lady kenilworth was the prettiest woman in england; her family, the courcys of faldon, was renowned for physical charms, and she was the loveliest of them all, exactly reproducing a famous romney which portrayed the features of her great great grandmother.
she had eyes like forget-me-nots, a brilliantly fair skin, a purely classic profile, a mass of sunny shining hair, which needed no arts to brighten or to ripple it, and a carriage, which for airy grace and supreme distinction, had its equal nowhere among her contemporaries. her baptismal name of clare had been almost entirely abandoned by her relatives and friends, and she was always called by them mouse, a nickname given her in nursery days when she pillaged her elder sisters’ bonbons and made raids on the early strawberry beds, and which had gained in the course of time many variations, such as sourisette, petit rat, topinetta, fine-ears, liebe mus, and any other derivative which came to the lips of her associates.
she had a mouse painted on the panels of her village cart, stamped in silver on her note paper, mounted in gold on her riding whip, cut in chrysoprase as a charm, and made of diamonds as a locket; and many and various were the forms in which the little rodent was offered to her by her adorers on new year’s day and at easter. she had, indeed, so identified herself with the nickname, that when she signed her name in a royal album, or to a ceremonious letter, she had great difficulty in remembering to write herself down clare kenilworth.
when she had been brought out at eighteen years old, she had been the idol of the season; people had stood on chairs and benches in the park to see her drive to her first drawing-room. it was not only her physical charms which were great, but her manner, her scornful grace, her airy hauteur, and the mixture in her expression of daredevil audacity and childlike innocence, were fascinations[46] all her own. the way she wore her clothes, the way she moved, the things she said, the challenge of her sapphire eyes, were all enchanting and indescribable. she “fetched the town” as soon as she was out in an amazing manner; and it was thought that she had thrown away her chances in an astonishing degree when it was known that she had accepted the hand of a little mauvais sujet, known as cocky to all london and half europe, who passed his time in the lowest company he could find, and was without stamina, principles, or credit. but she knew what she was about, and without giving any explanation to her people, she dismissed the best men, and decided to select the worst she could find; the worst, at least, physically and morally.
true, he always looked a gentleman, even when he was soaked in brandy and gin as the wick of a tea-kettle is soaked in spirits of wine. cocky’s hands, cocky’s profile, cocky’s slow soft voice, had always proclaimed his race, even whilst he chaffed a cabman whom he could not pay.
true, he was by courtesy earl of kenilworth, and would certainly be, if he outlived his father, duke of otterbourne; but then he was besides that and beyond that to all his world—cocky, and a more disreputable little sinner than cocky it would have been hard to find in the peerage or out of it.
but cocky “suited her book”; and to the horror of her own family and the amazement of his, this radiant débutante selected as her partner for life this little drunkard, who had one lung already gone and who formed the whipping-boy and stalking-horse of every radical newspaper in great britain.
at a garden party on the river lord kenilworth showed himself for once in decent society, and unfuddled by pick-me-ups and eye-openers. he walked alone with the beauty of the year under an elm avenue by the waterside, and this was their conversation:
“you won’t expect much of me?” he said, with his glass in his eye, looking vaguely down the river. “my wretched health, you know; er—there’s one good thing about it for you—i may kick over the bucket any day; one lung gone, you know.”
[47]“yes,” replied his companion; “i’ve always heard so. but you’ll let me hang on my own hook, drive my own team, won’t you?”
cocky nodded. he perfectly understood the allegorical phrases.
“oh, lord, yes,” he made answer. “i’m a very easy-going fellow. take my own way and let other people take theirs.”
“i warn you i shall take mine,” said the young beauty—she looked him full in the eyes. cocky’s own pale, drowsy eyes looked back into hers with so cynical a smile in them that for once she was disconcerted.
“lord, what’ll that matter to me?” he responded candidly. “i only marry to make the pater come down with the flimsy. we shall have to agree over financial questions, you and i, that’s all. most married people only meet over the accounts, you know.”
the young lady laughed.
“very well, then. if you see it in that sensible light, we’ll say it’s concluded.”
cocky had a gleam of conscience in his brandy-soaked soul. “you might do better, you know,” he said slowly. “you’re awfully fetching and you’re very young, and i’m—well, i’m a bad lot—and—and wretched health, you know.”
“i know; but you suit me,” said his companion with brevity. “i shall have the jewels, sha’n’t i?”
“yes; i’ve spoken to the pater; he’ll let you have ’em.”
“tôpe là donc!” she said frankly, and she held out her pretty gloved right hand. cocky respectfully kissed the tips of her fingers. then he grinned.
“let’s go and ask the pater’s blessing! he’s over there with the princess.”
“the devil take her if she hasn’t got some card up her sleeve that she don’t show me,” he thought as he continued to walk on beside her. “but she’s awfully fetching, and she’ll be great fun, and the pater will think i’m reforming, and he’ll come down with the blunt, and what a wax beric’ll be in!”
beric was his next brother, alberic orme.
[48]meantime the lovely and youthful creature, who brushed the grass with her bronze kid boots beside him, pursued similar reflections.
“he don’t look as if he’d live a year; and he’s too far gone to bother me much, and such a crétin as that harry won’t mind, and the vulture’s egg is worth a little worry.”
her relatives, and especially her eldest brother, were horrified by her decision; but their persuasions and their entreaties were as ineffectual as their condemnation.
“he will let me do as i like, and i shall have the vulture’s egg,” she invariably answered. the vulture’s egg was a great diamond, so called, which, while it had been in the possession of each succeeding duchess of otterbourne, had rendered her the envied of all her sex. one of the family, present at the battle of plassy, as a volunteer, had taken it from the turban of a native prince whom he had slain. it was a yellow diamond of great size and effulgence; and if she married cocky she could, she hoped, wear it at once, as his mother had been dead many years.
“you marry that little wretch for the sake of that looted jewel!” said her brother hurstmanceaux, furious.
“many people don’t marry anything half as nice as a jewel,” she replied calmly, and she persisted and did give her hand to the sickly little man with a classic profile and a ruined constitution, of whom his own father was ashamed.
cocky was a slight, pale, feminine-looking person, with very light eyes, which were usually without any expression at all in them, but now and then at rare intervals could flash with a steely sharpness. his wife knew those electric flashes of those colorless orbs, and was as afraid of them as it was possible to the intrepid nature of a courcy of faldon to be ever afraid.
cocky, however, possessed some excellent qualities. other men were garrulous and confidential after drinking; but the more cocky drank the more wary and the more silent he became. the tacit compact they made on that day of their betrothal, when they had walked beside the thames together, was never broken on her side or his. they never interfered with each other, and they were at[49] times almost cordial allies when it was a question of playing into each other’s hands against some detested third person, or of deriving some mutual advantage from some mutual concessions.
he usually let her have her own way as she had stipulated, for it was the easiest and most profitable way for himself.
he was very lazy and wholly unscrupulous. many thousands of pounds of good money had been spent on his education; tutors of the best intellect and the best morals had trained him from seven to twenty-one: his father, though a vain man, was of immaculate honor; every kind of inducement and pressure was put on him to be a worthy representative of a noble name; and nature had given him plenty of brains. yet, so pigheaded is human nature, or so faulty is the english system of patrician education, that cocky, for all practical result to his bringing up, might have been reared in a taproom and have matriculated in a thieves’ quarter.
“queer, monstrous queer,” thought his father often, with an agony of irritation and regret. “train a child in the way he should go and hang me if he won’t go just t’other way to spite you.”
cocky was a very old child at the time of his marriage; he was thirty-seven years of age, with his thin, fair hair turning very grey, and one lung nearly gone as he had declared; but he did not evince the slightest desire to reform, and he took money in all ways, good, bad, and indifferent, in which it offered itself to him.
“what a man to leave behind one!” thought otterbourne very often, with real shame and sorrow at his heart.
he was himself a very good man, and a gentleman to the marrow of his bones; his vanities were harmless, and his little airs of youth were not ridiculous because he was still very handsome and well preserved.
by what horrible fatality, he often asked himself, was cocky the heir of his dukedom? he had three other sons, all men of admirable conduct and health, both moral and physical. by what extraordinary irony and brutality of fate had his eldest son, who had enjoyed every possible benefit from early training and good influences, become[50] what he was? his wife had been a saint, and, for the first ten years of his life cocky had been as pretty and promising a boy as ever rejoiced the heart of parents.
she had given birth to the four charming little children whose names were recorded in burke, and who were admired by all the women they met when they toddled along the sunny side of the park, or drove in their basket carriage behind their two sleek donkeys with jack holding the reins and a groom walking at the asses’ heads.
they were pretty babies, dear little men and women, with big black eyes and golden masses of hair, and skins as soft and as fair as blush-roses; she was fond of them but they could not have much space in her life, it had been already so very full when they had come into it. she had never a moment to herself unless it were the time of meditation which her bath gave her, or the minutes in which, alone in her little brougham, she rushed from one house to another.
cocky went about with his wife quite often enough to set a good example. not into society indeed, cocky had a society of his own to which he was faithful, but he was always there when wanted—in the london house, in the country houses, in the paris hotel, at the german bath—he was always there in the background, a shadowy presence letting himself in and out with noiseless and discreet footsteps, a permanent sanction and indisputable guarantee that all was as it should be, and that lady kenilworth, with the big diamond of his house on her fair bosom, could attend a drawing-room or a state ball whenever she chose. he really kept his part of the compact with a loyalty which better men might have not shown, for better men would not have had his inducements or his patience to do so.
their financial embarrassments were chronic, but never interfered with their expenditure. money was always got somehow for anything that they really wished to do. they were at all places in their due season, and their own houses never saw them except when there was a house-party to be entertained, or a royal visit to be received. true cocky on such occasions was usually indisposed and unseen, but that fact did not greatly matter to anyone.[51] it was an understood thing in society that he had motor ataxy, a very capricious disease as everyone knows; putting you in purgatory one day and letting you sup with ballet-girls the next. and cocky had this useful faculty of the well-born and naturally well-bred man that he could, when he chose, pull himself out of the slough, remember his manners, and behave as became his race. but it bored him excruciatingly, and the effort was brief.
the marriage, on a whole, if they had not been continually in difficulties about money, might fairly have been called as happy as most marriages are. when they quarreled it was in private, and when they combined they were dangerous to their families.
she knew that she was never likely ever again to find anyone quite so reasonable, quite so useful as he.
he had, immediately on their marriage, been on very good terms with her friend harry; and when there was later on question of other friends beside harry he did not feel half so much irritation at the fact as did harry himself.
he had learned what card it had been which she had kept up her sleeve when she had spoken with such apparent frankness as she had walked along the grass path by the thames. but he had never made a fuss about it. he really thought harry a very good fellow though “deuced poor, deuced poor,” he said sometimes shaking his head.
harry, too, was useful and unobtrusive, always ready to get theatre stalls, or make up a supper party, or row the stablemen if the horses got out of form, or go on beforehand to see the right rooms were taken at homburg or biarritz, or nice. a good-natured fellow, too, was harry; sort of fellow who would pawn his last shirt for you if he liked you. cocky always nodded to him, and used his cigar-case, and sauntered with him for appearance sake down pall mall or piccadilly in the most amicable manner possible.
cocky was a nursery nickname which had gone with him to eton, and from eton into the world, and kenny was an abbreviation of his courtesy title which was unfortunately in use even amongst the cabmen, policemen, crossing-sweepers, and match-sellers of that district of[52] mayfair where he dwelt whilst awaiting the inheritance of otterbourne house.
“jump in, boy,” said the driver of a hansom to a telegraph lad, who had hailed him at the same time as lord kenilworth. “jump in, a growler’s good enough for kenny. he wants to get slow over the ground to give my lady time with her fancy-man.”
there was something about him which made all manly men, of whatever class, from cabdrivers to his own brothers and brother-in-law, perpetually desire to kick him. he knew that men wished to kick him; and he did not try to kick them in return. he wore his degradation smilingly, as if it were an order.
“that is the utterly hopeless thing about him,” said his father once.
the ormes had always been great people—true, staunch, polished gentlemen, holding a great stake in the country, and holding it worthily, riding straight, and living honorably. by what caprice of chance, what irony of fate, had this stalwart and high-principled race produced such a depraved and degenerate being as cocky?
“there must be something very wrong in our social system that so many of our men of position are no sounder than rotten apples,” the duke said once to a person, who replied that there were black sheep in all countries. “yes, but our black sheep are labeled prize rams,” replied otterbourne.
the four little children in the nurseries did not give him much consolation. the gossip of society hung over them like a cloud in his sight, and there were none of those dark sleepy eyes in his family portraits at staghurst.
“there are no black-eyed ormes in our family portraits,” he said once to his eldest son; and cocky’s face wore for an instant a droll expression, and his left eye winked. but it was only for an instant.
“there’s a legend,” he said, rolling a cigarette; “richard orme married a gipsy in william rufus’s time. lord, who shall say to where the brats throw back?”
“who indeed?” said the duke with a significance which penetrated even the cognac-sodden brains of his heir.
[53]but the legend did really exist, and when the children’s mother heard of the gipsy of william rufus’s time she thought the legend a very interesting one and very useful.
but who could blame cocky’s wife for anything? besides, the duke was of that old english temper, now grown so rare, which thought dishonor carried into a law court was only made much worse by the process, and was painfully conscious that kenilworth, although he looked like a gentleman, spoke like one, moved like one, and wore his clothes like one, was in many sorrowful respects a cad. but a clever cad! yes, cocky was clever by nature, if not by study; that was perhaps the very worst part of the whole matter. he could play the fool—did play it almost perpetually—but he had not been born a fool.
there was not even that excuse for him.
he was a man of considerable intelligence, whom indolence, depravity, and disinclination to take trouble had made approach very nearly to an idiot. but, as his mind had odd nooks and corners in it, which contained out-of-the-way scraps of learning sometimes profound, so his character had, occasionally, spasms in it of resolve and of volition, which showed that he might have been a different person to the mere nonentity and lounger that he was, if he had been forced to work for his living. as it was he was the butt of his friends, the torture of his father, the ridicule of his wife, and the favorite whipping-boy of the press and public, when they wanted indirectly to slate a prince or directly to pillory an order. as a gun loaded to the muzzle, which could at any moment be discharged with deadly effect at the upper house, he was unspeakably dear to the radicals.
one day, in a hyde park meeting met to howl against the lords, cocky, who was riding his cob down the road past the achilles, heard his own name spoken, and his fitness for an hereditary legislator irreverently denied. he stopped to listen, putting his glass in his eye to see his adversaries.
“my good people, you are all wrong,” he called to them at a pause in the oration. “i’m a commoner. plain[54] john orme, without a shilling to bless myself with. don’t suppose i shall ever live to get into the lords. the pater’s lungs are much sounder than mine, and his politics too; for he’d trounce you all round, and give each of you a horse-drench.”
so oddly constituted are mobs, that this one laughed and cheered him for the speech, and cocky, much diverted, got off his cob in hamilton place, at the batchelor’s club, and went to refresh his throat with a glass of brandy.
it was his sole appearance in public life.
“told ’em you’d give each of ’em a horse-drench,” he said with a faint chuckle, the next time he saw his father.
“thanks,” said otterbourne; “and if they break my windows the next time they’re out, will you pay for the glazier?”
“never pay for anything,” said cocky, solemnly and truthfully. and it was probably the only truthful word that he had spoken for many years.
