David Marshall was a tall, spare man whose slow composure of carriage
invested him with a sort of homely dignity. He wore a reddish beard, now
largely touched with white--a mixture whose effect prompted the
suggestion that his grandfather might have been a Scotchman; and the look
from his blue eyes (though now no longer at their brightest) convinced
you that his sight was competent to cover the field of vision to which he
had elected to restrict himself. He seemed completely serious, to have
been so always, to have been born half grown up, to have been dowered at
the start with too keen a consciousness of the burdens and
responsibilities of life. Coltishness, even by a retrospect of fifty
years, it was impossible to attribute to him. You imagined him as having
been caught early, broken to harness at once, and kept between the shafts
ever since. It was easy to figure him as backing into position with a
sweet and reasonable docility--a docility which saw no other course or
career for a properly minded young horse, and which looked upon the
juvenile antics of others in the herd as an unintelligible and rather
reprehensible procedure. He knew what he was for, and his way was before
him.
He had acted on his knowledge, and now, at sixty, he seemed still to be
travelling over the same long straight road, blinders at his eyes, a high
wall on either side, no particular goal in the dusty distance, and an air
of patient, self-approving resignation all about him.
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