CHAPTER XXVII

THE WRITING ON THE WALL

To the left the shoulder of Hameldon towered up like a crouching beast of the time before the flood, to the right the bastions of Hooknor cut the skyline and in front lay the moor, wind-swept, cloud-chased, the gathering place of rains between the two seas. Not a moorman's hut was to be seen, only far away on the other side of the hills the shifting light by seconds caught the walls of the great prison, which in this untamed wilderness still brings to the mind the rule of law. Buzzard, heron, crane, badger, otter, fox shot, hunted, preserved, even here in the wilderness, yet still with something of the freedom of the earlier world, before the steam trails marked the iron road. Still over the moor the curlew calls and the moor-fox barks on his rabbit hunting when the dry heath rustles in the scented wind and the rushes bend together in the lap of the peaty stream. On these hills the fiat of the Hebrew lawgiver seemed to Wilmot but the echo from a far-off land as she lay back against a ruined stone wall set up by a people so far distant in time that not even a name remains to them. The crash of broken commandments lost its terror beside the bellowing of distant thunder on the tors to the southward where the clouds chased one another over pathless heights, green where the light fell, and the next moment blue-black with the shadow of the rain-cloud. Wandering mists caught the rocky summits and drifted downwards into the valleys to fall in silver rain. Then the golden light

flashed on the scarred face of the wilder moorland to the right, showing up the black traces of fire and the scurfy patches where the peat had been cut.

As Wilmot watched, waiting for the thoughts that the wilderness can give to those who love her, the scuds of rain left the opposite hill grey with the rain-drops that lodged in the bracken, till the whole slope shimmered like iridescent satin and over the satin passed gigantic shadows, thrown by the racing clouds. It seemed like a phantom army of the bygone races who had tugged for a space at the breasts of the moor-and passed. Iberians, Britons, or Saxons they came and were but shadows, leaving only a few burial cairns, a few memorials to the dead, and most pitiful of all, because most intimate, many hut-circles and hearths. Lying in such a circle, with many more around her shut in by the enclosing double walls of Grimspound, she began to think of the builders. Had the men, but above all, had the women, ever agonized for a right or against a wrong, with a cruder judgment than her own, yet with a judgment human and not bestial? Fear they must have known, and yet what mattered now what they had feared? Did they fall or win: out, the walls fell for

what matter? The hearth-fires burnt just and unjust alike, and only the budding ling shakes where once the crouching women shivered at the wolf-howls outside the double walls. How useless it all was, this struggle for right, for a little measure of honesty against the longing of weakness. One step awry and a lifetime of

struggle. For what?

The moor found no answer but the tout passe that the cloud-shadows speak of, no less than do the hut-circles and rifled cairns. She dug up with her fingers a little fragment of peat made of myriad roots of moor plants. It smelt sweet, as no other earth can smell; soft, friable, an exquisite thing, yet worn from the hardest granite whence the plants

had obtained their food. So underneath the tout passe of the wilderness there was granite: something strong and firm yet not unchangeable, since the everlasting hills change and the tors themselves, now lower than they were, are turning what was lake into marsh and from marsh will give land. It was something strong and firm like the granite, changing with changing ages, yet always there that she wanted, that man wants when the great winds blow the storm-clouds up and the daylight fades and the last fear comes, that loneliness which lies in wait round every milestone-right to the very end that no man knows.

As she watched the moorland a figure appeared on the path to the enclosure. The wind was blowing strongly behind it and brought towards her the scent of tobacco, which smelt like new-baked bread to the starving, for somehow in the sense of masculine calm that came with it, the pain of struggle faded into acquiescence with whatever the next hour might bring. It was Roger Hannaford who must have seen her pass Ponsworthy on her way to the Pound. With feminine half-intent she had hoped he would see her, though not for worlds would she so have acknowledged to herself. The dog caught sight of her and bounded forward, giving a warm lick to her bare feet before she could tuck them under her.

"You've a thorn in your foot," said his master, prosaically, as he too sat down in the hut circle, leaning against the foundation of granite blocks; "let me take it out for you."

He placed her left foot gravely against his bent knee, and as he did so the sensitive flesh seemed to quiver under his touch. It was a shapely foot, because much used to freedom from shoes and stockings; but Wilmot hated him to handle what, for all its shapeliness, always looks in a woman's eyes the least spiritual part of her, the one that

links her most closely with her poor relations of the long ago.

"How did you know I was here?" she said, when the operation had been performed and she was trying to resume her natural tone.

All the thoughts that wandered down the centuries had gone now it is one of man's best gifts to woman—that sense of placidity; without it a houseful of women grows as electric as a cat with its fur stroked the wrong way in a thunderstorm. Moreover, her heart sang out joyfully that he evidently could not bear her out of his sight for a day.

"You are as cold as ice," he said, when she stooped to fold out with her finger a wrinkle in his bent neck as he leant above the foot; "put on your shoes, like a good girl, and let's be off."

"I haven't had my tea yet," she protested; "I brought everything for it, but I was too lazy to get sticks for the fire. Do let's stay here. You can go and get wood and then we shall be warm enough, if we sit close round it in this little house. Do, Roger."

So it was arranged, and they spent the next half-hour collecting withered bracken and dried heath stumps. The kettle was filled from Grim's Lake, that never dries save in extraordinary summers, and at last the fire, placed in the corner of the hut, settled into a steady glow, after the first uprush of flame from the gorse clumps they had first lit. As they ate and drank, crouching close to the fire, the wind crept round their shelter stealthily as the sun began to set. It was getting dark rapidly, for the thunder-clouds were gathering round Hameldon, though neither of them noticed it in their absorption. A nightjar purred down the valley and left the echo behind him; over the heath the curlew began to pipe, crying like a lonely child.

"This is like home," said Roger-"like our home that

will be. How many times will you pile up the logs against my coming in out of the cold? I can see you doing it now."

There was a still undertone of feeling beneath his simple words that moved her like the knell of a passing bell.

"I'm in rather a difficulty, do you know," he said, finding her still silent; "but it's a difficulty that has always been with me, so I ought to be used to it."

"Yes?" she answered interrogatively.

"You see, each generation wants to go one better than the last, but the old one always wants to keep to its own way. And when the old have a strong grip on things, it seems cruel to shake it off with a rough hand."

“I've never known much of that," said Wilmot, trying to see his drift, "for I've hardly counted with mother, I've been so little with her; and as for Uncle Dickie, he's so keen after things, that it's I who have had to race to keep up with him."

"But with my father it is all different. You see, he's spent his life making money and adding a little bit of land to a little bit of land, sometimes buying, sometimes foreclosing a mortgage. He can't see any other way of living than that, now."

“ No, after years of the same thing, of course one would find it impossible to change one's ideas. But isn't it hard to understand any one ever getting into such a rut?”

"Of course, he's made the money. And though it will be mine, it's his now. But I suppose no one, not even so far away from things as we are out here, is left just where his fathers were. You see, I'm a country man first and foremost, and I believe it's the country men who alone can help in the mess the country is in. For the squalid swelter of town can only be broken up by the country man showing that there's still food and life for thousands out here. They