He had not gone far out of the Countess's borders before he saw what
had happened. The country had been wasted by fire and sword: cottages
burnt out, trampled gardens, green cornlands black and bruised--
desolation everywhere, but no life. Death he did come upon. In one
cottage he saw two children dead and bound together in the doorway; at
a four-went way a man and woman hung from an ash-tree; of a farmstead
the four walls stood, with a fire yet burning in the rick-yard; in the
duck-pond before the house the bodies of the owners were floating amid
the scum of green weed. That night he slept by a roadside shrine, and
next morning betimes took the lonely track again. Considering all this
as he rode, he reached a sign-post which told him that here the ways
of Wanmeeting and Waisford parted company. "Wanmeeting is my plain
road," thought he, "but plainer still it is that of Galors--and not of
Galors alone. I think the longer going is like to be my shorter. I
will go to Waisford." He did so. After a patch of woodland was a sandy
stretch of road fringed with heather and a few pines. A man was
sitting here, by whose side lay his dead young wife with a
handkerchief over her face. Prosper asked him what all this misery
meant; for at High March, he added, they had no conception of it.
The man turned his gaunt eyes upon him. "We call it the hand of God,
sir."
"Do you though? I see only the hand of man or the devil," said
Prosper.
"May be you are in the right, Messire. Only we think that if God is
Almighty He might stay all this havoc if He would. And since He stays
it not we say He winks at it, which is as good as a nod any day."
"You are out, sir," said Prosper. "As I read, God hath given men wits,
and suffers the devil in order that they may prove them. If they fail
in the test, and of two ways choose the wrong, is God to be blamed?"
"Some of us have no such choice. It is hard that the battle of the
wits should be over our acres, and that our skulls should be cracked
to prove which of them be the tougher."
"God is mighty enough to make laws and too mighty to break them, as I
understand the matter," said Prosper. "But who, under God or devil,
hath done this wrong?"
"Sir," said the man, "it is the Lord of Hauterive (so styled), who
hath taken Waisford and destroyed it with the country for ten miles
round about it, and killed all the women who could not run fast
enough, and such of the men as did not run to him. And this he did
upon the admirable conceit that the men, having no women of their own,
would take pains that they should not be singular in the country, but
full of lessons in butchery, would become butchers themselves. It
seems that there was ground for the opinion. As for me, I should
certainly have been killed had he found me, for butchering is not to
my taste--or was not then. But I was on a journey, and came back to
find my house in ashes and my new wife, what you see."