Christian stared, then sighed smilingly and shook his head.
“No, that doesn’t seem to have been in my mind,” he replied with gentleness. He contemplated the elder brother afresh.
“Have you thought yet what you would like to do?” he asked again, almost with geniality.
“How d’ye mean ‘do’?” inquired Edward, with a mutinous note in his voice. “Is it something about a business? If you ask me straight, I’m not so fearfully keen about doin’ anything. No fellow wants to do things, if he can rub along without.”
Christian found himself repressing a gay chuckle with effort. He had not dreamed he should like this one of his kinsmen so much.
“No—no; you shall not do things,” he promised him, with a sparkling eye. “That would be too bad.”
Captain Edward turned in his chair, and recrossed his legs. “It’s a trifle awkward, all this, you know,” he declared, with an impatient scowl. “It doesn’t suit me to be made game of. You’ve got the whip hand, and you can give me things or not, as you like, and I’ve got to be civil and take what you offer, because I can’t help myself—but damn me if I like to be chaffed into the bargain! I wouldn’t do it to you, d’ye see, if it was the other way about.”
Christian’s face lapsed into instant gravity. A fleeting speculation as to that problematical reversal of positions rose in his mind, but he put it away. “Ah, you mustn’t think that,” he urged, with serious tones. “No, Cousin Edward, this is what I want to say to you.” And then, all unbidden, the things he really wished to say, yet which he had not thought of before, ranged themselves in his mind.
“Listen to me,” he went on. “You have been a soldier. You were a soldier when you were a very young man. Now, you had an uncle who was also a soldier when he was a mere youth—a very loyal and distinguished soldier, too. He died a soldier when he was in his fortieth year—far away from his family, from his wife and son, and much farther away still from the place and country of his birth. Once, in his youth, he was mixed up in an unpleasant and even disgraceful affair. How much to blame he personally was—that I do not know. It was very long ago—and he was so young a man—really I refuse to consider the question. I could insist to myself that he was innocent—if I felt that it mattered at all, one way or the other—and if I did not feel that by doing so, somehow he would not be then so real a figure to me as he is now. And he is very real to me; he has been so all my life.”
He paused, with a momentary break in his voice, to blink the tears from his eyes. It was not ducal, but he put the back of his hand to his cheeks, and dried them.