in it is a very curious one. But first get this clear in your mind—that the younger group, whom they speak of as the Jews, have money beyond counting, and have morals and intelligence moreover. Between these two groups no love is lost. In fact, they hate each other. The difference is the Christians go about cursing the Jews, whereas the Jews wisely shrug their shoulders and say nothing. No one suspected that they would do anything, either—but—oh, this is going to be an awful business!”
He held himself down to a fine semblance of dignified calm. “Tell me more,” he bade her, with an effect of temperate curiosity.
“Now comes tragedy,” she went on, and the hint of sprightliness disappeared from her face and tone. “It is really one of the most terrible stories that could be told. There is a very aged man—he must be nearly ninety—lying at death’s door in his great seat in Shropshire. He is at death’s door, I said, but he has the strength and will of a giant, and though he is half paralyzed, half blind, half everything, still he has his weight against the door, and no one knows how long he can hold it closed. It is your grandfather that I am speaking of. His name also is Christian.”
The young man nodded gravely. “My father would have fought death that way too, if they had not shot him to pieces, and heaped fever on top of that,” he commented.
The girl bit her lip and flushed awkwardly for an instant “Let me go on,” she said then, and hurried forward. “This old man had three sons—not counting the priest, Lord David, who doesn’t come into the thing. The first of these sons, also Christian, had three sons, and he and they were all alive six months ago. They are all dead now, two drowned in their yacht, one lost in the ‘Castle Drummond,’ one killed in Matabeleland. Lord David, the priest, the next brother, died last year—childless of course. There remained in England two sons of another brother who died some years ago, Lord Edward, and this horrible mowing down of human lives left them apparently nearest to the very aged man, your grandfather. Do you follow all that?”
“I think I do,” said Christian. “If I don’t I will pick it up afterward. In mercy’s name, do not stop!”
“The Jews, saying nothing, had lost sight of nothing. There was still another brother who had lived abroad for many years, who died abroad twenty years ago. You are getting to the climax now. The Jews must have kept an eye on this wandering cousin of theirs; it is evident they knew he left a son capable of inheriting, and that they did not let this son escape from view. Because Lord Ambrose Torr was older than Lord Edward, his brother, it happens now that the son of that Ambrose—”
The young man abruptly rose, and moved along to the rail. He had signified by a rapid backward gesture of the hand his momentary craving for solitude; he stretched this hand now slowly, as if unconsciously, toward the sunset glow on sky and sea, in the heart of which lay imbedded a thick line of cream-colored cliffs, escalloped under a close covering of soft olive-hued verdure. The profile of his uplifted face, as he gazed thus before him into the light, seemed to the eyes of the girl transfigured.
He stood thus, rapt and motionless, for minutes, until her mind had time to formulate the suspicion that this was all intolerable play-acting, and to dismiss it again as unworthy. Then he returned all at once to her side, apparently with a shamefaced kind of perception of her thoughts. He was flushed and uneasy, and shuffled his hands in and out of the pockets of his great-coat. He did not seat himself, but stood looking down at her.
“What is my grandfather?” he asked, with a husky, difficult voice.
“The Duke of Glastonbury.”
“I do not understand,” he began, hesitatingly; “it is not clear to me about my father. Why should he—”
She rose in turn, with swift decision, as if she had been alertly watching for the question. “That is what you must not ask me,” she said, hurriedly. “I think I will move about a little. The wind is colder here. I am getting chilled.”
They strolled about together, conducting a fitful conversation, but as often gazing in silence at the bulk of the headlands they were approaching, gray and massive now in the evening light. She answered freely enough the queries he put, but between these he lapsed into an abstraction which she respected. More than once he spoke of the extraordinary confusion into which her story had thrown his thoughts, and she philosophically replied that she could well understand it.
An hour later they had passed the fatuous inspection of the customs people, and confronted the imminence of leave-taking. Constraint enveloped them as in a mantle.
It occurred suddenly to him to say: “How strange! You possess the most extraordinary knowledge of me and my—my people, and yet the thought just comes to me—I have not so much as asked your name.”
She smiled at him with a new light in her eyes, half kind, half ironically roguish. “If I may confess it, there have been times today when I was annoyed with you for being so persistently and indefatigably interested in yourself—for never dreaming of wondering, speculating, inquiring something about me. But that was very weak of me—I see it now—and very wise of you, because—what does it matter about a nobody like me?—but next week the whole world will be bearing witness that you are the most interesting young man in England.”
He gave a swift glance down the train toward the guards noisily shutting the doors. “No, it is too bad,” he said, nervously. “You will always be my first friend in England—my very deeply prized friend everywhere. I know you only to-day—but that day is more to me than all the rest of my life—and it is full of you. They are closing the doors—but you will tell me? The notion of not seeing you again is ridiculous. You are in London—yes?—then how do you think I could come to London without first of all, before everything else, wanting to call upon you?”
“Oh, I daresay we shall meet again,” she answered, as perforce he stepped into the compartment. Her smile had a puzzling quality in it—something compounded, it seemed to him, of both fear and fun. “In a remote kind of way I am mixed up with the story myself.”
There was no time for any hope of further explanation. He put his head out of the window, and shook hands again. “Remember!” he called out fervently. “You are my first friend in England. Whenever—whatever I can do—”
“Even to the half of your kingdom!” she laughed at him, as the movement of the carriage drew him past her.
The tone of these last words, which he bore away with him, had been gay—almost jovial. But the girl, when she had watched him pass out of sight, turned and walked slowly off in the direction of her own train with a white and troubled face.
CHAPTER III
Many builders in their day have put a hand to the making of Caermere Hall. Though there were wide differences of race and language among them and though the long chain of time which binds them together has generations and even centuries for its links, they seem to have had thus much in common: they were all at feud with the sunlight.
On the very pick of summer days, when the densest thickets of Clune Forest are alive to the core with moving green reflections of the outer radiance, and hints of the glory up above pierce their way to the bottom of the narrowest ravine through which the black Devon churns and frets, somehow Caermere remains wrapped in its ancient shadows.
The first men, in
