All these admitted luxuries and triumphs notwithstanding, a day came when both Ernest Neuchamp, and Antonia his wife, began to approach, with increasing eagerness and decision, the question of return. In the three years which they had spent ‘at home’ they had, they could not conceal from themselves, exhausted the resources of Britain—of Europe—in their present state of sensation.
Natural as was such a feeling in the heart of Antonia, with whom a yearning for her birthland, her childhood’s home, for but once again to hear the sigh of the summer wave from the verandah at Morahmee, was gradually gaining intensity, one wonders that Ernest Neuchamp should have fully shared her desire to return. Yet such was undoubtedly the fact.
Briton as he was to the core, he had, during the third year of their furlough, been often impatient, often aweary, of an aimless life—that of a gazer, a spectator, a dilettante. Truth to tell, the strong free life of the new world had unfitted him for an existence of a mere recipiency.
A fox-hunter, a fisherman, a fair shot, and a lover of coursing, he yet realised the curious fact that he was unable to satisfy his personal needs by devoting the greater portion of his leisure to these recreations, perfect in accessories and appointments, unrivalled in social concomitants, as are these kingly sports when enjoyed in Britain.
Passionately fond of art, a connoisseur, and erstwhile an amateur of fair attainment, a haunter of libraries, a discriminating judge of old editions and rare imprints, he yet commenced to become impatient of days and weeks so spent. Such a life appeared to him now to be a waste of time. In vain his brother Courtenay remonstrated.
‘I feel, my dear Courtenay, and it is no use disguising the truth to you or to myself, that I can no longer rest content in this little England of yours. It is a snug nest, but the bird has flown over the orchard wall, his wings have swept the waste and beat the foam; he can never again, I fear, dwell there, as of old; never again, I fear.’
‘But why, in the name of all that is exasperating and eccentric, can you not be quiet, and let well alone?’ asked Courtenay, not without a flavour of just resentment. ‘You have money; an obedient, utterly devoted father-in-law, of a species unknown in Britain; a charming wife, who might lead me like a bear, were I so fortunate as to have been appropriated by her; troops of friends, I might almost say admirers—for you must own you are awfully overrated in the county. What in the wide world can urge you to tempt fortune by re-embarkation and this superfluous buccaneering?’