‘Breaking the entail!’ the idea was so surprising that all who heard it received it with the same exclamation. As for Anne, she did more: she cast one rapid involuntary glance around her upon the house with all its lights, the familiar garden, the waving clouds of trees. In her heart she felt as if a sharp arrow of possible delight, despair, she knew not which, struck her keenly to the core. It was only for a moment. Then she drew a long breath and said, ‘You bewilder me altogether; break the entail—why should you? I cannot comprehend it. Pardon me, it is as if the Prince of Wales said he would not have the crown. Mount is England to us Mountfords. I cannot understand what you mean.’
Heathcote thought he understood very well what she meant. He understood her look. Everything round was dear to her. Her first thought had been—Mount! to be ours still, ours always! But what did ours mean? Did she think of herself as heiress and mistress, or of—someone else? This pricked him at the heart, as she had been pricked by a different sentiment, by the thought that she had no longer the first interest in this piece of news; but there was no reason whatever for keen feeling in his case. What did it matter to him who had it? He did not want it. He cleared his throat to get rid of that involuntary impatience and annoyance. ‘It is not very difficult to understand,’ he said. ‘Mount is not to me what it is to you; I have only been here once before. My interests are elsewhere.’
Anne bowed gravely. They did not know each other well enough to permit of more confidential disclosures. She did not feel sufficient interest to ask, he thought; and she had no right to pry into his private concerns, Anne said to herself. Then there was a pause: which she broke quite unexpectedly with one of those impulses which were so unlike Anne’s external aspect, and yet so entirely in harmony with herself.
‘This makes my heart beat,’ she said, ‘the idea that Mount might be altogether ours—our home in the future as well as in the past; but at the same time, forgive me, it gives me a little pain to think that there is a Mountford, and he the heir, who thinks so little of Mount. It seems a slight to the place. I grudge that you should give it up, though it is delightful to think that we may have it; which is absurd, of course—like so many other things.’
‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘there is a great deal of the same sort of feeling in my own mind. I can’t care for Mount, can I? I have not seen it for fifteen years; I was a boy then; now I am middle-aged, and don’t care much for anything. But yet I too grudge that I should care for it so little; that I should be so willing to part with it. The feeling is absurd, as you say. If you could have it, Miss Mountford, I should surmount that feeling easily: I should rejoice in the substitution——’
‘And why should not I have it?’ cried Anne quickly, turning upon him. Then she paused and laughed, though with constraint, and begged his pardon. ‘I don’t quite know what you mean,’ she said, ‘or what you know.’
‘Miss Mountford, having said so much to you, may I say a little more? I am one of your nearest relatives, and I am a great deal older than you are. There is some question which divides you from your father. I do not ask nor pretend to divine what it is. You are not agreed—and for this reason he thinks little of my proposal, and does not care to secure the reversion of his own property, the house which, in other circumstances, he would have desired to leave in your possession. I think, so far as I have gone, this is the state of the case?’
‘Well!’ She neither contradicted him nor consented to what he had said, but stood in the fitful moonlight, blown about by the wind, holding her cloak closely round her, and looking at him between the light and gloom.
‘Pardon me,’ he said, ‘I have no right whatever to interfere: but—if you could bend your will to his—if you could humour him as long as his life lasts: your father is becoming an old man. Miss Mountford, you would not need perhaps to make this sacrifice for very long.’
She elapsed her hands with impatient alarm, stopping him abruptly—‘Is my father ill? Is there anything you know of that we do not know?’