“And have you no idea, Gilbert,—have you no idea as to whom the fortune is left?”
Mr. Monckton smiled.
“This is a question that concerns you, Laura,” he said, “a great deal more nearly than it does us.”
“What question?” asked Miss Mason, looking up from an elaborate piece of embroidery which she had been showing to Signora Picirillo.
“We are talking of Mr. de Crespigny’s fortune, my dear; you are interested in the disposal of that, are you not?”
“Oh, yes, of course,” answered the young lady, “I ought to be interested for Launcelot’s sake, I know; and I know that he ought to have the fortune, and that nobody has any right to deprive him of it, especially those nasty old maids who had him sent to India against his will, and I dare say he will have horrid pains in his liver from the climate when he’s older. Of course he ought to have the fortune, and yet sometimes I think it would be nicer for him to be poor. He may never be a great artist if he’s rich, perhaps; and I’d rather go to Rome with him and sit by his easel while he works, and pay the hotel bills, and the travelling expenses, and all that sort of thing, out of my own money, than have him a country gentleman. I shouldn’t like him to be a country gentleman; he’d have to hunt, and wear top-boots and nasty leather gaiters, like a common ploughman, when he went out shooting. I hate country gentlemen. Byron hasn’t one country gentleman in all his poems, and that horrid husband in Locksley Hall will show you what an opinion Tennyson has of them.”
Miss Mason went back to the Signora and the embroidery, satisfied with having settled the business in her own manner.
“He couldn’t look like the Corsair if he had Woodlands,” she murmured, despondingly; “he’d have to shave off his moustache if they made him a magistrate. What would be the good of his talking seriously to poachers if he wore turned-down collars and loose handkerchiefs round his neck? People would never respect him unless he was a Guy, with creaky boots, and big seals hanging to his watch-chain.”
Eleanor pushed the question still further.
“You think that Mr. de Crespigny has left his fortune to Launcelot Darrell, don’t you, Gilbert?” she asked.