The Freelands | Page 8

end of term, sir."
"Ah! You must not come back here, Freeland minimus. You are too
dangerous, to yourself, and others. Go to your place."
And poor little Tod ascending again all those steps, cheeks more
terribly rosy than ever, eyes bluer, from under a still more troubled
frown; little mouth hard set; and breathing so that you could hear him
six forms off. True, the new Head had been goaded by other outrages,
the authors of which had not omitted to remove their names; but the
want of humor, the amazing want of humor! As if it had not been a sign
of first-rate stuff in Tod! And to this day Felix remembered with
delight the little bubbling hiss that he himself had started, squelched at
once, but rippling out again along the rows like tiny scattered lines of
fire when a conflagration is suppressed. Expulsion had been the
salvation of Tod! Or--his damnation? Which? God would know, but
Felix was not certain. Having himself been fifteen years acquiring 'Mill'
philosophy, and another fifteen years getting rid of it, he had now
begun to think that after all there might be something in it. A
philosophy that took everything, including itself, at face value, and
questioned nothing, was sedative to nerves too highly strung by the
continual examination of the insides of oneself and others, with a view
to their alteration. Tod, of course, having been sent to Germany after
his expulsion, as one naturally would be, and then put to farming, had
never properly acquired 'Mill' manner, and never sloughed it off; and
yet he was as sedative a man as you could meet.
Emerging from the Tube station at Hampstead, he moved toward home
under a sky stranger than one might see in a whole year of evenings.
Between the pine-trees on the ridge it was opaque and colored like

pinkish stone, and all around violent purple with flames of the young
green, and white spring blossom lit against it. Spring had been dull and
unimaginative so far, but this evening it was all fire and gathered
torrents; Felix wondered at the waiting passion of that sky.
He reached home just as those torrents began to fall.
The old house, beyond the Spaniard's Road, save for mice and a faint
underlying savor of wood-rot in two rooms, well satisfied the aesthetic
sense. Felix often stood in his hall, study, bedroom, and other
apartments, admiring the rich and simple glow of them-- admiring the
rarity and look of studied negligence about the stuffs, the flowers, the
books, the furniture, the china; and then quite suddenly the feeling
would sweep over him: "By George, do I really own all this, when my
ideal is 'bread and water, and on feast days a little bit of cheese'?" True,
he was not to blame for the niceness of his things--Flora did it; but
still--there they were, a little hard to swallow for an epicurean. It might,
of course, have been worse, for if Flora had a passion for collecting, it
was a very chaste one, and though what she collected cost no little
money, it always looked as if it had been inherited, and--as everybody
knows--what has been inherited must be put up with, whether it be a
coronet or a cruet-stand.
To collect old things, and write poetry! It was a career; one would not
have one's wife otherwise. She might, for instance, have been like
Stanley's wife, Clara, whose career was wealth and station; or John's
wife, Anne, whose career had been cut short; or even Tod's wife,
Kirsteen, whose career was revolution. No--a wife who had two, and
only two children, and treated them with affectionate surprise, who was
never out of temper, never in a hurry, knew the points of a book or play,
could cut your hair at a pinch; whose hand was dry, figure still good,
verse tolerable, and-- above all--who wished for no better fate than Fate
had given her-- was a wife not to be sneezed at. And Felix never had.
He had depicted so many sneezing wives and husbands in his books,
and knew the value of a happy marriage better perhaps than any one in
England. He had laid marriage low a dozen times, wrecked it on all
sorts of rocks, and had the greater veneration for his own, which had

begun early, manifested every symptom of ending late, and in the
meantime walked down the years holding hands fast, and by no means
forgetting to touch lips.
Hanging up the gray top hat, he went in search of her. He found her in
his dressing-room, surrounded by a number of little bottles, which she
was examining vaguely, and putting one by one into an 'inherited'
waste-paper basket. Having watched her for a