“I’m sorry I hadn’t my purse to-night, and I’ve only got this note here. Please take what I owe you out of it, and with the change you might buy yourself a tie-pin. I wanted to give you a little present, but I’m afraid of getting something you won’t like. Please say you’re not cross with me for asking you to see about it yourself.”
The youth read the letter with indifference, but when he came to the last lines blushed, for his mother had instilled into him certain rules of honour, and against his will, he could not escape the notion that it was the most discreditable thing possible to accept money from a woman. For a moment he felt sick with shame, but the note was crisp and clean and inviting. His fingers itched.
His first impulse was to send it back, and he sat down at his writing-table. But when he came to put the note in an envelope, he hesitated and looked at it again.
“After all, what with the dinner and tea yesterday, she owes me a good deal of it, and I shall spend it on her if I keep it. She’s so rich, it means nothing to her.”
Then he had an inspiration.
“I’ll put the balance on a horse, and if it comes in I’ll give her the tenner back. If it doesn’t—well, it’s not my fault.”
He pocketed the note.
X
The Kents spent their honeymoon in a fisherman’s cottage at Carbis Water, the very name of which, romantic and muflical, enchanted Basil’s ear; and from their window the cliff, grown over with odorous broom, tumbled lazily to the edge of the coloured sea. There was an amiable simplicity about the old man from whom they hired rooms, and Basil delighted to hear his long stories of the pilchard fishery, of storms that had strewn the beach with wreckage, and of fierce battles fought between the fishers of St. Ives and the foreigners from Lowestoft. He told of the revivals which burned along the countryside, calling sinners to repentance, and how himself on a memorable occasion had found salvation; now he confessed his late-found faith with savage ardour, but notwithstanding made the most he could out of the strangers in his house! And the tall, gaunt figure of that ancient seaman, with furrowed cheeks and eyes bleared with long scanning of the sea, seemed a real expression of that country—wild with its deserted mines, yet tender; barren, yet with the delicate colour of a pastel. To Basil, weary with the conflicting emotions of the last month, it had a restful charm unrivalled by the distincter glories of more southern lands.
One afternoon they walked up a hill to see the local curiosity, a gravestone which crowned its summit, and Basil wandered on while Jenny, indifferent and tired, sat down to test. He sauntered through the furze, saffron and green, and the heather rich with the subdued and decorous richness of an amethyst: some child had gathered a bunch of this and thrown it aside, so that it lay on the grass dying, faded purple, like a symbol of the decay of an imperial power. For a reason that escaped him, it recalled to Basil’s mind that most poetical of prose-writers, the divinely simple weaver of words, Jeremy Taylor, and he repeated to himself that sad, passionate phrase used in the Holy Dying: “Break the beds, drink your wine, crown your head with roses and besmear your curled locks with nard; for God bids you to remember death.”