were in the church—Squire Moyle, Mr. Raymond, and Taffy close behind. The two men were discussing the holes in the roof and other dilapidations.
"One, two, three," the Squire counted. "I'll send a couple of men with tarpaulin and rick-ropes. That'll tide us over next Sunday, unless it blows hard."
They passed up three steps under the belfry arch. Here a big bell rested on the flooring. Its rim was cracked, but not badly. A long ladder reached up into the gloom.
"What's the beam like?" the Squire called up to someone aloft.
"Sound as a bell," answered a voice.
"I said so. We'll have en hoisted by Sunday, I'll send a waggon over to Wheel Gooniver for a tackle and winch. Damme, up there! Don't keep sheddin' such a muck o' dust on your betters!"
"I can't help no other, Squire!" said the voice overhead; "such a cauch o' pilm an' twigs, an' birds' droppins'! If I sneeze I'm a lost man."
Taffy, staring up as well as he could for the falling rubbish, could just spy a white smock above the beam, and a glint of daylight on the toe-scutes of two dangling boots.
"I'll dam soon make you help it. Is the beam sound?"
"Ha'n't I told 'ee so?" said the voice querulously.
"Then come down off the ladder, you son of a "
"Gently, Squire!" put in Mr. Raymond.
The Squire groaned. "There I go again—an' in the House of God itself! Oh! 'tis a case with me! I've a heart o' stone—a heart o' stone." He turned and brushed his rusty hat with his coat-cuff. Suddenly he faced round again. "Here, Bill Udy," he said to the old labourer who had just come down the ladder, "catch hold of my hat an' carry en fore to porch. I keep forgettin' I'm in church, an' then on he goes."
The building stood half a mile from the sea, surrounded by the rolling s and rabbit burrows, and a few lichen-spotted tombstones slanting inland. Early in the seventeenth century a London merchant had been shipwrecked on the coast below Nannizabuloe and cast ashore, the one saved out of thirty. He asked to be shown a church in which to give thanks for his preservation, and the people led him to a ruin bedded in the sands. It had lain since the days of Arundel's Rebellion. The Londoner vowed to build a new church there on the towans, where the songs of prayer and praise should mingle with the voice of the waves which God had baffled for him. The people warned him of the sand; but he would not listen to reason. He built his church—a squat Perpendicular building of two aisles, the wider divided into nave and chancel merely by a granite step in the flooring; he saw it consecrated, and returned to his home and died. And the church steadily decayed. He had mixed his mortar with sea-sand. The stonework oozed brine, the plaster fell piece-meal; the blown sand penetrated like water; the foundations sank a foot on the south side, and the whole structure took a list to leeward. The living passed into the hands of the Dean and Chapter of Exeter, and from them, in 1730, to the Moyles. Mr. Raymond's predecessor was a kinsman of theirs by marriage, a pluralist, who lived and died at the other end of the Duchy. He had sent curates from time to time; the last of whom was dead, three years since, of solitude and drink. But he never came himself, Squire Moyle having threatened to set the dogs on him if ever he set foot in Nannizabuloe; for there had been some dispute over a dowry. The result was that nobody went to church, though a parson from the next parish held an occasional service. The people were Wesleyan Methodists or Bryanites. Each sect had its own chapel in the fishing village of Innis, on the western side of the parish; and the Bryanites a second one, at the cross-roads behind the downs, for the miners and warreners and scattered farmfolk.
Ding—ding—ding—ding—ding.
It was Sunday morning, and Taffy was sounding the bell, by a thin rope tied to its clapper. The heavy bell-rope would be ready next week; but Humility must first contrive a woollen binding for it, to prevent its chafing the ringer's hands.
Out on the towans the rabbits heard the sound, and ran scampering. Others, farther away, paused in their feeding, and listened with cocked ears.
Ding—ding—ding.
Mr. Raymond stood in the belfry at the boy's elbow. He wore his surplice, and held his prayer-book, with a finger between the pages. Glancing down toward the nave, he saw Humility sitting in the big vicarage pew—no other soul in church.
He took the cord from Taffy, "Run to the door, and see if anyone is coming."
Taffy ran, and after a minute came back.
"There's Squire Moyle coming along the path, and the little girl with him, and some servants behind—five or six of them. Bill Udy's one."