The faintly-ironic lips opened at last.
“Ay? An’ did he tell you as our bull-calf had slipped shuppon an’ was lakin’ wi’ yon steam-engine o’ yourn?”
Brack’s superiority broke on a curse as he tore out to the car. The concrete facts that the bull-calf had smashed his off-lamp and horned fancy patterns on his paint did not lessen his chagrin at his mental defeat. He turned irritably on the calm old woman watching from the porch.
“It’s the old wheeze—the same old fusty old wheeze! ‘What a Lancaster says, goes!’ It’s Lancaster and Lancaster to it. Guess the whole lot of you’ll be something struck of a heap when they turn out plaster imitations at the Judgment!” He leaned on the car, looking at her with tense impatience. “You’ll not speak, but there’s folks in plenty putting words in your mouth. Now just listen right here! It wouldn’t take more than a cent’s-worth of shove to set his lordship against the Lugg for good and all. I had him wobbling, as it was. You can put the cinch on him, if you choose. Lancaster’s only a paid servant, when all’s said, and he’d have to knuckle under. You’ll never go to the Pride, with the fear of the sea on you, just to help the Lancaster tradition make good? I hope to God I may see them fired out of the countryside before I’m a year older, humbled and cursed and damned and broke!”
She looked at him straightly, then, answering him straightly for the first time.
“I’ve nowt to say to you, Brack Holliday, and them as says I have, lies! Who made the likes o’ you judge betwixt me an’ the Lancasters? But I’ll tell you what it is—you’re an over-throng, fidging, meddling jammy-lang-neck, as teptious as a wamp! You’re nowt but a daft rabbit scuttling to ground afore a storm. It’s not you that has anything to fear, and them as has can get through it without your help. There’s bigger things than you in this world, Canada Brack—ay, and a parlish lot o’ bigger folk an’ all!—and happen you’ll learn it sooner than late!”
She wiped him out of existence with her old stare over the sea, and, raging but silenced, he turned the Flanders to the gate.
By contrast, the atmosphere of Ladyford was all pure comfort and grace. Here he was an honoured guest. Here he could flow conversationally without fear of ironic silence. The string of self twanged joyfully in the breath of Mrs. Dockeray’s admiration. It was pleasant to sup to the sauce of her interest, to see Rowly’s eyes widen at his effects. Still more pleasant to stand behind Francey at the piano, asking in a light tenor, from a far-off point not specified, if they thought of him in the Dear Old Home. But it was rarest of all to sit opposite to her, watching her pale cheek bent over her knitting, while her mother, with discrimination almost too marked for comfort, called attention to his good points.
“It’s just as I’ve always said! There’s nowt like seeing the world—having a bit of a look round, if it’s only over the near wall into the next bull-coppy! Westmorland folks is that set on their own yard o’ ground, it takes a travelling-crane to hawk ’em out. Why, Brack, it doesn’t bear thinking on what-like you were as a lad, popin’ about like a yard o’ pump-water, wi’ toes turning in an’ chin poking out—a reg’lar daft-watty! And now you’ve come back real quality, talking as like his lordship as two peacocks, and in a deal better fettle an’ more than a deal better-like! It fair frets me thinking of folk—folk I could put a name to—slouching and talking broad, clumping about in great boots and smelling of the shuppons, with never a thought to spare above stock, an’ never a word to throw at a dog! You’ve capt the lot of us, my lad, showing folks what they can frame for if they’ll nobbut try!”
Brack glowed, seeing himself winsome and well-tailored, elegant, cultured, “arrived,” but before the women’s eyes rose Lup in his still, dumb dignity of the soil. Mrs. Dockeray was playing high. Armoured in commonplace virtues duly admitted, he would have stood little chance beside Brack’s glistening veneer; but mockery and contempt could not but give him place even in the most grudging imagination. Something of the pathos and power of Millet’s “Angelus” clung about him under her rough touch, showing him in full and beautiful accord with both earth and heaven. Unfortunately, Lup himself, coming in with Michael just as they sat down to supper, dispelled the illusion more than a little. His “bettremer” clothes were heavy and ill-cut, foiling the plate-glass impressions to which Brack added grace. His old-fashioned “bowler,” several sizes too small, gave him the anxious air of an uncertain juggler, while an astonishing red-and-yellow handkerchief of his father’s shrieked at Brack s peeping square of white silk. He followed Michael in with a forgotten catalogue, and was for making off again when Mrs. Dockeray netted him with cumbrous but sure sweep.