“But you truly know nothing about the Towers—or Torrs—your father’s family?” she continued, when they were once again seated. “It sounds incredible! I can hardly realize how you could have lived all these years and not—but how old are you?”
“Twenty-six.”
“—And not got some inkling of who—of who your father was?”
“My mother never told me. Perhaps she did not know altogether, herself. I cannot say as to that. And if Salvator knew—that I cannot tell, either. He is a curious man, my brother Salvator. He talks so you would think you saw him inside out—but he keeps many things to himself none the less.”
“Yes—that brother of yours,” she said abstractedly. “I have been thinking about him. But it can’t be that he has any importance in the game, else the Jews would have sent for him instead of you. They waste no time,—they make no errors.”
“The Jews!” he murmured at her, with no comprehension in his eyes.
She smiled. “I have been arranging it in my mind. The thing was like a black fog to me when you first spoke. I had to search about for a light before I could make a start. But when I stumbled across the thought, ‘It is the Jews’ work,’ then it was not very hard to make out the rest. I could almost tell you who it is that is to meet you at Brighton. It is Mr. Soman. Is it not?”
He assented with an impulsive movement of head and hands. The gaze that he fixed upon her sparkled with excitement.
“He is Lord Julius’ man of business,” she explained to his further mystification. “No doubt he has had one of those green eyes of his on you ever since you were a fortnight old. It frightens one to think of it—the merciless and unerring precision of their system. Is there anything they don’t know?”
“I am afraid of Jews myself,” he faltered, striving to connect himself with what he dimly perceived of her mood. “But what have they against me? What can they do to me? I owe nothing; they can’t make me responsible for what other people, strangers to me, have done, can they? And why should they give me a thousand francs? It is I,” he finished hopelessly, “I who am in the black fog. Tell me, I beg you, what is it that they want with me?”
She put a reassuring hand upon his arm, and the steady, genial light in her calm eyes brought him instantaneous solace. “You have not the slightest cause for fear,” she told him, gently. “Quite the contrary. They are not going to hurt you. So far from it, they have taken you up; they will wrap you in cotton-wool and nurse you as if you were the Koh-i-noor diamond. You may rest easy, my dear sir; you may close your eyes, and fold your hands, and lean back against Israel as heavily as you like. It is all right so far as you are concerned. But the others”—she paused, and looked seaward with lifted brows and a mouth twisted to express sardonic comment upon some amazing new outlook—“eye-ee! the others!”
“Still you do not tell me!” For the first time she caught in his voice the hint of a virile, and even an imperious note. Behind the half-petulant entreaty of the tired boy, there was a man’s spirit of dictation. She deferred to it unconsciously.
“The Lord Julius that I spoke of is—let me see—he is your great-uncle—your grandfather’s younger brother.”
“But if he is a Jew—” began Christian, in an awed whisper.
“No—no; he is nothing of the sort. That is to say, he is not Jewish in blood. But he married a great heiress of the race—whole millions sterling came to him from the huge fortune of the Aronsons in Holland—and he likes Jewish people—of the right sort. He is an old man now, and his son, Emanuel, has immense influence over him. You should see them sitting together like two love-birds on a perch. They idolize each other, and they both worship Emanuel’s wife. If they weren’t the two best men in the world, and if she weren’t the most remarkable woman anywhere, they would utterly spoil her.”
“He—this lord—is my great-uncle,”
Christian recalled her to his subject. “He and his son are good men.”
“They are the ones I referred to as the Jews. That is how they are spoken of in the family—to distinguish them from the senior branch—the sons and grandsons of your grandfather. Fix that distinction in you mind. There is the elder group, who have titles and miles of mortgaged estates, no money to speak of and still less brains—”
“That is the group that I belong to?” He offered the interruption with a little twinkle in his eyes. It was patent that his self-possession had returned. Even this limited and tentative measure of identification with the most desirable and deep-rooted realities in that wonderful island that he could see coming nearer to meet him, had sufficed to quell the restless flutter of his nerves.
She nodded with a responsive gleam of sportiveness on her face. “Yes, your place in it is a very curious one. But first get this clear in your mind—that the younger group, whom they speak of as the Jews, have money beyond counting, and have morals and intelligence moreover. Between these two groups no love is lost. In fact, they hate each other. The difference is the Christians go about cursing the Jews, whereas the Jews wisely shrug their shoulders and say nothing. No one suspected that they would do anything, either—but—oh, this is going to be an awful business!”
He held himself down to a fine semblance of dignified calm. “Tell me more,” he bade her, with an effect of temperate curiosity.
“Now comes tragedy,” she went on, and the hint of sprightliness disappeared from her face and tone. “It is really one of the most terrible stories that could be told. There is a very aged man—he must be nearly ninety—lying at death’s door in his great seat in Shropshire. He is at death’s door, I said, but he has the strength and will of a giant, and though he is half paralyzed, half blind, half everything, still he has his weight against the door, and no one knows how long he can hold it closed. It is your grandfather that I am speaking of. His name also is Christian.”
The young man nodded gravely. “My father would have fought death that way too, if they had not shot him to pieces, and heaped fever on top of that,” he commented.
The girl bit her lip and flushed awkwardly for an instant “Let me go on,” she said then, and hurried forward. “This old man had three sons—not counting the priest, Lord David, who doesn’t come into the thing. The first of these sons, also Christian, had three sons, and he and they were all alive six months ago. They are all dead now, two drowned in their yacht, one lost in the ‘Castle Drummond,’ one killed in Matabeleland. Lord David, the priest, the next brother, died last year—childless of course. There remained in England two sons of another brother who died some years ago, Lord Edward, and this horrible mowing down of human lives left them apparently nearest to the very aged man, your grandfather. Do you follow all that?”
“I think I do,” said Christian. “If I don’t I will pick it up afterward. In mercy’s name, do not stop!”
“The Jews, saying nothing, had lost sight of nothing. There was still another brother who had lived abroad for many years, who died abroad twenty years ago. You are getting to the climax now. The Jews must have kept an eye on this wandering cousin of theirs; it is evident they knew he left a son capable of inheriting, and that they did not let this son escape from view. Because Lord Ambrose Torr was older than Lord Edward, his brother, it happens now that the son of that Ambrose—”
The young man abruptly rose, and moved along to the rail. He had signified by a rapid backward gesture of the hand his momentary craving for solitude; he stretched this hand now slowly, as if unconsciously, toward the sunset glow on sky and sea, in the heart of which lay imbedded a thick line of cream-colored cliffs, escalloped under a close covering of soft olive-hued verdure. The profile of his uplifted face, as he gazed thus before him into the light, seemed to the eyes of the girl transfigured.
He stood thus, rapt and motionless, for minutes, until her mind had time to formulate