The Master-Girl

Title: The Master-Girl

Author: Ashton Hilliers

Illustrator: Arthur H. Buckland

Release date: March 9, 2019 [eBook #59039]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/59039

Credits: Produced by Tim Lindell, Graeme Mackreth, University of Calgary Special Collections and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

THE MASTER-GIRL

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

MEMOIRS OF A PERSON OF QUALITY AS IT HAPPENED AN OLD SCORE THE MISTAKES OF MISS MANISTY

LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT

THE MASTER-GIRL

BY

ASHTON HILLIERS

WITH EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS BY ARTHUR H. BUCKLAND

SECOND EDITION

METHUEN & CO, LTD. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON

First Published April 28th 1910

Second Edition 1910

TO MY CAVE MOTHER

Quarried from world-old gloom, Yellow, brittle and dry, Here, in our Science-Room, Locked under glass they lie; Bone to its bone brought nigh, Bare to general view, Bones that of yore were—you! And, bone of your bone am I! Nature her course has changed, The sea-worm's lair is dry, Your moon aloof, estranged, Stares from an alien sky, Levelled are low and high, Mountains have rumbled down, Here is a gas-lit town, But bone of your bone am I. Lords of the wild who reigned By fear of fang and eye, Antlered, tusked and maned, Under the ooze they lie. Mute is their hunting cry, Their forests fall'n and gone, Yet, the Soul that was you lives on, And, bone of your bone am I. Bend from your cavern-crypt, Mother, a kindling eye, Breathe thro' my manuscript Strength of a day long by; Colour, vitality, Passion and laughter give! Till the story's dry bones live, For—bone of your bone am I!

A.H.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Love at First Sight Frontispiece The Ghost-Bear Salving the Ghost-Bear's Skin He threw short with a Gasp Stale-mate Pursued The Forerunner Drew Swiftly, and as Swiftly Loosed

[Pg 1]

THE MASTER-GIRL

PROLOGUE

He had come gently and observantly up the glen, tapping here and scratching there as he climbed, and ever and anon straightening an elderly back to deliver a small cough. Also at intervals he would turn his face to the way by which he had come to rest the plantar muscles and study the lie of the land.

Chance-led he came and unadventurously, as one might say, and with no more premonition of impending change, or of this being a White Day in his life than had you, yourself, dear reader, when you left your breakfast-table this morning.

He was a little person in the clerical wideawake and dark tweeds of a don in vacation,[Pg 2] elderly and grey, with heavy, lower-middle-class features refined by expression as a sunset refines a dull street.

Something about the rounded shoulders and narrow chest bespoke the bookish man, the "scholar's slope," they used to call it. His hands were large and broad at the finger-tips, such must have done manual labour in their time, pick-and-shovel work, possibly. At the moment of his walking into this story they were—I will not say dirty, but redolent of the soil, for as he went he would still be fumbling in a roomy wallet which pulled down his shoulder, and be taking therefrom for close and loving inspection this or that shapeless fragment of stone which he would presently return to the society of its fellows.

"It never came here by accident—there is no such thing," he murmured, conversing with himself, thought discussing matters with thought, as do the thoughts of those of us who live the single life, or cherish[Pg 3] interests which are unshared by those with whom we cohabit. "We have no example from this level," he went on, turning in hand a something small and angular which he had picked up a few yards down the slope, a fragment of grey chert it was. "Three conchoidal fractures are sufficient, when associated with such patination. Here are—six—eight minor flaws in these cutting edges, apart from the cross-fracture—(patinated too). Yes, undoubtedly a used-up flake. And the thing hasn't travelled half-a-mile from home.... Where's the floor?"

"And, to think," he went on, "that such evidence would be lost—wasted upon that young doctor-fellow. It is almost incredible, the crass ignorance of our so-called scientific men.... Tried to interest him ... no use.... 'Out here to climb,' he says!... And with lovely things like these under his feet.... Amazing!"

In fact, the professor exhibited the impatience which the man of one idea feels[Pg 4] for the man of another, and had even the personal repulsion which a man with the Oxford manner experiences for one who begins all his sentences with "M'yess!"

From which disjointed self-communings the reader will have already deduced that the professor was an ethnologist, one of that small band of heroes who during the past hundred years have quietly dug out and fitted together the buried past of the human race, pelted all the while by Ignorance and Bigotry as they delved.

The little grey professor had come in for his share of pelting: not very recently, for his science has won her right to exist and speak her mind. Dogma, which would have burned the ethnologist some time back, and more recently did her best to starve him, has of late lifted the boycott. He is now merely glanced at with a pitying shrug and passed over when anything good is going, as "Eminent in his own line, but—peculiar," and forthwith, the good thing goes[Pg 5] to a safe man, someone who never did anything, nor ever will. This is Dogma's way of coming round. The sons of the men who pelted us will build our sepulchres, never fear, whilst themselves making a cock-shy of some other poor devil whom their sons will canonise in turn: for the bigots, and the poor, ye have always with you.

So it had come to pass that the professor by dint of giving to fossil-grubbing the forty-five years of life which he might have given to money-grubbing, and spending upon the collection and verification of tiny fragments of unpopular evidence the time which he might have spent more profitably in the delivery of sermons in St Mary's, which would have delighted the stupid by the "safety" of what they didn't see the bottom of, and amused the clever by the preacher's address in skating upon cat-ice, had come to know as much as was known about the Magdalanian Period.

[Pg 6]

Others worked at River-drift, Thames gravels and the terraces north of Amiens: and other some questioned the Plateaux deposits for eoliths and got but uncertain answers, as to which our professor reserved his judgment, unconvinced, but not wishing to be found sitting in the seat of the scornful at the Last Day. Neoliths he pretended to know nothing about whilst knowing everything that had been written. It was the men of the Madelaine Cave, the giant hunters of Mentone and their artist fellows to whom he had given his life.

Now some studies can be pursued by the fireside, the mathematics of a boomerang, for instance, or why a breakfast egg, if you set it spinning vigorously upon its side, will presently arise and spin upon its end. For the collation of Syriac gospels the neighbourhood of the Bodleian is as good a neighbourhood as any, but our professor, whose fireside was within a stone's-throw[Pg 7] of the Bodleian, cared for neither mathematics nor codices, and as regards his own particular study had long since known that to prosecute it as it should be prosecuted entailed days and weeks in clammy dark caverns long miles from anywhere, and subsequent months put in with a series of little sieves and acids and gelatine and what not, cleaning-out and piecing together the uncleanly little bits of brittle rubbish which eventually would constitute a New Fact and take a place in the growing chain of evidence.

"To anybody capable of weighing testimony," muttered the professor, "this flake, which can only have been brought eighty miles up-stream by human agency, is as good evidence of Early Man at this end of the valley as if I had projected myself back a thousand centuries and seen the fellow break his tool and drop it."

He was somewhat out of breath with his climb, moreover the going was none of the[Pg 8] best; there was no path, and the slope was clothed with a tall growth of flowering weeds, mountain coltsfoot, and the great purple gentian, dogwood, juniper and aconite. He replaced his hat after wiping his forehead, and, turning, parted the brush to find himself faced by a low bluff, an outcrop of the underlying bedrock, jutting through the rough slope of débris into which the at-one-time precipitous sides of the glen had broken down. The bluff bore a ludicrous resemblance to the countenance of some ancient person asleep and half buried in bedclothes; there aloft was a massive nose and receding rocky forehead, nearer an upper lip overhung a transverse fissure, an open mouth, nearly filled with a tongue of soapy-looking brown stalagmite resting upon a lower jaw of the same material hidden by a growth of Martagon lilies. The professor, unaware of what Fate had in store for him, and, to tell the truth, expecting nothing out of the

way, for a man[Pg 9] of his years and experiences is past being sanguine, peered through the lush greenery and saw beneath the edge of that lower lip a jumble of small broken stone loosely cemented like ill-compacted concrete into which water has percolated (which was precisely what the material was and what had befallen it).

And, peering thus, a Something caught the professor's eye. Now the Thing, whatever it might turn out to be, could not fly away, nor was its finder a callow novice that he should howk out his trove at sight and, maybe, destroy evidence in so doing, so he made himself a mental rough sketch of its surroundings before disturbing them.

"A lot of weathering just here," he muttered. "Glen half filled-up since the watershed was cut back and the stream diverted. This was a cliff once upon a time, and this was a cave. Roof fallen in and cemented down to an ancient stalagmite [Pg 10]floor ... breccia beneath with, apparently, a layer of charcoal in it.... If you please!" this to the lilies; they did please, or at least made way for him; he was down upon his elderly knees in the moist dirt breaking away the perished flooring of the old cave with his hammer; interested, of course, for the case was exactly in his line, but still without enthusiasm, when (see how our best things approach us unsought) the man made his great find, the chance of his lifetime came to him, such a trove as he had ceased to expect, for, despite many long vacations and snatched Easters spent in patient and systematic grubbing, the man had not been one of the successful cave explorers. But this was his day; a plate of stalagmite came away, and the disintegrated breccia beneath it gave to

his cautious and practised handling, and lo, he drew forth the whole and perfect shoulder-blade of a Cave Bear, the mighty Ursus spelæus himself, glazed all over back and front with a transparent film of carbonate of lime.

[Pg 11]

The relic bore abundant marks of the chert knife, a shard of which was cemented down to it; but, what raised its interest and value to the nth power, and made its discoverer's heart to flutter in his bosom, was the clear, boldly-drawn lines of the picture with which the flat surface of the bone was etched. Here was a find indeed, a leaf from the sketch-book of a Primitive, as good as anything found by Lartet and Christy. "Delightful! a find at last!" exclaimed the professor. "A contemporary picture of Spelæus, positively our first, I think. A bear attacking two humans, of opposite sexes, eh, what? but that seems unlikely. And what is this bent object in the hand of the indeterminate figure?—Weapon?—But what?" screwing up his eyes. "Bent throwing-stick, Egyptian type? Boomerang?—very curious. Same object repeated in corner of picture behind bear; conceivably boomerang in flight. But as to this—er—epicene figure—I doubt its being female[Pg 12] somehow!—and yet—" He turned the bone, "Hey, what have we here?—this

I might almost say justifies a feminine interpretation, there apparently was a woman in the case," for adhering to the back of the scapula was a bone needle! "Rough work this, for a female," remarked the professor, wagging his head whilst polishing his glasses, and attempting to realise the scene. "This fellow was as big as a horse, a grizzly would be considerably smaller and with inferior jaw power. The Magdalanian type was tall, I grant you,—she might have stood six feet and an inch, but—" he wagged his head again in disapproval of a woman participating in so rough a field sport as this sketch indicated. The professor was an old bachelor with mid-Victorian conceptions of the functions of womanhood.

"There is no getting over the charcoal—it was a cooking-place, a hearth. The design, here, implies leisure and permanent residence, and the needle a lady. This was[Pg 13] a home, a housekeeping." He wrapped the relic in a silk handkerchief; it was more precious in his eyes than the arm of St Mark in those of a Venetian, and at least as authentic. This done he turned to take stock of the place, conversing gently with himself the while. "Cave more roomy at one time—hardly to call a cave now, possibly was never better than un abri, just the rock shelter that I once spent an uncomfortable night under among the Spanish Pyrenees." He glanced up at the overhang, fringed with fern. "Calls for systematic exploration.... Costly business at this height, short season and no quarters within any reasonable distance. Entails a camp, I fear. Wonder if the University would come down with a grant?... Who were these people?" he stroked the handkerchief. "We get no nearer; a hundred thousand years is a wide gap—very. It makes the pre-dynastic

Egyptian seem neighbourly. We dig, we fit together,[Pg 14] but—they are too remote. Personally, I despair of getting to closer quarters with them in my time." He mused with half-shut, speculative eyes. "The Myers and Gurney business gives unsatisfactory results at its best, and what communications they claim to have received seem chiefly from the recently deceased.... Classic idea of a genius loci might have had something behind it ... but, they approached the Surmise with propitiatory sacrifices,—we try the planchette—and get piffle! Other plan seems sounder, but, how to set about it? Language question a difficulty. Something might be attempted with an Esperanto of Eskimo and Bushman roots, eh?" he smiled. "And the offering? Coarsish tastes, I conceive...." In common with some three hundred millions of his fellow Europeans, the professor had never seen a sacrifice offered. The conception, once universal, has completely passed out of our ken. That a trousered, cravatted white[Pg 15] man should take anything which he really

valued—a horse, a motor, a family heirloom, a prize pedigree ram, a cask of claret—what you will, and deliberately destroy it in public for some definite religious object, or to purchase some visible result, recompense or immunity, is unthinkable.

The professor's mind fell back from this impermeable wall of alien thought and custom. He sighed and shifted himself as if about to rise, still muttering. "I'd give a good deal," said he, without the faintest idea that he was really and veritably offering Something to Someone, but, sincere as far as he went, "for one hour's genuine confab, séance, communication (call it what you like) with this couple, here. What wouldn't I give?—ah—say a clear month out of my life—"

He said no more for that time, in fact he stopped short in the middle of his sentence and fell forward doubled up into a soft mass of the greenstuff which he had[Pg 16] treated with so little ceremony, nor did he fall alone; a sheet of stalactite, part of the ancient roof of the cave, had detached itself from the impending lip and fallen upon and with him.

Was it possible that the genius loci had taken him at his word?

[Pg 17]

CHAPTER I

LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT

The younger girls picked fast in fear of the Master-Girl's hard little hand, eating surreptitiously when her eye was off them. They made small progress, for what with the badgers and the birds and the lateness of the season the whortleberries were getting thin upon that rock. The Master-Girl ran a critical eye over the steep face below them. It was blue with fruit, but dangerous, for the strata dipped and the stuff was soft. She peeped into her pupils' skin wallets and uttered words of counsel, took the biggest satchel and went over the edge. It was finger-and-toe work and loose in places; she could hear smothered giggling above[Pg 18] her as she climbed, and knew that the youngsters were indulging, but held upon her way. The fruit she had reached was blue-black, dead-ripe, and for some reason untouched by the birds for days past. She had never tried this face before; she began to pick.

Then, all suddenly, her hands stopped, her eyes fixed, and every muscle grew tense, for from just below her feet had sounded a little faint sneeze!

Dêh-Yān was sixteen, full woman as her people counted, the biggest, strongest and bravest of the unmarried lasses of the Little Moons. She could throw a chert-headed assegai forty strides and make it spin as it flew. She could handle a stone hatchet dexterously, skin, cut up, and roast. She could rub fire out of two sticks more quickly than any member of the tribe, could use her bone needle and split sinew to admiration. In fact she was more than well-grounded in the domestic arts then[Pg 19] practised by woman, and hence the chief, and the head-wife of that chief, were in no hurry that this household treasure should marry out of the clan, and had set her in permanent charge over the younger children. Dêh-Yān was the First Governess.

When a modern woman is startled she shrieks, a perfectly useless expenditure of energy, and worse, for the sound and its reaction upon the system of the shrieker prevent her from hearing more; also she not uncommonly shuts both eyes to shriek the better. Dêh-Yān neither shrieked nor shut her eyes, although thoroughly startled and indeed frightened. Now Dêh-Yān was not easily frightened; there were in fact but three or four things which she really feared, a wolf in open country, a bear or lion in any country, and a wife-hunter from beyond the ranges. This sneeze was the sneeze of a man, of a strange man in a neighbourhood and in times in which a stranger was an enemy confessed.[Pg 20] So, the girl held her breath tightly and remained perfectly rigid for a few seconds, strung for such activities of flight as might be possible under the circumstances.

Nothing happened. Her presence was plainly unsuspected. And now the woman-nature in her proved itself. That small muffled sneeze excited in her bosom a vehement curiosity. Her duty, her safety, the safeties of the brats committed to her guardianship, depended upon a silent and prompt retreat, but, she must needs first see this man who had sneezed.

With infinite precaution she lowered herself to a ledge a few feet beneath her, crawled, leaned and peeped; farther and yet farther she craned for a view, and—there he was!—She found herself overlooking the brow of a cave, a fissure in the limestone, and there, at the cave's mouth, sate her enemy!

One steady, all-embracing glance assured the girl that this interloper was not of her[Pg 21] clan, nor of its allies. The stone-axe beside him was plumed with crimson feathers, the wings of a Wall Creeper. Its owner must needs be a Sun-Disc man, an enemy from the other side of the mountains, and one who was presumably hunting herself.

What should she do?—Another girl would have crept stealthily away up the cliff; another girl would already have been in full flight, and would have run shrieking to camp. Then the braves would have turned out and found—nothing!—and that girl would have been beaten for crying Wolf!