The sentence remained unfinished, as she took the arm Christian offered her, at Barlow’s eloquent approach.
CHAPTER XXV
During the progress of the luncheon, Christian found no opportunity for intimate conversation with Emanuel’s wife. The elderly and ponderously verbose Lord Chobham sat upon her right; there was the thin-faced, exigeant wife of some clerical person in gaiters—a rural dean, was it not?—full of dogmatic commonplaces, on his left. The other people did not seem to talk so much. The scene down the table—with so much black cloth offset garishly against the white linen in the daylight—presented an effect of funereal sobriety, curiously combined with a spontaneous reaction of the natural man against this effect. The guests ate steadily, and with energy; Christian noted with interest how freely they also drank. For himself, he could not achieve an appetite, but thirst was in the air. He lifted his glass bravely to Lord Julius, whose massive bulk and beard confronted him at the other end of the table—and then to others whose glance from time to time caught his.
Once he found the chance to murmur to Kathleen: “When this is over, I hope you will manage it so that I may speak with you.”
She nodded slow assent, without looking at him. He, observing her profile, realized all at once that something was amiss with her. It came back to him now that a certain intensity of sadness had dwelt in the first glance they had exchanged that morning, upon meeting. At the time he had referred it to the general aspect of woe which people put on at funerals. He saw now that it was a grief personal to herself. And now that he thought of it, too, there had been much the same stricken look upon Emanuel’s face. It was incredible that they should be thus devoured by grief at the fact of his grandfather’s death. No one had liked that old man overmuch—but surely they least of all. The emotion of Lord Julius was more intelligible—and yet even this had a quality of broken dejection in it which seemed independent of Caermere’s cause for mourning.
The disquieting conviction that these dearly beloved cousins of his—these ineffably tender and generous friends of his—were writhing under some trouble unknown to him, took more definite shape in his mind with each new glance that he stole at her.
Once the thought sprang up that they might be unhappy because such a huge sum of money had been given to him, but on the instant he hated himself for being capable of formulating such a monstrous idea. The wondering solicitude which all this raised within him possessed his thoughts for the rest of the meal. He was consumed with impatience to get away so that he might question Kathleen about it.
Yet when at last he found himself beside her, standing before an old portrait in one of the chain of big rooms through which the liberated company had dispersed itself, this was just the question for which it seemed that no occasion would offer.