'And I was telling you about him,' answered the Captain, slightly offended. His little low-born wife never hurried and hustled his thoughts in this way. She was content to sit at his feet, and let him meander on for hours. True that she did not often listen, but she was always respectful. 'I was remarking that Sir Vernon is a fine young fellow, and likely to live to see himself a great-grandfather. His brother, too, is nearly as big and healthy—healthy to a degree. The breakfast I saw those two young men devour at the hotel would have made your hair stand on end. But, thank heaven, I have never been the kind of man to wait for dead men's shoes.'
'I see,' said Ida. 'If these boys had been sickly and had died young, you would have succeeded to the baronetcy.'
'To the baronetcy and to the estate in Sussex, which is a very fine estate, worth eight thousand a year.'
'Then, of course, they are strong, and likely to live to the age of Methuselah!' exclaimed Ida, with a laugh of passing bitterness. 'Who ever heard of luck coming our way? It is not in our race to be fortunate.'
The shame and agony of her own failure to win fortune were still strong upon her.
'Who knows what might happen?' said the Captain, with amiable listlessness. 'I have never allowed my thoughts to dwell upon the possibilities of the future; yet it is a fact that, so long as those young men remain unmarried, there are only two lives between me and wealth. They feel the position themselves; for when Sir Vernon came over here to lunch, he patted my boy on the head and said, in his joking way, "If Peter and I had fallen down a crevasse the other day in the Oberland, this little chap would have been heir to Wimperfield."'
'No doubt Sir Vernon and his brother will marry and set up nurseries of their own within the next two or three years,' said Ida, carelessly. Eager as she had been to be rich during those two and a half bitter years in which she had so keenly felt the sting of poverty, she was not capable of seeing her way to fortune through the dark gate of death.
'Yes, I daresay they will both marry,' replied Captain Palliser, gravely, folding his napkin and whisking an accidental crumb off his waistcoat. 'Young men always get drifted into matrimony. If they are rich all the women are after them, If they are poor—well, there is generally some woman weak enough to prefer dual starvation to bread and cheese and solitude. Vernon told me he had no idea of marriage. He and his brother are both rovers—fond of mountain-climbing, yachting, every open-air amusement.'
'Did you see much of them while they were at Dieppe?'
'They only stayed three days. They walked over here to lunch, put the poor little woman in a fluster—although they were very pleasant and easy about everything—invited me to dinner, tipped the boy munificently, and went off by the night-boat, bound straight for Wimperfield and the partridges. Very fine partridge shooting at Wimperfield! Vernon asked me to go across with him and stay at the old place for a week or two; but my sporting days are over. I can't get up early; and I can't walk in shooting-boots. Besides, the little woman would have fretted if I had left her alone so long.'