Page:Gilbert Parker--The Lane that had No Turning.djvu/211

Rh The other was looking off towards the rye-field, where, for forty years, up and down the hillside, he had travelled with the cradle and the scythe, putting all there was in him into it, and he answered, blinking along the avenue of the past:

"Mebbe, mebbe!"

Rodney fretted under the old man’s vague replies, and said: "But darn it all, can’t you tell us what you think?"

His father did not take his eyes off the rye-field. "I’m thinking," he answered, in the same old-fashioned way, "that I’ve been working here since you were born, Rod. I’ve blundered along, somehow, just boggling my way through. I ain’t got anything more to say. The farm ain’t mine any more, but I’ll keep my scythe sharp and my axe ground just as I always did, and I’m for workin’ as I’ve always worked as long as I’m let to stay."

"Good Lord, dad, don’t talk that way! Things ain’t going to be any different for you and mother than they are now. Only, of course" He paused.

The old man pieced out the sentence: "Only, of course, there can’t be two women rulin’ one house, Rod, and you know it as well as I do."

Exactly how Rodney’s wife told the old mother of the great change Rodney never knew; but when he went back to the house the grey look in his mother’s face told him more than her words ever told. Before they left that night the pink milliner had already planned the changes which were to celebrate her coming and her ruling.

So Rodney and his wife came, all the old man prophesied in a few brief sentences to his wife proving true. There was no great struggle on the mother’s part; she