Chapter 22 - Page 2

said his Lordship, as they
rose from table. "I am not a good host, nor a very genial man, I
believe. I can do little to entertain you; but here is the house and
the grounds at your disposal,--horses in the stable,--guns in the
hall,--here is Father Angelo, good at chess. There is the library. Pray
make the most of them all; and if I can contribute in any way to your
pleasure, let me know."

All this certainly seemed cordial, and the manner in which it was said
seemed in accordance with the spirit of the words; and yet, whether the
fault was in anything of morbid suspicion in Redclyffe's nature, or
whatever it was, it did not have the effect of making him feel welcome,
which almost every Englishman has the natural faculty of producing on a
guest, when once he has admitted him beneath his roof. It might be in
great measure his face, so thin and refined, and intellectual without
feeling; his voice which had melody, but not heartiness; his manners,
which were not simple by nature, but by art;--whatever it was,
Redclyffe found that Lord Braithwaite did not call for his own
naturalness and simplicity, but his art, and felt that he was
inevitably acting a part in his intercourse with him, that he was on
his guard, playing a game; and yet he did not wish to do this. But
there was a mobility, a subtleness in his nature, an unconscious tact,
--which the mode of life and of mixing with men in America fosters and
perfects,--that made this sort of finesse inevitable to him, with any
but a natural character; with whom, on the other hand, Redclyffe could
be as fresh and natural as any Englishman of them all.

Redclyffe spent the time between lunch and dinner in wandering about
the grounds, from which he had hitherto felt himself debarred by
motives of delicacy. It was a most interesting ramble to him, coming to
trees which his ancestor, who went to America, might have climbed in
his boyhood, might have sat beneath, with his lady-love, in his youth;
deer there were, the descendants of those which he had seen; old stone
stiles, which his foot had trodden. The sombre, clouded light of the
day fell down upon this scene, which in its verdure, its luxuriance of
vegetable life, was purely English, cultivated to the last extent
without losing the nature out of a single thing. In the course of his
walk he came to the spot where he had been so mysteriously wounded on
his first arrival in this region; and, examining the spot, he was
startled to see that there was a path leading to the other side of a
hedge, and this path, which led to the house, had brought him here.

Musing upon this mysterious circumstance, and how it should have
happened in so orderly a country as England, so tamed and subjected to