"Not if you wish me to stay," he said, and folded his arms and waited.
"I do want you to stay—give me time to think, Digby—I—"
A cab rattled past the house outside, and as the sound died away, she rose slowly and with difficulty from her chair and looked at him. And he came and supported her on his arm, and drew his fingers up her throat and round her face to her forehead, and back again to her chin, and so forced her to meet his eyes.
"I will come," she said.
CHAPTER X.
The Squire sat making calculations in his study, as he did nearly every day of his life. There was nothing in his appearance to denote that anything unusual, least of all anything exceedingly pleasant, had occurred to him. And yet, it was only that morning that they had told him Jack was alive and was coming home the same evening. Perhaps it was that, like Digby, he found it hard to revive an affection that had ceased to be part of his life six months ago; or, more likely still, he felt in some vague way or another that Jack had come back to life on purpose to produce some unpaid debts for his father to settle. Sir Marcus never dissimulated, and he made no attempt to conceal the fact that his joy in his son's resurrection did not wholly compensate for the trouble that was certain to be a consequence of it.
So he sat making calculations as usual, though his wife felt bound to go into hysterics in the drawing-room, and the rest of the family were trying to erect a shaky evergreen arch in the garden, with "Welcome home!" nailed on it in evergreen letters. They were making a good deal of noise over it, too, and the calculations did not get on, in consequence. They related this time to rabbits, to the number imported yearly from abroad, and the inadequate number reared in the home country itself, and Sir Marcus was making them with the object of writing a letter to the county paper, suggesting rabbit culture as a lucrative employment for the British villager. According to Sir Marcus, the British villager had an immense amount of time on his hands. Not that his interest in the duck culture was in any degree on the wane, but the county paper had refused to insert any more of his letters about the Murville ducks and the enormous profits that the Murville laborer was said to realize from breeding them; and so the Squire had been only too glad to take up the question of tame rabbits, which was being tentatively ventilated by a neighboring Squire in another village. Sir Marcus never did anything tentatively, however; so he began by talking rabbits at every man he met in the village street; and as every man he met, owing to his own former persuasions, was a ducker, that worthy generally received his recommendation of this new animal with something like distrust. The duckers of Murville could not understand any article of commerce that did not lay eggs, and although they obediently ate the few samples that the Squire sent round to them for their Sunday dinners, yet they did so with much condescension, and no little suspicion that they were being coaxed into liking a new food that must be inferior because it was cheap. The Murville laborer had retained some of his independence, in spite of being the property of a Radical overlord.
"Tell ye what it is, George," said Tom Clarke, the biggest ducker in the village, as he sat smoking one evening in the newly built club in the main street, "I be altogether flustered along o' them new fancies of the Squire, I be. What be rabbits, hey, man? Can ye tell me that, now? Ye be oop at the Manor all day, along o' the Squire hisself, so ye ought to know for sure."
The handy man shook his head dumbly, which was his usual form of reply, and the one that his hearers generally preferred; and Tom Clarke continued his ruminations for the benefit of any of the members present who might be inclined to listen to him.