“She has a headache,” Christian reminded him.
“Yes, that would account for it, wouldn’t it?” The young man was visibly relieved by this reflection. “They may say what they like,” he went on, “she is the most beautiful woman in London to-day, just as she was when she was married. Let me see—I am not sure that I ever knew her precise age. Do you happen to know?”
“She is four-and-twenty.”
“Not more! I should have said six, or at least five. Hm-m! Four-and-twenty!” The reiteration, for some reason, seemed to afford him pleasure. “I am nearly thirty myself,” he added meditatively, “and I’m practically sure of being in the next Government. Shall you go in much for politics, do you think? It wouldn’t be of any great use to you, except the Garter, perhaps, and it’s so fearfully slow waiting for that. My father had the promise of it as long ago as Lord John Russell’s time, and it hasn’t come off yet. But then that Home Rule business was so unfortunate—it sent us all over to the Tory side, where there were already more people waiting for things than there were things to go round. If I were you, I would keep very quiet for a year or two—not committing myself openly to either side. I can’t help thinking there will be a break-up. It’s a fearful bore to have only twenty or thirty people on one side and five hundred on the other. They won’t stand it much longer. It doesn’t make a fair distribution of things. Of course, I’m a Unionist, but if I were in your shoes, I’d think it over very carefully. The Liberals haven’t got a single Duke—and mind you, though people don’t seem to notice it, it is a fact that a party practically never succeeds itself. The Liberals are bound to come in, sooner or later—and then, if you were their only Duke, why, you’d get your Garter shot at you out of a gun—so to speak. Of course, I mustn’t be mentioned as saying this—but you think it over! And it needn’t matter in the least—our being in different parties.. We can help each other quite as well—indeed, sometimes I’m tempted to think even better. Of course, I dare say there won’t be much that I can do for you—for the next two or three years, at least—except in the way of advice, and tips, and that sort of thing—but there may be a number of matters that you can help me in.”
Christian nodded wearily—with a nervous thought upon the time being wasted. “I am not likely to forget your kindness—or our family ties,” he said, consciously evasive.
“You never saw Cressage, of course; awful beast!” remarked the other, with an irrelevancy which still struck the listener as having a certain method in it. “It makes a man furious to think what she must have suffered with him. And a mere child, too, when she was married. Only four-and-twenty now! These early marriages are a great mistake. Of course, when a man gets to be nearly thirty, and there is a family and property and so on to be handed along, why, then marriage becomes a duty. That has always been my view. And I try invariably to do my duty, as I see it. I think a man ought to, you know.”
Christian sighed, and restrained an impulse to look at his watch. They had sauntered forward into the central hallway; through the open door could be seen a carriage and pair drawn up before the steps. A rustle on the stairs behind him caught his ear, and turning, Christian beheld Lady Cressage descending toward him, with Lord Chobham looming, stately and severe, in the shadows above her.
Christian moved impulsively to her. “It was the greatest surprise to me—and disappointment, too—to hear that you were going like this,” he declared, with outstretched hand.
She smiled feebly, and regarded him with a pensive consideration. Her heavy mourning of an earlier hour had been exchanged for a black garb less ostentatiously funereal, yet including the conventional widow’s-fall, which he had not seen her wear before. The thought that here at Caermere, last autumn, she had not even worn a widow’s-cap, rose in his mind. It carried with it a sense of remissness, of contumacy as against the great family which had endowed her with one of its names. But at least now she exhibited a consciousness that her husband was less than a year dead. And her pallid face was very beautiful in its frame of black—a delicately strong face, meditative, reserved, holding sadness in a proud restraint. “I am not very well,” she said to him, in tones to reach his ear alone. “The crowd here depressed me. I could not bring myself to appear at luncheon. It seems better that I should go away.”
“But it is such a fatiguing journey—for one who does not feel wholly up to it!” he urged upon her. “All these strangers will be going—I think some of them have gone already. I don’t know what their rule is here about stopping after luncheon—but surely they must clear out very soon. Then we shall be quite by ourselves—so that if that is your only reason for going—why, I can’t admit that it is a reason at all.”