They looked up the hill again to see that Daniel Brendon no longer
approached them. He had caught sight of Sarah Jane far away, and
already near the summit of Great Links. Instantly he changed his
course, and proceeded directly over the Moor toward her.
Seeking the reason of his action, Agg and Lethbridge also marked
Sarah Jane, now above a mile away on the heights.
"God Almighty, she's run for it--too late!" cried Lethbridge; but Agg
had already left him. He knew that he could cut off Brendon, and
started to do so. They met far below Great Links, and by the time
that they did so Sarah Jane had already reached the summit. She sat
there for a space, took her farewell of the world, drank her last
draught of the glory of the summer sun and the splendour of the
summer earth.
Like a dream picture painted in milk and gold, rich with magic light
even in the pearly shadows, overflowing with the lustre and fervour
of June, Devon spread before her feet and rolled in sunlit leagues to
the horizons of the sea. There lacked no gracious beauty proper to
that scene. It rose beyond perfection to sublimity, lifted her
watching spirit higher than any praise; begot the serene, still
sadness that reigns above all joy.
The mundane matter of Brendon's meeting with Agg interested her but
little. Like the struggle of two ants it seemed in the midst of that
huge loneliness. She saw the figures run together and turn and twist
a moment. Then the lesser was shot violently away and fell
sprawling. The prone atom writhed for a second and was still; the
other came on.
"Poor Walter!" thought Sarah Jane.
Her heart throbbed farewell to the only world she had known; and,
gazing upward, she was glad that the sky shone blue over her death.
As Daniel Brendon stood and gazed upon Ruddyford from the barrows of
White Hill, he had suddenly recollected two former occasions when the
distant farm spread before him with special significance. His first
vision of it in storm came to his mind, and he remembered how that he
had descended, and entered into the life of the place, and toiled
mightily to advance the welfare of the farm and its master. Then
came the moment when, fresh from reading Hilary Woodrow's will, he
had gazed upon the land of promise and, by slow stages, grasped the
tremendous truth that all he saw within these boundaries would
presently be his own. Vividly he remembered that occasion, and how,
lifted by the actual spectacle of Ruddyford, he had turned back again
to the giver and renewed his gratitude. And now he looked upon his
own, and called on his God to shatter it with lightning, to burn it
with fire, to bury it and blot it out, like the cities of the plain.
He hungered to be at the work, to tear its foundations from their
granite roots, to blast the bed it lay on, to leave no trace upon
earth by which man might remember it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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