Free In the Springtime of the Year by Susan Hill Page B

altered him, and his son had not forgotten either, so that now, thinking of Ruth Bryce, he was restless and perturbed, he prayed again, and, if the child had not woken and begun to cry loudly, with some pain, he would have gone to the cottage, for his own peace of mind.
    *
    Rydal, in his office, lit and re-lit a pipe, used up match after match, and sought to attend to his paper work and could not, nor could he think what money he should offer to Ruth Bryce, or whether she would even accept it from him. They were his woods, it had been his tree, and so he was to blame, though they had contradicted him, Potter, and Heykes, the farm manager, they had all of them been to inspect the fallen elm and Rydal saw for himself that they could not have known, nobody could have prevented it, But at night, he lay awake, sick with guilt and with a sense of the futility of his own life, of all their lives.
    Ben Bryce, who had worked for him since he was fifteen, and even before that, in summer evenings and holidays, for the pleasure of it, who had been reliable, thorough, industrious. Oh, but more than that, more, for all the men worked well enough, it was not only that. Ben Bryce. Rydal had liked to go and talk to him, say some word about the state of the trees, the weather, vermin, anything, he had liked to stand watching the young man at work, because he exuded some sort of contentment and strength, some satisfaction with the world which Rydal knew that he himself had lacked, perhaps ever since he was born. Silent Ben Bryce might sometimes have been, withdrawn, or else abruptly outspoken; but he was never dissatisfied, never unsure. He had been at one with things.
    Now, packing down the dark tobacco in the pipe bowl and lighting it again, Rydal thought, I am an old man; though he was not yet sixty. But it seemed that no blood ran in his veins, no life at all. His skin and flesh were dried out, his hair was thin, and he had no purpose, no hope. He was a rich man, and respected, the blue-bound wage book was thick with the list of men who worked for him, and none of it counted, none of it had value. He had stood in the church at Ben Bryce’s funeral and thought only that life had no meaning, and his own least of all.
    The pipe was dead again, the taste of burnt smoke bitter in his mouth. He looked down at the papers and did not know, still, about the money for Ruth Bryce and had no heart to work, nor to go back into the huge house and sit opposite the wife who did not love him.
    Instead, he walked as far as the top gate, and, leaning on it, looked over the land which belonged to him, and he would have given away all of it, in reparation, because it brought him no joy, and because the tree which had killed Ben Bryce had been his tree and the guilt would never leave him.
    No one could have told how old Moony knew, how the ripples had spread out to where he lived, six miles from the village, or whether he had picked the news up somewhere, on his endless walking, nor could they guess that he, too, was, in his own way, affected.
    Years ago, his place had been a hut for shepherds, forced to spend nights out during lambing time or in bad weather, there was only one room and the stone walls were patched up with old corrugated tin sheeting, the roof hung askew and leaked at the corner, so that inside, there was always the smell of damp and, often, a pool of water on the floor. But Moony was never cold, never ill. He had a fire, logs or brushwood or peat, and as often as not, the smoke blew back down the chimney tunnel, and clung to the walls, there was a crust of soot over them.
    He had carried the news of Ben Bryce’s death back, and brooded over it now, in the reeking hut. He knew them all by name, though they never spoke, but something had set Ben Bryce apart from the rest, and his young brother the same. They told the truth.
    In one corner, a tame raven with a damaged wing and no name perched like a scarecrow, and, as Moony fed it out of his hand