Betty swung with the light, firm step of a good walker out on to the highway.To walk upon the fine, smooth old Roman road was a pleasure in itself, but she soon struck away from it and went through lanes and by-ways, following sign-posts because she knew where she was going.Her walk was to take her to Mount Dunstan and home again by another road.In walking, an objective point forms an interest, and what she had heard of the estate from Rosalie was a vague reason for her caring to see it.It was another place like Stornham, once dignified and nobly representative of fine things, now losing their meanings and values.Values and meanings, other than mere signs of wealth and power, there had been.Centuries ago strong creatures had planned and built it for such reasons as strength has for its planning and building.In Bettina Vanderpoel's imagination the First Man held powerful and moving sway.It was he whom she always saw.In history, as a child at school, she had understood and drawn close to him.There was always a First Man behind all that one saw or was told, one who was the fighter, the human thing who snatched weapons and tools from stones and trees and wielded them in the carrying out of the thought which was his possession and his strength.He was the God made human; others waited, without knowledge of their waiting, for the signal he gave.Aman like others--with man's body, hands, and limbs, and eyes--the moving of a whole world was subtly altered by his birth.
One could not always trace him, but with stone axe and spear point he had won savage lands in savage ways, and so ruled them that, leaving them to other hands, their march towards less savage life could not stay itself, but must sweep on; others of his kind, striking rude harps, had so sung that the loud clearness of their wild songs had rung through the ages, and echo still in strains which are theirs, though voices of to-day repeat the note of them.The First Man, a Briton stained with woad and hung with skins, had tilled the luscious greenness of the lands richly rolling now within hedge boundaries.The square church towers rose, holding their slender corner spires above the trees, as a result of the First Man, Norman William.The thought which held its place, the work which did not pass away, had paid its First Man wages; but beauties crumbling, homes falling to waste, were bitter things.The First Man, who, having won his splendid acres, had built his home upon them and reared his young and passed his possession on with a proud heart, seemed but ill treated.Through centuries the home had enriched itself, its acres had borne harvests, its trees had grown and spread huge branches, full lives had been lived within the embrace of the massive walls, there had been loves and lives and marriages and births, the breathings of them made warm and full the very air.To Betty it seemed that the land itself would have worn another face if it had not been trodden by so many springing feet, if so many harvests had not waved above it, if so many eyes had not looked upon and loved it.
She passed through variations of the rural loveliness she had seen on her way from the station to the Court, and felt them grow in beauty as she saw them again.She came at last to a village somewhat larger than Stornham and marked by the signs of the lack of money-spending care which Stornham showed.Just beyond its limits a big park gate opened on to an avenue of massive trees.She stopped and looked down it, but could see nothing but its curves and, under the branches, glimpses of a spacious sweep of park with other trees standing in groups or alone in the sward.The avenue was unswept and untended, and here and there boughs broken off by windstorms lay upon it.She turned to the road again and followed it, because it enclosed the park and she wanted to see more of its evident beauty.It was very beautiful.As she walked on she saw it rolled into woods and deeps filled with bracken; she saw stretches of hillocky, fine-grassed rabbit warren, and hollows holding shadowy pools; she caught the gleam of a lake with swans sailing slowly upon it with curved necks; there were wonderful lights and wonderful shadows, and brooding stillness, which made her footfall upon the road a too material thing.
Suddenly she heard a stirring in the bracken a yard or two away from her.Something was moving slowly among the waving masses of huge fronds and caused them to sway to and fro.It was an antlered stag who rose from his bed in the midst of them, and with majestic deliberation got upon his feet and stood gazing at her with a calmness of pose so splendid, and a liquid darkness and lustre of eye so stilly and fearlessly beautiful, that she caught her breath.He simply gazed as her as a great king might gaze at an intruder, scarcely deigning wonder.
As she had passed on her way, Betty had seen that the enclosing park palings were decaying, covered with lichen and falling at intervals.It had even passed through her mind that here was one of the demands for expenditure on a large estate, which limited resources could not confront with composure.The deer fence itself, a thing of wire ten feet high, to form an obstacle to leaps, she had marked to be in such condition as to threaten to become shortly a useless thing.Until this moment she had seen no deer, but looking beyond the stag and across the sward she now saw groups near each other, stags cropping or looking towards her with lifted heads, does at a respectful but affectionate distance from them, some caring for their fawns.The stag who had risen near her had merely walked through a gap in the boundary and now stood free to go where he would.
"He will get away," said Betty, knitting her black brows.
Ah! what a shame!
Even with the best intentions one could not give chase to a stag.She looked up and down the road, but no one was within sight.Her brows continued to knit themselves and her eyes ranged over the park itself in the hope that some labourer on the estate, some woodman or game-keeper, might be about.