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.”
“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 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 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 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 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.