Honor and Christopher were riding together over the Moor; and, albeit the physical conditions promised fair enough until sunset-time, when both man and woman turned homewards very happy, yet each had grown miserable before the end, and they parted in anger upon the heathery wastes where northern Teign and Wallabrook wind underneath Scor Hill. For the weather of the high land and the weather of their minds simultaneously changed, and across both there passed a cloud. Over against the sunset, creeping magically as she is wont to creep, from the bosom of the Moor and the dark ways of unseen water, arose the Mist Mother. She appeared suddenly against the blue above, spread forth diaphanous draperies, twined her pearly arms among the stocks and stones and old, wind-bent bushes of the waste. Catching a radiance from the westering sun, she draped the grey heads of granite tors in cowls of gold; she rose and fell; she appeared and vanished; she stole forward suddenly; she wreathed curly tendrils of vapour over sedge and stone, green, quaking bog, still waters, and the peat cuttings that burnt red-hot under the level rays of the sun. Great solitary flakes of the mist, shining with ineffable lustre of light, lessened the sobriety of the heath; and upon their dazzling hearts, where they suddenly merged and spread in opposition to the sun on the slope of western-facing hills, there trembled out a spectral misty circle—a huge halo of colourless light drawn upon the glimmering moisture. Within it, a whitethorn stood bathed in a fiery glow without candescence; and from beneath the tree some wild creature—hare or fox—moved away silently and vanished under the curtain, while a curlew cried overhead invisible. The riders reined up and watched the luminous frolics of the Mist, where she played thus naked, like an innocent savage thing, before them.
"These are the moments when I seem to glimpse antique life through the grey—wolf-skins and dark human skins, coarse faces, black hair, bead-bright eyes, strange speech, the glimmer of tents or rush thatches through the mist. These, and the bark of dogs, laughter of women, tinkle of stone on stone, where some Damnonian hunter fabricates his flints and grunts of the wood-bears and the way to kill them."
"Always dreaming, dearest. I wonder what you would have done in those days? Did the Damnonians have Christos too?"
"Undoubtedly. I should have been a bard, or a tribal prophet, or something important and easy. I should have dreamed dreams, and told fortunes, and imparted a certain cultured flavour to the lodge. I should have been their oracle very likely—nice easy work being an oracle. In it you'll find the first dawn of the future art of criticism."
"Creation is better than criticism."
"That's your cousin, I'll swear! The very ring of him. No doubt he thinks so. Yet what can be more futile than unskilful creation? For that matter the awful amount of time that's wasted in all sorts of futile work."
"You're certainly sincere. You practise the virtues of laziness as well as preach them," said Honor without amusement.
"I do; but there's not that old note of admiration at my theories in your voice of late, my angel girl."
"No, Christo; I'm beginning to doubt, in a fleeting sort of way, if your gospel is quite the inspired thing you fancy it."
"Treason! You live too much in the atmosphere of honest toil, sweetheart. And there's hardly a butterfly left now to correct your impressions."