‘So should I, lad. What does your father say about it?’
‘Nothing more than that he will want to speak to me one day soon. He is not pleased.’
‘There don’t seem to me much to be not pleased about.—Eh, mother?’
‘We’ll see after a bit,’ answered the dame, cautiously, but smiling. ‘We don’t know yet whether Philip is to prove himself a very wise man or’——
‘Or a fool,’ interrupted Crawshay, with one of his hearty laughs.
‘Nay, Dick; not that. Philip will never prove himself a fool; but he might do worse—he might prove himself a sensible man doing foolish things.’
The stranger who provoked this discussion went on in his calm way, seeking what apparently he could not find, but always with a pleasant smile or a kindly ‘good-day’ to the people he met in the fields and lanes.
One of his favourite halting-places was at the stile which gave access from the roadway to the Willowmere meadows. On the opposite side of the road were the willows and beeches, bordering the river. Four of the latter trees were known as the ‘dancing beeches,’ from the position in which they stood, as if they had suddenly halted whilst whirling round in a country-dance; and when the wind blew, their branches interlaced and creaked in unison, as if they wanted to begin the dance again. This was a famous trysting-place, and in the summer-time the swains and their maidens would ‘wander in the meadows where the May-flowers grow.’ This is the burden of a rustic ballad which you would often hear chanted in the quiet evenings. It served the double purpose of supplying the place of conversation and of agreeably expressing the thoughts of the singers. Uncle Dick sometimes saw and heard them; but with kindly indifference to his clover, he would shake his head and turn away, remembering that he, too, had once been young.
Mr Beecham resting on the stile could, by an easy movement of the head, command nearly the whole of the hollow in which the village lay; and looking upward, could catch glimpses of Willowmere House peering through the apple and pear trees of the orchard.
After the lapse of years, how new it all looks, and yet how old; how changed, and yet familiar. There is the church, the same gray weather-beaten pile, in spite of the vicar’s manful efforts to get it put into a state of thorough repair. The vicar himself is the same cheery good friend in gladness, and the sympathising comforter in sorrow; his hair is almost gray now, and his figure is inclined to be rotund; but he is still the same. There are, however, new gravestones in the churchyard, and they bear the names of old friends. Their places in the world have been easily filled up; their places in the memory of the survivors never can be. Ay, there is change indeed.