“I took the responsibility from you. I need not have done it. I could have refused it. But I didn’t refuse. This is my work.”
And, as at Ladyford, so here, he saw clearly that, in every crisis, one particular soul holds the scale. Bluecaster was right, as Lup and Francey had been right, but there was a more stringent law beyond. The words that had haunted him all day came back to him now with redoubled force. “It is always one man’s work—always and everywhere.”
CHAPTER XXVI
HIS SILLY HOME
He dropped from the trap at his own gate, and walked up the drive. There had been no sound of his coming, so the door was not open, and the lack of welcome hurt him somehow, as if the house meant deliberately to shut him out. He did not come to it as to a place of healing, but at least it was his own hole to creep into when wounded. The blank door seemed to deny him even that.
It was very dark in the high-walled garden, but a ray from a side-window caught the Church Army summer-house across the lawn, and sprang a text into being. “Feed my sheep,” said the text, in reference to scrambled teas dispensed by Helwise under the Reckitt’s roof, but it brought many other things to his mind, to-night. He stood still and looked at it, thinking of the helpless stock the sea had taken. Brack’s dead, woolly things would cry to him for many a long day to come. He thought, too, of the marshfolk, broken and spent to-day because of his father’s building and his own seal upon it, of the two at Ladyford sleeping their last sleep; and out of the dark from over the west there seemed to come to him an exceeding bitter cry: “Where is the flock that was given thee, thy beautiful flock?”
As he turned again to the house, the door was flung open, and Helwise peered into the night.
“Is that you, Armer? Whatever are you doing, so late? I thought you had gone home long ago. But as you are here, you may as well bring a pound of bacon when you come in the morning, or there’ll be none for breakfast. Sliced. One pound. And remember I will not have those brown boots blacked!”
Lanty stepped inside.
“It isn’t Armer,” he said.
Helwise jumped and stared. It was certainly not Armer, but in that first instant it seemed to her as if it was not Lanty, either. Her voice was almost hushed.