SEVENTEENTH CHAPTER
Early on Good Friday I arrived at Calais. It was a misty, rimy, clammy morning, and a thick fog was lying over the Channel.
Almost before the train stopped I saw Father Dan, with his coat collar turned up, waiting for me on the platform. I could see that he was greatly moved at the sight of me, but was trying hard to maintain his composure.
"Now don't worry, my child, don't worry," he said. "It will be all ri. . . . But how well you are looking! And how you have grown! And how glad your poor mother will be to see you!"
I tried to ask how she was. "Is she . . ."
"Yes, thank God, she's alive, and while there's life there's hope."
We travelled straight through without stopping and arrived at Blackwater at seven the same evening. There we took train, for railways were running in Ellan now, and down the sweet valleys that used to be green with grass, and through the little crofts that used to be red with fuchsia, there was a long raw welt of upturned earth.
At the station of our village my father's carriage was waiting for us and a strange footman shrugged his shoulders in answer to some whispered question of Father Dan's, and from that I gathered that my mother's condition was unchanged.
We reached home at dusk, just as somebody was lighting a line of new electric lamps that had been set up in the drive to show the way for the carriage under the chestnuts in which the rooks used to build and caw.
I knew the turn of the path from which the house could be first seen, and I looked for it, remembering the last glimpse I had of my mother at her window. Father Dan looked, too, but for another reason—to see if the blinds were down.