LITMIR.BIZ

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at the place where she lay beneath the wall with the child beside her. He looked her straight in the face, and then turned a rather broad back between her and his advancing companions.

      “Nothing here, Jim,” he said, to a tall, loose-jointed man, with a half-filled sack over his shoulders.

      The man answered thickly, with an indication that he was something less than sober, but with a surprising fluency. The substance of his contention was that there was never any good to be got from a blasted church. He spat on the stones to emphasize his opinion concerning it.

      A small man with a weak face and a goatish beard rebuked him with drunken solemnity. He appeared to suggest a possible connexion between the recent catastrophe and the infidelity of Jim Rattray. He also suggested that those who had escaped might reasonably be expected to show some gratitude for their Creator’s favour.

      Rattray’s reply was again too picturesque for a literal reproduction. Its substance was that a Creator who preserved Monty Beeston, while disposing of so many millions of better men, must be weak in the head.

      There was an uncertain murmur from the little crowd behind them. An uneasy murmur, from which emerged a desire that there should be less talk, and that they should ‘get a move on’ in some more profitable direction.

      “Yes, we’re best out of here,” said the man whose back was offering a precarious shield to the woman and child who lay beneath the shadowed wall.

      Jim Rattray turned with a sudden anger which may have been prompted rather by a personal antagonism than by the words of the speaker.

      “I’m not taking orders from you, Tom Aldworth.”

      He took a step forward, steadily enough, with a threat of ultra-sanguinary intentions in regard to his antagonist’s interior organs.

      Tom Aldworth stood his ground, but declined the quarrel.

      “I don’t fight a man when he’s in beer,” he remarked, as one who mentions something too obvious for discussion.

      Jim Rattray looked dangerous for a moment, and then pulled himself together with an apparent effort. He said something indistinctly that sounded like “All pals here,” and turned to follow his retreating comrades.

      Tom Aldworth went also, without looking round at those whom he had interposed to shelter.

      Chapter Nine

      Muriel Temple would certainly not have lain silent had she been possessed of her normal strength, nor was she restrained by any fear of the rough group that had approached so nearly.

      She had walked unmoved through a kraal of hostile and rebellious Zulus to reason with a blood-drunken king, and been unconscious of heroism. If it were God’s will that she was to be murdered (which she thought unlikely), there was no more to be said. If it were not His will, the heathen might rage and imagine a vain thing, but as to doing her any injury they had just no power at all. A (Christian) child could see that. She played a game in which she held continual trumps, and the fault was hers if she lacked the necessary faith to play them victoriously.

      But she thought of the child, and of the faintness which had come to her when last she had risen, and she lay still, and left the situation for her Master to deal with.

      The miners did not return, and three days later she found strength to dig a little churchyard grave for the body of Cora Walkley, who thus found a quieter resting-place than had come to most of those that sea and storm had ended.

      With reviving strength, and being freed of the encumbrance of the dying child, Muriel rose on the next morning with a determination to learn more of the condition to which her world had fallen.

      The leaden pall of damp and dirty air, which for a century had lain unlifting upon the English midlands, as it lay upon the valleys of the Tyne and of the lower Thames, and upon the industrial districts of Yorkshire and Lancashire, as though to hide their foulness from the indignant day, had disappeared, and the sky showed a blue depth such as the factory-worker had only seen when on excursions to the distant coast, and supposed with vague unreason to be a particular quality of the seaside air.

      Muriel, whose life had been largely spent elsewhere, might have been less quick to notice its difference from the sickly struggle of frustrated light which had been locally known as a sunny day, but she was conscious of another quality, which she had no difficulty in defining. The air was salt. A fresh and pleasant wind came from the north, and it brought a strong scent of the sea.

      “It can’t be a mile away,” she thought wonderingly. With all that she had heard and seen she had not realized until that moment how great might be the ruin that had overwhelmed the world.

      Among the unconscious springs of conduct which she had not disciplined, because she had not understood their existence, or had not regarded them as antagonistic to the spiritual experiences or service which she supposed to be the only purpose of earthly existence, one of the strongest was the desire of exploration. She had little imagination. She was impatient of romance, or of the invented tale. But she liked new facts that came to her own experience. She liked to see and to know.

      She determined now that her first enterprise should be to discover the meaning of the salt taste of the northern wind, and in doing this she must learn something of the conditions on which human life was continuing around her.

      But first she made her way back to the ruins of the cottage where she had been living. She had seen, from the hillside, that it had escaped the destruction of fire, and she hoped to recover at least some of her personal possessions, and in particular the garments which she badly needed.

      But her search was useless. Others had been there before her. The little well-tended garden had been trampled by many feet. There were the marks of wheels and of a horse’s hooves in the soft soil. Beams had been dragged aside, and tiles and bricks were scattered.

      The body of John Wilkes, which had been exposed by these delvings (he had been smothered in the bed from which he had declined to rise), had been lifted, with that of his wife, into the ditch which bounded the garden on its lower side. There had been a rough attempt at burial, a few barrow-loads of earth and stones having been tipped over upon them. Muriel might not have observed the grave of her late landlord but for a liver-coloured, smooth-coated dog which was gnawing at an exposed foot, and lifted a snarling head as she made her way round the spreading débris of the fallen cottage.

      Everything had not been taken. She stepped among broken bedsteads and furniture, some tattered books, a washtub, and a dented bucket. But there was nothing left of personal clothing or bedding, of food, or tools, or utensils. She saw some of her private papers and letters blowing about the garden, but the box which had held them had disappeared.

      Here was at least sign of human life, and there was hope in the thought, though she would have preferred to find her possessions where she had left them.

      She reflected that there might be other houses down the village which remained unplundered, but before investigating further she was still resolved to explore the limit of the land, and the meaning of the salt wind that she had breathed that morning.

      She made her way back to the church. For the first time she entered the vestry.

      It contained little of value, a recent theft at a neighbouring church having made the Rector cautious about his own property; but there was an ancient chest containing surplices and other vestments, a few devotional books, and a wall-mirror with some brushes on a ledge beneath it. There was also an old brown jacket hanging behind the door, which the Rector had used when he busied himself with the church brasses, or on other matters of cleaning or decoration which he did not always delegate to others.

      Muriel hesitated to touch anything. The Rector might return, though it was strange that he had not done so earlier. Mrs. Walkley had not returned. No one returned. Of the little crowd that had gathered in the church a week ago there was no one left but herself and a dead child.

      Yet he might do so.

      She looked in the mirror, and it confirmed the earlier verdict of her own judgment.

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