"WE BEGAN TO MARRY THEM, MY GOOD FELLOW!"Lord Dunholm and his eldest son, Lord Westholt, sauntered together smoking their after-dinner cigars on the broad-turfed terrace overlooking park and gardens which seemed to sweep without boundary line into the purplish land beyond.
The grey mass of the castle stood clear-cut against the blue of a sky whose twilight was still almost daylight, though in the purity of its evening stillness a star already hung, here and there, and a young moon swung low.The great spaces about them held a silence whose exquisite entirety was marked at intervals by the distant bark of a shepherd dog driving his master's sheep to the fold, their soft, intermittent plaints--the mother ewes' mellow answering to the tender, fretful lambs--floated on the air, a lovely part of the ending day's repose.
Where two who are friends stroll together at such hours, the great beauty makes for silence or for thoughtful talk.These two men--father and son--were friends and intimates, and had been so from Westholt's first memory of the time when his childish individuality began to detach itself from the background of misty and indistinct things.They had liked each other, and their liking and intimacy had increased with the onward moving and change of years.After sixty sane and decently spent active years of life, Lord Dunholm, in either country tweed or evening dress, was a well-built and handsome man; at thirty-three his son was still like him.
"Have you seen her?" he was saying.
"Only at a distance.She was driving Lady Anstruthers across the marshes in a cart.She drove well and----" he laughed as he flicked the ash from his cigar--"the back of her head and shoulders looked handsome.""The American young woman is at present a factor which is without doubt to be counted with," Lord Dunholm put the matter without lightness."Any young woman is a factor, but the American young woman just now--just now----" He paused a moment as though considering."It did not seem at all necessary to count with them at first, when they began to appear among us.They were generally curiously exotic, funny little creatures with odd manners and voices.They were often most amusing, and one liked to hear them chatter and see the airy lightness with which they took superfluous, and sometimes unsuperfluous, conventions, as a hunter takes a five-barred gate.But it never occurred to us to marry them.We did not take them seriously enough.But we began to marry them--we began to marry them, my good fellow!"
The final words broke forth with such a suggestion of sudden anxiety that, in spite of himself, Westholt laughed involuntarily, and his father, turning to look at him, laughed also.But he recovered his seriousness.
"It was all rather a muddle at first," he went on."Things were not fairly done, and certain bad lots looked on it as a paying scheme on the one side, while it was a matter of silly, little ambitions on the other.But that it is an extraordinary country there is no sane denying--huge, fabulously resourceful in every way--area, variety of climate, wealth of minerals, products of all sorts, soil to grow anything, and sun and rain enough to give each thing what it needs; last, or rather first, a people who, considered as a nation, are in the riot of youth, and who began by being English--which we Englishmen have an innocent belief is the one method of `owning the earth.' That figure of speech is an Americanism I carefully committed to memory.Well, after all, look at the map--look at the map!
There we are."
They had frequently discussed together the question of the development of international relations.Lord Dunholm, a man of far-reaching and clear logic, had realised that the oddly unaccentuated growth of intercourse between the two countries might be a subject to be reflected on without lightness.
"The habit we have of regarding America and Americans as rather a joke," he had once said, "has a sort of parallel in the condescendingly amiable amusement of a parent at the precocity or whimsicalness of a child.But the child is shooting up amazingly--amazingly.In a way which suggests divers possibilities."The exchange of visits between Dunholm and Stornham had been rare and formal.From the call made upon the younger Lady Anstruthers on her marriage, the Dunholms had returned with a sense of puzzled pity for the little American bride, with her wonderful frock and her uneasy, childish eyes.For some years Lady Anstruthers had been too delicate to make or return calls.One heard painful accounts of her apparent wretched ill-health and of the condition of her husband's estate.
"As the relations between the two families have evidently been strained for years," Lord Dunholm said, "it is interesting to hear of the sudden advent of the sister.It seems to point to reconciliation.And you say the girl is an unusual person.
"From what one hears, she would be unusual if she were an English girl who had spent her life on an English estate.
That an American who is making her first visit to England should seem to see at once the practical needs of a neglected place is a thing to wonder at.What can she know about it, one thinks.But she apparently does know.They say she has made no mistakes--even with the village people.She is managing, in one way or another, to give work to every man who wants it.Result, of course--unbounded rustic enthusiasm."Lord Dunholm laughed between the soothing whiffs of his cigar.
"How clever of her! And what sensible good feeling!
Yes--yes! She evidently has learned things somewhere.Perhaps New York has found it wise to begin to give young women professional training in the management of English estates.Who knows? Not a bad idea."It was the rustic enthusiasm, Westholt explained, which had in a manner spread her fame.One heard enlightening and illustrative anecdotes of her.He related several well worth hearing.She had evidently a sense of humour and unexpected perceptions.