"Only that I think—I believe your Uncle Jonathan would have married the girl's mother—Janet Merryweather—but for your mother's influence."
"How in the deuce! You mean he feared the effect on her?"
"He broke it to her once—his intention, I mean—and for several days afterwards we quite despaired of her life. It was then that she made him promise—he was quite distracted with remorse for he adored Angela—that he would never allude to it again while she was alive. We thought then that it would be only for a short while, but she has outlived him ten years in spite of her heart disease. One can never rely on doctors, you know."
"But what became of the girl—of Janet Merryweather, I mean?"
"That was the sad part, though it happened so long ago—twenty years—that people have almost forgotten. It seems that your uncle had been desperate about her for a time—before Angela came to live with him—and Janet counted rather recklessly upon his keeping his word and marrying her as he had promised. When her trouble came she went quite out of her mind—perfectly harmless, I believe, and with lucid intervals in which she suffered from terrible melancholia. Her child inherits many of her characteristics, I am told, though I've never heard any harm of the girl except that she flirts with all the clowns in the neighbourhood."
"Uncle Jonathan appears to have been too ready with his promises, but,
I suppose, he thought there was a difference between his obligation to
Janet Merryweather and to his brother's widow?"
"There was a difference, of course. Janet Merryweather could hardly have had Angela's sensitive feelings—or at least it's a comfort to think that, even if it happens not to be true. Before the war one hardly ever heard of that class, mother used to say, it was so humble and unpresuming—but in the last twenty-five or thirty years it has overrun everything and most of the land about here has passed into its possession."
She checked herself breathlessly, surprised and indignant that she should have expressed her feelings so openly.
"Yes, I dare say," returned Jonathan—"The miller Revercomb is a good example, I imagine, of just the thing you are speaking of—a kind of new plant that has sprung up like fire-weed out of the ashes. Less than half a century produced him, but he's here to stay, of that I am positive. After all, why shouldn't he, when we get down to the question? He—or the stock he represents, of course—is already getting hold of the soil and his descendants will run the State financially as well as politically, I suppose. We can't hold on, the rest of us—we're losing grip—and in the end it will be pure pluck that counts wherever it comes from."
"Ah, it's just that—pluck—but put the miller in the crucible and you'll find how little pure gold there is to him. It is not in prosperity, but in poverty that the qualities of race come to the surface, and this remarkable miller of yours would probably be crushed by a weight to which poor little Mrs. Bland at the post-office—she was one of the real Carters, you know—would hardly bend her head."