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.Imust 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.
