Wolf pulled himself up, and was for leaving with the usual unemotional jerk, but Lanty stood up, too, and held out his hand. Still, neither said anything, until the old man, going, spoke up suddenly, playing the game to the last, even as Harriet had tried to play it, posing to hide a wounded heart.
“Yon fodder-gang, sir, as I mentioned? The old one’s as near done as may be. You’ll happen think it over——?” He broke off then, reality gripping him, and Lanty, biting his lip, said “I’ll see to it, Wolf!” and turned to the window. Brack laughed callously as the door closed.
“What’s the old boy so almighty stuck about? He’s through with Ninekyrkes to-day, isn’t he? Mighty sick, I should say, and feeling kind of ‘’Way down upon the Swanee River’! A bit lost, too, from his talk. He’ll want precious little with fodder-gangs out at the Pride!”
Lancaster said—“Grand weather for the time of year,” and handed him his receipt. The eyes of the two men met, Brack’s in a smiling half-sneer; and then he said “Champ!” turning, still smiling, to leave.
“I’m not going to hustle you with ‘wants,’” he added kindly, “though I guess that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to ask! I reckon the only thing that would mend Thweng is a keg of gunpowder. But I’d just like to warn you to keep your boots well strutted. There’ll be powerful cold feet for somebody in March!”
He swung out with his insolent smile, the last word successfully arresting an impulse that would have sent him spinning into the road. “March!” So Brack had evidently been behind Ezekiel, as conjectured. But why March? What was at the back of it all? And what did he think was coming?
Denny burst in just afterwards and dispelled his wonderings, full of joy about the mangold, and anxious to know if Mr. Lancaster had seen it. His rollicking vitality swept the air clean both of regret and apprehension, so that, by the time Lanty took his seat at dinner, the surprising touch of jealousy evoked by Wiggie’s request was his only aftermath of the morning.
The singer was on his left, with a very well-brushed Stubbs beside him, and Michael Dockeray opposite. At the head, Bluecaster, not quite certain that he wasn’t still in Cairo, had Willie Holliday, as chief tenant, on one hand, and Wolf on the other. The last was Dockeray’s place by right, but Bluecaster had contrived to remember the special circumstances and to whisper a word in Michael’s ear. The right waived, he called to Wolf, and the little attention brightened the old man considerably. It was by acts like these that Bluecaster kept his hold on his people in spite of his long absences. His larger generosity came to them, tempered by reason, through his agent, but his little touches of consideration had the charm of personal courtesy, and were thereby kept in mind. Lancaster was the strong arm upon which they leaned, but his lordship had his own place in their hearts.
Wiggie had a bad time with the enormous meal, but while he tried to disguise his primary plate of beef as turkey and various other dishes, his mind was busy with his surroundings. He knew that he had before him an ancient system working at its best under the most ideal conditions, a triangular relationship which needed the right men in each department to keep the bearings smooth. Just such a state of things might never come his way again. Men said the system was getting played out, becoming extinct as the dodo; but here at least it seemed as if change, however well-intentioned, could mean little but disintegration. The fascination of that most claiming of problems, the interdependence of human beings, not only for things of the body but of the spirit, took him as he looked round the ring of faces, after staving off a too-attentive plum-pudding. The townsman knew many employers of labour, men of large hearts and high standards, who had their thousands at a nod in the morning, and could play “smack-at-back-o’-t’lug” with them of an evening without the faintest troubling of authority. But here was something altogether different, reaching back into far years that had, even then, given each man present his place. Here were ease and understanding, but no forcing of either. The invisible silken strings between the three elements yielded this way and that to the need of the moment, but readjusted themselves immediately. You could shake hands across them, hail flesh and blood on the other side and hear the beating of good human hearts, but you could not climb them. They were always there, stretched by long custom and spun on many graves.
Brack alone was out of place, with his over-smart good looks and jarring mannerisms. If he could not scale the strings he could snip them, and you heard the click of the scissors. Even Stubbs, already well on the way to becoming a “kindred object,” and talking as broad Westmorland as anybody present, was to be preferred to Brack. Later, however, he began to get really warmed-up and quarrelsome, and it took pounds of Rotifer Magic to keep him quiet. Wiggie had spent the whole of the previous evening with a weary eye glued to the microscope, so that he was in a position to be fluent, and if he made bad breaks at times, the kindred object was not in a condition to point them out. Wiggie had a knack of acquiring information that was of no earthly use to himself, but smoothed the way for other people; and if the opportunity did not always turn up immediately, that did not prevent him getting ready for it. Sitting on stiles waiting for lame dogs was constitutional with Wiggie.