[Footnote]
"Swylce geac mona geomran reorde, singe sumeres weard, sorge beade bittre in breosthord; pset se beorn ne wat, secg esteadig, hwset pa sume dreoga, pe pa wrseclastas widost lecga! . . . . pince him on mode pset he his monndryhten clyppe and cysse andon cneo lecge honda and heafod; ponne onwsecne, gesihp him beforan fealwe wegas, bapian brimfuglas."
"Even so the cuckoo warns him with its sad voice, Summer's warden sings foreboding sorrow, bitter grief of heart. Little knows the prosperous fellow what others are doing who follow far and wide the tracks of exile . . . Then dreams the seafarer that he clasps his lord and kisses him, and on his knee lays hand and head; but he awakes and sees before him the fallow waterways and the sea-fowls bathing."
[End of Footnote]
Lawrence flung off the impression with a jerk of his shoulders, as if it were a physical weight. It was too heavy to be endured. Not even to marry Isabel was he going to impose on his own unbroken egoism the restricting code of a country village.
"You are a dreamer, Val! Why don't you throw over Bernard and take the Etchingham agency? Yes, I heard every word you said to Laura: you made a gallant effort, but the facts speak for themselves, and your terminological inexactitudes wouldn't deceive a babe at the breast. Bernard pays you 300 pounds a year and orders you about like a groom, Grautchester would give you six and behave like a gentleman. But no, you must needs stick to Bernard, though you never get any thanks for it! You're an unpractical dreamer."
"I don't know what on earth you're talking about."
"And you're all in it together, damn you!" Lawrence broke out with an angry laugh. "It's all equally picturesque—feudal's the word! I never knew anything like it in my life and I wouldn't have believed it could continue to exist. What do you do with gipsies? evict 'em, I suppose." He flung a second question at Val which made the son of a vicarage knit his brows.
"As a matter of fact there's a house in Brook Lane about which Bendish and I are a good deal exercised in our minds at the present moment . . . and the percentage of children born too soon after marriage is disastrous. You're all out, Hyde. Nothing could be more commonplace than Chilmark, believe me: life is like this all over rural England, and it's only from a distance that one takes it for Arcadia."
"Folly," said Lawrence. "Good God, why should you exercise your simple minds over the house in Brook Lane? Ah! because the men who go to it are your own men, and the parsonage and the Castle are answerable for their souls." Val, irritated, suggested that if Hyde's forebears had lived in Chilmark since the time when every freeman had to swear fealty, laying his hands between the knees of his lord, Hyde might have shared this feeling. "But they didn't," said Lawrence, drily. "My grandfather was a pawnbroker in the New Cut."