Page:Walpole - Fortitude.djvu/40

 Peter was crossing a ploughed field, and the rich brown earth heaved in a great circle against the sky and in the depth of its furrows there were mysterious velvet shadows—the brown hedges stood back against the sky line. The world was so fresh and clean and strong this morning that the figure and voice of his grandfather hung unpleasantly about him and depressed him. There were so many things that he wanted to know and so few people to tell him, and he turned through the white gates of Stephen's farm with a consciousness that since Christmas Eve the world had begun to be a new place.

Stephen was sitting in the upstairs room scratching his head over his accounts, whilst his old mother sat dozing, with her knitting fallen on to her lap by the fire. The window was open, and all the sound and smells of the farm came into the room. The room was an old one with brown oaken rafters and whitewashed walls, a long oaken table down the middle of it, and a view over the farmyard and the sweeping fields beyond it, lost at last, in the distant purple hills. Peter was given a chair opposite the old lady, who was nearly eighty, and wore a beautiful white cap, and she woke up and talked incessantly, because she was very garrulous by nature and didn't care in the least to whom she talked. Peter politely listened to what she had to say, although he understood little of it, and his eyes were watching for the moment when the accounts should be finished and Stephen free.

“Ay,” said the old lady, “and it were good Mr. Tenement were the rector in those days, I remember, and he gave us a roaring discourse many's the Sunday. Church is not what it was, with all this singing and what not and the clothes the young women wear—I remember”

But Stephen had closed his books with a bang and given his figures up in despair. “I don't knaw how it is, boy,” he said, “but they're at something different every time yer look at 'em—they're one too many for me, that's certain.”

One of Stephen's eyes was still nearly closed, and both eyes were black and blue, and his right cheek had a bad bruise on it, but Peter thought it was wiser not to allude to the encounter. The farm was exceedingly interesting, and then there was dinner, and it was not until the meal