So far from feeling impatient at his confinement to a sofa, therefore, Broughton affected distrust in his renovated limb for a full fortnight after the doctor had pronounced him cured. At last he was able to drive out, and soon afterwards to take exercise on horseback, Lydia Delmar and her father occasionally accompanying him.
People will talk at Leamington, as they do at other places; and so the gossips said that the rich—for he was still so reputed in the world—the “rich” Sir Dudley Broughton was going to marry Miss Delmar.
Gossip is half-brother to that all-powerful director called “Public Opinion;” so that when Sir Dudley heard, some half-dozen times every day, what it was reputed he would do, he began to feel that he ought to do it.
Accordingly, they were married; the world—at least the Leamington section of that large body—criticising the match precisely as it struck the interests and prejudices of the class they belonged to.
Fathers and mothers agreed in thinking that Colonel Delmar was a shrewd old soldier, and had made an “excellent hit.” Young ladies pronounced Liddy—for a girl who had been out eight years—decidedly lucky. Lounging men at club doors looked knowingly at each other as they joked together in half sentences, “No affair of mine; but I did not think Broughton would have been caught so easily.” “Yes, by Jove!” cried another, with a jockey-like style of dress, “he 'd not have made so great a mistake on the 'Oaks' as to run an aged nag for a two-year old!”
“I wonder he never heard of that Russian fellow!” said a third.
“Oh, yes!” sighed out a dandy, with an affected drawl; “poor dear Liddy did indeed catch a 'Tartar '!”
Remarks such as these were the pleasant sallies the event provoked; but so it is in higher and greater things in life! At the launch of a line-of-battle ship, the veriest vagrant in Tags fancies he can predict for her defeat and shipwreck!
The Broughtons were now the great people of the London season, at least to a certain “fast” set, who loved dinners at the Clarendon, high play, and other concomitant pleasures. Her equipages were the most perfect; her diamonds the most splendid; while his dinners were as much reputed by one class, as her toilet by another.
Loans at ruinous interest; sales of property for a tithe of its value; bills renewed at a rate that would have swamped Rothschild; purchases made at prices proportionate to the risk of non-payment; reckless waste everywhere; robbing solicitors, cheating tradesmen, and dishonest servants! But why swell the list, or take trouble to show how the ruin came? If one bad leak will cause a shipwreck, how is the craft to mount the waves with every plank riven asunder?