Edith did not say anything. She merely pressed the under one of the two hands that held hers.
"A very romantic history," said the visitor. "I have now told you whom Kate Grace married. She married a man who, after her death, sat thirty years on the throne of Poland, and was alive when that kingdom ceased to exist. What this man was I will not say. It is not my place, as a descendant of his, to tell his story. It has been told by many. I know little of it, but what I know is far from creditable to him. Remember, I never had my attention particularly directed to Stanislaus the Second, or Poland, until last night, and since then I have been enquiring after the living, and not unearthing the records of the dead."
"And you never even suspected anything of this until last night?" said Mrs. Grace, who now began slowly to recover the use of the ordinary faculties of the mind.
"Never. Nor did my mother. In the long paper my father left in charge of my mother he says he only heard the facts from some descendant of Sir Hanbury Williams. When he found out who he really was he seemed to have been seized with a positive horror of the blood in his veins, not because of what it had done in the past, but of what it might do in the future. He was a careful, timid man. He thought the best way to kill the seed of ambition in the veins of a Hanbury would be to reduce the position of the family from that of people of independent means to that of traders. Hence he went into business in the City; although he had no need of more money, he made a second fortune. He says his theory was that, in these days, no man who ever made up parcels of tea, or offered hides for sale, could aspire to a throne, and that no man of business who was doing well at home, ever became a conspirator abroad. When he saw I was taking a great interest in the struggles of parties in France, he thought the best thing he could do would be to let me know who I was, and leave me his opinion as to the folly of risking anything in a foreign cause, when one could find ample opportunity of employing one's public spirit usefully in England, for notwithstanding his foreign blood, my father was an Englishman with Englishmen against all the world. His instructions to my mother were, that if, at any time, I showed signs of abandoning myself to excess in politics, I was to get the paper, for if I leaned too much to the people the knowledge that I had the blood of a King in me might modify my ardour; and if I seemed likely to adopt the cause of any foreign ruler or pretender, I might be restrained by a knowledge that, as far as the experience of one of my ancestors went, unwelcome rulers meant personal misery and national ruin."
"And, Mr. Hanbury, what do you purpose doing? Do you intend changing your name and claiming your rights?"
"The only rights I have are those common to every Englishman. The name I have worn I shall continue to wear. Though my great grandfather's grandfather was for more than thirty years a king, there is not now a rood of ground for his descendants to lord it over. This marriage of Stanislaus Poniatowski with Kate Grace has been kept secret up to this. Now I wish to bind you and Miss Grace to secrecy for the future. I have told you the history of the past in order, not to glorify the past and magnify the Hanburys, but in order to establish between you two, and my mother and myself, the friendly relations which ought to exist between kith and kin. You are the last left of your line and we of ours. To divulge to the public what I have told you now would be to expose us to ridicule. I came here yesterday in the design of saving myself from ridicule a thousand times less than would follow if any one said I set up claims to be descended from a king. I will tell you the story of yesterday another time. Anyway, I hope I have made out this evening that we are related. I know, if you will allow it, we shall become friends. As earnest of our friendship will you give me your hands?"
The old woman held out hers with the young girl's in it and Hanbury stood up and bent and kissed the two hands.
Then Mrs. Grace began to cry and sob. It was strange to meet a kinsman of her dead husband, and her son, and her son's child, so late in her life, and it comforted her beyond containing herself, so she sobbed on in gratitude.
"My mother, who is the greatest-hearted woman alive, will come to see you both tomorrow. Fortunately all the Stanislaus or Grace, or Hanbury, money was not in rotten banks, and as long as English Consols hold their own there will be no need to seek a fortune in Millway or any other part of Sussex. Edith, my cousin, I may call you Edith?" he asked, gently taking her hand.
"If it pleases you," she said, speaking for the first time. She had felt inclined to say "Sir," or "My Lord," or even "Sire." She had been looking in mute astonishment at the being before her. She, who had more respect for birth than for power, or wealth, or genius, had sat there listening to the speech of this man as he referred to his origin in an old nobility, and related the spreading splendours of his forefathers blossoming into kingly honours, regal state! There, sitting before her, at the close of this dull day of disenchantment and sordid cares, was set a man who was heir not only to an ancient title in Poland, but to the man who had sat, the last man who had sat, in the royal chair of that historic land. Her heart swelled with a rapture that was above pride, for it was unselfish. It was the intoxicating joy one has in knowledge of something outside and beyond one's self, as in the magnitude of space, the immensities of the innumerable suns of the heavens, the ineffable tribute of the flowery earth to the sun of summer. Her spirit rose to respect, veneration, awe. What were the tinsel glories she had until that morning attributed to her own house, compared with the imperial, solid, golden magnificence of his race? Nothing. No better than the obscure shadows of the forgotten moon compared with the present and insistent effulgence of the zenith sun.