It became now all the more necessary to smash Realf. He could no longer be content with keeping just ahead of him; he must establish a sort of two-power standard, and crush his rival to the earth. That was not a good summer for expansiona drought baked up the greater part of Sussex, and there was an insect plague in the hopsnevertheless, Reuben bought thirty-five acres of Boarzell, on the east slope, by the road. He was tormented by a fear that Realf would buy the land if he[Pg 235] did not, and, moreover, during May two boards had appeared advertising it as "an eligible building site"; which was possibly bluff, possibly unusual cunning on the part of Flightshot, made resourceful by its straits.Robert felt warm and glowinghe had enjoyed that dance, and wished he could have danced with Bessie. Perhaps he would dance with her some day.... Behind him, the creak of Harry's fiddle sounded plaintively, with every now and then a hoot from the merry-go-round. The dusk was falling quickly. Yellow flares sprang up from the stalls, casting a strange web of light and darkness over the Fair. Gideon Teazel looked like some carved Colossus as he stood by the roundabout, his great beard glowing on his breast like flames ... behind, in the smeeth of twilight, with the wriggling flare of the lamps, the lump of dancers did not seem to dance, but to writhe like some monster on the green, sending out tentacles, shooting up spines, emitting strange grunts and squallsand at the back of it all the jig, jig, jig of Harry's tune.
"Hush.""Yes, master, but I think they are in bed, and may be have forgotten to rake the ashes over the fire."Little more remains to be said. De Boteler, upon discovering that Byles held Holgrave's land by virtue of the mortgage transferred by the usurer to Calverley, pronounced, in the most summary way, the whole thing illegal. Byles was dispossessed, and the farm, now the largest in the manor, returned to Holgrave, who thus, like old Job, became the possessor of greater wealth after his misfortunes than he had enjoyed before."Then, my lord, I call that man a liar, because he said he found the parchment in the steward's room; and I call him a traitor and a liar, because he got Stephen Holgrave out of the forest of Dean, by saying, that of his own good will, he helped to lay his mother in a church-yard, when he was paid in good broad pieces for doing the work."When he saw them running along the lane from school, or tramping the fields togetherthey were always togetheror helping with the hops or the hay, his heart would stir with a warm, unwonted sense of fatherhood, not just the proud paternal impulse which had visited him when he held his new-born babies in his arms, but something belonging more to the future than the present, to the days when they should carry on Odiam after his death. For the first time he had sons whom he looked upon not merely as labourers to help him in his work, but as men created in his own image to inherit that work and reap its fruits when he was gone.