Brand laughed again.
"It's hardly your business, is it?" he asked in a calm philosophical tone that shamed the young man's enthusiasm into silence. "Besides, it would be interference in what parsons tell us is the great scheme."
The boy winced. His father had come into the family living as a matter of course; a genial atmosphere of piety had sweetened the limited disappointments of Cummings' youth.
"That bugbear of religion," Brand went on, "what atrocities are committed in its name! 'God made all men equal.' What a lie! Some men are born to go under. In the fight for mere existence no allowance is made for frailty. Unless a man can keep up with his fellows, he must drop out of life's race. Some of us are doomed at the outset, fashioned and shaped and moulded in God's image, only to be ground down to powder by the great Juggernaut of circumstance, like that beetle under your heel."
He pointed contemptuously to the road.
"The days of miracles are passed, if they ever existed. Unless Richard Farquharson gets away from his surroundings, he will never have a chance in life. Stunted in mind and doubtless in growth, half starved, friendless, and unloved, pent up all day with a mad mother and an old woman of seventy—what can he do? It wasn't only in the much abused Herod's time that innocents were massacred. Take the police records of to-day.... No! don't, they're ugly reading." He stopped again. "Richard Farquharson's next-of-kin is now at Oxford. He has a father who moves with the times. He'll get on. The patriots of old bought titles with their blood, but gold is cheaper. This man wiped off one of a prince's debts, and got a knighthood for the privilege."
"Look," said Cummings suddenly. The two men stopped near the summit of a heather-covered spur, overlooking the castle. Cummings took a few steps forward, mounting to the crest, and then with that instinctive reverence, which one must be very young or very pure instantly to respond to, raised his cap.
Bleak, barren, desolate, perched like an eyrie upon the peak of a lonely moor, Glune held herself against the winds of heaven. Storms might come, storms did come, thunder would break, lightning and gales destroy, this or that avenue of trees. The spaces in the forest, the gaps and rents in the more cultivated landscape of the drive only served to give a clearer view of the severe outline of the grey building, about which such green things as strove to grow were ruthlessly cut down.
Some houses are almost human in their characters and impressions. In an English hospital Cummings had once seen the death of a veteran pensioner, a corporal who had served at Balaclava under his grandfather. Something in the look of the rugged stone, defaced but defiant in its pride and poverty, recalled the light in the old man's dying eyes as he said, "I've served my time, sir, eighty years of it all told, and I've got my faculties to the end, which is more than many a man can boast." Glune seemed as if it would keep its faculties to the end too.
The young man looked across to the further hills and down at the castle soberly. The grey of the afternoon had broken; the long, narrow windows opposite had captured the reflected light, a blood-red light which flamed out dazzlingly. The shadows of the pines and firs cut the rank grass of a neglected lawn immediately in front of the house; the glow of the sky was repeated in the running water of a little burn at the base of the hill. So far as eye could see, a chain of purple hills stretched loftily. Hills full of warmth and colour, and the mystery which compels a man's attention. So infinite, so eternal they seemed, that facing them the petty jars of daily life took their true value; and young as he was, Cummings realized in a flash that only what children call "big things" are of account in Heaven's reckoning—love, penitence, and sacrifice.