“They have asked me to tea in the nursery,” I said, “and I have accepted.”
“Jewel of a Snake-girl!” she laughed—she is not thick.
“Do you know the Torquilstone history?” she said, just as I was going out of the door.
I came back—why, I can’t imagine, but it interested me.
“Robert’s brother—half-brother, I mean—the Duke, is a cripple, you know, and he is toqué on one point, too—their blue blood. He will never marry, but he can cut Robert off with almost the bare title if he displeases him.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Torquilstone’s mother was one of the housemaids, the old Duke married her before he was twenty-one, and she fortunately joined her beery ancestors a year or so afterwards, and then, much later, he married Robert’s mother, Lady Ethelrida Fitz Walter—there is sixteen years between them—Robert and Torquilstone, I mean.”
“Then what is he toqué about blue blood for, with a tache like that?” I asked.
“That is just it. He thinks it is such a disgrace, that even if he were not a humpback, he says he would never marry to transmit this stain to the future Torquilstones—and if Robert ever marries anyone without a pedigree enough to satisfy an Austrian prince, he will disown him, and leave every sou to charity.”