, mother, thanks," I answered. "But how are you?" And
the next moment, it seemed to me, I heard her asking if I was
hungry;--whereupon, absurd as it must sound, I was aware of an immense
emotion that interfered with my breathing. It broke up through some
repressive layer that had apparently concealed it, and made me
feel--well, had I been thirty-five years younger, I could have
cried--for pleasure. Mother, I think, forgot those years perhaps. To her
I was still in overalls and wanted food. We drove, then, in comparative
silence the four miles behind the big pair of greys, the only remark
that memory credits me with being an enquiry about the identity of the
coachman whose dim outline I saw looming in the darkness just above me.
The lamplight showed one shoulder, one arm, one ear, the rest concealed;
but the way he drove was, of course, unmistakeable; slowly, more
cautiously, perhaps, but with the same flourish of the whip, the same
air of untold responsibility as ever. And, will you believe it, my chief
memory of all that scene of anticipated tenderness and home-emotion is
the few words he gave in reply to my enquiry and recognition when at
length the carriage stopped and I got out:

"Well, Brown, I'm glad to see you again. All well at home, I hope?"
followed by something of sympathy about his beloved horses.

He looked down sideways at me from the box, touching his cockade with
the long yellow whip in his thick, gloved hand. I can hear his warm,
respectful answer now; I can see the gleam of proud pleasure in his eye:

"Yes, sir, thank you, Sir Richard, and glad to see you back again, sir,
and with such success upon you."

I moved back to help our mother out. I remember thinking how calm, how
solid, how characteristically inarticulate it all was. Did I wish it
otherwise? I think not. Only there was something in me beating its wings
impatiently like a wild bird that felt the bars close round it....
Mother, I realized, could not have said even what the old coachman had
said to save her life, and I remember wondering what would move her into
the expression of natural joy. All that half-hour, as the hoofs echoed
along the silence of the country road, and the old familiar woods and
fields slid past, no sign of deep emotion had escaped her. She had asked
if I was hungry....

And then the smells! The sweet, faint garden smell in the English
twilight:--of laurels and laurestinus, of lilac, pinks, and the heavy
scent of May