“I need not, unless the Blairs put in their claim. The whole thing is in Bulstrode’s hands,� said Skelton with his unbroken forbearance.
But Lewis, on leaving the room, reiterated that he would never admit that he was not Lewis Pryor as long as he had a fighting chance. And, as on every occasion that it had been spoken of, Skelton gloried in the boy’s spirit with a melancholy joy. Something else besides pride in Lewis and affection for Sylvia made Skelton happy then. His mind seemed to awaken from its torpor, induced by excess of reading. All at once he felt the creative power rise within him like sap in a tree. The very night after he had pledged himself to Sylvia he went to the library to read, and suddenly found himself writing. The pen, which had been so hateful to him, became quickly natural to his hand. He cast aside his great volumes of notes, at which he had been used to gaze with a furious sense of being helpless and over-weighted, and wrote as readily and as rapidly as in the old days when he had written Voices of the People. Of course, it was not done in the same spirit; he realised he was making only the first rough draft of a work that would still take him years to bring into shape; but it was a beginning, and he had been fifteen years trying to make that beginning. A deep sense of happiness possessed him. At last, at last he had the thing which had eluded him. All at once good gifts were showered upon him. He felt a profound gratitude to Sylvia, for her touch that waked his heart seemed to wake his intellect too. The lotus eater suddenly cast aside the lotus and became a man.
Every day Sylvia claimed a part of his day, but the remaining hours were worth months to him in that recent time when he was nothing better than an intellectual dram drinker. Bulstrode saw it, and said to him:
“If you live long enough, you’ll write that book.�
If he lived long enough! But why should he not live?
That night, sitting alone in the library, working eagerly and effectively at that great preliminary plan, he remembered Bulstrode’s remark, and went and looked at himself in a small mirror in a corner to examine the signs of age upon him. Yes, the lines were there. But then the ever-sweet consciousness came to him that Sylvia did not think him old; that Sylvia would marry him to-morrow and go to live in the overseer’s house if he asked her. It came with a sweetness of consolation to him. He was at the very point where the old age of youth had not yet merged into the youth of old age; forty was a good deal older in 1820 than in 19—.
There was one person, though, who thought forty was very old—for a man, although fifty was comparatively young for a woman—and that was Mrs. Shapleigh. That excellent woman was in mortal terror of her future son-in-law, but she revenged herself by great freedom in her remarks about him behind his back, as far as she dared, to Sylvia.
Sylvia was indubitably a perfect fool about Skelton, as her mother reminded her a dozen times a day. When Sylvia would cunningly place herself at a window which looked across the fields to Deerchase, Mrs. Shapleigh would remark fretfully:
“Sylvia, I declare you behave like a lunatic about Richard Skelton. I’m sure I was as much in love with your father as any well brought up girl might be, but I assure you it never cost me a wink of sleep.�
“Very probably, mamma.�