“The times are changing, you see. We are on the eve of strange things. Still, I took the liberty of telling him that as long as he remained a Radical and went up and down the country blackguarding me and mine, I should refuse to know him.”
“And what said our fine gentleman?”
“He was amused. Whether he takes the hint remains to be seen. In any event it commits us to nothing.”
Charlotte shook a dubious head. “You’re shaping for a compromise, my friend. And in my view this is not a case for one.”
“If she is set on marrying the brute what’s going to stop her?”
The question was meant for a poser and a poser it proved. Somehow it left no ground for argument. Therefore, without further preface or apology, Lady Wargrave turned to a matter of even more vital consequence.
IV
By an odd chain of events, Jack Dinneford was heir apparent to the dukedom of Bridport. In the course of a brief twelve months two intervening lives had petered out. One had been Lyme, the Duke’s only surviving son, who at the age of thirty-five had been killed in a shooting accident—a younger son, never a good life, had died some years earlier—the other had been the Duke’s younger brother, who six months ago had died without male issue. The succession in consequence would now have to pass to an obscure and rather neglected branch of the family, represented by a young man of twenty-four, the son of a Norfolk parson.
Jack’s father, at the time of his death, had held a family living. A retiring, scholarly man, he had never courted the favors of the great, and the great, little suspecting that their vicarious splendors might one day be his, had paid him little attention. Blessed with progeny of the usual clerical abundance and without means apart from his stipend, the incumbent of Wickley-on-the-Wold had been hard set to educate his children in a manner becoming their august lineage. Even Jack, the eldest of five, had to be content with four years at one of the smaller public schools. It was true that afterwards he had the option of Oxford or Sandhurst, but by the time the young man had reached the age of nineteen he had somehow acquired an independence of character which did not take kindly to either.
One fine day, with a spare suit of clothes and a hundred pounds or so in his pocket, he set out in the most casual way to see the world, and to make his fortune. He went to Liverpool, shipped before the mast as an ordinary seaman for the sake of the experience, and made the voyage round the Horn to San Francisco. For the next two years he prospected up and down the Americas earning a living, picking up ideas, and enlarging his outlook by association with all sorts and conditions of men, and finally invested all the capital he could scrape together in a business in Vancouver.