To May it was a great pleasure to hear him dilate in this way. Near the house they met Augustus, radiant with smiles, and perfectly loaded with the wooden bottles for the men.
“I knows I’m a fool,” said he; “at least I ought to, since I’m told so forty times a day. But a fool must be sometimes right. ’Pend upon it, there’s nothing like ale!”
At Greene Ferne, May found a letter for her which spoilt the day. It was from her grandfather, Andrew Fisher, of the Warren, written in great anger, and commanding her immediate return home, and to mind and bring that rug with her that had been at Greene Ferne ever since Christmas. The old grasping miser, in his rage, remembered such a trifle as a travelling-rug. Fisher had sent a verbal message for his granddaughter before, which she had ventured to put off; now he wrote in a furious temper, and added at the foot that if that parson ever came a-nigh the Warren again he’d have him ducked in the mill-pool. So bitter had the mere thought made him that Felix wanted his money. There was nothing for it but for May to return, and she asked for her horse to be saddled. Felix could hardly suppress his annoyance. May was much downcast, but Margaret cheered her.
“I will go with you,” she said. “He was always nice to me. He is a regular old flatterer,”—(she peeped in the glass)—“only think, flattering at ninety! But a man must flatter, if he’s a hundred! I shall get over him! I’ll ride my chestnut, and I can stay with you, dear, can’t I? and come back next evening.”
So they left together. Geoffrey, in shaking hands with Margaret, tried to whisper, “May I come and meet you tomorrow evening?” but could not well manage it, Valentine being near.
“Be sure and return by the road, dear,” said Mrs. Estcourt—“the Downs are very lonely if you come by yourself, and you may lose your way.”
“Oh, no,” laughed Margaret. “I love the hills, and I know them all. I must come over the turf, mamma dear.”
Now, Geoffrey heard this, and mentally noted it. He had his horse at Thorpe Hall, and he determined to ride and meet Margaret on the morrow.
V
Evening
“Aw, aim for th’ Tump, measter; aim for th’ Tump,” said the carter, slanting his whip to indicate the direction. “When you gets thur, look’ee, go for th’ Cas’l; and when you gets thur, go athwert the Vuzz toward th’ Virs; and when you gets drough thaay, thur be Akkern Chace, and a lane as goes down to Warren. Tchek! Woaght!”
At the foot of the Downs, along whose base the highway road wound, Geoffrey had paused to take counsel of a carter, who had just descended with a load of flints, before venturing across the all-but-trackless hills. The man very civilly stopped his wagon and named the various landmarks by which he would have guided his own course to Andrew Fisher’s. Geoffrey had started early in the evening, intending to go all the way to Warren House, for he carried with him the rug (strapped to the saddle) which Margaret and May had forgotten, and for which the rude old man had written. This rug, which Mrs. Estcourt gave him, was in fact his passport, for he scarcely knew how Margaret would take his coming to fetch her in that rather abrupt way. Guessing what the man meant more by the slant of his whip than his words, he turned off the road on to the sward, and ascended the hill.
A long narrow shadow of man and horse, disproportionately stretched out, raced before him along the slope. The hoofs of the grey hardly cut the firm turf, dry with summer heat; the vivid green of spring had already gone, and a faint brown was just visible somewhere in the grass. Dark boulder stones—sarsens—bald and smooth, thrust their shoulders out of the sward here and there; hollowed out into curious cuplike cavities, in which, after a shower, the collected raindrops remained imprisoned in tiny bowls hard as the fabled adamant of medieval story. Round white bosses—white as milk, and globular like cannon-shot—dotted the turf, fungi not yet ripened into the dust of the puffball. Now and again the iron shoes dashed an edible mushroom to pieces, turning the pink gills upwards to shrivel and blacken in the morrow’s sun. The bees rose with a shrill buzz from the white clover, which is the shepherd’s sign of midsummer. Swiftly the grey sped along the slopes, the shadow racing before grew longer and fainter as the beams of the sun came nearly horizontally. Already the ridges cast a shadow into the hollows—into the narrow coombes, where great flints and chalk fragments had rolled down and strewed the ground as with the wreck of a titanic skirmish. Thickets of green furze tipped with yellow bloom, and beneath, peeping out, the pale purple heath-flower. On the stunted hawthorn bushes standing alone, stern sentinels in summer’s heat and winter’s storm, green peggles hardening, which autumn would redden and ripen for the thrush. Odorous thyme and yellowbird’s-foot lotus embroidering the grassy carpet; wide breadths of tussocky grass, tall and tough, which the sheep had left untouched, and where the hare crouched in her form, hearkening to the thud of the hoofs.
On past the steep wall of an ancient chalk-quarry, spotted with red streaks and stains as of rusty iron, where the ploughboys search for pyrites, and call them thunderbolts and “gold,”
