They had tacitly begun to move down the path together, loitering to look at plants on either side which particularly invited notice.
“Lord Julius is a remarkable man,” she said. “If one is fortunate enough to enlist his friendship, there is no end to what he can do for him. You can hardly imagine what a difference it makes for you in everything--the fact that he is warmly disposed towards you.”
“Yes, that I have been told,” said Christian, “and I see it for myself, too. I do not feel that I know him very well, as yet. It was only yesterday morning that I met him for the first time at an hotel in Brighton. We breakfasted together, we looked through papers together and then we began a long railway journey together, which only ended a few hours ago. We have talked a great deal in this time, but, as I have said, the man himself is not very clear to me yet. But no one could have been kinder--and I think he likes me.”
“Oh, of course he does,” affirmed Lady Cressage, as if anything else would have been incredible. “And--talking with him so much, so continuously, you no doubt understand the entire situation. I am glad that he at least left it to me to show you over Caermere; there is apparently nothing else in which I can be of use.”
Christian, though he smiled in kindly recognition of her attitude, offered no verbal comment, and after a wandering digression about dahlias, she returned to the subject.
“If there _is_ anything I can tell you--about the family, the position of affairs in general, and so on--you should not stand on ceremony with me. Has he, for example, explained about money affairs?”
The young man looked keenly at her for an instant, as if the question took him by surprise. Then he answered frankly enough: “Nothing definite. I only gather that it will be made easier for me than it would have been for--for other members of the family, if they--had been in my place. But perhaps that is not what I should say to you.”
Lady Cressage smiled on him reassuringly.
“Oh, don’t think of me in that light,” she pleaded. “I stand quite outside the--what shall I say?--the interested family circle. I have no ax of any description to grind. You, of course, have been told my position in the castle--that is, so far as it can be told by others. It is a simple enough story--I was to have been everything, and then the wind happens to change off the Welsh coast and lo! I am nothing--nothing! It is not even certain that I am not a beggar--living here on alms. Legally, everything is in such confusion that no one knows how he stands. But so far as I am concerned, it doesn’t matter. My cup has been filled so full--so long:--that a little more or less trouble is of no importance. Oh, I assure you, I do not desire to be considered in the matter at all.”