The foreboding slid in and tapped him on the shoulder. He had not meant to come to Watters, but something had driven him; perhaps the same need of Hamer Shaw’s strength that he had realised yesterday. He had left the worry at Hamer’s door. Things were no different, he told himself. The Lugg held no threat. Brack had no case. But after that one bright moment of clear-eyed proportion, Harriet had whistled the fear back to his side.
“Brack’s teeming with theories—has his pockets full of them!” he answered abruptly, getting up. He moved across to his hostess, excusing himself on business grounds. Helwise gathered herself together in a flutter and dropped her open purse, standing helpless in chattering dismay while everybody else dived and darted after trundling coins. Lanty took a last look round the room, while Wiggie, grave and anxious, moved the coalbox and the fender and the fire-screen and all the fire-irons to rescue a threepenny-bit. It was a lovely room, and it soothed him; it made his own still more absurdly desolate and drear; but even this was not his ideal. Somewhere, dimly defined in his imagination, was his holy place, with time-worn furniture and the calling atmosphere of home.
“Queer little body!” Hamer observed when he had seen Helwise and her purse safely off the horizon. “Talks like a string of telephone-wires touching in a wind. And the young one sounds as though she was pillow-fighting folk all the time! But they’re both ladies—queer how it creeps out, in spite of the top dressing! And the lad’s a gentleman too, although he’s so short and see-you-damned-first! He’s worrying, though, more than a bit. Seems to me he’s got something on his mind. Didn’t he strike you that way, Dandy Anne—as if he’d something on his mind?”
“He isn’t happy,” Dandy answered slowly. “He’s always thinking you’re going to hurt him, and getting ready for it. People don’t do that when they’re happy.”
“Likely he’s got too much to carry,” Hamer said thoughtfully. “He’s bitten off a big bite in Bluecaster, and they say the young lord don’t help much with the chewing. Some writing-chap has it that the strongest man is the one that can walk under the heaviest weight without staggering, but he doesn’t say how soon he drops in his tracks. I’ve a feeling that that Bluecaster agent isn’t so far from dropping.”
Mrs. Shaw laid a hand on his arm and drew him towards the door. Wiggie had petitioned her with a glance.
“Now, Father dear, you leave that particular tram alone! The horse may be a bit overwilling, but it doesn’t follow it isn’t up to weight. Don’t start putting things right before you’ve found the hitch. Come and help me unpack the new vacuum cleaner.”
“I hate to see any creature overpressed,” Hamer said pitifully. “I know what it is—it eats the soul out of you if you haven’t some big happiness behind to hold you up. And he hasn’t that. I can see he doesn’t take kindly to that little aunt of his. I should say they don’t pull well together. He’s lonely, is that young chap; he’s not satisfied—right you are, Mother, I’m coming!”
Wiggie had got his wish—Dandy all to himself—but he did not say anything for quite a long time. Instead, he came as if by accident to the piano, and though he played nothing coherent, he drew out funny little bunches and ripples of sound that somehow made the cool room seem cooler. Now and again he glanced at Dandy, sitting on her favourite stool with her head bent. She was changed already, he thought, and she was only too obviously not thinking of him. She had lost a little of her Halsted brilliance; she was a shade thinner, a shade dimmed, as if some new power had breathed a moment on her soul. Wiggie turned his eyes away when he thought that. His own soul was full of delicate little instincts like the dainty grace-notes tripping under his touch.
Dandy was thinking of Lancaster, and wondering why she had felt pleased when he laughed. Was it because in that instant he had ceased to be aloof? Yet how alien he really found her! There was the whole network of outlook between them. More than anybody else he had made her feel “new.”