He was on the point of breaking out in a still worse passion, but controlled himself.
“A clergyman!” he cried; “I would as soon see the undertaker. What could he do but tell me I was going to be damned—a fact I know better than he can? That is, if it’s not all an invention of the cloth, as, in my soul, I believe it is! I’ve said so any time this forty years.”
“Oh, my lord, my lord! do not fling away your last hope.”
“You imagine me to have a chance then? Good soul! You don’t know better!”
“The Lord is merciful.”
The marquis laughed—that is, he tried, failed, and grinned.
“Mr Cairns is in the dining-room, my lord.”
“Bah! A low pettifogger, with the soul of a bullock! Don’t let me hear the fellow’s name.—I’ve been bad enough, God knows! but I haven’t sunk to the level of his help yet. If he’s God Almighty’s factor, and the saw holds—‘Like master, like man!’——well, I would rather have nothing to do with either.”
“That is, if you had the choice, my lord,” said Mrs Courthope, her temper yielding a little, though in truth his speech was not half so irreverent as it seemed to her.
“Tell him to go to hell. No, don’t: set him down to a bottle of port and a great sponge-cake and you needn’t tell him to go to heaven, for he’ll be there already. Why, Mrs Courthope, the fellow isn’t a gentleman! And yet all he cares for the cloth is, that he thinks it makes a gentleman of him—as if anything in heaven, earth, or hell could work that miracle!”