"Yes.""My dear, if anyone else would buy the Moor, I'd be only too pleased to sell it to them. But so far there hasn't been a nibble. Backfield's the only man who has the temerity to think he could make anything out of a desert like Boarzell, and I must say I admire his pluck."
ONE:A quarter of an hour passed, and there was no sign of Harry. Reuben grew impatient, for he wanted to have the ground tidied up by sunset. It was a wan, mould-smelling afternoon, and already the sun was drifting through whorls of coppery mist towards the shoulder of Boarzell. Reuben looked up to the gorse-clump on the ridge, from behind which he expected Harry to appear.
ONE:Both unconsciously dreaded the time when they should demand more of each otherwhen the occasional enlacing of their hands would no longer be enough to open Paradise, when from sweet looking and longing they would have to pass into the bitterness of action. Tilly, though essentially practical and determined, was enjoying her first visit to faery, and also inherited her mother's gift of languor. She basked in those hours of sun and bees. She, like her father, was passing for the first time into a life outside the dominion of the farmbut,[Pg 220] whereas he fought it, and sought it only to fight it, she submitted to it as to a caress.
THREE:"Retire," said Sudbury; "we shall consider the matter."So much of his life had been bound up with the Fair[Pg 461] that somehow a part of him seemed to be jigging at it still, down in the Rother field. It was at the Fair that he had first resolved to conquer Boarzell, and he saw himself rushing with the crowd to Totease, scuffling round the barns while the big flames shot out ... and later he saw himself dancing with Naomi to Harry's fiddle. What had Harry played?a strange tune, "The Song of Seth's Home"one never heard it now, but he could remember fragments of it....
"Nay, Isabella," said the pale interesting lady of Sir Robert Knowles, "it is not strange that my Lord de Boteler should know the faces of those who were born on his land; and this young woman's skill could not fail to have procured her notice. But the handiness of her fingers has not made her vain. You know I am fond of reading faces, and I would answer that she is as modest and good as she is fair.""Did you not know that his crime had shut him out from the aid of religion?"Sometimes he would talk to her of the strange voyages he had madehow he had lived on ships ever since he was a boy of twelve, and had seen nearly the whole world, from the fiery steaming forests of Equador to the Northern Lights that make a mock day in Spitzbergen. He told her strange tales of wooded atolls in the South Seas, painting a fairyland she had scarcely dreamed, of palms motionless in the aromatic air, of pink and white shores, and lagoons full of fish all winged and frilled and iridescentof the sudden swift sunrises and sunsets between Cancer and Capricorn, of the great ice-wall in the south, below Tasmania, which he had longed to penetrate, for who knew what lay beyond it in the Unknown? "And there's another like it what I've seen from Franz Josef Landmaybe there's countries beyond it, with gold." Then he told her of the terrible storms south of the Horn, of the uncharted Nelson Straitof northern Baffin Land, where he had once gone on a whaler, of Rio Grande and the buried city of Tenoctitlan"where there's gold." Gold seemed to be hidden in large quantities all over the world according to Dansay, and Caro once asked him why he had never brought any back. "Because I love what's better than[Pg 349] gold," he answered, and drew her, happy and quivering, into his arms.
