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Some day there'll come a nasty bust up, and she may pull herself together and do things again, or she may go to pieces. I wonder which." "I don't," said Crowther. "You don't?" Piers paused, glass in hand, looking at him expectantly. "No, I don't." Crowther also raised his glass; he looked Piers straight in the eyes. "Here's to the boys of England, Piers!" he said.
I was within a mile of the village, returning from my visit to the Misses Crowther, when my horse, which was walking slowly along the soft side of the road, lifted his head, and pricked up his ears at the sound, which he heard first, of approaching hoofs. The riders soon came in sight Miss Oldcastle, Judy, and Captain Everard. Miss Oldcastle I had never seen on horseback before.
Stanley, as the organ of the ministry, had introduced a few evenings previously? and was rewarded by a perfect deluge of loquacious indignation and invective during a pause in which hurly-burly of angry words I contrived to effect my escape. "Crowther & Jenkins!" exclaimed one morning, Mr. Flint, looking up from the "Times" newspaper he held in his hand.
He waited with unswerving patience for the result. Piers spoke at last, and there was a queer note of humour in his voice, humour that was tragic. "So I've got to go back again, have I? Back to my valley of dry bones! There's no climbing the heights for me, Crowther, never will be. Somehow or other, I am always tumbled back." "You're wrong," Crowther said, with quiet decision.
"What do you mean?" asked Crowther. Piers' eyes were half-closed, and there was a drawn look about the lids as of a man in pain. "I mean, my good Crowther," he said, "that the mire and clay have ceased to attract me. My house is empty swept and garnished, but it is not open to devils at present. You want to know my plans. I haven't any. I am waiting to be taken in hand."
"Life is such a mighty big thing that even what we call failure doesn't count in the long run. You'll win through somehow." "And perhaps a little over, what?" laughed Piers. "Who knows?" "Who knows?" Crowther echoed, with a smile.
On their return to Sierra Leone, from the accounts they gave of the new settlement, a considerable number of their countrymen resolved to go there. Among the first was Mr Crowther. He is, I am assured, a man of high intellectual powers, and of eminent piety. He persuaded other Christian Africans to accompany him.
It would have been impossible to have lived with the man for so long without imbibing some of that essential greatness of soul that was his main characteristic, and Piers was ever swift to feel the effect of atmosphere. He had come to look upon Crowther with a reverence that in a fashion affected his daily life.
But even there Piers could not sit still. He prowled to and fro eternally, till Crowther set down his cup and joined him, pushing a quiet hand through his arm. "It's a lovely place you've got here, sonny," he said; "a regular garden of Paradise. I almost envy you." "Oh, you needn't do that. There's a serpent in every Eden," said Piers, with a mirthless laugh.
It was wildly, recklessly spontaneous; but there was about it a fevered quality that set Crowther almost instinctively on his guard. He did not know, and he had no means of gauging, exactly how deeply the iron had pierced. But that some sort of wound had been inflicted he could not doubt. It might be merely a superficial one, but he feared that it was something more than that.
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