Miss Lamb closed her thin lips, and her large, too prominent, china-blue eyes settled upon a portrait just opposite: the portrait of Colonel Kirtling, the Admiral's elder brother, the father of the mystery behind the folding-doors, and the husband of the pretty creature who had behaved so shockingly. The picture, painted by Richmond, was not unlike the famous portrait of Lord Byron. Colonel Fred Kirtling had been one of the handsomest men in the Guards. Richmond reproduced his curling auburn hair, his short upper lip, his finely modelled nose, his round chin with a distracting (the adjective was Lady Blessington's) dimple in it, and his "wicked" (Lady B. again) eyes.
"Did you know Colonel Kirtling, Mr. Dean?"
"Yes. A sad scamp, Miss Lamb, a scamp when he married—at sixty!"
He began to speak of the Kirtling family. Admiral Kirtling was the fourth son of the sixteenth Lord Kirtling, of Kirtling, in the county of Cumberland, who married a Penberthy from Cornwall, an heiress with a large fortune settled upon herself and her children. The seventeenth lord inherited whatever his sire had been unable to sell: Kirtling heavily mortgaged and stripped of its huge leaden roof (gambled away at hazard) and the wild moors which encompass it. This nobleman lived and died in chronic resentment against the poverty his father had inflicted upon him. His brother succeeded, and was the father of a son whom we shall meet by and by. Fred, the third brother, who had a royal duke for a godfather, married Louise de Courcy, a beauty with French blood in her veins. It is certain that she married Fred for love and against the wishes of her parents; and it is equally certain that she left him—just four years afterwards—because she loved somebody else much better. This somebody, who happened to be a peer and a famous soldier, offered Fred such satisfaction as one gentleman, even in those latter days, might tender an injured husband. Fred, however, wrote in reply that he was under an obligation to his lordship for taking off his hands the most ungrateful hussy in the kingdom. Fred's word, be it added, was little better than his bond (the children of Israel knew that to be worthless); and it is significant that Mrs. Kirtling's family, both French and Irish, abused Fred to all-comers: asserting that he had deceived dozens of women in his time, and none more cruelly than his charming wife. Death shut the mouths of the gossips by carrying off both Fred and Louise within six months of the latter's elopement.
By this time the Admiral, a bachelor of some eccentricity, had just settled into his new house at King's Charteris, near Westchester, and was known to be averse to leaving it. Yet he had to answer the question: "Who will take care of Fred's baby?" Lady Randolph, a kinswoman, was called into council.
"Children are the devil," said the Admiral gloomily. "Think of my nymphs." (He had some beautiful china).
"This one may prove the prettiest of them all," said Lady Randolph.
"Yes, yes; father and mother the handsomest couple, even if forty years were between 'em. Well, well, I lean on you, dear lady."
Lady Randolph did not fail him. She fetched the child from town, gave the nurse, an impudent town minx, twenty-four hours' notice, and installed in her place a respectable girl, Esther Gear, out of her own village of Birr Wood.
So much, and little more, was known to the company assembled in the Admiral's drawing-room.