Wayne stood looking up the highway long after she had gone, and turned at last to find Hiram's quiet grey eyes upon him.
"Well, Hiram? What art thinking of?" he said, with something between wrath and grudging laughter in his voice.
"Nowt so mich, Maister. 'Twould be a poor farmer as 'ud frame to sow Hawkhill Bog wi' wheat; that war all I hed i' mind. Soil's soil, choose how ye tak it, an' ye cannot alter th' natur on 't. Theer! My thowts do run on farming till I've getten no room seemingly for owt else; an' I niver axed ye how ye came by this red coxcomb o' yourn."
Wayne glanced over Hiram's question as he put his foot in the stirrup. He read the old fellow's meaning clear enough, and it angered him that his love for Janet should be hinted at under cover of this slow farming-talk.
"Soil's soil, Hiram," he said, "and I had as lief sow corn on yond stone wall as look for any crop of kindliness from that dried heart of thine."
"Begow, he knows nowt about me an' Martha," chuckled Hiram, as his Master rode down the highway. "My heart's as soft as butter nowadays; but I wodn't let young Maister guess it.—Martha, now. I believe i' going slow, an' that's gospel, but I'm getting flaired she'll slip me. There's shepherd Jose, th' owd fooil, dangling at her apron-strings, an' I'd be main sorry to see a lass like Martha so senseless as to wed him just for spite.—Well, Martha's noan a Ratcliffe, thanks be, an' that's more nor th' Maister can say o' yond leetsome wench fro' Wildwater. She'll bring him trouble yet, as sure as I shall mow th' Low Meadow by and by."
CHAPTER XVII
THE DOG-DREAD
A soft wind was fluttering from the edge of dark. The moon lay like a silver sickle over Dead Lad's Rigg, watching the fading banners of the sunset go down beneath the dark red-purple of the heath. No bird piped, save the ever-moaning curlew; the reeds whispered one to another, nodding their sleepy heads together; the voice of waters distant and of waters near at hand sobbed drearily. Over all was the masterful silence of the sky, that dread and mighty stillness of the star-spaces where the hill-gods stretched tired limbs and slumbered. Full of infinite sweets was the breeze, and the scent of heather mingled with the damp, heart-saddening odour of marsh-weeds and of bog-mosses.
The Lean Man, prone in the heather with his eyes on the dying sunset, felt every subtle influence of the hour. His life's grand failure had been compassed, the first and last deep terror had laid its grip on him; the wide moor, which had spoken of freedom once, was narrowed now to a prison, whose walls of sky were creeping close and closer in upon him. Man-like, he clothed his own dead passions—his love of fight, his pitiless lust for vengeance—with all the majesty of larger nature; man-like, he thought the moor's face darkened for his own tragedy, that even the curlews thrilled with something of his own intimate and tearless sorrow. What was this ghoul that had come, naught out of nothingness, and chilled the life-blood in him? It was a phantom, yet a hard reality—a thing of unclean vapours, yet stronger than if it had plied a giant's sword with more than a giant's strength of arm.