He had a curious quality derived of some inherited instinct of fear—­a quality that made him distrust change.  It had been that which had held him back on the day at St. Renny when he had dallied with the notion of running away to sea; it had been that which had made him loth to leave school at the end in spite of his excitement over returning to a Cloom legally his; and it was that now which enabled him to be hypnotised by his own furrows drawing out in front of him.  He clung to what happiness he knew in a way rare in one so young, and he was quite aware how much of it he found even in uncongenial company.  What might lie beyond it he distrusted.

Not for nothing had Annie lived through the stress she had before his birth, and from her circumstances, though not her nature, he drew that queer mingling of content and dread.  But from the old Squire, little as he resembled him in all else, came that impersonality in what are usually personal relationships, against which even the Parson beat in vain.  Through all his passionate sinning James Ruan had held himself aloof from the sharer in his sins.  What for him had been the thing by which he lived no one ever knew; his sardonic laughter barred all ingress to his mind.

With Ishmael, as the Parson was beginning to see, places had so far stood for more than people.  St. Renny, the manner and atmosphere of it, had meant more than Killigrew, the Vicarage than the Parson, Cloom than his brothers and sister and the friends he made there.  It was towards this very detachment that the Parson’s upbringing of Ishmael had tended, and yet he now felt the need of more.  For some appetite for more life was bound to stir and break into being one day, and Boase was passionately desirous that it should make for happiness and good.  Thus Boase thought of it all, but, after the fashion of the race of which Ishmael also was one, he showed no sign of his meditations.

With the approach of the boy’s twenty-first birthday the Parson saw light.  Though Ishmael had come of age, as far as the property went, three years earlier, still the occasion was not without import, and could fittingly mark some change.  A word to Annie produced no result, a hint to Vassie and the thing was in full swing.  Ishmael always thought it was his own idea that Killigrew, back in London from his Paris studies, should be asked down to Cloom.  It was not everyone that could have been called in to help at celebrating a twenty-first birthday under such circumstances as Ishmael’s; it could hardly be made an occasion for feasting tenantry and neighbouring gentry, but it might be used for what Boase, through Killigrew, hoped—­the disruption of an atmosphere.  That done, a new one could be created.

Killigrew arrived.  He startled the natives considerably by his loose jacket and flowing tie, but his red hair was cut fairly short, though his chin was decked by a soft young pointed beard that gave him a Mephistophelian aspect ludicrously set at naught by his white eyelashes, which, round his more short-sighted eye, were set off by a single glass.