“Good! Good luck to you!”
“Fine man, Colin!” Mr. Carroll observed, as the car moved off again. “A great citizen and a true friend. Not a stain on his reputation.”
Stacey did not contradict the assertion, even inwardly. He merely reserved judgment and was not especially interested in what the result of it would be. The only positive comment he passed (to himself) was that Mr. Jeffries talked rather like an orator on a platform.
“Oh, by Jove!” exclaimed Mr. Carroll suddenly, “I completely forgot! Selfish of me! Marian called me up and asked me to tell you that she wouldn’t expect you to-night—said she realised the family had first rights to you—but would look for you to-morrow afternoon, three-thirty. Considerate of her, though hard on you perhaps. Nice girl, Marian, very! Showed uncommon good sense in not coming to the station.”
But Mr. Carroll would have been dismayed had he known the effect his apologetic explanatory remarks produced upon his son. They weighed Stacey down. For it is the extraordinary truth that not once since Stacey descended from the train had the thought of Marian crossed his mind, and that to have it recalled to him now was burdensome.
However, he recovered quickly from the sudden feeling of depression. For, being totally without any scheme of life, he lived from day to day and met problems only as they arose. Marian was to-morrow’s problem. He shook it off.
“Thank you,” he said. “It’s right of her. Of course I want this evening at home with you.”
But when finally they were at home Stacey and his father found little to say to each other. Mr. Carroll was full of the nervous restlessness of repressed affection, bustled about, made his son a cocktail (which Stacey drank with relish), and finally threw himself down in a chair and lit a cigar, though it was close to dinner time.
Stacey was more self-possessed, though he could not be entirely self-possessed in this house where all the edges of things and thoughts were blurred by memories out of childhood. He was able to recognize clearly, with no more than a touch of sadness, that at bottom he and his father had little in common. Stacey felt that he ought to be expansive, communicative, but he simply could not be. Besides, he had nothing to communicate.
Yet, if Stacey revealed no characteristic for which he may be loved, he did reveal one for which he may be admired:—self-control. For when his father asked him, almost shyly, about the action in which he had won his American decoration, Stacey told the story of it, quietly, artistically, handsomely, with even a smile on his lips, as one might tell the story of Thermopylæ or Bunker Hill, while all the time his eyes, that gazed off across his father’s shoulder, were seeing the unendurable picture of the real thing. It was an achievement.