She winced sharply, but surprise came uppermost.

“I don’t understand! We knew he was a singer, of course, but not of any importance. His name is never in the papers.”

“He sings under his mother’s name—the famous Quetta. You’ve heard of her, I suppose, even at this Back o’ Beyond? You must have heard of him, too. He’s the great Quetta, now—makes pots of money, and is wanted everywhere. His agent in town was tearing his hair to come along with us. He can close his account now. Quetta’s done! I suppose you might not know, though. He liked to be incog. here, and his friends respected his wish for quiet. Well, you’ve quietened him all right! He should have stopped singing, years ago, but he had a reason for going on, a good reason——” He caught the big man’s eyes fixed earnestly on his lips, and checked himself with a vexed start. The other stood up slowly and looked at Harriet. (It was strange how both seemed to forget Stubbs.) His voice was low, with a curious intonation.

“I am that reason,” he said quietly. “I am Cyril’s half-brother, and once—it seems a very long time ago now—I was a singer, too. I had my own share of our mother’s gift, and I was getting on well. I might have been a great Quetta, also. Then I had an accident which left me totally deaf. I had no other trade in my hands, and I had both wife and children. Cyril was just coming out, and he took every engagement that came his way to bring us in a living. It was in those first hard years of fight that he broke his health. He kept us all then, and he keeps us all now. I do not know why he never told. Perhaps he was afraid that Mr. Shaw—his friend—would give him money. I do what I can for him—I learned the lip language, and I am now his secretary—but I do not earn half we cost him. And I have never heard him sing. I would give everything I have or ever hope to have, just to hear Cyril sing.”

Stubbs was sent down to the White Lion to telephone to Watters, and a middle-aged damsel at the other end clasped a treacle-posset to her bosom and wept. Long into the dawn Harriet sat by a burnt-out lamp in the little parlour. The walking-mail went by in the smallest hours, the creak of the wheels alone coming up to her, like a ghostly, undriven hearse of the dead. And when the first cock crew, just as if it were Harriet’s imperative voice calling him, the great Cyril Quetta, who was, after all, only Wiggie, struggled back to life, and observed that he was a sparking-plug.

CHAPTER XXI
THE TROUBLE COMING

The twenty-ninth of March. Lancaster had been at the Pride. Now he was walking along the north road, where he had stood with Francey Dockeray, months ago. They had had a good winter, just enough hard weather and little wind, and the spring was wonderfully early. The whole countryside breathed an atmosphere more like that of late Easter than wild March. But March had had no lion in it, this year. It had come in like a lamb, and continued to frolic softly onwards, crowned with garlands, like a sacrifice frisking to the altar.

He walked slowly, loving the kind air and the delicate light lying over the land, and his soul was at peace. His visit to the Pride had left him happier than he had expected. For long, the necessity of it had haunted him, and he had shrunk, without admitting it, from what he possibly might find. But there had been nothing to disturb or alarm. Wolf looked very old, but in better spirits than when he had last seen him, for old age has its own medicine of the mind. He spent most of his time at the last Ninekyrkes fence, looking over the fields. The new tenants were not into the house yet, but they were at work on the land, and he found a queer, half-bitter interest in watching others till his soil. Mrs. Whinnerah was a great deal thinner, seemed to have no more substance than a blown straw, but she was much softer in manner than Lanty had ever known her. Her eyes, grown large as she grew small, had the exalted, aloof, almost happy expression of the martyr-fanatic, but they rested more kindly upon him than of yore.

The little Pride was a model of neatness and comfort. He found himself envying them its cosy quiet, until, looking up, he saw the Lugg towering in at the window. For a moment he had the impression that his own satisfaction, the woman’s calm and the man’s quiet were all alike due to one terrible fascination, the charm that holds a fated creature still before a beast that springs. It was gone directly, and, as he walked with Wolf on the new land, they talked again of his father’s planning. He saw it broken up, portioned out, houses built, fences set, a new estate growing under the shelter of the Lugg. When there was a little colony there, the loneliness would vanish, and those that had never known it would laugh at the old tale of a dead fear.