The hasp of the gate against which he had leaned was a little shaky and loose; he found the tools, went to work, and put it to rights. Then he went into the orchard to the garden-house, and examined the gardener’s tools, one by one, to see if they had been roughly used, or injured; if so, the man must pay. The man had been digging; with the lantern in his hand Robert paced the distance dug to see how many yards he had completed.
Robert went to the stable, looked in at Ruy, climbed up into the tallet, and spied about to see if any forage had been stolen. He examined the carter’s collection of horsehair—his perquisite—to see if it was accumulating too fast.
He brought out a stool and saw, and sawed up firewood till he had made a goodly heap. He would have done more, but that would encourage waste. If only a little was cut up, only a little would be used.
He planed a piece of timber intended for the head of a gate. He counted the poles aslant against the woodpile. Nothing else remaining that he could do, he returned to the garden, took off his coat, set the lantern on the grass, and dug where the gardener had left off. While he dug the night went on—the night that was in no haste to do anything; and by degrees a pale light grew up above the eastern horizon. The dawn comes early in summer.
Still Robert dug steadily on till the other mail-cart—the down mail—approached. He stopped and listened; the driver did not pull up, so there were no letters. Robert scraped his boots, put away the spade, blew out the lantern, and went indoors.
By the pale white light he looked again at his bed; but he could not lie down. There was no rest in him that night. He lit his cheap candle and went up into the attic overhead, where he had not been for years. The shutters were perpetually closed up there, so that the place was partly dark, although streaks of dawn came through the chinks. The great bare room was full of ancient lumber.
He set the candle on an oak press and fell to work, sorting the confused mass which strewed the floor. Old chairs—some broken, some perfect—a picture or two, hair-trunks, books, bundles of newspapers, pieces of chain—odd lengths thrown aside—nameless odds and ends, such as candlesticks, parts of implements, the waste of a century, all covered with dust, and dead black cobwebs. Dead cobwebs thick with dust, not the fine clean threads the spider has in use; webs which had been abandoned fifty years ago.
The skeleton of a bird lay at the bottom of a hollow in the pile, perhaps an injured swallow that had crept in there to die. A pair of flintlock pistols, the flints still in the hammers, were in very good condition, scarcely rusted; Robert snicked the locks and examined them carefully. He was black with dust and cobwebs.
Chairs and furniture he threw on one side, boxes on another, papers and books in a corner, and soon began to make order of confusion.
The light of morning came stronger through the chinks; the flame of the candle appeared yellow. The alchemy of light was changing the sky without.
He worked on till footsteps sounded on the paths outside, the carters had come to see to the horses. There was someone at last to drive.
Robert went downstairs, and out to the pump; there he washed himself in the open air, as he had been made to do years and years ago in his stern old father’s time. The habit adhered still; the man was indeed all habit. Then he visited the stables, and began to drive the carters; the night was over, the day had begun.
Overhead and eastwards there shone a glory of blue heaven, illuminated from within with golden light. The deep rich azure was lit up with an inner gold; it was a time to worship, to lift up the heart. Is there anything so wondrously beautiful as the sky just before the sun rises in summer?
There was a sound of carthorses stamping heavily, the rattle and creak of harness, the shuffle of feet; a man came out with a set forehead, grumbling and muttering; the driver was at work.
No one heeded the alchemy proceeding in the east, which drew forth gold and made it shine in the purple.
XXI
Since Robert Godwin could not by the effort of a lifetime have summoned up sufficient imagination to tell his own story, I must do the romance for him, and explain why he could not sleep that night. You now know the man, who could rout about dusty lumber that his hands might be employed, who could not see the sky. Here is his romance.
Nine years ago, that very time of the year, Robert Godwin, starting forth into the fields one day, saw a trespasser in a meadow of mowing-grass. A trespasser rolling about in the sacred mowing-grass, wilfully damaging it—with the aid of a dog, too.
To walk among mowing-grass is a guilty thing, you must understand, in country places. This meadow in particular did not concern Godwin, but the fact of trespassing did; he could not have passed a trespasser without ordering the criminal off any more than a dog could pass a bone. He walked rapidly towards the place, full of hard language, bitter words and threats, swelling with eagerness to drive this daring human being. As he came near he was astounded at the absolute abandon of the youthful sinner; she not only trespassed, she revelled in her wickedness.
It was a girl about ten or eleven, tall for her age, and with her a great spaniel; together they were making themselves joyful in the flower-strewn grass.
Sometimes she ran,
