Part 3

They reached the end of the plowed field, and, passing through a gate, turned abruptly to the left and began to climb a narrow path which bordered the boundary wall, and which became steeper every moment. As they ascended, the orchard and the long, low house on the other side seemed to lie almost at their feet. The road and the open moorland beyond, stretching to the encircling hills, came more clearly into sight with every backward glance. Louise paused at last, breathless.

"I must sit down," she insisted. "It is too beautiful to hurry over."

"It is only a few steps farther," he told her, holding out his hand; "just to where the path winds its way round the hill there. But perhaps you are tired?"

"On the contrary," she assured him, "I never felt so vigorous in my life. All the exercise I take, as a rule, is in Kensington Gardens; and look!" She pointed downward to her absurd little shoes, and held out her hand, "You will have to help me," she pleaded.

The last few steps were, indeed, almost precipitous. Fragments of rock, protruding through the grass and bushes, served as steps. John moved on a little ahead and pulled her easily up. Even the slight tightening of his fingers seemed to raise her from her feet. She looked at him wonderingly.

"How strong you are!"

"A matter of weight," he answered, smiling. "You are like a feather. You walk as lightly as the fairies who come out on midsummer night's eve and dance in circles around the gorse-bushes there."

"Is it the home of the fairies you are taking me to?" she asked. "If you have discovered that, no wonder you find us ordinary women outside your lives!"

He laughed.

"There are no fairies where we are going," he assured her.

They were on a rough-made road now, which turned abruptly to the right a few yards ahead, skirting the side of a deep gorge. They took a few steps further, and Louise stopped short with a cry of wonder.

Around the abrupt corner an entirely new perspective was revealed--a little hamlet, built on a shoulder of the mountains; and on the right, below a steep descent, a wide and sunny valley. It was like a tiny world of its own, hidden in the bosom of the hills. There was a long line of farm-buildings, built of gray stone and roofed with red tiles; there were fifteen or twenty stacks; a quaint, white-washed house of considerable size, almost covered on the southward side with creepers; a row of cottages, and a gray-walled enclosure--stretching with its white tombstones to the very brink of the descent--in the midst of which was an ancient church, in ruins at the further end, partly rebuilt with the stones of the hillside.

Louise looked around her, silent with wonder. A couple of sheep-dogs had rushed out from the farmhouse and were fawning around her companion. In the background a gray-bearded shepherd, with Scottish plaid thrown over his shoulder, raised his hat.

"It isn't real, is it?" she asked, clinging for a moment to John Strangewey's arm.

He patted one of the dogs and smiled down at her.

"Why not? William Elwick there is a very real shepherd, I can assure you. He has sat on these hills for the last sixty-eight years."

She looked at the old man almost with awe.

"It is like the Bible!" she murmured. "Fancy the sunrises he must have seen, and the sunsets! The coming and the fading of the stars, the spring days, the music of the winds in these hollow places, booming to him in the night-time! I want to talk to him. May I?"

He shook his head. The old man was already shambling off.

"Better not," he advised. "You would be disappointed, for William has the family weakness--he cannot bear the sight of a woman. You see, he is pretending now that there is something wrong with the hill flock. You asked where the land was that we tilled. Now look down. Hold my arm if you feel giddy."

She followed the wave of his ash stick. The valley sheer below them, and the lower hills, on both sides, were parceled out into fields, enclosed within stone walls, reminding her, from the height at which they stood, of nothing so much as the quilt upon her bed.

"That's where all our pasture is," he told her, "and our arable land. We grow a great deal of corn in the dip there. All the rest of the hillside, and the moorlands, of course, are fit for nothing but grazing; but there are eleven hundred acres down there from which we can raise almost anything we choose."

Her eyes swept this strange tract of country backward and forward. She saw the men like specks in the fields, the cows grazing in the pasture like toy animals. Then she turned and looked at the neat row of stacks and the square of farm-buildings.

"I am trying hard to realize that you are a farmer and that this is your life," she said.

He swung open the wooden gate of the churchyard, by which they were standing. There was a row of graves on either side of the prim path.

"Suppose," he suggested, "you tell me about yourself now--about your own life."

The hills parted suddenly as she stood there looking southward. Through the chasm she seemed to see very clearly the things beyond. Her own life, her own world, spread itself out--a world of easy triumphs, of throbbing emotions always swiftly ministered to, always leaving the same dull sensation of discontent; a world in which the pathways were broad and smooth, but in which the end seemed always the same; a world of receding beauties and mocking desires. The faces of her friends were there--men and women, brilliant, her intellectual compeers, a little tired, offering always the same gifts, the same homage.

"My life, and the world in which I live, seem far away just now," she said quietly. "I think that it is doing me good to have a rest from them. Go on talking to me about yourself, please."

He smiled. He was just a little disappointed.

"We shall very soon reach the end of all that I have to tell you," he remarked. "Still, if there is anything you would like to know--"

"Who were these men and women who have lived and died here?" she interrupted, with a little wave of her hand toward the graves.

"All our own people," he told her; "laborers, shepherds, tenant-farmers, domestic servants. Our clergyman comes from the village on the other side of that hill. He rides here every Sunday on a pony which we have to provide for him."

She studied the names upon the tombstones, spelling them out slowly.

"The married people," he went on, "are buried on the south side; the single ones and children are nearer the wall. Tell me," he asked, after a moment's hesitation, "are you married or single?"

She gave a little start. The abruptness of the question, the keen, steadfast gaze of his compelling eyes, seemed for a moment to paralyze both her nerves and her voice. Again the hills rolled open, but this time it was her own life only that she saw, her own life, and one man's face which she seemed to see looking at her from some immeasurable distance, waiting, yet drawing her closer toward him, closer and closer till their hands met.

She was terrified at this unexpected tumult of emotion. It was as if some one had suddenly drawn away one of the stones from the foundation of her life. She found herself repeating the words on the tombstone facing her:

"And of Elizabeth, for sixty-one years the faithful wife and helpmate of Ezra Cummings, mother of his children, and his partner in the life everlasting."

Her knees began to shake. There was a momentary darkness before her eyes. She felt for the tombstone and sat down.

IV

The churchyard gate was opened and closed noisily. They both glanced up. Stephen Strangewey was coming slowly toward them along the flinty path. Louise, suddenly herself again, rose briskly to her feet.

"Here comes your brother," she said. "I wish he wouldn't glower at me so! I really am not such a terrible person as he seems to think."

John muttered a word or two of polite but unconvincing protest. They stood together awaiting his approach. Stephen had apparently lost none of his dourness of the previous night. He was dressed in gray homespun, with knickerbockers and stockings of great thickness. He wore a flannel shirt and collar and a black wisp of a tie. Underneath his battered felt hat his weather-beaten face seemed longer and grimmer than ever, his mouth more uncompromising. As he looked toward Louise, there was no mistaking the slow dislike in his steely eyes.

"Your chauffeur, madam, has just returned," he announced. "He sent word that he will be ready to start at one o'clock."

Louise, inspired to battle by the almost provocative hostility of her elder host, smiled sweetly upon him.

"You can't imagine how sorry I am to hear it," she said. "I don't know when, in the whole course of my life, I have met with such a delightful adventure or spent such a perfect morning!"

Stephen looked at her with level disapproving eyes--at her slender form in its perfectly fitting tailored gown; at her patent shoes, so obviously unsuitable for her surroundings, and at the faint vision of silk stockings.

"If I might say so without appearing inhospitable," he remarked, with faint sarcasm, "this would seem to be the fitting moment for your departure. A closer examination of our rough life up here might alter your views."

She turned toward John, and caught the deprecating glance which flashed from him to Stephen.

"Your brother is making fun of me," she declared. "He looks at me and judges me just as I believe he would judge most people--sternly and without mercy. After all, you know, even though I am a daughter of the cities, there is another point of view--ours. Can you not believe that the call which prompts men and women to do the things in life which are really worth while is heard as often amid the hubbub of the city as in the solitude of these austere hills?"

"The question is a bootless one," Stephen answered firmly. "The city calls to its own, as the country holds its children, and both do best in their own environment. Like to like, and each bird to his own nest. You would be as much out of place here with us, madam, as my brother and I on the pavements of your city."

"You may be right," she admitted, "yet you dismiss one of the greatest questions in life with a single turn of your tongue. It is given to no one to be infallible. It is even possible that you may be wrong."

"It is possible," Stephen agreed grimly.

"The things in life which are worth while," she continued, looking down into the valley, "are common to all. They do not consist of one thing for one man, another for another. To whom comes the greater share of them--the dweller in the city, or you in your primitive and patriarchal life? You rest your brains, you make the seasons feed you, you work enough to keep your muscles firm, and nature does the rest. She brings the food to your doors, and when your harvest is over your work is done. There are possibilities of rust here, Mr. Strangewey!"

Stephen's smile was almost disdainful.

"Madam," he declared, "you have six or seven million people in London. How many of them live by really creative and honorable work? How many are there of polyglot race--Hebrews, Germans, foreigners of every type, preying upon one another, making false incomes which exist only on paper, living in false luxury, tasting false joys? The sign-post of our lives must be our personal inclinations. Our inclinations--my brother's inclinations and mine--lead us, as they have led my people for hundreds of years, to seek the cleaner things in life and the simpler forms of happiness. If I do not have the pleasure, madam, of seeing you again, permit me to wish you farewell."

He turned and walked away. Louise watched him with very real interest.

"Do you know," she said to John, "there is something which I can only describe as biblical about your brother, something a little like the prophets of the Old Testament, in the way he sees only one issue and clings to it. Are you, too, of his way of thinking?"

"Up to a certain point, I believe I am," he confessed. "I do not think I could ever have lived in the city. I do not think I could ever have been happy in any of the professions."

"Certainly I could not imagine you as a stock-broker or a lawyer. I feel it hard to realize you in any of the ordinary walks of life. Still, you know, the greatest question of all remains unanswered. Are you content just to live and flourish and die? Are there no compelling obligations with which one is born? Do you never feel cramped--in your mind, I mean?--feel that you want to push your way through the clouds into some other life?"

"I feel nearer the clouds here," he answered simply.

"I suppose you are sure of content--that is to say, if you can keep free from doubts. Still, there is the fighting instinct, you know; the craving for action. Don't you feel that sometimes?"

"Perhaps," he admitted.

They were leaving the churchyard now. She paused abruptly, pointing to a single grave in a part of the churchyard which seemed detached from the rest.

"Whose grave is that?" she inquired.

He hesitated.

"It is the grave of a young girl," he told her quietly.

"But why is she buried so far off, and all alone?" Louise persisted.

"She was the daughter of one of our shepherds," he replied. "She went into service at Carlisle, and returned here with a child. They are both buried there."

"Because of that her grave is apart from the others?"

"Yes," he answered. "It is very seldom, I am glad to say, that anything of the sort happens among us."

For the second time that morning Louise was conscious of an unexpected upheaval of emotion. She felt that the sunshine had gone, that the whole sweetness of the place had suddenly passed away. The charm of its simple austerity had perished.

"And I thought I had found paradise!" she cried.

She moved quickly from John Strangewey's side. Before he could realize her intention, she had stepped over the low dividing wall and was on her knees by the side of the plain, neglected grave. She tore out the spray of apple-blossom which she had thrust into the bosom of her gown, and placed it reverently at the head of the little mound. For a moment her eyes drooped and her lips moved--she herself scarcely knew whether it was in prayer. Then she turned and came slowly back to her companion.

Something had gone, too, from his charm. She saw in him now nothing but the coming dourness of his brother. Her heart was still heavy. She shivered a little.

"Come," she said, "let us go back!"

They commenced the steep descent in silence. Every now and then John held his companion by the arm to steady her somewhat uncertain footsteps. It was he at last who spoke.

"Will you tell me, please, what is the matter with you, and why you placed that sprig of apple-blossom where you did?"

His tone woke her from her lethargy. She was a little surprised at its poignant, almost challenging note.

"Certainly," she replied. "I placed it there as a woman's protest against the injustice of that isolation."

"I deny that it is unjust."

She turned around and waved her hand toward the little gray building.

"The Savior to whom your church is dedicated thought otherwise," she reminded him. "Do you play at being lords paramount here over the souls and bodies of your serfs?"

"You judge without knowledge of the facts," he assured her calmly. "The girl could have lived here happily and been married to a respectable young man. She chose, instead, a wandering life. She chose, further, to make it a disreputable one. She broke her mother's heart and soured her father's latter years. She brought into the world a nameless child."

Louise's footsteps slackened.

"You men," she sighed, "are all alike! You judge only by what happens. You never look inside. That is why your justice is so different from a woman's. All that you have told me is very pitiful, but there is another view of the case which you should consider. Let us sit down upon this boulder for a few moments. There is something that I should like to say to you before I go."

They sat upon a ledge of rock. Below them was the house, with its walled garden and the blossom-laden orchard. Beyond stretched the moorland, brilliant with patches of yellow gorse, and the hills, blue and melting in the morning sunlight.

"Don't you men sometimes realize," she continued earnestly, "the many, many guises in which temptation may come to a woman, especially to the young girl so far from home? She may be very lonely, and she may care; and if she cares, it is so hard to refuse the man she loves. The very sweetness, the very generosity of a woman's nature prompts her to give, give, give all the time. There are other women, similarly circumstanced, who think only of themselves, of their own safety and happiness, and they escape the danger; but are they to be praised and respected, while she that yields is condemned and cast out? I feel that you are not going to agree with me, and I do not wish to argue with you; but what I so passionately object to is the sweeping judgment you make--the sheep on one side and the goats on the other. That is how man judges; God looks further. Every case is different. The law by which one should be judged may be poor justice for another."

She glanced at him almost appealingly, but there was no sign of yielding in his face.

"Laws," he reminded her, "are made for the benefit of the whole human race. Sometimes an individual may suffer for the benefit of others. That is inevitable."

"And so let the subject pass," she concluded, "but it saddens me to think that one of the great sorrows of the world should be there like a monument to spoil the wonder of this morning. Now I am going to ask you a question. Are you the John Strangewey who has recently had a fortune left to him?"

He nodded.

"You read about it in the newspapers, I suppose," he said. "Part of the story isn't true. It was stated that I had never seen my Australian uncle, but as a matter of fact he has been over here three or four times. It was he who paid for my education at Harrow and Oxford."

"What did your brother say to that?"

"He opposed it," John confessed, "and he hated my uncle. He detests the thought of any one of us going out of sight of our own hills. My uncle had the wander-fever."

"And you?" she asked suddenly.

"I have none of it," he asserted.

A very faint smile played about her lips.

"Perhaps not before," she murmured; "but now?"

"Do you mean because I have inherited the money?"

She leaned a little toward him. Her smile now was more evident, and there was something in her eyes which was almost like a challenge.

"Naturally!"

"What difference does my money make?" he demanded.

"Don't you realize the increase of your power as a human being?" she replied. "Don't you realize the larger possibilities of the life that is open to you? You can move, if you will, in the big world. You can take your place in any society you choose, meet interesting people who have done things, learn everything that is new, do everything that is worth doing in life. You can travel to the remote countries of the globe. You can become a politician, a philanthropist, or a sportsman. You can follow your tastes wherever they lead you, and--perhaps this is the most important thing of all--you can do everything upon a splendid scale."

He smiled down at her.

"That all sounds very nice," he admitted, "but supposing that I have no taste in any of the directions you have mentioned? Supposing my life here satisfies me? Supposing I find all that I expect to find in life here on my own land, among my own hills? What then?"

She looked at him with a curiosity which was almost passionate. Her lips were parted, her senses strained.

"It is not possible," she exclaimed, "that you can mean it!"

"But why not?" he protested. "I have not the tortuous brain of the modern politician. I hate cities--the smell of them, the atmosphere of them, the life in them. The desire for travel is only half born in me. That may come--I cannot tell. I love the daily work here; I am fond of horses and dogs. I know every yard of land we own, and I know what it will produce. It interests me to try experiments--new crops, a new distribution of crops, new machinery sometimes, new methods of fertilizing. I love to watch the seasons come and reign and pass. I love to feel the wind and the sun, and even the rain. All these things have become a sort of appetite to me. I am afraid," he wound up a little lamely, "that this is all very badly expressed, but the whole truth of it is, you see, that I am a man of simple and inherited tastes. I feel that my life is here, and I live it here and I love it. Why should I go out like a _Don Quixote_ and search for vague adventures?"

"Because you are a man!" she answered swiftly. "You have a brain and a soul too big for your life here. You eat and drink, and physically you flourish, but part of you sleeps because it is shut away from the world of real things. Don't you sometimes feel it in your very heart that life, as we were meant to live it, can only be lived among your fellow men?"

He looked upward, over his shoulder, at the little cluster of farm-buildings and cottages, and the gray stone church.

"It seems to me," he declared simply, "that the man who tries to live more than one life fails in both. There is a little cycle of life here, among our thirty or forty souls, which revolves around my brother and myself. You would think it stupid and humdrum, because the people are peasants; but I am not sure that you are right. The elementary things, you know, are the greatest, and those we have. Our young people fall in love and marry. The joy of birth comes to our mothers, and the tragedy of death looms over us all. Some go out into the world, some choose to remain here. A passer-by may glance upward from the road at our little hamlet, and wonder what can ever happen in such an out-of-the-way corner. I think the answer is just what I have told you. Love and marriage, birth and death happen. These things make life."

Her curiosity now had become merged in an immense interest. She laid her fingers lightly upon his arm.

"You speak for your people," she said. "That is well. I can understand their simple lives being as absorbing to them as ours are to us. I can imagine how, here among your hills, you can watch as a spectator a cycle of life which contains, as you have pointed out, every element of tragedy and happiness. But you yourself?"

"I am one of them," he answered, "a necessary part of them."

"How you deceive yourself! I am sure you are honest, I am sure you believe what you say, but will you remember what I am going to tell you? The time will come, before very long, when you will feel doubts."

"Doubts about what?"

She smiled enigmatically.

"Oh, they will assert themselves," she assured him, "and you will recognize them when they come. Something will whisper to you in your heart that after all you are not of the same clay as these simple folk--that there is a different mission in the world for a man like you than to play the part of feudal lord over a few peasants. Sooner or later you will come out into the world; and the sooner the better, I think, Mr. John Strangewey, or you will grow like your brother here among your granite hills."

He moved a little uneasily. All the time she was watching him. It seemed to her that she could read the thoughts which were stirring in his brain.