CHAPTER XXX.
There is no season so bad but there are some fine days in it, and there is no time so heavy but it has some happy hours. That stormy summer-time had its happy hours, although I must needs tell also of its clouds.
The earth was the same, although the eyes with which I saw it saw another image before they reached it, and sometimes the sense of its eternal beauty came to my spirit with a soothing song, and whispered of an enduring life that was beyond the changes and chances of varying weathers, bidding me be still and wait. I don't know that I was still, I don't know that at that time I was content to wait; but those voices that were so familiar made me glad as nothing else did, and, though I knew it not, made me strong.
The wind that breathed soft from over the downs, heavy with the scent of the hops; the wind that smote salt upon my cheek with the fresh sea-brine; the lap of the waves upon the sand's soft lip, or their fretful flow upon the steeper beach whence they would suck the pebbles back again to the ocean's heart; the rush and rustle of birds in the air—rooks, or starlings, or fieldfares in great congregations that blackened the sky; the clouds hastening over the blue that lay so wide a covering over the wide level land, and made the red roofs of the town purple beneath their touch; the rippling of a breeze in the ash-trees, and the moaning of it in the pines; the pattering of rain, the lowing of cattle; the hundred notes of birds, and sounds of beasts upon the land; the throbbing sunlight, and the cold moon—all these things, and many, many more, spoke to me, gay or pitiful, in tones that I had learned from my childhood up, and told me of that wide sea of life that was there for me, whether I would or not, beyond the present, beyond selfish longings, beyond happiness or unhappiness.
Yes, I think something of all this came to me even then, although I could not have told it in words, as I try to do now—ten years afterwards.
It was late August—the last of the harvesting. I had gone down to those wheat-fields upon the marsh that lie almost alongside of the beach.
The day's work was nearly done, the reapers were binding up the last sheaves, and only a few solitary gleaners were still busy where the hated machines had left off their monotonous grind. I don't know how it was the men had done work so early that day, for it was an hour off sundown yet, but I think it was the very last field they had to reap upon father's land.
Trayton Harrod had been there, but I had not spoken to him all the afternoon, and now, as I stood looking at him from afar through the late golden sunshine, and one of those strange showers of cobwebs that sometimes fall about this time of year upon our Sussex levels, I saw the squire upon the path hard by that led to the beach. I had seen him coming down the road before with his bailiff, but had scarcely noticed him then—he was such a familiar figure in the landscape. Only when he was comparatively close at hand something occurred to me with regard to him.
I gave up a foolish wish that I had had to walk up to the village with Trayton Harrod after work was done, and jumped the dike, beyond which only a narrow strip of pasture-land was between me and the road. I remember how I stopped to pluck meadowsweet and flowering willow as I stepped across, that I might just climb the bank not too long before the squire should have reached that point.
"Been harvesting, Miss Margaret?" said he, in, I fancied, rather a preoccupied manner. "We have all got plenty of that to do just now, haven't we?"