“I met the Miser: how has he been to-day? Rating you, eh?” said
Lord Brancepeth when he had been ten minutes or more ensconced in
the cosiest corner by the boudoir fire. He was a very well-featured
and well-built young man, with a dark oval face, pensive brows, and
great dreamy dark brown eyes; his physiognomy, which was poetic and
melancholy, did not accord with his conversation, which was slipshod
and slangy, or his life which was idiotic, after the manner of his
generation.
Mouse was standing behind him leaning over his shoulder to look at an
ancient British coin newly attached to his watch-chain; her own eyes
were soft with a fullness of admiration which would have been doubtless
delightful to him if he had not been so terribly used to it.
“The Miser was out of humor as usual,” she replied; “Ronald should
really live amongst some primitive sect of Shakers or Quakers, or
Ranters or Roarers, whatever they are called: he has all the early
Christian virtues, and he thinks nobody should live upon credit.”
“He certainly shouldn’t live amongst us,” said Brancepeth, with a
self-satisfied laugh, as if chronic debt were a source of especial
felicitation. “How he hates me, by the way, Mousie.”
“You are not a primitive virtue,” said his friend, with her hands lying
lightly on his shoulders, and her breath stirring like a soft balmy
south wind amongst his close curling dark hair.
Brancepeth had ceased to be a worshipper: and he had ceased even to
like being the worshipped, but habit is second nature, and it was
his habit to be wherever Lady Kenilworth was, and that kind of habit
becomes second nature to lazy and good-hearted men.
He was a young man who was so constantly, almost universally, adored
that it bored him, and he often reflected that he should never be
lastingly attached except to a woman who should detest him. He had
not found that woman at the date at which he was allowing his friend
Mouse to hang over his shoulder and admire the ancient British coin.
He always told people that he was very fond of Cocky. Cocky and he
were constantly to be seen walking together, or driving together, or
playing games together, outdoors and indoors; they were even sometimes
seen together in the nursery of those charming little blonde-haired,
black-eyed children who were taught by their nurses to pray for Cocky
as papa.
“The Miser will marry some day,” said Brancepeth now, “and then he
won’t be so easy to bleed.”
“I am sure he will never marry. Alan is sure he never will.” Alan was
her second brother.
“Stuff!” said Brancepeth. “Alan will be out in his calculations.”
“You will marry some day, too, I am sure, Harry,” whispered Mouse, as
she leaned over his chair; her tone was the tone of a woman who says
what she does not think to enjoy the pleasure of being told that what
she says is absurd and impossible.
Brancepeth gave a little laugh, and kissed the hand which was resting
on the back of his chair.
“When Cocky goes to glory,” he answered.
“Cocky!” said Cocky’s wife with fierce contempt. “_He_ will never die.
Men like him never do die. They drink like ducks and never show it.
They eat like pigs and never feel it. They cut their own throats every
hour and are all the better for it. They destroy their livers, their
lungs, their stomachs and their brains, and live on just as if they
had all four in perfection. Nothing ever hurts them though their blood
is brandy, their flesh is absinthe, and their minds are a sink emptied
into a bladder. They look like cripples and like corpses; but they
never die. The hard-working railway men die, the hard-working curates
die, the pretty little children die, the men who do good all day long
and have thousands weeping for them, they die; but men like Cocky live
and like to live, and if by any chance they ever fall ill, they get
well just because everybody is passionately wishing them dead!”
She spoke with unusual intensity of expression, her transparent
nostrils dilated, her red lips curled, her turquoise eyes gleamed and
glittered; Brancepeth looked at her in alarm.
“On my word, Sourisette,” he murmured, “when you look like that you
frighten a fellow. I wouldn’t be in Cocky’s shoes, not for a kingdom.”
“I thought you were longing to replace Cocky?”
“Well, yes, of course, yes,” said Brancepeth. “Only you positively
alarm me when you talk like this. I’m not such an over-and-above
correct-living fellow myself, and Cocky isn’t so out-and-out bad as all
that, you know. After all, he’s got some excuse.”
“Some excuse!” she repeated, her delicate complexion flushing red.
“Some excuse! You--you, Harry--you dare to say that to me?”
“Well, it’s the truth,” murmured Brancepeth sulkily. “And don’t make
me a scene, Mouse; my nerves can’t stand it; I’m taking cocaine and I
ought to keep quiet, I ought indeed.”
“Why do you take cocaine?” asked Lady Kenilworth, changing to
inquietude and interrogating his countenance anxiously.
“All sorts of reasons,” said her friend, sulkily still. “Oh, yes, I
look well enough, I dare say; people often look well when they are half
dead. Don’t make me scenes, Topinetta; I can’t bear them.”
“I never make _you_ scenes, darling; not even when you give me reason!”
“Humph!” said Brancepeth, very doubtfully, “when do I give you reason?
There never was anybody who stood your bullying as I stand it.”
“Bullying! Oh, Harry!”
“Yes, bullying. Cocky don’t stand it; he licks you; I cave in.”
With those unpoetic words Lord Brancepeth laid his poetic head back on
the cushions of his chair, and closed his eyelids till their long thick
lashes rested on his cheeks, with an air of martyrdom and exhaustion.
She looked at him anxiously.
“You really do not look well, love,” she whispered, as she hung over
his chair. “It is--is it--that you care for any other woman? I would
rather know the truth, Harry.”
“Women be hanged,” said Brancepeth with a sigh, his eyes still closed.
“It’s the cocaine; cures a fellow, you know, but kills him. That’s what
all the new medicines do.”