BOOK IV

THE SHADOW OF THE SCYTHE

CHAPTER I

QUESTIONS OF VISION

“I am getting on, you know,” said Nicky Ruan.  “At twenty-two—­nearly twenty-three—­a fellow isn’t as young as he was.  And I don’t want to stick here till I’m too old to enjoy seeing the world.”

“What should you consider too old, Nicky?” asked Ishmael.

Nicky hesitated; he made a rapid calculation in his head, and arriving at the fact that his father must be quite forty-six or seven, and being always averse to hurting anyone’s feelings unless it was very worth while, he temporised.

“Oh, well! it depends on the fellow, doesn’t it?  I expect, for instance, you weren’t nearly as old as me when you were my age, because you didn’t go to the ’Varsity, and of course that makes a difference....”

Ishmael sat smoking and looking at the boy in silence.  He felt he knew what the old Bible phrase meant when it spoke of yearning over a child.  He felt the helpless desire to protect, to stand between this golden boy and all that must come to him, and he knew that not only can no one live for anyone else, but that youth would refuse the gift were it possible to make it.

Nicky, about whom he knew so little, about whom he realised he had always known so little....  What did he really know about Nicky’s life, his doings up at Oxford, his thoughts?  Roughly he was aware of his tastes, his habits at home, his affections; but of the other Nicky, the individual that stood towards life, not the boy who stood in his relation of son towards him, he knew nothing.  Women, now ... what lay behind that smooth lean young face—­what of knowledge about women?  Ishmael had no means of telling.  Whether Nicky were still as pure as his two little sisters, whether he had the technical purity that may for some time go with a certain amount of curiosity and corruption of the mind, whether he had already had his “adventures,” or whether he were still too undeveloped, too immersed in sports and himself to have bothered about women, Ishmael could not really tell, any more than could any other parent.

The only thing in which Ishmael differed from the average parent was in acknowledging his ignorance to himself.  But then Nicky had always had that curious intangible quality, that mental slipping-away from all grip, which had made it especially difficult ever really to know what his thoughts were and what he really knew.  Not that there was any reserve about Nicky—­he was not at all averse to talking freely about himself; but it seemed as though either there were in him a hollow where most people keep the root of self, or else that a very deep-seated personality held court there.  Whichever it was, the effect was the same, the effect as of a sealed place.