“Ask me what you will, by all means, my dear young lady,” he answered. “You have come here quite unexpectedly, but you have captured all our hearts. It will please me to tell you anything you care to know.”
“Tell me then—there isn’t really any fear that all this may have to go?”
His face was suddenly the face of an old man. The primness of it, the self-control, the sphinx-like mouth, all seemed to fall away together. It was an old man looking at death.
“I cannot answer that question,” he confessed, and even his voice was different, metallic and toneless. “Bertram entered life with great ideas, and unfortunately his wife, who was a gracious and charming lady, and who would have been a great heiress, died when Gregory was born. Then Gregory grew up very much in the same fashion as his father. The war came and no Ballaston ever knew how to save money, or to save himself at other people’s expense. We are in terrible financial straits, and all the time there have been fresh mortgages. I myself am not an expert at business, but I have spent weary days and weeks thinking and adding up and wondering. Unless there is money soon, it seems to me that the lands must all go, and the house be sold up.”
“It would break your hearts,” she said softly.
“It would be death,” he answered. “If I could save Ballaston,” he went on, a little added strength in his voice, a glow, although a steely one, kindling in his eyes, “I would commit any crime on earth. I would kill, I would murder, I would destroy, I would plunge my soul into immortal misery to save the vandals from the auction rooms in London from coming and laying their hands upon the pictures and china and trees, or the furniture, and tramping about the rooms where history has been made. Sometimes lately I have awakened in the night and found myself crying out with fear, found great drops of sweat upon my body, and it hasn’t been a knife at my throat or any horror of that sort, but men with catalogues, little Jew men with pince-nez, peering at the pictures; fat, coarse-looking men floundering through the rooms and looking at the hall-marks of my china through magnifying glasses.”
He paused suddenly. When he spoke again he was a different being.
“My dear young lady,” he apologised, “I beg your pardon. It is not often that I let myself go like this. In fact, to tell you the truth, it has never happened before. Will you excuse me if I hurry you downstairs now? I know that they are waiting, and I must not monopolise you.”
She rose to her feet, still silent, curiously indisposed for speech, feeling in her youth and inexperience that deep though her sympathy and even her understanding, she still had no words to offer.
“You see how one gets,” he concluded, as they descended the stairs, “through dwelling on one subject and one subject only. I am a man with one idea, but for that idea I am willing to live; for that idea I would be quite willing to die.—Here is my nephew Reginald—a little angry with me, I fear, as the others will be, for having kept you so long.”