"I bet you don't get fat on what you earn carting hay in Wiltshire."
"I don't do it for the money. I want to know the lives these fellows are leading. Man's entitled to 'Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,' and there are moments when I begin to doubt if every man the wide world over is getting what I claim he's entitled to. I didn't think I was when I was a kid of fourteen. I don't think sweated labourers, prostitutes, incurables, children with tainted blood—I don't think they're getting all they're entitled to. The average Armenian, the natives of the Belgian Congo—I'm not easy in my mind about them, George. But before I die—my God!" He turned suddenly as a hand came to rest on his shoulder, and a voice behind him remarked:
"You're young to be talking of death, Mr. O'Rane."
"Let me introduce you to my uncle, Raney," I said.
He sprang to attention with the same click of the heels I had observed in Burgess's library some seven years before. As their hands met, Bertrand searched the lean, animated face and looked steadily into the expressive, defiant black eyes.
"I understand you are the late Lord O'Rane's son?" Raney drew himself up to the last inch of his height, for all the world like a rock-python waiting to strike. "Your father was a close personal friend of mine," Bertrand went on; "I am very proud to meet his son."
I set the words down as they were spoken; and, to read, there is little enough in them. Yet, when I heard them uttered, I still recall that my eyes began to smart. Bertrand's manner—half-sneering, half-openly brutal—had taken on a new courtliness towards a boy fifty years his junior. I do not regard myself as a man of undue sensibility: the change of tone was not created by my imagination. O'Rane lowered his eyes, bowed and murmured:
"Thank you, sir."
I have never seen a quicker or completer conquest. Gradually we relaxed our self-consciousness. I brought Bertrand a chair and gave him a cigar to smoke.
"Until two hours ago," he told O'Rane, "I knew no more of your existence than, I expect, you knew of mine."