He would abhor any kind of scandal. He is devoted to his mother, who is a pious and very proper person; he has a conscientious sense of his own vast duties and responsibilities; he would feel most uncomfortable if he thought people were talking grossly of him in his own county; and he has a horror of Lord Dawlish, noisy, insolent, coarse, a gambler and a rake.
Arrived at his bedroom door, Mr. Wootten is touched vaguely with a kind feeling towards his humble interrogator, or with some other sentiment less kindly, it may be. He pauses, looks straight before him at the wick of his candle, and speaks with that oracular air so becoming to him which many ungrateful people are known to loathe.
"That kind of connections are invariably dangerous; invariably," he remarks. "They have their uses, I admit, they have their uses: they mould a man's manners when he is young, they enable him to acquire great insight into female character, they keep him out of the lower sorts of entanglements, and they are useful in restraining him from premature marriage. But they are perilous if allowed to last too long. If permitted to claim privileges, rights, usurpations, they are apt to become irksome and compromising, especially if the lady be no longer young. When a woman is no longer young there is a desperate acharnement in her tenacity about a last passion which is like that of the mariner clinging to a spar in the midst of a gusty sea. It is not easy for the spar to disengage itself. On the whole, therefore, women of rank are perhaps best avoided in this sense. Passions are safest which can be terminated by the cheque-book. The cheque-book is not always indeed refused by great ladies,—when they are in debt,—but a cheque-book is an unpleasant witness in the law courts. However, as I said before, all depends on the lady's temper: no woman who has a bad temper is ever truly discreet. Good-night to your Grace." And Mr. Wootton, with his candle, disappears within his door-way.
He smiles a little blandly as his man undresses him. Five years before, Lady Dawlish offended him at a house-party at Sandringham, taking a fiendish pleasure in capping all his best stories and tracing the sources of all his epigrams. In that inaccessible but indelible note-book, his memory, he has written her name down as that of one to whom he has a debt to pay. "Je lui ai donné du fil à retordre," he thinks, as he drops into his first doze.
CHAPTER VIII.
"Alan is really coming to day!" says Dorothy Usk to her lord, with pleasure, a few days later, looking up from a telegram.
"How you excite yourself!" says Usk, with rude disdain. "What can you see to care about? He is a pretentious humbug, if ever there was one!"
"George!" She regards him with horror and amaze. Is he wholly out of his mind? Her cousin is Lady Usk's ideal of what an English gentleman should be. He does not keep black women down in Warwickshire.
"A pretentious humbug," repeats Usk. He likes to ticket his relations and connections with well-chosen descriptions. "All good looks and soft sawder. Women like that sort of thing——"