"I make every allowance for it," answered he; "only, I don't see how the two lots can mix together."
"You said just now that a man must do his work his own way, or not at all," I went on, without heeding him. "But I don't see that."
This time Mr. Harrod did more than smile, he laughed outright. I suppose even in the short time that we had been friends he had learned to know me well enough to see something amusing in my finding fault with any one for obstinacy. But I was not annoyed with the laugh; on the contrary, it restored my good-temper.
"Well, I don't see why you shouldn't go a little way to meet father," insisted I, boldly. "Of course he won't give in to you about everything; it isn't likely he should. But you might do a great many things that he wouldn't mind, which would make the farm better; and then, when he saw they made it better, and that the laborers went on just as well, maybe he would let you do a few more. I can't discuss it," added I, seeing that Harrod was about to speak, "because I can't understand it. But I see one thing plain, and that is that folk think the farm wants doing something with that father doesn't do—and if so, you're the man to do it."
I paused. Had I not followed the squire's instructions well? Had I not done my very best to "smooth over difficulties?"
"I don't think that I am the only man who could do it, by any means," answered Harrod. But he said it doubtfully—pleasantly doubtfully.
It made me bold to retort with greater determination: "Well, I think so, then. And if you say you are comfortable here, if you say you like the place—and the people," added I, hurriedly, "why don't you try, at least, to stay on and help us?"
He did not reply. We stood there what must have been a considerable time looking before us silently. The wane of the day had fallen into dusk, the brown had settled into gray, now that the gold of the sunset reflections had faded; the marsh-land was very still and sweet, the sheep were not even white blots upon it, so entirely did the tender pall harmonize all degrees of hue, so that the kine seemed no longer as living beings, but as mysterious shapes bred of the very land itself; even the old castle, so grand and solid in the day-time, was now like some phantom thing in the solitude—every curve and every circle defined more clearly than in sunlight, yet the whole transparent in the transparent gloaming of the air.
The most solid thing in all this varied uniformity, this intangible harmony, was a clump of trees in the near distance that told a shade blacker than anything else; for the turrets of the distant town lay only as a faint mass of purple upon the land, the little lights that twinkled in it here and there alone betraying its nature; long, living lines of strange clouds, that were neither violet nor gray nor white, lay along the blue where sea and sky were one.
"Before you came," said I, at last, in a low voice, "I used to think that I could help father as well as any man. I thought that I understood very nearly as much about farming as he did. I thought I could do much better than a stranger, who would not understand the land or the people. But now I think differently. I see how much more you know than I had dreamed of. You have made me feel very foolish."