Felix (nothing if not modern) had succumbed already to the feeling that youth ruled the roost. Whatever his misgivings, his and Flora's sense of loss, Nedda must be given a free hand! Derek gave no outward show of his condition, and but for his little daughter's happy serenity Felix would have thought as she had thought that first night. He had a feeling that his nephew rather despised one so soaked in mildness and reputation as Felix Freeland; and he got on better with Sheila, not because she was milder, but because she was devoid of that scornful tang which clung about her brother.
No! Sheila was not mild. Rich-colored, downright of speech, with her mane of short hair, she was a no less startling companion. The smile of Felix had never been more whimsically employed than during that ten-day visit. The evening John Freeland came to dinner was the highwater mark of his alarmed amusement. Mr. Cuthcott, also bidden, at Nedda's instigation, seemed to take a mischievous delight in drawing out those two young people in face of their official uncle. The pleasure of the dinner to Felix--and it was not too great--was in watching Nedda's face. She hardly spoke, but how she listened! Nor did Derek say much, but what he did say had a queer, sarcastic twinge about it.
"An unpleasant young man," was John's comment afterward. "How the deuce did he ever come to be Tod's son? Sheila, of course, is one of these hot-headed young women that make themselves a nuisance nowadays, but she's intelligible. By the way, that fellow Cuthcott's a queer chap!"
One subject of conversation at dinner had been the morality of revolutionary violence. And the saying that had really upset John had been Derek's: "Conflagration first--morality afterward!" He had looked at his nephew from under brows which a constant need for rejecting petitions to the Home Office had drawn permanently down and in toward the nose, and made no answer.
To Felix these words had a more sinister significance. With his juster appreciation both of the fiery and the official points of view, his far greater insight into his nephew than ever John would have, he saw that they were more than a mere arrow of controversy.
And he made up his mind that night that he would tackle his nephew and try to find out exactly what was smouldering within that crisp, black pate.
Following him into the garden next morning, he said to himself: 'No irony--that's fatal. Man to man--or boy to boy--whichever it is!'
But, on the garden path, alongside that young spread-eagle, whose dark, glowering, self-contained face he secretly admired, he merely began:
"How do you like your Uncle John?"
"He doesn't like me, Uncle Felix."
Somewhat baffled, Felix proceeded:
"I say, Derek, fortunately or unfortunately, I've some claim now to a little knowledge of you. You've got to open out a bit to me.
What are you going to do with yourself in life? You can't support Nedda on revolution."
Having drawn this bow at a venture, he paused, doubtful of his wisdom. A glance at Derek's face confirmed his doubt. It was closer than ever, more defiant.
"There's a lot of money in revolution, Uncle Felix--other people's."
Dash the young brute! There was something in him! He swerved off to a fresh line.
"How do you like London?"
"I don't like it. But, Uncle Felix, don't you wish YOU were seeing it for the first time? What books you'd write!"
Felix felt that unconscious thrust go 'home.' Revolt against staleness and clipped wings, against the terrible security of his too solid reputation, smote him.
"What strikes you most about it, then?" he asked.
"That it ought to be jolly well blown up. Everybody seems to know that, too--they look it, anyway, and yet they go on as if it oughtn't."
"Why ought it to be blown up?"
"Well, what's the good of anything while London and all these other big towns are sitting on the country's chest? England must have been a fine place once, though!"
"Some of us think it a fine place still."
"Of course it is, in a way. But anything new and keen gets sat on.
England's like an old tom-cat by the fire: too jolly comfortable for anything!"
At this support to his own theory that the country was going to the dogs, owing to such as John and Stanley, Felix thought: 'Out of the mouths of babes!' But he merely said: "You're a cheerful young man!"
"It's got cramp," Derek muttered; "can't even give women votes.
Fancy my mother without a vote! And going to wait till every laborer is off the land before it attends to them. It's like the port you gave us last night, Uncle Felix, wonderful crust!"
"And what is to be your contribution to its renovation?"
Derek's face instantly resumed its peculiar defiant smile, and Felix thought: 'Young beggar! He's as close as wax.' After their little talk, however, he had more understanding of his nephew. His defiant self-sufficiency seemed more genuine. . . .
In spite of his sensations when dining with Felix, John Freeland (little if not punctilious) decided that it was incumbent on him to have the 'young Tods' to dinner, especially since Frances Freeland had come to stay with him the day after the arrival of those two young people at Hampstead. She had reached Porchester Gardens faintly flushed from the prospect of seeing darling John, with one large cane trunk, and a hand-bag of a pattern which the man in the shop had told her was the best thing out. It had a clasp which had worked beautifully in the shop, but which, for some reason, on the journey had caused her both pain and anxiety. Convinced, however, that she could cure it and open the bag the moment she could get to that splendid new pair of pincers in her trunk, which a man had only yesterday told her were the latest, she still felt that she had a soft thing, and dear John must have one like it if she could get him one at the Stores to-morrow.
