The giddy months frolicked away like youths and maidens dancing on
a golden ground on one of Povis de Chavanne’s friezes. Flirting,
laughing, gaming, waltzing, shooting, hunting, driving, dressing--above
all dressing--the seasons succeeded each other with breathless rapidity
for Mouse Kenilworth, and hundreds of fair women like her.
Money grew scarcer, credit grew rarer, Billy became less easy to bleed,
Harry seemed to grow duller and less good-looking, cabmen became shyer
still of Cocky, and the old duke more unwilling to sign and sell; but
she still all the same enjoyed herself, still carried high her golden
head, and still crammed forty-eight hours into every twenty-four.
Occasionally she did a little philanthropy; inaugurated a railway line,
visited some silk mills, or laid the stone of a church. The silver
barrow she received made a pretty flower-stand, the pieces of silk
offered to her were also useful in their way, and when she had opened a
church she felt she had a dispensation for months from attending church
services. Only Egypt she could not manage this year. Egypt is a pastime
which requires a good deal of ready money, and she had to console
herself with hunting in the Midlands and shooting rocketers in the damp
English woods; she did not really care about shooting, but she found
zest in it because Ronald and the old duke hated the idea of women
killing things, and even Brancepeth disapproved it.
She went down again more than once to Vale Royal and went out with the
hounds to whose maintenance her host had subscribed so liberally. But
in February a long black frost sent hunters to their straw and riders
up to town, and she opened her house in Stanhope Street as the session
opened at Westminster. She had the children up also; partly because she
was really fond of them, partly because children _poser_ you, and touch
the heart and the purse-strings of your relatives.
She disliked the town in winter; she wanted to be in Cairo or at Monte
Carlo or Rome; but, being in London, she made the best of it and took
her graceful person to any place where she thought she could be amused.
There are many dinners in London when the frost binds the country in
its iron bonds and the horses champ and fret in their stalls, and the
herons starve by the frozen streams, and the dead kingfishers lie like
crumpled heaps of broken iris-flowers on the cruel ice of their native
ponds.
“Has Billy run dry?” asked her lord one day when their financial
difficulties were pressing more hardly than usual, and an unpaid cabman
had threatened Bow Street.
“No,” said Mouse curtly. “But the young woman is always there. She’s as
sharp as a needle.”
“Why didn’t you splice her to Ronnie?”
“He won’t even look at her.”
“How exactly like him!” said Cocky. “If there’s a thing he might do to
oblige one he always kicks at it.”
Hurstmanceaux always seemed to them odiously unfeeling and huffy;
nevertheless, as they always did in their troubles, they sent to him
to come and speak to them one day when their creditors had been more
offensive than usual. He was so rarely in town that they agreed it was
only prudent to take advantage of his being there for a week or two on
account of evidence he had to give before a House of Lords Committee on
an Irish land question.
What Daddy Gwyllian had said once in the smoking-room at Otterbourne
House, and had more than once since then repeated, dwelt in
Hurstmanceaux’s memory, and made him doubt whether it was indeed
worth while to go on impoverishing himself for people who had neither
gratitude nor scruple.
After all, if the Duke of Otterbourne’s eldest son went into the
Bankruptcy Court, it was the Duke of Otterbourne’s affair.
It would be cruelly hard on Otterbourne, who was himself one of the
most upright, honorable and conscientious of gentlemen. But it would
be still harder on himself, Hurstmanceaux, after his long self-denial
and self-sacrifice to find himself in Queer Street for sake of his
brother-in-law, a brother-in-law whom he considered, in his own
forcible language, not fit to be touched with a pair of tongs.
If they would only retire awhile and retrench they could pull
themselves together. Cocky had an estate in the west of Ireland,
entirely unsaleable for the best of reasons that nobody would buy it,
but which Hurstmanceaux considered a very heaven upon earth, for its
views of land and sea were sublime, and its myrtle and bay thickets,
its pine and cork woods, had almost the beauty of Cintra with the vast
billows of the Atlantic rolling on the rocky shores at their feet. If
they would go to this place, called Black _Hazel_, and live there for
a few years, their affairs would come round, and Mouse would be taken
out of that vicious circle of unending expenditure and compromising
expedient in which women of the world turn like squirrels in a cage.
To the innocence of this simple masculine mind it seemed quite possible
that if such a course were suggested to her she would follow it. She
was fond of the children; Black Hazel would be a paradise for them; she
liked sport--Black Hazel offered quail, woodcock, blackcock, teal in
abundance, and both fresh water and deep sea fishing to any extent.
He enumerated its attractions enthusiastically to himself as if he were
an auctioneer endeavoring to sell the estate, and, with the _naïveté_
of an honest man, imagined that after all his sister could only need to
have her duty clearly shown her to do it.
“The finest thoroughbred mare will chew dry reeds when she finds she
can’t get hay or oats,” he thought, his mind reverting to his memories
of the Egyptian campaign, which he had shared in as an amateur. The
brother of Lady Kenilworth should have known that women of the world
are more “kittle cattle” than even blood-mares; but he did not realize
this.
He knew that she was unreasonable, wildly extravagant, very selfish,
and so accustomed to have her own way that she thought the stars would
pause in their courses to please her; but still, even she would stop
short of absolute social suicide, he thought.
So when next he received a note from his sister asking him to come to
her on a matter of importance, which always with her meant money, he
took his way to the conference determined to tell her frankly that the
retreat to the west of Ireland was the only possible refuge for her,
and to keep well in his memory the sensible warning and counsel of
Daddy Gwyllian.
When he got to the house in Stanhope Street he found Cocky waiting to
see him before he went out. This fact alone was ominous and extremely
disagreeable to him, the presence of Cocky, in his wife’s morning-room,
invariably indicating not only that money was wanted, which was
chronic, but that some more than usually unpleasant dilemma had to be
met.
Cocky’s paper was all over the place, as he would have expressed it;
and very often in hands so disreputable that its rescue was a matter as
compromising as it was costly.
When he was walking about amongst the china and the trinkets, and the
flowers and the lacquer work, with his thin pale aquiline profile
against the light, and the Blenheims barking furiously at him as
they invariably did, his presence was the certain sign of something
impending which might get with most odious prominence into the
newspapers.
“If he’s forged anybody’s name, I only hope to heavens that it’s only
mine,” thought Hurstmanceaux: he always expected Cocky to come to
forgery sooner or later. In point of fact, Cocky had come to it very
early in his career, as early as his Eton days, when he had been ducked
in the river by the comrade with whose name he had taken such liberties.
With his hands in his trowser pockets and his little frail person
flitting amongst the chinoiseries and the heaths and orchids, he peered
up at this moment at Hurstmanceaux where he stood on the hearth, very
tall, very stern, very unsympathetic, and absolutely silent.
“What a glum brute he is,” Cocky thought of the man to whom he had
owed his own social salvation a score of times. “What an uncommon
nasty thing human nature must be that it must always look so deuced
unpleasant whenever it finds anybody in trouble.”
Cocky was of opinion that it was the first duty of other men to pick
himself out of the mud whenever he got into it, and that it should not
only be the duty of his neighbors but their pleasure.
“Such a hard-hearted brute is Ronnie,” he thought. “Only lives for
himself and don’t spend sixpence a day. I do hate selfishness and
stinginess.”
The Blenheims at this instant scampered into the room, and flew at his
ankles with that strong disapproval of him which they never failed to
show.
“Oh Lord, you little beasts!” he cried, as their shrill voices rent the
air.
Hurstmanceaux looked on in grim approval of the dogs’ discrimination,
whilst his brother-in-law wasted kicks in all directions, the Blenheims
avoiding them with the happiest dexterity and returning undaunted to
the charge.
The entrance of their mistress effected a diversion in the warfare and
relaxed the contemptuous sternness of her brother’s face.
“So kind of you, dear Ronnie,” she said sweetly as she came up to him
softly and brought a sense of fragrance and freshness, like a dewy
rose, as she came straight from her bath and its opponax soap and eau
de verveine.
“They’ve torn my trowsers,” said Cocky, looking down at the marks of
their small sharp teeth upon frayed cloth.
“You know they dislike you,” said his wife coldly. “Why do you provoke
them?”
“Hang it all, I’m their master,” murmured Cocky, eyeing his ankles
ruefully.
“Oh, dear no, you are not,” said Mouse very uncivilly; “I never taught
them to think so for a moment.”
“If you only sent for me to hear you quarrel over the ownership of the
Blenheims----” said Hurstmanceaux. He was angry; he had to attend a
Royal Commission at two o’clock, and he wanted to be instead on the
river, watching the practice of the Eton eight of which his youngest
brother was captain. And here he was, shut up at half-past twelve with
two bickering people and two barking lap-dogs, with the prospect of
hearing for an hour of debts and difficulties which he had neither the
power nor the will to meet or dissipate. “Pray let me hear the worst
at once,” he added. “Is it the Old Bailey, or only the Bankruptcy
Court, that Cocky is going to show himself in this time to an admiring
society?”
His sister looked at him and saw that he was not in a pleasant mood;
but she did not mind his moods, they always ended in giving her what
she wanted. He was an intrinsically generous and compassionate man, and
such tempers are always kindly to their own hurt.
“Damned ungrateful fellow he is!” reflected Cocky. “As if there wasn’t
_one_ Court that he ought to bless me for never going into.”
But he said nothing aloud, and left the recital of their difficulties
to his wife.
She plunged immediately into the narrative of their woes and needs,
the Blenheims, reduced to silence through want of breath, sitting with
their tongues out and their heads on one side, listening attentively as
though they were two auditors in bankruptcy.
Hurstmanceaux listened also in an unsympathetic silence which to his
companions seemed to bode no good to themselves. There was nothing new
in the relation; debts have seven-leagued boots, as everyone knows, and
people who spend a few thousands every year in railway journeys, but
do not pay their tailor, shoemaker, and greengrocer, realize this with
unpleasant frequency. Then there were debts of honor in all directions,
these being the only form of honor which was left to the delinquents as
Hurstmanceaux thought, but charitably forebode to say.
He looked at his sister whilst she spoke, admiring her appearance
whilst he scarcely attended to her words because he knew their import
beforehand so painfully well. What a terribly expensive animal was a
modern woman of the world! As costly as an ironclad and as complicated
as a theatrophone. The loveliest product of an entirely artificial
state, but the most ruinous, and the most irritating to those whom she
ruined.
He told himself that Daddy Gwyllian had been entirely right. And he
hardened his heart against this beautiful apparition which with dewy
lips, perfumed hair, and a delicious suggestion of a nymph fresh from a
waterbrook, stood before him in that charming attitude of contrition
and candor with which from her nursery days he had always known her
tell her very largest lies.
“So all the dirt you’ve eaten hasn’t done you any good,” he said
curtly, after some minutes of silence.
“What can you possibly mean?” said Mouse.
Cocky chuckled feebly. He knew what his brother-in-law meant.
“We can’t bleed Billy every day,” he murmured in an explanatory tone.
“You seem to think you can bleed your father and myself whenever you
please,” said Hurstmanceaux in his most incisive tones.
“Lord, what else is one’s family for?” said Cocky candidly.
His wife looked with impatience at the clock, for she had appointments
which were agreeable.
“Really, I think we’ve told you everything,” she said to her brother.
“It is not nice of you to insult us in our troubles, but I am sure you
mean to help us in the end, don’t you, Ronnie?”
“I am extremely sorry,” said Hurstmanceaux. “But it is wholly out of my
power to help you this time. Your debts are enormous. The only possible
chance for you is to give up London life, and life in the world
altogether, and go and retrench in the country. Why not at Black Hazel?
It would be admirable for the children; and your creditors, if they
knew you were really economizing, could probably be induced to wait. I
see no other prospect possible.”
“Don’t be a fool, Ronald,” said his sister curtly, throwing her
handkerchief rolled in a ball to the dogs.
Her husband stared through his eye-glass. “Ah--er--I thought you would
make some practical suggestion; something feasible, you know!”
Hurstmanceaux frowned.
“So I do. When people are in your position they always withdraw to
their Black Hazel or whatever their retreat is called. They don’t go
on living in the world. Black Hazel is a delightful place. It will be
much better than a second floor in Florence, or a boarding house in
Dresden, which many people come to who are in your plight.”
His sister looked at her watch.
“My dear Ronald, I have no more time to spare you,” she said rather
insolently. “And if you can suggest nothing more sensible than a second
floor in Florence, or a bog in Ireland, I shall lose little by not
hearing anything more that you may have to say.”
“I have given you my opinion and my advice,” said Hurstmanceaux
stiffly. “You can live at Black Hazel tolerably well, and in a way
becoming your position; the air is very fine and the children will
thrive admirably. But if you persist in continuing your present rate of
expenditure----”
His sister opened the door and disappeared, calling the Blenheims with
her.
“Lord, excuse me, Ronnie, but why do you talk that rot?” said her
husband, peering up through his glasses at his brother-in-law. “What on
earth is the use of going on in that way to her? Out o’ London? Down in
the west of Ireland? Your sister and me? Oh, Lord!”
The idea of his exile from “life” so tickled his fancy that he laughed
till he choked himself.
“Black Hazel! Mouse and I and her chicks at Black Hazel! Oh, good Lord,
Ronnie! You won’t beat that if you try for a week o’ Sundays!”
He chuckled feebly but merrily.
“What is there to laugh at?” said Hurstmanceaux. “Is the Bankruptcy
Court more agreeable than a country place which is your own and where
you will be your own master?”
But Cocky continued to laugh convulsively, holding his side and
coughing.
From his great height Hurstmanceaux looked down in scorn on the speaker.
“Pray,” he said coldly, “do you ever ask how your wife gets the ready
money she has to carry on with?”
Kenilworth shook his head.
“Not I. Mutual what do-ye-call it and non-interference is the only
sound basis for domestic peace.”
He spoke with an expression of implicit seriousness and good faith;
only his left eye winked knowingly, as if he had said something very
amusing indeed. Hurstmanceaux wondered if it would be within decent
manners to kick one’s brother-in-law on his own hearth.
“You are an unutterable scoundrel, Cocky,” he said, with an effort
mastering his impulse to use acts instead of words.
Kenilworth remained unmoved.
“That’s libel. A beak would fine you a fiver for it,” he said placidly.
“Do you happen to have got a fiver about you?”
“Go and ask Brancepeth for one,” said Hurstmanceaux, white with rage.
“Oh, Lord!” said the other innocently. “I’ve had _his_ last ages ago.
He is a very poor devil is Harry, a very poor devil, else we shouldn’t
be in this strait.”
Hurstmanceaux approached him so closely that Cocky, whose nerves were
shaken by much absinthe and angostura, trembled.
“I would sooner my sister were on the pavement of the Haymarket than
that she were the wife of such a cur as you.”
Cocky breathed more freely.
“That is a very exaggerated remark,” he murmured. “You are so very
stagy, my dear Ronald, so very stagy. You should have lived a century
or two ago.”
“I am ashamed to be of the same generation as yourself,” said
Hurstmanceaux sternly. “Great heavens, man! You come of a good stock;
you will be chief of a great house; your father is a gentleman in
every fibre of his being; how can you endure to live as you do with
your very name a by-word for the cabmen in the street? There is not a
servant in your house, not a match-seller on your area steps, not a
stableboy in your mews, who does not know the dishonor which you alone
affect to ignore! She is my sister, I am ashamed to say; but I can do
nothing with her so long as you, her husband, condone and countenance
what she does. You have every power; I have none. Take her to Black
Hazel, sacrifice yourself for sake of your children, shut yourself up
there, try and lead a cleanly life and make her lead an honest one.
Cease to be the miserable thing you are--a diseased maggot living on
putrefaction?”
Kenilworth listened imperturbably. To be likened to a diseased maggot
did not distress him; it slightly diverted him in its appositeness.
“The children?” he said softly and slowly. “You really think I ought to
consider those children?”
His pale, expressionless grey eyes, becoming suddenly full of
unutterable depth of expression, looked up into his brother-in-law’s
and said volumes without words.
Hurstmanceaux grew red to the roots of his bright curly hair. After
all, the woman spoken of, if this man’s wife, was his own sister, his
favorite sister, the little one whom he had carried about in his arms
when a boy, up and down the tapestried galleries and the oak staircases
of the dear old house at Faldon.
Kenilworth saw that emotion and despised it, but thought he would
profit by it and do a bit of dignity.
“My dear Ronnie,” he said almost seriously, “if I had married another
sort of woman than your sister Clare, I might have become a different
sort of man. It is not likely; still, it is possible. But, you may
believe me, if she had married the best man under heaven, she would
have been just exactly what she is. Sages and angels wouldn’t alter
her. Don’t you fret yourself about us. We aren’t worth it--I grant
that. We are of our time, and we shall get along somehow. Ta-ta,
Ronnie; you are a good boy. Be grateful that I am what I am; if I
were like you, _vieux jeu_, what a bother I should have made for our
respective families long ago in the D. C.”
And with a low complacent chuckle at having got the best of the
argument, he dived under his seat for his hat, glanced at the clock,
and, with an apologetic gesture of two fingers, left Hurstmanceaux
alone in the morning-room with the chinoiseries and nipponiséries.
“Now his conscience will work and make him miserable,” he thought,
as he went across the hall with satisfaction. “After all, I said the
truth, and he knows it is the truth. She is his sister, and she’s a
bad a lot as there is in London, and he’ll feel he owes me something,
and he’ll come down handsomely, stingy old bloke though he is. What
duffers those sentiment men always are to be sure. How neat I handled
him. Gad, if he didn’t blush like a girl!”
And Cocky stepped lightly down Park Lane to Hamilton Place and entered
the Bachelors Club “fancying himself very much,” as he would have
expressed it; and quite aware that his strategy would end sooner or
later in an interview more or less agreeable to his interests between
his own lawyers and those of his brother-in-law.