In the low light where they sat, he could see the faint color come and go in her face as the eager words came softly from her parted lips. Her eyes shone out like sapphire stars and seemed to glow with some inner light. To him she was not a nineteenth century young English lady, but a princess from a fairy tale.
“What would you do,” he asked, half laughing and half tenderly, “if by some accident or illness you were kept a prisoner in the house?”
“I should die—if it were in this house,” she answered quietly, looking straight into his face for the first time. “I suppose to you, who are a stranger here, the Chase appears simply an interesting old historical mansion. To me it seems a prison, haunted by the spirits of all the women who have been unhappy here.”
“You have studied the records and legends of your family, no doubt?”
“They were given to me as soon as I could read. Before I heard of Cinderella and the Sleeping Beauty, I had gone through those horrible tales of treachery and murder, and tyranny. Cranstouns of mediæval times hardly ever died in their beds, and the lives of their ladies were records of martyrdom, except in those cases when they also had some spirit, and turned against their brutal lords. Pride of race, cruelty, cunning, and revengefulness—there you have the dominant notes in the characters and lives of my ancestors, qualities which to me are all equally hateful.”
“Yet if there is anything in heredity, you should be intensely proud of your family on both sides,” he said. “The Douglases are to the full as proud as any Cranstoun can be.”
“But mamma wears her pride with a difference,” she said, quickly. “It is more like the interest any one might take in some heirloom, not because it is something peculiar to herself, and raising her above all other people. It is impossible to imagine any one more gentle and kind than mamma. She suffers a deal, and bears it beautifully. Her heart constantly troubles her, yet she must be in terrible pain before she utters a complaint. I am not a bit like her, I am sorry to say,” she added, humbly. “I shall never have her gentleness, her patience and resignation. When I am angry, I hate—mamma is incapable of hatred. I don’t know how I should have lived at all but for her constant kindness.”
Tears suddenly gathered in Miss Cranstoun’s eyes. Hastily brushing them away, she turned to Lord Carthew with a sweet smile.
“I ought to apologize,” she said, “for my very bad manners in talking of myself and my private affairs to you when I have never met you before to-day. But somehow I hardly feel that you are a stranger.”
She spoke in all simplicity, but the most practised coquette could hardly have chosen words better calculated to heighten the feelings of love and admiration which filled the young man’s heart.