The next day she learned that he had bought a string of hunters and a pack of fifty couples. A corresponding number of grooms and helpers appeared in the stables, as well as a pack huntsman, a kennel huntsman, and whippers-in. Hunting is the most expensive luxury, counting out dissipations, in which an Englishman can indulge, and Julia wondered at his sudden extravagance. True, he had never stinted himself in anything, and he was one of the best-dressed men in England, but, then, he had always schemed to make some one else pay, and since his social restoration his tailor had “carried” him. Relieved as she was at his avoidance of her, and to be excused from making conversation at the table, curiosity overcame her in the course of a week, and one night at dinner, when the servants had left the room, she asked him if he had joined the Hertfordshire.
“I have,” he said graciously.
“I thought hunting was so terribly expensive.”
“What of that?” he asked, with his new grand air. “Whatever is due my position I am not likely to forget.”
He uttered this copy-book sentiment, so different from his usual loose slang, as if he had rehearsed it, and Julia began to perceive that he had cut out a new rôle for himself, and was wearing it with his usual methodical consistency.
“But can you afford it? You know this is a matter which does not admit of debt —”
“I am not in the habit of being catechised, but I am willing to gratify you. I satisfied myself at Bosquith that neither my cousin nor his child has many months to live.”
“But I heard that the child was healthy, and that the duke was uncommonly well.”
“They are both in the last stages of tuberculosis, Bright’s disease, or diabetes, I have not made up my mind which. And I also satisfied myself that Margaret will have no more children.”
“Oh! I see. Then you expect to succeed shortly.”