“Are we clear of the wood?” he asked, lifting his face to meet the breeze.
“Yes, sir.”
He turned leftwards. “There’s a flat stone with a holly to north of it. D’you see it? I’ll sit there.”
She led him to it and he sat down on the stone, his stick between his knees, the sunshine on his face. She sat beside him, and as she looked over the expanse of pleasant vale and the ring of hills that compassed it about, the sense of his blindness moved her almost to tears. At their feet Garth, its red walls, its buildings and yards and policies, lay as on a plan. Beyond it, the tower of Garthmyle Church rose in the middle distance, a few thatched roofs peeping through the half-leafless trees about it. Leftwards the valley narrowed as the Welsh hills closed in, while to their right it melted into the smiling plain with its nestling villages, its rows of poplars, its shining streams. She fancied that he had been in the habit of coming to this place, and the thought that he saw no more from it now than when he sat in his room below, that he viewed nothing of the bright landscape spread beneath her own eyes, swelled her breast with pity. She could have cast her arms about him and wept as she strove to comfort him—could have sworn to him that while he lived her eyes should be his! Ay, she could have done this, all this—if he had been other than he was!
Perhaps it was as well—or perhaps it was not as well—that she did not give way to the impulse. For presently in a voice as dry as usual, “Do you see the gable of Wolley’s Mill, girl? Carry your eyes right of the hill, over the coppice at the corner of Archer’s Leasow?”
She told him that she could see it.
“That’s two miles away. It’s the farthest I own in that direction, but there’s a slip of Acherley’s land between us and it. Now look down the valley—d’you see five poplars in a row?”
“Yes, sir, I see them.”
“That’s our boundary towards the town. Behind us we march with the watershed. Facing us—the boundary is the far fence of Whittall’s farm at the foot of the hills.”
“The black and white house, sir?”