The old lawyer’s eyes moistened; but he answered somewhat caustically:
“I won’t say it is your deserts. But the gift is from Heaven, where your father, his battles over, sits at peace. ’Tis he hath interceded, and the Almighty—to satisfy his importunity, maybe—gives you a new house, as erst he did to Job, but for a better reason.”
Then he added a little inconsequently:
“You’ll find it in a damned bad state of repair.”
CHAPTER IV.
It was six o’clock of a cold September morning when Sir Robert—or Mr. Tuke, as we must now know him—woke in his room off the stable-yard of the old “George” inn at Winchester. Lying lazily snoozed amongst the pillows, he reviewed, with some amused satisfaction, the first courses of that scheme of reformation he had mapped out for himself, whereof two rather sleepless nights at Farnham and his present quarters—the result of an abstention in the matter of numerous “nightcaps,” which habit had made necessary to slumber—were the prologue. Now, the little battle fought and won, he preened his moral feathers smugly, and felt clear-eyed and very good indeed. As to the mysterious estate—the last stage on the journey to which he should cover that day—he had soon learned to accept its acquisition with that sweetness of irresponsibility that was his most engaging and aggravating characteristic. But, after all, he had an excellent digestion—in common with a great many men of the eighteenth century—and was little inclined to dyspeptic brooding over problems.
Now, as he lay, his half-dreaming glance was arrested by a coloured print after George Morland hanging on the wall over against him. The like he remembered dimly to have known in a nursery of long ago—a picture that had often set his young soul wandering by lanes of enchantment. Nothing could have served better to confirm and make abiding his present mood. He was a boy again, an apple-skinned Ulysses, with the limitless possibilities of the unknown before him. Without stain or guile he passed beyond the narrow margins of the print into a land that no mortal foot but his own had yet trodden.
Indeed, for the moment he was a child again, and there is nothing in after-life like the pure imaginings of such. To the child every incident is a picture framed and hung upon a wall. The memory of these pictures abides long, then fades a little and a little more. We are hardly conscious of them in old age, or at least feel hardly the ecstasy of their atmosphere. In acquiring our identities (Keats’s phrase), what don’t we lose? We find a fact for a dream—a wretched exchange. But the first possession doesn’t altogether go. It recurs to us at odd moments in little sweet mental vertigoes—never so much, perhaps, as during that half-waking hour of dawn when we are least conscious of our material selves.
Then to think of a dewy morning down; of a pleached alley of fruit-trees in blossom; of a windy common; of the mystery of snow and brooding distances; of a Christmas-tree, even, and the mingled ravishing smell of lighted tapers and banked fir-branches, is momentarily to recall the amazing romance and illimitableness of life; is to be quit of the dreariness of conviction, and to stand once more at the foot of the green slope, and look up and wonder whither the clouds are sailing over the far summit. A few artists, a few writers, a few musicians, have the power, or the instinct, to inspire us with these ancient imaginings; and such as can, we must dearly love, though they may never stand in the front ranks of their fellows. The child is the only real genius; and perhaps these have remained morally children. In mid-life they can arrest and record the fugitive retrospections that to the most of us are only bubbles broken away from the far-distant spring of life, to be caught at and to vanish on the prick of possession. God bless them! they are our best earnest of the spiritual.
Out of his luminous stupor on that grassy borderland of dawn, the dreamer came with a full heart, and, it must be confessed, a biting consciousness of emptiness in his stomach.