‘There will be more chance of reformation if you marry than if you don’t—especially if you choose the duke’s daughter,’ added Dinah, stiffly, ‘not the barbarian.’
‘And without any marrying at all! If some woman, as good as she is fair, would hold out her hand to me in friendship, would let me think that I held a place rather lower than a favourite dog or horse would hold in her regard! If—if—ah, Mrs. Arbuthnot! if you——’
But Lord Rex speedily discovered that he was apostrophising the waves and the stars. At the moment when his eloquence waxed warmest, Dinah Arbuthnot, village barbarian that she was, had walked away, without one syllable of excuse, from his lordship’s side.
He watched the outlines of her figure as long as they were discernible through the gloom; then, drawing forth his vesuvians and tobacco pouch, prepared to smoke a lonely pipe of wisdom on the bridge. Lord Rex was in a fever of perplexity. Until the last five days he had never cared for living mortal but himself. His brief fealties to the prettiest face of the hour, Rosie Verschoyle’s among the number, had been so many offerings at the shrine of small personal vanity. All this was over. His surrender to Dinah’s nobler beauty, his recognition of Dinah’s pure and upright nature, had roused him thoroughly out of self, made him look searchingly at the aims, the pleasures of life, and acknowledge that there were human affections, human fidelities, high above the range of his own light and worldly experience. Did happiness thrive in that loftier, chill atmosphere? Was Gaston Arbuthnot to be congratulated, wholly, on his lot?
One thing was certain—so Rex Basire decided, as he betook himself gloomily to the bridge. However this drama of domestic life might end, it would be monstrous, impossible, that he, Rex Basire, should be peremptorily dismissed therefrom, dismissed as one occasionally sees the frustrated stage villain, long before the final falling of the curtain!
‘And even if it is so,’ mused Lord Rex, half aloud, and drawing upon reminiscences of Nap. in his ill-humour, ‘if no choice lies before one but to “accept misery,” misery let it be! The man who goes blue does not invariably find himself in the worst position at the end of the game.’
But the lad’s philosophy was lip-deep only. Lord Rex Basire had never felt less cynically indifferent to loss and gain than in this hour.