Sons of the Morning. Eden Phillpotts

I should have paid for the pleasure she's brought me by lessening her own! I hope you're utterly wrong, Yeoland. This is a very unquieting thought."

      The man spoke much faster than usual, and with such evident concern that Christopher endeavoured to diminish the force of his speech.

      "Perhaps I'm mistaken, as you say; perhaps the reason is that we are now definitely engaged. That may have induced gravity. Of course it is a solemn thing for an intelligent girl to cast in her lot with a pauper."

      But Myles would not be distracted from the main issue.

      "Her laughter is characteristic—marvellously musical—part of herself, like bells are part of a fair church. Think of making a belfry dumb by a deliberate act! Honor should always be smiling. A little sister of the spring she seems to me, and her laughter goes to my heart like a lark's song, for there's unconscious praise of God in it."

      Yeoland glanced at the other.

      "You can be sentimental too, then?"

      "Not that, but I can be sad, and I am now. A man may well be so to think he has bated by one smile the happiness of Honor."

      "Sorry I mentioned it."

      "I'm glad. It was a great fault in me. I will try desperately to amend. I'm a dull dog, but I'll——"

      "Don't, my dear chap. Don't do anything whatever. Be yourself, or you won't keep her respect. She hates shams. I would change too if I could. But she'd be down on me in a second if I attempted any reformation. The truth is we're both bursting with different good and brilliant qualities—you and I—and poor Honor is dazzled."

      Stapledon did not laugh; he only experienced a great desire to be alone.

      "Are you going to wait for the badger?" he asked, as they turned and retraced their way.

      "Good Lord, no! Are you?"

      "Certainly. It's only a matter of hours at most. I can sit silent in the fern with my eyes on the earth. I thought you wanted to see him."

      "Not an atom. It's enough for me that he's here in snug quarters. My lord badger will show at moonrise, I expect. You'd better come down to the house and have a drink after the manifestation."

      He tramped away; his footfall faded to a whisper in the fern; and Myles, reaching a place from which the aperture below was visible, settled himself and took a pipe from his pocket from habit, but did not load or light it. He had an oriental capacity for waiting, and his patience it was that had won much of his curious knowledge. A few hours more or less under the stars on a fine summer night were nothing but a pleasure to him. Rather did he welcome the pending vigil, for he desired to think, and he knew that a man may do so to best purpose in the air.

      Once out of sight Christopher also stopped awhile and sat down upon a rock with his face uplifted. The rosy sky was paling, and already a little galaxy of lights afar off marked the village of Chagford, where it stood upon its own proper elevation under the Moor. Thus placed, in opposition to the vanished sun, detail appeared most clearly along the eastern hills and valleys. Cot, hamlet, white winding road stood forth upon the expanse, and while Christopher Yeoland watched the dwindling definition on earth there ascended a vast and misty shield of pearl into the fading sky. Through parallel bands of grey, like a faint ghost, it stole upwards into a rosy after-glow. Then the clouds faded, and died, and wakened again at the touch of the moon, as she arose with heightened glory and diminished girth, to wield a sceptre of silver over sleep. There descended then the great silence of such places, the silence that only country dwellers understand, the silence that can fret urban nerves into absolute suffering. Bedewed fern-fronds gathered light, and flung it like rain across the gloom, and brought far-reaching peace and contentment to the mind of Christopher. He dreamed dreams; he rose in spirit through the moony mist—a dimensionless, imponderable, spirit thing, ready to lose himself in one drop of diamond dew, hungry to fill high heaven and hug the round moon to his heart. For a little season he rejoiced in the trance of that hushed hour; then the moment of intoxication vanished, and he rose slowly and went his way.

      The other man, after long waiting, was also rewarded. From beneath him, where he sat, there came at last a sound and a snuffling. The badger appeared, and the moonlight touched his little eyes and gleamed along his amber side-streaks as he put up his nose, sniffed the air with suspicion, stretched himself, scratched himself, then paddled silently away upon his nightly business through the aisles of the fern.

      CHAPTER VIII.

      OUT OF THE MIST

      The calm awakened of moonlight, as quickly died, and Christopher Yeoland found himself in some uneasiness when he thought of his love. Whereon he based this irritation would have been difficult to determine, but a variety of small annoyances conspired to build it. These trifles, separately, laughter could blow away at a breath, but combined they grew into a shadow not easily dispelled. Already the name of Myles had oftener sounded upon Honor's lips than seemed necessary, even when Stapledon's position and importance at Bear Down were allowed; and now her name similarly echoed and re-echoed in the utterances of her cousin. Still Christopher smiled in thought.

      "It's the novelty of him after me. I'm a mere rollicking, irresponsible brook—only good to drink from or fish in—for ideas; he's a useful, dreary canal—a most valuable contrivance—smooth, placid, not to say flat. Well, well, I must shake Honor up; I must——"

      He reflected and debated upon various courses though immediate marriage was not included amongst them. But a fortnight later the situation had developed.

      Honor and Christopher were riding together over the Moor; and, albeit the physical conditions promised fair enough until sunset-time, when both man and woman turned homewards very happy, yet each had grown miserable before the end, and they parted in anger upon the heathery wastes where northern Teign and Wallabrook wind underneath Scor Hill. For the weather of the high land and the weather of their minds simultaneously changed, and across both there passed a cloud. Over against the sunset, creeping magically as she is wont to creep, from the bosom of the Moor and the dark ways of unseen water, arose the Mist Mother. She appeared suddenly against the blue above, spread forth diaphanous draperies, twined her pearly arms among the stocks and stones and old, wind-bent bushes of the waste. Catching a radiance from the westering sun, she draped the grey heads of granite tors in cowls of gold; she rose and fell; she appeared and vanished; she stole forward suddenly; she wreathed curly tendrils of vapour over sedge and stone, green, quaking bog, still waters, and the peat cuttings that burnt red-hot under the level rays of the sun. Great solitary flakes of the mist, shining with ineffable lustre of light, lessened the sobriety of the heath; and upon their dazzling hearts, where they suddenly merged and spread in opposition to the sun on the slope of western-facing hills, there trembled out a spectral misty circle—a huge halo of colourless light drawn upon the glimmering moisture. Within it, a whitethorn stood bathed in a fiery glow without candescence; and from beneath the tree some wild creature—hare or fox—moved away silently and vanished under the curtain, while a curlew cried overhead invisible. The riders reined up and watched the luminous frolics of the Mist, where she played thus naked, like an innocent savage thing, before them.

      "These are the moments when I seem to glimpse antique life through the grey—wolf-skins and dark human skins, coarse faces, black hair, bead-bright eyes, strange speech, the glimmer of tents or rush thatches through the mist. These, and the bark of dogs, laughter of women, tinkle of stone on stone, where some Damnonian hunter fabricates his flints and grunts of the wood-bears and the way to kill them."

      "Always dreaming, dearest. I wonder what you would have done in those days? Did the Damnonians have Christos too?"

      "Undoubtedly. I should have been a bard, or a tribal prophet, or something important and easy. I should have dreamed dreams, and told fortunes, and imparted a certain cultured flavour to the lodge. I should have been their oracle very likely—nice easy work being an oracle. In it you'll find the first dawn of the future art of criticism."

      "Creation is better than criticism."

      "That's your cousin, I'll swear! The very ring of him. No doubt he thinks so. Yet what can be more futile than unskilful creation?