Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/295



ORRELL was fifty years old when he became a gardener, and began to think less of pound notes and more of flowers. The material struggle had passed, and in passing had left him standing like a man made aware of an English Spring after the chill and the greyness of a Channel crossing, those greenly cushioned hills, the woods purple and gold with the swelling of the buds, the innocent faces of the primroses looking up. "Why fret?" And when a thrush sang to him—"Why worry, why worry?" his heart answered,—"Ah,—why?"

The phase came suddenly, and yet no phase is sudden, for a man is what he has been, and there is no growth without roots. To Sorrell it came like the opening of a door in a high, old wall, and within he beheld the ultimate inwardness of his very self, a self that had been growing through all the years.

He had been sitting at his desk in the cottage window with his private ledger open before him, the practical part of his consciousness reflecting the figures on the ruled page. His income! Nine hundred pounds from the Pelican. Two hundred pounds from his shares in the Roland Hotels. Seven hundred and sixty pounds from "William of Winstonbury." He had sat reflecting upon the material foundations of his life, the money that Roland had lent him refunded; the antique business his; a solid share in the four hotels just as surely his; money waiting to be invested.

Suddenly, he had smiled. He was thinking of Christopher, now Surgical Registrar at St. Martha's, a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, a young man well thought of by his elders and instinctively liked by them, which is the most potent form of liking. Kit was well on his way up the ladder, and below the ladder Kit's father had laid those careful foundations.