Christian’s mobile face had lengthened somewhat. “Is she also an—an ‘actress’?” he asked, dolefully.
Lady Cressage looked skyward, with halfclosed eyes, in an effort of memory. “I really seem to have heard what she did,” she mused, hesitatingly. “I know her sister has often spoken of her. Is it ‘barmaid’? No. ‘Telegraph’? No, it’s her father who’s in the General Post Office. Why, now, how stupid of me! She can’t be a nurse, of course, or there would have been her uniform. Oh, now I remember—she’s a typewriter.”
It was not clear to her whether Christian wholly comprehended the term, now that she had found it. She perceived, however, that he disliked something in what she had said, or in her manner of saying it. The remarkable responsiveness of his countenance to passing emotions and moods within him had already impressed her. She regarded his profile now with a sidelong glance, and reconstructed some of her notions about him by the help of what she saw. Nothing was said, until suddenly he paused, gazing with kindled eye upon the prospect opened before him.
They had come to the end of the garden, and stood at the summit of a broad stone-kerbed path descending in terraces. Above them, the dense foliage of the yews rising at either side of the gap in the hedge had been trained and cut into an arched canopy. From under this green gateway Christian looked down upon a Caermere he had not imagined to himself before.
The castle revealed itself for the first time, as he beheld it now, in its character as a great medieval fortress. On his arrival in the morning, emerging from the shadowed driveway into the immediate precinct of the house, he had seen only its variously modernized parts; these, as they were viewed from this altitude, shrank to their proper proportions—an inconsiderable fraction of the mighty whole. All about, the massive shoulders of big hills shelved downward to form the basin-like hollow in which the castle seemed to stand, but their large bulk, so far from dwarfing Caermere, produced the effect of emphasizing its dimensions. Its dark-gray walls and towers, with their bulging clumps of chimneys and turrets, and lusterless facets of many-angled roofings, all of somber slate, were visibly the product, the very child, of the mountains. A sensation of grim, adamantine, implacable power took hold of the young man’s brain as he gazed. For a long time he did not want to talk, and felt vaguely that he was signifying this by the slight, sustained pressure of his arm against hers. At all events, she grasped his wish, and preserved silence, holding herself a little behind him, so that he might look down, without distraction, upon his kingdom.
“These Torrs,” he burst forth all at once, with a nervous uncertainty in his tones as of one out of breath, “these ancestors of mine—the family I belong to—did they produce great men? You must know their history. Julius says we are the most ancient family in England. I have not had the time yet to learn anything of what we did. Were there heroes and famous soldiers and learned scholars among us? To look at that wonderful castle there at our feet, it seems as if none but born chiefs and rulers of mankind could ever have come out of it.”
“Captain Edward and his brother Augustine were both born there,” she permitted her own over-quick tongue to comment.
He let her arm drop from his with a swift gesture, and wheeled round to look her in the face. The glance in his eyes said so much to her that she hastened to anticipate his speech.
“Forgive me!” she urged hastily. “It was silly thoughtlessness of mine. I do not know you at all well as yet, you know, and I say the wrong things to you. Do tell me you forgive me! And it is only fair to myself to say, too, that I have been in a bad school these last few years. Conversation as one practices it at Caermere is merely the art of making everything pointed and sharp enough to pierce thick skins. I should have remembered that you were different—it was unpardonable of me! But I have really angered you!”
Christian, still looking at her, found himself gently shaking his head in reassurance. It was plain enough to him that this beautiful young woman had suffered much, and that at the hands of his own people. What wonder that acrid memories of them should find their way to her lips? He also had been unhappy. He smiled gravely into her face at the softening recollection.