Real English churchyard elms crowded about the wall and blightingly overshadowed the lonely group of graves. English ivy, instead of neatly clothing the wall, as it had been meant to do, straggled wildly over the part of the enclosure which had once been a garden around them. Out of it, like sea-stripped wrecks, dead sticks of rose-bushes poked up, and ragged things that had gone to seed. The turf was parched away, like the grass of the surrounding paddocks; the mounds were cracked; the head-stones—several of them ornate and costly—stained with the drip from the trees and birds, and some distinctly out of the perpendicular.
"It ought not to look like this," Deb apologised for it. "It ought to have been seen to. We used to come often, and bring water from the dam. But one forgets as time goes on; one doesn't think—or care. Poor dead people! How out of it they are! And we shall be the same some day—neglected and abandoned, just like this."
"DON'T!" muttered Guthrie Carey, shivering. The ghost of his sweet Lily seemed to reproach him with Deb's voice. But the ghost-woman fifteen months old had no chance with the glowing live woman born into his life but yesterday; and no blame to him either, and no wrong to the dead, if one can look at the thing dispassionately and with an unbiased mind.
"Let us go and see the dam," Deb cheered him, as she turned the ponies' heads. "You haven't seen our big dam, have you? Everybody that comes to Redford must see that, or father will want to know the reason why. 'Pennycuick's Folly' some people call it, because he spent so much money on it; but father is not one to spoil the ship for a pen'orth of paint. He likes to do things thoroughly. So do I."
And soon they halted on the embankment of a mile-wide sheet of water, shining like a mirror in a setting of soft-bosomed hills, their dun day colour changed to a heavenly rose-purple under the poetic evening sky.
"Why, it is a lake," said Guthrie Carey. "You could hold regattas on it." "We do, now and then, with our little boats. We have three over there"—pointing with her whip to a white shed on the farther shore. "And swimming matches. We used sometimes, when we were younger, to come down on hot nights and be mermaids. Once we moored ourselves out in the middle, away from the mosquitoes, and slept in the bottom of the boat, under the stars."
"How charming!"
"It was holiday time, and our parents were away. We took cushions and things, and it was great fun; but Keziah reported us, and we were never allowed to do it again."
They sat in the pony-carriage on the dam embankment, gazing silently. A flock of wildfowl had been scared away by their approach, and now not a wing, not an eye was near. At a great distance curlews wailed, only to make the stillness and solitude more exquisite, more profound. The purple of the hills grew deeper and softer, the lake a mere pulseless shimmer through the twilight haze. And then, last touch of magic, the moon swam up—the same moon that had transfigured Five Creeks garden and Alice Urquhart last night.
He poured out his soul to Deborah Pennycuick.