Chapter 9

Reuben drove slowly homewards through the brooding October dusk. The music of the Fair crept after him up the Foreign, and from the crest he could see the booths and stalls looking very small in the low fields by the Rother. "I wouldn't leave my little wooden hut for you," played the merry-go-round, and there was some mysterious quality in that distant tune which made Reuben whip the old horse over the hill, so as to be out of reach of it.

So much of his life had been bound up with the Fair[Pg 461] that somehow a part of him seemed to be jigging at it still, down in the Rother field. It was at the Fair that he had first resolved to conquer Boarzell, and he saw himself rushing with the crowd to Totease, scuffling round the barns while the big flames shot out ... and later he saw himself dancing with Naomi to Harry's fiddle. What had Harry played?—a strange tune, "The Song of Seth's Home"—one never heard it now, but he could remember fragments of it....

These troubling thoughts were forgotten when he came to his own frontiers. He drove up to the farmhouse door, and handing over the trap to a boy, went out for his evening inspection of Boarzell.

The sunset guttered like spent candles in the wind—the rest of the sky was grey, like the fields under it. The distant bleating of sheep came through the dropping swale, as Reuben climbed the Moor. His men were still at work on the new ground, and he made a solemn tour of inspection. They were cutting down the firs and had entirely cleared away the gorse, piling it into a huge bonfire. All that remained of Boarzell's golden crown was a pillar of smoke, punctured by spurts and sparks of flame, rising up against the clouds. The wind carried the smell away to Socknersh and Burntbarns, and the farm-men there looked up from their work to watch the glare of Boarzell's funeral pyre.

Reuben moved away from the crest and stood looking round him at what had once been Boarzell Moor. A clear watery light had succeeded the sunset, and he was able to see the full extent of his possessions. From the utmost limits of Grandturzel in the south, to the Glotten brook in the north, from Socknersh in the east to Cheat Land in the west—all that he could see was his. Out of a small obscure farm of barely sixty acres he had raised up this splendid dominion, and he had tamed the roughest, toughest, fiercest, cruellest piece of ground in Sussex, the beast of Boarzell.
 
His victory was complete. He had done all that he had set out to do. He had done what everyone had told him he could never do. He had made the wilderness to blossom as the rose, he had set his foot upon Leviathan's neck, and made him his servant for ever.

He stood with his arms folded over his chest, and watched the first stars flicker above Castweasel. The scent of the ground steamed up to mingle with the mists, a soft rasp of frost was in the air and the earth which he had loved seemed to breathe out towards him, and tell him that by his faithful service he had won not only Boarzell but all gracious soil, all the secrets of seed-time and harvest, all the tender mysteries of sap, and growth.

He knew that not only the land within these boundaries was his—his possessions stretched beyond it, and reached up to the stars. The wind, the rain, dawns, dusks, and darkness were all given him as the crown of his faithfulness. He had bruised Nature's head—and she had bruised his heel, and given him the earth as his reward.

"I've won," he said softly to himself, while behind him the blazing gorse spat and crackled and sent flames up almost to the clouds with triumphant roars—"I've won—and it's bin worth while. I've wanted a thing, and I've got it, surelye—and I ?un't too old to enjoy it, nuther. I may live to be a hunderd, a man of my might. But if I go next week, I shan't complain, fur I've lived to see my heart's desire. I've fought and I've suffered, and I've gone hard and gone rough and gone empty—but I haven't gone in vain. It's all bin worth it. Odiam's great and Boarzell's mine—and when I die ... well, I've lived so close to the earth all my days that I reckon I shan't be afraid to lie in it at last."

The End