The little boys grew big and went to school. This time it was not to the dame\'s school in the village, for that had collapsed before the new board-school which had risen to madden Reuben\'s eyes with the spectacle of an educated populace. They went to Rye Grammar School and learned Latin and Greek like gentlemen. There was something new in Reuben\'s attitude towards these boys, for his indulgence had deeper roots than expediency. Sometimes of an evening he would go to the bottom of the Totease lane, where it joins the Peasmarsh road, and wait there for his sons\' return. They would see him afar off, and run to meet him, and they would all three walk home together, arm-in-arm perhaps.

He would have been exceedingly indignant if in bygone days anyone had ever hinted that he did not[Pg 389] love the sons and daughters whom he had beaten, kicked out of doors, frustrated, suppressed, or driven to calamity. All the same, he acknowledged that there was a difference between his feelings towards Rose\'s children and Naomi\'s. Though Naomi was the wife more pleasant to remember, Rose\'s were the children he loved best. They had not grown up in the least like her, and he was glad of that, for he would have hated to confront again her careless, lovely face, or the provoking little teeth of her smile; they were Backfields, dark of hair and swarthy of skin, David with grey eyes, William with brown.

When he saw them running along the lane from school, or tramping the fields together—they were always together—or helping with the hops or the hay, his heart would stir with a warm, unwonted sense of fatherhood, not just the proud paternal impulse which had visited him when he held his new-born babies in his arms, but something belonging more to the future than the present, to the days when they should carry on Odiam after his death. For the first time he had sons whom he looked upon not merely as labourers to help him in his work, but as men created in his own image to inherit that work and reap its fruits when he was gone.

He was pleased to see their evident love of the farm. They begged him not to keep them too long at school, for they wanted to come home and work on Odiam. So he took David away when he was sixteen, and William when he was fifteen the next year.

Meantime it seemed as if in spite of his absorption in his new family he was not to be entirely cut off from the old. In the summer of \'87, just after the Jubilee, he had a letter from Richard, announcing that he and his wife were coming for a week or so to Rye. Reuben had not heard of Richard for some years, and had not seen him since he left Odiam—he had been asked to the wedding, but had refused to go. Now Richard expressed[Pg 390] the hope that he would soon see his father. His was a nature that mellows and softens in prosperity, and though he had not forgotten the miseries of his youth, he was too happy to let them stand between him and Reuben now that they were only memories.

Anne was not so disposed to forgive—she had her brother\'s score as well as her husband\'s to settle, and concealed from no one that she thought her father-in-law a brutal and conscienceless old slave-driver whose success was a slur on the methods of Providence. She refused to accompany Richard on his first visit to Odiam, but spent the afternoon at Flightshot, while he tramped with Reuben over the land that had once been so hateful to him.

Reuben, though he would not have confessed it, was much taken with his son\'s appearance. Richard looked taller, which was probably because he held himself better, more proudly erect; his face seemed also subtly changed; he had almost a legal profile, due partly no doubt to a gold-rimmed pince-nez. He looked astonishingly clean-shaven, he wore good clothes, and his hands were slim and white, not a trace of uncongenial work remaining. He had quite lost his Sussex accent, and Reuben vaguely felt that he was a credit to him.

Their attitude, at first constrained, soon became more cordial than either would have thought possible in earlier days. Richard made no tactless references to his brothers and sisters, and admired and praised everything, even the pigsties that had used to make him sick. They went out into the fields and inspected the late lambs, Richard showing that he had lost every trace of shepherd-lore that had ever been his. His remarks on shearing gave Reuben a very bad opinion of the English Bar; however, they parted in a riot of mutual civility, and Richard asked his father to dine with him at the Mermaid in a couple of days.

Anne was furious when she heard of the invitation.
 
"You know I don\'t want to meet your father—and I\'m sure he\'ll disgrace us."

"He\'s more likely to amuse us," said Richard; "he\'s a character, and I shall enjoy studying him for the first time from an unbiassed view-point."

"It won\'t be unbiassed if he disgraces us."

However, Reuben did not disgrace them. On the contrary, more than one admiring glance drifted to the Backfields\' table, and remarks were overheard about "that picturesque old man." Reuben had dressed himself with care in a suit of dark grey cloth and the flowered waistcoat he had bought when he married Rose. His collar was so high and stiff that he could hardly get his chin over it, his hair was brushed and oiled till its grey thickness shone like the sides of a man-o\'-war, and his hands looked quite clean by artificial light.

Richard had invited his young half-brothers too, for they had been at school when he visited Odiam. They struck him as quite ordinary-looking boys, dressed in modern reach-me-downs, and only partially inheriting their father\'s good looks. As for them, they were cowed and abashed past all words. It seemed incredible that this resplendent being in the white shirt-front and gold-rimmed eye-glasses was their brother, and the lady with the hooked nose and the diamonds their sister-in-law. They scarcely ventured to speak, and were appalled by the knives and forks and glasses that lay between them and their dinner.

Reuben too was appalled by them, but would not for worlds have shown it. He attacked the knives and forks with such vigour that he did not get really involved in them till the joint, and as he re............