THE LONELY PLOUGH

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THE
LONELY PLOUGH

BY
CONSTANCE HOLME
AUTHOR OF “CRUMP FOLK GOING HOME”

“It is always one man’s work—always and everywhere.”
Kipling.

MILLS & BOON, LIMITED
49 RUPERT STREET
LONDON, W.

Published 1914

TO
THE PEACE-RULERS

CONTENTS

THE LONELY PLOUGH

CHAPTER I
ACROSS THE DUB

He felt very old.

Older than the old face at the table before him, than the office furniture, which had been there before he was born, than his father’s portrait over the desk; older even than the tulip-tree bowing its graceful head to his window. Very old.

They said the tulip-tree blossomed no more than once in a hundred years. It was an ancient tree, biding its time as ancient things may. But Lancaster felt older even than that.

It had been a trying day. Helwise had made it trying, to begin with. She had come down to breakfast in a black print flickering with white spots, and a whirlpool frame of mind, grievance after grievance spinning musically to the surface, only to be submerged again in the twinkling of an eye. In the intervals of digesting a troublesome correspondence, he found himself flinging life-belts of common sense after long-sunk bits of wreckage, gaining nothing but an impulse of helpless annoyance and a growing dislike for the flickering spots. Helwise was his aunt and housekeeper, and though she could add nearly a score of years to his thirty-seven, the weight of time lay infinitely lighter upon her shoulders than on his; perhaps because she twitched them so gracefully from under every descending yoke. Her delicate face and softly greying hair gave the impression of a serene mind and a fading constitution, and if you were not, vulgarly speaking, up to snuff, you ran and did things for Helwise that Helwise ought to have been doing for you, and she always let you. But the serenity was sheer illusion and the constitution was tough. Closer inspection found her racing through life with the objectless hurry of a cinema express. She shimmered along a permanent way of mazy speech, and when you lived close to her you were always breathless and hurried, and the air was never quiet. She had the aimless velocity of a trundled hoop, and accomplished about as much.

Various printed notices drifted across the table on the rippling and bubbling of worries. She had a passionate habit of joining societies in all capacities, from President or Secretary to General Bottle-Washer, of getting herself appointed on innumerable county committees. As Lancaster’s aunt she was considered “the right person,” and as Lancaster’s aunt she took it for granted that his fingers should straighten the tangle of her ensuing bewilderment, and make her trundling path smooth.

He glanced through the circulars quickly, folding them neatly and adding them to his own collection. He was very business-like in his movements. The sheep and the goats of his correspondence were separated right and left; each envelope had its pencilled name and date; while the more important took cover in an elastic band and an inner pocket. His brown hands were methodical and deft; his weighing eyes implied a steady brain; his glance at the clock showed a sense of routine always alert. He was haste without hurry, while she, like the picture-train, rushed wildly and got nowhere.

A business-man born and made, you would have said of Lancelot Lancaster, not of stocks and shares or rustling parchments, but an acute, sound man of the land, a lean, light, open-air man, often in the saddle, with no aim beyond a clear-sighted judgment of terms and tenants, nor any desire more whimsical than a steady prosperity. It was only when you looked at his mouth, with its hint of patience and repression, of longing held in leash and idealism shrouded like a sin, that you wondered if he was not, after all, only very well-trained.

Yes, Helwise had been particularly trying at breakfast. Her post had required a lot of explanation, and his own had included a letter from Bluecaster, one of the kindly, idiotic letters at which Lanty smiled and swore in a breath. There was also a second letter (which of course he had read first) totally contradicting the other; and at the bottom of all had been one from the London solicitor, telling him (unofficially) to take no notice of either. Bluecaster’s agent pencilled patient comments on the three unnecessary epistles.

He had spent the morning with a prospective tenant who had seemed to take a gloating delight in raising difficulties which would never have so much as occurred to anybody else; the type of sportsman who goes house-hunting for the sheer joy of pointing out to the lessor the contemptible disabilities of his property. Getting back for lunch at the usual time, he found that Helwise had had it early and eaten most of it, afterwards cinematographing off to some meeting at least an hour too soon; and the afternoon had seen him harried from pillar to post by an inspector who kept telephoning trysting-places and never turning up. Helwise was having tea at her meeting, so there was none for him unless he chose to order it, and just as his hand was on the bell, tenants of standing had arrived, wanting him. It was really the tenants who had made him feel old.

Facing him at the office-table, Wolf Whinnerah had the light full upon his fierce old face, with its sunk, dark eyes and thatch of silver hair. He was over seventy, but until recently he had carried his years with an almost miraculous lightness. Now, at last, however, the rigorous hand of Time had touched him suddenly, breaking him in a few weeks. Pneumonia, during a trying season, had carried him very near the grave, and though he had fought his way back, he was nevertheless a beaten man. The strong bones of his keen face showed their clean lines under his furrowed skin. His height was dwindled, his step grown uncertain, his grasp weakened, his sight dulled. The end of the things that mattered had come to old Wolf Whinnerah.

His son—his only child—sat between the other two men, with his back to the fireplace. He had the mountain colouring, for all that he had been bred on a marsh-farm—the dark hair, and the gray eyes that have the blue of mountain-mist across them, the dale length and breadth, too, and the long, easy, almost lurching swing in his walk. And he had the slow, soft, deep, dale voice, and its gentle, distant dignity of manner.

He sat, for the most part, looking at the table, while his father laid his case before the agent. It was a case that put himself hopelessly in the wrong, but he kept his mouth shut, and stayed undefended. He had learned to keep his mouth shut. Argument with Wolf generally led to something perilously near unharnessed battle. He was over thirty, now, and during all the years he had worked for his father he had never had a penny’s wage. He had been kept and clothed, like a child, had tips for treats doled him like a child, and like a child been ruled in all his ways. He did not resent it; there was no question of injustice, since it was the custom in his class, and only slowly was it drawing towards change. But it kept a man his father’s property in a way curiously patriarchal and out of date to an outsider, making paternal authority a mighty weapon, and filial independence a strange, iconoclastic crime.

“Yon’s the way of it, sir!” old Whinnerah finished, leaning back in his chair, and spreading the long fingers of his knotted hand along the table, opening and shutting them slowly, as if they levered the operation of his mind. “I’m done, and the farm must go; and if the lad won’t take it on, as he says he won’t, why, then, there’s nowt for it but I must go an’ all!”

He looked down at his hand as he spoke, and clenched it, for it was trembling. The other men looked at it, too, Lancaster with regretful eyes; but the younger glanced away sharply, and set the line of his mouth a trifle closer.

“It’s bad hearing!” the agent said at last, seeing that the son did not mean to speak. “You’ve been at Ninekyrkes so long, you Whinnerahs. Naturally we like to keep the farms in the family, if it’s a family worth having. We’d be more than sorry to part with you—you don’t need telling that. Can’t you see your way to stopping on a bit longer yourself?”

The old man raised himself painfully to his feet, looking indeed like a grim old wolf, with the last yard of pace run out of him, and the last ounce of fight gone from him. His name he owed to a family tradition tracing a connection with Hugh Lupus of the Conquest, through his sister Lucia. Wolf’s son had the name in its Latin dignity, long since distorted to everyday use.

“I said I was done, Mr. Lancaster! You’ve eyes in your head as’ll show you, right enough. Yon time I was down such a terrible while, a year come Martinmas, that finished me, or I’d have likely been good for another nice few years. But I can’t carry the whole farm, now. I must give it over to a younger pair o’ hands. Not that I’m grudging that; it comes to all of us, in the end; but I’m rare an’ sore they’ll not be Whinnerah hands, Mr. Lancaster! The lad’s set on going abroad, as I’ve told you. He says he’ll not bide. I could have done a bit on the farm along with him, even yet—odd jobs to earn my board and keep my old bones warmed, but wanting him I’ll have to quit for good, and see other folk of another breed in the old spot. It’s not what I looked for, sir, not what I meant, and I’ll take it hard. I’ll take it hard!”

He lowered himself shakily back to his chair, and his hand slid out again on the table, opening and shutting, opening and shutting. Lup did not move, nor did his mouth alter. There came a second silence.

“Well, you know your own business best, of course,” Lancaster said presently, wondering what lay behind; “but surely”—he turned to the young man—“surely you don’t really mean leaving us? There has never been any misunderstanding either on your side or ours that I know of. My father thought a lot of you all—that’s old news, isn’t it?—and I’m of his mind. What’s making you quit, Lup, just when you’re needed most?”

Lup looked at the table and his father’s hand.

“I can’t stop, sir,” he said, respectfully but quite definitely. “I’m sorry if it’s putting folk about, but I reckon I’ll be better suited on the other side o’ the dub.”

“Canada?” The agent smiled and frowned. “Come, Lup, we can’t part with you, and that’s the long and the short of it! They’re taking too many of our best men, as it is. I don’t want to preach, but doesn’t it seem to you that it’s your duty to stay with your father as long as he wants you?”

“Happen it be,” laconically.

“Then, for every sake, man, stop!”

“Nay, I’ll not.”

He shut his mouth again, and Lancaster looked across to the father with a half shrug, then slewed on another tack.

“It’s a good farm, and you’ve done well by it. There’s money behind you, and money before you, which is more than a deal of folk can say. You’ll find nothing like Ninekyrkes, over there. Hasn’t it any memories for you? I don’t mind laying you’ll find it tug pretty hard on the other side!” He paused, and tried again. It was a very one-sided conversation. “I understood you were thinking of getting married—that there was to be a wedding on the far marsh. Do you propose taking the lady with you ‘across the dub?’”

The blood flamed over the set obstinacy of the dark face, but died instantly.

“I’ll not bide!” he said again, and that was all.

A wave of hysterical revolt broke over the dispossessed at his side. Wolf’s self-command was never of a lasting quality, and it had been very sorely tried.

“Nay, but I’ll not have you gang!” he cried, shaking from head to foot with the terrible effort of finished age forcing its will upon dogged youth and strength. “You’ll stop till I’m in my grave and through an’ by with my job for good! You’ll be quit of me then, right enough, and free to set about any daft-like scheme you choose, but I’m not under the sod yet, and I’ll see you do as you’re bid. I was a fool ever to hark to you! I should have said nay and nay to it from the start. It’s not so long since I could have broken my stick across you, an’ I’m not feared of you, now. Am I like to be feared, d’you think”—a sneer edged his quivering voice—“of a fool as can’t stick out a bit of a disappointment, as gets sneck-posset from the lass he’s after, and bides door slapped in his face without so much as shoving a foot inside? Nay, I’ll tell you what it is, my lad! she cares nowt, I tell you—nowt——!”

He stopped, for Lup had risen to his feet and bent towards him, so that over the table the two dark faces almost met, and before the steady anger of his eyes and locked lips even old Wolf was stilled. Lancaster felt the swift current of hatred and bitterness flash between them, sensed the passionate resentment, puzzle, and pain. Then Lup turned on his heel and went out.

“I’ll be yoking up, sir,” he threw over his shoulder as he disappeared, and presently they heard his long, unhurrying tread across the cobbled yard.

“What’s the trouble, Wolf?” Lancaster asked gently, as the clatter of hoofs and the jingle of harness came in through the open window. “What’s put the lad wrong?”

“Nowt but what puts every lad wrong, soon or late!” the other answered bitterly, sinking back. “It’s Dockeray’s lass, her as went to boarding school for a sight o’ years, and come back with a look an’ a way with her fit to beat a ladyship! Lup was always set on her, ay, an’ she on him, if seeing’s believing. They’ve been courtin’ this year past and more, going to singin’-practice an’ pill-gills an’ such-like, and I’ve never known her give him a wrong word. And then, when it comes to taking on the farm and getting wed and settling down, she’ll have none of it! She was at our spot to supper, the night it first come up. Whinnerahs and Dockeray’s have always been rarely thick, you’ll think on, living alongside, just them two selves right away over yon. You could never put a pin between ’em. Well, as I told you, she was having a bit o’ supper with us when I first spoke. I’d had it in my mind for long, ever since I was badly, but I’d put it by, time an’ again, and let it be. Likely I was no more ready than most to be set on the shelf, but the lad’s getting on, an’ he’d a right to his chance. I’d had a hard day, too, and it came over me sudden-like as I was done for good, and in a queer sort o’ way I was glad to be through with it all and rest, if it didn’t mean quitting. I thought of the old chair in the corner, and the view of a summer evening, and the sea washing at the wall, an’—an’ all the other things meaning Ninekyrkes and no other spot whatever! I’m not saying any man cares to sit by and see his son master where he’s held the reins, but there was a sort of pleasure in feeling I’d done with my job. I reckon the Almighty sends you that as a kind o’ sop, just to keep you from fretting over hard. And so I just up an’ told them how it was. I said I’d see you, sir, about handing the farm over, and then I says to Lup, ‘Now, Lup, my lad,’ says I, ‘You’ve been courtin’ long enough an’ to spare, and it’s time you settled down. We’ll change jobs this Martinmas, an’ you can get wed, an’, please God, there’ll be Whinnerahs at Ninekyrkes for many a long year to come. It’s a bargain, lad, that’s what it is! So now, Miss Francey, don’t you keep him waiting. You be getting your gear an’ such-like together, and we’ll have the wedding as soon as ever you can make shape to be ready!’ Yon’s what I said, an’ I reckon I put it real smart, eh, Mr. Lancaster?”—the agent nodded response to the appeal for commendation—“but happen it was over-smart-like for Dockeray’s lass! She never so much as coloured up or turned shy, but she round with her head very slow an’ looked at me that calm—she’s got quality’s ways with her, sir, as I said, very soft an’ kind, but with something holding her off at the back—an’ says she, in her whyet voice, ‘And what’s all that to do with me, Mr. Whinnerah?’ Eh! but I was rarely bothered just for the minute! When I come to think of it, there’d never been owt in black an’ white, after a manner of speaking. Lup’s not one for tongue-wagging, you’ll have found that for yourself. For all I could ha’ sworn to there might never have been talk o’ weddin’ betwixt ’em at all; but they’d been together a deal, an’—an’—why, I’d seen Lup’s eyes on her acrost table, an’ I’d be like to know, I reckon, when a Whinnerah’s set on a lass! So after a bit o’ coughing and fidging, thinking she was happen likely just joking us, I got out as we’d always taken it as she and Lup was sweethearts.

“‘Happen we be!’ says she, only in quality-talk, and she gives Lup the sweetest little look sideways as set him shining like the Angel Gabriel!

“‘Why, then, what there’s nowt to find!’ says I, trying not to get above myself. ‘If you’re courtin’, you’re likely thinking to get wed, and now’s your time. What’s to hinder? The farm’s ready, and the lad.’

“‘Ay, but not the lass!’ says she, spirity-like. ‘The right time’s my own time, and I’ll come when I choose!’

“‘You’ll come when Lup chooses!’ I said, fair lossing my temper out an’ out. ‘Tell her that, my lad. Tell her she’ll come when she’s fetched!’

“But Lup just sat there like a half-rocked ’un, glowering at nowt an’ saying less, as he did just now, and then my lady gets on her feet and has her talk out.

“‘You mean kindly,’ she says, ‘and to be fair and just, but you don’t understand how it looks to me. It’s the way things are worked, I know. A lad slaves for his father for years after he’s a man grown, with never so much as a penny to put between his teeth, and at last, when the old man’s tired, he gives his son his chance. Round comes the agent, and it’s, “You’re for getting wed, I reckon? Right!” (if it is right), and the contract’s made. The lass goes into the contract along with the farm, and along at the beck of the three men to the church. Well, that’s your way, but it’s not mine, and you may as well know it first as last. I’ll come when I’m ready, or I’ll never come at all!’

“And with that she took herself off, an’ after a minute Lup up an’ followed her. He didn’t come home while morning—I’ve an idea he spent the night on the sea-wall—and after that it was Canada. Ay, an’ Canada it’ll be, sir, and no two words about it!”

He stopped, exhausted, and Lancaster laughed.

“Why, man, you’re worrying yourself for nothing! It’s a lovers’ quarrel—no more. I thought, by the look of you, there was murder in the wind! Come, there’s no sense in whistling up your own ill-luck. The girl will be round again at the swing of the pendulum by this time to-morrow. She’ll pull up to the pole all right, you take my word!”

The old man shook a dogged contradiction.

“You’ve seen Lup,” he said. “You know how far there’s bending him. Have you seen the lass, sir? Nay? What, then——” on a sudden, cheering impulse—“see here, sir, suppose you put in a word?”

“What’s that?” Lancaster laughed again, amused but embarrassed. “You want me to tackle her—talk to her nicely, point out what she’s throwing away? That’s a bit too much to ask, Wolf! I’m not agent for Bluecaster for that.”

“She’d happen take it from you. She’d ha’ took it from your father, Mr. Lancaster. There’s a many he’s talked into a right way o’ thinking—ay, an’ women-folk among ’em!—as is glad and proud of it to-day.”

“Yes, but I’m——” Lancaster looked rather helpless—“well—not my father, Wolf!”

“You’re your father’s son. What a Lancaster says, goes—with most of us. You’ll try it, sir?”

“I don’t see how I can. What has your wife to say about it?”

“Something of the same mak as Lup, sir—lile or nowt, an’ nowt most often of the two. She sticks to it there’s trouble ahead, anyhow, and it’s no odds what road it travels. She’s got a queer trick of sitting an’ watching the tide, like as if she’s waiting to see something happen.”

“But surely she’s tried to make Lup hear reason?”

“Ay, I reckon she has, though she’s never let wit on it to me. He’s the very apple of her eye; she’s not like to let him go unspoken. But you’ll have a shot, won’t you, Mr. Lancaster? Do, sir—do now!” The tone was first wheedling, then wistful. “’Tisn’t only the lad. It means the farm—to me.”

He looked across at the agent with a childlike trustfulness that was almost absurdly pathetic, and Lancaster broke suddenly.

“Well, well, I’ll see what I can do!” he said, smiling somewhat wryly, and went out to help the old man into his trap, a growing feeling upon him of having seen the curtain rise upon some slow working of Fate. The dog-cart jogged through the gate, and for a moment he saw Lup’s head above the wall as he turned his horse towards the marsh. The rap of the hoofs came to him for long enough, dying and returning, until the last hill between swallowed them up.

And he felt old.

CHAPTER II
THE GREEN GATES OF VISION:—I. DUSK

He went back into the house when the distance had snapped the last vibrating link, but he did not stay there. The office was still under the domination of the young man’s silent anger, the old man’s piteous revolt. He felt troubled for both, seeing the situation as each saw it, and was conscious of sharp impatience with the cause of the deadlock, though in his own mind he was certain that her obstinacy would not last. But the whole affair was an unnecessary worry with which he could have dispensed very thankfully, and added heavily to his sense of weary irritation.

He found both drawing-room and dining-room equally unbearable in his present mood, for both were oppressively characteristic of Helwise, curiously so, since her character seemed always a shifting thing, sliding through your fingers and resting nowhere. He had lost his mother early—before his teens—but the house, under the firm conservatism of his father and an old servant, had kept her memory and her tenets for long. Helwise, however, had banished them very completely. With a long-nursed resentment he marked the disorder of the dining-room, the drunken regiment of chairs, the holes in the lace curtains, the cheap almanacs pinned haphazard between the good prints. Helwise loved to surround herself with calendars. They gave her a sense of keeping even with Time. He could not steal a march on her by a single day, while some grocer’s tribute marked the black footsteps of his pilgrimage. Yet she rarely availed herself of their services, left them hanging for years—horrible traps to the unwary—her own hasty references being invariably directed to the wrong month.

Lanty frowned distastefully at their almost ribald askewness, at the torn places in the paper where the crooked pins had slipped, at the untidy hearth and wild mass of correspondence on the open desk. It should have been a handsome room, by rights, for it was bright and well proportioned. The severe furniture that his father had bought had mellowed with time, and the few bits of silver on the sideboard had lost their parvenu air of recent presentation. He had chosen the carpet himself, and its soft, dark tints still pleased him, in spite of the tread worn white by the hurrying feet of his aunt. But there was no ease or homeliness in the room, and it was certainly not handsome, save as an elderly roué of once better days is handsome, in a last drunken effort after dignity and repose.

The drawing-room was worse. He had had no hand in the drawing-room, so Helwise had let herself loose upon it, with results that made him creep. He hated it, from the collection of smug pot dogs on the mantelpiece to the bad Marcus Stone imitations on the cold blue of the walls. He hated the cheap books lying about, the spindly furniture, the innumerable chair-backs bristling so fiercely with pins that you dared neither lay your head on them in front nor your hand on them from behind. There was only one comfortable chair in the room, and that was sacred to Helwise. Not that she ever actually claimed it as hers, but if you sat down on it by accident, she wandered helplessly over the wild-patterned carpet as if there wasn’t another seat within reach, until you became gradually aware of criminal poaching, and arose with shame. There were almanacs here, too, gaudy things evidently of a higher grade, matching, with a pleasantly thoughtful touch, the shrieking tiles of the modern grate. The wide fireplace of his youth had been a sacred altar, lighting a torch to many dreams, lifting the smoke of many prayers; but nobody but a Post-Impressionist could have prayed to this grate, and its brazen canopy had never housed a single vision.

With a half-sigh he wandered out again and into the garden, but even here Helwise had successfully impressed herself. During one of his very rare absences she had had the fine box-borders removed, and the paths edged with glittering rockery-stones, intersected by scrubby and unwilling little ferns. Lanty never quite forgot what he had felt at sight of them. There was an old song he had been used to growl softly as he walked between the box, a tender thing called “My Lady’s Garden,” and sometimes, at dusk, after a hard day, he had vaguely thought to find her there in the cool of the evening, even as himself and Another. He had always missed her, but she had been there, he was sure of that. But when the rockery-stones appeared, she came no more; and to all his big wants and losses there was added the loss of a little dream.

That was hard to forgive Helwise, just as it was hard to forgive her the scars on his precious lawn, where her heavy niblick had taken greedy mouthfuls, and the insane bumble-puppy pole, rearing its unsightly length in the middle of the soft, green stretch. She had a summer-house, too, a Reckitt’s Blue wooden thing on wheels, with texts all over it, like a Church Army Van. All the texts were about food, strung together at random: “I washed my steps with butter.” “Is there any taste in the white of an egg?” “There is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink ... For who can eat, or who else can hasten hereunto, more than I?” etc., etc. Lanty passed them with averted eyes, for they reminded him that he had had no tea and only the scrapings of his aunt’s lunch, and stopped for comfort before the one spot in the garden left untroubled, a stone seat in the terrace wall, with straggling letters running along its curve. “The whole earth is at rest, and is quiet,” said the quiet seat in the wall, a soothing rede for a tired heart, no matter how the truth might rage and storm without. With its balm upon his lips he dropped into the road through a little stile, and came before long, without pause or thought, to a lane winding across country vaguely south. He looked about him before turning into it. If there had been anybody in sight, he would have taken another way, but there was not a soul even far distant, and he stepped in quickly.

Once within its bounds, however, he slackened his pace to an almost hushed saunter. You did not use this lane as a muscular training-ground or a mere short cut; you crept into it on tiptoe, and caught it unawares. It was a capricious lane, racing up and down tiny hills between its high, warm, leaning hedges, spinning round sharp corners out of sight, or running innocently to alluring gateways, only to leave you stranded on arrival. It was full of surprises, full of secrets. As you walked, you heard all sorts of bewitching sounds above and around you, sounds you had known always and sounds you never heard anywhere else. You knew, for instance, the slur of the plough, the whistle of the blackbird, the whirr of the grass-cutter, the slash of the bill-hook on a far fence, the gnawing of turnips, the wind-talk of dead leaves. But there were others you never placed: elf-like twitterings that never came from any bird’s throat, weird, hoarse grunts like some guttural gnome-language that couldn’t possibly be just a sheep coughing; and if you caught the right time on the right night, you would hear a rustling along the lower fields as the Brush-Harrow Dobbie went by, with never a horse before it nor a man behind. There was also the famous Bluecaster Black-Dog Dobbie, which slunk stealthily at your side, panting and padding ever so softly in the dusk, and disappearing into the wraith of an old Tithe-Barn long since fallen away, that had once marked the boundary of the estate.

Besides these attractions, Lanty had a ghost of his own, and half his joy in the lane lay in wondering if he should find it. It was a very deep lane. You had to look up and up before you saw the feathery tops kissing the sky, and you walked between, very warm and safe and quiet, listening with all your ears at once. And then, all of a sudden, there would be a break on the lower side, and over a couple of moss-grown bars, or an ancient gate thrust in at any and every beautiful angle, you would see the lovely land sweeping down and out beneath you, and rising slowly, slowly again to soft curves and blue vapours. They came all along the lane, these flashing little peeps of a world shut out, like cloister vignettes in some silent Abbey. Your heart went before you hungrily to each, yet was loth to leave any for the next. And which was more dear, the tender quiet or the land through its living frame, it would have been hard to say. Lancaster called the peeps his Green Gates of Vision.

He stopped at the first of all, and his Ghost was there to meet him, a long, faint, knife-edged mountain, flung like a cloud against the south-west sky. It was often missing, and at its clearest the mass of it was no more than a blown web, yet the line of it had always the quivering sharpness of steel. He had grown to believe that the sight of it brought him luck, this Ghost-Mountain of his, so christened because it never seemed but the ghost of a hill, edged with the spirit-fire of something safe escaped from clogging matter. Its absence did not depress him, but its presence, sprung suddenly upon his cloistered walk, always made his heart leap, as at an unexpected promise of goodwill. He welcomed it to-day when he was weary and out of tune, and he leaned his arms on the weathered timber with a sense of rest, drawing his gaze slowly back from the far symbol to the country close at hand.

Four or five dropping fields away, Rakestraw stood in its sheath of woods, the new hay thick in the grey Dutch barns. There were rooks’ nests in the trees overhanging the house; even at that distance he could see them. That meant luck for Rakestraw, said the wise. He had always told himself that he would live at Rakestraw when the cease-fire sounded for the work he loved, farm it himself, lead his hay and breed his stock, and perhaps the rooks would build for him, too, as they had built for Dart Newby. He knew in his heart that he would never do it, just because it seemed so essentially the beautiful and right thing for him to do. Most of us have our dream-houses somewhere, and plot and plan their future and ours together; and whether we ever win to them or not with a signed conveyance, we have something of them always that is never set down in any legal bond.

To the left he could see the road twisting and dipping but yet steadily rising towards Gilmichel, and another road far away on higher land, with Topthorns set on its edge; then Dick Crag, like a soft, gray bear raising itself on hind legs to look abroad, and, behind it, fold on fold of neutral-tinted, blended fells. On the right the land rose again, only more sharply, until the line of the hedges broke once more into the sky, but over the hill he knew was Gilthrotin in the hollow, with its one little, steep street, its old bridge and ancient church, and its empty, eyeless manor-house topping the terrace over the river. He would come to that presently, when, by slow and delicious chapters, he had read his lane from start to finish.

Leaning there, his eyes resting on restful Rakestraw, he went back in mind to his late interview and the task he had undertaken. It was only one among many unconventional duties falling to him, he reflected, with the same wry smile. As agent for the Bluecaster estate, free to use his own discretion in almost every instance, yet often tied hand and foot by old observance, he frequently found himself in situations for the right conduct of which there could be no possible arbiter but his own judgment. Old duties were his along with the outside management, duties of house-steward and administrator, and even where his rule ended, the claims on him went on. If a casual visitor at the “Feathers” was lost out fishing, Lancaster was called to find him, as a matter of course. If the draper wished to commit suicide, Lancaster was fetched to command him to desist. If the doctor objected to the rates, or the parson struck a bad rock in Local Government, Lancaster was signalled for aid. Difficulties of all sorts came to him for settlement, from disputes over neighbours’ hens and washing and fondness for the American organ, to the moot point whether your money ought or ought not to go to your wife’s relations.

At the age of twenty-four, when scarcely through his training, he had been thrust into his father’s place by a blast of sudden death which carried off master, heir, and steward in the same month. The new lord was only just of age, and glad enough to have a Lancaster to lean on, so that before the young agent had learned to stand alone, he had the whole estate upon his shoulders. Thirteen years it was now since he took hold. Thirteen years since Jeffrey Kennet Cospatrick, tenth Baron Bluecaster, greeted his inheritance with a sigh. He was a kindly, shy young man, one of those puzzling natures that swing from an almost idiotic simple-mindedness to sudden touches of shrewdness; that take everybody at face-value three-fourths of the time, and for the rest can see through a stone wall. He had few near relations, and for the most part spent his flying visits to Bluecaster alone, but he always came when he was wanted, ready to face some traditional ordeal with a shy effort. He was generous, too—to a fault—but even in his most ultra-altruistic flights he could be made to listen to reason. Indeed, his faith in his agent was almost irritatingly sublime; there were times when the latter longed earnestly for a man who could see things steadfastly through his own eyes, Bluecaster leaned so heavily. Yet he knew himself wonderfully fortunate, and it was only when he was very wearied or worried, as he had been of late, that he felt his shoulders ache.

It was scarcely strange that he should feel old; he had had so little time to be really young. There were drawbacks to being the son of a fine man, he thought occasionally. People expected you to start where your father left off, to keep up his standard of ripe experience where any other beginner would be busy learning from his own mistakes. The tenants had turned to him from the first with the personal confidence and affection that they had given his predecessor, scarcely realising that he had not yet grown to the full stature of control. He had gone through hard years, often troubling himself unnecessarily, but in the end he had won out. Before he was thirty he had come to father the whole lot of them, Bluecaster included. The trust was his dearest possession, but, serving it, he had missed his youth.

His work was the breath of his life; its varied interests kept him keen and stimulated, but they increased continually, and every year new legislation made things more difficult for those engaged with land. The county, too, had claimed him, and he had yielded, inch by inch, to the fascination making almost the sole reward of the Great Unpaid. He had not had a holiday for years; he was too absorbed, too pressed, too afraid of getting behind. Besides, no other place called him. The whole of his heart was here.

Things might have run easier if Helwise had been—well, something quite inconceivably different from what she was. Her descent upon his desolate hearth from unrewarding efforts as companion to successive old ladies, had been welcomed by him at the time, not knowing that it was her special mission in life to make it more desolate still. He had been too busy at first to notice the atmosphere with which she surrounded him, attributing his dreariness of spirit to his father’s loss and his over-heavy task; and by the time he had made himself and formed his routine, it was too late to send her away. She was happy after her own parasitical fashion, and to uproot her now would mean a gigantic effort to which neither his will nor his heart felt equal. But of late there had grown upon him a longing for a home of his own making, an atmosphere with which Helwise should never have anything to do. He murmured old Samuel Daniel’s words as he leaned against the gate.

“To have some silly home I do desire,

Loth still to warm me by another’s fire.”

He had a home, certainly, and one silly enough, too, in its mismanagement and lack of all peace; but it was another silliness for which he yearned, the silliness of little, common home-interests and home-jokes, of crossed glances and talk without words, of parting kisses and meeting hands. He had a fire, of course, as well; that is to say, he paid for it; but in every other sense it was “another’s.” He thought of the drawing-room grate and renounced it violently.

Dusk was drawing down, now, though the Mountain still stayed with him, faintly limned as a dried tear. Milking was over at Rakestraw. He watched the cattle coming out from the shippons to a quiet night in the cool fields. Near at hand a sleepy twittering told him where a late-nested bird was hidden close. The clipped sheep and the sturdy lambs still called to each other, as if the tender time of mother-love was not yet over; and far down on the road he could hear children pattering home from their summer treat. There came into his head a song he had heard at a musical festival.

“What can lambkins do,

All the keen night through?

Nestle by their woolly mother,

The careful ewe.

“What can nestlings do

In the nightly dew?

Sleep beneath their mother’s wing

Till dawn breaks anew.

“If in field or tree

There might only be

Such a warm, soft sleeping-place

Found for me!”

Well, his hour of comfort and sanctity was nearly over. His soothed nerves gave him courage to laugh at his own longings. He must get back to Helwise and other duties, think out some plan of campaign with regard to Dockeray’s recalcitrant daughter. He raised himself reluctantly, wondering, at the last moment, what encouragement his Ghost was about to send him, when he was brought round sharply by sounds of frivolous song pouring down the lane. The shuttered quiet passed. The sheep, newly snuggled under the hedge, scattered in bleating alarm; fresh twitterings broke from the late nest, and every shy-peeping fairy-thing became instantly dumb and dead.

With the song came a shuffling as of dancing, and panting requests to the singer to “bang a bit more on the brass!” and as Lancaster, standing in the rutted road, looked up to the first frolicking bend, two figures whirled into sight through the thin veil of eve. Behind, their obedient accompanist let out his fine voice a little further. With the singer was a girl.

The dancers, closely clasped in each other’s arms, executed a series of intricate steps from hedge to hedge with the unanimity and gravity of extremely superior marionettes. They wore dinner-coats and evening pumps; their heads were bare, and now and then Lancaster caught the gleam of shirt-fronts as he watched them swing down through the dusk. He did not know them, he felt certain of that, and wondered in widening circles until he remembered that the eyeless house over the hill had been sold recently, and that these must be some of its new occupants. Watters was Gilthrotin property, and therefore not in his hands, and though he had been present at the sale, he had forgotten the buyer, though he had marked the Lancashire name as one with plenty of money behind it. That accounted for the strangers. It did not account though, he thought, ruffled and jarred, for their bad taste in thrusting noisily into his lane just at fairy-time. With the dogged resentment of the conscientious objector who stands stolidly in front of a motor-car, he remained in the middle of the road until the dancers ran into him. They spun in opposite directions, clutching at nothing, and the singer broke on a high note. Lancaster went on standing still.

The girl stepped forward, her whitely gray gown showing moth-like in the shadows. The disgruntled performers were busy picking themselves out of the hedge, breathing somewhat offhand apology.

“I hope they didn’t hurt you?” she began anxiously. “It’s the Tango. They don’t seem able to stop doing it, and of course they are only boys and very foolish. I do hope you’re not hurt!”

Lancaster assured her, smiling a little grimly, that he was perfectly whole. If anybody was hurt, it was much more likely to be the Tangoists in the hedge. These now came up, still panting.

“Licks creation! Stuns the stars! Bangs Banagher! I say, beastly sorry we barged into you like that. Took you for a turnip, honest injun we did! We’re shooting over to Bluecaster after a smoke-shop, and we thought it just as easy to tango there. And I say, look here! You’ll know what time they close, I expect. I suppose we can do it all right?”

“It’s six furlongs, and you’ve just ten minutes,” Lancaster answered severely. “You may do it, with luck. But if you beat Banagher down the hill in that costume, you’ll probably find yourself in jail in less time still.”

“Right-o, old cock! What’s a furlong, anyway? Anybody seen a furlong? As to the togs, why, it’s the country, the dear, silly old simple-life country! You can do anything you like in the country, or else what’s the good of it? Come on, you fellows, we’ve got to get that smoke!”

They flew together again in a furious embrace, and spun away out of sight, whistling like flying engines at a crossing. The girl and the singer stayed behind, still apologetic.

“You’d have gone quicker by the main road,” Lancaster said stiffly, still resentful. “But of course you probably know that already.”

She nodded.

“Yes. But the boys wanted to come by the lane. They love the lane. When they don’t tango, they bring the car and squeeze her along as fast as they can. The hedges are too high, though; you daren’t risk the turns. If they were only clipped so that you could see over, it would make a fine test for steering!”

The singer in the background began an appeasing little chant, as if he knew that Lancaster writhed.

“Perhaps some of us prefer it as it is,” he answered coldly. “Hadn’t you better be looking after your—your brothers? There’s rather a smart police-sergeant in Bluecaster.”

“They’re not my brothers. They’re just stopping with us, that’s all. Are we trespassing?” She lifted an anxious face. “I didn’t know the lane was yours. I’m ever so sorry! We’d better go on, hadn’t we, after the boys? but we’ll come back the other way.”

Lanty reddened, ashamed. The singer gave him a friendly smile over the girl’s head.

“It isn’t my lane—of course not. There’s no reason you shouldn’t motor down it if you happen to know a collapsible method of passing carts. It’s a favourite walk of mine, that’s all. And everything was just about asleep.”

She looked a little puzzled and still troubled.

“I expect you do feel it’s your own lane, really! I’ve only been here since March—we’re at Watters in Gilthrotin—but I’ve noticed people seem to think that lots of things belong to them just because they’ve had them somewhere round all their lives—hills and footpaths and favourite views—things like that. The man in the cottage behind us was dreadfully vexed because we cut down a half-dead sycamore by the river. He said he was used to seeing it from his bedroom window—wasn’t it funny of him? That’s what you feel about the lane, though, isn’t it? I wish I’d known! Any other lane would have done for us.”

Lancaster choked his feelings with an effort.

“Please do not bother about me,” he said curtly, raising his cap. “You have every right to the lane. And I don’t think it was funny at all. Good-night.”

She responded reluctantly, feeling that she had somehow failed to put things right. She wanted to placate this cross, solitary-minded person who had already turned his thin, serious face back to the break in the hedge. Perhaps he was not really cross. He might be suffering from nerves. They ought not to have worried him, poor thing!

A young moon came up over the hill. For a moment they looked together through the green arch.

“It must be fearfully quiet, down there!” she said, nodding towards the buildings hugging the land close as if they loved it and were loved in return. “I’m not sure I shall like living in the country. Everything seems to be listening for something that never gets itself said. And why don’t they put the poor animals under cover? I should hate to spend the night out of doors, myself!”

He had been watching the moon and his wraith of a Mountain, and at her words he winced again. She was shattering his magic with both hands. She had no thought for the summer dew or the nestled lambs, the grey robe of the night or the gentle miracle of dawn. It meant nothing to her, this creeping mystery of eve.

“Thought I heard a policeman’s whistle a minute ago,” he observed casually. “I met the constable following up tramps when I came out. Perhaps your folks have run into him.”

With a sense of relief he found himself alone again at last, but the charm had temporarily vanished, the fairy-things remained away. He wished she had not looked through his Green Gate with her alien eyes; he was afraid of seeing things as she saw them. She had thought it nicer for the stock to be indoors, just as she doubtless thought it better for him to be under his own roof instead of mooning about a ridiculous lane. He loathed the thought of his own house at that moment. He disliked the girl who had broken the happy spell. He leaned over the gate in the gloaming, watching the quietened sheep, and trying to call the magic back.

“If in field or tree

There might only be

Such a warm, soft sleeping-place

Found for me!”

CHAPTER III
TROUBLE

He rode over to Ladyford the following afternoon.

Helwise came agitating on to the doorstep, just as his foot was in the stirrup, to tell him that his lordship had returned unexpectedly.

“He telephoned from the House in the middle of the morning,” she went on, with the high-pitched, running ease which always seemed to make every difficult situation doubly trying. “He said he would like to see you at your earliest convenience, but of course I told him you were engaged both this morning and afternoon, and to-night you were going to take me to that lecture on ‘The Home Beautiful.’ (It was to-night, wasn’t it?) I forgot to tell you at lunch. I think it just as well, Lancelot, to let his lordship know how extremely busy you are, and not always able to run at his beck and call. I am sure it is quite time you applied for a rise, with all these horrid insurances to add up. We could do quite easily with a small brougham.”

Lanty loosed the stirrup.

“I’m quite satisfied with my screw, thank you,” he answered shortly. “You know Bluecaster’s generosity as well as I do. And I do wish, Helwise,” (their old Lancaster names formed the one love they had in common), “that you wouldn’t arrange my business for me. I could have gone to Ladyford to-morrow, and this morning I was no further than the show-field, having a look round. You might have sent Armer with a message. He was only helping you to thread that bead-curtain. I’ll go in and ring his lordship up at once.”

He turned towards the door, but she stopped him.

“It’s no good; he won’t be at home. He said he was going out to lunch—I forget where—but he assured me it would be quite all right if you went up in the morning. So you see there’s nothing to prevent you riding over to Ladyford, and as you’re passing through Sandwath I do wish you would call at Brunskill’s for my watch. The man in Bluecaster is no more good than my shoe. And—oh, Lancelot!—I do believe it’s the Annual Meeting of the Nursing Association to-day, and it had gone clean out of my mind! I’m something important, I’m sure—let me see, what was it?—oh, yes, of course, Honorary Secretary—and they’ll certainly expect me to be there, but it’s absolutely out of the question. I’ve promised to drive to a bazaar in Witham with Harriet Knewstubb—I believe we’re judging something—I’ve forgotten what—but I can’t possibly leave her in the lurch. The report is ready—you went through it for me last week, if you remember—but I simply can’t be there to present it. Couldn’t you do it for me?”

“No, I couldn’t!” Lanty returned firmly. “I do some queer jobs both for you and for Bluecaster, but I haven’t yet got as far as presenting reports at a nursing meeting. Throw over Harriet and get along to your post. If you don’t want to walk, you can order a trap from the ‘Feathers.’”

“I dare say, but I shan’t try. You know what Harriet is if you go back on her—her language, I mean. The whole nursing committee and the patients wouldn’t be in it. I do think you might help me, Lancelot! It isn’t often I turn to you for assistance.”

The last phrase had been part of his life so long that it did not draw even a mental shrug. In a way he had grown almost to welcome it, since it marked the full stop to some tangled rigmarole. As a rule, he awaited it patiently with shut ears, and answered—something.

“I’ll help you by leaving the report as I pass, if you like,” he said, at last, “but you can’t expect me to do more. What time is the meeting? Three? Then I shall only just do it. Fetch the papers along, please, and don’t invent any fresh messages for his lordship while I’m away.”

“And while you’re getting them,” he threw after her, “just think up some really plausible lie. Even a committee of women won’t swallow that bazaar.”

He stood waiting with a hand on the saddle, too trained to patience even to flick his worn cords with a restless whip. Blacker, the horse, had the same air of long-suffering towards feminine caprice. The black spaniel sank her nose between her paws. Black was the Bluecaster colour, from the flag on the roof to the household liveries and the pigs at the Home Farm. There had been a Bluecaster, fleeing from the Plague, who had put all posterity into mourning for his particular sins.

The odd-job man, who did a little of everything, including stable-work and summer-house texts, leaned somnolently against the horse’s shoulder. Lanty exchanged a word with him, and then left him in peace. Armer had had a hard morning. Helwise was entered for a bumble-puppy competition, in aid of a Dogs’ Home, and when he had finished the bead-curtain he had been called out to give her practice.

Through a window above she could be heard engaged in a scatter-brained search, and Lanty wondered vaguely why she kept nursing reports in the bathroom, but to follow the workings of Miss Lancaster’s mind was to return Ophelia-like, weaving wreaths for one’s distracted head. She appeared at last with a bundle of papers through which he looked carefully, having once been basely misled over Boarding-Out Agenda produced by him on her behalf at a golf-meeting; receiving a volley of instructions as he climbed finally into the saddle.

“If you don’t like to mention the bazaar, you must think of something for yourself,” she told him, following him down the drive. “There are plenty of useful things to say on these occasions, and nobody believes them. And you can just tell them I think nothing of the new district nurse—nothing at all! I’ve met her at least three times this week, and she never even dreams of bowing to me. Of course, I wasn’t able to attend the meeting at which she was interviewed, but that’s no excuse, as she must know as well as I do that I’m the Treas—no, what was it?—Honorary Secretary. She cycles with her saddle far too low, too—wait a minute, though; that was the last but one—and she spends too much of her time making herself pleasant to people of no importance whatever—the sort who are never ill and don’t subscribe a penny. Don’t forget the watch, will you, and the slippers—did I mention the slippers? Bedroom-blue-quilted-one-and-elevenpence-ha’penny—size 6—Wilson’s—no, I can’t get them in Bluecaster, you might have known that—and be sure you say something useful!”

She turned to seize on the factotum, who had adroitly vanished to finish his nap in the harness-cupboard, and Lanty succeeded in leaving her behind. Once safe in the road, however, he checked his horse a moment for a survey of the house. It was a square, gray-stone building, comfortable and compact, old enough to have acquired atmosphere, yet not too old for convenience. The garden, thanks to Armer, and in spite of Helwise, was looking well. There were roses everywhere, creepers and climbers as well as bushes, and here and there the dark velvet of violas foiled the pallor of the pinks. At the back of Crabtree Bluecaster stood in its park, with its shoulder to the hill, and behind and behind again, as far as he could see, the fells rose in long ranks until the Whygills towered above them all.

It was a strange day, very sultry and sunless, and the hills had an edge to their ominous dark blue. The stillness had a menace in it, too. Only in the garden, as he looked at it, where the colours showed vividly, as always before thunder, there seemed a protected peace. The house slept and the garden held its breath, and, caught in the spell, he could almost have believed the place a home indeed. Then his aunt’s voice came running (it seemed) from all directions at once, her feet scurrying in search of the slumbering one; and with a sigh he touched up the chafing horse, and made west to the marsh.

He met the district nurse almost immediately, a bright little woman of 100 h.p. energy, and found no difficulty in getting himself recognised; and a mile further on he turned up a drive, drawing rein before a porch arched with sweetbriar, where he pulled the bell without dismounting. Mrs. Yare herself came out to him, and to her he handed the papers. Through the near window he had a glimpse of a selection of hats, framing various degrees of interest and annoyance. His regrets were received with gracefully concealed unbelief.

“We were all wondering what had happened!” she told him. “We always have the meeting here—I’m a Chief Lady Superintendent or something Mikado-ish of that kind, you know—so I hardly thought Miss Lancaster could have forgotten, especially as she calls the meeting herself! I’m very disappointed she wasn’t able to come, but no doubt we shall manage all right. She is well, I hope?” she added courteously.

“She is only—mixed,” Lanty answered curtly, gathering up his reins. “I’m extremely sorry if you have been put out. Please accept my assurance that it shall not happen again. I was told to say something useful,” he finished grimly, “so perhaps you will be kind enough to convey a message to the committee? My aunt, with much regret, resigns her position on the Association!”

Bluecaster, House and village, lay some three miles from the narrow bay where it ran in to take the rivers Bytha, Wythe, and Ulva. Lanty could see the winding estuaries as he topped Hullet, with Wythebarrow standing out to the marsh on the north-west, and the grand barrier of Lake hills behind. Both north and east lay the marsh-farms, part of the rich property which ran from the sea (for the foreshore rights were Bluecaster’s) to the Yorkshire and Lancashire borders. But there were only two farms on the north, below Wythebarrow and across the strait—Ladyford and Ninekyrkes, standing alone on the lip of the tide. He lost them again as he dropped into Sandwath, where he executed his orders, turning into the marsh-road towards four o’clock.

The same brooding stillness held the bay in thrall; the same line of warning edged the hills. The tide was dead out, and the sands lay desolate under the heavy sky. Now he had the twin farms again, ahead and across where the bay narrowed in and stopped, unnaturally white on the gloom of their background, and flanked by slender stems of larch and fir. The marsh-road was deep-dyked on either hand, and here and there in the watery bottom he caught the sunny gleam of late goldilocks. On his left was the long sea-wall known as the Let, guarding the eastern marsh; on his right the land rose gently until it hid the village. Here were Moss End and Meadow’s Ing, with Lockholme beyond, and others; and, still beyond, close to the brown waste, Pippin Hall, where he left his horse.

He skirted the grassy bank for some ten minutes, and then struck across the sands to his destination. Walking thus, a lonely speck on the dreary flat, the isolation of the dwellings in front came to him sharply, so that their air of prosperous serenity, of tranquil sureness, seemed almost dangerously provocative. Far away and out, where the bay, between two headlands, ran into open water, a slant of light from the sullen sky laid a shining strip from point to point which he knew to be the sea. It was there and it was coming, quietly, perhaps, and inoffensively, but there would be many a night when it would come like a beast of prey, ravening its path between narrow shores, devouring the waiting desert. And yet the farms were not afraid.

The sea-wall had been carried in front of them also, reaching out to the last inch of broken land, and from thence merging into the huge, defiant bank which had once been famous throughout the kingdom. It ran along the coast for a couple of miles, joining the hill on which the town of Cunswick climbed, and behind it the reclaimed land lay safe.

Lancaster’s father had built both walls, the success of the lesser firing him, years later, to throw the larger gauntlet over the sands. They had christened the low wall “Lancaster’s Let,” which means merely a hindrance, but the big bank they had named “Lancaster’s Lugg,” from the Scandinavian “lugg,” a forelock, and “lugga,” which means “to pull by the hair,” for Lancaster had knotted the manes of the white sea-horses together, and dragged them out of their ancient stable.

It was built with a high daring across the one lung of the limited passage, and at its back the grassy waste harboured sheep and waited for man’s hand; for though it had long since been mapped out for building, only one house had risen as yet on the stolen ground. Lanty had often looked at his father’s plans, and locked them away again. Something held him back from putting them into shape, and, moreover, decreasing values and increasing Government drains had left the income tight at times. Yet he meant some day to materialise his father’s dreams, and had good hopes of them, for Cunswick was a growing seaside resort, and would eventually take up the land quickly enough. Meanwhile the big wall held its own, caring nothing for the onslaughts of the crouching foe behind that shining line. Whether the full moon brought the fierce thrust of a heavy swell, or the west wind, riding a wracked sky, hurried the shock of racing billows, the bank held off the one and flung back the other, steadily throwing the trend of the tide to the further and higher side of the bay. To-day, with never a trickle of water at its base, it looked like a mighty serpent on the uncovered sand, winding its slow and writhing length lazily to the sea, purposeless, abnormal, monstrous in the unnatural fight and leashed quiet. The sands themselves were dangerous—dangerous to walk and sail, with their deep, shifting banks, unknown quicksands and tidal bore. The whole place had the terrible fascination of lurking ill, and yet on all hands the farms lay peaceful and content, like trustful women sleeping in a tiger’s cage.

Lanty looked at the Lugg, that tremendous thwarter of the tides, and thought of his father. The project had aroused a storm of controversy at the time, out of which the thing itself had emerged triumphant. Men had pronounced it a risk to the whole coast, and time had proved them wrong. Lancaster had vindicated himself, leaving the bank as his monument, for, in looking out to it each day, the marsh saw also the dead who had planned it. They were not afraid of it there. Because a Lancaster had built it they trusted it, resting tranquilly on his word. It was in their simple confidence that his real monument was raised.

The son came at last to the channel of the Wythe, hurrying to sea past the foot of Ladyford, and from there he hailed the farm, shattering the stillness and causing even himself to start. Somebody answered from behind the buildings, and presently a tall boy appeared on the bank, and scrambled down to the boat below. This was Dockeray’s youngest son, the only one at home, and Lanty wondered, watching him pull across, what he and his parents thought of the Whinnerah complication. He had come with no definite plan, after all—simply to see how the land lay, and whether a timely word might in any way be possible. Certainly he doubted both the opportunity and his own wisdom. If the girl were as good-looking as her brother, he thought idly, she might be forgiven a little petulant coquetting with destiny.

Rowly greeted him with a smile as he grounded the boat, and made conversation readily enough as they went over. His parents were well, and the married brothers away. His sister? Yes, she was at home, now—had been for some time. Oh, yes, he was glad to have her. It was a bit lonely at Ladyford of a winter’s night, and Francey was champion at the piano and singing. He liked a song himself, and so did the old folks. They were well, too, at Ninekyrkes, barring old Wolf. He feared he looked like breaking up fast; but anyhow it was time he had a rest, and let Lup take hold. Ever since the pneumonia he’d been a different man. But that was all; no sign or hint of how matters stood, or on which side his sympathies lay. Lanty knew only too well the deeps covered by the apparent guilelessness of the breed, and asked no leading questions. It was early work for that, in any case. Better bide his time until he had seen the girl herself.

Michael Dockeray was waiting on the bank when they pulled in, spare and upright, with wise, quiet eyes and little to say. A totally different type from old Wolf—this; refined and tactful where the other was blunt and unafraid; strong enough, too, but with none of Wolf’s added violence. Yet the two had always been friends, often disagreeing, but turning to each other for help as naturally as to one of their own.

He met Lanty’s grasp warmly, and they moved on up to the house, leaving Rowly to get the boat ashore, for the tide would be on the turn before long. The agent came but seldom to the far marsh, and he caught a wave of welcoming excitement as he approached—figures passing from kitchen to dairy in a cheerful flurry that yet allowed time for a peep through the nearest window at the coming guest. Mrs. Dockeray’s voice could be heard running the full gamut of agitated instruction, dropping to a last whisper behind the pantry door concerning the new strawberry jam. Then she appeared, all pleasant smiles and hearty kindness, and Lanty’s homelessness was taken up into her motherly arms and smothered out of existence. Through the half-open door he had a glimpse of a smooth, dark head and a trim figure, and a desire for flight came upon him, in spite of the new strawberry jam. His task, vaguely irritating before, became suddenly impossible and grotesque. He consented to sit in the parlour, making polite conversation with his host while the ordered ceremonies went forward beyond, but he refused to be given tea there, and was glad when the summons came at last from the atmosphere of wool mats and honesty to the artistic rightness of the kitchen. Across the cool picture of yellowed walls, white-stoned flags, shining linen and china, Francey Dockeray’s face stood out cooler still, and as he shook her by the hand he felt painfully clumsy and inadequate before her pleasant self-possession. She knew why he had come—he guessed it from the faint satirical twist in her otherwise charming smile, from the swift summing-up of her gray eyes. The business-matter which he had put forward to her father would not pass muster with her, he felt certain of that. He could have dealt with the ordinary farmer’s daughter; he knew to a turn the phrase and manner to adopt with success, but they would not apply here. Wolf had been right when he used the word “quality” of Francey Dockeray. Her ease of manner had the simplicity of true good breeding, and it was to this that he had unwillingly paid tribute. But she was aloof, as he had said. Affectionate towards her parents, thoughtful for the guest, interested and attentive, she was yet, in some inexplicable fashion, outside and away from them all. Lancaster liked his errand less with every minute that passed.

It was inevitable, of course, that the conversation, veering from land-politics to wrestling and singing-practice for the benefit of the young folks, and back again to the farm, should turn at last to their neighbours. As soon as Whinnerah’s name was mentioned, Lanty took his first tentative step.

“You’ll know, I suppose, that Wolf’s talking of leaving?” he asked casually. “Lup’s off to Canada, he tells me, and that means the old folks clearing out of the farm. I’m sorry for both pieces of news. Whinnerahs are old friends. We can always do with the right sort, and Lup’s one of the best.”

He sent a straying glance round the group, only to meet the same blank impassiveness that had resisted his efforts crossing channel. It seemed as if, in the eyes of her family at least, Francey could do no wrong.

“Ay, the pneumonia did for Wolf!” Dockeray admitted sadly. “I’ll be loth to see the Whinnerahs go. We’ve known each other a sight o’ years, now, and when it comes to old company taking its hand off the plough, I’m like to think my own time won’t be so long, neither.”

“Nay, now, master!” Mrs. Dockeray put in quickly. “What, you’re a deal younger than Wolf, and as lish as a whip! You’ve no call to talk of giving up yet awhile. Not but what you’ll be missing them all sadly, I doubt, as I will myself. I’m not one for taking up with new stuff, an’ I’ve sort of grown with Whinnerahs. I’m not saying, though, but what it’ll do young Lup a deal o’ good to see a bit of the world. He sticks away in the old groove till he gets that tied with his tongue you’d think he hadn’t two brains to rub one at back o’ t’other!”

“Lup’s right enough, mother!” young Rowly put in indignantly. “Lup’s head’s as full o’ meat as most. You’ve no need to call him out of his name!”

“Nay, why I’ve nowt against the lad, not I! But he’d do with a shake an’ a slake an’ a shine with a polisher, after a manner of speaking. Look at Brack Holliday, now! Yon’s a lad worth running to see of a Saturday night! Canada done that; happen it’ll do something for the other an’ all. He hadn’t much in the way of schoolin’, hadn’t Lup—he was that stuck on the farm—and it doesn’t do not to keep a few manners put by when there’s call for ’em. Why, there’s whiles I’ve heard him talking with our Francey there, he so rough and she that nice-spoken—though I say it as shouldn’t, she being my own lass—there’s times I’ve felt right-down sorry Lup shouldn’t have no more chance of bettering himself than his own hired man.”

Lanty’s circular glance caught the faintest flush on Francey’s cheek, and passed to meet Mrs. Dockeray’s glance seeking his own; and it came to him, in a flash of inspiration, that she was on Lup’s side and her men-folk with her, that the wise mother-mind had its own method of pulling the strings, while the others stood apart, committing themselves to nothing. The matter struck him suddenly as a charming, homely comedy of courtship—no more; and he planted a further step with a firmer tread.

“I was doubly surprised to hear of his departure, because it was quite other news I’d looked for. Folk had it he was getting ready to marry and settle down, and I thought the lady in luck, whoever she might be. I was misinformed, I suppose? Strange how these tales get round!”

A certain uneasiness became apparent in both Michael and Rowly at this, but Mrs. Dockeray never turned a hair.

“Ay, well, courtin’ he might be, like enough, but it isn’t every lass would look at Lup, as I mentioned a minute ago, for all he’s a good enough lad and steady as yon shuppon. He’s not everybody’s choice in these days o’ lettering and figuring. There’s a many as’ll seek to look higher than just poor Lup Whinnerah!”

She fixed him again, and he nodded assent, seeing that it was expected of him; and then, from her post at the window, where she had moved at the end of the meal, he met Francey’s clear gaze. She stood half-turned to the casement and the stretch of sand beyond, her pale cheek to the brilliant geraniums on the wide ledge, and in her eyes, as they rested on his, something of scorn and yet of wounded appeal. He felt the blood rise to his face as he looked, conscious of having outraged both her feelings and his own good taste. The type he understood would have taken him in jest, or retreated from the room in dudgeon; not have remained without retort, gently contemptuous and quietly hurt. He changed the subject abruptly, wishing the Whinnerahs and their affairs at Jericho.

Lup’s name dropped like a stone, but the question of matrimony still hung in the air, for Michael himself came back to it after a lengthy discussion upon the late danger of plague from Irish cattle.

“Ay, there’s many a knock-down blow lying in wait for the poor farmer!” he observed, shaking his head over a new and harrowing tale. “But it’s a decent enough life for them as is framed for it and knows how to take it standing. It’s done well enough by me. I’ve a fairish farm and a just landlord, and the sort of missis a man’ll be put about to part with when the time comes for his last ride to church!” He looked across at his wife with a mild twinkle. “Not but what she’s a rough side to her tongue, and a mighty short stock o’ patience for them as doesn’t see same ways as herself;—but there’s only two sorts o’ wives, Mr. Lancaster—them as a man’s fain to be shot of, an’ them as he’d be right fain to be shot for—an’ yon last’s my missis, sir, and a good bit over!”

Francey left the window, and laid her hands on his shoulders for a moment, her face lightly smiling and tender. Then she was gone from the room, while Mrs. Dockeray, with the suspicion of a shake in her voice, defended her character for patience.

“Eh, well, I reckon we’re as easy as most!” she admitted at last with her cheerful laugh. “You’d do no harm to take copy from us, Mr. Lancaster. We’ve been looking for you to get wed, any time these last ten years!”

Lanty was used to the suggestion, and repudiated it without embarrassment.

“I’m not a marrying man, I doubt!” he answered; and, even as he spoke, felt a surge of envy sweep over him at the picture of mutual need before him. “Any more than Lup!” he added, with meaning, and there came another pause, during which Rowly slipped out after his sister.

“You know what’s to do, sir, I reckon?” the mother asked presently, as Lancaster waited for his challenge to be accepted; and at his brief—“Wolf told me something”—she unburdened herself of the situation, while Michael stared straight before him with his wise eyes, rocking gently from time to time in his cushioned chair.

“Whinnerah he come across rampin’ fit to kill himself, saying as how our lass had been playing fast an’ loose with his lad, and there was talk o’ Canada and quitting the farm an’ such-like! He was set on our putting our foot down, Michael an’ me, and giving Francey a piece of our minds, but we told him that hadn’t never been our way with her, and it wasn’t likely we’d begin now; so he took off again in a rare tantrum, an’ that’s all there is to it. It’s true, as he says, as we’ve always made sure she and Lup was courtin’, but we didn’t ask questions, taking it that she’d speak when she’d a mind. I’d be glad to see her wed the lad, ay, an’ so would Michael here, though I’m not saying she mightn’t do better. But if she’s not set on having him, she shan’t be driven to it, as long as there’s folks at Ladyford to her back. I’m real sorry for Wolf and Lup—ay, an’ poor Martha!—and I’d give a deal to see the lad stop, but our own barn comes first, and she shall suit herself, Mr. Lancaster.”

And Michael said: “Ay. Yon’s the way of it. Yon’s right!” rocking gently from time to time in his cushioned chair.

“Well, it seems a pity,” Lanty said at last, reluctantly making ready to go, “but I’m still hoping things will right themselves. It’s natural a girl should like to be consulted, though I shouldn’t have thought it was just a touch of pride with your daughter. She looks too fine a character for anything as small-minded as that.”

“’Tisn’t only pride, Mr. Lancaster! It’s something a deal stronger,—it’s love upside down. We’ve nobody but ourselves to thank, as I tell Michael. It’s the schoolin’ as done it. We’d a bit of money saved, and we took a fancy to have her finished like a lady, but I’m not so sure, nowadays, as we did the right thing by her. It’s hard, Mr. Lancaster, when you think a deal o’ your own, not to want to give them something better than you’ve had yourself, but I’ll not say as I think it’s always wise or kind, leastways, for a woman. A man, happen, can go an’ fight his own way in the world, but if a woman’s got to bide at home, the schoolin’s likely learned her nowt but hankering for what’s out of her reach. Not but what Francey’s been biddable enough, but I’ve kept my eye on her. I’ve been biding my time for this, an’ now it’s come. We’ve made her different of our own will, and we’ve no right to expect her to do as we’d have done. It’s us that’s to blame—an’ the learning. It makes a woman look at a man like a new sort o’ lesson-book. It starts her wondering what she feels instead o’ just feeling. It sets her seeing with her eyes an’ not with her heart. It’s not just brains you want for dealing wi’ men-folk, sir. It’s something as feels in the dark with blind eyes, something as sharp to hark as yon collie-pup, as soft to touch as a mother’s hands! Francey’s looking an’ not letting herself feel, and till she’s learned that looking doesn’t count in love, there’s nobody can help her. Nobody but Lup—and, happen, life—can set her right.”

“You’ll likely be giving them a look-in at Ninekyrkes, sir, as you’re here?” she added, following him to the door. “They’re terrible down, an’ it would cheer them up a bit. Wolf’s that set on your family, you’d happen think it was Royalty, to hark to him! He saw a deal o’ your father, yon time as the Lugg was so long building—Mr. Lancaster used to stop many a night along with him—an’ he’ll crack for a week about it if happen he gets the chance. He’d swear with his eyes shut to everything your father ever did—says there’ll never be his like again. Not but what he thinks a sight o’ you an’ all, sir! You’ll look in?”

“Yes, I’ll step over, now I’m here, but of course I’ll say nothing of what you’ve told me. If they really mean leaving, we must get things fixed up. Wolf said his wife had taken to looking ahead for trouble. Is that so, do you know?”

He saw a half-embarrassed glance pass between the two.

“She was always a bit of a worrit,” Michael said at last, rather hurriedly, “an’ this’ll have likely got on her nerves. I’ll set you a piece of the way, sir.”

Wondering, Lancaster followed him out into the heavy evening.

CHAPTER IV
THE TROUBLE SHAPING

It was milking-time when Lanty left Ladyford, with Dockeray beside him, and they met the cattle coming in to the shippons. Their slow swing across the yard added to the drowsy oppression of the day. It was as if he walked in sleep along the narrow sea-road linking the two farms. The flat land behind was in good cultivation. When it was turned by the plough, the share came out clean of rust and shining like silver. A big plantation stood away towards Wythebarrow, hiding the highway between. A wide cut was cloven betwixt the far meadows. There was no sign of the tide as yet, and out on the dry sands the Lugg still lay meaningless and bare.

Ninekyrkes was nearer the open sea than Ladyford, less sheltered, less homely, less pleasant to the eye. The rough, sturdy house stood up bravely to the winds. There were flowers round Dockeray’s, and an orchard behind it. Whinnerah’s had neither. It was built for storm and stress and fierce happenings, and bore upon its forehead the mark of an abiding-place of Fate.

Wolf came round as they appeared, and after a brief greeting Michael turned home. Lancaster saw him go with strange reluctance. The grim farm and its grim tenant fostered a sense of tragedy lying in wait, gathering itself to spring; but he roused his business-side determinedly, and kept strictly to technicalities as he started on his tour of inspection. Yet still the hand of tragedy obtruded through all. It was pitiful to hear the old man reverting to plans for the future as if the doom of dismissal had never been pronounced. He would stop at some field or fence, pointing out what he meant to do next year or later, and Lancaster listened patiently, or brought him back gently to the real state of things. His self-consciousness with regard to Michael’s daughter disappeared in face of the full situation, and his anger grew against the girl, who, for some trivial reason, could stubbornly rob a failing man of his earned desire. For Lup he had sympathy, if a good deal of impatience. He was strong enough, surely, to take what he wanted; yet perhaps it needed something finer than mere strength to capture Francey Dockeray. In any case, he should know his own business best.

They got to the house at last, and within it he felt again the marked contrast with Ladyford. Here, in the kitchen so similar in many ways, the cheerful peace was changed for hinted dread, emanating, he concluded at length, from the frail figure in the chair by the window. He had known Mrs. Whinnerah all his life, and he was not afraid of her unsmiling welcome, but to-night he felt that something hidden suffered and watched behind her chill reserve. The sense of it was so strong that it claimed his thoughts even while he carried on the usual conversational exchange.

They were a pathetic pair, he thought, looking from one bent figure to the other. Wolf was a sad enough picture, a fine man gone to wreck in a few devastating months, but the pathos of the woman went deeper. The hard life on the marsh had broken her long since, stolen her youth in the first years of marriage, crippled her with rheumatism, stamped on her thin face that look of passionless endurance which can be seen in many a farmer’s wife who has found her burden too heavy and gone on bearing it. She had been pretty, once. In the line of her cheek and the set of her head was still a beauty of refinement absent from Francey’s mother over at Ladyford, and the thin fingers of her worn hands were curiously sensitive and suggestive of a rare intuition. But that was all that was left to her. She was finished, as Wolf was finished, and the one thing that life might yet have held for them was to be taken away. Lanty wondered how Lup could look at them, night after night, sitting there hopeless, and steel his heart to the unbreathed prayer, even though sacrifice might mean daily crucifixion, with the love denied so close at hand. But Lup himself was part of the cruel situation. He did not come to it from outside, as Lancaster came, with fresh eyes full of pity.

Remembering both Wolf’s words and the Dockerays’ embarrassment, he found himself noting the old woman’s constant and fixed gaze out to sea. Her faded eyes were still clear, and the large pupils had the effect of dark pebbles seen through deep pools. Time after time he succeeded in drawing them to his own face, but, his question answered, they returned instantly to some invisible point beyond. Wolf had said she was watching for something, and it certainly seemed like it, for the glance was not the wandering one of custom, but a stare of genuine expectation, suggesting held breath and stiffened muscles. Wolf looked at her uneasily at times, and when she became conscious of his gaze she would bring her own with an effort to the guest, but always, always it went back. The sensation of mystery deepened, and Lancaster stirred restlessly under its touch. The sky had darkened and then filled with fire, and beneath the dull thunder-glow the houses on Bytham Knott looked like flakes of snow dropped on a sullen slab of granite. The thin trees stood like dumb sentinels of fear; the green of the fields smote the eye; a sudden clash of milk-pails from without set every nerve leaping, and then the stillness sank again. And the sands and the bank were stiller than the air. The only moving thing was the shining, quivering line far away to the west.

Mrs. Whinnerah made no complaint of the approaching change. She was ready to go, not with the decision of personal choice, but with the apathy of one led by destiny. Lanty asked at last where they thought of moving when the time came for breaking-up. There was a pause after the question, and he saw Wolf’s eyes travel to his wife, as if, in this moment, some urgent problem must be solved, but she gave him no assistance.

“You’ll think it queer, likely,” he began, filling his pipe with slow fingers, “but I’m hoping you’ll not say no to an old man’s wish. There’s yon cottage your father built, you’ll think on—that on the new land as they call the ‘Pride.’ It’s been empty a good bit, but it’s taken no harm. The key’s here, and I’ve had a look round now and then. Folk say it’s over lonesome; they get flate at night, hearkening to the sea, them as hasn’t been bred by it an’ learned to like it. I’d never rest without the song of it coming and going, but there’s folk can’t abide it. Well, I’ve got a fancy for that cottage, Mr. Lancaster. It’s nigh on Ninekyrkes land, and I’d be able to reach an eye over the old spot from the door. With a bit o’ practice I’ll likely learn not to mind seeing other folk at my job. It’ll not be for that long, I doubt.”

“Come, you’re good for many a year yet!” Lancaster put in, as cheerfully as he could. “I can have the cottage put in order for you if you’re really set on it, but don’t you think you’d be wiser to pitch your tent somewhere else altogether? Living within a stone’s-throw will only set you hankering after the farm. You’d be happier away. What has your wife to say to it?”

He turned to the woman, but before she could answer there came a sharp crack right across the empty sands, and with a strangled cry she half rose to her feet, gripping the wooden arms of the chair, her face livid and her arms rigid, her glassy eyes fixed on the inscrutable beyond.

“It’s through!” she said in a choked voice, so full of horror that it drew Lancaster to his feet beside her, but Wolf sat still and snarled from his chair.

“Yon’s thunder, nowt else! Look ye there!” and as a fierce flicker of lightning danced down the pane, she sank back into her chair, biting her lips to steady them, and knotting her trembling hands together on her knee. She was calm again almost immediately, and Lancaster, at the window, watching the blue daggers stabbing the dead waste, and hearkening to the long rattle of charging clouds, marvelled that she showed no further signs of agitation. Shock after shock broke overhead, leaving her unmoved, and the vivid flashes scarcely shut her eyes. It was not the storm that had frightened her, he told himself. What was it?

The almost running roar made conversation impossible, so he stood silent, watching the tempest sweep along the open space before him. The passion of it seemed grotesque, as wreaked upon a lifeless thing beyond the reach of hurt. It died away at last in tired, angry spasms and slow gleams, and the thick silence came again into the heavy sky.

When it was spent, Lanty turned to say good-bye, hoping to make home before the storm returned, circling on its tracks like a driven hare, but as he reached the door a strange thing happened.

Through the stillness dropped like a muffling shroud came a new sound, smooth, stealthy, swift, a soft sound as of shod wheels, swept wings and subdued speech; and in the same moment Mrs. Whinnerah collapsed in her chair, until he saw the thin, gray hair coiled at the nape of her neck. With an exclamation, half of pity, half wrath, Wolf turned and went back to her, and, looking out, Lanty saw the bore sweeping up over the vanishing sand. It was small to-day, innocent and slim, with a crest of white on its smooth head, but in the deadly certainty of its advance, the unhasting speed with which it met the sand and took it, there was a sinister promise of mightier power held back. The insidious reminder of its faint wash was almost as terrible as the shout of battle with which the winter tides came in. It slid lightly along the foot of the Lugg with barely a ripple, and the bank looked down almost unaware, like a dreaming graybeard at a child playing round his knees.

Behind him, with a troubled sense of intrusion, he could hear Wolf’s voice, impatient and distressed, coaxing the crouching figure in the chair.

“It’s by, lass—past an’ safe, by now—a whyet enough water with barely a lift to it. Nay, what you must be daft to take on like this! It’ll stand many a long year after we’re under the sod. You’ve no call to fret. It’s a Lancaster’s job, Martha, as sure as a gun an’ as right as a bobbin!” He looked up apologetically. “You’ll not take it amiss, sir? She’s always like this at the turn of the tide.”

Lanty sympathised as well as he could, but when he would have held out his hand in farewell, she shrank away and hid her face once more.

“The Lancaster hand!” she muttered, winding her fingers in the woollen antimacassar. “Oh, God! How long? How long?”

With a pleading look, Wolf drew him out, and he went gladly enough, bewildered by the whole situation. There was mystery somewhere, and he did not like to ask the cause.

“Mrs. Whinnerah seems thoroughly upset,” he ventured at last, in a matter-of-fact tone. “Living so long by the sea has got on her nerves, and I don’t wonder! It must be pretty drear out here on a rough night. You should get her away for a change,—she has a sister over at Bortun, hasn’t she? It doesn’t do to play with these things. If she keeps like this, you’ll surely never think of taking the cottage?”

Over the old man’s shoulder he could see in the distance the little gray building behind the Lugg, that some mocker had ticketed “Lancaster’s Pride.” It had had many tenants, but none had stayed very long. Their courage had not been equal to the dark nights on the lonely waste—nights, when behind the wall a full sea surged and swayed, claiming the land that man had robbed. It stood empty, now, waiting stronger spirits, and it was to this place of fear that Wolf’s heart turned, for from its windows he could look to Ninekyrkes all day long.

“Nay, the missis’ll do well enough,” he said, in answer to Lancaster’s speech. “She started yon worriting job nigh on a year back, a matter of a few week afore Brack Holliday landed home. He made such a stir, it kind o’ fixed it in my mind! She’ll likely mend after a bit. Anyway, she’ll not quit the marsh no more than me, that’s sure an’ certain!”

“Why, but man, it’s bad enough for her at Ninekyrkes!” the other argued. “It’ll be a good few hundred times worse at the Pride. You’ll never get her to go.”

“She’ll gang where I gang!” Wolf said obstinately. “Offer her any other spot on the estate, and see for yourself. She’ll bide all right.”

“Well, I can’t say I think you’re wise. Suppose I won’t let you the cottage? I’ve more than half a mind to refuse.”

“Then I’ll see his lordship, Mr. Lancaster! It’s not for a steward to be looking awry at a good tenant!” He added, “Begging your pardon, sir!” with instant contrition.

Lancaster nodded assurance.

“That’s all right, Wolf. But I wish you’d reconsider your decision. I don’t like the idea of your roosting away in that desolate spot.”

“It’s desolate, sir, but it’s safe enough. You’ve no call to fear the Lugg, surely?”

“Why, no, the bank’s all right!” Lanty answered, with a smile. “There’s never anything my father did but holds good to this day. But, all the same, I don’t want you at the Pride.”

“Ay, but all the same you’ll let it me, sir! It’s this way, Mr. Lancaster. Your father, when he’d made sure the Lugg was standing, he’d just time to build yon lile cot afore he died. He’d framed for a many more, but they had to bide. An’, near about the last time he was down, he says to me (I’d been a deal with him up an’ down the marsh, and he was the best friend I had, but yon’s an old story you don’t need to hear), he says to me: ‘Wolf,’ says he, ‘yon’ll be just the spot for you if ever you come to quit the farm. I’ll have been in my grave many a year by then, but my bank’ll see to you for me. I’d like to think of you in the little house, for there’s never a stone nor a plank but will call me to mind. Not but what I know you’ll not forget. I’ll never really die while the Lugg stands and Wolf Whinnerah’s over sod!’ You’ll not say no after that, sir?”

“Well, I’ll think it over,” Lanty answered reluctantly. “By the way, I haven’t had a word yet with the girl. Perhaps I’ll catch her as I go back, though I doubt it’s no use. Good-bye, and I wish to goodness you’d change your minds all round!”

He left him at the yard gate, and strode off along the road. On the other side of the Let the tide lapped tenderly. Deep in frowning thought, he was startled by a voice speaking his name, and, looking up, saw Francey Dockeray on the grassy barrier above him.

CHAPTER V
THE TOOL

He saw her for a moment poised against the brooding sky, and then she dropped down the bank to his side. They stood alone on the desolate strip of road twisting whitely between black peat, green mound, and brown sand. Midway from farm to farm they met—a fitting point, it seemed to him, for the peculiar arbitration he had in hand.

“Rowly’s at the boat, sir, if you’re wanting him,” she said politely, and he answered with a curt word of thanks. Then—“They’re in a bad way at Ninekyrkes,” he began, without preamble. “They seem gone to pieces altogether, both Wolf and his wife. It’s hard on an old couple, of course, when it comes to losing both their home and their only child.”

She looked away to the crag behind, and made no reply.

“I’ve just been round the place with the old man,” he went on, “and it was pitiable to see how he kept forgetting he’d got to go. It was like turning the knife in the wound to keep reminding him how things were. It’s hard, as I said. He might have had his last days in peace.”

Still she did not answer; only her gaze, turned inland, grew troubled and hard pressed.

“It seems so unnecessary!” He felt suddenly impatient before her silent resistance of his efforts. “Lup’s place is here; that’s plain enough to anybody with half a conscience. He’s fond of the old folks, too. It isn’t as if they didn’t get on. Normally, he’d never have thought of leaving them. Can’t something be done? Can’t somebody help?”

She gave a sharp sigh, as if forced against her will over old ground already trodden to weariness, and brought her eyes to his as they rested on her full of demand and penetration.

“Hadn’t we better be frank with each other, Mr. Lancaster?” she asked gently. “You’ve heard the story—I feel sure of that—and you want to try to talk me round. That’s so, isn’t it?”

“I’ve heard some sort of an account—yes; and it looks as if the key of the situation lay with you. Of course, you’ll say it’s no business of mine, and from one point of view it certainly isn’t, but when old friends are in trouble one wants to stretch a hand. I wish you’d tell me why you did it—why you went back on Lup Whinnerah just when he needed you most. You’ll not deny you went back on him, I suppose?”

“No, I don’t deny it.”

“Why, then, there’s hope!” He smiled with quick relief. “You’re surely not the sort to play down upon a good lad like Lup? You’ll never break up his home for the sake of a whim or a foolish twinge of vanity?”

“I don’t want to break up his home. I’ve tried to dissuade him from going away. He could stop, if he chose. I can’t see that I make any real difference.”

“You make all the difference.” He was speaking gently enough, now. “We like to have married men on the farms, for one thing; and even supposing Lup did stop on, what sort of a life would it be for him, with you always within reach? You’re all so dependent on each other, out here. He’s been over-hasty, I consider, but I can’t find it in my heart to blame him greatly. Sticking by the man, of course, you’ll say? Well, perhaps; but in this case there’s reason. Come, Miss Francey, think better of it. If you care for him at all, you’ll never let him go.”

“I’ll not keep him,” she said, and they fell silent.

Then—“Why?” he asked again. “But why?”

She smiled faintly.

“I don’t know why—not altogether. It’s true that it’s partly pride, I suppose—I’m not sure. I do care for Lup, and I’d promised to marry him, but when his father put it all into plain words, spoke out and told me to fix the date, all the glamour went, somehow. He had it so cut and dried—I felt as if I were being sold. It meant no more to him than a change of stock at a May fair. I’d have had to say no if it had killed me. He meant all right—of course I know that—and it would have been right for most, but it wasn’t for me. They wouldn’t treat one of your class like that, would they? But that’s the way of mine, and I’d no right to resent it, I suppose, only I’ve been made over and differently in those long years at school. I couldn’t accept it as perhaps I ought to have done. It hurt something in me that I didn’t know was there, something that wouldn’t be touched. That was part of the reason, I think. Not all.”

“And the rest?” he asked, at last.

“The rest is Lup’s, sir. I can’t tell you that. I don’t see it clear myself, as I said. Put it at pride altogether, if you like.”

“What’s pride, if you care?” he argued. “Let that go by the board! You can, if you try. And the other thing, too, whatever it is. For Lup’s sake—for the old folks’ sake——”

“I can’t. I can’t.”

“You’ll not regret it.”

“I can’t—that’s all.”

“Well, I’m not here to marry you against your will!” he growled, aggrieved at the deadlock. “If you won’t, you won’t, and there’s an end of it. I’d not be so hard on you if I thought the change would mean getting Mrs. Whinnerah away altogether, but it seems that Wolf is set on taking the Pride.”

“The Pride?” They had begun to walk slowly towards the boat, but now she half stopped, looking up at him anxiously.

“That’s his idea. I can’t very well refuse him, if he really means it, but it looks to me a bad move for the wife. Even Ninekyrkes seems too much for her nerves, as it is. You’ve seen her lately, I suppose? Can you tell me what’s at the back of it all?”

She quickened her step, looking down.

“She’s getting old, sir, and she imagines things. You mustn’t pay any heed, Mr. Lancaster. It only worries Wolf if you do.”

“Well, I must say you’re a happy family over here at present!” he grumbled, as they came down the shore. “I might as well have stopped away, for all the good I’ve done. You’ll be sorry for this, some day, Miss Francey!”

“I’m sorry now!” she answered, with so much pathos and helpless appeal in her voice that he was silenced. Scrambling into the boat, he was rowed away across the now wide stretch of water. The first shot of the new battery burst from the sky as he reached the other side, and through the playing lightning he saw Francey Dockeray still on the bank, with the blackness of all doom around and above her.

CHAPTER VI
HAMER’S HUT

Dandy Shaw looked round the Watters drawing-room with a little twist of the lips. She was perched on a high oak stool, with her feet on the rungs, and through the Chippendale mirror opposite she could see both her own figure and its setting. It was afternoon, and under the looped yellow silk blinds the sun pattered on dark wood and faint brocades, a carpet hushed as moss, elusive little water-colours, china ephemeral as frost-breath, books with the colouring of rare gems. There were no photographs in the room, and there was no silver, no flotsam and jetsam of Christmas and birthday offerings, but there were flowers everywhere, not massed with heavy ballroom effects, nor set at conventional intervals like a well-drilled regiment, but leading the eye on with unexpected thrills of pleasure from one delicate single shade to another, like tiny semitones in a fairy scale. From without, where the river crept beneath the dark splendour of turned beeches edging the terrace, the long, low, gray-faced house with its plain windows looked almost asleep, but there was a very active brain at work within.

Dandy—otherwise Anne—had no need to fear her image in the mirror, but she frowned at it, nevertheless. Even the image seemed joyously alive, with soft, bright hair, and blue eyes full of candid goodwill; and nothing about it clashed at first sight with its surroundings, yet she glanced from it to the old walls with amused yet abashed and apologetic resentment. For the first time in her life, Dandy Shaw was discovering that there are things which mean more than people.

From the still house and the simple, beautiful room her thoughts went back to Halsted, her late home on the outskirts of a Lancashire town—to the overwhelming magnificence of its ménage, the long, rich meals, the endless contrivances for comfort, the stream of guests, the intricate programmes of amusement. She saw the big, red pile, with the shining cars slurring up its drive, the long lines of hothouses, the priceless roses, the precious orchids flung into elaborate schemes of colour. It was all rich and splendid and inviting, luxurious and perfectly organised; but Watters cared for none of these things.

It was pale and gray and plain and cool and utterly aloof. It did not care a toss whether you looked at it or not, so of course you always did, leaning over the humped bridge, and wondering what ghosts moved in the darkened rooms and met by moonlight on the terrace. If you tried to bring a car up its twisting, cross-grained drive, the odds were you would find yourself in the river or a clump of clipped yews as old as Ernuin the Priest. And the roses at Watters would have died of sheer disgust in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of a rose-show marquee. They grew and scrambled and climbed in their own strong-willed fashion, clothing cold stone with hearts of deep orange, flinging arches of tender pink or glowing crimson against opal skies, or lifting single, dewy heads like pale lamps in the hushed garden after sunset. And at any but simple food it looked rigidly askance, loftily permitting the butcher to drop his beef and mutton, and condescending to game, as a country house of standing, but shutting shocked eyelids upon French ménus and foreign cheeses. Anything bisqué or braisé or soufflé or au gratin scarcely dared trust itself near the stove, and a pot of foie-gras had positively to be smuggled.

It was a curious impulse that had driven the Lancashire tradesman from the home of his own creating to one with which he had apparently nothing in common. Less than a year ago, Dandy had found him on the Halsted drive, with his hands in his pockets and his hat on the back of his head, surveying the symbol of wealth with a puzzled frown.

“There’s something wrong, Dandy Anne!” he broke out, as she slid a hand through his arm. “It’s strong and it’s good, and it’s warm and it’s cool, and comfortable and convenient and clean, but it isn’t anything else. It doesn’t make you think of the past and the future. It doesn’t make you want to throw up your hat one minute and dry your eyes on your coat-sleeve the next. It’ll never have any troubles or joys bigger than an insurance-card or a mayoral invitation. It’s smug—that’s what it is! It doesn’t feel—it can’t, and so it can’t make you feel, either. When a man’s getting on in years, he wants the sort of house that can show him how to grow old kindly. This red elephant would be smug and smiling while I was tottering into the grave. Let’s go and find a hut, Dandy Anne, where I can grow old gently.”

And Watters, for some reason known only to himself, had seemed to him just that “hut.” He had had it decorated by an artist, who, recognising the individuality of the place, seemed to have listened in secret to its whispered wants; and when it was finished, Hamer Shaw strode happily up and down it, a burly, incongruous figure with its hat on the back of its head, satisfied to the very marrow, and growing younger every day. He had opened his eyes in a Westmorland cottage, and though he had left it so speedily that it was scarcely worth mention, some power, biding its time, had called him back, to his passionate content. Mrs. Shaw was of the type that belongs nowhere but to the absorbing house-world of the moment, and she had borne the transplanting cheerfully enough, if not with her husband’s bubbling ecstasy. But to Dandy it was almost as terrific an experience as a total change of planet.

Bred in Lancashire, educated in London, finished abroad, she had no single tie with her new life and surroundings. She had been perfectly happy at Halsted, liking the constant excitement, the flow of money, the crowd of guests. She had understood everybody, and they had understood her. She had been an excellent hostess, and a very charming uncrowned queen, with not only Halsted, but all her circle at her feet. She had lived quickly and strongly, a little noisily, perhaps, but very vividly; and now, at the age of twenty-four, she was flung out of the rush into still water. Cessation may prove as distracting as revolution, and after five months she was even yet eminently perplexed. She had put no stone in the way of her father’s sudden desire, cheerfully resigning the old life for the new, for she was a happy creature with an interest in the world at large that would have stood the shock of almost any change. But this had proved so puzzling and disconcerting,—yielded so many emotions of an unexpected nature! Not only was she no longer a queen; she was scarcely an individual. With her somewhat exceptional powers of clear vision she soon discovered that. She was “the new girl from somewhere awful—I forget where; daughter of the new people at Watters—I forget who; new-rich dealers in something—I forget what.”

The word “new” followed her about like a witch’s curse. At Halsted it had been the last touch of praise for everything. If you made a purchase, you called everybody in the house to see it, whether it was a diamond necklace or the tiling in the bathroom. But in Gilthrotin nothing new was tolerated but necessaries like bread and butter; diamonds were nothing accounted of unless they had glittered first on a family neck in a family portrait; and when progress and the plumber forced you to a hot-water system or incandescents, you were always glad that your great-grandfather had not lived to see it. Under her cruel consciousness of “newness” Dandy was oppressed even to the earth. She frowned at the picture in the glass, much as Hamer had frowned at soulless Halsted.

Few people had called, as yet, except the neighbouring clergy, together with countless daughters of the horse-leech, cased in subscription-lists. More daughters had written. Indeed, begging letters dropped like hail. Hamer contributed to the first twenty-five, and then sat down to think about the rest. The county came slowly, however; in driblets, so to speak. Things would alter in time, of course, for even in the conservative country Hamer Shaw’s money would make its way, as well as—later—Hamer Shaw’s sterling worth and fine business capacity. And his daughter would be taken up, when it was discovered that she hadn’t actually worked in a mill and worn clogs, but was merely a charming and well-educated member of human society. But she would never be a queen again, even then. She would never be even one of the elect. She would always be “new.” In a ripe old age she would have progressed no further than “rather new.” She would always be an outsider at Watters in Gilthrotin.

To do her justice, though she sent a sigh after her lost crown, that was not the cause of her dissatisfaction. For the first time in her smooth career she was arrested, called to halt by something that thrilled almost to pain. For the first time, too, she saw herself no longer the pivot of her world, an outstanding figure on an obliging background of earth, but a mere unnecessary pigmy on its surface. She found the country cruel and very lonely, full of shut secrets, fearful, yet unquestionably alluring. In this new atmosphere, where the true Romance still brushed by on velvet wings, her unfledged soul shrank a little, and as yet was lost. The name of it in books had stirred her to a vague desire; the reality of it, keen as a sword, rich as purple curtains before God, made her afraid.

The house affected her in the same way. Its tranquillity, its dignity, its rapt air of hiding secrets mystic as the Grail, impressed her as the attributes of a living thing, with a mind and being larger than her own. Its susceptibility, too, amazed her. Halsted, for instance, had cared nothing for weather. When the sun burned, you drew the blinds, and, within, the luxury grew cool and fragrant; and when storm held sway without, again the blinds were drawn, shutting you into soft comfort, where electric light, silver, and china, laughter and the click of balls or the slur of dancing feet, struck always the same note of lapped pleasure. But, at Watters, when the sun shone, the old house stirred dreamily and smiled, and half-forgotten pictured faces looked alive from the dim walls, and threads of hot gold ran molten along the dark floors. There was no need to curtain the sun; the place needed it, and turned its old bones gratefully under its touch. And on days of stress the house shared it with the day; you could not shut the storm from Watters. The wind was in the house itself, lifting the rugs, whistling up the stair, crying like a lost soul in the eaves. The hurrying sky was mirrored in the glass of the panelling, and the beating rain filled the stone eyes with streaming tears. Outside, the full river swung above its banks, and the lost wail of sheep on the mist-hung fell rode on the tortured air.

But the silence was worse than anything, she found,—the real silence that is full of notes but never a note that jars. When she woke in the morning, it took her by the throat. No jangling of trams, mill-whistles, and trains; only, at times, faint music from the farm across the way, and the slow, sleepy call of church-bells. She could not lie, as she learned to do in later days, staring with quiet eyes at the sky, wrapped in a happy stillness more soothing than sleep. It often woke her in the night—that full silence.

They had had visitors, at first. Before they were fairly settled in the place, a crowd of friends had descended on them, and Hamer Shaw would sooner have shut his door to a Royal honour than an old acquaintance. But the circle, so pleasant and suitable at Halsted, was altogether out of the picture at Watters. The very house itself would have nothing to say to the guests; indeed, it deliberately sulked at them with grudging fires and lukewarm baths. It had other tricks, too—sudden stairs down which they tumbled in the dark; rattling windows, creaking boards and whistling key-holes for the hag-ridden hours of the night; soot in spotless grates, burst pipes and skilfully situated coal-buckets; while the outside world co-operated subtly, from the early rooster to the midnight owl. These drawbacks had been unknown at Halsted, and the guests asked each other dismally what could have possessed old Hamer to quit his palace for a God-forsaken monument like Watters. Their torpedo-nosed cars had a kind of abnormality in the little village at the river’s edge. The Halsted habitués rent the night with gramophones, and across the cool water flung the frenzied parlance of snooker. They were Halstedites who had tangoed through a dream in the lane. Dandy found herself shrinking from them unintentionally but unmistakably. She was glad when they went; and yet, when they had gone, she was sorry, for she felt her place to be with them. And the friends bemoaned themselves as they motored home, saying sadly—“That’s the end of you, Hamer, old man! In another year he’ll have forgotten he ever knew us. It’s the country does it—the benighted, besotted, be-swank-ridden country. Give him six months more, and he’ll be as rooted an old tree-stump as any of them!”

It wasn’t anybody’s fault, Dandy realised that thankfully. The hosts had been kind as usual, the guests hearty as ever, but the new conditions had laughed the old friendships to scorn. It was very sad, and it was also rather terrible, if you were once fully convinced that a house, a senseless mixture of stone and mortar, had done it all on its own!

Thus Dandy held review as she sat with her feet on the rungs of the high stool. Later in the day, on a sudden impulse, she unburdened her mind to her parents.

“It’s going to be a bit hard for me,” she said frankly, “so you must not be disappointed if I’m a failure! I don’t match here, and I’ve lost my old element, so at present I’m neither flesh, fowl, nor good red herring. I’ll have to grow to this place, and that sort of thing takes time. I don’t mean that I’m unhappy; it’s only that I don’t fit in. You’re all right, aren’t you, mummy? You touched ground over the Bluecaster butcher with the Halsted smile. And father’s been all right all along. It doesn’t seem fair that I should still be struggling in deep water.”

Mrs. Shaw said—“6 tr., 3 lacets, 1 sp., 31 tr.—have you seen the new stair-rods?—4 sl. sts. from third horizontal tr., turn!”

And Hamer took his pipe out of his mouth and added—“It’s great!” and put it back again.

“Yes, it’s great.” Dandy laughed and sighed. “So great that I’m not sure I’ll ever get round to the far side of it! It’s small and mean, too—does everybody keep a pet charity chained like a dog to nobble new-comers? And those that don’t beg seem to be tied up in a pride as big as a bath-towel—that nice, cross agent-person, for instance, who looks rather like a high-class keeper, and nabobs you off his land like a reigning duke. He’ll never want to be kind to us, I’m sure, and we must have somebody to pass the time of day with. Perhaps the house will decide. It turned a cold enough shoulder on the poor Halstedites; it owes us somebody in return. I hope it will send an interesting selection soon, though it seems queer to have to let a house choose your friends for you! I get on fairly well with the villagers, though they’re not exactly flattering. ‘Very pleased to meet you, miss, I’m sure! You mind me something surprising of her as was last school-teacher but two!’ That was the ‘Jeanne’ frock, mother, that Wiggie used to say looked like concrete moonshine, at Halsted. It looks like the fairy queen in a ballet, here. Even my sporting clothes are wrong—they sport too much. And I find I don’t know any of the things that matter—when the grass begins to grow, and which weather is coming up from the sea, and what to call it when it has come. No, I don’t fit in. Perhaps I’ll learn, after a while.”

Hamer Shaw said—“The land’ll teach you,” and leaned back and shut his eyes. He could hear milk-pails on the flags at the Parsonage Farm.

“And love,” Mrs. Shaw added, very unexpectedly, “7 lacets, 7 tr., 9 ch., turn—don’t forget to look at the rods!”

“The land—and love.” Dandy said no more, knowing nothing of either. On the fell opposite a floating wreath of mist was lifting delicately upward like a lawn kerchief drawn from a sleeping face. “The land—and love.” Great Masters. But the land, as yet, would have none of her, and love might never look her way. She could win the one if she chose to woo it; the other and greater must come unasked.

“Mais, cher dieu, de la tendre et divine épouvante,

Amour, que feraient-ils si vous ne veniez pas?”

CHAPTER VII
THE TROUBLE COMING.—THE GREEN GATES OF VISION: II. MORNING

“Afraid I’ve got to worry you a bit!” Bluecaster began apologetically in his slow, shy voice. He was big and broad-shouldered, with a manner toiling anxiously to meet your approval, and never quite sure of getting there. Yet there was the charm of breeding in his diffident speech and pleasant smile, and under all his patient horror of responsibility was a real desire to do “the decent thing.” He looked at his agent much as a conscientious hound looks at a kind and skilful but strict whip. If you were fond of dogs, you reached out your hand and patted him when nobody was looking, and he licked your hand in return.

“You’ll wonder, I expect, why I never dropped you a line to say I was coming, but, as a matter of fact, I hadn’t meant turning up again just yet. Had to leave the mixed doubles at Sledhammer. Ripping tennis we were having, too—and yet they say we landowners never do anything for our property! But the fact is, I’ve been put out about something, and I wanted to talk it over. How have things been going? Any news?”

Lanty thought of the careful letters he had written at such short intervals, detailed, explicit letters, suggesting, accounting, and wondered how much, if any, of the information had been grasped by his employer. He did not refer to them, however, but gave him the outstanding points of several situations as simply and rapidly as possible. Bluecaster was obviously glad when it was over.

The Ninekyrkes problem, though, had a chapter to itself.

“That’s curious!” he said thoughtfully. “It was about the land round there that I wanted to see you. Nothing to do with the matrimonial mix-up, of course! Very awkward for everybody, the girl cutting up rough like that. I wonder they didn’t call you in, Lancaster! They seem to think you can settle most things.”

“Well, they did,” the agent confessed, “but I wasn’t a success. I think I made matters worse, if anything! There’s no other trouble, though, that I know of, on the marsh. What have you heard, my lord?”

Bluecaster, however, still beat about his particular bush, inquiring after Helwise, the factotum, even the Church Army Van. He always remembered Helwise with little, quietly administered courtesies, though she pestered him to martyrdom when he came within reach.