“But you might meet some one among these men of rank and wealth whom you might like,” suggested Lord Carthew. “Having a title and money doesn’t absolutely debar any one from being capable of inspiring love.”
“I suppose it is my training and my contradictory nature,” she said, “but I must own that the fact of a man wearing a title would be a reason with me for having a strong prejudice against him to start with.”
“Isn’t that rather unfair?”
“I suppose it is; but I have had that formula that I was being educated solely with a view to marrying ‘well,’ and adding extra lustre to the name of Cranstoun dinned into me until I have revolted against it. And I know that after this season, when I am to be taken out and dressed, and inspected by eligible London bachelors, there will be terrible quarrels between my father and me, which will worry and terrify poor mamma beyond measure. You see, Mr. Pritchard,” she said, turning to him with that sweet, frank smile he had already learned to love, “I am indeed talking to you as though I had known you all my life. I dare say it is a good deal what you told me about your leaving England so very shortly which makes me so ready to confide in you. It seems much easier to be frank with a friend whom one may not see again for many years; and then when I heard you tell mamma your people were just yeoman farmers, and that you had nothing in wealth or position to be proud of, I warmed to you at once, and quite longed for a talk with you. The very name of Cranstoun and the expressions ‘old family,’ ‘county family,’ ‘blue blood,’ ‘rank, title, wealth, position, and ancestry,’ somehow produce a feeling of intense annoyance in me. I have been so much trained and preached to, in fact,” she concluded, laughing, “that at heart I have reverted to the savage, and that ideal of my father’s of which he constantly speaks as my vocation in life, to marry some man of brilliant position and fortune, is so detestably repugnant to me that I would far rather kill myself than submit to it.”
He listened, deeply interested, but a little puzzled. The romantic novelty of her sentiments amused and attracted him by their dissimilarity from the point of view taken of such subjects by the ordinary young Englishwoman of good education and good family, who is usually quite as anxious as her parents and guardians to make what is called “a good match,” and who only hopes that her future husband may be presentable enough for her to like him.
The clew to the mystery of Stella’s character Lord Carthew did not possess. As much as an emotional woman can dread and hate a man and a system, so strongly had Stella’s mother hated and feared Sir Philip Cranstoun and the aristocratic lords of the soil of whom he was a representative, and a very strong measure of the same rebellion, the same hatred, she had transmitted to her daughter. So that it necessarily came about that Stella tried not to think about Hilary Pritchard because she believed him to be Lord Carthew, while her heart and sympathies went readily out to Lord Carthew, whom she believed to be an altogether poor and undistinguished person.
This was exactly the state of mind in which her father, Sir Philip, desired to find her. The far-seeing Baronet had some time ago set himself to the task of investigating the means and position of certain eligible bachelors among the aristocracy whom Stella was likely to meet in London. And among these, few had a fairer record in the matter of eligibility than Claud Edward Clayton Bromley, Viscount Carthew, heir to the Earl of Northborough.
That horrible blot, the introduction of the gypsy Carewe element into the annals of the Cranstouns, might well be wiped out by such an alliance. Sir Philip’s keen eyes had noted what his daughter’s had totally failed to observe, the intensity of Lord Carthew’s regard as he turned toward Stella on his horse and drank in her words. As to what the girl’s sentiments in the matter were, that did not trouble Sir Philip for one moment. She had only been admitted into his household on suffrage, he told himself, a wretched infant, born in a hovel, and brought to his house by beggars. He did not know, so he argued, that she was even his wife’s child at all. When he said this, however, he lied, for the girl’s resemblance to her mother was very striking. In any case, it was not for her own sake, but to save her noble stepmother’s reason, that baby Stella was taken from her hiding-place in London and brought up in her father’s house. And a hundred times a day Sir Philip punished her for her lost mother’s pride and passionate temper.
If she liked flowers and she planted them, orders were given for them to be uprooted and destroyed. A Miss Cranstoun must not soil her hands by gardening. No servant that she liked was allowed to be about her, and in her growing girlhood books that she seemed to enjoy were invariably taken away. These petty tyrannies Stella had endured for years in proud silence. It was as though she had been reserving her strength for some great struggle which was one day to take place, and to alter for all time the relations between herself and her father. For a long time she had felt it, as it were, hovering in the air, and that it would be upon the subject of her marriage she had no doubt. Only, she supposed that the trip to London would be the starting point for their quarrel, nor could she guess that this kindly new friend, who rode beside her and listened with such sympathetic interest to her little troubles, would be closely associated with the crucial conflict which was shortly to wage between herself and her father.