Timbs did come home at last, and she did not have to wait for him until quite the end. His left leg was shattered, and he had been for a long time in a hospital before she was allowed to have him. About the time the armistice was signed he was ready for work again. But it was not in his master's power to give him the work he had done before the war. Hayslope Hall could no longer support a coachman, two or three grooms and a chauffeur. Timbs took the place of all of them. One horse was kept and both the cars, but the bigger one was seldom used because of the price of petrol and tires. Timbs turned himself into an efficient chauffeur, and liked the change in his duties. He had higher wages than before, but perhaps not quite so high as he could have got elsewhere if he hadn't preferred to stick to his old master. His quarters were the same, his wife was as devoted to him as ever, and his baby had grown into a pretty little girl of seven, who was the apple of his eye, and made a pet of by the young ladies. Timbs thought himself well off, even with his crooked leg; and perhaps he was, as things go nowadays.
Timbs knew when the Colonel was in the mood for a little chat, and when it was wise to render quick service with a silent tongue. In the good old days the Colonel had seldom come in from his morning ride without a cheery word or two to this favourite servant of his. He loved his horses and found plenty to say about them, though most of it might have been said many times before. And he would have something to say to Timbs about what he might have seen in the course of his inspection of farms and fields, which he liked to undertake before breakfast in the summer. In the autumn there were early starts for cubbing, and then of course there was plenty to talk about on the return.
The good days did not seem to have disappeared entirely when the war was over, though Hugo's death had made him more silent than before, and the reduction in stables and outdoor upkeep generally had already begun. But there was a season's hunting, and Pamela had made her first appearance in the field. Timbs, with one groom to help him, had been kept busy enough, but his first winter at home had seemed to him very good. This was what the Colonel and he had always looked forward to—the time when the young ladies would hunt regularly, one after the other. Miss Pamela was good company for her father. He would soon pick up his spirits, and everything would be as it had been again.
But by the next season the economies had increased. There was no more hunting from Hayslope Hall. The Colonel kept one horse to get about on, and there was an old pony for pottering work on the place, which the younger children sometimes rode. That was what the war had brought to Colonel Eldridge in return for his services, which had included a year in the field, and after that four years of routine work in various provincial centres of industry. As a soldier he made no complaints. At his age he expected no reward other than the conviction of having done his duty where he could be made most useful. As a landowner he had many complaints to make, but kept them mostly to himself. He had passed for a rich man before the war; now he was a poor one. But one did not flaunt one's poverty before the world. That was why he had dropped hunting altogether; his old Caesar would have carried him well enough for a day or so a week, if he had cared to go on.
The morning chats with Timbs were getting rarer. There would certainly be none this morning. After a look at his master's face Timbs led Caesar away without a word, and the Colonel went into the house. Something happened to put him out. Timbs's own face was overcast, and it was fully two minutes before he began to whistle at his work.
It was a quarter past eight. Breakfast was at half-past, and as Colonel Eldridge would ride no more that day, he went upstairs to change his clothes. He came down as the gong sounded, and his expression had somewhat cleared. He held strong opinions about keeping an even temper before his family.
An English family assembled for breakfast in an old-established country house—the nations of the earth may be invited to contemplation of it. Here at Hayslope Hall was an example that could have been multiplied by thousands at that hour, or at one a little later; for as a nation we are not early risers except on compulsion.
The room was large, but not too large for an air of domesticity when there was only the family to use it. It had three long small-paned windows, which on this summer morning were open to the wide, yet secluded garden. The walls were hung with pictures, some good, some indifferent, and all so familiar that they were never looked at. Of the portraits none were older than the middle of the eighteenth century; but five or six generations of men and women of the same blood who have lived in the same house, and, allowing for differences of era, in much the same way, is already something substantial in the way of background. The furniture was not more than about a hundred years old, of that period of solid and dignified ugliness which was yet so much more satisfactory than the fashions succeeding it that by contrast with them it is now beginning to acquire merit. How it had come to replace the eighteenth century furniture which the periwigged gentlemen and hooped ladies on the walls had used when in the flesh was now forgotten; but it is only of late years that old furniture has been preferred to new, and there was nothing remarkable in this. The refurnishing of the dining-room might very well have been set in hand again since the last clearing out a hundred years before if it had not been thought that it would do very well as it was, and that there were more important rooms to spend money on, if money was to be spent in this way. As a setting for the family that now used it the room was eloquent of an ancestry already respectably established, and it told somehow of interests that were not markedly concerned with the decorations and appointments of a house. To the Eldridges, their dining-room was the place for the enjoyment of food and the sociability that went therewith, and it fulfilled all purposes that could be required of it. It was only in the matter of large assemblies, of which the great expanse of dark mahogany and the score or so of well-padded chairs seemed to make perpetual suggestion, that any incongruity might have been felt. The time for that was not now. But with the table lessened to the needs of family use and the space around it thus agreeably increased, the normal occupation of the room was sufficient for it. Here began the day with the assembling of those who would go their ways, some together and some apart, throughout its course, but all with a sense of the nearness of the rest; and here they would meet twice again before the day was done, to keep alive one of the best of the good things that English country life has cherished and made complete—the community of the family.
Colonel Eldridge, after greeting his daughters with a mixture of formality and affection, occupied himself with his breakfast and the letters which lay in a little pile beside his plate. It had not been his habit to deal thus with his correspondence in the days before the war. He had been more ready to talk then. He would choose a few letters out of the pile and perhaps discuss them, as Mrs. Eldridge did with hers at the other end of the table, and leave the rest for afterwards. Now he went through them all, business letters as well as private, and, schooled as he was to hide his emotions, he could not always keep from his face some expression of annoyance, or even dismay. But it was only in his face that this showed, and his wife and daughters knew that it was not meant to show at all. By degrees they had learnt to ignore it. If they addressed him he would always respond, and he would have been annoyed if they had tried to suit themselves to his moods. He liked to hear them chattering gaily among themselves, though he was not always ready to join in their chatter. They were, indeed, the reward that all his anxieties and schemings brought him. It was the happiness and freedom of their lives in the home which it behooved him to keep intact about them that sweetened it to him. But for them there would have been no anxiety, but only some reduction of opportunities which would still have left the main interests of his life untouched.
Colonel Eldridge was very neat in his suit of grey tweed, well-cut, well-brushed, but well-worn, his white stock creaseless, his figure thin and a little stiff, but not with the stiffness of age, his gold-rimmed glasses on the ridge of his thin, straight nose, his well-shaped nervous hands manipulating his papers or the implements of his meal. He was