a week or two later hurstmanceaux saw a paragraph in the morning papers which made him throw them hastily aside, leave his breakfast unfinished, and go to his sister’s house in stanhope street. her ladyship was in her bath. “say i shall return in half an hour. i come on an urgent matter.” leaving that message with her servants he went to walk away the time in the park. it was a fine and breezy morning, but hurstmanceaux, who always hated the town, saw no beauty in the budding elms, or the cycling women, or even in jack or boo, who were trotting along on their little black shetlands. when the time was up he waited restlessly another half hour in his sister’s boudoir, where he felt and looked like a st. bernard dog shut up in a pen at a show.
she at last made her appearance, looking charming, with her hair scarce dry gathered loosely up with a turquoise-studded comb and a morning-gown of cloudy lace and chiffon floating about her; a modern aphrodite.
“you have made your husband a director in the city,” said hurstmanceaux without preface, almost before she had entered the room.
she was prepared for the attack and smiled, rather impertinently.
“what does it matter to you, ronnie?”
“a director of a bank!”
“’tisn’t your bank, is it?”
“a director of a bank!” he repeated. it seemed to him so monstrous, so shocking that he had no words left.
“they won’t let him into the strong-room,” said cocky’s wife. “it may be rather absurd; but it isn’t more absurd than numbers of other things—than your being asked to be a mayor, for instance.”
“if i had accepted i should not have disgraced the mayoralty.”
[121]“cocky won’t disgrace anything. they’ll look after him.”
“who did it?”
“is that your business, dear ronnie?”
“oh, of course, it was that miserable cad from dakota, whom you forced through the gates of otterbourne house.”
“if you know, why ask?”
“what an insult to us all! what a position to put us in! when everybody’s seen the man at your ball where we all were——!”
his indignation and emotion checked his utterance.
his sister laughed a little, but she was bored and annoyed. what business was it of his? why could she not be let alone to arrange these little matters to her own convenience in any ingenious way she chose?
“how could you make the duke appear to play such a part?” said hurstmanceaux. “he is the soul of honor and of proper pride. what have you made him look like? it is the kind of thing that is a disgrace to the country! it is the kind of thing that makes the whole peerage ridiculous and contemptible. imagine what the radical press will say! such scandalous jobbery justifies the worst accusations.”
“don’t read the radical newspapers then. i shall read them, because they will be so deliciously funny. they are always so amusing about cocky.”
“you have singular notions of amusement. i do not share them.”
“i know you don’t. you are always on stilts. you never see the comedy of cocky.”
“i do not see the comedy of what is disreputable and dishonorable. his father will be most cruelly distressed.”
“he should give us more money then. we must do what we can to keep ourselves; poodle never helps us. well—hardly ever.”
hurstmanceaux emitted a sound very like a big dog’s growl.
“otterbourne has been endlessly good to you. it is no use for him or anybody else to fill a sieve with water.”
“why don’t he give us the house? we are obliged to[122] pay fifteen hundred a year for this nutshell, while he lives all alone in that huge place.”
“why should he not live in his own house? what decent gentleman would have cocky under his roof?”
“you have no kind of feeling, ronnie. i ought to have otterbourne house. i have always said so. i can’t give a ball here. not even a little dance. poodle might keep his own apartments, those he uses on the ground floor there, but we ought to have all the rest.”
“he allowed you to have that ball there the other night, and all the cost of it fell on him.”
“that is a great deal for him to do certainly! to lend us the house once in a season when it is our right to live in it altogether!”
“he does not think so.”
“no! horrid selfish old man! pretending to be young, too, with his flossy white hair and his absurd flirtations. would you believe that he even made difficulties about our keeping our horses at his mews!”
“he probably knew that it meant his paying the forage bills. the duke is most generous and kind, and i think you ought to be more grateful to him than you are.”
“oh, rubbish!” said mouse, infinitely bored. “people who hate you to amuse yourself, who want you to live on a halfpenny a day, and who say something disagreeable whenever they open their lips, are always considered to be good to one. there is only one really good-natured thing that we ever wanted poodle to do, and that was to let us live in otterbourne house; and he has always refused. i am certain he will go on living for twenty years merely to keep us out of it!”
“don’t wish him in his grave. as soon as your husband gets otterbourne house he will sell it to make an hotel. a company has already spoken to him.”
“isn’t it in the entail?”
“perhaps. i cannot say. ask your lawyer. but i know that an hotel company has made overtures to him for purchase or lease in event of the duke’s death—may it be many a day distant! he is an honest gentleman, and you and your husband and your cursed cad out of dakota have made him look to english society as if he were[123] capable of having sold the honor of entrance to his house for a mess of pottage for his son’s thirsty maw.”
“my dear ronald, how you excite yourself! really there is no reason.”
hurstmanceaux looked at her very wistfully.
“can’t you see the dishonor of what you’ve done?” he said impatiently. “you coax and persecute otterbourne until he allows you to take those new people to his house, and then you let the cad you take there make your husband a director of a bank of which the man is chairman! can’t you see to what comment you expose us all? of what wretched manœuvring you make us all look guilty? have you any perception, no conscience, no common decency? if cocky were another kind of man than he is, such a thing would look a job. but being what he is, the transaction is something still more infamous.”
she listened, so much amused, that she really could scarcely feel angry.
“my dear ronald,” she said very impertinently, “you have a morality altogether of your own; it is so extremely old-fashioned that you can’t expect anybody to make themselves ridiculous by adopting it. as for ‘a job,’ isn’t the whole of government a job? when you’ve cleaned out downing street it will be time to bring your brooms in here.”
at that moment cocky put his head in between the door-curtains and nodded to hurstmanceaux. “she’s made me a guinea-pig, ronnie,” he said, with his little thin laugh. “didn’t think i should take to business, did you? have you seen the papers? lord, they’re such fun! i’ve bought ten copies of truth.”
his wife laughed.
“it’s no use reading truth to ronnie. he’s no sense of fun; he never had.”
“i have some sense of shame,” replied hurstmanceaux, looking with loathing on his brother-in-law’s thin, colorless, grinning face. “it is an old-fashioned thing; but if this wretched little cur were not too feeble for a man to touch, i would teach him some respect for it with a hunting-crop.”
then he pushed past cocky, who was still between the[124] door-curtains, and went downstairs to take his way to otterbourne house.
cocky laughed shrilly and gleefully.
“jove! what a wax he’s in,” said cocky, greatly diverted. “just as if he didn’t know us by this time!”
“he is always so absurd,” replied mouse. “he has no common sense and no perception.”
“he ought to go about in chain armor,” said cocky, picking up truth and reading for the fourth time, with infinite relish, the description of himself as an “hereditary legislator in mincing lane.” “i am not a hereditary legislator yet,” he said as he read. “as i don’t get the halfpence, why should i get the kicks? that’s what i said to the mob in the park. break the pater’s windows, don’t break mine. i’m plain john orme, without a shilling to bless myself with, and the beggars cheered me! they’ll cheer you for any rot if they’re only in the mood for it; and if they aren’t in the mood, you might talk like moses and mahomet, they’d bawl you down—oh, get out you little beasts, damn you!”
this objurgation was addressed to the blenheims, who, suddenly becoming aware of his presence, made for his trousers with that conviction that his immediate destruction would be a public service, which they shared with the editor of truth.
hurstmanceaux walked through the streets and felt his ears tingle as he heard the newsboys shouting the names of newspapers.
his sister had said rightly; he was not a man of his time; he was impetuous in action, warm in feeling, sensitive in honor; he had nothing of the cynical morality, the apathetic indifference, the cool opportunism of modern men of his age. he was no philosopher, and he could not bring himself to smile at an unprincipled action. he felt as ashamed as though he were himself at fault, as he entered the duke’s apartments in otterbourne house.
hurstmanceaux and the duke had much regard for each other, but their conversation was usually somewhat guarded and reserved, for the one could not say all he thought of otterbourne’s son, and the other could not say all he thought of ronald’s sister. there were many[125] subjects on which they mutually preserved silence. but this appointment of kenilworth seemed so monstrous to both that it broke the reserve between them. they each felt to owe the other an apology.
“my dear ronald,” said the duke, holding out his hand, “i know why you have come. i thank you.”
“i dare not offer any plea in her defence,” replied hurstmanceaux huskily; “i can only tell you how grieved i am that your constant kindness and forbearance to my sister should meet with so base a requital.”
the duke sighed.
“i am bound in honor to remember that the basest of men is her husband—and my son!”
they were both silent.
the morning papers were lying on a table by the duke’s side, amongst them the green cover of truth.
“that is no excuse for her,” said her brother at length. “this thing is of her devising much more than it is his.”
“there are women who are a moral phylloxera,” replied otterbourne. “they corrupt all they touch. but in fairness to her i must say that it was chiefly my son who persuaded me to let this man massarene into my house. they made me an accomplice in a job! perhaps,” the duke added with a sad smile, “the world knows me well enough to give me credit for having been an unconscious accomplice—for having been a fool, not a knave!”
to these two honest gentlemen the matter was one of excruciating pain, and of what seemed to them both intolerable humiliation. but society, though it laughed loudly for five minutes over the article on an hereditary legislator, forgot it five minutes later, and was not shocked: it is too well-used in these days to similar transactions between an impoverished nobility, with unpaid rents and ruinous death-duties, and a new-born plutocracy creeping upward on its swollen belly like the serpent of scripture.
