When he woke the room was bright with narrow strips of sun, already too
high to shine broadly through the doors and windows. His clothes, dry and
comparatively clean, reposed on a chair at his side, and, washing in the
basin which he found outside the door, he hastily dressed. He looked,
tentatively, for the priest, but found only his aged helper in the
roughly-cleared space at the back of the house.
Bartamon was a small man, with a skull-like head, to the hollows of which,
the bony projections, dark skin clung dryly; his eyes were mere dimming
glints of watery consciousness; and from the sleeves of a faded blue
shirt, the folds of formless, canvas trousers, knotted, blackish hands,
grotesque feet, appeared to hang jerking on wires.
"Where's the Father?" Gordon inquired.
The other rested from the laborious sawing of a log, blinking and
tremulous in the hard brilliancy of midday. "Beyond," he answered vaguely,
waving up the valley; "Sim Caley's wife sent for him from Hollidew's farm.
Sim or his wife think they're going to die two or three times the year,
and bother the Father.... But I wouldn't wonder they would, and them
working for Hollidew, dawn, day and dark, with never a proper skinful of
food, only this and that, maybe, chick'ry and fat pork and moldy ends of
nothing."
He filled the blackened ruin of a pipe, shaking in his palsied fingers,
clasped it in mumbling, toothless gums: he was so sere, so juiceless, that
the smoke trailing from his sunken lips might well have been the
spontaneous conflagration of his desiccated interior.
"Hollidew's a terrible man for money," he continued, "it hurts him like a
cut with a hick'ry to see a dollar go. They say he won't hear tell of
quitting his fortune for purgatory, no, nor for heaven neither. He can't
get him to make a will, the lawyer can't. He was telling the Father the
other day, sitting right in the house there, 'Pompey Hollidew,' he says,
'won't even talk will....' He'd like to take it all with him to the devil,
Pompey would." He turned with a sigh to the log. A cross-cut saw, with a
handle at either end, lay upon the ground; and Gordon, grasping the far
handle, helped him to drag the slim, glittering steel through the
powdering fiber of the wood.
As he worked mechanically Gordon's thoughts returned to the past, the past
which had collapsed so utterly, so disastrously, so swiftly upon his
complacency, robbing him of his sustenance, of Clare, of his home. The
complaining voice of the old man finally pierced his abstraction. "If you
are going to ride," Bartamon complained, "don't drag your feet."
The two men consumed a formless, ample meal, after which Gordon still
waited negligently for the priest. The sun sank toward the western range;
the late afternoon grew as hushed, as rich in color, in vert shadows,
ultramarine, and amber, as heavy in foliage bathed in aureate light, as
the nave of a cathedral under stained glass.
In a corner of the shed Gordon found a fishing rod of split bamboo, sprung
with time and neglect, the wrappings hanging and effectually loose. A
small brass reel was fastened to the butt, holding an amount of line. He
balanced the rod in his grasp, discovering it to be the property of the
old man.
"What'll you take for it?" he demanded. His store of money had been
reduced to a precarious sum of silver; but the longing had seized him to
fish in the open, to follow a stream into the tranquil dusk.
"I got some flies too." The other resurrected a cigar box, which held some
feathered hooks attached to doubtful guts. "They are dried out," Gordon
pronounced, testing them; "what will you take for the whole worthless
lot?" Bartamon demurred: the rod had been a good rod, it had been given to
him in the past by a mayor, or had it been a senator? It was not like
common rods, made of six strips of bamboo, but of eight, the line was
silk.... He would take sixty cents.
Delaying his expression of gratitude to the priest--he could stop on his
return with trout--Gordon was soon tramping over the soft, dusty road to
where he bordered a stream skirting the eastern range. A shelf of
pasturage ran, deep blue-green sod, against the rocky wall; to the left,
through scattered trees, the valley was visible; on the right the range
mounted precipitant, verdant, to its far crown. The stream, now torn to
white foam on a rocky descent, now swept with a glassy rush between level,
green banks, now moved slowly in a deep-shaded pool, where gleaming
bubbles held filmed sliding replicas of the banks, the trees, the sky.
The sun, growing less a source of light than a brilliant circle of
carmine, almost touched the western range; the shadow troop swept down the
slope and lengthened across the valley; cut by the trunks of trees the
light fell in dusty gold bars across the water. Gordon drew the line
through the dipping tip, knotting on three of the flies. Then he quietly
followed the stream to where it fell into a circular, stone-bound basin.
He made his cast with a quick turn of the wrist, skilfully avoiding the
high underbrush, the overhanging limbs. The flies swung out and dropped
softly on the water. On the second cast he caught a trout--a silvery,
gleaming shape flecked with vermilion and black, shaded with mauve and
emerald and maroon.
In a shallow reach he waded, forgetful of his clothes. He caught another
trout, another and another, stringing them on a green withe. He cast
indefatigably, but with the greatest possible economy of effort; his
progress was all but soundless; he slipped down stream like a thing of the
woods, fishing with delicate art, with ardor, with ingenuity, and with
continual success.
The sun disappeared in a primrose void behind the darkening mountains; the
hush deepened upon the valley, a hush in which the voice of the stream was
audible, cool--a sound immemorially old, lingering from the timeless past
through vast, dim changes, cataclysms, carrying the melancholy, eloquent,
incomprehensible plaint of primitive nature.
Gordon was absorbed, content; the quiet, the magic veil of oblivion, of
the woods, of the immobile mountains, enveloped and soothed him, released
his heart from its oppression, banished the fever, the struggle, from his
brain. The barrier against which he still fished was mauve, the water
black; the moon appeared buoyantly, like a rosy bubble blown upon a
curtain of old blue velvet. He cast once more, and met his last strike, a
heavy jar that broke the weakened line, in a broad, still expanse where
white moths fluttered above the water in a cold, stagnant gloom. He saw
the rotting wall of a primitive dam, the crumbling, fallen sides of a rude
mill. Night fell augustly. The whippoorwills cried faint and distant.
He sat on a log, draining his shoes, pressing the water from his trousers,
and smoked while the light of the moon brightened into a silvery radiance
in which objects, trees, were greyly visible; reaches sank into soft
obscurity. He recognized his position from the ruined mill--he was on the
edge of that farm of Pompey Hollidew's of which Bartamon had spoken.
Hollidew, he knew, seldom visited his outlying acres, then only in the
collection of rents or profits--they lay too far from his iron chest, from
the communication of the Stenton banks. Gordon knew Sim Caley, and,
suddenly, he decided to visit him; the trout would afford the Caleys and
himself an ample repast.
He crossed the road, made his way through a fragrant tangle of field
grass, over shorn and orderly acres of grazing. The moon rose higher, grew
brighter; the vistas were clear, unreal, the shadows like spilled ink. The
house toward which he moved stood sharply defined, and enclosed by a
fence, flowers, from the farm. As he approached he saw that no lights
were visible, but a blur of white moved in the shadow of the portico. He
decided that it was Sim Caley's wife; and, opening the gate, advanced with
a query for Mrs. Caley's health forming on his lips.
But it was Lettice Hollidew.