It was the only time in her life that she ever stood openly by Eliza’s hated son. But perhaps even that one occasion may count in the final sum of things. …
III
Now they had left the high-road and were making southeast through the winding lanes. Their shoulders were turned to the sea, though in that lost world of the mist only the native could tell where the bay was supposed to lie. It was one of the dead hours, too, when even the salt goes out of the marsh-air, and no pulse in it warns you subconsciously of the miracle coming. Between the high-mounted hedges it was still and close, and beyond them the land rose until its dank green surface stood soft against the sky. All the way Simon looked at the land with a critical eye, the eye of the lover which loves and asks at the same time. He looked at the ploughland and knew the rotation through which it had run and would have to run again; at rich grassland which seemed never to have known the steel, and fields which, at rest for a hundred years, still spoke to some long-rusted share. He loved it, but he thought of it first and foremost as good material for the good workman engaged on the only job in the world. It was always the land that he coveted when he came to Blindbeck, never the house. Eliza had made of the house a temple to the god of Blessed Self-Satisfaction, but even Eliza could not spoil the honest, workable land.
The farm kept showing itself to them as they drove, a quadrangle of long, well-kept buildings backed by trees. When the sun shone, the white faces of house and shippon looked silver through the peeping-holes of the hedge, but today they were wan and ghostly in the deadening mist. The turned beeches and chestnuts were merely rusty, instead of glowing, and seemed to droop as if with the weight of moisture on their boughs. The Scotch firs on a mound alone, stark, straight, aloof, had more than ever that air of wild freedom which they carry into the tamest country; and the pearly shadow misting their green alike in wet weather or in dry, was today the real mist, of which always they wear the other in remembrance.
The farm had its back well into the grassy hill, and the blind river which gave it its name wound its way down to it in a hidden channel and went away from it in a hidden dip in a field below. There was water laid on at Blindbeck, as Sarah knew, with a copper cylinder in a special linen-room, and a hot towel-rail and a porcelain bath. Simon’s particular envy was the electric light, that marvel of marvels on a northern farm. He never got over the wonder of putting his hand to the switch, and seeing the light flash out on the second to his call. Once he had sneaked out of the house on a winter’s night, and in the great shippon had turned the lights on full. Eliza, of course, had been nasty about it when she heard, but Will had understood him and had only laughed. Later, swinging a lantern in his own dark shippon, Simon had thought of those switches with envious longing. He did not know that they had taken the warm glamour out of the place, and slain in a blow the long tradition of its beauty. The lantern went with him like a descended star as he moved about, and out of the cattle’s breath wove for itself gold-dusted halos. There had been something precious about it all before, some sense of mystery and long-garnered peace, but tonight he could only remember Blindbeck and its modern toy. For the time being he ceased to feel the pull of the sweetest chain in the world, which runs straight back through all the ages to the Child in the Bethlehem Stall. … There was a billiard-table at Blindbeck, too, with more switches to tempt Simon, and a well-laid tennis-lawn in the neat garden by the stream. On the far side of the farm was a great highway running north and south, as well as a mainline station over the drop of the hill. It seemed as if everything was made easy for those who lived at Blindbeck, from the washing of pots and the moving of stock to the amusement and education of the bairns.
Folk who came to Blindbeck for the first time believed that at last they had found the farm of all their dreams. They called it an Earthly Paradise, a model miniature village, a moral object-lesson, a True Home. They came to it between well-cropped fields, marked by trim hedges and neat stone walls, and through uniformly painted gates secure in hinge and hasp into a tidy yard. They looked with pleasure at the shining knocker on the green house-door and the fruit tree lustily climbing the warm south wall. They looked with delight at the healthy, handsome family, the well-placed buildings and the show of pedigree stock. They looked at Will as he went shyly by, and said that his wife was undoubtedly the better horse. They looked at Eliza and said that she was the Housewife of Romance. When they went away they told others of this Paradise which was Blindbeck, and the others came in their turn and looked and said the same. But to Simon and Sarah it was plain Purgatory and nothing else, and with each gate that they loosed they unloosed a devil as well.
There was a party at Blindbeck this afternoon, as long custom might have led them to expect. It was part of Eliza’s Method to gather a party together when the poor relations were due. There was always a noisy crowd, it seemed to the Simons, when they were tired, or when they had any particular business to transact. On
