“Ay, I reckon she has, though she’s never let wit on it to me. He’s the very apple of her eye; she’s not like to let him go unspoken. But you’ll have a shot, won’t you, Mr. Lancaster? Do, sir—do now!” The tone was first wheedling, then wistful. “’Tisn’t only the lad. It means the farm—to me.”
He looked across at the agent with a childlike trustfulness that was almost absurdly pathetic, and Lancaster broke suddenly.
“Well, well, I’ll see what I can do!” he said, smiling somewhat wryly, and went out to help the old man into his trap, a growing feeling upon him of having seen the curtain rise upon some slow working of Fate. The dog-cart jogged through the gate, and for a moment he saw Lup’s head above the wall as he turned his horse towards the marsh. The rap of the hoofs came to him for long enough, dying and returning, until the last hill between swallowed them up.
And he felt old.
CHAPTER II
THE GREEN GATES OF VISION:—I. DUSK
He went back into the house when the distance had snapped the last vibrating link, but he did not stay there. The office was still under the domination of the young man’s silent anger, the old man’s piteous revolt. He felt troubled for both, seeing the situation as each saw it, and was conscious of sharp impatience with the cause of the deadlock, though in his own mind he was certain that her obstinacy would not last. But the whole affair was an unnecessary worry with which he could have dispensed very thankfully, and added heavily to his sense of weary irritation.
He found both drawing-room and dining-room equally unbearable in his present mood, for both were oppressively characteristic of Helwise, curiously so, since her character seemed always a shifting thing, sliding through your fingers and resting nowhere. He had lost his mother early—before his teens—but the house, under the firm conservatism of his father and an old servant, had kept her memory and her tenets for long. Helwise, however, had banished them very completely. With a long-nursed resentment he marked the disorder of the dining-room, the drunken regiment of chairs, the holes in the lace curtains, the cheap almanacs pinned haphazard between the good prints. Helwise loved to surround herself with calendars. They gave her a sense of keeping even with Time. He could not steal a march on her by a single day, while some grocer’s tribute marked the black footsteps of his pilgrimage. Yet she rarely availed herself of their services, left them hanging for years—horrible traps to the unwary—her own hasty references being invariably directed to the wrong month.
Lanty frowned distastefully at their almost ribald askewness, at the torn places in the paper where the crooked pins had slipped, at the untidy hearth and wild mass of correspondence on the open desk. It should have been a handsome room, by rights, for it was bright and well proportioned. The severe furniture that his father had bought had mellowed with time, and the few bits of silver on the sideboard had lost their parvenu air of recent presentation. He had chosen the carpet himself, and its soft, dark tints still pleased him, in spite of the tread worn white by the hurrying feet of his aunt. But there was no ease or homeliness in the room, and it was certainly not handsome, save as an elderly roué of once better days is handsome, in a last drunken effort after dignity and repose.
The drawing-room was worse. He had had no hand in the drawing-room, so Helwise had let herself loose upon it, with results that made him creep. He hated it, from the collection of smug pot dogs on the mantelpiece to the bad Marcus Stone imitations on the cold blue of the walls. He hated the cheap books lying about, the spindly furniture, the innumerable chair-backs bristling so fiercely with pins that you dared neither lay your head on them in front nor your hand on them from behind. There was only one comfortable chair in the room, and that was sacred to Helwise. Not that she ever actually claimed it as hers, but if you sat down on it by accident, she wandered helplessly over the wild-patterned carpet as if there wasn’t another seat within reach, until you became gradually aware of criminal poaching, and arose with shame. There were almanacs here, too, gaudy things evidently of a higher grade, matching, with a pleasantly thoughtful touch, the shrieking tiles of the modern grate. The wide fireplace of his youth had been a sacred altar, lighting a torch to many dreams, lifting the smoke of many prayers; but nobody but a Post-Impressionist could have prayed to this grate, and its brazen canopy had never housed a single vision.
With a half-sigh he wandered out again and into the garden, but even here Helwise had successfully impressed herself. During one of his very rare absences she had had the fine box-borders removed, and the paths edged with glittering rockery-stones, intersected by scrubby and unwilling little ferns. Lanty never quite forgot what he had felt at sight of them. There was an old song he had been used to growl softly as he walked between the box, a tender thing called “My Lady’s Garden,” and sometimes, at dusk, after a hard day, he had vaguely thought to find her there in the cool of the evening, even as himself and Another. He had always missed her, but she had been there, he was sure of that. But when the rockery-stones appeared, she came no more; and to all his big wants and losses there was added the loss of a little dream.