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 r?le 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, “per............