He kept his body motionless, but in his heart strange things were moving. That hatred which had run through him like a knife just before he lost consciousness in the battle of Boarzell, suddenly revived and stabbed him again. It was no longer without focus, and it was no longer without purpose. Boarzell ... the name seemed to dance before him in letters of fire and blood. He was suffering for Boarzell—his father had not been robbed, for his father did not care, but he, Reuben, had been robbed—and he had fought for Boarzell on Boarzell, and now he was bearing shame and pain for Boarzell. Somehow he had never till this day, till this moment, been so irrevocably bound to the land he had played on as a child, on which he had driven his father's cattle, which had broken with its crest the sky he gazed on from his little bed. Boarzell was his, and at the same time he hated Boarzell. For some strange reason he hated it as much as those who had taken it from him and as those who were punishing him because of it. He wanted to tame it, as a man tames a bull, with a ring in its nose.
There, at the post, quivering with a pain he scarcely felt, Reuben swore that he would tame and conquer Boarzell. The rage, the fight, the degradation, the hatred of the last twelve hours should not be in vain. In some way, as yet unplanned, Boarzell should one day be his—not only the fifty acres the commissioners had tweaked from his father, but the whole of it, even that mocking, nodding crest of firs. He would subdue it; it should bear grain as meekly as the most fruitful field; it should feed fat cattle; it should make the name of Odiam great, the greatest in Sussex. It should be his, and the world should wonder.
He left the post with a great oath in his heart, and a thin trickle of blood on his chin.
§ 4.
It was still early in the afternoon when Reuben set out homewards, but he had a long way to go, and felt tired and bruised. The constable had given him an apple, but as soon as he had munched up its sweetness, life became once more grey. The resolve which for a few minutes had been like a flame warming and lighting his heart, had now somehow become just an ordinary fact of life, as drearily a part of his being as his teeth or his stomach. One day he would own Boarzell Moor, subdue it, and make himself great—but meantime his legs dragged and his back was sore.
All the adventure and excitement he had been through, with no sleep, and eccentric feeding, combined to make him wretched and cast down. Once he cried a little, crouching low under the hedge, and thoroughly ashamed of himself.
However, things grew better after a time. The road broke away from the fields, and free winds blew over it. On either side swelled a soft common, not like Boarzell, but green and watery. It was grown with bracken, and Reuben laughed to see the big buck rabbits loppetting about, with a sudden scuttle and bob when he clapped his hands. Then a nice grinning dog ran with him a mile of the way, suddenly going off on a hunt near Starvecrow. Reuben came to Odiam aching with nothing worse than hunger.
Odiam Farm was on the northern slope of Boarzell—sixty acres, mostly grass, with a sprinkling of hops and grain. There was a fine plum orchard, full of old gnarled trees, their branches trailing with the weight of continued crops. The house itself was red and weather-stung as an August pippin, with strange curves in its gable-ends, which had once been kilns. It was one of those squat, thick, warm-tinted houses of Sussex which have stood so long as to acquire a kind of naturalisation into the vegetable kingdom—it was difficult to imagine it had ever been built, it seemed so obviously a growth, one would think it had roots in the soil like an oak or an apple tree.
Reuben opened the door, and the welcome, longed-for smell stole out to him—smothering the rivalry of a clump of chrysanthemums, rotting in dew.