‘There you lie,’ said Aunt Lydia, ‘resting after your hard day’s work. What a laborious young man you must be, Laurie! I never saw any one who wanted so much rest.’
‘Thanks,’ said Laurence, with a little nod of his chin from the grass. ‘My constitution requires a great deal of rest, as you say. If you don’t mind moving a little, Aunt Lydia, you are sitting on my note-book. Thanks. There are some swans there I should not like to lose.’
‘And of what use are swans?’ said Mrs. Westbury. ‘I wish you would tell me, Laurie; I am such an ignorant creature, and I should like to know.’
‘Use?’ said Laurie, opening his eyes. ‘They don’t get made into patties, as far as I know;—but they are of about as much use as the most of us, I suppose.’
‘The most of us have a great deal to do in the world,’ said Aunt Lydia, growing very red, for she was fond of pâtés; ‘if you knew how many things have to pass through my hands from morning to night——’
‘Yes, I know,’ said lazy Laurence, raising his hand in soft deprecation. ‘Mary has been telling us;—but what is the use of that, Aunt Lydia? Why should you worry yourself? Things would go on just as well if you let them alone,—that’s what I always tell Ben. What’s the good of fidgeting? If you’ll believe,’ continued Laurie, raising himself a little on one elbow, ‘all the people who have ever made any mark in the world have been people who knew how to keep quiet and let things work themselves out. There’s your Queen Elizabeth,’ he said, warming to his subject, and giving a slight kick with his polished boot to a big volume on the grass; ‘the only quality she had was a masterly inaction. She kept quiet, and things settled themselves.’
‘Oh, Laurie! not when she killed that poor, dear, Queen Mary!’ cried his mother from the sofa. ‘I hate that woman’s very name.’
‘No,’ said Laurie, gracefully sinking down again among the grass, ‘that’s an instance of energy, mother,—a brutal quality, that always comes to harm.’
‘Laurence, you are a fool!’ said Mr. Renton sharply, to his son’s surprise; and he turned his back upon them all abruptly, and went in across the soft grass, through the magical, evening atmosphere that tempted all the world to rest. His sister had taken all restfulness out of him. Though he was a sensible man, he was a Renton; and the family traditions when thus recalled to his mind had a great power over him. He went into the library, which looked out upon a dark corner of the grounds full of mournful evergreens; the blank wall of the kitchen-garden showed a little behind them, and the room at this time of day was a very doleful room. It was a kind of penance to put upon himself to come in from that air, all full of lingering hues of sunset and soft suggestions of falling dew, to the grim-luxurious room, in which he already wanted artificial light. Here he sat and pondered over his own life, and that of his boys. Up to this moment they had been a great deal happier than he had been. Like a gust of air from the old plains of his youth, a remembrance came over him of loneliness and wistfulness, and a certain impossible longing for a little pleasure now and then, and some love to brighten the boyish days. He had not been aware of wanting those vanities then; but he saw now that he had done so, and that his youth had been very bare and unlovely. He had scattered roses before his sons, while only thorns had been in his own path; but what if he had kept from them the harder training which should make them men? He sat till the darkness grew almost into night thinking over these things. They were men now,—the lads. Ben was five-and-twenty; Laurie but a year younger; and Frank, the happy boy, was only twenty, glorious in his red coat. Mr. Renton pondered long, and when the lamp came he made a great many notes and calculations, which he locked up carefully in his desk. He had a headache, which was very unusual. It was his wife’s rôle in the family to have the headaches; and it did not occur to Mr. Renton that there could be anything the matter with him. It was the heat, no doubt, or a little worry. The ladies had come into the drawing-room when his ponderings were over. It was a large room, full of windows, with one large bow projecting out upon the cliff, from which you could see the river through the cloud of intervening beeches. On the other side the room was open to the soft darkness of the lawn. There were two lamps in it, but both were shadowed; for Mrs. Renton’s eyes, like her head, were weak; and the cool air of night breathed in, odorous and soft, making a scarcely perceptible draught from window to window. Mrs. Renton lay quite out of this current of air, which naturally she was afraid of, on another sofa. Mary made tea in a corner, with the light of one of the lamps falling concentrated upon her pretty hands in twinkling motion about the brilliant little spots of china and silver. She had a ring or two upon her pink transparent fingers, and a bracelet, which sparkled in the light. Mrs. Westbury sat apart in a great chair, and fanned herself. Now and then, with a dash against the delicate abat-jour of the lamp, came a mad moth, bent on self-destruction. Mr. Renton dropped into the first chair he could find, not knowing why he was so uncomfortable, and Mary brought him some tea. The weather had been very warm, and everybody was languid with the heat. They all sat a great way apart from each other, and were not energetic enough for conversation. ‘Where is Laurie?’ Mr. Renton asked; and they told him that Laurie, with his usual wilfulness, had gone down to the river. ‘There will be a moon to-night,’ Mrs. Renton said, with some fretfulness; for she liked to have one of her boys by her, if only lying on the grass, or on the deep mossy carpet, which was almost as soft as the grass.
‘He has gone off to his moonlight, and his swans, and his water-lilies,’ said Mrs. Westbury, with disdain; but even she felt the heat too much to proceed.