Several thousand people caught that day their first curious glimpse of the new master of Caermere. At the most there were but a handful of aged persons, in the throng clustered along the sides of the road winding down from the Castle to the partially restored medieval collegiate church in the valley, who could remember any other duke than the one being borne now to lie among his fathers. The fact that these venerable folk, without exception, were in the enjoyment of a day’s holiday from the workhouse, might have interested a philosopher, had it been pressed upon his attention.
Quite two hundred horsemen, mounted in their own saddles on their own beasts, rode in the long procession which descended from Caermere toward the close of the noon hour. Clad in decent black for the greater part, with old silk hats or other formal and somber headgear, they jogged sedately in unison as the curbed horses stepped with caution down the hill. Their browned and large-featured faces wore a uniform mask of solemnity—distinguished chiefly by a resolute contraction of brows and lips, and eyes triumphantly cleared of all traces of speculation. They looked down, as they passed, upon the humbler dalesmen and laborers of the hillsides, and their womenfolk and swarming children, with an impassive, opacated gaze.
On the green, before the little covered gateway to the churchyard, dull murmurs spread through this cortege, propelled sidelong from mouths which scorned to open; the main principles of a proposed evolution came slowly, in some mysterious way, to be comprehended among them: after almost less backing and pushing into one another than might have been expected, they perceived themselves emerging into an orderly arrangement, by which they lined the two sides of the carriage-way crossing the green. They regarded each other across this significant strip of gravel with a gloomy stolidity of pride: the West Salop Yeomanry could scarcely have done it better. Then another rustle of whispered sounds along their ranks toward the church—and the civic side of their demonstration came uppermost. With a tightened left hand upon the reins, they removed their hats, and held them so that they could most readily read the names of the makers inside.
The carriages bearing the family of Torr, preceded by the curtained hearse, and followed by a considerable number of broughams and closed landaus recognizable as the property of the neighboring gentry, moved silently forward along this lane of uncovered horsemen. The distant swelling moan of the organ floated on the May air, in effect a comment upon the fact that the tolling of the bell in the tower had ceased.
The intermittent noise of carriage-doors being sharply shut, and of wheels getting out of the way, proceeded from the head of the procession at the gate—and tenants and other undistinguished people on foot began to press forward between the ranks. The horsemen, with furtive glances to right and left, put on their hats again, and let the restive animals stretch their muscles in the path. A few, dismounting, and giving their bridles over to boys, joined those who were moving toward the church. The majority, drawing their horses aside into groups formed at random, and incessantly shifting, lent their intellects, and in some restrained measure their tongues, to communion upon the one great problem of the day:—would the new Duke set the Hunt on its legs again?
The question was so intimately connected with their tenderest emotions and convictions, that no one liked to speak of it thoughtlessly or upon hasty impulse. Even those who doubted most, shrank from hearing the prophecies of evil they felt prone to utter. Men who nourished almost buoyant hopes still hesitated to create a confidence which must be so precarious. While the faint sustained recitative of the priest in the church could be heard, insistent and disturbing like the monotone of a distant insect, and then the sounds of the organ once more, and of singing, fell upon the sunlit green, the horsemen spoke cautiously about the hounds. Even before Lord Porlock’s death, things had not been what they should have been. The pack was even then, as one might say, falling between two stools. The Torrs hadn’t the money to keep the thing up properly themselves, but they showed their teeth savagely the minute mention was made of getting in some outside help. But since Porlock’s death—well, the condition of affairs had been too painful for words. The horsemen shook their heads in dumb eloquence upon this tragic interval. The Kennels had lapsed into a state hardly to be thought of, much less discussed. There had been no puppy-walk. Were there any young dogs at all? And, just heavens! if there were, what must they be like!
And yet the country-side, outraged as it felt itself to be in its finest feelings, beheld itself helpless. The old Duke—but really this was not just the time and place for saying what they felt about the old Duke They glanced uneasily toward the church when this theme suggested itself, and nodded with meaning to one another. It could be taken for granted that there were no illusions among them concerninghim. But what about the new man? Eyes brightened, lips quivered in beseeching inquiry, at the mention of this omnipotent stranger. What was he like? Had anybody heard anything that Welldon had said about him? It seemed that he was French bred, and that, considered by itself, might easily involve the worst. But then, was there not a story that he had ridden to the hounds in Derbyshire? Perhaps the younger generation of Frenchmen were better fellows than their fathers—but then, there was the reported fact that the Duke of Orleans fell off his horse and broke his leg whenever he tried to ride. Sir George had been informed in Paris that he would have been King of France by this time if he had been able to stick in a saddle. Yet, when one thought of it, did not this very fact indicate a fine new public sentiment in France, on the subject of horsemanship—and perhaps even of sport in general?
Christian, at the door of the church, had thought most of clenching his teeth, and straining his upper-arms against his sides, to keep from trembling. He had not pictured himself, beforehand, as entering this burial place of his ancestors alone. Yet, in the churchyard, that was how the matter arranged itself. His first idea had been to lead, with Kathleen on his arm—but she had said her place was with Emanuel instead. Then the alternative of walking arm-in-arm with Lord Julius had seemed to him even more appropriate—but this too, in the confused constraint of the moment, had gone wrong. Stealing an anxious half-glance over his shoulder, he discovered that Lord Julius had placed himself at Kathleen’s other side. The slight gesture of appealing invitation which he ventured upon did not catch the old man’s eye. There was nothing for it but to stand alone.
To be the strange, unsupported central figure in such a pageant unnerved him. He stood tremulously behind the pall—a burden draped with a great purple embroidered cloth, and borne upon the shoulders of eight peasant-laborers from the estate—and noted fleetingly that, so stunted and mean of stature were these poor hinds, he looked with ease above them, over their load, into the faces of the two priests advancing down the walk toward him.
These persons, an elderly, dark man, with a red hood folded upon his shoulders, and a thin-faced fair young man, seemed to return the gaze with meaning. He caught himself feeling that their eyes deferred to him; yes, if they had bowed to the ground, the effect of their abasement before him could not have been more palpable. Looking perfunctorily across the chasm of death, their glances sought to, make interest with the living. He hated them both on the instant. As they wheeled, and by their measured steps forward drew slowly in their wake the bearers of the pall, the chant of the elder—“I am the Resurrection and the Life”—came vaguely to his ears, and found them hostile.
The interior of the old church—dim, cool, cloistral—was larger than Christian had assumed from its outer aspect. Many people were present, crowded close in the pews nearest the door—and strangely enough, it was his perception that these were chiefly women, of some unlabeled class which at least was not his own, that brought to him of a sudden self-command. He followed the bier up the aisle to its resting-place before the rail, took tacit cognizance of the place indicated to him by some man in professional black, and stood aside to let Kathleen pass in before him, all with a restored equanimity in which he was himself much interested. Through the reading of the Psalm and the Epistle he gave but the most vagrant attention to their words. The priests read badly, for one thing; the whining artificiality of their elocution annoyed and repelled him. But still more, his thoughts were diverted by the suggestiveness of everything about him.
Especially, the size of the funeral gathering, and of the mounted and wheeled procession, had impressed him. There need be no pretense that affection or esteem for the dead man had brought out, from the sparsely populated country round about, this great multitude. Precisely for that reason, it became a majestic fact. The burial of a Duke of Glastonbury had nothing to do with, personal qualities or reputation. It was like the passing away of a monarch. People who cared nothing for the individual were stirred and appealed to by the vicissitudes of an institution. Inset upon the walls around him were marble tablets, and more archaic canopies of stone over little carved effigies of kneeling figures; beyond, at the sides of the chancel, he could see the dark, rectangular elevations of the tombs, capped by recumbent mail-clad statues, with here and there a gleam of gilt or scarlet retained from their ancient ornamentation; even as he had walked slowly up the aisle, his downcast eyes had noticed the chiseled heraldry of stones beneath his feet. Everywhere about him was the historic impact of the Torrs. Their ashes were here—their banners and shields and tilting-helmets, their symbolical quarterings of the best arms of the West, their own proudest device of all. Their white bull on the green ground was familiar in England long before the broom-corn of the Angevins had been thought of. The clerkly pun on Tor and Taurus was as like as not older than the English language itself. All this made something mightier, more imposing and enduring, than any edifice to be reared by man alone. It was only in part human, this structure of the family. The everlasting hills were a part of it, the dark ranges of forests, the spirits and legends of the ancient Marches.
“In the morning it is green, and groweth up; but in the evening it is cut down, dried up and withered,” droned the young clergyman.
But if man seemed to count for but little in this tremendous, forceful aggregation of tradition and custom, yet again he might be all in all. The tall old man under the purple pall, there—it was easy to think contemptuously of him. Christian recalled, in a kind of affrighted musing, that one view of his grandfather that he had had. The disgust with which he had heard the stupid, violent words from those aged lips revived within him—then changed to wonder. Was it not, after all, the principle of strength which most affected men’s minds? There had been discernible in that grandfather of his a certain sort of strength—dull, unintelligent, sinister, half-barbarous, but still strength. Was it not that which had brought forth the two hundred horsemen? And if this one element, of strength—yes, you might call it brute strength—were lacking, then would all the other fine qualities in the world avail to hold the impalpable, intangible combination together?
“‘He shall have put down all rule, and all authority, and power.’” It was the old parson who was reading now.
“‘For He must reign, till He hath put all enemies under His feet.’”
Yes, even in this Protestant religion to which he had passively become committed, force was the real ideal! Christian’s wandering mind fastened itself for a moment upon the ensuing words of the lesson, but got nothing from their confusing reiterations. He lapsed into reverie again, then started abruptly with the sudden perception that everybody in the church behind him must be looking at him. In the pew immediately behind, there would be Captain Edward and his wife, and Augustine; in the one behind that Lady Cressage, Lord Chobham and his son; beyond them scores and scores of others seated in rows, and then a throng in the aisle and the doorway—all purporting to think of the dead, but fixing their eyes none the less on the living. And it was not alone in the church, but through the neighborhood, for miles round about: when men spoke of the old Duke who was gone, their minds would in truth be dwelling upon the new Duke who was come. A thrill ran through his veins as the words spelled themselves out before his inner vision. The new Duke! He seemed never to have comprehended what it meant before.
No; and till this moment no genuine realization had come to him of this added meaning—this towering superstructure which the message of Julius and Emanuel had reared. It was only now that he hit upon the proper mental focus with which to contemplate this amazing thing. Not only was he a territorial ruler, one of the great nobles of Europe, but he was the master of wealth almost beyond counting as well!
Those nearest to him were rising now, and he, obeying imperative impulses within him, lifted himself proudly to his feet. While the air throbbed with deep-voiced organ notes, in the pause which here ensued, his gaze rested upon the pall before him. There was a sense of transfiguration in the spectacle. The purple mantle became imperial Tyrian to his eyes—and something which was almost tenderness, almost reverence, yearned within him toward that silent, incased figure hidden beneath it. The mystic, omnipotent tie of blood gripped his heart.
With a collected sidelong look he surveyed the profiles of Emanuel and Lord Julius to his left. Theirs were the lineaments of princes. As if he had eyes in the back of his head, he beheld Edward and Augustine, as fancy revealed them standing in the pew behind him. Tall, slim, athletic, fair—the figures his imagination made of them appealed to the new patriarchal spirit in his heart. Perhaps they were not wholly nice, these young men, but they also were princes, and they were of his race, and no one should persecute them, or despitefully use them.
The uncouth little bearers of the dead had come forward again, and taken up their burden. In a small lady-chapel, extending from the transept at the left, the interment was to take place, and thither Christian now followed the pall, leading the menfolk of his family and the male guests of position who attached themselves to the group. Thus some score of black-clad figures clustered round the oblong opening in the old stone floor, and Christian, standing at its head, glanced impassively over the undefined throng of spectators gathered at the doorway.
“‘Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery,’” proclaimed the younger priest, with a sudden outburst of high-pitched, nasal tones which pierced the unexpectant ear. “‘He cometh up and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.’”
Christian, watching abstractedly the impersonal wedge of faces at the door, all at once caught his breath in a sharp spasm of bewildered amazement. The little book he had been holding fell from his hands, balanced on its edge for an instant and toppled over into the dark vault below. He seemed unconscious of the incident—but stared fixedly, with parted lips and astonished eyes, at the image of something he had seen outside of the chapel. The thing itself had apparently vanished. He perceived vaguely that people were looking at him—and with a determined effort regained control of his face and bearing. The puzzling thought that it might have been an illusion—that perhaps he had seen nothing at all—brought mingled confusion and solace to his mind. He put his hand to the open book which Lord Julius at his side held toward him, and pretended to look at it.
The coffin, now bereft of its purple covering, had been lowered to its final place. One of the bearers, standing over the cavity, crumbled dry earth from his tanned and clumsy fingers, and it fell with a faint rattle upon some resonant, unseen surface.
The phrase, “‘Our dear brother, here departed,’” stuck out with awkward obtrusiveness from among the words of the priest. “‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’” the sing-song went on. Then they were repeating the Lord’s Prayer together in a buzzing, fitful murmur. There were other prayers—and then Christian read in the faces of those about him that the ceremony was finished. Accepting the suggestion of Lord Julius’s movement, he also bent over, and looked blankly down into the obscurity of the vault. But when he lifted his head again, it was to throw a more searching and strenuous glance than ever over the knot of people outside the door. And yes!—he had not been deceived. He distinctly saw the face again, and with lightning swiftness verified its features. Beyond a shadow of doubt it was Frances Bailey whom he beheld, mysteriously present in this most unlikely of places.
He withdrew his eyes and did not look that way again. The question whether she knew that he had recognized her, occupied his mind to the exclusion of all else, as he returned at the head of his followers to the body of the church. It still possessed his thoughts when he had joined the family group of chief mourners, loosely collecting itself in the aisle before the front pews, in waiting for the summons to the carriages. To some one he ought to speak at once, and for the moment his eye rested speculatively upon Cora. He identified her confidently, not only by her husband’s proximity, but by the fact that her mourning veil was much thicker and longer than any of the others. Some unshaped consideration, however, restrained him, and on a swift second thought he turned to Kathleen.
“I want you to look,” he whispered to her, inclining his head—“on the other side of the church, just in a line between the second pillar and the white-bearded figure in the window—there is a tall young woman, with the gray and black hat. Do you see her? In a kind of way she belongs to us—she is Cora’s sister, but I’m afraid if Cora asked her, she would not come to the Castle.”
“Yes—once you talked to me about her,” Kathleen reminded him.
“Well, will you do this for me?” he continued, in an eager murmur. “Go to her, and make sure that she promises to come up with the rest. It would be unforgivable—if we let her go away.”
He had an uneasy feeling that Mrs. Emanuel’s veil did not prevent her shrewd glance from reading him through and through—but he did not seek to dissemble the breath of relief with which he heard her assent.
It was not a very easy task,” Kathleen found opportunity to say to Christian, half an hour later, as the family were assembling in his library. They stood together by the window nearest the table, and watched the embarrassed deportment of Lord Lingfield under the conversational attentions of Cora, as they talked in low tones.
“But she is here in the Castle: that is the principal thing.” He did not shrink now from the implication of his words.
“Yes, she finally consented to come,” explained the other. “I told her that you insisted upon it—and then—then I used some persuasion of my own.”
“I thank you, Kathleen,” he said, simply. “It seems that she is to write an account of the funeral for some London newspaper. She said frankly, however, that that of itself did not account for her coming. It will pay her expenses—so she said—but the paper would not have sent her specially. And there is no doubt about it—she was really annoyed at being discovered.”
The solicitors from Shrewsbury, entering the room now, gave at once an official air to everything. The elder of them, with oppressive formality, drew a formidable parchment from a bag held by his junior, and bowed elaborately to Christian. Then, as if he had received some mandate to do so from His Grace, he untied the tape, and cleared his throat. Those who had been seated, rose to their feet.
The will came to them unaltered from 1859—and contained, wrapped in a surprising deal of pompous verbiage, a solitary kernel of essential fact. No legatee was mentioned save an impersonal being called the heir-at-law. The absolutism of dynastic rule contemplated no distribution or division of power. This slender, dark-eyed young man, standing with head inclined and a nervous hand upon the table, had not come into being until long after that will was made, and for other long years thereafter his very existence had been unknown to the family at large. Yet, as the lawyer’s reading ended, there he stood before their gaze, the unquestioned autocrat.
“This may be the best time to say it.” Christian straightened himself, and addressed his family for the first time, with a grave smile, and a voice which was behaving itself better than he feared it would. “There are no minor bequests, owing to the circumstances under which the will was drawn, but I have taken it upon myself to supply such omissions, in this matter, as shall commend themselves to my consideration. Upon this subject we may speak among ourselves at our leisure, later on.” With distinguished self-possession he looked at his watch. “I think luncheon is at two.”
There followed here an unrehearsed, and seemingly unpremeditated, episode. Lord Julius advanced with impressive gravity across the little open space, and taking the hand which Christian impulsively extended to him, bent over it in a formal and courtly bow. When Emanuel, following his father, did the same, it was within the consciousness of all that they had become committed to a new ceremonial rite. Kathleen, coming behind her husband, gave her cheek to be kissed by the young chief of her adopted clan—and this action translated itself into a precedent as well.
Edward and Augustine, after the hesitation of an awkward instant, came forward together, and in their turn, with a flushed stiffness of deportment, made their salutation to the head of the house. To them, conjointly, Christian said something in a whisper. He kissed Cora upon each cheek, with a faint smile in his eyes at her preference for the foreign method. His remoter cousins, the Earl of Chobham and Lord Lingfield, passed before him, and he vaguely noted the reservation expressed in their lifeless palms and frigid half-bow. They seemed to wish to differentiate themselves from the others—to express to him the Pickwickian character of their homage. They were not Torrs; they did not salaam to him as their over-lord. They had a rival dynasty of their own, and their appearance here involved nothing but the seemly courtesy of distant relationship. He perceived in a dim way that this was what their manner was saying to him—but it scarcely diverted his attention. His glance and his thoughts passed over their heads, to fasten upon the remaining figure.
Lady Cressage, unlike the other two women, had retained the bonnet and heavy veil of mourning. The latter she held drawn aside with a black-gloved hand as she approached. It flashed suddenly across Christian’s brain that the year of her mourning for her own dead was not over—yet in her own house she wore gay laces and light colors. But it was unkind to remember this—and senseless, too. He strove to revivify, instead, the great compassionate impulse which formerly she had stirred within him. A pallid shadow of it was all that he could conjure up—and in the chill of this shadow he touched her white temple with his lips, and she moved away. There lingered in his mind a curious, passive conflict of memories as to whether their eyes had met or not. Then this yielded place to the impression some detached organ of perception had formed for him, that in that somber setting of crape her face had looked too small for the rest of her figure.
Then, as the whole subject melted from his mind, he turned toward the two young men who, upon his whispered request, had remained in the library after the departure of the others. He looked at his watch, and beckoned them forward with a friendly wave of his hand.
“Pray come and sit down,” he said, with affability upon the surface of his tone. “We have a quarter of an hour, and I felt that it could not be put to better use than in relieving your minds a little—or trying to do so. Let me begin by saying that I do not think I have met either of you before. In fact, now that I reflect, I am sure that we have not met before. I am glad to see you both.”
The two brothers had drawn near, and settled uneasily into the very chairs which Lord Julius and Emanuel had occupied some hours before. Again Christian half seated himself upon the corner of the table, but this time he swung his leg lightly as he surveyed his guests. It flattered his prophetic judgment to note that Augustine seemed the first to apprehend the meaning of his words, but that Edward, upon pondering them, appeared the more impressed by their magnanimity. Between them, as they regarded him and each other doubtfully, the family likeness was more striking than ever. Christian remembered having heard somewhere that their father, Lord Edward, had been a dark man, as a Torr should be. Their flaxen hair and dull blue eyes must come from that unmentionable mother of theirs, who was living in indefinite obscurity—if she was living at all—upon the blackmail Julius paid her for not using the family name. The thought somehow put an added gentleness into his voice.
“How old are you—Eddy?” he asked, forcing himself into the use of the diminutive as a necessary part of the patriarchal rôle he had assumed.
“Nine-and-twenty in October,” answered the Captain, poutingly. It seemed on the tip of his tongue to add something else, but he did not.
“There’s two years and a month between us,” remarked Augustine, with more buoyancy.
“And you’ve been out of the army for five years,” pursued Christian. “It seems that you became a Captain very early. Would there be any chance of your taking it up again, where you left off?”
Edward shook his head. “It couldn’t be done twice. I got it by a lucky fluke—a friend of my father’s, you know. But they’re deuced stiff now,” he answered. “You have to do exams and things. An old johnnie asks you what bounds Peru on the northeast, and if you can’t remember just at the minute, why, you get chucked. Out you go, d’ye see?”
“What is your idea, then? What would you like to do?”
Captain Edward knitted his scanty, pale brows over this question, and regarded the prospect through the window in frowning perplexity. “Oh, almost anything,” he remarked at last, vacuously.
Christian permitted himself the comment of a smiling sniff. “Think it over,” he said, and directed his glance at the younger brother. “You’re in Parliament,” he observed, with a slight difference in tone. “I’m not sure that I quite understand-What is it that attracts you in a—in a Parliamentary career?”
Augustine lifted his pale, scanty brows in surprise. The right kind of answer did not come readily to him. “Well,” he began with hesitation—“there was that seat in Cheshire where we still had a good bit of land—and Julius didn’t object—and I had an idea it would help me in the City.” He recovered confidence as he went on. “But it is pretty well played out now, I came in too late. The Kaffir boom spoiled the whole show. Five years ago an M P. could pick and choose; I knew fellows who were on twenty boards at a time, and big blocks of stock were flying about them like—like hailstones. But you can’t do that now. M. P.s are as cheap as dirt; they won’t have ’em at any price. A fellow hardly makes his cab-fares in the City nowadays. And even if you get the very best inside tips, brokers have got so fearfully nasty about your margins being covered——”
“Oh, well,” interposed Christian, “it isn’t necessary that we should go into all that. I do not like to hear about the City. If you get money for yourself there, you have taken it away from somebody else. I would rather that people of our name kept away from such things.”
“If you come to that, everybody’s money is taken from somebody else,” said Edward, unexpectedly entering the conversation. His brother checked him with a monitory hand on his arm. “No, you don’t understand,” Augustine warned him. “I quite see what the Duke means.”
“If you see what I mean,” returned Christian, quietly, “perhaps you will follow the rest that I have to say; Do you care very much about remaining in Parliament?” Augustine’s face reflected an eager mental effort to get at his august interlocutor’s meaning. “Well—that’s so hard to say,” he began, anxiously. “There are points about it, of course—but then—when you look at it in another way, why of course——”
“My idea is this,” Christian interposed once more. “I hope you won’t mind my saying it—but there seems to me something rather ridiculous about your being in the House. Parliament ought not to be treated as a joke, or a convenience. It is a place for men who will work hard in the service of the country, and who have the tastes and the information and the judgment and the patriotic devotion to make their work of value to their country. I dare say that there are members who do not entirely measure up to this standard, but after all thereisa standard, and I do not like to be a party to lowering it. England has claims upon us Torrs; it deserves something better at our hands than that. So I think I would like you to consider the idea of resigning your seat—or at least, dropping out at the end of this Parliament. Or no—that would be waiting too long. You would better think of retiring now.”
“Do you mean thatIam to stand for the seat, instead?” asked Edward, looking up with awakened interest.
Christian stared, then sighed smilingly and shook his head.
“No, that doesn’t seem to have been in my mind,” he replied with gentleness. He contemplated the elder brother afresh.
“Have you thought yet what you would like to do?” he asked again, almost with geniality.
“How d’ye mean ‘do’?” inquired Edward, with a mutinous note in his voice. “Is it something about a business? If you ask me straight, I’m not so fearfully keen about doin’ anything. No fellow wants to do things, if he can rub along without.”
Christian found himself repressing a gay chuckle with effort. He had not dreamed he should like this one of his kinsmen so much.
“No—no; you shall not do things,” he promised him, with a sparkling eye. “That would be too bad.”
Captain Edward turned in his chair, and recrossed his legs. “It’s a trifle awkward, all this, you know,” he declared, with an impatient scowl. “It doesn’t suit me to be made game of. You’ve got the whip hand, and you can give me things or not, as you like, and I’ve got to be civil and take what you offer, because I can’t help myself—but damn me if I like to be chaffed into the bargain! I wouldn’t do it to you, d’ye see, if it was the other way about.”
Christian’s face lapsed into instant gravity. A fleeting speculation as to that problematical reversal of positions rose in his mind, but he put it away. “Ah, you mustn’t think that,” he urged, with serious tones. “No, Cousin Edward, this is what I want to say to you.” And then, all unbidden, the things he really wished to say, yet which he had not thought of before, ranged themselves in his mind.
“Listen to me,” he went on. “You have been a soldier. You were a soldier when you were a very young man. Now, you had an uncle who was also a soldier when he was a mere youth—a very loyal and distinguished soldier, too. He died a soldier when he was in his fortieth year—far away from his family, from his wife and son, and much farther away still from the place and country of his birth. Once, in his youth, he was mixed up in an unpleasant and even disgraceful affair. How much to blame he personally was—that I do not know. It was very long ago—and he was so young a man—really I refuse to consider the question. I could insist to myself that he was innocent—if I felt that it mattered at all, one way or the other—and if I did not feel that by doing so, somehow he would not be then so real a figure to me as he is now. And he is very real to me; he has been so all my life.”
He paused, with a momentary break in his voice, to blink the tears from his eyes. It was not ducal, but he put the back of his hand to his cheeks, and dried them.
“I show you how it affects me,” he continued, simply. “No matter what he did in some stupid hour in London, he was a brave soldier before that, and after that. He fought for many losing causes; he died fighting for one which was most hopeless of all. I am proud that I am his son. I am proud for you, that you are his nephew. And something has occurred to me that I think you will like to do—for me and for him. When I stood to-day over our vault—where we are all buried—it cut me to the heart to remember that one of us lies alone, a great way off—in a strange land by himself. I propose to you that you go to Spain for me—it is at Seo de Urgel, in the mountain country of the Catalans—and that you find his grave, and that you bring him back here to sleep with his people. He would not return in his lifetime—but I think he would be pleased with us for bringing him back now.”
Edward had looked fixedly up at his cousin, then glanced away, then allowed his blank gaze to return, the while these words were being spoken. It was impossible to gather from his reddened, immobile face, now, any notion of their effect upon him. But after a moment’s pause, he rose to his feet, squared his shoulders and put out his hand to Christian.
“Quite right; I’ll go,” he said, abruptly.
The two men shook hands, with a sense of magnetic communion which could have amazed no one more than themselves. Then, under a recurring consciousness of embarrassed constraint, they turned away from each other, and Edward wandered off awkwardly toward the door.
“Oh—a moment more,” called Christian, with a step in his cousin’s direction. Then on second thoughts he added: “Or shall we let that wait? I will see you again—some time to-day or to-morrow. Yes—leave me now for a minute with your brother.”
When the door had closed upon Edward, Christian turned slowly to Augustine, and, as he leaned once more against the table, regarded him with a ruminating scrutiny.
“I am puzzled about you,” he remarked, thoughtfully.
Augustine returned the gaze with visible perturbation.
“I think,” pursued Christian, “that it rather annoys me that you don’t tell me to puzzle and be damned.”
The other took the words with a grimace, and an unhappy little laugh. He, too, rose to his feet. “I funked it,” he said with rueful candor.
“Well, don’t funk things with me,” Christian advised him, with a testiness of which, upon the instant, he was ashamed. “Look here,” he continued, less brusquely, “I could take it from your brother that he did not want to do things. That fits him: he is not the kind of man to apply himself in that way. But I have the feeling that you are different. There ought to be performance—capacity—of some sort in you, if I could only get to know what it is. You are only my age. Isn’t there something that particularly appeals to you?”
Augustine balanced himself meditatively upon his heels. “You say you bar the City”—he remarked with caution. “Would you have any objection to Johannesburg? It’s not what it was, by any means, but it’s bound to pick up again. I might do myself very well there—with a proper start.”
“But you are thinking always of money!” broke in Christian, sharply once again. “Suppose that there was no question of money—suppose, what shall I say? that you had twelve hundred a year, secure to you without any effort of your own—what would you do then?”
This seemed very simple to Augustine. “I would do whatever you wanted me to do,” he replied, with fervor.
Christian shrugged his shoulders, and dismissed him with a gesture. “We will speak again about it,” he said coldly, and turned away.
Descending the great staircase a few minutes later, Christian entered the door which Barlow had been waiting to open for him—and made his first public appearance as the dispenser of Caermere’s hospitality.
The guests, after the old mid-day fashion of the place, were already for the most part gathered in the large dining-hall, and stood or sat in groups upon the side pierced by the tall windows. These guests did not dissemble the interest with which they from time to time directed glances across to the other side, where a long table, laid for luncheon, put in evidence a grateful profusion of cold joints and made-dishes.
A pleased rustle of expectancy greeted Christian’s advent, but it seemed that this did not, for the moment at least, involve food and drink. He strolled over to the company, and, as he exchanged words here and there, kept an attentive eye busy in taking stock of its composition. There were some forty persons present, of whom three-fourths, apparently, were county people. A few casual presentations forced themselves upon him, but the names of the new acquaintances established no foothold in his memory. He smiled and murmured words which he hoped were seasonable—but all the while he was scanning the assemblage with a purpose of his own.
At last he came to Kathleen, and was able to have a private word in her ear. “I do not see her anywhere,” he whispered.
“I could not prevail upon her to come in to lunch,” she answered; “I imagine it is partly a question of clothes. But she is being looked out for. And afterward I will take charge of her again, if you like—though——”
The sentence remained unfinished, as she took the arm Christian offered her, at Barlow’s eloquent approach.
During the progress of the luncheon, Christian found no opportunity for intimate conversation with Emanuel’s wife. The elderly and ponderously verbose Lord Chobham sat upon her right; there was the thin-faced, exigeant wife of some clerical person in gaiters—a rural dean, was it not?—full of dogmatic commonplaces, on his left. The other people did not seem to talk so much. The scene down the table—with so much black cloth offset garishly against the white linen in the daylight—presented an effect of funereal sobriety, curiously combined with a spontaneous reaction of the natural man against this effect. The guests ate steadily, and with energy; Christian noted with interest how freely they also drank. For himself, he could not achieve an appetite, but thirst was in the air. He lifted his glass bravely to Lord Julius, whose massive bulk and beard confronted him at the other end of the table—and then to others whose glance from time to time caught his.
Once he found the chance to murmur to Kathleen: “When this is over, I hope you will manage it so that I may speak with you.”
She nodded slow assent, without looking at him. He, observing her profile, realized all at once that something was amiss with her. It came back to him now that a certain intensity of sadness had dwelt in the first glance they had exchanged that morning, upon meeting. At the time he had referred it to the general aspect of woe which people put on at funerals. He saw now that it was a grief personal to herself. And now that he thought of it, too, there had been much the same stricken look upon Emanuel’s face. It was incredible that they should be thus devoured by grief at the fact of his grandfather’s death. No one had liked that old man overmuch—but surely they least of all. The emotion of Lord Julius was more intelligible—and yet even this had a quality of broken dejection in it which seemed independent of Caermere’s cause for mourning.
The disquieting conviction that these dearly beloved cousins of his—these ineffably tender and generous friends of his—were writhing under some trouble unknown to him, took more definite shape in his mind with each new glance that he stole at her.
Once the thought sprang up that they might be unhappy because such a huge sum of money had been given to him, but on the instant he hated himself for being capable of formulating such a monstrous idea. The wondering solicitude which all this raised within him possessed his thoughts for the rest of the meal. He was consumed with impatience to get away so that he might question Kathleen about it.
Yet when at last he found himself beside her, standing before an old portrait in one of the chain of big rooms through which the liberated company had dispersed itself, this was just the question for which it seemed that no occasion would offer.
She began speaking to him at once. “The young lady—Miss Bailey, I should say—has gone for a walk—so Falkner learns from some of the women. They have the impression that she is coming back—but I don’t know that I feel quite so sure about it.” Christian’s face visibly lengthened. “It’s very awkward,” he said, with vague annoyance. “They do not arrange things in a very talented fashion, these people of mine.”
“But what could they arrange?” she argued. An indefinable listlessness in her tone struck him. “It is a free country, you know, and this is the nineteenth century. They cannot bodily capture a young woman and keep her in the Castle against her will. As I told you, I had difficulty in persuading her to come at all.”
“Ah, what did you say to her?” he asked, eagerly.
“I can hardly tell you. She is not an ordinary person—and I know only that I tried not to say ordinary things to her. But what it was that I did say——” She broke off with an uncertain gesture, and a sigh.
“Ah, you saw that she was not ordinary!” said Christian, admiringly. “I should love dearly to hear what you really think of her—the impression that she makes upon you.” Kathleen roused herself and turned to him. “Do you truly mean it, Christian?” she asked him, gravely.
“Do you blame me?” he rejoined, with uneasy indirection.
She pressed her lips together, and stared up at the picture with a troubled face. “I know so little of her,” she protested. “You put too big a responsibility upon me. It is more than I am equal to.”
With a sudden gust of self-reproach, he perceived afresh the marks of suffering in her countenance, and recalled his anxiety. “Take my arm,” he said, softly, “and let us go on into the next room. There is a terrace there, I think. Forgive me for troubling you,” he added, as they moved forward. “I ought to have seen that you are not well—that you have something on your mind.”
She did not answer him immediately. “It is Emanuel who is not well.” she said, after a pause.
Christian uttered a formless little exclamation of grieved astonishment. “Oh, it is nothing serious?” he whispered imploringly.
She shook her head in a doubtful way. “No, I think not—that is, not irrevocably. But he has worked too hard. He has broken down under the strain. We are going away for a long journey—to rest, and forget about the System.”
He bent his head to look into her eyes—trusting his glance to say the things which his lips shrank from uttering. A window stood open, and they passed out upon a broad stone terrace, shaded and pleasant under a fresh breeze full of forest odors.
“Oh—the System”—he ventured to say, as they stood alone here, and she lifted her head to breathe in the revivifying air—“I felt always that it was too much for one man. The load was too great. It would crush the most powerful man on earth.”
She nodded reflective assent. “Oh, yes—I’m afraid I hated it,” she confessed to him, in a murmur full of contrition.
“But he is going away now,” urged Christian, hopefully. “You will have him to yourself—free from care, seeing strange and beautiful new places—as long as you like. Ah, then soon enough that gaiety of yours will return to you. Why, it is such a shock to me to think of you as sad, depressed—you who are by nature so full of joy and high spirits. Ah, but be sure they will all return to you! I make no doubt whatever of that. And Emanuel, too—he will get rested and strong, and be happy as he never was before—the dear fellow!”
She smiled at him in wan, affectionate fashion. “All the courage has gone out of me,” she said. “Will it be coming back again? God knows!”
“But surely——” Christian began, with hearty confidence.
She interrupted him. “What I am fearful of—it is not so much his health, strictly speaking—but the terrible unsettling blow that all this means to him. It is like the death of a beautiful only child to the fondest of fathers. It tears his heart to pieces. He loved his work so devotedly—it was so wholly a part of his life—and to have to give it up! He says he is reconciled. Poor man, he tried with all his strength to make himself believe that he is. I catch him forcing a smile on his face when he sees me looking at him—and that is the hardest of all for me to bear. But I don’t know”—she drew a long breath, and gazed with a wistful brightening in her eyes at the placid hills and sky—“it may work itself out for the best. As you say—when we get away alone together, ah, that is where love like ours will surely tell. I do wrong to harbor any doubts at all. When two people love each other as we do—ah, Christian, boy, there’s nothing else in all the world to equal that!”
He inclined his head gravely, to mark his reverential sympathy with her mood.
“Ah, but you know nothing of it at all,” she went on. “You’re just a lad—and love is no more to be understood by instinct than any other great wisdom. Millions of people pass through life talking about love—and they would stare with surprise if you told them they never had had so much as a glimmer of the meaning of it. They use the name of love in all the matings of young couples—and there’s hardly once in a thousand times that it isn’t blasphemy to mention it. Do you know what most marriages are? Life-sentences! If you have means and intelligence, you make your prison tolerable; you can get used to it, and even grow dependent upon it—but it is a prison still. The best-behaved convict eyes his warder with a cruel thought somewhere at the back of his mind. Do you remember—when you left us the first time, I begged you to be in no haste to marry?”
He bowed again. “Oh, yes, I remember it all,” he said, soberly.
“I have come to feel so strongly upon that subject,” she explained. “It seems to me more important than all others combined. It is the last thing in the world that should be decided upon an impulse, or a passing fancy—yet that is just what happens all about us. The books are greatly to blame for that. They talk as if only boys and girls knew what love meant. They flatter the young people, and turn their empty heads, with the notion that their idlest inclinations are very probably sacred emotions—which they may trust to burn brightly in a pure flame all their lives. The innocent simpletons rush to light this penny dip that is warranted to blaze eternally, and in a week or a month they are in utter darkness. We trembled lest you, coming so suddenly into a new life, should meet with that misfortune.”
He smiled faintly at her. “You see, I have not,” he commented.
She regarded him thoughtfully. “It is impossible to make rules for others in these matters,” she observed, “but there is this thing to be said. True love must be built upon absolutely true friendship; there can be no other foundation for it You will often see two men who are fond of each other. They delight in being together. Very often you cannot imagine what is the tie between them—and they would not be able to tell you. They just like to be together—even though they may not speak for hours, and may be as different in temperament as chalk and cheese. That is the essence of friendship—and you cannot have love without it. The man and the woman must have the all-powerful sense of ideal companionship between them. They must be able to say with truth to themselves that the world will always be richer to them together than apart. There may be many other elements in love, but there can be no love at all without this element. But you wonder why I am saying all this to you.”
He made a deprecatory gesture of the hands. “I am always charmed when you talk to me. I have been remembering that dear home of yours, and how inexpressibly good you were to me. I prize that memory so fondly!”
She smiled with an approach to her old gaiety of manner. “You were like a son of our own to us. And so we think of you now—as if you were ours.”
“And with what munificence you have treated me!” he exclaimed, fervently.
“And why not? For whom else would we be laying up our money? Oh, there was no difference of opinion about that. Months ago it was decided that when you came into Caermere you should come into everything.”
“I feared that Emanuel would be angry—disappointed—at my not taking up his work—but truly I could not. It wouldn’t be easy to explain to you—but——”
“No—let us not go into reasons. He had no feeling about it whatever. How should he? It would have been as reasonable to be vexed because the lenses of his spectacles did not fit your eyes. And Emanuel is reasonableness itself. No—the experiment was quite personal to himself. Without him, it could not have gone on at all. It will not go on now, when he leaves it to others. We make some little pretense that it will—but we know in our hearts that it won’t. And there was a fatal fault in it. To begin with, that would have killed it sooner or later, in any case.”
“I know what you mean,” he interposed, with sensitive intuition. “There was no proper place in it for women. ‘The very corner-stone of the System was the perpetual enslavement of women’—or rather, I should say”—he stumbled awkwardly as the sweeping form of the quotation revealed itself to him—“I should say, it did not provide women with the opportunities which—which——”
Kathleen also had her intuitions. “May I ask?—it sounds as if you were repeating a remark—was it Miss Bailey who said that about the corner-stone?”
Christian bit his lip and flushed confusedly. “Yes—I think those were her words,” he confessed. “But you must remember,” he added, eager to minimize-the offense—“it was in the course of a long discussion on the whole subject, and she——”
“The dear girl!” said Kathleen, with a sigh of relief.
“Ah, but you would love her!” he cried, excitedly perceiving the significance of her words. “She has the noblest mind—calm and broad and serene—and so fine a nature—I know you would love her!”
Kathleen put a hand on his arm, with motherly directness. “But doyoulove her?” she asked.
To his own considerable surprise he hesitated. “I have that feeling of deep friendship that you described,” he said, slowly. “The charm of being where she is is like nothing else to me. I cannot think that it would ever lose its force for me. I get the effect of drawing strength and breadth of thought and temper from her, when I am with her. I would rather spend my life with her for my companion than any other woman I have ever seen. That is what you mean, is it not?”
“Partly,” she made enigmatic response. “But—now you mustn’t answer me if I ask what I’ve no business to ask—but the suspicion came to me while you were speaking—I am right, am I not, in thinking that you have said all this to her?”
“Yes,” he admitted with palpable reluctance, “and she would not listen to me. Only a few hours before I heard the news of my grandfather’s death, I asked her to be my wife, and she refused. She seemed very resolute. And yet she has some of that same feeling of friendship for me. She said that she had always a deep interest in me. She had read books—very serious books—in order to be able to advise me, if the chance ever came. All that bespeaks friendship, surely! And her coming here, to look on and still not be seen—you said yourself that she was distressed at being discovered—is not that the act of warm friendship?”
Kathleen pondered her reply. She looked away at the nearest hills across the river for some moments, with her gaze riveted fixedly as if in an absorption of interest. Without moving her head, she spoke at last: “You have a good deal to say about friendship. It is my fault—I introduced the word and insisted on it—but did you also lay such stress upon this ‘friendship’ to her?”
“You do not know her nature,” he assured her. “There is nothing weak or commonplace in it. One does not talk to her as to an ordinary woman—as you yourself said. I begged her to join her life to mine, and I put the plea on the highest possible grounds. All that I have repeated to you, and much more, I said to her—how great was my need of her, how lofty her character seemed to me, how all my life I should revere her, and gain strength and inspiration from being with her.”
“H—m,” said Kathleen.
“Do you mean—?” he began, regarding his companion wonderingly—“was that not enough? Remember the kind of woman she is—proud of her independence, occupied with large thoughts, not to be appealed to by any but the highest motives—a creature who disdains the sentimental romances of inferior women—do you mean that there should have been something more? I do love her—and should I have told her so in so many words?”
“I’m afraid that’s our foible,” she made answer. On the face that she turned to him, something like the old merry light was shining. “You goose!” she scolded at him, genially.
His eyes sparkled up as with a light from her own. “Oh, I will make some excuse, and get away from these people, and find her,” he cried. “She will be returning, if not here, then to the inn, down below the church, don’t you think? There would be nothing out of the way in my riding down, would there? Or if I sent a man down with a letter, appealing to her not to go away—telling her why? There is no earthly reason why she should not stop here at the Castle. Her sister is here—why, of course, she belongs quite to the family party. How dull of me not to have thought of that! Of course, Cora can go and fetch her.”
“I think I would leave Cora out of it,” Kathleen advised him. “There is nothing that you cannot do better yourself. Come here! Do you see that patch of reddish stain on the hill there, above the poplars where the iron has colored the rock? Well, look to the right, on the ledge just a bit higher up—there is Miss Bailey. I have been watching her for some minutes. She has been round the hill; the path she is on will lead her to the Mere Copse—and to the heath beyond the orchards.”
His eyes had found the moving figure, microscopic yet unmistakable in the sunshine against the verdant face of the hill—and they dwelt upon it for a meditative moment.
Then he turned to Kathleen, and took her hand, and almost wrung it in his own. “Do let us go in!” he urged her, with exultant eagerness.