They are interrupted here by the entrance of baby Rollo on his way to bed, for it is getting late. "The rummiest little beggar," says Lord Burdon, introducing his small son. "Not much more than eighteen months, and solemn enough for an archbishop, aren't you, Rollo?"
The solemn one, pale and noticeably quiet and far from strong looking, justifies this character by having no smiles, though Mr. Pemberton greets him cheerfully and says approvingly: "Rollo, eh? The Burdon name. His name," he adds, and looks at Lady Burdon, who gives him a gentle smile of understanding.
IV
Mr. Pemberton looked after her very gratefully when she excused herself to take the child up-stairs. The door closed, he turned to Lord Burdon. "Nice—nice," he began in a stifled kind of voice, "to have a little son growing up—to watch. We watched young Lord Burdon—that poor boy—growing up—anxiously—so anxiously...."
He gave a nervous little laugh. "When I say 'we' you've no idea with what a terrible air of proprietorship the family is regarded by those, like myself, attached to it for generations, by those dependent on it. We looked so eagerly, so eagerly as the time drew on, to his coming of age. He was wanted so."
"Wanted?" Lord Burdon asked. "Wanted?" He pronounced the word heavily, as though he had an inkling of the answer and was apprehensive.
It started Mr. Pemberton on a recital that he spoke with seeming difficulty and yet as though he had prepared it. It occupied longer than either knew, and Lord Burdon, before it was finished, was sitting sunk low in his chair, as though what he heard oppressed him. The little old lawyer spoke of difficulties in connection with the estate; the diminished rent roll; the urgent necessity for comprehensive improvements essential to make the land pay its way; the long-urged necessity for the sale of Burdon House in Mount Street, heavily mortgaged and the interest an insupportable drain on the estate. It led him to why they had looked so anxiously for the coming of age. Everything that was essential was impossible, he showed, in the reign of gentle Jane Lady Burdon, who felt that she held in sacred trust for her grandson and would suffer no risks in raising of loans, nor depredation of her charge by sale of the town property. He had no eloquence, this devoted little lawyer, but he had earnestness that seemed to him who listened to fill the room, as it were, with living shapes of duties, demands, traditions of a great heritage that marshalled before him and looked to him to be carried forward, as soldiers to a leader.
A change in Mr. Pemberton's tone aroused him.
"He was wanted so," Mr. Pemberton said jerkily, and stopped.
No response, and in a funny little cracked voice, "Well, he's dead," Mr. Pemberton said.