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You're going to stay and have tea and I'm going to walk back with you." She stayed. They walked over the moor by Karva. And as they went he talked to her as he hadn't talked before. It was all about himself and his tone was very serious. He told her what he had done and why he had done it and what he was going to do. He wasn't going to stay in Garthdale all his life. Not he.
And she saw Morfe, gray as iron, on its hill, bearing the square crown and the triple pendants of its lights; she saw the long straight line of Greffington Edge, hiding the secret moon, and Karva with the ashen west behind it.
Roddy's beautiful face was bleached and sharpened; the sallow, mauve-tinted skin stretched close over the bone; but below the edge of his cap you could see the fine spring of his head from his neck, like the spring of Mark's head. They were in April now. He was getting better. He could walk up the lower slopes of Karva without panting. "Why are we ever out?" he said. "Supposing we went home?"
It had received the dangerous sanction of the soul. She turned off the high road at the point where, three months ago, she had seen Mary cycling up the hill from Morfe. Now, as then, she descended upon Morfe by the stony lane from the moor below Karva. It came over her that she was too late, that she would see rows of yellow blinds drawn down in the long front of Rowcliffe's house.
The light from the west poured itself in vivid green down the valley below them, broke itself into purple on Karva Hill to the north above Morfe, and was beaten back in subtle blue and violet from the stone rampart of the Edge. Nicholas had been developing, in fancy, the strategic resources of the country. Guns on Renton Moor, guns along Greffington Edge, on Sarrack Moor.
He was the sort of man you could like. They were soon out on the moor. Rowcliffe's youth rose in him and put words into his mouth. "Ripping country, this." She said it was ripping. For the life of them they couldn't have said more about it. There were no words for the inscrutable ecstasy it gave them. As they passed Karva Rowcliffe smiled. "It's all right," he said, "my driving you.
It not only urged him to tremendous heights, it made him actually feel that he would reach them. For a solid three-quarters of an hour, walking over the moor by Karva, he had ceased to be one of the obscurest of obscure little country doctors. And Gwenda Cartaret's eyes never for a moment contradicted him. They agreed with every one of his preposterous statements.
Rowcliffe's motor car tearing up the Dale. The woman in the other room heard it too. She had heard its horn hooting on the moor road nearly a mile away. She raised her hand and listened. It hooted again, once, twice, placably, at the turning of the road, under Karva. She shivered at the sound. It hooted irritably, furiously, as the car tore through the village.
She came down the twelve fields on the south slope of Karva: she could say them by heart: the field with the big gap, the field above the four firs farm, the field below the farm of the ash-tree, the bare field, the field with the thorn tree, the field with the sheep's well, the field with the wild rose bush, the steep field of long grass, the hillocky field, the haunted field with the ash grove, the field with the big barn, the last field with the gap to the road.
He thought of Veronica running about the house and crying, "Where's Nicky? I want him." Monday was like Sunday, except that he walked up Karva Hill in the morning and up Greffington Edge in the afternoon, instead of Renton Moor. Whichever way he went his thoughts went the same way as yesterday. The images were, if anything, more crowded and more horrible; but they had lost their hold.
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