CHAPTER XVI
THE SIMPLE LIFE
Julia was collecting fir-cones. All around her the land lay brown and still; dead heather, and sometimes dead bracken, a shade paler, and, more rarely, gorse bushes, nearly brown, too, in their sober winter dress. It was almost flat, a wonderful illimitable place, very remote, very silent, unbroken except for occasional pine-trees. These were not scattered but grew in clumps, miles apart, though looking near in this place of distances, and also in a belt not more than five or six trees wide, winding mile after mile like a black band over the plain. Julia stood on the edge of this belt now, gathering the dropped cones and putting them into a sack. The afternoon was advanced and already it was beginning to grow dark among the trees, but she determined not to go till she had got all she could carry. It was the first time she had been to collect cones; she had sent her father once and Mr. Gillat once. They had taken longer and gathered less than she, but it was not on that account that she had gone herself to-day. Rather it was because she wanted to go to the dark belt of trees which she saw every day from her window, and because she wanted to go right out into the wide open land and see what it looked like and feel what it felt like. And when she got there she found it, like the Dunes, all she had expected and more.
At last she had her sack full, and, shouldering it, carried it off on her back, which, seeing the comfort of the arrangement, must be the way Nature intended weights to be carried. Clear of the shadow of the trees it was lighter; the grey sky held the light long; twilight seemed to creep up from the ground rather than fall from above, as if darkness were an earth-born thing that gained slowly, and, for a time, only upon the brighter gift of Heaven. It was quieter, too, out here, for under the pines, though the weather was still, there was a breathing moan as if the trees sighed incessantly in their sleep. But out here in the brown land it was very quiet; the air light and dry and keen, with the flavour of the not distant sea mingled with the smell of the pines and the dead ferns—a thing to stir the pulse and revive the memory of the divine inheritance and the old belief that man is but a little lower than the angels, related to the infinite and god-like.
White's Cottage stood where the heath-land ceased and the sand began. There was much sand; tradition said it had gradually overwhelmed a village that lay beyond; indeed, that White's Cottage was the last and most distant house of the lost place. Be that as it may, it certainly was very solitary, rather far from the village of Halgrave, with no road leading to it except the track that came from Halgrave and stopped at the cottage gate—there was nowhere to go beyond.
Dusk had almost deepened to darkness when Julia reached the house; it gleamed curiously in the half light, for it was built of flints, for the most part grey, but with a paler one here and there catching the light. She put her sack of cones in one of the several sheds which were built on the sides of the cottage, and which, being of the same flint material, made it look larger than it was. Then she went into the kitchen.
Johnny Gillat was there before her; he had been busy in the garden all the afternoon, but, with the help of the field-glasses which he had not been allowed to sell, he had descried her coming across the open land. As soon as he was sure of her, and while she was still a good way off, he hurried away his tools into the house to get ready. He wanted it all to look to her as it had to him on the day when he came back from cone-getting—the fire blazing, the tea ready, the kitchen snug and neat; very unlike the dining-room at Marbridge with the one gas jet burning and "Bouquet" alight. Of course Johnny did not quite succeed; he never did in matters small or great, but he did his best. The dinner things, which Captain Polkington was to have washed, were not done, and still about. They had to be put in the back kitchen, and Johnny, who had no idea of saving labour, took so long carrying them away, that he hardly had time to set the tea. He had meant to make some toast, but there was no time for that; the first piece of bread had no more than begun to get warm when he heard Julia's step outside. But the fire was blazing nicely, and that was the chief thing; even though the putting on of the kettle had been forgotten. When Julia came in and saw the fire and crooked tablecloth and hastily-arranged cups, and Johnny's beaming face, she exclaimed, "How cubby it looks! Why, you have got the tea all ready, and"—sniffing the air—"I believe you are making toast; that is nice!"
Mr. Gillat beamed; then he caught sight of the kettle standing on the hearth, and his face fell.
But Julia put it on the fire. "It will give you good time to finish the toast while it boils," she said; "toast ought not to be hurried, you know; yours will be just right."