“How quiet the hills are!” Christian broke silence, half-way across the park. “Have you ever noticed how the first frost stills them like the touch of a cold finger? In summer they are almost restless, but as the winter strengthens they gradually fall asleep. I like them best asleep.”
She made no reply, and he felt rebuffed. Perhaps she did not care for that sort of thing. Perhaps, as his mother had said, it was the house that called her, the position and pride of place—he thought suddenly of her pictured eyes in Slinker’s room, and put the charge from him self-reproachfully; then remembered that she had seemed to prefer the road, and was chilled anew.
Down in a hollow a couple of panting, writhing forms thrust apple-red cheeks over each other’s shoulder, and he checked at once, forgetting the girl in his sudden interest.
“The Younger Generation!” he laughed, watching the herculean if highly unscientific efforts of the children, and, drawn gradually nearer in spite of himself, began to issue instructions.
“Your hold is too high, Jimmy. Get your feet more apart—you, whatever your name is. Now! right foot—lift—strike inside—got him!”
He came back to Deb apologetically, after superintending the traditional handshake of etiquette.
“I’m ever so sorry to have kept you standing about, waiting! You must think I’m horribly rude, and of course you’re wanting to get home. I’ve always been crazy about the sport—I suppose because it’s our own. It’s a fine thing for a county to have its own game, to feel that it’s bred in the very bone of you, and that it calls you as it calls no one else on earth. It marks a county’s character, too, keeps it individual and strong. And I couldn’t let them go on making a muddle of it, could I? You see, it’s at the start that things matter. Catch them early—that’s the way to get style. Later on, when a man’s set——” He looked at her averted head. “But of course all this can’t possibly interest you.”
“Can you tell me the time?” she asked, without turning. (Would they never cross the park?) And then, almost as if the words had been dragged out of her—“It’s a fine sport,” she added, and again Christian wondered, not knowing that his speech had put the final touch to the fierce passion of heritage which was tearing her asunder as she walked dumbly at his side.
On the bridge he stopped again, to look through the frost-mist on the river to Crump bare and lone against its black shield of woods and the cold sky overhead; but Deborah hurried on, and as she turned the corner, saw him still gazing. She had another picture of the bridge now for all time—one that had Christian’s face clear-cut by the frosty light against the darkening slope of the hill.
He caught her up before she reached the house.