Mary pouted, but she was a farmer’s daughter, a fellow bond slave of animals; she recognized the necessity.
“Anybody’d think it was your men had been wrastlin’ and not you, you great soft-heart. Oh, well, run along with ’e and come back when done and take a bite of supper with us, will ’e? Father’d be proud and I’ve fit a lovely supper.”
Eli promised and betook himself homewards. Five strenuous bouts on top of six hours’ work in the morning had tired him somewhat, bruises were stiffening and his left shoulder gave him pain, but his heart, his heart was singing “Mary Penaluna—Mary Penhale, Mary Penaluna—Mary Penhale” all the way and his feet went wing-shod. Almost he had asked her in the kitchen, almost, almost—it had been tripping off his tongue when she mentioned her cows and in so doing reminded him of his horses. By blood, instinct and habit he was a farmer; the horses must be seen to first, his helpless, faithful servitors. His mother usually turned her mount into the stable without troubling to feed, unsaddle it or even ease the girths. The horses must be seen to.
He would say the word that evening after supper when old Simeon fell asleep in his rocker, as was his invariable custom. That very evening.
Tregors had gone whistling down the wind long since; the unknown hind from Burdock Water had let it go to rack and ruin, a second mortgagee was not forthcoming, Carveth Donnithorne foreclosed and marched in. Tregors had gone, but Bosula remained, clear of debt and as good a place as any in the Hundred, enough for any one man. Eli felt he could make his claim for even prosperous Simeon Penaluna’s daughter with a clear conscience. He came to the rim of the valley, hoisted himself to the top of a bank, paused and sat down.
The valley, touched by the low rays of sunset, foamed with gold, with the pale gold of autumnal elms, the bright gold of ashes, the old gold of oaks.
Bosula among its enfolding woods! No Roman emperor behind his tall Prætorians had so steadfast, so splendid a guard as these. Shelter from the winter gales, great spluttering logs for the hearth, green shade in summer and in autumn this magnificence. Holly for Christmas, apples and cider. The apples were falling now, falling with soft thuds all day and night and littering the orchard, sunk in the grass like rosy-faced children playing hide and seek.
Eli’s eyes ran up the opposite hillside, a patchwork quilt of trim fields, green pasture and brown plow land, all good and all his.
His heart went out in gratitude to the house of his breed, to the sturdy men who had made it what it was, to the first poor ragged tinner wandering down the valley with his donkey, to his unknown father, that honest giant with the shattered face who had brought him into the world that he, in his turn, might take up this goodly heritage.
It should go on. He saw into the future, a brighter, better future. He saw flowers outside the Owls’ House perennially blooming; saw a whitewashed kitchen with burnished copper pans and a woman in it smiling welcome at the day’s end, her sleeves rolled up to show her dimpled elbows; saw a pack of brown-eyed chubby little boys tumbling noisily in to supper—Penhales of Bosula. It should go on. He vaulted off the bank and strode whistling down to the Owls’ House, bowed his head between Adam and Eve and found Ortho sitting in the kitchen.