nd the long deep
furrows running to the corners of the clean-shaven lips, which moved
as if mumbling thoughts. His long legs, thin as a crow's, in shepherd's
plaid trousers, were bent at less than a right angle, and on one knee a
spindly hand moved continually, with fingers wide apart and glistening
tapered nails. Beside him, on a low stool, stood a half-finished glass
of negus, bedewed with beads of heat. There he had been sitting, with
intervals for meals, all day. At eighty-eight he was still organically
sound, but suffering terribly from the thought that no one ever told him
anything. It is, indeed, doubtful how he had become aware that Roger was
being buried that day, for Emily had kept it from him. She was always
keeping things from him. Emily was only seventy! James had a grudge
against his wife's youth. He felt sometimes that he would never have
married her if he had known that she would have so many years before
her, when he had so few. It was not natural. She would live fifteen or
twenty years after he was gone, and might spend a lot of money; she had
always had extravagant tastes. For all he knew she might want to buy
one of these motor-cars. Cicely and Rachel and Imogen and all the young
people--they all rode those bicycles now and went off Goodness knew
where. And now Roger was gone. He didn't know--couldn't tell! The
family was breaking up. Soames would know how much his uncle had left.
Curiously he thought of Roger as Soames' uncle not as his own brother.
Soames! It was more and more the one solid spot in a vanishing world.
Soames was careful; he was a warm man; but he had no one to leave
his money to. There it was! He didn't know! And there was that fellow
Chamberlain! For James' political principles had been fixed between '70
and '85 when 'that rascally Radical' had been the chief thorn in the
side of property and he distrusted him to this day in spite of his
conversion; he would get the country into a mess and make money go down
before he had done with it. A stormy petrel of a chap! Where was Soames?
He had gone to the funeral of course which they had tried to keep from
him. He knew that perfectly well; he had seen his son's trousers. Roger!
Roger in his coffin! He remembered how, when they came up from school
together from the West, on the box seat of the old Slowflyer in 1824,
Roger had got into the 'boot' and gone to sleep. James uttered a thin
cackle. A funny fellow--Roger--an original! He didn't kno