“Oh, isn’t it?” she whispered breathlessly, her heart in her voice. “Isn’t it?”
“But never! While I sit around, I am being very, very busy, me, being alive—and being amused—and being, believe me, most eternally and most exultantly grateful. You call that doing nothing?”
“Of course I call that doing nothing,” replied Fair fiercely.
“Now that is strange—because, you know, I am so busy doing it that I can find time to do nothing else. To sit with the sun and beauty and silence all about, that is better than heaven, I think. Always I have loved Beauty better than life and once I thought that I had lost her for ever—and, see, she is mine again! In other fields—fields churned to madness, horrors of white clay and red blood, with the proud trees stripped to dirty black stumps—in other fields I remembered these, and I swore to that god of battles that if he would send me back to this golden grace—to this greenness and kind quiet—I would ask nothing more. And where those stenches made the poor soul sicker than the body, I could sometimes hold my breath, and smell apple-blossoms in the spring moonlight, and yellow roses in the summer sunlight, and spiced wood burning in the great chimneys, and cider blowing across the autumn winds. Now—now I need not hold the breath to smell the good ripe fruit, now I need not close my eyes to see my fields of gold, with the little warm gray sheep against the hills. Now I have come home to my fields, and I keep faith with the god of battles—I ask for nothing more. Look before you, Wise Eyes; what do you see?”
“The alley of lime trees and the north gate and the meadow,” said Fair, fighting to harden the voice that wanted only to break.
“Look farther——”
“I can see the thatch on Daudin’s roof and the road to the village and the little steeple on the church.”
“Nothing more?”
“There’s nothing more to see.”
“You do not see a little boy climbing that iron gate and racing home up that long alley, singing—racing quick, quick because it begins to grow dark?”