LIGHT OF AUTUMN
Sent to find granite and bidden to choose a boulder that would split
out, so that needful stone posts might be fashioned from it, Lawrence
Maynard climbed the Beacon and loitered here and there, examining the
great stones that heaved their backs or sides from the earth. For
the master of Falcon Farm was a Venville man and claimed moor rights
extending over stone and turbary.
Lawrence marked certain masses and thrust in sticks beside them, that
presently Joe Stockman might himself ascend and determine, from his
better knowledge, which blocks would yield the needful pillars. For
the farmer was skilled in granite and declared it to be a
good-natured stone in understanding hands.
Lawrence was mastered by his own thoughts presently, and with the
pageant of late autumn flung under his eyes, he sat down where a
boulder protected him from the fierce wind and brooded. From time to
time the vision of things seen broke in.
Upon this canvas, so hugely spread, Nature painted her pictures in
punctual procession, and in some measure Maynard valued them.
Indeed, under the present stress and storm that unsettled the weather
of his mind, he found himself more pervious than of old to the
natural impressions of the Vale.
To-day a north wind shouted overhead, drove the scattered clouds
before it and hummed in organ notes upon the great mass of granite
that capped the Beacon. Then copper red ribbons of beech fell
broadly into the depths below--and, against their fire, the
plantations of the pine wove darker patterns, where they descended in
a gradual arc over the shoulders of the hills, until the air and
space wrought magic upon their distances and swept them together in
one glowing integument for the low lands. There it was as though a
mighty tiger skin had been flung down upon the undulating earth, so
rich in orange-tawny and russet were the forest reaches, so black the
slant shadows thrown by the low sun at spinney edge, along the
boundary of hanging woods, or where open fields broke horizontally
into the kingdom of the trees. There shone green meadows against the
flame of the fall around them; and the ploughed fallows heightened
colour by their contrast. They intruded their tessellate designs,
wrought out in a network of squares and triangles and rhomboidal
forms; they climbed the hills, penetrated the valley depths and
ceased only where the upland ramparts barred their progress with
heath and stone. Shadows flew to dim the splendour and then again
reveal it; nor was the clarity of the air purchased without cost, for
unseen moisture drenched it and sometimes took shape of separate
storms, sweeping in a low, grey huddle over the earth they hid, yet
divided by great sunny spaces. They drew their veils over half a
league of the land at a time, then dislimned and vanished again. And
far away, beyond the last peaks and saliencies southward, stretched a
horizon of dazzling and colourless light, where sea girdled earth and
Devon rolled dark against the liquid brilliance of the Channel lifted
beyond it.
The Vale, with its river winding through the midst, was a frame for
these far-away passages of light and darkness--a setting and
boundary, rich but restrained; for under the sleight of distance, the
glories of the colour, each touch a tiny leaf of gold or crimson,
were cooled and kneaded with shadow and tempered by the blue November
air.
To appreciate the detail of the spectacle, the throb and palpitation
of so much fire, it had been necessary to descend among the forest
glades, where were revealed the actual pigments of all this splendour
and the manner of Nature's painting, touch by touch. Thence the
scene, whose harmonies rang so subdued from the height of the Beacon
above, resolved itself into a riot of colour. Larch and ash were
already grey, and the lemon of the birch, the gold of the elm flashed
out against the heavier bronzes and coppers of oak and beech. The
wood smoke that rose so thinly seen from aloft, here ascended from a
fire in a column of gentian blue under the sunshine, purple against
shadow. Carpets of colour extended where the trees broke--textures
of scarlet whortle and crimson blackberry, bright ivy, jewels of moss
and glittering dead grass. The spindle flashed its fruits, and
aglets and haws sparkled beneath it on briar and bough. There, too,
the sheltered fern had not been beaten flat as on the open heaths
above. It rose shoulder high, delicate in dead but unbroken
filigrees, with many a spider's gossamer and iridescent web twinkling
rainbows upon its amber frondage. The dusky regiments of the
conifers intensified the blaze. Green, or glaucous green, or of a
solid darkness, they massed, and, against them, stems of maiden
birches leapt upward to the last of their foliage, like woodland
candlesticks of silver supporting altar-flame within these far-flung
sanctuaries.
Intermittently Maynard allowed his thoughts to dwell upon these
things spread under his eyes; and he even dipped sometimes into the
communion of the trees and pictured all that lay beneath him; he
could spare a moment to reflect upon the ceaseless battle under the
splendour, and how every tree of these countless thousands had fought
through half a century for its place in the sun. But for the most
part his reflections turned upon himself, though unconsciously the
outward pageant became enwoven with the inward gloom, as long
afterwards he discovered.
He had taken life in an uncompromising spirit of old; he had
displayed a strength of purpose and a grip of his own values in some
measure remarkable for a man, at that time barely beyond his
majority. And now, into a life that he had deemed cut away once and
for all from all further human complexities, was come this unexpected
and supreme problem. Yet such rifts and gleams as had of late been
thrust through his grey existence must now be shut out. For a time
he considered with himself whether this should be so; but he weighed
Dinah's fate more tenderly in the balance than his own. For him,
indeed, the facts did not preclude possibility of actual temptation;
but he had yet to learn how they would affect her. Had he cared to
take consolation there, he might have done so; but what had
encouraged hope in another man, discouraged him. His temptations
were not proof against his principles, and he foresaw that more than
a narration of facts might be necessary when the day came for bare
speech with Dinah. The necessity for any return to the past had
never been anticipated by Maynard; but he had long seen now that one
certainly involved the other. The need for confession troubled him
little; the time of trial must come with Dinah's reception of his
confession. He hoped that she might take such an instant decision
that deeper distresses would be avoided; and yet the very hope seemed
cowardly to him; and sometimes he felt a desire above or below his
own view of rectitude. What promised distress in one mood opened the
gates to a new and a blessed life in another.
He was come, however, to the inevitable place of open dealing: he
must tell her all that still remained hidden from her. With a sense
of relief he felt that more could not be done until that position had
been reached; and for the present he put away from himself any
thought of what would follow his revelation in her mind, or the great
final decision that must be called for from his own.
Then he dropped his affairs for a little while and let the sense of
the immense and outspread earth drift into his thoughts. It
heartened him and inspired him to a dim resolution that a man might
glean something from the purposes of a world so large and splendid,
so that he, too, should rise worthy of his place in it, and largely
and splendidly order his own part amid the great scheme of things.
But he guessed all the time that such poetry only played over the
surface of forthcoming events. It had less power of reality, than
the bubbles on a wave to influence its way. The final pattern of
things lay deep within himself. No man or woman could ever alter the
terms of his own destiny, or change the principles under which he
willed to live. So he imagined.