"I'm not," said the Urchin.
Another pause, and then the Urchin spoke again, in a kind of stage whisper, "I'm frightened." The words seemed squeezed out of him.
"We may as well go back, anyhow," said Fiona, in a strained voice. "Down you go, Urchin."
The Urchin did go down at a considerable pace, and ran for the boat. Fiona managed to walk, by repeating to herself all the time under her breath, "You mustn't run, you mustn't run." But once in the boat she did not rebuke the Urchin for standing up and taking the other oar; and the pair paddled out, with many bumpings and scrapings, in a more speedy and less scientific manner than that in which they had entered.
Once out in the sunlight they felt better. They started automatically to fish home, and presently were talking again. But neither of them referred to the thing that was uppermost in each mind, though each was wondering if the other knew. For as they had sat on the wall of rock, each had heard clearly, in the utter darkness of the unvisited cave, the sound of heavy footsteps.
CHAPTER IV
THE URCHIN VANISHES
To most people there is some corner of the earth which means more than all others; and there are two or three in the world whose holy place is the old house on the sea-loch which the Student's humbler neighbors called the "big house." An old square building of gray stone, that matches the gray sky and the gray sea, it has small claims to beauty; it was built in the days of blank windows, and every wind in the island meets and screams round the battered iron balustrade which leads up its steps to the door, and strives to tear down the tendrils of ivy that cling to the east front. To the south front, lashed by the full Atlantic gales, not even ivy can cling; only a few twisted elders and stunted planes grow there, and take the first force of the winter wind; but the old lawn to the north bursts in summer into a cloud of white marguerites, whose ethereal beauty at sunset is like the ghosts of the dreams that haunt the place. For to some of us the old house is full of dreams, that cling to the dark passages and the uneven floors, and play in and out of the little windows that are still propped open with wood, as they were a hundred years ago; dreams of the bright lights and the bright voices that greeted us, coming in out of the blinding rain; dreams of the dance and the song, songs of old lost causes from which all bitterness has died away, leaving to-day nothing but beauty behind them; dreams of faded joys and forgotten sorrows, of loves that have passed elsewhere and of memories that abide; dreams of faces that are seen no more. Some day it will change ownership; it will be sold to someone from whom understanding of these things has been withheld, and who will see only the darkness of the old corridors, the shabbiness of the old doorway; and he will build new doors, and porticoes and a wide verandah, and make it fair within and without, levelling the floors and trimming the lawns; and he will have destroyed the old house and the fragrance of it, and it will never return. But to-day it still stands as it has stood for many a long year, clothed in the memories that never leave it and rich in all that the past has built into it; and to some who may never dwell there again it is yet ever present as the home of their hearts' desire, a true house of faery.
The Student had let the old house to the Urchin's father. He was a tall, thin man with a hooked nose, and he knew more about one particular family of Coleoptera than anyone living. He had taken the place, not because he wanted it for its shooting, but because one of the beetles of his family was reputed to be plentiful in the neighborhood. He was never there long; he was never anywhere long. For thirty years he had pursued his beetles over five continents; his measurements of their wing cases alone filled nine enormous MS. volumes. His great work on the variation of the length of the wing case in beetles kept in captivity had become a classic. Scientific men had nothing but praise for the book; several even read it. The majority believed that he had re-founded Neo-Mendelism past any overthrowing; a small but persistent minority argued that, on the contrary, he had utterly overthrown the Neo-Mendelians. All, however, agreed that the book was epoch-making, even though they differed utterly as to the sort of epoch which it made. The author himself was a shy and modest person, who never lost his temper except when people sent him unpaid parcels from Timbuctoo or Khamchatka containing beetles of other families in which he took no interest. On the rare occasions when he could be induced to go into society, kind-hearted hostesses, who saw no reason why one crawling thing should not do as well as another had been known to try to please him by starting a conversation about ladybirds or earwigs; and it was said to be worth foregoing one's cigar to hear him explain, with a chuckle, that though earwigs or ladybirds were no doubt meritorious creatures in their several spheres, and possibly legitimate objects of study to others, they were not his subject; his subject was a particular family of Coleoptera. He and the Student had become great friends, and when he was in the island he would often drop in to see the Student's bookroom after dinner and there the two would sit, one on either side of the fire, each smoking at a tremendous pace and talking hard on his own subject. Neither ever expected an answer from the other; neither ever got one. But they had silently established an unwritten law that when one had talked for three minutes by the clock on the mantelpiece he was to stop and let the other have a turn; and when at last they said good night, each felt that they had both had a thoroughly enjoyable evening. And so they had.
Unlike to unlike. The Urchin's father had married the daughter of a stockbroker, who, on her death, had left him two legacies; one was the Urchin, and the other was an occasional visitation from her brother Jeconiah. Mr. Jeconiah P. Johnson, the well-known promoter of companies, was a short, stout man with a red face and a shifty blue eye, always immaculately dressed in broadcloth with a huge expanse of white waistcoat, over which sprawled his double watch chain and his triple chin. There were possibly some good points even about Jeconiah, if anything so rotund could be said to have points; but there were certainly not many. He was supposed by some to possess what is called "a high standard of business morality"; it would be truer to say that his code was prehistoric. He had so far kept himself right with the law, because he had mastered the sordid maxim which proclaims that honesty is the best policy; no other reason was likely to occur to him. With some effort he had succeeded in formulating a rule of conduct of which he was rather proud: Do good to yourself and your friends and evil to those who stand in your way. If anyone had told him that the philosophy of ethics took its rise, some twenty-two centuries ago, in a reaction against a similar rule, he would have remarked jocosely that he never studied back numbers. Of anything more exalted than "policy," anything not to be reckoned in terms of £.s.d., he was as ignorant as a hippopotamus.