CHAPTER XXVIHIS SILLY HOME
Hedropped from the trap at his own gate, and walked up the drive. There had been no sound of his coming, so the door was not open, and the lack of welcome hurt him somehow, as if the house meant deliberately to shut him out. He did not come to it as to a place of healing, but at least it was his own hole to creep into when wounded. The blank door seemed to deny him even that.
It was very dark in the high-walled garden, but a ray from a side-window caught the Church Army summer-house across the lawn, and sprang a text into being. “Feed my sheep,” said the text, in reference to scrambled teas dispensed by Helwise under the Reckitt’s roof, but it brought many other things to his mind, to-night. He stood still and looked at it, thinking of the helpless stock the sea had taken. Brack’s dead, woolly things would cry to him for many a long day to come. He thought, too, of the marshfolk, broken and spent to-day because of his father’s building and his own seal upon it, of the two at Ladyford sleeping their last sleep; and out of the dark from over the west there seemed to come to him an exceeding bitter cry: “Where is the flock that was given thee, thy beautiful flock?”
As he turned again to the house, the door was flung open, and Helwise peered into the night.
“Is that you, Armer? Whatever are you doing, so late? I thought you had gone home long ago. But as youarehere, you may as well bring a pound of bacon when you come in the morning, or there’ll benone for breakfast. Sliced. One pound. And remember I willnothave those brown boots blacked!”
Lanty stepped inside.
“It isn’t Armer,” he said.
Helwise jumped and stared. It was certainly not Armer, but in that first instant it seemed to her as if it was not Lanty, either. Her voice was almost hushed.
“Why, Lancelot! When I saw you on the step, I thought for a moment it was your father!”
“Thank God it is not!” he answered, and moved towards his office. Across the hall, where the drawing-room door stood slightly ajar, he could see that there was a warm fire in the loathly grate, though the grate itself he could not see, nor the pot dogs on the mantelpiece. There was no light in the room but the light of the fire. On a low stool Dandy was sitting, staring into the red glow as it poured out and wrapped her round, setting a thousand torches to the brightness of her hair, and racing with golden feet over her slender grace. She looked curiously lonely, he thought, since there was somebody else in the room, whose voice he placed without hesitation. If the somebody else hadn’t been there, he might perhaps have entered, drawn by the first real glimpse of heart’s joy the house had held for years. At least he might have stood on the threshold and looked within, before his personal tragedy dragged him back into the desert; but instead he turned to Helwise, still staring at him with that half-look of fear.
“Can I have something to eat? I don’t seem to have had anything all day—I don’t remember.”
At the sound of his voice Dandy sprang up, looking nervously towards the hall, and Harriet came out of the dusk and stood beside her. Helwise threw the door wide.
“Don’t go into the office, Lancelot! There’s no fire, and the gas has been escaping. What a dreadful storm, wasn’t it? I felt certain every minute that the house would be blown down. I don’t know why Ididn’t have a heart-attack! Dandy and Harriet came over for news, so I made them promise to stay until you got back. I reallycouldn’tbe left alone, and it’s Our Agnes’s night out.”
The two girls came forward into the hall.
“It was very good of you,” Lanty said mechanically, looking at them with tired eyes. Behind them he could see the grate, now, and the pot dogs. Helwise chattered on.
“I’m sure I don’t know if you can have anything to eat! I expected you’d get some food at one of the farms. You always say you like it best there. We’ve had supper some time since, and it’s the girl’s night out, as I said. There isn’t any meat in the house, I know, and there won’t be any bacon for breakfast, as you weren’t Armer, after all, but I dare say you can have some tea, if you care about it. I put some into the Thermos at five o’clock, thinking you might turn up, so you can’t say I don’t remember your comfort sometimes! I’ll go and get it.”
“Hot whisky do you a jolly sight more good!” Harriet shot out bluntly, without looking at him. She looked instead at the sign-manual of her bicycle on the wall. Dandy, in an apologetic tone, murmured “Soup!”
Lanty smiled faintly. What a mixture life was—bathos dancing on the edge of the Pit! Now he came to think of it, he did not want anything to eat. He had asked for it as one asks for some small alleviation in an unbearable trial. He would not have the Thermos, anyhow.
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t really care anything about it.” The smile was slightly satirical, this time. “I’d forgotten it was Our Agnes’s night out!”
Helwise looked upset, and as if she might be getting ready for another heart-attack.
“I dare say there’s a tin of something somewhere, but I shouldn’t know what to do with it if there was. You’d much better let me get the Therm.—notin the office, Lancelot! I meant to have had it all tidiedup before you got back, but Dandy brought another crochet pattern and that was how I didn’t turn off the gas. What I mean is that I’ve been hunting through your old papers for accounts of the Lugg when it was first built. I thought it would be so interesting to have them pasted in a book now that the thing’s gone altogether, and then there’ll be all the fresh paragraphs about it, this week. I felt sure you would like to see them, but there were so many years back to look through, and the stickphast stuck such lots of other things beside the right ones. Oh, and do you know, Lancelot, there was a photograph of your father taken on the top of the Lugg, with his foot on the last spadeful, and on the right—no, left!—that poor old Whinnerah person who was drowned? Underneath they’d put: ‘Conqueror of the Sea!’ Don’t you think that it would be nice to have the photograph reproduced in this week’s paper, while everybody is so interested? People forget so soon. There might be a companion one of you, too, don’t you think, looking at one of the breaks?”
“With my foot on a coffin?” Lanty’s voice, risen a little, had in it something strange and wild. He stood gazing at her with a fixed expression on his face, striving to measure the exact immensity of the gulf between them, seeing her thousand selfish follies climb out of it like mocking gnomes. He had done all he could for her, not all she wanted, perhaps, but everything within his power, and at his greatest need she gave him nothing—no, much worse than nothing—in return. In this his hour of bitterness she would drag his dead into light, holding it up to public calumny with a pot of stickphast. He closed the office door between them, and heard her burst into terrified tears on the other side.
“It was his father!” she sobbed and gasped, as the girls attempted to soothe her. “It’s no use telling me it was Lancelot, because he never looked at me like that in his life. They say the dead come back sometimes, and stare at you through the children’s eyes,and I’m sure it’s true! He never liked me—the other. He always said I was silly, and I was frightened of him. I believe Lancelot is drowned, and this is his father come back in his place! No, it’s no use talking to me about eggs and bread-and-butter! If he’s a ghost, how can he eat? I won’t stay down here—no, I daren’t! He might come out again, and I should never get over it!”
She tore herself out of their hands, and stumbled, panting and weeping, up the stairs, and immediately they heard the bolt of her door shoot home. They were left in the hall, looking at each other, awkward and uncomfortable.
“This is rot!” Harriet observed presently. “Helwise must have gone clean off it. We can’t let the man starve. We’d better see if we can’t dig up something. That soup-notion of yours was first-class.”
“We might try,” Dandy agreed, “but I’m afraid I know next to nothing about cooking.”
“Well,Iknow everything!” Harriet answered calmly. “I can make soup that will fetch you galloping from the top of the house. You good-looking people haven’t bagged quiteallthe tricks in this unjust world!”
They went exploring into the dark larder, and both the rich man’s daughter and the mistress of the spotless farm-house exclaimed at the patent evidences of neglect.
“No bread!” Harriet commented, leaning over the big pot with a guttering dip. “Wish I’d left that last tough old crust at supper. Weren’t there some biscuits in that sixpence-ha’penny glass thing in the dining-room? Just think on about them, will you? Half a blanc-mange and a few pine-apple chunks—that’sno use to a hungry man! It’s all he’ll get for breakfast, though, by the look of things. I wonder if it’s any good going down into the cellar? Helwise said there was no meat, didn’t she? Eggs? No, I’m afraid not! Theremustbe some milk, though—Iwonder where? Might be in the boot-cupboard, onthissystem. Come on! We’ve got to unearth that soup somehow!”
They found the full tin stowed thoughtfully among a stack of empty ones, and in the dirty kitchen Harriet began her labours by the light of a gas-jet that burnt one-sidedly with a shrieking flame. Fortunately for present conditions, though not for the master’s pocket, the fire had been left piled up high; but this piece of criminal wastefulness was the only happy accident that befell them.
“What beatsme,” Harriet remarked, sniffing disgustedly at pans, and flinging half-washed spoons into a slimy tin in a stopped-up sink, “is why Lanty hasn’t been poisoned before now, or at any rate sold up and carted to the Workhouse. It’s too bad of old Helwise, it really is! After all, he keeps her, and he works jolly hard. She might have done him a bit better than this. Do you mind cleaning a few of these things while I open the soup?”
So while Harriet boiled, Dandy scrubbed, and produced, by some conjuror’s wand, a bowl and silver spoon, a small tray and a passably clean tray-cloth; also the biscuits. When the soup was added, steaming and strong, they looked at each other with conscious pride, on the heels of which came a sudden sense of guilt and confusion. After all, it was open to question that a couple of outsiders should be cooking food for a man in his own kitchen without his permission or even his knowledge.
“How are you going back?” Harriet asked, covering in the range, and slipping a plate over the lidless bowl. “I meant to have cleared out long before this. I hope Stubbs hasn’t been worrying Cyril.”
The name came out naturally enough, but Dandy started a little. The use of it by Harriet seemed to put her old friend Wiggie in a new light.
“Father is coming for me,” she replied. “He had to go to Manchester to-day, but he said he’d run over as soon as he got back. He wanted to see Mr. Lancaster.You’ll wait and come with us, won’t you? He should be here any time now, and I can’t stop alone, with my hostess locked away upstairs.”
“Right you are!” Harriet lifted the tray with reverent care. “Put out that one-eyed gas, will you, and light the candle? There’s a cockroach crawling up you—don’t know if you’re keen on ’em! You’d better go on in front and yell out if there are any booby-traps. I nearly broke my shin over a clothes-horse, and we can’t afford to lose the soup.”
But in the hall she stopped, even as her hand was raised to knock, for Dandy, with flushed cheeks, had stepped back into the firelight from the drawing-room, bringing to the other how Lanty had paused—from her corner she had seen him—paused, weary as he was, to look at the same picture. There had been in his face something of which he had not known, but which even Harriet, unobservant and callous, had not failed to read. It was as if, in that instant, he had seen at last the “silly home” of his desire.
She drew back, holding out the tray.
“Youtake it in, will you? I’m not fit to be seen, after grubbing about in that region of the lost.”
Dandy started, and shook her head violently.
“Nonsense! It’syourcooking. Go in and collect your own credit. If it comes to that,I’mnot fit to be seen, either!”
“Don’t fish!” Harriet snarled. “Buck up, I tell you! The stuff’s freezing. I’m not going in, anyway, so if you won’t take it I may as well sling it through the window.”
“But——” Dandy advanced with reluctance. “I don’t like to! It’s your place. You know him so much better than I.”
“That’s just it. He doesn’t want the folks he knows. They know too much. I’d probably be giving him my opinion before he asked it. You walk in as if you were used to it, and he’ll probably think you’re only Our Agnes.”
Dandy took the tray slowly, still doubtful.
“Git!” said Harriet, and knocked. Without waiting for an answer, she opened the door and pushed the girl in, closing it again instantly. Not content with that, she went out into the porch, and shut the inner door behind her. She would not even be within reach of their voices. The damp cold swept in from the west as she stood in the dark, biting her lip. The standard of action is mercifully adjusted to each of us, and perhaps Harriet’s funny, homely, big-little sacrifice formed a fine enough leaf in the laurels of Love.
She had been there barely a couple of minutes before the Watters limousine turned in and drew up at the step. She went forward, expecting to see Hamer, but instead, out of it came Wiggie. He came carefully, with the chauffeur’s hand under his arm, a wavering shadow uncertain of its feet, but yet he came, smiling a ghost of his old smile at Harriet’s amazement and concern. The chauffeur planted him safely within reach of her assistance, and returned to his car.
“Hamer’s a little way behind,” the new-comer explained breathlessly. “We met a certain Mr. Dennison going home from Bluecaster, and Hamer wanted to ask him things, so I came on.”
“But what on earth are you doing here at all?” Harriet demanded angrily. “What were Stubbs and that cap-and-apron nurse thinking of? Go back at once, or you’ll die!”
Wiggie looked guilty, trying to lean against a flower-stand afflicted with a chronic wobble, and she put her hand beneath his elbow.
“Oh, I needn’t die yet, need I, please? Hamer came round on his way here, and I—he seemed lonely. Dennison said Lancaster was back.”
Harriet nodded, opening the glass door, and supporting him inside.
“You’d better come out of the cold, as youarehere. Yes. About an hour since. Looking about twenty years older, and half-cracked. Sent Helwiseupstairs in screaming hysterics. He’s in there.” She jerked her head towards the office. “Dandy’s with him.”
Wiggie gave one long, quiet glance at the closed door. No sound of voices came to the two equally silent outside, the absence of speech within that shut room conveying an intimate isolation that no exchange of words could have held. In that look it seemed almost as if he were saying good-bye. Then he turned to Harriet, smiling as on the step.
“I did not come for Dandy,” he said gently. “I came for you.”
Harriet blushed violently. She looked angered almost to tears.
“You’ve no need to lie tome, Cyril! I should have thought you ought to know that, by now.”
“But it is true!” he said simply. And itwastrue. The look had been merely the seal set on a renunciation made weeks ago on the Watters stairs. “It’s been such a dreadfully long day without you! Dear old Stubbs has been hunting germs, and the nurse told me all the diseases I’d just missed having, and all the diseases I might have yet, if I’d hurry up. Can’t we slip away now, and send the car back for the others? Hamer won’t mind.”
“But don’t you want to see Lanty?”
“Perhaps I’d better not worry him to-night. I’ll be ready for him when he wants me, poor old man! Please take me home.” His voice was very weak, and she felt him heavy on her arm. “You might, you know. You’re not the only lonely pebble on the beach!”
Harriet blushed again, but without anger, this time. Wiggie had known, all along, and the thought had never hurt her or made her ashamed. And no matter where his own love was placed, he yet had an urgent need of herself. She remembered how he had turned to Wild Duck as his refuge. It was queerly pleasant to be needed. She would take him home.
They got him back to the car with some difficulty,and, once inside, he lay against the cushions so still that she was afraid, until she found that he had simply fallen into exhausted sleep. He had spent all his little store of strength in coming to her in the dark hour when she had deliberately shut herself out of Heaven. It was strange that he should always be digging her out of deep places. It seemed almost like fate.
The Rur’l D’trict C’cillor drew the rug more closely round him with an oddly-motherly touch.
There was indeed a vile smell of gas in the office, and an unlighted fire, astonishingly badly laid, showed yesterday’s cinders still unraked. A perfect sea of newspapers heaved along the floor, and across them Lanty’s boots had trodden a path to his desk at the far end, where his private documents had been swept aside to make room for moreGazettes. A large island of stickphast sat smugly upon the fine leather. The shelves had been ruthlessly rifled. Cupboard doors stood open. The newspapers themselves, evidently long folded away with neat precision, had been crushed and crumpled, slashed or torn across. For a second, Dandy forgot her nervousness in sheer amazed horror.
Lanty was standing by the desk, with one of the myriad sheets in his hand, looking down at it with a still intentness and absorption. When he heard the door he lifted his head without turning, clutching the paper close as if afraid that somebody might see it over his shoulder.
“Who is it?” he asked, still with the air of being on guard, and Dandy of the Tray, in a faint and rather frightened voice, wishing herself safely back at Watters answered: “Our Agnes!” The silver spoon clinked against the bowl.
Lanty had been well-trained by weekly nightmare meals to the stern remembrance of the “girl’s night out,” but in the present stress of circumstance his weary brain had again let slip the important fact. The voice might easily have belonged to Our Agnes, who boasted an organ varying between the colourlesstwitter of a new-fledged sparrow and the discordance of the tom-tom. It certainly carried no faintest reminder of Dandy. Moreover, in his passionate concentration upon the paper, yielding to it entire heart and soul and quickened, yearning memory, Dandy was as if she had never been.
He did not turn, because he was afraid to let even a vacant mirror like Our Agnes reflect his face; and also for another reason. The fragrance of Harriet’s galloping soup reached him quickly across the room, waking him to the violent realisation that he had not tasted food for many hours. If he saw it, he might be driven to a fierce snatching which would send Our Agnes to join Helwise in her orgy of hysterics upstairs; so he stood fast, clasping the paper like a child in peril.
“Will you put it down—whatever it is?” The tray touched the table. “Thanks! And, while you’re here, do you mind lighting the fire? I couldn’t find any matches.”
He sat down in the desk-chair, struggling with his consuming hunger, and cursing himself for having kept her a moment longer than was necessary. She would take hours to light the fire—she always did—and he would have to sit in torture until she had finished. But he was very cold, chill with hunger as well as damp, and the mere consciousness of a woman’s presence had roused the weary man’s instinctive claim for help. Perhaps she would not find the matches, either, and while she went for others he could retreat in dignity with the food. But she did find them. He heard them rattle as she drew them out from behind the clock. Why on earth hadn’t he thought of looking there himself? It wasn’t like Our Agnes to be so quickwitted. Now he would have to sit through an eternity of craving while she fumbled with the wet sticks. He fixed his eyes furtively on the paper, and was back again sharply in his former atmosphere of longing and regret.
Dandy, on her knees, fighting the unwilling sticks,fought also the strangling tears and pitiful laughter in her own heart. Harriet’s jest was become fact; he had indeed taken her for Our Agnes! Her voice had sounded strange even in her own ears—she admitted that; but, if she had ever had a real place in his life, ever stirred, if only for an instant, his difficult heart, ever been to him even a fraction of more worth than the slattern in his kitchen, would he not have known that there was somebody quite other in the room? She looked at his tired back and roughened hair with a great rush of pity and pain and longing to help, but it did not reach him. His wet wristbands and soaked boots blurred before her misty eyes, but he did not guess or care. Love was round him, kissing his hand, begging at his knee, pressing his aching head to rest, but he could not feel it. She might have drawn his attention with a word, a touch, but she left the one unspoken, the other unperformed. There are rights belonging to unself-conscious friendship that shrinking, fastidious love will never claim.
How could henotknow? Ah, but heoughtto have known! If he had cared ever so little, he would have guessed at her presence; cared much—sprung to meet it; and, last of all, if he had loved her, he would have looked for her to come to him somehow from the very ends of the earth.
But he had done none of these things. There was no answer to her prayer. If he never guessed, never turned, she would know that she meant nothing to him at all.
The soup was getting cold. She fretted, battling with the fire. Harriet would be annoyed if their labour was wasted, and he seemed too deep in his reading to remember that she had brought him food. Nervously she pushed the basin up the table within reach of his hand, and went back to her task. When she looked round again, it was empty, and he had buried himself afresh in his paper. After the thrill of joy that she had at least given him some shred of comfort came the renewed certainty that he was quiteunconscious of the giver. It was more than plain that she was outside his thoughts altogether.
The fire was crackling merrily now, and with a last strained hope that he might yet know her, she began to gather the papers into a corner, but before she had set the last on the pile, she saw him stir as if distressed and irritated through his absorption by her quiet movements. She stopped instantly, then, and moved to the door, yet slowly, and looking towards him, and all the way her heart was begging, begging for a sign. She knew that all these months her little taper of hope had burnt bravely, bending at times to the wind of disappointment, but always brightening and glowing. Now it was dying. By the time she reached the door it would be dead. Yet she would not call, nor speak aloud the words that the soul only could utter and its twin-soul only should hear. Even a commonplace he might possibly resent in this his trouble. He had said she did not understand. He might certainly say it now, if, in her ignorance of the real conditions, she tried to comfort him. She could only speak to him dumbly from her heart, and he did not hear. His home, his resting-place, were at hand, and he held his face from them. The little torch flickered low. The handle turned, and turned again. Outside the door Dandy stood, hugging her dead candle.
Hamer came in like an anxious bear in his large coat, and found her there.
“All alone?” he asked, stooping to kiss her. “Where’s the boy?”
“In the office. Miss Lancaster is upstairs. She seems rather upset.”
“That so? Poor little woman! I’ll go up and have a look at her. She wants stroking a bit, I reckon. Can you wait any longer, little girl, or are you aching to get home? I’d like just to have a word with the boy, if he’ll see me.”
“Yes—do. I don’t mind how long I wait.”
“I’ll get Miss Lancaster down to keep you company.”He stopped, his foot on the first stair, lowering his voice. “Does the boy look bad, Dandy Anne?”
She nodded.
“I doubt he’ll take it terribly hard—worse than anybody else would have done. He didn’t say anything to you, I suppose?”
“No. Nothing.” (And, verily—nothing!)
“You look a bit white, dearie. Getting tired, are you?” He came back to her. “Didn’tyousay a word to him, Dandy Anne? Didn’t you try to comfort the poor lad?”
She smiled bravely.
“I took him some soup, Daddy! Harriet made it, and I ‘dished up.’ I don’t think he wanted to talk. He’s very tired.”
Hamer said no more, looking down at her anxiously, trying to read her face. Sorrow was for bringing folks together, said Hamer’s simple philosophy, but it seemed to have failed here. He couldn’t think of any trouble in which his first longing would not be to feel Dandy’s arms round his neck. Things were wrong somewhere for his little girl. Had he brought her to Watters only to seek diligently for pain?
“Please hurry a little bit, Daddy dear!”
He gave her a last glance, turning reluctantly, with words evidently trembling on his lips; then marched off up the stair. Above, she could hear him pounding at Helwise’s door, and presently he had her out on the landing.
“It was his father!” Helwise chattered still.
“Nonsense, my dear! You’re a bit overstrung, that’s what it is! You want somebody to pet you and tuck you up on the sofa with a hot bottle—that’s it, isn’t it? Now you put your hand through my arm and we’ll trot along down to the fire. Why, you’re just shivering, poor dear! I’ve got a plan to propose to you, if you’ll take it on. What do you say to sending Lancaster for a trip after he’s got things in working order again—say Egypt or the Canaries—and you shut up house and come over to Watters?If we get a fairish spring we might try a motor-tour after Easter—how’d you like that? Cathedral cities, perhaps, or something of that sort. You keep Dandy company for a bit while I look in at the boy, and see if she can’t persuade you to think it over!”
So Helwise, purring with excitement, was stayed with cushions and comforted with cathedrals in front of the drawing-room fire, and Dandy, very heart-sick and resentful at her selfish neglect, yet remembered that she was something of Lanty’s, and was patient and sweet with her therefore, mapping out a tour on the hearthrug, with the whole of her being reaching across the hall.
Hamer knocked once, and went straight in to the lonely figure without a moment’s hesitation, setting big, raising hands on its shoulders. The Hamers of the world may do these things with impunity, for in their rare, angelic sincerity they carry an Open Sesame through the locked gates of the furthest shrinking sorrow. And though a dreaded somebody was looking over his shoulder at last, Lanty let his paper lie, and neither moved nor minded. Hamer’s eye passed over it as he drew up a chair and sat down close.
“I had to go to Manchester. Only just home, or I’d have been down—there—with you. I was somewhere on the marsh, as it was, until after three. Had anything to eat?”
“Yes, thanks.” Lanty’s voice sounded as if pulled by a string. “I’m afraid I frightened Helwise a little, but the girl brought me some soup. She lighted the fire, too. She’s not usually so useful.”
Hamer stared a minute, but said nothing. What game had Dandy been playing? Had Lanty really mistaken her for the “girl”?
“Miss Lancaster’s all right now, anyhow. She and Dandy Anne are having a cosy chat in the drawing-room, snug as snug. She’s very easy thrown out of gear. Dandy’s cosseting her a bit.”
“It’s very kind of Miss Shaw.” Hamer glanced at him shrewdly, but found the answer purely mechanical.No; this wasn’t Dandy’s hour, he decided with a sigh.
“I heard the—bad news—before I left. Lancaster, I can’t forgive myself for having that show of mine, last night!”
“It made very little difference.”
“A deal, surely! There’d have been many more, sheep saved, if the men had been on the spot.”
“I doubt it. You forget that they didn’t think the storm anything out of the common.”
“Except Brack. It was queer how he knew, wasn’t it? I’m blessed if I can make it out! He certainly did his best to warn us.”
“Perhaps. But Brack’s was hardly a business proposition.”
His tone was cold, and Hamer felt suddenly silenced. He raised his eyes to the portrait above them, vivid with energy and pride, remembering Helwise’s hysterical conviction, and the likeness between father and son, always marked, struck him strangely to-night. Reversion to type is always the first strong instinct to emerge under great stress. There had been something much deeper than she knew behind Miss Lancaster’s chattered fears.
“Well, I’ll fix no more hotpots till I get the weather ruled to order!” Hamer sighed. “I suppose the Lugg’s broken its back out and out? I saw a paper in Manchester. Those poor old souls at the Pride! I met Dennison, just now. He said Whinnerah was set on going there. You’d no choice but to let him have it, had you?”
Lanty thought a moment. Therehadbeen choice, perhaps, at the very beginning. He hardly knew; so swift had the hour of forced decision come upon him.
“They made it the test of my belief in the Lugg,” he said. “If the storm were to-morrow instead of yesterday, I would still let the cottage to-night!”
“Then you think you were right about the bank? You don’t blame it—you still think it justified?” Hamer stammered, taken aback.
For the first time Lanty turned and looked him straight in the eyes.
“Shaw, I’vegotto think it! If I didn’t, I should shoot myself. I’vegotto believe, in spite of everything, that the thing had a right to its existence. I’m not of the class that judge their fathers. I was brought up to see mine as the standing emblem of right thinking and right doing, and though out on the marsh I lost my bearings awhile and forgot it, I found my faith again here. This was his house, his office, his desk. There’s his face above it. Even now the place seems almost more his than mine, and, sitting here, I know what he saw, feel what he felt.” He laid his hand on the paper. “This is the full account of the building of the Lugg—how it was opposed and condemned, and finally sanctioned, fully sanctioned by expert authority—yes, and praised and copied! My fatherhadthe right to take the risk, both for himself and for posterity. That’s the faith I lost—and regained. The success was his. The rest—the failure—is mine.”
Hamer shook his head.
“The world won’t agree with you, my boy! It will say you had no chance, that you were bound to stand by your father’s work. It will place the fault with the man before you.”
“It will be wrong! It isn’t that I don’t believe in inheritance, in reaping and sowing from one generation to another. I’ve seen the dragon’s teeth come up too often for that. We’re bound both before and behind—I admit it all the way. Thinking of a race, from father to son, I always see—what is it?—‘the lean, locked ranks go roaring down to die.’ We’ve a hand in more fates than one. But, in spite of that, I hold that a strong man wins out on his own—wins out, or goes to the wall. There’s no other self-respecting creed. This thing fell to me. Judgment is due on me. I wouldn’t have it otherwise. Each of us in his little day represents all the rest, and in his own person stands by what he reaps. I say, I wouldn’t have it otherwise!” And he said to the father as hehad said to the daughter in an hour of sympathy forgot. “It’s our job while we’re on to it. It’s our job while the light lasts, to make the best of it we can. It’s always one man’s hand on the lonely plough.”
After the long silence, Hamer rose.
“I must be getting back to my little girl. Promise me you’ll be off to bed soon, and not stop the night here, fretting and thinking. And for Heaven’s sake get out of those sopping clothes! No—don’t come with me. Dandy’ll understand. Cyril came over for a word with you—did you know?—but he thought he’d better not bother you to-night. And Mother sent her love. Save us! I’d have caught it if I’d forgotten that! You’ll look us up, sometime?”
“When I’ve made my world over again.”
“Lancaster”—the words came hesitatingly, almost as if the speaker wondered at himself and them—“there’s one thing I envy you, anyway! I’m just a plain business-man who’s never run up against much except money that everybody else doesn’t taste equal, but you and your father between you have had something bigger and grander than comes to most folk, something that sets you near alongside the gods. They say old Whinnerah stuck it out because of you both, though Brack went to fetch him. For how many of us others, I wonder, would a man die to prove our pledged word?”
Before he went upstairs, Lanty opened the door and called to Helwise, still purring over her prospects. She rose startled, and came fearfully. He was standing by the table, and upon it theGazettelay wide. The whole world might see it now.
“I hope you haven’t waited up for me,” he said, quite gently. “I just wanted to tell you that I should like those cuttings in a book, after all. I should be grateful if you would finish them for me.”
The tears rushed back to her eyes.
“I didn’t mean to vex you. I didn’t mean to be prying and unkind! I thought all the fine things theysaid about the Lugg might comfort you a little—help you——”
“They have helped me.”
“Of course I know you’ll blame yourself because those two old people got themselves drowned, and the sheep and the mangolds and everything like that, but everybody thought it was very wonderful when it was built, and admired your father and said he had such a good leg! He was ever so proud of that photograph when it came out.”
“I am proud of it, too,” Lanty said, leaning over the paper. He looked long from his father’s face to that of Wolf behind. It was hard to think that both were dead—men of a personality that never really dies, but lives on in its effects. Taking a pen, he added a letter to the inscription below, and left the paper lying—
“CONQUERORSOF THE SEA.”