The rooks settled; the rooks rose. The trees which they touched so capriciously seemed insufficient to lodge their numbers. The treetops sang with the breeze in them; the branches creaked audibly and dropped now and then, though the season was midsummer, husks or twigs. Up went the rooks and down again, rising in lesser numbers each time as the sager birds made ready to settle, for the evening was already spent enough to make the air inside the wood almost dark. The moss was soft; the tree-trunks spectral. Beyond them lay a silvery meadow. The pampas grass raised its feathery spears from mounds of green at the end of the meadow. A breadth of water gleamed. Already the convolvulus moth was spinning over the flowers. Orange and purple, nasturtium and cherry pie, were washed into the twilight, but the tobacco plant and the passion flower, over which the great moth spun, were white as china. The rooks creaked their wings together on the treetops, and were settling down for sleep when, far off, a familiar sound shook and trembled—increased—fairly dinned in their ears—scared sleepy wings into the air again—the dinner bell at the house.
After six days of salt wind, rain, and sun, Jacob Flanders had put on a dinner jacket. The discreet black object had made its appearance now and then in the boat among tins, pickles, preserved meats, and as the voyage went on had become more and more irrelevant, hardly to be believed in. And now, the world being stable, lit by candlelight, the dinner jacket alone preserved him. He could not be sufficiently thankful. Even so his neck, wrists, and face were exposed without cover, and his whole person, whether exposed or not, tingled and glowed so as to make even black cloth an imperfect screen. He drew back the great red hand that lay on the tablecloth. Surreptitiously it closed upon slim glasses and curved silver forks. The bones of the cutlets were decorated with pink frills—and yesterday he had gnawn ham from the bone! Opposite him were hazy, semitransparent shapes of yellow and blue. Behind them, again, was the grey-green garden, and among the pear-shaped leaves of the escallonia fishing-boats seemed caught and suspended. A sailing ship slowly drew past the women’s backs. Two or three figures crossed the terrace hastily in the dusk. The door opened and shut. Nothing settled or stayed unbroken. Like oars rowing now this side, now that, were the sentences that came now here, now there, from either side of the table.
“Oh, Clara, Clara!” exclaimed Mrs. Durrant, and Timothy Durrant adding, “Clara, Clara,” Jacob named the shape in yellow gauze Timothy’s sister, Clara. The girl sat smiling and flushed. With her brother’s dark eyes, she was vaguer and softer than he was. When the laugh died down she said: “But, mother, it was true. He said so, didn’t he? Miss Eliot agreed with us. …”
But Miss Eliot, tall, grey-headed, was making room beside her for the old man who had come in from the terrace. The dinner would never end, Jacob thought, and he did not wish it to end, though the ship had sailed from one corner of the window-frame to the other, and a light marked the end of the pier. He saw Mrs. Durrant gaze at the light. She turned to him.
“Did you take command, or Timothy?” she said. “Forgive me if I call you Jacob. I’ve heard so much of you.” Then her eyes went back to the sea. Her eyes glazed as she looked at the view.
“A little village once,” she said, “and now grown. …” She rose, taking her napkin with her, and stood by the window.
“Did you quarrel with Timothy?” Clara asked shyly. “I should have.”
Mrs. Durrant came back from the window.
“It gets later and later,” she said, sitting upright, and looking down the table. “You ought to be ashamed—all of you. Mr. Clutterbuck, you ought to be ashamed.” She raised her voice, for Mr. Clutterbuck was deaf.
“We are ashamed,” said a girl. But the old man with the beard went on eating plum tart. Mrs. Durrant laughed and leant back in her chair, as if indulging him.
“We put it to you, Mrs. Durrant,” said a young man with thick spectacles and a fiery moustache. “I say the conditions were fulfilled. She owes me a sovereign.”
“Not before the fish—with it, Mrs. Durrant,” said Charlotte Wilding.
“That was the bet; with the fish,” said Clara seriously. “Begonias, mother. To eat them with his fish.”
“Oh dear,” said Mrs. Durrant.
“Charlotte won’t pay you,” said Timothy.
“How dare you …” said Charlotte.
“That privilege will be mine,” said the courtly Mr. Wortley, producing a silver case primed with sovereigns and slipping one coin on to the table. Then Mrs. Durrant got up and passed down the room, holding herself very straight, and the girls in yellow and blue and silver gauze followed her, and elderly Miss Eliot in her velvet; and a little rosy woman, hesitating at the door, clean, scrupulous, probably a governess. All passed out at the open door.
“When you are as old as I am, Charlotte,” said Mrs. Durrant, drawing the girl’s arm within hers as they
