He pointed with the stem of his pipe to a picturesque old mansion standing in its own luxuriously wooded grounds at the summit of a slope just ahead.
Calamity made no answer, but gazed thoughtfully at this home of his childhood, the home he had never expected to see again. And thinking of his early days there, and of the soft and sheltered lives of those who live in such mansions, it seemed very desirable to the world-worn, battered man. All sorts of trivial incidents of the past, forgotten until now, flashed across his mind as the car turned into a road that ran through a wood on the estate. In that wood, as a boy, he had seen an adder swallow a young bird and remembered killing the reptile with a heavy ash stick. In that piece of marshy ground, almost hidden by trees, there used to be a pond fringed with yellow iris; he wondered if that pond were still there, and the iris.... He made a resolution to go and see later on, but, even as he did so, knew that he would find it the same. Everything remained the same; Betty was the same; it was only he who had altered.
Then his mood changed, and, while he felt a grim satisfaction at thus returning as master to the home from which he had been thrust forth as a criminal, he was not at all sure whether, apart from this sense of triumph, he was glad to be back or otherwise—probably he was neither. He wondered, too, whether the old life, with all its luxury and ease, would appeal to him; whether he would feel at home again amidst these remembered surroundings, or at variance with them.
And then, of course, there were the people whom he would have to meet; people more foreign to him now than the polyglot rabble which had formed his last crew. He had seen Lady Betty shrink from him at first sight, and imagined that her present amiability was forced; that her words and those soft, languishing glances she cast upon him were void of sincerity. Others would shrink from him too, he supposed, and then hide their feelings under a mask of well-bred composure as she was doing. Could he meet these people on their own ground, speak their language, lead their life? he asked himself.
Seeing Calamity deep in thought, McPhulach, who had leaned over the wind-screen to return the tobacco-pouch, slid gently back into his seat and absent-mindedly dropped the pouch into his own pocket.
The car was now proceeding up a broad avenue which led to the main entrance of the Towers, and a vision came to Calamity of himself as a small boy on horseback, cantering down this same avenue with his father. The thought of the latter brought back to his memory the brother who had blackened him in his father's eyes and made him what he had been; what, in heart, he still was—an outcast and an exile.
Never had he hated his brother as he hated him at this moment.
Lady Betty, meanwhile, was taking advantage of his thoughtfulness to examine his profile at her leisure. It was a strong face, she reflected, stronger and harder far than that of the youth she had loved fifteen years ago.
"A penny for your thoughts," she said lightly, to dissipate an emotion induced by his proximity and those memories of their youth.
He turned swiftly, and the baffling, rather grim smile which played about his mouth, together with the fixed and merciless stare of his glass eye, embarrassed her to the point of actual nervousness.