’Nother night we’ll both be dead:
’Nother couple dance instead:
Honey! Lift your pretty head—
Honey, there’ll be dancin’ in the sky!”
Was she right, after all?—argued Billy-boy’s song. Soon they would all be in the dark, and the more fools they who had missed the sunshine and the mirth! Perhaps he was hard, his creed damnably drear. Yet he had been happy in it until he had heard Verity piping on the green. Had he been harsh to her, the pretty, piping thing? Had he hurt her for the sake of a soul that perhaps none could save?
Oh, Honey! Lift your pretty head!
CHAPTER XIII
A slow but sure affection was coming into being between the old Crump agent and the new. As a rule, this particular sympathy is far to seek, for the young man is nervous of the elder’s criticism, the old man impatient of the younger’s methods, while both are held apart by the jealous love that always clings to land; but Roger Lyndesay had retired too long to be irritated by trifles, and moreover the mismanagement of a decidedly indifferent successor had broken him very completely to patience. Callander was to be hailed with delight after Slinker’s other selection, whose sole recommendation had been a genius for extracting rents, and who had finished an altogether doubtful career in the river, when fishing. The new man, quiet and unassuming, slow to push himself among strangers, found life a little solitary in his house across the park, and by degrees he came to spend many an hour at Kilne, though he had a habit of slipping in unobtrusively, and he never seemed to say very much. It was old Roger who talked, and Callander who listened and learned—many things.
Deb was happier since his coming, for he had brought a new interest into her father’s day, and she would sit sewing by the fire, listening to the pair of them as they traced dates, conned agreements and settled valuations. Roger had many a tale to tell, too; of floods on the marsh, of the Great Cattle Plague, of the dobbies that haunt the lanes, of Royal Shows, shoots and rent-dinners. Callander would try to cap them sometimes with tales of his own, but his Shropshire experiences had no atmosphere in the heart of Westmorland, and he was content to steep himself in the glamour of the new life with which he felt so mysteriously satisfied.
He said less even to Deb than to her father. It is difficult to keep up a society conversation along with a discussion upon swedes and the merits of ground limestone, or the vexed question of Small Holdings. Yet, though he scarcely seemed conscious of her presence, he had a disconcerting habit of turning round on her with a question in cases of difficulty, and she was always too taken aback to conceal what knowledge she possessed. She might wear a mask with Christian, more or less successfully, but Callander’s curt directness got behind it every time.