“But there is a crusade going on all around us, for every one of us, always,” she said, opening her eyes wide. “We have never been without one since”—she stopped, but he knew what she meant.
“I quite envy those fellows who have their own way to make in the world,” he observed on another occasion, still with an underlying motive of self-defence, and speaking in allusion to her younger brothers’ work in their military and naval schools.
“Oh! but Berry does most of all,” she explained promptly; “and he is an eldest son—like you, I had almost said, but you are an only son and child. I pity you, if you will forgive me for pitying you.”
“Not forgive, but thank you, and I pity myself,” he answered quickly, for it had at that moment struck him that, if he had possessed an admiring sister to quote him as she quoted “Berry,” or to look up to and depend upon him as she described her schoolboy brothers looking up to and depending on their elder brother, he might have had more faith in himself, and more inducement for exertion.
“Lord Beresford is going into Parliament,”—she continued the conversation, always delighted to speak about Berry,—“and, do you know, Berry will never make a great speaker?” she confided to him, as if it were a matter of extreme surprise, no less than regret, to more than herself. “Berry acts, he does not speak. He has few words, except on rare occasions. He says he could not be eloquent to save his life. But that is nonsense; at least I have heard him what I call eloquent—to save other people’s lives, when he had to argue against the bad water and worse drainage in Friarton, the town next us. He hopes to be a useful member; and he says though he hates to be in town, and it makes him shiver to think there is the most distant chance of his having to speak within earshot of the reporters and the strangers’ gallery, and ironical cheers from the opposition benches, yet he ought to make himself acquainted with the working of the House of Commons, and to put himself in training, since, if he live, he must sit in the other House one day.”
“He is very good,” said De Vaux, abstractedly.
“Oh yes,” said Lady Margaret warmly, without any affectation of contradicting him. “I must not tell you what I think, because Berry says, if I go about praising him or any of the others, we shall be set down as the Mutual Admiration Society; only I may be permitted to mention that he does not need to go into Parliament for occupation. Our vicar—with whom, by-the-bye, Berry has some differences—always maintains that my eldest brother, what with his clubs, societies, and night-schools, his allotment schemes and co-operative experiments, is the hardest-worked man in the parish.”
“For a member of the bloated aristocracy,” commented De Vaux, with somewhat grim humour.