He spent a considerable part of the afternoon lying on the horse-hair couch, and staring at the ceiling. A ceiling is not, as a rule, very interesting to study, and the only thing that could be said for this one was that it was conveniently near. Reynold could examine every smoke-stain at his ease, and every fly that chanced to stroll across his range of vision. The first he noticed made him think of Barbara and Joppa, but the later comers were simply wearisome. There is a distressing want of individuality about flies. Even when one buzzed about his head, with a fixed determination to wander awhile upon his forehead, he had not an idea which fly it was. It seemed to him, as he lay there, with his arm thrown up for a pillow, that flies in general were just one instrument of torture of, say, a billion-fly power. The afternoon sunshine and the smouldering fire had wakened more than he could reckon in the little parlour.
He would not have cared to confess how much he was troubled by his uncle's silence. He had expected to be met rather more than half-way, instead of which it seemed that he was to be taught to know his place. The idea was intolerable, and it haunted him.
When Mrs. Simmonds came in with a tray (the surveyor always took his tea between five and six), she made a remark or two about things in general, which Reynold, turning his lustreless eyes upon her, endeavoured to receive with a decent show of interest. When she brought the tea-pot, she told him that Mr. Hayes had sent to the Rothwell Arms for a carriage early that afternoon. "Indeed!" said Reynold, this time endeavouring to conceal the interest he felt.
"What were they going to do?" he wondered, as he propped his head on his hand and sipped his tea. Was the old man taking Barbara away? What did it mean?
It meant simply that Mr. Hayes had wearied of his self-imposed seclusion, and had announced to his niece that he should drive over to Littlemere and see Masters. He added that he might not return to dinner, and that she was not to wait for him. While Reynold lay on the sofa the carriage had gone by, with the little man sitting in it, his head rather more bowed than usual, planning how he would explain the quarrel to his friend. "Masters will understand—he knows how the fellow behaved the night before," said Mr. Hayes to himself a score of times. But every time he said it he felt a little less certain that Masters would understand exactly as he wished.
Mrs. Simmonds, returning after a considerable interval, told her lodger that the wind was getting up, and she thought there was going to be a change in the weather. She mostly knew, as she informed him, on account of her rheumatism. Reynold opened the door for her and her tray, and then went to the window.
The moon had risen, the low roofs and gaunt poplars of Mitchelhurst were black in its light, and wild wreaths of cloud were tossed across the sky. It was a sky that seemed to mean something, to have a mood and expression of its own. Reynold watched it for a few minutes, till its vastness made the little box of a room, where even the flies had fallen asleep again, insupportably small. He took his hat and went out.
He did not care which way he went, if only it were not in the direction of the Place. Mr. Hayes, when he charged Barbara not to go near the gate, had a sort of fancy that the young fellow might walk defiantly on the very edge of the forbidden ground, and peer through the bars with a white, spiteful face. The girl acquiesced indifferently. She might not altogether understand Reynold Harding, but she knew most certainly that he would never approach them.
It chanced that evening that he took a narrow lane which led out of the Littlemere road. It proved to be a rugged but very gradual ascent. Presently it led him through a gate, and, still gently rising, became a mere cart track across open fields, where the wind came in sudden, hurrying gusts over the grey slopes, and brought undefinable suggestions of hopelessness and solitude. Reaching the highest point the wayfarer passed through another gate, and pursued a level road, bordered by spaces of unenclosed grass, sometimes widening almost to a common, sometimes shrinking to a mere strip between the white way and the low hedgerows. Reynold pushed forward, gazing at the sky. The clouds, torn and driven by the wind, fled wildly overhead, like shattered squadrons, and yet rolled up in new unconquered masses, as if from a gloomy host encamped on the horizon. The moon, slowly climbing the heavens, fought her way as a swimmer fights the waves. Now she would show a pale face through the blanched ripples of a misty sea, then would be over-powered by a black deluge of cloud, which darkened earth and sky, and swept over her sunken and scarcely suspected presence. And then suddenly she would emerge, pearl-white and pure, from the midst of the fierce confusion, rising unopposed over a gulf of shadowy blue. Or yet again she would glance mockingly from behind a rent veil of gossamer at the lonely little traveller who toiled so far below, under the vast arch of the heavens, and who raised his pre-occupied eyes to her, from the world of dream and mystery which he carried with him under the little arch of his skull. To Harding just then that inner world seemed more real, stranger, and less trodden, than did the world without. The billows of cloud, vast and formless and dark, rolling on high, were no more than symbols of the undefined forebodings which gathered blackly in his soul and changed with every thought. The wild and restless melancholy of the evening harmonised so marvellously with his temper, that he could almost have forgotten its outward reality, had it not been for the wind which blew freshly in his face. It did not seem possible that, when hereafter he came back to Mitchelhurst, he could walk this way whenever he pleased.
Yet he noted landmarks now and then. Here was a thin row of firs, slim and black, then a bare stretch of road where he stepped quickly, his shadow at his side for company, and then a sturdy oak, with all its brown leaves astir in a gust, which whispered hurriedly as he went by. Somewhat further yet the way grew narrow, dipping down into a little hollow, where a runnel of clear water crossed it, glancing over the pebbly earth. There was a plank at one side, and Reynold, stepping on it, smelt the water-mint which clustered at its edge. It seemed, somehow, as if the night, which uttered his desolate thoughts in the wind and the flying clouds, breathed them in that perfume.