid me take you, till you come and give yourself freely into my hands. Do you hear me. Glory?"
"Mehalah, save me," pleaded Mrs. Sharland. "Do what you can to save me from prison. Did I not lay by for you when I was a widow and needy? And will you refuse me this?
"One thing or another," said Rebow. "Either your mother rots in prison, with no escape possible till she goes out to her grave in a pauper's shell, or you and she return at once to Red Hall, on the same conditions as you have been there hitherto, on the conditions you proposed yourself." ”

“ His fingers that held her twitched convulsively as he spoke.
"Listen to me, Glory! and know me and respect me. I am no more to be escaped from than Fate. I am mighty over you as a Providence. You may writhe and circumvent, but I meet you at every turn, and tread you down whenever you think to elude me. Listen to me. Glory!" He paused, and drew a long breath; "Listen, I say, to me. Glory! how did you lose your money that night that Abraham Dowsing sold your sheep? I feel you stirring and starting in my hands. Yes, I took it. You went out with George De Witt, and left the purse on the table. ”