“You would not have him ashamed of the founder of his fortune. I have heard of a house in which the portrait of the good man who made the family wealth has a looking-glass in front of it, so that the will which ordained that that portrait should hang on one particular panel in the dining-room as long as the family mansion stood may be kept to the letter, while it is broken in the spirit. But this was a particularly irksome case, for the good man had made his money out of tallow, and had been painted with a pound of mould candles in each hand. Think of that, Maud! Fustian and corduroy are paintable enough; but not even Herkomer could make anything out of two bunches of tallow candles.”
“I wish Hubert would let me hang a fine Venetian glass in front of his worthy great-grandfather. However, since he himself is a gentleman, I suppose I ought to be satisfied,” said Maud; “I don’t believe there is a finer gentleman in England than my husband, Radical as he is.”
Vansittart’s sister was perfectly happy in her married life. She had a husband who petted and indulged her, with inexhaustible good humour, and who thought her the most enchanting of women, with infinite capacities for soaring to a higher level than she had yet attained. She had as much money as ever she cared to spend, and a house in which she was allowed to do what she liked, so long as she did not trample on the rights and privileges of the old servants from Hartley Manor, who had been dominant there since Hubert’s infancy; servants whose proud boast it was to have been associated with every circumstance of their master’s life, from the cutting of his first tooth to the bringing home of his bride. It is strange what Conservative ways these Radicals sometimes have in the bosoms of their families.
Sir Hubert Hartley was not like David, ruddy and fair to see. He was a small, dark man, who looked as if some of the original Sheffield smoke, the smoke inhaled by the inventor day after day for half a century, had given its hue to his complexion. He was wiry, and well built, active, energetic, a good shot, a good horseman, a lover of field sports and wild animals, loving, after the sportsman’s fashion, even the creatures he destroyed, curious about their habits, keen in his admiration of their strength and beauty. For the rest, he was a man of widest beneficence, charitable, hospitable, and he was a man whom the better-born Jack Vansittart loved and honoured.
They were about the same age, and had been at Eton and Oxford together, and Jack knew his friend by heart. He could have chosen no better husband for his sister; he could have chosen no man he would have preferred to call his brother-in-law. It seemed to him sometimes that he could have hardly liked a brother better than he liked Hubert Hartley.
Vansittart was still a gentleman at leisure. He had coquetted with politics, and had allowed himself to be spoken of as a young man who might prove an acquisition to the Conservative party, but he had not allowed himself to be nominated for any constituency. “The party is strong enough to get on without me,” he said; “I’ll wait till the General Election, and then I’ll go in for all I know, and try to gain them a seat from the enemy. I should like to try my luck in Yorkshire, and win an election against Hubert and all his merry men. I might stand for Burtborough—attack Hartley in his own stronghold.”
Burtborough was the small market town that supplied the necessities of Hartley Manor House. The Hartleys had represented Burtborough for two generations, but Hubert had withdrawn from the political arena, disgusted at the turn of events, and finding more pleasure in turnips and prize cattle than in the art of legislation. He had never been brilliant either as an orator or debater, and he thought he had done his duty by country and party when he had secured the election of a conscientious Liberal for Burtborough. Marriage had helped to make him lazy. He loved his home; stable and gardens; farm and woods; his pretty wife and cooing baby. His brother-in-law thought him the most enviable among men.
“He has all the desires of his heart,” thought Vansittart. “He has not an unsatisfied ambition. He has a clear conscience, can look his fellow-men straight in the face and say, ‘I have injured no man:’ as I cannot, God help me: as I never can so long as I live. At every turn of the road I expect to meet some one whom I have injured—a mother who may have loved that man as my mother loves me—a sister whose life has been made desolate by his death, reprobate though he was. No man stands alone in the world. Whoever he may be, when he falls, he will drag down some one.”
And then he thought of Fiordelisa, with her sunny Italian eyes, and her light-hearted acceptance of such good things as Fate threw in her way—the lodgings on the Rialto, the mandoline lessons, the fine dress and good food. She had taken these things as if they were manna from heaven; and assuredly no rigid principle, no adherence to her Church Catechism, would restrain her from seeking manna from new sources. What had she become, he wondered, in the years that had made his crime an old memory? An artist’s model, or something worse? In these days of photography that beautiful face of hers would have less value than in the golden age of Tintoret and Veronese.
He had done his best to forget that scene at Florian’s; but the image of Fiordelisa returned to his memory very often, harden himself as he might against the pangs of remorse, and the thought of her always saddened him. He had the same kind of sorrow for having spoilt her life as he might have felt had he been cruel to a child. Her ignorance, her friendlessness appealed so strongly to his pity—and even the old aunt, who so placidly accepted the situation, did not appear to him as odious as a hard-headed Englishwoman would have appeared under the same conditions.