The place had seemed splendid to me as a boy, and I well remembered how all the beautiful wonders of the spring blossomed here as nowhere else. But now these grounds too seemed to have suffered a change: there was an air of neglect about the unpruned hedges, with straggling blossoms running riotously over fence and shrubbery; the beds of hyacinths and tulips were trampled, and as I neared the house I saw that the blinds swung carelessly and the old look of thrift and prosperity was quite absent. Still, I observed all this dreamily, wondering, as returned travellers are apt to do, if the change were in the things themselves or in my own eyes.
"Perhaps," thought I, "Jack and his wife live in New York," when, suddenly answering my doubt, Jack himself came down the avenue in his light wagon.
I stepped aside, standing still, and he regarded me at first absently, then with startled curiosity, and sharply drew his skittish mare back on her haunches. "Good God, Floyd!" said he, "how glad I am to see you!" We looked straight in each other's face for a time, and his features worked, as he regarded me, with some emotion. "You were going to the house?" said he. "Nobody could see you. I have been driving father to the factories to-day, and he is not so well after it, and my mother is with him. I have to be back at twelve, so jump in and come out with me."
I obeyed him. It was but two years since we had parted, but he had aged and seemed quite different from the Jack Holt of former times. He was roughly dressed, and, though scrupulously neat and shaven, looked, I am sure, fifteen years my senior. He touched his whip, and the mare plunged down the avenue at a pace too disconcerting to allow either of us to speak for a few moments, and we were at least a mile away before her swinging canter subsided into a trot.
"What is her name?" I asked, laughing. "It ought to be Mary Magdalen, for she has seven devils in her this morning."
"Don't you remember the Duchess?" he inquired with a flicker of something like a smile crossing his heavy face. "You christened her yourself."
I remembered the Duchess. The yearling colt had been given to him on his sixteenth birthday. He wanted to call her Georgy, but his mother forbade it: so we named her after that duchess of Devonshire who had made the name famous.
"You'll find I have forgotten nothing," I replied, "but my thoughts are such a medley that I can't settle them at once."
"When did you return?"
"Only four days ago: I have not seen my mother yet."