“There was never many of ’em to leave, sir,” he said, grumpily, “and I don’t believe there’s any of ’em left anywheres. There seems to have been a curse upon ’em, for the last hundred years. Nothing ever throve with them. Look at what Cheriton is now, and what it was in their time.”
“I didn’t know it in their time, Mr. Blake.”
“Ah, you’re not old enough; but your father knew the place. He did business for the old Squire—till things got too bad—mortgages, and accommodation bills, and overdrawn accounts at the bank, and such like, and your father washed his hands of the business—a long-headed gentleman, your father. He can tell you what Cheriton was like in the Squire’s time.”
“Why do you suppose the Strangways are all dead and gone?”
“Well, sir, first and foremost it’s fifteen years and more since I’ve heard of any of ’em, and the last I heard was about as bad as bad could be.”
“What was that last report?”
“It was about Master Reginald—that was the eldest son, him that was colonel of a Lancer regiment, and married Lord Dangerfield’s youngest daughter. I remember the bonfires on the hills out by Studlands just as if it happened yesterday, but it’s more than forty years ago, and I was a boy in the stables at fourteen shillings a week.”
“Reginald, the elder son, colonel of Lancers, married Lord Dangerfield’s daughter—about 1840,” wrote Theodore in a pocket-book which he held ready for taking notes.
“What was it you heard about him?” he asked.
“Well, sir, it was Mr. de Lacy’s servant that told me. He’d been somewhere in the south with his master where there was gambling—a place where the folks make a regular trade of it. It’s a wonderful climate, says Mr. de Lacy’s man, and the gentry go there for their health, and very often finish by shooting themselves, and it seems Colonel Strangway was there. He’d come over from Corsica, which it seems was in the neighbourhood—where he’d left his poor wife all among brigands and savages—and he was at the tables day and night, and he had a wonderful run of luck, so that they called him the king of the place, and it was who but he? Howsoever the tide turned suddenly, and he began losing, and he lost his last sixpence, in a manner of speaking regular cleaned out, Mr. de Lacy’s man said; and by-and-by there comes another gentleman, a Jewish gentleman from Paris, rolling in money, and playing for the sake of the science, and able to hold out where another man must have given in; and in a week or two he was the king of the place, and the Colonel was nowhere, just living on tick at the hotel, and borrowing a fiver from Mr. de Lacy or any other old acquaintance whenever he had the chance, and making as much play as he could with two or three cart wheels, where he used to play with hundred-franc pieces. And so it went on, and he cut up uncommon rough when anybody happened to offend him, and there was more than one row at the hotel or in the gardens—they don’t allow no rows in the gambling rooms,—and just as the season was coming to an end the Colonel went off one afternoon to catch the boat for Corsica. The boat was to start after dark from Nice, and there was a lot of traffic in the port, but not as much light as there ought to have been, and the Colonel missed his footing in going from the quay to the boat, and went to the bottom like a plummet. Some people thought he made away with himself on purpose, and that the one sensible thing he did was to make it look like accident, so as not to vitiate the insurance on his life, which Lord Dangerfield had taken care of, and had paid the premiums ever since the Colonel began to go to the bad. Anyhow, he never came up again alive out of that water. His death was published in the papers: ‘Accidentally drowned at Nice.’ I should never have known the rights or the wrongs of it if Mr. de Lacy hadn’t happened to be visiting here soon afterwards.”