‘Do you say so, boy? Yet you will leave me.’
‘Would you not have me go?’
‘To the New World? Ay.’ He seemed to muse, pondering some vision. ‘For whither she hath gone should not her son follow?’ He stared and stared before him, till his eyes ran with weak tears. ‘I loved your mother, Brion,’ he sobbed: ‘I loved your mother.’
It was useless to prolong the scene. The young man knelt, and took the shaking hands in his, and, kissing them, laid them on his own head. They slipped down to imprison his face, to draw it towards the dishonoured lips whose utterance had yet never meant to him aught but truth and love.
By six o’clock the next day he and Clerivault and Nol porter were on the Plymouth road, the latter riding with them to convey the baggage, and to bring back the horses. Their way took them by Holne Chase and the head of the Horse-shoe Glen. It was a fair April morning, blue and white and gold. The birds were singing as they never sang but about that lovely haunted spot. It seemed suddenly to Brion that the fetters of long years were broken, and that he was riding forth to challenge the vision not of what was to be, but of what had been and fled. Love was on the heights, and it was the morning of an older day.
CHAPTER XXVII.
THE VOYAGE
‘The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared,
Merrily did we drop
Below the kirk, below the hill,
Below the light-house top.’