As this thought crossed his mind its judgment was belied by the round of approaching hoofs and wheels. The occupants of the room seemed to listen with strained attention, as though the occurrence was too rare to pass without due notice. A gig or light cart of some sort drew up at the gate.
“Go to the door, Nan,” said the mother quickly to the daughter.
In a minute the girl returned with a short summons:
“Ted.”
The boy rose slowly, drank off his tea at a gulp, and followed the girl out of the room. Duncombe was left alone with the mother, who began to re-question him, with nervous preoccupation, as to the details of the day’s run. Nan reappeared for a moment and fetched a boy’s overcoat and cap from a chair where they had been lying. Evidently Master Ted was being hustled off to some evening work for which he had no great enthusiasm. When the girl next appeared the receding sound of wheels betokened the cart’s departure. There was a moment’s silence, which seemed to Duncombe’s fancy more tense in constraint than any of its forerunners, and then a sudden volubility descended on his hostess. The departure of the sulky boy to his work or evening class seemed to have loosened her tongue. She gave Duncombe an account of her family history and connections that was almost defiant in its simple pride. She was a woman apparently on the young side of forty, or not much beyond it, and her children were mere boy and girl, yet her sympathies and interests seemed almost entirely with the past. Her father and her husband’s father had belonged to the best yeoman class, and evidently had stood high in their neighbours’ esteem. Good friends they seemed to have been, though their political creeds placed them locally in the forefront of the opposed party forces; she related with especial pride an incident which had happened when election passions ran high and an unpopular candidate had been threatened with violence by a hostile mob.
“There was no police anywhere near, and it seemed as if he must be roughly handled, when out he came into the crowd, with my father on one side of him and father-in-law on the other, and everyone made way and let them pass. There wasn’t anyone would do anything against my father and father-in-law, they were so looked up to and respected. But those times are gone. I’m as comfortable here today as I’ve ever been, but it isn’t the times that used to be, when one could hold up one’s head and feel that one was somebody. They’ll never come back.”
Duncombe hastened with ready confidence to give cheerful denial to the good lady’s repining.
“I’ll wager you are just as much looked up to by your neighbours as you and yours have been,” he said; “there may not be so many ways of showing it, but I’m sure the feeling is there all the same, and it’s feeling that counts, you know. Then you’ve got your young people growing up to take their place in the world; they are going to keep up the family reputation. The good old times will never come back for anyone, but one mustn’t turn one’s back on the good time coming.”
With the flow of cheering counsel on his lips Duncombe prepared to take his departure; he would ride on to the market town a few miles away, leave his horse stabled for the night at some hostelry, and get home by train in time for dinner. He would not dream of offending his hosts by offering anything in way of payment for their hospitality, but a graceful act of recognition suggested and commended itself to him.
“A friend of mine has just brought out a book, Old Days in Our Country,” he said; “if you will allow me, I should like to send you a copy as a souvenir of our talk. Only, remember, you must still put your faith in the new days and the young folk. They are going to be worthy of the times that went before.”
He rode off into the dusk, carrying with him the image of a woman’s wistful face, a little hard and strained in its hunger for bygone things. As he rode he pieced together her history in his mind; the death first of father and father-in-law, then of husband, and the gradual waning of the family’s importance in local affairs; the coming to the fore of newer names, the slipping away of old habits of consultation and consideration, the growing up of a proud feeling of neglected merit which in time would stand like a barrier against social intercourse. The young people had not yet arrived at an age of disposition to assert themselves, and the mother lived in the dead past. That was the thing that had given him the feeling of something dead lying in the house—the unburied past that still lay aboveground.
Duncombe stabled his horse in the town and caught a train just on the point of starting. In one corner of the carriage
