The hand—cold as of old—fell from his grasp.
He tried to close the dreadful eyes, but failed; tried once again, and failed, and then rose, panting. His cry had awakened his old nurse. She came to him feebly, candle in hand, with Dan sniffing at her ankles. At sight of his master the dog ran forward, and then, as if aware of mourning, crouched quietly on the floor beside the dead. And Richard, looking down upon his mother, and hearing Nurse Ailsa's lamentation shrill out of the silence, realized that this was indeed the end of the old hampering life, that he had put away "childish things" once and for all.
PART II
THE SPUR
"He had stamped with steady hand God's arrow-mark
Of dedication to the human need;
He thought it should be so, too, with his love.
He, passionately loving, would bring down
His love, his life, his best (because the best),
His bride of dreams, who walked so still and high
Through flowery poems as through meadow-grass,
The dust of golden lilies on her feet,
That she should walk beside him on the rocks,
In all that clang, and hewing out of men,
And help the work of help which was his life,
And prove he kept back nothing—not his soul."
E. B. BROWNING.
CHAPTER I
"You and I are the only mortals that I know of who ever found a way to each other's inner being by the touch of the hands."—GEORGE DU MAURIER.
Making as it does for desultory conversation and tempered criticism of your neighbour's failings, the half-hour after tea in a country house is one of the most pleasant of the day. Confidences spring from it, and intimacies ripen. Lovers drift happily away from their chaperones, knowing their absence will be unnoticed. The elder folk, who find interest and joy in each other's company, move together with no conscious effort into friendly nooks and corners where they are unobserved. Silences fall quite naturally on such occasions. Nobody minds them. They are, indeed, keys of that deeper confidence which is one of life's most beautiful gifts.
The five or six members of Lord Creagh's house-party who collected in his study day after day at the same hour, ostensibly to admire the tropical plants for whose cultivation he was famed, had come to look upon this reunion as the most vital of the day.
"Wit and brilliance depend almost as much on the furniture of a room as on the furniture of a mind," thought Evelyn Brand, one of the two women in the group, giving herself up, as Celts do, to the characteristic atmosphere. "Even Lady Mary Wortley-Montague herself could never have made her brilliant epigrams on a black horse-hair sofa backed by magenta curtains and stuffed birds in glass cases. The Nonconformist conscience, if it did but know it, owes quite half of its solidity to the mahogany four-poster in which it came to life. 'Victorian suites' make you formal and stilted, just as chintz and lavender and lattice windows compel discretion and a modest blush. How I love lavender! Why, age itself would fall quite tenderly upon the occupant of such a house as I would furnish if I could—a tender place of peace and perfume. Grey hair and gentle influences go together; old age should win one as a lover instead of capturing one as an enemy."