“Mother, look at the old horses.”
“Yes, dear.”
“Silly old things. They’re making that old cow run. The brown one’s like Wellington, the horse we had before dad bought the car.”
“So it is, dear.”
“P’r’aps it is Wellington?”
“No, dear, Wellington must be dead by now.”
The old lady in the opposing corner was looking at Jack over her spectacles, and the boy took to returning the stare with the inimitable composure of youth. Catherine had turned again towards the other window, but the white head-stones no longer checkered the hill-side. Instead, she saw her husband’s profile, stern and determined, yet infinitely sad.
Life has been described as a series of sensations; and though some days are dull and passionless, others vibrate with a thousand waves of feeling. To Murchison the day had been crowded with sensation since the break of dawn. It was a day of disruption, a plucking up of routine from the soil, a change of attitude that concerned the soul even more than the body. He yearned towards Wilton, and yet fled from it with gratitude; his old home called to him, and yet he dreaded it as a disgraced man might fear the shocked faces of familiar friends. It was a day of unrest, self-judgment, and great forethought for him. The physical atoms seemed to tremble and vibrate, till the manhood in him might have been likened to a tremulous vapor. He could eat nothing, fix his mind on nothing. Even the sagging wires, coming and going as the train swept from pole to pole, were not unsymbolical of his thoughts.
Two hundred miles, with an hour’s wait in London, and the monotonous Midlands gave place to the more mysterious and dreamy south. Pine-crowned hills, great oaks and beeches purpling the villages, the blue distance of a more magical horizon. In orchards and meadows the infinite glamour of a golden spring. Quiet rivers curling through the mists of green. In many a park the stately spruce built sombre, windless thickets; larches glimmered with Scotch firs red-throated towards the west. Trees in whispering and triumphant multitudes. Quiet, dreamy meadows where the willows waved. Mysterious Isles of Avalon imaginable towards the setting sun.
Murchison, leaning back in his corner, watched for the pine woods about Roxton town with a deep commingling of yearning and of dread. It was to be a home-coming, and yet what a home-coming! The return of a prodigal, but no cringing prodigal; the return of a man, stiff-necked and square-jawed, ready to fight but not to conciliate. There was something of the tense expectancy of the hour before the bugles blow the assault. Every nerve in Murchison’s body tingled.