“CONQUERORS OF THE SEA.”
CHAPTER XXVII
THE GREEN GATES OF VISION:—VI. SWEETHEART-TIME
In the late October afternoon Lancaster rode through the Lane fast, for he was behind time with his promise. Therefore he looked ahead of him to each flying curve, letting the Gates of Vision pass without notice, nor culling one magic thrill from the garden of enchantment. Yet he checked suddenly where the Lane ran off at right angles like a darting trout, half lest his pressed horse should take the hedge, half in joyful recognition. Out on the drifting distance—of the land, yet of the sky also—his Ghost-Mountain smote his eye with its strange twin-qualities of edged clarity and floating opaqueness, like the Shoulder of God made manifest, yet not clothed upon with flesh. What help had it for him, after all these desolate months?
He could spare it only a moment’s greeting, but for some reason his heart was lighter as he rode on. Amid the wreck of much the Ghost-Mountain had foundered too, forgotten. Its vivid, unexpected return set a faint hope beating that somehow, through some outside power, other lost things might come to resurrection also.
The spell of the “back-end” had its will again, and in spite of him caught him in its wound gossamer of remembrance. Though he looked between his horse’s ears, he knew well enough that round him on every hand were soft distances, melting, blending and changing from blue to purple and purple to gray, with filmy pillars of smoke raised like the standards of home against the stark, stripped woods. He could not keep his cheek from the mild fingers of the gentle air, nor from his lungs the smell of the fresh, damp earth, going rain- and dew-washed to its winter sleep. And under the horse’s hoofs the dry leaves rustled and the wet leaves crushed into a still, soft carpet of stamped crimson and bruised gold. Far in the amber sky a black little bird was singing, swung on a twig like a poised finger, and over Dick Crag he could hear the baffling music of tired hounds on the last spurt of the afternoon. Little by little he was taken and held by the old wonder and the familiar glory, so that the last terrible months dropped away, and his heavily self-raised prison unlocked. Through the cruel summer he had come mechanically and doggedly, with all his joy in his work gone like a blown petal, together with the quivering sympathy that had made him the perfect instrument of atmosphere and environment. For this is the last punishment of souls ordinarily attuned to Nature, when bent to the yoke of pain or sin. They cry to her, and she does not answer; she calls to them, and they do not heed; for though the eyes look abroad on the same beauty, the ears gather the same music, the spirit and meaning are fled, leaving only soulless mirages and jangled wires. But to-night Lancaster came back again to his kingdom.
The look of sudden age, stamped on that far death-dawn, still clung to some extent; the stern lines of his face were hammered and set; he was thinner, and his hair had whitened a little. But for compensation he had a new self-reliance, a new quietude born of the absence of nervous struggle. His was now the unfearful poise of one who has fallen and risen again before the hammer of the gods.
The inquest, the long, dreary spell of wild weather, intensifying the merciless handling of the marsh—the dismal rent-audit, the interminable hours of calculating and planning, of patient hearing of complaint, of ordering and overseeing repairs—all these were behind him now. The new tenant was settled at Ninekyrkes, and the Dockerays had taken both him and his to their robbed hearts. For Francey was in Canada with Lup, and though the old folk were for ever planning a future that held Rowly with a wife at Ladyford, and Lup back at the twin-farm—Dockera’s and Whinnerahs as of yore—they knew well enough that for the wanderers there could be no place ever again on the Northern marsh.
Slowly the wreck of things was pulled back into symmetry and order—houses carpeted and papered, Dutch barns rebuilt, fences set up again, the mutilated roads laid and rolled. The Let, too, had had all its yawning mouths filled and strengthened, and the dykes and cuts were deepened and increased. So the patched marsh grew trim again, and by the time the haycutter sang on the hill, the land below had gathered itself out of the horrors of destruction into a growing likeness of its old beauty. Only the Lugg and the Pride were left untouched, derelicts at the will of wind and tide.
The story had roused a storm of interest throughout the country, coming as it did at a slack time for news, and carrying with it the precious breath of long romance. Lanty refused all dealings with reporters and kept his eyes from the papers, yet knew well enough that both his father’s career and his own, their private life, and probably his personal future, were all common property in a highly decorated fashion. Into a seething world of clashing interests and warring classes the tale of the Northern property, where the flower of ancestry still sprang purely as well from yeoman and peasant stock as from patrician, where law was less than loyalty, long service a matter of course, friendship and understanding things born of inbred knowledge—dropped like a mediæval, blazoned shield into the arena of modern warfare. Men picked it up wonderingly, fitting it clumsily to an unaccustomed arm, only to discard it with a laugh.
“No agreements? That’s a lie, anyhow! You’ve got to have everything down in writing, nowadays, or else it’s just simply putting your neck in a halter. Landlord’s personal charm—tenants’ appreciation—sounds like the days of Magna Charta, doesn’t it?—tenure by knight service, socage, villeinage, and all the rest of it! I must say these journalists know how to pile on the colour. Amity between agent and farmers—well, I just don’t think! Why, it’s an understood thing that they’re always at each other’s throats! Scion of Hugh Lupus of the Conquest gives his life for an old trust—feudalism dug up by the spadeful, and plastered on with a trowel! Lies!”