And he, emotional, energetic, ambitious, was sprung from an interminable line of sterling, honest mediocrities. Great glories, great sorrows had avoided Darnley-on-Downe; the crashing crises in the House of Mortimer had no parallel in the long unchronicled history of the Dadds. No more than his wife could he escape from his traditions. And those traditions, well-bred, decent, honest though they were, yet were not the traditions of a ruling race. Inconspicuousness was their keynote. And Kingston found himself an alien in the citadel of the dead Mortimers. Their ghosts, insolent, gorgeous, tyrannous, looked down with contempt on the colourless shadows of all the sober Dadds. Those ghosts had ruled, in their great day, over counties of Dadds, over legions of good honest gentlemen of coat-armour who had been glad and proud to take service under the banner of the Mortimers. The House of March, perpetually struggling for sovereignty, had drawn to its service squires and knights innumerable from all the counties that it ruled. And the sense of feudal over-lordship was strong in the inherited blood of the Mortimers, even to the uttermost generation. Those others, those lesser people, noble and gentle, were but small and insignificant in the eyes of men and women who had violently swayed the destinies of England. They were loyal subjects, those others, perhaps, but equals and allies never. And now a man of the obscure order was lawful possessor of the last Mortimer. Queens and the sons of Kings had been, in old days, the mates of Brakelond; and the Castle seemed as if it could never accustom itself to the formal ownership, even to the presence, of one who might in former years have been squire or feudatory, indeed, to some Lord or Lady of March, but who could never, in the wildest upheaval of King Henry’s time, have hoped to become the master of a Mortimer.
Gundred had given her whole heart to her husband. But now, in the shadow of all her ancient selves, something began to thrill in her veins that was more than the mere pride of part-proprietorship in a splendid and historic house. An old house, soaked in all the personalities of a thousand bygone years, must needs retain the flavour and fragrance of them; and on one who in his own person resumes the lives of twenty generations, the compelling influence of his home, the scene and material of all those lives that throb again in his, must necessarily be so dominant that insensibly he takes the colour of the past by which he is surrounded. If this was so in the case of Kingston, hampered and controlled by all the decent ancestors that had lived and died unnoticeably in Darnley-on-Downe, it was likely that the effect would be far more obvious in the case of one whose own character was so neutral as Gundred’s, and whose ancestors were so terrific and blazing as the Mortimers. From every flagstone, from every wall, pressed out upon Gundred the influence of some masterful forefather; and in her quiet nature here and there a secret nerve or fibre, latent hitherto, and unsuspected, recognised the call of the soul in which it once had formed a part, and thrilled to life again. At Brakelond Gundred insensibly took the lead. It was she that decided to settle in the little ancient wooden wing that jutted away from the main mass of the Castle out upon the spur of cliff by the Chapel of King Mark. Her gentle manner grew more and more imbued with sovereignty, and her husband found himself now amused and now rebuffed by Gundred’s obvious sense of being at home. Away in London she might be anyone in general, or no one in particular, concealed her family pride in the Mortimers, was able to give her zeal for morality full sway in the condemnation of Queen Isabel. But at Brakelond her own individuality was swamped. Half reluctantly at first, but soon openly and even proudly, she began to contemplate the career of the wicked Queen, and exalted her with faint damnation that soon passed into positive sympathy. She spent her days unfolding to her husband all the nooks and secrets of the Castle. And, whereas normally she was a person of the most sensitive and neat-minded righteousness, hating fierce crimes, frigidly abominating love-intrigues, here in Brakelond her sense of right and wrong was in abeyance, and at times she canvassed old bloodstained stories with an unmoral calm, and a manner that admitted a not uncomplacent participation in their horrors.