But this knowledge, painful as it might have been to a proud and sensitive man, found Richard Maule almost indifferent. Had he been compelled to define his feeling in words, he would probably have observed that, after having brought his life to such utter shipwreck as he had done, this added mortification was not of a nature to trouble him greatly.
Richard Maule, in his day, and still by courtesy, a noted Hellenist, had come to a sure if secret conclusion concerning human life. He believed that the old Greeks were right in thinking that Fate dogs the steps of the fortunate, and lies in ambush eager to deal those who are too happy stinging, and sometimes deadly, blows. How else account for that which had befallen himself?
Till he had been forty-four, that is, till only ten years ago—for Richard Maule was by no means old as age counts now—his life had been, so he was now tempted to think looking back, ideal from every point of view.
True, he had lost both his parents in childhood, but he had been adored and tenderly cherished by his mother's father, the cultivated, benignant Theophilus Joy, of whom he often thought with a vivid affection and gratitude seldom vouchsafed to the dead. He trusted that the old man in the Elysian Fields was ignorant of the strange gloom which now enwrapped Rede Place.
The Fate in which Richard Maule believed had only dealt two backward blows at the cultivated hedonist whom Richard Maule now knew his grandfather to have been. One had been the premature death, by consumption, of the wife so carefully chosen, to whom there had never been a successor; and then, twenty-two years later, the death of his only child, Richard Maule's mother.
But these two offerings had satisfied grim Nemesis, and perhaps it was open to question whether the creator of Rede Place had not spent a really happier old age in moulding and fashioning his grandson, as far as possible, to his own image, than if the beloved wife and only daughter had lived.
In these latter days, when Richard Maule was enduring, not enjoying, life, he was apt to find a certain consolation in going back to the days of his delightful childhood. His grandfather had been the King, he the Heir Apparent, of a kingdom full of infinite delights and happy surprises to an imaginative and highly-strung little boy.
Each of the ornate rooms of Rede Place, each of the grassy glades outside, was to him peopled with groups of agreeable ghosts—the ghosts of the clever men and witty women whom his grandfather delighted to bring there at certain times of each year, especially during the three summer months, when the beautiful pleasaunce he had created out of an equally exquisite wilderness was in glowing perfection.
The only dark period of the boy's life—and that he would now have been unwilling to admit—was the two years spent at Eton—the Eton of the 'sixties. His grandfather, though worldly-wise enough not to wish the lad to grow up too singular a human being, had not realized that the life he had made his grandson lead up to the age of fourteen was not a fit preliminary to a public school. At the end of two years the boy was withdrawn from Eton and once more entrusted, as he had been before, to the care of an intelligent tutor, and to teachers of foreign tongues.
Oxford proved more successful, but with Balliol, with which he had many pleasant memories, Richard Maule had one sad association. It was while he was sitting there in Hall that he had received the news of his grandfather's death.