"Now, in your turn, hear me, Adrian," continued Mr. Landale with his blackest look. "I have listened to your summing up of our respective cases with perfect patience, notwithstanding a certain assumption of superiority which—allow me to insist on this—is somewhat ridiculous from you to me. You complain of my misunderstanding you. Briefly, this is absurd. As a matter of fact I understand you better than you do yourself. On the other hand it is you that do not understand me. I have no wish to paraphrase your little homily of two minutes ago, but the heads of my refutation are inevitably suggested by the points of your indictment. To use your own manner of speech, my dear Adrian, I have no wish to assume injured disinterestedness, when speaking of my doings with regard to you and your belongings and especially to this old place of yours, of our family. You have only to look and see for yourself...."
Mr. Landale made a wide comprehensive gesture which seemed to embrace the whole of the noble estate, the admirably kept mansion with walls now flushed in the light of the sinking sun, the orderly maintenance of the vast grounds, the prosperousness of its dependencies—all in fact that the brothers could see with the eyes of the body from where they stood, and all that they could see with the eyes of the mind alone: "Go and verify whether I fulfilled my duty with respect to the trust which was yours, but which you have allowed to devolve upon my shoulders, and ask yourself whether you would have fulfilled it better—if as well. I claim no more than this recognition; for, as you pointed out, the position carried its advantages, if it entailed arduous responsibility too. It was my hope that heirs of my body would live to perpetuate this pride—this work of mine. It was not to be. Now that you step in again and that possibly your flesh will reap the benefits I have laboured to produce, ask yourself, Adrian, whether you, who shirked your own natural duties, would have buckled to the task, under my circumstances—distrusted by your brother, disliked and secretly despised by all your dependants, who reserved all their love and admiration for the 'real master' (oh, I know the cant phrase), although he chose to abandon his position and yield himself to the stream of his own inertness, the real master who in the end can find no better description for these years of faithful service than 'hostility' and 'ingratitude.'"
Sir Adrian halted a pace, a little moved by the speciousness of the pleading. The incidental reference to that one grief of his brother's life was of a kind which could never fail to arouse generous sympathy in his heart. But Mr. Landale had not come to the critical point of his say, and he did not choose to allow the chapter of emotion to begin just yet.
"But," he continued, pursuing his restless walk, "again to use your own phraseology, I am not merely recriminating. I, too, wish you to understand me. It would be useless to discuss now, what you elect to call my hostility in past days. I had to keep up the position demanded by our ancient name; to keep it up amid a society, against whose every tenet almost—every prejudice, you may call them—you chose to run counter. My antagonism to your mode of acting and thinking was precisely measured by your own against the world in which the Landales, as a family, hold a stake. Let that, therefore, be dismissed; and let us come at once to the special hostility you complain of in me, since the troublesome arrival of Aunt Rose and her wards. As the very thing which I was most anxious to prevent, if possible, has, after all, come to pass, the present argument may seem useless; but you have courted it yourself."
"Most anxious to prevent—if possible...!" repeated Sir Adrian, slowly. "This, from a younger brother, is almost cynical, Rupert!"
"Cynical!" retorted Mr. Landale, with a furious laugh. "Why, you have given sound to the very word I would, in anybody else's case, have applied to a behaviour such as yours. Is it possible, Adrian," said Rupert, turning to look his brother in the eyes with a look of profound malice, "that it has not occurred to you yet, that cynical will be the verdict the world will pass on the question of your marriage with that young girl?"
Sir Adrian flushed darkly, and remained silent for a pace or two; then, with a puzzled look:
"I fail to understand you," he said simply. "I am no longer young, of course; yet, in years, I am not preposterously old. As for the other points—name and fortune——"
But Rupert interrupted him with a sharp exclamation, which betrayed the utmost nervous exasperation.
"Pshaw! If I did not know you so well, I would say you were playing at candour. This—this unconventionality of yours would have led you into curious pitfalls, Adrian, had you been obliged to live in the world. My 'hostility' has saved you from some already, I know—more is the pity it could not save you from this—for it passes all bounds that you should meditate such an unnatural act, upon my soul, in the most natural manner in the world. One must be an Adrian Landale, and live on a tower for the best part of one's life, to reach such a pitch of—unconventionality, let us call it."