During the progress of the luncheon, Christian found no opportunity for intimate conversation with Emanuel’s wife. The elderly and ponderously verbose Lord Chobham sat upon her right; there was the thin-faced, exigeant wife of some clerical person in gaiters—a rural dean, was it not?—full of dogmatic commonplaces, on his left. The other people did not seem to talk so much. The scene down the table—with so much black cloth offset garishly against the white linen in the daylight—presented an effect of funereal sobriety, curiously combined with a spontaneous reaction of the natural man against this effect. The guests ate steadily, and with energy; Christian noted with interest how freely they also drank. For himself, he could not achieve an appetite, but thirst was in the air. He lifted his glass bravely to Lord Julius, whose massive bulk and beard confronted him at the other end of the table—and then to others whose glance from time to time caught his.
Once he found the chance to murmur to Kathleen: “When this is over, I hope you will manage it so that I may speak with you.”
She nodded slow assent, without looking at him. He, observing her profile, realized all at once that something was amiss with her. It came back to him now that a certain intensity of sadness had dwelt in the first glance they had exchanged that morning, upon meeting. At the time he had referred it to the general aspect of woe which people put on at funerals. He saw now that it was a grief personal to herself. And now that he thought of it, too, there had been much the same stricken look upon Emanuel’s face. It was incredible that they should be thus devoured by grief at the fact of his grandfather’s death. No one had liked that old man overmuch—but surely they least of all. The emotion of Lord Julius was more intelligible—and yet even this had a quality of broken dejection in it which seemed independent of Caermere’s cause for mourning.
The disquieting conviction that these dearly beloved cousins of his—these ineffably tender and generous friends of his—were writhing under some trouble unknown to him, took more definite shape in his mind with each new glance that he stole at her.
Once the thought sprang up that they might be unhappy because such a huge sum of money had been given to him, but on the instant he hated himself for being capable of formulating such a monstrous idea. The wondering solicitude which all this raised within him possessed his thoughts for the rest of the meal. He was consumed with impatience to get away so that he might question Kathleen about it.
Yet when at last he found himself beside her, standing before an old portrait in one of the chain of big rooms through which the liberated company had dispersed itself, this was just the question for which it seemed that no occasion would offer.
She began speaking to him at once. “The young lady—Miss Bailey, I should say—has gone for a walk—so Falkner learns from some of the women. They have the impression that she is coming back—but I don’t know that I feel quite so sure about it.” Christian’s face visibly lengthened. “It’s very awkward,” he said, with vague annoyance. “They do not arrange things in a very talented fashion, these people of mine.”
“But what could they arrange?” she argued. An indefinable listlessness in her tone struck him. “It is a free country, you know, and this is the nineteenth century. They cannot bodily capture a young woman and keep her in the Castle against her will. As I told you, I had difficulty in persuading her to come at all.”
“Ah, what did you say to her?” he asked, eagerly.
“I can hardly tell you. She is not an ordinary person—and I know only that I tried not to say ordinary things to her. But what it was that I did say——” She broke off with an uncertain gesture, and a sigh.
“Ah, you saw that she was not ordinary!” said Christian, admiringly. “I should love dearly to hear what you really think of her—the impression that she makes upon you.” Kathleen roused herself and turned to him. “Do you truly mean it, Christian?” she asked him, gravely.
“Do you blame me?” he rejoined, with uneasy indirection.
She pressed her lips together, and stared up at the picture with a troubled face. “I know so little of her,” she protested. “You put too big a responsibility upon me. It is more than I am equal to.”
With a sudden gust of self-reproach, he perceived afresh the marks of suffering in her countenance, and recalled his anxiety. “Take my arm,” he said, softly, “and let us go on into the next room. There is a terrace there, I think. Forgive me for troubling you,” he added, as they moved forward. “I ought to have seen that you are not well—that you have something on your mind.”
She did not answer him immediately. “It is Emanuel who is not well.” she said, after a pause.
Christian uttered a formless little exclamation of grieved astonishment. “Oh, it is nothing serious?” he whispered imploringly.
She shook her head in a doubtful way. “No, I think not—that is, not irrevocably. But he has worked too hard. He has broken down under the strain. We are going away for a long journey—to rest, and forget about the System.”
He bent his head to look into her eyes—trusting his glance to say the things which his lips shrank from uttering. A window stood open, and they passed out upon a broad stone terrace, shaded and pleasant under a fresh breeze full of forest odors.
“Oh—the System”—he ventured to say, as they stood alone here, and she lifted her head to breathe in the revivifying air—“I felt always that it was too much for one man. The load was too great. It would crush the most powerful man on earth.”
She nodded reflective assent. “Oh, yes—I’m afraid I hated it,” she confessed to him, in a murmur full of contrition.
“But he is going away now,” urged Christian, hopefully. “You will have him to yourself—free from care, seeing strange and beautiful new places—as long as you like. Ah, then soon enough that gaiety of yours will return to you. Why, it is such a shock to me to think of you as sad, depressed—you who are by nature so full of joy and high spirits. Ah, but be sure they will all return to you! I make no doubt whatever of that. And Emanuel, too—he will get rested and strong, and be happy as he never was before—the dear fellow!”
She smiled at him in wan, affectionate fashion. “All the courage has gone out of me,” she said. “Will it be coming back again? God knows!”
“But surely——” Christian began, with hearty confidence.
She interrupted him. “What I am fearful of—it is not so much his health, strictly speaking—but the terrible unsettling blow that all this means to him. It is like the death of a beautiful only child to the fondest of fathers. It tears his heart to pieces. He loved his work so devotedly—it was so wholly a part of his life—and to have to give it up! He says he is reconciled. Poor man, he tried with all his strength to make himself believe that he is. I catch him forcing a smile on his face when he sees me looking at him—and that is the hardest of all for me to bear. But I don’t know”—she drew a long breath, and gazed with a wistful brightening in her eyes at the placid hills and sky—“it may work itself out for the best. As you say—when we get away alone together, ah, that is where love like ours will surely tell. I do wrong to harbor any doubts at all. When two people love each other as we do—ah, Christian, boy, there’s nothing else in all the world to equal that!”
He inclined his head gravely, to mark his reverential sympathy with her mood.
“Ah, but you know nothing of it at all,” she went on. “You’re just a lad—and love is no more to be understood by instinct than any other great wisdom. Millions of people pass through life talking about love—and they would stare with surprise if you told them they never had had so much as a glimmer of the meaning of it. They use the name of love in all the matings of young couples—and there’s hardly once in a thousand times that it isn’t blasphemy to mention it. Do you know what most marriages are? Life-sentences! If you have means and intelligence, you make your prison tolerable; you can get used to it, and even grow dependent upon it—but it is a prison still. The best-behaved convict eyes his warder with a cruel thought somewhere at the back of his mind. Do you remember—when you left us the first time, I begged you to be in no haste to marry?”
He bowed again. “Oh, yes, I remember it all,” he said, soberly.
“I have come to feel so strongly upon that subject,” she explained. “............