“Ye’ve got some game o’ your own, I’ll be bound,” he said, with one foot on the bottom rung of the ladder. “Well, it’s nowt to do wi’ me, though I am your master now,” he added, as he disappeared safely through the trap-door.
Rhys now cared neither how he existed nor what he did so long as he could see Isoline Ridgeway, and time, for him, was measured merely by the interval between one meeting and another. He snatched at Bumpett’s proposal, which would open the road to all he lived for and give him an occupation he liked. He had grown perfectly reckless, looking no farther than the actual present; his old identity, his old interests and possessions were lost, and no new life, however prosperous, could make up to him for a final parting with Isoline. He was like a man upon whom the sun bursts from behind some dismal pack of clouds, dazzling his eyes, heart, brain and imagination till he can no longer clearly see the objects around. He was blinded, overpowered; his self-important soul was humbled by the perfections with which he had invested his queen.
His very face had altered since the days before the Rebecca riots, for the clear tan of his skin was changed to a sort of pallor due to his indoor life. His roamings in the dusk and during the dark hours of night kept him in health, and his limbs had long ago recovered their strength, but he no longer wore the expression of self-centred carelessness which had characterized him a few months before. His keen eyes had a look of pre-occupation, the look of a man whose soul inhabits one place while his body lives in another. All his life his adaptability had been so great that, from every new change and experience, he had gathered some surface difference. Now, for the first time, a thing had happened which had gone down deep and reached the real man. It could not change him altogether, but it had raised the best flower which had ever sprung up from the poor and untilled ground of his nature.
James Bumpett was scarcely the man to let a debtor slip through his fingers as George had done, and he cast about on every hand to find out what had become of the truant. Williams, who was working among the cabbage-beds of the garden at Great Masterhouse, glanced over the fence one day to see the rubicund face and tall hat of the Pig-driver on the other side of it. The two men looked at each other, and Bumpett’s mouth made itself into a slit; he was so small that he could only just see over the high green boards.
“Well, to be sure!” he exclaimed, chuckling. “Well, well, I never did!”
The other met his eyes with a sullen calmness. “I’ve left you,” he said.
“Name o’ goodness! Have ye, now? Well, ye might say I suspected it.”
The old man came nearer to the fence, and, taking hold of the pointed boards of the top, drew himself up, till his hat had risen about a foot over it. Dignity was one of the few things he did not understand.
“Mind yourself; there’s nails,” said George.
“I suppose,” remarked Bumpett, “that ye thought ye’d seen the last o’ me.”