"It is time I went, Griff. You are tired of the old woman, you and Kate."
Then there followed such a storm of lover-like protestations, such a fondling of the wrinkled face and hands, that these two might never have been mother and son at all, but just a pair of newly-married youngsters getting through the business of their first quarrel. And Griff vowed, at the end of it all, that nothing would induce him to leave the Manor, since the dearest old lady in the world wanted him to stay. Whereupon the mother got up from her chair, wiped her eyes, smoothed out the rumples in her dress, and put twice as much asperity as usual into her voice.
"Now you are ridiculous, Griff. Dear, dear; here have I been wasting my time in crying—it was only a tear or two, though, was it?—when I should have been supplying you with wits. Stay on at the Manor, when you have bought Gorsthwaite? Waste your money, and let the house drop to pieces for want of looking after? Boy, where is your common sense?"
And that was how Griff came to take his wife to Gorsthwaite Hall.
CHAPTER XVIII. THE CUTTING OF PEATS.
The Marshcotes Moor was bounded, on the side remote from the village, by a broad stretch of "intake"—sparsely covered grass land, wrested from the heath by long years of sweat and perseverance. Beyond this again was an undulating valley, scarcely more than a dip in the moor plateau, which was full of rushes and swampy tracts, with here and there a bog. Above this valley lay Gorsthwaite Moor, where ling and bilberry-plants had less of their own way than on the Marshcotes side; great patches of gorse dotted the moor, and the sun never rose, summer or winter, without finding at least a few outstanding spots of yellow on which to shine.
At one corner of this moor, some two miles away from Marshcotes village, stood Gorsthwaite Hall, a fine specimen of the grim architecture in which the old moor squires delighted. The rectangular windows peered out at you, watchful and cold, from under their rugged brows of blackened sandstone. The door, plainly fashioned and massive, seemed to grudge the wonted breadth of entry, though its narrowness was more in appearance than in fact. The round-topped walls that guarded its paved courtyard harboured few of the kindly green sorts of mosses, but they were friends with bleak, grey lichens. The very chimney-stacks looked stiff and unbending, as if they had little to do with the roof that supported them; and the water-butt under the eaves, with its round black belly, was suggestive, in some vague, elusive way, of tragedies half-forgotten.
Yet Griff and his wife were as merry as the old house was sad. The spring had come and gone, and summer had run well on into August, and still they would hug themselves, these two, in the thought of their isolation. There were a couple of attics at the top of the house, well-lighted from the roof, which Griff had knocked into one room and fitted up as a studio. The itch for painting had taken hold of him with more than its old-time vigour, and the one perpetual ground of disagreement between Kate and himself was the fact that he would insist on making some fresh sketch of his wife's face every other day or so.