When he descended to the dining-room, his delightful landlady, entering with the tray, paused in critical survey of the table.
‘I have placed your seat before the fireplace, sir. Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy always prefers it so. But perhaps you would like to sit in front of the window.’
Luffington seized the fact that any taste but that of the mysterious great man’s would be evidence of inferiority. But it was necessary to make a stand for originality. The expected docility fired revolt in his veins. At the price of consideration, he decided for the window in front, instead of the fireplace behind. The pleasures and pangs of our life depend upon little things, and the little thing in question gave a silly satisfaction to Luffington, and disproportionately pained the good landlady.
After his late lunch, Luffington strolled forth to pick up rural sensations on his way to the Flemish priest’s. He encountered glances of dull interest, but nowhere the rosy village maid and her pursuant swain that his studies in pastoral literature had taught him to expect as the obvious decoration of a quiet rustic scene.
‘There is nothing so misleading as literature, unless, perhaps, history,’ he observed, in a fond retrospect of the centuries. ‘The disappointments of the present build for us the illusions of the future,’ he added incoherently.
The Flemish priest was tending his bees, with a thick blue veil tied over his felt hat, when he heard the garden gate swing upon its hinges. He looked up and saw an elegant young man pointing, as he came along, a meditative cane in the neighbourhood of his dearest treasures, a row of white and blue irises.
‘Santa Purissima! Can these sons of perdition not learn to keep their shticks and their long limbs from ze borders if they must invade our gardens?’
He slipped off his veil and showed a fat yellow face streaked with the red of anger. Luffington held out his hand, laughing.
‘By all that’s holy! My young friend of Antwerp. Welcome, welcome! Ah, my boy! how many, six, eight years ago! What a lad you were then with your dreams of love and fame! And how have they fared, those dreams—eh? Gone ahead, or dropped behind, as ’tis the way with young dreams? Hein!’
Luffington nodded sentimentally, like one rocked upon sudden waves of regret. The dreams had dropped behind with the years, and it was an effort to recall them to vivider shape than a cloud with a sunny ray upon it.