He
was a robust, well-built, red-brown young fellow, who smelt always of
freshly ground meal, as though his body, from long usage, had grown to
exhale the cleanly odour of the trade he followed. His hair was thick,
dark and powdered usually with mill-dust. His eyes, of a clear bright
hazel, deep-set and piercing, expressed a violence of nature which his
firm, thin-lipped mouth, bare of beard or moustache, appeared to deny.
A certain tenacity--a suggestion of stubbornness in the jaw, gave the
final hint to his character, and revealed that temperamental intolerance
of others of the rustic who has risen out of his class. An opinion once
embraced acquired the authority of a revelation; a passion once yielded
to was transformed into a principle. Impulsive, generous, undisciplined,
he represented, after all, but the reaction from the spirit of racial
submission which was embodied in Reuben Merryweather. Tradition
had bound Reuben in thongs of steel; Abel was conscious only of his
liberated intelligence--of a passionate desire to test to the fullest
the certainty of that liberation. As the elder had suffered beneath the
weight of the established order, so the younger showed the disturbing
effects of a freedom which had resulted from a too rapid change in
economic conditions rather than from the more gradual evolution of
class.
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