“But what good does it do me to be a Silurian and interesting,” he protested with a whimsical gesture, “if I—if I do not get what I want most of all in the world?”
“It seems to me that you have got more things already than most people on this planet.” She went on reflectively: “I had no idea at all what it meant till I saw these hills and the valleys below them, and the forests and the villages and the castle, and the people coming out from heaven knows what holes in the rocks—all with your collar round their necks. I should think it would either send you mad with the sense of power or frighten you to death.”
“I am really very humble about it, I think,” he assured her simply. “And there is not so much power as you seem to imagine. It is all a great organized machine, like some big business. The differences are that it works very clumsily and badly as it is at present managed, and that it hardly pays any dividend at all. The average large wholesale grocer’s or wine merchant’s estate would pay a bigger succession duty than my grandfather’s. He died actually a poor man.” The intelligence did not visibly impress her. “But it was not because he helped others,” she remarked. “Those about him grew poorer also. It is a hateful system!”
“There is something you do not know,” he began with gravity. “I said that my grandfather died a poor man. But since his death a tremendous thing has happened. A great gift has been made to me. The enormous debts which encumbered his estates have been wiped out of existence. It is Lord Julius and Emanuel who have done this—done it for me! I do not know the figures yet—to-morrow Mr. Soman is to explain them to me—but the fact is I am a very rich man indeed. I do not owe anybody a penny. Whatever seems to be mine, is mine. There are between seventy-five and eighty thousand acres. By comparison with other estates, it seems to me that there will be a yearly income of more than fifty thousand pounds!”
She drew a long breath and looked him in the face. “I am very sorry for you,” she said soberly.
“Ah, no; I resist you there,” he exclaimed. “I quote your own words to you: ‘It is an indolent view to take.’ There is a prodigious responsibility! Yes! But all the more reason why I should be brave. Would you have me lose my nerve, and say the task is too great for me? I thought you did not like people who solved difficulties by turning tail and running away. Well, to confess oneself afraid—that is the same thing.”
She smiled thoughtfully, perhaps at the quaint recurrence to foreign gestures and an uncertain, hurried use of book-English which her company seemed always to provoke in him. “I meant only that it was a terrible burden you had had fastened upon your shoulders,” she made answer softly. “I did not suggest that you were afraid of it. And yet I should think you would be!”
“I think,” he responded, with a kind of diffident conviction, “I think that if a man is honest and ambitious for good things, and has some brains, he can grow to be equal to any task that will be laid upon him. And if he labors at it with sincerity and does absolutely the best that there is in him to do, then I do not think that his work will be wasted. A man is only a man after all. He did not make this world, and he cannot do with it what he likes. It is a bigger thing, when you come to think of it, than he is. At the end there is only a little hole in it for him to be buried in and forgotten, as these people who raised this wall that we stand on are forgotten. They thought in their day that the whole world depended upon them; when there was thunder and lightning, they said it was on their account, because their gods in the sky were angry with them. But to us it is evident that they were not so important as they supposed they were. We look at the work of their hands here, and we regard it with curiosity, as we might an ant’s nest. We do not know whether they made it as a tomb for their chief or as a shelter for their cows. And if they had left records to explain that, and it does not matter how much else, it would be the same. We learn only one thing from all the numberless millions who have gone before us—that man is less important than he thinks he is. I have a high position thrust upon me. Eh bien! I am not going to command the sun to stand still. I am not going to believe that I ought to revolutionize human society before I die. There will be many men after me. If one or two of them says of me that I worked hard to do well, and that I left things a trifle better than I found them, then what more can I desire?”
She nodded in musing abstraction, but answered nothing. Her gaze was fastened resolutely upon the opposite bank.
“I am truly so fortunate not to have missed you!” he repeated after a small interval of silence.