Harding had done his best to check any gossip about his affairs, but his landlady was burning with curiosity. She made a remark about Mr. Hayes as she set the dish on the table, and her lodger replied that it certainly was a queer fancy for a lonely man to live in that great house, and might he trouble Mrs. Simmonds for a fork? She supplied the omission with many apologies, and said that Mr. Hayes was not very popular in the neighbourhood, she believed.
"Isn't he?" said Reynold, slicing away. "Well, all I can say is that I found him a very hospitable old gentleman. He had never seen me before, and he invited me to stay there for three days. Wouldn't take any denial."
"Well, to be sure, sir, we can but speak as we find," said Mrs. Simmonds, handing the potatoes. "Only, you see, there are some of us who remember the old family—you'll excuse me, sir, but it's wonderful how you favour Mr. John—and it's not the same, sir, having a stranger there. It's not like old times."
"No," said Reynold with a jarring little laugh. "I should think it was a good deal better. Thank you, Mrs. Simmonds, I have all I want."
And with a nod, which was exactly Mr. John's, he dismissed the old lady.
She was disconcerted; she did not know what to make of this young man with the Rothwell features, who was not gratified by a respectful allusion to the family. "A good deal better!" Well, of course, the Rothwells held themselves very high, and thought other people were just the dirt under their feet. There was no pleasing them with anything you sent in, nothing was good enough, and they expected you to stand curtseying and curtseying for their custom, and to wait for your money till all the profit was gone. Mr. Hayes paid as soon as the bill was sent in, and Miss Strange was a pleasant-spoken young lady. "A good deal better"—well, no doubt it was.
And yet the good woman had not been insincere when she spoke of the old times with a regretful accent in her voice. She remembered John Rothwell's father as a middle-aged gentleman, alert and strong. Those old times were the times when she was a rosy-cheeked girl, whom Simmonds came courting at her father the wheel-wright's, and not Simmonds only, for she might have done better if she had chosen. It was in the good old times that they set up their little shop, and that their little girl was born who had been in the churchyard three-and-twenty years come Christmas. There were no times now like those before Mitchelhurst Place was sold, when she didn't know what rheumatism was, and there were none of your new-fangled Board Schools, to teach children to think little of their elders. It was not to be supposed that Mrs. Simmonds thought that her stiff old joints would become flexible again if the Rothwells came back to the manor-house, but she certainly felt that in their reign the world went its way with fewer obstructions and less weariness, and was more brightly visible without the aid of spectacles. She had an impression, too, that the weather was better.
She straightened herself laboriously after taking the apple-pie from the oven, and was horrified to find the crust a little caught on one side. Having to explain how this had occurred when she carried it in, she had no opportunity of continuing the previous conversation, and the moment dinner was over Reynold was out again. The fact was that Mrs. Simmonds's parlour, which was small and low, and had been carefully shut up for many months, was not very attractive to the young man, who was fresh from the faded stateliness of the old Place. Besides, he was anxious to keep down importunate thoughts by sheer weariness, if in no other way.
He went that afternoon to the Hall, the dreary old farmhouse which Barbara had pointed out as the Rothwells' earlier home, and walked in the sodden pastures where she picked her cowslips in the spring. He looked more kindly at the old house, in spite of the ignoble disorder of its surroundings, but he lingered longest at the gate where she had shown him Mitchelhurst, spread out before him like the Promised Land. He studied it all in the fading light, and then, with a farewell glance at the white far-off front of the Place, he went down into the village, tired enough to drop asleep over the fire after tea.
"To-morrow, the letter," was his last thought as he lay down.