Part 43 (1/2)

Whistles, whips, boats, all seemed to grow under his gnarled old hands, with their discoloured and broken nails, as though without effort. And watching his success, knowing by some instinct he would not have told for fear of misconstruction to any but Judy, who always understood, that some malign wish to hurt lay at the springs of his brother's complaisance towards the children, Ishmael felt a stirring of the old unease that he admitted to himself was not without a leaven of jealousy.

For the Easter recess Nicky came down, and no lover ever waited for his mistress with a more high-beating heart than Ishmael did for his son.

And at the back of his mind was the haunting fear of Archelaus as affecting his relations with Nicky, a fear such as he might have had had Nicky been a woman and he and Archelaus young men.

Nicky came, charming as ever. He was so full of life that his forty-odd years seemed nothing to him. He had that immense vitality, sparkling but full of reserved strength, that brings with it a sense of completeness apart from youth or age. Ishmael felt the old pang of disappointment that Nicky gave so little, repented of directly some little thing showed how Nicky was thinking of and for him. Nicky drew his brows together when he heard of his uncle's advent. He was a great stickler for the conventions, and did not like this appearance in the flesh of old family scandals that might again become a topic for busy tongues.

Archelaus was out when Nicky arrived, but when the family party was a.s.sembled on the lawn for tea he made his appearance. Everyone was there. Ruth had driven over from her Vicarage with her two little girls, with whom Jim was playing and occasionally quarrelling; Marjorie sat by Nicky and waited on him with an indulgence she generally showed him on the first day together after they had been separated for a few weeks; and even the volatile Lissa was there, in a sense, as Ruth had had a long letter from her that morning which she had brought over to read to her father. Ruth's husband, a gentle, kindly, abstracted creature, was there too, pulling his long fingers through his beard and saying very little. Ishmael liked him, but preferred him to come to the Manor rather than himself going to the Vicarage. He had never got over the idea bred in him by a.s.sociation with the Parson that a priest should not be married.

Archelaus wandered on to the lawn looking his most spruce; he had evidently tried to tidy himself, having shaved and put on a clean collar of extraordinarily antiquated make. His clothes might have had ”American ready-made” written upon them. He advanced towards them slowly, leaning heavily on his stick.

”Nicky,” said Ishmael, ”this is your Uncle Archelaus.... This is my boy.”

Nicky got to his feet and said rather coldly that he hoped his uncle was well, but it was the old man whose eagerness in holding out his hand made Nicky's advance seem laggard. Nicky had taken a dislike to his uncle; he could not tell why. He flattered himself he was not a sn.o.b, but he thought this old Rip Van Winkle a terrible thing to drop into any family out of the blue. Archelaus lowered himself into a chair beside his nephew and began to try and make conversation. There was something pathetic about his evident efforts and Nicky's hidden distaste that was all there was to meet it, masked by courtesy. Ishmael suddenly felt his heart soften towards his brother; he told himself almost with a pang that he need not have been afraid that this old prodigal would have beguiled Nicky as he did the children; his simple wiles were not for grown men busy with affairs. Yet he still watched anxiously, though now the faint feeling of anxiety had rather transferred itself from Nicky to Archelaus.

As the days went on his heart grew no lighter, though in the society of Nicky, busy as he was with showing him all the latest improvements, he had not much time to think of anything else. Archelaus was too old and enfeebled to go all over the estate as Ishmael was still able to do, and gloried in the doing now he saw that there were others less able to than he. Yet, had he had more leisure to observe, his anxiety would have grown, not lessened, for a cloud began to gather upon Archelaus that was like the old brooding of his youth, though less articulate, but perhaps none the less dangerous for that. There had been a softening about him those first days of Nicky's return, as there was still when he played with Jimmy; but now the look that had held a timid eagerness when it was turned on Jimmy's father glowed with something else less good, a something that deepened when it was turned on Ishmael.

About this time Judith brought her visit to a close, and Ishmael was chiefly occupied with getting her off in safety and with as little fatigue as might be. Each year now their parting held something of the quality possessed by his yearly gamble with his crops, only in the former case the chances against them were doubled, for it might be Judy who failed to come again on the long journey from town.

She had a companion, a devoted creature but colourless, whom she could be said rather to suffer gladly than enjoy, and her interests, were divided between the little slum church she lived near in London, her friends at Cloom, and the rare visits of Lissa, of whom she was very fond, and who sometimes went and poured out to her enthusiasms about Futurist paintings, which Judy, who had remained true to the early Impressionist school, could only consider a perverse return to cave art.

”Shall I give your love to Lissa?” asked Judith as Ishmael tucked her into the cosiest seat of Nicky's car, which was to take her to Penzance.

”No, I won't,” she went on. ”I shall tell her she's to come and give it for herself. She is coming, I know, now she's got her International picture off her mind. She's a very gifted woman, but I sometimes think it's a pity for her to fill her life with nothing but paint and canvases. I'm old-fas.h.i.+oned, I suppose!”

”Lissa and I understand each other,” said Ishmael. ”She is the only other human being beside myself I've ever met who finds the deepest joy in things and places instead of people.”

”Do you still? Not you; they've failed you for a long time now, I know, and they'll fail Lissa. I wish I hadn't given her the advice I did when she came to town.”

”What was that?” asked Ishmael, stepping back as Nicky climbed into the driver's seat.

”Never to trust a man or offend a woman. She's stuck to it too well.

I've got to the age when I think it's better to have trusted too much than too little. Good-bye, my dear! Take care of yourself. I shan't come again.”

”What ...” began Ishmael; but at a sign from Judith Nicky had put in the clutch and the car was sliding off down the drive. Ishmael turned and went thoughtfully into the house. He wondered whether Judy too had suffered from that same sense of a shattered atmosphere that he had since the return of Archelaus.

It seemed absurd that he should, he told himself. He was seventy, Archelaus older; it was surely time they found it possible to live together in harmony.... And yet it was not that there was any definite bad feeling between them, that he could find any holes in the scheme of his brother's behaviour. It was only that Archelaus, old as he was, still retained the quality of a satyr, of something oddly malevolent, that boded ill. Ishmael tried to break himself of the feeling, life-old with him, though for so many years forgotten, but he found that, though he could force himself not to dwell on it, beyond that he was powerless.

There was no actual harm Archelaus could do him, and he told himself repeatedly that there must be something rather hateful in himself that he could still feel this profound troubling of aversion.

He called for Jim to go over the farm with him; but the little boy was not to be found, and one of the maids told him she had seen him go off with his new uncle. Ishmael paused to put on a big coat, for the wind was fresh although it was late in May, and then he too went out.

In the four-acre the young corn he had sown on that day of Archelaus's return showed some four or five inches of green blades. Lest it should grow too fast and rank, the roller had been busy over it the day before, and, though the elastic tissue of its frail-looking growth was already springing erect again, the field still showed alternate stripes of light and dark, marking this way and that of the roller's pa.s.sing, as though some giant finger had brushed the nap of this fine velvety tissue the wrong way.

Ishmael leant upon the gate and looked at the corn, mechanically noting its good condition, but feeling no pleasure at the sight. It was for him as though a blight had come over the Cloom of his idolatry, and he told himself it could never again be the same for him. He felt very old and tired, though it was still early in the day. His brain was working slowly; it took him a long time to register upon it his thoughts about anything at which he was looking, and the knowledge of this distressed him.

Judy had gone and was not coming back--she had said so. That aroused no acute sensation in him, but rather a dreary feeling of being sorry. Judy was old in spite of her vigour and her ever-quick tongue, which age had quickened. She had always been articulate, he always the reverse, and on this morning he felt a dumb impotency even towards himself. He stared out over the acres filmed with that thin, fine green, and past it to the wine-coloured ploughed lands and the pastures, and, turning a little against the gate, he saw the house, a pale pearl-grey on this clear day.

He turned to his left and saw cultivated land far as the cliffs where once waste had been; and here and there on the rolling slopes of the moor beyond he saw a little grey farmstead that was his too, whose tenants owed their prosperity to him. And for the first time in his life the sight gave him no joy. Archelaus had drawn a blight over it all. He might tell himself with the resentful anger of old age that the thing was all wrong, absurd even; but that availed nothing. Years had not softened the fact that the presence of Archelaus had power to spoil things for him, now as when he had been a child. Archelaus was somewhere now with little Jimmy, telling him tales of the far places of the earth, which he, Ishmael, had never seen, never would see. Jim was listening entranced, his bright brown eyes s.h.i.+ning as Nicky's did when he was moved, as Phoebe's had been wont to do.

A bright whistling sounded from the direction of the house, and Nicky came to the gate leading from the farmyard and stood looking across it.