“Yes!” Bedlington said eagerly. “Yes, indeed, and I too have wondered! I do trust we may not find anything seriously amiss! I cannot flatter myself the poor boy took me as much into his confidence as I could have wished.”
“He certainly did not take me into it.”
“No, well! I do not desire to mar the harmony of this evening by reproaching you, and I shall accordingly say nothing of that. Yet I cannot but feel that had you treated him with more sympathy—”
“My dear sir, you, I am persuaded, treated him with a marked degree of sympathy, but it does not appear to have won you his confidence.”
“True. It is very true! Sometimes I have asked myself if I caressed him too much, allowed him too much license. You know he has been free to treat my house as his home ever since his poor father’s death—that is to say, ever since he was of an age to be glad of a house in town where he might be sure of a welcome. Indeed, I have treated him like my own son, but I do not know that it answered. I hope I have not been the innocent means of leading him into temptation!”
Carlyon looked faintly surprised. “How should you be, indeed?”
“Oh, as to that—! In an establishment such as mine, you understand—my position as A.D.C. to the Regent. I need not say more! I am sure I do not know the half of the people who come to the house, and how could I tell whom poor Eustace might be meeting there? Young men cannot always be trusted to keep the line, and alas, there was a weakness in him—one must own it!—that might have led him to allow himself to be drawn into the wrong company.”
He went on in this strain for some time, but as his host remained politely unresponsive, abandoned it at last and relapsed into melancholy abstraction. He roused himself to inquire about the funeral arrangements, desiring Carlyon to postpone the date to enable him to attend the ceremony and almost tearfully begging him not to neglect the least pompous detail of it. Upon hearing that the cortege would set out from the chapel where Eustace’s body was at present lying, and not from Highnoons, he looked very much shocked and could not think it right. He wished to know the style of the cards Carlyon had no doubt sent out and the number of carriages he had ordered, not to mention the mutes and the plumes, and was only silenced by Carlyon’s saying that since Eustace, after making himself odious to the entire neighborhood, had met his end in a drunken brawl that must still further lessen his credit with his acquaintances, the more private and unostentatious his obsequies were the better it would be for all concerned.
“I shall attend the funeral!” Bedlington declared. “I mean to spend a night with that poor young creature at Highnoons. I dare say she will be glad of the counsel of an old man. I am sure I do not know what is to become of her, for it is not to be expected that Eustace has left her in affluence. That crazy old house, very nearly in ruins, from what I could see of it! It would cost a fortune to put it in order, and there she is, saddled with its upkeep and none to support or guide her!”
“Mrs. Cheviot does not reside there alone. She has an elderly companion with her.”