It was odd that his parents did not care. Now he came to think of it, they did not seem to care about anything very much, except Harry. It never struck him to think it was odd that he should care when they did not.
He sat down by the window, and leaning his elbow on the sill, looked out. It was still windy, and the sky was shredded over with cloud, lit by the paleness of a hidden moon. In the kitchen, two flights below, a fiddle sounded. It was Harry playing to his parents as he always played in the evening, while they sat on either side of the fire, nodding, smiling, half-asleep. Clods! Cowards! A sudden rage kindled in his heart against those three, his father, his mother, and beautiful Harry, who cared nothing about that for which he had suffered all things.
The crest of Boarzell was just visible against the luminous sky. There was something sinister and challenging about those firs. The gorse round their trunks seemed in that strange half-stormy, half-peaceful night to throw off a faint glimmer of gold. The fiddle wept and sang into the darkness, and outside the window two cherry trees scraped their boughs together.
Reuben's head dropped on his arm, and he slept out of weariness. An hour later the cramp of his shoulders woke him; the fiddle was silent, the moon was gone, and the window framed a level blackness. With a little moan he flung himself dressed on the bed.
BOOK I THE BEGINNING OF THE FIGHT
§ 1.
It was five years later, in the February of 1840.
A winter sunset sparkled like cowslip wine on the wet roofs of Odiam. It slipped between the curtains of the room where Reuben watched beside his dead father, and made a golden pool in the dusk.