She threw an anxious glance at him, for these two, notwithstanding the difference of their age and sex, were bound together by strong ties of sympathy, and she was really grieved that he should be ill.
“I am so sorry,” she said, in a gentle voice. “Insomnia is a terrible nuisance, but don’t trouble yourself too much about it, the fit will pass off.”
“Yes,” he answered grimly, “it will pass off, because I shall take drugs this evening. I always do the fourth night, though I hate them.”
“Those stuffs sometimes lead to accidents, Cousin George,” replied Edith, pretending to be absorbed in tracing the flowers of the carpet with the point of her umbrella, but really watching his weary face from beneath her long eyelashes.
“Yes, they sometimes lead to accidents,” he repeated after her, “as I have good reason to know. But after all, accidents are not always undesirable. I daresay that life still seems a very pleasant thing to you, Edith, yet others may think differently.”
“You ought not to, Cousin George, with your position and wealth.”
“I am old enough to know, Edith, that position and wealth, which you rate so highly, do not necessarily spell happiness, or even content. After all, what am I? A rich peer at whose name old women and clergymen turn up their eyes, they don’t quite know why, and whom men are afraid of because I can say sharp things—just one of the very common crowd of rich peers, no more. Then for my private life. Nothing interests me now; like the Roman Emperor I can’t find a new excitement, even horse-racing and high stakes bore me. And at home, you know what it is. Well, I am not the first man who has bought a cow and found that she can butt—and bellow.”
Edith smiled, for the vigour of the allusion tickled her.
“You know my one hope,” he went on, almost with passion, “or if you don’t, you are old enough and have brains enough to understand. I wanted sons sprung from a quiet, solid stock, sons who could make some good use of all this trash of titles and of riches which it is too late for me to do myself; men who would bear an honourable name and do honourable deeds, not fritter away their youth in pleasures as I did, or in what I took for pleasures, their manhood in the pursuit of idle philosophies that lead nowhere, and the accumulation of useless cash, and their old age in regrets and apprehensions. I wanted sons, it was my one ambition, but—” and he waved his hand through the empty air—“where are my sons?”
Now Edith knew Lord Devene to be a hard man where his interests were concerned, wicked even, as the word is generally understood, as for instance, Mrs. Ullershaw would understand it. Thus he would gibe at morality and all established ideas, and of every form of religion make an open mock. Yet at this moment there was something so pathetic, so tragic even, about his aspect and attitude, that her heart, none of the softest, ached for him. It was evident to her that his cold, calculated system of life had utterly broken down, that he was exceedingly unhappy—in fact, a complete failure; that although, as he had so often demonstrated, there exists nothing in the world beyond the outward and visible, of which our brain and bodies are a part, yet strong as he was that nothing had been too much for him. He was conquered by a shadow, and in its effects at least that shadow seemed very like the real and solid thing which some folk call Fate, and others the Hand of God. The idea disturbed Edith, it was unpleasant, as sickness and the thought of death are unpleasant. Therefore, after the fashion of her nature, she fled from it, and to turn the subject put the first question that came into her mind: