And because they couldn't understand a death like that, they went and made a god of him just the same.
But the Atonement was that—Christ's going away.
II.
February: grey, black-bellied clouds crawling over Greffington Edge, over Karva, swelling out: swollen bodies crawling and climbing, coming together, joining. Monstrous bodies ballooning up behind them, mounting on top of them, flattening them out, pressing them down on to the hills; going on, up and up the sky, swelling out overhead, coming together.
One cloud, grey as sink water, over all the sky, shredded here and there, stirred by slight stretchings, and spoutings of thin steam.
Then the whole mass coming down, streaming grey sink water.
She came down the twelve fields on the south slope of Karva: she could say them by heart: the field with the big gap, the field above the four firs farm, the field below the farm of the ash-tree, the bare field, the field with the thorn tree, the field with the sheep's well, the field with the wild rose bush, the steep field of long grass, the hillocky field, the haunted field with the ash grove, the field with the big barn, the last field with the gap to the road.
She thought of her thirty-four years; of the verses she had sent to the magazines and how they had come back again; of the four farms on the hill, of the four tales not written.
The wet field grasses swept, cold, round her ankles.
Mamma sat waiting in her chair, in the drawing-room, in the clear, grey, glassy dusk of the cross-lights. She waited for the fine weather to come when she would work again in the garden. She waited for you to come to her. Her forehead unknitted itself; her dove's eyes brightened; she smiled, and the rough feathers of her eyebrows lay down, appeased.