His eye and ear presently became so well trained that from a great distance he could detect a moving object, and with the wind blowing gently towards him, and his ear to the ground, could distinguish a single footfall on a path nearly a mile away, like any scout. Blindfold, or in the dark, he made his way across Glune without a slip. Books of travels in far countries, stories of Burnham and other members of the brotherhood of the intrepid, taught him to destroy the tracks of his incoming and outgoing, so that every step of the way to special places of concealment had in it the thrill, the enchantment of an adventure.
To one who has never been to a theatre, a country life becomes a beautiful play of birth and death; things move and have their being, that he may see them pass to their appointed end. The green earth is the stage, Nature the playwright, and God Himself the Great Scene Painter.
Richard's tutor, a half-blind village schoolmaster who came for three hours daily when Mrs. Farquharson could afford to pay his meagre fees, was the only "outside" person whom he ever saw. Between the boy and his mother, there was neither freedom nor confidence. He shrank away if he heard the rustle of her dress. Her presence in the house acted upon him like the presence of death. It was as if she stood with uplifted hand always ready to strike some covert blow at one of his innocent pleasures. He told her nothing; what was there to tell? She looked upon the things he loved with terror.
Morning and evening found him bidden to stand, mute and resentful, beside her erect form in its accustomed place, a high-backed chair in the study where his father's papers and diaries were collected. Her frozen lips—lips tightened into a line so hard that he always thought it must hurt her to move them, would touch his forehead stiffly in greeting, as one touches a thing with loathing and abhorrence. Of bosom throbbing at his approach, and the light of motherhood in her eyes, which she stifled as she heard him coming, he knew nothing. He would leave her rejoicing at a hard duty again accomplished. That she longed for him hungrily all day long, that she stealthily followed him to his play, that her spare tense figure was often shaken by passionate longing to clasp the slender limbs that had once lain warm and quiet beneath her heart, he never knew.
Only the exceptional man or woman bears the strain of a great shame and sorrow with no outside help. Mrs. Farquharson's pride in her son went side by side with ceaseless fear. Richard's fatal likeness to her dead firstborn, dearer far than Richard because he was the child of early wifehood, stabbed her heart. She had loved that child too well; forgetfulness of God by the mother had been visited by God upon the son, she told herself. And to watch another pay the price of your own sin is sin's most bitter penalty.
In Douglas Farquharson's case, there had been that sudden extraordinary return to a vicious type which occurs occasionally in a family that has for centuries bred fine men and fair women. When, page by page, after his death the record that proved his guilt was spelled out by his mother, the only plea she could urge in his defence was that the selfishness of her own love, given to man instead of God, had marred and distorted the human image by its very fervour.
She had "counted it a glory to make vain things." Her care had been, like the potter, "to strive with the goldsmiths and silversmiths." The voices of husband and child had made such triumphant music in her ears, that God's sublime call was drowned; she had bartered Heaven for a brief hour of human rapture, to find that God was a God of vengeance as well as love and love a two-edged sword which can wound or kill.
That very night, on her bedroom wall, she thought she saw a warning written in letters of flame. "His heart is ashes and his hope vain earth, his life more base than clay." ... "Being himself mortal, he fashioneth a dead thing with his hands."
Day after day, as Richard grew stronger and more handsome, she asked herself if he were born only to inherit his brother's legacy of dishonour. He looked frank and open enough, but eyes that shone as purely as his had been the casket of lies, and lips which had met hers more easily had given themselves to what was incredibly base.
The dead are often nearer to us than the living. Mrs. Farquharson's dead were scourges. When Douglas killed himself the shock broke his father's heart. By day and night his mother made silent pilgrimage to two lonely graves.