"Poor little fellow," said his wife; "but what has he done to be disinherited?"
"He's committed the crime of existing, my dear," replied the husband. "Can't you see, dear, that every farthing we have in the world will have to go to Lucius, for he will be the head of the family. Gad," he said, "he may be a peer of the realm, though that's a rather unlikely contingency. This child, Georgie, is not born in the purple, as is his elder brother; the one is clay, the other china."
The young mother nervously clutched the child to her breast and smothered him with kisses.
"Make the most of him, my dear, lavish your affection upon him. Unless the squire means doing something for him, his fortune is what I have predicted. Younger sons in England, George, have to live on monkey's allowance—more kicks than halfpence, and if there are half-a-dozen more of them, poor little chaps, the fewer halfpence they will get and the more kicks."
Careless idle words, spoken jestingly, but every one of which went home like a barbed arrow to the mother's heart. As she buried her face in the child's neck, she thought of her vow of eternal secrecy to her cousin. It had been extracted from her when under the influence of intense fear and horror. Her cousin had only forced a solemn promise from her with the intention of covering her own ignominy. It would have needed more than even the diabolical ingenuity of a Machiavel to have extorted from any mother her adhesion to a conspiracy for the ruin of her own child. But now she saw to her horror that each and every child she might bear to her own husband would, as a matter of course, be practically disinherited in favour of the little bastard. At that instant, there dawned on her for the first time the remote possible contingency of the child who was supposed to be Haggard's firstborn son ultimately inheriting the Pit Town title; that troubled her far less than do the probabilities of his ultimate succession to the Woolsack affect young Mr. Briefless when he is first called to the bar. But that each and every one of her children should by her own deliberate act, and for the benefit of an interloper, himself but a child of shame, be deprived of what was legitimately their own, their share of their father's heritage, did seem a very bitter cup.
"I can tell you one thing, Georgie," said her husband; "your father's quite of my mind in the matter, and it is our universal respect for the law of primogeniture that has made England what she is. It's a sort of natural law of selection, and the survival of the fittest. The eldest son must be taken care of at the expense of the rest; he is the tribal chief, his brothers and sisters are but his henchmen and his slaves. Why, look at the French; since the Code Napoleon, which chopped up the land into little blocks and gave each child his share, there have been no great families in France. Money a young fellow can squander, but he cannot get rid of his ancestral acres, when they are tightly tied up to come to his eldest son. There's no way out of it, Georgie; the Warrenders and the Haggards wouldn't content themselves with turning in their graves, they'd haunt the pair of us, if we hesitated to do the regulation thing."
On hearing these words, which for the first time in her life brought the real state of things home to her, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that young Mrs. Haggard's heart died within her. Was it not her duty to her child, to her husband, and to herself, to instantly make a clean breast of the whole mystery? Perhaps it was, but she struggled fiercely against the natural impulse to adopt this simple course. The fact has been insisted upon that secrecy was foreign to Georgie Haggard's nature; she hated deception and the very idea of anything which was underhand. Had she given way to her natural impulse, and then and there told her husband the truth, the dark web of intrigue which surrounded her innocent life would have been torn aside and dispersed at once and for ever. But with Georgie, unhappily for herself, her promise bound her as tightly as the most terrible oath. She had promised never to reveal Lucy's secret, and come what might, should this moral Juggernaut crush her, her child, and her offspring yet unborn, yet she would be true to it; her word, once plighted, should be kept to the bitter end.
"I think it's cruel, Reginald," she said, and the tears were in her eyes, "cruel and wicked too. What has he done, poor little fellow, that he should be made to inherit a sort of curse?"
But before her husband could answer this very natural objection, the door was flung violently open and the child Lucius, his face suffused with angry colour, bounced into the room. To his breast he clutched a tiny white kitten, it was quite young, its eyes not being yet open.
"Dad," he cried in a tone of rage, "Auntie says I shan't see the tittens drowned. I do want so much to see them drowned. I hate Auntie Lucy, and I hate Fanchette."