Also, in the course of his three-quarters of an hour he had considered,
for perhaps the hundredth time since he had come to the age of
discretion, what exactly three lives between a man and a title stood
for. Lord Talgarth was old and gouty; Archie was not married, and showed
no signs of it; and Frank--well, Frank was always adventurous and
always in trouble.
Well, I have set down the points, after all. But it must not be thought
that the gentleman with the pointed brown beard and thoughtful eyes, who
at five minutes past twelve went up the two steps into the smoking-room,
locked the doors, as he had been directed, took up his candle and went
to bed, went with an uneasy conscience, or, in fact, was a villain in
any way whatever.
CHAPTER III
(I)
The first spot in Frank's pilgrimage which I have been able to visit and
identify in such a way that I am able to form to myself a picture of his
adventure more or less complete in all its parts, lies about ten miles
north-west of Doncaster, in a little valley, where curiously enough
another pilgrim named Richard lived for a little while nearly six
hundred years ago.
Up to the time of Frank's coming there, in the season of hay-making,
numberless little incidents of his experience stand out, vivid, indeed,
but fragmentary, yet they do not form to my mind a coherent whole. I
think I understand to some extent the process by which he became
accustomed to ordinary physical hard living, into which the initiation
began with his series of almost wholly sleepless nights and heavy
sleep-burdened days. Night was too strange--in barns, beneath hay-ricks,
in little oppressive rooms, in stable-lofts--for him to sleep easily at
first; and between his tramps, or in the dinner-hour, when he managed to
get work, he would drop off in the hot sunshine down into depths of
that kind of rest that is like the sea itself--glimmering gulfs, lit by
glimpses of consciousness of the grass beneath his cheek, the bubble of
bird-song in the copses, stretching down into profound and utter
darkness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account