Yet the true picture was there all the time, defying the brush of maudlin sentiment, as a masterpiece glimmers through a daub.
The rights of the case spun between blame and praise like a feather between two mouths. Both Lancasters were strong men of a rare type that should be stuffed and labelled. They were also murderers, and should both have been drowned; truth-lovers, peace-rulers, regarding their charge as sacred; specious liars and hypocrites, afflicted with a grossly inordinate ambition.
But, as a matter of fact, there was plenty of sympathy for the son, the supposed victim of forced loyalty to a weak employer and an arrogant parent, the creature of destiny, bound to take the course he did, a helpless, doomed sheep, like all the other martyrs of the marsh. There were certain well-meaning souls who pursued Lanty with such comforting extracts, but even these smug blunderers did not do it twice. Only Lup and Francey, over the sea, and Hamer, sadly silent, knew what he really felt about it all; and not they fully. There are debts a man pays in himself alone.
He had resisted all attempts to get him away—Hamer’s pleasant plan for the Canaries had had a short existence and a sudden and violent death—but Helwise had not been defrauded of her tour. For a month she had spun luxuriously from place to place, petted and considered, chattering incessantly and happy as a singing kettle. And after that they had kept her at Watters for long enough, while Blenkinship’s Marget, lent to Lanty during his aunt’s absence, scrubbed and organised like an inspired fury, ruthlessly forcing the twittering Agnes through the mill of discipline and method, and feeding the silent master as he had hitherto been fed only in dreams. The transfer had been brought about by Dandy, cognisant, through bitter experience, of his need. But now Helwise was coming home, and King Muddle would have his own again.
Wigmore, slowly returning to a semblance of health, had spent the summer recruiting at Bournemouth and yachting with Bluecaster, and was now at Watters, while over at Wild Duck Harriet entertained the whole Quetta family (whose real name was something quite different) with reckless generosity. Lanty had seen her with them at the various Shows, preaching Westmorland agriculture into puzzled foreign ears. He had also seen Stubbs, no longer requiring to be soothed with rotifers, hung about with Quetta-lings like a family elephant.
But of Dandy he had seen nothing—nothing, that is, but, at intervals, a smiling, daintily-gracious transparency hovering on the borders of his clouded existence. Blotted out in a night of storm, she, who had come so near to meaning everything in his life, had ceased to mean anything at all. But to-night the old transfiguration was upon the once-loved fields, and everything was human and dear again, even as the friendly earth. At eventide there was light.
To a groom crossing the drive at Watters he handed over his horse, and went up through the gate at the top of the garden to the fields above. The house behind him lay silent and apparently deserted, but in Hamer’s meadow there was a busy little community, receiving that particular instruction in butter-making which comes under the County Council heading of “Higher Education.”
The Travelling Dairy Van from Asprigg was planted on the breast of the hill looking over the tiny, half-hidden village below, the long curve of the North Road, and the upward sweep of the park. In the big tent stretching from the side of the Van a dozen churns were at work on the wet boards of the temporary floor, and in the frame of lifted curtains on the far side the white gowns of pupils and instructress showed vividly against the green of the hill beyond. There was quite a little crowd on the surrounding benches, for this was examination-day, and relatives and friends were present to support the last supreme effort. On the raised platform of the Van, Mr. and Mrs. Shaw, together with Helwise and a county lady or two, backgrounded by a couple of husbands, an odd parson and Grumphy, surveyed the final throes of competition. The examiner, moving about among the workers, was very busy being taught his business by Harriet, mightily full of contempt for all Dairy Schools and officials thereto attached. In the last little gleam of sun outside Wiggie was walking slowly with his brother, while a gentle, foreign-looking woman struggled with a trio of joyous ruffians rolling down the hill. Stubbs had a fourth in the Rakestraw bath-chair, and was wheeling it patiently if awkwardly over the steep slope. The fourth was a sad little boy of eight, with black eyes swallowing up a pathetic face, conducting the bath-chair progression with the solemnity of high ceremonial. He smiled once, though, when a rapturous thrush, enamoured of the growing sunset, flung it a little flutter of song from a near hedge; and Lanty suddenly saw Wiggie in the smile.
From the middle of the tent, where the scales awaited the butter, the caretaker ruled teacher and taught alike, by virtue of ancient standing, peculiar wit, and a deficiency in hearing which made mutual wordy warfare impossible. To this autocrat Lanty handed his onlooker’s threepence, stopping to exchange a word with the examiner before joining Hamer on the platform. Harriet, however, was still saying her say.
“Of course I know you think you’re doing no end of good, but it’s all rot! None of that butter will be really fit to eat—you know it as well as I do. You wash and work all the goodness out of it, for one thing. Yet, in a minute, you and all the rest of the crowd will get up and say what first-class stuff it is, just because it looks pretty squatting on that table with a silly pattern sprawling over it. You’ve admitted yourself that I sent you in the best cream of all the farmers round. Very well! I can send you in a sample of the best butter to match. But I didn’t learn how to make it in a rotten tent from a mass of theories walking about with a notebook. I learned it from hard experience and Stubbs’s swears when he had to eat the result. Butter-making on the stage, I call it!” Harriet finished, glaring round at the trim, white figures. “Might be a Gaiety chorus getting ready to sing ‘We are the Churniest Churners!’ or, ‘Never forget your Plug!’ Let ’em go home and learn the real thing from their mothers!”