Part 6

He took his seat without invitation in the chair recently vacated by Mrs. Brent. "I want to go away for two or three weeks' holiday," he said, scowling slightly, and handling his bunched fingers. "Now you're going to have that man over from Burport for Harry's mathematics he can do without me--say for a month. He's well up in my subjects. The more he works at his mathematics the better it will be for him."

"Why do you want to go away just now?" she asked, as she had asked of Mrs. Brent.

"Why does anybody ever want to go away?" he said. "I want a holiday, and if I'm to go on here I must have one."

"If you want a holiday from work, there ought to be no difficulty about that. You know what's best for Harry. If you think that Mr. Fletcher will be of more use to him now, by all means arrange it like that and leave yourself altogether free for a time."

"Thanks very much. Of course I shouldn't want to do anything that would keep Harry back. You know that."

"Oh yes, I know that. He was to come first in everything. That was agreed upon between us when you first came here. I saw very soon that I could leave questions of education entirely to you, and I have always done so."

"Well, now I want to go away for a month or so. I'm getting stale. I'm not doing him justice."

"Perhaps not. I've been feeling that for some little time. But I don't think it would help you to do him justice if you went away so that you could drink, and undo everything that----"

"Lady Brent!" He was startled and outraged, and glared at her terrifically.

She was not moved. "That's what's the matter with you," she said, in the same even voice, "though you may not acknowledge it to yourself. I'm very sorry that this has happened. I had thought that after all these years the craving had left you. I don't think it can be as strong as it was. I ran the risk when I asked you to come here, and helped you over the difficult time. It is years since you told me last that the desire was strong in you, but it was easier to overcome it. What a pity to give way now!"

His deep frown had not altered while she was speaking. "Give way!" he echoed. "I've no intention of giving way. You've no right to speak of that at all. It was all over long ago."

"I helped you to get over it, didn't I?"

"Yes, you did. I'm not denying it. You can be a good friend to a man when it suits you; to a woman too, I dare say. But you're difficult to live with. I want to get away for a time. There's nothing to fear, of that old weakness. Perhaps I ought not to resent your bringing it up against me, but----"

"You wouldn't resent it if what I say wasn't true. You may not know it yourself, but you're playing with the idea of giving way. If you did give way you'd be very sorry for it afterwards, no doubt, but the mischief would have been done. You'd no longer be a fit companion for Harry. It's him I'm thinking about. You can do what you like, but if you go away you don't come back. It's what I've just said to Charlotte, who wants the same as you do. I'm not going to have everything spoilt when our task is coming near its end. If she's a foolish woman, you're an intelligent man. You can see it all as well as I can if you clear your mind of its vapours. You know it wouldn't do. You must stay here until you have finished with Harry. Then you can do what you like--stay here or go away."

"It won't matter what becomes of me then, I suppose."

"I said that you could stay here if you liked. This has been your home for ten years. It can go on being your home as long as you value it; or at least as long as I have anything to do with it."

He sat looking down, still frowning; but his frown had more of thought, and less of anger in it now.

He threw a glance at her sitting there self-possessed and at ease, and a wry smile came to his lips. "Why can't you always behave like that?" he asked. "I suppose the fact is you've worked off all your temper on that poor little creature who's been telling you just the same as I have. I met her crying on the stairs just now, and she wouldn't tell me what it was about. But I could guess."

She showed some surprise, but no resentment. "My temper!" she exclaimed. "Well, I suppose I must pass that over in the state to which you've reduced yourself."

His face became moody again. "I won't ask you what you mean by that," he said. "But you're quite wrong in what you said just now. Would you consent to my going away with Grant, if I could get him to come with me? He's rather a fool, but I'd rather have his company than--than----"

"Than mine, I suppose. No, I wouldn't consent to that. You came here on certain conditions, and you must keep to them. It won't be for very much longer now. I'm not altogether without sympathy with you. I've felt the strain myself."

He broke into a loud laugh, and went on laughing, while she waited patiently for him to finish, as if no vagary on his part could surprise or upset her.

"Oh, that's too rich," he said, "in that tone! Yes, you've been feeling the strain, and you've made us feel it. That's all the trouble. Well now, look here, Lady Brent, I accept what you say about its being too late to alter things now--or too early--whichever you please. We're all three of us in the bargain, I take it. It was your idea to keep the boy shut up here, and it has paid. I don't believe it would have paid nine times out of ten, and we've yet to see how it will turn out when the test comes. But Harry being what he is, it has been a brilliant success--so far. You've been justified in keeping me and his mother shut up here too."

"And myself, you must remember. I've shut myself up too, so as to make it seem all the most natural thing in the world to him."

"Quite so. And you've suffered for it, just as we have. Suffered in your temper. If we stick to it, as we must, you ought to make it as easy for us as possible. You haven't lately."

"So Charlotte seemed to imply. But I should like to know how."

"Oh, you know how, well enough. You said I was a man of intelligence just now. Well, you're a woman of intelligence. Just think it over."

He nodded his head, knowingly. He looked rather ridiculous, and Lady Brent laughed.

"I wish you'd go away," she said. "I want to finish what I'm doing before luncheon. You may tell Charlotte, if you like, that I'm sorry if I spoke harshly to her just now. She annoyed me and I did not pick my words. When three people live together year in and year out they are apt to get annoyed with one another occasionally, for no particular reason."

*CHAPTER VII*

*THE LOG CABIN*

The log cabin had reached the interesting stage at which its framework was complete, and the immediate task was to nail thin bark-covered boards upon it. After that it was to be thatched. Then it was to be lined with match-boarding.

Harry had built every bit of the framework himself, with such help as Jane and Pobbles could give him in lifting and holding the timbers in place, not without some risk to limb if not to life. He had drawn out his constructional plan, from careful study of a book. Then he had had the timbers prepared at the sawmills four miles away, and he and the children had fetched them in a farm cart. It had taken them weeks to get the framework finished, but they had made a very good job of it between them. As they hurried up through the wood to the clearing upon the edge of which the cabin stood, Jane and Pobbles were full of excitement at the thought of work to come which they could really do themselves. So far, it had been helping Harry, which was pleasurable enough, but not to be compared with the pleasure that was to come.

Harry let them chatter without much response, but made the pace towards the clearing so fast that they had to run to keep up with him. He was excited too. He was doing something real, from the beginning. He had invented something and had already carried out the most difficult part of it, meeting the difficulties as they came, and surmounting them. All the rest would be easy enough until it came to the thatching. He proposed to do that himself too. Watching a thatcher at work on a barn had first put the idea of building a log cabin into his head. He thought he knew how it was done, and he could always ask the old thatcher questions; but he was not going to let him lay a finger on the roof of the cabin, nor even stand by and direct. Jane and Pobbles might do whatever lay within their power; it would have been he who had taught them and directed them in everything.

They came to the clearing--a space of bright green turf nibbled short by rabbits, surrounded mostly by oaks interspersed with glistening hollies and here and there a graceful deliciously green beech. The cabin stood back among the trees, its squared timbers showing white and new against the background of green and russet. Harry paused and put his head on one side to contemplate it, and a grin of pure pleasure lit up his face. "A very workmanlike job so far," he said. "Come on, we'll get the whole of the front covered in this morning."

They worked at a rate unknown to members of Trades Unions, measuring and sawing up the boards, and nailing them fast to the posts. Harry did all the sawing, Jane and Pobbles took it in turns to nail one end of a board while he nailed the other. They quarrelled a little over this until Harry stopped them. Jane was of the opinion that Pobbles did not drive in a nail as well as she did. Pobbles was of the contrary opinion. There were only two hammers between the three of them, but Harry was to provide a third for the afternoon. They were to have a picnic tea at the cabin, after lessons, and hoped to see the walls roughly finished before dusk fell.

The brooding summer noon did not daunt these eager labourers. It was more like real work to sweat under the hot sun. Harry took off his coat at the start and turned up his shirt sleeves. Pobbles did the same in imitation of him. Jane, having nothing that she could reasonably take off, contented herself with rolling up her sleeves and warning Pobbles that he would catch cold, which gave him an opening that he was not slow to take advantage of. "Men don't catch cold when they're working," he said, and took off his waistcoat. Jane had to admit inferiority, for once.

They worked till the last possible minute, and met again at the first possible minute in the afternoon. The game which they made of their work was more entrancing now than it had been in the morning. The tasks of the day were done, and the long summer evening stretched infinitely before them. Moreover, the cabin, with its front all boarded in, was now beginning to look like a cabin and not the skeleton of one; and a picnic is always a picnic to happy youth, however inadequate the viands. They were not inadequate on this occasion. All three labourers had brought baskets. A fire was to be lit and tea made--billy tea, of which Harry had learnt the recipe from a book. The meal was to be an adequate substitute for what they would have eaten indoors. Harry was to be excused dinner for it. The children had their freedom until half-past eight.

Jane had changed her clothes, and wore, instead of the cotton frock of the morning, an outgrown coat and skirt, already laid aside "to be given away." The reason for this apparent feminine vagary became manifest when, arrived on the scene of action, she took off the coat, which was uncomfortably tight, and rolled up the sleeves of the shirt she wore beneath it. She was now at least as much like a pioneer as Pobbles.

In their imaginative adaptable brains they were pioneers in very truth. Harry was as serious about it as the children, though he was too old for any childish game of make-believe. "Now we'll knock off for an hour," he said, when one of the end walls had been boarded in, and the desire for bodily sustenance became urgent. "We must get the roof on before the rains begin, but we're well ahead, and it's better to keep at it steadily than to work ourselves out."

He was in some imagined country of the new world, where the first duty was to provide shelter before attacking the primeval woods and bringing the soil into cultivation. The soft English glade, upon which the shadows of English oaks and beeches were beginning to lengthen under the westering sun, was transformed in his imagination to a clearing in some tropical forest, or in the backwoods of Australia or Canada. The Castle, the Vicarage, the village, were wiped out. They were very far away from all such signs of ancient civilization, very far too from all possibility of replenishing their stores, if these should be wastefully used. He asked Jane to count the eggs carefully. "If there's one over, Tom had better have it," he said.

Tom was Pobbles, so called only on such occasions as this. Jane understood perfectly. She was the woman of the party, and it lay with her to adjust and husband the stores, also to support the head of it in his designs. On such terms she was willing to shoulder her burden of womanhood, and rather regretted having approximated her attire to that of the men. "You'd better put your jacket on now you've left off working," said Harry, throwing a glance not altogether of approval at her shirt, which she wore open at the neck, as he and the virile Tom wore theirs. She obeyed meekly, and went into the cabin to put on her tie as well, also the hat which she had discarded. "We ought to nail up a bit of looking-glass inside," she said, as she came out, and before she joined in picking up sticks for the fire she went into the wood where some late hyacinths were still to be found, and fastened a bunch of them on her breast.

Thus far they might make believe, acting as if they were a backwoods party, but not bringing the pretence to the point of utterance. They both laughed at Pobbles when he said: "We'd better stick together when we're picking up sticks, or one of us may get scalped in the wood," and Jane said: "We're helping Harry; he's not playing a silly game with us." Pobbles thought it would have been more amusing if they had boldly played the game which seemed to be in their thoughts no less than in his, but accepted the correction, and half understood it. Harry, who was so wonderful at making things, would belittle himself by playing children's games about them.

But there was no diminution in his dignity when he showed that his mind was full of the reality of what they were playing at. They sat on the chips and sawdust outside the cabin, when they had devoured everything in their baskets, and talked. Harry leant against the new built wall of the cabin with his legs stretched out in front of him, his dog at his feet, and Pobbles leant against the wall beside him, in as near an imitation of his attitude as he could contrive without making himself too uncomfortable. Jane reclined gracefully on her elbow, and occasionally pulled her too-short skirt over her knees. The shadows of the trees had perceptibly lengthened. There were two hours of daylight yet, but the heat had declined, and the evening freshness was mingled with the evening peace. The cuckoo was calling, now here now there, and its grey form could be seen sometimes flitting from tree to tree across the glade. The rabbits were out at the far end of it, and the wood pigeons were swinging home to the high woods behind them. But of human occupation, besides their own, the world seemed empty. They were secure in their retreat.

"It must be a grand thing, you know," Harry said, "to find a new place in the world which you can make what you like of. Supposing this were really right away from everywhere, in a new country, we should begin just like this, with a cabin a bit bigger but much the same in plan. Then we should make our garden round about it. After that we should prepare our fields. We should cut down trees, for more building when we wanted it, and for logs for burning in the winter. We should have our animals; we should have everything that we wanted round us, and what we hadn't got we should have to do without until we could go and bring it from the nearest town, which might be hundreds of miles away. There'd be a tremendous lot to do every day, but you'd like doing it, and you'd see the whole thing grow and grow till you had a splendid place which you had made out of nothing, and hundreds of people working on it."

"Shall you do that, when you're quite grown up, Harry?" asked Pobbles. "I think I shall. I know a good deal about it already, and I can easily learn some more."

Jane forbore to rebuke his assumption of knowledge, having one to make on her own account. "I used to think I should hate having to sew and learn to cook," she said. "But I shouldn't mind it if I was living in a log cabin. I can cook some things already. I suppose it would be more fun to be a man, but a woman would have to ride and all that, if she lived in a new country; and she could ride astride."

"It's only when things begin to get a little settled that women go at all," said Harry, dashing these dreams. "The real pioneers go alone, and carry everything they want with them on horseback. It must be glorious to ride for day after day in a country where no white man has ever been before, and at last to come to some lovely place where he can make a settlement."

"There's no reason why a woman shouldn't do that too," said Jane. "She could go alone herself, if the man didn't want her. She could dress like a man."

Pobbles exploded with mirth, at some cryptic joke of his own. "A pretty fool she'd look if the Redskins caught her!" he said.

"Shut up," said Jane sharply, relinquishing her dreams of a woman's empire, "or I'll punch your head."

"Shut up both of you," said Harry, "and don't spoil things by quarrelling. You'd never do for that sort of life if you couldn't spend five minutes without flying at one another. You'd have to spend weeks and months together without seeing another living soul."

"But you'd be there," said Pobbles. "You'd keep her in order."

"Shall you ever do it, Harry, do you think?" asked Jane. "I should like to come too, if you do. I could wait behind till you'd found the right place, and then Tom and I could come on together."

"Perhaps I shall some day," said Harry, for whom time and youth seemed to stretch ahead illimitably. "But not until after I've been in the army for some years. And I couldn't be away long from Royd. I might just go pioneering, and leave somebody else to work up the place I've found."

"Oh, you could leave Jane and me," said Pobbles. "And you could come there and see us sometimes. You would find we had worked it up better each time you came."

"I shouldn't care about it unless Harry was there all the time," said Jane. "Besides, I am going into the army too. I read about a girl in Russia who fought all through the wars, and nobody found her out. I shall be in Harry's regiment, but he won't tell anybody. You can too, Pobbles, when you're old enough."

Harry looked at her, and laughed with great enjoyment. He had just seen the woman coming out in her, and been mildly entertained by it through his seriousness. Now she was a sexless child again. "You're one in a thousand, Jane," he said. "Of course you shall join my regiment, and Pobbles too. We'll have some jolly times, and when it comes to fighting we three will stick together."

Jane did not mind being laughed at by Harry, and was pleased at the prospect held out to her. She took off her jacket, when they set to work again at the cabin, and threw away the bluebells, wondering why she had picked them.

Dusk was falling as Harry made his way up through the wood and across the park homewards. The air was very still, and the sweet scents of the earth, dissolved in dew, rose like incense. Usually his impressionable untroubled mind would have leapt to the message of his senses, and he would have exulted in the beauty that lay all around him, sublimated by the spell of oncoming night. But as his feet brushed the moisture from the grass, and stirred the cool scents to greet his nostrils, he looked down and not up as his way was. A vague discontent was upon his spirit, which was not quite unhappiness though near akin to it.

The vision of a free life in a free untouched land had come to him. For the first time in his happy boyhood he felt himself bound by his lot. The great world, with its endless varieties of adventure and invitation to be doing and living, lay beyond his horizons and he had never crossed them.

Melancholy touched him so seldom that it was a discomfort to be resisted. He wondered what made him sad at the thought of being tied to Royd, which had hitherto been a paradise of enjoyment to him. He stood still as he came out from among the trees and looked across the park to the dark mass of the Castle, in which lights were glimmering here and there, making it more romantic and beautiful even than when seen in the day-time. And as he looked, the momentary sadness fell from him, and he smiled with pleasure at the scene so familiar yet always showing itself in some new emanation of beauty. He was coming to the age at which he could no longer be satisfied with it as holding everything in life. The shadow of unrest had just fallen upon him, but it would not be yet that he would walk in it.

As he neared the Castle a white figure, dimly seen in the dusk, detached itself from the gloom that lay about the massive walls and came towards him along the trodden path by which he was hastening. He recognized it as that of his mother, who not infrequently came out to meet him like this when he had begged off dinner and came back after it. It usually gave him pleasure to find her waiting for him in this way. There was not, perhaps, very much in common between them, but he knew how much he was to her, and his chivalry went out towards her, in love and a sense of protection.

To-night he was conscious of the least little sense of discomfort in meeting her. His time was so fully taken up, with his work indoors and his innumerable pursuits out of doors, that neither his mother nor his grandmother saw very much of him except at meal-times, and less than ever in the summer-time. It was part of the wisdom of Lady Brent that he was left as free as he was. But he was sensitive to the atmosphere around him, and of late when the inmates of the Castle had been together it had been uncomfortable. Wilbraham, while they had done their work together, had been much as usual, but at table he had been morose and snappy. The two women had obviously put constraint upon themselves to be easy and natural before him, but the coldness and irritation between them had peeped through. There had been nothing to cause him to reflect upon something wrong, and the cause of it; he had been full of his own devices and forgotten all about the discomfort at home the moment he was away from it. But the discomfort was there. Perhaps it had had to do with the vague discontent that had just come upon him and passed away. But the sight of his mother coming to meet him brought it back ever so little. Whatever his dreams for the future, whether at home or abroad, the whims and vagaries of his elders if indulged in must shut them off. Going away from Royd meant going away from them; Royd itself must lose some of its glamour if life there was to be troubled by their jars.