“For the wrong that the pock-marked one did you, for the insult Gar Ling spoke to you, I slew them,” said Fa’ng, with sudden strength. “My debt is paid. Tsau kom lok.”
“Haie! You did that! Why did you do that? I could never pay you! And look! Aih-yah, oh, how piteous! You are dying!”
With awkward fingers, the vendor of sugar-cane tried to staunch the flow of blood where Gar Ling’s bullet had struck with deadly effect.
“Pay me?” breathed Fa’ng the hatchetman. “Did you—not—feed me? Can one—put a value—on food—when the stomach—is empty? Aih, what—matters it? A life,”—his eyelids fluttered and closed—“a life—a bowl of rice....”
HODGE
By ELINOR MORDAUNT
People are accustomed to think of Somerset as a country of deep, bosky bays, sunny coves, woods, moorlands, but Hemerton was in itself sufficient to blur this bland illusion. It lay a mile and a half back from the sea, counting it all full tide; at low tide the sly, smooth waters, unbroken by a single rock, slipped away for another mile or more across a dreary ooze of black mud.
The village lay pasted flat upon the marsh, with no trees worthy of the name in sight: a few twisted black-thorn bushes, a few split willows, one wreck of a giant blighted ash in the Rectory gardens, and that was all.
For months on end the place swam in vapours. There were wonderful effects of sunrise and sunset, veils of crimson and gold, of every shade of blue and purple. At times the grey sea-lavender was like silver, the wet, black mud gleaming like dark opals; while at high summer there was purple willow-strife spilled thick along the ditches, giving the strange place a transitory air of warm-blooded life; but for the most part it was all as aloof and detached as a sleep-walker.
The birds fitted the place as a verger fits his quiet and dusky church: herons and waders of all kinds; wild-crying curlew; and here and there a hawk, hanging motionless high overhead.