“What a dear old house it is, Godfrey, and how everything in it speaks to me of your ancestors—your own ancestors—not other people’s! That makes all the difference. At Cheriton I feel always as if I were surrounded by malevolent ghosts. I can’t see them, but I know they are there. Those poor Strangways, how they must hate me.”
“If there are any living Strangways knocking about the world houseless, or at any rate landless, I don’t suppose they feel over kindly disposed to you,” said Godfrey; “but the ghosts have done with human habitations. It can matter very little to them who lives in the rooms where they were once happy or miserable, as the case may be. Has your father ever heard anything of the old family?”
“Never. He says there are no Strangways left on this hemisphere. There may be a remnant of the race in Australia,” he says, “for he heard of a cousin of Reginald Strangway’s who went out to Brisbane years ago to work with a sheep farmer on the Darling Downs. There is no one else of the old race and the old name that he can tell me about. I take a morbid interest in the subject, you know. If I were to meet a very evil-looking tramp in the woods and he were to threaten me, I should suspect him of being a Strangway. They all must hate us.”
“With a very unreasonable hatred, then, Nita, for it was no fault of your father’s that the family went to the bad. I have heard my father talk of the Strangways many a time over his wine. They had been a reckless, improvident race for ever so many generations, men who lived only for the pleasure of the hour, whose motto was ‘Carpe diem’ in the worst sense of the words. There was a Strangway who was the fashion for a short time during the Regency, wore a hat of his own invention, and got himself entangled with a popular actress, who sued him for breach of promise. He dipped the property. There was a racing Strangway who kept a stable at Newmarket and married—well—never mind how. He dipped the property. There was Georgiana Strangway, an heiress and a famous beauty, in the Sailor King’s reign. Two of the Royal Dukes wanted to marry her; but she ran away with a bandmaster in the Blues. She used to ride in Hyde Park at nine o’clock every morning in a green cloth spencer trimmed with sable, at a time when very few women rode in London. She saw the bandmaster, fell over head and ears in love with him, and bolted. They were married at Gretna. He spent as much of her fortune as he could get at, and was reported to have thrashed her before they parted. She set up a boarding-house at Ostend, gambled, drank cheap brandy, and died at five-and-forty.”
“What a dreadful ghost she would be to meet,” said Nita, with a shudder.
“From first to last they have been a bad lot,” concluded Sir Godfrey, “and the Isle of Purbeck was a prodigious gainer when your father became master of Cheriton Chase and Baron Cheriton of Cheriton.”
“That is what they must feel worst of all,” said Nita, speaking of the dead and the living as if they were one group of banished shades. “It must be hard for them to think that a stranger takes his title from the land that was once theirs, from the house in which they were born. Poor ill-behaved things, I can’t help being sorry for them.”
“My fanciful Nita, they do not deserve your pity. They make their own lives, love. They have only suffered the result of their own Karma.”
“I only hope they will be better off in their next incarnations, and that they won’t get to that dreadful eighth world which leads nowhere,” said Juanita.
She made this light allusion to a creed which she and her lover had discussed seriously many a time in their graver moods. They had read Mr. Sinnett’s books together, and had given themselves up in somewise to the fascinating theories of Esoteric Buddhism, and had been impressed by the curious parallel between that semi-fabulous Reformer of the East and the Teacher and Redeemer in whom they both believed.