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And I will fight for it though a hundred Tathams call me adventurer!" So much for the root determination of the man; the result of weeks of excited brooding over wealth, and what can be done with wealth, amid increasing difficulties and problems from all sides.
She took up the silk of the dressing-gown and passed it through her fingers covetously; then her tired eyes ran over the room, the white bed standing ready, the dressing-table with its silver ornaments and flowers, the chintz-covered sofas and chairs. "Why shouldn't we be rich too?" she said angrily. "Your father is richer than the Tathams. It's a wicked, wicked shame!"
She was busy packing up brushes and paints, and her next remark showed him subtly that she did not mean to treat him as an acquaintance of the Tathams, whom she probably knew, but was determined to keep him to his rôle of stranger and tourist. "You had better look at Threlfall as you pass. It has a splendid situation." "I will. But why ought I to have heard of the gentleman? I forget his name."
How wise she had been to follow the sudden impulse which had bade her appeal to the Tathams! Were they not her kinsfolk by marriage? They knew what Edmund was! They were kind and powerful. They would protect her, and take up her cause. Edmund was now an old man. If he died, who else had a right to his money but she and Felicia? Oh! Lady Tatham would help them; she'd see them righted!
But the expression on his sunburnt face as he knelt on the grass, unscrewing her easel, seemed so little to call for snubbing that instead she gave him further information; interspersed with directions to him as to what to do and what not to do with her gear. "It belongs to a Mr. Melrose. Did you never hear of him?" "Never. Why should I?" "Not from the Tathams?" "No.
Penfold's chatter as to the daily homage paid by the castle to the cottage, through every channel courtesies or gifts that the Tathams' delicacy could invent, or the Penfolds' delicacy accept, had convinced him on that point.
But the Comic Spirit sitting aloft took note. They paused a moment on the edge of the plateau on which the house stood the ground breaking from it to the west. A group of cottages appeared amid the woods far away. "If all estates were like this estate!" cried Lydia, pointing to them, "and all cottages like their cottages!" Faversham flushed and stiffened. "Oh! the Tathams are always perfection!"
She said she'd come again." Netta asked questions. Lady Tatham, it seemed, was the great lady of the neighbourhood, and Duddon Castle was a splendid old place, that all the visitors went to see. And there were her cards. Netta's thoughts began to hurry thither and thither, and possibilities began to rise. A relation of Edmund's? She made Thyrza tell her all she knew about Duddon and the Tathams.
For as soon as the Tathams had stepped into the garden, she had become entirely monosyllabic; after a drive from Duddon at Harry Tatham's side, during which, greatly to her host's surprise, she had suddenly and unexpectedly found her tongue, talking, in a torrent of questions, all the way, insatiably. Mrs. Penfold, on her side, could do little but stare at "the heiress of Threlfall."
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