The miles decreased between the cavalcade and the village. Aderhold was riding now alone, Carthew still ahead, and Will fallen back with the litter. Looking about him, the physician found something very rich and fair in the day and the landscape. Not for a long time had he had such a feeling of health and moving peace, a feeling that contained neither fever nor exhaustion. There was a sense of clarity, strength, and fineness; moreover, the scene itself seemed to exhibit something unusual, to have a strangeness of beauty, a richness, a quality as of a picture where everything is ordered and heightened. It had come about before, this certain sudden interfusion, or permeation, or intensity of realization, when all objects had taken on a depth and glow, lucidity, beauty, and meaning. The countryside before him was for an appreciable moment transfigured. He saw it a world very lovely, very rich. It was noble and good in his eyes—it was the dear Earth as she might always be.... The glow went as it had come, and there lay before him only a fair, wooded English countryside, sun and shadow and the April day.
He saw the village clearly now, with a sailing of birds about the church tower. Carthew, who had kept steadily ahead, occupied apparently with his own meditations, checked his horse and waited until the other came up with him, then touched the roan with his whip and he and the physician went on together.
There was something about this young man that both interested and repelled. He was good-looking and apparently intelligent. Silence itself was no bar to liking, often it was quite the reverse. But Carthew’s was no friendly and flowing quiet. His silence had a harsh and pent quality. He looked often like a man in a dream, but the dream had in it no suavity, but appeared to contemplate high and stern and dreadful things. Aderhold looked instinctively first at a man’s eyes. Carthew’s eyes were earnest and intolerant. In the lower part of his face there was something that spoke of passions sunken, covered over, and weighted down.
The two rode some little distance without speaking, then Carthew opened his lips abruptly. “How do you like this country?”
“I like it well,” said Aderhold. “It is a fair country.”
“Fair and unfair,” answered the other. “It rests like every other region under the primal Curse—The old man, back there, has taken a fancy to you and calls you his kinsman. Do you expect to bide at the Oak Grange?”
“I think it truth that I am his kinsman,” answered Aderhold. “For the other—I do not know.”
“He is misliked hereabouts,” said Carthew. “He is old and miserly. Those who have goods and gear like him not because he will not spend with them, and those who have none like him not because he gives nothing. The Oak Grange is a ruinous place.”
The village now opened before them, a considerable cluster of houses, most of them small and poor, climbing a low hill and spreading over a bit of meadow. The houses were huddled together, but they enclosed a village green and here and there rose old trees, or showed a tiny garden. At the farther end, on the higher ground, the church lifted itself, dominating. Beyond it ran the highway still. The landscape was fair, with hill and dale, and to the right, against the horizon, violet-hued and misty, an old forest.
Aderhold looked somewhat wistfully at the scene before him. He had passed through much of harm and peril. Body and mind he wanted rest, quiet routine, for a time some ease. “It looks a place where peace might be found,” he said.