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When, with peace, came the expectation of Nicky's return in safety, it seemed to Ishmael that never before had he known all that fatherhood meant. Cloom, the future, all that he had worked for all his life, would surely come back with Nicky. "When Nicky comes home" grew to be the watchword in the household at Cloom.
That joy had not been won until her feet had trod stranger ways than her friends at Cloom ever imagined. Often she was seized by a pang of conscience that they should admire her as a creature above everything honest and courageous ... for there was more to know of her now than her relation with Killigrew.
Laughter and the swish of skirts mingled with the rustle of stalk and grain, the sway and the dip of skirts mingled with the bending of the sheaves. To Ishmael his lover seemed the sweeter thus absorbed as one of others than even alone. All that month he had been seeing her only, to such an extent that her relationship with the rest of the world down at Cloom had not held his attention.
"How d'you find it, John-Willy?" asked Ishmael of the little old man, who rolled an ear of barley in his horny fingers and answered: "Rich, Maister Ishmael, rich!..." So it had come to the time of the harvest at Cloom, and the crops were sound and sweet, and, if the weather held, the threshing would soon follow.
The rheumatism became so fierce that the local doctor at last decided it must be neuritis, and when the pain became increasingly acute and frequent he grew alarmed and insisted on a London opinion. Vassie herself felt a pang of fear, and it was a genuine terror she carried to the grim house in Harley Street a few days later. The next week she was at Cloom.
It was these gradual slopes.... She could not even say, "It was that moment I first knew I loved him." She lay, her brow pressed against the pillow, and saw again the Killigrew and the Judy of those early days at Cloom when she had been staying with Blanche, taken down there almost unwillingly, certainly against the wishes of her people, who had not shared her enthusiasm for Miss Grey.
And you have so much to do in it.... When d'you start?" "To-morrow morning with dawn, so I must be getting off. If you're awake round about then, Da Boase, think of me beginning to remake the world over at Cloom." And Ishmael set off through the night, his feet lagging with a blissful fatigue and his mind falling on an equally blissful numbness.
Cloom Manor, a deep-roofed, heavy-mullioned pile of grey granite dating from the Restoration, presented a long, low front to the moorland, a front beautified by a pillared porch with the Ruan arms sculptured above it, and at the back it was built round a square court, from which an arch, hollowed through the house itself, led into the farmyard.
It was in the winter that Archelaus reappeared, and the first that Cloom heard of it was a casual word dropped by Katie as she waited at table. "So Cap'n Arch'las is back among us," she remarked cheerfully, after the manner of Cornish servants, who see no harm in imparting items of gossip as they hand a dish; "they do say he'm rare and changed, though 'zackly how I don't knaw.
The letter began by asking for news of Ishmael, and went on with a brief dismissal of the writer's own life during the past years. It had been the "usual thing" no small measure of success, friendships, women, play and work. What mattered was that Killigrew had suddenly taken it into his head he must come down again to Cloom. He was coming and at once. He gave a few characteristic reasons.
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