And the more she singeth cuckoo, the summer draweth near.”
When she came to those last two lines I looked at her very hard, inspired by the thought that it was she had sucked dew out of the white flowers of April, the cuckoo-flower, the stitchwort, the blackthorn, and the first may, to make her voice clear and her lips sweet. While she sang it once Mr Stodham—a clerk somewhere who had seen a naked Dryad—bent his head a little to one side, perfectly motionless, the eyes and lips puckered to a perfect attention, at once eager and passive, so that I think the melody ran through all his nerves and his veins, as I am sure he was inviting it to do. I heard him telling Mr Morgan afterwards that he wanted to cry, but could not, it was not in his family.
That was in Mr Morgan’s own room, the library, the largest room in the house, where Mr Stodham had gone to escape the boys for a time. When Mr Morgan was not at the top of the steps which led down to the yard, smoking a cigar and watching the boys, the dogs, and the pigeons, and looking round now and then to see if Jessie would come, he was in the library sitting by the big fire with a cigar and a book. If anyone entered he put the book on his knee, shifted the cigar to the middle of his mouth, removed his spectacles, and looked at us without a word. Then with a nod he replaced book, cigar, and spectacles, and ignored us. We spoke in whispers or not at all as we coasted the high book-shelves lining every part of each wall, except in one corner, where there were several guns, an ivory-handled whip, and a pair of skates. The books were on the whole grim and senatorial. We felt them vaguely—the legal, the historical, and the classical tiers—to be our accusers and judges. There were also many sporting books, many novels, plays, poems, and romances of
“Old loves and wars for ladies done by many a lord.”
If we took some of these down they were not to be read in the library. We laid one on our knees, opened a page, but glanced up more than once the while at Mr Morgan, and then either replaced it or put it under an arm and ran off with it on tiptoe. “Stay if you like, boys,” said Mr Morgan as we reached the door; and immediately after, “Shut the door quietly. Good-bye.”
At most gatherings and conversations Mr Morgan listened in silence, except when appealed to for a fact or a decision, or when he laughed—we often did not know why—and dropped his cigar, but caught it in some confusion at his waist. He was a lean man of moderate height and very upright, a hawk’s profile, a pointed brown beard, cheeks weathered and worn, and the heaviest-lidded eyes possible without deformity. He stood about with one hand in his coat pocket, the other holding a newspaper or an opened book. The dogs loved him and leaped up at him when he appeared, though he took small notice of them. When we met him in the street he always had a slow horseman’s stride, was wrapped in a long overcoat and deep in thought, and never saw us or made any sign. At home, though he was a severe-looking man of grave speech, he accepted the irregularities and alarums without a murmur, often with a smile, sometimes, as I have said, with laughter, but that was a little disconcerting. It was on questions of sport and natural history that he was most often asked for a judgment, which he always gave with an indifferent air and voice, yet in a very exact and unquestionable manner. But they were the frankest family alive, and there was nothing which the elder boys would not discuss in his presence or refer to him—except in the matter of horse-racing. Jack and Roland, the two eldest sons, betted; and so, as we all knew, did Mr Morgan; but the father would not say one word about a horse or a race, unless it was a classical or curious one belonging to the past.
CHAPTER III
THE WILD SWANS
One day as I was passing the library door with a pair of swan’s wings belonging to Philip, Mr Morgan stepped out. The look which he gave to the wings and to me compelled me to stop, and he said: