The rebel army capitulated to the King in the early hours of Sunday morning. There was no escape by sea for the hundreds of men herded on the beaches. Only one fishing boat put forth from Fowey bound for Plymouth, in the dim light before dawn, and she carried in her cabin the Lord General the Earl of Essex, and his adviser, Lord Robartes. So much we learned later, and we learned too that Matty’s scullion had proved faithful to his promise and borne his message to Sir Jacob Astley at Bodinnick on the Friday evening. But by the time word had reached His Majesty, the outposts upon the road were warned and the Parliament horse had successfully broken through the Royalist lines, and made good their escape to Saltash. So, by a lag in time, over two thousand rebel horse got clean away to fight another day, a serious mishap which was glossed over by our forces in the heat and excitement of the big surrender, and I think the only one of our commanders to go nearly hopping mad at the escape was Richard Grenvile.
It was, I think, most typical of his character that when he sent a regiment of his foot to come to our succor on that Sunday morning, bringing us food from their own wagons, he did not come himself, but forwarded me this brief message, stopping not to consider whether I lived or died, or whether his son was with me still: “You will soon learn,” he wrote, “that my plan has only partially succeeded. The horse have got away, all owing to that besotted idiot Goring lying in a stupor at his headquarters, and permitting—you will scarcely credit it—the rebels to slip through his lines without as much as a musket shot at their backsides. May God preserve us from our own commanders. I go now in haste to Saltash in pursuit, but have little hope of overtaking the sods, if Goring, with his cavalry, has already failed.”
First a soldier, last a lover, my Richard had no time to waste over a starving household and a crippled woman who had let a whole house be laid waste about her for the sake of the son he did not love. So it was not the father after all who carried the fainting lad into my chamber once again, and laid him down, but poor sick John Rashleigh, who crawling for the second time into the tunnel beneath the summerhouse, found Dick unconscious in the buttress cell, tugged at the rope, and so opened the hinged stone into the room.
This was about nine o’clock on the Saturday night, after the house had been abandoned by the rebels, and we were all too weak to do much more than smile at the Royalist foot when they beat their drums under our gaping windows on the Sunday morning.
The first necessity was milk for the children and bread for ourselves, and later in the day, when we had regained a little measure of our strength and the soldiers had kindled a fire for us in the gallery—the only room left livable—we heard once more the sound of horses, but this time heartening and welcome, for they were our own men coming home. I suppose I had been through a deal of strain those past four weeks, something harder than the others because of the secret I had guarded; and so, when it was over, I suffered a strange relapse, accentuated, maybe, by natural weakness, and had not the strength for several days to lift my head. The scenes of joy and reunion, then, were not for me. Alice had her Peter, Elizabeth her John of Coombe, Mary had her Jonathan, and there was kissing, and crying, and kissing again, and all the horrors of our past days to be described, and the desolation to be witnessed. But I had no shoulder on which to lean my head, and no breast to weep upon. A truckle bed from the attic served me for support, this being one of the few things found that the rebels had not destroyed. I recollect that my brother-in-law bent over me when he returned, and praised me for my courage, saying that John had told him everything and I had acted as he would have done himself, had he been home. But I did not want my brother-in-law. I wanted Richard. And Richard had gone to Saltash, chasing rebels. All the rejoicing came as an anticlimax. The bells pealing in Fowey Church, echoed by the bells at Tywardreath, and His Majesty summoning the gentlemen of the county to his headquarters at Boconnoc and thanking them for their support—he presented Jonathan with his own lace handkerchief and prayer book—and a sudden wild thanksgiving for deliverance and for victory, seemed premature to me, and strangely sour. Perhaps it was some fault in my own character, some cripple quality, but I turned my face to the wall, and my heart was heavy. The war was not over, for all the triumphs in the west. Only Essex had been defeated, and his eight thousand men. There were many thousands in the north and east of England who had yet to show their heels. “And what is it all for?” I thought. “Why can they not make peace? Is it to continue thus, with the land laid waste, and houses devastated, until we are all grown old?”
Victory had a hollow sound, with our enemy Lord Robartes in command at Plymouth, still stubbornly defended, and there was something narrow and parochial in thinking the war over because Cornwall was now free. It was the second day of our release, when the menfolk had ridden off to Boconnoc to take leave of His Majesty, that I heard the sound of wheels in the outer court, and preparation for departure, and then those wheels creaking over the cobbles and disappearing through the park. I was too tired then to question it, but later in the day, when Matty came to me, I asked her who it was that went away from Menabilly in so confident a fashion. “Who else could it be,” Matty answered, “but Mrs. Denys?” So Gartred, like a true gambler, had thought best to cut her losses and be quit of us.
“How did she find the transport?” I inquired.
Matty sniffed as she wrung out a piece of cloth to bathe my back. “There was a gentleman she knew, it seems, among the Royalist party who rode hither yesterday with Mr. Rashleigh. A Mr. Ambrose Manaton. And it’s he who has provided her the escort for today.”
I smiled, in spite of myself. However much I hated Gartred I had to bow to the fashion in which she landed on her feet in all and every circumstance.
“Did she see Dick,” I asked, “before she left?”
“Aye,” said Matty. “He went up to her at breakfast and saluted her. She stared at him amazed—I watched her. And then she asked him, ‘Did you come in the morning with the infantry?’ and he grinned like a little imp, and answered: ‘I have been here all the time.’ ”
“Imprudent lad,” I said. “What did she say to him?”
“She did not answer for a moment, Miss Honor, and then she smiled—you know her way—and said, ‘I might have known it. You may tell your jailer you are not worth one bar of silver.’ ”
“And that was all?”
“That was all. She went soon after. She’ll never come again to Menabilly.” And Matty rubbed my sore back with her hard, familiar hands. But Matty was wrong, for Gartred did come again to Menabilly, as you shall hear, and the man who brought her was my own brother. But I run ahead of my story, for we are still in September ’44.
That first week, while we recovered our strength, my brother-in-law and his steward set to work to find out what it would cost to make good the damage that had been wrought upon his house and his estate. The figure was colossal, and beyond his means. I can see him now, seated in one corner of the gallery, reading from his great account book, every penny he had lost meticulously counted and entered in the margin. It would take months, nay years, he said, to restore the house and bring back the estate to its original condition. While the war lasted no redress would be forthcoming. After the war, so he was told, the Crown would see that he was not the loser. I think Jonathan knew the value of such promises, and, like me, he thought the rejoicings in the west were premature. One day the rebels might return again, and next time the scales be turned.
In the meantime, all that could be done was to save what was left of the harvest—and that but one meadow of fourteen acres which the rebels had left uncut but the rain had well-nigh ruined.
Since his house in Fowey had been left bare in the same miserable fashion as Menabilly, his family, in their turn, were homeless, and the decision was now made among us to divide. The Sawles went to their brother at Penrice, and the Sparkes to other relatives at Tavistock. The Rashleighs themselves, with children, split up among near neighbors until a wing of Menabilly should be repaired. I was for returning to Lanrest until I learned, with a sick heart, that the whole house had suffered a worse fate than Menabilly and was wrecked beyond hope of restoration.
There was nothing for it but to take shelter for the time being with my brother Jo at Radford, for although Plymouth was still held by Parliament the surrounding country was safe in Royalist hands, and the subduing of the garrison and harbor was only, according to our optimists, a matter of three months at the most.
I would have preferred, had the choice been offered me, to live alone in one bare room at Menabilly than repair to Radford and the stiff household of my brother, but alas! I had become in a few summer months but another of the vast number of homeless people, turned wanderer through war, and must swallow pride and be grateful for hospitality, from whatever direction it might come.
I might have gone to my sister Cecilia at Mothercombe or my sister Bridget at Holberton, both of whom were pleasanter companions than my brother Jo, whose official position in the county of Devon had turned him somewhat cold and proud, but I chose Radford for the reason that it was close to Plymouth—and Richard was once more Commander of the Siege. What hopes I had of seeing him, God only knew, but I was sunk deep now in the mesh I had made for myself, and waiting for a word from him, or a visit of an hour, had become my sole reason for existence.
“Why cannot you come with me to Buckland?” pleaded Dick, for the tutor, Herbert Ashley, had been sent to fetch him home. “I would be content at Buckland, and not mind my father, if you could come too and stand between us.”
“Your father,” I answered him, “has enough work on his hands without keeping house for a crippled woman.”
“You are not crippled,” declared the boy with passion. “You are only weak about the legs, and so must sit confined to your chair. I would tend you, and wait upon you, hour by hour with Matty, if you would but come with me to Buckland.”
I smiled, and ran my hand through his dark curls.
“You shall come and visit me at Radford,” I said, “and tell me of your lessons. How you fence, and how you dance, and what progress you make in speaking French.”
“It will not be the same,” he said, “as living here with you in the house. Shall I tell you something? I like you best of all the people that I know—next to my own mother.”
Ah, well, it was an achievement to be second once again to Mary Howard. The next day he rode away in company with his tutor, turning back to wave to me all the way across the park, and I shed a useless, sentimental tear when he was gone from me.
What might have been—what could have been. These are the saddest phrases in our English tongue. And back again, pell-mell would come the fantasies; the baby I had never borne, the husband I would never hold. The sickly figures in an old maid’s dream, so Gartred would have told me.
Yes, I was thirty-four, an old maid and a cripple; but sixteen years ago I had had my moment, which was with me still, vivid and enduring, and by God I swear I was happier with my one lover than Gartred ever had been with her twenty.
So I set forth upon the road again and turned my back on Menabilly, little thinking that the final drama of the house must yet be played with blood and tears, and I kissed my dear Rashleighs one and all and vowed I would return to them as soon as they could have me.
Jonathan escorted me in my litter as far as Saltash, where Robin came to meet me. I was much shaken, not by the roughness of the journey, but by the sights I had witnessed on the road. The aftermath of war was not a pleasant sight to the beholder.
The country was laid waste, for one thing, and that was the fault of the enemy. The corn was ruined, the orchards devastated, the houses smoking. And in return for this the Cornish people had taken toll upon the rebel prisoners. There were many of them still lying in the ditches, with the dust and flies upon them. Some without hands and feet, some hanging downwards from the trees. And there were stragglers who had died upon the road, in the last retreat, too faint to march from Cornwall—and these had been set upon and stripped of their clothing and left for the hungry dogs to lick.
I knew then, as I peered forth from the curtains of my litter, that war can make beasts of every one of us, and that the men and women of my own breed could act even worse in warfare than the men and women of the eastern counties. We had, each one of us, because of the civil war, streaked back two centuries in time, and were become like those half savages of the fourteen hundreds who, during the Wars of the Roses, slit each other’s throats without compunction.
At Saltash there were gibbets in the market square, with the bodies of rebel troopers hanging upon them scarcely cold, and as I turned my sickened eyes away from them I heard Jonathan inquire of a passing soldier what faults they had committed.
He grinned, a fine tall fellow, with the Grenvile shield on his shoulder. “No fault,” he said, “except that they are rebels, and so must be hanged, like the dogs they are.”
“Who gave the order, then?”
“Our General, of course. Sir Richard Grenvile.”
Jonathan said nothing, but I saw that he looked grave, and I leaned back upon my cushions, feeling, because it was Richard’s doing and I loved him, that the fault was somehow mine and I was responsible. We halted there that night, and in the morning Robin came, with an escort, to conduct me across the Tamar and so through the Royalist lines outside the Plymouth defenses, round to Radford.
Robin looked well and bronzed, and I thought again with cynicism how men, in spite of protestations about peace, are really bred to war and thrive upon it. He was not under Richard’s command, but was colonel of foot under Sir John Berkeley, in the army of Prince Maurice, and he told us that the King had decided not to make a determined and immediate assault upon Plymouth after all, but leave it to Grenvile to subdue by slow starvation, while he and Prince Maurice marched east out of Devon towards Somerset and Wiltshire, there to join forces with Prince Rupert and engage the Parliament forces which were still unsubdued. I thought to myself that Richard would reckon this bad strategy, for Plymouth was no pooping little town, but the finest harbor in all England next to Portsmouth, and for His Majesty to gain the garrison, and have command also of the sea, was of very great importance. Slow starvation had not conquered it before; why then should it do so now? What Richard needed for assault was guns and men. But I was a woman, and not supposed to have knowledge of these matters. I watched Robin and Jonathan in conversation and caught a murmur of the word “Grenvile,” and Robin say something about “harsh treatment of the prisoners” and “Irish methods not suiting Devon men,” and I guessed that Richard was already getting up against the county. No doubt I would hear more of this at Radford.
No one hated cruelty more than I did, nor deplored the streak of it in Richard with greater sickness of heart, but as we traveled towards Radford, making a great circuit of the forts around Plymouth, I noticed with secret pride that the only men who carried themselves like soldiers were those who wore the Grenvile shields on their shoulders. Some of Goring’s horse were quartered by St. Budeaux and they were lolling about the village, drinking with the inhabitants, while a sentry squatted on a stool, his great mouth gaping in a yawn, his musket lying at his feet. From the nearby inn came a group of officers, laughing and very flushed, but the sentry did not leap to his feet when he observed them. Robin joined the officers a moment, exchanging greetings, and as we passed through the village he told me that the most flushed of the group was Lord Goring himself, a very good fellow, and a most excellent judge of horses.
“Does that make him a good commander?” I asked.
“He is full of courage,” said Robin, “and will ride at anything. That is all that matters.” And he proceeded to tell me about a race which had been run the day before, under the very nose of the rebels, and how Lord Goring’s chestnut had beaten Lord Wentworth’s roan by half a neck. “Is that how Prince Maurice’s army conducts its war?” I asked. Robin laughed—he too thought it all very fine sport.
But the next post we passed was held by Grenvile men. And here there was a barrier across the road, with armed sentries standing by it, and Robin had to show his piece of paper, signed by Sir John Berkeley, before we could pass through. An officer barked an order to the men, and they removed the barrier. There were perhaps a score of them standing by the postern, cleaning their equipment; they looked lean and tough, with an indefinable quality about them that stamped them Grenvile men. I would have known them on the instant had I not seen the scarlet pennant by the postern door, with the three golden rests staring from the center, capped by a laughing gryphon.
We came at length by Plymstock to Radford, and my brother’s house, and as I was shown to my apartments looking north over the river towards the Cattwater and Plymouth I thought of my eighteenth birthday long ago, and how Richard had sailed into the Sound with the Duke of Buckingham. It seemed a world ago, and I another woman. My brother was now a widower, for Elizabeth Champernowne had died a few years before the war in childbed, and my youngest brother Percy, with his wife Phillipa, had come to live with him and look after Jo’s son, John, a child of seven, since they themselves were childless. I had never cared much for Radford, even as a girl, and now within its austere barrack precincts I found myself homesick, not so much for Lanrest and the days that were gone, but for my last few months at Menabilly. The danger I had known there, and the tension I had shared, had, in some strange fashion, rendered the place dear to me. The gatehouse between the courtyards, the long gallery, the causeway that looked out to the Gribben and the sea, seemed to me now, in retrospect, my own possession, and even Temperance Sawle with her prayers and Will Sparke with his high-pitched voice were people for whom I felt affection because of the siege we had each of us endured. The fighting did not touch them here at Radford, for all its proximity to Plymouth, and the talk was of the discomfort they had to bear by living within military control.
Straight from a sacked house and starvation, I wondered that they should think themselves ill used, with plenty of food upon the table; but no sooner had we sat down to dinner (I had not the face to demand it, the first evening, in my room) than Jo began to hold forth, with great heat, upon the dictatorial manners of the army. “His Majesty has thought fit,” he said, “to confer upon Richard Grenvile the designation of General in the West. Very good. I have no word to say against the appointment. But when Grenvile trades upon the title to commandeer all the cattle within a radius of thirty miles or more to feed his army, and rides roughshod over the feelings of the county gentry with the one sentence ‘Military necessities come first,’ it is time that we all protested.”
If Jo remembered my old alliance with Richard, the excitement of the moment had made him conveniently forget it. Nor did he know that young Dick had been in my care at Menabilly the past weeks. Robin, too, full of his own commander, Berkeley, was pleased to agree with Jo. “The trouble with Grenvile,” said Robin, “is that he insists upon his fellows being paid. The men in his command are like hired mercenaries. No free quarter, no looting, no foraging as they please, and all this comes very hard upon the pockets of people like yourself, who must provide the money.”
“Do you know,” continued Jo, “that the Commissioners of Devon have been obliged to allot him one thousand pounds a week for the maintenance of his troops? I tell you, it hits us very hard.”
“It would hit you harder,” I said, “if your house was burned down by the Parliament.”
They stared at me in surprise, and I saw young Phillipa look at me in wonder for my boldness. Woman’s talk was not encouraged at Radford. “That, my dear Honor,” said Jo coldly, “is not likely to happen.” And, turning his shoulder to me, he harped on the outraged Devon gentry, and how this new-styled General in the West had coolly told them he had need of all their horses and their muskets in this siege of Plymouth, and if they did not give them to him voluntarily he would send a company of his soldiers to collect them.
“The fellow is entirely without scruples, no doubt of that,” said Percy, “but in fairness to him I must say that all the country people tell me they would rather have Grenvile’s men in their villages than Goring’s. If Grenvile finds one of his own fellows looting, he is shot upon the instant. But Goring’s men are quite out of control, and drunk from dawn to dusk.”
“Oh, come,” frowned Robin, “Goring and his cavalry are entitled to a little relaxation, now that the worst is over. No sense in keeping fellows standing to attention all day long.”
“Robin is right,” said Jo. “A certain amount of license must be permitted, to keep the men in heart. We shall never win the war otherwise.”
“You are more likely to lose it,” I said, “by letting them loll about the villages with their tunics all undone.”
The statement was rendered the more unfortunate by a servant entering the room upon this instant and announcing Sir Richard Grenvile. He strode in with his boots ringing on the stone flags, in that brisk way I knew so well, totally unconscious of himself or the effect he might produce, and with a cool nod to Jo, the master of the house, he came at once to me and kissed my hand.
“Why the devil,” he said, “did you come here and not to Buckland?” That he at once put me at a disadvantage among my relatives did not worry him. I murmured something about my brother’s invitation, and attempted to introduce him to the company. He bowed to Phillipa, but turned back immediately to me.
“You’ve lost that weight that so improved your person,” he said. “You’re as thin as a church mouse.”
“So would you be,” I answered, “if you’d been held prisoner by the rebels for four weeks.”
“The whelp is asking for you all day long,” said Richard. “He dins your praises in my ears till I am sick of them. I have him outside, with Joseph. Hi! spawn!” He turned on his heels, bawling for his son. I think I never knew of any man, save Richard, who could in so brief a moment fill a room with his presence and become, as it were, the master of a house that was in no way his. Jo stood at his own table, his napkin in his hand, and Robin too, and Percy, and they were like dumb servants waiting for the occasion, while Richard took command. Dick crept in cautiously, timid and scared as ever, his dark eyes lighting at the sight of me, and behind him strode young Joseph Grenvile, Richard’s kinsman and aide-de-camp, his features and his coloring so like his general’s as to make me wonder and not for the first time, God forgive my prying mind, whether Richard had been purposely vague about the relationship between them, and whether he was not as much his son as Dick was. God damn you, I thought, begetting sons about the countryside before I was even crippled. “Have you all dined?” said Richard, reaching for a plum. “These lads and I could eat another dinner.” Jo, with heightened color and a flea in his ear, as the saying goes, called the servants to bring back the mutton. Dick squeezed himself beside me, like a small dog regaining his lost mistress, and while they ate Richard declaimed upon the ill-advisability of the King having marched east without first seeing Plymouth was subdued.
“It’s like talking to a brick wall, God bless him,” said Richard, his mouth full of mutton. “He knows no more of warfare than this dead sheep I swallow.” I saw my brothers look at one another in askance, that a general should dare to criticize his king. “I’ll fight in his service until there’s no breath left in my body,” said Richard, “but it would make it so much simpler for the country if he would ask advice of soldiers. Put some food into your belly, spawn. Don’t you want to grow as fine a man as Jo here?” I saw Dick glance under his eyes at Joseph with a flicker of jealousy. Jo then was the favorite, no doubt about that. What a world of difference between them, too—the one so broad shouldered, big, and auburn haired; the other little, with black hair and eyes. I wonder, I thought grudgingly, what buxom country girl was Joseph’s mother, and if she still lived, and what had happened to her? But while I pondered the question, as jealous as young Dick, Richard continued talking. “It’s that damned lawyer who’s to blame,” he said; “that fellow Hyde, an upstart from God knows what sniveling country town, and now jumped into favor as Chancellor of the Exchequer. His Majesty won’t move a finger without asking his advice. I hear Rupert has all but chucked his hand in, and returned to Germany. Depend upon it, it’s fellows like this one who will lose the war for us.”
“I have met Sir Edward Hyde,” said my brother. “He seemed to me a very able man.”
“Able my arse,” said Richard. “Anyone who jiggles with the Treasury must be double-faced to start with. I’ve never met a lawyer yet who didn’t line his own pockets before he fleeced his clients.” He tapped young Joseph on the shoulder. “Give me some tobacco,” he said. The youngster produced a pipe and pouch from his coat. “Yes, I hate the breed,” said Richard, blowing a cloud of smoke across the table, “and nothing affords me greater pleasure than to see them trounced. There was a fellow called Braband, who acted as attorney for my wife against me in the Star Chamber in the year ’33—a neighbor of yours, Harris, I believe?”
“Yes,” said my brother coldly, “and a man of great integrity devoted to the King’s cause in this war.”
“Well, he’ll never prove that now,” said Richard. “I found him creeping about the Devon lanes disguised the other day, and seized the occasion to arrest him as a spy. I’ve waited eleven years to catch that blackguard.”
“What have you done to him, sir?” asked Robin.
“He was disposed of,” said Richard, “in the usual fashion. No doubt he is doing comfortably in the next world.”
I saw young Joseph hide his laughter in his wineglass, but my three brothers gazed steadfastly at their plates.
“I daresay,” said my eldest brother slowly, “that I should be very ill advised if I attempted to address to you, General, a single word of criticism, but…”
“You would, sir,” said Richard, “be extremely ill advised.” And, laying his hand a moment on Joseph’s shoulder he rose from the table. “Go on, lads, and get your horses. Honor, I will conduct you to your apartment. Good evening, gentlemen.”
I felt that whatever reputation I might have for dignity in the eyes of my family was gone to the winds forever as he swept me to my room. Matty was sent packing to the kitchen, and he lay me on my bed and sat beside me.
“You had far better,” he said, “return with me to Buckland. Your brothers are all asses. As for the Champernownes, I have a couple of them on my staff, and both are useless. You remember Edward, the one they wanted you to marry? Dead from the neck upwards.”
“And what would I do at Buckland,” I said, “among a mass of soldiers. What would be thought of me?”
“You could look after the whelp,” he said, “and minister to me in the evening. I get very tired of soldiers’ company.”
“There are plenty of women,” I said, “who could give you satisfaction.”
“I have not met any,” he said.
“Bring them in from the hedgerows,” I said, “and send them back again in the morning. It would be far less trouble than having me upon your hands from dawn till dusk.”
“My God,” he said, “if you think I want to bounce about with some fat female after a hard day’s work sweating my guts out before the walls of Plymouth, you flatter my powers of resilience. Keep still, can’t you, while I kiss you?”
Below the window, in the drive, Jo and Dick paced the horses up and down. “Someone,” I said, “will come into the room.”
“Let them,” he answered. “What the hell do I care?”
I wished that I could have the same contempt for my brother’s house as he had. It was dark by the time he left, and I felt as furtive as I had done at eighteen when slipping from the apple tree.
“I did not come to Radford,” I said weakly, “to behave like this.”
“I have a very poor opinion,” he answered, “of whatever else you came for.”
I thought of Jo and Robin, Percy and Phillipa, all sitting in the hall below, and the two lads pacing their horses under the stars.
“You have placed me,” I said, “in a most embarrassing position.”
“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” he said. “I did that to you sixteen years ago.” As he stood there, laughing at me, with his hand upon the door, I had half a mind to throw my pillow at him.
“You and your double-faced attorneys,” I said. “What about your own two faces? That boy out there—your precious Joseph—you told me he was your kinsman?”
“So he is,” he grinned.
“Who was his mother?”
“A dairymaid at Killigarth. A most obliging soul. Married now to a farmer, and mother of his twelve sturdy children.”
“When did you discover Joseph?”
“A year or so ago, on returning from Germany, and before I went to Ireland. The likeness was unmistakable. I took some cheeses and a bowl of cream off his mother, and she recalled the incident, laughing with me, in her kitchen. She bore no malice. The boy was a fine boy. The least I could do was to take him off her hands. Now I wouldn’t be without him for the world.”
“It is the sort of tale,” I said sulkily, “that leaves a sour taste in the mouth.”
“In yours, perhaps,” he said, “but not in mine. Don’t be so mealymouthed, my loved one.”
“You lived at Killigarth,” I said, “when you were courting me.”
“God damn it,” he said, “I didn’t ride to see you every day.”
I heard them all in a moment laughing beneath my window, and then mount their horses and gallop away down the avenue, and as I lay upon my bed, staring at the ceiling, I thought how the blossom of my apple tree, so long dazzling and fragrant white, had a little lost its sheen and was become, after all, a common apple tree; but that the realization of this, instead of driving me to torments as it would have done in the past, could now, because of my four-and-thirty years, be borne with equanimity.