He did not drive away at once. He waited till Ralph and Ruth had disappeared within the gloomy building, then, heaving a long-drawn sigh, he touched his horse with his whip, and drove slowly down the hill toward the Star and Garter.
"It's very foolish of me to think about women at all," he mused, "especially about one woman in particular. I'm not a woman's man, and never was, and never shall be. Besides, she's good enough for the best in the land."
And he plucked at the reins and started the horse into a trot.
"If I were ten years younger and handsome," he went on, "and didn't keep a shop, and hadn't my mother to keep, and--and----But there, what's the use of saying 'if' this and 'if' that? I'm just William Menire, and nobody else, and there ain't her equal in the three parishes. No, I'd better be content to jog along quietly as I've been doing for years past. It's foolish to dream at my time of life--foolish--foolish!" And with another sigh he let the reins slacken.
But, foolish or not, William continued to dream, until his dreams seemed to him the larger part of his life.
In a long, barrack-like room, with uncarpeted floor and whitewashed walls, Ralph and Ruth found their mother. She was propped up with pillows in a narrow, comfortless bed. Her hands lay listless upon the coarse coverlet, her eyes were fixed upon the blank wall opposite, her lips were parted in a patient and pathetic smile.
She did not see the wall, nor feel the texture of the bedclothes, nor hear the sound of footsteps on the uncarpeted floor. She was back again in the old days when husband and children were about her, and hope gladdened their daily toil, and love glorified and made beautiful the drudgery of life. She tried not to think about the present at all, and in the main she succeeded. Her life was in the past and in the future. When she was not wandering through the pleasant fields of memory, and plucking the flowers that grew in those sheltered vales, she was soaring aloft into those fair Elysian fields which imagination pictured and faith made real--fields on which the blight of winter never fell, and across which storms and tempests never swept.
She had lost all count of days, lost consciousness almost of her present surroundings. Every day was the same--grey and sunless. There were no duties to be done, no meals to prepare, no butter to make, no chickens to feed, no husband to greet when the day was done, no hungry children to come romping in from the fields.