"I ask your pardon and God's, sir, for the wicked words I said before I
left the parlour. R." He folded this and addressed it with the proper
superscription; and left it lying there.
III
It was a strange ride that he had back from Tansley next morning after
mass.
Dick Sampson had met him with the horses in the stable-court at Matstead
a little after four o'clock in the morning; and together they had ridden
through the pitch darkness, each carrying a lantern fastened to his
stirrup. So complete was the darkness, however, and so small and
confined the circle of light cast by the tossing light, that, for all
they saw, they might have been riding round and round in a garden. Now
trees showed grim and towering for an instant, then gone again; now
their eyes were upon the track, the pools, the rugged ground, the soaked
meadow-grass; half a dozen times the river glimmered on their right,
turbid and forbidding. Once there shone in the circle of light the eyes
of some beast--pig or stag; seen and vanished again.
But the return journey was another matter; for they needed no lanterns,
and the dawn rose steadily overhead, showing all that they passed in
ghostly fashion, up to final solidity.
It resembled, in fact, the dawn of Faith in a soul.
First from the darkness outlines only emerged, vast and sinister, of
such an appearance that it was impossible to tell their proportions or
distances. The skyline a mile away, beyond the Derwent, might have been
the edge of a bank a couple of yards off; the glimmering pool on the
lower meadow path might be the lighted window of a house across the
valley.
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