Bessie Costrell | Page 9

"An', if you
please, Muster Watson, don't yer say nothin' to nobody."
The burly policeman looked from John to Isaac, then at the box. John's
hoard was notorious, and the officer of the law understood.
"Lor' bless yer," he said, with a laugh, "I'm safe. Well, good evenin' to

yer, if I can't be of any assistance."
And he went off on his beat.
The two men carried the box up the hill. It was in itself a heavy,
old-fashioned affair, strengthened and bottomed with iron. Isaac
wondered whether the weight of it were due more to the box or to the
money. But he said nothing. He had no idea how much John might
have saved, and would not have asked him the direct question for the
world. John's own way of talking about his wealth was curiously
contradictory. His "money" was rarely out of his thoughts or speech,
but no one had ever been privileged for many years now to see the
inside of his box, except Eliza once; and no one but himself knew the
exact amount of the hoard. It delighted him that the village gossips
should double or treble it. Their estimates only gave him the more
ground for vague boasting, and he would not have said a word to put
them right.
When they reached the Costrells' cottage, John's first care was to
examine the cupboard. He saw that the large wooden chest filled with
odds and ends of rubbish which already stood there was placed on the
top of his own box. Then he tried the lock, and pronounced it adequate;
he didn't want to have Flack meddling round. Now, at the moment of
parting with his treasure, he was seized with a sudden fever of secrecy.
Bessie meanwhile hovered about the two men, full of excitement and
loquacity. And the children, shut into the kitchen, wondered what could
be the matter.
When all was done, Isaac locked the cupboard, and solemnly presented
the key to John, who added it to the other round his neck. Then Bessie
unlocked the kitchen, and sent the children flying, to help her with the
supper. She was in her most bustling and vivacious mood, and she had
never cooked the bloaters better or provided a more ample jug of beer.
But John was silent and depressed.
He took leave at last with many sighs and lingerings. But he had not
been gone half an hour, and Bessie and Isaac were just going to bed,
when there was a knock at the door, and he reappeared.

"Let me lie down there," he said, pointing to a broken-down old sofa
that ran under the window. "I'm lonesome somehow, an' I've told
Louisa." His white hair and whiskers stood out wildly round his red
face. He looked old and ill, and the sympathetic Bessie was sorry for
him.
She made him a bed on the sofa, and he lay there all night, restless, and
sighing heavily. He missed Eliza more than he had done yet, and was
oppressed with a vague sense of unhappiness. Once, in the middle of
the night when all was still, he stole upstairs in his stockinged feet and
gently tried the cupboard door. It was quite safe, and he went down
contented.
An hour or two later he was off, trudging to Frampton through the
August dawn, with his bundle on his back.

SCENE III
Some five months passed away.
One January night the Independent minister of Clinton Magna was
passing down the village street. Clinton lay robed in light snow, and
"sparkling to the moon." The frozen pond beside the green, though it
was nearly eight o'clock, was still alive with children, sliding and
shouting. All around the gabled roofs stood laden and spotless. The
woods behind the village, and those running along the top of the snowy
hill, were meshed in a silvery mist which died into the moonlit blue,
while in the fields the sharpness of the shadows thrown by the scattered
trees made a marvel of black and white.
The minister, in spite of a fighting creed, possessed a measure of
gentler susceptibilities, and the beauty of this basin in the chalk hills,
this winter triumphant, these lights of home and fellowship in the
cottage windows disputing the forlornness of the snow, crept into his
soul. His mind travelled from the physical purity and hardness before
him to the purity and hardness of the inner life--the purity that Christ

blessed, the "hardness" that the Christian endures. And such thoughts
brought him pleasure as he walked--the mystic's pleasure.
Suddenly he saw a woman cross the snowy green in front of him. She
had come from the road leading to the hill, and her pace was hurried.
Her shawl was muffled round her head,