“So it is; a force inimical, to be conquered, held down, and trampled into the earth.”
“I don’t see how you’re going to conquer trouble. It has its way, and that’s all.”
“It’s not all. Trouble will make a man despair, or drink, or gamble, or go mad, or maybe even shoot himself. Well, I’d defy it to make me deflect a hair’s-breadth from myself, come all the shafts of fate. As long as I’ve lips I’ll grin.”
“That’s how you take things?” said Farquhar. “Well, it’s not my way.” His face lighted up with a heady defiance, his lips shut in a straight line, his eyes sparkled with quite unregenerate fire.
“What is your way, then?”
Farquhar’s expression went instantly out, and he lowered his eyelids. “Well, you know, things are different for you and me,” he said, diffidently. “I’m lucky in having a religious faith to fall back on.”
“Oh, I do like you!” said Lucian, after a few seconds, smitten with an admiration which was not wholly admirable. He solemnly stretched out his hand. “Sonny, you’re a great man,” he declared. “I wish I had your cheek. Shake!”
Farquhar smiled politely, deprecated the compliment, and evaded the point at issue; and shortly afterwards conveyed himself out of the room on the plea that the invalid had done enough talking. It was fortunate for him that the language of the eye cannot be put in as evidence, for Lucian knew that he had detected, in Farquhar’s too candid orbs, a tacit acknowledgment of all the deceit wherewith he was desirous of charging him.
Next morning in country and city men awoke to a white, silent world under a dome of blue, immaculate sky. There was no wind; and the breath of horse and rider hung still in the air after Noel Farquhar as he rode up to Burnt House. A huge sweep of bare, white country lay outspread, sparkling in the sun; the hedges were so thickly thatched with snow that they did not break the even whiteness of the prospect. The miserable little group of black, wooden cottages, Farquhar’s goal, was discernible a great way off; they were so lonely that when Farquhar rode back an hour later only his own tracks, black where the crushed snow had melted, confronted him upon the road.
The day passed, and several beside, and a week later the soiled rags of the snow still lingered under hedges and by tussocks in the fields when Farquhar took another morning ride, this time in the direction of Fanes. The house lay low; its E-shaped façade, built of bright-red brick and ornamented with facings of freestone, and with diagonal bands of dark brown crossing one another, looked across shaven lawns and wide gravel paths to a stream formally laid out with cascades and little islands, in summer bright with roses. Some noble trees sprang from the lawn; in particular, a most beautiful silver birch, whose slight, tapering branches sustained a colony of ragged black blots, which were the nests of the rooks of Fanes. The birds took toll from all the orchards around, and were almost as well hated as their owners.