Part 10

About mid-December they sat together in the little parlour of the kitchen, and Honor, who lolled beside the fire, employed her pretty fingers upon no more useful task than playing with a piece of string from a grocer's parcel.

"What are you doing?" asked Mark suddenly.

"Making cats' cradles," she answered, and won from him the reproof that such a confession invited.

"How is it you've given up reading of late days?"

"I've sunk into a lazy way. The lazier you are the less time there is for anything."

"You ought to read; you've ample leisure to improve your mind; and ample need to."

"That's just it--the ample leisure. When I had Christo to look after, though every precious moment of the day was full, I could find time for all. And that shows a busy man or woman's more likely to see well after affairs than a leisurely one. Some men can actually _make_ time, I believe--Myles could. But now--through these black, hateful, sunless days--I feel I'm always wanting to creep off to bed, and sleep, and forget."

"That's never my brave girl spoke that?"

"I'm not brave; and I'm tired of the awful stores of things worth knowing collected by people who are dead. How the men who wrote books must look back from the other world and shiver at the stuff they've left behind them in this--knowing all they know there! But Myles was right in that. He used to say he'd learned more from leaning over gates than from any books. And I believe he had."

"He was grounded in solid knowledge by lessons from wise books to start with. They taught him to learn."

"Such a way as he had of twisting everything into a precept or example!"

"You'd have held that prosy talk presently."

"Speak of sermons in stones! He found whole gospels in a dead leaf."

"But you would have grown mighty impatient of all that after a while."

"Very likely indeed. And yet I doubt it; for never being in earnest myself, I admire it in others," she said.

"Never in earnest and never of one mind! 'Tis a poor character, and I'd not like to hear anybody give it to you but yourself, Honor."

"With two minds you get light and shade into life--shade at any rate. If I hadn't been--but you'll grow as weary of that as I am. Yet a woman's days are so drab if she never changes her mind--all cut and dried and dead. Why, every morning I open my eyes and hope I shall get a new idea. I love my ideas to jostle about and fight and shift and change and dance, like colours in a cloud. I like to find myself helpless, shaken, bewildered, clutching at straws. You don't understand that, Uncle Mark. Ideas are the beautiful, budding flowers of one's thoughts."

"And fixed opinions the roots--or should be. What's the value of poor blossoms 'pon the top of a tree when the storm comes an' puny petals are sent flying down wind? You talk foolishness, and you know 'tis foolishness. Done to vex me, I could almost think. 'Tis your ideas that make you miserable now. A feather in a gale is a stable thing beside you, Honor. You must turn to books if only to please me."

She promised to do so presently, but did not keep her promise; and thus, to little purpose, oftentimes they talked. Then a circumstance quite unexpected made Honor think less of her ill fate and start into new and lively touch with her existence. After long intervals it chanced that some intelligence both of Yeoland and Stapledon reached Bear Down on the same morning; and Doctor Clack it was who brought news of his friend; while information concerning Myles came more directly from himself.

Doctor Clack dismounted with some parade, and made his announcement before Honor and her uncle. That he might perchance move the girl to emotion troubled him but little, for the physician was a staunch partisan, and held that Christopher had been very badly treated.

"A communication from the wanderer," said he. "Yeoland was leaving Sydney for his kinsman's up-country place when he wrote six weeks ago. All is well with him--at least so he declares, and--what do you think? He desires me to join him. Such a romantic notion!"

"Well?"

"Well, Mr. Endicott, positively I don't see why I should not. Little Silver without Christopher is, frankly, a howling wilderness from my point of view--a mere solitary tomb. And nobody ever ill--nobody ailing--no opportunities. When folk do succumb it means the end of them and the inevitable dose of churchyard mould--that final prescription none can escape."

"The health of the place is your highest tribute surely."

"Not at all--far from it. I've nothing to do with the matter. Drugs decaying in their vases; steel rusting in its velvet. Besides, the loneliness. A fishing-rod is but a vain thing to save a man--especially when it's close time as now; and the new people at Godleigh haven't asked me to a single shoot. In fact there's to be no shooting this year at all. So my case is desperate."

"Come and see us oftener," said Mark.

"I will; I positively must; but I think I'll go abroad. There's a saying that a man who can live quite happily alone must be one of two things: an angel, or a demon. Now I'm neither to my knowledge, and since Christo has vanished I've lived alone, and it's telling on me. I shall drift into one of those extremes, and I leave you to guess which."

"But you're always welcome everywhere, my dear Clack."

"I know it--at least I think so; but there's such fear of wearing out a welcome in a small place. Hereditary modesty, you'll say. If so, it's on the mother's side, not the father's. But, in all seriousness, why should not I join him?"

"You know your own business best. Is there money to be made there?"

"Plenty for a professional man. They are to have a qualification of their own, I believe; but at present a practitioner with English degrees gets the pull--very right and proper of course. Thus the old country drives her sons away; but not before she's arranged ample accommodation for them elsewhere--God bless her! So I'm wise to go--eh?"

"Nothing like seeing the ends of the earth and enlarging the mind," said Mark.

"Well, don't any of you develop anything in the nature of an interesting indisposition to tempt me to stop."

Margery brought in a letter at this moment as the postman had just penetrated to Bear Down--a feat he rarely accomplished much before midday. Doctor Clack wondered in secret whether her old lover had also communicated with Honor, but seeing that his own missive was charged with a general message of goodwill to all at Endicott's, he suspected the letter came from elsewhere.

Soon he was gone; then, without comment, Mark's niece read aloud a brief note from Myles Stapledon. It did no more than set forth his determination to return in a fortnight's time. Reason for the step was not given, as the writer disdained any excuse. His words were bald. "I will arrive on such a date, if convenient," he concluded; and Mark Endicott, reading ahead and reading backwards also, was saddened, even amazed, as one standing before the sudden discovery of an unsuspected weakness or obvious flaw in a work he had rejoiced to believe near perfection.

The stages by which Myles had arrived at the determination now astonishing Mark Endicott had extended over three months, and the curtain rose upon his battle exactly a week after he left the farm, for at that date he learned how the engagement between Honor and Christopher was definitely at an end, and how the latter would be on the sea before his words were read. The announcement came from Yeoland himself, and was written in London on the eve of his departure. Then began the fight that ended with a determination to return, and caused such genuine disappointment in Mr. Endicott. Mark, however, forgot the force of the passion his niece had awakened in this man; and certain it is that neither he nor any other could have guessed at the storm which swept Stapledon's soul when he learned how Honor had regained her freedom. Soaked as he was in love, to remain away from Endicott's with this knowledge for three months had proved no mean task to Myles. The battle fought and won with his passion while it had no right to exist proved but a prelude to encounters far more tremendous upon Christopher Yeoland's departure.

There grew within him a web of sophistry spun through sleepless nights. This at first, with the oncoming of morning, he swept away; but, spider-like, and with a spider's patience, the love in him renewed each mesh, and asked his conscience a question that his conscience seemed powerless to answer. He fought, yet knew not the name of the foe. To-day he marvelled at his own hesitation, and asked himself what still held him back; to-morrow a shadow of Yeoland shamed his troubled longings, and the word of Mark Endicott, "between you is a great gulf fixed," reverberated drearily upon his thoughts. Then the cloud castles fell to earth, and the sanguine glow upon their pinnacles vanished away. Yet against that saying of the blind man's every pulse in his body often throbbed furiously. He knew better, and Honor knew better also. It was not for nothing that they had walked over the Moor together; not for nothing they had stood silently, each by the other's side, on moonlight nights.

Out of darkness Christopher Yeoland sometimes took shape, but only as an abstraction that grew more misty with passage of days. He had gone for all time; and Honor was left alone. Myles burnt to know something of her mind; how much or how little she had forgotten; how much or how little she wondered at his attitude; in what she blamed him; whether such blame grew daily greater or was already fading away--perhaps along with his own image--in her recollection.

The great apparition of Duty rose. In the recent past he had made others supremely unhappy and tormented himself. That was over; and now--the slave of duty from his youth up--he stood in doubt. For the first time the man discerned no clear sign-post pointing to his road. Wherein lay duty now? He wearied his brain with dialectics. Sometimes duty looked a question of pure love; sometimes it hardened into a problem of pure logic. He would have risked all that he had for one glimpse of Honor's attitude towards the position; and finally he decided that his duty lay in ascertaining that attitude. This much might very easily be done without a word upon the vital theme. He told himself that a few hours under the same roof with her--the sound of her voice, the light in her eyes--would tell him all he needed to know. He dinned this assurance upon his own mind; but his heart remained dead, even before such a determination, and the cloud by no means lifted itself from off him. He presented the somewhat uncommon spectacle of a man trying to deceive himself and failing. His natural instincts of justice and probity thrust Christopher Yeoland again and again into his thoughts. He began three letters to the traveller on three separate occasions, but these efforts ended in fire, and the letter that was written and posted went to Bear Down.

Through turmoil, tribulation, and deepening of frontal furrows he reached this step, and the deed done, his night thickened around him instead of lifting as he had hoped and trusted. Perhaps the blackest hour of all was that wherein he rode through familiar hamlets under the Moor upon his way to Honor. Then came the real sting of the certainty that he had lapsed from his own lofty rule; and love itself forsook him for a space beneath Cosdon's huge shadow at sunset time. He hastened, even galloped forward to the sight of the woman; he told himself that in her presence alone would be found balm to soothe this hurt; and the very feebleness of the thought fretted him the more.

So he came back, and Chance, building as her custom is on foundations of the trivial, wrought from his return the subsequent fabric of all his days. For out of the deliberate action, whether begun in laughter or prayer, whether prompted by desire or inspired by high ambition, springs issue, and no deed yet was ever barren of consequence, hidden or revealed. Never, since conscious intelligence awakened here, has that invention of the dunces justified itself--never once has any god from any chariot of fire descended to cut one sole knot in a tangle of earthly affairs. The seeds of human actions are sown to certain fruition but uncertain crop, and Fate and Chance, juggling with their growth, afford images of the highest tragedy this world has wept at; conjure from the irony of natural operations all that pertains to sweet and bitter laughter; embrace and environ the whole apparition of humanity's progress through time. Life's pictures, indeed, depend upon play of ridiculous and tragic chance for their rainbow light, for their huge spaces of formless and unfathomable shadow, for their ironic architecture, their statuary of mingled mice and mountains--flung together, fantastic and awful. In Titan visions these things are seen by lightning or by glow-worm glimmer; or sunned by laughter; or rained upon with tears; or taking such substance and colour as wings above the reach of either.

Thus, his deed done, through chaos of painful thoughts, came Myles Stapledon; and then, standing amid the naked beds of Bear Down garden, he found Honor Endicott's little hand in his at last. Whereupon he whispered to his soul that he had acted wisely, and was now about to pass from storm into a haven of great peace.

*CHAPTER XIII.*

*SNOW ON SCOR HILL*

There came a day when Honor and Myles rode out upon a dry and frozen Moor under the north wind. The man, who had brought his own great horse to Endicott's, now galloped beside Honor's pony, and the pace warmed them despite the extreme coldness of the weather. Presently, upon their homeward way from Watern's granite castles, they stopped to breathe their horses, where a ring of horrent stones sprouted abrupt, uneven, irregular, out of the waste, and lay there, the mark of remote human activity. All the valley presented a stern spectacle unsoftened by any haze, untouched by any genial note of colour. The Moor's great, iron-grey bosom panted for coming snow; and Teign, crying among her manifold stairways, streaked the gorges with ghostly foam light, where naked sallows and silver birches tossed lean arms along the river. Only the water offered action and sound in the rocky channels; all else, to the horizon of ashy hills under a snow-laden sky, waited and watched the north.

Two horses stood steaming in Scor Hill Circle--that ancient hypaethral high place of the Damnonians--while their riders surveyed the scene and one another. Both long remembered the incident, and for them, from that day forward, the spot was lighted with a personal significance, was rendered an active and vital arena, was hallowed by interest more profound than its mere intrinsic attributes of age and mystery had formerly imparted to it.

Myles Stapledon did not reach the speedy conclusion he anticipated upon return to Bear Down. A month had now lapsed since his arrival, and, while very thoroughly assured of his own sentiments, while gulfed and absorbed, heart and soul, in a transcendent love of Honor that swept all before it and left him a man of one hope, one daily prayer, he had yet to learn her explicit attitude. His own humility helped to blind him a little at first, but she made no attempt to disguise her pleasure in his society, and by her unconventional companionship and intercourse wakened strong hopes within him. For he attached an obvious meaning to many actions, that had perhaps been conclusive of intention in any other woman, but were not in Honor. She went everywhere with him alone--to Chagford on horseback, to Exeter by train. Moreover, she let her cousin do as he would with the farm, and when he suggested embarking further capital and acquiring a half interest of all--she made no personal objection, but consulted Mr. Endicott. The inevitable sequel now stared Bear Down in the face, yet, when his niece put the question to him in private, Mark refused to give advice.

"That's a point none can well decide but yourself," he said. "The future's your own, as far as a human being can claim such control. As you act now, so the man will assume you mean to do afterwards."

"I mean nothing at all but the welfare of the farm and--you won't advise, then?"

"No. It looks all cut and dried to me."

Honor stamped her foot like a child.

"Everything's always cut and dried in my hateful life--try as I will," she said. Then she swept away, and he knitted on without visible emotion, though not lacking an inner sympathy. For he understood her desire to escape from the monotonous, and foresaw how this imminent incident would not bring about that end. Personally Stapledon had served to brighten his sightless life not a little, had set new currents running in his mind, had sweetened back waters grown stagnant by disuse; for Myles, as Endicott believed, was fine metal--wise, self-contained even in his love, a sober and discreet man--super-excellent save in the matter of his return to Bear Down. Even there, however, on second thoughts, Mark did not judge him. He only felt the lover to be human, and it was viewed in the character of a husband for Honor that the old man regarded his nephew without enthusiasm. Stapledon's very goodness, simplicity, and content with rural interests would suffice to weary the wife he wanted soon or late. And Christopher Yeoland must probably return to his home some day.

Thus he argued, but, meantime, full of hope, and arriving at a right logical conclusion on a wrong hypothesis of logical intention in Honor, Stapledon resolved to speak. And now, before the beauty of her, kissed into a sparkle by her gallop, her bosom rising and falling, a tiny cloud around her lips, caught and carried away by the wind at each expiration--before this winter vision his heart found a tongue; and, as they walked their horses in the grey circle, he spoke.

"It's a strange place this to tell you, yet these things are out of one's keeping. I must say it I must. Honor, do you care for me at all?"

"Of course I care for you."

"Do you love me?"

"Now, dear Myles, please don't say anything to make me cry in this wind. Think of the freezing misery of it! Please--Please."

"To make you cry! I hope not--indeed. I hope not that. Yet it's solemn enough--the most solemn thing a man can say to a woman."

"That's all right, then," she said cheerfully. "Nothing solemn ever makes me cry."

He looked bewildered, wistful, and her heart smote her; but the inopportune fiend would speak. She remembered how that Christopher had proposed marriage in a flippant spirit, while she craved for something so different. Here was no frivolous boy in a sunny wood, but a strong, earnest man under skies full of snow. His great voice and his eyes aflame made her heart beat, but they had no power to alter her mood.

"I love you!" he said simply. "I loved you long before I knew it, if you can believe so strange a thing. I loved you, and, finding it out, I left you and poured all the bitter blame on myself that I could. Then I heard how you had agreed to part. He was going. He went. And now I stand before you all yours. You are unlinked by any tie. He said so--he----"

"Oh you wretches of one idea!" she burst out, interrupting him. "You self-absorbed, self-seeking, selfish men! How can I explain? How can I lay bare my weaknesses before such superiority? He was the same--poor Christo--just the same. I suppose nearly all of you must be; and women are frightened to speak for fear of shocking you. So we pretend, and win from you a character for huge constancy that we often deserve no more than you do. Why attribute so many virtues to us that you don't possess yourselves? Why demand a single, whole-hearted, utter, ineffable love from us that not one in a thousand of you can give?"

"All this is nothing to the purpose," he said in a puzzled voice. "What can you answer, Honor?

"Well, I'll speak for myself, not for the hosts of single-hearted women. I won't tar them with my black brush. You want me to marry you, Myles?"

"God knows how dearly."

"And because I love you, you think I ought to marry you. Yet if I love somebody else too? I wish I had fine words, though perhaps plain ones are better to describe such an unheroic muddle. When I told Christo I loved you--yes, I told him that--he bowed his head as though he had heard his death knell. Yet I did not tell him I loved him less than before."

"You still love him?"

"Of course I do. Can a quarrel kill a live love? He was made for somebody to love him. And I love you--love you dearly too. And I'm not ashamed of it, however much you may think I should be."

"The end of that?" he said drearily.

"Clear enough. I've spoilt two lives--no, not all, I hope, but a part of two lives."

"It is I that have done so," he answered bitterly and slowly; then he stopped his horse and looked aloft where scattered flakes and patches of snow began to float heavily downward from the upper grey.

"No, no, no," said Honor. "It's just a snappy, snarling, unkind fate that wills it so. Two's company, and three's none, of course."

"Your knowledge is imperfect," he said, "and so your argument is vain. If you were a type, the foundation of civilisation would fail. Surely no woman worth thinking of twice can love in two places at once?"

"Then think of me no more," she answered, "for I do--if I know love at all. Is not the moon constant to earth and sun? A woman can love two men--as easily as a man can love two women. You couldn't--I know that; but you're not everybody. Most men can. Christianity has made a noble, exalted thing of love, and I was born into the Christian view. Yet I'm unfortunately a barbarian by instinct. Just an accidental primitive heathen who has cropped up in a respectable family. You can't alter any particular cranky nature by pruning. Oh, dear Myles, if I could marry you both! You for the working weeks and Christo for Sundays and holidays!"

He merely gasped.

"Yet I love to think you love me. But you know what naughty children say when they're crossed? I can't have you both, so I won't have either."

"This you say for love of him?"

"Don't trouble to find reasons. At any rate I'm speaking the truth. Should I have confessed to such a depraved and disgraceful frame of mind to a man I love if I had not been deadly serious despite laughter? Hate me, if you must, but I don't deserve it. I would marry you and be a good wife too; but there's a sort of sense of justice hid in me. Christo noticed it. So don't drive me into marriage, Myles dear."

"You love him better than me at any rate?"

"Arithmetic can't be brought to bear upon the question. I love you both."

There was a pause; then she added suddenly--

"And if there were a hundred more men like you and Christopher, I should love them all. But there are no more."

"You've got a big heart, Honor."

"Don't be unkind to me. It's a very unhappy heart."

"It should not be."

"That fact makes it so much the more unhappy."

"Do you know your own mind in this matter?"

"Of course I don't. Haven't you found that out?"

"It's going to snow," he said. "We'd better hurry."

"No, walk to the top of the hill; I like it."

"You must be made happy somehow," he continued. "It's everybody's duty who loves you to make you that, if it can be done."

"You great, generous thing! How I wish I could do what you ask me to; but I should be haunted if I did. You don't want a haunted wife, Myles?"

"Leave that. I have spoken and you have answered. I shall not speak again, for I pay you the respect and honour to believe your 'No' means no."