He turned once more, and looked out of the window at the grass bank sloping to the creek. The sun shone upon a strip of carpet at his feet, and the myriad dust particles danced in a beam of light.
'You are fortunate in having Tom and Harriet for parents,' said Henry. 'They will take care of you and this boy, and you won't be alone. Hal's allowance will automatically come to you now, of course, you realise that. And when I die, as I told you before, the child has everything.'
He glanced down dubiously at the small, solemn figure in the bottle-green velvet suit. 'An empty house, and a load of doubts and dreams-not much of a legacy,' he said.
John-Henry leant against his mother, and tugged at her hand, his signal that he wished to go. He did not care greatly for the strange man who looked down at him with pity, and he wanted to be back at the Rectory, with Granpie, amongst familiar things that he knew and understood.
'He's had enough of me,' said Henry, with a smile.
'All right, young man, I won't keep you any longer. I am going too.'
He walked with them to the hall. The luggage had been put in the carriage, the valet was standing in his hat and coat by the open door.
'It's a mistake,' said Henry, 'to walk back into the past. Look forward always, if you can.'
He gazed up at the house, the barred windows of the new wing, the iron balcony above the door. Then he shook hands with Jinny, and touched the boy lightly on the head. He climbed into the carriage, and the servant slammed the door, taking his seat on the box beside the driver.
'I want you to say goodbye to Tom and your mother for me,' said Henry. 'I won't see them again. Ask Tom whether he remembers saying to me over thirty years ago, 'I would rather be good like the Eyres than clever like you Brodricks'? The trouble is that goodness dies, and lies buried in the earth. Cleverness passes on and becomes degenerate.'
He looked for the last time at the stone walls of the castle, and down across the sloping grass to the creek, and Doon Island, and the grey mass of Hungry Hill. Then he smiled once more at Jinny.
'You never knew my mother, did you?' he said.
'She died many years ago in Nice. The last words she ever said to me were, 'Don't look serious, Henry boy. Thinking never did anybody any good.' I don't know if she was right or wrong, but thinking always brought me pain. You can tell that story to your son, when he comes into his legacy.'
He gave an order to the driver, and lifted his hat, and the carriage bowled away down the drive, and disappeared amongst the belt of trees. As it passed into the woods the herons rose from their nests in the tall branches, and went crying down the creek towards Doon Island.
EPILOGUE
The Inheritance, 1920
AS JOHN-HENRY turned into Queen Street a sentry came out of the doorway of a house.
'I wouldn't go any further,' he said. 'They're shooting down the other end and you might get a bullet in your back from one of our fellows.'
As he spoke they heard the rattle of a machine-gun and the squealing brakes of a car. The sentry grinned.
'Trouble for someone,' he said.
At the far end of the street a car skidded into the pavement, and from the lowered window they could see the nose of the gun pointing across the square. Three men on the pavement flung themselves on their faces. Someone ran from one of the houses to the car and jumped on the running-board. He had a rifle in his hand. A small party of soldiers appeared at the end of the street by the square, and the car gathered speed and turned sideways, up a back street by the farthest house.
The soldiers fired at the retreating car, and then they began to run across the square towards the big post office at the corner. The men who had flung themselves down on the pavement picked themselves up again, and dusted their clothes, as though nothing had happened. A woman called shrilly from one of the upper windows of a house. The church clock struck five o'clock. John-Henry lit a cigarette and smiled at the soldier.
'You'd think,' he said, 'that after four-and-a-half years of war men would be sick of shooting one another.'
The soldier took a fag from behind his ear, and borrowed a match.
'Not in this country,' he said; 'there's not a man amongst 'em who wouldn't knife his best friend if he had the mind, and then take flowers to his funeral.'
John-Henry laughed, and threw away the match.
'That's not fair,' he said. 'I'm one of them, and I've never wanted to knife anyone.'
He went on walking down the street towards the square, where the shooting had been. Many of the windows were broken, not from the incident of five minutes ago, but dating back over the weeks. The square was clear now of troops, but for the guard standing round the police-station. A young man was talking to a woman on the edge of the pavement. His face was lean and bitter. He had his hands deep in his pockets.
'They got Micky Farran,' he said to the woman, and then, as John-Henry passed, he stopped talking, and looked down at his feet.
They moved off together, and it seemed to John-Henry that the streets were empty now, and strangely quiet. Across the square, at the far end, were the remains of the barricade. The barbed wire lay in loose strands. A sudden shower of rain came from the bright sky, and was gone again. In the far distance a steamer hooted, deep and low, and was echoed by the high, thin answer of a tug. John-Henry was thinking of the sentry's words, 'Not a man amongst them who wouldn't knife his best friend, and then take flowers to his funeral.' It was true, he supposed, and yet.
Faces of his childhood came into his mind.
Dear Granpie, with his great, deep-set eyes, his bent shoulders, his white hair, walking through the market- square at Doonhaven, and one of the old women at the stalls lifting a streaming face to his and calling upon the Saints to bless him. He had found employment for the woman's son, and she had never forgotten it. Gran, small, bright and bustling, skimming the cream off the milk with a scallop shell, boxing his ears because he tickled the kitchen-maid's legs with a feather duster, and she half-way up a ladder at the time. Patsy, gardener on week-days and groom on Sundays, who told him the legends of the fairies who walked on Hungry Hill, and the little pixies who burrowed underground and bewitched the miners in the old days. He would not have known how to handle a knife except to whittle sticks or to cut a pig's throat. Perhaps killing a pig made it easy to kill a man…
The streets looked normal on this side of the city; and as he turned into the terrace where Aunt Lizette had her small flat, and saw a child bowling a hoop in the gardens opposite, it seemed ridiculous to remember the skidding car in Queen Street, the machine-gun fire, and the bitter flat voice of that man on the pavement, 'They got Micky Farran. '?
He rang the bell at No.5, and climbed the stairs to the little sitting-room, overfull of furniture, where Aunt Lizette sat day after day, crocheting lace samplers to be sold for blind babies. Queer passionate hobby, that must have its origin, surely, in subconscious pity of her own childhood, when, lame and neglected, she lived in fear of a resentful stepmother. She rose smiling now, as he came into the room, her sallow complexion a little yellower than usual, her eyes blinking behind the spectacles.
'You dear boy,' she said, and he noticed once more, with pleasure, that her voice had the soft, warm lilt belonging to Slane and the south, possessed also by his mother, which brought back to him always, rich and loved, the memories of boyhood.
'Your mother told me you would come, and I didn't believe her,' said Aunt Lizette, 'for surely, I said to myself, a young man has better things to do than to visit an aunt when he comes home.'
'Not this young man,' said John-Henry. 'He can't forget the pep-permints you used to keep in your cupboard.'
Aunt Lizette smiled, and took off her spectacles, and now he saw that her eyes were fine and handsome, like Aunt Kitty's, and he thought of the happily assorted household they had been out at Castle Andriff, Aunt Kitty, Aunt Lizette, and Uncle Simon, all living together in harmony, with very few servants and too many dogs, until the
