She stared at it longer than at any of the others, then, at last turning the page, came on a photograph of Ishmael, sent by him from St. Renny at the Parson's instigation. She stared at the mouth that, with its more generous curves, was yet so like her own, at the square brow that never came from her side of the family, at the narrow chin that in its delicacy seemed to her girlish. As she looked a sudden tremor ran over her. She realised she had been gazing at it as at the picture of a stranger, so altered did he look from when she had last seen him, over two years ago…. For some reason that stuck-up Parson had made every excuse for the boy to spend his holidays elsewhere for over two years. She had not seen him since before his confirmation, which she looked on vaguely as some sort of civil ceremony like a superior kind of getting apprenticed … perhaps as being definitely apprenticed to gentility. She had had Vassie "done" at Plymouth for that reason. This strange boy, this young man, was coming to-day to her house, which was his house … coming to upset everything. She stared again, trying to trace the features she remembered after a fashion, but which love had never imprinted on her memory with the only indelible draughtsmanship. She turned backwards swiftly till she came to the beginning of the book, where was another photograph taken from an old daguerreotype. It showed Ishmael as a baby … his mouth rather wet-looking, helplessly open, not unlike Phoebe's now … he seemed somehow a pathetic baby. Even Annie was struck by it.
She laid the book on her slippery lap, whence it fell unheeded to the floor, and stared in front of her…. Out of the dim past, almost as dim to her as to an animal, came a memory, the memory of a touch. The touch of a baby's hands feeling about her breast…. Not of Ishmael's in particular—how should she, whose motherhood had been so forced, so blurred a thing, keep one memory of it from another, or any that was not purely animal …? But it was his picture she had been looking at which had brought the idea of babyhood back to her, and it was with him personally that her mind connected the swift memory that was more a renascence of an actual sensation. She closed her eyes and clutched at the breast that had fallen on flatness. Her children would all go from her except this one who was coming back…. A warmth that was half-animal, and nearly another half-sentimental, rose in her heart, but at least for the moment it was genuine. There was even some vague feeling that she would protect him if the others made it hard for him….
Wheels sounded on the cobbles of the courtyard, and the clatter of hoofs; it meant that John-James and Vassie were back, bringing her son. She got to her feet and went through the house to the yard door, already recovering a little of poise, which meant artificiality, but still with something of that real glow about her. She knew a moment of dread lest Ishmael should rebuff it. She held out her arms with an uncontrolled gesture, and heard her own voice call his name on an ugly piping note she could not have told was hers.
CHAPTER II
WHAT MEN LIVE BY
Ishmael Ruan, like the rest of his world that day, had been planning ahead in his mind. His first conceptions were blown away from him with his breath at sight of Vassie glowing on the dingy railway platform; she was far the more self-possessed of the two, which was mortifying to a young man who, all the way down in the train, had been telling himself with what tact and kindliness he was going to behave. John-James had seemed so unaltered that his grip of the hand, as casual as though Ishmael were any acquaintance just back from a day's excursion, had been a relief. Remained his mother, for Tom, contrary to what John-James and Vassie had expected, did not look in at Penzance Station to greet Ishmael on his transit, and as to the Parson, he was letting Ishmael alone to find his feet with his family, holding himself as a person to be come to if occasion or affection prompted it later.
The drive was a silent one, as even Vassie felt shy, though she hid it under an affectation of calmness. Ishmael had plenty of time to readjust himself and think of his mother, the determining factor, now Archelaus was away, in his happiness—or so he thought, ignorant in his masculinity of the force and will sheathed in Vassie's velvet sleekness. His mother … he had no sentiment at the name; but then neither would he have had if the relation between them had been a happy one. He would then have felt love, but he would always have been of too deadly a clarity for sentiment. He was sorry for his mother with a degree of sympathy rare in one so young, for he had as little of the hardness of youth as might be, and what he had was not of judgment, but feeling. He was at the moment nothing but sorry for his mother, but though that pity would not change to condemnation it might turn to dislike. He too, as Annie was doing in the parlour as she awaited the sound of the wheels that were bearing him nearer her, tried to clutch at memories. He could find a few of fierce kindnesses, but not one of an embrace unqualified by some queer feeling other than simple love, which he had always felt in her. She did not, of course, care twopence for him, he decided. Well, he would not be a hypocrite—he would not bother or embarrass her with the expression of a tenderness neither of them felt; he would be gentle, he would kiss her if she seemed to expect it, but he would talk brightly and naturally of trivial things, he would make the occasion seem as little weighted with portent as possible. There should be nothing of the return of the master, nothing of the odious briskness of the new broom about him at his entry. Time enough after to talk over things…. He could spend the next day with John-James on the farm discussing improvements, alterations. They were very behind the times down here; he had seen farming in Somerset and Devon in his holidays that would make them open their eyes down here. That would all break it to his mother gently. She was getting old too—she must be quite fifty—and old people did not like to have reforms thrust upon them. No, there should be nothing eager, aggressive about him. He remembered stormy, excitable scenes of his childhood and resolved they should see what the self-control of a gentleman was like. Thus Ishmael, with intentions not by any means, not even most largely, selfish. Yet, of all moods, the worst to meet his mother's.
The growing interest of the drive as they neared the north-west and the familiar landmarks of his childhood came into sight, flooded with the June sunshine—the ruined mine-shafts staring up so starkly, the glory of white cattle in the golden light, the first glimpse of the pale roofs of Cloom itself, prismatic as a wood-pigeon's plumage, all these things struck at his heart with a keener shock than did anything personal, and made thought of his mother sink away from him. Behind the cluster of grey buildings he saw the parti-coloured fields stretching away—green pasture, brown arable, pale emerald of the young corn—all his. He saw in folds of the land little copses of ash whose trunks showed pale as ghost-trees; he saw, gleaming here and there through the gorse-bushes, the stream that ran along the bottom of the slope below the cart-track that led to Cloom. He saw the bleak, grey homesteads, cottages and small farms, set here and there, as he turned in his seat to look around him. And his heart leapt to the knowledge that all these things were his….
Annie's croaking cry, her thin arms, her quick straining of him, he all unprepared even for the mere physical yielding that alone saves such an embrace from awkwardness, found him lost. Annie felt it and stiffened, and the moment had gone never to come back. In after years, when Annie had magnified it to herself and him, accusing him of throwing her love back in her face when she had offered it, he was wont to reproach himself bitterly. But Annie was so volatile in emotion, except where Archelaus was concerned, that her new flow would, in all likelihood, not have held its course for more than a few weeks at the best. Ishmael knew this, but Annie, by dint of telling herself the contrary, never did. The awkwardness of the actual moment was saved by Phoebe, who had hung in the background waiting for what she thought might be the most telling moment to glide forward, but who, her natural pleasure at sight of her old playmate suddenly overbearing more studied considerations, could contain herself in silence and the shadows no longer.
"Ishmael!" she cried, running forward. "Ishmael!"