He found it necessary for his scheme of protection to tell his brother and sister briefly, the fear that Mark might inherit the failing that had claimed his mother, and that came to him as a terrible legacy from that mother’s family, and Grace, at least, had shared his anxiety over their cousin to the fullest degree.
If Sacha was less moved about Mark’s possible fate, that was, perhaps, natural, for Sacha had from the beginning of his life learned really to trouble about no one but himself. He was of an utterly different nature to either Grace or Val; there was less stolidity about him. He was never very practical, and lived, for the most part of the time, in happy dreams.
Contrary to the wishes of Val, and such of his kinsmen who in the beginning had had a right to enter into the young Ambletons’ lives, Sacha had followed no sound, practical profession; he had taken up art instead, and it was not to be denied that he had marked talent as a painter.
Val, when he found his brother resolved on adopting the brush as a means of earning his living, sacrificed his own feelings in the matter, and there was a very large room in the top floor of the Dower House which had long ago been set apart as a studio for Sacha when he cared to be at Dynechester.
The Dower House was practically a Wentworth property.
Most people imagined that the house and grounds had belonged actually to Mrs. Ambleton when she arrived, widowed, years before, to take up her abode in it; but this was not the case. Sir Ambrose had put the house at his sister’s disposal when she returned to England from Russia after her husband’s death.
There had not been too much money left to Mrs. Ambleton and her children at this time. She had made, in a sense, a poor marriage. Eric Ambleton had been a handsome young attaché when she had fallen in love with him, and she had become his wife in the face of a good deal of opposition, for most people realized that Eric Ambleton had been a man of promise but of promise only, and most people proved to be right.
Advancement in diplomacy is proverbially slow, and Eric Ambleton struggled on in an onerous and most difficult life, always hoping for better things that never came.
He died while attached to the embassy in St. Petersburg, and his wife had no other course open to her but to travel back to her old country with her two handsome boys and accept all her brother offered to her.
After her death Sir Ambrose desired Valentine to continue to regard the Dower House as a home for himself and his brother and sister—the little Grace who had been born there so soon after her mother’s widowhood.