He wondered if waiting for an absent lover was more trying than being the senior partner in a bank during a severe financial crisis.
He went downstairs to dinner without coming to any satisfactory conclusion on this rather difficult question.
|Westwood Court had been in the possession of the family of bankers since the days of George II. It had been built by that Stephen Westwood whose portrait was painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. In the picture the man's right hand carries a scroll bearing a tracing of the plans of the house. Before it had been completed, however, Sir Thomas Chambers had something to say in regard to the design, the result being sundry additions which were meant to impart to the plain English mansion the appearance of the villa of a Roman patrician.
It was a spacious house situated in the midst of one of the loveliest parks in Brackenshire--a park containing some glorious timber, some brilliant spaces of greensward, and a trout stream that was never known to disappoint an angler, however exacting he might be. It was scarcely surprising that love for this home was the most prominent of the characteristics of the Westwood family. Every member of the family, with but one exception, seemed to have inherited this trait. The one exception was Claude Westwood, the younger brother of Richard.
During his father's lifetime he had been in a cavalry regiment, and while serving in India, had taken part in a rather perilous frontier campaign against a strange set of tribesmen in the northwest. He had become greatly interested in the opening up of the conquered territory, and as soon as his father died he had left the regiment and had done some remarkable exploration work on his own account, both in the northwest of India and in the borderland of Persia.
He returned to England to recover from the effects of a snake-bite, and to stay for a month or two with his brother, to whom he was deeply attached. But when in Brackenshire he had formed another attachment which threatened to interfere with the Future he had mapped out for himself as an explorer. He did not notice any change in his brother's demeanour the day he had gone to him confiding in him that he had fallen in love with Agnes Mowbray, the beautiful daughter of Admiral Mowbray, who had bought a small property known as The Knoll, a mile from the gates of the Court. Richard Westwood had found it necessary for the successful carrying on of the banking business, which he had inherited, to keep himself always well in hand. If his feelings were not invariably under control, his expression of those feelings certainly was so; and this was how it came that, after a pause of only a few seconds, he was able to offer his brother his hand and to say in a voice that was neither husky nor tremulous: