“You and I,” he went on, for it caressed his soul merely to utter those words thus coupled, “tread at least as reverent intruders among the rings and barrows. We do not rest among them, as the shepherds do, simply for shelter against the winds and sleets. I came to them for healing; and you, even had you not been born with the capacity for awe,—as you were, oh, as indeed I know you were!—would have learnt it from that wise old man, your father. I have thought watching him at that delicate fingering of his shards, how he had dealt out to you the store of his scholar’s brain. To him, neat, tabulated, chronological, precise, but filtering through to yours in a strange jumble,—the painting of a bison on the wall of a cave, a man in thongs and bearskins sharpening a flint, slow glaciers crawling over England, kings buried on horseback in full panoply under a mound.”
“And did you find healing?” she inquired, catching on to the remark she could pursue with the least resentment.
“Oh, I found it, yes, I found it,” he replied, morosely, “if I may call that healing, which but exchanges one wound for another,—a poisonous wound, let us say, for a clean sharp one. Yes, I may call it healing, I suppose, for although my heart’s blood ebbs away through the fresh wound, there is no longer any gangrene in my system. I am purified; true, I may be dying, but at least I am purified. Yes, I found healing.”
“Dying?” she exclaimed.
“Oh, I spoke figuratively,” he replied with a toss of his hand; “don’t be afraid, Miss Clare, that in the course of your rambles you will come upon my body toppled down the side of a barrow,—though how should that distress you, indeed, beyond the ordinary shock of stumbling across a man recently dead? I am healthy enough of limb for a man of my age. Fifty, I am, you know,—old enough to be your father. It was kind of you to ask whether I found healing, and I am thankful to be able to tell you that I did find it; the winds of my first winter, which nearly blew my head off my shoulders and sent it bowling along these slopes, blew away my noxious thoughts. I told you I was led into miasmas; well, I brought them up here, clinging about me like a cloud, and the wind blew them away.”
“Yet you spoke of that woman just now with a good tang of bitterness,” she said shrewdly.
“Ah, well, I grudge the wasted years,” he returned, as though desirous of dismissing it thus lightly. “You may take my word for it, Miss Clare, that I have never bared that story to a soul except yourself; and probably should never have bared it to you but for some foolish, trivial reason I was anxious that you should hear it. Now that you have heard it you shall not be troubled with it again, I promise you. It is, moreover, an old story now; a score of years old, I should say, though I have forgotten the dates, and in the ordinary way of things I never think of it now. But people hereabouts have gossiped about me, I know, as was only natural, and lest any story should come to your ears, I prefer you to know the true one. You know it now; you know I am neither a prisoner escaped, nor a deserter from the army, nor a hunter of buried gold, nor any of the things which I have no doubt the village has credited me with, but simply a man once disappointed in love, as the saying goes, though Heaven knows whether those who coined that saying knew what they were talking about, or to what tragedy they were putting a name.”
“All that’s said for my benefit,” said Clare sturdily; “you do think on it now, and you haven’t forgotten the date; though maybe you will cease to think on it, since you’ve spoken it out; and it’s no longer simmering in your heart.”
He was gratified that she should so readily have caught that inflection in the voice which was meant to convey courage under sorrow, rather than forgetfulness after the passing of years.
“And should trouble come upon you,” he said very earnestly, “would you place your confidence in me? I ask it as a favour,—as a slight return. Whatsoever a duty a man might perform for you, will you call upon me and no other? You cannot know how happy your promise would make me. You are youth incarnate amongst these ancient hills.” He dared not say more, but continued to gaze at her with urgent and beseeching eyes.