"Gumble, are you there?" he asked carelessly.
The butler entered from the hallway. "Yes, sir."
"You may leave that decanter."
But the old servant may have misunderstood, for he only bowed and ambled off downstairs with the decanter, either heedless or deaf to his master's sharp order to return.
For a while Siward sat there, eyes fixed, scowling into vacancy; then the old, listless, careworn expression returned; he rested one elbow on the window-sill, his worn cheek on his hand, and with the other hand fell to weaving initials with his pencil on the margin of the newspaper lying on the table beside him.
Lamplight brought out sharply the physical change in him--the angular shadows flat under the cheek-bones, the hard, slightly swollen flesh in the bluish shadows around the eyes. The mark of the master-vice was there; its stamp in the swollen, worn-out hollows; its imprint in the fine lines at the corners of his mouth; its sign manual in the faintest relaxation of the under lip, which had not yet become a looseness.
For the last of the Siwards had at last stepped into the highway which his doomed forebears had travelled before him.
"Gumble!" he called irritably.
A quavering voice, an unsteady step, and the old man entered again. "Mr. Stephen, sir?"
"Bring that decanter back. Didn't you hear me tell you just now?"
"Sir?"
"Didn't you hear me?"
"Yes, Mr. Stephen, sir."
There was a silence.
"Gumble!"
"Sir?"
"Are you going to bring that decanter?"
The old butler bowed, and ambled from the room, and for a long while Siward sat sullenly listening and scoring the edges of the paper with his trembling pencil. Then the lead broke short, and he flung it from him and pulled the bell. Wands came this time, a lank, sandy, silent man, grown gray as a rat in the service of the Siwards. He received his master's orders, and withdrew; and again Siward waited, biting his under lip and tearing bits from the edges of the newspaper with fingers never still; but nobody came with the decanter, and after a while his tense muscles relaxed; something in his very soul seemed to snap, and he sank back in his chair, the hot tears blinding him.
He had got as far as that; moments of self-pity were becoming almost as frequent as scorching intervals of self-contempt.
So they all knew what was the matter with him--they all knew--the doctor, the servants, his friends. Had he not surprised the quick suspicion in Fleetwood's glance, when he told him he had slipped, and sprained his ankle? What if he had been drunk when he fell--fell on his own doorsteps, carried into the old Siward house by old Siward servants, drunk as his forefathers? It was none of Fleetwood's business. It was none of the servants' business. It was nobody's business except his own. Who the devil were all these people, to pry into his affairs and doctor him and dose him and form secret leagues to disobey him, and hide decanters from him? Why should anybody have the impertinence to meddle with him? Of what concern to them were his vices or his virtues?