"This one is; and he is something more than an Irish landowner. His mother was an East India merchant's only child, and one of the richest heiresses in England. Those Indian merchants are rank thieves, the General says—thieves and slave-traders, and they used to bring home mountains of gold. But that was fifty years ago, in the good old times."
"Poor souls!" said Tonia, thinking of the slaves. "What a cruel world it is!"
It grieved her to think that her friend's wealth had so base a source. She questioned her father on their next meal together.
"Is it true that Lord Kilrush's grandfather was a slave-trader?" she asked.
"'S'death, child, what put such trash in your head? Miss Lavenew was the daughter of a Calcutta merchant who dealt with the native princes in gold and gems, and who owned a tenth share of the richest diamond mine in the East. 'Tis the West Indian merchants who sometimes take a turn at the black trade, rather than let their ships lie in harbour till they ground on their own beef-bones."
It was a relief to know that her friend's fortune was unstained by blood.
"I do not think he would exist under the burden of such a heritage," she said to herself, meditating upon the question in the long summer afternoons, while she sat with open windows, trying not to hear street cries, as she bent over an Eastern story by Voltaire, which she was translating for one of the magazines.
Kilrush came in before her task was finished, but she laid her pen aside gladly, and rose to take his hat and stick from him with her dutiful daughterly air, just as she did for her father.
"Nay, I will not have you wait upon me, when 'tis I should serve you on my knees, as queens are served," he said.
It was seven o'clock, and he had come from a Jacobite dinner in Golden Square—a dinner at which the champagne and Burgundy had gone round freely before it came to drinking the king's health across a bowl of water. There was an unusual brightness in his eyes, and a faint flush upon cheeks that were more often pale.