Chapter XV. The First Man

The Shuttle

by Francis Hodgson Burnett

The mystery of the apparently occult methods of communication
among the natives of India, between whom, it is said, news flies by
means too strange and subtle to be humanly explainable, is no more
difficult a problem to solve than that of the lightning rapidity with
which a knowledge of the transpiring of any new local event darts
through the slowest, and, as far as outward signs go, the least
communicative English village slumbering drowsily among its pastures
and trees.

That which the Hall or Manor House believed last night, known
only to the four walls of its drawing-room, is discussed over the
cottage breakfast tables as though presented in detail through the
columns of the Morning Post. The vicarage, the smithy, the post
office, the little provision shop, are instantaneously informed as by
magic of such incidents of interest as occur, and are prepared to
assist vicariously at any future developments. Through what agency
information is given no one can tell, and, indeed, the agency is of
small moment. Facts of interest are perhaps like flights of swallows
and dart chattering from one red roof to another, proclaiming
themselves aloud. Nothing is so true as that in such villages they
are the property and innocent playthings of man, woman, and child,
providing conversation and drama otherwise likely to be lacked.

When Miss Vanderpoel walked through Stornham village street she
became aware that she was an exciting object of interest. Faces
appeared at cottage windows, women sauntered to doors, men in the
taproom of the Clock Inn left beer mugs to cast an eye on her;
children pushed open gates and stared as they bobbed their curtsies;
the young woman who kept the shop left her counter and came out upon
her door step to pick up her straying baby and glance over its
shoulder at the face with the red mouth, and the mass of black hair
rolled upward under a rough blue straw hat. Everyone knew who this
exotic-looking young lady was. She had arrived yesterday from
London, and a week ago by means of a ship from far-away America, from
the country in connection with which the rural mind curiously mixed
up large wages, great fortunes and Indians. "Gaarge" Lunsden, having
spent five years of his youth labouring heavily for sixteen shillings
a week, had gone to "Meriker" and had earned there eight shillings a
day. This was a well-known and much-talked over fact, and had
elevated the western continent to a position of trust and importance
it had seriously lacked before the emigration of Lunsden. A place
where a man could earn eight shillings a day inspired interest as
well as confidence. When Sir Nigel's wife had arrived twelve years
ago as the new Lady Anstruthers, the story that she herself "had
money" had been verified by her fine clothes and her way of handing
out sovereigns in cases where the rest of the gentry, if they gave at
all, would have bestowed tea and flannel or shillings. There had
been for a few months a period of unheard of well-being in Stornham
village; everyone remembered the hundred pounds the bride had given
to poor Wilson when his place had burned down, but the village had of
course learned, by its occult means, that Sir Nigel and the Dowager
had been angry and that there had been a quarrel. Afterwards her
ladyship had been dangerously ill, the baby had been born a
hunchback, and a year had passed before its mother had been seen
again. Since then she had been a changed creature; she had lost her
looks and seemed to care for nothing but the child. Stornham village
saw next to nothing of her, and it certainly was not she who had the
dispensing of her fortune. Rumour said Sir Nigel lived high in
London and foreign parts, but there was no high living at the Court.
Her ladyship's family had never been near her, and belief in them and
their wealth almost ceased to exist. If they were rich, Stornham
felt that it was their business to mend roofs and windows and not
allow chimneys and kitchen boilers to fall into ruin, the simple,
leading article of faith being that even American money belonged
properly to England.

As Miss Vanderpoel walked at a light, swinging pace through the
one village street the gazers felt with Kedgers that something new
was passing and stirring the atmosphere. She looked straight, and
with a friendliness somehow dominating, at the curious women; her
handsome eyes met those of the men in a human questioning; she smiled
and nodded to the bobbing children. One of these, young enough to be
uncertain on its feet, in running to join some others stumbled and
fell on the path before her. Opening its mouth in the inevitable
resultant roar, it was shocked almost into silence by the tall young
lady stooping at once, picking it up, and cheerfully dusting its
pinafore.

"Don't cry," she said; "you are not hurt, you know."

The deep dimple near her mouth showed itself, and the laugh in
her eyes was so reassuring that the penny she put into the grubby
hand was less productive of effect than her mere self. She walked
on, leaving the group staring after her breathless, because of a
sense of having met with a wonderful adventure. The grand young lady
with the black hair and the blue hat and tall, straight body was the
adventure. She left the same sense of event with the village itself.
They talked of her all day over their garden palings, on their
doorsteps, in the street; of her looks, of her height, of the black
rim of lashes round her eyes, of the chance that she might be rich
and ready to give half-crowns and sovereigns, of the "Meriker" she
had come from, and above all of the reason for her coming.

Betty swung with the light, firm step of a good walker out on to
the highway. To walk upon the fine, smooth old Roman road was a
pleasure in itself, but she soon struck away from it and went through
lanes and by-ways, following sign-posts because she knew where she
was going. Her walk was to take her to Mount Dunstan and home again
by another road. In walking, an objective point forms an interest,
and what she had heard of the estate from Rosalie was a vague reason
for her caring to see it. It was another place like Stornham, once
dignified and nobly representative of fine things, now losing their
meanings and values. Values and meanings, other than mere signs of
wealth and power, there had been. Centuries ago strong creatures had
planned and built it for such reasons as strength has for its
planning and building. In Bettina Vanderpoel's imagination the First
Man held powerful and moving sway. It was he whom she always saw.
In history, as a child at school, she had understood and drawn close
to him. There was always a First Man behind all that one saw or was
told, one who was the fighter, the human thing who snatched weapons
and tools from stones and trees and wielded them in the carrying out
of the thought which was his possession and his strength. He was the
God made human; others waited, without knowledge of their waiting,
for the signal he gave. A man like others--with man's body, hands,
and limbs, and eyes-- the moving of a whole world was subtly altered
by his birth. One could not always trace him, but with stone axe and
spear point he had won savage lands in savage ways, and so ruled them
that, leaving them to other hands, their march towards less savage
life could not stay itself, but must sweep on; others of his kind,
striking rude harps, had so sung that the loud clearness of their
wild songs had rung through the ages, and echo still in strains which
are theirs, though voices of to-day repeat the note of them. The
First Man, a Briton stained with woad and hung with skins, had tilled
the luscious greenness of the lands richly rolling now within hedge
boundaries. The square church towers rose, holding their slender
corner spires above the trees, as a result of the First Man, Norman
William. The thought which held its place, the work which did not
pass away, had paid its First Man wages; but beauties crumbling,
homes falling to waste, were bitter things. The First Man, who,
having won his splendid acres, had built his home upon them and
reared his young and passed his possession on with a proud heart,
seemed but ill treated. Through centuries the home had enriched
itself, its acres had borne harvests, its trees had grown and spread
huge branches, full lives had been lived within the embrace of the
massive walls, there had been loves and lives and marriages and
births, the breathings of them made warm and full the very air. To
Betty it seemed that the land itself would have worn another face if
it had not been trodden by so many springing feet, if so many
harvests had not waved above it, if so many eyes had not looked upon
and loved it.

She passed through variations of the rural loveliness she had
seen on her way from the station to the Court, and felt them grow in
beauty as she saw them again. She came at last to a village somewhat
larger than Stornham and marked by the signs of the lack of
money-spending care which Stornham showed. Just beyond its limits a
big park gate opened on to an avenue of massive trees. She stopped
and looked down it, but could see nothing but its curves and, under
the branches, glimpses of a spacious sweep of park with other trees
standing in groups or alone in the sward. The avenue was unswept and
untended, and here and there boughs broken off by wind

storms lay upon it. She turned to the road again and followed
it, because it enclosed the park and she wanted to see more of its
evident beauty. It was very beautiful. As she walked on she saw it
rolled into woods and deeps filled with bracken; she saw stretches of
hillocky, fine-grassed rabbit warren, and hollows holding shadowy
pools; she caught the gleam of a lake with swans sailing slowly upon
it with curved necks; there were wonderful lights and wonderful
shadows, and brooding stillness, which made her footfall upon the
road a too material thing.

Suddenly she heard a stirring in the bracken a yard or two away
from her. Something was moving slowly among the waving masses of
huge fronds and caused them to sway to and fro. It was an antlered
stag who rose from his bed in the midst of them, and with majestic
deliberation got upon his feet and stood gazing at her with a
calmness of pose so splendid, and a liquid darkness and lustre of eye
so stilly and fearlessly beautiful, that she caught her breath. He
simply gazed as her as a great king might gaze at an intruder,
scarcely deigning wonder.

As she had passed on her way, Betty had seen that the enclosing
park palings were decaying, covered with lichen and falling at
intervals. It had even passed through her mind that here was one of
the demands for expenditure on a large estate, which limited
resources could not confront with composure. The deer fence itself,
a thing of wire ten feet high, to form an obstacle to leaps, she had
marked to be in such condition as to threaten to become shortly a
useless thing. Until this moment she had seen no deer, but looking
beyond the stag and across the sward she now saw groups near each
other, stags cropping or looking towards her with lifted heads, does
at a respectful but affectionate distance from them, some caring for
their fawns. The stag who had risen near her had merely walked
through a gap in the boundary and now stood free to go where he
would.

"He will get away," said Betty, knitting her black brows. Ah!
what a shame!

Even with the best intentions one could not give chase to a
stag. She looked up and down the road, but no one was within sight.
Her brows continued to knit themselves and her eyes ranged over the
park itself in the hope that some labourer on the estate, some
woodman or game-keeper, might be about.

"It is no affair of mine," she said, "but it would be too bad to
let him get away, though what happens to stray stags one doesn't
exactly know."

As she said it she caught sight of someone, a man in leggings
and shabby clothes and with a gun over his shoulder, evidently an
under keeper. He was a big, rather rough-looking fellow, but as he
lurched out into the open from a wood Betty saw that she could reach
him if she passed through a narrow gate a few yards away and walked
quickly.

He was slouching along, his head drooping and his broad
shoulders expressing the definite antipodes of good spirits. Betty
studied his back as she strode after him, her conclusion being that
he was perhaps not a good-humoured man to approach at any time, and
that this was by ill luck one of his less fortunate hours.

"Wait a moment, if you please," her clear, mellow voice flung
out after him when she was within hearing distance. "I want to speak
to you, keeper."

He turned with an air of far from pleased surprise. The
afternoon sun was in his eyes and made him scowl. For a moment he
did not see distinctly who was approaching him, but he had at once
recognised a certain cool tone of command in the voice whose
suddenness had roused him from a black mood. A few steps brought
them to close quarters, and when he found himself looking into the
eyes of his pursuer he made a movement as if to lift his cap, then
checking himself, touched it, keeper fashion.

"Oh!" he said shortly. "Miss Vanderpoel! Beg pardon."

Bettina stood still a second. She had her surprise also. Here
was the unexpected again. The under keeper was the red- haired
second-class passenger of the Meridiana.

He did not look pleased to see her, and the suddenness of his
appearance excluded the possibility of her realising that upon the
whole she was at least not displeased to see him.

"How do you do?" she said, feeling the remark fantastically
conventional, but not being inspired by any alternative. "I came to
tell you that one of the stags has got through a gap in the
fence."

"Damn!" she heard him say under his breath. Aloud he said,
"Thank you."

"He is a splendid creature," she said. "I did not know what to
do. I was glad to see a keeper coming."

"Thank you," he said again, and strode towards the place where
the stag still stood gazing up the road, as if reflecting as to
whether it allured him or not.

Betty walked back more slowly, watching him with interest. She
wondered what he would find it necessary to do. She heard him begin
a low, flute-like whistling, and then saw the antlered head turn
towards him. The woodland creature moved, but it was in his
direction. It had without doubt answered his call before and knew
its meaning to be friendly. It went towards him, stretching out a
tender sniffing nose, and he put his hand in the pocket of his rough
coat and gave it something to eat. Afterwards he went to the gap in
the fence and drew the wires together, fastening them with other
wire, which he also took out of the coat pocket.

"He is not afraid of making himself useful," thought Betty.
"And the animals know him. He is not as bad as he looks."

She lingered a moment watching him, and then walked towards the
gate through which she had entered. He glanced up as she neared
him.

"I don't see your carriage," he said. "Your man is probably
round the trees."

"I walked," answered Betty. "I had heard of this place and
wanted to see it."

He stood up, putting his wire back into his pocket.

"There is not much to be seen from the road," he said. "Would
you like to see more of it?"

His manner was civil enough, but not the correct one for a
servant. He did not say "miss" or touch his cap in making the
suggestion. Betty hesitated a moment.

"Is the family at home?" she inquired.

"There is no family but--his lordship. He is off the place."

"Does he object to trespassers?"

"Not if they are respectable and take no liberties."

"I am respectable, and I shall not take liberties," said Miss
Vanderpoel, with a touch of hauteur. The truth was that she had
spent a sufficient number of years on the Continent to have become
familiar with conventions which led her not to approve wholly of his
bearing. Perhaps he had lived long enough in America to forget such
conventions and to lack something which centuries of custom had
decided should belong to his class. A certain suggestion of rough
force in the man rather attracted her, and her slight distaste for
his manner arose from the realisation that a gentleman's servant who
did not address his superiors as was required by custom was not doing
his work in a finished way. In his place she knew her own demeanour
would have been finished.

"If you are sure that Lord Mount Dunstan would not object to my
walking about, I should like very much to see the gardens and the
house," she said. "If you show them to me, shall I be interfering
with your duties?"

"No," he answered, and then for the first time rather glumly
added, "miss."

"I am interested," she said, as they crossed the grass together,
"because places like this are quite new to me. I have never been in
England before."

"There are not many places like this," he answered, "not many as
old and fine, and not many as nearly gone to ruin. Even Stornham is
not quite as far gone."

"It is far gone," said Miss Vanderpoel. "I am staying
there--with my sister, Lady Anstruthers."

"Beg pardon--miss," he said. This time he touched his cap in
apology.

Enormous as the gulf between their positions was, he knew that
he had offered to take her over the place because he was in a sense
glad to see her again. Why he was glad he did not profess to know or
even to ask himself. Coarsely speaking, it might be because she was
one of the handsomest young women he had ever chanced to meet with,
and while her youth was apparent in the rich red of her mouth, the
mass of her thick, soft hair and the splendid blue of her eyes, there
spoke in every line of face and pose something intensely more
interesting and compelling than girlhood. Also, since the night they
had come together on the ship's deck for an appalling moment, he had
liked her better and rebelled less against the unnatural wealth she
represented. He led her first to the wood from which she had seen
him emerge.

"I will show you this first," he explained. "Keep your eyes on
the ground until I tell you to raise them."

Odd as this was, she obeyed, and her lowered glance showed her
that she was being guided along a narrow path between trees. The
light was mellow golden-green, and birds were singing in the boughs
above her. In a few minutes he stopped.

"Now look up," he said.

She uttered an exclamation when she did so. She was in a fairy
dell thick with ferns, and at beautiful distances from each other
incredibly splendid oaks spread and almost trailed their lovely giant
branches. The glow shining through and between them, the shadows
beneath them, their great boles and moss-covered roots, and the
stately, mellow distances revealed under their branches, the ancient
wildness and richness, which meant, after all, centuries of
cultivation, made a picture in this exact, perfect moment of ripening
afternoon sun of an almost unbelievable beauty.

"There is nothing lovelier," he said in a low voice, "in all
England."

Bettina turned to look at him, because his tone was a curious
one for a man like himself. He was standing resting on his gun and
taking in the loveliness with a strange look in his rugged face.

"You--you love it!" she said.

"Yes," but with a suggestion of stubborn reluctance in the
admission.

She was rather moved.

"Have you been keeper here long?" she asked.

"No--only a few years. But I have known the place all my
life."

"Does Lord Mount Dunstan love it?"

"In his way--yes."

He was plainly not disposed to talk of his master. He was
perhaps not on particularly good terms with him. He led her away and
volunteered no further information. He was, upon the whole,
uncommunicative. He did not once refer to the circumstance of their
having met before. It was plain that he had no intention of
presuming upon the fact that he, as a second-class passenger on a
ship, had once been forced by accident across the barriers between
himself and the saloon deck. He was stubbornly resolved to keep his
place; so stubbornly that Bettina felt that to broach the subject
herself would verge upon offence.

But the golden ways through which he led her made the afternoon
one she knew she should never forget. They wandered through moss
walks and alleys, through tangled shrubberies bursting into bloom,
beneath avenues of blossoming horse- chestnuts and scented limes,
between thickets of budding red and white may, and jungles of
neglected rhododendrons; through sunken gardens and walled ones, past
terraces with broken balustrades of stone, and fallen Floras and
Dianas, past moss-grown fountains splashing in lovely corners.
Arches, overgrown with yet unblooming roses, crumbled in their time
stained beauty. Stillness brooded over it all, and they met no one.
They scarcely broke the silence themselves. The man led the way as
one who knew it by heart, and Bettina followed, not caring for speech
herself, because the stillness seemed to add a spell of enchantment.
What could one say, to a stranger, of such beauty so lost and given
over to ruin and decay.

"But, oh!" she murmured once, standing still, with in- drawn
breath, "if it were mine!--if it were mine!" And she said the thing
forgetting that her guide was a living creature and stood near.

Afterwards her memories of it all seemed to her like the
memories of a dream. The lack of speech between herself and the man
who led her, his often averted face, her own sense of the
desertedness of each beauteous spot she passed through, the mossy
paths which gave back no sound of footfalls as they walked,
suggested, one and all, unreality. When at last they passed through
a door half hidden in an ivied wall, and crossing a grassed bowling
green, mounted a short flight of broken steps which led them to a
point through which they saw the house through a break in the trees,
this last was the final touch of all. It was a great place, stately
in its masses of grey stone to which thick ivy clung. To Bettina it
seemed that a hundred windows stared at her with closed, blind eyes.
All were shuttered but two or three on the lower floors. Not one
showed signs of life. The silent stone thing stood sightless among
all of which it was dead master--rolling acres, great trees, lost
gardens and deserted groves.

"Oh!" she sighed, "Oh!"

Her companion stood still and leaned upon his gun again, looking
as he had looked before.

"Some of it," he said, "was here before the Conquest. It
belonged to Mount Dunstans then."

"And only one of them is left," she cried, "and it is like
this!"

"They have been a bad lot, the last hundred years," was the
surly liberty of speech he took, "a bad lot."

It was not his place to speak in such manner of those of his
master's house, and it was not the part of Miss Vanderpoel to
encourage him by response. She remained silent, standing perhaps a
trifle more lightly erect as she gazed at the rows of blind windows
in silence.

Neither of them uttered a word for some time, but at length
Bettina roused herself. She had a six-mile walk before her and must
go.

"I am very much obliged to you," she began, and then paused a
second. A curious hesitance came upon her, though she knew that
under ordinary circumstances such hesitation would have been totally
out of place. She had occupied the man's time for an hour or more,
he was of the working class, and one must not be guilty of the error
of imagining that a man who has work to do can justly spend his time
in one's service for the mere pleasure of it. She knew what custom
demanded. Why should she hesitate before this man, with his not too
courteous, surly face. She felt slightly irritated by her own
unpractical embarrassment as she put her hand into the small, latched
bag at her belt.

"I am very much obliged, keeper," she said. "You have given me
a great deal of your time. You know the place so well that it has
been a pleasure to be taken about by you. I have never seen anything
so beautiful--and so sad. Thank you --thank you." And she put a
goldpiece in his palm.

His fingers closed over it quietly. Why it was to her great
relief she did not know--because something in the simple act annoyed
her, even while she congratulated herself that her hesitance had been
absurd. The next moment she wondered if it could be possible that he
had expected a larger fee. He opened his hand and looked at the
money with a grim steadiness.

"Thank you, miss," he said, and touched his cap in the proper
manner.

He did not look gracious or grateful, but he began to put it in
a small pocket in the breast of his worn corduroy shooting jacket.
Suddenly he stopped, as if with abrupt resolve. He handed the coin
back without any change of his glum look.

"Hang it all," he said, "I can't take this, you know. I suppose
I ought to have told you. It would have been less awkward for us
both. I am that unfortunate beggar, Mount Dunstan, myself."

A pause was inevitable. It was a rather long one. After it,
Betty took back her half-sovereign and returned it to her bag, but
she pleased a certain perversity in him by looking more annoyed than
confused.

"Yes," she said. "You ought to have told me, Lord Mount
Dunstan."

He slightly shrugged his big shoulders.

"Why shouldn't you take me for a keeper? You crossed the
Atlantic with a fourth-rate looking fellow separated from you by
barriers of wood and iron. You came upon him tramping over a
nobleman's estate in shabby corduroys and gaiters, with a gun over
his shoulder and a scowl on his ugly face. Why should you leap to
the conclusion that he is the belted Earl himself? There is no cause
for embarrassment."

"I am not embarrassed," said Bettina.

"That is what I like," gruffly.

"I am pleased," in her mellowest velvet voice, "that you like
it."

Their eyes met with a singular directness of gaze. Between them
a spark passed which was not afterwards to be extinguished, though
neither of them knew the moment of its kindling, and Mount Dunstan
slightly frowned.

"I beg pardon," he said. "You are quite right. It had a
deucedly patronising sound."

As he stood before her Betty was given her opportunity to see
him as she had not seen him before, to confront the sum total of his
physique. His red-brown eyes looked out from rather fine heavy
brows, his features were strong and clear, though ruggedly cut, his
build showed weight of bone, not of flesh, and his limbs were big and
long. He would have wielded a battle-axe with power in centuries in
which men hewed their way with them. Also it occurred to her he
would have looked well in a coat of mail. He did not look ill in his
corduroys and gaiters.

"I am a self-absorbed beggar," he went on. "I had been
slouching about the place, almost driven mad by my thoughts, and when
I saw you took me for a servant my fancy was for letting the thing go
on. If I had been a rich man instead of a pauper I would have kept
your half-sovereign."

"I should not have enjoyed that when I found out the truth,"
said Miss Vanderpoel

"No, I suppose you wouldn't. But I should not have cared."

He was looking at her straightly and summing her up as she had
summed him up. A man and young, he did not miss a line or a tint of
her chin or cheek, shoulder, or brow, or dense, lifted hair. He had
already, even in his guise of keeper, noticed one thing, which was
that while at times her eyes were the blue of steel, sometimes they
melted to the colour of bluebells under water. They had been of this
last hue when she had stood in the sunken garden, forgetting him and
crying low:

"Oh, if it were mine! If it were mine!"

He did not like American women with millions, but while he would
not have said that he liked her, he did not wish her yet to move
away. And she, too, did not wish, just yet, to move away. There was
something dramatic and absorbing in the situation. She looked over
the softly stirring grass and saw the sunshine was deepening its gold
and the shadows were growing long. It was not a habit of hers to ask
questions, but she asked one.

"Did you not like America?" was what she said.

"Hated it! Hated it! I went there lured by a belief that a man
like myself, with muscle and will, even without experience, could
make a fortune out of small capital on a sheep ranch. Wind and
weather and disease played the devil with me. I lost the little I
had and came back to begin over again-- on nothing--here!" And he
waved his hand over the park with its sward and coppice and bracken
and the deer cropping in the late afternoon gold.

"To begin what again?" said Betty. It was an extraordinary
enough thing, seen in the light of conventions, that they should
stand and talk like this. But the spark had kindled between eye and
eye, and because of it they suddenly had forgotten that they were
strangers.

"You are an American, so it may not seem as mad to you as it
would to others. To begin to build up again, in one man's life, what
has taken centuries to grow--and fall into this."

"It would be a splendid thing to do," she said slowly, and as
she said it her eyes took on their colour of bluebells, because what
she had seen had moved her. She had not looked at him, but at the
cropping deer as she spoke, but at her next sentence she turned to
him again.

"Where should you begin?" she asked, and in saying it thought of
Stornham.

He laughed shortly.

"That is American enough," he said. "Your people have not
finished their beginnings yet and live in the spirit of them.

I tell you of a wild fancy, and you accept it as a possibility
and turn on me with, `Where should you begin?' "

"That is one way of beginning," said Bettina. "In fact, it is
the only way."

He did not tell her that he liked that, but he knew that he did
like it and that her mere words touched him like a spur. It was, of
course, her lifelong breathing of the atmosphere of millions which
made for this fashion of moving at once in the direction of obstacles
presenting to the rest of the world barriers seemingly
insurmountable. And yet there was something else in it, some quality
of nature which did not alone suggest the omnipotence of wealth, but
another thing which might be even stronger and therefore carried
conviction. He who had raged and clenched his hands in the face of
his knowledge of the aspect his dream would have presented if he had
revealed it to the ordinary practical mind, felt that a point of view
like this was good for him. There was in it stimulus for a fleeting
moment at least.

"That is a good idea," he answered. "Where should you
begin?"

She replied quite seriously, though he could have imagined some
girls rather simpering over the question as a casual joke.

"One would begin at the fences," she said. "Don't you think
so?"

"That is practical."

"That is where I shall begin at Stornham," reflectively.

"You are going to begin at Stornham?"

"How could one help it? It is not as large or as splendid as
this has been, but it is like it in a way. And it will belong to my
sister's son. No, I could not help it."

"I suppose you could not." There was a hint of wholly
unconscious resentment in his tone. He was thinking that the effect
produced by their boundless wealth was to make these people feel as a
race of giants might--even their women unknowingly revealed it.

"No, I could not," was her reply. "I suppose I am on the whole
a sort of commercial working person. I have no doubt it is
commercial, that instinct which makes one resent seeing things lose
their value."

"Shall you begin it for that reason?"

"Partly for that one--partly for another." She held out her
hand to him. "Look at the length of the shadows. I must go. Thank
you, Lord Mount Dunstan, for showing me the place, and thank you for
undeceiving me."

He held the side gate open for her and lifted his cap as she
passed through. He admitted to himself, with some reluctance, that
he was not content that she should go even yet, but, of course, she
must go. There passed through his mind a remote wonder why he had
suddenly unbosomed himself to her in a way so extraordinarily unlike
himself. It was, he thought next, because as he had taken her about
from one place to another he had known that she had seen in things
what he had seen in them so long--the melancholy loneliness, the
significance of it, the lost hopes that lay behind it, the touching
pain of the stateliness wrecked. She had shown it in the way in
which she tenderly looked from side to side, in the very lightness of
her footfall, in the bluebell softening of her eyes. Oh, yes, she
had understood and cared, American as she was! She had felt it all,
even with her hideous background of Fifth Avenue behind her.

When he had spoken it had been in involuntary response to an
emotion in herself.

So he stood, thinking, as he for some time watched her walking
up the sunset-glowing road.