Marjorie was a Colonial by birth—a good-looking, vigorous modern young woman, with a rather twangy voice. She admired Cloom so much as an antique that her enthusiasm seemed somehow to belittle it. Yet there was something splendid about her—in her confidence and poise, her candour, her superb health, and the simplicity of her thoughts. Ishmael could not but think her the perfect wife for Cloom and the future of Cloom. She would bring fresh, clear blood to the old stock, which showed signs of falling on unhealth. For the first time in his thirty-odd years Nicky was in contact with someone he admired more than himself, and the result was excellent. His early discontent had settled into ambition—the limited honest ambition of the country gentleman such as Ishmael would most have wished to see in him. Canada and the war between them had carried him far from the politics of his father—as far as Ishmael had found himself from Boase long ago; and when a bye-election occurred in the division he stood for it in the Unionist interests, and won, his honours still thick upon him, even in that Radical locality. He was now growing more and more to be master of Cloom, taking an interest in it even during his inevitable absences in town, Ishmael falling into the background; for his sixty years, though vigorous within him if he took care of himself, made him suffer for any violent exertion.
He had slipped into the background—to all but Georgie. She kept pace with him, although so much younger, because in him she saw her own youth. Her children had grown up and away from her as children must, and she clung to her husband as she had not been wont to do when the practical affairs of a family had absorbed more of her attention.
Ishmael endeavoured to live up to the Parson's advice and keep fluid, and his naturally mobile nature helped him in this. Where and when he did fall short, as the inevitable prejudices of age in favour of the ways it knows arose in him, he at least could see it and smile at himself. But, following on the intense period of personal feeling he had lived through while Nicky was at the war, had come the inevitable reaction, and from that reaction, as far as the capacity for any outstanding emotion went, he was too old to recover.
He had learned the lesson of life too well, saw the whole pattern with too great clarity. This alone would have relegated him to the background, for it is the frame of mind which, when it is temperamental from the outset, makes the looker-on at life; while when it is attained it creates the person to whom other people come for sympathy and help in matters that seem to them enormously important, even while they appeal to the wider view for better proportion.
He was in the background; but he was not yet content to be there. He was content to be thought a person who could have feelings that started and ended in others—even as a young man he had worked for that; but he had not filled in his background with anything that satisfied the portion of himself, which, even if a man live for others ever so completely, still clamours for satisfaction. Every part of him that was in relation to others had adjusted, but that one spot which always answers to the self alone was merely going on from day to day as best it could. He was content to have no burning emotions, no strong longings, to be considered less important than themselves by all the younger people amongst whom he lived, but within him the voice that says "I am I … I still want something for myself alone, some solution of the riddle, something to make up for loss of youth and beauty and strength," still stirred and muttered. Not prosperity, not children, not a wife who took step by step with him, could give this, or even help him to find out what it was. Not his memory of what the Parson had lived and died by could fill him wholly; he had not yet come to that perfect satisfaction, life was too insistent in him. Not in the next world, or in any personal contact, however intimate, in this, could the stuff of life be found. He had imagined while Nicky was away that after all he too had attained the personal fusion that most people seemed to cling to as the chief support in life, but now he knew that that way was not for him any more than for any other at the loneliest pass.
A few days after Nicky's triumphant election, when thought was once more possible at Cloom, Ishmael felt more depressed than he had for long; he had been living not so much in the valleys as upon the straight plains of late. To-day his eyes were hurting him and he could not read; there was no work crying to be done, and the heavy warm air was misted with damp that seemed to melt into the bones. He went out, shaking off Georgie's protests, and struck up the valley leading from the sea. The old mood was on him that had recurred again and again through life—the mood when nothing would satisfy but to go out alone and walk and walk and breathe in peace from earth and air. He went on, not walking fast, for the depression that was on him was not like a definite grief that urges the body to fierce exertion, and as he went it was as though he had neglected the charm too long and it was going to fail him. A blight seemed to hang upon everything, and a dread that had no form but that pressed on him grew as he went.
He came at last to the marshy bottom of the valley, where the wet and tussocky grass was set in a tangle of blackberry bushes and bracken higher than a man. A few forlorn tufts of cotton-grass still blew out in the languid breeze and the yellow stars of the cinquefoil shone from the moss, but disfigured by the dozens of evil-looking black slugs, three or four inches long, that lay motionless all over the marsh. A faint, subtle smell hung on the air, the fragrance of the dodder, that covered the gorse bushes with a fine vermilion net, studded with pale pink flowers like fat flesh-coloured flies caught in a vast red spider's web. The whole place seemed redolent of evil—the motionless glossy slugs, the deadly parasite with its curiously obscene flowers, the littered undergrowth rotting in the water, all these filled Ishmael with a suffocating sense of doom. He stayed at gaze, yet longing to get away from this steamy place, where the gorse had gone grey beneath the false embraces of the dodder.
At last he turned and climbed slowly up the valley side; when he reached the top he had to pause and lean upon a gate to get his breath. His heart was pounding in his ears. He did not look up; for a few minutes the world was dark and filled with a great roaring. Then he felt his breath coming more easily and the giddiness passed; he opened his eyes and straightened himself.
He opened them on to the wide stretch of sky that arched over the sea, and there he saw, stretched from headland to headland, one gleaming foot springing from an irradiated field, the other dying into a swirl of misty foam, a perfect arch of rainbow. It was so triumphant, so brilliant, so unexpected, that at first he stood staring, his mouth open, his whistling breath coming unheeded.
A rainbow alone in Nature always looks an alien thing—it is never part of a landscape, but the added touch which means wonder. Like snow, it is always a phenomenon. It has never lost the quality of miracle.