Томас Харди (Гарди)
Two on a Tower
XI
Why had Lady Constantine stopped and turned?
A misgiving had taken sudden possession of her. Her true sentiment towards St. Cleeve was too recognizable by herself to be tolerated.
That she had a legitimate interest in him as a young astronomer was true; that her sympathy on account of his severe illness had been natural and commendable was also true. But the superfluous feeling was what filled her with trepidation.
Superfluities have been defined as things you cannot do without, and this particular emotion, that came not within her rightful measure, was in danger of becoming just such a superfluity with her. In short, she felt there and then that to see St. Cleeve again would be an impropriety; and by a violent effort she retreated from his precincts, as he had observed.
She resolved to ennoble her conduct from that moment of her life onwards. She would exercise kind patronage towards Swithin without once indulging herself with his company. Inexpressibly dear to her deserted heart he was becoming, but for the future he should at least be hidden from her eyes. To speak plainly, it was growing a serious question whether, if he were not hidden from her eyes, she would not soon be plunging across the ragged boundary which divides the permissible from the forbidden.
By the time that she had drawn near home the sun was going down. The heavy, many-chevroned church, now subdued by violet shadow except where its upper courses caught the western stroke of flame-colour, stood close to her grounds, as in many other parishes, though the village of which it formerly was the nucleus had become quite depopulated: its cottages had been demolished to enlarge the park, leaving the old building to stand there alone, like a standard without an army.
It was Friday night, and she heard the organist practising voluntaries within. The hour, the notes, the even-song of the birds, and her own previous emotions, combined to influence her devotionally. She entered, turning to the right and passing under the chancel arch, where she sat down and viewed the whole empty length, east and west. The semi-Norman arches of the nave, with their multitudinous notchings, were still visible by the light from the tower window, but the lower portion of the building was in obscurity, except where the feeble glimmer from the candle of the organist spread a glow-worm radiance around. The player, who was Miss Tabitha Lark, continued without intermission to produce her wandering sounds, unconscious of any one’s presence except that of the youthful blower at her side.
The rays from the organist’s candle illuminated but one small fragment of the chancel outside the precincts of the instrument, and that was the portion of the eastern wall whereon the ten commandments were inscribed. The gilt letters shone sternly into Lady Constantine’s eyes; and she, being as impressionable as a turtle-dove, watched a certain one of those commandments on the second table, till its thunder broke her spirit with blank contrition.
She knelt down, and did her utmost to eradicate those impulses towards St. Cleeve which were inconsistent with her position as the wife of an absent man, though not unnatural in her as his victim.
She knelt till she seemed scarcely to belong to the time she lived in, which lost the magnitude that the nearness of its perspective lent it on ordinary occasions, and took its actual rank in the long line of other centuries. Having once got out of herself, seen herself from afar off, she was calmer, and went on to register a magnanimous vow. She would look about for some maiden fit and likely to make St. Cleeve happy; and this girl she would endow with what money she could afford, that the natural result of their apposition should do him no worldly harm. The interest of her, Lady Constantine’s, life should be in watching the development of love between Swithin and the ideal maiden. The very painfulness of the scheme to her susceptible heart made it pleasing to her conscience; and she wondered that she had not before this time thought of a stratagem which united the possibility of benefiting the astronomer with the advantage of guarding against peril to both Swithin and herself. By providing for him a suitable helpmate she would preclude the dangerous awakening in him of sentiments reciprocating her own.
Arrived at a point of exquisite misery through this heroic intention, Lady Constantine’s tears moistened the books upon which her forehead was bowed. And as she heard her feverish heart throb against the desk, she firmly believed the wearing impulses of that heart would put an end to her sad life, and momentarily recalled the banished image of St. Cleeve to apostrophise him in thoughts that paraphrased the quaint lines of Heine’s Lieb’ Liebchen: —
‘Dear my love, press thy hand to my breast, and tell
If thou tracest the knocks in that narrow cell;
A carpenter dwells there; cunning is he,
And slyly he’s shaping a coffin for me!’
Lady Constantine was disturbed by a break in the organist’s meandering practice, and raising her head she saw a person standing by the player. It was Mr. Torkingham, and what he said was distinctly audible. He was inquiring for herself.
‘I thought I saw Lady Constantine walk this way,’ he rejoined to Tabitha’s negative. ‘I am very anxious indeed to meet with her.’
She went forward. ‘I am here,’ she said. ‘Don’t stop playing, Miss Lark. What is it, Mr. Torkingham?’
Tabitha thereupon resumed her playing, and Mr. Torkingham joined Lady Constantine.
‘I have some very serious intelligence to break to your ladyship,’ he said. ‘But – I will not interrupt you here.’ (He had seen her rise from her knees to come to him.) ‘I will call at the House the first moment you can receive me after reaching home.’
‘No, tell me here,’ she said, seating herself.
He came close, and placed his hand on the poppy-head of the seat.
‘I have received a communication,’ he resumed haltingly, ‘in which I am requested to prepare you for the contents of a letter that you will receive to-morrow morning.’
‘I am quite ready.’
‘The subject is briefly this, Lady Constantine: that you have been a widow for more than eighteen months.’
‘Dead!’
‘Yes. Sir Blount was attacked by dysentery and malarious fever, on the banks of the Zouga in South Africa, so long ago as last October twelvemonths, and it carried him off. Of the three men who were with him, two succumbed to the same illness, a hundred miles further on; while the third, retracing his steps into a healthier district, remained there with a native tribe, and took no pains to make the circumstances known. It seems to be only by the mere accident of his having told some third party that we know of the matter now. This is all I can tell you at present.’
She was greatly agitated for a few moments; and the Table of the Law opposite, which now seemed to appertain to another dispensation, glistened indistinctly upon a vision still obscured by the old tears.
‘Shall I conduct you home?’ asked the parson.
‘No thank you,’ said Lady Constantine. ‘I would rather go alone.’
XII
On the afternoon of the next day Mr. Torkingham, who occasionally dropped in to see St. Cleeve, called again as usual; after duly remarking on the state of the weather, congratulating him on his sure though slow improvement, and answering his inquiries about the comet, he said, ‘You have heard, I suppose, of what has happened to Lady Constantine?’
‘No! Nothing serious?’
‘Yes, it is serious.’ The parson informed him of the death of Sir Blount, and of the accidents which had hindered all knowledge of the same, – accidents favoured by the estrangement of the pair and the cessation of correspondence between them for some time.
His listener received the news with the concern of a friend, Lady Constantine’s aspect in his eyes depending but little on her condition matrimonially.
‘There was no attempt to bring him home when he died?’
‘O no. The climate necessitates instant burial. We shall have more particulars in a day or two, doubtless.’
‘Poor Lady Constantine, – so good and so sensitive as she is! I suppose she is quite prostrated by the bad news.’
‘Well, she is rather serious, – not prostrated. The household is going into mourning.’
‘Ah, no, she would not be quite prostrated,’ murmured Swithin, recollecting himself. ‘He was unkind to her in many ways. Do you think she will go away from Welland?’
That the vicar could not tell. But he feared that Sir Blount’s affairs had been in a seriously involved condition, which might necessitate many and unexpected changes.
Time showed that Mr. Torkingham’s surmises were correct.
During the long weeks of early summer, through which the young man still lay imprisoned, if not within his own chamber, within the limits of the house and garden, news reached him that Sir Blount’s mismanagement and eccentric behaviour were resulting in serious consequences to Lady Constantine; nothing less, indeed, than her almost complete impoverishment. His personalty was swallowed up in paying his debts, and the Welland estate was so heavily charged with annuities to his distant relatives that only a mere pittance was left for her. She was reducing the establishment to the narrowest compass compatible with decent gentility. The horses were sold one by one; the carriages also; the greater part of the house was shut up, and she resided in the smallest rooms. All that was allowed to remain of her former contingent of male servants were an odd man and a boy. Instead of using a carriage she now drove about in a donkey-chair, the said boy walking in front to clear the way and keep the animal in motion; while she wore, so his informants reported, not an ordinary widow’s cap or bonnet, but something even plainer, the black material being drawn tightly round her face, giving her features a small, demure, devout cast, very pleasing to the eye.
‘Now, what’s the most curious thing in this, Mr. San Cleeve,’ said Sammy Blore, who, in calling to inquire after Swithin’s health, had imparted some of the above particulars, ‘is that my lady seems not to mind being a pore woman half so much as we do at seeing her so. ’Tis a wonderful gift, Mr. San Cleeve, wonderful, to be able to guide yerself, and not let loose yer soul in blasting at such a misfortune. I should go and drink neat regular, as soon as I had swallered my breakfast, till my innerds was burnt out like a’ old copper, if it had happened to me; but my lady’s plan is best. Though I only guess how one feels in such losses, to be sure, for I never had nothing to lose.’
Meanwhile the observatory was not forgotten; nor that visitant of singular shape and habits which had appeared in the sky from no one knew whence, trailing its luminous streamer, and proceeding on its way in the face of a wondering world, till it should choose to vanish as suddenly as it had come.
When, about a month after the above dialogue took place, Swithin was allowed to go about as usual, his first pilgrimage was to the Rings-Hill Speer. Here he studied at leisure what he had come to see.
On his return to the homestead, just after sunset, he found his grandmother and Hannah in a state of great concern. The former was looking out for him against the evening light, her face showing itself worn and rutted, like an old highway, by the passing of many days. Her information was that in his absence Lady Constantine had called in her driving-chair, to inquire for him. Her ladyship had wished to observe the comet through the great telescope, but had found the door locked when she applied at the tower. Would he kindly leave the door unfastened to-morrow, she had asked, that she might be able to go to the column on the following evening for the same purpose? She did not require him to attend.
During the next day he sent Hannah with the key to Welland House, not caring to leave the tower open. As evening advanced and the comet grew distinct, he doubted if Lady Constantine could handle the telescope alone with any pleasure or profit to herself. Unable, as a devotee to science, to rest under this misgiving, he crossed the field in the furrow that he had used ever since the corn was sown, and entered the plantation. His unpractised mind never once guessed that her stipulations against his coming might have existed along with a perverse hope that he would come.
On ascending he found her already there. She sat in the observing-chair: the warm light from the west, which flowed in through the opening of the dome, brightened her face, and her face only, her robes of sable lawn rendering the remainder of her figure almost invisible.
‘You have come!’ she said with shy pleasure. ‘I did not require you. But never mind.’ She extended her hand cordially to him.
Before speaking he looked at her with a great new interest in his eye. It was the first time that he had seen her thus, and she was altered in more than dress. A soberly-sweet expression sat on her face. It was of a rare and peculiar shade – something that he had never seen before in woman.
‘Have you nothing to say?’ she continued. ‘Your footsteps were audible to me from the very bottom, and I knew they were yours. You look almost restored.’
‘I am almost restored,’ he replied, respectfully pressing her hand. ‘A reason for living arose, and I lived.’
‘What reason?’ she inquired, with a rapid blush.
He pointed to the rocket-like object in the western sky.
‘Oh, you mean the comet. Well, you will never make a courtier! You know, of course, what has happened to me; that I have no longer a husband – have had none for a year and a half. Have you also heard that I am now quite a poor woman? Tell me what you think of it.’
‘I have thought very little of it since I heard that you seemed to mind poverty but little. There is even this good in it, that I may now be able to show you some little kindness for all those you have done me, my dear lady.’
‘Unless for economy’s sake, I go and live abroad, at Dinan, Versailles, or Boulogne.’
Swithin, who had never thought of such a contingency, was earnest in his regrets; without, however, showing more than a sincere friend’s disappointment.
‘I did not say it was absolutely necessary,’ she continued. ‘I have, in fact, grown so homely and home-loving, I am so interested in the place and the people here, that, in spite of advice, I have almost determined not to let the house; but to continue the less business-like but pleasanter alternative of living humbly in a part of it, and shutting up the rest.’
‘Your love of astronomy is getting as strong as mine!’ he said ardently. ‘You could not tear yourself away from the observatory!’
‘You might have supposed me capable of a little human feeling as well as scientific, in connection with the observatory.’
‘Dear Lady Constantine, by admitting that your astronomer has also a part of your interest – ’
‘Ah, you did not find it out without my telling!’ she said, with a playfulness which was scarcely playful, a new accession of pinkness being visible in her face. ‘I diminish myself in your esteem by reminding you.’
‘You might do anything in this world without diminishing yourself in my esteem, after the goodness you have shown. And more than that, no misrepresentation, no rumour, no damning appearance whatever would ever shake my loyalty to you.’
‘But you put a very matter-of-fact construction on my motives sometimes. You see me in such a hard light that I have to drop hints in quite a manoeuvring manner to let you know I am as sympathetic as other people. I sometimes think you would rather have me die than have your equatorial stolen. Confess that your admiration for me was based on my house and position in the county! Now I am shorn of all that glory, such as it was, and am a widow, and am poorer than my tenants, and can no longer buy telescopes, and am unable, from the narrowness of my circumstances, to mix in circles that people formerly said I adorned, I fear I have lost the little hold I once had over you.’
‘You are as unjust now as you have been generous hitherto,’ said St. Cleeve, with tears in his eyes at the gentle banter of the lady, which he, poor innocent, read as her real opinions. Seizing her hand he continued, in tones between reproach and anger, ‘I swear to you that I have but two devotions, two thoughts, two hopes, and two blessings in this world, and that one of them is yourself!’
‘And the other?’
‘The pursuit of astronomy.’
‘And astronomy stands first.’
‘I have never ordinated two such dissimilar ideas. And why should you deplore your altered circumstances, my dear lady? Your widowhood, if I may take the liberty to speak on such a subject, is, though I suppose a sadness, not perhaps an unmixed evil. For though your pecuniary troubles have been discovered to the world and yourself by it, your happiness in marriage was, as you have confided to me, not great; and you are now left free as a bird to follow your own hobbies.’
‘I wonder you recognize that.’
‘But perhaps,’ he added, with a sigh of regret, ‘you will again fall a prey to some man, some uninteresting country squire or other, and be lost to the scientific world after all.’
‘If I fall a prey to any man, it will not be to a country squire. But don’t go on with this, for heaven’s sake! You may think what you like in silence.’
‘We are forgetting the comet,’ said St. Cleeve. He turned, and set the instrument in order for observation, and wheeled round the dome.
While she was looking at the nucleus of the fiery plume, that now filled so large a space of the sky as completely to dominate it, Swithin dropped his gaze upon the field, and beheld in the dying light a number of labourers crossing directly towards the column.
‘What do you see?’ Lady Constantine asked, without ceasing to observe the comet.
‘Some of the work-folk are coming this way. I know what they are coming for, – I promised to let them look at the comet through the glass.’
‘They must not come up here,’ she said decisively.
‘They shall await your time.’
‘I have a special reason for wishing them not to see me here. If you ask why, I can tell you. They mistakenly suspect my interest to be less in astronomy than in the astronomer, and they must have no showing for such a wild notion. What can you do to keep them out?’
‘I’ll lock the door,’ said Swithin. ‘They will then think I am away.’ He ran down the staircase, and she could hear him hastily turning the key. Lady Constantine sighed.
‘What weakness, what weakness!’ she said to herself. ‘That envied power of self-control, where is it? That power of concealment which a woman should have – where? To run such risks, to come here alone, – oh, if it were known! But I was always so, – always!’
She jumped up, and followed him downstairs.
XIII
He was standing immediately inside the door at the bottom, though it was so dark she could hardly see him. The villagers were audibly talking just without.
‘He’s sure to come, rathe or late,’ resounded up the spiral in the vocal note of Hezzy Biles. ‘He wouldn’t let such a fine show as the comet makes to-night go by without peeping at it, – not Master Cleeve! Did ye bring along the flagon, Haymoss? Then we’ll sit down inside his little board-house here, and wait. He’ll come afore bed-time. Why, his spy-glass will stretch out that there comet as long as Welland Lane!’
‘I’d as soon miss the great peep-show that comes every year to Greenhill Fair as a sight of such a immortal spectacle as this!’ said Amos Fry.
‘“Immortal spectacle,” – where did ye get that choice mossel, Haymoss?’ inquired Sammy Blore. ‘Well, well, the Lord save good scholars – and take just a bit o’ care of them that bain’t! As ’tis so dark in the hut, suppose we draw out the bench into the front here, souls?’
The bench was accordingly brought forth, and in order to have a back to lean against, they placed it exactly across the door into the spiral staircase.
‘Now, have ye got any backy? If ye haven’t, I have,’ continued Sammy Blore. A striking of matches followed, and the speaker concluded comfortably, ‘Now we shall do very well.’
‘And what do this comet mean?’ asked Haymoss. ‘That some great tumult is going to happen, or that we shall die of a famine?’
‘Famine – no!’ said Nat Chapman. ‘That only touches such as we, and the Lord only consarns himself with born gentlemen. It isn’t to be supposed that a strange fiery lantern like that would be lighted up for folks with ten or a dozen shillings a week and their gristing, and a load o’ thorn faggots when we can get ’em. If ’tis a token that he’s getting hot about the ways of anybody in this parish, ’tis about my Lady Constantine’s, since she is the only one of a figure worth such a hint.’
‘As for her income, – that she’s now lost.’
‘Ah, well; I don’t take in all I hear.’
Lady Constantine drew close to St. Cleeve’s side, and whispered, trembling, ‘Do you think they will wait long? Or can we get out?’
Swithin felt the awkwardness of the situation. The men had placed the bench close to the door, which, owing to the stairs within, opened outwards; so that at the first push by the pair inside to release themselves the bench must have gone over, and sent the smokers sprawling on their faces. He whispered to her to ascend the column and wait till he came.
‘And have the dead man left her nothing? Hey? And have he carried his inheritance into’s grave? And will his skeleton lie warm on account o’t? Hee-hee!’ said Haymoss.
‘’Tis all swallered up,’ observed Hezzy Biles. ‘His goings-on made her miserable till ’a died, and if I were the woman I’d have my randys now. He ought to have bequeathed to her our young gent, Mr. St. Cleeve, as some sort of amends. I’d up and marry en, if I were she; since her downfall has brought ’em quite near together, and made him as good as she in rank, as he was afore in bone and breeding.’
‘D’ye think she will?’ asked Sammy Blore. ‘Or is she meaning to enter upon a virgin life for the rest of her days?’
‘I don’t want to be unreverent to her ladyship; but I really don’t think she is meaning any such waste of a Christian carcase. I say she’s rather meaning to commit flat matrimony wi’ somebody or other, and one young gentleman in particular.’
‘But the young man himself?’
‘Planned, cut out, and finished for the delight of ’ooman!’
‘Yet he must be willing.’
‘That would soon come. If they get up this tower ruling plannards together much longer, their plannards will soon rule them together, in my way o’ thinking. If she’ve a disposition towards the knot, she can soon teach him.’
‘True, true, and lawfully. What before mid ha’ been a wrong desire is now a holy wish!’
The scales fell from Swithin St. Cleeve’s eyes as he heard the words of his neighbours. How suddenly the truth dawned upon him; how it bewildered him, till he scarcely knew where he was; how he recalled the full force of what he had only half apprehended at earlier times, particularly of that sweet kiss she had impressed on his lips when she supposed him dying, – these vivid realizations are difficult to tell in slow verbiage. He could remain there no longer, and with an electrified heart he retreated up the spiral.
He found Lady Constantine half way to the top, standing by a loop-hole; and when she spoke he discovered that she was almost in tears. ‘Are they gone?’ she asked.
‘I fear they will not go yet,’ he replied, with a nervous fluctuation of manner that had never before appeared in his bearing towards her.
‘What shall I do?’ she asked. ‘I ought not to be here; nobody knows that I am out of the house. Oh, this is a mistake! I must go home somehow.’
‘Did you hear what they were saying?’
‘No,’ said she. ‘What is the matter? Surely you are disturbed? What did they say?’
‘It would be the exaggeration of frankness in me to tell you.’
‘Is it what a woman ought not to be made acquainted with?’
‘It is, in this case. It is so new and so indescribable an idea to me – that’ – he leant against the concave wall, quite tremulous with strange incipient sentiments.
‘What sort of an idea?’ she asked gently.
‘It is – an awakening. In thinking of the heaven above, I did not perceive – the – ’
‘Earth beneath?’
‘The better heaven beneath. Pray, dear Lady Constantine, give me your hand for a moment.’
She seemed startled, and the hand was not given.
‘I am so anxious to get home,’ she repeated. ‘I did not mean to stay here more than five minutes!’
‘I fear I am much to blame for this accident,’ he said. ‘I ought not to have intruded here. But don’t grieve! I will arrange for your escape, somehow. Be good enough to follow me down.’
They redescended, and, whispering to Lady Constantine to remain a few stairs behind, he began to rattle and unlock the door.
The men precipitately removed their bench, and Swithin stepped out, the light of the summer night being still enough to enable them to distinguish him.
‘Well, Hezekiah, and Samuel, and Nat, how are you?’ he said boldly.
‘Well, sir, ’tis much as before wi’ me,’ replied Nat. ‘One hour a week wi’ God A’mighty and the rest with the devil, as a chap may say. And really, now yer poor father’s gone, I’d as lief that that Sunday hour should pass like the rest; for Pa’son Tarkenham do tease a feller’s conscience that much, that church is no hollerday at all to the limbs, as it was in yer reverent father’s time! But we’ve been waiting here, Mr. San Cleeve, supposing ye had not come.’
‘I have been staying at the top, and fastened the door not to be disturbed. Now I am sorry to disappoint you, but I have another engagement this evening, so that it would be inconvenient to admit you. To-morrow evening, or any evening but this, I will show you the comet and any stars you like.’
They readily agreed to come the next night, and prepared to depart. But what with the flagon, and the pipes, and the final observations, getting away was a matter of time. Meanwhile a cloud, which nobody had noticed, arose from the north overhead, and large drops of rain began to fall so rapidly that the conclave entered the hut till it should be over. St. Cleeve strolled off under the firs.
The next moment there was a rustling through the trees at another point, and a man and woman appeared. The woman took shelter under a tree, and the man, bearing wraps and umbrellas, came forward.
‘My lady’s man and maid,’ said Sammy.
‘Is her ladyship here?’ asked the man.
‘No. I reckon her ladyship keeps more kissable company,’ replied Nat Chapman.
‘Pack o’ stuff!’ said Blore.
‘Not here? Well, to be sure! We can’t find her anywhere in the wide house! I’ve been sent to look for her with these overclothes and umbrella. I’ve suffered horse-flesh traipsing up and down, and can’t find her nowhere. Lord, Lord, where can she be, and two months’ wages owing to me!’
‘Why so anxious, Anthony Green, as I think yer name is shaped? You be not a married man?’ said Hezzy.
‘’Tis what they call me, neighbours, whether or no.’
‘But surely you was a bachelor chap by late, afore her ladyship got rid of the regular servants and took ye?’
‘I were; but that’s past!’
‘And how came ye to bow yer head to ’t, Anthony? ’Tis what you never was inclined to. You was by no means a doting man in my time.’
‘Well, had I been left to my own free choice, ’tis as like as not I should ha’ shunned forming such kindred, being at that time a poor day man, or weekly, at my highest luck in hiring. But ’tis wearing work to hold out against the custom of the country, and the woman wanting ye to stand by her and save her from unborn shame; so, since common usage would have it, I let myself be carried away by opinion, and took her. Though she’s never once thanked me for covering her confusion, that’s true! But, ’tis the way of the lost when safe, and I don’t complain. Here she is, just behind, under the tree, if you’d like to see her? – a very nice homespun woman to look at, too, for all her few weather-stains… Well, well, where can my lady be? And I the trusty jineral man – ’tis more than my place is worth to lose her! Come forward, Christiana, and talk nicely to the work-folk.’
While the woman was talking the rain increased so much that they all retreated further into the hut. St. Cleeve, who had impatiently stood a little way off, now saw his opportunity, and, putting in his head, said, ‘The rain beats in; you had better shut the door. I must ascend and close up the dome.’
Slamming the door upon them without ceremony he quickly went to Lady Constantine in the column, and telling her they could now pass the villagers unseen he gave her his arm. Thus he conducted her across the front of the hut into the shadows of the firs.
‘I will run to the house and harness your little carriage myself,’ he said tenderly. ‘I will then take you home in it.’
‘No; please don’t leave me alone under these dismal trees!’ Neither would she hear of his getting her any wraps; and, opening her little sunshade to keep the rain out of her face, she walked with him across the insulating field, after which the trees of the park afforded her a sufficient shelter to reach home without much damage.
Swithin was too greatly affected by what he had overheard to speak much to her on the way, and protected her as if she had been a shorn lamb. After a farewell which had more meaning than sound in it, he hastened back to Rings-Hill Speer. The work-folk were still in the hut, and, by dint of friendly converse and a sip at the flagon, had so cheered Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Green that they neither thought nor cared what had become of Lady Constantine.
St. Cleeve’s sudden sense of new relations with that sweet patroness had taken away in one half-hour his natural ingenuousness. Henceforth he could act a part.
‘I have made all secure at the top,’ he said, putting his head into the hut. ‘I am now going home. When the rain stops, lock this door and bring the key to my house.’
