The house still glows, though the moon has long since gone to its rest, and no soul thinks to sleep.
By this hour on the manor we are three hours dead to the world, for the ox rises before the lark and so must the man who follows it. Yet here they burn light freely, light with no candle and no tallow, light that costs them nothing and casts no smoke, and they waste it on nothing at all. On talk. On standing close and shouting over a drum that beats without a drummer.
I count the faces. Not one is weary from labor. Their hands are soft as a lord's daughter's. They have eaten, and there is food yet left upon the tables, food gone cold and forgotten, bread half-torn and abandoned, meat that would carry my whole household clear to Candlemas. They step over it. One lad lies sleeping in the corner and no one fears he has taken fever or drink unto death; they laugh and let him lie.
There is no fear here. That is the strangeness of it. No fear of the dark, no fear of the frost, no fear of the morning and what the morning demands. They have somehow bought their way out from under the weight that bends every back I have ever known.
I should think them blessed. God forgive me, I cannot. A man who never once in the night fears for the dawn has forgotten Whose mercy lets him see it.
They will pay for this ease. All ease is borrowed, and the Lord keeps close accounts.