"You keep going, Denzil," remarked Carnac as he lighted his pipe and came close to the old servant.
The face of the toiler lighted, the eyes gazed kindly, at Carnac. "What else is there to do? We must go on. There's no standing still in the world. We must go on--surelee."
"Even when it's hard going, eh?" asked Carnac, not to get an answer so much as to express his own feelings. "Yes, that's right, m'sieu'; that's how it is. We can't stand still even when it's hard going--but, no, bagosh!"
He realized that around Carnac there was a shadow which took its toll of light and life. He had the sound instinct of primitive man. Strangely enough in his own eyes was the look in those of Carnac, a past, hovering on the brink of revelation. His appearance was that of one who had suffered; his knotted hands, dark with warm blood, had in them a story of life's sorrows; his broad shoulders were stooped with the inertia of long regret; his feet clung to the ground as though there was a great weight above them. But a smile shimmered at his mouth, giving to his careworn face something almost beautiful, lifting the darkness from his powerful, shaggy forehead. Many men knew Denzil by sight, few knew him in actual being. There was a legend that once he was about to be married, but the girl had suddenly gone mad and drowned herself in the river. No one thought it strange that a month later the eldest son of the Tarboe family had been found dead in the woods with a gun in his hand and a bullet through his heart. No one had ever linked the death of Denzil's loved one with that of Almeric Tarboe.
It was unusual for a Frenchman to give up his life to an English family, but that is what he had done, and of late he had watched Junia with new eager solicitude. The day she first saw Tarboe had marked an exciting phase in her life.
Denzil had studied her, and he knew vaguely that a fresh interest, disturbing, electrifying, had entered into her. Because it was Tarboe, the fifteen years younger brother of that Almeric Tarboe who had died a month after his own girl had left this world, his soul was fighting--fighting.
As the smoke of Carnac's pipe came curling into the air, Denzil put on his coat, and laid the hoe and rake on his shoulder.
"Yes, even when it's hard going we still have to march on--name of God, yes!" he repeated, and he looked at Carnac quizzically.