At the piano the last chord sounded deeply. Michael leaped forward and wrenched William’s hand.
“How awfully good of you to come! This is my father — and my mother.”
William touched the Earl’s dry old hand and received a nod from Lady Hulme.
“Very good of you,” the Earl murmured. “It’s a long way from London, I’m afraid. We’re very quiet.”
“I like quiet,” William said.
He turned, still delaying, still dreading.
“This is my sister Emory,” Michael said simply.
William took a long cool hand into his own. “I’m afraid I interrupted the music.”
“We were only waiting for you,” she replied.
“Emory, pour tea,” Lady Hulme commanded. “I’ve dropped a stitch.”
She moved to obey, and for one instant William looked down into eyes dark and clear, set in a pale and beautiful face. He saw her mouth, the lips tender and delicate, quiver and smile half unwillingly, or so he imagined. She was tall and so thin that she might have been ill except for the look of clear health in her eyes and her pale skin.
“Do sit down,” she said in her sweet English voice, and seated herself by the tea table. “I’m filled with curiosity about you. I’ve never met an American.”
“I am not typical, I am afraid,” William replied, and tried not to stare at her hands as they moved above the cups. They were exquisite hands, and there was something about them so familiar that he frowned unconsciously to remember. Then memory came back to him. He had seen hands like these long ago, when as a little boy with his mother, he had looked at the hands of the Old Empress in Peking, the same thin smooth hands!
“Come along, Emory,” Lady Hulme said in her husky voice, still knitting briskly. She paused, however, to pull a bell rope with vigor as William sat down, and the manservant came in with a plate of hot scones on a silver tray.
“Hello, Simpkins,” Michael said. “How is it you’re passing the tea today?”
“Matthews has mumps,” Lady Hulme said. “It’s absurd, really, but he caught them from the new housemaid, I believe.”
“He did, my lady,” Simpkins said very gently.
Lady Hulme turned to William. “I hear you have pots of money. Here’s your tea.”
“Don’t heed my mother,” Michael said rather quickly. “She likes to think she’s daring. Why do you say such a thing, Mother?”
“Why not?” Lady Hulme retorted. Her face remained expressionless, whatever she said, the large eyes like pale lamps in her face that was reddened by sun and wind. “I can’t think of anything nicer than having pots of money. One needn’t be ashamed of it. I wish your father had it.”
William took his tea and helped himself to thin bread and butter and a hot scone. Some pleasant-looking cake waited upon a small, three-tiered table, but he knew, from school memory, that it would not be passed to him until he had eaten his bread and butter and scone. Sweets came last or not at all.
No one noticed his silence. Lord Hulme was eating with enjoyment, and drinking his tea from a large breakfast cup.
“I hope you weren’t seasick,” Lady Hulme said.
“Thanks, no,” William replied.
“It’s so beastly when one is,” Lady Hulme observed. “Of course American men are not so heartless as Englishmen. Malcolm always has believed that I am seasick purposely.”
“You are, my dear,” the Earl said.
“There, you see,” Lady Hulme said. “We went to Sicily for our honeymoon thirty-five years ago and I got ill in the little boat that took us across the Channel and had nowhere to lay my head. He wouldn’t let me put it upon his knee.”
“Oh, come now,” the Earl retorted. “As I remember, I hadn’t a chance to walk about — your head was always on my knee.”
They wrangled amiably, worrying the old subject between them, and Emory sat watching them with amused and lovely eyes, glancing now and again at William. She did not interrupt and at last Lady Hulme was weary.
“More tea all around,” she announced.
The Earl, revived by tea and argument, turned to William. “I see those papers of yours sometimes. What sort reads them, shopgirls and so on, I suppose!”
Michael sprang into the arena. “Everybody reads them, Father.”
“Really? Mostly pictures, though, aren’t they?”
William took the Englishman into his confidence. “Our people don’t read very much. One has to use pictures to convey one’s meaning.”
“Ah, then you have a purpose?” Lord Hastings said rather quickly.
“Doesn’t everyone have a purpose?” William replied. “The power potentiality of several million people is a responsibility. One cannot simply ignore it.”
“Ah,” the Earl said. He tipped his cup, emptied it, wiped his mustache with his lace napkin, rolled it up, and put it in the cup. Then he got up. “I suppose you’d like a walk? Michael and I always get one in before dinner.”
The early twilight was not far off and William would have preferred to stay in the great firelit room with the beautiful woman who sat in such silent repose, but some compulsive hand from the past reached out and he rose. After tea at school the headmaster ordered a walk for everyone. Not to want fresh air was a sign of laziness, weakness, coddling one’s self, all English sins.
“Those boots right for mud?” Michael was looking down at William’s well-polished country oxfords.
“Quite all right,” William said.
They tramped out into the shadowy fragrance, Michael respectfully in the rear. The Earl lit a short and ancient pipe, refusing William’s aid. “Thanks, no — I’ve got long matches — have ’em made to order. They’ve a chemical in the tip that keeps them from blowing out in a wind.”
After this a long silence fell as the three men walked through country lanes. William knew the English silence and he determined that he would not break it. Let these Englishmen know that he could endure the severest test! The Earl turned away from the drive and across a sloping lawn to a meadow. At a gate in a white fence he paused again to fill his pipe.
“I’ve never been to America. Michael is always wanting to go. But since he’s the only son, I’ve forbidden it — for the present.”
Michael laughed. “I have to marry and present him with an heir before he’ll let me go anywhere.”
“That is the way the Chinese feel, too,” William said. “But I hope you will visit us some day.”
“Where do you live?” the Earl inquired.
“I have a house in New York and another in the country.” William’s voice was as detached and tranquil as any Englishman’s.
“You do yourselves very well, you Americans!”
“Not better than you English!”
“Ah, but it’s taken us thousands of years.”
“We had a bigger bit of land to begin with.”
The Earl knocked the ash from his pipe and opened the gate. A hen pheasant started out of the grass and he watched her scuttling flight. “What fools we were to go after India instead of keeping America!” He was filling his pipe again. “Think of what the Empire would be if we’d really fought you rebels in 1776 instead of hankering after the fleshpots of that sun-blasted continent! It would have been to your advantage as well as ours. We’d have been invincible today against Germany or Russia if we’d been one country.”
“We, on the other hand, might have been merely a second Canada,” William said. “Perhaps we needed independence to develop.”
“Nonsense,” the Earl retorted. “It’s stock that counts. The people of India have no stamina — always burning with some sort of fever of the spirit. It’s the unhealthy climate.”