Archdale told the story, the outlines of which Elizabeth had given to Mrs. Eveleigh. But he told it with so many details that it seemed new to her. "Edmonson insists that the nobleman killed in this duel was a distant relative of Sir Temple Dacre," he said, as he finished the account of the flight and the taking of the portrait.
He told of its careful concealment afterwards lest it should identify them, and how, when the daughter's eyes rested upon it, she had a dread of discovery, that amounted almost to a sense of guilt.
"Poor woman!" said Elizabeth, "with the loss of her father and her child, she could not have been very happy."
Her listener recalled that the speaker at one time in her life had not considered the loss of a husband in any other light than a great satisfaction. But he went on to explain that after his grandmother's death, the portrait had been concealed where Elizabeth had discovered it. "My mother knew nothing of it," he said, "but my father had seen it before. He told me so after that day," he added, remembering that Elizabeth had heard Colonel's denial of any knowledge of the portrait. "He knew whom it was a picture of, I mean, and that we were not the Sunderland Archdales, but nothing of Edmonson's rights; and he had looked at the portrait so little that he never perceived the likeness to Edmonson until we all did. Edmonson, you know, was in search of this portrait. He had heard of it from his father, who passed as the child of the old man's only son, who died in India at about the same time that the baby and nurse came to the grandfather's. My grandmother Archdale besought her father to take care of the child until she could send for it, and he was better than her request. I suppose that he could not bear to give up both his children and he hated his son-in-law. Edmonson's father did not know his real name until after the elder Edmonson's death. Then the nurse told him the story. But at that time he was twenty-five; married, and established in his home, with no desire to change, or to share his possessions. Gerald learned the truth only when he came of age, and his capacity for getting through with money made him think that something ought to be made out of his colonial relatives. He had spent his own moderate fortune before he came here. He showed his character in his way of going to work," finished Archdale, contemptuously. "He could not believe that anybody would have honesty enough not to defeat his claim unless he could clinch his proofs instantly."
"It was a cowardly way of doing it," said Elizabeth slowly.
"Yes," he answered, and looked at her, wondering if he should learn what she was thinking about, for it seemed as if she had only half finished her sentence.
"Nothing seems to me stranger than the difference between people in the same family," she said at last, almost more to herself than to him. There was something so utterly impersonal in her tone that she seemed to be setting forth a general trite observation rather than comparing Edmonson with any of his relatives. And it was evident that, if she thought of her listener at all, this was the way in which the remark was meant for him. And yet—Then he heard Elizabeth saying that she must go back.
"Poor Melvin is dying," she said. "He probably will not live through the night. I promised to take down some messages for him. He began to give them to me, but was so exhausted that I had to leave him to rest. But I must not leave him too long, and then there are the others." Stephen helped her down from the rock as she spoke, and they went together along the beach and up the path from the shore, talking as they went. She told him some of the things that the men needed most, and asked his advice and his help toward getting for them what was possible. "I cannot go to the General for these; I cannot put any more burdens upon him," she said. Archdale told her all that he could, and then for a few minutes they walked on in silence. At the hospital she stopped and turned to him.
"Thank you," she said. Then, as he was about to answer, she added hastily, "I think that experience like this is good for us, for every one I mean; it opens up the world a little and shows so much suffering besides one's own. It's a help to get at the proportions of things. Don't you think so?" The appeal in her voice was an exquisite note of sympathy.
Stephen knew that all his life long it had been his way, as it had been that of the other Archdales, to consider his own joys and sorrows not only of more relative but of more actual importance than those of the people about him. He looked at Elizabeth, royal as she stood, full of compassion for him, but with her hand already stretched out to draw back the canvas which separated her from that presence of death in which live and grow, watered by tears, all human sympathies. It seemed as if she always touched some chord in him untouched by others. Was it the truth that she spoke that thrilled him so? He perceived nothing clearly except the one thing that he uttered.