"I thought you didn't care for it," said Barbara, sagely. "I thought you scorned it."
"Scorn it—I can't scorn it! It isn't mine!" He turned away from it, as if in a sudden movement of impatience, and lounged with his back to the gate. "It's like my luck!" he said, kicking a stone in the road.
Barbara was interested. Harding's tone revealed the strength and bitterness of his feelings. He had never seemed to her so much of a Rothwell as he did at that moment. "What is like your luck?" she ventured to ask.
He jerked his head in the direction of Mitchelhurst. "I may as well be honest," he said. "Honest with myself—if I can! Look there—I have mocked at that place all my life; for very shame's sake I have kept away from it because I had vowed I didn't care whether one stone of it was left upon another. What was it to me? I am not a Rothwell. I'm Reynold Harding, son of Sidney Harding, son of Reynold Harding—there my pedigree grows vague. My grandfather is an important man—we can't get beyond him. He died while my father was in petticoats. He was a pork-butcher in a small way. I believe he could write his name—my name—and that he always declared that his father was a Reynold too. But we don't know anything about my great-grandfather—perhaps he was a pork-butcher in a smaller way. My uncle Robert went to London as a boy and made all the money, pensioned his father, and afterwards educated his half-brother Sidney, who was twenty years younger than himself. He would have made my father his partner if he had lived. If my father had lived I might have been rich. As it is, I'm not rich, and I'm not a Rothwell."
"Well, you look like one!" said Barbara. She was not very wise. It seemed to her a cruel thing that this earlier Reynold should have been a pork-butcher—a misfortune on which she would not comment. She looked up at the younger Reynold with the sincerest sympathy shining in her eyes, and in an unreasoning fashion of her own took part with him and with the old family, as if his grandfather were an unwarranted intruder who had thrust himself into their superior society. "You look like one!" she exclaimed, and Reynold smiled.
"And after all," she said, pursuing her train of thought, "you are half Rothwell, you know. As much Rothwell as Harding, are you not?"
He was still smiling. "True. But that is a kind of thing which doesn't do by halves."
She assented with a sigh. She had never before talked to a man whose grandfather was a pork-butcher, and she did not know what consolation to offer. She could only look shyly and wistfully at Mr. Harding, as he leaned against the gate with his back to the prospect, while she resolved that she would never tell her uncle. She did not think her companion less interesting after the revelation. This discord, this irony of fate, this mixing of the blood of the Rothwells and the small tradesman, seemed to her to explain much of young Harding's sullen discontent. He was the last descendant of the old family of which she had dreamed so often, and he was the victim of an unmerited wrong. She wanted him to say more. "And you wouldn't come to Mitchelhurst before?" she said, suggestively.
"No; but the thought of the place was pulling at me all the time. I couldn't get rid of it. And so—here I am! And I have seen the dream of my life face to face—it's behind my back just at this minute, but I can see it as well as if I were looking at it. I'm very grateful to you for showing me this view, Miss Strange, but you'll excuse me if I don't turn round while I speak of it?"