When he forgot the cave he thought of their home-going in the dawn, of lights in misty shippons and the ivory gleam of milk. The mountains were fresh-made again, gentle as all new-born things. He saw the folks sitting at their meals, and heard them call to each other in the yards. He saw them dipping and clipping year by year, or high and alone with their dogs among the drifts. He thought of them kneeling in the little church, with Philip, Lord Wharton’s Prayer-Books in their hands. He thought of bridals under the axe-hewn beams, of corpse-roads over the fells, and arvel-bread....
Suddenly Bob spoke, making him start, for there had been years as well as miles between them as they drove. “You’ll be right suited to be back,” he said, flicking the dull horse with a listless whip. “It was a sad pity you ever had to quit.”
Kit said “Ay, ay,” rather vaguely, for he wanted to be left alone with his thoughts. Bob had already lost the exhilaration of setting out, and there was no place for this drooping failure in Kit’s mind. Besides, here on the marsh the past was so alive that voices barely found their way to his ear. No human speech, indeed, could have the colour and flow and flight of this epic spoken by his own soul. There was wistfulness in his memories but they were not sad, because only evil memories are sad. Beauty grows like a rose over every other, even pain; perhaps especially over pain. While he walked in his memories he was young and brave, unclogged by poverty, uncrippled by age. And how, in any case, could he be sad, who was going at long last to his home?
“They wanted you right off,” Bob went on. “They never give me no peace till I’d fixed a day.”
“They’re right kind,” Kit murmured, not thinking of them at all. He took another bite of the scone and tried to see the land around, instead of lighted caves and valleys in the dawn. “I think a deal o’ the spot,” he added, after a while. “I doubt I’d got too old to change.”
“Ay, but there’s changes at the farm an’ all,” Bob said, with a note of warning in his voice. “’Tisn’t in nature for things to stop the same. There’s bound to be changes when different folks get hold.”
Kit said “Ay, ay,” again, and munched stolidly at the scone. Marget had said things like that, and now she was saying them again through Bob. But he had left Marget ever so far behind, and out on the marsh she could not make him afraid. There couldn’t be changes in the place where he was at peace, because permanence was the essence of all peace. Bob should have known that, but Bob had forgotten peace. Bob, as his shoulders dropped, had found Marget still at his back. Not even on the marsh could Bob escape.
“’Tisn’t in nature,” Bob was saying again. “Folks is that different, they’re bound to make things different, too.” All his sentences seemed like tame echoes of Marget’s biting speech. “I don’t know as it ever does for folks to gang back.”
“Ay, well, I can nobbut try,” Kit said, sitting up and speaking with sudden force. “As for the changes you’re making out, I reckon they waint bite. There’s nowt can change that much in a couple o’ years, not things as is fairly set. There’s no change on the marsh as I can see, for all the sea’s frettin’ at it still; and danged if Jim Bell grandmother bedstead baint mendin’ yon fence yet!”
“Marsh don’t change overmuch, but it changes, all the same. What, they say, don’t they, as it all come out o’ the sea? Yon’s change enough, surely, when you come to think on? And folks change a deal faster than land and suchlike. I reckon you’ve changed yourself, these last two years.”