"But before I go, I want to hark back to a matter of quite ancient history—your lost shoes and stockings—for thereby hangs a tale."
And he proceeded to tell her how, about a week ago, being caught by a wild flurry of rain in an outlying part of the island, behind the black cottages and Inn, he took shelter in a disused ruinous boat-house opening on the great reed-beds which here rim the shore. A melancholy, forsaken place, from which, at low tide, you can walk across the mud-flats to Lampit, with a pleasing chance of being sucked under by quicksands. Abram Sclanders' unhappy half-witted son haunted this boat-house, it seemed, storing his shrimping nets there, any other things as well, a venerable magpie's hoard of scraps and lumber; using it as a run-hole, too, when the other lads hunted and tormented him according to their healthy, brutal youthful way.
—A regular joss-house, he'd made of it. And set up in one corner, white and ghostly—making you stare a minute when you first came inside—a ship's figure-head, a three-foot odd Britannia, pudding-basin bosomed and eagle-featured, with castellated headgear, clasping a trident in her hand. She, as presiding deity and—
"In front of her," Faircloth said, his chin still in his hands and eyes gazing away to the Bar—"earth and pebbles banked up into a flat-topped mound, upon which stood your shoes filled with sprays of hedge fruit and yellow button-chrysanthemums—stolen too, I suppose, from one of the gardens at Lampit. They grow freely there. Your silk stockings hung round her neck, a posy of flowers twisted into them.—When I came on this exhibition, I can't quite tell you how I felt. It raised Cain in me to think of that degraded, misbegotten creature pawing over and playing about with anything which had belonged to you. I was for making Sclanders, his father, bring him over and give him the thrashing of his life, right there before the proofs of his sins."
"But you didn't," Damaris cried. "You didn't. What do my shoes and stockings matter? I oughtn't to have left them on the shore. It was putting temptation in his way."
Faircloth looked at her smiling.
"No I didn't, and for two reasons. One that I knew—even then—you would find excuses, plead for mercy, as you have just now. Another, those flowers. If I had found—well—what I might have found, oh! he should have had the stick or the dog-whip without stint. But one doesn't practise devil-worship with flowers. It seemed to me some craving after beauty was there, as if the poor germ of a soul groped out of the darkness towards what is fair and sweet. I dared not hound it back into the darkness, close down any dim aspiration after God it might have. So I left its pitiful joss-house inviolate, the moan of the wind and sighing of the great reed-beds making music for such strange rites of worship as have been, or may be, practised within. Any god is better than none—that's my creed, at least. And to defile any man's god—however trumpery—unless you're amazingly sure you've a better one to offer him in place of it is to sin against the Holy Ghost."
Faircloth rose to his feet.
"Time's up"—he said. "I must go. Here is farewell to the most beautiful day of my life.—But see, Damaris"—
And he knelt down, in front of her.