TOWN 
 
 SHEILA KAYE-SMIffl
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 TAMARISK TOWN
 
 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 BY 
 
 SHEILA KAYE-SMITH 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 4 . '"THE CHALLENGE TO SIRIUS," 
 "SUSSEX GORSE," "THE ISLE OF THORNS," ETC. 
 
 "Show me the totm they saw, 
 Withouten fleck or flaw, 
 Aflame, more fine than glass . . ." 
 
 - DIGBY MACKWORTH DOLBEN 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY 
 
 68 1 FIFTH AVENUE
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1920, 
 BY E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY 
 
 All Rights Reserved 
 
 Printed in the United States of America
 
 \ rx 
 
 (0O 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PART I 
 THE BUILDER 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. MONYPENNY OF MARLINGATE . I 
 
 II. MORGAN LE FAY . . . . 49 
 
 III. CLIMBING STREETS 97 
 
 IV. THE BETRAYAL 142 
 
 PART II 
 
 THE DESTROYER 
 
 I. GUARDIAN AND GUIDE 213 
 
 II. THE BURNING HEART 2$O 
 
 III. THE MAYOR OF DEAD MAN'S TOWN 295 
 
 IV. RECONCILIATION 344 
 
 EPILOGUE 
 
 MONYPENNY ON THE SHORE 385 
 
 537850
 
 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 MONYPENNY OF MARLINGATE 
 
 i 
 
 IN the hollow of the hills that, to the North, melted into the 
 Sussex Weald and, to the South, broke and crumbled into the 
 sea, Marlingate lay with the green of the tamarisks hazing its 
 streets. The town itself was a tumble of blacks and reds, a 
 mass of broken colours flung between the hills, into the lit- 
 tle scoop between the woods and the sea. It lay there like a 
 thing flung down, heaped and broken, rolling to the very edge 
 of the waves, and held from falling into them only by its thick, 
 battered Town Wall. 
 
 A mist generally hung over it, the webbing and clotting of 
 its sea breezes as their spindrift met the homely things of 
 its atmosphere the grey hearth-smoke, the stewing heat of 
 the town's crooked ways, the dew that refreshed the tamarisks 
 at night. There was nearly always this fog of smoke and spray 
 over Marlingate, melting its reds through purple into the deep, 
 dancing blue of the sea; only now and then the colours came 
 out clearly, blocks of black and red, with slashes and slices of 
 white, and the old grey mouldings of church and Town Hall 
 with their battlemented shadows. Then the weather-wise 
 spoke of rain, and those wise in other ways than the weath- 
 er's, saw in the town a queer, changeling beauty, as if it lay 
 between the hills a fairy's town. A wind would rise and shake
 
 2 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 in the woods, and blow down Fish Street and High Street to 
 the sea; and the sighing waves would answer the sighing 
 trees, and roar and cry to each other over the little red town 
 that divided them, deep calling to deep, eternity calling to 
 eternity across time. 
 
 To Monypenny, watching at his window in Gun Garden 
 House, it seemed almost as if the woods and the sea would 
 soon fly together in some strange embrace, crushing the 
 town between them, swallowing up all his dreams for Mar- 
 lingate in that one great dream wherein he and Marlingate 
 swam together like bubbles, pledged to a divine destruction. 
 He would rise up and square his shoulders, and feel himself 
 upholding the town with his manhood, the alert, informing, 
 vitalising brain of it all saying to the woods and the sea: 
 "Thus far you shall come, and no further." So Marlingate 
 stayed a tumble and trickle of red and black on the edge of 
 the sea, with the woods pressing sullen and flat against it, 
 a little bit of time poised between two huge, threatening 
 eternities. 
 
 2 
 
 Mr. Hugo Becket sat in his office in Ludgate Street, wait- 
 ing for a visitor. The office smelt of dust and leather, and 
 stored papers almost flavorous. A small fire burned in the 
 grate, chewing smokily a single lump of coal. Mr. Becket 
 walked over to it and lifted his coat tails, giving an uneasy 
 glance at the window, as if in reluctant reproach of it, because 
 it did not frame the figure of Mr. Edward Monypenny pant- 
 ing to his appointment, now passed by thirteen minutes ex- 
 actly. 
 
 Then it struck Mr. Becket that perhaps Monypenny did 
 not mean to come at all. He had changed his mind, and 
 being Monypenny, thought the matter concerned himself only, 
 and had not troubled about the busy merchant who had cleared 
 a space for him in his cumbered day. Perhaps he should have
 
 MONYPENNY OF MARLINGATE 3 
 
 made a social matter of it, asked him to dinner; but the idea 
 of binding Monypenny with a dinner seemed ridiculous even 
 to Becket. He lifted his coat-tails still higher. Damn Mony- 
 penny! He had been a fool to get involved with him and his 
 concerns at once mad and trumpery. No good would come of 
 it, one might be sure. Perhaps it was just as well that Mony- 
 penny had missed his appointment. 
 
 There was a ring at the bell of the outer office, and the 
 next minute one of the clerks thrust his head into Becket's 
 room. 
 
 "Mr. Monypenny has called, sir." 
 
 "Show him in." 
 
 Every time he met him, Monypenny shocked Becket 
 shocked him with his youth. Somehow in the intervals the 
 merchant could never think of him except as an elder, or at 
 youngest a contemporary. So it was always a shock to meet 
 the tall, solemn stripling of twenty-eight, who now stood be- 
 fore him with outstretched hand. His youth was incon- 
 gruous, too; it shocked one's eyes as well as one's ideas, for 
 his hair was quite white, and gave a sinister look to his face, 
 which otherwise had nothing very remarkable about it save 
 the unusual length of the chin. He was clean-shaven, ex- 
 cept for the side- whiskers which 1857 demanded, and these, 
 together with his eyes and eyebrows, were black. 
 
 It was typical of Monypenny that he made no reference 
 to his lateness. He sat down without waiting for an invi- 
 tation. 
 
 "Well, have you been thinking over what we talked about 
 last night?" 
 
 Becket would have thought it more decent if he had begun 
 with a few remarks about the weather, but Monypenny was 
 always ruthlessly economical of intercourse. 
 
 "I've given the matter some consideration. It is certainly 
 promising, but of course you realise the whole thing is a gam- 
 ble more or less."
 
 4 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 "I don't see that. You're safe, anyhow. The mortgage 
 will guarantee your expenditure up to the last shilling. As for 
 the rest of us, we're pretty confident. Marlingate has been 
 growing in popularity for years we're meeting a demand, not 
 creating it." 
 
 "But don't you think you're meeting that demand quite 
 sufficiently as things are? Don't you think that the people 
 who come to Marlingate come chiefly for the bathing and 
 the quiet and the climate? If you turn the place into a typical 
 seaside resort you'll drive your best patrons away." 
 
 Monypenny smiled he had an odd unyouthful smile, which 
 people often seemed to find disconcerting, perhaps on account 
 of an indefinite irony that lurked in it. 
 
 "You needn't be afraid of that," he said, "I don't suppose 
 more than six per cent of average human beings want quiet at 
 the seaside. Of course I'm not going to turn the place into a 
 deadly racketing copy of London. I'm absolutely against any- 
 thing of the sort. It's the death of seaside towns London- 
 ising them. I'll merely build a Parade, an Assembly Room, 
 and some good houses on my land. I want to attract resi- 
 dents of high social standing." 
 
 "Who's the Mayor?" Becket was a little disconcerted by 
 Monypenny's use of the first person singular. 
 
 "Hewitson Pelham. A good fellow keeps the peace, and 
 doesn't meddle. I've planned a Town Committee, to deal ex- 
 clusively with this development idea. There's a strong Pro- 
 gressive party in the Town Council and among the local 
 tradesmen. Of course there's opposition, but it's not serious. 
 I've absolutely no doubt that we'll pull the thing through. 
 The times are ripe for it the town's prosperous, and so is the 
 country at large. All we want is enterprise and a certain 
 amount of financial backing." 
 
 "Urn," said Becket. 
 
 "Of course I shouldn't start my own building till I see how 
 the thing in general gets on. We'll probably begin with im-
 
 MONYPENNY OF MARLINGATE 5 
 
 proving the sea-front out of the Borough Fund, with perhaps 
 a loan. Then there'll have to be an Assembly Room, and of 
 course a proper water-supply at present all the water comes 
 from the Gut's Mouth Brook. Then, after a year or so, when 
 I see how the place is doing, I'll build a row or two of gen- 
 teel houses on my land, and I had thought of laying out part 
 of it as public gardens." 
 
 "It's a good scheme how large is your estate?" 
 
 "A thousand acres, just outside the town. It's mostly 
 woodland at present, but it's good for building clay, with a 
 gravel subsoil. I might start a brickyard." 
 
 "And you would like me to er support the undertaking?" 
 
 "Exactly. But it's not merely my own building I'm think- 
 ing about, though that's where your security comes in. I 
 want to find somebody who'll take an interest in the town, 
 and help make it known, and bring in genteel visitors." 
 
 Becket was flattered. 
 
 "Well, of course I might be of use in that way. My dear 
 wife's people . . . She was a Hurdicott of Graveley, you 
 know," and the widower sighed. "I'm related to the Duke of 
 Lincoln by marriage," he added more brightly. 
 
 "Quite so," said Monypenny, "that's the sort of visitor I 
 want to get." 
 
 "The Duke!" 
 
 "Why not? Once get a Duke to come to the place and 
 everybody else will follow. We'll build him a fine hotel one of 
 these days, and he can have his balls and his hunting and the 
 best climate in England. I'll build the town up round him." 
 
 Becket was now a little fired as well as flattered. 
 
 "As I've told you before, the idea appeals to me, but as a 
 man of business I see it's nothing but a gamble." 
 
 Monypenny smiled faintly, and Becket fidgeted. 
 
 "What I was going to suggest," said the former, "is that you 
 should come down and see the place for yourself. I can give
 
 6 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 you hospitality, and you can look round, and meet some of the 
 Town Council." 
 
 "Thanks. I should like that. No time this week, but if 
 next will suit you . . . ." 
 
 "Perfectly. I should like you to see the town it's ideally 
 situated for our scheme. Nature's given us a start in the way 
 of climate and scenery. Which day next week?" 
 
 He surveyed Becket impatiently as he ran through the 
 crowded list of his engagements. 
 
 "Thursday?" said the merchant. "I'm afraid I can't man- 
 age anything before then, and I'll have to be back on Friday." 
 
 "Very well Thursday," and Monypenny rose to take leave. 
 "I'll meet you if you let me know your train. You'll like 
 the place, and I'm sure you'll never repent of your decision." 
 
 "I haven't decided anything," said Becket, but Monypenny 
 had gone. 
 
 For some minutes Becket sat staring abstractedly at the 
 clock. Well, he was committed, he supposed, and he wasn't 
 sorry. He wanted some interest outside his city affairs. This 
 would bring him credit, too. . . . But he was not so sure of 
 that as he had been before this interview with Monypenny. 
 He now realised that if the thing succeeded and there was 
 credit for anyone it would somehow be Monypenny's, that if 
 anyone swaggered through Marlingate's festivals as a Victo- 
 rian Beau Nash it would be Monypenny, that if anyone had 
 a street named after him or a statue erected outside the Town 
 Hall it would be Monypenny. Damn Monypenny! 
 
 3 
 
 In spite of the omnibuses jolting down Fleet Street and the 
 Strand, Monypenny walked from Becket's office to the Golden 
 Cross Hotel. He liked the jostle of the pavements, all 
 the black-coated activity round him, the hurrying clerks, the 
 office-boys running laden to the post, even those who bumped
 
 MONYPENNY OF MARLINGATE 7 
 
 into him as they raced with time the almost complete ab- 
 sence of loiterers, and above all of women with their languors 
 and futilities. Though he was going to create a Paradise for 
 these, neither they nor their Paradise counted as much as 
 the labours that should raise it, the stately activities of the 
 borough fathers from which it should spring. 
 
 He called at the Hotel for his luggage, and had it brought 
 across the river to the station. He must catch the twelve 
 o'clock train down to Marlingate, as there was a Corporation 
 Dinner that evening at five. It was the first since the Mu- 
 nicipal elections, and of more than usual momentousness, for 
 at it were to be announced the details of the new great scheme. 
 
 It was many years now since the Town Council had begun 
 to dream of transforming their plain dumpling borough into 
 the spiced confectionery of a watering-place. Those dreams 
 had been at first withheld from materialisation by a reaction- 
 ary element in the Town Council itself sturdy fisher-folk who 
 had made their money at the nets, and scorned a future un- 
 connected with what had been Marlingate's most flourishing 
 industry ever since free trade took the bread out of the poor 
 smuggler's mouth. However, during the last few years this 
 faction had lost its grip, and the Progressives had got the up- 
 per hand. These eagerly welcomed Monypenny into their 
 ranks, as the biggest land-owner of the neighbourhood, who had 
 lately come of age, and succeeded to the estates that stretched 
 from Cuckoo Hill in the west to All Holland in the east, and 
 from the Warrior's Gate at the north end of the town away up 
 to the Sussex Weald. A precocious borough-father, he had 
 been elected Councillor, and three years later an Alderman. 
 The Council suddenly woke to the fact that he was its un- 
 official head, that it was he, not Mr. Pelham, the Mayor, who 
 led the Progressives. There had been no actual or noticeable 
 fight for supremacy he had just quietly assumed it. In a fit 
 of nervousness they offered him the mayoralty, which he de- 
 clined. He was too young, he said, with an odd kind of dif-
 
 8 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 fidence which he showed occasionally. The excuse came as a 
 shock. 
 
 It was a four hours' journey down to Marlingate, and lit- 
 tle or no provision was made for passengers in the way of 
 food or the warming of the train. Monypenny bought a Daily 
 News for fourpence, he was a Liberal of the intellectual 
 type, sometimes sharply critical even of his own party and 
 made himself as comfortable as he could in a second-class car- 
 riage. Hooting absurdly, the little green engine with its long 
 tooth-rimmed funnel, clanked its tail of wooden coaches out of 
 the station, and shook itself into a reckless pace of fifteen miles 
 an hour. 
 
 Monypenny watched the jogging country the meadow- 
 lands and spinneys of Kent and Sussex, smudged with autumn 
 fogs. Open country had for him at once a repulsion and a 
 charm. It was the life outside his life, so to speak, the life 
 he glanced at in his moments of leisure from the squat ur- 
 banities of Marlingate. All around the town the brown woods 
 heaped themselves over his land. He could see them from 
 his study where he worked at plans and calculations, and, 
 suddenly lifting his eyes to them from some design for the new 
 parade or the Borough gardens, he would have a quick un- 
 easy sense as of a wild animal crouching at the door. 
 
 As far as the jolting of the train would allow he read his 
 paper, and made notes in his pocket note-book. By the time 
 he reached Marlingate these were, as spasmodically recorded: 
 "Ask Becket to contribute to Borough Loan." ... "Be care- 
 ful of Gallop at dinner." . . . "Good idea offer to lower 
 rents on the State this will draw him." . . . "Railway ser- 
 vice must be improved only takes three hours to Brighton." 
 .... "Be careful of Lewnes, or he will vulgarise the place. 
 He is a common fellow." . . . "Offer Becket to name a street 
 after him." .... "Genteel houses only." . . . "Guide-book 
 necessary. Who will write it?" . . . "Becket is a fool." 
 
 At last after much pottering among 'hams and 'hursts, the
 
 MONYPENNY OF MARLINGATE 9 
 
 train sidled into Marlingate station. Monypenny stretched 
 his cramped limbs, and brushed off the superficialities of dust 
 and grime. He gave his bag to the porter, for he did not 
 want to drive. There was always a thrill for him in the walk 
 from the station, through the town, to Gun Garden House. 
 The air twanged faintly with the smell of fish it was the 
 good smell of the town, exhaled from all its brined and cob- 
 bled streets. Down where the new Station Road joined the 
 High Street by the America Ground there was for a moment 
 the gustier smell of the sea, with a glimpse of its white breakers 
 fretting at the groynes. The dusk hung over sea and streets, 
 a web in which were meshed dim orange stars the lights of 
 house windows and little shops, and the lights of the fishing 
 boats that bobbed on the deep waters off Rock-a-Nore. 
 
 In the High Street it was less than dusk, for the tall houses 
 gloomed over it, and blocked out the lingering radiations from 
 the west. The street was very narrow, and paved with boul- 
 ders and mine-stones, which made it rough going for anyone 
 who forsook the high pavements, standing occasionally four 
 feet above it, and recalling the days when it used to be flooded 
 at the spring tides. The houses, in their weather-stung irreg- 
 ularity, gave an odd impression of growth. It seemed incon- 
 gruous to link human art and labour with their gnarled front- 
 ages. Most were tall storey piled on storey, projecting, re- 
 ceding, overhanging, leaning, bulging, according to the fancy, 
 or necessity, of the builder. Seen from the street they showed 
 a chevaux de frise of gables pricking the sky, with here and 
 there an early star among their spikes. 
 
 At the end of the High Street on the right was a wilder- 
 ness of tamarisk and alder, stretching eastward across the 
 town to the mouth of Fish Street, which ran seawards par- 
 allel to the High Street. Opposite, stood a peaceable white 
 house from whose pillared porch a lantern swung. It was just 
 inside the boundaries of the town, as marked by the crumbling 
 Warrior's Gate. It stood plumb on the road, and had once
 
 10 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 been an inn the French Gun. Though for over a hundred 
 years it had been used as a dwelling-house there was still 
 something strangely inn-like about it, and travellers had even 
 been known to halt there by mistake, as if the tavern spirit 
 still haunted it and called to them. 
 
 Monypenny rang the bell, and was let in by West, his man. 
 He entered the gloomy house with a sense of relief and home- 
 coming. The dark walls, lowering balustrade, and cumbrous 
 furniture were all part of the idea of home and peace and se- 
 clusion which gave refreshment to the straining activities of his 
 public life. He had lived there from his birth in the remote 
 society of his mother, whose death, just before he came of age, 
 had made little difference to him either in habit or emotion. 
 The Monypennys, of far back Scottish descent, came of a 
 good yeoman stock which used to till the soil outside Mar- 
 lingate. Only a generation lay between Edward and old 
 Brinton Monypenny, owner of Leasan House on the Romney 
 marshes. Prosperity had brought his son into the town, where 
 he had married money and bought a large estate. He had a 
 passion for acres, and added to his domains by buying all the 
 land he could lay hold of, sometimes at crippling prices. He 
 had died soon after his son's birth, and his widow would have 
 liked to sell some of the estate, as the family's income was by 
 no means in proportion to its acres. But by the terms of the 
 will she could not do so till her son came of age, and b}- that 
 time she was dead, and he had formed plans which made every 
 foot of it precious. 
 
 From his study window this night he could see his territories 
 sweep up almost to the crest of Cuckoo Hill, which showed a 
 crinkled outline against the spent fires of sunset. Northward 
 the fog blurred them into the weald. They were thickly 
 wooded, spinney linked to spinney by tentacles of under- 
 growth, copse after copse ringing field and farm. They were 
 oddly shaggy and primeval for lands so near a town, and 
 that evening as he looked out at them he again had the sen-
 
 MONYPENNY OF MARLINGATE 11 
 
 sation as of some animal crouching outside and waiting to 
 spring. 
 
 4 
 
 The Maidenhood Inn was half way down the High Street, 
 opposite the Town Hall. Here the Corporation had kept its 
 feasts from time immemorable. The long, raftered dining-room, 
 where the walls were draped with fishing-nets and decorated 
 with cases of stuffed fish, had echoed to countless Mayoral 
 speeches and Aldermanic toasts. The smells of long-forgotten 
 dinners still seemed to haunt it, reeking stuffily from wood and 
 plaster, subduing the smell of sawdust and stale beer that 
 filled the rest of the house, and even the all-pervading smell 
 of fish which was the personal odour of the town. 
 
 Monypenny as he entered sniffed almost eagerly at the 
 thick flavourous air, now further condensed by tobacco smoke; 
 for the company was smoking while awaiting its full assem- 
 bly. Hewitson Pelham, the Mayor, presided, already panting 
 in his robes of office. Beside him was his son Robert, a lump- 
 ish youth, with rolling well-oiled quiff, and a suit of drabs 
 which did not fit him. Monypenny greeted them with a mix- 
 ture of formality and indifference which was characteristic 
 of him. He was more elegantly dressed than anyone in the 
 room in a dark-blue suit of French cloth, with long, tight 
 trousers. There were rumours afloat that he went to a Lon- 
 don tailor, which was considered unpatriotic, as everyone else 
 was arbitrarily clothed by Alderman Lewnes who had a 
 draper's shop and tailoring business three doors from the 
 Maidenhood. Alderman Lewnes stood close to the Mayor, a 
 youngish, stoutish, fussy little man, by no means a happy 
 example of his own cut and skill. 
 
 "Good evening, Monypenny" with an obvious effort leav- 
 ing out the "Mr." to maintain the equalities of borough life. 
 
 "Good evening."
 
 12 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 "Just come home. Had jolly time? The Great City. . . . 
 Tehe!" 
 
 "I went to the Leather-sellers' dinner." 
 
 "And somewhere else, I'll be bound " and again with an 
 
 obvious effort Lewnes dug him in the ribs. He had a local rep- 
 utation as a Dog. 
 
 "Nowhere else," said Monypenny. 
 
 "I went to Brighton the other day, and picked up a few 
 ideas for the Development." 
 
 "Brighton's going down. It's becoming Londonised." 
 
 "Brighton's good enough for me. If we ever do as well as 
 Brighton we shan't have much to complain about. I should 
 like to know what their Borough Fund stands at." 
 
 "Ours isn't so bad." 
 
 "No, no. But we'll have to increase the rates." 
 
 "Certainly." 
 
 "And there'll be squealing." 
 
 "I hope not." 
 
 "Sure to be. All these herring-trimmers down at the Stade." 
 . . . "Gentlemen, dinner is served." 
 
 The host, bringing in the turtle soup, fortunately inter- 
 rupted Lewnes just as Councillor Gallop known as the Fish- 
 ermen's Councillor, and brawny with long labour at the nets 
 had begun to move towards him. The Company spread itself 
 noisily round the tables, and still more noisily sat down, after 
 the Rev. Somerville Hunt, Rector of St. Nicholas, had said 
 grace. The turtle soup was an innovation, on Mansion House 
 lines, and complained of by some who found it took the edge 
 off their appetite, with few compensations and by a larger 
 number to whom its elegant consumption presented difficulties 
 of an apparently insurmountable kind. 
 
 The Town Council was built up mostly of tradesmen, 
 with a salting of the middle classes. The Mayor belonged to 
 the latter, being descended from a line of street-owners whosj 
 name had been linked with Marlingate from the fourteenth
 
 MONYPENNY OF MARLINGATE 13 
 
 century. Councillor Breeds was a retired doctor, and Coun- 
 cillor Wastel a solicitor. On the other hand, Alderman Vidler 
 was not ashamed to retail beefsteaks in person to fisher- 
 men's wives on Saturday night, Councillor Elphee still faintly 
 smelt of tallow from his grocer's shop, and Councillor Lusted 
 was a builder, responsible for most of the tall, bow-windowed 
 houses of tarred brick that had lately shot up on the Coney 
 Banks. 
 
 At the Town Banquet all were equals, for all had been bap- 
 tised into one endeavour. The advancement of Marlingate 
 was as a gospel to its Borough Council, long prophesied, long 
 prepared for, and now at last revealed. True there were some 
 heretics, even at the table, but these hardly counted in the 
 prevailing orthodoxy. 
 
 For years there had been a Progressive party in the Cor- 
 poration, which spoke unheeded of Parades and Assembly 
 Rooms, building and sanitary reform. Tljey had much to 
 fight against a majority of old men, who disliked the 
 thought of change, to whom the stationary statistics at every 
 census were a sign of grace, who wanted no more stimulat- 
 ing debauch than a game of skittles, took pleasure in the soft 
 green down that bloomed the less travelled streets, and en- 
 joyed the full flavour of the Gut's Mouth Brook if excep- 
 tionally they were reduced to drinking water. 
 
 One by one these had paid the penalty of reaction and 
 been swallowed up by the floods they chose to ignore. They 
 had died out, faded out, and their place had been taken by 
 the young and burning "Monypenny's young men" as they 
 came to be called, though most of them ante-dated Mony- 
 penny. There had been a regular explosion of town-plan- 
 ning and surveying, and Monypenny had given out his in- 
 tention of building over his estate as soon as his budget would 
 allow. Lately it had been rumoured that he had found a 
 financial backer, who would not only advance money for 
 building and road-making, but take interest in the town in
 
 14 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 other ways, improving its resources, and contributing to 
 its revenues. 
 
 Tonight the rumour was made official. Monypenny con- 
 firmed Becket's undertaking without the conditions and 
 reservations that gentleman still cherished in his ignorance. 
 Mr. Hugo Becket, on the board of the Worshipful Company of 
 Leathersellers, had become so deeply interested in Marlingate 
 that he had declared his willingness to invest a large part of 
 his immense fortune in its concerns. This fell a little short 
 of rumour. Some had said that Monypenny's backer was a 
 peer, others that he was an offshoot of royalty itself. A ro- 
 mantic minority had changed the sex and credited some in- 
 fatuated woman with tremendous sacrifices. It was a little 
 disappointing to find that the town's coffers were to be filled 
 by nobody more exciting than a city merchant, a member 
 of one of the lesser Companies, too. However, the results 
 would be the same, and good steady results, judging by Mony- 
 penny's details a residential district as a bait to a perma- 
 nent aristocracy was almost awe-inspiring in its possibilities. 
 . . . Alderman Lewnes already saw his shop double-fronted, 
 and Alderman Vidler was delivering legs of lamb to 
 Marchionesses. 
 
 5 
 
 The dinner took an immense time, for the Marlingate fathers 
 had immense appetites and it was something more than a 
 rumour that many of them increased their natural capacities 
 by an introductory fast. Conversation was at first spasmodi- 
 cally and indistinctly confined to Monypenny's news. Then 
 as the madeira succeeded the sherry, and the claret the ma- 
 deira, till at last the port was on the table, tongues 
 wagged more and more noisily, so that Tom Tutt, the host, 
 hereditary toast-maker, had to shout for silence when the 
 Mayor rose. 
 
 "Gentlemen! His Worship the Mayor!"
 
 MONYPENNY OF MARLINGATE 15 
 
 There was loud cheering, and some raucous attempts to 
 start "For he's a jolly good fellow." 
 
 Hewitson Pelham bowed and beamed. "Aldermen, Coun- 
 cillors, and gentlemen of Marlingate," he began richly. 
 
 Silence fell at once, and all eyes turned on the town's father, 
 majestic in his red and black robes, fur-trimmed and caped, 
 with the chain of office lying heavy as a Guildhall banquet 
 on his breast. 
 
 "Aldermen, Councillors, and gentlemen we are gathered 
 together at our Municipal Banquet to celebrate those elec- 
 tions which have established or re-established, as the case 
 may be us in those situations and offices we anticipate fill- 
 ing for the coming year. But more than ordinary import- 
 ance attaches to this reunion and to the year of which it is the 
 precursor, for Marlingate is, as you are all aware, to embark 
 on new and adventurous enterprises" (loud cheers). "For 
 some time, gentlemen, the Mayor and Corporation of this 
 Borough have had under their consideration plans for trans- 
 forming Marlingate from a sequestered, if thriving, fishing- 
 town into a genteel watering-place" (roars of approval, some 
 cries of 'Hear! hear!' and a groan). "Marlingate is not un- 
 known to fame already for its charming climate and unique 
 bathing, but all who appreciate it agree that it has not 
 achieved the celebrity, to say nothing of the fashion, it de- 
 serves, and acute and zealous minds among us have been 
 busily scheming its development in this respect. I can now 
 announce to you that we have agreed upon a plan of action, 
 owing greatly to the energy, the forethought, and sound com- 
 mercial sense of Alderman Monypenny" (a pause, some 
 cheering and a great craning of necks). "Alderman Mony- 
 penny kas been long enough among us to impress us with his 
 clearness and energy of mind. None of us has Marlingate's 
 interests more sincerely at heart than he. I am not a great 
 speaker" (loud cries of dissension, appropriately acknowledged 
 by the borough stylist) "so I will call on Alderman Mony-
 
 16 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 penny to put before you the scheme which, after much de- 
 liberation and consultation, has been evolved for the devel- 
 opment of this town from a place of industry to a place of 
 fashion, from the resort of the retiring and industrious few to 
 the playground of the leisured and genteel many so that 
 the great name of Brighton shall not ring more gloriously 
 than the name of Marlingate, whose Mayor I am, whose Al- 
 dermen and Councillors you are, and whose interests I war- 
 rant you all have next your hearts, resolute to consecrate 
 your intellects and labours to the advancement of the town 
 which I prophesy will in ten years' time rob Brighton of her 
 proud title of Queen of Watering Places." 
 
 This was a record even for the Mayor, and the cheering 
 was prolonged for some minutes after he sat down. Mony- 
 penny rose in the thick of it, and stood waiting for it to 
 subside. He hardly seemed to notice his surroundings, but 
 fixed his eyes on a stuffed tunny-fish on the opposite wall, at 
 which he continued to stare during the whole of his speech. 
 
 He did not speak like the Mayor in flowing periods, with a 
 tendency of the current to slop over. A rather harsh voice 
 and an abstracted gaze established no sentimental link be- 
 tween him and his audience; but somehow behind his words 
 was a vital quality, a knife-edged enthusiasm which seemed 
 to drive them into men's hearts and mix them with their 
 blood. 
 
 The matter of his speech was bald enough. He began with 
 reading out the names of those elected to serve on the new 
 Town Committee the Mayor, of course, Monypenny himself, 
 tvith his fellow-Aldermen Lewnes and Vidler, and Councillors 
 Breeds, Lusted and Wastel. The Committee would meet once 
 a month and deal exclusively with the development scheme. 
 
 He then outlined the scheme itself. It would begin with 
 reforms in such homely matters as sanitation and water-sup- 
 ply. These things, he said, were more thought of now than 
 they used to be, especially by people of fashion. The Cor-
 
 MONYPENNY OF MARLINGATE 17 
 
 poration were considering the building of waterworks on the 
 Totty Lands, for which they intended raising a loan. He him- 
 self would give the land for the undertaking. Later on he 
 hoped to lay out the whole of his estate in municipal build- 
 ing, thus increasing the area of Marlingate by some thou< 
 sand acres. This could be worked up into a fashionable resi> 
 dential quarter, where good houses could be let to good peo- 
 ple. For summer visitors lodgings would have to be found in 
 the town itself, the nearer the shore the better. With this end 
 in view the Corporation purposed pulling down the old Town 
 Hall and building a Marine Parade, such as is usual in seaside 
 towns. Naturally an Assembly Room would have to be built 
 for balls, parties and concerts, and it was also intended to de- 
 velop the waste ground known as the Wilderness into a Pub- 
 lic Garden or Town Park. Further, the piece of derelict land 
 known as the America Ground would have to be brought 
 within the Borough's jurisdiction. As the Council knew, it 
 was at present no-man's land, being a part of the sea-floor 
 abandoned by the tides, and therefore free to any beggars, 
 gipsies, or other undesirables who might camp on it with the 
 result that a mock city of shacks, huts, and tents encroached 
 on the western edge of the town, just where the new Parade 
 would end. 
 
 He finished abruptly and unexpectedly, and the company, 
 which never could accustom itself to his perorationless endings, 
 was taken aback, and instead of cheering sat expectant. Even 
 when it realised his dues, applause soon passed into discus- 
 sion. 
 
 Alderman Lewnes was the first to stand up, his napkin 
 still tucked forgetfully under his chin. He wished, he said, 
 to give his hearty support to every word Alderman Mony- 
 penny had uttered. For a long while they had all been think- 
 ing Marlingate was a little behind the times. The place 
 needed waking up. They wanted smart people to come down, 
 people who would appreciate London styles. He had long been
 
 i8 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 wanting to develop his business on more up-to-date lines, but 
 he had received little encouragement from the residents, who 
 seemed to think that Marlingate could be a law unto itself in 
 matters of taste. This development scheme would be an excel- 
 lent thing for shopkeepers. He foretold a new era of pros- 
 perity for local trade. The shops of Marlingate would be- 
 come as famous as the shops of Brighton, second only to 
 London in the lead of fashion. He also applauded Alderman 
 Monypenny's loyal offer of his estate for building purposes. 
 If this enterprise was successful he, Lewnes, might think of 
 bricks and mortar in connection with a bit of land he had on 
 the Coney Banks. 
 
 Loud cheers greeted this generous announcement, in the 
 midst of which up rose Councillor Gallop the Fishermen's 
 Councillor as he was called, for he was related to nearly 
 every family in the fishing quarter, and spoke the fisher lingo 
 even at Corporation meetings. 
 
 "Wotsumever you mean to do wud the quality, my mas- 
 ters, I hope you won't forget as this is fust and foremost a 
 fisherman's town, and as we don't want to see the Corpora- 
 tion neglect our trade for concerns that sound grand but 
 have unaccountable petty sawdust in them. Parades and 
 Parks and Waterworks are all very fine, but the herring-net 
 brings in boco more money and doesn't cost such a deal to 
 start. I ain't fur saying we should kip things as they are 
 have the gentry down and let 'em eat our herrings. But don't 
 go clearing out the Stade to build 'em pleasure gardens, and 
 as for the America Ground there's many an honest man has 
 his home there." ("No!" very loud from Alderman Vidler.) 
 "Fishery pays better than gentry in the long run, having naun 
 to do wud building and fashions. We don't have to beat a 
 drum to get the herrings down. . . ." 
 
 Here he was interrupted by a little tow-whiskered man, 
 who shot up in his place with the cry "I object to the 
 whole thing!" This was Councillor Elphee, son of a late
 
 MONYPENNY OF MARLINGATE 19 
 
 Mayor of the reactionary school, a grocer by trade and a 
 Methodist by conviction, and owner of some forty acres of 
 All Holland Hill. 
 
 "I object to the whole thing," he repeated, "it's only a 
 cloak for bringing vice and ungodliness into the town." 
 
 "Come, come, Mr. Elphee," said the Mayor, "you've no 
 right to say that. The very names of the Town Committee 
 guarantee " 
 
 "They guarantee nothing, your worship." 
 
 "That's because his ain't among 'em," came a ribald in- 
 terruption. 
 
 "I would scorn to have my name associated with an under- 
 taking to demoralise the town." 
 
 "Prove your words, sir!" cried Councillor Lusted. 
 
 "Well, you say you want to make this place like Brighton, 
 and the sea front at Brighton's nothing but a walk of adulter- 
 ers and adulteresses." 
 
 "Come, come, Mr. Elphee," and his Victorian worship 
 blenched, "you've no need to be so er Biblical in your 
 language. Besides, even if what you imagine were a fact, 
 which it is not by a very long way, it would not follow that 
 similar scandals would be tolerated for one moment in this 
 borough. As I've said the very names on the Town Com- 
 mittee ..." 
 
 "There's not one man of grace among them!" cried El- 
 phee. 
 
 Monypenny rose. 
 
 "The members were elected, as your worship knows, by 
 the Council and chief burgesses. The chief condition of mem- 
 bership was enthusiasm for the borough's concerns, which 
 naturally did not give much chance to gentlemen who pre- 
 ferred herrings or their Bibles." 
 
 "Now, Alderman, you've no need to jeer at me along of 
 him," cried Gallop truculently. 
 
 "I'm not jeering at you. You have a perfect right to pre-
 
 20 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 fer herrings to anything in the universe, and, to show you 
 that this Council acknowledges your rights, it proposes to 
 lower the rents on the Stade." 
 
 Gallop was taken aback. He had been fighting for a re- 
 duction for years, and here it was half contemptuously thrown 
 at him in the course of some other undertaking. 
 
 "If you don't meddle wud me I won't meddle wud you," 
 he said sulkily. 
 
 Councillor Elphee opened his mouth to wage his share of 
 the quarrel, but Pelham, nervous of strife, and also nervous 
 of what Alderman Monypenny might offer further in the 
 cause of peace, stood up and supplanted him. 
 
 "Gentlemen, I beg you not to let any altercation spoil the 
 unanimity of our reunion. I feel sure that the plans under 
 consideration will interfere in no wise with the customary 
 trade of the town, which, on the contrary, will be substan- 
 tially encouraged in all its branches. Moreover, no one in any 
 way familiar with the principles of this Corporation can fear 
 for the cause of religion and good order in our midst. Our 
 great object must be, as Alderman Monypenny has re- 
 minded us, gentility, which is incompatible both with vice 
 and with vulgarity. Our aim is to achieve a thoroughly 
 genteel and fashionable watering-place, select yet lively, 
 quiet yet abounding in entertainment, in perfect taste and 
 in perfect style. I think that the matter has been most sat- 
 isfactorily discussed, and we can now proceed from conver- 
 sation to endeavour. Therefore, I propose a toast, our first 
 toast this evening and the most glorious we have drunk for 
 years: To the growth and prosperity of Marlingate! 
 Marlingate the resort of fashion, the conqueror of Brighton, 
 the queen of watering-places! Gentlemen Marlingate!" 
 
 Everyone stood up, and glasses were emptied to shouts of 
 "Marlingate!" "Long live Marlingate!" "Marlingate and 
 no heel-taps!" "Marlingate, gentlemen! Marlingate!"
 
 MONYPENNY OF MARLINGATE 21 
 
 6 
 
 It was past one o'clock when the party at the Maidenhood 
 Inn broke up a dozen Aldermen and Councillors, with a 
 small-fry of clerks, all genially stuffed, and no one carrying 
 less than three bottles of excellent wine. The Mayor walked 
 home with his son to Harpsichord House, so called because 
 it straddled Fish Street like a grotesque pianoforte. Alder- 
 man Vidler went with them as far as the Grand Passage 
 Way, glad of the worshipful company to condone a slight roll 
 in his gait. The same slight roll in the case of Councillor 
 Lusted was tackled by his linking arms with Councillor Was- 
 tel, who in his turn hooked on to Councillor Putland, who, 
 linked to Councillor Breeds, stretched their line right across 
 the High Street till they had to break up at the Petty Pas- 
 sage Way. Elphee, the opposition, was drawn by a certain 
 fellow feeling to Gallop, who was not, however, so much op- 
 position as a thorn in the ministerial flesh. Councillor Luck, 
 whose road led by the America Ground, took hold of Tom 
 Potter, the Town Clerk, and a stout oak stick. 
 
 Soon all h,d gone except Lewnes and Monypenny. The 
 latter stood in the doorway, brushing with his sleeve his tall 
 chimney-pot hat. Lewnes looked as if he would have liked 
 to ask him for his company as far as the Coney Bank Steps, 
 but Monypenny had art with Lewnes, and without offending 
 him to any dangerous point, managed to keep their inter- 
 course within limits tolerable to himself. Of all the Town 
 Council, not excepting Elphee and Gallop, he liked Lewnes 
 the least. He saw him as that most dangerous of followers, 
 the disciple who will always go one better than his master. 
 He saw him besides as a Brummagem link in the borough 
 chain, a tliread of shoddy in Marlingate's adornment. This 
 municipal cheap-Jack, this shop-keeping Progressive Mony- 
 penny hid his contempt and opposition only that he might 
 the better mould him to his restraints. Tonight he felt that
 
 22 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 he could not foul his triumph with such company, so man- 
 aged just without rudeness he was accomplished in such 
 negative intercourse to send the Alderman off alone. A few 
 minutes later he himself started on his way home. Up the 
 High Street, under the blind windows, his footsteps clinked 
 in the hush of the town, as he marched sonorously past the 
 Coney Bank Steps and the Wilderness to the glooming door- 
 way of Gun Garden House. 
 
 He let himself in, and sighed deeply as the dark, still at- 
 mosphere of the place closed round him. He loved his home; 
 it was dear to him in every tile and stick its cumbrous 
 furniture and lowering, oppressive spaces to him the symbol- 
 ism of comfort and quiet. It was not want of hospitality that 
 made him neglect to ask Lewnes home. But hospitality was 
 with Monypenny a formal, sacred rite he would not cas- 
 ually violate the sanctities of his home for an unappreciative 
 babbler and vulgarity-monger like the Alderman. He loved to 
 give splendid, sombre feasts, when wax-candles lit up his ma- 
 hogany, and borough dignitaries and their wives solemnly 
 ate and drank the most excellent of meats and wines. His 
 dinners had a reputation in proportion to their rarity. He 
 never asked a friend to "drop in" for any meal ; he entertained 
 royally or he ate alone with no lack of state in that, either. 
 
 Tonight he stole quietly upstairs, as if respecting the si- 
 lence of the house. His bedroom was in front, and from the 
 uncurtained windows he could look down on Marlingate as 
 it lay a blot of darkness under the stars. He was not sleepy; 
 indeed he was a man who always seemed able to do with a 
 very small amount of sleep, and often spent a night out of 
 bed, either working at the town's business or soaring rest- 
 lessly among his dreams. 
 
 For in the sacred privacies of his house, Monypenny al- 
 lowed himself to dream. His dreams were at once the fruit 
 and forcing-bed of his activities. Sitting at his window he 
 would apocalypse that sleeping huddle of roofs and streets.
 
 MONYPENNY OF MARLINGATE 23 
 
 Fish Street and the High Street would broaden into two 
 streaming thoroughfares and flow seawards through palaces, 
 thronged with princely feet. A string of lights would sweep 
 along the Marine Parade, where the old Town Wall had been, 
 up-town houses would spark his bare lands with shining win- 
 dows, carriages would drive up to their doors, while everywhere 
 music tinkled of revelry. The tamarisk thickets of the Wil- 
 derness would trim themselves into the walks and beds and 
 ponds of the Municipal Park. . . . The whole thing would 
 glow and glitter and triumph in Monypenny's brain, with 
 behind it all a strange aching sense of the unsatisfied, of in- 
 adequacy even, of fulfilment, of a reaching out beyond hope 
 and desire, which salted these dreams with a torment all their 
 own, and made him hurry back to refuge in the actual. 
 
 He sat down by the window, and leaned his elbow on the 
 sill. Gradually the sky behind All Holland Hill was filming 
 with the moonrise, and at last the November moon came up 
 round and dim, pouring a honeycomb of light into the chinked 
 and creviced town. Out across the sea spread a mysterious 
 track that swamped the fisher-lights dipping and winking off 
 the Gringer. The sea sent up a solemn sigh, which mingled 
 with the sigh of the tamarisks in the Wilderness. 
 
 The southwest gale was rising; as yet it seemed far off, 
 moaning behind the westward jut of Cuckoo Hill. Now and 
 then it came ruffling over the town, with stormy rags of cloud, 
 breathing strange vagrant dreams into the sleep of Marlingate. 
 It seemed to Monypenny as if the wind linked up the woods 
 and the sea it joined their sighings, it mixed their savours, 
 it seemed to proclaim the alliance of these two against the 
 town. 
 
 7 
 
 Becket came down the following Thursday, and Mony- 
 penny met him at the station in a hackney carriage. There 
 was a fog on. the town, a clammy muffle of white, salt to the
 
 24 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 lips. The houses between which they drove were almost in- 
 visible, dim arabesques on the prevailing whiteness. It de- 
 pressed and chilled Becket; he preferred the sooty opacities 
 of a London fog to this, and he remarked irritably to Mony- 
 penny that they could never expect to bring fashion to a 
 town that reeked so powerfully of fish. 
 
 Monypenny sneered. "We'll call it ozone." 
 
 They stopped before a grey looming space. 
 
 "This is the house." 
 
 Becket was still further depressed. He had expected 
 Monypenny's house to be severely reclused in his estates, ap- 
 proached by a mile-long avenue, perhaps. This inn-like build- 
 ing, cheek by jowl with a rackety High Street, struck him as 
 undignified, even a little indecent. Once again he began to ask 
 himself where all his truck was leading him. Why had he 
 mixed himself up with the affairs of this dirty fishing-bor- 
 ough? In his heart he murmured against Monypenny, who 
 he felt had tricked him. He must have been bubbled some- 
 how, or he would never have let himself in for this foolish en- 
 terprise. That he was wholly committed he had not doubted 
 since arriving at Marlingate, though until that moment he 
 had told himself that the visit was only a preliminary survey. 
 There was something in Monypenny's calm assumption that 
 the affair was settled which paralysed Becket while it goaded 
 him. 
 
 However, he was a little appeased by the inside of the 
 house. Though the dark furniture and wide dreary rooms 
 oppressed him, they also gave him a reassurance of solidity. 
 Outside Gun Garden House might lie faint on the vision as 
 a grey fog-castle, but inside it was full of good substantial 
 things such as mahogany furniture, a respectful manservant 
 who valeted one to perfection, and a most excellent dinner, 
 with wine that lifted one back into lost enthusiasm. 
 
 During dinner Monypenny talked of indifferent things. His 
 reply to Becket's criticism of the town-smell had been his only
 
 MONYPENNY OF MARLINGATE 25 
 
 reference to the purpose of the latter's visit. Sitting over his 
 port and walnuts, his head and shoulders scarcely more dim 
 in the reflection of the table-top than against the massing 
 shadows of the room, he might have been some stately 
 courteous uncle of Becket's, solemnly sipping wine and talk- 
 ing politics of a mellowness in keeping with its vintage. There 
 was nothing revolutionary about Monypenny's liberalism, and 
 he had none of the impetuosities of catch-words of the 
 young men of his party. He approved of reform, he was in 
 favor of progress, and he admired Gladstone that was all. 
 He spoke of books, too, but not so much, for he had read 
 more deeply, though perhaps not more widely, than Becket. 
 Carlyle was his favorite author, and he had never heard of 
 Mrs. Henry Wood. 
 
 After dinner they went into Monypenny's study. The book- 
 lined walls impressed Becket, also the massive writing-table 
 covered with papers and plans and correspondence. Why this 
 last should have impressed him it would be hard to say, for 
 it was not more cumbered than his own. But somehow Moay- 
 penny's business had a uniqueness, in the phrase of the time 
 an "air" about it which the humdrum traffic of a city mer- 
 chant could not hope to imitate. Monypenny pulled two 
 leather arm-chairs up to the fire and opened a box of cigars. 
 
 "There's a young architect fellow coming down here to- 
 morrow he'll look over the place with us, and give us ex- 
 pert advice." 
 
 "Who is he?" 
 
 "His name is Figg, Decimus Figg, and he won the Bulver- 
 hythe corporation's prize for a Town Hall. I never heard 
 of him till I was over there a few weeks ago, but I saw his 
 design, and some other things he's done, and I said to my- 
 self 'That's our man.' " 
 
 "But don't you think we ought to have someone of more 
 experience and reputation?" 
 
 "I'd rather have talent and enthusiasm."
 
 26 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 "Are you sure he's got those?" 
 
 "Positive. I looked him up when I was in town, and he 
 seems exactly the right man to have. He's young and he's 
 keen as mustard. I don't set all that store on experience 
 for one thing it's dear, and for another it has a clogging ef- 
 fect on initiative. What we want for this town is young and 
 energetic people who won't be frightened of new ideas." 
 
 Becket was pleased. He was forty-five, with gouty ten- 
 dencies and that deep encrustation of precedent which is 
 called experience, and he liked to think that Monypenny in- 
 cluded him with the young and ardent spirits who were to 
 build the town. 
 
 "Then tomorrow you mean to have a kind of preliminary 
 survey?" 
 
 "Yes. You and I, Figg and the Town Committee. We'll 
 go round the whole borough, and then you'll see exactly what 
 wants doing. I'll leave my own land till afterwards. We 
 won't start on that till the Parade is finished." 
 
 "What kind of land's yours?" 
 
 "Mostly woodland, though I've one or two farms let on 
 short leases. It's not the usual kind of 'gentleman's es- 
 tate,' you know. My father scraped it up piecemeal, and this 
 house has no real connection with it just a converted tav- 
 ern. 'The French Gun' it used to be a posting-house 
 with pleasure-gardens, hence the name. There are names of 
 French origin all over the town; since they were continually 
 in the place at one time, either sacking or smuggling you 
 often meet some mess of a French word in the fishermen's 
 dialect. . . ." 
 
 Becket was not listening, for abruptly and without con- 
 text he had come upon the secret of that unfriendliness of Gun 
 Garden House, which he had never quite lost sight of in 
 spite of its conciliations. It wanted a woman. He realised 
 now that what had repelled him was the male element in its 
 comfort. Comfort, with him, was essentially feminine; his
 
 MONYPENNY OF MARLINGATE 27 
 
 house was full of the knick-knacks his wife had loved, uphol- 
 stered with plush, crowded with the frailities of flower-stands 
 and occasional tables. There was something alien in this solid 
 lack of ornament, this leather upholstery, these bare or book- 
 ish walls. His wife had been dead only two years, and he 
 sighed deeply. He became aware that Monypenny was 
 watching him. 
 
 "I was thinking I'd bring my children down here next 
 summer," he said uneasily. "I suppose there's a decent house 
 I could take?" 
 
 "Several. Most of the houses in the town itself are small, 
 but there are some good ones up on the Coney Banks." 
 
 "I don't want anything very large only four children and 
 
 a governess " He sighed deeply again. "I wish you could 
 
 have met my wife." 
 
 Monypenny mumbled something conventionally polite. 
 
 "She was a wonderful woman," continued the widower, 
 "most wonderful brains. A good woman, too ... a saint." 
 He shook his head sorrowfully. "When I think of my moth- 
 erless children. . ." 
 
 "You must find them a great trouble," said Monypenny 
 naively. 
 
 "Er responsibility," corrected Becket. "There are two 
 boys and two girls. Now Arthur, the eldest ..." 
 
 Monypenny hoped that Becket would see the unprofitable- 
 ness of making sentimental domestic confidences to a bach- 
 elor, who fathered a corporation. But he hoped too much. 
 For the rest of the evening Becket talked about his children 
 and his dead wife sentimentally, intimately, untiringly. 
 
 8 
 
 The next day the fog had gone. Marlingate was bathing 
 in a flood of tremulous, aqueous beauty a pastel of greens
 
 28 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 and blues and delicate flushing pinks, streamed over with 
 crystalline light. 
 
 Bit by bit, Becket was becoming reconciled to his sur- 
 roundings. Gun Garden House had placated him, and now the 
 town did so. Monypenny's plans for it looked less of a 
 "Stand and deliver" to fate. The air was delicious like 
 a spring morning after yesterday's November and the town 
 itself, cupped in green hills, and faintly smudged with the 
 vapour of its activity, had a look both dreamlike and secure. 
 Picturesque, Becket called it, and picturesqueness was fash- 
 ionable. Marlingate needed only advertisement and recom- 
 mendation to make it popular. It had more natural advan- 
 tages than either Ramsgate or Brighton, and when all the im- 
 provements were made . . . 
 
 He felt he could easily persuade his wife's people to come. 
 He would begin with the Wiltshire Hurdicotts, and they would 
 spread his recommendation to Graveley, and perhaps through 
 Graveley he might net the Duke. Becket's chest expanded 
 when he thought of how he would rise in the Hurdicott opin- 
 ion through this venture of his. Poor Emma's family had 
 plainly thought she was throwing herself away when she 
 accepted his hand. Now when they saw him the patron and 
 financier of a fashionable resort . . . 
 
 At breakfast the placating process was complete, for he 
 found himself actually well pleased with Monypenny. The 
 young man had risen early, and gone for a windy walk on 
 Cuckoo Hill. He came in with an unusual ruddiness of cheek 
 and gamesomeness of eye. For the first time he looked heart- 
 ily and aggressively young. Becket found himself uncle in- 
 stead of nephew that morning. With a tolerant smile he 
 watched Monypenny eat an enormous breakfast, play with 
 the cat, and ignore the daily paper for a new number of the 
 "Tale of Two Cities," which had just come up from the book- 
 seller.
 
 MONYPENNY OF MARLINGATE 29 
 
 "Great man Boz," he said, as last night he had said, 
 "Great man Gladstone." 
 
 Then gradually the young mood cooled and saddened. He 
 shut himself into his study with a mass of estate-accounts, 
 and when he came out he was once more the eager, author- 
 itative man of business, the landowner, the Alderman, Mony- 
 penny of Marlingate. 
 
 He set off with Becket for the Town Hall, where they were 
 to meet the Committee and Decimus Figg. The latter had 
 arrived, and was waiting for them a tall, pallid youth, rather 
 spotty and grimy. He had been travelling since seven o'clock 
 that morning, and was, when they found him, engaged in re- 
 moving the traces of the Southeastern from his face by the 
 doubtful means of his saliva and a dirty handkerchief. Onct 
 again Becket 's spirits sank; why would Monypenny insist or 
 using such hopelessly raw material? 
 
 Figg's conversation depressed him still further. 
 
 "Why did you ask me to meet you here?" he exclaimed 
 melodramatically. "Was it so that at the outset of my task 
 you might convince me of my incapacity to improve on this?" 
 and he waved his arm towards the delicate groining. 
 
 "I want you particularly to notice the Town Hall," said 
 Monypenny quietly, "as it is the best thing we have in the 
 town, and therefore the model we must always keep before 
 us." 
 
 Becket understood now why Monypenny had chosen his 
 architect raw. 
 
 The rest of the Town Committee began to arrive, and were 
 introduced to Becket. On the whole they impressed him as 
 decidedly middle-class, though he admired the mild and state- 
 ly Pelham with his smooth grandiloquence. Lusted, Lewnes 
 and Vidler were of course mere tradesmen, and though Breeds 
 and Wastel were something better, they hopelessly lacked dis- 
 tinction. It struck him that Monypenny was the vital spark 
 of a business that without him was only trifling and sordid
 
 30 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 he was the spirit of that to which the others provided a 
 clumsy, rather unclean body. They were the material part, 
 by means of which he worked, to which he lent a glorifying 
 vitality so that when the little procession set out from the 
 Town Hall, Becket, in spite of his qualms, had a feeling as of 
 the initiation of some solemn and exalted enterprise. 
 
 9 
 
 They went first of all to the Coney Banks the lower slopes 
 of Cuckoo Hill just above the town, where rabbit-hunt- 
 ing as a systematised sport had flourished in forgotten days. 
 Here, over the old warrens, had been raised a series of ter- 
 races, one above the other, varying architecturally from the 
 squat seventeenth-century houses just above the church, with 
 .their huge crumpled roofs and glow of tiles, to the latest cre- 
 ations of the House of Lusted, four storeys high, with two 
 rooms on each floor, and wedge-like frontages tarred from at- 
 tic to foundation. 
 
 It was here that the drawbacks of Decimus Figg became 
 apparent to the Town Committee. Councillor Lusted, as was 
 fitting, assumed the office of spokesman on the Coney Banks. 
 
 "This is what we look upon as one of the chief 'letting' 
 districts of the town. I'm not speaking of those cottages down 
 by the schoolhouse, but these terraces we've got up here. They 
 look a bit blocky just at present, but when we've made 'em 
 tight and regular, and maybe put in an extra house or two 
 
 "House!" exclaimed Figg. "D'you call these houses? I 
 call them Aldermen look at their stomachs!" 
 
 He waved his gaunt, cuffless arm at Lusted's idea of an 
 "elegant parlour window." The Town Committee glanced 
 furiously at their waistcoats. Only Monypenny looked un- 
 ruffled. 
 
 "Well, I suppose they are a bit pot-bellied," he said to
 
 MONYPENNY OF MARLINGATE 31 
 
 "Some of 'em have even got cocked hats," and the archi- 
 tect pointed to one or two attempts of Lusted's at a classical 
 style. 
 
 Monypenny smiled he even laughed, which the Commit- 
 tee had rarely seen him do. 
 
 "I'm not sure that the Aldermanic type isn't rather ap- 
 propriate to the town. Anyhow, Figg, I like that tarring. You 
 get it again down by the Stade keeps out the weather, 
 you know, and at the same time strikes an individual note in 
 domestic architecture. ..." 
 
 He walked on beside Figg, and seemed almost to forget the 
 others. He was certainly showing this mangy architect a 
 respect he had never shown his more prosperous associates. 
 At the same time Figg was not, any more than the others, 
 leading Monypenny. Whereas the Town Committee would 
 have deferred to him in architectural matters and treated him 
 otherwise as an inferior, Monypenny treated him as an equal 
 and at the same time boldly criticised his ideas. "We mustn't 
 be too Greek, you know," he said when they were discussing 
 the proposed Assembly Room. "The classic is the style for 
 Marlingate, when we're not simply domestic. But in my opin- 
 ion we get all our best effects from this sort of thing " and 
 
 he pointed to the jumbled High Street houses. 
 
 They crossed the High Street, and taking a foot-path 
 through the Wilderness came to the market-place. This was 
 the suggested site for the Town Park, stretching across the 
 neck of Marlingate, between it and the open weald. A bare 
 piece of ground, stockaded with sheep-pens, it had but little 
 to say of its future, except where, up at the Slough pool, some 
 tamarisks wove a misty green ring round the sky-filled water. 
 
 The Slough was the origin of the Borough's water-supply. 
 Thrice a week the sluice-gates were opened and its waters 
 overflowed into the Gut's Mouth Brook, which was swollen 
 from a dribble over weedy stones into a full-flushed torrent 
 at which the inhabitants of Marlingate, duly roused by a
 
 32 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 horn, could fill their household vessels. The process was sim- 
 plicity itself, but as Monypenny explained to Figg might seem 
 a trifle primitive to visitors accustomed to London's more 
 sophisticated ways. Hence the proposed waterworks on the 
 Totty Lands behind the town. 
 
 Three roads met at the southeast corner of the market- 
 place Fish Street, leading to the sea; Rye Lane, twisting up 
 through woods to the meadowed, chalky scarp of the weald; 
 and a cobbled track leading to a terrace on All Holland Hill 
 the simple rival of the multiple Coney Banks, just a line of 
 houses, stuccoed and white, cutting the hillside. This ter- 
 race, known as Mount Idle, was to be ignored in the borough 
 survey, for it was the property of Councillor Elphee, who 
 would not let so much as a gable be added to it. 
 
 The Town Committee turned into Fish Street, the main 
 thoroughfare of the Fishermen's quarter. Marlingate was 
 roughly divided by the Gut's Mouth Brook into the "Fisher- 
 men's quarter" and the "Town's quarter," and these two had 
 always kept distinct and apart. The dwellers in the High 
 Street and the Coney Banks and the west end of the Sea 
 Front looked on the fishermen as an alien race, with whom 
 they had nothing in common. The fishermen for their part 
 despised the tradespeople and residents, who, they felt, were 
 remote from the real business of the town. They had indeed 
 done much to make themselves the alien tribe they were con- 
 sidered "away west." They had intermarried to such an ex- 
 tent that there was a definite type among them brown skin, 
 sturdy limbs, dark eyes, a straight nose, and curly hair, very 
 different from the pale, mixed, shifting breed of the High 
 Street Ward. They spoke their own dialect, had their own 
 particular tradesmen, kept their own quarters; even the money- 
 makers among them retired not to the Coney Banks but to 
 their own east-end Mount Idle. 
 
 The Town Committee walked single file for the tall pave- 
 ments were narrower than in the High Street, sometimes not
 
 33 
 
 more than a ledge skirting the houses down to the Stade. 
 This huddle of tarred sheds and fishermen's stores choked up 
 the end of Fish Street, hiding the sea. It smelt strongly of 
 tar and seaweed and drying nets, and beyond it the black- 
 hulled fishing-boats lay on the beach, waiting for the turn 
 of the tide. 
 
 "We shan't do anything to speak of in these parts," said 
 Monypenny to Figg; "I merely wanted you to get a general 
 idea of the town. Our improvements must be in keeping with 
 the character of the place." 
 
 "In that case," said Figg, "we shall have to put colour be- 
 fore form." 
 
 Monypenny nodded. 
 
 "Quite so the difficulty is the Parade." 
 
 "Must you have one?" Figg asked brutally. 
 
 The Town Committee shuddered. 
 
 "We must have one, of course," said Monypenny, "but it 
 will be a difficult matter. You see, the point of the whole 
 thing is we want to improve this town; we don't want just 
 to add to it, to give it certain conventional features; we want 
 to improve it." 
 
 "You're an optimist," said Figg; "you're asking me to go 
 one better than the old folk who planted these streets. It's 
 like copying roses in wax." 
 
 The Town Committee were growing restive, and at this 
 stage Lewnes pushed forward. 
 
 "Can't you give us something like the Steyn?" 
 
 Pelham murmured that "the moorish style was always gen- 
 teel." 
 
 "But the Gothic is becoming fashionable again," said 
 Becket. 
 
 They moved on, leaving the Stade for the little sea-front 
 that ran along the shore from the great cliff-buttress of All 
 Holland Hill to the smooth green spread of Cuckoo Hill in the 
 west. Below Cuckoo Hill, wedged between town and sea, was
 
 34 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 the America Ground, a brown lumpy patch of tents, sheds, and 
 converted hulls, with grey spines of smoke ascending from 
 ramshackle chimneys and gipsy-fires. This would have to be 
 got rid of, and till it was gone there was no good planning 
 the Marine Gardens which had begun to flower in Mony- 
 penny's mind. The immediate concern was the Parade. At 
 present all there was of it was a rough, tide-eaten dyke, with 
 grass and sea-pink between the stones, and a spinney of tam- 
 arisks struggling under the old Town Wall which shut off the 
 rest of Marlingate. This wall had crumbled and fallen in 
 places; in others it had been quaintly assimilated by some 
 dwelling a little poke-roofed house squatting ruddily on its 
 yellowish-grey, or a sudden crop of tiling and chimneys 
 which, with a pierced window or two, spoke of a house that 
 had taken its strength for frontage. 
 
 The artist in Figg revolted from the thought of convert- 
 ing this wild growth of wall and town into a conventional 
 Marine Parade. But he had not come to Marlingate to be an 
 artist indeed he was grateful for the limited scope allowed 
 him by Monypenny. He had expected a demand for a rococo 
 reconstruction, and here at least was a man who, while he in- 
 sisted on "improvement," could contemplate a scheme which 
 did not include domes and balconies. 
 
 Monypenny rejected Figg's proposal to "restore" the sea- 
 front indeed the Committee would not have borne it. They 
 came clustering round Monypenny, fearful lest he should sac- 
 rifice to the picturesque. They pointed out that there were 
 enough romantic corners in the town to satisfy any visitors 
 who cared for such things, that the Town Wall was unsafe, 
 and learning their lesson from Monypenny unhygienic. 
 
 But he had never thought of keeping the sea-front as it was. 
 The town of his dreams was typified by this Marine Parade, 
 sweeping grandly east and west from hill to hill though 
 Monypenny's Parade had a remote crystalline beauty which
 
 MONYPENNY OF MARLINGATE 35 
 
 no Town Committee could imagine and no architect could de- 
 sign. 
 
 It was decided to take down the old wall, build houses, an 
 Assembly Room and an Arcade. Shops, in spite of some ma- 
 noeuvring of Lewnes's, were to be rigorously excluded. 
 
 Having roughly planned out the idea, the Town Commit- 
 tee turned homewards up the High Street. Monypenny had 
 invited everyone to dinner at Gun Garden House. 
 
 10 
 
 That summer broke on Marlingate like a sunrise. It was 
 the beginning of its greatness. The town was in an odd, 
 jumbled state. The Parade was a mass of earth and rub- 
 ble, with great blocks brought by railway from the north, 
 and heaps of cement dustily discharged from the little black 
 ships that bumped round the Gringer from the London River. 
 At the last minute the Town Committee had cleared a space 
 of beach for the digging and bathing, and hoped piously that 
 the wind would blow the workmen's back-chat away from 
 the visitors. 
 
 Up on the Totty Lands the water-works were now spoiling 
 the woods as the Parade spoiled the sea. Both sets of work- 
 men camped on the America Ground, which was having a 
 season of its own, with money flowing into the gin-shops, and 
 a big demand for house-property in the shape of sack-cloth 
 tents and old boats. The Town Committee felt unequal to 
 tackling it during its present boom they would wait till the 
 navvies were out of Marlingate, and then approach the Com- 
 mission of Woods and Forests. Meantime they hoped it 
 would strike visitors as Romantic. 
 
 People began to arrive towards the middle of June. There 
 had always been summer visitors at Marlingate, on account of 
 the climate and bathing, but they had been of the pioneer, pic- 
 nic kind. Now something better was hoped and prepared for.
 
 36 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 The Town Committee had worked desperately to make the 
 place known. It was Monypenny who had first been struck 
 with the idea of using the Railway for advertising purposes. 
 He persuaded the Corporation to have placards at London 
 Bridge station, and one or two big places on the way down, 
 setting forth the attractions of Marlingate "unrivalled sea- 
 bathing, picturesque scenery, elegant and comfortable lodg- 
 ings." 
 
 For the regulation of these last he established a Corpora- 
 tion Register, whereon were entered the names of all lodg- 
 ing-house keepers who were willing to submit their premises 
 to the inspection of a specially formed sub-committee. Lodg- 
 ings in Marlingate therefore had the personal voucher of the 
 Corporation, which became directly responsible for the com- 
 fort of the visitors. At first bookings were slow, but August 
 brought an increase. The first visitors had gone home and 
 were recommending the place. Hugo Becket had also per- 
 suaded a few good people to come down not the Duke, alas! 
 He went, as usual, to Brighton and thence to Homburg, but 
 good people nevertheless, who availed themselves in a pleas- 
 ant, well-bred way of the few opportunities provided for 
 spending money, who gave the beach a sprinkling of London 
 style, and finally set the seal on their good-breeding by go- 
 ing home well pleased, and recommending Marlingate to their 
 friends. 
 
 This was what Monypenny had hoped for and the line 
 along which he had planned. Marlingate was just such a 
 place as would appeal to those for whom Brighton was too 
 noisy and too stale. He fought that element in the Council 
 which looked on Brighton as the pattern and ideal. Mony- 
 penny's town was a cross between Brighton and the Marlin- 
 gate of bygone years. He would have the Parade, the Assem- 
 bly Room, and eventually the Municipal Park, without which 
 no respectable watering-place could hold up its head but he 
 would also keep the old red and black streets, the green slope
 
 MONYPENNY OF MARLINGATE 37 
 
 of the hills, the mystery of woods and weald; they should all 
 be part of the new Marlingate, as they had been part of the 
 old. 
 
 He was glad that Figg had realised this. The plans for 
 the improvements had come down, soaked in the Monypenny 
 idea. Figg had seen the impossibility of constructing a Parade 
 that should be in keeping with the welded mass of Marlin- 
 gate its twist of streets and bristle of gables, its tumble of 
 moss-grown roofs, its riot of sea-worn colours. Therefore, 
 unable to blend, he had jumped boldly at contrast. His par- 
 ade was classic in the purest style one long, low, white front- 
 age and the Assembly Room was a Greek temple, its col- 
 umned portico crowned by an entablature and pediment. 
 Monypenny had both approved his plans and fearlessly crit- 
 icised them. His knowledge of architecture was limited, his 
 knowledge of the town he wanted, absolute. The Council had 
 carped both at the plans and the improvements they bab- 
 bled of areas and balconies; Lewnes thought a "nice dome" 
 would give the Assembly Room a conspicuousness it lacked in 
 its present design. Lusted scoffed at Figg's ignorance of 
 modern styles not a bow-window on the Parade. But Pel- 
 ham was on Monypenny's side, and moreover his own weight 
 was enough to carry him through even a heavier opposition. 
 It was he who owned the land which, developed into an ar- 
 istocratic residential district, should set the crown on Marlin- 
 gate; it was he who indirectly swayed the town's finances 
 through the riches of Becket there was, besides, a general 
 vague respect for his "ideas," an odd deference to his preco- 
 cious efficiency. In short it was an example of the ignored, 
 denied, but universal homage to Brains. Monypenny had bet- 
 ter if younger brains than anyone on the Borough Council, 
 and the Council was forced, in the spirit if not in the letter, to 
 acknowledge it. 
 
 So things in general were shaping as he wished. The Maid- 
 enhood Inn, the Crown, and the New Moon the three good
 
 38 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 inns of the place were full, without any crowding or vulgar- 
 ity, of visitors of the better sort. Others, equally estimable, 
 but with larger families or smaller purses, had lodgings in 
 different parts of the town. In the morning they sat on the 
 beach, now professionally equipped with bathing machines and 
 bathing women, or walked on the small available bit of Par- 
 ade. They were never noisy, never promiscuous, always fresh 
 and well dressed. They spent moderately in the toy-shops and 
 the library, and in the afternoon banded themselves into dis- 
 creet excursions to such spots as Old Rumble, the Gringer, the 
 Stussels, or Spitalman's Down. For these Bond of the Li- 
 brary had prepared a Guide Book, full of garlanded informa- 
 tion. In the evening there would be card-parties and con- 
 certs in the big hall of the Maidenhood, with now and then a 
 small, select dance. 
 
 It was all as he would have it graceful, fashionable, po- 
 lite, not unmindful of beauty. Standing on the first' blocks 
 of the Parade, staring down at the beach gay with brightly 
 coloured shawls and parasols or from his window at Gun 
 Garden House watching the family excursions jolt up through 
 the Warriors' Gate in hired flies and gigs or in the evening 
 presiding at some discreetly gay reunion at the Maidenhood 
 he would experience a gratifying, almost paternal thrill. 
 He felt as if these people, enjoying themselves in Marlingate, 
 were his children, whose gambols were due to his indulgence, 
 who owed him their delight, even their being. He beamed on 
 them, and blessed them in his heart. 
 
 " 
 
 Towards the middle of July, Becket's family came down to 
 a long black slice of a house on the Coney Banks. Mony- 
 penny was introduced to them a fortnight later when Becket 
 arrived for his summer holiday, and recognized them as a 
 party he had often watched in his paternal gloatings two
 
 MONYPENNY OF MARLINGATE 39 
 
 girls and two boys, shepherded by a very immature-looking 
 governess. Becket was inclined to sentimentalise over them, 
 to see in their farthing faces a glimpse of the vanished Emma 
 Hurdicott. 
 
 "It's a heavy task," he murmured, "to bring up a family 
 of motherless children. I can't be with them as much as I 
 ought, and wish. I've got to make money for them. The 
 boys must have a good start, and the girls must marry well. 
 They're Hurdicotts, you see. I mustn't forget my dear wife's 
 people." 
 
 Monypenny was prepared to sneer, till he remembered that 
 Hurdicotts, from Wiltshire and from Graveley, were at pres- 
 ent giving a boom to his town. There was a bunch of them 
 staying at the Maidenhood, and another cluster in lodgings in 
 Zuriel Place. After all, Becket had given the town a good 
 name, by persuading exactly the right people to visit it. Also 
 he had subscribed generously to the Borough Loan and other 
 activities, and he was going to provide the money for exten- 
 sive building on the Gun Garden estates. Monypenny owed 
 him a debt, and, urged to sacrifice, he heroically invited the 
 whole party to drink tea at his house on the following Thurs- 
 day. 
 
 It was characteristic of Monypenny that he should not 
 give even a parcel of children a casual invitation, that he 
 should fix a decently remote day, and make elaborately formal 
 preparations. Becket would be in town, so he expected only 
 the children and Miss Wells. He thought out a suitable 
 scheme of entertainment. His own childhood seemed curi- 
 ously remote; all the memories he had of it were lumped into 
 an idea that children liked eating better than anything else. 
 That would simplify matters all he had to do would be to 
 lay in a store of sweets and cake and fruit; the consequences 
 would not trouble Gun Garden House, whatever their effect 
 on the Coney Banks. 
 
 On Thursday afternoon the party arrived a little of its
 
 40 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 freshness already rubbed off by the hot dusty walk from the 
 Coney Banks. Arthur and James, in Highland suits, held the 
 hands of Louisa and Charlotte, in the rudiments of crino- 
 lines. The governess did not wear a crinoline Monypenny 
 realised vaguely that something was wrong with her, but could 
 not tell what. She gave him a queer impression of brown- 
 ness brown skin, brown eyes, brown clothes. Her hair, 
 lumped untidily into its net, was like one of those brown 
 clouds that discharge rain at sunset. She was very young 
 absurdly young to have the charge of this motherless family, 
 and it was soon evident that she could not keep them in order. 
 At first a general shyness subdued voices and restrained ac- 
 tions, but when this had worn off in the course of a long tea 
 of cakes and raspberries, the governess showed herself power- 
 less to control results. Indeed, she seemed to enjoy the cakes 
 and raspberries too. 
 
 Monypenny sat at the head of the table, Miss Wells at the 
 bottom, with the tea-pot. When she poured out his tea she 
 slopped it into the saucer, and put in two lumps of sugar 
 without asking him if he took any, which he did not. When 
 little Louisa dropped her cake into her milk Miss Wells be- 
 gan to laugh, then suddenly seemed to remember herself and 
 started scolding instead. Whereupon Louisa wept, and Miss 
 Wells scolded louder, and dried her eyes with a violence so 
 extreme that Charlotte began to weep for sympathy. Then 
 Miss Wells kissed them both, so that the jam from their faces 
 rubbed off on to hers, which offended Monypenny, though he 
 was too shy to tell her about it. 
 
 He managed somehow to endure his tea-party its jammy 
 mouths, its fingers in his flower-beds, its heels in his turf, its 
 knees green from tumbles on his lawn; and when at last it 
 flapped away through the dust, a sticky mass of soiled clothes 
 and bodies, his chief disgust was for the governess. He could 
 not tolerate inefficiency, and the puppy-walker who was un-
 
 MONYPENNY OF MARLINGATE 41 
 
 able to keep her pups in order filled him with a deeper anger 
 than all the rioting of the pack. 
 
 12 
 
 The September of that year was sweetly mild, and brought 
 to Marlingate a succession of russet days, with the scent of 
 weed-burning in the mists. The sea lay like a pond, with the 
 dance of sunlight on the light crimp the breeze gave it far 
 from the shore, while the surf creamed gently round the 
 rocks it was wont to pound, lapping and gurgling and sucking 
 at the sand. 
 
 Several visitors who had planned to leave, stayed on, and, 
 what was more, others came down. Marlingate was more 
 sheltered than Brighton, flanked east and west by its bills, and 
 shut from the north wind by the weald open only to the 
 south, where for weeks the sea had drowsed blue and shim- 
 mering under a honey mist of fog and light. Near the end of 
 September the place was as full as ever, and Monypenny, in 
 conference with Becket and Pelham, formed a wonderful new 
 scheme. Why should they not have a Winter Season? That 
 was the way to attract superior visitors and good residents. 
 There were at that time very few winter resorts most sea- 
 side places became deserts in October. Marlingate was ideal- 
 ly sheltered for the cold weather facing south, a sun-trap 
 between hills. It had long been known that roses would 
 bloom all the year round in the gardens down by the Gut's 
 Mouth, and that primroses were found earlier in the woods 
 of Old Rumble than anywhere else in Sussex. 
 
 The plan was brought before the Town Committee. Mony- 
 penny was its sponsor, and spoke with the zeal and blaze he 
 seemed to keep entirely for borough affairs. He pointed out 
 the advantages both to finance and prestige. A Winter Sea- 
 son was more select than a summer one, however genteel that 
 might be better people came, people with more leisure and
 
 42 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 more money. They would be easy to cater for, wanting only 
 society and perhaps a little good music besides the leading 
 attractions of warmth and sunshine. The Assembly Room 
 could be pushed forward and finished early in the New Year 
 then there could be dancing, and card-parties on a large 
 scale . . . people might even stay on till Easter, so that the 
 town would be really empty only for about a month in the 
 autumn. 
 
 Pelham supported him, decorating his bare facts. Becket 
 also spoke; his family at any rate would stay on, and he 
 knew several people who would enjoy a change from London 
 at Christmas time. Besides, there were invalids to consider; 
 this new fashion of wintering in the south of France might 
 be modified and turned to British advantage. 
 
 The opposition came chiefly from Lewnes. He protested 
 that to spend money all the year round would make for a level 
 mediocrity of attraction, whereas to concentrate all the bor- 
 ough funds on one season would enable the Committee to 
 plunge. Selectness in the long run did not pay, he was sure 
 of that. Select people found pleasure in reading and in 
 scenery, neither of which would bring much revenue to Marlin- 
 gate. He did not want to attract anyone common oh, dear, 
 no! but a slightly inferior level of society indulged more 
 lavishly in pleasure. He felt it would be best to have but 
 one season, and do it really handsome. 
 
 However, he received very little support, for though it was 
 rumoured that the fishermen disliked the idea of visitors all 
 the year round, Gallop was not on the Town Committee to 
 voice their disapproval. Lusted, who otherwise might have 
 sided with Lewnes, was won to the other party by the thought 
 of substantial "lets" for his various houses, and perhaps, if 
 residents increased, large building contracts. Wastel and 
 Breeds were all for selectness and winter visitors, and Vidler 
 approved from the point of view of trade. In the end Lewnes 
 abandoned his dream of a thumping summer season, with per-
 
 MONYPENNY OF MARLINGATE 43 
 
 haps at last a Pier and sixpenny steamboat sailings, and the 
 new idea was adopted unanimously by the Town Committee, 
 who at once set to work to materialise it. New posters were 
 put up at London Bridge, proclaiming Marlingate's winter 
 warmth and genteel gaiety. A series of concerts was planned 
 in the big hall of the Maidenhood, and one or two covered seats 
 were dotted about the sea-front, where the huge cement blocks 
 were at last achieving the shapeliness of a Parade. 
 
 Monypenny once more felt the bite of enterprise. He 
 brought before the Corporation various suggestions for im- 
 proving the lighting of the streets, a necessity now that the Win- 
 ter Season was decided on, and hurried on the building both 
 of the Assembly Room and of the Marine Arcade a long 
 low erection, chiefly toy-shops and bazaars, yet giving scope for 
 a covered promenade and occasional music. 
 
 But his chief plan he kept to himself and Becket. If this 
 winter were successful, he would start building on his estates 
 the following spring. He would start quite modestly with a 
 few good, smallish houses, which could either be let for the 
 season or would perhaps attract a permanent residency. There 
 were few houses in the town likely to fulfil this purpose. The 
 residents belonged chiefly to the trading or fishing classes, liv- 
 ing either in the High Street or Fish Street, with one or two 
 professional men and retired shop-keepers, who lived on the 
 Coney Banks or Mount Idle, according to their origin east or 
 west of the Gut's Mouth. There were no villas or manors 
 likely to attract the genteel and well-to-do stranger. Gun 
 Garden House was the largest in the place, and that was 
 merely a converted inn. 
 
 One afternoon early in October he and Becket went over 
 the ground. Monypenny thought of running a new road east 
 of the Slough, starting from the track that divided the Wil- 
 derness from the Market Place and joining Rye Lane just as it 
 came clear of the town. The sheltered ground that dipped 
 away from the London Road and surrounded the Slough, he
 
 44 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 was reserving for the Town Park which should one day be 
 the glory of Marlingate. 
 
 The dedicated land was at present thickly wooded. There 
 were the inevitable tamarisks, but these merely hazed the 
 more exposed parts with pale green puffs and webs, soon giv- 
 ing place to the brown mysterious tangle of the woods, which 
 rolled away to the violet ridges of the weald. 
 
 Today one could not see farther north than Old Rumble, 
 for the autumn fogs, thick and sweet, hung over the woods, 
 drowning them into blue. The air was soft, yet with a sub- 
 dued restlessness that fluttered the still hanging leaves. 
 Clumps of tansy were still yellow in sunny corners, and the 
 sweetmint and scabious foamed a fragile purple round the 
 trunks of the ashes. 
 
 Monypenny felt something almost alien in these field flow- 
 ers, so unlike the thyme and the gorse of the cliffs, the thrift 
 and the horned poppy of the shore. Besides, all the sea- 
 flowers had died of the first autumn winds, and here in the 
 quiet matted shelter of the woods were a dozen summer 
 strays, patching the dun of the faded leaves with their yel- 
 lows, their purples and their pinks. He missed, too, the 
 smell of the sea, which never seemed to blow beyond the 
 outer ring of tamarisks. He felt shut away from Marlingate 
 in these woods that somehow did not seem to belong to him, 
 though he owned every rood and yard. 
 
 "It'll be a business clearing all this away," said Becket. 
 
 "We can leave a tree or two ornamental, you know. But 
 the bushes must go." 
 
 "It's good ground." 
 
 "Yes and I think we had better give each house plenty 
 of garden space." 
 
 "Of course. These must be good houses for good people. 
 Were you thinking of having Figg for architect?" 
 
 "Yes. He's a clever man, and I'd like to see him in a big 
 way. Then we can be proud of him."
 
 MONYPENNY OF MARLINGATE 45 
 
 Becket chuckled. 
 
 "I daresay this town will make a name for more than one 
 of us. I expect you'll be calling this road after yourself, as 
 a beginning?" 
 
 "Not I ! " said Monypenny . He moved on a few steps. He 
 felt vaguely uncomfortable, almost superstitious, as if within 
 himself he knew that no good would come of meddling with 
 these woods. The sunlight danced down to him through the 
 leaves, and he saw it gleaming far away on the Slough. The 
 thickets seemed full of a hushed madness, of laughter and 
 skipping feet. . . . 
 
 "I suppose . . ." Becket's voice reached him as from the 
 streets far away, "since you're not naming this road after 
 yourself, it hasn't occurred to you that er er that Becket 
 Road might sound er euphonious?" 
 
 "You shall call it what you please," said Monypenny; "you 
 have a right." 
 
 "Then what do you say to Becket Road? or Becket 
 Grove? It would look well planted with trees both sides." 
 
 Monypenny did not answer. He stood a little way apart 
 from Becket, almost uneasily breathing the racy sweetness of 
 the air. Evening, sun-steeped and perfumed, was streaming 
 in and out of the oaks, purpling their red crowns, fluttering be- 
 tween the hazels, and glimmering through those mysterious 
 thickets where tangles of bryony hung from bramble and ash. 
 At that moment the wood seemed to be trying to draw him into 
 its secret life. He felt disturbed, as if from behind a tree- 
 trunk or out of a thicket that life might suddenly take shape, 
 half human, half animal half loving, half alien. He could 
 hear all around him a fluttering, a crackling and a whisper- 
 ing and suddenly fear gave a twist to his heart. 
 
 He shrank, then glanced back over his shoulder. Two huge 
 dark eyes were peering at him through the branches of an 
 ash. They were the eyes of some creature half animal, half
 
 46 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 human, a fawn, a fairy . . . and as they looked they seemed 
 to call. 
 
 The next moment Becket's family was swarming and clam- 
 ouring round him, and he was shaking hands with the gov- 
 erness. 
 
 13 
 
 After that swift revel of emotion it was an anti-climax to 
 find the noisy, grubby Beckets trespassing in his woods, and 
 to be at the same time unable to treat them as he would 
 treat ordinary trespassers. He stretched his lips into a smile, 
 and, with a still greater effort, patted the head of little Char- 
 lotte who stood nearest to him. He looked at their purple- 
 stained mouths and hands 
 
 "So you've found plenty of blackberries in my woods"- 
 unable to resist at least an implied reproach. 
 
 "Ever so many," squeaked Charlotte. "Miss Wells tored her 
 skirt." 
 
 Monypenny then noticed that the gathers of the governess's 
 skirt were torn from the waist, so that the hem drooped and 
 flapped round her ankles. She stood leaning against the 
 trunk of an oak, her hands behind her, her bonnet fallen side- 
 ways, and her dead-leaf hair, escaping from what had once 
 been bandeaux, all rough against the bark. . . . 
 
 "Well?" she said suddenly. 
 
 "Er I beg your pardon." 
 
 "I thought you wanted to say something you were look- 
 ing at me." 
 
 "I beg your pardon " Monypenny repeated himself, then 
 
 coloured with annoyance. This governess of Becket's was an 
 absurdity. 
 
 "Perhaps we ought to be turning back," he said to the wid- 
 ower; "I think we've done everything that's needed for the 
 present." 
 
 "Yes, yes ... I suppose so. Miss Wells, will you take the
 
 MONYPENNY OF MARLINGATE 47 
 
 children on ahead? They ought to have their faces washed 
 before tea. You'll come back with us?" he added to Mony- 
 penny; "we started five-o'clock tea in town last Winter and it 
 has become a habit." 
 
 Monypenny shook his head. 
 
 "No, thank you. I have a lot of work to finish." 
 
 "You're strangely fond of work," said Becket as they be- 
 gan to walk towards the town. "I never saw a fellow so oc- 
 cupied a man of leisure, I mean." 
 
 "I should hate to be a man of leisure." 
 
 "Personally I find work just a means to an end. You seem 
 to like it for its own sake." 
 
 "It is also a means to an end." 
 
 "Ah you're thinking of Marlingate. I was thinking of 
 
 them " and he looked towards his disappearing family, 
 
 crashing down the slope at Miss Wells's heels. 
 
 "I should be most grateful if you would ask them to go 
 more carefully through my plantation." 
 
 Becket cleared his throat. "Miss Wells," he shouted, 
 "please see that the little ones don't damage Mr. Monypenny's 
 property." 
 
 The wind brought a faint, unintelligible answer, and at the 
 same time the vanishing group contracted round the gov- 
 erness. 
 
 "She's a wonderful woman," said Becket. 
 
 "Who? Miss Wells?" 
 
 "Yes out of the ordinary run of governesses, you know. 
 She's not a strict disciplinarian, but on the whole she man- 
 ages the children admirably. They're devoted to her." 
 
 "She seems to have a good deal in common with them," 
 said Monypenny grimly. 
 
 "That's partly the reason, I suppose. But in my eyes her 
 great quality is this " he dropped his voice "she was related 
 to my dear wife." 
 
 "Oh . . "
 
 48 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 "Yes it's rather an unhappy story; perhaps I ought not 
 to tell it to you . . ." he hesitated; "the fact is she's the 
 daughter of a cousin of my poor Emma's, a girl who was 
 brought up with her . . . and went wrong. . . . The man 
 was an officer in the service of the East India Company 
 drowned on his way home to marry her. She died soon af- 
 ter her child was born, and my sweet Emma always interested 
 herself in the poor little thing. A few years ago she took 
 her into our household. She's had a good education and can 
 teach simple lessons. She dances beautifully too, and sings 
 and plays. That will be useful to the girls later on." 
 
 "And you feel you can safely leave her in charge of the 
 children while you're away?" 
 
 "Oh, certainly. I've an old housekeeper who knows how 
 dear Emma would have liked things. . . . Sometimes, 
 Monypenny, I feel I would give everything just to know what 
 she would do on various occasions. I am so anxious not to 
 go against her wishes in any detail. Sometimes I can't help 
 feeling she sees us all now. . . ." 
 
 "Um," said Monypenny. 
 
 "She treated Miss Wells almost as a daughter during the 
 last few years of her life, and I assure you the dear girl cher- 
 ishes her memory as of a tender mother. In the evenings, 
 after the children are in bed, I often ask her to bring her 
 sewing into the drawing-room, and chat to her about my 
 poor Emma." 
 
 "Ah," said Monypenny. 
 
 That accounted for the governess.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 MORGAN LE FAY 
 
 i 
 
 THE Winter Season, after a few uncertain weeks, fulfilled 
 its sponsor's hopes. There was nothing sensational, no ex- 
 travagant burst of luck, just a steady flow of progress 
 through favourable circumstances. 
 
 The summer visitors who had enjoyed the quiet attractions 
 of July came down experimentally at Christmas, and those 
 with leisure drifted into a kind of winter residence. It was 
 not fashionable to roam from the winter fireside, except among 
 those who could afford the South of France. There were few 
 English cold-weather resorts except the inland spas, and the 
 knowledge of a sunny sheltered town, where picturesque scen- 
 ery and genteel entertainment could always be relied on, soon 
 spread without the help of the London Bridge posters. In- 
 valids who could not afford the Riviera, old people tried by 
 the northern cold, delicate people, children needing change 
 of air, and others with no pretext but a desire for novelty and 
 sunshine, came down to the various well-appointed lodgings 
 and modest hotels. When it was known that the woods just 
 outside the town were to be cleared for building, there were 
 one or two enquiries as to eligible houses. Figg had already 
 sent in designs for Becket Grove solid, red-brick houses, 
 for whose sprawling roofs, stubbed gable-ends and kiln-like 
 bulges, he had ransacked the far-off and ignored villages of 
 the Weald. There was no ornament, no mock-architectures, 
 no stucco, and no basements. Already the trees were being 
 
 49
 
 50 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 cleared away in preparation. A band of shorn earth, levelled 
 and pegged out, had appeared on the outermost woodland 
 rim. 
 
 Early in the New Year the Assembly Room was finished. 
 There was now no need to postpone its opening till Easter, as 
 had been at first planned. The town was not so full as in the 
 summer time, but there were many good people, and a large 
 public function was bound to advertise the place and attract 
 fresh visitors. There was much argument in the Town Com- 
 mittee as to the nature of the opening ceremony. The weak- 
 er sort clung to concerts and card-parties, the bolder were 
 for a ball. In the end the bolder won, compromising with a 
 card-room for dowagers. Small dances had been held from 
 time to time, at the Maidenhood, but this was to be alto- 
 gether more impressive. An orchestra was to come all the 
 way from Brighton, and the supper was to be the double tri- 
 umph of the Maidenhood and the New Moon. For days be- 
 forehand the Room was subjected to a drastic decorative 
 treatment, in which patriotism and Christmas sentiment were 
 combined according to the best traditions of municipal art. 
 
 In the town itself raged boiling anticipation, not unmixed 
 with strife for the Town Committee had vowed at all risks 
 to keep the festival "select," and had in its invitations en- 
 tirely ignored the tradesman class, except those connected with 
 the Borough Council. This caused much bitterness among 
 wives and daughters husbands and sons were appeased either 
 by contracts for provisions, draperies and such like, or by the 
 universal shopping-boom, which cleared out nearly every shop 
 in Marlingate during the fortnight before the ball. 
 
 There were three Masters of the Ceremonies, appointed by 
 the Town Committee Pelham, Becket, and Monypenny. 
 Pelham's uses were merely civic and ornamental; Monypenny 
 was the man of action, and director of the other two; Becket 
 was a financial background to Monypenny. He was also use- 
 ful from the social point of view, for Monypenny had had
 
 MORGAN LE FAY 51 
 
 but little experience of big entertainments, whereas Becket 
 with his City banquets and expensively-dining Hurdicotts, 
 was schooled above his rank in the etiquette of such occa- 
 sions. 
 
 The merchant was staying in Marlingate till the middle of 
 January, and Monypenny was often in the black, aldermanish 
 house on the Coney Banks, which Becket had now taken on a 
 long lease, and furnished with his London superfluity, patrioti- 
 cally supplemented at Dunk's local furniture emporium a wel- 
 ter of spindle-legged tables that fell at a jolt and mahogany 
 sideboards that could scarcely be wedged through the doorway, 
 with sofas and chairs of voluptuous outlines and ascetic sur- 
 faces. Becket always had ready good wine and tobacco, and 
 a certain amount of reliable if rather fumbling information. 
 The governess and children were never to be seen, though 
 Monypenny gathered that Becket indulged ignominiously a 
 children's hour after five o'clock tea. 
 
 2 
 
 With his faith in Becket's social alertness, it was a blow to 
 Monypenny to discover that he proposed allowing his governess 
 to go to the ball. 
 
 "The poor child is so eager, and has so few pleasures, 
 Monypenny; it's a grey life for a girl looking after other 
 people's children." 
 
 "I am sure it is." 
 
 "Besides, she's a Hurdicott we mustn't forget that, though 
 of course we can't let her use the name ahem and I feel 
 that on this occasion she will do our family credit. She's a 
 pretty girl, and a beautiful dancer. I find that Lady Cock- 
 street is willing to chaperone her." 
 
 This altered the case. Lady Cockstreet was a Hurdicott who 
 had married a Midland baron, and as dowager of his family 
 had added to the dignity of her own. If she chose to patronise
 
 52 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 a bastard slip of her honoured tree, it was not for others to 
 show disdain. Monypenny forgave Becket his folly. All he 
 had dreaded was that the widower, by his sentimental indul- 
 gence of dear Emma's foundling, should drive away the people 
 who brought glamour to Marlingate. 
 
 The night of the Assembly came dawdling at last to an ex- 
 pectant town. All day it had been in ferment the static and 
 permanent town that is, for the strolling population took with 
 extraordinary calm this supreme effort at its entertainment. 
 
 Mr. Vessit, the hair-dresser, had been busy from before 
 breakfast till an hour altogether dangerous in its proximity to 
 the ball. Those ladies who had applied to him too late for an 
 afternoon or evening attendance were forced to spend the 
 whole day in a state of oiled and curled irritability, unable to 
 put on a bonnet or to lay head on a cushion. The two local 
 dressmakers were frantic, as the peculiarities of their talent 
 required much in the way of alterations at the last minute. It 
 was rumoured that Mrs. Pelham had ordered a dress from 
 town, which was considered highly disloyal by the Misses 
 Lewnes, forced respectively to a pale pink and a pale blue 
 tarlatan at their brother's emporium. 
 
 When the actual hour of the entertainment came fresh dif- 
 ficulties arose, owing to the limitations of the livery stables 
 at the Maidenhood. These could not supply even half the 
 demand for carriages, and as anyone who came on foot would 
 be unclassed from thenceforward, there was a stream of arrivals 
 from nearly an hour before the ceremony till about the same 
 time after it. At the main entrance an awning had been put 
 up and a carpet laid. On either side jostled a mixed multi- 
 tude from the America Ground fishermen, workmen, tramps 
 and pikers, who, with their women, made audible and some- 
 times unlovely comment on their betters. 
 
 Inside was a dazzle of gas and colour. A huge chandelier 
 hung from the ceiling and was mirrored in the pool of the 
 polished floor, while round the walls were globes innumerable,
 
 MORGAN LE FAY 53 
 
 each with its screaming jet. Thick ropes of holly swung under 
 the ceiling, looped up with escutcheons of the borough arms 
 (three gorged lions regardant, issuing from castles and the 
 motto "Constans Fidei"). There was just the right amount 
 of mistletoe enough to be arch, and yet not enough to be 
 vulgar. Entwined Union Jacks and Royal Standards deco- 
 rated the bandstand at the end of the hall, and there were 
 several palms dotted about to suggest an illusory seclusion and 
 to hide awkward joins in the decorations. 
 
 Monypenny, Pelham and Becket arrived almost together. 
 They inspected the hall gingerly sliding their feet over its 
 beeswaxed surface the adjoining supper-room, the cardroom 
 and cloak-rooms. They also covertly inspected each other, and 
 both Becket and Pelham felt somehow outraged by Monypenny. 
 He was not exactly foppish, but subtly contrived to suggest 
 what he was not. His grey suit braided with black was more 
 closely connected with Saville Row than with the house of 
 Lewnes, and in Pelham's eyes at least carried its simplicity to 
 the point of ostentation. He himself had been clad by a city 
 tailor of conservative mind, and looked a degree better dressed 
 than Becket, who, consistent in his local patriotism, had al- 
 lowed himself to be clothed from collar to pumps by Lewnes, 
 and was now indignantly chafing to find his associates in dis- 
 loyalty and well-fitting suits. 
 
 What struck him most about Monypenny was his good looks; 
 he was used to the clothes, but the young man, while conform- 
 ing to plain London custom in his attire, had deliberately or 
 accidentally stressed the bizarre note in his appearance. His 
 hair was unoiled, which emphasised its whiteness, and his dark 
 side whiskers were so flat and short as to give his face a strange, 
 clean-shaven look. Becket noticed the extraordinary length of 
 his chin, the piercing blackness of his eyes; the face seemed 
 almost Spanish tonight, it had a sinister darkness and nar- 
 rowness. . . . 
 
 The next arrivals were Mrs. Pelham and young Robert
 
 54 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 she gorgeous in maroon velvet over a Eugenie petticoat, he 
 macassared and Lewnes-clad. Then Lewnes came bustling in 
 with his thin sisters, then Vidler, then Tom Potter the clerk, 
 then one by one the rest of the Town Council, except Gallop, 
 who "dudn't care fur routies." Elphee had been turned out at 
 the last municipal elections, and, retired to Mount Idle, had 
 solemnly shaken from his feet the dust of this new Babylon. 
 The Rector of St. Nicholas was there to emphasise the virtue 
 and selectness of the gathering. The doctor and the lawyer 
 were present with their wives. Bond of the Library had been 
 precariously admitted, as his guide-book, universally read and 
 admired, had lifted him out of trade into the ranks of author- 
 ship. The rest of the company was made up of visitors, among 
 whom glittered some Hurdicotts of Graveley. 
 
 Monypenny stood by the door, greeting the guests as they 
 arrived. Pelhami and Becket stood beside him, but they gradu- 
 ally seemed to fade, so that in the end it was often only Mony- 
 penny whom the visitors saw. For he had begun to find this 
 new aspect of the town's life as engrossing as any other, and, 
 moreover, there was something here that was not purely muni- 
 cipal, that called to the buried youth in him which so seldom 
 did more than stir in its grave, and ask questions that could 
 be answered. 
 
 The visitors praised him to one another as he moved among 
 them a Victorian Beau Nash, utterly devoid of that suavity 
 and lightness which make a man popular, but somehow impres- 
 sive, a stimulant to imagination. 
 
 "You may take my word for it that man has a most 
 romantic history," said Mrs. Alaric Papillon (born a Hurdi- 
 cott). 
 
 "He's certainly distinguished," remarked her maiden sister- 
 in-law, "so I should think it possible that he has never had a 
 romance at all." 
 
 "My love! with that air!" 
 
 "My opinion of him," said the Dowager Lady Cockstreet,
 
 MORGAN LE FAY 55 
 
 "is that he has not had his romance yet, but that Nature has 
 designed him for one. That man, to me, is all future." 
 
 "All future! and an alderman at twenty-eight. I hear he 
 was born middle-aged." 
 
 "No doubt. Therefore he has still to meet his youth. He 
 was introduced to me a short while ago, and I observed him 
 well. The man is emotionally in the nursery." 
 
 "And, like many men, may never come out of it," from the 
 virgin Papillon. 
 
 "He may not, of course; it is ridiculous to lay down the law 
 after a few minutes' conversation. But in spite of his staidness 
 and all his hard brilliance of mind, he strikes me as a man 
 less gifted in intellect than in emotion." 
 
 3 
 
 The band had arrived, and dancing had begun, swaying to 
 the deux-temps. The room was florescent with gay-coloured 
 crinolines, dipping and belling over the polished floor. There 
 was a floating of scarves and lace shawls there was a drift 
 of faint perfumes; flowers, macassar oil, ottar of roses, lavender 
 and peau d'espagne. Above it all was that air of glitter, beauty, 
 richness, sweetness and unreality which haunts the civilised 
 survival of primitive delights. 
 
 Monypenny watched it with a throb of pleasure. It was 
 the dedication-feast of Marlingate. At present the room was 
 a trifle too large for the company, but his imagination crowded 
 it with anticipatory ghosts. He saw this gleaming show as a 
 beginning, and his mind ran on to future revels, more bril- 
 liant, more sure in their effects, better given and better 
 graced. . . . 
 
 He was roused from his dream by a touch on his arm. He 
 started, then looked unrecognisingly at the face that stared up 
 at him. He had a swift, dazzling impression of a woman's skin, 
 marvellously white, of a jewel that gleamed, of a billowing
 
 56 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 dress in which a thousand silver threads made moonlight .... 
 then as he met eyes that were dark, a little wild, and a little 
 wicked, he knew, and stiffened into a disillusioned greeting. 
 
 "Good evening, Miss Wells." 
 
 "Good evening, Mr. Monypenny." 
 
 He had not noticed her when she came in with Lady Cock- 
 street. She had probably been received by Becket or by 
 Pelham. He was amazed at the child's effrontery in coming to 
 greet him like this where was her chaperon? The feeling of 
 irritation with which she never failed to inspire him, rose up 
 and sent a flush to his dark cheek; but mingled with it tonight 
 was a new feeling of wonder. 
 
 He gazed at her half incredulously. He had never thought 
 her capable of looking as she looked tonight. He was too in- 
 nocent to know how a change of hair-dressing can alter a 
 woman's appearance or how much on her appearance depends 
 her manner. He realised dimly that Miss Wells's hair no 
 longer flopped in ragged clouds over her ears, that her dress 
 no longer hung drabbly from her waist, and that her man- 
 ner was no longer that of the half grown-up little governess. 
 
 But he could not tell exactly where the change lay. All he 
 knew was that tonight she was white and glittering, transformed 
 as if by an enchantment. The spell must have touched him 
 too, for he suddenly found himself asking her for a dance. 
 
 She handed him her little empty card. His was crowded 
 with great names, and there was no space for her till near the 
 end. As he wrote, he saw Lady Cockstreet raise her fan, and 
 the next moment Miss Wells's little glove was over his hand. 
 
 'That will do I must go now. Thank you very much." 
 And still half under a spell, he watched her swim like a water- 
 lily over the pool of the shining floor 
 
 Then suddenly a German waltz began and his enchantment 
 was broken. He stiffened his back, smoothed his gloves, pat- 
 ted his shirt-frill, and, walking to where Miss Victoria Hurdi- 
 cott sat with her mamma, claimed her hand with a low bow.
 
 MORGAN LE FAY 57 
 
 After that the evening passed in pageantry. He danced, 
 and found himself a good dancer. The mazurka succeeded the 
 waltz, la tempete the mazurka, the quadrille la tempete 
 memories of the steps revived to mix with a natural lightness 
 and a rather formal grace. Some of his partners found him 
 too stiff, others too silent, but none spoke of him without 
 praise. "He's much the most presentable creature in this 
 room," yawned Miss Victoria over her fan. "He gives a cachet 
 to the assembly," said her mamma. "Anyhow he quite out- 
 shines poor cousin Hugo," said her uncle, Leo Hurdicott of 
 Graveley. 
 
 Monypenny knew he was attracting notice and favour. A 
 subtle essence of triumph was in his blood, heating and enrich- 
 ing it. He was a little surprised at his own enjoyment he had 
 never thought that he would find himself delighting in the 
 town's gaieties apart from their function as means to an end. 
 Tonight he was almost young in his savouring of the moment, 
 in his half-realisation of his own attractive manhood, in his 
 appreciation of his partners' lightness and beauty and grace. 
 
 The air became warm and heavy with fugitive scents, and 
 scent and music seemed to weave and mingle with the light 
 and the colours that shifted and swayed. A golden impalpable 
 dust hung over the dancers' heads, hazing the crude glare of 
 the gas, bringing that, too, into the mellow middle ground 
 which the room had begun to be every sharpness of vision or 
 sound sweetened into a floating harmonious dream, where all 
 was soft, glowing, warm and rhythmic. 
 
 Monypenny came at last to resent the attitude of his fellow 
 councillors, who for the most part stood round the wall in the 
 final stages of boredom. They all struck him as looking stupid 
 and badly dressed. He wished they had not come, since 
 they could not enjoy themselves, but must needs cast on all 
 this beauty and pleasure the blight of their disdain. They had 
 petty souls, which could not rise above the dusty concerns of 
 municipal life and viewed its brighter, more soaring aspects
 
 58 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 with, at best, mere toleration. Once, between the dances, he 
 was accosted by Vidler, who began to relieve his soul on the 
 matter of the America Ground, the population of which was 
 flattening its nose against the ballroom windows. It was high 
 time, said the Alderman, that they approached the Commission 
 of Woods and Forests for the removal of this abomination . . . 
 and Monypenny who had vaguely enjoyed the sensation of a 
 hundred envious eyes fixed upon his revels, felt angry with 
 Vidler for bursting in with borough affairs, and for thinking 
 that he would care to listen. He broke away, and offered his 
 arm to a Hurdicott who wanted a chicken sandwich and a glass 
 of wine. 
 
 The small hours came, with their mingling of lassitude and 
 spurting energy the fiery furnace of proof, in which pleasure 
 shall either melt and trickle away or fiercely purge itself into 
 joy. One or two guests began to leave, but there was no 
 formal departure, rather a furtive slipping out, as of those who 
 know they leave a feast too early. Monypenny, lighter than 
 ever of foot and heart, saw one or two sleepy dowagers and 
 disappointed spinsters to their carriages the Town Council 
 had vanished unseen at the first opportunity and turned back 
 to the ballroom, triumphantly conscious that it now contained 
 no one but the young and joyful. 
 
 He looked down at his programme to see who was his next 
 partner, and felt a little qualm of annoyance when he saw that 
 it was Miss Wells. Her magic had gone, and he wondered now 
 how she had ever bewitched him. He had noticed her only 
 at intervals during the evening sitting in mixed mutiny and 
 resignation beside Lady Cockstreet, or with some ineligible- 
 looking partner dodging her crinoline. She had not danced 
 much. The Hurdicotts present knew who she was, and did not 
 favour her. Lady Cockstreet considered that she had made a 
 mistake in bringing her, lost heart, and seldom dared introduc- 
 tions. She was shocked at the way the girl had accosted Mony- 
 penny, and gave her a lecture on ballroom manners, which
 
 MORGAN LE FAY 59 
 
 did not increase the friendliness between them. Miss Wells 
 felt sore against this relative who was ashamed of her, and 
 the elder woman felt sorry for her charge and angry with those 
 other members of her family who had turned her kind action 
 into a blunder. 
 
 Monypenny advanced and claimed the governess with his 
 formal bow, and when he stood with her by his side, her little 
 hand in his for the mazurka, he felt some of the lost magic 
 creeping back. Again he had that impression of radiance and 
 whiteness the black ringlets bunching on her neck accentu- 
 ated the whiteness of her skin, and a subtle rich scent rose 
 from her silvery dress which swam like starlight round her 
 shoulders. She stood gravely swaying her fan, and there was 
 something in her attitude which amazed him, so assured was it, 
 so graceful and confident. He had not thought her capable of 
 thus assuming the airs of a great lady. 
 
 He found her a beautiful dancer, light as cobweb, yet with 
 a warmth and an abandonment which his other partners had 
 lacked. Sometimes when he held her lightly pliant against his 
 arm he was conscious of that wild woodland thrill surging up 
 under her laces and half startling him with thoughts of chasing 
 sunlight. He was at once troubled and enticed by the idea 
 that she might suddenly dart away, or be magically trans- 
 formed into some woodland Cinderella and run off brown and 
 barefoot with dead leaves in her hair. 
 
 But this was never more than an undercurrent. In spite of 
 her one big lapse from ballroom etiquette she was on the sur- 
 face pre-eminently a fine lady, more so indeed than his other 
 young lady partners, whom convention and education con- 
 demned to airs suitable to white muslin. There was something 
 far more adult about Morgan Wells, just as there was also 
 something far more childish. He realised that part of her 
 oddness, part of her charm lay in the fact that she had 
 escaped girlhood, that she was always child or woman, never 
 girl. She was woman tonight. In time he came to realise what
 
 60 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 all of her sex in the room had known from the first, that the 
 extraordinary whiteness of her skin was due to an extraordinary 
 thickness of powder, and that the scent had been sprinkled more 
 lavishly than discreetly on her gown. That the gown itself was 
 made only of the cheapest silver muslin, he was too inexperi- 
 enced to see, for she wore it as if it were brocade indeed, even 
 those who realised the shifts on which it rested were bound to 
 acknowledge her superbness, the fine, if at present unfinished, 
 assurance of her manner. She was not a Hurdicott in vain. 
 
 Monypenny danced two dances with her. Once they stood 
 by an open window, where the fresh air could blow on them. 
 She glanced out at the looming faces, still curiously prowling 
 in the night, and he found himself telling her about the America 
 Ground and his struggles with it, passing thence to his ambition 
 for the town. She listened and smiled, but he knew that his 
 confidences must seem very remote. The strange thing was 
 that while he had disliked talking of such matters to Vidler, 
 he should want to discuss them with this creature, who belonged 
 to the woods, except when, in fugitive moments like these, she 
 suddenly became a spirit of festivity, artificiality, tinsel and 
 riot. He dragged himself away from borough affairs. 
 
 "What does M. mean?" he asked, looking down at her breast, 
 where a small M. of pearls crept into the lace like a secret. 
 
 "It's for Morgan my name." 
 
 "Morgan That's an odd name for a girl." 
 
 "Mrs. Becket told me it was a fancy of my mamma's. She'd 
 been reading a book and wanted me called after someone in 
 it." 
 
 "Morgan le Fay, perhaps." 
 
 "Who was Morgan le Fay?" 
 
 "King Arthur's sister, an enchantress." 
 
 "I like being called after an enchantress. Was she very 
 wicked and very beautiful?" 
 
 The question amused him, and he smiled.
 
 MORGAN LE FAY 61 
 
 "The legend says that she was both. She enchanted the 
 King's sword, so that he lost the battle." 
 
 Morgan laughed and looked pleased. The next minute the 
 music stopped, and he took her back to Lady Cockstreet. 
 
 That dawn, when he lay down for a few hours' sleep, he 
 dreamed a queer dream of her that she had come to the ball 
 in her old gown, with leaves stuck in her hair, and had dis- 
 graced him. 
 
 4 
 
 Morgan Wells woke at the usual time, in spite of the strange 
 time she had gone to bed. Her restless spirit called her out 
 of sleep, dancing her to and fro. 
 
 As she dressed she reviewed the joys of the night. She had 
 enjoyed every moment, or rather she enjoyed every moment 
 now, for at the time there had been weariness and antipathies. 
 Now all such were hazed over with the golden glow of the last 
 hours, when she had danced with Monypenny and been admired 
 of him. 
 
 She knew that he had admired her, though he had not spoken 
 a word of his admiration. She knew that she had succeeded, 
 that all her thoughts and pains, all her spendings, had been 
 justified. She sang to herself as she stood before the glass 
 brushing her hair, then she danced a few steps of the mazurka, 
 winding up with an odd little skip. She dressed more carefully 
 than usual, and arranged her hair in a modified form of last 
 night's style. She had looked quite genteel last night, she told 
 herself, and a faint perfume still clung to her skin, making her 
 feel happy and languorous, filling her with dreams. 
 
 The children found her absent-minded as she dressed and 
 taught them. But also she was softer and gentler than usual, 
 and when little Charlotte begged her for a story, she did not 
 tell her not to plague her life out, or mockingly oblige with 
 Jack-a-Manory, but told her and the others a wonderful tale 
 about an enchantress called Morgan le Fay, who could work all
 
 62 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 sorts of spells, turn towns into woods and castles into mush- 
 rooms, and people into seashore pebbles, and at last was able 
 to bewitch the great king himself, so that he gave her his magic 
 sword. 
 
 The end of the story was rather vague, and the children be- 
 gan to interrupt. 
 
 "How funny her name was Morgan!" said Arthur "it's the 
 same as yours." 
 
 Miss Wells laughed, and looked out at a tamarisk making a 
 mock-summer with its green against the January sky. 
 
 "Perhaps I'm an enchantress, too." 
 
 "What rubbish! There are no such things." 
 
 "Yes, there are." 
 
 "There aren't." 
 
 "There are." 
 
 "Well, if you're an enchantress, what have you enchanted?" 
 
 "Lots of things lots of people." 
 
 "What?" 
 
 Miss Wells laughed. 
 
 "I've enchanted this town. It isn't a real town, you know 
 it's all tamarisk trees, and I made them into a town. One 
 day I shall wave my wand, and it will become tamarisks again." 
 
 "Rubbish," said Arthur. 
 
 "Wave it! Wave it!" cried Louise. 
 
 "Not yet," said Miss Wells. 
 
 That afternoon she told them she was going to take them for 
 a long walk. They set out up Cuckoo Hill, and then across 
 Spitalman's Down to where a little path winds back to the 
 seashore. Morgan wanted to go to the America Ground, but 
 there were objections to her entering it boldly from the town 
 end. It was a long walk, but at first the children enjoyed it, 
 for they were still playing at "enchantments." Morgan had to 
 tell them what everything they saw was in reality, before she 
 had waved her wand over it for instance how the fat 
 grey sheep cropping at the scanty winter turf were the Mayor
 
 MORGAN LE FAY 63 
 
 and Corporation of Marlingate, whom she had turned into 
 sheep till she came back to the town "for of course it's only 
 tamarisk trees now I'm away, and I don't want them to notice 
 anything." The sparrows hopping and twittering in the skew- 
 blown thornbushes were the children that played in the Mar- 
 lingate streets. On the barest spot of the Down she stopped 
 and told them that they were in a fine lady's drawing-room, and 
 that what they took for stones and gorse-thickets were really 
 sofas and chairs "and there's a carpet on the floor all over 
 big roses." 
 
 This worked very well for a time, then the children grew 
 tired and bored. Arthur said "Rubbish!" and Charlotte said 
 "I wan'er go home." Morgan was resolved not to go back the 
 way they had come. She hustled her charges down the steep 
 cliff path, telling them it was a "short cut," though she knew 
 it was two miles longer. She vowed at all costs to visit the 
 America Ground, for last night at the ball Monypenny had told 
 her he meant to go there that afternoon. 
 
 Her cheeks were hot and her eyes gleaming. She did not 
 feel the cold wind blowing through her shawl, or notice the 
 twilight dropping on the sea. She hurried the children along 
 the sea-road at the foot of the cliff, which in summer was 
 beautiful with sea-pink and the yellow-horned poppy and the 
 white campions with their huge puffed seed-boxes, but this 
 afternoon was bare save for the rough shingle rolled over it 
 by the storms. The sea was like a moon-stone, grey and 
 gleaming, unrippled by the off-shore wind, and the beach swept 
 down to it in stony hillocks, its speckled pinks and blues washed 
 by the dull light into a prevailing dun. 
 
 Morgan walked quickly, for she feared that she might be 
 late. The children lagged peevishly, and she had difficulty in 
 keeping them to her pace. At last, round a jut of the cliff, she 
 saw the America Ground, a disarray of inverted hulls and beg- 
 garly shacks. She told the children it was really a beautiful 
 city which she had bewitched, but the game had finally palled,
 
 64 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 and Charlotte and Louisa were openly in tears when they came 
 to the boundary of clothes-lines. 
 
 "I wan'er go home," wailed Charlotte. 
 
 "We are going home. This is the quickest way." 
 
 "It isn't." 
 
 "It is." 
 
 " "Tisn't." 
 
 "It is, I tell you." 
 
 They were not a party to enter the lawless city without at- 
 tracting notice. A beautiful young woman with her hair 
 dressed in the latest Paris fashion, a trifle disarrayed by the 
 wind, four unhappy children in tow, two of whom were crying 
 loudly, would rouse comment even in a civilised street. The 
 America Ground was not civilised. It stood in the same rela- 
 tion to Marlingate as an animal stands to a human being. It 
 had many of its appetites, but few of its habits. The place 
 was full of a kind of savage squalor. Inverted hulks studded 
 the shingle, their sides peeled by the wind and scabbed by the 
 sun, while from their bursting seams as well as from their chim- 
 neys poured the smoke of malodorous cooking. Most of the 
 dwellings were old boats, but there were also a few shacks, built 
 of the spars of wrecks, slopped over with tar which hung in inky 
 pendules from their eaves, and rose in a bubble-up of black 
 blisters from their walls. There was a shop, where one could 
 buy little more than long dark pickled slices of a fish known 
 locally as Robin Huss; there were fishermen's stores, and sev- 
 eral gin-shops already filling up with men in jerseys and ear- 
 rings. Two of these screamed out at Morgan. One or two 
 women came out to stare, and coupled their indignation at her 
 treatment of the children with most unwarrantable conjectures 
 as to her morals. Then an old fisherman mending a net swore 
 at Charlotte and Louisa for making a dirty noise. Ragged 
 children made rude remarks about Arthur and James. In time 
 a little crowd was following them. 
 
 All this while there was not a sign of Monypenny. Morgan
 
 MORGAN LE FAY 65 
 
 did not dare make any enquiries; she hurried on, disconcert- 
 ingly aware that she had not the slightest idea of her way out 
 of this abominable place. She,. was lost in a mess of evil- 
 smelling tracks, winding in and out of sheds and dwellings, of 
 pig-styes, stables, fishermen's stores, old boats, and a regular 
 entanglement of clothes-lines. Everywhere she saw nothing but 
 dark faces, slatternly women with their hair upon their shoul- 
 ders, children dirty and verminous, workmen from the Parade 
 and waterworks, home after their day's toil and beginning the 
 evening's soak. 
 
 "Show you your way out, lady?" said a dark, gipsy-looking 
 man with crinkled hair. 
 
 Morgan shook her head and hurried on. 
 
 "I'll show you your way out in five minutes if you'll give 
 me the little gal's locket." 
 
 "I know my way," muttered Morgan desperately. 
 
 She seized the now screaming Charlotte by the hand. At the 
 same time the young man snatched the locket and broke the 
 chain. The next moment he had disappeared, and Morgan, 
 blanched with fright, found herself the centre of a villainous 
 crowd which had ringed round her, evidently to prevent her fol- 
 lowing him. She thought she was going to faint a mist swam 
 before her she felt the children tearing at her skirts . . . then 
 suddenly the crowd seemed to melt away like a marsh-steam, 
 and she realised that she was standing face to face with Mony- 
 penny. 
 
 "What what on earth are you doing here?" 
 
 She began to laugh hysterically. 
 
 "I I oh, I don't know I lost my way I was trying to 
 get home." 
 
 "Come with me," said Monypenny. 
 
 She followed him through the sheds to a rope-walk beyond 
 which lay the open beach and the unfinished parade. She was 
 trembling, partly from fear at her adventure, partly from 
 the joy of having met him. She hoped he would walk back
 
 66 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 with them to the town, but when they came to the boundaries 
 of the America Ground he stopped abruptly. 
 
 "You're quite safe now, and you can see the Coney Banks 
 from here." 
 
 She stood looking up at him, as she had looked at the ball, 
 but this time there was no answer in his eyes. 
 
 "Oh, Mr. Monypenny, I'm so grateful to you. I don't 
 know what we should have done if you hadn't come." 
 
 To her dismay the line of his mouth grew stern. 
 
 "No, and I don't know either. It was a most rash thing to 
 do. This is no place to bring children to, and I'm sure Mr. 
 Becket would be highly displeased if he knew of it." 
 
 Morgan's face grew white, and she bit her lip painfully. 
 Her dreams were toppling about her ears, and as they fell 
 her anger rose and flamed. He looked on her just as a govern- 
 ess, whom he could reprimand for lack of duty to her em- 
 ployer. Her adventure had ended in a rebuke she was no 
 Morgan le Fay to him, just a mean little governess, after all. 
 She turned without speaking and hurried away with her charges 
 who noticed, to complete the terrors of the day, that the tears 
 were trickling and splashing down her face. 
 
 5 
 
 She walked quickly, her head bent, her arms rigid against 
 her sides. Ahead of her Marlingate swam in the grey twilight, 
 with that strange appearance of wind which sometimes affects 
 even the unshaken masses of roofs and streets. She scarcely 
 saw it, or the sea-road along which she stumbled, so thick was 
 the sorrow in her eyes and the rage in her heart. The children 
 called to her to go more slowly, but she did not heed them. 
 
 So Monypenny despised her. He had taken some notice 
 of her when she was well dressed, and perhaps he was sorry 
 for her with her few partners; but he had never really admired 
 her, she had never been to him for an instant what he had been
 
 MORGAN LE FAY 67 
 
 and was still to her. Her throat felt dry and tight, the un- 
 uttered sobs in her breast lay heavy there, like stones. He 
 looked upon her only as a governess, a paid servant. He had 
 not troubled about her own distress and danger, merely her 
 employer's disapproval and the risk to which she had put his 
 children. Little Charlotte was crying 
 
 "I wan' my locket." 
 
 "Be quiet," said Morgan roughly. 
 
 She could not bear anything that took her thoughts away 
 from Monypenny. They were fixed on him in a blind concen- 
 tration of desire. He was strong and young and handsome 
 the man she wanted. She had wanted him from the first mo- 
 ment she had seen him. It was the passion of a creature inex- 
 perienced, unawakened, and at the same time merciless to itself 
 and others in its cravings, proud with the reckless pride that 
 only the half-civilised can know. Morgan's passion had in it 
 the goad of hate, which urged it on to action. She vowed to 
 herself that she would break his pride, that the day should 
 come when he should look down on her no longer, but seek 
 her out and plead with her for herself. 
 
 She would not deny him. For at the bottom of all her rage 
 and hunger was her love for him. It was an unreasonable love, 
 sprung almost entirely out of externals, but now pulling from 
 the very roots of her heart. She loved him through his very 
 humiliation of her, while all the time she vowed to punish him 
 for it. "He shall love me," she told herself, as she came to the 
 grey, wind-musicked town and his love should be both her 
 revenge and her reward. 
 
 6 
 
 The Town Committee was anxious that theJParade should be 
 finished by the beginning of the summer season. The work 
 had gone briskly from the first, and by the early spring the sea- 
 front of Marlingate was transformed. The quaintness and mel-
 
 68 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 lowness had disappeared the old sea-wall with its odd occa- 
 sional growths of roof and house-front, the strand where the 
 tamarisk trees streamed like green pennons northeastward 
 from the wind and the black hulls of the fishing-smacks lay 
 moored between the tides. But in their place was something 
 not unbeautiful, not without its part in the rambling pictur- 
 esqueness of the town. 
 
 Decimus Figg had striven to combine his duty to Monypenny 
 as his patron with his duty to Marlingate as his inspiration. 
 It was not such a difficult matter as if, instead of Monypenny, 
 had been the Town Committee with its neo-Gothic visions, and 
 memories of the Steyn. Monypenny was anxious for the con- 
 tinuity of Marlingate to be preserved, even if at the same time 
 he had unfortunate yearnings for the crystalline. Figg had 
 imagined a Parade of gleaming whiteness, which should shine 
 out like the Gates of Pearl to voyagers on the sea, a white 
 shining line from Cuckoo Hill to All Holland Hill, shutting 
 away the tumbled blacks and reds of the streets, which should 
 flower behind its whiteness like poppies in an alabaster bowl. 
 His houses stood plain and serene in one long facade, with 
 square windows and quaintly columned doors. The parade had 
 a look of unhewn massiveness, snow-white like the rest, yet 
 boasting of its strength against the wave-shocks, proclaiming 
 itself not only the walk of fashion but the block and barrier of 
 storms. 
 
 Monypenny was pleased, for though it was not exactly the 
 Parade of his dreams, he saw its efficiency as a compromise be- 
 tween them and the requirements of Marlingate. He had 
 known all along that what he had pictured could never quite 
 be realised he was growing used to that sense of "beyondness" 
 which seemed to attaint his ideals for the town. 
 
 His fellow workers troubled him little it was characteristic 
 of him that he had already begun to ignore them. His es- 
 tates gave him the advantage, and he had contrived to establish 
 a tacit superiority in matters aesthetic. In finance he was more
 
 MORGAN LE FAY 69 
 
 ready to take counsel indeed he had left the Borough Loan 
 almost entirely to Becket, Lewnes and Lusted but the decora- 
 tion and polishing of Marlingate had been handed over to him 
 unreservedly; a casual talk with Pelham in which he laid down 
 his plans, the occasional pretence of consulting Becket which 
 his indebtedness demanded, a few dry announcements at Town 
 Committee meetings, were his sole acknowledgment of the fact 
 that Marlingate did not belong to him. So far his attitude was 
 accepted by the others. He saved them a lot of trouble, and 
 at the same time gave them ample proof of his capabilities. The 
 stupidest of them was forced to own that he had the best brains 
 in the town he also had the best house, the best clothes, the 
 best breeding. In odd moments, away from him, Lewnes or 
 Breeds or Lusted might suddenly remember that he was only 
 twenty-nine, but would forget it at once when he saw him 
 face to face cold, youthless, saturnine, more like some old 
 man who by dint of training and contrivance still managed to 
 look young, than the boy he was in fact. 
 
 Nearly every day he came down to the Parade, and walked 
 along it from its beginnings at the base of All Holland Hill, 
 to its end within a few yards of the America Ground. The 
 Gut'g Mouth Brook had been bridged by a reculver, and just 
 beyond this was a large semi-circular bay, where later on a 
 band-stand would be erected. The old sea-road was even now 
 being macadamised, so that by summer an elegant carriage- 
 drive should be ready for the visitors who would live and lodge 
 behind that gleaming fagade, low and white like some long 
 palace of the Medici. 
 
 One morning early in April, Monypenny was watching the 
 railings being put up at the edge of the promenade, when 
 glancing landwards, he saw the Becket children walking with 
 their governess on the other side of the road. He had not met 
 any of them since his encounter on the America Ground. Now 
 that he saw them it struck him as odd that he had not seen 
 them for so long. It is true that he had been extremely busy,
 
 7 o TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 and also that the whole family had been away for a month, 
 visiting an aunt at Tunbridge Wells, but in a small place like 
 Marlingate people were always meeting, unless they deliberately 
 avoided one another. 
 
 Then he realised that this was probably what Miss Wells 
 had tried to do. That afternoon on the America Ground he 
 had spoken sharply he had been indignant at her reckless- 
 ness and incompetence, and had not attempted to hide his feel- 
 ings. He understood now that this must have been exceedingly 
 painful to her, especially on the day after the ball, at which 
 he had admired her and treated her as a friend. An uncomfor- 
 table flush went up to Monypenny's white hair. For some 
 reason he saw his behaviour as intolerable, though it had never 
 struck him before in that light. He had treated her like the 
 little governess she was, forgetting that she had been something 
 very different in the woods and at the ball. A vague irrita- 
 tion possessed him why must she alternate her moods of wood- 
 elf and great lady with a third as baffling as either? As if it 
 were not confusing enough to meet a dryad all powdered and 
 tight-laced in a ball-room, must he be still further confounded 
 by meeting her crying in the nursery? 
 
 They were opposite him now, on the other side of the road. 
 His feelings of compunction once more predominant, he took 
 off his hat and made her a low, expiatory bow. He also moved 
 a step or two across the road, then stopped baffled. With a 
 very slight inclination of the head she had walked quickly on, 
 though obviously aware of his intention to cross. He had 
 made sure that she would be delighted to see him, reassured 
 and gratified by his friendliness. Instead of which she did not 
 even smile, merely walked on with a bare acknowledgment of 
 his salute. Monypenny bit his lip. A dart of anger went into 
 his heart and stabbed through to the boy. He would not be 
 flouted by her in public, he would go after her and make her 
 speak to him he did not care if it was impulsive and undigni- 
 fied. The workmen on the Parade were surprised to see their
 
 MORGAN LE FAY 71 
 
 stately task-master suddenly dash off after a woman and four 
 children who had just turned the corner of the High Street. 
 
 Morgan turned round as he came up. Her look was one of 
 cold enquiry, veiling a challenge. 
 
 "Good morning," he said rather breathlessly "it's such a 
 long time since I've seen any of you, that I hope you will forgive 
 me for running after you to ask how you are." 
 
 "We're very well, thank you." 
 
 "And Mr. Becket? Has he gone back to London yet?" 
 
 "No. There is a Town Committee meeting today." 
 
 Monypenny darkened with anger at his slip, and her aware- 
 ness of it. Something in her manner had disorganised him, 
 and he was fumbling like a school-boy. She made a movement 
 as if she would walk on, and he searched desperately for a 
 pretext to detain her. It was at his elbow the confec- 
 tioner's shop into which the young Beckets, during this dis- 
 course of their elders, were hungrily gazing. 
 
 "Do you young people like tarts?" 
 
 "Oh, yes, thank you " 
 
 "Then come in and eat as many as you can manage." 
 
 "No eating between meals," began Miss Wells, but the Becket 
 family hurled itself into the shop, and Monypenny gave her a 
 look which said "My trick! " 
 
 Very soon they were all seated round a marble-topped table, 
 Monypenny opposite the governess, who in spite of her dignity 
 had chosen a very unwholesome-looking pink cake. 
 
 "This is jolly," said Arthur. "Mr. Monypenny is a brick." 
 
 "Dear Mr. Mullypelly," gurgled Louisa, and Charlotte slid 
 a sticky hand into his. 
 
 Monypenny felt out of place and ridiculous, and his self- 
 consciousness was increased by his conviction that Miss Wells 
 was laughing at him. What was the terrible little creature's 
 game? Why had she suddenly put on these airs, and why was 
 she laughing at him now? He looked across at her as she sat 
 eating her cake, and tried to imagine how he had ever seen
 
 72 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 either wildness or worldliness in this absurd grown-up child. 
 Then suddenly as he looked at her, she lifted her eyes, and her 
 glance crept over him, slow, melting, sensuous, under the wink- 
 ing shadow of her lashes. Her eyes seemed to be drawing him 
 into their depths, sucking him down into themselves like two 
 treacherous whirlpools of untroubled surface and devouring 
 heart. At the same time her lips parted, seemed to grow fuller, 
 redder, suddenly dangerous. . . . 
 
 Monypenny rose to his feet. His head was going round. 
 He went a few steps towards the door, then clumsily pulled out 
 his watch, and mumbled something about an appointment. 
 Then he remembered he had left his hat under his chair; for 
 one wild moment he thought of going without it, but he was 
 able to recover himself sufficiently to go back and fetch it, 
 bow to Miss Wells, and finally make his escape. As he shut 
 the door he heard her laugh, but it was not till he was half-way 
 up the street that he realised what an utter fool she had made 
 of him. 
 
 7 
 
 For some days afterwards he felt ruffled and disconcerted, 
 and made up his mind in future to avoid Miss Wells. She 
 had affronted his shyness, and he was too inexperienced in 
 these new ways to realise that a creature of such transparent 
 artifice was scarcely to be dreaded. Sometimes he asked him- 
 self a question beginning "Was it possible that . . . ?" then, 
 before he had finished asking it, choked it down with the 
 answer, "No, it couldn't be." The idea was preposterous, and 
 due to the foolish state into which for some unaccountable 
 reason she had plunged him. He rushed his mind into muni- 
 cipal affairs like a hunted animal burrowing into the earth for 
 safety. Under the comfortable, solid bricks of Marlingate he 
 would bury this new disquiet; Miss Wells should have no 
 more chances of twisting and troubling a respectable Alder- 
 man's life.
 
 MORGAN LE FAY 73 
 
 Marlingate was now busily preparing for the summer season. 
 Advance bookings were good, and several of the new houses 
 on the Parade had been let. Up behind the town, Becket Grove 
 was patching the rim of the woods with unexpected roofs. 
 Here Decimus Figg had become rural, and built with the huge 
 roof-spreads he had noticed on farm-houses inland, and the flat 
 latticed windows that had been knocked out of nearly every old 
 house in Marlingate to make room for the Alderman-like bows 
 that Lusted loved. 
 
 Encouraged by the letting of these villas, Monypenny planned 
 building larger ones, just off Rye Lane, on the slope of 
 All Holland Hill. There was no doubt that Marlingate was at- 
 tracting a "superior" set of visitors, the kind which is always 
 on the verge of becoming resident, which seldom takes lodgings 
 for less than six weeks, and spends more on its comforts than 
 on its amusements. To a certain extent this was due to Becket 
 but he had done little more than start things. Monypenny flat- 
 tered himself that the town's success with this "superior" class 
 was because it was itself "superior" in position, climate, scen- 
 ery, accommodation, and entertainment. There was nothing 
 cheap or makeshift about it, nothing of the pushing, imperma- 
 nent, mushroom town. There was nothing fast or showy, no 
 cardboard attempts to reproduce the gaieties and conveniences 
 of London. It was solid and respectable, without being heavy or 
 bourgeois. The houses both old and new were well-built, and 
 into the bargain the old were picturesque and the new were 
 elegant. There was no attempt to increase enormously the 
 borough's area Monypenny was resolved only to build such 
 houses as he could afford to build well and be sure of letting to 
 the best people. There was no sign of that slum-hinterland 
 which so generally springs up behind a prosperous seaside re- 
 sort the America Ground, it is true, still flourished, but was 
 doomed, for the Commission of Woods and Forests had now 
 turned their eye upon it, and no doubt in the slow-grinding of 
 their mills it would one day be ground exceeding small.
 
 74 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 The water-works were nearly finished, and the Parade was 
 quite so. The band-stand was now begun, and a band had been 
 engaged. There had been a good deal of discussion in the 
 Borough Council as to whether shops should be allowed on the 
 sea-front. Lewnes, Lusted, Vidler, and all the tradesmen 
 members were anxious to have them, but Monypenny opposed 
 them with his whole power. The place would deteriorate at 
 once, he said, if the Parade became a shopping thoroughfare; 
 it was to be a garden, an enclosure of beauty, no mart or forum 
 of trade-competition. That long white facade was to be in- 
 violate of plate glass or painted sign. There was plenty of 
 room for shops in the High Street, where Lewnes's estab- 
 lishment was undergoing staggering embellishments in view 
 of the coming season. On the sea-front itself he was allowing 
 a Marine Arcade, which combined a tasteful exposition of fancy 
 goods with a collection of "Wonders of the Deep," altogether 
 a select and beautiful undertaking. 
 
 8 
 
 Meanwhile triumph prevailed in the enemy's camp. Mor- 
 gan Wells knew that she had been successful. She made no 
 attempt to review the series of blunders whch had somehow 
 tumbled her into her heart's desire they seemed rather fine 
 tactics to her now. Nor did she analyse the exact quality of 
 her attainment. All she knew was that she had managed to 
 make a fool of Monypenny, and being a fool was a good 
 preliminary to being a lover. 
 
 It would soon be time, however, to pass from preliminaries 
 to the actual business, and that might not be so easy. This 
 occurred to her after a week or two, during which she did not 
 meet Monypenny even once. It was of course perfectly easy 
 for him to avoid her; he was in a very different position from 
 what hers would have been if it were he who pursued he 
 could have come in contact with her on a dozen pretexts,
 
 MORGAN LE FAY 75 
 
 whereas there was none which a little governess could make 
 for seeking out the chief Alderman of Marlingate. All she 
 could do was to hover round the places where she was most 
 likely to meet him, and she noticed that he seemed to have 
 left his old haunts. He never came to the Parade now that 
 the workmen were gone, and the band played there instead 
 of the music of hammer and pick. She had heard from Becket 
 that the America Ground business was temporarily settled, 
 and anyhow she would not have dared seek him there again. 
 Sometimes she went up with her charges to where Becket 
 Grove was crushing the spring out of the woods; but he was 
 not there. She could never find him. Yet the town was full 
 of him; she heard his name on everyone's lips; she was told 
 of his presence at Council and Committee, at concerts, card- 
 parties, balls, and other places from which she was shut out. 
 She knew that he must be avoiding her, and to a certain ex- 
 tent the knowledge made her pleased and proud. But it also 
 gave her a strange sense of helplessness, for it was an atti- 
 tude he could maintain indefinitely; it was not as if she were 
 some society woman whom he was bound to meet sooner or 
 later. He could avoid her for ever if he chose. 
 
 Had there been time and opportunity, she might have played 
 her old game of avoiding him herself. She saw now that it 
 had been one of her best points of strategy it had piqued 
 him, and goaded him at last to pursuit. But she had no means 
 of making her avoidance effective or even noticeable, and 
 early in June she was to go with Becket and the children to 
 Scotlaid, where one of his sisters was married to a Glasgow 
 ship-owner and had a summer villa at Rothesay. There was 
 only May in which to work, and May was slipping by in a 
 procession of golden hopes all unfulfilled. 
 
 The long tender days, with their drowse of sun and sea, 
 the evenings of gold and amethyst when the sirens crooned 
 in the fogs, were thick with a promise she only half under- 
 stood, an aching incompleteness, a sense of unfulfilment
 
 76 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 which seemed one with the hunger of her heart. Nature in 
 its hot, lush maturity, its thick fecundity, its heavy-aired 
 consummation, was somehow drawn by her to be part of her 
 own craving and emptiness, till she saw it only in the light 
 of her desire, and flowering grass and dancing flies and mated 
 birds and teeming sea, and all the contentment of the fer- 
 tile thundery air, were thrilled through with the sadness of 
 human love, with the ache of her empty arms and uncherished 
 lips, till she felt as if Monypenny himself must see the torrent 
 of the long, hushed evenings that brooded over his town. 
 
 Her want of him had passed into a second definite stage. 
 At first it had been compounded of resentment and admira- 
 tion, now somehow both these had been transmuted into more 
 subtle essences. In the place of resentment was a heavy sick- 
 ness of soul, and in the place of admiration the fever of 
 that sickness. Her brain seemed to have lost its powers of 
 planning she could only drift, yet never before had her de- 
 sire been more imperative; in the Winter it had been some- 
 thing outside herself, something she could mould with imag- 
 inings and feed with dreams now it belonged to the deep- 
 est, most secret parts of her being, it had become the potter 
 of her clay, and could be quieted only by love or by death. 
 
 The weeks passed, and June had come. Then she had a 
 feeble spurt of hope. The children had been promised a 
 farewell picnic before leaving Marlingate, and it struck her 
 that it might be possible to trap Monypenny with this. She 
 suggested to the little girls that they should ask their father 
 if they might invite Mr. Monypenny. But Charlotte and 
 Louisa found the suggestion uninspiring, and Arthur and 
 James were no better when approached. In spite of his gen- 
 erous conduct at the pastry-cook's, Monypenny was unpop- 
 ular with the little Beckets. They found him staid and stiff 
 and horribly grown-up; even Papa was more fun. Also Miss 
 Wells was not in favour with them just now, having been cross 
 and unlike herself for the last month; she had failed to keep
 
 MORGAN LE FAY 77 
 
 the secret of her own eagerness for Monypenny's invitation, 
 and with childish cruelty they resolved she should not have 
 her wish. She liked that horrid starched old prig, as the 
 boys called him, and perhaps he was the reason for her hav- 
 ing suddenly become grown-up too. 
 
 Morgan saw that nothing was to be done that way; for a 
 day or two she relapsed into inactivity, then the ever pres- 
 ent conciousness that only her own efforts could save her 
 roused her to the need for exertion. What did girls in nov- 
 els do when they wanted men to love them? She diligently 
 studied the romances that came her way, and reached the de- 
 pressing conclusion that the girls in novels did nothing. In 
 vain she searched the pages of "All The Year Round," Miss 
 Betham Edwards, Mrs. Ewing, and the new American nov- 
 els that everyone was reading the young women in them re- 
 mained obstinately passive, languishing in blushes and si- 
 lence for the favour of the adored; at best they went no fur- 
 ther than prayer a method Morgan had long ago given up 
 as useless. She came reluctantly to the conclusion that it 
 was not considered right or proper for woman to woo, and 
 that no self-respecting heroine would do so. The discovery de- 
 pressed her, but she did not waste much time over it. If 
 heroines made no effort to win their hearts' desire, then she 
 was willing to forego the privilege of being one. After all, was 
 not the part of wicked enchantress much more thrilling? Her 
 thoughts swung back to Morgan le Fay, and she saw herself 
 the witch who enchanted the enchanter and bound him her 
 slave. That was better than being a milk-and-water miss in a 
 novel, humbly waiting till her lord chanced to look her way. 
 She would not rest till she had found him and bound 
 him; by some means which fate would send he should be hers. 
 There should be no more aching Junes. . . .
 
 78 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 9 
 
 Monypenny was walking up the Coney Banks to call on 
 Lewnes about a little matter of town finance, when he en- 
 countered Becket. 
 
 "Good evening," said the latter "I was on my way to 
 your house." 
 
 "Then I'm fortunate to have spared you the trouble." 
 
 Becket never knew what to do with Monypenny's starched 
 politeness. He coughed and cleared his throat. 
 
 "Er yer are you particularly engaged next Wednesday?" 
 
 "No," said Monypenny. 
 
 "Because I had planned a little farewell gathering before 
 our departure for Scotland. Quite informal, you know just 
 the Leo Hurdicotts, the Papillons, the Fulleyloves, and Lady 
 Cockstreet, who is staying with the Leos. I thought we might 
 have an excursion a picnic French Landing or somewhere 
 along the cliffs." 
 
 "Delightful," murmured Monypenny. 
 
 Becket turned and began to walk with him towards Lewnes's 
 house. 
 
 "I had promised the children a treat some time ago. It 
 was Miss Wells who suggested that we might make a little 
 function of it. This is not the weather for drawing-room as- 
 semblies, and I feel that in this way we can all enjoy ourselves, 
 adults and children." 
 
 Miss Wells! He might have guessed it. Monypenny hardly 
 listened to the rest of Becket's amiable prosing, he was too 
 bitterly preoccupied with the trap in which he found him- 
 self. Why had he so readily disclaimed an engagement? He 
 ought to have been more suspicious, and left at least one way 
 of escape. Now it would be very difficult to wriggle out if 
 indeed he could decently do so at all. He did not care a 
 damn for Becket, but there were Hurdicotts to be consid- 
 ered, and a Dowager who must not be offended. He would
 
 MORGAN LE FAY 79 
 
 have to go and make himself agreeable to those people. As 
 for the governess 
 
 He was roused from his meditations by hearing her name. 
 
 "A wonderful woman," said Becket. 
 
 "I agree," said Monypenny. 
 
 "I am glad to hear you say that, for at one time I actu- 
 ally thought you were prejudiced against her." 
 
 Monypenny laughed. 
 
 "Of course," continued the other, "she is not like an ordi- 
 nary governess." 
 
 "You never spoke a truer word." 
 
 "I look upon her more as a daughter than as as a de- 
 pendant." 
 
 "She's a wonderful woman. Why don't you marry her?" 
 
 Becket's jaw fell and his eyes bulged. 
 
 "Why don't you marry her?" repeated Monypenny roughly. 
 
 "My dear sir I I the bare idea I mean the unsuit- 
 ableness and my beloved wife has not been dead two years." 
 
 "All the more reason for you to marry again " Monypenny 
 was speaking almost at random. "She's well born in spite of 
 her bar sinister, and she's beautiful, and she's clever oh, 
 damn clever! She's fond of the children, and she'd shine in 
 society with a little more polish. I don't suppose she'd dis- 
 grace you oftener than once a week. W T hy don't you marry 
 her?" 
 
 Becket's attitude had collapsed from astonishment to a 
 pained disapproval. 
 
 "I don't understand how you can even suggest that a man 
 in my position should marry a woman in hers. Her unfortu- 
 nate birth . . . and and other things. ... It would be 
 most unseemly, even if ... And I don't think you realise," 
 he added sorrowfully, "how time only increases my resolution 
 never to put anyone in my dear Emma's place. I must beg 
 you to accept my statement that my wife's memory is sacred 
 and shall never be supplanted."
 
 80 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 "Oh, certainly," said Monypenny carelessly. He had reached 
 Lewnes's house, and stopped at the gate. Becket thought he 
 looked strangely flushed. If he had not known him for the 
 most temperate of men . . . 
 
 10 
 
 On a sunny and stuffy afternoon a week later a string of 
 elegant carriages could be seen on the road that runs east- 
 ward along the back of the cliffs from Marlingate to Rye. The 
 first was the Leo Hurdicotts' and contained Mrs. Leo and 
 Lady Cockstreet, with Alaric Papillon and Monypenny dodg- 
 ing under their parasols. In the next came Leo himself tram- 
 pling the heart of little round-faced Mrs. Alaric, with his eye- 
 glass and Dundreary whiskers, while Mrs. Fulleylove and the 
 Reverend Somerville Hunt discussed the Romish practices at 
 St. Paul's Knightsbridge. Becket was in the third carriage 
 with Fulleylove, his daughter, and Victoria Hurdicott. Then 
 came two carriagefuls of children infant Beckets, Fulley- 
 loves, Papillons and Hurdicotts, swarming round their govern- 
 esses and nurses. 
 
 It was a deadly way of enjoying oneself, thought Mony- 
 penny. All the same he could not prevent an uneasy convic- 
 tion that he would have been perfectly satisfied but for that 
 last carriage. The day was ideal for a seaside picnic, and he 
 was in the company of charming women not that he cared 
 much for women's society, but these added wit and brains to 
 their more obvious attractions. He was also working for Mar- 
 lingate in the subtle social way he loved already Lady Cock- 
 street had asked him to send her particulars of the Rye Lane 
 houses. Nevertheless he was conscious of a strange inward ex- 
 asperation, which seemed to magnify the uglinesses and stupid- 
 ities of his surroundings. He chafed at the idea of being thus, 
 a man of full vigour and youth, driving in a C-springed car- 
 riage under ladies' sunshades somehow he wanted, as he had
 
 MORGAN LE FAY 81 
 
 never wanted before, to be away out of it all, there on the bit- 
 ten brown edge of the cliff, among the gorse-clumps and the 
 skew-blown tamarisks he wanted to feel the short tough 
 grass under his feet, and smell its trodden sweetness to roll 
 on the thyme and the thrift and bite their stalks. ... He re- 
 minded himself angrily that he was an Alderman of Marlin- 
 gate. 
 
 A lane left the road for French Landing, a surface of 
 creamy marl, baked by the sun into ruts and hog-backed 
 ridges. Along this the carriages bumped and swayed, stopping 
 at last at a farmhouse outside Landing Wood. From this the 
 party was to walk the ladies were helped out of the ba- 
 rouches and walked along the field-path, holding their petti- 
 coats off the grass. Monypenny walked between Lady Cock- 
 street and Mrs. Fulleylove, whose muslin domes each side of 
 him were like redoubts against the attacking armies of earth 
 and wind, whose generalship seemed now to lie in a vague 
 blue figure flitting in the field behind him, invisible save when 
 he rashly turned his head, yet somehow filling all his con- 
 sciousness. 
 
 French Landing was a gap in the cliffs, two of which had 
 caught a wood between them, a little struggling wood of 
 stunted oaks, which writhed out at one end into the open 
 country and at the other dripped over huge broken masses 
 of chalk and sandstone down to the sea. Here the French had 
 landed for one of their many sacks of Marlingate. They had 
 beached their ships under the protecting jut of the Gringer, 
 and marching west had shown the little fourteenth century 
 town the horrors of plunder, fire and rape. In later years 
 they had made more friendly, more dishonest landings. The 
 place had been a favourite smuggling haunt fifty years 
 ago, and there were stories of kegs still buried in un- 
 known caves or the matting of thorn and bramble. A little 
 creek trickled through the wood into the sea, and here no 
 doubt, in the shelter of split and tumbled rocks, many a
 
 82 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 French cutter had shipped her cargo of Burgoyne wine, or 
 Scotch coaster, spirit-reeking at her seams, landed whisky 
 tubs in defiance of batsmen and excise. 
 
 Down by the sea, the closeness of the day had lifted, and 
 while the thundery vapour danced inland, a soft green fresh- 
 ness rustled under the trees. The sunlight spattered through 
 the leaves, and the scents of spurge and dog-rose were washed 
 in the dew that had only just dried and would soon fall again. 
 
 Tea was spread at once, and the company sat down, dap- 
 pling the green mysterious coolness with pinks and blues and 
 heliotropes and garish blots of white. There was a good deal 
 of talk and laughter, and the children chattered. Monypenny 
 sat at the end of the great cloth that had been spread ridic- 
 ulously over the moss; Lady Cockstreet was still beside him, 
 leaning against a stump, on his other side was Victoria Hur- 
 dicott, her pretty pointed face simpering between ringlets, 
 her minute parasol fighting the solitary ray of sunlight that had 
 filtered through the leaves above her and threatened to put a 
 freckle on her nose. 
 
 With a cowardice pitiable even to himself he had striven to 
 put the greatest possible distance at most about five feet be- 
 tween him and Morgan Wells. He had not spoken to her yet, 
 she had been submerged in children, but he knew that he would 
 not be allowed to make a final escape. Why, he was the reason 
 of the picnic, its motive and attraction, and she, the obscure 
 little governess, was in reality the hostess, the planner and or- 
 ganiser of the whole. He could not help a bitter smile, but the 
 next moment it faded on his lips. His peril was no laughing 
 matter. 
 
 He knew now that he was in danger, or rather it was now 
 that he acknowledged it. He might listen with one ear to 
 the Dowager's worldly tattle or to Victoria's girlish niceties, 
 but really he was straining to catch the words of little Wells 
 as she talked to the Fulleyloves' governess. He was watch- 
 ing her too, wondering why she never looked in his direc-
 
 MORGAN LE FAY 83 
 
 tion. Then suddenly her eyes turned deliberately to his, met 
 them and held them, as they had done six weeks ago in the 
 confectioner's shop, and he seemed to feel the manhood go 
 out from him to her in a passion of seeking. 
 
 He wondered if Lady Cockstreet saw his emotion, and if 
 she did whether she realised its cause. She was a woman of 
 the world, and shrewd into the bargain. Morgan was not a 
 woman of the world, she was a woman of the woods. She 
 was all the more dangerous because she was unpruned and 
 primitive and swayed by winds. A worldly woman would 
 be easier to reckon with also there would be no subtle al- 
 liance between her and the wind and trees, such as he was 
 conscious of now. There seemed something prophetic in his 
 shrinking from the woods round Marlingate, in his sense of 
 them as a hungry beast prowling round his town. ... A 
 long deep sigh seemed to pass up through them, stirless in 
 the trees, carrying in its depths a roar as of power and won- 
 der. He shuddered and looked round him then someone 
 said: "Hark to the sea! You can hear it quite plainly." So 
 it was his other enemy that had found him out, the sea, that 
 other great eternity outside his little bit of time. . . . 
 
 The meal was really over; Morgan was eating cherries. They 
 bobbed against her lips. Monypenny found himself staring 
 at her lips. She wore a shady hat, under which her face was 
 mysterious, large-eyed like a fawn. Her gown was blue, as if 
 shredded from the sea. 
 
 The company was rising, and looking neither right nor left 
 Monypenny walked down the path with Lady Cockstreet. 
 He found in her a kind of support. How infinitely superior, 
 he told himself, old women were to young so much sweeter, 
 stronger, and wiser, like good old wine.
 
 84 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 " 
 
 As they walked down the path the boom of the sea came 
 louder through the trees. The two enemies seemed to sway 
 together in sound, hemming him in with their surge and rus- 
 tle, while the sunshine racing in and out of the bowing branches 
 spattered him with strange flecks and ripples of light. There 
 was a musty scent of nettles. 
 
 "I suppose, Mr. Monypenny," said Lady Cockstreet, "that 
 we shall find you an enthusiastic reader of Cornhill." 
 
 "I am looking forward to its appearance, I must say; espe- 
 cially as I hear on very good authority that Thackeray is to be 
 editor." 
 
 "You admire Thackeray?" 
 
 "Ever since I read 'Barry Lyndon' in Fraser's." 
 
 Monypenny looked round him uneasily. He thought he 
 heard a rustle in the trees. 
 
 "Would you put Titmarsh before Boz?" 
 
 "I would for Boz has no idea of beauty; also, though he 
 perhaps knows more of human nature, Thackeray knows more 
 of the world." 
 
 Lady Cockstreet wondered why the Alderman was looking 
 behind him. 
 
 "I must say," she continued, "that 'A Tale of Two Cities' 
 struck me as immensely inferior to 'Esmond.' " 
 
 "It is inferior in beauty." 
 
 "You would put beauty high in an author's list of quali- 
 fications?" 
 
 "Of course." What the devil was she talking about, this 
 woman? He hoped he was answering her sensibly. 
 
 "I can see how you have worked for beauty in Marlin- 
 gate." 
 
 He did not reply. Once again he heard that strange crackle 
 in the undergrowth, but this time it was in front of him, and
 
 MORGAN LE FAY 85 
 
 the next moment with scarcely a tremor of surprise, so in- 
 evitable it seemed, he saw Morgan on the path. 
 
 "Mr. Monypenny," she began at once, "Mr. Becket would 
 like very much to speak to you. He's over there outside the 
 wood." 
 
 "I am with Lady Cockstreet," said Monypenny stiffly. 
 
 "Of course he didn't know that. But if Lady Cockstreet 
 will allow me I can walk with her to the dripping-well and 
 meet you both there. He's only just outside the wood he'd 
 have come to you himself if he wasn't with Mrs. Fulleylove 
 and Miss Hurdicott. They say this path spoils their shoes, 
 so he asked me if I'd mind looking for you." 
 
 Monypenny distrusted the situation, but realised that any 
 objections would sound odd to Lady Cockstreet. Besides if 
 Morgan walked with her to the dripping- well. . . . 
 
 "Don't worry about me, Mr. Monypenny," said the Dow- 
 ager, "I shall easily find my way with this young lady." 
 
 Monypenny promptly conceived the insane idea that she 
 was in league with the enemy, and with a few maimed apol- 
 ogies, hurried off down the little path that led to the cliff side. 
 The next moment he realised that he had behaved like a school- 
 boy, but it was too late to make amends. So he fell to blam- 
 ing Morgan there was some fatality about her, driving him to 
 all kinds of cubbish imbecility. He ground his teeth as he 
 hurried through the young oak scrub. He must take himself 
 in hand, he must pull himself together. The fact was, he was 
 ashamed of his own inexperience; she was making him com- 
 pare himself to other men in his relations with her sex. That 
 was another part of the spell she cast over him and no or- 
 dinary man, he told himself, would have been influenced by it. 
 He must get a bit more normal in his relations with women 
 then he would not fall a prey to any ill-bred little upstart 
 who threw herself at his head. 
 
 He was outside the wood now, and of course Becket was 
 nowhere to be seen. But why had she . . .
 
 88 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 then that the adventure began to look entirely mad. He re- 
 visualised it, and suddenly laughed, the laugh passing into a 
 shudder of horror. Good Lord! what had he done with his 
 life? Bent it, twisted it, made out of its flowing lines some- 
 thing crooked and meretricious. And yet, mixed with this re- 
 actionary criticism, lingered still a choking sense of sweetness, 
 sometimes merely latent in his self-reproach, sometimes over- 
 powering it and sweeping him back helpless into the past, to 
 stand between the woods and the sea with a woman's heart 
 beating against his own. 
 
 His servant put the port on the table and left the room. It 
 was filled with dusk, a thick mysterious twilight that seemed 
 to hang like a film about the middle rose-bowl, gathering up 
 its perfume and spilling it into the shadows. The man's figure 
 sat blocked against the window, motionless, like some black 
 Pacific god. He was thinking, and stumbling strangely among 
 his thoughts. Half of him was praying for help to his sur- 
 roundings, half of him harked back to French Landing, 
 smelling the sea, and the leaves in the hair of Morgan le 
 Fay. . . . 
 
 He drank some port it seemed to help him. It was the 
 very colour and spirit of mahogany, the concentrated es- 
 sence of his house. He knew now that he was awakening 
 from the dream, his past life no longer seemed entirely cut off 
 from him by one mad moment. The more he thought of it, 
 the madder it seemed. And the consequences ... he 
 drained another glass of port. He had promised to meet 
 her tomorrow at the Slide; the chief Alderman, the future 
 Mayor, of Marlingate, had an assignation with a nursery 
 governess. He always called Morgan that when he wanted 
 to escape from her, knowing that she was as much one as a 
 changeling fairy would be, a puck or a goblin put by curi- 
 osity or enchantment into the place. She was no governess, 
 and he was no Alderman they were man and woman to-
 
 MORGAN LE FAY 89 
 
 gether. Curse it, there he was back again! Running round 
 and round this one little circle like a goat on a stake. 
 
 He was a fool. What other man, he wondered, would have 
 been so easily caught? It was his utter inexperience of women 
 that had put him so helplessly into her hands. She had used 
 no art, no subtlety, no special skill she had crudely and 
 vulgarly thrown herself at his head. Any man with the slight- 
 est knowledge of women would have laughed at her. He had 
 been an easy prey a fledgling, and she had him in her 
 claws. 
 
 And yet ... he was back under the Gringer, his arms 
 were round her, his mouth closed on the sweetness of her 
 lips. . . . 
 
 He spoke plainly to himself. This was a case of mere sex- 
 ual attraction. His masculinity had been starved and had 
 snatched at the morsel offered him. How could he expect to 
 feel any real love for a woman he had met so seldom and un- 
 der such unfavourable circumstances, who was worlds apart 
 from him in taste and conduct and character and position? 
 It was merely the healthy hungry young man in him crying 
 out to the healthy satisfying young woman in her. Yet he 
 could not forget the exaltation of soul that had come to him 
 as he held her, that sense of possessing all things from the 
 ground under his feet to the sky above his head, of having 
 reached out at last beyond the illusion of his desires and 
 grasped that reality for which he had always unconsciously 
 striven. 
 
 He rose from the table, and went across to the window. 
 Outside, lights were beginning to dot and twinkle. He heard 
 the rattle of a cart on the road, he heard a faint stir of 
 movement coming from the High Street, over which hung 
 a flushed haze of lamps. Then music floated towards him 
 from a house close by dance music; with its faint tinkle it 
 seemed to entice him back into the life of Marlingate, the 
 balls and assemblies, concerts and routs. He thought of the
 
 88 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 then that the adventure began to look entirely mad. He re- 
 visualised it, and suddenly laughed, the laugh passing into a 
 shudder of horror. Good Lord! what had he done with his 
 life? Bent it, twisted it, made out of its flowing lines some- 
 thing crooked and meretricious. And yet, mixed with this re- 
 actionary criticism, lingered still a choking sense of sweetness, 
 sometimes merely latent in his self-reproach, sometimes over- 
 powering it and sweeping him back helpless into the past, to 
 stand between the woods and the sea with a woman's heart 
 beating against his own. 
 
 His servant put the port on the table and left the room. It 
 was filled with dusk, a thick mysterious twilight that seemed 
 to hang like a film about the middle rose-bowl, gathering up 
 its perfume and spilling it into the shadows. The man's figure 
 sat blocked against the window, motionless, like some black 
 Pacific god. He was thinking, and stumbling strangely among 
 his thoughts. Half of him was praying for help to his sur- 
 roundings, half of him harked back to French Landing, 
 smelling the sea, and the leaves in the hair of Morgan le 
 Fay. . . . 
 
 He drank some port it seemed to help him. It was the 
 very colour and spirit of mahogany, the concentrated es- 
 sence of his house. He knew now that he was awakening 
 from the dream, his past life no longer seemed entirely cut off 
 from him by one mad moment. The more he thought of it, 
 the madder it seemed. And the consequences ... he 
 drained another glass of port. He had promised to meet 
 her tomorrow at the Slide; the chief Alderman, the future 
 Mayor, of Marlingate, had an assignation with a nursery 
 governess. He always called Morgan that when he wanted 
 to escape from her, knowing that she was as much one as a 
 changeling fairy would be, a puck or a goblin put by curi- 
 osity or enchantment into the place. She was no governess, 
 and he was no Alderman they were man and woman to-
 
 MORGAN LE FAY 89 
 
 gather. Curse it, there he was back again! Running round 
 and round this one little circle like a goat on a stake. 
 
 He was a fool. What other man, he wondered, would have 
 been so easily caught? It was his utter inexperience of women 
 that had put him so helplessly into her hands. She had used 
 no art, no subtlety, no special skill she had crudely and 
 vulgarly thrown herself at his head. Any man with the slight- 
 est knowledge of women would have laughed at her. He had 
 been an easy prey a fledgling, and she had him in her 
 claws. 
 
 And yet ... he was back under the Gringer, his arms 
 were round her, his mouth closed on the sweetness of her 
 lips. . . . 
 
 He spoke plainly to himself. This was a case of mere sex- 
 ual attraction. His masculinity had been starved and had 
 snatched at the morsel offered him. How could he expect to 
 feel any real love for a woman he had met so seldom and un- 
 der such unfavourable circumstances, who was worlds apart 
 from him in taste and conduct and character and position? 
 It was merely the healthy hungry young man in him crying 
 out to the healthy satisfying young woman in her. Yet he 
 could not forget the exaltation of soul that had come to him 
 as he held her, that sense of possessing all things from the 
 ground under his feet to the sky above his head, of having 
 reached out at last beyond the illusion of his desires and 
 grasped that reality for which he had always unconsciously 
 striven. 
 
 He rose from the table, and went across to the window. 
 Outside, lights were beginning to dot and twinkle. He heard 
 the rattle of a cart on the road, he heard a faint stir of 
 movement coming from the High Street, over which hung 
 a flushed haze of lamps. Then music floated towards him 
 from a house close by dance music; with its faint tinkle it 
 seemed to entice him back into the life of Marlingate, the 
 balls and assemblies, concerts and routs. He thought of the
 
 90 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 Marine Parade, swimming with colours and lights, of the As- 
 sembly Room like a crystal box, of the Town Hall with its 
 crockets and spires, of the water-works a-building, the Ma- 
 rine Gardens and Town Park that were to be. ... 
 
 He would be a fool if he lost Marlingate for the sake of a 
 passing impulse towards Morgan Wells. His love was a spark, 
 a flash, and would die, while Marlingate remained to reproach 
 him. He tried to picture Morgan as his wife. No memories 
 of her occasional stateliness could hide her catastrophic unfit- 
 ness. The marriage would be simply disastrous. His career 
 would be blasted and the future of Marlingate with it. 
 
 Then anger suddenly possessed him. How dared she? . . . 
 He was hot with fury when he thought how calmly she had 
 brushed aside the town, sweeping it carelessly away as a 
 thing of naught, offering herself in its stead. Did she real- 
 ise the effrontery of that substitution? Did she know that 
 if he took her he lost Marlingate? Did she care if she knew? 
 Damn her! She set a price on herself, weighed herself in the 
 balance with Marlingate and tipped the town to the beam. 
 She was like a child, jauntily offering him a bunch of leaves 
 in exchange for all that was real and solid and settled in 
 his life. 
 
 Already the vision at the Gringer was growing dim or 
 rather assuming a strange flatness, like some picture, apart 
 from himself, a mere image of something that could scarcely 
 be. Marlingate lay between him and the eastward cliffs, cut- 
 ting him off with its dear substantiality from the land of il- 
 lusion and spells. He must never go back there, where the 
 woods met the sea. In spite of his civic honours and expe- 
 rience, he was still too young to venture unscathed into 
 Luthany. 
 
 He remembered the tryst at the Slide. He must keep that, 
 but only to destroy the rest. He would tell her all that he 
 had found in his own heart, repeat to her the arguments that 
 Marlingate had used against her. With his queer ignorance
 
 MORGAN LE FAY 91 
 
 of woman, which no intercourse with women seemed able to 
 djspel, he expected her to follow his reasoning and come to 
 his conclusions. Anyhow she was going to Scotland in a day 
 or two. It was only a question of resisting her now. Soon half 
 the kingdom would divide them, and when she came back she 
 would have forgotten, and he would be safe. He probably 
 would not see her again till October, and by then the spell 
 would have vanished. It was fading now only a faint 
 memory seemed to linger, like spindrift on the air. 
 
 13 
 
 The Slide was an old smugglers' haunt like French Land- 
 ing and the first of those valleys that scoop the cliffs between 
 Marlingate and the Stussels, where the high ground crumbles 
 slowly into Romney Marsh. There was a little wood, as at 
 French Landing, and a sea-going stream, but the hollow lay 
 cracked wide open to the Channel, and the salt winds plunged 
 up it, twisting the oaks, which the brined fogs had dwarfed, so 
 that with their gnarled and crooked branches, all leeward 
 blown, they were like hands lifted from the earth in a gob- 
 lin prayer. They grew out of tangles of gorse and blackberry, 
 sprawling pignut and spiney rushes. Above them rose the 
 westward slope of the Gringer, crested with the sheep-nibbled 
 mounds of an old British camp. 
 
 Monypenny looked up at it as he came down All Holland 
 Hill towards the Slide. He did not allow his eyes to rake 
 the valley, in case they saw what might weaken his heart. 
 He was still unfaltering in his resolve. His waking had con- 
 firmed the evening's sanity French Landing was now just 
 an impossible dream, a picture he had seen, a song he had 
 heard. . . . He piled up the morning's work between him 
 and its madness. The post had brought him a mass of cor- 
 respondence, all relating to borough affairs. There was some- 
 thing profoundly settling and soothing in the Town Clerk's
 
 92 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 formal announcement of a Council meeting on Tuesday in 
 a memorandum from Wastel on the matter of renaming the 
 Gut's Mouth, whose present name was said to give offence 
 to genteel-minded visitors in a letter from Vidler about the 
 America Ground, enclosing a communication from the Commis- 
 sion of Woods and Forests, who proposed inspecting the place. 
 He had read everything slowly, making notes of his replies, 
 smacking the borough savour. It was all sweet and sane and 
 passionless, smooth and solid as its own stucco, imposing and 
 pompous as its own Aldermen, as far from romance as the 
 Town Hall from the Gringer. . . . 
 
 He had ended by cramming the whole mass into his pocket 
 its municipal character and the borough arms stamped all 
 over it seemed to give it magic powers of support. It was a 
 counterspell that he carried against the enchantments of Mor- 
 gan le Fay. . . . 
 
 She was waiting for him. From far off he saw her standing 
 under one of the stunted oaks, its warped and flattened 
 branches clawing out above her like fingers. It was char- 
 acteristic of her to be there first she was at once too child- 
 ish, too adult and too wild for coquetry. Besides, a woman 
 who priced herself at Marlingate had no need to fear lest she 
 should cheapen her favours. Directly she saw him she ran 
 forward to meet him, a sudden and dangerous reconstruction 
 of yesterday, with her sea-blue dress, and brown face, and lips 
 like red bryony berries. 
 
 Then suddenly she stopped, and stood poised and uncer- 
 tain, her brightness clouded, for she saw his arms stiff at his 
 side, and his eyes once more cold and municipal. 
 
 "Edward!" 
 
 He started at the name. No one had called him anything 
 but Monypenny for years. 
 
 "Edward. . . . What is the matter? You've changed." 
 
 He suddenly wished that he had not come, that he had left 
 his unkept tryst to tell her of his unfaithfulness. Yet to
 
 MORGAN LE FAY 93 
 
 what had he been unfaithful? Not to her, but to an im- 
 pulse, to a moment. He fingered the Town Clerk's letter in 
 his pocket, and spoke with all the stiffness of embarrassment. 
 
 "I haven't changed. I never really was what you saw yes- 
 terday. Now I'm just myself again." 
 
 She stared at him as if she could not understand. 
 
 "Miss Wells. ... I want to explain things to you I want 
 you to see " 
 
 Her eyes were fixed upon him. They were of a strange 
 amber colour, like the water that collects under dead leaves. 
 A sudden pain tore open his heart and twisted his tongue out 
 of its formalities. 
 
 "For God's sake, help me a little! Don't stare at me like 
 that say something don't you see how difficult it is?" 
 
 But she was like a stricken animal, dumb, with staring, 
 pleading eyes. He had to go on speaking, to spare them both 
 the torture of silence. 
 
 "I want to tell you how sorry I am. I quite lost my head 
 yesterday, and did and said things I was ashamed of as soon 
 as I had time to think them over!" 
 
 "Ashamed of loving me!" 
 
 "No ho no! Ashamed because I didn't love you, be- 
 cause I gave way to an impulse. You were like a flood to 
 me. Oh, forgive me! . . . But you no more really wanted 
 me than I really wanted you. We've nothing in common . . . 
 and it wouldn't be fair to you any more than to me if we went 
 on as we began." 
 
 Strange to say her side of the question had never struck 
 him before. He had been enraged by her cunning, her reck- 
 lessness, her effrontery, he had heard only the voice of Mar- 
 lingate accusing her. 
 
 "You can't really care for me," he continued, trying to 
 salve her self-respect, for he was feeling a new pity for this 
 poor little thing who sought to measure herself against his 
 town "you don't care for me you just want to make a
 
 94 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 new interest. But it's a dangerous game in a town like 
 this; people would " 
 
 "I don't care about people, and I'm not playing a game, 
 as you call it. I love you, and I'm not ashamed of it as you 
 are. I love you, and I don't mind who knows it." 
 
 "But I don't think you can realise what it would mean if 
 you married me. Do you feel you could endure being an Al- 
 derman's wife perhaps a Mayor's wife in a year or two?" 
 
 "I don't ask you to marry me spoil your career. Ill be 
 anything you like. . . ." 
 
 "Hush!" cried Monypenny, intensely shocked. 
 
 "Yes I'll be your slave. Only let me love you. You can 
 throw me over when you get tired of me. I don't ask you 
 
 "Will you be quiet!" cried Monypenny. "What do you 
 take me for?" 
 
 Morgan looked at him rather bitterly out of her slanting 
 eyes. 
 
 "Then give up all those stuffy old things and marry me." 
 
 "Give them up! I couldn't." 
 
 She was unconsciously fighting the town's battle against 
 herself, by the way she ramped and plunged and tore her 
 way through all his most quickset conventions and ideals. 
 She kicked aside the town and the decalogue with equal dis- 
 respect. He need not have troubled to salve her pride she 
 evidently had none, or if she had, it was of that undisciplined, 
 primitive kind which is not susceptible to ordinary humilia- 
 tions. 
 
 "Oh, Edward, I could make you so happy I could show 
 you such wonderful things. Come away with me we'll go 
 into the country or to foreign places. We'll get away from 
 this horrible Marlingate, which is sucking all the spirit out 
 of you. You're only a boy, really the boy I love and 
 Marlingate is turning you into a stuffy, middle-aged, old 
 
 "I think that's enough," said Monypenny. He resented her
 
 MORGAN LE FAY 95 
 
 insults of her rival as much as if that rival had been made of 
 flesh and blood instead of bricks and mortar. The uneasy 
 truth that lay in her words only made them more outrageous. 
 
 It was lucky for him that his enchantress was yet so young. 
 So clumsy, so unskilled in magic. She saw that she had only 
 one spell left the spell of French Landing. During the half 
 malignant silence which fell on them then, she had crept to~ 
 wards him, drooping like a wild hyacinth in her blue gown. 
 Then suddenly she flung her body straight, flung back her 
 head, her arms were round him soft and strong as fox-glove 
 stalks, and her hair, falling loose, trailed on his lips, till he 
 tasted it sweet as syllabub. 
 
 But her contact was no snare, as it had been at French 
 Landing; strange to say, that part of the adventure seemed 
 to have died, and was buried far away, on the other side of 
 the Gringer. Instead he felt only a strange and intense pity. 
 Pity and sorrow and the pain of her beauty filled his throat 
 and made the tears blur his eyes. ... He put up his hands 
 to hers and tried to loose them, and all the time the tears in 
 his eyes gathered and grew till they spilled over. Her in- 
 stinct seemed to tell her that his weakness was not her tri- 
 umph, that these strange tears were not shed for his defeat 
 but for his victory. It was as if the vanquished boy in him 
 wept over the victorious Alderman. . . . She relaxed her 
 clasp of him, and sank down into the pool of her spread blue 
 gown. 
 
 He sat down beside her, hugging his knees. For some mo- 
 ments they sat in silence, and in that silence they were just 
 boy and girl together, weeping because life was cruel and had 
 beaten them. The next minute he would be an Alderman 
 again, and she would be a governess; but at present they 
 were just a boy and a girl sitting and crying together in the 
 pignut tangles of the Slide. The magic still hung over 
 them. . . . 
 
 Then it broke, scattering like the webs of the night which
 
 96 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 the sunrise melts off the grass. The Alderman stood up, and 
 shamefully wiped his eyes; and then, without looking at the 
 governess, walked away. 
 
 He went resolutely up All Holland Hill. Once he thought 
 he heard her coming after him, but it was only the wind 
 whiffing through the gorse clumps and the knapweed. There 
 was something like a stone in his breast when he thought of her, 
 but he did not think of her often, for his thoughts were mixed 
 with shame shame for her, shame for himself, shame for the 
 adventure of passion and pity, which was dead, walled up and 
 buried in bricks and mortar like an old-time rebel against es- 
 tablished sanctuaries.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 CLIMBING STREETS 
 
 i 
 
 IT passed; it became like a dream. The lock of his arms 
 about Morgan le Fay, the seduction of her lips under his, 
 grew vague, fantastical, an orgie of memory, almost of imag- 
 ination. At the bottom of his heart it had undoubtedly left 
 a sediment, a certain painful richness. Monypenny was too 
 vital to escape the sentence of that law which decrees that ex- 
 perience shall always work a sharper life and death. But the 
 dream was put away into the past where it belonged, it never 
 troubled the present with its intrusions or sent its shadow 
 darkling along the future. 
 
 He had not seen her since he left her at the Slide. For two 
 days he had furtively scanned the distances of the town; but 
 nothing happened, and on the third day the Beckets left for 
 Scotland. He was safe, and he wondered how he could ever 
 have risked his dear safety and freedom, the prop and the 
 expanse of his endeavour. He had been a fool, he had be- 
 haved like any foolish, hot young man to whom a girl is a 
 better prize than a city. Now he was sane he had escaped 
 beyond the outposts of his passion, those dim unrests and 
 windy questionings which had troubled his peace even be- 
 fore the day of French Landing. Never again would he let 
 a woman snare him. He might see the reality and wisdom 
 of love for those who had no other calling, but he had con- 
 secrated himself to more enduring things, and he would never 
 forget how for one moment love had made him stagger before 
 
 97
 
 98 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 his ambition, risk its glories for the magic of a girl's eyes and 
 lips, and unsubstantial things of wind and sea. 
 
 He turned back to Marlingate as a man who has left his 
 work to watch from the window an organ-grinder with a per- 
 forming monkey turns to his desk again and wonders what 
 made him such a fool as to waste his time. The town was in 
 the full flower of its summer season. Day by day the band 
 played in the Moorish kiosk on the Parade, and round it 
 trailed crinolines and parasols, velvet coats and white top- 
 hats, like marionettes on a string. . . . 
 
 Becket Grove was now nearly finished, and so well let that 
 Monypenny planned continuing it and joining it to Rye Lane 
 by a short terrace. The big villas were also growing, and 
 Lady Cockstreet had taken one for next season. From Gun 
 Garden House the woods had ebbed away, cut off by red- 
 brick walls, asphalt pavements, and the beginning of roads 
 as yet all muddy and slabbed. At the other end of the town 
 the sea was held back by the glistening white battlements of 
 the Parade. Up and down and to and fro promenaded the 
 crinolines and parasols, velvet coats and white top-hats. Peo- 
 ple thought far more of the Parade and the band than they 
 thought of the sea as it lay remote beyond the shingle, hunted 
 over by shadows. 
 
 2 
 
 The summer passed, and after a few months the winter 
 season blossomed sunnily out of the bleakness of autumn. A 
 cosmic regularity was establishing itself in Marlingate; there 
 was no leaping progress, no sudden discovering and over- 
 whelming of the town, but a steady, sober increase of pop- 
 ularity. It was not likely that Marlingate would ever be the 
 size of Eastbourne, let alone Brighton; a couple more groves' 
 and a crescent or two would accommodate its residency, and 
 when a hotel had been built to relieve the slightly congested 
 inns and lodging-houses its birds of passage would be roosted
 
 CLIMBING STREETS 99 
 
 too. That the town should become widely known as a select 
 watering-place was the aim of the town council; that it should 
 be beautiful beyond the measure of all other watering-places 
 was the aim of Monypenny. There was a quaint Fragonard- 
 ish touch in his conception he saw the revels on Marlin- 
 gate beach conducted with the dainty strutting picturesque- 
 ness of an eighteenth-century pastoral canvas. He was as 
 eager as Pelham or Mastel for the place to be high-class and 
 genteel, but gentility was not for him, as it was for them, 
 Mamma in her silk paisley shawl seated between her daugh- 
 ters listening to the "Bohemian Girl" overture, but something 
 altogether more arch, delicate and laced, something frilled 
 and iridescent, which hovered like a spell over the hoops 
 and shawls of Mamma and her daughters, as Fragonard's 
 art cast magic on the smock of the village shepherdess. 
 
 During the autumn Monypenny had heard little of Becket, 
 whom now he uneasily expected back. He resented the fact 
 that he was uneasy, and his resentment barbed itself against 
 Becket, who he felt was responsible for it by suddenly wrap- 
 ping himself in secrecy. He had left Scotland and was now 
 in London, but Monypenny's last letter to him stayed un- 
 answered, and his house on the Coney Banks was sublet to a 
 retired Colonel and his genteel unmarried daughters. 
 
 What would happen if Becket came back, and Miss Wells in 
 her mad, challenging blue gown walked down the High Street 
 some day in December? Would the woods and the sea rush 
 back to Marlingate and engulf it as they had done in June? 
 Would the Mayor and Corporation become so many blocks of 
 stone and the borough minutes so many tons of waste-paper, 
 while the chief Alderman danced on the cliff to the piping of a 
 fairy? . . . 
 
 Monypenny pulled up his thoughts with a jerk. All that 
 was over, if indeed it had ever been. He now had himself 
 in hand, he knew his perils, and all he had to do was to se- 
 cure himself against inner treacheries. As time passed he told
 
 ioo TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 himself more and more decidedly that it was the suppressed 
 instincts of his manhood that had betrayed him, and would al- 
 ways betray him if he did not turn them to better work, play- 
 ing him into the hands of any woman who was sharp enough 
 to gauge his weakness as she had been, that monkey. He was 
 not afraid of himself now he could tackle the forces within 
 just as he could tackle those without. Something infinitely 
 great called him out of himself, so that he had no need to cru- 
 cify his nature, simply leave it behind. He was no ascetic 
 sourly mortifying the flesh, but a philosopher enthusiastically 
 ignoring it. 
 
 Then, on the morning of the Christmas Assembly a let- 
 ter came from Becket. As Monypenny read it he experienced 
 an odd nervous shock, due to the revelation of a trickiness in 
 fate which up till now he had seldom thought of and never 
 experienced. After a characteristically long-winded opening 
 of formalities and apologies, came: 
 
 "I have, however, a respectable excuse, for this last week 
 has been filled with a happiness and excitement I had little 
 reason to expect again at my years. In brief, I have ven- 
 tured to repeat the happiness I once enjoyed in wedded life. 
 Even last summer you may have noticed my growing regard 
 for my young kinswoman, Morgan Wells, so perhaps it will 
 not come as a great surprise to you to hear that I mar- 
 ried her at our parish church last week, and have just re- 
 turned from Cheltenham, where we spent our honeymoon, 
 the shortness of which I hope to atone for in more propitious 
 weather. The fact that my dear wife is a relation of the 
 first Mrs. Becket makes our union all the more blessed to 
 me. During her brief visits to Marlingate you had oppor- 
 tunity to appreciate her charm, elegance, and warmth of heart. 
 The children are delighted that one to whom they are so 
 deeply and deservedly attached should become their Mamma. 
 I have kept the matter private until our return to Eaton
 
 CLIMBING STREETS 101 
 
 Square, but have now written and apprised the Leo and the 
 Arthur Hurdicotts as well as yourself. Unfortunately I can- 
 not look forward to a meeting in the near future, as my wife 
 finds that the air of Marlingate does not agree with her 
 indeed, for some constitutions it may be a trifle too bracing 
 and I have promised her that our country excursions shall be 
 to Cheltenham for this year. However, you may be assured 
 of my practical interest in the town and its affairs, and I hope 
 you may find it convenient to communicate with me fre- 
 quently as to its progress." 
 
 Monypenny laughed. 
 
 The situation appealed to his sense of humour. So Becket 
 had been caught, where he had escaped. What an old fool 
 Becket was! mating ridiculously at forty-five with a gov- 
 erness-girl, only two years after the loss of the wife he had 
 sworn unreplaceable and unforgettable. He remembered a 
 certain conversation on the Coney Banks, and laughed again. 
 
 Then he hoped that the Hurdicotts would not be driven 
 out of Marlingate by this treachery to their legitimate stock, 
 but the next moment he had comforted himself with the 
 thought that the Beckets were not likely to be in the town 
 much after this, and anyhow Marlingate now had its own 
 grip on the Hurdicotts, apart from Cousin Hugo. Monypenny 
 laughed again. He laughed because he was not worse stricken 
 by the news indeed, scarcely stricken at all. It was odd 
 that he should care so little, see only the ridiculous side of 
 the episode, after all his burnings and questionings. The 
 flesh was a very poor thing, after all, weak in its holdings, 
 foggy in its memories. It had made a fool of Becket, and it 
 had made a fool of Monypenny, but Monypenny, unlike 
 Becket, would not be made a fool of twice. As for Morgan, 
 she was a minx; she had snared the old man just as she would 
 have snared the young if he had let her. She was quite right 
 about the air of Marlingate it was certainly too bracing for a
 
 102 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 woman of her temperament. Ha, ha! Monypenny laughed 
 again. 
 
 3 
 
 For a little time Marlingate swarmed and hummed round 
 the Becket-Wells wedding. Opinion was divided. Some 
 blamed him for an old ass, some blamed her for a self-serv- 
 ing upstart. All wondered what the Hurdicotts felt about 
 the business. There was some heat in the discussion at first, 
 but soon the little drama lost interest, the two chief actors 
 being off the stage, and Marlingate turned to its own scan- 
 dals for diversion. 
 
 As for Monypenny, he was absorbed in the final throes 
 of the America Ground. That business had really been 
 settled at last, and the blight on the town's beauty and de- 
 cency was to be removed. The Commissioner of Woods and 
 Forests had inspected the land and come to terms with the 
 Corporation. The waste was to be taken over by the Crown, 
 and notice was given to the inhabitants that they must sur- 
 render their dwellings after five years. This might seem a 
 long time to one whose brain was big with a Marine Garden 
 and Aquarium, but Monypenny 's sense of justice accepted 
 the arrangement. He would spend the interval in perfect- 
 ing his plans. Meanwhile he was relieved to have the mat- 
 ter settled. He had struggled long and hard with the cal- 
 losities and procrastinations of the law, sturdily supported 
 by Vidler, whose sense he had come to rely on and appre- 
 ciate. 
 
 Indeed a measure of friendship had sprung up between 
 these two. Vidler had not the slightest pretensions to edu- 
 cation or breeding; he was in many ways the roughest mem- 
 ber of the Town Council, and often came to meetings smell- 
 ing of the blood with which his hands were stained on Sat- 
 urday nights, but he entirely lacked the small-souled vul- 
 garity of Lewnes, the avarice of Lusted or the windiness of
 
 CLIMBING STREETS 103 
 
 Pelham; he was practical and reliable and could understand 
 certain aspects of Monypenny's larger aims for Marlingate. 
 The result was that the younger man moderately confided 
 in him, and the two made many expeditions among the 
 shacks, laying out groves and rockeries, erecting belvederes 
 and reclusing seats. 
 
 On their return from one of these rambles Vidler asked 
 Monypenny home to dinner, which he still had at the unfash- 
 ionable hour of five. He himself had occasionally attended 
 those solemn rituals of hospitality at Gun Garden House, 
 when seven or eight gentlemen would sit stiffly round the ma- 
 hogany and stuff themselves to an accompaniment of boneless 
 politics; but Monypenny had never been inside the house over 
 the shop in Fish Street, for on the one or two occasions Vid- 
 ler had invited him to take tea, it had been drunk, according 
 to local custom, on the pavement outside one of the dis- 
 torted survivals of French habit which in some unchronicled 
 way had drifted into the life of the fishing quarter of Marlin- 
 gate. 
 
 The house was in the thick of the fishing district, jammed 
 between two others of such greater height and solidity that it 
 looked like a small nut in the crackers. Within it suddenly 
 displayed itself immense a warren of inter-opening rooms 
 and winding passages, with gulfs of cupboards and a false 
 floor or two dating from smuggling days. Like all else in 
 that part of Marlingate it was impregnated in every seam 
 with the smell of fish and dried spray, so intensely concen- 
 trated that the odours which now and then drifted up the 
 High Street and caused genteel noses to wrinkle were in com- 
 parison as the ghost to the body. 
 
 Monypenny was welcomed by Mrs. Vidler, and a niece, 
 Fanny. The latter was a raw girl of seventeen, with red 
 hair, turned-up nose, and wide, not unpleasing mouth. She 
 was the daughter of Vidler's only brother, who had died 
 leaving her a good house and a pretty piece of land in the
 
 104 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 parish of Old Rumble just outside the town, where she lived 
 with a middle-aged cousin who was not present on this oc- 
 casion. 
 
 Dinner consisted of a dish of baked herrings, a joint, and 
 an old-fashioned salmagundy, followed by pancakes and 
 washed down with plenty of Sussex ale. Monypenny en- 
 joyed himself the good-humoured casualness of the enter- 
 tainment was a novelty to one accustomed to be formal even 
 at a sea-picnic. Mrs. Vidler was an interesting woman, 
 shrewd, hard-headed and kind-hearted like her husband; she 
 had been born a Gallop, and spoke the fisher-lingo much more 
 noticeably than the Alderman, who had spent his boyhood in 
 the west-end of the town and had only recently set up shop 
 among the herring-nets. Fanny was not very talkative, but 
 grinned much, displaying her good white teeth. What struck 
 Monypenny most about these women, especially Mrs. Vid- 
 ler, was their interest in Marlingate and acquaintance with 
 the most trivial details of its progress; he was particularly 
 impressed by the fact that they were as anxious for it to be 
 kept quiet and select as if they had been Hurdicotts 
 of Graveley. 
 
 "We doan't want no 'Ramsgate Beach' hereabouts," said 
 Mrs. Vidler; "y u know the picture? They've a print of it 
 up at the Maidenhood, all performing mice and rabbits and 
 niggers dancing to the bones. Them rarees aun't fur us 
 what we want is boco quality, and what quality wants is boco 
 fresh sea air, and bathing, and sweet music. I'm fur none 
 of those folly shows; they bring the wrong foalkses down." 
 
 "Well, it's the Alderman here as has kept off all that," 
 said Vidler. "There's some in the Town Council as ud like 
 to see us all scrambled up on the beach so as you couldn't 
 get a bat into the cracks, as ud rather see a lot o' second- 
 class folk gaping in at their third-class shop winders than 
 those fine ladies and gentlemen sitting elegant on the Par- 
 ade and listening to the band. When we wur speaking of
 
 CLIMBING STREETS 105 
 
 the Town Park last Corporation meeting, Alderman Lewnes 
 he ups and asks why we shudn't spend the money on a Pier 
 instead a Pier, mark you! and have all the Margate rowdies 
 in with their banjos." 
 
 "Lor!" said Fanny. 
 
 Monypenny sat wondering how far the attitude of these 
 people was a reflection of his own, to what extent he had 
 stamped his image on the town, till the whole pulled as 
 from one motive towards one goal. He remembered that at 
 the beginning the concepts of his associates had been hazy and 
 their activities scattered; it gave him a proud thrill to realise 
 how much he had been able to clarify and co-ordinate, to 
 think that it was his brain and effort which had made the 
 town what it was, not only through their own direct achieve- 
 ment, but through the glorious indirectness of their dominion 
 over others so that he was in fact as well as in spirit the 
 builder of Marlingate, a Briareus hundred-headed and hun- 
 dred-armed. 
 
 After dinner he and Vidler went into a little back room 
 which was the latter's privacy. Here Mrs. Vidler brought 
 them a tray of rum and Barbadoes water, while she and 
 Fanny retired to take tea. Vidler asked Monypenny what 
 he thought of Fanny. 
 
 "A very pleasant girl quiet and capable-looking." 
 
 "I am glad you like her, and I tell you she's all you think. 
 She has a valiant property, too, up at Old Rumble." 
 
 "Yes her land touches mine on the north, and I have 
 crossed it once or twice." 
 
 "You should go over it. Fanny ud be delighted, and ud 
 ask you to drink tea afterwards at Old Rumble House. I cud 
 see at dinner that she'd taken a fancy to you." 
 
 "Ah," said Monypenny uninterestedly. 
 
 "I suppose," continued Vidler, "that it has never occurred 
 to you what a happy thing it ud be fur Marlingate if the 
 two estates wur to be joined there's a pretty lot of build-
 
 106 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 ing-ground up at Old Rumble, you cud run a couple o' streets 
 along there, and a Square. Fanny's a good girl and ud like 
 nothing better than to lay out her land fur the town's ad- 
 vantage, and as I've said before I can plainly see as she's 
 taken a fancy to you." 
 
 "I've never thought of the matter," said Monypenny, "and 
 I'm sure it's out of the question." 
 
 "Well, of course you know your own business best, but I 
 couldn't help suggesting it, like. It wur Mr. Becket's wed- 
 ding as put it into my head, and I thought as I'd ask Fanny 
 down fur you to have a look at. But, bless you, there aun't 
 no offence of course the gal aun't born your equal, though 
 she's plenty of money, and her mother wur a lot above us 
 Vidlers." 
 
 "I am making no reflection on her," said Monypenny stiffly. 
 "I have not the slightest inclination to marry and shall prob- 
 ably never do so." 
 
 Vidler was wise enough to change the subject, and they 
 spoke of town matters till Monypenny went home. 
 
 That night, however, the question revived in the young 
 man's brain. He could not ignore the fact that Vidler had 
 made an exceedingly practical suggestion. If he meant to 
 marry, it would be diplomatic to marry locally, and Fanny, 
 though not exactly his equal in birth, was well connected 
 municipally and socially, and had the further advantages of 
 a fortune and an estate. She seemed a good girl too, and 
 would be easy to live with. Also, if he married, he told him- 
 self he would be definitely secured against such follies as 
 that which had nearly ruined him nine months ago. A nice 
 comfortable little wife, and a child or two. . . . 
 
 Bah! All that was in him of the adventurer and the ex- 
 plorer resented such a commonplace assumption of a yoke. If 
 he must marry he would marry romantically, on a scale 
 worthy of his life-work for Marlingate. But there was no 
 real reason why he should marry at all he prized his eel-
 
 CLIMBING STREETS 107 
 
 ibacy, its dignity, its freedom, its immunity from domestic 
 cares and intrusions. He was not like other men, craving for 
 warmth and love, he was strong enough to stand aloof from 
 the soft things of life in his pursuit of the great. He had 
 civic rather than domestic instincts. It is true that he had 
 been mad once, but that was another Monypenny, a 
 changeling who by some spell had been freakishly set in 
 his place for a few wild moments at French Landing, but 
 now merely haunted the woods which day by day Marlin- 
 gate drove further from its streets. 
 
 4 
 
 The next five years were crowded and progressive, ac- 
 cording to the sedate manner of Marlingate's crowds and 
 progresses. Becker Grove was finished up to its latest con- 
 nection with Rye Lane, which Monypenny had called Lewnes 
 Road half in scornful acceptance of a hint from his fellow al- 
 derman, half in fiery remembrance of that triumphal Star, 
 whose rays were Bonaparte's marshals, streaming from the 
 central greatness. 
 
 The Rye Lane villas were finished and let, and houses had 
 sprung up on the London Road outside the Warriors Gate, 
 driving the woods still further back into the weald. On the 
 Marine Parade, the Marine Hotel had opened, and was full 
 of the elect. The water-works and drainage system had been 
 finished long ago, also the repairing and relighting of the 
 streets. Marlingate was now complete as to essentials, and 
 had only to be stroked and caressed into further ornament. 
 
 There was by this time plenty of money in the town, al- 
 lowing a free hand to its improvers. The tide of visitors 
 had not increased about the same number of people came 
 down every year, either Summer or Winter but on the other 
 hand the residents had increased enormously. From one or 
 two pioneers in Becket Grove or the newer Coney Bank
 
 io8 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 houses, they had come to fill a residential hinterland, which, 
 with Becket Grove as its backbone, ribbed east and west from 
 the London Road to Rye Lane. These were the people who 
 brought the town its prosperity, as they not only spent money 
 more substantially than the visitors, but paid rates and taxes, 
 and provided an aristocratic background to the bourgeois, if 
 picturesque, High Street and Fish Street. Their carriages 
 rolled elegantly up and down the Marine Parade, and their 
 private entertainments filled gaps in the succession of balls 
 and concerts at the Assembly Room. They remarkably en- 
 couraged local trade shops became suddenly double-fronted, 
 diamond panes flourished into plate glass, fashionable Lon- 
 don goods were no longer mere objects of curiosity and con- 
 templation. 
 
 Monypenny saw that it was politic to put the residents 
 before the visitors when making plans for the town. This 
 was one reason why he steadfastly opposed the Pier scheme, 
 brought forward by Lewnes and Lusted. A Pier would spoil 
 the sea-front and attract undesirable excursionists from less 
 genteel towns far better spend the Corporation's money on 
 gardens and packs, or houses of the superior kind. From the 
 same motive he fought the constantly recurring demand for 
 shops on the Parade, also an occasional proposal for streets 
 of small houses to attract residents of lesser means. He told 
 the Borough Council that quality, not quantity, must be their 
 watch-word. He felt that it would be a mistake to increase 
 Marlingate's size to any great extent, and he had no wish to 
 attract lower-middle class residents. It was not size, noise, 
 or numbers that he wanted, but beauty, aristocracy, and 
 peace. There were Margates and Southends enough in 
 England he wanted Marlingate to stand alone, an achieve- 
 ment apart from other seaside towns. 
 
 He was supported by the Town Council even though 
 Lewnes and Lusted might blunder in with coarse, cheese- 
 smelling suggestions, they could nearly always be convinced
 
 CLIMBING STREETS 109 
 
 of their inexpediency. Pelham, Wastel, Vidler, Breeds, Bond 
 and one or two of the new residents who had been elected on 
 the Council and Town Committee were whole-heartedly on 
 Monypenny's side. 
 
 Becket, during these years, came seldom to Marlingate, and 
 his family not at all. But his name remained on the Town 
 Committee, and he continued to be generous from a dis- 
 tance, always ready to contribute to Borough improvements, 
 and liberally financing the development of the Gun Garden 
 estate. When he was in the town, which was never more than 
 a day or two at a time, he stayed at the Marine Hotel. Some- 
 times Monypenny asked after Mrs. Becket and was told that 
 she was well, but preferred an inland spa to Marlingate, hav- 
 ing friends at Cheltenham, with whom she spent much of her 
 time. He had also taken her abroad, and it appeared that 
 she was a success in Eaton Square, where she entertained dis- 
 criminatingly at her husband's house. Becket confided to 
 Monypenny that the Hurdicotts still treated him with cold- 
 ness, but that they had thawed considerably during the last 
 year or two, and he was not without hopes of a complete 
 reconciliation. 
 
 Somehow the news made Monypenny rather hot and sore 
 he had liked to dwell on the ineligibility of Morgan Wells, and 
 here she was showing herself surprisingly capable of social 
 dignity, and becoming her new position. He remembered her 
 stateliness at the ball after all, even in those far-off days 
 he might have seen. . . . "She's a wonderful woman," said 
 Becket, in the tone that he used to keep for the virtues of his 
 first wife. 
 
 5 
 
 The Town Park was the crown of Monypenny's ambition 
 for Marlingate. It would not be the last item in the plan of 
 general improvement circumstances pushed the Marine Gar- 
 dens to a later date but it should be the chief. It was ad-
 
 no TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 mirably in line with that formal streak which ran through all 
 his aims. Just as he had once wanted to gather up all the 
 red and black riot of the town into one long gleaming front- 
 age, as obstinately stuck to his Marine Parade as any 1 worship- 
 per of Brighton and the Steyn, so he wanted now to clip the 
 wind-shuttle thickets of the Wilderness into a paradisal trim- 
 ness. But in his desire was nothing banal or Philistine. His 
 Park was a dream just as his Parade had been, a thing of un- 
 seizable beauty like the other. 
 
 "I can give you only the carcase of what you want," said 
 Decimus Figg, when he was consulted. He was a rising man 
 now, no longer the cheap convenient creature the Corporation 
 used half-contemptuously to employ; but Monypenny had in- 
 sisted on retaining him in spite of subdued clamours for some- 
 one less expensive. 
 
 "It's the same as with the Marine Parade at the begin- 
 ning," continued the architect; "I knew then you had in your 
 mind something which could never be accomplished." 
 
 "How d'you mean?" asked Monypenny. They were sit- 
 ting in the study at Gun Garden House, smoking cigars and 
 drinking marsala, with a litter of plans before them. They 
 were now friends, or as near friends as anyone ever came to 
 be with Monypenny. 
 
 "Well, the fact is, you're too much of a dreamer for this 
 job." 
 
 "I don't understand you quite. Am I not practical?" 
 
 "Yes quite practical. It's rather difficult to explain what 
 I mean. You see it's like this usually when people ask me to 
 design a Town Park or a Town Hall, I know I can satisfy 
 them. As long as the thing is practical, and not too ugly, or 
 ugly in the way they want, I know it will come up to their 
 expectations. But I know that nothing I can design will come 
 up to yours. I can please you, but I can't satisfy you see?" 
 
 Monypenny was silent for a moment, then he asked: 
 
 "What makes you think so?"
 
 CLIMBING STREETS ill 
 
 > 
 
 "Nothing particular; but there's something about you it's 
 very difficult to describe, and you probably think me an idiot 
 that shows me you're the wrong man for this job." 
 
 Monypenny was startled. 
 
 "You're the first to tell me that." 
 
 "I'm quite sure I am." 
 
 "Do you mean that I'm wasting myself on my work or that 
 my work is wasted on me?" 
 
 "Neither. But you're putting too much emotion into it, 
 and in the end that will react both on the town and on your- 
 self." 
 
 "You think I should have some more definitely artistic 
 means of expression?" 
 
 "That's partly the idea. Marlingate isn't big enough for 
 you." 
 
 "What could I find bigger?" 
 
 "That I can't say. But I'm sure you are not the man to 
 find satisfaction in the concrete and you're bound to suffer 
 if you try to do so. You need some kind of art into which to 
 put your best emotions; I don't know which kind especially 
 it may be music, or poetry, or perhaps a woman." 
 
 "A woman!' 
 
 "Yes, why not? Some men are born poets and some mu- 
 sicians, and some, though only a few, are born lovers." 
 
 "Then you look upon love as a department of art. I should 
 have called it nature." 
 
 "Not a bit. Desire is natural, but love is the artistic cul- 
 mination of desire, just as poetry is the artistic culmination 
 of speech and real love is about as rare as real poetry." 
 
 Monpenny smiled. 
 
 "Surely if I had been born to anything beyond this I 
 should have discovered it by now." 
 
 "Hardly since from your boyhood you have shut yourself 
 up in streets and told yourself they were the universe. I don't 
 know what you were born for, but I know by a dozen tokens
 
 112 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 that this sort of thing isn't your birthright. You were bora 
 to be an artist or a lover." 
 
 Monypenny stood up, to end the conversation, which had 
 begun to annoy him. 
 
 "My dear Figg, I was born to be Mayor of Marlingate." 
 
 6 
 
 For some months there were murmurs in the town about 
 Monypenny's possible acceptance of the mayoralty. Hitherto 
 he had declined the office, first on account of his youth, later 
 because it had seemed cumbrous and unnecessary to his ob- 
 ject. Pelham, who after a year of Wastel and another of 
 Breeds, had returned to power, was absolutely the right man 
 for the job suave, impressive, inactive, the ideal figurehead. 
 Monypenny had always ruled the town in practice, so had 
 been quite content to leave it to others in theory. But now Pel- 
 ham spoke of resignation. Monypenny suggested that his son, 
 who was like him in many ways, should be asked to succeed 
 him, but Robert had just married a wife and declined the hon- 
 our for that scriptural reason. Then there was talk of Lewnes. 
 Lewnes was popular on the Town Council, and the only man 
 who had it in him to be a municipal power after the manner 
 of Monypenny; not that he had his brains or width of en- 
 terprise, but he had horns and hide a strong push and a 
 thick skin which sometimes answer just as well. He let it 
 be known that he would gladly take office if he had the 
 chance. Monypenny resolved he should never have that 
 chance, and the best way to prevent it was to take it himself. 
 
 But this was not his only reason for coming forward. He 
 saw he had reached that stage in his career when the office 
 would be an added dignity, and one which would neither clog 
 nor stale him. As Mayor his unofficial headship of Marlin- 
 gate would receive municipal sanction; he came forward to 
 receive the benediction of the town as a bridegroom to re-
 
 CLIMBING STREETS 113 
 
 ceive the benediction of the church. His love wanted that 
 much of sanctification. 
 
 He also saw that there was a widespread demand for him 
 to take office. He was popular among the visitors and among 
 the residents, old and new. The exact reason for his popu- 
 larity would be hard to define he was aloof, formal, oddly 
 ungracious, autocratic, and yet he was liked by almost every- 
 one with whom he came in contact socially or municipally. 
 The cause lay doubtless in the double sense of trust and re- 
 spect which he inspired among his associates in borough en- 
 terprise, and the becoming veil of mystery which graced him 
 in social matters. It was the entire absence of anything ro- 
 mantic which had made him a figure of romance to visit- 
 ing young ladies no one could be so cloudily remote from 
 the vital matters of love without having a secret history packed 
 with their activities. His rather saturnine good looks, his man- 
 ner with women both stiff and courtly, won him the good 
 graces of those who were weary of the easy accessibility of 
 most of bis sex, just as his solid and solemn hospitality won 
 him the approval of their husbands and fathers. He was un- 
 doubtedly as much the chief figure of Marlingate from the so- 
 cial as from the civic point of view, his spiritual remoteness 
 balancing the effect of that odd boyish greediness for festiv- 
 ity and brightness which contrasted so strangely with his her- 
 mit-like habits at Gun Garden House. 
 
 That same remoteness served him well on the Town Coun- 
 cil, for though it stimulated the respect and trust with which 
 his colleagues viewed him, it staved off any personal hatred 
 which his power and autocracy might have roused. Hatred is 
 the most personal of emotions, and Monypenny was oddly 
 impersonal to all outside him. He was less of a man to his 
 associates than the incarnate trinity of an active brain, a cul- 
 tivated taste and a practical ambition. As the years went by 
 he seemed to grow more and more abstract to those about him
 
 114 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 to women alone he was sometimes, by virtue of his mys- 
 tery, a man. 
 
 About this time appeared the Marlingate Courier, the first 
 local paper. Bond of the Library, now Alderman Bond, was 
 the editor, having whetted his literary appetite on successive 
 guide-books till nothing could satisfy it short of a weekly 
 newspaper, written entirely by himself and one assistant, with 
 a few "select poems" from talented and pseudonymed visit- 
 ors. The Courier soon began to agitate for Monypenny's elec- 
 tion as Mayor, it distributed hints even as far as its fashion 
 column, worked them into its review of Romola, and finally 
 developed them in two lengthy editorials, which were quoted 
 by the Sussex News. 
 
 When November came, it was known in all town circles 
 that Monypenny would accept office, and at the first Cor- 
 poration meeting after the municipal elections, he was sol- 
 emnly chosen by the Councillors and Aldermen. The ob- 
 servant noticed a faint tremulous flush mount his cheeks as he 
 sat for the first time with the Mayoral chain on his breast, 
 and the sentimental put down the hesitation and pauses of 
 his first speech to emotion. It was odd, but directly Mony- 
 penny became Mayor, the office clothed itself in glamour, not; 
 only for romantically-minded women, but for the more stolid 
 imaginations of the Borough Council. He seemed to trans- 
 mute it into something eager and spiritual he was the High 
 Priest of the town, pontifical in his black and scarlet robes, 
 performing rites and offering sacrifices. 
 
 A week later, when according to custom the Mayor and 
 Corporation went in state to St. Nicholas Church, the whole 
 town turned out on the pavements, and the visitors, who had 
 hitherto held aloof from mere civic pageantry, crowded the 
 windows to watch the young Mayor drive down the High 
 Street, in his robes and cocked hat, with his postilions before 
 and his mace-bearers behind. A few young ladies threw flow- 
 ers into the carriage, to the horror of their mammas; the shop-
 
 CLIMBING STREETS 115 
 
 people cheered from their doorways; the church-bells crashed 
 and jangled; and even the children in the street ran shouting, 
 "Monypenny! Monypenny! Mayor of Marlingate!" 
 
 It was his triumph, and he knew now partly why he had 
 postponed it. He had wished it to be the crown of his achieve- 
 ments, he had wished to save it for the hour when he could 
 look round on his ambition realised Marlingate aflame with 
 elegance and fashion, prosperous, festive, complete. He had 
 left the years of effort to Pelham's decoration, while he worked 
 and planned uncumbered by office. Now his throne was built, 
 and he ascended it. 
 
 His eyes were bright and his face was pale with triumph 
 as he sat there alone in the huge carriage, rolling and sway- 
 ing on its springs. His excitement gave him an unusually 
 eager, boyish look, so that in all his mayoral trappings he 
 seemed younger than when dancing in the Assembly Rooms) or 
 picnicking on the cliffs. In spite of his stateliness, he was 
 frankly excited, and a little shy. His burning, youthful ex- 
 citement seemed to lighten the dark cast of his face. The 
 women thought him handsomer than ever, the men found for 
 him a new kindliness in their hearts; only one and she was 
 a woman, Lady Cockstreet thought he looked pathetic, sitting 
 there alone. 
 
 "Monypenny! Monypenny! Mayor of Marlingate!" The 
 boys shouted, and the bells seemed to be ringing it now, as 
 Highgate bells had rung to Dick Whittington, though this 
 time not in promise but in fulfilment. He sat there erect and 
 proud, with shoulders straight under the heavy yoke of his 
 honour, flushed, triumphant, his mind at once giddy and serene 
 with the sense of consummation. At thirty-five he had won 
 his great ambition, still young and full of work he had seen 
 the effort of his life materialise. Marlingate was what he 
 had planned to make it, and he was Mayor of Marlingate. 
 
 "Monypenny! Monypenny! Mayor of Marlingate!" The 
 people shouted it, the bells clanged it, and in his heart it was
 
 ii6 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 being sung his triumph, his victory, this battle he had won 
 over circumstances, himself, that weakening sense of "beyond- 
 ness," that unrest of the woods and the sea. . . . The woods 
 were now being cut and clipped into the order of the Town 
 Park; the sea was shut away beyond the shining austerity of 
 the Marine Parade. His little bit of time had been able to 
 chain and subdue those two boasting forces of eternity, and 
 he, himself, who had found their treacheries within him, wore 
 a chain, the Mayor's chain of office the heavy pompous yoke 
 that bound him forever to the triumph he had won. 
 
 7 
 
 In the spring of '64 the Town Park was finished. It cov- 
 ered the site of the Wilderness and of the Market-place, the 
 latter having been moved by the Corporation to Gingerbread 
 Green, outside the Warriors' Gate. The grounds contained the 
 old Slough with its ring of tamarisks, now transformed into 
 an ornamental pond with a trim little island in the middle 
 and an importation of waterfowl. Out of the Slough ran the 
 stream that had once been indecorously known as the Gut's 
 Mouth, now renamed, the Marlin which gave pomposity 
 both to its rather insignificant waters and to the town which 
 reddened them with its reflected walls. "Marlingate on the 
 Marlin" was gracious in the ears of the Corporation. 
 
 Across the Town Park ran a carriage-way, in the place of 
 the old road, edged with trees and a grass border. In the 
 middle of its course it looped out suddenly round a band-stand, 
 not a white Moorish dome like that on the Parade but daintily 
 classic like a Trianon belvedere. Southwards to the town, 
 northwards to the woods behind the prim battlements of 
 Becket Grove, stretched lawns and parterres, with arbours both 
 open and reclused, and in the southwest corner a maze crept, 
 neither too simple nor too intricate, always smelling sweetly 
 of its clipped box walls.
 
 CLIMBING STREETS 117 
 
 The Town Park was as Monypenny would have had it, as 
 far as his dream had any truck with reality. It was part of 
 that delicate tinted formality into which his ambition always 
 poured itself, however far it might spread beyond and frame 
 the charming picture with a cloud of sun and whirlwind. Now 
 he scarcely thought of the frame in his appreciation of the 
 picture he could delight in its pastel shades even if they had 
 caught only half his fires, tread its sedate walks forgetful of 
 the summoning highway. Decimus Figg had made the Park 
 a place of paradisal beauty, and if a mediaeval saint could 
 dream his eternity into a formal garden, so could Monypenny 
 find for his ambition a place of refreshment, rest and peace 
 among those spreads. of shaven green and solemn bloom. 
 
 All that the Town Park wanted was a ceremonial opening. 
 For a long time Monypenny pondered it and the Corporation 
 discussed it. Then suddenly he startled them by saying that 
 Royalty must be invited. Nothing less than the Blood Royal 
 was worthy to set the crown on Marlingate. The Town Coun- 
 cil, who had been talking about Lady Cockstreet and the 
 Mayor of Brighton, were aghast at his boldness. But Mony- 
 penny would not listen to their timid persuasions his mind 
 was set on the very best for his town. He made plans and 
 enquiries, and at last suggested to his Aldermen that Princess 
 Sophia of Worcester should be approached. He had written 
 to Hugo Becket on the matter and Becket had no doubt but 
 that he could approach the Princess through the Lincoln Duke 
 and Duchess. Becket, perhaps a little ashamed of his re- 
 moteness from Marlingate, was willing to do all in his power 
 to develop the present crisis in its glory. A long correspond- 
 ence followed between him and Monypenny. Princess Sophia 
 was approached first indirectly by the Lincolns, then directly 
 by the Corporation, and early in May the warm throbbing 
 air of Marlingate parties hummed with the murmur that a 
 Royal Princess would open the Town Park. 
 
 The murmur became a voice and the voice roared into a
 
 ii8 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 general shout of excitement. The opening of the Park would 
 be the highest festival the town had ever known. All the 
 aristocracy of the county would be there, the Duke and Duch- 
 ess of Lincoln would support the Princess, also the Lord War- 
 den of the Cinque Ports and other notabilities. Moreover, it 
 was said that Mr. and Mrs. Becket would come down to Mar- 
 lingate on this great occasion. 
 
 8 
 
 The ceremony was fixed for early June. The heat came soon 
 that year; there was no aftermath crop of April weather, just 
 a hot sweet flow of days, tawnied with thick sunshine, drowsy 
 under a burden of heavy scent and muffled sound. In the 
 Town Park the rhododendrons faded and the roses bloomed. 
 Their languorous reds spotted and blurred on the thickets, 
 and their perfume stole fugitive down the staid paths, as if a 
 running shepherdess should find her way into a Friar's garden. 
 
 The town flowered, too, with flags and bunting. Banners 
 waved across the High Street and triumphal arches spread 
 their welcome from one parapet to another. Along the Mar- 
 ine Parade glittered a string of coloured lights, tossing at dusk 
 their reflections into the black sighing mirror of the sea. 
 
 The Princess would not stay more than a day, but a week 
 had been fixed as the limit of the feast, a week stuffed with 
 dancing, dining, music and gaiety, and garnished with civic 
 pomp. There wasi to be a big ball at the Assembly Room, and 
 a municipal card-party. One or two important families, such 
 as the Leo Hurdicotts and the Pelhams, were giving private 
 dances, and Lady Cockstreet had sent out invitations for a 
 conversazione. The Town Committee, with Monypenny at 
 their head, worked hard so that there should be no clashing 
 of dates or overlapping of ceremonies. Marlingate blossomed 
 like a flower. It seemed to realise and fulfil its township, 
 claiming for its streets the beauty some would grant only to
 
 CLIMBING STREETS 119 
 
 lanes and meadows. It lay rose-red in the calyx of the hills, 
 faintly smudged with the green of its tamarisks, as they 
 ringed it round, and splashed as with sea-water the warm 
 bloom of its ways. 
 
 When the great day came the Mayor and Corporation met 
 the Princess's train. Then there was a solemn procession 
 through the town down the Station Road, up the High Street, 
 along Becket Grove, then down Fish Street and along the Pa- 
 rade to the Marine Hotel. Monypenny had personally planned 
 this proqession, which he intended as a triumphal prog- 
 ress and display, and oddly enough there was nothing ridic- 
 ulous about it. That which might easily have been a mere 
 bourgeois parade a fat German princess, Mayor and Corpo- 
 ration assumed the peculiar dignity of consecration which 
 Monypenny brought to his office. The ridiculous might out- 
 weigh the sublime in that pompous march past of horsemen 
 and carriages, that flourishing of maces and coats-of-arms. But 
 somehow it was no more apparent than in the Mayor's cocked 
 hat and black and crimson robes, which no one would ever 
 dream of calling ridiculous on Monypenny. It was all part 
 of the Municipal Idea which he had sanctified. 
 
 First of all came the Princess's carriage, drawn by two 
 white horses, and after her the Lincoln Duke and Duchess, 
 demi-royal. Then came Monypenny erect and solitary in 
 front of his mace-bearers. Lewnes, Pelham, Lusted and Bond 
 followed in a fourth carriage. Robert Pelham and Leo Hur- 
 dicott were on horseback, riding each side of the Princess, 
 and Wastel and Breeds and other gentlemen were also 
 mounted. At the end of the procession was a long tail of pri- 
 vate carriages, barouches and gigs, bright with the shawls and 
 parasols of Hurdicotts, Papillons and other notables. Becket 
 was there, looking older and heavily whiskered, but his wife 
 did not drive with him. She had brought her baby with her 
 to Marlingate a girl born at the beginning of the year and
 
 120 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 Becket told Monypenny that some ailment of the child had 
 kept her at home that morning. 
 
 The procession stopped at the Marine Hotel for a cere- 
 monial luncheon. The Princess was all praise and gracious- 
 ness, so that one forgot her German accent, her unwieldy 
 figure, unfashionably large bonnet and still larger appetite. 
 She thoroughly enjoyed her meal and allowed a little personal 
 flattery to spice her thanks to the young Mayor. 
 
 After lunch the great ceremony of the day took place in the 
 Town Park. The Princess made a formal speech, which 
 sounded curiously unlike her. She stood under a big willow (a 
 survivor of the Wilderness), a sweep of lawn dividing her 
 from the common crowd, while a favoured aristocracy grouped 
 round her. Monypenny stood by her side in his Mayoral 
 robes. He felt hot under their weight and blazing colour, his 
 forehead was wet in the grip of the Mayoral hat and some 
 of the drowsiness of heat settled on him, losing the Princess's 
 words in a blur of sound and her substantial figure in the haz- 
 ing green of lawns and thickets. 
 
 Then a movement in the crowd diverted him. He looked 
 up, and saw that the Princess had finished speaking, and that 
 towards her over the lawn a flower was moving. Crimson and 
 silken, a peony trailing its crinkled petals over the grass, it 
 came. Monypenny watched it, watched this woman who was 
 a flower in her streaked splendour, her wind-swung grace, her 
 soft yet flaming transparency of colour. She came across the 
 lawn, carrying a bouquet which she offered to the Princess, 
 looking more than ever peony-like when she curtseyed low, 
 her crimson petals spreading round her over the grass. Mony- 
 penny's eyes were slowly dragged towards her by a power 
 which was both without and within him following her till 
 she vanished into the boskage of women about the Princess. 
 And even then the lawn seemed to shimmer and glow with 
 her brightness.
 
 CLIMBING STREETS 121 
 
 He could hear a murmur in his ears. It came from Becket, 
 whose whiskers brushed his robe: 
 
 "She's a wonderful woman, Monypenny, a wonderful wo- 
 man my wife." 
 
 9 
 
 So Morgan le Fay had come back to Tamarisk Town. 
 Monypenny accepted the fact quite calmly, without any 
 warmth in his blood or a quickened beat of that heart which 
 had leaped so madly once at French Landing. There was in 
 her return something strangely like the fulfilment of the ex- 
 pected something inevitable, like the return of Spring. He 
 had never thought she would come back, and yet now she 
 had come he looked upon it as the keeping of a promise, the 
 promise which Marlingate had held in its heart all these years. 
 Scent and sound, emotion and sensation, seemed to mingle and 
 swoon and yet he was curiously untroubled; he stood quietly 
 beside the Princess in the lengthening shadows of the Town 
 Park, watching the sunshine blazing on the roses, by some in- 
 explicable means relieved of the heat of his robes and the 
 weight of his Mayoral chain. 
 
 The ceremony was over, the crowd broke into separate col- 
 ours, and sprinkled itself over the Town Park like a scat- 
 tered posy. The Mayor and Corporation solemnly escorted 
 Sophia of Worcester to her train, and went home convinced, 
 in direct contrast to the morning's emotions, that they had be- 
 stowed a signal honour upon her in asking her to visit Mar- 
 lingate. 
 
 Monypenny, after disrobing at the Town Hall, went straight 
 to the Marine Hotel, where the Beckets were staying. There 
 was a strange, tumbling eagerness about him. He did not stop 
 to question his delight, just let it run through him like Spring 
 sap, calling the hidden boy, which cropped out so oddly at 
 times from his municipal staidness. Part of his excitement 
 spilled over in a new enthusiasm for Becket. Becket had be-
 
 122 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 haved splendidly Marlingate could never have reached its 
 present glory without him. It was true that he would not in 
 the end lose by his generosity, but he had stuck to the town 
 through years of absence with an extraordinary faithfulness,, 
 ignoring no loan, subscription list or borough enterprise. 
 Monypenny's heart glowed towards him, in spite of that deep- 
 grooved streak of folly which ran through all the merchant's 
 dealings whether public or domestic, and of which Mony- 
 penny was so keenly aware, that even now on his way to see 
 him, full of gratitude and anticipation, he caught himself mut- 
 tering: "Becket is a fool." 
 
 When he saw Mrs. Becket he knew that mixed with his 
 eagerness there had been qualms. He had been unconsciously 
 wondering how much of the past she would bring back. He 
 had to wait for her a few minutes in the Beckets' sitting-room. 
 It was a large, handsome room, gay after the manner of the 
 times with plush and gilding, and the sea sighed through the 
 open window. That open window was its only token of dif- 
 ference from a hundred other such drawing-rooms in Marlin- 
 gate. A discreetly opened window was healthy in June, and 
 many sashes were moderately raised along the Parade or in 
 the High Street. But here all the great bow gaped and rat- 
 tled in its frame as the sea-wind swept it, stirring about the 
 room, shifting pictures, flapping fire-screens and antimacas- 
 sars. Monypenny thought it right to close the window, 
 and was struggling with the stiff sash-lines when a sudden 
 swelling of the breeze into a hurricane proclaimed the open- 
 ing of the door. He swung round uneasily in the bow, ex- 
 pecting Morgan to blow in like a dead leaf. Instead she 
 sailed in like a stately ship, her hoop spread wide, her hand, 
 with a broad velvet ribbon round the wrist, stretched out to- 
 wards him. 
 
 Then his doubts left him. He need never have feared this 
 woman, polished and sleeked by marriage and experience. He 
 realised smitingly that she must be as ashamed as he was of
 
 CLIMBING STREETS 123 
 
 that episode under the Gringer, and as anxious to forget it. 
 She had not learned for nothing the wisdom of towns, and he 
 need never fear that she would try to bring him back into that 
 terrible place which his soul dreaded between the woods and 
 the sea. 
 
 She greeted him without a trace of embarrassment or re- 
 collection, complimenting him on the ceremony in the Town 
 Park, and the general development of the town since she had 
 seen it last. He asked after the health of the baby which had 
 kept her at home that morning, and she told him that it was 
 partly for the child's sake that she had come to Marlingate. 
 The little girl had been ailing that spring and needed sea air. 
 
 "But that's only one reason why I came. I wanted to see 
 the town again after such a long absence. I have heard won- 
 ders of Marlingate." 
 
 She laughed suddenly, and when she laughed the old Mor- 
 gan seemed to come back. He found himself laughing too, 
 and had a queer feeling that they were both laughing at Mar- 
 lingate. 
 
 He was glad when Becket came in with Mr. and Mrs. Leo 
 Hurdicott. Tea was brought and as the Hurdicotts were talk- 
 ative, Monypenny had a chance of silently watching Mrs. 
 Becket. In the Town Park his senses had been in too deep 
 a trance for him to examine her, but now he saw that she had 
 altered in appearance as well as in deportment she had filled 
 out and ripened, her movements were slower and more digni- 
 fied, she actually seemed taller, and carried her elegant robe 
 with an air. The mood he had caught in mere baffling snatches 
 long ago, those strange gleams of polish and state which had 
 perplexed him, now formed the woman herself, her poised and 
 stately mould. Yet as he sat and watched her talking, he 
 sometimes caught glimpses of the woman that was gone, the 
 wood-faun that danced in her eyes, and broke her polished 
 charm with little ripples of wildness. It seemed as if since 
 her marriage she had turned her nature inside out the va-
 
 124 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 grant mood had become the woman, and the woman he had 
 known lived only in her laugh and her long veiled eyes. 
 
 Becket's attitude towards her was probably exactly the 
 same as that he had borne towards his Emma of pious mem- 
 ory. He admired her openly, almost foolishly, consulted her, 
 deferred to her, and was in his turn treated with amiability 
 there was no other word to express her attitude of active 
 toleration. Oddly enough it would seem as if she had given 
 him a polish there was less of the counting-house about him 
 than there used to be. 
 
 Monypenny felt very happy. His life was broadening and 
 streaming he felt it spread and flow like a river. For some 
 strange reason that episode at French Landing, which had al- 
 ways stood apart from everything else in his life, inexplicable 
 and alien, now became part of the main stream, part of his 
 ambition for Marlingate, part of his success, part of his May- 
 oral greatness. 
 
 10 
 
 He saw a good deal of the Beckets during the next week. 
 They were present at all the various gatherings, whether so- 
 cial or municipal. Monypenny became used to Morgan's 
 swimming grace beside Becket's solidity, like a sapling birch 
 beside a shrub. He became used to the new tones in her voice 
 and the new graces in her manner. The pleasure these gave 
 him was not grounded in a mere snobbish relief at finding her 
 admired and sought after by others as well as himself, the 
 praised of Lincolns, the pardoned of Hurdicotts. It was rath- 
 er a half-triumphal pleasure in finding that she had gone the 
 way of everything else in his town, and become beautiful, elect 
 and polished. As the Wilderness had become the Town Park, 
 so Morgan Wells had become Mrs. Hugo Becket, and Mony- 
 penny exulted in her clipped and trimmed decorum, in her 
 flowering, wide-petaled sweetness and it was now part of his 
 delight that he could never forget how once this garden rose had
 
 CLIMBING STREETS 125 
 
 bloomed wild on the cliffs and pricked his heart with thorns. 
 
 The week of festival culminated in a Grand Ball at the As- 
 sembly Room. Balls had developed since the opening cere- 
 mony five years ago. The room was packed this night, and 
 Monypenny and the stewards worked hard to clear the mere 
 gazers and saunterers into the card-rooms, so that the floor 
 could be kept free for dancing. The decorations were more 
 chastened and more expensive instead of flags there were 
 flowers, roses and camellias with that drugged element in their 
 sweetness which the hot-house gives. A more liberal artistic 
 experience had also taught the Town Committee to distrust 
 the decorative qualities of the borough arms; so their Constans 
 Fidei and lions regardant did not appear more than once or 
 twice upon the walls. The Corporation smelt less of the coun- 
 ter, and Monypenny's elegance was no longer conspicuous in 
 a wad of Lewnes-clad Aldermen. The whole thing was more 
 polished, more easy, more accustomed, and to Monypenny's 
 eyes it glowed with all the dazzle of a promise fulfilled. 
 
 He opened the ball, leading out the Duchess of Lincoln, 
 while the Duke led Mrs. Becket. Her dress of sea-green Lyons 
 silk swam round her white shoulders and her shining, silver 
 feet. A wreath of myosotis bound her elegant dark head, 
 and a great fan of curled, creamy feathers swung to and fro 
 before her breast. She was the finished and perfect work of 
 art for which her appearance at that first Assembly, six years 
 ago, had been a trial sketch. He watched her with a soft, fur- 
 tive pleasure. She satisfied at once his sense of beauty and 
 his sense of fitness the underlying outrage was no more. He 
 looked forward to the time when he was to claim her hand for 
 the waltz. 
 
 By then the room had emptied a little, for the waltz, with 
 its hardy encircling of the waist, was still not favoured for 
 debutantes and young ladies, so these joined the chaperones 
 along the walls, while the more emancipated married women 
 took the floor.
 
 126 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 The band struck up a waltz by Offenbach, and the lilting, 
 tinkling music seemed wonderfully to express the night whose 
 perfections were not of the stars and the earth, but of the 
 strung lights and the polished floor. Morgan herself seemed 
 part of the sweet artificiality of it all. It was as if he danced 
 with a marionette, to the tune of the musical box in her breast. 
 . . . His happiness dared, as it always dared when the wild 
 things it dreaded were remote. All round him was the world 
 he loved the world of solidity and polish, beauty and formal- 
 ity. Swung by his daring he broke a silence he had cherished, 
 and asked her 
 
 "Do you remember how we danced together long ago?" 
 
 The next minute he felt as if he had committed an indis- 
 cretion, but at once her long, dazzling look reassured him. 
 
 "Of course I remember what an ill-bred little minx I was 
 in those days!" and her laugh broke up the insincerities of 
 his denial. 
 
 They laughed together. He was glad now that he had 
 stirred up the sleeping beasts of memory he almost wished 
 she would speak of French Landing. But she did not; their 
 talk was of mere, general things till the end of the tune from 
 "La Belle Helene." 
 
 When he had made his formal, courtly bow, and had left her, 
 he felt at once soothed and stirred. His heart went out to 
 the woman who could remember with gay forgiveness the 
 crudities and humiliations of their common past. He was full 
 of a sweet, unreasonable content. His partners found him 
 strangely cordial, his Councillors watched him half bewildered 
 at his new warmth and serenity. It was as if he loved all who 
 were in that room, young and old, beautiful and ugly, visitors, 
 residents, everyone. The music swayed and sobbed and 
 laughed, scents fluttered and stole, or hung heavy in the thick, 
 sweet air, lights glowed, and colours dipped and swung togeth- 
 er. Monypenny no longer lived remote from it all. He was no 
 longer merely the Mayor of Marlingate, the leader and gov-
 
 CLIMBING STREETS 127 
 
 ernor and builder of the town; he had stepped down from his 
 creating aloofness, and was part of the warm, living thing he 
 had made. 
 
 " 
 
 At three o'clock the ball was over and the dancers had 
 gone home. Monypenny stayed to the end, polite, attentive, 
 opening carriage doors. In time the last persisting sound of 
 wheels had died away. He went back, inspected the empty 
 rooms, locked the doors, shook off a lingering Alderman, and 
 found himself alone. 
 
 He stood on the steps under the white moon-dazzled por- 
 tico. The street was a void of moonlight and silence it slept 
 and its sleep was full of dreams; they troubled the shadows 
 that lay in blots and slats on a white sheen, they haunted the 
 chinks of the houses, and fluttered under the stooping gables. 
 Somehow he felt as if he were now looking on the High Street 
 for the first time all his earlier sights of it, crowded, busy, 
 coloured and noisy, were illusion, the mere snatching of a 
 mood; now for the first time he saw it in its reality. This 
 empty street, streamed over with moonlight and gulfed with 
 shadows, this severe fantasy in black and silver, was the real 
 spirit of Marlingate, the surviving spirit which should be when 
 all else was gone. Society, fashion, prosperity would be as 
 the strains of music that is dead, the forgotten violins of the 
 ball, and every night the moon and the darkness should build 
 the High Street anew, and it should be cherished in the soft 
 night, unknown to all save perhaps some lonely privileged 
 watcher like himself. 
 
 A shudder passed over him, for he learned for the first time 
 that his town was built of dreams and shadows, cobwebs of 
 desire, and little rustling winds of regret. ... A low moan 
 broke into the night, swelling into a roar, ebbing back into a 
 sigh. It was the sea, and the echo of it went up all the silent 
 street, and seemed to flow round Monypenny, sucking him off
 
 128 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 the steps into the pool of shadow at their base, then gently 
 drawing him to the angle of the street, where he could see the 
 white line of the waves and the hanging sickle of the moon. 
 
 He felt he could not go home, take rest, or sleep. Some- 
 thing within him was calling him, urging him to receive it, to 
 fulfil it. ... He walked along the Marine Parade, his foot- 
 steps echoing strangely on the stones. The bandstand looked 
 haunted and terrible in its emptiness he found himself hur- 
 rying by the beach-chairs, the bathing machines, had all 
 somehow added to themselves a sinister quality. Divorced 
 from their functions they seemed to lapse into the unreal 
 they were so many mocking skeletons, bones and frames of 
 the colour and gaiety that clothed them in the day. Heavens! 
 Was Marlingate like this every night? He looked out to sea, 
 and saw the path that the light had trodden from the moon. 
 The low soft roar, the blurred horizon, the phosphorescent 
 break of the waves on the beach were a comfort to him in the 
 strangeness of his disembodied town. His little refuge between 
 the woods and the sea had betrayed him his bit of time had 
 crumbled but its eternal boundary remained, the great whole 
 of which Marlingate was a part, and to which its ghost, so rest- 
 less and troubling tonight, belonged, the deep from which it was 
 taken and to which it would return. 
 
 He came to the Stade. He was not unhappy, merely un- 
 certain and bewildered. Indeed, during his walk, he had be- 
 come conscious of a sure ground of happiness in his heart, quite 
 apart from his attitude towards the town. The Stade was not 
 silent and ghostly like the Marine Parade it was full of 
 voices and moving lights. The fishing smacks were putting out 
 to sea. A cool wind blew shorewards round the juts of All 
 Holland Hill, and Monypenny drew his cloak more tightly 
 about him. A lantern moved up to him, and he saw old Gal- 
 lop. 
 
 "Hello," said the fisherman, "I thought as you wur danc- 
 ing wud the quality."
 
 CLIMBING STREETS 129 
 
 "The ball is over," said Monypenny, "and I've come out 
 for a breath of air. Are you going to sea?" 
 
 "Yes, we've got the tide now. My boy's taking out his nets 
 till the turn would you like a sail, Mayor?" 
 
 Monypenny hesitated. He felt a curious longing to be away 
 out on that great stretch of darkness with its one white path. 
 He had had little to do with Gallop since the latter's with- 
 drawal from the Town Council, but there had always been a 
 certain cordiality between them, and now he found himself 
 wanting to share that life which was so characteristic of Mar- 
 lingate and yet so remote from its present activities, which 
 had been of old times, and perhaps would still be when all the 
 rest had departed. 
 
 "We'll be back by the afternoon," continued Gallop, "and 
 the boys have got coffee and eggs on board. 
 
 "Thanks," said Monypenny "I should like to go." 
 
 12 
 
 The Lizzie Hope had been built at Marlingate, in one of 
 the smack-building sheds which the visitors knew nothing 
 about, and few even of the residents had heard of. She was 
 black and tub-like, her round sides pocked with tar-bubbles, 
 her snub bows decorated with the head and bust of Lizzie 
 Hope, who had become weather-beaten to the point of shape- 
 lessness in her tussles with the waves. Aboard, a tiny cabin 
 glowed red with the light of a brazier; there was a smell of tar, 
 of ooze, of fish; there was the strong salt bite of the sea- wind, 
 humming across the bay, and ruffling against the cliffs of All 
 Holland Hill. 
 
 Monypenny climbed up the rope-ladder hanging from her 
 deck, and settled himself under the bulwark. It was a new ex- 
 perience, and unexpectedly gratifying for him to realise that he 
 was best out of the way, to secrete himself and lie low, know- 
 ing that no one wanted his commands or supervision. He lay
 
 130 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 listening to the scrape of the men's sea-boots, to their shouts, 
 muffled in the soft thick dark, to all the rumblings, creakings 
 and cursings that accompanied the Lizzie Hope's putting out 
 to sea. Nobody took any notice of him till they were out be- 
 yond the shallows, rocking softly on the deep waters off the 
 Gringer. Then Gallop's boy offered him a cup of coffee and 
 a grilled herring, which tasted oddly delicate in that atmos- 
 phere of tar and salt and windy freshness. 
 
 He found it hard to realise that an hour ago he had been 
 at the ball, breathing the sickly-sweet warmth of flowers and 
 women's scents, with the perfumes of wine and macassar oil. 
 It all seemed unreal to him now, like a dream. . . . He had to 
 rub the tight soft fabric of his ballroom clothes to convince 
 himself that the thing had ever happened. Even the ghostly 
 tinkle of the music in his brain was dead. He heard only the 
 throb and flutter of the wind over the waves, and the creak- 
 ing of the Lizzie Hope. 
 
 The nets were down, and the smack's red light was now one 
 of a dozen bobbing in the darkness off Rock-a-Nore he had 
 often watched them from his room in Gun Garden House. In 
 the distance he could see the lights of Marlingate streets, soft 
 orange stars in the black mass of the town. The houses were 
 dark he wondered if anyone was watching the fisher- 
 lights. . . . 
 
 The men spoke to him very little a gruff word now and 
 then. He knew he was outside their business, and counted not 
 at all, though he was Mayor of Marlingate. Old Gallop him- 
 self had not sailed there was young Gallop, a man addressed 
 as Bunker, and a boy. They watched the nets, smoked and 
 chewed foul tobacco, spoke in low grunts and mutters, and 
 brewed innumerable cups of coffee. 
 
 The sky was growing paler, and at the approach of dawn 
 the mists which had covered it shredded, and Monypenny saw 
 one or two huge dawn-stars, hanging low, like lamps. Hitherto 
 he had thought little about the stars they had been too re-
 
 CLIMBING STREETS 131 
 
 mote from Marlingate's activities for him to think of them 
 much but now he found himself strangely thrilled by those 
 solemn lights a hundred years away, the lights by which the lit- 
 tle boat trimmed and shaped her course, in cheerful trust of 
 their eternity. A great world seemed to be opening up all round 
 him, a world he had hitherto scarcely realised save in uneasy 
 glimpses, now revealing itself solemn, immense, everlasting, a 
 globe of fire and crystal at the bottom of which Marlingate 
 lay like a speck of dust. . . . 
 
 "Hi! kip clear of the net!" 
 
 He drew aside, while Gallop, Bunker, and the boy hauled the 
 net over the bulwark. The Lizzie Hope reeled, and seemed to 
 stoop against the water, then suddenly righted herself as a 
 shower of iridescence poured over her gunwale and flooded 
 her deck. In the quickening light it was as if a rainbow had 
 melted into froth and lay there leaping and bubbling in the 
 nets. Monypenny sat close to the bulwark while the great col- 
 oured fish jumped and shimmered round him they streamed 
 over the deck, flapped, leaped, flashed in the sudden kindling of 
 the sky. Above was a fiery opalescence spreading and flushing 
 among the clouds; below was, as it were, a distilled drop of 
 that gleaming mackerel-sky, all shining greens and pinks and 
 blues, with opaque glaucous white. 
 
 Gradually the commotion in the smack subsided, while the 
 clouds scattered from the zenith, leaving the sky a dull blue 
 arch, gaping for the sun. Then over All Holland Hill came a 
 sudden fan of red, and a hot copper ball which seemed to hang 
 for a while motionless above the cliffs, then to rise and cool in 
 the tent of the meridian. The mackerel in the Lizzie Hope 
 danced and flashed no more, but lay a huge greeny-white heap, 
 from which came a continuous dripping sound. 
 
 Monypenny watched the men lower the nets again, then go 
 into the cabin to make more coffee. He looked out north of 
 west, and saw that Marlingate was waking between the hills. 
 He felt quite happy and serene. The motion of the Lizzie
 
 132 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 Hope, rocking on the thick green swell of the Deep Channels, 
 the reek of salt and fish and tar, the men's rough detached at- 
 titude towards him, all gave him an immediate sense of free- 
 dom and security. In the distance lay Marlingate and the 
 hills, and it was astonishing how far away it seemed, and how 
 far away he was content to let it be. His seething preoccupa- 
 tion was gone. He watched its many-coloured brightness as 
 a man might watch a bubble, and as he watched more and 
 more of a bubble it became to him a glowing iridescent 
 dream, unreal, transient, mere air and water, bright with mock 
 colours which were only the reflections of the eternal things 
 around it. 
 
 13 
 
 It was when, towards afternoon, the boat grounded, that 
 Marlingate once more became real. Then he had a sudden 
 smiting consciousness of its reality; it stood out as a solid thing 
 among the dreams that had bewildered him all night. His 
 landing was a spiritual as well as an actual coming to shore. 
 Once more his foot was on the firm ground, and he rejoiced to 
 feel the warmth and corporeity of it under him. A man can- 
 not live forever on the shifting green of the waves; he must 
 have earth, warm solid earth, that he can walk on and trust 
 in, and Marlingate had come to mean the earth to Mony- 
 penny. 
 
 It was the dinner hour, and most people were indoors. The 
 streets had a deserted look, but they were steeped in sunshine, 
 the walls and pavements mellow in a soak of light. Mony- 
 penny smelt the hot dear smell of lath and brick, he smelt the 
 peculiar and individual smells of the shops, he smelt the 
 baking little gardens at the back of High Street, and Marlin- 
 gate's own essence of fish and salt, a tempered concentration 
 of the wild windy smells of the sea. 
 
 He walked drowsily up the street to Gun Garden House. 
 He felt suddenly in need of rest he had not slept since the
 
 CLIMBING STREETS 133 
 
 ball. His man and his housekeeper were not alarmed at his 
 absence, as Gallop had let the town in general know that the 
 Mayor had gone to sea in the Lizzie Hope. He refused the 
 meal that was waiting, and went straight upstairs to his room. 
 He must sleep, at all costs he must sleep. 
 
 For two or three hours he lay motionless on the big gloomy 
 bed, his head sunk deep in the pillow, looking strangely young 
 and helpless in his sleep. Then he began to dream, tossing 
 and struggling, till at last he woke. He dreamed he was walk- 
 ing through Marlingate, up and down the streets, past the 
 Town Park and the Town Hall, along the Marine Parade, 
 up and down and to and fro, conscious all the time of an aching 
 sense of futility and longing. The town was empty, he did not 
 meet a soul, and an oppression lay on it as on a city of the dead. 
 The familiar landmarks filled him with a kind of horror the 
 Gothic moulding of the Town Hall, the tiers of houses on the 
 Coney Banks, the white streak of Mount Idle, the gleaming 
 procession-way of the Marine Parade, though all unchanged, 
 had something vaguely terrible about them. They seemed to 
 mock at him, to shut him in. He felt shut up in Marlingate, 
 he could not breathe, he was choking, panting, struggling . . . 
 oh, thank heaven! waking at last. . . . 
 
 He sat up on the bed, wiping the sweat off his face, still 
 shaking in the horror of his dream. Then the chimera passed; 
 he knew he was awake, secure in the midst of his solemn, or- 
 dered existence, no prisoner in Dead-Man's-Town, but Mayor 
 of Marlingate. At the same time, the experiences of the night, 
 the reactions on landing, the fears of which the dream had 
 been an expression, seemed to blend and consolidate. He sat, 
 elbows on knees, solidly facing the problem of his life. 
 
 Everything could be summed up in a name, the name that 
 had been with him the whole time, yet which neither his lips 
 nor his heart had dared articulate Morgan le Fay. In her 
 he had paced through the solemnities of the past week, in her 
 he had danced and drunk the wine of youth at the ball; in her
 
 134 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 he had dreamed out at sea, off Rock-a-Nore, had seen the sun 
 rise, and Marlingate gleam like a bubble which shall flash 
 from glory into nothingness; in her he had trodden the solid 
 earth, imploring it to save him; in her he had seen his town 
 become a chimera, a horror, a starting nightmare from which 
 he had thanked God to awake. 
 
 All his easy happiness was gone. He knew now that he could 
 drift no longer; he must think, and fight. He loved Morgan 
 Becket; how or when he had begun to love her he could not 
 say whether his love had been born in the lilt of Offenbach's 
 music at the ball, in the joyful discoveries at the Marine Ho- 
 tel, or in that sudden sense of freedom and lightness which had 
 come to him in the midst of the oppression of his office in the 
 Town Park, or indeed if it had not been sown like a seed long 
 ago at French Landing, to lie buried till this new sunshine 
 called it into growth and bloom. All he knew was that he loved 
 her, and if it had been folly to think of loving her five years 
 ago, it was ten times folly now. Then she had merely been un- 
 suitable, now she was catastrophic. In loving her he risked 
 the supreme honour of Marlingate, his own greatness and dig- 
 nity, the happiness of the town's benefactor, the peace and 
 good name of Morgan herself. If a few years ago he had mar- 
 ried Becket's little governess, he would have damaged himself 
 slightly, he would have lost a little of his social lustre, which 
 he valued because it shone on Marlingate; but in time the blun- 
 der would have been lived down, and Morgan would have 
 adapted herself to her position, just as she had so surprisingly 
 and perfectly adapted herself to her position as Becket's 
 wife. ... A groan burst from him at the thought. What a 
 fool he had been! and what a coward! If only he had married 
 her then, risked her unsuitability, he would not now be face to 
 face with her as the embodiment of ruin. Surely he might have 
 guessed those hidden qualities which blossomed in her now 
 they might have flowered for him instead of for Becket. . . . 
 He pictured her as his wife, as Mayoress of Marlingate, superb
 
 CLIMBING STREETS 135 
 
 in dignity and beauty, yet giving him in private that wild sweet- 
 ness of the woods which should blow like a promise through 
 the stuffy streets of his town. 
 
 He pulled himself up. Regret is waste of emotion, and the 
 psalmist has said that the dead giants shall not rise to praise 
 the Lord. He had only the present and the future to deal with, 
 and in order to tackle them he must cut away the past. He had 
 made a mistake, but it was irreparable, and he must think of 
 it no more. Perhaps indeed it had not been such a mistake after 
 all. He certainly had not loved Morgan then as he loved her 
 now, and if he had married her in doubt and dread she might 
 have remained always what he hated. It was possible that 
 Becket's stolid sentimentality had achieved a work which could 
 never have been wrought by his own doubting passion. Any- 
 how, there was no use thinking of it. He must think of how 
 he could tear her out of his life before she became rooted. He 
 had been a fool to let her cling, to drowse in his ease and hap- 
 piness till his life became a thicket of impossibilities. 
 
 After all, it ought not to be so very hard to get free. She 
 and Becket would soon leave Marlingate, and his folly would 
 go with them. But he would put himself beyond reach of its 
 return, there should be no more rising of the five-years-dead. 
 He would marry, lay sure foundations, build himself into Mar- 
 lingate till he became part of its structure, immovable and un- 
 shakable. 
 
 He had been a fool to delay marriage for so long; he had 
 trusted too much to the reserves of his nature, laid too much 
 stress on the preoccupations of the married state, ignoring the 
 fact that purely domestic conditions have little reaction on a 
 man's career. Marriage would not tamper with his ambition. 
 On the contrary it would support it socially, and lessen the risk 
 of such catastrophes as that which faced him now. He would 
 not marry for love, but for settlement, comfort, social co-oper- 
 ation, and domestic amiabilities. Though curiously simple and 
 unspoiled in his relations with women, he could not help real-
 
 136 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 ising that there were several in the town who would marry him 
 if he asked them he would have to think carefully and choose 
 discreetly. 
 
 As he made these plans he was conscious of a vigorous re- 
 coil, both mental and physical. But he hardened his heart. 
 
 14 
 
 The whole of the next morning was taken up with borough 
 affairs, and he had little time to think. The America Ground's 
 day of grace was nearly over, and plans for the Marine Gar- 
 dens and Aquarium were before the Town Commttee. Mony- 
 penny had insisted that the gardens should be designed by 
 Figg, so that they should be linked with the rest of the town 
 in one artistic conception. Some hours were spent over paths 
 and belvederes and aquarium tanks. Then there was a long dis- 
 cussion about a theatre for Marlingate. Monypenny had al- 
 ways been a play-goer, and on his rare visits to town had never 
 failed to see Toole, or Paul Bedford, or Fanny Kemble. But 
 he understood that some of the visitors objected to a theatre 
 on moral grounds, and thought it would be a pity to alienate a 
 considerable section of the town's most genteel patrons. He 
 suggested a Concert Hall in the way of compromise. This could 
 be run as a municipal concern, which would vouch for its re- 
 spectability. Good theatrical companies might be engaged 
 from time to time, with a stock or a classic repertory, though 
 it would be principally used for first-class concerts Mony- 
 penny spoke of Jenny Lind for his Hall in the bold, careless 
 way he had spoken of Sophia of Worcester for his Park. 
 
 He came home for luncheon, which he ate, as usual, in digni- 
 fined solitude. He had now adopted London hours for his 
 meals, and dined late, with luncheon at one, and five-o'clock 
 tea. He felt tired and a little dreary, and for the first time he 
 asked himself if he were not too much of a recluse. Now, if he
 
 CLIMBING STREETS 137 
 
 had come home from Corporation frets to cheerful compan- 
 ionship and a loving voice . . . 
 
 For just a moment he saw her sitting opposite him at the 
 end of the table, a black velvet band round the whiteness of 
 her wrist, a lace cap on her hair, a gentle rustle of silks as she 
 moved, and in her eyes the promise of endless freedom and de- 
 light. 
 
 He rose, and pushed away his plate. She would never sit 
 there, and he must not let her come even in dreams. Dreams 
 were dangerous, sapping their way into a man's heart, and lay- 
 ing a mine there to blow up his life . . . but he must fill that 
 empty place, or she would continue to come to it unbidden. 
 All the morning his brain must have been working subcon- 
 sciously at its new problem, for directly he turned to it, it 
 furnished him with the name of Fanny Vidler. If he married 
 he ought to marry locally, and Fanny was certainly the best 
 match in the town. No doubt there were more aristocratic 
 brides to be had among the visitors, but more than ever Mony- 
 penny was consolidating his desire to build himself into Mar- 
 lingate. Fanny was the niece of one of his most prominent 
 supporters on the Town Council; she owned land immediately 
 touching his own, good land which could be built over and 
 added to the greatness of Marlingate. She was besides an at- 
 tractive girl, well-educated, and not ill-connected. He had met 
 her once or twice since the occasion at Vidler's house, and his 
 liking for her had increased each time. Certainly she would 
 make him a good wife, support his ambition yet not encroach 
 upon it. He would go to see her this afternoon. 
 
 I 5 
 
 Old Rumble was a recognised excursion from Marlingate. 
 A small greenish stream suddenly began to pelt downhill al- 
 most at the rate of a waterfall, and achieved some picturesque 
 ripplings and windings before joining the Gut's Mouth just
 
 138 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 above the Slough. To the woods of Old Rumble shays, ba- 
 rouches, and meek hackneys would drive out on sunny after- 
 noons, and as long as the excursionists did not stray from the 
 roads and paths or otherwise damage Miss Vidler's property, 
 they were always welcome in the deep valley farthest from the 
 house. 
 
 This afternoon there was a special concert in the Town Park, 
 so Monypenny found his walk unusually private. He had 
 formed a plan to walk across the woods, inspecting the two 
 farms on the property, and winding up with a call on Fanny, 
 but soon after he left the road he found his resolution losing 
 some of its trim and practical conciseness. Indeed, it began to 
 strike him as a little ridiculous. Not so easily were the big 
 eternal things outwitted. He was away from the town now 
 all that came to him of Marlingate in that soft sun-slotted 
 shadow was the faint lilt of the band in the Town Park. The 
 band played "Rienzi" with daring, but to him it was only a 
 distant tinkling sound like a child's musical-box. 
 
 He was alarmed at his own reactions. Why should he swing 
 to and fro like this, like a pendulum, like a trivial charm on a 
 woman's bracelet? What right had fate to make caper the 
 Mayor of Marlingate? His path was taking him close to the 
 track frequented by driving excursionists, and the distant purr 
 of wheels made him draw back into the thickets. He threw 
 himself down on a pile of last year's leaves, crackling grimly 
 under the spurge. He wanted to think before he went fur- 
 ther, and yet he knew that to think was the last thing he 
 could do. He was in torment. The love that had brought 
 him at first a drowsy sense of peace and well-being was now a 
 remorseless laceration. He fumed at his helplessness to con- 
 trol the mental powers which had once been his glory. He 
 surrendered illy to his own disintegration. Surely, he thought, 
 only fools and sensualists could welcome love to the think- 
 ing man, the mental ruler, the philosopher, it must, with its 
 pickaxe in his brain, be always the greatest of catastrophes.
 
 CLIMBING STREETS 139 
 
 The approach of the distant carriage made him raise him- 
 self, afraid lest he should be seen in his collapse. He stood up, 
 then suddenly shrank back into the cover of the hazel, for in 
 the carriage, driving with Lady Cockstreet, glowing like a poppy 
 under the scarlet shade of her parasol, was Morgan Becket. 
 He wondered if she had seen him he was only ten yards or so 
 from the driving track, and a ruffle of wind was treacherously 
 tossing the hazels. He could hear her voice unshaken in its 
 conversation with the Dowager. Perhaps she had not noticed 
 him. Or perhaps if she had, she thought nothing of it after 
 all, had he any ground whatever for believing that she felt for 
 him as he felt for her? It was queer, but somehow he had 
 taken it for granted; without a shred of evidence he had been 
 convinced that she loved him and that the consummation or 
 renunciation of their love rested with himself. Now he saw 
 how utterly baseless was such an idea. She had never by look 
 or word given him reason to think that she remembered or 
 cared. The realisation made him almost faint with pain; he 
 saw now how piteously he wanted her, how utterly he was de- 
 pendent on her return of his passion. 
 
 In his agony he had thrown himself down again, and lay 
 motionless till an approach of wheels from the opposite di- 
 rection made him fear that the carriage was coming back. 
 Probably it had driven only to the crest of the woods above 
 the stream, avoiding the steep hill down to the water. He 
 slipped back a yard or two further in the bushes, but he could 
 not resist glancing through them; perhaps this would be his 
 last sight of her, she would probably be gone in a day or two. 
 He looked, but drew back disappointed this was not the same 
 carriage; yes, it was the same carriage, but Lady Cockstreet 
 sat in it alone. Morgan and the poppy parasol had disap- 
 peared; perhaps she had decided to walk down to the stream, 
 perhaps she had gone to call on Fanny Vidler. 
 
 Monypenny stood up. He would go back to the town, to 
 that concert in the Town Park, which was now sending to-
 
 i 4 o TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 wards him the echoes of a waltz made plaintive by distance. 
 The Mayor must go back to bricks and mortar, to his aldermen 
 and mace-bearers, his robes and cocked-hat. He must run from 
 the wild woods where wandered Morgan le Fay seeking him 
 with enchantments and spells. Suddenly panic-stricken he 
 turned to go, then realised with a gush of infinite relief that it 
 was too late. She stood before him. 
 
 The leaves rushed in a moving pattern over her gown, and 
 the scarlet brightness of her parasol put an unusual flush into 
 her cheeks. As she stood there between him and Marlingate 
 she was less a woman than a flutter of mingling colours and 
 lights, the concentrated essence of the sunshine that moved in 
 the woods and filtered in scattered brightness through the trees. 
 She stood in an open space, a little below him. He had not 
 seen her come there; it was as if the sunshine had suddenly 
 created her. 
 
 "Well," she said gaily, "I saw you from the carriage, and 
 thought I should like to talk to you; so I let Lady Cockstreet 
 drive down alone." 
 
 It was perfectly natural. He was a fool to feel so afraid. 
 
 "I felt I wanted to ramble in the woods after a stuffy 
 morning at the Town Hall." 
 
 The words came almost foolishly as he drew near and stood 
 with her in that little open space among the hazels. Far away 
 the waltz had finished, and there was silence save for the rus- 
 tle of the underwood. 
 
 "You're wise." 
 
 It was still quite natural, but his lips were dry and his 
 tongue was hot and thick in his mouth. He began to talk 
 stumblingly, feeling that words could save him. Words could 
 spin a web between him and Morgan le Fay, and perhaps her 
 magic would be caught in it before it could reach him. So he 
 talked on about the Marine Gardens and the Aquarium and 
 the Concert Hall snatching at Jenny Lind and modern mu- 
 sic. He scarcely noticed her comments and replies, for all the
 
 CLIMBING STREETS 141 
 
 time he was watching her eyes working at his web, melting 
 and tearing it. The faster he wove the faster her long, slant- 
 ing eyes seemed to eat up with their spells his handiwork of 
 desperation. 
 
 She stood almost listlessly, her parasol across her shoulder, a 
 Windsor hat dipping over her brow and making her eyes gleam 
 more brightly under its shadow, like water under the shade of a 
 tree. The Mayor wove faster and faster, and while he wove 
 her long eyes tore and slit and shrivelled the web till sudden- 
 ly he collapsed, with the utter weakness of a strong man, and 
 held out trembling hands towards her. 
 
 "Morgan have pity on me." 
 
 She did not speak, and he repeated: 
 
 "Morgan. . . ." 
 
 Then she dropped her sunshade, which rolled in a whirl of 
 scarlet down the slope, like a poppy falling, and stretching 
 out her hands took his white, struggle-worn face intd their cool 
 palms, drawing it down to her silent mouth. 
 
 In the Town Park the band played "II Trovatore." The mu- 
 sic eddied up into the woods, questing among the thickets, 
 eager, plaintive, almost reproachful. For in those woods of 
 Old Rumble the man who had made Marlingate had forgotten 
 it altogether.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 THE BETRAYAL 
 
 THEN came some shining days of peace. Monypenny was 
 like a shipwrecked man flung at last by the waves on the shore 
 of a tropical island; he drowsed there in the warmth of the un- 
 known country, resting after the struggle, at once too calm and 
 too bewildered to explore his new surroundings, living only in 
 the present relief. 
 
 So this was the coast that had scared him, on which he had 
 been driven struggling and protesting, invoking his gods of 
 bricks and mortar and borough parchment. ... As time went 
 on he was able to investigate, to look round him, and every step 
 made him realise more joyfully that he was on the firm ground. 
 His foot was on a rock which stood firmer than Marlingate; 
 that vague feeling of indefiniteness, of a reach beyond, which 
 had always qualified his relations with the town, had now de- 
 parted, leaving things real. The sense of reality which per- 
 vaded his life was part of the best of it; yearnings and dreams 
 were gone, and instead he had solid possessions, culminations, 
 satisfactions. It was all as different from the old state as earth 
 from air or water. It seemed as if for the first time he now 
 walked on earth, as if before he had always swum or drifted 
 through more fluid elements. 
 
 The next thing he realised was that, surprisingly, he stood 
 closer than ever to Marlingate. His new experience had not 
 parted him from his town on the contrary, he felt all the 
 closer linked with it; for now it kept its proper place in his 
 
 142
 
 THE BETRAYAL 143 
 
 life, holding the foreground without usurping the horizon. 
 Monypenny saw Marlingate as a great achievement and his 
 own possession, he saw it as the consummation of an endeavour 
 of which any man had a right to be proud, and at the same 
 time it no longer choked up his life, blocking all its exits to 
 wider things. The new clearness with which he saw it made it 
 more precious and more intimate; he seemed to have commun- 
 ion with the humble things of Marlingate, to be one with its 
 common life not only the watcher from the hillside, but the 
 guest at the hearth. 
 
 Morgan had given him all this. It was part of the dowry 
 that she brought her lover a dowry so rich that he had not 
 imagined half of it. Her love was a flood of experience; in its 
 depths seemed to lie all knowledge. He had never realised till 
 then how ignorant, wavering, and lifeless his existence had 
 been till she took it up in her hands and breathed on it. He 
 had lived only in his town his private life had been squeezed 
 and toneless but now he had an immense life of his own, all 
 the more wonderfully his because she both gave and shared it. 
 
 This new growth made him feel very boyish and fumbling 
 sometimes. He saw how immeasurably richer in everything she 
 was than he. Life had moulded her, shaped her, adorned her, 
 and yet left her essentially herself, whereas he had scarcely 
 changed at all during his adult years, and as a boy had not 
 been very different from what he was now. She was of more 
 malleable stuff than he, and yet not malleable from weakness, 
 but rather from the excess of her vitality, enthusiastically 
 adapting itself to every change and varying pressure of life, 
 molten silver shaping to beauty. He no longer wondered how 
 she could have changed herself from Morgan the governess to 
 Morgan the great lady, for he saw her in all things fierily fluid; 
 and the source of his greatest delight and wonder was the way 
 she had through all her changes remained Morgan le Fay. 
 Those wood-notes which had piped bewilderingly through the 
 tinkle of her immature years still fluted in the minuet of her
 
 144 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 ranged, sedate existence, telling of woods and leafy silences 
 and the slopes of the Gringer golden with gorse and sun. . . . 
 
 Now that he loved her it was these wood-notes that he lis- 
 tened for most eagerly, for now he knew he might obey their 
 piping. The Mayor of Marlingate had his secret place in the 
 woods, where he could dance and tumble on the brown leaves 
 without shame, and forget without loss or guilt the red town 
 behind the tamarisks. 
 
 The summer drifted by in days of warmth and life. Mar- 
 lingate simmered and stewed in the pan of the hills, and the 
 sea was smoked with purple mists of heat. At the back of the 
 town the woods wove a web of shadow over the heads of 
 Monypenny and Morgan, and cool airs ran through their tun- 
 nels to the lovers' cheeks, so that the Mayor forgot the baking 
 streets of his town and the hard shadows of gables, and lay 
 with his head in the lap of Morgan le Fay, and watched the 
 running shadows of the leaves fly over her face, making it mot- 
 tled and mysterious like a fawn's. 
 
 But they did not always meet in the woods; that tryst was 
 only for occasional liberties, queer little escapes. They met 
 most often in the intricacies of the town's social life, the pac- 
 ings of the borough quadrille in which they crossed and re- 
 crossed, turned, and set to partners before the admiring eyes 
 of all Marlingate. He met her at the concert, at cards, at the 
 ball in the Town Park, among arbours of clipped yew, in the 
 Marine Gardens, new and soil-smelling. They listened to 
 Jenny Lind together, at the Library they discussed "Our Mu- 
 tual Friend," turned the pages of "Household Words," and 
 watched in the daily paper how Sherman marched through 
 Georgia. He never chafed at the publicity of their encounters, 
 for the public, ceremonial conditions of most of their meetings 
 gave a sweetness of contrast to their few wild privacies. Be- 
 sides, he liked to see Marlingate as the setting of the jewel, the 
 calyx of the rose; he liked to see her glory shining on it, giv- 
 ing it new wonderful powers of satisfaction, making each func-
 
 THE BETRAYAL 145 
 
 tion, each assembly glow with new colours, so that the whole of 
 that summer season was like a familiar landscape seen for the 
 first time in sunshine. 
 
 2 
 
 The town began to notice the change in Monypenny; he was 
 melting. Gradually out of the stiff casing of his municipal 
 dignity was emerging something warm and simple and hu- 
 man, a delayed boy, come as it were just before the feast was 
 over, and still a little timid and awkward at his late arrival. 
 People noticed the change and liked it. They put it down to 
 his success; they said that Monypenny was obviously a man 
 whom success did not spoil, whom, on the contrary, it im- 
 proved in mind and manners. They found that up till then 
 he had lacked suavity; the men had found him stand-offish, the 
 women unresponsive. Now they were, both men and women, 
 continually surprising new warmths in his character, little 
 spurts of occasional wildness and wit. Instead of merely direct- 
 ing and controlling Marlingate activities, he animated them. 
 He no longer paced alone through balls and conversaziones, 
 remote and saturnine, with his melancholy, unawakened eyes, 
 and heavy chin. He stood with a new readiness and informal- 
 ity of tongue, in the middle of some clump of tall hats and 
 Paris bonnets his laugh was occasionally heard. 
 
 As he opened his heart, so also he opened his house. Gun 
 Garden House became less of a solemn sanctuary, within 
 which few had entered, and then only under the weight of 
 ceremonial restrictions. He still clung to his privacy he did 
 not change his type, merely fulfilled it; but he entertained 
 more generally and more frequently. He gave gay little din- 
 ners at Gun Garden House not mere rites of municipal or so- 
 cial necessity. 
 
 In the mahogany-smelling glooms of his dining-room shone 
 the gold and silver muslins of Hurdicotts of Graveley, of Pa- 
 pillons and Fulleyloves and Beckets. On more middle-class oc-
 
 146 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 casions the rich old wine of the Gun Garden cellars was sol- 
 emnly rolled over the tongues of his Aldermen Pelham, and 
 Lewnes and Lusted, invited with their ladies. Lewnes now 
 had a lady, of the Lusted tribe, with wide eyes and shining 
 slate-coloured hair and generously curved frontage, like one of 
 her father's houses. "Obviously built from Lusted's design 
 no one who had seen the houses on the Coney Banks could 
 doubt his paternity for a moment" so Monypenny remarked 
 to Pelham in an unbending moment, and the saying went round 
 the Corporation back to Lewnes, who took no offence, for when, 
 he asked, had anyone ever heard the Mayor make a joke? He 
 was proud that Mrs. L. should be the subject of his Worship's 
 first effort. 
 
 Becket and his wife came often to the dinners at Gun Garden 
 House. It was part of the setting in which she glowed. Her 
 pale smile would suddenly gleam at Monypenny like moonlight 
 out of the dimness of the room, where the wax candles throbbed 
 warm and civilised among the shadows of sideboards and alder- 
 men. He lived through his evening in the happiness of the one 
 glance she might be able to throw him for himself alone. 
 
 He remembered how he used to picture her there, in his 
 heart-ache and loneliness, sitting with the warm candle-gleam 
 on her breast, and a broad black velvet wristlet to show the 
 whiteness of her little hand. . . . Well, she sat there now, his 
 own, the heart and satisfaction of his dreams. He would drag 
 his eyes away from her, in case he should worship her too open- 
 ly before them all. 
 
 Their love was quite unsuspected, no suspicion polluted the 
 freedom and dignity of their intercourse whether in public or 
 in private. It was the fashion in the town to admire Mrs. 
 Becket, and Monypenny, its head and governor, might lead it 
 in this as in other matters. Those summer mornings, large par- 
 ties of ladies and gentlemen would ride out on Cuckoo Hill, 
 cantering daintily over the cushions of turf and thrift, and 
 sometimes Monypenny and Morgan would sweep more daringly
 
 THE BETRAYAL 147 
 
 ahead, and then, with the keen wind streaming past them with 
 its thin wail, would turn their bent heads and look adventur- 
 ously into each other's eyes. Their faces would be all aglow 
 with the glory and fun of their secret, the joke of their con- 
 cealment, the excitement of hiding such a love as theirs from 
 the sedate, municipal eyes of the borough fathers, or the more 
 piercing, less decorous glances of Marlingate society. A look 
 and a smile that was all they had time for before the rest of 
 the calvacade would canter up round them, with flying veils 
 and flowing habits and shining boots. But it was enough to 
 make an adventure of that formal ride, since a look and smile 
 expressed all the wonder and the joyousness of their love. 
 
 3 
 
 At the end of the Summer, Morgan and her husband went 
 back to London, but the separation was not so terrible as 
 Monypenny had dreaded. There was something transient and 
 unreal in the months that flowed by without her, and at the 
 same time a sense of their inevitable course towards reunion, 
 as of a river flowing to the sea, while a perfume seemed to 
 linger in the town, and every street-bend and promenade-seat 
 was a shrine since here he had met her, and here he had 
 caught a glimpse of her swaying gown, and there she had sat 
 under the scarlet shade of her parasol, and there they had 
 leaned together over the rail and watched the sea as it sought 
 the land in long sighs and caresses. . . . 
 
 The Assembly Room had become a temple, dedicated to the 
 memory of sacred rites of waltz and quadrille, and the stone- 
 smelling aisles of St. Nicholas Church had a new beauty of 
 holiness, since from his big empty pew at the back he had so 
 often watched her bonnet bend and bow through the devotions 
 of a dozen sunny, sleepy Sundays. 
 
 As for the woods, they held her memory so closely that his 
 thoughts became humble and faltering when they strayed into
 
 148 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 them. Buried in their tawny hearts were things both reverend 
 and wild, secrets that they would never give up to the town. 
 He no longer had that feeling of hostility towards the woods, 
 for in them, as it were, the scrolls and deeds of his love were 
 deposited. When the long, sighing sweep of the wind rustled 
 up from their alleys, and flew moaning down the High Street 
 to the sea, he heard no threat in the sound. He liked to think 
 of those two great freedoms outside his town, sighing and strain- 
 ing to each other across it, linking themselves with winds that 
 fluttered and sped, ignoring the blot of crimson dust between. 
 That Autumn he moved dreamily through the packed activ- 
 ities of Marlingate. He did not lose his practical sense in mu- 
 nicipal affairs, but in the gaps of borough meetings and social 
 functions, and in his solitary evenings at Gun Garden House, 
 he found a new solace in dreams unconnected with his town. 
 He read a great deal of poetry, too. His favourites, Dickens 
 and Thackeray, Lytton and Ainsworth, were put aside for the 
 scarce-read Tennyson; he also read Mackay, but more doubt- 
 fully. Once or twice he found the sweet rhythms and word- 
 spells of the "Idylls" and "In Memoriam" acting on his brain 
 and spirit with a strange intoxication. His own mind groped 
 for words, his own hand fumbled with the pen, and the stored- 
 up sweetness of his heart found a queer, half-sad expression 
 it was strange, he thought, that when he tried to express his 
 love, which was all happiness to him, he should find it come 
 forth in the grey tones of sorrow, sad and restless, as the 
 shadow of a tree. 
 
 "A lover sighed in Tamarisk Town, 
 
 (Tamarisk Town by the Sussex Sea) 
 This was his sigh and thus did he cry 
 (And Mayor of the town was he). 
 
 'Come back to these woodlands, sweet Morgan le Fay, 
 
 For the chills of the Autumn are here ; 
 Come back, for the wind ploughs a sorrowful way 
 
 Through the tatters and shreds of the year.
 
 THE BETRAYAL 149 
 
 Come back, and put stars in the evenings that lie 
 
 Like clouds on the woods and the sea, 
 Put warmth in the sun and put light in the sky 
 
 And the promise of Spring into me.' 
 
 The answer ran through Tamarisk Town 
 (Tamarisk Town by the Sussex Sea) 
 
 When the lamps were lit and the dusk was brown 
 (And the Mayor in love was he). 
 
 'Forget, mortal lover, the wood-fairy's kiss, 
 
 The kiss of the child of the thorn. 
 There is doom for her love, and the doom it is this 
 
 That never with man human-born 
 Must she mate, for the price of her mating would be 
 
 That she lost all the spells of the wild, 
 And humble and mortal and human as he, 
 
 No more be the wood-fairy's child. 
 So forget me, my lover, whose lips I adore, 
 
 For that ransom I never could pay, 
 And the streets by the shore shall be trodden no more 
 
 By the footsteps of Morgan le Fay.' 
 
 A lover sighed in Tamarisk Town, 
 
 (Tamarisk Town by the Sussex Sea), 
 
 A lover sighed and a lover died 
 (And another Mayor had to be)." 
 
 Morgan was inclined to banter this new mood: "Why so 
 doleful, Mayor of Marlingate?" she scoffed tenderly. "And 
 why so determined that Lusted shall take office this Novem- 
 ber? He will not be nearly so ornamental as your Worship." 
 Yet she was kind to his stumbling efforts, with a loving, arbi- 
 trary criticism: "I am glad that you are learning to write some- 
 thing a little more inspired than the minutes of Town Com- 
 mittee Meetings. You are losing some of that extreme air of 
 responsibility which I remarked at first in you. Oh, Edward, if 
 only our love could show you the world which is not built of 
 bricks and mortar, and is not divided into Wards, and assessed 
 for rates, then, whatever the end of it, we have not loved for 
 nothing." 
 
 He noticed in her letters not very frequent, for he and she 
 must be discreet always a little trickle of contempt for Mar- 
 lingate. Love had not made it glamorous to her, as it had to
 
 150 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 him. He saw that in her heart he stood alone, requiring no 
 setting of richness and dignity. She could have loved him if 
 he had been a borough sweeper, whereas could he have loved 
 her if she were still the little governess? He shook his head 
 no, he could not; at least, not as he loved her now. She had 
 not been complete in those days; a dazzling, perfecting part of 
 her was lacking, or rather submerged under stuff that clogged 
 and irritated. Yet he could not help realising that what he 
 loved best in her now was what he had loved in her then, the 
 wild spirit, Morgan le Fay, who had lived in little Wells, the 
 governess, as surely as in Mrs. Arthur Becket. And that part 
 of her which he loved most and had loved longest, was 
 just the part, the only part, which he could never hope to hold 
 and call his own. 
 
 4 
 
 At Christmas time the Beckets returned to the merchant's 
 house on the Coney Banks, just vacated by the Colonel and 
 his genteel daughters. The Coney Banks now formed a pop- 
 ular residential district of Marlingate. Here lived the more 
 solid, old-fashioned part of the new ratepayers. Becket Grove 
 and the Rye Lane villas were looked upon by the Coney Banks 
 as a rather fast suburb, the abode of long purses and short ped- 
 igrees. On the Coney Banks, besides the Beckets, the Leo 
 Hurdicotts and the Alaric Papillons had their sea-side houses. 
 Lady Cockstreet still lived in Rye Lane, because she said she 
 liked the view of open fields at the back of her villa, and the 
 Fulleyloves had a house in Becket Grove; also the old aristoc- 
 racy of Marlingate, the Pelhams, the Breedses, and the Was- 
 tels, still clung to their heavy-beamed, brine-reeking houses in 
 High Street or Fish Street or Zuriel Place but, speaking gen- 
 erally, the Coney Banks were considered the best part of Mar- 
 lingate, the most select, the most genteel. 
 
 Lewnes was delighted to see his property in such favour his 
 rents and reputation going up together. He planned to build
 
 THE BETRAYAL 151 
 
 more houses, and talked the matter over with Lusted, their 
 heads full of stucco and basements and area railings. Mony- 
 penny swooped down on them like a dominie on two plot- 
 ting schoolboys, and told them that though Lusted might be 
 the builder the archiect must be Decimus Figg. 
 
 Lusted and Lewnes looked blank. 
 
 "Figg!" snorted Lusted, "why, he's done the whole town. 
 You might leave a bit of it, Mayor, to chaps that were in the 
 building line when Figg was in petticoats." 
 
 "And the airs he gives himself now," said Lewnes, "and the 
 figure he charges. One ud think that having made his fortune 
 out of us, whom nobody had heard of before we took him up, 
 that he'd do us half fees; but not he! not my lord!" 
 
 "And why should he?" asked Monypenny. "He charged 
 what his designs are worth, and I, for one, don't feel inclined 
 to pay less for them." 
 
 Lewnes sniffed. "It's all very well, Mayor, but this time it 
 ain't your money." 
 
 It was characteristic that neither Lusted nor Lewnes should 
 tell Monypenny that it wasn't his Coney Banks and that he 
 could go and hang himself. 
 
 The argument continued intermittently for some days, and in 
 the end, Monypenny having found out that Figg's charges were 
 in fact a little beyond Lewnes's purse, offered to pay the archi- 
 tect's fees himself. 
 
 "The Mayor's a gentleman," said Lewnes to Lusted; "he's 
 got his ideas, and he don't mind paying for 'em. Now I don't 
 hold with him at all what he says about stucco and that bal- 
 cony notion of yours just shows he's got no taste, to my mind 
 but he's done a lot for this town, and let him have it as he 
 wants, say I, since he's able and willing to pay for it." 
 
 "And where do I come in?" grumbled Lusted, "I that was 
 designing houses before he and his Figg was born that had 
 built the Coney Banks before he'd built a toy-brick church." 
 
 "You're the builder and contractor and maybe" in a com-
 
 152 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 forting whisper "you'll be able to get in some dodge of your 
 own." 
 
 "Yes it'll be easy to work in that pretty little fancy o' mine 
 about the area steps in a house that's, as you might say, hov- 
 ering on the ground, instead of nestling cosy in it. They're all 
 area houses in Berkeley Square in London, and Grosvenor 
 Square, and every stylish place. It's only in Marlingate that 
 we've got no style," and Lusted spat into the foundations. 
 
 The Beckets came down with a train of servants and chil- 
 dren. The children of Emma Hurdicott were now schoolboys 
 and schoolgirls home for the holidays. They were like their 
 father, stolid and plump young people, the boys agog for 
 Christmas fare, the girls whispering together about Signor 
 Frampini, music master at the Sutton Academy where they 
 were boarders. Baby Lindsay came down in her nurse's arms, 
 with hands outstretched towards her mother's bright shawl, 
 and Growings of desire for the silken cherries in her mother's 
 bonnet. Even at a year old, Lindsay was curiously like Mor- 
 gan in colouring and feature, but her eyes were different, more 
 like Becket's, though they were Morgan's brown instead of 
 Becket's blue. 
 
 Morgan had a queer, detached attitude towards this child. 
 She was fond of the little creature, but she seemed to lack the 
 maternal solicitude, the detailed preoccupation of most moth- 
 ers. She would play with little Lindsay as if she was a pretty 
 kitten, fondle her like a kitten, and deck her like a kitten with 
 ribbons; but the aching yearning care of a mother for her 
 child seemed to have struck no root in the complexity of her 
 nature. She did not fret her heart over the delicate baby's ail- 
 ments, though she told people it was for the child's sake that 
 she and her husband had returned to Marlingate. She did not 
 dodge among her engagements for Lindsay's bedtime, or dis- 
 turb Becket's late sleep by having her brought to her in the 
 morning.
 
 THE BETRAYAL 153 
 
 "Funny little monkey it's queer to think she's mine," she 
 said once to Monypenny. 
 
 "She could be nobody else's she's like you in every way." 
 
 "Not in every way in some ways she's more like Hugo, and 
 I've a feeling that she will grow up like him in nature, though 
 in appearance she will always take after me." 
 
 "A baffling combination." 
 
 "Yes, she'll puzzle some man." 
 
 "Disappoint him perhaps if he hopes to find Morgan le 
 Fay." 
 
 His arm slid round her in the darkness. They were sitting 
 in her drawing-room together, and a stormy dusk was gleam- 
 ing dingily in the big gilt mirrors on the wall. 
 
 "Do I puzzle you, Edward?" 
 
 "Profoundly but I like it." 
 
 "Do you really know very much about me?" 
 
 The question struck home with a strange pang. He felt that 
 he wanted to read the riddle in his arms. 
 
 "For instance," she continued in a kind of dreamy warmth 
 "do you know how long I've loved you?" 
 
 Her arm in its silken sleeve was round his neck, and as she 
 spoke her head dropped against it, so that her wide sweet mouth 
 lay close to his cheek. 
 
 "No don't kiss me, Edward; let me tell you I've loved 
 you now for nearly ten years." 
 
 "But you've been back only one year." 
 
 "You know I loved you before. You didn't love me then, 
 but I loved you from the first moment." 
 
 The grip of her arm tightened round his neck, till he could 
 feel her little fist doubled under his chin. 
 
 "I loved you from the very first moment, and I made up my 
 mind that I would make you love me." 
 
 "And Becket?" he threw at her, fighting her because he was 
 afraid. 
 
 "Oh, he was a reaction. I was so wretched after that day we
 
 154 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 parted at the Slide you didn't know you couldn't. I felt I 
 had lost my chance, and I wanted to kill myself. Then Hugo 
 came and was kind to me he's always been kind to me 
 and I married him because I wanted someone kind, to help me 
 forget. ..." 
 
 It was the first time they had discussed her marriage, and 
 Monypenny found his words choked by an uneasy, fumbling 
 respect ior Becket. So he had been kind to her he had 
 helped her through some dreadful, lonely years when her lover 
 had forsaken her. 
 
 "But I couldn't forget, and after a time I felt sorry for what 
 I had done. And then I was glad oh, so glad!" 
 
 She turned away her face from his cheek, and hid it in his 
 shoulder. 
 
 "What do you mean? why glad?" 
 
 "It was after I had been married a year, and I suddenly dis- 
 covered that I was different I was learning things I'd never 
 known before, and I saw that people thought differently of 
 me than they used to think that I was a success. Then when 
 I saw that people thought differently, I felt that you too would 
 think differently, that at least I had it in my power to make 
 you really love me. And I vowed that I would. Yes then! 
 all those years ago! It was something to live for training 
 and moulding myself to be fit for you. That was why I stopped 
 away from Marlingate so long I would not go back till I had 
 made myself what I wanted to be for your sake. Oh, I saw 
 how surprised you were when we first met you scarcely recog- 
 nised me. Then I knew that I had succeeded, and that night 
 I cried for joy." 
 
 Monypenny could not speak. His thoughts were a conflict 
 of joy and pain, pride and humiliation. It was strange that 
 on the whole the rougher, more painful feelings predominated. 
 This revelation by Morgan of herself, of her long pursuit, hu- 
 miliated him. Perhaps she would have been wise not so openly 
 to have shown her hand. He had always looked upon himself
 
 THE BETRAYAL 155 
 
 and her as victims of fate, and now he alone was the victim, 
 not of fate, but of her. She had pre-ordained him for her- 
 self and had won by the strength and guile that a woman 
 knows. And mixed with his humiliation was fear of the 
 love which was so much greater even than he had thought, 
 which had the strength not of twelve but of a hundred 
 months. He had an uneasy feeling that such a love could never 
 be shut up in Marlingate. These narrow, twisting streets could 
 not contain it; its nest was on the cliffs, not under the 
 eaves. . . . 
 
 He gently disengaged himself from her arm and went over 
 to the window, looking down into Marlingate at the foot of the 
 Coney Banks. It lay in the dusk like a grey pool, with lights 
 like the reflections of stars. He had a sudden horrible con- 
 sciousness that it was not there it had vanished; that was 
 only a pond he was gazing down at, fringed with dim, dipping 
 shapes of tamarisks. His eyes desperately fought the twilight 
 for familiar landmarks, and at last dragged out the street of 
 Mount Idle just fading out of the western light, then, as they 
 grew more accustomed to the dimness, he saw the pallid fagade 
 of the Assembly Room, and then the crook of Zuriel Place with 
 Fish Street, yellow in the gleam of some new-kindled lamp. He 
 heaved a sigh of relief and turned from the window. 
 
 5 
 
 Through the Winter into the Spring, past the budding of the 
 trees in Old Rumble Woods to the flowering of the sea- 
 purslane under Cuckoo Hill, Morgan and Monypenny carried 
 their love, now beginning to wear the dear, quiet tints of cus- 
 tom. The intense sunshine of their happiness had faded it out 
 of some early crudeness into a thing rich and mellow. The ad- 
 venture had not departed, but was focussed in a steady vision. 
 They wore their happiness with less self -consciousness, but no 
 less wonder.
 
 156 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 For a year they had kept the secret of their love. This was 
 due largely to Monypenny's discretion. Morgan alone would 
 have been more reckless; also she had the single eye for the 
 man's possessions, whereas he saw both the woman and the 
 town both part of the same whole, it is true, yet each sep- 
 arately demanding his service. On this account he and Mor- 
 gan had their first dispute, the little flutter of words which af- 
 terwards fell into its place, giving to their relations a queer bite 
 and spice, the lack of which they had not felt before. Owing 
 to his conduct at certain public dances, and to one or two pri- 
 vate remarks of Vidler's, Marlingate had chosen to couple 
 Monypenny and Fanny Vidler in its gossip. Fanny was now a 
 bright-eyed bright-haired woman of twenty-two, and, it was ru- 
 moured, had been proposed for by every eligible male of the old 
 Marlingate aristocracy, Pelhams and Breedses and Wastels, 
 and also by one or two of the new residents. People said that 
 she was waiting for the Mayor, and Morgan was angry because 
 her lover did not seem to resent this talk of him; on the con- 
 trary found a perverse pleasure in its survival of contradiction. 
 
 "Don't you see that it makes things easier for us?" he said, 
 "and it shows no one has any idea of what we are to each 
 other." 
 
 "That's what you always think of whether anyone suspects 
 us or not. Oh, Edward, why must we strut about like actors 
 before this gaping town? Sometimes I wish that we could be 
 found out, and then we should have to go away together and be 
 rid of Marlingate." 
 
 Dim echoes of the Slide came up in his reply. 
 
 "Morgan you don't know what this town means to me." 
 
 "I do know and I hate it." Thus she declared war. 
 
 But this first battle was quickly over her victory as he 
 hid his face from his town in her long hair and soon after- 
 wards their love had one of its deepest experiences. Becket 
 was in London for a week of board meetings, the children, ex- 
 cept Baby Lindsay, were at school, and one morning Mrs.
 
 THE BETRAYAL 157 
 
 Becket left home to visit some Cheltenham friends who were 
 staying at Folkestone. She was away a week, and shortly be- 
 fore she came back, the Mayor went off to see a farm of which 
 he was the mortgagee, returning a day or two after Mrs. Becket. 
 So it happened that Morgan and Monypenny had three days 
 alone together at Branzett in the marsh, away beyond Rye, at 
 the back of Dungeness. 
 
 Those days were to live in memories of June-baked grass, 
 of slatting dykes clumped with may, of long green miles of 
 reeds bowing before the sea-wind, of the munch of ring-straked 
 cattle among buttercups, and the shadows of clouds moving sol- 
 emnly from farm to farm. The marsh was one wide freedom 
 and solitude for lovers, spread gold under spread blue. Only 
 here and there in thick islands of elms would squat a lonely 
 farm or a lonely chapel, remnant of some thriving hamlet of 
 smugglers and owlers, or of some rich foundation of the monks 
 of Canterbury. Brenzett was just a glorified farmyard, with 
 the inn and the church shouldering each other beside the mid- 
 den. At dusk there was a sweet smell of farmyard mud, of 
 milk, of wood fires, and in the early morning the lowing of 
 cows would wake Morgan and Monypenny into the greyish 
 whiteness of the inn chamber, with huge dim beams over them, 
 and curtains waving in the dawn-wind that blew cold over 
 thirty miles of marsh. 
 
 It was a strange, beautiful time, detached from anything 
 that had gone before it in Monypenny's life. He was alone 
 with Morgan, away from Marlingate, which lay forgotten be- 
 yond those distant cliffs whose outlines he could dimly see in 
 the cleansed gleam of early morning. For two days he scarce- 
 ly gave it a thought. He and Morgan would rise early, and 
 after the inn's rough breakfast, wander out into their para- 
 dise. North, south, east and west it spread without a hint of 
 boundary, save for the rare and doubtful vision of the Marlin- 
 gate cliffs and of the northward ridge whence Ruckinge and 
 Warehorne and Court-at-Street looked down on the flats. They
 
 158 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 roamed beside the dykes, where Morgan picked armfuls of yel- 
 low flags, and left them; they asked for drinks of milk at name- 
 less farms, and peered through the cob-webbed windows of for- 
 saken marsh-chapels into a green and rotting dusk. Morgan 
 no longer wore the sailing hoop of her dignity, but an old brown 
 dress which clung round her knees and made him think of the 
 brown girl who long ago had mocked him in a wood. They lay 
 among the buttercups, El Dorado, with the yellow light of the 
 shaking flowers upon their faces, and he held her to him in the 
 thickets of the grass. 
 
 Then at last twilight would fall, the dawdling, languorous 
 swale of June. The sky would burn at the rims, and the ze- 
 nith be pricked with stars. The scents of grass, of may, of pig- 
 nut and cow-parsley, of sluggish water, swam in the air. A big 
 red moon rose out beyond Ansdore, lifting her burning horns 
 above the fogs that lay smoky in the east; and through the 
 long grass, and the scent, and the stillness, and the curdle of 
 dusk and moonlight, Monypenny and Morgan would walk back 
 to Brenzett and the dingy Crown, where supper was spread in 
 the glooming gold of one small lamp. 
 
 On the last day, they strayed further, and found themselves 
 in the town of Belgarswick, at the end of Dym Church wall. 
 Belgarswick had once been modestly famed as a resort and 
 bathing place, but lately it had crumbled, and now decayed 
 streets of dirty windows and peeling frontages converged on a 
 cracked parade silted up with shingle. An empty bandstand 
 stood, hollow and chipped like a decayed tooth, on a wide 
 sweep of cement, where iron seats accommodated those few 
 who wished still to sun themselves in the rotted town. The 
 sight depressed the lovers the shops either empty or stuffed 
 with common goods, the houses full of ghosts, the forlorn band- 
 stand, the Assembly Room now used as a Drill hall for the 
 Rifle Volunteers. Morgan was merely disgusted, and anxious 
 to go back to the buttercups and the watercourses, but Mony- 
 penny found himself perversely attracted by the spectacle of
 
 THE BETRAYAL 159 
 
 decay, curious as to its causes railways, he supposed, with 
 their choosing and stranding. Some shoddy policy of Mayor 
 and Corporation, or perhaps just a freak of climate or of 
 fate. . . . 
 
 "Morgan," he said suddenly, "suppose Marlingate should 
 ever be like this? . . . ." 
 
 "Perhaps it will," said Morgan, and laughed. 
 
 "Not in my life time" and back into his heart which had 
 forgotten Marlingate rushed the old ambition and the old pride. 
 This corpse of a watering-place made his eyes turn with love 
 and desire to the far-away hills beyond which his town lived 
 in its honour and triumph and dignity. He did not speak much 
 as they walked back to the marsh, their footsteps ringing on 
 the hot, split pavements, their few words mocked back to them 
 from the peeling walls; but Morgan knew that it wa& the 
 Mayor of Marlingate who walked beside her. 
 
 6 
 
 That summer Monypenny planned the building of a new 
 street. It should run from Becket Grove to the Park gates, 
 with a view of Cuckoo Hill and the southwest sea. He talked 
 it over with Figg, who terraced it. Park Terrace should stand 
 at the head of a shallow flight of red brick steps, shelving down 
 into the road; the houses should be of the same rustic shape as 
 those in Becket Grove, and unlike those of black and barrelled 
 frontage which he had designed for the Coney Banks. There 
 was still a demand for good houses at the back of the town, es- 
 pecially since a neat yellow omnibus had begun to ply up and 
 down the High Street. Monypenny had hesitated before al- 
 lowing the Maidenhood stables to bring forth such a metropol- 
 itan enterprise, but he had seen the advantage of linking his 
 residential background more closely with the sea. People came 
 he realised with a little pang of outrage to Marlingate for 
 the sea, and lived there for the sea. The sea, the enemy, was
 
 160 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 the town's greatest attraction. Well, he must make it acces- 
 sible; he must for Marlingate's profit acquiesce in the attitude 
 which ignored the town's own beauty, looking beyond it to 
 alien, outside things. So the little yellow omnibus linked up 
 the woods and the sea, crowded inside with petticoats and 
 pelisses and outside with pot hats and pardessus. 
 
 Becket, partly from his unflagging local patriotism, partly 
 from financial implication, was keenly interested in the ven- 
 ture of Park Terrace. In its earlier stages Monypenny had 
 not realised how this new creation would bring Morgan's hus- 
 band out of the dim background where he lurked behind the 
 lovers and set him down square and solid in forefront of their 
 lives. For over a year he had ignored Becket, thrust him aside, 
 forgetting his debt to him and his dependence on him; but 
 now he saw that neither he nor Marlingate could move a step 
 forward without him. Becket was the financial backer of Mar- 
 lingate and the husband of Morgan le Fay; he was the com- 
 monplace, grotesque link between these two wonderful things, 
 the two great loves of Monypenny's life. Morgan and Mar- 
 lingate Becket supported and cherished and served them 
 both, both owed him the greater part of their success and dig- 
 nity; the realisation seemed to give a kind of cosmic impor- 
 tance to the merchant as he inspected the site of the new build- 
 ing with Monypenny. 
 
 It was a windy September day, with rags of grey cloud fly- 
 ing before a wind that had the chills of autumn in it. The 
 tamarisks bowed to the ruffled surface of the Slough, and away 
 behind Becket Grove the oaks and beeches and ashes tossed 
 and nodded their clumps. There was a shudder of wind from 
 Old Rumble and a sigh from behind Cuckoo Hill. Monypenny 
 shivered in the elegant light clothes of Marlingate's summer 
 season, and Becket rubbed red hands together. 
 
 It was the first time for many years that they had been en- 
 gaged like this in a common cause, and Monypenny was con- 
 scious of restraints and awkwardness. Becket, as might have
 
 THE BETRAYAL 161 
 
 been expected, talked about Morgan, but Monypenny missed 
 his old irritation at the other's uxorious sentimentality. The 
 clearness of vision which love brings now seemed a doubtful 
 and double-edged gift, for today it enabled him to look through 
 the upper crust of the merchant's folly and see the steadfast, 
 loving nature it concealed. "He was kind to me he's always 
 been kind to me." Morgan's own words seemed to rise up with 
 a curious kind of condemnation as he walked beside the man he 
 had wronged. 
 
 They surveyed the patch of woodland at the bottom of 
 Becket Grove, and planned its clearing. Becket approved of 
 the terrace scheme. 
 
 "He's full of ideas, that young Figg at least you get the 
 ideas and he puts a polish on them. Fancy your picking him 
 up like that at the start, when no one else could see any 
 chances in him! He's on the way to being a great man now." 
 
 "I hope he's not the only man whose name will be made by 
 this town." 
 
 "Not likely! I know of at least one more perhaps an- 
 other," and he blew himself out a little. "Becket Grove that 
 sounds well, and it'll always be there to make people remem- 
 ber me." 
 
 There was something about his attitude that was honest and 
 innocent and pathetic. Monypenny found himself touched by 
 it was it that his heart had grown softer of late, or had 
 Becket only just developed these endearing, genuine qualities 
 of simplicity? It seemed strange that he should have to wrong 
 the merchant before he should be able to recognise him as a 
 fellow human being. He did not like these thoughts and feel- 
 ings they hurt. Was it true that we were all linked up by 
 our mutual wrongs, our common struggles, or forgive- 
 nesses? ... A world wider than Marlingate seemed to open, a 
 grey world in a half light, where men sinned sadly and unwill- 
 ingly against each other and as sadly and unwillingly forgave, 
 where black and white and light and darkness were all smudged
 
 162 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 together in one grey blur of tears, tears of sorrow, tears of par- 
 don. 
 
 "I'm deeply attached to this town," said Becket, standing 
 with his legs apart and staring at the spot where they had just 
 built the ghost of a house. "It's done a lot for me. In the 
 first place it took me out of myself and helped me build up my 
 life again after poor Emma's death, and it's made a bit of a 
 name for me too I like to feel I'm mixed up with it. And now 
 look what it's done for my wife and little one. The baby gets 
 fatter and rosier every day, and Morgan haven't you noticed 
 how much better she looks?" 
 
 "She looks very well," said Monypenny. 
 
 "This last spell of seaside air has worked wonders for her. 
 Last summer, before we came down, I thought she was getting 
 a bit thin and off colour wore herself out entertaining people. 
 It's marvellous what a success she's been won the Hurdicotts 
 round and everything. But I think it took a lot out of her, 
 and I'm glad she's had a quiet year." 
 
 Monypenny said nothing. He stood grating in the earth 
 with his malacca cane. Becket, not encouraged to proceed, 
 turned rather reluctantly to the matter in hand. 
 
 "Yes I agree; we want big houses, and plenty of land to 
 each. We might put up two or three to start with, and see 
 how they let." 
 
 "There's no immediate hurry." 
 
 "Oh, better start at once. 
 
 Monypenny turned slowly away towards the town. His 
 heart was heavy he realised how much he was in this man's 
 debt, and for the moment could not stomach the thought of 
 adding to his obligations. He would have liked to have been 
 able to pay off every penny he owed Becket, and here he was 
 piling up the burden. He/ suddenly decided to drop Park Ter- 
 race for a time and yet what prospect was there of his ever 
 being able to take up the scheme again in more honourable 
 circumstances? Either he must behave in a way that was an
 
 THE BETRAYAL 163 
 
 outrage to all decent feeling or he must abandon a venture 
 which was part of the success of Marlingate. 
 
 The wind blew into Monypenny, chilling his thoughts. For 
 the first time since that June of a year ago he saw incompat- 
 ibility between his love for Morgan and his plans for Mar- 
 lingate. The sunshine was gone from the woods, sucking out 
 all the green and amber and gold, and in the cold, watery light 
 of storm Monypenny seemed to see again the old strife the 
 strife he had realised in the bewilderment of those days be- 
 tween Morgan's renewed challenge and his surrender, but had 
 afterwards lost sight of in the peace wherein they had pos- 
 sessed each other. They were foes, Morgan and his town, and 
 a truce could only temporarily break their warfare. He felt 
 himself caught between them, and, for perhaps the first time 
 in his life, a helpless thing, a man who is caught between two 
 buffers, who is struggling and going to be crushed. . . . 
 
 He threw off the oppressing mood, and turned to Becket 
 with small talk of the town. The wind was blowing behind 
 them down into Marlingate, and as the steely light of the storm 
 moved over the sky, everything seemed to take on a strange, 
 metallic substance. Between hills of lead Marlingate lay like 
 a blot of rust, and down from behind it iron woods crushed to- 
 wards a gleaming, brazen sea. 
 
 Monypenny persuaded Becket to shelve Park Terrace for a 
 month or two. This was made easier by the rising of the Ma- 
 rine Gardens on the horizon. The workmen had been quicker 
 than the Council had expected, and the question of a grand 
 Opening Day lay before the Town Committee at their No- 
 vember meeting. Lewnes and Lusted and one or two others 
 wanted to postpone the ceremony till next summer's season, 
 but Monypenny, backed by Pelham, Breeds and Becket, wished 
 to carry through the business at once. Monypenny pleaded
 
 164 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 for the Winter Season that was, if anything, the more import- 
 ant of the two, the more "select"; December, January and Feb- 
 ruary were months to fill and fatten even beyond June, July 
 and August. Winter brought the best people they stayed 
 longer, they spent more money, they bunched less in lodgings 
 and hotels, indulging in "winter residences" at the back of the 
 town or on the Coney Banks. 
 
 Monypenny spoke well. Abrupt and plain as ever, he 
 seemed to have acquired lately some new quality of emotion; 
 his appeal was vibrant in its restraint, and swept the Town 
 Committee, who abandoned forthwith all cheaper ideals. Then 
 Pelham rose, and with due ornament proposed that as that 
 month would, they hoped, see Monypenny take office for the 
 third year, he should himself perform the opening ceremony 
 at the Aquarium. The proceedings might be linked up with 
 those attending his election, and a grand municipal festivity 
 made of it. The Town Council, moved by a sudden enthusi- 
 asm for their young grave Mayor, greeted Pelham's proposal 
 with stampings and cheers. Monypenny, surprised at his own 
 popularity, suddenly became charming. With a new warm 
 colour in his dusky skin, his melancholy eyes full of brightness, 
 his fine teeth showing in unexpected smiles, he accepted almost 
 boyishly this honour of his Councillors and Aldermen. He 
 laughed, he stammered, he showed for the first time signs of 
 3 r outhful nervousness. They cheered him to the beams of the 
 Town Hall. 
 
 He came out still smiling to himself, and was pursued with 
 unofficial congratulations by Lewnes and Vidler. The latter 
 walked with Monypenny as far as the Petty Passage Way. 
 
 "I'm unaccountable glad of it, Mayor. Wot do we want to 
 go hauling in furriners from outside to do our jobs, when we've 
 a man in the town as ull do 'em better? I reckon Fanny ull be 
 boco pleased. She always said as she'd be glad if you wur to 
 take office another year." 
 
 "It's very good of her, I'm sure," said Monypenny.
 
 THE BETRAYAL 165 
 
 "Her cold's better." 
 
 "I am delighted to hear it." 
 
 "I expect she'll be at the Croquet Club Ball, but she was 
 unaccountable sorry to miss Lady Cockstreet's evening party. 
 Howsumdever, I tell her it'll do her good to be shut off a few 
 routies such a heap as she's had of 'em lately. And half the 
 men in the town after her she finds it tiring." 
 
 "I expect she does." 
 
 "Mrs. V. and I we often says to each other as we wish Fan 
 ud settle down, but again we say it won't do her no harm to be 
 mighty particular. You see she ain't like one of us takes 
 more after her mother's people. Only last week she refused 
 young Never-mind-who with five thousand a year. I'd half a 
 mind to tell her not to be so blame particular. She says she'll 
 marry where her heart is, but I'm hemmed if I see any sense 
 in her sitting around waiting for what may never come." 
 
 Monypenny had an uneasy feeling that Vidler was talking 
 at him. The Alderman's manner was perfectly kind and friend- 
 ly, but the Mayor thought he detected an undertone of re- 
 sentment. After all he had allowed himself, passively though 
 not actively, to be coupled with Fanny in local gossip. He had 
 made no real efforts at contradiction, and it was quite possi- 
 ble that Fanny's own conjectures had been aroused and even 
 that her feelings had been touched. He felt an uneasy sense 
 of shame as he shook hands with Vidler at the opening of the 
 Passage Way. He liked the kindly Alderman, and could not 
 bear the thought of doing any harm to him or his. He also 
 liked Fanny, and was really shocked to think that he might 
 have caused her pain and uneasiness. This was the second time 
 that his love for Morgan had involved him in treachery and 
 injury towards those whom he respected. As he climbed the 
 Coney Banks to the house where Morgan was waiting for him, 
 he asked himself bitterly if their love was inseparable from de- 
 ceit and wrong. For two people in their public position to love 
 secretly as they did was to involve themselves in all kinds of
 
 166 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 outrage. He saw the evil getting closer, the mud getting 
 thicker . . . and by the time he reached her house, his gay 
 looks had quite faded, and he told her almost half-heartedly 
 of the afternoon's doings. 
 
 The dusk had fallen ; a soft grey mist was banking over the 
 sea, rolling up to the bluff of All Holland Hill. In the north 
 and west the sky was clear, the radiance drifting down into 
 the woods and smudging their brown and orange into the 
 clouds. From behind Cuckoo Hill horns and shafts of light 
 went up into the air, so that on the opposite slope the streak 
 of Mount Idle glowed like a bar of porphyry. There was a 
 coldness and rasp in the air, a gathering of mist and smoke and 
 dew into damp curds, yet Monypenny agreed almost eagerly 
 to Morgan's suggestion that they should go out on the hill. 
 She flung on a little cherry-coloured camail, and they slipped 
 down the narrow tongue of garden where the sunflowers hung 
 their rain-sogged stalks, out of the black gate on to the slope 
 of Cuckoo Hill, where it was all still and dusk and damp and 
 rather cold. 
 
 Between the tall narrow blocks of the Coney Bank houses 
 they could see the well of the town, twinkling with soft lights, 
 while more lights sprinkled the sea. . . . Morgan's hand 
 dragged at Monypenny's arm, and he looked down at her. Her 
 face glowed wistfully in the dying light, pointed and pale be- 
 tween the flat black loops of her hair. The dusk had drunk all 
 the colour out of her cherry-tinted cloak, and he saw only the 
 whiteness of her neck above it, stretched to his caresses. In a 
 convulsion of passion and pain he drew her to him, and as he 
 kissed her lips and throat it was as if he drank up the sadness 
 of the dusk and that strange loneliness of Cuckoo Hill, which 
 was the loneliness of the edge of a town, more dreary than the 
 wilderness. 
 
 They stood clasped together there above the twinkling lights 
 of Marlingate, one dim shape in the mist, a darkness patched 
 only by the white gleam of their hands and faces. Without
 
 THE BETRAYAL 167 
 
 words and almost without joy they stood and kissed; while the 
 fire in the sky died down behind them, and shadows crept up 
 round them from the grass, and below them Marlingate lay 
 with a faint tinkle of music coming from its streets. 
 
 A step sucking on the mud made the blotted shape against 
 the wall suddenly dissolve itself into two creatures. A man's 
 figure loomed up suddenly out of the darkness, nearly ran into 
 them, then swung to the side with a muttered "Beg pardon." 
 A smell of tobacco and a smell of fish seemed to linger after 
 he had passed. 
 
 "Did you see who that was?" asked Monypenny in a choked 
 abrupt voice. 
 
 "No, I didn't." 
 
 "It was Gallop." 
 
 "Old Gallop of the Stade?" 
 
 "Yes there was just enough light to see him by. I won- 
 der if he saw us." 
 
 "I doubt it." 
 
 "Morgan if he did if he spoke " 
 
 "It would be a good job," said Morgan. 
 
 n 
 O 
 
 Monypenny dined alone and drearily at Gun Garden House. 
 After dinner he went into his study where a fire was lighted 
 and threw himself into an armchair. His writing desk was 
 littered with papers thick parchment-like papers embossed 
 with a well-known coat of arms. On the occasional table by 
 his side lay a fresh, uncut number of "Dr. Marigold's Pre- 
 scriptions," but neither Marlingate's business nor the new 
 Dickens had power with him now. He was in a terrible state 
 of unrest. He lay back in his armchair with his long legs 
 stretched to the hearth; the fire hummed and crackled, and the 
 gas-jet by the chimney-piece whined a queer little song. Then 
 he heard the wind get up and prowl, shaking doors and win-
 
 168 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 dows, rustling the trees and creepers, rumbling in the chim- 
 ney. 
 
 For a year he had lived in peace indeed peace was too neg- 
 ative a word for the thrilling quiet of mind and body that had 
 been his ever since his surrender in Old Rumble Wood. Now 
 he saw that this year had not been, as he had thought it, the 
 beginning of a new era, but an interval between the old times 
 and the new. For a year he had enjoyed both Morgan and 
 Marlingate, but now he saw by certain disquieting tokens that 
 he must make his choice between them. 
 
 He reviewed these tokens in his mind. Strange to say, they 
 started with the three days at Brenzett. He realised now for 
 the first time that those days had been the beginning of dis- 
 quiet. For they had shown him the difference between his re- 
 lations with Morgan as they were and as they might be. Till 
 then he had felt satisfied with their restrained, almost cere- 
 monial intercourse, but the privacy and familiarity and freedom 
 of those three days had shown him what Morgan could be if her 
 setting were not a town but a home ... if she were sitting 
 opposite to him beside the fire. Now he had his desolate eve- 
 nings. 
 
 He thought of Brenzett the sweet waking up and falling 
 asleep together, the sharing of meals and walks and jokes and 
 plans. All he had now instead of this was an occasional hid- 
 den handclasp, a darted look, a snatched shuddering moment of 
 alarms on the hillside or in the wood and at last they had 
 been seen, their discovery was beginning; he would have to 
 wrap himself closer and closer in deceit, court Fanny Vidler, 
 fawn on Becket. . . . 
 
 Ugh ! He sprang up out of his chair, and walked across the 
 room, pulling back the curtain from the window. Outside he 
 saw his own gas dancing against the night, then as his eyes 
 pierced the darkness he made out tangled lumps of woodland 
 lying there beyond the cleared spaces of Becket Grove, in a
 
 THE BETRAYAL 169 
 
 windy huddle under the stars. He dropped the curtain and 
 turned back into the room. 
 
 After all he had been a fool not to have seen further at the 
 start. He might have known that it would be impossible for 
 a man and woman to love undetected in their public station. 
 The eyes of all Marlingate were upon him, the tongues of all 
 Marlingate discussed him, the minds of all Marlingate pon- 
 dered him and she was in scarcely a more private situation. 
 They were bound to be discovered sooner or later, unless he 
 stooped to fresh outrages of deceit. Some men in his place 
 would have married Fanny Vidler, but the thought of it made 
 him sick. 
 
 Besides, what he wanted was not a long-drawn intrigue; he 
 wanted Morgan for his wife. He had learned that at the Bren- 
 zett Farm he had learned how much more she could be to 
 him than she was now. After all, their relation was difficult 
 and unsatisfactory, a thing of alarms and starts and deceits. 
 As dear friend and wife . . . the very thought was torture to 
 his longing. Yet how could it be? Becket was her husband, 
 and could be put aside only through a scandal which would 
 lose Marlingate to the man who had made it. He saw now 
 that he could have Morgan as he had dreamed, but only if he 
 went to her outside the camp, only if he shook from his feet 
 the dear dust of his town. . . . 
 
 A feeling of anger rose up in him. Why could not things 
 have stayed as they were? Why could not he and Morgan 
 have tripped on forever like marionettes through the combined, 
 mazes of the borough dance? Why had the fiddles suddenly 
 stopped and left him with her there in the middle of the floor, 
 knowing that he must either bow and leave her and seek an- 
 other partner or go out with her into the darkness, never to 
 come back? 
 
 What could he do? He hid his face in his hands, and his 
 mind was black with thought. Which of these two dear things 
 could he forsake? the town which was his own creation, or the
 
 170 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 woman whose new creation he was. He had made Marlingate a 
 town and Morgan had made him a man. Which could he soon- 
 est betray? He thought of his youth and early manhood spent 
 for Marlingate, his watchings and strugglings and denials, his 
 achievement and success. Then he thought of Morgan and how 
 she had poured fire and colour into the grey mould of his life, 
 how she had brought him wisdom older than the world, how she 
 had taught him to feel and taught him to see. He had been 
 only half a man before her love had wakened his dormant pas- 
 sion and virility, had picked his youth out of the streets where 
 he had lost it and brought it back to delight them both. He 
 could not go back to that state of unfulfilment in which he had 
 lived till he found her. Marlingate had quickened only half of 
 him. . . . Marlingate and Morgan if only he could have 
 one of them a little less. 
 
 As he withdrew his hands from his eyes he saw the spread 
 papers on the writing table "Constans Fidei." The borough 
 motto brought him a qualm of remorse. Was he going to prove 
 unfaithful to the work of his own hands? Of course by now 
 Marlingate was firmly established, and doubtless it could get 
 on without him, though not so gloriously. But could he live 
 without it, apart from its interests, away from the sweet for- 
 malities of its social life? He longed to talk over his doubts 
 with Morgan, yet he knew what her attitude would be. Mor- 
 gan would for his sake leave tomorrow her home, her husband, 
 even her child she would toss her good name like spray to 
 the wind. She could never understand how the thought of 
 Marlingate had power to hold him when all her links were 
 snapped so easily. Her failure to grasp the real significance of 
 Marlingate to him was one of the few blank spaces in their re- 
 lation. She had never lain awake and planned its glory, 
 shuddered at his risks. . . . Yet he remembered Morgan at 
 Brenzett, her beauty, her straying sweetness, her moods like 
 shifting sunlight and chasing wind and underneath it all the 
 calm solid strength of her love, half savage, half maternal, and
 
 THE BETRAYAL 171 
 
 wholly strong and fine, like the earth under waving grass. She 
 seemed then to his stricken thought as the most wonderful 
 thing in the world. With her sailing ease and dignity and grace 
 she yet carried that elemental wildness which would blow ad- 
 venture into marriage, and though her love made her some- 
 times just a form of physical passion, yet that passion had none 
 of the frets and fumes and fires with which it wears out some 
 souls it was deep and still and peaceful as the earth, not the 
 outward smoky expression of love but its inmost core of rest. 
 He flung himself back in the chair, and remained huddled 
 there till West brought him his bedtime grog of hot whiskey 
 and water. Monypenny sent him away he felt he could not 
 bear his presence in his room and undressed alone. The great 
 gloomy bedroom was cold, and Monypenny hurried through 
 his toilet, tumbling quickly into the big bed where he lay hud- 
 dled up, looking strangely small and insignificant amidst the 
 heaped bedding. Outside Marlingate lay in a thin spatter of 
 lights. A few street lamps, a clump of sleeping houses, a boy 
 huddled up alone in a great bed, so Marlingate and its Mayor 
 showed to the pitiful, slow-moving darkness. 
 
 9 
 
 The next day he had arranged to meet Morgan in the woods. 
 There is a little hollow just where Old Rumble Wood sprawls 
 on to Spitalman's Down, and the hollow, with the scrub of 
 trees beyond it, is known as Harold's Plat; for the legend says 
 that it was here that Harold stood, when his hairy Saxon troops 
 poured out through the Warriors' Gate to meet the conqueror. 
 Harold's Plat looked pale and fairy-like that Autumn day. In 
 a bright, cold sunshine the spindled tracery of the oaks and 
 ashes waved golden against the fragile blue of the sky. Here 
 and there on the oaks were clumps and clusters of brown and 
 golden leaves the ashes were bare and underfoot was a 
 thick straw of gold, as the fallen leaves mixed with the rusting
 
 172 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 fern. It was all picked out in frail, shining colours, yet, trem- 
 ulous, gleaming and pale, except for a vivid patch of crimson, 
 which was Morgan's cape, her little cape of yesterday, as she 
 sat on an ash-stump waiting for her lover beneath it her 
 brown dress flowed down soberly into the leaves. 
 
 He had made no definite plan of confidence, but it was as- 
 tonishing how soon after their greeting the tale of his dif- 
 ficulty was poured out. Perhaps she had helped it by her 
 anxious enquiries as to his health she thought he looked ill 
 and harassed. After he had told her everything she sat quite 
 still, her hands clasped in her lap, but he saw dawning slowly 
 in her eyes the expression of that joy which he had dreaded. 
 
 "Is this because Gallop saw us or did not see us yester- 
 day?" she asked in a matter-of-fact voice. 
 
 "Well, it brought things to a climax, somehow but of 
 course it was nothing in itself. I'd been anxious for weeks. I 
 I think it began at Brenzett." 
 
 "Why then?" 
 
 "Because then, I think, I saw how much more we still might 
 be to each other." 
 
 Morgan's sweet low laugh broke the stillness of Harold's 
 Plat. She turned to Monypenny, and took his eager, har- 
 assed face between her hands. His eyes were restless with 
 pain, and partly her laugh had caused it. He was always a 
 little disquieted by that laugh, low-pitched and trickling like 
 the fall of water. It seemed to him only half human, and it 
 emphasised those qualities he could only partly apprehend in 
 Morgan, the side of her he could never possess. He remem- 
 bered how he had always been afraid of her laugh, in the far- 
 off days when it was just a maddening climax to a general im- 
 possibility as much as now when it was merely a flaw in her 
 perfection. And yet . . . there was the paradox that without 
 this disturbing, elusive side of her Morgan would lose half her 
 power; the delight, the freshness, the beauty, and the adven-
 
 THE BETRAYAL 173, 
 
 ture of her were due to this same, strange, sub-human quality 
 which so often shocked and mystified him. 
 
 "Morgan," he said briefly. 
 
 "My dear." 
 
 "I know you're glad but I wish you would say so instead 
 of laughing." 
 
 "Of course I'm glad and I can't help laughing. Oh, how I 
 should like to see the faces of the Aldermen and Councillors 
 when they find that the Mayor has run away with 
 
 It was a sudden and practically the first revival of little 
 Wells, the governess. Monypenny stiffened. 
 
 "But the Mayor is not going to run away. Morgan, I'm 
 wretched with the contrivance and uncertainty of all this, but I 
 can't see what change we could make for the better. I can't 
 possibly give up Marlingate." 
 
 "Why not?" she asked nonchalantly. 
 
 "Because I love it." 
 
 "And don't you love me?" 
 
 "Oh, my God! . . ." 
 
 "Well, you can't love both of us." 
 
 "Why not?" It was his turn to ask. 
 
 "For the reasons you've just given me. Things have come 
 to a climax, and can't go on as they did before. You've got to 
 choose." 
 
 "Morgan, you don't know what this town means to me." 
 
 "I've heard you say that before," she was tempted to reply, 
 but his expression and attitude killed all mockery in her. He 
 sat with his hands clenched on his knees, his long chin thrust 
 forward, and his mouth set. His mouth was the mouth of a 
 fanatic, but his eyes were the eyes of a lover, craving and pit- 
 eous, scarcely striving to do battle with the sterner part of him, 
 merely calling her, straining to her she came closer to him on 
 the ash-stump, crushing little twigs and leaves. 
 
 "Edward, I know what this town means to you. I know 
 what it has done for you and I know what you have done for it.
 
 174 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 You've given it all your best, your youth, your brains, your en- 
 ergies. You've turned a poor little fishing-village into a thriv- 
 ing watering-place, you've made Marlingate famous, and as far 
 as such a town may be, beautiful. And now I'll tell you what 
 it's done for you it's drained all the youth and activity out of 
 you, it's made you narrow and repressed and middle-aged long 
 before your time, it's boxed you up and shut you in, it's throt- 
 tled you and crushed you, and if I had not been there to save 
 you it would have bled you, and bleached you, thrown you out 
 without any life or love or colour left that's what Marlingate 
 means to you it means your death." 
 
 He was amazed at the earnestness, almost the hatred, of her 
 words. Her voice shook with passion against the town as if it 
 had been a living thing, and there was at the same time some- 
 thing of the dread and foreboding of a prophet in her appeal. 
 She was too close to him now for safety, and his arm stole 
 round her, drawing her up against him which was perhaps 
 how she had meant the outburst to end. Their kiss was the 
 length of a robin's song, among the bare ash-trees of Harold's 
 Plat, and when he lifted his mouth from hers it was once more 
 the mouth of a lover. 
 
 With a queer little sigh, Morgan smoothed her crimson cape, 
 and settled up against him on the stump. Then she began to 
 plan more definitely and daringly than he had ever imagined. 
 They would go away together abroad see those wonderful 
 places of scent and sunshine where love is just one of the many 
 flowers of the land. Becket, always kind, would grant a di- 
 vorce, and they would marry and live at Florence or at Capri, 
 which she, little Wells, had seen and could describe to the sol- 
 emn, portentous, untravelled Mayor of Marlingate. They 
 would have children. . . . 
 
 "And your own, Morgan" he interrupted "Do you realise 
 that you will have to leave your child? will other children 
 make up for that?" 
 
 "Lindsay is only half mine; the other half is Hugo's those
 
 THE BETRAYAL 175 
 
 will be all mine, because they will also be yours, and you are 
 
 mine." 
 
 "There's something not quite human about you, Morgan." 
 "Because I shall love the children of the man I love better 
 
 than the children of the man I don't love?" 
 "No not that; though that suggested it." 
 
 " 'Forget, Mortal lover, the wood-fairy's kiss, 
 The kiss of the child of the thorn' "... 
 
 She mocked him round-eyed and round-mouthed like an elf 
 sitting on a stump. 
 
 "Those were doleful verses of yours, Edward I suspected 
 then that there was something about me that you did not un- 
 derstand." 
 
 He laughed, somehow pleased and amused at the inadequacy 
 of her definition of his state. 
 
 "They suit you, those words they describe you 'the child 
 of the thorn.' " 
 
 "I don't know whether I shall take them as a compliment." 
 
 "You shall you shall, for they express just a little of your 
 wonder." 
 
 "You talk like a poem. When I first met you, you talked 
 like the minutes of a Town Council meeting." 
 
 "Oh, Morgan! . . ." Her simile had revived a little of the 
 lost pain. 
 
 "You talk like a poem, and in a month or two you shall live 
 like a poem." 
 
 "My dear I can't be sure I can't promise I I 
 
 He was trembling now, his arms round her waist, his head 
 huddled against her shoulder. She sat upright, almost triumph- 
 antly, for in spite of his stammers and hesitations she knew that 
 he was won. Her cheeks were red and glowing as the leaves 
 fluttering near her head or as the robin's breast among the 
 boughs; she had taken off her hat, and held it in her lap with 
 trembling, triumphant hands.
 
 176 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 Monypenny sat huddled against her, his eyes fixed on the 
 ground, where his big feet and her little ones lay mixed to- 
 gether in the leaves. Once he looked up and saw in the dim 
 distance, in a dip of the woods, all spindled over with the bare 
 branches of Harold's Plat, a patch of red. It was Marlingate, 
 just where it silts up against All Holland Hill, above the High 
 Street and the old Gut's Mouth. He stared at it almost un- 
 recognisingly, then lifted his eyes to the beautiful, glowing, 
 mysterious face above him. 
 
 "The child of the thorn. . . ." 
 
 10 
 
 The next day was a great day in Marlingate, for it was the 
 day of the Mayoral election and also, in the afternoon, of the 
 Opening of the Marine Gardens and Aquarium by the newly- 
 elected Monypenny. There had never been any question of a 
 rival, and indeed all the municipal elections had passed off very 
 peacefully. There had been a sharpish contest in the Fish 
 Street Ward, where Vidler had risked losing his seat to a fish- 
 erman candidate, one of Gallop's numerous sons-in-law; and 
 Becket had been returned for St. Nicholas' Ward in the place 
 of Wastel, who was retiring on the plea of old age and failing 
 health. Otherwise the Town Council was exactly as before, 
 and went whole-heartedly to the business of re-electing Mony- 
 penny as Mayor. Then followed the election of Aldermen, with 
 the addition of Lusted and Breeds. Tom Potter was started 
 on his thirteenth year as Town Clerk, and finally the Town 
 Committee was reappointed, enriched by a Hurdicott of Grave- 
 ley. 
 
 After the elections came luncheon at the Marine Hotel the 
 Mayoral Banquet would take place at the Maidenhood the next 
 day. Then the solemn procession formed itself, and wound 
 down the High Street to the Marine Gardens and Aquarium. 
 It was very like the day of Monypenny's first election to the
 
 THE BETRAYAL 177 
 
 Mayoralty. The town turned out on its streets to see the young 
 Mayor drive by, erect and solitary in his huge swaying car- 
 riage, with the two mace-bearers mounted behind in blue and 
 silver cloaks and laced hats. 
 
 "Monypenny, Monypenny, 
 Mayor of Marlingate." 
 
 The town boys had made a kind of song of it since the last 
 occasion, and chanted it after his carriage as it rolled and wal- 
 lowed in the trough of the street, between the high pavements, 
 which towered above him, so that in some places the feet of the 
 spectators were on a level with his cocked hat. Monypenny did 
 not look so shy and formal as he had looked two years ago, 
 neither did he look so excited and proud. The morning's for- 
 malities had wearied him a little; he had been conscious of a 
 burning impatience to get shut of this borough traffic, and do 
 the two things he wanted most think, and talk to Morgan. 
 
 All the afternoon of the day before, and most of the night 
 he had pondered the new set of circumstances that had arisen, 
 the new adventure that had broken up the old. He had not, in 
 fact, utterly committed himself to it, but it was shaping itself 
 firmly in his mind, and this evening he was going to see Mor- 
 gan to discuss details. The broader facts departure, a for- 
 eign country, divorce, and at last marriage were plain enough, 
 but all lesser matters of place and time and opportunity had 
 still to be considered, and he must see the thing as a whole be- 
 fore he inevitably pledged himself. In spite, however, of this 
 reservation, he felt that he already belonged to the new life, as 
 if all this traffic and parade was merely the tail of a retreat- 
 ing past. The morning ceremonies in the Town Hall had 
 seemed to him strangely unreal and newly irksome; the pom- 
 pous talk, the florid oratory of the luncheon at the Marine Ho- 
 tel had awakened an entirely new feeling of contemptuous tol- 
 eration; and now in the carriage, his Mayoral trappings of 
 chain and hat and scarlet robes seemed to choke him and weigh
 
 178 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 him down, as they had done on that solemn occasion in the 
 Town Park, before Morgan le Fay came blowing over the 
 grass like a flower. 
 
 He longed to have finished the afternoon's ceremony, and 
 yet, perversely, as he went deeper into it, .t began to hold 
 him. After all he could not help feeling a little ashamed of 
 his detachment when he remembered all the joy and excite- 
 ment and satisfaction that Marlingate had given him there 
 seemed not a little ingratitude in this present remoteness. It 
 might be true, as Morgan had said, that it had thwarted and 
 choked and aged him, but after all it had made him what she 
 loved; it was a part of his nature and he could not imagine him- 
 self without it. Its influences had moulded his boyhood, its 
 exigencies had shaped his manhood, its repressions had made 
 him the brimming vessel of love at which her thirst was slaked 
 by no other means could he have become what she 
 adored. ... So his thoughts ran on as he sat there erect in 
 the great carriage wallowing down the High Street, while 
 bright coloured shawls and crinolines swung above him on the 
 pavements, and the bells of St. Nicholas clashed in their crock- 
 eted tower, and the town-boys sang: 
 
 "Monypenny, Monypenny, 
 Mayor of Marlingate." 
 
 The carriage rolled on out of the High Street on to the Ma- 
 rine Parade. Here a delicate sunshine poured down suddenly 
 from the shredded November sky, and in it swam all the white 
 fagade with which Marlingate fronted the sea. The bandstand 
 stood up like a boss of gold on a marble plate, and behind it the 
 long line of houses from the High Street to Fish Street was al- 
 most crystalline, almost the dream that had surged in Mony- 
 penny's brain before it took shape on earth in stone and stucco. 
 He was dazzled by the swerve into gleaming whiteness out of 
 the muddled colours of the High Street, and scarcely noticed 
 the sea as it lay green and deep against the breakwaters, with
 
 THE BETRAYAL 179 
 
 the soft blurred tatter of the sky reflected on it in strangely 
 cumbrous shadows. 
 
 The procession stopped at the entrance to the Marine Gar- 
 dens. These lay at the end of the Parade, right under Cuckoo 
 Hill, swallowing up the America Ground and part of the old 
 sea-road along which Morgan had dragged and stumbled ten 
 years ago. It was a sheltered corner, screened from wind, and 
 swamped in sun, which also streamed back on it from the baked 
 and basking cliffs of Cuckoo Hill. Its closeness to the sea pre- 
 vented the growth of anything except sea-shore plants, and 
 these in the present season were not in flower. But there were 
 prepared walls of rock, to be smothered in their time with cush- 
 ions of thrift, and pits and crannies where the horned poppy 
 could grow, while a ring of tamarisks spun a green web round 
 the big outdoor tank of the Aquarium. There was also an 
 Aquarium-building, topped by a glass dome, containing, be- 
 sides various sea wonders rather diffidently purchased by the 
 Corporation, swimming baths for both ladies and gentlemen, 
 seaweed baths, brine baths and other modest experiments, in 
 hydropathy. In the white arch of the entrance were several 
 genteel mechanical toys in glass cases a church that when 
 a penny was inserted would hum with organ music and send a 
 choir rotating through the porches, peasants that danced round 
 a queer little tree which bore two kinds of fruit, orange and pur- 
 ple, and a drawing-room scene in which papa got up and poked 
 the fire and mamma wound a skein of crimson wool off the stiff- 
 stretched arms of a wooden daughter. These were meant chief- 
 ly for the young people of Marlingate, though their elders 
 would be sure to admire such ingenious and select devices. 
 
 Grouped in the entrance were various members of the Mar- 
 lingate aristocracy who had not taken part in the procession 
 the Leo Hurdicotts and the Alaric Papillons, the Fulleyloves 
 and the Arthur Fulleyloves (a callow, whiskered son and Vic- 
 toria Hurdicott), Lady Cockstreet and Morgan Becket in a 
 dress of the colour of a half-ripe blackberry. Monypenny was
 
 i8o TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 conscious of her challenging glance flung him between the bon- 
 nets of Mrs. Arthur and Mrs. Leo. But he would not meet it, 
 perhaps was not meant to do so; only, as it wavered to him 
 through the elect like light through water, he felt a sudden, un- 
 expected twang of resentment because she would not let him 
 lie in the returning peace of town traffic, but must needs for a 
 moment twist him out of his surroundings, spin him to the 
 woods and show him in Old Rummage and Harold's Plat the 
 beginning and the end of his surrender. Resentment passed 
 naturally into defiance, and he found himself stuck on the re- 
 solve to enjoy this last borough ceremony. Since this was the 
 last time that he would stand in his Mayoral vestments, offer- 
 ing like a priest the sacrifice of the town's wonders, he must 
 avail himself to the full of his right to eat of the sacrifice. The 
 strange rigour in which he had dragged through the morning 
 had passed away, releasing his cramped municipal emotions 
 he felt them pricking into his heart like blood returning to a 
 numbed limb. Tamarisk Town . . . built of the stuff of his 
 dreams, of his own substance, of his own soul, now to be re- 
 nounced in its perfection ... he felt his love for it returning 
 as a sickness of which he must die. 
 
 Everyone agreed that the Mayor had never spoken with such 
 force as at the opening of the Marine Gardens. He was almost 
 ardent the fire of his zeal melted his usual short, staccato 
 sentences, running them together in a new stream of eloquence. 
 People were surprised, but they had noted many changes in the 
 Mayor of late, and most of them could remember the long 
 struggle over the America Ground, and could realise his tri- 
 umph in this blossoming of the desert as a rose. 
 
 Monypenny's enthusiasm made the story of the Marine Gar- 
 dens almost an epic. He described the mock city that used to 
 be here the rope-walks, the gin-shops, the smell of tar and ooze 
 and brine and rotting Robin Huss, the inverted hulls with their 
 crooked, smoking chimneys, the ruffianly pikers and gypsies 
 who had preyed and spied on the gentilities of Marlingate. He
 
 THE BETRAYAL 181 
 
 told of his plottings with Alderman Vidler, the slow workings of 
 the Commission of Woods and Forests, the arguments and in- 
 spections and here, only once, he wavered, as he remembered 
 how on one of these he had found Morgan le Fay blowing about 
 the America Ground like a leaf, and how he had torn and 
 crushed her. He recovered his voice with what sounded rather 
 like a tremor of anger, and went on to tell how his town had 
 triumphed over the mock town like the truth over a lie and 
 now over the site of the old illusion crept the spreading beauty 
 of Marlingate in a tide of flowers and music and wonder. The 
 Aquarium was in many ways the town's most subtle triumph 
 Monypenny's cheeks burned as he spoke of it, and his eyes 
 glowed like a boy's and a lover's. Then, as, carried away by 
 the new eloquence, he made a queer little florid peroration, 
 Morgan's challenge came to him again, flung him from un- 
 der level brows over Becket's shoulder. This time he caught 
 it and held it and flung it back to her. 
 
 ii 
 
 The procession re-formed itself and wound up the High 
 Street away from the creeping shadows of the sea. At the 
 Town Hall Monypenny unrobed, and talked a little to Vidler 
 and Pelham. He was still defiant and elated, and the Alder- 
 men found him almost talkative. They discussed a few de- 
 tails of the next day's banquet, and the Mayor was congratu- 
 lated anew on the success of the afternoon. 
 
 "Reckon we won't want any more Sophia of Worcesters to 
 open our shows," said Vidler. 
 
 "We'll try Pelham next time," said Monypenny with a 
 comradely laugh. "He's a better speaker than I, and ought 
 to get a chance." 
 
 Pelham bowed elegantly from the top of his trousers. 
 
 "Many thanks, Monypenny, for a graceful compliment; I
 
 182 TAMARISK TOWN ' 
 
 should be delighted but I am not aware that we have er 
 anything left to open." 
 
 " We'll find something, never fear a church, or a sewer; 
 I'll see that you find some pot for your flowers of speech to 
 grow in," and Monypenny slapped Pelham on the back to the 
 utter amazement of the Corporation. No one had ever seen 
 him in such an unbending mood he was actually whistling as 
 he left the Town Hall. 
 
 As he walked up the High Street to Gun Garden House, 
 he knew that his high spirits were partly due to the realisa- 
 tion that he had not as yet definitely pledged himself to aban- 
 don Marlingate. Of course he had always been aware of 
 this, but the knowledge had not seemed of much account. De- 
 sires bound him if not words, and it was only when desire was 
 weakened that he realised his freedom from the shackles of a 
 vow. Not that he definitely meant to refuse Morgan, but he 
 was glad to know himself free, or otherwise he might have 
 found a reproaching pain in those streets, now slowly falling 
 into the brown November dusk. By the time he was in his 
 room at Gun Garden House all the trough of the town was 
 full of orange lights Fish Street and High Street were clearly 
 pricked out in the swale, and the lights swarmed together in 
 constellations down by the old Gut's Mouth, or winked as 
 lonely stars from the slopes of Rye Lane and Mount Idle. 
 Looking up to the sky it was almost a surprise to Monypenny 
 to see lights there too, as if a dim city hung there, of which 
 those lights between the hills were only a reflection. It was 
 queer to think what strange tricks Marlingate had played him 
 at night once it had disembodied itself and mocked him with 
 its ghost, once it had altogether disappeared and frightened 
 him with a misty pool, out of which he had had to drag it 
 piece by piece, and tonight it was only the reflection of an- 
 other town, of a city hung in the sky. . . . 
 
 He was dining wth Morgan at the newly fashionable hour 
 of seven. They had both been looking forward for some time
 
 THE BETRAYAL 183 
 
 to this meal alone together. Becket was dining that night in 
 town with the Clothworkers' Company; he had gone up di- 
 rectly after the ceremony of the Marine Gardens, and hoped 
 to be back in time for the Mayoral Banquet next day mean- 
 time he had asked Monypenny to entertain his wife during her 
 solitary evening, a request which had given Monypenny some 
 qualms of dishonour unshared by his companion. 
 
 The dinner was solemn and formal. Servants padded to 
 and fro in the dusk behind the table. On the table candles 
 burned under orange shades, and bloomed with orange Mor- 
 gan's pointed face. She talked to him about the weather, 
 about books, about the settlement of the American Civil 
 War, about the great fire at Limoges and the Prince of Wales's 
 visit to Denmark. It was exactly like a dozen other dinners 
 they had eaten together, except that whereas on those more 
 crowded occasions, when they had been just two among a 
 throng of guests, each had been glowingly conscious of the 
 adventure that linked them, now when they ate alone, this 
 sense of hidden communion seemed to fail. Whether it was 
 because this meal lacked the daring of secret glances, of words 
 stressed for a lover's ear, or whether the fault lay just in a 
 tacit strife, would be hard to say. Probably it was due to 
 Monypenny, who was still a little intoxicated with the Marine 
 Gardens, and had that night an Aldermanic swagger. Once 
 he told Morgan that he was thinking of building a church the 
 town was growing beyond the accommodation of St. Nicholas; 
 he would build a church at the north end of Gingerbread 
 Green, and put a Puseyite into it, which would attract a new 
 and desirable set of people. It would be interesting to see 
 what Figg could do in the ecclesiastical line. Then he blinked 
 at her defiantly, as if to say "You see, my dear, I intend to 
 be in this town for some time yet." 
 
 Morgan drank a glass of wine when the fruit was on the 
 table, then went up to the drawing-room. Monypenny sat 
 for a while over his port and cigar, then joined her. He felt
 
 184 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 disturbed, for the afternoon's realisation had almost become the 
 evening's resolution. The words he had not said at last seemed 
 more important than those he had. He had nearly yielded 
 in Harold's Plat, but the last pledge had not been definitely 
 made his signature was not yet fixed to the articles of sur- 
 render. 
 
 His reluctance had grown almost imperceptibly. It had 
 started as a feeling of shame for his remoteness from Marlin- 
 gate's latest triumph. Then the ceremony at the Marine Gar- 
 dens had genuinely gripped him; he had been thrilled by his 
 own tale of his struggles with the America Ground, and the 
 sense of his achievement had surged up in him, restoring the 
 old values, breaking down the barrier which had risen like an 
 enchantment between him and his town. 
 
 In the drawing-room he found Morgan a little impatient. 
 
 "What a time you've been! I thought perhaps you'd gone 
 to sleep over the port it would be quite in keeping with your 
 Aldermanic mood." 
 
 "Am I very like an Alderman tonight?" 
 
 "You're 'Monypenny, Monypenny, Mayor of Marlingate' 
 you're all the Aldermen and Councillors rolled into one you're 
 the Mayor and Corporation, the Town Clerk and the Town 
 Crier. . . . 
 
 He stood on the hearthrug looking down at her as she lay 
 back lazily in a big arm-chair, the firelight shuttling up and 
 down her silken skirts, her face tilted into the shadow, where 
 her eyes gleamed. 
 
 "Sit down," said Morgan. 
 
 He sat down at her feet and she pulled back his head against 
 her knee, stroking the thick white hair from his crumpled 
 forehead. 
 
 "Of course," said Monypenny, pursuing aloud an argument 
 he had waged internally over the port, "I oughtn't to have 
 stood for re-election this year. I should have let Pelham be 
 Mayor."
 
 THE BETRAYAL 185 
 
 "My dear Edward, are you going to talk borough politics all 
 the evening? I thought we meant to discuss a more important 
 matter." 
 
 "But don't you see that it's bound up with it? If I wasn't 
 Mayor I I might well, I might feel differently about leav- 
 ing Marlingate." 
 
 Unaware of the ground that had been yielded since her tri- 
 umph in Harold's Plat, she felt almost magnanimous to the 
 beaten town. 
 
 "Pelham is Deputy Mayor he will step into your shoes 
 directly you are gone." 
 
 He suddenly turned his face to her knee, hiding it in the 
 soft, fire-warmed silk. 
 
 "Morgan, Morgan ... I can't." 
 
 "What do you mean?" 
 
 He felt her shudder, and her hand dropped quickly from 
 his hair to his cheek, pressing his head against her skirts. 
 
 "I mean that we must go on as before for a time at least. 
 I can't leave Marlingate." 
 
 She did not speak. His words seemed to have killed her 
 words like foes in battle. 
 
 "My dear," he continued, murmuring into her lap, "I love 
 you; you're my own self. But so is Marlingate. It's a part of 
 myself as truly as you are." 
 
 "Monypenny, Morgan, and Marlingate a trinity in dis- 
 unity" and her laugh rose sudden and strident, like wind be- 
 hind a house. 
 
 It did not fail to produce its usual effect. Monypenny threw 
 himself back from her knee and met her eyes almost angrily. 
 
 "Morgan, you won't understand " 
 
 What this town means to you. Is it natural that I should 
 understand? Is it natural that after all we have been to each 
 other I should understand why you forsake me for a beggarly 
 town? . . ." 
 
 "I am not forsaking you. God knows we've been happy
 
 186 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 enough during the last eighteen months can't we get back 
 to those times?" 
 
 "No, we can't, for they're gone. It's no use, Edward. Sure- 
 ly you're not deceiving yourself with the thought that after 
 this we can go back to the old conditions. You yourself have 
 said it is impossible." 
 
 "So I thought but I see things differently now. I got 
 panic-stricken. I made sure we would be discovered. Now 
 I feel saner after all there's no trace of a rumour about us in 
 the town if Gallop had spoken 
 
 "Ah, I see, you were not so much running away with me as 
 running away from Gallop, and now that Gallop neither barks 
 nor bites the necessity is past." 
 
 She was surprised at the anger in her voice, and realising that 
 it would scarcely help her, strangled it into an appeal. 
 
 "Edward my dear can't you understand why I don't want 
 to return to our old secret ways? It isn't because they will 
 lead to our being found out but because they will kill our 
 love." 
 
 "Why should they kill it?" 
 
 "Starvation, anxiety, fear, hiding, denial all these things 
 kill love." 
 
 "But I'm not suggesting that the arrangement should be 
 permanent only till my year of office is ended." 
 
 "But what difference will there be when it is ended? Mar- 
 lingate will be there just the same and you'll still be the most 
 important man in it. The Mayoralty is just a decoration 
 it makes no real difference to your position in the town. If 
 you can't break free now you can't break free then." 
 
 He saw the truth of her words and they brought him back 
 helplessly to his first statement. 
 
 "I can't leave Marlingate." 
 
 The hopelessness of it all rushed over her, overwhelmed her 
 the invincibility of the town that had always stood between
 
 THE BETRAYAL 187 
 
 them. Her strength left her, her rage collapsed, and she began 
 to cry. 
 
 Monypenny took her in his arms. His own tears were not 
 far off, and yet he never felt more firmly dug into his pur- 
 pose. Morgan felt his triumph even as he caressed her, and 
 suddenly pushed him away. 
 
 "Don't Edward it's no use. We're hopelessly divided, and 
 this is mere weakness." 
 
 "Why should it divide us now? it didn't before. Oh, 
 Morgan, don't you know how happy I was during those months 
 when Marlingate was just the setting of our love? I loved 
 you better because of the town and the town because of you." 
 
 "And I? You never troubled about what I felt " she 
 laughed "I'll tell you now. I felt that Marlingate was the 
 prison of our love, just as it's always been the prison of your 
 soul ; and I hated it I hated it and I vowed that I would get 
 you away from it, and let you know what it was to spread 
 your wings and fly up into the sun, instead of hopping and twit- 
 tering round your cage, and pretending it was the world when 
 it was only your prison." 
 
 It had always been Morgan's fate, ever since the days of 
 little Wells, to show her hand too openly. Now Monypenny 
 recoiled his sad eyes grew cold, and his mouth straight and 
 civic. 
 
 "I know you've always hated Marlingate and that means 
 you've always hated something in me. If you really loved 
 me you would love Marlingate." 
 
 He would have recalled the words as soon as uttered, but 
 it was too late they were spoken and she had taken up their 
 challenge with her laugh like the wail of the rising wind. 
 
 "Very well, I hate you, then because I hate the thing that's 
 there to ruin you, that will ruin' you now, since you've refused 
 your chance of escape. If that's hate, then I hate you." 
 
 He was silent her mood jarred on him almost as much as a 
 mood of little Wells. This fine lady was throwing off her
 
 i88 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 skin, and showing him underneath all the primitive things that 
 were his enemies. At present anger and his surviving elation 
 sustained him, but he had a feeling that if he stayed much 
 longer these would go, and it would all become sad inex- 
 pressibly sad. 
 
 "I don't think there's any good my stopping longer tonight," 
 he said slowly "we're almost quarrelling." 
 
 "And we'll have quarrelled quite after another six months 
 of the old ways, as you call them." 
 
 "Morgan don't don't make things so hard." 
 
 He held out his arms, but she swung away from them. He 
 flushed, and walked quickly to the door, glancing back from the 
 threshhold to see her standing defiant by the hearth, blazing in 
 her crimson dress like an autumn tree. 
 
 12 
 
 For some minutes after he was gone Morgan did not move; 
 she stood proudly by the fire, one arm on the mantelpiece, the 
 other hanging at her side. She heard him go down the long 
 flights of the narrow house, then there was a pause while he 
 put on his overcoat in the hall, then the front door slammed 
 footsteps sounded on the damp asphalt path that ran under a 
 tunnel of alder and arbutus to the gate. Then the gate clacked 
 softly and the footsteps crunched on the muddy shingle of the 
 road . . . they began to die away, and her ears strained after 
 them . . . they came more distinctly as they rang between the 
 houses on the Coney Bank steps, clanking slowly down into the 
 muffled, draggled silence of the November night. 
 
 Morgan dropped into her chair and covered her face. She 
 had refused to give way while a sound of him still hung in the 
 darkness, for she knew what he did not know. She knew that 
 this was no lover's quarrel, to be followed by a doubtful patch- 
 ing or a splendid reconciliation. It was the end her smashing 
 defeat by Marlingate. She had met the town in square and
 
 THE BETRAYAL 189 
 
 open fight, and it had beaten her. The witchcraft of Morgan le 
 Fay had not prevailed against it and she had been so near 
 victory. ... It was just that very nearness which now showed 
 her the hopelessness of her defeat. 
 
 "Oh, Edward . . . Edward . . ." 
 
 The cry broke from her. She longed for the man she had 
 been too weak to win. Her powers had failed her, her spells 
 had just fallen short of the great enchantment; and yet she 
 had not wanted him quite selfishly, she had wanted him for his 
 own sake as well as for hers. 
 
 It was only nine o'clock, and she sat for another hour, hud- 
 dled in her chair, while the fire died at her feet. The room 
 lost its red glow, and the chandelier flared yellow against the 
 ceiling. The hard, throbbing light made her eyes ache, but 
 she felt too languid, too badly bruised, to stand up and lower 
 the gas. For an hour she hoped that Monypenny would come 
 back, then hope died because she knew he would come back, 
 not tonight, but tomorrow or in a day or two, expecting to go 
 on with what she knew was ended. He did not see things as 
 she saw them he was blind and dazzled with his mirage 
 but she saw clearly that he had renounced her in refusing to 
 renounce Marlingate. He did not know he had renounced her 
 that was what made it all so pitiful he felt they were 
 estranged, but he did not know that they were sundered. He 
 had gone off with hope smouldering under his anger, and soon 
 hope would blaze up and show him his old illusion of their 
 love set in the frame of Marlingate, of that ceremonial, secret 
 sweet relation which he had loved and she had hated. Bah! 
 he had made of their love an arabesque, a flittering shadow, a 
 spindle that shuttled against the blazing background of his 
 town. Her hands clenched with anger she hated him for his 
 blindness, for his obstinate sacrifice to shadows; he was an ig- 
 norant child and she despised him. Then suddenly her rage 
 melted into grief, her head sank slowly to her clenched hands, 
 and she began to sob she sobbed into her own lap, while the
 
 igo TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 gas whined in the chandelier above her, and the dead ashes 
 dropped on the hearth. 
 
 At ten o'clock her maid came in, and Morgan decided to go 
 to bed. Her head ached, and at first she felt almost healed by 
 the relief of lying down in the darkness, but soon it seemed as 
 if the darkness had only driven in the pain into her brain 
 and heart. She tossed to and fro and her thoughts tramped 
 by like a procession one of those poor shows of a third-rate 
 theatre, where the same actor comes round and round again, 
 perhaps with a flimsy attempt at disguise, perhaps unblush- 
 ing in his reappearance. Sometimes she was angry, and some- 
 times she was sorrowful, and sometimes she was hard and bit- 
 ter, and sometimes she was soft and piteous, and often she was 
 just tired, a form of helplessness and exhaustion, feeling that 
 she could sink through the bed to a rest which seemed always 
 out of reach. 
 
 She slept a little at the turn of the night, but woke early, 
 and was tossing and haggard when her maid brought her choc- 
 olate and pulled back the curtains. 
 
 "I'm afraid you haven't slept well, Ma'am." 
 
 "No, Henderson. I've got a headache." 
 
 "Then will you have Miss Lindsay in, Ma'am? Nurse was 
 saying " 
 
 "Yes, I remember. I told nurse to bring her in, and she 
 may as well come. She's a good baby." 
 
 "Very well, Ma'am." 
 
 A few minutes later Lindsay appeared, curly and compla- 
 cent, and suggested that Mamma should read to her. 
 
 Curiously enough Morgan had just begun to long for Becket. 
 She felt that she could have found rest in his solid kindness, in 
 his homely, unimaginative caresses. Now she took the child 
 into her arms with unaccustomed eagerness, kissing the brown 
 curls damp from the nurse's brush, and the little warm face 
 which was so like her own, and so reproachfully different. 
 Lindsay pointed to her shoes.
 
 THE BETRAYAL 191 
 
 "New shoes," she remarked comfortably. 
 
 "So I see. Who bought them for you?" 
 
 "Mamma." 
 
 "Whom do you love?" 
 
 "Mamma," said Lindsay like a well-trained child. 
 
 Morgan took her book, which was "Andersen's Fairy Tales," 
 and read part of the story of the little sea-maiden, who loved 
 the prince and wanted to be human for his sake, though it 
 hurt her like treading on sharp knives. At this point Lindsay 
 began to cry because the poor little girl had lost her tail. Mor- 
 gan felt she could cry too, if her tears had not all been dry. 
 Why, she wondered, were even children's tales so sad? Here 
 in this fairy-tale of her baby's was the story of love's sacrifice 
 offered in vain. Instead of grasping immortality in the love 
 she had walked on knives to win, the little sea-woman had be- 
 come as foam upon the waters. Lindsay was soon soothed 
 and cheered by the comfort of the many pretty things that, 
 in spite of the prudish bedroom fashions of the time, Morgan 
 wore about her. But the mother could never drive out of her 
 head the words that seemed to speak her own doom "If you 
 do not win the Prince's love, so that he forgets father and 
 mother for your sake, and tells the priest to join your hands, 
 you will not receive an immortal soul. On the first morning 
 your heart will break and you will become foam upon the 
 water." 
 
 13 
 
 Morgan lived through the next few hours on that buried 
 rock of self-control which is under the sand of almost every 
 woman's weakness, and which she seldom reaches till the hour 
 of her most desperate need it is the bedrock, the bottom, far 
 closer to despair than any ravings or yieldings. 
 
 Her thoughts held up a mirror to the future, in which she 
 saw her failure stretch into the years. Sometimes it was proud 
 and acknowledged, sometimes it was shamed with disguise
 
 192 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 she saw herself hiding her head in the shallows of Monypenny's 
 love as an ostrich in the sand. Sometimes her heart cried out 
 "Let him come back, let me take from him thankfully all 
 that he can spare from Marlingate let him give me his ghost." 
 But the next minute she would see that not even that com- 
 promise could live. If she had played merely for the casual 
 love that a man often gives a woman, a frolic away from his 
 real interests, then she might have won her game. But she 
 had played for the man himself, and had lost him. She would 
 not have the town's leavings, she would be unable to hide her 
 disdain, and her hatred of what he loved would divide them 
 surely. They would have to part, either with a clean cut now, 
 or later with much slow tearing. . . . 
 
 She ate her breakfast, because it might have roused talk to 
 leave food on the plates. She gave orders to the cook about 
 the dinner, and stood patiently while her maid fitted on a 
 casaque that she was making. Little Wells, the governess, 
 would have flung herself down on the bed and torn her frills 
 and sobbed and found a relief that Mrs. Hugo Becket could 
 not win. She felt the storm of her grief hanging behind her 
 eyes like thunder, and her head ached, and ached, but when 
 Henderson asked after the headache she said that it had gone. 
 
 At a few minutes to eleven she was ready to go out, but 
 hung about the drawing-room till she realised that she was 
 hanging about for Monypenny, and made up her mind to leave 
 the house at once. One or two genteel residents in the Coney 
 Banks remembered afterwards how they had seen Mrs. Hugo 
 Becket leave her house at about eleven o'clock, wearing an ele- 
 gant gown of Arabian silk, and a little bonnet trimmed with an 
 owlet sitting close to her soft, hanging curls. 
 
 It was a fine November day, a little muddled and tattered, 
 but warm for the time of year. The colours of dead woods 
 were in the sky, soft greys and browns smoking against the 
 blue. In the hollow at the foot of the Coney Banks the reds 
 of Marlingate were rubbed out in the thick air. As last night
 
 THE BETRAYAL 193 
 
 it had mirrored the sky with its lamps, so today it borrowed 
 the sky's colours of withered leaves all soft greys and 
 browns it smoked against the sea, which wore the wan trem- 
 ulous blue of the wider spreads of heaven. It almost seemed 
 as if Tamarisk Town had no definite life of its own, but must 
 draw its life as it drew its lights and colours from the greater 
 things around it. It was a ghost, a reflection, and Morgan 
 clanking down into it between the tall, narrow houses of the 
 Coney Banks was the only real thing in its trickery of mists 
 and bubbles. She felt her life and love reaching out beyond 
 it, calling her lover to come out of it to the only real thing in 
 his world of dreams. Yet she knew that he would not hear 
 the spell of its illusions had proved stronger than the spell of 
 her flesh and blood. It held him now and would not let him 
 go till it had picked his bones. Her own heels clanking down 
 the passage between the houses made her think of his, last 
 night, that echoing tramp which was her last memory of him. 
 She came into the High Street where a feeble sunshine lay, 
 and went to several shops, giving orders for food and house* 
 hold needs, with some special delicacies for Becket's meal that 
 night. She also bought a book for little Lindsay, to comfort 
 that victim of fairy-tale tragedies "The Nursery Keepsake," 
 which, with its gaily-coloured illustrations, and artless happy 
 tales of Lucy and her mamma at the seaside and little Ellen at 
 the farm, would not be likely to make her cry. She took this 
 with her, meaning to give it to the child on her return, but 
 she did not want to go back just yet. She was not expecting 
 Becket till nearly one, if indeed he had time to call at the Coney 
 Banks before going to the Maidenhood, and she could not bear 
 the thought of stuffy loitering in the house. She wanted to 
 walk, to make herself tired, so that her aching limbs might per- 
 haps bind down her spirit to their needs. She walked up and 
 down the High Street, then through the Petty Passage Way 
 into Fish Street, under Harpsichord House, and through Zur- 
 iel Place into the High Street again. She was tired but not
 
 194 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 tired enough, and her spirit had found a way of ignoring her 
 limbs and pursuing its aching quest in spite of them. Also 
 she was conscious of a queer sense of stifling and oppression. 
 Up on the Coney Banks, looking down on Marlingate, she had 
 felt the only real thing in all that landscape of mists and clouds 
 and stifling colours, but now she felt, reversely, that she was 
 the only unreal thing in these solid streets, a little hunted, 
 driven wisp of a dream, a puff of faery disintegrating slowly 
 among the solid walls and solid smells and solid noises of the 
 town. 
 
 She blew along the Marine Parade like a dead leaf. One 
 or two Hurdicotts and Fulleyloves saw her and greeted her, 
 and Lady Cockstreet beckoned to her from her chair, but Mor- 
 gan did not stop. She passed the bandstand, where the band 
 was playing Meyerbeer's "Dinorah," and vanished among the 
 black wooden towers of the Stade. She felt as if she was fight- 
 ing the town for her life, not for Monypenny now, but for her 
 own existence if she did not get out of it quickly it would 
 choke her, she would lie dead in its streets. Or, worse still, 
 dead she would walk up and down it, with the dead Mony- 
 penny by her side, and the ghost of love beside them in the 
 grave of love. . . . 
 
 She held her handkerchief up to her mouth as she walked 
 through the Stade. Her grief seemed to be splintering down 
 into the rock of her self-control, and with it was a strange kind 
 of fright, a fear of her own loneliness; she felt herself begin- 
 ning to sob with fear, and pressed her handkerchief against 
 her lips her eyes were dry enough. Luckily she was walking 
 through the Stade where men had other business than to no- 
 tice this stray of western gentility adrift among them. Old Gal- 
 lop sat against the black tar-bubbled wall of his son's store, 
 and smoked his pipe while Phineas mended a net beside him. 
 Others of his sons and sons-in-law, with uncles and cousins and 
 the more scattered kin of that community, worked round the 
 snubbed craft upon the beach, pitched and tarred and turpen-
 
 THE BETRAYAL 195 
 
 tined their bulging seams, or mended their tawny sails with 
 beer-brown patches. Only one or two afterwards remembered 
 having seen a woman in a crimson dress climb the flight at 
 the end of the Stade known as Tamarisk Steps, and pass out 
 from the roofs and chimneys of the fishing quarter to the free 
 slope of All Holland Hill. The Hill was covered with bracken, 
 dying down the scale of yellows into rust. The crimson patch 
 seemed sometimes just a part of the hillside Autumn, a knot of 
 colour where so many threads were tangled ; but more than one 
 man at the Stade had seen it move, rest, shift, climb upwards, 
 and at last disappear over the top of the hill. 
 
 M 
 
 Morgan felt that she had escaped, and her sense of fear 
 abated, but she was weak and quivering from the effort. She 
 sat down to rest by a clump of gorse, faintly sprinkled with a 
 dying gold. The town was out of sight, and round her lay the 
 high downs of All Holland Hill, breaking off raggedly against 
 the sea, three hundred feet below, and today not so much a 
 spread of water as a spread of misty light. 
 
 For a time she sat still, panting gently, while a siren crooned 
 far out among the webs of light that wove together sea and sky. 
 Then her thoughts began again to torment her. They showed 
 her Marlingate waiting at the foot of the hill for her return 
 her escape was only the little tortured run that a cat allows a 
 mouse. She would have to go back and choke in its streets; 
 she would have to take up again her burden of fear and fail- 
 ure, and watch Monypenny's love fade slowly through com- 
 promise into death. If only she had the strength to send him 
 away . . . but she was too weak, and too loving to deny 
 him the little of her that he wanted. 
 
 She scrambled to her feet and hurried on. She had a mad 
 thought of going too far to come back, of stumbling and tear- 
 ing her way over the Gringer and Stussels and Marrowbone till
 
 196 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 the darkness came down on her at Cliff End. But she knew 
 that such thoughts were only a cheat of comfort. She had 
 gone too far in the ways of order and decorum to be able, in 
 her hour of need, to find refuge in the old freedoms. For the 
 love of Monypenny she had sold herself into bondage, and 
 now that he was lost her shackles remained she could never 
 strike them off. Every minute she realised more acutely the 
 significance of her defeat. She had lost not only Monypenny 
 but herself she had played for a bigger stake than she had 
 known. 
 
 "Remember when you have once received a human form, 
 you can never be a sea-woman again, and if you do not win 
 the Prince's love, you will not receive an immortal soul. Your 
 heart will break and you will become foam upon the water." 
 
 For the love of her Prince she had forced herself into strange 
 ways, forsaking her own. She had renounced her own nature, 
 but he had not given her his, so she was indeed for his sake 
 without her soul, a weak, helpless, drifting thing, foam upon 
 the water. If she could have won him from his town to at- 
 tach himself to her heart and soul then she would have truly 
 become his and in his life would have found her own. But his 
 love had not been strong enough to give her an immortal soul, 
 and now her heart must break. 
 
 She had reached by a drifting, aimless path the eastern slope 
 of All Holland Hill. At her feet lay the Slide, with the Gringer 
 rising bluff beyond it. Everything was very quiet; the thick 
 November breeze scarcely stroked the bracken on the two hill- 
 sides, or stirred the hazy water at the foot of the cliffs. There 
 was a sweetness of damp and withering fern, of the few black- 
 berries that still hung with red leaves on the brambles, of moist 
 earth, of rain-pools stagnant among fallen leaves, of spindrift 
 caking on the cliffs, or thickening into the dense, stirless air. 
 There was no sound, except every now and then a long sigh 
 from the Channel, ebbing slowly from the foot of the Gringer.
 
 THE BETRAYAL 197 
 
 Far out to sea the water smudged into the sky through a mist 
 of bluish grey, rifted and dazzled with spills of light. 
 
 Morgan sat down again, for her anguish had made her weak. 
 It seemed as if the suffering of the last twelve hours had been 
 cumulative, swelling slowly from the disillusion of last night 
 to this moment of despair. She sat quite still, her hands hang- 
 ing between her knees, her shopping-bag and Lindsay's book 
 beside her on the grass. Still a decorous figure enough, she 
 sat there for nearly half an hour, unconscious of time and con- 
 vention, both calling her back to Marlingate lost in the sad- 
 ness of her own heart and of the Autumn that ate like rust 
 into the hill. 
 
 But all the time her mind must have been working uncon- 
 sciously through its stupor, for after a while her shoulders be- 
 gan to shake, and she sobbed brokenly with rebellion and grief. 
 Hitherto she had not rebelled, she had been dumb and stricken, 
 scarcely understanding all the hardness of her fate, but now 
 her whole being flamed up and protested in great sobs without 
 tears. 
 
 Then suddenly, as if revolt had cleared away the mists, she 
 saw a way of escape. It was so clear and straight that she 
 wondered she had never seen it before. There was a way out 
 of Marlingate for both her and Monypenny. She could save 
 him in spite of himself, and at this last moment snatch the vic- 
 tory from the town. She sat up among the fern, her hands 
 clenched, her head thrown back, a smile shining under the lids 
 of her long eyes. Her lips parted and the same smile shone be- 
 tween them, as if a light had been kindled. It was thus that 
 she had so often invited her lover, and now she seemed almost 
 to feel his mouth on hers again. Before long she would feel 
 it, and the burden of him against her breast, clinging to her as 
 the only thing he had left in all his shattered world. 
 
 No doubt he would spurn her at first, and rage at her, but 
 she could bear it, knowing what must come in the end. For 
 she would be all he had left when the town he loved had
 
 198 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 cast him out like Cain, when she had told her husband of her 
 long unfaithfulness, and with evidence from the Crown at 
 Brenzett, won her divorce, and put herself and him together 
 outside Marlingate's respectability. Marlingate would turn on 
 the man that had made it, the clay would deny the potter 
 broken and naked he would have nowhere to turn but to her 
 breast. 
 
 She jumped to her feet, shaking the crumbled fronds of 
 bracken from her gown. She started running up the hillside, 
 breathing in gasps, while her eyes blazed with triumph. In a 
 few minutes she would be at the top of the hill, looking down 
 at a town she no longer dreaded. She laughed to herself, al- 
 most picturing its discomfiture, as if it was a living thing. Any- 
 how, it had not got her man her wit had cheated it of him at 
 the last moment. True, she would recover him almost a corpse, 
 but she had life for both and would give it to him abundantly. 
 Besides, his misery and helplessness would make him doubly 
 precious to her heart she would love him with double meas- 
 ure when she had him shorn of the greatness which had been at 
 once her dread and her contempt. He had always been liable 
 to freeze her suddenly her lover in her arms had sometimes 
 turned, appallingly, into the Mayor of Marlingate but now 
 their love would grow warm and wild and innocent in its new 
 freedom from civic frights. 
 
 She had not enough breath to take her to the top of the hill. 
 Exhausted with emotion and with her long tramp over broken 
 ground she soon had to stop to rest. Her head was spinning 
 a little as she stood and panted with her hands under her 
 breast. The owlet was askew on her hair, and one or two of 
 the hanging curls were draggled against her neck. She stood 
 looking back into the valley of the Slide, where the skew-blown 
 trees were now tawny above the wan yellows that clumped be- 
 side the stream. 
 
 Her mind went back to the day very long ago when she and 
 Monypenny had met down there at the roots of the Gringer.
 
 THE BETRAYAL 199 
 
 At first a little thorn of hate went into her heart when she re- 
 membered all he had made her suffer. But the next moment 
 she seemed to see him sitting beside her under the dwarfed 
 trees she remembered how he had cried. Tears rose in her 
 own eyes at the memory, and suddenly her victory did not seem 
 so precious. He had been very helpless and very young in 
 spite of all his municipal swagger. He had cried like a boy, be- 
 cause his heart had been torn in two with a divided love. He 
 had loved her a little and Marlingate very much "Morgan, 
 you don't understand what this town means to me." 
 
 For the first time she saw Monypenny's love for his town as 
 a real thing, a love with roots as deep in reason as her own. He 
 had said those words to her twice before once at the Slide and 
 once in Harold's Plat and each time she had brushed them 
 aside with a fond contempt, tenderly ignoring with a selfish- 
 ness possible only to love the eldest and hungriest half of the 
 man whose whole being she might have possessed. He had 
 been right she had not understood, when her understanding 
 would have saved them both but it was her fate to under- 
 stand now when to understand was to close her one way of es- 
 cape. 
 
 It was a curious feeling this sudden realisation of what for 
 years she had been content to ignore and at first she did not 
 grasp all that it involved of sacrifice. She stood looking down 
 towards the Slide, where the wan sunlight gleamed on the 
 crooked trees, and sighs crept up from the water below. Her 
 breast laboured less heavily, and the flush passed from her 
 cheeks, but she did not move, and after a time she knew that 
 she could not the way was closed. 
 
 For the first time she seemed to see deep down into 
 her lover's heart, and her own heart melted. The more she un- 
 derstood this love he had apart from her the more her own 
 love grew. She knew now that she could never carry out her 
 plan she could no more maim his spirit in order to win him 
 than she could maim his body, blind or wound him so that she
 
 200 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 could take advantage of his helplessness. For her love had 
 undergone a sea-change. She did not love him as she had loved 
 him long ago, when he had been set above her and she had 
 sworn to have him, the great man of Marlingate, the Alder- 
 man, the Mayor, the town's father. She did not love him as 
 she had loved him in the year of possession, with all her wo- 
 man's greed for his manhood. She did not love him for what 
 he promised or for what he gave, but just for himself, the man 
 Edward Monypenny, the creature helpless and sorrowful as 
 herself, the human being which her love had created but could 
 not sustain. She felt her love and passion rising in her heart 
 like tears, and as tears they streamed from her eyes. Crouch- 
 ing down in the rust-cored bracken she sobbed again, but this 
 time without dryness. She sobbed for Monypenny because 
 she had nearly ruined him, and for herself because she must 
 lose him. But she would rather lose him than maim him as 
 she had planned. 
 
 He wanted Marlingate, so he should have it. She would not 
 stand in his way any more. He had loved her, and found his 
 youth and his manhood in her, but now her love had become a 
 snare to him, and in a little while it would become a sorrow. 
 She would not let that happen she would stand aside, and 
 spare him the torments of a divided allegiance. She would 
 leave him to serve his town with all the new strength that she 
 had given him. She loved him so much that his happiness was 
 what she most desired in the world, even if he fulfilled it in 
 ways apart from her. 
 
 But where could she go? 
 
 There was only one answer. As long as she lived her life 
 would be his snare and her torment. Besides, whether he went 
 in cursing or in blessing, she could not live without him, for 
 she had no life apart from him, having renounced her own 
 ways for his sake. Only her death could set them both free. 
 This was the way of escape the only way. Her being had ex- 
 hausted and torn itself in bringing to this painful birth its first
 
 THE BETRAYAL 201 
 
 unselfish emotion, and she longed for rest ... as foam upon 
 the water. . . . 
 
 She stood looking down into the cool grey reaches of the sea, 
 hazy and still at the foot of the Gringer. Close under the cliff 
 brown rocks broke the water into pools where the foam lay in 
 long white lathers. There were no waves, only now and then 
 a motion that seemed a heave of the whole surface against the 
 cliff, a peaceful swell, out of which dragged a long sigh, hush- 
 ing slowly down into quietness, as the mass ebbed from the 
 cliff, and fell back into those deep green pools with their rims 
 of lathered foam. 
 
 This could be her release, and she could fulfil here the des- 
 tiny which now seemed no longer a threat but a promise. "As 
 foam upon the water," she could escape for ever from the 
 streets where her feet had bled. Her death would bring no 
 real grief to anyone on earth. Her baby would forget her, her 
 husband would find comfort in sentimental orgies of memory, 
 and the man for whom she died would be set free from the tan- 
 gle her love had coiled round him. 
 
 Her heart was quite melted now, and the tears splashed over 
 her cheeks as she climbed down the slope of All Holland Hill 
 to the cliff edge. She looked over it was far to fall, but that, 
 she knew, would only make the end more sure and more merci- 
 ful. A rickety fence leaned this way and that along the edge. 
 In places the ground had crumbled away under it, and it hung 
 over the void. Morgan climbed through the pales, and stood 
 on the narrow rim of turf that in places hung right over the 
 cliff. It would be easy to do the ground would probably 
 give way under her before she had to force herself over. It was 
 strange that she should still hesitate, but something within her 
 made her shrink from dashing herself to pieces on the rocks. 
 She wanted to die, yet she wished she could have found an 
 easier way. 
 
 Shutting her eyes, she took a few quick steps towards the 
 edge. Then she remembered Lindsay's "Keepsake," which she
 
 202 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 still carried, and, taking it back to the fence, put it carefully 
 beside her shopping-bag. Then she shut her eyes again, and 
 went forward. 
 
 The hazy noon drowsed on. The stillness seemed to mend 
 its torn edges over the cry that had risen sudden, frantic, and 
 despairing from the cliff. For some time there was a dribble 
 of loosened sandstone, shaken out by the larger fall from the 
 edge, when all the green lip that for several weeks had hung 
 from the fence suddenly broke into turf and sods and shud- 
 dered down into the pools at the foot of the Slide. Long rip- 
 ples stroked across the pools, and the water thickened with 
 pulping earth, then slowly cleared and calmed. But in one of 
 the pools, half under the water, half trailing on the rock, lay 
 something which from the top of the cliff looked like a dead, 
 crimson leaf. 
 
 i5 
 
 The Mayoral dinner was at two, an hour which was a com- 
 promise with fashion, convenience, and appetite. The big din- 
 ing-room at the Maidenhood looked very much the same as it 
 had looked on the far back occasion when Alderman Mony- 
 penny had first laid down the programme of Marlingate's great- 
 ness the brown and white nets still hung upon the walls, with 
 the stuffed tunny fish. The tables were laid with perhaps a 
 little more elegance there were flowers and silver and glass, 
 where before there had been earthenware mugs and jugs. This 
 new elegance had also spread to the company. The borough 
 fathers no longer looked like a set of jolly red-faced trades- 
 men sitting down to gorge. Even Lewnes and Lusted wore 
 London clothes, and when the meal began it had not that fine 
 orchestral sound which had sometimes reached as far as loafers 
 at the window. 
 
 Monypenny sat at the head of the table. He did not wear 
 his Mayoral robes, for the atmosphere, rich as ever with the 
 fumes of bygone beer and pipes, did not favour his panoply of
 
 THE BETRAYAL 203 
 
 fur and velvet. His long-tailed black coat and close-fitting 
 grey trousers showed off his tall, graceful figure still youth- 
 fully slim in spite of the looming forties. His chain of office 
 hung upon his breast, distinguishing him, if any added distinc- 
 tion were needed, from his Councillors and Aldermen. At his 
 right hand sat Pelham, the deputy Mayor; at his left sat the 
 new Councillor Becket, and down the table on either side 
 gleamed the shirt-fronts and watch-chains of Breeds and Vid- 
 ler, Lewnes and Lusted, Bond of the Library, Tom Potter, the 
 Town Clerk, Councillors Luck and Putland and Dunk and 
 Robert Pelham, Councillor Raymond Hurdicott (elegant re- 
 turn of St. Nicholas' Ward), the Rev. Somerville Hunt and his 
 Puseyite curate all the Marlingate worthies, new and old, as- 
 sembled to do honour to their town and their stomachs. 
 
 During the first courses there was little conversation. 
 Becket made one or two remarks to Monypenny without much 
 encouragement he had had a poor dinner with the Clothwork- 
 ers, and he wondered who had chosen their wine he wondered 
 where his wife had gone, as she was not in when he called at 
 the Coney Banks on his way from the station had Mony- 
 penny enjoyed his dinner with her last night? he hoped she 
 had given him better mutton than the Clothworkers had given 
 her husband. 
 
 Monypenny scarcely listened to his babblings. He felt 
 happy and abstracted it seemed as if his life, after much 
 rocking, had established itself again, and he was able to 
 dream and brood over matters which for a nightmare interval 
 had been the mere dust of routine. The glamour of his office 
 had come back, and with it a new zest, a heat of emotion, as if 
 some of the sweetness of his love for Morgan had been blown 
 into the tracks of the town's business. That emotional, pas- 
 sionate quality which had hung yesterday over the Marine 
 Gardens and Aquarium hung today over the long saloon of the 
 Maidenhood and all the common food and common company. 
 His mind was aflame, and sported with its satisfaction. As he
 
 204 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 ate and drank he found the crippled poet in him at work, with 
 strivings which formerly only Morgan could have called forth. 
 
 "At the Maidenhood House were the fathers assembled, 
 The fathers of Marlingate, Queen of the sea . . ." 
 
 He found it running out as his verse had once run out on 
 lame feet to Morgan, stumbling among thoughts too fiery to ex- 
 press; and this time it lacked that quality of sadness which had 
 bewildered him before. It would seem as if his relations with 
 the town were all happy, and he could hardly bear to think 
 how nearly he had sacrificed them for that which had never 
 been without its undercurrent of pain. The danger was still 
 there he remembered Morgan as he had last seen her, stand- 
 ing by the hearth like a blazing Autumn tree but now he saw 
 her in her proper relation to Marlingate, she was dwindling 
 back into her frame, and he would never let her come out again 
 to work her magic in the woods. He told himself that he would 
 be able to go back to his old ways with her, that this sudden 
 flaring up of their two hearts was only an accident, an inter- 
 lude, as had been that sudden parching of his municipal life. 
 Yet he could not quite shake off the stifling sense of danger 
 he knew that her love must henceforward always hold a threat. 
 
 The meal was more elaborate than in the old days. It be- 
 gan with turtle soup like any Guildhall banquet, then individ- 
 ualised itself with the fish. Tom Tutt and his son and his 
 waiter came staggering in together with an enormous Robin 
 Huss pie. Robin Huss was to Marlingate as the lion to Brit- 
 ain or the cock to France, a patriotic emblem. This symbol- 
 ism had rescued him from the looming accusation of vulgarity 
 under which he would probably soon have vanished from the 
 genteel dinner-tables of the town. In the fishing quarter he 
 fed every family from April to December baked or sodden or 
 fried, or buried in pies or chopped in steaks or dried in long 
 brown strips while his young like thick white eels fed the
 
 THE BETRAYAL 205 
 
 Fish Street cats and in various ages of decay proved an inex- 
 pensive substitute for eggs at Parliamentary elections. 
 
 The Robin Huss pie was now a ceremonial dish at Mayoral 
 banquets, in spite of the fact that it left appetites flabby for 
 the baron of beef and the apple tart that had still to come. But 
 a good will brought the Corporation also through these, and 
 the cloth was removed for dessert. 
 
 Just as Tom and Jo Tutt were setting the decanters on the 
 table, Henry, the waiter, came in with a note for Becket. The 
 merchant read it, looked surprised and alarmed and a little be- 
 wildered, then rose and pushed back his chair. 
 
 "I'm sorry, Mayor and gentlemen, but I must go home. 
 I've been sent for." 
 
 "I hope there's nothing wrong." 
 
 "I hope not but I'm afraid there must be, as otherwise no 
 one would have dreamed of calling me away from this happy 
 assembly. My baby you know she's been ailing . . . and 
 this was written by the Nurse." 
 
 "Is Mrs. Becket at home?" 
 
 "She can't be yet, or she would have written herself. I 
 hope ..." His mottled face suddenly went pale, and he hur- 
 ried out of the room. 
 
 A buzz of commiseration and conjecture went round the ta- 
 ble. People began to surmise, and Monypenny felt that he 
 must at all costs crush their surmisings. He stood up and at 
 once began his speech of the evening. 
 
 "Mr. Deputy Mayor Aldermen, Councillors of Marlin- 
 gate . . ." 
 
 For some twenty minutes his voice, rather deeper and harsh- 
 er than usual, kept his own mind and the Corporation's off 
 Becket's disaster. He dared not let himself make any guesses 
 at what had so suddenly called the merchant away, and he felt 
 something intruding and sacrilegious in the guesses of the oth- 
 ers. He was making violent efforts at self-reassurance. After 
 all it was not to be expected that Becket's summons should
 
 206 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 have anything to do with Morgan; it was far more likely to 
 concern his child. 
 
 It was scarcely to be wondered at that this undercurrent of 
 mental strife should make the beginning of his speech a lit- 
 tle darker and more rambling than was usually expected from 
 Monypenny, but gradually he pulled himself together and soon 
 had the matter going straight. He gave, as was expected of 
 him, a brief review of the town's progress during the past year, 
 laying stress on the opening of the Aquarium and Marine Gar- 
 dens. He then spoke of the future. There was very little more 
 that could be done, he said, in the way of enlarging Marlin- 
 gate. The bigger strokes of the town's beauty were finished; 
 all that remained was for it to be lovingly stippled into per- 
 fection. He still objected to the idea of a Pier he felt that it 
 would cheapen Marlingate and dim its selectness but the 
 Town Committee had plans before them for the development 
 of a Winter Garden, where the band could play in the after- 
 noons during the cold months. He mentioned that approaches 
 had been made to him and other landlords by a London firm of 
 contractors to purchase building sites on the Coney Banks and 
 Gingerbread Green, but they had unanimously decided 
 Monypenny did not describe the process by which his nega- 
 tive had crushed the hankering of Lewnes that strangers must 
 not come into their midst with perhaps alien notions of what 
 was beautiful and suitable to Marlingate. The name that 
 would always be associated with building and architecture in 
 the town was Decimus Figg. He wished the architect was with 
 them tonight so that they could pay him publicly the honour 
 that was his due. Beyond expressing his regret for this, and 
 pointing out that the offer of the London contractors showed 
 how the fame of Marlingate was spreading, he had nothing 
 more to say. So he would end his remarks by proposing ac- 
 cording to a now respectably dated custom, Marlingate as the 
 toast of its Corporation. "Gentlemen Marlingate." 
 
 The toast was drunk, Aldermen and Councillors standing up
 
 THE BETRAYAL 207 
 
 and clinking glasses. The company was back in its seats with 
 its pipes, and Pelham had risen to propose the health of the 
 Mayor when Tom Tutt came hurriedly into the room and 
 whispered something to Tom Potter, the Town Clerk. Potter 
 gave an exclamation and stood up, and Pelham, who was clear- 
 ing his throat for his opening period, asked what was the mat- 
 ter. 
 
 "It's news come from Mrs. Becket, Sir she's been found 
 drowned." 
 
 There was a clatter as the Mayor's churchwarden pipe fell 
 suddenly and broke itself on the table. 
 
 "Mrs. Becket drowned where?" cried Pelham. 
 
 "That must have been why Becket was sent for," said 
 Lewnes wisely. 
 
 "I heard it from one of the coastguards at Marrowbone 
 Gap," said Tom Tutt. "Seemingly they found her two hours 
 ago. The fellow's in my bar now; would you like him to come 
 in here and tell you about it, gentlemen?" 
 
 "No no; not under any circumstances," said Monypenny. 
 
 "Dear me," wailed Pelham, "what a terrible thing what a 
 dreadful affliction for our esteemed Councillor!" 
 
 "We must pray for him," said the Rev. Somerville Hunt. 
 
 "And for her," said his Puseyite curate. 
 
 "And a fine woman she was, too," said Lewnes. 
 
 "Was she drowned by accident?" asked Lusted. 
 
 Everybody glared at him. 
 
 "They seemed to think up at the station as she'd been pick- 
 ing leaves," said Tom Tutt "there was a bunch of something 
 in her hand." 
 
 "Maybe she'd grabbed at it to save herself, poor woman," 
 said Vidler. 
 
 Pelham was almost in tears. 
 
 "Mr. Mayor Aldermen and Councillors I feel after 
 what we have just heard that we cannot continue this festiv- 
 ity. One of our number has been sorely stricken, and the least
 
 208 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 we can do is to show our sympathy by disbanding this con- 
 vivial assembly. Your worship, have I your permission to sug- 
 gest that the proceedings be now brought to a close and that 
 we return heavy-hearted and sorrowful to our own homes?" 
 
 ("After having each one of us separately pumped the coast- 
 guard in the bar," said Raymond Hurdicott under his breath.) 
 
 "Certainly," agreed Monypenny, standing up. During all 
 the babble he had sat quite still, staring at his broken pipe. In 
 his heart was an emotion which made his cheeks burn with 
 shame, and gave a peculiar brightness to his eyes that were 
 usually so sad. It was a feeling of relief. He could scarcely 
 believe it, it seemed so incredible, yet there it was. The news 
 of Morgan's death had been as the lifting of a yoke and the re- 
 moval of a snare. As long as she lived she would have stood 
 between him and Marlingate, striving to keep them apart. Her 
 death had set him free to go back to the old allegiance, which 
 he felt now as if he had betrayed. All the love in him was 
 now free to be poured on his town. A fiery exaltation was 
 upon him a psychologist or a doctor would have attributed it 
 to the workings of a shock as yet scarcely assimilated. Yet 
 his heart was full of shame and remorse, for he, alone of all 
 the company, felt sure that her death had come to her seeking. 
 He remembered her as he had last seen her, in her pride and 
 despair. He might have known that she was not for compro- 
 mise. If he had known, perhaps he would have gone back . . . 
 was he glad that he had not known? . . . 
 
 His tongue faltered with his emotions, giving the right im- 
 pression of grief. Pelham whispered loudly in his ear that he 
 should propose a vote of sympathy with Becket, and he did so, 
 scarcely realising what he said, but seeing it carried with 
 groans and sighs and much shaking of heads. 
 
 Then the company melted away, and Monypenny found 
 himself walking up the High Street alone. 
 
 The sun was still on the pavements, gleaming down from 
 a great arch of mackerel sky that spread from hill to hill. A
 
 THE BETRAYAL 209 
 
 faint rose fanned into it from behind Spitalman's Down, but 
 there was still a thick, tempered heat in the rays that struck 
 back from pavements and doorsteps, and baked on the old 
 tiles. The smells of lath and brick crept out of the warmth 
 and mixed with the salt smell of the sea. Here and there a 
 yellow tree pushed its boughs between two houses, over some 
 garden wall, and strawed the pavement with shrivelling leaves 
 that sent out a dim perfume of dying woods into the solid bor- 
 ough smell of bricks and mortar.
 
 PART II 
 THE DESTROYER
 
 CHAPTER I 
 GUARDIAN AND GUIDE 
 
 THE next morning Monypenny awoke with a curiously 
 blank mind. It was like an empty slate, and he proceeded to 
 write Park Terrace all over it. He saw that now he was free 
 to build Park Terrace, and while he shaved and dressed he 
 pictured its bricked frontage glowing to the South, its gleam 
 of white parapets and porches, its wide semi-circular fling of 
 steps shelving gravely to the decent road. From Park Ter- 
 race he passed back to an old plan, temporarily put aside, and 
 toyed with the idea of a municipal parterre of streets named 
 after his Town Council. Pelham Square should finish Becket 
 Grove, and hooked to its corners four new roads or "Places" 
 should be the immortality of Bond and Lusted, Breeds and 
 Vidler Lewnes already had his memorial in the road that 
 linked Becket Grove with Rye Lane. 
 
 All day long he turned over this idea; by evening he was 
 clinging to it, for he knew by this time the thoughts that were 
 gathering under the steady surface of his mind. As the pa- 
 ralysis of shock wore from his emotions, they began to take on 
 various tortured activities, which he fought with his plans for 
 Marlingate and with that strange feeling of relief and freedom 
 which still survived, though it was no longer dominant. The 
 town reeked of yesterday's tragedy it was discussed in every 
 bar and shop and drawing-room. Morgan's name came to 
 Monypenny from under women's parasols, from behind coun- 
 ters, and over teacups it blew down the Parade, and the 
 
 213
 
 214 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 Municipal band could talk of nothing else during its mid-day 
 interval; the matter was even discussed on the Stade, Phineas 
 Gallop declaring he had seen Mrs. Becket go through to Tam- 
 arisk Steps, and wishing under the circumstances that he had 
 noticed her more particularly. 
 
 Monypenny saw nothing of Becket. He had helped in the 
 drawing up of a formal expression of sympathy from the 
 Mayor and Corporation, but he had found himself totally un- 
 able to write any personal letter of condolence. He spent his 
 time wandering over the site of his prospective building, a lit- 
 tle forlorn in the damp November flutter of the wood, and 
 urgently scribbling down his ideas and plans on paper. The 
 evenings he gave up to formal copying, and writing to Figg. 
 Sometimes he would experience queer little gusts of anger be- 
 cause the catastrophe did not affect him more. He would have 
 felt in better conceit with himself if his heart had been wrung 
 with agonised and noble throes, if he had suffered what his 
 sense of poetry and decency told him he ought to suffer, in- 
 stead of just this restless dream spun over a blank. 
 
 The inquest took place on the third day, and the jury 
 brought in a verdict of "accidental death." The Coroner, a 
 retired doctor of Marlingate's obscurity, played at first the 
 part of devil's advocate, and questioned various witnesses as 
 to the possibility of Mrs. Becket's "accident" being self- 
 sought. He may have done this partly from conscientious mo- 
 tives, and, living away from the town's modern activities, he 
 would not have shared the jury's friendly itch to make things 
 as comfortable as possible for Becket. But he could prove 
 nothing. There was nothing in the circumstances of Mrs. 
 Becket's death, as given by the evidence, to suggest suicide. 
 She had been in perfect health and spirits a headache early 
 on the fatal morning (which, her maid said, had passed away 
 before she went out) was of little account, except that per- 
 haps it might have caused a sudden vertigo as she stooped to 
 pull the branch of the crimson tree which had evidently been
 
 GUARDIAN AND GUIDE 215 
 
 her undoing. Becket swore that his wife had no secret trouble 
 or care, and as for her going to the Slide that morning the 
 only circumstance that seemed to need explanation she had 
 always been rather strange and wilful in her impulses, she 
 often went out on little lonely expeditions to the cliffs or the 
 woods. Anyhow the jury felt convinced that the wife of a 
 Marlingate borough-councillor would never commit suicide, 
 and their verdict was a tribute to Becket's dignity as well as a 
 quite logical conclusion from the evidence. In the end even 
 the Coroner supported the "accidental" theory, and endorsed 
 a rider which urged that the fence on All Holland Hill should 
 be rebuilt a couple of yards further from the cliff edge. 
 
 The verdict with its appendages was brought to Monypenny 
 at Harpsichord House, where he was taking tea with the Pel- 
 hams. He had at one time been afraid that he might be called 
 upon to attend the inquest, having dined alone with Morgan 
 Becket the night before her death; but there had never been 
 any real suspicion of suicide, and to his infinite relief his evi- 
 dence was not required. He had, however, been glad to get 
 Pelham's invitation to drink tea with him and his wife he 
 shrank from loneliness during those days, and he also felt an 
 itch to tell Pelham about his building plans, since he could not 
 at present tell Becket. The Alderman was not used to being 
 taken into his confidence, and listened reverently with his fin- 
 ger-tips together and his head attentively on one side. Late in 
 the evening Robert Pelham and his wife brought the verdict 
 of the Coroner's jury. Monypenny was intensely relieved, 
 though he had never really doubted the issue. But he was 
 quite unshaken in his belief that Morgan's death had been of 
 her own seeking, a freewill offering to despair. 
 
 As he walked home that night across the town it seemed 
 to him as if Marlingate exulted in the death of Morgan le Fay. 
 Her life and her love had threatened its prosperity, but now 
 she would live and love no more. In her battle with it she had
 
 216 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 been beaten it had killed her, and now her bones would lie 
 in its heart. 
 
 The wind sighed over the roofs, but it no longer seemed a 
 link between the woods and the sea, rather something lost and 
 outcast, a spirit wailing restlessly among the chimneys of the 
 town. 
 
 2 
 
 The funeral was two days later. Monypenny attended, and 
 the rest of the Town Council, but not officially. Lewnes had 
 indeed suggested that a municipal parade might comfort and 
 cheer their comrade in his grief, but the idea had found no ac- 
 ceptance, and the town fathers merely sprinkled the graveside, 
 praying into their hats. 
 
 "Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust," said the Rev. Somer- 
 ville HunUthe dust of Morgan to the dust of Marlingate, that 
 she might be one with the thing she hated, and perhaps some 
 day so inextricably mixed with it as to be shaped into the 
 very bricks that were dug from its clay. Thus dreamed Mony- 
 penny, with his hat before his eyes, and saw in his dream the 
 gulf under his thoughts grow wider, and yawn to swallow him. 
 
 The funeral was on a bitter, frosty day, and several of the 
 Corporation caught cold at it. Among them, surprisingly, was 
 the Mayor. He had never been really ill before, but now he 
 collapsed inexplicably before a cold caught at a funeral. In- 
 fluenza, bronchitis, pulmonary congestion, and every trick a 
 cold can play, this ignoble chill played with Monypenny's 
 strong body, now mysteriously deprived of resistance. It was 
 like a hollow trunk, sturdy and erect to see, but at the first 
 blow of the axe found to be consumed within. Ever since Mor- 
 gan's death fire and decay had been eating him, and now he 
 was empty. 
 
 However, he lived through the attack, and spent many 
 weary, torpid days of convalescence, lying in his big dark bed 
 at Gun Garden House, and watching the tracery of the Town
 
 GUARDIAN AND GUIDE 217 
 
 Park trees sway and flicker against the December sky. Some- 
 times he forgot that they were not the trees of the Wilderness 
 indeed, for some weeks he was subject to queer attacks of 
 aphasia, in which the new Marlingate faded into the old that 
 used to be, a quiet town of grass-grown streets and sunny, 
 brine-sweet spaces. 
 
 But there was yet another Marlingate into which his spirit 
 was sometimes fetched, and this was a town he dreaded. He 
 saw it only in dreams, of a kind which recurred rather fre- 
 quently during the early stages of convalescence, when his tem- 
 perature still went up at nights. It was his old dream of a 
 dead town, which he had dreamed after his sail in the Liz- 
 zie Hope. He found himself a prisoner in dead, airless streets 
 empty, not with the sunny emptiness of bygone Marlingate, 
 but rather with an aching, striving emptiness, on which his 
 heart was ground as on a grindstone. He saw all the familiar 
 landmarks the Town Hall, the Maidenhood, the Assembly 
 Rooms, St. Nicholas Church, the Aquarium but each had 
 clothed itself with a new and indefinable horror. They were 
 familiar and yet horribly strange their outlines were hateful, 
 and so were the outlines of the empty streets, and the shuttered 
 houses past which he wandered on an aching search after he 
 knew not what. Up and down in dead man's town he walked 
 all night, only finding rest in a weak, sweating waking at dawn, 
 after which his horror still hung over him for a time. Indeed, 
 once or twice, during the latter part of his convalescence, when 
 the dream itself came no more, he found the terror closing 
 down on him in waking hours, when he sat in his easy chair at 
 the window, looking out at Marlingate. It was as if the town 
 suddenly grimaced at him, as if its ruddy smiling face, turned 
 up so peacefully to the mild December sky, had suddenly con^ 
 torted with a leer and a sneer. 
 
 Monypenny said nothing of these experiences. He was 
 afraid of them. They were signs of a mental condition he 
 would be ashamed to reveal. He felt that they were symptoms
 
 218 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 of madness he had heard that the distortion of familiar ob- 
 jects is a common accompaniment of insanity. No doubt the 
 shock he had received, followed by the undermining of a long 
 illness, had shaken the seat of his reason. He fought with his 
 trouble in secret, and at last it passed. His mind cleared, and 
 he saw things as they were or at least, as he used to see them. 
 By the middle of January he was once more taking his part 
 in the town's winter gaieties, with a trace of hectic emaciation 
 to make him doubly romantic in the eyes of Marlingate's 
 young ladies. 
 
 3 
 
 After his wife's funeral Becket had gone back to London for 
 a couple of months, but in February he returned to the Coney 
 Banks and proceeded to wallow in his memories. Monypenny 
 called on him once or twice, sometimes in a spirit of reluc- 
 tance, sometimes aware of the tuggings of a strange bond of 
 union. Here was a man who had loved Morgan kindly and 
 faithfully, the only man on earth who shared Monypenny 's 
 love and sorrow, and at the same time the last man on earth 
 who could be told of them. Yet sometimes in the bare fact 
 there was comfort, and Monypenny would sit and listen pa- 
 tiently to his sentimental prosings, and come away soothed 
 into a kind of peace. At other times Becket's unconscious 
 fellowship with him in the dead was only a source of madden- 
 ing irritation, and a jealousy that had never gnawed while 
 Morgan was alive. 
 
 Marlingate was extraordinarily gay that winter. Every 
 evening the music of the Polka and the Valse a deux-temps 
 came from the Assembly Rooms or from some lighted-up house 
 in the residential part of the town. The afternoons were 
 filled with concerts, theatrical performances (sometimes by 
 genteel amateurs) and calls paid sedately by brougham or vic- 
 toria, while the mornings were spent in ceremonial promenad- 
 ings round the band-stand, or on some sheltered seat in the
 
 GUARDIAN AND GUIDE 219 
 
 Marine Gardens. Through all this gaiety, from the morning 
 promenade to the evening polka, Monypenny moved centrally, 
 the chief figure of all. No one noticed that he was partner- 
 less, that all his pacings and bowings were as ridiculous as 
 those of a man who goes through a minuet alone. Some peo- 
 ple thought that he was relapsing a little into his old shyness 
 and silence, from which he had so marvellously emerged some 
 eighteen months ago, but the tendency was to put this down 
 to his illness, and young ladies murmured romantically that 
 he was consumptive which he was not. 
 
 He never became quite as abrupt and reserved as he had 
 been in the old days Morgan had made a social animal of 
 him, and he could not in a twinkling undo her work. But he 
 was aware in his heart of a new remoteness, such as had never 
 underlain the old taciturnity. He was able to laugh and talk, 
 pay compliments, and even make jokes, as he had never done 
 in his early days of triumph, but he could not lose that sense 
 of loneliness a rather grotesque loneliness. 
 
 This futility gnawed at him not only on the social but on 
 the municipal side, which was ridiculous, for he knew that 
 Morgan had never taken the slightest interest in his borough 
 activities except to thwart them. Nevertheless, his first free 
 rapture of zeal had been succeeded by a strange inertness at 
 Corporation and Town Committee meetings he felt dwindled 
 and pathetic in his seat under the Borough arms. This was 
 not the same as the emotion that had stirred him into revolt 
 and boredom during his perplexing day of surrender it was 
 rather a state of strangeness and clumsiness, of municipal in- 
 hibition. He was half inclined to put it down to the languors 
 of illness he asked his doctor to prescribe a tonic, and drank 
 two glasses of port, carefully, after dinner. . . . 
 
 But all the while he knew that under all these restraints 
 and activities, these yearnings and stirrings and regrets of his 
 surface being, lay a gulf too deep for his thoughts to fathom,
 
 220 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 at the bottom of which lived horrors unimaginable, and into 
 which he must inevitably go down some day. 
 
 4 
 
 But at present he was still on the surface, moving about 
 forlornly among ghosts pale substances that waxed in un- 
 reality till at last it seemed as if everything real and vital was 
 down in the gulf and the only living thing about him was 
 this despair he could not face. Even his grief for Morgan, 
 as he was able to formulate it, was a surface thing, and seemed 
 strangely inadequate. He missed her as woman and as in- 
 spiration but that was all. He was sometimes astonished at 
 the littleness of his feelings on her account she had been so 
 wonderful, and there was nothing wonderful about his sorrow, 
 nothing but a dull ache and growing futility. His sense of free- 
 dom still remained, but it was less pleasurable and therefore 
 less shameful it was growing, like all the rest of his emotions, 
 rather stale. 
 
 He still finicked with his plans for Park Terrace, and cor- 
 responded with Decimus Figg. Once Figg came to stay at 
 Gun Garden House, and tore many shadows and silences with 
 his boisterous laugh and wagging tongue. He was growing 
 prosperous now. Marlingate had brought him into reputation, 
 and he had just been commissioned to design a Town Hall for 
 a newly incorporated northern borough. Monyperiny envied 
 him his enthusiasm and pride in his work, and his love for it 
 which had kept him celibate and single-hearted. 
 
 "I don't get time to think of women and after all, when 
 I've got hold of Beauty, why should I bother about what is 
 at best only a partial attempt at its expression? Looking for 
 beauty in woman is like drinking the water of life out of a 
 cracked cup, when you've got the whole river at your feet. 
 Besides, there ain't enough of me to go spreading over every- 
 thing. I was made more for dreaming things than doing 'em,
 
 GUARDIAN AND GUIDE 221 
 
 just as I design Town Halls but should be doosid sorry to have 
 to build 'em. You're different you're a man. Found it out 
 yet?" 
 
 Monypenny, who had a queer feeling of intimacy and equal- 
 ity with Figg, was moved to a partial confidence. 
 
 "I've found out that you were wrong in what you said to me 
 here two or three years ago. Do you remember? You said 
 that I would never find real satisfaction in Marlingate that I 
 was born to be something more than just the builder of this 
 town, a poet or a lover or something. Well, I'm not I've tried 
 it, and it didn't answer. I found that this town means more 
 to me than any human relationship, and when I had to choose 
 between Marlingate and er love, I chose Marlingate." 
 
 "I'd never have thought it. I'd have thought you'd make a 
 doosid fine lover. You've got an air, you know. Don Juan 
 ha! ha! Well, perhaps it's better to be a Mayor or an Al- 
 derman than a lover not quite so common, anyway. Ha! 
 ha!" 
 
 "Hal ha!" 
 
 The evening after Figg left, when Monypenny, in spite of 
 a certain feeble enjoyment he had felt at his friend's visit, 
 was looking forward to being alone, Alderman Lewnes came in. 
 
 Monypenny was lying back in his favourite attitude in his 
 leather armchair, with his long legs stretched to the fire, his 
 hand over his eyes, feeling the first welcome approaches of a 
 doze. He could scarcely restrain his annoyance at the sight 
 of Lewnes, red-faced and bustling, and grasping a roll of parch- 
 ment which meant the discussion of borough affairs. 
 
 "Good evening, Mayor. Thought I'd find you. You look a 
 bit pulled down still weak and easily tired, I suppose. Nasty 
 complaint, influenza never seems to have done with you." 
 
 Monypenny had risen, and with grave courtesy had pulled 
 forward another armchair, at the same time ordering his serv- 
 ant to bring in port and cigars. 
 
 Lewnes sat down and unspread his roll.
 
 222 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 "Figg left this at my place this morning, and Lusted and I 
 are both agreed we can't stand it." 
 
 He thrust into Monypenny's hands the architect's designs 
 for the new houses on the Coney Banks. 
 
 "If they were to be built like that," continued Lewnes. point- 
 ing with a podgy and rather, dirty ringer, "in three years' time 
 no one would scarce ever know that they were new 'ouses." 
 
 Figg had taken as his models the seventeenth century houses 
 at the foot of the Banks, and had kept faith with their big, 
 sprawling roofs and casement windows. Even Monypenny 
 thought he had been a little extreme in his loyalty to the 
 spirit of the town. 
 
 "You could modify the windows," he suggested "Figg isn't 
 pig-headed. He'll let his designs be improved upon." 
 
 Lewnes sniffed. 
 
 "You'd never improve these 'ouses into anything decent. 
 They've got no style not a vestige of it. I want something 
 modern and convenient on my land, something with style a 
 bit slap-up, you know." 
 
 "I see but that would hardly be in keeping with the rest 
 of the Coney Banks." Monypenny felt a sudden weariness of 
 the whole job. His voice lacked its old ring of authority, and 
 Lewnes's horns came out a bit further. 
 
 "Excuse me, Mayor, but it would. All those Coney Bank 
 'ouses were new and up-to-date and in the best style when they 
 were first put up. The party who built those old places down 
 by the street he didn't think he'd got to copy the Town Hall 
 or any other old building that was there he ran up some- 
 thing fashionable in his time; and so did Lusted 's father when 
 he took to building higher up he didn't copy the old party 
 down at the bottom; and Lusted didn't copy his father. You 
 see it's progress, and you'll never get on without it. Fashion- 
 ables want new slap-up styles, and you can't put 'em off by 
 talking of 'the spirit of the town.' Picture me if I was to sell 
 nothing but knee-breeches and high-waisted gowns in my Em-
 
 GUARDIAN AND GUIDE 223 
 
 porium, because Eugenie skirts and plaid trousers didn't match 
 with the spirit of the town. He! he! " 
 
 Monypenny was far too logically minded not to see reason 
 in Lewnes's speech. But he could hardly suppress a feeble 
 laugh when he saw logic put into action. The Alderman tri- 
 umphantly pulled out a second roll. 
 
 ''This was done in Lusted's office this afternoon. These are 
 his 'ouses, and I must say I like them better than Figg ; s." 
 
 The latest imaginations of the house of Lusted were like 
 the older ones in height, but unlike them in substance. The 
 old Aldermanic houses, which Decimus Figg had laughed at ten 
 years ago, had been built either of bricks or of mine-stones, and 
 their frontages were generally tarred these new houses were 
 fashionable in suits of stucco, and their bows had been angu- 
 larised into bays, with balconies outside them, and, drooping 
 from above, strange curving iron shades, toothed and perfo- 
 rated at the rims, which reminded Monypenny of the parasols 
 the ladies of Marlingate carried at that period. 
 
 "What are these?" he asked lamely. 
 
 "The very newest thing verandah-shades. They can be 
 painted green or red or blue, according to the fancy of the ten- 
 ant." 
 
 "Don't like them or basements either. Why do you want 
 areas?" 
 
 "All modern houses have them most convenient. People 
 don't want their servants with them on the same floor. Be- 
 sides, it saves land. You get three or four rooms extra on the 
 same ground-space." 
 
 "I was not aware that we were hard up for land." 
 
 "Not now. But mark my words we will be, if we build these 
 beauties. They're absolutely the last London style; and I'll 
 tell you something, Mayor, in confidence. There was a lady, 
 no end of a swell, in my place yesterday afternoon, and I 
 heard her say that she wouldn't mind living down here if she 
 could get a nice modern convenient 'ouse "
 
 224 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 "Well, there's Becket Grove and Rye Lane Villas " 
 
 "But hark to what she said after that she said she wished 
 there was some 'ouses here like what they're building now at 
 Brighton; and they're building ten streets of these little beau- 
 ties at Brighton 1" and Lewnes waved Lusted's designs tri- 
 umphantly. 
 
 Monypenny did not attempt to answer him. He felt tired 
 fagged out in spirit. The style of house on the Coney Banks 
 seemed suddenly a very inconsiderable matter, compared with 
 his great desire to be let alone. He wished Lewnes would go, 
 and stop bothering him. 
 
 Lewnes must have realised this unfamiliar weakness in the 
 master mind, for he began to advance his position under cover 
 of a little bluff. 
 
 "Of course Lusted and I have made up our minds. We ain't 
 going to have Figg's designs. We'll pay him for 'em right 
 enough there's nothing mean about your 'umble servant, I 
 hope. But we won't use 'em. That's flat. We said we'd look 
 at 'em to oblige you, Mayor, and now we've looked and we 
 don't like so that's over. Naturally if you've any observa- 
 tions to make about these designs of ours, I'll be very willing 
 to listen." 
 
 For a moment during his words Monypenny's anger had 
 quickened, but the next it had died out like a spark too weak 
 to burn. After all, what was the sense of fighting Lewnes on 
 this trifling question? What did it matter if he built the 
 Coney Banks over with freaks and deformities? He had reason 
 on his side, and it was hardly worth sacrificing reason to 
 beauty since beauty was dead. Nor was it just that his pleas- 
 ure should be spoiled for the sake of a man who would never 
 know pleasure again. Anyhow it was not worth the effort of 
 opposing him. He waved a languid white hand towards 
 Lewnes's scroll. 
 
 "Build what you please crystal palaces or bathing boxes. 
 I don't care. I leave it all to you."
 
 GUARDIAN AND GUIDE 225 
 
 Lewnes looked startled. He had seen the unusual weakness 
 of the opposition, but he was unprepared for this collapse. 
 
 "And you've no observations to make?" 
 
 "None whatever." 
 
 Lewnes raised his port to his lips surprise and victory 
 made his hand a little unsteady. Then he looked across at 
 Monypenny in the opposite chair, and for the first time in his 
 life he pitied him. He looked weak and ill and helpless he 
 must be in very poor condition to let himself be bullied. Yes, 
 tonight he, Lewnes, had actually bullied him. And he had pit- 
 ied him too, which seemed nearly as impossible. It would be 
 something to tell Lucy tonight and Lusted tomorrow. His 
 heart warmed towards the cause of his triumph. 
 
 "You look a bit down in the mouth, old feller. That nasty 
 influenza still hanging about, I suppose. D'you know, I often 
 feel, Monypenny, that you ought to have someone to look af- 
 ter you someone like what I've got at home a nice little wo- 
 man that'll fuss round and see that your shirts are aired and 
 your slippers at the fire." 
 
 Monypenny's face was lost behind a cloud of cigar-smoke, 
 or perhaps Lewnes would not have continued 
 
 "Now you take the advice of one that's tried it, and get mar- 
 ried. There's a score of nice gals that ud have you and one 
 I know of in particular. You 'eart-breaker!" 
 
 Monypenny sat up. 
 
 "I suppose you'll build those houses half-way up the Banks, 
 on the south side of the road?" 
 
 "Yes, a row of 'em." 
 
 Lewnes was a little bewildered at this boomerang swing of 
 the conversation, and having won his victory was not anxious 
 to remain on the battlefield. But Monypenny kept him skir- 
 mishing over details, till at last, with his opinions as to the 
 weakness of the enemy a trifle modified, he rose for a retreat 
 to the little woman who was warming his slippers. 
 
 Monypenny, as he showed him out of the door, experienced
 
 226 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 a violent desire to help him down the steps with a kick behind. 
 It was the first real emotion he had felt for months, but he re- 
 strained it. 
 
 5 
 
 The next morning he could not think how he had done it 
 allowed himself to be bullied into toleration of Lewnes's vul- 
 garities. In all his life he had never been guilty of such a 
 lapse. He had betrayed his town only in a minor matter, it 
 is true, but it added to his shame to realise that he had failed 
 in so little who had been faithful in so much. Constans Fidei 
 in fulfilment of the borough motto he had sacrificed the 
 whole heart and sweetness of life, and now over a minor mat- 
 ter of rue and cummin he had been found wanting. 
 
 At first his impulse was to go to Lewnes and revoke his 
 bounty, but he was withheld, partly by the realisation that 
 his opposition would be useless it had no legal rights, it 
 had always been built on a prestige which he had now kicked 
 over and partly by the dragging of the old weariness. The 
 old question "what does it matter?" had not been answered 
 yet. Besides, the Coney Banks were only a very small part of 
 the town, and he had all his new building at the back of the 
 Park to think of. If he carried out his great plan, then the 
 small unsightliness of Lewnes's creation would be wiped out in 
 the general dazzle. 
 
 These thoughts brought him out to the woods that after- 
 noon. It was a moist February day a pale sunshine shone 
 among the clouds, but seemed almost too feeble to reach the 
 earth, where there was neither gleam nor shadow. Only in 
 the upper air a kind of radiance hung, dim and thick in the 
 earth-smelling mists that smudged the fine tracery of the oaks. 
 Under Monypenny's boots the ground made sucking, watery 
 sounds, for it held the soakings of much rain. Pools had gath- 
 ered in the mud, and in the hollows of the ash-stumps, and the 
 ruts of the track were full of water which was yellow with the
 
 GUARDIAN AND GUIDE 227 
 
 reflection of the primrose gaps in the sky. There was no colour 
 in the woods save washed-out duns and yellows, and no scent 
 save the smells of earth and water, and no sound save the 
 splash and suck of Monypenny's feet in the mud. 
 
 He followed the track out of sight of the backs of Becket 
 Grove, away towards Old Rumble, where it began to climb. 
 All the while he traced beside it houses and gardens that would 
 wipe out the indignity of the Coney Banks. He carried a roll of 
 plans with him, and every now and then he stopped and pored 
 over it. He half wished that he had asked Becket to come with 
 him. He could do nothing without Becket. He would fetch 
 him out tomorrow. After all, it was a poor game, doing this 
 sort of thing alone. The woods were dreadfully lonely, and 
 their stillness oppressed him. . . . 
 
 "Come back to these woodlands, sweet Morgan le Fay. . ." 
 
 He had put his roll of plans against a tree, holding it in po- 
 sition with his hand and forearm, and his despair closed on 
 him. What was the use of wandering in the woods when he 
 would never again see Morgan le Fay laughing at him from a 
 tree-trunk, as she had laughed when first he came to plan? 
 What did it matter whether he came alone or with Becket, now 
 that he was doomed to a lifelong loneliness? What was the 
 use of planning for beauty now that beauty was dead? 
 
 He sat down upon an ash-stump, his hands clenched round 
 the scroll of his useless endeavour, and his thoughts became 
 miserably clear. He saw why he had given in to Lewnes last 
 night. It did not matter a damn what Lewnes built on the 
 Coney Banks, or what Monypenny built behind the Town 
 Park. Everything was equally futile now Morgan was dead. 
 He had built Marlingate for Morgan before he had even 
 seen her he had built it for her she was that Dream Beyond, 
 after which he had always striven, and at last had held, and 
 now had slain. 
 
 He saw what was in the gulf under his thoughts. It was
 
 228 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 the knowledge that he had sacrificed himself and Morgan to a 
 lie. Hitherto he had always been able to get a little com- 
 fort, a little moral stiffening, from the thought that he had 
 been faithful where his faithfulness was due, but now he saw 
 that his very faithfulness had been nothing but a huge be- 
 trayal of himself. It was to Morgan that he had always be- 
 longed, not Marlingate, and if he had clung to Morgan, he 
 realised that in some dim, strange way he would still have kept 
 Marlingate, even if he never set foot in it again but when he 
 renounced Morgan he lost Marlingate too. Morgan le Fay in 
 her death had worked a far greater enchantment than ever in 
 life. For she had taken his town with her into the shadows. 
 Marlingate was dead. 
 
 6 
 
 The trees of Old Rumble and Sharnden Woods hid from the 
 town the sight of its Mayor crouched upon an ash-stump, his 
 head on his knees, his roll of plans in the mud beside him. 
 Drippings from the boughs splashed on his shoulders and on 
 his grey top-hat which lay forlornly in the leaves beside the 
 parchment. For an hour he scarcely moved, and the woods 
 which had kept the secret of his love from the prying town now 
 kept the secret of his grief. 
 
 For an hour Monypenny sat hunched on his ash-stump, so 
 still that a rabbit ate a primrose leaf beside him, and a thrush 
 broke a snail's shell on the crown of his top-hat. Then he 
 lifted a damp, lined face. He had been down in the gulf un- 
 der his thoughts, and came up like a man half-drowned. His 
 eyes looked weak and red, though he had not wept. 
 
 He stretched his limbs, which were aching with cramp, and 
 stood up; then he discovered that he was trembling. He was 
 shaking so that he could hardly stand. He sat down again, 
 and picking up his hat, began to brush it with his sleeve. Far 
 away down in the pit of his tortured mind some habit of nice- 
 ness still lived and fretted to see the rubbed nap, with the
 
 GUARDIAN AND GUIDE 229 
 
 drops of rain and bits of snail-shell. Given at first to mechan- 
 ical stimulation, the habit rose out of the pit to the surface of 
 consciousness, and Monypenny found in his chaos and flood a 
 little bit of solid ground. He picked up a handful of dead 
 leaves and began to rub the mud off his boots, he brushed 
 globes of moisture from his coat, re-settled his tie which had 
 gone astray under the wings of his Gladstone collar. Then he 
 stood up, once more a man. 
 
 But he could not go back to Gun Garden House. At his 
 solitary tea-table in his library of glooms the horror might 
 swallow him up again. He dared not face a lonely evening, 
 and unluckily he had no engagement that night. Should he 
 go back into the town and call upon the Pelhams? or the 
 Hurdicotts? or the Fulleyloves? or Lady Cockstreet? Pel- 
 ham would talk of the town's business, and the rest of the 
 town's pleasure. All were linked with the agony he had suf- 
 fered they lay with Morgan and Marlingate in the hell he 
 had just struggled out of, which yawned to capture him again. 
 Besides, he did not like to think of the long walk townward 
 through the woods, between the mocking' ghosts of the houses 
 he was planning for naught. He wanted a near refuge. 
 
 As he looked over his shoulder, he suddenly saw the sun- 
 set gleam in a merge of copper and amber on the windows of 
 some house set up above the woods. His first thought, in a 
 brain still weak and unsteady from its experiences, was that 
 this was one of his ghostly houses, suddenly alive and aflame. 
 But the next moment he realised that it was Old Rumble 
 House. The illusion had been too transient for him to feel 
 wistful at its fading on the contrary, he thought of Old Rum- 
 ble and Fanny Vidler with a certain comfort. Fanny's com- 
 pany would be less drearily indifferent than Pelham's or Hur- 
 dicott's, and her house a better and a closer refuge than any in 
 the town. She was a good girl, Fanny, and he felt that her 
 peaceful kindliness was the very welcome he wanted. 
 
 He realised that he was no fit object to call at a lady's house
 
 230 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 but he couldn't help that. He must have some sort of friend- 
 ly company, and he knew now that what he wanted was a 
 friendly woman's company. Fanny would divert and soothe 
 him, she would pamper his body which felt cold and tired and 
 cramped. He would sit by her fire and drink the hot tea he 
 was craving for, and listen to her good-natured, cheerful talk. 
 He remembered what Lewnes had said to him about her last 
 night, and at any other time the memory would have kept 
 him away, but today it had no more power than his damp and 
 muddy clothing. 
 
 7 
 
 Old Rumble House was a four-square Georgian building, 
 red and solid, at the corner of Old Rumble Wood. When 
 Monypenny drew near, it seemed ridiculous to think that he 
 had ever taken it for a ghost; it was altogether substantial 
 typical creation of an imagination fed on beef and turnips. It 
 stared blandly at him down its drive as he walked up towards 
 it, and its large friendly portico seemed to welcome him as he 
 stood beneath its fluted columns and raised the heavy knocker 
 of the door. 
 
 A further welcome waited inside. Monypenny had called 
 only once before at Old Rumble, and then it was on some dim, 
 ceremonial occasion, half-forgotten. Fanny and her cousin Sue 
 Vidler were alone, and intensely thrilled and delighted by this 
 visit of the Mayor. The hungry imaginations of Monypenny's 
 fagged brain were realised. He found himself sitting in a deep 
 armchair by a blazing fire, while Fanny and Sue handed muf- 
 fins and tea. His overcoat, in the midst of his apologies for it, 
 was sent to the kitchen to be dried, and if he had not been still 
 sufficiently himself to shrink from any contact with the ridic- 
 ulous, the same would have happened to his boots. 
 
 It was the comfortable peace he had expected; the fire and 
 the hot tea brought him into a state of well-being which showed 
 him that the reactions of the body have power over the most
 
 GUARDIAN AND GUIDE 231 
 
 desperate states of the mind. He began even to take an in- 
 terest in Fanny's conversation at first there had been a queer 
 startled abstraction about him, a restless timidity, which gave 
 rise to much fluttering and laughing conjecture between the 
 two women after he was gone. Fanny sat on a low chair, her 
 maroon silk skirts spreading round her on the floor, the fire- 
 light playing on her broad pretty face, showing him her big 
 white teeth every time she smiled, which was often. She was 
 now? an extraordinarily fine young woman of twenty-six, with a 
 soft creamy skin, warm golden eyes, and hair the colour of Old 
 Rumble Woods in Autumn. Her voice was soft and pleasant, 
 and she used pleasant words when she spoke. She was trivial 
 without being silly. 
 
 He had always liked her, and now he felt himself grateful 
 to her for the refuge she was unconsciously providing. Fanny 
 was not brilliant, and one or two Marlingate young ladies 
 might have called her ungenteel certainly there was nothing 
 remarkable about her simple chat that evening. But it was 
 keeping Monypenny out of hell. 
 
 When he felt himself safe, and able to face his lonely night, 
 he rose to go. Fanny blushed when he thanked her sincerely 
 for his entertainment, and he remembered Lewnes's words with 
 more embarrassment than earlier in the afternoon. Perhaps it 
 was wrong and cruel of him to have used her as a comforter 
 when he would use her as nothing else and yet her happy face 
 told him that he had not used her ill. 
 
 8 
 
 After that Monypenny saw a great deal of Fanny Vidler. 
 They met frequently in the natural course of entertainments, 
 but that had always been, and now was not enough. He 
 sought her out at the back of the town, in her house behind 
 the woods. Here a great red fire burned on right into May, 
 and there was always a chair for him beside it, and tea and
 
 232 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 muffins, and a friendly voice that made no demand on his tired 
 wits but flowed serenely on through pleasant things. 
 
 He needed Fanny, and he was grateful to her not only for 
 supplying his need but for creating it. He was glad to dis- 
 cover any cravings in himself, however humble and he would 
 never forget how she had saved him in his hour of despair. 
 There had been no falling back into the pit, but he suffered in 
 his daily life with a new awareness. It was one of the many 
 baffling accompaniments of Morgan's death that time should 
 quicken rather than deaden his sense of loss, that every week 
 his sorrow and his longing should grow, twined more and more 
 closely with regret and bitter shame. 
 
 He was still as thorough as ever in his Mayoral duties, but 
 it was a more mechanical thoroughness. His ambition no 
 longer preyed on circumstances or soared in dreams. At th* 
 same time he lost that outward air of weariness and abstrac> 
 tion which the Corporation had occasionally noticed and put 
 down to his illness. He was now always business-like and in- 
 creasingly dignified. With Lewnes he had an especial air of 
 stiffness, as if to warn him that his manners must mend. 
 
 Meanwhile the plans for Park Terrace and Pelham Square 
 had been approved by Becket and were to take shape at once. 
 Nearly every day Monypenny was up in the woods to inspect 
 the clearing, and at the end of an afternoon's surveillance it was 
 natural that he should go for rest of mind and body to Old 
 Rumble House. He was still unable to face a lonely evening, 
 and the mixed distractions of municipal entertainments had 
 not the same soothing effect as these quiet hours of sunset and 
 firelight. He was too deeply exhausted to find much diver- 
 sion in carnival ; besides, all the gaieties in which he took part, 
 whether borough or private, reminded him of Morgan, and 
 that sedate, sweet dance they had danced together through 
 Marlingate's festivities. Morgan had no associations with Old 
 Rumble House. Her ghost did not follow him in under the
 
 GUARDIAN AND GUIDE 233 
 
 fluted columns of its portico he left it outside in Old Rum- 
 ble Woods. 
 
 Of course he knew the conclusions that Marlingate would 
 draw from his visits to Fanny; it had gossiped enough when 
 his attentions were merely social and public, so he could 
 imagine how it talked now that they had become personal and 
 private. Sue Vidler an arch, indiscreet old maid, given to 
 significant withdrawals no doubt had her thoughts on the 
 subject, and no doubt did not keep them to herself. The 
 trouble was that Fanny must have thoughts too. She could 
 not know that Monypenny came to her because he dared not 
 face his own solitude, whether alone at Gun Garden House or 
 in the midst of some gay company because she was, inex- 
 plicably, the only human being who could give him any sort 
 of rest. He often wondered how it was that he found rest in 
 Fanny. He had always liked her, but then he had always 
 liked Lady Cockstreet, and never thought of going to her in 
 his loneliness. 
 
 He saw clearly that it was woman he wanted, and less clear- 
 ly that he wanted her as woman. At first he was horrified 
 when he discovered this. But as well as the comfort of Fanny's 
 presence and conversation he wanted the comfort of her in 
 his arms, to kiss her pleasant mouth and tawny hair, to take 
 from her the ghost of love, since he could never have more than 
 the ghost. 
 
 He was ashamed of himself, ashamed of compromising 
 Fanny with the town, and of troubling her heart. He was 
 ashamed to discover that his senses and his virility had not 
 died with her who had awakened them. He tried to keep away 
 from Old Rumble House, and found that he could not. Fanny 
 was now the only fixed thing in his life Morgan was dead and 
 Marlingate had crumbled, but Fanny had somehow a life and 
 solidity of her own. Her goodness to him had made her real, 
 and her reality had created his need of her. 
 
 At first he rebelled miserably against these discoveries. It
 
 234 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 was humiliating to realise that he could not endure his grief 
 in self-respecting austerity, but must take what comfort he 
 could get from the things it had left upstanding. He found 
 himself envying those noble souls who were able to keep faith 
 with their sorrow, and having lost the best, turn in contempt 
 from everything else, keeping their clear-eyed vigil beside the 
 polished tomb of love Constans Fidei. 
 
 A year ago he would have recoiled in fastidious horror from 
 the suggestion that so soon after Morgan's death he would be 
 considering marriage with another woman. Yet he knew in his 
 heart that his unfaithfulness was only the bodily expression 
 of an inward faith. If he had loved Morgan a little less he 
 might have been true to her memory. 
 
 Marriage was the only way he could fill the void that she 
 had left in his life. No doubt an outbreak into vice would 
 have been a more normal and approved expression of his grief, 
 since it could not be expressed in terms of constancy. But his 
 was a nature self-contained and arrogant even in its reactions 
 besides, to be vicious in Marlingate required an effort and 
 any sort of effort was beyond him now. He could only follow 
 his poor unheroic path to Fanny, stumbling to her feet to be 
 comforted. 
 
 As he could not stop away from her he must marry her, be- 
 cause he had too much regard for her to compromise her or to 
 grieve her. Besides, he must once more have woman in his life. 
 If he married Fanny he would not be putting her in Morgan's 
 place he must have that much concession to sentiment 
 Fanny would be a comfortable background, the keeper of his 
 house, the mother of his children, all the things that Morgan 
 would never have been, except in so new and brave a way that 
 they would not have seemed the same things any more. His 
 mind went over much the same ground as it had gone when he 
 lay in his bed and pondered, after his landing from the Lizzie 
 Hope, but it now knew a new need, and the old considerations 
 of borough expediency no longer swayed him. His delibera-
 
 GUARDIAN AND GUIDE 235 
 
 tions ended, as the earlier ones, in a walk through the woods 
 to Old Rumble House, 
 
 9 
 
 This time there was nothing to stop him on his way to sacri- 
 fice no embodiment of all the sunshine in the woods, the 
 glowing, poppy-coloured, fire-hearted shape of Summer and 
 love. He tramped without uncertainty. He had no need to 
 fling himself down in a thicket, and think on with his half- 
 thought question. He had stooped to his fate, to the inevitable 
 tragedy of his human weakness, and the only doubt in his mind 
 was whether Fanny would accept his offering. She must know 
 that he did not love her he had never pretended to love her, 
 he could not now pretend to love her. His offering of himself 
 was a surrender not to love but to grief. Fanny would be 
 sure to see that something was wrong, and refuse to accept him 
 on such terms. For Monypenny was still very humble and dif- 
 fident in the matter of women. The town would have laughed 
 at him, and told him that Fanny would be willing to forego not 
 only love on his side but love on hers. Refuse the Mayor of 
 Marlingate, with rank and power, good looks and money! 
 What girl would be so grasping as to demand that love be 
 thrown into such a weighted scale? 
 
 It happened that both Monypenny and the town were 
 wrong. Fanny accepted him joyfully and gratefully, and not 
 for his wealth or his position, but for himself, the man she had 
 loved and longed for nearly ten years. Not only did she love 
 him, but she had no idea that he did not love her. She had 
 seen for months that he obviously could not keep away from 
 her, and how should she possibly know that it was love for 
 another woman that drove him to her side? He had never 
 flirted with her or paid her compliments, but it was easy to see 
 that his nature had not any of that small change. He never 
 attempted to make love to her or kiss her, but in those days 
 such familiarities formed no part of a decent wooing. Mony-
 
 236 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 penny by his frequent visits, his gentle, humble manner in her 
 presence, and tin staid embrace with which he received her 
 acceptance of him had fulfilled all the conditions of courtship 
 as understood by Fanny Vidler in 1867. 
 
 10 
 
 So one August day the bells of St. Nicholas rang for Mony- 
 penny's wedding. It was a festival in Marlingate, and the 
 church was crowded, so that the mouldy aisles smelled like the 
 Assembly Rooms on gala nights of flowers, cologne water, 
 new glaces, and macassar oil. All the company could not be 
 got into the church, nor afterwards into the Marine Hotel, 
 where the reception was held, as Fanny's own house was too 
 remote, and her uncle Vidler's too lowly, for the purpose. 
 
 There had been intense excitement when it was known that 
 the Mayor had at last thrown the handkerchief. Everyone 
 said that they "had expected it would be Fanny Vidler," none 
 the less extraordinary rumours were current of a disappointed 
 baronet's widow, a titled debutante who had straightway left 
 Marlingate with her frustrated Mamma, and a Hurdicott of 
 Graveley who had fainted circumstantially over the back of 
 the sofa on hearing the news. 
 
 Some people said that he had thrown himself away on Fanny 
 Vidler he could have had rank as well as wealth for the ask- 
 ing; others were rejoiced that he had chosen municipally, and 
 also according to prophecy. Everyone agreed that Fanny was 
 a good girl and deserved her luck. She gave herself no airs, 
 either during the engagement or at the wedding. Indeed, she 
 looked a little shy and abashed standing by her husband's side 
 at the Marine Hotel, her Brussels veil rolled back from her red 
 hair, while Hurdicotts and Papillons and Fulleyloves and even 
 the Lincoln Duchess, offered her their kid-gloved hands. 
 
 Monypenny looked flushed and rather excited. He laughed 
 and talked a great deal with his Aldermen and Councillors,
 
 GUARDIAN AND GUIDE 237 
 
 who grouped round him just as her bridesmaids grouped round 
 Fanny. Decimus Figg was best man, triumphant but a little 
 baffled. Somehow Fanny was not at all the sort of girl he 
 would have expected his friend to marry . . . and had she 
 anything to do with the confidence Monypenny had made him 
 that night six months ago? . . . and had either of 'em, sup- 
 posing there were two, anything to do with that extraordinary 
 lapse in which the Mayor had given Lewnes and Lusted a free 
 hand to build houses like wedding-cakes on Cuckoo Hill? . . . 
 Figg's Adam's apple worked convulsively; he was one of the 
 people who believed that Monypenny was throwing himself 
 away, and hoped that he would not throw away anything 
 more than himself. 
 
 Becket prowled round the company rather sadly. He had 
 broken his retirement to come to Monypenny's wedding, and 
 was feeling dazed and out of focus. People remarked to each 
 other on his altered looks evidently the loss of Morgan had 
 broken him more than the loss of Emma. 
 
 "Poor soul," said Fanny to her bridegroom. "It must be ter- 
 rible for him to come to a wedding, of all things. He ought to 
 have stayed at home; you wouldn't have been hurt would 
 you, Edward? You'd have understood she hasn't been dead 
 a year." 
 
 The honeymoon was long and rambling. The doctor had 
 told Monypenny that he ought to have quite three months 
 away from Marlingate. That was Dr. Cooper, the new doctor 
 who had come to live in Becket Grove. He told Monypenny 
 that he had not yet entirely shaken off the effects of last win- 
 ter's illness, and that the fatigue and inertia of which he com- 
 plained were due to his need of a thorough rest and change. 
 
 "When you go away keep away. You want to lead a thor- 
 oughly different life from what you've been leading for the last
 
 238 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 ten years; you want travel, change, leisure and Mrs. Mony- 
 penny." 
 
 Monypenny did his best to carry out this prescription. His 
 Mayoral duties forbade his entirely severing himself from Mar- 
 lingate, but he was able to go to and fro by rail when occasion 
 demanded, and for that reason, after the first month, they never 
 went very far from the town. The first month was spent in 
 Derbyshire, first at Matlock Bath, and afterwards at Buxton. 
 Then Monypenny and Fanny came south to Tunbridge Wells, 
 where they stayed for a fortnight, afterwards travelling desul- 
 torily from place to place within thirty miles of Marlingate. 
 
 Having had no illusions, Monypenny found marriage very 
 much what he had expected. He had married for the comfort 
 of Fanny's presence, just as a man might break the crushing 
 dark of a cavern by lighting a candle. The tiny flame is lost 
 in the blackness, yet it is better, a thousand times better, than 
 nothing. Some women might have outrun his calculations, and 
 surprised him when he possessed them, showing new qualities 
 under new conditions, but Fanny had no surprises she would 
 always be the same comfortable, kindly soul, loving and quiet, 
 not unintelligent but a little slow, practical and infinitely pa- 
 tient. The only difference was that he occasionally grew a 
 trifle weary of her. He grew tired of her slow, pleasant talk, 
 and of her slow, pleasant mind which was like a little garden. 
 He was careful not to let her see this, for his gratitude and re- 
 spect were unabated; he merely made occasions for leaving her 
 with any nice women there might be in the hotel, while he ex- 
 plored town and country. 
 
 He grew familiar with the places where they stayed Tun- 
 bridge Wells, Maidstone, Canterbury, Ramsgate. He explored 
 their streets and their surroundings, and in time they came to 
 have a curious, individual life of their own, they seemed more 
 alive to him than Marlingate. Tunbridge Wells was alive in 
 the quiet streets dozing round the neglected Pantiles, it was 
 like an ancient beauty living on her memories; Maidstone was
 
 GUARDIAN AND GUIDE 239 
 
 more countrified beside the river, and it had grass-grown al- 
 leys and old stones that smelled sweet in the sunshine and re- 
 minded him of the Marlingate that used to be before he 
 changed it and he caught himself wishing that he had never 
 changed it, but had let it drowse on in the sunshine between 
 the hills as Maidstone drowsed beside the river. . . . He 
 could remember Zuriel Place when the grass grew between the 
 cobbles and in the cracks of its old steps. . . . 
 
 Last of all they went to Ramsgate. It was now the end of 
 October, and the place was nearly empty. Only a few visit- 
 ors lurked in corners of the hotel or dotted the promenade. 
 Somehow Ramsgate reminded Monypenny of Marlingate even 
 more than Maidstone, but not of Marlingate as it used to be, 
 nor yet of Marlingate as it was now it seemed to link him 
 with some aspect of his town that he had not yet realised. He 
 was not able to explore it much, for the hotel was so dreary 
 that he did not care to leave Fanny, as he had so often done 
 in the more cheerful company of Tunbridge Wells and other 
 places. He made up his mind soon to go back Marlingate 
 was not deserted in November; on the contrary its winter sea- 
 son was just starting in circumstances as auspicious as ever. 
 
 "Ramsgate is going down," said one of the few inmates of 
 the hotel, a retired solicitor from Chatham, "and I blame the 
 Corporation. They ought to have worked the winter season 
 better. Every respectable watering place has a winter season 
 nowadays; it's the fashion. I test a town by its winter sea- 
 son. It's easy enough to get people of a sort to come in 
 Summer; but Winter's altogether different you must make a 
 place worth coming to if you're to have visitors in Winter." 
 
 "We get plenty of people to come to Marlingate in Winter, 
 don't we, Edward?" said Fanny. 
 
 "Yes, my love. I've always tried to impress the Town Com- 
 mittee with the importance of the Winter Season." 
 
 "Oh, you're one of the big pots of Marlingate, are you?" 
 said tha man from Chatham. "That's a town which has had a
 
 240 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 wonderful success. I've never been there I'm still faithful 
 to Ramsgate been here every year since I married. I remem- 
 ber it when it was as stylish a place as Marlingate full all 
 the year round. But now it's going down there's no mistake 
 about it it's going down." 
 
 "How do you account for it this decay of seaside towns? 
 One's noticed it in other places besides Ramsgate" and 
 Monypenny remembered Belgarswick, with its dirty, empty 
 windows, and cracking walls. 
 
 "It would be hard to say causes vary in every case. Some- 
 times the Mayor and Corporation bite off more than they can 
 chew and find themselves left with no money to go on with. 
 Sometimes a fellow gets in and cheapens the whole show 
 that's fatal. Sometimes there's a scandal or a scare bad 
 drains or something. Or people take it into their heads that 
 the place is getting ungenteel. Once drive the best people 
 away and the rest will follow the quantity always follows 
 the quality in the end." 
 
 "Wei!, Marlingate isn't likely to have any trouble of that 
 kind," said Fanny comfortably. 
 
 "No," said the man from Chatham; "from what I hear I 
 should say that Marlingate would want more than a push to 
 send it over. You see there's always been plenty of money in 
 the town, and the authorities have gone on the right tack. It 
 will see Ramsgate out, and Brighton too. It's been carefully 
 built on a solid foundation Egad! I should think it would 
 be even more of a job to knock Marlingate down than it was 
 to build it up." 
 
 12 
 
 They went home in November. Monypenny had declined 
 the Mayoralty that year, and at his suggestion Vidler was 
 elected. Thus Fanny was doubly honoured, through her uncle 
 and through her husband, for though Monypenny was no
 
 GUARDIAN AND GUIDE 241 
 
 longer Mayor, he remained, as always, the chief man in Mar- 
 lingate. 
 
 A year ago he would have doubted the wisdom of putting 
 Vidler in office. The Alderman was sensible, loyal, and effi- 
 cient, but he was a plain man of the people, and neither his 
 house nor his wife was adapted to his new glory. But now 
 Monypenny had reached a stage when his municipal feelings 
 were weak enough to be overridden by his more human emo- 
 tions. He knew that Vidler wanted to be Mayor, he had al- 
 ways liked Vidler, and he knew that his promotion would please 
 Fanny. So he gave the Corporation the necessary hint, and 
 Vidler was elected, with Pelham as Deputy Mayor. 
 
 Fanny was perhaps a little disappointed that her husband 
 should thus have doffed his honour, even though it was in fa- 
 vour of her uncle. However, she never showed, by look or 
 word, the smallest dissatisfaction. She was not by nature a 
 grumbler, and now her whole strength was concentrated on the 
 effort to please her husband. For by this time she saw that he 
 did not love her, that she herself was not enough for him, and 
 that only by what she did, instead of by the mere fact of her 
 being, could she make him happy. She had discovered this 
 fairly early in their honeymoon. Marriage had not been for 
 her, as it had been for him, the fulfilment of a mediocre ex- 
 pectation. She had married him blinded by the glamour of 
 her love, and thinking that he loved her too; but that illusion 
 could not survive marriage as it had survived courtship. 
 Monypenny was invariably kind and considerate, but she was 
 not such a fool as to be content merely with his good manners. 
 Inexperienced as she was in the ways of love, she could not 
 help seeing that his few moments of passion did not ring true. 
 His passion was a ghost, and had the queer effect of making 
 her feel a ghost too. When he kissed her she seemed to lose 
 her substance, to acquire in her own eyes the unreality which 
 she felt she had in his. The result was that, in spite of her 
 deep and intensely human love for him, she shrank a little
 
 242 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 from his caresses, gradually moulding their relations to a calm- 
 er expression, in which she was his servant, and waited on him, 
 doing him constant, loving service, from the ordering of his 
 house to the mending of his fire. She was most at her ease 
 when she had him in his armchair by the hearth, with his slim 
 legs stretched to the coals, and his cheek resting on his hand 
 while she sat opposite him and arranged the firescreen, and 
 spoke at intervals in her slow soft voice, being careful as to 
 what and how she spoke, for she saw now that she bored him 
 occasionally. 
 
 She sometimes wondered why he didn't love her, and why, 
 not loving her, he had married her. She did not think he had 
 married her for her money. It was not according to his nature, 
 and he seemed to care so surprisingly little about her estates. 
 After some thought she came to the conclusion that he had 
 married her because he was lonely, though even that did not 
 tell her why he had chosen her out of all the beautiful and ele- 
 gant young ladies of Marlingate. 
 
 Then in course of time she found that from the ghost of pas- 
 sion that he had given her was going to come the great reality 
 of her life. She was going to give him a child. His life was 
 within her, even though she had never had his love. Out of 
 shadows and illusions something living and tangible would 
 spring, and her patient, submissive love for her husband would 
 bring her the inestimable reward of suffering for his sake. She 
 would have dignity too, and as the unloved mother of his child 
 perhaps be happier than if she had been loved and childless. 
 For her motherhood was her love expressed in its ultimate, 
 most human terms, all the long dumb service of her body and 
 her soul given its voice at last. 
 
 But in the midst of her joy she wondered whether it would 
 be joy to him too. She doubted, and from day to day put off 
 telling him. She had no definite ground for her doubts, and 
 when at last she saw them confirmed by the blank, rather 
 startled look on his face, she did not understand exactly why
 
 GUARDIAN AND GUIDE 243 
 
 he was resentful at this coming to life of the shadows. He ob- 
 jected to a child in the house, perhaps, or he was too deeply 
 preoccupied with his civic affairs to care for another respon- 
 sibility. But the look was all she saw of protest, the deep pro- 
 test of his whole nature against inexorable life; the next minute 
 he smiled, and kissed her gravely, with words of kindness and 
 congratulation. 
 
 The next morning, before she was awake, he rose noiselessly, 
 and went out on Cuckoo Hill. The day was pale and fresh, 
 with spills of primrose in the flecked March sky, over which the 
 wind was hurrying, restless as the shadows it drove across the 
 sea. He went a little way up the hillside and. sat down by a 
 thicket of alder and bramble. He wanted to think; he could 
 not think unless he was alone, and now he never seemed to be 
 alone. He remembered that he had married to save himself 
 from being alone. 
 
 13 
 
 When, at last, towards the end of September, Monypenny 
 held his newborn son in his arms, he felt almost afraid. Once 
 more he was conscious of the presence of the invader, and his 
 attitude to the little red, wrinkled thing in its cocoon of blan- 
 kets was very much what his attitude had been at first towards 
 Morgan le Fay. He felt once more in the presence of the dim 
 everlasting things that he dreaded that he still dreaded, 
 though he had definitely renounced them for his time-born 
 streets. It seemed as if, in spite of his love lying dead in the 
 grave of his town, he had to acknowledge, after all, the tri- 
 umph of the woods and the sea. 
 
 It would, perhaps, be difficult to associate the forces of life 
 with that little weak infant, whose protesting wail was the 
 dwindled echo of his father's lustier emotions. Life, too, did 
 not seem to have much to do with Fanny, as she lay among 
 the shadows of the great bed, worn and languid, almost too 
 weak to smile. Nevertheless, Monypenny felt that in these
 
 244 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 two life at once threatened and mocked him. All his inertia, 
 his indifference, his brooding, his drifting, had resulted only in 
 fresh life. Life was springing out of the death of his soul. He 
 was afraid. 
 
 Fanny looked at him anxiously. She knew he had wanted a 
 girl, and hoped he was not very much disappointed. She her- 
 self would have wanted a boy if her longings had been free. 
 This boy was to be called Edward, after his father. 
 
 "Where are you going, my love?' she asked, as he laid the 
 child back at her side. It seemed to her that he had been a 
 very short time in the room. 
 
 "I have a Town Committee meeting at twelve." 
 
 He smiled down at her rather sadly, and went out. She 
 turned her head on the pillow towards the baby. 
 
 Monypenny found the Town Committee explosive with con- 
 gratulations. It consisted now of Vidler, Pelham, Becket, 
 Lusted, Lewnes and Bond. They sat in one of the smaller 
 rooms of the Town Hall, a low dim chamber to which the sun- 
 light came chastened by the borough arms in the windows. 
 
 "Most commendable of you, Monypenny," said Pelham, "to 
 have torn yourself away from your home on such an occasion." 
 
 "How's Fanny?" asked Vidler bluntly. 
 
 "I expect you're glad it's a boy," said Lewnes; "when I 
 heard the news I said to Mrs. L., 'There, my dear, that's an ex- 
 ample for you to follow next October after keeping me wait- 
 ing all this time, don't you go and job me with a gal.' " 
 
 "I hope he is a healthy child," said Becket, "not like my poor 
 little Lindsay." 
 
 Monypenny was rather stiff, both in receiving compliments 
 and answering questions. He seemed anxious to turn from his 
 own affairs to the town's, and in five minutes Tom Potter was 
 reading the minutes of the last Committee meeting. 
 
 Marlingate was once more a-building at both ends. On the 
 Coney Banks Lewnes and Lusted were expressing their souls 
 in stucco, bay-windows, areas, and verandahs like broken par-
 
 GUARDIAN AND GUIDE 245 
 
 asols. Behind Becket Grove the scaffolding of Park Terrace 
 rose over the trees. There was some difficulty about workmen, 
 for since the abolition of the America Ground the artisan pop- 
 ulation of Marlingate had dwindled almost to the point of dis- 
 appearance. 
 
 "There's no accommodation for work-people here," said 
 Lusted. "We should have thought of that when we cleared 
 away the America Ground. We can't do without working-men 
 in the town." 
 
 "We could get some in from elsewhere, surely," said Bond, 
 "just to meet the present emergency." 
 
 "But where are they going to stop while they're here? We've 
 no lodgings for 'em either. We're so mighty genteel nowadays 
 no one lets lodgings except to the quality." 
 
 "Wouldn't any of the fishermen take them in?" 
 
 Lusted, Lewnes, and even Monypenny, laughed. 
 
 "The tanfrocks wouldn't care tuppence if Marlingate fell 
 down tomorrow, as long as Fish Street and the Stade were left 
 standing. You won't get 'em to move an inch to help the town 
 -it's nothing to them." 
 
 "But if they were paid. . . ." 
 
 "They earn plenty of money at the nets." 
 
 "The fact is," said Lusted, "that what we want here in Mar- 
 lingate is one or two rows of decent workmen's dwellings. They 
 could be run up at very little cost, and would take up very lit- 
 tle room." 
 
 "Hear! hear!" said Lewnes. 
 
 "Where would you build them?" asked Monypenny. 
 
 "There's room between High Street and Fish Street, down 
 by the Gut's the Marlin Brook," suggested Vidler. 
 
 "Or behind High Street, at the bottom of the Coney Banks," 
 said Bond. 
 
 "Which would complete the beauty and architectural vari- 
 ety of the Coney Banks," said Monypenny.
 
 246 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 "Or on the south side of the Cuckoo Hill, above the cliff," 
 suggested Lewnes. 
 
 "Which would be a charming prospect from the Marine 
 Gardens," said Monypenny. 
 
 Lewnes was irritated by the Great Man's contempt. He had 
 succeeded in dictating to him once, but all later efforts had 
 been nipped by a blight of sarcasm. He raised his voice. 
 
 "What about your wife's land at Old Rumble? It's yours 
 now you can build on it." 
 
 "I probably shall build on it but not workmen's dwellings. 
 Anything of that kind," he added, "I think would be best down 
 at the Brook, as the Mayor has suggested." 
 
 Lewnes looked sulky, but the rest of the Committee seemed 
 as willing as ever to submit to Monypenny's dictation. The 
 motion was put to the vote and carried, and the Committee 
 passed on to considering the estimates of some repairs at the 
 waterworks. 
 
 Afterwards, as he walked home, Monypenny asked himself 
 why he had allowed workmen's cottages to be built by the 
 Marlin Brook. Their erection would spoil the quiet and 
 pleasant heart of the town. The gardens sloping to the stream 
 from the old backs of Fish Street and High Street were as old 
 as the streets themselves, full of rich soil and ancient timber. 
 They stuffed the ribs of Marlingate with green, from them 
 trees and bushes and borders of lupins and dahlias straggled in 
 shady strips between the houses, breaking and softening the 
 reds and blacks of the town's mass. By building and build- 
 ing meanly in the midst of all this, he broke up the spacious- 
 ness of Marlingate, its few green places. True, it would be 
 better to build here than on Cuckoo Hill or on the Coney 
 Banks. But there was no real necessity to build at all. The 
 situation did not require it with a little care and arrangement, 
 temporary accommodation could have been found. He had al- 
 ways meant to keep Marlingate free from the slums that in- 
 vaded sooner or later most seaside towns, the mean streets
 
 GUARDIAN AND GUIDE 247 
 
 which prosperity seemed invariably to spawn at its back doors 
 and here he was, deliberately blessing such corruption. He 
 could have prevented it; he had absolute power with the Com- 
 mittee, and though Vidler was now the head, he was still the 
 brains of the town. But he had given way not to the acutest 
 form of evil, it is true, nevertheless he had tolerated it. It was 
 all part of the new spirit which had put Vidler into the May- 
 oral office and sanctioned Lewnes's preposterous building on 
 the Coney Banks. This was the third blow he had struck at 
 the thing he used to love. 
 
 14 
 
 Well, he did not much care. It was nothing to him if Mar- 
 lingate went the way of Ramsgate or Belgarswick. Such was a 
 common fate of seaside towns. Then he remembered the 
 words of the Chatham solicitor "Egad! it would be even more 
 of a job to knock Marlingate down than it was to build it up." 
 Perhaps, after all, his indifference would not hurt it much. 
 People were so stupid they suffered the second-rate gladly; 
 only the fifth-rate or the sixth-rate would really sicken them. 
 The workmen's houses and Lewnes's houses would not even 
 make the town second-rate, they would merely be a dulling of 
 its lustre, like breathing on glass. It would continue to flour- 
 ish, with the bones of Morgan le Fay in its heart. It had 
 eaten her alive ... it had eaten him too; it could not fail to 
 grow fat. 
 
 As he walked up the High Street, treading the yellow leaves 
 into the pavement, it seemed as if the town wore the grimace 
 he had seen on it in the days of his fever. There was some- 
 thing mocking and disgusting in its prosperity, lying there 
 licked by the sun, sending up complacently the smoke of its 
 hundred fires. A year ago he had said, "Marlingate is dead," 
 but now he knew that it was only Morgan who was dead. Mar- 
 lingate lived and thrived and fattened, with her bones in its 
 heart.
 
 248 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 He did not care what happened to it. Or rather he did 
 care. The passive, almost unwilling, indifference of months, 
 had passed through disgust into active hostility. He knew 
 that he would like to injure Marlingate to make it dingy with 
 mean streets, and ridiculous with Lewnes's houses, to fill it 
 with third-rate people, to see it like Belgarswick, with dirty, 
 empty windows and cracking walls. He would like to spoil 
 its ancient picturesqueness and modern elegance he would 
 like to avenge the beauty and life and imagination it had de- 
 voured. He would like to smash it. 
 
 He was surprised at the violence of his emotion. Hitherto 
 he had drooped before his town, with no warmer feeling than 
 regret regret because he had loved it so much and had sac- 
 rificed to it in vain and now loved it no longer. But today he 
 hated it. He saw it as a thing that had cheated and betrayed 
 him. It had cheated his ambition and betrayed his love. His 
 joy, his hope, his glory lay dead in its streets. Revenge had 
 been lurking with despair in that void under his thoughts, and 
 now it was kindling his dead emotions. He felt alive again, 
 and fused with a queer resolve and strength. For once more a 
 passion had moved him, though it was a passion of hatred for 
 all that he had formerly loved. 
 
 He stood for a moment on his doorstep, trying to recover 
 himself before he went in to Fanny. Something was crying 
 out to him, harsh and exultant. He felt that he had again a 
 purpose, something to live for, and at first he scarcely saw the 
 bitterness of the new conditions. 
 
 He mastered his excitement before long, and went upstairs 
 to his wife. Fanny noticed a difference in him he seemed to 
 have acquired since he went out a new elation and a new hard- 
 ness. He stretched himself on the bed beside her, and began 
 talking about the Town Committee meeting, and the work- 
 men's cottages that he had decided to build down by the Mar- 
 lin Brook.
 
 GUARDIAN AND GUIDE 249 
 
 "But won't they spoil the pretty gardens at the back of 
 High Street?" asked Fanny. 
 
 Monypenny opened his mouth to say "I don't care if they 
 do," but bargained with a few remarks on the necessity for 
 workmen's dwellings and the scarcity of building space in Mar- 
 lingate. 
 
 "You could build them on the edge of Old Rumble, behind 
 the Totty Lands. You know, Edward, I've always wanted you 
 to build on my land." 
 
 a So I shall," said Monypenny, "so I shall and on the south 
 side of Cuckoo Hill, and by the churchyard, at the bottom of 
 the Coney Banks. I'm grateful to the Town Committee for 
 making me some valuable suggestions." 
 
 "What a lot of building there'll be!" 
 
 "Yes too much for Lusted. I'll have to get a London con- 
 tractor in. And now " sliding off the bed "give me the new 
 citizen. I want to look at him." 
 
 He found that he was grotesquely linking his son's birth with 
 this rebirth of himself in sinister emotion. Poor little Edward 
 was taken from his warm place beside Fanny, and laid in his 
 father's hard, awkward arms. He howled.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 THE BURNING HEART 
 
 i 
 
 THE years piled themselves between Monypenny and the 
 golden days the days of his love for Morgan and his love for 
 Marlingate. He was now walled into the new conditions. It 
 seemed a different man who had loved Morgan Becket in the 
 woods, and had walked young and free in the town's streets, 
 shaping their glory. 
 
 He was no longer actively unhappy. Custom and conven- 
 tion, which had always clipped and trimmed his enterprises, 
 were now at hand to regulate his sorrow. He found his usual 
 comfort in the solemn, heavy, beautiful order of his home in 
 his wife and child and in his various municipal interests, revi- 
 talised now with his new malice. 
 
 People said that he was growing very sober and solemn. The 
 little flare of youth, which had amazed his worthies in the year 
 of the Town Park and the Marine Gardens, seemed quite to 
 have burnt out, leaving more than the usual amount of ash. 
 Young ladies actually said that he was growing dull but that 
 was probably only because he was married. 
 
 Yet it was true that marriage had a little dimmed him. It 
 had blunted those ideals of austerity which had kept his spirit 
 keen and bright in the midst of bodily comfort. Its effect, 
 however, was only on the surface inwardly it made far less 
 difference to his habit than might have been expected. Fanny's 
 personality was not strong enough to stamp her husband's ever 
 so faintly. She had not even moulded the domestic routine of 
 
 250
 
 THE BURNING HEART 2511 
 
 Gun Garden House into a more feminine shape. The heavy 
 hospitality remained with the mahogany furniture, West still 
 governed Monypenny's wardrobe, and Mrs. Earl his kitchen. 
 Fanny's own maid fluttered like a scared shadow in the gloom, 
 and gradually the mistress seemed to efface herself with her, 
 to fade into the background like Pepper's ghost. 
 
 Her husband was invariably kind, unfailingly patient and 
 considerate, but his queer, shadowy passion seemed to be devi- 
 talising her, to be making her one of his dreams. She was 
 afraid of his love, not because it was too virile, but because it 
 was ghostly, the shadow of a flame. As for her own love, it 
 was, of itself, unable to sustain her it was an evaporation of 
 herself into the empty air, so that in spirit she slowly faded, 
 till she became one of the many ghosts of that dark house. 
 
 Monypenny felt her going from him, and sometimes wanted 
 to hold her back, for she was sweet and comfortable; but he 
 lacked the power. She seemed to exist only in what he needed 
 of her, and he needed so little. He wondered why she had 
 faded out like this in the days of his wooing she had been 
 substantial enough, the only substantial thing in the world. 
 Could it be that the love which he still bore for the dead wo- 
 man was disintegrating her, destroying her swamping her in 
 each one of his perfunctory caresses, like Niagara pouring into 
 a tin mug? 
 
 The boy had a sturdy life of his own, but here the dead had 
 no claims at least so it seemed at present, though Monypenny 
 knew how much he had belonged to Morgan even in the child's 
 begetting. Perhaps one day she would demand her share of 
 Ted ... or passionately blot him out like his mother. 
 
 Monypenny's attitude towards him was rather nervous and 
 aloof. He loved him, but he did not understand children, and 
 he was not a man to whom the bare fact of fatherhood is an 
 illumination. On the contrary he would have preferred not to 
 see himself reproduced. There was already one materialisa- 
 tion of himself in existence, and he had made up his mind to de-
 
 252 TAiMARISK TOWN 
 
 stroy it. It confounded the issues to have this secondary re- 
 production. 
 
 So at first he left Ted to his wife. In that province she 
 should dominate, who kept the background in all others. But 
 as the little boy grew, he seemed to grow out of the corner into 
 which his father had shut him; he forced himself on Mony- 
 penny's notice, not because he had a forceful character, but be- 
 cause of the eager life within him which would not be re- 
 pressed. He was an attractive child, too. In face he was like 
 his father, with his swarthy skin and dark eyes, and the prom- 
 ise of his long chin; in character he was more like Fanny, gen- 
 tle and good-tempered, though every now and then Monypen- 
 ny caught a glimpse of something which was certainly not 
 Fanny's, and which as the years went by he recognized as the 
 inheritance of his own passionate idealism. 
 
 Then he was afraid. Suppose that Ted, when he grew up, 
 should love Marlingate as he had loved it ... suppose that 
 in it he should seek and not find, ask and not receive, knock 
 and not be answered. Ted, like his father, might live to break 
 his heart on the town's stones. 
 
 2 
 
 Monypenny now definitely schemed against Marlingate. It 
 was his only possible response to the new conditions; it was, 
 besides, a new focus of the broken and scattered rays of his 
 imagination. It had a colouring of mania, which his earlier 
 ambitions had lacked, being in the normal, constructive course 
 of nature, whereas this was a purpose to destroy, and, more- 
 over, to destroy what he himself had created. But he was quite 
 clear-headed indeed, his present outlook was more balanced 
 and more normal than those terrible, shadowy months of lan- 
 guor and indifference. Besides, the sense of tragedy was re- 
 lieved when he looked back, he felt that there was nothing 
 more heart-rending, more pathetic in his life than those blows
 
 THE BURNING HEART 253 
 
 he had unconsciously struck at the town, those occasions on 
 which, out of his indifference, he had dishonoured it. Now at 
 least his attitude was deliberate, it had the dignity of a cam- 
 paign. He had turned, by his own power, a humble fishing- 
 village into one of the most select and prosperous resorts in 
 England; by that same power he could transform his new cre- 
 ation into what he conceived as the lowest, most loathsome 
 form of municipal existence a third-rate seaside town, a haunt 
 of trippers, without beauty, order, or seemliness. He, Marlin- 
 gate's builder, its guardian and guide, was novt leagued against 
 it with the woods and the sea he would work with these to 
 avenge their martyr. 
 
 He saw the difficulties of his task. It would indeed be a big- 
 ger job to destroy Marlingate than it had been to build it. It 
 was not merely a town; it was a society, a unit of civilisation, 
 a solid lump of prosperity, as hard to disintegrate as a rock. 
 There was no use merely staying his hand and letting its own 
 vulgar elements wreck it there was little hope of its bursting 
 from noxious gases within. Lusted and Lewnes might have 
 common ideas, but they would not go far of themselves, and 
 Vidler, Becket, and Pelham had strong notions on the subjects 
 of dignity and gentility, and would be sure to suppress the Pro- 
 gressive rowdies long before they had passed the danger line. 
 It is true that in their eagerness for mean streets they had 
 failed to appreciate the town's artistic unity, but a few slums 
 would not damage Marlingate had not damaged it, though 
 now they choked its heart and blotched its seaward head and 
 strewed the high ground behind it, where rows of yellow brick 
 cottages tilted across the Totty Lands. After all, Marlingate 
 had survived the America Ground in more fragile, uncertain 
 times than these. It was not to be expected that its fashion- 
 able visitors and residents would be as sensitive as Monypenny 
 to this new ugliness. If ugliness was to devastate Marlingate 
 it must be an ugliness that ate into the core of its life and 
 blighted its assemblies, and if an alien class was to overflow
 
 254 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 by its intrusion the town's social integrity, it must be a class 
 which could invade the fashionable sanctuaries and defile them, 
 not a class which merely camped at the gates and cleaned the 
 doorsteps. 
 
 A more effective way would be to enlarge recklessly the 
 borough's residential district. Hitherto he had always been 
 careful to keep a modest scope, knowing that over-expansion is 
 often the forerunner of dilapidation. He had planned Pelham 
 Square and its surroundings as his last piece of building in 
 Marlingate, but he saw now that he could develop the idea into 
 numberless deteriorations. Flanking the greatness of Pelham 
 Squareland Lewnes Avenue and Becket Grove could be smaller 
 houses for smaller people this would debase the residential 
 standard, and where that declines, the transient order soon fol- 
 lows. Marlingate had good residents. Many people had 
 houses in Brooke Street and Clarges Street and also at Mar- 
 lingate. The Corporation had always .put the residents before 
 the visitors in their schemes, and to this the solid basis of their 
 success was due. 
 
 Monypenny saw that to strike at the residents would also 
 be a blow at the Winter season, at onca the foundation and the 
 token of progress in seaside towns. Marlingate's aristocracy 
 was mainly resident in Winter, and would begin to dwindle as 
 soon as it saw its dignity being soiled at the edges. Here 
 Lewnes had already done some useful work. He had built a 
 terrace of monstrosities on the Coney Banks, and was letting 
 it rather indifferently to small professional people, and to one 
 or two Fish Street tradesmen who had been tempted by its 
 pagoda'd bays to flout custom and retire there instead of to 
 Mount Idle. "Balmoral," "Midlothian" and "The Gram- 
 pians," with their stucco, areas, and hideous painted balconies, 
 were too mean a parody of Mayfair and Belgravia to attract 
 residents from those quarters. Mayfair and Belgravia pre- 
 ferred the houses in half-built Park Terrace tile-roofed, red-
 
 THE BURNING HEART 255 
 
 walled, square-corniced, their casements raking through the 
 Town Park to the shadow-walk of the sea. 
 
 Monypenny resolved to propagate "Balmoral," "Midlothian" 
 and "The Grampians." They and their homogeneous inhabit- 
 ants should outrage polite sensibilities in Becket Grove and 
 Pelham Square as well as on the Coney Banks. This would in- 
 volve a heavy expenditure. When his original plans for Pel- 
 ham Square and its surroundings were finished he would have 
 built over the whole of his estate. More land would have to be 
 bought, more money borrowed from Becket. The original mort- 
 gage expired in '75. There would be no difficulty about re- 
 newing it, but Monypenny's heart shrank a little from the 
 thought of involving Becket in a transaction which might lead 
 to heavy loss. He was beginning now to realise the financial 
 implications of his new purpose. If the rise of Marlingate had 
 made the fortune of all its notables, so that Lewnes's shop was 
 double-fronted in plate glass, and Pelham drove behind sleek 
 greys, and Becket patriotically re-invested every year his local 
 thousands in local funds, the fall of Marlingate would bring the 
 ruin of all these good, comfortable, people, who trusted him as 
 their shepherd and the fattener of their lives. Well, he could 
 not help it he would fall with them. He would be ruined with 
 Becket and Breeds and Pelham and Lewnes and Lusted. It 
 would merely be Samson pulling down the roof on himself as 
 well as on the Philistines. . . . "And Samson said 'Let me die 
 with the Philistines.' " 
 
 3 
 
 His great difficulty was Decimus Figg. Figg had not the 
 slightest intention of building Balmorals and Midlothians. Not 
 that Monypenny made any such crude suggestion, but when 
 the architect brought him his plans for Pelham Square, he be- 
 gan an argument for smaller houses. 
 
 "Then you'll get smaller people," said Figg. 
 
 "Why?"
 
 256 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 "Well, gentlefolk with small establishments don't come 
 trapesing down to the seaside in Winter. You'll merely get 
 retired grocers." 
 
 But Monypenny was obstinate. He wanted, he said, to en- 
 large the original idea of Pelham Square. The Corporation 
 had decided to build on a larger scale than it had at first con- 
 templated, and was already in negotiation for the Braybrook 
 Farm estate, which adjoined the Old Rumble Lands on the 
 northwest. If it was to do this it could not afford to throw 
 away money on houses for Lords. These big houses would 
 not let so easily as smaller ones. Besides, the estimates had 
 already exceeded those laid down by the Town Committee. 
 
 Figg grew restive and protestant. 
 
 "The streets you're building now are to be the finest in 
 the town. They're going to crown your work all the building 
 you've done so far has been only to lead up to them. If 
 they're unworthy, the whole thing will be an anti-climax. I 
 tell you this is a work of art, not a commercial transaction. 
 Why d'you want to go messing the place up with houses? It's 
 quality, not quantity, that's always been the motto here. 
 Lewnes has been making a fool of you again, and now you'll 
 spoil the town with a piece of dirty bathos." 
 
 Monypenny took his protest, with all its appending insults, 
 in surprisingly good part. But he stood firm, and the Town 
 Council supported him. It had always been inclined to jib 
 at Figg's refined and high falutin' ideas, and had accepted 
 them only out of its confidence in Monypenny; and now the 
 great man himself was against the architect. Figg had gone 
 a bit too far even for the Mayor he was. Mayor from 1869 
 to 1872. 
 
 In the end it was decided to let Pelham Square and its ap- 
 pendages stand as Figg had designed them, with a few small 
 modifications on the score of economy. But the streets of lesser 
 houses on the Braybrook land were given over to a triumphant
 
 THE BURNING HEART 257 
 
 Lusted, Figg having refused, with many oaths, to take a hand 
 in them. 
 
 For some months he was hardly on speaking terms with 
 Monypenny. 
 
 "It's his doing," he said once to Lady Cockstreet, "and it'll 
 spoil the town. What's he want to go making money for? 
 We've got plenty. By Jove, when that Pelham Square was 
 finished, I could have said 'Nunc Dimittis,' and so could he. 
 But now he's gone and messed up the whole thing with that 
 Braybrook estate. He's turned commercial, and it'll be the 
 ruin of him and the place too." 
 
 "But I don't see why you should blame him especially. The 
 whole Corporation was against you." 
 
 Figg snorted. 
 
 "Do you think that would have mattered if the Mayor had 
 been for me? He'd soon have taught 'em their business. Why, 
 that was what he did when I first came down here took my 
 part against them all. They wanted me to build things like 
 the Crystal Palace and the Steyn, but he was on my side, and, 
 between us, we saved the town. We could have done it again 
 now. But he's changed. Look at him building those horrors 
 on the Totty Lands and letting Lewnes and Lusted spoil the 
 Coney Banks with their abominations! He's out after rents 
 instead of glory. He's changed. He's commercial. He's 
 married." 
 
 Lady Cockstreet laughed. 
 
 "So really you put all the blame on poor little inoffensive 
 Fanny." 
 
 "Not directly. But marriage is a quencher of imagination. 
 Besides . . . what did he want to throw himself away like 
 that for?" 
 
 "I like Fanny. She's a pleasant girl, and quite devoted to 
 him." 
 
 "No doubt and has as much inspiration in her as a pudding. 
 She's so devoted that he's got fat and clogged and uxorious.
 
 258 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 He doesn't care a rap for beauty and fitness, or for Marlingate, 
 except on rent day. And now there's a child. Damn! I beg 
 your pardon." 
 
 4 
 
 After a time Figg's ruffled feathers were smoothed, and he 
 was once more to be seen eating his mutton and drinking his 
 wine at Gun Garden House, paying insincere compliments to 
 Fanny, whom he still looked upon as the arch enemy of Mar- 
 lingate, and even patting the cheek of little Ted and asking him 
 what he would be when he was a man. To which Ted once 
 unexpectedly replied "an architeck," but on being questioned 
 was found to have no idea as to what the word meant beyond 
 that "it was the same as Mr. Figg." He had acquired a deep 
 and silent admiration for Mr. Figg with his pipe and plaid 
 trousers, and his arms that waved like windmill sails when he 
 got excited after dinner, displaying big bony wrists covered with 
 red hair. Ted hoped that when he grew up he would have 
 hairy hands like Mr. Figg, and chiefly for that reason wanted 
 to be an architect. He once asked his father what he would 
 have to do to become one, but Monypenny had answered eva- 
 sively, and Ted after some brooding had put the subject out of 
 his mind, especially when he discovered that Phineas Gallop, 
 who was not an architect but fisherman, had not only his hands 
 but his chest covered with beautiful thick hair. 
 
 Monypenny had been a little startled by his son's answer to 
 Figg's question. This child of his could not be ignored, in 
 spite of his meek, self-effacing disposition. Suppose he should 
 grow up to frustrate his father's plans . . . The only danger 
 he had hitherto feared was that Ted should love Marlingate 
 too well for his own sake. But now he saw a new set of com- 
 plications. Already the boy was showing an eye for beauty, 
 and an eager pursuit of it in the naive forms that appealed to 
 his imagination. His inheritance from Fanny was evidently 
 more of mood than of tendency, and Monypenny could per-
 
 THE BURNING HEART 259 
 
 ceive in his son's mind ardours and melancholies that were his 
 own bequest. Ted might not only love Marlingate, but work 
 and fight for it. It was probable that by the time he grew up 
 the town's deterioration would have become obvious, and that 
 he would oppose it with all the alert, questing, constructive 
 power he had inherited from his father. 
 
 Monypenny was goaded by these alarms to press on his ac- 
 tion against Marlingate. He must have the wheel of destruc- 
 tion well turning before Ted grew up to put his spoke in it. He 
 groped for a larger plan than a mere abasing of his own high 
 standards into cheapness and utility. He remembered the Pier 
 which had been discussed in the Town Council on earlier oc- 
 casions, but had been rejected by all the more chaste imagina- 
 tions of the borough fathers, as opening a seaward gate on the 
 unrefinement of other towns. The Pier must be revived, and 
 this time without rejection. 
 
 His difficulty lay in the means, for the great difference be- 
 tween his old schemes and the new was that the latter could be 
 worked only secretly. The old ambition had been simply an 
 affair of direction, but now he must wait on opportunities, and 
 was occasionally in want of a stalking horse. This need for 
 craft attracted him and salted his purpose. He felt damn 
 clever. He was at first uncertain whether to announce a con- 
 version and re-introduce the Pier himself, with certain safe- 
 guards (which he could afterwards get rid of), or whether to 
 trap some Alderman or Councillor into sponsorship. Lewnes 
 had always been an enthusiastic promoter of the Pier scheme, 
 but Monypenny realised that his opinion would not carry much 
 weight with the aristocracy of the Corporation. He thought of 
 Becket, and decided to sound him. Becket was a man of good 
 position and high connections; and Becket was a fool. 
 
 But to his surprise, he found him opposed to the plan with 
 more vigour and sense than he would have expected. It is true 
 that his chief objection was a sentimental one it seemed that 
 at some time or other Morgan had expressed her contempt of
 
 260 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 piers but Becket's convictions were never so firm as when 
 grounded in sentiment. Besides, he had other reasons a pier 
 would vulgarise the town by destroying its remoteness and ad- 
 mitting the rowdier elements of other resorts, and it was quite 
 unnecessary, Marlingate being already supplied with a prom- 
 enade, a concert-hall, and a prospective Winter Garden; and 
 it would spoil the beauty and symmetry of the Marine Parade. 
 In fact he had all the reasons that had made Monypenny ex- 
 tinguish the project five years ago. 
 
 5 
 
 Becket had taken a fancy to little Ted Monypenny, and the 
 child spent much of his time in the tall black house on the 
 Coney Banks, where once his father's steps had sounded so 
 youthfully on garden walk and narrow stair. Lindsay Becket 
 was two or three years older than Ted, but she did not despise 
 him, for there were few children of her own age in the town, 
 except those who came only for a month or two and were gone 
 as soon as known. Becket 's family by his first wife were now 
 grown up and scattered. Louisa had married a stock-broker, 
 and Charlotte a clergyman. Arthur was in London reading for 
 the bar, and James was at Oxford. So Lindsay was alone with 
 her father and her governess, and was glad even of Ted's mean 
 fellowship, especially since her advantage in years counterbal- 
 anced his advantage in sex and made her the leader in all their 
 games. Not that Lindsay tyrannised she was a good-hu- 
 mored, rather sentimental little girl, with her father's soul look- 
 ing out of her through her mother's eyes but Ted really 
 seemed to like being dictated to, though sometimes he would 
 put on queer frenzies of command, which she in her turn liked 
 a little. 
 
 Becket took pleasure in watching the children play, though 
 his presence sometimes spoiled their games. One could not 
 play properly with grown-ups looking on even Miss King, the
 
 THE BURNING HEART 261 
 
 governess, was a nuisance. Nevertheless Ted endured him, be- 
 cause at the end of the afternoon he often gave him sixpence 
 or a shilling, which the little boy spent on paints or pencils, for 
 his world was full of lovely things which had a queer knack 
 of hurting him till he had put them down, more or less gro- 
 tesquely, on paper. 
 
 Sometimes Becket brought Lindsay to Gun Garden House, 
 but this was not such good fun as going to the Coney Banks. 
 For Gun Garden House was so gloomy and heavy that 
 it seemed to weigh down their games hide and seek was even 
 rather terrible among its corners. Also one day Becket made 
 Ted's mother cry. Running into the parlour after he and Lind- 
 say had gone, he found her holding her handkerchief to her 
 eyes. His first impulse was to run away, but the next moment 
 something made him climb on her knee and hug her. 
 
 "What are you crying for, Mamma darling?" 
 
 "I'm so sorry for poor Mr. Becket, dear with no Mrs. 
 Becket to love him." 
 
 "Was there ever a Mrs. Becket?" 
 
 "Of course there was Lindsay's mamma. He's just been 
 talking to me about her. She died nine years ago." 
 
 "Did he mind?" 
 
 "Mind! why, of course he did. Papas always mind when 
 mammas die." 
 
 "Would Papa mind if you died?" 
 
 "Of course he would. Don't say such things, darling. It's 
 not right and we don't talk about people dying like that." 
 
 "Why not?" 
 
 "Because because well, we don't talk about it while 
 they're alive. After they're dead we may, perhaps." 
 
 "May we talk about Mrs. Becket, then?" 
 
 "Yes, but not in front of her poor husband. Poor man! My 
 heart aches for him to love someone like that and then to 
 lose them. What a blessing he has dear little Lindsay to com- 
 fort him."
 
 262 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 Ted as usual took away his mother's words to think them 
 over. After he had pondered them for a few days he said to 
 Lindsay: 
 
 "Lindsay, did you know that you once had a mamma?" 
 
 "Of course I know," said Lindsay "haven't you seen?" 
 
 "Seen what?" 
 
 "I'll show you." 
 
 Lindsay now had a new governess, Miss Percival, who was 
 not nearly as strict as Miss King. She was very easy to dodge, 
 and one afternoon they managed to give her the slip in the 
 High Street, and Lindsay dragged Ted up to Coney Bank steps, 
 and then sideways under Lewnes's new houses till they came 
 into St. Nicholas' churchyard. 
 
 The churchyard was all of a slant on the hill ; it was tipped 
 against the church which had an air of preventing the whole 
 thing from sliding down into the High Street. Lindsay led the 
 way mysteriously over the graves, and stopped before one with 
 a large white stone. 
 
 "There!" she said triumphantly, "that's mamma." 
 
 Ted had just learned to read, and could spell out 
 
 "In ever loving memory of Morgan Becket, who entered into 
 rest on the loth of November, 1866. Aged 31. 'I shall go to 
 her but she cannot return to me.' " 
 
 "Oh!" said Ted. He felt somehow a little abashed, a lit- 
 tle envious. 
 
 Lindsay giggled self-consciously. 
 
 "I put a bunch of chrysanthemums here every tenth of No- 
 vember and on her birthday. Papa says they were her favour- 
 ite flower. Of course he pays for them." 
 
 "Do you remember what she looked like?" 
 
 "How could I, silly? She died when I was only two. I've 
 got a book, though, that she bought for me the day she died. 
 Papa keeps it locked up in a drawer, and it smells of some- 
 thing sweet." 
 
 "Morgan's a funny name for a mamma."
 
 THE BURNING HEART 263 
 
 "Not any funnier than Edward Monypenny is for a little 
 boy hullo, who's that over there? We'd better go home now, 
 before anyone sees us and tells Miss Percival." 
 
 A tall man had come into the churchyard, and was walking 
 slowly towards them with hanging head. He did not seem to 
 notice them, but there was something about him which made 
 them feel frightened. The sun had dipped behind Cuckoo Hill, 
 and long shadows were afoot among the graves. This dim 
 churchyard and this grave of a dead mamma suddenly became 
 sinister and terrifying to the children. They grasped hands 
 and scuttled towards the gate. 
 
 "Lindsay," panted Ted as they ran, "did you see who that 
 man was?" 
 
 "No," said Lindsay "and I don't want to he looked hor- 
 rid." 
 
 "It was Papa." 
 
 6 
 
 For some time after this both Ted and Lindsay had an un- 
 controllable dislike of St. Nicholas churchyard. Lindsay was 
 even unwilling on her visits of ceremony. She could not ex- 
 actly say why after all the man had been only Ted's papa. 
 But she could never forget the funny way he had come towards 
 them without seeing them. Ted also said that he had "shown 
 a lot of white in his eyes," which had so frightened Lindsay 
 that she came in time to believe that she had seen it herself. 
 She often woke screaming from dreams of Monypenny coming 
 towards her through the shadows with hideous white eyes. 
 
 But though they were too scared to seek more adventures in 
 the churchyard, they found them together in other parts of 
 the town. Miss Percival was an ideal governess. Every morn- 
 ing she went to the Library to look at the new novels. Bond of 
 the Library had died in the Spring of '69, and had been suc- 
 ceeded by a man called Benbow from Folkestone. Benbow was 
 even more modern and go ahead than Bond. The very newest
 
 264 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 novels were to be found on his shelves, and he had already in- 
 troduced several startling new features in the Marlingate Cour- 
 ier and Visitors' List, the editorship of which he had taken over 
 with the shop. 
 
 But even the children soon realised that Miss Percival did 
 not go to Benbow's for the novels, though she generally came 
 out clutching a volume of 'The Ladder of Life" or "Ben Hur" 
 or "Melbourne House." Her attraction was the tall beautiful 
 young man with the long whiskers and pathetic cough who 
 drooped over Benbow's back counter. 
 
 "Children, I shall probably be some time choosing my new 
 book. You can run to the bottom of the street, if you like." 
 
 So Ted and Lindsay would run off and taste perilous de- 
 lights of freedom. Sometimes they went into the pastry-cook's 
 at the corner of the Parade and ate tarts till they had that 
 comfortable bursting feeling which could so seldom be at- 
 tained when grown-up people controlled the feast. Sometimes 
 they went to the Marine Gardens and spent their pennies on the 
 clockwork toys in the entrance of the Aquarium. These had 
 outlived their fashion, and were considered amusements for 
 children only. To Ted and Lindsay they were more than 
 amusement they were wonder and rapture. When pennies 
 were scarce it would sometimes take a quarter of an hour to 
 decide whether they should see the choir march in and out of 
 church to the solemn croon of the organ, or the peasants dance 
 tinkling round their mysterious little tree, or mamma winding 
 wood on arms which had lost their hands but none of their ef- 
 ficiency. The glass covers would sometimes be fogged thickly 
 over by the breath from the two little faces flattened against 
 them, and one day a terrible thing happened. For some reason 
 Lindsay jostled Ted, pushing his head against the case, and the 
 cairngorn brooch on his Highland cap struck the glass and 
 cracked it. 
 
 This was bad enough in itself, but in its consequences 
 far worse, for the ensuing fuss and enquiry brought to light
 
 THE BURNING HEART 265 
 
 Miss PercivaFs half-hours in Benbow's shop and the children's 
 licensed truancy. As a result, the age of freedom came abrupt- 
 ly to an end. Miss Percival drove off with red eyes and her tin 
 box, and it was decided henceforth to do without a governess 
 for Lindsay and send her to school. She was now twelve years 
 old, and an academy was selected in the country near Clap- 
 ham. She did not share Ted's dismay at the prospect, though 
 she was far too much the product of her age not to drive off 
 looking quite as miserable as Miss Percival. For a day or two 
 Ted missed her as deeply as the young man at the Library 
 missed the governess, and forgot her nearly as soon. 
 
 7 
 
 The following Spring Ted himself was sent to school to 
 Holland House under All Holland Hill. This Academy for 
 young gentlemen had lately been established by two rather 
 helpless ladies in Rye Lane. Fanny Monypenny was anxious 
 to help Mrs. Peters and Miss Buries, and her husband saw no 
 objection to his son being educated locally till he could go to 
 Charterhouse. Ted was glad enough of the new arrangement. 
 Though his ache for Lindsay was now growing numb and in- 
 definite, he felt very lonely at Gun Garden House. His mother 
 was kind and gentle and his father was kind and just, but he 
 always felt somehow a little remote from his mother and a lit- 
 tle afraid of his father. 
 
 As the years went by Fanny had sunk deeper and deeper into 
 the shadows of the house. She regulated the household ways 
 with efficiency and discretion, and entertained her guests with 
 graciousness and dignity; she was a good wife and a good 
 mother and a good friend to the poor, but there was no more 
 spirit in her. She was like a rose picked and put in a jar and 
 left unwatered; she drooped, and her fragrance was gone. Ted 
 loved her and knew that she loved him, but he never sought 
 her out as comrade or champion. Poor Fanny, one of love's
 
 266 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 betrayals, saw him slipping from her arms that were too weak 
 to hold him, saw him stagger off from her unsteadily on his own 
 feet, wondering how soon and how heavily he would fall. 
 
 On the other hand, Ted found his father vivid enough. Both 
 mentally and physically he was inspiriting but a little terrify- 
 ing. Wherein his terror lay might not be easy to guess, as he 
 was never rough or harsh to the boy; it was perhaps due to his 
 stiff, unapproachable manner, which was hardening back into 
 the sternness of his youth, with an added toughness from expe- 
 rience. Where Fanny was merely vague and remote, Mony- 
 penny was definite and close, but repelling. Ted admired him 
 in the midst of his fear. His father even had a glamour, es- 
 pecially in his mayoral pomp. Three times Ted had seen him 
 drive as Mayor down the High Street, in his furred, scarlet 
 robes, with cocked hat athwartships, his postillions before and 
 his mace-bearers behind. Child as he was he had noticed the 
 difference between Monypenny, and Vidler and Pelham, whom 
 he had seen wear those same scarlet robes on other occasions. 
 His father was the finest, handsomest man on the Town Coun- 
 cil, and the cleverest everybody said so. Ted was proud of 
 him and avoided him. 
 
 He was therefore not sorry to leave home for the cheerful 
 aimlessness of Holland House. Punching little boys' heads in 
 the corners of sunny rooms, or pacing with a bigger boy's arm 
 round his neck over the dancing shadows of the poplars in the 
 garden, and in the intervals of feud and play pecking at the 
 crumbs of education held out timorously by Mrs. Peters and 
 Miss Buries, all this filled up some happy days, which stretched 
 into months and years without losing their brightness. He 
 learned easily and superficially; he made easy, superficial 
 friends and enemies. He left Holland House without having 
 added to his life anything definite in the way of knowledge or 
 human relationship. But the years could not be called empty, 
 for during them he discovered Marlingate. 
 
 He discovered it piecemeal on half-holidays. He did not
 
 THE BURNING HEART 267 
 
 care to spend these at home, and only partly and occasionally 
 with his school-friends. He used to prowl about by himself on 
 Wednesday afternoons; at first his intention had been to "get 
 into the country," but he soon found the country featureless 
 beside the town. He had not the rustical mind, and his taste 
 craved unconsciously for form for straight elegant lines and 
 balanced curves, for arches, which seemed mysteriously to drag 
 his soul up to their apex, for the wedded austerity of par- 
 allel lines, for colours blended by choice and not by chance. 
 He found all this in Marlingate, and he found too a romantic 
 and picturesque beauty which stirred his imagination: Tam- 
 arisk steps, mellowed and stubbed by the booted generations 
 of tan-frocks and smugglers, the black wooden towers of the 
 Stade, the beach of Rock-a-nore, with the smacks like por- 
 poises wallowing on the shingle the curve of Zuriel Place, 
 with its high red houses looking down at the grass between the 
 mine-stones Harpsichord House straddling Fish Street like a 
 giant spinet the grey masses of the Town Hall and St. Nich- 
 olas Church, the High Street roofs red as sorrel. ... He 
 would sit up on All Holland Hill in the evening, just below 
 Mount Idle, and watch the reds and blacks turn smoky in 
 the dusk. The lamps would be lit, at first mere orange splashes 
 on the twilight, then deepening to red and running together, 
 till a crimson glow went up from the streets like the glow of a 
 burning house, hanging in the clouds. . . . 
 
 He loved, too, the new town which his father had built. The 
 Marine Parade gleamed in the twilight like a shining wall be- 
 tween the town and the sea, and the Assembly Room made 
 him think of the Palace Beautiful. He liked the red, solemn 
 houses in Park Terrace and Becket Grove, and at first he had 
 liked the houses Lewnes had built on the Coney Banks, with 
 the bright colours of their crinkled balconies. But after a 
 time he lost his pleasure in these, and indeed came to think 
 them nearly as ugly as what he called the Ugly Houses which 
 were the dingy little rows in the heart of the town.
 
 268 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 Once he said to his father 
 
 "Father, I can't bear the Ugly Houses, can you?" 
 
 To which Monypenny replied 
 
 "Why can't you bear them?" 
 
 "I oh, I dunno. Ugly things make me feel horrid. I say, 
 Papa 
 
 "Well?" 
 
 "Let me draw you a house I can I've drawn heaps." 
 
 "I'd rather you didn't. Don't waste your time. When do 
 you draw them? at school?" 
 
 "Yes I draw them for Miss Buries; and when I'm at home 
 I draw them for fun. . . . And sometimes I draw them for Mr. 
 Figg." 
 
 "Mr. Figg!" 
 
 "Yes I drew him a whole street when he was staying with 
 Mr. Becket last spring. He liked them, and said that one day 
 he'd teach me to make elevations." 
 
 "The deuce he did!" 
 
 8 
 
 When the Pier was first built Ted thought it was the most 
 beautiful thing he had ever seen. It was like the picture of 
 the mosques in the illustrated London News all white, with 
 shining domes and cupolas. After a time, however, he lost his 
 admiration about the same time as he lost it for Lewnes's 
 houses. The Pier sometimes made him want to laugh it was 
 so full of bulges and it seemed quite ugly when one looked 
 at it after the Marine Parade. But people said it had cost a 
 lot of money. 
 
 Mr. Figg had not designed it, and he soon discovered that 
 Mr. Figg did not admire it, either. Perhaps this had some- 
 thing to do with Ted's change of attitude, for he was now at- 
 taching himself to Figg. The architect came seldom to Gun 
 Garden House, but was, instead, growing more friendly with
 
 THE BURNING HEART 269 
 
 Becket, and was often to be found at the house on the Coney 
 Banks. He also liked Ted, and took an interest in him. He 
 acknowledged his talent for drawing, and saw for him a fine fu- 
 ture in his own profession. He and the boy would have long 
 and impassioned talks about the houses they would build some 
 day. 
 
 Ted seldom met Lindsay Becket. She was sixteen, and im- 
 possibly superior to boys of twelve. Moreover, the summer 
 the Pier was built her father at last gave way to her entreaties, 
 and allowed her to go to a finishing school in Germany. Ted 
 did not regret her, for Figg was all that he wanted now. When 
 Figg was at the Coney Banks, young Monypenny came almost 
 every day to the house, and if he could not talk to him, would 
 lie curled up in the window seat or stretched on the hearthrug, 
 listening while he talked to Becket. From those conversations 
 he gathered, to his surprise, that his hero did not altogether 
 approve of his father. 
 
 "I could have torn my hair out over that Pier," said Figg. 
 
 "So could I," said Becket, and Ted thought how much worse 
 he could afford it nearly all his hair now grew below his ears. 
 
 "And yet there you are putting your money into the blasted 
 thing." " 
 
 "Well, I feel I must support the town, even if I don't en- 
 tirely approve of all that's done in it. My poor Morgan loved 
 it and is buried in it." 
 
 'Tt's highly generous of you, but personally I'd have felt u> 
 clined to teach Monypenny a lesson. That's why I refused 
 point blank to " 
 
 "Ahem!" coughed Becket, glancing towards Ted on the win- 
 dow seat. 
 
 "Oh, never mind the youngster. He'll hear no real harm of 
 his dad. But I consider Monypenny muffed that business bad- 
 ly. Fifteen years ago all the king's horses and all the king's 
 men couldn't have built a pier in Marlingate." 
 
 "He did his best to stop it."
 
 270 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 "That's the point he did his best, and he failed. Before 
 his marriage, he could have shut up Lewes and Co. with his 
 second best. He's been letting things drift, and now finds he 
 can't pull 'em together. You may say that it was that feller 
 Benbow who put the measure through, but Monypenny ud 
 never have left him a chance in the old days. To begin with, 
 the chap hasn't any business to be on the Town Council he's 
 not at all the sort of man we want, and he didn't take over 
 Bond's seat with the Library. I hear that Raymond Hurdi- 
 cott is disgusted, and talks of resigning." 
 
 "Dear, dear that would be terrible." 
 
 "I bet anything he'll do it, and most likely go to Brigh- 
 ton next Winter." 
 
 Becket sighed. 
 
 "I hear that both the Raymonds and the Leos are shocked 
 at the Pier and so are the Papillons." 
 
 "Quite right, too. The place ull be a bear-garden on excur- 
 sion days from Southend." 
 
 "But I thought those safeguards of the Mayor's very sensi- 
 ble. If they work well ..." 
 
 "They won't work. They're too flimsy. It's all very good 
 to have Pier Tolls for the beasts coming off the steamers, and 
 not letting 'em into the town unless they've got sixpence. But 
 even a Margate tripper is generally worth that much. Besides, 
 what's to prevent the Council abolishing the tolls at their next 
 meeting? As for having me design it ... I told Mony- 
 penny I'd see him damned first. Bah! The whole thing's rot- 
 ten, and I hope you haven't put much money into it." 
 
 "One doesn't like to be thought ungenerous." 
 
 "Um . . . well, they got nothing out of me. Seriously, 
 Becket, if I were you I shouldn't invest too much locally. The 
 place ull go down now I'm sure of it; and once a landslip like 
 that gets started, you never know where it will end." 
 
 "Nonsense, my dear friend," said Becket, "Marlingate is as 
 safe as a rock."
 
 THE BURNING HEART 271 
 
 9 
 
 Ted Monypenny went to Charterhouse in the Spring of '81. 
 His father experienced an odd, indefinite relief at his going; 
 and yet, perversely, he missed the boy. Till he went away, he 
 had not known how much his son was to him, but now that 
 his feet could never be heard padding up the steps of an eve- 
 ning, home from school, now that his room was shut up, and 
 his chair stood empty at the solemn meals, Monypenny knew 
 that he had taken a real, if sorrowful pleasure in watching the 
 growth of this young nature which was so like his own, and 
 yet so vitally different. He had seen in the innocent exposure 
 of his son's mind the ardours of his own youth, burning more 
 loosely, without ruling or purpose. The fires of Monypenny's 
 youth had been like the fires of some engine, subdued to one 
 object in Ted the fire burnt more for warmth and beauty, set 
 no rods moving or wheels turning. Ted would suffer more eas- 
 ily than his father, because the forces of his nature were more 
 scattered and vulnerable, but he would not, for the same 
 reason, suffer so deeply. Still, the thought of his pathetic, easy 
 pain gave Monypenny a pang of protective anxieties. He 
 could not, after all, escape his own fatherhood, and he was be- 
 ginning to learn that this boy was the child not only of his 
 flesh and blood in their temporal treachery, but of his soul and 
 his dream in their undying faithfulness. 
 
 Yet he was glad to have him gone. For Ted's sake, he was 
 best out of Marlingate. So far the municipal idea had taken 
 no very strong hold of him, but there were tokens of its onset, 
 and both circumstances and heredity favoured its growth. For 
 the next ten years he was certainly best away from home. 
 Charterhouse would absorb his energies, and then Oxford. He 
 would form a new environment. Anyhow, he would forget 
 Figg, whom Monypenny looked on as Ted's most dangerous 
 influence. The boy did not seem to be of a particularly at- 
 tached or constant nature, and if only he could be kept away
 
 272 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 from Figg and Becket during the holidays would probably soon 
 cease to trouble about either. 
 
 Circumstances were helpful. Ted quickly made new friends 
 at Charterhouse, and spent a large part of his holidays at their 
 homes. Also Figg's visits to Marlingate became fewer. His 
 erratic, ruthless mind soon tired of Becket's sentimental prosi- 
 ness. The friendship was maintained officially, but not in prac- 
 tice. As for his relations with Monypenny, these in time be- 
 came definitely hostile. There were constant arguments and 
 recriminations on the subject of the Pier, also on the designs 
 for New Marlingate as the streets at the back of Becket 
 Grove came to be called. In the end Figg wrote several vio- 
 lent and indiscreet letters to friends in the town, in which he 
 blamed Monypenny for all the trouble, and rode his anti-matri- 
 monial hobby-horse to the edge of offensiveness. Monypenny, 
 he said, was "a damned uxorious, renegading swine, who'd lost 
 his soul and would lose the town too if the Corporation wasn't 
 careful." He drew up a Grand Remonstrance in which he ac- 
 cused the Mayor of defacing the town's beauty with work- 
 men's cottages, of cheapening its glory with the abomination 
 of New Marlingate, of vulgarising its gentility with his scan- 
 dalous Pier, and of encouraging outsiders such as Lewnes and 
 Lusted and Benbow, while alienating gentlemen and artists 
 such as Hurdicott, Becket, and himself, Figg. 
 
 Monypenny had borne a good deal from Figg in the way 
 of personal insult, but this was really too much, and the breach 
 between him and the architect became public and scandalous. 
 Becket made some clumsy attempts at a reconciliation, but the 
 rest of the Town Council did their best to aggravate the may- 
 oral sense of outrage. They were tired of Figg and his airs. 
 He was getting too big for his boots he thought he was boss 
 of the town and could build what he liked in it. From the first 
 Lewnes and Lusted and Breeds and others had disapproved of 
 him, and now he was too much even for Monypenny. They 
 were glad, and hoped that Marlingate had seen the last of him.
 
 THE BURNING HEART 273 
 
 Their hopes were fulfilled. That year Figg passed out of 
 the Town's history. Always violent and over-stressed either 
 in liking or in loathing, he could never speak of Marlingate 
 without a curse. He settled in London, and designed Town 
 Halls and churches for the north. He was also the architect 
 of several London suburbs the circle of urbanised villages that 
 were now smudging the rim of London across the South East- 
 ern Railway. In the Jubilee year he was knighted, and two 
 years later denied the philosophy of a lifetime by marrying the 
 widow of a Colonial Bishop, and doing some of his best work 
 afterwards. 
 
 He was the only real friend Monypenny had known, but if 
 he ever regretted him, ever thought wistfully of the day when 
 Figg, with his long arms waving, his face a-sweat with en- 
 thusiasm, had led the first Town Committee round the old 
 Marlingate and planned its glory or when Figg and he had 
 mixed their eager breath over the first designs for Becket Grove 
 or saluted each other's genius across the flowering glory of 
 the Town Park if he ever thought of those days, he never 
 showed the weakness of the thought. 
 
 Yet he often wished that he was not quite so lonely. He 
 would have liked to break through his loneliness to Ted or to 
 Fanny, or even to Becket or to Pelham but he could not. It 
 seemed as if Morgan wanted, in death as she had wanted in 
 life, to keep him all to herself, and would not let him go to 
 any other creature. He sometimes thought that she might have 
 let him go to Fanny, for Fanny was as lonely as he, and wanted 
 him as much as he wanted her. But naturally Morgan would 
 not let him go to the woman who had already taken from her 
 the husk of his allegiance on the contrary, she had through 
 those very tokens and caresses he had given away from her, 
 wiped the other woman out, made her as dead as herself. . . . 
 
 Yet Morgan need not have been afraid. Even if he could 
 have gone to Fanny in the spirit as well as in the flesh, he could 
 never have loved her whole body and mind as much as he
 
 274 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 loved Morgan's little finger and smallest thought. He could 
 never forget her; each year that went by took her no further 
 from him down the stream of memory. Her grave in the heart 
 of the town was the shrine to which he made many sorrowful 
 pilgrimages. When twilight fell on the tilted churchyard, and he 
 was sure that no one would see, he crept in with the shadows, 
 and stood for long, darkening minutes, looking down at the 
 stone with its graven lies sometimes ,with a heart soft 
 enough to pray and eyes young enough to weep, sometimes too 
 hard and too old for either. He never thought of her as she 
 had been very long ago, when her hair was rumpled and her 
 dress was torn, and she caught him in a snare between the 
 woods and the sea. His mind loved order and dignity too well 
 to recall her without them. He saw her as she had graced the 
 Assembly, with all eyes turning to look at her, as she had 
 graced her home, with all tongues moving to praise her, as she 
 had graced his heart with her love, which had all the dignity 
 as well as the freedom of a storm. She was lovely and fitting 
 and fair and sedate, and the secret of the woods was in her 
 heart, under the silk and lace that were so seemly . . . and 
 she had taken it away with her, leaving him to stumble and 
 grope in the streets of his accursed town. 
 
 "And the streets by the shore shall be trodden no more 
 By the footsteps of Morgan le Fay." 
 
 He had built his town for her, and then had offered her 
 up as a sacrifice to it. Nothing less than its ruin could avenge 
 her, nor her monument be less than the defiled stones on 
 which he, poor betrayed priest of the Golden Bough, had of- 
 fered her to an illusion. 
 
 10 
 
 Ted was sorry that Decimus Figg had cut himself off from 
 Marlingate, but he missed his new friend less than his father 
 missed his old one. His personal attachments were not strong,
 
 THE BURNING HEART 275 
 
 and his life was already crowded with boys and young men in 
 various stages of intimacy. Some of these friendships were in- 
 tense, almost worships, but they never seemed to survive any 
 change in their environment. Even the most passionate of 
 them did not survive his leaving Charterhouse for Oxford. 
 
 This happened in 1887. He had an Oriel scholarship, and 
 was thought to have passed through Charterhouse very credit- 
 ably. Monypenny felt proud of him, but he never spoke of 
 his pride. The silence which necessarily cloaked the main pur- 
 pose of his life was now extending to his lesser emotions. As 
 a husband he was extraordinarily silent, and his solemn com- 
 pany became almost unbearable to Fanny, who asked if she 
 might have her cousin, Sue Vidler, to live with her again. 
 
 Monypenny agreed readily. He was sorry for his wife in 
 the loneliness to which he had condemned her, and he was now 
 beyond the petty annoyances of an old maid's chatter. So Sue 
 left the east-end roof of her uncle and aunt, and brought her- 
 self and a huge assortment of coloured wools to Gun Garden 
 House. She and Fanny spent long hours together chatting and 
 clucking over the wools, and Fanny seemed to recover a little 
 of her lost vitality as she turned the dwindled stream of her 
 emotions to the working of mats and cushion-covers and stool- 
 covers and firescreens. 
 
 Not long after this old Vidler died quite suddenly he was 
 found dead in bed of an unsuspected disease whose occasional 
 twinges he had not thought it worth while to mention. He 
 proved to have been even richer than was rumoured in the 
 town, and besides leaving his wife very comfortably provided 
 for, had bequeathed a handsome legacy to his beloved niece, 
 Fanny Monypenny, and to his great-nephew, Edward Mony- 
 penny, Junior. There were, besides, legacies to various local un- 
 dertakings the Borough Fund, the Winter Garden (which 
 had, however, been scrapped in favour of the Pier) , a Fund for 
 the redecoration and enlargement of the Assembly Room, and 
 the Fishermen's Benevolent Society.
 
 276 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 Ted had loved his uncle, and shed some bitter tears at his 
 death, but he could not help feeling important and excited now 
 that he had a regular income of two hundred a year. He re- 
 ceived his first dividends at the beginning of his second term at 
 Oxford, which enabled him to start at once the redecoration of 
 his rooms according to the new tastes inspired by his first 
 term's contact with Varsity ideals. 
 
 Those were the days of the aesthetic movement in art, when 
 Punch laughed at Maudle and Postlethwaite and the Cimabue- 
 Browns, and young men tried to look like Oscar Wilde. Ted 
 for one term tried to look like Oscar Wilde, and wore a green 
 suit and a flowing tie, with a fur collar on his overcoat and a 
 flower in his button-hole. 
 
 From aestheticism he passed to ritualism wore a cross on his 
 watch-chain, confessed to a Cowley Father, read "John Ingle- 
 sant," and fought with beasts at the Patronal Festival of All 
 Saints, Margaret Street. Then behold him an agnostic, bit- 
 ter and rather sad, reading Haeckel, and waving the fiery cross 
 of Nietzsche and the Gotterdammerung in the faces of his for- 
 mer associates. Then a wave of socialism passed over him, 
 leaving him high and dry on the Tory beach, before the dis- 
 tressful cry of Ireland called him out to sea again. 
 
 Monypenny watched half amused, half scornful, these va- 
 garies of his son's mind. But under both amusement and scorn 
 ran a current of uneasiness, for Ted's waverings of thought and 
 taste only emphasized his one constancy. Whatever he might 
 be during the term, in his vacations he was still the faithful 
 lover of Marlingate, brooding over its beauties and uglinesses, 
 poking at its constitution. His love would no doubt find prac- 
 tical expression in his future as an architect, for even after the 
 removal of Figg, he persisted in this ambition. He had already 
 the three Board of Education certificates. All Monypenny 
 could do was to persuade him to postpone any further steps 
 till after he had left the 'Varsity, bribing him with a half- 
 promise of a course in Germany or Geneva. By then, he des-
 
 THE BURNING HEART 277 
 
 perately told himself, the boy would have changed; he changed 
 quarterly in friendship, religion, politics, and art surely a 
 change would come soon in more fundamental things. But he 
 knew in his heart that this constant change of unessential ex- 
 pression only served to emphasise the firmness of the essen- 
 tial impression, which he himself had made on him in his be- 
 getting. This was life compelling from the father unwilling 
 gifts which in time the son would use to confound him. 
 
 Ted still kept up desultorily his friendship with Becket, and 
 always went two or three times every vacation to dine with the 
 old man. Lindsay was still away. She had come home for a 
 brief interval, tasted and despised the delights of "coming out," 
 and then gone back to her beloved Germany, to study music 
 and singing at Weimar. The merchant was rather prosy com- 
 pany for Ted, but they had the subject of Marlingate in com- 
 mon, and on that subject all the evening the young man would 
 enlarge and the old man reiterate. Becket had succeeded Figg 
 as the head of the reactionary party. He was but a pottering 
 leader, and his followers were few and inclined to straggle, but 
 he had the same ideal for the town as Ted, though he called it 
 gentility instead of beauty. He had refused to advance the 
 money necessary for finishing New Marlingate, so that a lim- 
 ited liability company had to be formed to carry on the work 
 calling itself the Braybrook Estate Syndicate. It was the first 
 time he had refused to support any local undertaking, and his 
 action caused great offence in the town. 
 
 Monypenny did his best to discourage Ted's association with 
 Becket. The young man was capable of giving him and his 
 party the qualities of brain and taste and enterprise that would 
 make them dangerous. So far they had only sentiment and or- 
 thodoxy; Ted, young, eager and privileged, would put strength 
 into their flabby sinews and fire into their faint heart. Besides, 
 Becket was sure to stuff the boy's head with the idea that his 
 father had blundered he would rake up the Figg controversy, 
 and rouse all that there was in Ted and there was much of
 
 278 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 chivalry and enterprise. But Monypenny went no further than 
 a rather negative discouragement, for he saw plainly the effect 
 that a positive opposition would have on a temperament like 
 his son's. It would drive him over at once to the enemy's side, 
 whereas if only he had the wisdom and the patience to wait, 
 the years would probably work their own changes. He kept 
 on assuring himself that a nature like Ted's could not remain 
 fixed on any one purpose, and that at last probably at the 
 passing of adolescence something would happen to change 
 the groundwork whose superstructure had so continually 
 shifted. 
 
 For one thing, he would marry. Considering his number- 
 less ardours it was surprising that so far he had never fallen in 
 love. His enthusiasms had never hurled him into any amor- 
 ous adventure, for he inherited his father's shyness with wom- 
 en, also his stiff sense of sexual dignity. Perhaps to his inex- 
 perience was due a certain strain of naivete which ran rather 
 attractively through his other qualities. But Monypenny 
 hoped that love would not come so late to his son as it had 
 come to himself. He was beginning to attribute much of his 
 own tragedy to the late coming of his love and the early suc- 
 cess of his ambition. He had achieved his object and crowned 
 his life's work before he was forty, and then love had come 
 too late; for he was now the prey of the thing he had pursued 
 and caught too soon. He hoped that love would claim Ted be- 
 fore Marlingate got him it had not definitely seized him yet. 
 Then the boy would not have to make his father's choice. Also 
 he would no longer stand in the way of his father's schemes. 
 In love and marriage he would either lose or centralise his en- 
 thusiasm, his foundations would be shifted, and Marlingate 
 would lose its only champion, its only hope of escape from the 
 destruction its builder had planned.
 
 THE BURNING HEART 279 
 
 " 
 
 So far there had been no open discussion between Ted and 
 Monypenny. They seldom talked and never argued about the 
 town. Monypenny's reasons for silence were simple enough, 
 Ted's were more complex. He was still a little afraid of his 
 father, and during the last few months had felt rather bitter 
 against him. He joined with Becket in disapproving of his 
 latest policy for Marlingate, and accused him in his heart of 
 pandering to low ideals in the Corporation, and of robbing the 
 future by grabbing the cash of the present moment. 
 
 But there was no outward breach between them, and dur- 
 ing his vacations Ted was a good deal with Monypenny, ac- 
 companying him on his walks, and attending him, when not 
 too actively discouraged, to various borough functions. He 
 always felt both stimulated and afraid in his father's so- 
 ciety. Monypenny was silent, melancholy, rather terrifying, 
 and his mind seemed to seize Ted's and shake it as a wolf 
 shakes a lamb. 
 
 But a change had taken place in the boy unperceived by 
 his father; in Becket 's company he had somehow blundered 
 into the municipal idea. Hitherto his love of Marlingate 
 had been purely aesthetic. He had hated to see its ancient 
 beauty defaced, to watch the spreading cancer of mean dwell- 
 ings in its heart, to see the tawdry growth of New Marlin- 
 gate spoil the pure pattern of Figg's imagination. But Becket's 
 prosings had somehow led him into a new conception. He 
 saw the beauty not only of Marlingate's bricks and stones but 
 of its charter and constitution. He saw the dignity and se- 
 renity of its life, the order of its seasons, and saw too that all 
 this, as well as its structure, was threatened by the growing 
 spirit of vulgarity and commerce. The contamination of other 
 towns entered it daily through its Pier gates, and now the 
 question of cheap railway excursions was soon to come before 
 the Town Committee. This measure filled Ted with an ex-
 
 280 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 ceptional fury he thought that it would finally degrade the 
 town and his indignation grew, till at last he could contain 
 it silently no longer, and resolved to "have things out" with 
 Monypenny. 
 
 The opportunity was given by a walk on All Holland Hill. 
 It was at the end of the long vacation, a soft September day 
 of copper and rust. Ted and his father had gone for one of 
 their usual walks, talking mostly of abstractions. Mony- 
 penny liked to have the boy with him to watch his brown 
 eager face as he talked, the eyes and mouth all full of anima- 
 tion but his manner was as usual solemn and remote. He 
 looked noticeably older now. His side whiskers were as white 
 as his hair, and he had let them grow a little; his eyes were 
 becoming cavernous, and his skin had grown stretched and 
 parchment like, giving his face a hard, bony look which it had 
 lacked in youth. 
 
 They were at the top of the hill, and before they followed 
 the path down to the Slide, they stood still for a moment and 
 looked back at the town. The sight of it gave Monypenny a 
 sudden and sinister joy. He had been hammering it for twenty 
 years, and now for the first time he could see his mark upon it. 
 The face of Marlingate was changing it was growing grey. 
 There was grey beside the Brook, and grey on the Coney Banks 
 and grey on the Totty Lands, the ugly grey of the new houses. 
 The infection had spread to some of the older buildings, which 
 had covered their old red faces with a maquillage of stucco, 
 now and then even throwing out a bay or balcony, aping the 
 unlovely youth of "Balmoral" and "Midlothian," which grinned 
 across from the Coney Banks like a row of false teeth. 
 There was the Pier, too, now dingy with the storming of years 
 on inferior substance; and at the north end of the town there 
 was the disorder of New Marlingate, with its scaffold poles and 
 its mixed styles, ranging from Figg's noble houses in Pelham 
 Square to Lusted's orgies of debased gothic and the frank jerry- 
 building of a London contractor.
 
 THE BURNING HEART 281 
 
 His contemplation was broken by Ted's voice. 
 
 "Father, how are those houses letting?" 
 
 "Which houses?" 
 
 "The new ones at the back of Pelham Square." 
 
 "They are letting very well." 
 
 Ted was slient a moment, and they turned on their walk 
 towards the Slide. Then he said: 
 
 "But are they letting to a good class of people?" 
 
 Monypenny raised his eyebrows. 
 
 "I don't see why not." 
 
 Each reply had a ring of finality about it, as if it were a 
 key turned in a door which Ted must not seek to re-open. 
 But he forced himself to overcome his susceptibility to failure, 
 and knocked on at the closed doors of his father's mind. 
 
 "I can't feel that a good class of tenant will come to that 
 very inferior kind of house." 
 
 "You consider the houses inferior, then?" 
 
 "I do." 
 
 Monypenny shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 "Perhaps they are." 
 
 Again the lock clicked, and Ted felt hopelessly discouraged. 
 For some moments they tramped in silence over the au- 
 tumn hillside, where the rust was eating into the gold, and 
 the brambles knotted heavy purples and crimsons into the 
 web of sad colours that hung over the hill. Then Ted came 
 once more to the attack, and this time more desperately. 
 
 "Father, why won't you talk to me about Marlingate? .You 
 know I'm interested in it, and yet every time I open my lips 
 about it, you shut me up." 
 
 Monypenny hesitated a moment, then replied 
 
 "Our views on the subject are not the same. I can scarcely 
 discuss my plans for Marlingate with you as long as you are 
 so thick with a man who's opposed to me in every matter of 
 town policy." 
 
 "You think I'm disloyal, because I'm on Becket's side?"
 
 282 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 "I think you are a fool to be on the side of a fool." 
 
 "Becket may be a fool in his methods, but he's perfectly 
 sound in his ideas." 
 
 "I don't agree with you there, nor does anyone else in the 
 town." 
 
 "Pelham does, and Breeds is with us in most things." 
 
 "Urn." 
 
 "Of course I know that the majority follow you. That's 
 what makes me so sick. I mean you can make everyone do 
 what you want, and yet . . . Oh, if only you wanted to 
 keep Marlingate as it used to be, instead of rushing into all 
 this cheap expansion! I know you could do iK Lusted and 
 Lewnes wouldn't have a chance against you. I can't think 
 why " 
 
 He met his father's eye and flushed. 
 
 "It's awfully difficult for me to speak to you, Sir. But 
 I'm feeling so dreadfully sick about the way things are go- 
 ing." 
 
 "What do you mean exactly?" 
 
 "It's hard to explain just the trend of things they're 
 cheap. Those cheap houses . . . and then the Pier . . . 
 and that talk of letting the South Eastern run day excursions 
 . . . don't you see how that kind of thing will drive all 
 the decent people away? And the other sort won't make 
 up for their going, even if they come in much greater num- 
 bers. I can't think how you don't see it. You're so damn 
 clever. You must see it and yet it doesn't seem to matter 
 to you." 
 
 "And does it matter to you? You're a young man at Ox- 
 ford, and must have better things to think about. Can't you 
 turn your attention to the affairs that concern you?" 
 
 "Marlingate does concern me." 
 
 "How?" 
 
 "I love it." 
 
 His eyes looked angrily and passionately into his father's,
 
 THE BURNING HEART 283 
 
 and Monypenny stiffened for war. At the same time a pang of 
 regret and pity went through him. 
 
 "I love it," repeated Ted "I'm awfully keen on it; and I 
 can't bear to see you spoiling it. You don't care about Mar- 
 lingate, whatever you have done once I can see that plainly, 
 and so can Becket. The only thing you care about is to make 
 it pay, and one day you'll over-reach yourself and the whole 
 thing ull fall to pieces. But I don't think you care about 
 that either. Oh, I wish you cared! We could work together. 
 I'm to be an architect I could help you rebuild Marlingate. 
 We could make it beautiful again scrap all those rotten 
 houses demolish the Pier " 
 
 Monypenny laughed. 
 
 "A pretty program for the next Town Committee meeting! 
 I wonder how they'd take it." 
 
 "You could get it through," cried Ted passionately "you 
 could make them accept anything. That's the pity of it all 
 to me. You could do all this, and you don't. Please, Sir, 
 listen to me. Between us we could make Marlingate splendid 
 we could kick out all those wretched people who are cheap- 
 ening and dirtying it. You could direct and manage every- 
 thing, and I'd design I'd try to be what Decimus Figg was 
 in the beginning. Oh, Father . . ." 
 
 He stopped. Monypenny 's face was quite white. Ted 
 watched him anxiously he could not read the look in his eyes. 
 It did not seem to be anger so much as anxiety and pity. 
 When at last Monypenny spoke his voice was quite gentle. 
 
 "Don't, Ted don't waste your love on this town. It will 
 be thrown away. Find a woman and love her. Flesh and 
 blood are better than bricks and mortar. Don't waste your 
 youth on a stuffy town. Believe me, it isn't worth it. And 
 as for my policy, it's not merely the result of the greed and 
 indifference to which you alternately ascribe it. It's the re- 
 sult of consideration. We differ, but my opinions are as firm 
 as yours."
 
 284 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 "Then," said Ted, blazing, "you mustn't mind if I oppose 
 you publicly, I mean. I promised Becket that if he'd or- 
 ganise a meeting to oppose the Day Excursions, I'd speak at 
 it." 
 
 "Nonsense!" the calm of Monypenny's bearing suddenly 
 broke down "there'd be no sense in that. You'd do no good 
 merely create a scandal." 
 
 "I can't help that. Anyhow I must speak. I'm going to 
 do all I can to stop this madness." 
 
 "It will be edifying to see me and my son at loggerheads 
 in the town." 
 
 "I tell you I can't help that. I must try to save Marlin- 
 gate from its Mayor and Corporation, and I don't see what 
 else I'm to do." 
 
 Monypenny did not answer. He stood still, staring down 
 into the yellowing trees of the Slide. Out of them suddenly 
 had run Morgan le Fay her crimson dress flew behind her on 
 the wind, and her eyes shone under her tangled hair. Her 
 lips were parted, and he saw the white arc of her teeth, her 
 tilted smile flying up to her tilted eyes. Then suddenly Becket 
 looked at him out of her eyes, and a little, tinkling, girlish 
 laugh broke up the dream. 
 
 "Lindsay!" cried Ted. 
 
 She held out her hand to both. 
 
 "You didn't know I had come back did you? I came 
 back last night. Here's Papa we've been over to French 
 Landing." 
 
 Becket came sweating and panting out of the wood. There 
 were greetings all round, and in the end the party joined for 
 the walk home. Ted and Lindsay went on ahead, and the two 
 fathers walked behind. There was no more talk of borough 
 matters never a safe subject now between Monypenny and 
 Becket. Instead, the merchant raved about his daughter's re- 
 turn, about the beauty and talent she had brought back with 
 her. Monypenny stared at her dipping skirts, and scarcely
 
 THE BURNING HEART 285 
 
 knew whether he loved her for what she had of her mother or 
 hated her for what she had not. 
 
 S I2 
 
 Lindsay Becket was a shining and central figure in Mar- 
 lingate during that Winter season. She had not been through 
 a seaside winter for some time. Before going to Weimar she 
 had spent a couple of winters in London, dancing with the 
 Goldsmiths and the Fishmongers and the Haberdashers and 
 the Merchant Taylors with whom her father dined. She was 
 now nearly twenty-five, but a graceful immaturity of mind and 
 body wiped out at least four of her years. 
 
 Monypenny's eyes leaped to her every time he entered a 
 room where she was. Something in her alert, swaying car- 
 riage the way she stood, giving an impression of poise, of 
 the balance of a bird on a bough made him ache with the 
 memory of her mother. She was a little taller and more large- 
 ly made, but her movements were the same. Her colouring 
 was the same too, and she emphasised it by the colours of her 
 gowns, the tansy yellows, the bracken browns, that had made 
 Morgan like a blazing October tree. He was too manlike to 
 notice the difference in their make the bunched hips instead 
 of the flowing hem, the squeamish, narrow decolletage instead 
 of that generous gleaming display of white shoulders, which 
 used to make a man at the old Assemblies feel as if he was 
 watching a bed of floating waterlilies. He noticed more read- 
 ily the difference in her eyes and voice. Her eyes were 
 Becket's, solemn and humourless they never flashed or 
 flew, like Morgan's; and her laugh was just a girl's laugh, un- 
 certain and sweet he remembered how Morgan's laugh had 
 always jarred on him with its loud mockery, how it had never 
 passed with the rest of her into civilisation, but had always 
 been a wild laugh, neither sweet nor quite human. 
 
 He danced with Lindsay occasionally, but not often, for
 
 286 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 any long or close communion with her gave him pain though 
 he could never tell whether the pain was due to the resem- 
 blances or the differences between her and her mother. He 
 was not now the untiring dancer he used to be he was over 
 sixty, and his breath often failed him after exercise but he 
 could not resist Lindsay's indefinite, baffling attraction. Some- 
 times he asked himself whether in his waltzes with her he 
 was not trying to create an illusion; if so, it was an illusion 
 that her voice and her look continually shattered, but he 
 could not altogether clear himself of guilt. 
 
 Lindsay's feeling towards him was mixed. She liked him 
 because he interested her and because he admired her, but 
 she also found him at times curiously repelling. lis life- 
 long ignorance of women and mental awkwardness witn them, 
 instead of being dispelled by twenty years of marriage, had 
 only increased. She was quick to notice it; she found him 
 stilted and formal, and his old-fashioned politeness could not 
 hide the clumsiness of his mental approach to her girlishness. 
 Sometimes he saw that he jarred on her, and would revenge 
 himself by drawing her out, so that he might expose and de- 
 spise her. Once he asked 
 
 "Do you like Marlingate?" 
 
 And she answered 
 
 "I think it is a delightful little place." 
 
 For which he did not know whether to love or hate her. 
 
 But, in spite of these clashes, she never rebuffed him or re- 
 refused to waltz with him. She once told a friend that she 
 danced with him because he was "easily the best-looking man 
 in the room." 
 
 Marlingate's winter gaieties were now a trifle shorn. One 
 or two of the more aristocratic visitors had seceded to Brigh- 
 ton, in the wake of Raymond Hurdicott; the Alaric Papil- 
 lons were at Bulverhythe, a small military town eight miles 
 west of Marlingate, which was beginning to develop a Winter 
 Season. Lady Cockstreet was dead; she had died that Au-
 
 THE BURNING HEART 287 
 
 tumn in her Rye Lane villa, unconscionably old. At the dances 
 now one saw young folk who would never have been ad- 
 mitted in earlier days. The ineligibles of Town Councillors 
 had always been tolerated in their fathers' honour, and the 
 blue robe of an Alderman covered not only the sins of the 
 fathers but of the children. But now began to appear the 
 young of Gallops and of tradesmen unsanctified by any mu- 
 nicipal connection. Moreover, the colonists of New Marlin- 
 gate demanded, but did not deserve, their part in the local fes- 
 tivities. The result was that genteel mammas became remon- 
 strant, and complained that their daughters met undesirable 
 men. One or two select and dull private dances were given, 
 but the public, more enjoyable affairs had become sadly mixed. 
 Monypenny saw that the town was losing the knack of com- 
 bining gaiety with refinement its present efforts to purge it- 
 self being one and all tainted with insipidity. It was all part 
 of his campaign against Marlingate's Winter season part 
 of his strangle-hold upon it, which was to divert the streams 
 of life that ran through the town to the less vital Summer sea- 
 son, which in its turn would soon bloat and burst like an over 
 full blood-vessel. 
 
 Some time ago the Town Council had been approached by 
 the South Eastern Railway with regard to running cheap day 
 and half-day excursions to Marlingate from London, Chat- 
 ham, Erith and other industrial places. In those days Mony- 
 penny had seen that the time had not yet come for such a 
 measure. Nobody but Lewnes and Lusted had supported it 
 on the Town Committee, and he had realised the folly of try- 
 ing to force it through. But now he had shaped the spirit 
 of the town more conformably Benbow had joined the Com- 
 mittee and Hurdicott had left it, Tom Potter had left the 
 town in '85, and had been succeeded as Town Clerk by Mark 
 Boas, a much younger man of go-ahead tendencies. The 
 Progressives had increased not only in number but in daring. 
 The calculating purpose and indomitable will which had
 
 288 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 dragged his Aldermen and Councillors after him in every en- 
 terprise had not failed him yet. Give him time, and he knew 
 that he could put practically any measure through the Com- 
 mittee and the Council too. 
 
 He was now fairly certain that there would be a majority for 
 day excursions, and he knew that such a concession would be 
 a long stride forward in the path of squalor. The crowds 
 brought by the steamers to the Pier from Margate, Broad- 
 stairs and Southend, and no longer sifted by pier-tolls which 
 had been abolished four or five years ago had already begun 
 to hurry the summer gentry out of Marlmgate. The Win- 
 ter season had been reduced by the exodus of Hurdicotts and 
 their kind, and the lowering of the residential standard, and 
 now the Summer season was to be put out of action by 
 periodically letting loose hordes of barbarians among those 
 decent and well-bred people who might otherwise be 
 reckoned upon to fill Marlingate from May to October, long 
 after the Winter notables had abandoned it. These people 
 were already complaining of the steamer excursions; what 
 would they say when excursion-trains vomited demoralised 
 London trippers and rowdy factory employees into the sanc- 
 tuaries of the Marine Parade and the Town Park? 
 
 His only trouble was Ted's threat of opposition. In Ted 
 he would have, for the first time, an opponent who was 
 worth considering. Becket's sentimental platitudes, Pelham's 
 ornate remonstrances, the futile uncertainties of Breeds 
 could form no serious obstacle. But Ted. the winged adver- 
 sary, with his tongue and his heart of flame . . . Ted with 
 a brain as good as his father's, with a zeal as fervent, with 
 a love as strong as his father's hate ... he would probably 
 have as deep an influence as Monypenny on the waverers of 
 the Town Committee, and it was the waverers who mattered 
 in a case like this when the definite parties were small. If he 
 and Becket organised their preposterous meeting it was quite 
 possible that they might make the Progressives kick the beam.
 
 THE BURNING HEART 289 
 
 for Monypenny could imagine how Ted would speak, how his 
 youth and zeal would appeal to men's feelings as his father's 
 passionate reserve could never do. Hitherto he had carried 
 on his scheme in the face of only a pottering opposition, but 
 now, at a critical moment, and through the action of his own 
 flesh and blood, that opposition might become formidable, 
 perhaps overwhelming. 
 
 Sometimes he found himself the prey of a sick and foolish 
 reaction. If Marlingate mattered so much to Ted, why not let 
 him do as he wanted with it? Why not stand aside and let 
 him lift the town out of its declining ways, back into its 
 ancient glory? Why thwart this young life with the oppo- 
 sition of his old and tired revenge? . . . For he was be- 
 ginning to be tired now, to feel the strain of his unceasing 
 conflict of the continual direction, tricking and forcing of 
 weaker minds than his own. He was Marlingate's brain, and 
 that brain had thought too many long thoughts. 
 
 He felt that he would like to put out his arms and take 
 into them Ted and Fanny, and warm his last years of life 
 with their kindness. He had been alone all his life, and he 
 would like to spend what remained of it in company. He was 
 over sixty, and very tired perhaps there was not much more 
 to come. 
 
 But if ever he allowed himself to think like this, the re- 
 proach of Morgan would come back to him, and he would re- 
 member her as he had loved her, and as he had forsaken her. 
 He would remember her as he had last seen her, on fire with 
 passion and grief, like a lovely tree with its death upon it in 
 gay colours; and he would remember her grave where 
 Becket had laid her, under the carven lies. He had promised 
 her a better grave than those mean few feet of earth under 
 Becket 's tombstone; he had promised her as a memorial the 
 piled destruction of Marlingate, its streets and houses and 
 shops and trade and wealth heaped in her honour like the 
 barrow of an ancient queen. He could not fail her now dull
 
 290 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 his memory and his promise with the love of wife and child, 
 drive away her ghost into the wind. Hitherto only his body 
 had been unfaithful to her, but if he failed her now he failed 
 her with his soul, and he must keep his soul true, so that it 
 could go to her at last in the shadow where she lived. 
 
 13^ 
 
 When Ted came back to Marlingate for his Winter vaca- 
 tion, Lindsay no longer said that Monypenny was easily the 
 best-looking man in the room. It was natural that she should 
 prefer the younger man, the more indefatigable dancer, and 
 Monypenny gave her up to him with rather a crooked smile. 
 What he could not understand was why the boy did not fall 
 in love with her. Much as Morgan's daughter lacked of her 
 mother's beauty, or rather of the spirit informing it, it seemed 
 impossible that any man could fail to notice her pre-em- 
 inence over the other women, and yet Ted seemed just as 
 happy dancing with Dorothy Lewnes or Mabel Fulleylove or 
 Queenie Cooper, and his attitude towards Lindsay's obvious 
 favour was a compound of denseness and naivete which made 
 his father heartily ashamed of him. 
 
 However, in his heart, he was glad that the expected (by 
 Lindsay, by himself, by the town) had not happened. For 
 one thing Ted was too young he was only twenty-one, and 
 curiously shifting and unformed; for another the marriage 
 would draw closer the bonds between him and Becket which 
 Monypenny wanted to have severed. But there was another 
 reason more subtle, more indefinite than these practical con- 
 siderations, and yet also far more vital and compelling. Mony- 
 penny felt that he could not have borne to see the love of 
 these two for each other the shadow of himself loving the 
 shadow of Morgan with a love which could be only the 
 shadow of their love. He could not have borne it, and he 
 was glad it had not happened. Nevertheless, in some remote
 
 THE BURNING HEART 291 
 
 back-country of his mind these two were linked, with the 
 glory round them of his lost love which it seemed myste- 
 riously as if they had found and held in pledge against the 
 day when he could claim it. 
 
 Perhaps the anxieties of the father's thought worked more 
 powerfully and more definitely than he knew, moulding the 
 hot, soft stuff of the son's heart, melting it into the hard 
 metal of Lindsay's, which was to hold it as an unfinished 
 casket holds molten silver two crude, precious things, one 
 containing the other and likely to be broken by it. For 
 though he went through his Winter unimpressed, when he 
 came down again at Easter time Ted began to turn towards 
 Lindsay. 
 
 There was nothing obvious or violent indeed, the first ef- 
 fect of his attraction was to make him immensely shy. Mony- 
 penny noticed nothing but an increasing restlessness, which 
 sometimes appeared to be linked with dissatisfaction, some- 
 times with a queer, dreamy excitement. He seemed to be 
 growing more awkward, more inward, and Monypenny, to 
 whom love had meant development and escape and expan- 
 sion, had nothing in his own experience to link this moodiness 
 and silence with anything but the increasing jar of their 
 relations. 
 
 The matter of day excursions had been shelved at the 
 Spring Town Council meeting, and would not come up again 
 till the early Summer, by which time he considered its pros- 
 pects would have still further improved. He put down the 
 increase in Ted's visits to the Coney Banks to the spreading 
 activities of the opposition, and a certain surreptitiousness 
 in the making of them encouraged this idea. Monypenny 
 thought of interference, of issuing the law, but he was with- 
 held partly by the feeling that such action would only pre- 
 cipitate matters, partly by an odd reluctance to make a def- 
 inite breach with Becket. It might sound ridiculous, but 
 Monypenny could never quite lose that queer, occasional
 
 292 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 sense of fellowship with the merchant, that sense of sharing a 
 precious thing though he also had his fits of alienation and 
 jealousy, when he passionately hated Becket for keeping a 
 faith that he had been unable to keep. . . . 
 
 He would have been surprised, and perhaps not quite so pa- 
 tient, if he could have seen Ted sitting in the drawing-room at 
 the Coney Banks, his head thrown back against the cushions 
 of the window-seat, while he listened to Lindsay Becket sing- 
 ing. It was the drawing-room where the plush-framed mir- 
 rors had reflected the smouldering dusk behind the heads of 
 Morgan and Monypenny as they leaned together in some 
 huge scroll-backed sofa hung with antimacassars. . . . The 
 mirrors were not there now in their place were a few good 
 water-colours, and some Aubrey Beardsley drawings, for 
 Lindsay liked occasionally to think herself daring and fin de 
 si&cle. She would sit at her elegant Bechstein piano her 
 mother's little Collard had been given a safe and sentimental 
 refuge in her father's study and sing little German songs that 
 haunted Ted, that seemed to paint his mind over with pic- 
 tures of fir trees and snow in the night. 
 
 She had a beautiful voice, which sometimes had a rather at- 
 tractive note of mockery in it, and she was often asked to 
 sing at Marlingate parties. Here she sang from the new 
 Gilbert and Sullivan operas, or scared her audience with 
 fragments of Wagner or delighted them with Bizet. Ted liked 
 to think that she kept the little German songs for him 
 alone. 
 
 Sometimes after the party he would see her home. He 
 would walk beside her in a kind of awe, watching her grace- 
 ful, shawled head and shoulders in the gleaming moonlight, 
 her hair that broke and flew from under her shawl like spray, 
 the shine of her little satin shoes beside his feet on the pave- 
 ment. Those were cold, still nights, with a path of moon- 
 light over the sea, and All Holland Hill and Cuckoo Hill 
 blocked against a sky like mother o' pearl. It was strange
 
 THE BURNING HEART 293 
 
 how all Marlingate seemed to fade and drop from him, leav- 
 ing him alone with Lindsay, shut up in the little soft chamber 
 of her presence. They seldom found much to say to each 
 other, but occasionally they would talk of the time when he 
 and she as children had enjoyed a lawless freedom in the 
 town. She reminded him of their adventures, of the shells 
 they had bought in the wooden shops down by the Stade, and 
 the mechanical toys they had loved to watch at the Aquarium. 
 
 "Do you remember the peasants dancing round the tree?" 
 
 "And do you remember how I smashed the glass of 
 Mamma's Drawing- Room? I never go to the Aquarium now 
 it depresses me." 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 "Oh, I dunno. It's getting shoddy like most things in 
 Marlingate." 
 
 "That's what Father says Marlingate's going dowa. But 
 it must have been lovely when we were children. What lit- 
 tle wretches we were, by the way! Do you remember the 
 cakes we used to eat?" 
 
 They said "Do you remember?" many more times before 
 they came to the turn of the Coney Bank steps by St. Nich- 
 olas' churchyard. 
 
 "Do you remember that time you and I went in to look at 
 your mother's grave, and the awful fright we got?" 
 
 "Yes from your father. We thought he was a ghost. I 
 must say he looked rather creepy. Do you know that he still 
 frightens me a little?" 
 
 "So he does me." 
 
 "It's only sometimes but it comes over me all of a sudden. 
 There seems to be something in him that makes him different 
 from us." 
 
 "That's just how I feel." 
 
 They had stopped on the ascending flight, and Lindsay's 
 eyes gleamed out of the shadows on her face. Beyond the 
 palings, the moonlight swam over the graves. Then suddenly
 
 294 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 he saw her look as she had never looked before; a queer, fly- 
 ing glance came into her eyes he saw it for the first time, 
 and it made him think of a streak of sunshine flashing along 
 a wall on a windy day. He had never seen her like this 
 with this queer, flying, sidelong look and there was some- 
 thing in him to which it was irresistible, something in him 
 which seemed to go out to meet it, with an ineffable yearn- 
 ing. . . . 
 
 They stood gazing at each other on the Coney Bank steps, 
 and he felt her hands in his, firm and calm, quite unlike her 
 eyes. Then suddenly his self-control broke down, and his 
 arms went round her, straining her all warm and thrilling 
 against his heart. He stood on the step below her, and her 
 head drooped against his neck, so that his mouth moved over 
 her hair in its hungry search for her face. Then at last he 
 found her lips and held them for the long plighting kiss. The 
 moonlight swam over the graves.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 THE MAYOR OF DEAD MAN'S TOWN 
 
 i 
 
 THE Spring was creeping into Marlingate it always came 
 into the town a little furtively, showing itself chiefly in the 
 shop-windows and new-painted house-fronts. This year it 
 seemed to have a greater boldness, perhaps because its arti- 
 ficial manifestations were a little less emphatic. The new 
 muslins and the stucco frontages did not so compellingly with- 
 draw one's eyes from the laburnum drooping over garden 
 walls, nor did the smell of paint quite drown the soft, haw- 
 thorn-scented airs that came down from the inland fields. 
 
 However, with the exception of the Marine Hotel, ad- 
 vance bookings were good, though, on the whole, for shorter 
 periods, and showing a tendency to concentrate in the months 
 of July and August instead of over-running them as far as 
 May and October. The Marine Hotel was indeed rather for- 
 lorn not a third part full, and having, with the rest of the 
 Parade, lost a little of that white, shining look which made it 
 like a temple facing the sea. It had been, since its opening, 
 the pulse of Marlingate's prosperity full in its good times, 
 but of late slack and intermittent. This symptom had not 
 much impressed anyone besides Monypenny and the Hotel 
 Company. To Lewnes and Lusted and their crew it mattered 
 little who filled the town as long as it was full indeed they 
 would rather have seen it crowded from lodgings in the Totty 
 lands than politely sprinkled from the Hotel. But those who 
 had money invested in the Marine Hotel Company had been 
 
 295
 
 296 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 grumbling for some seasons, and now with a startling drop 
 in the already decreasing figure of patronage they began to 
 quake for their investments, and say that the Hotel would 
 never go through another bad winter. The Pier company was 
 not paying, either, and there were awkwardnesses and re- 
 criminations about the Aquarium, which for some years had 
 been carried on at a loss. 
 
 All these signs of deterioration were comforting and en- 
 couraging to Monypenny, but with his triumph was mixed an 
 indefinable regret. He hated the town, and he had resolved 
 to avenge the love it had betrayed, but his hatred was not the 
 pure emotion that his love had been queer currents of mem- 
 ory ran through it, bearing reproaches and desires. 
 
 One of these reproaches was his own son. During the last 
 two weeks of the Easter vacation, reaching on into May, the 
 change he had begun to notice in Ted became more obvious. 
 Monypenny now felt convinced that something was happen- 
 ing to him, but he was still unable to guess its nature. Per- 
 haps it was the growing difficulties of the Opposition, per- 
 haps the approach of the time when he must publicly take 
 action against his father. . . Monypenny expected the fu- 
 ture and his own mind to show him the boy's trouble. He did 
 not expect, after what had passed between them on All Hol- 
 land Hill, to be taken into his confidence. 
 
 He was accordingly surprised when one morning, as they 
 sat alone in the dining-room after breakfast, Ted asked 
 
 "May I speak to you, Sir?" 
 
 He was turning over the pages of a new number of the Savoy 
 with fingers that shook a little. Monypenny was reading the 
 Daily News with the same stern intentness as he had read it 
 every morning since the day when he had first taken it out of 
 respect to Charles Dickens. 
 
 "Yes what is it?" thinking that some bootless and rend- 
 ing discussion on borough politics lay before him.
 
 THE MAYOR OF DEAD MAN'S TOWN 297 
 
 "May we go into your study? We might be interrupted 
 here." 
 
 Monypenny lifted supercilious eye-brows over suddenly 
 anxious eyes. 
 
 "Just as you please." 
 
 They went into the study, and sat down in the two leather 
 arm-chairs each side of the hearth, where Monypenny had sat 
 and talked to Becket and to Lewnes on momentous occasions. 
 
 "Well?" he said, wondering how often he was to hear the 
 words "cheap excursions" during the next ten minutes. Then 
 suddenly he caught sight of Ted's face and he was baffled. 
 Surely nothing municipal could produce that look of mingled 
 shyness and triumph, ecstasy and doubt, joy and defiance, 
 water and flame. 
 
 "What is it?" he asked abruptly. 
 
 "Father I've been wanting to tell you for some days. I 
 I've fallen in iove." 
 
 A pang went through the elder man's heart, and his hands 
 slowly clenched on the arms of his chair. 
 
 "So you've done it at last and you've come to tell me 
 very pretty and girlish of you." 
 
 He himself was astonished at the bitterness of his words, 
 but only some definite brutality could relieve his inward sense 
 of laceration. 
 
 Ted's face went pale, and the glow in his eyes quenched, 
 then burned again with a new and harder flame. 
 
 "I had to tell you because I know you'll be displeased. 
 You'll hate it." 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 How could Ted know that his father was jealous of him? 
 If one can give the name jealousy to a starving man's feel- 
 ing for another who has a piece of bread. 
 
 "Well, you see it's Lindsay Becket." 
 
 He looked anxiously into Monypenny's face for the disap- 
 proval he expected to see there. At first he saw nothing, only
 
 298 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 a queer, hardening mask. Then suddenly the eyes blazed, the 
 skin parched, the mouth twisted and opened 
 
 "You fool!" cried Monypenny "you fool!" Then his 
 voice dragged and failed "I can't," he said almost entreat- 
 ingly. 
 
 Ted stared at him, shocked and bewildered. He had ex- 
 pected opposition, but not this white-hot anger, this con- 
 tempt and sorrow, with which his news seemed to have filled 
 his father overwhelmingly. He wanted to go on, to explain 
 himself further, but he did not know what to say. After this 
 there was absolutely no knowing how the governor would 
 take any remark of his. 
 
 In a moment Monypenny spoke again. 
 
 "How long has this been going on?" 
 
 "I've only just told her but I've cared for her some time." 
 
 "Nonsense! You didn't care tuppence about her when you 
 were here at Christmas." 
 
 "But ever since I came back at Easter. ... I knew 
 then that I that I wanted her." 
 
 "And you call that 'some time.' Very well, then. Does 
 she care for you?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "And what do you propose to do about it?" 
 
 "Why marry her." 
 
 Monypenny said nothing. He put his hand over his eyes, 
 as if he could darken the sight of his mind. The vision which 
 tormented him was not the vision of Ted in the enemy's 
 camp, new-armed against his father, but of Ted and Lindsay, 
 the shadow of Monypenny loving the shadow of Morgan. He 
 saw all that there was of himself in Ted loving all that there 
 was of Morgan in Lindsay. He and Morgan were both dead, 
 but their son and daughter stood before them saying, "We 
 are the resurrection and the life." 
 
 He could not bear it this terrible resurrection of the dead. 
 He quailed before the triumph of love as years ago he had
 
 THE MAYOR OF DEAD MAN'S TOWN 299 
 
 quailed before the triumph of life. What purpose of man could 
 stand before these two terrible things which no grave could 
 hold? ... He was afraid of this young man who stood 
 before him with the two keys of the world in his hand and 
 suddenly stumbling to his feet, he went hurriedly, almost 
 awkwardly, out of the room. 
 
 2 
 
 Ted was astonished at his father's behaviour. He had ex- 
 pected difficulties he had known that local politics would 
 make almost unseemly a match between Monypenny's son 
 and Becket's daughter. But he had not expected this con- 
 sternation his father had seemed really stricken. For some 
 time he hesitated as to whether or not he should follow him 
 out of the room, but at last decided to leave him to himself. 
 This strange uncalled-for emotion must work itself out. In 
 the end he went off to see Lindsay, to spend his morning in shy 
 ardours and fervent timidities. 
 
 When he heard Ted go out, Monypenny went back to the 
 study. He threw himself into his chair and gave himself up 
 to a prostration of helpless thought. Strangely enough, his 
 mind had been unprepared for what had happened. He had 
 thought of the love of Ted and Lindsay only as a terrible 
 thing which had been spared him. Now he had to face it, 
 to know it, and to bear it and he had to acknowledge that 
 it was dreadful, almost unendurable, though all the while he 
 wondered angrily why this should be so. Why should this re- 
 production of his love and Morgan's hurt him so inexpress- 
 ibly? He ought to be glad he ought to bless these chil- 
 dren who had found what their parents had lost. Was he 
 jealous? . . . perhaps he was. And yet Ted did not love 
 Lindsay as his father had loved Morgan. Ted loved only with 
 the little bit of himself which was his father, the lit- 
 tle bit of Lindsay which was her mother. That was all.
 
 300 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 But this marriage must be stopped at all costs and of 
 course he could stop it. Ted's eager, soft, fiery nature could 
 not stand before the bruising iron of his father's will. 
 Yet ... He put his hand over his eyes, as if he would hide 
 from the empty room the pain that was in them. He could 
 not bear the thought of hurting his son, and he knew that 
 he would hurt him terribly crush him as soon as he put 
 out all his strength. But the next moment his heart hard- 
 ened, for he thought of his own love, and of all the suffering 
 that had come from its betrayal the death-in-life that 
 was his marriage, the dead-man's-town that was all he had 
 left of Marlingate. He had suffered this, and out of his suf- 
 fering Ted had been born to enjoy what his father had lost. 
 Monypenny's heart revolted against his innocent successor 
 he should not enjoy these spoils of a battle more terrible than 
 any he could ever face. He should not escape his father's 
 tragedy. The father himself, whose weakness had begotten 
 him, and whose weakness he perpetuated and personified, 
 should set his own choice before him. 
 
 He sprang to his feet, and began walking up and down the 
 room. Hang it all! He supposed he couldn't stop Ted mar- 
 rying Lindsay if he wanted to, but at least he should do it at 
 the cost at which his father would have married Morgan. He 
 should not have both his woman and his town; he could not 
 have them, since they were not a double prize, but a con- 
 flicting choice Ted should choose between them, as his fa- 
 ther had chosen. Then, even if he chose Lindsay, and with 
 her entered the Paradise from which his father was shut out, 
 at least he would not be there to spoil his plans in the wilder- 
 ness. Monypenny would once more be alone with Marlingate 
 its one redoubtable champion would be gone. 
 
 He was growing more resigned. He was beginning to see 
 that it was inevitable that he should have to watch his son 
 building up either the town he had destroyed or the love he
 
 THE MAYOR OF DEAD MAN'S TOWN 301 
 
 had lost. In the irony of the repeated choice the bitterness 
 of his heart found a certain satisfaction. 
 
 3 
 
 However, he did not meet Ted that evening with any real 
 confidence. Fanny and Sue as usual took their wools into 
 the drawing-room, where Monypenny's conventions, surviving 
 into the nineties, forbade him to join them with his after- 
 dinner cigar. Ted's cigarettes must also be smoked, rather 
 unwillingly, in his father's study, and here, in the midst of 
 the heavy mahogany furniture which had loomed over so 
 many conflicts, and a litter of paper embossed with the bor- 
 ough arms, and of plans and designs and accounts dating 
 from Figg's expensive dreams to the shoddy reach-me-downs 
 of today, Monypenny faced Ted with the riddle which he 
 himself had failed to answer more than twenty years ago. 
 
 The preliminaries were short, no more than the lighting 
 of a cigar and a cigarette, and a look that was half challeng- 
 ing, half exploring. 
 
 "I've been thinking over what you told me this morning," 
 said Monypenny, "and I've decided that it's quite impossi- 
 ble." 
 
 "Impossible?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 Ted wished that his father would not start every discus- 
 sion by locking up and putting away the subject. 
 
 "I don't see how it's impossible," he ventured desperately, 
 "I'll own that it's inconvenient difficult but I feel sure that 
 we ... that you . . . that we could somehow manage to 
 understand each other, if only we could talk things over." 
 
 "The marriage would be unseemly." 
 
 "I don't see why. Surely our local factions aren't so hope- 
 less as all that." 
 
 "Not to you, perhaps."
 
 302 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 "But you meet Becket socially." 
 
 "Formally." 
 
 Ted felt irritated. "Then I can't see what difference my 
 marriage will make. You can still go on meeting him for- 
 mally." 
 
 "Not a bit. The whole situation would become at once im- 
 mensely complicated. Besides, that's not my only objection, 
 nor, indeed, my chief one. You're too young." 
 
 Ted flushed. 
 
 "I'm twenty-two." 
 
 "That's too young for the step you are wanting to take 
 to marry the daughter of your father's chief opponent, a wo- 
 man many years older than yourself." 
 
 "Lindsay's only a year or two older than I am." 
 
 "You are very young for your age raw inexperienced 
 
 ignorant " his father rasped out at him. Ted had never 
 
 seen him in such a mood, he was conscious of an unreason- 
 ableness in him, a certain excitement, and it helped him re- 
 tain his own balance better than he might have done if Mony- 
 penny had offered his usual calm and frigid opposition. 
 
 "i'm sorry, Sir. I'm sorry you think so badly of me. But 
 in this case I really do know my own mind." 
 
 "How can you? You've never been in love before. You 
 don't know what love is." 
 
 "I do know what love is." 
 
 "How can you? Prove it, then." 
 
 "I will prove it by marrying Lindsay." 
 
 Monypenny saw that his emotions were exposing him to de- 
 feat. He made an effort and mastered himself. 
 
 "For your own sake I don't want you to rush headlong into 
 this. Why should you? There's no hurry you have plenty 
 of time." 
 
 Ted was not placated. 
 
 "You want me to wait because you think there's a chance
 
 THE MAYOR OF DEAD MAN'S TOWN 303 
 
 of my changing my mind. I tell you I won't change and 
 I won't wait." 
 
 "Indeed. Then what do you propose to do?" 
 
 "Marry Lindsay as soon as she will have me. I've thought 
 it all out, and I've talked it over with her. She's quite ready." 
 
 "Does she realise how you stand that you have nothing 
 but two hundred pounds a year no profession and no quali- 
 fication for any profession and that your prospects at my 
 death, I don't mind telling you, are exceedingly poor?" 
 
 The boy coloured. 
 
 "Lindsay knows all about me." 
 
 "Not quite all. I don't think you know quite all your- 
 self. Anyhow you don't realise it. You don't realise that 
 if you insist on marrying her, even in keeping up this mock- 
 ery of an engagement, I wash my hands of you. You'll have 
 to look out for yourself." 
 
 Ted was astonished. He had not remotely imagined that 
 Monypenny's opposition would take so brutal, practical and 
 old-fashioned a shape. Any form of argument, inducement or 
 interference was to be expected, but not this drastic assump- 
 tion of the part of heavy father he grew angry, because 
 Monypenny made him feel like a young man in a melodrama. 
 
 "You understand," continued the voice which was so curi- 
 ously cold and deep "if you don't try to shake off this in- 
 fatuation and I'll give you all the help I can, send you out 
 to Switzerland, the Tyrol, Germany, anywhere you like this 
 Summer I simply refuse to be responsible for you any longer. 
 You'll have to leave Oxford, and if you think you can marry 
 on two hundred a year and no prospects ..." 
 
 "I can write. The Savoy took a thing of mine last year." 
 
 "And paid you a guinea for it, if I'm not mistaken. You 
 won't make much out of that. Besides, I always understood 
 that you meant to be an architect, a profession which requires 
 special training and the payment of heavy fees. There won't
 
 304 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 be any good counting on your father-in-law; he's been hard 
 hit over the Marine Hotel and other local companies." 
 
 "I shouldn't dream of counting on him." 
 
 "No I suppose you'd shelve him in the same way as you're 
 shelving me." 
 
 "I'm not shelving you. I've proved that by coming out of 
 my way to ask your advice for which you laughed at me this 
 morning." 
 
 Monypenny remorsefully relented. 
 
 "Don't let's quarrel, Ted. I only want to put the matter 
 before you. Give up this girl, and you shall spend the Sum- 
 mer abroad or do anything else that you think will help you to 
 forget her. Then finish your time at Oxford, and after that 
 you can have a course of architecture in Germany or Switz- 
 erland, and finally be articled to some really good man. 111 do 
 that for you, and welcome. But if you persist in having 
 her " 
 
 "Well, what will happen then?" 
 
 "Need I tell you? Can't you imagine what will happen when 
 you want to marry on two hundred a year?" 
 
 "I don't care." 
 
 "One thing that will happen is that you will have to leave 
 Marlingate you and Becket won't be able to block the Pro- 
 gressives any longer." 
 
 "You won't mind that." 
 
 "No but I thought perhaps you might." 
 
 Ted's mouth twitched. 
 
 "I'll still be able to work for Marlingate even if I'm mar- 
 ried." 
 
 "Not if you marry like this. You'll have to go somewhere 
 where you can pick up some sort of a living. Besides, your 
 career as an architect . . . you haven't thought of that." 
 
 "Do you really believe that my career is worth the sac- 
 rifice of my love?" 
 
 "That's for you to decide."
 
 THE MAYOR OF DEAD MAN'S TOWN 305 
 
 There was silence in the room among the heavy shadows. 
 The firelight swept in a fan over the ceiling, then died into a 
 subdued flicker and jig of arabesques. Monypenny watched 
 Ted's face. He had put his choice before him and he did 
 not yet know how he would choose. In spite of the boy's 
 swaggering words the matter was not settled. He himself had 
 spoken many swaggering words of love to Morgan, and yet 
 Marlingate had had him in the end. . . . 
 
 "Don't make up your mind in a hurry," he said rather ner- 
 vously "think it over tonight. I've put the matter squarely 
 before you, and you can choose." 
 
 "I've made up my mind already," said Ted moodily, "and 
 a night or a week won't make me change it. But there's 
 no good arguing here," and he got up and swung towards the 
 door. There he paused, and said rather stiffly "Good night." 
 
 "Good night," said Monypenny. 
 
 He felt shaken, but no longer at the thought of Ted's choice 
 so much as at the thought of how he wanted him to choose. 
 Hitherto he had felt that he would prefer even the prospect 
 of his continued interference in Marlingate to the sight of him 
 married to Lindsay, with his shadowy love vindicating it- 
 self where his father's consuming passion had failed. But 
 now he saw that somehow, during their argument, his base 
 had shifted. He wanted this boy, the inheritor of his life, to 
 be set free from the bondage that had crushed his father. He 
 could not bear to see Marlingate destroy Ted's love as it had 
 destroyed his own. Ted must not choose Dead-Man's Town, 
 for it had nothing to give him; it would merely take all he 
 had his youth, his hope, his love, his imagination. . . . 
 
 He saw Marlingate as Morgan had seen it long ago, as a 
 thing that beat and clung and crushed, as a prison-house, and 
 in his heart he pleaded with his son as Morgan had so often 
 pleaded with himself "Don't let this place get hold of you, 
 don't let Dead-Man's Town eat your bones as it has eaten 
 mine. I gave my youth and my love and my glory to it, and
 
 306 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 it has given me tears and dust. Don't choose as I chose, lest 
 you should be one day what I am now. Here's your chance 
 of escape take it run out of this city of destruction with 
 your singed garments smelling of fire." 
 
 4 
 
 Ted breakfasted early the next morning, so as to avoid his 
 father, and directly afterwards went out to find Lindsay. He 
 found her in the fin-de-siecle drawing-room on the Coney 
 Banks, pinning on a straw hat in front of a small copper- 
 framed mirror. 
 
 "I was going out to look for you on the Hill," she said, 
 blushing as he kissed her. 
 
 "I want a good long talk with you," said Ted. "Lindsay, 
 the governor's cut up even worse than I thought." 
 
 "Oh, dear!" 
 
 "He's simply sick he's simply frightfully sick. What does 
 yours say?" 
 
 "Oh, he's pleased, of course. But he won't like your father 
 minding so much. He always wants to be friends with your 
 father, even though he thinks differently about the town." 
 v "Do you think that when he finds my dad's against it, he'll 
 be against it too?" 
 
 "N-n-no. Only, of course, Ted, he doesn't think we're 
 going to be married for ages. He's no idea we want to be mar- 
 ried soon." 
 
 "Oh, Lord! They are a nuisance. I can't think what's upset 
 my governor so. Of course it's a bit awkward, he and your 
 father being cuts on the Town Committee, but he's never 
 meddled with my politics before he's never tried to prevent 
 my coming here it's only the marriage that upsets him." 
 
 "Perhaps he wants you to marry someone else. 
 
 "Whew! I wonder who it is. Miss Lewnes or Miss Lusted 
 or Miss Benbow Help! No, if you ask me, he's set against
 
 THE MAYOR OF DEAD MAN'S TOWN 307 
 
 the idea of my marrying at all. He says I'm too young." 
 
 "And I suppose he thinks I'm a wretched cradle-snatcher." 
 
 "I don't know what he thinks I can't make him out. 
 There's only one thing I'm sure of and that is that he doesn't 
 know anything about love." 
 
 Lindsay nodded her head wisely. 
 
 "You should have heard the arguments he brought up 
 against my marrying you," continued Ted "cold, materialistic, 
 trumpery and he actually said that if I went abroad for three 
 months I'd forget all about you. He can't ever have been in 
 love in his life." 
 
 "Well, I daresay people didn't fall in love when he was 
 young at least not like us. They were afraid of their 
 passions." 
 
 "Early Victorians!" 
 
 "Yes, that's just it. You can't imagine an Early Victorian 
 falling violently in love with anyone ... it would be all crino- 
 lines and antimacassars. You know what this drawing-room 
 used to be like before I took it in hand you can't imagine 
 anyone making love in it." 
 
 "But your father loved your mother I've often heard how 
 devoted he was to her." 
 
 "Yes he's never been the same man since her death. But 
 I expect they were an exception; I can't think that your 
 father " 
 
 "No, dear, nor can I. If he'd ever been in love he'd have 
 understood better about you and me." 
 
 "But he Ted, he can't prevent us marrying?" 
 
 "Of course he can't. It isn't even as if I was dependent on 
 him we can easily manage on what I've got, and on what 
 I'll make besides." 
 
 "Oh, my dear, won't it be wonderful!" 
 
 They were crouching together on the hearth-rug, in front of 
 the small spring fire. The sunshine poured down on them 
 through the big bow window over which now no curtains
 
 308 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 drooped, and dusted their hair and faces with a queer golden 
 bloom. Lindsay shuffled closer to him on her knees, and her 
 arms stole round his neck, drawing his cheek down to hers. 
 
 "Ted let's talk about it ... when we're married." 
 
 "Shall you tell your father?" 
 
 "No," said Lindsay wisely ''I think not not until after- 
 wards. He might be worried, you know your father so set 
 against it, and all that. But afterwards, when it's happened 
 and he can't do anything, then I don't think he'll mind." 
 
 "When is it going to happen, Lindsay?" 
 
 There was silence for a moment, the two dark heads, pow- 
 dered with sunshine, seemed to fuse together in the golden light. 
 The sunshine was so bright that all colours were drunk up in it 
 only a golden boy and girl knelt together among the dancing 
 motes. 
 
 "Ted, darling let's have it soon." 
 
 His arm was round her waist, and drew her close, with the 
 timid, thrilling pressure she loved so in Ted Monypenny. 
 
 "It must be soon things will only get worse if we wait." 
 
 "I've been thinking. Next week, you know, I go to Louisa's. 
 Couldn't you make some excuse to go up to town, and we'd be 
 married then? It would be much easier than going off together 
 from here." 
 
 "Yes . . ." 
 
 She looked up sharply. 
 
 "Why do you say 'yes' like that? Didn't you mean it to be 
 so soon?" 
 
 He had not meant it to be so soon, but he could not tell 
 her. 
 
 "It's only this you see, dear, I'm helping your father or- 
 ganize a campaign against day excursions. There's a big 
 meeting to come off next month, and " 
 
 "Ted!" 
 
 "My darling " She had slipped from his arm, and knelt 
 
 upright before him.
 
 THE MAYOR OF DEAD MAN'S TOWN 309 
 
 "You don't mean to say you're thinking about that now?" 
 
 "Why not? I've got to think of it. Of course, I ..." he 
 hesitated. He could not tell her how the day before he had re- 
 nounced his career and Marlingate for her sake. "Well, I feel 
 I want to do just that much first. If only I could knock out 
 those beastly day excursions, then I'd feel I'd at least done 
 something for Marlingate before I left it." 
 
 "But what does Marlingate matter? Oh, Ted you don't 
 mean to say you care for Marlingate more than me?" 
 
 "Of course not" and he laughed with knowing bitterness, 
 "but I don't want to leave this particular job I mean, it's 
 partly for your father's sake, and and " 
 
 "If it's only a silly old meeting, surely you could speak at it 
 after we're married. You'd have to come down from Oxford, 
 anyhow." 
 
 "You don't understand, dear. When I marry you, I'm out 
 of Marlingate for a time, at any rate. I've had to choose 
 between you and Marlingate, and I've chosen you, and I'd 
 rather have you than anything else in the world." 
 
 "And yet you want to postpone our marriage for a wretched 
 meeting." 
 
 "It isn't only the meeting it's the whole campaign." 
 
 "When did you mean to get married, then?" 
 
 "I thought early in the Vac." 
 
 "Anything may have happened by then, and anyhow Father 
 will be in town, and I shan't be any longer at Louisa's. It'll 
 be hopeless, I tell you . . . and all for this stupid Marlingate." 
 
 "Lindsay, you don't know what this town means to me." 
 
 "It means more than me, anyway." 
 
 She was crying now, with bowed sun-smitten head. 
 
 "I've cheapened myself," she sobbed "I'm more eager for 
 our marriage than you are. I've been forward, and begged you 
 to marry me sooner than you care to. ... I've shown you that 
 I want you more than you want me. I'm doing all the offering 
 and the giving. ..."
 
 310 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 ''Lindsay, don't . . ." he cried, swallowing his own tears, and 
 seized her with a new tender roughness, dragging her up against 
 him, and fondling and kissing her so that her pretty hair was 
 loosed "don't Lindsay. Forgive me. . . . I've been a beast. 
 We'll be married next week I want you far more than you 
 want me." 
 
 "More than you want Marlingate?" 
 
 "A hundred times more." 
 
 "Oh, Ted, I'm a fool, but I thought . . ." 
 
 "Then you were a fool. I only meant oh, never mind what 
 I meant. Marlingate can go to blazes. I don't care about 
 anything but you. Come, Lindsay, my precious darling come 
 away. We're going to show these early Victorian people what 
 love is." 
 
 5 
 
 During the ten days or so before his return to Oxford, Ted 
 and his father did not exchange a single word about their dif- 
 ferences. There was now and then a little conversational 
 prowling, but neither was inclined to tackle. Ted felt sad 
 and estranged he had always admired his father, and thought 
 it cruel that he should now be separated from him in the two 
 most vital matters of his life. Somehow, he did not feel the 
 same need of his mother's sympathy, warmer and readier as it 
 was. Fanny's sympathy lacked that definiteness which would 
 have made it a support. Also he knew that no matter how 
 softly she might speak or how much she might seem to under- 
 stand, in her heart she was with his father, humbly sure of his 
 wisdom. 
 
 "Your father must know best, dear," she said more than 
 once. 
 
 Monypenny, on his side, was more fretted by the tension 
 of those days than he would care to admit. He wanted to know 
 how matters stood with Ted. Had he definitely chosen? 
 What was he going to do? Sometimes he grew furious at the
 
 THE MAYOR OF DEAD MAN'S TOWN 311 
 
 boy's silence. How dared he shut up his mind so that his 
 father could not read it? He was tempted to tear open those 
 sealed covers after all, it would be easy enough to bully Ted. 
 But he was withheld by many restraints. He felt unequal to 
 the pain of another discussion, to a further revelation of this 
 love which wounded him with its ignorance and its sweetness. 
 Besides, he knew how matters would end Ted would marry 
 Lindsay; he would have told his father if he had decided other- 
 wise. His silence meant perseverance in his choice, planning 
 for its fulfilment. He was often out, and often alone he was 
 planning his escape, his freedom. Monypenny ought to be glad, 
 for now he would be free to finish his life's work; there would 
 no longer be any danger of a serious opposition to his plans. 
 Besides, this boy whom he loved would be free of the snare in 
 which he himself had been taken ; he would not lie" broken in 
 the streets of Dead Man's Town ... his father's heart ought 
 to rejoice at his escape, and yet that heart was human enough 
 to be torn with a human jealousy at the sight of his son 
 treading the free road his own feet would never know. 
 
 It was characteristic of them both that he never discussed 
 the situation with Fanny. He briefly informed her of it, and 
 listened in silence to the few comments she had to make. 
 Fanny was inwardly grieved that her husband should oppose 
 her son in this as well as in less understandable town matters. 
 She was a little afraid of Lindsay Becket, whose hard, shining 
 ways abashed her, but if Ted loved her it seemed cruel that he 
 should be denied. However, she was far too loyal to Mony- 
 penny to admit the smallest exaggeration or unreasonableness 
 in his opposition. She made some feeble efforts to persuade 
 her son into a submissive mood, and resolutely silenced Sue 
 Vidler the only person with whom she was ever emphatic 
 when, chiefly from a scaffolding of overhead phrases, she tried 
 to discuss the matter and attach the blame she thought due. 
 
 Lindsay went up to London on thej twelfth of May to stay 
 with her half-sister Louisa, and Ted returned to Oxford two
 
 312 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 days later. He seemed to become anxious and low-spirited di- 
 rectly Lindsay went away, and Monypenny almost contempt- 
 uously compared his attitude with his own towards the absences 
 of Morgan. He had never moped or pined in the midst of his 
 certainties, which were as great in her absence as in her pres- 
 ence. He might have written to her sadly of the lonely Mayor 
 in Tamarisk Town, but only the poet in him had lamented, 
 seeking beauty in sorrow since, through her, he had learned 
 to find beauty everywhere. 
 
 But Ted's unhappiness was not due merely or chiefly to 
 the weakness of a love unable to sustain itself away from the 
 loved object it was due to the rising up of emotions which 
 in the presence of Lindsay he had been able to keep submerged. 
 He felt the reproach of Marlingate. There was no use telling 
 himself that his desertion was only temporary, that he would 
 come back and bring more power with him. The fact stood 
 that he was deserting the town in its hour of utmost need. 
 Another year, even, and he might have put the Opposition on 
 its legs. ... Of course Becket would still be there, but he 
 knew quite well that Becket was a potterer and a blunderer, 
 with no definite party, no loyal supporters just a vexatious 
 branch in the torrent of Progress, which would soon rush him 
 out of its way. In a few years from now, probably, the harm 
 would have been done and Marlingate trodden into the mud 
 of a vulgar policy. 
 
 Sometimes his heart was as hot against his father for his 
 municipal as for his matrimonial opposition he showed him- 
 self as wrong-headed in the one as in the other, and acted, it 
 seemed to Ted, more out of character. What was his father 
 doing, asked the boy, in this galley of Lewneses and Lusteds? 
 he who might have steered the town like a stately ship 
 through all the shoals of its adversity. He was indifferent, he 
 was callous, he was materialistic, he was cynical his attitude 
 towards the town was much the same as his attitude towards 
 love.
 
 THE MAYOR OF DEAD MAN'S TOWN 313 
 
 But his reproach of his father was really only a part of his 
 own self-reproach, during those days when he was alone with 
 Marlingate, making his excuses and farewells. Sometimes he 
 felt that it was thoughtless of Lindsay to have left him like this 
 alone with her rival, and his anger surged against her, too. But 
 of course Lindsay did not consider the town seriously as a 
 rival the thought would seem to her preposterous she ac- 
 cepted his offering of it to her as something trivial and foregone, 
 with less excitement than she accepted his engagement ring. 
 She priced herself at his town, and called it giving herself 
 to him. 
 
 6 
 
 About a week after Ted had left for Oxford, Monypenny 
 had a letter from him, with the London post-mark. It was 
 brought to him as he sat in his study, examining some plans 
 of Lusted 's for a fresh street in New Marlingate. This was to 
 be a street of small "High Art" houses, such as were now be- 
 ginning to crop up in various suburbs. "High Art" with Lusted 
 stood for a lavish use of rough-cast embedded with small 
 pebbles. It was hoped that these houses would put vigour into 
 the rather languishing finances of the Braybrooke Farm Estate 
 Syndicate. They were to run, bow-shaped, from the London 
 Road across to Rye Lane, and were to be called climactically 
 Monypenny Crescent. "These 'ouses I look upon as my chay 
 doover," Lusted had said when he brought the plans; "these 
 'ull strike the Note. Always the very latest styles, that's our 
 motto in Marlingate. We go ahead with the times not like 
 some people. Once it was areas, now it's art for art's sake. 
 That's why I think as it 'ud be only fitting if this lot was 
 named after you, Mayor." 
 
 Monypenny worked on for some minutes, with Ted's letter 
 lying beside him on the table. Then he began to wonder why 
 he was writing to him from London. He tore the envelope,
 
 3H TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 which was addressed in delicate, artistic handwriting, rather 
 like his own, but without his Victorian slant. 
 
 "79 Brunswick Square, 
 
 London, W. C. 
 "May 23, 1891. 
 "My dear Father, 
 
 "You won't be at all pleased when you get this, but of course 
 I must write and tell you. Lindsay and I were married four 
 days ago. We went to Dartmoor for a three days' honey- 
 moon, and then came here, where we have taken rooms. No 
 one knows what we have done except Lindsay's sister Louisa, 
 whom we had to tell, as Lindsay was staying with her when 
 I came up. Today my wife is writing to her father and I am 
 writing to you. I hope you won't be very much displeased, 
 but I can hardly expect it. You will probably think me un- 
 grateful, and of course after this I don't expect any further 
 help from you. I am not going back to Oxford. I'm afraid 
 you will never understand my motives and will think the worst 
 of us both, but I wish I could make you realise what it is to 
 love anyone as I love Lindsay. I'd give up everything for her 
 much more than I have. Please tell Mother not to worry. I 
 am quite all right. I have my two hundred a year from Uncle 
 Vidler, and I mean to do some writing and journalism. You 
 know I had a thing taken by the Savoy last year, and now I'm 
 starting an article on 'Coptic Architecture' which might do for 
 Temple Bar. My wife feels sure her father won't be angry 
 at our marriage, though of course he'll feel annoyed and un- 
 comfortable if you don't come round. I hope for his sake as 
 well as ours you'll forgive us. 
 
 "Ever your affectionate son, 
 
 "EDWARD MONYPENNY." 
 
 Monypenny's mouth drew itself into a gash across his face. 
 "If I don't come round . . . hopes I'll forgive them for 
 Becket's sake that's rather good."
 
 THE MAYOR OF DEAD MAN'S TOWN 315 
 
 He stood up, for the room had suddenly grown stifling. 
 
 "But he's out of the way. I've no one against me now 
 that counts. He's thrown up the sponge . . . he's gone . . . 
 I've cleared the field . . . nothing can stop me now. . . ." 
 
 He had reached the window, and threw it open. He was 
 suffocating, and his head was swimming, so that the red roofs of 
 Marlingate spun like a fiery ball among the trees of the Town 
 Park. Then he tore at his collar, and fell heavily against 
 the wainscot. 
 
 7 
 
 Dr. Cooper told him that he had valvular disease of the 
 heart. For a long time he had been over-working, over-strain- 
 ing himself, and now at last his heart was going to teach him 
 what old age meant. He was only sixty-one, but all his life 
 had been one long expending of himself, an outpouring of him- 
 self all the more passionate because so quiet, so restrained 
 into either love or hate. He had paid the price of too ardent 
 seeking, and was now to watch the wild ass's skin of life shrivel 
 up in the scorching of his desire. 
 
 He would have been glad if he could have felt that his 
 purpose was achieved; but he could not believe that he had 
 brought Marlingate to the point when he could lift his hand 
 from it, and leave it to rot with its own decays. It could still 
 be saved he must not die till he had put it beyond the hope 
 of redemption. Then he would be glad to die. 
 
 For some weeks after his fainting fit he was kept in the 
 house, either in his bed or on the sofa. Those days reminded 
 him of his illness twenty-five years ago, the only other serious 
 illness he had had. But now he lay with a glow of anticipation 
 on his hollow cheeks, and his eyes bright with the sight of the 
 journey's end. As then, he gazed out of the window at Dead 
 Man's Town, but its grimace no longer appalled him he had 
 grown used to it in all these years.
 
 316 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 Up and down 
 
 In Dead Man's Town. . . . 
 
 So he still went in dreams, but here again the horror had 
 left him, for as his footsteps rang in the empty grass-grown 
 streets and the tamarisks writhed out from the bursting walls 
 and pushed up the breaking roofs, he was always comforted by 
 a dim sense of companionship, as of a presence in the next 
 street . . . round the next corner . . . whom someday he 
 would meet and embrace in the desert of the town, which would 
 then straightway become the City of God, with streets of pure 
 gold, filled with girls and boys. . . . 
 
 It was characteristic of his illness that he should dream re- 
 markably. 
 
 His seclusion spared him some of the gossip and excitement 
 that ran about the town. Marlingate fermented with the news 
 of Ted and Lindsay's marriage. People remembered that the 
 bride's mother had also married romantically ; the bridegroom's 
 father, on the other hand, had made but a stuffy marriage 
 no wonder he had taken to his bed on hearing that his son had 
 stampeded his dear conventions. His Councillors called on 
 him respectfully. Among them came Becket. At first Mony- 
 penny refused to see him, but on the next occasion consented, 
 feeling that an interview was inevitable and had better be done 
 with as soon as possible. 
 
 Becket began by being conciliatory, but stiffened in the chill 
 of Monypenny's formal, hostile attitude. 
 
 "You must remember that you took my son from me many 
 years ago, when you turned him against me in town politics. 
 This is only the consequence of your treachery then." 
 
 "Treachery? Come, come, Monypenny, that's a strong 
 word. I did nothing whatever to turn the boy against you 
 ... on the contrary. But I couldn't prevent him seeing what 
 was in front of his nose." 
 
 "No. Why should you? But don't let's discuss that aspect
 
 THE MAYOR OF DEAD MAN'S TOWN 317 
 
 of the matter any more. The point is that my son has married 
 your daughter in direct defiance of my wishes." 
 
 "And of mine." 
 
 "Of your knowledge, not of your wishes." 
 
 "Hang it all, Monypenny. You're grossly insolent. Are 
 you suggesting that my daughter isn't a good enough match for 
 your son?" 
 
 "I suggest nothing of the kind. My objection is for quite 
 different and I may say, quite obvious reasons." 
 
 "Because we're opposed on the Town Committee? I shouldn't 
 have thought that could divide two old friends like us." 
 
 "The matter goes deeper than the Town Committee, and 
 an alliance between our families is now most undesirable." 
 
 "Yes, I know we've split gone apart. It isn't my fault, 
 and I thank God my dear Morgan didn't live to see it. It 
 would have broken her heart she always thought a lot of you. 
 We're estranged . . . and I thought perhaps this marriage 
 ... oh, I've a feeling she would have blessed it; perhaps she 
 blesses it now. Monypenny, for her sake . . ." 
 
 Monypenny did not answer. 
 
 "Well," continued Becket angrily, "since you persist in this 
 unnatural quarrel, you mustn't blame me if I ignore you en- 
 tirely and do my best for the young people. I can't do much 
 all my money's in this town, and if things get worse . . . 
 my only comfort is that if I'm broke, you'll be broke, too. 
 That's what you're riding for, and you must see it now, though 
 you're too proud to own it. If you hadn't driven that boy of 
 yours out of Marlingate he might have helped us pull things 
 up a bit. But I'm glad he's gone glad he's out of it. Yes, 
 when I look round and see all the mess and the wickedness, 
 I'm glad the children have escaped, and there's only us old men 
 left to face the smash." 
 
 "Yes," said Monypenny, "we're all old men now."
 
 318 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 8 
 
 Monypenny was well enough to attend the Town Committee 
 meeting in June. He would have attended even against his 
 doctor's orders, for at this meeting the matter of Day Excur- 
 sions was to come up for final discussion. Becket had rallied 
 his few supporters for a last forlorn stand. His anti-excursion 
 campaign had been a failure it had lacked vigour, clearness 
 and organisation and had moreover been hustled into a few 
 weeks; for the Progressives were moving more quickly than 
 the Opposition had bargained for they had expected, es- 
 pecially since Monypenny's illness, that the matter would be 
 allowed to stand over till the following Spring, and were then 
 surprised to find that the enemy had taken advantage of them 
 and meant to act at once. Becket wrote earnestly to Ted, 
 begging him to come and address the chief Opposition meeting 
 at the Concert Hall, but Ted belonged to Lindsay now, and 
 Lindsay would not give him up to Marlingate even for a single 
 day. They had been married scarcely a month, and he was 
 very much in love. . . . "He felt that it was unseemly that, 
 after what had happened, he should appear on a public platform 
 to speak against his father." . . . "He thought it as well to 
 keep clear of borough politics for a bit. Of course, later on, 
 he hoped to take his part in them again." By such phrases 
 poor old Becket read that his chief supporter had forsaken him. 
 
 It happened, however, that the Committee meeting did not 
 open badly for the Opposition. The first item on the agenda 
 was a complaint by Pelham, acting as spokesman for many of 
 the better-class visitors and residents, as to the increasing vul- 
 garity of the Marlingate Courier, For some years this paper, 
 under the editorship of Benbow, had been more and more 
 closely approximating itself to common journalism, as distinct 
 from the elevated and refined conceptions which journalism 
 used to involve in Marlingate. Benbow had introduced ribald 
 competitions, unsavoury reports of cases without the frontiers
 
 THE MAYOR OF DEAD MAN'S TOWN 319 
 
 of Marlingate's selectness, and even, it must be confessed, 
 within them, and finally a medical column, which was now the 
 cause of offence. In this column, and in the "Answers to Cor- 
 respondents" belonging to it, parts and organs of the human 
 body were taken out of the polite wrappings of periphrasis in 
 which local delicacy had kept them for so long, and at once 
 lightly and boldly tossed out on pages that were read at every 
 breakfast-table. And worse had followed. This week, said Pel- 
 ham, the following answer had appeared to "Anxious Dora": 
 "You are certainly pregnant." Was this, he asked the Town 
 Committee, as husbands and fathers, to be allowed to go on? 
 
 "When I see this assembly here," continued old Pelham, 
 "when I see our Mayor in his chain of office, when I see our 
 worthy Aldermen and Councillors gathered together in this 
 chamber of so many hallowed associations, I am reminded of 
 another, earlier assembly, when we united to remove what we 
 then considered a stain on the selectness and refinement of our 
 town. I ask you, shall those ears which were chastely outraged 
 at the naming of our central brook then offensive to the 
 genteel as the Gut's Mouth, now as the Marlin graceful even 
 on the lips of our juveniles I ask you, shall those chaste ears 
 tolerate the coarseness I have just read, and allow our local 
 journal, the leader of Marlingate, to to to er er er " 
 
 Old Pelham now often found it too tiring to stand till he 
 had fought a refractory sentence to a finish, so supplemented 
 the inadequacy of speech with a wave of his hand, and sat 
 down. Benbow immediately stood up and vindicated himself 
 in a speech in which the words "plain," "direct," "hypocrisy," 
 "squeamishness," "medical science," and the text "to the pure 
 all things are pure" were repeated very often. Lewnes sup- 
 ported him and said that Marlingate must move with the times. 
 Becket then lifted the Obstructionist voice and expressed his 
 horror that such words as those quoted by Pelham should ever 
 be read by pure, modest women. It was all part of the general 
 deterioration of the town, a side-issue of the Corporation's pol-
 
 320 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 icy of cheapness he hoped that they realised now where "Pro- 
 gress" was leading them. 
 
 Monypenny enquired who was this "Medico" who answered 
 correspondents so unbecomingly. The guilt was finally fixed 
 on a chemist in Station Road. Then followed a hoarse and 
 violent debate which showed signs of raging on till the end of 
 the meeting and shelving more important business. Mony- 
 penny at last succeeded in stopping it by moving the appoint- 
 ment of a sub-committee to investigate the matter and cross- 
 examine Medico. The question of Day Excursions was then 
 brought forward by Benbow. 
 
 Benbow had made himself unpopular by his share in the 
 Courier scandal. Marlingate, whether Progressive or Obstruc- 
 tionist, was a loyal worshipper of British morality, and it was 
 soon obvious to Monypenny that the spirit of the meeting was 
 hostile to this purveyor of physiological indelicacies. How- 
 ever, in spite of the feeling against him, Benbow spoke vigor- 
 ously, and sketched with clearness and persuasion the plans 
 of the Town Council in combination with the South Eastern 
 Railway. During the Summer whole-day and half-day excur- 
 sions would be run from London, Chatham, Erith, and other 
 large industrial centres. The people thus brought would be the 
 well-to-do class of artisan, who would probably have plenty of 
 money to spend in the town. Of course there would be due 
 precautions against rowdyism. . . . 
 
 "Such as the Pier Tolls," interrupted Cooper, who had hith- 
 erto been considered pretty safe as a Progressive, and an ironic 
 laugh went round the meeting. 
 
 "Why were the Pier Tolls ever abolished?" asked Robert 
 Pelham. "Some of the people landing from the Margaret Belle 
 should never have been allowed to get through." 
 
 "The Pier Tolls wouldn't have kept them out," said Becket; 
 "it's the fundamental idea of excursions that's wrong for this 
 town." 
 
 "Hear! hear!" said one or two voices.
 
 THE MAYOR OF DEAD MAN'S TOWN 321 
 
 "Rot!" cried Lewnes. "If nobody's allowed to come into the 
 blooming place, how are we poor tradesmen going to make 
 money?" 
 
 "It's a bad way to make money throw out the sovereigns 
 and fill up with farthings," said Breeds unexpectedly. 
 
 Monypenny saw that the case was more dangerous than he 
 had anticipated. He must take it in hand at once. He stood 
 up, and according to the long habit of years silence fell upon 
 the meeting. 
 
 "I think you've misconceived the plan," he said, and with a 
 nod to Benbow took up his tale. Thank heaven, he still had 
 his power over these Aldermen and Councillors of Marlingate! 
 His voice was still the voice of the town, and as he spoke he 
 could see the Committee's expression change. It was largely a 
 case of personal power, for he did not fumble issues in his 
 speech. But that terse, unemotional voice had a curious infec- 
 tion of enterprise. When he sat down he knew that once more 
 the spirit of the assembly had changed, that once more it was 
 in bondage to his brain and will. 
 
 There was a moment's silence. Then Becket stood up to do 
 his best for the Opposition. Monypenny scarcely heard him, 
 for all the time he was thinking of what might have happened 
 if the man to oppose him had been his son. Ted, alone in 
 Marlingate, could have undone his father's work, for he alone 
 had his power of words, more diffused yet more ardent. Ted's 
 words could have burnt up his father's words. But he was 
 far away, and here stood poor old Becket, stuttering platitudes. 
 
 The voting came and was close enough. Breeds and the two 
 Pelhams supported Becket, but Cooper had been converted, and 
 he, with Lusted, Lewnes, Smith (a new man), Benbow, and 
 Monypenny carried the motion through.
 
 322 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 About a week later, Fanny had a letter from Ted. His letter 
 to Monypenny had not been answered, and now he wrote to 
 his mother, half-pleadingly, half-reproachfully. He told her 
 that his father-in-law had not treated him as harshly as his 
 father. On the contrary, he had been most generous, and was 
 paying his premium to the architectural firm of Britton & Giles, 
 at whose office in Holborn he was to start work next week. 
 This was extraordinarily generous of the old man, as of course 
 he was not nearly so well off as he used to be. He was also 
 continuing Lindsay's dress allowance of fifty pounds a year, 
 which, small as it was, made an encouraging difference to their 
 income. He said he was sorry he could not do more for them, 
 but of course he was in difficulties himself. . . . 
 
 The implied reproach was not only in Ted's words but in 
 Fanny's voice as she read them aloud to her husband at the 
 breakfast-table. He sat grimly opposite her, applying Glad- 
 stone's rule of mastication to his bacon and eggs. When she 
 had finished reading he picked up his paper without a word. 
 
 "Oh, Edward" . . . she hesitated "aren't you going to say 
 anything? Aren't you going to do anything for them?" 
 
 "Why should I do anything?" 
 
 Fanny nearly faded into silence, but her love for her son 
 gave her still a little substance. 
 
 "Well, he's our boy . . . and it doesn't look well, Becket 
 helping him and us doing nothing." 
 
 "I see no reason why I should help him in his disobedience 
 and defiance of my wishes." 
 
 "But if Becket helps him . . ." 
 
 "Becket is a fool, and as far as I know he did not defy 
 Becket; merely deceived him. Besides, I am even less able to 
 help him than Becket is as you know, there's a mortgage on 
 the entire Gun Garden Estate, which has to be paid off in three 
 years' time. It would grossly incommode me to make even the
 
 THE MAYOR OF DEAD MAN'S TOWN 323 
 
 smallest allowance, and I don't see why I should put myself out 
 for the sake of two obstinate young people who do not consider 
 me in the least. Let them learn to live on two hundred and 
 fifty a year many a couple has set up on less." 
 
 He turned furiously to his paper, and Fanny subsided. His 
 face was white and his hand shook, and she feared that he might 
 have another "attack." But his anger was not chiefly for Ted 
 and Lindsay, as she thought. It was for Marlingate. He saw 
 that once again the town had got the better of him, and this 
 time it had robbed him of his son. Even dying it could slay, 
 and in its last struggle it had torn from him the love which 
 might one day have been his consolation for the love he had 
 lost through its earlier betrayal. In spite of his half- jealous, 
 half-contemptuous attitude towards Ted, he longed to forgive 
 him, to have him back, to give him all the help and sympathy 
 he wanted. But he must deny himself stifle almost the only 
 human emotion he had left. For if he had Ted back, Ted could 
 still save Marlingate. He must keep him away till its last hope 
 of restoration was gone, and he was glad that the demands of 
 office life, with the addition of poverty and disgrace, would 
 keep the young man out of the town probably for some years to 
 come. But it was hard to have to go on paying up to the 
 end like this. 
 
 10 
 
 The Day Excursions measure had been passed through the 
 Town Committee too late to come into operation before August. 
 After the Town Committee had approved it, it had to pass an 
 "open" meeting of the Town Council. But this was an easy 
 matter. The Councillors and chief burgesses were warmly in 
 favour of "popularising" the town. Those signs of decay which 
 they were able to see, they interpreted, under Monypenny's di- 
 rection, as tokens of a general need for "waking up." The Op- 
 position had crumpled up altogether. After his failure in the 
 Town Committee, Becket had lost heart and wiped the dust of
 
 324 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 Marlingate off his respectable boots. He suddenly decided to 
 let his house on the Coney Banks for the summer which he 
 did with great difficulty and at a very low rent to a family of 
 Shadwell Jews that he always felt it on his conscience to have 
 admitted to the town and retired to London, heavy-hearted 
 and disappointed, with a few revengeful hopes centred on the 
 year 1895, when the Gun Garden mortgage expired. Without 
 him Pelham was merely voluble and bewildered, and in the 
 Town Council he and Robert both voted for the Excursions 
 which they had voted and spoken against in the Committee. 
 This left only Breeds to vote against them, which he was much 
 too scared to do. So the measure was passed unanimously. 
 
 Monypenny's feelings on Becket's retirement were strangely 
 mixed. Of course it was opportune, but Becket alone had never 
 been formidable, and now he was gone Monypenny realised 
 that preposterous as it might seem, his presence in the town 
 had always given him a sort of comfort. In spite of their dif- 
 ferences, reinforced on his side by a scarcely-veiled contempt, he 
 had always felt with this old man the supreme link of a memory 
 shared. No one else in Marlingate remembered Morgan as 
 he and Becket remembered her, though Becket's memories of 
 her sometimes aroused his derision, and sometimes his jealousy. 
 Now that the old man was gone it was almost as if he had 
 taken something of Morgan with him not her urging spirit, for 
 that had always been Monypenny's, but stray fragments and 
 scents, that small yet definite part of her which had belonged to 
 the house on the Coney Banks and the drawing-room of the 
 plush-framed mirrors. . . . 
 
 But if Becket's departure was not a relief it was at least 
 a favourable sign. It showed him that the Opposition was 
 routed and Marlingate had lost its last defence. It was beaten 
 now, and all that remained for him to do was to consolidate 
 and secure his victory. Indeed, the Day Excursions seemed to 
 be doing their work even quicker than he had hoped. Every 
 week of that August and September rowdy train-loads of holi-
 
 THE MAYOR OF DEAD MAN'S TOWN 325 
 
 day-makers belched out of Station Road and denied the sanc- 
 tuaries of the Marine Parade and the Town Park. Generally 
 they behaved decently, and the trail of their presence was 
 nothing worse than orange-peel and their shrill, happy voices. 
 But sometimes there were scandals, which borough gossip duly 
 magnified. Besides, shrieks and orange-peel were enough in 
 themselves to frighten the surviving elect among the visitors. 
 One or two unofficial protests were made to the Town Com- 
 mittee, and the Council did their best to suppress rowdyism, 
 but felt that it would be neither diplomatic nor generous to close 
 the town to trippers. The visitors had long ago been filleted 
 of their powerful Hurdicott backbone, and since Becket's re- 
 tirement had been unrepresented on the Town Council. There- 
 fore they had small means of making their indignation felt, ex- 
 cept by packing up and going away, which they did in large 
 numbers. 
 
 But, as the town was as full as ever, their departure did not 
 cause any serious alarm. That Summer was spoken of as a 
 record season, and it a little surprised the borough fathers 
 that none of the Corporation funds seemed to have benefited 
 from the crowds the Aquarium, the Pier, and the Marine 
 Hotel were still going down as fast as ever, though the latter 
 had lowered its prices and took people in at what were prac- 
 tically boarding-house terms. 
 
 It was decided to retrench a little during the coming Winter, 
 and at its September meeting the Town Council considered 
 various plans for the turning of the new Summer boom to its 
 financial advantage. Lewnes aired more openly than he had 
 ever dared before, his long-standing grievance against the 
 Winter season. What was the use, he urged, of wasting the 
 Corporation's money on Winter attractions? People had given 
 up coming to Marlingate in the Winter fashions changed, and 
 it was now the fashion to go to the South of France, and to 
 Switzerland 
 
 "And Bulverhythe," suggested someone.
 
 326 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 Bulverhythe didn't matter it was only a village, where a 
 few cranks went every Winter for their health. 
 
 "The Hurdicotts go there," persisted the voice, which was 
 Robert Pelham's. No one even knew which side the Pelhams 
 would take at any meeting. They apparently suffered from 
 chronic bewilderment. 
 
 Lewnes pointed out that the Hurdicotts were stuffy and su- 
 perior. They wanted a town built for themselves. Now this 
 Summer had shown them that people like that were not the 
 people to cater for. He, personally, would never forget that 
 Summer the happy crowds that had filled the town and made 
 it look really alive and up-to-date. The rather uncertain state 
 of local finances was due to the fact that they had not adopted 
 this go-ahead programme long ago. The Corporation must now 
 see the folly of sacrificing the Summer to the Winter season. 
 They must advertise, advertise, advertise, and get people down, 
 and give them something to do when they came. He, no more 
 than anyone else, liked to see people sleeping on the beach or on 
 benches on the Parade. Now if you had something for them to 
 do or to watch Niggers at the Aquarium, or a Confetti Car- 
 nival on the Pier . . . 
 
 "Where's the money to come from?" asked Robert Pelham 
 querulously. 
 
 "Well, if we didn't waste six or seven hundred pounds on a 
 Winter Orchestra that nobody cares to listen to . . ." 
 
 Then old Pelham jerked totteringly to his feet. 
 
 "I protest!" he cried in his cracked old voice. But patience 
 was short that afternoon. No one was going to listen while 
 the oldest Alderman unfurled his long, flapping arguments. 
 There were one or two new young men on the Town Council, 
 in the place of those who had resigned. These did not know 
 the Marlingate tradition of respect for the borough's rhetorician 
 and for the first time in his life Pelham was howled down.
 
 THE MAYOR OF DEAD MAN'S TOWN 327 
 
 Away in London, among the sooty Georgics of Brunswick 
 Square, Ted Monypenny gathered up rather fumblingly the 
 threads of a new life. He had now been married four months, 
 and was beginning to lose the first terrified wonder of ex- 
 perience. The first weeks of his marriage had almost terrified 
 him with the force of their emotion. All his being seemed to be 
 gathered up into one close knot of feeling. He had never real- 
 ised that it was possible for the heart of man to feel and hold so 
 much. He and Lindsay had met, not as man and woman, but 
 as two clouds of passion, melting into each other. When he 
 was away from her, in the streets or at Britton & Giles's office, 
 her mirage dominated him, scents of her rose out of musty 
 books, the sound of her light feet came in the tread of boys, 
 her eyes looked at him out of other women's faces. When he 
 was with her, she was never close enough ; even when he held 
 her in his arms, she was not close enough she would never be 
 close enough till her being was his being . . . possession was 
 like the mountain top, always one crest beyond. 
 
 Now his feelings were calmer, and he felt relieved, though 
 their calmness came more of their falling back tired than of 
 their having fulfilled their quest. As for Lindsay, she had 
 always been calm cool and smooth. That flying, slanting look 
 never came into her eyes in Brunswick Square. He now saw 
 how like Becket she was in many ways. 
 
 They lived simply, but not uncomfortably. Ted's efforts at 
 journalism were so far a failure, but their tiny income was 
 enough for necessities, and now, thanks to his father-in-law's 
 generosity, he had some prospects of a career. Britton & Giles 
 were not in a particularly flourishing way of business he could 
 not have paid the large premium demanded by a better-class 
 firm but they were sound, and in their office Ted learned to 
 keep and check accounts, write reports, make inspections, and 
 the rest of architectural routine.
 
 328 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 Early in August Becket came up to London. He was tired 
 and depressed, and obviously failing. Ted and Lindsay would 
 sometimes go to see him in the evenings, and smoke and sew 
 while Becket prosed, telling them of the early days of his mar- 
 riage, though they noticed with some concern that his two mar- 
 riages had fused together in his mind, and his poor Emma 
 changed places indiscriminately with his poor Morgan as the 
 heroine of those fresh green days when they walked under the 
 trees at Leamington Spa and her little sunshade was hardly 
 enough to hide her chin from the sun. 
 
 The shock of his final rupture with Marlingate and with 
 Monypenny had much affected him. He missed the old ways of 
 the house on the Coney Banks, and he was worried about his 
 finances. He had put large sums of money into local invest- 
 ments the Pier, the Aquarium, the Marine Hotel, none of 
 which was paying dividends now. It is true that Monypenny 
 paid regularly his interest on the mortgage, but neither that nor 
 the prospect of foreclosure gave him any real satisfaction. The 
 Gun Garden Estate had deteriorated in value like everything 
 else in the town, and he had no wish either to have it on tils 
 hands or to sell it at the sum it was likely to fetch in the open 
 market. 
 
 Ted was depressed by the news of Marlingate. He felt that 
 his father-in-law had put up a poor fight. Yet he could not 
 blame him without blaming himself. He was the real defaulter, 
 not poor old Becket over eighty, muddled, impoverished, dis- 
 appointed, deserted. Ted was busy now with competition work, 
 designing a market-hall for Middenchester. But as he worked 
 at this in his evening freedom, or occasionally during spare time 
 at the office, he would sometimes find a vision coming between 
 him and his elevations, the ghosts of dream-terraces at the back 
 of Marlingate Monypenny Crescent as he and not Lusted 
 would have built it, arching like a rainbow across the north of 
 the town, and receiving into its arc the rays that streamed from 
 the central sun of Pelham Square. So real was this mirage
 
 THE MAYOR OF DEAD MAN'S TOWN 329 
 
 that sometimes he almost felt as if the dream must have some 
 substance in the town, and that if he were to return he would 
 see the goodly frontages of his own streets instead of the 
 mixed brick and stucco of New Marlingate, representing the 
 schism of Lusted and Figg, the paltry scrannel of Vidler Road 
 with its ridiculous carriage-drives to mean front doors or 
 Lusted Avenue, drab and semi-detached, or Benbow Terrace 
 ending in scaffold poles and a tin meeting-house. 
 
 He sometimes upbraided himself for these moments. They 
 were a disloyalty to Lindsay. Much as he loved Marlingate 
 he could not regret that he had refused to pay its price. What 
 was any town of streets, even when vitalised by an artistic and 
 creative impulse, compared to a woman of flesh and blood, and 
 the love of her which is Art Itself and Creation? If he had 
 chosen Marlingate instead of Lindsay he would have renounced 
 the spiritual for the material, heaven for earth, love for dust. 
 So he told himself . . . yet his dream still rose continually 
 between him and his daily bread. 
 
 12 
 
 Spring came to colour and ripen even the Bloomsbury 
 Squares. In the Square gardens the thick rose and white 
 tapers of the horse-chestnut teased young Monypenny with a 
 fragmentary June a June that came only in spasmodic mo- 
 ments, in a scattering of blossoms, in a whorl of hot, golden 
 dust in a drip of laburnum through some chink between the 
 houses, in the stuffy scent of privet in the sun. And it came 
 most mockingly and fragmentarily of all in the painting of the 
 houses, in the ladders and the scaffoldings that were put up, in 
 the smell of the new paint and its wet gleam. For Ted remem- 
 bered the yearly painting of Marlingate chiefly of the white, 
 shining houses on the Marine Parade, but also of the ancient 
 woodwork in the High Street and Fish Street, and on the Coney 
 Banks, where many a tall black house was given its new coat
 
 330 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 of tar. Of late this vernal rite had not been so devoutly cele- 
 brated houses on the Marine Parade were allowed to turn 
 grey before white paint restored them, which gave a patched 
 and streaky look to the line; and on the Coney Banks the big 
 tar blisters swelled and even burst before they were healed with 
 a new wash; but there was still plenty of house-painting done 
 here and there, and Ted always connected Spring with the 
 painters' men in their white aprons, carrying their splashed 
 boards and buckets, and the rich, sickening smell of the wet 
 paint, and the chalk warning scrawled on step or pavement. It 
 seemed almost an insult that Brunswick Square, or Torrington 
 Square, or Russell Square, or Bedford Square, or Montague 
 Square should paint itself and gleam and smell like Mar- 
 lingate. 
 
 In the evening Brunswick Square would sometimes insult him 
 further, for it would drape itself in a dusky stillness, in which 
 its Georgian outlines stood grey against the pink, blurred sky, 
 and then it would put on a queer, haunting look of Marlingate, 
 with bow windows and columned doorways and crinkled roofs. 
 He could hardly bear it when it looked like that, and the scent 
 of its horse-chestnut trees came to him like the scent of the 
 Town Park, and the scent of its new-painted houses like the 
 scent of the Marine Parade when the Summer season was at 
 hand. . . . 
 
 He found himself pathetically hungry for news. This came 
 to him either through Becket's letters his fragmentary cor- 
 respondence with Pelham and Breeds or from Fanny, who 
 occasionally shook into her letters a few stray crumbs of 
 borough news, as one who has dined well, on rising shakes care- 
 lessly the crumbs from his lap, not realising what these may 
 mean to the dogs who cannot eat the children's bread. 
 
 "We had great doing yesterday," she wrote in June; "it was 
 the first big excursion of this season, and the town was full of 
 people, from Erith I think they came. They arrived about 
 eleven, all with buttonholes, and walked up and down the
 
 THE MAYOR OF DEAD MAN'S TOWN 331 
 
 Parade singing. Your father took me out to see them. Some 
 of the visitors were shocked, and would not stay on the Parade 
 while they were there. Then they all went and had dinner. 
 Some were rich enough to go to the Marine Hotel, and the 
 others went to the shops Sinden's was quite full. They ate up 
 nearly everything there was in the town. After dinner some 
 of them got drunk, and they danced in the High Street, and 
 some went to sleep on the beach and on the benches on the 
 Parade. I believe a good many of the visitors do not like it, 
 but they say the town has never been so full as it is this year." 
 
 The greater part of her letter was about Monypenny. He 
 was not well and would not take care of himself. He 
 had had another sharp attack of fainting, pain and breathless- 
 ness, and yet he had insisted on going to a Town Council meet- 
 ing within four days. He was very busy now about a Watch 
 Committee he and Pelham were setting up the idea had 
 been started by something shocking which had appeared in the 
 Marlingate Courier. 
 
 Ted crumpled the letter, and tossed the ball into the fender. 
 He and Lindsay were sitting at their breakfast. 
 
 "What is it, dear?" asked Lindsay smoothly from behind the 
 coffee pot. Ted felt a sudden spasm of annoyance at the sight 
 of her sleek hair, so carefully brushed, with the neat fringe 
 upon her forehead. To match his mood she should have been 
 dishevelled, and in protest and example he rubbed his own 
 hair violently the wrong way. 
 
 "What's the matter, dear?" she asked, if anything a little 
 more evenly. 
 
 "Marlingate I'm worried about it." 
 
 "Of course so are we all." 
 
 "You're not." 
 
 Lindsay raised her eyebrows. 
 
 "Of course I am." 
 
 "Damn it! I tell you you're not." 
 
 Lindsay dropped her napkin in surprise, and stared at him.
 
 332 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 "Ted!" 
 
 "I'm sorry but really this sort of thing makes me desperate. 
 You don't seem to mind I believe you enjoy this dreadful 
 life." 
 
 "This dreadful life? What do you mean?" 
 
 "Well, is it a life for a man? ... cut off from the work 
 that he ought to be doing, and which is being smashed to pieces 
 while he's away." 
 
 "Ted, you can't mean to say you're . . . sorry?" 
 
 All her calmness was gone now. She sprang to her feet, 
 and went up to him, drawing his rough head to her shoulder. 
 
 "Of course I don't mean that," he murmured, contrite. "I 
 shall always be glad I married you always glad. But I'm 
 sorry for other things. ... I can't help it." 
 
 Lindsay did not answer, and he felt her warm mouth seeking 
 his own. He turned his head and gave her his lips, but all the 
 time that they clung together in that long kiss, which had ended 
 and would end so many arguments, he was conscious of a 
 barrier between them, the same barrier that was between him 
 and his work the streets of a dream, the breadth of Mar- 
 lingate. 
 
 13 
 
 August lay in a golden haze over the sea, in gold dust on 
 the streets, in golden clumps of sunflowers and dahlias in the 
 gardens. The scent of hops and corn came townwards from the 
 weald, sometimes carried in the carts that bore the queer names 
 of wealden farms into Marlingate. Monypenny, walking on 
 the shady side of the street, and using his stick less ornamen- 
 tally than of old, found the town air stifling, and sometimes 
 snuffed impatiently at the country smells. He caught him- 
 self in useless longings to follow these carts, cut through the 
 Warrior's Gate, through the dingy suburban spread of New 
 Marlingate, to the "Odiam" or "Worge" or "Moon's Green" or 
 "Spell Land," lettered on them. But the days were gone when
 
 THE MAYOR OF DEAD MAN'S TOWN 333 
 
 he could have walked so far, and when he could have walked 
 he had not cared to go. He wondered whether, if he had lived 
 in the country, his life would have been different whether, for 
 instance, it would have been happy. Surely in the country 
 there were no hungry ambitions to swallow up a man's soul. 
 Yet he could not help feeling that even from Odiam or Spell 
 Land he would at last have drifted to Marlingate, for without 
 Marlingate he would not have been Monypenny. Marlingate 
 was part of Monypenny, no matter how he fought it and hated 
 it it was part of his being, and he was part of its dust. 
 
 His feelings toward it were beginning to be less hostile, as a 
 man relents towards a beaten enemy. Marlingate had betrayed 
 him both as lover and as father he had built it at the price 
 of the woman he loved, he had destroyed it at the price of his 
 only son. But he had won the battle he lived and it was dead. 
 Tamarisk Town which had gleamed like a crystal bowl beside 
 the sea was now a dishonoured vessel, the wash-pot of trippers. 
 He had grimed it and cracked it and thrown it into the gutter, 
 where it would soon be trodden to pieces. 
 
 His chief hope for the future was in Lewnes. He trusted 
 Lewnes to carry on his work after he was gone. It made him 
 smile ironically to think that he should ever live to thank 
 heaven for Lewnes he who had always despised the Alderman. 
 As a matter of fact he despised him still. Lewnes was deputy- 
 Mayor that year. 
 
 "What we want in this town," said he, "is something to 
 make people sit up. They're a sleepy lot for the most part, the 
 High Street people. I'm glad we're getting some new blood on 
 the Council with that young Ellam. Now we ought to go ahead. 
 That's what pays to go ahead, and move with the times. I've 
 always said that, 'aven't I?" 
 
 "You have, indeed." 
 
 "Now, come, Mayor, I know you ain't the one for throwing 
 bookays, but tell me, just as an old friend boys together, we 
 were haven't I been your right-hand man on the Council all
 
 334 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 the way through? I've helped you to go ahead when everyone 
 else was for hanging back whether it was building the Parade 
 or asking Sophia of Worcester down, or having a Pier or Day 
 Excursions or anythink. It's always been me that have sup- 
 ported you and stuck by you against Pelham or Becket or any 
 such-like old pudding-heads." 
 
 Monypenny made him a courtly little bow. 
 
 "I can certainly say, my dear Lewnes, that I could never 
 have made this town what it is if it had not been for you 
 and I look to you to carry on my work after I am gone." 
 
 "Oh, don't talk of going, Mayor. You're not going to leave 
 us now for a long while yet. Quite a boy, you are only 
 sixty-two. But if ever you got tired of being Mayor for every- 
 one knows you're Mayor of this town as long as you choose to 
 be and thought you'd like a bit of a rest in the evening of 
 life, well then . . ." and he blew himself out. 
 
 "When I retire I shall certainly express a wish that you may 
 succeed me." 
 
 "That's kind of you, Mayor that's friendly. I can promise 
 to carry on the work on your lines. After all, you've almost 
 done the job. It makes my 'eart proud to see Marlingate this 
 Summer so full you could hardly squeeze an extra child into 
 it. At one time I thought we were going to have things spoiled 
 for us by Becket, and you'll pardon me saying so your young 
 man. But now Becket's gone home sulky, and your young 
 gentleman's found something better to do. Of course I'm sorry 
 that's happened, but boys will be boys, and it ain't a bad 
 thing that he should go away just when he was beginning to 
 make mischief. He'll come back, never fear, in a more sensible 
 and go-ahead frame of mind. And now we've got no Opposi- 
 tion, not that counts. There's only old Pelham, and ten 
 months out of the twelve he don't know what he is he's get- 
 ting doddery, poor old chap." 
 
 "I've made him chairman of the Watch Committee. That 
 seems in his line, and ought to relieve his feelings a bit."
 
 THE MAYOR OF DEAD MAN'S, TOWN 335 
 
 "Yes, that Courier business upset him and Robert. Egad! 
 Benbow was a fool. But now we've started a Watch Commit- 
 tee ... first-class idea of mine, that, wasn't it?" 
 
 As a matter of fact the idea of a Watch Committee had 
 been Monypenny's, but he had managed to let it appear as 
 Lewnes's, even to the Alderman himself. He had seen how the 
 establishment of a Watch Committee would perpetuate the 
 Courier scandal, besides giving Marlingate a reputation it had 
 so far done nothing to earn. He could hear people talking 
 "Marlingate an awful place they've had to set up a Watch 
 Committee there awful state of affairs." So he had suggested 
 forming the sub-committee appointed to investigate the Benbow 
 outrage into a definite Watch. It consisted of Pelham, Cooper, 
 Lewnes and Lusted, and would, he felt sure, soon make the 
 name of Marlingate to stink throughout the realm. 
 
 13 
 
 The September of that year was an empty month. As soon 
 as the excursions stopped, after the first week, the town had a 
 desolate look, for the visitors survived only in casual groups, 
 dotted forlornly about the beach, lurking in corners of the 
 Marine Gardens, or scattered sparsely over the Parade. There 
 had always been one empty month in the year November, 
 when the last of the Summer visitors was gone, and the first 
 Winter patron had not come. During November Marlingate 
 had briskly cleaned and prepared itself, for it knew that there 
 would be no further leisure till November came round again. 
 Even Spring-painting and Spring-cleaning could not keep 
 Spring visitors away. But early in the town's decline, Novem- 
 ber had enlarged itself, its emptiness overflowing into October 
 and at last into December. Then a gap appeared in the Spring 
 season. March became an empty month and matched Novem- 
 ber; and now the void spread up and down both sides of the 
 year, from September to Christmas, and from February to June.
 
 336 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 It was even rumoured that this year the two converging chan- 
 nels would flow together and wipe out the Winter season. 
 There was to be no orchestra, for the Corporation were saving 
 money to spend on an even more successful Summer. Great 
 schemes of advertisement were afoot at Charing Cross and 
 at Victoria hectic posters should call "Come to sunny Mar- 
 lingate" after Hurdicotts and Papillons and Lincolns and Ful- 
 leyloves on their way to Eastbourne and Brighton and Bulver- 
 hythe. 
 
 Monypenny felt relieved to find peace in the town again. 
 The Summer had tried him, in spite of its promise, and now 
 he was glad to be able to make his way unjostled along the 
 pavements, or sit in the Town Park, in the misty Autumn sun- 
 shine, without being forced to contemplate banana skins and 
 sprawling couples. He spent his time, on the whole, quietly, for 
 he was very tired. But sometimes queer explosions of energy 
 would send him walking out of the town, not out to the farms 
 he dreamed of, but to places within easier reach. He visited 
 Old Rumble, where the house now stood empty, for the mean 
 streets of the Totty Lands had crept up to its park palings, 
 forming a new, less picturesque America Ground, through which 
 it was hardly safe to walk alone at night. He visited the woods 
 where he had gone with Morgan, by Harold's Plat and the 
 Rumble Brook. He seemed to see himself slinking through the 
 trees, the young Monypenny, leaving his prosperous town be- 
 hind him, going out to meet a love that was the sunshine and 
 colour and secret of the woods. . . . 
 
 One day he went westward over Spitalman's Down, and, 
 looking towards the sunset, saw in the distance how the town of 
 Bulverhythe was growing. He could see the dim shapes of 
 large buildings, mansions and hotels, the spire of a new church, 
 the important outlines of gasworks and water-works. Only 
 twenty years ago, when Marlingate was in its prime, Bulver- 
 hythe had been a quiet little village a mile from the sea. Then 
 suddenly it had stirred, the sap of ambition had run into it,
 
 THE MAYOR OF DEAD MAN'S TOWN 337 
 
 and it had grown as far as the beach. Large barracks had been 
 built near it and helped its life it had spread and flourished 
 and fattened, and now people who came to Marlingate no 
 longer went to Bulveryhythe and spoke well of its liveliness and 
 fashion. 
 
 As he watched it there, melting into the red western light, 
 Monypenny felt almost a pang of longing and regret such as 
 many years ago the Mayor of Belgarswick might have felt 
 when he looked towards Marlingate. There lay the town that 
 was to supplant him, the town of the future, the town with all 
 its history before it instead of behind. He wondered what the 
 Mayor of Bulverhythe felt as he looked at his town. It was 
 a fine thing to be Mayor of a thriving town. ... It was a great 
 thing to build a town, to raise a poor little village out of 
 obscurity, to drive back the woods and the sea. 
 
 He turned with a sigh towards the east from which the light 
 was fading, leaving a pool of tremulous green above All Holland 
 Hill. Half a mile's walk brought him back within sight of 
 Marlingate, and then his mood quickly changed. The sunset 
 swam over the town, but owing to his position the light did 
 not drink it up, only showed it more clearly the lines of its 
 roofs arid the corners of its streets and the dim green blots of 
 its gardens and tamarisks. As he walked down the slope of 
 Cuckoo Hill, he could even see the "To Let" boards hanging 
 like black flags over garden-walls and area railings. Under the 
 swimming light the streets had a peculiar look as of being 
 under water, a town swallowed up by the sea. The illusion 
 was increased by the silence in which it lay looking down at 
 it from the hill he had the sensation of looking down into a 
 pool of shining sea-water, and the drowned city at the bottom 
 of it. ... 
 
 Yes, it was a great thing to build a town, a great thing to 
 bring fame and prosperity to an obscure seaside village but 
 it was an even greater thing to destroy a town, to bring a 
 thriving, flourishing watering-place to ruin. Any man with
 
 338 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 wealth and energy and enterprise could boom a decent village 
 into a fashionable resort, but one had to be more than wealthy 
 and enterprising to work the charm backwards. One had to 
 be damn clever. 
 
 He had been damn clever far more in this than in his first 
 achievement. For he had had no tradition to follow, no gospel 
 to preach, no disciples to organise he had had to work silently 
 and secretly, using tendencies, snatching opportunities. He 
 had seen the tokens of decay in other towns and worked them 
 back to causes, he had taken advantage of tendencies in the 
 Town Council, and he used stalking-horses such as Lewnes 
 and Benbow. Attacking Marlingate first through its beauty 
 and selectness he had worked down to its foundations of pros- 
 perity. It had been a long and terrible job, and in the process 
 of it he had lost all that he had still left to lose his wife, his 
 son, his fortune, his health. But he had avenged his love 
 Marlingate would not live to triumph over that. Wounded, 
 bereaved and broken as he was, he had won his victory, for he 
 had vindicated his manhood in the face of the grinding forces 
 of the earth, and had shown himself able to destroy the work 
 of his own hands when that work had become vile. 
 
 14 
 
 He was now only a few hundred yards above Gun Garden 
 House, but as he turned into the path that led down to it, he 
 realised that a man was coming towards him along the hillside. 
 He walked quickly over the uneven ground and something in 
 his walk was familiar. Monypenny stared at him, and blinked; 
 surely it couldn't be .... 
 
 "Ted!" 
 
 He was utterly surprised, but not mistaken. The young man, 
 looking maturer than when he saw him last, came up to within 
 * few yards of him, and then paused uncertainly. 
 
 "I thought it was you, Sir."
 
 THE MAYOR OF DEAD MAN'S TOWN 339 
 
 "What are you doing here?" 
 
 "I came down for the day." 
 
 "Oh, Becket, I suppose?" 
 
 "No he's not here." 
 
 They stood for a moment in silence. Monypenny's heart 
 was beating very fast. He had not seen his son for nearly 
 eighteen months, and his feelings were a mixture of joy and 
 amazement and suspicion. What game was the boy up to? 
 Did he imagine that the Opposition was not dead? A cold 
 breeze came rustling up from the sea. Monypenny shivered, 
 and turned up his coat-collar. 
 
 "I mustn't keep you," said Ted. 
 
 "Have you been to Gun Garden House?' 
 
 "No." 
 
 "Then what on earth are you here for?" 
 
 "Oh, Fve been looking about." 
 
 "In Marlingate?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Well, what d'you think of it?" he could not resist the 
 taunt. 
 
 Ted did not answer. 
 
 "But I fail to see," continued Monypenny, "why you should 
 want to look about Marlingate. You haven't, I gather, over 
 much free time, or even much free cash . . . and I thought 
 you'd given up the place." 
 
 "I can't give it up." 
 
 The voice came dully and sadly, with almost a ring of pro- 
 test in it. Monypenny looked quickly at his son. 
 
 "So, it's got you, too?" 
 
 Ted did not grasp his meaning. 
 
 "It got me once," continued his father, rubbing his hands 
 together, "but it had to let me go." 
 
 "I wish it would let me go," said Ted drearily "I can't 
 give myself up to new things when I want the old things so 
 much." 7
 
 340 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 "Won't the new things take its place? You've got a career 
 . . . and a wife." 
 
 "I was keen on being an architect only so that I could build 
 up Marlingate. There's no good my designing beastly market- 
 halls for places I don't care tuppence about, or public baths 
 for holes I've never heard of, or houses for some upstart manu- 
 facturing place houses that'll be black before they've been 
 up a year. That's the kind of thing I'm doing now, and am 
 likely to do all my life. I tell you all I want is to rebuild 
 Marlingate pull down that mess over there" waving his hand 
 towards the new town "and build streets and houses worthy of 
 the old place and the streets that Figg built. But I've no 
 chance of doing that now . . . you'd see me damned first." 
 
 "Is your wife here?" 
 
 "No it wasn't worth it. I'd the afternoon off, so I thought 
 I'd just run down for a few hours by the 2 130 train." 
 
 He looked at Monypenny rather defensively. He felt that 
 his father was prying for some sign of failure in his marriage. 
 
 "She isn't interested in Marlingate?" 
 
 "Yes of course she is. But there's no use dragging her 
 down here, especially after the way her father's been treated." 
 
 Monypenny did not speak for a moment. He was asking 
 himself a question he had tried to ask it of Ted, but he saw 
 the boy was far too loyal to answer. His look softened almost 
 to pity, and he surprised his son by patting him on the 
 shoulder. 
 
 "Take my advice, lad, and don't think any more of Mar- 
 lingate. You can't do anything for it; all the king's horses 
 and all the king's men can't build it up now." 
 
 Ted stared at him in surprise. 
 
 "Then you do acknowledge that the place is in a bad way?" 
 
 "Certainly." 
 
 "Oh, my God! If only you'd seen it before . . ." 
 
 "I saw it all the time." 
 
 "What do you mean?"
 
 THE iMAYOR OF DEAD MAN'S TOWN 341 
 
 "Half an hour ago I was at the other side of the hill, looking 
 at Bulverhythe, and I realised how much more difficult it is 
 to destroy a town than to build it." 
 
 Ted stared at him. 
 
 "I don't know what you're talking about. All I know is 
 that if I'd made such a mess of things as you have, Sir, I 
 shouldn't be so so infernally complacent about it." 
 
 Monypenny felt his anger rising against Ted's ignorance. 
 
 "You don't know what I'm talking about, or what you're 
 talking about, either. I tell you it's a big thing to have 
 smashed up a place like Marlingate. You could build it easy 
 enough you're probably right there but you couldn't destroy 
 it, as I've done." 
 
 "My dear Father, I fail to understand you. You've mis- 
 managed and muddled one of the finest towns in England, so 
 that at last even you have to acknowledge it's ruined. I don't 
 know whether I ought to speak to you like this, but I must say 
 that if I'd made the mess of things you have, I'd be humbled 
 to the dust." 
 
 "Not if you'd done it on purpose." 
 
 Ted gaped. 
 
 "If all this had been done by accident by mismanagement 
 and miscalculation then there'd be some cause to be ashamed. 
 But as it has been worked out as carefully as the building 
 was thought out, worked out, planned, struggled for my 
 God! how I've fought the place! I tell you it's something to 
 be proud of, not ashamed." 
 
 Ted was speechless, but Monypenny's confidence grew, and 
 he found a queer relief in it. He had never told anyone before 
 of his plans to ruin Marlingate, but Ted was worthy to hear 
 them, for he was one of the few who had seen that the place 
 was ruined a great many, in spite of omens, believed that 
 Marlingate had never been more prosperous than it was now. 
 
 "I've been at it now for nearly twenty-four years, practically 
 your life-time. It was on the day you were born that I made
 
 342 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 up my mind to do it. On that day I saw that the only way to 
 save myself was by vengeance. Never mind what it was for. 
 I swore that day that I'd smash up the place I'd make it a 
 third-rate, decayed sort of hole like Belgarswick. And I've 
 done it. You tried to stop me but I tripped you up in the 
 rope I'd fallen over myself, and I bundled you out. Now Mar- 
 lingate's lost ruined. There's no good your trying to put it 
 together again after I'm gone. You can't I've smashed it 
 beyond any chance of that/' 
 
 He looked at his son, wondering what he would see on his 
 face rage, disappointment, horror, or perhaps, even ad- 
 miration. He saw none of these, but, instead, a look which 
 he could not read. 
 
 The boy came up to him, and gently laid his hand on his 
 shoulder. 
 
 "Don't talk like that, Father and don't worry. Don't 
 let's talk any more about Marlingate. I'm sorry I've been such 
 a plague to you." 
 
 He thought his father was mad. Nothing else could ac- 
 count for what he had just heard. The muddle and ruin of 
 Marlingate, and his own financial implication, had affected his 
 brain, and inspired him with this monstrous, megalomaniacal 
 delusion. There was something infinitely pathetic in this 
 shaky, proud old man, whose mind had been so cruelly scarred 
 in the battle he had lost. He looked smitten in body, too. His 
 skin showed unhealthily yellow against his white hair and whis- 
 kers, and he stooped badly, who used to be so erect. The hand 
 on his stick was an old man's hand with blue, knotted veins. 
 
 "Father, please forgive me for having hurt you." 
 
 "It's easy enough to forgive you now you've lost and I've 
 won." 
 
 "Don't . . . please. Don't let's talk of Marlingate any 
 more. I'm sorry I've worried you and crossed your wishes. 
 Now let's leave it alone." 
 
 "Will you come home with me and see your mother?"
 
 THE MAYOR OF DEAD MAN'S TOWN 343 
 
 "I can't now. I must catch the seven o'clock train back. 
 But I'll come down another day with Lindsay and see you 
 both." 
 
 "You ain't particularly happy, are you?" 
 
 "Of course I am." 
 
 Monypenny said nothing. Standing there on the hill beside 
 his son, he was asking himself if it was possible that this boy, 
 too, had made the wrong choice. Morgan's husband would not 
 have run back for craving glances at Marlingate, so why should 
 Lindsay's? It would be a dreadful thing if here beside the 
 man who had mistakenly renounced his love for his town 
 should stand the man who had mistakenly renounced his 
 town for his love. Did life never bless? 
 
 The fiery sunset had swung down into the sea; a crimson 
 light stroked All Holland Hill, and wandered over the roofs of 
 Marlingate. For a moment the town was like a burning pyre, 
 then dusky purples smoked it, and it smouldered into grey. It 
 lay a heap of ashes between the hills, waiting for the night.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 RECONCILIATION 
 
 i 
 
 THAT November Monypenny was again elected Mayor. He 
 was anxious now to keep in office till his death. He did not 
 expect to live much longer he had suffered from one or two 
 recurrences of his illness, and he detected a forced note in 
 Dr. Cooper's optimism. 
 
 "Bah! You may live to be ninety," said the doctor alder- 
 man, with a punch at his patient's ribs, too obviously careful to 
 be encouraging. 
 
 "Thanks. I'd rather not," said Monypenny. Another year 
 or two was all he wanted. 
 
 That year was his sixteenth year in office, and a record in 
 Marlingate, indeed in other towns. Monypenny found his 
 photograph in the Daily Graphic, and another paper spoke of 
 him as the "grand old man" of Marlingate. Locally the oc- 
 casion was celebrated by a banquet given him at the Maiden- 
 hood by his Aldermen and Councillors and the most prominent 
 townspeople. He was popular in the town, in spite of his 
 formal manner, which grew if anything more stiff and starched 
 with the years. The banquet was almost a banquet of old 
 times. Robin Huss appeared in all his glory, and the trades- 
 men and innkeepers and local investors he had put on the road 
 to ruin drank his health with hearty clappings and shouts. The 
 aged Pelham rose with a spilling glass in his shaky hand, to 
 strew the last flowers of speech in his seedy old garden at the 
 
 34*
 
 RECONCILIATION 345 
 
 feet of "our esteemed Mayor and fellow-townsman, our wor- 
 shipful Er-er." 
 
 For some reason Monypenny felt a lump in his throat during 
 Pelham's speech. Pelham was a relic of the old days, a 
 memory almost as old as his first ambition. When he spoke 
 it was as the voice of the old Marlingate speaking, the Mar- 
 lingate he had loved, and whose ghost lived still in crooked 
 ways and weather-stung old houses haunting Zuriel Place and 
 Tamarisk Row and Harpsichord House and the old red houses 
 at the foot of the Coney Banks the Marlingate he had not 
 built and did not want to destroy. Old Pelham droned on, 
 then sat down among the respectful applause of old Lewnes, old 
 Lusted, old Benbow and other contemporaries, and the profane 
 sniggers of Mark Boas, the Town Clerk, and the other young 
 men on the Council. Then Monypenny stood up old Mony- 
 penny. 
 
 His voice came more harshly nowadays, with a hoarse, 
 grating sound, and in the characteristic pauses and breaks of 
 his delivery he sometimes coughed and cleared his throat. But 
 every word he said was strong and clear, and had all the 
 strength and clearness of his brain behind it. He stooped a 
 little more than usual today with the weight of his Mayoral 
 chain but his figure was commanding, though he did not wear 
 his robes of office, merely a tightly buttoned frock-coat, grey 
 trousers, and a collar with soaring wings each side of his long 
 chin. 
 
 He gave the Corporation's plans for the next Summer season. 
 The borough fathers had in their wisdom decided to put all 
 their strength and credit into the Summer. For that reason 
 the Winter orchestra had bee abolished, saving the town many 
 hundreds of pounds. The money could be spent on a record 
 Summer splash record advertisements, record excursions, a 
 municipal band, confetti fetes, carnivals and other entertain- 
 ments. Marlingate should show itself as capable as other towns 
 of moving with the times.
 
 346 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 While he spoke he noticed that some of the young men were 
 sniggering at him, as they had sniggered at Pelham. He did 
 not mind; he only thought how fitted they were to carry on 
 his work after he was gone. Young idiots let 'em grin. They 
 could never build a town, still less knock it down. In his 
 heart he mocked the young men. 
 
 2 
 
 That Winter was the quietest Marlingate had ever known. 
 The dim, white, gleaming days succeeded one another like pearls 
 on a string. The sun hung a pale disk over a channel veiled 
 in torn silver webs, and in the short, misty twilight Marlingate 
 shone like a pewter town beside a pewter sea. No more 
 strident tones came from it to break the peace ; all the Summer 
 it had rioted and shouted, and now it lay tired and still, its 
 colours drained out of it, its streets empty and silent, its parks 
 and gardens soggy and brined with the deposit of the sea-mist, 
 which ate away its stucco, and toned its paint into dim, neutral 
 sea-colours, which were also the colours of rots and mosses and 
 soils. 
 
 On the Marine Parade the bandstand stood empty. It rose 
 an empty boss off the wet gleaming slabs of Portland stone, 
 and round it were the empty iron seats (such as could not, like 
 the deck chairs, be packed up and put away) . Sometimes when 
 the weather was less still, and the brooding fogs ceased to 
 flatten and smooth the sea, there would be strange music there. 
 The wind would fiddle through its arches, and the drums of the 
 sea thud their rumbling accompaniment against its foundations. 
 The wind skimmed and danced along the battered fagade of the 
 Marine houses, calling queer notes and hummings out of their 
 columns and pediments . . . then it was as if the ghost of 
 Mamma in her paisley shawl sat between her genteel daughters 
 on the empty seat and listened to the orchestra of wind and sea. 
 
 Monypenny sometimes listened to it, alone on the empty, wet
 
 RECONCILIATION 347 
 
 Parade. At dusk the place was always forsaken, for the few 
 visitors had mostly come for the sake of their health, and 
 though they would spend the day enjoying the dim, sweet sun- 
 shine which was the one gift Monypenny could not take from 
 Marlingate, they seldom ventured out of their lodgings after 
 dark. 
 
 Occasionally in these twilight prowlings he would catch 
 queer glimpses of beauty and dignity in the ugliness he had 
 created. Walking home from the Parade, up the High Street, 
 he would see the hideous stucco houses piling on the hill-slopes 
 like the tiers of some huge ampitheatre. On the left the Coney 
 Banks would rise from the gnarled houses at their roots to the 
 houses of Lewnes and Lusted on the right Mount Idle still 
 showed under the stars the gleam of its ancient whiteness. 
 Houses and chimneys, dredged of all colour by the night, silted 
 up towards the Totty Lands and the horror of New Marlingate 
 purged by the starlight into something mysterious and ma- 
 jestic. It was all like some great arena vast, towering, loom- 
 ing, its very ugliness giving it a queer sort of dignity. Above it 
 the stars winked on the dark zenith, and at the bottom of it 
 was he, the man who had made it, looking up at those great 
 stars as from the bottom of a well. 
 
 3 
 
 Ted Monypenny had availed himself only perfunctorily of 
 his father's permission to visit Gun Garden House. The scar- 
 city of time and money and a decided unwillingness on Lind- 
 say's part had reinforced a definite reluctance of his own. He 
 could not bear the sight of Marlingate dropping contentedly 
 into squalor the cheapness and ugliness of the new building, 
 the debasing of the old aesthetic and social ideals, the scrub- 
 biness of the Winter season, all combined to depress him. 
 
 He brought Lindsay down at the beginning of January, but 
 the visit was not a great success. Ted found his surroundings
 
 348 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 even drearier than in September, and though Lindsay did her 
 best to be agreeable she could not thaw completely, while 
 Monypenny's attitude towards her was strangely defensive. 
 Ted managed to avoid a solitary interview with his father, but 
 he spoke to his mother rather seriously about him. Fanny shed 
 a few tears over her husband's physical condition, but when her 
 son went forward to impeach his mind, she could not follow. 
 
 "Your father always had a wonderful brain," she insisted 
 "sometimes he's so clever that he quite frightens me. I can't 
 keep up with him ... I lose the thread." 
 
 "But when I saw him in September it struck me that he er 
 that he suffered from delusions." 
 
 "Oh, no, my dear, I'm sure he doesn't. He never had a de- 
 lusion in his life. It's wonderful how clearly he sees things." 
 
 Ted did not press the matter further. He went back to 
 London profoundly saddened. Even his official reconciliation 
 with his family did not comfort him much. He could never go 
 back to Marlingate as a son, for with the town itself he could 
 never be reconciled. He had forsaken it in its hour of need, 
 and now it was too late to retrieve his desertion. In his absence 
 the whole Opposition had crumbled and the place had settled 
 down into decay. At present only a few clear-sighted people 
 saw the ruin, but the time would come when the downfall of 
 Marlingate would be an open shame. Then probably Lewnes 
 and Lusted and all the rest of that beastly lot would turn on 
 the proud old Mayor and rend him. "O my God!" thought 
 Ted, "I wish I could get him out of this!" 
 
 4 
 
 Early in March Monypenny heard from his son that Becket 
 was very ill. He had had a kind of stroke, and though he had 
 made a partial recovery his condition was serious. The doctor 
 had ordered sea-air, and as the tenants had left the Coney 
 Banks house, and there was no immediate prospect of another
 
 RECONCILIATION 349 
 
 let, he and Lindsay would go down to Marlingate for a few 
 weeks. Ted himself could not leave town, except perhaps for 
 an occasional week-end. 
 
 Monypenny suspected a separation that was only half-un- 
 willing reading the dim signs and tokens of his son's life in 
 the light that had been given him on his two visits to Mar- 
 lingate. He saw a gradual disillusion, feeding on regret and 
 self-reproach, and now expressing itself in circumstances. The 
 passionate love which had made Ted renounce his ambition for 
 Lindsay's sake would never have allowed her to go from him 
 like this. Some other refuge could have been found for Becket 
 after all, there were poor Emma's sons and daughters, and he 
 need not have taken poor Morgan's girl from her husband to be 
 his nurse. It was not likely that there had been any open break 
 between Ted and Lindsay probably, indeed, there had been 
 no inward acknowledgment of division but Monypenny could 
 tell from his own experience the relief of dropping the outward 
 symbolism of love, of bringing the body into the solitude that 
 the heart has long ago created. Ted would be happier than he 
 had been for many weeks, alone in the smutty Georgian rooms 
 in Brunswick Square, no longer forced to the expression of what 
 he did not feel, the flesh sharing the celibacy of the spirit and 
 he had not been married two years. 
 
 Towards Becket, Monypenny's feelings were of pure exas- 
 peration. He had grown more irascible of late years it was 
 one of the ways in which he showed their advance; Fanny com- 
 plained of it in secret to Sue, and Bateson West's inadequate 
 successor periodically informed the servants' hall that the 
 governor was a oner to lose his wool. The sight of Becket mad- 
 dened him, and the sight of Becket was a common one that 
 Spring an old man being wheeled up and down the Marine 
 Parade in a bath-chair, his elegant, unapproachable daughter 
 walking beside him. Monypenny would give them a cold, for- 
 mal bow, to which Lindsay would reply with a slight inclination 
 of her head. Becket made no reply, for his head was perma-
 
 350 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 nently fixed over one shoulder as if he were eternally on the 
 verge of looking round at something behind and nothing very 
 pleasant to judge by the confused, uneasy expression on his 
 face. Monypenny hated him the old image ! trundling up and 
 down the Marine Parade that his long-lost money had built, 
 at once grovelling and flaunting in his ruin. 
 
 5 
 
 Monypenny prided himself that he neither flaunted nor 
 grovelled, though his financial condition was considerably worse 
 than Becket's. He had not been so well off to start with, and 
 was even tighter coiled in the town's disasters. The Marine 
 Hotel, after a gallant effort to carry on over the empty Spring, 
 had at last gone into liquidation. The Aquarium threatened 
 to follow, and it was proposed to sell it for what it would fetch 
 to an Entertainment Syndicate which owned several Casinos 
 and Palace Piers on the South Coast. Monypenny was, more- 
 over, involved in the New Marlingate enterprise which now, like 
 everything else in the town, was showing signs of financial de- 
 bility. He had contrived so far to pay punctually his interest 
 on the Monypenny estate mortgage. A certain pride had kept 
 him to this, but he now saw little prospect of being able to 
 redeem on the date fixed in the mortgage deed. He would 
 either have to raise a further, equitable mortgage on the estate, 
 or let Becket foreclose, and sue him on the covenant. He in- 
 clined towards the latter course, his only fear being that 
 Becket would indulge a sentimental mercy on account of his 
 poor dear Morgan having once "thought a lot" of his debtor 
 
 In May a few timid visitors began to trickle down, but soon 
 fled in boredom from the pleasureless place, with the empty 
 windows of the Marine Hotel staring gauntly down at the 
 Parade. In June the town looked more animated. Excursion- 
 ists began to arrive, and at least brought colour and noise. A 
 brass band, engaged by the Corporation, started its duties in
 
 RECONCILIATION 35 1 
 
 the bandstand, and the Aquarium was occupied by a dramatic 
 company. A series of confetti fetes was organised on the Pier, 
 and quite half the Apartment cards vanished from the windows. 
 
 "What I can't understand," said Lusted to Lewnes, "is why, 
 with the place filling up like this, things don't pay better." 
 Lusted was in the Central toils of the Braybrooke Farm Estate 
 Syndicate, which in spite of the crowds that filled the town was 
 staggering in a perplexity of empty houses and falling rents. 
 
 "Only temporary, my dear chap, only temporary," said 
 Lewnes. "Things often go down like that for a year or two for 
 no particular reason. But we're going the right way to send 
 'em up again. This is going to be a record year for Marlin- 
 gate." Lewnes had fewer financial anxieties than any man in 
 the town. In the days of the boom on local investments he had 
 had very little capital he had spent most of his profits on his 
 business, and now was planning the transfer of his Emporium to 
 the Marine Parade, which with its gape of empty premises could 
 no longer afford to maintain the ban on shops. 
 
 Old Becket continued to trundle up and down, his bath chair 
 dodging its way between the trippers with their linked arms and 
 changed hats. His intercourse with Monypenny was still lim- 
 ited to a frigid bow from the latter. He had indeed once called 
 at the familiar house on the Coney Banks, but on being told 
 that Becket was out, had rightly or wrongly put this down to 
 a wish to deny himself on the merchant's part, and had merely 
 taken it as an added cause of offence. He was not exactly 
 pleased when early in July he had a letter from Ted urging him 
 to go and see his father-in-law. 
 
 "I know that you are not on good terms, but in the circum- 
 stances I feel it would be better if either you ignored him alto- 
 gether or else ignored the quarrel. I am writing because I 
 hear from Lindsay that the poor old gentleman is getting quite 
 upset about the way you bow to him on the Parade. All this 
 is hateful, and I know it is largely my doing, but it seems hard 
 that my wife, and poor old Mr. Becket, who is in possession
 
 352 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 of all his faculties, should suffer for my fault. That's why 
 I'm writing to ask you to bury the hatchet you've buried the 
 blade, I know, by having Lindsay and me to Gun Garden, but 
 the handle still shows above ground. Please, Father, go to see 
 old Becket and ask Lindsay to come and see you and my 
 Mother." 
 
 Monypenny resented the tone of the letter. 
 
 "The young jackanapes! Does he think I've got time to run 
 round bowing and scraping to all his seedy relations? And as 
 for asking the girl to come here, I'm not going to be despised in 
 my own house by a New Woman. That's what she is, that 
 girl; she's a New Woman and treats me as if I was mud. 
 Confound her!" 
 
 However, in spite of his blustering, he thought a good deal 
 of Ted's words. After all it would not be undignified to have 
 better relations with his own daughter-in-law and her father. 
 He need not be friendly, merely civil. The boy must have been 
 worried, or he would not have written like that and he did 
 not want to add to Ted's worries ... for Ted's sake he would, 
 he told himself, endure Lindsay's uppishness and Becket's even 
 less tolerable degradation. 
 
 So on a July morning of salt-smelling heat, Monypenny set 
 out for the Coney Banks. He found Becket at home, for in the 
 hot weather he did not go out till after tea, preferring to sit in 
 the drawing-room with its cool eastward look to All Holland 
 Hill. He was half-lying in an armchair, which, when the visitor 
 came in, had to be re-arranged, so that Monypenny could sit on 
 his right. Ever since his stroke the merchant's head had been 
 permanently turned away from the things on his left. 
 
 Lindsay moved and settled her father, and was civil enough, 
 though also plain in her intention of leaving the room. Mony- 
 penny did not like this for some vague reason he did not 
 want to be left alone with Becket and was very nearly affable 
 in his efforts to make her stay. But Lindsay murmured some 
 smooth remark about "helping cook with the jam," and went
 
 RECONCILIATION 353 
 
 out probably, he reflected, more set above herself than ever 
 by his obvious wish for her company. 
 
 Left alone with the merchant he made some efforts at con- 
 versation. 
 
 "The weather seems to have settled down to be fine." 
 
 "It's very hot." 
 
 Becket's voice was not so clear as it used to be, and his 
 tongue seemed to have grown larger. It showed a little be- 
 tween his teeth. 
 
 "I expect you find it trying," continued Monypenny. 
 
 "It's very hot," repeated Becket. 
 
 Monypenny decided not to stay more than a few minutes. 
 The sight of the old man depressed him. It made him think 
 of his own age, though he was nearly twenty years younger. 
 It made him think, too, of the old days, when Becket had been 
 his companion and henchman, the second in Marlingate. This 
 was the man who had been so pompous at the opening ball at 
 the Assembly Room, so impressive at the opening of the Town 
 Park 
 
 "I'm sorry to see you looking so poorly," he said. 
 
 "I'm very well," said Becket. 
 
 "But I daresay you still feel a bit low after your illness." 
 
 "I feel very well." 
 
 "Then you don't look it," said Monypenny, ruffled by the 
 old fellow's antagonism. 
 
 "I'm very well very well indeed. Quite got over my ill- 
 ness." 
 
 It struck Monypenny that Becket was trying to be dignified, 
 and his irritation died into pity. 
 
 "Are you down here for a long stay?" 
 
 "Dunno. Till I let the house." 
 
 "The town is beginning to fill up." 
 
 "With rubbish not the sort of people that ud take a good 
 house like this." 
 
 Monypenny's anger rose again. He considered Becket's be-
 
 354 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 haviour most unseemly he had no right to take this tone with 
 him when he had sacrificed his pride to pay a visit of recon- 
 ciliation. 
 
 "Don't let us discuss Marlingate, Mr. Becket, as it still seems 
 to be a matter of contention between us." 
 
 "Of course it is! Where are my dividends?" 
 
 Monypenny drew himself up. 
 
 "What am I to leave my poor children when I'm gone?" con- 
 tinued Becket in a rush "they'll be ruined and done for. 
 So will you. You're beginning to look shabby already . . . 
 old coat." 
 
 Monypenny was annoyed that Becket should criticise his 
 coat, which was certainly a little shiny at the seams. 
 
 "My coat's good enough," he growled "I didn't put on my 
 best one to come here." 
 
 Becket's eyes were beginning to bulge; he was growing more 
 and more angry, and Monypenny was growing more and more 
 angry with him. He was angry with Ted, too, for urging him 
 into this abominable visit, which had failed lamentably as a 
 visit of peace. Becket had completely changed from his usual 
 plaintive sentimentality probably his illness was responsible 
 for the extreme irritation into which he had been so easily 
 roused. None the less, Monypenny felt annoyed at the sight 
 of his foolish, apoplectic wrath, and for a moment the two men 
 sat glaring at each other, Monypenny lean and haggard, his 
 face falling away like & diff from cavernous yes, Becket stout 
 and purple, his face bloating up round his eyes, which seemed 
 to be trying to start out of it. 
 
 "Thank God my poor wife isn't alive. It's dreadful to 
 think I should ever thank God for that but I'm glad she's 
 been spared all this misery." 
 
 Monypenny was too disgusted to speak. He sat watching 
 a dark and curiously twisted vein rising on Becket's forehead, 
 and apparently trying to race his eyes out of his head. 
 
 "My poor Morgan," continued Becket "it ud have broken
 
 RECONCILIATION 355 
 
 her heart to see me like this" ("you said a minute ago that 
 you were perfectly well," thought Monypenny) "and you 
 come to despise me in my trouble. She wouldn't have let you 
 despise me." 
 
 "My God, sir!" cried Monypenny, jumping to his feet, "is 
 this my reward for trying to be friendly?" 
 
 "Who asked you to be friendly? Where are my dividends? 
 I tell you you're insulting me ... mocking me. . . . Thank 
 God I'll be going to her soon she's waiting for me ... my 
 poor Morgan. . . ." 
 
 "She wasn't yours she was mine." 
 
 Anger and disgust fired the words out of him. The next 
 minute he would have had them unsaid, but he realised curi- 
 ously that Becket had not taken in their significance. This 
 swung him back into the violent mood, and he repeated them. 
 
 "She wasn't yours she was mine." 
 
 Still Becket did not seem to understand, and Monypenny's 
 anger blazed out at him, consuming every impulse of pity or 
 reluctance. Why should this old fool die in the belief that he 
 possessed Morgan le Fay? When he was dead he would soon 
 find out his mistake ... he would see then that though he 
 was to lie beside her in her grave she did not belong to him, but 
 to the man who had not found his rest. Often during her life 
 he had lain down beside her in smug confidence that she be- 
 longed to him, not thinking of the man who waited alone outside 
 the house; he should not so lie down in death. . . . 
 
 "I loved her, and she loved me." 
 
 Becket gave a queer, spluttering sound. 
 
 "She loved me and she's waiting for me now. There's no 
 good your dying and going to her. She doesn't want you 
 she's waiting for me." 
 
 "You liar!" 
 
 Monypenny realised half incredulously that Becket did not 
 believe him. His anger was for the affront to his wife, not 
 for his own shame. Becket was a fool.
 
 356 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 "I'm telling you the truth for the first time in your life. 
 Morgan loved me." 
 
 "I don't believe you. How could she have loved you? She 
 was my -wife." 
 
 He delivered this argument with almost a shout of triumph. 
 Then suddenly his expression changed. The vein on his fore- 
 head seemed to have beaten his eyes in the race. It suf- 
 fused . . . spread ... his face became purple. 
 
 "Tsch tsch tsch." 
 
 His mouth opened, closed, twisted; then his whole bulk 
 seemed to collapse. Monypenny was frightened. What had 
 he said to Morgan's husband? . . . who had been so kind to 
 her. . . . Becket began to snore. 
 
 "Hi! girl! Lindsay!" 
 
 He had pulled open the door, and was shbuting over the 
 bannisters. Lindsay came running up. She gave one terrified 
 look at Becket. 
 
 "He's had another stroke. You've been exciting him go 
 and fetch a doctor." 
 
 "Why did you leave me alone with him?" 
 
 "Fetch the doctor," she repeated, her voice rising hysteri- 
 cally on the last syllable. 
 
 He went out, down the flights of the narrow house, and out 
 of the front door. Then he remembered that he had forgotten 
 his hat, and went back for it, taking it mechanically off its peg. 
 
 "Shabby, I suppose he'd call it," he said to himself. 
 
 Luckily he found Dr. Cooper's victoria waiting outside Mid- 
 lothian, and help was soon sent up the Coney Banks to Becket's 
 house. Monypenny did not go back feeling badly shaken, he 
 started on his way home. 
 
 As he walked down the narrow, clanking passage to the High 
 Street, he had a queer illusion. Between the high, shadowed 
 walls of the houses he could see the street at the bottom of the 
 steps, glaring with sunshine; and it seemed to him as if men 
 and women went to and fro as in the days of Marlingate's
 
 RECONCILIATION 357 
 
 glory, the men in plaid trousers and white top-hats, the 
 women in crinolines and paisley shawls they carried little 
 sunshades in red and blue and green. He stared, and at the 
 same time knew that he did not really see them. 
 
 At the bottom of the steps they faded. There was only 
 the sunshine left, and a baker's boy speaking to a dog. Mony- 
 penny stood leaning against the hot, sun-baked wall of the 
 house, breathing heavily. The air was full of a dragging, 
 stuffy scent of privet and horse-chestnut bloom ... he felt 
 faint. . . . 
 
 Then suddenly he saw the errand boy looking at him. He 
 was a boy who had just come into the town from a distant 
 village and did not recognise the Mayor. 
 
 "Here . . . boy . . ." he said faintly, "help me home." 
 
 "Where do you live?" asked the boy. "I've got my round." 
 
 "Gun Garden House quite near." 
 
 "Hook on to my arm, then, and go steady." The boy 
 thought that perhaps this tall, shaky old man had been 
 drinking. 
 
 Monypenny preferred, on account of his height, to lean on his 
 shoulder. So the baker's boy helped him home. 
 
 6 
 
 Becket lingered unconscious a few days, and then died, and 
 Monypenny was well enough to come to his funeral. It was a 
 municipal affair, attended in state by a forgiving Mayor and 
 Corporation. Death, the commonest thing in life, had as usual 
 failed to inspire the ordinary contempt for common things, and 
 had put the borough into an attitude of gaping respect, even 
 for the old obstructionist. Marlingate whispered and won- 
 dered, as if this had been the only man who had ever seen 
 death. 
 
 The service was read in St. Nicholas church, which the Rev. 
 Somerville Hunt had now left some years for his place outside
 
 358 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 it. His successor knew little about Becket, or indeed about 
 Marlingate, which he saw as nothing more than a rather dingy 
 setting to St. Nicholas church. Afterwards, by the graveside, 
 the common people nudged and whispered, asking each other 
 behind their hats who Becket was. "Old chap who lost his 
 money in the town" "Local investments" "Never invest your 
 money locally, old boy" . . . "Almighty God, with whom the 
 souls of the faithful, after they are delivered from the burden 
 of the flesh, are in joy and felicity. . . ." 
 
 Old Monypenny stood stiff and erect beside the grave, watch- 
 ing old Becket lie down beside Morgan le Fay in his last 
 mockery of possession. His children and succeeding genera- 
 tions would read his tombstone and know him as Morgan's 
 husband, while the man who had been her love and life slept 
 far away, beside another woman. No one would ever know 
 that Morgan had been his. Even Becket had not known it, in 
 spite of the horror of that last meeting. He had died exulting 
 in the thought of his possession, in the fact that Morgan le Fay 
 had been his in the eyes of the law and of society, his cove- 
 nanted property, no matter what preposterous title-deeds de- 
 luded and jealous claimants might bring forward. A little of 
 Becket's triumph seemed to hang over his grave, from which 
 seemed to come the echo of his last triumphant words: "She 
 was my wife." 
 
 All his children were there Arthur, James, Charlotte and 
 Louisa middle-aged and unrecognisable as the little people 
 in Highland suits and long, frilled drawers who, with their 
 wild governess, had once plagued young Monypenny. There 
 stood Lindsay, cold and smooth and elegant, a little of the 
 New Woman even at the graveside, and close to her stood Ted, 
 the prodigal home on sufferance, looking tired and ashamed. 
 Poor boy! betrayed by his dreams just as his father had 
 been betrayed. . . . Monypenny watched him sorrowfully. He 
 guessed now that he was in the stupor which had muffled his 
 own faculties before they found the way to liberty through
 
 RECONCILIATION 359 
 
 vengeance. By vengeance he had purged his soul of its error, 
 but what could this boy do? He was too weak for vengeance; 
 besides, he had no town to wreak it on only a woman. 
 
 Monypenny wondered if nothing could be done to save him, 
 if he must tread his path of disillusion to the end. Certainly 
 there was only one person who could save him, and that was 
 Lindsay. But she was not likely to do so. Monypenny 
 watched her as she stood beside her husband. The girl was 
 stupid, complacent . . . and yet she had worked the spell 
 which all the magic of Morgan le Fay had been unable to 
 accomplish. She had snatched the town's prey out of its teeth. 
 However, what did that matter since she did not know what 
 to do with her man now she had got him? Lindsay was a 
 fool like Becket. There was no use looking to her for Ted's 
 salvation. She was merely an instance of the stupid and the 
 commonplace succeeding where the fine, the free, the noble had 
 failed. 
 
 That afternoon he shut himself up in his study, and thought 
 of his son. He had not tried to speak to him after the funeral, 
 and the whole Becket family had gone home to hear the reading 
 of the will. Monypenny wondered a little what Becket had 
 been able to do for Ted and Lindsay probably not much, in 
 spite of his affection for poor dear Morgan's child. It struck 
 him, with a pleasant tickle of irony, that the best thing they 
 could hope for was the Gun Garden mortgage at least the in- 
 terest on that was regularly paid. But that, he reflected, would 
 most likely go to Arthur, the eldest son, and Ted and Lindsay 
 would have to make shift with Becket's other investments in 
 Marlingate which would be very like leaving them a treasure 
 at the bottom of the sea. 
 
 If only Ted could put his hands on a little ready money, 
 thought his father sadly, he could leave his dreary London 
 bondage, which was eating his soul, and try his luck in a new 
 country. In a flash this appeared to him as Ted's only chance. 
 If he left England, he would be definitely free of Marlingate.
 
 360 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 which was already beginning to draw him back from the short 
 distance he had run. If he went out to a new country, 
 America or Australia, where new towns were building, he might 
 be able to reconstruct his ambition, and in the strength of that 
 rededicate his love .... But there'd be no good selling him- 
 self up and emigrating. For all his ardours, Ted was not the 
 stuff adventurers are made of. He would need to set up in 
 business over there he had already passed the Preliminary 
 and Intermediary examinations of the R. I. B. A. and it 
 would be an excellent thing if he could go into partnership with 
 some rising man. Bah! what was the use of thinking of it? 
 All Ted would get would be, at most, a fifth part of Becket's 
 paltry estate, all knotted up with every complication of Mar- 
 lingate finance. 
 
 Monypenny leaned back in his chair, and stared out at the 
 drooping trees of the Town Park. Shrill sounds of coquetry 
 came from its seclusion, and then were suddenly drowned as 
 the band began to bray a selection from "The Belle of New 
 York." What a damned noise 1 it interrupted his train of 
 thought. He had been thinking . . . Oh, yes, if only Ted 
 could lay his hands on some capital and set up as an architect 
 in some new place overseas. Well, why shouldn't his father 
 help him? Becket could do nothing, but Monypenny still had 
 it in his power to raise the wind. After all, he owed it to the 
 boy he had brought him into the world (a fact which never 
 failed to overwhelm him with a sense of shame-faced responsi- 
 bility), and he had done nothing for him during his two years 
 of marriage. Let him help him now. 
 
 It is true that he could not write him out a cheque for a 
 few thousand pounds but there were other ways. He could 
 mortgage Gun Garden House that ought to fetch something; 
 he might even have a bill of sale on the furniture . . . there 
 were all sorts of ways open to a man who will face risks. What 
 did it matter if he died impoverished and burdened with debts? 
 He need not think of Fanny she had her Uncle Vidler's
 
 RECONCILIATION 361 
 
 money. The only person he had to think of was Ted how 
 to save him from the inaction and disillusion which were de- 
 stroying him. 
 
 Even at this moment a little of the old jealousy revived. If 
 he helped Ted reinstate his ambition he felt sure that it would 
 lead to a renewal of his love. His love was failing him merely 
 because the other things of life had failed, and Lindsay was 
 not large enough to be a man's all, as her mother could so 
 easily and so satisfyingly have been. Once that Ted had found 
 himself in his career he would once more find himself in his love. 
 Could Monypenny bear it? Could he bear to think of these 
 two children triumphing at last where their parents had failed? 
 He groaned when he thought that it might have been for him 
 and Morgan to go to a new country and re-state his ambition 
 in the light of a love compared to which the love of Ted and 
 Lindsay was but cloud. . . . Then he thought that even worse 
 than to see his son enjoying all he had lost would be to see 
 him broken as he was broken. . . . Perhaps, after all, the best 
 monument he could raise to himself and Morgan was not the 
 ruin of the town which had parted them, but their love living 
 again in their children, liberated and vindicated. 
 
 There was a curious pricking at the back of his eyes, as if 
 the dried well of his tears was finding its spring again. It 
 seemed to him then as if the spirit of Morgan le Fay pleaded 
 with him for their children, begging him to make his last sac- 
 rifice, for their ransom from the fate which had divided their 
 parents, and was now threatening to divide them as surely. 
 After all, what did it matter that they were so different from 
 their parents that their love hardly seemed, to his passionate 
 memory, to be love at all? It was with them, as it had been 
 with himself and Morgan, the fullest expression of their being, 
 and if it alone could not satisfy his son, that was because, in the 
 paradox of things, ambition and not love had been the core of 
 his sensuous, dreamy nature, while all the hardness of his
 
 362 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 father's heart had been built up round the fiery passion which 
 had at last consumed it. 
 
 With his ambition set free from the weight of the dead Mar- 
 lingate, Ted's love would also be set free, and in the new 
 country the new town and the new love could exist together 
 in an agreement which the old town and the old love had never 
 known and could never know. Far away in California or 
 New South Wales there might some day be a new Marlingate. 
 . . . For a moment Manypenny seemed to see it, under the 
 thick blue skies of Capricorn, washed by Pacific seas, white 
 and shining, like crystal the town that could never quite 
 be 
 
 u\_ * * 
 
 But perhaps it could be for the young Monypenny; his 
 dreams were not the same as old Monypenny's, always hanging 
 unseizable before him on the edge of nothingness. They could 
 be held and realised they were small enough for a man's hands 
 to shape them, just as the daughter of Morgan le Fay was 
 tame enough for a man's arms to hold. 
 
 7 
 
 The next morning he set out for the house on the Coney 
 Banks. During the night he had made up his mind on yet 
 another point, and that was to lay his plan first before Lindsay. 
 After all, the boy's liberation must come to him through his 
 wife, and if Lindsay set herself against the scheme all its 
 chances were spoilt. He hoped that she would not oppose it, 
 though, he told himself impatiently, it was quite possible that 
 she would not see its urgency. She was complacent and sleek 
 as a cat would she realise that her husband's world was 
 wrecked and that he must find a new one? He shrank a little 
 from the task of convincing her he wondered whether he 
 would be tortured most by her likeness to her mother or by her 
 unlikeness, by her calm self-satisfaction, her capable stupidity, 
 or by those errant flashes of lightness, those occasional lifts of
 
 RECONCILIATION 363 
 
 manner, which marked her as the daughter of Morgan le Fay? 
 
 When he entered the drawing-room, he found her smoking; 
 this gave him an introductory sense of outrage, though she 
 threw away the cigarette and made some half apology she 
 was not New Woman enough to dare custom so far. He had 
 asked for Mrs. Monypenny, but Lindsay thought the servant 
 had made a mistake. 
 
 "Ted's gone to the station to see off Lousia and James the 
 others left last night." 
 
 "I don't want to see Ted," said Monypenny. "I came to 
 see you." 
 
 She looked surprised. 
 
 "I want to speak to you about Ted." 
 
 Lindsay sat down and raised her eyebrows a little. What 
 could Monypenny have to say to her about Ted? What did 
 he know about him? 
 
 "The boy's in trouble." 
 
 She gave him an acute, half-angry look. She disliked him, 
 both for his behaviour to Ted and his behaviour to her father. 
 She considered that he was to blame for Becket's second stroke 
 he must have irritated the old man. However, for Ted's 
 sake she would not actually be rude to him, so she merely 
 said: 
 
 "What makes you think that?'" 
 
 "Well, it's natural for him to be in trouble, isn't it? This 
 unfortunate death " 
 
 "You know you don't mean that." 
 
 "Does it leave you any better off?" he asked abruptly. 
 
 Lindsay stiffened. 
 
 "You had better ask Ted." 
 
 "I prefer to ask you." 
 
 Really the old man was impossible, but she controlled herself 
 with an effort not invisible. 
 
 "You ought to know that my poor father wasn't in a position 
 to do much for us."
 
 364 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 "Why not? He might have left you the Gun Garden mort- 
 gage it would have brought you in a few hundred a year, or 
 you could have foreclosed, and found yourself the owner of 
 a promising estate" and Monypenny grinned. 
 
 "That goes to James" after all he had a right to know who 
 was to hold the mortgage. Probably that was what he had 
 come after. 
 
 "Ah ... I gather the rest of the property was in a bit of 
 a muddle local investments and suchlike. There are the 
 two houses . . . but the lease of this one is nearly up." 
 
 "Really, I think you had better see Ted." 
 
 "I don't want to see him till I've laid my plans before you. 
 As I've told you already, the boy is in trouble and one of 
 the causes of his trouble is poverty. I wanted to know if 
 he'd be likely to get enough out of Becket's estate to take him 
 abroad, and get him into parnership with some good man out 
 in Queensland or California. I gather from what you say 
 that this is impossible; therefore I myself am willing to advance 
 the money." 
 
 Lindsay sat up and stared at him. He had made his speech 
 with some of the quaint formality which used to characterise 
 him in the days they seemed far off and impossible now 
 when she had looked upon him as her most distinguished part- 
 ner at Marlingate dances. 
 
 "Go abroad! leave England! But he's never contemplated 
 such a thing. Why should he?" 
 
 "Because, as far as I can see, it's his only chance of being 
 able to make anything of his life and his career to say nothing 
 of his marriage." 
 
 He spoke loudly, almost shouted at her, because her assur- 
 ance was maddening. She drew herself up. 
 
 "What do you mean?" 
 
 "You know perfectly well.- Even you must see a little of 
 what he is suffering." 
 
 "I fail to understand you."
 
 RECONCILIATION 365 
 
 Her chin was lifted, and her half-closed eyes gazed at him 
 with a kind of insolence. He lost his self-command, all his 
 dry formality he felt he must smash that casing of Becket 
 stupidity in which she had shut up the spirit of Morgan le Fay. 
 If only he could find that spirit, he might be able to save his 
 son. He rose out of his chair and came towards her. 
 
 "Lindsay, you know Ted is in trouble. Don't pretend you 
 don't, just to baffle me. I know you hate me, but you love 
 Ted, and for his sake you must listen to someone else who loves 
 him." 
 
 He had come quite close to her, stooping over her as she 
 sat on the sofa, and in a sudden recoil she thrust out her arm 
 to keep him away, as if she feared some physical violence. Her 
 complacency broke. 
 
 "How dare you say you love him after the way you've 
 treated him? You've been hideously cruel and unjust to him. 
 You've been a perfect brute to us all." 
 
 "That's right speak out at me. I want to hear you speak 
 out. Then I can speak out. I can't argue with you when you 
 sit there before me like a crab, all claws and shell. You're 
 Ted's wife, or else I wouldn't trouble about you. Because 
 you're his wife you can save him. You must take him right 
 away, out of this country, away from this wretched town, to a 
 place where he can make a fresh start. I'll find the money, 
 and he can set himself up over there, and make himself a 
 career, and build a new town if he likes. The rest is in your 
 hands." 
 
 "I'm glad you think I can do something," she snapped at 
 him. 
 
 "Yes or, as I said before, I shouldn't trouble about you. 
 He belongs to you now, not to me, and I can't help him unless 
 you'll help me. I want you to persuade him to go that's why 
 I came to you. If I'd gone to him first you might have spoiled 
 the whole thing by opposing it. You can still twist him about." 
 
 "Why should I do anything to help you? You've been
 
 366 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 against me all along and now you're being unpardonably 
 rude." 
 
 "I'm not asking you to help me I'm asking you to help 
 him. You love him, don't you?" 
 
 She turned red. 
 
 "Yes and he loves you. But your love is being spoiled 
 because it won't hold all he's trying to put into it. You see, 
 he wants so much so much more than you. No, I'm not 
 being rude again, I'm only trying to explain things to you. 
 The more a man wants a woman the more he wants to have 
 more than just herself, but a woman never understands that. 
 She always thinks she can fill a man's life, take the place of his 
 career, self-respect, ambition, anything else he may happen to 
 want that isn't her. Why, even your mother ..." 
 
 "What about my mother?" 
 
 "Wasn't quite everything to your father, I suppose." 
 
 "I don't see what that's got to do with it. Still I don't 
 mind owning to you that I think Ted wants a change of some 
 sort some new interests. London doesn't suit him he wants 
 sea air. But why can't you set him up somewhere in England? 
 Why do you want us to cut all our ties and go half across the 
 world?" 
 
 "Because, for one thing, England's an old country, all built 
 over, and no place for a struggling architect. For another, I 
 want him to get away from Marlingate." 
 
 "But we'd never dream of settling down in Marlingate." 
 
 "No but anywhere in England would be too close to Mar- 
 lingate for Ted. The town's got him." 
 
 "What do you mean?" she remembered uneasily some 
 doubts her husband had confided to her nearly a year ago as 
 to his father's sanity. 
 
 "As long as he's within reach of Marlingate he'll always be 
 hankering after it and scheming for it though even if I died 
 tomorrow it would be too late for him to undo my work." 
 
 Lindsay's uneasiness grew.
 
 RECONCILIATION 367 
 
 "Don't let's talk about Marlingate," she said nervously. 
 "Perhaps it's best, as you say, for Ted to make a fresh start 
 in a new country. After all, there aren't many openings for 
 an ambitious man over here." 
 
 "You're quite right. But probably it'll take some persua- 
 sion to make him go. He won't like, taking money from me 
 for one thing, but you'll have to get him over that." 
 
 "We'll take it as a loan, of course." 
 
 "Just as you like as long as you make him agree." 
 
 "You seem anxious to see the last of us" a little of her 
 anger revived, as pity and fear abated. 
 
 "You can imagine how anxious I am to see the last of my 
 only son, now my old age is beginning and probably my death 
 is not far off." 
 
 Lindsay was vexed with herself because she felt rebuked. 
 But she told herself that it was his manner more than his 
 words. The poor old chap, who used to be so fine, was break- 
 ing up. He had now gone back to his chair, and sat with his 
 hands folded on his knees, in a tired attitude uncommon to him, 
 
 "But he must go away," he insisted "it's his only chance. 
 You know he's in trouble you see it yourself and you worry 
 over it in secret, though you're too proud to tell me. Very 
 well, his salvation rests with you, and you're your mother's 
 daughter." 
 
 "That's the second time you've spoken of my mother. Did 
 you know her well?" 
 
 "I should never dare say that." 
 
 "People tell me I'm very like her." 
 
 "Be assured you are not in the least like her. But I think 
 there's enough of her in you to save my son. Good-bye." 
 
 He stood up and held out his hand. Lindsay put her own 
 into it, feeling rather at a loss. 
 
 "I'll speak to Ted, and hear what he has to say to it." 
 
 "Thank you." 
 
 He would not let her come to the front door with him, but
 
 368 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 she heard him go down the stairs and then down the asphalt 
 walk to the gate. A minute or two later she heard his feet 
 on the Coney Bank steps, solemnly clanking down into the 
 town. His footsteps struck a hollow sound out of the tall 
 houses clank, clank, clank, they went, growing gradually 
 fainter, and as they died away she found herself listening for 
 them with an unaccountable sense of longing and regret. . . . 
 
 8 
 
 They were silent now the world seemed to hang empty, 
 and she stood in a sort of despair. She rated herself for a 
 fool, and yet she could not shake off that peculiar feeling as of a 
 thing ended. Then suddenly her heart leapt, for feet sounded 
 again on the Coney Bank steps, drawing nearer. Perhaps it 
 was Ted coming home it might be anyone no one yes, it 
 was Ted. She saw him now, coming round the corner by Mid- 
 lothian. She waved to him out of the window, then ran down 
 to the hall door to meet him. 
 
 "Oh, Ted, I'm so glad you've come back!" 
 
 He was surprised. It was a long time since his intercourse 
 with Lindsay had been ruffled by any expressed emotion. 
 
 "What is it, old girl? Been feeling lonely?" 
 
 "No I've had your father here. Only I'm so glad you've 
 come back. Oh, Ted . . ." 
 
 She held out her arms, and as she did so, that strange, laugh- 
 ing, enticing look came into her eyes, as it had not come since 
 their marriage. Her face was lit up with that queer, flying 
 gleam, like sunshine in wind, and his heart melted suddenly. 
 With a little tender noise in his throat, he clasped her to him, 
 caressing her in happiness and love and reconciliation. The 
 door slammed behind them, shutting out the aching noon, and 
 the town that had divided them.
 
 RECONCILIATION 369 
 
 9 
 
 A little to Lindsay's surprise, Ted grasped almost eagerly 
 at his father's offer. For a long time he had been feeling him- 
 self bound to a dead thing, the priest of a rejected sacrifice, 
 and he saw in this new beginning his only chance of escape 
 from a sterile bondage of regrets. Some months ago it had 
 struck him that the best thing he could do was to emigrate, 
 but he had been hampered by the chains of Becket and by his 
 own reluctance to take Lindsay into the poverty of a strange 
 land. Now both his hindrances were removed. 
 
 "Egad! But it's infernally generous of the old man," he 
 said to his wife. 
 
 "I think he wants to get rid of us," said Lindsay. 
 
 "Very likely still, he could have done it cheaper. I wonder 
 how he's got the money he must have been hit as well as your 
 father I hardly like to take it from him." 
 
 "We can pay it back. Besides, I really consider he owes us 
 something. He's done nothing for us up till now, remember." 
 
 "I don't think we can claim anything. We married against 
 his wishes." 
 
 "Yes, that's true. But do you know that he spoke rather 
 nicely this morning about our marriage? He he " she hes- 
 itated "he seemed to understand more than I ever thought he 
 would." 
 
 "Hang it all, Lindsay! He's been jolly decent." 
 
 "Yes, I suppose he has but I can't quite forgive him, all 
 the same. The way he's treated you and my poor old father." 
 
 "I agree that there he behaved unpardonably. But I'm sorry 
 for him, you know he's in a bad way . . . breaking up." 
 
 "I'm afraid so. He talked a little to me as he talked to you 
 that time you told me of making out he'd ruined Marlin- 
 gate." 
 
 "He has ruined it but he wants us to believe he's done it 
 on purpose."
 
 370 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 "Perhaps it's only bluff he doesn't want us to think him a 
 bungler." 
 
 Ted shook his head. 
 
 "It's not bluff his mind's gone on that point; the worry 
 and all that has driven him quite off his hook. Otherwise 
 he's perfectly rational, I should say. But I'm damned sorry 
 for him boxed up with that monstrous idea." 
 
 "It is monstrous!" 
 
 That evening Ted went up to see his father at Gun Garden 
 House, and spent some hours shut up with him in his study. 
 Monypenny was not so surprised as Lindsay at his son's per- 
 suasion. He knew what desperate roads a man will take to 
 liberty, and, after all, this road he opened to Ted was wider 
 and smoother than any his own feet had trodden. He won- 
 dered a little why life seemed so willing to forgive this boy 
 and to take him back into favour, while he himself had found 
 no place of repentance though he sought it carefully with 
 
 tears He did not know that life seldom forgives her 
 
 stronger sons when they fall away. 
 
 Ted went back to Lindsay feeling happier and more hope- 
 ful than he had felt for long months. It is true that the new 
 Marlingate which his father spoke of would never be the 
 same as the old nothing would be able to give back to young 
 Monypenny all the joy he used to feel in the old red streets, 
 that sense of ancient mystery which used to inspire his most 
 modern musings. But this substitute which his father offered 
 was now the only possible hope. At least, once more he had 
 ambition, and ambition seemed to pour like a mighty wind 
 into his love, turning the sails of that mysterious mill which 
 had so long flopped in the calms of his disappointment and 
 stagnation. Once more the bread of life was to be ground. 
 
 The next day he took Lindsay back to London, but only till 
 he had finished his time at Britton and Giles. His articles ex- 
 pired in September, and it was settled that in the same month 
 he should start for Los Angeles. This destination was fixed
 
 RECONCILIATION 371 
 
 on after much discussion and correspondence, and finally some 
 consultations between Monypenny and a son of Lusted's, who 
 had emigrated to the States twenty years ago, and had set up 
 as a builder in Sacramento. He came home that summer to 
 see his old parents, and told wonderful tales of the growing 
 West, of the mushroom towns that shot up their palaces on 
 the Pacific coast. If young Monypenny wanted an opening, 
 there it was he could give him an introduction to a rising 
 chap in Bennetville, fifty miles north of Los Angeles. Goshl 
 he'd be planning cities in a few years' time the architects 
 couldn't work quick enough for the builders. And they had 
 taste, too, those Yanks nothing but white palaces behind 
 groves of palm trees . . . not the mess poor old Pa makes 
 down here and calls Building Houses. Monypenny's eyes 
 gleamed at the thought of a Marine Parade built of white pal- 
 aces behind a grove of palm-trees. . . . 
 
 Ted and Lindsay spent their last days in England at Gun 
 Garden House. Here Lindsay did her unsuccessful best to 
 be cordial to her father-in-law, while Ted made his farewells 
 local and personal. Their hearts belonged already to the fu- 
 ture. Even Ted's was beginning to lose its response to the 
 soiled beauties of Marlingate and when at last the slow 
 South Eastern train dragged out of the station he almost felt 
 as if he was leaving just a common, unprosperous seaside 
 town, an illusion which had tried to hold him, but had failed, 
 tearing only a piece off his garment. 
 
 10 
 
 Marlingate was beginning to empty itself. The visitors, 
 mostly office men with their families, or tradesmen and small 
 professionals with only a few weeks to spare, had gone back 
 to the desks and the counters which never let them stop away 
 very long. However, the season was not quite over, for one 
 or two big excursions were due before the end of the month.
 
 372 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 The first of them was fixed for the next day, when a large firm 
 of tin-box makers was sending down two train-loads of its em- 
 ployes for their annual beano. 
 
 These people came early in the morning; they must have 
 left their beds at four to have arrived in Marlingate before 
 seven. While breakfast was in progress at Gun Garden House, 
 a few of them straggled up past the windows, seeking the shade 
 of the Town Park. These were mostly women, already tired 
 after their long, close-packed journey, and untempted by the 
 public house in Station Road or by the remoter signs of the 
 New Moon and the Maidenhood. 
 
 It was a hot, hazy September day, and there was a smell 
 of corn-dust in the town, for the faint wind that occasionally 
 moved the heavy, wilted foliage of the Town Park, blew from 
 inland, bringing scents of dusty lanes and stripping hop-vines. 
 The sea-smell scarcely came further inshore than the Parade, 
 where the sun baked and blistered the seats and the peeling 
 paint on the houses. The trippers lay together in shoals on 
 the hot shingle, languidly making love, or throwing stones into 
 the sea, or listening to the tired singing of a troupe of minstrels 
 which had lingered on after the usual visitors were gone, in the 
 hope of some pickings from these droves that still occasional- 
 ly stampeded the town. Others sat and lolled and slept on the 
 seats, others lay and ate plums and bananas in the Town 
 Park, others swung up and down the Parade, or up and down 
 the High Street, their arms linked and their hats on their ears, 
 singing "Daisy, Daisy," "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay," and "The 
 Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo." 
 
 These were the typical activities of a typical crowd, driving 
 the stray, scared nursemaids off the beach, and even out of 
 the refuges of the Marine Gardens. But today the heat ag- 
 gravated the brutalities of the type, for heat was the genera- 
 tor both of ill-humour and thirst. The public-houses \vere 
 soon full each opened bar-door showed a tight packing of
 
 RECONCILIATION 373 
 
 backs. Drink sometimes led to sleep, but most often to more 
 drink. 
 
 That morning Monypenny, as it rarely happened, took 
 Fanny for an airing. The old couple passed down the High 
 Street, he in his staid morning clothes, she in a jetted bonnet 
 and cape, and leaning on his arm. 
 
 "The town looks very full today, my love." 
 
 "Yes there's an excursion from Erith." 
 
 "They seem rather an inferior class of people." 
 
 "They are factory hands, and naturally a bit rough." 
 
 " 'Ullo, old boy! Where did you get that 'at?" a voice 
 called up to the pavement from the furrow of the street. 
 
 "Don't you think it's rather a pity to let such people into 
 the town?" said Fanny, wincing. "Mrs. Bowerman was saying 
 only the other day that she doesn't like the thought of leav- 
 ing her nurse and children alone here, as she usually does when 
 she goes back to London." 
 
 "My dear, I know what I'm doing." 
 
 "Of course, my love," said Fanny mildly. 
 
 Monypenny took her into the pastry-cook's at the corner of 
 the High Street, and they each had a biscuit and a glass of 
 sherry, as their custom was when out together. The place 
 was now crowded with trippers, stuffing themselves with food 
 and shouting at one another. Fanny and Monypenny could 
 not even keep their table to themselves; two girls with big, 
 feathered hats sat down with them, and plagued them with gig- 
 gling impertinences. Then a woman at a table near them 
 was sick, and they had to go out, for Fanny was quite upset. 
 As for Monypenny, he was most unreasonably furious at all 
 this rowdiness and indecorum. He forgot that it was mere- 
 ly the result of his own long scheming, and became irritable 
 and abusive during his progress up the High Street, which, 
 outside the Maidenhood, was blocked with drunken crowds, 
 trying to get into the bar.
 
 374 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 "Confound you! Let me pass!" he said, raising his stick, 
 while Fanny clung trembling to his arm. 
 
 One man grew threatening at this demeanour, and squared 
 his fists right up to the stern, unterrified old face. Fanny 
 screamed, but someone more good natured in the crowd cried : 
 
 " 'Ere, boys, mike room fer Gawd Awmighty's brother 
 'Grace," and with loud shrieks of laughter and derision the 
 wedge of drinkers and quarrellers split, and the old pair walked 
 through. 
 
 n 
 
 There was to be a Town Council meeting that afternoon, 
 and soon after luncheon Monypenny had to go back to the 
 High Street, where he found the uproar worse than ever. There 
 were not enough public houses in Marlingate to accommodate 
 this enormous crowd, which was largely made up of habitual 
 drinkers, and of those made thirsty by the weather. Only a 
 limited proportion of it could squeeze into the bars, and while 
 the few stood and drank the many tried to force their way in 
 and turn out the few. When one man, disgusted and stifled, 
 came elbowing his way out, a dozen fought to take his place, 
 and there was a series of rushes from the street. Moreover, 
 the bored loungers on the beach and the Parade heard that 
 there was a shindy in the High Street, and, seeking diversion, 
 rolled up in their dozens, and took sides out of sheer animal 
 love of fighting. The result was that at one time Monypenny 
 thought he would never reach the Town Hall. The Maiden- 
 hood was nearly opposite it, and as he drew near he heard the 
 shivering music of broken glass. Then a great yell went up 
 from the crowd. The Maidenhood was throwing out its drunks. 
 Then another yell rose the Maidenhood was putting up its 
 shutters. There was a rush towards the entrance, men were 
 swept off the high pavement into the street, where they fell 
 on those struggling beneath; there were loud screams and 
 curses, more blows, more broken glass but in the ebbing of the
 
 RECONCILIATION 375 
 
 tide Monypenny was able to slither ungracefully into his Town 
 Hall. 
 
 Upstairs in the Council Chamber he found a knock-kneed 
 Pelham, supported by his son Robert, engaged in a fantasia 
 on the word 'Shocking.' They seemed to have lost all other 
 powers of speech. Two minutes later Lewnes joined them, his 
 face red and damp, and the hairs that were usually trained 
 across his crown hanging limply on his collar. Then Mark 
 Boas, the Town Clerk, came in with a large cake of dirt flat- 
 tened between his shoulders. 
 
 "What's to be done?" cried Lewnes, throwing himself help- 
 lessly into the Mayoral chair "why don't the police do some- 
 thing?" 
 
 "They're doing their best," said Boas, "but we haven't got 
 enough of 'em." 
 
 "How many of these ruffians are there in the town?" 
 
 "Perhaps a thousand." 
 
 "Who the devil allowed them to swamp us like this? Who 
 let 'em come?" 
 
 Nobody spoke, then Boas mentioned that a proper appli- 
 cation had been received from Turner Brothers through the 
 South Eastern Railway, and had been agreed to by the Town 
 Committee. 
 
 "But we never bargained for this gang. Why doesn't the 
 railway take them back again? When are they due to leave?" 
 
 "They're supposed to leave in two special trains starting at 
 eight and at eight-fifteen." 
 
 "I'll telephone to the police-station," said Monypenny. 
 
 The Town Hall had recently been equipped with a tele- 
 phone, and the Chief Inspector of Marlingate Police was soon 
 an indistinct member of the discussion. He would do his best. 
 He would send two mounted men. He had recommended all 
 the public-houses to close. 
 
 "Two mounted men! A lot of good they'll do!" groaned 
 Lewnes.
 
 376 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 "Better send for the military," said Robert Pelham. 
 
 "From Bulverhythe?" 
 
 "Yes. They might put the fear of God into these beasts/' 
 
 "Nonsense!" said Monypenny briskly "we haven't come to 
 that yet. They'll stop when they're tired." 
 
 They showed no signs of tiring yet. The High Street, with 
 its lofty pavements and troughed roadway, made an ideal bat- 
 tle-ground. Soon the pavement was being manned by the de- 
 fenders of the Maidenhood, the staff of Tutts, helped by 
 a few fighting citizens, while the trippers attacked from the 
 fosse of the street, or more dangerously threw bottles from the 
 pavement opposite. Glass was shivering all down the street, 
 and the Maidenhood had not a window left. 
 
 The borough fathers stood staring down forlornly at their 
 demoniac town, and as they stared were joined by Lusted and 
 two younger Councillors, Smith and Ellam. The two latter 
 were half-inclined to joke, dusting the grime of conflict off 
 their clothes, and talking of kicks they had given the "beasts." 
 Lusted was literally in tears. He stood in a corner of 
 the Council Room and sobbed into a torn but cleanly hand- 
 kerchief. 
 
 "Egad, gentlemen! We'd better start the meeting," said 
 Monypenny, swinging round from the window. "No use wait- 
 ing for anyone else; we're half an hour overdue as things are." 
 
 The Town Council was astonished into agreement; it shuf- 
 fled sheepishly into its seats, and sat meekly while Mark Boas 
 read the minutes to an accompaniment of screams and 
 falling glass. No one listened particularly, and before he had 
 finished a stone came spinning through the sacred windows of 
 the Town Hall, scattering the borough lions and Constans 
 Fidei in shivers on the floor. This broke the spell of Mony- 
 penny's eye, and the Town Council stampeded. 
 
 "Where are the police?" shrieked Robert Pelham. 
 
 "This is shocking truly shocking!" wailed his father. 
 
 "Send for the military!" cried Robert Pelham.
 
 RECONCILIATION 377 
 
 "It's your doing!" shouted Lusted to Lewnes. 
 
 "That's right blame me blame anybody; so's it's not 
 yourself." 
 
 "Gentlemen, gentlemen," said Monypenny "this is a meet- 
 ing kindly address the chair." 
 
 "Well,- I ask you if it ain't his fault?" cried Lusted hys- 
 terically. "It's him who was for bringing these people down 
 and popperalising the town and all that you scoundrel!" 
 
 "Order! order!" 
 
 "Scoundrel yourself. Who built the rotten 'ouses?" 
 
 "Will you address the chair?" 
 
 "Who put the money in his own pocket, and never invested 
 it and lost it like poor, decent people?" 
 
 "There is the chair!" 
 
 "You dirty jerry-builder!" 
 
 "Chair!" 
 
 "Order! Order!" 
 
 There was now almost as much uproar inside the Council 
 Chamber as outside it. Lewnes and Lusted were being for- 
 cibly withheld from jumping at each others' throats. 
 Monypenny stood up and uttered words of command that 
 were for the first time unheeded. Seeing the uselessness of 
 interference he walked over to the window and looked out 
 again. 
 
 The fight was as fierce as ever. Two mounted policemen 
 were powerless to control it, though they had drawn their 
 truncheons, as had also the foot police. More and more cit- 
 izens were being involved. Monypenny saw Henderson, the 
 High Street butcher, backed against the door of the Maiden- 
 hood, and young Dunk from the Furniture Emporium, also a 
 couple of clerks from Lewnes' old bank, and others. Only the 
 fishermen kept aloof. There was not a single tanfrock in the 
 crowd. They were probably mending their nets on the Stade 
 as peacefully as ever. 
 
 The crashing in of the window next him, with the stained
 
 378 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 glass effigy of a Tudor Mayor, made Monypenny withdraw 
 hastily into the room. Here he found that the battle had sub- 
 sided, and Lewnes was asking for a glass of water. The Town 
 Clerk came up to the Mayor and whispered to him. 
 
 "You'd better send for the military. The police can do noth- 
 ing." 
 
 Monypenny hesitated. 
 
 "They'll set the whole place on fire if we don't do some- 
 thing," continued Boas. "Look! They've got into the Maid- 
 enhood!" 
 
 There was a loud triumphant yell from the street, and the 
 crashing of doors, with some groans and shrieks of pain. At 
 the same moment the telephone bell rang. 
 
 It was the chief inspector. They must have help. He could 
 do nothing with this mob. Would his worship send over to 
 Bulverhythe for the soldiers? just to frighten them, you 
 know. Yes, the South Eastern would undertake to remove 
 them after the five-thirty London express had gone out. 
 
 He rang off, and Monypenny immediately asked the ex- 
 change for the barracks at Bulverhythe. Hullo! Yes . . . 
 Colonel Andrews would send over a small detachment? . . . 
 oh, quite small . . . more could follow? ... he hoped it 
 wouldn't be necessary . . . just to frighten them, you know. 
 
 12 
 
 The detachment arrived an hour later, in charge of an of- 
 ficer. It lined up outside the Town Hall, while the officer came 
 up to the Council Chamber. During that hour a good deal 
 had happened; the Maidenhood had been stormed and taken 
 by the enemy, who were now diversely engaged in drinking up 
 its cellars and tearing the tiles off its roof. These they flung 
 mostly at the Town Hall, and the floor of the Council Cham- 
 ber was spangled with a broken rainbow of coloured glass. 
 The arrival of the soldiers put the fear of God into some of
 
 RECONCILIATION 379 
 
 the rioters, who forthwith returned to the innocence of the Pa- 
 rade, but the majority were fired by the courage of the Maid- 
 enhood cellars, and a good many were unable to fight their 
 way out of the mass in which they were wedged. Several of 
 those who remained had their passions roused to even uglier 
 violence by the sight of the military. Howls, groans and curses 
 greeted the soldiers as they filed along the Town Hall wall and 
 lined up facing the Maidenhood and a shower of tiles, stones 
 and bottle-necks crashed through the municipal windows, so 
 that when Captain Barnes came in he found the borough fa- 
 thers blotted in undignified attitudes in the corners of the room. 
 
 A tall, pale old man came forward, with a manner that was 
 still half stately. 
 
 "Captain Barnes? I am the Mayor." 
 
 "Good evening, Mayor. You're having a bit of a picnic in 
 your town." 
 
 "I'm very sorry to trouble you, Captain, but things have got 
 a little out of hand. We have done all we could, but were 
 obliged to come to you." 
 
 "Oh, don't apologise. I hope we'll be able to help you. I 
 thought things quieted down a little at the sight of us." 
 
 "They seem pretty bad again now." 
 
 "Yes I'm afraid there's a lot of drink about. However, 
 when it actually comes to lifting our rifles " 
 
 "Oh, I don't want you to fire on them." 
 
 Monypenny realised that he did not want any murder done 
 in his town. 
 
 "I don't suppose it'll come to that and we'll fire over their 
 heads, anyway. But you'll have to read the Riot Act first." 
 
 "I see. Give them a chance of dispersing peaceably?" 
 
 "Yes. Are many of your own people among them?" 
 
 "I'm afraid so. A lot came out to help Tutt at the Maid- 
 enhood." 
 
 "Better not lose any time, your worship," said Boas, com-
 
 380 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 ing forward. "Read 'em the Act, and then, if they won't dis- 
 perse, leave things to Captain Barnes." 
 
 Monypenny stood uncertainly in the middle of the room. He 
 now realised that his whole heart was against this. He saw 
 that it would be the crowning work of his destruction "the 
 Marlingate riots. . . ." But he could not bear the thought 
 of it, and of his share in it. He seemed to see himself long 
 years ago, standing on the Marine Parade, and looking down 
 on the beach, on all the happy innocent people who were en- 
 joying his town, while he beamed down on them with pater- 
 nal pride. . . . And now. ... He saw Boas bring up his 
 robes of office, his scarlet cloak and cocked hat, while some- 
 one thrust a paper into his hand. He looked at it and saw 
 "Our Sovereign Lord the King ..." then a stone crashed 
 through the Jubilee window, and the Aldermen and Councillors, 
 who had begun to gather round him, scattered back into their 
 corners. 
 
 "Where can he read it from?" asked Captain Barnes. 
 
 The porch of the Town Hall was between the two windows, 
 backed by an enormous effigy of the borough arms. It was 
 reached from the side of the right hand oriel, and on its bal- 
 cony successful Parliamentary candidates had often stood in 
 response to cheers. Robert Pelham suggested the porch as 
 more imposing than the window. 
 
 "He'll never be heard from the window," said Boas. 
 
 "The porch is dangerous," said Lewnes. 
 
 "And what about the window?" 
 
 "I'll accompany his worship," said Captain Barnes. 
 
 "No, I'd rather go alone," Monypenny broke out of a strange 
 spell of dumbness "I don't want to flourish the military at 
 them. You'd better be down below with your men. I'll be all 
 right. They won't try to damage me, and if they do, it'll be 
 only pot shots just as likely to hit you as me," and he turned 
 rather maliciously on the Town Council. 
 
 Captain Barnes tried to press his point, backed by one or
 
 RECONCILIATION 38 1 
 
 two Councillors, but the Mayor was firm, and in the end the 
 officer went down to join his men, while Monypenny, still 
 strangely reluctant, moved towards the window. 
 
 "Stand back," he said to the Council, "keep away from the 
 broken glass." 
 
 He had not much need to speak, for Aldermen and Coun- 
 cillors were already hugging the remoter wall. Only Lewnes 
 stood uncertain in the middle of the floor. 
 
 "I'm coming with you, Mayor," he said in a quavering but 
 resolute voice. 
 
 "Nonsense stop where you are. I'll work 'em better alone" 
 and Lewnes fell back, trying not to look relieved. 
 
 There was hardly a shiver of glass left in the oriel, so Mony- 
 penny stepped easily through it, and stood on 'the flat roof of 
 the porch. 
 
 13 
 
 For a moment after he went out there was a lull, as if the 
 crowd had been impressed, in spite of itself, by the tall old 
 figure in black and scarlet, with its cocked hat and Mayoral 
 chain. But the next minute the uproar burst out again. Mony- 
 penny stood silent, staring down at the sea of furious 
 faces, lifted arms, and whirling missiles of mud and tiles. Op- 
 posite him the Maidenhood roof showed its stripped rafters, 
 while a crusade of tiles had slid and been miraculously 
 stopped on the edge of the gutter, dripping towards the broken 
 windows and split weather-boarding of the frontage. The rest 
 of the street had a dead, barricaded look the citizens and 
 visitors were locked up inside their doors. Below him the 
 beast of the crowd writhed and yelled, shooting up queer 
 spines of arms among faces close-packed like scales, one here 
 and there showing white and bloody in the midst of the oth- 
 ers, borne and jostled to and fro in their mass. Its anger 
 was aimed no longer at the Maidenhood, but at the Town
 
 382 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 Hall, and the armed force which had been brought to with- 
 stand it in its lawful battle for its lusts. 
 
 Monypenny could not speak for a moment. In his ears 
 hummed the words "Marlingate the great is fallen, is fallen, 
 and has become the habitation of devils, the hold of every 
 foul spirit, and the cage of every unclean and hateful bird." 
 Then his mood changed, and he seemed to stand as he had 
 stood once long ago, on the steps of the Assembly Room, 
 looking down into the empty High Street, streamed over with 
 moonlight and gulfed with shadows. Even beyond this up- 
 roar the moon and the darkness should every night build the 
 High Street anew, and it should lie cherished in the soft 
 night, unknown to all, save perhaps some lonely, privileged 
 watcher like himself. . . . 
 
 He lifted up his hand, in mute entreaty for silence, and 
 began to speak. But the shouting continued and his voice 
 was lost in it. No one in the Council Chamber could hear a 
 word. 
 
 "Is he reading the Act?" asked Boas. 
 
 "Not yet I don't think so," said Robert Pelham. 
 
 "He's speaking to 'em first," said Lewnes. 
 
 "He's appealing to their better feelings," whimpered old 
 Pelham. 
 
 "He'll have 'em in a minute, see if he don't," said Lewnes; 
 "he'll do it with his eye." 
 
 "I wish he'd read the Act," wailed Lusted. 
 
 Crash! A large tile flung the head of a Carolean Mayor 
 in shivers on the Chamber floor. 
 
 "Damn them!" cried Boas. 
 
 "I'll see if the old chap's all right," said Ellam, and, greatly 
 daring, he slipped out from safety to the window. 
 
 "It's all right he's still speaking Now he's going to read 
 the Act. By George! he's a game old cock." 
 
 "Those beasts ull get a few bullets in them soon, let's hope," 
 said Boas.
 
 RECONCILIATION 383 
 
 Monypenny was reading the Riot Act. They could hear the 
 words, as a sudden, short lull of curiosity fell upon the crowd. 
 
 "Our Sovereign Lord the King chargeth and commandeth 
 all persons being assembled immediately to disperse them- 
 selves and peaceably to depart to their habitations or to 
 their lawful business, upon the pains contained in the act 
 made in the first year of King George for preventing tu- 
 multuous and riotous assemblies. God Save the King." 
 
 The last words were lost, as the crowd recovered its wrath. 
 Shouts, yells, hisses, hoots, groans, crashes, breaking glass . . . 
 every strepitous and murderous noise of pandemoniacal pos- 
 session for a full minute . . . and then suddenly, almost ex- 
 plosively silence. The silence hung terrifyingly for a second 
 or two like the stillness after an earthquake, then it seemed 
 to spill and scatter itself into a hundred little noises a mur- 
 mur of hushed voices, a shuffle of feet in the roadway, a dull 
 pattering and hum, a synthetical sound which to the waiting 
 borough fathers at last assumed the surprising but unmistake- 
 able character of a crowd dispersing. 
 
 "They're going!" gasped Lusted. 
 
 "He's done it!" cried Lewnes "I told you he would. He's 
 got power in his eye. He knows how to scare 'em. He's a 
 man, I tell you. Oh, Lord! the power of his eye!" 
 
 "Be quiet!" cried Boas "Listen! "Yes, you're right. 
 They're going. I'm sorry they'll miss their punishment, 
 though." 
 
 "Oh, that man's eye!" chanted Lewnes in rapture, "the 
 power of that man's eye. I've seen it seen it on this Town 
 Council, pulling the guts of the obstructionists, so's they'd 
 show their hands Progressive though they'd talked 'emselves 
 'oarse fur 'all of an hour before 'and. Oh, the power of that 
 man's eye!" 
 
 "We'd better go out to him now," said Ellam "he's done 
 his job." 
 
 "Maybe he'll be coming in."
 
 384 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 "Not he! he'll see the street empty first." 
 
 They crowded in a body to the window, their boots crashing 
 and chinking on the broken glass. Down in the street they 
 could see the crowd pouring towards the sea, quickly, almost 
 silently, and strangely furtive. The soldiers, immediately be- 
 low against the wall, their rifles grounded before them, gazed 
 after them in mingled surprise and contempt. Then the Town 
 Council looked out on the porch. 
 
 Monypenny lay across the parapet, his arms dangling down 
 towards the street. His cocked hat had fallen over one ear, 
 and from under it a small trickle of blood ran down to the 
 brighter scarlet of his Mayoral robe. . . . 
 
 Boas and Ellam stood wedged in the doorway, while the 
 heads of the Council craned over and round their shoulders, 
 with startled eyes. There was a moment of silence, then Ellam 
 with a curse sprang out on the porch, and the others followed 
 all except old Pelham, who, feeling unable to negotiate the 
 step from the window, stood where he was, and cried. 
 
 Lewnes was the first to reach Monypenny, and lifted him off 
 the parapet. 
 
 "He's dead!" cried Lusted. 
 
 Boas groped under his clothing for his heart. 
 
 "Take off his chain," said somebody. 
 
 "Give him air," cried others, "let him breathe." 
 
 "It's no use," said Boas "he's gone." 
 
 "Gone!" 
 
 "Yes his heart's quite still." 
 
 "Oh, Lord!" cried Lewnes "Oh, Lord!"
 
 EPILOGUE 
 MONYPENNY ON THE SHORE 
 
 IN August, 1910, when Marlingate was at the height of its 
 Summer season, Ted Monypenny re-visited the town. He came 
 only for a day, running down from London where he had left 
 his wife and boy and girl. Lindsay did not want, she said, 
 ever to see Marlingate again, but Ted had felt the lure of curi- 
 osity as well as of courtesy and the bondage of old times 
 when he was invited by the Mayor, Alderman Ellam, to at- 
 tend the ceremonial unveiling of his father's statue. 
 
 "Your visit to England at this time," wrote his worship, "is 
 a fortunate coincidence. We want to make an imposing func- 
 tion of the unveiling such as will attract the numerous hol- 
 iday-makers in our town and I feel that your presence, as 
 son of the great man, will add much to the dignity and inter- 
 est of the proceedings." 
 
 Ted had refused the Mayor's invitation to perform the cere- 
 mony himself, preferring that it should be done by Ellam, as 
 had been the original plan. But he drove with the Aldermen 
 and Councillors from the Town Hall to the Marine Parade, 
 and stood among them at the foot of the draped statue, which 
 had been erected at the west end of the Parade, not far from 
 the Marine Gardens. 
 
 The Corporation consisted mostly of men he did not know. 
 He recognised Boas, in his clerk's wig, but the others were 
 strangers. They seemed to be drawn largely from the trad- 
 ing class, though he afterwards heard that Councillor Dwight 
 was a Baptist minister. The whole town wore, to him, an air 
 of strangeness as he stood there on the plinth of the tall 
 
 385
 
 386 r A.Wi.n.SK TOWN 
 
 statue, with the Summer sea-wind racing over him. Surprisingly 
 it had grown all the front of Cuckoo Hill, above the Marine 
 Gardens, was ridged with pink rows of little brick houses, evi- 
 dently new. The Parade itself looked squalid the big Victo- 
 rian houses were in need of paint and repair, their ground floors 
 had been broken up into shops, and several of them stood 
 empty. The Marine Hotel bore no trace of its old glory, but 
 was sliced into flats, several of which were empty to judge by 
 the blank and dirty windows. At the corner of the Parade and 
 the High Street, what had once been the Assembly Room was 
 now a furniture warehouse. 
 
 The crowd that had come to watch the ceremony reminded 
 him of the crowds he had known in Marlingate's latter days. It 
 was sun-burnt, sweaty, and good-humoured, and apparently 
 thought the unveiling of the great Mayor's statue most fitly 
 celebrated by the waving of paper streamers and the wearing 
 of false noses. It surged round the platform where the Cor- 
 poration stood, it chaffed and laughed, and passed ribald re- 
 marks on the civic vesture, it ate ice-cream, its babies howled, 
 its young men and women flirted noisily during the Mayor's 
 speech. 
 
 "Ladies and gentlemen ... a very special occasion . . . 
 honour to a great man . . . Monypenny of Marlingate. . . ." 
 
 The words reached Ted as he stood dreaming on the 
 threshold of the past, of that mysterious old town which he 
 had known as a boy, whose secret ways he had explored, 
 whose glories he had passionately dreamed. It seemed now 
 almost as if that town had never been, that secret, sweet old 
 town no more than the town of his father's great days, 
 Marlingate in its glory. Surely Marlingate had always been 
 this cheap, third-rate, rather soiled resort there had never 
 been a time when a boy had dreamed among the old houses, 
 or a time when beauty and gentility and fashion had paced up 
 and down that High Street and Marine Parade, and danced in 
 that Assembly Room.
 
 MONYPENNY ON THE SHORE 387 
 
 "This is the statue of the man who made Marlingate what 
 it is ... the grateful townsfolk who would like to immor- 
 talise his memory . . . the no less appreciative visitors who 
 year after year have enjoyed our salubrious climate . . . 
 yet I might indeed use the words that were used of the great 
 architect of St. Paul's Cathedral, 'If you want a monument, 
 look round.' . . . Marlingate is the monument of this great 
 and noble man, it is his life's work, and the work for which 
 he gave his life. ... I shall never forget that day . . . per- 
 ished in the noble discharge of his official duty . . . Mony- 
 penny of Marlingate ... a household word . . . always 
 remembered with love and respect by those privileged to 
 know him . . . my own personal privilege of calling him 
 friend. . . ." 
 
 "He speaks well, don't he?" an Alderman whispered to Ted 
 behind his hat. 
 
 Monypenny nodded, though he had heard only a few scat- 
 tered words, rising up like islands out of the sea of his own 
 half-wistful thoughts. The Mayor had finished his speech, 
 and proceeded to unveil the statue. The crowd had not 
 listened to him in absolute silence it had shuffled and gig- 
 gled and munched but now a brief, strained quiet hung over 
 it, as the Mayor lifted his hand, and the voluminous white 
 shroud fell, and Monypenny of Marlingate stood carven in 
 granite before the eyes of his town. Then a loud cheer went 
 up, not quite, Ted suspected, without a ring of good-hu- 
 moured mockery. What did this mixed multitude care about 
 a dead and gone Mayor? 
 
 A few comments drifted up to the official platform "a 
 regular beauty, I don't think" "Should say he was a Sheeney, 
 by his nose" 
 
 As a matter of fact the statue the work of a midland art- 
 ist was not a bad one. Monypenny was represented more 
 than life size, standing in his Mayoral robes and chain, his 
 cocked hat in his hand, gazing out to sea. The sculptor had
 
 388 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 been particularly successful with the face its peculiar, sat- 
 urnine cast, the drooping, idealistic nose, the melancholy 
 caverned eye. The mouth was grim and set above the dispro- 
 portionately long chin, but the carriage was courageous and 
 alert, the whole figure suggesting a kind of triumphant expect- 
 ancy. Ted wondered a little why it did not stand facing the 
 town, but looking away from it, out to sea. 
 
 On the plinth was carved in gilded letters "Edward Mony- 
 penny, 1829-1893, sixteen times Mayor of Marlingate the 
 builder of the new town, and founder of its prosperity who 
 gave his life in the discharge of his official duties, September 
 1 9th, 1893. Constans Fidei." 
 
 One or two Aldermen made speeches, but the crowd had now 
 heard and seen enough of Monypenny, and began to disperse 
 to the beach and the gardens and the Joy-wheel on the Pier. 
 The speechifying Aldermen addressed mostly departing backs, 
 and about ten minutes later the Mayoral procession reformed, 
 and made its way back to the Town Hall. 
 
 "Come in and have a drop of something," said Ellam to 
 Ted as the carriage rocked up the High Street, with the shad- 
 ows of the two Mace-bearers cast into it by the southward 
 sun. 
 
 Monypenny could not refuse, and accordingly soon found 
 himself upstairs in the Council Chamber, which had been 
 equipped with a new set of stained glass windows. 
 
 "Shall I ever forget that day?" said Ellam, following Ted's 
 eyes to the re-constructed Tudor Mayors "a sherry or a whis- 
 key, Mr. Monypenny?" 
 
 "I'll have whiskey, thanks. There's only you left, isn't 
 there, of the lot that was here when it happened?" 
 
 "Only me and Boas. Smith went up to Wigan in 1906. The 
 others are dead, except Robert Pelham, who's taken a dislike 
 to the place ever since, and lives at Eastbourne. They were 
 pretty old chaps at the time, you know. Old Lusted, he croaked 
 that very year. Old Lewnes, he doddled on a bit, but he
 
 MONYPENNY ON THE SHORE 389 
 
 never got over it the riot and your father being found dead 
 like that. It's awful to think he was lying there all that time 
 when we were in here cheering him for the way he'd settled 
 those beasts." 
 
 "It was never found out who struck him?" 
 
 "No couldn't be, very well. It wasn't much of an injury, 
 you know he died of shock more'n anything else. Dr. Cooper 
 said he'd been treating him for heart trouble for years, and of 
 course the excitement and the worry and all that . . . but 
 it was a glorious death." 
 
 Ted did not speak. He stood gazing at the Tudor Mayors. 
 
 "How are you doing now?" he asked after a moment. 
 
 "In the town d'you mean? Oh, nicely, very nicely; you 
 saw what a crowd there was this morning. Well, we're full 
 like that pretty well all the Summer." 
 
 "Don't get many people in Winter, I suppose?" 
 
 "No we don't expect them. We cater for quite another 
 class." 
 
 "And you find it pays?" 
 
 "Oh, of course times are difficult now you hear the same 
 everywhere. People are damned hard to please; they want so 
 much and they'll spend so little. Now suppose you toddle 
 home with me, and we'll ask the wife to give us a cup of tea." 
 
 Ted excused himself desperately. He realised that he 
 wanted to spend the rest of his time alone. He wanted to go 
 over the town and see how much remained of the Marlingate 
 he used to know. It was now eighteen years since he had been 
 in England, and between him and his memories lay the new 
 streets of the new town he was building out in the new coun- 
 try "New Marlingate" he called it. He would like to go over 
 the old place, and take some fresh memories of it back with him 
 though probably those memories would soon fade out in the 
 keen, shining air of Bennetville, Cal., and become dim and 
 ghostly, like the old ones. 
 
 He had tea at the pastry-cook's at the corner of High
 
 390 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 Street. It was crowded with trippers, eating and talking good- 
 humouredly, and keeping the little, touzled waitress running 
 to and fro on their errands. It was a happy, cheerful crowd, 
 reckless over its pence, and somehow conveyed a factitious im- 
 pression of prosperity. The shop had never been so full in the 
 days when Ted and Lindsay had sought adventure in it, but 
 then in those days there had been stately revellers at the Ma- 
 rine Hotel, and others more humble, but no less substantial 
 sitting down to a good meal of tea and bread and Robin Huss 
 at the Maidenhood Inn. 
 
 The Maidenhood was now only a common public-house, and 
 did not provide meals, except to a few commercial gents. 
 The name of Tutt was no longer on its sign the Tutts had mi- 
 grated to Bulverhythe. Ted's inspection of the town revealed 
 nothing that could genuinely be called a hotel. There were a 
 couple of Boarding Houses on the Parade, and when he reached 
 the top of the High street he had the shock of his visit. 
 Gun Garden House stood, looking rather brown and battered, 
 by the Old Warriors' Gate, and swinging out from its porch 
 was a sign "The French Gun." 
 
 Young Monypenny stood staring at the house where he had 
 been bom ... he was glad his father had not lived to see 
 this had not lived to make the material expiation of his mis- 
 taken policy, or to work out the doom of his stricken 
 mind. ... He wondered how long the house had been de- 
 graded. A policeman was passing, and he questioned him. 
 
 "How long has it been a pub? Oh, only a couple of years. 
 Prynne came here in 1908, and before that the house had been 
 empty since 'two or 'three. You see the kind of people that 
 can run a house that size don't come to Marlingate regular 
 barrack it was; so were those houses on the Parade, them that 
 are mostly flats and apartments now. The big-wigs used to 
 live in them fifty years ago, but that kind don't come here now. 
 People want small houses, and they're building 'em over by 
 Cuckoo Hill. This house used to belong to old Mr. Mony-
 
 MONYPENNY ON THE SHORE 391 
 
 penny the one whose statue they unveiled today, as I daresay 
 you know. He was Mayor here on and off about fifteen years, 
 and built the Parade and the new town. But he hadn't enough 
 money left to finish, and after his death the estate was sold to 
 some London contractors. His wife lived in Benbow Road till 
 she died, six or seven years ago, but she couldn't afford that 
 house. It was sold to a man called Painter, from Sevenoaks, 
 and a precious white elephant he found it till Prynne took it 
 on as a pub. They say it used to be an inn a hundred years 
 ago, before it ever was a house. Oh, don't mention it, Sir, very 
 pleased, I'm sure." 
 
 Monypenny turned away up the London Road. He felt he 
 would like to see New Marlingate Becket Grove, Pelham 
 Square, Monypenny Crescent, and all the rest of his father's 
 soaring and failing creation. The sight did not relieve his 
 mood. Figg's fine imagination in red brick and white column 
 ran up into the later atrocities of Lusted, and both were mixed 
 up in the rather lame experiments of the London contractor, 
 who seemed to have lost courage and expressed himself chiefly 
 by large weather-stung boards, standing at waste corners and 
 advertising building plots on the Braybrook Farm Estate. 
 
 He turned away, and going up Becket Grove in which he 
 saw several Apartment cards re-entered the old town by way 
 of Fish Street. Here he was given a certain comfort. The 
 fishing quarter was in most respects quite unchanged. The 
 same red and black houses sagged their tarred gables over the 
 narrow street, while the nets dried on the slopes of All Hol- 
 land Hill, and the fishermen in their tawny smocks loitered 
 in the sunshine outside the New Moon, or mended their tackle 
 under the black towers of the Stade. Here was an aspect of 
 Marlingate that had never changed that had always been, 
 and probably always would be. The town might be the most 
 select watering place in England or a fifth-rate resort of trip- 
 pers, without making any difference to the men who cast their 
 nets in the deep waters off Rock-a-Nore.
 
 392 TAMARISK TOWN 
 
 He came back into the High Street through the Petty Pas- 
 sage Way. It was now late in the evening, and he was going 
 home by the seven o'clock train. He had meant to visit the 
 Coney Banks, but there would not be time and he must con- 
 tent himself with a look upwards at their patched tiers, vary- 
 ing from the seventeenth-century houses that still huddled at 
 the foot, through the tall, black, mine-stoned creations of the 
 earlier Lusted the Aldermen with their stomachs and cocked 
 hats to the latest projections of the mind of Lewnes, with 
 bayed and stuccoed fronts and verandah-shades like broken 
 parasols. 
 
 The last pilgrimage he had time for was to St. Nicholas 
 churchyard. He came first of all to Becket's grave, on the 
 southern slope; he had seen the headstone before, many years 
 ago, but now his father-in-law's name had been cut below Mor- 
 gan Becket's, with the text "In death they are not divided." 
 
 Then he crossed to the further side of the churchyard, where 
 Monypenny lay with his feet towards All Holland Hill. A 
 plain, grey marble headstone marked his grave, with little 
 more than his name upon it according to instructions in his 
 will "Edward Monypenny, gent., of Gun Garden House in- 
 this borough." Fanny had been buried more piously, and the 
 tombstone at the bottom expressed opinions on which its top 
 half was remarkably silent. "Blessed are the dead which die 
 in the Lord. For they rest from their labours and their works 
 do follow them." 
 
 Ted stood for a few moments by the grave, his head bowed, 
 his thoughts with the man whose last act in life had been to 
 give him all that he himself had lost. He seemed to see his fa- 
 ther in the streets of a new shining city 
 
 "Aflame, more fine than glass 
 Of fair abbayes the boast, 
 More glad than wax of cost 
 Doth rrake at Candlemas
 
 MONYPENNY ON THE SHORE 393 
 
 The lifting of the Host. . . . 
 There many knights and dames 
 With new and wondrous names 
 Go singing down the street. . . ." 
 
 He did not linger. He had paid his dues to the dead, and 
 now would leave these quiet sleepers to their sleep. Already 
 the evening shadows were creeping down Cuckoo Hill, swallow- 
 ing up the churchyard, and spreading twilight over town and 
 sea. The sun lingered only on All Holland Hill, and in one last 
 gleam on the Marine Parade, for a moment transforming it 
 into the glowing, shimmering walk of light, the crystalline won- 
 der, of its creator's dream. 
 
 By the time he was down by the sea the brightness had 
 faded. Only the dusk was there, shifty with indistinct col- 
 ours. The trippers wandered to and fro, up and down the Ma- 
 rine Parade, their gay colours at once fused and broken in the 
 dusk ... it seemed to Ted that they were quiet now that 
 evening was come. 
 
 Their feet made a shuffling, dragging noise on the Parade, 
 and here and there a laugh went up, or a muffled cry, or the 
 sound of a kiss. Someone in a lodging on the Marine Parade 
 was playing an old tune, a waltz of Waldteufel's such as 
 might have been danced long ago in the Assembly Room. . . . 
 The lights of the Pier suddenly shot up out of the amethyst 
 twilight of the sea, and the old tune was drowned in the crash 
 of the Municipal band, beginning one of Sousa's marches. The 
 trippers broke their half-quiet walk, and streamed towards the 
 Pier and the bandstand. Soon the west end of the Parade was 
 deserted. Only the great statue of Monypenny stood blocked 
 against the sunset, staring with blind eyes out to sea.
 
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