Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/183

 I am not disappointed. I like them, but they are too young, too happy, and too rich for me not to envy them a little, and though love and jealousy may co-exist, love and envy cannot.

"In all this long letter, my own Walter, I have said nothing of you. You understand why. I dare not. I dare not give utterance to the discouragement which your last vague letter caused me, lest such discouragement should infect you, and by lowering your spirits weaken your efforts. Under these circumstances, and until I hear from you more decisively, I will say nothing, but strive and hope! On my side, there is little striving possible, and I dare not tell you how little hope. "Your own, ""

To the strong, loving, and loyal heart of Walter, a letter from Marian was a sacred treasure, a full, intense, solemn delight. She had thought the thoughts, written the words, touched the paper. When disappointment, distress, depression, and uncertainty accumulated upon him most ruthlessly, and bore him most heavily to the ground, he shook them from him at the bidding of a letter from her, and rose more than ever determined not to be beaten in the struggle which was to bring him such a reward. The calmness, the seeming coldness even of her letters did not annoy or disappoint him; theirs was the perfect love that did not need protestation, that was as well and as ill, as fully and as imperfectly expressed by the simplest affirmation as by a score of endearing phrases. No letter of Marian's had ever failed to delight, to strengthen, to encourage Walter Joyce, until this one reached him.

He opened the envelope with an eager touch, his dark cheek flushed, and a tender smile shone in his eyes; he murmured a word of love as the closely-written sheets met his impatient gaze.

"A long letter to-day, Marian, my darling. Did you guess how sadly I wanted it?"

But as Walter read the letter his countenance changed. He turned back, and read some portions twice over, then went on, and when he concluded it began again. But not with the iteration of a lover, refreshing his first feeling of delight, seeking pet passages to dwell on afresh. There was no such pleasurable impulse in the moody re-reading of this letter. Walter frowned more than once while he read it, and struck the hand in which he held it monotonously against his knee when he had acquired the full unmistakable meaning of it.

His face had been sad and anxious when the letter reached him—he had reason for sadness and anxiety—but when he had read it for the last time, and thrust it into his breast-pocket, his face was more than sad and anxious—it was haggard, gloomy, and angry.

crow has a fair flight westward over the great Wiltshire plain, where the long chalk waves of the old sea bed are now covered with crisp short grass, which by turns the wild thyme purples, and the drifts of thistle-down whiten; and where, beside the graves of Danish kings, wheatears flit from ant-hill to ant-hill, and quick rabbits scud from thorn bush to thorn bush. It is a lonely wind-swept region, whose sentinels are the shepherds wrapped in soldiers' grey great coats, and moodily watching their flocks. Roman roads chequer the plain, British graves dot its surface, Druid circles stud its desolate regions. Old war-dykes traverse it in shadowy lines, marking the spots where Alfred smote the Saxon, or where he fell back towards the Somersetshire marshes, ready to pounce again upon their revelling camps. Sarsen stones and grey wethers point the way to the great temple of Stonehenge, and the haunted clusters of Druid altars at Avebury. Yonder, too, the crow sees here and there the wool-gatherers, those witch-like old women, who creep along the valleys of the Downs, wrenching from the surly thorn-bushes the tufts of wool the branches have snatched from the sheltering sheep.

The wind here, with a free and clear rush of thirty or forty miles, unimpeded by anything more resisting than a clump of firs or a rifle butt, comes laden with oxygen and life. As Mr. Ruskin says of the wind on the Yorkshire wolds, you can lean up against it. It is the most vitalising wind that races over England; and if it were not for the hard Wiltshire beer and the still harder cheese, one hardly knows how Wiltshire men could contrive to die, short of a hundred years old. Free down the land has always been here, free to the shifting flocks of starlings, free to the rabbit and the fox, free to the hare and the greyhound, free to the shepherd and the wool-gatherer. The Downs are quiet enough now—quietest of all on summer Sundays, when the village bells toss their music from valley to valley; quiet at sunset, when the Druid altars grow once more crimson, and the golden bars of the western sky rise like steps to the gate of Heaven, or the last fading rounds of that ladder on which the patriarch saw the angels ascending and descending. It was here round the