Lord Denis was fly-fishing--the weather just too bright to allow the little trout of that shallow, never silent stream to embrace with avidity the small enticements which he threw in their direction.
Nevertheless he continued to invite them, exploring every nook of their watery pathway with his soft-swishing line. In a rough suit and battered hat adorned with those artificial and other flies, which infest Harris tweed, he crept along among the hazel bushes and thorn-trees, perfectly happy. Like an old spaniel, who has once gloried in the fetching of hares, rabbits, and all manner of fowl, and is now glad if you will but throw a stick for him, so one, who had been a famous fisher before the Lord, who had harried the waters of Scotland and Norway, Florida and Iceland, now pursued trout no bigger than sardines. The glamour of a thousand memories hallowed the hours he thus spent by that brown water. He fished unhasting, religious, like some good Catholic adding one more to the row of beads already told, as though he would fish himself, gravely, without complaint, into the other world. With each fish caught he experienced a solemn satisfaction.
Though he would have liked Barbara with him that morning, he had only looked at her once after breakfast in such a way that she could not see him, and with a dry smile gone off by himself. Down by the stream it was dappled, both cool and warm, windless; the trees met over the river, and there were many stones, forming little basins which held up the ripple, so that the casting of a fly required much cunning. This long dingle ran for miles through the foot-growth of folding hills. It was beloved of jays; but of human beings there were none, except a chicken-farmer's widow, who lived in a house thatched almost to the ground, and made her livelihood by directing tourists, with such cunning that they soon came back to her for tea.
It was while throwing a rather longer line than usual to reach a little dark piece of crisp water that Lord Dennis heard the swishing and crackling of someone advancing at full speed. He frowned slightly, feeling for the nerves of his fishes, whom he did not wish startled. The invader was Miltoun, hot, pale, dishevelled, with a queer, hunted look on his face. He stopped on seeing his great-uncle, and instantly assumed the mask of his smile.
Lord Dennis was not the man to see what was not intended for him, and he merely said:
"Well, Eustace!" as he might have spoken, meeting his nephew in the hall of one of his London Clubs.
Miltoun, no less polite, murmured:
"Hope I haven't lost you anything."
Lord Dennis shook his head, and laying his rod on the bank, said:
"Sit down and have a chat, old fellow. You don't fish, I think?"He had not, in the least, missed the suffering behind Miltoun's mask;his eyes were still good, and there was a little matter of some twenty years' suffering of his own on account of a woman--ancient history now--which had left him quaintly sensitive, for an old man, to signs of suffering in others.
Miltoun would not have obeyed that invitation from anyone else, but there was something about Lord Dennis which people did not resist;his power lay in a dry ironic suavity which could not but persuade people that impoliteness was altogether too new and raw a thing to be indulged in.
The two sat side by side on the roots of trees. At first they talked a little of birds, and then were dumb, so dumb that the invisible creatures of the woods consulted together audibly. Lord Dennis broke that silence.
"This place," he said, "always reminds me of Mark Twain's writings--can't tell why, unless it's the ever-greenness. I like the evergreen philosophers, Twain and Meredith. There's no salvation except through courage, though I never could stomach the 'strong man'--captain of his soul, Henley and Nietzsche and that sort--goes against the grain with me. What do you say, Eustace?""They meant well," answered Miltoun, "but they protested too much."Lord Dennis moved his head in assent.
"To be captain of your soul!" continued Miltoun in a bitter voice;"it's a pretty phrase!"
"Pretty enough," murmured Lord Dennis.
Miltoun looked at him.
"And suitable to you," he said.
"No, my dear," Lord Dennis answered dryly, "a long way off that, thank God!"His eyes were fixed intently on the place where a large trout had risen in the stillest toffee-coloured pool. He knew that fellow, a half-pounder at least, and his thoughts began flighting round the top of his head, hovering over the various merits of the flies. His fingers itched too, but he made no movement, and the ash-tree under which he sat let its leaves tremble, as though in sympathy.
"See that hawk?" said Miltoun.
At a height more than level with the tops of the hills a buzzard hawk was stationary in the blue directly over them. Inspired by curiosity at their stillness, he was looking down to see whether they were edible; the upcurved ends of his great wings flirted just once to show that he was part of the living glory of the air--a symbol of ******* to men and fishes.
Lord Dennis looked at his great-nephew. The boy--for what else was thirty to seventy-six?--was taking it hard, whatever it might be, taking it very hard! He was that sort--ran till he dropped. The worst kind to help--the sort that made for trouble--that let things gnaw at them! And there flashed before the old man's mind the image of Prometheus devoured by the eagle. It was his favourite tragedy, which he still read periodically, in the Greek, helping himself now and then out of his old lexicon to the meaning of some word which had flown to Erebus. Yes, Eustace was a fellow for the heights and depths!
He said quietly:
"You don't care to talk about it, I suppose?"Miltoun shook his head, and again there was silence.
The buzzard hawk having seen them move, quivered his wings like a moth's, and deserted that plane of air. A robin from the dappled warmth of a mossy stone, was regarding them instead. There was another splash in the pool.
Lord Dennis said gently: