THE FREELANDS

One early April afternoon, in a Worcestershire field, the only field in that immediate landscape which was not down in grass, a man moved slowly athwart the furrows, sowing—a big man of heavy build, swinging his hairy brown arm with the grace of strength. He wore no coat or hat; a waistcoat, open over a blue-checked cotton shirt, flapped against belted corduroys that were somewhat the color of his square, pale-brown face and dusty hair. His eyes were sad, with the swimming yet fixed stare of epileptics; his mouth heavy-lipped, so that, but for the yearning eyes, the face would have been almost brutal. He looked as if he suffered from silence. The elm-trees bordering the field, though only just in leaf, showed dark against a white sky. A light wind blew, carrying already a scent from the earth and growth pushing up, for the year was early. The green Malvern hills rose in the west; and not far away, shrouded by trees, a long country house of weathered brick faced to the south. Save for the man sowing, and some rooks crossing from elm to elm, no life was visible in all the green land. And it was quiet—with a strange, a brooding tranquillity. The fields and hills seemed to mock the scars of road and ditch and furrow scraped on them, to mock at barriers of hedge and wall—between the green land and white sky was a conspiracy to disregard those small activities. So lonely was it, so plunged in a ground-bass of silence; so much too big and permanent for any figure of man.

Across and across the brown loam the laborer doggedly finished out his task; scattered the few last seeds into a corner, and stood still. Thrushes and blackbirds were just beginning that even-song whose blitheness, as nothing else on earth, seems to promise youth forever to the land. He picked up his coat, slung it on, and, heaving a straw bag over his shoulder, walked out on to the grass-bordered road between the elms.

“Tryst! Bob Tryst!”

At the gate of a creepered cottage amongst fruit-trees, high above the road, a youth with black hair and pale-brown face stood beside a girl with frizzy brown hair and cheeks like poppies.

“Have you had that notice?”

The laborer answered slowly:

“Yes, Mr. Derek. If she don't go, I've got to.”

“What a d—d shame!”

The laborer moved his head, as though he would have spoken, but no words came.

“Don't do anything, Bob. We'll see about that.”

“Evenin', Mr. Derek. Evenin', Miss Sheila,” and the laborer moved on.

The two at the wicket gate also turned away. A black-haired woman dressed in blue came to the wicket gate in their place. There seemed no purpose in her standing there; it was perhaps an evening custom, some ceremony such as Moslems observe at the muezzin-call. And any one who saw her would have wondered what on earth she might be seeing, gazing out with her dark glowing eyes above the white, grass-bordered roads stretching empty this way and that between the elm-trees and green fields; while the blackbirds and thrushes shouted out their hearts, calling all to witness how hopeful and young was life in this English countryside....

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CHAPTER I

Mayday afternoon in Oxford Street, and Felix Freeland, a little late, on his way from Hampstead to his brother John's house in Porchester Gardens. Felix Freeland, author, wearing the very first gray top hat of the season. A compromise, that—like many other things in his life and works—between individuality and the accepted view of things, aestheticism and fashion, the critical sense and authority. After the meeting at John's, to discuss the doings of the family of his brother Morton Freeland—better known as Tod—he would perhaps look in on the caricatures at the English Gallery, and visit one duchess in Mayfair, concerning the George Richard Memorial. And so, not the soft felt hat which really suited authorship, nor the black top hat which obliterated personality to the point of pain, but this gray thing with narrowish black band, very suitable, in truth, to a face of a pale buff color, to a moustache of a deep buff color streaked with a few gray hairs, to a black braided coat cut away from a buff-colored waistcoat, to his neat boots—not patent leather—faintly buffed with May-day dust. Even his eyes, Freeland gray, were a little buffed over by sedentary habit, and the number of things that he was conscious of. For instance, that the people passing him were distressingly plain, both men and women; plain with the particular plainness of those quite unaware of it. It struck him forcibly, while he went along, how very queer it was that with so many plain people in the country, the population managed to keep up even as well as it did. To his wonderfully keen sense of defect, it seemed little short of marvellous. A shambling, shoddy crew, this crowd of shoppers and labor demonstrators! A conglomeration of hopelessly mediocre visages! What was to be done about it? Ah! what indeed!—since they were evidently not aware of their own dismal mediocrity. Hardly a beautiful or a vivid face, hardly a wicked one, never anything transfigured, passionate, terrible, or grand. Nothing Greek, early Italian, Elizabethan, not even beefy, beery, broad old Georgian. Something clutched-in, and squashed-out about it all—on that collective face something of the look of a man almost comfortably and warmly wrapped round by a snake at the very beginning of its squeeze. It gave Felix Freeland a sort of faint excitement and pleasure to notice this. For it was his business to notice things, and embalm them afterward in ink. And he believed that not many people noticed it, so that it contributed in his mind to his own distinction, which was precious to him. Precious, and encouraged to be so by the press, which—as he well knew—must print his name several thousand times a year. And yet, as a man of culture and of principle, how he despised that kind of fame, and theoretically believed that a man's real distinction lay in his oblivion of the world's opinion, particularly as expressed by that flighty creature, the Fourth Estate. But here again, as in the matter of the gray top hat, he had instinctively compromised, taking in press cuttings which described himself and his works, while he never failed to describe those descriptions—good, bad, and indifferent—as 'that stuff,' and their writers as 'those fellows.'

Not that it was new to him to feel that the country was in a bad way. On the contrary, it was his established belief, and one for which he was prepared to furnish due and proper reasons. In the first place he traced it to the horrible hold Industrialism had in the last hundred years laid on the nation, draining the peasantry from 'the Land'; and in the second place to the influence of a narrow and insidious Officialism, sapping the independence of the People.

This was why, in going to a conclave with his brother John, high in Government employ, and his brother Stanley, a captain of industry, possessor of the Morton Plough Works, he was conscious of a certain superiority in that he, at all events, had no hand in this paralysis which was creeping on the country.

And getting more buff-colored every minute, he threaded his way on, till, past the Marble Arch, he secured the elbow-room of Hyde Park. Here groups of young men, with chivalrous idealism, were jeering at and chivying the broken remnants of a suffrage meeting. Felix debated whether he should oppose his body to their bodies, his tongue to theirs, or whether he should avert his consciousness and hurry on; but, that instinct which moved him to wear the gray top hat prevailing, he did neither, and stood instead, looking at them in silent anger, which quickly provoked endearments—such as: “Take it off,” or “Keep it on,” or “What cheer, Toppy!” but nothing more acute. And he meditated: Culture! Could culture ever make headway among the blind partisanships, the hand-to-mouth mentality, the cheap excitements of this town life? The faces of these youths, the tone of their voices, the very look of their bowler hats, said: No! You could not culturalize the impermeable texture of their vulgarity. And they were the coming manhood of the nation—this inexpressibly distasteful lot of youths! The country had indeed got too far away from 'the Land.' And this essential towny commonness was not confined to the classes from which these youths were drawn. He had even remarked it among his own son's school and college friends—an impatience of discipline, an insensibility to everything but excitement and having a good time, a permanent mental indigestion due to a permanent diet of tit-bits. What aspiration they possessed seemed devoted to securing for themselves the plums of official or industrial life. His boy Alan, even, was infected, in spite of home influences and the atmosphere of art in which he had been so sedulously soaked. He wished to enter his Uncle Stanley's plough works, seeing in it a 'soft thing.'

But the last of the woman-baiters had passed by now, and, conscious that he was really behind time, Felix hurried on....

In his study—a pleasant room, if rather tidy—John Freeland was standing before the fire smoking a pipe and looking thoughtfully at nothing. He was, in fact, thinking, with that continuity characteristic of a man who at fifty has won for himself a place of permanent importance in the Home Office. Starting life in the Royal Engineers, he still preserved something of a military look about his figure, and grave visage with steady eyes and drooping moustache (both a shade grayer than those of Felix), and a forehead bald from justness and knowing where to lay his hand on papers. His face was thinner, his head narrower, than his brother's, and he had acquired a way of making those he looked at doubt themselves and feel the sudden instability of all their facts. He was—as has been said—thinking. His brother Stanley had wired to him that morning: “Am motoring up to-day on business; can you get Felix to come at six o'clock and talk over the position at Tod's?” What position at Tod's? He had indeed heard something vague—of those youngsters of Tod's, and some fuss they were making about the laborers down there. He had not liked it. Too much of a piece with the general unrest, and these new democratic ideas that were playing old Harry with the country! For in his opinion the country was in a bad way, partly owing to Industrialism, with its rotting effect upon physique; partly to this modern analytic Intellectualism, with its destructive and anarchic influence on morals. It was difficult to overestimate the mischief of those two factors; and in the approaching conference with his brothers, one of whom was the head of an industrial undertaking, and the other a writer, whose books, extremely modern, he never read, he was perhaps vaguely conscious of his own cleaner hands. Hearing a car come to a halt outside, he went to the window and looked out. Yes, it was Stanley!...

Stanley Freeland, who had motored up from Becket—his country place, close to his plough works in Worcestershire—stood a moment on the pavement, stretching his long legs and giving directions to his chauffeur. He had been stopped twice on the road for not-exceeding the limit as he believed, and was still a little ruffled. Was it not his invariable principle to be moderate in speed as in all other things? And his feeling at the moment was stronger even than usual, that the country was in a bad way, eaten up by officialism, with its absurd limitations of speed and the liberty of the subject, and the advanced ideas of these new writers and intellectuals, always talking about the rights and sufferings of the poor. There was no progress along either of those roads. He had it in his heart, as he stood there on the pavement, to say something pretty definite to John about interference with the liberty of the subject, and he wouldn't mind giving old Felix a rap about his precious destructive doctrines, and continual girding at the upper classes, vested interests, and all the rest of it. If he had something to put in their place that would be another matter. Capital and those who controlled it were the backbone of the country—what there was left of the country, apart from these d—d officials and aesthetic fellows! And with a contraction of his straight eyebrows above his straight gray eyes, straight blunt nose, blunter moustaches, and blunt chin, he kept a tight rein on his blunt tongue, not choosing to give way even to his own anger.

Then, perceiving Felix coming—'in a white topper, by Jove!'—he crossed the pavement to the door; and, tall, square, personable, rang the bell.

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CHAPTER II

“Well, what's the matter at Tod's?”

And Felix moved a little forward in his chair, his eyes fixed with interest on Stanley, who was about to speak.

“It's that wife of his, of course. It was all very well so long as she confined herself to writing, and talk, and that Land Society, or whatever it was she founded, the one that snuffed out the other day; but now she's getting herself and those two youngsters mixed up in our local broils, and really I think Tod's got to be spoken to.”

“It's impossible for a husband to interfere with his wife's principles.” So Felix.

“Principles!” The word came from John.

“Certainly! Kirsteen's a woman of great character; revolutionary by temperament. Why should you expect her to act as you would act yourselves?”

When Felix had said that, there was a silence.

Then Stanley muttered: “Poor old Tod!”

Felix sighed, lost for a moment in his last vision of his youngest brother. It was four years ago now, a summer evening—Tod standing between his youngsters Derek and Sheila, in a doorway of his white, black-timbered, creepered cottage, his sunburnt face and blue eyes the serenest things one could see in a day's march!

“Why 'poor'?” he said. “Tod's much happier than we are. You've only to look at him.”

“Ah!” said Stanley suddenly. “D'you remember him at Father's funeral?—without his hat, and his head in the clouds. Fine-lookin' chap, old Tod—pity he's such a child of Nature.”

Felix said quietly:

“If you'd offered him a partnership, Stanley—it would have been the making of him.”

“Tod in the plough works? My hat!”

Felix smiled. At sight of that smile, Stanley grew red, and John refilled his pipe. It is always the devil to have a brother more sarcastic than oneself!

“How old are those two?” John said abruptly.

“Sheila's twenty, Derek nineteen.”

“I thought the boy was at an agricultural college?”

“Finished.”

“What's he like?”

“A black-haired, fiery fellow, not a bit like Tod.”

John muttered: “That's her Celtic blood. Her father, old Colonel Moray, was just that sort; by George, he was a regular black Highlander. What's the trouble exactly?”

It was Stanley who answered: “That sort of agitation business is all very well until it begins to affect your neighbors; then it's time it stopped. You know the Mallorings who own all the land round Tod's. Well, they've fallen foul of the Mallorings over what they call injustice to some laborers. Questions of morality involved. I don't know all the details. A man's got notice to quit over his deceased wife's sister; and some girl or other in another cottage has kicked over—just ordinary country incidents. What I want is that Tod should be made to see that his family mustn't quarrel with his nearest neighbors in this way. We know the Mallorings well, they're only seven miles from us at Becket. It doesn't do; sooner or later it plays the devil all round. And the air's full of agitation about the laborers and 'the Land,' and all the rest of it—only wants a spark to make real trouble.”

And having finished this oration, Stanley thrust his hands deep into his pockets, and jingled the money that was there.

John said abruptly:

“Felix, you'd better go down.”

Felix was sitting back, his eyes for once withdrawn from his brothers' faces.

“Odd,” he said, “really odd, that with a perfectly unique person like Tod for a brother, we only see him once in a blue moon.”

“It's because he IS so d—d unique.”

Felix got up and gravely extended his hand to Stanley.

“By Jove,” he said, “you've spoken truth.” And to John he added: “Well, I WILL go, and let you know the upshot.”

When he had departed, the two elder brothers remained for some moments silent, then Stanley said:

“Old Felix is a bit tryin'! With the fuss they make of him in the papers, his head's swelled!”

John did not answer. One could not in so many words resent one's own brother being made a fuss of, and if it had been for something real, such as discovering the source of the Black River, conquering Bechuanaland, curing Blue-mange, or being made a Bishop, he would have been the first and most loyal in his appreciation; but for the sort of thing Felix made up—Fiction, and critical, acid, destructive sort of stuff, pretending to show John Freeland things that he hadn't seen before—as if Felix could!—not at all the jolly old romance which one could read well enough and enjoy till it sent you to sleep after a good day's work. No! that Felix should be made a fuss of for such work as that really almost hurt him. It was not quite decent, violating deep down one's sense of form, one's sense of health, one's traditions. Though he would not have admitted it, he secretly felt, too, that this fuss was dangerous to his own point of view, which was, of course, to him the only real one. And he merely said:

“Will you stay to dinner, Stan?”

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CHAPTER III

If John had those sensations about Felix, so—when he was away from John—had Felix about himself. He had never quite grown out of the feeling that to make himself conspicuous in any way was bad form. In common with his three brothers he had been through the mills of gentility—those unique grinding machines of education only found in his native land. Tod, to be sure, had been publicly sacked at the end of his third term, for climbing on to the headmaster's roof and filling up two of his chimneys with football pants, from which he had omitted to remove his name. Felix still remembered the august scene—the horrid thrill of it, the ominous sound of that: “Freeland minimus!” the ominous sight of poor little Tod emerging from his obscurity near the roof of the Speech Room, and descending all those steps. How very small and rosy he had looked, his bright hair standing on end, and his little blue eyes staring up very hard from under a troubled frown. And the august hand holding up those sooty pants, and the august voice: “These appear to be yours, Freeland minimus. Were you so good as to put them down my chimneys?” And the little piping, “Yes, sir.”

“May I ask why, Freeland minimus?”

“I don't know, sir.”

“You must have had some reason, Freeland minimus?”

“It was the end of term, sir.”

“Ah! You must not come back here, Freeland minimus. You are too dangerous, to yourself, and others. Go to your place.”

And poor little Tod ascending again all those steps, cheeks more terribly rosy than ever, eyes bluer, from under a still more troubled frown; little mouth hard set; and breathing so that you could hear him six forms off. True, the new Head had been goaded by other outrages, the authors of which had not omitted to remove their names; but the want of humor, the amazing want of humor! As if it had not been a sign of first-rate stuff in Tod! And to this day Felix remembered with delight the little bubbling hiss that he himself had started, squelched at once, but rippling out again along the rows like tiny scattered lines of fire when a conflagration is suppressed. Expulsion had been the salvation of Tod! Or—his damnation? Which? God would know, but Felix was not certain. Having himself been fifteen years acquiring 'Mill' philosophy, and another fifteen years getting rid of it, he had now begun to think that after all there might be something in it. A philosophy that took everything, including itself, at face value, and questioned nothing, was sedative to nerves too highly strung by the continual examination of the insides of oneself and others, with a view to their alteration. Tod, of course, having been sent to Germany after his expulsion, as one naturally would be, and then put to farming, had never properly acquired 'Mill' manner, and never sloughed it off; and yet he was as sedative a man as you could meet.

Emerging from the Tube station at Hampstead, he moved toward home under a sky stranger than one might see in a whole year of evenings. Between the pine-trees on the ridge it was opaque and colored like pinkish stone, and all around violent purple with flames of the young green, and white spring blossom lit against it. Spring had been dull and unimaginative so far, but this evening it was all fire and gathered torrents; Felix wondered at the waiting passion of that sky.

He reached home just as those torrents began to fall.

The old house, beyond the Spaniard's Road, save for mice and a faint underlying savor of wood-rot in two rooms, well satisfied the aesthetic sense. Felix often stood in his hall, study, bedroom, and other apartments, admiring the rich and simple glow of them—admiring the rarity and look of studied negligence about the stuffs, the flowers, the books, the furniture, the china; and then quite suddenly the feeling would sweep over him: “By George, do I really own all this, when my ideal is 'bread and water, and on feast days a little bit of cheese'?” True, he was not to blame for the niceness of his things—Flora did it; but still—there they were, a little hard to swallow for an epicurean. It might, of course, have been worse, for if Flora had a passion for collecting, it was a very chaste one, and though what she collected cost no little money, it always looked as if it had been inherited, and—as everybody knows—what has been inherited must be put up with, whether it be a coronet or a cruet-stand.

To collect old things, and write poetry! It was a career; one would not have one's wife otherwise. She might, for instance, have been like Stanley's wife, Clara, whose career was wealth and station; or John's wife, Anne, whose career had been cut short; or even Tod's wife, Kirsteen, whose career was revolution. No—a wife who had two, and only two children, and treated them with affectionate surprise, who was never out of temper, never in a hurry, knew the points of a book or play, could cut your hair at a pinch; whose hand was dry, figure still good, verse tolerable, and—above all—who wished for no better fate than Fate had given her—was a wife not to be sneezed at. And Felix never had. He had depicted so many sneezing wives and husbands in his books, and knew the value of a happy marriage better perhaps than any one in England. He had laid marriage low a dozen times, wrecked it on all sorts of rocks, and had the greater veneration for his own, which had begun early, manifested every symptom of ending late, and in the meantime walked down the years holding hands fast, and by no means forgetting to touch lips.

Hanging up the gray top hat, he went in search of her. He found her in his dressing-room, surrounded by a number of little bottles, which she was examining vaguely, and putting one by one into an 'inherited' waste-paper basket. Having watched her for a little while with a certain pleasure, he said:

“Yes, my dear?”

Noticing his presence, and continuing to put bottles into the basket, she answered:

“I thought I must—they're what dear Mother's given us.”

There they lay—little bottles filled with white and brown fluids, white and blue and brown powders; green and brown and yellow ointments; black lozenges; buff plasters; blue and pink and purple pills. All beautifully labelled and corked.

And he said in a rather faltering voice:

“Bless her! How she does give her things away! Haven't we used ANY?”

“Not one. And they have to be cleared away before they're stale, for fear we might take one by mistake.”

“Poor Mother!”

“My dear, she's found something newer than them all by now.”

Felix sighed.

“The nomadic spirit. I have it, too!”

And a sudden vision came to him of his mother's carved ivory face, kept free of wrinkles by sheer will-power, its firm chin, slightly aquiline nose, and measured brows; its eyes that saw everything so quickly, so fastidiously, its compressed mouth that smiled sweetly, with a resolute but pathetic acceptation. Of the piece of fine lace, sometimes black, sometimes white, over her gray hair. Of her hands, so thin now, always moving a little, as if all the composure and care not to offend any eye by allowing Time to ravage her face, were avenging themselves in that constant movement. Of her figure, that was short but did not seem so, still quick-moving, still alert, and always dressed in black or gray. A vision of that exact, fastidious, wandering spirit called Frances Fleeming Freeland—that spirit strangely compounded of domination and humility, of acceptation and cynicism; precise and actual to the point of desert dryness; generous to a point that caused her family to despair; and always, beyond all things, brave.

Flora dropped the last little bottle, and sitting on the edge of the bath let her eyebrows rise. How pleasant was that impersonal humor which made her superior to other wives!

“You—nomadic? How?”

“Mother travels unceasingly from place to place, person to person, thing to thing. I travel unceasingly from motive to motive, mind to mind; my native air is also desert air—hence the sterility of my work.”

Flora rose, but her eyebrows descended.

“Your work,” she said, “is not sterile.”

“That, my dear,” said Felix, “is prejudice.” And perceiving that she was going to kiss him, he waited without annoyance. For a woman of forty-two, with two children and three books of poems—and not knowing which had taken least out of her—with hazel-gray eyes, wavy eyebrows darker than they should have been, a glint of red in her hair; wavy figure and lips; quaint, half-humorous indolence, quaint, half-humorous warmth—was she not as satisfactory a woman as a man could possibly have married!

“I have got to go down and see Tod,” he said. “I like that wife of his; but she has no sense of humor. How much better principles are in theory than in practice!”

Flora repeated softly, as if to herself:

“I'm glad I have none.” She was at the window leaning out, and Felix took his place beside her. The air was full of scent from wet leaves, alive with the song of birds thanking the sky. Suddenly he felt her arm round his ribs; either it or they—which, he could not at the moment tell—seemed extraordinarily soft....

Between Felix and his young daughter, Nedda, there existed the only kind of love, except a mother's, which has much permanence—love based on mutual admiration. Though why Nedda, with her starry innocence, should admire him, Felix could never understand, not realizing that she read his books, and even analyzed them for herself in the diary which she kept religiously, writing it when she ought to have been asleep. He had therefore no knowledge of the way his written thoughts stimulated the ceaseless questioning that was always going on within her; the thirst to know why this was and that was not. Why, for instance, her heart ached so some days and felt light and eager other days? Why, when people wrote and talked of God, they seemed to know what He was, and she never did? Why people had to suffer; and the world be black to so many millions? Why one could not love more than one man at a time? Why—a thousand things? Felix's books supplied no answers to these questions, but they were comforting; for her real need as yet was not for answers, but ever for more questions, as a young bird's need is for opening its beak without quite knowing what is coming out or going in. When she and her father walked, or sat, or went to concerts together, their talk was neither particularly intimate nor particularly voluble; they made to each other no great confidences. Yet each was certain that the other was not bored—a great thing; and they squeezed each other's little fingers a good deal—very warming. Now with his son Alan, Felix had a continual sensation of having to keep up to a mark and never succeeding—a feeling, as in his favorite nightmare, of trying to pass an examination for which he had neglected to prepare; of having to preserve, in fact, form proper to the father of Alan Freeland. With Nedda he had a sense of refreshment; the delight one has on a spring day, watching a clear stream, a bank of flowers, birds flying. And Nedda with her father—what feeling had she? To be with him was like a long stroking with a touch of tickle in it; to read his books, a long tickle with a nice touch of stroking now and then when one was not expecting it.

That night after dinner, when Alan had gone out and Flora into a dream, she snuggled up alongside her father, got hold of his little finger, and whispered:

“Come into the garden, Dad; I'll put on goloshes. It's an awfully nice moon.”

The moon indeed was palest gold behind the pines, so that its radiance was a mere shower of pollen, just a brushing of white moth-down over the reeds of their little dark pond, and the black blur of the flowering currant bushes. And the young lime-trees, not yet in full leaf, quivered ecstatically in that moon-witchery, still letting fall raindrops of the past spring torrent, with soft hissing sounds. A real sense in the garden, of God holding his breath in the presence of his own youth swelling, growing, trembling toward perfection! Somewhere a bird—a thrush, they thought—mixed in its little mind as to night and day, was queerly chirruping. And Felix and his daughter went along the dark wet paths, holding each other's arms, not talking much. For, in him, very responsive to the moods of Nature, there was a flattered feeling, with that young arm in his, of Spring having chosen to confide in him this whispering, rustling hour. And in Nedda was so much of that night's unutterable youth—no wonder she was silent! Then, somehow—neither responsible—they stood motionless. How quiet it was, but for a distant dog or two, and the stilly shivering-down of the water drops, and the far vibration of the million-voiced city! How quiet and soft and fresh! Then Nedda spoke:

“Dad, I do so want to know everything.”

Not rousing even a smile, with its sublime immodesty, that aspiration seemed to Felix infinitely touching. What less could youth want in the very heart of Spring? And, watching her face put up to the night, her parted lips, and the moon-gleam fingering her white throat, he answered:

“It'll all come soon enough, my pretty!”

To think that she must come to an end like the rest, having found out almost nothing, having discovered just herself, and the particle of God that was within her! But he could not, of course, say this.

“I want to FEEL. Can't I begin?”

How many millions of young creatures all the world over were sending up that white prayer to climb and twine toward the stars, and—fall to earth again! And nothing to be answered, but:

“Time enough, Nedda!”

“But, Dad, there are such heaps of things, such heaps of people, and reasons, and—and life; and I know nothing. Dreams are the only times, it seems to me, that one finds out anything.”

“As for that, my child, I am exactly in your case. What's to be done for us?”

She slid her hand through his arm again.

“Don't laugh at me!”

“Heaven forbid! I meant it. You're finding out much quicker than I. It's all folk-music to you still; to me Strauss and the rest of the tired stuff. The variations my mind spins—wouldn't I just swap them for the tunes your mind is making?”

“I don't seem making tunes at all. I don't seem to have anything to make them of. Take me down to see 'the Tods,' Dad!”

Why not? And yet—! Just as in this spring night Felix felt so much, so very much, lying out there behind the still and moony dark, such marvellous holding of breath and waiting sentiency, so behind this innocent petition, he could not help the feeling of a lurking fatefulness. That was absurd. And he said: “If you wish it, by all means. You'll like your Uncle Tod; as to the others, I can't say, but your aunt is an experience, and experiences are what you want, it seems.”

Fervently, without speech, Nedda squeezed his arm.

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CHAPTER IV

Stanley Freeland's country house, Becket, was almost a show place. It stood in its park and pastures two miles from the little town of Transham and the Morton Plough Works; close to the ancestral home of the Moretons, his mother's family—that home burned down by Roundheads in the Civil War. The site—certain vagaries in the ground—Mrs. Stanley had caused to be walled round, and consecrated so to speak with a stone medallion on which were engraved the aged Moreton arms—arrows and crescent moons in proper juxtaposition. Peacocks, too—that bird 'parlant,' from the old Moreton crest—were encouraged to dwell there and utter their cries, as of passionate souls lost in too comfortable surroundings.

By one of those freaks of which Nature is so prodigal, Stanley—owner of this native Moreton soil—least of all four Freeland brothers, had the Moreton cast of mind and body. That was why he made so much more money than the other three put together, and had been able, with the aid of Clara's undoubted genius for rank and station, to restore a strain of Moreton blood to its rightful position among the county families of Worcestershire. Bluff and without sentiment, he himself set little store by that, smiling up his sleeve—for he was both kindly and prudent—at his wife who had been a Tomson. It was not in Stanley to appreciate the peculiar flavor of the Moretons, that something which in spite of their naivete and narrowness, had really been rather fine. To him, such Moretons as were left were 'dry enough sticks, clean out of it.' They were of a breed that was already gone, the simplest of all country gentlemen, dating back to the Conquest, without one solitary conspicuous ancestor, save the one who had been physician to a king and perished without issue—marrying from generation to generation exactly their own equals; living simple, pious, parochial lives; never in trade, never making money, having a tradition and a practice of gentility more punctilious than the so-called aristocracy; constitutionally paternal and maternal to their dependents, constitutionally so convinced that those dependents and all indeed who were not 'gentry,' were of different clay, that they were entirely simple and entirely without arrogance, carrying with them even now a sort of Early atmosphere of archery and home-made cordials, lavender and love of clergy, together with frequent use of the word 'nice,' a peculiar regularity of feature, and a complexion that was rather parchmenty. High Church people and Tories, naturally, to a man and woman, by sheer inbred absence of ideas, and sheer inbred conviction that nothing else was nice; but withal very considerate of others, really plucky in bearing their own ills; not greedy, and not wasteful.

Of Becket, as it now was, they would not have approved at all. By what chance Edmund Moreton (Stanley's mother's grandfather), in the middle of the eighteenth century, had suddenly diverged from family feeling and ideals, and taken that 'not quite nice' resolution to make ploughs and money, would never now be known. The fact remained, together with the plough works. A man apparently of curious energy and character, considering his origin, he had dropped the E from his name, and—though he continued the family tradition so far as to marry a Fleeming of Worcestershire, to be paternal to his workmen, to be known as Squire, and to bring his children up in the older Moreton 'niceness'—he had yet managed to make his ploughs quite celebrated, to found a little town, and die still handsome and clean-shaved at the age of sixty-six. Of his four sons, only two could be found sufficiently without the E to go on making ploughs. Stanley's grandfather, Stuart Morton, indeed, had tried hard, but in the end had reverted to the congenital instinct for being just a Moreton. An extremely amiable man, he took to wandering with his family, and died in France, leaving one daughter—Frances, Stanley's mother—and three sons, one of whom, absorbed in horses, wandered to Australia and was killed by falling from them; one of whom, a soldier, wandered to India, and the embraces of a snake; and one of whom wandered into the embraces of the Holy Roman Church.

The Morton Plough Works were dry and dwindling when Stanley's father, seeking an opening for his son, put him and money into them. From that moment they had never looked back, and now brought Stanley, the sole proprietor, an income of full fifteen thousand pounds a year. He wanted it. For Clara, his wife, had that energy of aspiration which before now has raised women to positions of importance in the counties which are not their own, and caused, incidentally, many acres to go out of cultivation. Not one plough was used on the whole of Becket, not even a Morton plough—these indeed were unsuitable to English soil and were all sent abroad. It was the corner-stone of his success that Stanley had completely seen through the talked-of revival of English agriculture, and sedulously cultivated the foreign market. This was why the Becket dining-room could contain without straining itself large quantities of local magnates and celebrities from London, all deploring the condition of 'the Land,' and discussing without end the regrettable position of the agricultural laborer. Except for literary men and painters, present in small quantities to leaven the lump, Becket was, in fact, a rallying point for the advanced spirits of Land Reform—one of those places where they were sure of being well done at week-ends, and of congenial and even stimulating talk about the undoubted need for doing something, and the designs which were being entertained upon 'the Land' by either party. This very heart of English country that the old Moretons in their paternal way had so religiously farmed, making out of its lush grass and waving corn a simple and by no means selfish or ungenerous subsistence, was now entirely lawns, park, coverts, and private golf course, together with enough grass to support the kine which yielded that continual stream of milk necessary to Clara's entertainments and children, all female, save little Francis, and still of tender years. Of gardeners, keepers, cow-men, chauffeurs, footmen, stablemen—full twenty were supported on those fifteen hundred acres that formed the little Becket demesne. Of agricultural laborers proper—that vexed individual so much in the air, so reluctant to stay on 'the Land,' and so difficult to house when he was there, there were fortunately none, so that it was possible for Stanley, whose wife meant him to 'put up' for the Division, and his guests, who were frequently in Parliament, to hold entirely unbiassed and impersonal views upon the whole question so long as they were at Becket.

It was beautiful there, too, with the bright open fields hedged with great elms, and that ever-rich serenity of its grass and trees. The white house, timbered with dark beams in true Worcestershire fashion, and added-to from time to time, had preserved, thanks to a fine architect, an old-fashioned air of spacious presidency above its gardens and lawns. On the long artificial lake, with innumerable rushy nooks and water-lilies and coverture of leaves floating flat and bright in the sun, the half-tame wild duck and shy water-hens had remote little worlds, and flew and splashed when all Becket was abed, quite as if the human spirit, with its monkey-tricks and its little divine flame, had not yet been born.

Under the shade of a copper-beech, just where the drive cut through into its circle before the house, an old lady was sitting that afternoon on a campstool. She was dressed in gray alpaca, light and cool, and had on her iron-gray hair a piece of black lace. A number of Hearth and Home and a little pair of scissors, suspended by an inexpensive chain from her waist, rested on her knee, for she had been meaning to cut out for dear Felix a certain recipe for keeping the head cool; but, as a fact, she sat without doing so, very still, save that, now and then, she compressed her pale fine lips, and continually moved her pale fine hands. She was evidently waiting for something that promised excitement, even pleasure, for a little rose-leaf flush had quavered up into a face that was colored like parchment; and her gray eyes under regular and still-dark brows, very far apart, between which there was no semblance of a wrinkle, seemed noting little definite things about her, almost unwillingly, as an Arab's or a Red Indian's eyes will continue to note things in the present, however their minds may be set on the future. So sat Frances Fleeming Freeland (nee Morton) waiting for the arrival of her son Felix and her grandchildren Alan and Nedda.

She marked presently an old man limping slowly on a stick toward where the drive debouched, and thought at once: “He oughtn't to be coming this way. I expect he doesn't know the way round to the back. Poor man, he's very lame. He looks respectable, too.” She got up and went toward him, remarking that his face with nice gray moustaches was wonderfully regular, almost like a gentleman's, and that he touched his dusty hat with quite old-fashioned courtesy. And smiling—her smile was sweet but critical—she said: “You'll find the best way is to go back to that little path, and past the greenhouses. Have you hurt your leg?”

“My leg's been like that, m'm, fifteen year come Michaelmas.”

“How did it happen?”

“Ploughin'. The bone was injured; an' now they say the muscle's dried up in a manner of speakin'.”

“What do you do for it? The very best thing is this.”

From the recesses of a deep pocket, placed where no one else wore such a thing, she brought out a little pot.

“You must let me give it you. Put it on when you go to bed, and rub it well in; you'll find it act splendidly.”

The old man took the little pot with dubious reverence.

“Yes, m'm,” he said; “thank you, m'm.”

“What is your name?”

“Gaunt.”

“And where do you live?”

“Over to Joyfields, m'm.”

“Joyfields—another of my sons lives there—Mr. Morton Freeland. But it's seven miles.”

“I got a lift half-way.”

“And have you business at the house?” The old man was silent; the downcast, rather cynical look of his lined face deepened. And Frances Freeland thought: 'He's overtired. They must give him some tea and an egg. What can he want, coming all this way? He's evidently not a beggar.'

The old man who was not a beggar spoke suddenly:

“I know the Mr. Freeland at Joyfields. He's a good gentleman, too.”

“Yes, he is. I wonder I don't know you.”

“I'm not much about, owin' to my leg. It's my grand-daughter in service here, I come to see.”

“Oh, yes! What is her name?”

“Gaunt her name is.”

“I shouldn't know her by her surname.”

“Alice.”

“Ah! in the kitchen; a nice, pretty girl. I hope you're not in trouble.”

Again the old man was silent, and again spoke suddenly:

“That's as you look at it, m'm,” he said. “I've got a matter of a few words to have with her about the family. Her father he couldn't come, so I come instead.”

“And how are you going to get back?”

“I'll have to walk, I expect, without I can pick up with a cart.”

Frances Freeland compressed her lips. “With that leg you should have come by train.”

The old man smiled.

“I hadn't the fare like,” he said. “I only gets five shillin's a week, from the council, and two o' that I pays over to my son.”

Frances Freeland thrust her hand once more into that deep pocket, and as she did so she noticed that the old man's left boot was flapping open, and that there were two buttons off his coat. Her mind was swiftly calculating: “It is more than seven weeks to quarter day. Of course I can't afford it, but I must just give him a sovereign.”

She withdrew her hand from the recesses of her pocket and looked at the old man's nose. It was finely chiselled, and the same yellow as his face. “It looks nice, and quite sober,” she thought. In her hand was her purse and a boot-lace. She took out a sovereign.

“Now, if I give you this,” she said, “you must promise me not to spend any of it in the public-house. And this is for your boot. And you must go back by train. And get those buttons sewn on your coat. And tell cook, from me, please, to give you some tea and an egg.” And noticing that he took the sovereign and the boot-lace very respectfully, and seemed altogether very respectable, and not at all coarse or beery-looking, she said:

“Good-by; don't forget to rub what I gave you into your leg every night and every morning,” and went back to her camp-stool. Sitting down on it with the scissors in her hand, she still did not cut out that recipe, but remained as before, taking in small, definite things, and feeling with an inner trembling that dear Felix and Alan and Nedda would soon be here; and the little flush rose again in her cheeks, and again her lips and hands moved, expressing and compressing what was in her heart. And close behind her, a peacock, straying from the foundations of the old Moreton house, uttered a cry, and moved slowly, spreading its tail under the low-hanging boughs of the copper-beeches, as though it knew those dark burnished leaves were the proper setting for its 'parlant' magnificence.

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CHAPTER V

The day after the little conference at John's, Felix had indeed received the following note:

“DEAR FELIX:

“When you go down to see old Tod, why not put up with us at Becket? Any time will suit, and the car can take you over to Joyfields when you like. Give the pen a rest. Clara joins in hoping you'll come, and Mother is still here. No use, I suppose, to ask Flora.

“Yours ever,

“STANLEY.”

During the twenty years of his brother's sojourn there Felix had been down to Becket perhaps once a year, and latterly alone; for Flora, having accompanied him the first few times, had taken a firm stand.

“My dear,” she said, “I feel all body there.”

Felix had rejoined:

“No bad thing, once in a way.”

But Flora had remained firm. Life was too short! She did not get on well with Clara. Neither did Felix feel too happy in his sister-in-law's presence; but the gray top-hat instinct had kept him going there, for one ought to keep in touch with one's brothers.

He replied to Stanley:

“DEAR STANLEY:

“Delighted; if I may bring my two youngsters. We'll arrive to-morrow at four-fifty.

“Yours affectionately,

“FELIX.”

Travelling with Nedda was always jolly; one could watch her eyes noting, inquiring, and when occasion served, have one's little finger hooked in and squeezed. Travelling with Alan was convenient, the young man having a way with railways which Felix himself had long despaired of acquiring. Neither of the children had ever been at Becket, and though Alan was seldom curious, and Nedda too curious about everything to be specially so about this, yet Felix experienced in their company the sensations of a new adventure.

Arrived at Transham, that little town upon a hill which the Morton Plough Works had created, they were soon in Stanley's car, whirling into the sleepy peace of a Worcestershire afternoon. Would this young bird nestling up against him echo Flora's verdict: 'I feel all body there!' or would she take to its fatted luxury as a duck to water? And he said: “By the way, your aunt's 'Bigwigs' set in on a Saturday. Are you for staying and seeing the lions feed, or do we cut back?”

From Alan he got the answer he expected:

“If there's golf or something, I suppose we can make out all right.” From Nedda: “What sort of Bigwigs are they, Dad?”

“A sort you've never seen, my dear.”

“Then I should like to stay. Only, about dresses?”

“What war paint have you?”

“Only two white evenings. And Mums gave me her Mechlin.”

“'Twill serve.”

To Felix, Nedda in white 'evenings' was starry and all that man could desire.

“Only, Dad, do tell me about them, beforehand.”

“My dear, I will. And God be with you. This is where Becket begins.”

The car had swerved into a long drive between trees not yet full-grown, but decorously trying to look more than their twenty years. To the right, about a group of older elms, rooks were in commotion, for Stanley's three keepers' wives had just baked their annual rook pies, and the birds were not yet happy again. Those elms had stood there when the old Moretons walked past them through corn-fields to church of a Sunday. Away on the left above the lake, the little walled mound had come in view. Something in Felix always stirred at sight of it, and, squeezing Nedda's arm, he said:

“See that silly wall? Behind there Granny's ancients lived. Gone now—new house—new lake—new trees—new everything.”

But he saw from his little daughter's calm eyes that the sentiment in him was not in her.

“I like the lake,” she said. “There's Granny—oh, and a peacock!”

His mother's embrace, with its frail energy, and the pressure of her soft, dry lips, filled Felix always with remorse. Why could he not give the simple and direct expression to his feeling that she gave to hers? He watched those lips transferred to Nedda, heard her say: “Oh, my darling, how lovely to see you! Do you know this for midge-bites?” A hand, diving deep into a pocket, returned with a little silver-coated stick having a bluish end. Felix saw it rise and hover about Nedda's forehead, and descend with two little swift dabs. “It takes them away at once.”

“Oh, but Granny, they're not midge-bites; they're only from my hat!”

“It doesn't matter, darling; it takes away anything like that.”

And he thought: 'Mother is really wonderful!'

At the house the car had already disgorged their luggage. Only one man, but he absolutely the butler, awaited them, and they entered, at once conscious of Clara's special pot-pourri. Its fragrance steamed from blue china, in every nook and crevice, a sort of baptism into luxury. Clara herself, in the outer morning-room, smelled a little of it. Quick and dark of eye, capable, comely, perfectly buttoned, one of those women who know exactly how not to be superior to the general taste of the period. In addition to that great quality she was endowed with a fine nose, an instinct for co-ordination not to be excelled, and a genuine love of making people comfortable; so that it was no wonder that she had risen in the ranks of hostesses, till her house was celebrated for its ease, even among those who at their week-ends liked to feel 'all body.' In regard to that characteristic of Becket, not even Felix in his ironies had ever stood up to Clara; the matter was too delicate. Frances Freeland, indeed—not because she had any philosophic preconceptions on the matter, but because it was 'not nice, dear, to be wasteful' even if it were only of rose-leaves, or to 'have too much decoration,' such as Japanese prints in places where they hum—sometimes told her daughter-in-law frankly what was wrong, without, however, making the faintest impression upon Clara, for she was not sensitive, and, as she said to Stanley, it was 'only Mother.'

When they had drunk that special Chinese tea, all the rage, but which no one really liked, in the inner morning, or afternoon room—for the drawing-rooms were too large to be comfortable except at week-ends—they went to see the children, a special blend of Stanley and Clara, save the little Francis, who did not seem to be entirely body. Then Clara took them to their rooms. She lingered kindly in Nedda's, feeling that the girl could not yet feel quite at home, and looking in the soap-dish lest she might not have the right verbena, and about the dressing-table to see that she had pins and scent, and plenty of 'pot-pourri,' and thinking: 'The child is pretty—a nice girl, not like her mother.' Explaining carefully how, because of the approaching week-end, she had been obliged to put her in 'a very simple room' where she would be compelled to cross the corridor to her bath, she asked her if she had a quilted dressing-gown, and finding that she had not, left her saying she would send one—and could she do her frocks up, or should Sirrett come?

Abandoned, the girl stood in the middle of the room, so far more 'simple' than she had ever slept in, with its warm fragrance of rose-leaves and verbena, its Aubusson carpet, white silk-quilted bed, sofa, cushioned window-seat, dainty curtains, and little nickel box of biscuits on little spindly table. There she stood and sniffed, stretched herself, and thought: 'It's jolly—only, it smells too much!' and she went up to the pictures, one by one. They seemed to go splendidly with the room, and suddenly she felt homesick. Ridiculous, of course! Yet, if she had known where her father's room was, she would have run out to it; but her memory was too tangled up with stairs and corridors—to find her way down to the hall again was all she could have done.

A maid came in now with a blue silk gown very thick and soft. Could she do anything for Miss Freeland? No, thanks, she could not; only, did she know where Mr. Freeland's room was?

“Which Mr. Freeland, miss, the young or the old?”

“Oh, the old!” Having said which, Nedda felt unhappy; her Dad was not old! “No, miss; but I'll find out. It'll be in the walnut wing!” But with a little flutter at the thought of thus setting people to run about wings, Nedda murmured: “Oh! thanks, no; it doesn't matter.”

She settled down now on the cushion of the window-seat, to look out and take it all in, right away to that line of hills gone blue in the haze of the warm evening. That would be Malvern; and there, farther to the south, the 'Tods' lived. 'Joyfields!' A pretty name! And it was lovely country all round; green and peaceful, with its white, timbered houses and cottages. People must be very happy, living here—happy and quiet like the stars and the birds; not like the crowds in London thronging streets and shops and Hampstead Heath; not like the people in all those disgruntled suburbs that led out for miles where London ought to have stopped but had not; not like the thousands and thousands of those poor creatures in Bethnal Green, where her slum work lay. The natives here must surely be happy. Only, were there any natives? She had not seen any. Away to the right below her window were the first trees of the fruit garden; for many of them Spring was over, but the apple-trees had just come into blossom, and the low sun shining through a gap in some far elms was slanting on their creamy pink, christening them—Nedda thought—with drops of light; and lovely the blackbirds' singing sounded in the perfect hush! How wonderful to be a bird, going where you would, and from high up in the air seeing everything; flying down a sunbeam, drinking a raindrop, sitting on the very top of a tall tree, running in grass so high that you were hidden, laying little perfect blue-green eggs, or pure-gray speckly ones; never changing your dress, yet always beautiful. Surely the spirit of the world was in the birds and the clouds, roaming, floating, and in the flowers and trees that never smelled anything but sweet, never looked anything but lovely, and were never restless. Why was one restless, wanting things that did not come—wanting to feel and know, wanting to love, and be loved? And at that thought which had come to her so unexpectedly—a thought never before shaped so definitely—Nedda planted her arms on the window-sill, with sleeves fallen down, and let her hands meet cup-shaped beneath her chin. Love! To have somebody with whom she could share everything—some one to whom and for whom she could give up—some one she could protect and comfort—some one who would bring her peace. Peace, rest—from what? Ah! that she could not make clear, even to herself. Love! What would love be like? Her father loved her, and she loved him. She loved her mother; and Alan on the whole was jolly to her—it was not that. What was it—where was it—when would it come and wake her, and kiss her to sleep, all in one? Come and fill her as with the warmth and color, the freshness, light, and shadow of this beautiful May evening, flood her as with the singing of those birds, and the warm light sunning the apple blossoms. And she sighed. Then—as with all young things whose attention after all is but as the hovering of a butterfly—her speculation was attracted to a thin, high-shouldered figure limping on a stick, away from the house, down one of the paths among the apple-trees. He wavered, not knowing, it seemed, his way. And Nedda thought: 'Poor old man, how lame he is!' She saw him stoop, screened, as he evidently thought, from sight, and take something very small from his pocket. He gazed, rubbed it, put it back; what it was she could not see. Then pressing his hand down, he smoothed and stretched his leg. His eyes seemed closed. So a stone man might have stood! Till very slowly he limped on, passing out of sight. And turning from the window, Nedda began hurrying into her evening things.

When she was ready she took a long time to decide whether to wear her mother's lace or keep it for the Bigwigs. But it was so nice and creamy that she simply could not take it off, and stood turning and turning before the glass. To stand before a glass was silly and old-fashioned; but Nedda could never help it, wanting so badly to be nicer to look at than she was, because of that something that some day was coming!

She was, in fact, pretty, but not merely pretty—there was in her face something alive and sweet, something clear and swift. She had still that way of a child raising its eyes very quickly and looking straight at you with an eager innocence that hides everything by its very wonder; and when those eyes looked down they seemed closed—their dark lashes were so long. Her eyebrows were wide apart, arching with a slight angle, and slanting a little down toward her nose. Her forehead under its burnt-brown hair was candid; her firm little chin just dimpled. Altogether, a face difficult to take one's eyes off. But Nedda was far from vain, and her face seemed to her too short and broad, her eyes too dark and indeterminate, neither gray nor brown. The straightness of her nose was certainly comforting, but it, too, was short. Being creamy in the throat and browning easily, she would have liked to be marble-white, with blue dreamy eyes and fair hair, or else like a Madonna. And was she tall enough? Only five foot five. And her arms were too thin. The only things that gave her perfect satisfaction were her legs, which, of course, she could not at the moment see; they really WERE rather jolly! Then, in a panic, fearing to be late, she turned and ran out, fluttering into the maze of stairs and corridors.

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CHAPTER VI

Clara, Mrs. Stanley Freeland, was not a narrow woman either in mind or body; and years ago, soon indeed after she married Stanley, she had declared her intention of taking up her sister-in-law, Kirsteen, in spite of what she had heard were the woman's extraordinary notions. Those were the days of carriages, pairs, coachmen, grooms, and, with her usual promptitude, ordering out the lot, she had set forth. It is safe to say she had never forgotten that experience.

Imagine an old, white, timbered cottage with a thatched roof, and no single line about it quite straight. A cottage crazy with age, buried up to the thatch in sweetbrier, creepers, honeysuckle, and perched high above crossroads. A cottage almost unapproachable for beehives and their bees—an insect for which Clara had an aversion. Imagine on the rough, pebbled approach to the door of this cottage (and Clara had on thin shoes) a peculiar cradle with a dark-eyed baby that was staring placidly at two bees sleeping on a coverlet made of a rough linen such as Clara had never before seen. Imagine an absolutely naked little girl of three, sitting in a tub of sunlight in the very doorway. Clara had turned swiftly and closed the wicket gate between the pebbled pathway and the mossed steps that led down to where her coachman and her footman were sitting very still, as was the habit of those people. She had perceived at once that she was making no common call. Then, with real courage she had advanced, and, looking down at the little girl with a fearful smile, had tickled the door with the handle of her green parasol. A woman younger than herself, a girl, indeed, appeared in a low doorway. She had often told Stanley since that she would never forget her first sight (she had not yet had another) of Tod's wife. A brown face and black hair, fiery gray eyes, eyes all light, under black lashes, and “such a strange smile;” bare, brown, shapely arms and neck in a shirt of the same rough, creamy linen, and, from under a bright blue skirt, bare, brown, shapely ankles and feet! A voice so soft and deadly that, as Clara said: “What with her eyes, it really gave me the shivers. And, my dear,” she had pursued, “white-washed walls, bare brick floors, not a picture, not a curtain, not even a fire-iron. Clean—oh, horribly! They must be the most awful cranks. The only thing I must say that was nice was the smell. Sweetbrier, and honey, coffee, and baked apples—really delicious. I must try what I can do with it. But that woman—girl, I suppose she is—stumped me. I'm sure she'd have cut my head off if I'd attempted to open my mouth on ordinary topics. The children were rather ducks; but imagine leaving them about like that amongst the bees. 'Kirsteen!' She looked it. Never again! And Tod I didn't see at all; I suppose he was mooning about amongst his creatures.”

It was the memory of this visit, now seventeen years ago, that had made her smile so indulgently when Stanley came back from the conference. She had said at once that they must have Felix to stay, and for her part she would be only too glad to do anything she could for those poor children of Tod's, even to asking them to Becket, and trying to civilize them a little.... “But as for that woman, there'll be nothing to be done with her, I can assure you. And I expect Tod is completely under her thumb.”

To Felix, who took her in to dinner, she spoke feelingly and in a low voice. She liked Felix, in spite of his wife, and respected him—he had a name. Lady Malloring—she told him—the Mallorings owned, of course, everything round Joyfields—had been telling her that of late Tod's wife had really become quite rabid over the land question. 'The Tods' were hand in glove with all the cottagers. She, Clara, had nothing to say against any one who sympathized with the condition of the agricultural laborer; quite the contrary. Becket was almost, as Felix knew—though perhaps it wasn't for her to say so—the centre of that movement; but there were ways of doing things, and one did so deprecate women like this Kirsteen—what an impossibly Celtic name!—putting her finger into any pie that really was of national importance. Nothing could come of anything done that sort of way. If Felix had any influence with Tod it would be a mercy to use it in getting those poor young creatures away from home, to mix a little with people who took a sane view of things. She would like very much to get them over to Becket, but with their notions it was doubtful whether they had evening clothes! She had, of course, never forgotten that naked mite in the tub of sunlight, nor the poor baby with its bees and its rough linen. Felix replied deferentially—he was invariably polite, and only just ironic enough, in the houses of others—that he had the very greatest respect for Tod, and that there could be nothing very wrong with the woman to whom Tod was so devoted. As for the children, his own young people would get at them and learn all about what was going on in a way that no fogey like himself could. In regard to the land question, there were, of course, many sides to that, and he, for one, would not be at all sorry to observe yet another. After all, the Tods were in real contact with the laborers, and that was the great thing. It would be very interesting.

Yes, Clara quite saw all that, but—and here she sank her voice so that there was hardly any left—as Felix was going over there, she really must put him au courant with the heart of this matter. Lady Malloring had told her the whole story. It appeared there were two cases: A family called Gaunt, an old man, and his son, who had two daughters—one of them, Alice, quite a nice girl, was kitchen-maid here at Becket, but the other sister—Wilmet—well! she was one of those girls that, as Felix must know, were always to be found in every village. She was leading the young men astray, and Lady Malloring had put her foot down, telling her bailiff to tell the farmer for whom Gaunt worked that he and his family must go, unless they sent the girl away somewhere. That was one case. And the other was of a laborer called Tryst, who wanted to marry his deceased wife's sister. Of course, whether Mildred Malloring was not rather too churchy and puritanical—now that a deceased wife's sister was legal—Clara did not want to say; but she was undoubtedly within her rights if she thought it for the good of the village. This man, Tryst, was a good workman, and his farmer had objected to losing him, but Lady Malloring had, of course, not given way, and if he persisted he would get put out. All the cottages about there were Sir Gerald Malloring's, so that in both cases it would mean leaving the neighborhood. In regard to village morality, as Felix knew, the line must be drawn somewhere.

Felix interrupted quietly:

“I draw it at Lady Malloring.”

“Well, I won't argue that with you. But it really is a scandal that Tod's wife should incite her young people to stir up the villagers. Goodness knows where that mayn't lead! Tod's cottage and land, you see, are freehold, the only freehold thereabouts; and his being a brother of Stanley's makes it particularly awkward for the Mallorings.”

“Quite so!” murmured Felix.

“Yes, but my dear Felix, when it comes to infecting those simple people with inflated ideas of their rights, it's serious, especially in the country. I'm told there's really quite a violent feeling. I hear from Alice Gaunt that the young Tods have been going about saying that dogs are better off than people treated in this fashion, which, of course, is all nonsense, and making far too much of a small matter. Don't you think so?”

But Felix only smiled his peculiar, sweetish smile, and answered:

“I'm glad to have come down just now.”

Clara, who did not know that when Felix smiled like that he was angry, agreed.

“Yes,” she said; “you're an observer. You will see the thing in right perspective.”

“I shall endeavor to. What does Tod say?”

“Oh! Tod never seems to say anything. At least, I never hear of it.”

Felix murmured:

“Tod is a well in the desert.”

To which deep saying Clara made no reply, not indeed understanding in the least what it might signify.

That evening, when Alan, having had his fill of billiards, had left the smoking-room and gone to bed, Felix remarked to Stanley:

“I say, what sort of people are these Mallorings?”

Stanley, who was settling himself for the twenty minutes of whiskey, potash, and a Review, with which he commonly composed his mind before retiring, answered negligently:

“The Mallorings? Oh! about the best type of landowner we've got.”

“What exactly do you mean by that?”

Stanley took his time to answer, for below his bluff good-nature he had the tenacious, if somewhat slow, precision of an English man of business, mingled with a certain mistrust of 'old Felix.'

“Well,” he said at last, “they build good cottages, yellow brick, d—d ugly, I must say; look after the character of their tenants; give 'em rebate of rent if there's a bad harvest; encourage stock-breedin', and machinery—they've got some of my ploughs, but the people don't like 'em, and, as a matter of fact, they're right—they're not made for these small fields; set an example goin' to church; patronize the Rifle Range; buy up the pubs when they can, and run 'em themselves; send out jelly, and let people over their place on bank holidays. Dash it all, I don't know what they don't do. Why?”

“Are they liked?”

“Liked? No, I should hardly think they were liked; respected, and all that. Malloring's a steady fellow, keen man on housing, and a gentleman; she's a bit too much perhaps on the pious side. They've got one of the finest Georgian houses in the country. Altogether they're what you call 'model.'”

“But not human.”

Stanley slightly lowered the Review and looked across it at his brother. It was evident to him that 'old Felix' was in one of his free-thinking moods.

“They're domestic,” he said, “and fond of their children, and pleasant neighbors. I don't deny that they've got a tremendous sense of duty, but we want that in these days.”

“Duty to what?”

Stanley raised his level eyebrows. It was a stumper. Without great care he felt that he would be getting over the border into the uncharted land of speculation and philosophy, wandering on paths that led him nowhere.

“If you lived in the country, old man,” he said, “you wouldn't ask that sort of question.”

“You don't imagine,” said Felix, “that you or the Mallorings live in the country? Why, you landlords are every bit as much town dwellers as I am—thought, habit, dress, faith, souls, all town stuff. There IS no 'country' in England now for us of the 'upper classes.' It's gone. I repeat: Duty to what?”

And, rising, he went over to the window, looking out at the moonlit lawn, overcome by a sudden aversion from more talk. Of what use were words from a mind tuned in one key to a mind tuned in another? And yet, so ingrained was his habit of discussion, that he promptly went on:

“The Mallorings, I've not the slightest doubt, believe it their duty to look after the morals of those who live on their property. There are three things to be said about that: One—you can't make people moral by adopting the attitude of the schoolmaster. Two—it implies that they consider themselves more moral than their neighbors. Three—it's a theory so convenient to their security that they would be exceptionally good people if they did not adopt it; but, from your account, they are not so much exceptionally as just typically good people. What you call their sense of duty, Stanley, is really their sense of self-preservation coupled with their sense of superiority.”

“H'm!” said Stanley; “I don't know that I quite follow you.”

“I always hate an odor of sanctity. I'd prefer them to say frankly: 'This is my property, and you'll jolly well do what I tell you, on it.'”

“But, my dear chap, after all, they really ARE superior.”

“That,” said Felix, “I emphatically question. Put your Mallorings to earn their living on fifteen to eighteen shillings a week, and where would they be? The Mallorings have certain virtues, no doubt, natural to their fortunate environment, but of the primitive virtues of patience, hardihood, perpetual, almost unconscious self-sacrifice, and cheerfulness in the face of a hard fate, they are no more the equals of the people they pretend to be superior to than I am your equal as a man of business.”

“Hang it!” was Stanley's answer, “what a d—d old heretic you are!”

Felix frowned. “Am I? Be honest! Take the life of a Malloring and take it at its best; see how it stands comparison in the ordinary virtues with those of an averagely good specimen of a farm-laborer. Your Malloring is called with a cup of tea, at, say, seven o'clock, out of a nice, clean, warm bed; he gets into a bath that has been got ready for him; into clothes and boots that have been brushed for him; and goes down to a room where there's a fire burning already if it's a cold day, writes a few letters, perhaps, before eating a breakfast of exactly what he likes, nicely prepared for him, and reading the newspaper that best comforts his soul; when he has eaten and read, he lights his cigar or his pipe and attends to his digestion in the most sanitary and comfortable fashion; then in his study he sits down to steady direction of other people, either by interview or by writing letters, or what not. In this way, between directing people and eating what he likes, he passes the whole day, except that for two or three hours, sometimes indeed seven or eight hours, he attends to his physique by riding, motoring, playing a game, or indulging in a sport that he has chosen for himself. And, at the end of all that, he probably has another bath that has been made ready for him, puts on clean clothes that have been put out for him, goes down to a good dinner that has been cooked for him, smokes, reads, learns, and inwardly digests, or else plays cards, billiards, and acts host till he is sleepy, and so to bed, in a clean, warm bed, in a clean, fresh room. Is that exaggerated?”

“No; but when you talk of his directing other people, you forget that he is doing what they couldn't.”

“He may be doing what they couldn't; but ordinary directive ability is not born in a man; it's acquired by habit and training. Suppose fortune had reversed them at birth, the Gaunt or Tryst would by now have it and the Malloring would not. The accident that they were not reversed at birth has given the Malloring a thousandfold advantage.”

“It's no joke directing things,” muttered Stanley.

“No work is any joke; but I just put it to you: Simply as work, without taking in the question of reward, would you dream for a minute of swapping your work with the work of one of your workmen? No. Well, neither would a Malloring with one of his Gaunts. So that, my boy, for work which is intrinsically more interesting and pleasurable, the Malloring gets a hundred to a thousand times more money.”

“All this is rank socialism, my dear fellow.”

“No; rank truth. Now, to take the life of a Gaunt. He gets up summer and winter much earlier out of a bed that he cannot afford time or money to keep too clean or warm, in a small room that probably has not a large enough window; into clothes stiff with work and boots stiff with clay; makes something hot for himself, very likely brings some of it to his wife and children; goes out, attending to his digestion crudely and without comfort; works with his hands and feet from half past six or seven in the morning till past five at night, except that twice he stops for an hour or so and eats simple things that he would not altogether have chosen to eat if he could have had his will. He goes home to a tea that has been got ready for him, and has a clean-up without assistance, smokes a pipe of shag, reads a newspaper perhaps two days old, and goes out again to work for his own good, in his vegetable patch, or to sit on a wooden bench in an atmosphere of beer and 'baccy.' And so, dead tired, but not from directing other people, he drowses himself to early lying again in his doubtful bed. Is that exaggerated?”

“I suppose not, but he—”

“Has his compensations: Clean conscience—freedom from worry—fresh air, all the rest of it! I know. Clean conscience granted, but so has your Malloring, it would seem. Freedom from worry—yes, except when a pair of boots is wanted, or one of the children is ill; then he has to make up for lost time with a vengeance. Fresh air—and wet clothes, with a good chance of premature rheumatism. Candidly, which of those two lives demands more of the virtues on which human life is founded—courage and patience, hardihood and self-sacrifice? And which of two men who have lived those two lives well has most right to the word 'superior'?”

Stanley dropped the Review and for fully a minute paced the room without reply. Then he said:

“Felix, you're talking flat revolution.”

Felix, who, faintly smiling, had watched him up and down, up and down the Turkey carpet, answered:

“Not so. I am by no means a revolutionary person, because with all the good-will in the world I have been unable to see how upheavals from the bottom, or violence of any sort, is going to equalize these lives or do any good. But I detest humbug, and I believe that so long as you and your Mallorings go on blindly dosing yourselves with humbug about duty and superiority, so long will you see things as they are not. And until you see things as they are, purged of all that sickening cant, you will none of you really move to make the conditions of life more and ever more just. For, mark you, Stanley, I, who do not believe in revolution from the bottom, the more believe that it is up to us in honour to revolutionize things from the top!”

“H'm!” said Stanley; “that's all very well; but the more you give the more they want, till there's no end to it.”

Felix stared round that room, where indeed one was all body.

“By George,” he said, “I've yet to see a beginning. But, anyway, if you give in a grudging spirit, or the spirit of a schoolmaster, what can you expect? If you offer out of real good-will, so it is taken.” And suddenly conscious that he had uttered a constructive phrase, Felix cast down his eyes, and added:

“I am going to my clean, warm bed. Good night, old man!”

When his brother had taken up his candlestick and gone, Stanley, uttering a dubious sound, sat down on the lounge, drank deep out of his tumbler, and once more took up his Review.

[ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]

CHAPTER VII

The next day Stanley's car, fraught with Felix and a note from Clara, moved swiftly along the grass-bordered roads toward Joyfields. Lying back on the cushioned seat, the warm air flying at his face, Felix contemplated with delight his favorite countryside. Certainly this garden of England was very lovely, its greenness, trees, and large, pied, lazy cattle; its very emptiness of human beings even was pleasing.

Nearing Joyfields he noted the Mallorings' park and their long Georgian house, carefully fronting south. There, too, was the pond of what village there was, with the usual ducks on it; and three well-remembered cottages in a row, neat and trim, of the old, thatched sort, but evidently restored. Out of the door of one of them two young people had just emerged, going in the same direction as the car. Felix passed them and turned to look. Yes, it was they! He stopped the car. They were walking, with eyes straight before them, frowning. And Felix thought: 'Nothing of Tod in either of them; regular Celts!'

The girl's vivid, open face, crisp, brown, untidy hair, cheeks brimful of color, thick lips, eyes that looked up and out as a Skye terrier's eyes look out of its shagginess—indeed, her whole figure struck Felix as almost frighteningly vital; and she walked as if she despised the ground she covered. The boy was even more arresting. What a strange, pale-dark face, with its black, uncovered hair, its straight black brows; what a proud, swan's-eyed, thin-lipped, straight-nosed young devil, marching like a very Highlander; though still rather run-up, from sheer youthfulness! They had come abreast of the car by now, and, leaning out, he said:

“You don't remember me, I'm afraid!” The boy shook his head. Wonderful eyes he had! But the girl put out her hand.

“Of course, Derek; it's Uncle Felix.”

They both smiled now, the girl friendly, the boy rather drawn back into himself. And feeling strangely small and ill at ease, Felix murmured:

“I'm going to see your father. Can I give you a lift home?”

The answer came as he expected:

“No, thanks.” Then, as if to tone it down, the girl added:

“We've got something to do first. You'll find him in the orchard.”

She had a ringing voice, full of warmth. Lifting his hat, Felix passed on. They WERE a couple! Strange, attractive, almost frightening. Kirsteen had brought his brother a formidable little brood.

Arriving at the cottage, he went up its mossy stones and through the wicket gate. There was little change, indeed, since the days of Clara's visit, save that the beehives had been moved farther out. Nor did any one answer his knock; and mindful of the girl's words, “You'll find him in the orchard,” he made his way out among the trees. The grass was long and starred with petals. Felix wandered over it among bees busy with the apple-blossom. At the very end he came on his brother, cutting down a pear-tree. Tod was in shirt-sleeves, his brown arms bare almost to the shoulders. How tremendous the fellow was! What resounding and terrific blows he was dealing! Down came the tree, and Tod drew his arm across his brow. This great, burnt, curly-headed fellow was more splendid to look upon than even Felix had remembered, and so well built that not a movement of his limbs was heavy. His cheek-bones were very broad and high; his brows thick and rather darker than his bright hair, so that his deep-set, very blue eyes seemed to look out of a thicket; his level white teeth gleamed from under his tawny moustache, and his brown, unshaven cheeks and jaw seemed covered with gold powder. Catching sight of Felix, he came forward.

“Fancy,” he said, “old Gladstone spending his leisure cutting down trees—of all melancholy jobs!”

Felix did not quite know what to answer, so he put his arm within his brother's. Tod drew him toward the tree.

“Sit down!” he said. Then, looking sorrowfully at the pear-tree, he murmured:

“Seventy years—and down in seven minutes. Now we shall burn it. Well, it had to go. This is the third year it's had no blossom.”

His speech was slow, like that of a man accustomed to think aloud. Felix admired him askance. “I might live next door,” he thought, “for all the notice he's taken of my turning up!”

“I came over in Stanley's car,” he said. “Met your two coming along—fine couple they are!”

“Ah!” said Tod. And there was something in the way he said it that was more than a mere declaration of pride or of affection. Then he looked at Felix.

“What have you come for, old man?”

Felix smiled. Quaint way to put it!

“For a talk.”

“Ah!” said Tod, and he whistled.

A largish, well-made dog with a sleek black coat, white underneath, and a black tail white-tipped, came running up, and stood before Tod, with its head rather to one side and its yellow-brown eyes saying: 'I simply must get at what you're thinking, you know.'

“Go and tell your mistress to come—Mistress!”

The dog moved his tail, lowered it, and went off.

“A gypsy gave him to me,” said Tod; “best dog that ever lived.”

“Every one thinks that of his own dog, old man.”

“Yes,” said Tod; “but this IS.”

“He looks intelligent.”

“He's got a soul,” said Tod. “The gypsy said he didn't steal him, but he did.”

“Do you always know when people aren't speaking the truth, then?”

“Yes.”

At such a monstrous remark from any other man, Felix would have smiled; but seeing it was Tod, he only asked: “How?”

“People who aren't speaking the truth look you in the face and never move their eyes.”

“Some people do that when they are speaking the truth.”

“Yes; but when they aren't, you can see them struggling to keep their eyes straight. A dog avoids your eye when he's something to conceal; a man stares at you. Listen!”

Felix listened and heard nothing.

“A wren;” and, screwing up his lips, Tod emitted a sound: “Look!”

Felix saw on the branch of an apple-tree a tiny brown bird with a little beak sticking out and a little tail sticking up. And he thought: 'Tod's hopeless!'

“That fellow,” said Tod softly, “has got his nest there just behind us.” Again he emitted the sound. Felix saw the little bird move its head with a sort of infinite curiosity, and hop twice on the branch.

“I can't get the hen to do that,” Tod murmured.

Felix put his hand on his brother's arm—what an arm!

“Yes,” he said; “but look here, old man—I really want to talk to you.”

Tod shook his head. “Wait for her,” he said.

Felix waited. Tod was getting awfully eccentric, living this queer, out-of-the-way life with a cranky woman year after year; never reading anything, never seeing any one but tramps and animals and villagers. And yet, sitting there beside his eccentric brother on that fallen tree, he had an extraordinary sense of rest. It was, perhaps, but the beauty and sweetness of the day with its dappling sunlight brightening the apple-blossoms, the wind-flowers, the wood-sorrel, and in the blue sky above the fields those clouds so unimaginably white. All the tiny noises of the orchard, too, struck on his ear with a peculiar meaning, a strange fulness, as if he had never heard such sounds before. Tod, who was looking at the sky, said suddenly:

“Are you hungry?”

And Felix remembered that they never had any proper meals, but, when hungry, went to the kitchen, where a wood-fire was always burning, and either heated up coffee, and porridge that was already made, with boiled eggs and baked potatoes and apples, or devoured bread, cheese, jam, honey, cream, tomatoes, butter, nuts, and fruit, that were always set out there on a wooden table, under a muslin awning; he remembered, too, that they washed up their own bowls and spoons and plates, and, having finished, went outside and drew themselves a draught of water. Queer life, and deuced uncomfortable—almost Chinese in its reversal of everything that every one else was doing.

“No,” he said, “I'm not.”

“I am. Here she is.”

Felix felt his heart beating—Clara was not alone in being frightened of this woman. She was coming through the orchard with the dog; a remarkable-looking woman—oh, certainly remarkable! She greeted him without surprise and, sitting down close to Tod, said: “I'm glad to see you.”

Why did this family somehow make him feel inferior? The way she sat there and looked at him so calmly! Still more the way she narrowed her eyes and wrinkled her lips, as if rather malicious thoughts were rising in her soul! Her hair, as is the way of fine, soft, almost indigo-colored hair, was already showing threads of silver; her whole face and figure thinner than he had remembered. But a striking woman still—with wonderful eyes! Her dress—Felix had scanned many a crank in his day—was not so alarming as it had once seemed to Clara; its coarse-woven, deep-blue linen and needle-worked yoke were pleasing to him, and he could hardly take his gaze from the kingfisher-blue band or fillet that she wore round that silver-threaded black hair.

He began by giving her Clara's note, the wording of which he had himself dictated:

“DEAR KIRSTEEN:

“Though we have not seen each other for so long, I am sure you will forgive my writing. It would give us so much pleasure if you and the two children would come over for a night or two while Felix and his young folk are staying with us. It is no use, I fear, to ask Tod; but of course if he would come, too, both Stanley and myself would be delighted.

“Yours cordially,

“CLARA FREELAND.”

She read it, handed it to Tod, who also read it and handed it to Felix. Nobody said anything. It was so altogether simple and friendly a note that Felix felt pleased with it, thinking: 'I expressed that well!'

Then Tod said: “Go ahead, old man! You've got something to say about the youngsters, haven't you?”

How on earth did he know that? But then Tod HAD a sort of queer prescience.

“Well,” he brought out with an effort, “don't you think it's a pity to embroil your young people in village troubles? We've been hearing from Stanley—”

Kirsteen interrupted in her calm, staccato voice with just the faintest lisp:

“Stanley would not understand.”

She had put her arm through Tod's, but never removed her eyes from her brother-in-law's face.

“Possibly,” said Felix, “but you must remember that Stanley, John, and myself represent ordinary—what shall we say—level-headed opinion.”

“With which we have nothing in common, I'm afraid.”

Felix glanced from her to Tod. The fellow had his head on one side and seemed listening to something in the distance. And Felix felt a certain irritation.

“It's all very well,” he said, “but I think you really have got to look at your children's future from a larger point of view. You don't surely want them to fly out against things before they've had a chance to see life for themselves.”

She answered:

“The children know more of life than most young people. They've seen it close to, they've seen its realities. They know what the tyranny of the countryside means.”

“Yes, yes,” said Felix, “but youth is youth.”

“They are not too young to know and feel the truth.”

Felix was impressed. How those narrowing eyes shone! What conviction in that faintly lisping voice!

'I am a fool for my pains,' he thought, and only said:

“Well, what about this invitation, anyway?”

“Yes; it will be just the thing for them at the moment.”

The words had to Felix a somewhat sinister import. He knew well enough that she did not mean by them what others would have meant. But he said: “When shall we expect them? Tuesday, I suppose, would be best for Clara, after her weekend. Is there no chance of you and Tod?”

She quaintly wrinkled her lips into not quite a smile, and answered:

“Tod shall say. Do you hear, Tod?”

“In the meadow. It was there yesterday—first time this year.”

Felix slipped his arm through his brother's.

“Quite so, old man.”

“What?” said Tod. “Ah! let's go in. I'm awfully hungry....”

Sometimes out of a calm sky a few drops fall, the twigs rustle, and far away is heard the muttering of thunder; the traveller thinks: 'A storm somewhere about.' Then all once more is so quiet and peaceful that he forgets he ever had that thought, and goes on his way careless.

So with Felix returning to Becket in Stanley's car. That woman's face, those two young heathens—the unconscious Tod!

There was mischief in the air above that little household. But once more the smooth gliding of the cushioned car, the soft peace of the meadows so permanently at grass, the churches, mansions, cottages embowered among their elms, the slow-flapping flight of the rooks and crows lulled Felix to quietude, and the faint far muttering of that thunder died away.

Nedda was in the drive when he returned, gazing at a nymph set up there by Clara. It was a good thing, procured from Berlin, well known for sculpture, and beginning to green over already, as though it had been there a long time—a pretty creature with shoulders drooping, eyes modestly cast down, and a sparrow perching on her head.

“Well, Dad?”

“They're coming.”

“When?”

“On Tuesday—the youngsters, only.”

“You might tell me a little about them.”

But Felix only smiled. His powers of description faltered before that task; and, proud of those powers, he did not choose to subject them to failure.

[ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]

CHAPTER VIII

Not till three o'clock that Saturday did the Bigwigs begin to come. Lord and Lady Britto first from Erne by car; then Sir Gerald and Lady Malloring, also by car from Joyfields; an early afternoon train brought three members of the Lower House, who liked a round of golf—Colonel Martlett, Mr. Sleesor, and Sir John Fanfar—with their wives; also Miss Bawtrey, an American who went everywhere; and Moorsome, the landscape-painter, a short, very heavy man who went nowhere, and that in almost perfect silence, which he afterward avenged. By a train almost sure to bring no one else came Literature in Public Affairs, alone, Henry Wiltram, whom some believed to have been the very first to have ideas about the land. He was followed in the last possible train by Cuthcott, the advanced editor, in his habitual hurry, and Lady Maude Ughtred in her beauty. Clara was pleased, and said to Stanley, while dressing, that almost every shade of opinion about the land was represented this week-end. She was not, she said, afraid of anything, if she could keep Henry Wiltram and Cuthcott apart. The House of Commons men would, of course, be all right. Stanley assented: “They'll be 'fed up' with talk. But how about Britto—he can sometimes be very nasty, and Cuthcott's been pretty rough on him, in his rag.”

Clara had remembered that, and she was putting Lady Maude on one side of Cuthcott, and Moorsome on the other, so that he would be quite safe at dinner, and afterward—Stanley must look out!

“What have you done with Nedda?” Stanley asked.

“Given her to Colonel Martlett, with Sir John Fanfar on the other side; they both like something fresh.” She hoped, however, to foster a discussion, so that they might really get further this week-end; the opportunity was too good to throw away.

“H'm!” Stanley murmured. “Felix said some very queer things the other night. He, too, might make ructions.”

Oh, no!—Clara persisted—Felix had too much good taste. She thought that something might be coming out of this occasion, something as it were national, that would bear fruit. And watching Stanley buttoning his braces, she grew enthusiastic. For, think how splendidly everything was represented! Britto, with his view that the thing had gone too far, and all the little efforts we might make now were no good, with Canada and those great spaces to outbid anything we could do; though she could not admit that he was right, there was a lot in what he said; he had great gifts—and some day might—who knew? Then there was Sir John—Clara pursued—who was almost the father of the new Tory policy: Assist the farmers to buy their own land. And Colonel Martlett, representing the older Tory policy of: What the devil would happen to the landowners if they did? Secretly (Clara felt sure) he would never go into a lobby to support that. He had said to her: 'Look at my brother James's property; if we bring this policy in, and the farmers take advantage, his house might stand there any day without an acre round it.' Quite true—it might. The same might even happen to Becket.

Stanley grunted.

Exactly!—Clara went on: And that was the beauty of having got the Mallorings; theirs was such a steady point of view, and she was not sure that they weren't right, and the whole thing really a question of model proprietorship.

“H'm!” Stanley muttered. “Felix will have his knife into that.”

Clara did not think that mattered. The thing was to get everybody's opinion. Even Mr. Moorsome's would be valuable—if he weren't so terrifically silent, for he must think a lot, sitting all day, as he did, painting the land.

“He's a heavy ass,” said Stanley.

Yes; but Clara did not wish to be narrow. That was why it was so splendid to have got Mr. Sleesor. If anybody knew the Radical mind he did, and he could give full force to what one always felt was at the bottom of it—that the Radicals' real supporters were the urban classes; so that their policy must not go too far with 'the Land,' for fear of seeming to neglect the towns. For, after all, in the end it was out of the pockets of the towns that 'the Land' would have to be financed, and nobody really could expect the towns to get anything out of it. Stanley paused in the adjustment of his tie; his wife was a shrewd woman.

“You've hit it there,” he said. “Wiltram will give it him hot on that, though.”

Of course, Clara assented. And it was magnificent that they had got Henry Wiltram, with his idealism and his really heavy corn tax; not caring what happened to the stunted products of the towns—and they truly were stunted, for all that the Radicals and the half-penny press said—till at all costs we could grow our own food. There was a lot in that.

“Yes,” Stanley muttered, “and if he gets on to it, shan't I have a jolly time of it in the smoking-room? I know what Cuthcott's like with his shirt out.”

Clara's eyes brightened; she was very curious herself to see Mr. Cuthcott with his—that is, to hear him expound the doctrine he was always writing up, namely, that 'the Land' was gone and, short of revolution, there was nothing for it but garden cities. She had heard he was so cutting and ferocious that he really did seem as if he hated his opponents. She hoped he would get a chance—perhaps Felix could encourage him.

“What about the women?” Stanley asked suddenly. “Will they stand a political powwow? One must think of them a bit.”

Clara had. She was taking a farewell look at herself in the far-away mirror through the door into her bedroom. It was a mistake—she added—to suppose that women were not interested in 'the Land.' Lady Britto was most intelligent, and Mildred Malloring knew every cottage on her estate.

“Pokes her nose into 'em often enough,” Stanley muttered.

Lady Fanfar again, and Mrs. Sleesor, and even Hilda Martlett, were interested in their husbands, and Miss Bawtrey, of course, interested in everything. As for Maude Ughtred, all talk would be the same to her; she was always week-ending. Stanley need not worry—it would be all right; some real work would get done, some real advance be made. So saying, she turned her fine shoulders twice, once this way and once that, and went out. She had never told even Stanley her ambition that at Becket, under her aegis, should be laid the foundation-stone of the real scheme, whatever it might be, that should regenerate 'the Land.' Stanley would only have laughed; even though it would be bound to make him Lord Freeland when it came to be known some day....

To the eyes and ears of Nedda that evening at dinner, all was new indeed, and all wonderful. It was not that she was unaccustomed to society or to conversation, for to their house at Hampstead many people came, uttering many words, but both the people and the words were so very different. After the first blush, the first reconnaissance of the two Bigwigs between whom she sat, her eyes WOULD stray and her ears would only half listen to them. Indeed, half her ears, she soon found out, were quite enough to deal with Colonel Martlett and Sir John Fanfar. Across the azaleas she let her glance come now and again to anchor on her father's face, and exchanged with him a most enjoyable blink. She tried once or twice to get through to Alan, but he was always eating; he looked very like a young Uncle Stanley this evening.

What was she feeling? Short, quick stabs of self-consciousness as to how she was looking; a sort of stunned excitement due to sheer noise and the number of things offered to her to eat and drink; keen pleasure in the consciousness that Colonel Martlett and Sir John Fanfar and other men, especially that nice one with the straggly moustache who looked as if he were going to bite, glanced at her when they saw she wasn't looking. If only she had been quite certain that it was not because they thought her too young to be there! She felt a sort of continual exhilaration, that this was the great world—the world where important things were said and done, together with an intense listening expectancy, and a sense most unexpected and almost frightening, that nothing important was being said or would be done. But this she knew to be impudent. On Sunday evenings at home people talked about a future existence, about Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Chinese pictures, post-impressionism, and would suddenly grow hot and furious about peace, and Strauss, justice, marriage, and De Maupassant, and whether people were losing their souls through materialism, and sometimes one of them would get up and walk about the room. But to-night the only words she could catch were the names of two politicians whom nobody seemed to approve of, except that nice one who was going to bite. Once very timidly she asked Colonel Martlett whether he liked Strauss, and was puzzled by his answer: “Rather; those 'Tales of Hoffmann' are rippin', don't you think? You go to the opera much?” She could not, of course, know that the thought which instantly rose within her was doing the governing classes a grave injustice—almost all of whom save Colonel Martlett knew that the 'Tales of Hoffmann' were by one Offenbach. But beyond all things she felt she would never, never learn to talk as they were all talking—so quickly, so continuously, so without caring whether everybody or only the person they were talking to heard what they said. She had always felt that what you said was only meant for the person you said it to, but here in the great world she must evidently not say anything that was not meant for everybody, and she felt terribly that she could not think of anything of that sort to say. And suddenly she began to want to be alone. That, however, was surely wicked and wasteful, when she ought to be learning such a tremendous lot; and yet, what was there to learn? And listening just sufficiently to Colonel Martlett, who was telling her how great a man he thought a certain general, she looked almost despairingly at the one who was going to bite. He was quite silent at that moment, gazing at his plate, which was strangely empty. And Nedda thought: 'He has jolly wrinkles about his eyes, only they might be heart disease; and I like the color of his face, so nice and yellow, only that might be liver. But I DO like him—I wish I'd been sitting next to him; he looks real.' From that thought, of the reality of a man whose name she did not know, she passed suddenly into the feeling that nothing else of this about her was real at all, neither the talk nor the faces, not even the things she was eating. It was all a queer, buzzing dream. Nor did that sensation of unreality cease when her aunt began collecting her gloves, and they trooped forth to the drawing-room. There, seated between Mrs. Sleesor and Lady Britto, with Lady Malloring opposite, and Miss Bawtrey leaning over the piano toward them, she pinched herself to get rid of the feeling that, when all these were out of sight of each other, they would become silent and have on their lips a little, bitter smile. Would it be like that up in their bedrooms, or would it only be on her (Nedda's) own lips that this little smile would come? It was a question she could not answer; nor could she very well ask it of any of these ladies. She looked them over as they sat there talking and felt very lonely. And suddenly her eyes fell on her grandmother. Frances Freeland was seated halfway down the long room in a sandalwood chair, somewhat insulated by a surrounding sea of polished floor. She sat with a smile on her lips, quite still, save for the continual movement of her white hands on her black lap. To her gray hair some lace of Chantilly was pinned with a little diamond brooch, and hung behind her delicate but rather long ears. And from her shoulders was depended a silvery garment, of stuff that looked like the mail shirt of a fairy, reaching the ground on either side. A tacit agreement had evidently been come to, that she was incapable of discussing 'the Land' or those other subjects such as the French murder, the Russian opera, the Chinese pictures, and the doings of one, L—— , whose fate was just then in the air, so that she sat alone.

And Nedda thought: 'How much more of a lady she looks than anybody here! There's something deep in her to rest on that isn't in the Bigwigs; perhaps it's because she's of a different generation.' And, getting up, she went over and sat down beside her on a little chair.

Frances Freeland rose at once and said:

“Now, my darling, you can't be comfortable in that tiny chair. You must take mine.”

“Oh, no, Granny; please!”

“Oh, yes; but you must! It's so comfortable, and I've simply been longing to sit in the chair you're in. Now, darling, to please me!”

Seeing that a prolonged struggle would follow if she did not get up, Nedda rose and changed chairs.

“Do you like these week-ends, Granny?”

Frances Freeland seemed to draw her smile more resolutely across her face. With her perfect articulation, in which there was, however, no trace of bigwiggery, she answered:

“I think they're most interesting, darling. It's so nice to see new people. Of course you don't get to know them, but it's very amusing to watch, especially the head-dresses!” And sinking her voice: “Just look at that one with the feather going straight up; did you ever see such a guy?” and she cackled with a very gentle archness. Gazing at that almost priceless feather, trying to reach God, Nedda felt suddenly how completely she was in her grandmother's little camp; how entirely she disliked bigwiggery.

Frances Freeland's voice brought her round.

“Do you know, darling, I've found the most splendid thing for eyebrows? You just put a little on every night and it keeps them in perfect order. I must give you my little pot.”

“I don't like grease, Granny.”

“Oh! but this isn't grease, darling. It's a special thing; and you only put on just the tiniest touch.”

Diving suddenly into the recesses of something, she produced an exiguous round silver box. Prizing it open, she looked over her shoulder at the Bigwigs, then placed her little finger on the contents of the little box, and said very softly:

“You just take the merest touch, and you put it on like that, and it keeps them together beautifully. Let me! Nobody'll see!”

Quite well understanding that this was all part of her grandmother's passion for putting the best face upon things, and having no belief in her eyebrows, Nedda bent forward; but in a sudden flutter of fear lest the Bigwigs might observe the operation, she drew back, murmuring: “Oh, Granny, darling! Not just now!”

At that moment the men came in, and, under cover of the necessary confusion, she slipped away into the window.

It was pitch-black outside, with the moon not yet up. The bloomy, peaceful dark out there! Wistaria and early roses, clustering in, had but the ghost of color on their blossoms. Nedda took a rose in her fingers, feeling with delight its soft fragility, its coolness against her hot palm. Here in her hand was a living thing, here was a little soul! And out there in the darkness were millions upon millions of other little souls, of little flame-like or coiled-up shapes alive and true.

A voice behind her said:

“Nothing nicer than darkness, is there?”

She knew at once it was the one who was going to bite; the voice was proper for him, having a nice, smothery sound. And looking round gratefully, she said:

“Do you like dinner-parties?”

It was jolly to watch his eyes twinkle and his thin cheeks puff out. He shook his head and muttered through that straggly moustache:

“You're a niece, aren't you? I know your father. He's a big man.”

Hearing those words spoken of her father, Nedda flushed.

“Yes, he is,” she said fervently.

Her new acquaintance went on:

“He's got the gift of truth—can laugh at himself as well as others; that's what makes him precious. These humming-birds here to-night couldn't raise a smile at their own tomfoolery to save their silly souls.”

He spoke still in that voice of smothery wrath, and Nedda thought: 'He IS nice!'

“They've been talking about 'the Land'”—he raised his hands and ran them through his palish hair—“'the Land!' Heavenly Father! 'The Land!' Why! Look at that fellow!”

Nedda looked and saw a man, like Richard Coeur de Lion in the history books, with a straw-colored moustache just going gray.

“Sir Gerald Malloring—hope he's not a friend of yours! Divine right of landowners to lead 'the Land' by the nose! And our friend Britto!”

Nedda, following his eyes, saw a robust, quick-eyed man with a suave insolence in his dark, clean-shaved face.

“Because at heart he's just a supercilious ruffian, too cold-blooded to feel, he'll demonstrate that it's no use to feel—waste of valuable time—ha! valuable!—to act in any direction. And that's a man they believe things of. And poor Henry Wiltram, with his pathetic: 'Grow our own food—maximum use of the land as food-producer, and let the rest take care of itself!' As if we weren't all long past that feeble individualism; as if in these days of world markets the land didn't stand or fall in this country as a breeding-ground of health and stamina and nothing else. Well, well!”

“Aren't they really in earnest, then?” asked Nedda timidly.

“Miss Freeland, this land question is a perfect tragedy. Bar one or two, they all want to make the omelette without breaking eggs; well, by the time they begin to think of breaking them, mark me—there'll be no eggs to break. We shall be all park and suburb. The real men on the land, what few are left, are dumb and helpless; and these fellows here for one reason or another don't mean business—they'll talk and tinker and top-dress—that's all. Does your father take any interest in this? He could write something very nice.”

“He takes interest in everything,” said Nedda. “Please go on, Mr.—Mr.—” She was terribly afraid he would suddenly remember that she was too young and stop his nice, angry talk.

“Cuthcott. I'm an editor, but I was brought up on a farm, and know something about it. You see, we English are grumblers, snobs to the backbone, want to be something better than we are; and education nowadays is all in the direction of despising what is quiet and humdrum. We never were a stay-at-home lot, like the French. That's at the back of this business—they may treat it as they like, Radicals or Tories, but if they can't get a fundamental change of opinion into the national mind as to what is a sane and profitable life; if they can't work a revolution in the spirit of our education, they'll do no good. There'll be lots of talk and tinkering, tariffs and tommy-rot, and, underneath, the land-bred men dying, dying all the time. No, madam, industrialism and vested interests have got us! Bar the most strenuous national heroism, there's nothing for it now but the garden city!”

“Then if we WERE all heroic, 'the Land' could still be saved?”

Mr. Cuthcott smiled.

“Of course we might have a European war or something that would shake everything up. But, short of that, when was a country ever consciously and homogeneously heroic—except China with its opium? When did it ever deliberately change the spirit of its education, the trend of its ideas; when did it ever, of its own free will, lay its vested interests on the altar; when did it ever say with a convinced and resolute heart: 'I will be healthy and simple before anything. I will not let the love of sanity and natural conditions die out of me!' When, Miss Freeland, when?”

And, looking so hard at Nedda that he almost winked, he added:

“You have the advantage of me by thirty years. You'll see what I shall not—the last of the English peasant. Did you ever read 'Erewhon,' where the people broke up their machines? It will take almost that sort of national heroism to save what's left of him, even.”

For answer, Nedda wrinkled her brows horribly. Before her there had come a vision of the old, lame man, whose name she had found out was Gaunt, standing on the path under the apple-trees, looking at that little something he had taken from his pocket. Why she thought of him thus suddenly she had no idea, and she said quickly:

“It's awfully interesting. I do so want to hear about 'the Land.' I only know a little about sweated workers, because I see something of them.”

“It's all of a piece,” said Mr. Cuthcott; “not politics at all, but religion—touches the point of national self-knowledge and faith, the point of knowing what we want to become and of resolving to become it. Your father will tell you that we have no more idea of that at present than a cat of its own chemical composition. As for these good people here to-night—I don't want to be disrespectful, but if they think they're within a hundred miles of the land question, I'm a—I'm a Jingo—more I can't say.”

And, as if to cool his head, he leaned out of the window.

“Nothing is nicer than darkness, as I said just now, because you can only see the way you MUST go instead of a hundred and fifty ways you MIGHT. In darkness your soul is something like your own; in daylight, lamplight, moonlight, never.”

Nedda's spirit gave a jump; he seemed almost at last to be going to talk about the things she wanted, above all, to find out. Her cheeks went hot, she clenched her hands and said resolutely:

“Mr. Cuthcott, do you believe in God?”

Mr. Cuthcott made a queer, deep little noise; it was not a laugh, however, and it seemed as if he knew she could not bear him to look at her just then.

“H'm!” he said. “Every one does that—according to their natures. Some call God IT, some HIM, some HER, nowadays—that's all. You might as well ask—do I believe that I'm alive?”

“Yes,” said Nedda, “but which do YOU call God?”

As she asked that, he gave a wriggle, and it flashed through her: 'He must think me an awful enfant terrible!' His face peered round at her, queer and pale and puffy, with nice, straight eyes; and she added hastily:

“It isn't a fair question, is it? Only you talked about darkness, and the only way—so I thought—”

“Quite a fair question. My answer is, of course: 'All three'; but the point is rather: Does one wish to make even an attempt to define God to oneself? Frankly, I don't! I'm content to feel that there is in one some kind of instinct toward perfection that one will still feel, I hope, when the lights are going out; some kind of honour forbidding one to let go and give up. That's all I've got; I really don't know that I want more.”

Nedda clasped her hands.

“I like that,” she said; “only—what is perfection, Mr. Cuthcott?”

Again he emitted that deep little sound.

“Ah!” he repeated, “what is perfection? Awkward, that—isn't it?”

“Is it”—Nedda rushed the words out—“is it always to be sacrificing yourself, or is it—is it always to be—to be expressing yourself?”

“To some—one; to some—the other; to some—half one, half the other.”

“But which is it to me?”

“Ah! that you've got to find out for yourself. There's a sort of metronome inside us—wonderful, sell-adjusting little machine; most delicate bit of mechanism in the world—people call it conscience—that records the proper beat of our tempos. I guess that's all we have to go by.”

Nedda said breathlessly:

“Yes; and it's frightfully hard, isn't it?”

“Exactly,” Mr. Cuthcott answered. “That's why people devised religions and other ways of having the thing done second-hand. We all object to trouble and responsibility if we can possibly avoid it. Where do you live?”

“In Hampstead.”

“Your father must be a stand-by, isn't he?”

“Oh, yes; Dad's splendid; only, you see, I AM a good deal younger than he. There was just one thing I was going to ask you. Are these very Bigwigs?”

Mr. Cuthcott turned to the room and let his screwed-up glance wander. He looked just then particularly as if he were going to bite.

“If you take 'em at their own valuation: Yes. If at the country's: So-so. If at mine: Ha! I know what you'd like to ask: Should I be a Bigwig in THEIR estimation? Not I! As you knock about, Miss Freeland, you'll find out one thing—all bigwiggery is founded on: Scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours. Seriously, these are only tenpenny ones; but the mischief is, that in the matter of 'the Land,' the men who really are in earnest are precious scarce. Nothing short of a rising such as there was in 1832 would make the land question real, even for the moment. Not that I want to see one—God forbid! Those poor doomed devils were treated worse than dogs, and would be again.”

Before Nedda could pour out questions about the rising in 1832, Stanley's voice said:

“Cuthcott, I want to introduce you!”

Her new friend screwed his eyes up tighter and, muttering something, put out his hand to her.

“Thank you for our talk. I hope we shall meet again. Any time you want to know anything—I'll be only too glad. Good night!”

She felt the squeeze of his hand, warm and dry, but rather soft, as of a man who uses a pen too much; saw him following her uncle across the room, with his shoulders a little hunched, as if preparing to inflict, and ward off, blows. And with the thought: 'He must be jolly when he gives them one!' she turned once more to the darkness, than which he had said there was nothing nicer. It smelled of new-mown grass, was full of little shiverings of leaves, and all colored like the bloom of a black grape. And her heart felt soothed.

[ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]

CHAPTER IX

“...When I first saw Derek I thought I should never feel anything but shy and hopeless. In four days, only in four days, the whole world is different.... And yet, if it hadn't been for that thunder-storm, I shouldn't have got over being shy in time. He has never loved anybody—nor have I. It can't often be like that—it makes it solemn. There's a picture somewhere—not a good one, I know—of a young Highlander being taken away by soldiers from his sweetheart. Derek is fiery and wild and shy and proud and dark—like the man in that picture. That last day along the hills—along and along—with the wind in our faces, I could have walked forever; and then Joyfields at the end! Their mother's wonderful; I'm afraid of her. But Uncle Tod is a perfect dear. I never saw any one before who noticed so many things that I didn't, and nothing that I did. I am sure he has in him what Mr. Cuthcott said we were all losing—the love of simple, natural conditions. And then, THE moment, when I stood with Derek at the end of the orchard, to say good-by. The field below covered with those moony-white flowers, and the cows all dark and sleepy; the holy feeling down there was wonderful, and in the branches over our heads, too, and the velvety, starry sky, and the dewiness against one's face, and the great, broad silence—it was all worshipping something, and I was worshipping—worshipping happiness. I WAS happy, and I think HE was. Perhaps I shall never be so happy again. When he kissed me I didn't think the whole world had so much happiness in it. I know now that I'm not cold a bit; I used to think I was. I believe I could go with him anywhere, and do anything he wanted. What would Dad think? Only the other day I was saying I wanted to know everything. One only knows through love. It's love that makes the world all beautiful—makes it like those pictures that seem to be wrapped in gold, makes it like a dream—no, not like a dream—like a wonderful tune. I suppose that's glamour—a goldeny, misty, lovely feeling, as if my soul were wandering about with his—not in my body at all. I want it to go on and on wandering—oh! I don't want it back in my body, all hard and inquisitive and aching! I shall never know anything so lovely as loving him and being loved. I don't want anything more—nothing! Stay with me, please—Happiness! Don't go away and leave me!... They frighten me, though; he frightens me—their idealism; wanting to do great things, and fight for justice. If only I'd been brought up more like that—but everything's been so different. It's their mother, I think, even more than themselves. I seem to have grown up just looking on at life as at a show; watching it, thinking about it, trying to understand—not living it at all. I must get over that; I will. I believe I can tell the very moment I began to love him. It was in the schoolroom the second evening. Sheila and I were sitting there just before dinner, and he came, in a rage, looking splendid. 'That footman put out everything just as if I were a baby—asked me for suspenders to fasten on my socks; hung the things on a chair in order, as if I couldn't find out for myself what to put on first; turned the tongues of my shoes out!—curled them over!' Then Derek looked at me and said: 'Do they do that for you?—And poor old Gaunt, who's sixty-six and lame, has three shillings a week to buy him everything. Just think of that! If we had the pluck of flies—' And he clenched his fists. But Sheila got up, looked hard at me, and said: 'That'll do, Derek.' Then he put his hand on my arm and said: 'It's only Cousin Nedda!' I began to love him then; and I believe he saw it, because I couldn't take my eyes away. But it was when Sheila sang 'The Red Sarafan,' after dinner, that I knew for certain. 'The Red Sarafan'—it's a wonderful song, all space and yearning, and yet such calm—it's the song of the soul; and he was looking at me while she sang. How can he love me? I am nothing—no good for anything! Alan calls him a 'run-up kid, all legs and wings.' Sometimes I hate Alan; he's conventional and stodgy—the funny thing is that he admires Sheila. She'll wake him up; she'll stick pins into him. No, I don't want Alan hurt—I want every one in the world to be happy, happy—as I am.... The next day was the thunder-storm. I never saw lightning so near—and didn't care a bit. If he were struck I knew I should be; that made it all right. When you love, you don't care, if only the something must happen to you both. When it was over, and we came out from behind the stack and walked home through the fields, all the beasts looked at us as if we were new and had never been seen before; and the air was ever so sweet, and that long, red line of cloud low down in the purple, and the elm-trees so heavy and almost black. He put his arm round me, and I let him.... It seems an age to wait till they come to stay with us next week. If only Mother likes them, and I can go and stay at Joyfields. Will she like them? It's all so different to what it would be if they were ordinary. But if he were ordinary I shouldn't love him; it's because there's nobody like him. That isn't a loverish fancy—you only have to look at him against Alan or Uncle Stanley or even Dad. Everything he does is so different; the way he walks, and the way he stands drawn back into himself, like a stag, and looks out as if he were burning and smouldering inside; even the way he smiles. Dad asked me what I thought of him! That was only the second day. I thought he was too proud, then. And Dad said: 'He ought to be in a Highland regiment; pity—great pity!' He is a fighter, of course. I don't like fighting, but if I'm not ready to, he'll stop loving me, perhaps. I've got to learn. O Darkness out there, help me! And Stars, help me! O God, make me brave, and I will believe in you forever! If you are the spirit that grows in things in spite of everything, until they're like the flowers, so perfect that we laugh and sing at their beauty, grow in me, too; make me beautiful and brave; then I shall be fit for him, alive or dead; and that's all I want. Every evening I shall stand in spirit with him at the end of that orchard in the darkness, under the trees above the white flowers and the sleepy cows, and perhaps I shall feel him kiss me again.... I'm glad I saw that old man Gaunt; it makes what they feel more real to me. He showed me that poor laborer Tryst, too, the one who mustn't marry his wife's sister, or have her staying in the house without marrying her. Why should people interfere with others like that? It does make your blood boil! Derek and Sheila have been brought up to be in sympathy with the poor and oppressed. If they had lived in London they would have been even more furious, I expect. And it's no use my saying to myself 'I don't know the laborer, I don't know his hardships,' because he is really just the country half of what I do know and see, here in London, when I don't hide my eyes. One talk showed me how desperately they feel; at night, in Sheila's room, when we had gone up, just we four. Alan began it; they didn't want to, I could see; but he was criticising what some of those Bigwigs had said—the 'Varsity makes boys awfully conceited. It was such a lovely night; we were all in the big, long window. A little bat kept flying past; and behind the copper-beech the moon was shining on the lake. Derek sat in the windowsill, and when he moved he touched me. To be touched by him gives me a warm shiver all through. I could hear him gritting his teeth at what Alan said—frightfully sententious, just like a newspaper: 'We can't go into land reform from feeling, we must go into it from reason.' Then Derek broke out: 'Walk through this country as we've walked; see the pigsties the people live in; see the water they drink; see the tiny patches of ground they have; see the way their roofs let in the rain; see their peeky children; see their patience and their hopelessness; see them working day in and day out, and coming on the parish at the end! See all that, and then talk about reason! Reason! It's the coward's excuse, and the rich man's excuse, for doing nothing. It's the excuse of the man who takes jolly good care not to see for fear that he may come to feel! Reason never does anything, it's too reasonable. The thing is to act; then perhaps reason will be jolted into doing something.' But Sheila touched his arm, and he stopped very suddenly. She doesn't trust us. I shall always be being pushed away from him by her. He's just twenty, and I shall be eighteen in a week; couldn't we marry now at once? Then, whatever happened, I couldn't be cut off from him. If I could tell Dad, and ask him to help me! But I can't—it seems desecration to talk about it, even to Dad. All the way up in the train to-day, coming back home, I was struggling not to show anything; though it's hateful to keep things from Dad. Love alters everything; it melts up the whole world and makes it afresh. Love is the sun of our spirits, and it's the wind. Ah, and the rain, too! But I won't think of that!... I wonder if he's told Aunt Kirsteen!...”

[ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]

CHAPTER X

While Nedda sat, long past midnight, writing her heart out in her little, white, lilac-curtained room of the old house above the Spaniard's Road, Derek, of whom she wrote, was walking along the Malvern hills, hurrying upward in the darkness. The stars were his companions; though he was no poet, having rather the fervid temper of the born swordsman, that expresses itself in physical ecstasies. He had come straight out from a stormy midnight talk with Sheila. What was he doing—had been the burden of her cry—falling in love just at this moment when they wanted all their wits and all their time and strength for this struggle with the Mallorings? It was foolish, it was weak; and with a sweet, soft sort of girl who could be no use. Hotly he had answered: What business was it of hers? As if one fell in love when one wished! She didn't know—her blood didn't run fast enough! Sheila had retorted, “I've more blood in my big toe than Nedda in all her body! A lot of use you'll be, with your heart mooning up in London!” And crouched together on the end of her bed, gazing fixedly up at him through her hair, she had chanted mockingly: “Here we go gathering wool and stars—wool and stars—wool and stars!”

He had not deigned to answer, but had gone out, furious with her, striding over the dark fields, scrambling his way through the hedges toward the high loom of the hills. Up on the short grass in the cooler air, with nothing between him and those swarming stars, he lost his rage. It never lasted long—hers was more enduring. With the innate lordliness of a brother he already put it down to jealousy. Sheila was hurt that he should want any one but her; as if his love for Nedda would make any difference to their resolution to get justice for Tryst and the Gaunts, and show those landed tyrants once for all that they could not ride roughshod.

Nedda! with her dark eyes, so quick and clear, so loving when they looked at him! Nedda, soft and innocent, the touch of whose lips had turned his heart to something strange within him, and wakened such feelings of chivalry! Nedda! To see whom for half a minute he felt he would walk a hundred miles.

This boy's education had been administered solely by his mother till he was fourteen, and she had brought him up on mathematics, French, and heroism. His extensive reading of history had been focussed on the personality of heroes, chiefly knights errant, and revolutionaries. He had carried the worship of them to the Agricultural College, where he had spent four years; and a rather rough time there had not succeeded in knocking romance out of him. He had found that you could not have such beliefs comfortably without fighting for them, and though he ended his career with the reputation of a rebel and a champion of the weak, he had had to earn it. To this day he still fed himself on stories of rebellions and fine deeds. The figures of Spartacus, Montrose, Hofer, Garibaldi, Hampden, and John Nicholson, were more real to him than the people among whom he lived, though he had learned never to mention—especially not to the matter-of-fact Sheila—his encompassing cloud of heroes; but, when he was alone, he pranced a bit with them, and promised himself that he too would reach the stars. So you may sometimes see a little, grave boy walking through a field, unwatched as he believes, suddenly fling his feet and his head every which way. An active nature, romantic, without being dreamy and book-loving, is not too prone to the attacks of love; such a one is likely to survive unscathed to a maturer age. But Nedda had seduced him, partly by the appeal of her touchingly manifest love and admiration, and chiefly by her eyes, through which he seemed to see such a loyal, and loving little soul looking. She had that indefinable something which lovers know that they can never throw away. And he had at once made of her, secretly, the crown of his active romanticism—the lady waiting for the spoils of his lance. Queer is the heart of a boy—strange its blending of reality and idealism!

Climbing at a great pace, he reached Malvern Beacon just as it came dawn, and stood there on the top, watching. He had not much aesthetic sense; but he had enough to be impressed by the slow paling of the stars over space that seemed infinite, so little were its dreamy confines visible in the May morning haze, where the quivering crimson flags and spears of sunrise were forging up in a march upon the sky. That vision of the English land at dawn, wide and mysterious, hardly tallied with Mr. Cuthcott's view of a future dedicate to Park and Garden City. While Derek stood there gazing, the first lark soared up and began its ecstatic praise. Save for that song, silence possessed all the driven dark, right out to the Severn and the sea, and the fastnesses of the Welsh hills, and the Wrekin, away in the north, a black point in the gray. For a moment dark and light hovered and clung together. Would victory wing back into night or on into day? Then, as a town is taken, all was over in one overmastering rush, and light proclaimed. Derek tightened his belt and took a bee-line down over the slippery grass. He meant to reach the cottage of the laborer Tryst before that early bird was away to the fields. He meditated as he went. Bob Tryst was all right! If they only had a dozen or two like him! A dozen or two whom they could trust, and who would trust each other and stand firm to form the nucleus of a strike, which could be timed for hay harvest. What slaves these laborers still were! If only they could be relied on, if only they would stand together! Slavery! It WAS slavery; so long as they could be turned out of their homes at will in this fashion. His rebellion against the conditions of their lives, above all against the manifold petty tyrannies that he knew they underwent, came from use of his eyes and ears in daily contact with a class among whom he had been more or less brought up. In sympathy with, and yet not of them, he had the queer privilege of feeling their slights as if they were his own, together with feelings of protection, and even of contempt that they should let themselves be slighted. He was near enough to understand how they must feel; not near enough to understand why, feeling as they did, they did not act as he would have acted. In truth, he knew them no better than he should.

He found Tryst washing at his pump. In the early morning light the big laborer's square, stubborn face, with its strange, dog-like eyes, had a sodden, hungry, lost look. Cutting short ablutions that certainly were never protracted, he welcomed Derek, and motioned him to pass into the kitchen. The young man went in, and perched himself on the window-sill beside a pot of Bridal Wreath. The cottage was one of the Mallorings', and recently repaired. A little fire was burning, and a teapot of stewed tea sat there beside it. Four cups and spoons and some sugar were put out on a deal table, for Tryst was, in fact, brewing the morning draught of himself and children, who still lay abed up-stairs. The sight made Derek shiver and his eyes darken. He knew the full significance of what he saw.

“Did you ask him again, Bob?”

“Yes, I asked 'im.”

“What did he say?”

“Said as orders was plain. 'So long as you lives there,' he says, 'along of yourself alone, you can't have her come back.'”

“Did you say the children wanted looking after badly? Did you make it clear? Did you say Mrs. Tryst wished it, before she—”

“I said that.”

“What did he say then?”

“'Sorry for you, m'lad, but them's m'lady's orders, an' I can't go contrary. I don't wish to go into things,' he says; 'you know better'n I how far 'tis gone when she was 'ere before; but seein' as m'lady don't never give in to deceased wife's sister marryin', if she come back 'tis certain to be the other thing. So, as that won't do neither, you go elsewhere,' he says.”

Having spoken thus at length, Tryst lifted the teapot and poured out the dark tea into the three cups.

“Will 'ee have some, sir?”

Derek shook his head.

Taking the cups, Tryst departed up the narrow stairway. And Derek remained motionless, staring at the Bridal Wreath, till the big man came down again and, retiring into a far corner, sat sipping at his own cup.

“Bob,” said the boy suddenly, “do you LIKE being a dog; put to what company your master wishes?”

Tryst set his cup down, stood up, and crossed his thick arms—the swift movement from that stolid creature had in it something sinister; but he did not speak.

“Do you like it, Bob?”

“I'll not say what I feels, Mr. Derek; that's for me. What I does'll be for others, p'raps.”

And he lifted his strange, lowering eyes to Derek's. For a full minute the two stared, then Derek said:

“Look out, then; be ready!” and, getting off the sill, he went out.

On the bright, slimy surface of the pond three ducks were quietly revelling in that hour before man and his damned soul, the dog, rose to put the fear of God into them. In the sunlight, against the green duckweed, their whiteness was truly marvellous; difficult to believe that they were not white all through. Passing the three cottages, in the last of which the Gaunts lived, he came next to his own home, but did not turn in, and made on toward the church. It was a very little one, very old, and had for him a curious fascination, never confessed to man or beast. To his mother, and Sheila, more intolerant, as became women, that little, lichened, gray stone building was the very emblem of hypocrisy, of a creed preached, not practised; to his father it was nothing, for it was not alive, and any tramp, dog, bird, or fruit-tree meant far more. But in Derek it roused a peculiar feeling, such as a man might have gazing at the shores of a native country, out of which he had been thrown for no fault of his own—a yearning deeply muffled up in pride and resentment. Not infrequently he would come and sit brooding on the grassy hillock just above the churchyard. Church-going, with its pageantry, its tradition, dogma, and demand for blind devotion, would have suited him very well, if only blind devotion to his mother had not stood across that threshold; he could not bring himself to bow to that which viewed his rebellious mother as lost. And yet the deep fibres of heredity from her papistic Highland ancestors, and from old pious Moretons, drew him constantly to this spot at times when no one would be about. It was his enemy, this little church, the fold of all the instincts and all the qualities against which he had been brought up to rebel; the very home of patronage and property and superiority; the school where his friends the laborers were taught their place! And yet it had that queer, ironical attraction for him. In some such sort had his pet hero Montrose rebelled, and then been drawn despite himself once more to the side of that against which he had taken arms.

While he leaned against the rail, gazing at that ancient edifice, he saw a girl walk into the churchyard at the far end, sit down on a gravestone, and begin digging a little hole in the grass with the toe of her boot. She did not seem to see him, and at his ease he studied her face, one of those broad, bright English country faces with deep-set rogue eyes and red, thick, soft lips, smiling on little provocation. In spite of her disgrace, in spite of the fact that she was sitting on her mother's grave, she did not look depressed. And Derek thought: 'Wilmet Gaunt is the jolliest of them all! She isn't a bit a bad girl, as they say; it's only that she must have fun. If they drive her out of here, she'll still want fun wherever she is; she'll go to a town and end up like those girls I saw in Bristol.' And the memory of those night girls, with their rouged faces and cringing boldness, came back to him with horror.

He went across the grass toward her.

She looked round as he came, and her face livened.

“Well, Wilmet?”

“You're an early bird, Mr. Derek.”

“Haven't been to bed.”

“Oh!”

“Been up Malvern Beacon to see the sun rise.”

“You're tired, I expect!”

“No.”

“Must be fine up there. You'd see a long ways from there; near to London I should think. Do you know London, Mr. Derek?”

“No.”

“They say 'tis a funny place, too.” Her rogue eyes gleamed from under a heavy frown. “It'd not be all 'Do this' an' 'Do that'; an' 'You bad girl' an' 'You little hussy!' in London. They say there's room for more'n one sort of girl there.”

“All towns are beastly places, Wilmet.”

Again her rogue's eyes gleamed. “I don' know so much about that, Mr. Derek. I'm going where I won't be chivied about and pointed at, like what I am here.”

“Your dad's stuck to you; you ought to stick to him.”

“Ah, Dad! He's losin' his place for me, but that don't stop his tongue at home. 'Tis no use to nag me—nag me. Suppose one of m'lady's daughters had a bit of fun—they say there's lots as do—I've heard tales—there'd be none comin' to chase her out of her home. 'No, my girl, you can't live here no more, endangerin' the young men. You go away. Best for you's where they'll teach you to be'ave. Go on! Out with you! I don't care where you go; but you just go!' 'Tis as if girls were all pats o' butter—same square, same pattern on it, same weight, an' all.”

Derek had come closer; he put his hand down and gripped her arm. Her eloquence dried up before the intentness of his face, and she just stared up at him.

“Now, look here, Wilmet; you promise me not to scoot without letting us know. We'll get you a place to go to. Promise.”

A little sheepishly the rogue-girl answered:

“I promise; only, I'm goin'.”

Suddenly she dimpled and broke into her broad smile.

“Mr. Derek, d'you know what they say—they say you're in love. You was seen in th' orchard. Ah! 'tis all right for you and her! But if any one kiss and hug ME, I got to go!”

Derek drew back among the graves, as if he had been struck with a whip.

She looked up at him with coaxing sweetness.

“Don't you mind me, Mr. Derek, and don't you stay here neither. If they saw you here with me, they'd say: 'Aw—look! Endangerin' another young man—poor young man!' Good mornin', Mr. Derek!”

The rogue eyes followed him gravely, then once more began examining the grass, and the toe of her boot again began kicking a little hole. But Derek did not look back.

[ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]

CHAPTER XI

It is in the nature of men and angels to pursue with death such birds as are uncommon, such animals as are rare; and Society had no use for one like Tod, so uncut to its pattern as to be practically unconscious of its existence. Not that he had deliberately turned his back on anything; he had merely begun as a very young man to keep bees. The better to do that he had gone on to the cultivation of flowers and fruit, together with just enough farming as kept his household in vegetables, milk, butter, and eggs. Living thus amongst insects, birds, cows, and the peace of trees, he had become queer. His was not a very reflective mind, it distilled but slowly certain large conclusions, and followed intently the minute happenings of his little world. To him a bee, a bird, a flower, a tree was well-nigh as interesting as a man; yet men, women, and especially children took to him, as one takes to a Newfoundland dog, because, though capable of anger, he seemed incapable of contempt, and to be endowed with a sort of permanent wonder at things. Then, too, he was good to look at, which counts for more than a little in the scales of our affections; indeed, the slight air of absence in his blue eyes was not chilling, as is that which portends a wandering of its owner on his own business. People recognized that it meant some bee or other in that bonnet, or elsewhere, some sound or scent or sight of life, suddenly perceived—always of life! He had often been observed gazing with peculiar gravity at a dead flower, bee, bird, or beetle, and, if spoken to at such a moment, would say, “Gone!” touching a wing or petal with his finger. To conceive of what happened after death did not apparently come within the few large conclusions of his reflective powers. That quaint grief of his in the presence of the death of things that were not human had, more than anything, fostered a habit among the gentry and clergy of the neighborhood of drawing up the mouth when they spoke of him, and slightly raising the shoulders. For the cottagers, to be sure, his eccentricity consisted rather in his being a 'gentleman,' yet neither eating flesh, drinking wine, nor telling them how they ought to behave themselves, together with the way he would sit down on anything and listen to what they had to tell him, without giving them the impression that he was proud of himself for doing so. In fact, it was the extraordinary impression he made of listening and answering without wanting anything either for himself or for them, that they could not understand. How on earth it came about that he did not give them advice about their politics, religion, morals, or monetary states, was to them a never-ending mystery; and though they were too well bred to shrug their shoulders, there did lurk in their dim minds the suspicion that 'the good gentleman,' as they called him, was 'a tiddy-bit off.' He had, of course, done many practical little things toward helping them and their beasts, but always, as it seemed, by accident, so that they could never make up their minds afterward whether he remembered having done them, which, in fact, he probably did not; and this seemed to them perhaps the most damning fact of all about his being—well, about his being—not quite all there. Another worrying habit he had, too, that of apparently not distinguishing between them and any tramps or strangers who might happen along and come across him. This was, in their eyes, undoubtedly a fault; for the village was, after all, their village, and he, as it were, their property. To crown all, there was a story, full ten years old now, which had lost nothing in the telling, of his treatment of a cattle-drover. To the village it had an eerie look, that windmill-like rage let loose upon a man who, after all, had only been twisting a bullock's tail and running a spiked stick into its softer parts, as any drover might. People said—the postman and a wagoner had seen the business, raconteurs born, so that the tale had perhaps lost nothing—that he had positively roared as he came leaping down into the lane upon the man, a stout and thick-set fellow, taken him up like a baby, popped him into a furzebush, and held him there. People said that his own bare arms had been pricked to the very shoulder from pressing the drover down into that uncompromising shrub, and the man's howls had pierced the very heavens. The postman, to this day, would tell how the mere recollection of seeing it still made him sore all over. Of the words assigned to Tod on this occasion, the mildest and probably most true were: “By the Lord God, if you treat a beast like that again, I'll cut your liver out, you hell-hearted sweep!”

The incident, which had produced a somewhat marked effect in regard to the treatment of animals all round that neighborhood, had never been forgotten, nor in a sense forgiven. In conjunction with the extraordinary peace and mildness of his general behavior, it had endowed Tod with mystery; and people, especially simple folk, cannot bring themselves to feel quite at home with mystery. Children only—to whom everything is so mysterious that nothing can be—treated him as he treated them, giving him their hands with confidence. But children, even his own, as they grew up, began to have a little of the village feeling toward Tod; his world was not theirs, and what exactly his world was they could not grasp. Possibly it was the sense that they partook of his interest and affection too much on a level with any other kind of living thing that might happen to be about, which discomfited their understanding. They held him, however, in a certain reverence.

That early morning he had already done a good two hours' work in connection with broad beans, of which he grew, perhaps, the best in the whole county, and had knocked off for a moment, to examine a spider's web. This marvellous creation, which the dew had visited and clustered over, as stars over the firmament, was hung on the gate of the vegetable garden, and the spider, a large and active one, was regarding Tod with the misgiving natural to its species. Intensely still Tod stood, absorbed in contemplation of that bright and dusty miracle. Then, taking up his hoe again, he went back to the weeds that threatened his broad beans. Now and again he stopped to listen, or to look at the sky, as is the way of husbandmen, thinking of nothing, enjoying the peace of his muscles.

“Please, sir, father's got into a fit again.”

Two little girls were standing in the lane below. The elder, who had spoken in that small, anxious voice, had a pale little face with pointed chin; her hair, the color of over-ripe corn, hung fluffy on her thin shoulders, her flower-like eyes, with something motherly in them already, were the same hue as her pale-blue, almost clean, overall. She had her smaller, chubbier sister by the hand, and, having delivered her message, stood still, gazing up at Tod, as one might at God. Tod dropped his hoe.

“Biddy come with me; Susie go and tell Mrs. Freeland, or Miss Sheila.”

He took the frail little hand of the elder Tryst and ran. They ran at the child's pace, the one so very massive, the other such a whiff of flesh and blood.

“Did you come at once, Biddy?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where was he taken?”

“In the kitchen—just as I was cookin' breakfast.”

“Ah! Is it a bad one?”

“Yes, sir, awful bad—he's all foamy.”

“What did you do for it?”

“Susie and me turned him over, and Billy's seein' he don't get his tongue down his throat—like what you told us, and we ran to you. Susie was frightened, he hollered so.”

Past the three cottages, whence a woman at a window stared in amaze to see that queer couple running, past the pond where the ducks, whiter than ever in the brightening sunlight, dived and circled carelessly, into the Tryst kitchen. There on the brick floor lay the distressful man, already struggling back out of epilepsy, while his little frightened son sat manfully beside him.

“Towels, and hot water, Biddy!”

With extraordinary calm rapidity the small creature brought what might have been two towels, a basin, and the kettle; and in silence she and Tod steeped his forehead.

“Eyes look better, Biddy?”

“He don't look so funny now, sir.”

Picking up that form, almost as big as his own, Tod carried it up impossibly narrow stairs and laid it on a dishevelled bed.

“Phew! Open the window, Biddy.”

The small creature opened what there was of window.

“Now, go down and heat two bricks and wrap them in something, and bring them up.”

Tryst's boots and socks removed, Tod rubbed the large, warped feet. While doing this he whistled, and the little boy crept up-stairs and squatted in the doorway, to watch and listen. The morning air overcame with its sweetness the natural odor of that small room, and a bird or two went flirting past. The small creature came back with the bricks, wrapped in petticoats of her own, and, placing them against the soles of her father's feet, she stood gazing at Tod, for all the world like a little mother dog with puppies.

“You can't go to school to-day, Biddy.”

“Is Susie and Billy to go?”

“Yes; there's nothing to be frightened of now. He'll be nearly all right by evening. But some one shall stay with you.”

At this moment Tryst lifted his hand, and the small creature went and stood beside him, listening to the whispering that emerged from his thick lips.

“Father says I'm to thank you, please.”

“Yes. Have you had your breakfasts?”

The small creature and her smaller brother shook their heads.

“Go down and get them.”

Whispering and twisting back, they went, and by the side of the bed Tod sat down. In Tryst's eyes was that same look of dog-like devotion he had bent on Derek earlier that morning. Tod stared out of the window and gave the man's big hand a squeeze. Of what did he think, watching a lime-tree outside, and the sunlight through its foliage painting bright the room's newly whitewashed wall, already gray-spotted with damp again; watching the shadows of the leaves playing in that sunlight? Almost cruel, that lovely shadow game of outside life so full and joyful, so careless of man and suffering; too gay almost, too alive! Of what did he think, watching the chase and dart of shadow on shadow, as of gray butterflies fluttering swift to the sack of flowers, while beside him on the bed the big laborer lay?...

When Kirsteen and Sheila came to relieve him of that vigil he went down-stairs. There in the kitchen Biddy was washing up, and Susie and Billy putting on their boots for school. They stopped to gaze at Tod feeling in his pockets, for they knew that things sometimes happened after that. To-day there came out two carrots, some lumps of sugar, some cord, a bill, a pruning knife, a bit of wax, a bit of chalk, three flints, a pouch of tobacco, two pipes, a match-box with a single match in it, a six-pence, a necktie, a stick of chocolate, a tomato, a handkerchief, a dead bee, an old razor, a bit of gauze, some tow, a stick of caustic, a reel of cotton, a needle, no thimble, two dock leaves, and some sheets of yellowish paper. He separated from the rest the sixpence, the dead bee, and what was edible. And in delighted silence the three little Trysts gazed, till Biddy with the tip of one wet finger touched the bee.

“Not good to eat, Biddy.”

At those words, one after the other, cautiously, the three little Trysts smiled. Finding that Tod smiled too, they broadened, and Billy burst into chuckles. Then, clustering in the doorway, grasping the edibles and the sixpence, and consulting with each other, they looked long after his big figure passing down the road.

[ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]

CHAPTER XII

Still later, that same morning, Derek and Sheila moved slowly up the Mallorings' well-swept drive. Their lips were set, as though they had spoken the last word before battle, and an old cock pheasant, running into the bushes close by, rose with a whir and skimmed out toward his covert, scared, perhaps, by something uncompromising in the footsteps of those two.

Only when actually under the shelter of the porch, which some folk thought enhanced the old Greek-temple effect of the Mallorings' house, Derek broke through that taciturnity:

“What if they won't?”

“Wait and see; and don't lose your head, Derek.” The man who stood there when the door opened was tall, grave, wore his hair in powder, and waited without speech.

“Will you ask Sir Gerald and Lady Malloring if Miss Freeland and Mr. Derek Freeland could see them, please; and will you say the matter is urgent?”

The man bowed, left them, and soon came back.

“My lady will see you, miss; Sir Gerald is not in. This way.”

Past the statuary, flowers, and antlers of the hall, they traversed a long, cool corridor, and through a white door entered a white room, not very large, and very pretty. Two children got up as they came in and flapped out past them like young partridges, and Lady Malloring rose from her writing-table and came forward, holding out her hand. The two young Freelands took it gravely. For all their hostility they could not withstand the feeling that she would think them terrible young prigs if they simply bowed. And they looked steadily at one with whom they had never before been at quite such close quarters. Lady Malloring, who had originally been the Honorable Mildred Killory, a daughter of Viscount Silport, was tall, slender, and not very striking, with very fair hair going rather gray; her expression in repose was pleasant, a little anxious; only by her eyes was the suspicion awakened that she was a woman of some character. They had that peculiar look of belonging to two worlds, so often to be met with in English eyes, a look of self-denying aspiration, tinctured with the suggestion that denial might not be confined to self.

In a quite friendly voice she said:

“Can I do anything for you?” And while she waited for an answer her glance travelled from face to face of the two young people, with a certain curiosity. After a silence of several seconds, Sheila answered:

“Not for us, thank you; for others, you can.”

Lady Malloring's eyebrows rose a little, as if there seemed to her something rather unjust in those words—'for others.'

“Yes?” she said.

Sheila, whose hands were clenched, and whose face had been fiery red, grew suddenly almost white.

“Lady Malloring, will you please let the Gaunts stay in their cottage and Tryst's wife's sister come to live with the children and him?”

Lady Malloring raised one hand; the motion, quite involuntary, ended at the tiny cross on her breast. She said quietly:

“I'm afraid you don't understand.”

“Yes,” said Sheila, still very pale, “we understand quite well. We understand that you are acting in what you believe to be the interests of morality. All the same, won't you? Do!”

“I'm very sorry, but I can't.”

“May we ask why?”

Lady Malloring started, and transferred her glance to Derek.

“I don't know,” she said with a smile, “that I am obliged to account for my actions to you two young people. Besides, you must know why, quite well.”

Sheila put out her hand.

“Wilmet Gaunt will go to the bad if you turn them out.”

“I am afraid I think she has gone to the bad already, and I do not mean her to take others there with her. I am sorry for poor Tryst, and I wish he could find some nice woman to marry; but what he proposes is impossible.”

The blood had flared up again in Sheila's cheeks; she was as red as the comb of a turkey-cock.

“Why shouldn't he marry his wife's sister? It's legal, now, and you've no right to stop it.”

Lady Malloring bit her lips; she looked straight and hard at Sheila.

“I do not stop it; I have no means of stopping it. Only, he cannot do it and live in one of our cottages. I don't think we need discuss this further.”

“I beg your pardon—”

The words had come from Derek. Lady Malloring paused in her walk toward the bell. With his peculiar thin-lipped smile the boy went on:

“We imagined you would say no; we really came because we thought it fair to warn you that there may be trouble.”

Lady Malloring smiled.

“This is a private matter between us and our tenants, and we should be so glad if you could manage not to interfere.”

Derek bowed, and put his hand within his sister's arm. But Sheila did not move; she was trembling with anger.

“Who are you,” she suddenly burst out, “to dispose of the poor, body and soul? Who are you, to dictate their private lives? If they pay their rent, that should be enough for you.”

Lady Malloring moved swiftly again toward the bell. She paused with her hand on it, and said:

“I am sorry for you two; you have been miserably brought up!”

There was a silence; then Derek said quietly:

“Thank you; we shall remember that insult to our people. Don't ring, please; we're going.”

In a silence if anything more profound than that of their approach, the two young people retired down the drive. They had not yet learned—most difficult of lessons—how to believe that people could in their bones differ from them. It had always seemed to them that if only they had a chance of putting directly what they thought, the other side must at heart agree, and only go on saying they didn't out of mere self-interest. They came away, therefore, from this encounter with the enemy a little dazed by the discovery that Lady Malloring in her bones believed that she was right. It confused them, and heated the fires of their anger.

They had shaken off all private dust before Sheila spoke.

“They're all like that—can't see or feel—simply certain they're superior! It makes—it makes me hate them! It's terrible, ghastly.” And while she stammered out those little stabs of speech, tears of rage rolled down her cheeks.

Derek put his arm round her waist.

“All right! No good groaning; let's think seriously what to do.”

There was comfort to the girl in that curiously sudden reversal of their usual attitudes.

“Whatever's done,” he went on, “has got to be startling. It's no good pottering and protesting, any more.” And between his teeth he muttered: “'Men of England, wherefore plough?'...”

In the room where the encounter had taken place Mildred Malloring was taking her time to recover. From very childhood she had felt that the essence of her own goodness, the essence of her duty in life, was the doing of 'good' to others; from very childhood she had never doubted that she was in a position to do this, and that those to whom she did good, although they might kick against it as inconvenient, must admit that it WAS their 'good.' The thought: 'They don't admit that I am superior!' had never even occurred to her, so completely was she unselfconscious, in her convinced superiority. It was hard, indeed, to be flung against such outspoken rudeness. It shook her more than she gave sign of, for she was not by any means an insensitive woman—shook her almost to the point of feeling that there was something in the remonstrance of those dreadful young people. Yet, how could there be, when no one knew better than she that the laborers on the Malloring estate were better off than those on nine out of ten estates; better paid and better housed, and—better looked after in their morals. Was she to give up that?—when she knew that she WAS better able to tell what was good for them than they were themselves. After all, without stripping herself naked of every thought, experience, and action since her birth, how could she admit that she was not better able? And slowly, in the white room with the moss-green carpet, she recovered, till there was only just a touch of soreness left, at the injustice implicit in their words. Those two had been 'miserably brought up,' had never had a chance of finding their proper place, of understanding that they were just two callow young things, for whom Life had some fearful knocks in store. She could even feel now that she had meant that saying: 'I am sorry for you two!' She WAS sorry for them, sorry for their want of manners and their point of view, neither of which they could help, of course, with a mother like that. For all her gentleness and sensibility, there was much practical directness about Mildred Malloring; for her, a page turned was a page turned, an idea absorbed was never disgorged; she was of religious temperament, ever trimming her course down the exact channel marked out with buoys by the Port Authorities, and really incapable of imagining spiritual wants in others that could not be satisfied by what satisfied herself. And this pathetic strength she had in common with many of her fellow creatures in every class. Sitting down at the writing-table from which she had been disturbed, she leaned her thin, rather long, gentle, but stubborn face on her hand, thinking. These Gaunts were a source of irritation in the parish, a kind of open sore. It would be better if they could be got rid of before quarter day, up to which she had weakly said they might remain. Far better for them to go at once, if it could be arranged. As for the poor fellow Tryst, thinking that by plunging into sin he could improve his lot and his poor children's, it was really criminal of those Freelands to encourage him. She had refrained hitherto from seriously worrying Gerald on such points of village policy—his hands were so full; but he must now take his part. And she rang the bell.

“Tell Sir Gerald I'd like to see him, please, as soon as he gets back.”

“Sir Gerald has just come in, my lady.”

“Now, then!”

Gerald Malloring—an excellent fellow, as could be seen from his face of strictly Norman architecture, with blue stained-glass windows rather deep set in—had only one defect: he was not a poet. Not that this would have seemed to him anything but an advantage, had he been aware of it. His was one of those high-principled natures who hold that breadth is synonymous with weakness. It may be said without exaggeration that the few meetings of his life with those who had a touch of the poet in them had been exquisitely uncomfortable. Silent, almost taciturn by nature, he was a great reader of poetry, and seldom went to sleep without having digested a page or two of Wordsworth, Milton, Tennyson, or Scott. Byron, save such poems as 'Don Juan' or 'The Waltz,' he could but did not read, for fear of setting a bad example. Burns, Shelley, and Keats he did not care for. Browning pained him, except by such things as: 'How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix' and the 'Cavalier Tunes'; while of 'Omar Khayyam' and 'The Hound of Heaven' he definitely disapproved. For Shakespeare he had no real liking, though he concealed this, from humility in the face of accepted opinion. His was a firm mind, sure of itself, but not self-assertive. His points were so good, and he had so many of them, that it was only when he met any one touched with poetry that his limitations became apparent; it was rare, however, and getting more so every year, for him to have this unpleasant experience.

When summoned by his wife, he came in with a wrinkle between his straight brows; he had just finished a morning's work on a drainage scheme, like the really good fellow that he was. She greeted him with a little special smile. Nothing could be friendlier than the relations between these two. Affection and trust, undeviating undemonstrativeness, identity of feeling as to religion, children, property; and, in regard to views on the question of sex, a really strange unanimity, considering that they were man and woman.

“It's about these Gaunts, Gerald. I feel they must go at once. They're only creating bad feeling by staying till quarter day. I have had the young Freelands here.”

“Those young pups!”

“Can't it be managed?”

Malloring did not answer hastily. He had that best point of the good Englishman, a dislike to being moved out of a course of conduct by anything save the appeal of his own conscience.

“I don't know,” he said, “why we should alter what we thought was just. Must give him time to look round and get a job elsewhere.”

“I think the general state of feeling demands it. It's not fair to the villagers to let the Freelands have such a handle for agitating. Labor's badly wanted everywhere; he can't have any difficulty in getting a place, if he likes.”

“No. Only, I rather admire the fellow for sticking by his girl, though he is such a 'land-lawyer.' I think it's a bit harsh to move him suddenly.”

“So did I, till I saw from those young furies what harm it's doing. They really do infect the cottagers. You know how discontent spreads. And Tryst—they're egging him on, too.”

Malloring very thoughtfully filled a pipe. He was not an alarmist; if anything, he erred on the side of not being alarmed until it was all over and there was no longer anything to be alarmed at! His imagination would then sometimes take fire, and he would say that such and such, or so and so, was dangerous.

“I'd rather go and have a talk with Freeland,” he said. “He's queer, but he's not at all a bad chap.”

Lady Malloring rose, and took one of his real-leather buttons in her hand.

“My dear Gerald, Mr. Freeland doesn't exist.”

“Don't know about that; a man can always come to life, if he likes, in his own family.”

Lady Malloring was silent. It was true. For all their unanimity of thought and feeling, for all the latitude she had in domestic and village affairs, Gerald had a habit of filling his pipe with her decisions. Quite honestly, she had no objection to their becoming smoke through HIS lips, though she might wriggle just a little. To her credit, she did entirely carry out in her life her professed belief that husbands should be the forefronts of their wives. For all that, there burst from her lips the words:

“That Freeland woman! When I think of the mischief she's always done here, by her example and her irreligion—I can't forgive her. I don't believe you'll make any impression on Mr. Freeland; he's entirely under her thumb.”

Smoking slowly, and looking just over the top of his wife's head, Malioring answered:

“I'll have a try; and don't you worry!”

Lady Malloring turned away. Her soreness still wanted salve.

“Those two young people,” she murmured, “said some very unpleasant things to me. The boy, I believe, might have some good in him, but the girl is simply terrible.”

“H'm! I think just the reverse, you know.”

“They'll come to awful grief if they're not brought up sharp. They ought to be sent to the colonies to learn reality.”

Malloring nodded.

“Come out, Mildred, and see how they're getting on with the new vinery.” And they went out together through the French window.

The vinery was of their own designing, and of extraordinary interest. In contemplation of its lofty glass and aluminium-cased pipes the feeling of soreness left her. It was very pleasant, standing with Gerald, looking at what they had planned together; there was a soothing sense of reality about that visit, after the morning's happening, with its disappointment, its reminder of immorality and discontent, and of folk ungrateful for what was done for their good. And, squeezing her husband's arm, she murmured:

“It's really exactly what we thought it would be, Gerald!”

[ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]

CHAPTER XIII

About five o'clock of that same afternoon, Gerald Malloring went to see Tod. An open-air man himself, who often deplored the long hours he was compelled to spend in the special atmosphere of the House of Commons, he rather envied Tod his existence in this cottage, crazed from age, and clothed with wistaria, rambler roses, sweetbrier, honeysuckle, and Virginia creeper. Freeland had, in his opinion, quite a jolly life of it—the poor fellow not being able, of course, to help having a cranky wife and children like that. He pondered, as he went along, over a talk at Becket, when Stanley, still under the influence of Felix's outburst, had uttered some rather queer sayings. For instance, he had supposed that they (meaning, apparently, himself and Malloring) WERE rather unable to put themselves in the position of these Trysts and Gaunts. He seemed to speak of them as one might speak generically of Hodge, which had struck Malloring as singular, it not being his habit to see anything in common between an individual case, especially on his own estate, and the ethics of a general proposition. The place for general propositions was undoubtedly the House of Commons, where they could be supported one way or the other, out of blue books. He had little use for them in private life, where innumerable things such as human nature and all that came into play. He had stared rather hard at his host when Stanley had followed up that first remark with: “I'm bound to say, I shouldn't care to have to get up at half past five, and go out without a bath!” What that had to do with the land problem or the regulation of village morality Malloring had been unable to perceive. It all depended on what one was accustomed to; and in any case threw no light on the question, as to whether or not he was to tolerate on his estate conduct of which his wife and himself distinctly disapproved. At the back of national life there was always this problem of individual conduct, especially sexual conduct—without regularity in which, the family, as the unit of national life, was gravely threatened, to put it on the lowest ground. And he did not see how to bring it home to the villagers that they had got to be regular, without making examples now and then.

He had hoped very much to get through his call without coming across Freeland's wife and children, and was greatly relieved to find Tod, seated on a window-sill in front of his cottage, smoking, and gazing apparently at nothing. In taking the other corner of the window-sill, the thought passed through his mind that Freeland was really a very fine-looking fellow. Tod was, indeed, about Malloring's own height of six feet one, with the same fairness and straight build of figure and feature. But Tod's head was round and massive, his hair crisp and uncut; Malloring's head long and narrow, his hair smooth and close-cropped. Tod's eyes, blue and deep-set, seemed fixed on the horizon, Malloring's, blue and deep-set, on the nearest thing they could light on. Tod smiled, as it were, without knowing; Malloring seemed to know what he was smiling at almost too well. It was comforting, however, that Freeland was as shy and silent as himself, for this produced a feeling that there could not be any real difference between their points of view. Perceiving at last that if he did not speak they would continue sitting there dumb till it was time for him to go, Malloring said:

“Look here, Freeland; about my wife and yours and Tryst and the Gaunts, and all the rest of it! It's a pity, isn't it? This is a small place, you know. What's your own feeling?”

Tod answered:

“A man has only one life.”

Malloring was a little puzzled.

“In this world. I don't follow.”

“Live and let live.”

A part of Malloring undoubtedly responded to that curt saying, a part of him as strongly rebelled against it; and which impulse he was going to follow was not at first patent.

“You see, YOU keep apart,” he said at last. “You couldn't say that so easily if you had, like us, to take up the position in which we find ourselves.”

“Why take it up?”

Malloring frowned. “How would things go on?”

“All right,” said Tod.

Malloring got up from the sill. This was 'laisser-faire' with a vengeance! Such philosophy had always seemed to him to savor dangerously of anarchism. And yet twenty years' experience as a neighbor had shown him that Tod was in himself perhaps the most harmless person in Worcestershire, and held in a curious esteem by most of the people about. He was puzzled, and sat down again.

“I've never had a chance to talk things over with you,” he said. “There are a good few people, Freeland, who can't behave themselves; we're not bees, you know!”

He stopped, having an uncomfortable suspicion that his hearer was not listening.

“First I've heard this year,” said Tod.

For all the rudeness of that interruption, Malloring felt a stir of interest. He himself liked birds. Unfortunately, he could hear nothing but the general chorus of their songs.

“Thought they'd gone,” murmured Tod.

Malloring again got up. “Look here, Freeland,” he said, “I wish you'd give your mind to this. You really ought not to let your wife and children make trouble in the village.”

Confound the fellow! He was smiling; there was a sort of twinkle in his smile, too, that Malloring found infectious!

“No, seriously,” he said, “you don't know what harm you mayn't do.”

“Have you ever watched a dog looking at a fire?” asked Tod.

“Yes, often; why?”

“He knows better than to touch it.”

“You mean you're helpless? But you oughtn't to be.”

The fellow was smiling again!

“Then you don't mean to do anything?”

Tod shook his head.

Malloring flushed. “Now, look here, Freeland,” he said, “forgive my saying so, but this strikes me as a bit cynical. D'you think I enjoy trying to keep things straight?”

Tod looked up.

“Birds,” he said, “animals, insects, vegetable life—they all eat each other more or less, but they don't fuss about it.”

Malloring turned abruptly and went down the path. Fuss! He never fussed. Fuss! The word was an insult, addressed to him! If there was one thing he detested more than another, whether in public or private life, it was 'fussing.' Did he not belong to the League for Suppression of Interference with the Liberty of the Subject? Was he not a member of the party notoriously opposed to fussy legislation? Had any one ever used the word in connection with conduct of his, before? If so, he had never heard them. Was it fussy to try and help the Church to improve the standard of morals in the village? Was it fussy to make a simple decision and stick to it? The injustice of the word really hurt him. And the more it hurt him, the slower and more dignified and upright became his march toward his drive gate.

'Wild geese' in the morning sky had been forerunners; very heavy clouds were sweeping up from the west, and rain beginning to fall. He passed an old man leaning on the gate of a cottage garden and said: “Good evening!”

The old man touched his hat but did not speak.

“How's your leg, Gaunt?”

“'Tis much the same, Sir Gerald.”

“Rain coming makes it shoot, I expect.”

“It do.”

Malloring stood still. The impulse was on him to see if, after all, the Gaunts' affair could not be disposed of without turning the old fellow and his son out.

“Look here!” he said; “about this unfortunate business. Why don't you and your son make up your minds without more ado to let your granddaughter go out to service? You've been here all your lives; I don't want to see you go.”

The least touch of color invaded the old man's carved and grayish face.

“Askin' your pardon,” he said, “my son sticks by his girl, and I sticks by my son!”

“Oh! very well; you know your own business, Gaunt. I spoke for your good.”

A faint smile curled the corners of old Gaunt's mouth downward beneath his gray moustaches.

“Thank you kindly,” he said.

Malloring raised a finger to his cap and passed on. Though he felt a longing to stride his feelings off, he did not increase his pace, knowing that the old man's eyes were following him. But how pig-headed they were, seeing nothing but their own point of view! Well, he could not alter his decision. They would go at the June quarter—not a day before, nor after.

Passing Tryst's cottage, he noticed a 'fly' drawn up outside, and its driver talking to a woman in hat and coat at the cottage doorway. She avoided his eye.

'The wife's sister again!' he thought. 'So that fellow's going to be an ass, too? Hopeless, stubborn lot!' And his mind passed on to his scheme for draining the bottom fields at Cantley Bromage. This village trouble was too small to occupy for long the mind of one who had so many duties....

Old Gaunt remained at the gate watching till the tall figure passed out of sight, then limped slowly down the path and entered his son's cottage. Tom Gaunt, not long in from work, was sitting in his shirtsleeves, reading the paper—a short, thick-set man with small eyes, round, ruddy cheeks, and humorous lips indifferently concealed by a ragged moustache. Even in repose there was about him something talkative and disputatious. He was clearly the kind of man whose eyes and wit would sparkle above a pewter pot. A good workman, he averaged out an income of perhaps eighteen shillings a week, counting the two shillings' worth of vegetables that he grew. His erring daughter washed for two old ladies in a bungalow, so that with old Gaunt's five shillings from the parish, the total resources of this family of five, including two small boys at school, was seven and twenty shillings a week. Quite a sum! His comparative wealth no doubt contributed to the reputation of Tom Gaunt, well known as local wag and disturber of political meetings. His method with these gatherings, whether Liberal or Tory, had a certain masterly simplicity. By interjecting questions that could not be understood, and commenting on the answers received, he insured perpetual laughter, with the most salutary effects on the over-consideration of any political question, together with a tendency to make his neighbors say: “Ah! Tom Gaunt, he's a proper caution, he is!” An encomium dear to his ears. What he seriously thought about anything in this world, no one knew; but some suspected him of voting Liberal, because he disturbed their meetings most. His loyalty to his daughter was not credited to affection. It was like Tom Gaunt to stick his toes in and kick—the Quality, for choice. To look at him and old Gaunt, one would not have thought they could be son and father, a relationship indeed ever dubious. As for his wife, she had been dead twelve years. Some said he had joked her out of life, others that she had gone into consumption. He was a reader—perhaps the only one in all the village, and could whistle like a blackbird. To work hard, but without too great method, to drink hard, but with perfect method, and to talk nineteen to the dozen anywhere except at home—was his mode of life. In a word, he was a 'character.'

Old Gaunt sat down in a wooden rocking-chair, and spoke.

“Sir Gerald 'e've a-just passed.”

“Sir Gerald 'e can goo to hell. They'll know un there, by 'is little ears.”

“'E've a-spoke about us stoppin'; so as Mettie goes out to sarvice.”

“'E've a-spoke about what 'e don't know 'bout, then. Let un do what they like, they can't put Tom Gaunt about; he can get work anywhere—Tom Gaunt can, an' don't you forget that, old man.”

The old man, placing his thin brown hands on his knees, was silent. And thoughts passed through and through him. 'If so be as Tom goes, there'll be no one as'll take me in for less than three bob a week. Two bob a week, that's what I'll 'ave to feed me—Two bob a week—two bob a week! But if so be's I go with Tom, I'll 'ave to reg'lar sit down under he for me bread and butter.' And he contemplated his son.

“Where are you goin', then?” he said.

Tom Gaunt rustled the greenish paper he was reading, and his little, hard gray eyes fixed his father.

“Who said I was going?”

Old Gaunt, smoothing and smoothing the lined, thin cheeks of the parchmenty, thin-nosed face that Frances Freeland had thought to be almost like a gentleman's, answered: “I thart you said you was goin'.”

“You think too much, then—that's what 'tis. You think too much, old man.”

With a slight deepening of the sardonic patience in his face, old Gaunt rose, took a bowl and spoon down from a shelf, and very slowly proceeded to make himself his evening meal. It consisted of crusts of bread soaked in hot water and tempered with salt, pepper, onion, and a touch of butter. And while he waited, crouched over the kettle, his son smoked his grayish clay and read his greenish journal; an old clock ticked and a little cat purred without provocation on the ledge of the tight-closed window. Then the door opened and the rogue-girl appeared. She shook her shoulders as though to dismiss the wetting she had got, took off her turn-down, speckly, straw hat, put on an apron, and rolled up her sleeves. Her arms were full and firm and red; the whole of her was full and firm. From her rosy cheeks to her stout ankles she was superabundant with vitality, the strangest contrast to her shadowy, thin old grandfather. About the preparation of her father's tea she moved with a sort of brooding stolidity, out of which would suddenly gleam a twinkle of rogue-sweetness, as when she stopped to stroke the little cat or to tickle the back of her grandfather's lean neck in passing. Having set the tea, she stood by the table and said slowly: “Tea's ready, father. I'm goin' to London.”

Tom Gaunt put down his pipe and journal, took his seat at the table, filled his mouth with sausage, and said: “You're goin' where I tell you.”

“I'm goin' to London.”

Tom Gaunt stayed the morsel in one cheek and fixed her with his little, wild boar's eye.

“Ye're goin' to catch the stick,” he said. “Look here, my girl, Tom Gaunt's been put about enough along of you already. Don't you make no mistake.”

“I'm goin' to London,” repeated the rogue-girl stolidly. “You can get Alice to come over.”

“Oh! Can I? Ye're not goin' till I tell you. Don't you think it!”

“I'm goin'. I saw Mr. Derek this mornin'. They'll get me a place there.”

Tom Gaunt remained with his fork as it were transfixed. The effort of devising contradiction to the chief supporters of his own rebellion was for the moment too much for him. He resumed mastication.

“You'll go where I want you to go; and don't you think you can tell me where that is.”

In the silence that ensued the only sound was that of old Gaunt supping at his crusty-broth. Then the rogue-girl went to the window and, taking the little cat on her breast, sat looking out into the rain. Having finished his broth, old Gaunt got up, and, behind his son's back, he looked at his granddaughter and thought:

'Goin' to London! 'Twud be best for us all. WE shudn' need to be movin', then. Goin' to London!' But he felt desolate.

[ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]

CHAPTER XIV

When Spring and first love meet in a girl's heart, then the birds sing.

The songs that blackbirds and dusty-coated thrushes flung through Nedda's window when she awoke in Hampstead those May mornings seemed to have been sung by herself all night. Whether the sun were flashing on the leaves, or rain-drops sieving through on a sou'west wind, the same warmth glowed up in her the moment her eyes opened. Whether the lawn below were a field of bright dew, or dry and darkish in a shiver of east wind, her eyes never grew dim all day; and her blood felt as light as ostrich feathers.

Stormed by an attack of his cacoethes scribendi, after those few blank days at Becket, Felix saw nothing amiss with his young daughter. The great observer was not observant of things that other people observed. Neither he nor Flora, occupied with matters of more spiritual importance, could tell, offhand, for example, on which hand a wedding-ring was worn. They had talked enough of Becket and the Tods to produce the impression on Flora's mind that one day or another two young people would arrive in her house on a visit; but she had begun a poem called 'Dionysus at the Well,' and Felix himself had plunged into a satiric allegory entitled 'The Last of the Laborers.' Nedda, therefore, walked alone; but at her side went always an invisible companion. In that long, imaginary walking-out she gave her thoughts and the whole of her heart, and to be doing this never surprised her, who, before, had not given them whole to anything. A bee knows the first summer day and clings intoxicated to its flowers; so did Nedda know and cling. She wrote him two letters and he wrote her one. It was not poetry; indeed, it was almost all concerned with Wilmet Gaunt, asking Nedda to find a place in London where the girl could go; but it ended with the words:

“Your lover,

“DEREK.”

This letter troubled Nedda. She would have taken it at once to Felix or to Flora if it had not been for the first words, “Dearest Nedda,” and those last three. Except her mother, she instinctively distrusted women in such a matter as that of Wilmet Gaunt, feeling they would want to know more than she could tell them, and not be too tolerant of what they heard. Casting about, at a loss, she thought suddenly of Mr. Cuthcott.

At dinner that day she fished round carefully. Felix spoke of him almost warmly. What Cuthcott could have been doing at Becket, of all places, he could not imagine—the last sort of man one expected to see there; a good fellow, rather desperate, perhaps, as men of his age were apt to get if they had too many women, or no woman, about them.

Which, said Nedda, had Mr. Cuthcott?

Oh! None. How had he struck Nedda? And Felix looked at his little daughter with a certain humble curiosity. He always felt that the young instinctively knew so much more than he did.

“I liked him awfully. He was like a dog.”

“Ah!” said Felix, “he IS like a dog—very honest; he grins and runs about the city, and might be inclined to bay the moon.”

'I don't mind that,' Nedda thought, 'so long as he's not “superior.”'

“He's very human,” Felix added.

And having found out that he lived in Gray's Inn, Nedda thought: 'I will; I'll ask him.'

To put her project into execution, she wrote this note:

“DEAR MR. CUTHCOTT:

“You were so kind as to tell me you wouldn't mind if I bothered you about things. I've got a very bothery thing to know what to do about, and I would be so glad of your advice. It so happens that I can't ask my father and mother. I hope you won't think me very horrible, wasting your time. And please say no, if you'd rather.

“Yours sincerely,

“NEDDA FREELAND.”

The answer came:

“DEAR MISS FREELAND:

“Delighted. But if very bothery, better save time and ink, and have a snack of lunch with me to-morrow at the Elgin restaurant, close to the British Museum. Quiet and respectable. No flowers by request. One o'clock.

“Very truly yours,

“GILES CUTHCOTT.”

Putting on 'no flowers' and with a fast-beating heart, Nedda, went on her first lonely adventure. To say truth she did not know in the least how ever she was going to ask this almost strange man about a girl of doubtful character. But she kept saying to herself: 'I don't care—he has nice eyes.' And her spirit would rise as she got nearer, because, after all, she was going to find things out, and to find things out was jolly. The new warmth and singing in her heart had not destroyed, but rather heightened, her sense of the extraordinary interest of all things that be. And very mysterious to her that morning was the kaleidoscope of Oxford Street and its innumerable girls, and women, each going about her business, with a life of her own that was not Nedda's. For men she had little use just now, they had acquired a certain insignificance, not having gray-black eyes that smoked and flared, nor Harris tweed suits that smelled delicious. Only once on her journey from Oxford Circus she felt the sense of curiosity rise in her, in relation to a man, and this was when she asked a policeman at Tottenham Court Road, and he put his head down fully a foot to listen to her. So huge, so broad, so red in the face, so stolid, it seemed wonderful to her that he paid her any attention! If he were a human being, could she really be one, too? But that, after all, was no more odd than everything. Why, for instance, the spring flowers in that woman's basket had been born; why that high white cloud floated over; why and what was Nedda Freeland?

At the entrance of the little restaurant she saw Mr. Cuthcott waiting. In a brown suit, with his pale but freckled face, and his gnawed-at, sandy moustache, and his eyes that looked out and beyond, he was certainly no beauty. But Nedda thought: 'He's even nicer than I remembered, and I'm sure he knows a lot.'

At first, to be sitting opposite to him, in front of little plates containing red substances and small fishes, was so exciting that she simply listened to his rapid, rather stammering voice mentioning that the English had no idea of life or cookery, that God had so made this country by mistake that everything, even the sun, knew it. What, however, would she drink? Chardonnet? It wasn't bad here.

She assented, not liking to confess that she did not know what Chardonnet might be, and hoping it was some kind of sherbet. She had never yet drunk wine, and after a glass felt suddenly extremely strong.

“Well,” said Mr. Cuthcott, and his eyes twinkled, “what's your botheration? I suppose you want to strike out for yourself. MY daughters did that without consulting me.”

“Oh! Have you got daughters?”

“Yes—funny ones; older than you.”

“That's why you understand, then.”

Mr. Cuthcott smiled. “They WERE a liberal education!”

And Nedda thought: 'Poor Dad, I wonder if I am!'

“Yes,” Mr. Cuthcott murmured, “who would think a gosling would ever become a goose?”

“Ah!” said Nedda eagerly, “isn't it wonderful how things grow?”

She felt his eyes suddenly catch hold of hers.

“You're in love!” he said.

It seemed to her a great piece of luck that he had found that out. It made everything easy at once, and her words came out pell-mell.

“Yes, and I haven't told my people yet. I don't seem able. He's given me something to do, and I haven't much experience.”

A funny little wriggle passed over Mr. Cuthcott's face. “Yes, yes; go on! Tell us about it.”

She took a sip from her glass, and the feeling that he had been going to laugh passed away.

“It's about the daughter of a laborer, down there in Worcestershire, where he lives, not very far from Becket. He's my cousin, Derek, the son of my other uncle at Joyfields. He and his sister feel most awfully strongly about the laborers.”

“Ah!” said Mr. Cuthcott, “the laborers! Queer how they're in the air, all of a sudden.”

“This girl hasn't been very good, and she has to go from the village, or else her family have. He wants me to find a place for her in London.”

“I see; and she hasn't been very good?”

“Not very.” She knew that her cheeks were flushing, but her eyes felt steady, and seeing that his eyes never moved, she did not mind. She went on:

“It's Sir Gerald Malloring's estate. Lady Malloring—won't—”

She heard a snap. Mr. Cuthcott's mouth had closed.

“Oh!” he said, “say no more!”

'He CAN bite nicely!' she thought.

Mr. Cuthcott, who had begun lightly thumping the little table with his open hand, broke out suddenly:

“That petty bullying in the country! I know it! My God! Those prudes, those prisms! They're the ruination of half the girls on the—” He looked at Nedda and stopped short. “If she can do any kind of work, I'll find her a place. In fact, she'd better come, for a start, under my old housekeeper. Let your cousin know; she can turn up any day. Name? Wilmet Gaunt? Right you are!” He wrote it on his cuff.

Nedda rose to her feet, having an inclination to seize his hand, or stroke his head, or something. She subsided again with a fervid sigh, and sat exchanging with him a happy smile. At last she said:

“Mr. Cuthcott, is there any chance of things like that changing?”

“Changing?” He certainly had grown paler, and was again lightly thumping the table. “Changing? By gum! It's got to change! This d—d pluto-aristocratic ideal! The weed's so grown up that it's choking us. Yes, Miss Freeland, whether from inside or out I don't know yet, but there's a blazing row coming. Things are going to be made new before long.”

Under his thumps the little plates had begun to rattle and leap. And Nedda thought: 'I DO like him.'

But she said anxiously:

“You believe there's something to be done, then? Derek is simply full of it; I want to feel like that, too, and I mean to.”

His face grew twinkly; he put out his hand. And wondering a little whether he meant her to, Nedda timidly stretched forth her own and grasped it.

“I like you,” he said. “Love your cousin and don't worry.”

Nedda's eyes slipped into the distance.

“But I'm afraid for him. If you saw him, you'd know.”

“One's always afraid for the fellows that are worth anything. There was another young Freeland at your uncle's the other night—”

“My brother Alan!”

“Oh! your brother? Well, I wasn't afraid for him, and it seemed a pity. Have some of this; it's about the only thing they do well here.”

“Oh, thank you, no. I've had a lovely lunch. Mother and I generally have about nothing.” And clasping her hands she added:

“This is a secret, isn't it, Mr. Cuthcott?”

“Dead.”

He laughed and his face melted into a mass of wrinkles. Nedda laughed also and drank up the rest of her wine. She felt blissful.

“Yes,” said Mr. Cuthcott, “there's nothing like loving. How long have you been at it?”

“Only five days, but it's everything.”

Mr. Cuthcott sighed. “That's right. When you can't love, the only thing is to hate.”

“Oh!” said Nedda.

Mr. Cuthcott again began banging on the little table. “Look at them, look at them!” His eyes wandered angrily about the room, wherein sat some few who had passed though the mills of gentility. “What do they know of life? Where are their souls and sympathies? They haven't any. I'd like to see their blood flow, the silly brutes.”

Nedda looked at them with alarm and curiosity. They seemed to her somewhat like everybody she knew. She said timidly: “Do you think OUR blood ought to flow, too?”

Mr. Cuthcott relapsed into twinkles. “Rather! Mine first!”

'He IS human!' thought Nedda. And she got up: “I'm afraid I ought to go now. It's been awfully nice. Thank you so very much. Good-by!”

He shook her firm little hand with his frail thin one, and stood smiling till the restaurant door cut him off from her view.

The streets seemed so gorgeously full of life now that Nedda's head swam. She looked at it all with such absorption that she could not tell one thing from another. It seemed rather long to the Tottenham Court Road, though she noted carefully the names of all the streets she passed, and was sure she had not missed it. She came at last to one called POULTRY. 'Poultry!' she thought; 'I should have remembered that—Poultry?' And she laughed. It was so sweet and feathery a laugh that the driver of an old four-wheeler stopped his horse. He was old and anxious-looking, with a gray beard and deep folds in his red cheeks.

“Poultry!” she said. “Please, am I right for the Tottenham Court Road?”

The old man answered: “Glory, no, miss; you're goin' East!”

'East!' thought Nedda; 'I'd better take him.' And she got in. She sat in the four-wheeler, smiling. And how far this was due to Chardonnet she did not consider. She was to love and not worry. It was wonderful! In this mood she was put down, still smiling, at the Tottenham Court Road Tube, and getting out her purse she prepared to pay the cabman. The fare would be a shilling, but she felt like giving him two. He looked so anxious and worn, in spite of his red face. He took them, looked at her, and said: “Thank you, miss; I wanted that.”

“Oh!” murmured Nedda, “then please take this, too. It's all I happen to have, except my Tube fare.”

The old man took it, and water actually ran along his nose.

“God bless yer!” he said. And taking up his whip, he drove off quickly.

Rather choky, but still glowing, Nedda descended to her train. It was not till she was walking to the Spaniard's Road that a cloud seemed to come over her sky, and she reached home dejected.

In the garden of the Freelands' old house was a nook shut away by berberis and rhododendrons, where some bees were supposed to make honey, but, knowing its destination, and belonging to a union, made no more than they were obliged. In this retreat, which contained a rustic bench, Nedda was accustomed to sit and read; she went there now. And her eyes began filling with tears. Why must the poor old fellow who had driven her look so anxious and call on God to bless her for giving him that little present? Why must people grow old and helpless, like that Grandfather Gaunt she had seen at Becket? Why was there all the tyranny that made Derek and Sheila so wild? And all the grinding poverty that she herself could see when she went with her mother to their Girls' Club, in Bethnal Green? What was the use of being young and strong if nothing happened, nothing was really changed, so that one got old and died seeing still the same things as before? What was the use even of loving, if love itself had to yield to death? The trees! How they grew from tiny seeds to great and beautiful things, and then slowly, slowly dried and decayed away to dust. What was the good of it all? What comfort was there in a God so great and universal that he did not care to keep her and Derek alive and loving forever, and was not interested enough to see that the poor old cab-driver should not be haunted day and night with fear of the workhouse for himself and an old wife, perhaps? Nedda's tears fell fast, and how far THIS was Chardonnet no one could tell.

Felix, seeking inspiration from the sky in regard to 'The Last of the Laborers,' heard a noise like sobbing, and, searching, found his little daughter sitting there and crying as if her heart would break. The sight was so unusual and so utterly disturbing that he stood rooted, quite unable to bring her help. Should he sneak away? Should he go for Flora? What should he do? Like many men whose work keeps them centred within themselves, he instinctively avoided everything likely to pain or trouble him; for this reason, when anything did penetrate those mechanical defences he became almost strangely tender. Loath, for example, to believe that any one was ill, if once convinced of it, he made so good a nurse that Flora, at any rate, was in the habit of getting well with suspicious alacrity. Thoroughly moved now, he sat down on the bench beside Nedda, and said:

“My darling!”

She leaned her forehead against his arm and sobbed the more.

Felix waited, patting her far shoulder gently.

He had often dealt with such situations in his books, and now that one had come true was completely at a loss. He could not even begin to remember what was usually said or done, and he only made little soothing noises.

To Nedda this tenderness brought a sudden sharp sense of guilt and yearning. She began:

“It's not because of that I'm crying, Dad, but I want you to know that Derek and I are in love.”

The words: 'You! What! In those few days!' rose, and got as far as Felix's teeth; he swallowed them and went on patting her shoulder. Nedda in love! He felt blank and ashy. That special feeling of owning her more than any one else, which was so warming and delightful, so really precious—it would be gone! What right had she to take it from him, thus, without warning! Then he remembered how odious he had always said the elderly were, to spoke the wheels of youth, and managed to murmur:

“Good luck to you, my pretty!”

He said it, conscious that a father ought to be saying:

'You're much too young, and he's your cousin!' But what a father ought to say appeared to him just then both sensible and ridiculous. Nedda rubbed her cheek against his hand.

“It won't make any difference, Dad, I promise you!”

And Felix thought: 'Not to you, only to me!' But he said:

“Not a scrap, my love! What WERE you crying about?”

“About the world; it seems so heartless.”

And she told him about the water that had run along the nose of the old four-wheeler man.

But while he seemed to listen, Felix thought: 'I wish to God I were made of leather; then I shouldn't feel as if I'd lost the warmth inside me. I mustn't let her see. Fathers ARE queer—I always suspected that. There goes my work for a good week!' Then he answered:

“No, my dear, the world is not heartless; it's only arranged according to certain necessary contraries: No pain, no pleasure; no dark, no light, and the rest of it. If you think, it couldn't be arranged differently.”

As he spoke a blackbird came running with a chuckle from underneath the berberis, looked at them with alarm, and ran back. Nedda raised her face.

“Dad, I mean to do something with my life!”

Felix answered:

“Yes. That's right.”

But long after Nedda had fallen into dreams that night, he lay awake, with his left foot enclosed between Floras', trying to regain that sense of warmth which he knew he must never confess to having lost.

[ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]

CHAPTER XV

Flora took the news rather with the air of a mother-dog that says to her puppy: “Oh, very well, young thing! Go and stick your teeth in it and find out for yourself!” Sooner or later this always happened, and generally sooner nowadays. Besides, she could not help feeling that she would get more of Felix, to her a matter of greater importance than she gave sign of. But inwardly the news had given her a shock almost as sharp as that felt by him. Was she really the mother of one old enough to love? Was the child that used to cuddle up to her in the window-seat to be read to, gone from her; that used to rush in every morning at all inconvenient moments of her toilet; that used to be found sitting in the dark on the stairs, like a little sleepy owl, because, for-sooth, it was so 'cosey'?

Not having seen Derek, she did not as yet share her husband's anxiety on that score, though his description was dubious:

“Upstanding young cockerel, swinging his sporran and marching to pipes—a fine spurn about him! Born to trouble, if I know anything, trying to sweep the sky with his little broom!”

“Is he a prig?”

“No-o. There's simplicity about his scorn, and he seems to have been brought up on facts, not on literature, like most of these young monkeys. The cousinship I don't think matters; Kirsteen brings in too strong an out-strain. He's HER son, not Tod's. But perhaps,” he added, sighing, “it won't last.”

Flora shook her head. “It will last!” she said; “Nedda's deep.”

And if Nedda held, so would Fate; no one would throw Nedda over! They naturally both felt that. 'Dionysus at the Well,' no less than 'The Last of the Laborers,' had a light week of it.

Though in a sense relieved at having parted with her secret, Nedda yet felt that she had committed desecration. Suppose Derek should mind her people knowing!

On the day that he and Sheila were to come, feeling she could not trust herself to seem even reasonably calm, she started out, meaning to go to the South Kensington Museum and wander the time away there; but once out-of-doors the sky seemed what she wanted, and, turning down the hill on the north side, she sat down under a gorse bush. Here tramps, coming in to London, passed the night under the stars; here was a vision, however dim, of nature. And nature alone could a little soothe her ecstatic nerves.

How would he greet her? Would he be exactly as he was when they stood at the edge of Tod's orchard, above the dreamy, darkening fields, joining hands and lips, moved as they had never been moved before?

May blossom was beginning to come out along the hedge of the private grounds that bordered that bit of Cockney Common, and from it, warmed by the sun, the scent stole up to her. Familiar, like so many children of the cultured classes, with the pagan and fairy-tales of nature, she forgot them all the moment she was really by herself with earth and sky. In their breadth, their soft and stirring continuity, they rejected bookish fancy, and woke in her rapture and yearning, a sort of long delight, a never-appeased hunger. Crouching, hands round knees, she turned her face to get the warmth of the sun, and see the white clouds go slowly by, and catch all the songs that the birds sang. And every now and then she drew a deep breath. It was true what Dad had said: There was no real heartlessness in nature. It was warm, beating, breathing. And if things ate each other, what did it matter? They had lived and died quickly, helping to make others live. The sacred swing and circle of it went on forever, full and harmonious under the lighted sky, under the friendly stars. It was wonderful to be alive! And all done by love. Love! More, more, more love! And then death, if it must come! For, after all, to Nedda death was so far away, so unimaginably dim and distant, that it did not really count.

While she sat, letting her fingers, that were growing slowly black, scrabble the grass and fern, a feeling came on her of a Presence, a creature with wings above and around, that seemed to have on its face a long, mysterious smile of which she, Nedda, was herself a tiny twinkle. She would bring Derek here. They two would sit together and let the clouds go over them, and she would learn all that he really thought, and tell him all her longings and fears; they would be silent, too, loving each other too much to talk. She made elaborate plans of what they were to do and see, beginning with the East End and the National Gallery, and ending with sunrise from Parliament Hill; but she somehow knew that nothing would happen as she had designed. If only the first moment were not different from what she hoped!

She sat there so long that she rose quite stiff, and so hungry that she could not help going home and stealing into the kitchen. It was three o'clock, and the old cook, as usual, asleep in an armchair, with her apron thrown up between her face and the fire. What would Cookie say if she knew? In that oven she had been allowed to bake in fancy perfect little doll loaves, while Cookie baked them in reality. Here she had watched the mysterious making of pink cream, had burned countless 'goes' of toffy, and cocoanut ice; and tasted all kinds of loveliness. Dear old Cookie! Stealing about on tiptoe, seeking what she might devour, she found four small jam tarts and ate them, while the cook snored softly. Then, by the table, that looked so like a great loaf-platter, she stood contemplating cook. Old darling, with her fat, pale, crumply face! Hung to the dresser, opposite, was a little mahogany looking-glass tilted forward. Nedda could see herself almost down to her toes. 'I mean to be prettier than I am!' she thought, putting her hands on her waist. 'I wonder if I can pull them in a bit!' Sliding her fingers under her blouse, she began to pull at certain strings. They would not budge. They were loose, yes, really too comfortable. She would have to get the next size smaller! And dropping her chin, she rubbed it on the lace edging of her chest, where it felt warm and smelled piny. Had Cookie ever been in love? Her gray hairs were coming, poor old duck! The windows, where a protection of wire gauze kept out the flies, were opened wide, and the sun shone in and dimmed the fire. The kitchen clock ticked like a conscience; a faint perfume of frying-pan and mint scented the air. And, for the first time since this new sensation of love had come to her, Nedda felt as if a favorite book, read through and done with, were dropping from her hands. The lovely times in that kitchen, in every nook of that old house and garden, would never come again! Gone! She felt suddenly cast down to sadness. They HAD been lovely times! To be deserting in spirit all that had been so good to her—it seemed like a crime! She slid down off the table and, passing behind the cook, put her arms round those substantial sides. Without meaning to, out of sheer emotion, she pressed them somewhat hard, and, as from a concertina emerges a jerked and drawn-out chord, so from the cook came a long, quaking sound; her apron fell, her body heaved, and her drowsy, flat, soft voice, greasy from pondering over dishes, murmured:

“Ah, Miss Nedda! it's you, my dear! Bless your pretty 'eart.”

But down Nedda's cheeks, behind her, rolled two tears.

“Cookie, oh, Cookie!” And she ran out....

And the first moment? It was like nothing she had dreamed of. Strange, stiff! One darting look, and then eyes down; one convulsive squeeze, then such a formal shake of hot, dry hands, and off he had gone with Felix to his room, and she with Sheila to hers, bewildered, biting down consternation, trying desperately to behave 'like a little lady,' as her old nurse would have put it—before Sheila, especially, whose hostility she knew by instinct she had earned. All that evening, furtive watching, formal talk, and underneath a ferment of doubt and fear and longing. All a mistake! An awful mistake! Did he love her? Heaven! If he did not, she could never face any one again. He could not love her! His eyes were like those of a swan when its neck is drawn up and back in anger. Terrible—having to show nothing, having to smile at Sheila, at Dad, and Mother! And when at last she got to her room, she stood at the window and at first simply leaned her forehead against the glass and shivered. What had she done? Had she dreamed it all—dreamed that they had stood together under those boughs in the darkness, and through their lips exchanged their hearts? She must have dreamed it! Dreamed that most wonderful, false dream! And the walk home in the thunder-storm, and his arm round her, and her letters, and his letter—dreamed it all! And now she was awake! From her lips came a little moan, and she sank down huddled, and stayed there ever so long, numb and chilly. Undress—go to bed? Not for the world. By the time the morning came she had got to forget that she had dreamed. For very shame she had got to forget that; no one should see. Her cheeks and ears and lips were burning, but her body felt icy cold. Then—what time she did not know at all—she felt she must go out and sit on the stairs. They had always been her comforters, those wide, shallow, cosey stairs. Out and down the passage, past all their rooms—his the last—to the dark stairs, eerie at night, where the scent of age oozed out of the old house. All doors below, above, were closed; it was like looking down into a well, to sit with her head leaning against the banisters. And silent, so silent—just those faint creakings that come from nowhere, as it might be the breathing of the house. She put her arms round a cold banister and hugged it hard. It hurt her, and she embraced it the harder. The first tears of self-pity came welling up, and without warning a great sob burst out of her. Alarmed at the sound, she smothered her mouth with her arm. No good; they came breaking out! A door opened; all the blood rushed to her heart and away from it, and with a little dreadful gurgle she was silent. Some one was listening. How long that terrible listening lasted she had no idea; then footsteps, and she was conscious that it was standing in the dark behind her. A foot touched her back. She gave a little gasp. Derek's voice whispered hoarsely:

“What? Who are you?”

And, below her breath, she answered: “Nedda.”

His arms wrenched her away from the banister, his voice in her ear said:

“Nedda, darling, Nedda!”

But despair had sunk too deep; she could only quiver and shake and try to drive sobbing out of her breath. Then, most queer, not his words, nor the feel of his arms, comforted her—any one could pity!—but the smell and the roughness of his Norfolk jacket. So he, too, had not been in bed; he, too, had been unhappy! And, burying her face in his sleeve, she murmured:

“Oh, Derek! Why?”

“I didn't want them all to see. I can't bear to give it away. Nedda, come down lower and let's love each other!”

Softly, stumbling, clinging together, they went down to the last turn of the wide stairs. How many times had she not sat there, in white frocks, her hair hanging down as now, twisting the tassels of little programmes covered with hieroglyphics only intelligible to herself, talking spasmodically to spasmodic boys with budding 'tails,' while Chinese lanterns let fall their rose and orange light on them and all the other little couples as exquisitely devoid of ease. Ah! it was worth those hours of torture to sit there together now, comforting each other with hands and lips and whisperings. It was more, as much more than that moment in the orchard, as sun shining after a Spring storm is more than sun in placid mid-July. To hear him say: “Nedda, I love you!” to feel it in his hand clasped on her heart was much more, now that she knew how difficult it was for him to say or show it, except in the dark with her alone. Many a long day they might have gone through together that would not have shown her so much of his real heart as that hour of whispering and kisses.

He had known she was unhappy, and yet he couldn't! It had only made him more dumb! It was awful to be like that! But now that she knew, she was glad to think that it was buried so deep in him and kept for her alone. And if he did it again she would just know that it was only shyness and pride. And he was not a brute and a beast, as he insisted. But suppose she had chanced not to come out! Would she ever have lived through the night? And she shivered.

“Are you cold, darling? Put on my coat.”

It was put on her in spite of all effort to prevent him. Never was anything so warm, so delicious, wrapping her in something more than Harris tweed. And the hall clock struck—Two!

She could just see his face in the glimmer that filtered from the skylight at the top. And she felt that he was learning her, learning all that she had to give him, learning the trust that was shining through her eyes. There was just enough light for them to realize the old house watching from below and from above—a glint on the dark floor there, on the dark wall here; a blackness that seemed to be inhabited by some spirit, so that their hands clutched and twitched, when the tiny, tiny noises of Time, playing in wood and stone, clicked out.

That stare of the old house, with all its knowledge of lives past, of youth and kisses spent and gone, of hopes spun and faiths abashed, the old house cynical, stirred in them desire to clutch each other close and feel the thrill of peering out together into mystery that must hold for them so much of love and joy and trouble! And suddenly she put her fingers to his face, passed them softly, clingingly, over his hair, forehead, eyes, traced the sharp cheek-bones down to his jaw, round by the hard chin up to his lips, over the straight bone of his nose, lingering, back, to his eyes again.

“Now, if I go blind, I shall know you. Give me one kiss, Derek. You MUST be tired.”

Buried in the old dark house that kiss lasted long; then, tiptoeing—she in front—pausing at every creak, holding breath, they stole up to their rooms. And the clock struck—Three!

[ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]

CHAPTER XVI

Felix (nothing if not modern) had succumbed already to the feeling that youth ruled the roost. Whatever his misgivings, his and Flora's sense of loss, Nedda must be given a free hand! Derek gave no outward show of his condition, and but for his little daughter's happy serenity Felix would have thought as she had thought that first night. He had a feeling that his nephew rather despised one so soaked in mildness and reputation as Felix Freeland; and he got on better with Sheila, not because she was milder, but because she was devoid of that scornful tang which clung about her brother. No! Sheila was not mild. Rich-colored, downright of speech, with her mane of short hair, she was a no less startling companion. The smile of Felix had never been more whimsically employed than during that ten-day visit. The evening John Freeland came to dinner was the highwater mark of his alarmed amusement. Mr. Cuthcott, also bidden, at Nedda's instigation, seemed to take a mischievous delight in drawing out those two young people in face of their official uncle. The pleasure of the dinner to Felix—and it was not too great—was in watching Nedda's face. She hardly spoke, but how she listened! Nor did Derek say much, but what he did say had a queer, sarcastic twinge about it.

“An unpleasant young man,” was John's comment afterward. “How the deuce did he ever come to be Tod's son? Sheila, of course, is one of these hot-headed young women that make themselves a nuisance nowadays, but she's intelligible. By the way, that fellow Cuthcott's a queer chap!”

One subject of conversation at dinner had been the morality of revolutionary violence. And the saying that had really upset John had been Derek's: “Conflagration first—morality afterward!” He had looked at his nephew from under brows which a constant need for rejecting petitions to the Home Office had drawn permanently down and in toward the nose, and made no answer.

To Felix these words had a more sinister significance. With his juster appreciation both of the fiery and the official points of view, his far greater insight into his nephew than ever John would have, he saw that they were more than a mere arrow of controversy. And he made up his mind that night that he would tackle his nephew and try to find out exactly what was smouldering within that crisp, black pate.

Following him into the garden next morning, he said to himself: 'No irony—that's fatal. Man to man—or boy to boy—whichever it is!' But, on the garden path, alongside that young spread-eagle, whose dark, glowering, self-contained face he secretly admired, he merely began:

“How do you like your Uncle John?”

“He doesn't like me, Uncle Felix.”

Somewhat baffled, Felix proceeded:

“I say, Derek, fortunately or unfortunately, I've some claim now to a little knowledge of you. You've got to open out a bit to me. What are you going to do with yourself in life? You can't support Nedda on revolution.”

Having drawn this bow at a venture, he paused, doubtful of his wisdom. A glance at Derek's face confirmed his doubt. It was closer than ever, more defiant.

“There's a lot of money in revolution, Uncle Felix—other people's.”

Dash the young brute! There was something in him! He swerved off to a fresh line.

“How do you like London?”

“I don't like it. But, Uncle Felix, don't you wish YOU were seeing it for the first time? What books you'd write!”

Felix felt that unconscious thrust go 'home.' Revolt against staleness and clipped wings, against the terrible security of his too solid reputation, smote him.

“What strikes you most about it, then?” he asked.

“That it ought to be jolly well blown up. Everybody seems to know that, too—they look it, anyway, and yet they go on as if it oughtn't.”

“Why ought it to be blown up?”

“Well, what's the good of anything while London and all these other big towns are sitting on the country's chest? England must have been a fine place once, though!”

“Some of us think it a fine place still.”

“Of course it is, in a way. But anything new and keen gets sat on. England's like an old tom-cat by the fire: too jolly comfortable for anything!”

At this support to his own theory that the country was going to the dogs, owing to such as John and Stanley, Felix thought: 'Out of the mouths of babes!' But he merely said: “You're a cheerful young man!”

“It's got cramp,” Derek muttered; “can't even give women votes. Fancy my mother without a vote! And going to wait till every laborer is off the land before it attends to them. It's like the port you gave us last night, Uncle Felix, wonderful crust!”

“And what is to be your contribution to its renovation?”

Derek's face instantly resumed its peculiar defiant smile, and Felix thought: 'Young beggar! He's as close as wax.' After their little talk, however, he had more understanding of his nephew. His defiant self-sufficiency seemed more genuine....

In spite of his sensations when dining with Felix, John Freeland (little if not punctilious) decided that it was incumbent on him to have the 'young Tods' to dinner, especially since Frances Freeland had come to stay with him the day after the arrival of those two young people at Hampstead. She had reached Porchester Gardens faintly flushed from the prospect of seeing darling John, with one large cane trunk, and a hand-bag of a pattern which the man in the shop had told her was the best thing out. It had a clasp which had worked beautifully in the shop, but which, for some reason, on the journey had caused her both pain and anxiety. Convinced, however, that she could cure it and open the bag the moment she could get to that splendid new pair of pincers in her trunk, which a man had only yesterday told her were the latest, she still felt that she had a soft thing, and dear John must have one like it if she could get him one at the Stores to-morrow.

John, who had come away early from the Home Office, met her in that dark hall, to which he had paid no attention since his young wife died, fifteen years ago. Embracing him, with a smile of love almost timorous from intensity, Frances Freeland looked him up and down, and, catching what light there was gleaming on his temples, determined that she had in her bag, as soon as she could get it open, the very thing for dear John's hair. He had such a nice moustache, and it was a pity he was getting bald. Brought to her room, she sat down rather suddenly, feeling, as a fact, very much like fainting—a condition of affairs to which she had never in the past and intended never in the future to come, making such a fuss! Owing to that nice new patent clasp, she had not been able to get at her smelling-salts, nor the little flask of brandy and the one hard-boiled egg without which she never travelled; and for want of a cup of tea her soul was nearly dying within her. Dear John would never think she had not had anything since breakfast (she travelled always by a slow train, disliking motion), and she would not for the world let him know—so near dinner-time, giving a lot of trouble! She therefore stayed quite quiet, smiling a little, for fear he might suspect her. Seeing John, however, put her bag down in the wrong place, she felt stronger.

“No, darling—not there—in the window.”

And while he was changing the position of the bag, her heart swelled with joy because his back was so straight, and with the thought: 'What a pity the dear boy has never married again! It does so keep a man from getting moony!' With all that writing and thinking he had to do, such important work, too, it would have been so good for him, especially at night. She would not have expressed it thus in words—that would not have been quite nice—but in thought Frances Freeland was a realist.

When he was gone, and she could do as she liked, she sat stiller than ever, knowing by long experience that to indulge oneself in private only made it more difficult not to indulge oneself in public. It really was provoking that this nice new clasp should go wrong just this once, and that the first time it was used! And she took from her pocket a tiny prayer-book, and, holding it to the light, read the eighteenth psalm—it was a particularly good one, that never failed her when she felt low—she used no glasses, and up to the present had avoided any line between the brows, knowing it was her duty to remain as nice as she could to look at, so as not to spoil the pleasure of people round about her. Then saying to herself firmly, “I do not, I WILL not want any tea—but I shall be glad of dinner!” she rose and opened her cane trunk. Though she knew exactly where they were, she was some time finding the pincers, because there were so many interesting things above them, each raising a different train of thought. A pair of field-glasses, the very latest—the man had said—for darling Derek; they would be so useful to keep his mind from thinking about things that it was no good thinking about. And for dear Flora (how wonderful that she could write poetry—poetry!) a really splendid, and perfectly new, little pill. She herself had already taken two, and they had suited her to perfection. For darling Felix a new kind of eau de cologne, made in Worcester, because that was the only scent he would use. For her pet Nedda, a piece of 'point de Venise' that she really could not be selfish enough to keep any longer, especially as she was particularly fond of it. For Alan, a new kind of tin-opener that the dear boy would like enormously; he was so nice and practical. For Sheila, such a nice new novel by Mr. and Mrs. Whirlingham—a bright, wholesome tale, with such a good description of quite a new country in it—the dear child was so clever, it would be a change for her. Then, actually resting on the pincers, she came on her pass-book, recently made up, containing little or no balance, just enough to get darling John that bag like hers with the new clasp, which would be so handy for his papers when he went travelling. And having reached the pincers, she took them in her hand, and sat down again to be quite quiet a moment, with her still-dark eyelashes resting on her ivory cheeks and her lips pressed to a colorless line; for her head swam from stooping over. In repose, with three flies circling above her fine gray hair, she might have served a sculptor for a study of the stoic spirit. Then, going to the bag, her compressed lips twitching, her gray eyes piercing into its clasp with a kind of distrustful optimism, she lifted the pincers and tweaked it hard.

If the atmosphere of that dinner, to which all six from Hampstead came, was less disturbed than John anticipated, it was due to his sense of hospitality, and to every one's feeling that controversy would puzzle and distress Granny. That there were things about which people differed, Frances Freeland well knew, but that they should so differ as to make them forget to smile and have good manners would not have seemed right to her at all. And of this, in her presence, they were all conscious; so that when they had reached the asparagus there was hardly anything left that could by any possibility be talked about. And this—for fear of seeming awkward—they at once proceeded to discuss, Flora remarking that London was very full. John agreed.

Frances Freeland, smiling, said:

“It's so nice for Derek and Sheila to be seeing it like this for the first time.”

Sheila said:

“Why? Isn't it always as full as this?”

John answered:

“In August practically empty. They say a hundred thousand people, at least, go away.”

“Double!” remarked Felix.

“The figures are variously given. My estimate—”

“One in sixty. That shows you!”

At this interruption of Derek's John frowned slightly. “What does it show you?” he said.

Derek glanced at his grandmother.

“Oh, nothing!”

“Of course it shows you,” exclaimed Sheila, “what a heartless great place it is. All 'the world' goes out of town, and 'London's empty!' But if you weren't told so you'd never know the difference.”

Derek muttered: “I think it shows more than that.”

Under the table Flora was touching John's foot warningly; Nedda attempting to touch Derek's; Felix endeavoring to catch John's eye; Alan trying to catch Sheila's; John biting his lip and looking carefully at nothing. Only Frances Freeland was smiling and gazing lovingly at dear Derek, thinking he would be so handsome when he had grown a nice black moustache. And she said:

“Yes, dear. What were you going to say?”

Derek looked up.

“Do you really want it, Granny?”

Nedda murmured across the table: “No, Derek.”

Frances Freeland raised her brows quizzically. She almost looked arch.

“But of course I do, darling. I want to hear immensely. It's so interesting.”

“Derek was going to say, Mother”—every one at once looked at Felix, who had thus broken in—“that all we West-End people—John and I and Flora and Stanley, and even you—all we people born in purple and fine linen, are so accustomed to think we're all that matters, that when we're out of London there's nobody in it. He meant to say that this is appalling enough, but that what is still more appalling is the fact that we really ARE all that matters, and that if people try to disturb us, we can, and jolly well will, take care they don't disturb us long. Is that what you meant, Derek?”

Derek turned a rather startled look on Felix.

“What he meant to say,” went on Felix, “was, that age and habit, vested interests, culture and security sit so heavy on this country's chest, that aspiration may wriggle and squirm but will never get from under. That, for all we pretend to admire enthusiasm and youth, and the rest of it, we push it out of us just a little faster than it grows up. Is that what you meant, Derek?”

“You'll try to, but you won't succeed!”

“I'm afraid we shall, and with a smile, too, so that you won't see us doing it.”

“I call that devilish.”

“I call it natural. Look at a man who's growing old; notice how very gracefully and gradually he does it. Take my hair—your aunt says she can't tell the difference from month to month. And there it is, or rather isn't—little by little.”

Frances Freeland, who during Felix's long speech had almost closed her eyes, opened them, and looked piercingly at the top of his head.

“Darling,” she said, “I've got the very thing for it. You must take some with you when you go tonight. John is going to try it.”

Checked in the flow of his philosophy, Felix blinked like an owl surprised.

“Mother,” he said, “YOU only have the gift of keeping young.”

“Oh! my dear, I'm getting dreadfully old. I have the greatest difficulty in keeping awake sometimes when people are talking. But I mean to fight against it. It's so dreadfully rude, and ugly, too; I catch myself sometimes with my mouth open.”

Flora said quietly: “Granny, I have the very best thing for that—quite new!”

A sweet but rather rueful smile passed over Frances Freeland's face. “Now,” she said, “you're chaffing me,” and her eyes looked loving.

It is doubtful if John understood the drift of Felix's exordium, it is doubtful if he had quite listened—he having so much to not listen to at the Home Office that the practice was growing on him. A vested interest to John was a vested interest, culture was culture, and security was certainly security—none of them were symbols of age. Further, the social question—at least so far as it had to do with outbreaks of youth and enthusiasm—was too familiar to him to have any general significance whatever. What with women, labor people, and the rest of it, he had no time for philosophy—a dubious process at the best. A man who had to get through so many daily hours of real work did not dissipate his energy in speculation. But, though he had not listened to Felix's remarks, they had ruffled him. There is no philosophy quite so irritating as that of a brother! True, no doubt, that the country was in a bad way, but as to vested interests and security, that was all nonsense! The guilty causes were free thought and industrialism.

Having seen them all off to Hampstead, he gave his mother her good-night kiss. He was proud of her, a wonderful woman, who always put a good face on everything! Even her funny way of always having some new thing or other to do you good—even that was all part of her wanting to make the best of things. She never lost her 'form'!

John worshipped that kind of stoicism which would die with its head up rather than live with its tail down. Perhaps the moment of which he was most proud in all his life was that, when, at the finish of his school mile, he overheard a vulgar bandsman say: “I like that young ——'s running; he breathes through his —— nose.” At that moment, if he had stooped to breathe through his mouth, he must have won; as it was he had lost in great distress and perfect form.

When, then, he had kissed Frances Freeland, and watched her ascend the stairs, breathless because she WOULD breathe through her nose to the very last step, he turned into his study, lighted his pipe, and sat down to a couple of hours of a report upon the forces of constabulary available in the various counties, in the event of any further agricultural rioting, such as had recently taken place on a mild scale in one or two districts where there was still Danish blood. He worked at the numbers steadily, with just that engineer's touch of mechanical invention which had caused him to be so greatly valued in a department where the evolution of twelve policemen out of ten was constantly desired. His mastery of figures was highly prized, for, while it had not any of that flamboyance which has come from America and the game of poker, it possessed a kind of English optimism, only dangerous when, as rarely happened, it was put to the test. He worked two full pipes long, and looked at the clock. Twelve! No good knocking off just yet! He had no liking for bed this many a long year, having, from loyalty to memory and a drier sense of what became one in the Home Department, preserved his form against temptations of the flesh. Yet, somehow, to-night he felt no spring, no inspiration, in his handling of county constabulary. A kind of English stolidity about them baffled him—ten of them remained ten. And leaning that forehead, whose height so troubled Frances Freeland, on his neat hand, he fell to brooding. Those young people with everything before them! Did he envy them? Or was he glad of his own age? Fifty! Fifty already; a fogey! An official fogey! For all the world like an umbrella, that every day some one put into a stand and left there till it was time to take it out again. Neatly rolled, too, with an elastic and button! And this fancy, which had never come to him before, surprised him. One day he, too, would wear out, slit all up his seams, and they would leave him at home, or give him away to the butler.

He went to the window. A scent of—of May, or something! And nothing in sight save houses just like his own! He looked up at the strip of sky privileged to hang just there. He had got a bit rusty with his stars. There, however, certainly was Venus. And he thought of how he had stood by the ship's rail on that honeymoon trip of his twenty years ago, giving his young wife her first lesson in counting the stars. And something very deep down, very mossed and crusted over in John's heart, beat and stirred, and hurt him. Nedda—he had caught her looking at that young fellow just as Anne had once looked at him, John Freeland, now an official fogey, an umbrella in a stand. There was a policeman! How ridiculous the fellow looked, putting one foot before the other, flirting his lantern and trying the area gates! This confounded scent of hawthorn—could it be hawthorn?—got here into the heart of London! The look in that girl's eyes! What was he about, to let them make him feel as though he could give his soul for a face looking up into his own, for a breast touching his, and the scent of a woman's hair. Hang it! He would smoke a cigarette and go to bed! He turned out the light and began to mount the stairs; they creaked abominably—the felt must be wearing out. A woman about the place would have kept them quiet. Reaching the landing of the second floor, he paused a moment from habit, to look down into the dark hall. A voice, thin, sweet, almost young, said:

“Is that you, darling?” John's heart stood still. What—was that? Then he perceived that the door of the room that had been his wife's was open, and remembered that his mother was in there.

“What! Aren't you asleep, Mother?”

Frances Freeland's voice answered cheerfully: “Oh, no, dear; I'm never asleep before two. Come in.”

John entered. Propped very high on her pillows, in perfect regularity, his mother lay. Her carved face was surmounted by a piece of fine lace, her thin, white fingers on the turnover of the sheet moved in continual interlocking, her lips smiled.

“There's something you must have,” she said. “I left my door open on purpose. Give me that little bottle, darling.”

John took from a small table by the bed a still smaller bottle. Frances Freeland opened it, and out came three tiny white globules.

“Now,” she said, “pop them in! You've no idea how they'll send you to sleep! They're the most splendid things; perfectly harmless. Just let them rest on the tongue and swallow!”

John let them rest—they were sweetish—and swallowed.

“How is it, then,” he said, “that you never go to sleep before two?”

Frances Freeland corked the little bottle, as if enclosing within it that awkward question.

“They don't happen to act with me, darling; but that's nothing. It's the very thing for any one who has to sit up so late,” and her eyes searched his face. Yes—they seemed to say—I know you pretend to have work; but if you only had a dear little wife!

“I shall leave you this bottle when I go. Kiss me.”

John bent down, and received one of those kisses of hers that had such sudden vitality in the middle of them, as if her lips were trying to get inside his cheek. From the door he looked back. She was smiling, composed again to her stoic wakefulness.

“Shall I shut the door, Mother?”

“Please, darling.”

With a little lump in his throat John closed the door.