"The only time he got mad was when I wouldn't believe him when he told me who he was.I was a bit hot in the collar myself.I'd felt sorry for him, because I thought he was a chap like myself, and he was up against it.I know what that is, and I'd wanted to jolly him along a bit.When he said his name was Mount Dunstan, and the place belonged to him, I guessed he thought he was making a joke.So Igot on my wheel and started off, and then he got mad for keeps.He said he wasn't such a damned fool as he looked, and what he'd said was true, and I could go and be hanged."Reuben S.Vanderpoel laughed.He liked that.It sounded like decent British hot temper, which he had often found accompanied honest British decencies.
He liked other things, as the story proceeded.The picture of the huge house with the shut windows, made him slightly restless.The concealed imagination, combined with the financier's resentment of dormant interests, disturbed him.
That which had attracted Selden in the Reverend Lewis Penzance strongly attracted himself.Also, a man was a good deal to be judged by his friends.The man who lived alone in the midst of stately desolateness and held as his chief intimate a high-bred and gentle-minded scholar of ripe years, gave, in doing this, certain evidence which did not tell against him.
The whole situation meant something a splendid, vivid-minded young creature might be moved by--might be allured by, even despite herself.
There was something fantastic in the odd linking of incidents--Selden's chance view of Betty as she rode by, his next day's sudden resolve to turn back and go to Stornham, his accident, all that followed seemed, if one were fanciful --part of a scheme prearranged"When I came to myself," G.Selden said, "I felt like that fellow in the Shakespeare play that they dress up and put to bed in the palace when he's drunk.I thought I'd gone off my head.And then Miss Vanderpoel came." He paused a moment and looked down on the carpet, thinking."Gee whiz! It WAS queer," he said.
Betty Vanderpoel's father could almost hear her voice as the rest was told.He knew how her laugh had sounded, and what her presence must have been to the young fellow.His delightful, human, always satisfying Betty!
Through this odd trick of fortune, Mount Dunstan had begun to see her.Since, through the unfair endowment of Nature--that it was not wholly fair he had often told himself--she was all the things that desire could yearn for, there were many chances that when a man saw her he must long to see her again, and there were the same chances that such an one as Mount Dunstan might long also, and, if Fate was against him, long with a bitter strength.Selden was not aware that he had spoken more fully of Mount Dunstan and his place than of other things.That this had been the case, had been because Mr.Vanderpoel had intended it should be so.He had subtly drawn out and encouraged a detailed account of the time spent at Mount Dunstan vicarage.It was easily encouraged.Selden's affectionate admiration for the vicar led him on to enthusiasm.The quiet house and garden, the old books, the afternoon tea under the copper beech, and the long talks of old things, which had been so new to the young New Yorker, had plainly made a mark upon his life, not likely to be erased even by the rush of after years.
"The way he knew history was what got me," he said.
"And the way you got interested in it, when he talked.It wasn't just HISTORY, like you learn at school, and forget, and never see the use of, anyhow.It was things about men, just like yourself--hustling for a living in their way, just as we're hustling in Broadway.Most of it was fighting, and there are mounds scattered about that are the remains of their forts and camps.Roman camps, some of them.He took me to see them.He had a little old pony chaise we trundled about in, and he'd draw up and we'd sit and talk.`There were men here on this very spot,' he'd say, `looking out for attack, eating, drinking, cooking their food, polishing their weapons, laughing, and shouting--MEN--Selden, fifty-five years before Christ was born--and sometimes the New Testament times seem to us so far away that they are half a dream.' That was the kind of thing he'd say, and I'd sometimes feel as if Iheard the Romans shouting.The country about there was full of queer places, and both he and Lord Dunstan knew more about them than I know about Twenty-third Street.""You saw Lord Mount Dunstan often?" Mr.Vanderpoel suggested.
"Every day, sir.And the more I saw him, the more I got to like him.He's all right.But it's hard luck to be fixed as he is--that's stone-cold truth.What's a man to do? The money he ought to have to keep up his place was spent before he was born.His father and his eldest brother were a bum lot, and his grandfather and great-grandfather were fools.
He can't sell the place, and he wouldn't if he could.Mr.
Penzance was so fond of him that sometimes he'd say things.
But," hastily, "perhaps I'm talking too much.""You happen to be talking about questions I have been greatly interested in.I have thought a good deal at times of the position of the holders of large estates they cannot afford to keep up.This special instance is a case in point."G.Selden felt himself in luck again.Reuben S., quite evidently, found his subject worthy of undivided attention.