"Oh, you could leave Jane and me," said Pobbles. "And you could come there and see us sometimes. You would find we had worked it up better each time you came."
"I shouldn't care about it unless Harry was there all the time," said Jane. "Besides, I am going into the army too. I read about a girl in Russia who fought all through the wars, and nobody found her out. I shall be in Harry's regiment, but he won't tell anybody. You can too, Pobbles, when you're old enough."
Harry looked at her, and laughed with great enjoyment. He had just seen the woman coming out in her, and been mildly entertained by it through his seriousness. Now she was a sexless child again. "You're one in a thousand, Jane," he said. "Of course you shall join my regiment, and Pobbles too. We'll have some jolly times, and when it comes to fighting we three will stick together."
Jane did not mind being laughed at by Harry, and was pleased at the prospect held out to her. She took off her jacket, when they set to work again at the cabin, and threw away the bluebells, wondering why she had picked them.
Dusk was falling as Harry made his way up through the wood and across the park homewards. The air was very still, and the sweet scents of the earth, dissolved in dew, rose like incense. Usually his impressionable untroubled mind would have leapt to the message of his senses, and he would have exulted in the beauty that lay all around him, sublimated by the spell of oncoming night. But as his feet brushed the moisture from the grass, and stirred the cool scents to greet his nostrils, he looked down and not up as his way was. A vague discontent was upon his spirit, which was not quite unhappiness though near akin to it.
The vision of a free life in a free untouched land had come to him. For the first time in his happy boyhood he felt himself bound by his lot. The great world, with its endless varieties of adventure and invitation to be doing and living, lay beyond his horizons and he had never crossed them.
Melancholy touched him so seldom that it was a discomfort to be resisted. He wondered what made him sad at the thought of being tied to Royd, which had hitherto been a paradise of enjoyment to him. He stood still as he came out from among the trees and looked across the park to the dark mass of the Castle, in which lights were glimmering here and there, making it more romantic and beautiful even than when seen in the day-time. And as he looked, the momentary sadness fell from him, and he smiled with pleasure at the scene so familiar yet always showing itself in some new emanation of beauty. He was coming to the age at which he could no longer be satisfied with it as holding everything in life. The shadow of unrest had just fallen upon him, but it would not be yet that he would walk in it.
As he neared the Castle a white figure, dimly seen in the dusk, detached itself from the gloom that lay about the massive walls and came towards him along the trodden path by which he was hastening. He recognized it as that of his mother, who not infrequently came out to meet him like this when he had begged off dinner and came back after it. It usually gave him pleasure to find her waiting for him in this way. There was not, perhaps, very much in common between them, but he knew how much he was to her, and his chivalry went out towards her, in love and a sense of protection.
To-night he was conscious of the least little sense of discomfort in meeting her. His time was so fully taken up, with his work indoors and his innumerable pursuits out of doors, that neither his mother nor his grandmother saw very much of him except at meal-times, and less than ever in the summer-time. It was part of the wisdom of Lady Brent that he was left as free as he was. But he was sensitive to the atmosphere around him, and of late when the inmates of the Castle had been together it had been uncomfortable. Wilbraham, while they had done their work together, had been much as usual, but at table he had been morose and snappy. The two women had obviously put constraint upon themselves to be easy and natural before him, but the coldness and irritation between them had peeped through. There had been nothing to cause him to reflect upon something wrong, and the cause of it; he had been full of his own devices and forgotten all about the discomfort at home the moment he was away from it. But the discomfort was there. Perhaps it had had to do with the vague discontent that had just come upon him and passed away. But the sight of his mother coming to meet him brought it back ever so little. Whatever his dreams for the future, whether at home or abroad, the whims and vagaries of his elders if indulged in must shut them off. Going away from Royd meant going away from them; Royd itself must lose some of its glamour if life there was to be troubled by their jars.
But he remembered now, as he called to his mother and hurried his steps to meet her, that the cloud had seemed to have lifted itself somewhat at luncheon that day. Wilbraham, at any rate, had recovered his equanimity entirely, and had been good-humoured and talkative; and Lady Brent had been suave, when for some days she had seemed covered with prickles. Only his mother had been subdued, with traces of past tears about her eyes.