His people, his family, his many, many relations, his world, he thought, were all inside the Mirror—all embedded in that green, soft, silent enclosure. He saw, stretching from one end of England to the other, in all Provincial towns, in neat little houses with neat little gardens, in Cathedral Cities with their sequestered Closes, in villages with the deep green lanes leading up to the rectory gardens, in old Country houses hemmed in by wide stretching fields, in little lost places by the sea, all these persons happily, peacefully sunk up to their very necks in the green moss. Within the Mirror this ... Outside the Mirror the rolling forests guarded by the shining wall of sea. His own family passed before him. His grandfather, his great-aunt Sarah, his mother and his father, Aunt Aggie and Aunt Betty, Uncle Tim, Millicent, Katherine.... He paused then. The book slipped away and fell on to the floor.
Katherine ... dear Katherine! He did not care what she was! And then, swept by a fresh wave of feeling springing up, stretching his arms, facing the room, he did not care what any of them were! He was the Idiot, the discontented, ungrateful Idiot! He loved them all—he wouldn’t change one of them, he wouldn’t be in any other family in all the world!
The door opened; in came old Rocket, the staff and prop of the family, to turn up the lights, to poke up the fire. In a minute tea would come in....
“Why, Mr. Henry, no fire nor lights!” He shuffled to the windows, pulling the great heavy curtains across them, his knees cracking, very slowly he bent down, picked up the book, and laid it carefully on the table next to the “Hibbert Journal.”
“I hope you’ve not been reading, Mr. Henry, in this bad light,” he said.
III
Later, between nine and half-past, Henry was sitting with his father and his uncle, smoking and drinking after dinner. To-night was an evening of Ceremony—the Family Ceremony of the year—therefore, although the meal had been an extremely festive one with many flowers, a perfect mountain of fruit in the huge silver bowl in the centre of the table, and the Most Sacred Of All Ports (produced on this occasion and Christmas Day) nevertheless only the Family had been present. No distant relations even, certainly no friends.... This was Grandfather Trenchard’s birthday.
The ladies vanished, there remained only Henry, his father and Uncle Tim. Henry was sitting there, very self-conscious over his glass of Port. He was always self-conscious when Uncle Tim was present.
Uncle Tim was a Faunder and was large-limbed and absent-minded like Henry’s father. Uncle Tim had a wild head of grey hair, a badly-kept grey beard and clothed his long, loose figure in long, loose garments. He was here to-day and gone to-morrow, preferred the country to the town and had a little house down in Glebeshire, where he led an untidy bachelor existence whose motive impulses were birds and flowers.
Henry was very fond of Uncle Tim; he liked his untidiness, his careless geniality, his freedom and his happiness.