The Inheritors | Page 9

pathetically happy. It had come so easy to me. I had doubted my ability to do the sort of thing; but it had written itself, as money spends itself, and I was going to earn money like that. The whole of my past seemed a mistake--a childishness. I had kept out of this sort of thing because I had thought it below me; I had kept out of it and had starved my body and warped my mind. Perhaps I had even damaged my work by this isolation. To understand life one must live--and I had only brooded. But, by Jove, I would try to live now.
Callan had retired for his accustomed siesta and I was smoking pipe after pipe over a confoundedly bad French novel that I had found in the book-shelves. I must have been dozing. A voice from behind my back announced:
"Miss Etchingham Granger!" and added--"Mr. Callan will be down directly." I laid down my pipe, wondered whether I ought to have been smoking when Cal expected visitors, and rose to my feet.
"You!" I said, sharply. She answered, "You see." She was smiling. She had been so much in my thoughts that I was hardly surprised--the thing had even an air of pleasant inevitability about it.
"You must be a cousin of mine," I said, "the name--"
"Oh, call it sister," she answered.
I was feeling inclined for farce, if blessed chance would throw it in my way. You see, I was going to live at last, and life for me meant irresponsibility.
"Ah!" I said, ironically, "you are going to be a sister to me, as they say." She might have come the bogy over me last night in the moonlight, but now ... There was a spice of danger about it, too, just a touch lurking somewhere. Besides, she was good-looking and well set up, and I couldn't see what could touch me. Even if it did, even if I got into a mess, I had no relatives, not even a friend, to be worried about me. I stood quite alone, and I half relished the idea of getting into a mess--it would be part of life, too. I was going to have a little money, and she excited my curiosity. I was tingling to know what she was really at.
"And one might ask," I said, "what you are doing in this--in this...." I was at a loss for a word to describe the room--the smugness parading as professional Bohemianism.
"Oh, I am about my own business," she said, "I told you last night--have you forgotten?"
"Last night you were to inherit the earth," I reminded her, "and one doesn't start in a place like this. Now I should have gone--well--I should have gone to some politician's house--a cabinet minister's--say to Gurnard's. He's the coming man, isn't he?"
"Why, yes," she answered, "he's the coming man."
You will remember that, in those days, Gurnard was only the dark horse of the ministry. I knew little enough of these things, despised politics generally; they simply didn't interest me. Gurnard I disliked platonically; perhaps because his face was a little enigmatic--a little repulsive. The country, then, was in the position of having no Opposition and a Cabinet with two distinct strains in it--the Churchill and the Gurnard--and Gurnard was the dark horse.
"Oh, you should join your flats," I said, pleasantly. "If he's the coming man, where do you come in?... Unless he, too, is a Dimensionist."
"Oh, both--both," she answered. I admired the tranquillity with which she converted my points into her own. And I was very happy--it struck me as a pleasant sort of fooling....
"I suppose you will let me know some day who you are?" I said.
"I have told you several times," she answered.
"Oh, you won't frighten me to-day," I asserted, "not here, you know, and anyhow, why should you want to?"
"I have told you," she said again.
"You've told me you were my sister," I said; "but my sister died years and years ago. Still, if it suits you, if you want to be somebody's sister ..."
"It suits me," she answered--"I want to be placed, you see."
I knew that my name was good enough to place anyone. We had been the Grangers of Etchingham since--oh, since the flood. And if the girl wanted to be my sister and a Granger, why the devil shouldn't she, so long as she would let me continue on this footing? I hadn't talked to a woman--not to a well set-up one--for ages and ages. It was as if I had come back from one of the places to which younger sons exile themselves, and for all I knew it might be the correct thing for girls to elect brothers nowadays in one set or another.
"Oh, tell me some more," I said, "one likes to know about one's sister.