CHAPTER IX

BELLEW BOWS TO A LADY

There was silence at the Firs, and in that silent house, where only five rooms were used, an old manservant sat in his pantry on a wooden chair, reading from an article out of Rural Life.  There was no one to disturb him, for the master was asleep, and the housekeeper had not yet come to cook the dinner.  He read slowly, through spectacles, engraving the words for ever on the tablets of his mind.  He read about the construction and habits of the owl:  “In the tawny, or brown, owl there is a manubrial process; the furcula, far from being joined to the keel of the sternum, consists of two stylets, which do not even meet; while the posterior margin of the sternum presents two pairs of projections, with corresponding fissures between.”  The old manservant paused, resting his blinking eyes on the pale sunlight through the bars of his narrow window, so that a little bird on the window-sill looked at him and instantly flew away.

The old manservant read on again:  “The pterylological characters of Photodilus seem not to have been investigated, but it has been found to want the tarsal loop, as well as the manubrial process, while its clavicles are not joined in a furcula, nor do they meet the keel, and the posterior margin of the sternum has processes and fissures like the tawny section.”  Again he paused, and his gaze was satisfied and bland.

Up in the little smoking-room in a leather chair his master sat asleep.  In front of him were stretched his legs in dusty riding-boots.  His lips were closed, but through a little hole at one corner came a tiny puffing sound.  On the floor by his side was an empty glass, between his feet a Spanish bulldog.  On a shelf above his head reposed some frayed and yellow novels with sporting titles, written by persons in their inattentive moments.  Over the chimneypiece presided the portrait of Mr. Jorrocks persuading his horse to cross a stream.

And the face of Jaspar Bellew asleep was the face of a man who has ridden far, to get away from himself, and to-morrow will have to ride far again.  His sandy eyebrows twitched with his dreams against the dead-white, freckled skin above high cheekbones, and two hard ridges were fixed between his brows; now and then over the sleeping face came the look of one riding at a gate.

In the stables behind the house she who had carried him on his ride, having rummaged out her last grains of corn, lifted her nose and poked it through the bars of her loosebox to see what he was doing who had not carried her master that sweltering afternoon, and seeing that he was awake, she snorted lightly, to tell him there was thunder in the air.  All else in the stables was deadly quiet; the shrubberies around were still; and in the hushed house the master slept.

But on the edge of his wooden chair in the silence of his pantry the old manservant read, “This bird is a voracious feeder,” and he paused, blinking his eyes and nervously puckering his lips, for he had partially understood....