The Splendid Fairing

that Simon was not the first who had made a mess of his own affairs while remaining perfectly competent to hand out good advice to others. The well-arranged water-supply was Simon’s idea, as well as the porcelain troughs which were so easy to keep clean, and the milking-machine which saved so much in labour. There were other innovations⁠—some, Eliza’s pride⁠—which were due to Simon, if she had only known it. He was a good judge of a beast as well, and had a special faculty for doctoring stock, a gift which had certainly not been allowed to run to waste during those bewitched and disease-ridden years at Sandholes. Will was indebted to him for many valuable lives, and often said that Simon had saved him considerably more than he had ever lent him. It remained a perpetual mystery why so useful a man should have achieved so much for others and so little for himself. The answer could only lie in the curse that was glooming over Sandholes⁠—if there was a curse. Nature certainly plays strange tricks on those who do not exactly suit her book, but in any case the hate at the heart of things was enough to poison luck at the very source.

While Sarah sat through her long torment in the kitchen, rising up at last for that great blow which at all events felled her adversary for the time being, Simon was enjoying himself airing his knowledge in the buildings, contradicting his brother on every possible occasion, and ending by feeling as if he actually owned the place. However, the reason of his visit came up at length, as it was bound to do, and his air of expert authority vanished as the position changed. One by one, as he had already done to Mr. Dent, he laid before his brother his difficulties and disappointments, much as a housewife lays out the chickens that some weasel has slain in the night. He wore the same air of disgust at such absurd accumulation of disaster, of incredulity at this overdone effort on the part of an inartistic fate. The story was not new to Will, any more than to the agent, but he listened to it patiently, nevertheless. He knew from experience that, unless you allow a man to recapitulate his woes, you cannot get him to the point from which a new effort may be made. He may seem to be following you along the fresh path which you are marking out, but in reality he will be looking back at the missed milestones of the past. And there were so many milestones in Simon’s case⁠—so many behind him, and so few to come. After all, it could only be a short road and a bare into which even the kindest brotherly love had power to set his feet.

So for the second time that day Simon lived his long chapter of accidents over again, his voice, by turns emphatic and indignant or monotonous and resigned, falling like slanting rain over the unheeding audience of the cattle. Will, listening and nodding and revolving the question of ways and means, had yet always a slice of attention for his immediate belongings. His eye, casual yet never careless, wandered over the warm roan and brown and creamy backs between the clean stone slabs which Simon had advocated in place of the ancient wooden stalls. The herd was indoors for the winter, but had not yet lost its summer freshness, and he had sufficient cause for pride in the straight-backed, clean-horned stuff, with its obvious gentle breeding and beautiful feminine lines. That part of his mind not given to his brother was running over a string of names, seeing in every animal a host of others whose characteristics had gone to its creation, and building upon them the stuff of the generations still to come⁠—turning over, in fact, that store of knowledge of past history and patient prophecy for the future which gives the study of breeding at once its dignity and its fascination. At the far end of the shippon, where the calf-pens were, he could see the soft bundles of calves, with soft eyes and twitching ears, in which always the last word in the faith of the stock-breeder was being either proved or forsworn. The daylight still dropping through skylights and windows seemed to enter through frosted glass, dimmed as it was by the warm cloud of breathing as well as the mist that lined the sky beyond. A bird flew in at intervals through the flung-back swinging panes, and perched for a bar of song on the big crossbeams supporting the pointed roof. A robin walked pertly but daintily down the central aisle, a brave little spot of colour on the concrete grey, pecking as it went at the scattered corn under the monster-noses thrust between the rails. Simon leaned against a somnolent white cow, with an arm flung lengthways down her back, his other hand fretting the ground with the worn remnant of a crooked stick. Will’s dog, a bushy, silvered thing, whose every strong grey hair seemed separately alive, curled itself, with an eye on the robin, at its master’s feet.

He roused himself to greater attention when Simon reached the account of his interview with Mr. Dent. Accustomed as he was to more or less traditional behaviour under the traditional circumstances which govern such lives as his, he fastened at once on the puzzling attitude of the agent.

“It fair beats me what Mr. Dent could think he was at,” he observed thoughtfully. “Once you’d settled to quit there was no sense in keeping you hanging on. Best make a job and ha’ done wi’ it, seems to me. ’Tisn’t like Mr. Dent, neither, to carry on in such a fashion. I wonder what made him act so strange?”

Simon wore his original air of injured dignity as he leaned against the cow.

“Nay, I don’t know, I’m sure, but he was terble queer! You might ha’