“There’s plenty blankets on the bed, and I’ve put him yon quilt as we bought at Wilson’s sale. It’s as good a quilt as ever I see. I mind Maggie Wilson making it herself. As for t’ blankets, they’re the best there is in t’house.”
“Ay, ay,” Thomas nodded, “hap him up. Give him the best we’ve got, and you’ll not be wrong.”
“I’d think shame o’ myself to give a visitor owt else.” There was a stress in her voice that made him turn his head, but she was going away from him into the scullery and he could not see her face. Her last words, however, were flung back with the crisp cheerfulness to which he was used. “I’ll be getting they scones buttered while you’re off.... Now don’t be mooning about and miss your time!”
She disappeared through the open door, and he was left to his vigil over the marsh. His mind, released from the tie of another in the room, began slowly and toilsomely to go back over old events. Once he sighed sharply, as if oppressed, but it was simply with extraordinary relief. He knew now, from his sudden sense of mental ease, how he had worried and fretted about the old dad. It was as if something he had ignored had been tugging at his coat, and now he could look behind him without fear of what he might see. He was free, or thought himself free, of that troubling episode at his back ... yet wondered ever so vaguely why there should still be a sore place at his heart. It was not as if he regretted anything he had done, or that he would not have been ready to do that particular thing again. There had been only one way for him, and he had taken it, and if it had happened a thousand times he would have taken it still, but nevertheless it had left him with a latent fear of life, a darkening sense of indebtedness to fate. Even now, with the whole business right at last, and the road clear as the stars before his feet, he suffered a faint oppression of the mind. He supposed he would always have a bitter memory of the breaking up of the old home. Even an outsider must have felt it to some extent, an outsider who had had nothing to do with the cause. The old man had taken it so hard and yet with scarcely a word, so painfully like a hurt but yielding child; and he himself had done nothing but stand by, because just at that time he had not been able to help.... When he came to that word “able,” it somehow stuck in his throat.... Anyhow, able or no, he had not helped, that was sure; and so the old man and the home had had to go....
That was after his mother’s death, of course, and after his eldest brother’s death, too; not that matters had ever been very grand at Beautiful End. Kit had never been a practical man at any time of his life, had never known the substance from the shadow or the business from the dream. He would be off playing his fiddle while crops waited and stock starved. Not but what he had played it rarely—everybody admitted that. There was not one of his sons but was proud of his gift, however awkward the moment of demonstration and the certainty of its cost. Even among themselves they allowed no criticism of his method of life, and certainly they never allowed it from anybody else. They had the strong filial feeling natural to their breed, and, added to that, a vague sense of something helpless and wonderful entrusted to their care. Lacking the gift on their own account, they yet shared an artistic strain which bade them pay tribute to the glamour, and worship, if they could not follow, the gleam. They had no quarrel with music if there was also daily bread. It was only that farming and suchlike didn’t agree.
Perhaps things might have been better if Kit had gone to a new spot instead of following his father on the farm where he was bred. For once, in the shock of change, he might have seen both place and life in a practical light, and begun, at least, on normal, practical lines. But on the marsh, where he had dreamed as a lad, and which he had never left, he had never had even the vestige of a chance. For him it was saturated with wonderment, tuned to the first magic of his fiddle, set in the light that never was on sea or land. It was impossible for him to reduce his particular enchantment to sound commercial terms. The place wasn’t even real to him in the sense that it was real to others. It was the land of faery, and he had never come out of that land until—well, if the truth were known, he had never really come out. Spiritually, he had gone on living as he had lived as a youth. Life had not altered for him even when he succeeded to the farm, except that the rent which had stood in his father’s name now stood in his own.
Not that Thomas, brooding as he watched, worked things out for himself like this. He only said to himself that his father, when he was young, might have done better with a bit of stirring up. It was right enough for a man to come back to his own place, as he himself had done, but it did him no harm to have a look at other methods first. Rooted and grooved in a spot, he might never grow up, and so throw the whole chain of existence out of gear. This bother, for instance, of the last few years—why, it should never have been allowed to happen at all. If Kit could have framed a little better at his job ... if he could have hung on a bit longer ... made a little brass ... but where was the use of thinking about that now? Farther than this little mental growl, Thomas neither argued nor blamed. He accepted his father and his doings as he had accepted them all his life, and traced the shadow that lay on the evening’s joy no further than himself.
The three sons had been dark, silent men, caring for little beyond their work and the ordinary pastimes of their class. They had been cradled in music, but, as Thomas said, its only expression through them was in their heels. They were all good dancers, and had been known as such far and near, appearing at every gathering with their serious faces and light feet. They were wrestlers as well, though here Bob was easily first, just as in the dancing Thomas was easily first. John might have been better than either, but he had not tried or not cared. Both the younger sons had gone out to service as lads, while John stayed to help his father at home. John had never married, never gone away to stay, never moved one day out of the groove into which he had been born. He had worked hard, but without zest, and in his work had kept to the old ways, instead of moving with the times. It was almost as if he had known his life would end at thirty-eight, and so the travail of progress had not seemed to him worth while. He never talked of the future as the others did when they met, even unlucky Bob, with all the weights he had made such haste to fasten about his neck. Thomas remembered him moving alone about the level fields, a melancholy figure in spite of his youth and strength. He had been most at home with the stock, friends, whose lives, like his own, were ruled from without and had but a little day. But as long as he lived he had kept things going on the farm, just as his mother had kept things going in the house. And then, just over two years ago, the pair of them had died within a month; he, of a slipping ladder on a stack; she, in the new-established order of change. Shortly after had come the final change of all, when the living had followed the dead from out the house.
John had been only a negative sort of success, but Bob had been a failure all along the line. He had not liked his first situation from the start, and it was not long before the situation ceased to care about him. He had taken to changing places very soon, and, as is usually the case, the changes were mostly towards a lower grade. Marriage had anchored him, after a fashion, but at the same time it had finished his chance of ever rising higher. He now lived in the village across the marsh, acting as odd-job man to a cattle dealer in the place. His cottage was an abode of tempest and wrath, slatternly beyond belief, full of crawling and screaming children and the loud alarums of a nagging woman’s voice. It was easy to see where Bob would probably end, with a public-house almost cheek by jowl with his own. And yet, as Agnes had just said, he had been a smart enough lad....
Thomas, indeed, was the only one who had made out, unless John’s translation from a workaday world might be counted a higher achievement still. At his first hiring he had found for himself a rare good spot, and had stayed there solidly all through. Bob’s flights of fancy in the way of new jobs did not appeal to his farther-seeing mind; never, indeed, stirred him to anything but a sort of wondering contempt. He knew what he wanted, and, once set upon the course that led to it direct, could not be forced from it or lured aside. He had his settled programme of life long before it came anywhere within his reach. He would save enough brass to start comfortably on his own; he would take a farm on the marsh, and he would marry Agnes Black. But he was thirty-five before any of these things came to pass.