Temple's note ran thus:—
Dear Gusty,—If your annoyances have not affected your brain, I am at a loss for an explanation of your last letter. How, I would ask you, is a poor secretary of legation to subsist on the beggarly pittance F. O. affords him? Four hundred and fifty per annum is to supply rent, clothes, club expenses, a stall at the opera, and one's little charities in perhaps one of the dearest capitals in Europe. So far from expecting the demands you have made upon me, I actually, at the moment of receiving yours, had a half-finished note on my writing-table asking you to increase my poor allowance. When I left Castello, I think you had sixteen horses. Can you possibly want more than two for the carriage and one for your own riding? As to your garden and greenhouse expenses, I 'll lay ten to one your first peas cost you a guinea a quart, and you never saw a pine at your table under five-and-twenty pounds; and now that I am on the theme of reduction, I would ask what do you want with a chef at two hundred and fifty a year? Do you, or does Ellen, ever eat of anything but the simplest diet at table? Don't you send away the entrées every day, wait for the roast gigot, or the turkey, or the woodcocks, and in consequence, does not Monsieur Grégoire leave the cookery to be done by one of his “aides,” and betake himself to the healthful pursuit of snipe-shooting, and the evening delight of Mrs. Somebody's tea at Portshandon? Why not add this useless extravagance to the condemned list of the vineries, the stables, and the score of other extraordinaires, which an energetic hand would reduce in half an hour?
I 'm sure you 'll not take it in ill part that I bring these things under your notice. Whether out of the balance in hand you will give me five hundred a year, or only three, I shall ever remain Your affectionate brother,
Temple Edgerton Bramleigh.
“Read that, Nelly,” said Augustus, as he threw it across the table. “I 'm almost afraid to say what I think of it.”
This was said as they sat in their little lodgings in the Rue des Moines; for the letter had been sent through an embassy bag, and consequently had been weeks on the road, besides lying a month on a tray in the Foreign Office till some idle lounger had taken the caprice to forward it.
“Her Majesty's Legation at Naples. Lord Culduff is there special, and Temple is acting as secretary to him.”
“And does Marion send no message?”
“Oh, yes. She wants all the trunks and carriage-boxes which she left at Castello to be forwarded to town for transmission abroad. I don't think she remembers us much further. She hopes I will not have her old mare sold, but make arrangements for her having a free paddock for the rest of her life; and she adds that you ought to take the pattern of the slipper on her side-saddle, for if it should happen that you ever ride again, you 'll find it better than any they make now.”
“Considerate, at all events. They tell us that love alone remembers trifles. Is n't this a proof of it, Gusty?”