ONE:The neighbours despised and mistrusted his enthusiasm. There he was, thinking of nothing but his land, when Harry, his only brother, lay worse than dying. But Reuben often thought of Harry.Harry had not aged so successfully. He was terribly bent, and some of his joints were swollen grotesquely, though he had not had so much truck as Reuben with the earth and her vapours. He was so thin that he amounted to little more than shrivelled yellow skin over some twisted bones, and yet he was wiry and clung desperately to life. Reuben was sorry for thishis brother annoyed him. Harry grew more irritating with old age. He still played his fiddle, though he had now forgotten every semblance of a tune, and if it were taken away from him by some desperate person he would raise such an outcry that it would soon be restored as a lesser evil. He hardly ever spoke to anyone, but muttered to himself. "Salvation's got me!" he would croak, for his mind had been inexplicably stamped by Pete's outrage, and he forgot all about that perpetual wedding which had puzzled him for so many years. "Salvation's got me!" he would yell, suddenly waking in the middle[Pg 384] of the nightkeeping the memory of the last traitor always green.
TWO:In little more than half an hour, they arrived at the meadow in which stood the parish church and the abbey of Hailes. The church, a small, plain Gothic building, with a red tiled roof, stood in the centre of a burial-ground, of dimensions adapted to the paucity of inhabitants in the parish. A low stone wall enclosed it, and some old beech-trees threw their shadows upon the mounds and the grave-stones that marked where "the rude fore-fathers of the hamlet" slept."I d?an't see that. Wot I can do, they can."
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