"Oh, look at those beauties! I must have them!" And she pointed to where, on a vividly green patch of marsh, a whole grove of cotton-gra.s.s stood up in the glow of the setting sun. The golden light poured through the silky tufts, making of each a flake of fire, all raining at the same slight slope from hair-fine stems. Against the turf they looked for all the world like Chinese lanterns swung for some miniature revel of the fairies--they seemed literally to diffuse light upon the air. Ishmael stood staring, stung to excitement by that suddenly-glimpsed beauty; but Phoebe darted forward, and the next moment had withdrawn a foot whose stout country shoe and white stocking were dripping greenly.
"Here, let me!" cried Ishmael; but she waved him back.
"No, you"re too heavy; you"d go through at once. Hold my hand while I lean over;" and she swung outwards from his grasp, her other hand stretching vainly.
"Best leave that lot," advised Ishmael; "there"s some much easier to get at just along there."
She turned her head, body still swung forward, and followed the line of his pointing finger to where a cl.u.s.ter of gra.s.s as fine, but untrans.m.u.ted, stood in shadow.
"Oh, but that hasn"t the sun on it!" she exclaimed navely. The next moment she had seen the absurdity of her own speech, and, pivoting to the path beside him, joined in his laughter.
"Well, it seemed sense to me when I said it," she protested.
"So it would have been if you could have picked the sun too."
"But I suppose it was only the sun that made me want them at all.
Aren"t I a goose? Va.s.sie would say I shall never get sense."
"I like that sort of nonsense; it"s rather jolly, somehow. I say, Phoebe, I shall think of you as the girl who wanted to pick the sun.
Doesn"t it sound ripping?"
"Oh, my feet are so wet!" cried Phoebe. "I must hurry home. Mother will fuss so over me, you can"t think."
"Shall I just get you that sunny gra.s.s before we go?"
Phoebe hesitated, and then some instinct, finer than her comprehension of it, prompted her to a refusal, and the cotton-gra.s.s was left to swing its gossamer globes of light till the sun should have dipped below the rim of the moor.
When Ishmael had delivered Phoebe up to the tender agitations of the fussy, weakly mother, and himself got away from the too-enthusiastic welcome of the father, he struck towards the cliffs and the Vicarage with a younger heart than had been his all the evening. Quite naturally life had slipped through from a film of darkness on to a brighter plane, and he greeted Boase with none of the gruffness that would have weighed on him earlier. This also had the result of breaking the reticence which would otherwise have kept him from telling anything of his real feelings. Now that his family and the life before him no longer seemed rayless, he could speak of the blight that had, for him, settled even over the future as he sat in that fearsome parlour.
Boase listened, glad that the boy seemed to be growing more articulate; it would make his help, when it was needed, easier to give. He kept Ishmael for supper, feeling that consideration for Annie was not the most important thing just then, and after it he walked with the boy as far as the stile that gave on to the cliff path. Ishmael was far from having given way to one of his old unbalanced fits of chattering, but it had been a pleasure to him to talk freely to the person with whom he was most intimate. It was long--unnaturally long for expansive youth--since he had talked so freely, for Killigrew had left St. Renny a year before him to study painting in Paris. It was the time when the great Barbizon school was in its prime, when Diaz and Rousseau and Harpignies and the rest of that goodly company were heading the return to Nature which the epoch needed, just as later it was to need, with equal sincerity, a return to the primitive in art. Killigrew was absorbed by the fervour of his new creed and wrote but rarely, and his letters were all but incomprehensible to Ishmael. Not in his moments of freest intercourse with Phoebe that evening had it been possible to exchange anything beyond the chatter and playfulness of children, but there was that in Ishmael to-night which, he being young, had to find outlet. For youth is the period of giving, as gathering age is of withholding.
Coming home after so long, coming home, moreover, with a meaning portentous beyond the ordinary attached to the act, had excited Ishmael unknown to himself. Physically he felt very tired, which he told himself was absurd, but mentally he was of a joyous alertness. Leaning upon the stile, he drew a deep breath of the salt air and raised his eyes to the night sky curving, so high was he placed, for an immense arc about his tiny form. To the north the Plough trailed its length, but south, high over the dark blot which to the keen sight of love meant Cloom, Spica, brilliant crown of Virgo, pulsed whitely, while the glittering sisterhood of Aquila and Lyra, Corona and Libra swept towards the east, ushering up the sky the slim young moon, as bright as they but more serene, like a young mother amidst a flock of heedless girls. How often had Ishmael counted these same clear callous eyes from sleeping St.
Renny, but never with the answering gleam in his breast that he felt now he saw them over his own land.
"So life is going to be good, after all," remarked the Parson abruptly.
"Rather. It seems jolly good to-night, anyway. All my life I"ve been looking forward to this, just this, coming back here and making something of it all ... and the funny thing is now it"s come I"m not disappointed."
"Why should you be?"
"I dunno. Only one expects to be when one"s been expecting to be happy.
That sounds Irish, but you know what I mean."
"Yes, I know, but then I"m older than you. Why should you have found that out?"
"Some things--things like that--one doesn"t find out by what happens.
One sort of knows them to start with. It"s funny too, because what I"m so c.o.c.k-a-hoop about to-night is that life"s so full of things just ahead, things that are going to happen. I say, look at that moon; I sort of feel as though I could jump over her if only I tried hard enough!"
"That"s what youth lives on," said Boase--"not on what happens, but on what may happen. Every morning when you wake don"t you feel--"To-day _It_ may happen," though you haven"t the vaguest idea what It may be?"
"Why, yes, I think that"s true," said Ishmael slowly.
"Yes, it"s true. It"s what youth and hope and courage lives by."
"And old people--what do they live by?"
"Ah, that everyone has to find out for himself. It depends largely on what his middle-age has drawn on, and that"s nearly always something more material than what fed his youth. There"s only one thing certain--that we all have something, some secret bread of our own soul, by which we live, that nourishes and sustains us. It may be a different thing for each man alive."
"We must each work out our own d.a.m.nation," said Ishmael, and then could have kicked himself for his own smartness that he heard go jarring through the night. He waited in a blush of panic for some reproof, such as "That was hardly worthy, was it?" But the Parson, ever nothing if not unexpected, did not administer it, though Ishmael could have sworn he felt his smile through the darkness.
"d.a.m.nation, salvation, it"s much the same thing," said Boase, cheerfully, "though naturally youth likes to use the former word. But the great thing is never to despise the means by which another man attains it. Patience, tolerance, tolerance, patience...."
"Oh, I don"t know," protested Ishmael. "I don"t think much would get done in the world at that rate, would it?"
"Perhaps not. And you have so much to do in it.... When d"you start?"
"To-morrow morning with dawn, so I must be getting off. If you"re awake round about then, Da Boase, think of me beginning to remake the world over at Cloom."
And Ishmael set off through the night, his feet lagging with a blissful fatigue and his mind falling on an equally blissful numbness. As he went the Parson"s phrase went with him, stirring his imagination, and when he climbed into the big bed beneath the drooping Christ it worked more articulately within him. "Secret bread ..." he thought; "that"s what he called it.... I wonder if Phoebe"s is sun--she wanted to pick the sun.
And his is religion, of course, and mine--I know what mine is. It"ll always be the same. I shan"t change even if I grow old."
He began to feel very drowsy and drifted into a vague wonder at the thought of growing old. "I wonder what it feels like. I suppose one takes no more interest in anything; it can"t matter what one"s secret bread is. But mine, of course, mine is Cloom...." And on that he fell asleep.
CHAPTER III
FIRST FURROW
Youth is susceptible to that which it awakes, and Ishmael sallied out early next morning in a mood to match the month as it then shone to greet him. The sun had not long cleared the east, and the globes of dew glimmered on leaf and twig and darkened his boots as he crossed the ill-kept lawn in front of the house. He promised himself it should be rolled and mown and have flower-beds around it, and that a wind-break of firs should be planted along the low granite wall which was all that divided it from the bare moor. He went to the little gate and, leaning his back against it, looked long at the house as though for the first time. He noted the solid simple lines of its long front and the beauty of its heavy mullions and the stone corbels beneath the roof. The portico over the door had pillars of square rough-hewn granite, a whole room was built out over it, with a wide-silled window, beneath which the Ruan arms were carved on a granite shield. That door should have a drive leading up and widening before it; at present what cart-track there was went meekly along the side of the low wall into the farmyard. Those two big velvet-dark yews that stood sentinel either side of the porch would look splendid when clipped taut and square. So he planned, and then, hearing the voice of John-James calling to the cows, he remembered that the utilitarian side of the place must come first; and he went up the path, through the panelled corridor that led through the house, into the court, pa.s.sed under the arch at the opposite side, and so into the farmyard. There the cows were gathering for the milking, swinging slowly into the yard while John-James held open the gate from the field.
They were good cows, but Ishmael glanced at them critically. Cows were to be his chief concern, for the home farm was not large enough to yield much in the way of crops for sale--nearly all would be needed for the winter consumption of his own beasts. Most of the corn sown was the dredge-corn, a mingling of barley and oats sown together and ground together, which was used for cattle, and the roots and hay were all needed also. Even then there would have to be special foods bought, Ishmael decided, for he believed in farmyard manure, and to obtain that at its best the cattle had to be well and carefully fed. These cows he now saw were good enough of their kind, but he wished to start Guernseys or Jerseys, or more probably a cross-breed of the two, as being fitter for the bare country than pure-bred animals.
John-James tramped in behind the last cow and closed the gate. He had made no remark at sight of Ishmael, and all he now said was:
"Them are good cows. Good as any you"ll get up-country I reckon."
"They look all right for their kind," admitted Ishmael.
"Finest in the place. Not like Johnny Angwin"s beasts--high in the bone and low in the flesh. He"m a soft kind o" chap, sure "nough, and sick to his heart at having to take to farming toall. He was in a book-shop to Truro, but had to come home when his brother died. T"other day he come to I and he says, "Oh, John-James Beggoe, my dear, what shall I do? I forgot I did ought to arrange my cows all in steps, so to speak, so that they shouldn"t all calve to wance, and now they"ll all be a doen of it and us won"t get no milk...."" John-James broke off with a chuckle, then resumed with: "Seen the calves yet?"
"No. I suppose they"ve been turned out?"
"Not yet. I"ll wait till the middle of the month before turnen out.
Eight heifers and three bulls there be."
"Well, I"ll see what they look like. Morning, Katie!"