"Dick oughtn't to have done it," said Roger slowly, as if he were enunciating some new and startling hypothesis. "But to do him justice I do believe he might have married her if he'd lived. I think if he cared for anybody it was for her. Dick meant well, but he was touched in his head. She ought not to have trusted him. Not quite like other people; no memory: and never in the same mind two days running."
There was a short silence. But Roger had got under way at last. Very soothing at times is a monologue to the weary masculine mind.
"I used to think," he went on, "that Dick was the greatest liar and swindler under the sun. He went back on his word, his written word, and he wasn't straight. I'm certain he ran a ramp at Leopardstown. That was the last time he rode in Ireland. You couldn't trust him. But I begin to think that from the first he had a bee in his bonnet, poor chap. I remember Uncle John leathering him within an inch of his life when he was a boy because he said he had not set the big barn alight. And he had. He'd been seen to do it by others as well as by me. I saw him, but I never said. But I believe now he wasn't himself, sort of sleep-walking, and he really had clean forgotten he'd done it. And do you remember about the Eaton Square house?"
Of course Janey remembered, but she said, "What about that?"
"Why, he wrote to me to tell me he had decided to sell it only last August, a month before his accident, as he wanted cash. He had clean forgotten he had sold it two years ago and had had the money. Twenty thousand it was."
Puff! Puff!
"Jones, his valet, you know!"
"Yes."
"Jones told me privately when I was in Paris a month ago that Dick couldn't last much longer. Gangrene in both feet. The wonder is he has lived so long. Aunt Louisa will get her wish after all. You'll see he will die intestate, and everything will go to Harry. Pity you weren't a boy, Janey. Dick can't make a will now, that's certain, though I don't believe if he could and wanted to, Lady Jane would let him. But whatever happens, the family ought to remember Jones when Dick's gone, and settle something handsome on him for life. Jones has played the game by Dick."
Janey thought it was just like Roger to be anxious about the valet, when his own rightful inheritance was slipping away from him. For Roger came next in the male line after Dick, if you did not count Harry.