Christian, professing to himself momentarily that the chance to get away from his guests was at hand, discovered that his escape, all the same, was no easy matter.
Kathleen had disappeared somewhere, and without her he seemed curiously helpless. He did not as yet know the house well enough to be sure about its exits. The result of one furtive attempt at flight was to find himself in the midst of a group of county people, who fell back courteously at his approach and, as if by design, let him become involved in a quite meaningless conversation with a purple-faced, bull-necked old gentleman whose name he could not remember. This person talked at tremendous length, producing his words in gurgling spasms; his voice was so husky and his manner so disconcerting—not to mention the peculiarities of the local dialect in which he spoke—that Christian could make literally nothing of his remarks. He maintained a vapid listener’s-smile, the while his eyes roamed despondently about the room, and what he could see of the next apartment, in search of some relief. If he could hit upon Dicky Westland—or even Edward or Augustine!
It became apparent to him, at last, that his interlocutor was discoursing on the subject of dogs. Of course—it would be about the Caermere hounds. On the grave faces of those about him, who stood near enough to hear the sounds of this mysterious monologue, he read signs that they considered themselves a party to it. It was on their behalf as well as his own that the old gentleman was haranguing him—and he swiftly perceived the necessity of paying better attention.
“The hounds—yes,” he said, after a little. “I have been making inquiries about them. I am advised that they cannot be kept up properly for less than four thousand five hundred a year.”
“Up to Lord Porlock’s death, we had something like twenty-four hundred pounds from the Castle, and we made a whip-round among ourselves,” the other replied, “for the rest. With corn what it is, and rents what they are, we’re all so poor now that it’ll be harder than ever to get subscriptions, but we’ll try to do our share if the Castle’ll meet us half-way.”
Christian felt that he liked being referred to as “the Castle.” Moreover, an idea suddenly took shape in his mind. “My uncle, Lord Porlock, was the Master,” he said. “And before him my grandfather, I believe. But what has been done since Lord Porlock’s death—about a new Master, I mean?”
Out of the complicated response made to this question he gathered vaguely that nothing had been done—that nothing could have been done.
“My cousin, Captain Torr, is a hunting man, I think.” He threw out the question with some diffidence, and was vastly relieved to see the faces brighten about him.
“None better, by God!” affirmed the old gentleman, with vehemence, and there followed a glowing and spluttering eulogium of Edward’s sportsmanlike qualities and achievements, in the middle of which Christian recalled that the speaker was Sir George Dence.
“I like the Mastership to continue in the family, Sir George,” he replied, suavely proud of the decision he had leaped to. “I think I shall suggest to you that Captain Edward take the hounds, and that, for a time at least, you allow the Castle to be at the entire expense. At all events, you have my annual subscription of five thousand pounds to begin upon.”
He made a dignified half-bow in the silence which ensued, and boldly moved away. The murmur of amazed admiration which rose behind him was music in his ears.
Visions of possible escape rose for the moment before him. He walked with an air of resolution through the next room, trying to remember whither the corridor outside led—but at the doorway he stopped face to face with Lord Lingfield.
“Ah,” said his cousin, amiably, “I did not know if I should see you again. I thought perhaps that you had gone to lie down. Funerals take it out of one so, don’t they? My father is quite seedy since lunch, and poor Lady Cressage has the most wretched headache! I think myself she’d do better not to travel while it lasts, but she’s anxious to get away, and so we’re all off by the evening train.”
“Oh, I didn’t dream of your hurrying off like this,” exclaimed Christian, sincerely enough. “But if you are set upon it—come, let’s find your father. It will seem as if I had neglected him.”
“He’s in his room,” explained Lord Lingfield, as they moved away together, “getting into some heavier clothes. The evenings are chilly here in the hills, and we’re to start almost immediately, and take the long drive round through the forest. Lady Cressage has talked so much of it, and we’ve never seen it, you know.”
“But this is all too bad!” urged Christian. “You rush away before I have had time to have a word with any of you. There is no urgent reason for such haste, is there now, really?”
“Lady Cressage seems anxious to go,” answered the other, with a kind of significance in his solemn voice. “And of course—since she came with us——”
Christian stole a quick glance at his kinsman, and as swiftly looked away. “If she prefers it—of course,” he commented with brevity.
“Do you think she is very strong?” asked Lord Lingfield. “I have a kind of fear, sometimes, that her health is not altogether robust. She seemed very pale to-day.” There was a note of obvious solicitude in his voice.
“She has a headache,” Christian reminded him.
“Yes, that would account for it, wouldn’t it?” The young man was visibly relieved by this reflection. “They may say what they like,” he went on, “she is the most beautiful woman in London to-day, just as she was when she was married. Let me see—I am not sure that I ever knew her precise age. Do you happen to know?”
“She is four-and-twenty.”
“Not more! I should have said six, or at least five. Hm-m! Four-and-twenty!” The reiteration, for some reason, seemed to afford him pleasure. “I am nearly thirty myself,” he added meditatively, “and I’m practically sure of being in the next Government. Shall you go in much for politics, do you think? It wouldn’t be of any great use to you, except the Garter, perhaps, and it’s so fearfully slow waiting for that. My father had the promise of it as long ago as Lord John Russell’s time, and it hasn’t come off yet. But then that Home Rule business was so unfortunate—it sent us all over to the Tory side, where there were already more people waiting for things than there were things to go round. If I were you, I would keep very quiet for a year or two—not committing myself openly to either side. I can’t help thinking there will be a break-up. It’s a fearful bore to have only twenty or thirty people on one side and five hundred on the other. They won’t stand it much longer. It doesn’t make a fair distribution of things. Of course, I’m a Unionist, but if I were in your shoes, I’d think it over very carefully. The Liberals haven’t got a single Duke—and mind you, though people don’t seem to notice it, it is a fact that a party practically never succeeds itself. The Liberals are bound to come in, sooner or later—and then, if you were their only Duke, why, you’d get your Garter shot at you out of a gun—so to speak. Of course, I mustn’t be mentioned as saying this—but you think it over! And it needn’t matter in the least—our being in different parties.. We can help each other quite as well—indeed, sometimes I’m tempted to think even better. Of course, I dare say there won’t be much that I can do for you—for the next two or three years, at least—except in the way of advice, and tips, and that sort of thing—but there may be a number of matters that you can help me in.”
Christian nodded wearily—with a nervous thought upon the time being wasted. “I am not likely to forget your kindness—or our family ties,” he said, consciously evasive.
“You never saw Cressage, of course; awful beast!” remarked the other, with an irrelevancy which still struck the listener as having a certain method in it. “It makes a man furious to think what she must have suffered with him. And a mere child, too, when she was married. Only four-and-twenty now! These early marriages are a great mistake. Of course, when a man gets to be nearly thirty, and there is a family and property and so on to be handed along, why, then marriage becomes a duty. That has always been my view. And I try invariably to do my duty, as I see it. I think a man ought to, you know.”
Christian sighed, and restrained an impulse to look at his watch. They had sauntered forward into the central hallway; through the open door could be seen a carriage and pair drawn up before the steps. A rustle on the stairs behind him caught his ear, and turning, Christian beheld Lady Cressage descending toward him, with Lord Chobham looming, stately and severe, in the shadows above her.
Christian moved impulsively to her. “It was the greatest surprise to me—and disappointment, too—to hear that you were going like this,” he declared, with outstretched hand.
She smiled feebly, and regarded him with a pensive consideration. Her heavy mourning of an earlier hour had been exchanged for a black garb less ostentatiously funereal, yet including the conventional widow’s-fall, which he had not seen her wear before. The thought that here at Caermere, last autumn, she had not even worn a widow’s-cap, rose in his mind. It carried with it a sense of remissness, of contumacy as against the great family which had endowed her with one of its names. But at least now she exhibited a consciousness that her husband was less than a year dead. And her pallid face was very beautiful in its frame of black—a delicately strong face, meditative, reserved, holding sadness in a proud restraint. “I am not very well,” she said to him, in tones to reach his ear alone. “The crowd here depressed me. I could not bring myself to appear at luncheon. It seems better that I should go away.”
“But it is such a fatiguing journey—for one who does not feel wholly up to it!” he urged upon her. “All these strangers will be going—I think some of them have gone already. I don’t know what their rule is here about stopping after luncheon—but surely they must clear out very soon. Then we shall be quite by ourselves—so that if that is your only reason for going—why, I can’t admit that it is a reason at all.”
He paused, and strove to cover with a halting smile his sudden perception that they were not talking with candor to each other. There were things in her mind, things in his mind, which bore no relation to the words they uttered. She was looking at him musingly—and he felt that he could read in her glance, or perhaps gather from what there was not in her glance, that she would not go if he begged her with sufficient earnestness to remain. Nay, the conviction flashed vividly uppermost in his thoughts that even a tolerable simulation of this earnestness would be enough. It was as if a game were being played, in which he was not quite the master of his moves. In this mere instant of time, while they had stood facing each other, he had been able to reproduce the whole panorama of his contact with this beautiful woman. From that first memorable day when she had come into his wondering, distraught vision of the new life before him, to that other day but a week ago when he had stood trembling with passionate emotions in her presence, his mental pictures of her rose connectedly about him. They exerted a pressure upon his will. They left him no free agency in the matter. By all the chivalric, tenderly compassionate memories they evoked, he must bid her to remain.
“I am very sorry that you feel you must go,” was what he heard himself say instead.
“Good-bye,” she answered simply, and gave him her gloved hand with an impassive face. “Lord Chobham and Lord Lingfield are good enough to see me back to London again. We are driving round through the forest. Our people are to join us at the station with the luggage. Goodbye.”
He accompanied the party out to the carriage door, despite some formal doubts about its being the proper thing to do. Both father and son made remarks to him, to which he seemed to himself to be making suitable answers, but what they were about he never knew. The tragedy of Edith’s final departure from Caermere—she who had been the hostess here when he came; she who was to have worn the coronet on her lovely brow as the mistress of it all—seized upon his mind and harrowed it. A vehement self-reproach that his thoughts should have done her even momentary injustice stung him, as he beheld her seated in the carriage. She smiled at him—that wistful, subdued smile of the headache—and then, as the horses moved, his eyes were resting upon another smile instead—the beaming of fatuous content upon the countenance of Lord Lingfield, who sat facing her.
Christian, regarding this second cousin of his as the carriage receded from view, suddenly breathed a long sigh of relief.
All at once remembering many things, he wheeled with the impulse to run up the steps. Upon reflection, he ascended them sedately instead, and gave orders in the hall that Mr. Westland should be sent to him forthwith. Two or more groups of departing guests came upon him, while he stood irresolutely here, and he bade them farewell with formal gravity. The two parsons whom he had seen at the church were among them—attired now in black garments with curiously ugly little round, flat hats—and he noted with interest that their smirking deference now displeased him less than it had done in the morning. He perceived that his lungs were becoming accustomed to the atmosphere of adulation, and smiled tolerantly at himself. How long would it be, he wondered with idle amusement, before it would stifle him to breathe any other air?
Augustine had sauntered out from some unknown quarter into the hall, and Christian beckoned to him. A shapeless kind of suspicion, born of a resemblance now for the first time suggesting itself, had risen in his brain. He took the young man by the arm, and strolled aside with him.
“Am I wrong,” he asked carelessly, “or did I see you at the supper at the Hanover Theater? Let us see—it would be a week ago to-night? I thought so. Why I asked—I was curious to know whom you were with. It was a young man; you were standing together between some scenery as I passed you.”
“Oh!” said Augustine, with visible reassurance. “That was Tom Bailey—Cora’s brother, you know.”
“What sort is he?” Christian pursued, secretly astonished at the inspired accuracy of his intuition.
“Well”—replied the other, hesitatingly—“it’s rather hard to say. He got sent down from Cambridge for something or other, and his governor got the needle over it, and put him on an allowance of a pound a week, or something like that, and so what could he do? It’s jolly hard on a young fellow round town to have less money than anybody else. He’s bound to get talked about, if he only owes half-a-crown to some outsider or other, and that makes other fellows turn shirty. But I think he always pays when he can.”
“You like him, then, do you?”
“Oh, yes—I like Tom well enough,” answered Augustine, dubiously pondering the significance of the interrogatory. “He’d be all right if—if he had a proper chance.” With a sigh, he ventured to add: “He’s like the rest of us—that way.”
At sight of Dicky Westland’s approach. Christian dropped his inquiries abruptly. “All right,” he said, with enigmatic brevity, and turned to his secretary with a meaning gesture. “I want to get away from here—out of the Castle,” he murmured to the newcomer, “without a minute’s delay. I have a—kind of appointment, and I am already late. If you will get our hats, we will walk out together, as if we were discussing some private matter, and then no one will interrupt us.”
This confidence was only partially justified by events. The two made their way unmolested into the open air, and across some long stretches of lawn to the beginning of the series of gardens. It was within Christian’s memory that one reached the orchards and the opening upon the heath by traversing these gardens. But in the second of them, where remarkable masses of tulips in gorgeous effulgence of bloom occupied the very beds in which he believed the dahlias must have been last year, there was some one on the well-remembered path in front of him.
A little child of two or three years, still walking insecurely at least, was being led along the edge of the flower-border by a woman in black whose back was turned.
The infant had caught the notion of bending over the hyacinths, one by one, laboriously to smell their perfume, and the woman indulgently lent herself to the pastime, halting and supporting the little one by the hand.
Christian wondered vaguely what child this could be, before observation told him that the person they were approaching was a lady. He took Dicky’s arm then, and quickened their step. “We will be very much engaged as we pass,” he admonished him. After a few paces, however, the futility of this device made itself apparent. The lady, glancing indifferently over her shoulder at the sound, of their tread, turned on the instant with a little cry of pleasure.
It was Cora who came toward them, now radiant of face and with an extended hand. She dragged the surprised child heedlessly along at her side with the other arm.
“Oh, Duke!” she cried. “I did so long to burst in upon you, wherever you were to be found, and thank you when I heard. It was Sir George Dence who told us. And Eddy, he’s quite off his head with joy! He wanted to look you up, too, but I told him to put off thanking you till to-morrow; between ourselves, I don’t fancy he’ll be seen quite to the best advantage later on to-day. But I know you’ll think none the worse of him for that; and there’s a good bit to be done, he says, in the way of pulling the Hunt together again to work like one man. He’s begun already promoting the right sort of feeling. He’s got Sir George and old General Fawcett and about a dozen more of ’em in the billiard-room, and I told him everything would be all right so long as they didn’t sing. On account of the funeral, you know. And—why, you’ve never seen my oldest unmarried daughter! Look up and say, ‘How-de-do?’ Chrissy. Why, she’s your namesake! Yes, her baptismal name is Christiana or Christina—which is it? We always call her Chrissy. And you haven’t told me what an effective family group I make. You never would have believed that I could be so domestic, now, would you?”
She had gathered the child up into her arms, and under the influence of her jocund mood Christian smiled cheerfully. “You are very wonderful as a mother,” he assured her, and extended a tentative finger toward Chrissy, who, huddled in awkward and twisted discomfort under her mother’s elbow, regarded him with unconcealed repulsion.
“She seems an extremely healthy child,” he remarked, and the words were not so perfunctory as they sounded. The robust, red cheeked heartiness of Chrissy raised musing reflections in his mind. If this infant, with its stout mottled arms and legs, had been a boy, it would be at this moment his heir. No one could ask for a finer child—and she was very closely akin to him. And Cora was her mother—and Cora’s sister!
“Oh, but wherearewe going to live?” she broke in upon his meditations. “I said to Eddy that I’d lay odds you were thinking of David’s Court for us. You know the kennels used to be there before Porlock’s time.”
“All that we can arrange,” said Christian, shaking off his reverie, and lifting his hat. “Rest easy in your mind about everything.”
She nodded with an expansive geniality which freely included Dicky as well, and then walked away. It slowly occurred to Christian that she had said nothing about her sister’s presence in the neighborhood, although it was impossible to suppose her ignorant, of it. Upon consideration, he decided that her reticence was delicate. He felt that he liked Cora, and then uneasily speculated upon the seeming probability that his liking for her was in excess of her sister’s.
“Westland,” he said, with a new thought in his busy brain, “you know about geography—about where the different British colonies are on the map, and what they are distinguished for. I want to know of a good place, a very long way off, where two young men with a moderate capital might do well, or-at least have the chance to do well.”
“Fellows like that generally go to South Africa, nowadays,” replied Dicky, “though I believe it’s gone off a bit. It’s not as far away as Australia, but it’s livelier, apparently. They don’t seem to come back as much.”
“No; I have a prejudice against that Johannesburg. It is not a good atmosphere, and it is too easy to get into trouble there.”
“There are great reports about British Columbia just now. They’ve found wonderful new gold-fields, and they’re a fearful distance from anywhere. It takes you months to get to them, so I’m told. But it depends so much on what the fellows themselves are like. If I may ask, do I know them?”
“It is Augustine Torr that I have in mind, and a young friend of his—Bailey his name is. By the way, a brother of the lady we just left.”
“I knowofhim,” commented Dicky sententiously.
“Well, it has occurred to me that these young men, for whom there seems no specially suitable foothold in England, might accomplish something in the colonies. That is the way Greater Britain, as they call it, has been made—by young men who might have done nothing at all worth doing at home. Life is really very difficult and complicated in this crowded island, unless one has exactly the temperament to succeed. But in the colonies it is different. Men who are of no use here may become valuable there. I have heard that there are many instances of this. And these young men, it seems to me that very possibly, if they found themselves on new ground, they might do as others have done and get on. We do not quite know what to do with them here, but we send them out, and they make the Empire.”
“It’s rather rough on the Empire, though, isn’t it?” said Dicky.
Christian frowned and drew himself up a little. “One is my cousin,” he said coldly, “and the other is the brother of—is the brother of my cousin’s wife.”
There was a moment of silence, and then the secretary, as upon a sudden resolution, stopped. “It’s no good my going on,” he said, nervously, but with decision. “I daresay you don’t mean it, but all the same it’s too much for me. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll turn it up and catch the evening-train. I don’t mind going to the station in the brake with the servants and the luggage. It certainly won’t take anybody by surprise.” Christian regarded him with open-eyed astonishment. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, in obvious candor.
Dicky restlessly threw out his hands. “Oh, I can’t stand this Dukeness of yours,” he declared. “You put it on too thick. I know Gus Torr, and I know as much as I want to of Tom Bailey, and I know they’re no good, and you know it, too—although I don’t say they mayn’t get on in the colonies. God knows what won’t get on there! But when I make some perfectly civil and natural remark on the subject, you flame up at me, and blow yourself out like a pouter pigeon, and say they’re—haw-haw!—relations of yours. Well, that be damned, you know! It may do once in a way with outsiders, but it isn’t good enough to live with.”
“Dicky!” said Christian, in a voice of awed appeal. His brown face distorted itself in lines of painful bewilderment as he gazed at his companion. “Have I done that? Is it as bad as that?” He gasped the questions out in a frightened way and tears sprang into his eyes. “Then it is not you who should catch the evening train, but me. I am not fit to be here!” He finished with a groan of bitter dejection and bowed his head.
Westland, as much scared as surprised at the violent result of his protest, moved impetuously to his friend and put a hand on his shoulder. “No-no! No-no,” he said, in a soothing voice. “It’s all right! I said you didn’t mean it, you know. Truly, old man, Iknewyou didn’t mean it! Upon my word, it’s all right!”
Christian lifted his head, and tried to choke down his agitation. “But you go away from me!” he said in despairing tones. “It is the same as ever! Nothing is changed for me! I do not make friends—much less keep them!”
“But Iamyour friend! Youarekeeping me!” Dicky insisted, raising his voice. An odd impulse to laugh aloud struggled confusedly with the concern the other’s visible suffering gave him. “I take it all back. I’m stopping with you, right enough!”
Christian accepted the assurance in a dazed way, and after he had silently shaken the other’s hand, began walking on again, studying the ground with a troubled frown. “I am a weak and dull fool!” he growled at last, in rage at himself. “I have not sense enough to behave properly! It is a mistake that I should he put over anybody else! I make myself ridiculous, like anyparvenu.”
“No—that’s all rot,” the other felt it judicious to urge. “You’re perfectly all right, only—only——”
“Only I’m not!” Christian filled in the gap of hesitation with an angry laugh.
Gradually a calmer view of himself pervaded his mind. “It is more difficult than you think, Dicky,” he affirmed, after a pause. “It is not easy at all—at first—to—what shall I say?—to keep feeling your feet under you on the solid ground. The temptation to soar, to think you are lifted up, is upon you every minute. It catches you unawares. Ah! I see one must watch that without ceasing. Oh, I am glad—more glad than I can tell you—that you stopped me. Ah! that was a true friend’s service.”
Dicky chuckled softly: “It’s much nicer, if you can take it that way,” he admitted.
“If I am ever anything but nice toyoo,” Christian began, gravely, and then stopped as if he had bitten his tongue. “Oh, there is patronage again!” he cried with vexation—and then let himself be persuaded to join in the frank laughter that the other set up.
“Oh, we shall hit it off all right,” Dicky assured him as a final word on the subject. “It’s merely a question of time. You’ve got to get accustomed to your new job, and I to mine: that’s all there is of it. We shall learn the whole bag of tricks in a week or so, and be happy ever afterward.”
The joking refrain struck some welcome chord in Christian’s thoughts. He looked up, and noted that they were very near the door leading out from the fruit-garden to the heath beyond the wall. Halting, he smiled into his companion’s face.
“No one will follow me now,” he said with sparkling eyes. “I will let you turn back here, if you don’t mind.”
Christian realized blankly, all at once, as’ he stood and gazed out over the moor, that he did not know his way.
The spring had laid upon this great rolling common a beauty of its own. Everywhere, on thorns and furze and briars, the touch of the new life had hung emeralds to bedeck and hide the dun waste of winter. The ashen-gray carpets of old mosses were veined with the vivid green of young growths; out from the dry brown litter of lifeless ferns and bracken were rising the malachite croziers of fresh fronds. The brilliant yellow of broom and gorse blooms caught the eye in all directions, blazing above the vernal outburst of another year’s vegetation, and the hum of the bees in the sunlight, and the delicately mingled odors in the May air were a delight to the senses. But under this exuberance of re-awakened nature, welcome though it might be, somehow the landmarks of last autumn seemed to have disappeared.
The path which had led along the wall, for example, was now nowhere discernible. Or had there really been a path at any time?
It was clear enough, at all events, that his course for some distance lay beside this massive line of ancient masonry, even if no track was marked for him. At some farther point it would be necessary to turn off at a right angle toward the Mere Copse—and here he could recall distinctly that there had been a path. But then he came upon several paths, or vaguely defined grassy depressions which might be paths, and the divergent ways of these were a trouble to him. At last, he decided to strike out more boldly into the heath, independently of paths, and try to get a general view of the landscape. He made his way through creepers and prickly little bushes toward an elevation in the distance, realizing more and more in his encumbered progress that his quest was like that of one who should search the limitless sea for a small boat. There seemed no boundaries whatever to this vast tract of waste land.
As he began at length the ascent of the mound toward which his course had been directed, he scanned the moor near and far, but no human figure was visible. No signs could he discover of any beaten track across it; of the several patches of woodland beyond, in the distance to the left, he could not even be sure which was the Mere Copse. Below, on the edge of the sky-line at the right, he could see the tops of the towers and chimneys of Caermere. Wheeling round from this point, then, he endeavored to identify that portion of the hill, on the opposite side of the river-chasm, which Kathleen had pointed out to him from the terrace. But, viewed from here, there were so many hills! The hopelessness of his errand became more apparent with each glance round. Despondently, he sauntered up the few remaining yards to the top.
He stood upon the ridge of a grass-grown wall of stones and earth, which in a somewhat irregular circle enclosed perhaps a quarter-acre of land. This wall on its best preserved side, where he found himself, was some dozen feet in height. Across the ring it seemed lower, and at three or four points was broken down altogether. He realized that he was surveying a very ancient structure—no doubt, prehistoric. Would it have been a fortress or a temple, or the primitive mausoleum of some chieftain-ruler in these wilds? One of the openings seemed to suggest by its symmetry an entrance to the enclosure. It was all very curious, and he promised himself that very soon he would examine it in detail. Some vague promptings of a nascent archaeological spirit impelled him now, upon second thoughts, to walk round on the crest of the wall to the other side.
Suddenly he stopped, stared sharply downward with arrested breath, and then, while his face wreathed itself with amused smiles, tip-toed along a few paces farther. Halting here, his eyes dancing with suppressed gaiety, he regarded at his leisure the object of his expedition.
Upon the sunny outer side of the sloping embankment, only a few feet below, was seated Frances Bailey. Her face was turned from him, and she was apparently engrossed in the study of a linen-backed sectional map spread on her knees. A small red book lay in the grass at her side, and he was so close that he could decipher the legend “Shropshire and Cheshire” on its cover.
After a minute’s rapturous reflection he turned and noiselessly retraced his steps, till he could descend from the wall without being seen. There was a kind of miniature dry moat surrounding it at this point, and this he lightly vaulted. Then, straightening himself, he strolled forward with as fine an assumption of unsuspecting innocence as he could contrive. It occurred to him to whistle some negligent tune very softly as he came, but, oddly enough, his lips seemed recalcitrant—they made no sound.
At the obtrusion of his shadow upon the map she was examining she looked swiftly up. For a moment, with the afternoon sun in her eyes, she seemed not to recognize him. There followed another pause, infinitesimal in duration, yet crowded with significance, in which she appeared clearly at a loss what to say or do, now that she realized the fact of his presence. Then she smiled at him with a kind of superficial brightness and tossed the map aside.
“I am fortunate indeed to find you,” he said, as he came up, and they shook hands formally. A few moments before, when he had looked down upon her from the mound, he had been buoyantly conscious of his control of the situation; but now that he stood before her it was she who looked down upon him from her vantage-ground on the side of the bank, and somehow this seemed to make a great deal of difference. The sound of his voice in his own ears was unexpectedly solemn and constrained. He felt his deportment to be unpleasantly awkward.
She ignored the implication that he had been looking for her. “I suppose this must be the place that is marked ‘tumulus’ on the map here,” she observed, with what seemed to be a deliberately casual tone. “But I should think it is more like a rath, such as one reads about in Ireland—a fortified place to defend one’s herds and people in. As I understand it, a tumulus was for purposes of burial, and this seems to be a fort rather than a tomb. What is your idea about it?” She rose to her feet as she put the question, and turned to regard the earthworks above and about her with a concentrated interest.
He tried to laugh. “I’m afraid I’m more ignorant about them than anybody else,” he confessed. “I have never been here before. I suppose all one can really say is that the people who did these things knew what they were for, but that since they had no alphabet they could not leave a record to explain them to us, and so we are free to make each his own theory to suit himself.”
“That is a very indolent view to take,” she told him over her shoulder. “Scientists and archaeologists are not contented with that sort of reply. They examine and compare and draw deductions, and get at the meaning of these ancient remains. They do not sit down and fold their hands and say, ‘Unfortunately those people had no alphabet.’ Why don’t you dig this thing up and find out about it?”
He smiled to himself doubtfully, “I have only been in possession of it for about three hours,” he reminded her. Then an inspiration came to, him. “Wouldyoulike to dig it up?” he asked, with an effect of eagerness shining through the banter of his tone. “I mean, to superintend the excavations. You shall have forty men out here with picks and shovels to-morrow if you say the word.” Instead of answering, she stooped to get her book and map, and then moved with a preoccupied air to the top of the bank. After an instant’s hesitation he scrambled up to join her.
“I suppose that would have been the entrance there,” she observed, pointing across the circle. “And in the center, you see, where the grass is so thin, there are evidently big stones there. Thatdoessuggest interment after all, doesn’t it? Yet the Silurians are said to have buried only in dolmens. It is very curious.”
“I do not find that I care much about Silurians this afternoon,” he ventured to say. There was a gentle hint of reproach in his voice.
“Why, you’re one yourself! That is the principal point about the Torrs; that is what makes them interesting.”
“But what good does it do me to be a Silurian and interesting,” he protested with a whimsical gesture, “if I—if I do not get what I want most of all in the world?”
“It seems to me that you have got more things already than most people on this planet.” She went on reflectively: “I had no idea at all what it meant till I saw these hills and the valleys below them, and the forests and the villages and the castle, and the people coming out from heaven knows what holes in the rocks—all with your collar round their necks. I should think it would either send you mad with the sense of power or frighten you to death.”
“I am really very humble about it, I think,” he assured her simply. “And there is not so much power as you seem to imagine. It is all a great organized machine, like some big business. The differences are that it works very clumsily and badly as it is at present managed, and that it hardly pays any dividend at all. The average large wholesale grocer’s or wine merchant’s estate would pay a bigger succession duty than my grandfather’s. He died actually a poor man.” The intelligence did not visibly impress her. “But it was not because he helped others,” she remarked. “Those about him grew poorer also. It is a hateful system!”
“There is something you do not know,” he began with gravity. “I said that my grandfather died a poor man. But since his death a tremendous thing has happened. A great gift has been made to me. The enormous debts which encumbered his estates have been wiped out of existence. It is Lord Julius and Emanuel who have done this—done it for me! I do not know the figures yet—to-morrow Mr. Soman is to explain them to me—but the fact is I am a very rich man indeed. I do not owe anybody a penny. Whatever seems to be mine,ismine. There are between seventy-five and eighty thousand acres. By comparison with other estates, it seems to me that there will be a yearly income of more than fifty thousand pounds!”
She drew a long breath and looked him in the face. “I am very sorry for you,” she said soberly.
“Ah, no; I resist you there,” he exclaimed. “I quote your own words to you: ‘It is an indolent view to take.’ There is a prodigious responsibility! Yes! But all the more reason why I should be brave. Would you have me lose my nerve, and say the task is too great for me? I thought you did not like people who solved difficulties by turning tail and running away. Well, to confess oneself afraid—that is the same thing.”
She smiled thoughtfully, perhaps at the quaint recurrence to foreign gestures and an uncertain, hurried use of book-English which her company seemed always to provoke in him. “I meant only that it was a terrible burden you had had fastened upon your shoulders,” she made answer softly. “I did not suggest that you were afraid of it. And yet I should think you would be!”
“I think,” he responded, with a kind of diffident conviction, “I think that if a man is honest and ambitious for good things, and has some brains, he can grow to be equal to any task that will be laid upon him. And if he labors at it with sincerity and does absolutely the best that there is in him to do, then I do not think that his work will be wasted. A man is only a man after all. He did not make this world, and he cannot do with it what he likes. It is a bigger thing, when you come to think of it, than he is. At the end there is only a little hole in it for him to be buried in and forgotten, as these people who raised this wall that we stand on are forgotten. They thought in their day that the whole world depended upon them; when there was thunder and lightning, they said it was on their account, because their gods in the sky were angry with them. But to us it is evident that they were not so important as they supposed they were. We look at the work of their hands here, and we regard it with curiosity, as we might an ant’s nest. We do not know whether they made it as a tomb for their chief or as a shelter for their cows. And if they had left records to explain that, and it does not matter how much else, it would be the same. We learn only one thing from all the numberless millions who have gone before us—that man is less important than he thinks he is. I have a high position thrust upon me.Eh bien!I am not going to command the sun to stand still. I am not going to believe that I ought to revolutionize human society before I die. There will be many men after me. If one or two of them says of me that I worked hard to do well, and that I left things a trifle better than I found them, then what more can I desire?”
She nodded in musing abstraction, but answered nothing. Her gaze was fastened resolutely upon the opposite bank.
“I am truly so fortunate not to have missed you!” he repeated after a small interval of silence.
“Why should you say that?” she asked almost with petulance. “You make too much of me! I do not belong in this gallery at all. I am very angry with myself for being here. I ought not to have allowed Mrs. Emanuel to persuade me against my own judgment. It did not enter into my head that I should be seen by anybody. I was on my vacation—I take it early, because some of the girls like to get away at Whitsuntide—and at Bath I saw in a paper some reference to the state with which your grandfather would be buried, and the whim seized me to see the funeral. I came on my bicycle most of the way, till the hills got too bad. I thought no one would be the wiser for my coming and going. And one thing—you must not ask me to come into the castle again. I am going to the inn to get my machine, and go down to Craven Arms or Clun for the night. I have looked both roads out on my map. Is Clun interesting, do you know?”
“I have not the remotest idea. In fact, there is only one idea of any sort in my mind just now. It is that you are not to be allowed to go away. Have you seen the dungeons in which we fasten up people whose presence is particularly desired, and who will not listen to reason?”
The jesting tone of his words was belied by the glance in his eyes. She frowned a little. “No, there is no reason in it at all. What have I to do with these people? They are not my kind. It is the merest accident that you and I happen to be acquainted. If you did not know me now, nothing is more certain than that we should never meet in the world. And our seeming to each other like friends on those other occasions—that had nothing to do with the present. The circumstances are entirely different. There is nothing in common between us now, or hardly anything at all. You ought to understand that. And I look to you to realize how matters are altered, and not to insist upon placing me in a very undignified and unpleasant position.” She had spoken with increasing rapidity of utterance, and with rising agitation. “Not that your insisting would make any difference!” she added now, almost defiantly.
He looked at her in silence. The face half turned from him, with its broad brow, its shapely and competent profile, the commanding light in its gray eyes, the firm lips drawn into tightened curves of proud resistance to any weakness of quivering—it was the face that had made so profound an impression upon him at the outset of that wonderful journey from Rouen. The memory became on the instant inexpressibly touching to him. She was almost as she had been then—it might well be the same sober gray frock, the same hat, save that the ribbon now was black instead of fawn. She would have no varied wardrobe, this girl who earned her own bread, and gave her mind to the large realities of life. But this very simplicity of setting, how notably it emphasized the precious quality of what it framed! He recalled that in his first rapt study of this face it had seemed to him like the face of the young Piedmontese bishop who had once come to his school—pure, wise, sweet, tender, strong. And now, beholding it afresh, it was beyond all these things the face which woke music in his heart—the face of the woman he loved.
With gentle slowness he answered her: “The position I seek to place you in does not seem to me undignified. I should like to hope that you would not find it unpleasant. You know what I mean—I offered it to you in advance, before it was yet mine to give. I beg you again to accept it, now when itismine to give. If you will turn, you can see Caermere from where you stand. It has had in all its days no mistress like you. Will you take it from my hands?”
She confronted him with a clear, steady gaze of disapproval. “All this is very stupid!” she said, peremptorily. “Last week—it had its pretty and graceful side then perhaps, but it is not nice at all now. It does not flatter me; it does not please me in any way to-day. I told you then, I had my own independence, my own personal pride and dignity, which are dearer to me than anything else. If I had them then, I have them very much more now. What kind of idea of me is this that you have—that I am to change my mind because now you can talk of fifty thousand a year? I like you less than I did when you had nothing at all! For then we seemed to understand each other better. You would not have rattled your money-box at me then! You had finer sensibilities—I liked you more!”
He returned her gaze with a perplexed smile. “But I am asking you to be my wife,” he pointed out.
She sniffed with a suggestion of contempt at the word. “Wife!” she told him stormily. “You do not seem to know what the word ‘wife’ means! You are not thinking of a ‘wife’ at all. It is a woman to play Duchess to your Duke that you have in mind, and you feel merely that she ought to be presentable and intelligent, and personally not distasteful to you; we’ll even say that you prefer a woman towards whom you have felt a sort of comrade’s impulse. But that has nothing to do with a ‘wife.’ And even on your own ground how foolish you are! In heaven’s name, why hit onmeof all women? There are ten thousand who would do it all vastly better, and who, moreover, would leap at the chance. You have only to look about you. England is full of beauties in training for just such a place. They know the ways of your set—the small talk, the little jokes, the amusements and social duties and distinctions, and all that. Go and find what you want among them. What have I to do with such people? They’re not in my class at all.”
Christian sighed, and then sought her glance again with a timid, whimsical smile. “Ah, how you badger me always!” he said. “But I have still something more to say.”
“Let me beg that it be left unsaid!” She folded up the map, and began moving along the ridge as she spoke. “It is all as distressful to me as can be. You cannot understand—or will not understand—and it puts me in an utterly hateful position. I do not like to be saying unpleasant things to you. I had only the nicest feelings towards you when we last parted; and this noon, when I saw you in the church, you made a picture in my mind that I had quite—quite a tenderness for. But now you force me into disagreeable feelings and words, which I don’t like any more than you do. I seem to be never myself when I am with you. I have actually never seen you but three times, and you disturb me more—you make me hate myself more—than everything else in the world.”
The exigencies of the path along the summit of the mound forced Christian to walk behind her. In the voice which carried these words backward to him the quavering stress of profound emotion was more to him than the words themselves. He put out his hand and laid it lightly upon her arm.
“It is because you feel in your heart of hearts that I love you,” he said in a low, tremulous voice. “Can you not see? It is that that has made all our meetings disturbed, full of misunderstandings as well as pleasure. You wrong me, dear—or no, you could not do that, but it is that you do not comprehend. I have loved you from that first day. Oh, I have loved you always, since I can remember—long years before I saw you. There is not any memory in my life, it seems, but of you—for all the sweet things were a foretaste of you, and all the bitter are forgotten because of you. And shall there not be an end now to our hurting each other? For where you go I follow you, and I must always be longing for you—and I do not believe that in your heart you hold yourself away from me, but only in your mind.”
She had drawn her sleeve from his touch, and irresolutely quickened her steps. She perforce paused now at a broken gap in the bank, and with books and gathered skirts in one hand, lifted the other in instinctively balancing preparation for a descent. He took this hand, and she made no demur to his leading her down the steep slope to the level outer ground. He retained the hand reverently, gently in his own as they walked in silence across the heath. It seemed ever as if she would take it from him, and that he consciously exerted a magic through his touch which just sufficed to hold it.
With a bowed head, and cheek at once flushed and white, she began to speak. “You are very young,” she said, lingering over the words with almost dejection in her tone. “You know so little of what life is like! You have such a place in the affairs of men to fill, and you come to it with such innocent boyish good faith—and men are so little like what you think they are. And as you learn the lesson—the hardening, disillusionizing lesson of the world—and the soft, youthful places in your nature toughen, and you are a man holding your own with other men, and lording it over them where you can, then you will hate the things which hamper you, and you will curse encumbrances that you took on you in your ignorance. And you are all wrong about me! It is because you do not know other women that you think well of me. I am a very ordinary girl, indeed. There are thousands like me, and better than me, with more courage and finer characters, and you do not know them, that is all. And there are the young women of your own little world, who are born and reared to be the wives of men in your place, and you will see them——”
“I have seen them,” he interposed softly. “But it is not fair!” she hurried on breathlessly. “It is the duty of a friend to hold a man back when he is bent on a folly. And we pledged ourselves to be true friends, and I implore you—or no, I insist! I will not have it. It is too cruelly unfair to you—and—I am going now—no, not that way; in the other direction. We will say good-bye.”
He would not relinquish the hand she strove to drag away. All the calmness of confident mastery was in his hold upon this hand, and in the gravely sweet cadence of his voice. “I love you,” he said. “I shall love no one in my life, or in another life, but you. I will not live without you. I will not willingly spend a day in all my years away from you. You are truly my other half—the companion, the friend, the love, the wife, without whom nothing exists for me. I am not young as you say I am, and I shall never be old—for in this love there is no youth or age for either of us. Try to look backward now! Can you see a time when we did not love each other? And forward! Is it thinkable that we can be parted?” Slowly she lifted her head.
“Look at me!” she bade him in a voice he seemed never to have heard before.