“What has come over her, I wonder,” he said to himself. “She was so frank and natural and pleasant, and now she is chilly and stiff, and scarcely opens her lips. It is since I spoke of Vale Royal. But she said she agreed with me. Perhaps she knows Gerald, and is fond of him. But he could hardly know anybody intimately whom I have never seen, or never heard of, at the least.”
“Yet there is this to be said. You blame this person,” she added in a low but clear tone as she walked on, looking straight before her. “You admit that your world is more contemptible than he. What obliged Lord Roxhall to live in such a manner that he was forced to sell his old estate? Are not nearly all of you tradesmen and horse-dealers and speculators? Who fill the markets with game, the wharfs with coal, the shows with fat cattle and brood-mares? Who breed herds of Shetland ponies to sell them to the cruel work of the mines? Who destroy all the wild-bird life of three kingdoms, that the slaughter of the battues may be wholesale and the pheasants sent in thousands to Leadenhall? Your own order, your own order. What has it done, what does it ever do, to make it so superior to the man from Dakota?”
Hurstmanceaux listened in extreme astonishment. He could not understand the scorn and suppressed vehemence with which her words vibrated. He was silent because, in his own mind, he found the indictment a just one. But his aristocratic temper was in conflict with his intellectual judgment.
“What have the English aristocracy brought into fashion? What do they uphold by example and precept?” she continued. “Their life is one course of reckless folly; the summer is wasted in crowded London houses, varied by race-meetings and pigeon-shooting; the autumn and winter are spent in the incessant slaughtering of birds and beasts; their beautiful country houses are only visited at intervals, when they are as crowded as a booth at a fair. What kind of example do they set to ‘the man from Dakota’? What do they suggest to him of self-denial, of culture, of true grace and courtesy, of contempt for ill-gotten riches? They crowd around him as poultry around a feeding-pan! The whole thing is discreditable. But perhaps the most shameful part in it is not his!”
Hurstmanceaux was silent. He thought of Cocky and his sister, and he felt his blood tingle under the lash of her stinging words.
“My own withers are unwrung,” he said at last with a smile. “I don’t do those things. My estates are extremely unproductive, and I live, for the chief part of the year, on one of them—Faldon.”
“It is on the sea, I think?”
“Yes; on the coast of Waterford.”
“Do you cut your timber?”
“I do not.”