“Oh, she was very sympathetic,” the young man hastened to insist. “She had the warmest praises for both you and your father. And I could not but feel she wished me well, too.”
Emanuel made no immediate reply, but walked slowly along, revolving silent thoughts, with a far-away, deliberative look in his eyes. When he spoke at last, it was to revert with abruptness to the earlier topic. “The policy, as we are calling it,” he said, “can be put in a nutshell. We take that kind of pride in the family which impels us to resolve that, if we cannot induce it to do great things, we will at least prevent it doing base things. The position which your grandfather inherited was one of remarkable opportunities, and also of exceptional responsibilities. He was unfit to do anything with the opportunities, and as for the responsibilities, he regarded them with only ignorant contempt. His immediate heirs were very little better. It became a problem with us, therefore, how best to limit their power for harm. Money was the one force they could understand and respect, and we have used it accordingly. I say ‘we’ because as the situation has gradually developed itself, it is hard to say which part of it is my father’s and which mine—and still more impossible to imagine what either of us would have done independently of my mother. I will tell you more about her sometime. It was she, of course, who brought the money to us, but she brought much else besides. However, we will not enter upon that at the moment. Well, suddenly, last summer, the deaths changed everything. Up to that time, what we had been doing had had, so to speak, only a negative purpose. We had been keeping unfit people from parading their unfitness in too scandalously public a fashion. But all at once the possibility of doing something positive—something which might be very fine indeed—was opened up before us. As you know now, we were aware of your existence, but there were inquiries to be made as to—well, as to the formal validity of your claim. After that, there was some slight delay in tracing your whereabouts—but now you are here, at last.”
“Now I am here, at last!” Christian repeated softly. He looked up into the sky; somewhere from the blue an invisible lark filled the air with its bubbling song. He drew a long breath of amazed content, then turned to his companion.
“That men like you and your father should be making plans and sacrifices for one like myself,” he said—“it is hard for me to realize it. There is nothing for me to say but this—that I will spare no thought or labor to be what you want me to be. And you will make it all clear to me, will you not? in every detail what it is I am to do?”
“Oh, hardly to that length,” said Emanuel. He smiled once more—that grave, sweet, introspective smile of his, which suggested humor as little as it did flippancy—and spoke more freely, as if conscious that the irksome part of his task lay behind him. “We dream a great dream of you, but it would be folly to attempt to dictate to you at every stage of its realization. That would do you more harm than good, and it would be unfair to both parties, into the bargain. No, what I desire is to show you the practical workings of a system, and to fill you with the principles and spirit of that system. I think it will interest you deeply, and I hope you will see your way to making it, in its essentials at least, your own. It has taken me many years to build it up, and I can’t pretend to suppose that you will grasp it in a week or a year. But you will see at least the aim I have in view, and you will get a notion of how I progress toward it. I shall be satisfied, for the time being, merely to commend it to your judgment as the aim which you might do well to set before you. It occurs to me to ask you: have you decided opinions in politics?”
Christian shrugged his shoulders diffidently. “In France my friends were of many parties, but since I thought never of myself as a Frenchman, I did not take sides with any of them. My brother Salvator is very advanced indeed; he is a Free Mason, and his friends are Carbonari in Italy and Socialists in France. But to me, these things had not much meaning. I said always to myself that I was English, and I read journals from London when I could, to learn about English parties. But it was not easy to learn. I stood in the streets often at Cannes in the early spring to see Mr. Gladstone when he passed, and to take off my hat to him, because I read that he was the greatest Englishman. But then I talked with English people on the Riviera about him, and they all cursed and ridiculed him, and told me that in England no respectable people would so much as speak to him. So it is very hard to know the truth—when you are born and bred in another country.”
“Even those who are born here do not invariably agree upon definitions of the truth,” commented Emanuel. “But I was not speaking of parties or politicians, so called. Politics, in its bigger sense, means the housekeeping of humanity—the whole mass of interests that the individuals of the human race have in common. But I don’t want to generalize to you. Let us stop here for a few minutes; I have brought you to this point that you may get the view.”
Their leisurely stroll through pastures and meadows, and latterly across a strip of grassy common dotted with sheep, had brought them by a gradual ascent to the summit of a knoll, crowned by a group of picturesquely gnarled and twisted old trees, the boughs of which were all pointed backward in the direction whence the men had come. Christian, coming to the ridge and halting, confronted the unexpected breeze, steady and sustained as an ocean swell, which he could hear murmuring through the land-ward bent branches overhead. In front of him, at the distance of a stone’s throw, the sloping heath abruptly ended in what for the instant he supposed was the sky-line—and then saw to be a vast glittering expanse of water, stretching off to an illimitable horizon.
“Oh, the sea!” he cried out, in surprised delight. “I had never dreamed that we were near it.”
He could distinguish now the faint intermittent rustle of the waves on the hidden beach far below. Perhaps a mile out the profile of a craft under full sail shone magically white in the sunlight. He knew it to be a yacht, and began watching it with an intuitive appreciation of its beauty of line and carriage. Then in a sudden impulse he swung around and faced his companion. “I do not like to look at it,” he broke out nervously. “I am afraid to see the ghosts of those cousins who were drowned—killed to make room for me. Where their yacht went down on the rocks—was that close by here?”