“Yes. Sonia and David were dining with him; and I told David to bring him. You don’t mind? I wanted to be friends. Ah . . .!” The sound was painfully like a sob; but, when I turned, I saw Barbara smiling eagerly as the O’Ranes came—unaccompanied—up the stairs. “Take David where he won’t be trampled on,” she whispered.
I was glad of a moment’s respite after the unintended shock which Barbara had given me. Eric had left too deep a mark on her spirit to be quickly forgotten; but I fancied, when her old exuberant joy in life returned, that she was no longer missing him. An hour before, I had been stupefied to realize that Barbara was my wife; now I wondered how much she was my wife. Not all her thoughts were mine; was all her affection? I was checked, by some question from O’Rane, on the verge of a shameful jealousy.
“You want to know who’s here?” I looked down on a seething mass of heads. “It would be easier to say who’s not. Generally speaking, any one who was too old or too young for the war; and a sprinkling of people with charmed lives. The summer and winter without the spring, Raymond calls it.”
“It was a slaughter and a half!,” O’Rane muttered. “If you calculate, among your own friends, the families who’ve been left without a direct heir . . .”
“Oh, Bertrand will tell you the old aristocracy is done for. I don’t know. It weathered the industrial revolution and the Napoleonic wars.”
“The shock was more gradual; there was a greater power of resistance. Now the big estates are breaking up; and the great masses are becoming conscious of their strength.”
As I looked down the stairs, Crawleigh and Bertrand were finishing their altercation. I heard Raymond telling them that it was time for old men to be in bed; and the phrase reminded me of my meeting with Saltash. In every sense of the term, they were old men, no longer able to hold their own against the young vigour of Saltash’s recruits; in any struggle of class with class, the material ammunition had passed from their hands. Their prestige was weakening before the pressure of those who excelled them in everything but length of tradition; and that tradition was now being cut short.
“I suppose you can call yourself a radical and still believe in the value of a good strain in breeding,” I said. “That hard-worked creature ‘the historian of the future’ will have to say, I suppose, that the people of this country carried a heavier burden than any other in the war? I think he’ll say that, of all our people, those who carried the heaviest burden were the leaders. In fighting, in directing, in paying . . . And in being killed: that’s why there are so few of them here to-night. We shall be the poorer if we lose that strain.”
“We’ll hope there are still enough of them left to carry it on,” said O’Rane.
“The next few years will be a race; there’ll be a fight against time, to spread the tradition before the people who maintain it are swallowed up.”