Christian began his walk with swift, energetic steps, and a guiding eye fixed resolutely on a distinguishing mark in the distant line of tree-tops beyond, as if both speed and directness of course were of utmost urgency to his purpose. While his body moved forward thus automatically, however, his mind remained engrossed with what had been said and done in the room he was leaving behind.
His brain reproduced over and over again the appearance of the two young brothers, their glances at each other, their sneering scowls at him. The picture of Augustine whispering in Edward’s ear, and of Edward shaking his sulky head, stuck in his memory as a living thing. He had continued to see it after he had turned his back on them and gone to the window. The infamous words which had been spoken about his father were a part of this picture, and their inflection still rang in his ears just as the young men still stood before his eyes, compact of hostility to him and his blood.
The noise of guns in the wood he approached was for a time subordinated in his mind to those bitter echoes of Edward’s speech. When at last these reports of firing attracted his attention, he had passed out of sight of Caermere, and found himself on a vaguely defined path at the end of a broad heath, much overgrown with heather and broom and low, straggling, inhospitable-looking shrubs novel to his eye. Curious movements among this shaggy verdure caught his wandering notice, and he stopped to observe them more closely. A great many rabbits—or would they be hares?—were making their frightened escape from the wood in front of him, and darting about for cover in this undergrowth. He became conscious now of an extraordinary tumult in the wood itself—a confused roar of men’s voices raised in apparently meaningless cries, accompanied by an unintelligible pounding of sticks on timber and crackling brush. This racket almost drowned the noise of the remote firing; its effect of consternation upon the small inhabitants of the thicket was only less than the bewilderment that it caused in Christian’s mind. Forgetting altogether his own concerns, he pushed cautiously forward to spy out the cause of the commotion.
Somewhat later, he emerged from the wood again, having obtained a tolerable notion of what was going on. He had caught a view of one line of beaters making their way through a copse, diagonally away from him—rough men clad for the most part in white jackets, who shouted and thrashed about them with staves as they went—and it was easy enough to connect their work, and the consequent rise and whirring rush of birds before it, with the excited fusillade of guns farther on. Christian did not get a sight of the sportsmen themselves. Albeit with some doubts as to the dignity of the proceeding, he made a detour of the piece of woodland, with the idea of coming out upon the shooting party, but when he arrived at the barrier it was to find on the spot only a couple of men in greenish corduroys, whom he took to be underkeepers. They were at work before a large heap of pheasants, tying the birds in pairs by the necks, and hanging them over a long stick, stretched between two trees, which already bent under its burden. They glanced up from their employment at Christian, and when he stooped to pick up one of the cartridge cases with which the ground at his feet was strewn, they exchanged some muttered comment at which both laughed aloud. He instinctively threw the little tube down, and looked away from the men. The thought occurred to him that if they only knew who he was their confusion would be pathetic, but as it was, they had the monopoly of self-possession, and it was he who shyly withdrew.
The whole diversion, however, had cleared and sweetened his mood. He retraced his steps through the wood and then struck off in a new direction across the heath, at a more leisurely pace than he had come, his mind dwelling pleasurably upon the various picturesque phases of what he had witnessed. The stray glimpses of la chasse which had been afforded him in the South had had nothing in common with this. The unkempt freedom of the growths about him appealed to his senses as cultivated parks and ordered forests had never done. It was all so strong and simple and natural—and the memory of the beaters smashing along in the thicket, bawling and laying about them with their clubs, gave it a primitive note which greatly pleased his fancy.
The heath was even finer, in his eyes, than the wood. The air stirring across it, for one thing, had a quality which he seemed never to have known before—and the wild, almost savage, aspect of its squat gray and russet herbage, the sense of a splendidly unashamed idleness and unproductiveness suggested by its stretches of waste land, charmed his imagination. He said to himself, as he sauntered here, that he would gallop every day across this wonderful plain, with a company of big dogs at his horse’s heels. The thought of the motion in the saddle inspired him to walk faster. He straightened himself, put his hands to his coat at the breast as he had seen young Englishmen do on their pedestrian tours, and strode briskly forward, humming to himself as he moved. The hateful episode of the morning had not so much faded from his thoughts, as shaken itself into a new kaleidoscopic formation. Contact with these noble realities out of doors had had the effect, as it were, of immeasurably increasing his stature. When he thought of those paltry cousins of his, it was as if he looked down upon their insignificance from a height.
He came at last face to face with a high stone wall, the pretensions and obvious antiquity of which told him at once that he had returned to the vicinity of the castle. Sure enough, there were discernible at a considerable distance down to the right some of the turrets and roofs of Caermere, and he turned his course in that direction. It seemed to him a long way that he walked by the side of this great wall, marveling as he did so at its size and at the ambitious views of the persons who built it. The reflection that they were ancestors of his own came to his mind, and expanded therein. He also would build like a great nobleman in his time! What was there so grand as building?—he mused as he looked about him—unless it might be the heath and the brownish-purple hills beyond, and these also one intuitively thought of as having been built.
Presently a small doorway appeared in the massive wall, and Christian, finding it unlocked, passed through it into a vast garden. The inner and sunny side of the wall, as far as he could see in either direction, was veined with the regularly espaliered branches of dwarf trees flattened against it, from which still depended here and there belated specimens of choice fruit. On the other side of the path following close this wall, down which he proceeded, were endless rows of small trees and staked clumps of canes, all now bereft of their season’s produce. The spectacle did not fit with what had been mentioned to him of the poverty of Caermere. Farther on, a tall hedge stretching at right angles from the wall separated this orchard from what he saw now, by glimpses through an open arch, to a be a flower garden. He quickened his pace at the sight, for flowers were very near his heart.
At first there was not much to move his admiration. The sunlit profusion of his boyhood’s home had given him standards of size and glowing color which were barely approached, and nowhere equaled, here. Suddenly he came upon something, however, before which he perforce stopped. It was the beginning of a long row of dahlias, rounded flowers on the one side of him, pointed and twisted cactus varieties on the other, and he had imagined nothing like this before in his life. Apparently no two of the tall plants, held upright to the height of his breast by thick stakes, were alike, and he knew not upon which to expend the greater delight, the beauty of their individual blossoms or the perfection of skill exhibited in the color-arrangement of the line.
He moved slowly along, examining the more notable flowers in detail with such ardor that a young lady in a black gown, but with a broad hat of light straw on her pale hair, advanced up the path, paused, and stood quite near him for some moments before he perceived her presence. Then with a little start, he took off his hat, and held it in his hands while he made a stiff bow.
“You are fond of flowers?” Lady Cressage said, more as a remark than an inquiry. She observed him meanwhile with politely calm interest.
“These dahlias are extraordinary!” he exclaimed, very earnestly. “I have never seen such flowers, and such variety. It surprises me a great deal. It is a spécialité in England, n’est ce pas?”
“I think I have heard that we have carried the dahlia further than other countries have done,” responded the lady, courteously giving the name the broad-voweled sound he had used. She added with a pleasant softening of eyes and lips: “But you ought not to begrudge us one little triumph like this—you who come from the very paradise of flowers.”
The implication in her words caused him to straighten himself, and to regard her with a surprised new scrutiny. He saw now that she was very beautiful, and he strove to recall the few casual remarks Lord Julius had dropped, concerning the two ladies at the castle, as a clue to her identity. One had been an actress, he remembered—and this lady’s graceful equanimity had, perhaps, something histrionic in it. But if she happened not to be the actress, then it would no doubt anger her very much to be taken for one. He knew so little of women—and then his own part in the small drama occurred to him.
“It is evident that you understand who I am,” he said, with another bow. The further thought that in either case she was related to him, was a part of the family of which he would soon be the head, came to give him fresh confidence. “It is not only dahlias that are carried to unrivaled heights of beauty in England,” he added, and bowed once more.
She smiled outright at this. “That is somewhat too—what shall I say?—continental for these latitudes,” she remarked. “Men don’t say such glowing things in England. We haven’t sun enough, you know, properly to ripen rose-hips—or compliments. I should like to introduce myself, if I may—I am Edith Cressage—and Lord Julius has told me the wonderful story about you.”
She held out her hand as she spoke, with a deliberate gesture, which afforded Christian time to note its exquisite modeling, if he had had the eyes for it. But he took the hand in his own rather cursorily, and began speaking with abruptness before he had finished his bow and relinquished it.
“It is much too wonderful,” he said, hastily. “It frightens me. I cannot get used to it. I have the feeling that I should go away somewhere, and live by myself, till it became all familiar to me. But then I see it would be just as painful, wherever I went.”
“Oh, let us hope it would be least painful here, of all places,” urged the lady, in gentle deprecation of his tone. “Caermere is not gay, but it can be soothing and restful—to those who stand in need of solace. It has come to be my second home—I never thought one could grow so deeply attached to a place. It has been to me like a tender old nurse and confidante—in times when—when its shelter and consolation were very welcome”—she faltered for an instant, with averted face, then raised her moist eyes to his, and let them sparkle—“and oh, you will grow to love Caermere with all your heart.”
Christian felt himself much moved. He had put on his hat, and stepped now to her side.
“I have seen nothing of it at all,” he said. “I am going to ask that you shall show it to me—you who love it so much. But if I shall remain here now, that I cannot in the least tell. Nothing is arranged, so far as I know. I am quite in Lord Julius’ hands—thus far.”
They had tacitly begun to move down the path together, loitering to look at plants on either side which particularly invited notice.
“Lord Julius is a remarkable man,” she said. “If one is fortunate enough to enlist his friendship, there is no end to what he can do for him. You can hardly imagine what a difference it makes for you in everything—the fact that he is warmly disposed towards you.”
“Yes, that I have been told,” said Christian, “and I see it for myself, too. I do not feel that I know him very well, as yet. It was only yesterday morning that I met him for the first time at an hotel in Brighton. We breakfasted together, we looked through papers together and then we began a long railway journey together, which only ended a few hours ago. We have talked a great deal in this time, but, as I have said, the man himself is not very clear to me yet. But no one could have been kinder—and I think he likes me.”
“Oh, of course he does,” affirmed Lady Cressage, as if anything else would have been incredible. “And—talking with him so much, so continuously, you no doubt understand the entire situation. I am glad that he at least left it to me to show you over Caermere; there is apparently nothing else in which I can be of use.”
Christian, though he smiled in kindly recognition of her attitude, offered no verbal comment, and after a wandering digression about dahlias, she returned to the subject.
“If there is anything I can tell you—about the family, the position of affairs in general, and so on—you should not stand on ceremony with me. Has he, for example, explained about money affairs?”
The young man looked keenly at her for an instant, as if the question took him by surprise. Then he answered frankly enough: “Nothing definite. I only gather that it will be made easier for me than it would have been for—for other members of the family, if they—had been in my place. But perhaps that is not what I should say to you.”
Lady Cressage smiled on him reassuringly.
“Oh, don’t think of me in that light,” she pleaded. “I stand quite outside the—what shall I say?—the interested family circle. I have no ax of any description to grind. You, of course, have been told my position in the castle—that is, so far as it can be told by others. It is a simple enough story—I was to have been everything, and then the wind happens to change off the Welsh coast and lo! I am nothing—nothing! It is not even certain that I am not a beggar—living here on alms. Legally, everything is in such confusion that no one knows how he stands. But so far as I am concerned, it doesn’t matter. My cup has been filled so full—so long:—that a little more or less trouble is of no importance. Oh, I assure you, I do not desire to be considered in the matter at all.”
She made this last declaration with great earnestness, in immediate response to the sympathetic look and gesture with which Christian had interrupted her narrative.
His gentle eyes regarded her troubled beauty with compassionate softness. “I venture to think that you will be considered a good deal, none the less,” he remarked, in a grave yet eager tone. The sense of elation at being able to play the part of Providence to such a lady spread through his mind and possessed his being. The lofty possibilities of the powers devolving upon him had never been so apparent before. He instinctively put out his arm toward her, in such overt fashion that she could but take it. She did not lean upon it, but imparted to the contact instead a kind of ceremonial reserve which directly ministered to the patrician side of his mood.
They walked, if possible, still more slowly now, pausing before almost every stake; their talk was of the flowers, with occasional lapses into the personal.
“What you said about Lord Julius,” she remarked, in one of these interludes, “is quite true. He has it in his power to say whether the duke shall be a rich man or a pauper, and until yesterday he was all for the pauper. If poor Porlock and his sons had lived, they knew very well that Lord Julius was no friend of theirs, and would starve the title whichever of them had it. And so with these others—Edward and Augustine—only with them, it isn’t merely dislike but loathing that Lord Julius has for them.”
“I met those young gentlemen this morning,” said Christian stiffly. “It seemed to me that Lord Julius went quite out of his way to be kind with them. I should never have gathered that he hated them.”
“Oh, not personally,” she explained. “I don’t think he dislikes anybody personally. But in what you may call their representative capacity he is furious with people if they don’t measure up to his idea of what they should be. I never heard of any other family that had such a man in it. I used to admire him very much—when I was newly married—I thought his ideals for the family were so noble and fine—but I don’t know—”
“Do you have suspicions of Julius, then?” asked Christian, hurriedly.
“Oh, no, no!” she protested. “Nothing is farther from my thoughts. Only I have seen it all, here. I have lived in the very heart of it—and much as I sympathize with his feelings, I can’t help feeling that he is unjust—not willfully, but still unjust. He and his son are men of great intelligence and refined tastes; they would do honor to any position. But is it quite fair of them to be so hard on cousins of theirs who were not given great intelligence, and who had no capacity whatever for refinement? That is what I mean. You saw those young men this morning. They are not up to much, certainly; their uncle Porlock and his sons averaged, perhaps, even a shade lower—you see I am speaking quite frankly—but when it is all said and done, they were not so remarkably worse than other men of their class. If any of the six had succeeded to the title, he would not have been such a startling anomaly in the peerage. I doubt if he would have attracted attention, one way or the other. But it became a fixed idea with Lord Julius years ago to get control of the estates, and to use this control to bully the elder line into the paths of sweetness and light. It didn’t succeed in the least—and I think he grew a little spiteful. That is all. And besides—what does it matter? It is all ancient history now.”
Christian was looking straight before him, with a meditative gaze. They walked for some moments in silence before he spoke. “And how did he know that he would like me?” he demanded, musingly. “How should he be confident that I was better than the others? Perhaps—do you know?—was he very fond of my father?”
“I have no idea,” she responded. It was impossible not to note the brevity of her tone.
“No one speaks willingly of my father,” he broke forth with impulsive bitterness. “Even Lord Julius would tell me nothing of him. And the young lady on the boat—she too—”
He paused, and his companion, who had been looking away, glanced again at him. “The young lady on the boat,” she said, more by way of suggesting to him a safe topic than as an inquiry.
“Oh, I much want to know who she can be,” he cried, unconsciously accepting the diversion. He described the meeting at Rouen, the conversation and, after a fashion of his own, the girl herself. “She said,” he went on, “that she had personally something to do with the story—‘remotely’ was the word she used. I asked Lord Julius, but he could not think who she might be. She earns her own living—she told me that—and she had never been out of England before. She is not well educated—in the school sense, I mean—her French was ridiculous. But she spoke very beautifully her own language, and her mind filled me with charm, but even more so her good heart. We swore friendship for all time—or at least I did.”
“Dear me!” said Lady Cressage. Her thoughts had not been idle, and they brought to her now on the instant a satisfactory clue. She pondered it for a little, before she decided to speak. “I think I know who this remarkable young lady must be,” she observed then. “This Captain Edward whom you met this morning—he has a wife.”
“Yes, I know,” put in Christian abruptly—“the actress-lady; Julius told me of her.”
“I suppose ‘actress’ would cover the thing,” she answered, with an air of amiable indifference. “She danced more than she acted, I believe, but ‘actress’ is a very general term. Well, your eternal friend is, I suspect, her younger sister. ‘I have never seen her, but by accident I happen to know that she is aware of your coming to England.”
Christian’s mobile face had lengthened somewhat. “Is she also an—an ‘actress’?” he asked, dolefully.
Lady Cressage looked skyward, with halfclosed eyes, in an effort of memory. “I really seem to have heard what she did,” she mused, hesitatingly. “I know her sister has often spoken of her. Is it ‘barmaid’? No. ‘Telegraph’? No, it’s her father who’s in the General Post Office. Why, now, how stupid of me! She can’t be a nurse, of course, or there would have been her uniform. Oh, now I remember—she’s a typewriter.”
It was not clear to her whether Christian wholly comprehended the term, now that she had found it. She perceived, however, that he disliked something in what she had said, or in her manner of saying it. The remarkable responsiveness of his countenance to passing emotions and moods within him had already impressed her. She regarded his profile now with a sidelong glance, and reconstructed some of her notions about him by the help of what she saw. Nothing was said, until suddenly he paused, gazing with kindled eye upon the prospect opened before him.
They had come to the end of the garden, and stood at the summit of a broad stone-kerbed path descending in terraces. Above them, the dense foliage of the yews rising at either side of the gap in the hedge had been trained and cut into an arched canopy. From under this green gateway Christian looked down upon a Caermere he had not imagined to himself before.
The castle revealed itself for the first time, as he beheld it now, in its character as a great medieval fortress. On his arrival in the morning, emerging from the shadowed driveway into the immediate precinct of the house, he had seen only its variously modernized parts; these, as they were viewed from this altitude, shrank to their proper proportions—an inconsiderable fraction of the mighty whole. All about, the massive shoulders of big hills shelved downward to form the basin-like hollow in which the castle seemed to stand, but their large bulk, so far from dwarfing Caermere, produced the effect of emphasizing its dimensions. Its dark-gray walls and towers, with their bulging clumps of chimneys and turrets, and lusterless facets of many-angled roofings, all of somber slate, were visibly the product, the very child, of the mountains. A sensation of grim, adamantine, implacable power took hold of the young man’s brain as he gazed. For a long time he did not want to talk, and felt vaguely that he was signifying this by the slight, sustained pressure of his arm against hers. At all events, she grasped his wish, and preserved silence, holding herself a little behind him, so that he might look down, without distraction, upon his kingdom.
“These Torrs,” he burst forth all at once, with a nervous uncertainty in his tones as of one out of breath, “these ancestors of mine—the family I belong to—did they produce great men? You must know their history. Julius says we are the most ancient family in England. I have not had the time yet to learn anything of what we did. Were there heroes and famous soldiers and learned scholars among us? To look at that wonderful castle there at our feet, it seems as if none but born chiefs and rulers of mankind could ever have come out of it.”
“Captain Edward and his brother Augustine were both born there,” she permitted her own over-quick tongue to comment.
He let her arm drop from his with a swift gesture, and wheeled round to look her in the face. The glance in his eyes said so much to her that she hastened to anticipate his speech.
“Forgive me!” she urged hastily. “It was silly thoughtlessness of mine. I do not know you at all well as yet, you know, and I say the wrong things to you. Do tell me you forgive me! And it is only fair to myself to say, too, that I have been in a bad school these last few years. Conversation as one practices it at Caermere is merely the art of making everything pointed and sharp enough to pierce thick skins. I should have remembered that you were different—it was unpardonable of me! But I have really angered you!”
Christian, still looking at her, found himself gently shaking his head in reassurance. It was plain enough to him that this beautiful young woman had suffered much, and that at the hands of his own people. What wonder that acrid memories of them should find their way to her lips? He also had been unhappy. He smiled gravely into her face at the softening recollection.
“We were speaking of different things, I think,” he commented, and nodded approval at sight of the relieved change which his tone brought to her countenance. “I know very well there are many disagreeable and unpleasant matters close about us—when we are down below, there. But now we are up above them, and we forget them all, or ignore them—and I was asking you about the history of the family—its ancient history.”
She put her hand lightly upon his arm again. “Lord Julius is right about it being a very, very long history,” she said, putting into her voice a tacit recognition of his magnanimity. “I know it, in a certain way, but I can hardly make a good story of it, I’m afraid. The family is Keltic, you know. That is what is always said about it, as its most distinguishing characteristic. It is the only large English one which managed to survive through the Saxon period, and then the Norman period, and keep its name and its estates and its territorial power. This makes it very interesting to historians and archaeologists. There are many stone circles and Druidic monuments about here, some of which are said to be connected with the introduction of Christianity into Britain. You will see them another day, and read the legends about them. Well, it is said that the chief who possessed this land here, and who had some kind of a stronghold there where the castle is, at that time, was a Torr. Of course, there were no surnames then, but it would have been his tribal appellation, or something of the sort. The fact itself, I believe, is generally accepted—that the family that was here in St. David’s time is here now. It is a tradition that there should always be a David in the family; it used to be the leading name, but now Christian is usually the duke’s name, and the others are all saints, like Anselm, Edward, Augustine and—and so forth.”
The young man looked down in meditation upon the gloomy, historic pile. “It is a very grand beginning,” he said, thoughtfully.
“Perhaps it was too grand for mere mortals to live up to,” she ventured, with a cautious sidelong eye on him.
“I see your meaning,” he assented, nodding. “Yes, no doubt it is natural. It is as if a boy were named Napoleon. He would be frightened to think what he had done to make his name and himself fit together—and very likely he would never do anything at all.”
“Yes, that is it,” she answered, and drew a long, consolatory breath.
They had begun to move down the wide winding path, and when they paused presently at one of the steps to note a new view of the buildings, she called his attention to something by a little exclamation and a pointing finger.
“Do you see the balcony there, up above and to the left of the flat-topped tower—no, this side of the highest chimneys—there are figures coming out on it from the window.”
“There is some one in a reclining chair, n’est ce pas?” he asked, following her finger.
“It is your grandfather,” she said softly. “Those are his apartments—the rows of windows with the white woodwork. When the sun gets round to them, they bring him out—if he is strong enough. Evidently this is one of his good days.”
Christian, gazing eagerly, made out beyond the attendants and the couch they bore, another figure, with a splash of white like a shield upon its front.
“Is it not Julius?” he asked swiftly, pressing her arm. “Oh, then by this time my grandfather knows of me—knows that I am here! Should you not think so? And no doubt, since it is his good day, they will take me to see him. Is that not probable?”
“I haven’t the least idea,” she responded, after a momentary pause, “either as to what Lord Julius has told him, or as to how much he is capable of understanding. Except from this distance, I have not seen him since he was struck down with paralysis. I know nothing of his condition beyond a stray, guarded word now and then from the doctors. If I were a professional thief and he a crown jewel, I could not have been more securely shut out from him!”
The melancholy bitterness of her words, and tone appealed to the young man. He drew her hand closer to his side by a delicate pressure of the arm. “I can see that you have been very unhappy,” he said, compassionately.
“Oh-h-h!” she murmured, with a shuddering sigh. “Don’t—don’t speak of it, I beg of you!”
“I also have had a sad youth,” he went on, unconsciously tightening his arm. “But now”—and he lifted his head and smiled—“who knows? Who shall say that the bad days are not all gone—for both of us?”
Only the flutter of the hand against his arm made answer. They walked oh together down the broad sunlit path.