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 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.”
“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.
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 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 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. 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
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.
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 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.