Tea arrived during the narration. Matthew listened with amused interest, for his son and his son's child were the dearest things earth held for him. His wife had died many years ago, when Sylvester was just emerging from boyhood and the great glory had gone out of his heaven. But his love for Sylvester had deepened, and of late years the sad parallelism of their widowed lives had drawn the two men very near together. In many ways they were singularly alike, the mere facial resemblance stamping them at the first glance as father and son; both were grave, intellectual-looking men, of the same clean, wiry make, with an air of reserve and good breeding that commanded respect. But the older man possessed that peculiar grace of manner, called nowadays of the old school, which the brusquer habits of more modern times have forbidden to flourish. Both faces bore the marks of suffering; but the passage of the years had chastened that of the father, who looked more frankly at the world than the son and out of kindlier grey eyes. He was a little over sixty, his hair whitening fast; still he held himself erect, and scoffed satirically at old age.
“The prime of life, my dear sir,” he would say, “the heyday of existence! Up to sixty a man gathers his experience and tears his fingers dreadfully. After sixty he can sit down quietly and enjoy it and let his fingers heal.”
There was a pause in the talk, and the three sat, as they often did, content to be together, looking into the fire and thinking their own thoughts. Perhaps the girl's were the happiest. The room had darkened, and the firelight played on their faces gathered round the hearth. Suddenly Sylvester spoke.
“I was talking to Ella about my plans, father, before you came in.”
“A very sensible person to talk to,” said Matthew.
“I've burned my ships. I have sold the practice and am going to join Frodsham in London.”
“I'm very glad indeed to hear it,” said the old man; “you should have done it years ago.”
His voice was suave and even, but the keen eye of the physician detected a trembling of the fingers resting on the broad leathern arm of the chair.
“I don't at all like to leave you,” said Sylvester, feeling guilty. Matthew waved away the reluctance.
“Nonsense, my boy. I'm not a cripple that requires to be taken care of. Grown up men can't be for ever hanging on to—I was going to say, to each other's apron strings. London is your place. Perhaps after a time, when I am dead and gone—a man must die some day, you know—you'll like to come back to the old house and devote yourself entirely to research and be independent of two guinea fees and that kind of thing. That would be nice, wouldn't it, Ella?”
The girl's heart throbbed at the share implied, but a tenderer feeling quieted it at once.
“It would be impossible without you, Uncle Matthew,” she said.
He rose with a laugh. “None of us are indispensable, not even the most futile. I'm going to dress. You'll dine here, of course, Syl? And, Ella, tell them to get up some of the '84' Pommery to drink good luck to Syl.”
He walked out of the room with the brisk air of a man thoroughly pleased with life; but outside, in the passage, his face grew sad, and he mounted the stairs to his dressing-room very slowly, holding on to the balusters.
The younger folks remained for a while longer in the library. Sylvester bent forward and broke a great lump of coal with the poker.
“I'm not fit to black his boots, you know, My companionship means much more to him than Dorothy's does to me, and he gives it up without a murmur.”
“And that settles the Dorothy question?” asked Ella, in the direct manner that sometimes embarrassed him.
“Of course it settles it,” he cried warmly. “What a selfish beast you must have thought me!”
“If you didn't love others so warmly, I shouldn't—”
She came to a dead stop because his eyes were full upon her.
“Well?”
“I shouldn't care for you so much.”
“Do you care very much for me?” he asked rather wistfully, and came to where she was standing with one foot on the fender.
“You know I would do anything in the world you asked,” she answered in a low voice.
“Some day I may claim your promise.”
“You know I always keep my promises,” she said.
The dressing bell clanged loudly through the house. Sylvester hurriedly departed so as to dress in time for dinner. But Ella lingered by the fire, the girl in her wondering whether she had said too much, and the woman in her filled with a delicious pity for the strong-brained, deep-natured man who seemed dumbly to be holding out his hands for her love. She gave it generously and gratefully. Compared with him, all other men seemed of small account, and in her aunt Lady Milmo's house, where most of her life was spent, she had seen all the sorts and conditions of males that a well-to-do collector of minor celebrities can gather around her in London. But to her direct mind the truest men of her acquaintance were Matthew Lanyon, her former guardian, whose title of uncle was purely one of courtesy, and Sylvester, with whom the old quasi-cousinly relations were being transmuted into sweeter ties.
CHAPTER II—THE SHADOW IN A LIFE
Father and son sat together in the dining-room, smoking their after-dinner cigars, and speaking very little, as their custom was when together. With its snow-white table-cloth set off by the glass and cut flowers and the rich purple of the old port in the decanter; with its picture-hung walls, its massive mahogany sideboard gleaming with silver, amid which displayed itself opulently a huge salver presented to Matthew Lanyon, Esquire, by his fellow-townsmen on the completion of his third year of mayoralty; with its great red-shaded lamp suspended over the table, and its dark marble fireplace—the room had an air of warmth and generous comfort that spoke of a long continuance of worldly ease. In his younger days Matthew Lanyon had roved about the world, picking up much knowledge of men in new lands where life was rude, and a little money wherewith to start a career when he returned to civilisation. His return was speedier than either himself or his friends had anticipated. The latter beheld him married to a sweet flower-like girl whom he had met not long before in Australia; but more than this they did not learn. He was not given to offering information as to his doings, and there was that suggestion of haughtiness behind his frank young smile which forbade questioning. He was there; his wife was there. The friends must accept both on their merits. He had served his articles as a solicitor before leaving England. He turned to his profession for maintenance and bought a share in a cousin's practice in Ayresford. He was to have made his fortune, gone away again with his young wife into the wide world, and seen all the wonders that it held. But as in the case of many other young dreams, it seemed otherwise to the gods. Wealth had come quickly, and he had added gradually to his little home until it had become a great house, and his cousin had died, and his wife had died, and in Ayresford he had lived all the time, married and widowed, and now the longing for change had gone, and in Ayresford he hoped that he himself would die, in the home endeared to him by so many memories, in the bed consecrated by the pale sweet shadow of her who even now seemed to lie by his side.
Wealth had come, yet much of it had gone; how, no man knew but himself and one other; he had toiled hard to win it, was toiling hard at sixty to win it back. And how strenuously he toiled,