“You have the best right of all. She loves you.”
“She loves—Crump.”
“Of course she loves Crump!” Callander burst out angrily. “Heavens, man! You talk as though it were a crime! She loves Crump in a way that you can’t even begin to imitate, for all it’s your own property. Don’t you know yet why she would have married your brother? Have you spent hours at Kilne, watching her while the old man talked, and not guessed? Or can’t you discriminate between mere vanity and greed and the pure flower of devotion? If you think it’s money that draws her, you’re wrong. If you think it’s even pride of race, you’re wrong! And it certainly isn’t the trappings of riches, your servants and your forty bedrooms and your oak staircases and all the rest of it. It’s every blade of grass springing upon Crump land; it’s every furrow turned in Crump soil; every tree that draws life from it, and every sunset painted on its woods. She’s not the last of the branch for nothing, and above all, it’s certainly not for nothing that she’s Roger Lyndesay’s child. You’ll wonder how I know. Well, she didn’t tell me—not consciously; but I do know, just as I know she loves you, though it’s needless to say she never told me that. She knows best why she denied it to you—that’s no business of mine. Anyhow, it’s true, and you can take my word for it. Anybody but a morbid, star-gazing Lyndesay would have guessed it for himself!”
He stopped as abruptly as he had begun, picking up a bottle from the mantelpiece, and turning to the door. “I’ll drop this as I pass,” he went on, in his normal tone, and when Christian protested that a servant could take it, putting out a hand to the bell, he checked him brusquely.
“I am your servant!” the older man answered, with a kind of grim affection, and went out, slipping the bottle into his pocket.
Roger Lyndesay was sitting in the porch, serenely content in the tranquil spring evening, which was yet full of crying life, from the lambs calling behind the house to the birds in the new green wonder of the trees. Deb came behind him, and had to put her hand on his shoulder before he turned his eyes from the fresh spring garment of the park.
“We did our best, didn’t we, Deb?” he asked, looking up at her with a kind of mystic exaltation. “We gave it all we could. It hasn’t suffered in our charge, has it?”
He was following out some silent train of thought, but she did not need to ask what he meant. The pronoun set her heart beating. For once she was included; for once he saw her definitely linked to the long Kilne chain.
“Oh, yes, we’ve done our best!” she answered, with a thrill in her voice. “We’ve put it first, always. We have given it—ourselves. And it will never really forget, whoever may come after us!”