“If there is anything I can tell you—about the family, the position of affairs in general, and so on—you should not stand on ceremony with me. Has he, for example, explained about money affairs?”
The young man looked keenly at her for an instant, as if the question took him by surprise. Then he answered frankly enough: “Nothing definite. I only gather that it will be made easier for me than it would have been for—for other members of the family, if they—had been in my place. But perhaps that is not what I should say to you.”
Lady Cressage smiled on him reassuringly.
“Oh, don’t think of me in that light,” she pleaded. “I stand quite outside the—what shall I say?—the interested family circle. I have no ax of any description to grind. You, of course, have been told my position in the castle—that is, so far as it can be told by others. It is a simple enough story—I was to have been everything, and then the wind happens to change off the Welsh coast and lo! I am nothing—nothing! It is not even certain that I am not a beggar—living here on alms. Legally, everything is in such confusion that no one knows how he stands. But so far as I am concerned, it doesn’t matter. My cup has been filled so full—so long:—that a little more or less trouble is of no importance. Oh, I assure you, I do not desire to be considered in the matter at all.”
She made this last declaration with great earnestness, in immediate response to the sympathetic look and gesture with which Christian had interrupted her narrative.
His gentle eyes regarded her troubled beauty with compassionate softness. “I venture to think that you will be considered a good deal, none the less,” he remarked, in a grave yet eager tone. The sense of elation at being able to play the part of Providence to such a lady spread through his mind and possessed his being. The lofty possibilities of the powers devolving upon him had never been so apparent before. He instinctively put out his arm toward her, in such overt fashion that she could but take it. She did not lean upon it, but imparted to the contact instead a kind of ceremonial reserve which directly ministered to the patrician side of his mood.
They walked, if possible, still more slowly now, pausing before almost every stake; their talk was of the flowers, with occasional lapses into the personal.
“What you said about Lord Julius,” she remarked, in one of these interludes, “is quite true. He has it in his power to say whether the duke shall be a rich man or a pauper, and until yesterday he was all for the pauper. If poor Porlock and his sons had lived, they knew very well that Lord Julius was no friend of theirs, and would starve the title whichever of them had it. And so with these others—Edward and Augustine—only with them, it isn’t merely dislike but loathing that Lord Julius has for them.”
“I met those young gentlemen this morning,” said Christian stiffly. “It seemed to me that Lord Julius went quite out of his way to be kind with them. I should never have gathered that he hated them.”
“Oh, not personally,” she explained. “I don’t think he dislikes anybody personally. But in what you may call their representative capacity he is furious with people if they don’t measure up to his idea of what they should be. I never heard of any other family that had such a man in it. I used to admire him very much—when I was newly married—I thought his ideals for the family were so noble and fine—but I don’t know—”