Sir Richard went to her and lifting her hand he kissed it gallantly. “I was about to look for you, my dear, to tell you I was home. Meanwhile, it seems, Kate has been bravely taking care of Mr. Blayne while you and I deserted the field. They’ve lighted all the candles because it’s grown so dark they couldn’t see each other. And Kate has made a proposal to him.”
Lady Mary screamed delicately. “What? You’re mad, Richard!”
Sir Richard put up his hand. “No, no — don’t jump to conclusions! She proposed merely that he accept our original idea and bring the paintings here. The castle would become the museum where it stands, as we understood from the first.”
“A splendid idea,” Lady Mary said. “It always was. I can’t think why you gave it up, Mr. Blayne.”
John Blayne looked from one to the other of these three. Fantasy, he thought, dream people living in another age! How to bring them into reality! He began to speak slowly and clearly.
“Lady Mary, Sir Richard … and …” He looked at Kate and away again. “I wish I could agree that the idea is a good one, Lady Mary … it isn’t, I’m afraid. The castle is too out-of-the-way here. It’s not even on the tourist route from London.” He hesitated a trifle awkwardly. Kate had turned away but Sir Richard and Lady Mary were looking at him with painful intensity. He must not hurt them! He went on, haltingly.
“Castles belong to a certain era, I suppose. They were necessary once, when a man had to build his own fortress. Today — well, fortresses don’t protect any longer. They’re rather like the Great Wall of China, where the people feared the enemy from the north. Now the enemy comes from the sky or the earth or the sea. We’re surrounded! So the castle becomes a museum piece in itself, wherever it stands, in the old world or the new. The new world needs it more, perhaps — lacking a history of its own. Anyway, in this curious compressed world today, history belongs to everyone, everywhere.”
Sir Richard rejected all this with a wave of the hand. “Socialism! My castle belongs to me, Mr. Blayne. Let us stay by the facts, if you please.”
John Blayne turned to face him. “Very well — you shall have the facts, Sir Richard. My lawyers have investigated. Even with the castle open to the public for a year, one day of every week, you have cleared two hundred dollars or thereabouts. Let’s see — that’s about eighty-seven pounds. How many people? A few hundreds — enough to support an inn, I suppose, but not a castle. I’ll be honest with all of you. It would be wrong, wouldn’t it, to bring great works of art here, at immense cost, where no one would come to see them? … It wouldn’t be fair — now would it? — to rob a new country like mine, whose people are hungry for art and beautiful things, by taking its treasures away and putting them where they couldn’t be enjoyed by everybody.”
He gazed at their faces and saw only uncommunicating gravity.
“Or am I wrong?” he inquired.
Lady Mary replied brightly to this. “What’s wrong, pray, with an exclusive museum? It would be nice to have only people with clean boots. Put the idea to your father.”
Sir Richard drew off his riding gloves. He was smiling now but vaguely, as though he were not listening, his eyes glazed and remote. He had withdrawn himself from them all. “Quite — quite,” he murmured. His eyes fell on Lady Mary. “I see you’re ready for dinner, my dear. You look very pretty. I expect Philip will soon be down. We’ll join you in a few minutes. … Mr. Blayne, it’s time to dress for dinner.”
He left the room with dignity and after a moment John Blayne followed. He felt helpless. What could he do except leave them to their fate? And so he might have done, he realized, had it not been for Kate, so young and beautiful a creature whose fate and future were involved somehow with this ancient castle and the three dreamlike old creatures who inhabited it and would not leave it. As it was, what would become of her?
“Sit down, Kate,” Lady Mary commanded when they were alone.
She sat down as she spoke in the great carved oak chair beside the chimney piece and folded her hands in her lap. She felt lost and alone. She, the mistress of Starborough Castle, was not being told what was really going on. Where had Richard gone riding for hours? Why had Kate been talking alone with the American? Who was plotting what, and she not told anything? The afternoon had been torturously long while she sat crocheting and in unbearable, tedious anxiety. Wells had been too agitated and irritable to question because of a guest for dinner and at last she had dressed half an hour too early, on the pretext that this gown, which she had not worn since she had been unable to afford her own maid, was difficult to get into alone.
“Now, Kate,” she began. “What have you been saying to this young man?”
Kate sank on the hassock at Lady Mary’s side. “I really said nothing, my lady, except that I do wish he’d just have the museum here as we wanted from the first.”
“Quite absurd to think of it, as I now see him,” Lady Mary said impatiently. “He’s not the sort of person who could be at all happy here.”
“Why not, please?”
“An American? Besides, Kate, I don’t think they would like it, you know — it would he so restricting to them to have an American about all the time, not to mention other Americans coming here, even in small numbers. They’d be quite put out. I shouldn’t like to answer for the consequences. After all, they’ve been here much longer than we have, and they can’t be ignored.”
Kate reached for Lady Mary’s hand, a slender nervous hand, delicately veined, restlessly moving. “Dear,” she said, “are you quite sure you do hear them? It isn’t just — dreaming? I sometimes think you live too solitary a life here, shutting yourself away even from the tourists.”
Lady Mary withdrew the hand. “Certainly I hear them! And it’s not only I, Kate. You remember what I told you about Richard’s mother. She came here as a bride and the very first night in the castle, although simply nobody had told her about them, when she came downstairs to dinner she asked Richard’s father who the lovely lady was at the top of the stairs. And old Sir Richard answered quite calmly, ‘Ah, you’ve seen her! She was lady-in-waiting to a queen, and she was murdered by a groom who fell in love with her.’ Certainly I don’t dream, Kate, and it hurts me very much to have you doubt me.”
“I don’t doubt you, my lady. It’s just that I myself can’t see them—or hear them.” She rose and stood beside Lady Mary.
“That means you do doubt them,” Lady Mary retorted, “for if you believe in them you see them, or at least hear them. I do assure you, when I’m alone they make themselves known to me — put it that way.”
“You don’t actually see them?”
“I do see them, as clearly as those candles burn there on the table. Yet if you blow the candles out, quite possibly you might think they were never lighted, mightn’t you? Or couldn’t be lighted? They look dead until someone lights the flame. Well, that’s how it is. When I’m alone, I concentrate for a moment, sometimes for half an hour, and I think about them and they feel me thinking and then they come out of the shadows. They’re there all the time, but they must be felt before they can be seen or heard.”