Blanchard stayed not a moment when the work was done but strode to Newtake like a jubilant giant, while Mr. Blee and Chown, with the horse, tools, and rough sledge, followed more slowly.

The father proceeded homewards at tremendous speed; a glorious hope filled his heart, sharing the same with sorrow and repentance. He mumbled shamefaced prayers as he went, speaking half to himself, half to Heaven. He rambled on from a pet.i.tion for forgiveness into a broken thanksgiving for the mercy he already regarded as granted. His labours, the glamour of the present achievement, and the previous long strain upon his mind and body, united to smother reason for one feverish hour.

Will walked blindly forward, now with his eyes upon the window under Newtake's dark roof below him, now turning to catch sight of the grey cross uplifted on the hill above. A great sweeping sea of change was tumbling through his intellect, and old convictions with sc.r.a.ps of a.s.sured wisdom suffered shipwreck in it. His mind was exalted before the certainty of unutterable blessing; his soul clung to the splendid a.s.surance of a Personal G.o.d who had wrought actively upon his behalf, and received his belated atonement.

Far behind, Mr. Blee was improving the occasion for benefit of young Ted Chown.

"See how he do stride the hill wi' his head held high, same as Moses when he went down-long from the Mount. Look at un an' do likewise, Teddy; for theer goes a man as have grasped G.o.d! 'Tis a gert, gay day in human life when it comes."

Will Blanchard hurried through the farm gate, where it swung idly with its sacred support gone forever; then he drew a great breath and glanced upwards before proceeding into the darkness of the unlighted house. As he did so wheels grated at the entrance, and he knew that Doctor Parsons must be just behind him. Above stairs the sick-room was still unlighted, the long-necked kettle still puffed steam, but the fire had shrunk, and Will's first word was a protest that it had been allowed to sink so low.

Then he looked round, and the rainbow in his heart faded and died.

Damaris sat like a stone woman by the window; Phoebe lay upon the bed and hugged a little body in a blanket. Her hair had fallen down; out of the great shadows he saw the white blur on her face, and heard her voice sound strange as she cried monotonously, in a tone from which the first pa.s.sion had vanished through an hour of iteration.

"O G.o.d, give un back to me; O G.o.d, spare un; O kind G.o.d, give my li'l bwoy back."

CHAPTER VII

GREY TWILIGHT

In the soft earth they laid him, "the little child whose heart had fallen asleep," and from piling of a miniature mound, from a small brown tumulus, now quite hid under primroses, violets, and the white anemones of the woods, Will Blanchard and his mother slowly returned to Newtake.

He wore his black coat; she was also dressed in black; the solitary mourning coach dragged slowly up the hill to the Moor, and elsewhere another like it conveyed Mr. Lyddon homeward.

Neither mother nor son had any heart to speak. The man's soul was up in arms; he had rebelled against his life, and since the death of his boy, while Phoebe remained inert in her desolation and languished under a mental and bodily paralysis wherein she had starved to death but for those about her, he, on the contrary, found muscle and mind clamouring for heroic movement. He was feverishly busy upon the farm, and ranged in thought with a savage activity among the great concerns of men. His ill-regulated mind, smarting under the blows of Chance, whirled from that past transient wave of superst.i.tious emotion into an opposite extreme. Now he was ashamed of his weakness, and suffered convictions proper to the narrowness of an immature intellect to overwhelm him. He a.s.sured himself that his tribulations were not compatible with the existence of a Supreme Being. Like poor humanity the wide world over, his judgment became vitiated, his views distorted under the stroke of personal sorrow, and, beneath the pressure of that gigantic egotism which ever palsies the mind of man at sudden loss of what he holds dearest upon earth, poor Blanchard cried in his heart there was no G.o.d.

Here we are faced with a curious parallel, offered within the limits of this narrative. As the old labourer, Blee, had arrived at the same conclusion, then modified it and returned to a creed in the light of subsequent events, so now Will had found himself, on the evening of his child's funeral, with fresh interests aroused and recent convictions shaken. An incipient negation of Deity, built upon the trumpery basis of his personal misfortunes, was almost shattered within the week that saw its first existence. A mystery developed in his path, and startling incidents awoke a new train of credulity akin to that already manifested over the ancient cross. The man's uneven mind was tossed from one extreme of opinion to the other, and that element of superst.i.tion, from which no untutored intellect in the lap of Nature is free, now found fresh food and put forth a strong root within him.

Returning home, Will approached Phoebe with a purpose to detail the sad, short scene in Chagford churchyard, but his voice rendered her hysterical, so he left her with his mother, put on his working clothes, and wandered out into the farmyard. Presently he found himself idly regarding a new gate-post: that which Martin Grimbal formerly brought and left hard by the farm. Ted Chown had occupied himself in erecting it during the morning.

The spectacle reminded Will of another, and he lifted his eyes to the cross on the undulation spread before him. As he did so some object appeared to flutter out of sight not far above it, among the rocks and loose 'clatters' beneath the summit of the tor. This incident did not hold Will's mind, but, prompted to motion, restless, and in the power of dark thoughts, he wandered up the Moor, tramped through the heather, and unwittingly pa.s.sed within a yard of the monument he had raised upon the hill. He stood a moment and looked at the cross, then cursed and spat upon it. The action spoke definitely of a mental chaos unexampled in one who, until that time, had never lacked abundant self-respect. His deed done, it struck Will Blanchard like a blow; he marvelled bitterly at himself, he knew such an act was pitiful, and remembered that the brain responsible for it was his own. Then he clenched his hands and turned away, and stood and stared out over the world.

A wild, south-west wind blew, and fitful rain-storms sped separately across the waste. Over the horizon clouds ma.s.sed darkly, and the wildernesses spread beneath them were of an inflamed purple. The seat of the sun was heavily obscured at this moment, and the highest illumination cast from sky to earth broke from the north. The effect thus imparted to the scene, though in reality no more than usual, affected the mind as unnatural, and even sinister in its operation of unwonted chiaro-oscuro. Presently the sullen clearness of the distance was swept and softened by a storm. Another, falling some miles nearer, became superimposed upon it. Immediately the darkness of the horizon lifted and light generally increased, though every outline of the hills themselves vanished under falling rain. The turmoil of the clouds proceeded, and after another squall had pa.s.sed there followed an aerial battle amid towers and pinnacles and tottering precipices of sheer gloom. The centre of illumination wheeled swiftly round to the sun as the storm travelled north, then a few huge silver spokes of wan sunshine turned irregularly upon the stone-strewn desert.

Will watched this elemental unrest, and it served to soothe that greater storm of sorrows and self-condemnation then raging within him. His nature found consolation here, the cool hand of the Mother touched his forehead as she pa.s.sed in her robe of rain, and for the first time since childhood the man hid his face and wept.

Presently he moved forward again, walked to the valleys and wandered towards southern Teign, unconsciously calmed by his own random movements and the river's song. Anon, he entered the lands of Metherill, and soon afterwards, without deliberate intention, moved through that d.a.m.nonian village which lies there. A moment later and he stood in the hut-circle where he himself had been born. Its double stone courses spread around him, hiding the burrows of the rabbits; and sprung from between two granite blocks, brave in spring verdure, with the rain twinkling in little nests of flower buds as yet invisible, there rose a hawthorn.

Within the stones a ewe stood and suckled its young, but there was no other sign of life. Then Blanchard, sitting here to rest and turning his eyes whither he had come, again noticed some sudden movement, but, looking intently at the spot, he saw nothing and returned to his own thoughts. Sitting motionless Will retraced the brief course of his career through long hours of thought; and though his spirit bubbled to white heat more than once during the survey, yet subdued currents of sense wound amid his later reflections. Crushed for a moment under the heavy load of life and its lessons, he presented a picture familiar enough, desirable enough, necessary enough to all humanity, yet pathetic as exemplified in the young and unintelligent and hopeful. It was the picture of the dawn of patience--a patience sprung from no religious inspiration, but representing Will's tacit acknowledgment of defeat in his earlier battles with the world. The emotion did not banish his present rebellion against Fate and evil fortune undeserved; but it caused him to look upon life from a man's standpoint rather than a child's, and did him a priceless service by shaking to their foundations his self-confidence and self-esteem. Selfish at least he was not from a masculine standard, and now his thoughts returned to Phoebe in her misery, and he rose and retraced his steps with a purpose to comfort her if he could.

The day began to draw in. Unshed rains ma.s.sed on the high tors, but towards the west one great band of primrose sky rolled out above the vanished sun and lighted a million little amber lamps in the hanging crystals of the rain. They twinkled on thorns and briars, on the gra.s.s, the silver crosiers of uncurling ferns, and all the rusty-red young heather.

Then it was that rising from his meditations and turning homeward, the man distinctly heard himself called from some distance. A voice repeated his name twice--in clear tones that might have belonged to a boy or a woman.

"Will! Will!"

Turning sharply upon a challenge thus ringing through absolute loneliness and silence, Blanchard endeavoured, without success, to ascertain from whence the summons came. He thought of his mother, then of his wife, yet neither was visible, and n.o.body appeared. Only the old time village spread about him with its h.o.a.ry granite peering from under caps of heather and furze, ivy and upspringing thorn. And each stock and stone seemed listening with him for the repet.i.tion of a voice. The sheep had moved elsewhere, and he stood companionless in that theatre of vanished life. Trackways and circles wound grey around him, and the spring vegetation above which they rose all swam into one dim shade, yet moved with shadows under oncoming darkness. Attributing the voice to his own unsettled spirit, Blanchard proceeded upon his road to where the skeleton of a dead horse stared through the gloaming beside a quaking bog. Its bones were scattered by ravens, and Will used the bleached skull as a stepping stone. Presently he thought of the flame-tongues that here were wont to dance through warm summer nights. This memory recalled his own nickname in Chagford--"Jack-o'-Lantern"--and, for the first time in his life, he began to appreciate its significance. Then, being a hundred yards from his starting-place in the hut-circle, he heard the hidden voice again. Clear and low, it stole over the intervening wilderness, and between two utterances was an interval of some seconds.

"Will! Will!"

For one instant the crepitation of fear pa.s.sed over Blanchard's scalp and skin. He made an involuntary stride away from the voice; then he shook himself free of all alarm, and, not desirous to lose more self-respect that day, turned resolutely and shouted back,--

"I hear 'e. What's the business? I be comin' to 'e if you'll bide wheer you be."

That some eyes were watching him out of the gathering darkness he did not doubt, and soon pushing back, he stood once more in the ruined citadel of old stones, mounted one, steadied himself by a young ash that rose beside it, and raised his voice again,--

"Now, then! I be here. What's to do? Who's callin' me?"

An answer came, but of a sort widely different from what he expected.

There arose, within twenty yards of him, a sound that might have been the cry of a child or the scream of a trapped animal. a.s.suming it to be the latter, Will again hesitated. Often enough he had laughed at the folk-tales of witch hares as among the most fantastic fables of the old; yet at this present moment mystic legends won point from the circ.u.mstances in which he found himself. He hurried forward to the edge of a circle from which the sound proceeded. Then, looking before him, he started violently, sank to his knees behind a rock, and so remained, glaring into the ring of stones.

In less than half an hour Blanchard, with his coat wrapped round some object that he carried, returned to Newtake and summoned a.s.sistance with a loud voice.

Presently his wife and mother entered the kitchen, whereupon Will discovered his burden and revealed a young child. Phoebe fainted dead away at sight of it, and while her husband looked to her Mrs. Blanchard tended the baby, which was hungry but by no means alarmed. As for Will, his altered voice and most unusual excitement of manner indicated something of the shock he had received. Having described the voice which called him, he proceeded after this fashion to detail what followed:

"I looked in the very hut-circle I was born, an' I shivered all over, for I thought 'twas the li'l ghost of our wee bwoy--by G.o.d, I did! It sat theer all alone, an' I stared an' froze while I stared. Then it hollered like a gude un, an' stretched out its arms, an' I seed 'twas livin' an' never thought how it comed theer. He 'in somethin' smaller than our purty darling, yet like him in a way, onless I'm forgetting."

"'Tis like," said Damaris, dandling the child and making it happy. "'Tis a li'l bwoy, two year old or more, I should guess. It keeps crying 'Mam, mam,' for its mother. G.o.d forgive the woman."

"A gypsy's baby, I reckon," said Phoebe languidly.

"I doan't think it," answered her husband; "I'm most feared to guess what 'tis. Wan thing's sure; I was called loud an' clear or I'd never have turned back; an' yet, second time I was called, my flesh crept."

"The little flannels an' frock be thick an' gude, but they doan't shaw nought."

"The thing's most as easy to think a miracle as not. He looked up in my eyes as I brought un away, an' after he'd got used to me he was quiet as a mouse an' snuggled to me."

"They'd have said 'twas a fairy changeling in my young days," mused Mrs.

Blanchard, "but us knaws better now. 'Tis a li'l gypsy, I'll warn 'e, an' some wicked mother's dropped un under your nose to ease her conscience."

"What will you do? Take un to the poorhouse?" asked Phoebe.

"'Poorhouse'! Never! This be mine, tu. Mine! I was called to it, weern't I? By a human voice or another, G.o.d knaws. Theer's more to this than us can see."

His women regarded him with blank amazement, and he showed considerable impatience tinder their eyes. It was clear he desired that they should dwell on no purely materialistic or natural explanation of the incident.

"Baan't a gypsy baaby," he said; "'tis awnly the legs an' arms of un as be brown. His body's as white as curds, an' his hair's no darker than our awn w.i.l.l.y's was."

"If it ban't a gypsy's, whose be it?" said Phoebe, turning to the infant for the first time.

"Mine now," answered Will stoutly. "'Twas sent an' give into my awn hand by one what knawed who 'twas they called. My heart warmed to un as he lay in my arms, an' he'm mine hencefarrard."

"What do 'e say, Phoebe?" asked Mrs. Blanchard, somewhat apprehensively.

She knew full well how any such project must have struck her if placed in the bereaved mother's position. Phoebe, however, made no immediate answer. Her sorrowful eyes were fixed on the child, now sitting happily on the elder woman's lap.

"A nice li'l thing, wi' a wunnerful curly head--eh, Phoebe? Seems more 'n chance to me, comin' as it have on this night-black day. An' like our li'l angel, tu, in a way?" asked Will.