The Squire's Daughter. Hocking Silas Kitto
mended."
"You can't ladle the sea dry with a limpet-shell, Ralph, nor carry off a mountain in your pocket. No, no; let us not talk about the impossible, nor give up hope until we are forced to. Perhaps young Seccombe will recover."
"But if he should die, father. What would happen then?"
"I don't know, my boy, and I can't bear to think."
"But we'd better face the possibility," Ralph answered doggedly, "so that, if the worst should come to the worst, we may know just where we are."
"'Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,'" David answered, with a far-away look in his eyes. And he got up from his seat and walked slowly out of the house.
Ralph sat looking out of the window for several minutes, and then he went off in search of his mother and Ruth.
"Do you know, mother," he said, as cheerily as he could, "that I have had no breakfast yet? And, in spite of the bad news, I am too hungry for words."
"Had no breakfast?" she said, lifting up her hands in surprise. "I made sure you got something to eat before you went out."
"Well, then, you were wrong for once," he said, laughing. "Now, please put me out of my misery as quickly as possible."
"Ah, Ralph," she answered, with a sigh, "if we had no worse misery than hunger, how happy we should be!"
"That is so, mother," he said, with a laugh. "Hunger is not at all bad when you have plenty to eat."
She sighed again.
"It is well that you young people don't see far ahead of you," she said plaintively. "But come here and get your breakfast."
Two hours later, when in the home close hoeing turnips, he lifted his head and saw his father coming across the fields from the direction of St. Goram, he straightened his back at once and waited. He knew that he had been to see the parson to get the latest and fullest news. David came slowly on with his eyes upon the ground, as if buried in profound thought.
"Well, father, what news?" Ralph questioned, when his father came within speaking distance.
David started as though wakened out of a reverie, and came to a full stop. Then a pathetic smile stole over his gentle face, and he came forward with a quickened step.
"I waited for the parson to get a reply from the War Office, or I should have been home sooner," he said, bringing out the words slowly and painfully.
"Well?" Ralph questioned, though he felt sure, from his father's manner, what the answer would be.
"The parson fears the worst," David answered, bringing out the words in jerks. "Poor man! He's in great trouble. I almost forgot my own when I thought of his."
"But what was the news he got from the War Office?" Ralph questioned.
"Not much. He's on the list of the dangerously wounded, that's all."
"But he may recover," Ralph said, after a pause.
"Yes, he may," David answered, with a sigh. "God alone knows, but the parson gave me no comfort at all."
"How so?"
"He says that the swords and spears of the dervishes are often poisoned; then, you see, water is scarce, and the heat is terrible, so that a sick man has no chance like he has here."
Ralph did not reply. For a moment or two he looked at his father, then went on with his hoeing. David walked by his side between the rows of turnips. His face was drawn and pale, and his lips twitched incessantly.
"The world seems terribly topsy-turvy," he said at length, as if speaking to himself. "I oughtn't to be idling here, but all the heart's gone out of me somehow."
"We must hope for the best," Ralph said, without raising his head.
"The parson's boy is the last 'life,'" David went on, as though he had not heard what Ralph had said. "The last life. Just a thread, a feeble little thread. One little touch, and then – "
"Well, and what then?" Ralph questioned.
"If the boy dies, this little farm is no longer ours. Though I have reclaimed it from the waste, and spent on it all my savings, and toiled from dawn to dark for twelve long years, and built the house and the barn and the cowsheds, and gone into debt to stock it; if that boy dies it all goes."
"You mean that the squire will take possession?"
"I mean that Sir John will claim it as his."
Ralph did not speak again for several moments, but he felt his blood tingling to his finger-tips.
"It's a wicked, burning shame," he jerked out at length.
"It is the law, my boy," David said sadly, "and you see there's no going against the law."
Ralph hung his head, and began hoeing vigorously his row.
"Besides," David went on, "you see I was party to the arrangement – that is, I accepted the conditions; but the luck has been on Sir John's side."
"He took a mean advantage of you, father, and you know it, and he knows it," Ralph snapped.
"He knew that I had set my heart on a bit of land that I could call my own; that I wanted a sort of resting-place in my old age, and that I desired to end my days in the parish in which I was born."
"And so he put the screw on. It's always been a wonder to me, since I could think about it at all, that you accepted the conditions. I would have seen Sir John at the bottom of the sea first."
"I did try to get better terms," David answered, looking wistfully across the fields, "and I mentioned ninety-nine years as the term of the lease, and he nearly turned me out of his office. 'Three lives or nothing,' he snarled, 'and be quick about it.' So I had to make up my mind there and then."
"You'd have been better off, father, if you'd dropped all your money down a mine shaft, and gone to work on a farm as a day labourer," Ralph said bitterly.
"I shouldn't have had to work so hard," David assented.
"And you would have got more money, and wouldn't have had a hundredth part of the anxiety."
"You see, I thought the land was richer than it has turned out to be, and the furze roots have kept sprouting year after year, and that has meant ploughing the fields afresh. And the amount of manure I have had to put in has handicapped me terribly. But I have kept hoping to get into smooth waters by and by. The farm is looking better now than ever it did before."
"But the ground rent, father, is an outrage. Did you really understand how much you were paying?"
"He wouldn't consent to any less," David said wistfully. "You see things were good with farmers at the time, and rents were going up. And then I thought I should be allowed to work the quarry down in the delf, and make some money out of the stone."
"And you were done in that as in other things?"
"Well, yes. There's no denying it. When I got to understand the deed – and it took me a goodish time to riddle it out – I found out that I had no right to the stone or the mineral, or the fish in the stream, or to the trees, or to the game. Do you know he actually charged me for the stone dug out of my own farm to build the house with?"
"And ever since has been working the quarry at a big profit, which would never have been unearthed but for you, and destroying one of your fields in the process?"
"I felt that about the quarry almost more than anything," David went on. "But he's never discovered the tin lode, and I shall never tell him."
"Is there a tin lode on the farm?" Ralph questioned eagerly.
"Ay, a beauty! It must be seven years ago since I discovered it, and I've kept it to myself. You see, it would ruin the farm to work it, and I should not get a penny of the dues; they'd all go to the squire."
"Everything gets back to the rich in the long-run," Ralph said bitterly. "There's no chance for the poor man anywhere."
"Oh, well, in a few years' time it won't matter to any of us," David said, looking with dreamy eyes across the valley to the distant range of hills. "In the