It was another wet and chilly Easter in another year, and the town had
just begun to fill after the recess, when one morning after luncheon
the good Duke of Otterbourne, as his county called him, riding down
the Kensington high road, was thrown from his horse, between whose
forelegs a bicycle had staggered and fallen. The boy on the bicycle was
but scarcely bruised; the Duke was carried insensible to the nearest
pharmacy and never rallied. By four o’clock he was dead; and many
persons, men and women, old and young, gentle and simple, felt their
eyes wet as the news of his death circulated through the Park and
streets.
His daughter-in-law heard of it as she drove in at Hyde Park Corner;
a man she knew stopped her carriage and broke the intelligence to her
as gently as he could. She was shocked for a moment; then she thought
to herself: “We shall have Otterbourne House now, and I suppose
there’ll be money, at least for a time.” Then, as she always studied
appearances, she went home decorously and busied herself telegraphing
to his family and her own.
The body of the old duke had been already taken to Otterbourne House
and laid on his bed in those modest rooms opening on the gardens, to
which she had so often desired to limit him. His features were calm
and wore a look of peace; his neck had been broken in the fall; it
was thought probable that he had suffered nothing, not even a passing
pang. Whilst telegrams were being sent all over England, and it grew
dusk, she came, clothed in black, and knelt by the low bed, weeping.
She always did what was right in small things, and at any moment some
member of her family or his might enter the room. Meanwhile messengers
of all degrees, servants, grooms, commissionaires, telegraph boys, were
rushing to and fro over the metropolis and its environs in their vain
search for the Earl of Kenilworth. No one had any idea where Cocky was.
No one had seen him for two days; his absence was of so slight an
account that even his valet never took any heed of it; it was surmised
that he was in congenial society.
She was thinking as she knelt of the alterations she would make in
the house; the gardens were old-fashioned and would have to be laid
out afresh; the circular entrance-hall should be made a _patio_ like
Frederic Leighton’s and have a glass dome; the picture gallery sadly
wanted weeding, and the process of weeding might be made lucrative to
the weeder, for dealers would buy anything out of Otterbourne House
with their eyes shut; the small oval room painted by Angelica Kauffman
should be her boudoir. “I sha’n’t need to bore myself with Billy,” she
thought: the duke had not been a rich man and had been impoverished
by his sacrifices to assist Cocky; but still things would be very
different to the hand-to-mouth life which they led, and which drove her
to support the nuisance of Harrenden House and Vale Royal, and similar
expedients. The Duchess of Otterbourne would, she reckoned, have a free
hand at least for a time; and they would probably be able to sell lots
of things despite the entail.
Alberic Orme arrived that night from his country vicarage; he was
white, haggard, inexpressibly grieved; he had loved his father dearly.
“Where is my brother?” he asked her.
The two younger sons were away--the one with his ship, the other with
his troop--in the Indian Ocean and at the Cape.
“Cocky?” said Cocky’s wife. “Oh, they are looking for him. They will
find him--in some pot-house!”
And so they did on the following morning.
When messengers in hot haste went flying over London to find his son,
and telegrams were being despatched to the lamented duke’s country
seats and county towns, Cocky was drinking gin and playing poker with
half-a-dozen persons, more congenial than distinguished, at a little
riverside inn near Marlow, where he had been spending three days lost
to the world, but dear at least to the hearts of Radical journalists.
When at last he was found, and the fatal accident to his father
communicated to him, Cocky, who, however drunk he might be, never
became a fool, pulled himself together, comprehended the position, and
put all the money lying about in his pocket.
“Damned if they’ll dare ask a duke for it!” he said to himself with a
chuckle, and walked quite steadily to the carriage which had come for
him, not casting even a look at his late companions, male or female,
who were too awed and astonished, as well as too befumed with various
drinks to stop him or even to speak to him.
“I’ll have a rattling good time now,” he thought, as he drove to
the Marlow station. “And I’ll divorce her; Lord, what a joke it’ll
be! Perhaps they won’t give it me; I dare say they won’t give it
me; there’s a marplot called the Queen’s Proctor; they’ll talk of
collusion, and she’ll bring counter-charges, and all the rest of it;
but we’ll have the fun all the same, and she won’t be able to show her
face at Court. They’re so damned particular at Court about the people
who are found out! So is society: she’ll be drummed out of society.
Lord, what fun it will be!”
Better even than gin and poker and music-hall singers and shady
bookmakers in a village on the Thames.
Whilst his father had lived that fun had been always peremptorily
forbidden to him.
“Whatever your wife may have done or shall do, you have forfeited all
title to resent it,” the old duke had always said to him; “and I will
not have my name bespattered with your filth in public.”
Wholly unconscious of the dark designs he carried in his sodden but
sharp little brains, his wife was almost civil to him when he came into
her presence, sobered by the fresh air he had breathed on his return
from Marlow. She restrained the Blenheims from attacks on his trousers,
and did not make any inquiries as to why he had been missing for
fifty-six hours.
He was Cocky, he would always be Cocky, the most wretched little scamp
in creation; still he was indisputably Seventh Duke of Otterbourne, and
had considerable power to make himself disagreeable.
Out of his presence she enjoyed rapturously the vituperation which
society papers and the Radical press poured upon him now that he had
really become an hereditary legislator.
“They are too funny for anything,” she said, tossing a handful of them
to Brancepeth. “They must have had detectives after him every hour of
his life. How on earth do they know all they do?”
“It’s easy enough to know about a man who don’t pay his cabman and
borrows sovereigns of his valet,” replied Brancepeth with equanimity,
picking up the scattered news sheets.
“Well, he won’t want to borrow sovereigns now,” remarked his wife.
“Won’t he?” said her friend, with worlds of significance in the simple
words. “Oh, Lord, if he ever gets to heaven he’ll pawn St. Peter’s key!”
“But there’ll be lots of money, won’t there? And the roc’s egg will be
mine, won’t it?” she asked, for her knowledge of such matters was vague.
“Ask your solicitor,” said Brancepeth.
The remains of the late duke were taken down to Staghurst, his
principal place, a vast mansion and a vaster park in a southwest
county, his sons and daughter accompanying the corpse; his
daughter-in-law went also, taking with her Jack and Gerry; in small
things she always did what looked well. If you pay in halfpence in that
way the world pays you back in guineas.
The funeral took place on the following morning, on a very disagreeable
day, with sleet and rain and wind; and the family vault and monuments
were in a churchyard which lay fully exposed to the blasts from the
east, with great yews overshadowing it and sepulchral figures by
Chantrey and Nollekens and Roubiliac, looking grim and grey in the
foggy air.
The late duke had many sincere mourners, for he had inspired many
warm friendships in his own world, and respect and regard in all
classes. Moreover, the large number of persons who in various ways were
connected with, or dependent on, the Duke of Otterbourne could not but
view with terror the advent to that title of the small, frail, hectic
little man, who had so cynical a smile in his pale eyes and so shocking
a reputation in the country. Gossip, too, had not spared that lovely
lady in her graceful crape garments, and the beautiful little boys,
whose rosy cheeks were a little less bright than usual, as she led them
under the darkling yews and the sombre, weird sculptures of the tombs.
The people assembled there, especially the tenantry, peasantry, and
servants, all felt that the reign of kindness, straightforwardness, and
dignity was over, and that the future before them was one clouded and
threatening.
“His new Grace do look a mighty poor chap,” said one old laborer to
another. “And they do say as his blood’s all brandy, and none o’ the
young ’uns is his own.”
“Hold yer gab, Garge, or they’ll hev ye in the lockup,” said his more
prudent spouse.
But what the old man said audibly many there present thought.
The ceremony was dreary and tedious; Jack and Gerry were cold and
frightened, and everyone else was bored; the clergy alone were, as
usual, in all their swelling glory and fussy supremacy, headed by the
late duke’s brother, Augustus Orme, who was Bishop of Dunwich and
Waton-on-the-Naze.
After the funeral, and reading of the will, the local magnates of
county and church dispersed, and everyone else returned to London by
the four o’clock express except Cocky and his wife. He was chilly,
feverish, sleepy, and disinclined to leave the house, and she wanted
to look over the collection of historial laces which had belonged to
her mother-in-law, which had never seen the light for many years,
Otterbourne having always jealously guarded them as the most sacred
heirloom. They could not be sold now, but they might be used, in
various ways; at the least they would adorn Drawing-room costumes;
there was, she knew, a _manteau de cour_ which had belonged to
Henriette d’Angleterre. She was very fond of lace, and she was still
more fond of little _mauvais tours_; she did not forget or forgive
many words and acts of the late duke; it was one of those unkind small
revenges which were to her pampered taste as cayenne pepper or chutney
is to a jaded palate, to unlock the dead lady’s Italian cabinets and
Indian boxes and sandal-wood coffers, and to play havoc with the
Spanish point, the English point, the Venetian point, the Chantilly,
the Flemish, the Dutch, kerchiefs and collars and aprons and flounces
and edgings, all fine and rare, many marked with the arms or badges of
famous houses or royal wearers of a vanished time.
The poetic interest of the collection was nothing at all to the present
duchess; what mattered to her was the value of it in money, though she
could not sell it, and the effect it would have if she wore any of it.
She did not herself like old lace, it always looked yellow and dingy;
but other people did and envied it, and it would all look very nice at
some Loan Collection, and make her friends most agreeably jealous. She
passed the afternoon hours over it, and in ransacking all the little
drawers and boxes in the various cabinets of what had been the favorite
sitting-room of the late duchess. Otterbourne, though he had often
given his wife cause for jealousy, had been profoundly attached to her
and had kept this room untouched, even unentered, except to be swept,
dusted, and aired.
Mouse knew this well enough--she had often been irritated at this
room being locked against her; but her knowledge did not prevent her
pillaging it any more than the sanctity of a church or a mosque to its
pious devotees prevents soldiers from sacking and firing it. She had
nothing to do, this rainy, chilly, dull day, and the examination of
her mother-in-law’s relics and treasures served to pass the time; her
second maid aided her, a sagacious and discreet young woman, who knew
when to use her eyes and when to close them.
The poor dead duchess’s room was the cosiest and cheeriest in the
whole huge building of Staghurst, which was an immense, uninteresting,
last-century house built by Bonnani, and with a fire burning on its
long-cold hearth, and a dozen wax-candles lighted in its silver
sconces, it was a warm, comfortable, pleasant place for a chilly
evening. She had a nice succulent little dinner served there, and when
she had done full justice to it returned to her examination of the
Japanese cabinets and the Indian boxes and the sandal-wood coffers.
What sentimental creatures men are, she thought, seeing a bouquet
of flowers, which had been dead five-and-twenty years, still left
untouched in their porcelain bowl in which the water had long been dry.
If ever there was a male flirt, poor Poodle had been one, and yet he
had cherished such a solemn _culte_ for his dead wife that he had kept
her morning-room like a temple for a quarter of a century! It seemed to
her very droll.
The little boys came to bid her good-night, and she gave them some
_marrons glacés_ and kissed them and sent them away. She was impatient
to go on with her examination of her late mother-in-law’s possessions
before anyone could interrupt her, for she did not know at all who had
the legal right to them.
Jack’s brilliant eyes under their long lashes roved over the room and
espied the suggestive confusion of it.
“She’s been lootin’,” he thought; he knew what looting was; Harry had
told him.
“P’rhaps these was looted too,” he thought, gazing down on his handful
of Paris chestnuts.
He was a very honest little man; he was honest by nature, and Harry had
made him so on principle; he had never seen his friend “dedful angy”
save once, when he, Jack, had taken a large, sweet, crescent-shaped
cake off a stall in the Promenade des Sept Heures at Spa.
His mother had no such qualms; she continued her investigations.
There were things which would have touched some women. There were the
love letters of Otterbourne, then Lord Kenilworth, ardent, tender, and
graceful, tied up with faded ribbon. There were innocent little notes
written by Cocky in a big round hand between pencilled lines beginning
“my darling mama.” There were baby shoes in pale-blue kid and pale-pink
satin, of which the little wearers had died in infancy. There were
diaries, very simple, very brief, not always perfectly well spelled,
but always full of affectionate records and entreating prayers of which
her husband and her children were the objects. But these things did not
move the present occupier of the title and of the room; she pitched
them all into a heap with no very gentle touch and cast the heap upon
the fire. Old rubbish was best burned!
Just as she had done so and was assailed by an unpleasant misgiving
that somebody might make a row about the destruction of these things
(for everybody was so foolish and sentimental), she heard the voice of
Cocky’s body-servant speaking at the door to her maid, and the maid
approached her with a rather astonished face.
“If you please, your Grace, his Grace is unwell: could you go to his
room a moment, madam?”
“Go to his room?”
She was as astonished as her maid. Cocky must be very ill indeed if she
were summoned to him. His chronic maladies, due to brandies and sodas
and insomnia, were never even named to her. He had certainly coughed
and shivered at the funeral that forenoon, and in the train the day
before, but then he so often did this no one attached any importance to
a little more of it or a little less.
This time, however, poor Cocky, over whom Providence (or the powers
of darkness) did not watch as they ought to have done, had caught
something worse than a cold, standing without a hat so long in that
biting March morning, in a damp and windy country churchyard, and
without a drop of anything inside him, as he pathetically remarked.
In the evening he was so unwell with shivering, difficulty of
breathing, and pains in his head and limbs, that he could not even
drink liquors and enjoy the newspaper attacks upon himself in his own
rooms, but had to go to bed at ten o’clock, which he had certainly
never done since his early boyhood.
“Most unlucky beast in all creation I am,” he muttered as he shivered
between the sheets. “Just got the ribbons between my fingers and ten to
one the coach’ll land in a ditch; ditch we must all end in, eh? Worms
and winding sheet and all; even Mouse’ll come to that some time. Here,
you, get me some brandy and don’t stand staring, you fool.”
But his valet was no fool, and instead of bringing the brandy went to
another wing of the house for the doctor, who had always lived in it
for many years as attendant on the deceased duke.
The doctor found the new duke in a very sad state of health, with some
fever and a hacking cough, which threatened to become pleuro-pneumonia
and would try the slender amount of strength which the sick man
possessed very dangerously; he advised that the duchess should be told.
So she was told, and came across the great house looking like a
Burne-Jones in her long black robes, with the fairness of her skin and
hair dazzling in their contrast to her garb of woe.
“Is it anything serious?” she said, in an awed voice, for she was
really shocked by his appearance, and did not want him to die at this
moment of his succession.
“It’s skull and cross-bones business; that’s what it is,” said her
husband with a groan. “Rascally east wind did it. Don’t come here; you
can’t do me any good.”
A famous London physician, who had probably killed more people than any
other doctor living, and was esteemed proportionately, was summoned by
telegraph; and by the sick man’s own desire the chief solicitor of the
county town, who had been legal adviser and agent to the late duke,
was sent for, to return in all haste to Staghurst and take down his
instructions. Left alone with this person on his arrival, by his own
express desire, Cocky, who had scarcely any voice left, whispered to
him:
“Would it keep ’em out of the succession if I declare they aren’t my
children?”
The solicitor hesitated; he felt his own position a most delicate and
embarrassing one.
“Your Grace must not entertain such suspicions,” he said, with some
confusion. “The duchess enjoys the esteem and respect of every----”
“Stow your gab!” hissed Cocky. “All I want to know is--if I made a
formal declaration, would it stand?”
“No, sir--it would not.”
The lawyer thought the dying man’s mind wandered, being himself a
country person to whose ears the gossip of smart society did not come.
“Oh, your Grace, you must not think of such a thing,” he added,
greatly embarrassed. “Dear me, dear me, I do not know what to say, sir.”
“Would it keep her brats out?” said Cocky, as savagely as his failing
breath allowed.
The lawyer shook his head. “No, your Grace--it would not. Whatever may
have happened, sir, you have condoned, you see. Of course, I am not for
a moment supposing that there are any grounds----”
“Stow that bosh!” said his client, as savagely as his weakness allowed.
“If I could have divorced her all these years, and didn’t? If I said so
now?”
The lawyer shook his head again. “It would not stand, sir.”
“Why not?” asked Cocky.
“Children born in wedlock must be legitimate heirs, your Grace,” the
lawyer said, very decidedly, to pierce through the muddled senses of
the dying client.
“Wedlock, eh?--wedlock?” repeated Cocky with a chuckle which ended
in a convulsive cough. The word tickled his fancy mightily, though
Mr. Curton could not imagine what he had said which was ludicrous.
“Wedlock!” echoed Cocky; “you won’t beat that, Curton, in a brace of
years!”
“The word is good law and good English, sir,” said the solicitor, a
little offended. “I repeat, after so many years of wedlock you could
not leave a posthumous charge of the kind behind you. It might be mere
pique and malice on your part. No Court would ratify it. It would only
make a dreadful scandal, sir, because, I presume, Lord Alberic would
endeavor to uphold your declaration, since he is next in succession
after your Grace’s sons.”
An angry flash came into Cocky’s sunken colorless eyes.
“Beric? Gad! I’d forgot that. So he would. I’d rather little Jack came
after me. He’s a good plucked one; bit his lips not to squeal when I
pinched him. And I don’t dislike poor Harry. He’s a good fellow, and
she got over him.”
A fit of coughing stopped his revelations, to which the discreet
lawyer turned a deaf ear. He was an excellent person who lived in a
large, square, white house, with shrubberies, and a carriage-drive, and
a page in buttons; to him marriage was marriage, and a duke and duchess
were one and indivisible; when such people got into law courts he was
sincerely sorry that they did not respect themselves as greatly as he
respected them; he knew that the gentleman, too, who now lay dying had
been in many discreditable straits, for he had himself been frequently
called in to assist in getting the delinquent out of them; but a duke
was a duke, Otterbourne was Otterbourne, in the eyes of the good and
conservative attorney, and he had a deaf ear which he could turn very
usefully when needed.
To assist in making such a terrible hotch-potch of scandal, as would
be made by any posthumous repudiation, might have tempted a London
Old Bailey practitioner, but it did not tempt for an instant this
respectable rural devotee of Themis.
Cocky was silent for some time, breathing hard and deliberating what he
would do. Almost more than his wife he hated his brother Alberic, who
had always been the beloved of his father.
He raised himself, at last, feebly on his pillows. “Look here, Curton,”
he said, with gasping effort, “you make my will, and be quick about
it, for I’m dead beat. I can’t touch much, I know, but where I can do
anything, make it as deuced unpleasant for her as you can; and renew
the--the--what d’ye call it--settlement for the jewels, so that
she’ll have to give ’em up; renew it just as it stood in my father’s
and grandfather’s wills, will you? And look here, Curton: I appoint as
guardians my brother-in-law and my uncle Augustus.”
Mr. Curton inclined his head in approval.
“Lord Hurstmanceaux and the Bishop of Dunwich? Your Grace could not
make a more admirable selection. The highest principle----”
Cocky chuckled with a sound very like the death-rattle. “I choose
Ronnie ’cause he’s so damned conscientious, he can’t refuse, and he’ll
hate it so; and I choose old Augustus ’cause he came down once when I
was a shaver at Eton and never tipped me, and gave me a beastly book
called ‘The Christian Year.’ Make it all as deuced annoyin’ to both
of ’em as you can. Lord, what a pother they’ll find all my affairs
in--that’s a comfort.”
And it was a genuine tonic and cordial to him to think how, after his
decease, all his sins and embarrassments would continue to circle like
mosquitos around the heads of his trustees and executors.
“Beric will hate being left out,” he murmured; on the whole he was
getting considerable fun out of this ante-mortem duty. But it was a
bore to die, an awful bore, just when he had come into things and could
do what he liked; he moved restlessly and uneasily on his bed while the
lawyer wrote out the clauses of the testament, hastening as much as he
could, for he saw that every breath might be his client’s last. When
the witnesses were called in, oxygen was given to the dying man, and he
rallied enough to sit up in his servant’s arms and sign “Otterbourne”
legibly, in that clear handwriting which he had learned at Eton, and
which had signed so much “bad paper.”
“I couldn’t do much, but I’ve done what I could,” he said feebly, as
the pen fell from his fingers. “To be damned disagreeable to ’em all
round,” he concluded, as his cough permitted him to complete the phrase.
“What a Christian spirit!” murmured the vicar of the village, who was
present to witness the will, and had not heard the concluding sentence.
“Shut up!” said Cocky feebly but viciously. “You parsons are just like
ravens, always comin’ and cawin’ where anybody’s bein’ snuffed out;
birds of ill-omen, you are--marryin’ and buryin’--he, he!”
The scared vicar looked aghast at the polished London physician. “The
mind wanders: the end is near,” murmured that bland person, with a
professional sigh.
Mr. Curton shook his head as he folded up the document. It was all very
painful to the excellent lawyer; it destroyed all his theories of the
nobility; and to make a ducal will in a hurry seemed to him almost like
_leze-majesty_.
“Oh, my dear sir,” he murmured, in sad and useless regret, “why, oh,
why leave such a document as this to such a moment?”
“Always thought the pater’d outlive me,” murmured Cocky; “so he
would--twenty years--if that byke hadn’t upset him.”
Mouse, sweet, resigned, composed, regretful, came noiselessly into the
chamber of death, leading Jack by the hand, very sober and a little
frightened, with his beautiful black eyes wide open and fixed in a
vague terror on the bed.
“Dear little angel!” murmured the vicar, at whom Jack was wont to aim
paper pellets in church.
Mouse approached the bedside. “Beric is here, dear,” she said gently.
“He begs to see you. May he come in? Ronald is here, too.”
“Goody-goody and the Miser?” said her husband, in a muffled faint
voice. “No; tell ’em both to go to the devil.”
Cocky closed his eyes, and lay to all outward semblance unconscious
and indifferent to worldly things; the worn-out lungs drawing in
desperately a few last breaths of air. Who shall say what vain regrets
for lost opportunities, for wasted talents, for foolish and fruitless
hours, were in his thoughts? He looked already dead, save for the
slight labored heaving of his chest beneath the bedclothes.
And there had been a time when in that very house he had been a pretty,
innocent, beloved child; when he had been clasped in a mother’s arms,
her idol and her hope; when he had run across those lawns without with
fleet feet and flying hair; when old servants had watched his every
step, repeated his every word, and a proud race had seen in him the
security for its future continuance and honor!
The vicar by sheer force of habit folded his hands, composed a pious
face, and began a prayer.
“O Lord our God, let this Thy good and faithful servant----”
“Stop that,” said Cocky, opening his eyes. “I won’t bluff the Almighty
just at the last out of funk.”
It was one feeble flicker of the honor of his race, which he had
outraged and derided all the forty years of his life, but which in
the moment of death came to him for one second. The words shocked his
hearers as a blasphemy, but in truth they expressed the only honorable
scruple of a dishonorable life. He would not “bluff the Almighty”; he
would not at the end of all, and in the face of death, turn, out of
fear, to what he had mocked and ridiculed through all his years of life.
“Get on the bed and kiss your poor dear papa, my lord,” whispered the
nurse, who had followed Jack into the room lest he should worry her
lady.
Jack hung back, reluctant, but the slender white hands of his mother,
which could hold so tightly, gripped him round the waist and lifted him
on to the bed. He burst out crying from fright and a vague pity which
stirred in his childish bosom. Then his compassion made him conquer
his fears. He put his fresh rosy mouth shrinkingly to the waxen sunken
cheek of the dying man. But Cocky by a supreme effort turned his head
away with a glare of anger in his eyes, and the child’s warm lips
kissed the pillow.
“Damn you and your brats!” he said, with enfeebled voice but
intensified venom, and his gaze, full of meaning, met hers, and said
all which he had never spoken through all the years in which she had
borne his name.
“It is so sad how often the dying take a hatred to what they love best
in life,” she murmured to the London physician, a bland bald person
who had buried patients in Westminster Abbey, and that second best
Valhalla, St. Paul’s.
“Damn you and all your brats!” Cocky muttered feebly again as his gaze
sought and found his wife’s face through the mist of unreality which
was fast hiding all the facts and figures of existence from him for
evermore.
“Let us pray,” said the vicar in a hushed and awed voice, for he was
indeed unspeakably shocked. She dropped on her knees and everyone else
knelt also.
Then the shrill short labored breathing ceased to whistle feebly
through the silence: the bed-covering heaved no more.
Cocky was dead.
The child slipped down on to the floor. Alberic Orme and Hurstmanceaux
stood hesitating on the threshold of the chamber.
“Oh, dear Duchess!” sighed the fashionable Esculapius, who was
eminently pious. “These are the trials which are sent to us to detach
us from earthly affections! The ways of God are inscrutable, but we
must not question their merciful purpose.”
Cocky lay on the bed between them, very straight, very waxen, very like
an effigy in yellow stone; but looking down on him his wife shuddered,
for it seemed to her that his left eye opened and winked and that his
rigid jaw grinned. She had an uncomfortable feeling that, though she
would soon comfortably forget all the rest of him, Cocky’s grin and
Cocky’s wink would long rise up in her memory.