“And why not? You did manage well, Sir Richard dear! When the American saw how you felt about the castle, he knew he was honor bound to yield. He is honorable, don’t you think?”
Only when she saw that her gaiety did not serve to cheer them did she realize their state of mind. They were sitting quietly, Lady Mary with her hands folded in her lap, and Sir Richard with his knees crossed. Their faces were grave, their eyes far away, looking as though they were not even listening to her.
“Whatever is the matter, my own dears?” she inquired tenderly.
She knelt impulsively before Lady Mary and chafed her narrow old hands, thin little hands, Kate always thought, like small plucked birds.
“We are very badly off, Kate,” Sir Richard said. “Nothing is any better, really.”
“How would you like to see the castle made into a prison?” Lady Mary asked mournfully.
“Ah, but it can’t be that bad,” Kate said. “You’re just tired, the two of you, and I can’t blame you. I’m exhausted myself.”
“I shall have to keep my word to this American,” Sir Richard went on. “Even if I broke it — which I am not willing to do, mind you — I’d have to be talking to someone else in a week from now, and about something else.”
She rose to go to him, but he would not be comforted.
“No, no, Kate,” he groaned, pushing her away. “You don’t understand. No one does. I must be by myself for a bit.”
And he lifted himself out of the deep armchair and went from the room.
She returned then to Lady Mary, and drawing up a footstool, she sat down at her side. A dying fire burned under the chimney piece but in spite of it the room seemed chill.
“Is it really so desperate, my lady?” she asked.
“It is,” Lady Mary said and sighed. “And what worries me most, Kate, is what they will say.”
“I’ve thought of that, too.”
Sometimes when they were alone, Kate leaned her head against Lady Mary’s knee, as though she were a child again. She did so now and felt Lady Mary’s hand smoothing her hair. She took the gentle hand and laid her cheek against it. “We’ve always respected them,” Lady Mary went on. “We let them move about at night, even when it keeps us awake. And nothing can stop those bells! If we worry about them so much, one would think they could do a little worrying about us, now wouldn’t one?”
“If they know,” Kate said. “Yet how can they help us even if they do know? They may be far more helpless than we think, poor things! It’s all a matter of waves, I sometimes fancy!”
“Waves?” Lady Mary repeated vaguely.
“Like the wireless, you know, my lady. No wires, nothing one can see, but the voices come in. Only we don’t have something in ourselves that we can turn on. Perhaps they try all sorts of ways to break through to us and can’t.”
Lady Mary seemed not to be listening. “If only they could help us to find a treasure hidden somewhere,” she mused. “Of course Richard says it’s nonsense because all castles are supposed to have treasures hidden in them by ancestors, but if it’s always supposed to be so, perhaps sometimes it is so.”
“Maybe King John would tell us, if I got up early when the bell rings.”
She spoke half playfully and Lady Mary did not answer for a moment. When she did her voice was grave.
“Kate, are we mad, do you think?”
Kate kissed the hand she held. “Certainly not. Did you ever make anything up out of your head, my lady?”
“Never,” Lady Mary said fervently. “Never, never! One of them always told me.”
“Then they do get through sometimes and we must simply try our best to get help from them,” Kate said.
She rose to mend the fire and put on a log. When she spoke again her voice was carefully indifferent. “Too bad the American came here with such a stupid idea! He’s rather nice — and not at all stupid, really.”
She broke off with a laugh. “That frog — so amusing!”
Lady Mary stared at her open-mouthed. She was about to inquire why the laughter and what about the frog, pray tell, but the look on Kate’s face silenced her. What was happening? There was more than amusement in that look. There was tenderness.
… Sir Richard reined in his horse and gazed over his fields. A faint mist had all but obscured the sun since noon, but as the afternoon hours lengthened, the mist had burned away, and the sun shone full upon the enlivened landscape. It was a fair sight, the fields green with early corn and his good Guernsey cows grazing the rolling meadows. In the distance a cluster of roofs showed the village, and here and there a few trees sheltered a cottage for a farm family.
How eternal the landscape! Fields, meadows and forests were his by the divine right of ancient kings long dead, but who before they died had bequeathed this part of their realm to William Sedgeley, his ancestor. He was proud of the fact that he looked like William. Even as a boy his mother had said, “Richard looks so much like Sir William. I wish we’d named him William.” The portrait of William hung over the chimney piece in the ballroom, a tall slim man on horseback, his head held high. There was royal blood somewhere in the Sedgeleys — hidden, of course. A rumor, spoken only between the generations, hinted that William had been the lover of a queen and had taken their son secretly at birth to be reared among his own children, an eagle among pigeons. The story must be true, else why would the castle, a royal seat, have been given to the Sedgeleys?
And above all, how explain himself? He had known long ago that he was no common man even among his peers. Proud he had been called, even arrogant, “that haughty young chap,” they had said of him at Oxford, and the phrase had stung until he had told his father.
“And quite right,” his father had said complacently. “You’ve every right to hold up your head. You’re Sedgeley of Starborough Castle, and the rest of them are upstarts by comparison.”
And yet, with all his pride, he was not free. He had the tenants — they had him! They were like their kind everywhere in the world, asserting not their independence but their dependence. The power of the weak! They were children, who demanded without thought of giving. Kings were their slaves as all rulers were slaves of the ruled. The people were the tyrants, the discontented, dissatisfied, greedy, stupid people. If he had been an ordinary man, earning his living, even someone like Webster, would he be harried and oppressed as he was now, his conscience a burning coal in his breast because he felt responsible for his tenants as a king for his subjects? He groaned aloud. Intolerable burden laid upon him because he was born in a castle, the son of his father, heir to all the responsibilities of a kingdom! Well, it was a sort of kingdom — bigger than Monaco!
Musing thus as he did so often, Sir Richard now heard shouts. At the end of the winding road ahead he saw a ragged cluster of farmers waiting for him. There they were, wanting something again, he thought with deepening gloom, without the sense to know that the world as they knew it, and as their fathers before them had known it, was about to come to an end.
He quickened his horse to a trot and drew up before them, very straight and brusque. “Well, men? What do you want now?”
A rough fellow with a brush of tawny hair stepped forward and he recognized Banks, the troublemaker. “Please, Sir Richard, we’ve heard the castle’s to be sold.”
Sir Richard looked down at him from his seat on the great gray stallion. “Well?” he inquired coldly.
Banks looked back at him sturdily. “What’s to become of us, sir?”