“It’s all right, Youngest One! You can’t think of us in the same light; and, after all, why should you? I come of tougher stock, rougher stuff. I knew how to handle a man like Slinker. I could have made something of him—perhaps—something that Heaven wouldn’t have been ashamed of—if I’d tried. But I didn’t think him worth while, and I don’t doubt that the Almighty agrees with me. I didn’t even think the estate worth while, with Slinker slung round my neck like an albatross; so I went to Canada to my sister, and thought of him as seldom as possible till I got the news of his death and his charmingly-planned comédie à trois. I wonder what he meant by the whole thing?—whether he was waiting for me to hear, and come back? It would have been like Slinker’s slinkin’ way of doing things. I’d have been bound to come to the church, at any rate; not a step further! I wonder if that’s the real solution of the muddle? After all—Slinker cared.”
“Don’t!” Christian shuddered. “Don’t you see what a diabolical situation that creates for—for—the other woman?”
She looked at him curiously.
“Yes, I suppose it makes things worse, doesn’t it? It wouldn’t have been so bad if Slinker had loved her and wanted her too badly to remember that he had some wretched sort of a wife already. Well, we’ll leave it at that! What do I care? But you mustn’t blame her too much. It’s because she’s one of your own people that you feel as you do—that she shouldn’t have stooped to a man like that for a reason like that. You could forgive a stranger who had done it—a woman who wasn’t a Lyndesay born and bred; you could forgive—Nettie Stone, the horse-dealer’s daughter!”
He looked at her whimsically, knowing her too well, respecting her too much, to lie to her. He let the statement pass.
“Didn’t the place call you more than once?” he asked. “Didn’t all this—the land, the house, the things they stand for—call you ever again after that one moment when you put out your hand and took them?” He looked through the green veil of the wood to the long house lying below them, and over the house to the faint hills. “Didn’t you want it, ache for it, break your heart for it? Oh, Nettie, how did you keep away?”
She shook her head, smiling.
“That isn’t in me—how should it be? How should generations of horse-dealing draw any human soul magically to Crump? The house is dumb for me—in spite of the hundred tongues it keeps for you. The land says nothing—no more than it says to every other soul that springs from it and goes back to it. It is our mother—we others. To you, it is your child.”
“But, if you don’t feel, how do you know?” he asked, laying a hand for a moment on an ancient trunk. “And you do know!”
“Intuition, I suppose. Besides, the thing radiates from you. One has only to watch your eyes—listen to your voice. It must mean more to you than to us whose forefathers owned no more than the six feet of earth doled them for a grave. You don’t get a soul for soil out of that! No. Just once the whole thing caught me—the glamour of Lyndesay of Crump; but never again. I never felt it again.”