‘Mr. Le Breton! Mr. Le Breton! Papa says Lynmouth may go out trout-fishing with him this afternoon. Come up with me to the Clatter. I’m going to sketch there.’
‘Very well, Lady Hilda; if you want my criticism, I don’t mind if I do. Let me carry your things; it’s rather a pull up, even for you, with your box and easel!’
Hilda gave him her sketch-book and colours, and they turned together up the Cleave behind the Castle.
A Clatter is a peculiar Devonshire feature, composed of long loose tumbled granite blocks piled in wild disorder along the narrow summit of a saddle-backed hill. It differs from a tor in being less high and castellated, as well as in its longer and narrower contour. Ernest and Hilda followed the rough path up through the gorse and heather to the top of the ridge, and then scrambled over the grey lichen-covered rooks together to the big logan-stone whose evenly-poised and tilted mass crowned the actual summit. The granite blocks were very high and rather slippery in places, for it was rainy April weather, so that Ernest had to take his companion’s hand more than once in his to help her over the tallest boulders. It was a small delicate hand, though Hilda was a tall well-grown woman; ungloved, too, for the sake of the sketching; and Hilda didn’t seem by any means unwilling to accept Ernest’s proffered help, though if it had been Lord Connemara who was with her instead, she would have scorned assistance, and scaled the great mossy masses by herself like a mountain antelope. Light-footed and lithe of limb was Lady Hilda, as befitted a Devonshire lass accustomed to following the Exmoor stag-hounds across their wild country on her own hunter. Yet she seemed to find a great deal of difficulty in clambering up the Clatter on that particular April morning, and move than once Ernest half fancied to himself that she leaned on his arm longer than was absolutely necessary for support or assistance over the stiffest places.
‘Here, by the logan, Mr. Le Breton,’ she said, motioning him where to put her camp-stool and papers. ‘That’s a good point of view for the rocks yonder. You can lie down on the rug and give me the benefit of your advice and assistance.’
‘My advice is not worth taking,’ said Ernest. ‘I’m a regular duffer at painting and sketching. You should ask Lord Connemara. He knows all about art and that sort of thing.’
‘Lord Connemara!’ echoed Hilda contemptuously. ‘He has a lot of pictures in his gallery at home, and he’s been told by sensible men what’s the right thing for him to say about them; but he knows no more about art, really, than he knows about fiddlesticks.’
‘Doesn’t he, indeed?’ Ernest answered languidly, not feeling any burning desire to discuss Lord Connemara’s artistic attainments or deficiencies.
‘No, he doesn’t,’ Hilda went on, rather defiantly, as though Ernest had been Lady Exmoor; ‘and most of these people that come here don’t either. They have galleries, and they get artists and people who understand about pictures to talk with them, and so they learn what’s considered the proper thing to say of each of them. But as to saying anything spontaneous or original of their own about a picture or any other earthly thing—why, you know, Mr. Le Breton, they couldn’t possibly do it to save their lives.’
‘Well, there I should think you do them, as a class, a great injustice,’ said Ernest, quietly; ‘you’re evidently prejudiced against your own people. I should think that if there’s any subject on which our old families really do know anything, it’s art. Look at their great advantages.’
‘Nonsense,’ Hilda answered, decisively. ‘Fiddlesticks for their advantages. What’s the good of advantages without a head on your shoulders, I should like to know. And they haven’t got heads on their shoulders, Mr. Le Breton; you know they haven’t.’
‘Why, surely,’ said Ernest, in his simple fashion, looking the question straight in the face as a matter of abstract truth, ‘there must be a great deal of ability among peers and peers’ sons. All history shows it; and it would be absurd if it weren’t so; for the mass of peers have got their peerages by conspicuous abilities of one sort or another, as barristers, or soldiers, or politicians, or diplomatists, and they would naturally hand on their powers to their different descendants.’
‘Oh, yes, there are some of them with brains, I suppose,’ Hilda answered, as one who makes a great concession. ‘There’s Herbert Alderney, who’s member for somewhere or other—Church Stretton, I think—and makes speeches in the House; he’s clever, they say, but such a conceited fellow to talk to. And there’s Wilfrid Faunthorp, who writes poems, and gets them printed in the magazines, too, because he knows the editors. And there’s Randolph Hastings, who goes in for painting, and has little red and blue daubs at the Grosvenor by special invitation of the director. But somehow they none of them strike me as being really original. Whenever I meet anybody worth talking to anywhere—in a railway train or so on—I feel sure at once he’s an ordinary commoner, not even Honourable; and he is invariably, you may depend upon it.’
‘That would naturally happen on the average of instances,’ Ernest put in, smiling, ‘considering the relative frequency of peers and commoners in this realm of England. Peers, you know, or even Honourables are not common objects of the country, numerically speaking.’
‘They are to me, unfortunately,’ Hilda replied, looking at him inquiringly. ‘I hardly ever meet anybody else, you know, and I’m positively bored to death by them, and that’s the truth, really. It’s most unlucky, under the circumstances, that I should happen to be the daughter of one peer, and be offered promiscuously as wife to the highest bidder among half a dozen others, if only I would have them. But I won’t, Mr. Le Breton, I really won’t. I’m not going to marry a fool, just to please my mother. Nothing on earth would induce me to marry Lord Connemara, for example.’
Ernest looked at her and smiled, but said nothing.
Lady Hilda put in a stroke or two more to her pencil outline, and then continued her unsolicited confidences. ‘Do you know, Mr. Le Breton,’ she went on, ‘there’s a conspiracy—the usual conspiracy, but still a regular conspiracy I call it—between Papa and Mamma to make me marry that stick of a Connemara. What is there in him, I should like to know, to make any girl admire or love him? And yet half the girls in London would be glad to get him, for all his absurdity. It’s monstrous, it’s incomprehensible, it’s abominable; but it’s the fact. For my part, I must say I do like a little originality. And whenever I hear Papa, and Uncle Sussex, and Lord Connemara talking at dinner, it does seem to me too ridiculously absurd that they should each have a separate voice in Parliament, and that you shouldn’t even have a fraction of a vote for a county member. What sort of superiority has Lord Connemara over you, I wonder?’ And she looked at Ernest again with a searching glance, to see whether he was to be moved by such a personal and emphatic way of putting the matter.
Ernest looked back at her curiously in his serious simplicity, and only answered, ‘There are a great many queer inequalities and absurdities in all our existing political systems, Lady Hilda.’
Hilda smiled to herself—a quiet smile, half of disappointment, half of complacent feminine superiority. What a stupid fellow he was in some ways, after all! Even that silly Lord Connemara would have guessed what she was driving at, with only a quarter as much encouragement. But Ernest must be too much afraid of the social barrier clearly; so she began again, this time upon a slightly different but equally obvious tack.
‘Yes, there are; absurd inequalities really, Mr. Le Breton; very absurd inequalities. You’d get rid of them all, I know. You told me that about cutting all the landlords’ heads off, I’m sure, though you said when I spoke about it before Mamma, the night you first came here, that you didn’t mean it. I remember it perfectly well, bec............