Even Gloria seemed as if it had never been—aye, and things before Gloria was, events when he was still really quite a young man.
He cut at the tufted grasses with his stick, swinging it in dexterous circles as if it had been his sword. He found himself humming a tune almost unconsciously, but when he paused to consider what the tune was he found it was the national march of Gloria. Then he stopped humming, and went on for a while silently and less joyously. But the gladness of the fine morning, of the clear air, of the familiar place, took possession of him again. His face once more unclouded and his spirits mounted.
'The place hasn't changed much,' he said to himself, looking around him while he walked. Then he corrected himself, for it had changed a good deal. There were many more red brick houses dotting the landscape than there had been when he last looked upon it some seven years earlier.
In all directions these red houses were springing up, quaintly gabled, much verandahed, pointed, fantastic, brilliant. They made the whole neighbourhood of the Heath look like the Merrie England of a comic opera. Yet they were pretty in their way; many were designed by able architects, and pleased with a balanced sense of proportion and an impression of beauty and fitness. Many, of course, lacked this, were but cheap and clumsy imitations of a prevailing mode, but, taken all together, the effect was agreeable, the effect of the varied reds, russet, and scarlet and warm crimson against the fresh green of the grass and trees and the pale faint blue of the May sky.
To the observer they seemed to suit very well the place, the climate, the conditions of life. They were infinitely better than suburban and rural cottages people used to build when he was a boy. His mind drifted away to the kind of houses he had been more familiar with of late years, houses half Spanish, half tropical; with their wide courtyards and gaily striped awnings and white walls glaring under a glaring sun.
'Yes, all this is very restful,' he thought—'restful, peaceful, wholesome.' He found himself repeating softly the lines of Browning, beginning, 'Oh to be in England now that April's here,' and the transitions of thought carried him to that other poem beginning, 'It was roses, roses, all the way,' with its satire on fallen ambition. Thinking of it, he first frowned and then laughed.
He walked a little way, cresting the rising ground, till he came to an open space with an unbroken view over the level country to Barnet. Here, the last of the houses that could claim to belong to the great London army stood alone in its own considerable space of ground. It was a very old-fashioned house; it had been half farmhouse, half hall, in the latter days of the last century, and the dull red brick of its walls, and the dull red tiles of its roof showed warm and attractive through the green of the encircling trees. There was a small garden in front, planted with pine trees, through which a winding path led up to the low porch of the dwelling. Behind the house a very large garden extended, a great garden which he knew so well, with its lengths of undulating russet orchard wall, and its divisions into flower garden and fruit garden and vegetable garden, and the field beyond, where successive generations of ponies fed, and where he had loved to play in boyhood.
He rested his hand on the upper rim of the garden gate, and looked with curious affection at the inscription in faded gold letters that ran along it. The inscription read, 'Blarulfsgarth,' and he remembered ever so far back asking what that inscription meant, and being told that it was Icelandic, and that it meant the Garth, or Farm, of the Blue Wolf. And he remembered, too, being told the tale from which the name came, a tale that was related of an ancestor of his, real or imaginary, who had lived and died centuries ago in a grey northern land. It was curious that, as he stood there, so many recollections of his childhood should come back to him. He was a man, and not a very young man, when he last laid his hand upon that gate, and yet it seemed to him now as if he had left it when he was quite a little child, and was returning now for the first time with the feelings of a man to the place where he had passed his infancy.
His hand slipped down to the latch, but he did not yet lift it. He still lingered while he turned for a moment and looked over the wide extent of level smiling country that stretched out and away before him. The last time he had looked on that sweep of earth he was going off to seek adventure in a far land, in a new world. He had thought himself a broken man; he was sick of England; his thoughts in their desperation had turned to the country which was only a name to him, the country where he was born. Now the day came vividly back to him on which he had said good-bye to that place, and looked with a melancholy disdain upon the soft English fields. It was an earlier season of the year, a day towards the end of March, when the skies were still but faintly blue, and there was little green abroad. Ten years ago: how many things had passed in those ten years, what struggles and successes, what struggles again, all ending in that three days' fight and the last stand in the Plaza Nacional of Valdorado! He turned away from the scene and pressed his hand upon the latch.
As he touched the latch someone appeared in the porch. It was an old lady dressed in black. She had soft grey hair, and on that grey hair she wore an old-fashioned cap that was almost coquettish by very reason of its old fashion. She had a very sweet, kind face, all cockled with wrinkles like a sheet of crumpled tissue paper, but very beautiful in its age. It was a face that a modern French painter would have loved to paint—a face that a sculptor of the Renaissance would have delighted to reproduce in faithful, faultless bronze or marble.