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Later, when the sun had moved high and they scrambled up to go home, Georgie was the laughing child again; only for a second, as they stood on the ridge above and looked down to the silvery patch where the bright grass was flattened where they had lain, she wore the look that had transfigured her before. In the early autumn Ishmael married, and a new phase began for him at Cloom.
And he withdrew the foot and was off through the darkness under the elms. Phoebe was left with her awakened heart-beats. Harvest had all been gathered in at Cloom, the threshing was over, the grain lay in heaps, grey-green and golden, in the barn, or had been sold and taken away, and the first tang of early autumn was in the air.
Renny, although in the same county, was a great one, for whereas Cloom lay on the wind-swept promontory where only occasional folds in the land could give some hint of what gentler-nurtured pastures might be like, the whole little grey town of St.
He still had the delightful affectations of youth, but wore them with a better grace. He came back not only the heir and future master of Cloom, but a man who could have won his way in the world without so many acres behind him.
A few days after Nicky's triumphant election, when thought was once more possible at Cloom, Ishmael felt more depressed than he had for long; he had been living not so much in the valleys as upon the straight plains of late. To-day his eyes were hurting him and he could not read; there was no work crying to be done, and the heavy warm air was misted with damp that seemed to melt into the bones.
In the night, when the wall was filmed with shadow save for the faint flickering of a rushlight that made great rounds of light upon the dimness, then he saw all his life at Cloom passing in a shadow show across the wall, crawling like the flies.... He was never delirious; physically his fine and sane constitution was recovering well from a nasty blow it was merely as though all his mind had been set a little faster, like a newly-regulated clock, a clock set to work backwards; and he could hear its ticking through all the sounds of everyday life that, hushed as much as might be, came into his room.
Cloom was a house of neglected glories, of fine things fallen on base uses, like the family itself. When James Ruan came into his inheritance it was still a gentleman's estate; when he died it was a mere farm.
The only girl he even knew at all was Phoebe, and at the idea of her in connection with himself he smiled. That would indeed be giving the lie to all he had struggled after to the vision of the Cloom to be that he had built up with much work and many dreams.
With a sensation of something clogging, but infinitely satisfying too, he admitted it. Cloom had been too strong for him. It was the only time another path ever even suggested itself to him, and then the suggestion had not been sincere, merely the promptings of that literary sense which is in all imaginative youth.
Archelaus had "won" in that Cloom would belong, though no man knew it, to his son and his grandson after him, but it no longer seemed to Ishmael to matter whether Archelaus "won" or not. There was at last no striving, no unacknowledged but hidden combat, no feeling of lingering unfairness.
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