“Pardon me,” I answered; “not to myself—but to the impossibility of being myself. I am an English peer. I have not even the picturesqueness of poverty. You do not understand. In Ertaria they do not hold flower shows. I do not object to myself—I object to Lord Havensea.”
The General looked round anxiously. A wide-breeched soldier was walking toward the fort; a white-stringed bonnet was going home. Seaward the streak of smoke blackened the eye of the sun. The sight of that caused the man of granite to swear solemnly in Ertarian—a language admitting a wide choice of expression to a man oppressed with a sense of wrong.
“I will reply to your first question,” he said. He spoke in a low voice. He was under some strong emotion. “I am disturbed. That little streak of smoke dissolving out there represents my hopes dissipated, evaporated. My hopes are the hopes of Ertaria. We are a small country, but we are proud.”
“A country’s pride invariably compensates for lack of acres.”
“It is a jest to you,” he said sadly. I had expected him to be angry at my flippant remark. The sadness of his voice slipped past my guard. Here at last I had found a man who could feel.
“Your pardon, General,” I said more soberly than I had previously spoken. “The pride of Ertaria I know rests upon an unstained national honor.”
“If you believed that!” he cried.
“I do,” I answered stoutly. “Frankly, you are all absurd, but it is a glorious absurdity. Small, hemmed in by enemies, you have kept an independence, noble and untainted, for seven hundred years.”
“You believe it! Why not?” he cried excitedly. “Your father, the dear Lord Havensea, loved us. He was our friend. His representations at St. James’s saved us once. You inherited his love. We are in peril now.”
“Ah,” said I, “the lost heir.”