Chapter Thirty Two.
A Dead Feud.
Time glided away as fast in the days of James the First as it does in the reign of our gentle Queen; and a year had gone by in the quiet peaceful vale, where, to a man, all who had been in the great trouble had more or less quickly recovered from their wounds.
The prisoners were the worst sufferers, and in the great friendly peace brought about between the old lords of the land, partly by their own manly feeling and the love that had somehow sprung up among their children, the greatest of all the Christian virtues took deep root, and flourished in a way that would have put the proverbial green bay tree to shame.
Hence it was that, as very slowly one by one the miserable crippled prisoners, so many wrecks, diseased by their own reckless life and crippled by their wounds, struggled back slowly to a condition in which perhaps a few years were left them for a better life, they were left entirely in Master Rayburn’s hands; and first one and then another was sent off with a little money and a haversack of food to seek his friends and trouble the peaceful valley no more.
It took nearly the year before the last of the wretched crew bade farewell to the place, grateful or ungrateful, according to his nature, after going through a long course of physical suffering; and by that time Cliff Castle was pretty well restored, and the two lads, after a long absence, were back home again to the land of mighty cliff, green forest, and purling stream.
It was on one of those glorious early summer mornings when the air seems full of joy, and it is a delight even to exist, that, as the sycamores and beeches in their early green were alive with song, there came a rattle of tiny bits of spar against Mark Eden’s casement window, and he sprang out of bed to throw it open and look down upon Ralph Darley, armed with lissom rod over his shoulder and creel on back.
“Oh, I say,” he cried, “asleep, and on a morning like this!”
“Yes, but you’re too soon.”