ILLIAM RED SPENSER lived by his pen.
Neither of his grandfathers would have approved this calling, but theirs were the days of rent-rolls and fortunes invested in 'the funds,' and, since old orders change and the devil drives high and low, the son of fifty squires lived by his pen.
Had he cared to live in a city, to write more quickly, to study the public taste, he could have made more than he did: but the Red Spensers had never been townsmen, and the love of the countryside was in his blood. More. He came of a line of landlords that loved their land. An acre of his own, in the midst of which he could live, meant more to Spenser than ten times its worth in shares: and, since in post-war England such a life was beyond his means, he had bought a tiny estate in the foot-hills of the Pyrenees.
When his freehold had been paid for, his old English furniture installed and a pocket bed-chamber made into a decent bathroom, the owner of the old white-walled homestead had found himself poor indeed. Happily, however, he had a market for his work, and, before six months were over, he was abreast of his outlay and able to pay his way.
And now two years had gone by, and William Red Spenser, recluse, was doing well. The old house was in order, the little property flourished, the massive coach-house sheltered a serviceable car. The friends who declared that he was wasting his life paid him flying visits and went away less sure. There was a stable peacefulness about Piétat which was not of their world. The place and its pleasant master stuck in their minds, rose up before them like a proverb the comfortable wisdom of which is not to be denied.
Belinda Pomeroy, popularly supposed to get the most out of life, made no bones of her approbation.
"Rufus knows how to live. I get more satisfaction out of a day at Piétat than out of Ascot itself. Why? Because I get down to Nature. We're all on the wrong tack—, if you like, rushing into the sea. But Rufus sees further. He sits right down in his castle and watches the crowd go by. He lives as men and woman were meant to live. But he ought to marry."
"He can't take a wife," said her husband, "out of the Gadarene swine. That would be a mésalliance."
"There must be others," said Belinda.
"There are. But they wouldn't suit Rufus. He buries himself alive, but he doesn't go rough."
This was most true.
When Spenser emerged from his kingdom,, he might have stepped out of his Club. Beyond a certain gravity of manner, solitude and simplicity left no mark upon the man. A handsome villa at Biarritz brought the Pomeroys thither twice in the year. When Spenser visited them, his clothes were faultless and his address was superb. As he danced at the Casino, nobody would have dreamed that his heart was in a fold of the foot-hills forty miles off.
"We're not Gadarene swine," said Belinda. "We may be Gadarenes, and I admit that we rush: but we don't rush quite so violently as the—the—as some do."
"True," said her husband, holding his glass to the light. "But, even so, can you reclaim a Gadarene? I can't see you dwelling at Piétat, brushing the sheep before breakfast and turning out after dinner to gather the slugs."
"I should love it," said Belinda. "Let's go to Biarritz next week."
"What, an' miss Goodwood?"
Mrs. Pomeroy hesitated. The raiment she had chosen for Goodwood was very fine.
"Of course," she said, "I'm afraid I'm in over the knees. Before we married, I had begun to rush. And now..."
Her husband drained his glass, rose to his feet and picked her up in his arms.
"I'm a born Gadarene," he said, "and I married the best of my kind. But for you, I should have been a Gadarene swine. And there you are. Rufus commands our admiration, but then and there we get off. And so, I'm afraid, my beauty, will everyone else. But I shouldn't trouble your head. Rufus is very happy and thinks far too much of my wife to look twice at another girl."
Belinda kissed him. Then she sighed contentedly.
"At least," she said, "he's only just twenty-nine. And we can always hope."
She could not know that at that very moment William Red Spenser was trying not to despair.
The man was standing in his courtyard, by the side of his well, frowning upon a fine cord, of which twenty inches were wet.
Water.
Piétat had but one well, and now, before the great drought, its springs were beginning to fail....
Spenser lifted his head and looked at the sky.
This was mercilessly blue: where the earth rose up to meet it, outline was blurred: distance was dancing, and the sun swaggered in the heaven, a heavy-handed monarch of all he surveyed.
Spenser looked again at the cord.