See him on Good Friday afternoon, laughing, eagerly
questioning, a boy--see him on Good Friday night, grim, legs stiff, eyes
cold as stones, a man--no easy thing for Mrs. Pascoe's blowzy thunderings
to conquer, but something vastly amusing apparently to grandfather Westcott
to watch.
He discovered that the sun rose about six o'clock, and therefore five
o'clock on Easter morning found him shivering, in the desolate garden with
his nose pressed to the little wooden gate. The High Road crossed the moor
at no great distance from him, but the faint grey light that hung like
gauze about him was not yet strong enough to reveal it. He would hear them
as they passed and they must all go up that road on the way to the hill.
In the garden there was darkness, and beyond it in the high shadow of the
house and the surrounding trees, blackness. He could smell the soil, and
his cheeks were wet with beads of moisture; very faintly the recurrent
boom of the sea came through the mist, dimmed as though by thick folds of
hanging carpet.
Suddenly the dark trees by the house, moved by a secret wind, would
shudder. The little black gate slowly revealed its bars against the sky as
the grey shadows lightened. Then there were voices, coming through the dark
shut off, like the sea, by the mist--strange voices, not human, but sharing
with the soil and the trees the mysterious quality of the night.
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