"Oh! I give you my word I know it," Lord Shotover replied, with most disarming candour. His father affected, with difficulty, not to hear the remark.
"It doesn't do for a man in your position to be owing money all over the country. It brings the aristocracy into contempt with the shop-keeping class. They're always on the lookout for the shortcomings of their superiors, those people. And they do pay their debts, you see."
"They've always got such a thundering lot of money," Lord Shotover put in. "Don't know how they'd contrive to spend it unless they did pay their debts."
"Oh! ah!—yes——" His father hesitated. It struck him Shotover was a reasonable fellow, very reasonable, and he took the whole matter in a very proper spirit. In short, it was not easy to blow up Shotover. Lord Fallowfeild thrust his hands far down into his trouser pockets and turned sideways in the great, leather-covered chair.
"I'm not narrow-minded or prejudiced," he began. "I always have kept on civil terms with those sort of people and always will. Courtesy is an obligation on the part of a gentleman and a Christian. I'd as soon be rude to my tailor as eat with my knife. But a man must respect his own rank or others won't respect it, especially in these nasty, radical, leveling times. You must stand by your class. There's a vulgar proverb about the bird that fouls its own nest, you know. Well, I never did that. I've always stood by my own class. Helped my poor brother Archibald—you can't remember him—weren't born at the time—to run away with Lady Jane Bateman. Low, common fellow Bateman. I never liked Bateman. She left Ludovic all that money, you know——"
"Wish to goodness she'd left it to me," murmured Lord Shotover.
"Eh?" inquired his father. Then he fell into a moralising vein. "Nasty, disreputable things elopements. I never did approve of elopements. Leave other men's wives alone, Shotover."
The younger man's mouth worked a little.
"The nuisance is sometimes they won't leave you alone."
Lord Fallowfeild gazed at him a moment, very genially.