'No,' exclaimed the lawyer, with tremendous emphasis. 'Squire Penwyn was much too wise for that. He let other people take the risks, and only stood in for the profits.'
They talked about the estate for some little time after this, and then Churchill threw himself back into his corner, opened a newspaper and appeared to read—appeared only, for his eyes were fixed upon one particular bit of the column before him in that steady gaze which betokens deepest thought. In sooth he had enough to think of. The revolution which James Penwyn's death had wrought in his fate was a change to set most men thinking. From a struggling man just beginning to make a little way in an arduous profession, he found himself all at once worth something like seven thousand a year, master of an estate which would bring with it the respect of his fellow-men, position and power—the means of climbing higher than any Penwyn had yet risen on the ladder of life.
'I shall not bury myself alive in a stupid old manor-house,' he thought, 'like my grandfather. And yet it will be rather a pleasant thing playing at being a country squire.'
Most of all he thought of her who was to share his fortunes—the new bright life they could lead together—of her beauty, which had an imperial grandeur that needed a splendid setting—of her power to charm, which would be an influence to help his aggrandizement. He fancied himself member for Penwyn, making his mark in the House, as he had already begun to make it at the Bar. Literature and statecraft should combine to help him on. He saw himself far away, in the fair prosperous future, leader of his party. He thought that when he first crossed the threshold of the Senate House as a member, he should say to himself, almost involuntarily, 'Some day I shall enter this door as Prime Minister.'
He was not a man whose desires were bounded by the idea of a handsome house and gardens, a good stable, wine-cellar, and cook. He asked Fortune for something more than these. If not for his own sake, for his betrothed, he would wish to be something more than a prosperous country gentleman. Madge would expect him to be famous. Madge would be disappointed if he failed to make his mark in the world. He fell to calculating how long it would have been in the common course of things, plodding on at literature and his profession, before he could have won a position to justify his marrying Madge Bellingham. Far away to the extreme point in perspective stretched the distance.
He gave a short bitter sigh of very weariness. 'It would have been ten or fifteen years before I could have given her as good a home as her father's,' he said to himself. 'Why fatigue one's brain by such profitless speculations? She would never have been my wife. She is a girl who must have made a great marriage. She might be true as steel, but everybody else would have been against me. Her father and her sister would have worried her almost to death, and some morning while I was marching bravely on towards the distant goal I should have received a letter, tear-blotted, remorseful, telling me that she had yielded to the persuasions of her father, and had consented to marry the millionaire stockbroker, or the wealthy lordling, as the case might be.'
'Who is this Mr. Clissold?' Churchill asked by and by, throwing aside his unread paper, and emerging from that brown study in which he had been absorbed for the last hour or so.
'A college friend of poor James's, his senior by some few years. They had been reading together in the north. You must have met Clissold in Axminster Square, I should think, when you dined with your aunt. He and James were inseparable.'
'I have some recollection of a tall, dark-browed youth, who seemed one of the family.'