Lately, however, he had begun to feel secure, as if he had sunk some of
himself into the earth there, and were rooted for ever. His very soul
seemed to have sunk into that Cornwall, that wild place under the moors.
And now he must tear himself out. He was quite paralysed, could scarcely
move. And at the farm they all looked at him with blank faces. He went
back to the cottage to burn more manuscripts and pack up.
And then, like a revelation, he decided he would come back. He would use
all his strength, put himself against all the authorities, and in a
month or two he would come back. Before the snow-drops came in the farm
garden.
“I shall be back in a month or two--three months,” he said to everybody,
and they looked at him.
But John Thomas said to him:
“You remember you said you would never drive to town again. Eh?” And in
the black, bright eyes Somers saw that it was so. Yet he persisted.
“It only meant not yet awhile.”
On the Monday morning he went down to say good-bye at the farm. It was a
bitter moment, he was so much attached to them. And they to him. He
could not bear to go. Only one was not there--the Uncle James. Many a
time Somers wondered why Uncle James had gone down the fields, so as not
to say good-bye.
John Thomas was driving them down in the trap--Arthur had taken the big
luggage in the cart. The family at the farm did everything they could.
Somers never forgot that while he and Harriet were slaving, on the
Sunday, to get things packed, John Thomas came up with their dinners,
from the farm Sunday dinner.
It was a lovely, lovely morning as they drove across the hill-slopes
above the sea: Harriet and Somers and John Thomas. In spite of
themselves they felt cheerful. It seemed like an adventure.
“I don’t know,” said John Thomas, “but I feel in myself as if it was all
going to turn out for the best.” And he smiled in his bright, wondering
way.
“So do I,” cried Harriet. “As if we were going to be more free.”
“As if we were setting out on a long adventure,” said Somers.
They drove through the town, where, of course, they were marked people.
But it was curious how little they cared, how indifferent they felt to
everybody.
At the station Somers bade good-bye to John Thomas, with whom he had
been such friends.
“Well, I wonder when we shall see each other again,” said the young
farmer.
“Soon. We will _make_ it soon,” said Somers. “We will _make_ it soon.
And you can come to London to see us.”
“Well--if I can manage it--there’s nothing would please me better,”
replied the other. But even as he said it, Somers was thinking of the
evening in town, when he and Ann had been kept waiting so long. And he
knew he would not see John Thomas again soon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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